I woke up to Todd nudging me and then resting his hand on my stomach. I hate that.
Me: “Is it my turn to get up?”
Todd: “Yes.”
Me: “Ten more minutes.”
Todd: “I’m going to stick my finger in your belly button. . .”
Me: “I’m going to punch you in the fucking face. And then the nuts.”
Todd: “I love you, too.”
Posts Tagged ‘Me’
True Love
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009Chicago
Saturday, May 2nd, 2009So lame with the blog updates. . . just now updating on Chicago anniversary trip.
First of all, I hate flying.
We had a hard time ever leaving. Our first plane had mechanical difficulties, so they gave us another one, but we had to have our seats reassigned. Then we got on and sat at the gate for 25 minutes while they took care of a maintenance issue. Then we taxied out on the runway. Then we turned around and went back to the gate because the pilot “didn’t feel comfortable with the mechanical problems we were having.” Very reassuring. By this time, we were already an hour behind, and I was starting to worry about my Xanax lasting through takeoff, much less the landing at Midway. We got off the plane and went to different gate to reboard our third plane. Of course, we had to go through the whole boarding thing again. I popped another Xanax for good measure.
Takeoff and flight were uneventful, but when we got to Midway, we came in for landing, then before we touched down, the pilot pulled back up and said that he apologized, but he “wasn’t comfortable with conditions on the ground.” Awesome. Just let me clean up this puke on the head of the lady in front of me, and then perform surgery on the broken bones in Todd’s hand, and I’ll be ready to go again.
Second landing attempt was fine, but at that point, i was pretty exhausted from all that concentrating that I did to hold the plane up in the air.
At Midway, we got on the train to head out to Tom’s neighborhood. Tom is Todd’s friend from Auburn. I only get to hang out for snippets with Tom, but I love him. He is funny and a little strange. The first time I met him was around the time Todd and I got married, and then he has visited a few times since. We also stayed with him when he lived in San Francisco. So, Tom met us at the station and then we walked back to the apartment
(I love visiting a great walking city and Chicago fits the bill), stopping on the way to grab beer at the liquor store. That was where I first ran into my new favorite beer:
When I saw it, i got all excited, then looked at the price and said, um, no. So, i took a picture of it. But then I ended up having one later. It was great. More on that later.
It was raining that day, and so we decided to drink and grill out, so we wouldn’t have to walk in the rain. Tom lives with his girlfriend Tara, and their apartment is awesome. Kind of a 20s/30s feel, with tons of space, a porch, sunroom, living room with fireplace, bedroom, dining/sitting area, office/closet and a big kitchen and pantry. For some reason it made me yearn for city apartment living. I conveniently blocked out the fact that I have children and it would be a horrible place to live with them. In my daydream, I guess I was 25 and had a fabulous, exciting high-paying job.
We ended up running out of beer (how did that happen?) and so Todd and i offered to go back out to the liquor store. We borrowed raincoats and umbrellas and headed back to the liquor store. Did I mention that the liquor store had a dog? His name is Cosmo.
I know. Sometimes my travel posts are just about my Pet Tourette’s in a different city. . . .
We walked back in the rain. Vacation is great; even the walking in the rain toting wet bags of beer is fun. Here is Todd hiding out under the shelter of an old fire station.
So, Tom and Tara’s friends came over to meet us and grill out. We had yummy grilled meats and homemade salsas and guacamole – Tom is quite a good cook. By the time the friends all got there I was pretty toasty, but these folks, Lucas and Lizzie, still let me hold their baby, Liam.
I talked to them for a long time and really enjoyed it. One of my favorite things about travel is meeting new people. I know a lot of folks who say that their lives are too busy for keeping up with old friends, much less meeting new people, but I guess I kind of crave meeting new people. It always feels like I have been recharged the day after experiencing new people. It just feels healthy to me. I liken it to when the kids have new experiences and it’s like they are sponges that just soak them up. It is like you can see their little synapses firing after a new experience.
The boys did the grilling. I think Todd is cute when he is happy and hanging out with his Auburn boys:
Here are our wonderful hosts, at the dinner table:
Please note pots on shelf in background. Tom has done all this really great pottery, and I forgot to take pictures of it, which is a bummer. I believe he said something about trying to throw 500 pots? I don’t remember exactly, because I was drinking, but there were tons of them. Attempts to sneak one into my luggage failed
Here are Todd and Tom with some more of the guests, nice guys all:
And one more:
Hmm. Perhaps the reason i felt so “recharged” was all the men hanging around! It was definitely not the uncooperative cold and rainy weather.
There was more rain the next morning when we got up. Even though the weather channel was telling us there was not more rain. We had no idea how to dress, so, we ended up with umbrellas and rainjackets and hats and short sleeves underneath. Layers turned out to be the way to go, as it rained off and on all day.
Tom and Tara had other plans that morning, so Todd and I walked around the corner and a few blocks to Big Jones. Tom had told us that they had “good” grits and fried green tomatoes, but Tom is from Chicago, so i was doubtful. But he said fried green tomatoes and then I had to have them, even if they sucked. They didn’t! Totally the right consistency and batter. Just needed a little salt. Todd’s shrimp and grits were pretty good, too. It felt weird to eat “Southen Coastal Cuisine” in Chicago.
We walked back out into the weather to take the train to the Art Institute. I took pictures of cool signs (one of my favorite things to do, especially vintage ones. Chicago had some great ones.) I loved the wedding cake sign on this bakery:
And the handbells on these imprints in the pavement. Why handbells?
And you can never have too many shots of church signs:
The Art Institute of Chicago was by far my favorite part of the trip. I could go back and spend a week there. I will, too, because the Modern stuff was mostly off exhibit due to the new wing construction they are doing. And the Cubs weren’t in town, so i have to go back for a game.
We saw so much amazing stuff that I couldn’t even begin to name them all. It is truly a museum where you turn every corner and find another masterpiece that you doubted that you would ever see in person. One of my highlights was seeing the three Ivan Albrights on display. I could have looked at them all day. (My photos don’t do them justice.)
We saw this:
And this:
And this:
And then Todd and I split up; I wanted to see the Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. He wanted to see Renaissance stuff. Mine was way better.
I saw this:
And this:
And this:
See that lady with the umbrella? She is a couple feet taller than Todd. This thing is huge in person. You could spend an hour looking at it from afar and another hour staring at each little detail up close. See? Here is the monkey:
Check this out:
And this!
Oooh!
Ah!
I really was pretty blown away. My pictures don’t do justice to the individual works, and they certainly don’t reflect the sheer numbers of awesome things we saw. They have whole rooms of Gaugin and Monet. One of the funniest exhibits was a paperweight collection. Who knew paperweights could be so beautiful and varied?
It was just the best way to spend an afternoon. I didn’t want to leave.
Wooh. I think this is going to be a two-parter. . .
Busy Bee
Monday, April 20th, 2009Gardening. Coupon-clipping. Laundering. Carpooling. School volunteering. Cooking. Exercising. Trying not to be a fat ass.
These things, they are time-consuming. Dogwood Girl suffers for it.
The Living and the Dead, Heaven and the Moon
Friday, March 20th, 2009Recently, on Friday nights, we go out and get mexican or pizza with the kids and then come home and have movie night. This is kind of Todd’s thing, and he and the kids pick out the movie and he cuddles up with them. Meanwhile, I pour myself a drink, and I sit and write or read or fuck around on Facebook. This also means that when the pick isn’t that great, i can blame Todd for its failure. Like, oh, say, tonight.
We had a discussion at the dinner table the other night about what movie we would watch on Friday. Tiller voted Bolt. Rollie voted Wall-E.
“Hmmm,” I said. “I think i would like to watch Wall-E too. Todd, what would you like to watch?”
Todd knew by the tone of my voice that he wanted to watch Bolt, so as to create a tie, and a teaching experience. We would teach them how to share through the joys of a family movie night tie-breaker.
“I would like to watch Bolt,” Todd said. Cause he knows what’s good for him.
Rollie and Tiller both sputtered. It is inconceivable to a 3 or 5 year old that things might not swing their way.
“Seems we have a problem,” I said. “We do not have a majority here. What are we going to do?”
We all looked at each other around the table. Rollie was obviously mulling something over.
“I know,” he said.
“What?” said Tiller.
“Well, Daddy and Tiller can watch Bolt, and me and Mama can watch Wall-E. We get the upstairs tv!”
Todd and I looked at each other, knowing we had been outsmarted by a five-year-old. Not exactly what we had in mind.
“I’ve got an idea,” said Todd. “I’ll go by the library tomorrow and get us a new movie.”
He did.
So, tonight, he got ready to go out for his Friday night outing, I poured a Bloody Mary, and the kids and i piled up on the couch, lights turned off, movie cued up, the setting sun illuminating our west-facing room. The dog and the cat were our bookends on the couch.
We had been talking all day about Daddy’s pick: The Corpse Bride.
It is PG. We debated if we thought it was okay for them to watch. They saw The Nightmare Before Christmas and loved it. Rollie saw Coraline in the theater, in 3D no less, and loved it. We figured this would be a piece of cake. Tiller fell asleep about halfway through and Todd took her up to bed. Then he left and Rollie and I finished the movie, his head nestled on my chest to my left, Quint curled up in a donut to my right, and Scully sitting in a curl next to Rollie. One big happy family.
For those of you who haven’t seen The Corpse Bride, it is great. A brief synopsis: Gawky, geeky Johnny Depp-looking guy of modest means, Victor, is set up to marry the well-to-do in name, not so well-off monetarily bride, Victoria. They fall in love. The wedding turns into a disaster and ends up not happening. Victor accidentally marries a corpse instead. Corpse loves Victor. He grows to care for her, but still loves Victoria. Stuff happens. Skeletons do a catchy musical number. To make marriage the real deal, Victor must die. Meanwhile, Victoria must wed bad guy who actually made the corpse bride a corpse in the first place. In the end, Victor and his true love Victoria end up together and the corpse bride is set free and the bad guy gets his comeuppance. So, suffice to say that there are three weddings, and a whole lotta dead folks.
During the third wedding, Rollie says to me: “I don’t like weddings.”
Me: “Why not?”
Rollie: “They’re boring.”
I laugh.
Me: “Yeah, actually, sometimes they are boring. You know what, though? If your daddy and I never got married, you wouldn’t even be here now, right? So, that’s a good thing.”
Rollie thinks this over, then says, “I went to a wedding. It was boring.”
I think to myself, no way you remember the last wedding you went to, which was Aunt Lisa’s. You were three.
I say, “When did you go to a wedding?”
Somehow, I knew what he was going to say before he said it.
“Grandma and Papaw Johnson had a wedding.”
“What?” I say.
“They had that girl that used to sleep in the chair all the time.”
My mind was racing to figure this out, hoping he wasn’t talking about what I thought he was talking about.
He was looking at me, waiting to see if I knew what he was talking about.
When Todd’s grandmother was alive, and living with my in-laws, she spent a lot of time sleeping in a chair in her room.
“Honey, do you mean Meemaw?”
Rollie said, “Yes, we went to the wedding and she was dead.”
FUCK.
I took a deep breath.
“Sweetie, that wasn’t a wedding. That was Meemaw’s funeral. A wedding is when two people who love each other promise to be together forever. Like Mama and Daddy. A funeral is when people get together to celebrate the life of a person who has gone to heaven. Like Meemaw.”
Rollie: “Oh.” He seemed to accept this all and go back to watching the movie. I, on the other hand, will need therapy after showing my son a movie that totally blurred the lines between the living and the dead in such a believable way.
We sat on the couch quietly watching the movie, him getting the dazed look kids get when they are tired, me thinking quietly to myself that the movie seems so benign and sweet, but I can see where all the living and the dead people hanging out together could be confusing to someone so little. At the end, Victor and Victoria stand together on the church steps, watching as the Corpse Bride disintegrates into a beautiful cloud of. . . well, I won’t give the full imagery, in case you haven’t seen the movie. (See the movie!) But the particles of her being float apart and up into the moon.
“Where is she going?” Rollie says to me.
“She’s going to heaven, Honey. She found love and acceptance, and that freed her soul to go to heaven.”
Rollie mulls over this and then says, “Is Meemaw in the moon?”
“Yes, honey, i think that if the moon is heaven, then she might be in the moon.”
“I like the moon.”
“Me, too, sweetie.”
Just Like Kids Again
Monday, March 16th, 2009When I was a little girl, I used to go visit my Grandma Smith in the summers. She lived in an apartment complex in Chattanooga, Tenn. Mom grew up in Chattanooga. Mom would pack me and my sister up in the red Caprice Classic station wagon and we would go spend a few days with Grandma. This was the most fun ever for my sister and I, as everyone knows that Chattanooga is the epicenter for kitschy tourist traps found on those pamphlets in motel lobbys, Howard Johnsons, and rest areas.
We would go to Rock City, ride the incline, and get candy from the candy shop at the top of the incline. See, we had the hookup, because Grandma’s best friend worked at the candy shop. Fudge and rock candy. Ahhhh. In the afternoons, we would swim at the apartment pool, while mom or Grandma and Aunt Dot watched us. Grandma and Aunt Dot did their laundry in the laundry room in a room right off the pool area while we swam. This is also, I assume, where they kept the liquor. Now, i don’t want to question my mother’s parenting, but she would let grandma watch us swim. I never ONCE saw Grandma swim in the pool. I assume she could swim, but have my doubts as to whether she could retrieve either me or my sister from the bottom of the pool if necessary, especially without putting down her drink or getting her cigarettes wet.
My favorite thing to do, though, (other than go to the castle, which was a toy store near Grandma’s, with a castle facade and an awesome board that counted down the days until Christmas, and where I would buy a Breyer horse every time we visited) was go to Lake Winnepesauka.
Lake Winnie is awesome, even though they have a really shitty website. It is an old school amusement park, and has been open since 1925 and is still run by the grandchildren of the original owners. It is pretty much a family tradition now, as my grandparents, my mom, and me and Lisa all grew up going to Lake Winnie. I have not taken the kids there yet, but can’t wait to do so.
It has a pretty famous old wooden roller coaster, the Cannonball. It has my faves the Himilaya and the Tilt-A-Whirl. It has Leelee’s fave, The Scrambler. A boat chute. An awesome merry-go-round (that was originally at Lakewood fairgrounds in Atlanta). A great haunted house fun house, skeeball, all set around a lake (that I believe used to be a swimming pool before my time) filled with the biggest damn carp ever. Paddleboats. It is very old-school, and family-oriented. I heart Lake Winnie. I cannot wait to take the next generation there. I think Dash needs a couple years and he will be ready to party with us, too.
So, all of this is to say that we took the kids to one of those temporary carnivals at a nearby mall. OH. MY. GOD. Most fun i have had in years. It was pretty awesome to see so many of my neighbors there, and kids from Rollie and Tiller’s schools. Met my sister, BIL, and nephew, Dash there, too. Dash was unimpressed by the rides, but did like the lights and the music from the Himalaya.
Dash finds carnies fascinating.
Lisa loves the Ferris Wheel, so she rode with my kiddos, which is great, because those things make me really nervous. Sure, it made me nervous to see my babies riding, too, but common sense tells me that they will be fine, and I should stay on the ground and try to smile. I am pretty sure that if I was up there, my fear of heights would kick in and i would have a panic attack and they would have to pry me out with a crowbar, because my fingernails would be embedded in the ride. The children would be traumatized and need years of therapy. Plus, if you stay on the ground, you can eat cotton candy and hold the baby, and what is better than smelling a baby’s head while eating spun sugar? Not one damn thing.
Tiller fearlessly rides the Ferris Wheel with Aunt Lisa.
Rollie rode the big slide thing with one of the twins from down the street (Sydney, I believe).
Rollie and Syd Slide
Tiller was too scared to ride it, so she went with the teacups. A classic choice. She rode with the twins, Leah and Sydney, and loved it. When their cup went by the carny, he would reach down and give them a huge spin, eliciting screams and laughter, along with a slight chance of whiplash. I have seldom been happier in my life than standing by my friends Lauren and Scott at near sunset, watching our little girls smile the widest smiles and scream the screams that only happy little girls can emit, all the while holding my nephew, who was mesmerized by the lights and sounds.
Tiller rides the teacups with the big girls.
Money’s tight, so Todd and I picked a couple rides we wanted particularly to ride, and left the rest to the kids. When I say the kids, I really mean me, because I would have pitched the biggest fit ever if I couldn’t ride both the Tilt-a-Whirl and the Himalaya. Rollie was very brave and rode the Tilt-A-Whirl with me. I have to admit that I choked up a bit getting up there, navigating the metal platform to pick out a car with my son in hand. He was so brave! We climbed in, and all i could think of was what it was like to ride the Tilt-a-Whirl with my mom at Lake Winnie. I think I remember Lisa going one time, but now it makes her sick. (Or so she says.) There is something so cozy about leaning back with your arm around your kid and then when the ride starts, screaming your guts out and hoping he won’t puke on you. We actually rode with another kid, a little girl who had never ridden it before, about Rollie’s age, who was going to ride alone. (Her wussy mom was over there to the side with my wussy sister.) I sat in the middle and put an arm around each kid and we just laughed when we were going slow, catching our breath, and screamed when we went fast. I had forgotten that when you are little, it actually looks like you are going to run into the other cars whirling around, but Rollie and the little girl kept saying, “We almost ran into that one!” And that thing spins a lot harder than I remembered. I am sure it had nothing to do with the fact that i weigh sixty pounds more than last time I rode it. Nothing at all to do with that.
Lisa and I saved the best for last: The Himalaya. Lisa decided she would be scared and nervous to ride it. Just like the old days! I sat on the outside, so I wouldn’t crush her. We had a discussion about how the one at Lake Winnie must be bigger. Mom and Lisa and I used to all ride together. No way that we would all have fit into this new one. Again, had nothing to do with the fact that we were under ten last time we rode it. Nothing at all to do with that. Mark took pictures of us nervously waiting for it to start. Tiller and Rollie looked on with Daddy from the side, and danced to the music. Again, I felt a wave of emotion, hearing the loud music blaring and the siren going off when they hit top speed. You know how I love Kid Rock! They still play all the hits (Hey Ya!, Hot in Heerrre! Lisa, Todd? What else did they play?), but i am pretty sure they would make more money off us old fogies if they would play some Def Leppard, Van Halen, etc. I am pretty sure that the best job ever goes to the carny who gets to play DJ on the Himalaya. I mean, that, that is a job. Every time we went around, I waved at the kids, which is easy to do when your hands are in the air the whole time. Lisa had the bar in a death grip, all the while laughing maniacally. We screamed, and laughed our asses off, and discussed how we should just leave the kids and run away with the carnies.
Back on the Himalaya
Seriously, the most fun i have had in ages. Highly recommended for those stuck in a rut.
Can’t believe I haven’t updated in a week. Poor neglected blog.
It’s Alive!
Thursday, January 22nd, 2009Seems that the kinks are worked out and i have a working blog again. Please let me know if you see anything funky, though.
Boy, i have a lot of catching up to do. But probably not today. Today is for me. 37.