A Charmed Life

My Momma Done Told Me

Happy Easter Sunday!  And to the Greek Orthodox branch of my family, happy Easter-candy-on-sale-Eve!  Aunt Deb's gonna hook you up and good.  The same goes for the person who can finish that quote without Googling it first!  First person in the comment section with the right answer (hint: the answer is somehow relevant to Easter) gets a box of See's Scotchmallow Eggs, along with my undying love and respect.  But I totally get it if you'd rather have the candy.  Dark chocolate, marshmallow and caramel...does it get any better than this?  If you don't like dark chocolate...well then you're a heathen, and begone with ye!

I thought about my mom all day today. While running, of course, since my September race is in her memory.  At church, because the Easter flowers made me think of her in the yellow dress she wore to my First Communion.  Mostly, though, the holiday brought back so many memories of her because it was one of the times she really had the chance to shine.

Mom was a great mother, both generous and creative, and she really pulled out the stops for Easter. Every year she'd go to Bromilow's Chocolates (if you're in the NJ area, check 'em out, they're awesome) and load up on chocolate bunnies and foil-wrapped eggs.  I still can't eat a chocolate bunny without wincing (I can't help it, I'm sensitive!), but those eggs were the star of the show.  Some of them went into our baskets (and although we never had much money, we always had our own basket) along with the standard jelly beans, malt eggs and Peeps.  The rest of them were the quarry in our annual Easter egg hunt.  Every year, Mom would write a poem, customized for whatever home we were in, and hide the eggs in batches of three for my brothers and me.  Those little eggs really got around...we'd find them hiding in the bookshelves, taped under the desk, even in the spider plants.  We begged for those hunts even when we were way too old for them.  I think I even took over one year, because they gave us such a laugh.  I wish I had a sample here to post...maybe next year, after we unpack.

I couldn't replicate the chocolate egg hunt at my house this year.  For one, Seph is too young to understand the rhymes and follow the directions.  For another, I have pets, and my first instinct when seeing something brown on the rug is not to eat it. But the last directive my mom ever gave me, in the letter she left for me after her passing, specifically mentioned keeping the family traditions going.  What, might you ask, is the time-honored Angelo family Easter tradition?  The "dud" egg. 

It's easy.  You start with perfectly normal egg dye- your choice. Now attempt to color said egg in an unusual hue.  The standard goal is purple, although salmon is a good choice some years.  The object is to end up with a hideously ugly egg that can only redeemed itself as an egg salad sandwich. This is accomplished, either accidentally or on purpose, by moving the egg from one color bath to another in an attempt to redeem the color into something remotely attractive.  Ugly is the goal, but laboring for several minutes only to end up with what looks like an ordinary brown chicken egg is pretty good, too.

Seph with the purple dye...can she do it??  Hmm, looks like she's ended up with...brown.  Although I bet if I check her fingers carefully, I can find that nice mottled salmon-violet color.  I guess we need to dye another day...

The Lights Are On, But No-one's Home

In a nutshell, why I feel blessed this Sunday:  our house is finally on the market, I didn't kill my daughter's cat, and you can evidently get the smell of cat pee out of the dryer.

I may have mad skillz in the kitchen, but I'm no Martha Stewart when it comes to keeping house.  As anyone who stays home with a toddler can attest, doing housework with a giggling 25-pound weight clinging to your leg can get pretty challenging.  At this point I consider my head above water if the dust bunnies aren't breeding, so it should follow that normally I don't worry about things like wrinkled bath towels.  However, yesterday afternoon we were rushing around madly before our 2pm appointment with our realtor, trying to make our Home Sweet Home look more like a Marriott.  While Dave headed to the storage unit to stow away yet more boxes, I decided to throw the guest bathroom towels in the dryer to fluff them.  I already had it set on "High" to dry a cotton slipcover, so I just lightly dampened the towels and tossed the towels in on top of it.  I continued to bustle around the house until Dave came home with cheeseburgers for lunch, and we sat down for a fifteen-minute break.  I then walked back into the laundry room and heard a banging noise...coming from inside the dryer.

Pookie.  Our beautiful, sable Burmese, who lets our two year-old manhandle him, while he purrs like a fool the entire time.  Who sits on the tub while she takes a bath and loves nothing more than having  his belly scratched. The cat who I call a root beer barrel with ears, a living teddy bear, was slumped in the dryer, tongue hanging out, wet and bloody.  He'd somehow slipped into the dryer unnoticed, and was not only suffering heatstroke but had had three claws ripped off while inside the drum.  (We think that perhaps Seph let him in the dryer earlier and he'd crawled under the slipcover for a nap- I'd caught her in the laundry room a few times after we took down the pet gate that had barred her from playing in the litter boxes.  I'm not ducking from my own carelessness, but it would explain how he got in the dryer when I barely opened the door to throw in those towels.)

Luckily Dave was there to stay with Seph while I rushed Pookie to the vet.  Pookie passed out on the way there and I really thought he was gone.  I prayed my standard prayer to St. Francis (patron saint of animals, naturally!), something along the lines of, "oh please, oh please, oh please"...I think he must get a lot of those and is therefore understanding ;)  Luckily, they got him on oxygen and fluids right away to bring his temperature down.  When the vet finally came back to talk to me, he told me that Pookie's temperature on arrival was 107, but that they'd brought it down to almost normal already.  I guess I have a smart mouth even while in shock, because my response was, "well, that's because my dryer was set to "cotton"- there was no setting for "cat".  I got lucky and the vet cracked up laughing.

After a transfusion of plasma and a 24-hour stay, Pookie is back home- still not eating, but purring and resting comfortably.  The only bruising is a little one on his leg from the IV, his three sore claws, and our bank account.   The cost of my stupidity, combined with the curiosity that almost killed this cat?  $1031.00  Yeah, I know, I almost needed them to put me on the oxygen instead.  That's roughly the cost of, what, a new dryer?

So, you've gotta help me out, here.  That was the last thing our budget needed, and we really need to sell this house!  Our realtor gave us all kinds of tips on how to present our place in the best light- actually, she said that when we leave the house to allow for a showing, we should turn on every light in the house.  I think that's awfully descriptive of my mental state...the lights are on, but no-one 's home!   Anyway, if you're reading this, and would love to live in a four-bedroom home in a cute neighborhood in northern San Diego county, shoot me an e-mail!  Special pricing for all blog readers!  The house comes with a new furnace, master bath and all appliances...including a freshly-scrubbed dryer.

The Journey Of A Thousand Miles...

...begins with a whole lot of bubble wrap.  I'll get to that in a minute.

If anyone had ever told me I'd blow my diet by eating half a pan of freshly-made Rice Krispy treats in one evening...I'd say, "Yeah, that sounds like something I would do".

If anyone had ever told me that I would have an earring fall out of my ear and into my cleavage while I was dipping my hand into the font of holy water at church...I'd think, "Yeah, that sounds like something that would happen to me". (I should add...I don't wear revealing clothes to church.  Heck, I don't even wear makeup to church.  But anything that doesn't come all the way up to my neck is a potential fallout shelter for  small objects such as earrings, pendants and the odd Rice Krispy.  DNA strikes again.)

If anyone had ever told me that one day I'd have a lovely conversation with my father's ex-wife and thank her profusely for calling...I'd have thought, "Well, that's something only I would ever be lucky enough to pull off".

But if anyone had ever told me that I was in church to pray for help because I was freaking out from dealing with my very fragile father who is moving overseas, worrying about the expensive plane tickets I bought to drag my toddler there so I could pack up the house he is no longer sure he wishes to sell, feeling awful about the cat it turns out he thought I was planning on adopting, and only finding out about it from the woman my mother stole him from in the first place, all while secretly hoping that the answer God was giving me to my PMS-fueled, frantic prayers was to prepare and consume a flat of Krispy treats before tackling the next round of packing...I'd have thought, "Girl, are you f*cking crazy?  Oh yeah, you are.  As you were, then".

Uhh...yeah.  Packing.  There's no easy way to say this, so if you know me IRL and you haven't heard the rumors...we're moving.  We haven't gotten around to telling more than one or two of our friends yet, because we were waiting for final confirmation from Dave's work (actually, the final FINAL confirmation isn't in yet, technically), but in the meantime we've been packing and storing and fixing and dumping and flipping out per a realtor's advice.  Well, everything but the freaking, that is.  She won't tell us to do that until she actually sees the house after next weekend.  After one look at the huge to-do list and the very non-Aztec white walls, she'll probably join me in a nice Xanax smoothie.  If I'm still willing to share at that point, and if I haven't packed the blender, yet.

We love our friends here, and we love our home.  After all, it's where we met, and where we brought our daughter home from the hospital.  It's just time for a different life for us, minus the smog and horrendous traffic, plus the family members we'll actually get to live near, if this house manages to sell before that vein in the middle of my forehead explodes.  Our thousand-mile journey will actually be 1061.87 miles, give or take a few feet, if I can have my dream of buying a house close enough to my SIL's so that we can tunnel in between our respective walk-in closets and share clothes.  I'm so looking forward to being with my nieces all the time, instead of just on special occasions.  And Seph will get to see her beloved "Unca Stee", Dave's only brother.  My own middle brother will settle nearby eventually.  It's a big change...I spent almost my entire life growing up in New Jersey, and my whole adult life in San Diego...but I want my girl to grow up with the family I never had.  And after all, home is where you hang your hat, right?  I just never thought it would be a cowboy hat...

Oh yes, I almost forgot...home-to-be is the Front Range of Colorado, near Boulder.  I don't ski, because I have a healthy fear of trees.  But, I do breathe on a fairly regular basis, and my poor little bronchitis-prone lungs always feel wonderful in the fresh mountain air.  I've never in my life lived inland, far from any beach, and I'll miss it terribly...but I'm hoping that the drastic drop in our expenses will make for some pretty awesome beach-type vacations. 

I'm not torn about the move in the least.  I moved so many times growing up that packing is second-nature to me.  But this is the longest I've stayed anywhere, and I'm dreading saying goodbye to the friends that have become my family.  So much, that I've put it on this blog, first, so that anyone who gets ticked off at me can clearly see how much I love and miss them already.  I'm always afraid that my friends will forget all about me.  I have friends that I've known for many years, but I've usually been the one to get back in touch.  Not that I mind, but I sometimes wonder what would happen if I didn't send that first email or make that phone call.  Now, my family?  They're stuck with me.  (Sorry, L., I already know where you live, and where in your closet you keep that awesome purple suit I want to borrow.)

Wow, this is getting long.  I'll close by saying, I've been wonderfully blessed in this life with a great (if crazy) family and loyal, devoted friends.  I wish we could all be closer.  But I know I can't have my Rice Krispy treats and eat them, too. So let me just say that, if you're my friend and reading this, whether you're far away or about to be, you couldn't be closer to me than you already are.  You're right next to me in my heart, and I'll always be as close as my calling plan or frequent flier miles will take me. 

That being said...who wants to lend me their pickup truck?

Now You Perseid, Now You Don't

::yawn:: We just got back from an amazing view of the Perseid meteor show in Anza Borrego State Park.  The stars are incredibly bright so far from the city, and it was so quiet that when I detected a mysterious loud noise of unknown origin, it turned out to be the carbonation from my open can of soda.

Seph woke up about five minutes after I put my feet up in my brand-new lounge chair, Dave was viciously attacked by a very territorial cactus, and some lucky coyote will be munching on a spilled pile  of sour cream-and-cheddar potato chips for breakfast.  I hear they're  a great accompaniment to roadrunner.

If you didn't get to see the meteor shower, fear not, I made plenty of wishes for everyone.  What, you don't believe in wishing on "falling stars"?  It worked for the coyote, didn't it?

I hope everyone had a blessed Sunday.