Chocolate and other bad habits

July 9th, 2009

I will never joke and say death by chocolate would be a good way to go again.  Not after just reading an article about a poor guy who really did die after falling into a vat of chocolate!  The weirdness of it just leaves me speechless, almost.  How do you even begin to tell someone’s family?  It would be bad enough to be the person to have to report a work place death to family, but to have to say, “He died after falling into the chocolate…”?!  This  has depressed me.  I may not eat chocolate again for like… twenty minutes.

Some time ago I blogged about one of my favorite spots in this house.  It’s in the kitchen at the booth the previous owners had custom made to fit right underneath the windows.  My 5am wake up always consisted of getting my first cup of coffee, turning on the local news on the tiny tv in the kitchen, and sitting here at this booth with my laptop on, reading the news as well as my favorite blogs.

Then I blogged about how I decided to remove the tv from the kitchen because the kids had developed the terrible habit of gravitating to it, sitting at the booth, and snacking almost nonstop.  I probably should have enforced some sort of rule without depriving myself of my routine, but I didn’t.  So I ended up basically following the same pattern every morning but in the location of the reclining couch in front of the big screen tv in the family room.

And that’s where I’ve gone wrong.  I sit my ass down there every morning, and I’m always so tired anyway, that the comfort of the couch and the lull and hum coming from the tv makes it almost impossible to perk myself up and start the day positive and energetic.  It takes me twice as long to get moving physically and mentally.  I’m not saying my blog has ever been very interesting to anyone who doesn’t have a personal interest in me, in general, but I’ve decided this new beginning is an even better thing than I realized.  Simply because going back over the posts after moving into the family room… oh my gosh, they.suck.ass.

The thing about sitting here at this booth, I’m not sure why it’s so different.  I think it’s a combination of things.  I’m forced to sit up straight.  There’s sunlight pouring in the window.  I look out and can see the neighborhood going about their busy day, never slowing down.  It all adds up to an atmosphere more conducive to a positive beginning to my days.

I’m moving back to my booth.  I’m not putting the tv back, though.  I’ll just have to do more news reading than watching.  At present there is only one tv in this house connected to our satellite service.  There are mot tvs than people in my house, and as dumb as that is, I can rectify that stupid decision some.  They can still play their video games on their tvs, even slip in a dvd to watch at the end of the day if they want.  But no one is getting cartoons or sports beamed into their bedrooms 24/7.  It’s a start.

Add that to the fact that I’ve cut out all their caffeine and much of their sugar, and I just might be an okay parent someday.  Hell, they might even end up being normal children.

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I Forgot

July 6th, 2009

Apparently there’s a study just out that caffeine may help prevent/improve Alzheimer’s.  In mice, anyway.  The test showed improvement in mice over a two month period after the mice had been induced to have the same symptoms of someone with Alzheimer’s and then given the equivalent of five cups of coffee a day (or about 2 1/2 modern-size cups).  Anything that makes my coffee look good is fine with me, but my biggest question is how in the heck do you induce things like memory loss in a mouse?  And how do you know you’ve caused it to lose its memory?  I mean, you can’t ask it if it remembers where it put the car keys.  Maybe you trick it in one of those mice mazes?  I have no idea.  I just want them to keep manipulating the studies so that my caffeine addiction doesn’t look so bad after all.

I joke but I do worry about illnesses like Alzheimer’s.  I think such things have definitely taken center stage in my anxieties more since I began caring for my grandmother.  According to the quack aunt that was supposedly taking care of her previously, my grandmother was diagnosed in the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s several years ago.  However, no one else in the family can remember ever hearing of that diagnosis before now.  Either way, when you find out a disease like that may be present in your family genetics, it forces you to think about it more even if we’re told such illnesses aren’t hereditary. 

Maybe I am suffering from some sort of memory loss because I cannot believe it’s July already.  Time is flying by these days, and it doesn’t seem to matter if I’m extremely busy or doing nothing at all.  I can’t believe 2009 is half way over.  I need the dog days of summer to slow down just a little so that maybe I can enjoy it a little.  I think the biggest reason we’re all walking around here in disbelief of the date is that the entire month of June was spent indoors hiding from tornados and flash flooding.  Around here we feel like summertime is just beginning.  The kids definitely feel cheated out of precious school vacation days.  Now that the sun is finally out, we’ll have to try to squeeze two month’s worth of vacation into one.  Yay… just what I needed… another reason to shove even more activity into already overloaded days.

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Memory Lane Keeps Winding

March 8th, 2009

He was bigger than life to me.  He could do no wrong in my eyes.  He broke almost every rule my parents ever put in front of me when I was a little girl.  I could run wild when I was around him, and he never yelled or corrected me in any way.  Well, any way other than teaching me the right way to behave on a farm.  He was serious about how to stay safe and respectful.

He taught me how to ride and care for horses.  He taught me how to gather eggs without getting flogged.  He let me feed pigs and cows.  He made me feel like I had the most important job ever walking behind him in the garden and stepping on the potatoes as he dropped them on the ground to be covered by the rich black earth.  The back half of the farm was kept for tobacco.  I got to ride on the big tractor with him when he worked that.

He lost his leg in WWII.  After spending a long day working, he would remove that big ole wood and steel and terribly scary looking fake leg, and then he would rub the nub of the knee area.  I could tell it hurt even though he didn’t show it.

I was the first grandchild, and I looked just like him and my dad.  I saw perfection when I looked at him, and I think he felt the same about me.  I struggled when I first began to learn to read, and when I finally found my way, caught up, and passed everyone else in my class, he’s the one who celebrated the loudest.  He gave me a silver dollar for it.  It might as well have been all the gold at Fort Knox because that’s what it felt like; that’s how important it was to me.

I didn’t know the man the way everyone else knew him.  The real man was a hard hateful person.  He was one of those people who could drink and drink and drink and you’d never know it because he handled himself so well.  He could, and he did.  He was hard on his kids.  They were up with chores completed by 6am, or they didn’t get breakfast.  He was hard on my grandmother.  He never abused her, but living with an alcoholic is hell with or without the physical stuff.  He gambled on the weekends.  He stayed out late playing cards.  Sometimes he’d win the weirdest things.  Once a man’s wife made me a beautiful Christmas dress for free because my grandpa won a card game.

He was murdered on Halloween night by his best friend.  They were drunk, and he shot him over a damn hand of poker.  I was only eleven years old, but that’s one night I remember like it was last week.  My heart was ripped from my chest and stomped into nothing more than a bloody lump on the floor.  l had nightmares about him for the longest time after he died.  I remember every detail of his funeral.  I remember what they dressed him in, how they carefully placed his glasses into the pocket of his shirt.  I remember an aunt trying to console me by telling me I’d see him again in heaven.  I remember forcing myself not to punch her for being so perky and positive.

The night he died was the first time I saw my dad cry.  As I grew older and had to acknowledge my grandfather hadn’t been perfect, I felt guilty for not seeing the bad things he’d done.  I felt guilty for idolizing him the way I did.  Until I realized that it was okay to love him for what he was to me.  Even as a young girl, I thought that if he’d been such a horrible person my dad wouldn’t have been broken hearted over losing him, so it must be alright to mourn him even if he wasn’t perfect.

He was exactly what I needed, and he loved me unconditionally.  That made him the perfect grandfather for me.

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