Veintiocho años!

The older we get, the faster the years go by.
It's once again time for my annual accounting of "the little things" that are really the glue that keeps John and me together.
This all started in 2009 when we lived in Baltimore and our anniversary sneaked up on me. I made the first list in lieu of a card.
So here we go:

1. I love that you keep insisting that I learn Spanish. It's probably not going to happen but you should keep nagging me. (
2. I love how you enjoy writing controversial things in the sand and then wait for a tourist to come by. And how irritated you get when nobody notices.
3. I love your silly selective memory. "Do I like this food? Have we seen that movie?"
4. Shopping with you at Kohl's can be a blast but please don't make me watch you try on seventeen pairs of jeans even though I love your butt.
5. I love our Sunday picnics at the beach and your scientific approach to planting the umbrella in the sand.
6. I love your slavish attention to our cars, every repair bill for the past decade carefully saved and filed in that ugly cabinet that I will never convince you to discard.
7. I love how much fun you have with brother-in-law Bob.
8. I love dreaming of a Murphy bed for our den so we can have even MORE COMPANY during the winter months.
9. I love that you impishly hide the United Methodist church cup that I like to drink from on Sunday mornings, as if that would stop my OCD for that particular habit.
10. I love how you actually enjoy being introduced as "the long suffering John Phillip."
11. I loved our New Year's Eve party--taping "2015" on the champagne flutes that we didn't get to use last year.
12. I love that we are both losing our hearing at the same time.
13. Subsequently, I love the hysterical laughing we do when we replay something we've missed on a TV show three times and STILL CAN'T UNDERSTAND WHAT'S BEING SAID.
14. I love that you continue to feed my addiction to Crocs sandals. My comfortable shoe fetish!
    
15. I love it when you get a wild hair, take me on a whirlwind trip to somewhere and act silly.
16. I love how you love old things.
17. I love how you understand why an occasional visit to Whole Foods is therapeutic, even if we don't need anything.
18. Consequently, I love how you stare at the cost of olives and try to find the least expensive. Which I tell you will taste bad. So we buy the good ones.
19. I love how mad you got when the printer stopped working and when I got it fixed again, the first thing it spit out was the FTD flower order for our anniversary. 
20. I love going to garden shops and looking at plants with you even though our "farm" area is pretty small.
21. I love how this year, you finally have a chance to win it all in the NCAA pool we enter every year...and how frustrating it is that you used my name on the potential winning bracket.
    
22. I love discovering new places with you on weekends.
23. I love how you look at the back of greeting cards to see how much I spent.
24. I love how much you enjoy talking to our kids on the phone.
25. I love how you have embraced my current Fitbit obsession even though it means I don't want to go on as many bike rides as I used to.
26. I love how you let me buy kitchen gadgets galore whether we need them or not. C'mon, that egg steamer is awesome!
27. I love how you compare every dog you see to Dottie and none of them compare.
28. I love falling asleep, holding hands.

Thanks for another great year, honey!

Twenty-seven reasons!

Twenty-seven years ago today we promised we'd stay together. For richer, for poorer. In good times and bad.

There have been trials! But my annual accounting is never difficult.

1. I love that you (we!) figured out to watch Netflix on our fancy TV without Charlie writing down each step. (Push the power button on the black remote....)
2. I love your devotion to home decor--making sure every square inch of wall in our condo has something on it.
3. I love going to Key West with you. We could go this weekend but I'm on call...
4. I love tricking you into eating at Hibachi grills which I enjoy but you, not so much...until the food arrives.
5. I love picking the trotters with you at the Pompano track.
6. I love how you enjoy feeding squirrels who live in the trees outside our condo.
7. I love it when you ask me if 70-degrees is cold enough weather for chili. It's not but we can turn up the AC and make it anyway.
8. I love getting up first, making coffee, reading "your" paper (the Sun-Sentinel) until I don't hear you snoring anymore. That silence means it's time for me to start reading "my" paper (the Miami Herald).
9. I love grocery shopping at Publix with you to see your eyes roll in mock disgust at the slowness of the elderly.
10. I love how proud you are of down-sizing our storage to a manageable amount of stuff.
11. I love our Friday night dinners at Rotelli's
12. I love walking on the beach and picking up shells.
13. I love when you take the shells we picked up on Sanibel, and plant them on the beach on our side of Florida and watch tourists pounce on them like treasure. 
14. I love how you try to humanely trap the lizards on our deck so they don't get into the house.
15. I love how you complain about getting up early for Dolphins tailgate gatherings but still manage to have fun anyway.
16. I love that you insisted I spend New Year's Eve and Day with my family in Rochester, MN when Paula and Bob had the transplant surgery. You knew I wanted to go but that I was worried about the cost.
17. I love that you will eat a meatless meal every once in awhile, without complaining.
18. I love how irritated you get at the snowbirds.
19. I love how you always answer your cell phone when my brother calls.
20. I love how you keep trying to win the Powerball jackpot so I can retire. 
21. I am amused by (and thus love) your aversion to sitting at a red light for a few minutes and your goofy detours to avoid that fate.
22. I love that you bought us both bikes for Christmas which has led to delightful rides on Saturday and Sunday.
23. Subsequently, I love that you tricked out my bicycle with a bell, cellphone holder, water bottle grip and a place for my keys.  Ding, ding! Here I come!
24. I love how you drunkenly tried to write a message on a napkin at Irish Kevin's regarding your role in "Walk the Line."  And how you stayed in bed for most of the next day, recovering for the hangover.
25. I love how you talk  r e a l l y  s l o w l y  to our South American neighbor who does not understand a word of English as if that will make it easier. Just smile and wave!
26. Person of Interest! Blacklist ! House of Cards! I love watching certain TV shows with you!
27. I love that you love sushi. Let's celebrate this anniversary with spicy, crunchy tuna. 

Stone in love...

Happy 26th anniversary John.  This is a bit later than usual, my days got away from me this year!

Listen to this first, then read the list...


1. “What are you doing here?”  I love how, on the day I got fired from KSHB, you were surprised that I was home early.   You always have faith in me.
2. I loved the 25th anniversary celebration with the kids on the beach in Fort Lauderdale.  Not that I ever expected to be living here a year later…
3. I love that you now know which TV shows or movies I will NEVER watch, no matter how much I hear and read about “True Blood” or “Walking Dead.”
4. I love laughing with you at impatient South Florida drivers.  Beep beep!
5. I love playing in the surf with you and seeing you body surf like a little boy.
6. I love that you went to see “Hunger Games” with me right after it came out even though you had NO INTEREST in the movie.

7. I love that you love South Dakota.
8. I love that you discovered Tree Faces and hope we can find a place to put ours in the new place.
9. I love coffee is ready for me when I get up at 12:05am.
10. I love how we can look back at some of the most stressful times during the past six months and realize that our relationship was tested but never broken.
11. I love that you still like listening to Y-100.  Brittney, bitch.
12. I love packing a lunch, grabbing the umbrella and chairs and just heading out for some sand time.  When we move, we’ll only be six miles from the ocean so let’s promise to keep it up.
13. I love you care about my mom.
14. I love tailgating with you…any sport, any time.
15. I love the Great Toilet Paper Debate.
16. I love exploring with you.
17. I love our daily walks and talks about the people we see while walking.
18. I love that you intently listen to my dad’s stories.

19. I love how we went from a single-family house with a pool to a two-bedroom condo on a golf course.  And how happy we will be! 
20. I love your unreasonable and completely hilarious fear of animals-that-are-more-afraid-of-you like deer, bears and alligators.
21. I love that we figured out early (thanks Priest Lake vacation) that our retirement dream of roving the US in a motor home is probably not grounded in reality…for us, anyway.
22. I love that you protect my sleep schedule.
23. I love that you don’t force me to throw away kindergarten math papers from our kids even though it’s a pain to move the boxes from city to city.
24. I love how you instinctively know when I’m too tired to keep going.
25. I love how you like to be photographed in strange places.

26. I loved getting to the car this morning to find red roses in a plastic bucket along with a note telling me not to drive with the bucket full of water, just in case I was too sleep deprived to figure that out on my own.

He still makes me laugh every day

Watch "VID_20130317_171507.mp4" on YouTube

I can make it.

We had guests for the Labor Day weekend.  My brother Perry and his wife, Toni.  Our son Charlie.  Our nephew Paul.

Hurricane Isaac impacted our plans Friday with a rain out of the Twins game.  I tried and failed to give the tickets away but we ended up using them Sunday in the scorching, searing Missouri heat.  And of course, the Twins lost.  We came home from the K ready for a fine meal and more family time.

The title of this post refers to a "kitchen incident" that occurred Sunday night as I was preparing dinner for my guests.  The menu?  BBQ country-style ribs in the pressure cooker, cole slaw and beans.  Followed by Perry's delicious zucchini cake.

Ribs cooked this way are fall-off-the-bone tender so I was confident that I would be receiving accolades for hours after dinner.  Except for the stupid move I made with a sharp knife.

Quick rewind.  For Mother's Day, John and Charlie bought me some REALLY sharp knives.  I don't even like to put them in the dishwasher, so as not to dull the edges.  I love those knives.  And there's a bunch of 'em.  There's a paring knife, a chef's knife, six steak knives, a bread knife, a boning knife.  A fabulous pair of kitchen scissors that will cut through anything.  Even a tomato knife.

But it was the utility knife that did me in.

Five minutes before the ribs should leave the flame, I was attempting to open a jar of slaw dressing with the utility knife.

The blade slipped and I stabbed myself right in that fleshy part of the hand between the thumb and index finger.

I yelled.

Not in a panic, mind you.  More at myself.

I went to the sink and turned on the water, to wash the wound a bit.

Then blood started spurting from the hole in my hand and I really yelled.  Loud.

"I cut myself!"

Medic!  (My brother was in the National Guard and my nephew is active duty.)

Both sprang to action.

"Put pressure on it," my brother ordered and despite my morbid desire to see the blood blurting out and the fact that he's seventeen years younger than I am, I obeyed.  Paul was right there with the bandage.

It's not a big cut...just about a quarter of an inch.  But it is deep and it hurt like hell.

Pressure and a bandage was exactly what I needed.  That and for my brother to finish cooking dinner while I supervised, telling him what to do and when.

Just what I needed.

When the news hits too close to home

Wednesday morning was one just like most others.  Wake up, turn on the morning news, make coffee, read the newspaper.  Our morning team was dealing with breaking news that day.  A wrong-way crash hurt three people.  I-435 had been closed for hours and was still closed at 6am.  Bummer for commuters.

That afternoon, I was on a conference call and idly clicked on to my Facebook page.  A message?  How fun!  I clicked it.

"The girls in the wrong way crash are Ken and Diane's daughters," my cousin messaged.  "They are headed to KC right now."

Ken (Kendall) Wiechmann is my cousin.  Our grandfathers were brothers so we aren't first cousins. Second?  Third?  Whatever.  We went to school together, starting in the one-room school house through 12th Grade.  We had the same last name so we walked one after the other at graduation in May, 1975.  I went off to college and he started his own career.  We hadn't seen each other in years.

When we were children, Kendall was always just a little bigger and a little stronger than I was.  We had a typical "cousins" relationship.  Our farms were a mile apart.  He had a sister who was Pam's age and a brother who was Paula's age.  We played together.  We swam in the creek together.  We poured water down gopher holes together.

"You're ugly," I would say to him.

"You're dumb," he would counter.

And we would throw dirt clods at each other.  (A common childhood  activity in South Dakota.  Dirt clods look like rocks but aren't as dense and turn into dust upon contact.)

Back to Wednesday afternoon.  I was frozen.  I raced to the assignment desk where Killer pulled the accident report. KrissaMarie (age 22) and Kayla Wiechmann (age 26), both of Nashville (formerly of South Dakota), were driving home to see their family.

Rory Liberty, a guy with a relatively clean record, apparently driving under the influence, crashed into their car.

I didn't know these girls but my heart ached for their worried parents.  Thursday I waited for the driver to be charged so I could tell their parents.  I looked at the girls' pictures on Facebook and wondered at their lives.

Another cousin told me about the driver who was right behind them when they collided with Rory Liberty's car.  He put out the fire that started and stayed with them until the ambulances came.

That truck mechanic saved them from further injury and possibly worse.

My family is grateful to Richard Jewell.

25 reasons why I love John Phillip

I'm a list-maker.  

In what has become a series, here are the 25 reasons why I love my husband as we approach two and a half decades of commitment which will be celebrated in style on April 2.

1. I love how you always ask me the speed limit when we're driving somewhere and how you then brag about never getting a ticket.
2. I love that when I walk in the door at the end of a long day, you instinctively know if I've had a challenging day and STILL kiss me hello and ask me about it. Even when the answer might be long-winded and boring.
3. I love that you let me have two Christmas trees this past year.  I might go for three eight months from now.  You've been warned.
4. I loved looking for houses with you and I love the one that we (I) picked...even though it doesn't have a big deck and a finished basement.
5. I love it when I come home in the winter and the fireplace is already lit.  Even on a Tuesday.
6. I love how you made my brother Pat's 50th birthday special that made him feel special.
7. I love that you insist on hanging pictures of our kids in various stages of growth in a prominent place so everyone knows that our family is very important.
8. I love how you put up with my live-on-the-edge mentality.  Plans?  Who needs plans?
9. I love taking pictures of you in funny places (in front of signs proclaiming the locations of Tightwad, Missouri and Peculiar, Missouri).  Yes, you are a tightwad and peculiar.
10. I love going to Sonic with you and getting a giant cherry limeade with our hot dogs.
11. I love that you're becoming quite the handyman with your new tools.
12. I love how irritated you get when I call my veggies-in-pots-on-the-deck a "farm."  Get over it.  I'm a farmer's daughter.  Anything I grow is a farm.
13. I love how you insist we see fireworks on the 4th of July.
14. I love that you seem not to mind that I'm "husky."  And that you support me when I try to lose weight.
15. I love that you know every single dog on our weekend walking route and that you've adopted Curly- the-Great-Pyrenees.  Bonus Love.  I know you know Curly is not enough for me because I want our own dog.  (Tick tock tick, the clock is ticking for us to get another mutt...)
16. I love that you wrote down all the days we should OFFICIALLY fly the American flag on the calendar so we don't forget.
17. I love how you wear your political emotions on your sleeve and that incredibly, you're more liberal-leaning than I am.
18. I love how you put up with my mad sports obsessions...like the Chiefs, Sporting Kansas City and the Royals and enjoy tailgating almost as much as I do.
19. I love that you buy lottery tickets for me to scratch off and are disappointed when we don't win.
20. I love how you groaned about going to South Dakota last year when the floods disrupted our regular routes but did it anyway, even when it added hours and hours to the trip.
21. I love how worried you were when Carly got hurt in the bike crash and how you called every hospital trying to find her.
22. I love how you've figured out how to take pictures of any jackpots you win at the casino.  And text them to me so I can be jealous that I'm not winning too.
23. I love how you take Charlie golfing and gloat when you beat him.  Enjoy it now.
24. I love how there can be a million men in a room and that I only have eyes for you.
25. I love how you've tried and tried to guess what your anniversary present would be...and how you may have figured it out but won't let me know for sure.  And I'm not telling until I'm ready.

Parenthood

Parenthood.  Funny thing.  This morning on my walk, my iPod on "shuffle," this Enya song came on and I started thinking about a part of the lyrics:

One by one my leaves fall.
One by one my tales are told.

At 54, I'm staring mortality right in the face.  My children, at 29 and 24 years, respectively, no longer need me (except for cash, sometimes).

Jacquelyn Mitchard wrote a book entitled "Deep End of the Ocean" that I read even before it got onto Oprah's hit parade.  And because of that book, I bought another written by her.  "The Rest of Us" is a compilation of her columns and on our recent trip to New Orleans, I re-read it on the plane.

Her description of parenthood goes like this:

"...our sons and daughters are only passing through.  At first, they are of you, born to come to your arms.  Rapidly, they are with you, pausing only long enough for you to dab a few hurried strokes of paint on the canvas they are becoming--they are on their way to belonging to themselves, and then to the world.  If we are lucky, they always will consider our home their harbor, but they are headed out to the open sea, almost from the first."

I still consider the farm six miles north of Wagner, SD my harbor.  But which home, of the many we've had, will my children consider their harbor?  Germantown?  Kansas City?  Somewhere else?

I wonder.

Once More, With Feeling

I promise not to turn this blog into an emotionally silly and endless tribute to our dog.  We've been so grateful for the kindness of co-workers, friends and family who understand the connection we had with Dottie and why we miss her so.

John's cousin sent us a bit of prose that I hadn't seen before -- and it, combined with the cards, telephone calls and other messages, truly helped us both:

Hello Peggy ,Jon & fam, Colleen and I read your e-mail and were reduced to tears.We never got the pleasure of seeing Dottie just smiled through the years of stories told We could only imagine what a great companion and loyal friend of the family she was. Dogs are a gift to us in our lives, they give all for so little .The only comfort is we give them the love they depend on so much. I often wonder about the fate of finding a dog who found who ?.......... Michael . Colleen and Riley

The Rainbow Bridge

(inspired by a Norse legend)

By the edge of a woods, at the foot of a hill,

Is a lush, green meadow where time stands still.

Where the friends of man and woman do run,

When their time on earth is over and done.

For here, between this world and the next,

Is a place where each beloved creature finds rest.

On this golden land, they wait and they play,

Till the Rainbow Bridge they cross over one day.

No more do they suffer, in pain or in sadness,

For here they are whole, their lives filled with gladness.

Their limbs are restored, their health renewed,

Their bodies have healed, with strength imbued.

They romp through the grass, without even a care,

Until one day they start, and sniff at the air.

All ears prick forward, eyes dart front and back,

Then all of a sudden, one breaks from the pack.

For just at that instant, their eyes have met;

Together again, both person and pet.

So they run to each other, these friends from long past,

The time of their parting is over at last.

The sadness they felt while they were apart,

Has turned into joy once more in each heart.

They embrace with a love that will last forever,

And then, side-by-side, they cross over… together.