CASSEROLES

The email said, “We hope every member can help by making four or five casseroles to sell at the fundraiser.”  Yikes!  I haven't made four casseroles in four years!

I hoped this would go away.  Miracles happen in churches, don’t they?  Then I got the email my circle leader sent to all circle members.  “If you did not pick up your casserole trays tonight, please see Sandy because she has them for you,” with a P.S.,  “Maggie [that’s me], Sandy needs to get some more quart sized containers and then she will have yours for you.”  I guessed I had volunteered by default. 

Maybe I’ll give it some more time.  Maybe Sandy will forget about it.  Maybe she will wait too long and the quart containers will be gone.  Maybe if I’m the last to show up somebody else will have taken my quart containers.

Oh shoot! Sometimes it's easier to "just do it" than dodge.  Never fear.  I'll create something unforgettable! 

DON'T BITE THE HAND THAT FEEDS YOU

I’m not a violent mouse.  However, I have had one or two fits in my life.  Two of them were about George not eating the food I cooked. 

Sounds silly?  He fixes his own breakfast, but I feed him the other two meals every day.  He eats the food if he likes it.  If it’s just OK and he’s not too hungry, he leaves it on his plate.  The least he could do is force it down!

Sometimes I, too, don’t like what I’ve cooked.  But if it’s not too bad, I eat it simply because it’s good for me and there’s nothing else to eat except cookies or cheese or something equally non-nutritional.  George is willing to substitute three packs of Nabs for a balanced but unappealing meal.  When he does that, I have to think even harder about what to prepare for his next meal that will get some nutrition into him via a picky palate.

Yesterday I carried his barely used plate to the sink and knocked the food off so hard it hit the wall.  That encouraged me and I did it some more.  George stayed very quiet.  I wasn’t at all happy with that so I marched back into the living room where he and his now empty TV tray sat and blessed him out about not eating what I cooked and about how hard I try to feed him things he likes that are healthy and about how he totally lacks appreciation when he eats candy bars and Slim Jims before supper.

He did better today.

.

SMITHSONIAN PARKING LOT

Our first mistake was planning to park at the Smithsonian.  The Smithsonian doesn’t have a parking lot.  Whose idea was this anyway?  Never fear.  Susan and I dropped Betty and George off at the museum and (second mistake) drove off to find a parking lot. 

This being cherry blossom season (third mistake), the traffic was bad.  I drove around our great capital city for what seemed like hours, past demonstrators and tour busses and lines of school kids, until at last I saw a “Public Parking” sign with an arrow to the left.  I said “shoot” because I was in the right lane.  I swerved the car into an available pedestrian walking area on my right and waited for the light to turn red and stop traffic for a moment, then I turned left across six lanes.  

After making detailed notes of where our parking space was, Susan and I power walked through drizzling rain the eight blocks or so to the museum– Susan taking pictures and telling me she had worn her hair in a bun so no one could grab her.  Did I need to hear that?

I called Betty’s cell.  She said they were just inside the museum and to the left of the big rock.  What rock?  I asked how she had gotten up all those steps with her walker.  She asked, “What steps?”  Hmmm.  Another entrance - other side of the block.

That night we bought some beer and wine at the local convenience store and planned our next sightseeing day while we laughed our butts off about the “Do Not Enter” sign in the parking garage, the weird guy in the crowd, the nine dollar hotdogs, and the fact that the wine definitely needed some sugar!

 

POLICE PARKING

Didn’t think I was tired. Must’ve been. I drove seven hours to Washington, checked in, then drove a couple of hours around Washington and ended up in the off-limits part of the Pentagon. Maybe that was a sign.

After that unnerving incident, I drove the four of us to the sports/pizza bar, then back to the motel. There were only two handicap parking spaces, one of which I needed because my mother-in-law uses a walker. The other one was occupied, and a lady had the doors wide open unloading suitcases and such. I politely gave her some space when I parked. I was a little over the line, but I know that handicap spaces have extra wide borders beside them. Well, I think I know that.

The next morning I found a parking ticket on my windshield. Huh? The handicap placard was hanging on my rear view mirror like it was supposed to be. But there was the ticket. I pulled the car out of the parking place and over to the front door to let my mother-in-law get in. Then I went in to the concierge to ask what I had done wrong.

It was then that my daughter told me I was parked over the line, infringing on a space clearly marked that it was reserved for police parking. What the…? She said she had told me last night. She tells me a lot of things, though. She talked all day. Of course, I did too. But the fact is that I do miss some things she says if I’m talking at the time.

The concierge sympathized. She phoned the policeman/security guard and asked him to come down. I tried to tell him that there was plenty of room and that I had parked a little over the line but there was an area marked with lines that allows some extra space for handicapped people. “What lines?” he asked. I walked over to the parking place, and there were no lines. In my defense, there were some lines on the other side of the other handicap space. That wasn’t much help.

I walked back, and he let me know in no uncertain terms that he was forced to park in the back parking lot the night before because of me. I looked into his eyes and said, “I’m sorry.” He melted and took the ticket back.

Driving away and patting myself on the back for my ability to melt him, my daughter told me that he sort of melted when I was off looking at the parking space and she was pleading my case: “You know, officer, she can’t park anyway, and it was dark.”

Having been taken down a notch, I thanked her for her help. She told me she had left out the part about, “And after all, officer, she did have a couple of beers.” Thank you Susan.

PHOTOGRAPHING THE PENTAGON

We laughed and cut up all the way to Washington. Betty saw some “speed enforced by aircraft” signs and we laughed about airplanes swooping down and picking up cars that were speeding. Yes, we got pretty ridiculous, but we didn’t care.

We checked into our hotel in Alexandria and then drove into Washington to get a glimpse of the cherry blossoms before dark. Little did we know that the best view we would get all weekend would be from the bridge, where we stayed for a while, stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic. This gave me time to develop a strategy. I would make left turns after I got off the bridge until I got down to the cherry trees on the shoreline. Wrong. We saw tourists, strollers, demonstrators, dogs, joggers, tour busses, and traffic lights. We also saw some beautiful architecture as nightfall approached. Susan took five hundred photographs. But none of cherry blossoms.

Night was falling, so I put my energies on finding Interstate 395 - and getting back to the hotel – while Susan took pictures and George and Betty enjoyed the scenery. We passed the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, and a couple of cherry trees (Susan photographed them) but no signs for I-395. There was the Jefferson Memorial. We could see the Pentagon. But not I-395.

I realized there wasn’t much traffic around us. I was headed somewhere, but it wasn’t to I-395. I tried to turn around but there was no way to do that. My passengers had not noticed. Susan was still taking pictures of the Pentagon. Certainly there would be a dead end and a turn-around opportunity at a monument or something.

I passed a “Do Not Enter” sign. A median on each side prevented any sort of U-turn or Y-turn. I rounded a curve and got a real good – too good - view of the Pentagon. Oops. Now I was creeping at a snail’s pace, wishing one of those airplanes Betty talked about would swoop down and pick us up off this road and fly us to safety. I steered us around another curve and a structure that looked like a toll booth appeared. So did an armed guard.

He motioned us through the toll booth, where four large cameras flashed, two in front of us and two behind us. The guard approached and I said, “How do I get to 395?” I can’t describe his expression.

We got out of there without an incident, which was fortunate considering the fact that Susan had been hanging out the window photographing the Pentagon. She didn’t even know it had photographed her!

Mud Puddle Delight

As a child, my brother-in-law Jim never met a mud puddle he didn’t like. After a rain, he made a point to weave through the yard and splash through all the mud puddles.

One rainy day, Jim’s mom told him he had to stay on the porch. Confined and frustrated, he watched those mud puddles form into great big temptations, but he stayed in bounds obediently.

When the rain ended and he was at the peak of his frustration, the neighbor Mrs. Hall came out of her house and started walking toward Jim’s house. Jim liked her a lot. He knew she was cool, and there was a whole yard full of virgin mud puddles between him and her. Jim couldn’t get to those puddles, but there they were. Desperate, he yelled, “Walk through those mud puddles, Mrs. Hall!”