Do you ever have those days when you know that you should write deep and thought provoking things to prove that you’re giving proper reverence to events?
OK. So a sentence that was supposed to be simple has turned into this cryptic, convoluted monster but I’m so sick of reading it over and over and trying to fix it that I’m just going to leave it the way it is.
Apparently today is just a day for really long sentences that make sense if you read them quickly and don’t pay too much attention to them.
While we were home for Thanksgiving, Mom and I got to talking about old Christmas ornaments that I remembered from when I was little. You have to understand that I’ve never loved Christmas – even when I was little – but there are a couple of ornaments that make me feel all warm and fuzzy.
One of those ornaments is from a set of Danish ornaments that my grandparents always put on their tree.
They’re these little plastic top hat looking things with a piece of tin that spins when you blow on it and I can remember sitting under the Christmas tree and spending hours [I was easily amused back then] blowing on those ornaments and listening to them as the tin whirred around and around.
Since Mom wasn’t sure where the ornaments were, we planned on me coming back this week.
Mom would watch the kids and I could go through my grandparents’ attic and get what I wanted.
The drive to Arkansas was hell. OK. Maybe not really Hell [big h] but hell [little h] since I hate driving in the rain. And when I say “rain” I don’t mean sprinkles. I mean blowing sheets of rain that rendered my windshield wipers useless. The kids were oblivious since I had my laptop hooked up in the SUV with Up playing on repeat.
And on a very important side note…since my laptop battery is deader than a doornail [is deader a word?] I had to get a power converter and the thing I got just might be the coolest thing I’ve seen in a coon’s age. The converter [you plug it into your cigarette lighter and then you plug stuff into it] is shaped like a coffee cup.[affiliate link] How cool is that? That power converter saved me while I was stuck in traffic in Memphis.
When I say stuck in traffic, I’m talking about this insanity:
If you’ve never driven to Memphis from Arkansas, you should know that you have to drive over the “Old Bridge” or the “New Bridge” because of this thing called the Mississippi river. I sat on the interstate [speed limit 70mph] with my SUV in park for thirty minutes in the far left lane – I needed to be in the middle lane – and finally a nice 18 wheeler driver let me in the middle lane.
My view went from the above picture to this:
…and that was my view for another 15 minutes.
I finally got smart and took an an alternate route.
The whole visit went well and I got a lot of ornaments from my childhood that now my kids seem to love as much as I did. And there’s something really cool about seeing Cara sit under our tree and blow on the top hat ornament things.
And then she lays on the kitchen floor at Mom’s house and tries to eat the head off of her Barbie and all I can think is, “Dude, you’re such a dork”.
Truck and Cara images| Amy Tucker Other image|Yves.
