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I’m avoiding mopping my floor today. It’s a bad idea. The floor has not been mopped since before the Fourth of July and it’s the 17^th. I sweep it. It’s not like lots of people trod on it. However, it requires I move lots of stuff into the living room and I don’t feel like it today. I will eventually do it today….However, I don’t want to do it right this minute.

Onward….

Laughter is the best medicine.

That is so true….It’s also a very elusive medication in my life and it’s difficult for me to cope without it- because I’m addicted to it, so I feel I have to create my own humor….

And you dear reader are the victim of my addiction.

I know some of what I write is not funny. I understand. Everyone’s humor is different. However, I am writing this for the benefit of my children and myself and my friends who accept my lame attempt at hilarity and if you don’t like it, well, it’s like watching television…. You are ultimately the decider of what you watch and read.

You can always stop reading and go make yourself some Ramen Noodles.

The choice…………….Is yours.

Family Histories!

Some people have really cool family histories. Some people have adventurous families and some people have famous families and some people have families right off the boat and they are really exotic.

I have a weird family.

On one side of my family are my grandparents from my mother’s side which include my grandfather, who was totally German. I mean, his grandparents fell off the boat.

Literally.

My great great grandmother fell off the boat from Germany into the water and was kept afloat by her petticoats. A sailor had to jump in the water to save her.

They were what we call now “Euro-trash”.

Seriously.

My great great grandfather was asked to leave Germany “because of his indiscretions”.

My mother says it was probably somebody’s wife.

I’m afraid it was somebody’s goat.

I thank my maternal grandfather for my art and love of flowers. The man was hideously violent.

The woman he married, which would be my maternal grandmother, could tell you her family history back to the revolutionary war.

They were a very well off family and one her cousins was an ambassador and another one her other cousins a general in the Korean War. The family was made up of lawyers and teachers and other brilliant people.

She eloped with my grandfather to spite her family.

That seems to be a trend with us.

In her circumstance, it all went bad because my grandfather was an abusive alcoholic, who beat my grandmother and my mother and my uncles.

My mother told me the reason she didn’t want to go back to her family because she was afraid that her mother would do the whole “I told you so” thing; and so bound herself to a private purgatory.

When my grandfather died in 1970, at a young age, my mother thanked God that her mother finally would have peace without him.

Yeah, that’s how bad….

Her family was originally from England. Then more recently they included Scottish and Irish girls in their gene pool.

Hence, our silly sense of humor and predisposition towards loving Monty Python.

My grandmother was an awesome woman. She made a lot of my clothes and she laughed all the time after my grandfather died. She played the piano for the silent movies and then all the way up until her death she continued to play for her own enjoyment and that of her family’s.

For years I had her piano. Then a shirt tail relation bought it from me for his little girls to learn piano on and since it was going to waste here because I never had time to play it….I think it was something my grandmother would have thought was a little bit of okay.

The Other side of my family, my father’s father; my grandfather, (whom I just found out information on recently) didn’t give up much information on his family, possibly because he didn’t know it, possibly because of the stigma of his generation….Or possibly because he didn’t care.

And to be honest…That’s fine.

He was English, German Jew and Cherokee.

Yeah, put that in your peace pipe and smoke it.

He was a born story teller (even though none of his stories gave us any clue where he came from or what our lineage was) and it is probably where my brother and I get our storytelling gene or more less our predisposition to write.

The man read the entire newspaper; remembered poems from when he was eight. He graduated the eighth grade and ran a farm most of his adult life. He had the soul of a cowboy. He declared to his grandkids one time that he had considered at one point, going back to his home state and murdering his step father.

Yeah.

No grandpa, tell us how you really feel. Don’t hold back.

My grandmother on my father’s side of the family was, in my humble opinion, one of the last great ladies of the United States. That’s just my opinion mind you….Other people might not agree so much.

Her family went all the way back to England, and she was descended from royalty. She came from an aristocratic family and she eloped with the hired hand.*

She was third cousin to Wallis Simpson, (and I do apologize to England. It’s just the way the women in our family are, we make men give up thrones for us). And her family was pure as the driven snow up until her mother married my Dutch great grandfather. We are a D.A.R. dream.

Her family bumps into, it seems, every English and American icon in history.

It’s like the Forest Gump of family histories. (My husband’s family has a moment like that with Abraham Lincoln- but they are no where near as bizarrely tied to history as mine).

She told me once that I was the fifth cousin to the Duchess of Windsor, when we were planting flowers- I think?

I believe I took the news like- there would be tuna for lunch, not knowing at that time what Wallis Simpson was…. and frankly, not caring.

My grandmother on my father’s side, made her own soap; she made her own hand lotion. She made her own arthritis balm; she had a ginormous garden in the backyard. She had grape arbors which she used for jam and jelly, a raspberry patch that she and I spent time picking raspberries in and singing “Ma, He’s Making Eyes At Me,” and she made the most interesting cheese cake with Jell-O. She and my grandfather ate organic peanut butter. A fact which I thank her for, because when I and my friend went to buy organic peanut butter (and my friend freaked out because of the oil separated on the top of the jar) I knew enough to tell her, “No, no, that’s normal, you have to stir real peanut butter up because the oil separates.”

It’s not pretty, but it is all natural.

She gave me a love of history and I’m not the only one she gave this love to in my family. This love of history permeates my family now. My nephew is a history scholar and is bent on getting his doctorate in history, my one brother is a civil war aficionado and I just love finding out about my own history through my family history. She told me all about her family, and so now when I do research, every once in a while I come across a name I recognize and it’s all due to her. She was wonderful and I didn’t appreciate how wonderful until she was gone or until I was grown up enough to see what a really neat person she was while she was alive.

She could cook and bake like no one I had ever met.

My dad takes a close second.

So I have this weird family that just goes from being Doritos’s to being Caviar and Vodka. It’s really really weird and interesting to research.

*see my paternal grandfather.

Holy moley!

My cat Inky, from time to time, presents me with a mole on my porch. In exchange, I give her a wonderful can of wet cat food. Wet cat food is only given as a treat or reward for good behavior or fantastic critter catchin.

This morning I got up and let her in and there on my deck, was a mole.

As if to say,” Here mom, I brought you a present!”

This followed up with a lot of, “Oh what a good kitty you are, yes you are such a good kitty, good mole catching Inkster! Good girl!”

You have to praise cats for their presents because if you don’t they will think they’ve failed and bring you larger and larger presents I don’t want a deer on my porch or an elephant to arrive on my deck. I just think that would be bad taste.

Don’t meow with your mouth full.

My cat Max loves to fetch.

My husband believes that he probably thinks he’s a dog and doesn’t understand why he can’t bark.

He plays a game called “throw the mouse”. And in this game we are forced to throw the mouse repeatedly until Max no longer thinks he wants to play anymore. If we do not play with him we are punished by being followed around the house and meowed at non-stop.

The other day he decided that I needed to pay attention to him even though he had not yet dropped the mouse out of his mouth. So, in a crazy moment, he meowed with the mouse still in his mouth. Now that was weird enough but what happened next was almost insane.

In an almost human reaction, he spit the mouse out and meowed properly. As if to say, “Sorry, I had my mouth full, let me repeat myself.”

I just stared at him.

Strange kitty.

Shabing Cream.

The other day Booga told me that we were out of shaving cream. I don’t want to know how he knew that (I am afraid that he was going on covert ops to see if he could shave without me knowing…However, that’s another story).

Anyway, we have a chalk board in our kitchen we use to write on what we need to get from the store, so that when we get ready to go we can quickly write down all of it and eliminate having to go over a mental list all the time.

Well, sometimes I forget that Booga is not like your normal kid (having raised two of the other kind) and I told him, “Go ahead and write it on the chalk board.”

Booga has a certain way of saying things. Because of this, I can more easily understand two year olds than the average person. It’s part of his autism and we just praise God everyday that he can even speak. This was a miracle, and something the doctors believed might never happen, so we just accept what he says and do our best to comprehend him.

Anyway, he went to the chalk board and had me spell out “shaving cream” and when I went and looked at the chalk board, to write down what we needed, instead of seeing the word “shaving cream”, I saw what resembled the more phonetic spelling of “shaving cream”, according to Booga’s mind.

It said, “shabing cream.”

In the spelling world according to Booga, that is how shaving cream is spelled ….phonetically.

Sometimes, I create my own humor, and sometimes God provides it through Booga.