Heather Barton

While I still read a lot of made-with-paper books, I’ve recently delved into e-books.  More specifically iTunes books on my phone.  It started because one of my favorite authors, Lois McMaster Bujold published a new book but only in electronic format.  My desire to read Gentleman Jole and The Red Queen pushed me into reading books on my phone and it was a pretty good experience.

So when I saw a link on Facebook to BookBub.com I signed up and I’ve been getting these tantalizing daily book offers ever since.  I selected authors and genre types and it sends me things it thinks I’ll like.   I view them and if the blurb doesn’t sound interesting I’ll erase the email.  Needless the say, I have LOTS of emails that I didn’t erase waiting for me to decide to download or not.  (More clutter in my life….sigh.)

A few weeks ago I was without anything I wanted to read so I downloaded one the BookBub finds.  The Song of Dragons trilogy by Daniel Arenson.  The blurb sounded very good with an interesting concept of wereDragons.   I did manage to get about halfway (I think it was halfway, hard to tell with an e-book) before I realized that this book was boring the CRAP outa me.  If I had to speculate, I would say it was written by a male in his early twenties… it’s so adolescent in it’s plot line, with little life experience and no humor.  Ironically, it’s NOT written by an adolescent but definitely by a male raised on D&D and not his first novel….not even the first in the series, even!

So I took another chance and downloaded a different series.  The Imp series by Debra Dunbar.  And I’m thoroughly hooked!!  I don’t know how far I’m into Demon Bound but this book is HILARIOUS and WONDERFUL and SHOULD BE A MOVIE OR SERIES!  I adore this author.  And perhaps it’s not her first novel… (and it would be sad if Song of Dragons wasn’t Arenson’s first, cuz it reads as a first) …just her most popular series, cuz it’s well thought out, with clear and interesting characters and a wonderfully interesting world.   With Demons being risk-taking hedonists pared with their nemesis the tight-assed, sanctimonious Angels, oblivious humans and other races all  interacting in modern day east coast countryside…. it is a joy to read.   And surprise, surprise, Dunbar is a middle aged (in her prime!) single mom.

I’ve always favored female writers because they tend to flesh out their stories with really interesting and real characters.  But I do have several male authors that are just as captivating in their created worlds who I thoroughly enjoy.  But as I age and become more experienced when I read a book I need a character that I can relate a bit more with.  Dunbar’s Imp Series’ character is young for a demon (under 1,000 years) but old for a human (in her 40’s) and she’s lusting after her 20-something gardener like a good Cougar would and it is SOOOOOO much fun!

A bit ago my mother tried to visit her sister.  I say tried, because my mother’s younger sister is 70 and in a mental care facility.  And I was reminded of a statement my mother once made of how she wouldn’t be surprised if her sister had undiagnosed cancer.  After all her sister had the same tonsil treatment she did and it gave HER cancer!

See… back in the early 50’s when my mother was a kid instead of going under the knife to remove tonsils, which everyone was doing back then, HER parents had her and her sister do a new treatment which “radiated” the tonsils away.  Combine that with the bad thyroid history in my family and its not really surprising my mother got thyroid cancer when she was mid-thirty.  She beat it by having it removed and trusting her gut by NOT going on chemo.  She’s been cancer free now for 35 years or so.

The point being…  same trigger, different outcome.  Some could say its genetics.  After all my mother and her sister don’t look very much alike so there is an obvious difference in their genes….and they’re very different in personality.   So those who point to that could be right.  But me….. I think it was all the pot my aunt smoked from the age of 16 on.  I mean, hippie level pot smokage here!   And with all the studies now about how great marijuana is for medical purposes, well, may she cured her cancer before it started!

Then I was thinking about how the experts say learning music helps with math.  I wonder… if Luke had stuck with his free music lessons in violin at school, would he be better at his Algebra?   The Algebra he failed in 11th grade and 12th grade and in his first year in college?   And that made me laugh.  I played piano for 5 years as a child and I barely squeaked by with a D at the Algebra Luke is struggling through.  And I took it twice also, with the same grade both times!!   With those facts, I might surmise that bad math is genetics that my kids obviously got from me.

And on the note of genetics…..

I remember my mother telling me not to shave my legs as a teen and to just bleach it away with lemon juice in the sun.  My leg hair was dark and hers was non-existant!  So as a teen, of course, I ignored that….  But these days as I’m showering and doing the usual places for a razor, legs & pits (other parts get a quick waxing by an expert lol), I’ve noticed that my body hair barely grows anymore.  I only need to shave now once a week!     And then  it clicks.  This must have happened to my mother and that’s why she thought it was fine to just bleach the few hairs she had!  It’s menopause!  My metabolism hasn’t slowed.  It’s down-right retired!   It has given the raspberry & the finger to “the boss”, tossed all its papers and responsibilities in the air and left the building!    And THAT is one of the biggest reasons I’ve been gaining weight over the last year!   My body is no longer using energy for menstrual cycles, hair growth, hair COLOR, good nail growth, skin moisturizing & elasticity and probably a lot of other functions I’m unaware of.  The Guildmen of my metabolism have gone on strike/vacation and all that’s left is me- the Lord ruler and the Surfs of my basic system.   Sadly, the greedy Tax Collector of my appetite is still levying taxes across the board and THAT is just packing on the pounds.

It doesn’t help that I work in a retail store which makes candy bars cheap and within easy grasp!

There are all kids of spillage in our lives…     And I’ve dealt with my fair share of it…..food, drink, lube, etc. But in all my experiences very little spillage had been worse than spilling my phone into a toilet.

It didn’t happen the way you think. I was NOT on my phone at the time, nor was I doing anything naughty. I was sitting there, doing my business with my phone in one hand (cuz I usually keep it in my back pocket so I take it out to NOT drop it into the toilet prepping to ‘sit’) And I noticed “something” on the toilet paper holder & thought I’d do a solid and clean it up.  And while doing that the phone slipped right out of my hands and into the water.

I leapt up instantly and fished it right out, battling the self flushing mechanism of the toilet. I dried it the best I could while pulling up my pants and watched in dismay as the screen when white & flickered.

What I didn’t know to do THEN (and I do now) was to power it completely off. I just helplessly dried it and rushed home. I knew to put it in rice, but didn’t know THEN (and I do now) that I should have NOT waited until I got home to do so. I didn’t know the rice trick was a time sensitive issue and I should have rushed down to the market section of Target and bought rice and ziplock bags. And when I got home I didn’t know I should put the phone into zip locked rice, not just IN rice.

So yes, my phone was a lost cause.

Which was an interesting experience being without a phone for two days.  I knew I relied upon it for a lot.  I just didn’t realize how much I do on it on a moment to moment basis.  For instance, I spent two days at work feeling confused about what day it was, what time it was, what my schedule was.  The phone makes my dyslexia so very easy to manage.  My own form of my family’s high anxiety, well conditioned since childhood by dyslexia is constantly questions my instincts, worried the dyslexia has me wrong.  So whenever that happens, I confirm it on my phone.  Example…

Me:   Today’s date is… the 10th… the 10th?  mmmm….yeah, I think it’s the 10th.  Are ya SURE!

With a phone I just check.  Without a phone, I question & question… & on that day, I laughed.  I’ve lived with this quirk of mine for so long I don’t let it stress me.  There have been so many challenges in my life that the minor ones just make me giggle.

So while many would freak losing their phone, I marveled at the new experience of appreciating just how much I used it for.  I checked 8 emails daily; half work, half personal, I was unable to check anything until I got home to my computer each day.  I had my calendar to remind me when I started and ended my work shifts and all my appointments ahead.  I had my contacts, and it was THOSE I realized I needed back!

See when I managed to take my phone to the Apple store, they were able to retrieve SOME of my data by linking to my iTunes account but not my contacts!  But I’d not gone in with my computer.  So after paying for a new phone ($300… ouch!) I rushed home to see if I could manage it at home.  And after a bit of searching found a backup dated a month before.  See, my phone hadn’t been able to sinc up to iTunes for months, so I had all these photos and contacts and videos that never uploaded.  The loss was sad but not nearly as sad as losing all my contacts.

But after another trip to the Apple store, computer in hand, we managed to get the backup uploaded and lo and behold my contacts were restored!!!

The true irony of the entire story was barely an HOUR before the Spillage I was bragging to a fellow employee (after seeing his banged up phone & him hearing how he’d dropped it so many times) about how my phone had been dropped at least 20 times, skidding under countless cars and “Look! Pristine!”

Gee, Fate…. did I really need a $300 lesson on being without a phone or was this a back of the head slap about being humble?

I’m primarily a Liberal.  But I’m also a writer.  And what that means is I don’t arbitrarily hate what is different from me.  Not saying that Liberals do… nor their Conservative counterparts…. what I’m saying is I can see the logic and benefits of many sides of any issue.  I guess some would call me a Centrist in attitude and a Liberal in practice.

Couple months ago I went to a financial planning institution to straighten out my investments.  See, a few years back I did SUCH a good job at cutting costs (streamlining) and sales at my mother’s business that I got a SEP contribution.   My (then) husband was a trained financial planner so he opened a TD Waterhouse (now Ameritrade) account with it.  What he neglected to impress upon me tell me was I had to take charge of where I dispersed it.  And since I was raising 3 kids (4 if you counted him), working and going through peri- menopause, I completely ignored that account for 4 years.  Where it sat there, not even collecting interest!

In calling the company that handled my Roth IRA investments to see about name changes, etc last year I found out it wasn’t set up the way I wanted it originally.  See 17 years ago when I left a job to marry and move to Texas I had somehow accumulated a pension.  So I rolled it over into a Roth IRA through my new brother-in-law who worked for AmEx Financial Planning (now Ameriprise – don’t you love the erie similarity in names).  I told him I wanted it put into socially responsible mutual funds.   He frowned but I was firm and so I thought he’d done that.   I contributed to it a bit in the early years of our marriage but after the third kid, pretty much left it alone.  It grew.

After the recent phone call though I found out it wasn’t in socially responsible funds.  And after talking to him I didn’t feel he was willing to help me move it to where I wanted.   And then after talking to the Ameritrade woman, personally, I realized this attitude was a permanent structure in the entire investment community.   Those who lived and breathed Capitalism would never understand or connect with the likes of me.   They were ruled by the “More money at any costs” greed aspect that extreme Capitalism generates.

Her explanation that an investor had the right to expect “as much return as he could get” from a company just because he had chosen THAT company in which to invest his money.  Yes, it had a level of logic.  And I saw that logic.  What I noticed was SHE didn’t see was the greed in the statement “as much as he could get.”   And that is the true core problem in Capitalism.  Yes, investing in companies with great ideas moves forward progress and is a wonderful way to use excess money to benefit society.  BUT (and this is a HUGE but, a Baby Got Back butt) it should NEVER become more important than the people in the company working for the company or the customers supporting/benefiting from the company.  And THAT is a part of Capitalism that Greed has blinded most people from realizing.

She sited GM and Unions as an example.  I kept my mouth shut.  Yes, the Auto Union in GM seemed to have wound its way into wounding the company.  Yes, many of the positive need for Unions had disappeared as we grew a social conscience as a society.  But did she see that cutting salaries from the top down makes more of a social impression than gutting pensions?  No.  And I knew at that moment she never would.   So I didn’t bring up Costco vs Walmart as a better business plan.  I didn’t bring up how big business has finagled into their pockets all the gov. subsides meant to help the smaller business [farms].  I didn’t mention the business owner who took a giant pay cut so his employees could all make $70,000 a year.

I didn’t say any of that, because she was old school.  I could tell this from her over tanned, bleach blond, fake nail manicure, over 50 at least appearance… and her conversation of tickets to the Derby opening as Santa Anita and how she had 2 horses running.   Times are changing, albeit slowly, and she and I will be dead before we see the complete change, but social media is allowing people to put their money where their beliefs are and more and more people are standing up against greed.   Not as many as their needs to be in my opinion, but I also think (or perhaps I’m being idealistic)  the NEW entrepreneurs are going to go more in the way of the Costco, Starbucks business model than the GM or Walmart.

Either way, I realized then that, again, I was on my own in making sure this investment went where I wanted it to go.    So I’ve got some research to do on socially responsible mutual funds.  And maybe a quick tutorial on “balancing” a portfolio lol.  But I was firm about TWO stocks I wanted to buy.  Costco and Tesla.   She babbled about how no one purchases stocks unless its in 50 share bundles because that’s how you sell it.  But when I went online to handle my account, the computer had NO problem using half the funds to buy what Costco stocks I could afford and the other half to buy what Tesla stocks I could get with the balance.  See… what she doesn’t understand is I don’t plan on selling these.  This is my way of letting my money support business’s I believe in.  If it makes a profit, yay… if it doesn’t, well, it’s money that was more of a gift than earned.

I would rather live a poor but happy life than get sucked into the level of SOULLESS GREED is see at the top.

Go Bernie Sanders!!!  heeheehee