How Do You Do?

I do just fine. Now that Mikey made it home last night. He came home with no turkey. Which I think is okay, I really wasn't looking forward to the large tail feather spread he would want to hang on the wall somewhere in this house. How about inside the walk in closet? When I was growing up, my Dad had (and still does) his own room. He kept a huge table in there that was always covered with a variety of stuff. Bullets, empty shot gun shells, paper work, screw drivers neatly lined up by size. He'd built a vise onto the edge that always seemed to have a bunch of high powered magnets attatched to it that I loved playing with. Anytime anything got broken, whether it was fixable or not, it was taken "to Daddy's table" to be ignored for a few months then finally either fixed or pronounced dead and thrown away. He also had two trees in there. Yes, trees. They are still there to this day. One on each side of the table. They are real trees, cedars that he cut down himself, striped of all needles and bark and sanded smooth with these branches sticking out in all directions, with coats, hats, and binoculars hanging off them. He even has these two hornets nests he found still attatched to little branches stashed up in the tops of each tree. There's also an assortment of hand drawn pictures and cards given through out the years from me, my sister, all the grandkids, and there's photographs stuck here and there all over that big table. On one wall there's this huge picture of us three kids and my Mom back when I was about 2 or 3 years old. My Mom was hacked because it was suppose to be a picture of just us three kids but I was too scared and wouldn't get my picture taken unless she was holding me. So, there we are, Mom with this huge scowl on her face and me with tears on my cheeks and my brother and sister smiling away like nothing out of the ordinary just happened. I mean, this picture is huge. Around 3 X 3-1/2. Feet. On another wall there's the guns, bows, arrows, deer antlers, and last but not least, turkey tail feathers. Spread out with the beards tacked onto the center. All over this chair that's who knows how old, yet somehow still comfortable to this day. Back when they had little house dogs, that's where you'd always find one of them. Curled up in that chair. That room, it has it's own smell, it's own ambiance, it's own sounds. That room saved my Mother from the pain of having that stuff strewn around the rest of the house.

Mike, on the other hand, doesn't have a room like this. We have a spare bedroom that is 100% cram packed with junk. Most of that junk is not really junk, but Mike's music equipment. Amps, guitar cases, more amps. Mic stands, cords, pedals, mics. Then there's the junk, like these stupid golf bags and clubs (and he doesn't even play golf) that he found at a flea market and thought was a good buy, thinking he could sell it and make some profit. Some more non junk like all my sewing supplies and all my canning supplies and my great Aunt Clara's china carefully packed away in boxes. If Mike were to say, have a deer head he wanted to stuff and display, there would be a fight as to where this deer head would end up. He would argue for the living room. I would say absolutely not. Under no circumstance do I ever want to see any part of a deer in my living room. He was already looking for a place to hang that turkey tail section. Mike needs his own room. He's got so much stuff, he needs his own 30 X 30 building.

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Can you say "Oops"? Mike called me at work around 4:30 asking me to pick Shael up because he was still at work and would be for another hour or so. He thought I'd be getting off in another 30 minutes. Wrong. I worked over tonight, too and didn't make it to pick Shael up until 5:45. She'd forgotten her house key to my parent's house and their spare key wasn't there, it was left in the house where it wouldn't do a person any good. So, when she got off the bus at 3:30, she had to sit there and wait outside until 5:45 for me to pick her up. She came bounding out of my Dad's Suburban that he wasn't driving today and said "FINALLY! WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?" She said she laid on the porch and took a nap for a while but kept getting woke up every time a car would drive by. Then she got uncomfortable on the hard concrete and got in the Suburban.

Now we are fighting over her social studies studies. These are her vocab words for social studies this week: aristocracy, democracy, Australia, Oceania, demagogues, oligarchy, epic, myths, acropolis, comedies. I don't think 6th grade was this hard when I was in 6th grade. I don't think I'd ever heard the word "demagogues" until high school. Last weeks bonus words were: Odysseus, acropolis, aristocracy, Hellenistic, and multicultural. Ooo-kay. I'm really not sure if I would be able to pass 6th grade myself if I were to take Shael's tests for her. Gee willakers. In math this semester they have covered algebra and geometry.

Shael is giving me the definitions of her vocab words. For epic she said "A long story poem" then under her breath she added "A long boring story". I believe I have to agree with her there. Especially when it comes to Homer. Lord, if she learns about Beowulf next, I'll totally sympathize with her. Empathize more like it. I learned about that boring "epic" when I was in high school and my Dad was amazed because he said he learned about that boring epic when he was in college. Now it's probably taught in middle school. That makes me wonder what the heck they teach in college now a days. Guess I'll find out soon enough, won't I?