Monday, August 24, 2009

best laid schemes of mice and women...

....gang aft agley when you go to bed without writing them down first. ;-)

Well, hello, poor little neglected blog. I've thought of so much to write about over the past few weeks, but usually as I'm about to doze off. I repeat it to myself a few times and figure I'll remember in the morning, and I never do, of course.

Now that it's daylight, I actually do have something to write about....later. :-) This really is an excuse to start typing in the hope that it will activate whatever brain cells it needs to so that I can stop staring at a blank Word doc and write a story instead.

Thursday, August 6, 2009

Mom and Twain

Have a place for everything and keep the thing somewhere else. This is not advice, it is merely custom.
— Mark Twain



My mother was, and is, the queen of "safe places." The constant refrain "But I put it in a safe place!" got to be a running joke in our house. It also meant that whatever couldn't be found probably was lost and gone forever.

Mom also was really good about dropping things down the drain (jewelry, especially rings) or throwing them away (somehow, believe it or not, partial dentures win this category hands down). If you can take it out and wrap it in a Kleenex, and it costs a ton of money, you can rest assured that you will be assigned to dig through the trash several hours later, hunting for it.

Occasionally, however -- and this one took, oh, 30 years to sink in -- Mom had a point. Every time she spent another fortune at the dentist, she would come home with the plaintive admonition to "take care of your teeth!"

Yeah. Well. That presumes you have 1) dental insurance, once you're off the parental units' plan or 2) a job that pays you enough to self-fund the work.

In a word (OK, 2 words): UFF DA.

I'm thinking more about the pain than the money at the mo, but the cost wouldn't be nearly as much if there weren't so damn much wrong due to lack of ability to pay for care.

So yeah -- prevention is definitely a plan. But so is decent insurance, for *everyone.* Are you listening, Washington?