Carol Archives - Page 17 of 18 - Ramblin' with Roger

A dozen years

She also has considerable assets of her own. She manages money well. She’s not a religious zealot, but she has a moral center that I trust.

Carol and I have been married 12 years. Not a tremendously long time, but longer than any two other relationships I’ve ever had, so that’s something.

I submit that of course, it’s partly that she is a very good woman. But it’s also the case that I’ve probably learned better relationship skills, probably due to trial and error.

It’s not that the little stuff – you know, discussions of where to store the garbage cans, or her reading my blog in draft form, or me regularly having to clear the kitchen counter of (usually her) non-cooking/non-food stuff – doesn’t bug me. It’s that it just bugs me considerably less than it might have 20 or 30 years ago. Have I mellowed? ~~Maybe~~Probably.

Still, she also has considerable assets of her own. She manages money well. She’s not a religious zealot, but she has a moral center that I trust. Also, and I’m afraid I’ve been a bad influence with this, she’s not nearly as believing of the things that people in authority say as she was when I first met her almost 19 years ago.

So happy anniversary, honey.

The new Mother’s Day reality

The running joke when I’d call or send a card is that I’d say or write that it was from her favorite son.

Someone sent me this picture some months ago. I thought it was rather funny. Specifically, it reminded me of the Paul Simon song Mother and Child Reunion, which is based on a chicken and egg dish that Simon had at a Chinese restaurant.

Then my mom died, and it’s my first Mother’s Day without her. The visual is still funny but in a more melancholy way. Melancholy humor.

I’ve discovered that Mother’s Day ads REALLY irritate me lately, more than Father’s Day ads did 10 years ago. Maybe it was because it was longer between when my father died until the next holiday (August to June) than it is for my mom (February to May). But probably it’s because I get more e-mail solicitations than I did a decade ago, and they are more difficult to ignore.

The picture above is of my mother with her favorite son many years ago in front of 5 Gaines Street, Binghamton, NY USA; the house and the trim, BTW, were green. The running joke when I’d call or send a card is that I’d say or write that it was from her favorite son. She was generally polite enough not to mention that I was her ONLY son.

Last Sunday, there was a Mass for Mom at the Mission San Diego Basilica de Alcala in San Diego. As my sister Leslie reported, it was “beautiful. It was the regular Noon Mass, but it was announced at the beginning that this Mass was for Trudy Green, mother of Leslie Green, who is a member of the Mission Choir.” I will be getting a copy of the event. “It was a packed house on a beautiful day.”

The bottom picture is of my daughter with her favorite mother. Carol is, among other things, a good mom.

Happy Mother’s Day to all of you mothers, and all of you who have or had mothers.

The Lydster, Part 82: The Girl Who Mistook A Coat Rack for Her Mother

Lydia tells her jokes(?) with such relish, I can at least appreciate the delivery, if not the content.

Someone told me, when my daughter was an infant, that she would see me as perfect until she was about 12, then turn on me. That has proven not to be the case. On the contrary, the Daughter is really good at pointing out the errors of both of her parents already, though, like most of us, is less perceptive about her own flaws.

So if I leave something on the floor, or don’t hang up my coat or [horrors] EAT IN THE LIVING ROOM, then I definitely hear about it. Yet she is struck blind by the things on the floor that are hers unless I threaten to vacuum them up.

She laughs when I accidentally misspeak a word, but not so much when I am deliberately trying to be funny. Meanwhile, I scratch my head at what passes for humor in kindergarten, though she tells her jokes(?) with such relish, I can at least appreciate the delivery, if not the content.

One day, she was upstairs. I was downstairs vacuuming, but when I had finished, I had not yet put back the coat tree in the corner, so it was in the middle of the living room floor. Her mother and I were talking at the dining room table when Lydia came downstairs. The coat nearest her on the coat tree was her mother’s, so she started talking to her mommy. Then she looked over to the dining room table, saw her mother, looked back at the coat rack, walked into the dining room, and continued telling her (actual) mother her story. No embarrassment, no “oops”; I was impressed, actually, as I would have been mortified at her age.

30 Day Challenge – Day 30: Whomever You Find Most Attractive In This World

Rebecca and Rico were dubbed “Lightning” and “Thunder”, respectively.

Jeez, Louise. I started this thing on May 6. I posted Day 29 on November 14. 30 days? HA!

This picture of my wife and daughter is from April of 2008 in Virginia, probably Jamestown or Norfolk, someplace near Williamsburg.

Oh, my niece Rebecca, who had one of those Kickstarter things to raise the $3000 to put together a music album reached her goal! It was interesting because, with less than a week to go before the Christmas deadline, she seemed stuck at about $2350. Got $1000 in the last week.

And speaking of my niece Rebecca, did I mention that she and her husband Rico both appeared on a peculiar TV competition program called Wipeout back in September? It’s Season 3, Episode 16: Food Fight. Annoyingly, I cannot find it either on the ABC.com site or on Hulu.com, though other episodes can be found there. Oddly, though, there is a transcript of the show.

The hosts try to create artificial tension between Rebecca and another woman over Rico’s affection. Also, Rebecca and Rico were dubbed “Lightning” and “Thunder”, respectively. Though Rico was the third to cross the Shape Shifter (don’t ask), and the first to cross without riding in a shape, he was eliminated in the first round. Rebecca made it to the finals, where she ultimately came in second.

30 Day Challenge – Day 29: Somewhere You Want To Visit

Now the Girlfriend said, if I’m not going to New Orleans, which I had pitched and was rejected, why not try to go to Hawai’i with her?

I always wanted to go to Paris, and after seeing these pictures from Luxembourg daily, I’m practically packed. Ah, but what am I to make of the travel alert to Europe over terrorism? At least it’s not a travel warning, such as what exists in Mexico.

Domestically, the place I most want to go is Hawai’i. There’s a story about that. Back in 1995, when I was going out with The Girlfriend, who eventually became The Wife, she was working for an insurance company. She had achieved some significant designation in the industry and had won a free trip for two to the 50th state. Did I want to go? Well, of course, I did, except…

At the very same time, there was a work trip to New Orleans. Now my job in the organization at the time was to do liaison work with other SBDCs and going to the ASBDC conference fit in with that. I SHOULD be going on this trip. Unfortunately, we had gotten a new boss about a year earlier, and she was prone to pick her favorites to travel. I was not one of her favorites; none of the three men were, and only about half the women she liked. So she decided that only she and her most favorite would go to New Orleans because the office would otherwise be short-staffed.

Now the Girlfriend said, if I’m not going to New Orleans, which I had pitched and was rejected, why not try to go to Hawai’i with her? Because I knew she’d reject that too since the office would still be shorthanded.

Then, at the last minute, the boss decided that I COULD go to New Orleans. This was not her being magnanimous. It was her realizing that they had heavy equipment to schlep on and off the plane and that they needed someone strong to do that, and I was elected.

Knowing that boss as I did, I firmly believed that if I had pitched going to Hawai’i, I would have likely have gone neither there OR to New Orleans.

I don’t think The Girlfriend truly understood this as not a rejection of her, but a realization of what was possible. I believe this incident played into us breaking up about six months later. Obviously, we’ve overcome it, but going to Hawai’i with her now would be splendid.