Music, Saturday In Paducah and Fall

My mother has always said she loved music. She said she liked to sing.  She bought a piano, and gave me lessons as a kid.  She bought me a saxophone and lived through me practicing it.  She always said she loved music.

She never played the radio in our house. She never had a stereo, ever, since I was born. She never sang in the church choir. She never played a tape or CD in the car or the house. After my whole life of 57 years of not having any music in the house, except for what I brought into it, my mother has begun to hum to the music on the old movies she watches on The Classic Movie Channel.  At the age of 89, she finally is releasing some lock she put on herself and enjoying music.

That said, I spent the day in Paducah - away from the parents, OMG. I shopped and had lunch at Starnes' Barbecue. The most amazing thing happened at Starnes'. My grandmother's brother's grandchildren walked in. What are the odds of that happening on any random day at any random time!

Just as my sandwich was served, I realized the woman that was sitting down a few stools away from me was terribly familiar.  I decided to risk it, and asked, "Ramona?" She looked at me rather blankly. The man with her looked at me totally blankly. Then she realized who I was.

The two people were Ramona and Scott H., the children of Harvey Reno's daughter. Harvey was Ninny's brother and owned a shoe shop in Benton. I think the last time I saw either of them was 40 years ago. Ramona is on Facebook so I had seen a recent picture of her. She has the classic Reno face. The one we women in the family inherited from my grandmother, Emma (Ninny).

We had a lovely lunch together. Scott was gallant, and bought mine. He also insisted on buying the bottle of sauce that my DH, Max, in Memphis will get. Max, you should thank him! Ramona is living in Barlow now, and Scott has been in Johnson City, TN, up in the NE corner, for about 15 years.

After lunch, I finished up my shopping and came on back home.  I was pleased to check out clothesline lumber and figure out I could probably do one for not much more than $40.00.  I just have to get some help getting the 4x4s in the car and then from the car to the site. Ooof, they're heavy. I think I'll try to get the holes dug first.

It was so nice to be out for a few hours and not be worrying about Joe and Lola.  It was also nice to come home to a freshly vacuumed house!  I love my sitters.

Sometime after I left, Joe decided he had to walk down into the gully. There's a steep incline to the right of the house in the back yard which has a few trees near the bottom. Something about those trees is on his mind, because he keeps fussing down there. Anyway, the grass was slick from the rainstorm, and his feet slid out from under him. The only damage I can discern is bruising on his right arm, from wrist to elbow.

Later in the evening, we had a yelling match in the yard over it. I was sitting on the patio steps talking on the phone to Max, when Joe wandered from his workshop over to that side of the yard. He saw a white magnolia blossom petal on the ground and picked it up. He then decided he had to pick all of them up, which led him down that incline.

So I jumped up and tried to intercept him before he tumbled down it again. Of course, trying to get him to not do something he'd decided needing doing - picking up fallen magnolia petals - was worthy of rage. Couldn't tell him what the petals were (he didn't know). Couldn't tell him they weren't worth picking up. Couldn't tell him they weren't worth risking another fall. I simply blocked his path, and he finally stalked off.

Right after midnight, Joe's up pissing in the trash can he's now keeping in his bedroom. When I first arrived, he had an old hospital male urinal he kept in his walk-in closet he used. Took a while to figure that one that.  He was good about dumping and rinsing that one.

During a torrential downpour which made the ceiling leak in his bedroom, I put a pot in there for a few days. Joe decided it was an excellent piss pot. When I took the rainwater-collection pot out of his bedroom, apparently he decided having a piss pot in his bedroom was a brilliant idea. So an extra trashcan appeared in there and has become the piss pot.

Sometimes he actually takes care of it, so it's not that noticeable.  But you have to check to make sure he's doing that. Otherwise it gets rank. Then, again, it doesn't take into account how he will leave the three cups of water on his desk each night, ignore them, walk to the bathroom to get a drink, and then go back to his bedroom to pee in the trash can.