No matter where you go
I found the answer to my jiggity jig question and more. Click and enjoy a silly trip down memory lane. If any of these are new to you, you’ve missed something.
I’ll pick up where I left off soon. Do you see that one of my trademarks is variety?
Thunder on the prairie
I have traveled the great American prairie, desert, and Rocky Mountains many times. The first trip I can remember is when I was three. I can’t remember much, but the snapshots include two walls of rock on either side of the car, playing elevator with sliding glass closet doors, and being scared silly when my brother-in-law picked me up. “Down Buster!” Dad laughed at my response for years.
During subsequent trips my dad was conflicted with “making time” and stopping at scenic overlooks so he could take pictures of desert expanses on black and white film with a Brownie box camera. A few times we took the route toward Denver, diverted to Colorado Springs, walked the Garden of the Gods and visited old Mr. Wilson who had at one time courted Mom before she fell for the dashing 6′2″ soldier in uniform in 1942.
There was almost 1/2 century between me and my parents. They were raised by people who were raised by people who settled this country’s expanse in wagons. It’s pretty awesome to me that there are only two links between them and me. I think of all the pioneers every time I look across wide open flat land. I imagine the exuberance, the heat, the weather, the fatigue and the raw fear. So much could and many times did go wrong. It was said that every mother could expect to lose 20% of her children during her own short lifetime. Think about that. So the advice was to bear as many children as nature allowed, stay as busy as you can even at the very real risk of death by childbirth. I read that the girl who later married Andrew Jackson was on the flatboat migrating to a violent frontier — very near to where I live — and her sister lost her firstborn baby during an Indian raid. They hid in the bushes on shore and when they reassembled on the boat, the baby had been left behind and it was impossible to go after him. The young mother narrowly escaped permanent insanity by bearing 16 children and never forgetting.
A lady at work dismays at her granddaughters’ inability to put up with what she had to endure growing up but in the next breath she admits she couldn’t have lived in her grandmother’s world either. I hear that. I was one of the rare ones who wanted to know everything about the ancestral past while keeping maybe one eye on the present.
I’ve been re-reading my all time favorite historical novels by Bess Streeter Aldrich. Her style is so easy but very real. You helplessly watch the clouds of locusts approach, feel the hot sun through a cotton bonnet, you hear the non-stop prairie winds and the thunder in the distance. We’re surrounded by hills and trees here in Tennessee. I remember being on the prairies. I know the difference trees and hills make when the temperature is the same 90 or 95 under a cloudless sky. How did they do it? Some didn’t make it. Some turned back.
How many miles can the eye really see across flat land? Flat is flat. On this last trip as on others, we drove out of the open rolling areas of southeastern Indiana, flatter than Kentucky which is flatter than Tennessee, to flat central Indiana but as we approached the eastern border of Illinois it seemed to go from flat to flatter to flatterer. It’s the same story going across Iowa to Nebraska to eastern Colorado.
Out there you can see thunderheads on the horizon that are probably pummeling the neighboring state, not knowing if it’s coming after you or not. If you are very still you can hear the thunder. At night you can see the flicker of the lighting on the horizon’s razor edge and imagine you can feel in the soles of your feet the earth shuddering in response. Imagine sitting around the campfire with only a wagon and starlight between you and the animals, the natives or the thunder. No one was so naive or such a romantic that they would dare let down their defenses and ignore the very real possibility of a sudden and violent death, yet they risked it willingly for a better future than they had had.
Close your eyes. Go back to that time of uncertainty and danger. Make the decision to pack up a wagon and rebuild literally from the ground up with not a single Holiday Inn or Cracker Barrel in sight. Leave parents, friends, and cousins knowing it could be the last time you see them. Yet …. in hindsight, for them the future was bright and simple. The pioneers had a singleness of purpose, a common goal, unlike today. Where is the unity of thought and purpose today?
There is thunder in the distance. We can’t afford to be naive and comfortable as we sit around our campfires ignoring the very real probability of our world crashing around us, our freedoms lost forever as we stubbornly clutch onto them. The dangers surround us, the storms in the distance are signaled by the low rumble of thunder and are indeed coming toward us.
The two Fox newsmen were released only after they converted to Islam. The Islamic predators will convert or kill. They’ve killed already. On film. To quote Osama: ‘We love death. They (that’s us) love life.’” Read that again. Again. And again. “But whosever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven” Matthew 10:33.
If we withdraw from this conflict, if we pick up our ball and say we won’t play anymore, will they quit playing too?
No.
Shhhhhh…….. Do you hear the thunder?
Speaking of Pix
tuning me in to digital pix and kiosks at WalMart has awakened a sleeping giant. My goal is the hottest hotsy totsy camera and pix port out there. Woo hoo hoo! Yee Haw and all those other redneck responses I can’t figure out.
If I put my index finger tips to my temples I think I can read Owen’s mind. Mmmmm, yes! "Lunch! Mommy! Where are you and will somebody please rescue me! I don’t know what a brother is but right now I’m not all that interested. Mom-meeeeeeeee!!"
He survived. How about this one?:
Did not Nana say to Drew?: You’re going to teach Owen everything.
Drew turned 3 on the 15th. Those peskey fingers don’t always cooperate. He said "three" but had to coax that third finger out of the thumb’s grip to match.
Here is the 3 generation home repair team. Poppy’s goal is to help son with home improvement projects and son will, if God wills the time, teach the son of son of Pop how to install a door in a 75 year old house or whatever else needs doing. And a proud door it was by jimminy!
I went to WalMart today to play with the Kodak kiosk. I chose poorly, printing a single pic, not knowing how it all worked at which point I allowed a woman to print her pix for observation purposes so I could learn. Too bad for me she printed a zillion twillion pix. So I waited and generously allowed another woman to print from her handy dandy little camera chippy which didn’t read. Then, having noticed that a nice man was also waiting, I let him print his umpty-zoolian pix ahead of me and wouldn’t you know it, the other lady, who BTW hadn’t stopped talking over the last hundred hours, wanted to edge in front of me to see if by chance her little camera chippy would maybe read this time which it mercifully didn’t. Forty-five minutes and $16 worth of prints later, I walked out of the store, turned the AC to minus 20 farenheit and headed for the cave — er — home.
It’s a disagreeable 9pm + and I am typo-ing my way into oblivion. Excuse me while I escape to the snore chamber. See ya with more my-grandchildren-are-the-most-fascinating-people-on-the-planet pictures. (They are, y’know)
Jiggity Jig
Ok. I told you I’d look up the phrase on google. I did. And I waded through (ON DIAL-UP) eight, count them, EIGHT pages of other bloggers who had travelled and used the same phrase for their home again opening post!
Help! Where did that phrase come from? It’s late, I’m going to bed, but trust me, I will not lose sleep over it.
Is it Friday yet?
I’ve been putting in 10 to 11 hour days this week making up for missing Monday without pay and now am working on offsetting the 16th, 17th, and 18th with a little overtime into next week as well. That’s the long version of "I’m whipped." Honey is in Boston at a trade show this weekend earning overtime to make up for what I won’t be able to contribute to the checking account. No whining. The trip was worth it and I wish we’d been able to stay two weeks instead of just one. Someday.
The pics are still on disks. Yeah, yeah. I work across the street from WalMart and had it on my list all week to take them in for printing. So I was in WalMart tonight after work but had taken the disks out of the purse. And by stopping at WM I was late getting home which doesn’t really matter when I’m the only one in the house.
This weekend. This weekend I will catch up on sleep, laundry, the blog WITH pictures, take total charge of the remote, and shuffle about in bare feet. Maybe I’ll get dressed. Or not.
Okay, just a little about the reunion. I picked up my name tag but Honey’s grad pic was on it instead of mine which is logical since it’s not my town or school. I commented that I don’t look like that. She smiled and said neither does Stan. True. He’s still cute to me though.
Also featured in the entry will be the visit with the home town family with special mention of Honey’s brother’s wife who is struggling with the progress of Alzheimer’s disease, one of those situations no one really wants to think about or be around. We are all linked to someone afflicted with it if only through an acquaintence or friend.
See y’all later this weekend. Oh, shoot! I just missed Monk!
Home again, home again
jiggity jig 931 miles one way. (Where did that little ditty come from? I think I’ll google it when I’m done here)
Anyway….
In the last entry I mentioned going to a nephew’s house for a birthday party. What a pile of bedbugs. Fun, friendly, happy bedbugs and I am one of them.
My sister has 5 grown sons. #1, Jaimie, #2, Schon, our host, and #5, Jordan, were at the party. #3, Jason, was attending to his wife after their 3rd, Hawthorne Russel, was delivered via C-section on Tuesday the 15th. #4, Robin, was still in the hospital fighting for his life having overdosed and being brought back after 8 minutes of no heartbeat. More about Robbie separately.
The birthday was for Sam, 8, Schon’s firstborn. In attendance was …… oh, man, don’t make me list everyone — they were ALL OVER the place!! I took pictures too. And that’s another thing! The digital camera world — and we have an older one generously given to us by our daughter’s fiance, Chip. The image is captured two full seconds after we all say cheese and the button is pushed and anything can change. What we aren’t used to is checking the image and saying “Nope, try again Bucko!” before we let the subject(s) wander off at 50mph. For example, my sister brought Jason’s two girls to the party, one of whom has big Frodo eyes. We tried gathering her, Schon’s 5 & 8 yr olds, The Bug, me, Camille (3) and Lily with the big Frodo eyes. The phrase “herding cats” comes to mind. Stan snapped it, declared it good, and when I checked the collection in the camera somewhere around Rockford, I saw that Lily’s head was down and we captured the part in her hair. (eyeroll)
The Bug is social to say the least. We didn’t know how he would travel with just Nan and Pop but he was great. We get there and all we had to do was walk in the house. He sniffed out the potato chips, the cookies and the cousins — pick-a-cousin and follow down to the family/toy room. Half of our time was asking if anyone had seen our grandchild. More than once I worried that Randy would be really ticked if we lost his kid.
Randy and my sister’s 5th, Gobie aka Jordan, are 3 months apart and spent quite a bit of time together growing up. So when I saw him there, I handed him my cell phone and dialed up The RanMan so they could talk. Oh, and Gobie, tell Ran that his son is downstairs playing with girl toys. They have a great little pink vanity with a brush and a fake hair blower and did Drew ever like them. I heard a distinct “NOOOOOO!” on the other end of the phone line.
Also in attendance was my other sister, Sharon, and her daughter, Laurie, and family of four. Laurie’s daughter, Emily, is gorgeous and qualifies for the convent school unless they can get her to ugly down some. The braces aren’t enough.
It was the chaos that inspires. The party was in River Falls, WI, about an hour’s drive from Bug’s house. We left about 9 or so and worried a bit that he would crash and throw off his sleep schedule. Hardly. The Bug is nocturnal and doesn’t want to miss ANYTHING. He was awake, ready for games, playing with his MacDonald’s happy meal treasure chest, lost the key, I want my jammies, Nanny, key Nanny, where key, light on, key Nanny, there’s Daddy’s TV tower (thank you, God) where key Nanny, light off Nanny, peek aboo, and so on, but no crying. Such a good and FUN little boy! We brought him home sweaty, dirty feet, tired and we found the key. When he comes to our house we’re watching The Little Rascals and The Three Stooges. What are grandparents for anyway?
Tune in soon for fun at the 40th class reunion. (Who are all these old people?)
One more day with the munchkins
We have another new game. It’s called Tip Over Poppy.
The routine is that Bug (the 3-yr-old) is to stay in bed or at least in his room until 7am. This let’s mommy and daddy get a last wink after various night feedings. The rule still holds when grandparents are visiting both for consistency for the 3-yr-old and the tired, creeky grandparents’ need for that last wink as well.
Nana has been assigned the nursery futon, Poppy the downstairs futon. 7:00.000001 and I open my eyes to a grinning Bug. "Hi Nana. Where’s Poppy?" The child has no clock in his room and can’t tell time anyway. How does that work?
"Poppy’s downstairs. Go get him" is followed by foot-thumps, grrrr’s, giggles, and repeated Oh, noooo’s.
Tip Over Poppy starts with "Help me! Help me!" Pop then sits up as if to escape. Step two is "Rahrrr" and a charge. Step three is a body tackle toppling a helpless Poppy. Follow-up is two or three rolls and simultaneous tickling. Repeat, repeat, repeat until someone (probably Poppy) thinks of something else to do usually involving food.
This afternoon Pop and I are to meet with some of my side of the family 2 hrs into Wisconsin; tomorrow is Honey’s 40th class reunion 2 hrs the other direction. We will be spending the night there with Honey’s brother, leaving way too early, stopping one more time here before hitting the 14 hour trail. If we go the way we came, we’ll stop and retrieve the eggs we left in our friend’s frig at the empty farm house. If we go our usual route, we will be camping in Bloomington or maybe Indianapolis.
Time keeps pace with the Concord. Giggle when you can.
Safe arrival
We pulled into the driveway at 10:30 central time Sunday morning. We would have been here sooner if I hadn’t gotten stuck in Iowa behind people doing of all things, the speeeed limit. Could they not tell I was on a Destination Mission?? It is truly a 14 hour trip if one stops only for gas. However, this time we varied the route to include cruising through downtown Cameron, my growing-up town and stay the night at a friend’s farm house. But since we arrived at the farm house way too early and with way too much driving energy left, we decided to push on as far as we could which turned out to be Cedar Rapids. Beyond that lay only flat farms, no commerce, and exhaustion. The whole idea of the Cameron overnight stop was to save motel expense. We did the back and forth pro/con thing and decided to arrive in Rochester in the morning instead of the afternoon.
The three-year-old is adorable and pure entertainment, the 3-week-old wins the Precious Award. We will be taking pictures galore.
On a more intense note, simultaneous with this visit, my nephew was hospitalized. He is gradually fighting his way out of a coma, blinking and hand squeezing on command, a real answer to prayers from all over the country, considering he was given a 10% chance of living and a "likelihood" of permanent brain damage. I will be seeing the rest of the crew on Friday anyway but I would like to visit at the hospital, schedule permitting. We’ll see.
So far Poppy and I have marched around the basement banging the tamborine, singing the Mickey Mouse Club theme song while Drew banged the drum. We’ve also played "Toys", including but not limited to driving the schoolbus over the mountains and across the bridge that invariably "GOES OUT" and the bus plunges into the river giving all aboard headaches. This morning Poppy removed his eyeball and rolled it around his mouth before he stuck it back in.
I don’t remember having this much fun when my kids were three.
Snooze button
Not being mechanically minded and having momentarily glanced the other way while technology screamed past me, I have a simple question: How many times can one hit the snooze button on the average alarm clock before it will either turn off completely or break down?
That was a rhetorical question. I have no interest in the literal answer. Here’s a better one: How many attacks and threats of attacks since 1979’s hostile takeover of the US embassy in Tehran (p.s., one of the gunmen is now Iran’s vicious leader) can we ignore before we’re destroyed in our sleep?
Several months ago the search team at our church found what has turned out to be an excellent choice for a youth minister, Tim Ellis, a young man in his 20’s, well trained, and with a heart for teens and their challenges. When he came to us he brought his fiance, a very pretty, slim young woman who reflects the love of Christ from within. When she came with Tim to the front of the sanctuary to be introduced, I noticed some scarring on her leg and arm, deep purple, not straight, not small, almost like stab wounds. Thoughts collided, thoughts of child abuse, a car accident, was she mugged? Worse.
On the way home I asked Stan if he noticed. Don’t you remember? She’s one of the two sisters that were in the bombing in the London subway last year. She was close enough to see the bomber just before he detonated. She survived with miscellaneous schrapnel wounds because between her and the bomber was a woman whose body absorbed the shock as she was disintegrated.
Katie has undergone several surgeries, the most recent one done on her ankle this summer. She hopes that is the last one. The scars will stay.
I hear that August 22nd is an important date on the muslim calendar. Allegedly Mohammed ascended into heaven in such a way that he lit up the sky. The plan thwarted in England was a dry run before they were to celebrate just that by lighting the sky with at least 12 airliners loaded with infidels (that’s us) detonated simultaneously. The terrorists have been patiently planning. But when the plan was leaked by one of their own, a muslim woman, and calls were made to the Pakistani leader, he said to run with it. Too late. This time.
I remember saying to my coworkers on 9/12/01 that I didn’t think there would be another major attack until the terrorists felt we were comfortable again. Well …….. were you? Do you wonder how Scotland Yard nabbed the subway bombers so quickly? Does the presence of at least 50,000 cameras in the London area alone give you a clue?
It’s late. Stuff intended to be loaded up for our trip to MN tomorrow is scattered and piled, to use Doris Murphy’s venacular, from stem to gudgeon. Look up gudgeon in the dictionary. Some of Mom’s sayings made no sense whatsoever. But I see what she was driving at.
See y’all sometime Sunday.
Bedtime already!!
Working an extra hour here and there, a last minute haircut this morning at 7:30am, check my blog buddies, throw some darks in the washer (as I type, the spin cycle is shaking the monitor), and it’s time to turn in. What is today? Wednesday? And what genius put the d in front of the n in wednesday? Who first spelled February and were the r and the u a transposition error?
I’m tired. Do y’all remember how exhausting it is to watch screens download with dial up? I think I’m the last person on planet earth with dial up internet connection. I’ve paid exactly one bill and was tossed out trying to pay another. Of course I didn’t get home until 7:30.
The list is out there in the living room somewhere and Honey wants to know where the 35mm camera went. Is it on the list? No? Then, I don’t know.
The worst part: switching purses from the crocheted bag which I’ve come to scorn to the big pocketed bag, packing bandaids for cuts that won’t happen and aspirin for headaches that might. It’s a good thing I’m not flying. I don’t think Kroger plastic bags are acceptible carry-ons.
Do you realize I’m turning into my mother, the authority of the last-minute-paper-bag-in-the-back-seat? Together, Mom and Dad were the authorities on how to get lost on a checkerboard WITH a map!
Don’t laugh. But for the grace of God go thee. And thee could go there someday.
G’night.
