The Burrow

Yes, denizens, the fun has overtaken my responsibilities to you.  It started at the zoo (getting 8 people to one place is an exercise in logistics I've not had to consider in decades)  where there were birds of unusual coloring and shape and an elephant as old as FlapJilly (who will be bigger, we wondered). Giblet called every animal Buh Buh (their nickname for Thomas the Wonder Dog, who stayed at home with MOTG and Big Bob) and wondered why they didn't respond to his call. Dinner out at Culinary Dropout , where ping pong and cornhole and the photo booth kept us occupied while the grown ups ate and drank to their hearts' content.  When Giblet faded, the grandparental units took the little ones home, where, since she's older, FlapJilly got to stay up two and a half whole hours past my bedtime! We made brownies and added ice cream and decided that I'm really treating up tonight!   Is it any wonder the only time I could find to type to you...

Sometimes, there's just too much going on to blog. I'll try, again, tomorrow. For now, I'm just going to soak up the love. Thanks for understanding, denizens.

The first round of guests have taken a side trip to the Grand Canyon. I pick up the second group at the Tucson airport on Saturday. These middle two days are filled with preparing our adult size home for a toddler with a penchant for climbing.  I've unearthed the dollhouse Daddooooo made for Little Cuter 30 years ago, the wooden ferry with its cars on board that Uncle Jeff made for Big Cuter when he was small, and the alligator he made for Little Cuter when he heard that her wooden dog-that-wags-when-I pull-it had rolled its last roll. It's 7:45 am and not a creature is stirring. I won't be saying that again soon. I can hardly wait!

Was napping part of your experience? It certainly was here in our house.

Merry Merry Christmas ! http://liftupyourday.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Caroling-Geese.jpg As in years past, my all-time favorite Xmas carol,  courtesy of Walt Kelly and Pogo.  Sing loudly and lustily to the tune of  Deck the Halls..... Deck us all with Boston Charlie, Walla Walla, Wash., an' Kalamazoo! Nora's freezin' on the trolley, Swaller dollar cauliflower alley-garoo! Don't we know archaic barrel Lullaby Lilla Boy, Louisville Lou? Trolley Molly don't love Harold, Boola boola Pensacoola hullabaloo! Bark us all bow-wows of folly, Polly wolly cracker 'n' too-da-loo! Donkey Bonny brays a carol, Antelope Cantaloupe, 'lope with you! Hunky Dory's pop is lolly gaggin' on the wagon, Willy, folly go through! Chollie's collie barks at Barrow, Harum scarum five alarm bung-a-loo! Dunk us all in bowls of barley, Hinky dinky dink an' polly voo! Chilly Filly's name is Chollie, Chollie Filly's jolly chilly ...

The first of our many guest are arriving this afternoon.  Others will come at the end of the week.  The house is sparkling clean.  The beds have fresh sheets and the towels are neatly folded over the bathroom racks. Mr. 16 drove over yesterday to deliver a sentimental card and chocolates for TBG and me.  As it said in the note, this was all his idea; his mother and brother had nothing to do with it.  He's grown and matured and is an altogether wonderful human being, having left the snarky older brother schtick behind. Amster had a painting party and a cookie party and went with me to see Beautiful Annie's Nutcracker ballet . I've had holiday lunches all over town. There may not be much time for deep thought over the next two weeks.  I'm going to revel in the love.

I couldn't watch the debate.  I'm so tired of people screaming about the details when the world is going off the rails. I couldn't listen to the talking heads comparing and contrasting and making a mountain out of a mountain that I didn't want to see even though it was right in my path.  I reread yestereday's post before writing this one and was startled by the number of typos.  I'll go back and fix them when I'm done here, or maybe I'll leave them as a reminder of how frazzled I am. I wrapped a gift Little Cuter sent for TBG and then I couldn't find it.  I spent a few hours convincing myself that I'd included it in the gifts box I just sent her way, before I found it atop the bedding reserved for her arrival..... right where I put it so that it wouldn't get lost.... because it was so obvious a place I couldn't forget it..... and it only took me four hours to stumble upon it. All these bits and pieces of reality are interfering wi...

They spoke their minds.  All day long, they spoke their minds.   I tried to listen to "the other side" but it made my skiin crawl.   Facts are facts, or so I thought.  Apparently, facts are not part of the process arguments being made by the Republicans. And I keep coming back to the same thing, over and over and over again - if he has nothing to hide, why forbid his toadies' testimonies?   And yet, no guns have been drawn.  The military is not filing our streets.  Our upcoming election is at risk and our current government is eating itself from within and the Senate Majority Leader has already declared that he is not impartial...... and yet, I have hope. This is democracy at work.  With my fingers crossed, I have hope.

It was shocking to get a How Do You Like Them email without the items themselves having arrived.  That was the general tone of the Where is my order?  email I sent to the on-line customer service helpers after the telephone helpers decided, 5 minutes into their enforced musical interlude, that they were unable to help at this time.  I hit Send  and went to bed.   It took a few hours for him to respond, but when he did, Justino was on top of the situation.  He knew what caused the delay and why.  He contacted the warehouse and bumped us to the front of the line.  He told me when it would ship and how long it would take.   And he did it all with a charming, self-deprecating style. As to my I can't believe you did this  comment, he had that covered, too: I know, it seemed kinda odd. Don't worry, we've already fixed it on our end so that it won't happen again in the future.  I'm not shopping that much this ye...

Lady Jane wants to know if she's a grinch.  She doesn't want poinsettias which she'll have to water.  She's not interested in the Stealth Elf-ing I've been asked to do in her home, for her son in Australia.  She's exhausted.  She's asked too much of her 86 year old self and she's taking more mid-morning naps as the holidaze overwhelm her. ***** The cashier at the Dollar Tree was taking forever.   I realized that she had to ring each item individually, even though the gentlemen in front of me were buying 25 of the same things over and over and over again.  She shrugged, I smiled, and the woman behind me and I fell into conversation.  It's not Nordstrom; I want these items; I've already invested the time in the line; what will I do with the 5 minutes I save someplace else...... and from there, somehow, it morphed into bemoaning the sorry state of American discourse.  We agreed that we were tired of all the yelling.  It doesn't seem t...

They came racing out of the classroom, crying my name. Grandma! Grandma!  LOOK WHAT WE GREW!!!! I was as surprised as they were. They started the seeds weeks ago. Now they have stems and leaves . Caring has rewards. Just another life lesson from Grandma's Garden.

I created a Shutterfly book of a kindergarten class making scarecrows.  Before unveiling it, I wondered if, perhaps, they would know some of the characters in the story.  They certainly did know them, as their squeals and points and grins revealed. At the end, the teacher was teary.  Those are the happy kind of tears , I explained as she wiped them away.  We closed our eyes and listened to our feelings for a second or two, then opened them and looked at our friends. Everyone had a smile, a big, gigantic, ginormous, I've never smiled this big ever in my life face on.  We floated on that feeling as we paraded across the playground, gathering admirers as we entered the garden, restricting access to us and us alone.  We placed one in the nook of the mesquite tree, and one on the side of the orange tree.  We ate scallions for our Super Power (extreme bad breath) and described the taste as we strolled back to class. We had all the good feelings t...

I woke up this morning to information from a reliable source who told me that The New York Times was reporting on a Trumpian Executive Order that would, this very morning, define Jews as a nationality. This did not resonate with TBG.  He didn't feel the shiver up his back, though he certainly noticed mine.  He's as sensitive as a Protestant-raised-educated-white-guy can be; half a century with me has tuned his radar.  But he was surprised at the depth of my reaction. I was terrified. Sure, I was mortified for our country and I was disgusted that such a thing could come from the Office of the President.  The lack of intellectual rigor that underpins every word the man speaks was, once again, appalling.  But mostly, I was scared. I'd have a lot more cousins is my standard response to Holocaust questions.  I was a child when G'ma insisted I watch the black and white films of the liberation of the death camps on our Motorola tv.  We put the cat in ...

Time that could have been spent baking was spent tracking down and then reporting the absence of Big Cuter's brownies to the United States Postal Service.  It wasn't the first time the postal service hijacked my life this week. It happened over and over and over again. Time went by as I waited and waited and waited for the computer to boot up, to find Google, to find the USPS site. Time was wasted as the site refused to load, then refused to find my address book, then refused update the addresses I wanted to change. I canceled more Batch Orders than I created; the editing function was no more accessible in the final step than it was in the Address Book itself. My printer decided to run out of ink.  I had no replacement cartridges.  I went out. I got two lists conflated and confused and mixed up together; it took the better part of the afternoon to figure out who had received brownies and who had said yes to TBG's 70th Birthday Soiree. I'm not sure what I...

People don't know how to drive when it rains in Tucson.  I think that they are stunned by the fact that we are experiencing weather.  I'm sure that it rained where they lived before, and I'm sure that they drove in that rain.  Somehow, living in the desert has erased any muscle memory of those events.  Turning on the windshield wipers activates the Oh, dear, what do I do  part of themselves.  They pause for no reason, often in the middle of the middle lane, slowing but not stopping, wondering, I suppose, how they became trapped in this wetness. I'd be upset, except that by the time I got to my destination the deluge had stopped and the air smelled of creosote, and the sky was crystal clear, and the puddles on the parking lot were undisturbed and reflected the sunlight the way icy patches along Lake Shore Drive's bike path and parking lots used to do, when I had to worry about skidding .across the beauty. This is much better.

I thought I had it down perfectly. Three batches at a time, the trebled recipe written in bold sharpie.  Pans of the correct size and hue and material.  One teaspoon for the wet ingredients and one teaspoon for the dry, one tablespoon, one half-tablespoon,  and my old faithful silver one cup fit nicely in the not-too-big-not-too-small glass bowl, along with the Revereware saucepan.  The bowl lives on the counter when The Brownie List is in full swing, all self-contained and self-satisfied. Until I went to Bed, Bath and Beyond and found this: It slides right into the corner of an 8x8 pan or brownies divided in half then in half then the otherway twice..... even if you make the cuts with a bigger spatula, to save time. It bends its beveled-to-a-point edge underneath without damaging the brownie's structural integrity while scraping the pan clean without scratching the non-stick surface, just as the packaging  promised.  The blade is exactly the le...

One thing I'm sure of - the high pitched screech was not part of the call. I'm on a 15 person Advisory Committee, which convened this afternoon via a conference call.  Dialing in was simple, so was entering the pin code.  The automated voice welcomed me, told me that there were more than 4 people on the call, and asked me to mute my phone. That required some searching, since I replaced my land lines last month.  I examined the handset, found the word MUTE and managed to figure out which button to push.  I pushed, and then I heard nothing.  Nothing.  No music.  No leader welcoming me.  No voices.  I was anxious, wondering if I'd screwed it up somehow.  A minute or two passed (of course I called in early) before someone announced his presence.  Then another voice chimed in, saying that he was here, too.  I un-muted the phone and chimed in at the same time that two other women did the same. Suddenly, I didn't feel so alo...

I listened to the lawyers teach a seminar on the Constitution, the framers, and impeachment.  I turned off the sound when the Republicans began to spew mud in all directions except the one most deserving - upstream. I drove to Prince and found solace in the garden. Our hanging baskets and our scallions  and our radishes  are doing very well. It's a treasure hunt beneath the foliage. As always, there is fiendishness afoot. Though this scholar is politely watering the plants while posing for this picture, further examination reveals what he'd been doing just moments before.  Why he felt the need to make a mud crater is beyond me, yet he did.  And his classmates were thrilled with the sucking sounds made by the rakes in the muck. They smoothed and they dug and they giggled.  They were - literally - a ray of sunshine on a muddy day.

According to Ronald Reagan, the 9 scariest words ever spoken were "I'm from the government.  I'm here to help you."  I scoffed at that, until this weekend.  In the end, I was in love with the bureaucrats who make the wheels of governance roll smoothly, but it took a long time to get there. We (okay, mostly I, but he agreed at the time) made a mistake while applying for TBG's social security retirement benefits.  We made this mistake after two days of arguing with the website, or being locked out of the website, of wondering why the website wasn't responsive to our pleas. Trying to fill out the application proved to be more difficult that we'd anticipated.  It took some time to remember where we'd stored the relevant password and user name. I typed. I failed.  I was locked out after persistently entering the same information over and over again.  I cursed, waited the required 24 hours, and tried a different combination and voila, I was in. The err...

Black Friday.  Cyber Monday.  Giving Tuesday.  It's enough to make a grown woman weep.  I stayed home and bought nothing on Friday.  I'll see if there are deals on socks and underwear (my default gift giving options) today, on Monday, but mostly I'm looking forward to Giving Tuesday. As angry as I am with Mark Zuckerberg in specific and Facebook in general, this is a good thing.  Facebook absorbs all the costs associated with the donations.  There are no annoying "leave us a tip" options from the processing firm.  There are just posts of the wonderful things my friends are up to. The ones rescuing dogs and cats , the ones rescuing donkeys and min-horses , the ones educating the scholars I serve, they are all filling my heart with joy.  I joined the party last year, and raised enough money to buy shoelaces and classroom books for everyone.  I'm doing it again this year.  Here's what I posted on Facebook .  If you're inc...

We've never known anyone quite like him.  I don't know that we ever will, again. Garage Bands and the history of rock and roll are not subjects that typically draw us out on a weekend afternoon.  His involvement in a project, though, drew us to Hotel Congress for a retrospective, replete with album covers and handbills and posters and newspaper criticism covering the walls.  A lot of the music was from the era when I was birthing and nursing, so it rang no emotional bells, but the effort and energy and creativity and enthusiasm brought us right along with the crowd. It was his doing.  As is often the case in Tucson, a weird conglomeration of old hippies and young hipsters, senior citizens looking for a free afternoon's entertainment, young families whose grown ups were friends of friends of the mastermind at the head of the event, music geeks, and random strangers filled the venue.  And, as is also often the case in Tucson, we learned some things, we enjoy...