marypat57

I first heard Holy Thursday referred to as Maundy Thursday in Espicopal/Anglican services. i attended Catholic schools for 11 years, and have taught First Communion classes for many years.

Here is another item I thought might be good for a bit of Wolek family fanfic. in the beginning of the show (7/1968), it was mentioned that the Wolek parents, Dan and Maria(yes, Larry’s son was named after his grandfather), came from Poland before their children were born. Perhaps it was true that they wanted to come to the USA to have a better life for themselves and their children, but somehow they got involved in some sort of espionage activity and they had to escape Poland before they were captured by the bad guys . It could have been near the time that Hitler took power. Perhaps they had help escaping to maybe London first and then made their way to the US. I’m thinking that the accident that killed the parents (I assumed they died together) may have been caused by someone connected with whatever they had been involved with in Poland. The “new” Woleks could be distant relatives or people somehow connected to the Communist regime in Poland as t that time…

I did enjoy Mel Hayes’ character—especially his mother, played by Helen Gallagher. It was interesting to see “Maeve Ryan” playing a sex therapist.. jbst: your ideas sound great! BTW: OLTL turned 55 years old yesterday. Nurse Karen Martin saw (or thought she saw) Larry Wolek push Ted Hale down the hospital steps to his death. And so it began…

Hmmm. Now I am thinking. Larry was the only Wolek who actually had a child. As far as I remember ( i started watching the show on 7/15/68, but gave up watching sometime near the end of 1999), Larry and Meredith had Dan and his unnamed stillborn twin sister in the early 70s. Meredith died when Dan was about a year old—this was when Larry and Dan went to live with Anna and Jim. Larry and Karen Wolek never had children. Vince and Wanda Wolek never had children before Vince was killed in the line of duty. Maybe Larry could have fathered an unknown child during his college baseball playing days…..

I like your idea about Schuyler becoming involved with Larry Wolek’s granddaughter, the daughter of Dan, and possibly named Meredith, after Dan’s mother.

@lookeyloo I’m sorry that I’m only replying to your May 18th post now, but I’ve been busy with moving and asthma and such. A few years ago, I purchased an RTic cooler (like the Yeti ones, only about half the price) as well as the expensive ($300) back up battery for my CPAP machine. I wanted to be prepared for the next Long Island hurricane. Food can stay safe for a few days in that kind of cooler. I live in an apartment complex, so no generator for me. During superstorm/hurricane Sandy, I was without power for 13 days, 3.5 hours. There is one building in our complex that backs up to the main road, and they were only without power for 3 days. It was painful to look at their lighted windows. My entertainment was limited to an hour of radio per night to conserve battery power. The NYC schools were even closed for a few days. I went back to school to keep warm and charge my phone and tablet. The parents of the children in the kindergarten class I taught were very concerned about me, and they rejoiced when I told them I had power again!

I too, have difficulty with the cuts that PBS makes. When I was unable to watch part of Season 11 when it was on originally, I solved the problem by purchasing the dvds from the BBC online shop instead of PBS. I will do the same for Season 12 when it is released.

Back in my college days ((1971-75) almost all of the undergraduate computer classes involved learning how to keypunch—oh those stacks of cards—one mistake, and you have to do it all over again!

Wasn’t Jason Webb the nephew of Wanda Webb Wolek? He had some kind of learning disability, and never learned how to read well.

My mother passed away over 28 years ago, and most of her friends and our neighbors have either passed away also, or moved far away. So, it is not too often that I meet someone who knew her. One afternoon last summer, I was speaking to a woman that I often would see at the 1210pm mass at our church. I knew my mother had known her from the neighborhood and the younger kids school. Since it was summertime, she told me how she would enjoy seeing my mom at the community pool each summer. I did not know that my mom would sometimes take her lunch break from the local hospital and go for a short swim at the pool. After her swim, she would change her clothes and go back to work. Even after so many years had passed, it is still nice that people from outside our family still thought about her.

Jc: This reminds me of the Christmas that my mother was ill with the flu or something similar. My father had passed away in September of that year, so it was also a tough year in that respect. We were also hosting my mother’s mom. She was a great mom, but my mother had called her brother in Ohio and asked if my grandmother could visit his family for a few days. My grandmother did not want to go, so she came to our house. Back to the beef. Before she got sick, mom had purchased a whole beef tenderloin. Her plan was to roast it and then serve it. Since she did not even rise from her bed that day, I made an executive decision to cut it into steaks and BBQ it. My sister’s fiancé dragged the bbq grill from the patio, through the dining room and kitchen and into the attached garage. We grilled the steaks with the garage door open and they were quite yummy—and yes, we did save one for my mother to eat when she was feeling better.

When Pampers first came on the scene in the mid to late 60s, you still needed diaper pins to fasten them. My next to youngest brother (#5 out of 6 brothers) wore them for a few months until he was toilet trained. When brother#6 was born about 3.5 years later, he was exclusively wearing Pampers, except for a few times when we ran out of them and had to use cloth diapers. I do remember using electrical tape or duct tape to fasten my brother’s diapers when I had misplaced the pins. I think that Pampers finally came out with attached tape strips sometime in 1970 or 1971.

I have ordered my last 2 dvd sets from the BBC website, not the PBS. I’m sure that the BBC sets are uncut, if I can compare the BBC with the PBS ones, I can tell for sure. Christmas is coming!!

I remember when my youngest brother bought his first computer with money he had earned from his paper route. It was a Commodore Vic20 with a magnetic tape drive. It ran on regular cassette tapes. I remember buying him whatever sale games they had at Toys R Us that Christmas. One of them was a poker game. My grandmother was watching him play the game one night, and she offered him helpful hints. Grandma was an awesome poker player. We used to save our pennies in a decorative jar, so she could play with her friends when she came to visit us. She also loved horse races , and at one time had an OTB account. In her younger days, she and my grandfather liked to go and patronize speakeasies.

I live on the east coast and I think Exxon/Mobil Gas cards would be good. If she is planning to drive on the highways most ofvthe time, I think that would be a good choice. In other extremely important Prayer Closet news, I was browsing through my email and I saw that there was a BIG sale at Talbots— online only—until 11:59pm tonight in whatever time zone you are in. I’m hoping to buy a few things, but I may have to go out to my car to do it. My power has been out since about 5:50pm; power company says it may be up and running by 9pm. I’m wondering if this is a “memorial “ power outage for the 10th anniversary of Superstorm Sandy. We were without power for 13 days, 3 hours and 15 minutes for that disaster. I did however, consider myself lucky that we just had wind and rain, but no flooding. We had a party the first night in the lobby of my apartment building. Everyone bought something to share like ice cream or other perishable things. We had a young couple living in our building who were from Minnesota. They had never been through a hurricane, do Ben kept running out to take pictures. After the novelty wore off, he finally stayed in where it was safe. I did put on my teacher voice and threatened to call his mother….

I had to smile when I heard what your dad did with nuisance calls. When my father died, my mother kept the phone in his name. After my mother died I saw no reason to change the name on the phone . When I sold the family home and moved to a new apartment, I was unable to keep the phone number, so I had the new phone number in my name. However, when I moved to the new apartment, I switched phone providers and found I could get back the old number, which I did. If a person leaves a message for dad, I don’t answer..

These houses remind me of the tv show Escape to the Country that I get on my Dabl channel. It’s a British show where people get taken to lovely homes and bid on them. The ones I see are several years old, but I still enjoy them

I would take a guess and say that those “dark spots” are freckles. One day as I was helping a kindergarten child, she looked at my arm, and wanted to know what all of those brown spots on my arm were. I explained to her that the spots were called freckles, and while her skin was brown all over, mine was brown in spots.

@Notabug The swimsuits on the website are absolutely beautiful! The fabrics are colorful without being too over the top, and the head coverings are lovely , too. I have bought swimwear from Lands’ End, and I’m sure that Jill and her girls could find nice things there. My main concern, just like many of us here, is sunburned skin. I come from a family of mostly redheads(I’m the only brunette) so I cover up with the long sleeved rash guard and a pair of capris with attached short skiers. Works for me!

In my school it was “JMJD”; because after all, we were educated by Sparkill Dominican Sisters, aka Sparkies. That was in elementary school. High school was down the block (in fact a favorite daydreaming task of mine in grade 5 was looking out the window and watching them hoist the girders for the new high school) and was also staffed by the Sparkies, and the Sisters of Mercy from Brooklyn .

Oh dear @merylinkid, I see that you also share the same delights in visiting cemeteries as I do with my youngest brother. In fact, our parents are buried in an extremely large VA cemetery about 50 miles east of where we grew up. We refer to it as our folks “condo out east”. When we go to visit them, we always say hi to their neighbors Howard and Floyd. It’s the neighborly thing to do. I also bring paper towels, some bronze cleaner and scissors to clean and trim the area around their plaques. Toward the late afternoon in this cemetery, you can see young deer roaming the area. It’s quite lovely.

The Apple Watch definitely works—or at least it did for me and a few of my siblings. I bought an Apple Watch series 5 just over 2 years ago, right before the pandemic hit the fan, so to speak. I spent the weekend fooling around with it. When I used the heart rhythm feature, the watch detected an afib, which can be quite serious. I did not have a primary care doctor at the time, but I had a recommendation from a friend. I drove over to the group practice office, figuring I could fill out paperwork and set up an appointment. One of the doctors had an appointment available at 3:15 (it was 2:55), so I waited. After the doctor looked at the ECG, she wanted to send me to the hospital in an ambulance. I declined, but I agreed to go to the cardiologist the next morning. In the meantime, the assistant had found another cardiologist in their practice group who could see me at 4:30. His office was less than a mile away, and the primary care doctor made me promise “not to drive fast”. The cardiologist was excellent, and I’m managing the afib with blood thinners, and I may have a procedure to shock my heart back into the right rhythm (first one didn’t last very long) As it turns out, one brother has afib, but not quite as bad as mine, another one does not have it at all and the rest need to be tested. Another interesting fact my doctor pointed out is that about 40% of patients with afib also have sleep apnea. When I was tested, I had an average of over 30 disturbances an hour, and my O2 levels went as low as 85%. I wear my cpap machine faithfully, and rarely have a disturbance. ***Also, I do have some good news to share. My sister in law’s sister has made some progress with her blood clotting issues, and is doing better. Hopefully, the doctors will find a way to keep it from happening again. Thanks for all your prayers and good wishes!

Hi fellow Small Talkers: I’ve been asked by my dear friend(who is also my sister in law’s sister) to pray for her younger sister, who just turned 65 in January. The younger sister has had a host of auto-immune disorders (not sure of exact diagnosis). She has been on oxygen for a few years, but right now the main concern are blood clots that are forming and the doctors have been unable to dissolve. My friend, who is the oldest in the family, was quite upset when she called me. It does not look good, but for any small talker that would be inclined to offer prayers, we would most certainly appreciate them. The woman’s name who is sick is Carol. Thank you so much!

@Rootbeer I remember that when I returned for my sophomore year of high school, that one of the orders of nuns that staffed our school had switched to a modified habit—shorter, knee length habits with simple veils. If the individual sister wished to stay in the “old” habit, they could. We had two orders of nuns in our school. One order wore white habits, the other wore black habits. They had separate convents, one at each end of the school building. Your aunt’s friend bringing “regular” clothing reminded me of the afternoon that Sister Julienne took off from her duties and went to the movie theater to see The Sound of Music. She looked different in her non-religious clothing.

@Rootbeer I loved some of your stories about “fun” nuns. My friend told me a story about her aunt, who is a member of one of the local order of nuns. My friend’s aunt loved to travel and go places with another nun. The two sisters liked to go to one of the local Native American casinos and spend a few dollars at some of the different activities. My girlfriend’s dad said that the two women were “going off to perform charitable” work in the Native American community. The two nuns also made several trips to Las Vegas. Just like your aunt’s friend, they enjoyed a good glass of wine, and the occasional bottle of beer. My sister in law’s sister is a member of the same community, and they all enjoy serving the Lord joyfully, even though it’s not the same job they signed up for 50-60 years ago, or even more.