Weird Stress Dreams

Andrew just told me that I blog when I'm stressed. I've been gritting my teeth all day. My jaw hurts, but I'm pretty sure I could crush marbles.

I know I'm whacked out when I have weird dreams. Last night, I was a volunteer in an orphanage. I went from room to room and picked up babies. (Weirder still is that I do not like babies.  OK, before you send me hate mail, some babies are OK, but they're gooey and smelly and they make funny noises. Yes, I had them, but that wasn't my favorite.) So there I was the baby-phobe manhandling babies. I kind of took a shine to a baby named Derek. Derek suddenly turned into a 3 year old with really broad shoulders and a head that looked like he could smash rocks. But I kind of liked Derek so I picked him up and of course Tim was standing there because anyone can appear at any time in any dream. I said "Hey, I want to adopt Derek." Before Tim could even start to scream, the smart card fell out of Derek and he broke into little lego sized pieced. Poof. Gone.  Wow, I said to the orphanage people, I broke your baby. Incidentally, you might want to warn people that your babies are run off of microchips. Then I woke up.

Strange. Not as strange as the recurring elephant nightmare I used to have as a kid. I was in a large circus tent full of elephants that were multiplying at a rapid clip and I was running out of air. Poof, I'd wake up. I think I had that dream like 400 times and it still gives me the creeps. Hopefully Derek doesn't reappear since I smashed his smart card. Again, that was an accident. I'm not homicidal. Honest.

Crazy

'Tis interesting that in all the few years that I've been slogging through this blog that I've never titled a blog, "Crazy." Considering that I feel crazy most of the time perhaps there's not generally a need to actually label the girl as actually "crazy." I prefer "sanity challenged."

The "management" continues to have issues with the "tenants" (read teenagers). For one, what gives with the locking yourself in the bathroom whenever there's a request to do something difficult like, get up out of the bed you've been ensconced in for 12 hours or to turn off the light in your room? I have keys to the bathroom so locking yourself in there does nothing but make me see those little stars in my peripheral vision (my own personal Leonid meteor shower). 

However, the management did have one break- through with at least one tenant this week.  I keep saying "You have to have a plan. Have a plan. Make up a plan. Strive for something- for so help me God and as God as my witness and we may be dealing with an angry Old Testament God- if you are living in my basement some day, I will just do something undesirable in your general direction."(I don't know what and I'm not commiting to what thing I might do because I shouldn't be using the energy to think about this.)

You know what? One of them came up with a plan. It's a plan that actually has some potential and it involves cash money and college tuition (not paid by me, although I'll happily pay) and a job and an occupation. Of course, I'm not holding the tenant, I mean kid, to this. But, it's a plan!

The other kid doesn't have a plan and no matter how many conversation hearts I speed eat while I type this, I cannot impose upon him a plan. I suppose he'll come up with something one of these days. I hope it involves cash money and maybe a Winnebago for me and Tim. That would be nice.

Back to the crazy, if I have to explain where the crazy fits into all this, then you don't know me at all. For the record, I feel very sane except for the stars.

Suite!

I got an email on Wednesday, while zipping to a meeting out of town, offering us tickets to the Detroit Tigers game on Thursday. Turns out the tickets were in a Suite a little to the third base side of home plate at Comerica Park in Detroit. A&P thought they had gone to heaven as we surprised them when we picked them up from a week up at Lake Huron. The tickets even included a parking pass and a special entrance so we were parked about a dozen yards from the gate. Wow. And, the suite had its own bathroom. Besides the view, this held the biggest fascination and why wouldn't it?

My only problem here is that Andrew is not on the left. No one listens to me anymore. Seriously people.

Sunday A&P will head off the the Boy Scout Jamboree at Fort AP Hill in Virginia for the better part of two weeks. Here are their smiling faces before camp a few weeks ago. This is when their clothes were clean, their teeth were brushed and they weren't covered with mosquito bites. Andrew is on the left here. Can you see the height difference? We're baffled because Andrew actually eats. Peter seems to live mostly on Oatmeal Creme pies.

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My new Bible finally showed up. Thanks US Postal Service for rushing it out to me in 14 days. What if I was really having a crisis? I guess the 4th grade Bible would have had to do.  I got sucked into Proverbs 31 this week. I'm not sure who this lady is, but whoa, I'm feeling rather inadequate.

I did manage to paint this desk though. A few folks might recognize it as the Muncie desk that ended up in my house a few years ago. I decided to paint it red. Take that Proverbs 31 lady.

The Last Seventeen Cents

We've been working with a local organization called The Village for a while. We rented some space in a not-so-nice neighborhood about nine months ago with some lofty ideals about changing the world or some such thing. This is really rather daunting, but I suppose you have to start somewhere. So you put a stake in the ground and say "here, is where we start."

There's a lot more back story to this endeavor, but I want to share one little bit with you.

Today, we had a free parking lot party. Tim did a lot of the planning so we rolled in about an hour before the official start time to set up grills and do whatever needs to be done to have a cook out in a parking lot. Miraculously, it stopped raining long enough for this to happen. (It's rained enough that I saw a mushroom the size of a hubcap today. I may grow gills.)

Our South Korean friend arrived just before we did. He saw a man near the intersection for the highway ramp and the main road. He picked up the man and brought him along. Everything he owned, presumably, was in a rolled up pack about the size of a small pillow. He wasn't unkempt, but he was homeless and ragged, so a certain amount of unkempt goes with the territory. He helped unload grills and carry things. He stayed with us nearly all afternoon eating hamburgers, drinking orange Kool Aid and listening to music. Someone said he was trying to get to Pontiac, Michigan.

As I stood behind the food tables to refill bowls of chips or whatever, I saw him slowly approach the table. We had some flyer's down at the end that we were holding down with a small change bank (like the ones you use for spare change during Lent.) The party was free but a few folks had jammed some bills in the coin slot on the top of the can. They didn't need to, but it was nice anyway. The man refilled his water bottle from the orange Kool Aid container and then reached into the little pocket on his jeans. You know the pocket- the little one in the front that makes them five pocket jeans. He pulled out a few coins. From the looks of him, I have to imagine this is about all he had.

He took a silver coin and some pennies and another coin, maybe a dime, and he put them in the can. He walked away slowly. I saw him a few minutes later on the other side of the building lighting a cigarette and then he was gone. Off to Pontiac I guess.

He didn't need to give us his money. For that matter, our friend didn't need to have picked him up. But he got picked up and he fished in his pockets for coins for the can. Do I ever give that much? Do I ever reach into my pockets and rummage through the last few coins that I have and willingly and cheerfully give them away? Am I that generous with my time? Am I that generous with my talents and spirit that even when I'm pretty sure I have nearly nothing left, I give just a little bit more away?

Well Sir, I don't know who you are, but what you did will stay with me forever. I hope you made it to Pontiac, Michigan. Thank you for coming to our picnic.

Fib Practice

I have a colleague. I don't like this person one bit. Not one iota.

This person thinks I fib. Either that or she likes to check up on me. If you know me at all, you know that this makes me crazytown insane.

So this is what I'm going to do. I am going to call it out. I am going to call it like I see it. If you don't believe what I say and you insist on going behind my back like a 5th grader to see if I what I tell you is true, then I will call this out.

Here's the thing. If I fibbed or made stuff up, I wouldn't be mundane. I would go big. I would tell the biggest whopper you ever heard. So, if you think, Dear Miss Checkerupper that I am lying about someone being out of town, just see what I might tell you if I was really fibtastic.

No, we wouldn't be out of town at a meeting (which for real! it's the truth!) We would be...

Eating tea sandwiches with flying monkeys at a garden shop in Queensland Australia.

Or wait, this is better. We would be riding blue dragons to a luncheon with the King and Queen of Luxemermia. (That's where I'm from after all. For those of you who don't know me well, I was kidnapped by Russian spies out of my castle in Luxemermia back in 1981. I was only 6 months old and I woke up in an orange crib in Wauwatosa Wisconsin with Paula and Stu. I'm just waiting for the King's people to hook me up with my fortune. Still waiting!)

So here's the deal Miss Checkerupper, if you're too dumb to figure out that I know that you're going around checking up on me like you're some kind of insecure 5th grader, then when I meet you next week, we're going to have some fun. You just won't know it's happening because the whopper will be so big, well, I'll stop there. I don't want to give away my secrets.

A Walk in the Woods, Final Episode

Greetings Sports fans! Sometimes there's victory and then there's the agony of defeat. If you followed my instructions and read "A Walk in the Woods" then you'll know the agony of the Appalachian Trail (AT) approach trail. Anytime there's an approach to more trail (2,100 miles of it) you may want to think twice. Andrew reminded me that the characters in the book discarded most of their food (Little Debbies and the coffee filters too) in the 7 mile hike on the approach to the terminus of the AT.

We left the Len Foote Inn with some packed lunches and our spirits high since we knew our trail out, although longer, was more down than up. I guess it all depends on your knees whether you like the up or the down, or neither. Me, I'll take any of it because it's not a day bashing my head against a wall at the office (I like that sort of thing, though.)

The picture above is, finally!, what it should be with Andrew on the left. Seriously people. It's not hard.

We had our regularly scheduled Atkins family breakdown about half way down the mountain. This time there was no aggravating incident just some frayed 13 year old nerves. This turned Andrew into a melted mess and Peter into a hiking machine- apparently in an effort to get as far away from the other 75% of his family as quickly as possible. He's a gazelle when motivated like this. We saw him again somewhere near the stream below.

Oddly, I wasn't as worried as I would be in Montana that something would eat him. Either it's that I didn't think something would eat him because we were in Georgia or maybe I was secretly wishing that he would be carried away by a family of wolves. Is that so wrong?

Six miles later, here is the Amicalola Creek that feeds the waterfall. Yippee! We could almost see the car from here! Nothing had eaten Peter and he was perched on a rock not far from the creek with a look on his face that said "I wish you would melt into spring rain sloshed in mountain mud." What a bonus.

Did you make your reservations yet? What are you waiting for? Seriously, you have no excuse.

Did I mention that I would LOVE to do the entire AT through hike? I read everything I can about the AT and through hikers and I met a through hiker named Catfish on this trip. I've been trying to decide what I might name myself- so far the only thing I can come up with is Cosmo (after my favorite drink). I think I can do better than that.