The Day We Fled Illinois

The Day We Fled Illinois

It's been a ridiculously long time since I've posted a blog, but I've got an excuse. And it's not one of those lame made-up excuses like "My dog ate my homework," or "The president's motorcade stopped me to ask for directions to the airport." I just moved from Illinois where I'd lived my whole life under a regime of prison-bound governors to the Great State of Georgia where the overalls are baggy and the grits are homemade. Am I worried about this major life change? If you've read any of the fretting blogs here, you know the answer to that. But it's also kind of exciting. And it seemed like the timing was right, both for the move itself and for our escape from Illinois on Saturday, June 1.

Why did we choose Georgia? My husband was offered a relocation at his work, so we decided to take them up on the adventure. Since our son's in college, we didn't have to worry about making him change schools, and we were 100% ready to never live through another Northern Illinois winter. So it was off to Georgia with four annoyed cats and a bunch of winter parkas that we refused to get rid of because we don't quite believe that it doesn't snow down here.

We were planning to leave on a Saturday morning, so the movers came and took away our furniture Friday. Without beds at our house, we decided to stay Friday night in a hotel. As we drove past the high school next door to our house, I saw a line of porta-potties in the parking lot.

"Do you suppose tomorrow's that charity run?" I asked my husband. Every summer since we'd been in that house, there had been a charity run that started at the high school, blasting music from the 80s and 90s through our windows at 6 a.m. on a Saturday morning. That's one thing I definitely wouldn't miss about our old house, and it seemed fitting that it would be happening on the day we were leaving.

"No!" my husband cried in horror. "We'll never get out of here tomorrow morning!" That's when I remembered the other associated inconvenience that came hand-in-hand with the charity run.

The police shut down our road before the race and it stays closed until the last pathetic straggler has completed the whole course. It takes hours. During which time we're not allowed to pull a car out of our driveway. So our plans to leave Saturday morning were just shot through the butt. Unless…

"If we can get out of the house really early tomorrow, we might be able to beat the road shut-down," my husband suggested.

"What time are we talking about here?" I asked nervously.

So we went to our favorite pizza place one last time before leaving town to consider our options. And sure enough, when we walked in, we came face-to-face with a bunch of people wearing charity race t-shirts. They were signing up late participants. We asked when the road was being closed the next morning. We were told 7:45 a.m. It was harsh, but at least we had a goal for our escape.

The next morning, we woke up at 5:00 a.m. and were down in our hotel lobby for the free breakfast when it opened at 6:00 a.m. By 6:30 we were back at our house. Of course, Michael Jackson tunes were blasting from speakers next door at the high school parking lot. But we didn't have time to think about that. We only had an hour, or we'd be trapped and we might not check into our hotel in Clarksville, Tennessee until midnight.

I handled the four cats: Feed them, clean litter boxes, put litter boxes into big plastic garbage bags and toss them in my car, give sedatives to the cats who weren't too old to handle the drugs, then capture them all and stuff them into their cat carriers.

My husband handled everything else: Clean out the fridge, last minute cleaning out of cabinets and drawers, sealing up the suitcases. We had thought we'd have plenty of time to do all this on Saturday morning, but that was before we knew the swarm of locusts…I mean charity-minded individuals…was about to descend upon our street and render us immobile for hours.

Everything was crammed into our two cars and we jumped into the drivers' seats. As we pulled out of our driveway one last time, we could see them coming. The runners were setting off early – it was only 7:30 a.m. – and the police were leading the way as they approached with their barricades for the road. As we put them in our rearview mirrors, it felt like the villagers were running us out of town with their pitchforks and torches. What a perfect way to take our leave of Illinois.

About a mile away, my husband and I pulled over to set our GPSs and make sure we hadn't forgotten anything vital, like one of the cats. But we were all there, and the drugged cats were already nodding off.

Six hours after racing out of what had been our hometown for the past 10 years ahead of a sweaty mob, we crossed the border into Kentucky. At the gas station, I realized the parking permit from the job I'd had to quit in order to relocate was still dangling from the rearview mirror. With a huge grin on my face, I tore it off and tossed it in the trash.

Time for a new adventure in Georgia…

Tigers!

Say you're at the circus, enjoying the show, when you decide it's time to hit the bathroom. You walk into the restroom and find yourself looking into the face of a real, live tiger. That's exactly what happened to a Kansas woman recently. http://news.yahoo.com/kan-woman-meets-circus-tiger-bathroom-171537184.html.
This incident has made me evaluate how I can make my own trips to the bathroom safer. After all, who knows when you'll step into the restroom (or your classroom or a parking garage, etc.) to find a tiger (or bear or zombie, etc.). So from now on, I will always carry a five-pound beef roast with me wherever I go. Before I step into any room, I crack the door open first and chuck in the meat. That way, if there's a hungry carnivore waiting on the other side, he/she/it will be distracted when I enter the room. It seems like a wise precaution, now that we're living in a world where tigers can be lurking in any bathroom.
Be safe out there!

Book promotion!

One of the (many) things I fret about is that I'm not doing enough to promote my books. Some writers seem like they're born for publicity, while others are pretty shy about tooting their own horns. I'm a shy tooter, so promotional activities are a challenge. But the cool thing is that sometimes it's possible to get someone else to do my tooting for me.

I co-wrote a book with my aunt, the psychic advisor Louise Helene. It's called I SAW YOUR FUTURE AND HE'S NOT IT, and it's full of love and relationship advice taken from the consultations my aunt has had with her clients. The book is funny and entertaining and offers excellent advice. And I'm not just tooting here.

Well, Louise Helene has been invited to be a guest on a few upcoming radio shows where she'll be talking about the book and maybe taking calls from listeners who have love and relationship questions. Following is a list of the upcoming shows. I hope you can stop by and listen. You'll definitely enjoy yourself and you might pick up some ideas for improving your love life.

- Guest on local Canadian radio show Passion on CJAD-AM in Montreal. It's scheduled for April 18th from 9:30 - 10:00 p.m. Central/10:30-11:00 p.m. Eastern.
- Guest on online radio show The Psychic Partners on May 13th from 5:30-6:00 p.m. Central/6:30-7:00 p.m. Eastern.
- Guest on online radio show Mystical Cruise Ship on Friday June 21 from 7:00-8:00 p.m. Central/8:00-9:00 p.m. Eastern.

Goodbye to Daxter

My cat Daxter had to be put to sleep today due to a liver tumor. I'm beating myself up about how much more I should have done to save him and how I should have taken him to the vet sooner when he started losing weight. As you know by reading this blog, half my life is spent fretting, worrying, and feeling anxious, but this is so much worse because there's an acute loss at the center of it. This is so much worse because Daxter's gone.

For a creature that only weighed ten pounds, Daxter had a huge personality that permeated our whole house and family. You couldn't take out the butter dish without slicing off a little taste for him, and I swear he could HEAR cream cheese when I brought it home from the grocery store. We had to buy him a collar with a bell so he wouldn't catch birds, but he still tried. Last summer, he chased a baby fox through our backyard, his bell jingling all the way.

My son found Daxter in the parking lot by his old karate school 10 years ago. He was a sick, scrawny kitten of about 6 months old. When I took him to our vet the next day, they asked me if I wanted to spend the time and money to get him healthy because he was a "fixer-upper." So we fixed him up, and we shared our lives with him for the better part of a decade.

Today I'm mourning my sweet little Daxter. He should have had a lot more years to chase foxes and mooch cream cheese. He should have been able to move to Georgia with us when we relocate in June. I wonder what he would have thought of an armadillo.

Rest in peace, Daxter. You're loved and missed, now and forever.

Diet "Experts"!

After reading a lot of books full of advice about how to lose weight and be healthy, I've become very worried about the people who call themselves diet "experts." They all have different opinions, and they all claim that their way is the only way to live a healthy life and avoid leaving behind a fat, ugly corpse when you die prematurely of some hideous disease. But since everyone has a different opinion, there's no way to know which one is right. And they all seem pretty ridiculous and impractical in their own way.

I just finished reading yet another book that promises to help me get skinny and healthy, as long as I follow the authors' program. Unfortunately, I got to the middle of the book before realizing that their actual agenda was to convince everyone to stop eating meat, dairy, and all other animal products. Apparently, if I eat nothing but fruits, vegetables, and soybeans that are molded into fake meat. Sounds like fun, doesn't it? Their suggested menu for breakfast: Eat a piece of fruit, then another one, then another one. Apparently no one told these women that bagels were invented to give people incentive to get out of bed in the morning.

There are lots of other so-called diet experts who claim that the vegan diet recommendations from the skinny book are plain wrong. I receive a natural health email newsletter every day, and the guy who writes it says that meat, dairy, and eggs are important to a healthy diet. Unfortunately, the suggestions about how to eat these things are a little, um, unconventional. He thinks we should eat eggs, but only raw ones. (Yick!) Milk is fine, but it has to be un-pasteurized, which can contain bacteria that could make people sick. Some fruits are OK, but many are a problem because they contain sugar, and they all have to be organic. Veggies are very good, as long as they're organic and raw. Oh, and those bagels I want for breakfast are out of the question.

There are other diets floating around out there, including the high-protein, low-carb variety and the low-fat type. Allegedly, both are the only way to lose weight, keep the weight off, and become healthy. And both completely contradict each other, not to mention the skinny diet and the raw egg diet.

So what can we eat while abiding by all the guidelines in these various diet plans? Eggs? No. Meat? Be serious. Milk and cheese? Not a chance. A cookie? Don't be ridiculous. Blueberries? Nope. Which leaves us with raw organic spinach and maybe a carrot on your birthday. Yum. Thank goodness I spent the time reading all these diet books so I could get such excellent, practical advice. I think it's time to just give up and order a pan pizza. It might not be so good for my body, but it's excellent for my spirit.

Receipts!

My husband recently accepted a work transfer to Georgia. Our move provides enough material for infinite Daily Fret blogs all by itself since we've both lived in Illinois our entire lives, and we don't know anyone in Georgia. But we'll get to that later. Later, as in some day when I'm not buried under a ton of garbage in every room in my house, trying to clean stuff out and pack. Which is why I haven't written a blog in maybe two weeks.

Anyway, today's Fret isn't about Georgia or the fact that I don't particularly care for peaches or the impending need for me to drive 12 hours in my car with a bunch of angry, crying cats in the backseat the whole way. Today's problem is that I can never find anything I'm looking for! We're preparing to sell our house, so I have to look back through my file cabinets and boxes of papers and random piles of paperwork stashed under furniture to find details about this place so we can offer it for sale. Because we're being relocated through my husband's company, we need to tell them how much we paid for our house, what's wrong with it, what kind of remodeling we've done over the past 10 years, and whether the place smells like cats.

In order to buy a new house in Georgia, we also have to dig up every bit of financial data we've ever come in contact with, including tax forms, pay stubs, and written receipts from the Salvation Army collection guy who we gave a dollar to last Christmas. Fortunately, I've got most of this stuff because I'm a packrat. Sadly, there's always one piece of paper - a vital piece of paper that's the key to every other piece - that I can't find. On Thursday, for instance, I literally spent from noon to 4 p.m. looking for a property tax bill from 2010. Oh, I had 2009 and 2011, but I needed 2010 and couldn't find it for 4 hours. It took so long because I had every other piece of paper from 2010, and I needed to search under them in order to find what I needed. The online version of the bill didn't have the one little detail that I needed, so I had to search. And eventually discover that it was where it should have been, but the paperclip had fallen off, so the page had gotten stuffed to the bottom of the tax envelope.

And it's not  just home-related stuff that goes missing. Today I had to find a receipt for my son's computer so he could get warranty service. We bought the extended, in-home warranty, so we're going to use it! But first I have to spend 2 hours looking for the receipt. It should have been in email, but it wasn't. Every other email was there. I have about 200 junk mails about buying low cost ink cartridges alone, but can I find the thing I need? Of course not.

So the moral of this story is that you can save 1000 tiny pieces of paper and have them filed clearly in just the right place, but the one you need won't be there when you need it. It makes me think that I should just throw all paperwork and receipts away immediately. Then I'll at least know that I don't have what I need, and I don't have to waste hours searching for it.

Daylight Savings Time - The Sequel!

I've always hated Daylight Savings Time, and now I've got scientific evidence that it's a plague on humanity. Waking up in the pitch dark to change the time on all my clocks is more than an inconvenience. Turns out, it's actually dangerous.

According to an article in the LA Times, hazards ranging from heart attacks to traffic accidents increase dramatically on the Monday following the time change. This "spring forward" nonsense strips us of an hour of much-needed sleep, which increases stress on our bodies. Sleep experts (yes, there are sleep experts) say it can take some people up to 3 weeks to get used to the new time.  http://www.latimes.com/health/boostershots/la-heb-daylight-saving-time-health-dangers-20130311,0,2861449.story

So be safe out there because apparently everyone's half asleep.