mine mine mine

In my house, the rule is generally eat it or lose it.  I live with a midnight muncher who has a tendency to reach in the fridge and grab whatever he touches even if it's covered with my name.  When my brother is home, it's even worse.  I have become rather protective of my food, especially my sweets.  So, last night when my friend Chris gifted me with a plate of frosted banana scrumptiousness, I was determined that it would survive to be consumed on the morrow.

I am very mature.

days

Hello, internet.  Did you have a good weekend?  My weekend was pretty okay.  I am going to tell you about it, because this is my blog, the place where I Tell Things.

On Saturday, I slept in.  Even when one's job does not often require them to rise early, it still feels good to sleep in on a Saturday.  In case you were wondering.  In the morning, I got all my doors ready to post for the upcoming week, then I put Lani in the back of my jeep and drove off to check on a cat.  I'm not technically supposed to take my dog along when going to a pet sit, and I only really do it if I'm only going to be checking on cats and if I'll be anywhere in the area of the dog park.  The people whose cat I'm feeding hadn't actually left for their trip yet, which was odd, and awkward, and I was quite happy to drive away and sit in the sun at the dog park for a spell.

There were lots of dogs in the park, along with their people, a few of whom were handsome dudes.  I have a sneaking suspicion that I'll meet my future husband in a dog park, which is a secret I've never told anyone but now I'm telling you, internet.  I did not, however, meet him on Saturday.  After we spent 45 minutes being socially awkward (Lani tends to bark at children--I think she sees unnaturally small people and it weirds her out), we headed to the library to drop off a book that was due.  I hadn't actually read it yet, as I'm in some kind of reading slump, but someone had put a hold on it and I couldn't renew it.  I returned home determined to read one of the two remaining books I had checked out. 

Here is where I make a confession: I am a reader of romance novels.  It's something I've gotten a good amount of flack about over the years, so it's not something I tend to bring a great deal of attention to.  Don't mistake me, I'm not ashamed of it.  In real life, I'll talk your ear off on the subject if given half a chance.  Saturday, I sat down determined to break my slump, and I did.  I read Tempt Me at Twilight by Lisa Kleypas, who is hands-down my favourite romance novelist.  It was fantastic, and I'm very glad that I waited as long as I did to read it, because it means I don't have to wait as long for her next books, due out in May, and June, respectively.

After finishing the book, I went back to actually feed the cat I'm sitting for, hoping that waiting until 8 pm would have given the family plenty of time to leave.  I had been told to expect not to see the cat, but he crept in, ghost-like, while I was getting his food ready.  A dark Siamese, he crept out again, as silent as before, when I turned away momentarily.  I'm thinking of him as my creepy ghost kitty.

On Sunday, I woke up to a bed full of animals and the scent of cinnamon rolls.  The second library book was first on my mental agenda.  I had been number 236 on the waiting list for it when I signed up, so there was no way it was going to get returned without being read.  It was Sizzle, by Julie Garwood, a romantic thriller that was neither thrilling nor particularly sizzling.

I returned both of the books on my way back from checking on the creepy ghost kitty, who materialized in one of his cat beds while my back was turned and decided to stay and let me talk to him.  He's an old guy, and partially deaf, but pretty sweet.  I had brought both dogs with me, and they had stuck their heads out the window and started a fight with the dog next-door while I was inside.  Hoodlums.

The rest of the day was spent going through my DVR backlist, writing e-mails, and developing a raging migraine.  Thrilling, I know.  I tried to start a third book, but when a character was decapitated in the first chapter and all I could thing was "The lucky bastard," I decided it was time to turn it in.

Right now, this is my life.  I sort of want to preserve it before I go off to somewhere entirely new and do something completely different.  What will my weekends look like then?  I'm eager to get started on it, but at the same time reluctant to say goodbye to these sometimes boring days.

you have bewitched me

It was Thanksgiving 2005.  My family was in South Carolina, but I had traveled to Milwaukee, Wisconsin to keep my best girl Laura company while she worked over the holiday.  She insisted on making an entire turkey for the two of us.  I contributed instant mashed potatoes and green bean casserole, the bottom of which was burned when it was left sitting on the stove to cool with a burner on beneath it.  When it was time to eat, we cleared a shelf on a bookcase to use as a serving area, which then collapsed under the weight of the food.  I spent 20 minutes vacuuming up stuffing while Laura wrestled with the stubborn turkey.  There's a photo of me somewhere watching the Macy's Day Parade with a pot on my head.

Night fell.  Exhausted by our foibles in the kitchen, we decided to catch a movie.  We took a bus across town to a cinema Laura had never been to because it was the only one still playing the film we wanted to see.  It was an old one, with velvet-covered seats beaten down by the years.  It had once been a single theatre-style cinema, but someone had long since split it in two.  There were gold sconces on the right wall, but not the left, which looked straight out of the 1980s.  Only half the ceiling fresco was visible.  We saw Pride and Prejudice. It was perfect.

This poster brings all of these things to mind.

via Kate, of course

a fudge brownie for neelie

There are days when I miss my grandmother so much I can’t breathe.

Three years ago last month, my mother’s mother passed away. She was 90. She’s buried in my grandfather’s hometown in North Carolina, and on the drive down there, my mom and I realized that there was one last thing we could do for Grandma: we could buy her a fudge brownie.

If ever there was someone who loved chocolate, it was Neelie Grier. I come by it honestly, you see. And whenever we went on a car trip, she would buy at least one Little Debbie fudge brownie. So on that last trip to Statesville, my mother and I were women on missions. We had to find fudge brownies to eat, in Grandma’s memory. Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be. Everyplace we stopped had everything but fudge brownies, and I, at least, arrived in Statesville feeling like I’d somehow failed my grandmother.

Ever since then, if I’m on a car trip and I spot a fudge brownie, I buy it. Like Mel Gibson’s character in "Conspiracy Theory" who is compelled to buy copies of Catcher in the Rye wherever he goes, one could easily track my movements through fudge brownies sold in gas stations.

I came across a CD labeled “Neelie’s 85th Birthday” today and discovered that it contained a slideshow someone, probably my cousin Jane, had made for the occasion. Some of the photos I’d seen, but some, like the one above, were new to me. It’s not much, but it eases the missing a little bit.

cleverer than she looks

This is Summer, or, as she is affectionately called, "the dumb one."  Summer fears many things: balloons, the cat, your feet, boxes of crackers, leaves blowing in the wind.  However, the things she fears above all else are storm drains.

It's odd, too.  The other stuff she's feared most of her life, but the storm drain thing is recent.  Like, she finally got around to reading It or something.  As soon as she spots a storm drain, she turns and runs in the opposite direction.  Which can be problematic if you're walking more than one dog.  However, I've spent the last few months coaching her, and now she knows to get up on the curb before we reach the storm drain, that way she'll walk over it, which is not scary at all.  In fact, she gets this little spring in her step, as if she knows she's defeated something and darn if it doesn't feel good. 

Right now, we have a few inches of snow on the ground, with more falling as I type.  All of the storm drains are covered by the snow the plows pushed to the curb, so I didn't think about them at all as I set out to walk the dogs this afternoon.  Summer, however, is evidently cleverer than she looks.  She knows those storm drains are there, even if she can't see them.  So, as we approached the first storm drain on our walk, she plowed into the snow on the side of the road.  Summer is not a likes-to-get-her-feet-week kind of dog, so this was odd, to say the least.

"What are you doing, dummy?"  I asked her, tugging her back towards me. Summer obediently came.  We got closer to the storm drain.  Next thing I knew, my left arm was yanked behind my back, and Summer, in her desperation to GETAWAYGETAWAYGETAWAY had pulled out of her collar.

And that's why I spent 5 minutes of my life chasing a terrified little dog through the neighborhood.

goin' to memphis

When I was little, my best friend was a girl who lived down the street.  Her dad worked for a major airline, and they were always getting to vacation in foreign exotic places.  I was terribly, terribly jealous.  The only time we ever got to take an airplane was when we went to Memphis.  My dad's from Memphis, and his dad was quite ill, so we made quite a few trips out there over the years.  As jealous as I was, and since Memphis was the only card I had to play, well, I made those trips sound as awesome as I possibly could.  (I mean, they WERE awesome, but visiting family versus a week in Granada, Spain?  Not much of a comparison.)  I guess I did a pretty good job, because one day while I was over at her house, I overheard my friend saying to her mother, "Why don't we ever get to go to Memphis?"

I didn't say anything at the time, but I can remember walking home with it mulling in my head.  Later on that evening, I mentioned it to my mom.  She was used to me complaining about how we never went anywhere interesting and exotic.  She smiled, and remarked that I was pretty lucky after all.

And I am.  I love Memphis.  It's one of my favourite places in the world, and my family there is just the best.  Now, I do have an actual purpose for this trip, which I will get to at some later point if everything works out the way I hope it will.

So the point of this post is that I will be away for a little over a week.  I'm not going to bring my laptop, but I've got a few posts scheduled to go.  You'll hardly miss me at all!  And I will return with photos, stories, and hopefully many, many tacky souvenirs. 

photo is of my brother leaping into my aunt and uncle's pool--and pretty much how psyched I am for this trip!

christmas past

When my grandmother was alive, Christmas Day nearly always looked something like this.  Chaos, people everywhere, wrapping paper everywhere, and when my brother and I were small, we were everywhere.  It was not something I particularly enjoyed.  See, my brother and I are both much younger than the rest of my cousins, so we were the little kids crashing the adult party.  My favourite part of Christmas was always the very early morning, when it was just our little family opening presents and delving through stockings.

However, ever since my grandmother passed away, the family has fractured.  My mom's siblings who have grandkids are now making their own family traditions.  Now that Christmases are just us, and sometimes my aunt, I find that I miss the chaos and noise.  Go figure.

This year, a family friend asked me to sing with her church choir during the month of December.  Her church is the one my grandmother attended until she died, it's where my parents were married, and where I was baptized.  Being there reminds me so much of her, how she always had tissues squirreled away in her pockets and sleeves, how she made her own harmonies up as she sang the hymns.  My grandmother was an ever present part of my life and I miss her all the time, but never more than at Christmas.

the story of santa's beer

I find that Christmas is the best time to reminisce.  It's so full of traditions that there's always something to look back on.  So, indulge me, will you, as I stroll a bit down memory lane.

I have to say that my absolute favourite thing to look back on are the years we still left cookies out for Santa.  In the beginning, we left him cookies and milk, as most kids do.  However, after a few years of disappointment upon discovering that Santa had completely ignored the milk, my dad suggested an alternative.  All the other kids leave Santa milk, he explained, but you know what Santa really wants on his busiest night of the year?  A nice, cold beer.  And it made a strange sort of sense.  My dad loved beer, so why wouldn't Santa?  Plus, if we were the only ones leaving it for him, he'd probably like our house more than the others, which couldn't be a bad thing, either.

And so it came to pass that every Christmas Eve, the Williams children carefully placed out where he was sure to see them a plate of homemade cookies and a nice, cold beer.  And you know what?  Santa didn't always eat the cookies, but damn if he didn't down that beer every year. 

If you want to join in, please do!  You can leave a favourite Christmas/holiday memory here in the comments, or send me a link if you blog about one.  Plus, Abby created this great Flickr group for looking back on holidays past.

on my honor

photo source

My little blogger bio over on the right simply gives my location as "Northern Virginia," but I actually live in a town called Vienna.  I was born here, actually.  Vienna likes to present itself as a small town and, many years ago, it actually was one.  It even had a unique name, Ayr Hill (after early settlers, the Ayrs), until the townsfolk decided that Vienna was more European and dignified.  Or something.  Anyway, mad suburban sprawl have long since turned Vienna into just a small piece of the D.C. Metropolitan area, but every once in awhile something happens to remind me of Vienna's small town roots.

Yesterday morning, as I was heading into town to begin my dog-walking/pet-sitting rounds, I remembered that I needed something from the hardware store.  There's a little place right on the main drag, and I was going right past it, so I decided to stop there.  This is a true mom-and-pop enterprise, the kind of place that hangs family portraits over the register and sells local produce and preserves alongside hammers and nails.  I was familiar with it, but I hadn't been there in a long time.  As it turned out, my purchase was rather small and I didn't have enough cash.  Actually, I didn't have ANY cash, and the amount was too little for the owner to charge.  I was standing there, wracking my morning-fogged brain for ways I could make this work, when the owner pulled me out of my stupor.

"Do you live nearby?" he asked, and surprised, I answered that I did.  "Then bring it to me when you can."  Now, I had heard of store owners using honor systems before, in myth and legend, but had never experienced it myself, and certainly not here.  I stuttered out a thank you and ran through the rain to my car, determined to hit an ATM as soon as I was finished with my rounds.  Not two hours later, the gentleman had my $2.46.

"I didn't expect to see you so soon!" he exclaimed as I walked in, and I smiled at him.  The amount might have been small, but the gesture of trust had not been.  It made me glad to claim this town as mine.