Here is a small bit of Useful Advice: when you are out of butter, do not substitute butter-flavored cooking spray on your sourdough muffin. It is not good, believe me. Took me forty-two years to learn that.
Actually, it took me 42 years to get stupid enough to try it.
Monday evening we delivered bags of gifts to some of our relatives, partly to get a few more things out from underfoot at our house, which is looking more chaotic by the moment. At Robert and Margaret’s house, the children got out to play with their cousins and their new collie pup. The puppy was as delighted with all the children as the children were with her, I think.
At Kenny and Annette’s house (we call them ‘The Other Jacksons’), Kenny and Larry got embroiled in discussions of all warp and woof--and the rest of us listened with enthusiasm.
Kenny reminded Larry of a time, shortly after they came to Columbus in 1974, when they had some company--including the visitors’ bratty young son who happened to have a pronounced stutter. Larry and Kenny, ages 13 and 12 respectively, having been exposed to such impediments only on TV (most likely Elmer Fudd), labored under the illusion that those sorts of things were done intentionally, solely for entertainment purposes.
Sooo…they imitated the hapless kid.
He burst into tears and fled upstairs to his mummy and pappy.
The conceited elder brother immediately rose up in great indignation, stalked up the stairs in the wake of his distressed sibling, and told on the Jackson Rogues.
Larry and Kenny looked at each other. ‘Uh, oh,’ they telegraphed silently.
Soon Lyle’s footsteps were heard on the steps. He looked at his wide-eyed sons, cleared his throat, and said, “You mustn’t make fun of somebody when they have something wrong with them that they can’t help.”
Larry and Kenny nodded gravely.“You’ll have to apologize,” he continued, and his offspring nodded again.
Then, knowing that they hadn’t understood about such afflictions before, and doubtless thinking that the little brat could sure enough dish it out, but didn’t do such a jolly good job of taking it, he grinned and returned to his company, Larry and Kenny reluctantly tagging along at his heels to administer the requisite apology.
That was the last time those people ever came calling, and they never once ever invited the Jacksons to their house.
And everybody lived happily ever after.
Kenny has been remodeling his house, and it has been a long-drawn out operation. Recently, he finished all the plumbing in the downstairs bathroom.
When he was ready to take the old pipes apart and fit the new pipes together, he told his family, “Do not flush the upstairs toilet under any circumstances.”
So there he was, struggling away with a pipe at about head level, trying to fit joints together and squiggle pipe elbows onto pipe straights, when suddenly he heard an ominous sound overhead:
Gurgle Gurgle Gurgle gurgle Gurgle gurgle
gurgle!!!
Kenny fled for his life.
Behind him erupted Steamboat Geyser, upside down.
Katharine had forgotten.
After a stint of floor-mopping, Kenny returned to the task at hand.
But, as Kenny said, “Once was not enough.”
He hadn’t quite gotten the last fitting pushed together when––
ka-FLOOOOSH!!!
––a cataract came gushing down the pipe once again, giving him a thorough drenching before he could get away. And this time, poor Kenny did enough yelping and hollering, roaring and bellowing, that Katharine, although absent-minded and habitual as three-year-olds the world over, did not forget again.
“Why didn’t you just turn the water off?” asked Larry, who is blessed with more logic than any one person has the right to claim.
“Because Annette was washing clothes,” replied Kenny reasonably.
“No, I mean just turn the water off to the upstairs toilet,” explained Larry, “with the knob behind the tank.”
Kenny looked blank for a moment. Then, with a shove against Larry’s shoulder, “Now you tell me!”
He’d just finished installing a vented fan in that bathroom, and it had taken him two hours to saw his way through the bricks. Now he must tape the Sheetrock joints, texture, and paint. Little by little, their house is getting done.
Late that night, Larry and I went to Hy-Vee. As we came out, a lady in a gold van pulled up. The man walking out behind us headed her way…she opened her door and said something to him--and with that, he lunged at her, grabbed her, and began beating her up. He banged her head on the steering wheel, socked her in the stomach, and elbowed her so hard in the ribs that her head flew violently back. As he climbed into the van, she managed to scramble away, open the passenger’s door, and jump out. In a flash, the man was across the van, grabbing her sweater, hood, and long hair, and jerking her back so hard that he banged her head against the van. He pulled her back in, pounding her all the while, wrapped one arm around her neck, and commenced to strangling her.
“That man is beating up that lady!” I cried to Larry, who was putting groceries into the Suburban. I dashed off for the store, calling back, “Make him stop!”
About that time, the lady managed to hit her panic button, which made the van’s lights start blinking and the horn start honking.
Larry headed toward them, while I ran inside and told the first person I came to, who rushed for a manager, who called for help over the intercom. Within seconds, four or five young men were running outside.
In the meanwhile, the man had noticed Larry’s advance toward them. He let go of the woman, and she jumped out. But then he got out, too, they had a little talk, and she must have forgiven him, because she took his hand, and then they got back into the van. One of the store managers ran to the van and talked with the woman. She evidently assured him that all was well, and soon drove off. Goodness; I hope that beast doesn’t kill her someday.
“If you hadn’t have been here,” I informed Larry, “and if there had been no grocery store to run to for help, I would have beaned that barbarian right in the head with that big can of pineapple.” I pointed at it. “I will never, ever be able to stand idly by while some savage brutalizes somebody.”
“Yes, I know,” he agreed, “that’s why I never pick a fight with you when there are canned goods around.”
I poked him.
“Help, assault!!!” he howled.
“Hushshshshshsh!” I hissed, looking around to see if anybody had heard him.
Larry laughed at me.
Hester finished putting together all the pretty pieces of jewelry she was making, and asked me to wrap them for her. “The edges never come out right,” she explained.
So I wrapped them, making an envelope of colorful paper for each one, wishing I had small boxes instead. As soon as I was done, I turned around to put them on my dresser--and there were all the small boxes I’d needed, in the form of little Altoid mint tins. Isn’t that just the way??
I still need a few more presents, especially for Lawrence and Norma, for whom I have absolutely nothing. What shall I get them What shall I get them What shall I get them What shall I get them What shall I get them What shall I get them? ! ? ! ? ! ? ! ???
Tuesday morning, I made four batches of chocolate chip/white chunk/Reese’s chips/Heath Brickle cookies, and that afternoon I made one and a half batches of wedding mints. Yes, wedding mints. Why? Well, uh, because they’re yummy, that’s why.
And all I got packed that day was one china doll.
In the box into which I put the doll, I discovered three packets of gourmet coffee. Thinking that the box had come from Hannah’s house, and knowing that many of the boxes had been from things they received for their wedding, I gave them back to her when she and Aaron came visiting that afternoon.
“Hmmm,” she said, looking them over, “I wonder how many other things we missed, that are still in boxes somewhere?”
Teddy and Amy stopped by later that evening. “Did you find the coffee packets I gave you?” he asked.
“Huh?” I said intelligently.
Yep, they were from Teddy, not Hannah, and he’d given them to me because they don’t have a coffee maker.
“You can have them back,” offered Hannah, who had dropped in to get something she’d earlier left behind. (We misnamed her; we should have named her ‘Gretel’.)
“No, no; never mind!” I laughed, “Just keep them for Bobby; he likes coffee.”
Could somebody please explain to me how I manage to send a Christmas card to somebody--using an old address where they lived five or ten years ago, even though their new address is in all three of my newest address books, the ones I use all the time???
Esther’s parents are planning to buy our house after we move out, and are making all sorts of plans already, such as taking out a bunch of the basement walls and making it one big room again (the better for all the grandchildren to play in), and remodeling the upstairs, which was in bad need of a remodeling from the moment some dunce first drew up the blueprint. Bobby’s brother Jonathan wants to buy Esther’s parents’ home; he is going to marry Angie, one of Larry’s first cousins once removed. The house belonged to her parents before they moved to the country, and Angie is quite fond of it. Angie is the eldest sister of Hester’s best friend, Emily. Here’s something funny: the oldest three Wright brothers have all chosen for themselves girls who had either a grandmother or a grandfather who was a Jenkinson; the girls are all cousins.
Did you get all that straight? Or do you feel like Piglet did, when Owl was telling him about an accident that nearly happened to a friend of one of his relations?
Wednesday, Victoria went off to school in a Grand Excitement, because that was the day they were going to exchange gifts in her little classroom. She’d drawn one of her cousin's names, and could hardly wait to give her the gift we’d wrapped for her. A few of the children brought gifts for everyone. Guess it was a good thing they all didn’t do that, or the poor little kiddos wouldn’t have been able to carry out all their loot. We put Victoria’s gifts for the other children under the tree at church.
“But now I won’t get to see the kids open them,” lamented Victoria.
She brought home two little stuffed Husky pups--one of which was from my sister, Lura Kay, who is the school principal. She gets gifts for every last one of the students and teachers, imagine that. Lydia and Caleb’s teacher gave each of the children a hymnal just like one of the hymnals we sing from at church. They were absolutely thrilled; Lydia’s been playing from her hymnal ever since.
That was the last day of school before Christmas vacation; they will not return until January 2nd.
By noon Thursday, I’d packed one more china doll. At that rate, we should be ready to move by the year 2040. Robert told us that, when we are ready, he will call the high school boys out of school to help us move.
“I’ve let them out of school to help several people move--and they never even complain!” he laughed.
“But what about Penny?” I asked, speaking of our blind teacher who lives just across the street and down a couple of houses from us.
He laughed again. “Well, she’s never too awfully gung ho,” he said. “She’s pretty serious about teaching!” He shrugged up one shoulder, just the way I remember him doing when he was a little boy. “Guess that’s why she’s such a good teacher.”
She was not at all impressed when the children all went outside once in the middle of one of her classes to observe a rare total solar eclipse.
“But Penny!!!” I exclaimed, “They can do English any time!”
“Notheycan’t,” she retorted quick as a wink. haha
Dorcas called that afternoon; she was sewing herself a dark green satin dress for the Christmas program, and had just broken her last needle. And, of course, she can’t go off to Wal-Mart and leave Mama alone. So Hester and I went to Wal-Mart to get her more needles. She’s always running errands for everyone else; guess it’s about time somebody returned the favor!
While we were there, I also got filters for the fish tank, along with another kind of food--TetraColor; it’s supposed to make the dear little fishies more colorful--and some stuff that is advertised to make cleaning the tank a once-every-six-months operation. Ha! I doubt it. But perhaps it will extend it from four or five days to eight or nine.
Larry came home at 5:00 Thursday; work is beginning to slow down with the colder weather. He spent the evening getting the motor in his pickup disconnected and ready to remove.
I decided I’d better wash some clothes, even though I really wanted to do nothing but pack things into boxes. People have a lot of nerve, getting their duds all soiled and doity when I’m much too busy to do washing.
“Why don’t you wear the same dress all week?” I asked Victoria. “After all, ‘A little doit never hoit anyboidy,’ said Moity to Goity as they ate doit.”
“Say it again!” she giggled, just like she has done since she was one year old--and just like her siblings before her used to do.
So I said it again, faster that time.
Ah, well…even the Israelites, when they were moving from Egypt to Canaanland, had to take time out to wash their clothes--in spite of the fact that none of their clothes ever grew old, and nobody ever grew out of them, either.
In the very first load I did that day, my dark blue chenille sweater strewed dark blue chenille fuzz all over everything in the washer and dryer, even though I washed it with dark colors. That is, everything was dark except the white sleeves and collar on Victoria’s navy flowered dress. You ought to see those sleeves and collar now.
That fuzz multiplied and increased and reproduced through every wash cycle and every drying cycle, until every last thing I washed was coated in soft, clingy, navy chenille fuzz. When I put the clothes away, the fluff spread and dispersed until it covered every shirt and dress in every closet, every clothing item and every towel and cloth in every drawer. When we get dressed, navy fur immediately whisks up to our faces, onto our hands and arms, and down to our legs and feet--and stays there, via static cling.
By the end of the day Thursday, I’d used up all the boxes I had, and, when I looked around, it seemed like I’d hardly cracked the surface with all the packing.
Friday, it was cold and windy out, with 40-mph gusts. I warmed myself up with a sourdough muffin dripping with peanut butter and honey (and real butter, thank you very much)--and the last of the mints, when nobody was looking. (Otherwise, I would have had to share them.)
That afternoon, I took Hester to Wal-Mart to have her eyes checked for contacts. Or ‘contact’, as it were. Her glasses are really pretty, but since one eye is nearly 20/20, requiring practically no correction at all, and the other one needs quite a bit of correction, if you look closely when she has her glasses on, you can tell that one eye appears larger than the other. This, she does not like.
She is going to get the disposable kind; they are safer for the eye. And since she only needs them for one eye, they’ll be half the price. She’s glad, for she’s using her own money to pay for the exam and the contacts, with money she earned staying with Mama while Dorcas went shopping.
Before leaving, I got a stack of taken-apart boxes at the layaway counter--and nearly blew away with them when I walked outside. Sort of like putting a mainsail on a dinghy.
Okay, now what do I do with them? How do I put them back together again??!!! Aaarrrggghhh. In fact, BAH!!! HUMBUG!!!
Well…guess I’ll overlap the flaps and tape them with the enormous excess of masking tape we got when I was painting downstairs.
But before I could do any packing, I absolutely had to clean out the fish tank. To the fresh water, I added the new clean-tank stuff I got from Wal-Mart, and then gave the fish their new food.
Caleb peered into the aquarium. “Are they brighter colored?!” he asked eagerly when they’d scarcely had a chance to even taste the flakes, let alone swallow any.
I can’t tell any difference in color yet, but the food seemed to make them more hyper, if you ask me. Or perhaps it was just the effects of their tank being so sparkling clean that they were able to see me better, which scared them out of their gill filaments. In any case, they were sho’ ’nuff whizzing around like rabid submarines. The scavenger shot right out of the water, bonked his noggin on the aquarium hood, and went to sulk in the coral reef.
Would you belief, not a single fish has died for nigh unto six weeks?! Maybe they were going through their Survival of the Fittest routine, and got it perfected now. Aaaaaaa! I just remembered that Charles Darwin came up with that Survival of the Fittest business. Are goldfish Darwinists?!
Natural Selection, in biology, the process by which environmental effects lead to varying degrees of reproductive success among individuals of a population of organisms with different hereditary characters, or traits. The characters that inhibit reproductive success decrease in frequency from generation to generation. The resulting increase in the proportion of reproductively successful individuals usually enhances the adaptation of the population to its environment. Natural selection thus tends to promote adaptation by maintaining favorable adaptations in a constant environment (stabilizing selection) or improving adaptation in a direction appropriate to environmental changes (directional selection). Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace first proposed this concept in 1858.[1]
Eh? Huh? Howzat? Come again? Do you know what that said?
After a supper of chicken pot pie Friday evening, the children went off to Christmas Program practice. Lydia was sick, but she got out of bed, fixed her hair, and went anyway. While the children were at church, Larry and I went to Madison to take the owner of Madison Body Shop a check for the pickup motor and the Mazda. Everybody loves you when you are doling out checks.
Home again, we sat down to read the story of Zacharias. And Lydia’s face got redder…and redder…and redder… I took her temperature and discovered it was 103.8°! I rushed her off for some Tylenol and a bath in lukewarm-to-cool water. She got back out too soon, and her temperature only went down a tenth of a degree. But by then she was very tired, and shivering like anything, so I let her go to bed. In the morning her temperature was 100.5°, and she felt a little better.
Our house mover called; he’d made it to the town he was aiming for at dusk Friday--by 11:00 a.m. He would have gone farther, but the woman who must sign the road permits was in Lincoln and wouldn’t be back all day. So he was done stymied. Rats! He won’t move it again till Monday. The power companies won’t be working Tuesday, so he’ll have to complete the job Thursday or Friday, maybe both.
Saturday was more of the same: me, packing things and washing clothes; Larry working on his pickup. I got all the clothes washed--and then everyone threw their dirty clothes down the clothes chute, and Larry brought home a coat and a pair of coveralls that had diesel fuel and grease all over them. He got the motor out of both his pickup and also out of the van, which was a mighty difficult job, since the cherry picker (that’s what we here in the Land of Corn call an engine hoist) wouldn’t lift the motor the last inch necessary for it to clear the body of the van. But with an adjustment to the fuseau and a wangle to the gigtree, and then with a finagle to the graffage and a ruggle to the thripple, he got ’er out.
Victoria didn’t feel well Saturday, and I finally took her temperature late in the afternoon: it was 99.3°. Then, just for the fun of it, I took my own temperature. I thought I was more achy than usual because of all the packing and lifting…but, lo and behold, my temperature was 99.5°--and my normal temp is usually 97.6°, about one degree low. Aaauuuggghhh! I’m sick, I’m sick! Somebody get me Jeremiah Peabody’s Green and Purple Pills!
Oh, yes, before I forget: Happy Boxing Day!
(That’s what it says on the calendar; I just noticed.)
{How did they know we were boxing everything in our pathways?} {‘Boxing’, as in, ‘Putting Everything Into a Box’.}
May you have a wonderful Christmas with your loved ones.
To the Canadian friend who sent me a gift:
P.S.: Thank you ever so much for the can of Tim Horton coffee; I really like it, and it was a welcome reprieve from the Folgers that I was getting so tired of.
I just read an article in our paper that told how coffee isn’t so good anymore because there aren’t good quality checks on the imported beans, and when we buy ground coffee, we are getting not only rotten beans ground into it, but also twigs and leaves! Ugh, yuck, bleah! Izzat true?
The article said that the best way to insure our coffee is good is to buy it in whole bean form and grind it at home, making sure to remove any bad beans.
But…we don’t have a grinder. There is one at the grocery stores, however; so Larry said that what we will do is this: we will get a bag of whole beans off the shelf, open it up, and dump the beans out all over the aisle floor, then sit down amongst the beans and sort them, bean by bean.
I have a better idea: GET A CAN OF TIM HORTON COFFEE FROM YOUR VERY GOOD FRIEND FROM CANADA.
Oh, and thank you for the ginger snaps (that is what they were, isn’t it?). They were quite tasty. I shared them with the children, and a couple of them dipped theirs in a mug of milk. Mmmmm…
Thank you, thank you!
To Aunt Ardis:
P.S.: So sorry to hear that Uncle Frank had to be put in the Veterans’ Home. It’s sad when these things happen, but at least there are places where our loved ones can be cared for when we can no longer do it ourselves.
I do hope you are okay, Aunt Ardis? It’s at such times that we can be thankful for our families, isn’t it?
And one thing is for sure: our troubles and trials on this old earth certainly make us long for Heaven, don’t they? We will be sure to remember you and Uncle Frank in our prayers.
We love you.
P.S.: Don’t worry, don’t worry at all if I write thrice to your twice (or whatever it happens to be); doesn’t matter at all! Just tell yourself, Well, she’s more of a blabberfingers [variation of ‘blabbermouth’] than I am. :-D
[1]“Survival of the Fattest,” Microstupid ® Encarta® Encyclodurance 99. © 1993-1998 Microsmart Collection. All monkeys refunded.
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