Blog to the Bone

Homeschooling

2010-07-23T21:27:00.002-05:00

I never thought I would be a homeschooler. Homeschooling was for religious fundamentalists, back-to-nature extremists, and parents who believed their kids were the new Einsteins. Homeschooling was for the extraordinarily anal and the extraordinarily loose, not for ordinary people like me. I lack the organization, the discipline, the follow-through to push my kids through the scientific method, daily baths and well-rounded meals. I lack the easy-going, stream-of-consciousness, follow-your-bliss free spirit to focus on Japanese folklore for three weeks followed by concurrent units on locking mechanisms, archery and sculpting clay. I lack the patience. I lack the desire. Or so I thought. Because this fall, I will join the ranks of those educational Froot Loops.

Kayleigh will be in 11th grade. The plan is for her to take art and electronics at the high school and the rest of her subjects at home. With me. State law allows her to take two classes at her home district school while being homeschooled, as long as there is space in the classes she wants. The school can choose to allow her to take more than two, but they don’t have to. She is required to take 875 instruction hours per school year and study, minimally, language arts, reading, math, science, social studies and health in sequentially progressive courses.

We’re busily gathering advice from other homeschoolers and researching curriculum. In some respects it’s exciting. Kayleigh is delighted at the thought of studying history that does not involve the American Revolution or Civil War. But in other ways, it’s pretty daunting. I don’t really remember much about chemistry. I mean, when’s the last time I needed to know the atomic charge of calcium? The last time I took chemistry.

It’s not just daunting academically, either. Kayleigh and I have a lot in common, and I think we get each other. But we also are very different. We’re motivated in different ways and our interests are often miles apart. Basically, we can drive each other absolutely nuts. I know that’s true of any mother-daughter pair, but we’ll be stuck together. She can’t slam a door when she doesn’t like it that I’ve asked her 14 times to focus on the limit of X as it approaches infinity rather than what her Achilles tendon feels like when she repeatedly bangs it against the metal barstool – just as I can’t throw my hands up in frustration and stuff my face with chocolate in said situation. Just wait until we’re both in the throes of PMS. Eek.

Kayleigh is a smart kid with a unique temperament. She also has ADD. Although she has usually done well academically, she has never really gotten along with school. School is very regimented, and there is little room for creativity or exploration. She has the rule-centeredness of most first children, but her head is happiest, and perhaps most productive, in the clouds – or, more accurately, in the worlds she created in her mind. She did not excel at rote memorization of math facts, and a packet of instructions for a history project or an English paper that basically tells her line-by-line what to write is completely overwhelming. But she slogs on. The perfectionist in her has kept her going until recently.

She is a well-behaved child. She doesn’t need to be lectured, yet again, on what constitutes acceptable behavior at school, unlike the children who have cut her hair, spit in her face, sworn at her and dubbed her a reject. Hell, even the rejects have finally rejected her. She was often unaware when other children tried to befriend her, likely a result of the ADD. As time passed, they stopped trying. The teachers she didn’t enjoy have called her aloof and oversensitive. The ones who saw past her shyness and self-doubt think she is bright, talented and a joy to teach. They encouraged her to open up more, but after years as a square peg, she gets no satisfaction from participating. Even now that her classmates simply see past her and she could probably say and do anything without social recourse, she remains silent. It is her defense and offense.

I hope that in the last two years of high school we can give her opportunities for meaningful exploration and expression free from the bounds of brick walls, lengthy assignments designed to prepare her for her next standardized test, and judgmental classmates. We are proceeding with hope and excitement, as well as a bit of fear and nervousness. I think we’ll be OK.

To Dad

2010-06-21T16:31:00.000-05:00

If you were here on Father’s Day
I’d feel your rough hands and bristly whiskers
I’d light your cigar and play some Spike Jones
I’d broil you a steak and buy you a beer
If you were here.

If you were here on Father’s Day
I’d watch you wind your watch at your dresser
I’d smell the Old Spice on your neck
I’d listen to you play the piano and not even plug my ears
If you were here

If you were here on Father’s Day
I’d ask about when you met Mom
I’d show you your growing grandkids
I’d tell you how treasured you were and are and always will be
If you were here

I love you.

40! Happy birthday?

2010-05-28T14:02:00.005-05:00

This is my birthday cookie (and my unwashed hair). The cookie was huge, as you can see, and delicious. Highly recommended: Lady Fortunes. They make custom cookies for all occasions. Cool.

I recently turned 40. I'm not thrilled.

Turning 30 wasn't bad at all. I tend to think of the 30s as the heyday of adulthood. You're still young, but you've moved past your 20s, where people still treat you like you're 17 and don't know anything whether you know anything or not. You're often building a family and a career and your body hasn't betrayed you yet, or at least not much.

But 40. Forty is a time to reflect on how much youth you wasted, all the doors you've closed, a time to feel the creaks in your joints and examine the wrinkles on your neck - when did those get there? Your children are older and snottier and demanding more of your money and sucking you of your innate protective tendencies. Your parents are older and dottier and demanding you clean their bathrooms after you've picked up their prescriptions.

But 40. Forty is also a time to exploit your withering hormones and tell everyone exactly into which dark crevice(s) they can stick their, uh, demands. Forty is a time to do the things you were too afraid or too broke to do when you were younger. It's a time to re-live some of your glory days or live them the way you would have if you hadn't been busy with building that career and family. It's a time to reacquaint yourself with your partner now that the kids aren't sleeping between you. It's a time to eat at decent restaurants instead of cheap, family-friendly ones.

And it's a time to buy some new toys. Men get themselves a nice new sports car. And women, that is, this woman, got herself a nice new (used) motorcycle.

This is Julia Joy. I always wanted a Julia. And Joy goes without saying. Red. It matches the drum set I got when I turned 30. Heh.

I had a motorcycle years ago, but I sold it when Kayleigh was little. I wasn't using it and we needed the money. I always kind of regretted it, and every spring and fall since then I've looked through the want ads to see what's out there. This year, Julia Joy was out there. I love her and will take very good care of her.

Those milestone birthdays are so good for giving us an excuse to spoil ourselves. Bring on 50, baby.

Just give me a good 10 years first.

Tilt

2010-05-27T11:19:00.003-05:00

Food has been a struggle of mine for, well, most of my life. I didn't eat enough or I ate too much or I didn't eat the right foods. I just could never do it right. You'd think feeding yourself wouldn't be so difficult. Open mouth, insert food, chew, swallow, repeat. Stop when full instead of repeating, literally, ad nauseum.

I climbed on the scale today after six months of stress eating. You could call it comfort eating, but I haven't been comfortable – not with my choices, not in my clothes, not with my life. But compulsive eating is how I deal with my problems. It's not dealing, though, is it. I stuff my face with food and stuff those difficult emotions down with it.

It's definitely a learned behavior. In fact, as a kid, I didn't eat much at all. I liked most food, though, and was growing properly. But my brother Clinton teased me because of how little I ate. "You don't eat enough to keep a bird alive," he would say. Given my family history of enormous women, a slender girl might be cheered rather than ridiculed. But, no. It didn't occur to me that my brother was rather overweight and had his own food issues. I was a kid.

Still, I heard stories of my sister Cynthia eating 16 pieces of French toast for lunch. "We had to go to the neighbors for more bread!" my mother would say, a twinkle in her eye as she reminisced. I always asked how big the bread was but was just told it was bread size. I couldn't possibly have eaten 16 pieces of French toast. I could hardly finish one piece of French toast. Think of the size of my little stomach. Cynthia was much taller than I was (and is and am, in fact) and thinner, too, and could eat 16 pieces of French toast. My parents raved about her boisterous exploits in and out of the kitchen and enjoyed her company, and as a kid, I felt less valued because I had a more moderate temperament and appetite. They would never joyfully regale anyone with stories about me eating 16 pieces of French toast.

As I got older, I started taking more food. I tried so, so hard to eat more. I thought I was supposed to. I thought everyone wanted me to eat more. Maybe they did. Maybe they didn't really care how much I ate. I don't know. I only know how I felt, and that was that I didn't eat enough to make my family happy. My dad would make meals and be angry that there were so many leftovers. My mom would pour me more milk and plop more meat on my plate without asking if I wanted more, declaring, "Milk, Amy," and "Meat, Amy." Yes. There it was.

Sometimes I would put the food in my mouth, chew it, then spit it into my napkin. Especially the meat. I just couldn't stand that gristly old beef roast my mother would make, so blackened and stringy. She got wise to that napkin trick, though, and scolded me. Other times I tried slipping my food onto other people's plates when they weren't looking. Again, moms have eyes in the backs of their heads, and it didn't work.

The only time food was ever taken away from me was when it was dessert. "Your eyes are bigger than your stomach," my dad would say. "You'll never finish all that," my mom would say as she'd snatch a good portion for herself.

When I was about 9, I noticed I was getting heavier. My thighs started rubbing together. It hurt and gave me a rash. On a particularly sweltering summer night, as I sat watching television in our dark, humid living room with a big bowl of strawberry swirl ice cream in my lap, my dad said, "Amy, you're fat!"

I looked down at my exposed belly and the bowl of ice cream I didn't even like but whose chill felt so good against my sticky skin. "No, I'm not," I said. He'd always been proud of my strength and athletic ability, and to have him think I was fat was a huge blow to my ego.

"You are!" he said.

"I am not!" I yelled. He laughed and walked away. I wouldn't talk to him the rest of the night. I knew how he felt about fat people. Fat people weren't athletes; they were sissies and slobs. I didn't want to disappoint him.

I probably weighed about 70 pounds.

My parents lived through the Depression. If there was something salvageable on a piece of food, they salvaged it. And they wouldn't buy more until that nasty shit was gone. So, bruised, sour, rotting apples sat in the refrigerator drawer next to shriveling oranges and darkening bananas. Bread would get so dry that the jam, which had nearly reverted to juice, would run right through it. I used to take empty lunch boxes to school and beg food off my friends. I just couldn't stand the ick factor of our sandwiches. And there was no way my parents would buy me a loaf of Wonder Bread and a jar of Jif. If my dad didn't like it, we didn't buy it.

Once at the grocery store, in the most thrilling of aisles, the cereal aisle, my dad told me to choose whatever I wanted. I looked up at him, knowing he didn't really mean that. He meant, choose Corn Flakes, Bran Flakes, Shredded Wheat or Cheerios. He probably figured I'd go with the Cheerios since, to him, they were junk food. But I kept a close eye on him. I knew I couldn't get the Sugar Pops or Cocoa Puffs. When he was beginning to grow more impatient, he looked away, and I snagged a box of generic frosted flakes. I put it in the cart backwards so he couldn't see what it was. He saw the plain, blue box and was likely assured I hadn't gotten the Froot Loops or Cookie Crisp. I made sure to keep the box surrounded with other groceries as we shopped.

When we got to the check-out, he took the box out of the cart and finally saw what it was. His face turned red and he held it up. "Who put this in our cart? We don't get this crap!" Then he looked down at me.

"You told me I could get anything I wanted," I said, and I started to cry. I was embarrassed to cry, upset that he was angry about a box of cereal, mad that I was right he hadn't really meant I could get what I wanted, only what he wanted me to want. He relented. Kids are famous for grocery store meltdowns, and he caved with grace.

As the years went by, he loosened up about cold cereal. I think I was about 20 when he finally read the nutrition information on the Shredded Wheat box. He said, "There's not much junk in Shredded Wheat, but there's not much of anything else, either." What an epiphany to have in your 70s.

As a teen, I quickly learned I got attention from the popular kids if I had a big bag of Skittles around. Or M&Ms. And you know how most teenage girls spend all their money on clothes? Not me. I spent it on food. I knew pizza delivery guys by name. I knew the best and worst delis and cafes, and I was the youngest person hanging out at Steep & Brew, the ultra-hip, dark and smoky, mostly gay coffee joint downtown. (It’s not like that anymore.) I had definitely learned how to eat more.

And it showed.

One of my former tennis teammates (former because I stopped going out for sports) jogged past my dad and me one day. He said, “You should do something like that. When you’re active you eat a lot, and when you stop being so active, it’s hard to stop eating as much as you did, and you gain weight.”

He was probably trying to be helpful. But it hurt. Every 16-year-old girl wants her dad to tell her what a pig she’s become. Right?

I am sort of momentum-driven, so when I had the fortune of getting mono in 11th grade, the weight that fell off from being so sick stayed off. And I lost more. And once I got out of high school, I headed to Mexico. I can tell you, if you want to lose weight, there’s nothing like a couple months of diarrhea to strip the pounds away.

How awesome it was to come home and buy new clothes and get a real job and meet people who liked me. It was a confidence booster, and I kept shedding fat.

When I shrunk to a size 9, my sister and mom told me I was too thin and they were worried about me. Now, as I mentioned, my sister is a few inches taller than I am. Yet, she wore a size 9 even after her second child was born. Apparently I was supposed to be the fat one. It pissed me off.

My weight stabilized there for several years. I ate what I wanted when I wanted and ignored my family’s incessant remarks. I loved oat bran and pizza and seldom ate candy or cookies or ice cream. My mom told me I was no fun at all.

And then I met Eric.

At work one day, I bought a Hershey bar from the vending machine. Oh, it was perfect. The chocolate was so sweet and sour and it melted just right in my mouth. I had another. Oh, man. It was good.

When I got up to get another one, my friend Rekha said, “Amy, my god, what is going on?”

I stopped and looked at her. “What?” I said. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with me.

“I’ve never seen you eat a candy bar, ever, and now you’re eating three? When you want a snack you eat a bagel. What is wrong with you?” She was laughing, but she meant it.

I laughed it off. Then I realized I was eating instead of dealing with this craziness called love and the fact that I would have to hurt my boyfriend because there was no way I could stay with him after meeting Eric. I didn’t get the third candy bar. I don’t remember what I told Rekha.

I did put a little weight on, and my family was pleased. Eric told me he wouldn’t want me to be any heavier. He liked skinny women. He thought it meant they took care of themselves and had a healthy relationship with food. (He no longer believes that to be the case. And he's always been totally on my side, supportive, gentle and caring.)

I was a pleasant size 8 when Eric and I got married. And then the weight started coming up again with all that eating out new couples do. And then I got pregnant, and that was pretty much the end of being thin ever again. God. Oh, sure, I lost most of the 55 pounds that I gained with Kayleigh. Then my dad got sick (sicker) and then he died and I ate my way through my grief. I lost some of that weight. It was harder. Eric and Kayleigh put the pressure on for another kid. I told Eric I wanted to lose some more weight before we attempted conception. I hit my target weight, which was more than I wanted to weigh, but it was acceptable and reachable, and we had at it.

I tried harder not to get so big with that next kid. And it worked. My doctor congratulated me for keeping my weight under control, that it was hard to do.

My weight went up and down after Kelsey was born, but last year I tried rather successfully to lose it again. I bought some smokin’ jeans and girly tops and felt OK about myself.

And then my mom’s health fell apart, and my diet fell apart with it. I can feel that I’m almost at the end of my grief bingeing, although I’ve been thinking that for a few months. My clothes don’t fit. I weigh almost as much as I did when I was at my most pregnant with Kelsey. My percent body fat is obscene. I don’t want to turn into my mom, whose health would have been a completely different story had she kept her weight down and moved her body. I don’t want to do that to myself or to my family. But I can’t seem to stop eating and it just makes me feel bad.

I love my mom. I love all my family. I want to honor them and the love we share by being better than I have been. I want to be healthy for all of us. It’s just so hard. Bad habits and coping mechanisms are pretty hard to overcome. It makes me feel weak for not being able to just put down the candy bar or turtle sundae or 5th slice of pizza and stop. What am I getting from food that it’s worth the pain and the guilt and giant, roly-poly belly? (I do like my boobs. They’re big and soft and squooshy boobs like I always thought I’d have, not the little pimples I had when I was young and trim.) I honestly don’t know. I feel less frantic, less afraid. Maybe I just feel less.

Because what I have to feel these days isn’t very pleasant. My parents are dead, my daughter is sick, my husband’s health is always on the edge, I just turned 40. Midlife crisis? I suppose. Then I think about people with real problems and feel like I should be grateful, and I am, but apparently not enough.

I just need to move my ass, shut my mouth and get that momentum going in the right direction again.

My new motorcycle should help with that. But that’s a story for another day.

My Mom, the end

2010-04-18T19:01:00.004-05:00

Donna Jean Boughey Wagner
July 16, 1925 - February 24, 2010

So, it's taken me a long time to try to write this. I'm not sure how much detail I want to rehash. It's strange getting used to someone being gone. It's strange going to my mom's house, sorting her things into piles for her children, the inevitable garage sale, and Good Will.

I hate seeing her clothes. Her jacket was slung over her walker in her living room, just waiting for her to come back, but she won't. I avoided washing a bag of her laundry that I'd taken to my house from the hospital, and when I finally opened it, only a couple of weeks ago, the clothes still smelled like her. It was a gut punch, and I bawled my eyes out, clutching her stained sweatpants as I leaned over the washer.

What was she thinking those last few weeks? Was she thinking? She couldn't speak well, she'd been very confused and hallucinating. As it became clear her body wasn't going to work the way she wanted it to, she just seemed to check out. She withdrew, settled into her own mind.

We had to just let her go. We honored her wishes as set forth in her health care directive, and we felt like we were killing her. It was freeing to have decisions already made, and made by her, so when we were asked how to proceed, we could say, this is what she wanted. At the same time, we likely hastened her death in doing as she asked, and there's no feeling of liberation in that. There is the knowledge, though, that she suffered less and that we did as she wanted. Still, what if she changed her mind? We'll never know.

I talked to her before I left her the last time. I told her she was a good mom, that I was glad she was my mom. I thanked her for giving me a good life and teaching me everything she had. I thanked her for being a good grandma. I told her I hoped Heaven was real and that Dad was there waiting for her. I told her I'd miss her. I told her I loved her. I touched her face, feeling her full cheeks, her wrinkly forehead, her round chin. Then I kissed her goodbye and went home. She died a few hours later.

So now we're all getting used to life without her. We've been busy trying to settle her estate, and I've enjoyed seeing my siblings more. It's funny the different memories we all have.

My kids had a hard time, and it brought up a lot of memories for Eric of his mother's death and life. We've held one another a lot in the last several months. Love and hugs are good healers. And so is time. Sometimes it seems like it's been so long since she died. Other days I remind myself it really hasn't been long at all.

Now Mother's Day is coming up. What a strange day it will be without her.

Eric says it's time for My Mom, Part 3

2010-02-06T17:00:00.003-06:00

Today I got a call from the VA Hospital informing me that Power of Attorney was activated, and I am named in that capacity. Any decisions regarding my mom's treatment would be mine to make. What a bizarre feeling.

The plan was, she was going to come stay with me starting February 4. But before we got her room ready and before she was ever discharged from the nursing home, she got a little goofy. She has had trouble distinguishing dreams from reality, and her motor control and speech have deteriorated. On Tuesday, the nurse called the doctor about her motor control, speech and dazed mental status, and the doctor ordered her to the hospital, suspecting a stroke. It's been a rapid slide since.

I hadn't given the VA the most recent POA papers my mom had signed, which also names my sister as POA, but I told the doctor over the phone that she was on her way with said papers in hand. Now we share the responsibility on an either/or basis. I think my mom chose us because she planned to stay in our homes and we'd need the ability to act on her behalf.

I don't think she'll be staying with either of us any time soon.

Today, my sister says, my mom was traveling. She was heading to Venezuela, with a stopover in Miami, to visit her boyfriend, Cesar, who is 86. She also picked some strawberries today. Yesterday she planted roses and paid her bills and was quite annoyed that she didn't have any stamps or underwear. She saw my dad and our neighbor Lenny, who died in 1987. There were birds in her room. She believes she is at home.

Now, some of this is plain hilarious. Seriously. Cesar? He speaks English, by the way. It's also difficult to watch her struggle to figure out what the hell is going on, and she really tries hard. She held a pen in her hand and worked diligently to write out a bill to UW Health. She was apparently satisfied with herself, so I snatched the paper away from her as soon as she paused and told her I'd put a stamp on it at home. Later, after I left, she lined up tissues on her table and tried to write on those, paying more bills, just like a little girl playing pretend.

It's not heartbreaking to me to see her mind go, and I'm surprised at that. She is busy and mostly at ease and content, except for her underwear and the stamps, or whatever the problem of the day is. I think if she were aware that she wasn't really there it would be heartbreaking.

What is more heartbreaking is seeing how my kids and my siblings are dealing with it. She's our mom, you know? Kelsey said it made her sad that she can't make cookies and cakes with Grandma anymore. Kayleigh is sad, too, and worried Grandma is going to die, and angry that Eric is supporting me – to her mind – to the exclusion of everyone else's needs.

On top of it all, I'm horrifically sick. I don't want to go down there and pass on my germs to her. She just doesn't need that. So I'm hunkered in bed with Tylenol and cough drops and a chocolate malt (thank you, Eric), resting, coughing, sneezing, moaning, and hoping I get better soon, just as we're hoping the same for my mom.

The doctors are hoping that a different dose of antibiotics will knock out an infection and help clear her mind. We'll just have to wait and see what happens.

My Mom, part two

2010-01-21T20:46:00.003-06:00

First, thanks to everyone for all the support and love you've given me and my family. We've all needed it, and we all appreciate it. Thank you. I'm not usually so out there with my emotions, but I had to unload.

Second, my sister spent a lot of time at the hospital and nursing home with my mom over her winter school break, and I am so grateful to her for that. It's not the way she had planned on spending that month, but she was such a comfort to my mom – and to me. Knowing she was there and having her stay at my place was a huge stress-reducer. We spent mornings chatting increasingly later, and she cleaned my microwave and kitchen sink! I told her to bring her clean-freak friend next time and take care of my whole house.

So, my mom just finished two weeks at the nursing home and expects to be there another week or so. She's been making slow but good progress in rehab. She was frustrated at how slowly they were taking it, but they explained that many exercises put strain on the heart, and with a new pacemaker, they have to very gradually increase the workload. She seemed OK with that explanation. Prior to that, my sister reported, she'd been a little snotty sometimes about the exercises she was doing. My mom tends to poo-poo things as silly or pathetic, but it seemed like she got more on board after being told why things were moving at the pace they were.

Despite progress, she's still very weak and increasingly dizzy and light-headed. We spent ALL DAY at the doctor today, and they're trying to figure out what could be causing the dizziness. It seems to accompany some pretty serious dinginess on her part. She couldn't find words today, and mispronounced a lot of them. It was as if she were totally hammered – like, about-to-pass-out hammered. (I've never seen her that hammered, by the way. She just falls asleep when she drinks.) She also couldn't remember her Social Security Number, which really, really made her mad.

It was nice to kidnap her from the nursing home for the day. We had an appointment at a clinic I didn't know existed with a doctor I'd met before at an urgent care. I think she might have been the one who took care of Eric after a bee sting. Anyway, she was fantastic, very kind, patient, and thorough. Most doctors can't seem to wait to get out of the office, but she really took her time, asked a lot of questions, and seemed to genuinely care about what she was doing and for whom. Nice.

The afternoon was spent at the VA hospital in cardiology. (I even managed to call a couple of sources while she was having an EKG. Smokin'.) Her pacemaker is working fine, but they changed a setting to see if it would help her light-headedness. We ended up spending a little more time there than expected because they really want to try to figure out the dizziness. We'll be going back in a month.

Between appointments we went out to lunch. She'd been so excited to go out to eat. Institutional food is just the pits, although she says the nursing home is better than the VA, which she considers a wonderful incentive to anorexia. Bummer that her food was a little cold, even after she asked them to warm it up again. She did, however, have two cups of real coffee, not nursing home coffee, which she suspects is really decaf even though they say it isn't.

Fussing with the wheelchair was a hoot. It has two different foot rests, which bugs her, and I had to figure out how to take them off and put them on again. I also had to hoist this wheelchair into my little bitty car. Cheap entertainment, folks.

Anyway, she made it through the day, tired but ticking. I guess that makes two of us.

Balance and flexibility: life's gymnastics

2010-01-16T13:31:00.004-06:00

This has been a busy work week and still a tense one with my mom in the nursing home. I don't like having such important parts of my life so uncertain.

I thought freelancing would be a good way to have some flexibility in my personal and work lives. I wanted to work but also be available to my family. And mostly that's the case. But then I got a whole bunch of work all at once, and the thought of all that money and more recent clips sounded good to me. Gotta keep your name out there, right? It was also right around Christmas, which is a rather busy time, that I got all these jobs. I figured that'd be OK, though. Then my mom had her problems, and all of that piled together made me think freelancing wasn't quite as flexible as I thought.

For now, balance. I do what I can for whom. We'll see what the future holds when it unfolds.

My Mom

2010-01-07T21:55:00.003-06:00

How do you watch the woman you care most about in the world slowly slip away?

On Wednesday I drove my mother to a nursing home. My siblings and I knew she never wanted to go to a nursing home. She protested, but on the day she relented. Part of her seemed to know she needed rehab after losing a lot of strength during a recent illness. The rest of her was mad as hell, resentful, surprised, betrayed, defeated, placating, depressed, disbelieving, sad.

When my husband and I bought this house, we bought it with her (and our) later years in mind. Everything is on one level – just right for an old fart or even a young fart. Walking through the first time, she said, "This is my room," referring to the room that is now my daughter Kelsey's.

Over time, my mom has grown weaker, slower, sleepier. Her body and her breath are shorter. Her eyes don't work, her hands don't work, her legs don't work. She slurs her words. She eats poorly. She smells bad. But she maintains, even now, that she is well enough to live in her own home, even after telling us on Christmas Day that she would need to move in with one of us kids soon.

She can't even get in bed by herself. She shuffles and grunts and wheezes from her bed to her chair to the toilet with assistance, and a lot of it. She falls asleep mid-sentence. There were times last week, in the hospital, when she woke, she couldn't distinguish dreams from reality. Not all of her dreams are nice, little old lady, cookie-baking, sweet grandma dreams. Her paranoia and lack of logic frightened all of us. Fortunately, her mind seems to have cleared.

And now she lies in a hospital bed in a little corner room in an institution full of other women and men unable to care for themselves, with the hope that rehabilitation will make her strong enough to go home again. An activities chart hangs on the door: Bingo, cards, sing-alongs. They wear bibs at meal time, and scarcely a meal goes by without that drab, drippy, lifeless fruit cocktail. She will stay with the bingo, fruit cocktail and bibs until she stops making gains in rehab or until 20 days is up, when Medicare stops paying 100 percent, whichever comes first.

When the kids and I arrived last night for a visit, she was asleep in her bed, her food tray on her table over her lap, a mug of hot chocolate in her bent hands, resting on her chest. She didn't wake until I touched her head, running my hand through what is left of her coarse, white hair. She was happy to see us, but she didn't have much to say. She kept falling asleep. I imagine she was worn out after the activity of checking out of the VA hospital and into the nursing home. It's a lot of change, a lot of newness, none of it welcome.

Seeing her there, after driving her there, I feel like a traitor. I said she could live with me. I work a job that lets me choose to work or not so I could be more available. I bought this house, this plain rectangle, with her in mind. She expected to be welcome here, or with my sister or my late brother's family. She never wanted a nursing home.

"I'll never go to one of those places," she said. "My kids will take care of me. That's why you have kids."

I always believed it was my duty to care for her. She took care of me growing up. I owe her.

But it's more than obligation. It's also a privilege; an honor; a maddening, difficult, heartbreaking joy. I love her. I want to help her. And I failed her.

After she settled in, she lay in her bed and looked around at her little room. "So this is where I live now," she said. "Until I get better." We all hope she gets better.

She says she will not use her money to pay for her care. She wants us kids to have it, not a nursing home or at-home nurse. I think she will have to change her mind about that. She needs more assistance than we can give her ourselves. She should have put her house in trust or transferred ownership years ago. We talked with her about it years ago, but she just said she'd never go to a nursing home; they would drag her out of her house in a box, or her kids would take care of her. She should have taken better care of herself. She should have eaten right and kept her weight in control and gotten up off her ass and moved her body and stayed active and strong. But she didn't do any of these things. And now she is suffering for all of it. And so are we.

I imagine she will move in with my sister when she leaves the nursing home. My sister has no kids at home and she eats meat and she plays Scrabble and she talks more than I do and she seems less terrified than I am.

I hope my mom uses this time in the nursing home to get stronger. I am afraid she will just give up. I hope she forgives us for putting her there. I guess we'll see.

So, how do you watch the woman you care most about in the world slowly slip away? Sadly.

Looking for inspiration in the bottom of my blog

2009-12-23T22:31:00.004-06:00

Clearly, I've been neglecting blogging.

Go read my prison series. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

Check out grass jelly drink, one of my first posts. Marvel how much thinner I was and realize how fat I thought I was.

Some of my travel posts are cool. Or maybe it's just the photos I like. Whatever. The links are in the sidebar.

The ones relating to my brother I like a lot. Coca Cola Glass Lung cancer awareness We set up his fishing village under the Christmas tree today. I miss him.

"Eastwick" gets hanged

2009-11-10T08:21:00.004-06:00

ABC is burning "Eastwick" at the stake. The only prime time show I watch, "Eastwick" was just canceled after seven episodes. The show was cursed from the beginning.

First, I watch it. I watch it. I cancel things. "Eastwick" is only the latest casualty. I tuned in for silly reasons, namely Jaime Ray Newman, Paul Gross, and sex.

Jaime Ray Newman played Kristina Cassadine on "General Hospital." If it weren't for fan loyalty, I would never have watched "Eastwick" in the first place. I only started watching GH a few months ago, actually, after spending the last year or so watching clips of Newman's former GH costar Nancy Lee Grahn. I loved Nancy on "Santa Barbara" when I was a teen, and reconnected last year when I needed some distraction from the nightmares of school and general insanity.

Paul Gross is a god. Americans might remember him from "Due South," a show about a Canadian mounty in Chicago. I liked him best in "Slings and Arrows," a Canadian show so close to perfect my face is getting hot just thinking about it. He played Geoffrey Tennant, a nut job stage actor-turned artistic director who communicates with the ghost of his mentor/rival. The writing and acting absolutely crackled. Loved it.

And then there's the sex. "Eastwick" was the latest iteration of "The Witches of Eastwick." The book came first, and there was a rather successful movie, as well. Any time you put witches and demons together, you're probably going to get some sex. And I like sex. So I wanted to watch because I like to watch. And the show, in fact, had some fun and sexy moments.

A pleasant surprise was the humor. Well done. I was expecting more drama and fewer chortles. I'm sort of stingy with my laughter, but this show got me.

Also a nice surprise were the actors. Paul Gross and Jaime Ray Newman were known quantities for me, but I'd never seen Rebecca Romijn in anything before. She's pretty amazing. Also amazing was Lindsay Price, who I'd never heard of before. I'll definitely be on the watch for them, as well as Sara Rue, who isn't one of the witches, but the BFF for Lindsay's character.

So what killed this show besides me? There are a number of cliches we could blame, such as the line-up. It followed an entirely new comedy line-up on Wednesday. Maybe "Cougar Town" attracts a similar audience as "Eastwick," but I'm not convinced. I'm not watching "Cougar Town," a half-hour sit com about a forty-something woman lusting after much younger men, including high-schoolers. It's not funny to watch older guys have impure thoughts about young girls; it's equally unfunny when a woman is the lustful one. High school kids are just that – kids. Gross. Leave them alone. No, this show needed to follow something like "Desperate Housewives," which had a similar spunky, dramedic tone. And it definitely needed to follow an established series, preferably on a weekend, not be the last prime time offering on a mid-week night of all new shows.

Another problem is that "Eastwick" needed to leave the gates running, and it started at more of a meander. It's cool to do that in a book and let characters and story arcs develop. But on television, there's no time. You've got an hour to hook an audience and give them a reason to return. After the first episode, it was apparent this show would not make it. There was not enough punch, not enough to make me invest in those characters, and I really wanted to invest in them. I wanted to, so I did, and came back for every episode. But without that pre-existing investment, there was little reason to tune back in, unfortunately. After a few episodes, the show was starting to find its stride, and although it's not quite there yet, the potential exists for some really good stuff. There's drama, mystery, humor, all wrapped in and around a pretty quirky idea for network TV – that is, these three surprise witches summon the devil.

At least it's not another crime drama or hospital show. Or maybe that's why it didn't make it. Whatever the reason, I'll be sorry to see it go.

November is Lung Cancer Awareness Month

2009-11-01T13:26:00.006-06:00

This is my brother Clint. Clint died two years ago after a shockingly short battle with lung cancer.

November is National Lung Cancer Awareness Month. Lung cancer kills more people every year than breast, prostate, colon, liver, kidney, and melanoma cancers combined, yet it receives a fraction of the research funding. October was Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Pink ribbons were ubiquitous, from the corrugated insulator on my coffee cup at Caribou to specially marked packages of M&Ms, with proceeds going to fund research and outreach. Public awareness, screening programs and research funding have helped contribute to huge strides in treatment and survival of breast cancer, and that is fantastic. Now it’s time to focus more attention and money on lung cancer, a disease that affects so many people, either themselves or someone they love.

Like my brother. Clint was diagnosed in August 2007 and died that December. Although I shouldn’t have been shocked, I was. Only a week before he died, his doctors told my sister-in-law, Lee, they expected him to recover.

He was not a smoker, not that it should matter. But some people seem to think that people with lung cancer deserve it because they smoked. That attitude surely contributes to a lack of funding for lung cancer research. According to the Lung Cancer Alliance, total research funding for lung cancer in the U.S. in 2009 is projected to be $199 million, down one-third since 2005. Compare this figure to breast cancer research funding: a projected $1.1 billion for 2009, up $50 million from 2005.

Perhaps the lack of funding also stems from projected outcomes. Lung cancer is considered a death sentence, with 5-year survival rates just under 16 percent, compared to 89 percent and almost 100 percent 5-year survival rates for breast and prostate cancers respectively. Doctors don’t want to board a sinking ship, and the government doesn’t want to buy a boat with a hole in the hull.

Clint and Lee had four kids. He will never see his children get married, never know his grandchildren, never gaze lovingly at his wife again. He will never tease me again, never show me how to be a patient, loving parent again. My mother had to bury her first-born child.

I miss my brother. I think about him every day. His photo is on my hutch. His Coca Cola glass is on my dresser. His love is in my heart.

Lung cancer needs to be talked about, and it needs to be eradicated. Check out these sites for more information or to get involved.

Lung Cancer Alliance
National Cancer Institute
Bonnie J. Addario Lung Cancer Foundation

Come on, get happy

2009-10-25T16:04:00.004-05:00

I've started this post four times. Everything I write sounds so crabby and self-important I don't want to publish it. So, here are some happies instead. It's still self-important because it's all about me, but what the hell. I'll cap it at 20.

1. Apple pie. OK, any kind of pie. But if it's apple, mine, because mine is better.
2. Roses
3. Sprite with ice
4. Lit candles in every room
5. Finding a clip of a favorite old TV show on YouTube
6. Butt rubs
7. Diamonds
8. Black pearls
9. Real hot chocolate
10. Puppies, dogs
11. Kittens, cats
12. Girl rats, even with giant, horrible tumors
13. Eagles
14. Fresh bread
15. Art fairs
16. My mother laughing so hard she coughs
17. Kelsey dancing
18. Kayleigh talking
19. Eric holding me
20. The four of us playing a board game by the fireplace

How about you? What are some of your happies?

Student Assignment Report

2009-10-07T16:47:00.004-05:00

It's progress report time at the high school, and my inbox is filling with files from Kayleigh's teachers. That she can get as low as 21 percent in Effort and still get in the 90s and 100s in the Knowledge and Skills portion of her grades is a testament to what a tremendous waste of time much of the homework assigned really is and makes me wonder what she would be doing if they actually challenged her. Good thing she challenges herself with other things.

My favorite part about these reports is the label on the little icon that accompanies the email attachment: "Student Ass."

Smokin'. What exactly is my daughter being graded on at this school? And do the teachers feel this way about all their students?

Afternoon Wood

2009-09-30T20:45:00.002-05:00

Pulling up the hill, I stopped short of my house and parked my little car in front of the neighbors' perfectly kept home and yard. My ragged yard was especially tatty with the pile of branches and leaves growing taller and wider at the curb as Paul and Michael took down our teetering honey locust tree limb by limb. They'd gotten pretty far in only a few hours, down to only a few large bare, branches.

Michael scampered around the tree, cutting, and Paul kept his feet on the ground, holding hard on the ropes tied to the branches Michael had trimmed bit by bit, guiding the wood to the ground, away from our house, away from the maple tree, the ash tree, the ginkgo tree, away from the power lines.

Kayleigh and I glanced up at Michael as we walked up the driveway. He stood on a solid branch, surveying his next move, his next cut.

"You're crazy!" Paul hollered up to him. "You're not walking out on that."

"I'll have to straddle it," he shouted back.

Paul looked at me and smiled. I handed him two water bottles and 65 cents, his change. The water in my house is perfectly fine, as is my bathroom. They prefer to stay outside.

"Straddle it?" I peered up at Michael. "I've never had that much wood between my legs."

I smiled and headed inside.

See you later

2009-09-23T20:20:00.002-05:00

Goodbye, friend. I hope my brother met you with open arms.

Odds and ends

2009-09-13T15:09:00.003-05:00

New siding and windows tomorrow. We've moved everything away from the windows so they are accessible. My, I like my rooms with less stuff. Not that I didn't already know that.

I am in the throes of a deadline. Two stories, due the same day. I've had ample opportunity to write. I try. I just really suck at focus. I've tried caffeine, but it hasn't helped. I've tried allowing myself to be distracted in order to get the distractions out of my system. That hasn't helped, either. I think I just need a lot of pressure. Too much pressure.

Kelsey contracted her back-to-school illness already. She is a living, almost-breathing snot factory. She jammed her index finger up her nose and stretched her left nostril to the point where silver dollars could surely have had spare room. I said, "Could you please use a tissue to do that?" She continued her sinus diving and said, "I can't find the boogers when I use a Kleenex. ... Oh, there's one."

So, the siding. When the guy tore the yellow aluminum off, underneath was dark green cedar. It's one of those old colors that seems to be coming back in style. The kids love it. I must say, I don't mind it. It's better than the yellow aluminum. But tomorrow I will have light yellow vinyl instead. And it will match my garage. Cool. I wanted a light color rather than a dark one, and I didn't want to re-side the garage, which was already light yellow. So, light yellow it was. They call it cream. I tell you, if anyone ever presented me with cream that color, I would have to mention being on a diet or something, because that is not a healthy color for cream.

The windows are triple pane, also vinyl, with a wood grain interior. I'm happy about those. They are better looking than white, much cheaper than wood, and will hopefully make the house a lot warmer. Kelsey's room is in the northeast corner, and it is about 10 degrees cooler than the rest of the house in winter. Poor kid. You can feel the breeze in there. Kayleigh would like that, actually. What Kayleigh is not liking at the moment is having to clear a path to her windows. She has been a pack rat since she could grasp objects. I try not to object too much anymore because it's pretty pointless. I'd have to turn on the bitch-wolf mama me in order for anything to change, and I really don't have the energy, nor do I think it's very important. She'll clean her crap up someday in the next few years. That'll do. In the meantime, she just closes the door.

So, back to my deadlines. Oh, I found a T-shirt that says, "Not now. I'm on deadline." Perfect.

What are your odds and ends these days?

Follow Your Bliss

2009-08-28T20:32:00.000-05:00

Toasted marshmallow Jelly Bellies + hot coffee = bliss

My Van is a Vampire, a traveling tale of synchronicity

2009-08-23T22:19:00.008-05:00

Sometimes everything fits, like pieces of a puzzle. Sometimes things just go together, like bread and butter. Sometimes timing is everything, and the past and the present fuse in a way that makes futuresense.

And sometimes the puzzle is a few pieces short of a box, the bread is moldy and the butter is frozen, and the only sense made out of the past, present and future is that you have always been and will continue to be a great big dork.

I’ve just returned from a short trip to Traverse City, Michigan, and all of the above applied.

To begin: My van is a vampire.

There’s something about travel that causes menstruation. The last thing I want to think about when tooling around the country is what state my uterus is in. Believe me, I wish I could leave it home. I suppose that day is coming given that my moon time has lately caused more blood loss than childbirth. But it’s not just perimenopausal, whisker-sprouting broads like me who are afflicted. My poor teenager, who has enough stress simply as a result of her age and interests (or disinterests, as would be more likely), has to carry around period baggage. Going anywhere? Guaranteed to bleed. It’s one of our rules to live by. I just hope my jeans (Totally rockin’ Lucky deep dark blues that I got on clearance at Macy’s because, seriously, I’m never in style and I’d never pay full price for some scraps of denim. Think of my African daughter! The guilt….) wash out as nicely as the motel bedspread.

I’ve been wanting to see Traverse City since I was a little girl. My grandfather was born in Traverse City, and my mom talked about it with such fondness and pride that the city has always held a regal spot in my heart. My great-grandfather, Quincy Edward Boughey I, was apparently a man of prominence in the city, and a street and a hill are named after the family – or after him, I’m not actually sure.

The girls and I visited Boughey Street on Boughey Hill. I laughed out loud when I saw the yellow houses on the corner. I grew up in a yellow house. I bought two yellow houses. We are re-siding our house and guess what color we picked? Yellow. Not that I love yellow. It's that we are too cheap to re-side the garage, too, and since we are re-siding, we want the house and garage to match. Right now, the house is a ghastly yellow six-inch aluminum siding. The garage is a less-ghastly, four-inch, light yellow vinyl.

Anyway, this particular trip came about because Eric, my ever-loving husband, decided to attend a seminar at Interlochen College of Creative Arts, about half an hour from TC. When I met Eric in 1990, he had this plastic board called a Chapman Stick that when he tapped he made music. Not much later, he quit. But a few years ago, when our lives blew up, he grabbed hold of his Stick again. This summer, Interlochen held a Stick seminar taught by Emmett Chapman, inventor of the Chapman Stick, and Greg Howard, Stickist extraordinaire. Eric couldn’t pass up this opportunity, and neither could I.

Eric packed his Sticks (yes, he has more than one now) and his amps. He forgot a sweatshirt. He always forgets a sweatshirt. And why would you really think of a sweatshirt in August, right? I packed sunscreen and swimming suits and beach towels (and supermegavortex tampons and onlyslightlysmallerthandiapers pads). Northern Michigan missed the memo that it’s summer. Eric bought a sweatshirt to add to his collection of sweatshirts purchased on summer vacations. I drank a lot of hot drinks, unsuccessfully dodged rain drops and finally just holed up in our chilly, humid motel room reading Harley Jane Kozak’s second Wollie Shelley mystery, Dating is Murder. Saturday night, having finished the book, I flipped on the TV after hunkering under the blankets and who should appear on my screen but the lovely (and hilarious) Ms. Kozak herself. She has such fine features and exquisite hair. And she was hugging Scott Bakula. What could be better? Now I can say I’ve seen the last five minutes of “Necessary Roughness.” But I’d still like to see the whole thing for Harley’s sake.

My grandfather, Stoepel Boughey, son of the aforementioned Quincy Edward I, was visiting from Florida that awful day in 1986 when Harley's "Santa Barbara" character Mary was tragically killed by a poorly tethered neon C. My grandfather and I were finishing up a rollicking game of cribbage when the poor, fallen, crushed nun Mary said, “God’s here,” and I bawled my eyes out while my grandpa laughed at my anguish. "Santa Barbara" was a funny, crazy, well-crafted (for a while) soap opera. They even did one episode in iambic pentameter, but that was well after Harley's unfortunate departure.

So, tragic deaths and Traverse City: In poking around Traverse City history through the magic of the Internet, I discovered my great-uncle Quincy Edward Boughey II, my grandfather’s brother and nemesis, was a telephone man who died as a result of electrocuting himself installing a phone in his own home. My brother Doug is a telephone man.

See? Past and present. Things go together. Just not the way you might expect.

Next time: Peaches, porn, grinders, bars and brown people – Wisconsin and Michigan really are miles apart.

Check out Harley Jane Kozak's blog, The Lipstick Chronicles, which she shares with the rest of the Book Tarts, a group of women who write mysteries and blog about life and its many accompanying mysteries.

Let's get some shoes

2009-08-16T22:54:00.007-05:00

Eric bought new shoes today. I love shoes. I guess I really am a girl.

(Eric got some fancy Nikes on megasale at Kohl's. Apparently they can even communicate with his iPhone. That's a little scary. And what are they saying? "Slow down! Wait for your wife!" "No, move faster – she's PMSing!" I don't know. I don't want shoes calculating my steps and calories burned and likely mapping where I've been and sending it to my insurance company so they can deny my claims for being a lard-ass, or worse, to the government for being a liberal. Wait, that's OK again. For now. Babbling – shutting up.)

When I was little, before I was in school, I had a pair of hiking boots. You know the ones that everybody wore in the '70s? The suede, round-toed clodhoppers with black, very marking soles, heavy as a broken heart. Loved 'em. My brother Doug had a pair just like them. Of course. Anything that Doug had I had to have, too. He was Jesus. And he had a Jeep that he apparently thought could walk on water because he was always getting it stuck in the muddy bottoms of a mucky river.

I had some other boots, too, when I was even younger. Rain boots. Someone took a picture of me wearing nothing but my boots. And when my Kelsey was little, I took a picture of her wearing nothing but her boots. I thought it would be cute to put the two photos next to each other – like mother, like daughter. The psycho at Walgreen's who developed the film called the police, fearing my little naked 2-year-old might be the victim of some variety of sexual abuse. How you can look at a picture of a child, scarcely past a baby, and even have sexual thoughts cross your mind is beyond me. I hope the police investigated the lunatic.

It's funny how many of my shoes I remember. I had an ugly blue pair of knock off All-Stars in kindergarten. My first-grade shoes were remarkably similar. My mother told me to write my name on them, so I took a magic marker and wrote absolutely everywhere. I was perfectly content, but she had a fit about me ruining them and she should have known better than to give a magic marker to a child (yes, she should have) and I'd have to wear them anyway. Well, then I was ashamed of them, embarrassed, and I absolutely did not wear them. She had bought me another pair a couple sizes up, and I wouldn't wear those either when I finally grew into them, even though I hadn't marred them with even one black dot.

Many of my shoes didn't fit well. My mom wanted me to get a lot of wear out of my shoes so she didn't have to keep buying them. So, I got them too big and wore them until they were way too small. When my toe pushed out the end of one particular pair I was quite fond of, overtaking the sole, my dad declared my feet had been damaged because of my ill-fitting footwear. I think he might have been right, actually. My big toes point the wrong way, as though I've been wearing high heels since birth, and I certainly haven't. He was always in my corner after that, getting me comfortable shoes I liked, even if they cost more than $4.99.

I wasn't at all brand conscious until about 5th grade when Nike waffles started appearing on the feet of my friends. Even though I thought they were weird and ugly, they were making quite a splash, and I didn't want to be left out. I fondled and sniffed a pair of blue ones with a daring yellow swoosh at Athlete's Foot one day at the mall. How I pined for them. Sometime in middle school I talked my mother into getting me a pair of Nikes, but not the nice blue and yellow waffles, just a pair of light blue ones with a plain sole and a white swoosh. Very subdued, and much cheaper. But it was still a hard-earned accomplishment. They weren't really any more comfortable and they didn't wear any better, and that disappointed me a bit. I didn't insist on name-brand shoes ever after, but my mom still didn't like spending more than $8 on my feet. Unless the shoes were leather. Bring on the GASS. Ugh. I had to wear those big clunkers forever.

These days, well, I'm not exactly sexy in my selections, but my feet feel good, crooked toes and all. And I'm willing to drop decent money on a pair of running shoes, but you'll never find me at a boutique shelling out for couture. (Unless I drop about 30 pounds and decide to get some thigh-high black leather boots. I'll definitely blog about that and include pictures. Please don't call Walgreen's or the police.) I do have a pretty cool collection of Chuck Taylors, though. My latest: light blue oxfords with fuzzy clouds and farm animals and little silver lightning strikes.

Eventually I'll have a photo of my sweet Chucks. Kelsey took my picture, but it's been sitting on her camera, and now I can't find it. And I wrote this so long ago, that the photos I popped in there from around the web (with full credit and links, of course) have gone the way of ether.

Who's that kid with the Oreo cookie

2009-08-13T12:45:00.002-05:00

Oreo limited edition Strawberry Milkshake creme: edible, nothing I'd ever buy again.

Of the non-ordinary Oreos, I like the mint and the peanut butter. I seem to recall a mocha flavor, but it might be my mind's wishful thinking.

Speaking of mocha: Nestle's Mocha Crunch – eew. I don't think they're making it anymore because, you know, eew. Awful color, funky consistency, chemical flavor. nass-tee

I do like it when candy companies do limited-edition flavors. Some are fantastic, like Kit Kat's dark, mint and orange flavors. Yum. I wish I'd stockpiled those darks. Apparently they have dark minis in multiflavor bags, but they're in there with those awful white chocolate ones. So not worth the money. Spew.

The Things We Keep

2009-07-30T23:28:00.004-05:00

My diploma arrived on Thursday. Very nice. Now I can slip it into a drawer with other stuff I want to keep but don't really want to look at very often.

It's funny the things we keep. My Girl Scout sash. Little slips of paper with things the kids have said. My softball T-shirt from 8th grade. A Kelsey doll in a wedding gown that I'm saving for Kelsey's bridal shower, should she ever have one. A clay ash tray I made in second grade art class. Cards and letters and papers and awards and more diplomas – and I thought I wasn't into stuff.

But I keep those things because they mean something to me, because they take me back to a particular time in my life, because the people involved mean something to me, because the people involved mean everything to me.

Now my big red diploma folder will nestle among my pink, wind-up bunny that I've had since birth; a brand-new Twitter T-shirt that Nancy Lee Grahn signed because I was playing celebrity whore; my dad's Army pouch containing some foreign coins from his wartime travels, if you want to call them travels; and a host of other things too numerous to mention or even remember without peeking.

But sometimes I peek, and I remember the things I keep.

California dreamin' on such a summer's day

2009-07-13T20:34:00.004-05:00

When I was a kid, I was hopelessly smitten with the Little Rascals. I loved their adventures, their ingenuity, their perseverance. I loved that the good guys won, even if they got shamed on occasion, and friends stayed friends even after misunderstandings, quarrels and outright betrayal. I loved that adults were usually buffoons. One thing I didn't notice as a kid, because it seemed normal to me in the era in which I grew up, was that Our Gang was an integrated group; white kids and Black kids played together and thought nothing of it.

The Little Rascals made me feel connected to my parents. They grew up in the '20s, '30s and '40s. I imagined my mom building firetruck go-karts out of junk she found after scrapping around in dirt lots. I imagined my dad camping in a cave with his brothers and buddies, literally scaring them shitless with his graphic and spirited storytelling and particular flair for practical jokes. I imagined my parents happy and engaged and busy with the joys of childhood during a time when people were hungry, when men left their families in search of work, any work, anywhere; when penicillin, had it been available, would have knocked out my dad's scarlet fever, which forever damaged his heart, and my mom's strep, which took her out of all but two weeks of third grade and took nearly all the body fat and muscle her little body had.

Those kids – Spanky, Afalfa, Darla, Butch, Scott, Stymie, Buckwheat, Jackie, Chubby – were so real to me. One night I dreamed about them. We were friends, and I knew all their last names, which was a big deal to me, I remember. It was awfully disappointing to wake up and realize I didn't know those incredible children, that we weren't going to have one exciting adventure after another, that we never had, and I still didn't know their last names.

At one point I asked my mom where movies and TV shows were made, and she told me California. Hollywood. Well, I had to go there.

I talked about California all the time. I looked at pictures of California. I imagined standing atop the Hollywood sign. I pictured myself hobnobbing with Mike Douglas, my favorite talk show host. Every time my mom and I sat in the car waiting for my dad to run into some store, I climbed into the driver's seat and pretended we were driving. My mother would ask where we were going, and I would say, "California!" and she would laugh at my youthful obsession.

When I was 16, I had a layover at LAX. It was my first California experience. By then, I had given up my California dreamin' for the most part. I still hoped to move to San Diego, establish residency and go to college there. But I knew it was pretty unlikely. Still, a little part of me was glad I finally made it out there.

My next trip to CA was one where, two months before we were married, I tagged along with Eric on a week-long business trip to Apple in Cupertino. We arranged to get out there early and leave late so we'd have time for fun stuff, and we had the most fabulous hotel room, only because they hosed our reservation and didn't have any other rooms. It was bigger than our apartment! Loved it. The plan was, he'd go to Apple all day and I'd bum around all day and we'd do whatever at night. We had a rental car, so I could head to San Francisco or meet up with my friend Brian who was living with his parents in Los Gatos while working for Mac Week magazine for the summer. Brian had friends up at Berkeley who would love to hang and do martial arts, and it all sounded perfectly perfect to me.

I stayed a day.

My dad had dropped us off at the airport (It was Eric's first time being driven by my dad. I warned him, but his knuckles were pretty white by the time we arrived.) then picked up my mom for a little country drive before the NBA finals came on TV. They got out to the micropolis of Token Creek, which consists of a bar and a ball field, when my dad said, "Honey, I don't feel well." Then he fucking died.

Never fear, fair reader. He was approaching a stop sign in front of the aforementioned bar and ball field when he went into defib, so the car wasn't going very fast. My mom reached over and tried to cut the ignition, but her arthritis was too painful, and she couldn't do it. As they sailed through the stop sign, she knocked his leg off the accelerator and steered their jaunty little Ford away from a parked car.

Someone at the ball field noticed and yelled for others. He ran alongside the car, opened the door, and got his foot on the brake. After he turned the car off, he dragged my breathless, pulseless, lifeless father, whose skin was already peeling away from his fingernails, out of the car and onto the ground and started CPR. A young woman approached and offered to do the breathing. A man came up and said he was a doctor.

My mother stood by and cried. She had never believed in CPR. She thought people should just be left to die and stay dead. She worked in a hospital and saw a lot of people resuscitated only to live a brain-damaged, burdensome life. She didn't want that. But she didn't stop anyone trying to save her husband. Nor did she believe it was going to work. But it did.

"I have a pulse," the doctor shouted. The pulse came and went, and these strangers pressed my father's chest and breathed their air into his lungs until an ambulance arrived. It had been rerouted from a nearby fire and arrived quickly, no small miracle given their rural location.

They cut his shirt off him, got paddles on him and a board under him and sped away to Madison. Someone helped my mother to the hospital and returned my parents' car its rightful driveway. My mother hasn't driven since, probably, 1939.

So, anyway, there I was in sunny California, plotting my adventures. My mother had a helluva time finding us. We hadn't thought about telling anyone our specific whereabouts. Duh. And cell phones were known as car phones and were the size of a brick. They came complete with lots of cords and a Monte Carlo-sized magnetic antenna to adhere to the car's roof, and we obviously did not have one with us. But we had a message at the front desk: Emergency at Amy's house.

We arranged for my return trip, spent a day wandering Muir Woods, miserably, and that was it for me in California.

My dad came through pretty well. He was weak and confused for a couple days, and couldn't remember what happened. He had an automatic internal defibrillator put in when he was strong enough, which went off 13 times before he finally died three and a half years later.

Eric's been back to CA for lots of business trips, but I haven't accompanied him.

This week, though, I am going. The girls and I are heading to LA on Thursday, my mother's 84th (or 85th, depending who's asking) birthday. Yes, LA is a smog-laden traffic nightmare. I don't care. I'm going to sink my toes into the sand. I'm going to watch the sun set over the Pacific. I'm going to eat too much. I'm going to take a picture of the Hollywood sign. And I'm going to look for Spanky's star on the Walk of Fame.

Old Stuff

2009-07-03T09:27:00.012-05:00

Good Will kicks ass. I went in for a small jar or cup or bowl or plate or something to put my pot shards in.

Did I write about my shards? I don't remember. I guess not. When I was in Santa Fe, Jackie and Dorothy took me to their friends' house for a picnic. Isn't it pretty?

The house is built on an old midden and shards just spring up out of the ground. Every time there's rain or good wind, they wander the yard and find something that hasn't seen the light of day for roughly 1,000 years. They have a huge bowl full of them – gorgeous things. Some have paint, some you can see where the coils were pressed together, some show the rims of bowls or handles of pitchers. They also have a giant velociraptor bone they found. Anyway, it was a very fun time searching their land. This is their front yard, where I found most of the shards.

The ones I found are small but so, so cool. Since it was private property and I had permission of the owner to keep them, my shards are totally legal. Apparently, you can't keep any artifacts found on public land.

Shard hunting is something I've always wanted to do, and it was such an unexpected treat to be able to do so. The shards are between 800 and 1,200 years old, according to the property owners, Joan and George, who did some research and asked some scholarly types about them, as well.

I wanted something to put the shards in so we could see them and take them out and touch them. And I'm cheap, so Eric and I went to Good Will. I love the stuff you find there.

A toast to the bride and groom.

Water bottle, water bong, water bongle – dude, whatever.

Eric got a new case for his glasses. It is hard plastic, closes solidly and has a nice, felt-lined interior. It also says NBA on it, but what do you want for 39 cents? He says he's going to put a sticker over the NBA logo.

Here are my shards in their new home.

I'm not sure I like them in a glass. A plate might be better. They'd be easier to see and pick up on a plate. But if I change my mind, then my 69-cent glass will be put to use in the kitchen and I'll head back to Good Will for something more suitable.

Squirrelly Girl

2009-06-30T17:10:00.005-05:00

So, I had this self-revelation over the weekend: I am squirrelly. When I can't work out my squirrellies through physical activity, I work my squirrellies out by eating. What a bass-ackwards way to live. And I've been doing it so long! You'd think I'd've figured it out a long time ago. I suppose I did, but I ignored it, invoking the Wagner family motto.*

I'm a squirmer. I've known that forever, and I've been driving people crazy forever. I need to wiggle, jump, run, kick, punch (Pads! I kick and punch pads!) spin, stand on my head, bounce on the bed and any number of equally boisterous things.

Being squirrelly doesn't lend itself to grade school, middle school or high school. Or college, for that matter, but at least in college, your classes are a mile apart and you have to haul ass to get there on time.

It's not demure or polite for a grown woman to bounce her leg up and down through boring budget meetings or tap her pencil during yet another PowerPoint presentation. At least at the paper, I got to stand and pace (sometimes on the table) when I ran the meetings.

Anyway, my little moment of self-understanding feels so liberating. Isn't it silly? I feel like I should toss my hat in the air and grin like Mary Tyler Moore, who really could turn the world on with her smile. (But that statue is creepy.)

Now – I'm hungry. Heh, heh.

*The Wagner motto is "Fuck it." For the record, the Knapp family motto is "Clear off a seat anywhere."

Music Meme

2009-06-22T08:56:00.004-05:00

This meme comes from Daniel.

Take your iPod or alternative, cheap, unfashionable, non-Apple MP3
player or even your music collection on your computer.

Pick a song, maybe one you like at the moment, doesn't really matter which one.

Using the alphabetic list of songs in your iPod/player/computer, list
that song and the following nine in alphabetical order. What do you get?

If I Didn't Know Any Better, by Alison Krauss & Union Station, from the album Lonely Runs Both Ways. I love this song. Kelsey likes it, too.

If I Ever Lose My Faith in You, by Sting, from the cheap collection Very Best of Sting. Eric popped this one onto a disk of other songs he thought I might like. That was an eclectic disk.

If I Had a Hammer, by The Weavers, from another collection, Greatest Hits. I swiped this album from Jackie & Dorothy when I was in Santa Fe. I haven't actually played this song yet.

If It Makes You Happy, by Cheryl Crow, from the album Cheryl Crow. Good song. I wish it popped up more often.

If You Were Gay, original cast, from the album Avenue Q. I love this album. I love this show.

Iko Iko, by Od Tapo Imi, from the album Panstyle. Od Tapo Imi are a steel drum band from Madison. For a time, they were my favorite Madison band. Eric's friend Dave Gochberg played on some of their songs. Dave died suddenly last year. Those heart attacks are nasty. Makes me want to go running. Well, makes me think of running, anyway.

Illegal Alien, by Genesis, from the album Genesis. Weird song, but it's got a good beat and you can dance to it.

In And Out of Love, by Bon Jovi, from the album Cross Road. Gotta say, this isn't one of my favorites. But Kelsey is a big Bon Jovi fan.

In Heaven There Is No Beer, by Clean Living, from the album Dr. Demento's 25th Anniversary Collection. This one usually gets skipped over, too.

In The Dark, by Vika and Linda, from the Live and Acoustic album. I like Vika and Linda in small doses. I'm usually not much for live stuff, but their Grandpa's Song live is exceptional.

How about your random 10?

Breakfast on the Farm

2009-06-14T22:00:00.008-05:00

Always looking for cheap and novel things to do with the kids, I was pleased when, milling among the masses at the Dane County Farmers' Market's Cows on the Concourse, someone handed me a flier for Breakfast on the Farm.

I've looked into Breakfast on the Farm before. For a small fee, attendees visit a local farm and poke around and eat breakfast. We haven't gone before because the menus I've seen offered something like 12 kinds of meat washed down with whole milk. Yuck.

But this year, the menu appeared to offer enough that we would eat, although it had nary a fruit or a vegetable on it. (Not true, as I think about it – frozen strawberries came with the ice cream. Frozen strawberries at the height of strawberry season. Tragic.) It was quite dairy heavy, in fact, which could be expected in Wisconsin. Being dairy crazy, we went. Well, we three chicks went; Eric was in San Francisco being a geek at Apple's WWDC.

The farm, Hinchley's in Cambridge, was about a 25-minute drive through the rolling hills of southern Wisconsin. It was a cold, drippy morning, but by the time we got there, the skies had begun to clear.

I envisioned a quiet wander among the barns and a chilly breakfast with a few dozen blue-hairs and a handful of neo-hippies. My quaint (and naive) notions of a locavore experience were shot to hell when I saw the lines of people walking down the highway and county police directing traffic outside the farm. It would be me, my kids, and oh, thousands of other people eating eggs and warming our hands with coffee.

I steered the car over the muddy field that served as the parking lot that morning. Hayrides to the farm were available, and Kelsey wanted a hayride. The trailers came in many sizes, as did the tractors pulling them. Only one was horse-drawn. We had to wait for three to fill and leave before we got our turn, but the wait was less than 10 minutes, which only goes to show what a huge operation this was.

The hay bales were surprisingly soft. Usually hay bales are like bricks with slivers.

So we got our tickets and stood in the food line. We were getting pretty hungry, and the lines were really long. But we were in the line right next to where they cooked the food. They had two enormous pans of scrambled eggs going, and apparently they were boiling sausages in some milk cans. Three egg scramblers stood over the pans of eggs, mixing and turning them with huge spatulas, chatting and smiling as they worked.

A miserable-looking little dog wandered into the food prep area and was promptly shooed away. He looked even more miserable then, the sad bastard. I can just hear him, whimpering about all these people in his territory. It must have been completely overwhelming.

So, we sat at a Holstein-painted table and ate our cheesy scrambled eggs, which were actually very good, our cheese cubes (Farmer's rope and mascarpone), cheese danish coffee cake, and milk. I went with the full-fat chocolate milk from Sassy Cow. God. That stuff is too good. I made the mistake of looking at the calorie content – 230 per cup. Whoa. Usually I drink skim, at 80-90 calories per cup, depending on whose nutrition information you choose to believe.

Alice in Dairyland was passing out stickers to some small children at the next table. You know what I like about Alice in Dairyland? Her thighs. She's a real Wisconsin girl, not some twiggy, model wannabe with more face paint than Bozo.

After we ate, we started to wander. The farm was really very pretty. The barns were all well kept and they had a small area to walk through that had different pens of animals. There were the stinky pigs, goats, three or four kinds of geese, loads of many different kinds of chickens, baby chicks, pheasant, rabbits, and of course, cows. We all held the bunnies and marveled at how weird goats are and how huge goose eggs are and how cute chicks are. Cows are cows. They eat. A lot. And they're not the brightest animals around. But it's fun to get lickin' close to them and watch the younger set feed them out of their hands. Eew – spit.

It made for a pleasant morning, and I'm glad we went. Kelsey loved it so much, she wants to go to another one next weekend. We'll see about that. I'm just wondering how many eggs they cooked that day. Kayleigh figures a whole building full of them. She may be right about that.

Fifteen years

2009-06-03T16:07:00.001-05:00

Kayleigh turned 15 today! Yea! Happy birthday, Kayleigh! I love you!

Saludos

2009-05-30T16:20:00.003-05:00

Estoy en Nueva Mexico visitando mis hermanas y comiendo demasiado. Hace sol, pero las noches hacen frias y duermo en el portico. (No se usar los acentos, obviamente.) Las montañas son bellas, y hay mucho mas vegetacion que esperaba.

Hoy fuimos al centro para ir de compras. En el Palacio de los Gobiernos los indigenos venden joyeria que hacen – y que preciosa! No compre nada alla, pero compre un cafe y unos postres. Jaja.

Ya es la hora de siesta. Voy a poner unas fotos mas tarde. Hasta.

Do you know the way to Santa Fe?

2009-05-28T09:09:00.002-05:00

Tomorrow morning before the break of dawn, I head off to lovely Santa Fe, NM, for a long weekend. On the Dallas-SF leg of my flight, I have a seat with removable arm rests for the advantage of the disabled or exceedingly large. Cool.

This will be quite the chicksperience, except for Lawrence, the lone holder of the Y chromosome. We will have me, whose XX status is pretty weak anyway, Jackie, Dorothy, Lee, Melva, Ruth, and Lawrence. Tana arrives after I depart.

Jackie is in the throes of chemo and so pretty tired and a little loopy, although she says her pain isn't as bad as it was last week.

I'm not sure how much I'll be doing as far as seeing the sights because Jackie is so tired, but I will be happy to be there with my family and friends. These wonderful people have brought me in as a sister, and I love them all.

So, see you all next week. Kayleigh turns 15 next Wednesday! Her quinceañera. Wow. Have some sangria for her, cuz she ain't gettin' any here.

Now I just wonder why

2009-05-17T09:00:00.003-05:00

Kelsey climbed into my bed this morning, all lean and long and beautiful.

"You're so pretty," I said. "Sometimes I wonder how I made you."

She smiled and rubbed my arm.

"You used to be pretty," she said.

– Wait, it gets better. –

"Used to be?" I winced.

"How can you be pretty when you have bags under your eyes and you’re all wrinkly and pimply and you can see your big pores and your hair’s gray and all messed up?"

I no longer wonder how I made her. Now I just wonder why.

Trifecta

2009-05-10T12:47:00.004-05:00

Meteorologists attribute recent strange weather patterns to a monumental sigh of relief believed to be heaved from the raspy lungs of a recent college graduate. Storm trackers and weather spotters have traced the center of these disturbances to a woman at the University of Wisconsin-Madison whose graduation and first annual 39th birthday nearly coincided with Mother's Day. The resulting forces have stressed the capacity of local officials to contain the mix of glee and contentment swirling around the flagship campus and surrounding area.

"Joy and relief are literally suspended in the air," said a source at the university who wished to remain anonymous because he did not have authority to speak officially. "We've been unable to locate the woman in question because she's apparently so happy she's bouncing all over town in a state of giddiness. I tell you, if she doesn't calm down, she's going to gulp all the air out of the city."

He suggested a job might be useful in bringing her down, but he worried that finding gainful employment would only exacerbate her excitement.

"I'd hate to see what would happen if someone hired her in this economy," he said, rubbing his forehead. "She might actually explode, and then where would we be?"

Madison weather gods Charlie Shortino and Gary Cannalte have combined resources to create the Super-mega-my-Doppler-is-bigger-than-yours3.15 to pinpoint the exact whereabouts of the woman in question in an effort to restore weather patterns to normal. Shortino anticipates the sophisticated instrument will be activated by Monday morning.

"We'll have her found in no time, and then we'll settle her down," Shortino said.

Cannalte explained between laughing and high-fiving Shortino: "We're going to read to her from one of her unread textbooks the book store wouldn't buy back. That'll snap her out of it."

.................................................

Psst! I'M DONE! And I couldn't be happier.

Thanks to my professors and advisers who've encouraged me and taught me so much. You've shown me possibilities I never knew existed and pushed and dragged and cajoled and held me up so I could see.

Thanks to my friends who told me to get my head and fingers out of my ass. You guys rock!

Thanks to my family for sticking by me these last four years. I appreciate all the support you've given me and the sacrifices you've made for me. The ride hasn't always been a smooth one, but I'm glad you took it with me. I love you.

Engrish

2009-04-22T19:30:00.003-05:00

I find that whenever I am feeling a little down or worn out, looking at this T-shirt gives me a rise.

Kelsey's Cream Puffs

2009-04-19T16:03:00.004-05:00

Kelsey made cream puffs today. I have never been a big cream puff fan, but she thinks they're wonderful. She wiggled into my bed after breakfast, saying she wanted to make something yummy. I told her to go ahead. When she said she wanted to make cream puffs, I did an internal eye-roll and then told her to get The Joy of Cooking, that book would have the best recipe. She said she'd already bookmarked it in January. Figures.

She looked through the recipe. The ingredients were simple enough. She declared she was not going to sift the flour because she hates sifting and it never makes any difference. Whatevs, chickie. She also decided to make half a recipe since a full recipe was 24 cream puffs, and, for some wild reason, she thought 24 was too many. Of course, halving the recipe brought questions.

"How am I going to add two to two-and-a-half eggs? I'm just going to use two." Fine.

"How much butter is a sixth of a cup?" I took a break from folding laundry and showed her how to measure it.

Her arm got a bit tired stirring, but she did fine. They puffed up wonderfully, and she was quite pleased with the outcome.

We bought a can of whipped cream (because the cans are fun and "they remind me of spray cheese," she says) and vanilla pudding since she's the only one who actually wanted cream in her cream puffs.

Often I don't care much for that kind of pastry. It's always hard and tasteless or so thin that it falls apart in your hand and tasteless. Yuck.

Kelsey is, naturally, spectacular. And her cream puffs were, naturally, spectacular. They were moist and sweet, delicate without being flimsy, firm without being hard. I actually liked them and could definitely have eaten my share of the 24 had she made the full recipe.

It is her goal to open a bakery when she grows up. She wants to put her art on the walls and have poetry nights. My little bohemian. I think she's well on her way.

Easter is for Bunnies

2009-04-12T16:46:00.004-05:00

We've spent the last week building a new rabbit cage. Ours was just too small for two big bunnies, and I always felt so guilty stuffing them inside at night. We'd looked around at bigger homes for rabbits, but we weren't impressed. They were horribly expensive (starting at $300) and not very nice, so we just built one ourselves.

We bought three boxes of white wire Organize It cubes from Target for $14.99 each and a couple bags of cable ties from Farm & Fleet (cheap). Kelsey and I started slapping the thing together, figuring out how big to make it and where to put stairs and ramps as we went along. At first we weren't sure what to do for flooring, but in talking it through we decided on a scrubable bathroom panel ($9) laid on a piece of chipboard we already had in the garage. Eric cut them to size and put some cheap casters on the bottom. We put down some carpet we had left over after last year's basement fiasco and a few towels, bought a couple of new litter boxes, a cushy bed and a couple of toys for a total cost of about $100.

It's three stories, 42 inches tall, 56 inches wide and 28 inches deep. There's a door at the bottom and one at the top so we can reach them up there.

And the dudes love it. They were in there nosing around before it was even done. Once it was finished, they didn't even get out with the door gaping open. They have lots of room to stretch, stand, flop and hop. They can stay close if they want to snuggle or they can get out of each other's fur if they so desire.

We feel better about having caged animals. We can't always pay attention to them, so on days they have to stay inside their cage, we're glad they have a nicer place to be. I think they're glad, too.

Back at it

2009-04-02T11:35:00.004-05:00

Have you missed me? I didn't think so. But I've been busy on the Web, searching for the latest in awesome goodness. Behold: Squeez Bacon.

Leave it to those crazy Swedes, who also bring us Plopp candy bars, to invent the marvel of bacon-flavored goo in a plastic jug. Now you can add that delicious porcine zing to all your favorite dishes: potato salad, BLT sandwiches, apple slices, ice cream sundaes, trifle. Use it in place of ketchup, A1 steak sauce or Vermont's finest maple syrup.

My brilliant child

2009-02-24T12:03:00.002-06:00

So, as you've likely forgotten, Kayleigh is taking a class at MATC this semester. This class is in addition to her high school classes, not in lieu of them.

Last week, she came down with a horrific cold. She slept about 40 out of 48 hours early in the week. Still, she really had to go to her MATC class. It meets only once a week for four hours, so to miss one night is to miss a lot. We kept her home from school on Wednesday so she could rest up for her long evening.

On the drive to MATC, Eric said, "Wait, don't you have an exam tonight?" He only knew this because he'd talked to her teacher, Eric's colleague Bill, a couple days prior, and Bill had mentioned it.

Kayleigh emerged from the fog and replied, "Yeah, I think I do, actually."

Joy. So she was insanely sick and she had a test – a college test – she hadn't studied for at all.

She got a perfect score.

Quiet, absent

2009-02-10T19:34:00.000-06:00

Eric says I'm quiet. Kayleigh says I'm quiet. My mom says I'm quiet. I have nothing to add.

The Fourth Estate

2009-01-19T20:07:00.002-06:00

More layoffs at the paper today. They want to get rid of 12 FTEs this time. The new editor emailed a list of five people whose last day was today. Another reporter quit last week. Boy, I can't wait to graduate.

Snap, crackle, knuckle

2009-01-15T18:37:00.002-06:00

Oh my god.

I am up to my eyeballs in research. I did not expect this little job to be so consuming. I spend my day on the phone, trying to coax corporate executives into spilling their guts about sales figures, trying to find a list of women-owned businesses in the state, trying to confirm a business really is owned by a woman or a group of women, trying not to trip over my tongue after hours of repeating myself.

I told my editor to prepare the noose, but apparently they can't afford one.

And now I've just jammed my ring finger and darling pinky trying to block a kick to the back from Kelsey. We get a little rowdy when we're cooking sometimes, and Kelsey and I practice kicks, punches and blocks. I have a tremendous size advantage, naturally. Nevertheless, poor technique coupled with distraction resulted in a delicate *snap* and the swelling of my phalanges.

Ah, well. It's my show night. "MI-5" (known as "Spooks" everywhere else in the world) started last week. The first episode was good, so I'll give it another try. I've only been watching one other show, "Doc Martin," which I watch with my mom on Saturday nights. Someone (Hi, Judie!) sent me the DVDs ages ago, but I'm watching it on TV with my mom instead. It's good to have an excuse to get together.

And by the way--it's not nearly as cold as it's been predicted to be. I bet the kids will be back in school tomorrow, unfortunately. I like having them around.

I just want to know...

2009-01-12T13:50:00.002-06:00

Are all receptionists named Nancy?

I've called about a bajillion places for this fact-checking job I'm doing, asking the same question over and over. Ugh. I swear I'm talking to the same person every time. Does Nancy work at a call center? Is that who I'm really getting? I think maybe so....

Ice

2009-01-11T11:40:00.004-06:00

Last week, we had a little ice storm. Kelsey and I played soccer with some firewood, which was pretty cool to watch slide across the ice. Some of the pieces were completely encased in ice. We didn't get the wood split and stacked before the snow came early and deep. The snow you see in the video is what was left after our recent melt. Our snow blower is seeing a lot of action this year.

Here is Kelsey skating on our driveway. Eric has since removed the big pile of firewood and leaves and the accompanying shredded tarp.

Judas, these videos take FOREVER to upload.

Sure saves money on grocery bills

2009-01-08T15:49:00.002-06:00

I expected a quiet week at home with everyone back in school but me. I had a list of things I wanted to do before I went back to school, and by some curious happenstance, I was getting some of them done. (Not all of them, of course. I mean, let's be realistic about who exactly is writing this.) And it has been a quiet week, aside from the occasional sounds of weeping and retching coming out of my children's bedrooms.

Yes, my kids have gone back to school for the post-holiday virus exchange. Kayleigh was stricken first, coming into our room at 4 a.m. Wednesday saying she didn't feel well. Kelsey returned from school today and headed straight for the toilet. Both are snug in their beds. Kayleigh has visions of rockets and bananas in her head. I guess she's growing into her mother's girl, at least in her wild, illness-induced dreams.

I just got a decent freelance job, too. I was finally settling in, my computer dutifully open, my distracting tabs closed, ready to work. But it looks like another couple days of stressing. I do fret about puke. And given the odd twist in my gut right now, I may be doing more than fretting soon.

But I hope not.

Looking in

2009-01-05T17:03:00.003-06:00

My life has changed a lot in the last few years. Some of these changes were anticipated and welcome; others were complete surprises, some pleasant, some not. Sounds like life, doesn't it?

I haven't blogged much lately. It's not that I have nothing to say; it's that I have too much to say. That being the case, I've chosen to keep my mouth shut in the hopes that I won't have to extricate my toenails from my tonsils. I do tend to go on like nobody's business sometimes, and some things are just nobody's business.

Still, here's a safe topic: the new year. I'm not big on resolutions because I suck at following through on much of anything. But here are a few things I'd like to work on this year.

• Get a website up and running. I have some ideas for subjects. I just need to think a bit more about feasibility.

• Get a job. A real job.

• Shrink fat, grow muscle, and increase flexibility and cardiovascular endurance

• Paint the living room and the stairwell.

• Be more patient and gentle.

• Help my mom more. She's not doing so well.

• Stop being such a sarcastic pansy ass.

We'll see how that goes. I graduate in May, so there will be more changes ahead for me and my family. Trying to balance their needs with my own is always a challenge. Figuring out exactly what my needs are is the biggest challenge of all.

The weather outside

2008-12-28T23:10:00.004-06:00

Let's just say it has snowed a lot this December. To be fair, a lot did melt the last few days. Thank goodness. We couldn't see out the end of the driveway. Thanks to the monster dumping of the white stuff, even Eric is dreaming about points south, so there is hope for me yet.

(I took this picture in Madison last week.)

Who put the stump?

2008-12-19T08:53:00.001-06:00

I may never look at our Christmas tree angel the same way again.

In the moment

2008-12-14T11:58:00.002-06:00

Today is a gift; that's why it's called the present.

Sometimes I get so caught up in distractions that I forget the things I really want and need. I hope today can be more focused.

I can't wait

2008-12-11T18:41:00.001-06:00

I'm in full-on freak mode. I have a 10-page paper due Tuesday at 5 p.m.

I haven't actually started yet.

What a duh.

I thought I'd be out of college before my kids started. Hmmph.

2008-12-06T16:51:00.005-06:00

Kayleigh registered at MATC this week. It was a little weird signing my kid up for a college class while she's 14. High school and college at the same time sounds challenging, but she is very excited. She said it's different taking a class she really wants to take instead of stuff she has to take in high school. She also likes the idea that she'll be in class with more mature students. Even though it's open enrollment, she still had to apply and be accepted into the program. So she has a college email address and ID, which I think is pretty cool.

We told her if she was getting too frazzled or wasn't able to keep up with her regular high school stuff we'd pull her out. She said that was OK, but she doesn't seem to think that will happen. She has a study hall next semester, after all.

She's taking web programming, of course. HTML. In the fall, if she continues, she'll take javascript with dear old dad. That will be especially weird.

I hope she has a good time, learns lots and kicks some serious collegiate booty.

Her dream is to become an animator at PIXAR. Not a bad goal at all. She's been interested in storytelling, movie making and special and visual effects since she was 3, when she figured out people were creating reality, not recording it. For all my frustration with her living inside her head and being so wrapped up in fantasies, I can only support her now that that separate life is becoming a tangible part of this one.

Funeral Black Friday

2008-11-29T10:13:00.003-06:00

My mom said I looked like the friendly undertaker. This from a woman dressed in a dirty sweatshirt, inside-out underwear and nothing else. She had just gotten up.

I arrived at 8:55, five minutes before the agreed-upon 9 a.m. She couldn't remember the time she had told me to come and help her dress.

After sloshing down her lukewarm coffee, she stood. The crumbs of her Thanksgiving-leftover breakfast disappeared between her dimpled thighs. They could still be there.

Supporting herself on her walker, she shuffled down the hall to her room and dug through her closet, looking for the pants she wanted to wear. They zip up the back, so I'd have to do that for her. She found a gray suit and set it on her bed.

"Here, sister. Take the pants."

"Just the pants?" It was a nice looking outfit. I didn't remember it. The top had short sleeves, and she wouldn't want that. The embroidered flowers she wouldn't mind.

"Just the pants. The blouse looks too summery."

She ambled around her little hospital bed. The mattress has been squashed nearly flat in spots. It can't be very comfortable, but she can raise the foot of it and drain the fluid from her feet and legs, something she doesn't do often enough.

Lowering herself onto her rumpled sheets, she groaned and caught her breath. "Here. Put my socks on."

Her socks are for male diabetics, black and gigantic and very, very stretchy. I'm glad she finally found some that fit, and I'm glad when she wears clean ones. Her feet are at once dry and flaky and moist and stinky.

"Do you think I should wear a brassiere?" I can't remember the last time she wore one. She is big.

"Yes." She knew she should, but I suppose she hoped I'd say she needn't bother. No such luck.

"Oh, I guess so." She heaved a sigh. "Get the new one that clasps in the front."

I held up one that clasps in the back.

"That's the one," she said.

She slipped her arms through the wide straps and started jiggling herself into the cups, which might be better called bowls. Mixing bowls. I tugged hard on the hooks, trying to stretch them enough to clasp them. I think I broke a sweat. Finally she was attached, the cloth digging deep into her skin.

"That looks like it hurts," I said, coming around to the front of her.

"I think I'm falling out the bottom," she said, pressing her escaping boob up inside the material. The cups were pointed to the sky. She looked like Madonna in her cone period. A really big Madonna. And old.

"You need a bigger one," I said.

"This is the bigger one! This is the 'Oh, my God' woman one." When she'd gone to get fitted for a new boulder holder, the fitting diva/mistress/technician took one look at her and said, "Oh, my God." They had to special order something.

"Well, it's time for her to call upon the Lord once again," I said.

She chuckled. "Don't make me laugh. Now I've piddled."

Looking in her drawer for new underpants, I saw more bras. 44DD. 46F. 50G. That's the one.

I handed her some clean undies and started unhooking her. She was happy to be out of the 42 we'd managed to squeeze her into, happy to be breathing again. I put the little mite of a brassiere in the trash. The 50G went on much more easily.

"Hell, we forgot my toe thing," she said. "Don't let me forget my teeth!"

We got her assembled in plenty of time. She sat in her chair for a while, fretting about what coat to wear and when to be there. Eric would meet us there.

We were soon off to the funeral of a friend. John had been our minister for a while. He married Eric and me. He was a gentle soul, and his wife, Margaret, was and is one of my mother's best friends. When Eric and I got home from our honeymoon, Margaret was the first person after my parents I went to see. As a minister's wife, she had a public persona. But we know the woman behind the smile, and we love her.

We came to honor John and give our love to Margaret and her family. It was a fine funeral full of mostly old people. You don't live to be 90 and have many young friends. There were a lot of white collars in attendance, and one of the ministers who used to work at the church came to participate in the funeral. I was happy to see her. She is looking older, too. We all are.

People said nice things, honest things. We sang and we prayed, and then we went downstairs to eat.

Watching my mother and Margaret together made me sad and hopeful. When I was a little girl, these two women were strong and smart and kind and jubilant and I wanted to be just like them. Now they are old and a little teetery but still smart and kind, though less jubilant. My mother has shrunk and gotten fatter. Margaret has shrunk and gotten skinnier. They both have white hair and wrinkled everything and gigantic glasses. How their bodies have changed, how their minds have not, how lucky they are to have gotten old together.

"We're both widows now," Margaret said to my mom, holding her shoulders. Margaret is actually a widow for the second time. It wasn't any easier the second time, she said.

They chatted about their failing bodies, the deaths of their husbands. They'll talk more later, they said. And they will.

I hugged Margaret's stooped, slight frame and wished her well, then my mom and I made the slow, deliberate walk to the church elevator.

At home, I unzipped my mom's pants and unhooked her bra. I took off her shoes and socks and cut off as much of the callous on the ball of her foot as I could.

"You should write about dressing Mother," she said to me.

So I did.

Going to the printer--Thank you!

2008-11-16T15:13:00.003-06:00

Well, thanks to you and many others, we have raised enough money to get our magazine printed! Yea!

We are all very happy – and relieved! We have a launch party on Dec. 9. I'm telling you, come Dec. 10, there will be a such a collective sigh of relief we might alter weather patterns the world over.

Thank you!

Brother, can you spare a dime?

2008-11-11T19:46:00.004-06:00

So, I'm taking a magazine class. I'm one of the lead writers. My story is about niche farming. I got to talk to lots of farmers, visit their farms and their sales stands, pet their cows, eat their organic veggies, hold ostrich eggs. It was fun.

The editorial philosophy is "Move Wisconsin Forward." We've got cool stories about advancing the state in the areas of body, mind and soul. We've got Trek Bicycle, we've got Chad Vader. (See the clerk at the three-minute mark? He was in my play.) We're in the final throes of getting this thing put together. Check out last year's class Web site: Curb. Ours is still under construction. Every year, the class starts from scratch.

We have to raise money to get our magazine published. Our original plan was to print 10,000 copies, but it became apparent quickly that we would not be able to raise that much money. So we cut it in half.

Selling ads has been quite a task given the downturn in the economy, but our business team has done pretty well. They've raised almost $6,000. We only need another $230 to get printed. But we need it fast.

So I'm asking for your help. Can you send a few dollars our way? Can you send a lot of dollars our way? Instead of stopping for a $5 coffee, could you please help fund this magazine? Next time I see you, I'll buy your $5 coffee. I'll even get you that pumpkin chocolate chip pound cake to go with it, and I promise not to drool while I watch you eat it.

Please, donate here. It's a completely secure site through the University of Wisconsin Foundation. All money will be directed to our class for the purpose of publishing our magazine.

Thank you! Now, go on. Do it for me. Do it for higher education. Do it because it feels SO GOOD! Yes, yes, yes!

We don't need no education

2008-11-08T12:36:00.003-06:00

Kelsey skipped school yesterday.

There was about 40 minutes left in the day, and the teacher was talking about the buses. Kelsey thought since she was talking about the buses, it was time to go. So she put her stuff on and left. Out the door. By herself. No one stopped her.

She realized as she was walking home that she'd made a mistake, but she just kept coming home. By the time she got here, she was bawling, a little confused, and terrified she was going to get in trouble.

I was at work, but Eric was home, thankfully. He called the school, but no one answered. So he called her teacher directly, who was upset a child could just leave without being noticed. I'm sure she was imagining the wrist-slapping she and the school would get for allowing it to happen.

It's not the first time a kid has wandered off from school, and it's hard to keep track of every child at every moment. But, geez.

Change Has Come

2008-11-05T07:51:00.000-06:00

Buzz

2008-11-02T19:35:00.005-06:00

You can tell it's those high-flying days after Halloween. Kelsey is sick. And Kayleigh – well, Kayleigh is Kayleigh:

"Mom, I've licked this Tootsie Pop 340 times, and I still haven't gotten to the center."

UPDATE: "It's been 460 licks now, and I exposed a little bit here [she points to a mocha-colored spot on the right side of the cherry candy]."

The coolest part of this is that she's only licking one side. So the other side of the Tootsie Pop is still perfect, never-been-licked.

Hmm, there's something vulgar passing through my mind.

Stay tuned. I wonder how much Tootsie Roll she wants to expose before she has the answer: How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? The world may never know, but Kayleigh will.

And you can, too.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Kayleigh is chomping the cherry Tootsie Pop, having found the center of the Tootsie Roll in the center of the Tootsie Pop at 640 licks. That's a lot of licks.

Now, let's consider the science of Tootsie Pops. Sometimes the Tootsie Roll in the center of the Tootsie Pop is not actually in the center, and it's rarely spherical. Nor is the candy surrounding the Tootsie Roll. Also, we probably need to consider the quality of her spit. I mean, warmer spit would dissolve the candy faster. And what about her spit viscosity? And how about the age of the candy? I would think that older candy would have deteriorated a bit already, thereby requiring fewer licks. Perhaps temperature and humidity would come into play. So, really, we (as in, she) needs to conduct more trials.

She said she tried this experiment once before, but she got bored after three licks and just chomped the sucker, so to speak. Must have been in the pre-Adderall days.

When it's time to change, you've got to rearrange who you are into what you're gonna be

2008-10-28T18:43:00.003-05:00

Sha-na-na na-na na na-na-na, sha-na-na na-na....

Right. I'd rather hear the Brady Bunch than the hip-hop that's suddenly pumping out of my favorite music station. Former favorite music station. They've had a format change at 93.1, The Lake. Suddenly it's 93.1 Jams. They can jam it, all right.

Friday I was happily singing along to the Moody Blues, Elton John, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Heart. Well, not so happily singing along to Heart, but you get my point.

You know, I had a boyfriend who was totally in lust with those chicks, and I just couldn't see it. I mean, what's to like about big boobs and husky voices, right?

Anyway, what's to like about this bass-driven drivel? Oy, I think I'm channeling my father.

So I turned the radio on after class and switched it off Air America – don't even start – to my afternoon tunes. Except they were playing some unremarkable rap that had no melody, no harmony and scarcely audible lyrics. Format change fear hit hard, but I hoped maybe it was an ad. Alas, the song finished and their little station identification came on to notify me that this was a twin broadcast from something much further up the dial. As if one frequency weren't enough.

Ugh. I had been so happy that there was one station that played music I liked. I guess I'll have to move over to the oldies station and suffer through "Earth Angel" to get the occasional Beatles tune.

Yesterday all my troubles seemed so far away. Now it looks as though they're going to play that awful crap all night and day....

I must be mellowing

2008-10-27T09:48:00.000-05:00

The last time I took this quiz, my blog was rated as medium.

Superficial

2008-10-24T20:16:00.002-05:00

So, I finally joined Facebook. It's probably another distraction I don't need, but it's interesting to poke around and see who's on and who isn't. I certainly haven't figured it all out yet.

It's funny – I bumped into someone at the grocery store a while back, and he said if I was on Facebook I should look him up. So when I joined, I did look him up and sent him a friend invitation. But instead of friending me, he sent me a friendly message. That's OK by me. We were never close, to say the least, and I had wrestled with whether to send an invite in the first place. I guess our mutual noncommittal is fine with both of us. Our ties are superficial.

And so is so much of what we do on these social networking sites. Like this blog. Like Facebook. I've met a good number of people in the flesh after having met online. I really hit it off with a couple of them, definitely not with others, and then there's the third category of people that, well, we did fine together, but that's probably as deep as it will ever get unless we spend more time together.

But for the most part, I keep this blog superficial. I write about candy and walks in the woods, and I whine about school. Those are fine, benign aspects of my life that make up the big Me. I consider laying it bare sometimes, the good and the ugly. But negative comments (you know who you are; knock it off) have recently made me want to keep it to the inconsequential.

When I see a guy's MySpace page, and he has more than 30,000 friends (seriously, I just saw this yesterday) who leave such pithy and perceptive comments as "Thanks for the add! You rock!" I have to wonder precisely what the draw is. But it's there. I visited his page, too, after all.

What are we really doing online? That I could feel so involved with someone else's life, someone I've never met and probably never will, someone whose life I seem to know better than the old couple next door, better than some of my family – should I?

It's fun to read about ordinary people and their ordinary lives and their ordinary ups and downs. And it's quite pleasing to check in on them and have them check in on me. I like it.

So even though I don't say much that matters, I suppose I'll keep saying it. And I'll see some of you around.

Going Down?

2008-10-13T16:18:00.002-05:00

What is this world coming to? This album makes Time-Life look cutting edge. Ooh, I really need a sick version of The Young and the Restless on my iTunes. God save us.

Putting the bone in Blog to the Bone

2008-10-12T14:40:00.003-05:00

So the other night, Eric and I got a little loud. Let's face it: I am a screamer. But, because I don't want to wake the neighbors or frighten the children, I usually restrain the primal yell well. Holding back the cries of ecstasy takes a lot of fun out of mingling our skin and secretions, however. And think how long until the kids move out. Ugh.

But on this recent night, Eric couldn't hold back the release of decibels that accompanies the release of Mt. Vesuvius.

"That was loud," I said. "I think Kayleigh's still awake."

"Gonna give her an education," he said.

Fast forward about 18 hours. We were all in the kitchen, and Eric dropped some utensil I can't remember. And what did he say?

"Mmwuhhh, arr, uhhh." Or something similar and similarly reminiscent of the previous evening's party for two.

And Kayleigh said, "You sound funny when you say 'mwuhhh.'"

Eric looked at me and smiled. I burst out laughing and finally left the room. Kayleigh was mystified. And I'm glad. Education is fine, but the finer points she's going to have to work out herself. At a much later date. And without an audience, if she's lucky.

Family time

2008-10-08T16:22:00.010-05:00

Last Saturday was a lovely day, so we skipped out on work and had a little fun. We headed up to the apple orchard and spent a little time poking around in the woods that were pretty thoroughly washed out in this spring's floods.

It's so hard to get Kayleigh to look at a camera, and then not to make a disgusted face.

Political Sunday

2008-10-05T09:35:00.004-05:00

We're getting close to the election. I hope you're paying attention. There's more to the candidates than sound bytes. The person we put in office does matter. Please look at the issues and where the candidates stand on them. Maybe this quote quiz (Thanks, Dorothy!) will help. Want to try to guess my score?

October

2008-10-03T20:07:00.003-05:00

October is my favorite month. It's not hot, it's not obscenely cold. When it's not raining, it's gorgeous. The leaves are turning and beginning to fall, apples are ripe, pumpkins are ready, the farmers' market is bursting with the fall harvest, and kids are thinking about Halloween. I suck down vats of hot tea in front of the fireplace and fantasize about all the trails I could be hiking instead of doing homework. (Hi, Katy! Hi, Lew! I love school!)

You need to get your fill of fall hiking before gun deer season starts. Last November, not heeding common sense, we set out into the hills just before sunset, gunshots echoing around us. The charm of little wisps of snow floating down with the crisp, fall leaves sort of fades when you're wondering if you're going to be mistaken for a turdy point buck.

October also means it's time to turn the heat on. I think we could have suffered a little longer, but I make it policy not to bitch about turning the heat on once 10/1 rolls around. (You should hear me howl if someone dares to try to turn it on in September. Ha! Not happening. Bake a pie if you want to get warm in September.) October is settlement month with the utility company. They check our annual power use against what was budgeted, and we either get a refund or pay up. Refunds are nice though infrequent. The downside is that you don't get cheap-cheap bills in the summer when the only things running are the computer and the Wii.

The thing I really dislike about turning the heat on is the smell. All the dust that's collected since April or May comes whiffing out the register with that stale, burned sugar odor. And it's so dry. I think I could peel my face off in sheets.

Do you have a favorite month? Does it have anything to do with face peels?

Kayleigh says my name should be Jo

2008-09-29T17:37:00.005-05:00

Last week at the paper, a friendly debate began over the phrase "openly gay lifestyle." The parties involved agreed that being gay is a fine way to be, but they disagreed on "openly gay lifestyle." Two of the three parties involved were gay. The phrase was used in the paper in a quote by a woman who disapproved of any gay lifestyle. The article was written by the gay guy in the discussion. He had no problem with it. He thought it reminded people that not all in this world are free. The straight guy didn't like it because he thought it was demeaning. The woman (also gay) agreed it had negative connotations.

They started trying to figure out different ways to say gay and straight and every other manner of sexual identity that weren't so loaded. I must say, it was rather distracting.

So I chimed in.

"What do you call someone like me who's straight but everyone thinks is gay?" I asked.

"In the closet."

"Latent."

We settled on butch.

Seeing the world through my sweet tooth

2008-08-30T19:06:00.009-05:00

If you've been paying attention over the last couple years of this blog, you've noticed I like to travel and I like to eat. Some of the most fun I have is eating while traveling. Seeing what delicious or peculiar fare is offered around the globe always fascinates me. And returning to favorite places makes me gooey.

On our way to Boise, we stopped at a gas station outside Twin Falls and perused their candy section. We walked out with an Idaho Spud, which I had tried once before and not liked much, a Cherry Cocktail, a Big Hunk, a Skinny Hunk, and a Rocky Road.

The Idaho Spud: Gross; I still don't like them. The Idaho Spud is a spongy, marshmallowy, gelatinous cocoa mass with more aftertaste than flavor. Coated in chocolate and dessicated coconut, it was like eating frozen Cool Whip with fingernail clippings of newborns tossed in for a little al dente sensation. Spew.

The same company makes the Cherry Cocktail. I can't help but wonder if perhaps the suits at Owyhee, makers of these pathetic confections, aren't a bit sadistic. The Cherry Cocktail is a sticky mound of chocolate and crushed peanuts, and the cherry cream center holds a whole maraschino cherry. It might politely be described as having the appearance of a tremendous gum drop. It would be more accurately described as looking like a horse apple. The flavors are quite strong, and it doesn't taste bad. It doesn't really taste good, either, though. It's definitely edible but too damn big for something so sicky sticky sweet. The texture is fairly off-putting, however, and it's just so awful looking! This is desperation chocolate only.

The Hunks: Strange. The Big Hunk is sort of a chewy nougat or taffy with peanut pieces. It's very chewy, definitely not for the loose tooth crowd. It tastes quite nutty, which I liked. But it was really sweet, which I didn't like. It's also, as they say, big. More than enough to satisfy. You have to chew so much that you start to drool and your jaw gets tired. The Skinny Hunk is a smaller, nutless version of the Big Hunk. Without the nuts, it's like eating condensed marshmallows. This is one girl who likes her Hunks to have nuts.

We were getting pretty full of candy and starting to feel a little puky. Also, I'm not thrilled to eat marshmallows (gelatin), even for cultural understanding. So we decided to put the Rocky Road away for future sampling. Then we forgot about it. I found it in the van several days later. Thank goodness the packaging held in the heat or I would have had liquid Rocky Road absolutely everywhere. It was totally melted. I mean totally. Squeezing the package, it seemed like a warm bag of diluted Hershey's syrup. It went in the trash. Oh, well.

A travel favorite: When I go to Salt Lake City, I always go to Marie Callender's for pie. We don't have Marie Callender's here. I like pie. Marie Callender's has about 20 kinds of pie available daily. It's really hard to choose. Tradition calls for coconut cream, but with so many varieties to try, it's a little narrow-minded to get the same thing every time. Not that I'm in Salt Lake very often.

Once, my mother brought me a Marie Callender's coconut cream pie home on the airplane. Airline regulations wouldn't allow her do that anymore. Ooh, scary pie! It might be an explosive. I was pretty impressed she would lug a whole pie home. That's love.

Anyway, this time, there were 11 of us at Marie Callender's, all eating pie. Someone thought we should share – take a bite and pass it on. I thought not, although I did allow my nephew to try a forkful of my lemon cream cheese slice. We agreed it was good, better than his Key lime. He managed to get a bit (or several) of his mother's, too. I think she got this colossal piece of triple chocolate cheesecake. It looked really good. Really good.

I'll need to go back.

Scenic Byways

2008-08-23T13:10:00.008-05:00

After the funeral, the family started going their separate ways. I headed to Boise with the girls to visit a friend of Kayleigh's who moved there in June. We decided (rather, I decided) to take a scenic byway to get there.

As it turned out, it wasn't as scenic as I would have hoped considering how much extra time it took. Still, there were some interesting spots along the way. Huge canyons, some waterfalls, spots to walk along the Oregon trail.
The Oregon Trail was pretty amazing, really. Think of how many people walked there or sweated in a jostling wagon, trying to make it ever further west. They didn't travel at 75 MPH in air-conditioned comfort with a convenience store plopped down every 20 miles. It was so hot, so dry, so windy, so shockingly free of wildlife – so shockingly free of anything edible. We saw the occasional tiny lizards that moved so fast you couldn't focus on them until they sat still. Scarcely a bird, seldom a river, never a deer or antelope or even a gopher.

There were warnings about rattlesnakes, scorpions and deer ticks, but we didn't see any. I thought it was a little funny to equate a deer tick with a rattlesnake, but my brother, the E. coli-infected one, has had Lyme Disease twice, so he might not find it so amusing.

It made me grateful for the wet green of my home.

Boise turned out to be different from what I expected. It had a big-city feel, even though it's only around 180,000 plus its rapidly expanding suburbs. We never saw a cloud, nor was it awfully hot – in the low 90s, which, with the breeze and nonexistent humidity was thoroughly bearable. People always talk about the dry heat being more tolerable, but I always thought, Right, ovens are dry, too.

We sent Kayleigh off with her friend and Kelsey and I wandered around town. The downtown was quite nice. It had loads of places to eat, and most offered outdoor seating. We found a funky little coffee shop where we both had rather odd iced mochas. I think they must have used whole milk. I noticed on our walk around the city that it must not get as cold there as I thought it did. They had outdoor escalators, which would be laughably impractical around here – snow, ice, salt, torrential rain equals no way. There was something else, too, but I can't remember anymore. Regardless, the winters seem as if they must be milder there than here.

We visited an old prison on the edge of town. It started as a federal territorial prison in the 19th century and closed as a state prison in the 1970s, if memory serves me. It housed men and women. We certainly treated (perhaps, treat) our prisoners poorly. We saw the isolation chambers, which were about 5 feet by 10 feet and held up to six men. There were no lights, no toilets, no windows. Solitary confinement, a spot for one man, was about 3 feet by 8 feet, and again, no lights, toilets, or windows. There was a hole in the ceiling about as big around as a coffee can for fresh air and light, a hole in the floor for the toilet, and a tiny grate at the bottom of the solid cage door for a little more air. One man was held in one of these rooms for 8 months.

Our last stop was the gallows. I stood there and looked up and looked down and looked out at the observation room. The trap door opens to a large room with a huge door where the ambulance can pull right up and take the body away.

I don't believe in capital punishment.

My mom thought a prison was a peculiar place to take my 8-year-old. Kelsey thought it was interesting, though. I'm glad it didn't scare her.

In the afternoon, we stopped at Sierra Trading Post, one of my favorite catalog/online stores. This was a little one. The one in Cheyenne was much bigger. Kelsey got a Stetson, a perfect memento of our westward wandering.

Graveside

2008-08-19T14:00:00.004-05:00

We arrived in Bennington, Idaho, on Thursday night after a fun but long Wednesday. It was nice to see everyone again, and it was fun to watch my daughters so easily fit with their big cousins.

Ah, those big cousins. Kayleigh went along with James and Daniel to do some errands. She said it was the most fun she'd ever had running errands. James, I'm told, is almost as crazy a driver as I am. Later, we took turns on James's motorcycle, which, fortunately, doesn't go very fast, but it does go through ditches quite nicely. And after that it was time to go shootin' in the orchard. We blew Mountain Dew out of trees, at which point, Kayleigh was feeling like she never wanted to go home again.

Kelsey was a bit more sedate, choosing to make bead jewelry after she burned her leg on the motorcycle. She regrets not going shooting now, but at the time, her leg really hurt.

More family arrived later, and it was getting to be quite the reunion. I told Lee, my sister-in-law, that it bugged me it took Clint's death to get us all together, then I started to cry. She said that's the way it always is, which I suppose is true. But Clint would have enjoyed himself with everyone around, and it just reinforced what a raw deal he got.

The next day was the graveside service, and Lee was very nervous. I just hoped I could keep it together. One look at the hole in the ground and a rock with my brother's name on it and that was blown to hell. I wandered toward some trees away from the group and started tearing up. The harder I tried to stop, the more I cried. Kelsey came over and held my hand and rubbed my back, the sweet thing, so I just blubbered.

After mostly composing myself, I turned back to the assembly to find the small kids peering into the hole and shouting about how deep it was, and one of them took a seat and dangled his legs in, ready to jump. I thought it was kind of funny, but the parents of those involved did not.

Lee's sister Lyona offered a shoulder, literally. She said if I needed someone, I should just go stand shoulder to shoulder and we'd hold each other up. Then she pressed into me, and we held each other, shoulder to shoulder, our eyes getting red and drippy.

I won't say too much about the service itself. Mostly because I can't remember what people said, but I do remember it was quite nice. Lee spoke about their courtship, marriage, and family and some about Clint's last day. Each of Clint and Lee's kids did their part. Daniel sort of ran things, Sarah said a lovely prayer, Ben consecrated the ground and James lowered the box, which he had to drop because the hole was so deep. After that, I sprinkled some Wisconsin dirt over the box, and that was pretty much the end of it. Ah, the bishop was there, too, but he didn't say a lot.

We took some pictures, then went back to Lee's for food. Lee's cousin Susan brought her scooter over for people to ride. Kayleigh took it around the back yard a bit, but didn't venture onto the streets. I gave Lee's nephew Cole a ride. Cole was hilarious. He held on so tight and giggled as soon as we got going. At the end, he proclaimed, "I was brave!" My sister Martha has a scooter story now, too, but that's hers to tell.

I slipped away to Lyona's house around the corner for a visit with Lee's sister Jackie and her partner Dorothy. When we met last December, I felt an instant bond with them, and it was nice to have some quiet time together.

The evening was spent in front of a fire pit just talking and enjoying each other. After a while, a couple of neighbor friends stopped by and talked about their time in Russia farming. The man, whose name I can't remember, asked Kayleigh where she was. She gave her 14-year-old "huh?" as a response. He said, "Are you pre-mission, post-mission, married, high school...." She said, "Um...." So Lee asked her where she'd like to do her mission, which also got an "um." I said she'd like to go to Pixar. In the dark after a day like that, it wasn't the place to explain our nonconforming ways. We just had a laugh and moved on.

And that was pretty much it. On Sunday, we shared a pancake breakfast, then, for the most part, went our separate ways. The girls and I went on to Boise to visit a friend of Kayleigh's for a few days. Much of my family went to Salt Lake City, but my sister Cynthia headed to Las Vegas where she won $1,000 on a penny machine. Nice.

Have credit card, will travel

2008-08-17T10:06:00.003-05:00

Home again, home again.

In the last 12 days, I've stayed at six different motels, and I can tell you, you get what you pay for. I don't need a fancy room, but crickets in the bathroom and mattresses that have seen more action than Hugh Hefner start pushing up the sphincter factor.

Speaking of sphincter factors, my brother (the live one) came down with a nasty case of E. coli a few days ago. His stay in the frontier has been prolonged while he recovers. I have never seen a man – and he is a big, strong man – vomit with such force, intensity and length. The poor guy.

I think the next time I travel, instead of noting license plates from different states and provinces, I'm going to keep track of museums. There are a lot of museums in the world, and some are truly bizarre. Like the Danish Immigrant Museum. The SPAM museum. Or the Bob Feller Museum. Who the heck is Bob Feller? Why does he need his own museum? Ever been to the Museum of the Fur Trade? Or the Museum of the Mountain Men? I haven't.

Anyway, I'm tired.

Way Out West

2008-08-11T10:35:00.004-05:00

Greetings from the land of Larry Craig, who is not and never has been gay.

On our way to bury my brother, the XX-chromosome van wound its way through Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, Wyoming and Idaho. Soon we'll be on our way to Utah. We shared the road with about 500,000 bikers on their way to Sturgis.

South Dakota is still my favorite. I like the lumpy hills in the east and the Black Hills in the west, and the Badlands are fun to jump around in and so alien.

My mom always told me she hated the Badlands. I could never understand why, and when we got there, she said, "I've never been here before." She doesn't know what she thought of as the Badlands, but she had the wrong place in mind. I don't know how much she enjoyed it, but she was interested at least for a little while. Kelsey and I could have stayed all day.

I was worried about my mom. She's 83, overweight, can hardly walk, and was terrified she was going to die getting out here. She didn't want to do anything fun, but when I said that meant driving through Nebraska, she changed her mind.

She might change it back after driving through Wyoming. I was fortunate the last time we drove through Wyoming, as it was dark much of the time. Wyoming is mile after mile of a nearly unchanging landscape. Ugh. It's interesting at first because it's so vast and so different from anything at home. But after several hours of hills and sagebrush, it gets pretty dull. At least in Nebraska there are cities and traffic. Wyoming is just desolate.

Take, for example, Lost Springs, Wyoming.

The last time we went through here, the population was 4. I wonder what happened.

Anyway, we also hit Wall Drug, Mt. Rushmore and Custer State Park while in South Dakota. When I was a kid, the Wall Drug bumper stickers said, "Where the HELL is Wall Drug?" Now they say "heck" instead.

Kayleigh ragged about going to Mt. Rushmore. She wasn't too impressed when she saw it when she was younger and hated how touristy it was. My niece Estelle, however, said it was the most exciting thing she'd done all year. I had always wanted to see it as a kid, and my brother Clint, the dead one, said, "It's just a big rock." I guess now I think it's interesting to see, nowhere I'd need to return to, and nowhere I'd really spend a lot of time. I'm glad Estelle got to see it, and my sister, too. My mom stayed in the car.

We drove past the Crazy Horse monument. It's not done, and they were going to charge us $27 to get in. We said no thanks and turned around.

The highlight of the day for me was driving through Custer State Park. We took the Needles Highway through some spectacular rock formations and fabulously twisty mountain roads. We saw loads of wildlife – buffalo, pronghorn, deer, prairie dogs. We had a picnic by a little lake, where Kelsey ate Fritos and a nasty Little Debbie cake and declared she was going to barf. She did not barf, thankfully.

Finding a place to stay was hard with all the bikers around. And because all the bikers were around, prices were jacked up. We drove and drove and drove, hoping to find a place cheaper down the road. We finally got on the phone to Eric at home who called every motel in every small town in southeastern Wyoming. We got gouged, but we got to sleep.

My mom was pretty beat, and I worried. But she seemed to recover pretty well over night. We arrived in Bennington, Idaho, the following evening, grateful to see our family.

And then the real fun began....

Out of Town

2008-08-05T08:25:00.002-05:00

In approximately 35 minutes, I am headed to Idaho with my kids, my mom, my sister and my niece.

Normally, I enjoy getting out of town. This trip is to bury my brother. And it's a long drive with a lot of people. Pardon me if I'm a little bummed about the whole thing.

A Peculiar Anniversary

2008-07-31T10:08:00.002-05:00

For our anniversary, Eric and I went to a vegetarian restaurant in a little town near by. Somehow I had come across their Web site while I was looking up a recipe for something I have long since forgotten. The menu offered so much that sounded so good I really wanted to go there. So off we went.

As soon as we walked in, Eric's freak-o-meter started pinging. I have little experience with religious fringe and didn't notice anything other than a rather quiet hostess and a rather empty dining room. But he, far more versed in such matters, spied the dark blue books on a little etagere, and those, with the smiles and demeanor of the employees, as well as the fact it was a vegetarian restaurant, had him squirming. He, apparently, had our server squirming, too. I wondered if the server didn't like women or just me in particular. Everything Eric ordered was an "excellent choice." One item was whipped up with the chef's special ingredient – love. I didn't get any love, and my choices were not so enthusiastically received. Ah, well. I guess I didn't appear receptive to enlightenment.

The food was good, and the selections were numerous. Everything was quite attractively presented. We thought we'd go again, but now I'm not sure.

When Eric went to the bathroom and I paid, I peeked at their blue books and free DVDs. I grabbed a couple of the DVDs out of curiosity, although I still haven't watched them. Eric was so right about the place.

At home, I looked them up on the Internet. There were buzzwords galore: advent, atonement, accord, later days, light energy, perfect, love, fear, depression, God, Jesus, forgiveness, peace, enlightenment, and my favorite, hologram. As far as I can tell, it's a New Agey thing that combines a whole bunch of ideas from a whole bunch of religions. We're all on our way to departing our bodies and the time-space continuum through forgiveness, and when we do, we'll be gods ourselves, or something like that.

People can believe whatever they want to believe, and that's fine with me, as long as they don't get too crazy and decide it's time for all of us to depart our bodies and slip a little cyanide into the Kool-Aid (oops! too late) or bomb the shit out of the Middle East because God told him to (oops! too late) or fly airplanes into the World Trade Center so exalted martyrs can be greeted by virgins in heaven (oops! too late) or ... yeah, it's endless, isn't it.

So, that was my anniversary. We drove around the countryside a bit, then came home. It was nice. Odd, but nice, too.

A Grand Day Out

2008-07-24T14:15:00.023-05:00

Last weekend, I sprang it on Eric that I wanted to go somewhere. Anywhere would be nice, but that particular day I had Point Beach in mind. He doesn't like it when I spring trips on him. Eric needs to make things, and he plans on making things most weekends. I am not a good planner, however. I am more of a spontaneous planner. And I need to go places.

We decided to go, but Eric would finish something first. But by the time he finished, it was rather late for a day-trip of that length. So – shudder – we planned to go on Wednesday instead. And we did.

Getting out the door proved challenging. We kept forgetting things. We left three times. And the trip took several detours around Fond du Lac, but that was OK, because we found a cool spot in town – a park across from Lake Winnebago with a merry-go-round, a little train, a petting zoo, bumper boats. I'm surprised my dad would have never taken me here. Maybe he did and I don't remember. Or maybe he was too busy chasing dead relatives and his next brandy. Regardless, I don't remember seeing it before, but when Kelsey saw it, she wanted to go. So we did.

Kayleigh felt a little weird going on the train. She's at that age where doing little kid things is embarrassing.

It was a fine little distraction. But off we went again.

Next stop was High Cliff State Park. I remember going here once for about five minutes. My dad and I met my uncle, his gal pal, and my aunt and uncle for a weekend when I was about 11. We did lots of driving, and High Cliff was one of our many stops. We got to get out long enough to look at the lime kiln ruins and that was about it. Apparently my rotund uncle couldn't do much walking. It sucked.

We did some walking on Wednesday, though. Not a lot, but enough. The park overlooks Lake Winnebago. There are some effigy mounds, the ruins, an observation tower, and a statue of Red Bird, a Ho-Chunk (still called Winnebago at the time the statue was erected) chief. The park is built on the lake as well as in and on limestone cliffs.

I've never been very impressed with Lake Winnebago. It's big, and that's about all you can say for it. It's so dirty. Gack. My dad told me his dad got drunk and drove their Model A into it once. Or maybe that was a friend of theirs. The stories run together, and I haven't heard them since I was little.

Next stop was visiting my dad. It made me sad. Before we left home, I took a penny from the year Clint died out of Clint's Coca Cola glass to take along. At the cemetery, I found a spot by my dad's stone and dug up a little dirt. I pushed the penny down as far as I could, then covered it up again. I know it seems a little silly, but I wanted them to be able to share something. They had a difficult relationship, but they loved each other in a desperate, ferocious, longing way.

We cleaned up some old flowers and faded flags. I stood there and cried, trying not to. My family was sweet to me. Kelsey never got to meet my dad, but she likes to hear about him and look at his photos. Kayleigh has one strong memory of him stepping on her foot and apologizing. She was 19 months old when he died. She adored him, and he adored her. She called him Baba, and he was easily her favorite grandparent. She used to shove my mom out of the way to get to him.

She was very upset when he died. She just didn't understand death at such a young age. My family is not one for really pouring out their emotions, either. After he died, people didn't want to talk much about it. When she asked where he was, my mom said he was gone. I heard a phone conversation she had with my mom about a week after he died.

Grandma: We love Kayleigh, and we love Grandma, and we love Daddy, and we love Mama–
Kayleigh, backing away from the phone, starting to cry: And Baba, too! And Baba, too! And Baba, too!

It didn't help that Eric's mom died 8 weeks later. "Gamma Mack" was her second-favorite grandparent. Nine months after Maxine died, Kayleigh was still looking for her. Sad. It took a long time before Kayleigh trusted us again. Years. Not kidding, not kidding myself, either.

Anyway, we wandered through the tiny cemetery toward the church. My great, great-grandparents got married there, I guess. I can't remember anymore. The farm around the cemetery is still in some part of the family rather far removed at this point. I don't even know their names. For all the tramping around we did in the area when I was a kid, my dad never seemed interested in seeking out his living, distant cousins.

Next was a stop for ice cream, which scored quite highly on Kelsey's daily events scorecard.

And then it was off to Point Beach, finally. It was getting late, and shadows were already long by the time we got there. We didn't mind. The water of Lake Michigan was cool and fairly clear and very high. There was hardly a beach at all, in fact, at least compared to years past.

Kelsey played in the water and collected shells

while Eric took pictures of dragonflies,

Kayleigh sat on a towel and thought and doodled,

and I wandered among the three of them. There weren't many people there. It was quite pleasant, nicely relaxing.

As the sun set, we left for home. Kelsey got sand in areas she'd rather not have, so I gave her lots of water, and we had to stop a couple times. We got some hot chocolate and some gasoline as the night animals started their prowls. Sadly, one of them will prowl no longer. A family of four raccoons was making its way toward Lake Winnebago, and I didn't see them in time. I hit the brakes, but my front right tire got one of them. I always wondered how people could not see raccoons. Now I know. They weren't there, and then they were. I suppose that's the way it is with deer – and small children. God.

We got home about 11:20, tired but happy for a day together.

Tomorrow is our 16th wedding anniversary, so we're going out again. Without the kids this time.

A note on the pics: Some are from my cell phone, but some are ones that Eric took with his nice camera. He took the one of the forest, the dragonfly, Kelsey in the water, and the last one of Kayleigh on the towels on the beach.

Kelsey's tarts

2008-07-21T13:27:00.006-05:00

It's raspberry season again. We've had a few weeks of little, red glory. They ripened a little slower this year, probably because of the obscene winter and resulting spring floods.

Kelsey looks forward to raspberries every year. We do, too (not Kayleigh), but Kelsey is always very enthusiastic. The birds like them, too. We can tell by the color of their whitewash, which turns pink and purple.

Last year, Kelsey made some little tarts. She's been dying to make them again, and she finally got the chance. The recipe, if you can call it that, was hers.

Raspberries are an ideal plant for us. We can abuse and neglect them, and they keep coming back, loaded with flavor and color. The plants cost us $3 apiece. We bought six, three each of everbearing and summer-bearing. They arrived from McKay the day we were leaving for a long vacation. We just popped them in the ground quick and left. All the ever-bearing ones died, but the other three certainly made up ground.

They say you're supposed to cut them back in the fall, but we never do. We're too lazy to actually work on our yard.

Fortunately, we're not too lazy to pick the berries. I like them best when they're still warm from the sun, while I'm standing in the thick of them, my daughter by my side, our bowls slowly filling.

Happy birthday

2008-07-16T12:13:00.008-05:00

Today is my mom's birthday. She is 83 ... 84 if the Navy is asking. She lied about her age to get in over 60 years ago. I always wonder what would happen if they found out now. Would they strip her of her veteran's benefits? They've done that to other people.

She was stationed at the San Diego Naval Hospital. She worked at the information desk. Pretty cushy for war-time service, I suppose. I don't know why she was so antsy to join. She said she wanted in and didn't want to wait another year. I always thought joining the Navy was an odd decision to make: she gets sea sick.

Anyway, I will be making the cake. I'm cheating and using a mix. It's a Duncan Hines French vanilla. It's what I had for my birthday, too, and it was actually very good. Two layers (well, mine was three), with whipped cream and strawberries between them and whipped cream on top. Hard to go wrong, really. Yum.

Kelsey made her a worry doll. Kelsey is heavy into worry dolls right now. Worry dolls with big heads, for some reason. Then she wanted to make her a box to put her worry doll in when it wasn't worrying for her. So, with some help from Eric, and not nearly as much help as you might think, she made her a box on the lathe. It's curly maple and gorgeous. I'm sure Grandma will be very happy.

Family history in trinkets

2008-07-14T14:30:00.010-05:00

Boy, am I glad we stopped by my mom's on a whim last Friday night. As we sat and chatted, my mom gave Kelsey a bracelet that my dad had given my mom. My mom was never a bracelet person, and it always annoyed her that my dad couldn't keep that little nugget in his head. Anyway, it's a rather gawdy thing, but Kelsey was happy to get it. My mom suggested we look in her jewelry box for a matching necklace. I didn't find one, but as I walked back out her bedroom door, I noticed the garbage can was full to the top. I saw my grandfather's face and newspaper clippings and bits of frill tossed in with dirty kleenexes and deteriorating latex gloves. (I am so glad I haven't needed those gloves recently.)

I grabbed the garbage can and wandered back to the living room.

"Are you storing this stuff in here or throwing it away?" I asked, starting to pick through it all.

"No, I'm throwing it away," my mom answered.

Like hell.

I had a gas looking through all that stuff. I couldn't believe she would throw it away. (Well, I suppose I can, and I don't blame her, really, when I look at the stacks of accumulated stuff in my own house.) I salvaged my grandpa's business cards from Kodak. He worked there for 33 years. There was an ad for senior housing from a Winter Haven, Fla., newspaper in which he was the model. There was a little aluminum booky thing that he had made in 1918 when he was in the war. My mom figures it was a cigarette holder. There was a cigarette lighter with my mom's cousin's name on it. There was a bookmark her friends gave her when she retired and an engraving plate, never used, from my parents' wedding stationery.

I asked her what other things she had thrown away. She said nothing, she had only gone through one drawer, but she was sick of all this junk lying around. I told her I wanted anything that had someone's name on it if she didn't want it herself.

Those old trinkets mean something to me. They're a connection to the past. I don't have memories of her cousin Quin, and my kids didn't even know what my grandpa looked like. These people are part of me and part of the future.

Just the other day, a woman told me Kelsey looks just like me. She does. She also looks just like her Aunt Marcia and her Grandpa John and her great-great (I think) Aunt Nina. That face is living history. That face won't live forever, but little bibs and bobs will hang around long after we've all gone. It's sad in a way. But without a cigarette lighter from Traverse City, I probably never would have known about Quin or the fact that his sister still lives in Grand Rapids. I'd've looked her up the last time I was there if I'd known.

I still don't know anything about Quin other than he was always very nice to my mom and her sisters. But that's nice to know.

(I blurred out Doug's phone numbers because I didn't want people pestering my mom. Heh. I don't think he did the handyman thing very long.)

Detail of my grandpa's handicraft. He used to make jewelry, too. Oh – my mom said she probably shouldn't have thrown that out, but she couldn't see well enough to even know what it was.:

Breaking News: Woman's ass declared 51st state

2008-07-11T14:43:00.003-05:00

Seriously, someone who would like to lose weight and get in better shape should probably not accept assignments to write about food. But seriously, someone with an ass with its own ZIP code is probably someone who likes food. So what do you do? You take the assignment and say it's all for the experience, for the clip, for the money – for the good of the reading public. And you giggle about your incredible luck in getting this plum assignment.

And then you go out and eat. And eat. And eat some more. You get drinks, you get appetizers, you get the entree, you get desserts. You have to be thorough or the readers won't get an accurate picture of the establishment. What kind of reporter would you be otherwise?

Old Photos

2008-07-09T10:31:00.011-05:00

My cell phone has a camera on it. I use it to get snapshots now and again. Yesterday I dumped photos from the last year and a half or so. It's sort of a pain, so I haven't bothered. And we couldn't find the little thingy that lets us get them off the phone for free. These are in no particular order. Gotta love Blogger. And I'm too lazy to rearrange them.

Eric, Basil and Kelsey

Reese's Puffs frowning and crying

Mmm... cherries.

A little something for the Witches of Eastwick.

Kelsey in chalk

Smokers' lounge outside Madison Newspapers, Inc. Charming.

Turtilla. Kelsey has a thing about taking pictures of food.

My great-nephew Sam. I call him Sammo de Mayo because he was born on the fifth of May.

This year's pigs aren't as nice as last year's. But they still come to greet me when I visit the farm.

Snowtubing Kelsey

My mom having lunch at O'Malley's Jet Room, a fun spot to eat a lot.

My mom's retina. She has macular degeneration in her right eye.

Flat bread from Noodles eaten into the Apple shape by Kelsey.

Epcot

Last year's pigs were so fun and cute. They've long since been slaughtered and digested. Poor little things.

Kelsey sculpted the cream from a few Oreos. Gross.

The glow of the computer on Kelsey.

The view of the Wasatch Mountains from my plane leaving Salt Lake City after my brother's funeral.

Snowtubing Kayleigh

Kelsey waiting while we fill out paperwork to buy our new car.

Eric's rain detector

A gorgeous swallowtail outside the swimming pool.

This bat hangs around Olive Garden. We saw it again this year.

My mother at rest

Kayleigh at the dinner after my niece's wedding in St. Louis.

This is the elephant that could scratch his foot with his penis. Nice.

This little fawn was lying in the grass outside American Player's Theatre last summer. So sweet.

Kelsey and I enjoying a Lake Mendota sunset at Picnic Point.

This is the car Kelsey wanted us to buy.

Reclining

Kelsey waits for her soccer game to start.

My feet, Eric's cell camera.

Another shot from Eric of his favorite subject.

Kelsey at my niece's wedding dinner in St. Louis.

Red, white and blue

2008-07-04T14:36:00.002-05:00

Welp, after 15 years in this neighborhood, I think I am finally sick of the Fourth of July festival. Every year, the same thing. The same carnival, the same games, the same musicians, the same art fair with the same artists selling the same stuff. The only change is the food vendors: Pizza Extreme instead of Pizza Oven, and no sub sandwiches at all this year. Otherwise, even the food is the same. I was glad when, about five years ago, they finally started getting some good vendors who sold things other than meat. It was always so disappointing to get a bottle of water and an ice cream cone. It's just not that hard to offer food without dead animals all over it.

Last week, we went to Rhythm & Booms in Madison. We haven't gone in years. Eric and Kayleigh went a couple times since Kelsey was born, but when Kelsey was little, she hated loud noises, so she and I hung out at my mom's, just a couple miles from the park. My mom used to enjoy going, but she didn't go this year. She loves fireworks, but it's too hard for her.

When she used to come, we would park the car in the morning across the four-lane road across from the park. If you didn't have to cross that road, it was fairly smooth sailing back to her house. Rhythm and Booms is well-attended, usually with around 300,000 people going, so you had to claim your parking space early.

Shortly before the fireworks would start, one of us would drive everyone down to the park. They would find a bare spot in the grass, which wasn't always easy. Then whoever had the car drove back to my mom's and walked down to the park in time for the fireworks. When the display was over, we'd make the slow shuffle across the street and up into the little residential roads where we'd parked the car. The ride to my mom's usually took about half an hour or 45 minutes. On a regular day, it takes about 5 minutes.

One year, a family along the drive home had a toilet in their front yard. They handed out bean bags to people sitting in their cars and invited them to try to toss the bags into the toilet. It was a lighthearted way to kill the time in gridlock, with lots of cheers all around. My mom got one in, so it was especially fun.

A couple of times, we made the mistake of trying to go home instead of staying at my mom's. It took hours – we live 20 minutes away from her. This year we pitched the tent in the back yard. It has been a mosquito-y year after all the floods. The newspaper reported that the number of mosquitoes at the park was 100 times what they typically see for that time of year, and I absolutely believe it. My mom worried about us camping out because of all the skeeters. She and my nephew said we were crazy to go to the fireworks. But we went.

And this year, there was lots of space and no mosquitoes. I suppose a lot of people didn't want to spend the gas money, and the weather was questionable. But there was a nice, light wind, which likely kept the mosquitoes away. So we had a fantastic seat, right up close, and no pests.

There were cannons this year, which was fun. Loud. Very loud.

Afterward, we walked back to my mom's house and got ready for bed. The mosquitoes were apparently asleep, too, because they weren't hanging around anymore. The trouble was, though, that almost all the cops in the city were at the park. So when neighbors went insane shooting off fireworks, we just had to lie there and listen and wonder when the next bomb was going to go off. That doesn't bother me too much; it's part of the day. But it bothered Eric a lot, who startles terribly. Between that and the LIVE BAND that the neighbors hired, it made for a very restless night. The kids didn't seem to mind.

It didn't feel very festive having the Fourth of July celebrations in June. So tonight will be a little nicer since it's the actual day. Even if the fireworks are just little and even if I'm kind of sick of it.

One of our neighbors has a British flag hanging in the door. Heh.

Gender Traps

2008-07-01T16:57:00.002-05:00

Wow, being a conventional woman has never felt so good. Usually I am going insane doing nothing, but this summer, nothing, as in something, is fitting like a glove.

I am hauling my children to their activities. I am cooking. I am cleaning. I am reading. I am going for walks.

And I'm really enjoying myself. I've apparently – finally – gotten past the bristle of being a SAHM now that I am facing no longer being one. You might know. But it's probably because I'm about to join the work force that I can enjoy it. It's sort of a light at the end of the tunnel thing, I think.

Good for a laugh

2008-06-30T21:13:00.005-05:00

My children are in the basement playing a video game in which you make up your own characters. In so doing, they are laughing the kind of laughs that completely take your breath away. Still, somehow, between the massive spasms of hilarity, they manage to spit out a few words. What are these words?

Fart.
Megafart.
Butt.

What else could possibly be so funny? Nothing is funnier than a fart.

Metal

2008-06-24T20:19:00.006-05:00

Today Kelsey and I went to the salvage yard. We had a couple of sewing machines to get rid of. One of them a neighbor gave us a few years ago. They didn't know where it came from or if it worked, but we needed one, so they handed it over. It didn't work. The other was Eric's mom's, which also didn't work. Kelsey was upset we were getting rid of something of Grandma Max's until she found out it was useless. Eric swore at that thing for years.

Anyway, the salvage yard. It's much like any other junk yard/recycling center – it's a pit. But it's close and they take almost everything. So we walked in and there was no one there, just the sound of a radio and the smell of grease and spoilage. Kelsey started fanning her nose. We looked around and finally I decided to just start walking through the discarded chunks of American consumerism awaiting dismantling, melting and repurposing. Past the smashed bits of vehicle but before the wasteland of dehumidifiers, a man poked his head at me.

"Are you looking for Maury?" he asked, coming a little closer and wiping his blackened hands on an equally blackened towel.

"I just want to get rid of some stuff," I said.

"Go through that gray door," he said, pointing toward a gray door that said the area was for hard hats and employees only. We went through, stepping carefully over the piles of debris and oil-soaked dirt.

On the other side of the door, the room was quiet. Out back were more heaps of metal and plastic. Trucks awaited emptying and filling, and a crane stood idle. There were three rows of conveyor belts. Directly in front of us were about 15 carburetors. Past that were air conditioners, and past that it's anyone's guess. Assorted pieces of machinery were in various states of disassembly and the space between the rows was taken up with absolutely anything imaginable that might have some metal on it. There was even a Trek mountain bike that appeared to be in pretty good shape except for a bit of rust around the brake calipers. I wondered if that was there for recycling or if it was something Maury rode to work.

I called out, "Hello?" No answer. "Hello?" Nothing.

Kelsey kept my hand tight and close as I scanned for signs of life. There was a large, gray door that said in white letters, "KEEP DOOR LOCKED AT ALL TIMES." It was open, so we walked toward it through the metal graveyard where something was hissing its last gasp on the conveyor belt.

Nearing the door, we heard a voice. It sounded like Maury was on the phone.

We got to the open door that was supposed to be locked. I gave a quick glance inside and saw stairs and another open door that led to what must have been a break room. The voice was close, but still a little muffled. I called again. "Hello?"

"What do you need?" came the voice, closer than I expected, and I looked through the door and around the corner. The voice came from behind another door that read, "TOILET."

I smiled and said I wondered if I could drop off some stuff.

"I'll be out in a minute."

Kelsey and I hurried back to the door that said hard hats and employees only. I didn't want to be standing there when he flushed. I wondered if he would flush at all, if he would be too embarrassed to flush after being caught talking on the phone taking a dump in a dump. He did. He washed his hands, too, not that anyone could tell, and he was dripping in sweat. I can only wonder if it was very hot in the john or if he had an excruciating time of it. Like a dog shitting peach pits, he was.

"Whaddya got?" he asked, coming nearer, a dubious expression on his face.

"Can you take old sewing machines?" In a moment of feminine passivity, I didn't know if they'd be interested in something so paltry. I mean, I wasn't delivering half a Buick.

"I'll take a look at 'em."

As I led him to my car, which looks like a four-door Smart Car, he asked, "Are they pretty big?"

No.

He said he'd take them. I should back my car up and just leave them by the green sign. He'd pick them up.

So that's what we did.

Across the street, the upscale coffee roaster billowed light, gray smoke and the bitter smell of burning beans into the industrial air.

Let the healing begin

2008-06-19T20:19:00.002-05:00

So, I've been a bit under the weather. I've felt like doing nothing. I lie in bed, my mind is fine (just go with it), so I try to do something, and then I need to go lie down again. It's quite boring and makes me feel utterly useless. I even had a dream that Eric was leaving me because I was such a useless drip. I also started smoking crack in that dream. And tried to hide the smell by polishing my nails.

Anyway, I feel remarkably better today than yesterday.

Kelsey is also feeling better. She had a day yesterday that would exhaust a lumberjack, she ate like a lumberjack, then she spent the early morning hours ejecting it all. Fortunately, I had suggested a bucket be put in her room when she complained of a hurting tummy. Eric had the honor of holding it for her. I don't do barf well, I'm ashamed to say.

What is it about barf that gets me into panic mode? It's just barf. But if Eric is here to handle it, I completely flip out. I wasn't so bad last night because it was contained and we pretty well knew it was coming. When there's no cleaning of it, I do pretty well. But if it is all over the floor or the smell is strong, I nearly faint. I can't sleep the rest of the night. Every sound I hear is the child waking up to puke again and I freak out all over again, profuse sweating, heart pounding, full-body tingling, heavy breathing. When Eric's not here, it still upsets me, but I have a kid to help and soiled items to clean, so I have to keep some control. But what a spaz.

Do other animals detest vomiting so much? Most humans object rather strongly. I used to know a guy who said throwing up was natural and animals use it to heal all sorts of ailments, so whenever he felt slightly ill for any reason, he'd make himself hurl. Got a toothache? Upchuck to the rescue. Sprained ankle? Forget ice or Ace bandage. Try purging instead.

That was not a friendship that lasted. Opposite ends of the psycho spectrum.

Which way do you go?

The ark has landed

2008-06-16T13:43:00.003-05:00

Well, hey! It hasn't rained in about 12 hours. The lake and lagoons continue to rise, though, as we are downstream from much of the hardest hit areas of Wisconsin. My neighbors down the street have sandbags fortressing their yards and homes, too late, though for some of them. They don't call it a flood plain for nothin'. Even the neighbor next door is down the hill just far enough that the water table has risen into his basement. We had a bit of water, but nothing to complain too much about. Kayleigh, Eric and I worked to direct water and wet-vac the stuff that got in the house. Every time it rains, we're learning what we need to do with our landscaping to keep our house dry. Eric checks the gutters frequently now, and he recently caulked the gap between the house and the driveway. When our neighbor was out with a snow shovel trying to get the water away from his house, Eric tore down a fieldstone garden wall to channel the water to a different part of the back yard and away from our house and the neighbors'.

In the midst of it all, we got our new carpet for the basement. It seemed a bit idiotic to put new carpeting in while we worried about it flooding, but we went ahead. It was the end of April when the old carpet got flooded out, and we haven't had a drop in that part of the house since.

The installers were a couple of brothers doing subcontract work. They were a stitch, singing along at operatic volume to the radio and politely substituting "sugar" for "shit" when something didn't go perfectly. The only trouble we had was that we had asked for the carpet to be glued to the floor and they put pad down. I had seen pad on the invoice, but I assumed it was for the stairs. That'll learn me, huh? They were not pleased, and neither were we. The salesman had written the work order wrong, but we approved it. Eric and Shane, one of the installers, talked to our salesman. They worked out putting down a rubber pad that won't hold water. Shane said he's removed water-damaged carpet with that kind of pad underneath, and the pad was fine. It costs more, though. The salesman ate the cost, and we have a purple rubber pad under our new carpet. We're not convinced it is such a good thing, but we are willing to live with the consequences.

Anyway, I'm glad our corner of the world is drying out.

Friday the 13th

2008-06-13T20:51:00.002-05:00

Today is my brother's birthday. He would have been 59. It's his first birthday without him. It feels pretty crappy.

I took my mom out to lunch. I wanted to do something for her. Food is always good for simultaneously filling you up and stuffing you up. On the drive home, she said, "He didn't live very long, did he. Lee was the best thing that ever happened to him. Lee and the kids."

True.

After he died, my sister-in-law – that's Lee – gave me one of his Coca Cola glasses. I've been filling it with pennies ever since, and now it's almost full. I thought I should do something meaningful with them, but they're just sitting on my dresser. I'll play with them, I think. Clint played with his pennies, some game no one could ever figure out. When I was a kid, I thought he was just screwing around and whenever you thought you figured out what he was going to do next, he told you that you were wrong just so you couldn't figure it out.

Today is also my nephew's birthday. I'll call him.

Pity party

2008-06-08T14:02:00.003-05:00

I can't say what I really want to say because it would be rude. It would be truthful, but it could be interpreted as mean. Even when people are rude and mean to me, I won't be rude and mean back. Maybe I'm a sucker. Maybe I'm nice. Maybe I'm just a chicken.

I would love to let fly right now. But I won't because I'm a nice chicken sucker.

How about this: If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything. Remember that?

Nice chicken suckers finish last, I think.

For Heidi, who's gotta have it

2008-06-03T09:36:00.004-05:00

I'm sitting at the Toyota dealer, waiting for my free oil change. The free hot chocolate to go with my free oil change is absolutely nasty. It's bitter and watery, and I hope they do a better job with my engine oil than they have with the cocoa. [shudder]

I meant to write a story while I sat here about last night's middle school band concert, but I got distracted by the TV, set to Regis and Kelly. I never watched that show very much, and it has been rather a while since I've seen it. What struck me were Kelly's arms and shoulders. What the hell? Chickie could totally kick my ass. She's obviously been hitting the gym. Her shoulders have that masculine roundness about them, and her biceps are long and large.

Unless it's just a ghost effect on the TV here.

Still, it's disturbing. While I've been sucking lattes, Kelly's been pumping iron with a personal trainer. That bulging-muscle, vein-popping look isn't really what I'm after, but neither is the frumpy mom look that debases me every waking and a few sleeping moments.

Hmm...I've decided Kelly is toned but not huge. Their TV just came in better focus.

...

And now I'm home again. My car made weird noises after they returned it to me. They tell me it was probably making that noise before and I never noticed because nothing they did could cause it. They looked it over and decided it was the radiator fan rattling things around. I chose not to wait to have it examined more closely. I'll go back on Friday the 13th. What a day for car repairs.

And how interesting.

Regis and Kelly had the kid who won the national spelling bee on. They did a mini-bee between the team of Regis/Kelly and the champ. One of the words was triskaidekaphobia, a fear of the number 13. June 13 is also my dead brother's birthday, as well as my live nephew's birthday, although I have several live nephews and no dead ones.

And speaking of birthdays, today is Kayleigh's birthday. She is 14. Balls and a half. She wants to go to the Olive Garden for dinner and have my monster, triple-layer, triple-chocolate cake.

Fourteen years ago today, my dad arrived in my hospital room to say, "I'm here. I didn't die." I made him promise. He didn't make it to see Kelsey. We videotaped Eric fumbling with Kayleigh's diaper for the first time. Kayleigh puked on me for the first time. I got a migraine. I liked having other people make my meals, even if they were hospital meals.

Kayleigh was such a cute little thing. She had a huge head of black, curly hair and a little upturned nose. Her mouth was a sweet little pink pooch. One of her eyes was bloodshot from getting squeezed through a hole that wasn't quite big enough for her. Man, the sound of those scissors cutting my skin is something I'll never forget. She was a big baby. Nine pounds, three ounces.

She didn't cry when she was born. They whisked her off to suck out her poopy lungs and tried to keep her quiet. They did such a good job that they started to worry about her. Her face, hands and feet were blue. But when they were done clearing her lungs, she let loose a yelp, and they wrapped her up and handed her to Eric. She turned those giant, vulnerable blue eyes to his and he just about fainted. He still gets that way sometimes, like last night when she was dressed for band. She doesn't think of herself as beautiful, but we do, and we always will.

Happy birthday, kid.

Mmmm....

2008-05-29T17:35:00.002-05:00

There's something to be said for compulsive eating.

I'm in the throes of high-fructose corn syrup ecstasy. Warmth and calm spread out from my round, jiggly belly. I'm lightly dizzy, breathing deeply, a little dazed and dopey. Sleepy, I guess, but alert. I am full. It's like an orgasm hangover without the wet.

Summer

2008-05-26T18:20:00.002-05:00

Ah, warmth and humidity. I couldn't be happier. It's not so muggy that it's uncomfortable, just wet enough to make the heat hotter and my skin rejuvenate after the arid winter.

Kelsey and I spent Saturday morning at the farmers' market, our first of the season. It was fun to wander with the throngs and lie down in the grass and watch people go by.

We spent the afternoon at riding lessons, where she started posting. She was excited, but it tired her little legs out. They told her she did a good job for her first time. I sat in the car and read, occasionally interrupted by a rather foul-mouthed man working on putting up a fence.

The rest of the day was spent at my brother's cottage along the Wisconsin River. My sister-in-law Lee was visiting from Utah, and my nephew Ben came up from Illinois. We were a happy, noisy bunch, which drove my mother crazy. She kept plugging her ears. Lee said she wished Clint were there. He would have enjoyed himself.

Sunday was spent cleaning a bit. It was needed more than a bit.

Today we finished the touch-up painting in the basement. We picked a melted mint ice cream green. I can't remember what they called it. Paint colors always have such crazy names. Kelsey was fantastic helping with the entire job. Her roller had gotten a bit heavy at one point, so there were some blobs that needed attention. That's what we took care of today. I think it will be nice once the carpet is in and the furniture is back. We got indoor/outdoor carpet so that if we flood again, we can vacuum it up easily. Also, it will be wonderfully new carpet, not permeated with decades of filth.

Kayleigh worked on cleaning her room today. My goodness. The deal was if she cleaned her room, Eric would put a computer in there. So, she cleaned her room, then she and Eric worked on transferring files here and there. Unfortunately, the computer that was supposed to go in her room didn't work. She was pretty disappointed. One of Eric's friends came over to try to help after everything Eric tried failed, but it still didn't work. I told her to go mess up her room quick. She was not amused.

We had the first trip to the pool today. It was nice. Warm, breezy, sunny, not a lot of people. Kayleigh stayed home and did homework, but I did homework poolside while Kelsey and Eric swam. Summer school starts tomorrow for me. Four credits in four weeks. Sounds fun and a bit intense.

I think I would have left out the middle initial

2008-05-23T19:27:00.004-05:00

With a name like that, it's no wonder he's lashing out. Just read the first sentence.

Now, please, I need your advice! See previous post.

An apology and a ponderance

2008-05-23T09:37:00.002-05:00

For whatever reason my addled mind found fitting, I thought once school was over I would catch up with my blog buddies. Not happening. Very sorry. I have caught up on some DVD viewing and some family visiting, though. I watched season two of "Slings and Arrows," recommended by Laurie and seconded by me. Season three just came in yesterday at the library, and if I ever get out of bed, I'll go snatch them off the hold shelf. I also polished off the last two seasons of "Goodnight, Sweetheart." It was good, but I thought it ended rather abruptly. Even if they didn't want to tell us what happened down the line, a little more at the end would have been appreciated.

Seeking your advice:

I could graduate in December if I take two dreadful classes. There is a class I want to take (not required) that conflicts with one of the dreadful ones, both of which are required. The class I want to take is a magazine class. I'm hoping to learn applicable skills in the class.

One of the dreadful classes is offered by a better professor in the spring.

Is it worth it to take a class I want to take and choose a professor who's more interesting but postpone graduation by a semester?

Or should I get out of school and into the job market and learn on the job?

Bear in mind my advanced age and advanced credits: I will have to pay double tuition. Does another semester really matter after all this time? I'm really sick of school. But I don't want to graduate and be lacking in desirable skills. I wouldn't get a job then, and there'd be no point in graduating.

OK, I'm babbling.

What do you think?

Screaming O

2008-05-16T21:01:00.003-05:00

Yes, that's me you just heard. Did the earth move for you, too?

Let me tell you about today:

It is my birthday. I'm the age Eric was when we got married. I'm almost as heavy as he was the day we got married.

I had to work. It was my last day. My big story might run Sunday, but they've had something more timely come up and mine might get held for space. They asked me to work tomorrow and next week, too. I am busy. But I'll be back in the fall. Maybe. Probably.

I had to write a 10-page paper comparing Joan Didion, James Agee, and AJ Liebling (five pages) and John Hersey and William Langewiesche (five pages). This type of writing is not my favorite. In fact, it is my least favorite and it is one thing that kept me out of an English degree when I was younger. I just couldn't stand it. Yuck. But...

I JUST FINISHED THE STUPID FUCKING PAPER! Yes! Oh, yes! Oh, god! Yes! Yes!! YES!!!

What a way to spend your birthday! Writing a stupid fucking paper! I didn't even get to have a birthday cake. I didn't get any presents. Why not? BECAUSE I HAD TO WRITE A STUPID FUCKING PAPER!

My party is tomorrow and you're all invited. Bring Doritos.

Lasts

2008-05-15T21:23:00.001-05:00

A long time ago, when Kayleigh was little, I subscribed to parenting magazines. I thought they were interesting if not necessarily informative. It was fun to read about other people going through the same confusion, delight, frustration and awesome love that I was. There were horror stories of sick children and psycho nannies. There were inspiring stories of moms keeping their heads above their hormones and dads overcoming their dread of pink frills.

But there was one story that I've always remembered. It was a story about your child's lasts. Parents are so focused on their kids' first tooth or first step or first word. But there are lasts, and usually they slip away without anyone ever knowing, until one day you realize your daughter no longer needs you to accompany her to the bathroom; she no longer holds your ear as she's falling asleep.

Today was a last. It was a little last, but a last. Kayleigh, whose feet are now bigger than mine, had her last choir concert. She didn't sign up for it next year, and I know she won't go back to it. It was a good concert. These kids are getting so big. The boys have deep voices and muscles, the girls wear make-up and tight shirts. Kayleigh always stands on the end because she's tall. We sat right in front of her to see her last choir concert.

It doesn't make me sad, but it does make me remember.

Elizabeth Berg wrote that story about lasts in Parents Magazine when Kayleigh was a little girl. How right she was. But how lucky for Kayleigh and me that we could complete a circle of lasts with a first. Last night, I introduced Kayleigh to Elizabeth Berg, who was in town promoting her new book. Kayleigh told her that her book was funny. I told Elizabeth that Kayleigh was a pretty good writer herself. The best-selling author, the first Kayleigh's met, smiled and encouraged her.

Word of the Day

2008-05-13T08:49:00.002-05:00

The word for May 13 is farticles

The particles of air contaminated after someone or something lets out gas.

Example: You contaminated my air with your farticles!

Thanks to Arizona's leading fartologist for passing this juicy news along.

My window is open again

2008-05-05T20:57:00.003-05:00

Someone either just fell into the lagoon or caught a really big fish. He's hootin' and hollerin' and laughin' like Bill Clinton watching a Jeff Foxworthy special without interruption from commercials or Hillary.

"Oh, my god! Oh, my fucking god! Whooooo! HAHAHAHAHAHA! Yeah!"

Repeat.

And again.

And yet again.

For my 200th post...

2008-05-04T12:37:00.002-05:00

...nothing special. Well, special because I stole it from RC.

Your Personality at 35,000 Says...

Deep down, you prefer spending time alone to spending time with others. (Not sure about that one.) You enjoy thinking more than talking. (True)

You don't spend much time thinking about your place in the world. (Not even remotely true.) You are who you are - and people can just deal with that! (Words to live by. I'm no chameleon. WYSIWYG)

Your gift is having a way with words. (My dream is having a way with words.) You know how to express yourself well. (Particularly when I'm angry.)

You are inspired by challenges. If something is hard to accomplish, you want to do it. (This was more true when I was younger. I'm getting lazy and complacent.)

You are happy as long as you are given some personal space. It's important for you to have your own private life. (Not easy when I was the proverbial stay-at-home mom. Can we say crazy?)

The Personality Test at 35,000 Feet

It's a major award! But I didn't win

2008-05-01T13:27:00.002-05:00

Last night was the adult awards and scholarship recognition. I was nominated but didn't win, but I wanted to go anyway. They said Bucky Badger would be there and they'd have snacks. I'm so easily bought. Bucky was, indeed, there. He scared the hell out of Eric at one point, coming up behind him and putting his big furry paws over his eyes. Eric recovered himself well, but I felt bad for him. The food was fantastic. Dang. I gotta go to more of these university-sponsored events.

So, the people who won have pretty amazing stories. I knew they would. I've had it relatively easy. You know, I'm not a war refugee who just learned English a few years ago. I haven't raised disabled children while living in my car. One guy, who didn't win either, was so overcome he couldn't even speak when he got his certificate. He started to cry instead. God. I didn't know what to say when I got mine, so I thanked my professors and my family and when I started to babble, cut it off. I was told I looked "relaxed." Must have been that pineapple that was starting to turn.

There were some people there I knew. I was happy to see one of them, surprised to see another, and disheartened to see yet another – of all the arrogant, self-satisfied dicks on campus, he definitely wins the asshole award.

But enough about him.

It was a nice 90 minutes. The alumni association made sure to get all our pictures and releases so they can use us for advertising and fundraising to keep those scholarships and awards coming. The chancellor said he understood it was harder for returning adults to go to this school. We are such a tiny portion of the student body that school services are geared toward traditional students out of necessity. Which doesn't make it any easier for us. So, go us.

Eric and Kayleigh talked to the dean and an assistant dean, and he pointed out the story they had read on the front page the previous morning was mine. Heh. He's always drumming for me. He also told them Kayleigh was looking at UW-Stout for college. They both said how much they liked Stout, so I think that made her feel good.

Anyway, I better get some work done. Darn.

The Guys in Green, the end

2008-04-30T07:27:00.005-05:00

Wisconsin incarcerates more of its Black population – 4 percent – than any other state in the country. African Americans comprise 6 percent of Wisconsin’s population but 45 percent of the prison population.

The guys in green are, for the most part, men in black skin. Fifteen graduates are Black. Three graduates are White. One of the Black graduates has white skin and black corn rows. Another appears Black, White, American Indian. Even the courts couldn’t decide his race. He is sometimes listed as Caucasian and sometimes African American on his many criminal complaints. Whether he is judged by his race matters little compared to the judgment he faces for his crimes, too many to list, the most heinous of which include incest with a child and sexual assault of a child.

He is outgoing, engaging, and well-spoken. He wears his graying hair in a stiff ponytail that trails the length of his long, slender back. He wrapped up the graduation by singing a song he wrote called “Grandma’s Hands.” I tell him it was lovely, and it was. He adored his grandma, misses her, hopes for a new one somehow. He said the song was a metaphor for the restorative justice program, a strict, caring, wise, ever-present guide. He said he needed his grandma’s guiding hands. I have a hard time believing those hands were very effective.

One of the White guys, who’s had a steady stream of well-wishers, is now sitting alone, wolfing his cake. I wonder if he feels like an outcast among his darker brothers. When he accepted his diploma, he took the microphone like an old pro. Turns out he is. He worked in radio in four states. He says he misses it. “Radio is an addiction,” he said, smiling. He is outgoing, gregarious even, smooth, well-spoken, quick with a joke and a smile, a bit of a showoff. We chat easily.

He used to work in the prison kitchen, but he gained 15 pounds licking out the giant bowls of cake batter. Now he works in the laundry, which is boring, he says, but he is happy to work. He said he had to get out of the kitchen, even though he liked the work. “The guy in charge, he and I didn’t – well, I have bakery experience. We didn’t do things the same way. It was time for me to get out of there, or I’d’ve gotten in trouble. I don’t want that.” He smiled and took another forkful of cake.

There are only about 200 jobs in the prison, and he says he is lucky to have one, even if all he does is lift and load green garb and press buttons. “It’s mind-numbing!” He laughs his easy laugh again.

In a moment, his face flashes anger, then resignation. Although it surprises me, I haven’t for a moment forgotten that this disarming, outgoing guy with the professional broadcasting voice is here for a reason. The reason is 25 years for first-degree sexual assault of a child, causing a child to expose a sex organ, and repeated sexual assault of the same child. He thinks he got a harsher sentence because he was a public figure. He is appealing the conviction. I leave him to finish his cake.

Being among these men is confusing. They are like men I see every day. They don’t look evil. There have no features that distinguish them from law-abiding men. They could be at the grocery store, the bus stop, the bank, in the car next to mine as I drive to school. The guys in green speak of their children, their jobs.

But they are not like men I see every day. Some of their crimes are shocking, frightening, sickening. Some are simply a laundry list of addiction. They have made terrible mistakes and many have made them repeatedly. As a society we have decided they need to be punished for what they have done and separated to keep the rest of us safe. I’m OK with that.

But they need rehabilitation, and the men in this program want it. And they will need help when they are released. It would be sad, it would be foolish, it would be wrong to let them have their 13-inch TVs and their 90 minutes of exercise three times a week and little else. They need to be prepared to re-enter society, and society needs to be prepared to accept them.

When the guys in green receive their diplomas, they are allowed to say a few words.

“This program should be required for all eligible inmates. It would reduce recidivism. People on the outside need to know there are offenders who do wish to repair the damage they’ve done.”

“I’ve learned so much. There’s going to be a world of giving back.”

“I am deeply sorry for the crimes I have committed. Those of you on the outside, thank you for not giving up on us.”

The guys in green are grateful for the chances they have been given to rehabilitate themselves. They want to rejoin society and do a better job of being men. For all our sakes, I hope they can, and I believe at least some of them will.

Part 1, Part 2

The Guys in Green, part 2

2008-04-29T16:04:00.005-05:00

The guys in green fidget in their chairs, eager to begin the graduation ceremony of the 13-week restorative justice program they have just completed. Graduation marks the end of the program and the beginning of understanding what their crimes have done to their victims, the victims’ families, their own families, employers, insurance companies, the criminal justice system, themselves. They begin to understand the physical, the emotional, the financial, the criminal, the punitive, the restorative. But it is only a beginning.

Tanya is a victim, a survivor. She was robbed at gunpoint by two teens who then pistol-whipped her. She limps, her face is crooked, her right arm is unnaturally stiff. When she takes your hand to shake it, she cannot grasp it because her thumb is pressed into her palm and her fingers remain straight.

Tanya taught the guys in green about the aftermath of her attack. “I walked around with a huge chip on my shoulder for about a year and a half,” she said. “Everything was focused on the offenders. The justice system, my friends, even my family talked about the offenders. No one talked about me. I felt like I had no voice.”

She said she got sick of being a victim. “I do have a voice, and I have a right to use it. The restorative justice program gave me this voice.”

She is a strong supporter of the program and participates in restorative justice programs throughout the state. “I take what I learn with me everywhere I go.”

This is the third restorative justice graduation ceremony at Columbia Correctional Institution. There were 20 slots available for participation in the program. Fifty-seven men applied. Two men dropped out before completion. Almost 900 are incarcerated at CCI. Most of these men will be released and reintegrated into society.

I talk with one man who will be released in five years. He wants to start his own business, a prison catalog company. There are four catalogs inmates may order from. He wants to start another. He knows what the customers want, he says, touching his Jheri-curled twists with the tips of his fingers. He would also like to start a restorative justice program of his own, or a prevention program for youth, so they don’t end up like he did – accepting a plea bargain to reduce that first-degree intentional homicide charge to second-degree reckless homicide and hiding a corpse.

He appears sincere in wanting to go straight on the outside. He talks about the ripple effect his crimes have caused. He is young and strong and hopeful. He wants to go to Madison instead of back to Milwaukee so he can start fresh, away from the influences and behaviors that got him in green scrubs behind red bars. He knows he might have to work for someone else for a while before he can start his business. I feel his excitement in doing something worthwhile. I wonder if he knows how hard it will be once he leaves the security of his brothers, the name most offenders give to their fellow inmates.

“Some men leave here and return to their families, their jobs,” said Rev. Jerry Hancock, who oversees the program. “Others will get on a bus to be taken back to their county of residence with their prison clothes on, and that’s it. It is our hope to give them choices. But many of these men have no hope to return to society. The average sentence of the men in this room is 20 years. Some will be here 40 years. They have to learn how to have some hope for their future in this community, this new community in this prison, and that’s what we’re really focusing on with the restorative justice program.”

What choices will a young black man from the ghetto who’s done time for homicide have? Who will give this man a chance? He remains hopeful. I find myself looking away from him. I feel bad for this murderer. I don’t share his optimism. I worry he will not be able to separate himself from his previous life. He won’t know how to do it or where to go for help, where to go to live, and he will fall into the same behavior that put him in prison. I worry that progressive, colorblind Madison will not give him a chance.

I hope I am wrong. I hope the program is effective and there are fewer Tanyas out there sharing their stories. I shake his hand, smile, and thank him for speaking with me, then turn to mingle with more felons.

Part 1, Part 3

The Guys in Green

2008-04-28T13:04:00.002-05:00

Double fences topped with rolls of barbed wire surround the Columbia Correctional Institution. The observation tower provides a 360-degree view of the yard, the visitor and staff parking lot, and the green countryside that envelops the double-max prison. All who enter are buzzed in by security through two sets of heavy doors.

Visiting hours are posted below the sign-in window. Small, brown lockers are provided free of charge. Inside there will be allowed: No jackets. No cell phones. No jewelry. No recording devices. No weapons.

There are bathrooms and a payphone. There is a machine to change your bills to coins. There is a photo of the governor above a glass display case that holds examples of prisoners’ toils: teddy bears, books on tape, Braille books, crocheted hats, scarves and mittens for children, wooden bird houses, ancient eyeglasses packaged in ziplock baggies with the prescription handwritten on a white sticker in the corner.

The floor is tile, red and orange. The walls are concrete block, painted the color of an old woman’s teeth. The bars are brick red. The bars cover every window, every door.

We remove our shoes, place our locker keys in a cup, and proceed through the metal detector. Our hands are stamped.

“Don’t forget to get stamped,” says Susan, a prison ministry volunteer. “They won’t let you out if you don’t have a stamp.”

We wait by another barred door. When we are buzzed through, the door slides closed, and the deep sound of metal latching echoes in the tiny room between doors. The next door with the red bars opens and shuts, and we are in. We stride down a short hall and into the visitors room. There are windows at the top of the walls, the ever-present red bars across them. Ahead, chairs are arranged to face a podium. At the rear, small tables have tiny chairs, children’s chairs, on top of them. The wall has Sesame Street characters painted on it.

To the left are the men in green. They are seated in neat rows facing the podium. They smile when we enter. They sit up straighter and watch us. They nod. They look happy, nervous, expectant.

We sit. It feels like church. It’s quiet.

I wonder what got them here. I wonder how long they have been here, how long they will stay. I wonder if I have ever met any of them, if I ever will meet them when they are released, if they will be released at all. I wonder what I will say when I get the chance to speak to them.

I will soon find out.

Part 2, Part 3

Lily pads in my head

2008-04-26T09:06:00.002-05:00

It's funny-strange how one thought leads to the next, how you can be thinking about your clogged downspouts and only moments later, through whatever weird wiring is in your brain, you're thinking about that kid who beat you up in middle school.

What happened to that kid? The one who was a year behind so he was enormous and strong compared to you? The one who would select someone at random and throw them to the ground and laugh? The one who was completely at ease in rounding up 20 of his closest friends and encircling you, pushing you, taunting you, yelling in your face, humiliating you, punching your chin, your gut, holding your face against the ground with his foot while his friends laughed? If a guy can do that to a girl when he's 12, what can he do when he's 38?

I decided to find out, so I went to wcca.wicourts.gov and looked him up. It appears he's been up to cocaine, drug paraphernalia possession, battery, disorderly conduct, failing to pay his bills and felony drunk driving. This is Wisconsin – it takes a lot to get a felony drunk driving charge here. The first offense isn't even a crime. His current address is the jail in a county north of here. His wife filed for divorce last year. Small wonder.

I escaped him relatively unscathed. He scared me, of course, and I did everything I could to avoid him after his little gathering of friends. I saw him on a bus once years later, and he smiled at me and nodded, flirting. He didn't even remember me. I about had to jump off the bus.

What prompted his ire? One day at lunch recess, he hip-checked me and sent me flying down a small hill, sliding over the snow and ice and landing against a pole. I was mad as hell. He and his friends thought it was hilarious. I was never one to turn the other cheek, but obviously I couldn't hope to retaliate physically. So I wrote something about him on a desk. It was, frankly, hilarious and terribly crude. Whenever anyone read it, they laughed and read it out loud, and everyone in the class would titter. I was pleased.

But he found out I was the one who wrote it. One of his friends said he wanted to see me after school. I said I wouldn't be around. "He'll get you at lunch then," he said, smiling. And he did.

It was the worst I ever had it, and it was a pretty tiny event in the world of abuse. The only thing it's really done for me is make me worry about my kids. I never told my parents. What aren't my kids telling me?

But that's a lily pad I don't want to jump on right now. Eggs. I think I'll have some eggs. Toast. Jelly. Tangerine. Cumquats. Mom. Feet. Saturday night British comedy on TV. Need to pick up that DVD from the library. Canadian. Idaho. Van. Summer.... Lily pads.

Oh! If you go to that link up there to find hardened criminals, you can find me! But I already blogged about that.