Month: February 2025

Melodica man

https://youtu.be/zSLEZU3o9jI?si=4b8AUHkRc693L9im

Click this link for a great laugh!

Aid and Attendance Benefit

I am sitting in VA office waiting to see an agent. Because of my father’s military service during World War II, Mother is eligible for Aid and Attendance Benefit. This is a benefit to help pay for care for veterans and their dependents who served during war time. It is a godsend

Aid and Attendance Benefit

Wartime veterans and their surviving spouses, 65 years and older, may be entitled to a tax-free benefit called Aid and Attendance provided by the Department of Veteran Affairs.

The Benefit is designed to provide financial aid to help offset the cost of long-term care for those who need assistance with the daily activities of living such as bathing, dressing, eating, toileting, and transferring.

American Veterans Aid, a private company, is dedicated to helping war era veterans and their surviving spouses receive this Benefit which they so deserve.

See if you qualify

Enter your info to get pre-qualified for the Aid & Attendance Benefit. Get up to $3,740 per month!Name of Inquirer*Email*Phone Number*State of Residence*    Alabama  Alaska  Arizona  Arkansas  California  Colorado  Connecticut  Delaware  District Of Columbia  Florida  Georgia  Hawaii  Idaho  Illinois  Indiana  Iowa  Kansas  Kentucky  Louisiana  Maine  Maryland  Massachusetts  Michigan  Minnesota  Mississippi  Missouri  Montana  Nebraska  Nevada  New Hampshire  New Jersey  New Mexico  New York  North Carolina  North Dakota  Ohio  Oklahoma  Oregon  Pennsylvania  Puerto Rico      Rhode Island  South Carolina  South Dakota  Tennessee  Texas  Utah  Vermont  Virginia  Washington  West Virginia  Wisconsin  Wyoming  Veteran Name*Surviving Spouse (if applicable)

  • Is the veteran 65 or older? If you are a surviving spouse, answer “Yes” to this question as there is no age requirement.Yes No
  • Did the veteran serve during a period of war?Yes No
  • Is the veteran or spouse, now or in the very near future, in need of assistance with one or more of the daily activities of living such as bathing, dressing,eating,transferring/mobility, and toileting?Yes No
  • Is the veteran or spouse currently receiving a VA benefit for service connected injury or illness that is more than $2,000 per month?Yes No

SUBMIT

Receive up to $3,740 monthly withthe Aid and Attendance Benefit

The Aid & Attendance Benefit provides benefits for war era veterans and their surviving spouses who require the regular attendance of another person to assist in at least two of the daily activities of living such as eating, bathing, dressing and undressing, transferring and the needs of nature.Call (877) 427-8065now to see if you qualify!

Great News

You get some great, amazingly fantastic news. What’s the first thing you do?

I’d have to digest it a minute, discuss it with Bud, and then share it with my nearest and dearest. Aha! While I was writing this I got good news! The guy who is to paint the interior of my house just called to come by! I’ve been waiting a while!

This is a guest post by my friend Harvey Hughett. I just love his stories of Appalachia. Check him out on his facebook site Musing AppalachiaBERTHY SEES A SIGNGod’s Hillbilly Warrior Goes Yondering (Part 2 of 9)© Harvey Hughett

It had been a hard winter, and cabin fever was starting to set in for Aint Berthy. It was weeks before the garden needed to be planted. And the chirping of the birds was so loud that it was starting to drive her crazy. Mockingbirds were the worst with their never-ending attempts to one-up the other birds. She was ripe for another road trip, but not on a bus this time. She had enough of bus stations.

She cut down trees, chopped her own firewood, and walked everywhere. She was in top physical shape. It was while walking to Bulls Gap to trade some free-range eggs for sugar that she stopped in the road to let a copperhead snake slither out of harm’s way and into the ditch. She liked snakes and didn’t bother them. She even had a five-year-old copperhead living under her back porch steps, and they never bothered each other. She named it Clyde after Sherriff Clyde Snowden over at Morristown because he’d once backed out on his word to her about getting rid of some prostitutes who’d moved into a house down the road from her and were attempting to set up shop. In the end, Berthy had to fix that problem herself. After that, she didn’t have much use for cops.

As she stopped to let “Clyde’s friend” pass, she happened to glance up and saw a barn with a sign painted on the roof that said, “SEE ROCK CITY.” She took that for a message of some kind. Berthy strongly believed in signs and omens. She’d never seen Rock City, but the snake and sign on the barn probably weren’t coincidences. She paused and pondered the possible meaning of what she’d just witnessed.

It was at that precise moment she remembered that Old Lady Gooch, who used to live up the road, still owed her some money from eight years ago. She’d moved to Chattanooga and lived near Rock City (Lookout Mountain). So, that was it! She was destined to go to Chattanooga and collect on the debt while experiencing new scenery and meeting interesting people!

While in Bulls Gap, she picked up a train schedule at the depot, went across the street to Gilley’s Hotel, and bought an ice cream cone. She loved to eat ice cream and watch the trains come through. She’d imagine what the lives of the passengers arriving and departing might be like. She loved traveling and dreamed about taking a trip by rail herself someday. As she sat on a bench and studied the train destinations and fares, she noticed that a ticket to and from Chattanooga cost $28.65. She was appalled at the ridiculously high price.

As she was leaving town, she met a hobo and walked with him for a bit. She asked him about hopping trains and getting free rides. He explained that freighthopping was dangerous and illegal, but he did it all the time and had traveled as far as San Francisco several times in a boxcar. He stressed safety, timing, and location. He told her to avoid busy areas where there were bulls (rail guards) and heavy security and to look for unguarded spots where the trains had to slow down or stop. He described a curve just before Whitesburg where trains slowed to less than 5 MPH and, if one were lucky, he (or she!) could just throw their bag into the boxcar and hop on for a free ride to the next stop.

He advised her to choose an enclosed boxcar so she could hide and stay out of bad weather. He also told her how she could use an old rail spike to wedge the door partially open so she wouldn’t be locked inside. Once, he’d been locked in a week before someone heard him banging on the door and let him out. And he cautioned her to respect other travelers. He said that hobos just peed out the open doors. He remarked that he wasn’t sure how a woman would manage that but suggested that she respect the property and not mess it up because he might want to ride in that same train car someday.

During the next few weeks, Berthy practiced jumping onto the bed of a horse-drawn freight wagon in the back pasture until she could easily do it with a full pack.

She pre-loaded a WWII military surplus backpack she’d picked up at a thrift store with a change of clothes, a blanket, her bedside alarm clock (she didn’t own a watch), pokes for cornbread and venison jerky (a deer made a mistake and got in her garden), a bottle of Percy Medicine, and a few other odds and ends like her special crystal, potions, candles, matches, and…Hercules, her reliable travel companion. It was a small Harrington & Richardson snub nose revolver in the unusual .44 Bull Dog caliber. Not many stores carried ammo for the old gun, but Hasson-Bryan Hardware Store in Morristown had it. It had to have the headstamp of .44 B.D. and not .44 Magnum. But it blew a hole the same size. Berthy knew all this stuff and was a good shot.

She carried Hercules and her valuables in special pouches she’d sewed into secret pockets in her petticoat. That way, she always knew where they were. Concerning money, she devised a system of tying bills, coins, and jewelry into little pouches and attaching them to the petticoat with short pieces of string. For example, suppose she needed seven dollars and thirty-three cents to buy something. In that case, she’d excuse herself to a private place where she could lift her dress and extract a five-dollar bill from the pouch with that denomination and another small sack with other bills or coin sizes. In a way, she was a walking cash register. It was an excellent way to keep close track of her valuables and still get relatively quick access. She had a special pocket on the outside of her dress where she carried a small military-size Bible her husband had brought back from the Army.

When around her daughter, Nova, or her cute grandchild, Jan, she’d just whip up her dress and count out the money. She felt safe walking around with her treasures safely hidden in her dress. They served as a secure place to hide her precious belongings. Being a guy, she was discreet, so I never saw her lift her dress.

(to be continued)

If you don’t mind, it would please me if you’d leave a LIKE, FOLLOW, and SHARE my stories with your friends. If you scroll down my Facebook Page, there are about a hundred stories on a lot of crazy topics.

Riding

Are there any activities or hobbies you’ve outgrown or lost interest in over time?

That’s an easy one. When I was a kid, I rode my horse any time I had a spare moment. My brother and I used to pester my dad incessantly to saddle Frosty up for us. Of course, it wasn’t always a good time. One day, he said, “When you get big enough to catch the horse and saddle him yourself, you can ride any time you want.”

What a notion! We went straight out, lured the horse into a stall with oats and worked together to hoist the saddle to the top rail of the stall, then slid it over to the horse’s back. We were ten and seven at the time. We were ecstatic!

Frosty got regular workouts after that.

Move Over, Medusa, We Got Ya’ Beat!

First Grade School Picture First Grade School Picture

Repost of an old post few people saw

To curly-haired people Mother might have seemed mild-mannered enough, but beneath her calm exterior she nursed a sadistic streak, committing home permanents with malice aforethought, ignoring her helpless daughters’ protests that “I like my hair this way.” and “nobody but old ladies has THAT kind of hair.” squashing arguments with a terrifying directive, “Don’t dispute my word.”  “Disputing my word” assured swift and terrible punishment, followed by a furious lecture about how great we had it and ending tearfully with, “and I would have given anything to have a permanent wave like Margaret Lucille, but I had to wear my hair chopped off straight around.”  Had I met Margaret Lucille, the author of my misery, I would have gladly pulled out every permanently-waved hair on her despicable head.  I hated her than Mother.

Around July 4th every summer, Mother would casually start to dangle the threat that she had to give us a permanent before school started.  We’d protest vainly against her response that “She wasn’t going to look at that long, stringy hair all year.”

A procrastinator, Mother didn’t get to the evil deed right away.  Just before Labor Day, when the humiliation of last year’s perm had grown out enough to be approaching normalcy, Mother would stretch her budget to include a home permanent for each of us.  I longed for cyanide when she dragged out those hateful pink and white “Lilt” boxes.  After a long night of dreading the inevitable, Mother got us up early to clean the house so she could start the long perming process.  I’d mope over to borrow the pink curlers from Miss Joyce, hoping to be hit by a truck.  When I got back home, defeated, I surrendered to my frizzy fate.  Mother seated me on a kitchen chair and cut my hair, using her time-honored secret for a perfect hairdo.  I don’t know where she got the idea her haircuts were perfect, but I’d have been happy if I could have kept them secret!  Maybe a bag over my head for the next six months?  She methodically divided my luscious locks (my description, not hers)into sections, started at the bottom, and held up about fifty hairs at a time, measured them against a mark she’d made on a rat-tail comb, and cut.  My my mood became increasingly glum as she measured and cut, measured and cut.

After an interminable period, I was beaten down enough for the next step.  Mother opened the home permanent kit and mixed the deadly chemicals, assaulting the senses with the sulfurous scent of rotten eggs and a healthy touch of essence of pee.  Dividing what remained of my hair into tiny sections, wetting it with putrid permanent solution, she wrapped it in papers, and wound it as tight as possible on the hard pink plastic curlers.  If my eyes weren’t popping out enough, she’d rewind.  Once this misery was accomplished, she sent me on to enjoy the rest of the day, anticipating the frizzy mess I could expect tomorrow, and got to work on my sister’s hair.  I tried to stay out of sight to avoid being ridiculed by the neighbor kids.

After trouble and expense of inflicting a perm on us, Mother made us leave the hard plastic curlers in overnight, fearing an early release might let the curl “fall out.” I’d have sooner slept on pine cones. My fine hair was no match for the perm solution, and I was never fortunate enough for my curl to “fall out.”  I was glad to get the curlers out the next morning, but dreaded the reveal of the “fried, frizzy, old lady hairdo.”  I was never disappointed.  Mother took the perm curlers out and we all looked like Brillo Pads.

When we complained about how horrible it looked, Mother assured us it would be fine after we rolled it.  That just postponed the disaster.  When the brush rollers and hair pens came out at the end of the day, it was always even worse than I remembered from the year before.  I wanted to die.  Mother always tried to cheer us up by saying, “The frizz will wear off in about a week.”  When we weren’t cheered by that, she offered the cold comfort, “Well, it will always grow back,”

What kind of monster would do the same thing to her kids ever year, just so they could listen them bawl when they told them it would grow back?  When she tired of our bellyaching, she’d work herself into a self-righteous frenzy of pity when we refused to be grateful for the torture she’d inflicted on us just to ensure we’d be social outcasts for another year. We always went back to school with a frizzy mess, looking we’d escaped from an insane granny cult.  The fact that my sisters shared my fate did nothing to cheer me.  I didn’t want to look like that bunch of freaks.

Candy

What’s your favorite candy?

The most luscious candy is a Millionaire. Pecans and caramel covered in chocolate. It just couldn’t be better. I wish I had one or two or ten right now. Thank goodness, I have none.

Break?

Do you need a break? From what?eak.

I don’t need a b

Don’t Bother Reaching for Your Umbrella, It’s Probably Broken!

Baby group Kids small

Top pic:  Me and the kids in baby’s first days.  Notice how I don’t appear to know how to manage.  A picture is worth a thousand words.

Bottom Pic: Children about six months later

The baby was tiny. I hadn’t seen anything but tonsils, poop, and Sesame Street in three weeks. My three-year-old-jabbered non-stop. My ears were sore. Naturally, with the clear-thinking of a woman with near terminal post-partum depression, I took full responsibility everything that went wrong.

I don’t know if Bud was a good father or not, since he was rarely home. Just days just before the baby came, he’d been lucky enough to land a job where he worked six days on, three days off. We were ecstatic! For the first time since we got married, we were rich! Miraculously, we didn’t have to worry about getting the utilities cut off each month. There was no way either of us was about to complain about the demands of his job as long as he could stagger to work.

This time out, Bud been gone two days. The baby cried incessantly, with the exception of frequent poop breaks. Of course, I used cloth diapers since this was more than forty years ago. My son was happy as a clam, jabbering merrily behind me every step I took. All was going well till I foolishly left a poopy diaper to soak in the toilet. Of course, I knew what might happen.  Bud had pointed it out to me repeatedly when he left me to do all the rinsing! Though my son had no interest in toilet-training, toilet-flushing was high drama. The toilet plugged.

Our budget had only recently stretched to include regular utility payments. There was no way it would include a plumber. I did not look forward telling Bud what had happened when he got back.  Thank goodness, I was able to hook it with an unraveled wire coat-hanger, saving the day.

Apparently, the gods of Mayhem weren’t through with me yet! On the pre-rinse cycle, with the diapers still dirty, the washer threw a belt,  halting the first load of the morning. Still on a high from the joy of retrieving the diaper from the toilet, I thought. That’s not so bad, I can probably find enough change in the piggy bank to take a couple of loads to the laundromat. Bud would be paid in a couple of days. At least we have plenty of groceries, a roof over our heads, and all the bills paid.

Pulling the sodden, stinking mess from the washer, I wrung them out enough to get them in a plastic basket, heaving the heavy wad into the trunk of my car, along with a load of my toddler son’s essentials. Even though I put them in a plastic trash bag first, it leaked, leaving a malodorous, disgusting stream on my clean floors. I mopped the mess up with disinfectant, a pretty hefty job.

It was as cold as it gets in Louisiana, probably in the low teens. I dressed the kids warmly and strapped them in the car, dreading the trip to the laundromat. I needn’t have worried. The car wouldn’t start! I tried two or three times, hoping for magic since I’d been so blessed with the diaper in the toilet miracle. My luck was done for the day. I had also stunk up the trunk of the car for nothing.

I dragged the kids back in. By now, the baby was squawling and my son was disappointed. He’d been promised a treat! He hadn’t been out of the house in two days. I knew just how he felt! I got them settled. Brought the stinky diapers back in, did them in the bathtub, and cleaned up the floor again while they dried! Take it from me, diapers not spun in the washer take a long, long, long time to dry. So do toddler clothes.

Since my hard floors were freshly mopped and sweet-smelling, while the laundry was still drying, I reasoned it would be best to go ahead and vacuum the living-room and my bedroom, so the whole house would be clean at once! I could at least enjoy a clean house if I was stuck at home. Getting the vacuum out of the closet, I plugged it into an outlet in the living-room. Pop!! Sizzle!! Smoke and a sickening electrical smell arose as it snapped off. That was enough. I started boo-hooing then and there. Not to be outdone, both children joined in. We shared quality family time.

Finally, things settled down. I got the kids to bed. I didn’t fight the nightly battle to get my son to sleep in his own bed. I’d had enough! The baby awoke, crying for a bottle around midnight. I got up to feed her and felt a stabbing pain in my side. Oh darn it! I must have pulled a muscle dragging the sodden laundry around. Maybe it wouldn’t get too sore. My son padded in behind me to help as I fed the baby, jabbering non-stop and dragging his bunny. I sent him back to bed. I settled her and got back to bed. Later, I woke up sweltering and sweating. I felt like I was in a sweatbox and had difficulty getting a breath! I tried to sit straight up and felt an excruciating pain in my back. Was I dying alone here in the house with two helpless children? Bud wouldn’t be back for three more days! They could die, too. I had to try to save them! Only the courage of a dying mother explains what happens next. I forced myself to breathe slowly and deeply, rolling on my side. The pain was agonizing, but for the sake of my children, I pushed on. By now, I was on my stomach, slipping on my knees on the floor. I breathed shallowly through my pain, drawing in a little each time, making an effort to fill my lungs for maximum strength, not knowing what would happen when I tried to stand. My face was burning! The baby was three-weeks old. Did I have some kind of late-developing child-bed fever?

As I marshalled my strength to reach for the bed-side phone, it rang. Had Bud somehow psychically sensed my distress and called home to check on us? Gratefully, I croaked, “Thank God you called!”

It took the caller a moment to recover from the warm reception. “I’m beatin’ my meat!”

“What?” I wasn’t prepared for this, as I was expecting salvation.

“I’m beatin’ my meat!”

I hung up.  The diversion did get my mind off my troubles for a moment, till I remembered the agony of a pulled muscle. My son woke up and said, “Mommy, I’m hot!” Surely he didn’t have child-bed fever, too! Making my way down the hall to check the thermostat, I found his bunny hanging where he’d pushed the thermostat to max before heading off to bed. That explained my fever.

Some aspirin and a few miserable days took care of the pulled muscle. A new car battery and washer belt fixed things right up when Bud got back in three days later. The vacuum was toast. I had plenty to tell Bud when he asked, “What went on while I was gone?”