Help!! I've Been Abducted By Spare Time

I haven't worked since March 16th.

That is highly unusual for me.

Therefore I am beginning to feel highly unusual.

And that's no picnic for Tim or Massey, who unfortunately live with me.

Or am I living with them at this point?

After eight long weeks of (not so) patiently waiting, my unemployment finally began to trickle in.

By the time COVID 19 closed my restaurant down on March 16, I was down to a solid twenty or twenty five hour work week, which netted me $500 a week and more often than not, more.

After being a waitress full time for forty years, that was fine and good with me.

My feet hurt.




My husband has now held a wonderful job for the past five years. He is very much appreciated by his company, as well as compensated, and continues to climb the ranks.

Who'd a thunk Ole Jed would hit that Texas Tea when they sent him to Lubbock, way back when?

#thetimeIstayedinNewnan

Five hundred bucks a week isn't a lot, but when it is taken away sure seems so.


When I was at my wits end, after emailing the governor and both state representatives about waiting over forty five days for any type of assistance to no avail... a manager (and his lovely wife) from my old  job back in Atlanta mailed us a more than extremely generous Club Pub gift card.

It was like Christmas Day for me, which is ironic considering they are both Muslims.

As Leslie Jordan would say...
 "You can't make this shit up."

And I'm not.


Fast forward a day or two... my money suddenly began to come in from unemployment in a sporadic and spastic fashion, but at least it came in.



I have worked and paid taxes since I was fourteen years old.

circa  1974

The money they are depositing into my account is a heck of a lot less than what has been taken out of each and every one of my own paychecks since 1974.



I'm also glad I have always claimed all of my tips; since they based my payout on what I claimed.

Cha Ching!



I am also weeks away from being sixty years old.

 To my credit, the above is au natural, although makeup would have been a huge help.
But as Popeye said in the fifties and sixties, "I yam what I yam."



So my job started to contact some employees to come back to work, planning on opening soon with limited hours - Wednesday through Saturday, from 3-10...with rigid procedures  and safety regulations in place.

Once again, as Leslie Jordan would say,

I worked from ten or eleven in the morning until three or four in the afternoon. It took me almost three years to work my way up to exclusively working the day shift.

I've heard nothing but crickets from my former job.
 On the up side...

I also have had nothing but spare time...and quickly learned to love it.
Thank God we bought and  moved into our forever home before this happened.

All I've ever wanted is a yard to play in and look at; able to admire from windows inside of my house, to admiring it while walking outside, on my way back down a long driveway from the mailbox, smelling the jasmine both ways.

This...is my idea of paradise.



I wake up every morning, happy to look out my bedroom windows as I stretch and wake up, not even  having to get out of bed to do so. It is certainly a daily inspirational scenario.

 We lived in a rented tiny cement box for over two years.

I now realize we do live in paradise.

I am a very blessed person, and don't think for one single minute that I take any of it for granted.

Life can...and often does, throw curve balls.

Been there done that.
A couple of times now.



 I am almost sixty now,
and have been a server for forty years.

I'm not real smart, but I  am smart enough to  know COVID19 is real...
and could easily kill someone my age.

I wait on people in a upscale restaurant/bar five minutes from the airport of the number one travel destination in the world.

Talk about some germs.!

I'll sit home and wait until they call me back to work, if they do.

If they don't...that's okay too.



When things ( hopefully) finally clear up and we all get back to what is surely destined to become the new type of normal, maybe they will give me a call and I can be their Day Shift Diva once again.
I can say with full confidence that I'm a hard ass worker and have more loyalty than most Cher fans.
(which says a lot)

If not,
it just simply wasn't meant to be...but a phone call or text would have been nice.

Just sayin'

Till next time

Continuing to be a COTTON

It Will Never Be Normal Again

 Everyone talks about "When things get back to normal."

Guess what?

It's never going to be what we considered normal, in December of 2019.

Ever...again.

Talk about a Brave New World?!

What bothers me most, is that we seem more divided than ever... during a  time we need to stand strong together, albeit six feet apart.

And yes, a mask needs to be a part of our lives, if we want to continue and fight this.

As we should.

Are you telling me that wearing a freaking face mask while out in crowded spaces (not forever, but for now) makes you feel like your rights are being violated? You are listening to the wrong clowns.

(sorry I don't sugar coat)

This isn't a political issue, it is a health and survival issue.

I love and worship the Heavenly Father I choose to follow, but this thing has killed almost 100,000 fellow Americans since March.

And it's not ever the end of May.

You're stupid if you  pay more attention to politicians than scientists and medical professionals at this exact moment in time.
And if you do

 "Good luck with that."

I will pray for you.

Till next time,

COTTON

Always Find The Silver Lining

It's certainly not like I've had a bad life...I haven't.

But I have had life sling some serious dooky my way, more than once... or even twice.

In hindsight they were all (each and every one) lessons I needed to learn and not only go through, but grow through.

I want to think I'm a good person, but when I stop and take a look around me, especially these past few months, I can't possibly be doing enough to even consider myself a good person.

What I am doing instead, is simply surviving.

And that's not nearly enough.

I was raised better than that.

Finis Coronat Opus

"The end crowns the work: the goal gives value to the labor that produced it."

Shout out to every single person I know, or don't know.

If your path crosses mine, what kind of person would I be to not extend a hand?

If I fall short of your expectations as a friend, and as humans we often do...

know the two people pictured above, are shaking their heads at me from  upstairs, while enjoying their much deserved  BIG DANCE and constantly reminding me I can be a better person.

And I will be.

It takes practice.

If problems outnumber your blessings, you need to count them again.

but if they seem to... after counting again, I'm down to help.

Till next time...Cotton

Blurred Lines

Number one, America knew about coronavirus late December of last year...

yet the government didn't take serious action until early March.

Hopefully Johnny Mathis wasn't right in the late seventies.

I wake up every day and think the same thing right off the bat.
Did I dream this?


I can remember a time when  I would have never thought or imagined (growing up in  the sixties) that I would ever have my own personal cellular phone which could also double as a computer...much less all three of my kids have one, and by the time they even hit high school.

And now this?
I'm simply a Flinstone, trying to get by in a Jetson world.
#truefact

I could go on with the gloom and doom, but as of late , we all hear enough of it.
 Every single day.



Instead I will switch gears and share a few of my own observations over the past forty odd days of sitting at home and not getting paid to do so.

You know you're bored when you shave your legs at the age of sixty, during a shelter in place order.
 With the amount of hair left on a woman's' body after menopause, I could've plucked my legs quicker.
So there's that.

I haven't put on a stitch of makeup since March 16, hence no need to look in the small magnifying mirror I use for just that purpose. A magnification mirror is no friend of a sixty year old woman's face.
True fact.

I got out the magnification mirror today (day forty five of not leaving the house except for the grocery store or bank) and discovered I was growing a goatee, comprised of three different, sporadically placed wild hairs, almost to the point of curling. It totally grossed me out, and as I shaved them off, silently thanked God for letting my husband's eyesight be as bad as my own.

Thirty two years down the road of life together...now everything's blurred lines, for the both of us.

I also need to send a Thank You card to the older woman (yes older than me) at Great Clips, who last cut my hair over six weeks ago.

She scalped me. It was  even hard for me to look at myself in the mirror for well over two weeks.
I still can't believe not one person asked me how my brain surgery went.

Week three (above) it looked semi okay again, but still short.
 I made Massey do my highlights so at least it was blonde instead of gray at the roots.

Fast (didn't seem fast) forward three more weeks. My hair is perfect!
Of course every person with short hair will tell you. The minute your hair looks great and is complimented on, it's fixing to look like a bad wig in about three days.
That happened to me yesterday.
At least the Ole Gal gave the best bang for my buck!

I let Massey cut my hair let Massey day before yesterday...she couldn't make it look any worse, and she didn't!

Thank goodness I'm just hanging around the house. Massey and Tim probably have secret meetings while I'm in the shower (maybe twice a week...I've become very european) laughing about how I wear the same thing three or four days in a row, and bet each other about which one of my two outfits I'll put on next.

I've started calling it my costume.

In my defense, I'm tiny.  I haven't been lifting heavy weights in a sweat suit three times a day. Unless you call pulling weeds lifting.

Anway, back to "Costume.".
When Zachary was little, about the age he was in the above picture, my sister was taking him somewhere in her car. They passed a private school as the kids (in uniforms) were being released. Little Zach asked her if they all wore the same costume every day?

Zach has always been good for a chuckle, especially (pretty much only) when he was (as we say in the south) a Lit'lun. TJ was always such  a sweet but serious little guy, and Massey didn't say ten words before she turned four.

Wow, three decades can certainly fly by.

My favorite Zach story of all time was when he was around the age he was in the above photos.
We call them his happy years.

Although I was raised going to church at least three times a week, sometimes more, I dropped the religion ball with my own kids when they were very young. Oh I taught them about right and wrong and the Golden Rule, but organized religion was not part of their early life like it was my own.

My best attempt was to blast Jesus Christ Superstar over the stereo every Sunday morning while I cleaned house and cooked.


I know every word..seriously.

 It is still one of my top three albums.
Jesus was a Rock Star in our house, so there's that in my defense.


The week before Easter one year, we were headed over to my sister's for dinner. We passed the little country Methodist church near our house. They had the three crosses draped out front. I turned down the radio, intending to use it as my teaching moment.  I looked in the rear view mirror at him in his booster seat and remarked, they had nailed Jesus to the cross, by his hands and feet.

Zach's reply?

"I thought they hung him with a rope."
I then explained the term hung.

Then he asked why there were two other crosses? I explained that two robbers were on either side of him as well. I followed that little bit of info up with...

"You know what the last thing was Jesus said to all those people, who had done this to him, as he hung on that cross? He said, I forgive you."

Zach kinda stared out the window as we drove on by and thoughtfully replied, "I would have said I will get you."

My reply?
"Well that's why your name is Zachary and his name is Jesus."


Which brings up an even better "Church'in" story.

(when we started taking them to church on a semi regular basis when they started a pretty good non denominational one at a local high school, Zach would get in the car after his youth service and say "That was some good church'in."
 I tend to call it "Getting muh Jesus on."

One of our neighbors , way back in the late sixties or early seventies, was talking with my Diddy one day out in our front yard. He wasn't a church goer at all, but was a nice enough man. Our Diddy, on the other hand, was a devout member of  East Point Christian Church. He was a deacon, an elder, a Sunday School teacher and on various boards and committees.

That's him in the middle on the front row..

Anyhoo...
Something came up about race in their conversation...after all, it was the sixties and the south.
The man mentioned something about caucasians (old school term for whites) being the superior race, just like it said in the Bible.
My father didn't miss a beat or sound accusing in any way, but simply said "You know, I've read the Bible cover to cover more than a few times and don't remember that specific passage."
Our neighbor replied that it was in the book of Noah.
Once again my father calmly and casually said he didn't remember there being book of Noah in the Bible.
Our neighbor solemnly said (I kid you not):
"Well there was, before Roosevelt had it took it out."
(yes he said took)
...was this man totally and completely serious?!

He was.

Total rimshot moment.


As Leslie Jordan says, you can't make this shit up...and I didn't.

It's been a wild, almost sixty year long ride, and would do it all again in a heart beat...if it meant we'd still wind up here, in this place, in this house, with all the same loved ones in my life, who crazily enough love me as well.

That, my friends, is a win.




Coronavirus has upended the life and livelihood of basically every person on this planet. We've lost more Americans to this virus in the past three months, than we did all those years our troops fought in the Vietnam War.
Any conspiracy theory is a denial of true scientific data.

That's not a blue statement or a red statement. It's a red white and blue statement.
And therein lies the difference.

Yes the economy is crushed. You don't have to tell me that. I was big ballin along at the age of almost sixty, finally just working twenty hours a week but bringing home well over $500.

I've been  paying into the unemployment system since the year 1975, but after forty five days of being out of work, the system has given (returned to) me $195, and it took forty days to get here.

What about the people who don't have a spouse(like I do) who's still working...or wonderful family and friends like we are fortunate enough to  have?
Ask them about a conspiracy theory and they will most likely point the finger at unemployment.
And who can blame them? They are tax paying citizens.
My motto about Florida's unemployment system is "If it walks like a duck and sounds like a duck, it probably is a duck...but with a 'F."

This too shall pass...but what will the final body count be?

It's not a hoax, trust me.

 Til next time,
a temporarily broke plate slinger...
COTTON