This Gill’s Been on the Go-Go

This has been an unbelievably busy past three weeks.  It seriously felt like December the way the calendar looks.  I can’t even remember what all has been going on, but anyway here’s a partial list.  And thankfully, as of today, things now will slow down since school’s out.  Yeehaw.  I don’t think I could’ve kept up the pace much longer and this house needs some serious attention.

It’s been:

• Field trips and special activity days at school out the wazoo-- I’ve chaperoned a historical walk in town, helped with all-day water games, helped set up and chaperone a 5th grade party at the Y, prepared food for a teacher appreciation meal, took in treats so my girl with the summer birthday could celebrate for once at school, and attended three band concerts, a DARE graduation, and one talent show, hauling the big-A tuba back and forth to the park uptown for that

 

• An adventure trip to St. Louis with my finally-on-break-from-college nephew, Ross, where we sampled 1) the new Goodwill Outlet, yes, you read that correctly—Goodwill has an Outlet if you can imagine that, and 2) a delish Cuban sandwich and Mex meal at a restaurant called Hacienda.  And we wrestled a substantial sand table and twenty nine-foot toboggan into the back of the van in the middle of a hard-blowing downpour, just one of the recent storms we’ve had this horrible weather month.  Fun times.  Really, it was, though.  Ross makes most anything fun. Kind of exciting, too, when the power went out while we both were in the Goodwill’s windowless bathrooms which meant pitch blackness until we blindly guided ourselves out by feel.  Ew, I know.  

 

• (I don’t really want a bullet here, just a new paragraph but I can’t seem to do that?….) So anywho, at the Goodwill, we also scored Ross a spaghetti…spoon? dipper? what do you call that utensil?, a package of dowels and Ross is still wondering why the heck I would pick those up, two games, two books, a tin of marbles highly coveted by another shopper who so wanted them and kept waiting for Ross to put them down and even asked if he would give them up, a Pyrex measuring cup for the shop building so I can mix up bug spray and grass killer a little more accurately than I have been when eyeballing and guessing how much is two ounces, and, ugh, I think there was even more stuff, but I can’t recall now.  Anywho, all this useful stuff, including the sand table that Sam has already played the heck out of and the sled, and it all cost a grand total of $10.50.  Goodwill Outlet, people!  Market Street, St. Louis, free parking.  You pay for your stuff by the pound which works out to nearly free.  Well, unless you buy bricks or something.

 

• I will say I passed on a Red Hot Chili Peppers vinyl album that day that was very tempting (Uplift MoFo Party Plan from 1987) but I’m ok with that and have no regrets.  It was still a great day of aunt/nephew bonding.

Ok, back to the exhausting list….

• Fundraising night for Boy Scouts where we (I) put together three baskets for the auction and took four extra kids on top of our family and we all bowled like crazy ‘til pretty late

 

• Volunteered in the school library doing an inventory of books spanning from the 1960’s to present, taking many, many, many hours but that was ok since I really like doing that kind of stuff

 

• Dentist, orthodontist, doctor visits and one hair one, totaling six different appointments, plus, add in one diagnosis of strep (Sam) and a upcoming thumb surgery (me—more on that later)

 

• Dealing with the insurance and roofing companies’ tiffs, starting to wonder will we ever get a new roof?

 

• Putting together end-of-the-year thank you’s for the kids’ teachers and bus drivers

 

• Helping the Boy Scouts at the Relay for Life flag raising ceremony, and last Saturday, setting out flags at the cemetery at all veterans’ graves

 

• Attending a Six Flags chaperone/band parent meeting, and Bunco, and 6th grade orientation

 

• Having Mexican four days in a row this week

 

• Going to three Zumba classes to find, once there, they were all cancelled, grrr.  Dumb weather.

 

• Helping Gary get the Gator out of the swampy mud in our flooded bottom ground

 

• Shopping for a fridge (today at the Mills), not knowing what we really want which is making it take forever

 

• Tidying up landscaping and putting out flowers at the Walton place which sits still for sale with little action at all, and the renters move out at end of June

 

• Doing some work a couple of days for a friend, and meeting the girls for lunch yesterday(counting as one of my Mexican meals)

 

• Trying to sort through a years’ worth of school papers and leftover supplies brought home today, TIMES FOUR

This doesn’t even include the everyday normal stuff that keeps us busy enough like mowing and laundry and Boy and Girl Scout meetings and getting to the bus stop multiple times a day and getting groceries and cooking and mowing and refereeing and feeding kids and did I mention mowing?

I seriously am so relieved we don’t have kids’ sports practices and games added into the mix.

Not a complaint, a busy life is great with me, but just a hopefully valid excuse for not being so up-to-date on the ol’ blog.  Missed you guys!!

The Jacket

It appeared again as we cleared out a closet of winter coats.  The arms were a bit stiff, but hey, it turned 26 years old this Spring. 

And can I say, Gary, you rock, like totally!  I don’t think many men can still zip up their jacket from their high school days. 

 

Man, those 80’s were sure full of zippers.

MusicMonday—My Recent Books

I really don’t get the chance to read much, or rather I don’t make it a priority I guess, since I seem to choose to do other things when I have a spare minute.  The reading I attempt before I go to sleep is a joke since I get through maybe half a page before my book drops thud onto my chest.  Then Gary laughs. 

I used to love to read and miss it, but somehow over the years of being so busy with kids, I have gotten completely out of the literary groove.

Unless you include the books I’ve been drawn to lately.  When I was dashing to return something into the library the other day, their new books display caught my eye since it is right there at the entrance/exit so I impulsively grabbed two books.  And I read them right away. 

Kinda easy when the material is simple. 

I will say more than one person laughed out loud at me when they saw me reading about Taboo.  You know who you are. 

And Neil Diamond, too, for that matter.

 

Then while out yard saling one Friday night, Gary noticed another book that I might be interested in.  Yep, he was right!  I read it yesterday, the cold and rainy Sunday that it was, when there wasn’t mowing or too much work to be done. 

I will say you can skip those first two books, but I actually got something from the Pattie Boyd book from 2007.  Her tales of the 60’s and the mingling of the various British celebs was interesting.  She lived quite an adventure, marrying good friends George Harrison and Eric Clapton.  They were so incredibly ga-ga over Pattie that they both wrote beautiful songs about her.  It was a complicated triangle and interesting story.  The first time she met George on the set of A Hard Day’s Night, he asked “Will you marry me?”  They were just in their young 20’s at that time and two years later, they were married.

I was craving his song Something, written in 1969 about her, the whole time I was reading the book, but our internet wasn’t cooperating yesterday and I totally forgot I could just go get it from our old cd collection, duh.  So now here it is. 

That’s Pattie and George right there.

George was my favorite Beatle. 

And Eric wrote several songs inspired by Pattie that included Wonderful Tonight, Bell Bottom Blues, Old Love, and Layla, and I like them all.  It was so hard to pick a favorite version of Layla, so I just picked one of the many excellent ones. 

It would seem that Pattie was a lucky girl to be a model, long and gorgeous, and loved by these two famous, talented, and rich men, but the story was actually very sad, I thought.  She didn’t have a happy childhood, she was treated really crappily by George and Eric with them both blatant cheaters, and eventually divorced both after about ten years with each.  To top it off, she so wanted a child and was unable to have one. 

I don’t know when this picture is from actually, but Pattie is 67 years old now and a single lady and still lives in England.

So, yep, that’s the kind of stuff I learn when I read. 

Things that Go Crackle in the Night

Tuesday night, Grant just couldn’t settle down for bed which is not totally uncommon.  In fact, it is common.  He told me the other night that he wished school happened in the middle of the night. 

That would work much better for him.

Tuesday night, I ended up going up the stairs twice to tell him to stop playing with his Legos and get his light off and go to sleep. 

By then it was probably 11:00 p.m.  Gary and I and Grandma Barbara, who was spending the night here before she left on her 10-day Red Cross volunteer adventure helping flood victims in Southern Illinois, decided to call it a night. 

So in the night around 3:30 a.m., I heard an unusual sound that apparently was loud enough to wake me up.  I didn’t pay much attention to it actually because there seems to always be some noises around here in the night with the dog messing around on the deck or the fridge or water softener doing their thing.  But then when I heard it a second time, I thought I better get up and check it out, this mystery noise.

When I walked through the living room, Grandma on the couch asked “What is going on?”  So, it was loud enough that it had woke her up, also. 

The sound was coming from upstairs.  As I took up the stairs, my immediate thought was an angry “that kid is up again playing with his Legos!!”   But then I  pinpointed the sound was not from Grant’s bedroom, but from the boys’ bathroom.  That led me to conclude that Grant’s sleepwalking days were not over after all and he was in the bathroom still completely asleep, but flinging Legos around the room. 

That’s what it sounded like. 

Then as I entered the bathroom, I right away reassessed, letting Grant and his Legos off the hook when I blindly determined that our whole bathroom ceiling must be caving and falling to the floor. 

This all passed through my head in the span of just a few seconds and I know I haven’t felt such confusion since the night the little earthquake woke me up in the night a few years ago.

Then I turned on the bathroom light. 

I saw millions, maybe billions, of little chunks of glass all over the floor. 

The shower door was completely cracked into a trillion pieces and falling bit by bit.   It was still making a crackle sound as each individual piece of glass cracked into smaller pieces.  Unreal.  I stood there just stunned for a second.  Grandma had followed me up the stairs and we just looked at each other in confusion.  Why was this happening?  What do we do?

Using that super-responsive, quick brain I have and my supreme ability to get right at solving whatever problem is facing me, I ran downstairs and woke up Gary.

I will say I did have the presence of mind to get a sheet and lay it down so at least the rest of the glass could be somewhat contained and a little easier to clean up.

I also had sense enough to put on my flip flops. 

Gary went at it barefoot.  I was thinking “that sure ain’t too smart.”  

He told me to go get a couple of Phillips screwdrivers.  I was so impressed that he knew about some special screw in the shower door frame that we could untighten to help us with this shower door problem crumbling before our eyes.  I would never have known that!

I ran downstairs and quickly back up to produce the two Phillips screwdrivers I had.  I handed him one, directly flat onto his palm just like the nurses do for the doctors on TV, with total respect for this wonder man. Really, his remarkable intelligence and know-how amaze me sometimes.    

And then he started busting the remaining hanging glass with the screwdriver.  

???

Made me kinda question the need for a Phillips-specific screwdriver, but I didn’t actually question that out loud.

By the end of the whole crazy event, we ended up with three ice cream buckets of tiny shattered glass pieces and a whopping mess in and outside the shower. 

And this empty door frame. 

  

But an interesting night, for sure. 

None of the kids even came out of their beds to see what was happening and I’m telling you, the whole event was so noisy.   And no one really knows what caused it to happen.  Jack and Grant use that shower each night before bed and no one noticed anything.  We were just relieved the crack fest didn’t happen while they were in there.

***No feet (bare or flip-flopped) were harmed in the making of this story, just our good night’s sleep.*** 

If Every Day Was Mothers’ Day…

I’d be smiling from morning to night, 365.

 

 

 

It was such a great day with perfectly perfect, make that ideal, weather.  The kids and Gary were so good to me and we all had fun.  Good to me included a great breakfast including an onion and tomato omelet that Gary cooked for me just like I like despite his feeling that those two things are the purest poison on Earth, putting up two hammocks in our yard, going out for a nice meal that included *bonus* free cheesecake with strawberries, and playing together at the park. 

And we didn’t take Scooter even though it is a dog park.  See, it was a special day for me!

{If you are a reader named Grant Gill and you are worried that your mom hates your dog and this sentence above makes you upset, don’t be.  Sometimes I kid.}

{But to the rest of you, you know sometimes I don’t.} 

  

This was when Grant jumped for the equipment here and totally over-leaped the handles.  That was funny.

Then we came home and put up our own new fun in the front yard. 

You move out to the country, you gotta have a tractor tire tire swing.

I love how over the span of several minutes, the crowd gradually grew from two to four.   

You know, all I think I ever really knew I wanted to be in life was a mom. 

I love happy endings. 

Love ya, my precious family. 

Our Little Ms. Electrician

Caroline brought home this certificate and a pin that she was recently awarded at school.  It was given to her directly from the principal in front of everybody in the whole gym. 

OMG, she was so excited when she got off the bus that day! 

 

Here, so you can read it carefully….

We were so excited, too, since as her parents, we can take full credit for her outstanding wiring, DNA, whatever you want to call it.   : ) 

MovieMonday—Theme: Out of Touch

This weekend, we had two movies in the player here at home, one for the kids and one for me as part of my Mother’s Day dream day, where I actually get to sit and watch a movie that I pick.   Without interruption was part of the dream but, hey, I realize even on Mother’s Day, you can’t have it all. 

As totally different as the two movies appear to be, they really were similar in several ways….basically, it was the story of someone living outside the scope of reality in a world of hallucinations and nightmares, engaged in heavy conflict with a peer, and both with some dramatic costumes. 

His and hers. 

 

 

I present to you the movie combo of:

&

(I liked both!)

My Recent Discovery

We were doing yard work in the rain last weekend, clearing out fencerows by the horse corral, primarily.  But then that branched off to other jobs you notice and next thing I know, I was digging up dandelions in the yard by our fence that runs down the hill south from the house.  I noticed something muy unusual as I turned over a spadeful of ground.  Hmm, it was black and slimy and at first glance I thought it was a snake, but then definitely not, it had legs and toes!  Interesting, I thought, and I turned the ground back over and went on with my business. 

As I kept working but now onto another part of the yard, I couldn’t drop the thought that maybe that thing was something more than interesting.  I told Gary when he finished what he was doing to meet me at the front yard, I had something to show him. 

As I took him to the spot where the thing was, we found that it had halfway embedded itself back into the dirt.  I probably would have just left him alone and went on, but Gary pulled him out of the dirt and said we should let the kids look at it.  He didn’t really know what it was.  Neither of us had seen one of these before.     

The kids came out.  

You would think from the look on Sis’s face it was something really scary but it wasn’t.  A bit creepy maybe, but it was just this little harmless creature. 

(Gary’s man hand for perspective)

I think I kinda grazed its back with the spade, but thankfully, it hadn’t broken through the skin.  We were amazed at the strength in that tail once he/she got to moving around a little. 

“Well, I’d say it was either ambystoma jeffersonianum or maybe it’s an ambystoma platineum.  Sorry, Mom and Dad, I guess I’m a little rusty on my western central Illinois salamanders.”

Really, all we recognized was that it was a salamander.  Gary took it off to the far part of the yard that had standing water since it was losing its shiny sliminess as we had it in the open air for a few minutes. 

I just looked on the Illinois Natural History Survey - U of I site to possibly identify it and see none that look like this noted to be found in our county. 

Hmm, I may need to tell them about this one.  Maybe it’ll turn out to be an ambystoma dianegillum.