Well, I guess I know how to top off a great vacation!  All morning at the doctor’s office for my six month check up for bloodwork.  Great report-cholesterol down, blood pressure great, heart rate great, liver function great (have to worry about this due to some of my meds), and lost 3 pounds (although I don’t know how this happened after a week’s vacation),

Afternoon was spent having my eyes checked, to see if my cataracts have advanced.  They are about the same as a year ago.  I guess I can’t see too well anymore just cause I’m getting more mature!

Spent the evening listening to the Braves while I quilted a while.  Hope to have this one ready to take to LeeAnn in Los Angeles in November.   Then there’s the skirts to make for the great niece in Bowdon, and some more gardening aprons and tshirts to get ready for a fall bazaar and garden workshop.  That should keep me busy and out of trouble for a while!

Maggie is off to spend the week with Gram.  We call it her summer camp.  Gram dotes on her.  This is a woman who has never petted a dog in her life, until Maggie came along.  Now she calls to see if she can keep Mags for a few days when she needs a ‘doggie fix’.  Maggie eats it up.  Laying in Grams’s chair all day when she reads, taking walks around a new neighborhood with all those new smells, sleeping in bed with Gram (yep, we all found that unbelievable).  She’ll be sorry to see home again when we go get her.  And I’ll miss her terribly!

Yep.  It’s official.  Scott and I are old.  We spent an evening in Lowell at the Opry House last night listening to country music from the sixties.  And really enjoyed it!  This was the first time we went to a show there, and it was really quite good.  We’ll for sure be going back again.  The music wasn’t too loud, the singers were very good, doing imitations of some of the old country stars such as Waylon, Willie, George Jones.  The atmosphere were very relaxed.  i’d recommend it as a short trip for a fun evening.  But don’t tell my mama we enjoyed it so much.  After my years of complaining every Saturday when she listened to the Opry when I was a kid while Dianne and I ironed all the clothes, I’m afraid she might whup me.

I sometimes ponder on the state of our world today.  My mother is still one of the hardest working women I’ve ever known.  She still grows a huge garden, cans and freezes her harvest, cooks for ‘the boys’ two meals a day, and tends her flowers.  Her hands were so swollen from peeling peaches a couple of weeks ago, she was out of commission for a day or two.  Yet, she keeps getting by.  Her social security check helps he squeak by, and she refuses money from any of us kids.  She has her pride.  Now the unfair part:  Why is someone who never worked or put money into Social Security able to draw more per month than my mother (and thousands of other retirees) who worked for most of their lives and paid into the program?  I know there are some cases where government help is needed, but able bodied people?  There are jobs that need to be done-cleaning our roadsides, yardwork around public buildings, cleaning up public parks and recreation areas-the list goes on.  But ‘pride’ makes some people think that kind of work is beneath them.  I’ll take my mother’s kind of pride (which is earned) over the unearned pride of some of these freeloaders.  And don’t tell me that there isn’t enough money.  If the greedy politicians could have kept their hands off of the Social Security money as it was paid in, it could have been invested and made money.  They put in plenty, but our ‘leaders’ were not good stewards of the money they paid.  Maybe we should take money from the politicians who dipped into the funds for their pet projects and invest it to put money back into SS.  And that’s all I have to say about that!