Monkling's Blog

Yesterday Frank & I were out at a party with a group of friends. Theresa went out to my brother’s house to go to the movies with her cousins.

Paul: “What’s your mom doing?”
Theresa: “She’s at a party.”
Paul: “No she’s not. She doesn’t go out to parties.”
Theresa: “It’s with people from Church.”
Paul: “Oh! Okay, now that makes sense!”

Is he trying to imply that I am not the partying sort? Or that I don’t hang out with fun people? Let me tell ya something, my Church friends are a heck of a lot of fun. I also found out that Archbishops from Australia have a real good sense of humor.

This past week, we missed a couple of promotion/graduation things. My niece ‘graduated’ from 5th grade on Thursday. We were supposed to be going to my brother’s house to celebrate that rather than the ER.

Earlier that week, my nephew/godson ‘graduated’ from pre-K. When they were all here yesterday for Father’s Day, we were filled in on that graduation. It seems that Christopher almost had his parents convinced that he was not supposed to wear the cap & gown like the rest of the children. No. He was going to dress up like a clown. He would then throw pies at the other kids and spray them with water.

Yes, my nephew thinks he is a comedian. I don’t know where on earth he gets that from. It couldn’t be his father. Or me. Or his godfather, Stephen.

First, let me say (in case anyone wanders in here who doesn’t know me and thinks I am completely insane) that I am not in any way diminishing the seriousness of the earthquake in L’Aquila, Italy. It was a horrible tragedy and my prayers are with the people affected by it.

That being said, it is time to move on to my son and our conversation today. (Luckily, he does not read my blog.) He said he was woken up early yesterday morning when the bed shook. His bed is lofted. He had no idea what was going on so he decided to sleep on the couch after that, not being too anxious to be on the bed if it collapsed.

He went all through the day with whatever it is seminarians do when they are off from school and planning a trip. It wasn’t until today that he found out it was an earthquake.

Me: “How could you have no clue it was an earthquake?”
Him: “It’s not like I have a TV in my room.”
Me: “It was all over the Internet.”

Apparently he doesn’t read the news online. Nor in the Italian newspapers, for that matter.

We spoke a bit about his upcoming trip to Ireland, where he will spend Easter & stay for a little over a week. Then he signed off and went to have dinner. A few hours later, he signed back on and IMed me again.

“We were at dinner, talking about the earthquake. Suddenly the table started shaking. I thought it was one of the guys screwing around until I looked up and saw the lights shaking.”

Those must be some powerful aftershocks if they can feel them 70 miles away in Rome. He is quite glad to be leaving tomorrow and hoping the earth will have settled down by the time he gets home.

Then he tells me how there’s a fault line that runs throughout Italy. That way I can have something to be concerned about for the next 4 years…

Theresa: “Couldn’t you have popped me out a week earlier?”
Me: “You were 3 weeks early as it was. Why?”
Theresa: “Formal is a week before my 21st birthday. I won’t be able to drink.” Then she thinks a bit. “Maybe they won’t proof me. Or if they do, maybe they’ll let it slide since I’ll be 21 in only 6 more days.”

Speaking of drinking, I think this is an appropriate place to get to another of Lanny’s comment about adult drinks.

On New Year’s Eve, 2 years ago that “Anonymous in a Hick Town” poster was visiting with her almost fiancée. We decided we wanted to make Chocolate Martinis but we didn’t have all the ingredients. We did find a drink called a Chocolate Monk but I decided to change it around a bit. The resulting drink was renamed.

I felt it appropriate for it to have Frangelico in it, don’t you think?

There you have it – my very own drink.

Darling Daughter is home. It’s Spring Break time. You can tell Theresa is home because there is a big bag on the stairs and another one the couch.

While away at school, she was watching TV episodes on her laptop through Netflix. They have an thing where you can watch instantly; they stream the show or movie to your computer. Anyhow, Theresa decided she wanted to watch the shows on the TV. The project to enable her to do so took a couple of hours.

First it required her to go out to buy a cable so she could hook her laptop to the TV. Then she had to find a wireless mouse so she could control the computer from the couch. Then there seemed to be a problem getting the sound to work and how could you watch the show on a nice big TV, yet listen to crappy laptop speakers. Her first idea was to rig something up with a regular, stereo speaker. That didn’t work. I said she should just take my computer speakers which are pretty good ones. This required crawling under my computer desk, unplugging things, looking for an extension cord and getting them set up in the living room.

8 hours later, she is watching The Office through her laptop on the TV. Hopefully Frank won’t kill himself tripping over wires when he gets home from work.

Now for one of the great blog comments. First we will hit Dave’s question: “What website do you visit on a regular basis that we would never expect the Monkster to be interested in?”

I’m afraid the answer is boring. That’s why it’s buried here. There is not one single bookmarked website that anyone would be surprised to find on my computer. Not one. Seriously.

Tonight Frank & I went with Theresa to a Mexican restaurant we like. She usually wouldn’t be joining her parents on a Saturday night but we were going to BJ’s afterwards and she wanted to go shopping with us. BJ’s is one of those warehouse shopping places and Theresa wanted to stock up on stuff she needs for dorm life. Important things like pens, post it notes, disinfectant wipes to clean things…

Anyhow, so getting back to the restaurant, Frank & I are ordering beers. Theresa is just getting water. I made some comment about how, in a few months, she’d be able to order a drink. After the waitress walks away, she says, “Gee, Mom, thanks for embarrassing me.”

“Huh?”

“You had to say that in front of the waitress?”

Well alrighty. I had no clue talking about how she’s going to be 21 soon was a topic of embarrassment. I can see if maybe the topic was about sex or discussions about graphic surgical procedures but that? Never saw that one coming.

Besides, she should be used to me making wise cracks and shooting my mouth off. That’s okay. I don’t care if she thinks I’m strange. Her friends think I’m cool. Now isn’t that all that really matters?

My mother in-law has been in a nursing home for over a year now. We have finally convinced my sister in-law that it’s time to start clearing out the apartment, especially since the people who own the house are currently living upstairs, where MIL used to live and still want MIL to pay rent & the electric bill. (Long story but let’s just say the situation isn’t quite renter/landlord and it’ll be a cold day in hell that they’ll get any more money.)

Last weekend, Frank stopped by the apartment with his sister and came home with exactly one box. Clearly they needed a bit of help. This weekend, I went with them. We came home with 4 boxes and Frank’s sister went home with 2 more. It seems they spent more time last weekend looking through stuff rather than tossing stuff into boxes. For me, the idea is simple – grab every single paper and photo and throw it into a box.

This meant that I had a total of 5 boxes to sort through. Oh, and a giant plastic garbage bag stuffed with papers, as well. After the sorting, there is now 1 box filled with photos and half a box with important papers. The rest was junk. But, oh, let me tell you about the junk!

There were utility bills dating from the 70s. There were stacks and stacks of scrap paper because you apparently never know when you’re going to run out of paper. There were empty rolls that previously held paper towel or toilet paper. I have no idea why on earth why my MIL felt the need to save those. Maybe I could see if there were still little ones who ran around the house using them as bullhorns but otherwise… uh, no clue.

Then there was this:

I don’t know what’s in there. I’m sort of afraid to find out. I plan on waiting for Frank to get home because he hasn’t seen it yet. Then we will open it. I’m wondering if we should don rubber gloves and masks, though.

There were a few interesting items among the papers. Their dad kept the death certificates from his parents so I now am able to add a bit to the family tree. And we found out that my MIL’s name is not what we thought it was. The name she has been know by, Lucy, the one on her marriage certificate, is her middle name, not her first name. Her first name is actually the same as my mother’s: Maria. I wonder if we’ll find out any other family secrets.

This is the Table Mascot we created at my cousin’s wedding, many years ago:

We did carry on the Table Mascot tradition at other weddings but I think this may be the only one captured on film.

Only my family…

If y’all wouldn’t mind, maybe you could fling some prayers over to my sister, Janet. She’s back in the hospital again. The initial problem was kidney stones but apparently they snowballed into a kidney infection. That nice little infection decided to go on a little trip because I guess it got tired of just hanging around in the kidney so off it went into her blood. They’re trying to pinpoint just what sort of bacteria they’re dealing with so that they can treat it with the most effective antibiotic. In the meantime, we wait.

Back in the day, I recall doctors talking to people face to face following surgery. Okay, I admit I haven’t waited around for people getting surgery all that often. Matter of fact, the only time I ever did was when my mom had 349 brain surgeries all within a 4 months span. Fine, it wasn’t quite that many but it sure seemed that way. The point is, afterwards, the doctor came out and spoke to us in person. That was my only experience with the surgical waiting experience.

This time around, when we left Theresa, they showed us where the waiting area was. We went to the desk and were given a pager. One of those pagers like you get when you go to a restaurant. It came with the same instructions. “The range of the pager is limited. Don’t go wandering off too far. Otherwise we’ll give your table to someone else.”

Now since we were there at the hospital for so many hours, we were hungry. There was a coffee shop just below the waiting area. We were told that’s within range. As we walked down, I wondered whether or not I should stand in the middle of the floor with my arm raised up sort of like an antenna. I decided it was more important to eat. Unfortunately, the hospital coffee shop didn’t have much in the way of decent food. Not unless you like stuff with mayonnaise – chicken salad, tuna salad, fake seafood salad… Ah, well. I would have been better off standing outside doing my imitation of an antenna.

Off we go, back up to the waiting area to wait. An hour later, the pager goes off and we go running to the desk. The receptionist points to a phone on the wall that’s ringing. It doesn’t sound like a regular phone ring. It sounds like something from a game show. I pick up the receiver and talk to the doctor. Naturally I didn’t think of any questions for him until after I hung up.

Then I walked downstairs to call my sister to let her know Theresa was fine. Everyone else seemed to have a perfectly good signal right there in the waiting room. Not me, though. For a company that spends so much money advertising about more bars, uh, I think they need to come look at my phone.

I walk in between 2 doors. Talking there didn’t work out too well. Every sound seemed amplified. I decided to stand outside, which was fine. Until I tried to get back inside. Who would have thought the doors would lock behind me? Lucky thing someone was passing and didn’t think I looked like an angel of mercy so he let me back in.

After my experience, I have a list of demands for the next time. Not that I want there to be a next time but hey, if there is one, this is what I want:
1. Pagers are fine to let people know surgery is over but if someone is cutting into my child, I want to see the doctor in person afterwards.
2. I want a couple of seconds to think of questions.
3. I want decent food. Damn, if you gotta be in the hospital for hours, have something edible!
4. Get something in there to boost my cellphone signal so I don’t get locked out of the building.
5. And while we’re at it, how about a TV in the waiting area. Or at least some newspapers & magazines.