Monday, October 16, 2000 - Is the Administrative Assemblage of the Contemplative Road Construction Crew of America actually a Left-Wing Revolutionary Armed Guerrilla Vigilante Force?

Hewlett Packards

(not to be confused with Ron Packard, a dentist and mayor in Carlsbad, California);

High Temperatures (both outdoors and in);

Hairdos (or the lack thereof);

Artwork and Roadwork;

And other unrelated things.

       Last Saturday, when Larry, Teddy, and Joseph came home from the shop, they brought something with them:  a new (slightly used) computer.  It’s a Gateway 2000.  This computer will be for the children to use for school, and also for their games that so take up memory in my computer, and have a nasty habit of messing things up.  So now ‘my’ computer will really be ‘my’ computer!  Yaaaaay!  

          A Hewlett Packard DeskJet printer came with the new computer, and I promptly cabbaged onto it--“It’s mine!!  It’s mine!!  It’s mine!!”  I don’t think Hewlett Packard is quite as good as Canon, which is what my other printer is; but my Canon is four or five years old, seriously out of date for anything to do with computers.  Furthermore, the Canon didn’t print in color any more, so in need of a cleaning is it.  I printed a color picture on the HP, and it’s pretty good…although not as good as the Canon, when it was new.  The HP printer cannot print as far to the edges of paper as the Canon.  

      I was right, saying I would be staying home with Victoria last Sunday…and she wasn’t the only one who stayed home.  Joseph, Lydia, and Caleb were sick, too.  I curled Hester’s bangs, brushed her hair, and then was doing Lydia’s, standing in the bathroom in front of the counter, with Lydia closest to the door…and she said, “I’m afraid I’m getting the flu, because my stomach hurts, but I’m not sick yet.”  

         “Aauugghh!” I exclaimed, “you’d better head straight for home, if you do start feeling sick!”  

          I finished curling her bangs, turned her around, was brushing the back of her hair--and she said, “I think I’m getting sick.”  

         You wouldn’t think a forty-year-old with grey hair could leap out of the way so fast, you sho’ ’nuff wouldn’t.  I spun her around, saw her safely to the commode, and fled for my life.

         Joseph managed to go to church that night; the others stayed home.  That evening, Dorcas couldn’t find her glasses.  How does one hunt properly for one’s glasses, without one’s glasses?? 

        Monday, surprisingly enough, everybody managed to make it to school.  I spent the day mending clothes, washing clothes, sorting clothes, folding clothes, and putting away clothes.  That day, Larry helped Keith finish painting and clearing his pickup.  Now he only needs to put it back together, and the pickup will be done.  Keith is getting excited…that pickup has been waiting to get itself finished for a good long while.

       One of the other things--amongst several--that we got from the man who owns the Pawn Shop, in lieu of payment, was a go-cart.  And another go-cart.  Yes, we now have a couple of go-carts for our kids to kill themselves on.  Well, maybe not; they really don't go too awfully fast... but fast enough.  They have weed-eater motors for power (the go-carts; not the kids), and are really quite the cat's meow.  Or the dog's bark.  Or the alligator's purr.  Or the aardvark's sneeze.  Larry and the kids went to Gerard Park to try out the go-carts.  The children are delighted.  But we could have used the money.  

 

         After sleeping for a little while Monday night, Larry got up to go to Colorado.  My brother Loren went with him.  I spent the night peeling, coring, and slicing pears and making four pear streusel pies.  But there was a problem:  I couldn’t find the corn syrup the recipe called for.  I looked high and low, and then I started over and looked low and high; but the corn syrup was simply nowhere to be found.  I stopped hunting for corn syrup and started hunting for a substitute.

          The pear pie turned out fine and dandy, even if I DID use pancake syrup instead of corn syrup.  That bottle of corn syrup had mysteriously and inexplicably disappeared from the face of the earth.  Or the face of the Jackson kitchen, to be exact; that face that seems everlastingly to have itself in a severe state of stickiness.  

         As always, the pie filling boiled out, because, as usual, I filled the pan too full.  It spread itself all over the floor of the oven.  And as always, I neglected to clean the oven in time, so that when we fired it up (takes kerosene and a match, you know) to bake our supper that night, it smoked the house thoroughly, neatly removing every last mosquito from the joint, thereby proving that it is, indeed, profitable at times not to be a fanatical Clean-It-Up-Now sort of a person. 

        I won't be at all surprised if I should find that bottle of corn syrup residing in someone's hapless sock drawer someday, entirely incognizant of the route, rhyme, and reason it took to get itself there.  Then again, it might wind up in a bathroom cupboard somewhere, deviously masquerading as a bottle of bubble bath.  Imagine splashing around in that.

        The pie was done at 6:15 a.m.  So then I went to bed.  And I might have even gone to sleep, had not Hester left her book on my bed!

        Dorcas finally found her glasses Tuesday--they’d fallen into her flower box, lens side down, and she hadn’t seen them, even though she had looked in that box.  That afternoon, Hannah took Victoria with her to Wal-Mart, and got her some colored, jeweled hair clips.  Victoria was ever so pleased; she carries the card of clips around with her everywhere she goes, and regularly exchanges the little clips in her hair for a different set on the card.

        Tuesday night after curling Hester and Lydia's hair, I got out the scissors to cut Victoria's hair.  When it's shorter, you see, it looks neater, longer.  I mean, it stays longer neater, shorter.  What I mean, you understand, is that when it isn't so long, it longer stays neater, shorter.  In other words, shorter it is neater longer.  And the longer it is neater, shorter.  So it really is better neater shorter.  Longer, it is shorter neater.  You do understand, do you not?  

         Well, it occurred to me that the child, although agreeable and pleasant, as usual, did not act her enthusiastic self about this hair-cutting business, so I thought I would ask a few questions before I got started... You see, when I was little, I had no choice in the matter: I had short hair.  When it got long enough to be almost bearable, it got whacked off again.  Bushwhacked, you might say, so that most of the time, I had a good deal of forehead and much lobe of ear showing. UGH.

        Ohhhhh... I was so sad over that poor little pitiable hairdo; I wanted looong, beautiful curls!  Not short, straight, do-nothing hair.  But that's all I had, until I was twelve, when I started curling it with those horrid ol' brush curlers.  And I actually slept on those awful things.  Aarrgghh.  Furthermore, I wound up looking like Grandma Riddlesdorf, into the bargain.  

       Fortunately, by the time I was 13 ½, my hair was getting wavy on its own, and I decided to let it do what it wanted to do... so my dented (or indented, as the case may be) skull was given the chance to restore its form.  It didn't, but it can never say it was not given the opportunity to do so, should it have so desired. 

        And I let it grow a little bit longer... not much, just a little. 

        Immediately after Keith was born, my hair went straight again.  Luckily, the world had taught me about curling irons, so I didn't have to commit carnage on my wretched cranium again. 

        Okay, now what was all that for?  These lengthy discourses of mine have a way of getting themselves lost...  Oh... yes.  Victoria's hair.  

        I asked her, "Do you want your hair short, or long? And do you want me to cut all your hair, or just your bangs?"

       And she, knowing I had intended to cut the entire 'do', and wanting to be agreeable, smiled sweetly and said, "Oh, I like it cut all the way around, but just the bangs." 

       Hmmmm.

       So I said, "How do you like your hair, short or long?" 

       She nodded amenably.  "I like it short or long," she replied. 

       Lydia looked at Hester, which was a mistake, because Hester was looking at Lydia, and once they made eye contact, both snickered at once.  They gathered themselves together, choked, and snickered some more. 

        I tried again.  "Which part of your hair do you want cut?" 

        Victoria considered.  She patted her bangs.  "I like my bangs cut; they're really long."

        "What about the back?" 

         Her little hand reached around and felt of her hair.  She tipped her head and smiled at me.  "Pretty soon it will be getting long like Hannah's," she said. 

          I thought perhaps I was beginning to come to the answer.  "So, do you want your hair to be like Hannah's?" 

          Victoria nodded soberly.  "Hannah's hair is really pretty, isn't it?" 

          I agreed that it was.  But I threw in an option, just one more time..."Your hair is really pretty, too, when it's short," I told her. 

         "And when it's long," she continued, "then it's really, really, really pretty!" 

          I cut the child's bangs and left the rest as it was.  She was soon skipping off happily to peer at herself in my big cheval mirror. 

         Meanwhile, the clothes in the wash machine were politely swishing around, getting themselves nice and clean--or so I thought.  What I didn’t know was that a blue flannel shirt of Teddy’s was insidiously permeating its dye onto every other item in the wash.  When I went downstairs to put the clothes into the dryer, there was a whole load of pretty, light blue things.  

         Dorcas had recently bought herself a pink robe, saying as she showed it to me, “Every year at Christmastime, one of the Grandmas or Aunts gave Hannah and me robes.  I always got blue; Hannah always got pink.  Always.”  She held up her new pink robe.  “Well, look!  I finally have a pink one!”

          Guess what.  Dorcas has another blue robe.

          And Dorcas does not have a pink robe.

         Luckily, it was a very pretty color of blue that all these clothes turned; and luckily I had managed to put socks with their mates into the same load…all but two pairs of my newest white socks, that is, of which I had only put one sock each.  And they were not the same kind of socks.  So I put the shirt back into the wash machine, along with the two socks that were still white, turned the water to hot, and added detergent.  I left the lid up, so the water would stay in the machine, and turned it on.  And then I forgot and left them in the washer too long.  When next I remembered to look, they had turned much bluer than the first two blue socks.

         I spent the night trotting up and down the stairs, fishing a couple of socks out of the washer to compare them to the other two previously-dyed blue socks.  First one unmatched pair was resting damply atop the spinner in the wash machine, lid up so the water didn't drain out, while the second unmatched pair reclined wetly in the hot bowels of the washer, wondering what dastardly deed they had done to deserve such a drowning…and then the other unmatched pair took its place, while the second pair went back into the washer. 

         Just about the time the pear pie got done, I determined that all four socks had arrived at the same blue hue.  I put everything back into the washer and closed the lid so the wash cycle could finish.  Whew!  Such troubles!  If anybody wears that shirt again, I’m going to wrap the sleeves around his neck, tie them together, and pull.

        Loren and Larry got home at 10:00 p.m. Tuesday, making very good time, especially considering that they blew a tire at Lexington.  They took the northern route, coming through Cheyenne, which gives them Interstate all the way, and saves time even though it is a few miles longer.  

        The road is better, too.  When Larry heads east, he invariably runs into roadwork by the ton, where large, angry men with jack hammers, air chisels, and wrecking balls have hacked the cement into pieces the approximate size of a standard Chiclet.  The workers are prefaced by orange cones, roughly 85 million of them, which direct the traffic flow into half-lanes of travel, from its customary six lanes, starting some one hundred miles before the actual roadwork begins, and ending about fifty miles beyond it.  Over-sized trucks lurk menacingly in ‘must-merge’ lanes, waiting for small vehicles such as Honda Accords, Ford Festivas, and Li’l Tykes Cozy Coupes to steer in front of them, so that they can hurtle forward suddenly and run over them, the middle bowels of the truck swallowing the compact car in its entirety, like a python knocking back a mulita.  Other than these rare spurts of velocity, the balance of the traffic moves along at roughly the same speed as the Hubbard Glacier, where the sturdy residents of nearby Yakutat conduct momentous celebrations once each millennia when it is determined that the glacier has moved .09238 of a millimeter further toward the sea.  Big earth-moving equipment, including huge scrapers, mammoth dump trucks, towering cranes, and gargantuan graders, skulk about the sides of the roadways, evidently serving no useful purpose other than to add to the general décor and aesthetics of the job site, for they have not moved in two decades.  For all we know, they have no engines.  Sometimes the only things moving in a two-hundred-mile-long work area are the flashing neon signs proclaiming, “Delays May Be Possible,” “Workmen Ahead, Give ’Em a Brake,” and “Do Not Exceed 15 mph.  Fines Doubled In Work Zone.”  The latter is a joke; vehicles are always traveling along uniformly at five miles per hour or less.  

        Someday we will discover that the Administrative Assemblage of the Contemplative Road Construction Crew of America is actually a Left-Wing Revolutionary Armed Guerrilla Vigilante Force, established for the sole purpose of bringing America to its knees.

          I am still celebrating my birthday:  Tuesday afternoon, Joseph gave me a humungous Hershey’s candy bar (with Almonds), and my brother and sister and their respective mates gave me gifts, too.  With that big Hershey bar nearby to keep me company, I began altering all the new clothes I received, every last one of which needed some sort of adjustment or modification done.  Did you know that if a skirt is two inches too big and you take it in two inches on either side, it winds up being two inches too small?  I just found that out.  As I have said, story problems always did bumfoozle me.  

        Larry and I went to the grocery store after church Wednesday night.  Home again, I was getting bags of groceries from the Suburban…I turned to walk into the house, and caught my purse strap on the mirror of Dorcas’ car, which soon brought me to a sudden stop.  It reminded me of the time we were all going to Sunday School…  I rounded the corner, headed down the steps…and somehow the stair railing slid itself neatly right up the sleeve of my suit.  Momentum carried me along until the railing had instilled itself all the way up to my shoulder.  By the time I got stopped, the end of the railing was attempting to poke right out through the back of my jacket.  So the entire line of people behind me had to come to a halt and reverse itself while I backed up three steps and extricated myself from the railing.  

        Larry’s face was strangely contorted while he gave valiant endeavor to keeping it straight.

        Thursday I peeled, cored, and sliced the entire big box of apples we got from the lady in Platte Center, where we get lots of fruit during the summer months.  Hannah came visiting for a little while.  She is doing ‘crow hook’ crocheting with a long crochet hook with a hook at either end, and using two coordinating skeins of yarn, so that one side is variegated blue, the other side variegated white.  She is making a baby blanket, and I think she is planning to keep it.  This, because…  

        And now I am going to tell you a secret:

        Larry and I are planning to become grandparents, perhaps next April.  !!!!!!  Isn’t that exciting?!

        Okay, back to the pies:  Thursday, I made seven pies.  Three were Danish apple bars, and four were Dairy State apple pie. 

        Larry took the children to Gerard Park to ride the go-carts before supper...and once again, I didn’t go, because there were pies in the oven.  Also, it was getting too dark to take pictures.

        Larry and I rode to UnSmart Foods on our bikes after everyone went to bed, to get more ingredients for pies.  It wasn’t really very cold out, but the breeze was stiff enough that my ears were plastered flat against the sides of my head.

         I am almost done with Dorcas’ Thanksgiving dress.  She cut out a matching dress for Susan’s baby Danica, and I will sew it for her.  As I was sewing, Victoria was sitting on the floor beside me, reading out loud to herself.  She had quite a pile of books on the floor beside her, and was methodically making her way through them…unread books on the left, books she’d finished reading on the right.  Some of the stories she knows practically by heart.  Some no one has ever read to her, so she looks at the pictures and makes up a story that might possibly go along with the illustrations.  She was reading a book about a teddy bear who had to go to the doctor.  On one page was a picture of the doctor checking the bear’s ear.  The bear’s face was somewhat crumpled in apprehension…  

        And Victoria said, said she, “The doctor was looking in his ear to see what would happen if he crabbed…”

        Caleb turned seven years old on Friday.  We gave him an orange and purple cap, a pile of books, a pair of ice skates, shoes, a windbreaker, a couple of shirts, and a stuffed dog whose long ears flap and clack when he is squeezed.  I made eight more apple pies, changing the recipes a little from the previous day’s favorites, making them even more scrumptious than before.  I cram as much as possible into my biggest pans--and they are big; I got them from Larry’s aunt, who was a cook at a truckstop owned by her husband and sons.  When they sold the truckstop, she gave me a couple of the pans.  

       Lawrence and Norma, and Bobby and Hannah came that evening.  Lawrence and Norma gave Caleb a nifty little Lego set, and a stuffed Dalmation that can do more tricks than a real dog, I think.  Bobby and Hannah gave him a koosh ball, a matchbox car, and a ‘Bike Blaster’ to fasten onto his bike.  It plays all sorts of sounds--sirens, engine-revving, horns, whistles, etc.  My mother gave him some money, which he immediately decided to put into his savings account.  

         Lydia didn’t join the party, because she didn’t feel well, and had a bad headache.  She lay on my bed the entire evening.  After everyone left, I suddenly realized Victoria was flushed, and piping hot.  I took her temperature--and it was 104°!!!  Yipe!  I gave her water, Tylenol, and tucked her in bed.  I’ll bet Lydia had a temperature, too, and I didn’t even think to check.  Poor little thing.

         Teddy got a ticket on the way home from Amy’s house…he was stopped because a headlight was burned out, and then he got the ticket because the paperwork was not all done properly.  The fine is $73.00.  Good grief.  What a deflating end to a perfectly good date.

I spent a good deal of the day Saturday helping Joseph with the sketching of his weeds.  Sketching (with pencil) did not take long at all.  Coloring them took a loooong time.  Joseph, however, spent two hours sketching the first drawing, and was in despair over ever getting done.  As is par for the course, he had suddenly discovered the project was due Monday, after thinking he still had one week left in which to do it. 

Joseph doesn't hear well, and he misses things his teachers say sometimes. 

He was planning to do his sketches on paper, and glue them onto the posterboard...  But I thought the glue would rumple the paper... so we divided the posterboard into 6 squares each, since he needed drawings of 12 plants, and we wrote the names of each of the plants he'd chosen at the top of each square with my calligraphy pen.  He showed me his papers on which he had written scientific names and descriptions of the plants.  He opened his book to the first one.  

The drawings were to include the entire plant, flower, bud, root system, stem cross-cut, and seed.  I picked up a pencil and sketched all that into the square in which it belonged.  I sketch lickety-split; I was done in less than two minutes. 

Oh, you should've seen the face he made at me; that was too funny for words.  He picked up the paper he'd been struggling over, and showed it to Teddy.  "Look what I did in two hours," he said gloomily.

Then he picked up the posterboard and put that under Teddy's nose. "Look what she (he jabbed a thumb in my direction) did in five seconds," he said in an acerbic tone.  

Welllll...as I've said, I'm no artist.  But the pictures turned out good anyway, and Joseph is pleased.  He did the hard part--writing all the information about the plants--all that stuff about kingdom and phylum and class and order and family and genus and species and common name.  That done, he had to write where the plants are found, and what type of environment they grow in.  A lot of that information is hard to come by. 

Saturday night, Victoria’s temperature was 102.5º, so I kept her home Sunday morning.

The entire family came for dinner.  We had roast beef, baked potatoes, carrots, and onions; fruit (including peaches, apricots, pears, plums, pineapple, and bananas; bread and butter pickles, dill pickles, buttermilk biscuits, and Dairy State apple pie with whipped cream.  Keith and Esther gave Caleb a giant bucket of Lego, and the bucket is shaped like a huge piece of Lego.  As I look around the living room, I can see Lego structures and vehicles sitting on virtually every flat surface in the room.

My nephew Robert preached Sunday night.  He is very good at explaining things, and he always seems able to find exactly the right thing to fit all the happenings in our lives.  After church, Larry left for Ohio.  His trailer was already loaded with a couple of recyclable trailers from Beatrice, and he hoped to get to Buckeye Lake by Monday evening.  

You ought to see Victoria playing with the new computer.  Wow, she's getting good at it!  

She just typed all sorts of words--I think they were in Czechoslovakian, although I cannot be sure.  Done with that, she then used the 'Eraser' to wipe it all back off again.  A little bit ago, she drew a hilarious picture on the computer’s PaintBox program, and then she had the audacity to say it was ME.  I told her she was a bratty kid, and now she's sitting over there giggling, and trying to draw an even FUNNIER face.  

She reminds me of myself, when I was little.  Once upon a time, when I was about eight, I suppose, my father, mother, and I stopped at a restaurant on one of our many journeys hither and yon.  I sat down at a table, slid in...  and my father sat down beside me.  He slid over and bumped into me.  I moved over.  He slid over and bumped me again.  I moved closer to the wall.  He looked perfectly innocent, and I didn't realize for a minute or two he was teasing me... until finally, I was all squished up against the wall, and he was still sliding into me...  I'd thought that for some unknown reason he was trying to make room for my mother to sit there beside him.  It didn't make a lick of sense, because there was a bench on the other side of the table, but I didn't realize he was kidding for a little bit.

Finally, well wedged in, I tipped my head up and looked at him, wondering what in the world...  and I suddenly saw that he was trying to keep from grinning.  I abruptly changed attitudes.

I started giggling and shoving on my father with all my might and main, while my mother whispered our names very quietly under her breath, trying to get us to BEHAVE, for goodness sake.  It WAS a public restaurant, and people were LOOKING.  (They were smiling, too; but that made no difference to HER.  They were LOOKING.)  

Daddy scooted back into his place, and I unsquished myself from the corner.

             The children just went back to school after lunch.  Over the noon hour, Hester went next door, extracted Mandy from her yard, and brought her into our house.  (Mrs. Foreman doesn't care; she's glad when the kids play with the dog.)  Mandy, all excited, came skidding wildly down the hall, around the corner (nearly falling flat), and into the kitchen, making Tad's tail get extremely bushy. Teddy tossed her a few tidbits, and she caught every one of them, gulping so fast that sometimes she failed to detect the bite, and then stared anxiously at the floor, wondering where it had gotten to. 

Hannah came then, having walked over here because, once again, her purse was in her garage--and her key was in her purse.  So Teddy took her to my nephew David Walker's shop where Bobby's car was parked, so she could get the other key from Bobby's car... Teddy took her back to her house, dropped her off, and headed off to our shop. 

Hannah walked in her back door--and promptly spotted her own set of keys...under the kitchen table, on the floor. 

But in the meanwhile, back home on the ranch... 

When Mandy heard Teddy's pickup departing, she forgot all about food, despite the fact that she is half starving half to death, and went bombing around the corner into the front hall, nearly upending herself.  She jumped up on the door and put her paw on the latch.  The door popped open, and the dog went tearing down the porch steps, across the lawn (nearly running over Kitty, whose tail immediately got every bit as bushy as her son's had been a few moments earlier), and out into the street, dashing along after Teddy's pickup.  Teddy's head popped out the window, and I saw him say something to the dog and point back toward her house.  She stopped chasing the pickup, her tail drooped, her head went down, and she walked forlornly off toward home. 

When the children went to school a few minutes later, Tad skedaddled out the front door behind them and trotted across the street after them.  Moments later, I heard the school door go shut, and soon after that, I heard the loud, lonesome cry of a young tomcat left out in the cold.  There sat Tad on the front porch of the school, staring through the glass, yeoowwling his head off.  The windows of the nearby library were open, and soon a few heads were peering out, and I heard children laughing.  Fortunately, before he disturbed the just-beginning classes, his mother across the street declared war on a large leave blowing along the curb.  She ambushed it suddenly with fury and vehemence.  Tad, distracted from his objective of Getting Someone to Let Him Into the School, watched as Kitty leaped and pounced, and then gathered herself together and fled for dear life from the frightful predator.  He gave it only a moment's thought before he came pelting back across the street and followed his mother pell-mell into the back yard.  They were not seen for a good long while afterward.  

Once again, Victoria is typing away on the new computer; she said just a minute ago, "I've got to get this weakling letter done!"  (She meant, 'weekly'.)

 

And I must get back to the sewing machine.