Pope St. Celestine V

I was going to go swing dancing this weekend.  I’d paid my registration, RSVP’d for my housing assignment, figured out my budget for gas, started planning my packing list, even informed my family that I would not be available.  I had been looking forward to this for a while, hoping that it would be the weekend that would remind me of why I love swing dancing so much, something that’s been hard to remember lately as it’s gotten progressively more and more buried under a load of relationship & community dysfunction.  It was kinda like when a couple’s relationship is strained, so they go away for the weekend to rekindle that old spark.  I figured, a weekend away, maybe a few really good dances, the kind I haven’t had in a while, seeing some old friends, and I’d be good to go again, at least for a while.

Alas, instead I am currently sprawled across the futon in my living room here in Dayton.  There is no dancing anywhere remotely near, and I couldn’t participate even if there were.  You see, on Wednesday I did Something Bad to my leg.  I was at the usual Wednesday Night Swing, dancing with Bounce.  It was my first dance of the night, to Madeleine Peyroux’s I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate, which is my favorite version of one of my favorite songs of all time.  We were maybe a minute into the song, when I stepped back on my left leg, and felt/heard something go “pop” in my calf.  And that was it.  I was done dancing.  Bounce helped me get over to one of the chairs at the side, and then stood near me offering me water and grapes and anything he could think of to make things better.  It was very sweet.

Unfortunately, since the sudden pain was making me a bit nauseous, grapes and water weren’t much help.  However, soon after I was able get Swing Snark’s attention, and asked her if she would take a look at the problem.  Swing Snark is an Athletic Trainer, so she knows about these things.  She moved my foot and leg around, did the whole “Does this hurt?” thing, and told me that it appeared that my tendons & ligaments were fine, so it was probably either a muscle strain or tear.  I should ice it relentlessly for the first 24 hours, take ibuprofen, start stretching it after a day or so, and if it didn’t get significantly better in 3-5 days, see a doctor.  I found all of this extremely reassuring (I had been trying to worry through whether or not I could afford to go to the ER, and then which one would be best), and I’m so grateful that she was there.

Once I knew what the problem was, and that it wasn’t, like, life threatening or something, I had some other problems to deal with.  Like how I was going to get home.  My little car is a stick-shift, so I couldn’t drive it if I couldn’t use my left leg.  And then, if I could get someone to come get me, how would I get my car home?  And then how was I going to get to work in the morning?  Things like that.  As it turned out, the answers were as follow: Dad and Indy came to get me, the car stayed out by the dance studio until Thursday night when Johnnycakes and Pippi teamed up to help me retrieve it, Mariah volunteered to get me to work, and Pippi brought me home again.

Being a little bit disabled the last few days has made me realize how much crankiness and pride I have lurking under my usually sweet surface.  It’s hard for me to ask for help, even when I genuinely need it.  On Thursday I nearly didn’t get any lunch at all because I was too prideful to ask one of my co-workers to go get me a salad from the cafeteria, and too cranky to make the trip myself, knowing that I was going to have to be nice to all the people who would want to stop me to ask what happened.  And then, I know that compared to what some people deal with every day, this isn’t all that much pain, but it still has me completely worn out by the end of the day.  So I’m also getting a lesson in exactly how whiny I can be.

It also reminds me how much work dealing with a disability is.  For example, I need to go grocery shopping.  However, while I think I could do the actual shopping (I’d have a cart to hold onto after all), getting to the grocery store is a problem.  I haven’t tried driving again yet, and I’m worried about whether or not I’ll be able to make it both there and back.  And then once I get the groceries home, how will I get them into the house?  The answer to this problem seems to be to get someone to go with me, but I’m so unused to having to coordinate my schedule with anyone else’s that it’s taken me a few days to arrange things.  So far the plan is that Johnnycakes will go with me, both to help carry things, and to drive the two of us home if I can’t, and we’re going to go just as soon as he gets up from his nap.  Any time now.  I think.

The bright side is that little by little, my leg is getting better.  Today I’ve been able to walk around the house without the cane, and with only a few mishaps.  I’m starting to be able to stretch my calf muscle.  My steps are still slow and halting, but I’m getting there.  Hopefully by Monday I will be able to get myself both to work and home again.  And maybe before too long I’ll even be able to dance again.  I’ll look forward to that.

St. Joseph of Persia

I don’t know how to write about this weekend.  I just don’t.  I mean, do I write about the weird head place I’ve been in for the last week, mostly on account of things I also don’t know how to write about?  Or perhaps I should write about my very strange day at work on Friday.  Then there’s the odd story of how Saturday night I found myself sitting in a hotel room with seven strangers and one friend giggling (because, really, what else can you do at that point?) my way through a sales pitch for, um, intimate objects (believe me, I had no idea that was going to be part of the evening’s entertainment), and then less than twelve hours later, helping to set up for my brand new baby niece’s Baptismal celebration at a small, conservative, small town Catholic church with large posters announcing some sort of presentation on Holy Modesty posted on every door.

Then, just to top everything off, I sprained my ankle kinda badly in the church parking lot as we were leaving, requiring me to spend the rest of the day on the couch with my foot propped up on a block of ice.  Seriously, the only thing that would make the weekend stranger would be if someone I haven’t seen in five years (and, yes, I’m thinking of a particular person) suddenly burst through the front door wearing a pink elephant costume and leading a brass band through the living room.  Which the way things are going, just might happen.  Let me just check to make sure that the door is really, really locked.

Ok, we’re good.  The door is locked, and while I was up I limped down to the basement to cycle the laundry.  Because sprained ankle or not, I’m going to need clean uniforms to wear tomorrow.  Though how I’m going to wear the required pantyhose with an Ace bandage on my ankle I don’t know.  But we’ll deal with that later.

Perhaps we should look at a picture of the cutest niece on earth for a moment, just to settle our nerves.

There, that’s better.  That’s Sweet Pea sleeping the sleep of the newly Baptized in her godmother’s arms.  The blanket was lovingly crocheted by Mariah.  My own christening present, the sweater I started knitting, um, a while ago, is still missing part of a sleeve, so she doesn’t have it yet.  However, she’s so tiny that she’d be swimming in it anyway, so I’m ok with this.

So this is what happened on Saturday.  A good friend asked me to come to a bachelorette party with her.  The bride-to-be was a work friend of hers, and while she wanted to go to the party, she also wanted someone with her.  I happened to owe her pretty big for how she helped me avoid the relationship equivalent of starting a land war in Asia just a few days earlier, so I said yes even though I did not see how this could be anything but awkward.  So I put on my Standard Girl Party Clothes (jeans, nice shirt, slightly fancy earrings), and was ready to go at the appointed time.

And, you know, I had heard about bachelorette parties like this, the ones with the embarassing reproductive organ adornments for the bride, and the way too much alcohol, and embarrassing public displays, but I think I didn’t really believe that real people really did this.  I mean, what woman in her right mind would willingly parade around in public carrying a many times life size balloon version of a male reproductive organ?  What loving relative would force their sister/daughter/cousin to wear a tiara ornamented with midget penises that light up and blink?  People didn’t really do that, did they?  All the bachelorette parties I’d ever been to were much more like nice dinners out with the girls, with sometimes slightly risque gifts.  (My favorite was always to give the bride a couple of cans of Redi-Whip and label it “tasteful lingerie.”)  And it wasn’t just because most of my friends are fairly religious.   If anything, the parties for my more secular friends were tamer than the ones for the Good Catholic Girls.  This party, however, was the one that was going to prove me wrong.

This party had it all: the balloon reproductive organs, the embarrassing head ornaments for the bride, the dysfunctional family dynamics.  And, well, it wasn’t my family, and the poor bride (who looked like she just wanted to get through to the other end of this night in one piece) wasn’t my friend.  I would never see any of these people again in my life, so I decided that I would be the perfect party guest, helps things go off smoothly, and do my best to help both my friend and that poor bride have a good time.  And I think I did pretty well.  All the alcohol helped.  Even discovering that the two nice ladies who had been waiting in the hotel room when we got there weren’t also party guests, but consultants representing a discreet line of, well, sex toys which they were about to present to us didn’t phase me too much.

But after the presentation came the ordering, and then came the family dynamics of getting people out the door to the next thing, and then there was the comedy club, and the maid of honor who wanted all the attention for herself, and by that time I’d been hanging out with these people for close to six hours and I didn’t even know them.  I was done.  Thankfully my friend was willing to run me home (she ended up going back to support the bride for a few more hours), which meant I got home at a fairly reasonable hour.  But still.  One of the more surreal nights I’ve ever had.

And then the next morning I got up, got dressed, and headed off to help Sweet Pea get Baptized.

My dears, life is strange.

Also, if I ever happen to get married (and let’s not hold our breaths for that one), and happen to have a bachelorette party, anyone who comes near me with plastic reproductions of sex organs will get their hands cut off.  Just saying.

Sts. Fusca & Maura

The problem with not blogging for a while is that when you get back, there’s just too much to talk about!  Generally when you don’t know where to start, people say to start at the beginning, continue until the end, and then stop.  However, I have found that sometimes it works much better to start with the most recent happenings, go back until you’re either tired of talking, or the other person is caught up, and then stop.  So I think we’re going to go with that plan.

The most recent news is that Saturday night we had our much-anticipated Beer Tasting Party.  The idea for this party actually came from a blog post I put up last September about a visit to Mr. & Mrs. Darwin’s manse in Columbus, and the Founder’s Breakfast Stout that I drank while I was there.  There was much beer discussion in the comments, and when I put forward the idea of a beer tasting, both Dove and Sugar Ray were enthusiastic.  The only difficulty was scheduling.  I tried at first in October, but between wedding prep and people’s schedules, it just didn’t work out, and I put it on the back burner.  Then on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, when my Catholic young adult group was at South Park Tavern after going to Mass together, Sugar Ray brought up the subject again, and asked me when I was going to schedule it.  I opened up my calendar, and decided that it was going to be on January 14.  And it was.

The party itself was a good time.  We crammed in just about as many people as the house will hold, particularly since it was much too cold to spill out to a fire in the back yard like I was originally hoping.  People brought so much food that I had to open up the extra leaves on the dining room table.  This included the Vat o’Beer Cheese supplied by my sister Mariah, who borrowed my six quart crock pot to make it in (it was darn good, btw).  Sugar Ray brought some of his home brewed beer, I went to Belmont Party Supply and filled up two boxes with whatever looked good, people brought some amazing new things with them, and we had a great time.  Here (in no particular order) are all the beers we tried:

• RJ Rockers Son of a Peach Wheat Ale
• Bell’s Two Hearted Ale
• Yuengling Traditional Lager
• Celis Raspberry
• Brooklyn Brewery Black Chocolate Stout
• Sierra Nevada Biggfoot Barleywine Style Ale
• Samuel Adams Irish Red
• Samuel Adams Latitude 48 IPA
• Samuel Adams Winter Lager
• Samuel Adams Octoberfest
• Samuel Adams Holiday Porter
• Leinenkugel Berry Weiss
• Leinenkugel Fireside Nut Brown
• Newcastle Brown Ale
• Abita Purple Haze
• Perre Jacques 2011 Belgian Style Ale
• Wild Blue Blueberry Lager
• Pepe Nero Belgian Style Ale
• Wernesgruner Pils
• Emelisse Imperial Russian Stout
• Rogue Shakespeare Oatmeal Stout
• Heavy Seas Gold Ale
• Great Divide Wild Raspberry Ale
• Brekle’s Brown Ale
• Southern Tier Imperial Choklat Stout
• Point Belgian White
• North Peak Darkangel Cherry Porter
• Shock Top Pumpkin Wheat
• Young’s Double Chocolate Stout
• Ovila Dubbel
• Founder’s Breakfast Stout
• Belhaven Scottish Ale
• Framboise Lambic
• Lagunitas Cappuccino Stout
• Fort Collins Brewery Chocolate Stout
• Original Sin Hard Cider
• Crispin Natural Hard Apple Cider – honey crisp

You may notice that the list is rather heavy on the stouts and porters, particularly chocolate stouts.  This is mostly because I like them, so I bought a lot.  Maybe next time I’ll have more variety, but then again, maybe not.  I do love my dark beers!  We also tried Sugar Ray’s home brews, and did a side by side tasting of the Founder’s Breakfast Stout, and his own version.  It was pretty darn good.  Over all, I think my favorite was the Ovila Dubbel, contributed by The Pessimist.  It was smooth and caramel-y and delicious.  It also won my personal Bernadette Award for Best Beer At The Party.  When I was out shopping for the party, I decided that we needed to have prizes.  (This had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that those really cool big ornaments filled with chocolate pralines were on super sale.  Nothing at all.)  I had three things to give out, so I decided that they would be for Best Beer, Best Snack, and Person Who Amuses Bernadette The Most.  So The Pessimist won for Best Beer (though he left before I could give it to him), Mariah won for Best Snack, and Pippi won for Most Amusing.

The one thing that disappointed me about this party was that I had carefully, and with mischievous intent, hung a sprig of mistletoe in the greenery still decorating my house.  (What?  Christmas isn’t over until Candlemas!)  You would think that if you fill a house with mostly single young adults, supply them with lots and lots of beer, and then hang a sprig of mistletoe, that there would be at least a few kisses by the end of the night.  But no.  Not a single one.  It made me sad.  Though I do know of one girl who got asked out at the party, so that’s good.  But still… sigh.  We’re going to have to work on this.

Before rejoicing sometimes comes sorrow.  On Thursday we marked three years since my brother Jacob died.  This is always a hard day.  I had been thinking that I was doing very well with things this year, but as soon as I got off work Wednesday night the reality of what the next day was hit me like a brick.  That night and the next day were very hard, especially since I wasn’t able to take the day off this year like I did last year.  One thing I am grateful for is that in the afternoon, while I was alone in the office and feeling rather melancholy, three of the A/V tech guys (the closest thing I’ve seen to computer geeks since I’ve been on the new job) came in to get new badges made.  I hadn’t realized how much I had been used to being surrounded with geeks & nerds until they came in, and were so lovely and familiar that they felt like old friends even though I’d never met them before.  They were being utterly ridiculous, making funny faces into the camera, and teasing each other like geeks do, and it was all so great.  I laughed until tears came – the good kind.  It was an unexpected blessing.

I never told you guys what the results were of the poll you took a while back on what kinds of blog posts you would like to see.  The results surprised me.  Not a single person voted for the video posts, which, combined with the fact that my new work apparently Does Not Approve of youtube, means that you won’t be seeing any of those again for a while!  Most of you seem to really like the newsy posts about my life, followed by posts about my family.  To be honest, I had started doing links posts and picture posts and video posts because, well, sometimes my life just isn’t that interesting.  I swear.  Plus it starts to feel a little weird, talking about myself all the time.  But you guys seem to like it, so I’ll keep on.   I haven’t figured out a new blog schedule yet.  There’s no way I can post long, newsy posts about myself five times a week (it’s that not really that interesting thing again), so this does mean I’ll be posting a little less frequently.  But hopefully as I settle down into my new schedule I’ll figure something out.

And that’s as much time as I have to write today.  Tonight will be (God willing) my second ever visit to the Dayton Knitting Guild.  Good times ahead, my friends!

The Holy Name of Jesus

On New Year’s Day, I was thinking how different this year has been from pretty much every other New Year’s Day going back just about as far as I can remember.  Usually, New Year’s Day means the Huge Family Party, in which we pull out all the stops to entertain about forty of our nearest and dearest.  This means that we would have pulled ourselves out of bed early after days of cooking and cleaning (plus one night of revelry), ready to face a tight schedule of more cooking, cleaning, arranging, and then entertaining.  It would be a great party, a great way to start the new year, and definitely worth it.  However, it would also be a lot of stress and everyone would fall into bed at the end of the night totally exhausted.

This New Year’s, I got up in plenty of time to make it to Mass at my home parish, ate breakfast at home, and then headed over to the Family Homestead in time to see Indy and Rosie off to the Bengal’s game.  After a little while of hanging out, the rest of us headed off together to watch Tin Tin, which was awesome.  When we came out, we decided to see how many of us we could squeeze into the instant photo booth.  The answer was five (see evidence above).  The Duchess, Sae, and I were on the bottom, and AnniPotts and Fleur were on top.  I’m particularly proud of the picture on the bottom, where I managed to get at least half of my face into the frame.

After the movie, we headed home and cooked a quick dinner of pork chops, sweet potato fries, green beans and salad, and ate together around the big table.  Then there was dishes, and then I headed home again.  It was a little surreal to be heading away from my parents’ house on New Years Day, so early and so rested, but it was nice.

The night before was very nice too.  Mariah had her annual New Year’s Eve Party, complete with breaking a pinata in the front yard.  The pinata this year was the most adorable dinosaur, with big brown eyes, and a long neck that made him look disconcertingly like a llama.  And how can you hit a llama?  It’s just not possible.  It was a good thing it was dark, and we were blindfolded, otherwise we might have been totally defeated by The Cute.  Still, somehow we were able to overcome.  :D

After the pinata was properly subdued, we all headed back inside for more fun until we crowded up stairs (that’s where the tv is) to watch the ball drop in Times Square and toast the New Year.  Then, of course, there were noisemakers and poppers on the front porch.  But there was more.  I had gone into the house, and was tidying up the upstairs room when PM came to get me.  While he was gone in the wilds of Indiana the past year, he was apparently so lonely that he resorted to ballroom lessons.  I had told him that I wanted to learn Hustle (which is his favorite), and he had decided that I was going to have a lesson right then.  I’m always up for dancing, so I followed him downstairs to Mariah’s dining room, where I got my first Hustle lesson.  And then, since turn-about is fair play, I taught him some East Coast swing.  And then all the girls who had been watching wanted to learn swing too.  So I ended up starting off my New Year by beginning to learn a new dance, and then giving swing dancing lessons in my sister’s dining room.  Not a bad start, that.

Now I am in the midst of my last week at Job1 and Job2.  Tomorrow is my last day at Job2, and I’ve gathered that there is going to be some sort of good-bye luncheon.  No one has actually told me this, but they keep accidentally copying me on the e-mails.  Then I’ll take down the things on my bulletin board, return the cup I borrowed from one of them when mine disappeared, make a few last contract files, and say good-bye.

I really hate good-byes.

Sigh.

Bl. John Alcober – the 5th day of Christmas

The past few days have been full of Festivity.  First there was my parents’ Anniversary (they’ve been married now for 41 years).  It was a laid back sort of affair – hanging out at the Family Homestead and watching movies all together.  Mariah brought over most of her truly impressive alcohol collection, and we mixed Gin & Tonics with St. Germaine, and concoctions of ginger liquer mixed with Creme de Cacao or orange juice, plus many, many Shirley Temples for Fleur.  We watched A Muppet’s Christmas Carol together (I cried at the “Life is made up of meetings and partings. That is the way of it. I am sure that we shall never forget Tiny Tim, or this first parting that there was among us. “ part, and so did Mariah), and then we watched Raising Arizona, which was much more cheerful.

On Wednesday we had our Family Gift Day, which was mostly lovely, the first part, anyway.  This year AnniPotts and Boy-O collaborated on their presents, which included cleaning out the used book store.  Apparently they found a whole series of really ridiculous romance novels with nerdy heroes (The Nerd Who Loved Me, Nerds Like It Hot, Talk Nerdy To Me, My Nerdy Valentine, etc.), and gave one to each of the girls in the family.  Except Fleur.  She’s not old enough for even the most ridiculous romance novel.  Mariah had already given me my Christmas present (two very nice cardigan sweaters when I was freaking out about not having an office-y enough wardrobe), but she threw in a license plate cover from Fiber Works that says “I’d Rather Be Knitting.” I thought that was pretty cool.  I gave up on trying to finish Mr. T’s cabled socks, and instead gave him a gift card to Olive Garden.  I figure the socks will have to be a birthday present after all.

The hard part was that after we’d done all the fun present giving, Mariah brought out the last of the boxes of Jacob’s stuff, the ones that have been sitting in her living room for months, ever since we moved them out of Sae’s basement.  It seems like no matter how much of Jacob’s stuff we go through and distribute, there’s always more.  Or there was.  I have it on reliable authority that this was the last.  And it better be.  It took us five and a half hours.  It felt like infinitely longer.  At one point I thought we were never going to get out of there.  But we did.  I now have custody of what was Jacob’s stuffed R2D2, his George R.R. Martin books, the letters I wrote him while I was on NET, his The Tick figurine that used to balance on a bit of plastic wall until somehow we lost the wall, and his Baptismal candle, among other things.  And now we’re done.  I think.  I hope.  Please, God, let us be done!

Thursday was better, though I felt like I had a hangover most of the day from the emotional overload the day before.  I kinda just wanted to go home, crawl into bed, and not come out again until the next day, but CO2 was in town for Christmas, and had volunteered to lead our Catholic young adult group in a Posada.  This is a Mexican (and other Spanish speaking countries) tradition in which you act out the journey of Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem.  Afterwards you have a party, complete with a pinata.  I love pinatas!  So I packed up the vat of Buffalo Chicken Dip I made in my slow cooker, crackers, napkins, rope, and a whiffle ball bat to hit the pinata with.  And I was glad I did.  There’s nothing like whaling on a pinata to chase the holiday blues away.  And our pinata, a very jaunty blue pony, put up a fight!  Everyone got a turn blindfolded, and then we started whacking on it without the blindfold.  It was pretty sweet.  Once it was finally eviscerated we cheerfully adjourned to our meeting room for food & hanging out.  And it was good.

Tonight, in a few minutes I’m heading out to the Welcome Back Dinner for PM (my long lost Minion).  After dinner people are heading over to Tank’s, but I don’t think I’m going to.  I’m just tired.  I want to stay in and, I dunno, paint my nails.  Or something.  Tomorrow is Mariah’s Big New Year’s Eve Party, and then New Years Day is another family day.  We’re not having our Huge Family Party this year.  (We’ve thrown three weddings this year.  That’s enough parties for a while.)  But we’re still going to get together and hang out, and probably go watch Tin Tin.  And somewhere in there I swear I’m going to get some sleep.  Really.