I am not really very fond of camping.  If, by camping, you mean anything that involves sleeping outdoors in anything that lacks four solid walls, a roof, running water/modern plumbing, and heating/cooling.  I have heard tell of this thing called Glamping.  I think it may approximate something a little more closely to my preferences, but still likely falls short.  Don’t know for sure though, as I’ve never glamped.

I have, however, camped.

My first foray into camping was as a girl scout.  I come from a family of scouts.  My dad was a scoutmaster, my three brothers were scouts, my brother-in-law was a scout master, and my nephew made Eagle Scout.

Growing up with my dad and my brothers I was entranced by their stories of camping.  I loved the smell of the cedar foot locker they took with them on their trips.  I loved the mess kits, the sleeping bags, the flashlights, the canteen, and all the gear associated with camping.  I loved how my dad would come home from camping and hiking the App Trail with a scruffy beard and the woodsy aroma he carried with him.  Ok, maybe I am being a little kind there calling it a woodsy aroma.  Unwashed body for 4 days with a hint of the woods, is more like it.

Top o’ the mornin’ to ya! Seeing as we just celebrated St. Patrick’s Day this past week, day drinking is top o’ the mind with me.

These days, day drinking is defined as a couple of cups of hot tea in the morning and as close to 64 ounces of water as I can get.  And that about does it.  In the summer we can get a bit wild with it and have some unsweetened iced tea.  Maybe a lemonade. There might be perhaps a small glass of milk if I am eating a cookie. Thankfully, I have not yet reached the age where prune juice is de rigueur.

But that was not always the case.

 Exhibit A:  The college years.

 To be fair , in the college years there often was no delineation between day and night drinking.  It was pretty much round the clock.  Especially during football season.  One would break up the drinking between day and night with a well-timed power nap and a cheeseburger and fries.

Ernie and I had a conversation about straws the other day.  Lest ye judge the seeming lack of excitement in our relationship, do note that when you are married for nigh on 39 years now, sometimes the conversations can tend towards the mundane. 

And to be fair, we were in a car on a two hour drive to Brooklyn to visit the grandchild.  In between my singing Ain’t No Mountain High Enough and Stop! In the Name of Love, like I was a 4th Supreme, we found ourselves talking about straws.

Amusement parks.  They are a bit of a misnomer for me.  Nothing I find really amusing about them.  Oh, don’t get me wrong.  I did think they were a lot of fun for like a brief blip on what is my now aging timeline. Sometime in my childhood, where those years now seem like nano seconds.

 The fun years, where I enjoyed amusement parks, began when I was like 7 or 8.  Our Catholic grade school, St. Denis, held its annual fundraiser, the May Fair, in it’s asphalt parking lot which doubled as our playground every other school day of the year. 

My sister has recently spent some time in jail. Her crime? Liking too many Instagram posts.  Now, fortunately, Instagram Jail is not nearly as formidable as a real jail.  No orange jump suit required and you can eat, sleep, shower, and bathe any time you want and you are free to go about your daily business.

But for someone who loves photography, who enjoys it, is great at it, as much as she is, it was pure torture.

Let’s start with the irony of it.  Instagram is an app that encourages you to share pictures and to interact with each other.  That is it’s raison d’etre.  So it is truly bizarre that one can be banned, albeit temporarily, for doing the very thing for which it was designed.

I thought closed caption TV was for the hearing impaired or anyone watching Derry Girls.  I was wrong.  Unless you count me and all the people I know over the age of 60 as hearing impaired.  Which does have some truth if we are defining hearing impaired as needing the TV at 70 on the volume scale to hear it.

My BFF Kathy and I were having a text conversation on this the other day.  We were chatting about a TV series we both like, The Empress.  She commented that she thought the dubbing (it’s in German) would be annoying but the closed captioning eliminated that problem. 

Me: Closed captioning? You watch tv regularly with closed captioning?

Kathy: Yes, always.  My girls got me hooked.

I didn’t follow up on that, but was quite curious because her girls are in their late twenties and early thirties.  Young people watching TV with closed captioning? Is this some new trend? What? Why? When? How?

Kathy: Conversely, Mike (husband) hates it but needs to turn the volume up to 75.  And he still misses dialog so then we have to rewind and I’m like, ‘how about we try closed captioning?’

I saw something recently from the National Archives asking if there are any people that can read the cursive writing on some historical documents. 

They are looking for “anyone with an internet connection interested in volunteering to transcribe these historical documents and help make the archives’ digital catalog more accessible.”

I would ask, is there anyone left out there under the age of 50 that can read any cursive writing, let alone cursive writing from 1776?

Remember when your TV was just a TV?  You know.  When it was simply a device to watch shows that were served up to you on a schedule.  You got a little book called a TV Guide.  You looked up the shows you wanted to watch. Seinfeld is on Thursday nights at 9 pm on NBC.  Got it.  Turn on the TV. Turn the channel to NBC.  And voila.

Nothing that require an advanced degree to operate it.  The biggest advancement was when remote controls came along.  And suddenly you didn’t have to get up off the couch to change the channel.  Saving many a child from being human remote controls for their parents.

This is true of so many inanimate objects.  Suddenly, it seems, everything is “smart” these days.

Remember when grandparents were simply known as Grandma or Grandmom, Nanna or Nanny, MomMom, Grandpop or Granddad, PopPop or Pop?  I might be missing a couple. Meemaw anyone? And Bubbe and Zayde, if you are Jewish.  But you get the idea.  Basic. Traditional.  A name that clearly identified your relationship to the child.

Like a lot of things exposed to the passages of time, and the proclivities of both the Boomers (don’t call me old) and their Millennial children (don’t call me traditional) who are now becoming parents, these names have changed. Oh, some grandparents today may still go by these names, but that is becoming a rarity, kind of like the Eastern Lowland Gorilla which is to say, on the critically endangered list.

There are two kinds of people in this world.  Those who believe the GPS and those who don’t.

I am now in the Those Who Believe the GPS camp.  But it wasn’t always that way.

First, we have to go waaaay back.  Like 1985 way back.  For those of you who may have read one of my previous blog posts, my first job out of college was as an Area Representative for Westinghouse Credit Corporation.  I was responsible for the Tri-State area (PA-NJ-DE). 

My job consisted of mainly traveling each day to the companies on my list that required inventory checks.  This is pre-GPS folks, when people had to use these things called maps to figure out how to get to places with which they were unfamiliar or to which they had never been.

I had a tri-state area so that meant lots of places with which I was unfamiliar.  Maps? I had so many maps I needed a milk crate to hold them all.  State maps. County Maps. Street Maps.

‘Tis the season.  Ergo, time to make the cookies.  Nothing says Christmas like cookies, tons of cookies, feverishly baked as if you are in an endurance marathon of some sort where you will die if you don’t get them done in time.  You consult your carefully planned out calendar.  It’s Tuesday. That means it’s Snickerdoodle and Chocolate Chips day.

Truth be told, I am not much of a baker.  Too much precision is required.  Unlike cooking, which is far more forgiving.   A little too much oregano in your chicken scallopine isn’t going to ruin the dish.  Miscalculate your flour when baking? Fuhgeddaboudit.

Had really hoped to close the book on Unwanted Houseguests at Chapter 3.  No such luck.

A couple of weeks ago, Ernie called out to me, saying, “Hey, Mary! Come here a sec.  Does it smell in here to you?”

He was in the downstairs powder room.  I wanted to yell back, “I don’t know, did you just go?”

However, I assumed this was not a case of typical bathroom odors as he is not in the habit of asking me if it smells in there. 

I approached the bathroom trepidatiously.  I leaned my head in and whoa!

 “Yes,” I answered.  “It smells like dead fish.”

I speak dog fairly fluently.  Not Cesar Milan fluency level.  But well enough.

 Which is why I was completely surprised the other night to discover perhaps not as well as I thought.

 But first, a little context.

 Regarding my boast of my dog speaking skills:  We are on dogs number 4 and 5. Daisy, age 10 and Winnie, age 8.  Altogether it has been over 30 years that dogs have been members of our family.  So, you know.  After all that time, you learn to speak their language.  Nothing inherently talented about it.  It just goes with the territory and you soak it in, like osmosis.

Ah! Thanksgiving.  That treasured time of year where family and friends gather around the table to partake in that most traditional of feasts where the turkey is the centerpiece, the piéce de resistance.  Unless of course you happen to be Italian-American.

Guest Blogger: Mona Liss ponders the etiquette of emojis.

I've come to realize that texting is now an art form. It's not just the words, but the added illustration - that cutesy or heartfelt emoji - has become integral to the message. And sometimes, just an emoji itself is the most powerful text.

Actually, when I think about it, it's laughable how we 'dress up' our messages with an emoji, and even elaborate with two plus more.
Is it a reciprocated red heart or a smiley, smirky face?❤️😆....Crazy, it can take so much time to figure out what's appropriate to communicate through a pin size illustration or a cartoon.🤯

I can recall the time when a text was a quick message. No emojis, just words. But now, it's an art form to convey a multitude of different emotions.🤔

There was this great little Italian restaurant right around the corner from our house, that was a favorite of ours.  An Italian family from Naples ran the place.  Really good, authentic Italian cuisine for an affordable price, a BYO to boot.  Great place to take the kids.

However.  You had to know there was a however coming, right?

Most of the waitresses, who were sisters and/or cousins, somehow all related, were mean.  They really didn’t enjoy their jobs it seemed, and really seemed to not like their customers at all.  They were akin to the Soup Nazi, for any Seinfeld fans.  Don’t mess with them in any way or they will give you the malocchio (maloik).

Every time we would go we’d hope to get one of the nice waitresses.  The four of us would eye up the situation once we were seated and try to ascertain if we would end up with one of the nice ones.

On one particular occasion, we ended up with the meanest one of all of them.  We placed our drink order and perused the menu and accepted our fate.

Laundry.  Like many other chores, it’s sysphean in nature.  No sooner do you complete the task and you have to do it all over again.  Lather, rinse, repeat. But there’s no other alternative.  Well,  to clarify,  there is no other alternative if you value cleanliness and hygiene.  Hey, I’m sure there are some people out there who don’t mind not washing their sheets every week.  Or wearing that pair of jeans for like the 5^th time.  I, however am not one of them.  I am a certifiable germaphobe, who HIGHLY values cleanliness and hygiene.

But before we go there, when I think about laundry, I can recall the first time I saw Ernie’s, who was my then college boyfriend, bedroom for the first time.  We walked into his room and no lie, I could not even see the bed because of the mounds of laundry all over his floor.  I mean, perhaps I should have gone running for the hills at that point (glad that I didn’t though, 38 years married and counting).  But given my germaphobia, I should have recognized that on that point we were incompatible.

We’ve had the opportunity to live the trendy, hip, cool, artsy Brooklyn life these past couple of weeks.  Without actually being trendy, hip, cool, or artsy ourselves.  Talk about fish out of water. And speaking of fish out of water, having lived in the suburbs our whole life, the first adjustment was just city life in general: the sights, sounds, smells, people, and activity of a lot of people living in a concentrated area.  Let alone the specifics of this particular neighborhood, Greenpoint, in Brooklyn.

Well, peeps, this week’s blog can practically write itself.

Remember the Underdogs R Us blog from a few months back?

You know, where I was marveling at the fact that our Phillies were the number one baseball team in America, while at the same time was confused because it was a strange feeling, one that we from Philly are not used to, being the city of underdogs that we are?

Yeah. The old feeling is back.  That new, strange feeling of being number 1, was short-lived, a blip, a flash in the pan, not in it for the long run.  Not in it for any runs, something our Phillies couldn’t seem to manufacture to save their lives and our hopes in the playoff series.

And just like that, after the hot Mets, a team that seems to have St. Destiny on their side took us out, we are back to the old familiar feeling of trying hard, giving it our best, but somehow coming up short.  It’s like the Mets were us from two years ago, and we were the Braves. 

We’ve covered the topic of aging more than a few times on this blog.  Here comes one more.

I recently read an article from The New York Times that outlines a key to longevity, something to give us all a little leg up (because who can’t use a little help with getting their legs up when you are over 60?) on Father Time and the Inevitable.

Seems like the experts “are increasingly finding that having a positive mind-set is associated with aging well.” Well, that and a $1.50 will get you…wait, I don’t think there’s anything you can buy for a $1.50.  That and $5.00 will buy you a McDonald’s value meal.

Ok, so maybe that’s like, did we really need a study to know this?  Apparently.  It was a decades long study and found that those with positive beliefs around getting older lived seven and a half years longer than those who felt negatively about it. More research found that it was also associated with lower blood pressure, and a reduced risk of developing dementia.

Well, color me, sunshine and flowers! Take that Father Time! I am going to claim my extra seven and a half years, thank you very much. Don’t have to tell me more than once. I am all in!