Here they come: pink and red and personal notes

 

Happy Earth Day everyone. We belong to the earth.

I didn't go out of the apartment at all last Wed. So when I took out the trash on Thursday, I ran (well walked) back inside to get the phone. All these flowers were bursting out with colors!

I love these blooms, which are double or triple blossoms!

Ornamental Cherry blossoms are so beautiful the azaleas became the out of focus background here! I'll give you more Cherry blossoms soon.

Some more azaleas to enjoy.

On a more personal note, I had 2 doctor's appointments yesterday. The first one I arrived a bit early. But was called into the exam room within 5 minutes. Then I sat and sat and sat...after the nurse had done her review of my meds, my blood pressure and my pulse ox. This was a check up 6 weeks after I'd been really hit by some bad coughing spells. But after waiting an hour in that room, I just said, this is not happening. So I got up and left. I told the nurse I'd reschedule. She said she didn't know the Dr. hadn't been in to see me yet. As I talked to the scheduler she told me the next available would be in August.

I said ok, give me one. And then she found I already had one scheduled for June. I left happy, though hadn't even seen the Dr. I wonder if they'll charge my insurance for the nurse seeing me...

The second Dr. did an X-ray of my hands (that's his specialty) and then told me I had arthritis, and some osteoporosis...but not that bad. He said for a 79 year old, my hands looked very good. (It must be all the typing, I thought!)  But as for the times my index finger and thumb get out of joint, he couldn't see any reason that should be happening. It wasn't like a trigger finger...so he said the next time it happens I should take a photo or video of it and send it to him. It hurts like hell when it happens, and I'm supposed to leave it like that until I can figure out how to take a photo or video one handed! Sure. I just hope it doesn't ever happen again.

Today's quote:

The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves.

 -P.D. James, novelist (3 Aug 1920-2014)

A tiny conundrum but some eaglets too!

I step out my door and see this beauty...

Yes, those are dandelions!

But what are these little purple volunteers?

I'm pretty sure those reaching vines are from the same plant. And those are all over without these blooms.

And here are some more blossoms near the Community Garden...

And a link to see Pittsburg's eaglets... LIVE!

Today's quote:

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. -James Baldwin, writer (2 Aug 1924-1987)

Here they come: more blossoms

 In my neighborhood, at another apartment building...

These do remind me of Japanese Andromeda, as identified by fellow blogger HERE

 I saw the same plant in front of the Grovewood Gallery much later in the month.

Today's quote:

The strength of a person’s spirit would then be measured by how much ‘truth’ he could tolerate, or more precisely, to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened, muted, falsified.

—Friedrich Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil 

Here they come: the first dogwood and then...

 

 

Down the street (Old US 70) at Dogwood Apartments, stands the first full blooming dogwood. It doesn't appear damaged by the snows and sleet of the day before I took this shot. Sorry about reflection from taking it through car window.

By the time I publish this, many dogwoods will be flowering out in the woods also!

The greening of the mountains is beginning behind my neighbor's dogwood.

After many days of clouds, the late sun broke out and left nice shadows.

At Lake Tomahawk on April 15, 2022...dogwood blossoms against an older trunk of another tree.

I'll share more dogwood beauty in a few more posts.

Today's quote:

Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.

 -Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, philosopher (27 Aug 1770-1831)

Lunch under the red umbrellas

 Lunchtime in Black Mountain!

Author, Vicki relaxing with choices for lunch before she returns to her Madison County home.

Friend Susan who I've lunched with in the past at the Lake Tomahawk lunch program for seniors.

Some days a selfie is just not worth taking!

We had had an enjoyable reading by Vicki Lane at the Library, of her latest book "And the Crows Took Their Eyes." The program was jointly sponsored by the Library and the Swannanoa History Museum. 

Both Susan and I had met Vicki previously...and she mentioned us in recognition of our support on FaceBook and her blog while her book was in progress. Susan had even contributed some letters from the period during which it took place...which Vicki used to help develop the voices of some of the real historic persons in her book.

I've mentioned that book before...Here.

If you like historic fiction, I highly recommend this book...about a massacre that really happened during the Civil War, and some of the people involved on both sides of that conflict.

Today's quote:

You say ‘I’ and you are proud of this word. But greater than this — although you will not believe in it — is your body and its great intelligence, which does not say ‘I’ but performs ‘I’.

—Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Happy Easter

In honor of the Ukranian artists who developed Pysanky Eggs.   This artist is from Nova Scotia Canada.

More Pysansky Eggs by So Jo Leo of Canada.

Today's quote:

People share a common nature but are trained in gender roles. 

-Lillie Devereux Blake, novelist, essayist, and reformer (12 Aug 1833-1913)

 CNN's 5 Things Newsletter said:  April 17 is Easter Sunday, the day Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ on the third day after his crucifixion. It also marks the end of the 40-day period of penance called Lent. Easter is considered to be the most important season of the Christian year.

The corner market

Sepia Saturday this week...and I had all that history to talk about...so I will match the prompt on a separate post!

Norton's Quick Stop, corner of Montreat Rd. and North Fork Rd. Black Mountain NC.

taken probably when phone booths were still available...so before everyone had cell phones, pre-1990

.

Today's quote:

I speak two languages, Body and English

. -Mae West, actress, playwright, singer, screenwriter, and comedian (17 Aug 1893-1980)

CNN's 5 Things Newsletter:

Saturday will mark 15 years since the shootings at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007 -- one of the deadliest mass shootings in US history. A gunman killed 32 people on the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University campus in Blacksburg, Virginia, before taking his own life. Various vigils and ceremonies are scheduled to remember the victims.

My 59th anniversary as a stewardess

 A timely joke...

a.k.a. "old stewardesses never die, they just blog away."

Pan Am flight attendants, 1973. I was in a class like this 10 years earlier, in 63.

A stewardess talking to passengers in 1958. My first flying experience had been in 1958, a TWA turbo prop with these seats that faced each other. 

A stewardess helps a passenger deplane...everyone used to walk down those portable stairs then walk to the concorse...1958.

United Airlines stewardesses in the 1940s, wearing capes.

The original flight attendants were required to be nurses, so that they could provide care on flights for passengers who were ill, not so they could care for them after a crash! But often stewardesses were injured when a plane hit an air pocket, and the plane might suddenly lurch throwing people and serving carts around a bit.

Flight attendants got to be the preferred title as more men became stewards. Here are a lot of trained young people in the 70s. My training was 4 intense weeks. Nobody was a nurse.

In the late 60s stewardesses became part of the force for women's rights.

These were the uniforms which I wore as a Pan Am stewardess.

The following is a repost of my Pan Am adventures...which I shared here several times before.

I did have a few months of my 21st year flying professionally.  I quit college over a failed romance, and took a job as a Flight Attendant for Pan American World Airways (aka Pan Am).  The jets had recently started flying passengers, and that's where I worked.

We had to carry our flat shoes in our purses while walking to the planes, where we removed our high heels which could perhaps punch holes in the lightweight floors as we trod up and down the aisles serving as waitresses for almost a hundred people.

 I was flying the Latin American routes instead of learning in college, while my sister and her boyfriend here are seeing me off, after I was hired in April 1963. (Yes, we all walked from the Miami terminal out to the planes...passengers as well as crew.)  I flew the 2 jets shown below, learning all the emergency procedures, as well as food service.  I also flew in DC-6 and DC-7's, prop planes that flew shorter flights in the Caribbean.  I'll never forget the live chickens in a straw shopping bag which was included along with several children piled with mom into one seat.

Boeing 707

Wikipedia shares:

"Pan Am was the launch customer of the Boeing 707, placing an order for 20 in October 1955. It also ordered 25 of Douglas's DC-8, which could seat six across.  

The 320 "Intercontinental" series 707 in 1959-60, and the Douglas DC-8 in March 1960, enabled non-stop transatlantic crossings with a viable payload in both directions.

Popular Culture loved Pan Am:

Pan Am held a lofty position in the popular culture of the Cold War era. One of the most famous images in which a Pan Am plane formed a backdrop was The Beatles' 1964 arrival at John F. Kennedy Airport aboard a Pan Am Boeing 707–321, Clipper Defiance.^[136]

From 1964 to 1968 con artist Frank Abagnale, Jr. masqueraded as a Pan Am pilot, dead-heading to many destinations in the cockpit jump seat. He also used Pan Am's preferred hotels, paid the bills with bogus checks, and later cashed fake payroll checks in Pan Am's name. He documented this era in the memoir Catch Me if You Can, which became a distantly related movie in 2002. Abagnale called Pan Am the "Ritz-Carlton of airlines" and noted that the days of luxury in airline travel are over.

Then almost 50 years later... ABC had the TV show, Pan Am.  And it only ran for one season.

Pan Am is an American period drama television series created by writer Jack Orman. Named for the iconic Pan American World Airways, the series features the pilots and stewardesses of the airline as it operated in the early 1960s at the beginning of the commercial Jet Age.

Actresses in the TV Show Pan Am

Pan Am premiered on ABC on September 25, 2011 and ended on February 19, 2012.

The Pilot Show: April 1963. Dean pilots the Clipper Majestic '​s first New York to London flight—his first as a captain—and searches for his girlfriend, Bridget, about whom Dean learns some shocking news. Maggie, a stewardess suspended for not wearing her girdle to work, is unexpectedly reinstated when the scheduled purser, Bridget, does not arrive. Veteran stewardess Kate is revealed to be a CIA courier who was recruited during a layover in Rome three months prior, and she takes her first U.S. intelligence assignment to switch a passenger's passport. Meanwhile, Laura must deal with people asking her if she is the stewardess on the cover of Life magazine, and trying to do her best while not bothering her sister, Kate, who resents Laura's sudden fame. Colette sees a former lover on the flight, only to discover he is accompanied by his wife and son.

Pan Am won the "Best Series" at the Rose d'Or TV awards, Europe's equivalent of the Emmys.

This TV series setting took place at exactly the time I was flying; same uniforms, same issues (well without the CIA at least) and different routes.

I only flew to South and Central American and Caribbean countries, then back to the states.  Portugal was the only European country I visited, but there were lots of trips to Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, and the east coast of South America as far south as Sao Paolo, Brazil.  I flew over Cuba a few times on the way to Puerto Rico. (This was just after the Cuban Missal Crisis.)

I stayed in various hotels on layovers where Pan Am made contracts, in many Latin cities, and San Francisco once. In Caracas, Venezuela there were various political upheavals including armed conflicts, so we stayed out of town at a posh resort.

Not where we stayed, but this is a park near Caracas

I loved Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and I had 3 days layover there to see the sights.  The flight which I had just worked from New York was a non-stop overnight flight of 12 hours, carrying the Brazilian soccer team.  We really had a strain on the little bathrooms when all those men woke up in the morning wanting to shave before landing and meeting their fans.

 I would often be away from my home in Miami Springs FL (near the airport) for a week to 10 days.  There might be a trip every day, and sleeping in a different bed each night.  Or there might be one trip of 12 hours, then a layover for 3 days.  I had no seniority, so I got the flight schedules that were least desirable. But I initially loved all of them.

Not mine, but a typical Pan Am Crew of Flight Attendants (aka Stewardesses) ready to go to work. Each plane had it's own name, and was considered a Clipper Ship.

The traveling waitress life had a toll on me.  I may have been recovering from my broken romance, but I was also away from home for the first time with no friends to speak of.  I was immersed in a culture of mostly Hispanic women and men, and I felt pretty lonely.

As a stewardess I stretched myself too thin with days and nights of work, then partying much of the time I wasn't working. I think I was having a bit of delayed adolescence.

British Stewardess, Betty Riegel welcoming passengers in the same style uniform which I wore.

Our uniforms were tailored, but with all the good food I was eating, I already was stretched to the limit in mine.  The blue cloth was not as bright a blue as shown in the TV series, either. 

Soon I was so glad to leave the supposedly romantic traveling life of a waitress in a plane to settle down with an old friend who wanted to get married.  At that time stewardesses weren't allowed to get married or have children.  And suddenly that was exactly what I wanted.

I do still enjoy a flight now and then...squeezed usually against some giant person or another...but I really enjoy a take off which feels so grand to the bottom of my shoes.  Glad I never really had a lot of "G's" like an astronaut, or this might be chicken feed.

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Read Betty Riegel's story I Lived the High Life as A Pan Am Stewardess HERE.

Wikipedia is my source for most quoted materials and photos.

Images of the two advertisements are from PanAmAir.org.

Information about Pan Am the TV Show comes also from Wikipedia HERE.

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And later, much later, my middle son married a woman whose mother had also been a Pan Am stewardess. She worked out of the New York station while I worked out of Miami, and we would maybe have passed each other in the concourses somewhere. She worked much longer than I did, on flights to Europe. Stewardesses were required to speak at least 2 languages, and mine was Spanish, while Joanne's was either French or Italian.

On the right is Joanne Naglieri, to become my son's mother-in-law many years later. Chubby Checker needs no introduction.

Sharing with Sepia Saturday, where most of my historic posts have been shared, as well as a lot of trivia from the past!

Today's Quote:

 "Where Beauty was, nothing ever ran quite straight, which, no doubt, was why so many people looked on it as immoral." 

John Galsworthy author of Forsythe Saga. B. Aug 14, 1867