Saturday... Memorial Day Weekend

The weather has been heating up and up...... my cousin left just in time because I don't think she and her hot flashes would've enjoyed the 100-plus-degrees we've had since she went back up north. Although, if she were still here, she probably wouldn't be feeling the heat at all because she'd want to be back in the air-conditioned comfort of SteinMart.

I had to go back to that store yesterday, to return one thing that I bought when my cousin was here. Of course, you can't just return something to that store without having a look-see at what's new. And of course, I found something. Always something in that store. No complaint from me... my closet has never looked better.

I also had to go to Home Depot in search of a "barn light" for the driveway. Ours burnt out, and I called the electrical repair service to come take a look at it. The young man they sent out, who looked to be about 15, told me that the ballast was no longer good and it would be cheaper for me to buy a "whole 'nother fixture" than replace the ballast and the bulb. "Easy as pie," he told me. "Just go to Home Depot over yonder by I-45 and ask for a barn light."

So that's what I did. Except that there were about 29 choices of "barn" lights to pick from. All I wanted was one that looked similar to what we already had up there. Miracle of miracles, I found an orange-shirted Home Depot person to help me within three minutes, rather than having to search the aisles for 18 minutes before finding someone who works there. (Sorry, Home Depot, but you never seem to have enough people working in your stores. Either that, or those orange shirts are equivalent to Harry Potter's "Invisibility Cloak.")

Mr. Orange Shirt showed me all the options I had for barn lights, spot lights, security lamps--"fine enough for home, barn, pasture or pool," said he. "Now if y'all want an industrial light, we have those going up to 4,000 watts." I kindly told the man that I wanted to light just my own driveway, not illuminate all of Clear Lake.

I told him the fixture that was there before held a 70-watt bulb. Seems that those fixtures were older, taking bulbs that aren't energy-efficient. The newer models have bulbs with some sort of mercury-sonar-something filaments, 175 watts, with a soft blue hue that doesn't attract bugs and isn't blindingly bright. Off I went with one of those, which didn't fit into the truck of my Thunderbird, but sat very nicely on the passenger seat next to me and seemed to enjoy the Manilow music on the way home.

The 15-year-old electrician was here first thing this morning to install the light, and I will find out at dusk tonight whether my driveway has a soft-blue bug-free haze, or whether the planes flying towards Hobby will mistake it for Runway 17.


We're planning another Charades party for June. This will be our first party without our dear friend Frankie. Our last party was on Valentine's Day, and we all thought she would be well enough to attend, but her lung capacity proved us all wrong. (To all of you out there who are still smoking: Quit! Stop! Enough!)

We thought we'd have one last party to kick the summer off, before everyone starts making plans for vacations. So, June 17th it will be..... pot-luck dinner, followed by Charades. My husband keeps reminding me that the men got the higher score at the last party. I keep reminding him that the men won for the simple reason that the person who made the clues for the women (my husband) pulled song and movie titles out of the depths of Dante's Inferno. The person who made the clues for the men (me) had the graciousness to pick popular song and movie titles, each with the word "love" in the titles, to celebrate Valentine's Day.

I swear, I can still see, in my mind's eye, all the men beating their chests with their right hands as their faces dropped into frowns as they mimed the word "love" to their team-mates. You would've thought they were miming the word "death." One of the wives suggested that an entire psychological study could've been conducted on the husbands' reactions to the word "love."

For this coming Charades party, we'll use the cards that came with the Charades game. I found that game on eBay about 5 years ago. There must be over one thousand cards in that box, each of which have a dozen choices to pick from: songs, movies, plays, books, people, places. We'll have enough Charades clues to last us for the next 75 years. I was trying to keep the cards we've already used separate from the cards we haven't looked at yet. Everyone in the Charades group laughed at me when I said that. They told me that they can't even remember what they had for breakfast the day before, much less remember the Charades cards from the last party.