As I get older, I get less stressed about the outside world. Maybe this is a bad thing these days with all the chaos in our government, but I feel like I’ve survived everything that life has thrown at me so far, including some things that should very well have killed me (like getting in the car with an impaired driver).
If I can’t do anything about life throws at me, then there’s nothing to gain by panic. I will survive, or I will not, and if I do not, then I won’t know what happened. It’s a fatalistic stance, I guess. But I think it’s a natural consequence of getting older.
I haven’t had great, amazingly fantastic news in so long, I have to use my imagination to think about what I would do if I got it. Luckily I have a great imagination. Maybe this is a factor in getting older, but I’ve gotten more bad news (like people dying) than good news these last several years.
Wow paper background with colorful geometric confetti. Vector illustration.
What would be great, amazingly fantastic news? Winning the lottery or snagging an agent, winning an award at work or selling a lot of books. Maybe I expect more from great news than I did when I was younger; I’m not sure.
The first thing I would do if I got great, amazingly fantastic news is let my husband know. Probably by text, because I’m not a big one for phone calls. It’s not a terribly exciting answer, but there it is. His response would be “Yay!” because he’s not an excitable person.
We’d probably celebrate later at a local restaurant, and we would discuss what to do with this great, amazingly fantastic (I love that phrase) thing that befell us, because even great, amazingly fantastic things have consequences.
I’m going to sit here and think of great, amazingly fantastic news. I’ll let you know if anything comes my way. After I tell my husband.
No, really, I do not. I just got off a long break three weeks ago, and I don’t need a break this soon. But I’d really like a break.
I don’t get another break till late March. I used to teach at a college that believed students needed a three-day weekend every six weeks, so that they didn’t tear down the residence halls or do something else stupid. They might have had a point — maybe we all need a three-day weekend every few weeks so that we don’t do something stupid.
I think, if I had a break, I would rest all day. I feel like I could sleep a few hours right now. That’s how winter affects me (although it’s 40 degrees out at the moment). So my break would be me reclined on the couch sleeping. That actually sounds good right now.
I don’t ask for much, and this includes ideal days.
My ideal day usually happens on a Saturday or Sunday. The best of these days happens in Kansas City while on a mini-vacation. My husband and I wake up in a hotel room and stretch and yawn, then get dressed up for a day of wandering.
My favorite breakfast is at Eggtc, which is a breakfast restaurant in the KC area. I usually order something bad for me, although sometimes I eat the avocado toast. From there, we go to Broadway Cafe, with the goal of some writing time. I like the Cafe’s coffee, and so I drink less coffee at Eggtc to make sure I don’t get over-caffeinated.
We stay at the Cafe for a while. Part of the reason we’re in KC is for a writing retreat. We probably stay there till lunch, and then go to lunch at Choga in Overland Park. we don’t get to eat Korean food often. We usually order dolsot bibimbap, which is a sizzling rice bowl with Korean vegetables and bulgogi.
After this, we go to Whiskers Cat Cafe and play with the cats there. Mind you, we have three cats at home, but it’s fun playing with the cat residents there, especially the kittens in their enclosures. After Whiskers, we may go back to the room to rest, or maybe to the Cafe again. Dinner is likely to be ordered in through Door Dash.
It’s not an exciting day, but it’s ideal as far as this old lady is concerned.
I didn’t own a computer until I graduated with my Ph.D.. The University of Illinois had an abundance of computer labs, and I didn’t have money for a computer, being a student. I should talk about the computers I used then, of course. I was a student before Windows came out, and that meant I used DOS operating system with its glowing green cursor on a black background. Soon after, I took a class with Apple IIes, and decided I liked Apple computers better.
I was also active on the PLATO system. PLATO was an educational system at several universities and other sites; its hub was at University of Illinois. In addition to educational lessons, PLATO offered several features that are part of today’s Internet: messaging, email, discussion forums, and group chats. PLATO became a social network for the people who had access to it, including things like online dating and group meets. It was a haven for a geek girl like me.
The first computer I had access to at home was a classic Mac. It was not mine; I borrowed it when I was laid up at home with a broken leg. Those machines were cute, almost portable.
The first computer I bought myself was an Apple IIvx, a desktop computer that cost me $2300. That is in 1993 dollars; the computer would cost $4,992.97 today. It was an exorbitant price, however PC machines had not started running Windows yet and I preferred the WYSIWYG operating system. Not long after I bought this computer, Apple came out with a cheaper and faster computer called Quadra. I was one of the people angry that we had paid so much for an inferior computer, but I had my computer for several years.
Computers today are so much faster, so much more powerful, so much more graphically inclined, that talking about a 1993 computer seems quaint. My computer today (A Samsung Galaxy Ultra 4) is so far beyond what I had back then.
I am not a complainer, or at least I hope I’m not. I make an exception for my aching bones.
I’m over sixty, and that means my body has seen a lot of wear and tear. My knees are misaligned, causing a lifetime of wear on my cartilage. A car hit me when I was in my late twenties, and I have a bar and screws in my left leg; this has also caused some lasting problems in my hip.
I ache. I can’t take any of the NSAID drugs because of kidney disease, which leaves me treating all the pain for this with acetaminophen (paracetamol). It is only slightly effective, leaving me with the rest of the pain as part of my daily routine.
This is my life now. I’m told it’s part of getting older, but I don’t feel that old. Sixty is not that old, is it?
(I assume the question above presumes a big jackpot win rather than $2. The type of win that changes one’s life rather than just settles a bit of money on one.)
We (my husband and I) would proceed cautiously. First, we would get a lawyer and an accountant, and let the lawyer take over on the receipt of the funds, avoiding publicity, and the like. We would mark out a bit of money to spend in the first year so that we didn’t go wild with spending. We would spend that money on a mortgage, renovating the house and yard, which would benefit us in the short run and help us sell the house in the long run.
Then we would retire. There’s no conceivable way we could continue working under all the notoriety that a lottery win would cause.
We would work with a financial planner to set up our money in a way where we could live off the interest (not richly) and set up trusts for family members. I think we would also set up a trust for charitable purposes.
We would move to a bigger, more interesting town. Nothing too fancy and nothing too big. A college town would be nice, or an artsy town. We talk about this now as a thought exercise. We haven’t agreed on where yet.
We would be more discerning with our purchases. We would think of quality, not quantity. I think this will be the hardest part for us, as we seem obsessed with gadgets.
My biggest worry is that money might change my mind about the haves and the have-nots. I would hope I would not fall into the trap of believing that I deserved the money while others do not. I would not want to begrudge my tax dollars going to support the poor. I would not want to become a right-winger, and would do anything in my power not to be one.
My family had a Christmas tradition — I guess one could call it a tradition. It involved a set of candle holders that spelled out ‘Noel’ that my mother had. These are common in the US. ‘Noel’ is an Old French word that means ‘Christmas’. One might wonder why the Old French is common; keep in mind that the German version is ‘Weihnachten’, which doesn’t lend itself to candleholders.
I should point out that my mother decorated for Christmas HARD, by which I mean she decked the halls until they got dizzy and tied ribbons around everything that didn’t run away fast enough. The Noel candleholders always sat on a piece of furniture that took up part of the living room.
My father, on the other hand, had a peculiar sense of humor. And dyslexia. And a colleague named Leon. All of these came together, and my dad would rearrange the letters NOEL to spell LEON. The trick was to see how long it took Mom to recognize that the letters now spelled Leon.
I adopted the practice of rearranging the letters. This made two generations of letter-swapping, and my mother had to be extra vigilant that her decoration was not declaring ‘Leon’ She was not vigilant enough; she never caught us.
One year for Christmas, I found a cute set of block candles that spelled out ‘Noel’. I unwrapped the packaging carefully and rearranged them, then had my niece smuggle them under the Christmas tree (wrapped, of course) to Mom from Leon. This niece got the joke, because she herself started rearranging the letters, making three generations to adopt the trick. My mother also got the joke and laughed hard. The next year I got a bottle of homemade wine for a Christmas present — named Vin Leon.
My parents are gone now, but my husband and I bought a set of letters spelling out NOEL, and we rearranged them for our tree. The Christmas tree proclaims LEON.
Clutter is the bane of my existence. We have clutter everywhere in the house. The coffee table is piled a foot high at the moment, and the kitchen counters are covered with soup cans and boxes of cornbread mix. There’s not a place for everything unless it’s at the bottom of a pile.
We’ve considered Swedish death cleaning, but we’re sure we might need all these things someday. That’s what you get when hobbies and projects take over life. I’m sure there’s a fishing reel winder at the bottom of the table clutter that I could never get to work. The seed-starting materials are piling up by the couch where I swear I will take them down to the basement eventually.
I could reduce clutter anywhere in the house if I could only find a place to start.
I have this fascination with unincorporated areas in the US — these are not quite towns, but places that have names and very little population. They fascinate me because they obviously have a history and, at least at some time, an identity, yet many of them are forgotten now.
Some of them have road signs, such as Quitman, which is in the county where I live. I have been to Quitman and seen the small collection of houses there. According to Wikipedia, there are 45 people there in 23 households as of the 2010 census (Wikipedia, 2025). However, an unincorporated area’s road sign doesn’t have a population posted, which is part of how one can tell it’s unincorporated.
Other unincorporated areas are unmarked, but can be found in the memory of people who lived there. Wikipedia may have information on unincorporated areas in a county. Having the name of the unincorporated area, one can often locate them on a maps app on the phone. Even Gaynor, MO, which is listed in Wikipedia as ‘extinct’, can be found on Google Maps.
I have not been to Gaynor, but I have been to both Quitman and Wilcox, the two other unincorporated areas in Nodaway County, Missouri. And I remain fascinated by these former towns and not-quite towns that haven’t quite disappeared from human memory.
Words Like Me 