I believe I was well in to my teens before I ever knew my sister Barbara was not my natural sister.  She was adopted by my parents in 1939 when she was about a year old.  She was the daughter of my father’s half-sister, and she was as much a part of the family as any of us.

Death is just another phase of this journey we call life.  One may say our path to it begins the day we are born.  Nonetheless, it is what it is.  Neale Donald Walsch in his book “Conversations with God” presented me with a new view of death.  In it he describes life as a plan devised by God and our spirit prior to birth.  We are but an individuation of the Soul of God, and at our death our spirit is reunited with that soul.  I think it is beautiful and beautifully described.
My sister is in a beautiful place now.  She is reunited with God and happy beyond her wildest dreams.

I loved her and will miss her.

And that is all I have to say about that…

Whenever I hear people talking their “situation,” be it normalcy or happiness or whatever they use to describe their state of mind, I immediately think back to my dear departed mother.  She and my dad lived an abundant life.  Were they rich?  Hell no!  My dad retired in 1967 and later told me the highest salary he ever earned was $7500.00 a year.  What surprised me about his earnings was the simple fact to me - and my four siblings – is that we never lacked for anything, never went hungry, had a warm, comfortable home and lived a pretty nice life.

These were simple people, living a simple life.  My mother thought she was in Heaven if she had a Filet-o-Fish, and order or fries and a cup of coffee at McDonald’s.  Dad just always seemed to be happy just to be with my mother.  This was their normal, their happiness.

Three and a half years ago a sister-in-law passed away after five years of battling melanoma.  She was a truly amazing woman and an inspiration to us all.  Never a complaint, she made the absolute best of an untenable situation, and though life through her curveballs she never lost her smile or her sense of humor.  She knew how to live, she was normal, and I believe to the very end of her life she was happy.

I commented on my friend’s post that she first needed to define normal and that I bet she is more normal than she thinks.  She really needs to define what makes her happy or what she thinks will make her happy, and then declare that happiness for herself.  Perhaps I need to call her and talk to her about the philosophy of The Best Day Ever?

Each of us has a choice in this, we can live it happy and normal or we can go wanting and searching all of our lives.  I choose happy.

And that is all I have to say about that…

Let’s hit on retirement first?  The jury is still out on the retirement thingy.  I can say unequivocally I will not be going back to work, unless finances should ever require it, but I can also say without pause this retirement thing is not totally what I expected.  Having said this, I need to explain my thinking.  I should have put off my retirement date until the spring.  At this time of the year I am trapped inside, and while there are things to do inside, I am not truly motivated to do them, and a guy can only play computer games so many times, read so many books, watch so much TV and sit on his ass for so long.  Bottom line, I am bored.

My boredom will pass in about two months as the birth of a new spring materializes.  I have already begun planning my garden.  Very shortly my favorite power equipment company will pick up The Tank – my zero-turn mower – and get it ready for grass mowing season, a sure sign of the approaching spring.  I have a list of outdoor projects I want to complete and am longing for warmer weather to arrive so I can start them.  Knowing I am fully responsible for what happens to me in my life, I fully accept responsibility for my state of mind.  I am the dumbass in this.

Football?  The Nancy is the real football fan in this house, I am not.  I can watch it and enjoy it.  I can root for the home team – The West Virginia Mountaineers – as avid fans do, but my football interests can also be more than gratified just reading the results of the game in the morning paper. The Nancy can watch any game at any time, college or professional. 

Today there are two football games scheduled to broadcast; The Nancy and I will be firmly planted in our designated spots in our family room watching both.  Well, the TV will be on as the games being played.  The Nancy will have her iPad on and I will have this laptop in my lap, and both of us will look up as the ball is hiked.  Neither will have a horse in the race, the outcome matters not.  Thank God the football season will be over in to weeks.

And then there is politics, and that is a different story.  I am interested, The Nancy is not.  Some of you who read this are Republicans, others are Democrats.  I am not really sure what I am – Republican or Libertarian, but I sure as hell will never be recognized as a Democrat.

I do not agree with the Republican stance on abortion.  Personally, I am against terminating the life of a child, but will not, would not impose on a woman’s right to determine what is best for her.  I believe we need strict gun controls laws in this country.  I wholeheartedly believe labor unions have outlived their usefulness and are driving jobs out of the country.  I believe the right to vote should be given to those who have some skin in the game; if you pay no taxes you do not get to vote.  I believe everyone should pay their “fair share,” but I do not believe someone with a high income should pay a greater percentage than someone with a lesser one.  What the hell is a fair share anyway?  And then there is all this crap about corporate greed.  Somewhere along the line people seem to have forgotten the purpose of a corporation.  Very simply the purpose is to make money, but within the law.  As long as the profit is made legally, shut the hell up.  Lastly, I believe this current Administration is out of touch and ruining our way of life and they need to go. 

There, I have said it and I feel better.  It is off my chest and I am lighter for it.  Now I can go about the rest of the day and do my stuff…or not.

And that is all I have to say about that…

One of the examples used by a guy they interviewed was that he is not able to take vacations like his parents were able to provide him and his siblings.  These unfortunates of the woe-is-me generation are being denied this ability by the mean, rapacious upper class.  This is truly a sad situation.  They cannot afford to go to Disney World on vacation.

I wasn’t born in the 50s or the 60s.  One of my children was born in 1967 and does not live at the same level as she was raised, but she is fully aware of why she does not, and I can say unequivocally she, to my knowledge, has never blamed anyone but herself for her situation.

Is the decline of the middle class the fault of anyone?  I think not.  The middle class is being used as puppets to promote a political agenda.  The decline of the middle class has occurred because the middle class wants it all.  Unfortunately we live in different times then our parents, and thank God we do.

When my dad retired in 1967 a male’s life expectancy was something in the neighborhood of sixty-three years.  He was sixty three.  He and my mother lived in a three bedroom, two-story house of not more than 1200 square feet that they had purchased in 1943 for $4500.00.  It had one bathroom.  At one time seven people occupied this little house.  We had one car, one TV, we ate in a restaurant maybe once or twice a year thinking we had died and gone to heaven, and we wore a lot of hand-me-downs.  We ate simple meals at home but never went hungry, and we always ate our supper together as a family, but not before Dad said Grace.  After supper we would gather in the living room and watch TV, which basically means we watched what Dad chose, and his choice was most generally a western of some sort – Gunsmoke, Paladin, Maverick. 

As kids we played outside most of the time, even in cold weather.  When the weather was inclement, we stayed inside and played board games like Monopoly and Parcheesi.  In the summer when school was out we all played outside with friends only coming home to eat or for band aids.  And we loved it.  Back then, we never thought about what class we were in, and, very frankly, we didn’t care.  We did know we were not rich, and we did know we were happy with what we had, and therein lay the difference between us and today’s middle class wannabees.

We all want, as our parents wanted for us, for our children to live at a higher standard than we had.  So these days every household has to have several TV sets, High Definition of course, and most assuredly more than one car.  We cannot live without laptops, Wiis, GPS, iPhones (each kid has to have one), iPods, iPads, apps, Xbox 360s and everyone has to have a college education (whether or not they can learn or are prepared for it).  The simple fact of the matter is, we are a spoiled society and have been since the end of World War II.

We act as though these days being a plumber, a carpenter, and electrician or any job in the trades is not a middle class job.  What we truly need to do is eliminate the class distinctions.  Then it won’t matter.  Still, even if some feel they are not able to enjoy the same lifestyle in which they were raised, we all live a life many people around the world can only dream about.  Our basic problem is that “we want it and we want it now.”

I am not one of the 1%, but I sure as hell do not feel any obligation to support these malcontent, anarchist, wackjobs occupying the parks in our major cities screaming for a small number of citizens to “pay their fair share” when all the while these people pay nothing at all but suck the lifeblood out of the rest of us…but I digress.

No matter what we do, and Jesus could not do it either, these people will never be pleased, no matter what.

And that is all I have to say about that…

I cannot pinpoint the exact time I became interested in Quantum Physics and Quantum Mechanics, but I surely know I am fascinated by them.  Photons, neutrons, electrons, atomic particles and all that tiny stuff these physicists get into is way over my head, I can barely do simple mathematical equations.  These quantum dudes are thinkers, real thinkers, unlike me who gets hung up early with insignificant the details (or ignores them). 

Dr. Wolf, in the 2004 movie “What the Bleep Do We Know,” spoke of the strange behavior of atomic particles and of how while observing atomic particles they might disappear and then reappear in a different position.  His question was, “Where do they go?” He says of “time” everything that has ever happened, is happening and will happen is occurring at this very moment.  In the book he explains we live in memory, explaining by the time our brain processes what our eyes see and our ears hear the event is over and our brains reconstruct what it thinks we viewed and heard.  He discusses connectivity, something Neale Donald Walsch talks about in “Conversations with God,” and it is something I so totally believe.  We are all inexorably connected; we are one spirit, or Walsch notes, “individuations of the one soul, the Soul of God.”

Ponder this factoid for a moment: every atom that exists today has existed in some form since the beginning of time.  “Life is a journey. It’s a roundtrip.  We end up where we began” says Dr. Wolf.  He goes on to say, “There is no such thing as either a birth or a death.  They both are temporary markings having to deal with the illusion that we are each a body.  We can mark our bodies as having a birth and a death, but the ‘I’ has never been born and will never die.”

He speaks of parallel universes, something the thought of intrigues the hell out of me.  This gets into the area of quantum mechanics which explains every event has many outcome possibilites.  Dr. Wolf believes we may drift from one parallel universe to another when we dream.  I know I have been in some interesting universes from time to time, and awakened (drifted back to this one) at some inconvenient moments – bummer. “As fantastic as it may sound, the parallel universe theory posits that there exists, as if on a different but parallel layer, another world, a parallel universe, a duplicate copy, slightly different and yet the same as this one.  And not just two parallel worlds, but three, four and even more – no less than an infinite number of them make up a universe of universes.  In each of these universes, you, I, and all others live, have lived, will live, will have ever lived, are alive.” Don’t you just love it?

I have to leave you now; I have had enough of this stuff.  I didn’t write this yet and I wrote it yesterday or was it last week?  At the key stroke of the last tittle and am out of here and out there somewhere into the great beyond.  Later, dudes!

And that is all I have to say about that…

We made the decision to attend the Orange Bowl when West Virginia University was selected as one of the participating teams.  The Nancy and I had season tickets this year, made it to five home games, and decided this might be our last opportunity (financially) to see a real live bowl game.  So here we are.  But, where are we?

One would surmise when making plans to attend The Orange Bowl to be played in Miami, Florida – assuming one is not a complete screw up – that the Orange Bowl would be played at the stadium of the same name.  Makes complete sense, right?

I checked Google and got the address of the stadium, researched hotels nearby, determined our best airfares would be on Southwest flying into Ft. Lauderdale (a mere 24-mile drive to the hotel) and booked it, Dano.  I secured the hotel and a rental car.  The Nancy ordered our game tickets.  We were set to go.

We arrived at our destination yesterday at 3pm.  We have a very nice room on the 12th floor of the Miami Hilton, a corner room with a tremendous view of the ocean and downtown Miami.  Just to the west I can easily see the Orange Bowl Stadium about 2.3 miles away.

Details, assumptions?  Last night, while enjoying a couple of hundred brewskies at the hotel bar, talking with a Clemson fan, we learned, much to our surprise, the Orange Bowl is not being staged at the Orange Bowl in Miami but rather at the Sun Life Stadium in Miami Gardens, which is a scant 15-mile drive back toward Ft. Lauderdale.  Say what?

Let’s analyze this a little?  I am here in Miami staying in a hotel where I will make a total 30-mile round trip to see the 2012 Orange Bowl being played at the Sun Life near Ft. Lauderdale. Wonderful!  I could have stayed at a hotel near the Sun Bowl that is probably less expensive and only five or six miles from the airport in Ft. Lauderdale, taken cabs instead of a rental car, but, no!  Instead, I will get to drive back to Miami tonight after midnight and arise tomorrow and drive 25 miles to Ft. Lauderdale to catch our flight home.  Brilliant!  Details, details, details.

Perhaps a New Year’s Resolution is in order for me to get more detail oriented, but then in the whole of my life I have never been a detail man.  Why change now?  I subscribe to the tangent of Murphy’s Law that says, “There is never enough time to do it right, but always time to do it over,” and it has served me well.

And that is all I have to say about that…

I am not into self-aggrandizement and am really not comfortable in settings where people say nice things about me – it’s not my style.  I am just a guy who knows the Universal Presence some of us refer to as God has smiled upon me all of my life, and I haven’t a clue as to why.  Bloviating is not my style, so what I am about to write is not a boast but moreover a point of fact.

I recently retired from a job that provided me with six-figure income for many years, and now a handsome pension that will allow me to live a comfortably yet conservative life.  This is truly amazing to me in so many ways.  I have to be honest and own up to being a not-so-bright kid from a blue-collar neighborhood in Baltimore with a mere twenty-two disjointed college credits, and one who quite frankly made it through life with an innate ability for bullshit.  I know I didn’t make it on my looks, but nonetheless I made it.

This begs the question, why?  I said earlier I haven’t a clue as to why, but I do know exactly why.  In my rapidly atrophying medulla oblongata I inadvertently created my life without ever realizing it.  I knew early on I would never make it in this world using my hands – frankly, I have no mechanical ability at all: well, maybe a tad, but a small tad at that.  Being the lazy ass that I am, I knew I would never make it via an education.  I hated school and was determined to do as little as I needed to get through it.  The only reason I have twenty-two college credits is because I needed to take some courses to get my GI Bill money ($325.00 a month) at a time when I needed the mulla.

I have written many times before about being the consummate underachiever.  If awards were given in this category I would have received top honors.  I mastered the art of it, but somewhere deep within me there was a plan, a course, a path that led me to a management position and a rewarding 28-year career.  I defied gravity while so many others of my ilk did not. 

My granddaughter coined the phrase “The Best Day Ever.” It is one The Nancy and I have adopted and declare every morning.  This is going to be The Best Day Ever!  This has been The Best Life Ever!

I think deep within my soul I have always thought of each day this way, though never voiced it, never realized I was declaring it.  It took a four-year old to put it in perspective for me.  I was successful in life because of my attitude toward it.  My glass has always been full to the brim, and never just halfway of anything.

And that is all I have to say about that…

You may have heard this before elsewhere or read it here at one time or another.  Someone once said if the word “but” is used in a sentence, everything prior to the “but” is a lie.  Example: “I hate to bother you, but…” Admit it, we have all done it.  But in this retirement thing, I am not complaining.

Now here come my non-complaints.  Firstly, I have remained busy these five weeks, though at times I sit and wonder what to do next.  There seems always to be something to be done – little chores, little projects, much of what I have put off forever.  But, there are times when I feel I am not doing anything constructive.  Make work is more like what I am up to these days.  I do not have any plans to change what I am doing or how I am going about my present life.

I do not have a Bucket List and don’t plan on developing one.  There are things I want to do and am delighting myself in my rampant procrastination.  I suppose the greatest thing about retirement is the mere fact I do not have to do anything at all…ever.  Life is still full of possibilities and choices, and I have complete control over the choices I make.

If there is any real disappointment at all it is the issue I am having with sleeping beyond 5:30.  I would really like to be able to sleep and wake up bathed in sunlight.  In the past ten years I bet I could almost count on my fingers the number of days I have awakened to daylight.  Believe me, it sucks, but I ain’t complaining, just saying.

Okay, okay!  I am complaining, so sue me!  Some years back I made the decision to accept full responsibility for what happens to me in my life.  This is the bed I have created for myself, and though I may not be able to sleep until sunrise I am loving life and loving the fact I have reached an age wherein I can bullshit to my heart’s desire and it simply does not matter.

Bullshit is not complaining and bullshit isn’t lying.  It’s just bullshit, and if I must say so myself I am getting better at it every day.

And that is all I have to say about that…

Early last week I received a call from The Nancy’s dad telling me her mother had fallen and broken the femur in her right leg.  Thus began our Christmas odyssey.  We came to Bridgeport, WV on Thursday where Nancy has spent most of her waking hours the past five days in a hospital room with her mother.  I put in more than a few hours myself, at least six on Christmas Eve, and I hate hospitals.

Christmas Day I dropped The Nancy off at the hospital and drove to Richmond, VA to share a little Christmas with two of our three daughters and two of our six grandchildren.  So far we have been away from home for five nights…yuck!

The good news is that today The Mother-in-law will be discharged and moved to a rehab facility close to her home.  The second part of the good news bubble is we, too, will be heading home.  I know our cat is missing us after being cooped up in the house all this time.

The Mother-in-law had a rough time of it the first few days.  Older people can get a little confused in hospital surroundings.  This particular old person was way off her nut for a while, but has bounced back to being her old ornery self – a welcomed sight, for sure.  Had someone told me the woman we saw last Thursday as we first entered this hospital is the same one I just saw, I would have doubted it top to bottom.  Amazing transformation!  Who says drugs are bad?

I have not had the “pleasure” of being in a hospital for an overnight stay in a long, long time.  This place is just a year old and very state-of-the-art.  They have a room on this floor where someone sits and monitors all the beeps and blips coming from patients’ rooms.  Technology has taken over hospitals as it has everything else.  The nurses all carry a little gizmo that turns a light on outside the room they are in to alert others a nurse is in attendance.  The Nancy and I guessed the beds in this place must have cost several thousand each.  It is quite the place I sincerely hope I never have to spend a night in.  The only thing I can think of about the place that reminds me of hospitals of old is the food.  It still sucks.

The M-I-L is to be released in just a few minutes.  Once we get her settled in a new room in a new place we are off to our habitual abode in good old Downtown Berkeley Springs, WV, population 711.  It will be good to get home to my own bed, my own bathroom (I hate using public ones) and my own beer supply.

This, too, is The Best Day Ever.

And that is all I have to say about that…

I know the record of a “Holly Jolly Christmas was recorded in 1965.  The song, which makes little sense, since there I no definition of what a Holly Jolly Christmas, get stuck in my head at this time of the year.  The song was written by a Jewish guy named Johnny Marks, the same guy that wrote the lyrics for “Rudolph the Red-Nosed,” “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” and that classic Christmas song everyone knows and loves (?), “Run, Rudolph, Run.” All kidding aside, they do add to the joy of the season.
That said, The Nancy and I have spent the last couple of days with The Nancy’s mother in a hospital room.  My favorite mother-in-law of 2011 took a bad fall and broke her right femur and is on the mend, albeit, not without a little confusion of her part.  We are pleased, given the severity of the break, and even with the confusion she is encountering, she does not seem to be in a lot of pain and appears to be content.

We hate for The Nancy’s mom to be in this state at this particular time of the year, but such is a part of life, and this too will pass.  Even with this going on we got to spend this morning with the grandchildren as they had their Christmas today since their nurse mother has to work tomorrow.

Life goes on, life is good and we are looking for this to be The Best Day Ever, The Best Christmas Ever.

Still, the question at hand goes unanswered.  It is one of life’s little mysteries.  What the hell is a Holly Jolly Christmas?

And that is all I have to say about that…