Aunt Goo-Goo

Meet me adorable nephew, Evan. My nephew!!!! It's such a joy and a pain, because I cannot be there!! My Rob and Myung act like they're the first people to have a baby, LOL Let them, I say, for there's no experience like it. I just think it's awesome that Rob is forty and this is his first child. I'm 34 and I have two who are on the cusp of adolescence. God bless 'em. TBC...

Aunt Glou-Glou Finally Has A Nephew

Last night, my brother and my SIL had a beautiful baby boy. Evan Bernard arrived in the world nearly at midnight Texas time. This is the fifth grandchild for my folks; it's been almost 9 years since we had a baby. It's the second boy and my dad finally has someone to carry on the family name. I am DYING to see this child, but they are in Texas and I'm here in WV, not like I can jump in the car and nip on over to the hospital. Rob is just going to have to come east soon, that's all. Rob says he's beautiful, slender and red-brown hair, hazel eyes. The eyes will probably turn brown, since Myung's Asian looks will be dominant. Myung is gorgeous; Rob is handsome except for his nose.

Welcome to this spinning ball of filth, young wormbaby.
May God bless you.

As I was sayin....

About me lovely nieces Mary and Maggie.
They and my children have grown up together. Dylan goes to Canada with them every year, wonderful girls, vastly different. Mags is a character, funny, imaginative, quick to laugh and cry, heh heh. She always runs to me with hugs and likes to smell me. That's her thing, smelling people. I hope she becomes a lil more discriminate of that as she grows up.
Mary is quieter, a studious but very likable young lady. She is the firstborn grandchild and Tara came a year later. Mary is a very talented dancer, and she has very photogenic dark good looks. She and Dylan are close--every year when they go to Canada, Mary and Maggie "adopt' Dylan for the week. No brothers in their family.
When I was pregnant with Dylan, Sue was also pregnant, two weeks further along than I was. Difference was, Sue had planned her pregnancy and Jim and I more or less conceived Dylan on the notion 'if it happend, oh well, we have a family started anyway.' Sue miscarried, and it was so painful for her to watch me go through my rather eventless pregnancy. It took so much courage to bring herself to the hospital when I had Dylan. I may complain about my sister, but I love her and the fact that she shared in my joy while grieving means more to me than anything. I remember while I was carrying Dylan, I would dream that when I had the baby and gave it to Sue out of guilt. I did feel guilty that I was carrying a healthy boy baby when she lost her much-wanted child. She never did get her boy. She miscarried two more times before finally conceiving Maggie and carrying her to term without a hitch.
The picture in my last post---that is of the kids at our favorite park, Idlewild. Mary, Maggie and Dylan are making the "Poopy's Diner A-OK" sign. It's this funny comedy bit that Mary and Mags devised, talking in these weird strangled accents and calling each other Poopy and Poppy. I love my girls :)

Poppy and Poopy's Diner

Until October, I have only been blessed with two wonderful offspring of my sister--my two nieces, Mary and Maggie. My brother is expecting his first child soon, a boy, my first nephew, second grandson for my parents.
Mary was the first child, the first newborn baby I ever held. I'd arrived at the hospital within minutes of her birth. She was absolutely beautiful--the prettiest newborn I'd ever seen. Her birth brought Sue and me closer; we are 8 years apart and closeness is something we'd never experienced. (to be continued...)

What Happened to the Math Genes?

"If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you."
(from the poem "If" by Rudyard Kipling )
http://www.swarthmore.edu/~apreset1/docs/if.html

In order to fulfill my graduation requirements, I have to take another semester of math 0_ cringe!_o
Math and I do not see eye to eye because we tend to fight for utilisation of the same side of the brain. Math wants to use the left hemisphere, when most of the data the LH has absorbed is mainly music-related. Ironically, studies have shown (and these studies must have been done by folks who have not an inkling of musical knowledge)
that people who show a proclivity for musical theory and performance tend to be excellent math scholars. I am living, breathing proof that for me, these are the polar opposites. HA!
My mother tends to brand me as a 'prodigy.' Now, prodigy to me means that cute little car made by Mazda driven mainly by college students and starving writers. I am/was no musical prodigy. I simply had the inherent ability to play any song I've ever heard. I'd learn to play the song *first, then I would learn the sheet music, altering here and there what I thought should have been changed. That doesn't mean i'm a genius. I do have perfect pitch (something I lost after giving birth but regained.) I do have the knack for memorizing pages and pages of music, mentally photocopying each page so I can 'flip through' the score and reference any given bar. I didn't know that how most musicians *don't* retain memory; most do it by touch. I do both, and my tendency to do the mental page-flip is stronger than the compulsion to feel my way across a keyboard if I miss a note. Who knew?
Well....back to the math thing. Today in class we were given a test to show more or less what we know. Basic stuff--the addition and multiplication--was small potatoes for me. Throw in the counterparts subtraction and division required a little more effort. Mix in letters and integers and parentheses, brackets, little pointy thingys that look like single quotations and I'm in fucking Siberia, man.
With God's grace and hopefully divine interference, I will get through this class with AT LEAST a C, which would shame me 8^(
Someone told me that I have such trouble with math because I have such a hatred for it that I've blacked any possible route to learn it. Bull puckey. I hate math because it hated me first, in the form of a sadistic dried-up bag of a teacher named Mrs. Wells who used to shame me in front of the entire third-grade class. Called me lazy while I stared at the math book in tears and confusion. Everyone thought that because I was a super reader taht I should have been adept in math too. It took many years for me to convince my teachers and my mother that I was not lazy, that I didn't understand what I was supposed to do with these problems. So much for pathos *shrug*

Corn.

Cast of characters for today's serial (in no particular order)--

Aunt Glou-Glou: Our hero
Walter: The hero's Prince
Billy Clem: Gardener who's a perv
Larry: The hero's brother-in-law

Oh my God.
I just realized that I am becoming as PC as the rest of the world. Was just watching a Kia commercial and a pretty girl comes into the Kia showroom, daintily bearing a tray, to offer the male customer a choice of milk or cream for his coffee. Sat there thinking "WHY a girl, and a pretty one? Will it influence his decision? Will it give him a boner while he picks his condiment?" Sheesh. The whole commercial was about how easy it is to make a decision to buy a dang Kia. Or was it?

I just had my first taste of Billy Clem corn. Two ears' worth of tender, juicy, buttery salty bliss. I love summer vegetables and Billy's corn is by far the best I've eaten this season. I wonder if it has to do with the way he loves his vegetables like he loves a woman (I just choked as I wrote this.) Billy is an old man whom I met through Walter who met him through Larry. He used to be a streetcar-and bus driver in DC before they converted to Metro. Fascinating guy, has a lot of ribald and raucous stories to tell about the numerous affairs he'd had. He and his wife have been married fifty-odd years, had 8 kids, and he still screws around on her like he's a sixteen year old. Walter and I took him on his birthday for a crab-feed and he kept trying to pick up the waitresses, shouting things like "Come ere and I'll give you a lil taste of my raw oysters!" I was ready to leave, and Billy doesn't care what he says. Walter says to let him do whatever he wants, he's an old man, etc etc...sorry, but there's a way to conduct oneself in public inside a family restaurant, and being stuck with 2 drunk men kind of makes me look bad, n'est-ce pas?

Corn is a- bahling...

and I can't C&P the dang postings I previously made.....

Corn is Cookin...(About Aunt Glou-Glou, Sort of...)

and I'm putting some back postings here, so yous'll get to know me better...

PB&C: Sounds like a grisly combination of a sandwich and a surgical procedure, doesn't it? I remember when I was a child, I could withstand extremes of heat and cold without whining, whinging, bitching and begging to come inside. *I* didn't have a PS2! *I* didn't have a computer of my very own! *I* didn't have a CD/DVD player (I had an 8-track and Realistic turntable.) All I had was...the creek, a footbridge and the desire to catch and release crayfish all day. I dropped Avon jewelry among the slimy stones and pretended I had found pirates' treasure. I'd build tiny fires among the dry stones and burn bits of paper and leaves and pretend I was sending smoke signals. I had a 3-speed bike, a Huffy with a leather seat that I would ride all over the quiet country roads. My best friend and I always met each other halfway at the Barn with the Star, and then we'd go on to her house or mine. We would forage for hours among piles of trash, junky stuff like empty tins of Velvet pipe tobacco, old curtains, bedframes which we'd try to resurrect into an entrance to our secret fort. When on the rare occasion that we were indoors, we played with dolls who led more sophisticated lives than ours, the Charlies Angels and the Darci dolls were top models and beautiful keepers of peace. We danced to music on our LPs to the music of the Annie soundtrack, Lenny Dee and Donna Summer. When the 80s debuted with David Bowie and Men at Work, we still danced and mouthed the words, certain that we were destined for stardom. We didn't have cable; yet, our local-yokel station broadcast Solid Gold on weekends--we swooned and wept over Boy George when he sang "Karma Chameleon." God, life was so good and sweet. No worries about money, because we always had pennies for candy. Never bored, because we put our minds to work and created whatever world we wanted to be in at the time. I wish I could go back, but it's only possible in my memories. My friend will never know what a savior she was to me, rescuing me and taking me away from the hands of my abusive mother and my footbridge dad. I loved her then and I still do, even though our lives are so removed from each other. Stacy, you were the best friend I ever had. I miss you, but most of all I miss what bliss we lived in before we became grown-ups, and you and I wanted to grow up so quickly.

PB&C is a peanut-butter and cheese sandwich, my son's favorite.

"The Things that Scream At Me."
My dear user-friendly cat, Booger Fred, decides to cut his chest open on a shard of glass. Now he is infected with an infection, a glass-only infection, I suppose. So my son, niece and I haul him to the vet, and he PURRRRRRRRRs throughout the entire exam--this includes the ol' thermometer up the keister and a test for worms. I sure as hell would not be purring. Fred is now sleeping off the trauma underneath my desk after we consoled him with some vanilla milkshake.It's hot here in Eastern West Virginia, and we spent the morning cutting grass, trimming and pulling weeds. After the two young smeets went indoors to cool off and rest, I traipsed my way through snake-infested junglelike weeds to the shed in back of my property to coax out Fred. After 30 minutes of cooing "Heeeeeeeere Booger! C'mon Booger Fred!" he came close enough for me to grab his front legs and hoist him out. Good thing too, because a praying mantis was eyeing my ankles, thinking they were juicy and delectable. Cats are more trouble than baby humans, because when in pain, they revert to eons-old instinct and flee when injured or dying. Thank God for humans such as myself for braving vermin and deadly heat in order to rescue your feline asses. My smelly felines can be viewed here at http://www.catster.com/pet_page.php?j=t&i=144230