Betsy's Blog

  Restaurants are practicing the new ‘smize’ with their waitpersons. They are perfecting the smile with their eyes only. Some even wear a photo of themselves smiling without a mask on.  My Birthday Wish came true! In addition to my usual wish for health and happiness, I wished to see my children and grandchildren. It sounded so easy, but nothing is easy these days. They live a four- hour drive away in another state where COVD 19 is rampant. We have a new granddaughter who is almost three months old who we haven’t seen yet. In order to see her, the pediatrician said we needed a negative COVID Test, a booster DPT shot, and be quarantined for 14 days. We did the first two items, but not the quarantine. We just moved into a new house in a new state and have too many daily errands to quarantine. What to do? A birthday strategy was planned. We drove straight to our daughter’s condo. Then we put on our masks and entered her locked gate with the code, walked down a long sidew...

  Today I drove by a lady in a pink convertible with matching pink hair on Flamingo Road. She is only one of the many flamboyant characters who live in Las Vegas. This desert oasis attracts tourists who like to eat at buffets pre-COVID, drink, live big, and gamble. Paul McCartney recently explained why he would never do an artist residency in Las Vegas. Sir Paul said he avoids the city “because you only go to Vegas to die.” That made me think about my recent move here. I guess we chose to live here for the quality of life and not the opposite. Unpacking boxes seem to consume our days and nights. We have a moving system down that seems to work after living on five continents. We open the boxes, unwrap the items, and sort them into three piles: ‘keep it, take it to the dump, or donate.’ When I make my daily run to Goodwill, the parking lot is full of customers buying each other’s treasures. Yesterday, a homeless man asked if he could have my big, red suitcase with a broken wheel as...

                                                                           I am a big fan of the film “Gone With the Wind.” I went to see it at the Michigan Theater on my 14th birthday. My favorite character was the sweet, but strong Melanie Hamilton. She exuded a calm demeanor but kept all the other characters on the right track. She could even calm down the fiery Scarlett O'Hara and served as a role model for all. Olivia de Havilland recently passed away at 104 years old. She won an Academy Award twice for Best Actress. I was talking about Olivia’s career with a friend this morning. We both felt that Olivia was someone to emulate in our daily lives.  My mom was a mixture of the best character traits from both Melanie and her sister in law Scarlett. My mom w...