Tennessee Trees

So, Tennesse was a strange place to me, when I moved here, less than two years ago.

Here are some lovely Tennessee trees, at sunset. I took these outside of the Dollar General Store last week.

I am originally from Baltimore. Maryland. I grew up there, went to college there, and lived there till my 30’s.

In Maryland, the locals like to say that Maryland counts as a southern state, because after all “we are south of the Mason Dixon Line.”

Funny thing is, since I’ve actually been living in the south,  I’ve never heard any real southerners stake their claim to being a southern state, based on being south of the Mason Dixon Line !

In fact, I’ve never heard anyone mention the Mason Dixon Line at all, since I’ve been here. They don’t feel the need to justify being in the south.

And no one down here thinks Maryland is a southern state. Only Marylanders do, apparently.

The accent is funny here, in Tennessee,  but I don’t notice it as loudly as I did, when I first arrived here.

There is basically no “long I ” sound at all. If you want to say the word “eye” …it is “Ahh”….like in the word “sonic.”

It’s basically a short “o” vowel sound (like box, fox, or socks) , in place of any long “I” sound that should be in like, bike, sight, might etc.

So you end up with …Ahh mahh-t  get a mahh-t to eat.”

Or you could write it as “Ahh  mot go get a bot to eat.”

Rather than “I might go get a bite to eat.”

I had more trouble understanding people than my daughter did. A few times I had to ask her what in the world someone had just said to us, after thet had walked away.

Once we were in the hospital for some nasty flu, and the triage nurse was weighing my daughter and getting her height, like they do. That nursing assistant kept saying something about “sonometer”.

And I thought she was trying to say sonogram or something. I had no idea why we would need a sonogram for the flu. I was thinking maybe the poor girl just wasn’t too smart.

After we were in our room, my daughter leaned towards me and whispered,  “Mom, she was saying “centimeters.” She was telling you how many centimeters tall  I am.”

I was like “what? Seriously ?”

She was like,  “Yep. She was saying centimeters. But it sounded like sonimeters ”

So that was pretty funny, and it’s a funny memory for us now.

I have had a Baltimore accent, for most of my life. When I moved to New Jersey 12 years ago, people there often didn’t understand me, especially over the phone. But eventually, I ended up adjusting my accent when I was speaking to people I didn’t know; trying to filter out the Baltimore vowels and the way I was used to pronouncing “DR” like a “J”…..

Examples  of Baltimore pronunciations –

Drink is Jrink

Dresser is Jresser

Drunk is Jrunk

Drip is Jrip

So, after over 13 years living in Jersey, I kind of had a “half – Baltimore/ half – Jersey” accent.

So you can imagine how I must have sounded to the Tennessee folks !

They didn’t know what to make of me. ….except for that cool lady that works at my local gas station , that’s originally from Wisconsin !

That would be Shannon.

I think I may be the less strange accent to the Tennessee locals , than hers is ! I’ve gotten to be friends with her, and she loves when I come up to the little gas station hut to chat with her.

Anyway, so now I’ve been in the Knoxville area of Tennessee, for coming up on 2 years. I think October (around Halloween) will make 2 years.

I remember our first Halloween here. My teenage daughter was afraid the Halloween scare house and haunts would not be as good as Jersey. (New Jersey did have awesome scare houses) .

And she was sure no one was going to like her, and that she would not fit in.

But I went online and found a haunted attraction , called Dead Man’s Farm. She reluctantly agreed to go with me.

We ended up having the best time ! It was a really cool haunted farm and barn. She loved it. They had a bonfire in the big open , grassy area.

Not only that, she immediately made friends with the group that was behind us, in the line to go into the haunted barn.

One of the 20 year old girls was scared to go into the barn.

My daughter held her hand, and kept track of her all the way through. I think the girl may otherwise have made a run for it, out one of the windows.

Afterwards, we took pictures together , with that group. My daughter was chattering all the long ride home, about how much fun she had and how the people just included her.

Even some of the actors, that were working in the haunted barn, got into some of the pictures with my daughter.

No one even mentioned her Jersey accent. They were more concerned with a farm zombie jumping out with a hatchet!

When it gets closer to Halloween, I’ll locate those pictures from that night and share them with you.

Let’s hope the haunts will be open this year, so I can get new pictures to share.

Happy 2020. Hang in there ! We’ll make to the other end of this tunnel, one way or another !!

 

 

Run on the Grocery Stores

So, here are what the grocery stores and Walmart looked like in Tennessee today.

How are things looking where you are ?

A Fun Sensual Silly Fantasy Starter For You This Morning…

A beautiful woman had been stranded on a deserted island, in the tropics, for many months. She was the only survivor of a terrible shipwreck which was caused by a drunk driving sea captain.

He had received previous SSWI tickets. (Sailing a Ship While Intoxicated ) tickets from the Coast but he was stupid and still drank while Sailing. His favorite drink was Jack Daniels.

Everyone died in the shipwreck except the woman in my story. Some of them drowned and others were eaten by sharks.

One of the men survived the shipwreck and was intending to swim to shore but was lured by a malicious mermaid out to sea

Our story character….   let us call her… “Sensualana” …swam to shore. She was a strong swimmer but still almost did not make the long distance.

She finally collapsed upon the shore and slept there exhausted for hours. Some pirates came and stole her clothes but did not take advantage of her.

I don’t know why. If you run unto them, you can ask them. I also do not know why they did not capture her or how in the world she did not wake up while pirates were tearing off her clothing.

When she awoke, she got herself up and went about the business of surviving on a tropical island. For the purposes of my silly story, she easily found shelter and learned how to get plenty of food.

She never thought about why she was naked or wondered where her clothes went.

She was creative and resourceful. She also had developed a great tan with no tan lines.. .since she was all alone on the island ….so she thought.

Little did she know that an indiginous tribe had been watching her. They knew the territory so well that they easily kept hidden from her, as a few of them watched her as she gathered her fruits and berries.

She entertained herself by singing and she had also fashioned a flute type of instrument out of a hollow wooden branch.

The men of the indiginous tribe  loved  to listen to her music. They found it stragely erotic and yet soothing.

Once a dolphin swam up to the shore to listen to Sensualana play her flute.

The music had magical powers and so the dolphin sprouted wings and began to fly…

Either that or Sensualla had eaten the wrong kind of wild  mushrooms for breakfast….

Alas, one of the tribal men fell madly in lust with her. One day he was watching her as she was fishing in the ocean.

He admired her resourcefulness and her ability to make fishing tools from what she found here and there on the island.

She caught many fish and knew she would have a feast for dinner.

She left her fish in a bucket on the shore and decided to take a swim in the water. She dove underneath the waves and swam.

The man did not see her for a minute or so and almost ran out of his hiding place to see if she was drowning.

Momentarily he saw her head come up out of the undulating waves. She swam closer to shore and the sunlight danced off of her golden long hair.

The man watched…  entranced. .. as the beautiful woman stood up in the water. The ocean water was waist deep and he could see the rest of her naked back.

Her curves were perfect and the man thought she must be a goddess.

Her hair hung down to her waist. She reached her arms up to run her fingers through her hair. As she turned, the man could see her from the front.

Her beauty was so stunning that he lost the strength in his knees. His foot moved and a branch he stepped upon made a noise.

She heard this and looked towards his direction. …..

What happens next is for your imagination to enjoy………:)

If anyone wants to continue the rest of the story in writing feel free to copy and paste this and then write your own ending. Simply designate where your part begins and credit my part to my blog.

Send link to me in the comments. Keep it a little silly or unrealistic,  in order to stay with the style and mood.

Have a lovely, creative day,

Annie<3

Folding Clothes with the Little One

This is a story about my little niece. She was 5 at the time of this story. Very cute and soft spoken.  She loves to fold clothes with me. I don’t think it is the clothes, as much as having my undivided attention.

There are lots of kids in her family and “one on one”  time is on short supply for her.

She always asks me if I have any clothes to fold. One day her grandmother (also the grandmother of my kids) had folded all of my clothes and left them on top of the washer.

Obviously she was trying to be being helpful…but Jade saw them and got all teary eyed. I thought my heart might break right there. 

All this sadness due to a pile of folded clothes….whatever to do?

I told her not worry because I had more clothes upstairs to fold. She said “Really ?”

“yes” I told her “Wait here while I bring these clothes upstairs to my apartment.  Then I will find the unfolded ones. In a few minutes I will call you upstairs to help me fold.”

Well she was very pleased and I made my way up the stairs with the folded clothes. 

I wonder if you have figured this one out yet ?   How well do you know me from reading my blog? What did Aunt Annie do?

Yep. I dumped all those folded clothes all over the floor and messed them all up in a big pile all over the place ! It was fun too.

 My daughter who was 11 at the time, saw me doing that. She is used to seeing me do weird things, but she was still curious. I told her Jade wanted to fold the clothes but your Grandma had already folded them.

Oh ! My daughter thought it was a grand idea !

I called Jade upstairs and she was happy to help me fold them. We had a little chat about all kinds of things.

I asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up. She said, “A Mermaid”

If you Can’t Find the Ice Scraper…Stay Out of the Kitchen !

My teenage daughter and I got into a conversation about her driving soon. She is 18 and I have to take her to get her learner’s permit soon.

I began mentioning safety rules and things like that. It was raining outside, which made me want to talk to her about rules for driving on slippery roads.

Somehow this conversation went into funny stories about what NOT to do with the car.

I told her that my mother once could not find the ice scraper. She was late for work so she decided to improvise.

She went into the kitchen…yes the kitchen… What do you think her tool of choice was?

No. you didn’t guess it. A butter knife! Yes, she scraped the windshield of my step father’s black cadillac with red interior with a butter knife.

Needless to say, he was not too happy with all the scratches all over the windshield.

But then….my daughter said she could top my story!

She said that a few winters ago, her grandmother (my ex husband’s mother) did something worse than the butter knife to the windshield.

I thought..what could be worse?

My daughter said “It was MUCH worse !” 

Well, I was in suspense.

So, the story starts the same way that my story did. 

The windshield was full of ice. She could not find the ice scraper.

SO………

She went into the kitchen….yes the kitchen..

Nope, not a butter knife.

She got out a pot and boiled some water. Yes….here it comes..

She poured boiling water all over the frozen windshield !

Yes, it cracked. It cracked all over the place. It made a terrible noise, which is what she noticed first and then a little crack that just kept going. Then more cracks.

Needless to say,  Grandpa was not happy when he came home.

So, both of my daughter’s grandmothers wrecked their windshields when they could not find the ice scraper, and decided to seek tools from the kitchen. .my mother and my ex husband;s mother.

So, the moral to the story is one of the following.

1. When you think you have the best story about your relatives….someone can top you !

2. If you can’t find the ice scraper….Stay Out of the Kitchen !

Lovely Story of Love in the Old folks Home

I had a lovely ten minutes at work this evening having a conversation with one of my elderly ladies. I was supposed to give her a shower but she decided to pass. I told her I had allotted the time for her so maybe we could chat , if she would like to. She is often in her room alone, so she was delighted.

I am aware that she is often seen with a handsome older man who also lives in the facility. I asked her about him and she blushed like a school girl !

She said that is her boyfriend and that they have been together for a couple of years. She was already living at the facility and met him shortly after he came there.

I love stories about how people met their husbands or boyfriends, so I just had to ask. She was so excited to be asked this question that her whole face just lit up!

She proceeded to tell me the cutest story about how they met. I ran home and typed it up..of course….You know, it is a blogger thing…

I changed the names of course. I just sent the story off to the Kindness blog because I thought it would be best placed there. So, I have given them the offering and hopefully you can read it soon. If for some reason they are too full for submissions, then I will post it here.

I know you all will love this story as much as I did. She was so cute how she blushed when she said his name. I loved it. She said she felt so blessed to have met him and that he chose her out of all the women at the facility.

There are always many more men than women at these facilities, so the the women are in the majority. The men that come can have more of a choice than the women do. That is just the way it is. So, if you are a man, this is something you can look forward to in old age!

These women are still very interested in men. They always notice if a new man arrives. Some of them wll even put on a little extra lipstick, when a new man is expected to be in the dining room that evening !

I bet you never knew !

I have time once in a while to visit in one of their rooms. When I have a few minutes, I always try to pick one of the ladies who I know is particularly lonely or who really likes company. When I watch the old movies with them, they always comment on the cute men in the movie!

One of them said to me once…(about the actor)…”Mmmm..I would have that man and there would be nothing left of him, when I was done with him!! ”

Just thought you might like to know. There is still sex drive in the 90’s. I don’t think that many people realize that, because you do not have the opportunity to speak with people that old, on a regular basis, like I do.

The Ghost of Room 221…New Jersey Nursing Home Ghost

This is the story about the ghost in room 221. This is a true story and I will be describing the actual events as I witnessed them that evening. I was inspired to write up this ghost story after reading a ghost story that I enjoyed on another blog, which you can check out HERE. 

I was working as a nursing assistant in a nursing home in New Jersey. I had five rooms assigned to me on this night. Each room had two roommates living in it.

It was dinner time, and all of my residents were at dinner, in the dining room. We had a call bell system, similar to that which you may have experienced in a hospital. If a resident needed help in the room, there was a call bell on a string , by their bed and they could pull the string to ring for help.

If the call bell was activated, it would call my pager in my pocket, and also call the computer at the front desk. When the secretary at the desk received the call, she would announce it over the speaker.

On this particular night, the call bell rang in room 221. As I said, the residents were at dinner. I went to the room to check, because you never know of someone may have wandered into the room. There are a lot of dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease residents in the nursing home. They do wander into rooms by accident, from time to time.

When I arrived at room 221, there was no one there. I cancelled the call bell and assumed that maybe it had been rung before dinner, and I had forgotten to cancel it. I told the secretary that I had cancelled the bell, and let her know that no one was in the room.

A few minutes later, the call bell rang again. The secretary started scolding me for not answering the bell. I reminded her that she knew I had cancelled it. This particular secretary did not like me and seemed to enjoy telling me that I did not know how to do my job.

I went to the room and cancelled the bell again and informed her that the bell had been cancelled and that both of the roommates were in the dining room, eating dinner. The dining room was right in front of the desk and she could see into it. I gestured towards the dining room for her to see, but she just grumbled something about me neglecting my residents.

This went on a few more times, until the nasty secretary reported me to the supervising nurse, for not answering my call bells. I explained to the nurse that I had cancelled the bell each time and that there was no one in the room.

The nurse thought there must be something making the call bell stick, so that it was not cancelling. This was not true because there is a cancel message that is sent to my pager each time a call bell is cancelled.

That evening I had received a cancel message each time I had cancelled the bell. I knew it  was ringing from scratch each time.

The nurse and I went together and she cancelled the bell. I asked her to please let the nasty secretary know, so that she would stop fussing at me. (I did not quite phrase it that way…)

So, of course about 5 minutes later,  the bell rang again, The secretary started yelling at me about the fact that if the bell rings too long, the computer will call the Director of Nursing at her home. This was an overreaction on her part, because the bells have to ring for 20 minutes straight before the director is called.

I tried to explain this to the secretary. I told her that at no time has this call bell rung for more than a few minutes before I had cancelled it. Besides it was not my fault that the bell kept ringing. Again, she mumbled something about me not taking care of the residents when they call.

Needless to say, this woman was not my favorite person to work with. Of all the people I have worked with over the years, she caused me the most anxiety.

So, the call bell rang again and I got the nurse myself this time. I asked her to please have that secretary call maintenance, since there was clearly something wrong with the bell. She agreed that there was a maintenance issue and asked the secretary to call the maintenance guy.

Well, he arrived and found me to ask what had been happening. I explained the whole story to him and told him that I could not keep going into this room to cancel this mystery bell. It was beginning to interfere with my other work.

He was compassionate to my situation and went right away to get tools to fix the bell. He came back and worked on the bell. He found me 15 minutes later and told me that he believed it should be fixed okay now. He said to call him, if there were any further problems with the bell.

After about 15 minutes, the bell rang again. The resident were now sitting in the TV room and no one was in the room. The secretary began yelling at me again that I was neglecting my residents and I overheard her telling some of my coworkers the same thing.

At this point I was losing patience with the secretary and I refused to go into the room any more. She could sit there and stress over the bell calling the director, if she wanted to.

Maybe the director should know about it anyway. After all, if the bell was not working properly by the time I put my sweet old ladies to bed, then how would they be able to call for help if they had an emergency?

The nurse called maintenance and asked the secretary to stop telling the other workers that I was not taking care of my residents.

He came back and found me. He said he would try something else to fix it and not to worry if it rang while he was working on it. He said to ignore the bell for the time being and go about the rest of my work. I was happy to do this, as I was getting behind and I had a lot of people to get ready for bed.

He left the room and  I saw him near the front desk, I was busy working and figured he would find me, when the room was ready for me to return those ladies to it.

He came to me on the floor, where I was working. He asked me, “did the call bell from 221 just ring on your pager?”

I checked and it in fact had just rung on there. I had been busy taking care of a resident and I had not noticed it.

“Come with me. I want to show you something,” he said.

I liked this maintenance guy, so I agreed to go with him, so that he could show me whatever it was that he wanted me to see. He took to to room 221.

He walked me into the room to where the call bell was. He said “Look” and pointed to the wall, where the call bell assembly was usually mounted.

There was just a huge empty hole in the wall. The entire assembly had been removed.

He said to me “I could not think of anything else to do, so I decided to remove the entire system out of the wall. I took it out about 30 minutes ago.”

“How?” I stammered…

He said, “I have no idea. There is nothing there. There is nothing hooked into the electrical system. There is no call bell here now.”

And still the bell rang for the rest of the night.  The frequency  slowed down after a while and it  began ringing every hour or so.

When the night shift arrived on the next night, I asked them if that bell had continued to ring after I had gone home the night before.  They told me that every couple of hours that bell would ring, even though all that was left of it was a gaping hole in the wall.

That is my ghost story from the nursing home. It was weird and I still remember the room number all these years later.

They eventually replaced that bell assembly with a new system. It was an upgrade and different from the older one. But from time to time, during the next year I worked there, that call bell would ring when no one was in the room.

The Fire Alarm Story from the Nursing Home

A few weeks ago, I posted on here that there had been a fire alarm at the nursing home where I work. The single most terrifying words to ever hear, when working in a second floor dementia unit at a nursing home, are “This is NOT a Drill! “

So, there we were. It was about 8 pm. Luckily the hospice aides were still with us. They usually work from about 4om to 8:30 pm. had it been a half hour later, there would only have been 3 of us, to move all of the residents, including lifting heavy people out of their beds and getting them into wheelchairs.

There were 3 of us , plus 3 hospice aides there, on the unit. The hospice aides were great and stayed with us, until the danger was cleared.

The alarm system at a nursing facility, is not the same as what you have in your home. It is extra loud and there are all kinds of buzzers and lights flashing, in addition to the alarm ringing noises. The noise and the flashing lights are enough to raise anyone’s blood pressure through the roof.

In addition, there was a terrible problem with communication to the main nurse station. Since we were upstairs, on the second floor, we had no idea where the fire was, or what exit we should be taking people towards. At first we did not even know if it was a real fire.

Upon trying to contact the nurse station with our walkie talkies, we quickly found out that they could not hear us and we could not hear them well, over the sounds of the alarms. I was trying to ask them which way to take the residents. The response that I heard was “take everyone to a common area”

This idea of a common area was confusing, based on the way the dementia unit is set up. This is a lock down unit, with a coded door. The unit is sectioned away from the rest of the facility, in order to contain the people with Alzheimer’s disease, for their own protection.

If they were not locked into the unit, they could end up wandering outside in front of a car, going into the kitchen and getting burned and any number of possible dangers.  Also most of the are “Fall Risks,” which means that they cannot walk without falling. but they also do not remember not to get up and walk.

Many of them think they are 30 or even 19 and they do not remember that they are in a wheelchair, and cannot walk by themselves without falling. This was a frightening issue during the fire incident, because we were afraid to lose track of anyone or leave anyone in a place where they might get up and fall.

In addition, these alarms are blaring and the lights are flashing and everyone is feeling that “fight or flight” mode in their body. We wanted to move them to the proper place, but where was the proper place?

What is the “common area” ? I was speaking into the walkie talkie and they could not hear me asking “DO you want us to keep them in the lounge area ?” “Do you want us to bring them out of the lock down area, into the hallway” …”DO you want us to bring them downstairs?”

No one could hear my questions. We had no idea where they wanted us to bring them all. SO, we guessed.

We started to bring all the residents in their wheelchairs, into the hallway, outside of the lounge , but still in the dementia lock down area. Some residents had to be gotten out of bed.

We had trouble even communicating with each other, over the extreme noise of the alarm system. And the longer the alarms kept going, the longer our brains and bodies stayed on “high alert” with blood pressure elevated and the whole body in that frightening “life and death” emergency mode.

The supervisor working with me that night had us take the residents down the hall. towards the back stairs.

Each bedroom was checked. As we were going along, we closed the door to each room that was cleared, and placed a pillow on the floor, outside the bedroom door. The pillow is an alert that the particular room has been checked and cleared.

The pillow system is  great, because there is no time to be checking rooms that another worker already cleared. As it was, we were having trouble communicating because of the extreme noise.

Let me tell you something about the stairs….We would never get everyone out ! There simply would not be time.

It is terrifying that In the midst of this situation, there dawns this realization on you that….We Would Never Get Everyone Out.

How would we get people down the stairs? The ones that can walk, do not walk well. It would be a very slow process, walking one old person down the stairs, and keeping them from falling,

Then what?

The wheelchairs don’t go down stairs. The residents cannot walk. We are supposed to take one at a time, lay them on a sheet, and with one person holding each end of the sheet…..drag them down the stairs with the sheet.

How difficult would this be? How long would it take? Do you think that argumentative residents that will throw their grilled cheese sandwich at you during lunch…are just going to allow you to lay them on a sheet….and just cooperate ….

…while we drag them down a hard set of stairs, inevitably banging them and hurting them a little bit, on the way down?

Do you think we could even get them to cooperate enough to lie down on a sheet? It would not happen…

Not only that…Even if we got one resident outside, what would happen to them, as we went back up to get the next one? These are the people that we have in the lock down unit, for the very reason that they are not safe to be left alone.

So, there we were. I was beginning to wonder about my own safety. Where was the fire? Was it on our floor? Was it right beneath us?  Was is blocking our exit?

After a few minutes, before we had tried to get anyone do go down the stairs, the nurse came up from downstairs and said “NO ! You have taken them to wrong place. The fire is right underneath all of you ! “

So, then we had to start all over again, and move the 25 wheelchairs down the other end of the hallway. This time they wanted us to take them out the lock down door and into the 2nd floor hallway. This we did.

By some miracle, none of the residents fell or fought us too much, or tried  to get up out of their wheelchairs.

So, the alarm is beginning to make my head hurt. It is disorienting my brain. My ears, and everyone else’s are about to bleed from listening to this alarm, for 10 or 15 minutes by now.

Then the fire department came and they cleared the danger. We were told that everything was okay now and we could return the residents to their rooms.

But…….

The alarm was still going….and going….and going…

By now, the residents were becoming very agitated, The ones that have hearing problems were the best off, but the others were becoming over stimulated by listening to this alarm, the buzzers and the flashing lights…which …would….not…..STOP !

I called down on the walkie talkie, but they could not hear what I was saying over the alarm.

“Turn off the alarm ! Pleeeeaaaase turn off the alarm. My ears are bleeding! “

“What? We can;t hear you. The alarm is still going off on your floor.?”

“Really ????”

“yes, we cannot hear you.”

“Turn off the alarm! The residents are getting combative, Sarah tried to kick me and 2 others are climbing out of their wheelchairs and they are going to fall.”

“What? We can’t hear you.Your alarm is really loud.”

“Really ? I did not notice. “

Anyway, I  gave up on the walkie talkie and I called the office from the phone in the kitchen, The alarm was going in there too, but somehow they could hear me a little bit. 

They told me….and you won’t believe it ……

“The alarm is off on the first floor, where we are The alarm seems to be still going off, where you are, The fire dept has already left. We have to call maintenance . AT HOME, and have him come in to turn it off.”

“What?  Holy crap. We cannot tolerate this for another 20 minutes. The residents cannot even hear us, when we are telling them to sit down. They are climbing up because the alarm is frightening them. ..

“The workers cannot communicate with each other. This is a major safety problem, besides the fact that my brain is going to explode right  out of my ears, any second now !! “

“Yes, we are calling Marty now. He will have to come in from his home to turn off the alarm.”

FINALLY, 20 minutes after the 1st floor alarm was cleared, which was 20 minutes after the fire dept cleared the alarm originally. The alarm was off !

I could still hear it ringing in my ears, so I had to wait a minute to be sure it was really off, and not just a dream…

“Thank you. Yay ! Yay ! The alarm is off on second floor. “

dizzy, headache, room spinning, disoriented,,,,relieved.

Insomnia Blog … Why do People Knock on Wood for Luck? Folklore and More… LOL

1. • I am enjoying all of your comments on my posts.

     I am glad that there are people that can understand the meaning of my abstract, philosophical ranting.

     Most of the regular people in the world would just scratch their heads….

     That really is a weird saying, isn’t  it?

     Do people actually scratch their heads when they do not understand something?

     Is it to open up a little hole, to allow thoughts to come in?

     Or to allow narrow mindedness to leak out?

     Sorry, i got onto a weird rant  again. …It actually began this morning,  while i was corresponding with a reader in the comments section of one of my recent posts.

     Where do these weird phrases come from though?

     One of the weirdest ones is when people say “knock on wood”. That is supposed to be for luck. Not only do people say it. They actually look around for something made out of wood to knock on.

     Most Pagan cultures in the ancient world believed that trees were inhabited by nature spirits. They thought that if you   knocked on the bark of a tree  you could wake up the  benevolent nature spirits, called  dryads. These were good spirit creatures who would assist you if you called on them by knocking on their tree home.

     In Irish tradition, the people  believed that knocking on the tree  was a way to thank the ” little people”

     (leprechauns), for any good luck you have had.

     There is also a tradition of people in Bulgaria to knock on ones head, if no wood was around. I wonder if the little voices in my head would come out to offer me assistance, if I knocked on my head like that?

     The funny thing is that , in Bulgaria, wooden tables do not count for knocking on. In the US people almost always use the wooden kitchen table to do their knocking. We got it backwards ! LOL

     Probably not. they mostly just run around in there being afraid of everything. Sometimes they are a bit funny, but not that helpful . LOL
     The link below is to a fun list of the origins of weird phrases. If you are up for it you can read to find out the origin of the phrase “raining cats and dogs”. It is way down the page, but you will find it. It is actually too disturbing and gross for me to write about here. So only read it if you are up for something gross that has to do with animals. Yuck !

     I won’t even use that phrase anymore. I don’t think I ever did use it much anyway.

     http://www.neatorama.com/2008/08/07/origins-of-familiar-phrases/

     So there you have it. An early morning weird blog from Annie. And to think… I only woke up because my darn bladder told me to. LOL ! This is what you get , when I am overtired and up early in the morning when I should be sleeping , since i went to bed around 4 or 5. I forget now. You all know better than I do, what time I went to bed.

     Sleepy Annie with run on sentences and all..zzzzzzz…..oh sorry I fell asleep a little…..Is that like being a little bit pregnant? ……. sleeping a little…..

     Back to run on sentences… so sorry …I a too tired to editediteditidie dzzzzzz edit thid this zzxzzzzz,,,,,…. sleeping

     I hate run on sentences… Oh!  she is changing topics in mid blog…. oh crap…. zzzzzz … still dozing,,,zz..  run on sentences are bad ….. 

     . I hate run on sentences because they are hard to follow and to understand what they are trying to say and what the point is to them and all of that stuff and because they are annoying and I do not like them at all because they are just too damn hard to read and to understand !!!

     LOL

     That was for Nekaar because I know she and the Fat Lady from her blog , will smile at my run on sentence 🙂

     If you have never read it, check out this blog from Nekaar. It is one of my all time favorite posts. I have read it several times, when I needed to smile.

     http://ramblingsofnekaaar.wordpress.com/2014/12/03/la-grosse-dame/

     Back to sleep now. I guess you can call this my second good night post LOL

     Blessings,

     Slightly Crazy Annie 🙂 and the silly voices in her head that want to go back to sleep 🙂 LOL

My Patient with Alzheimer’s disease / dementia is Afraid I will not Find my way Back to Her Again

My sweet lady, I will call her Rosalie, always cries when I leave work for the night. She also gets upset when I leave to go for my dinner break.

I always have known that she likes me there and that she is sad when I leave. But it was not until tonight that I finally realized just why it is so traumatizing for her. Now that I realize it, I can make it better for her.

A visiting nurse came to see Rosalie today. Rosalie took an instant shine to her and  felt very safe with her. The time came for the nurse to leave and poor Rosalie was holding her by her jacket and not letting go. She was crying and begging her to stay.

The nurse and I both tried to reassure Rosalie that she would come back to see her tomorrow. Rosalie said “no she won’t. She has to stay here.”

After the nurse left , I told Rosalie that she would be back tomorrow. Rosalie then said something that has never occurred to me before. She said “No she won’t. How will she find me again? How will she find her way back?”

That is when the realization came over me. Rosalie does not know where she is. She used to have a home and now she does not know how to get back. She does not know where that home is. She could not find it, even if we gave her the car keys and let her go.

She is so lost in time and space that she assumes that everyone else is too. The fact that the nurse happened to find Rosalie today, does not necessarily mean that the nurse can find her tomorrow.

Poor Rosalie feels so lost that she does not think anyone else knows where she is either. She does not understand that other people can find their way home and then back again to find her.

It was a great moment of realization to me. In her world, she is lost. She has no idea how she got to this place where she lives now. As far as she can tell , it is a lost place that no one can find.

Her family does not come to see her, so she must think they are lost and cannot find her too.

So. when she is crying at the end of my shift when I leave, she is truly afraid that I will not be able to find my way back to see her again.

So then, I explained to Rosalie that the nurse and I were good with finding our way home and back to her again. I told her that the nurse had found her way here today on purpose and could find her way home.

I explained to her that I had found my way to see her many times. It was not an accident that I ended up here. I assured her that I know how to get to where she is and that I would never lose my way to her.

This seemed to help.  From now on, I will remind her that I know how to get to where she is.

I will not lose her. I love her very much and will find my way back to her every time.

It reminds me that we all live in different realities. Our experiences form our perceptions and our feelings.

When we try to understand people by looking at their situation from our reality, we cannot truly have full compassion for them.

In order to understand, we have to listen and see that their world is different from ours. That includes the world they perceive in their mind. It is the only reality they know.

People who have been abused, people with PTSD, people with mental disabilities and people who are very poor have a very different reality than others.

It is true for many situations including people who have sick children, people who live with chronic pain, eating disorders, alcoholism and addiction.

In order to have true compassion we have to know that others see and feel things differently than we do.

Namaste,

Annie