Medora's Great Adventure

Meet Medora. She's a 4-footed stinker, but cute as a bug.



As I've said previously, Lovely Daughter and Lars are in Albuquerque this week, so we're dog sitting and supervising their cats. This involves going over to her house every day, sifting through the litter boxes, making sure they've got food and water, and playing with them a bit. At the moment they have three cats in the house. But knowing their household, that could change to a larger number at any time.

Homer is a handsome old dude who doesn't know he's a cat. She got him at a rummage sale when she lived in Virginia. He's got a unique personality, and I swear if he was a human he would be gay. Then there's Hermione, a beautiful, long-haired white kitty who arrived at their house supposedly on a temporary basis until the original owner could find a home. You guessed right - Hermione is still there. The only real problem with this is that Lovely Daughter was told that Hermione had been spayed. Guess what - that wasn't accurate, and about a month ago Hermione went into heat, howling and rolling on the floor all night long, calling all the neighborhood Toms to come to her rescue. Hermione has a doctor's appointment the day after they get home. No more solos at midnight from her.

Well, this set off Hercules, who is an adult neutered male, who definitely didn't want all the neighborhood Toms invading his property, so he set off marking his territory. All over the inside of Lovely Daughter's house - which caused Hercules to become an outside cat very quickly.

Now Medora is a real social butterfly, and when I was over *visiting* the kitties yesterday she was so lonesome - so much more so than the other two - that I decided to bring her home with me. She's visited over here numerous times so I knew it wouldn't be strange to her. As usual she hopped out of her carrier and proceeded to investigate everything. Senior Citizen Simon follows her around everywhere she goes as though he's trying to keep watch so she doesn't get into any trouble.

Ole and I crawled into bed last night as usual - one dog on the floor by the foot of the bed, the other on the floor on his side of the bed. You have to be very careful if you get up at night because of the dogsticle course. There are bodies laying all over the bedroom floor. I expected Simon to climb into his usual place beside my legs, but he didn't. He was still supervising Medora. So off to sleep we all went. It didn't take long for both Ole and Beau to start snoring - and what a competition that is. Beau lays on his back with all four feet in the air, head tilted way back and saws logs. Ole lays on his back but he's missing the feet in the air (snicker).

Anyway, just as it was becoming light out this morning I was rudely awakened by some very loud howling and catterwalling. I sat straight up in bed thinking Simon and Medora had gotten in a fight, went racing out to the living room and kitchen, but no cats. I could still hear the howling and determined it was coming from outside, but who in the world could it be? I had made sure that all the little flippy dog and cat doors were locked so Medora couldn't get out.

The one thing I had forgotten to close was the bedroom window. I had left it open a crack (and didn't have a screen on it), just enough to get some fresh air into the bedroom. You have no idea how much body heat two big dogs can give off. Well, Medora, with her nosy nature, had apparently hopped up into the window and managed to slither through the opening and escaped to freedom!! I have no idea how long she had been outside exploring, but it had started to rain during the night, and she looked like a drowned rat when I found her. At least she was smart enough to come back to the same location from which she had escaped. She's very fortunate because she is definitely not street smart and we have a lot of wild critters around here that would have loved to have a little kitty for a midnight snack.

So I ran quickly out to the garage, opened the door and she came barrelling in, looking like someone had dunked her in a pail of water. She's long-haired, so all her hair was plastered to her body. I wrapped her in a towel and tried to dry her off, but she was so wiggley and squirmy it was hard to do. All she wanted to do was lick my face in what I presume was gratitude. Although she was pretty hungry (snicker) and when I put her down she immediately inhaled all of Simon's food.

And that concluded Medora's Great Adventure.

Technology Way Back in the Dark Ages

I read Bluesleepy's blog this morning and she was writing about technology today and wondering how we ever got along before the days of cell phones and computers. It seems everyone is "plugged in" at all times these days.

That brought to mind all the business classes that I took in high school - among them were typing and shorthand - two necessities for women at that time who were planning on going into the business world. Back in the "Dark Ages" we were called secretaries and we weren't ashamed of it. Now they're called administrative assistants, as though the title secretary is something to be looked down upon. In most instances it wasn't the boss who ran the office, it was the secretary who saw to it that everything ran like clockwork. A good secretary could make her boss shine and in many cases she was the reason he got all those promotions that he did.

Anyway, I digress. Back to typing class.



The teacher (Miss Ronsberg) who taught both typing and shorthand was a bit on the outdated side. This was in the 60's, but she dressed like a Gibson Girl from back around the turn of the century. She wore her hair in an upswept fashion with all the ruffled "waists" as she called them. She wasn't as pretty as the Gibson Girl below though. I think she was about 95 years old (snicker) and had to weigh in at about 250 pounds. She was not petite by any means.

We learned on manual typewriters - you know the ones where you would reach the end of the line and have to lift your left hand off the keyboard, hit the return lever and start on the next line again. We had to have strong fingers back then to hit the keys hard enough to make the imprint on the paper. I couldn't do it today because my hands have become pretty wimpy from just using a computer keyboard.

She would walk up and down the rows when we were being given timed tests with her yardstick. You were taught proper posture, which was to sit straight in your chair without leaning against the back, ankles together and feet flat on the floor. That's where the yardstick came in - if you weren't sitting properly you would get whacked across the shins with the edge of the yardstick. Ouch!! It sometimes even left black and blue marks.

Because I was a good student I eventually got to use the one and only electric typewriter in the classroom. But even that didn't make correcting errors any easier. We had things called correcting tape and whiteout. But we also had to learn to use a typewriter eraser, which could really make a mess on your original if it wasn't clean. And then think of making multiple copies and having to correct the error several copies down. Ugh.

The IBM Selectric was a miracle typewriter because it gave you the option of being able to change fonts by removing and inserting a new ball on a peg, which would spin around to the appropriate letter and leave that imprint on the paper.

When I got my first job I thought I had died and gone to heaven because I worked on a self-correcting IBM Selectric. It had a spool of correct-tape that you inserted from one side, through the area where the ball hit the paper and then wound itself onto a spool on the other side of the carriage. If you made an error you hit a certain button on the keyboard and the typewriter would backup a space, remember the letter that had been imprinted, hit that letter on top of the correct-tape and leave a blank space. Then all you had to do was insert the correct letter. This was fine for the original, but you still had to weed through all the copies and correct them manually.

At the point in time when I worked Federal Civil Service up in Iceland every document that I prepared had to have an original and 8 copies. Each copy was a different color designating which department it went to and was made of a thin tissue-like paper which made corrections difficult because it was easy to erase right through the paper.

At one point in time I worked as the secretary for the president of a life insurance company. That was my first contact with computers in the office environment. The secretaries were all still using typewriters, but all the billing was done on a computer that filled an entire room, and hummed along like it was ready to take off into outer space. We named this monstrosity Big Bertha, and when she malfunctioned the entire office was in a panic because we then had to prepare 20,000 billing statements by hand. Regardless of what your position was, you prepared statements.

This is Bertha being repaired. It could sometimes take days.

My first personal experience in the office world with a computer was when I worked in the Placement Office of a local college. When Lovely Daughter started school the school systems were teaching computers and were using the Apple IIC, so we bought one for her to use at home. This little toy cost over $2000 at that time. And about all it was good for was playing games and writing letters. Now you can buy a laptop with a many-gig hard drive and lots of other bells and whistles for $700. My how times have changed.

So here I am, dumped into an office environment with a PC that I knew nothing about. I was absolutely certain that if I touched the wrong key that everything on the hard drive would disappear. What a relief to discover that wouldn't happen.

So through the years I progressed up the learning curve to today. Now I copy movies onto DVD, I'm currently digitizing all of our old LPs (that's the old 33 1/3 record albums for those of you who are to young to remember what an LP is) and burning them to CDs, all my photos are digital and stored on CDs, along with personal records and documents being scanned into the computer and stored. When I think of how productive we actually were before the age of computers I am truly amazed. Now I suffer withdrawals whenever mine goes down.

Psssst: Just as an aside, at one point in my career when I worked for a court reporter I could type 120 wpm and take shorthand at 150 wpm.

Lemons turned to Lemonade? Well, Kinda'

There it was, the last weekend in APRIL and there was 9 inches of snow on the ground. We should have been out enjoying the spring in our backyard, but instead we had to have knee-high snowboots on in order to wade through all the darn stuff. So on Saturday afternoon Ole decided he wasn't going to let the snow get the best of him and he decided we were going to have a fire in the firepit in the backyard that night.

He hauled out the little snowblower, blew a path out to the firepit, blew out the surrounding concrete area, dumped all the snow off the chairs and loaded the pit with wood. Called some friends to come over - and we had a party.

He built a pretty big fire so we were all pretty warm. In fact it toasted our knees and some of us had to back up a bit.

So we took the lemons and turned them into lemonade and we didn't even use any "yellow snow." And goodness knows we've got plenty of that with two big shepherds running around here.

Lars and Lovely Daughter are flying the coop today - headed for Albuquerque, NM. Lars is quite a bowler and is involved in a high stakes tournament down there. They'll be gone for a week so Daisy and Beau will be spending the week at our house. Guess they're on vacation too because they'll get to sleep over here. Everyone's going on "vacation" except Ole and me (sniff, sniff). Big Brother lives about three hours from Albuquerque, so the kids will be renting a car and going to spend a few days with him when the tournament is over. Wish I was going too (sniff, sniff, wipes eyes with large hankie pulled from bosom of housedress). I haven't seen Big Brother for two years (blows nose hard with same hankie before stuffing it back into housedress). It would be easier to deal with staying home if there wasn't snow on the ground (sob).

Sympathy, people, I'm looking for sympathy here!!

Ole and Lena were ScandiHOOvian farmers who, unlike other ScandiHOOvians who farmed in northern Minnesota, farmed in the southern part of Minnesota, adjacent to the Iowa border. One day a surveyor came to Ole and Lena's farm to survey their property. After he finished, the surveyor met with Ole and Lena and said, "I surveyed your property, but I found a problem. All these years you thought your farm was in Minnesota, but my results show your farm is in Iowa." The surveyor looked at Ole and Lena for a response, but instead of them being upset, they looked pleased. "I thought you would be upset," said the surveyor. "Why do you both look so happy?" "Well," said Ole, "I'm so glad now. I didn't think we could stand another of those terrible Minnesota winters!"