"Oh My God!", "That's Enormous!"

The title this time comes from one of my favorite Who's Line Is It Anyway sketches. 

OUTTAKES:

• Josh (describing how his throat hurts because of his allergies) "It's like a night wasp." 
• Jon (responding to the bossy GPS voice telling us that our next turn was in .5 miles) in his best Python-esque voice: "NOBODY expects a right turn in .5 miles!"
• So the other night, we finally got to sit down and watch the Tony Awards. Josh was totally into it, and paying particular attention to the audience. Every time the camera landed on one fellow in particular, the little Glee-addict would yelp, "It's Mr. Shue, It's Mr. Shue!!!" Then, when they actually intro'd him, he changed it up to, "It' Matthew Morrison, Mommy. Matthew Morrison!" *Ahem.*

For the longest time, the only thing I could have written was that all three of us were slugging through the joy of allergies on a grand scale...and that we were/are losing the Battle of the Ants -- never mind how many ant traps we've put out for the little buggers -- I swear they are using the bait as breath mints.  In truth, I should not say little buggers...The last wave resembled the ginormous ants from the movie, THEM, and I half expect them to say @#!$ it, and just pick up our house by its foundation to take back to the nest. Would that only the ants had made a cameo, but we've also been host to several wood spiders (oh, god, I _hope_ that's just a wood spider), the smallest of which was three inches long. We've managed to keep our arachnophobic fears in check long enough to get them out and away from the house, but I swear -- this guy wasn't there one minute, then I turned around found him on top of the laundry, and I will attest in court that he looked up at me, smiled, waved one leg while doing a perfect Jon Lovitz "Why, Heh-Looo!" 

Pardon me while I muffle my own scream.

Of course, we can't be fighting B-Movie Monsters or ex-SNL actors all of the time.  Back in April, Grandma O. had enough back pain, and decided to schedule a surgery.  Well, the older (read Mom, Uncle Jerry, and Auntie Suzing) swept in ready to do battle with doctor-lions...only to find out that Gram was put on the back burner for  five days because of medicine and heart issues the docs hadn't known about/considered before.  I got to be the messenger, relaying what pitiful information we actually knew about the situation (and even as time went on, we had seemed to get less input from either the docs or Grams) to the younger part of the heard, but I was given strict (and fierce) orders not to encourage the cast and crew to "stop in" for fear that Grandma O. would think we were circling the wagons for the last time. 19 tests and an oil change later, she was cleared for surgery at 3:30 p.m. on April 26th. To this day, I don't know that anyone really knows the exact name of her surgery, but she had to have a thirteen inch incision in her back, through muscle, to ease the pressure of a disk on her spinal nerves. While she suffered a great deal of incision pain...and wasn't expecting the amount of rehab pain that came into play, she seemed to enjoy most of her stay at the Center across from her home.  Roxy, her dog could come over any time, and Grandpa Ours (our beloved "Sun King") had at least one or two meals a day with her.  While Grandma seemed to treat the experience as an odd-sort of spa ...where she didn't have to lift a finger or fix a meal, Suz was given the task of, um, riding herd/acclimating Grandpa to the situation...and for any number of reasons, he was not "happy" about it all. Don't get me wrong, we know he was worried about her.  However, anyone that knows Grandpa O. also know that he has a way that he liked things done...and Gram's surgery and recovery was something of a disruption in the way he liked things done.  Oh, yeah, Gram's surgery was rough on her...but some of us still contend (out of hearing) that Suz may have won the runner's up prize with "Mr. Congeniality". I tease, I tease. I'm serious, but I tease. 

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The good news is that my book, "Hum A Few Bars... : A Collection of Short Stories and Poetry" is inching closer to final approval mode (Jon's still double checking certain tax questions) but it really will be available on Amazon soon (yes, really and truly it IS going to happen!) -- though the finished product may have more pages than are currently listed.

To check out my official Amazon Author page (and get a quick look at the cover), go here:
I'd really appreciate it if you would take the time to preview some of my work in this book, here:
and please help me out by answering the questions you find there -- I'd really appreciate your time and help in this matter.

As I was getting the book in order, I got the chance to talk to one of my dearest, hardest-to-catch friends, Carole.  I had realized that I didn't have any good pictures of me. (Who am I kidding? I loathe all pictures of me.  In my head, I see myself as pretty and if not thin, well certainly not as I am...and then I see a picture of myself and I look like the old cartoons of The Shmoo from the old comic strip -- bloody hell!).  The last good picture I had of myself was a black and white of me holding Josh when he was brand new, and Carole had taken the shot, so I needed to check with her to see if I could use it as my author photo.  (For the record, Carole NEVER has any bad pictures.  She's a ringer for Audrey Hepburn and even her driver's license photo looks like a Vogue Cover.)Talking to her was divine...she's one of the people I can always fall back into conversation with, as if time and distance never played into it.  I think we talked for about forty-five minutes...and of course, because I was on the phone, and he wasn't, Josh decided to chase me around the house with his noisy toy-claw (I should take a hammer to my head for buying that racken-fracken thing, much less bringing it into my house!).  We are still working very hard to establish polite boundaries when someone is talking on the phone, but of course when I mentioned the incident to Mom, she snickered and muttered something (rather loudly) about payback and five kids.  I have no idea what she was talking about.  I still wish I could master her ability to be *ahem* "reminding us of proper behavior" (read: keeping all of us from jumping off each other's heads) one second and be able to snap on a cool, Donna Reed composure the moment the phone rang.  I simply don't have the hang of that trick, yet, though her skill with that technique boggled and amazed us for years.  When the phone rings at our house, I keep feeling I need to pick it up with one hand, and throw a steak to the lion chewing off my leg with the other. Jon keeps gently reminding me that a whip and a chair are not actually apropos to proper parenting, but he's usually not on my end of the phone when he calls. Whi-CHAAAA! Back! Back! Down! Stop.Climbing. On. My. Head. No! You can't talk to her. Because I'm trying to talk to her.Ow! My Hair! Let Go! Whi-CHAAA!

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Somehow, we made it to Jon's vacation, and Josh was packed up and gift-wrapped and sent to the Wild Woman's for a week of Bible School with a big bow on his head.


Ohhhhhhhh...the boy may have departed our domicile, but the drama didn't stop.  Mom and Dad keep letting him sleep in their bed with them, and for four of those nights with them, Josh would snuggle up to Mom, get his back scratched, smile, then HURL all over her (oddly enough, Dad seemed to come out of these escapades with no additional bodily fluid on him...He was and is "The Wizard!").  Apparently those allergies would do their worst when he was down for the count, and once all of that copious snot hit his stomach, well...it's a technicolor yawn, a quick clean up, and then he'd sleep like an angel all night.  I can tell you, from an hour and a half away, I felt so bad for mom...but from an hour and a half away, I confess, I was kind of pleased not to be in firing range, too. :)  Mom was certain that he wasn't sick enough to come home, and according to all reports he loved dancing and singing in Bible School, though every night when we'd call (and we could usually only catch him around 7 p.m.), he would mope and fuss and roll out the tragedy mask. Oh, he'd be fine the next day, but the moment we call, it was, "Ohhh, Mommy. When are you coming to get me, I miss you."  G.U. Harry had a harder time catching up with Josh than we did, and it seemed to take a toll on him.  At one point, he got so desperate to talk to "his boy" that he called at a quarter of 10 one night. If I haven't said this before, in my family, if you call before nine in the morning or after nine at night, it usually means someone is in the hospital....so that phone ring was greeted with hold-your-breath-say-a-prayer-terror...and it was not helped that Josh was in full-out misery mode, and had gotten himself so worked up after our call that Mom (who has never once made use of the "Naughty Chair" for Josh) finally plopped his little scrawny butt right down and told him he couldn't get up until he got a grip.  When Harry called that night, Josh went off on another tear again, and Harry was convinced he was being tortured ...because, obviously, Mom does that (somewhere in the middle of all of that abject adoration, dancing and tickling of his back she always tries to make time to work in a little constructive Torquemada-ing for character building purposes)  You never saw a man with his head so slumped and his tail so tucked between his legs...and don't think all of us (but Harry) were well aware that Josh was working every angle he could.  I know it was a long haul for a little kid, I really do...but all reports said Josh was having a blast and was even brave enough to volunteer to help with the morning prayer in front of 160 people, so I knew he wasn't in dire straits. The drama only went to eleven when the day was almost over, and he was shagged out completely. When the sun came up, his mood did a complete turnaround.

Back on our end, our goal had only been to get him there, and we were so focused on that aspect that we completely forgot to figure out what we were going to do in our boyless state. For the first two days we just stayed home, under the radar. After much hashing and re-hashing, we decided against the spa-animal preserve (Kalahari), and instead we opted for one night at Mohican (though you'll be proud of me, I stayed clear of the Fire Tower this time) and one night in Columbus to catch the touring show of Chicago.  Mohican was as wonderful and soul-bathing for me as it was the last time around.  I felt a blank of calm just wrap around me like a blanket the moment we pulled into the parking lot.  And just like the last time, it was as though the resort was open only for us.  Because it is a nature preserve, the animals were utterly brazen and completely unconcerned about the two-legged visitors in their midst.  Deer pranced alongside our car as we drove, or meandered around people's front yards nibbling on their flowerbeds. Squirrel kits let us get within three feet of them without so much as a tail-flick. In fact, the only truly jarring moment we had during our visit was when we were on our way to a lookout point, and nearly turned the car right into four bull mastiffs who were sitting in the middle of the road.  They were so huge, I thought they were bears at first.  Their owners had the land on either side of the rode, and the (car-eating?!!!) dogs were allowed to roam the property freely.  Eventually, our hearts started beating properly again, and we continued to my favorite spot, which was a covered bridge.  Jon and I split up and he took a trail while I took a gazillion shots of the bridge, and then we met up again about an hour later.  We partook of Amish goodness for dinner, and the day was kind enough to remain beautiful until we got back to our room, then the rain came down like it was dancing.  We took our coffee out onto the balcony and listened to the rain hit the leaves.  It was pure heaven.

The next day, we had more Amish-y goodness for lunch (and I shall restate my personal theory that if the road to Hell was paved with Amish pies, people would get there and say, "Yeah, it was _Totally_ worth it!") and set our course for the next destination, Chicago via Columbus.  I didn't find much soothing about our hotel this time around, and soothing didn't enter anywhere near the description of the traffic, where every dip in a car felt the need to reenact every flippin' action sequence from every flippin' eighties-cop-movie. But Chicago?  Well, Jon was *ahem* caught up the moment the first dancer and her mile-high support hose stepped onstage (and, in all fairness, I can't blame him.  She really was quite stunning!), and then the rest of it came at us non-stop. Bonnie Langford played Roxie Hart, looking like a baby Reba McEntire, and acting like an evil Sandy Duncan (but it WORKED!)   Brenda Braxton was a bit more subtle, pacing the stage like an exotic cat.  They took a few more liberties with certain numbers (particularly "I Can't Do It Alone"), but all-in-all, it was genuinely enjoyable. 

When Josh came home, we jumped into the Summer Reading program, and last week, Josh had the opportunity to hose down some poor fellow with a fire hose when Fire Chief Rick came in to do his Safety routine. He has a running spiel that never fails to get a chuckle: "If you see a gun lying in the ground what should you do? That's right. You don't touch it, you call you mommy or daddy and have them call us, because guns can hurt you.  What do you do if you see a box of matches or a lighter on the ground?  You never play with it, but you call your mommy or daddy to put someplace safe, because fire can hurt you. Now, what do you do if you find a quarter lying on the ground?  You call me, that's right. And I'll come and get that quarter!"  The fire truck's siren was still more than Josh could handle, but Josh was still beaming about hosing down the lone father at storytime for days after the fact.

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We marked our anniversary gently this year.  It was quiet, it was lovely. We celebrated with grilled steak and roasted corn, and laughed at Josh's delight as he tried to chew on his well-buttered cob. In the end, there was more butter on him than the corn.  Again, it doesn't seem possible that we've been married eight years, somehow it actually feels as though we've been together all our lives. I'm sticking to my plan to feel like a newlywed on our seventieth anniversary. Jon's agreeable, so long as I'm still giving him head rubs when it rolls around.