Well I have to talk about something that I saw last week.  My daughter had some surgery in one of the big hospitals in Oklahoma City because there was no one here in our town who had done the procedure very many times like a doctor in the city.  The day of the surgery we were in one of the waiting rooms.  They had two next to the part where my daughter was.  One with a tv and vending machines and another that was a Quiet room for those who wanted to just read or whatever.  We went in and sat in the tv room.  I immediately noticed a stack of blankets and pillows over in the corner.  By stack I mean it was about 3 feet high.  Also along the window ledge were lots of personal things, a laptop, drinks, books, sacks from restaurants, etc.  I did find out the two ladies who were sitting there in the recliners were members of a family who were “living” in the room while some relative was in a room in a comma. That day was day “10″ of their stay so far!  I find it hard to believe that the hospital was allowing this.  The room had an odor of too many people in too small a space, and of people who were probably taking a “spit” bath in the restroom sink.  They were from a small town a couple of hundred miles away.  I thought to myself that they surely could have gotten an “extended stay” room in one of the hotels across the street from the hospital.  They cold have bunked in together and split the cost and would have been able to bathe, eat and rest there and take turns waiting in the hospital.  They were in control of all the recliners, the remote to the tv, and the chairs facing the tv.  It was as if they felt the rest of us were intruding on their space in a public place.  I wanted to watch something on the tv for a few minutes and had to ask for the remote from the lady who had it under her blanket, I am sure hiding it so no one would change the station.  I am sure if one of my family was in a comma I would want to be near by.  I noticed the staff were finding relatives of sick people all the time to report on conditions.  Their living in the hospital waiting room was certainly unnecessary.  One of my family noticed one morning that the cleaning staff had to sweep and clean around those sleeping people in order to make the room half way decent.  I blame the hospital for not providing written rules prohibiting such things and I blame people for not thinking of others in a time of stress for everyone.  I do hope their relative gets well and they can go home, after all there are a lot of others who would like to sit and watch tv awhile to get their mind off their problems.

P.S. my daughter is fine and we came home after 3 days.

This article was in the paper yesterday and I wanted to share it.  Jeff is one of my favorite coumnists here for our local newspaper.

May 19, 2011

The end is near: Or maybe it’s not

By Jeff Mullin, columnist Enid News and Eagle

We made a quick trip to Dallas last weekend and I thought I’d pass on some pictures and notes from the trip.  We went down because my granddaughters were in National Cheer Competition.  On the way down, with gale force winds trying to push us off the highway, we made a note of the fact that the Red River was almost totally dry at the point where we crossed.  You can believe us when we say we are in a drought.

As we drove through Minco, Oklahoma on Hwy 81 South we could see miles of wind mills.  NextEra has acquired land rights to about 9,000 acres with 65 property owners. The Grady County wind farm will have 62 turbines each with a maximum generating capacity of 1.6MW which  gives the wind farm about 100 megawatts of power capacity at the end of 2011.  Their size gives them the impression of monster wind mills.  When we came by, going home after dark the next day, instead of seeing the windmills you see red blinking lights across the horizon.

The girls had their competition at the Dallas Convention Center, downtown Dallas.  Believe it or not the center was built about half way around an old Pioneer cemetery.  The old and often crooked tombstones rise from the grass in the shade of lots of great old trees.  This gives a nice place to sit and think, wander around and read the names and dates of the deceased, or just stop and take pictures.

And finishing the day off and leaving downtown you pass the famous grassy knoll and the spot where President Kennedy was shot.  It’s hard to imagine such an awful event happened on this mildly curving downtown street.  On this day a group of protestors on some sort of quest, were making a lot of noise on the knoll,  but not enough to even make cars slow down.

Well I think I better go on to something else besides life in the “40s Only” – maybe one of these days I will find a subject that a bunch of people like to read. I don’t ever plan to have a site like some of my blogger friends with 89 comments per post!!! I think I would just faint. I blog with some people who are really neat bloggers. My friend “the Retired one” as she calls herself at (the Retirement Chronicles) – she is a fantastic photographer and has the most beautiful photos on her site. You really must stop by and look at her pictures. I have saved a bunch of them and use them as Desktop Backgrounds.

Then there is another friend, Judy, who lives in Kentucky and has a great blog “Living on the Other side of the Hill”
– AND she has another blog called “The Southern Lady Cooks“, and let me tell you, you will gain 10 lbs just looking at the things she has on that site. I keep telling her she needs to do a recipe book. Gosh this lady can COOK!!

Then there is Marissa, who never wants to grow up and says “I intend to live forever, so far so good”. She will certainly make you tired just looking at her riding a push scooter or doing a cart wheel. She calls her blog “WhaHappen? or Surviving adulthood for the kid at heart” – and she is bound to make your day a little more fun and give you a good laugh.

Joanna will fill your reading with something that will make you chuckle at her blog she calls “The Fifty Factor” . How she can come up with such fun, I don’t know. Wish I had her writing ability.

If you are a theatre lover and want some good reads from a community theatre actor, check out Preston Brooks and his blog called “Me and the Blue Skies“. He’s always going out to eat at the neatest places so take notes if you are back East sometime.

Now if the 70s are your thing, Joe has you covered with his blog “70s-Child“. He has a treasure trove of pictures, trivia and information from the 70s. Now who doesn’t have memories from the 70s?

Jude posts her blog like a daily journal which reads like a good novel. in “Brighton the Corner Where You Are” -as she puts it nonsensical thoughts, emotional days, fears and worries and the normal day-to-day in this unfinished woman’s life. Check in and read how she is doing with her new hip.

To finish this post off I want you to look into my son’s blog “Curtis D. Tucker, that sneaker wearing entrepreneurial cartoonist internet guy” -who is the best Dad in the world and probably the funniest person I know. When he tells you of his lunches with his two “crumb crunchers” or an outing with “hot wife” you are bound to wish you could have him for a son. He is the person who warms everyone’s heart and gets their day started with some neat information and a usually a good laugh, on his Facebook.

These are only a few of the nice people who are my blog friends and if you don’t have any blog friends, you are sure to want some after checking out these sites. Make yourself a free blog, let me know your site and lets be friends!

I was watching a commercial about frozen fish and got to thinking about when I was a child, my dad would go fishing and if he kept them, would come home and clean them. What a mess. Scales all over the sink, a fishy smell and it seems there would always be a bone or two that were left in the cooked fish.

My mom killed and cleaned a chicken if they had one. Can you imagine most of the football watching, over zealous businessmen or men with working out on their mind, standing in the kitchen today cleaning fish? I know in places like Alaska and a few other places that they probably do that on a daily basis but not the majority. I was also thinking about how we did not have instant news, telling us what is going on all over the world. Sometimes it was days before word got around about happenings across the ocean. I feel like we are very spoiled but very, very lucky living in a world like we do. There are some bad things in todays world, like you can’t let your kids go trick or treating alone, there are kid snatchers who should be locked away forever, and on, and on. My granddaughters would just lay down and throw a fit if they had to walk to school and back home! I look at my laptop and wish I could live another 50 years so I could see and use all the great things that will be invented. It is definitely more interesting today as far as electronics go. Life is more hurried than the 40s that’s for sure but you know air conditioning sure is nice in the summer and I love colored TV.

When I was a kid and we got our first TV (black and white of course) we also got this piece of plastic that was tinted blue on the top, a yellowish in the middle and green at the bottom. You taped it over the standard size screen and it helped you imagine it was colored TV, at least until you were viewing an living room scene behind the green part…LOL what a hoot.

Have you ever heard of a store called F. W. Woolworths or Kress?  Well let me tell you it was a 5 & dime store where you could actually buy things for 5 and 10 cents. They had rows and rows of counters with sections full of the neatest things from makeup to toys, home and school supplies. You could buy change purses and jigsaw puzzles, craft patterns and coloring books, crayons, bobby pins, combs, a tea kettle, or a strainer. The merchandise they carried was of standard quality. They specialized in supplies for housewares, sewing, cooking, light hardware, toys, etc. They were the direct predecessors to K-Mart, Wal-Mart, Target, etc. They seemed, to a kid, to have one of everything in the world.  Then the peace de resistance, a soda fountain.

A long, long counter with stools that revolved and they would make you a sandwich, and a coke or a piece of pie.  The sandwiches were almost always of an egg type, i.e., egg salad, ham salad, etc.  They made banana splits and ice cream sundaes of all sorts.  We loved to take a break from shopping and have a fountain coke in a glass of ice.

The dime stores with a soda fountain had glassware with special shapes that you could never forget.

Most of these type of stores had hard wood floors and after years and years of foot traffic, they had ruts where the traffic was heaviest.

Woolworths, building with white awning and red sign across front

As you can see from the pictures, these were very large stores which meant tons of items. About 170,000 different items were sold in these stores. Life was simple but full of excitement when we went downtown.

Kress store

If you remember these stores, do you remember buying one of these items:

The old frog clicker

Kid pilot wings

My grandkids asked what games we played in the 40s.  I had to take a minute and think about that one.  When you are making up your own games with your own rules and very little objects to play with, you have to think.  We sure had no computers, cell phones, or ipods.  Do you remember how we used to pick which game we were going to play?  Decisions were made by going ‘eeny-meeny-miney-moe’.

-There was the “Clothes Pins in the Bottle” game:

Place a milk bottle (or other jar with a small opening) on the ground or floor. Let each kid try dropping ten clothespins into the bottle. See who can make the best score. Note: Yes, you can still buy clothespins in the supply section of most grocery stores.  This was fun and played a lot at parties, along with spin the bottle when we were a little older.  If you don’t know what spin the bottle is, you don’t need to hear it from me.

-Hide and Seek  and when the game was to be over we yelled “ollie, ollie oxenfree”.  Remember that?

-Jacks played on someones cement front porch kept us occupied for hours.  My friend, who lived around the block had the best, smooth front porch.

-Hopscotch was great fun when we could find some chalk.

-My Dad had a huge collection of Lionel Trains with buildings and bridges, little trees, etc that was spread out on the upstairs floor.  My brother and I would run that train and had more fun pretending.  My dad had a car that dumped barrels off, one that had a door that opened and shut, and a bunch that did other things.  What fun!!

-Monopoly was a great board game when we got big enough to count money and read cards.  We also played Clue.  I loved that game because I loved murder mysteries.

-Of course all kids had a pair of Skates and usually a scraped knee or two if you were a beginner.

-Rode Bicycles  – Do you remember how playing cards in the spokes transformed any bike into a motorcycle?

-Sand Box – I loved my sand box.  Dad had put a roof on it so the sand stayed just right.

-Swing from a tree limb was a must.

-I have already mentioned listening to the radio in the evenings.  Daytime was outside time.  No one stayed in side unless you were sick or the weather was bad.

-card games

-tag

-Jump rope

-We went to the movies every Saturday morning

-And when we got old enough to get a library card, we went to the county library and read books or checked them out.

-We read comic books a lot and my favorite was Archie.

Boy do I wish I had saved a trunk load of those comics.  Have you seen what they go for these days?