Fleetingly Carol

Old Man has discovered social networking! I didn't introduce him to it. He was complaining to our daughter, who lives in another state, that he didn't see very many pictures of his grandchildren. "Well, Dad, if you would go online to this website, you could see all the pictures becasue I post them there." That was all it took. He's on it morning noon and night because he's discovered the games that you play where you have to 'plant' crops or 'bake' a certain number of cakes. He startles me when he shouts, "I made the next level, I'm an 'Elegant Farmer' now!" Elegant Farmer? The other day he told me that he was making some self-defecating remarks on some of the pictures that friends and family posted. "What?" I asked, thoroughly confused. "Did anyone get mad?" "No, I don't think so. I wasn't too bad. Just a little self-defecating. I don't mind too much and people think it's

Once upon a time, when Old Man was Young Man and Young Man, Jr. was just a wee bit of a baby, our household was visited by an angel. And this is how it happened: Have you ever heard the expression that when you pay your bills, you have to 'rob Peter to pay Paul'? Well, in our household, we couldn't even rob poor Peter because he was slap out of money, too. On grocery shopping day, I would take stock of supplies. If I thought I had enough to get by for one more week, I wouldn't buy it. Of course, that left me running out of things - a lot! If I ran out of dish detergent, I used a scoop of laundry powder to wash dishes. If I ran out of laundry powder, I poured just a little shampoo in the washing machine (I would only wash what the family could not do without). To try to make ends meet, I signed up with a company for whom I would fill out surveys. In return, they sent me cents off coupons for the products I liked to buy. They were also supposed to supply free samples