I’ve loaded most of my stuff into the car. Just the laptop and various things that I’ll need in the morning before I go. Now I just have to manage to get out of bed early enough that I get home before 2 AM. I’m not very good at leaving early enough on these driving trips of mine.

In some ways I’m not ready to go yet either. I haven’t looked for the date, though I feel pretty sure that it has to be 2002. I haven’t gotten anything ready to munch on in the car, so I’m going to end up paying way to much to get something at a gas station. And overall, I’m just never sure if leaving is the right thing to do. There’s so much that needs to be taken care of here, and I feel so guilty that I can’t get it all done.

I know that Perci disdains such things, but I have to figure out the diet thing again. I cancelled my Weight Watchers membership, because it was just sucking the monthly fees out of my account and I wasn’t doing a thing with it. I was just wasting money or paying for a dream, if you’d prefer. I really have to do something though because I am bigger than a hippo.

I did a little reading, and I signed up for SparkPeople. It’s free and has online journals just like WW. They count calories and various nutrients, rather than points. In some ways points are easier for me, as I’m not a math whiz; but this is at least not costing anything. I decided that for me, New Year’s Day wasn’t the starting point. I am still in Virginia, and I know I would just fail immediately. I’ll try starting next week, when things are more in my control and there are fewer sugary things around. I just have to do something and soon before I’m unable to move like that mother in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. I feel like I’m already there. I’m just no good at any of it.

So I guess that I should go to bed. My sister is going to call me when she leaves for work in the morning, around 7:30 or so. I’m hoping to get out of bed and get underway well before noon. Given my track record, the odds aren’t good, so no wagering please.

Bizarre Sign

Having realized that there was no way that I could leave here tomorrow in anything like a normal time frame, I called and asked for an extra day off. Tomorrow, however, I really have to get things pulled together. As always, I’m worried about how to get all this stuff in the car. It seems impossible given the two big boxes of dishes (I only expected one box). I’ll try to save that stress for tomorrow.

I’m having a horrible problem with tendinitis and/or carpal tunnel tonight. Everything I do seems to cause shooting pain to the tips of my fingers. I actually noticed this beginning last week. There’s something that I’m doing when I’m cooking that causes it. I’m not quite sure what. Something about using a spatula too eagerly or may it’s the whisk. I don’t know, but it hurts like hell. I’ve iced it most of this evening, and it’s still sore. At least for now I can still type. God help me if I lose the ability to type.

I did get some NCTE work done this evening—cleaned up all the broken links for our content report. I need to send it off tomorrow. I was going to try to get a lesson plan on writing comic strip scripts finished for the report, but I realized that what I really need for its interactive piece is some artwork that’s been embellished with Comic Life. Since I didn’t bring my mac to Virginia, I can’t finish that project. I’m certain that it’s worth waiting. I can create some panes in Comic Life that will illustrate some of the definitions in the handouts for the lesson. I searched for online comics that I could use, but the political cartoons that are out of copyright are so different from the cartoons and comics that students are used to. Beyond that, they really didn’t demonstrate all of the principles that I needed. I’m sure that waiting is the thing to do.

Maybe I can pull off some other lesson plan miracle for tomorrow’s report. Otherwise, it has to go on with no new lessons. Given that we were all out of the office for the last two weeks, it’s acceptable for it to be blank. I’m just a perfectionist, and I hate to leave it like that.

Back to the land of ghosts for some sleep now.

Hokies Win! 35-24

Overhead during the Gator Bowl:

• “He has hands the size of small dogs.”
• “I can’t believe that he got it up.”
• “She almost looked like a drag queen.” (My sister speaking of a cheerleader)

I need to get dressed and start loading up the car for the return to Illinois tomorrow. Unfortunately, I don’t have any energy for such a task. I am energy-free. Unlike, say, gluten-free, energy-free is not really a good thing.

The game starts in about 20 minutes, I think. Maybe I should at least shower. If I had will power or energy, I could carry a laptop to the living room even. Course my desire to watch the game has disappointed some family members. I never seem able to do the right things.

It may not have been the most exciting New Year’s Days for me. I just couldn’t wake up today. I usually can’t, but when I realized that there were no parades and such stuff, I gave up and went back to bed. Why bother? I’m just a slug.

We did have the sauerkraut and sausage fest this evening. It’s a German/Pennsylvania Dutch New Year’s tradition. My family isn’t overly German and not at all Pennsylvania Dutch, but my parents were both from Pennsylvania, and I guess that’s where their families picked up the tradition. One Web site had this saying regarding the custom: “If on New Year’s Day you serve ‘Kassler (smoked pork chops) mit Sauerkraut,’ so the saying goes, you will never run out of available cash.” Another explains that the pork and sauerkraut tradition arose because “a Pennsylvania Dutchman would never dine on chicken on New Year’s because the bird scratches backward.” I don’t find that a very satisfying explanation, as it could just as easily be justification for eel and turnip casserole.

Perhaps the best explanation I found was from the University of Cincinnati Libraries:

Pork & Sauerkraut are a main dish for New Years Day in the German heritage, as pigs are considered good luck charm symbols and cabbage leaves are symbolic of money, thus having pork and Sauerkraut are felt to be the best way to pave the way for the New Year. This goes back to the distant past when farm families who had a pig felt they were lucky enough to have one to feed their families during the winter. Pigs thus became good luck charms and were also used then for saving money in piggy banks. In German one says “ich habe Schwein gehabt,” or I have had pig,” which means colloquially that: I have had good luck!” Little pigs of cake or candy (marzipan – almond paste is popular) are also produced. The custom really demonstrates the ancient rural origins of this particular custom.

No marzipan piggies here, but plenty of pork and cabbage.

Tomorrow is the Virginia Tech bowl game, and it’s time for me to pack up the car. We got the two big, heavy boxes in this evening—the dishes. I’m always afraid that I’ll never fit it all in. I usually end up in frustrated tears as I’m trying to pack. Fortunately, my mother sent the toaster oven to my house, so at least there’s one less huge thing to fit in the car. Course there will also be crying because I’m leaving, but that’s a different kind. I’m such a stupid baby.

This room is beginning to haunt me. Not in the ‘oh no, there are ghosts under the bed’ way, but in the way where I look around the room and see things that just make me sad and teary. Things with daddy’s handwriting on them. His baseball glove. Books that he bought as he planned for retirement. He wanted to start a consulting company. He never got to retire. All these things he used or planned to use. This is his desk that I’m using. When I dug into the closet a bit ago to hang up some wet clothes I just washed, there were shirts and things that he wore. And I still haven’t had the nerve to go check the urn. I know that when I touch it, I will cry. I cry thinking about it. I don’t know how to do this anymore. Just seeing his handwriting on the labels on boxes kills me. How can I go check?

I told someone about a book that I’m reading, Donorboy. The simple plot is that the teen’s two mother’s die and her sperm donor father is trying to raise her now. It’s much more complicated, of course. But the relevant thing is that the father, speaking of his own mother’s death, tells the young girl, “I find that even twenty-six years later, it hurts too much. It never really hurts any less; it just hurts less often” (34-35).

So if I believe that, I’m always going to be reduced to horrible, gut-wrenching tears. I’m going to be lying on that bed, look up and see that baseball glove on the top shelf and be unable to sleep for crying. I’ll look in that closet again, and simultaneously want to take some of his shirt, but know that if I do, I’ll cry when I try to wear them. I’ll look across the room and see the books that evidence unfulfilled dreams and cry like it happened this afternoon.

The ball has dropped. It’s 2006. At midnight, my sister’s dog Snuffles was in my lap, and he got all silly and licked my face. Yes, at midnight, I got kissed by a poodle. Probably the only midnight kiss I’ve gotten actually. I can’t think of others. Yes, my life is that pathetic.

It would be hard for New Year’s Eve 2005 to top yesterday, so we didn’t even try. My nephew is still alive this morning, and apparently not feeling as horrible as he should be after last night’s performance. After hearing all the stories, we have a better picture. It seems that he crawled from the bedroom to the bathroom and ended up throwing up in the sink. My sister, his aunt, saw some of this. Unfortunately, when he tried to turn on the sink, he yanked up on a potted plant, rather than the faucet. After he finally recognized that the plant was not the faucet, he got the tap turned on and laid his head on the sink, which was rapidly filling with water. He had to be told to turn down the water unless he wanted his head under water.

He attempted to crawl back to the bedroom, but gave up in the doorway. He was only on the floor a few minutes before my brother got him up for the woozy drunk walk to his bed.

Later in the evening, he burst into his sister’s bedroom, through the closed door, opened a desk cabinet, and looked in confusedly. She asked what he was doing. He replied, “nothing” and left, falling into the door on his way out. We still haven’t found out if he remembers any of this.

To his credit, when I went down around dinner time tonight to ask the questions that I needed to ask, all I had to do was walk over to his desk. He looked up at me and said, “I made a bad choice.” That sure makes it a lot easier. No need to talk about the evils of overdoing it. I did quiz him on whether he was drunk when I left, and he assures me that he wasn’t. The friend who was supposed to pick him up just never showed. He says that’s not why he was drinking though. Maybe he’s scamming me, but I’m choosing to believe him for my own sanity’s sake.

I did some work on the manuscript, finishing another subsection of the chapter. I just can’t get going on the next section though. I need to probably jump ahead, but I’m too linear in my thinking and I just can’t write out of order. Maybe I’ll have a break-through tomorrow.

I heard a few minutes of Dick Clark, and sort of wonder if putting him on TV really was the best choice. Oh well, no TV in this room, so I don’t have to listen.

We were supposed to go to dinner at 8:30 tonight, because that allowed my brother to join us. Mama wanted to leave the house at 8, so that we could get the table taken care of before everyone gets there. It’s a place that doesn’t take reservations (Texas Roadhouse) for large groups.

Mama and the sister who lives here, my niece and I are in the car, all waiting on my 21-year-old nephew. Mama is getting pissed because he’s not there, and his mother doesn’t seem to know what’s going on with him. My mother is fuming, so it’s my job to try to solve the problem. I get out of the car and go in the house. I check on him, and he’s still wearing only boxers and sweatpants (see earlier audio post).

I go back outside and tell mom to leave that I’ll bring him. I get in my car to warm it up while I’m waiting for him. At 8:25 or so, after waiting for at least 15 minutes, I begin to wonder what is going on. I go back in the house. I can’t find him. He’s not in his room. Not in the bathroom. I’m wondering if he went out the back door to a friend who lives nearby and just didn’t tell me. I go through the utility room to see if I can tell if he used that back door. Instead, I find him coming in from the garage in shoes, shorts, and a hoodie. He looks like he has a headache or something.

I ask what’s wrong, and he tells me that he never wanted to go to dinner with us. He says that his mother said that we would be having dinner at the house tonight, and he didn’t expect us to be going out and certainly not so late. He tells me that his friends (a different group) were supposed to pick him up at 9 to go play pool, etc. He makes it clear that he doesn’t want to go, but, well never mind all that. So I said, I’ll tell them you have other plans, and I’ll go ahead without you.

I make him confirm that this is what he wants. I leave him in the house. We come home a couple hours later or so. His dog is loose in the house, and the front door wasn’t completely closed. My sister (his aunt, not his mother) calls for us to come downstairs because he is lying on the floor of the bathroom and hallway downstairs.

When I get there, he won’t answer anyone who asks him what’s wrong. My brother waves everyone off, hovers over him, and says, have you been drinking? Yes, he says.

So there was once a gallon bottle of Jim Beam that had about 3 inches in it. It’s empty now. There has been nothing but fighting and yelling and arguing since, and none of it directed at him, cuz he’s passed out and had to be carefully walked by two people back to his bed. He’s thrown up a little at the last report.

He was one of the drunkest ppl I’ve ever seen, all toppling over and woozy. No telling when he started drinking, but he wasnt drunk like that when I left him. I thought something was wrong, but he told me it was that he didn’t want to go to dinner with the family because he had other plans. He apparently hadn’t eaten much today, and drank that 3 inches of Beam. His mother is flipping out and yelling and crying. See, today is her birthday; so Mr. Drunk skipped her birthday dinner to get drunk alone at home. At least that’s how it’s being perceived.

I’m sure it’s more complicated than all this. I don’t know if his friends didn’t show or what. I feel horrible because I’m afraid that I should have noticed before I left. He looked stressed or like he had a headache, but not drunk. I feel like a horrible person.