Once again, I have had multiple desktops up this week. I spent another morning taking photos of spider webs in the morning dew, and I had this one up on my desktop for a few days.

The cows coming for a drink at the pond in the late afternoon

was the next photo I had up for a while, and in the same field is an endangered Pennsylvania Field Stone Fence, which is my current desktop photo.

 Something I am not happy about is my recent blood test results. My cholesterol is too high, as are my triglycerides.

Since I quit my job at Curves my body is different. I can see more fat on me and my weight hasn’t changed that much. It can only mean one thing. I’ve been losing muscle.

Wuscle mays war...er...I mean, muscle weighs more. I can only imagine how much fat I’ve added.

“Stop in your next time past Curves and check it out,” Mary Ellen, my former boss offered. And that scares me. Do I really want to know?

It took my two years to get to where I was and only four months to undo all that hard work. It isn’t fair!

“What are you going to do about it?”

Good question. Crying it isn’t fair doesn’t help a thing. When Mike and I get back to Missouri from our mountain home, we are going to turn our spare room into a weight room. Mike needs to rebuild his muscles too. Muscles he has lost as a side effect of slowing down and aging.

Now, while I am thinking about it, I think the double cheeseburger from Sonic the day before my blood test probably had a lot to do with the results too!

Mike and I were packing up the RV for our trip to Bath, New York to trade our Bago in when I heard him yell, “Peg!”

“What!” I yelled back, exasperated. It never fails. I’ll be right in the middle of something and he will need me.

“You got a phone call,” he said coming in from the breezeway.

Why would anyone be calling Mike’s phone to talk to me? I wondered. I reached for the phone.

“It’s the public defender in Missouri,” Mike said handing it over.

My first thought was, “Uh-oh. What have I done?” But for the life of me I couldn’t think of one single thing that might have landed me in legal hot water. My second thought was, “Someone stole my identity again.” But I was wrong on both counts.

“Peg?” A man said.

“Yeah.”

“Hi. My name is Wah-Wah and I’m a public defender in Jefferson City. I’m calling to ask what you know about Wah-Wah pulling a knife.” I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. I hoped if I listened long enough I would catch on.

“You are mentioned in the Lake Ozark Police departments report concerning wah-wah-wah wah-wah, wah-wah-wah wah.”

Yeah, you guessed it. I stopped listening. I was trying to fit the pieces together. The only thing I could come up with was an incident I witnessed where one man was threatening to beat the crap out of another. Two off duty police officers had been on the Strip at the time, heard all the yelling, and before I could call the police, they had identified themselves and gotten between the aggressor and the victim. They made a report about what happened and I made a report about what I saw. But I didn’t see a knife.

“...and I was calling to see what you could tell me about it,” Mr. Public Defender finished.

“I saw a bunch of yelling, but I didn’t see a knife. Didn’t you get the report I made?” I asked.

“It says here that you didn’t see anything and no report was made.” I was so confused!

“....Trapp Building, Wah Wah told the police about a woman with a camera and two little dogs. The police stated they were familiar with that woman and when they checked, discovered you didn’t know anything about the incident.” Slowly his wah-wah’s were dissolving into words I could understand. It was Jordan! I never knew Jordan’s last name and honestly, I haven’t even thought about Jordan for a long time. But I do remember the police coming to me and telling me Jordan named me for a witness. I told them I didn’t witness Jordan pull or not pull a knife on anyone and I gave them a copy of the story I wrote the day I met Jordan.

In a nut shell, here’s what happened. Jordan did some work for a man and when it came time to pay, the man either didn’t want to pay, or didn’t want to pay what they agreed on. “Honestly, I think he was trying to get slave labor and when Jordan argued with him he decided he would just call the police,” Shawn, Mr. Public Defender told me. “Jordan told the police that he was using the knife to clean his fingernails and they didn’t believe him. ‘No one uses a knife like that to clean their fingernails with,’ they said.”

When I saw Jordan that morning, he was cleaning his fingernails with that knife. That’s what I was supposed to be a witness to! Boy! I’ll tell you what! The Lake Ozark Police Department certainly had not made it clear to me what Jordan said I was a witness to!

“All Jordan was trying to do was to get enough money to get back to his mother’s in Kansas City,” Shawn said. “He’s been sitting in jail since that day, May 26^th.”

“I wrote a story about meeting Jordan that morning,” I told Shawn.

“I have a copy of it right here, I read it yesterday.”

“Well, that’s all that I know.”

“If you can think of anything else, will you call me?” he asked and I said that I would.

Guys, you know as well as I know, that whether Jordan actually threatened him with the knife or not doesn’t matter. All the man has to do is say he felt threatened.

I hope, the fact that I wrote the story the same day I met Jordan, helps in his defense. He seemed like a nice enough guy who simply got some bad breaks.

I am practicing keeping my mouth shut. I get frustrated when Mike has to cover the same territory over and over and over again! After 19 years, I know how Mike is and I also know I will never change him, not that I would ever want to either. All I can do is change how I react to him.

“I just don’t say anything when my husband gets that way with me,” a very wise woman told me.

“If I do that, Mike says, ‘So you’re not talking to me now?’”

She thought about that for a minute. “Just say you don’t have anything to say.”

Why did I never think of that!

So when Mike goes off on one of his routines and I don’t feel like playing, I just stay quiet. Eventually I will hear my side of the argument come out of his mouth then before long, he’s on to something new and I’ll talk again. But Mike isn’t stupid. He caught on to what I was doing weeks ago and has just let it slide.

Then this morning Mike was going on and on about something and I didn’t say anything.

“How come you never talk to me anymore?” he asked.

“I don’t have anything to say,” I replied.

“I don’t either, but I still talk!”

I laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed! In fact, even as I write this, sitting in the lounge of Camping World, trying hard to suppress my laughter, it came leaking out of my eyes anyway.

Let’s call this one done,

Lots and lots of love,

Peg and Mike