Home » mom

mom

Fingers in a door

Blog Posted by kitt at 11:21 on 23 April 2007

Once, when I was around four years old, my family arrived from out somewhere I have absolutely no idea where. I was in the back seat of the car when my mom opened the car door and hopped out. She immediately turned, and shut the car door, turning back to the house. As she turned, she heard a high pitch muffled little "eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!"

A moment later, she realized that I had reached up on the door jam when she opened the car door, and she had closed the door on my fingers. She opened the door quickly and released my fingers.

I ended up losing a couple fingernails, but gained an entertaining story.

When Kris and I leave in the morning for Velocity Sports, having switched to the 7am class for the "convenient" time and the personalized training with group rate prices, the car is often covered in dew. I've taken to wiping off the passenger side window before opening the car door, so that Kris can see outside my side of the car.

This morning, I forgot to wipe the window before entering the car, so I rolled the window down slightly. Kris hates when I roll the window all way, believing the water will roll into to inside of the door and rust it out. I stuck my hand out the window and started wiping off the window so that Kris could see.

Kris looked left, looked right, rolled the window down slightly so that he could see, looked left again, and, as he pulled out of our street turning left, reache down and pulled on the passenger window switch to roll it up.

With my entire hand still out the window.

Clearly my vocabulary has increased in the intervening decades. Instead of a high pitched muffled little "eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!" Kris heard a very succinct, "OOOOOOOOOoooooooooWwwwwwwwwwwwwwWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!"

Poof! She's home

Blog kitt decided around 13:52 on 2 March 2007 to publish this:

Here only a week, Mom left this morning. I dropped her off at the airport, then went to work. Unlike most people I know, I have a great relationship with my mom. Her leaving is sad, but her visiting is always fantastic.

She had originally come to visit to help me work on the house. We managed to get exactly nothing done while she was here.

Exactly nothing.

We were supposed to work on the garage, clean it out and give away most of the crap in there in the launch of reReuse. Yeah, that didn't happen.

Each time Mom wanted to be motivated, I distracted her. Each time I wanted to be motivated, Mom distracted me.

We're good for each other that way.

So, yeah. Maybe next time we'll be productive. This time, this time was girl time.

Fantastic girl time.

Pisser pissing

Blog Instead of being asleep at 22:33 on 1 March 2007, kitt created this:

Mom's heading home tomorrow, so she asked if she could take me out to dinner on her last night here. We've been cooking most meals, and managed to eat all the leftovers, so heading out was a good idea.

After dinner, we were readying to leave the restaurant, but, never missing the opportunity, we went to use the toliets. As luck would have it, the women's was occupied, but the men's wasn't.

Yes, I went into the men's restroom. Both of them are single rooms, not stalls, so closing and locking the door meant no one would be shocked at a woman in the men's room. Just as I was closing the door, I thought, hey, maybe Mom doesn't want to stand outside there, wondering, cripes, is my kid going to get in trouble for this, so I invited her in.

Women. We can do this and not be embarrassed.

As I was sitting on the toliet, Mom looked at the urinal on the opposite wall, complete with a bright red liner that screamed, "TARGET! AIM HERE!"

"Hmmmm, I guess they put that in there to prevent backsplash."

"The red thing? I guess so," I responded.

"Wouldn't that be a pisser? You're wearing tan pants and you splash on yourself when you pee? At knee height, no less," she continued, marvelling at the urinal.

"Uh, pun intended? A pisser pissing?"

"Pun intended!"

A minute later, I was washing my hands and Mom was using the toliet.

"You know what would be a worse pisser, Mom?"

"No. What?"

"If I left right now."

"Yeah. Not sure how'd I'd explain that to the guy trying the door right now."

"There's someone outside the door right now?"

"Yep."

"Oh. I'll just wait then."

"You do that."

Examples of my baking prowess

Blog Instead of being asleep at 21:22 on 28 February 2007, kitt created this:

Tomorrow's Master Gardener class is actually a tour of various Master Gardener projects. We're to head out some time this week to see the different projects and report back in small groups next week.

I'm heading out tomorrow with my mentor group, and Mom is going with me. I'm not sure we're going to spend the whole day touring projects, but we'll tour at least in the morning.

The group is doing a potluck lunch. I've been dying to make some of Shirley's peanut butter cookies, which she had made for me like six months ago after I helped her move a couch. Since I'd lost my sense of smell, most peanut butter cookies taste like cardboard. These, now these I could taste.

And I wanted some.

So, I told Mom we were going to make some tonight. We had dinner and watched the most recent episode of Heroes before starting on the cookies at 9:00 at night.

Only to realize the recipe calls for the dough to chill for 2 hours in the middle.

2 hours.

TWO hours.

Yeah, I'm not staying awake that long, I thought, we'll just chill them in the freezer for a few minutes, they'll still turn out.

Ten minutes of chilling, one minute of dropping balls of dough onto the baking sheets and twelve minutes of cooking later, I pulled the two dozen cookies out of the oven.

Now, for the record, they taste wonderful. Mom ate three lickety-split, and she doesn't eat cookies very often. I downed two before accidently dropping one on the floor and dodging out of the way of the doggie feeding frenzy.

So, they taste good.

They just look like little piles of doggie puke:

Maybe I won't take them to the potluck tomorrow.

Mom's parking karma

Blog Instead of being asleep at 14:39 on 27 February 2007, kitt created this:

When I went to the airport on Monday to pick Mom up, I drove into the parking structure to park. She had let me know that she was cleaning out her garage, she had found stuff for me, and she was bringing it: pull up the car and come in to help carry it out.

When I went to park, I drove next to the entrance to the baggage claim, and to my left was a one hour parking spot. I stopped and stared at it for a few moments, trying to figure out if this space was really okay to take. It wasn't a handicapped spot. It wasn't an electric car only. Oooh-kaaaay.... I thought, as I eased into the spot.

Baggage claim was twenty feet from my car. I could not have parked any closer.

Monday evening, Mom and I went to Whole Foods to pick up items for dinner. We were winging it, not really any dinner plan. As we pulled into the lot, a car pulled out of a spot right next to the front door.

We pulled in behind and parked all of twelve feet from the store entrance.

This, in a lot I'm used to hoofing it clear across the expanse of cars, having fought for that one space that I parked in where even I couldn't get out of my tiny car because the cars next to me were parked so close.

Today, Mom came for lunch. She asked to have my car instead of the truck for her afternoon errands. When I went to move the truck to a closer spot after handing Mom the car keys, I lucked into a spot closest to the crosswalk from work.

Sure, the spot was fifty feet from my desk, but it was the closest one to my desk.

That woman is a parking spot good luck charm. I need to figure out how to bottle this parking karma. I'd make millions.

No, billions.

QotD: You've got to blog!

Blog Yeah, kitt finished writing this at 15:57 on 31 July 2006

If you could get someone in your life to start a blog, who would it be and why?

I've seen pictures of my mom as a child, playing under the big tree in the backyard of the house my grandfather built. Decades later, I would run through that backyard as a child myself on my way from our house to my best friends house, cutting through back yards to cut the walking time from 10 minutes to two. My mother's childhood home was long since sold, but she loved the house we moved into, the house on the hill from her childhood dreams.

What other dreams did my mother have? What hopes, and problems, and joys, and failures and victories did my mom experience? How close does my life parallel her life, and how far away from hers is mine?

I don't know.

I know her better than she knew her mother, but ultimately I don't know much of my mother's life before me. I know the highlights. I can imagine the minutae. But, I really don't know.

The saving grace to this vacuum of knowledge is that she writes. She has journals; she writes short stories, many of them based on her life experiences fictionalized. If she started a blog, a personal one of highlights of each day, her life would open up, and I'd know how much we are alike. And how much we are different, though, I know I am my mother's daughter in so many ways.

Come to think of it, I know even less about my dad. Oh, the stories he tells when he's in the mood. If he started a blog, it would have to be an audio blog to get the full side splitting life of his words. Now that would be a blog worth listening to.

Pages