Sheila Winston

Don’t want to go out on New Year’s Eve, so I declined the party invitations and will be staying home. Today I stopped by the nursing home again and spent a couple hours with my granny. She wanted to play cards with a couple of her friends. It is a version of rummy and it takes about 2 hours to play if everyone is paying attention and don’t get sidetracked with too many stories and jokes. It was fun, even though neither of us won the game.

I guess I will fix a nice dinner, maybe a nice salmon steak and  rice pilaf, and watch the ball drop in Times Square tonight, then get some sleep so I start the new year off on a good note.

Hope you have a Merry Christmas!

I am exhausted and still have a handful of presents to wrap before I can go to bed. Tomorrow will be a busy day. Looking forward to a few hours with fmy sister’s amily and then a visit to the nursing home to share a nice dinner with my granny and my mom. The food is actually very good – and I don’t have to cook it or clean up afterward.

Then I will go to my brother’s house and hang out for a while. I always enjoy watching his kids play with their toys and games. They are so competitive but have learned to be good sports and are very generous with sharing their toys as well as their expertise on the different video games.

We just realized that the little black and white TV and emergency broadcast radio combination does not work any more. Because there is no converter for this little TV set. Sigh.

This morning my throat was sore when I woke up. I can’t breathe and I feel totally awful. There’s no fever, so I guess it is not the flu. Maybe I am having a severe allergy attack? The weather has been crazy so I don’t know if it is the ragweed or the leaf mold.Or maybe a cold.

The only thing that makes me feel a little better is the hot tea. I don’t even want coffee – it makes my throat worse. So I’m sipping hot tea and staying in bed today.

One of the seasonal entertainments in this area are big haunted houses. Most of them are very elaborate, with live actors and high tech effects.

The good ones have already opened for business this weekend and they go through the end of October. There are five or six in the area – I have to decide which one to go through this year. I can’t afford to go to them all, and they sure are fun.

Usually I avoid the roads around the mall. The traffic is always very heavy and I hate to creep along with stop lights at every corner. But today I ended up driving through that area and I noticed that one of the big multi-screen movie theaters has switched from first run movies to the older movies and they reduced the ticket prices to a buck fifty. Now that’s a bargain and I might just start going out to the movies again to catch some of the ones I missed the first time on the big screen.

One of the fun activities at the beach is playing miniature golf. Even at night, you can easily play under the lights and have fun.

Around here there are a couple of miniature golf courses, but as far as I know there is only one official Putt Putt course. There used to be a second one, but last I heard it was up for sale.

Finally we have some of the new TV shows coming out with their season premieres. I like the way some of the popular shows are running the last one or episodes from last year before they show the new premiere. Especially when the last year’s show ended with a cliff hanger of someone getting shot or some other tragedy. I guess most of the cliff hangers are really about someone getting shot. Does this go back to the days of “Dallas” when they introduced the concept of “Who shot JR?”

Only a handful of Big Brother contestants left. The drama queen was finally kicked out. Now the drama King is on the block. I can’t wait to see if Russell gets kicked to the curb or if he can campaign to save his skin. Personally, I hope they kick him out – he’s the biggest threat to the remaining players. Surely they are smart enough to realize that.