Monkling's Blog

It’s an Italian summer time thing to do:

And yeah. It tastes just as good as you think it would – so slice up a peach or 2, pour some nice red wine over them to submerge them, let ‘em soak for a few hours and then eat them.

Don’t let the bedbugs bite.

A few weeks ago, on the evening before my anniversary, the evening before we were supposed to go away for a few days to celebrate our anniversary, I was woken up at 2 a.m. by my daughter. She was quite upset, although not nearly as upset as I was to be woken up at that hour out of a dead sleep.

I hustled her out of the bedroom before she could wake up her father. “What’s wrong?”

“There’s a bedbug in my room.”

I was obviously not doing back flips at this point. I can’t remember ever being capable of doing back flips. I was also pretty sure she was wrong & was carrying on over a beetle. “I doubt it’s a bedbug.”

“It is. I captured it and looked it up online. I’m sure it is a bedbug.”

At that hour, there wasn’t anything we were going to do about it. I told her that, although probably not in my most pleasant and reassuring voice. I told her to sleep in the guest room in the meantime. She wasn’t going anywhere near a bed. I may have said something like, “Fine. Stay up all night. I really don’t give a damn what you do. I am going to bed.”

I then laid in bed thinking about how we were supposed to leave early the next morning to go away. What if it was a bedbug? I’d have to call someone in to take care of this immediately. I was so looking forward to spending my anniversary with an exterminator rather than out with my husband. Would we have to call off the entire trip? How much was it going to cost to get an exterminator and a new mattress? Where did it come from and how many little friends were in my house? What if they were in my room??

A couple of hours later, I was wide awake. I decided to go back downstairs and get myself a nice shot of Limoncello to help me sleep. Theresa was still up, sitting at the kitchen table with her laptop looking at bug pictures. “Mom, come here and look at this picture. It’s not a bedbug. It’s a weevil.”

As much as I hate looking at bugs, I looked at the captive and then looked at the photo. Yep. Absolutely positive ID. It was a weevil. “Weevils wobble but they don’t fall down,” she told me.

I poured us both a shot & we went up to bed, quite relieved.

Yesterday we were at my brother’s celebrating my nephew’s 6th birthday. My brother was showing off his fancy bracelet. He had received it, courtesy of the local hospital where they had all been until 2 a.m. that morning. It turns out my brother has a digestive issue that ultimately required general anesthesia to resolve but then he arrived home, good as new, except for a bit of a sore throat.

After a water battle involving balloons, water gun-type weapons, hoses & pails, we got into a discussion. (And yes, I was the only adult involved in the water battle. What can I say? I’m the crazy mother/aunt) Now where was I? Oh, yeah. Our conversation.

We came to the conclusion that it’s a lucky thing the human race doesn’t operate on the premise “Survival of the Fittest” or none of us would have made it. Yep, we are a pathetic lot, although at least I wouldn’t have fallen to a disease. Nope. I’d just have died in childbirth.

If my survival depended on how well I battle with a water gun, I’m afraid I wouldn’t have done too well on that front, either. Although, I was quite outnumbered. And they knew to go right for my weak point. Yep, hit me in the face. Get the glasses wet. How could I counterattack if I couldn’t see?

Finally I just pulled the glasses off, at which point, they mocked me. “Can you see me? How many fingers do I have up?”

Ah, yes. Lucky thing I don’t have to worry about being the fittest to survive.

It seems to be going around lately. My blog & the blogs I read religiously all have this hollow sound when you walk around in an empty room. We were all blogging nearly every day. Now? Some of us write maybe once a month. And so my big question is: What has happened to us? Why aren’t we blogging anymore? Did Facebook have something to do with this?

I can’t answer for anyone else out there. I do know, for me, well life is generally pretty quiet. Once Theresa went off to school and Stephen went off to Rome, no one was around to make fun of me. No one was around for me to make fun of. I got used to the quiet and I guess that quiet extended to here, as well.

When I started this blog, it wasn’t because I expected anyone would be interested in my life. It was first & most importantly, an exercise in writing. It forced me to sit down and write. And I did. Nearly every single day for over a year. But, like any good comedian, I needed an audience. It was like – there is this little spark of a funny idea in me but then, give me applause. Tell me how funny I am. Then, wham! It’s like throwing logs into the fire.

I don’t know. Maybe, as interest in my blog died, so did my interest in writing the thing. Or maybe I just ran out of funny stories. Or maybe my life just got real boring.

I have no answers. I have none for myself, much less for those bloggers who also seem so quiet lately. I’m just pondering.

Maybe I need to get back to basics. Just write every day, even if it’s just nonsense. Or maybe I need to start looking around me again and discovering the humor that I seem to have misplaced.

Stay tuned. Either this blog will get interesting again. Or it won’t.

The action surrounds what’s been going on here: basement reconstruction. Since Saturday, I’ve had men in my house. They have been hammering, sawing, drilling & generally making a racket. At the end of all the upheaval will be a nice little family room/art studio down in the basement.

There’s not really much natural light for an art studio but lots of artificial lighting. Thus we come to the other item in our title: lights. Ah, that was an adventure. It started on Saturday when I asked the contractor when I’d need to get the lights by. “I’ll let you know.” Yesterday, he let me know. He needed them by today.

Launch into panic mode. I need someone to shop with me. I cannot pick out something like this all on my own. I know nothing about lights, nothing about home decor, nothing about… well anything. The person I consider my expert? Well there’s 900 miles between us so having Louie along didn’t quite work out. Luckily another friend who lives a bit closer had compassion on me and accompanied me today.

Dolores & I wandered in the store. We looked at a gazillion lights. I went back & forth with what I wanted. Finally I settled on a combination of track lighting and fixtures with adjustable little track-like lights. I whipped out my phone & took some photos to send to Louie. (Yeah, it wasn’t a camera but a camera phone. Close enough!)

Did I mention the torrential rain after getting nothing for weeks and weeks? Hopefully it will rejuvenate my lawn and turn my hay back into grass. Unfortunately, because the ground was so hard and dry & the gutters on our house need to be replaced, we had some water leak into the basement. Yep, that would be the same basement currently getting a makeover with new sheet rock. Guess who’s getting new gutters this weekend.

And now the age old question: Why is it that doing any home project always means doing several? Because you know other things will turn up. I think it’s a conspiracy among houses. They all get together and decide what to do when any work is done on there. They have an official manual and everything.

They say it takes 2 weeks to form a habit. I don’t know exactly who they are or where they got their information. It was probably a bunch of professors with degrees out the wahzoo who spent millions of dollars trailing people for years.

I can just picture them now. They all wear glasses and white lab coats. They carry around clipboards & continually scribble in them. Of course they’d have to wait for a new habit to crop up or how could they track how long it takes to be firmly developed?

“Look! That subject just picked his toes. I never saw him do that before! Now I will watch him to see if he does it again and mark it down each time.” Or course he is following the test subjects secretly so he has no clue the guy was actually just scratching his toes because he has athlete’s foot.

Maybe the 2 week rule only applies to bad habits. It certainly can’t be applicable to good habits & I don’t need to conduct a scientific study to prove it. Countless people who change their eating habits, lose double digits off the scale, only to then go back to eating junk do well enough to prove my point.

What brings this up, you wonder? (Okay, maybe you didn’t wonder. Just pretend!) I have some arthritis in my knees. I take supplements & they do help. The pain is much less and I can bend my knees without grunting.

Now wouldn’t you think if you take supplements every day and especially if they help you not be in pain, you would remember to take them? Wouldn’t you have formed a habit of taking them? Yeah, that would be why I completely forgot to take them. For an entire week. I was reminded when the pain came back.

Seriously – how is it that you can get addicted to the heavy duty pain meds so easily or develop a habit of oh, say cracking your knuckles within a week or 2 but something useful and practical – of course not! That would just make life too easy. And we all certainly need our challenges!

With the current heat wave & record highs in the area, I thought this might be a good time to put a couple of links here.

Current power outages in NYC (Con Ed):

Current power outages on Long Island (LIPA):

Note the maps are just snapshots from July 7th at noon and are not current. You need to click on the maps to see current outages.

Yesterday I went out to lunch with some friends. We braved the 100+ degree heat, racing from the air conditioned car into the air conditioned diner. (Some people will endure the most unbearable of circumstances simply to eat!)

Being that the place was Greek, we went with traditional Greek diner fare: a gyro, spinach pie, a Greek salad (we won’t mention what Marie ordered but she’s young so she’s allowed to stick to the familiar).

We hung out talking, eating, talking, downing gallons of ice cold water, talking, eating, talking…

Dolores had stuffed grape leaves with her lunch. She doesn’t like them so she tried to pawn them off on the rest of us. I can’t remember the last time I ate that. It had to be over 25 years ago. I ate one. “These aren’t as good as I remembered them.”

Lisa said she didn’t like them but Marie got her to taste one. “These aren’t as bad as I remember.”

That got me to thinking about memories & how dusty they can get sitting there in your mind for all those years. Maybe dusty & covered with cobwebs isn’t an accurate description. After all, if something is dirty, you can usually clean it and it’s as good as new. It won’t look any different. I think memories are more like fancy wax candles. They sit up there in that attic of a brain. They melt. They warp. Sometimes they only bend slightly. Other times, they are completely distorted.

Yeah. I think I like the candle analogy much better. It seems to explain more accurately how my sister, my brother, and I can talk about stories from our childhood and remember it completely differently.

I can just feel things up there in my brain melting away right this very minute. Or maybe it’s just the summer heat.

From the time we were little, my mom drilled into us how important family is. She lost her parents at a very young age. The loss of her mother at the age of 5 especially had an impact on her. It defined her. Someone once told me the lessons you learn when you are young, whether told verbally or learned just through experience, are the things that stay with you – for good or bad. To a large extend, I believe that to be true. Why else would it be so difficult to overcome beliefs that seem to be ingrained? “I’m not smart enough. I’m not pretty enough. I’m not good enough.” It takes a lot of work to throw off the stuff that was thrown on you as a kid.

I am very lucky and blessed to have a close relationship with my siblings. I am also close to my aunt, uncle & cousins on my mom’s side. We grew up with them. We saw them often. Sundays were a day for visiting with family. Growing up, we either went to visit my grandmother or cousins or they came to visit us. Maybe it wasn’t exactly every Sunday but it felt like it.

My relatives on my father’s side were a different story. They were in the picture when we were young but they moved to the west coast when we were all fairly young. My dad & his brother weren’t particularly close and, so, neither were we. Still – they were family. Growing up, when they still lived in NY, I loved seeing them. I clung to the idea that they are family and family is important.

After my mom died, my father became closer to his brother. After my uncle lost his wife, a year later, the brothers went on a cross country road trip and bonded. They vacationed together. Frank & I joined them on a couple of trips and I got the opportunity to meet my cousins and get to know them as adults. We went to California for a week and got to meet their children, cousins who I was just meeting for the first time. It was great. We had a lot of fun.

This past week, my uncle and some of my cousins came to NY. I have no idea when they arrived in NY or how long they planned on staying. Neither my father nor my uncle or cousins told me they would be here. All I know is they have been here through the long holiday weekend.

Going back to my mom & the whole family thing, I expected that they would want to see us. I thought we had developed a bond during the trips we took. They are, after all, family.

Late last night, I got a phone call from my dad. If I wanted to see them, I only had one shot at it, this afternoon (his phrase – one shot). I was annoyed that it seemed like they were squeezing us in, that they seemed to not really care about whether they saw us or not. As it turns out, I have plans this afternoon and can’t make it. My father told me how very busy they had been over the past few days. Yes. Busy seeing their other relatives.

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t begrudge them for seeing their mom’s side of the family. I know they were very close to their aunt. I understand how important that is. But they are also taking time to drive down to PA to visit friends. Clearly that is a priority over seeing family. Our family, anyway. I cannot even imagine traveling out to CA and not getting in touch with any of them or not caring whether or not we got together.

And so I am hurt. I know it’s irrational. I shouldn’t care. These are not people we grew up with. Up until a few years ago, despite the bond we share as cousins, they were complete strangers.

It’s hard kicking aside ideas that have been embedded in you, though. That notion of how important family is – well I’m not going to toss that aside. I will, however, not waste my time & energy on people who don’t care about me, even if they are family. That’s one childhood lesson that needs a bit of an alteration.

Nope, I am not going to talk about our nation’s independence. What I am going to talk about is my son’s independence. On July 1st, he moved into what will be his home for the next year. He is home to do a pastoral year at a nearby parish and will be living in the rectory there. This morning we went to Mass at his parish as this was his first Sunday there. We knew the pastor would be introducing him to the congregation today.

Unlike a week ago, when we attended Fr. Alonzo’s first Mass, this Church had air conditioning. Lucky thing since it was already 91 degrees by 11:30 a.m. and expected to hit close to 100. We sat near the front of the Church, as is our custom. I don’t like sitting in the back. I’m only 5’1″. I can’t see a thing more than a few pews back.

As it nears noon, we hear the organ kick in. We turn to look and see a young man. We only see his back. “Is that Steve?” Yes, pathetic as it is, from that distance, we had no idea if that was our son or not. A few minutes later, Stephen emerges from the front of the Church. Now unless he can bilocate, he obviously was not playing the organ.

Before the final blessing, after the Mass was over, the pastor came out to introduce Stephen. I see him standing on the altar near the woman who was reader for the Mass. I see her say something to him & then I see him pointing at us. Luckily, the pastor didn’t notice. I don’t think anyone else did, either.

After Mass, we met the pastor who we apparently met before. When we visited Steve in D.C. a few years back, we attended Mass at the basilica and the priest we had for Mass that day? Yep, his current pastor. We then had a little tour of the rectory and his room. Uh, I mean rooms. He has a nice sized bedroom, bigger than the one he has here at home. He has a living room complete with desk, recliner, sofa, and a TV with cable. And the biggest plus for him, after 7 years of living in a seminary, for the first time, he has his very own bathroom.

He’s currently hanging out here killing people. But not me. I’m already dead. Twice. He is playing a James Bond video game. He asked if we wanted to play with him. Frank says okay. Steve replies, “I really want Mom to play. That way I can kill her. I don’t want to kill you.” After getting killed a few times, I quit. I didn’t get him even once.