Family tradition

Thanksgiving weekend may be the best weekend of the year if you're fortunate to have friends, family and reasonably good health.

Thursday was for family. I got to see my friend Sandy Cazee. (Thanks for the trip down memory lane, for being interested in what's happening in Claymont and that awesome fridge photo. I miss him, too.)

We gathered at my sister Donna's house where Ali and Rachel beat the snot out of me at euchre and I absconded with most of my cousin Lori's cranberry relish. It's good as part of the holiday meal, but it's even better the next day for breakfast. And lunch.

My Uncle Larry had a vintage fishing pole to get to his cousin, Johnny, and I delivered it to his sister Elaine who in spite of living just a town away from me, I never see. It was fun catching up with her and her husband Tom. We may even get a cousins/sisters/nieces shopping trip together soon.

While Jeff did a combo bourbon-craft beer trek, Ali and I spent most of Friday shopping and I scored this awesome wreath as part of my Broad Ripple Kiwanis winnings. It's from Sambol's Tree Farm and well worth the drive. It was almost a top-down day -- beautifully clear and sunny-- which was good because we were in the car for a good eight hours.

We had packed provisions, so we didn't go without food or water.

We started out around 8:30 a.m. to score some bargains at Half Price Books on West 86th Street. Our quest to win $100 gift car was for naught, but we snagged a free $10 and some fun gifts. We went east on 86th Street to some shops and then up to 96th Street to meet Elaine. From there it was Fortville, then back north of 86th and eventually back into Broad Ripple.

At one point, I think I said something to Ali about how we might be doing too much shopping.

"That's not a thing, Mom," she replied and scrammed to another aisle at The Good Earth.

Friday was also our annual Friendsgiving with Patricia and Patrick Jackson, who will one day simply make a date with Ali and make a reservation for a party of three. We tried out Public Greens, which was awesome.

Ali and I traditionally decorate the house starting Friday and throughout the weekend. I had a bunch of yard work, too, so I left her with most of the tree work on Saturday. Jeff channeled his inner lumberjack and cleaned up our woodpile and chopped some new fireplace fuel. He was celebrating a bit because he got in on a Kahn's liquor lottery that involved dialing until you got through to the store owner. I don't know how many other men (maybe women, too) for dialing for booze, but he was at it for more than an hour before he connected and ended up with a bottle of William Larue Weller bourbon.  It's apparently exceptionally rare.

When he connected, he was able to buy more, also collectible or coveted bottles of other stuff, but declined saying he'd give other people a chance. He'd made a bit of a haul the day before and probably had already exceeded his booze budget, but it was still a generous thing. Some people sell this stuff on a secondary market. It's a little like King Rat, apparently except no one's in prison. I think.

Anyway, when he went to get his super, jizzmonic bottle of booze, the owner of the store remembered his generosity. They got to talking and Jeff said if he'd made a miscue, it was that he'd let slip by the chance to buy a 2014 Duckhorn Vineyards Three Palms Merlot, which is this year's Wine Spectator Wine of the Year.

Just so happened there were three left, so I scored too and now have that bottle waiting for me downstairs. Karma apparently is a boozer.

Ali abandoned us for dinner at a friend's house, and Jeff suggested we go visit one of our favorite restaurants, The Vanguard. He made this offer just after I'd just about crippled myself mulching and blowing and bagging some of the gazillion leaves that have been standing ankle deep in parts of my yard. I was smelly, dirty, sweaty and achy in places I'd forgotten I had.

For a nanosecond, I thought, "No. I just want to go to bed and I might not make it to the shower first." But then I remembered that he had dismantled our bed and gotten out his power drill, mumbling something about needing to reinforce a support.

Apparently the lumberjack had morphed into Bob the Builder. So I couldn't have gone to bed if I'd wanted to. The shower was good. The Vanguard was even better.

Some lovely wine and two Aleves later, I was in my apparently reinforced bed and dead to the world. This morning brought a little more decorating and cleaning up but no yard work. The leaves are out there taunting me but I have the best wine of the year in here.

It's no contest. In fact, the leaves may be there come Spring.

Today, I decided my back porch will be a great wrapping room. Also, I got tired of looking at it looking so gross. I really need to find a permanent solution to that wall. I worked on a temporary measure for a bit before football began. I'm sure Martha Stewart wouldn't approve, but she's probably not going to be in my neighborhood this season.

Ali's doing homework and chores and we're all drifting slowly back to a normal school and work week. I need every bit of the four days of Thanksgiving weekend, and I suspect you do, too.

If I had one more day off, it's possible that I would get to those damn leaves. But not likely.

There's wine, you see...

Oh! Before I forget: I dug deep in the Christmas boxes and came up with these gems, which Jeff harvested from his father's basement one year.

Jeff's Dad always hangs a decoration, who the Reed siblings call "Sickening Santa." I don't know if it's because of the rotating lights or maybe they each, independently got soused and came home to see it blinking and in their bleery hazes, deposited part of their holiday spirit. Regardless, I offer these two Santas from the same vintage.

Ali thinks the one that's just a head is creepy, and I think the smaller one is angry. I think they may need to be reunited with their buddy back home.

For now, they've been allowed to be unboxed but are relegated to the porch.

If your teenager doesn't kill you, she might make you stronger

When I was pregnant with Alison, I prayed every night that she would get Jeff's genes but I had a recurring nightmare that she would be born with my legs and his arms, and her hairy knuckles would drag the ground when she walked.

Thankfully, the prayer rather than the nightmare came to fruition. She has long legs, long arms and  the metabolism of a hummingbird. As I am at the other end of that spectrum, it's a daily struggle not to smack her in the face.

Not really. We invested heavily in orthodontia, and I'm not one to waste money. But add killer smile and naturally curly, red-gold hair to that list of physical attributes and you'll see why I should win Mother of the Year for my soft and gentle approach to parenthood.

Why she keeps trying to kill ME, I'll never understand. Her latest attempt was cleverly disguised in a bid to get me to stop complaining about my weight.

"Come swimming with me, Mom," she said. "It'll be good for you."

Ali joined the Herron High School swim team last year and she's back at it again. She's doing well this season, beating her times and having fun, to boot. She practices every stinking day of the school week (she gets Thursday and Friday off this week) and swims laps that total out in the thousands of meters. Thousands. Every day. And she's 16.

Last year when I fell for her "Let's do it together; it'll be fun!" lines, I was left nearly dead at the side of the Jordan YMCA, panting like a beached whale.

This year, we're at LA Fitness and somehow I haven't drowned or beached myself. In a post-swim delirium, I did walk into the men's locker room instead of the women's. Twice, actually, but who's counting. (In my defense, they are very close together and I don't wear my contacts in the pool. Thank God the row of urinals is hard to miss even if it's a blur of white.)

Today was rough, but I pushed through. I stumbled home to find her on the couch.

"How'd it go?" she asked.

"I almost threw up," I said, truthfully.

"Awesome!" she said. "I'm proud of you."

She's a killer, I tell you.

A Bug's Life (2)

It was inevitable.

We went to the International Festival this weekend with two other couples and Ali, and she showed us the Taiwanese food stand where she had volunteered earlier in the week. She gave us pointers as to what to buy.

Next door was a stand shilling cookies and cupcakes that were made with ground up meal worms instead of flour. It's environmentally responsible, if a bit unusual to Hoosier palates. But it wasn't long before a dare was making itself known.

Ali came back after the boys had downed bites of tiny cupcakes that tasted like dry cupcakes. (I may be spoiled by Alison's confections. Or, worm cupcakes may just be gross.) No one threw up so of course, the cookie had to be tried.

Ali came by after the men had downed their share of the cookie that wasn't just made with worm-flour, but was riddled with actual, non-ground-up worms. "You have to try it, everyone else did," lied her father.

Susie did support the effort to get another mini-cupcake but Tracy was having none of it. No one asked for a take-out box.

I wish the lady at the stand luck in her endeavor. I like the planet, and I'd like to keep it humming. Living off bugs will be my last choice in environmental consciousness, though...

We've had quite the friends weekend: dinner with Team Vielee on Friday night where we shared some awesome wine and got caught up on John's impressive, month-long Camino de Santiago pilgrimage.

On Saturday, our Evansville friends, Tracy and Eric, met our Ogden friends for dinner at the Keystone Sports Review where we had just about every kind of bad-for-you-food (not one worm on the table.) It was yummy.

I don't know if it was the spirits or the fact that Tracy and I had taken a long walk before the trip to the fairgrounds for the festival or Ali coaching me through a swim at the gym, but I fell asleep soon after we got home. On the couch. While listening to a story someone was telling.

It's official: I'm old. Today, I finally got Halloween tucked away where it belongs and even cleaned up the shed a little bit, sweeping out the summer's dirt and getting the Christmas containers down. I won't decorate for Christmas until Thanksgiving weekend, but it's good to get them down from their perch on the high shelves.

Jeff is at a bourbon tasting, Ali is doing homework, and Tracy and Eric have gone home. It feels too quiet, and I'm kind of hungry. Not so hungry that I need a worm cupcake, mind you...

I leave you with a few of my favorite photos of my favorite veteran. Back when I was a younger and just-as-trusting version of Alison, he convinced me that the tiny white curvy thing I found in a walnut was candy. Funny how history repeats itself. #BoysAreWeird

Happy Veterans' Day to all who served, those who are serving and those who will. It's a big deal to be an American soldier. I know I'm not alone in being grateful for  your sacrifice.

 

 

My endorphins are as blind as I am

The last time I went swimming with Alison, she nearly killed me.

It's possible that it was my fault. I made the mistake of thinking I could keep up with her. She was deep into the Herron High School Swim Team and had been conditioning five days a week, two hours at a stretch.

I was wearing an old suit that kept revealing more than my bad stroke. Oh, and I was wearing my out-of-shape, ancient body under it. Suffice it to say, my top wasn't the only thing not keeping up with the nimble fish called Alison.

A year later, I was more savvy, and I had a new suit. I was inspired by the realization that I can't zip the dress I wore in Auntie Jen's wedding. My same-old, same-old workouts aren't cutting it. Ali is back in swim and I told her I'd swim with her as long as she would ignore me unless I sank to the bottom.

So we went on Saturday and she suggested a few things and only once stopped me with a frown. I was doing a stroke of my own invention. I call it "Still-in-the-water-and-moving."

"That is not a thing," she said, observing me with one raised eyebrow.

It's a great stroke. You lay on your back and kick a little, but mostly move your arms, sort of like you're stretching. It gives you a chance to breath and to rest your trembling limbs.

She also looked askance at me when I started out my swim by heating myself up in the sauna. (The pool water is icy...) But I mostly got through it. When I pick Ali up from her conditioning sessions, she's sometimes a little loopy, and we blame it on her endorphin high -- a phenomenon I've never really experienced.

On Sunday, she had homework and a friend coming over, but she wrote me out a schedule to follow, using all the things she'd shared with me the day before. I told her I'd do my best.

I did 20 minutes on the treadmill to warm myself up and to finish a book, then a small stint in the hot tub to keep the inner heat going. There were a couple of women in the hot tub chattering away, but we paid each other no mind.

I did have to resort to my lifesaving stroke a couple of times, but I finished everything Alison had laid out for me and I might have met an endorphin. I was just as shocked as you are.

In fact, I was about to quit when I went back to the little sheet she'd written out to discover I only had one more thing to do -- and it was a cool down! 

So, I survive, and I stumbled out of the pool. I was headed for the sauna, which is in the middle of the Woman's Locker Room, to dry off a bit and recover. I had worn my glasses to the gym, and didn't have them on. My muscles were all tremble-y, I was exhausted and blind.

Which is how I ended up in the Men's Locker Room.

I could hear the shower going, and I had my hand on the sauna door, thinking, this lay-out looks a little different than what I remember. It was the row of urinals that brought it home, if not in full focus.

I didn't think I had it in me to scoot as fast as I did out of there, but I slipped and slid my way to the next door down and found myself where I belonged. I think it was in the escape that my endorphin made its presence known.

I sat down, still blind and laughing a little bit at myself. The women I'd seen in the hot tub were in there. My heart was still beating out of my chest from the Men's Locker Room detour. They were still chattering.

One of them was complaining about the latest news about the DNC, Hilary Clinton and the new book out about the influence her campaign had wielded. The woman was outraged. Her companion tried to dial her down, and I tried not to listen. But it's a small sauna. I was blind and under control of the lone endorphin.

I said, "You know, the DNC was nearly bankrupt," trying to support the other woman's message and imply the Clinton campaign had offered an investment and expected a return.

The angry woman whipped around to look at me, tells me she wasn't talking to me, I had no part in her discussion and she didn't care about my opinion.

I sat there silently for a nanosecond. I not only didn't know the women, I couldn't even see them as I didn't have my glasses on and I was still coming to terms with the lone endorphin. I was more amused than angry, but I was surprised at her vehemence.

I said something like, "It's not so much an opinion as a fact, but OK."

The women then left, the second one turning around and apologizing as the angry one flounced out. I stretched out, wondering if I'd just dreamed the exchange. Had I butted in? Sure. But it's a small sauna and it seemed like they were reasonably current, intelligent women.

I think that angry one needs to meet an endorphin. That'll settle her right down.