What to do with this blog and how I do miss Beth.

Most of the people who came over with me from the late lamented Spaces to Blogger have slowly disappeared since 2010. Not that I ever got a lot of comments but the list of people who come here have gone elsewhere or just stopped completely. From 10 or 12 comments I am down to one or two and I do thank those folks for coming here. Putting a blog together is a bit of a task for me. It can take me a while, and to be honest it is disappointing when you only get one or two comments, at least after all these years that's on me for not making my blog interesting enough for others to read. Still I admit that I do like blogging and I probably won't shut down, at least until something I have written gets no comments at all. All my Spaces friends have disappeared save for Toodie, and my dear friend Beth is no longer with us. I do miss her greatly. She was  always very kind to me and we did have an off the blog friendship via phone calls and regular mail. Still  with all that said here I am again. It would be very hard for me to shut this down after seven or so years.

I recently opened a Facebook account and I have been overwhelmed with all the invites and old friends. Actual people from my past. Truthfully I'm not sure what to make of Facebook. On the one hand it's a great way to reconnect with these people, on the other it does seem more superficial than a blog. I just can't seem to get myself excited because somebody posted a humorous picture (and those are always subjective) and I am supposed to like it. Even if I do, plowing through all those postings for very little if any substance seems boring to me. I do like the fact that I am put in contact with some people I haven't seen in 30 or 40 years. Maybe I'm just on the cusp of becoming a cranky old man. Though I am semi retired and look forward to full retirement in about a year, I still haven't settled into a routine yet. I work three full days and have four off. For those three days (to maintain my benefits) it seems that nothing has changed except I make a lot less money per hour. Still there are people with much greater problems than I have. In fact I have to say that I am pretty lucky. I am in good health, have a wonderful relationship and some money saved. For the most part I should not be whining at all, but this last year and a half has been a radical change for me after working this particular job since, of all days, April 1, 1971. I was featured on the cover of my store flyer this passed week. It was just a small picture, with a brief line or two about my career. From 1971 until 1999 it was a wonderful place to work. We were all well paid, the best in the area. There was a family feel to the company. They took good care of us and we had lots of pride in this historic supermarket company. This very year they are celebrating their 100th birthday. Since 1999 we were bought and sold several times. Things got worse and worse to the point where we were glommed on to the side of another New England chain and the stores were slowly having the name of the stores changed to a name not familiar in the Boston area. Business was dying. Now this latest owner wants to change the names of all those stores back because of the historical nature of our company in the area. It was the first market in the country to wrap fresh meats in cellophane so the customer didn't have to wait for a butcher to wrap it up in paper. The same with our bundle pick-up service. You paid for your groceries, they were put in a numbered tub and it disappeared into the bowels of the store. You drove around the building, handed in your numbered tiles and your groceries were loaded in your car. I hope all this rebadging of the stores works because besides working for them for all these years, my parents shopped there and the bundle pickup was like magic to me when I was 5. By next year they hope to have the chain back up to 30 stores.

So what else is new? I spent a good portion of Saturday cleaning out my computer again. So many pictures and videos. I made a slideshow of some of the pictures. I think there's one from the Vineyard, a few from western Massachusetts, maybe a couple from New Hampshire, Maine, Cape Cod, Gloucester, (Home of the Gloucester fisherman!), Salem and several local shots from the Mystic Lakes. There's nothing mystical about the lakes. It's a name derived from and Indian name that I can't recall at the moment. Then there's the neighbors cat who took a shine to me she would greet me when I  came home from work. She was very sweet. She was 20 years old when she disappeared last winter. The music is me. I used to have a little home recording studio. It's a tune I never finished. It's the beginning and the end spliced together. I never finished it because I kept making a mistake on the bass line of the electric part and I went to stop the recording and in frustration I hit the record and stop button at the same time and broke the recorder. What you hear is just the beginning and the end spliced together played on a nylon string guitar. There's a bit in the middle that has two guitars but it was never going to be the finished product. It was just a fill in until I could come up with something better. Maybe someday I'll finish it.
 


Well thanks for reading my whiny post.
I'm outta here.