On Vacation

In honor of it being the first day of my vacation, blogger.com has decided to cause trouble for me, where trouble equals sheer panic and hysteria. I can post but I can't read anything. And this comes directly on the heels of a fleeting thought I had recently which was, "I wonder if something ever happened to blogger.com if I would ever be able to retrieve everything I've written since, naturally, I have not saved it anywhere else." It is precisely because I thought this that blogger.com decided to break down. I know, they told me.

Update: If anyone else is experiencing this problem, delete the sitemeter (which appears to have been contributing to the problem). Access your blog by going to blogger.com (assuming that's who you use) and signing in there, then go to Dashboard, then to Layout and delete sitemeter there.

Today is the first day of vacation and the first day of no internet access for a week, unless soupisnotafingerfood lets me use her laptop one day.

Before I go, I have a confession: My name is Chesapeake Bay Woman, and I have an internet addiction. I am a blog-a-holic.

How in the world I am going to make it for so many days without spending hours on here is well beyond my comprehension.

In the interim, I wish everyone a wonderful week.

To entertain me when I return, and assuming people are able to get on here and comment (because I can't as of today), please answer the following question for me:

If you could be a tree, what type of tree would you be? (Just kidding. Really.)

OK, here's the question:

Who in your family or your circle of friends is the most eccentric, weird, bizarre, or just plain hilarious? Describe them and their peculiarities.

I want to laugh at other families, I'm getting tired of laughing at my own.

Have a fantastic week full of peace, laughter and happiness.

-Chesapeake Bay Woman

p.s. If you haven't had a chance to, take a gander at my mother's write-up in the post prior to this one.

The Golden Years

My mother agreed to write something for me, and below is the first of a couple essays she produced.
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“I just finished trying to polish the furniture with air freshener. When that didn’t work well, I used furniture polish and was quite pleased with the result. Yesterday, Husband put cat litter in the refrigerator TWICE.* It does kind of look like a milk bottle, but really. I fear we are living in our twilight years, or maybe we were just experiencing the fog of confusion that surrounds sixty-something parents who never know a moment when some one of our children is not: getting married, getting divorced, getting sick and having no health insurance, changing jobs, moving to yet another apartment, etc. I balance the constant out-of-control bad feeling in the pit of my stomach by adopting needy animals.** Somehow that works for me."
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CBW must interrupt this lovely essay written by her mother to make the following public service announcement on behalf of herself and her siblings: Pardon me, Mother? You didn't say you were gonna write stuff like this. We now return to my mother's attack, already in progress.
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"I have a herd of 19 cats, 2 dogs, 2 ducks and a goose. I know, you’re thinking…and a partridge in a pear tree…very funny. I also police the yard for downed baby birds and stray baby opossums, raccoons and once a fledgling eagle. (That wasn’t my doing; the thing was on my duck trying to kill it and I shooed it away but had to call the game warden to take it to wildlife rehabilitation for help.) Evidently this assignment came from on high because I feel compelled to render aid.

We don’t want to think about the money all this costs us; and so, we don’t.

Aside from being an enabler, my husband does illegal alien jobs – the jobs Americans won’t do – like drive a truck in the middle of the night and weed-whack. As a hobby, he repairs old Volkswagens, including the collection he has sitting around our yard. His other hobby is tractors. He mostly enjoys buying them. Using them is less of a thrill I guess, but we have them if we need them. His third obsession is the spring of holy water on our property, or as I call it, the Lesser River of Jordan. He and his buddy swear it is the purest water going. I don’t know; until I see it cure a leper I’m a skeptic.

People ask me what I do all day and I am embarrassed to tell them; so I lie. Instead of “I rescued a baby raccoon by placing it in a basket and climbing up a ladder to the pump house windmill tower (where his mother was) and securing the basket on the roof—in the middle of a storm—and climbing up in the same storm on the same ladder to see if his mother got him that night,” I say, “Slaving away getting ready for company” or some such untruth.

We are alright and I believe there are good things in store for us. My next project will be to dam up the Lesser River Jordan and construct a cold tub to sit in when we have a smelting-hot day; and then if we don’t break out in lesions, we’ll know the water is safe to drink!”
-Chesapeake Bay Woman’s Mother
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*Now do y’all understand why I do the things I do? Can you imagine an entire family that acts like this on a regular, routine, daily basis? Cat litter in the ice box? (By the way, I call a refrigerator an ice box because my grandmother always did and I can't break the habit.)
** Do ya see how she blames us kids for her animal obsession? She is worried about 3 daughters and so that justifies adopting 24 animals? Did you read the part about teetering on a ladder in a storm with a baby raccoon in a bucket so she could hang it from the water tower? What do we have to do with that?

Please, somebody give me a vacation. Oh! That’s right I am getting one next week. With my entire family! Can't wait!

-CBW