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Those of tender stomachs look away now -

- because birds' anatomy is different so that their urinary and, er, other waste products are combined; and because you control the diet and can make very sure that it's strictly vegetarian; their excreta are nothing like as noxious as other animals'.

You still don't want it decorating the Axminster or landing in the toaster, naturally; but you don't either have to go far beyond a quick wipe with some Flash or whatever you use for clean-ups.

It's actually their dander that tends to cause problems for human lungs. But that's probably not going to cheer you up! :/
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Cold sweat. Trying hard not to panic.

My brand of coffee has been unavailable for a few weeks. Hadn't been a problem, because any addict knows to keep a healthy stash, and when I asked the store assistant about it and he said "there's been a fire at the warehouse" I assumed he was being flippant.

He was not being flippant. There has been a fire at the warehouse. I had sufficient presence of mind to say first that I hoped there weren't any injuries - there weren't, thank goodness - but I then urgently needed to know what they were doing about this utter, utter catastrophe.

They hope to restore supplies by the 29th November. I have one packet just opened and an emergency packet of unground beans. 😰😱😭
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CM, I must ask the brand of coffee, wonder if we even have it over on this side. Some brands really cause me intestinal issues so I don't drink coffee but one cup a week now. Used to drink three cups a day until it started causing me gastric issues. That was about 15 years ago now. Doc prescribed Nexium. I did not want a lifetime of a med just so I could drink coffee. No nexium, no coffee. Drink green tea various flavors, pomegranate my favorite, and does not cause any upper or lower issues.
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Reading again, on the internet....

"It was said that when angels are present, they tend to leave feathers along your path as they walk with you."

The Lord knows my needs.......sent the whole Tweety bird full of feathers!
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So this talk made me think of when we moved my parents here to live with us. We had a huge moving truck, my suv and my parents car in a caravan.
My Dad being a bird lover had many pigeons. As well as I had taken my dog and hen and her babies with us when we went to stay with them 3 months. ( I love my pets). So we caged up and boxed up (with wir holes) all the birds and put them in the back of my suv. My Dag was in the back seat. I am already frantic because my Mom had to drive their car and I was so worried. As I was driving and rounding this curve, all of a sudden my dog jumps in the front and hits the steering wheel and I was blessed not to go into any cars or off the road. Shortly after I look in my rearview mirror to see birds sitting on top of boxes and all escaping out of their cages. Now if you know homing pigeons will go back to where they were born unless they have hatched babies. So I had to be cautious not to let any out. Difficult when I had to get out to get gas or use the restroom. But ther was no way I could get them back in their cages, along the journey or they would escape. I put my dog with DH in moving truck and just imagined what people thought when I stopped at lights and they saw all these birds lose in the back of my car. A 10 hour journey.
Needless to say we had to wait until dark after we arrived home to catch them, and I was cleaning up bird poop for a little while.
Anyway, thanks for letting me share my bird poop story.
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That was a nice Bird poop story smeshque~
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Thank you Lu,
It was a pretty stinky day :)
My parents were quite amused by it so that made it bearable. :)
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I have a different kind of Bird poop story smeshque....
When I was about 6, I was playing "cars" in my Grandparent's gravel driveway and suddenly my arm turned white. I ran in to show my Mother. She and my Grandmother told me it was Bird poop and then I started crying, while they laughed.
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Lu,
Aww, that will ruin playtime quickly. I would have cried too.
However, I have heard said that if a bird poops (from the sky) on you that means you are special.
:)
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I dunno, who wants to be that special?

I guess some days you are the Pigeon
And some days you are the Statue!
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Glad, Linda has very sweetly sent me a brand suggestion to try - I notice they've just opened in Cardiff, which isn't so very far from me. It is possibly a little too far to be a sensible distance to go for a packet of coffee... If I get really desperate there are two branches of Starbucks in the town, too.

My favourite poison is nothing special, it's a supermarket's own blend that just happens to tick all the right flavour boxes with me and I've been drinking it - far too much of it - for over twenty five years.

My grandmother used to go to a proper old-fashioned grocer for Jamaican Blue Mountain, which was delicious. But you'd have to add a tot of brandy to recover from the price of the stuff.

It is just possible that a little less caffeine for a week or two will do me no harm. Courage! How bad can it be?
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CM, I started chuckling about your coffee panic. Then I suddenly stopped because I recalled the time when my Mr Brown ice coffee was out of stock on island. I need my daily cup of morning coffee. It starts my day. The wrong coffee or no coffee will trigger my migraine which no Excedrin can relieve the pain. Doesn't help that I can't stand those fancy ice coffees like Star Buck and Coffee Beanery. In a panic, I was buying all the different Hawaiian canned coffees, Asian coffees in their language on the can, different powdered coffee - trying to find the brand closest to my favorite coffee. It all flunked the test. Since then, I always keep an extra case (24 count) of coffee in my bedroom for emergency. I also keep at least 2 cases in the kitchen. Good thing, too! On the last typhoon scare, I went to buy a case, and they had only one left. I wasn't worried because I still have the emergency stash in my bedroom.

I wish you luck, from the bottom of my heart, that you find a coffee similar to your favorite.
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The bird stories made me laugh. As a kid, I had a pair of parakeets, and one of them liked to fly around the room, the other was a bit of a "homebody" and preferred the cage. The "flier" was roaming around the room and all of a sudden I looked and he had landed on the turntable of my little record player and was going round and round. I had been playing a 45 record and he apparently enjoyed the ride.
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I already knew this winter was going to be brutal even before mom died, it is only 4:00 in the afternoon and I've run out of things to do. I know some of you are no longer caregivers and are retired - what do you do all day?
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Wait for death? Just kidding.

I've really gotten into fitness. I try to work out at least every other day.

Other than that I've been just trying to get to know myself again. I forget who I was before taking care of Mom started. I think I was taking care of her since my Dad died when I was four in some capacity or other.

What did you like to do before Willie? Any hobbies that you could still pursue?
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Some days it feels like I'm just waiting for death😕. The thing is I was kind of at a transition point in my life when I came home to help mom, what I had been doing before had ended. That made it seem that the fates had aligned to enable me to become a caregiver, now though I'm back where I was before only years farther on and with no clear direction where to go next.
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Can you do some online courses during the winter months, cwillie?

art history, astronomy, 18th century lit, perhaps?

any home based business ideas ? eBay merchant ?

small batch, organic recipes

big sister to a foster kid ?
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CW, you've had, like, five minutes to adjust! Give yourself a chance!

After caregiving it is *incredibly* difficult to think of anything that merits your time. I can't go back to what I was doing before, I just can't. I've lost all patience with these absurd people and their pitiful conceits and their trivial demands...

As one account handler put it to me long ago: "it's a good thing you're not client-facing, isn't it?"

I couldn't think *what* she meant! But that was even before I'd lived with the insult that according to "the real world" (don't start me) my ability to craft straplines - things which I'd always loathed from the bottom of my heart anyway - was seventy times more valuable than my willingness (if not much ability) to comfort a dying woman.

And it's worse than it was. Over twenty five years ago I made up a pharmaceutical company called "Winsome & Hush - caring for you." It was supposed to be a joke. B*gger me if there aren't now encouraging little slogans over every spare inch of wall in the hospital - it's all I can do not to take a black permanent marker and go round the place correcting the misplaced apostrophes.

There goes my nervous tic again.

Could put horns and fangs on all the Chief Executive's 'big brother' posters. Or speech bubbles - "f*** 'em, they're only patients..!"

As I say. I really can't go back to my old life.

There's CCTV in every corridor, for a start.

At your crossroads, where were the other signposts pointing? And if those options now seem devoid of any interest or value, why do they? What are they lacking?
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I'm being haunted.

I looked out of the kitchen window. There's a van there with an organisation's name and the strapline "love people better".

The organisation is working with the church and the police to address offending behaviours. Through compassion and understanding, rather than blame and sanctions. More love, better results. See what they did there?! Clever, huh?!

I am going to go and vomit quietly in the garden now.
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CM, you captured my feelings very well. I keep thinking "how stale, flat weary and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world...." or however those lines go (it's been a long, long time since I was forced to memorize them).
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One of the best-ever renditions of that soliloquy is at the end of "Withnail & I"! Which I can heartily recommend if you're in the right sort of disaffected mood for it and can get it on DVD - only I'd never claim it exactly cheers you up. It's more for your inner rebellious teenager. Plus it's got a very young Paul McGann in it :)

Don't watch it on a full stomach.
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Country, I think you should say the hell with vomiting quietly..........let it spew out of you full force. Make as much noise as possible.

My Mom had a company help her once to move some junk. They were named "Two Small men with Big Hearts" My Mom said they should have renamed it "Two Fat Idiot's with Bad Attitudes" LOL
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Force yourself to go daily to a matinee to escape the doldrums of 4:00 in the afternoon. Take notes on how people in the movies are living.
Go until you no longer feel as if waiting to die. Go until you are sure you cannot see another movie. Nevermind the expense-this will be so much less than therapy.
You are only hesitating to live.......
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Hmmmmmmm.

If I go to the cinema at four o' clock I can see Bohemian Rhapsody.

I have just watched the trailer.

I am not quite convinced that even two hours of Queen tracks will make up for the excruciating frustrations of watching someone attempt to play Freddie Mercury who is not Freddie Mercury.

But it's also got Tom Hollander in it. And he is one of those actors I will happily watch in absolutely anything.

I must quickly add that Tom Hollander is not attempting to play Freddie Mercury. That idea is so bizarre and unthinkable that not even Freddie Mercury would entertain it.
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Freddie Mercury, if you ask me was one of the most entertaining musical front men of his time. I think old Freddie would have had pointed opinions about who played him. I wonder if they passed this by the surviving members of the band before they decided on who would play him.

I thought I might like this movie but then I think it would be difficult to encapsulate Freddie in any shape or form. They broke the mold after he was born.

I haven't been to see a decent movie in years. I've become very picky about what I'll waste two hours watching. One t.v. series I have really enjoyed the last two years is "A Handmaid's Tale" Country, I don't know if you get this one or not but I'd give it a view if you can get your hands on it. Season three will be starting soon so you have a chance to binge watch the first two seasons.
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Agree.

It's hard enough to be a maverick when you win approval and acknowledgement. To go on doing it for two decades in the teeth of jeering hostility (and I can't offhand think of *any* commentators, not even in fashion, who are b*tchier and more snobbish and more up themselves than the British music press) and never doubt yourself and never stop growing creatively - amazing man. Just amazing.

Bowie did, too, and for longer; but then they all adored him. He could do no wrong. Freddie could do nothing right. They were utter jackals to him, and now look at them all going on about his genius. They make me sick.
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CWillie,
You have the lines of Hamlet down pretty good! However, concerning you, I am sure there is a beautiful blooming garden in your future.

HAMLET
Oh, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt,
130Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God, God!
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
135Fie on ’t, ah fie! 'Tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this.
But two months dead—nay, not so much, not two.
So excellent a king, that was to this
140Hyperion to a satyr. So loving to my mother
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I have budgeted for myself to purchase 1 audible version to all the ebooks that I purchased from my favorite authors in Amazon. I usually scroll through the kindle and purchase the next audible to the series. 2 days ago, I could have sworn I purchased this audible. Instead of turning on the laptop and checking my Word list, I purchased it for $12.99.

Since I was in my 20's, in actual paper notebooks, I list every single book I purchased - whether on island at flea markets or online. On the laptop, I have a Word File on all the books I purchased- based on genre and in alphabetical orders of authors. You can imagine I have a long list of ebooks.

It was bugging me that I bought that audible when I could have sworn I already purchased it. Yep, this morning, I checked my list. Including the recent purchase of the audible, I have MISSING in both my Amazon account and in my Kindle - 4 audibles (books 3, 4, 5 and 6.) Her series ended on book 10. I'm really pissed off. If I wasn't so OCD about listing all the books I've purchased, I would have just thought I THOUGHT I purchased those audibles but didn't. Now, I have to backtrack and look through my notebook to find the dates those audibles were purchased, then dig up my bank statements (which I still have since time beginning and never got around to getting rid of) to show I purchased it. Then I will contact Amazon to get reimbursed for purchasing twice that audible and to re-instate my audibles for books 4, 5 and 6...

I wondered why my audible books in Kindle looked so few!!! Now I have to backtrack. This time, I'm going to open a Word file for all the audibles I purchased. D*rn it!!!
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At the going down of the sun, and in the morning
We will remember them.
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In the quiet moments of the day, Cwillie
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