Indiana wants me.

My mom had been within the border of every state before she was twenty-one. In 1952, they were all still contiguous.  Her friends told her she should appear on the TV show "I've Got a Secret."

Annie's family lives in Indiana, and we were last there in 2009 for Thanksgiving.  I loved Indiana farmland the way you love someplace you'll never have to live.  The silence was thick around my ears and squeezed its way in.









Occasionally, I dream that Annie and I have bought a house in the Midwest because prices are good. I try to be happy, but we are always either settling in southern Ohio in my first hometown, or in southern Indiana in hers.

My mother grew up in NYS, and that's where I went when I was eighteen.  There are scads of my relatives there, few of whom I've ever met. If your name is Luce, we are cousins descended from Henry Luce of Martha's Vineyard - the first Luce in the U.S. There are lots of other ways for us to be cousins, but that's the easiest. I don't have any money, so there's no reason you'd want to acknowledge kinship.

I didn't grow up with holiday traditions.  I've shared satisfying holidays with friends and with Annie's family, but this is the first time EVER that I am going to spend Thanksgiving with my relatives in a traditional style.  Woohoo!  Some of us are ultra-liberal, some of us are conservative, and a couple of us are libertarian.  Some are Mormon, some atheist, some agnostic, and some are New Age-y.  Some don't believe in Western medicine, and some believe in nothing else.  I don't see how anything can go wrong.
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We went shopping for a book suitable for a little girl who has just started reading.  [We had to drive an hour to a town with a bookstore.]  We browsed a Disney Princess book, and asked the clerk for something where women don't need to be rescued.  She directed us to a series written by Jamie Lee Curtis;  we chose Today I Feel Silly: and Other Moods That Make My Day.  It made us LOL!  Good call, Books-a-Million clerk!
~~~~~~~

Still searching for butt rests.  Took them out for test-rests today.

Why did the blogger cross the road?

First, it was to get a shot of these birds hanging out with the cows.

Wiki-gret.  May have been inexpertly edited.

Unexpectedly, cows are divas.

Pulled off the road with my New York license plates, and taking pictures of cows, I deserved everything they were thinking about me.

Can I get some service?

The diesel is cheaper - I'll have that.

No hurry - I'll wait.  Can you check the oil?



While I was gallivanting, the old folks at home were getting things done:

I'd help, but it's time for wine!  I'll be out soon, honest.

And there's no good reason.

I keep thinking about posting, and then it's too hot so I go swimming.  Afterward, I'm too sleepy, so I take a nap.  I wake up hungry so I eat;  immediately after, it's time for a beer and then I'm too drunk.

We're unboondocking here at my mother and stepfather's house.  This is the resort experience.  I tried to lay our black water bladder in the driveway and John almost shot it.  That reads like a non sequitur (Latin: non for "don't;" sequitur for "blog while drinking"), but I mean to say that a black water bladder is a boondocking, not a resort, item.

I don't want to give you the impression things are easy here.  They are, but I don't want to give you that impression.


This critter hangs out with us in the cabana:











but disapproves of this sort of thing:

COMPLETELY unretouched.  I need to eat something.

That's more like it.  I must have been desiccated.

My mom, who is not certain she approves either but tolerates it anyway.


Lily, who approves of nothing.



Annie has not been idle, though! While I was sleeping, she made a new thing:

Take: one long-lasting whiney complaint,
stir in:

Mix with a drill and one Sparky until your set-up looks like this:

and then this:



I wished aloud that there was a DC port in front that ran off the house, not chassis, batteries.  My wishes are magic.

Having learned of the Endless Breeze 12V fan by Fan-Tastic, it was milliseconds before Annie learned she needed it like she had previously only needed fudge.  I can't report on its performance and power economy yet, because we are sucking from the teat of Florida Power and Light.  Later, fully weaned, I'll let you know how it goes.

Also in the mail:  Coolaroo. 

Daylight Losing Time

Mom is doing very well.  The cardiologist told her (me) to put away the rocking chair and get back to life.  She has no medical restrictions on her activities, except the ones fatigue imposes.  She's got 50% cardiac function - anyone with half a heart knows what that means - and exercise and medication may improve that a little.

Today she and her husband are back at their religious meeting for the first time in two weeks, so she should be a minor celebrity there.  Me, I'll be a celebrity here if anyone stops by to find me washing every garment I have.  Oh, put away the Emetrol and stop overreacting.  I'm wearing a towel.  I said stop it!  It's a really, REALLY big towel.

Last time I wrote, I was whining appropriately upset about poor connectivity.  After a couple of calls to AT&T, the technician came out, but his job was complicated by the electrical wire that draped gracefully across the driveway and kept us without electricity.  WHAT IS THIS PLACE.  Now we have screaming-fast dial-up, power, and a clear phone line, and what in the world do you Yankees want, anyways?  It doesn't matter.  I drank the diazepam water days ago, and only notice the tweeting birds, and is the pool ready yet?  It's very peaceful here.  

About light, sunshine and emotional well-being:  yes.  I've been noticing that the sun seems high in the sky at noon.  Is that normal?  I'm flying back to NYS tomorrow, where the sun skulks around the horizon as nature intended.  Then listen for our engines rumbling in about 10 days.

I also noticed that there are more followers now that I haven't been writing.  Hi y'all!  If I stop writing altogether this blog could reach Dooce-ic proportions.

Up-to-date in the Sunshine State.

Thank you all for your good wishes and healing thoughts!  Life here is slower, and maybe gentler, than back home, and so we waited three hours yesterday for Mom's primary doctor to see her.  The slower, gentler doc was alarmed by some things we told her, and then we spent five hours again in the ER so that slow, gentle healthcare providers could monitor and evaluate her.  I can't bust on these people;  their good work Monday morning stabilizing her in their ER absolutely saved her life.  They wanted to put her in a helicopter to Jacksonville, but weather was too bad, so they loaded her into an ambulance with 75 miles of screaming sirens.  [*falls over*]

She seems to be improving.  Her appetite is stronger.  She walks around, and got dressed today.  She doesn't tell me how to do the housework, however, so there is a long road of recovery ahead. Today I did something called "dusting."  I've seen it on TV, and apparently I did it right because everything is much dustier now.

This area doesn't get cell reception or iPad signal, and the landline is full of static.  Internet connection is dial-up, which means that as fast as I can chisel a message into a rock, run to the mule, and deliver it personally to each of your screens, I can communicate with just that kind of late-19th-century speed.

Still, I'm sitting with the window open and a warm breeze carries in birdsongs while I type and drink my Coke on the rocks.  Life could be worse in three or four ways.

Annie isn't telling you, but she is powering through on her own up there.  List?  Check.  List?  Check.  Check, check, check.  We think that as soon as Mom and her husband have the routine of medication in hand, I'll fly back and we'll head south together.  Her husband drives, but doesn't hear, so right now she needs someone to ask questions, remember the answers, remind her of the answers, explain the answers, or just make up answers.  And drive.  She doesn't have dementia, but it's all been a big shock and she's not completely tuned back in.

While I was running errands today, I got the greatest shot!  The problem is that I didn't bring my picture-uploading-cable.  So, imagine this:  there's this extravagantly run-down building, see, and no roof, see, and it's all grown up, see, and there's this sign ...

I guess I'll wait for the picture.  You will, too.