Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Elletu's Hand: Spa Day

Every spring we BVG's look forward eagerly to our Spa Day. Well, to be honest, we're coming up on just our second annual Spa Day, so I should say that two years in a row we have looked forward eagerly to the BVG Spa Day. Once again the BVG's will gather at my home for a day of pampering ourselves and being pampered by a massage therapist coming in with her spa table and her assistant, who will tend to either our HANDs or our feet. We choose. Last year Cool, j and I chose to have our feet soaked, waxed, cleaned up, massaged and softened up with soothing, fragrant lotions. On the other HAND, Elletu chose to have the same treatments applied to her HANDs. I find the picture above of her right HAND to be of particular interest now that my own HANDs have recently been similarly immersed, not in hot wax to make my HANDs softer but rather Gorilla Glue to make my HANDs.......oh, wait, that's for another post. Let me just say here that it was a bad experience, one that was hard to HANDle. Elletu's HAND pictured here represents the 'best of times,' whereas my Gorilla Glue story represents the 'worst of times.' Instead of helping my HANDs, it hurt my HANDs. That's why there will be no Gorilla Glue at our upcoming Spa Day. There will definitely be soft, relaxing music (and maybe a little HANDel music too). There will be sliced cucumbers to rest upon our weary eyelids. (After they are removed I will use the cucumber slices to clean the faucets in my sink. We learned all kinds of wonderful uses for cucumbers at the last Spa Day. We don't just relax, we learn things.) There will be delicious, nutricious snacks leading up to lunch served in my dining room. My family room, on the other HAND, will be rearranged to accommodate the massage table, foot bath and HAND bath. The big question is, what will Elletu choose, the HAND therapy or the foot therapy? I think she'll go for the HANDs again, and I think Cool and j will go for the feet again. After what my HANDs went through with the Gorilla Glue, I'm sorely tempted to have them pampered this time around. Either way, it's going to be another wonderful day of friendship. I have to HAND it to the Bethel Valley Girls---we know how to have fun!

Just one problem for the day---apparently the plant couldn't HANDle the mimosas!!!
No problem. I was its designated driver.

A Tale of Three Hands

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...........we always make it fun!"
                                              --Firstelle

Three Bethel Valley Girls, three days, three hands (or, to be exact, five hands), three very different experiences, three stories of friendship, all with ties to the BVG's. These stories will follow. They are each deserving of their own page, their own title:
   Elletu's Hand:  Spa Day
   Firstelle's Hand:  The Horror of Gorilla Glue
   j's Hand:  The First Cut is the Deepest

Coming Soon:  Getting to Know Cool's Hand Like You've Never Known it Before

Retirement Poem: Ode to j - April 1, 2013 - Free at Last!

Note: Yesterday, April 1, 2013, I composed this poem for j. Yes, it was April Fool's Day, but she really did retire yesterday. In honor of this milestone in j's life, Elletu and I are taking her to lunch today. But today, April 2, 2013, is not only noted because it is j's first day of freedom, but it is also her 65th birthday. So Happy Birthday, j, as well as Happy Retirement. We love you! And as our motto says, LOVE US! And now, I give you:
 
           RETIREMENT POEM: Ode to j
 
75% of the BVG's are happy for j's retirement today,
But 25% of the BVG's hope it's just a joke for April Fool's Day.
75% of the BVG's will celebrate j's retirement and birthday tomorrow,
But 25% of the BVG's not being there will fill the 75% with sorrow.
During this last day of work j might be a little wordy,
And then,believe it or not, she just might shed some tears at 4:30.
Can any of us imagine Cool in the jury office without j?
It's so hard to even contemplate this on this April Fool's Day.
75% of the BVG's need to let 25% know we have her back,
And if she grumbles while training Lori, we will cut her some slack.
j is gleeful now, but should retirement turn out to be a bore,
Firstelle's job will be to encourage j to get out more.
As the 50% duo who are turning sixty-five this month--no kidding!--
They will do volunteer work that to them is most fitting.
They will exercise their brains by studying things that come from vines,
And do 'coffee' runs for 50% who have no time to stand in lines.
So here's to j, your freedom is less than five hours away,
And 75% of us salute you on this, your Retirement Day!

Monday, February 11, 2013

Coming up, the day of love...

Coming up this week is a day many people love and others speak of hating. Perhaps it's true, Valentine's Day has been commercialized way out of proportion. Case in point: The other day I saw the perfect Valentine for my husband with the shocking price of $7.79!! I thought to myself, I could buy two lattes with that kind of money. So I put this high-priced card back in the rack and remembered that I can write my own poetry for free. For instance, my children loved (?) this:
FRUITS AND VEGGIE TALES
by Firstelle
I fell in love with a PICKLE,
But it was really no big DILL;
I fell in love with a BANANA,
Until it lost its apPEEL.
I fell in love with an APPLE,
It was such a DELICIOUS affair!
Then I fell in love with a FIG,
Until I found out it was really a PEAR.
I fell in love with a PEPPER,
But I just didn't ring its BELL;
I fell for a shy PEANUT,
But I couldn't get it out of its SHELL.
I fell in love with a TOMATO,
It was really quite diVINE;
Then I fell in love with a GRAPE,
But I couldn't stand its WINE.
I fell in love with a POTATO,
But we didn't see EYE to EYE;
So I'm giving up FRUITS and VEGGIES--
I think I'll give GRAINS a try!
***************************************************************
If you don't like this poem--if you think it's CORNy--I don't CARROT all PEAcause I had fun writing it. I've BEAN interested in writing poetry since childhood, and even if you criticize me, I'll stay cool as a CUCUMBER and refuse to be BEETen by your lack of support for my poetic talent. You may TURNIP your nose to my prose, but please don't SQUASH my enthusiasm! LETTUCE not argue over it, because when criticism SPROUTS up, in THYME the whole thing MUSHROOMS. When you become ARUGULAmentative, I become MELONcholy. I know I am PARSLEY to blame because I allow myself to get hurt by it, but you know that I YAM what I YAM.
I should probably heed some SAGE advice and CURRY your favor by not making this blogpost too long this week. But since it is the week of LOVE, I want to express mine to each of you, BVG's, sisters of the Sisterhood, friends forever................................................Love us!

Tuesday, February 5, 2013

BVG's: The Next Generation

As previously noted, I was the last of the Bethel Valley Girls to become a grandmother. My two grandsons are soon to be seven and four months old, and although one lives in Hawaii and the other in California, we were all together in California at Christmas and we Skype to keep connected. It's a new year, and I don't know when or if I will see either one of them in person during this coming year. After family trips to New Orleans, North Carolina, Greece, Hawaii and California three times in the past year and a half, we're staying put and they'll have to come and see us in 2013. This may or may not happen. But they are always close in my heart.

So God bless all of our friends who live close. God bless the Bethel Valley Girls! Girls??? In two months, 50% of us will turn 65---Hello Social Security! Hello Medicare! Is it time to 'pass the baton' to a new generation of 'girls' to carry on the BVG tradition? Do we have a legacy to pass down to our sons and daughters? Have they learned important things from us that will help them navigate through the 'Blur Years' of marriage, child-rearing and careers? Have we set good examples for them? These things are on my mind on this rainy morning.

As my readers might have guessed, I love BVG demographics. I already wrote that 50% of the BVG's turn 65 in two months. The other 50% are still in their 50's. However, as of this July, 75% of the BVG's will be in their 60's and only 25% will be in their (her) 50's. A full 50% of the BVG's have three children, while the other 50% have two children. Elletu is part of the first group, with two daughters and one son. I am also part of the first group, and I have two sons and one daughter. Interestingly, j has two daughters and Cool has two sons. To me, this is beautiful symmetry. In the grandchildren department we're pretty spread out. Elletu has ten of them, and yet she is the youngest of the BVG's. I have the two grandsons, as does j, but she also has a granddaughter, which I don't have, but Cool does have. Only Elletu has grandchildren living close to her, but she also has three grandchildren living far away in a foreign country, so we all do grandparenting from afar.

Alas, our child-rearing days are over, done with, we've moved on to a new season of life. We can only hope and pray that our children will be blessed to find lasting friendships like ours to carry on after their child-rearing days are completed. I think that's happening in my daughter's life, so I've made a mental note and I'm praying over her and her friends Nicole and Katie. It's not Bethel Valley, it's San Mateo, so I'll dub them the SMG's and picture them as grandmas years down the road. They'll be old and exhausted too and will need that yearly Spa Day to look forward to (ours is coming up in two months---yay!).

So Angela, Nicole and Katie are the SMG's (San Mateo Girls)--sort of like the BVG's: The Next Generation. Angela worked with Nicole years ago in California and then later with Katie as a different company. At some point he introduced them to each other, and the three of them became fast friends. Nicole and Katie were both married but childless at the time. Angela was "never going to get married, and I'm never going to have children"---clearly, she is not clairvoyant! When her job took her to live in London, I was sad to see her leave all her close friends behind, especially Nicole and Katie. Fast forward to last year: Angela moved back to California from London,and she moved in to a house just five minutes from Katie's. Then she had her wedding in Greece, and Katie was her maid-of-honor, Nicole her bridesmaid, and her other bridesmaid was a London co-worker, her friend Leslie who was there with her husband and their two-month-old son. Sadly, both Nicole and Katie had divorced, but Nicole had since married a wonderful, wonderful man. I got to see my daughter with a zillion of her awesome friends from truly around the world, but nothing was closer than her bond with Nicole and Katie, and Leslie seemed to fit right in with that tight trio of friends.

Now Angela is not only happily married to her soulmate but she is an awesome mother. I wondered if this would throw a monkey wrench in her friendships, but then the most amazing thing happened: Nicole announced she is pregnant, and what joy, she's expecting twin girls three months from now! As if that's not exciting enough, she and her husband realized their third story condo in a Victorian in San Francisco wouldn't work well with twin babies. So they found a fabulous smaller Victorian home to rent in San Mateo, and Angela is over the moon because they are going to be two blocks away from her. With Katie five minutes away, that makes the three of them exactly as close as I was to the Bethel Valley Girls when I was raising my children. Hmmm...could history be repeating itself?

My daughter said to me the other day, "Mom, when I go for my daily walk with my baby, I can walk over to Nicole's and see her twin daughters." She was excited at the prospect of this, and immediately this conjured up visions of me getting Angela and her two brothers strapped in to the car and driving the five minutes over to Bethel Valley Lane to play with the Bethel Valley kids, the children of Elletu, Cool and j. The kids played, we moms bonded, and what we realize now but didn't realize then is that those bonds were irreversible. Right now I'm praying a good man in to Katie's life, with healthy children to follow. I want these three friends to have what we BVG's had at that stage of life and have today. And why stop there? I'm bold--I'm praying that Leslie, the other bridesmaid, and her little family will move back to the States and choose San Mateo. The thing is, IT COULD HAPPEN! I was gone to Hawaii and Virginia for 11 years, and here I am. If the BVG's are a group of four, I think the SMG's should also be a group of four. So I pray big, realizing GOD CAN DO ANYTHING HE WANTS!

And that's what's on my mind on this rainy morning in..........well, here. And if we BVG's are here, it doesn't really matter where here is.

Monday, January 28, 2013

Rainy Days and Mondays Never Get Me Down

It's Monday morning, and it's either been raining in our little town or it's going to be raining. I learned long ago not to let that depress me. My daughter, a characteristically and delightfully cheerful soul, nonetheless finds gray weather gets her down. For her, moving from London back to California was a godsend. We chose to leave sunny Hawaii and sunny Virginia to get back to here, so I will not complain. The sun will come out.........................no, not tomorrow, but someday. And until then, I will use these 'punnies' to keep me cheerful. I didn't write them, but I know the BVG's will love them:

I tried to catch some Fog. I mist.

When chemists die, they barium.

Jokes about German sausage are the wurst.

A soldier who survived mustard gas and pepper spray is now a seasoned veteran.

I know a guy who's addicted to brake fluid. He says he can stop any time.

How does Moses make his tea? Hebrews it.

I stayed up all night to see where the sun went. Then it dawned on me.

This girl said she recognized me from the vegetarian club, but I'd never met herbivore.

I'm reading a book about anti-gravity. I can't put it down.

I did a theatrical performance about puns. It was a play on words.

They told me I had type A blood, but it was a Type- O.

A dyslexic man walks into a bra.

PMS jokes aren't funny, period.

Why were the Indians here first? They had reservations.

Class trip to the Coca-Cola factory. I hope there's no pop quiz.

Energizer bunny arrested. Charged with battery.

I didn't like my beard at first. Then it grew on me.

How do you make holy water? Boil the hell out of it!

Did you hear about the cross eyed teacher who lost her job because she couldn't control her pupils?

When you get a bladder infection, urine trouble.

What does a clock do when it's hungry? It goes back four seconds.

I wondered why the baseball was getting bigger. Then it hit me!

Broken pencils are pointless.

What do you call a dinosaur with a extensive vocabulary? A thesaurus.

England has no kidney bank, but it does have a Liverpool .

I used to be a banker, but then I lost interest.

I dropped out of communism class because of lousy Marx.

All the toilets in New York 's police stations have been stolen. Police have nothing to go on.

I got a job at a bakery because I kneaded dough.

Haunted French pancakes give me the crepes.

Velcro - what a rip off!

Cartoonist found dead in home. Details are sketchy.

Venison for dinner? Oh deer!

Earthquake in Washington obviously government's fault.

I used to think I was indecisive, but now I'm not so sure.

Be kind to your dentist. He has fillings, too.

And now that they are laughing their heads off as I did when I first read these---and might I say, I'm really missing that head about now-----I'll just add that our monthly get-together, which was last Wednesday night, was as fun as ever. I like that, no matter what, we work the time out so we can meet here for dinner once a month. They are even more fun than a list of 'punnies'---and that's saying something!

May we never take this special Sisterhood relationship for granted!

 




Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Resolutions

Where has the time gone? We are 22 days in to the new year--2013--and I'm just getting around to writing about New Years Resolutions. Isn't it obvious what I should write?

In 2013, I resolve to be more faithful in keep up with the Bethel Valley Girls blog!

Tomorrow night we are having our first dinner meeting of the year. I'll be serving Coq au Vin. Since we're all on some sort of a diet, I prefer to call it 'Diet Coke au Vin,' but whatever. Anything with 'vin' in it sounds good to me!! After all, 'vin' is proof God loves us and wants us to be happy. I know we will all be happy to get together tomorrow.

So much has happened since I last posted in the blog....now, if I could only remember what that is. Hmmm. Well, I know this: 50% of the BVG's have had surgery since then. How's that for BVG demographics? I had the privilege of picking Elletu up at her house in the wee dark hours one morning and took her to a small hospital in an undisclosed area (because we work hard to keep our anonymity online) for surgery 'of a personal nature.' It was quite the bonding experience to be with her in her time of need. She was cute in her little gown in the pre-op area. I couldn't get over how fun all the people working there were. They said they were mixing up a little 'cocktail' for her. On the other hand, I only got free Tully's coffee in the waiting room during her surgery. But hers knocked her out completely, and I kept my wits about me, which is good because not only was I her 'family' that day, but I was her designated driver as well, also her caregiver back at my house after she was released---on her own recognizance, I believe they said.

I was amazed at how alert and perky she was after her surgery, so much so that we went out to lunch at the local tea room on our way back to my house. Once home, we each took a recliner, curled up with blankets and watched some chick flicks. I had ginger ale for her, orange sherbet, things like that, and when we watched the movie "Chocolat" and she got a craving, I even indulged her in that area. Eventually, other fans of hers came by to pay their respects (lured by the offers of free wine, I suspect), and her daughter came to claim her and take her back home. She had to solemnly swear to follow doctor's orders before I would allow her to leave.

When j had her recent nose surgery, however, I was away in California. All I could do was pray---for her, and also that I would not laugh at the pictures she sent of her with her nose all bandaged up. I would like to have made her some chicken soup or something. She apparently did okay without me. I'll be anxious to hear how she is doing when I see her at tomorrow night's meeting.

The big thing for me at the end of 2012 was being able to look back and realize that we made it through all of our big trips we had to take during the year. Actually, in a year and a half we had major trips to New Orleans, California (3 separate driving trips), North Carolina, Greece and Hawaii. During that time there were three family weddings and two grandsons born, so we have been clearly blessed many times over. But I'm tired from all of the traveling. Staying home this year will be fun, and for the first time, we plan to see the horrendous balance on our credit card go down instead of up. So that's another resolution:

I resolve to stay home this year and to pay our credit card bill down!

Then there's the usual:

I resolve to get healthier!

I remember back in the early '70's---no, not MY 70's, the 1970's---when I had about 20 pounds to lose and was so disgusted with myself. My New Year's Resolution was this:

I resolve that you will see less of me this year!

But I don't want the Bethel Valley Girls to misunderstand me. I want to see more, not less, of them in 2013. I was thinking of this as my husband and I were driving back from California after two weeks of family Christmas fun with the families of two of our three children. This included our two baby grandsons----what incredible fun! Yes, it was hard to say goodbye, but as we drove home I realized how much I had also missed my friends while we were away. We said goodbye to our family, but our friends are family to us also, and no one more than the Bethel Valley Girls. So this year:

I resolve that I will let the Bethel Valley Girls know how much they mean to me and my life!

Everything.