random-crap

He’s bound for New Orleans..

Sorry, lost in the headphone zone again. I’m trying to block out distractions. For some reason I’m easily distracted. BTW, that’s why the Black Crowes are below this entry; there’s no hidden meaning, it just came on the radio and made me chuckle so there it is.

Todd Snider tells a great story about how some of the best advice he ever received was to never own more shit than you could pack up and move in 15 minutes. Let me tell you, I’ve never met anyone who has actually acomplished this (I can’t speak for Todd, he tells the story but I have no idea if he still follows that advice). I know for a fact that we just spent four days sifting, sorting, and packing stuff; we still aren’t done. What a long fifteen minutes…

And hey, I’ve been busy all day, I just checked and the world is panicking as stocks slump. Oh, now there’s a shock. You can almost hear a dozen Presidential Hopefuls preparing their press conferences about how they are now Expert Economists and have the secret to Fix Everything, but they won’t tell us what it is until after we elect them. And just last week everyone was jumping around saying that giving American’s $1,000 would keep us out of a recession. Yeah, right.

Did anybody watch any football? I saw one play, this weekend I think. The last play of the Giants / Packers game. Damn, that looked cold.

My kids were awesome this weekend. Their dad is the one that needs the work. Really. One more weekend of hell, and we’ll be caught up on the moving front. I hope.

I feel like I’m in a rut, writing-wise.

Is it because there is nothing to say? Perhaps. Too much? Maybe that, too.
I’m writing this in a word processor and it keeps telling me when I screw up, with a sentence fragment. Or something. I think it’s funny that our computers think they know grammar better than we do. (that’s a joke, computer. And thanks for telling me that I mis-spelled ‘grammer’ a minute ago, that was cool of you)

So what’s going on? Where should I start?

My mom-in-law got sick just before Christmas. No, not broken-arm sick, that we had for Thanksgiving, this was an infection that had moved to her blood. So she spent a week in the hospital. Now? She’s in a skilled nursing facility, doing exercises and getting real live nursing care that we really can’t do here at the house with three kids. My wife has been busting her ass to do things for her (legal stuff, plus the usual ‘can you run get me a sprite’ stuff). Visit just about every day; unless someone else from the family is stopping in to see her.

The home itself is an incredibly sad place, to me. People that have just gotten old. Now they sit in their chairs or their beds, waiting for the next big activity. Some days it’s a haircut. Sometimes they just look forward to lunch or dinner. It’s tough just to be there, for me. But it’s a necessary thing; there aren’t enough nurses in the world to be in all of these people’s homes at once.

We are hoping that in six or eight weeks she’ll be home. Maybe before that. But the main thing is she has to be strong enough to move herself around. We’ll see how that goes, but you’ll understand that I don’t write about it much here – there isn’t much to say right now.
Christmas was strange, for us. Not just because of the hospital stay, but because this is the first time in over 20 years we’ve been home for Christmas. My kids were freaking out (‘Santa won’t come here – it’s too HOT.’) In the end we had a lot of family time, just our family, and it was pretty cool.

The paycheck-gathering thing is kicking my butt, time-wise.

I mowed the lawn last weekend; it was hot. Won’t have to mow this weekend, and they say the weekend after that it may freeze. Go figure. If you want I’ll take a picture of the green grass.

Say, in the ‘can of worms’ department – I put my email address into one of those websites to get a quote about a move (Grammy’s stuff going to another town, the big question is should we uhaul it or pay someone to do it). Guess what? Yeah, they are FLOODING my fucking in-box. And calling my phone. “We’re ready to give you! A Quote! Here’s a coupon for a free box! We’re the best!” Yeah, except on some of the emails (I’m not making this up) they misspell words like “quote”. Which is kinda funny, since my word processor told me just now that ‘kinda’ is not a word; but apparently I spelled “fucking” right, since it isn’t underlined. Oh, and that was one mother of a run-on sentence, it just said.

I think I’ll quit now. Say something, I won’t bite.

Okay, one more thing. Die Hard, re-enacted by Bunnies, in 30 seconds.

Hi, internets.

We’re having a mellow weekend. I got my hair cut. The car? She’s inspected. The groceries have been bought for another week or so. We put up our Christmas lights, something we wanted to do over Thanksgiving but couldn’t due to all the excitement.

While we were up on the roof (I had my boys up there, much to my daughter’s disappointment. She’s not old big enough), I hear this: “Wow, it sure is warm on the roof.” Have I mentioned that it was nearly 90 degrees today? Mmm, yeah. But hey, the lights are up.

The kids carry name tags so that Grammy can remember who they are. I keep charging her cell phone, she wants it to be ready in case any of her kids call. They rarely do, since they don’t want to use up her minutes. Or something like that. The battery goes back down when she tries to use it to change the channel on the TV.

I rented Just Like Heaven, which is almost Just Like Ghost. We also rented Santa Claus 3, and watched Frosty last night.

I saw Beowulf. Apparently, he had some violent tendencies. He also had a huge ego. Angelina is in it, showing off her golden globes. (she wanted to play with his huge ego) Quite a movie. Even the parts where she’s not there.

Grammy is now handing out birthday money, even though it’s nobody’s birthday today. I need to get my ass over there.