What, Karma?

This past weekend was the Highland Games. We wait for this event all year long. This is our Christmas, Rosh Hashanna, Halloween and Superbowl all rolled into one. So, I shouldn't have been surprised when Delta went on without me after Phee-Phee and Oscar came down with croup. After a day and a night on prednisone, the girls were given the green light to travel so we headed up to NH to join Delta. Everything seemed fine.Until I woke up to the ominous sound of a pig rutting in my blankets. Fortunately it was just Oscar. Unfortunately the rutting sound was a portent of things to follow, quite literally. Seconds after I identified the sound , buckets of meatball red vomit soaked through my fleece pajamas and onto my skin beneath. Oscar was like a fondue fountain, the puke just kept coming. And even after I'd changed our pajamas and our sheets and walked her to the bathroom to brush her little fangs, I couldn't shake the queasy feeling I'd gotten when I tried to pull my shirt over my head. I managed to fall back asleep but when I woke up I was still queasy. I thought about going home, but DElta convinced me to stay. My stomacheache grew worse as the morning progressed. The two mimosa's our friend Jay the Scott brought over did not do anything to abate the pain. A long, hot, 75 cent shower did nothing to improve my mood. Finally, I stood in the doorway of the public restroom, beseeching the heaven's to send me a sign and suddenly a great rolling wave of thunder answered me. If you were to record the sound the thunder made and play it back at a much higher speed, you would clearly hear "Didi - go home - you are sick" but I had no recording equipment so I missed the message and stayed.
"You can go," said Delta, "And bring the camper back with you."
I know what you're thinking, "Whatchou talkin bout, Delta?" right?
Me too. But so strong was the feeling that he knew something I didn't and that if I left I would miss out on that something, that I stayed despite my churning digestive tract. By the time I rolled into my driveway last night and dragged my ass into bed, kilt and all, my fever was at 102. I drifted off to sleep (After Desperate Housewives of course) promising Karma that next time I'll listen and just stay home.

My Delta's as Sneaky as They Come

Today started out a perfectly normal Monday. Ya-Ya stayed home sick from school. We met OHM at Starbucks before Oscar's ballet lesson. After ballet we headed out to Ipswich to this awesome place for my quarterly Polarity/deep tissue massage. (And by deep, I mean she stirred my bone marrow.) Everything was going just fine until Delta called me on the hour and a half drive home.
"Are you going to jujitsu?" I asked, glancing at the clock and noticing he was already 15 minutes late.
"No, I just got home."
"Just got home? It's 7:00. WHere have you been?"
"What am I on parole?"
"If by parole you mean advising Queen Mother as to your whereabouts for the last 2 unaccounted hours than yes."
- wait. I'm making things up again. Let me remember how it really went - ....
OK. Something about jujitsu, then this big, elaborate fabrication about picking earthmoving equipment with his friend The Mouth to do work on Mom and Superdad's house before the wedding. With absolutely NO prompting on my part. And if any of you don't know already, I'll tell you that when someone makes up a whopper before you can even ask what they were doing, something's up. And I KNOW you know that when said whopper is followed by a hissing through the teeth so as to mimic phone static, something's REALLY up. So, I seethed all the way down Route 128. Then I fumed across the Mass Pike. Then I ground my teeth into a fine powder through the backroads of Framingham. Then,when I finally got home and sailed through the house with my chin in the air and my eyes pointedly averted, Delta fell over onto the bed in a fit of giggles.
"What?" I demanded.
"The windows look nice," he giggled. And I have to admit, he took me aback for a moment. He noticed I washed the windows! But then I saw the blue diapers wrapped around his forearms.
"What have you done to yourself?" I cried. "Why have you wrapped yourself in surgical diapers?"
And then I realized why. My sneaky Delta Hotel went off and got himself some more tattoos today. This is the fourth time he's brought me home tattoos as surprises. Why doesn't he just tell me when he makes the appointment? That Delta and his secret tattoo-gettin' life. After the pain from my jaw grinding subsided and the migraine loosened it's grip just a hair, we had a good laugh. And he does realize that this is war. I too will find myself a secret life. I just can't figure out what.

How to Plan a Wedding in Just Three Weeks

On October 8th my mom is going to marry the man of her dreams. This is a second marriage for both of them - my mom is a divorcee and my future super-dad (my mom's alternative to the title stepdad) is a widower. Both of them have kids - my mom has me and my superdad to be has three sons and all of us are married with families of our own. Mom and Superdad are going for the ultra-low key this time around. But when my mom used the words "We're just going to have something simple, us and all the kids and grandkids," I thought that meant everything was under control. Last night she called to ask if my future supersister-in-law had been in touch with me.
"About what?" I asked.
Long, l-o-n-g, looooooooong pause.
"About the wedding plans," answered my mom in her I'm-speaking-this-softly-because-I-can-see-the-end-of-your-life-and-it's-at-hand voice.
"The wedding plans," I said.
"Keep it simple," she growled.
What I'd failed to realize, way back when when they announced their engagement, was the command prompt buried in the exciting exposition.
Do any of you have any idea how long it takes a Libra to plan a wedding with all the choices involved??? Here's an illustration. Delta and I, both Librans, spent 25 minutes at the Toyota repairs counter yesterday with "the man" looking on before we decided to let him remove the door panel of the sequoia to see why the drivers side window would not go up. Twenty five minutes, one decision. We can't even decide where to go to dinner without calling a UN Special Convention. I can't speak for all librans, but when my very limited decision making tank is overloaded, craziness ensues. That's why I sometimes wear Delta's clothes and speak in tongues. So, my mantra - no - my prayer for the next three weeks is that no one ends up sitting round the reception table eating from Pez dispensers, wearing jester hats and drinking windex. Thank God my supersister-in-law to be seems to be quite level headed.

Whoa...

So, you know how we have this cute little Scotty Highlander camper, right? And how we're some camping fools, right? Well, it wasn't always this way. When I first met Delta, I had taken a life vow of not ever camping on purpose again. Something about shelter halves and rifles in my sleeping bag and brown recluse spiders and dirt on any exposed inch of sweaty flesh just did me in. But Delta loves to camp. He's also a champion peer pressurer. So one year I relented and we went tent camping and I was reminded of how much I loathe waking up covered in dew and stuffy nosed because I invariably wallow over some previously unseen hill facedown. I'm always cold and sweaty at the same time and I must be charged with some mysterious Swifter energy because all the dirt from everywhere sticks to the worst possible places on my body. So Delta bought me a pop-up. We used it two, maybe three times, then I decided that it was too much like a tent with wheels and I hated it. So Delta bought the little Scotty. Meanwhile, the pop-up sat in our back yard all old and unloved. The roof had some weird problem and all the snow went inside during the winter so the thing was basically wrecked come spring. Delta was sad. He thought all he could do was give it away on Craigslist to be used as a trailer. So one day this guy came over talking about how he wanted to take his boys camping and showing Delta his tattoos and they got along all right. Delta liked him because he came right out and said he was stuck in the eighties, and anyone who can do that - and actually is - is freaking hilarious. That was months ago. Tonight I was reading through the blogs and I noticed that a friend wrote about the camper she'd gotten from Craigslist for free. "No way," I told myself, "Too much of a coincidence. It couldn't possibly be OUR old pop-up!" So, I went to flickr and found a picture of this girl's boyfriend.
"Delta!" I called. "Do you remember the guy you gave the camper to?"
"What about him?"
"Did he have curly black hair? Was his name Karp?"
"Yeah, as a matter of fact it was Karp."
"Did he look like this?" I said, stepping aside from where I'd been blocking the monitor."
"That's him! That's Karp who took the camper! Why is he on your computer?"
How weird is that??? I'm so glad that Karp and Marla got the pop-up. I'm amazed that they actually fixed it up but glad that someone is getting some use out of it and making some memories. I really want to see how they handled that roof leak. Life is so weird. We took out an add in Craigslist and filtered a bunch of people only to give the camper to the boyfriend of a girl I've known since I was 16. Ha.

Don't think I haven't written because I don't love you. It's not you, really, it's me. And it's not that I don't have anything to write about, I do. There was Phee-Phee's luau birthday party where she cried 'cus she wanted too and, well, you know how the song goes. Then there was the camping trip in the wake of the hurricane and the ghost hunt to the top of October Mountain where an abandoned old graveyard can be found, sinking away into oblivion. And Oscar's third birthday party out in the sticks. And I'm wondering why I've heard the concept of parallel universes a total of three times this week from three seperate parties whose words echoed precisely the words of those before them. And then the other concept of serendipity repeated by two close friends who I swear have met each other but insist that they wouldn't know the other if they were "choking on her". And then, of course, the failed root canal and Tiarra's insistence that I shall succumb to brain fever before the rooster cries three times. Lucky for me I'm addicted to novocaine. School started last week in a tidal wave of melancholy. Turns out that stupid tacky homily that everyone who has ever raised a child to adulthood forces into the brain of every new parent is actually true. They do grow up too fast, and you do find yourself looking at the soggy breakfast cereal they've left behind wondering where in the hell you were when it happened. Stupid true cliche. But, one must not continue to pop out children just to fill the lonely hours in an elementary school day. Especially when one's husband has had a vasectomy. Life's full of these little winters I've come to discover. As Delta would say, does say whenever he suspects a whine is about to pass through my lips, Suck it up and something good will happen.