December 25, 2005 11:45 a.m.

I knew this was going to be a strange Christmas but it has turned out to be stranger than strange!

It was "scheduled" to be strange because my Mate wasn't going to be here, being the Good Son and going to be with his Mother on her first Christmas as a widow. But to make it even stranger the weather has been wicked windy. The lights went out at 10:15 a.m. on Christmas Eve. All day long I revisesd assessments on how I would get dinner cooked. The plan had been to put the fully cooked ham in the crock pot and cook it on slow for 6 hours, resulting in lots of gravy fixings and a nice hot ham. The other elements of dinner, mashed potatoes, peas, cranberry sauce and Chocolate Satin Pie (from Safeway) didn't require electricity or at most, a small amount.

As the day wore on and time to put the ham in the crock pot passed I began to make contigency plans. Okay--so... if the power comes on by 1:00 I'll still have 4 hours to cook the ham. Then, if the power comes on by 2:00 I'll turn it on high and still have time. At 12:30 I got tired of trying to make deals with the Power Gods and made one last deal: I'll go for a LONG walk--all the way to the mini-mart and back. I'll be a really good citizen, take shopping bags with me and pick up trash on the way. I'll take my Netflix and put it in the blue mailbox at the mini-mart. It'll take me a good hour and a half, but by the time I get back around 2:00 surely the power will be on and I can proceed with my Christmas Eve dinner plans. Looking back on this it makes no sense at all but I had to do SOMETHING!!! I did this. I walked all the way up there--I loaded one whole grocery sack with trash from the right side of the road--I dropped the Flix in the box. I peered down the hiway to see if electricity workmen were fixing the offending line and saw nothing. I trudged back, my feet hurting by this time, picking up trash on the other side of the road and humming "Deck the halls with bags of garbage, fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la". A woman stopped her car to say, "God bless you for picking up the trash!" I wondered if I looked pathetic in my leather man's hat and no makeup. She must have wondered why this woman had nothing better to do than pick up trash on Christmas Eve.

I got home with my two very full bags of aluminum cans, Taco Bell cups, straws, those awful yellow plastic straps that are around bundles of magazines (who throws so many of these on the side of the road?), beer bottles, cigarette packages, kleenex and GUESS WHAT? The lights were not on. The bargain didn't work. The Power Gods weren't paying attention. So I took the next logical step. I took a nap. Or tried to. All that walking had me too pepped up to really sleep. I laid there formulating the last ditch plan. If the lights aren't on by 4:00 I pack up the whole thing, potatoes, ham, rolls, pie and take it to my Mom's house to cook.

The happy ending to this dark tale is that the lights finally came back on at 3:30. I slammed the ham into the crock pot, turned it on high, ran to shower my stinky-trash-picking body, peeled the potatoes, vacuumed the worst spots, turned on the Christmas Tree lights and hopped in the car to go pick up my Mom and my Brother. Christmas Eve was saved!

Did I fail to mention that when our lights are out we can't run water or flush the toilet? And it also happens that our wood stove is in pieces and the oven on my gas range is on the fritz? The lights being out was just the coup de gras!

And now it is Christmas Day, after what turned out to be a lovely Christmas Eve, and the lights are out again. I woke up at 5:30 to howling winds and at 6:30, boink, they were out again. It's mid-day now and the PSE has no ETA on when they will come back on. SHIT. And, oh yeah, Merry Christmas.

TKO at Christmas

My Mate is just now getting on an airplane to go spend Christmas with his recently widowed Mother in Ventura, CA. I am lucky not to be going. I have the perfect excuse. I have to stay here and “take care” of my Mom’s Christmas. Last year I left the State and I am still being reminded of how “sad and desolate” my Mother’s Christmas was without me. It’s nice to be needed, but I don’t like being needed that much! If I left again I would be hearing about it until Kingdom Come or The Rapture, whichever comes first.

My Mate and his Mother are equal in their stubbornness, pigheadedness and stiff-neckedness! They are at a Greek Stand-Off, both wanting to have control of what happens in the future, now that life is without husband and father. I think Christmas in Ventura will be loud on Fiesta Lane. I will perversely be looking forward to the reports of what is happening down there while I wallow in the luxury of time alone.

I will be here, in my house in the woods, enjoying a quiet Christmas with hot cocoa, maybe a cinnamon roll, watching the squirrels and the birds duke it out for the black sunflower seeds and reading my delicious book. You might hear me purring…..

More Popular Than Jesus

John Lennon got in trouble saying that but I don't think I will. For one, not enough people are listening and number two, I think most people would agree with me. I am referring to the fan base that my newest granddaughter has. All her fans are making pilgrimages to see her, to have their pictures taken with her, to bask in her blue aura, to win a smile and dare we hope? to hear a laugh.

My pilgrimage took place about 1 1/2 weeks ago, right after Thanksgiving. I had not seen Alison since she was a month old. She had a powerful aura then, too, but she wasn't doing anything much except staring at my black rimmed glasses, drinking her Mama's mile and pooping and sleeping. I knew that I would see more of her wonders on this trip. I was not disappointed!

Ali was a little over 7 months old during my trip back to Wisconsin this time. I had been prepped by many pictures of her on her Daddy's blog, so I knew her eyes were more open and big and blue and that she was smiling and laughing. But pictures and the real thing are thousands of miles apart. It's the smell and the feeling of the skin that you can't get in the pictures. Baby smell should be bottled and if there was a moisturizer that made an adult's skin feel like a babies it would be the best seller of all time. Baby Skin, $1000 a bottle, and people would buy it! Pictures couldn't prepare me for the joy she exhibits when her clothes come off for a bath or the funny, slightly surprised, but not upset, look she gets on her face when the bath water drips down her face as her hair gets washed.

I was honored to help feed her and to witness the bedtime ritual of stories, with Goodnight Moon at the end. I was present when her first picture with Santa Claus was taken at the Mall of America with the REAL Santa Claus.

I ate breakfast dinner and lunch with her and saw three baths and many sessions on the floor with Shoe Shufflin' Sam and her Grandma W's "tag tree". I watched her "run" in her "ring of fun" as my son calls one of her toys. I witnessed her with her Daddy and her Mommy.

It was one of the best pilgrimages I have ever been on and I wish I could have brought back some of her smell and the feel of her skin. She is more popular than Jesus, and for good reason, if you ask me!

What a Dream!

When I was visiting last week in Wisconsin, a whole other blog post, I had a dream. I dreamed that my brother got arrested for drug dealings and that he was headed for the Big House. I dreamed that my Mate and I were roped into trying to bring down some bigger drug dealers than my brother and had to go undercover into a serious gang of drug thugs. I dreamed that in order to show his bravery, my Mate threatened to shoot off one of his balls and then went through with it. I dreamed he was proud of himself. I dreamed I was proud of him, too. My hero!

Thanksgiving Wonder

Wonder of wonders. This 4-person Thanksgiving Day was probably the best, quietest, most serene I have spent in many a decade. This is a day that has sent me home in tears, or caused ultimatums of dire proportions, or just been too loud and too crazy, or I've felt put-upon, sweating in the kitchen alone while everyone else sits around on their fat asses.

As usual this year, the meal took all day to cook and we ate it in 15 minutes. This always seems absurd, but it is the way it is. Only this year, my brother, who is on many meds and can be horribly over the top and incredibly "inappropriate" for a 50 year old, actually acted like a pretty normal human being, during and after dinner. My Mate and I decided that we should segue immediately into a game of dominoes to head off any collapsing on the couch by guests while we played an old holiday movie. This turned out to be a grand idea. Instead of a movie we played "Light Classical" music from the Dish Network music thing and at points we were all singing opera. We taught Mom and Brother how to play Mexican Train and we played for several hours, only stopping to have pumpkin pie with huge blobs of whipped cream that Mate almost turned into butter with his gung-ho whipping. Mom sort of got the hang of the game and Brother finally started to win some torward the end. All were satisfied. Next year we'll have prizes for the winner and the Big Loser.

By the time the dominoes tournament was over it was 9 pm and time for guests to head on home. I didn't have a tension headache, the kitchen was mostly cleaned by Mate (he won many husband points) and nobody got mad. A great and wonderful success in my book!

Okay...So...It's the Holiday Season

Let's do it one more time. Or...let's forget about it one more time. Or...let's hide from it again this year like we did two years ago. Shall we trim the tree or get a dead branch and decorate it like I did the year my last child left home. Shall I send Christmas cards? Shall I make one of those letters? And what about Christmas Eve? Why do I feel differently about Christmas every single year? What's up with that!!! Why is Christmas such a hard-ass question mark? How come it's so full of STUFF?!&*(^^%%&%$r*&^(*)_(!!!@@@

On My Way to Work

On my way to work, nearly every day, I pass a tiny house with a flagpole in its front yard. The tiny house is lived in by a small, elderly man. Every morning he comes out to put his flag up. The unusual and moving part of this scene is that several school children line up for the school bus on the road next to his home. And every day he asks one of the school children to help him put up his flag. I have seen him, with a child, helping the child hold the flag off the ground, helping that child attach the flag to the line that hoists it up the pole. I don't know what he tells the children about the flag. I can only imagine. He might be a veteran, he might just be a patriot. I am moved by the fact he is out there every day with the kids, even in the rain, teaching them something about their country's flag.

I'm not in any way a "patriot". In the 60's I could have burned a flag if given half the chance. I'm not impressed with patriotism at all. But I am impressed with this elderly man and his committment, to his flag raising and to the kids. The connection between him and the kids is obvious, even if I've never heard a word exchanged between them. What a wonderful thing for all of them, what a memorable part of the kids' childhood, what a great way for the old guy to keep in touch with youth.

I know one day he will be gone but I hope it's not until after I retire, because if I have to see this ritual end it will make me cry.

Last Night

Last night I cried. I haven't cried for a pretty long time. I cried because my grandchildren live too far away and the littlest one, in particular, has so much competition for her time that others are getting to her before I can and maybe she won't even know me. My dear man, who knows when to hug and sooth, reminded me that soon I will be retired and then I will be able to go as often as I want to watch her grow and that she will know me very well. I hope he is right. It pains my gut so much to know she is growing fast, she is cutting teeth, learning to roll over, sitting up, eating real food, drooling, crying, laughing, and I am not there to see.

I am trying hard today to get some links on my page, so that others can go to the pages that I like to visit, but I am having a devil of a time. If anyone knows how to do this properly I would sure like your advice!

The day is dark and rainy, but it's a good, hard rain, not that misty crapola that I hate. At least you can get your windshield wipers going at a decent speed and not have to turn them off every couple of minutes. I don't use umbrellas anymore, just a good, big waterproof man's hat. Makes me feel macho in the face of the damp! Good day for coffee. Wish I was home.

This Might Be Steven Wright

I might be stealing from the comic I most love, Steven Wright, with the deadest pan there is, but here is a thought for the day:

Protons have mass? I didn't know they were Catholics!

Yeah, I'm sorta blotto today. The Good Coffee Man didn't come today so I'm drinking company coffee. Company coffee is what we are provided (company Perk--pun intended) and it goes through a machine that cannot be cleaned. I am not sure I want to contemplate what might be in the coffee maker after years of uncleanness. The coffee is dreadful but it has caffiene in it and just enough coffee flavor to make me feel okay about
not stopping to buy something waaaaaay better. I would have been late to work and I would have had to get into my change to buy an Americano, one of the cheapest drinks available. That would have made me feel like a junky, which I'm not really.....really, I'm not. Really.

Winning Limerick

The Washington Post runs a weekly contest in its Style section called the "Style Invitational." The requirements this week were to use the two words, Lewinsky (The Intern) and Kaczynski (the Unabomber) in the same limerick. Remember, the following winning entries were printed in the newspaper:


The winning entry:

Lewinsky and Clinton have shown
What Kaczynski must surely have known
That an intern is better
Than a bomb in a letter
When deciding how best to be blown

Spooky

Is it just me or is this little baby creature made out of Marzipan just a little spooky? Tell me what you think.

Blogs Are Us

Let's try a new font, just for the heck of it! What's up today? I discovered a new blog, thanks to my friend, Bookworm. It's middledaughter.blogspot and it's really fine. This person is an artist and she writes like one--colorfully and without restraint. I look forward to reading her posts. She puts in a little something about the TV she guiltily watches. I don't watch anything guiltily! I watch lots of it with great relish and enjoy the ability to record bunches of it so I can watch even more! I am bad, bad! Anyway, this year I am particularly enjoying Lost. My male mate says he has never seen me "into" a TV show like I am "into" this one. He's right. I'm rivited. Don't really know why, either. Usually I can figure these things out, but not with this show. I used to love X-Files. Maybe it's like that--there are likable people such as Hurley (the BIG GUY) and the doctor and you NEVER know what's going to happen next! Some people, like my Male Mate, don't like that we don't know what's going to happen, or that the plot is all over the place, but I do! Suprise me, I say! And take that Reality Show Crap off. Stop doing that. Fiction has been popular for thousands of years because we like made up stories! We like to end the chapter not knowing how the next one will begin.

And I started a new (old really) Anne Tyler novel yesterday--Celestial Navigation. It's cozy to read Tyler because you know she's going to write about quirky families. But, as with Lost, you never know where she's going to go with them. I just finished Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides, and it's worth recommending, especially, if, like me, you are married to a half-Greek, and you want to know more about how Greek families operate. There's lots more to it than that, but that got me started.

Over and out for today.

Blog Discovery

I was just fooling around today and I found an interesting blog called The Movie Review Diary, www.dvdlovers.blogspot.com . I found the reviews interesting but especially interesting were the comments on the reviews. Go there some time and see what you think. Also interesting is my friend Kay's new blog, called Book Worm. Her address is www.clearcreekgirl.blogspot.com. Check her out, too. She is a professional writer and always has interesting ideas about books, movies and life.

Link to Son

I am trying to put a link to my son's blog on this post, because I think he has one of note. It's fun to read. I'm not sure the link is going to be there however, so I will also type it here. http://plasticporkbone.typepad.com This has been a great link to my son in the communicative sense also, as I am not great for making phone calls at the end of a working day and neither is he. The email and blog have been a boon to our "relationship", mother/son. I am getting to know a son that is a grownup, but mysteriously has many of the same thoughts as I do about irritants in the world and other important business. I just wish I could get his sisters to be as dedicated to their blogs as he is.

A Good Daddy

Today I want to write about what a great father my son is. I hope my daughters don't mind. I think they are great and wonderful mothers and I always have thought so. But for some reason when a son shows what a good father he can be, it's surprising. It's as if we expect our daughters to do well because we taught them how to be compassionate and caring and supportive. We taught them (in most cases) how to cook and clean. Even if we've tried with our boys to teach them all the same things sometimes it just doesn't take. In my son's case, something very wonderful took place. He loves his daughter deeply and you can see it in the way it hurts him when she cries. He understands that his wife will be tired and need help and you can see that when he takes over the baby when he comes home from work and when he cooks good dinners for his wife to keep her healthy. He realizes that the Grandparents of his new little girl are far away and need to see pictures of his daughter and so he provides them on his website with regularity.

I can't take all the credit for this--his Dad took good care of him when he was a baby. But I'd like to think that I did something right in order to produce such a good and kind son, husband and Daddy. I must have done the same things with my daughters, because they exhibit the same qualities. However, if any of them had turned out to be a bank robber, I would take no credit for that at all!

Bird Creating News

Who else is annoyed by this Bird Flu crap? If there's nothing we can do about it, no virus to take, absolutely no precautions for us, except for maybe staying away from Fowl, then why do we have to hear about how threatened we are? I would prefer ignorance, at least until the horrible stuff gets here. CNN, USA Today, all the biggies are reporting what "could" happen. Today it was "Bird Flu Could Spell Economic Disaster"! Good grief. I could get hit by a car when I go out to get lunch, but will I? Probably not! I hope, I hope, I hope it never comes and "they" all look like the "News Idiots" they are. http://www.usatoday.com I wish we had Huntley and Brinkley and Walter Cronkite back. They would never use the words "could" or "might".

Three Girls in Scotland

In the Spring of 2006 my mother, my daughter and I are going to Scotland together. It occurs to me that my other daughter hasn't heard this news yet, and won't if she never looks at this blog. But that's not why I'm writing about this trip. I'm writing because I think it will be the trip of a lifetime. I haven't seen my Norfolk Daughter in several years now. She's pretty good about email, when I nudge her, so we've been in contact, but I haven't gotten to hug her or look upon her pretty face for a long, long time. She hasn't seen her Grandmother in lots longer than that. It's at least 12 years since she has lived here, where her Grandmother resides. Her Grandmother, my Mother, is 83. I have to take her somewhere really special before she becomes fragile, which luckily hasn't happened yet. Scotland is the place her ancestors on her mother's side come from and the ancestors have been the subject of Norfolk Daugher's research in the past few years, so it became Scotland.

I've always felt a connection to that other very green land and I have discovered the novels of Diana Gibauldon, so I am eager to see the Highlands and the other areas we'll be visiting. I want to learn how to speak in a Scottish brogue, too. I am very excited to see my daughter and mother get reaquainted. For Christmas I will give my mother a new suitcase with things in it for her trip--a travel journal among them. My mother writes in a diary almost every day and is in a Writer's Group, where she goes weekly with her writing assignment.

I will have lots to report after that trip I am sure. About my Mom, my Daughter and very likely, about myself.

Fast One

This is going to be a fast one. My son, the tech whiz, says change your blog so we can comment even if we aren't members, so I have done that. Welcome all who wish to say stuff! I am sure my Son would like to comment on the "rant" comment I made about him. I hope he understands that I am very interested in all his rants! This morning my rant has to do with "the other Grandma" and how often she is seeing my new Granddaughter, Alison! It's not fair! But, as I've told everyone I know, life isn't fair. At least I have pictures, though I've not yet seen a picture of Alison and her new teeth! Maybe this site will be a Grandmother Rant.

Virgin Blog

Okay, folks, this is my very first post to my very own blog. I have never had a blog and have only commented on other's blogs. So who will read this one? Maybe my kids. Who else would be interested in a 61 year old, happily married grandmother of 5? Well, who cares anyway? My daughter's blogs seem to be about their health and personal interests. My son's blog is pretty much one big rant. I think mine will be a combination of the two.

My rant for today? The credit union website, where I went to try to pay a bill. Some goofy page came up that asked if I had a new email address and when I told it I didn't, it wouldn't go anywhere, just sat there, mocking me. When I got out of that page and tried again, credit union told me, "Oh, no, can't log in twice!" Ack!!! So that's how I ended up here!