Where is my watch?

My parents named me Victoria Mary.  My mother's sister was named Victoria; she died  of tuberculosis when she was young and I was named in her honor.  Growing up, I was called Vic, Vicki, Vicky, and Victoria Poop (God knows why).  In my Catholic grade school, I was Miss Kelly.  Those nuns were so formal!  When we moved to Florida in 1996, I decided that I wanted to reclaim my birth name, so I introduced myself as Victoria in this place where nobody knew me as Vicki.  This was problematic when my husband called my workplace and asked to speak with Vicki; my coworkers had no clue who this mysterious Vicki might be.  I love my name, so I'm grateful for the opportunity to be Victoria.   As I've mentioned in previous posts, I've been exploring my ancestry in both 23andMe and Ancestry.com.  Both sides of my family present unique ancestry challenges.  I know from  childhood  memories that my father's mother was called Chic...

Yes, it was a boy that stared my smoking.  Damned boys.  I went to an all girls Catholic high school:  St. Mary of the Angels Academy.  Really.  During our senior year, we went on a religious retreat to some lovely mountain monastery.  I wish I had kept notes; I don't remember the name of the place, but it was beautiful, peaceful, and had, as a bonus, a group of boys on retreat from an all boys high school.  That's were I met him: Doug.  Gorgeous, sexy, Doug with long blonde hair and an air of danger.  How attractive is that to a sheltered, shy, young-for-her-age girl?  Ah, Doug.  It was love.  He and I established a long-distance relationship.  Well, it was long distance if you're a teenager without a car.  He sneaked out of his house and got a bus to visit me during the Christmas holidays.  His parents called.  They had no idea where he had gone.  This boy...sigh.  Yes, Doug smoked cigarettes, an...

Bars, saloons, taverns, dives, I've visited a bunch of them.  Most of them are upscale and shiny.  Even when they are noisy and crowded, they're never raucous or bawdy.  Maybe I don't get out enough, or stay long enough for the customers to get inebriated.  Maybe now that I'm older, I go to the wrong places.  I need to check with my younger friends. Every once in a great while, I'll walk into an older bar, usually one with a rich history.  Then, if I'm really lucky, I'll hear it:  the sound of pucks smacking a shuffleboard table.  Then, I'll smell it:  the powder wax, the stale beer, the cigarette and cigar smoke embedded in the walls, the floors, the wooden bar.  It's that smell, that wonderful smell of the Fire Station bar of my youth.   That smell takes me back to time spent with my father.  He wasn't much of a talker, and I don't think we ever had a long conversation.  I saw a different side of him when he dei...

I don't remember when I realized that I could make people laugh, but I have a vivid memory of the time my attempt at humor was very hurtful for the target.  I was a freshman in high school, and I was struggling mightily.  I felt quite lost in the crowd and didn't know how to make friends.  To add to the drama, I had gained twenty pounds over the summer, so any friends I had from grade school were shocked and sometimes snarky when they saw me.  I found a few new friends, one of whom was mildly handicapped with a speech impediment.  He wasn't around one day when I decided to mimic his speech to get some laughs.  I'll never forget my shame and embarrassment when he appeared as I was completing my performance.  All these years later, the memory is vivid. A couple of years ago I was posting on Facebook about my husband's attempts to install lights under the cabinets in our kitchen.  I was having a great time chronicling his failures, including the ti...

As I've mentioned in previous posts, I had grand plans for my retirement.  I was going to jump into writing my book, exercise every day, create a magnificent stained glass project, become a great and courageous cook...none of that has happened yet (although, it's only been six weeks and if I was talking to a friend and not to myself, I'd cut my friend some slack!).  The excuse I used when I was working was lack of time.  Now I realize that time was never the problem; my fear of failing is the problem.   I'm afraid of spending all day cooking some marvelous recipe only to have it taste horrible.  What a waste!!!  I fear using my supply of beautiful stained glass to create something that is really just plain ugly.  I am afraid of getting into an exercise regimen and turning into an exercise addict; that may not seem like a failure, but it is when exercising becomes more important than time with family and friends.  Been there, done that, and ...

I am always early.  I wake up early, get to appointments early, get to work (when I still worked) early, and don't even get me started how how early I arrive at the airport.  It's always been that way; it's how I was raised.   It occurs to me that I blame my upbringing for all that I like and don't like about myself.  As I've mentioned in previous blogs, my childhood was...interesting.  I will write a book about that someday, but for now I'm thinking about how rushed things were.  Because my mother was an obstetrician, she was on call all the time.  I was born in 1954; it would be many years before answering machines or cell phones came on the scene.  Mom had an answering service that was based in another town.  The nice ladies there would pick up her phone calls when she could not, e.g., she was at the hospital, or playing golf, or just outside (no cordless phones back then).  If we went shopping, she would stop at pay phone...

Ah, the many joys Florida life!  I've written that we have a pool in our backyard.  My husband loves the pool; he is in there many times a day.  As an older woman, the wardrobe transition I have to make in order to get in the pool is daunting; I must REALLY want to get in the darned pool to make all of that worthwhile.  My husband just takes his shirt off and dives in.  Nice. I do enjoy knowing that the pool is there in case of an emergency...maybe if the house is on fire or I'm being chased by aliens who can't swim.   Sometimes things get in the pool accidentally.  This is a point on which my husband and I disagree.  I believe that frogs don't know that they are hopping off the cement into the pool.  My husband thinks they know what they're doing; they're trying to cool off.  There are days when I rescue as many as twenty errant frogs.  They seem pretty happy to be out of the water.  This morning, I saw an armadillo s...

I've subscribed to both Ancestry.com and 23andMe.  I planned to find lots of information about my ancestors and my DNA.  The general information from both services wasn't surprising; I already knew that my mother's side of the family was German and my father's side was Irish.  Both Ancestry and 23andMe confirmed that I am what I thought I was in my genetic composition.  Here's what I didn't expect: I can spend hours and hours going down various unproductive rabbit holes in Ancestry.com.   There are a couple of real challenges in my ancestry search:  my father's surname is Kelly and my mother's is Smith.  Right.  There are LOTS of Kellys in Ireland, and Smith was not my mother's actual surname.  For whatever reason, my mother's father changed his last name from Meyer to Smith.  I don't know why, but I'm working on that.  Oh, how I wish I had asked my mother more questions about my ancestors before she passed away.  I wish...

In-laws can be difficult; my in-laws are amazing.  When I met them, my first thought was, "I want to be part of this family!"  They laugh, they play games (sometimes with ferocity), and it is obvious that they genuinely love each other.  My husband is one of five children; each has her/his own personality, but they have in common their real devotion to the family and to each other.   My father-in-law passed away more than twelve years ago, two weeks after my daughter was married.  Because he was so ill, my mother-in-law chose to stay with him and did not witness her first grandchild's wedding.  We missed her terribly, but we understood that she needed to be by his side.  He sensed that he was dying, but my mother-in-law didn't want to accept that.  In his hospital bed, he made sure that we all knew how much he loved us.  He told my mother-in-law that she was the best wife anyone could ever have.  She was.  His children and gr...

I wonder how many opportunities I've missed in my life due to my irrational fear of parking.  I know it's kind of crazy, but parking the car paralyzes me.  I almost didn't take advantage of a free ticket to an awesome performance of Kinky Boots at our downtown theater because...where would I park!?!??!?  Seriously, this is a problem.  Art festival?  Where will I park?  Visit St. Augustine (a beautiful, historic town nearby)?  No parking!  Drive into the city?!  I don't think so.   My parents are both long gone, but I think I can trace some of this fear to the way I was raised.  My mother had her OB/GYN practice in our home and we lived on a four lane highway.  Problematic.  We had a small pseudo parking lot on the side of our house, but it wasn't large enough to accommodate my mom's patients and our family cars.  Every time mom had office hours, we had to move our cars to another neighborhood and walk home....

About 5 years ago, I got a severe sunburn on my nose.  It was my own fault; I was at the beach and sat in the blazing sun without sunscreen.  My nose looked as though someone had held a match to it; it scabbed and eventually healed.  I thought that was the end of that. Two years after the burned nose incident, one of my colleagues said, "What's going on with your red nose?"  Thank you, helpful and honest colleague.  I hadn't paid much attention to it, figuring whatever damage I had done was over.  Not so much.  A visit to the dermatologist confirmed sun damage.  He said, "You are fortunate that this isn't cancer."   How does one treat sun damage such as I have?  I did some research (of course, I did; I'm a librarian).  The best approach to disappearing that red seems to be pulsed dye laser (see  https://www.bcm.edu/healthcare/care-centers/dermatology/procedures/pulsed-dye-laser ).  I had that done once.  O...

As any of my colleagues will tell you, I can talk and laugh all day long.  I don't do well with silence in meetings; if nobody else speaks up, I will.  I may not have anything important or valuable to add, but, hey, maybe I can make these people laugh!  You know the type: saying things just to fill the empty void of NOBODY TALKING!   Most of us in the education world go to a lot of workshops.  Sometimes these workshops focus on self-discovery; I've attended a few True Colors (see  https://truecolorsintl.com/the-four-color-personalities/ )  and taken a couple of Myers-Briggs Type Indicator ® personality assessment tests (see  https://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/mbti-basics/ ) .  My most recent True Color is orange, and my most recent Myers-Briggs personality type is INFJ.  I say most recent because our personalities do change as our circumstances change.  I'm not nearly as shy or afraid of the world at large a...