The Beast checked and found out that our Garmins need to be updated. I guess a lot of changes have taken place since we last updated them. So *I* get elected to wait until 2AM to download the 4GB of data that it says will take 3 hours to finish. Oh boy...just what I needed on a night I had plans to go to bed early.
We have to wait because we are paying for 15GB of data from 8am until 2am..and then we have another 15GB from 2am until 8am. I know it's not really divided well but that's how Dish divides what we are paying for. Worse, we never know how FAST we will be at any time we are online. But, since we spend the majority of our time on during the day, we MUST wait until 2am to do this particular download. We need our Garmin's up-to-date for our trip to Chicago in October.
I called my gf, Marilyn, to let her know that I WAS, indeed, going to be up for the get-together of the *girls* then. She was so glad I would be able to make it this time. I keep missing when Alice, a girl I actually grew up with, makes it in from her horse ranch in Oklahoma. We were friends all the way through grammer school into high school and until we both got married. She moved away since she married a cowboy...so-to-speak. She has had three kids that are now married and have made her a grandmother.
Funny, but only a few of us girls actually had more than one child. Some never had any. Two girls married men with kids so they were step-mothers and have step-grandkids from them. Only a couple of the girls have been married more than once. My gf, Marilyn, was widowed three times before she was 40. No, she didn't kill anyone...LOL. She just married older men. Then she met Denny, her current husband, who was actually closer to her age than anyone she had ever been attracted to before. In fact, he's two or three years younger.
I kid her that, at 40 years old, she was just becoming a cougar...LOL. I hope you know what that is because I am NOT going to explain it. Ask someone. It became a joke among all of us girls after I said it.
We once were a big group. Around 30 of us that hung out together in high school. We were our own clique. No, we weren't priviliged kids. We were kids that either were from poor families, lower middle class or big families that struggled to make sure we had the basics. Most of us were rebels. Some of us had run away from bad home situations more than once. We had such similar backgrounds that it was normal for us to stick together. But we had fun. We played basketball, learned how to dance. Some of us took ballet at greatly reduced rates from a well-known studio in Chicago that wanted to enrich our lives. We even performed the Sugar Plum fairy on stage to the upper echelon of Chicago society one Christmas.
We were in a special Catholic boarding school in Chicago called Heart of Mary High School. We stayed all week and went home on the weekends. I used to have to take a bus and then a train to my house out in the suburbs. Sometimes my dad picked me up after work on Friday and brought me back on Sunday evening. Some of the kids had parents that paid tuition and boarding, depending on their finances. Since my folks had 7 kids (Marilyn's folks had 8), all they had to do was send me back with enough money to pay for some of the extras I might need. Like having my hair done every week. That kind of thing. Most of us enjoyed ourselves there. The nuns were nice and helpful with other things like teaching us to crochet or embroider. We had regular teachers for our schooling and expectations were high. I left there when I was a Senior and went to a regular high school near my home for my last year.
Some of us stayed in contact after leaving. Like me, Marilyn, Jamie, Carol and Delores. I don't remember who put together the 25th reunion we had but it ended up a big one. We had over 150 girls that came. It was such fun. After that, the bunch of us that were closest started meeting every year in late June. Sometimes we met at a restaurant and we always tipped well. Sometimes one of the girls would host it at their homes. Jamie seemed to do that the most and we all brought food or desserts along to help ease the financial burden. The past couple of years, however, we are back to meeting at a restaurant that Marilyn found that is happy to have us girls.
But the crowd has lessened. Some of them we lost to drugs, unfortunately. Two overdosed. One committed suicide. Two we lost to car accidents. Another died in a fire. We lost Delores five years ago. She came home from work, lay down for a short nap (she told her son to wake her in an hour). But, when he tried to wake her, she had passed. She was only 60 years old.
Some of the girls just live too far away to make it every year. Oregon, Washington State, California, Oklahoma...you get the idea. As they retired, they moved to places they wanted to live out their lives or because their kids lived there and they wanted to be close to them and their grandkids. I understand that.
But the core of us that really try to be there, we are as close as we were when we were young and still crazy after all these years. We laugh together. We let each other know how the others are doing that couldn't join us. A few of them will be emailing me or calling me this upcoming month. Can you tell I am looking forward to it?
I have cousins that live in the Chicago area that want to get together with me while I am there. They found out from a mention of it on my FB page that I was going to be there and got excited. A couple I haven't seen in about 10 years. I look at pictures of their kids that I remember when they were very young and now they are married and have kids of their own! Where in the hell has the time gone??? When did I get so damn old?
The Beast cut down two more of our fruit trees today. Unfortunately, even though they bore fruit (and a lot of it) the damn fungus in the ground rotted the fruit even before they ripened fully. I hated that it happened to the Bartlett pears. I was really hoping to can a lot of them this year but it was not to be. It made me so sad to see the trees go but the spots they were planted were just not good ones. I could almost wish for another drought here. We got the most amazing fruit because there was no excess water in the ground to allow the fungus to thrive. *Sigh* I thought the Japanese beetles were bad enough. They decimated our peaches even with loads of traps set out (and boy, did those traps get FULL!). The state told us the rainfall helped them to thrive also. You just can't win. We had such high hopes.
Time to get this posted. Love you all. Conflict cannot survive without your participation.
~Wayne Dyer~ ***Hugs***
HINT#1: Never, ever, ignore a chip in your windshield. Get it fixed right away. A chip will often eventually grow into a crack, which will raise your costs from about $100 for a chip repair to $1,000. or more for a full windshield replacement. There are even companies that will repair the chip right there in your driveway. Just do a Google search for something like *mobile windshield repair* near your home.
HINT#2: If your driveway or garage floor has bedcome an easy place to do some Rorschach testing thanks to the grease, oil and transmission fulid stains all over the place, take heart....clean concrete is only 10 minutes away. Spray any stained areas with oven cleaner, then let sit for 1- minutes. Rinse off with a hose and the stains will disappear.
Would that be the Kelsey Grammer school?
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