No, no, no . . . this is not a psychological crisis. I just really don’t know why I am here typing on my cow; I have nothing to say. It could be I am hiding out here, grabbing a wee bit more  downtime before I get to doing something – and let me tell you I have many “somethings” to do. And they are chores . . . and my famous “experimental” fixing things activities. Oh, it could get out of hand. You know, I still haven’t figured out where the main water turn off to this one little bathroom is. The toilet doesn’t have a turn off under the tank and in the furnace room below, the only valve I found was for the hot water. I hope I don’t have to turn off the house water. I can’t do that until I am really, really confident in what I am doing to the toilet or else I would be – okay, no joke here because I tell the kids scatological jokes aren’t clever, they are just snicker things. And snicker doesn’t count.

Of course, there are some situations where snickers just burst out – like at the family reunion when this 80+ year old lady paused in chewing her potato salad and made some graphic and clinical  remarks about her husband’s penis and his prostate. Actually, we didn’t snicker; we were concentrating too hard on keeping our lips pressed together so food didn’t spray across the table . . . and I think my mother was almost prostrate under the table. Yes, yes, it really happened. We talk about it sometimes and . . . snicker. So, okay, maybe this wasn’t a good story to tell and maybe this is a reason why I shouldn’t be here at the cow and should be doing something productive.

This is the family reunion where two people weren’t there because they were dead – like for decades dead. The dead woman was the second wife of the dead man and she always made a jell-o for reunions that didn’t want to come out of the dish. People would take the spoon, think they had a scoop on it only to find there was always a filament of jell-0 ready to thwang it back into the pan just as it was stretched almost to a plate. I kid you not. This was way before my time, of course, so maybe people exaggerated over time.

I do know this, though. My mother said of this second wife: “Well, your grandmother never had them over for dinner.” Okaaaaay.

I really loved my grandma. I can still hear her voice and smell her and feel the starch in her housedresses; it fascinates me that people who are so dear to me in the continuing generational flow have no memory of her at all. Well, SHE would have completed many chores by this time in the morning so I guess I will bestir myself.

Say, I need Der Bingle to guest post about his grandmother. Whoa, now there was a force to be reckoned with . . . and right around the corner from me is the little Sunday School chair from the Denver church she painted  – along with his grandfather – for our older son. I mean she and he painted it . . . she didn’t paint Grandpa Vance.

I have just got to get out of here.