Maryann Purgason has been entertaining many of us with her emails for the last several years. This column recounts some of the best that I have on record. If any of you have some that I have missed, please email them to me and I will post them. And... If someone will send a later picture ... I will replace this one.
2/12/2010 At the Library Again
So. It turns out that there were 18 people on our road who were having the same trouble with their ATT internet service that we were. How do I know? I stopped and asked the linemen at the end of the road. When you want to know something, ask somebody who really knows and is on the scene, not some dude with a script in Pakistan.. Now our desktop works, but they had Dan disconnect the wireless setup and he\'s looking at Dawg Nation, so I\'m here, b/c my laptop is wireless. I\'d like to thank all of you who sent all those funny, funny emails, since I can\'t laugh out loud here. Don\'t worry, I have the library ladies e-addresses and I sent the emails to them. We\'re supposed to have snow. Must be global warming.
2/20/2010 Godzilla Died
Godzilla died. For those who may not know, Godzilla was Dan\'s huge greeeeeen big mans\' recliner than dominated the living room until I convinced him a year ago to build its own room. Now, I like green; it\'s my favorite color, but this green was so out of style that I couldn't find anything to go with it, except to get lucky at yard sales. Some of you may even know that Godzilla was locally famous, having been chosen for an article I wrote for the Lagrange News on Father's Day a few years back. The really neat thing is that it was big enough for Dan and several grands to eat watermelon and old enough that they could, without recriminations. Our puppies chewed on the handle. We began to notice creakiness after a spring broke and could not be replaced, because they no longer make either the chair or the spring. There was a huge recliner sale at Father's Day and Dan bought a tan microfiber suede recliner that went perfectly with the rattan porch furniture. I had a lovely room of tans, creams, and turquoise, absolutely up to the minute style and I loved it. Dan hated it. Suede gave him the creeps and it wasn't big enough for him and the dogs, so, I got the new recliner and Dan dragged Godzilla out of the garage. We kept looking. We saw some wonderful chairs that had everything. They rocked. They heated. They massaged. They had storage. None measured up. We drove to other states so he could sit in them or see the swatches. Finally, he ordered a tan plush catnapper cloud 9 rocker recliner for delivery in six weeks. Saturday afternoon, he got stuck in Godzilla. It absolutely would not fold and he had to fight his way up. The phone rang and it was the truckers with the new chair, four weeks early. Kismet. Now, Dan wouldn\'t pay extra to have the thing placed in our house, so they unloaded it onto our pickup and he drove it around to the sunroom door. We removed Godzilla\'s body and commenced unloading the thing. Now, excuse me, but I am 63 years old and a female and I can pick up my side of the recliner, but the 3 inch shipping staple in my hand was a little too much. When I let go, the chair hit Dan in the head and we all went down in a heap and we\'re not even in the door yet. We yelled at each other for awhile, which is our nature, and then stopped the bleeding. Finally, we got it in. It\'s bigger than Godzilla. Dan and the dogs took a nap. Godzilla is back in the garage. Should I have it bronzed?
2/26/2010 The Purgason Ballerina
No. It wasn\'t me. It was Sugar, the Bulldog, who thinks she's Hogansville's answer to Pavlova's Dying Swan. More like Dead Duck. She did a swan dive off the new recliner, which is higher than the old one and went splat on the laminate floor that covers the old concrete patio. She was stunned for about half a minute, couldn't get up for trying for a minute more and then limped to me with her paw held out, whimpering. She continued to limp for a couple of hours before we could get her in to see the vet. She's mainly bummed up, but he weighed her while we were there. She weighs 60 pounds! At nine months old! .
3/11/2010 No Good Deed...
So. Let\'s go back to when we built the house and decided to put in the new kind of septic system that is kinder to the environment. It was 1996 and green wasn't cool, but we did it anyway, wanting to be responsible people who make the right choices. You may have heard of the times (I lost count) there was ankle deep sewage in the house that had to be pumped out. After we replaced the carpet with laminate floors, we had a few good years there during the drought, but it happened again after the ice storm and again during the Atlanta floods last fall. Whenever it rains, it backs up. We got 2 inches of rain yesterday. Closed doors didn't help, so I lit candles all over the house. Damn if the fire alarm didn't go off. Scared the dogs, scared us. The dogs got loose in the house and inside of 2 minutes, the boys had marked everything in the living room and Sugar had stolen a tube of who-knows-what from the bathroom trash where I had discarded outdated cosmetics. She ran like the wind to get outside thru the doggie door, with me in pursuit and when I\'d go out the people door, she\'d snatch it and come inside, and when I\'d go inside, she\'d snatch it and go out. With the candles out and the fire alarm off, Dan came to man the doggie door and we trapped her, getting the tube, along with one of my missing sox and five chewed paintbrushes. I also picked up something else on my shoe, so then I had to clean the floor of that, plus the boys gifts and wash my shoes all because of that septic system. Now, Dan is trying to replace the carpet Sugar chewed off the sunroom step and she\'s helping by standing right beside him, pulling the carpet off. He\'s only almost fallen twice. SweartoGod, I\'m not making this up. No good deed goes unpunished.
3/22/2010 Rules of Laundry
Today, Murphy\'s Law of Laundry: Part 1: if it fits and looks great and you love it, it will shrink. Doesn't matter how careful you are--cold water, hang it up--it's gonna shrink. Part 2: If you love it and it looks great but it's too big, it won't shrink. No amount of hot water and hot dryer tumbling will make it. Part 3: It will, however, fade.
4/6/2010 More Laundry
Tried a getup for Sugar that came undone in the wee hours. I was too sleepy to do much about it; so am washing bed linens AGAIN. I'm going to get something smaller, with ruffles on it for her. We'll have to go through this twice more before we can breed her. Everyday, I want puppies less and less. Have been plowing through half a dreadful book, about a bunch of seniors at Princeton writing their senior theses--my first mistake was listening to the critics who loved it. To engender my interest, I skipped to the end to see what happened and still didn\'t care. Decided to bail. I hope you are thoroughly enjoying sunny skies.
4/6/2010 P.S.
After I applied for my passport, I stopped at the Troup County Rec Center to join for their Cardio room and the pool. This morning, I realized that if it is to augment my new healthy lifestyle, I\'ll actually have to go and work out or swim. Darn.
4/6/2010 Swimming
Ok, so I drove 10 or 15 minutes, peeled out of my cutsie dress designed to go over my swimsuit and stashed my keys, glasses, Rec Center card, towel and sandals in a locker and about froze myself to death getting into the pool. The Troup County Sharks are still competing and they like the water frigid. It certainly keeps you moving once you get past the 4th step. It\'s move or die. I did my slow laps for 20 minutes as instructed, thinking that it was hardly worth the bother to drive to Lagrange for 20 minutes. Then I tried to get out of the pool. Forget the ladder, I had to go over to the kiddie steps and pull myself out among the little minnows and their grandad who said he had better sense than to swim laps. He found me to be amusing. I found him to be a jerk. I think it\'s stupid that you have to drive to a pool dressed, go into the locker room and change, then change back to go home. It\'s a pool for pete\'s sake, why not wear a swimsuit? But I am a Southern woman and I go by the code, though it is antiquated and I\'m about to fall over. They don\'t like for you to squish through the lobby, but why? It\'s a pool! Wouldn\'t you expect water? We do that at the beach too. We walk 50 yards to the sand and we wear clothes that we must peel off and then wear them back full of sand. Maybe it\'s just me...but it seems like a lot of bother. I\"m not going to the Olympics, not even the Senior ones. I\'ll be happy to feel better and maybe even get out of the pool on the ladder. Someday.
4/17/2010 The right way, the wrong way, and the Purgason way
So. I packed the car Thursday night to alleviate as much last minute running around as possible and was ready to leave at 8a. m., having aimed for 9. Agatha called a few minutes later to say that she was ready, so I said , \"Let\'s go.\" I drove over to the gas station to fill the Santa Fe in the meantime. She arrived, spoke to her kid, Dan, and we left a few minutes before 9. She was meeting friends for a long weekend in Dahlonega and I was going to keep the dog for a quiet weekend and the kids for a week and a weekend while John met his fiancee Claudia in Germany. We made it to John's house in an hour and a half, from 35 minutes from ATL airport, through downtown Atlanta, to Gillsville. This is from the farthest Southwest suburb to the farthest Northeast suburb of metro Atlanta. Nifty trip. No stops, no stalls, no accidents, although the traffic was heavy, on a Friday. This is momentous. The S*** Fairy, however, was waiting for us at John's. Anticipating a ten hour flight to Germany, he had ridden his racing bike for 25 miles and had arrived home to find that his flight had been cancelled due to the volcano in Iceland. He was beside himself. I don't know what Agatha said, but suddenly he burst out, "It IS a big deal. It's a great big deal. It's a bigger deal than y'all (he's a Southern boy) know. We are going to get married while we are over there." Bless their hearts, they planned 2 weddings: the Catholic one in Garmisch for her family and the Protestant one here, for us. Each one would have a ceremony with family. Silence. To be honest, I was relieved, since the only one I knew about was the one where John\'s family would be and none of Claudia's. We love her dearly, but it's not the same as her having her family there. I would love to be in Germany, but hey, it's their wedding, they should have what THEY want. The best wedding I ever went to, everybody was barefoot on the beach at sunrise, had a wedding breakfast at the beach house and partied all day. "When is it?" I asked. \"I don't know, " he answered, "Some time next week. I'm just gonna show up and do what they tell me. Okay, I said, "We have time to regroup." After much planning and many phone calls, we threw our luggage into the carport, threw his in, and all piled into the car, headed to meet a ride to ATL airport. Agatha was in the back with the dog, who had escaped and run to the car. She proceeded to shed all over Agatha's pretty navy blue sweater set. We met Scott, who was headed back south, switched the luggage, hugged quickly, and they went. Agatha and I hadn't eaten anything so we stopped for lunch. I would have taken her to meet her friends, but she had left her purse at John's house. We went back. She called and they came to the house. In the meantime, Agatha carefully cleaned the dog hair off her sweaters, but as soon as she sat down, the dog jumped into her lap. The the meter guy came to install the new meter for the house addition. The TV went off; all the channels are locked; I don't know the code. After Agatha escaped with her friends I watched one of those Pirates of the Caribbean movies, which I hadn't seen yet. Just as Orlando Bloom came out of the maelstrom, healed of the wound to his heart, the phone rang. "Mooooom?" John had stood in line for four hours and had a flight for Rome on Monday. Claudia will ride the train from Bavaria to Rome. (Yes!) He rode the train to Doraville MARTA station and I headed out again. I couldn't find it and couldn't speak Korean or Spanish, but finally found someone who spoke English and knew where it was. John hadn't eaten all day. This is the kid who I never got between and the refrigerator when he got off the bus after school, so I took him to the nearest Chili's. He bought us a nice dinner and expressed a desire to go to Rex's baseball game. So I took him and came home. My stuff was still in the carport. I'll go back on Monday. I know if I'd had the kind of day he had, I would want to spend the weekend alone. And I brought the dog, which he requested, so I have 4 for the weekend. That's about it, except for Spaghetti Junction at rush hour coming back from the train and the hole in my passenger side floor from John's braking.
4/22/2010 A Done Deal
They did it! John and Claudia eloped while in Germany--just went off by themselves to get married. No family, no friends, just them. I thought it was wonderfully romantic. They did what they wanted. Imagine, the bride and groom had the wedding they wanted. What a concept! I wish I'd run off to Germany.
5/04/2010 Sugar the Bulldog
So. She\'s loose in the house when she is supposed to be in the sunroom or the yard, but she followed Dan, who cannot resist a pretty face, and then she found one of my NEW sandals, but I chased her down before it got any teeth marks. I barred the closet door, which will keep all of the a/c in the closet, so I\'ll move in there. We are doing our best to keep her on a diet, but she likes the boys' food best and they like hers best, so it's a huge deal to get them separated, running back and forth, capturing escapees twice a day. Then, she won\'t eat unless Dan feeds her by hand and we both have to stand right beside her while she eats, \"Because, " he says, "She has separation anxiety." We're standing there quietly, not moving, in the kitchen when this prescient flash hits me.--" This dog is spoiled." (ya think?) The good news is that my brain still works and we exercise by chasing them around.
5/8/2010 Maryannie\'s Big Weekend
Time for Dan\'s semi-annual golf trip and I have celebrated by making a huge mess in the house. For whatever reason, when I deep clean I make things worse for awhile. It has something to do with the way I think, which is global, but I do have a method here: fire up, mess up, clean up. Oh, yeah, and it's okay for me to end a sentence with a preposition, and misplace my modifiers, 'cause I'm Southern and I write like I talk. I fired up Thursday by running errands to collect the cleaning supplies I needed and the tchotchkis I had purchased and left in the store until I needed them. I thought that was inspired, as I have been known to lose things that I put up until later or where I will know exactly where they are. I messed up Friday by moving furniture and vacuuming, dusting, and finding things like Dani's Binky. Dani's six, but it WAS squashed between the bed and the wall and would have only been found when the bed was moved. I could have said it was Zane's as he's younger, but it was pink. I have found that it's much easier to be truthful about myself, as it's too much trouble to keep up with stories. Besides, the goofy way I do things makes it much more interesting. The whole process would have been quicker and easier had I simply put the furniture back in the same place, but what\'s the fun in that? I'll clean up later today, like right when I press send, except that it\'s really already clean, just messy or rather, " in disarray". Happy Mother's Day!
5/13/2010 Confirmation
So. Dan takes the long walk out to the mailbox at the road every day. I didn't go while he was on his golf trip, since I was otherwise occupied in the back bedroom rakeout. When he got back, he collected the exciting missives. His comment was, "We must be old." He laid the letters next to my computer and I looked to see what he meant:
Letter #1: The Scooter Store
Letter #2: AARP membership renewal
Letter#3: Insurance for final expenses (I love that--\"final expenses.\" Isn\'t that sweet?)
I am reminded of my Mother\'s aunt, Lolly, who lived alone and drove in the city of St Louis until she was 100, the Big Ten -o.. One December, while in her nineties, she had a heart attack and didn't tell anybody cause she didn't want to ruin Christmas. The following March she decided to depart for the Trans-Canada Mystery Train. "Oh, Lolly," I protested, "Do you really think that's a good idea?" "Well," she said, "I thought about it and I've already paid for it. I can't get my money back. I decided that, if I die, it's not my problem."
5/19/2010 Roses x 9 = Pain
Happy Mother's Day to me. I planted those babies in pots, which almost killed me. Thank goodness I didn't have to dig holes or I would still be in bed, unable to move. Dan was most helpful. He went to Home Depot for ten 40 pound bags of soil and left his truck so I could use the tailgate for a potting bench while he went to his mother's to sit on his bum for the afternoon. I\'m not complaining