Lassie, Come Home

Or, in this case, Ron, Come Home! For the last five weeks Ron's been in Iowa during the week being the Miracle Worker on some power plant in Council Bluffs. His last day in this tour of duty is tomorrow and I am SO excited that he'll be home again.

Of course, I'm excited to have him back so that I have someone intelligent to converse with. Not that Tyler's stupid or un-scintillating . . . he's just never here. And Zooey? Well, the only communication she's able to handle is to stand in front of me and stare at me until I (or Tyler) take her outside for the eighty-fifth time in a day for her to go grass hunting, i.e. smell a blade of grass for fifteen seconds and then move on to the next blade.

And, I'm excited to have him back so we can spend some time on the porch, although I fear our porch sitting days are numbered as the heat of August threatens to roar down upon us.

But, truth be told . . . I also miss him like crazy because of all the stuff he does. Like watering the plants (which I "entrusted" to Tyler). And making sure that we're not getting water in our basement after the torrential rains we got last night. Oh, I could make sure we weren't getting water in the basement, but I'm not so sure I'd know what to do if we did. And, finally, I'll be glad that he's home to do his share of grass hunting with Zooey. Hmmm. Grass Hunting With Zooey . . . sounds like a great title for a PBS show circa 1967.

Superfreak

Apparently, I am some sort of freak of nature because my body seems to be completely immune to the benefits of pain pills. Sad, sad case in point . . .

Over the past eight years, I've had about six instances where I do something seemingly innocuous and end up with excruciating lower back pain. Things like making the bed or picking up a basket of laundry (and don't think I didn't use that to get out of a lot of chores). I feel a tiny pop in my back and within hours I'm in great agony. A couple of weeks ago I picked up a pillow (a decorative pillow, not even one of our fluffy down pillows) and I felt the twinge. Out of commission for a day.

On Saturday, Ron and I headed over to Panera to pick up some treats for our friends, Dave & Lisa, who just moved to OP from Virginia. I got out of the car and felt a little ache in my lower back. By the time we left Panera, I was holding on to the counters because I couldn't stand up. When we got home I took TWO Tylenol #3 with codeine. Ron was all like, "Well, you're done for the day." Didn't phase me one bit. Three hours later I drove to Dave and Lisa's and was able to carry on a coherent conversation, which is more than I can say for Ron when he took one of those little pills after his nose surgery.

Sunday morning I almost passed out in the shower and was in so much pain I threw up. This episode has been, by far, the worst yet. So today I finally went to the doctor, pretty much begging for drugs. Because the pain that was in my lower back has now been joined by an incredible tightening all up and down my back. It's like my spinal chord has just seized up. The good doctor prescribed Oxycodone (percocet) AND Flexeril (a muscle relaxer) and, for good measure, told me to take Advil, too.

I called my mom to tell her what the doctor prescribed and she started yelling, "That's what your father was on [when he had back surgery] and it put him out of his head." Oh, my. She handed the phone to my father, saying, "Janet's taking the same medicine that put you out of your head." My father's advice? "Don't go out of your head." They crack me up.

So, I come home, eat dinner and pop two oxycodone. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Still in pain. Still mad at the world. About an hour ago I took the muscle relaxer. And now I'm writing a blog. I will say I'm a little buzzed, but I've gotten higher sucking helium from a balloon. But that really doesn't have anything to do with alleviating pain, does it? Ok, scratch that bit about the helium.

You know, being a Superfreak is not all it's cracked up to be.

All You Need to Know About Ron Martin

Last night we made a quick trip to Hobby Lobby to buy some decorative sand. Why decorative sand? Well, it's . . . decorative. We bought some really cool tall square candles in Estes Park (they were fifty percent off), but of course, don't have any square candlesticks (which is why, maybe, they were fifty percent off). So, Ron being the brilliant and talented man that he is, pulled out two little juice glasses from our "pretty stuff" cabinet and says all we need is some decorative sand. Hence, the quick trip to Hobby Lobby.

We arrived about 7:40, a good twenty minutes before the store was supposed to close and discovered, to our amazement and bewilderment, that they'd moved everything around (not that we'd have known where the decorative sand was before the shuffle, but that's really neither here nor there). Ron asked the manager where it was and he pointed us in the right direction. Before I knew it, Ron was two football field lengths ahead of me. "Roooonnnnnn," I yelled. He stopped turned around and said,
*gasp*
"I'm so glad,"
*gasp*
"you told me"
*gasp*
"to slow down."
*gasp*

And there you have it. That's Ron Martin in a nutshell. Always running. Always going full speed ahead. Waiting for someone to tell him to slow down.

Which I do .

More often than you want to know.

Rejuvenated

Despite almost missing our first two flights, daily rain and waaaaayyyy too many people, our trip to Colorado was fabulous. Eight days is just enough time to completely relax AND still enjoy the company of the people you have to live with once the vacation is over.

We rented a home this year because Ron and I are way too old to "appreciate" the rustic-ness of furniture made of unsanded pine and twenty year old mattresses. This year we had a mammoth sized bed made of aspen logs. How big was it? We had to use our walkie talkies to say goodnight. The only drawbacks to the location were the dog kennel and chop shop on either side of us. I had to really restrain myself from yelling at the top of my lungs, "Would you dogs shut up already? You're ruining my peace and tranquility."

Maybe the best feature of the home was the ultra-fine cassette tape of John Denver's greatest hits. Was I in heaven? Indeed I was. Until Tyler heard the lyric, "Sometimes I feel like a sad song. And I'm all alone . . . " He thought it was "Sometimes I feel like a Sasquatch." Which would pretty much explain why he felt all alone.

We spent hours on Alluvial Fan, this massive rock /water fall that is a result of the dam breaking at Lawn Lake (or Fern Lake, I can't remember which). It dumped 29 MILLION gallons of water down the mountainside and flooded Estes Park (a good five or six miles away) with five feet of water. It's Tyler's favorite place to hike (he went to the top twice this trip) and my favorite place to watch people do stupid things. Stuff like piling six people on a boulder in the middle of the waterfall just to take a picture. Seriously, it's dangerous. One summer I saw an eight-year old boy take the waterslide ride of his life down the falls. Luckily there wasn't too much water that year; I'm not sure anyone could survive it when the water's up. So, yeah, I let Tyler disappear for hours following the trail up river. Don't think that notion of Sasquatch didn't enter my mind more than once.

Ron fished his little heart out. And caught a bunch. We only saw him catch one . . . I know why he likes to fish in solitude. Tyler and I started hopping around and hollering, which I'm told is not conducive to a good day of fishing. As I watched these two trout basically treading water right next to a big boulder I had to think that life as a fish would suck. That's all they do all day. Swim upstream, trying to figure out if that little hairy thing in front of them is the real deal or a cleverly disguised apparatus with a nasty barbed hook on the end of it. Turns out they're not all that smart. 'Cause like I said, Ron caught a bunch.

To the left are some of my favorite shots of the week (all taken by Tyler).

Oh, yeah. Humidity stinks.

That's Just WRONG

Today I was out driving and I saw something that just made me shake my head and think, "Leona Hutchinson would roll over in her grave if she saw this." Leona Hutchinson was an older lady I knew when I lived in Marshall, MO. We moved to Jefferson City when I was 12 so that tells you that this memory is very old and, quite possibly, not entirely accurate. For example, her last name might have been Hutcherson, I don't really know for sure. For the sake of this story, it's really immaterial whether her name was Hutchinson or Hutcherson.

I remember three things about Mrs. Hutchinson/Hutcherson:

First, she had clear plastic slipcovers on her furniture. The kind with raised bumps on them that left indentations on the back of your legs when you got up. I now find it odd that she had these slipcovers because she was a widow and had no children (that I know of). So from whom was she protecting her furniture? Probably dirty little kids like my brother and me. For all I know, she put them on five minutes before we got there and took them off as soon as our car left the driveway.

Second, she always had a candy jar filled with these round sticks of individually wrapped candy. The candy had stripes on them and I'm pretty sure my brother and I never took our eyes off that jar the whole time we were there. Mrs. Hutchinson/Hutcherson and my parents would be having a conversation and Jeff and I would sit stock still, as if in a trance. I'm sure my parents told us we could only have the candy if we were well behaved children. So we were. Anything for a stick of that candy. Once we got it, we'd suck on it until we'd formed razor sharp points and the proceed to stab each other to near death on the way home.

Third (and this is what made me shake my head), every year she bought a new Cadillac. It might have been every two years, but one sounds so much more decadent. And back then, Cadillacs were The Bomb. Huge, huge cars that were so long they actually bent in the middle when they turned corners. Only people who "came from money" had Caddy's and you could almost bet that any woman who stepped out of one would be wearing a long fur coat and elbow-length gloves. Ladies like Cruella DeVille.

So today, when I saw a Cadillac that looked more like a Ford Taurus, I was dismayed. It was tiny, tiny, tiny and was nowhere close to being a Bomb. Maybe a bomb (little b), but for sure not a Bomb (capital B). And, to make the situation even more pathetic, it had a spoiler. You know, to me, that's almost a heresy. I'm guessing Mr. Cadillac is rolling over in his grave as well. Sigh.

The Black Lab. The Kong Addict.

(Disclaimer . . . The following is not intended in any way to minimize the devastation of addiction. It's simply meant to make you smile.)

Her name is Zooey. Z-O-O-E-Y. She's six and a half years old. And she's a Kong addict. For those of you unschooled in the dark underbelly of dog toys, a Kong is a red rubber "ball" that could quite possibly survive a nuclear holocaust. Some people cram peanut butter inside to give their dogs a more frenzied experience, but Zooey takes it straight up.

The signs of Zooey in need of a fix are unmistakable. She pants/huffs around the house, saliva slowly dripping from her jaws (ok, that doesn't happen, but it makes for good TV/blogging). She goes from room to room in search of her stash. Usually when she gets this way, her Kong has been left in a room that now has a closed door, making it impossible for her to get to her "sugar." When we, a family who has consistently enabled her by opening those closed doors, finally can take her agony no more, we grudgingly respond, saying, "Zooey, this is the last time. I mean it."

Sometimes, the Kong has rolled under a table or chair, making Zooey's drug of choice even more of a forbidden pleasure. She sees it. We see it. She knows we see it. We know she knows we see it. And what do we do? Again, we cave in, not being able to bear seeing her in such a deplorable state. Oh, sure, she makes the empty promises that she'll give it up. Cold turkey, if she has to. But we know, come tomorrow morning, she'll come padding up the stairs with that Kong in her mouth. She needs help. She needs . . . an intervention.

Life in Reverse

Every once in awhile, I see something that warrants a second look. Most of the time, this happens while I'm watching TV. For instance, tonight Ron and I were watching "Living With Ed," a show about Ed Begley, Jr. and his over-the-top green life. I didn't quite catch his daughter's name, so I hit rewind to find out what it was (Hayden). To be quite honest, I'm not sure how I managed to live 48 years without DVR or the ability to rewind live TV. It's rare when we watch a WHOLE TV program, commercials included. And I'm getting quite good at hitting that play button at just the right second. Actually, I rule at that task

Tonight, Ron and I encountered another "rewind" moment while driving around the block (literally: he got a rental car for his trip to Iowa and I made him take me for a spin). We were approaching the stop sign at the intersection of Craig and 61st Street and we passed a signpost with two yellow signs on it. We go through that intersection probably fifteen times a week (maybe more) and tonight was the first time I saw the two signs clearly. As we passed it and came to a stop, I said to Ron, "Did you see that sign back there?" We sat there at the stop sign for probably 15 seconds and then he put the car in reverse and backed up. And there it was.

The top one was the one warning us of a school crossing. And the one below it had a large stag (as in a male deer) raised up on its hind legs, its front legs pawing the air.

We drove the half block home with our eyes peeled for prancing deer, deer that would suddenly bolt across the street, causing us to swerve recklessly and perhaps take out a headlight or two. I wonder: does your insurance go up if you have a prancing deer warning sign in your neighborhood? Because that would REALLY tick me off.