The family that lies together, stays sane together!

I’m often quite oblivious to what’s going on around me. Perhaps it’s because I spend so much time in my own imagination. So it should come as no surprise that when my family lies to me— in the name of protecting my sensitive sensibilities— I’m totally oblivious to their deceit.

One Saturday evening, my man and I splurged on a couple of mega-size chocolate bars, and with our treats in hand, sat down to watch TV. My man finished his bar, but I only ate half of mine, so I wrapped up the remains and set it on the end table beside my chair.

On the following Monday, I returned home from the day job, ravenous with hunger. While supper cooked, I decided to alleviate my hunger by scarfing down the rest of my bar. But the bar was gone.

I searched the floor, under the table, under my chair. Nothing, nada, zilch. Not even a piece of the wrapper in the garbage. The only explanation was that my man or boy had found it, consumed it, then hidden the evidence of their crime, which was in truth, odd behaviour for them both. Although I’ve been known to raid their stashes, they never touch mine. But I digress…

The inquisition was on. When my man and boy arrived home from work, they both denied eating the bar. My man suggested I’d woken in the middle of the night, done the deed myself, then forgotten it by morning.

Huh? I’ve never sleepwalked in my life.

The next night after work, too hungry to wait for supper to cook—yes, there’s a pattern here—I widened my search and again found nothing. Perplexed, I emailed our oldest son. Had he dropped in while we were all at work? His answer…a definite no.

Over the next few nights, still fixated on the missing chocolate bar, I searched the house and quizzed my family. But they stuck to the sleepwalking story.

The following Thursday, I headed downstairs for potatoes and opened the cold room door. A mousetrap, along with a poor dead mouse, was on the floor between me and the potatoes.

I closed the door and went back upstairs to cook rice.

Later, my man and boy confessed they’d conspired to keep silent to protect me from myself. They knew me well enough to know that a mouse in the house would bring out my latent crazy gene. If I’d known about the mouse, I’d have had them tearing apart the house until they found the poor frightened creature.

Instead, they quietly resolved the issue, setting traps and determining how the mouse gained access to the house so they could prevent it from happening again.

Has your family ever lied to you to protect you from a similar truth? Or do they man-up, tell you the facts, then live with your craziness?

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I want to be as good a person as my dog thinks I am…

My best friend in Dallas lost one of her best friends this week.  Her sweet dog, Roxie had to be put down because of a bleeding tumor that was causing her to go down fast, and with alot of pain.   My friend is struggling with Roxie’s absence, and it got me thinking about our furry family members and how important they are in our lives.  So I thought I’d do a little tribute to them, and invite you to do the same with yours.

Here is Roxie in better days, and what a sweetheart she was…

They have another dog, a golden retriever, Gracie, who is blissfully ignorant about most things in life…lol…but is also full of sweetness and love and thinks she’s a lapdog.  And also thinks she belongs on a pool float with a drink…

Here’s my old lady dog, Ruby, who lives for Sonic runs so that she can snatch tater tots.

   

So tell me about your babies!!!!   

And dear sweet Roxie…I will miss you dearly.  Hope you’re having fun up there with Josie and Honey.  

RIP sweet girl.

The Gift of Sight

My mother has macular degeneration, a medical condition which results in the loss of vision at the center of the eye. Eventually it spreads outward and causes blindness. This condition makes it difficult or impossible for her to recognize faces and read the newspaper. Although she still has enough peripheral vision to allow her to perform the daily activities in her life, there are many other limitations.

She cannot drive, nor can she check her grocery bill to ensure the charges are correct. If she uses magnification, she can read the headlines in the newspaper, but she is unable to read the tiny print in the article. Needless to say, when my dad was alive, we would often find him at the kitchen counter with her, reading the ingredients of a recipe out loud, and helping her get the right measurement in the cup. Gosh, they made such a cute couple, the memory makes me smile.

During mom’s annual visit to the eye specialist, she asked him if removal of cataracts would help her vision. The doctor thought it might and immediately set up an appointment with another doctor to have the procedure done.

As the day of the surgery approached, my mother started to get nervous. She’d heard that cataract surgery could worsen the macular condition. Since she already had one eye on the verge of being declared legally blind, and the doctor was going to start with her good eye, she feared she could come out of the procedure not being able to see at all.

The surgery was performed on March 16th, the day of her 84th birthday. Mom left the hospital with cloudy vision, then fretted for the rest of the day that the cloudiness would remain, leaving her worse off than she was before. The next morning, we went to the doctor for a checkup and he reassured us that the cloudiness would pass.

That afternoon, as we prepared food for a small family gathering to celebrate her birthday, mom asked me to read the wrapping on a package of ham because she wanted to know if it was smoked. As I silently scanned the label, she started to read the ingredients out loud.

It was a miracle. She read the package ingredients, the numbers and words around the stove dials, then brought out the cookbook to see if she could read it, too. And she could. She immediately called her sister to share the good news. When I called her the next day, she had been sitting on the couch with her magnifying glass, reading the articles in the local paper.

I never would have expected the removal of a cataract to give my mom the gift of sight, but it did. Now she can’t wait to have her other eye done.

Do you know someone who might benefit from this information? If so, please pass this story along.

For more information on macular degeneration, click here.

Forty-Five…

Today I have been on the planet for… 45 years.

Forty five years. Wow.  I remember when that was a hundred years away.

My daughter is seventeen, and I remember seventeen.  I REMEMBER seventeen and many things about that age that I hope my daughter won’t be remembering when she’s my age.  Then again, if I take my mommy hat off for a minute, I hope she does.  I want her to do the crazy things she’ll sit around a fire telling stories about later, I just don’t want to know she’s doing them.

I remember turning nineteen when that was the drinking age in Texas…for five whole months.  Then it changed to 21 and I had to be a baby using fake id’s again…um…I mean, I had to stay home again.

I remember leaving home at twenty and moving 300 miles away…learning about what big cities were like.  I remember having my daughter at 27, moving back home at 32, trying to open a bookstore at 35, going back to crunching numbers behind a desk at 37, and getting remarried at 39.

Where on earth did all the time go?  Suddenly that arbitrary age that seemed a century away is lying on me like a blanket, with aching muscles and not quite so taut skin.  Highlights and lowlights that cover up more gray than I care to admit.

But that’s okay.  I’m still here.  And still kickin’.  I’m blessed and happy to be here to see another year!!  Tonight will be Mexican food gorging, and ice cream cake.  Because it’s all about the ice cream cake.

Now I need to go see what my seventeen year old is doing… 

The Simple Things…

If you are like me, you are meeting yourself as you walk in the door.  I wave hello at the equally frazzled version of me as I come in from work and she is off to buy something/pick up something/bring someone somewhere….and hope that she did the laundry so I don’t have to.

I did something this past weekend that I’m kind of embarrassed to admit really stuck with me.  Because it was something I haven’t done in probably close to a year.  The fact that it really settled around me like warm milk and made me notice…makes me think I should do it again.

I sat down outside in the sunshine and did nothing.

On purpose.

I didn’t write, I didn’t pretend to write, I didn’t clean ANYTHING, I didn’t cook anything.  I sat outside in an old chair (yeah, that one up there isn’t mine…I wish it was!)  and listened to the cockatiels in our aviary chatter.  I closed my eyes and absorbed the warmth on my skin that was probably wondering what the heck I was doing.  My daughter came out to sit on the ground and read.  My old lady dog came outside to sit between us on a warm pavestone.  It was sooooo nice.  I loved it.

I’ve been so frantic since I signed with my publisher, bouncing from one issue and deadline to the next, that I haven’t taken the time to just enjoy the simple things.  It may get crazy again soon…in fact I want it to….but I’m hoping I’ll remember this time to stop and breathe.

What do you do to decompress?  Do you have a favorite place or activity?