Random Texas Thoughts

A blog about what else, Texas!! The life I've lived here.

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Deliverance am I right? That’s the thought that came to your mind!!. Hahaha! Working on quirky characters is all, truly!

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“Straighter than a By God!”

I heard this today and was thrown back 40 years!! So my dad used to say this all the time. This was in the 60s and 70s. What does it mean?! Enquiring minds’d like to know!

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I’m sick to death of virtual. I don’t want no virtual meetings or Zoom weddings or meetings or appointments.....let’s get back together y’all! Covid is a thing but it’s not the end thing. Yes it’s dangerous but so is living every day. Our bodies were built for fights like this. Let it fight! The evolution of human existence has to be in the game to win it!!

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I’m not a natural talented artist in any way but I’ve been taking a few online art classes and have thoroughly enjoyed being silly instead of trying for likeness I go for goofy. I can paint any color, any character anything at all. It actually stretches me more to let the silliness take the lead. I highly recommend this to everyone!!! Cheapest therapy around!!!

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A Quote Stopped Me in My Tracks Today

Photo by Leah Kelley from Pexels

The quote I just posted “Everybody wants to save the earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.” was found in my Living Simple magazine today.  First page, my eyes land there and truly I got sad all over!  How much truth resonated in those few words!!!

There are others of you out there, like me, who were born an environmentalist.  I was born one in 1965 in a small Texas town.  It was way before it had become a word, only Californians were dabbling in it.  

At three years old on camping trips, I walked among the campsites around us and picked up trash before we set up our tents.....and the day we left.  When I was 10 or so, I wrote letters to the star telegram outraged at the loss of Monarch habitat and the buildings being erected on the massive fields of bluebonnets I loved to visit every Spring.  They were just seas of blue and interspersed in there was the Monarchs eating their favorite milkweeds.  Like little stained glass windows flying around.  My mom and I used to lie on our backs in our front yard and count them on their migrations.  We’d count to the thousands before we got tired and went in to eat dinner.  Solidly one of my favorite memories of my mother and I.  At age 12 I started to raise them and let them go when they hatched.  I became the subject matter expert but no one cared.  

When I was a teenager and we started floating the Guadalupe and the Comal River, I’d dive for trash and take it to the cans.  Absolutely disgusted with all the drunks and dopey college kids throwing all their trash in the beautiful creation life had built for them.  

I remember the commercial with the native American Indian on horseback crying looking out over all the trash we as a society leave everywhere.  I hated that commercial, and I loved it!  I was glued to the TV watching it and feeling a tingly anger all over my body that he had to be sad about it!

As I’ve grown into an adult, I realized I could only do so much, the rage and nagging of others to see things the way I do get you no where.  I simply lived an example.  I use no pesticides, I plant gardens, I started naming and talking to my trees, I protect honey bees, birds and butterflies and all animals, I pick up trash, I recycle everything and never buy anything new hardly at all.  We can all just take a little less and we’d receive so much more.  I’m not changing the whole world, I’m changing my little world and it’s not hard at all!  If only our great people could get in the habit of just doing a FEW things to make their personal world better, it would add up to great things!

Plastic is truly one of our times greatest environmental sin.  Every decade it seems in modern society is wrought with a plague caused by apathy.  Humans tend to only create great change when they are in danger.  I sure hope we are listening.  We have to listen harder, there are more of us than ever in history using, abusing and destroying.  

Do your part, please do your part.  

If you weren’t born a natural environmentalist, create yourself into one by just doing a few things to make Momma healthier and happier.

Be well.

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Everybody wants to save the earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes

P.J. O’Rourke, All The Trouble In The Word--Living Simple Magazine

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Mask Requirement Lifted in Texas What the Hell!!  Yee Haw!

Photo by Yaroslav Danylchenko from Pexels

It was a fabulous day and quite the surprise when I learned the mask mandate had been lifted and bars and restaurants were allowed to open to full capacity!  I know there is so much controversy over this but as for me, I was elated! 

Immediately I noticed everyone complaining about it and the comments “what's going to happen if there is a spike in cases????”.  I just think there will be, it will be inevitable but we must move on. We as a society have got to get on with life and figure this shit out, we can’t hide in closets, within Zoom walls and behind masks forever.  The only thing this epidemic has done is cultivate new hates, judgement and discriminations.  Remember in the beginning “we are all in this together?”  Yeah, misery together and that togetherness has faded.  We are so far away from together it’s the worst in all human history!  I have hardly seen any person I know except for a few co workers and immediate family in OVER A YEAR.  Asinine.

Regardless of the dangers of COVID, people have to eat, support children, save some money for later and pay for their stuff!  We can’t live off government handouts forever and the $1200 here and $600 there will not fix the financial pain a lot of people have felt over the last year.  

I HOPE there are others out there that are like me.  Yes I recognize COVID for what it is, yes I am careful about contact and washing hands, temp taking etc., but I’m also relaxing into and ramping out my excitement for a new vision forward with our new normal and rebuilding phase to a better decade than this one has started out to be!  

I am READY!!!  I want to TRAVEL again, I want to go on a CRUISE again!  I want to go to Oktoberfest in Germany again and fly to Holland again!  IT. IS. TIME. PEOPLE!!!

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To gain your own voice, forget about having it heard

Allen Ginsberg

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Youngun’s learned a lot from Texas Snowpacolypse!

My two young adult children moved away from home in December to their own apartments.  What a proud moment!!!

I chuckled at some of the things they learned and experienced.  I then realized, in the end, it will make them stronger and understand that the world is only part oyster, but lots of storm clouds, danger and uncertainty, and how to bank against the big bad wolf.  

I thought I would jot them down for the memories later on.  

#1, when threat of possible water turn off, fill the bath tub and any available vessel!  Make sure you have some of it available for drinking too!  Boil some and put in the fridge.

#2 how to go #2 in less than great circumstances (Wal Mart bag in a Lowes bucket anyone?).  Then how to dispose of it.  I swear I cackled with laughter for a solid hour of my daughter describing having to do this in her posh apartment complex.  Since neither of them stowed any water, they had to get serious (even worse, my sons water remained off for 3 more days, he’s over it!).

#3 Grocery stores are fallible, we are always one step away from total food shortages and you may not always have unlimited access to food (sobering moment for all of us, but my kids really did learn this the hard way) that you enjoyed the day before.  Have a small emergency storage of soups, dried milk, even a couple of MREs.  

#4 COVID knocked out the ability to work for my daughter who is a server but this storm?  It double downed on what COVID had to offer because now the restaurant she works at lost power, food had to be donated, all the water pipes burst and now they have a massive mess and no telling when service will resume (once again, food shortages are real).  This goes for a lot of the high end restaurants around.  Lesson:  EMERGENCY FUND

#5.  COVID taught us people are not nice when they feel threatened.  Work hard to remain patient and kind, choose kindness always.  My son got his car stuck on a hill in the ice.  A girl in his apartment complex came out to help him and she even volunteered to take him to the grocery store with her (that’s where he was going).  After that, they ended up playing board games and now he has a new friend.  It’s as simple as that people.

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Out in Force!

The folks in N Texas have had their fill! There ain’t no Covid! There ain’t no snowpocalypse!! Only BEER! My husband and I were shocked at the crowd!! ‘Twas a good day, one of the most “normal” days in 13 months!!!

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Driving around today after Snowpocalypse!!

In one day, life back to normal(ish). Crazy horrible Texas drivers but clear roads that’s good.

The temps soared to 55 and the frozen giblets that kept us huddled in masses, starving, without toilet flushing even as of yesterday are gone! My kids won’t have to poop in a trash bag lined bucket on their verandas of their apartments now.

Today I ventured to Home Depot and got my packets of seeds for Spring, my little packets of hope for anything better than February. I will sow them in my window sills to keep the hope growing.

Be well y’all.

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Snow, you may go

First post to the world that doesn’t really care. 

 I sometimes want to write a blog, and most times I don’t.  Tumblr looks like a good free platform that I don’t have to maintain, I can just put my random thoughts someplace.  Not looking for sympathy, even empathy, pity, or even to boost my ego.  Just a place to write my thoughts, one lady in Texas whose lived a good life and has great memories of that life.  How life has changed.....for the worse, for the better?  Everyone has a viewpoint.  More.....there is always more thoughts.

That being said, this Texas Snow Storm, it’s been the worst.  I’ve lived here all my life and have never seen the breakdown this caused.  Quite scary.  

A little ridiculous how it always takes catastrophe to create change in society.  Like, we as humans wait until it’s almost life over as we know it before saying hey, how about we change our behavior to make things better?  Wow, what a great thought!  Amazing!  

I remember this discussion in the 70′s when air pollution was really awful.  I remember riding around town in the back seat of my parents giant car and seeing the yellow smog.  It was nasty.  It took 50 years to get better with air pollution!  That is crazy!  

I was born an environmentalist.  I drove my dad crazy with it.  I had a love for the natural world that was not taught to me, it just was.  

I’m hoping in my life time I could see the ban or the minimization of plastic.  I truly believe it is the next catastrophe waiting in the dark to destroy a part of our natural world we can just never get back.  

On the other hand, maybe I’ll be dead by then and I won’t have to worry about it anymore............the thoughts of the aged, they are raw and don't’ give a shit what other people think.  That’s the best part about age.  

I’m here to tell ya..........