Monday, I decided I had better time the Christmas program, to make sure it didn’t accidentally wind up lasting four or five hours. I started off playing our organ since everyone was asleep, but the organ kept making strange, loud noises, rather on the order of the space shuttle at departure time. I turned it off…turned it back on…and it was okay. But it soon did it again, roaring with even louder vehemence the second time. I turned it off…turned it back on…but it wasn’t long before it again blared thunderously enough that several people in Roselawn Cemetery sat bolt upright and gazed about them in bewildered amazement. It only took two more episodes of that before I gave up, collected the church keys, and headed off to finish at the church. The church piano now has a humidifier/dehumidifier attached underneath, and a big black heavy cover over it. There is a special light in the ceiling in the corner, so that one can see the song rack better…an amplifier attached to the soundboard… And the piano sounds beautiful. I love to play it.
Larry put lettering on the sides of his pickup--one of the requirements, according to the DOT officer in Indiana, when hauling for someone else. It says “Jackson Trans Co”, standing for Transportation Company, along with his ICC(?) (DCC? QRZ? PQQ? ICK? YAK? MAC?) number. A vinyl custom-made sign would’ve cost him $150, at the cheapest. But he got the stickers from Sapp Bros., put them on himself, and only spent $30.
There was a tornado watch Monday night, along with a severe thunderstorm warning. Well, I think--although I am not sure--that a couple of drips fell from the sky; but they could have come from Tad’s paws, after he got them wet jumping up onto the counter in an attempt to go out the kitchen window. He accidentally stepped splaaat into a cup of water sitting there.
Last Sunday night’s tornado damaged several farm buildings around the area, but missed nearby houses. There have been a number of other tornadoes throughout the week. One little town in south central Nebraska was nearly devastated Halloween night. Quite a lot of adults and children were out celebrating and playing games. They took shelter in a big building in the middle of town--and it was one of few structures left standing, although the attached store was demolished.
Tuesday was Mama’s 83rd birthday. We gave her a hand-blown glass flower and hummingbird figurine. Joseph picked it out, and it is so pretty. Also, we gave her the cedar box with the sparkly hologram picture of hummingbirds and flowers on the lid, which I got on top of Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park. I put a few of my favorite postcards inside it. A couple of my nephews, along with some of their family, were there; and John and Lura Kay came, too. We wound up telling droll stories about some of our trailer happenings and mishappenings…and then Mama told us a few stories about travels she took with Daddy.
She told us of a time, in the middle or late 50s, when Daddy had some sort of an early-50s model car with an enormous trunk. He thought this was just the ticket for long-distance travel--he would not have to rent motel rooms, because the trunk was plenty large enough to use as a bed!
So…off they went. They traveled all day. Night fell. Parking on a side street in some little town somewhere on the back side of nowhere, they spread their blankets in the trunk, tossed in their pillows, and climbed in after them. Now, Mama wanted to sleep with her head at the rear of the car, feet toward the back seat; but Daddy held the opposite viewpoint. What if it rained? With the trunk propped open as it was, the rain would come right in on their faces!
So they pushed their pillows deep into the bowels of that trunk, under the rear window shelf and up against the back seat. Mama didn’t like it, not one little bit. She felt as if she were cramped inside a deep, dark dungeon… But they were tired, and sleep soon claimed them.
A couple of hours later, in that hazy state somewhere between nightmare and reality, she awoke Daddy with frightening moans and gasps for air. She thought she was suffocating, and he thought something terrible was wrong with her, for he couldn’t get her roused enough to stop those fearsome outcries, and he didn’t realize she was dreaming.
He finally got her to wake up. By then, the scare had thoroughly awoken him, and he was in no mood to attempt further sleep. They climbed from the trunk, got back in the front seat, and were off.
And that was the very last time Daddy ever tried sleeping in the trunk of a car--or at least, that was the last time he ever tried it with my mother!
Tuesday, I cut out two jumpers, a dress, and a blouse for Victoria. I have now finished her dress for the Christmas Program. The bodice and ruffles over the sleeves are of burgundy crushed velvet, cut from a jacket I wore for Christmas when I was seventeen years old. It has a gold-sequined skirt, and the sleeves and wide sash are of thin gold metallic Something-or-other…it looks like really shiny tissue paper, and is stiff enough that the sleeves puff out perfectly, even without the sleeve header I usually put into a dress. (Could it be lamé?) There is gold pleated ribbon in a curved yoke around the bodice, around the neckline, and at the hem. At the V waist is a piece of gold metallic trim with burgundy thread in the middle. Victoria is delighted with it--she acts much more excited over this dress than she did over the dark green velvet of last year, with its marabou and dark green chiffon trim, although *I* think last year’s dress was much more elegant and classy.
It’s always fun to start sewing newly-cut-out material, and to watch it turn into a dress worth the wearing.
We had pumpkin pie for dessert Monday…Tuesday…Wednesday…and then it was gone. All those sixteen pies I made last Saturday--gone.
Larry left Tuesday afternoon to go to Indiana. He departed later than he wanted to, because he had to replace cracked studs on his trailer wheels. After pounding the studs out--which of course damages the threads--he couldn’t get all of the replacement studs he needed, because they were back-ordered, and the parts stores didn’t have enough on hand --so he had to put the old ones (the ones that were not cracked, that is) back in--which entailed re-threading the damaged ends of the studs, which of course took a good while.
Dorcas and Joseph bought some candy bars for the Trick-or-Treaters, but very few kids came, so there was lots of candy to eat, ourselves. Hester trotted over to my mother’s house to tend to the Halloweeners there, so my mother would not have to keep getting up to go to the door.
Teddy came home from the shop, saw all our candy, and made a bee-line for the front hallway, where he flicked off the porch light. That, because in Columbus, if we don’t want any Halloween beggars coming to our door, we simply turn off the porch light. A lit porch light indicates that one is willing to treat the hobgoblins.
“Teddy!” admonished Lydia and Caleb, who were enjoying passing out the candy. Teddy grinned and turned the light back on.
“You can’t have it, anyway,” Victoria informed him, interpreting things correctly, “because you’re too fat!!!”
Teddy wept big crocodile tears, and Victoria giggled.
And then Hannah arrived with a big bag of all different kinds of freshly-made Rice Krispy bars. Mmmmmmmmm…we wasted no time launching into that treat. Later, after we came home from Mama’s house, Lawrence and Norma brought us a large bowl of Wyoming Whopper cookies and candy. We were tooooo full to eat even one. Whew… Ugh! Or, as Hester used to say, “Hoink.”
Some kids came Trick-or-Treating--spotted Dorcas--and shouted, "DORCAS!!!" --they knew her from the daycare center.
Our children do not go Trick-or-Treating; I have come to dislike Halloween more and more. It is not at all a Christian holiday, and each year, I think, it becomes easier to see that. But we do give the neighbor children cookies or candy.
I went Trick-or-Treating a few times, when I was a child, back when it seemed more harmless than it does now… I was Witch Hazel once, in a black outfit my sister-in-law made for me, with the name appliquéd on the skirt in big glow-in-the-dark letters.
Another time, I was a ghost in a sheet--and the eyeholes wouldn't stay in the proper place. But the worst thing of all was that nobody had thought I needed a nose hole--and I nearly suffocated! Aarrgghh! Me, who likes the wide-open spaces! I did not stay in that sheet long before I got a good grip on one of the eyeholes and tore a big enough hole to stick my entire head through.
There. Much better.
After a sunny, blue-sky day Tuesday, there was another tornado watch that night. Strange weather.
In a big box of toys downstairs, I found a little Polly Pockets snap-open case. I brought it to Victoria, who has taken a real shine to Polly Pockets. When the case is open, it looks like a tiny schoolroom. The desks pull out--and the bottoms of them are little stamps with cute pictures on them. There is a stamp pad in the middle of the case. I got her a little notebook to make pictures in, and she had all sorts of fun with it.
Teddy painted his S-10 pickup that evening. It's dark blue, and he's terribly pleased--it turned out perfectly; he didn't get a single 'run' in the paint. It's one of the few things he's ever painted all by himself. He's good at that sort of thing.
When he arrived home, he not only had a few dabs of dark blue around the paws, he also had a navy sheen around his eyes. It made his big gray-blue eyes look bigger and bluer than ever. I told him not to worry about it; it simply looked like he had pretty eyeshadow on, that was all. He made faces and headed for the shower in one quick hurry. After that remark of mine, he probably scrubbed hard enough to endanger his eyeballs.
Larry called Wednesday afternoon, telling me about a detour he’d had to take in Chicago. The main Interstate was being worked on because somebody had gone blundering through the guardrail of an overpass and messed everything up. So there was Larry, wending his way through the streets of Chicago, when he came to a bridge that was 13’6”.
“Hmmm,” he thought, “That looks close.”
He slowed down quite a bit, but there were cars behind him, and he hates to impede traffic by doing such a thing as actually stopping, getting out, and looking, and he’s an incurable optimist about such situations, so he drove on through. He didn’t in fact feel anything, but there was a strange noise… Hoping it was merely the sound of his tires on the road echoing inside the underpass, he continued on his way.
But, looking in his mirror, he saw a few pieces of plastic flying down from the top trailer, and he knew the front cargo trailer had hit the bridge. He wondered how badly it had been damaged…and then, three blocks further on, he came to a railroad bridge whose clearance was even lower--only 13’. He crept forward slowly, hoping that first trailer had shrunk--and just about the time he’d decided perhaps it hadn’t, a black truck driver coming from the other direction confirmed it:
“You’ll never make it!” he shouted, hanging his head far out his window to make certain Larry heard him.
There was nothing else for it; Larry began backing.
Homo sapiens are troublesome creatures. All those dolts in cars behind him refused to move until it looked as though that backing trailer in front of them was about to skin a few molecules off their front bumpers…and then they moved a teeny little bit. Mostly, though, they sat plunk in the way, honking helpfully. This, although there was plenty of room for them to go around, for it was a four-lane road! Good grief.
Larry had to back a distance of two blocks. He then pulled onto a residential street where he could stop and survey the damages, and fix things to go back under the previous bridge without further mishap. If the lane going the other direction should have been blacktopped or some such thing since the clearance sign had been put up, there was a possible that he would have an inch or so less clearance than he had had on the other side of the road.
He climbed out and assessed the trailer’s wounds. He discovered that a roof vent had been knocked off, and a piece of trim torn loose. OOOOOoooo… Thank goodness that bridge didn't hit the trailer itself! Larry would be able to repair the vent... and the piece of trim… But what if the whole trailer had’ve been bashed in?! And, horror of horrors, what if that trailer had’ve been ripped from the slant trailer and tossed onto some unwary motorist beneath?! Ooooooo… shudder.
He took the front wheels off that particular trailer, which allowed it to sit further down on the slant trailer, let air out of the rear tires, and turned a block of wood under the hitch, so that it was not sitting up so high. Then he went back under the first bridge, and began hunting for another way to get back to the Interstate. Every road, it seemed, went under those same train tracks, and the bridges were no taller in one place than in another. He wound up in the slums of Chicago, where there was not one single other white person to be seen. It can be dangerous there, it sho’ ’nuff can.
As he was going along over a drawbridge, he spotted a familiar bridge, so he headed in a direction that he hoped would take him there. After a long altercation with traffic and intersections and strange roads, he suddenly recognized the hinterland: he was right back where he’d started from. He’d wandered in a circle, rather like a lost hunter in a snowstorm! He wound up losing two hours there in Chicago.
As I write, Victoria is playing with her Li'l Tykes house. A few minutes ago, she asked me to plug in the pencil sharpener for her... and soon she was sharpening pencils like everything. “The children are getting ready for school,” she explained. School is evidently over at the present, for she has now notified me that all the Li'l Tykes people are going to a sale at Wal-Mart.
The day was sunny and bright Wednesday afternoon, so I told Victoria we would go for a walk. But I had one more thing to do…and then just one more thing…and then one more…and so I wound up putting it off until about 5:15 p.m., when the sun was at the horizon--or at least, I think it was; but I couldn’t be sure, because it was covered by dark gray clouds. Over in the west, the bottoms of the clouds were fiery red, but they didn’t stay that way long. It was chilly enough that we wore sweaters and earmuffs.
I told the kids they could go out to play for a couple of minutes while I finished something I was doing, telling them I would be there shortly to take Victoria for the promised walk.
She was back inside in about one minute flat, hugging her arms and shivering, saying, “Brrrr! I’m freezing!” She turned around and gazed back out the front door. “Caleb is freezing, too,” she informed me, “but he didn’t say so.”
I helped her into the stroller, wrapped her dark red fleece teddy bear blanket all around her, tucked it under her ever-present red boots, and then we were off. We saw Hannah driving home, so we walked that way, managing to catch her before she went in the house. She’d been at the Salvation Army, and gave us some pretty black shoes for Lydia.
Hannah has been feeling decidedly ‘icky’ lately, but we are all very thankful that she has had very few troubles with asthma, so she hasn't needed to take her medicine, which is all the better for that baby-on-the-way.
As we walk along, the stroller brake over the left rear wheel has a habit of descending and clack-clacking against the rear tire. But I have the remedy down to a science: I take fifteen steps and then, without missing a beat, I give the brake a first-rate kick, walloping it right back up where it belongs. Fifteen steps later, I boot it again. I have become so accustomed to this routine that I do it without conscious thought, never breaking stride: step step step step blam! step step step…step step clobber! step step…step step step blooey! step step step …step step crack! And Victoria doubtless thinks that this is the customary way strollers conduct themselves.
Hester and Lydia’s teacher took her class outside to read to them one fine afternoon. There were the children, all lined up on the porch and sidewalk, and there were Kitty and Tad, strolling from one end of the line to the other, fluffy tails held high, both mother and son happily absorbing all the attention. Each child they passed reached out in turn and petted them, and they promenaded solemnly on.
My printer ran out of ink…and I hadn’t another cartridge, nor any idea under the sun just where inside that printer the cartridge was lurking, how to get it out, nor yet how to put in a new one. Dorcas offered to go to Wal-Mart for me, so I told her to get two black cartridges and one color cartridge.
She came back with one black, and no more. That one ink cartridge cost $29.99! $%^@¢£!%$#¥¿«#»@¡¡¡¡!!!! So she only got black.
I opened up my printer and stared blankly down into its viscera… Teddy came and peered in helpfully, too. He got a good grip on either end of the printer, and pullllled… until his mother howled, “Stop, stop!!! You’ll ruin it!”
He pointed vaguely at numerous screws scattered about the interior of the contraption, recommended that we find a big screwdriver, and then he made tracks out of this place. After all!--he must keep his date with Amy, mustn’t he???
“Help, Joseph!” I cried, poking around gingerly inside the apparatus.
He came and looked at it. I showed him the cartridges I had located, buried in the side of the printer, beyond my reach. He pressed ineffectively at the corner of one--and suddenly I had an idea. Reaching over his shoulder, I pushed the On/Off and the Resume switches at the same time--and, PrestoBingo!--the cartridge holder slid itself neatly right to the center of the contrivance, slicker’n a whistle, where we could easily remove the old and insert the new.
“Ooooooooooooooo!” I exclaimed. “I’m soooooooooo smart!!!”
Joseph turned around and looked at me. “You need a reward,” he remarked, and, so saying, he reached over, pulled open one of the drawers on my roll-top desk, removed a piece of my very own gum, and handed it to me.
Larry got home at a quarter after eleven Wednesday night. He would’ve been sooner, but, somewhere around Arlington, Nebraska, his throttle broke. He gave it a temporary fix and continued on home.
Victoria is always delighted when her father gets home. When he came in, she was eating a piece of pie. “Hi!” she said. “I digged a hole in my pie,” she informed her father, “and it’s a really big dig!” said she.
Thursday Larry put a new vent on top of the damaged trailer, and fixed the trim. Then, so far as I knew, he left that morning to take the trailers to Colorado. I was wrong.
However, I labored under this illusion until shortly after Teddy and Joseph came home from the shop that evening. I had baked a pizza from Papa Murphy's, and let Hester, Lydia, and Caleb get their "Book-It" pizzas--pizzas they get free from Pizza Hut after reading a certain number of books each month and turning in a paper, with a list of said books, to their teachers. When the Papa Murphy’s pizza was done, I cut it into as many pieces as we needed--or rather, as many as I thought we needed.
The boys came in, put their allotted pieces of pizza onto their plates, and then took enormous bites. Subsequently, mouths full, they said at nearly the same time, "Where'sh Daddy'sh peesha?"
And I said intelligently, "Huh?"
That's when I learnt that he was indeed still at the shop--or, more likely, he was on his way home right that minute. I hastily retrieved another small pizza from the freezer and stuck it into the oven. Lucky thing we have a Schwan man!
One of the things Larry had been doing that day was hunting for a place to move to. And he finally found one--a large building a few miles south of town, in which are several useful machines and tools that he may use for $50 more per month. He spent part of the day out there today.
He had also been shoe-spooning a Ford Bronco into the large rear cargo trailer, in order to haul it to Denver, where he would deliver it to somebody. He had to remove the wheels in order to finally get it to fit.
Larry left at 4:00 a.m. Friday to take the load of trailers to Colorado. It was his 40th birthday, and we were supposed to attend a birthday party for him at Keith and Esther’s at 8:00 p.m. I didn’t really think he’d make it…or, if he did, I expected him to sleep through the entire bash. Larry, on the other hand, was quite certain he would be back in plenty of time…
But a little after 5:00 p.m., he called--from Denver. In getting the Bronco out of the back cargo trailer, the wooden floor broke to smithereens. And, when those things happen, we are responsible to pay for the damages. The man to whom the Bronco belongs has generously offered to help… I declare! If it isn’t one thing it’s another!
We rang up Esther and canceled the party. She, hospitable as ever, told me we could still come, if we would like…but I allowed as how I would feel like a heel, having gala festivities and revelry without the Guest of Honor. She laughed and promised to have the party at a later date.
The Nebraska Cornhuskers played the Kansas Jayhawks today, and won handily--56 to 17. If they’d have only played such an inspired game last week.
Larry arrived home at 8:00 a.m. this morning. I’d expected him back around 1:00 a.m., so I stayed up till all hours of the morning sewing, wondering why he didn’t call, imagining him in a ditch somewhere. Turns out, he’d stopped and slept a couple of times.
The clothes, having been left to mount up in ever-growing heaps and piles (that only takes two days, in this neck of the woods), are working their way through the decrepit wash machine and dryer, and coming out fairly clean, in spite of the state of affairs. Three loads of clothes are on my bed, waiting to be folded.
And now, I'm off to give Victoria a bath, toss another load of clothes into the dryer... OOOoooo...Victoria’s got a barrette stuck in her hair. "Oh!" she said, grimacing as she tried gingerly to remove it, "This is stuck! Now it will be in my hair forever and ever!"
Forever was not really all that long; I had the barrette out in short order, and left the child's hair in her head, too.
P.S.: OH! By the way!--
Perhaps you have already heard this IMPORTANT information, but in case you haven't, please note the following:
Voter turnout is now expected to be much higher than previously thought. Consequently, there will be TWO voting days: Tuesday, Nov. 7th; and Wednesday, Nov. 8th. Those who want to vote for George Bush should vote on Tuesday, Nov. 7th. Those who wish to vote for Al Gore should vote on Wednesday, Nov. 8th. Please put the appropriate date on your calendar and tell all of your friends.
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