update from the sticks

I couldn’t write a blog post this morning because I didn’t have any pictures to post at the top of my blog. (Yeah, I have silly rules for my own blog. I don’t know what I’m going to do if I break them. Fire myself?) So I’m out here in the sticks and NOTHING is photogenic. It’s about 104 degrees in the shade and we have to stay inside my mom’s dark non-photogenic mobile home with the air conditioning blasting away or else our faces will melt ride off our heads. It’s that hot. The drapes are drawn to keep the heat out and her walls are lined with dark wood paneling (just like those skanky old Calvin Klein ads). That means I can’t’ take any pictures without using my dreaded in camera flash. I hate using my flash. I can’t do a timed exposure because most of my subjects (ie Baby Bug) cannot hold still.

That is my excuse for lagging on the Monday morning post. But, as you can see, I finally found a picture (with the blasted flash) that is acceptable.

I came out to the Sticks because my Grandma was in the hospital and then she was moved to a nursing home. She is okay. She’s just in there for a few days so she can get better enough to go home. She is getting old and her heart is weak so she has a tendency to catch pneumonia and other miscellaneous ailments that older people get. Pneumonia or not, she’s still her punky old self. She cracks jokes with the nurses and flutters her eyelids like she’s done her entire life.

When I close my eyes and think of my grandma, I see her fluttering her eyelashes at me. Not like a flirtatious Minnie Mouse but more like she’s rolling her eyeballs under her lids and she’s sighing to herself, thinking that she is surrounded by a silly kids. Which she is. The other image that comes to mind is her bending over weeding. Just like those garden ornaments you see that are wood cut outs of a fat woman’s back side. That would be my grandma. Up to her ankles in water, pulling weeds from her garden that she’s flooded with the hose.

I would have taken a picture of my Grandma in the nursing home but she wasn’t feeling very photogenic. It would be really bad manners to catch her in her nightgown in bed without her hair curled and her pearls on. I did get a few of my cousin who is visiting from Seattle but she forbade me to put them up on the internet. Maybe because we were playing with our camera’s and I got a shot about three inches from her nose. We will always be silly kids.

Thankfully, my Grandma doesn’t seem to mind us visiting and being silly. You should have heard my Mom and my Aunt. They were like the peanut gallery with a running commentary to every question the nurse asked my Grandma. My Grandma could barely get a word in. Mostly because it takes her longer to think because she is tired and in some pain, but it didn’t help that we were all interrupting (me and cousin with the hijinks and of course the baby put her two cents in too). The process took forever…. but I suppose it’s better to have too much family than not enough.