Jaci Dawn

That is just pitiful. So sad it makes your eyes tear up.

Murphy just wants attention. He feels neglected in the midst of babies. The littlest baby is being held by mama and the other two year old is cuddled up with Grandma and what’s a big boy to do?

Why, cuddle up with The Boss, that’s what.

A long-time co-worker of mine retired today. Her office held a surprise party for her to which many of her extended friends within the company were invited. So of course, we went.

After all, Val has been there for us. She’s worked in almost every branch of the company and in several departments. She’s always been cheerful. She’s quite good at her job. I love her approach to things (she thinks like I do).

My immediate boss & I drove over to the party in time to be there for the surprise part. Just before they led Val into the room, someone said, “Oh! We should have a camera!” Everyone looked dumbfounded and someone said, “Well, I’ve got one at my desk…” But of course there wasn’t time for that.

Guess who has a camera in her purse? All the time? It’s almost the office joke: Jaci and her camera. It’s those darn 365 photos.

So today’s photos are of Val’s Moment.

The initial surprise.

Every surprised person needs a good friend to hold them up.

It was an emotional party as you can see.

I hope and wish the best for Val in her new life. And may she always remember how much she was loved.

That is a rather ominous post title, but relax. I’m talking about these:

Rams & Impalas.

Rams are 1/4″ and Impalas are 3/16″. Pure rubber and marketed to orthodontists with adorable sketches of wildlife on the plastic bags. I have no idea who decided one was a ram and one was an impala, or what goats and antelope have to do with straightening teeth. I do know how inconvenient and uncomfortable the darn things are.

And I have “three to six months (more like six months)” left with them. That will make my tenure in braces over 2 years, but I will have a perfect bite when this is all finished.

I am not getting my teeth straightened for any vain reason (well, I guess keeping my teeth could be considered a vanity issue): I am getting them straightened because I was biting down on two molars and those molars were threatening to crack under the pressure. The rest of my teeth didn’t connect at all.

Most people never noticed my crooked teeth. I had this vampire tooth that jutted out almost at a side angle and front teeth that folded over each other. I was missing eight molars. Wow, that makes me sound like a toothless hillbilly – hardly! I had four molars pulled when I was a kid, to make room for the rest of my teeth. Those were replaced by my wisdom teeth. I lost four more molars to tooth decay and the oral surgeon, but they weren’t noticeably gone to anyone but me.

The amazing thing about finally going to the orthodontist has been how my teeth have moved forward and filled in those four gaps. My wisdom teeth have become my back molars. My vampire tooth has aligned with the rest of my teeth and looks normal. My mouth has come a very long way since I consented to the wire torture.

Actually, I haven’t had as much trouble adjusting as some young people have. While at the ortho today, there was a young girl who came in who was in so much pain she was nearly in tears. Me, I have something to compare the pain with: an infected tooth or a dry socket.

Let me tell you: getting your braces tightened doesn’t begin to hurt like an abcessed tooth or a dry socket. It’s pain that goes away. It’s pain that eases as the teeth settle into position. It’s pain that can be managed with Ibuprophen & Acetomenophen.

Anyway, back to the wild animals. The Rams and Impalas. These attach to little knobs on the braces. Forward to back, up and down and even from the left to the right. Oh, yeah. How fun.

Anyway, my mouth is a bit sore tonight and I need to go put the rubber bands into the medicine cabinet by my toothbrush so I remember to put them in at night and in the morning. I am determined to get my teeth all lined up so I can bite down on all my molars.

Since everyone enjoyed that last confession, let me tell you about keys. Specifically automobile keys.

It isn’t simply that I lose my keys, but… well, I lose my keys. Or I lock them inside the car. You know that dreadful sound of a car door clicking shut just as you realize your keys are still in the ignition? Yeah, that sound.

People just shake their heads when I start looking for my keys.

I really try to keep my keys in one place and I try to remember to remove them from the ignition. I swear I do. There’s some synapses missing in my brain function that causes me to overlook keys.

It got so bad that Don went out and purchased one of those magnetic key safes where I could store my spare key under the bumper. There isn’t a lot of real metal on my truck which is why we chose the bumper: it’s real metal.

Once, I lost all my keys except my car key. The house key, Don’s car key, all the work keys. I had to borrow keys for three weeks. Then one day I opened up the top cupboard in my cubicle to get something out and there they were. Right where I’d put them.

Once, I set my keys on top of the car while I loaded kids into car seats. Don was driving. We never did find those keys.

In the summer, when I leave the center window open on my truck, I can always climb into the bed and use a hanger to retrieve keys from the steering column. I’ve done that. In a dress.

It is especially embarrassing at work when I have to ask someone else to lock up because I just left my keys in my truck.

The last time I locked my keys in my truck, I wasn’t worried: I had that key safe. That key safe had saved my bacon several times and I knew right where it was located under the bumper. Sure, my hands would get dirty when I reached under there to retrieve it, but I’d have a key.

Except it was gone. GONE. Dun Rund Off. How the heck does that happen? One heavy duty magnet that didn’t even slide and it was just GONE.

I stood by my truck and considered crying. Everyone came out and patted my shoulder while I called my husband. Someone mentioned AAA.

DOH! I have Triple A! That’s WHY I have AAA. So I called and everyone left the parking lot. I paced around my car, talking to the woman on the other end. It would be 90 minutes before they could get to me. I was alone in the parking lot in the rain and it was getting dark.

I said I wanted to talk to my husband because surely he could drive to where I was in 30 minutes. He’d be ticked, but… I stopped by the passenger door and clicked my phone off.

I dialed Don. Or got halfway into dialing because something caught my eye.

The passenger door was unlocked.

Oh.

I drove home and thought up a dozen different lies to tell everyone at work about how AAA rescued me. In the end, I just confessed. It made a better story, anyway.

And that’s just the car keys.

There was the time in the early 1980’s that my girlfriend & I had to wake up her husband and con him into removing the window from my backdoor so I could get back into the house before Donald came back home from Portland & job hunting. My friend’s husband had the glass out and was reaching in to turn the knob when the alarm went off.

My bedside alarm, telling me it was time to wake up and meet Don at the bus depot.

At least Don got the job. He was not impressed about the back door.

My brain is just not keyed into keys.

I always have great ideas for blog posts when I am nowhere near my computer. But sit down and face the screen? All those ideas just vanished out of my head.

“Writer’s Block” is what it is called and I get it every time I sit down with a keyboard. I want to write something interesting, but I also want it to be fun and honest. I would like to stick with certain subjects, but my life doesn’t seem to roll that way (garden? What garden? You mean that soggy place out back?). I haven’t gone hiking since last summer and it is too cold & wet for camping (well, for me to go camping: I am a fair weather camper).

Here’s one subject I thought about sharing: Stupid Stuff I Have Been Known to Do.

Start with last week. Every work night at 4:40PM, I take off my computer-reading glasses and put on my all-purpose glasses so I can drive home. I turn off my computer, lock all the cabinets, and take the mail and the bank deposit out to my car. Someone always asks me if I have my keys and the deposit bag. Check. Check. Good to go.

I leave work, drive half a block, drop the mail into the PO box in the next parking lot, then I head to the bank where I drive through the drive-thru. Finally, at about 5:05PM, I am free to go home.

One day last week, I changed out my glasses and headed out the door. Dropped the mail off and drove over to the bank. Before I got in line, I looked down and realized I had no deposit bag. I panicked, called work and asked if the bank bag was there. It was: right where I’d changed out my glasses. Someone else made the deposit for me because I was already halfway home.

The next night, I made sure I had the bag. And the mail. And my keys. Drove over to the next parking lot and dropped the mail into the slot. Pulled out of the parking lot on my way to the bank and happened to look over at THE MAIL.

I’d dropped the deposit bag into the mail slot.

Don’t laugh. This could happen to you.

Probably won’t happen to you because you’re not me, but it COULD.

The story had a happy ending: the mailman who picked up the mail at 5:30 found the bag and took it back to our office and dropped it in our mail slot. The CFO was not upset. I told him he could tease me about it in two weeks when my ego was not feeling so bruised.

He made fun of me within ten minutes.

The worst part is that I always have to go back to work after I do something stupid. I can’t just call in sick for the next three months and pretend that it never happened.

That would be nice. If I could get paid for it.

We have one tree in our yard. Out of a 100×100′ lot in a neighborhood where the streets are lined with forty-foot tall Doug firs and a mix of elm, oak, and maples, we have one tree.

OK, I lie: there’s a holly tree in the backyard, but someone hacked the top out of it and it is more bush than tree. And there’s a camellia bush pruned to look like a very short tree. And an ancient rhododendron that stands nearly 15′ tall (it’s still a bush).  But if we’re talking about a tree that stands 20 feet or so, reaching into the sky like a tree should, then we have only the one.

It is a dying lodgepole pine tree. It stands smack dab in our small front yard. Most of the living branches are on the lee side of the tree and those are dying back. It has some fungus deep in its heart and some day we will have to replace it.

It is a wildlife tree and I hate to think of it dying and going away. In the summer, the hummingbirds explore the uppermost branches. The rest of the year, all sorts of birds flock to it. We hang our bird feeders off of the lowest branches, some ten feet off the ground.

We have had every visitor from Pileated woodpeckers to northern flickers to nuthatches, towhees, varied thrush, American robins, crows, dark-eyed juncos, two kinds of chickadees, house finches, song sparrows, English house sparrows, starlings, small warblers and flocks of grosbeaks. We have had more than 20 band-tailed pigeons flock to our lone pine tree in a neighborhood of giant fir trees.

Sunday, three Eastern Fox squirrels set up camp in the tree.

Yeah, sucker. YOU. I don’t think he was terribly intimidated by me. He’s also stupid with testosterone.

I just took the first baby step toward creating my own website: I purchased my Domain Name. I probably won’t do anything with the Domain Name or the website for a few months (seeing as how I do not have ready access to my art supplies or a room in which to work at the moment), but I’ve made the leap.

TwoCrowFeatherWoman.com now belongs to me.

Next on my list is creating a logo and writing up a brief biography. Then I need to categorize what I have and what I want to put up on the website. Then I will worry about actually building it.

Kind of scary, but this has been a goal of mine for sometime.

I’ll keep you all posted.

(self portrait 1978)

I stepped out the back door and took a hand held photo of the camelia bush in the rain, no flash.

Then I went into photo edit and pixelized the photo. I rather like the result.

I like how it redeemed the bad photo.