Home Alone Again

I called home around noon today.

Andrew: This is Buddy the Elf! What's your favorite color?
Me: Oh Golly, did you eat sugar cereal for breakfast?
Andrew: Mine's yellow, what's yours?
Me: Is your brother alive?
Andrew: Haven't seen him.
Me: Go check, I'll call you later.

It's calls like this that make me find articles online about kids left home alone sniffing glue and shampooing the cat.

Yesterday when I called, Peter answered.

Me: Hey, did you eat? (If I don't ask them to eat, they'll only eat Oatmeal Cream Pies and Fritos making their starvation my fault because I didn't tell them to eat. Seriously, I have nothing better to do than call home and remind you to eat something that isn't shrink wrapped in clear plastic).
Peter: Just getting ready to heat up some chicken nuggets.
Me: Oh no..I left you money. Just go get a quart sized ice cream from Mr Freeze. That doesn't involve vulcanizing your victuals and you can ride your bike.
Peter: Good idea.

It's calls like this that make me question my parenting skills, but least I won't spend the evening blowing out the smoke and vacuuming ashes.

On the upside, I had a Heloise moment when I rubbed the charred chicken part marks off of my good white plates with baking soda. Yep, good old fashioned working mom, stay at home destructive kid, ingenuity.

They leave for camp on Sunday. It's in exactly 60 hours. Actually 60 hours and 45 minutes. I can make it.

Home Alone

My phone rang around 1:00 on Friday...

Me: What, I'm busy!
Tim: They almost burned the house down.
Me: Seriously?
Tim: Our boys need remedial cooking assistance.
Me: Huh- you can so totally teach them.
Tim: They're beyond help.

Apparently Peter decided to make some chicken nuggets in the microwave. As any good Scout would, he read the package- and then put two plates in the microwave for TWENTY-ONE MINUTES.

Tim: Peter- is the microwave in flames?
Peter: No. But the nuggets are black.
Tim: Get the package and read it to me.
Peter: Cook 6 nuggets for Twenty-one slash 2 minutes.
Tim: How long have you been out of school? Twenty one slash two? Look at it again!
Peter: What, wait, Oh, two and a half. I'm an idiot.

The black charred spots came off of my white plates with baking soda.

The house smells like it was only burning for a short while.

Our microwave is original to the house, circa 1985. I think there was a brown out in Perrysburg around 12:30 on Friday. My electric bill probably doubled for the twenty-one minute nugget cremation ceremony.

****
This is going to be a good week. A&P are at sailing camp during the day on Lake Erie. They love it and enjoy a spectacular capsizing as much as the next sailor. And, I got invited to a Bible study. It takes a brave person to invite another person to a Bible study. What an awesome friend. I love her very much. I guess I'll actually have to study.

I need to study because I'm not good at quoting or remembering things I should remember. I tried to quote a week or so ago, while dissing a coworker about having to walk by the ladies of ill-repute behind our office building. There's something profound about what you do for the least, you do for me- as in Jesus. But it came out something like- "Don't diss the hoes, they could be Jesus." That didn't have the impact I was looking for.

May you have a week full of love and thankfulness for being able to read the freezer packages to microwave your chicken nuggets.

That Tornado and My Home Ec Teacher can kiss my big fat...

Curtain. They can kiss my big ol' curtain.



First the Tornado. I don't have any pictures of that- would you really want them?



Around 11pm last Saturday night we were somehow spared- not even a twig out of place- but 5 miles east of us is in bad shape. The high school is destroyed. The police station is flattened. They have no school buses and no police cars. Five people are dead. A mom and her little boy were sucked right out of their beds, their house flattened. The neighbors found them in the yard. The dad and a daughter somehow survived.



A&P were at camp about 60 miles west of here. They evacuated to the showers and were well taken care of, but we couldn't help remembering the Scouts killed in Iowa 3 or 4 years ago. We are so lucky, so blessed.



Onto to something less horrendous, aren't you loving that curtain? I made that. With some help from my fabulous friend of course. I haven't sewed since 7th grade and then one day a month back a light went on in my ever misfiring skull "you should buy a sewing machine." What the heck, it's better than starting a crack habit or beating my kids.


Then I got brave and I made this one for Andrew's room. All by myself. My home ec teacher thought I was a disaster. I may be a disaster, but I can plug in a machine. This one for Andrew is made out of fabric that has the Pledge of Allegiance printed on it. The blue is stars. Andrew said "Is this just for the 4th of July and you're making another one?" Don't push it buster.



I have to tell you though, I am a big mess. My dining room is not suitable for eating. I spilled the same box of 500 pins- twice. Several dozen got stuck in my feet. I got another set of teeny tiny pins and I promptly dropped those all over the floor twice. The cat keeps running off with my bobbin thread thing-a-ma-bobbers.



Do you know how hard it is to drink and sew at the same time? Take it from me, you have to be really, really careful not to spill.




Lastly, because I am starting to ramble and the blogger gods nearly made this entire post disappear which would have been tragic, we went to the Indy 500. We surprised A&P and went to the race with family that knows how to manage a giant track with whizzing cars. Fun had by all.

Here's hoping that the 50 or so families that lost their houses pretty darned close to here can draw upon the good times to pull through. All I had to do was pick up about 4000 straight pins and pick the other 100 out of my toes. I know where my birth certificate is and I have a roof. If you think of it, donate to The Red Cross or something- they help people just like them.

Channeling Alice Cooper

I knew I was doing something right with my children when Andrew relayed the following anecdote..

Kid: Schools out for summer!
Andrew: Oh ya, good song.
Kid: Yes, I really like "High School Musical."
Andrew: OMG. Seriously? That's Alice Cooper.

With 7th grade safely under our belts, or so I'm told, we're off for the summer. I lost the boys for over an hour yesterday. I was pretty sure they were abducted. They resurfaced eventually.

And here's ultimate irony for you. Peter has harassed me for years that he's the only poor sod without a cell phone. (This is absolute crap because he has a phone, but he won't use it. I don't eat leftovers so I blame myself, really I do.)

At dinner after finally finding them again today as they re-emerged from the wilderness that is Perrysburg, I said...

Me: so if I text you and say "where are you?" what would you do?
Peter: Assuming I had a phone, I would text you back.
Tim: We're using GPS, you can't hide from us. I always know where you are.
Peter: Oh please.

My own insecurity is going to result in two children being saddled to phones. I can feel it. I hope my health insurance covers thumb joint replacements.

Last night at 8:45 pm they were out roaming the countryside. I started to freak out, but they did come back.

They are never learning to drive a car, but when they do, they will be blasting Alice Cooper and texting me from stoplights.

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.

Knocked Around

In my quest for some good TV, I stumble around the dial of 200 channels like an inebriated housefly desperately searching the screen for a hole big enough to cram into and escape. Surely TV is an escape for most everyone. After an hour slogging through the machinations that is a VH1 reality show, I flipped over to a narrative of The Wreck of the Whaleship Essex and Hermann Melville. It's one of my favorite stories- gruesome but wonderful language and allegory.





Ever feel like you've been whacked upside the head by a 2 ton right whale? I can't be the only one. But when that happens, there's always the little stuff to get you through, hour by hour, if necessary. Like some of this stuff...





Andrew has a beautiful, young soul. He's not an old soul- I know you know what I mean. He doesn't look at me with those eyes that say "I've done this before, leave me alone." His eyes say "Hey, this is the first time I've seen this and I'm having a wonderful time, thank you very much." It's rather refreshing after a day or two of being knocked about in what feels like a very small, hole riddled boat.





Yesterday he told me that the new shampoo I got him made him so happy because it was a great shade of blue. "It actually made me smile in the shower." How cute is that? It's shampoo so I think that's rather delightful. He never said anything profound when peering into the Grand Canyon a few years back- he said something more like "That's a big hole." I suppose if he can appreciate the small things, I've done my job.





This is what he picked out for me for Mothers' Day...

I've received a variety of opinions about what this means- including one that suggests that he is trying to butter me up should he end up in the slammer. He's not the felonious type generally so that can't be it. Regardless, he was quite proud of the purchase and insisted that I take it to my office. So I did. Hopefully the nuns don't mind the mild profanity. (Incidentally, Peter got me a very nice vase.)

Being knocked about is generally worth it, even when the boat springs a leak, or 12. I found at my local Big Lots a nifty four pack of root beer that helped me focus on what's important even when someone else is yanking the life jacket and pushing my head under water.

It was way up on the top shelf, but not out of reach. Nothing is, if you try hard enough.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to bailing me boat.

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.