Christmas Garland

When I was a little girl, my mom and dad bought this beautiful garland for our tree. Well, I was eight and I thought it was beautiful. It was red with a red and white gingham check pattern in the middle. It wasn’t like all the other garland that everyone else had and I loved it. On Christmas morning that year, I don’t remember the presents that were under the tree at all. I remember how beautiful it was, I remember that Santa had been there and turned on the lights and made everything look like magic. I remember the awe and the wonder and believing that miracles could happen.

I think I might have gotten a cabbage patch kid that year.

The presents are not important to my thirty something year old mind. I remember the magic the wonder and the love and how the tree was really all about that.

My mother decorates the most beautiful Christmas trees. I have always endeavored to follow in her footsteps, but I have never received a single compliment about my tree from anyone other than my husband. I try hard, but I don’t know that anyone ever really understands the components of a Christmas tree. What puts it together for me and makes it beautiful and perfect, is not the same for someone else.

Mine developed like this:

When I first moved out, I had a small box filled maybe five ornaments that belonged to me from the family Christmas tree. I still have those five ornaments. They have stood the test of time. There’s the little holly hobby girl in her white dress and red checked apron. I’m not sure who got her for me, but I love her, I had holly hobby quilts in my bedroom growing up that my grandmother gave me. There are a lot of memories attached to that little ornament. There is also a little mouse my grandmother cross stitched for me when I was 13 years old, the year my brother was born, and a couple of hallmark ornaments purchased for my tree that year.

When my great grandmother passed away, I was gifted with a box of her Christmas ornaments. She had copies of some of my favorite ornaments on my mother’s Christmas tree. I was so grateful to receive them, and still have every one of the ornaments from my great grandmother’s tree, and hang them on my own tree every single year. I miss her, she was a weird lady to me, but she was also a truly lovely human being. I think of her every year on Christmas and say a prayer to God to keep her safe in heaven while I’m trimming the tree.

There was more sentiment to come, of course.

Every year, my mother and grandmother sent me Christmas ornaments, just one or two here and there. I loved them and still treasure each one. When my daughter was born, my grandmother began collecting Barbie hallmark ornaments for her. These line the top of my tree every year. There are mice sitting on floppy disks and computer themed ornaments galore, because, you know, we’re nerds. All sorts of brick-a-brack was sent to me with an obvious idea or thought of it being perfect for my tree and every single one of these odd, quirky little things, is perfect. Absolutely perfect.

This trend continued until one year when my mother went through a weird carpentry phase and she manufactured a box full of wooden, hand-painted ornaments for my tree. That was the year my husband and I bought our house and we celebrated by buying ourselves a brand new, gigantic Christmas tree and a bunch of hand blown glass ornaments.

Those of you who have read my blog over the years, will recall that tree as being the one that tried to kill me every Christmas for the first five years that we lived in this house, but it was ours. It was the first tree that we really did together and when it was finished, I knew that it was finished. I called my mother and grandmother and said, “Stop sending me ornaments now. I had to buy an 8 foot tall tree to hold them all and I can’t carry the thing up the stairs by myself. I think we can call it good now.”

Such things are never, really a finished work though, are they? Every year since I left home, the job of decorating the family christmas tree has fallen to me. My husband now breaks the tree out of the box and sets it up for me so that I don’t injure myself on the tree. The kids help too. I hang the ornaments initially and then I have them go around and spread things out. Over the course of the month, the ornaments fall off and get broken and replaced, or get put back. The tree doesn’t really look right until some time around Christmas Day, when it will be at its most photogenic.

On Christmas Day, I really believe that Christmas trees have their own magic. There is an aura about them that is filled with light and laughter and most importantly the love that it took to carefully craft them into a thing of beauty. I can’t wait to see what my Christmas tree will become this year and how beautiful it’s going to be.

But, I never thought of it like that when I was eight. I used to think that those Christmas trees when I was little, that were so beautifully decorated, belonged only to my mother. She was the mistress of all of that beauty and joy and Santa simply added to that beauty and made it great and Dad and I were the spectators who stood back in awe of their amazing work.

Really though, it was never all about my mother. It was about our little family. I remember now, that I was the one who pointed out that garland in the store. I begged for us to have it on our tree. I painted and folded and cut and drew ornaments for that tree and my parents and grandparents and aunts all contributed a little piece of love to those trees.

I texted my mom today and told her that I remembered that garland and that I loved it. She texted me back with a smile and said, “It was pretty.” I told her I was going to try to find it again today and I looked. I called several different stores. No one had anything even close.

It’s all right though.

That garland is still alive inside my memories. I keep it tucked carefully inside a little box and let it come alive for me every year when I decorate my tree. For maybe twenty minutes, once a year, I am an eight year old little girl who is sitting happily with her mom and dad in a tiny little house, who never realized she was loved. The 36 year old woman that the little girl grew up to be, looks back and smiles, because she knows that she’s still loved, without a doubt.

The garland may be gone, but the love never is.

Love and Laughter on Thanksgiving Day

There is a certain joy to be had in celebrating Thanksgiving with one’s family. For 16 years, I have celebrated it apart from my parents and my brother and my aunts and uncles and cousins and extended relatives. I have celebrated it instead, with my two children, my husband and my dog, this year… there is an additional dog in the mix.

Thanksgiving day here is a rather quiet affair. We buy way too much turkey. We have yams and green bean casserole and pumpkin pie and cranberry sauce because these things are required, and I think someone always wants mashed potatoes with turkey gravy too. It’s a lot of food for four people. Generally speaking, the dog gets a fair portion of the turkey, or at least, the previous dog did. Miss Lucy is allergic to turkey. I think we can give her some of the mashed potatoes and a few of the green beans as long as we carefully remove the french fried onions from the casserole before applying it to her food bowl.

So much has changed in 16 years and not just the dogs, though right now, it is the most noticeable change for me since it’s the most recent. My husband and I started off just saying Happy Thanksgiving to each other and eating whatever we had planned for dinner that night and we skipped the whole turkey and gravy thing entirely. When our kids were little, they didn’t want to eat turkey and cranberry sauce the first year we relocated away from the relatives. We were both too tired to cook it anyway.

Now I can’t believe what I see when I look at my children. When did they get that tall? When did they do all of this growing up? My oldest is almost 18 years old. He’s been looking forward to turkey and cranberry sauce for about two weeks, no more chicken nuggets and french fries for him. The youngest is 16 and she’s the reason that we make yams every year, even though her father and I really don’t need the sugar or the addition to the waistline. Her tastes have clearly advanced beyond having Spaghetti-Os in her hair and down her shirt and none in her mouth.

The kids are what thanksgiving is about to me and my husband. We have enjoyed spending it with them and sharing our memories of holidays that have passed us by. I think that’s why this particular Thanksgiving is so hard for me. This is the last Thanksgiving I will spend with my son while he is still legally considered a child. I remember him at his first Thanksgiving, rubbing mashed potatoes in his hair and by his second Thanksgiving, he was banging on his tray and shouting “Pah-TAY-TOES!” at the top of his lungs. I remember my daughter being passed around a room full of love and laughter for her first Thanksgiving when she was not quite two months old, and soon she will be going off to college.

And it will be me and my husband and my dogs when they are gone.

I will miss them so much. Just as much as I miss my parents and my brother and my aunts and my uncles and my cousins.

The love and the laughter is still here though. That will never change.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.

Old Dog

There is a certain peace and serenity that can be found in the company of an old dog. I experience this every Saturday morning when Miss Lucy wakes me up before the sun comes up to take her outside. I step outside with her and watch her run around the yard and she smiles and I smile and then she comes inside, taking her time up the stairs leading to my deck so that she doesn’t fall. Then we come inside and she curls up on the family room sofa and I sit down with her and we just… stay like that.

Sometimes, it’s really nice to just… be.

I love old dogs. They have a wisdom and a knowledge that comes with an entire lifetime’s worth of experience. They have the most beautiful souls. There is nothing more wonderful in my world than the quiet, constant, companionship of an old dog.

Even if she does wake me up at 6 am on a Saturday, so I can take her out to potty in the freezing ass cold. At least she comes back inside for the snuggling part. This is the whole reason I’m awake this morning, because Lucy needed her special “Mom” time.

I love you Miss Lucy… even though you bark at me at 5:45 every morning to wake me up, and then sit on my feet until I roll out of bed with you, I just don’t even care. I love you anyway because you’re my pretty yellow girl.

Like Magic

So it’s been crazy this last week.

I started NaNoWriMo.

The basement smells like Axe, so I can’t go down there to hide and write. On top of all of that, I’ve had the flu, hubby passed his written FAA exam, one of my NaNo friends finally, after 29 hours of labor, gave birth this morning at 1:45 am and I was miserable that I could not be at the hospital with her because I’m contagious. She texted me frequently and sounded so scared, but I know that I was scared too when I was having my first child, I did my best to keep her calm via text message and be supportive. I’m surprised that no one took her phone away from her. I just wish I could have been there to hold her hand. I hope she knows that I was there in spirit.

This gal amazes me. I can’t believe she’s still intending on participating in NaNo this year, but she has done it every year for the last three at least. She said she wasn’t going to stop now.

Talk about dedication. I admire that. She is so brave and so strong. I just know that she and her newborn son are going to have a wonderful life.

To make matters more interesting, because it really DOES get more interesting, Lucy’s due for chemo next week. We’re expecting snow soon and I’m going to have to talk to the doctors and find out if it’s possible to make arrangements for someone here to give Lucy her final dose of vinblastine safely, if we have a snow storm that I can’t drive through. I wonder if the risk of that is even worth the benefits of the final dose of chemo at this point. If an unqualified doctor doses vinblastine improperly, it could cause tissue damage to Lucy’s leg.

I think I would rather skip the dose and risk having cancer show up sooner. I can’t imagine how excruciating it would be to have pain in your leg like Dr. House, but I suspect that’s about the size of what would happen if someone missed the vein. I know they make doggie vicodin, but unfortunately, I don’t see a large market for cool canes for dogs. Lucy would be missing out on a critical piece of attire.

We may be able to fly Lucy to Pullman for that last dose if it snows bad enough. Hubby’s flight instructor has offered to ride along with him if he rents the plane. That seems a bit over the top to me, to rent a plane to take Lucy to Pullman for chemo. I think they just want to make the flight because hubby needs the hours and are trying to come up with excuses to fly.

As if they need to come up with excuses. I’m so exhausted right now, they could tell me it was kumquat season and I’d buy it.

I’ve pulled more than one late night to get some writing in. I haven’t stayed up past midnight to work on insane amounts of writing material since um… 2008. Last year’s NaNo, I paced myself and just barely made the goal. This year though, my goal is not 50,000 words. It’s to get the majority of the frame work for a COMPLETE story down. 50,000 words is actually only about 150 pages of material. It is not enough for a novel. It’s enough for half of a really short one.

Through all of this, Lucy and Mugen have been my writing companions. They have taken up the banner for Reilly, who sat quietly at my side during 2008, gently nudging his nose into my armpit when I would get tired. Reilly was the best writing companion a girl could ever have. He was quietly vigilant and his support and his love for me just flowed out of his eyes when I looked at him. I knew he wanted me to do it. I knew that he believed in me. He stood beside me during my first NaNo and got me through it. I had the confidence to do it because he was with me.

Lucy and Mugen are taking turns splitting up the job this year. Last year, Mugen was more of a distraction than a help and Lucy wasn’t sure that she actually liked me yet. She liked my husband pretty well, so I flew solo for most of the 2009 NaNo season. It was rough because that novel was so intensely personal to me. It was all about Reilly. Reilly was with me in spirit as I wrote, and I spent most of last year crying as I typed.

This year is different though. This year, I’m not alone. It took some time, and my husband had to have more than one conversation with Mugen about how he had very big shoes to fill. As it turns out, it took two dogs to fill those shoes. They were just too massive for one dog to fill alone. He was just too good. I still miss Reilly every single day, but it’s hard to focus on the loss when a beautiful blonde barks at you at 7 am.

See, Lucy takes the early morning shift.

Lucy takes her job, very, very seriously.

If Lucy does not manage to wake me up by barking at my head, she moves around to the other side of the bed to wake up my hubby. When she does this, I’m sure she’s channeling Reilly’s spirit. Reilly never barked at us, but he would pace from one side of the bed to the other, shoving his nose under our hands until he’d managed to wiggle his head up under the sheets so he could put his cold nose in someone’s armpit. This was very effective for him.

Lucy finds barking works best for her because my hubby wakes up and says, “LUCY! What is the problem girl?” and then he scratches behind her ears and falls back to sleep. Him shouting “LUCY!” is what wakes me up. After Lucy has had her morning ear scratch from my hubby, she comes over to my side of the bed and barks until I move from a laying down position, to a sitting position.

This is when she knows her efforts have met with a measure of success. She then relaxes and takes a seat on her dog bed and wiggles until I grab my fuzzy red bath robe and head down the stairs with her then I open the back door and send her outside to play while I make some coffee or tea.

After she comes back in, she barks at me until I’m awake enough to remember that she should be getting her pills BEFORE breakfast and not after, so then I give her her pills and she settles down for a nap on the sofa, on the complete opposite end of the house from where I write.

She only sleeps there until I start typing. Once she hears my fingers hit the keyboard, she relocates and lays down in the floor underneath my dining room table where I am trying desperately to come up with something more substantial than the bad 1990′s anthem for clinical depression that’s been playing over and over in my head for the last fifteen minutes. And then, when she puts her nose over the top of my foot, I swear it’s like magic.

My muse wakes up and we begin to dance.

My NaNoWriMo Word Count as of this morning, is 16,536. What’s yours?

Argh! That was my FACE!

So.. Lucy is feeling good.

She’s feeling so good that my fears and concerns and negativity about her cancer have just melted away.

She is barking at tweedle dee and tweedle dum across the street. She’s chasing squirrels. She’s plotting the inevitable end of the neighbor’s schnauzer and is STILL attempting to exit our back yard so she can go into the OTHER back yard and play with our other neighbor’s dog, a brittany, whom Mugen intensely dislikes and yet… Lucy wants to make a great friend of. It’s almost as if she’s trying to play with this dog to spite Mugen.

She is also doing this, while rolling my butt out of bed at 6 am, because Daddy’s awake and this means that Mom must be awake shortly thereafter. In spite of the fact that it is summer and we are NOT going to hop in the car and go to Starbucks because I have the robo-espresso that saves me 5$ a day on lattes and feeds my caffeine addiction with a continuous stream of body, heart and crema.

But… there’s more.

A while ago, Mugen’s interior butt tucking circuit began to include my window bench. This bench is a part of the house and is a six foot long 2 foot wide piece of wood. Reilly jumped up on it and barked at tweedle dee and tweedle dum and scratched the surface a bit, but no REAL damage to the wood. Once Mugen’s butt tucking circuit began to include jumping up on the window seat, I had to do something because he was making Reilly’s old surface scratches become gouges. So… I grabbed a hallway runner and put it on the window seat to protect the wood.

The dogs… LOVE that I did this.

Mugen and Lucy get up there ALL the time for naps. If I sit down on the window seat, Mugen plops his butt up there next to me for cuddles. Lucy likes to stretch out with her head on the window sill and watches the world go by while I’m vacuuming the floor.

This is probably the best idea I have ever had in the history of owning this house.

So I walked into the parlor today and there was Miss Lucy on the window seat. She looked up and her tail slammed that rug and made a deep “thud, thud, thud” noise as I walked over to her. Mugen followed me into the room and Mugen did what he always does when Lucy is perched on something.

He play bowed and barked twice. We have determined this is Mugen speak for “Play with me! Play with me NOW or I will bite your kneecaps!” which… is the next thing he will do if Lucy does not gesture back at him. He’s a very persistent little stinker.

I… being the IDIOT that I am… sat down next to Lucy on the window seat and planned to watch all of this pan out. I did not expect to see Lucy shove me to one side so that she could do the following in this order:

1. Dive bomb Mugen from a height of about a foot.
2. Grab his cheek.
3. Drag him to the floor by his cheek.
4. Stick her butt in the air and thump her tail…. into my face.

This turn of events set Mugen off… and he started butt tucking across the parlor/dining room portion of my house.

I was too stunned by Lucy’s tail smacking me across the cheek to realize what was about to happen next.

As Mugen took off, my hand went to my face, Lucy sat on my left foot and proceeded to watch Mugen run. Mugen made the figure 8 circuit around the dining room table and then turned to head back in our direction and he paused for a tenth of a second to spring onto the window seat and that is when a synapse fired in my brain and I suddenly thought to myself…

“Crap. This is gonna hurt.”

Mugen launched himself at my face. His chest connected with my left glasses lens and smashed it into my eyebrow.

I have a cold, which means my sinuses are agony today.

The pain of having my glasses rammed up into my forehead made my sinus pain seem completely irrelevant.

The rapid fire cursing that happened afterwards caused Mugen to stop in his tracks. He parked his butt next to mine on the window seat and looked at me with his worried, “I’m not sure if I should get much closer, but I don’t want to go much further away either.” look.. and Lucy just watched me and looked completely… and totally… amused.

I walked out on the gruesome twosome saying only… and in my best impression of my grandmother’s voice…

“Y’all are on your own.”

Now they are sitting in the kitchen doorway, watching me type. Their adorable heads tilted at exactly the same angle.

And I love them.. but I’m pretty sure they are plotting my demise.

Good Girl Lucy?

So… since the cone of shame has been on Lucy’s head… she has decided that I must take over her duties as Mama Dog to Mugen.

So… when Mugen whines and gets bored, Lucy gets up from her nap, comes over to me and barks at me until I ask her what’s wrong. Then she sits and looks at the pup, who whines… as if on cue… and then finds a ball. Since Lucy is unable to play bitey face due to the cone and the stitches, I must take her place as Mugen’s playmate.

Fine… okay, I get it.

For the last several weeks, it’s been raining. In fact, most of the time, it’s raining. Mugen is bored out of his mind. Lucy has been barking at me quite a bit and my nerves are just about shot. I cannot wait for this cone to come off of her head so they can play together again.

I even had to break out the Mugen’s Bane this morning because Mugen was back to chewing on my dining room chairs and Mugen is so very bored with indoor fetch. The daughter and I have done our best, sacrificing our shoes and umbrellas to take him on as many walks as we can… but there is just no satisfying this pup. He wants to run free and snuffle in the holly bush and chase bees.

So… as you can imagine, it’s been a HUGE pain in the rear to get Mugen to come inside. Even though his recall is great indoors, outside has been a bit of a challenge. Not even chicken jerky is tempting enough to lure him away from the underbrush and the bees and the birds. He just LOVES to be outside. But I can’t leave him out there.

It’s pouring down rain!

So… someone has to go get him. It’s usually me.

Today, I let them out. Lucy ran around the back yard for a while with the cone on her head and I just let her run. I stood on the deck and watched the dogs do their usual thing and then it started to sprinkle. Not much, just a light feathering of rain.

Lucy decided she was done with outside once her nose got a drop or two on it. So she came up the deck stairs to me. Mugen did not follow her.

Lucy looked for him for a second and then she sat next to me and waited a second or two more… and then she BARKED.

Oh man did she bark.

As soon as she started barking, Mugen came out of the bushes and headed up the stairs and into the house, then Lucy settled down and followed him in. I’m not sure how I feel about this, that she can boss him around like that, but for now, I’m gonna go with it.

Mugen’s 1st Birthday

Wow… it’s been a whole year.

As I write this and look down at my feet, I see a 70 pound hunka chocolate love that was minutes ago running around my house at top speed after a green squeaky ball that makes a noise that sounds so distinctive that it has become known as “The Farty Ball”. There are two such balls in my house, both will send my chocolate chunk into a dive bombing frenzy the second they appear in the hands of a human.

His happiness over these kinds of things… makes my days worth waking up to.

The last year has been hard for us as a family, but I want to celebrate today as the first birthday of my best friend and confidant. Mugen always has a hug for me when I need it, he even knows that when I go to sit down in a couple of spots, I sit there because I’m feeling sad or bored and he will come join me, plant his butt next to my hip and lay his head on my shoulder and wait for my arms to wrap around him.

He also seems to have a knack for acting like a complete idiot when I really need to laugh and when that doesn’t work, he grabs one of my bras and runs around the house with it in his mouth. I swear to God that when I finally get it from him, he’s laughing his butt off in a way that only a puppy can.

He has been the best puppy a girl could ever ask for.

I cannot tell you how much he is loved. He came to us at a time when I was raw and bleeding and he stitched me back up with the wonder of watching him sleep on the floor. He ranks pretty high up there on the list of best things that have ever happened to me. There are not enough words to describe what he means to me and to my family.

His wild puppy antics have made the difference some days, between us living and just existing. He really does THAT much for us. He is there to greet my children as they come in the door from school every day and he happily does a bounce and a wiggle, in typical Lab fashion, while trying to eat their clothes so that he can drag them down to his level and lick their faces. He greets my husband with the same exuberance. Me, well, he won’t pull that crap on me. He waits for me to get to the kitchen counter and set my stuff down first.

We’re still cooking him. But… man are we cooking with gas. Mugen is in the process of earning his CGC and while he failed the first test, the trainers have told me that I have every single right to be proud of the progress we’ve made. It is rare that they have a Lab in their classes that is as young as Mugen is that can actually pass Advanced Home Companion. He is ready to move into Rally and Obedience competition classes. He has been an exceptional puppy.

And today, he graduates from puppyhood to become, my exceptional dog.

Happy Birthday Mugen, my gemini compadre!

Mugen and the Street Sweeper.

So… I had some yard work to do out front today. The weather is just gorgeous and I felt bad about leaving Mugen inside because it was super hot in the house and we haven’t done the first start of our A/C unit yet. Lucy was already firmly entrenched in her post-lunch, pre afternoon nap, nap.

So… I grabbed the long line and went out front.

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Book Review: The Long Way Home by David Laskin

I don’t normally read non-fic. I was asked by a friend to review David Laskin’s The Long Way Home. I told him up front, “I don’t do history.” and he said, “It’s okay, it’s not dry, boring history. I promise.”

I was pleasantly surprised when I got completely sucked into this book after it arrived here. The Long Way Home, has been a different sort of read for me. I would love to write a fully detailed review for you, but I’m not going to do that.
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Cheap Shoes

I have long known that Mac users and PC users speak a different language.

There’s a fundamental difference between how PC users use their machines and how Mac users do it. The biggest one being that backups and restores are absolutely no problem over here. I still have no idea how one accomplishes this under Windows without copying over massive groups of files, by hand. In fact… now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure that’s the only way to do it under Windows without spending any money on third party software and if that’s the case, that makes me really, really sad.

Apple, may I say again, that Time Machine… simply rocks.

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