Cheryl Beckham

Now is the time of the year that I start looking at getting my hands all in the dirt and thinking more and more about Gardening. Today it was so nice outside that I was so tempted to start doing some digging and tilling, but of course that would have been a waste of my time and energy since we will most likely be dealing with “Old Man Winter” for a few more months and anything could happen with this crazy weather we have been experiencing this winter.

I’ve been finding seed and plant catalogues in the mailbox lately and I’m enjoying looking at all of the varieties of plants, trees, bushes, flowers and shrubs that you can order these days. I can’t wait to order flowers for my new window box planters which I bought at the end of the season last deal. Man did I get a sweat deal on those babies. My mother used to have some of the most beautiful window boxes that she always took such pride in. So I’ve always wanted to give them a try and now that time has come. I just hope I can do them justice by looking even half as good as my mother’s did. I’m excited.

There’s a grocery store in Europe that makes our little ’self-checkout’ lines look obsolete already.  In Germany, there’s a grocery store that you take your cell phone, scan the items with it that you put in your shopping cart and then when you get to the check out, your cell phone will display a bar code for everything you scanned total, the check out person scans that and you pay and out you go.

So it looks like we’re not only looking at advances in grocery shopping but also in cell phones.  At the check out, once you scan the payment bar code, you can pay by cash, credit card, debit card or fingerprint (after you have signed up for fingerprint shopping).  And the politicians wonder why we are falling behind the rest of the world where technology is concerned.

We certainly have become a very materialistic society and apparently many of us are considered hoarders. There is a big push for us to down size and organize all of the “stuff” that we are constantly bringing home. I have been in a few homes through out the years that I would consider to belong to hoarders, not a pleasant place to be. I can’t imagine living the way so many of these people do.

Now don’t get me wrong, I have a lot of stuff and I certainly could use a good down sizing. I’ve been wanting to gather up a good amount of stuff and have a yard sale for a few years, but yard sales are so much work that just the thought of holding one gets my stomach all in knots. I think what I really should do is to call a Houston Junk removal company and have them come and just take it all away in one full swoop. That way I don’t have to sort, fix, clean up, display, price and deal with nasty and rude customers for two days straight. And then when all is said and done there is always stuff left over that you have to deal with. What a pain.

No matter what we do we seem to just keep getting Spam, Spam and more Spam, sorry I’m just tired of going on to the computer and having to deal with all of the adult rated junk and online narcotic ads that seem to find their way into my computer no matter what box I check off and block things when given the opportunity. I’m going to have to talk with my brother’s buddy who is a computer whiz type of guy and see what he suggests, it is really getting on my nerves.

One thing about moving back in with my father when I split up with my husband, was leaving the neighborhood that we had lived in for almost 9 years and all of the friends that we had made there. Our daughter wasn’t happy about leaving her friends that she had made at her school either, which I can certainly understand and sympathize with, even though I try my best to schedule play dates and sleep overs with many of them when I can.

Our next door neighbors were the best neighbors that I have ever had the pleasure of having and knowing. They had an awesome swimming pool in there backyard that we spent a lot of time enjoying during the warm and hot weather months. One thing about using some one else’s pool is that you don’t have to deal with any of the up keep that goes along with a pool. They had to provide the pool filters and pool chemicals and all of the other pool supplies that are necessary to keep a pool safe, clean and fun, while we just got to enjoy all that a pool offers people that love water. I really miss them and their pool.