Sometimes I think about giving my parents the URL to this Web site. What the hell. These days I mostly write movie reviews anyway, and when I don’t, I am very careful about what I write. I tend to assume that my coworkers might be reading (some are … hi!), and that various family members might be reading. I don’t assume my grandparents are reading, because that’s going a bit too far, but you never know when my brothers or sister might run a Google search on something and stumble onto this site. For all I know, they did find the site, skimmed a boring movie-related entry, didn’t realize it was me, and left without remembering anything about the experience.
But then I think about it some more, and I imagine my mother calling me up after reading an entry about family conversations and saying, “I thought it was very funny, but would you please take out the part about farting? People will think we’re crude.” I am sure I would hear, “Do you have to use that kind of language?” And I can bet she’d tell me that “It’s a very nice page but I think that story about your grandmother was a little too personal. If she died tomorrow, you’d feel really sorry that you wrote that about her.”
Category: family stories
post-holiday vacation
I decided to take a vacation day today, after spending yesterday driving back to Austin from greater New Orleans. It was one of my smarter ideas. I have done damn near nothing today except lounge around the house and listen to KGSR and reread Betsy and the Great World and snack on this and that and drink lots of hot tea. Oh, and I had a shower. Very productive of me.
Driving back home was more difficult than driving to New Orleans. I felt less well rested, and more bored, and I kept having to deal with glare from the sun in my eyes. I didn’t get home until 8:45 pm because I stopped in Baton Rouge to visit with Toni for a bit. I got to see the tree that killed Christmas, and the red-nosed cat, and I sat in the time machine, and Toni gave me some shrimp-and-corn soup, which we may have for dinner if I can figure out where to get some decent French bread in this town.
would everyone stop talking so I can think of a title? please?
Well, we were planning to drive to the North Shore today to visit my aunt and uncle and various assorted other relatives, but the Causeway is closed. The roads are too slick and maybe even icy. It’s been sleeting all morning, and you can see bits of ice pellets on the roof (in New Orleans, they call this snow). In short, this is as close to a white Christmas as you ever will see in the greater New Orleans area.
If it keeps up, we also will have to cancel plans for my sister and her boyfriend to drive over here tonight so we can see The Life Aquatic at Canal Place Cinema (note to boyfriend: yes, this is the theater where we saw Lost in Translation, although Sis’s boyfriend assures me that the audiences there are normally well-behaved). My brother and I might go see it at the movie theater in Clearview, assuming I can talk him out of wanting to take my dad to see Meet the Fockers.
I don’t really mind the change in plans too much. I get to sit here at a nice kitchen table and try to catch up on writing, although admittedly it is a little difficult when people are talking and channel-surfing and asking me if I know where the remote went or if that looks like Barry Bostwick or how much I like the choir singing on TV (well, it’s not actively offending me) and whether we should eat in the dining room away from the TV and if we can time it around some damn football game. Also, using the keyboard on the laptop irritates my arms because they have to rest on the edge of the laptop. Who came up with the bright idea of putting laptop keyboards close to the monitor edge instead of the other edge? It’s quite irritating.
Continue reading would everyone stop talking so I can think of a title? please?
holiday greetings
It has been quite a festive holiday preparation weekend chez Jette and Beau. I assembled and decorated the pink and sparkly Barbie tree, which is topped this year by a finger puppet of the Abominable Snowman that my sister gave me last Christmas. I also kept Drinky Snowman and put SpongeBob next to a curvaceous bikini-clad woman. At the foot of the tree, Eloise’s pet turtle Skipperdee rests atop a hot-pink-and-silver tree skirt. Keep it fun, that’s my motto. My boyfriend looked on in amusement during breaks from coding Holidailies, which is his idea of festive holiday preparation.
I put on appropriate tree-trimming music, too. My boyfriend requested that I skip the Muppet music. I have some Christmas CDs that aren’t Muppet-y, but they weren’t quite what I wanted. I finally put the following four CDs on random in the CD player, where they provided excellent background music for the evening:
no oyster dressing
This is the first year that my parents are spending Thanksgiving without any of their kids around. It would be easy to drown in pathos about how the kids all deserted them, but it’s not that easy.
It all started last year after my mom worked hard to host a Thanksgiving dinner that would include her sister’s family and my mom’s parents (my grandparents). Well, wait. It starts earlier than that.
that wacky hurricane
Most of my immediate family is safe on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, complaining that all the stores are closed and they’re having to find creative things to do with shrimp they took out of the freezer and boiled. (We should all be so unfortunate.) My brother’s family made it safely to Lafayette—it only took them 4.5 hours to make the normally two-hour trip, but they were pretty fortunate because I heard horror stories about how it took some people most of the day just to get to Baton Rouge (normally about an hour away from New Orleans).
And now it looks like the hurricane will land over in Mobile, once again curving at the last minute from a direct hit to New Orleans. I nearly took a job in Mobile once, but I ended up staying in Austin on a post-grad fellowship, so I guess I was lucky there.
waiting for a right hook
What I am doing is sitting here waiting to hear about the right hook. Like in boxing, in which a right hook is a surprise swing aimed at your opponent’s kidneys … but this is actually a weather-related phenomenon.
Since I was a little girl, I have heard about hurricanes threatening the New Orleans area. (I was born after Betsy, the last hurricane to hit New Orleans directly, in 1965, and I am too young to remember Camille in 1969.) I can remember sitting in front of the TV set and hearing local newscasters recommend evacuation, and wonder what it would be like to go to a shelter, while my dad shook his head and said, “No, it’s not coming anywhere near us. Don’t worry.”
He was correct. Hurricanes in the Gulf Coast somehow always manage to take a sharp turn (usually a right turn) right before they could hit New Orleans. New Orleanians expect this traditional right hook. I don’t know if it’s voodoo or some bizarre Gulf Stream effect or the refusal on the part of hurricanes to settle the issue of the Bowl Effect Theory, but New Orleans has evaded an awful lot of potential direct hits.
happy birthday, Dad
For those of you who were wondering, my nose is a lot better now. The stitches came out last week and barely any trace of the line of stitching is left. That side of the nose looks a bit red and blobby, like I had a scary acne attack, but that’s about it.
The only problem is that the area with the biggest wound repair is right over my nostril, which means a big wad of hard tissue, or something, poking down in my nostril and making it hard to blow my nose. Or as my dad would say, it’s making it hard to pick my nose.
It’s my dad’s birthday, so I thought I would make one joke in his typical style of humor. Someone mentioned the other day that my dad would have made a great comedian in the 1970s, which sounds just about right.
the finger
Update on a previous entry: Apparently my dad didn’t do anything memorably embarrassing at the brunch. He did refer to one woman as a manatee, but she wasn’t anywhere in hearing range when he said it. He claims in his defense that she really did look like a manatee, anyway.
However, Monday night my sister called to tell me that my dad had to go to the hospital. He was working outside in his garage-turned-shop (he builds and refinishes furniture) and somehow he sliced his finger on a long sharp piece of oak. By the time she told me more details than I wanted to know, it was too late to call my parents. So I called last night to check on how my dad was doing.
even weddings aren’t sacred
I’ve told the story about how my family behaves at funerals. I swore we were normally quite polite in public. But I’m not sure that’s true anymore.
My mom likes to make phone calls when she’s in the car and someone else is driving. She’s bored, I guess, so she uses the time productively. Somehow the times when my mom is riding and phoning always seem to coincide with the times when I am watching a movie on DVD, or eating, or doing something else that I don’t really want interrupted.
She called on Saturday night when we were watching Shattered Glass to tell me that she and my dad were on the way home from a wedding reception. It is not always easy to get my mom off the phone quickly, and other people were waiting to watch the end of the movie too, so I may have been a little brusque. To assuage my guilt, I called my parents’ house as soon as the movie ended.