My Summer Song....

This post was published on Light Refreshments Served and I am honored to be there with the amazing women who post there regularly.

Okay, it's more like a moan. I do not like the summer. It's the heat. And the bugs. And the sweating even when you're sitting still. Give me Spring, Winter, Fall. I'll take them all. Just let me sleep through summer in an air conditioned house set at 65 degrees and hermetically sealed to keep the bugs out.

Of course, that's not happening. Our a/c has been on its last legs for a couple of years now, so we don't run it until the worst part of summer hits - mid July and August, usually. We run fans full blast all night upstairs and as soon as I rise in the morning we get the windows opened and the fans going downstairs to suck in the cooler air. One of the beauties of living in Colorado is that it does cool off, at least somewhat, almost every night. It's not unusual to have a 20 or even 30 degree drop over night. Thank goodness, because the lovely result of my misery in the heat is I'm the queen of crabby. I just can't help it, I tell my family.

My hatred dislike of bugs has a number of causes. When I was still in my teens, I watched an episode of 'Night Gallery' titled 'The Caterpillar' in which a man who desired a colleague's wife pays an accomplice to put an earwig in the ear of the unsuspecting husband. In a twist of fate, the accomplice accidentally enters the room of the man who hired him and places it in his ear instead. After suffering through horrible pain as the earwig eats through his brain and exits the other side, a doctor called to aid him tells him the ordeal is not over as the earwig has laid eggs en route through his brain and he is now host to all of them. Fun, eh? Now, many years later, I still pull my hair over my ear when I roll onto my side at night. My husband says I do this even in a deep sleep. Hey, those earwigs can climb up on the ceiling. I've seen them.

I also was cursed blessed to have grown up with two brothers who thought it hilarious to hold grasshoppers over my face, screaming, "It's going to spit tobacco all over you!" and rubbing the wings of miller moths with the taunt, "It's going to get its wing dust all over you!" as if these things were some sort of poison. To me, they were certainly great horrors, to say the least. And they took great pleasure in their evil deeds games. They could not have known they would be forever damaging my psyche or could they?. With some sort of miracle, I avoided a life in a straight jacket but retained my fear dislike of the creeping, crawling things of this world and have broken my husband's heart with a refusal to ever enjoy a new life in Tahiti or some other tropical place. I can barely endure the bug population here, can you imagine what would happen to me there????

And one more thing, I was a redhead when I was a kid. In fact, until my 30's. My skin is fair and tender around sunlight, like a vampire's as it smokes, burning in the UV rays, so I stay out of the sunlight mostly and sunscreen heavily when I must be in it.

So, for those of you who enjoy the heat, the sun, the bugs of summer - go forward and enjoy the next couple of months. As for me and my pale skin, I'll enjoy my retirement in Alaska during the summer (mostly just mosquitoes is what I hear) and right here in Colorado during the winter.

A Parent Update and Downloading Songs

First the update so I can move on to happier thoughts. My mother took a fall a few days ago because a medication she was on wasn't at the proper dosage and thinned her blood out too much. It caused her to faint. Thankfully, she didn't re-break the hip she just finished rehab for or anything else. But once in the hospital, they discovered a bedsore she's been battling from infection for many, many months was seriously reinfected. So she's in a rehab center again for the next 3 weeks or more. My sister already has their room at the nursing home we have to move them to and you can't let them go or you won't get them back. Dad can't go alone as he's the main reason for the move - his dementia is so bad, my mother can't even care for him and he could never manage a new place alone. So, for now, he's being day sat by a college student home for the summer. It's been stressful for my sister - beyond imagination. And just when she thought she would have a break from 3+ years of caring for them while their health has seriously declined, things aren't moving along. I think if you've not experienced the exhaustion of caring for aging parents, you can't really understand. But I took care of them for just a week when they came to visit and were much healthier than they are now and I was tired. Their visit last summer to stay at my brother's wore he and his wife out, too. It's exhausting and I admire and am grateful for my sister's love and dedication toward them all this time - while she's been raising two sons and working as a professor and associate dean at a university. That's a lot of responsibility and a lot of hours in the day. I hope she knows how grateful I truly am.

Okay, on to the downloading of songs. So with Jay out of work, as he still is, we had no money at Christmastime. Our amazing ward family took care of us to ensure our daughter - and both of us - had a Christmas and it was an wonderfully spiritual experience for us. I had no money to spend on my sweet nephews and the one precious niece still under 18 (I don't buy gifts for them once they turn 18 or graduate from high school, whichever comes first). Then I discovered I could download some music for them, burn CD's and....wala! Of course, as luck would have it, I completed my niece's CD and then my drive bit the dust. In comes tax return time and we've replaced that, so for the past week or so, I've been trying to get my nephew's CD's downloaded. They are 10 and 17. They like several kinds of music, as do I. In fact, I've enjoyed a few of their "rap" music choices and am keeping copies of them for myself on my computer, too. But then they asked for some Lil Wayne. Oh man! What garbage. How this little, disgusting piece of trash has made money in the music business, I cannot tell. First, he's filthy. No, I mean big time filthy. So I've had to search for the "clean" versions of his songs because no way am I contributing to the distribution of that crap or the corruption of my nephews. Second of all, he can't sing. His voice is this croaking, nasty sound. So all his "songs" feature other singers. You know, people who actually CAN. I'm grateful to have finished downloading these songs and hope to never have to listen to him again. And Thank Goodness for Radio Station who continue to play the CLEAN versions of these loser's music......