Older Ladies

http://youtu.be/O4QzHeUE-CM

This video just says it all.  Thanks to my friend Maureen! 

Just too funny to miss.....

Hope you enjoy it too.

Who Knew?

Who knew that someday I would attempt writing a book?  This idea all came about after attending a career guidance course at a local community college.  After retiring, I dabbled in going back to college.  The career counselor suggested that I take this course.  I was very hesitant about spending 2 full days in a class.  At the age of 62, what could they tell me about a career?  Heck, I'm retired, what's the use?

Well, after spending over 20 years in real estate, I was told that sales was the worst thing for me!  Wow....that was quite a shock!  Being the old resistant me, I just couldn't believe this.  I don't even like to write!

What I've come to believe in life is that there are living angels that intersect your life with a gift for you.  That little angel suggested that I write a blog.  A blog....what is that?  The seed was planted.  Thanks, Denise.

Then life happened....I moved to a different state and reconnected with another angel that first came into my life back in 1994.  As fate would have it, he was writing a blog....no coincidence!  He gave me the logistics of how to create this blog.  My goal in writing this blog was to stretch myself by writing about fun.  I was always so serious, what did I know about fun?  Lo and behold......this blog has been all over the world!!  Thanks, Geoff. 

Then again....life happened.  I took a job at a property management firm and now I write every day.  I send emails to owners and tenants.  This is like learning to play the piano.  You start off practicing the scales.  My boss tells me all the time how great my emails are.  She gives me a lot of assurance  and spurs me on.  Thanks, Judy.

Last month my world travelling friend blew into town.  Besides other activities, she asked me to join her in attending a mini seminar.  The guest speaker was Patrick Snow.  It was about "Creating your own Destiny."   He gave us some really great tips on how to self-publish.  What a dynamic speaker.  He kept us mesmerized for three hours.  The time just flew by...we all felt as though we wanted more.
Thanks, Maureen.

Since taking that seminar, I've submitted another piece, for consideration, to O Magazine.  While the very first one I submitted about a year ago, didn't take, I've made up my mind that one of these days, if I keep writing and submitting articles, someday I may be able to say that I had something published by them.

Another great thing is that I've now got a writing coach.  She keeps me on task.  I'm submitting 2 written pieces a week to her.  She gives me great feedback.  Some day, I'm hoping that she will design the cover of my book.  She is so artistic.  She is my secret angel.  Thanks for all your support.

Moral of the story?  Have you met any great angels lately?  They are out there.....seek and ye shall find.

Hawaii No Ka Oi

A friend shared this video of various artists from Hawaii.  It really makes you feel homesick for the Islands.

Many years ago I worked with Palani Vaughan's dad, Frank at TheoDavies.  What a treat it was to listen to Palani, his dad and brother sing together.  That was priceless!

While at TheoDavies, (formerly known as Theo. H. Davies) in 1973, I also had the opportunity to meet the Tai Pan, Simon Keswick.  His family's business in Asia, called Jardine Matheson, was a far eastern trading company founded in 1832.  They purchased TheoDavies and diversified by adding Pizza Hut, and the Taco Bell franchises, as well as Mercedes Benz and Jaguar. 

The video features several local artists and the various sights in Hawaii.  I especially loved the Ipu's (not Ipo's - as my daughter corrected me).  Wouldn't mind playing that instrument.  It is made from gourds that have been hollowed out.

I hope that you enjoy this video as much as I did:

http://www.youtube.com/attribution_link?a=w9aaYCsQC6I&u=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DbhibLQFebpQ%26feature%3Dshare

This song was written by Eleanor Kekoaohiwaikalani Wright Prendergast as a patriotic song for members of the Royal Hawaiian Band who protested the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalni and the annexation to the United States.  The members of the band walked off their jobs after the bandmaster tried to force them to sign an oath of loyalty to the provisional government, which later became the Republic of Hawaii.  They felt that it was not right to sell one's loyalty to their country for money.

For a long time the song was considered sacred and was not used for hula dancing.  Today this song is usually danced by graceful, mature women.

The words and one interpretation is as follows:

Kaulana nā pua aʻo Hawaiʻi Kūpaʻa mahope o ka ʻāina Hiki mai ka ʻelele o ka loko ʻino Palapala ʻānunu me ka pākaha	Famous are the children of Hawaiʻi Ever loyal to the land When the evil-hearted messenger comes With his greedy document of extortion
Pane mai Hawaiʻi moku o Keawe       Kōkua nā Hono aʻo Piʻilani Kākoʻo mai Kauaʻi o Mano Paʻapū me ke one Kākuhihewa	Hawaiʻi, land of Keawe answers The bays of Piʻilani help Kauaʻi of Mano lends support All are united by the sands of Kākuhihewa
ʻAʻole aʻe kau i ka pūlima Maluna o ka pepa o ka ʻenemi Hoʻohui ʻāina kūʻai hewa I ka pono sivila aʻo ke kanaka	Do not fix a signature To the paper of the enemy With its sin of annexation And sale of the civil rights of the people
ʻAʻole mākou aʻe minamina I ka puʻukālā a ke aupuni Ua lawa mākou i ka pōhaku I ka ʻai kamahaʻo o ka ʻāina	We do not value The government's hills of money We are satisfied with the rocks The wondrous food of the land
Mahope mākou o Liliʻulani A loaʻa e ka pono o ka ʻāina     [alternate stanza:      A kau hou ʻia e ke kalaunu] Haʻina ʻia mai ana ka puana Ka poʻe i aloha i ka ʻāina	We support Liliʻuokalani Who has won the rights of the land     [alternate stanza:      She will be crowned again] The story is told Of the people who love the land

Aloha to all of you that read this!

Source:  ref:  Wikipedia Kaulana Na Pua

My World is Out Of Kilter!

It has been a myriad of little disasters since the passing of my friend.  The wonder of it all is the fact that I'm not totally bummed or saying woe is me....or why me?

The day after Shirley's passing. I'm at the dentist, doing a root canal.  Only Armel can't complete the procedure because now I have to take antibiotics for the tooth and ear infection.  A few days later.....

It started with water coming down from the ceiling of my bathroom early Sunday morning.  Picture this....I am sitting on the throne barely awake.  Drip drip.....I feel water on my head.  What started as a little trickle became a flood within 15 minutes.  I get a knock on the door from my downstairs neighbor because now he has water leaking into his unit.

Dave, the super of my complex, comes in with a bucket and tears into the ceiling...the water is coming from upstairs....ok by now I'm thinking UGH "toilet water" - NOT "raindrops keep falling on my head."

Every towel I have is now being put on the floor to stop the flooding.  I have to keep squeezing the towels so I get this bright idea to run the towels in the spin cycle of my washer.  Well after repeatedly spinning the towels out, the leak is stopped and Dave leaves

Now I proceed to go to wash all of the dirty laundry and lo and behold.  The dryer decides to quit on me.  The assistant manager states that rather than trucking everything off to the Laundromat, they have a dryer in the office I could use.  So I trek all the heavy towels in my laundry basket to the office and oops - their dryer isn't there.

Now I have to truck it on down to the Laundromat.  Happy Super Bowl!  So just 2 minutes before my batch will be going to the "cool" cycle.  Someone mistakenly puts more coins in my dryer!!  Bah humbug.

In a couple of days....I get a brand new dryer.  The first batch didn't dry so I restart the dryer cycle.  OK by now you probably figure where I'm going with this huh?  WRONG!!!  At the end of the second cycle, I open my dryer door and there is all this black guck all over the inside of the door.  I figure it's from the lint from my clothes but wait there's a lot of black hair too.  Total of six cycles to dry my one batch of clothes!  This is even worse than the old dryer!

Monday morning I report what happened to the office before going to work.  Long story short on this....  they send another super to vacuum out the vent outside my apartment.  Something they did about a month before my previous dryer died. 

Now I am coming down with a cold.  I'm coughing till my sides hurt! Now that I'm sick - I can't do the second half of my root canal, so I had to cancel and reschedule.

OK....flash forward a week later.  The washer is now broken, I can't test the dryer to see if the cleaning of the vent worked.  My friend Eric put a sock on the vent to stop all the guk from coming onto my clothes.  Unable to do laundry again this weekend.  I have to go to the dentist tomorrow for Armel to complete the procedure.  Everyone in my office is down with the cold.  My friend Raul who put up shelves for me last week is sick.  He blames me....Seems like everybody I came in contact with has the cold.  Well heck.....one of my plumbing vendors accused me of giving him my cold through the telephone!  HELLO? 

My co-worker's boyfriend made the whole office some soup.  It was called a Wedding Soup!  It was delicious.  We all got the recipe.  We all have a different strain of the cold because the symptoms are so varied.  People are spraying the office with antiseptic and wiping their hands with it too.  Everyone has taken some time off  to try and recuperate.

OK.....bottom line this is really becoming weird! 

Miracle of Miracles again.....my friend Maureen is in town this week.  She is a Reiki Master and Intuit.  It will be fun sharing this with her....what is the Universe trying to say to me?   Isn't this amazing?

You would think that I'd be angry about all of this.....NOPE....I'm actually laughing inside.  What does this mean??

Too Funny!

The Sisterhood

A very long time ago, there was a sisterhood of women that met and became friends through a direct sales cause of keeping women beautiful.

These sisters included Rita, Mili, Doris, Shirley, Mom and Me.  Rita owned a direct sales line of natural skin care and cosmetics.  Mili was the area director, Doris was her recruit who in turn brought in Shirley, Mom and Me to the fold.

We would hold meetings in Mom's yarn shop.  There were similarities of interest ranging from crocheting, knitting, mahjong, gambling, having fun and family get togethers.

Today I witnessed a miracle.  Today I lost my best friend Shirley to colon cancer.  She was 78 years old and died this morning around 8:30 a.m. or thereabouts.  The miracles of miracles is this.  At the same time this morning, Mili and Doris received the call about Rita's passing from a major stroke.  Although Rita, who was 90 years old, passed on January 18, when Mili received the call was the same time that Shirley passed.

It seems as though Rita was waiting for Shirley, and Mili, who I haven't seen in maybe 20 years and Doris are in town to help me to celebrate Shirley and Rita's life and to talk over the memories we had with one another.

Rather than being sad at the loss of my dearest friend, I was able to recall the good times we all had.  Doris treated me to a wonderful Japanese dinner which went from Unagi (eel) hand rolled sushi to Sea Bass and Jidori chicken with fried rice, to Passion Mango sorbet for dessert.  YUM!

After dinner, we met Mili and her daughter Tammy at the Black Jack table and I sat there chatting while Mili and Tammy played and we all chatted and caught up with our life stories for those lost 20 years.  While the dealers changed shifts 3 times, they enjoyed our stories ranging from gender sociology to the restaurant business, to kids and grand kid stories. 

Mili was always the ring leader, but at the age of 80....she is almost blind, suffering from Macular Degeneration.  Imagine Mili with this huge jeweler's magnifying gizmo that almost looks like a welder's mask, trying to play Black Jack.  Being the vain person that she still is....she just opted for having the dealer tell her what cards were on the table and counting it up for her.

It was quite hilarious to watch.  Mili who always over the years had some sort of sexual joke about her body parts was true to form tonight, believing that she had better live it up with whatever time she has left. She was down about $5,000.  WOW.

My conclusion.....Thank you God for sending Mili and Doris to be here with me.  Thank you for allowing Rita to wait for Shirley, who always admired her.  Now that is what I call Sisterhood.

To my best friend Shirley who has been my sister, at times my mother, my buffet eating buddy and Hanafuda card friend.  You showed me that no matter what bad things happened to my life, that compared to what you were facing, my troubles were so miniscule that I became embarrassed to even think about feeling down.  You brought so much laughter into my life.  You brought the "get up and go" spirit into my life.  We had fun.  We laughed, cried and sometimes we laughed so hard we cried and almost peed in our pants.  That was the kind of friendship we had. 

When we went through a period where what ever happened to one of us eventually happened to the other was scary.  You stated one day that we had to stop thinking like this and it stopped.  Your funny stories about your life made me laugh many times.  You were my very own comedy show.  Don't forget to say hello to my mom.  You promised!

I will miss you Ahjuma.....you are with your Jehovah now and someday we will meet again....even though our religious beliefs are different.  Now that you have crossed over....left me say this last thing to you since you can't disagree back.....I believe in the separation of church and hate!

That is my belief and I'm sticking to it!

 

So Many New Gadgets Out There

Being from the "Baby Boomer" era, electronics seem quite difficult for me.  It really takes dedication to persevere.

For Christmas, the gift I gave myself was a new Kindle Fire HDX.  Every day when I get home, I try to tackle a new thing.  It is funny too, because every day, something new is added, not by me, but by a plan of action that was probably built into the design of the Kindle.

The other day I came across the "live" person that could assist me feature.  That was fun.  Up to that point, I kept calling Amazon in the middle of the night.

I started out getting slot machine games.  Then I progressed to Mah Jong games.  After a couple of weeks with that, I moved on to loading music onto my Kindle.  Although it was difficult and I had to get help more than once, actually the hardest part was trying to remember the names of the songs that I wanted to add.  Did you know that one of the first things to go for seniors is the short term memory? Funny how we can remember things from 50 years ago, but we can't remember what happened 10 minutes ago.

Every morning on my way to work, I'm singing along with the tunes from my favorite "oldies" radio station, KJUL 104.7.  Finding the songs in the Amazon store was easy.  It's remembering what I wanted to remember that was hard.  I would make a mental note about the song title and 5 minutes later the thought is gone.  It is impossible to write the name of a song down as I'm tooling down the freeway at 65 miles per hour, not to mention the police traps all along this freeway.  This morning I counted 6 policemen in both motor cycles and squad cars, that had pulled people over for speeding.  Some even pull 2 cars at once.  Anyway getting off topic here.....another senior dementia moment! (Hee Hee).

Getting back to my new Kindle....I've loaded 68 songs on it so far.  It is fun singing along to songs like.....Tan Shoes and Pink Shoelaces by Dodie Stevens or Top of the World by the Carpenters, along with songs by artists ranging from Patsy Cline, Johnny Mathis, Elvis, Josh Groban, Barbra Streisand, Michael Jackson, Brenda Lee, Frank Sinatra, Skeeter Davis, Dionne Warwick.....Peter, Paul and Mary just to name a few.  Every day the list gets longer. 

Then I got an audible book.  Imagine having Colin Firth's sexy English accented voice reading me a bedtime story called:   The End of the Affair.  He was the "hottie" from Bridget Jones' Diary.

Can you tell I'm having fun with this?

Here are some sample music faves....Enjoy ok?



 



It was such a shock to hear that after all these years The Captain and Tennille are getting a divorce.

 

 

Just a few of my favs.....hope you enjoyed them!

 

 

Oh....BTW, some of the music that is now loaded on my Kindle even have lyrics!!!   I feel like I'm in my own private Karaoke room.  Feel sorry for my neighbors having to listen to me sing at the top of my lungs though!

 

 

Video downloads from YouTube include:

Minnie Riperton singing Lovin' You (1975)

Bobbie Gentry  singing Ode to Billie Joe (1967)

Captain and Tennille singing The Way I Want to Touch You (1972)

From the Cast of  the Motion Picture Rent - Seasons of Love (2005)

 





My Dance Card is Filling Up Again

What is great about living in Las Vegas is that whenever friends from Hawaii come to town, they always look me up so that we can reconnect.

The fun will start this week.  Super Bowl weekend is when the high rollers come to town.  We have a mini reunion in between games.  Not being a gambler, I look forward to meeting up with friends and going to a very nice restaurant to catch up with each other about our lives.  This week, I've already been warned that someone that I haven't seen in about 20 years is coming to town and I need to be "ready."

When the Super Bowl crowd goes back to Hawaii, the "cousins" will be in town again so here we go with doing funky things.  We've already talked on the phone and jotted down all the times and whereabouts and we will meet up the very next week after my Super Bowl buddies go back home.  With the cousins, we're maybe planning to go to a stage performance.  Haven't figured which one yet.

The week after the cousins go back to Hawaii, it's then my world travelling Reiki friend who will be in town and I am looking at fun on a totally different level.  It's about connecting with people on a different plain.  The intuitive level is a lot of fun.  To connect with strangers who don't seem like strangers.  Most times it is not about getting their name and contact numbers.  We can have a very deep understanding and feel love at that level and not have to know their vitals.  Wow....I'm always amazed how the "genie" inside me can sense the nature of people that I meet at these soirees.  It's like exorcising/exercising that part of the brain and it feels so great!

Nurturing the soul and connecting with others on an intuitive level energizes you for quite a while.  It's like being put back on track after a train wreck caused by everyday life. everyday thinking and everyday worrying. 

Following that, the following week we will have a meeting with writers in Las Vegas.  This meeting is to brainstorm on a collaborative effort to publish a book.  I am really excited about this.  It is my goal to get my writing published.  It is scary and exciting at the same time.

How great is that!!! 

It certainly is great to be ALIVE! 

Oh Happy Day

Korean Dramas

Watching Korean dramas, a few "aha" conclusions came to life.

The first "aha" conclusion:  Korean mother-in-laws are really scary.  I can personally attest to this fact.....may she rest in peace.  Somehow it is quite assuring to come to the realization that it was part of the culture that sons were kings and daughters were the consolation prize.  The lowest was the daughter-in-law, on the scale of importance.  Now I can truly say that it wasn't me, but rather the culture that shaped my ex-mother-in-law. God bless her!

The next "aha" conclusion is that Korean jewelry is really wonderful.  The gaudier the better.  Many was a time that I said to my own mother...."oh mom....are you really going to wear that?"  Now I am at the age when I find it fun to wear funky jewelry.  The jewelry in Korean dramas are really awesome.  It makes me wish that I had the talent to create such fun pieces.  However, I found a store that had something close to it, so for Christmas I sent my daughter and granddaughter some fun pieces.  Check out the headbands and jewelry.  While the model is gorgeous....focus on the headbands and the necklace and bracelet.

 



 

 

 

 

 

Needless to say.....it was fun to shop for these things and what is even better is to see my granddaughter trying them out.  Such a "girly girl princess!"

 

 

Korean fashion is also wonderful. 

 

 

 

 

The above picture came from the movie Jang Ok Jung, Live in Love.  This movie showed some really great traditional fashions.,

 

 

Then there are the food movies.....Kimchi Family showcased many different kinds of Kimchi

 

 

 

 

while Feast of the Gods focused on many different kinds of foods prepared according to Korean tradition...

 

 

 



 

 

What a cultural (my culture) learning experience I am having. My grandmother must be smiling down on me right now, because I remember her playing the Janggu (Korean drum) and singing the Korean folk song Arirang.  She sang what I consider to be the north and south versions and loved to dance as well.

 

 



 

 



 

 

 

The second version called Jindo Arirang is my favorite, while the first version above is the well known classic.  My grandmother sang both versions.

 

Hope you enjoyed the experience.