Monthly Archives: September 2009

Just Me - AmeliaJake

ooooooh, a little miscue

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We kind of all realize that Alison has a little problem with over-reminding people of things and events. Kind of like: gonna do that now? gonna do that? gonna do that? not gonna forget to do that? Then, today, September 30, when I took her to work at 6:30 am. she didn’t have anything to remind me about. Nothing, nil, zip?

Mother drove home this morning by herself because she said she felt better and then I sat down and leaned over and slipped into a nap – actually, I may have taken my medicine twice. Anyway, I was in the tar pits of napping. Eyes opened but re-closed.  TV movies slipped from one to another. And then I felt a demanding thought flogging through the murky trails of neurons: MUST  . . . WAKE . . . UP . . . MUST  . . . MOVE. So I staggered to the shower and then set about getting some food for the horde of two coming from school.

Summer came in the front door and just a couple of minutes later, the doorbell rang. She went to check and said, “Oh, it’s some Chinese people.” You never know with Summer, so I went to the door and there were two ladies who are involved in Colin’s placement and casework. They were here at the house for a meeting with the family. Okay . . .

Actually, I think we handled it quite well: I settled them in a the table at the fair end of the kitchen and when Robert came in I plopped him in a chair and then we grabbed Summer and Cameron and put them on the two antique stools I had scored at an antique place for only $23 each even thought they are really strong with good ball bearings and thick, wooden, round seats that rotate.  Then I leaned up against the trestle table and just puttered around as we had our little confab.

Then, about 90 minutes later, they left. And I looked at Summer and said, “Chinese?”

(The ladies were very nice.)

Just Me - AmeliaJake

just a quick word

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I was watching “Any Given Sunday” with Al Pacino and Dennis Quaid because I was trying to figure out with which movie I had confused it. And then I sat on the remote and I am now watching a Ken Burns special on Mount Desert which I think is a part of a series on National Parks. Yes, that is what it is: National Parks and I am no longer seeing stuff about Mount Desert. Most times I would enjoy watching a documentary on National Parks and Stephen Mather’s push for a national park system, but right now watching this educational program is striking chords in my nervous system on a par with sitting through a Cotton Mather sermon. So I am going back to Pacino and Quaid and perhaps mind rot.

Oh, wait, now we get gossip: Mather had mental problems and “was sent to an asylum” outside of Baltimore. He had had his first breakdown in 1903 and three subsequent episodes had been prevented from escalating by trips to the wilderness of national parks. So, what about Mather and this fourth onset – did he get better or not? Okay, now they are talking about Mt. McKinley and in a filmed clip, an oldtimer explorer said the mountain had the “Heart of an Old Whore”.

Bears! There are bears pictured. I see no cows, though. Mostly I think the scenery and inspiration of the land and the talk of wealthy people are just asking me to be more than I feel like being at this moment. On the phrase “power elite” I click over to Pacino and Quaid. Sometimes you just have to tie one on.

This and That at The Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse

The situation

A while back, I mentioned in a post that the patrons of the Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse (and the Foo Bar) were distressed that I appeared to be ignoring them, going off in my own fugues and distractions. Heck, take my word for it; I’m not going to search and link to it. (Well, okay, I got curious and did just that.) Now, the opposite seems to be the case: I walk through the PBC&R and look in the door of the Foo Bar and everyone is in suspended animation. Lydia is at the piano, but her fingers are just above the keys; the checker game is forever at the same move and the special sarsaparilla keeps flowing out of the spigot but the glass never overflows. It’s weird . . . kind of like a Stephen King or Dean Koontz opening chapter.

HEY, YOU GUYS . . .PERK UP. I need you. There, I’ve said it. You folks are important to me. I need help, especially since a group of singing sisters (biological, not nuns) came to door asking for a place to perform and bunk and eat. They call themselves the SighClones and if I can get them all together at once, I’ll take a picture. (They were all here with me watching “Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison” yesterday but I didn’t have my camera.)

So, guys, there’s a need for a real surefire cure . . . We need a party.

Just Me - AmeliaJake

Trip to Indianapolis

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Alison and I headed on down to Options today to see Colin for the first time now that he has settled in. He has lost weight and is a lot calmer and seems content. After about 30 minutes he told his mother he guessed we had seen everything and could go. Then he talked for about 30 more minutes and gave hugs with no tears and we headed back north, reassured in his state of mind.

It was a great day for the trip – all four lane and mostly interstate and, wow, the place is just right off the exit ramp. Now we need to scout out the city via the internet so we can take advantage of our trips down there. This time we thought we’d better play it safe and get right back on the entrance ramp, though.

Just Me - AmeliaJake

Out behind Mother’s

I was following Mother up through the yard to the back deck when I heard a loud shout. I ignored it and we went inside and did a few little things and then I looked out back through the screen and exclaimed, “Holy Smoke!” And smoke is what it was, only I didn’t have my camera. There was black smoke and flames and the fire department came and all I had was my cell phone and I haven’t fully figured out the camera.

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And I don’t want to go to the trouble of rotating either. But, if you hold your head sideways, you can see black smoke. Now aren’t you excited? Oh, and that black circle in the forefront? Well, that’s the burn pile site. Last time we scorched the leaves on a maple . . . this time it was a willow. You’d think we’d learn.

Okay, okay, okay . . . I did the right thing and flipped it.

Snapshot 2009-09-26 08-03-37

This and That at The Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse

Walter Cronkite’s voice

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There is a good thing about being in my early sixties: I know Walter Cronkite’s voice the second I hear it. So if the television is playing in the background on the Military Channel or the History Channel International as it so often is, I am alerted that there is a good show coming on by the sound of his voice.

I stopped what I was doing this morning to watch a show that covered the time from the Japanese Attack on Port Arthur through WWII. Cronkite referred to the ‘unity and disciple” of the Japanese culture standing out among Asiatic groups. And that triggers a memory of a 60 Minutes episode about Japanese businessmen in training being required to stand on a busy street corner shouting out about mistakes they have made.

Generals came from all over to view how Japan had mastered the strategy of Western war and modern weapons. Nine years later, as Cronkite announced, they would be at war with each other.

Yes, I remember the Schlieffen Plan – the assumption the Russians would take six weeks to deploy and that France would fall in that time. I like hearing Cronkite explain it so much better than any history professor I have had. I remain fascinated by the first engagement of that August begun war: an airplane spotted Germans in Belgium and British Cavalry was sent in which was repelled by a German group traveling on bicycles. There were pictures – pictures of these young Germans  – four abreast – pedaling along a road. Pictures of men on horses.

The Battle of Mons and the audio recording of a British soldier who won the Victoria Cross as he held the Germans off at the bridgehead long enough for the British Army to fall back. And I’m thinking of that man who had that voice – “He’s dead now, been for some time.” Cronkite is dead too, now . . . as are the 20,000 British who went “over the top” at the Somme and died in the very first hour.

And somewhere in the narrative I hear him mention that Napoleon had 20,000 shells at Waterloo; the British stocked up 3 million in preparation for the Somme.

Despite himself, there is pride in Cronkite’s voice as he speaks of Midway  when the battle seemed going Japan’s way until “Thirty-six American planes spotted the Japanese fleet . . . On that day, Japan started to lose the war.”

The show went on and ended talking about the month and year of ’45; I was born in ’48. I saw the generations of the time from 1905 to 1045 through the lens of accomplishment without visible war wounds. The maimed were hidden away in Veteran’s Hospitals; we didn’t see them. We saw the prosperity and vitality of the GI’s turned students. For awhile America was still the America of small towns and girls still wearing skirts and Currier & Ives holidays. There was energy and church going and laden dinner tables smelling of roasts and turkeys and pies. Autos were big and heavy. Shoes were leather and high-tops until the were bronzed and made into bookends.

I went to college in the era of Western Civilization; within a decade,  multi-culturalism would be re-witing the curriculum.  Political correctness would discourage questions. Citizens of the world . . . but I think it might be a facade – that we are still leaning toward our tribes. And, quite frankly, I wonder about what was remarked upon over a century ago – that Japanese “unity and discipline”.  I wonder, too, about just what the American spirit is now.

I guess I’m not being so political correct, mentioning something like this. But I see it; I think I do – in my electronics, in garages, in quality. I don’t think what I’m viewing is an optical illusion.

This and That at The Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse

Thinking of mice and men

I thought I was sleepy; apparently, I am not. I have been lying down thinking about Of Mice and Men, thanks to my granddaughter’s English assignment. Of course, there has been talk of symbolism and foreshadowing has made an impression on her. More so than on me. I’m a lot older – I can deal with foreshadowing. We discussed it when she read Steinbeck’s The Pearl; her teacher says the wife woke up first at the very beginning because she would see the pitfalls involved with finding the pearl before her husband did; I tend to think it was not a specific thing or symbol – that in an Indian family in Mexico, a poor Indian family living in a hut, the wife, especially the mother of a young child, normally awakens first.

But never mind that; now we are in the mice book. She has been talking about themes and settled on loneliness. Personally, I think writing papers about the themes in literature is a foray into a loneliness trying not to be alone with a theme that is not “the accepted one”. Oh, please, please, let me be on the teacher-approved bandwagon.

Now, as I lay there thinking of George shooting Lenny, I wondered if Steinbeck wondered what would be the case if George had put Lenny out of his misery before he killed Curly’s wife. That is, was it evident Lenny would really mess up and stepping in before the fact would save a life?

Whoa, that would have had the whole class looking at me like a pariah. See, this is why I don’t like discussions of literature and what the author meant – they want you to think inside the book, inside accepted ideas, to never see the book as a box that maybe a thought might pop out of  into the outside’s underbelly. Have I got enough symbolistic phrasing in that sentence?

Well, I’m closing up now, latching the door. Maybe I’ll lie back down and foreshadow.

Just Me - AmeliaJake

Yo, I’m here

I have been sticking my head in various nooks and crannies, some real and some not, while trying to figure out where some real things have been stashed and  also the places some of my ideas want and/or need to go. And I haven’t figured it out yet, but that’s okay. I’ll keep working on it. I had to postpone it a wee bit this morning because we had a TWO HOUR FOG DELAY. And then tomorrow is the dreaded Wednesday automatic  and inane half-hour delay.

I have things I have to do – finish the pattern for the bathroom floor is the first one. It is hanging over my head, which is a neat trick for a floor, but that’s the way my life is. Then I need to resand and restain part of the kitchen and re-poly; the good news is I have found some clear protector that does not have the little nubs that grab the rug that is usually underneath. This is for hardwood.

We have to go; we will see you again.

Just Me - AmeliaJake

Pizza afternoon

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I will have pictures and I will add them, but right now I just want to say there has been a lot of home-made pizza making going on in the kitchen here in the Peanut Butter Cafe &  Roadhouse. Green peppers, red peppers, yellow peppers, orange peppers; onions; mushrooms; pepperoni; tomatoes; sausage and different cheeses plus regular spices. I, AmeliaJake, combined a lot of these ingredients into a blender/chopper and made “the mystery topping” for my small pizza – and, of course, included was the super double secret ingredient that endows those who eat it with secret powers. Everyone is afraid to eat it because they anticipate turning everything they touch to kohlrabi or cauliflower. So it is mine, mine . . . all mine.

Oh, dear, I seem to be typing on a vegetable . . . hahahahahahahahahahahaha.

bingle lobster

summer concentrating pizza

pizza

Just Me - AmeliaJake

No curbside pick-up in Kendallville

It used to be that on the Saturday of “clean-up week”, you could put your cast-offs at the curb and they would be picked up. The city stopped doing that some years ago and instead just issued free tickets to the transport site for the landfill. Soooooo, we accumulated some – shall we say – stuff during the years because we didn’t have a way to get big things to the site.

This year Der Bingle decided to take the situation by the horns and got a U-Haul truck with a COW on it – – but he didn’t notice he had a cow until I came out yelling, “You have a cow! You have a cow!”

Bing cow

He acknowledged it was a cow from Wisconsin, but he said it in passing because he was thinking of the work ahead.

smiley and cow

Here is Cameron, at my insistence, giving the cow a scratch behind the ears. It appears he is also thinking of the work ahead.

the big push

Here is the big push from Summer as the sofa goes in . . .

a little sofa accident

And here is Summer’s dad, Robert William, going down in the Big Push.

the arm calls out for help

Notice the arm reaching out for help.

the mighty moo

And finally, The Mighty Moo takes off.