It occurred to me last night that, while I mock Dad both on the blog and to his face (we have an interesting and jovial relationship too complicated for your average psychologist to explain without charging us extra); I rarely subject Mom to the public humiliation of writing about her here. This is something I should fix; Mom is hilarious in more ways than I can name.
My family often calls her "Snow White" because animals and small children flock to her, like in Enchanted when Amy Adams throws open the window of a New York apartment, singing and attracting all the local wildlife. But she also has a hilarious evil streak no one can see from the outside, resulting in her letting me, as a small child, lick the cake batter off her finger and ending the experience by thrusting her batter covered finger up my nose. I smelled vanilla for days.
Here is a note to illustrate Mom's style, which she sent me on Ravelry:
hi luv, i’m writting with one hand holding the key board up to the monitor light because i can’t find any light bulbs. i may be in the dark now but you sure light up my life. love you mom
It is unchanged from the original note, I copied and pasted. My mom really does send me sweet little notes. And she holds the keyboard up to the monitor for light to type by, resulting in hilarious misspellings (like what I do for a "living"). She used to slip little things like that into my backpack on the way to school, especially when she knew I'd had a rough week.
Allow me to illustrate what Mom does to make me laugh.
We went to Warsaw today. Mom needed to go to the knit shop and before that we had to eat lunch, at Steak and Shake. Captain Awesome was there again, this is a young man who asks us questions. When we answer in a positive way, he responds with "Awesome." I really like that guy. So, I nicknamed him, using the hilarious name of the sister's boyfriend in Chuck.
Together, we tried to figure out the tip. At first, I just did the math as I do, taking 10% of the bill and doubling it for a 20% tip, which is the easiest for me. it came out to $2.60. The bill was just over $13, and Mom kept saying she could give the full tip if she just rounded up to $15. I kept saying that she was wrong, that would be much less than $2. I ended up being right. I discovered something new on my cell that would have aided me much over the past two years, a calculator, and began to work out the math. Mom read numbers too fast for me, we got confused, and she just insisted that she would figure it out on her own up at the register. I exclaimed, "No! Then you'll have to do math, with numbers!" attracting the attention of many patrons who wondered why the special needs girl with the funny hat had been given leave from the hospital to eat dinner out.
Okay, so that was kind of a me story, but it is somewhat funny to think of two adult women sitting in a booth for ten minutes arguing about basic addition.
Then we went to the grocery store, Marsh. Randomly, some farm dudes were giving out free bread and pencils. So we both got some, since the guy said he had to give out all the bread and pencils before he could go home. Since they were in the grocery store rather than going door to door or just standing on a street corner (and we are in central Indiana, where there is hardly any crime except making meth, taking meth, giving meth to children, living in the church where you work and making meth in its attic while the congregation sings downstairs and lights lots of candles, or getting violent because you've taken too much meth) we took some and went home.
Hours later as she headed to bed, Mom walked into the kitchen holding her new pencil and commented to me that it had a good eraser. This is important due to the amount of use the eraser gets during the solving of sudoku puzzles.
I was taking my sudafed so I could sleep while still breathing at the same time (it's not so good when you do the first thing without the second, sometimes you die). I noticed Mom walking over to our Junk Drawer, where spare screws and exhausted batteries and flashlights and garbage bag ties go to die. As I watched, Mom took a box cutter, a new shiny and presumably sharp one, over to the trash can.
She then proceeded to use this box cutter to sharpen her pencil, despite the many sharpeners we have scattered throughout the house. This is a woman who once nearly severed a finger, wrapped it in a towel, and waited for me to come home from college so that I would look at it for her. This is a woman who has sustained three second degree burns in the last two months alone, a woman who once threw a stick for my dog and had it stick to her glove and come around to knock her unconscious in the driveway. She has fallen into the river reaching for my dog's frisbee many times, and has damaged herself in other ways while playing with Darcy's all-time favorite toy as well. Not to mention the whole passing out on a walk in an empty field thing that happened a couple weeks ago. All the horrific and amusing injuries I have had in my life are nothing when held up to my mother's track record, which has spanned decades.
I stood, looking on in shock and awe, as my mother used this box cutter to sharpen her pencil, then took her sudoku book and went to bed.
Mom was still working on her sudoku puzzle as I came in to say goodnight. We oohed and ahhed over the dog and discussed plans to combat her skunk-related stink issues and then Mom said, "Look at this!" She showed me her puzzle in frustration. "Eight, nine, eight, nine, eight, nine, eight, nine, eight, nine," she proclaimed. We have previously discussed this issue in sudoku puzzles, because we spend so much time together and when two people do that, these kind of things come up. I informed her that she could just put either number in the boxes when something like that comes up, and she responded by dropping the book onto the ground, shortly followed by the pencil.
I had walked to the door and was about to leave as I noticed her straining to reach the switch on her bedside lamp. It was one of those lamps with the little wheel clicker on the cord, so it seemed to move further from her with each time she reached for it. She kept stretching out her arm, but not lifting it up toward her head, only continued flailing it out to the side, grunting slightly with the strain as she attempted to grab the cord that was inches behind her hand. I began to laugh, and this was her response:
"What? I can't move my arm up...It's an old frisbee injury."
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