Category: city

I’ve heard of drive-ins, but..

  
It’s Sunday morning and what are we doing? We’re in line,as you can see by the picture.Where? We are at a car dealership some thirteen miles from the house.

Yes, It’s 7:35am on a Sunday morning and we are in line at a car dealership waiting for a flu shot.

When we were in the city, our local community hospital gave out flu shots, and you called up, made an appointment, came in, got your flu shot.

Down here, they have a drive-thru flu clinic,which is sponsored by the country’s department of health. They run it from 8am thru 1pm. Evidently, it’s so popular that you have to show up early to get on through.This way you have some Sunday left to do something with.

Clever,eh?

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Hurry Up and Wait…

Ah, the joys of relocation.

This time last year I was lamenting the fact that we had to get up tomorrow morning at 2am and make sure we were packed up to head back to the city. To add insult to injury, after we would unpack the car and walk the girls, we’d have, maybe, a half hour to lay down before I’d have to leave for work.

How times have changed.

I am watching folks in the neighbor hood throw their trash away in their cans, close their windows, pack their cars and kids up and head up Delsea Drive or the Garden State Parkway. It’s a step backward into the area I have come to love during the weekday, the area called QUIET.

Sure, It doesn’t hurt that I have two days off until I have to go back to the bakery, but, hey, it’s the first official weekend holiday of summer. I am not going to bed at 9:30. I am having an adult beverage.I can sleep in tomorrow.

Whoo-hoo!

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Greetings from Undisclosed

It’s been a while since I wrote an Undisclosed update.

I think I wrote more about Undisclosed, I think, before I retired, but since I have been down here full-time, I haven’t really thought about it as” Undisclosed”, although it is still that.It’s weird,because it’s home to boot.

We are adjusting to full-time life here, and we are happy.The girls really are happy because, for now, I am here full-time, that is, not working, so they get a ton of attention.Jim likes to tease me about being a happy homemaker,but after 30 years of waiting on cold street corners and windy train platforms to go to town,there are plenty things to keep me happy.

We both are trying to figure out about working.It is weird,because it is something we know that can’t be full-time, because there basically NO full-time positions here.We’ll decide, somewhere along the way, if there is something we can do.As the weather gets warmer, it’s less of a thought because there are things to get done around here, and when it is nice out, who wants to be outside.

Life is good.

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Packing it up

The problem with weekends is that they are too short.

We have gotten the car packed up and probably will try to hit the road around 1:30p.m.-2p.m.,as we would like to get back down to home before sunset.It is incredible when you try to bypass a major urban area and plot for back roads,well, you see the mileage decrease but the time is somewhat comparable.We actually are planning to try a new route home, so it would be so nice to see where we are going.

It has been a blast hanging out with Juls and Tim, and the bonus is that the fit bit zip daily goals have been met, thanks to being on the side of a mountain. If anything, they should add more kudos on because you are actually hiking up the side of a mountain when you are coming back up to the house.After fifty plus years of being in the city, and being used to the background noise to the point of it being white noise, well,between Undisclosed and here, the quiet with an occasional passing car really rocks.I get to pray, meditate, clear my thoughts, and generally be at peace.

After all, life is too short.

TRIPS

Ever trip we have had going down here to Undisclosed we have had one basic route.We would try to take the drive to bypass expressway traffic.

As much as I want to leave the city, the route on the way out was always so nice.The Boathouse row is especially nice at night when the houses are lit up. It is so gingerbread that is screams to take a picture.The other site we take in is the Art Museum, home of many wonderful paintings, but most importantly, the steps that Rocky took in the movie.

Nice to have the pictures for the memories.

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Stress

So anyone who has moved at all during their life knows the stress of moving. As many times as I would move, and I would pray I’d never have to do it again.

No, the stress with moving is a walk in the park: try tying in the art of wrapping up your entire life in retirement and moving from an urban area to a place where I stand out on our deck at night and I hear crickets or birds and night sounds you’d never know exist in the city. We have come to the point where are in the home stretch and the anxiety is overwhelming.

Comcast is a current nail in our foot.Jim’s comcast email has disappeared. He has spent over 8 1/2 hours on the phone with Comcast, who evidently have decided they know how to do anything, lets assign people trouble tickets, and tell them their problem will be solved in 72 hours. Not good.Try to complain to Xfinity, you know the “kinder, gentler Comcast name”, well, they don’t care.There is no one to complain to and with their outsourcing of workers, they have no qualms at hanging up on you.I work in a Customers Service unit and if I even thought of trying what they( Comcast) are doing, I wouldn’t have to worry about retiring.

So I will wrap this post up praying for a miracle regarding Comcast, and hopefully, some peace of mind along the way.If you want to share any Comcast customer service, er, rather, lack of service stories, feel free to leave them in the comments.

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Typing with one eye open.

They say that there is often sympathetic pain when a family member is suffering.

Zush has her issue with the cyst on her rear left leg. Me? My lower spine is knotted up tighter than a Philadelphia soft pretzel. I had been sleeping off and on since four o’clock this afternoon .My brother-in-law and Jim’s nephew Tom were over and I was completely oblivious to it,

Now I am up and having a little rice pudding for dinner, typing the post, and then a shower and bed, only to be up at three to head back up to the city.It truly will be sweet once the two of us are back on all our wheels again.

Here’s hoping your night is good, your week is better and the weekend comes really quickly!

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To Paraphrase Seinfeld’s George..

The expressway was angry that day.

Well, not actually the expressway.

I left work at 5PM.

Where my bus would take the exit, there was a major back-up on the expressway because the accident closed the main road up to my current homestead.Fortunately,my nephew Greg was there to save the day.

Zush isn’t feeling well: she’s in some pain. Greg was able to go to the vet for me and pick up her medicine.We were going to meet and I was going to pay him and then we’d part.Little did we know from the texts we exchanged and I exchanged with Jim that I would still be on the bus at 6:24 and not able to get off until 6:35 by Greg’s phone.He was the one who found out what happened and I was able to relay the news to my new friends on the bus.It was like being on a lifeboat.You let your loved ones know you were ok and put dinner in the refrigerator because it’s going to be a while until I come home.Then there were the “Hello Dr Soso? I can’t make my 6:15 appointment, as I am parked in a 9 bus on the Schuylkill expressway.”There were no useless conversations on the bus today.We were all tired and frustrated adults who just wanted to get home.

Retirement looking really good right now.

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Working for “The Man”

I had a chance to work overtime tonight and did. I worked an additional four hours and boy am I beat!

One of the benefits of working overtime is I can earn time to use as I wish. This is really the reason that I do this, as it allows me to continue taking Fridays off through the end of the year.

Just wanted to share a quick picture I snapped from my window tonite of the skyline at sunset.As much as I was really tired and didn’t feel like staying, and as much as I wanted to be home with my family, the sight was really pretty. Knowing I probably won’t catch it again was bittersweet.Mind you, I won’t miss the city, but being blessed with vision to take this view in is something I will warmly press in my memories.

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End of the Summer Season

Yup, I know Fall doesn’t start until late September.

As I sit here and type this, I am looking out the window and looking at the late summer lawn and garden.Part of me is genuinely sad, as I am sitting in the room where both my parents passed away in 1998 and 2012.That thought and looking at the outside really makes me feel the passage of time.Part of me laments the fact that I used to go swimming in the summer with Zush, and the fact that we are both getting a little older, well, Zush goes in and I keep her company going up to my mid-calves.

I feel depressed.

The hope I have is for the future.

The hope to finish out my time here in the city and pray that the future is kind to us all.To actually live in a house with my husband that is ours and with our furniture and belongings and things that are ours is something that I am patiently waiting for. I hear Jim say about how is going to miss his job, and yet, I am leaving mine to move as is he, and this was the first time I heard him express that.Wow…something else to mull over in my mind,

I mull these things over in my head, and although I know I am more than ready to leave, I can only pray that we all survive the transition.

In the crispness of fall, hopefully, things will be comforting to us and we all will be alright.

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Daily Public Transit-The Good,The Bad, The Ugly

I am climbing on my soapbox again to talk about my daily commute.

Back in my prior life, when we lived two blocks away from the train station, life was sunny. A nice morning train, a brisk walk to work;in short, no worries.

Then our house sold and we moved two miles further from the train.There lies the rub: the bus.

I honestly hate the commute. In order to get into the city I take the bus onto an expressway, where I lose forty-five minutes to an hour one way.It irks me because it is time I’ll never get back again in my life.Traffic usually sucks.If you aren’t entertained by someones’ blow by blow description of how their life is going, how their **fill in the blank here: sex life, date life,third marriage is going, well,I know, I know, read or something** Well, there’s only so much to read or listen to. I refuse to be chained to Verizon and use my hot spot to be on-line. Then, when the bus reaches center city, I get off the bus and wait for a second bus.

Did I mention I hate personal trivial conversations on a cell phone on public transportation?
**Sigh**

Fortunately, I hope to God I get through this last stretch before I retire taking public transit. Pretty sad when I get to “treat” myself, thanks to my Flip Fitness class and physical therapy,and walk to the train station to get on a train that spares me the expressway.The indignity is I have to get OFF the train to get back on a bus to get home.

I won’t miss this at all.

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Monday, Monday…

Talk about a rough Monday.

It has gotten to the point that we can’t bring ourselves to come up on Sunday nights anymore. We are really in no hurry to come back to the city, I mean, after all, we ARE home.Why should we rush up to get away from home?

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So the above picture is of what has been our past two Monday mornings. It’s a shot of the dawn traffic coming back up from the shore into the city.It’s bad enough that you are bleary eyed enough, trying to wake up and face a brand new day, but then, to add insult into injury, you have to make a 90 mile drive back into a sea of humanity.

The only comforting thing that we have is that there is, indeed, a time stamp on how much longer we have to make this trip.True, we talk in the car about the fact that someday, maybe, just maybe, we’ll miss making this trip…..I doubt it.