verizon

Thursday Dec 16th ,I was nestled near the TV watching the protracted and uncomfortable Larry King goodbye-show.  As bad as it was, the fact that this man was around long enough to interview Moses, John Wilkes Booth and Al Jolson before the "talkies" obligated me to at least wave good bye to his image on the screen...Ten minutes to go in the show and the phone rings....'I'll get it right after the show is over" I thought but then it rings again and AGAIN...something must be wrong ...my son was out of the house at the time so i was the only one to pick it up.. only to hear my neighbor screaming into the phone  "Are you OK???"  "yeah, i'm fine," i respond...."are you sure?"   "YES! I'm watching Larry Kings farewell show"

"Well, there are two policemen who have been banging on your front door for the last ten minutes!!"  my knees buckled......and i felt as if i had just bought a first class ticket on the express train to Heart Attack city.....the walk from the back of the house was one of the longest of my life..and i was shaking like a leaf.

a call had been made from my apt.. to 911.....and i hadn't even been near the phone...when the cops determined i was okay and the gaggle of neighbors whose faces at that point were a blur, had left...i went back to shaking....couldn't reach my kids and was a wreck...finally hear from my daughter but no one including my brother could reach my son....any parent knows what i am talking about....you need to know they are okay.

my brother offered the nerve bending advice that ..since the police did not check the house,,,some one should check the closets and under the beds....so there i was...in my pjs...my brother on speaker phone in one hand and me with a knife in the others...at that point i was shaking so much that if someone HAD made their way into my home...the only thing i would have been good for was to use the knife to prepare a bagel with a schmear of cream cheese  on it..  as and for looking under the bed....that would have been the end....a bad knee makes it hard to get down and even harder to get up...this was a lose-lose situation...but i checked just the same

after many phone calls..finally reaching my son ,,calling 911 back.. then calling my cousin the ex cop and a neighbor to fill me in on the details as to what happened since i was totally unable to process anything at the time it happened...i discovered....that the main equipment in the central office in the verizon headquarters had a  glitch in it which made it AUTOMATICALLY dial 911from my phone

how do you like that for a service upgrade???....i MUST review my bill more carefully for other service options...who knows ??maybe one day i will come home and there will be the verizon guy with an apron covering his beer belly and i will find the table set and dinner ready!!

life is funny sometimes #3/weight

I am officially "fluffy".....if you look it up in my dictionary you will see it  means i-have-been-eating-too-much-for-the-holidays-the-devil-made-me-do-it-and-i -need-a euphemism-RIGHT-NOW!!..I am hoping to convince myself that this is a cyclic thing which occurs mostly in the winter and therefore is proof positive that we have some bear genes in our DNA... isn't it the prudent thing to do to stock up on as much insulation as possible during these cold winter months??  I mean, if it is true we evolved from the monkey who am i to question a bear?

The only problem is that right now I'm feeling that if i have to get up from a chair to go from one part of the house to the other i need to call the Santini Brothers moving company.....as a matter of fact the way this holiday is going i may have to put them on retainer......but i am not without a conscience....so the pasta, chocolate, bread and  (here just insert the inventory from your local grocery store) must always be followed by something dietetic or healthy....this actually doesnt feed my body in the way i would want to but it feeds or should i say pacifies my conscience...,,,and incidentally i am pondering the answer to this question.....how much does a conscience ACTUALLY weigh...?? if it comes in  under a few pounds then i am totally guilt free..and have a little wiggle room....so pass the pasta

life can be funny sometimes #2/acting lesson

when I think of my mother at my age I  think of a woman whose permanent uniform was any apron size XL.......while on some days I may look that way or at the very least feel that way...i could never imagine my mother doing things that I  have done when I was her age...now don't get me wrong...she had many accomplishments and at the ripe old age of 62 graduated from college....God bless her

but would she have thought of swimming  40, 50 or 60 lengths of a pool in one shot...riding on a canoe with a local deep into the jungles of Panama, being the oldest teeny bopper in some of the hip rock clubs in New York watching one of her kids tear it up on stage or taking acting classes and then going to try out an English accent for an audition?  I don't think so.... but they say 50 is the new 30 , 60 the new 40 etc. etc.  so I guess that leaves us lots of time to play...and play I did....especially the acting..

Now there are those who know me who wondered why I even bothered to take lessons....as the stage in one form or another is just a natural part of my existence...never put me near a microphone or a camera...it is like a moth to the flame, but take acting I did....and not only found out that I loved it and had a natural bent for comic timing but also that acting was a metaphor for life.....stay focused, stay in the moment , listen to what your partner says, work with your partner and commit , commit, commit. Once you do that you will find it can bring you to another place...it is almost transcendental..

It is just that some of us are better actors than others and some handle life better than others....so you gotta ask yourself the question.....if like shakespeare says all the world's a stage ...would you want to buy tickets to your show???

i just discovered how to write a blog....and that is pretty amazing...finally an outlet for some of life's little adventures...the kind that make me laugh...or are funny because they are ironic...where to begin?? so many humorous incidents flood my mind...that it is hard to pick one.... and were they truly funny or my just seeing  things in a different way....

I think as you get older you find more humor in life because sometimes there is no rhyme nor reason as to why things happen....so it is better to laugh about them and see the ridiculousness in things....helps you live longer ...is good for your immune system....and as i often tell people...."I live in my own world and am happy there"

like tonight for example...went to a concert  and was sitting just a few feet away from a small group of cellists......what was impressive beyond their music was the fact that the male in the group was a doppleganger for someone i know....  whose emotional elevator stops a few stories   short of the top floor...i mean this guy is nuts!!....anyway as i watched them play and was swept away by the music I started to feel an empathy for the musician...and consequently for the elevator guy...as the music progressed so did the positive feelings for the individual i knew.....and by the time the whole thing was over....i had mentally transformed mr. elevator into a human being with great feeling and focus...and all because of a cello.!!!

see what i mean? it is the simple unexpected things that take you by surprise and can lead you from one path to another.  i guess what really saved mr. elevator was that i wasnt watching lady gaga.