too old for Pokemon go

When I see crowds of people looking down at their phones and trampling grass and gardens in my neighborhood, I want to strangle all of them. Especially the smokers who throw their cigarette butts on the ground and leave them them in our glorious Olmstead-designed park over-looking Lake Michigan.

Our Victory Garden of 100 raised beds has also been overrun with “searchers”. Some idiot must have planted a pokemon in our vegetable gardens.

Mothers pushing strollers.. both mother and baby looking down at their phones. Dads riding bikes with their children sitting in their bike seats looking down at their phones. This is insane.

why i still work

August 3, 2016

Most of the people I know have retired by now. My husband, my best friend, my brothers, my neighbors…

I still work because I love my job and I have the best deal one could imagine. The people I work with have me set up so that I can work from home on my computer and ‘be’ at my desk in my office. I can be in France or Amsterdam or Bilbao and still work. The only thing I can’t do is open the snail mail or make the bank deposits if they come in as a check. My boss does the depositing if I am on a long trip. My formal title is ‘Executive Administrator’ (that’s what is printed on my business card) but it could say office manager or gopher or den mother instead. My colleagues’ titles are ‘Light-plumber’, ‘Communicatrix’, ‘Parking Lot Cosmologist’. Titles like that. The business is so unique both in it’s function and scope that I’m not really sure what my title is. I am the oldest person in the Company by at least 20 years. I guess my title could be ‘Wise Woman’. I work 32 hours per week.  I can take vacations anytime I want. I take Monday afternoons and Fridays off and play  Mah Jongg with my friends. And I get paid!

My desk is to the right of  the best boss I’ve ever had. We are 10 feet away from one another separated by some potted palms. My boss is kind, sweet, funny, helpful, laid-back and adorable (can I use the word ‘adorable’ for someone who is over 50?). I’ve worked in both the not-for-profit world and in the for-profit world. I’ve always been a manager or the boss or the owner. I’ve had quite a few jobs in my working career and when I wasn’t working for myself, I’ve had some doozy bosses. A couple of them were out-and-out schmucks. I feel very lucky that the last job of my career is with the wonderful, brilliant and funny people at The Elumenati, LLC

My working life has come full circle. At the age of 24 (in those turbulent 1960’s), my husband and I left Madison, WI where we had been going to school. We moved to Amsterdam  and brought our psychedelic light show equipment with us. We had been performing in Madison with rock bands and also doing theater and independent films. This was the summer of 1969… during the height of the End-The-Vietnam-War demonstrations and Madison was a hot-bed . It was time for us to make a move. We didn’t have the desire to stay and fight anymore..

I am now back doing light shows again … the modern, computer-driven, 3D, no shadows, inside a dome, on a pano screen, on a globe hanging from a truss, in a museum, in a planetarium, in a mall, multi-media millennial type of light show. (in the ‘old days’ we had to drag around movie projectors and overhead projectors and slide projectors and transformer boxes that weighed a ton and Aldis projectors and inks and glass slides and glass plates and color wheels…. and much more… in our VW Van. Memories were made…)