Blooms are awesome; roots are more important

Spring has apparently decided to do more than stick its head in the door, and my yard is awash with color. Thanks to my botanical strategery, we'll have splashes of yellow, purple, pink and magenta for next few weeks before a wave of orange and different shades of yellow displaces the early bloomers.

The flowers are a diversion from the mangy lawn that one day will get serious attention, which I'm sure my neighbors will appreciate. But that's another story.

Most of the plants I have on purpose in my yard are perennials -- phlox and daffodils, hostas, black-eyed-Susans and day lilies, flowering ground cover and lamb's ears, hens and chickens, grape hyacinth, iris, bee balm -- which pop up every year without me having to do anything to them. I should have a ton of tulips but the damn squirrels have ferreted out just about every bulb I've ever planted.

The magnolia that came with the house and its sister tree next door provide different shades of pink and if my lilac ever blooms, it should be a huge pop of purple in front and back. When it's all in full bloom, it's kind of awesome.

I'm a huge fan of perennials because the more serious upfront costs have an endless and amazing ROI. Annuals are fun bits of different colors and petal shapes to mix in, but they're one-and-done kind of plants. They don't dig their roots in deep. They don't keep coming back to enrich and beautify your life just when you need them most even when you've kind of forgotten about them.

Good friends are like perennials. They're rooted deep. They're there even when you can't see them, don't think about them. Even if your level of care and feeding would shrivel less-hardy stock.
 
One case in point: Debbie Ellis Lubelski. Back in high school, she and I went together like peas and carrots as Forrest Gump would say.

We were country kids, so we spent a ton of time outdoors with horses and dirt bikes. We tore up the back roads in her little red Chevette. We were going to go to Purdue University together, get our degrees and work for National Geographic. I'd write and she'd take stunning photographs. We were going to travel the world.

In reality, I didn't get to Purdue, but life worked out fine for this Sycamore. Deb, however, graduated from Purdue, where she met and married a great guy (hence the Lubelski portion of her name.) They have two sons, and they both work at Purdue in science-y jobs I can't describe. David works in a clean room where you can kill yourself with chemicals if you're not careful. Debbie oversaw greenhouses and is about to go back into lab work. They're super smart and probably have done things that have made your life better or safer.

Aaron has graduated and lives out-of-state doing important research. Adam is finishing a nursing degree at Purdue. Other than an occasional visit over the years, Deb and I have kept in touch largely via Facebook despite not living that far apart. But when I messaged her to say Ali was interested in Purdue and ask if she would have any time at all for a personal tour of the place, she didn't hesitate.

Deb didn't just give us a tour; she wore the hell out of us.

We'd had a great group tour earlier in the month, which gave Alison a glimpse of some of the labs. The Lubelski tour went from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. or so, and we were in and out of places I bet some students don't even see -- certainly not as high school juniors.

And while it had been years since we'd seen each other, it didn't seem like decades had whizzed past us once we re-united. The last time I'd seen David, we decided, was at their wedding.

I'd been to Deb's baby shower for Aaron, her oldest, but I'd not met Adam at all. But it didn't seem to be an issue.  He met us for lunch and then stuck around to show us places he haunts on campus - places he thought Ali might want to know about if she goes to Purdue. He and Ali took off a couple of times on their own, leaving the old folks to catch up and rest weary knees.

At one point, another student was taking us to some chemistry labs and Adam was peeling off to go study. I remarked about how amazing it was that he was so willing to take so much time to trot us around. Debbie thought I was talking about the female grad student who was ahead of a few steps with Alison. She quietly corrected me on my pronoun choice.

"I meant Adam," I said, which set us off into a laughing fit that made me remember a time her mom was driving us to an away basketball game and someone (it was probably Debbie) said, "I got gave a pig."

Debbie's dad was a pig farmer, so it makes sense that a porcine transaction would have been a topic of conversation. It makes sense that she would have said but I don't remember  the details. Just that the sentence's grammatical incorrectness made us explode in laughter that must have driven her mother to the edge of insanity. You probably had to be there to get the joke, but my stomach still aches from laughing about it.

Which brings me to my actual point. In my garden of friends, Debbie is a perennial. How many friends you haven't seen in decades would take a day off work to cart around you and your kid around a college campus? And bring along her husband and kid because it was long past time that you got to know them? And whose spouses you've barely met would make time for you like that? I hope you have some because they're awesome.


It was an amazing day. We had department heads, grad students, undergrads, scientists who took time out of their day to show us around. We saw mass spectrometry and electron microscopes being used, a mice lab where the woman running it showed Ali how to inject DNA into embryos that would be implanted in mice as part of her research into killing tumors.

Another lab was working on super secrete defense stuff. We were in a greenhouse with a guy who is trying to figure out how to keep e. coli out of our salad bowls. We were about done when someone mentioned electron microscopes and Deb said, "You want to see some?"

"Uh, yeah," Ali said as if it was crazy to think she wouldn't.

So we popped into another building where a woman thought for a second about who was doing what with the equipment in that area. She walked us back to an area where two guys were using one of the microscopes. These aren't the desk top microscopes you may remember from high school. They each have their own room and they kind of reminded me of a submarine periscope. They're huge and they give you an atomic-level view of whatever it is you're examining.
 
Our guide decided that the first viewpoint wasn't good enough, so she grabbed a tissue sample and gave Ali a closer look at it using a different electron microscope in a room across the way.

Ali geeked out and talked science with more people than we will remember. Many of them offered up their contact information if she wanted to stay in touch. On the way home, I said something to Ali about how fun it was for me to watch her talk science with these folks who are conducting what could be truly life-changing research.

"I was glad I could hold a conversation," she said. "It was super cool."

It was super cool, and made possible only because of the generosity of my old friend and the favors she and her husband called in from their network of friends at Purdue. So if their credentials aren't enough for you, there's that.
 
Oh. I said Deb wore the hell out of us. Here's my evidence. When we got back in the car to go home, Ali curled up and was dozing before we got off campus. I woke her up a few minutes later when I stopped to get gas and a Red Bull, without which neither the Mustang nor I would have made it home.

I'm fortunate to have met friends like Debbie everywhere I've been. The grape hyacinth in my yard came from my friend Cindy Athey's yard. Every year when it pops up, I think about her and wish we saw each other every day like we used to. I have peonies out back that my former neighbor wanted me to transfer so she can some visit them one day. My day lilies and irises are from back home.


The great thing about friends and perennial flowers is they don't have to always be in bloom to be part of your root system.

Bartlett pears, prom and a hint of pee

It was prom this weekend, and Alison went with her friend, Corie, and a bunch of other friends. They were hilarious, so pretty, and so ready to see the back of me.

They met at the Broad Ripple Steak & Shake and went in a caravan. I took a few shots before they invited me to go back home for a date night. The best part of the evening was when she got home from the dance. She was barefoot, of course, tired and smiling. I took her little tokens -- a light ball and a candle holder with Herron High School etched into it -- made sure she took care of her dress and went back to my room only to hear her shout for me from her bathroom.

"Mom!" she cried.

When kids are little, it's possible to get tired of hearing the constant request for attention. When they get into the teenage years, the tone changes, generally containing more notes of annoyance than need. When they're sixteen-going-on-seventeen, you're just grateful they're speaking to you. I ran into the bathroom to see what tragedy had happened.

She was standing there, her dress half-off, laughing. "Look!" she said. "I have glitter in my belly-button."

Sure enough there were remnants of the prom stuck to her skin. She's still my little girl...

She's still trying to get over her latest respiratory issue, and I was worried that she'd have a coughing fit at the prom. Like I did when I was a kid (and still sometimes) Ali coughs like an 87-year-old chronic smoker. It's startling if you've never experienced it. "I don't feel bad," she'll say between gasps. "I just sound bad."

She had a few episodes as we waited at BR Nails for her mani/pedi, which may or may not have contributed to people sidling away from her. We've been going there since she was little, and the owner glanced over at her when I told him it prom night. "Already?" he asked. "I remember when she was fourth or fifth grade."

Later, his brother or cousin heard her coughing and said he suffers with the same issue. He, too, has two inhalers and has tried a lot of things. He suggested having her drink tumeric powder dissolved into water. He said it was the best thing -- the only thing -- that had worked for him. We tried it when we got home and I might have overdone it. There was orange sediment in the bottom of the glass.

She had another bout a bit ago and I tried again. Less sediment, but then again I used a teacup...


In non-prom related matters, Alison spent K-8 at Christ the King, a small Indianapolis school whose sidewalks are bordered by ornamental Bartlett Pear trees. I can't remember when she started complaining about the smell that accompanies their spring blossom, but she hasn't stopped since.

So when I was driving to pick her up the other day and I was on Talbott Street, surrounded on either side by even larger specimens of the trees, I inhaled deeply. It was warmish and I had the top own and the heat on. I was proud that I kept on the right side of the street as I kind of choked up. Ali was right. They do stink.

So when I picked her up, I meant to take her up that street. Halfway home, I remembered that I'd forgotten and told her about it and showed her the picture I'd taken.

"They're pretty, but they smell like shit," she said, giving me the side-eye to see if I'd call her on her profanity.

"Actually," I said. "I think they smell like pee."

She looked at me. "Yeah? I don't get that."

We went back and forth a little bit about which elements we detected in the air before she looked over at me and said, "I love our little arguments."

Saturday morning we were walking to BR Nails to get her a mani/pedi for the prom, returning to the pear tree discussion.

"You know that when I said they smell like, you know, I didn't mean they smell like feces," she said. "I just meant they smell bad."

I said I'd known that, but remained committed to my literal description.

"It's not really urine, though," she said.

"Maybe not throughout, but it definitely finishes with a pee smell," I said.

It was there, on the 6100 block of Compton Street we realized our descriptions of the tree aroma was strikingly similar to how Jeff describes beer and wine. In deference to the Captain, I won't repeat the rest of our walking-home chatter.

One more prom shot.... this is what I woke up to this morning. It made me laugh because it's SO Alison. She wore those boots to school. Why, I couldn't tell you. It wasn't rainy. She just likes them. It's normally her Converse sneakers, sometimes combat boots (which she considered wearing with her dress to prom. Thank you Macy's customers and staff who talked her into the shoes) sometimes shiny sneakers or more delicate boots. But Friday, it was her Bean boots.

I love her so much. She is such a complex little creature and almost always comfortable in her own skin.  No matter the occasion.

OK. Maybe a few more...

Call me June Cleaver

I have never been -- will never be -- confused with a good cook. Give me a phone and I can order the best dinner this side of the Ohio River, but there aren't many people who've left my dinner table extolling my skills in front of the stove. Jeff gets all that love. I'm the default sous chef/clean-up crew.

In my defense, I've never killed anyone with my culinary attempts. (Jeff has come close a few times.) It's OK, though. I don't have to be great at everything. But there are those occasions when I wish I was better in the kitchen.

Jeff's out on a work trip, and Alison had decided we shouldn't be take-out queens in his absence. She even said she'd been thinking about planning a menu that would have her pitching in to cook. I looked at her funny and asked her to repeat herself. She's known as the Taco Queen for a reason, and she generally looks forward to Jeff's night away from dinner because I'm almost always down to order out.

"I want to make Mango Chicken Curry," she said. "Do we have fresh ginger?"

Here's what it's supposed to look like. Pretty, right?

I should have known things wouldn't work out as planned. Ali woke up Monday feeling bad, complaining of a sore throat and asking if she could come home early from school. She didn't want to miss Chemistry, but didn't think she was up for a full day of learning.

I agreed, and she spent the afternoon and most of the evening on the couch where she went through two boxes of Kleenex as she watched YouTube videos, did homework and picked up notes and assignments online. I glanced at the mangoes I'd bought for her and wondered if they'd make it into the saucepan.

She was feeling better by Tuesday and said she wanted the curry chicken for dinner.

"Do I have time for a bath?" she asked as she darted into her bathroom.

I'm sure what I offered was to prepare the ingredients so she could make the dish.

I sighed. "Mother up," I told myself.

The recipe said it would take 15 minutes to prep. The recipe lied.

I've been known to get halfway into a recipe only to discover I don't have an essential ingredient. This time I was going to be smarter and assemble all the ingredients ahead of time. I needed white vinegar, which was in the far corner of a tall pantry shelf.

In getting it, I knocked over a bottle of fancy olive oil that's infused with hot, red pepper. The fancy cork in the stupid fancy bottle popped out and I had olive oil and red pepper flakes all over the wider, lower shelf. My wasabi peas were safe in their clear plastic box, but the lid was covered in oil. It was everywhere, actually. Oil is good for wood, right?

I mopped up most of the oil and went back to assembling ingredients and reading the recipe.

I had to chop the onion, bell pepper, chicken and mangoes, and mince the garlic and the ginger. I considered that a while. I know what mincing is, but I thought we have a tool for that.

I'm not exactly sure what the tool I used was really for, but it didn't squeeze out little minces of ginger. It was more like a juicer. I ended up chopping the clump of root that emerged and threw the juice into it. I almost kissed the jar of minced garlic I found in the fridge. It was right beside the jar of minced ginger. (I might have cursed when I found that...)

Now for the produce. I debated the difference between "diced" and "chopped" for a while. God forbid I end up with wrong-sized chunks.

I Googled it. Turns out chopping is what my dicing usually turns into when I have to dice too much of something. So I chopped. It also turns out that mangoes are super slippery and have some sort of a fibrous core to them like a pineapple. I was pretty sure that I didn't keep the core. I learned that mangoes are sturdy enough to wash off just fine if they shoot off the cutting board and slide across the floor.

SIDE NOTE: Growing up, my family called green bell peppers "mangoes." Don't know why, but we did. FYI: mangoes are not green bell peppers. Not even close.

The recipe called for a red bell pepper. I had orange. Same thing, right?

I went back to the recipe. Step one was "Cook onions, bell pepper, garlic, ginger, spices.

We didn't have any vegetable oil and I'd spilled all the fricking olive oil.  Jeff is always yammering on about the right kind of oil and its smoke point or flame level or some such nonsense. I can never remember which one is right or the for what reason. But ha! I have a can of spray coconut oil. That counts, right? Mangoes and coconuts are both tropical. Close enough.

I sprayed the spray oil until it was near liquid in the pan and threw in the chopped onions and pepper, the minced ginger and garlic and the spices and went back to the recipe.

Crap! The recipe used grammar and tricked me. Step one had a colon. The stupid onions and peppers were supposed to be fried (I mean sauteed) first. Then, the garlic and ginger were to be added and stirred around a bit. The spices were to arrive fashionably late. Oh well. It all was in there and damn if I didn't need to spray the pan with oil again.

I added up the times I was supposed to cook in stages and let it all cook up, spraying here and there like a beauty pageant contestant with a can of Aqua Net.

Step two said to add the vinegar, coconut milk and one of the mangoes. Goddammit! I had chopped the stupid fruit and threw it all in the same bowl. I could estimate half, right? I mean, even I can divide by two. I threw it all in and got it to the simmering point.

I feel I should point out that I was well past the 15-minute point by now. My back hurt, I was working on a case of carpal tunnel, and I had oil in my hair.

It was then I read that I had puree the concoction once it was done simmering. Me, hot, spicy fruit and a blender. That's a recipe for disaster if ever there was one.

I kept telling myself to remember the lid, remember the lid: this stuff is h.o.t. I was glad Ali had the exhaust fan and her speakers on because I was literally talking myself (out loud) through the ordeal.

I remembered the lid. (Ha! You didn't think I would, did you? I totally had a Lucy Ricardo vision, but I worked hard against it.)

Even as I pulsed the blender, I was shaking my head. I don't puree things. Maybe a smoothie, but not a dinner entree. That's Jeff-Reed-level cooking. I so should have made Ali do this.

But, she was sickly, and when she or Jeff is in the kitchen, there's stuff dripping from the ceiling and all over the floor. I may not be a great cook, but I can clean the crap out of things. So far, (other than the oil) I hadn't destroyed the kitchen. I had, however, used up a ton of different vessels. Cleanup was going to take longer than the damn prep.

The puree was supposed to go right back into the pan, which seemed kind of like a cheat, but OK. I was to add the chicken and the mango and cook it for 10 minutes. I took a deep breath, surveyed all that I'd done so far and decided it wasn't a disaster. I tossed it all in and tackled the small mountain of dishes that had multiplied like litter on a post-Spring Break beach.

Crap! The mangoes weren't supposed to mingle with raw chicken. This recipe was not my friend. In its defense, the words were there. I just maybe skimmed a bit more than I should have.

I had to add two tablespoons of fat-free half-and-half because I'd bought light coconut milk, which according to the recipe was like using cardboard instead of lasagna noodles or something. It was a snarky editorial comment that I feel is not appropriate for recipe work, but who cares what I think?

The recipe actually called for heavy whipping cream, "if you "must" use light milk."

Let's get real here. If I bought light coconut milk and "must" use it, what are the chances that I have heavy whipping cream in the house? Right: zero.

Idiot recipe. I was supposed to use "slightly unripe on the firm side" mangoes, too, and be prepared to balance out the sweetness or not-sweetness depending on what level of ripe/firm I ended up with. I guess I could have Googled how to tell when a mango was ripe, but I was still laughing over calling green peppers mangoes. Who can Google when you're giggling?

There was a remedy for the mango state of existence that involved raisins or vinegar, but I decided to skip over that scenario entirely. Ali had -- thank GOD -- told me she didn't want raisins in it. We didn't have raisins anyway.

We also didn't have fresh cilantro to garnish the dish when it was done. It's Tuesday. Tuesday dinner doesn't deserve garnish. That's a weekend thing. A weekend when Jeff is manning the stove.

Anyway, I stir the stuff around and let it cook. Ali emerged from her bath as it reached the end of its suggested cook time. She peered into the saucepan. She'd been in the bath approximately six hours. (It was maybe less than that, but it seemed like a long time.)

"There's a lot of liquid in there," she remarked.

"Yeah, I may not have had exactly the right amount of chicken," I said.

The recipe called for 1-and-a-quarter pounds of chicken. I had two breasts leftover from a larger event. They were in an unmarked Ziplock freezer bag. I have no idea how many pounds it was. It had taken FOREVER to chop into bite-sized pieces and I'd had to trim off gross wads of fat. It looked like enough. I sure didn't want to thaw and chop more.

"Did you weigh it?" Ali-of-the-bath asked.

Uncle James got her a fancy kitchen scale for Christmas. It lives next to the blender, but I averted my eyes from it. I really didn't want to chop more chicken than I had to.

She tasted it and said it might be OK anyway. "I'm going to add frozen peas," she said.


Cool, I thought. Better peas than raisins. I microwaved some rice and she took her bowl to her sick couch.

"Hey Mom," she called. "Can you bring me more Kleenex?"

I walked into the room and directed her to the Kleenex behind her, within arm's reach.

"It's really good!" she said, snatching the box and grinning.

"It's really good," she repeated.


I snatched my phone and started taking pictures. She told me to stop taking pictures.

"It's not very often I do things right," I explained.

"You do things right," she said. "Just not in the kitchen."

She's lucky she's sick.

Status: Glass approaching full

Standing in the hallway of the Purdue University Memorial Union 10 days ago, I'll admit to being weepy. Someone had called out for the parents to step to one side of the wide hall and the students to step to the other.

We were there for a visit to determine if Alison might want to attend the school, and for all I knew, it was the last we'd see of Alison until the end of the day.

She was super chill about it and strolled off with a quick smile. Jeff was doing his cool dad thing, but I know he was desperate for her to turn around and ask him something ... anything that would reassure him that she still needed his advice. He got nothing.

I really, really tried to keep it together, but  it was one of those terrible/wonderful events where another thread ripped free of the slender cord connecting us. I could see it unraveling and flying off in the breeze as clear as day. He turned around and saw me and started to laugh.


He positioned himself so she couldn't see my face. It's not that I wasn't proud of her or don't want her to live her life, but man, the milestones are hard. The division of parents and students was short-lived, and my weepy moment passed. I tried to keep back and let her do her thing.

We ended up having a really good day and we only embarrassed her a couple of times. That I know of.

At one point, we were in a small group, and Dr. Beatriz Cisneros was querying parents and students about what they wanted out of the day. Were were only about a dozen people, and as an ice-breaker, she asked us to give a fun fact about ourselves. Mine was that Mitch Daniels had once fired me. The adults in the room thought it was a super fun fact. Alison was not amused.

"Why did you say that?!" she asked me later. 
 
She knew the former governor had invited me and my fellow Democrats to leave when his Republican regime took over, but she didn't realize he was now the president of Purdue. She gave me that "uh-huh" look when I explained the hilarity of my fun fact.

I can't remember exactly how Jeff embarrassed her, but I'm sure he did. I mean, it couldn't have only been me...

Anyway, I'm mostly over my anxiety over her imminent departure. I have another year and half before it's time for college, and we have more visits to make. I'll have to work on my fun facts for them. It's doubtful I'll have a better one.

In an ironic twist of fate, I had an actual Mitch encounter a week after our visit to West Lafayette via a work project headed by Bill Oesterle. The event was the Brain Gain Talent Summit, the first event of a larger project designed to keep talented people in Indiana whether they're natives or come here for college or university. It's a concept Bill and the former governor have been talking about and working on for years and I'm happy to be helping with it.

As the event wasn't about me and I had a job to do, I didn't take the opportunity to tell the governor/president that Ali is considering his university as her next educational institution or that he met her years ago. Not that he was the first governor to make her acquaintance, of course.
  
I was working for Governor Frank O'Bannon when Ali was born. There was a Day Nursery school in the state office building next to the Statehouse, so she and I had "gone to work" together since her enrollment there as an infant. She was a frequent visitor to the governor's office, once marking it as her territory when her diaper leaked all over one of the couches. 

One night when I was working late, my friend Cindy Athey was dispatched to pick her up. That was the longest walk in Cindy's life as Alison apparently screamed most of the way. In later years, her Day Nursery class visited with Governor Joe Kernan. So the entire state complex was just a playground to her and everyone -- even the security detail -- was just another potential playmate.

She was four-years old and Mitch had just taken office as governor when they met. I was still licking my wounds from the election lot and was freshly unemployed. Jeff, who was still working downtown, had taken over getting her to Day Nursery and back.

When they came home that night and he told me that he'd encountered the new governor that day. Not only had they traded cordial greetings, the governor had leaned down to talk to Ali and then taken HER HAND and walked with them to the cafeteria, chattering about this and that like you do when you meet an adorable little kid.

I was not amused.
 
"You let him hold her hand?" I asked, outraged. "Did you tell him that he'd just fired her mommy?" 

I'm pretty sure the eye roll he gave me at Purdue the other day was the same one I got that day back in 2005. I like to think I've matured since then. 

Jeff has abandoned us for a few days for a work trip that has a special side bonus of being in Portland, Oregon, home of our good friend Sami Khawaja. It'll be a mix of craft beer, wine, jazz and, of course, important work.

Ali left me too, for an overnight with a friend of hers. It wasn't a problem because their absence left me open to monopolize my nephew Jason, who was in town for his weekend with the naval reserve. Even though I knew what he was here for, seeing him walk toward me in uniform was a bit of a shock. There's a big welcome home party for him next week, but it's also Alison's prom so I'll miss it.

I was thrilled to be able to spend some quality time with him ahead of the party, which he pointed out, is something I probably wouldn't get at the party. So it couldn't have worked out better.

I don't think I have words for how proud of Jason I am. Don't tell him because it would embarrass him, but he's the kid every parent hopes to have. He's not a kid, of course. He's a grown-up. A husband. A parent. A grandparent, actually. He's a frickin' soldier.

I'm pretty lucky to be surrounded by all kinds of people doing good things. Ali needed service hours for National Honor Society, and my friend Karin Ogden didn't hesitate to put her to work around the Athenaeum YMCA.

All around me, people are doing amazing things, and it's making me optimistic even on this rainy Sunday when all I have to keep me company is my laptop and my NYT.

There's a lot this world has to work on, but I'm glad to know a lot of folks who are making a positive difference in whatever way they can.

It even seems Old Man Winter is about to be wrestled back to his cave after one last battle tomorrow.
Even if there's more snow in the forecast, spring IS coming.  There's more good ahead than bad in the days to come. I'm sure of it.

Cheers to a glass that's more than half-full today. Hope yours is, too.

 

Paradise Lost

It's only fitting that after a week in paradise, we come home to a monsoon, the threat of tornadoes and now, snow. We do live in Indiana, after all.

We have a bit of water in the basement, but my guess is there are few bone-dry basements in the central part of the state after we were hit with record high rainfall. We've been down this road before and were prepared, so nothing but a small inconvenience at this point.

Some of my other family members and friends south and west of here weren't so lucky, with trees down; some
in outbuildings that now contain smashed vehicles. No one hurt, though.

Tomorrow, the Captain and I will take Ali to our first family college visit. She's visited a few campuses as part of high school trips, but we've never gone along before. We're headed to Boilermaker country, Purdue University. For you non-Hoosiers, it's about 90 minutes northwest of Indianapolis.

The forecast calls for 46-degrees and cloudy tomorrow, which is not as great at Turks or Caicos, but better than a blizzard, which based on the year so far, is still as possible, as is sunny and 75 in Indiana.

As the snow falls here, I'm going to think about last week rather than this one. And once again thank Gary Reed for his generosity and the rest of TeamReed Maine for hanging out with us.

Some highlights from the week:

• A slight knee injury had me packing a knee brace and lounging with an ice pack the first day, but by the end (and after much more lounging) I was virtually healed. I'd injure it again if I thought I could do rehab back at Beaches.
• No one was super painfully sunburned.
• We indulged in wonderful massages. 
• Ali and I were convinced a taxidermist had  installed a stuffed bird into the shrubs one morning. We watched it for a long time and it didn't move so we decided it was odd, but had to be an April Fool's joke or something. Then it appeared in a different shrub some hours later. It moved and freaked us out. So much for taxidermy on the island.
• David didn't catch only a fish head this year, but he didn't land a whole one either.
• Peter hauled in a Tuna and Mahi Mahi, some of which he had served up as fabulous appetizers one night. He donated the rest to the kitchen staff.
• Ali, James and I snorkeled and saw sea turtles, a manta ray, a barracuda and tons of fish and pretty coral. Ali and James spent more time in the reef than I did, and they added a lion fish and some other creatures to their vista. We'll get the photos in 10 days or so. 
• I was reaching out -- not really intended to touch it -- but close to the tail of the barracuda when Ali saw me and snagged my fin. She's convinced she saved my life. I'm convinced I wasn't that close.
• Jen and I swapped books, and she and I shared the same opinion of my Book Club book. 
• Most of us hit the water park with Ali on our last day, trotting up and down the stairs to the slides as if we were all teenagers.
  
  Early in the week, some of us had gone to Sapodilla's, one of the fancier restaurants, and Ali and Jeff fell in love with their desserts and were conspiring to come back before they'd savored their last bites.

 It wasn't until our last night, after we dined at Kimono's a hibachi restaurant, that they got their chance. It was late by the time we finished dinner, and there was a chocolate fest going on near our rooms. None of that mattered to Jeff and Ali, who had waxed so poetically to the other family at our table that they actually beat us there. The staff was closing down but agreed to slip them all to-go plates. I was too full to order, and even managed to pass up the chocolate buffet on the way home.


As we had to have our bags ready to go before breakfast, we had packed up before dinner. Ali hit the room, stripped off her dining attire and stuffed it into her bag, planning to indulge in comfort. It was only after she'd stripped and stuffed that she realized she'd packed everything but clothes for the morning.

She looked at the suitcase, her dessert plate, the clock and back to her dessert plate. She shrugged, grabbed the plate and hopped onto her bed.

"Guess I'm eating creme brulee in my underwear!" she said. And she did.

 We have little to show for our time in the sun but good memories and some fun photos. But they're pretty awesome memories.