Thursday, January 8, 2009

Clean Up In Green Aisle

For those of you who have known me in my previous life, this blog might sound like a repeat of a past "Howerton & Co." or "K & J Show". Those were the names of the morning shows I hosted during my days in small market Christian radio. Those were the days of early mornings, long days, little pay, and freebies you really didn’t want, but snagged anyway. (Spam logo’d T-shirt which I still wear!) I had said when I started this blog, I would not always be deep or profound, or Biblical. I’ve had enough of the heavy emotional stuff for a while. I will get back to that - I’m sure. It seems that stuff is never too far from me these days.

I proposed on the radio show what I thought were great ideas in response to certain shall I say "peculiarities" that occur in the male brain. Those ideas have recently been expanded now that I, singularly, have to do household chores.

First, my clothes dryer drives me crazy. There’s a setting called Automatic Dry-Miser. Apparently it is a "Push START and let it figure out when to stop" setting. Why then does it have variable settings like "More Dry" and "Less Dry"? Isn’t "Dry" good enough? Isn’t the definition of dry the absence of wetness? How in the world can you then have dry but with wetness? I guess with a name like "dryer" the next question should be "dryer than what?" Here’s an idea. One setting: "Make Clothes Dry".

One of my long-standing ideas, which Cindy thought was totally ridiculous but made some sense, was to have grocery stores and Wal-Mart arrange their merchandise by the color of the product. A White section - Light bulbs, TP, Milk, White-Out, copy paper, cottage cheese, tennis shoe strings, etc. A Yellow section with Post-It’s, Bananas, hazzard tape, Dummy’s Books, manilla folders, etc. A Black section with tires, tv components, some picture frames. You get the idea. Then, the floor could be painted with colored stripes that could lead you to the area where you need to shop. I know it’s not practical, but you sure could find stuff faster!

There are a couple more things that have been bugging me lately - maybe I am just over-sensitive to things right now. Maybe being alone and having lots of free time to think about stuff has made me more keen to annoyances. Maybe I just think of stupid ideas way too much.

One of the things I loved about Cindy was how she would listen intently to my most stupid of ideas and then say, "You’re an idiot." And, then we’d laugh because I knew she was right. That was why she loved me - my "peculiarities".


(On the sickness front, I am feeling much better now - thanks for all of the concern and prayers.)

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

I'm Sorry, It Is The Moops

I can’t believe that it is already 2009.

I still remember doing a chalk drawing in grade school depicting what I thought it would be like in the year 2000. 2000 was 9 years ago and that Van Gogh was done around 1980 and was hung at the University Mall. That was back when THE MALL had that big round fountain. I miss that fountain - and the organ player - and the cafeteria - and the A&W Root beer store. Anyway, my picture was straight out of a scene of the Jetsons with flying bubble cars, bubbles over the buildings and bubbles over the town. I was apparently into bubbles and why in the world do I still remember that!!!

Anyway, it’s been 29 years since I did that picture and I remember it vividly. I also have been remembering Cindy in vivid ways. Every so often - sometimes at home, sometimes at work, but thankfully not at court, yet - I get a vivid picture or memory of Cindy. Some of the memories are of her just prior to her death. Some of them are of her at home with her "big girl". Some of them are of when she was sitting on the edge of the bed for hours - just sitting because nothing else felt any better. I even had a flashback of me changing the gauze around her renal catheter that was sticking out of her back. She liked the way I changed it much better than the nurses because, like with a Christmas present, I used a lot of tape. It’s kinda weird. I covered that gauze with plastic so she could shower and changed that gauze every day on my lunch hour for nearly 3 months but I only remembered it yesterday for the first time in 2 months.


Some vivid memories are better than others. I hope I can remember those good ones 29 years later. Maybe if we had blown more bubbles.


(Title is a reference to Seinfeld's Bubble Boy episode.)

Monday, January 5, 2009

What A Combo!

I have not had a lot of creative energy (or any kind of energy) to compose a blog entry the last two days. I woke up sick Sunday at 1:30am. I will spare you the quite gory details, but needless to say - I didn’t go to work today and tomorrow is not looking good either. I understand that most people are getting over this stomach flu in a couple of days. With my compromised immune system, it normally takes me a little longer to fight off illnesses.

Luke is really starting to talk. He is still only doing one word at a time in most cases. However, tonight he did put two words together as I was rocking him to sleep. I can only imagine that he heard them from me. I bet when I carry him down the hall, to go downstairs, past the wall of family pictures - he learned to put these two words together: "Momma died."