A Christmas party at an old folk's home is quite a sight. There is a new executive director here, though, and she seems to have given it a valient try. The band was actually pretty good - two guitars, a drum set, keyboard, and clarinet. They played all the s standard Christmas tunes and some folk classics. Last year all they had was one guy screeching out solos, accompanting himself on a keyboard.

Santa made his obligatory appearance. They need to either gert a new Santa suit and a new beard, though, or dry clean the ones they have, 'cause Santa was looking right scruffy.

The amusing part about this attempt at Christmas glee is the way the old folks react to it - or, rather, the way they DON'T react to it. They all just sit around in their wheelchairs and look at the band. They don't smile, they don't talk, they don't sway to the music or tap their feet or hum along - nothing. They just stare at the band.

Rain! What a pain!

Most folks do not like the rain,
In fact, they think it sucks.
I think NO ONE likes the rain,
Except, perhaps, for ducks.



“Never run in the rain with your socks on.”
― Billie Joe Armstrong

What did Santa Claus’s wife say during a thunderstorm?
Come and look at the rain, dear.

What kind of umbrella does the Queen of England carry on a rainy day?
A wet one

Why do mother kangaroos hate rainy days?
Because then the children have to play inside

There was a communist named Rudolph. One day he looked out the window and said, “It looks like a storm is coming.” “No it isn t,” said his wife. “Besides, how would you know?” “Because,” he responded, “Rudolph the Red knows rain, dear.”


I think that maybe the rain has rotted my brain!





Hmmmmm... I just found a reason for hope!

Winchester, cont.

Back to Winchester...

Sue swears the parsonage was haunted. She was 2-6 when we lived there, and can remember sitting calmly on her bed and talking to two children with red hair that floated around outside her window. Not to put too much stock in this, but we WERE immedialely up the street from the hospital... and it WAS a really old house with lots of history...

But, come to think of it, both of her older siblings DID make her watch Dark Shadows every afternoon.

It was a pretty, nice, moderate sized house on a good street. The house had a great front porch, on which we played "Lost in Space"


I was always Dad or Don, because I was oldest. Ed was Will Robinson. Jennifer Costello was all the women. Sue, being youngest, was the robot.

Winchester

Back to parsonages-

After Roanoke, we moved to Market Street Church in Winchester. Market Street Church had been through the Civil War. Church ownership changed from North to South dozens of times - often even several times a day. There were bloodstains on the wooden steps up to the balcony, because the balcony was used as a hospital. The walls of one of basement Sunday School rooms wouldn't hold paint. Freshly applied paint immediately peeled off, because, during the war, blocks of salt were stored in the room.

The house was old. We had two stories containing 4 bedrooms and an unfinished basement.

The basement had two rooms. One was a big room with a tile floor. It was fairly dark and dingy. The other room had a dirt floor, and, according to my parents, had once been a root cellar. Considering the civil war history of the church, however, we children preferred to believe that it was a secret confederate cemetery. We dug for bones on many occasions, but never found any.

The house was fair sized. It had both a full formal dining room and an eat-in kitchen. There was room in the living room for my piano, which we bought with Dad's wedding money.

It was a nice old house. You could tell it was nice because it had cut glass doorknobs. It had 4 bedrooms, so we each had our own room. (Granny didn't live with us then.) Methodist parsonages are furnished. My room had a great big, antique double bed with a huge headboard and a huge old chest of drawers and a large bureau with an attached mirror. Having been totally self-absorbed at that age, I have no idea what kind of furniture my siblings or parents had.

Never again! I promise!!

If you don't believe-- in God, in the Nature Spirit, in Kismit, in Buddha, in Tao, in Allah, in Krishna... if you believe there is no power out there to judge you or to keep you on the straight and narrow, then have I ever got a story that's going to make you quake in your booties!

I wrote a fairly mean blog post last time, detailing an unfortunate, embarrassing incident which will never, ever be mentioned again, but which happened to my saintlike mother. Immediately after I'd published the mean post, I browsed, went to an infected site, caught a horrible virus, couldn't use the computer, and paid Geeks Mobile USA $150.00 to fix it. (Ron had said he'd look at it when he got back in town, but I was impatient...

So, if you know what is good for you, respect your mother.

New house Roanoke

I think I'll go back to writing about the avarious parsonages we lived in while I was growing up.  I was writing that series a couple months ago, and it seemed to be slightly amusing (as parsonages usually are!).  Apparently, however, I had not gotten very far into the series, because I seem to have ended it in "old house Roanoke", which is a place in which I lived from ages 6 to 8.

"New house Roanoke" was a lot larger and more suitable for our growing family.  Ed had his own room, and Granny always had her own room, so I guess we had 4 bedrooms... unless, that is, they perhaps turned some small room that wasn't supposed to be a bedroom into Granny's room.  They did that sometimes.

All I know for sure is that I HAD TO SHARE MY ROOM WITH THE DRATTED BABY!!  Can you believe it???!!!  How could my parents have forced someone as special and as adorable as I was to share a living space with an annoying little baby?

We had an outdoor patio attached to the house. It was a concrete slab with a steel grate that surrounded it and no roof.  I firmly believed that, if my parents really loved me, they would enclose that area and make it into a bedroom for me.  When I played on it, I would deccide where to put all my furniture.

The house was located on a steep hill in what was known as the Round Hill neighborhood.  We were about halfway up the hill.  One of my earliest memories is of poor Mom getting out of the car on an icy, snowy day, and slipping, and sliding on her rear end through several streets worth of yards and pavement. 

Hairspray

I went and saw Hairspray at the Signature Theater this afternoon. It was fantastic. The music, dancing, singing, and acting were all great. It was a whole lot of fun.

If you've what "Hairspray" is, it's a musical about a plump teenage girl, Tracy, who dreams of dancing on a local TV dance show. When Tracy dances on the show, she becomes an overnight celebrity. She then manages to integrate the show. (This takes place in the early '60's.)

In the movie, John Travolta played Tracy's mother.

Signature is where I went and saw "The Hollow" back in October. I did not like that show much, but I think it was more that I actually didn't like the show itself, as written, rather than not liking the production.