I received a poem in ths vein! No author given tho! RockAway Rest Home Christmas "Twas the night before Christmas at Rock-Away Rest,and all of us seniors were looking our best. Our glasses how sparkly,our winkles,how merry;Our punch bowl held prune juice plus 3 drops of sherry. A bedsock was taped to each walker,in hopes that Santa would bring us soft candy & soap. We surely were lucky to be there with friends, secure in this residence & our Depends. Our grandkids had sent us some Christmasy crafts, like angels in snowsuits & penguins on rafts. The dental assistant had borrowed our teeth,and from them she'd crafted a wreath. The bed pans so shiny, still all in a row, reflecting our candles magnificent glow. Our supper so festive-the joy wouldn't stop...it was creamy warm oatmeal with sprinkles on top. Our salad was Jello so jiggly & great, then puree of fruitcake was spooned on each plate. The social director then had us play games, like "Where are you living?" & "What are your names?" Old Grandfather Looper was feeling his oats,proclaiming that reindeer are nothing but goats. Our resident wand'er was tied to her chair in hopes that at bedtime she would still be there. Security lights on the new fallen snow made outdoors seem noon to the old folks below. Then out on the porch there arose quite a clatter (but we were so deaf that it just didn't matter). A strange little fellow flew in through the door, he tripped on the sill & fell flat on the floor. 'Twas just our director,all togged out in red. He jiggled & chuckled & patted each head. We knew from the way he strutted & jived, our social security checks had just arrived. We sang-how we sang- in our monotone crock,till the clock tingled out its soft 8 o'clock stroke. And soon we were snuggling deep in our beds, while nurses distributed nocturnal meds. And so ends our Christmas at Rock-a Way- Rest 'Fore long you'll be with us. We wish you the best! Then she writes "Want to share a room?" So hope you enjoy this & fact that the Old Woman is in your mirror & not in here!! Happy New Year! Jan

Sherry, when I received the email notification that you had commented on my blog, the address line of the sender (you) was this: sherryocala [noreply-comment@blogger.com] You get email replies to your comments from me because I already have your email address. I just get it from my contacts folder. When setting up your Blogger profile, you have to actively check the "show email address" option, otherwise your email is hidden. Many folks do this on purpose, thinking that providing their email will be a wide-open door to Spam City. My email is available on my blog, and here on GW, and I can't say that I have noticed any increase in spam because of it. It's all in the way that I blog. I skip around reading blogs ... many of which come from sidebar blog lists of other blogs I enjoy ... and I lose track of where I've been. If a blogger uses the comment section for a reply, chances are that I will never see it. (You can subscribe to comment replies on blogger blogs ... I did that once on a very popular blog, and my inbox was inundated with everyone's replies.) I think of personal comment replies as Thank You notes ... it's just what I do, and I feel bad when I can't send a personal reply. Just this morning, I had two lovely comments from folks that I couldn't contact personally. I commented on the blog, and I hope they see it. Other readers got personal replies, with our dear Professor Roush receiving a continuation to a comment conversation that started between the two of us on his blog ... which is FABULOUS, BTW.

I understand the need to protect your religious beliefs and not want to see anything that doesn't go along with Adam and Eve. It's not archeology that doesn't exist, it's archeology that's not talked about. If you research and you are interested in the field, it's there EVERYWHERE, but it's certainly not talked about and/or taught in schools. Then before you know it, the pieces come up missing. Stashed away, never to be seen again or stuck off in some box somewhere in a museum warehouse with only old photos left. You cannot research and examine old photos, you cannot get DNA samples from old photos so therefore they must not be real. I refuse to close my mind to what's all around me...I do not have some silly preconceived notions of how the heavens and earth were created. But in the end, it really doesn't make a whole hill of difference. We are born, live and pay taxes and get old and die. It is what it is...as they say. We will absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, never know the real truth. The evidence is long since been lost in history. I can old have my theory of what I believe which really only brings up more questions.

Here's what we did a few years before we sold our house, and I swear it came back to us four times in our price. I don't have a photo, but I'll try to describe it...and test your patience! I designed a work area that went across the back of our narrow single-car garage and around both corners, to make a long U-shape with short sides. We had built a library upstairs years earlier, and had two nice L-shaped birch countertops that our cabinetmaker mis-measured and had to do over. Our contractor built simple open frames, using 2 X 6's nailed to the wall to support the back, sheets of 3/4" plywood, with 1 X 2 nosing along the front edges, as the vertical supports, and 1 X 4 horizontal aprons under the front edges of the countertops. I designed the spacing on the ends of each side under there to fit a couple of Elfa basket units that I had been lugging around for years. The rest we left open, with 1/2-depth shelves against the wall inside. In the center of the U, there was about 30" to fill, so we installed an inexpensive fiberglass sink in a length of butcher block from Lumber Liquidators (we used the rest of the piece to hold the laundry sink elsewhere), supported in the same way. I hung a simple curtain on a tension rod under the sink part, and kept buckets and rags and cleaning things there.I stained all the wood countertops with cherry stain, and gave them three coats of spar varnish, which made them essentially waterproof. We covered the walls above the countertops on both sides with pegboard, and hung tools in one L, and craft and potting supplies in the other. Same division of categories for the areas underneath each side. I painted the wall over the sink with blackboard paint and used it to make lists and note measurements or whatever I needed for whatever I was working on. We ran a shelf around the top on sturdy metal brackets on the tool side to make use of the space between the top of the pegboard and the ceiling. The other side had ductwork at the top, and we stopped the pegboard and put the shelf at that same height to make the space consistent... We stored paint cans and plastic tubs of paint-related stuff up there. We painted the pegboard the same shade of chalky white as the walls of the garage, and painted the underneath structure battleship gray. I used inexpensive peel-and-stick vinyl floor tiles that resembled gray and cream stone on the concrete in that area. Then we continued the storage along both side walls with an open gray plastic shelf unit from Lowes for garden things on one side, and a Rubbermaid tall storage cabinet for car stuff on the other. It was fabulous. Very simple, and really useful, and a pleasure to do stuff in. I was crazy proud of myself!