Before or coinciding with spring this year in New England comes Mud Season. All that snow has to go somewhere when it melts. It melts into lovely rivers of water. Water that turns dirt roads like mine into mud pits. I live as Jeff Foxworthy would say, “if your directions say, turn off the paved road…you might be a redneck.”  My normally calm dirt road is full of huge ruts this year, ruts that you have to navigate carefully, bumping and holding onto the steering wheel with all of your might, as the car bucks and hops like some sort of deranged bronco.

     Never mind the visual after effect left on my car. My poor Honda Pilot looks like it has been “Mudding”, there are splotches of mud all over the side of my car and streaks of it on the mirrors. All this from just navigating my road.
     I know what most of you will say, “you chose to live there, that is what you get,”  and yes you would be right. It is what I get, I also get temperatures that are at least 10 degrees cooler in the summer, and less humid than in the flatlands. A peace and quiet that can’t be achieved in the city or even the suburbs. The kind of bucolic peacefulness that it hard to come by.
     I also get the constant trail of mud from dogs that don’t know how to wipe their feet when they come in the house, as well as mud left my kids and a husband that know how to, they just don’t. Sand and dirt on and in the bed, from the same dog that believes that once the bed is made, it is her job and right to unmake it and crawl under the covers. Muddy feet and all.
     This time of year no matter how many times I sweep or mop, the mud is just there. Caking everything, like sticky cake batter, that doesn’t taste near as good. But it means that my family is enjoying the outdoors. All of them, kids, hubby and pets alike. Someday there will be no muddy footprints, and I will miss them.

     

   

      Yesterday I had been married 19 years. I remembered the day with all of its fanfare. The church, the reception, the pictures, my family, the bridal party. The last minute glitches, the missing bridesmaid bouquet and the fact it was raining the day of, and my parents driveway was a muddy mess. But most of all I reflected on the things I have learned about and while being married. It isn’t about getting married, it is about staying married. As I was getting ready to walk down the aisle and was a bundle of nerves my dad said to me, “we got this, it’s a lead pipe cinch.”  At the time I had no idea what he meant, 19 years later (and after wanting to smack hubby with that lead pipe a time or 2). I know he meant, it will be fine, you are ready. He and my mom will be married 49 years in July. I had great role models.

1.  Patience
2.  Communication is vital
3.  Sometimes you just need to leave each other alone, or in the words of the Whalens..don’t poke the nasty beast with a stick.
4.  Married couples do not have to do everything together
5.  You really do need your own money.
6.  Sex is the icing on the cake, and who just wants a muffin
7.  Sometimes you have to to something drastic to jolt your spouse out of their “zone”.
8.  Being comfortable isn’t always the best way.
9.  Life can be full of adventures. If your spouse wont embrace them, do them alone. P.S. I bet they will embrace them after they see you having fun.
10.  Don’t let your kids rule your life. Once they are gone, what the hell will you do or talk about?
11.  If you think your house should look like Martha Stewart lives there-hire her.
12. Compromise, because if not 1 of you will always be unhappy.
13.  Don’t be a slave to your imposed schedule, spontaneity is fun.
14.  Hear each other as well as listening.
15.  If something is bothering you, talk about it. Bottling it up, just causes an explosion later.
16.  Don’t try and “one up” each other.
17.  Keeping score is for sports not marriage.
18.  Flowers for no reason are the best.
19. Remember why you fell in love and celebrate that.

    

As I age I have come to the conclusion that I was sold a bill of goods as a young woman and a young woman. This bill of goods was one that I willingly bought and paid for, shelled out those bills and change without a second thought. It was what I thought I was supposed to do.
     Work full time as a young woman, enter the dating pool, swim, float and sink at times. Try and find someone to settle down with, someone that I could embrace their faults and quirks.
Although I was never supposed to show them mine. It was the early 1990’s, and all of us women were supposed to be “perfect.” Never to let them see your flaws, we were one step removed from June Cleaver and Carol Brady.
     I found that person, settled down and married in 1996, yes do the math I will be married 20 years next year. In just over a week I will be married 19 years, the thought still boggles my mind. 19 years and 2 children, 3 dogs and 5 cats later. The woman that walked down that aisle almost 19 years ago was a very different lady from the one writing this post now. She was idealistic, and wide-eyed, and full of wonder about marriage and child rearing. The 19 year married me realizes that those are great qualities but they just don’t cut it in the everyday world.
     My children will only eat vegetables and fruit and meat and whole grains. No candy or junk, yeah right a lollipop soothes the tears of a crying 2 year old, and ice cream, who can live without it? Needless to say the idealism went out the window quick. I was also going to nurse my baby for a year, until the first time, holy ouch and this just doesn’t come naturally. I hated it, to put it mildly, gave it the required 3 months n then went to bottles. Judge me all you want, but I hated being a human cow, and I was a bottle fed baby and  had survived to 28 just fine!!
     As I watch the young girls dress more scantily each day I wonder what they are thinking. That they have to be perfect to fit in, perfect friends, perfect bodies, perfect hair, perfect boyfriend, perfect grades. I want to tell them that perfection is hard to achieve and even harder to maintain. That keeping up the facade of perfection takes a toll that is just not necessary. I want to yell at them, “be yourselves, have fun, don’t worry about that extra pound or that hair out of place. Your true friends won’t care.” Only the ones that are worrying about being perfect will care. Please don’t think I condemn these young girls for attracting the wrong attention by wearing these clothes, that is not where I am going. I just want them to understand that even supermodels don’t look like that without being airbrushed.

     

   

I am fully aware that this post is gonna ruffle feathers, piss in peoples cheerios and generally unnerve some. To be completely honest with you, I don’t care, I care that you read this blog, and I care that you comment. But if it gets your panties all in a wad, maybe it will have done it’s job today.
     I live in Franklin County Massachusetts, we are famous for the Bridge of Flowers in Shelburne Falls, Yankee Candle in South Deerfield, we used to have a nuclear plant in Rowe and now we have an enormous Opioid addiction problem. The first 3 I am proud of, the last one not so much. In every town in this county people are using and abusing Opiods, namely Heroin and most recently Fentanyl patches laced with Heroin.
     In 2013 there were 1,000 deaths attributed to unintentional Opioid overdose, that is a 46% increase from 2012. This also caused 2000 hospital stays in 2013. There have already been 200 overdoses to date in 2015 and it is just April. I will give our new Governor props that he is addressing the problem. He has created an Opioid task force that has met 3 times and is trying to come up with solutions. One of them has already been implemented, all insurers must now pay for 14 days of Inpatient Care for Drug Addiction, without pre-authorization.
     Unfortunately therein lies one of the big issues, Massachusetts has this large Opioid addiction.  But we do not have near enough inpatient, or outpatient beds to treat it. People who finally decide that they want help, encounter the same message “we have no beds.” How does this task force plan to fix, or even address and control this addiction if there aren’t enough beds to treat the addicts that want to get clean.
     Most of the beds, be they available or not are way out of the addicts comfort zone or ability to travel zone. What I mean by that is that they are in the Greater Boston Area. There are few detox centers  in Franklin County. As you head towards the major metropolitan area the detox centers are more prevalent, that does not mean that they have any beds available though.
     I was having a conversation with my PCP (about another issue altogether), and we somehow ended up on the topic of Heroin use in the County. She informed me that she has teenage patients as young as 14 years old injecting Heroin in every school district in this county. That flabbergasted me, I am sure I sat there with my mouth hanging open like a fool. What I was thinking was can I put my children in bubbles, protect them from everything and everyone.
     Instead I came home and asked both of them about drug use at their school. Both said “yeah it is there mom, but not with our groups.”  I breathed a small sigh of relief but then realized that some mothers child is shooting up at school, and it is nauseating. In my day, and I know that makes me so old, the drug of choice was weed, Heroin was hard core, high school kids wouldn’t think of doing that.
     Oh how things have changed, this is the world that we live in now. We need to adapt and change to be relevant and protect our kids. As one person affected by the horror of the heroin epidemic said “How many people are going to die while you people gather info?” We need to fix this fast, before we lose more than 1,000 people to Heroin this year. 1,000 mothers, daughters, sons, fathers. These are all people not just a number and we need to fix this before another 1 of them dies

   

As long I can remember I have hated exercise, actually hate is probably to mild a word. Detest, loathe and abhor would be more like it. I was diagnosed with asthma at 14 months old, very severe asthma, the kind that would send me to the ER with lips that were blue and lungs making a horrid wheezing noise.
     Exercise only exacerbated the issue, so I spent most of my time sitting on the sidelines watching. Watching others run and jump and skip, knowing that if I did those things I would be wheezing and hacking and coughing in a short period of time.  It didn’t take long for me to equate exercise with pain and aggravation. Thereby making me detest it as much as humanly possible.
     I found a few things that I liked to do that did not induce wheezing, but they were not the normal type of exercise. I loved to downhill ski, spent countless hours on the mountain, wore out at least a pair of gloves a season and just might have had hot cocoa in veins instead of blood by the end of the season.
     Once the weather turned warm my focus changed from snow to water. I loved to swim (and still do.)  I excelled at it, and progressed through the classes. I joined the swim team like most kids in town. My stroke was the butterfly, if I were to do it now I think I might drown. I swam every summer, and have a wall full of ribbons in my childhood bedroom to prove it.

     In high school I tried to play field hockey, but my lungs were not happy with all the running required. This was the ’80’s, the era of Jane Fonda and her aerobics, something that did not go well with my cranky asthmatic lungs.
     Finally after trying elliptical machines and treadmills and walking and hating every blessed one of them. I went back to my true love, I now swim 2 miles 2-3 times a week, that combined with a healthy diet has helped me shed 70 lbs. By going back to what I loved, I found a way to move forward.🏊🏊

   

    I received a Facebook Notification last week, that is really nothing new, I receive about 25 notifications a day. But this one stopped me in my tracks, and it really shouldn’t have. It was a notification from my High School Class. They are planning our 30th Reunion. I stopped and did some quick mental math to make sure the group that was planning this affair actually had the year right. Yes they do, 2015-1985=30 years. I never in my wildest dreams thought I would even entertain going to a 30th reunion.
     Let me take you back to the mid 80’s, I was a very shy, quiet young lady, very afraid of the world. Scared of most of my classmates. Which is quite humorous considering my class only consisted of 121 kids total. If you looked at me wrong I would shrink away in fear. I was easy to pick on, and really would not stand up for myself or anyone else.
     I could not wait for my 4 year stint in high school to be done. I was a good student, but bored nothing excited me in the 4 years that I was there. I looked forward to college with a passion, like chocolate or my love of pasta.

     I was accepted into college in a large city in CT, far away from the sticks of my hometown. I couldn’t wait to graduate and leave. The person that walked across the stage in June of 1985 stepped off with her diploma and promptly “died”. Not literally but figuratively. When I entered SCSU in August of 1985 I was a vastly different person, no longer shy or fearful of the world. I was excited to experience it, and see what it had to offer. Make new friends, live and enjoy the college experience. Because this Tammie was a whole new lady, nothing scared me, I wanted to try new things and live in ways that were never possible.
     The Tammie that will go back to the High School reunion in September will go with many life experiences under her belt. Not just husband and kids, but the multitude of experiences that make me the person that I am now. I like the person that I am now, and I think the rest of my class will too.

     Is it truly to much to ask of someone to do their job?  I really don’t think so, but then again what do I know?  I have really had a week that have tried my patience, and this age old adage too.
     Somewhere along the line we as a group, society, community call us whatever you want we have lost a large amount of common decency in the way we conduct ourselves.
     Earlier this week a young gentleman that is employed by my husband chose to quit. I know no harm in that people change jobs every day, that is nothing new. It is the way that he went about it that shows me that the common decency is missing. He quit via a telephone call on Monday night, no 2 week notice, it wasn’t even done face to face. He was supposed to call the owner of the business to tender the resignation, but wasn’t “man”  enough to do that either; pure cowardice. What have we taught this generation about how to handle themselves in business?
     As I have said before I have asthma, fairly severe asthma, the kind that makes my lungs pretty much the focal point of my daily life. Along with my asthma has come eczema in recent years, just the joy, can’t you see me jumping for joy here ( that is dripping with sarcasm.)  The eczema causes a pervasive itch, like my body it being over run by ants. I moisturize on a daily basis, multiple times a day and still find myself scratching. The only thing that deals with this itch at night is a medication called Hyroxyzine. It is available by prescription only. This week my auto refill of that prescription had no more refills on it. The pharmacy contacted the doctor and she ignored their repeated requests. I went 3 days without the medication, last night my body went into total itch overload. I itched everywhere, and constantly. Sleep was not an option, after 5 hours of this merciless itching, which I tried to control with Benadryl to no avail. The stress finally took over and next came the migraine, I treated that with Imitrex, Promethazine for nausea and Vicodin for pain. Finally I was knocked out.
     When I woke up this morning my first call was to the Physicians Office where I met yet another excuse about why my prescription hadn’t been called in. But the staff assured me it would be. I just walked out of the Pharmacy empty handed and made a call to the Physicians Office and reached their after hours staff, because again someone didn’t do their job!!!  I just would like someone to explain to me how something can fall through the cracks for 4 days in a row???
     Incompetence seems to be the only word that springs to mind at the current moment. The on call Physician assures me he has called it in now, but why did it take so long, so many calls and so much agony to get people to just do their jobs???

  

  Some of you may know that I belong to an online health club group, called the Single Dad Laughing Health Club. From her on forth known as SDLHC, I know that last line sounded like a lawyer, but I really didn’t want to type the whole name over again the whole time.
     This group is full of amazing people, they have motivated me to keep swimming even when I don’t want to get my ass up cuz it is too cold, to take a yoga class even though I am sure that I am too fat and the whole class will be laughing at me, to take an early morning core class and get my body in better shape than I ever thought possible. Every time I want to give up, hit the snooze button, shave laps off my 2 miles in the morning I think of these people. They push me to go further than I ever thought possible. The funny thing is I have never met any of these people face to face, but that doesn’t make them any less motivating.
     41 of these super motivating people did something that I find truly and absolutely beyond the scope of my imagination last weekend. They ran a Tough Mudder, they did the Icy Enema, The Electroshock Therapy, Birth Canal, Funky Monkey, and all the others, climbed the multiple walls, sloshed and hauled through countless tons of mud and water. They walked, and ran and laughed and giggled in the Arizona Desert. All in the name of exercise, camaraderie, friendship, motivation and fun.
     I am super proud of all of them, and never doubted for a New York minute that any of them could complete this course. I also know in my heart of hearts that there is no way I could do a Tough Mudder, my fear of heights will forever keep me from scaling those walls. In one thought and breath I think these people are crazy as bed bugs, and in the next breath, I know they have accomplished something I will never have the cojones to do!!!

     I have heard people say countless times that “Your life can change in the blink of an eye, so tell your loved ones how you feel now.”  This adage became glaringly apparent this week. On Wednesday Evening while my boss was walking to his truck from the local Pizza Parlor, while carrying 2 pizzas n grinders, his arms laden with food. He was confronted by an angry customer of ours. He is an electrician, this customer owed us a small amount of money, and after multiple collection calls with no results. He had me take them to Small Claims Court as a last resort.
     This customer sucker punched him in the face 3 times, he fell down and struck his head on the cement steps, losing consciousness. He was rushed to the local hospital, and then transferred to a larger Trauma Unit. He has suffered memory loss, and asks the same 3 questions of his wife over and over again.
1.  Was I drunk?
2.  Where is my truck?
3.  Where do we live?

     It is unknown at this time what the future holds for this man. A man with a great business, an amazing wife and 2 wonderful little boys that love their dad. He has a successful electrical contracting business, and is well known in the community. Literally in the blink if an eye this all was put in jeopardy by someone who couldn’t see beyond their anger and selfishness.
     Someone who couldn’t see that the debt owed to our business was a business transaction, nothing personal. By adding violence to the mix he made it personal. He turned it into a personal vendetta, and in the process changed 2 lives forever, he will now spend some time behind bars reflecting on what he has done, and the choices he has made. While my boss will spend the forseable future recovering.
     So I remind all of you to hug your children tight, along with your significant others and parents and any other loved ones. Because in the blink of an eye your life can change.