50+ Lifestyles

In and Out of the Quad Cities

Contributed by Gail McPike and Toni Hall

Back in 1788 Scott Poet Robert Burns twisted his way into the New Year by writing a great poem. But we’re not going to wax eloquently about poetry – that honor goes to fellow writer and radio great Max Molleston. Truthfully, we rarely spend time pondering (weak and weary) over quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore. Mostly, these two Quad-City girls
shuffle to the beat of that Cyndi Lauper song – “Girls just want to have fun.” And for us, that means music, merriment and dancing. But, we digress. Sometime between 1788 and 1939, Canadian-American Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians decided to turn Burn’s poem into something special to us.

With that footnote, let us quote the three lines we can remember:

May old acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind
We’ll take a cup of kindness now, and drink for Auld Lang Syne
Yippee and Happy New Year, let’s have some champagne

Well maybe the last line wasn’t part of the official song, but in the name of full disclosure, we probably spent more time tuned into Dick Clark’s Rocking New Year than Guy and is Royal Mounted Cavalry… or whatever they were called.

Let us be the first to welcome you to 2011! When we think about all the time we spent studying George Orwell’s 1984 back in 9th grade or watching Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey back in 1971, 2011 is amazing. Sure, the world as we knew it back in 1967 came to a crashing end sometime around 1978. But, a computer named Hal isn’t making us write this – no sir – we’re doing ourselves on a nameless gray laptop. But, that’s a different story.

Bear with us as we regress – we’ll go back in time. Setting the knobs on Mr. Peabody’s WAYBACK machine to January 2010, we find ourselves reading Gail and Toni’s bucket list. In that column we listed off everything we hoped to accomplish in 2010. The top 5 of the list looked exactly like this:

1. Celebrate Financial Ruin with Black Eyed Peas
2. Go to a real live Broadway Play in New York City and have drinks on the sidewalk
3. Imbibe in three “Side Cars” at our favorite spot Boozies
4. Watch the sun go down from the Boat House deck
5. Go have dinner at that catfish place near Maquoketa (Bluff Lake)

In retrospect we may have set the bar just a bit high – our score turned out to be two out of five. Hopefully, they’re grading on the curve and we can squeak by with a C-minus. We had a great 2010 just not the super-duper stellar year we had planned.

What’s that saying? Failing to plan is planning to fail.. or something like that. So with that little thought in mind, let’s jump back to the future.

With just a wee bit of fanfare, we present to you the new, improved and much easier to achieve bucket list 2011. Current Trophy Husband Phil, says that maybe we should call it a “pail list.” We hope he is referring to the size of the bucket – but he could be defining something else. He is a Senior Olympian you know. Either way, here’s our new and far easier to attain list.

The list
1. Be the last ones on our block to pull in the trash can one week of every month
2. Wear miss matching socks in public at least once
3. Lie about our age to get the Senior Coffee Discount at McDonald’s at least once
4. Take advantage of the free wine samples at the grocery store whenever possible
5. Go to the Downtown Farmer’s Market on the nicest day of summer
6. Open our eyes once during prayer at church – so don’t you be peaking
7. Take two toothpicks whenever we go out to eat
8. Say something nice to our husbands with our fingers crossed at least once a week
9. Always ask for extra fruit in our Side Cars at Boozies’
10. Tell everyone we meet – “We live in the Hollywood Hills of Iowa”

Well now that we have this planning thing out of the way, can we revisit the subject of our extended holiday season from last month? Remember us; we are the gentlewomen who added a full 6 days to your Holiday Cheer.

As you read this we can report that we celebrated “Dia de Reyes” with our friends in Mexico. Guess what? We found the Baby Jesus in our fancy “Rosca de Reyes” cake. Really – we have three Wise Men Witnesses. That makes it’s our patriotic duty to plan the next party. CTH Frank claims the right thing for us to do is begin work on his birthday celebration. He visualizes it as the hybrid-cross between the Royal Coronation, a 1890’s Fourth of July and the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona. We’ll let you know how it turns out.

And before we amble down the trail, we would like to extend our thanks to all of our loyal readers in 2010. It has been fun sharing our thoughts with you.

But, we must admit, we were just a little bit embarrassed when that armored truck pulled up with all those great gifts…. You shouldn’t have.