End of an era

My mother's brother died about 1:30 this morning, and it's odd to consider life without him in it.

We have expected this for some time, especially since he went into hospice care a few weeks ago, but I'm not sure "expecting" can mean "ready for" death under any circumstances, and
when the death closes an important door, it's most just—weird.

Uncle was the youngest of my grandmother's three children (I never new my grandfather), and he symbolized for me more than any of the rest of our family "the greatest generation" because I always associated him with the military, from which he retired in the '60s or early '70s. I can't swear that I actually ever saw him in uniform, but I certainly saw pictures of him in one, and my early knowledge of his life always correlated with his military experience.

Outside of the tall frame and the usually booming voice (I always wondered if he looked like his dad, who died while Uncle was still in school, and I always assumed the loud voice was, like the older sister's, a function of his concern for his mother's deafness, although those who knew her better knew that she pretty much heard what she wanted to hear, regardless the volume), my memories of him are really quite sketchy.

I remember a trip to visit him in Colorado Springs (was that the year daddy drove all night and Margaret Joan and I marveled at the ice patterns on the windows?) when he woke us up one morning banging around in the kitchen making what he called a southwest omelette, which appeared to me to be eggs with vegetables like bell pepper and tomato and onions mixed in. I've never been at all sure his name for it made any real sense, but I remember liking it then and making something similary many times since.

I remember his little cocker spaniel who was so spoiled that she had a set of red rainboots to protect her feet in wet weather and a later wire-hair who just seemed to me to be way too energetic for her own good. I might should have watched that one more; I later adopted a part-terrier shelter dog who had a lot of that same energy.

When I was a freshman in college, he and his wife and my grandmother lived in a little house just a couple of blocks from our campus, and on most Wednesday afternoons I hiked over to their house to visit my grandmother and join the family in their standard tv dinners. I never understood why the menu was always tv dinners, but I liked the company and even tv dinners were a break from dorm food. If the fare was an attempt to discourage me from coming, it didn't work.

One of the stories I heard from Uncle during that time was his horror upon walking in on grandmother in her room, standing on her rocking chair to reach something on a too-high shelf (easy enough since she was less than 5 ft tall). If I was in college, grandmother must have been around 70, which I guess we all considered really old; now that I'm past 60, every time I climb on anything I chuckle about uncle's worry, especially since grandmother lived more than 100 years. I'd worry about my sister Susan Rene climbing on anything; Margaret Joan has only recently given up hanging theater lights, and she is now enjoying retirement in a woodshop where she has a lot more opportunity for danger than standing in a chair.


Uncle continued to drift in and out of my life over the years, most recently, I guess, a few years ago when he decided that the latest good think on the culinary scene was buffalo meat. For some reason, he seemed pretty sure that since I work at a school with a large agriculture program, I should have connections to a good source for buffalo. He didn't seem to connect the fact that I teach in the engineering college on a campus of nearly 50,000 students that includes a golf course, a railroad track, and an airport; my best hope for connecting with buffalo meat was the same internet he had used to email me about his plans to use it.

But his death this morning really does end our family's ties to "the greatest generation." Daddy was the first to go almost 40 years ago, followed by most of his family before we lost mother and grandmother almost 20 years ago and the rest of our parent's generation since then. Uncle was about 88 this morning, the longest-lived of any of them except his mom.

When daddy died (at only 56), we were all horrified to lose our dad, especially so young. When mother died after a tough fight with bone cancer, we were relieved to see her suffering end, but we realized oddly that, even as adults, we felt like orphans—and even more so a year or so later when our grandmother died and we had no one in our direct bloodline older than we. The other deaths in that generation weren't nearly as hard to take until this one: it's really the end of a generation in our family, really the end of an era.

Vacation is good!

I haven't worked in over a week on anything that risks bringing in income or affecting the way I teach my class next semester, and I've gotta say it's been nice. (Yeah, I'll be "on vacation" the rest of this week, but I have a couple of consulting jobs on the back burner that I'll knock out in the next couple of days.)

This vacation started when I thought I was flying to Los Angeles last Monday, when in fact my flight wasn't until Tuesday evening. I took some vacation hours I sort of wished I hadn't used that way, but it meant that I could sort of practice chilling for a few hours in preparation for intentionally not logging into the work websites for the next several days. (I took my laptop with me to LA so I could follow my favorite RSS feeds and play solitaire on it, but I never checked the office email and I answered only one relevant to my consulting in a whole week away from home.)

Today's vacation activity has been all about getting home from Christmas. When DD was home in November, she compared the Christmas event at her dad's house as sort of a matter of those who had money getting it out and passing it one person to the left since more specific "gifts" are sort of not on the menu. I wasn't sure how to take that: did she mean she'd rather not exchange gifts at all for Christmas? Or did she mean that a bit of shopping for them could be a good thing?

Hitting the stores with her helped answer that, and while I wasn't in a mood to spring for the Wii she and PC would have liked (having just put four new tires on my car the day before we left), I was happy to pick up the tent she thought she and he could use, and when she spotted a nifty cast-aluminum griddle, I tucked it in, too.

Turns out she not only looked forward to exchanging gifts but she had some spot-on ideas, too. She had been concerned that NOS hadn't upgraded his cell phone in maybe three years, so he was using an old instrument that couldn't take advantage of the web access on our family phone plan. Taking a chance on his particular taste, we stopped by a shop and got a bargain on a new phone that she thought was sophisticated enough and I thought might be durable enough to make him happy.

Buying a new phone meant diverting his service from his old one, so we wondered whether he would make it to Christmas without pitching a fit about its not working in the interim, but as it turned out, he wasn't the one who couldn't wait that long: Friday morning before he woke up, his best buddy called and left a hysterical message on his voice mail. I had plugged in the phone to charge it the night before, and I woke up earlier than NOS Friday morning and listened to the message to see whether he was missing anything significant. Later in the morning, I played it back for DD, who couldn't stand the wait: she turned up the volume, started the message, and held it to his ear to wake him up.

We couldn't have done better; once he figured out that the phone was his, he went to work to learn how to use it, and even at home today he was bubbling over about how cool it is. If he's worried about "lack of durability," he certainly hasn't indicated that. We did good.

While DD and I were plotting for a new cell phone for NOS, he and PC were out shopping for me. DD and PC had been out of ideas for me for some time, but NOS has lived with me for over a year now, and they were counting on him for something that would work. I had somewhat casually mentioned that the slide show screensaver on my laptop is boring because it doesn't shuffle the pictures for me, so I was thinking about getting an electronic photo frame that would let me see my pictures all the time. He passed that word along to PC, and off they went to the electronics store.

The one they bought me was much nicer than I'd have gotten myself, and PC had found time to copy pictures from his and DD's cameras into the memory so I could "plug and play" as soon as I got the frame. DD observed that it wouldn't turn itself to show off vertical pictures very well, and I'd have to learn to take pictures in "wide view" to fit the wide display, but outside of that, she thought it was pretty cool, too.

This afternoon I decided to see what I could do about getting my own pictures into the frame and making them fit. I sort of stumbled into a photo editor that I had to learn to use, but it's got a pretty good handle on fine tuning and red-eye reduction, so I figured it was worth the effort. I wasn't at all sure how to get the right aspect ratio to make the pictures fit the frame, but I sort of eyeballed them to get as close as I could without losing to much of the detail.

The whole project took hours—literally—to get the photos the way I wanted them, and I've spotted several that maybe I need to work on again. But the upshot is that the new editor parks the photos in the screensaver file on the laptop, so now all my screensaver photos are cropped and edited, too.

I'd have never taken time to do this if I hadn't been on vacation, although it's the sort of thing I'd have cheerfully done a few years ago before I began to feel so overwhelmed by work. This vacation has been good!

That's life....

Number One Son and I drove back home late last night from our flight from Los Angeles where we spent Christmas with Darling Daughter and her Prince Charming, a week-long trip that was sullied temporarily by a bit of a kerfuffle between me and PC. I never apologized to him for my part in that, although I should have, but the incident gave me some insight into his thinking that will be interesting to watch.

The skirmish arose over a dominoes game called chickenfoot. It's not one of those games that comes in a box with a specific set of rules; in fact, the rules that normally come with a box of double-bigger-than-six dominoes are for a game called Mexican train, which I've never seen played, and I can't find anybody who admits to having ever played it. I don't know of any "official" rules to chickenfoot at all.

Consequently, I learned to play chickenfoot from other players, and I've played with several different groups, whose interpretations of the "rules" tend to vary a bit from one venue to another. One "rule" that tends to be up for discussion is whether the double blank is zero points (in a game where the low score wins) or 50; most groups I've played with make it 50. Another is the number of dominoes in a "hand"; when I looked up rules online several years ago, the number was usually enough to give each player an even number with some quantity left over in a "bone" pile that was usually around 5 or 10 dominoes.

The "rule" in question in LA was whether a player who could not play on a turn should have to draw from the "bone pile" until they drew a "player"—which could mean that one person could draw as many as five or six dominoes in our case. PC insisted that forcing a player to draw nearly as many "bones" as they started with was unfair, and he didn't want to play a game that was inherently unfair.

I pointed out to him that I'd played the game long enough to know that the "unfairness" had a way of distributing itself so that quite likely in any game, most players would have a chance of getting stuck with a lot of extra dominoes. I hadn't ever seen anyone protest the unfairness of it before because it was a chance we were all willing to take. It didn't occur to me at the time to check to see if newer rules from some online site might suggest another option, but the other players and I agreed to a compromise that would at least reduce the damage if anybody had to draw more than a couple of bones.

He continued to protest, and I stupidly gave him the option to accept the rules or not play. He was thrilled; I'm not really sure whether his complaint was more against the unfairness of the game or the fact that he hadn't had a "fix" of the social networking sites that he surfs continually. He immediately jumped online and immersed himself in his internet world, ignoring the game and DD's sideways suggestions that he was welcome to join the fun—and the party in progress in their own apartment—at any time.

At one time he went to the kitchen to refresh his drink and knocked mine over on the way back. I grabbed a towel and started to sop up the spill, and he snapped into action to help me. As we went back to the kitchen to refill my glass, he said he was sorry, but he simply couldn't engage with a game that he found so terribly unfair.

But that's what life is, I said, and I meant it. While this game doesn't have the sure boundaries of the models he was using—the exact size and weight of the ball, size of the  playing field, or height of the goals in football or basketball, for example—what it does have is more of the flavor of a much bigger game: life.

The way I see it, in life as in chickenfoot, we don't all start off with exactly the same hand to play, and some of us, through no fault of our own, get stuck with situations that are more or less insurmountable along the way; some of us draw "good" hands that never send us to the "bone pile" (in this case, DD escaped the pile for the whole game), and some of us seem to go back to it repeatedly (the other three of us took some pretty big hits from it).

The "game" in life is coming through it with our sense of self-worth intact, and that depends on our ability to enjoy the game, whether we "win" or lose. And enjoy we did: the fourth player after PC quit was one of DD's college friends who is building a career as a comedian, and she has a sharp sense of funny; NOS's wit is enough to play off hers, and we found ourselves laughing frequently, even as the three of us dropped farther and farther behind DD's score. I lost—big time—but I really didn't care because I felt bad about the skirmish with PC and I had laughed so hard at the other two. For me, chickenfoot really doesn't have as much to do with winning and losing as it does with how you play the game.

The next morning I did go online in search of other rules, and I found a couple of suggestions that a player should draw only once before ending the turn, and that makes sense to me. (The rest of the rules on those sites didn't; they advised starting with so few dominoes per player that games could end with many dominoes left over, and having so many dominoes out of play would pretty much eliminate any kind of "strategy"). I like the rules my friends have played with that distribute most of the dominoes at the beginning of the game, but I could go along with limiting the number of draws.

But what interests me about the kerfuffle with PC is how it plays out with him off the game table. I didn't miss noting that his complaint about fairness followed hard on the heels of his draw that added probably four or five dominoes to  his hand, which cued my personal sense that political conservatives—and Texas conservatives in particular, I think—seem to have a propensity for crying foul when their personal "games" are affected by "the rules," but somewhat less so when their "rules" limit the "games" of others ("sanctity of marriage," "right to life, ""death penalty," and "socialized medicine").






One reason I'll be interested to see how this plays out with PC is that I wonder whether his sense of "fairness" extends to life in general. I was really interested to hear him talking with someone about his experience of living in California for the past several months and recognizing that Californians are somewhat more willing to tolerate people who are different from themselves; he seemed to see that as a positive, and he seemed to be okay with it.

And that's what interests me: If he really has adopted that attitude, if he really does believe in principles that we all deserve a fair chance and to be left alone to live our lives as we choose, then I will have a tremendous amount of respect for him. If, on the other hand, he limits the "fair playing field" to protecting himself and his beliefs at the expense of others, then maybe not so much.





I'll be interested to see how he plays at life.

Happy holiday!

I woke up this morning in Darling Daughter's apartment in Los Angeles a couple of hours before any of the younger folks in residence opened their eyes, so I hopped on my computer to catch up with email and RSS feeds that I missed yesterday as I traveled west.

The computer had barely come up when an instant message opened. The screen name was one of our online students who took my graduate course a semester or two ago, so my immediate thought was "Good grief; how did I mess up that grade?" rather than "Ah, I should wish her a merry Christmas!"

 I had had many "office hours" chats during the student's semester with me, but I nonetheless replied to her usual, "Good Morning Ma'm" with a bit of trepidation.

After she was sure she had connected with me, she completely changed my mood:  "Every time I had to use some of the knowledge I got from you class my heart goes out to you to say thank you." Wow! That's the sort of thing I love to hear.

After a few more exchanges, I discovered that this student—like a couple of others I've heard from this semester—credits her success with her final writing project (an engineering report, which is similar to a thesis but not quite as intense) because of the planning I had her do when she took my class.

She said at one time she didn't realize what a "bad" writer she had been before my class, although I'm pretty sure that she wasn't so much "bad" as "uninformed." What I do in my class can't be enough to make a "bad" writer good, but I think I teach some skills that help them organize their thoughts better, and that at least makes them more efficient writers, which for engineers is often a big step forward.

It was really a nice way to start my day!

Hope floats. Turns out, so does dogfood.

I got up this morning checking items off my list for the trip to Los Angeles to spend Christmas with Darling Daughter and Prince Charming, excited about the opportunity to get away from the house for a few days and to spend some time just with family.

I had opened the computer to do a few things on it when I heard a crash in the kitchen. When I got there, Miss Kitty was on the floor near the garden window, scoping out her chances of hopping back up to chase out a wren that had flown in the back door; I had left it open so she and the Alpha Bitch could come and go as they pleased, and the bird apparently invited itself in.

MK was sitting on the floor where the dog food dish belongs, but in its stead were a ceramic bowl, a broken terra cotta pot, a potpourri of potting soil, pebbles, and dog food, and the remains of a once-healthy African violet. At one time, the violet had been potted in the terra cotta pot, which sat in the ceramic bowl with pebbles between the pot and the bowl; for several years, this has been my most successful means of keeping houseplants alive, and since this one had been on the edge of a shelf, it has to have been one of my healthiest plants. Not so much any more.

I scuttled the cat out of the kitchen, closed the doors, and went to work. A couple of times, the bird flew away from the window and I tried to point it toward the door, but not successfully. Eventually, it found its way out on its own when I wasn't watching.

I picked up the bowl and the plant (which still had a decent amount of dirt around its roots) and picked up as many leaves as I could. I decided the best way to separate the pebbles from the dog food and dirt was to run them all through a collander to get the dirt out and then to figure out how to get the dog food out of the pebbles so it wouldn't decompose and stink up the kitchen. I filled the sink with water and submerged the collander; I was pleased to see the dog food float to the top so I could skim it off. AB was pleased to have wet food in her bowl.

I found another flower pot and a bag of soil and established what was left of the violet back in the pot, stuck the pot in the bowl, and poured the pebbles back into place.

But I still had a small mountain of leaves left over. I found a tray from some ice chest we've owned, put in an inch or so of soil, and dusted the petioles with root starter, and lined up nearly three dozen leaflets in the tray. Number One Son had left a blanket bag from the cleaners on the dining room table, so I slipped the tray into the bag and stuck it in the garage, where I have a couple of lamps providing light 12 hours a day to the plants that would be outdoors if not for the erratic fall weather.

I've got a pretty good track record at starting plants from leaves, but I've never attempted it at this scale before—especially not the morning of a week-long trip away from home. And I already have three dozen violets in some stage of survival in a couple of places in the house.

Hope floats, and so does dog food. Whether or not the violets get that will take a few days to discern.

Long live the queen?

I graduated from college to a queen-size mattress nearly 40 years ago. Sometimes I wonder how much landscape that really means I gained.

The earliest bed I know I slept in was a baby bed that Mother used to tell me Daddy had "cut down" to make what she called a "junior bed" for me—some arrangement, I'm sure, that used the mattress and maybe whatever base the baby bed had had.

The reason I know about that bed is the story she used to tell of having had a houseful of people one night when it occurred to her to wonder where I was. A quick look around the living areas suggested I had either wandered into a bedroom and just wasn't answering when she called me or I had wandered somewhere outside, which at that time was a pretty broad expanse of not much of anything.

She found me, she used to say, bent over at the waist on my bed, sound asleep with my feet on the floor. Never let it be said I'm new at sleeping like a rock.

The first bed I really remember is the double bed I shared with my sister Margaret Joan in the large front bedroom of our home that was probably supposed to have been the "main" if not the "master" bedroom. Logic put me and MJ in there in a double bed with sister Susan Rene's bed pushed up against one wall of the room and ours paralleling, not unlike the dormitory at the orphanage. I remember making the bed every morning and lining up an assortment of dolls and stuffed animals with their heads on our feather pillows, and I remember arranging my shoes squarely beside the bed when we crawled in to sleep at night.

Our brothers shared a room across the hall that I mostly remember featuring Beau's twin bed and Joe Duck's baby bed. I assume JD moved out of the baby bed before Mother and Daddy remodeled when he was somewhere between 3 and 5, but I really don't recall. My place was across the hall.

My memories of the double bed are faded, too, except for the night SR threw up in my shoes. I remember that it seemed that SR was sick a lot during her high school years, possibly, I suppose, related to the problems with her appendix that eventually led to an appendectomy in our family. The nausea came on her suddenly, and I remember Mother patiently following behind with a mop and pail; I wonder now if she was grateful then for the linoleum tile floors we had in the days when carpet of any kind was a luxury we couldn't afford.

The night I recalled was another one of those times when SR woke up just enough to lean over the side of her bed and toss her cookies before she woke MJ enough to tell her she was sick. MJ is our saint in training, and she elected to try to help SR feel better while I went to get help. One look at my shoes was all it took for me: I had visions of slogging off to school the next morning with vomit still in my shoes.

I was old enough to go wake up Mother and Daddy, and when I wailed my way into their room, they were both up and out in seconds, Mother to take care of SR and weild the mop and Daddy to set up shop in the bathroom to calm me down and clean up my shoe. Most of my shoes except for my Sunday patents were pretty much washable, and by morning mine were clean and dry and fine to wear to school. That memory of sitting in the bathroom with Daddy cleaning my shoe and comforting me is still one of my strongest images of him.

Mother and Daddy added bedrooms to the house before SR went off to college, and I eventually got "promoted" into her small bedroom and twin bed after she was gone. I was fine with a twin bed—bigger than my half of a double and small enough not to take up much space in my room.

I got the queen when I got my first job after college because by then I was engaged and my guy and I had decided a queen would be large enough to be comfortable but small enough not to be wall-to-wall bed in our apartment. I don't recall at all where I slept on the bed while I was still single, but I think I sort of took my half out of the middle.

When we married, we had a bit of a discussion over who got which side of the bed, and I think it eventually came down to "my" side being the one closer to the bathroom in our first apartment so that I could get up and slip out of the house before the husband had to get up. I don't recall ever feeling as if my "side" of the bed was my "half" of the bed, but I didn't think much of that because I am physically smaller than the other occupant, and he seemed to move around in his sleep more than I did.

I didn't pay much attention to that until Number One Son came along and reached the age where he would slip downstairs from his room and slip into bed next to me. He never made much noise; he just quietly crawled in next to me, and if he moved again before morning, I seldom knew it. I remember waking up to think it was pretty amazing that he didn't fall off the bed because of the few inches he had available.

I became more aware of it when Soldier Son reached that age. Instead of settling for the ribbon of space between me and the edge of the bed, he'd crawl over me and proceed to flail his arms and legs enough that his dad banished him from the bed. We resolved that by putting a pallet on the floor near enough to me that he could feel comfortable, and all of us slept better for it.

When the spousal unit moved out, I inched a little nearer the center of the bed, but the alarm clock on the nightstand sort of limited my place to an arm's length from the snooze button. Before long, the unused side of the bed became piled with an assortment of paperwork as I burrowed into my room to work so the kids could have the open area for their entertainment; as long as the sounds from there were happy sounds and nobody was getting hurt, I was fine letting them have their space, and it sort of didn't occur to me that I was giving up mine.

Darling Daughter eventually observed that possibly working in my sleep space might not be an optimal lifestyle, so I reorganized my life enough to have the whole bed for sleeping, restricted only by the distance to the snooze button.

With the papers gone, all three cats and the dog started sleeping with me. Typically, I had a cat snuggled into my tummy, one parked behind my knees, and one nestled on my feet. The dog had plenty of room on the far side of the bed.

Gradually, all of those animals died off, and I replaced them with one new cat and a dog. At first, the cat liked to sleep with me, but the dog is clearly an Alpha Bitch, and she soon outlawed that.  AB typically sleeps at the foot of the bed, near where the previous dog slept, but she never relieves herself of guard duty; not only does she alert me to anything moving in or near the house, but she protects the bed from the cat and snaps at me if I move my feet. But for the last couple of nights, I've had one or another of the carry-on bags I'm packing for an upcoming trip to Los Angeles parked more or less in her spot, so she's had to move.

Last night, she snuggled right up next to me on the pillows. For some reason, I had a restless night (not anything, as far as I can tell, to do with the AB), so I found my self arranging and rearranging the pillows and bedding.

And wondering how it is that I sleep alone on a queen-size bed and still manage to wind up two inches from the edge.

Angel on my shoulder

I know that my ambivalence about religion frustrates some members of my family—my sisters, I'm sure, and probably also my Soldier Son to some degree, and no doubt others—but whatever my thinking may otherwise be, I'm pretty sure lately I've had an angel on my shoulder.

I was peripherally aware of that Wednesday night when I visited my sister Susan Rene the evening after her home was burglarized. I was hugely proud of her strength of spirit as I heard her tell caller after caller that she simply doesn't have room in her life for fear, even as she admitted her frustration at having lost a few very precious items among the assortment of valuables the thieves had stolen. I was—and still am—pretty sure I would at least be rattled by such an experience, and while I can't think of a thing I own as precious as some of her losses, I'm sure I'd be far more groused by it than she was.

Her first response to the discovery that her home had been breached had been to call her children, two of whom were johnny-on-the-spot to help her pick up the pieces and put her home—and her life—back together again. As she began to cope with the violation of her space, she discovered that her daughter had suffered her own traumatic experience early in the day: a jerk with more time on his hands than brains in his head had gone to great lengths to express his anger at her over a decision she had made that he didn't like, ultimately following her into a parking lot and keying the entire side of her minvan.

And I was ticked off because I had been careless enough to lose a $4 lipstick out of a shallow pocket on a pair of too-tight pants.

I drove home without incident on Thursday, mulling over for a part of the way that it's really kind of nice that we are angry about and hurt by events like this because they are so rare: SR has been living in her house for 39 years without anything so scary happening, and she figures she's got another 39 coming. I think there's something in that.

Friday night I was absolutely sure the angel on my shoulder was on duty when I realized I should have been t-boned at an intersection on my way home from an errand. I don't know what sort of side trip my brain had gone on, but I had pulled to a stop at a red light that I probably had seen go from green to yellow to red. For some reason, I looked up to my right and saw the green lights there, my brain triggered "green means go," and off I started into the intersection.

I realized my mistake—and how completely stupid it was—when I realized that the car approaching the intersection from my left was turning alongside me into the street I was on. (Fortunately—or maybe not—there were no cars to my right; maybe if I had seen cars when I saw the lights I'd have registered that it wasn't my turn.) I glanced to the left to see that the other car there, which should have proceeded straight across the intersection and t-boned me, was instead making an illegal left turn into the lane behind me.

Having heard my niece's story only a day or two before, I had visions of the driver being either a cop, doing his civic duty by giving me the ticket I had more than earned, or another crazed driver determined to chase me down and give me what-for for cutting him off and endangering both of us. I popped to attention and watched for police flashers, but I didn't see any. I did everything I could to drive flawlessly for the next several blocks, alert to the potential for the other driver to make sure I got my due, but in less than a mile, that driver turned and I was on my own again. I couldn't believe it. I thought about driving downtown and turning myself in for being an idiot.

I was back on the road today to drive to an old friend's house an hour away so we could go to The Nutcracker together, and this time I turned short of the exit to her house. Except that I  had to take a few ack roads, that trip was uneventful.

As soon as I got home, I buzzed around the house in packing mode so I could be ready to fly tomorrow to Darling Daughter's for Christmas. Late in the evening,when Number One Son got in from work, I wondered why I still hadn't received anything from the airlines about our flight, so I sorted back through my email to see what I had figured out wrong. Sure enough, it's because we don't fly tomorrow morning; in fact, our flight is Tuesday evening.

Turns out my failure to double-check means I'm losing a day and a half of vacation time that I could have saved for later, but that's okay; I'm looking forward to having two whole weeks away from the grind.

And I'm sure someone's parked an angel on my shoulder.

About that walking in the sand thing...

I've heard for years that walking in the sand, like along a beach, is a wonderful form of exercise.

Turns out that not so much if what you're doing is hauling shovelfuls of it across the back yard.

I sort of thought I had "simulated" the walking-in-the-sand thing when I made myself a pair of "rice socks" a few weeks ago. That actually started a couple of years ago, I guess, when I found a pair of "footwarmer booties" at WallyWorld and really like the experience. The "booties" were a rather normal-looking pair of houseshoes that had muslin inserts with rice in them. The idea was that you could pop the inserts in the microwave and warm them for a few seconds, then slip them into the booties to keep your feet warm. Since my extremities tend to be cold anyway, I thought they were a pretty cool—warm?—idea.

The only problem with them was that the inserts had only a little rice in them, so it just sort of sloshed around and didn't keep my feet nearly as warm as I thought they could. I sent them upstairs to my sewing room so I could recreate the inserts (and, potentially, even remake the booties in some color more interesting than muslin) with a healthier stuffing of rice.

Sending anything to the sewing room around here lately has been more accurately consignment to a black hole, so I don't have a clue what happened to them. But when the weather started to get chilly this year, I figured I could buy a fun pair of booties and make new inserts. I found a pair of socks for a dollar, poured in small amounts of rice, and sewed across the socks to keep the rice in "pockets." I can stick these into the microwave for a minute and drop them into a big pair of socks or a pair of fuzzy booties and enjoy having warm tootsies.

Walking on them is interesting, too; as the rice moves around under my feet, I get a lot of the same feeling as I get walking on sand, so I like to pretend it's actually good for me. Of course, taking 100 steps a day or so on them is probably not exactly a workout, but I've always been a huge fan of play-pretend.

And I can walk on real sand anytime I take a notion to. When my Soldier Son's dog Tank moved in with us a couple of years ago, I had an invitingly green spread of Asian jasmine covering my back yard. Jasmine seemed to be a good choice because I have had too much shade to encourage grass to grow back there, and the sprinkler system was never designed to reach anywhere near my back fence. Turns out jasmine doesn't hold up too well to large-footed dogs charging around the yard, so within a few months of Tank's arrival, my lush green had become mostly ghostly gray sand. Not too good for my housekeeping, but plenty of opportunity to walk on sand if I want to.

Not that I really wanted to this afternoon, but duty calls. Tank, it turns out, loves to play fetch, and his favorite spot for waiting for the ball is right at the edge of the built-up patio. But the patio—like the deck I had before it—keeps sinking. With the deck, I'm pretty sure at least part of the problem was that sand and detritus from the forest built up around the uprights and caused them to rot from the bottom; with the patio, the only thing I can figure is that the sand is gradually seeping out through the walls. Or, in the case of the corner where Tank likes to wait for the ball, maybe under them.

I had asked Number One Son, the current resident, some time ago to move some bricks around to form a sort of "landing" under the patio to keep the dogs from digging out more of the sand and helping it escape from the under the walls. Since I had finished a couple of projects this morning and had a bit of spare time on my hands, I decided that this was the day to make that happen.

I grabbed a rake and a shovel and hopped off the deck to see what I was going to have to do. Raking up "available"sand was clearly not going to make a dent in the hole the dogs had dug just by taking off from the "landing" to chase balls. But the other end of the chase has often entailed skidding to a stop next to the back fence, and walking around outside the fence shows that they've built it up over a foot in some places—plenty of dirt to level out a "landing" that would be less inviting than dirt.

I happily set off to get a shovelful of dirt and thought how healthy it would be to make a few trips over the loose sand between the deck and the fence. My Darling Daughter gave me a yoga mat for Christmas last year as part of a plea that I vegetate less and exercise more, and I sort of pledged to myself this year to work out every day until I get my weight down a few pounds as sort of a birthday gift to her. I didn't do the prescribed exercise video today, but I figured the hikes across about 15 yards of sand would do.

Logically, this should have taken only a couple of trips; after all, surely no self-respecting do-it-yourselfer would try to survive long without a wheelbarrow, and I have one, too. Except at this time of year it is doing duty in the garage keeping outdoor plants in out of the cold. Given the choice between trekking across the yard with shovelfuls of dirt or unloading the wheelbarrow to save myself a few trips, I opted for the exercise.

Mostly, it all went pretty well, too. I trudged back and forth across the yard probably 30 times with loads of dirt, and mostly the dogs only watched. There was that one time when they decided to play chase across the yard, and they thundered past me kicking up a wall of dust that made me think of a west-Texas sandstorm. I thought fleetingly that they had come pretty close to knocking me down, but as I lugged the dirt the rest of the way back to the patio, I realized that I probably should have been more scared that they might have knocked me down and left me bruised or broken or something—my sedentary life for the past several months probably hasn't done much to ensure bone strength—but instead I had thought that I might have to kill them if they caused me to lose my load of dirt.

Other than that, the activity was pretty uneventful. My face felt gritty, my hair turned stiff, and I still have sand between my toes, but I do have a sort of a rudimentary landing to try to hold some of the dirt inside the patio.

And I'm just sure I'm going to wake up in the morning feeling all exercised from walking in the sand.

Or in my rice booties, since it's supposed to freeze tonight.

Happy birthday, Punkin

Today is my daughter's birthday. It's not one of those "special" dates like "a quarter century" or whatever the "Big 0s" mean, but it's close enough to the Christmas season—and the end of grading mountains of papers—that I always seem to grow a little mellow thinking of her on "her" day.

I understand that she and Prince Charming are in San Diego for the weekend to see the sights, and her one big wish, as I understand is, was to do at least most of the weekend without electronic umbilicals to the rest of the world. Since I don't make a lot of phone calls and I don't use my phone for internet browsing, that wouldn't be very meaningful to me, but I've watched her enough to know that being out of touch could either be the roots of an honest vacation or make her stir crazy.

I got that information from reading her blog before they left, and I found myself rethinking where she is in life.

When she decided almost 10 years ago now to uproot herself from Texas and move to Los Angeles to go to USC and try her luck in theater arts, I got plenty of flack about how I was "pushing" her there and how I wanted this for her because she would be responsible for living the dreams I never realized.

How wrong that was.

I am a mole; she thrives in the sun.

I don't make friends easily; she practically fights people away.

I am a wallflower; she loves center stage.

I have to work hard to understand the world around me; she takes it in at a glance and usually gets it right.

I like being at home, in my small space with my little world wrapped around me like a cocoon; she chases every passing rainbow.

I like a sunny day that lifts some of what I generally see in shades of gray; she brightens LA's smog.

She said in her blog that she expects to move back to Texas in the next couple of years, and I find myself facing that with divided emotions.

I'll be absolutely appalled if she makes that kind of move without first being sure she'll be able to take care of her financial obligations, although I shouldn't worry; she has put together a better life for herself than a lot of theater arts students do, and she's still heart and soul into the theater, even if she's not acting. She's got a good head on her shoulders, so she'll be okay.

Having her here would mean that going to see her would be a matter of traveling a few miles down the road, one way or another, without the frustrations of air travel or being stuck on the other end with only my feet for transportation. On the other hand, since I'm pretty much a mole, it doesn't really mean that I'd see her much more often; both our lives are pretty overscheduled, and setting some specific times when we can actually visit may actually have advantages over a rather looser "oh, whenever" kind of deal.

And I think I'd miss California. I've "hitchhiked" more than once on her successes: when she has done well in life, I have been thrilled to be able to say, "That's my daughter," and knowing that she has been able to take herself to the left coast and thrive there has made me feel as if a little bit of me has that kind of tenacity, too.  Getting to set myself free of Texas, to go to west, and to see and hear and smell a place that is so foreign and yet so fascinating to me gives me a chance to feel as if my wings aren't quite so short and my world not quite so gray. I could miss that.

But wherever she goes from here, my heart goes with her. I know her dreams of Texas include finding a way to settle down and start a family (beyond her current little knot of PC and the Junkyard Dog), and I'd love to have grandbabies, too. I'm just not good at counting chickens before they hatch.

Today she's in sunny San Diego, about the last place I can imagine thinking of when I think of Christmas. But just the right kind of place, I suspect, for a December birthday.

Happy birthday, baby.

Workers in the attic

A convergence of recent factors pushed me into installing more workmen in my attic this week:

• The tax dudes tell me I can take a deduction of $1500 if I upgrade my air conditioning system before the end of the year.
• The son who deployed to Afghanistan last week has a lot of money in the bank and owes me enough of it to cover the cost of the new system.
• The system I had was more than 30 years old. Well, the air conditioner part was; the heater was replaced something like 10 years ago, but in the world of air conditioning systems, that means they're both pretty old.

This all sort of came to a head over the summer when we had Shrek living upstairs and I noticed a continual pouring of condensation off the upstairs system during the hottest month of the year, and when my energy bill came in after that month, I was almost apoplectic. I'm generally pretty green, and I've always run the air conditioning warmer and the heating cooler than most folks to save money and save energy. I don't think the upstairs was unusually cool during the summer; I think Shrek's video equipment was just broiling the system.

At some point, something in that system gave up and required a service call. I got the guy out here, and he replaced the part and got us going again for less than the energy bill had been. By then, the weather had taken a turn toward unseasonably cool, and I shut down the systems on both floors. But I took to heart the workman's observation that the other unit was really, really old, and this might be a good time to consider replacing it. And just think of all the money I would save by going from the old, energy-hog unit to a bright, new, efficient one!

Okay, I'm not good at math, but I know this much: if the electricity part usually only about half of my monthly bill from the city (which includes things like water and garbage pickup) and my monthly bill is usually not huge, then it will take the rest of my life for me to "save" enough to pay for a new system. Furthermore, as the guy explained to me, the system that gets the most stress is the upstairs one: since heat rises anyway, and that one is closer to the roof, it has to combat both the effects of sun on the roof and heat from downstairs. Sort of explains why that air conditioning unit only lasted about half as long as the one downstairs and the heater up there almost never trips on.

The only financial justification for this mess is to get the tax break, take advantage of the amount of money the soldier owes me, and deduct the remainder from the cost of the new unit I'd probably be buying in a few years anyway if I don't replace it now. So I bit the bullet and had it done.

Temporarily forgetting Margaret Joan's rule. My sister says a do-it-yourself job takes twice the amount of time you estimate, promoted to the next time unit: a 10-minute job will take 20 hours.

The workers showed up about 9 o'clock Thursday morning, ready to dismantle and remove my old system and plug in the new.

Of course it couldn't be that easy.

For one thing, nothing manufactured in 2010 bears much resemblance to anything manufactured in 1979, so "plugging in" was a somewhat bigger challenge. Even the cement pad beside the garage had to be replaced for the bigger new unit. And 30 years of people crawling around in the attic to store outgrown stuff hasn't done the duct work any favors, either. I remember thinking briefly as I chased one of the dogs out of the attic while the workers went to lunch that at least the weather was cool enough for attic work to be more comfortable.

In the daytime, at least. While the temperatures were just cool.

As the night set in and the units were still not all connected, I realized that I would have to come up with some alternative for keeping warm. I've had a heating pad on the foot of my bed lately to ward off Popsicle feet, and Soldier Son had sent me a wonderful, heavy, tiger-print blanket at the end of his duty in Iraq a few years ago. I bundled up in flannel pajamas, turned on the heating pad, and snuggled under my tiger for the night.

Getting up to a cold house Friday morning was harder. I layered on sweatpants and a hoodie, dragged my heating pad into my lounge chair, and curled up under my laptop to stay warm. By noon, the heater still wasn't ready yet, but the thermometer said it was warmer outside than in. I put out the dogs and headed to the office.

When I got home, the workmen had gone. Number One Son said they had left a couple of items to finish on Monday, but the system had tested out just fine and we could use it immediately.

The temperature was a balmy 72 degrees.

Me-ow?

I think my cat needs oiling.

Miss Kitty was an adorable little thing when I brought her home from the shelter several years ago, and I've felt very sorry that she has spent about half her life hiding out from Tank, my Soldier Son's rescue dog that appears to be about 60 pounds of Portuguese pointer. Tank is kind of hard to figure out: he may just really want to be buddies with Miss Kitty, or maybe he thinks she'd be a tasty lunch. I certainly don't blame her for facing up to him with a bit of trepidation.


This week was Kitty's annual check up, so I rounded her up, snapped a leash onto her collar, and stuffed her into the car. She isn't as bad as our previous cats whose Siamese yowls always made the trip interesting, but she did manage to sing the unhappy song for much of the trip. She bore up pretty well on the examining table, but she was more than happy to be set free back at the house.

Like all the other lifeforms around here, she's pretty fond of affection when she can get it, but if she has a choice of providers, I'm not usually high on her list. So I was a little surprised the other morning when she levitated onto my lap and started kneading my collarbone—making biscuits, as my brother says it. I was somewhat surprised by that: she normally isn't too eager to visit me anyway, and if she does, she doesn't usually seem particularly content.

So I was doubly surprised when she settled into a rhythm and started to purr.  At least, I think that was a purr. I haven't heard her purr much, so the sound that was coming out was a little hard to explain. It looked like she was purring, and it felt like she was purring, but the sound was more of a squeak, as if I were stepping on her tail.

Maybe she just needs oil.

The second-worst call

The worst phone call I can image ever getting is one where something horrible has happened to one of my children. I don't lie awake—any more, at least—worrying that that might happen; they all are adults now, and they appear to be reasonably healthy and happy.

The second-worst call is the one I got at 4:30 yesterday morning.

My middle child is a soldier, and built in to that description is the contingency that he can be injured or killed; it's just part of the job.

That contingency is exacerbated if he is deployed to a war zone. He has been in dangerous situations before: he volunteered for the Army Reserves shortly after Shrub Bush did his Yosemite Sam act in Iraq because my son believed our country had damaged a country that he needed to help clean up. I recognized that our nation was losing soldiers there and I worried about him, but I also had faith that he would come home safe and sound.

This time the war zone is Afghanistan, and I am not nearly so sure. We went into this war too fast and with too little consideration of who we were fighting and how we needed to fight; Shrub happily oversaw the dismissal of some of our most critical personnel when he fired large numbers of Arabic translators because he was more interested in their sexual orientation than in their skills, and he left us exposed to an enemy we could not understand linguistically nor culturally. As far as I can tell, we have never moved much beyond that, and our short-sighted politicos are less than eager to resolve anything—with the possible exception of dismantling our government altogether.


My phone doesn't often ring at 4:30. I shrugged off the blankets, fumbled a bit in the dark, and picked up the receiver.

"Hey," he said. "We're trying to get out of here; our plane's been delayed for hours. I hate snow." I had noticed on my weather-checker that the temperature in Baumholder had been 17 degrees a few hours earlier.

"On your way to Afghanistan?" I asked.

"Yeah."

"Did you get your lunch card?"

"No." He's been eating at the local fast-food shops. Presumably, the card made it to his post, but he had been too absorbed with preparations for his trip to even check his mail. I should expect it back here in a couple of weeks.

"I've gotta go; looks like they're finally loading us."

"I love you, son."

"You, too."

That's the last I've heard from him, and my heart sticks in my throat every time of recall that call.

The second-worst call in the world.

Livid

Some words just don't get enough time in the limelight, so it's time to give a shout out to livid.

Actually, it's just wonderfully appropriate for the student who felt seriously offended the other night when I asked her a too-hard question after her paper presentation.

The course I teach is called a "presentations" course, but the course description says it's a research opportunity. That's not quite accurate, either; the students are required to complete a summer internship of some sort before the senior year, and most of them do some sort of "independent project" that becomes the subject of their presentations at our student paper contest. Most of them don't need a semester of "research" to develop a contest presentation, so my job is to teach them to write a paper about the topic. I decided this year to make them "practice" their presentations in a session with me to earn credit for the course.

The downturn in the economy in the past few years has has the twin effects of increasing our student population and decreasing internship opportunities, so a pretty big percentage of our students haven't had internships when they get to my class. The first of the semester this year was a scramble as they looked for topics for papers, but most of them came up with some idea or another.

I started listening to presentations early in the month, and earlier this week I was feeling pretty smug about how well things were going. 

I had felt guilty for a while after I told one of the girls that I thought she needed to make some significant changes to her presentation. I tried to help her understand that my biggest problem was that she didn't appear to recognize what good work she had done, and the changes I was suggesting were an attempt to play up that fine work. Her reaction didn't suggest that she really thought I was trying to help her, but she was at least receptive enough to be willing to try to satisfy me.

Before many sessions had taken place, the joke among the students was pretty much that one student would present; the others would have a civilized, somewhat professional question-and-answer session; and then I would tear into them about things they needed to do to get the presentation up to snuff. Some of them seemed really attentive to my suggestions because they really want to do well at our contest, some were somewhat cynical about it, and for some, I just didn't see much point in saying anything.

And then we get to Miss Livid. This self-confident young woman started her presentation with a slide that had both her name and the name of a graduate student on it, which she explained by saying, "He did the work." Since the "rules" clearly say that the student is supposed to do an "independent" project, I jumped the gun at the end of the presentation and said,"I'm concerned about you. I need you to answer this question: What did you do?"

"I did the research."

That didn't satisfy me, so I asked again, this time with a little different emphasis: "What did you do?"

"I did the research," she repeated, stepping out from behind the monitor.

I asked again, and this time she said, "I don't understand what you mean. I did the research." At each question, she came closer to me.

By this time, I was pretty sure she hadn't done enough of the project to know what "research" means, so I pressed again: "What exactly did you do?"

She had come down the length of our long conference table to where her pack was sitting in a chair, reached inside it, and pulled out a stack of papers. "There. That's what I did," she said.

"So you downloaded and printed some papers?"

"No I read them. I read some of them. I mentioned the one by ------."

"Reading the literature is not 'doing' the research," I said. "It's an important part of the project, but it comes before the research. The question you have to answer is what you did in the project."


I've seen a dozen presentations since then, so I don't remember how she extracted herself from the situation, but she plopped down in a chair on the opposite side of the table from her bag and sulked there through several more presentations. In fact, I think it was close to an hour before I took a short break, and she stomped out of the room with me. I didn't have to ask how she felt about my questions.

"You had no reason to call me out like that and embarrass me in front of my friends," she spat out.

"You're right; I'm sorry," I answered.

"You haven't done that to anybody else," she almost hissed.

"Yes, I have—just not in your group," I said.

She stormed at me for several more minutes before she finally realized that I was not willing to believe that she had actually done the research, especially not after she let slip that the grad student had done all of the work during the summer before she ever talked to him and that she had "at least talked to him enough to know pretty much what it was about." I figured that "least" was about the size of it.

She had good reason to be afraid: as the course instructor, I have the privilege, if I choose to exercise it, of failing her in the course because of her academic dishonesty. Furthermore, if she can't make the project seem to be her own at the paper contest, she could be stopped from graduating. Except that that's never happened in my 20 years in the department, and I don't see it happening in the future.

I did what I could to assure her that I would not flunk her now (tempting as that is....) because I have accepted the work she has done so far. Besides, if she can cobble together an answer to the question that will fly at the paper contest, she'll be home free. I tried to be as reassuring as I could be, but she stomped out as angry as she had been from the time I first challenged her.

Livid.

And that wasn't all...

I was pretty sure that my life was going to settle down once all the twenty/thiry-somethings cleared out and I could get back to something close to routine, until another message popped up on my instant messenger:

Does my sister still have my car?

Yes.

What's Prince Charming's phone number?

555.555.5555

A couple of beats later, my phone rang. Darling Daughter on the other end:

"I'm in Soldier Son's car and I've looked all over, but I can't find his meal ticket."

Meal ticket? Now we're looking for a meal ticket?

DD has borrowed SS's car on Monday so she and PC could visit his family and friends down the road, and SS was pretty sure he had left the meal ticket somewhere in it. I'm not too sure why the US military still issues badly laminated meal tickets to soldiers (our university has had swipe stripes on student ID cards for years for campus purchases), but sure enough, SS had left home without his.

I had seen it. Somewhere. I had been in his car, and it could easily enough have been in his console. I also had been in his room, which we had ransacked in the early hours of Sunday morning, and it could have been in there. One other place came to mind.

Text to Number One Son, who was home from class:

SS has lost his meal ticket. See if it's on the marble top dresser.

Seconds later, the response:

I've got it in my hand.

Ours may be the only university in the country with an airport on its property, although I suppose others may have fully functioning, stand-alone post offices. I swung by on the way into the office this afternoon to express-mail the lunch card.

I'm really proud of my soldier, but the one who forgot his lunch card? That one's still my son!

Of *course* it couldn't have been that simple....

The kids' idea to stay up all night and see SS off to the airport at 6 o'clock on a Sunday morning amused me, but I figured I'd sneak out around 1 and get some sleep. Which seemed okay until I realized that it was already about 3 and I was sort of running interference between the honoree and his guests. T heyhad decided to hang out on the driveway instead of the dining room, where he was sort of hoping to play 42. I tried to be subtle about suggesting that at least some of them might go inside.

Once they drifted in in twos or threes to join him in dominoes (none of them seemed to know how to play 42 except the most annoying one in the bunch), they got the sillies and started reciting the scripts of favorite old movies—way too much fun for me to miss for a couple of hours of possible sleep. So I wound up staying up with them.

As 6 o'clock neared, I again urged SS to get his stuff together and into the truck so we could make our dawn adventure, and we all piled in. Since I was the only one who hadn't been drinking, I drove, and the rest of the crowd sorted themselves into the nooks and crannies left around SS's pile of travel goods.

We zipped the couple of miles to the airport, where everybody tumbled out of the van for hugs and good-byes in maybe the sweetest parting scene I've ever seen. SS took off for the door, and the rest of us piled back into the truck. I watched as he lugged his stuff up to the counter and started to check in, and the lump forming in my throat urged me to linger just a few minutes more until he headed to the security area. But the sleepy people in the truck, the cold ones in the back, and the growing line of traffic behind me told me I needed to move on.

I headed out of the airport and to the south to deliver the only person who wasn't planning to sleep at my house to his apartment. The trip took only a few minutes—nothing in our town takes many—so we  were soon back at the house and ready to turn in for a few hours of rest.

And then the phone rang.

SS was on the other end, furious because he had been calling almost since we had pulled out of the loading zone and hadn't reached us. I didn't have pockets in the pants I was wearing, and I had left my cell phone at home. He had tried his sister, but she wasn't answering, either. (I don't know whether she had her phone with her or not; he thought it had a dead battery.)

His problem was urgent: the page of orders that would get him through customs in Germany was not with him, and he had to have it.

NOS answered the only corded phone in the house and got the word that SS needed the paper, which was supposed to be next to the tv in his room. DD was on it—up the stairs in record time—as I got the cordless phone to stay in communication with him, especially since the paper clearly wasn't there. SS had had me sorting through a stack of other papers in search of my updated power of attorney, and DD ripped through all of them in search of the orders. They simply weren't there.

I jumped into the first car on the driveway and roared back to the airport to get him to come and look for himself. If we found it quickly enough, we might—just might—still get him on the plane.

No such luck. He looked through the mess in the room until he finally realized that since it had been a bad photocopy to begin with and had been folded to fit into his pocket, he could easily have brushed it off into the trash with other papers. He grabbed the trashcan he had been using and dumped it over, to no avail. Hoping that the paper might still be in the outside trash can, he raced down the stairs and dumped it over. By some miracle, he had missed Thursday's trash collection: the orders were there.

But by now it was almost time for the plane to leave, and even though he had a ticket, we didn't have much hope of getting him aboard. If we didn't, we'd have to get him to the connecting flight—out of Dallas, which is about a 3-hour drive. Add in the couple of hours he might need to get through customs in a big airport, and we had only a couple of hours of leeway. We had to try.

DD insisted on going back to the local airport with us to see if she could help get him on the plane here, but to no avail; I suspect that the airline had called his name a time or two while they were loading the plane, but when he didn't respond, they gave his seat to somebody on standby. Our only recourse was a long drive on little sleep.

I had asked DD to give up her morning to make the drive with me, and she at first had grudgingly agreed to go. But she was right: this was supposed to be a vacation trip for her, she hadn't been feeling well for a couple of days, and she badly needed rest. She convinced NOS to go, but I really wanted him to stay around so that if the crowd started to wake up before I got back, he could supervise some rudimentary housekeeping.

SS and I were left with each other. His steel blue eyes are often playful, but when he is serious, they are firm. He argued logically: he had drunk less than anyone at the party except for me, and the morning's misadventures had been a huge wake-up call for him. He also had slept 6 hours later than me Saturday morning, and he had spent a year in Iraq as a driver for the military. He could drive to Dallas if I could handle the trip home.

Worst-case scenario, if I wasn't up to driving when we arrived, I have a sister in Dallas who would let me crash at her place. That wasn't a good plan for several reasons: this is the worst of all possible times for me not to be available to zip into the office, so driving back on a Monday morning wasn't at all optimal. And if I had to drive out of Dallas on a Sunday, I'd much prefer morning to night. And I've been getting emails from my sister lately that said she was miserable with seasonal crud, and I can't afford to get sick.

I grabbed my favorite cuddly blanket and changed from the pants without pockets to pants with, and we loaded into the car. SS grabbed a handful of cokes from the fridge, threw a stack of CDs into the back seat, and climbed behind the wheel. I laid the seat back as far as it would go and pulled the blanket up over my head to keep the sun out.

I don't have any idea how long I slept. I remember thinking I was awake for miles and miles, and I think I sensed when SS turned from the highway near our house to the one that would take us halfway to Dallas, but I don't remember slowing down for the first town, maybe 20 miles away. I roused up when he made a pit stop about an hour down the road, so he asked if I needed anything. I muttered something like " peanuts or something," and was pleased when he came back with cashews instead. I was just sure I'd know when he made the next highway interchange, but I suspect all I was sensing was a change of lanes or two.

When he pulled off after about another hour for another pit stop, I was ready to go in, too. I saw when we came out that he'd gotten himself an energy drink, so I don't know how well he was really holding up, but he seemed fine. In fact, he soon became downright chatty, and over the last 50 miles or so, we had a really nice visit. He doesn't have much experience at being the "honoree," so he didn't know how to respond to it, but his words on the last leg of the trip were all about how glad he was that he had sprung for the tickets and had had such very special people around him.

Gracie Garmin was no more help than the highway signs about getting us into the airport; for some reason she routed us to the north entrance, which wound back around to the south to get in, and we had no clue about which terminal we needed until we passed the toll booth on the way in. We arrived at about 11 for his 2:40 flight, leaving him enough time to check in, go through security, and hang out at the USO before he had to board the plane. Of course, we both realized at about the time we got to the airport that if he had left home without the orders, the USO might have been able to fix him up—but we both were glad we didn't have to rely on that.

He found the terminal, piled out, and grabbed his gear, and I moved over to the driver's seat. As soon as I texted the crowd at home that I was on my way back, I unwound my way out of the airport without problems except for my curiosity about why Gracie had steered us through Fort Worth to get there and through Dallas to get back. Except for a U-turn in Euless that  made no sense to me, the trip was a pretty straight shot to US 20, and the rest of the road was a trail I had followed plenty of times before.

I made it back to the first northbound pit stop before I slowed down for gas, and I let the home crowd know I was about an hour away. They were all just starting to move and seemed pretty amazed that I was so close to home. A few minutes later, DD called to tell me they were about to leave for a bar where they could get food and watch football. Did I want to join them?

My knee-jerk said no, because I didn't need more junk food in my life and I wanted to go to bed. (Except for the sleep on the trip north, I had been up for more than 30 hours.) But on further consideration, I figured I could join them long enough to feed myself, and if I wanted to crash before they left, I'd have my car. I called back to find out where to meet them and joined them for a meal. One team won; the other lost in the last few seconds of play; and the food and the company were well worth the trip.

I managed to stay vertical long enough to watch in amazement as my house guests made a commendable stab at straightening up my house while DD made a perfunctory visit to her dad. When she got back, the whole group piled back into the pickup to attend a "house party" that turned out to be in the very house where I grew up.

I barely managed to get through a quick bath before I tucked myself in before 8 p.m., but I still resented the alarm when it finally dragged me out of bed at 7.

When I got to the office around noon, a single instant message popped up on my computer screen: safe in germany.

I finally could rest.

Whoop! He called it!

When Soldier Son stepped off the plane from Germany a couple of weeks ago, he had one thought on his mind: Aggie football. Number One Son was eager to pick him up from the airport, but SS's instructions were explicit: my job was to pick him up at the airport, and NOS's job was to get a table at a local bar that would have the game on tv.

Almost from the time he got off the plane, SS was all about the Aggies. "They're better than people think," he assured me. "Nobody is giving them credit for how good they are. The coach knows what he's doing." I was so glad to have him home after almost a year away that I didn't care what he had to say, and seeing his determination that he was supporting the right team had me almost as excited as he was.

The first play of the game made him look right. The bad guys snapped the ball badly, and our guys had 2 points. SS lit up like a Christmas tree.  By the half, we were up 19 zip, and SS was sailing. In the third quarter, though, the bad guys roared back 17 points, and I was in a knot over what looked to me like a looming loss. NOS had crashed in his car (he had been up late for several nights getting the house ready for his brother to come home, and a few beers had put him down). I left SS with a friend and took NOS home.

A few minutes later, Darling Daughter's Prince Charming tweeted me: "How's SS liking the game?" I had run out, so I had no clue. "33-19" came the answer. In a few seconds, "Yep, 33-19. That's the final." I had to work on that a few minutes to realize that we weren't the team with the 19. SS had been right; whatever anybody thought, we had clearly won that one.

A friend from Germany whose family lives up the road a few miles had an extra ticket for the next week's game, and SS took him up on the offer to use it. He came home beaming about the 42-30 score against a team that was supposed to be much better than ours.

I was a little worried about this week: tonight is SS's last night at home before he ships back to Germany and then on to Afghanistan for a year-long tour, and I'm more than a little sad to see him go. But he had purchased tickets weeks ago so he and his siblings and cousins could go to see our team play a team that is ranked much higher than ours, and I just wasn't convinced that the evening was likely to go very well for him.

As things turned out, I could have gone to the game except that I was working on a project for my consulting business and, well, I didn't think I could cope well with a game that was likely to be as disappointing as I thought this one could be.

As it turned out, I dropped the troops off for a tailgate party and headed home to work on my job. After a couple of hours I surfed the web enough to discover that we had held the bad guys to 3 points in the first quarter, which was much better than the blowout I was afraid of.

A little later, I saw that we had tied it up at 3, which was not exactly a big win for the good guys, but it was okay. Two weeks ago, the bad guys scored on us in the third quarter; last week we pulled ahead in the third. This week we pulled ahead, but in keeping with the early part of the game, only by 3. Good, but not good enough.

I checked back several times in the fourth, but after I saw a tied score at a little more than 6 minutes left, the website I was checking seemed to freeze up, and the time and the score stayed stuck. When I finally got a new time on the game clock, I also saw a new score—and we were ahead!

SS organized the troops to come back home instead of hanging out at bars after the game (fighting the traffic to get home would be less trouble than standing in line), and the troops have decided to stay up all night so we can drop him at the airport early in the morning together.

I don't know how this trip has been for him; he's had some chances to get spoiled and some frustrations that he hasn't been able to do everything he had hoped to do. But I do know that he couldn't be happier about his favorite team and his favorite sport.

He called it!

I like happy grams

I didn't want to go to work this morning (well, okay, by the clock this is Saturday, but my body still thinks it's Friday) because all my kids—Number One Son, Soldier Son, Darling Daughter, and Prince Charming—and all three dogs were at home. But I had to go because I had an appointment with a student to discuss his problems with his term paper for my course.

The student showed up late, which gave me a chance to check my office email before he got there. To say I was intrigued to see a message with "Smiley High School" as the subject line might be an understatement: I had started my teaching career there nearly 40 years ago, but I hadn't been back since I left there after 5 years on the job.

The message turned out to be from a former student who had been in my class that very first year. He went on from the school to become a missionary, and he has moved to my town as Director of International Relations at our university's new health science center.

He had stumbled across my name in a hunt for something else, and he emailed me just to see if I were the teacher he remembered from all those years ago. I have to say that his memory is better than mine is; I don't remember many names from that first year, and his isn't one of them.

But the message—including that he was happy to see that I'm still teaching—was a delight.

The best happy grams of all are the ones you never expect.

Margaret Joan's rule of thumb

My next-older sister, Margaret Joan, has joked for years about her formula for determining the amount of time a do-it-yourself project will take. My best recollection of it is this:

• Estimate the amount of time you think the job should take.
• Double it.
• Advance it to the next unit of time.

I've always found it amusing, in spite of the fact that it has too often been freakishly accurate for me. I  forgot that it also applies to contract projects.

I should have remembered that tidbit from my days in gradeschool when mother and daddy remodeled our house and mother complained frequently about "3-day delivery," which she said was the amount of time all deliveries take to arrive at the job site. Obviously, some showed up a bit earlier; most arrived a good deal later. But the contractors always assured her the needed materials would be delivered in 3 days; apparently, some 3-day stretches are longer than others.

My case is that I have toyed for a long time with the problem of corroded knobs in the upstairs bathtub that have needed to be replaced. I had a plumber in several years ago now to switch out the valves in the downstairs tub. That was a pretty serious problem that entailed taking out a kitchen cabinet shelf to get to the waterworks, but the cabinet problem was within my range of engineering, so we managed to handle it efficiently enough. And the valves downstairs weren't as badly corroded as these were, probably at least partly because I replaced them several layers of corrosion earlier.

At some past time, I took out the upstairs potty so I could tile the floor up there, and my lack of plumbing expertise meant that I spent a whole lot of time crouched in a pocket of the attic next to the bathroom wall replacing a pipe that I might not have had to replace if I'd gone to a plumbing supply house and bought a different part than the one the d-i-y shop had. (I try to ease that memory by telling myself that the pipe I replaced really was too corroded to accept the easier-to-fix part.)

That lesson was enough to tell me that the tub repair upstairs wasn't going to happen from inside an adjoining cabinet or attic; this tub abuts the outer wall of the house beyond the attic, so getting to the valves was going to require cutting in through the stucco on the outside and hoping the slope of the adjoining roof would allow that to reach the valves, or cutting out at least some of the tiles on the inside.

I called a couple of plumbers, and one offered to come out for a free estimate. The young kid who showed up for the estimate told me about a couple of options, one of which would entail only cutting through the tiles in the area where the pipes come into the system and putting a "chromette" plate behind the shower valve. The price for the plate (which turned out to be plastic) was ridiculous, but it was both more efficient and cheaper than Option 2: retiling the entire shower. (This place is 30+ years old, and I suspect the tile color in the bathrooms was "whatever was going out of style and therefore on sale cheap." Knocking out and replacing a few tiles was pretty much out of the question.)

The plumber kid told me the whole job would take a couple of hours, which would mean we'd have plenty of time to do the job, start to finish, well ahead of Soldier Son's scheduled return from overseas duty this weekend.

Or not. PK arrived as scheduled yesterday morning and carefully removed a couple of tiles in the area of the valves and frowned. He removed a few more tiles and reported the bad news: apparently because the tub is in a corner of the house, the builders had an upright running between the hot-water valve and the shower head. For reasons nobody really seems to know, the wall there is thicker than most,with two 2x4s filling the space where one should normally be. The builders had bored a hole in the front 2x4 so they could run the hot water pipe through it.

All of this meant that PK couldn't possibly reach the pipes he needed to fix without knocking out far more tiles than his little plate could cover, and he couldn't possibly finish the job in his estimated 2 hours.

I had sort of assumed I might be looking at retiling the shower anyway, so I told him to do what he needed to do. That entailed not only knocking out a lot of tiles but also building a complex piping system to move the valve stems forward enough to fit into the new single-handle valve. And cutting through the odd 2x4 that had had the pipe running through it. (PK cut it more than I think he needed to, but I think there's plenty of wood left up there to keep the house from caving in.)

By noon, I had two plumbers and a tiler in my bathtub. The tiler came in and got his measurements, looked around a bit, and assured me he could get tiles in today if I picked a style he had in stock. All I had to do was drop by his office and pick out my tiles.

When I got to his office, he showed me several suggestions, and we agreed on a plan. He didn't actually have my tiles in stock, but he expected them today, and he could have tilers at my house before noon. As long as 3-day delivery didn't come into play.

All I had to do was get the old tiles, the backboard, the mortar, and the wire mesh that used to be hung behind tiles out of the way before they arrived.

Fortunately, Number One Son has been eager to work around the house lately because I'm willing to help him pay his flight fare to go visit a buddy in Denver in January. He's pretty much paid off the ticket, but he was short on effort on last month's rent, so I was willing to bribe him to tear out the old tile. I forgot at first that I actually own a sheetrock saw, so he muddled through with a couple of cutting blades, a heavy pair of work gloves, a 22-ounce hammer, and a 2-pound sledge. Four hours or so after he started, he was finishing up with his Shop-Vac.

The tilers arrived bright and early this morning and puttered around for several hours before I had to leave for the office. I don't have any idea how long they stayed here, but when I got home, they had tiles stuck in the right places with little blue plastic separators scattered merrily throughout; they're do back tomorrow to do the grouting, and then I'll be able to get the plumbers back to finish up with the faucets and handles.

If things go well, I'll get them back here tomorrow, or they may not be able to get here until Friday.

Which means that our 2-hour job could easily fit write within MJ's estimate of 4 days.

And it's not even do-it-yourself!

My house smells like Sunday

I have a pot roast simmering on the stove, and my house smells like Sunday.

I don't suppose we really had pot roast for lunch every Sunday when we were kids, but that's the strongest memory I have: that wonderful salt-and-peppery smell and the snapping sizzle as  Mother seared the roast just before we left the house for Sunday school and church, and then the warm, rich smell when we came back a couple of hours later.

We pretty much tumbled out of the car and into the house to go change out of our "church" clothes while Mother readied the mashed potatoes and gravy. I have memories of salad and something green—I suppose green beans or peas or something—most of the time, but Sunday for me was pot roast and mashed potatoes and gravy. Anything else was just extra.

From my perch among the riches I  have, I can hardly imagine how Mother fed a family of seven on one roast that was probably not bigger than the one in my pan—and then had enough left over to drown in a thicker gravy or simmer with a bit of barbecue sauce or chunk into a hearty soup for supper on Monday—but somehow she always did. And I remember liking the roast the second time around every bit as much as I liked it the first.

Mine won't taste as good as Mother's, I'm sure. I got started okay, but then when I had the pan too hot, I hit the wrong stove button to turn it down and inadvertently turned on a different burner instead. Fortunately, nothing burned except one side of the roast, and maybe simmering it a while will sort of even that out.

And I've never been able to replicate her gravy quite the way she did it, so we're likely to have something closer to "au jus" than what I remember, but that will be okay.

I'll like our potatoes better: Number One Son and I will leave the skins on (no instant potatoes in our house!) and leave them a little bit lumpy (so they don't feel like they came out of a box). I remember Mother pulling potatoes out of the pan and whipping them up with her old yellow Mixmaster to get them light and fluffly, and one way I've always rebelled, I guess, is that I exalt the lumps that boast the "real," hearty, original potato.

And I have no clue what we'll scrounge up for the "green" on our plates, but I know we'll have to find something. I've never really glommed onto the fancy new "food pyramid" or two that have come into vogue in recent years, but I still try to keep an eye on the "basic four," so our protein and starch will obviously have to share space with at least one vegetable.

I'm not dragging out Mother's old gold-rimmed china for dinner tonight, and I won't be drinking tea from her goblets. It won't be quite the same on my stoneware and plastic cup, but I can tell from the smell wafting from the kitchen that our meal will be just the ticket on this slightly chilly evening.

And I'll go to bed in a house that smells like Sunday.

Shrek’s dad

The current occupant of the extra room upstairs is the son of a couple who have determined that their life’s mission is to serve the needs of the people of Swaziland, where 50% of the population tests HIV positive. Shrek’s dad is an emergency care doctor who is well-qualified to minister to both their medical and their spiritual needs; his wife teaches the children English, helping them develop reading skills by studying from the book of Mark.

Dad has been back in Texas for several days now on something of a sabbatical and fund-raising mission. Since the home they built to their own specifications on a piece of land large enough to breed horses hasn’t sold in the months since they left for their new life in Swaziland, he moved back into it to camp out for the next several weeks and have a headquarters for his fund-raising opportunities.

Shrek and Number One Son have gone out to visit dad several times and to clean up the “guest house” on the property so Shrek can move into it; he'll be the local caretaker until the place sells. Sunday night dad invited us out for dinner there, ostensibly to thank NOS for his help and me for boarding Shrek for the past several weeks, but likely also to give dad some company; rolling around in that big, empty house for several days is probably plenty to make him lonely when he’s used to having a wife and busy life around.

Dad is 78 but in excellent health, and he was proud to show off his cooking skills on his classy convection stovetop, quickly sautéing a salmon steak and a potful of mixed greens. The guys disappeared for most of the time he was cooking (I suspect pursuing their connections with coffin nails), so I asked dad about his story. I found out about three older half-brothers I hadn’t known Shrek had, along with several amusing stories about how dad and his wife had wound up together (although surprisingly I didn’t find out much about Swaziland).

The boys drifted back in time to eat but disappeared before time to clean up. Dad continued his story until about the time I was ready to call a halt to it, which was also about the time the boys showed back up to “rescue me” from dad’s long-winded tale. I played along and was happy to get home, whether I had been “rescued” or not.

Yesterday was my long day at the office—my class meets at 5 and lets our around 6:30—so I was expecting NOS to take care of supper for me. He called to let me know dad had invited Shrek and him back out to eat and assured me that he’d bring home a corner of his steak if I didn’t get home in time to go with them. As it turned out, I had several items to handle before I could leave the office, so I pulled into the driveway just as they were coming out the door. They piled into my car and off we went.

This time I knew about dad and the long-winded stories, and I was already tired from the day at the office, so I was all set to watch for opportunities to extricate myself shortly after we ate. I even had a good excuse: it was late, I was tired, and I needed to get my rest!

True to form, as soon as dinner was over, the boys lit out to light up, so I was left visiting with dad. This time the conversation turned to writing poetry and some poems he was proud of that his wife had written. Obviously, I really needed to see her work, so when the guys came back in, dad got Shrek to help him hook up his printer so he could print them out for me.

While they solved the computer problems, NOS went quietly about cleaning up the kitchen. He couldn’t locate dish soap, but he figured a good rinse with hot water would be at least a head start, so he happily worked on scrubbing out the stuck-on residue from the cooking pans. He also splashed out the dishes we had used for dinner, and I had dad plenty wound down to let us go.

In one of his rare shows of energy, Shrek decided he could help dad out by rinsing out the remaining dishes littered about the kitchen, so he piled up a stack of gently-used Styrofoam plates and some plastic glasses and started rinsing and wiping them. Since I was eager to go, I felt as if he took interminably long times to rinse each plate, but then he started the cups.

Keeping in mind that he hadn’t located soap, about the best he could hope for was a thorough rinsing, which by my definition entails splashing a bit of water into the bottom of the cup, swishing the cup a bit, wiping the lip, and flashing back under the water. If I have more than one or two to wash at my house, I fill a sink with  enough water to swish them out, and I often drain and refill it to rinse.

Not Shrek. He set the faucet to spray and patiently waited as it slowly filled each glass. He wiped blindly around the rim, emptied the water, then filled the cup again to rinse it. Each cup took forever, and he “washed” a dozen or more that way. (I was leaning on the counter next to a bottle of dishwasher soap. I handwash dishes at home because NOS and I usually accumulate a couple of plates and glasses and a pot that can’t go in the dishwasher; for this pile of stuff, I would definitely have cranked up the machine.)

Dad had plenty of time to print not only the poem that I just had to read but to locate, print, and tell me the story behind at least two more. He admitted he was prejudiced about their quality because they were written by the wife that he adores; I thought they were okay but certainly not remarkable. Of course, I was tired and I wanted to go home, so I might have been biased, too.

When Shrek finally had "washed" all the dishes he saw, we started making our way to the door—now already after 10 o’clock. As soon as we got out of earshot of the house, the boys started apologizing again for dad’s long-windedness.

“Dad?” I asked. “You’re blaming dad for this? Baloney!”

Huh? Dad was the one telling the story, wasn’t he?

“Yeah, but last time I was finding out interesting stuff, and I could have left whenever I wanted to. Tonight, I didn’t want to make dad feel like some woman was coming into his home and cleaning up after him, so I stayed out of your way.

“The problem is not that dad was telling too many stories. You guys don’t know how to wash dishes!”