My grandson AJ:

Andrew and Tom's new country house:

Two days ago was my birthday; I turned 65. Sound the noisemakers and poppers. A quiet and pleasant enough day. It's almost 2 months now since I stopped smoking. Haven't cheated, still moving along with it. Diet starts right after New Years.

And the big news, the GREAT news - the mortgage for Tom & Andrew's country house got the final approval Friday morning. It's all engines on and full speed ahead now. Closing will be scheduled in a few days and the house will be theirs for Xmas. Yay!!!!!

I am so happy for them. I am kvelling like crazy for them. Absolutely shepping nachas for them. They have all worked so incredibly hard to reach this point. This is such a great way for Andrew & Joanna to go into the new year.

In other excellent news, my daughter Astrid has a new terrific job. Her base is in Basel, Switzerland but she'll also be working out of several other project centres including NJ this week. So yes, Asti is in the Metro NY area working this week and visiting family during her down time.

I presume I'll hear more news from other family members at some point. I refuse to allow facebook to take over family communications. I loathe how people utterly expose themselves on FB. This blog is as public as I plan to get.

Enough for now. I need to look through some seed catalogs.

It's almost 6 weeks since I stopped smoking. No lapses, still going clean. But now finally after all these weeks I'm experiencing deep cravings for a cigarette. I push the feelings behind me but they are undoubtedly miserable. I'm hoping they start to fade away or lessen soon.

Today.
Three Weeks.
Smoke Free.

Not bad.

Made to-die-for chopped liver today. Alan liked it so much he had no complaints. He just shut up and ate and ate. If you know Alan, you understand how unusual that is. I posted the recipe to our family cooking blog.

2 days short of 3 weeks no smoking. Ugh I'm yearning for a cigarette. Not often but now and then - so much.

It will pass, it will pass....soon I hope.

Day 17. I had expected the quitting side-effects would be easing off by now but instead, topsy-turvy, from nothing at first it's growing to sudden episodic bursts of craving. I'm taking it one day at a time, one hour at a time. This too shall pass.

Meanwhile the weather here is non-stop miserable - cold and raining. Alan made a pot of his world class French onion soup today. I made latkes for breakfast and we had the soup for dinner. We're transitioning to a much healthier lifestyle lately; now we just need to get a ground floor flat and we'll be set.

Tomorrow is day 14! Two weeks no smoking. Not fun. Not fun at all.
It's not nicotine I crave; it's the pleasure of fiddling with the cigarette, the texture and experience of exhaling the smoke. Playing with the smoke is the prime smoking experience for me as I never actually inhaled. I know people always claim that but I was sure of it and double checked with my son Andrew who agreed that he always noticed how I didn't inhale. In fact, if I on a rare occasion somehow mistakenly did inhale, that was very noticeable because I would choke and sputter and cough.
Anyway - tomorrow - day 14.

I thought it was supposed to start getting easier after not smoking for a few days - not so here. After a fairly mild first week I'm suddenly and rapidly developing physical withdrawal symptoms. They're the miseries I'd been warned about loud and clear. I can only hope they're a last hurrah and by tomorrow morning they start fading away. Otherwise it's going to get ugly around here.

Originally dated 2005 from when Asti & I were living in Basel, Switzerland
Another mostly useless wasted week. Very limited access to my computer so my productivity was close to zero. Got all the papers to apply for the visa but no tiene los dinero - ie. All the nice offers and promises went up in smoke when the time to put up or shut up arrived, Asti's friend Robin even went back on his offer to give me a job interview/expression of interest letter to include with my application.

So add all the endless crap on top of crap and add to that an early winter settling in which a stunning cold spell. It's been in the 30s-40s F. the past few days and I'm feeling ill, cold or flu coming on. There's no heat in the house either! The landlord ddn't bother turning it on when the temps started regularly sinking into the 30's and 40. Oh joy! The rent is almost 3000 SFr a month but no heat so we're huddling wrapped in blankets.

Someone must have complained because we finally started getting heat at 4pm today. Not real heat yet but the ends of the radiators have started to warm. It will take many hours to warm this apt tho because most of the exterior walls are vast expanses of glass. I'm hopeful tho and at least it's one cheery note in a bleek vista.

So, no visa and no money to cover the fee. I'm going to have to find a way because I -must- have that visa. Without it I can't legally work. I can't go thru that nightmare again. Perhaps I'll have to take my sterling silver flatware from Asti and sell it. I was going to just let it be, but whatever.

Oh, and that is the positive side compared to all the other crazy stuff going on.
1. Asti's new house lease/tenancy isn't approved yet - so
2. She can't agree on a delivery date with the movers
3. The movers want payment upfront which is ok because Asti has more than enough in her pension account to cover the move.
4. Except Switzerland's anti-female laws require a signed notarized statement from Nick. Who is in deepest Oxforshire currently.
5. And they want a signed letter from him and a copy of his passport.
6. Both notarized
7. We don't have the paperwork for the 3 cats to travel yet
8. We don't have train reservations for us to go from Basel to London
9. It gets worse, believe me. And I haven't even gone into Alan being depressed because he's so broke lately.

I think a hot shower is needed right now.

And a new storyline! Damn, why isn't there a nice, kindly god who could change it all

Must have HOT shower. Must get warm warm warm ...

A week without cigarettes. Surviving. I'm still reaching for one and still feel it between my fingers as I reach for that first relaxing puff with my coffee. But nothing I could identify as physical. Just memories of the pleasant gesture.
But, it's a week, 7 days and I'm moving on ok.

Day 5 - quitting smoking cold turkey. I had to stop smoking; couldn't afford the cost any more. A depressing choice which provides me no support or comfort in the withdrawal process. Meh - what a misery.

Dentist

Home again, home again, half a jig on...

So today was my 2nd session with the dental surgeon and another wisdom tooth extracted. This was a more complex session than my previous one. The tooth was in the upper jaw and its roots penetrated the sinus as well. There were a few additional bits of legacy roots next to the tooth, left from a long ago extraction, that also needed removing. I won't go into detail except to say that today I was well and truly thankful for my dentist's expertise, gentle technique, and patient style. It was a bit overwhelming and scary at times but no pain and lots of calm assurances which helped a lot. Finally home the whole thing overwhelmed me and I eventually staggered off to bed to slide under the duvet and sleep the rest of the day.

I think I've only 2 more sessions to complete the prep works and then its back to my own dentist for restoration works. Meanwhile I'm trying to move my jaw as little as possible and let it all calm down and heal.

Bubbles

Industrial strength unpoppable bubbles

6 cups water
1 cup corn syrup
2 cups regular strength Joy dish soap

pan and large ring to create giant bubbles

Kitty Cuisine

Rosie has recently refined her dining choices by rejecting the super-premium wet "pouch" cat food she used to like for a mixed regimen of dry Iams kibble and Real People Food. While her fondness for chicken and pulled pork is quite understandable, some of her other choices leave us bemused: hard boiled egg yolk, marmalade, ginger ale, cheesecake.

Rosie and her new toy

Rosie carefully checking out the devious white ball.

Attacking the evil intruder!

Rosie, our semi-long haired cat, demands to be brushed. Endlessly. In fact, she prefers endless attention of almost any sort. She's very verbal and loudly calls us to come out and play if she is feeling bored or neglected.

Kitties

We are a cat household once more. A local cat rescue group dropped off a mama cat and her newborn (1 day old!) kittens last night. Mama cat is gorgeous and loaded with charming personality.

Shared from my daughter Astrid's Facebook post:

Being Green

Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the older woman that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren't good for the environment.
The woman apologized and explained, "We didn't have this green thing back in my earlier days."

The young clerk responded, "That's our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations."

She was right -- our generation didn't have the green thing in its day.

Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were truly recycled.

But we didn't have the green thing back in our day.

Grocery stores bagged our groceries in brown paper bags, that we reused for numerous things, most memorable besides household garbage bags, was the use of brown paper bags as book covers for our schoolbooks. This was to ensure that public property, (the books provided for our use by the school) was not defaced by our scribblings. Then we were able to personalize our books on the brown paper bags.

But too bad we didn't do the green thing back then.

We walked up stairs, because we didn't have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn't climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks.

But she was right. We didn't have the green thing in our day.

Back then, we washed the baby's diapers because we didn't have the throwaway kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy-gobbling machine burning up 220 volts -- wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing.

But that young lady is right; we didn't have the green thing back in our day.
Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house -- not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana. In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn't have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap. Back then, we didn't fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn't need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity.

But she's right; we didn't have the green thing back then.
We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull.

But we didn't have the green thing back then.
Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn't need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 23,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest burger joint.

But isn't it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn't have the green thing back then?

Please forward this on to another selfish old person who needs a lesson in conservation from a smartass young person.

Today my husband looked around the living room and commented, "We could have had a Christmas tree in here".
Err, yes, I only mentioned it and suggested it a few hundred times since we moved to the new place last February. He admitted he probably wasn't listening to me. Probably.

Lol! Next year we will have a gorgeous tree here. We will start collecting ornaments now.

Not a bad day at all and a rare roast beef dinner to cap it all off.