The Next Great Invention

A list of things I need to invent:

1. a barkless dog (as opposed to the one we have who lays on the bottom bunk in the bedroom adjacent to the office and incessantly barks at:  squirrels, lizards, the neighbors driving by, the neighbors walking by, kids on bikes, kids on skateboards, kids walking by, the postman).
2. a shitless cat (as opposed to the Bigass Cat who is so finicky about his cat box that he’d rather shit on the floor).
3. cat shit that the other people in my house could see (as opposed to the invisible-to- everyone-but-me cat shit we have here now).
4. kids who can eat a bowl of cereal without me hearing the banging of the spoon against the bowl way back here in the office (as opposed to whichever one is clanging away out there).

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My Daily Grind

Here ’round the Casa, we don’t divide up the household chores like Mike and Susan down the block.  Take for instance, say…grocery shopping.  I don’t do it.  I can’t tell you the last time I entered a grocery store for more than a loaf of bread or a 5 freaking dollars!?!?! gallon of milk. 

Nope, the Mr. likes this chore and keeps it largely to himself.  He works here in town so gets home by 4:30 every afternoon, polls the constituents as to what we fancy for dinner, then he goes to the beer store to H-E-B for the groceries, and comes home to fix it right up.

For urgent matters, I will shoot him an email at work, like I did yesterday:

• COFFEE
• bandaids
• antibiotic ointment
• milk

Is it hard to figure out which is the most important item on that list? 

No, of course it isn’t.

So imagine my surprise when the first words out of the Mr’s mouth this morning were

“FUCK.  I forgot the coffee.”

So, whereas I am used to say…3 hot cups in the a.m. and a large iced one in the afternoon, today I had nada.  And here we are at the Casa on a “NO SODA” kick, so there is not even a COKE OR DR PEPPER OR EVEN A PEPSI to be had.

My caffeine withdrawal headache chiselling away at the back side of my right eyeball was almost enough to dispatch one of my flying monkeys my Favorite Longhorn to Starbucks to drop 5 large on ‘a coffee,’ which is something I have never done…which, I realize puts me in the same category as someone who has never read a Harry Potter book…

BUT…

I perservered and resisted the temptation.

It’s just a damn good thing the Folger’s made it home from H-E-B today.

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A Confession of Sorts

I am apparently the only human being in the whole entire Universe who did not spend the weekend like this

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The Cast at the Casa

Chrisyub

The Mr. and Me

The Recent College Graduate a.k.a. RCG

My Favorite Longhorn

The College Freshman

and last but not least, The Junior and the Boy

oh yeah…

and Max, the Bigass Cat

So, there they are.  The faces to go with the names. 

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For Sale or Trade

1 recent college graduate, currently resides in my front room and watches a lot of the OC and One Tree Hill and old Dawson Creek reruns, while she awaits the perfect dream job offer to come floating through the window and land gently on her pillow whilst she slumbers.  Good with computers.

1 recent high school graduate who runs in and out worse than the 8-year-old.  Good at swinging in a hammock while singing loudly along with her Ipod.

1 8-year-old whose summer goal is to eat me out of house and home.  Good at video games.

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Texas Tornados, Part Deux

Spring Remembered.

Beep. Beep. Beep. 

WELL, not so much a beep as a tornado warning siren, which is what, out of the blue, went off here at Casa de Yub a while ago.  Now, I haven’t so much as watched the weather and hadn’t even checked why the weather bug was chirping at me, since it was merely just cloudy and muggy, not windy and stormy out, which meant that I did not go into tornado preparedness mode (read that I didn’t put on a touch of makeup for the reporters, I didn’t put on clean unders in case I wound up at the hospital, and I didn’t put on no shoes because my feet are sorty puffy today).  Got the mental picture?

So, the sirens are blaring and SD come in the office with a WTF look.  Oh, the Mr. and the Boy had went to get ’em some hurcuts.  So’s anyway, since it was just me and the girl here, we quick turned on the TeeVee.  Nothing on 11, nothing on 8, nothing on 5, AHA channel 4 says it is going to be a stormy night.   Well, i gotta tell ya i was sorty goin’ WTF too.  Anyway, so then we decided to go do what yer never sposed to do.  Go outside and peer up at the heavens, tryin’ to see that there tornader that was causin’ the sireens to go off.  

Alls we saw was a cloudy sky, but the feller who came out down the street from us, also ready for the teevee reporters wearin’ no shirt and some sweatpants (he did have on shoes though) comes outta his house and peers at the same clouds the stepgal an me were lookin’ at and says 

holy shit

well, by then the sireens had done gone off sos we wuz thinkin we wuz in the clear.  just about then my oldest calls me from down where she’s at and asks me WELL DID YA SEE IT?  See wut?  THE TORNADO.  DAD says it is just over the house (me an my first 3 babies’ daddy live right around the corner from one ‘nother pretty much).  well then me and the SD exchange WTF look fer real and go to tryin to find something about it on the Teevee again.  Then the sireens went to goin off again.  It was just about then i said we best grab us one of these here couch cushions and hunker down in the hall fer a bit and listen to the sireens wail.  me and the firstr born had a chat about how dad was on the roof of their house with the cell phone talkin to her, lookin up at the purty swirly clouds right up til the rain started pourin down.  not me baby.  me and the gal hit the hall with pillers.  anyway, the sireens turned off after a few minutes and i came back to this here machine to see that channel 5 had indeed emailed me a friendly tornado warning.  must have come when i was outside in my barefeet starin’ up at the sky.

So anyways, then the mister and the boy came back from their trip to the walmarts.  neither one’s hurr was cut.  seems the hurrcut gals an arybody else at the walmarts got to go to the center of the store til the storm passed.  the boy got so hawngry he had to eat a mint his daddy had in his pocket leftover from his whataburger lunch.  he ain’t one to eat candy that isn’t chewy or covered in a candy coating, so ya know he was hawngry.  The mister said while they was goin in to the store he sure nuff did see a teensy tiny baby tendril of a ternado but he thought nuttin’ of it and went on in.  

so, the feller on the TeeVee says it is going to be a rocky night.  to put it bluntly, there’s one big ass storm a comin’  from the west…so, after he dropped off the little feller, the mister headed out to get some vittles fer dinner beer.  

So, I think I might orta go gather me up some shoes, check the underwear situation, pat on some CoverGirl and wait for round two.

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Auntie Em! Auntie Em!

Well, what a wonderful way to spend a Friday afternoon in NorthCentralish Texas (I always think of us as central, but then some folks central is more down toward Austin way).  Our little Johnson County took quite a beating, so I hear from Mr. Finfrock on NBC.  The Mr. has expeditioned between waves to the grocery and beer store (we wouldn’t want to be stuck in a tornado with no food beer.  Anyway, I’m sure he will bring back tales from the road.

It was such a blessing though, to have this Doppler radar to depend on.  Back in the day, my mother was terrified of storms.  It seems she’d done a stint in Kansas when I was a baby and living in tornado alley sorta ruined her for being able to appreciate a nice Texas thunder boomer.  She didn’t care if they were big or small, if it  “was comin’ a cloud,” as they used to say in Glen Rose, Texas, we were going to the cellar.  It didn’t matter if it was 9 in the morning, 10 at night or 3 in the morning, she knew when a storm was brewing.  If, on the 10 o’clock news, Harold Taft mentioned we had a chance of storms overnight, she’d sleep with her clothes on and her purse tucked safely beside her in case we had to make a fast getaway to the cellar.  

It was funny this afternoon…as we were preparing for the big cell to come over, I realized not only do I not have a purse, I can’t really think of any important documents I couldn’t just get another of if need be.  That’s the difference, see.  My mom did.  In that purse were the most treasured of documents…my adoption papers and her citizenship papers.  I used to laugh at her, sitting in the doctor’s office or in the car, clutching her beloved purse, but back then I didn’t really realize the significance of what she carried in that bag.

When she died, her purse, her sweater and her pillow were the only things of value I cared to keep.  I sleep on the pillow, or at least it is on the bed, every night, the old sweater hangs in my closet, complete with the gravy stains…probably from when she’d made a roast or sweet and sour chicken or chicken and dumplings or noodles and beef gravy…any one of the dishes she made with so much love it seemed they’d last forever.  I never knew back then that if love was an ingredient and you were poor that a pot of chicken and dumplings could feed you forever.  Anyway, it occured to me that I can’t find that purse the other day when I was looking at that old stained sweater.   After she died, I would go through that purse and wonder…why the hell she keep this receipt for a payment she made on that TV she “bought on time” from the Western Auto back in 1976?  In that ever important bag that carried all her treasured history, was a pay stub from my father from when he was in the Air Force back in 1965 and the terrible letters he sent to her from the mental ward of the Air Force Hospital after he sent us to Texas.  I would sit and wonder, why in the world would she keep something so hurtful?  There were S&H Green Stamps from the grocery store, pictures of all the kids she had helped raise over the years, pictures of the girls, a few quarters in a change purse, and her treasured glasses.  I can’t even tell you how many times the treasured contents of that purse were gone over, read, opened, change counted, glasses opened and closed and put back in their case.  I just understood then why my mama always had her purse with her wherever she was.  That purse chronicled her life.  The good and happy parts and the horrible dark parts that helped shape this little German woman who never said Uncle no matter what life threw her direction.  

I didn’t give my mama enough credit when she was here, but sitting in the dark in the living room at 3, telling the LittleYub how it was “back in the day” when it would “come a cloud” and about my mama, the grandmother he would never know, sure did bring it all back to me.  I gotta find that purse.

With me knowing, thanks to the Doppler radar and David Finfrock, that there was no need for me to grab the twin mattress off the bottom bunk and huddle in the hall until the tornado sirens stopped blaring, LittleYub was free to entertain us in this grass skirt he found in the back closet…for a loooooong time.

And the thought popped into my head, as I watched this 8-year-old whirlwind in a grass skirt dancing in front of me that, in the midst of a storm, he would have driven my poor mama batty.

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