Seeing Spots Before Your Eyes

by Jody Worsham

All rights reserved for 101 Dalmatians 

I was supposed to meet some of the ladies in my church tonight for supper but after glancing in the mirror, I realized I was a walking,talking, appetite suppressant. I shall explain.

When you hit that 70th birthday, and for some it starts even before, your body parts hold a convention.  All the parts that had been functioning nicely and fairly independently of each other for all these decades suddenly feel the need to support each other.  So now when your head hurts, your knees join in.  When you have a touch of heartburn, your intestinal track backs up the heartburn.

As a teenager that golden tan I worked so hard on, now breaks apart into spots of brown in decade number seven which leads me to my current state. I had noticed a tiny brown spot on my facethis morning when I had climbed on top of the bathroom counter to get close enough to the mirror so I could see to put on my make-up.  See how the eyes are joining forces with my skin?  Eyes and skin then sent an urgent message to my brain which was "UGLY!  DERMATOLOGIST!! NOW!"  I immediately called and made an appointment with my dermatologist.

With age I have gained a measure of coping skills when it comes to sitting in a doctors' office. I now bring some kind of meaningful work to fill the time while I am waiting, you know like folding laundry, soap carving, candle making, tanning hydes.  I have noticed I don't have to wait as long. Rather quickly, I was called to the examination room.

I knew I was in trouble when the doctor came in singing the score from "Frozen" wielding her liquid nitrogen gun.  Before I could throw up the deer hyde as a defense, she zapped the tiny brown spot under my eye, the four brown spots on my left cheek, the six on the right cheek, and for no apparent reason other than she was in the middle of "Let It Go", seventeen brown places on both my arms. I'm just glad I was wearing long pants and a high necked shirt and the song did not have any more verses.

By the time I got home I was feeling like a dog shot with rock salt. A glance in the mirror confirmed that I looked like a dog...a Dalmatian.

Even I didn't want any supper after that.  Sorry ladies, another time.




Sent from my iPad

Tips for Over Worked Parents and Underworked Children

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By Jody Worsham

All Rights Reserved for tip jar!

Over the course of some odd sixty plus years, I have learned a few things, mostly by trial and error, heavy on the error part. It is my sincere hope that through my tips you can avoid some embarrassing moments with your neighbors/local law enforcement and possibly keep your name off the school's "Minimal Parenting List". Please tell me your school has one of those and it's not unique to my kid's school. Here are some tips for overworked parents.

1. Now while you may think putting your toddler on a Sit-N-Spin and squirting him with a water hose constitutes doing the laundry, it doesn't work that way … at least not the second time. What does work is to have a different colored laundry basket for each room in the house. Instead of folding clothes, toss items in the appropriate basket. Each person can then be responsible for folding and putting away his "room".
   

1. Children cannot live by bread alone; they must have peanut butter and jelly and sometimes a vegetable or two. To avoid Corn Dog Prone-itis and frost bite fingers, find five good crock pot recipes and keep the ingredients stocked up in your pantry. Post the recipes in a prominent place…like where you keep the chips and chocolate. Dinner can be assembled in the morning and ready to eat by supper time. Invest in those crock pot liners for fast clean up.
   

   
   

2. What parent hasn't made a mad dash to Wal-Mart at 10:00 at night for supplies for a school project due the next morning? Ok, six times six kids for me but by the seventh kid, I learned. When school starts in the fall buy extra folders, markers, poster board, paper, glue, brads and hide them where the kids don't often look, like under their beds. It's cheaper than paying speeding tickets for those late night dashes; I speak from experience.
   

   
   

3. If you are or ever have been the parent of a third grader, then you know what it's like to be scrounging around after dark with a flashlight in your neighbor's back yard; then trying to explain to the nice policeman that you are looking for twig "logs" for a pioneer log cabin due by first period the next day and not attempting burglary. I suggest you buy stick pretzels while you are at Wal-Mart. They come in various log sizes and when glued to a cereal box, look just like logs…sort of…from across the room. At least it might keep your face from being plastered on every street sign by the Neighborhood Crime Watch.
   

   
   

4. While you are at Wal-Mart stocking up on extra school supplies, colored laundry baskets, and pretzel logs, you may as well grab a couple of generic birthday presents for the birthday party you forgot or was told about an hour before the party. Puzzels are good as are Frisbee's and card games. Beats embarrassing the Birthday Child when he tries to cash a hot check.
   

   
   

5. Oh, and my final tip for this time concerns travel. When you've had enough laundry, school projects, crock pot meals, log cabins, instant birthday parties, and you can't take it anymore,
   

   take that brown/black suitcase and wrap bright colored or decorative duct tape around the suitcase just below the zipper line. You will be able to spot your luggage coming off the carousel right away, even among other brown/black suitcases, thereby making a quick get-away before you are caught…or guilt sets in.
   

   
   

If you find these tips useful or even semi-humorous, I will have a tip jar out by the mailbox. Feel free to contribute.

"Out, Out, Dammed Spot"

by Jody Worsham
All rights reserved for cleaning supplies.

As you know, Shakespeare took ideas from life, overheard conversations, and history. Lady Macbeth’s famous sleep walking speech was probably first spoken by Will’s Mom on laundry day as she tried to remove the grass stains from his pants. She could have used some of our modern day stain fighters.
A trip down the laundry aisle at your local Wally World will produce more stain fighting products then you have “dreamt of, dear Horatio”. There is Oxiclean which purports to bubble the stain right out. There is “Shout” which I guess replaces “Scream It Out” and “Yell It Off”. “Spray and Wash” will remove red wine and grass stains if any of your little league guys celebrate too heavily after a game.
My personal favorite stain remover is a cleanser that can be purchased only at Dollar Tree. And yes, it costs a dollar. What I like about it is the myriad of items it will clean. A look at the back of the bottle will reveal almost one hundred items that are no match for its stain removing powers. It will clean your tires, counter tops, laundry, baby bottles, chain saws, grease pans, shutters, bugs from your grill, carburetor, and ovens. It will remove gum, paint, tar, peanut butter, lipstick, markers, fingernail polish, frog guts, blood, mud, and crud from anything living or dead depending on the ratio of cleanser to water.
But nothing, I repeat nothing will remove the red clay stains from my five-year-old’s white baseball pants or his socks. I defy any product on the legal market to clean these two items. I have cloroxed, boraxed, and tilexed them to the point that the threads in the socks have disintegrated except for where the stains actually were. The Cheer Lady will never plant her flag on our lawn. His socks will never be on the poster of the Clorox commercial. Red clay will never be one of the stains that Tide can remove in one washing…not even one hundred washings.
No, in households across the red clay plains of Texas, Georgia and all points in the northern hemisphere, ladies of the house can be heard mumbling late into the night “To be or not to be clean by game time. That is the question”.
In the end, I know I will have to purchase new baseball pants and new socks because “All the perfumes in Arabia will not sweeten this” …or take out the stains. Sorry, Lady Macbeth, those stains are here to stay!!

OK,because you asked,it's Awsome (not me, well maybe me, no that's the name of the cleanser "Awsome".