A Night Out - Velez Style

On Friday night, the Velez Family usually celebrates "Movie/Game Night". Most often, we just get very lazy and watch a movie and eat junk, but sometimes we play a game as well. This past Friday, we decided that we had suffered a lot these past few weeks and needed to go to a double feature at the drive-in. The new Harry Potter was playing, and so we were off with our cooler of goodies, our pillows and blankets, and our dirty minivan.

Leonarrrrrrdo decided that it would be a great idea if we added ice to the cooler. But it was a Friday and on Friday Catholics don't eat meat, so we had egg salad sandwiches and tuna salad sandwiches - along with brownies and fruit - in our coolers. Since I have not yet had the chance to do any major grocery shopping since moving in, I have forgotten some paper/kitchen items. I had to wrap my sandwiches in tinfoil. Tinfoil is leaky when ice begins to melt on a hot summer night...

We arrived, eager and excited, at the drive-in. Parked. Set up our chairs and blankets and arranged who was going to sit in the car and who was going to sit outside. It was warm, so we all gathered around the back of the open minivan. Leonarrrrrrdo pulled the sandwiches from the cooler, because everyone had heard they were there and suddenly decided they were hungry. All but one was a drippy eggy/fishy mess. We ate brownies and - even though Lee insisted that he was going to eat all the sandwiches rather than waste them - we all marched over to the snack stand and bought burgers, chicken fingers, nachos, and hot chocolate. Oh, and mozzarella sticks. From the time we had unwrapped our draining sandwiches to the time it took to get to the snack stand, we had forgotten it was a Friday. This is very unusual for us. But I guess the devistation of trying to be cheap, but failing, was too overwhelming for us.


The first picture began, our bellies were full, and the sun went down. It dropped about 10 degrees and we all started freezing in our short sleeves. By the time five hours had passed, somewhere around 1:20am, Harry Potter had accomplished absolutely nothing, I had snored my way through half the last movie, and one of the back seats that Lee had taken out of the van for more snuggling room, had gotten stuck in a nearly backwards position.

Every other car in the drive-in had long gone except for workers and a man who wanted to know if we had jumper cables. After about 15 minutes of Lee shoving the car around, while trying to fix the seat, I finally convinced him to just let the stupid seat sit askew as it was and drive home in our now weird and dirty minivan.

We all drove home screaming at each other because we were tired and irritated and angry for Harry Potter, who we all agreed - is really a complete priss who manages only to get beaten up, let at least one good guy (a film/book) die, and allow the pure evil bad guy to get away. But he has friends. Lots of them, and they are as boring and wimpy as he is.

We are done with Potter, and our car finally got fixed the next morning just in time for us to go to, Knoebel's, the biggest redneck amusement park I have ever experienced. There were lots of gap-toothed smiles and mullets and balding women, but we had a blast on all the rides and with our hands continually inside a 3 lb bag of PA Dutch Kettle Korn.

We hope to stay home for the next Movie Night.

We, the RiffRaff

Last night, my husband and I got to drive (ALONE) to our old house on the mountain to pick up some filing cabinets and utility cabinets for the bathroom in our new home. Lenya - our gracious pal - agreed to stay behind in the new house to watch my tired and overfed children (as long as we returned with a selection of decent ice cream).

Thank you, Lenya:)

Leaving town for the mountain is weird. Leaving anywhere for the mountain is weird. In town, my favorite restaurant of the past 10 years since we have been coming to or living in Jim Thorpe has live jazz blasting as you pass slowly by in your car. The tattoo parlor is blinking obnoxiously. There are children on the sidewalk playing everywhere. Even very young children, and the schizophrenic lady a couple houses up is pacing up and down the street talking to herself and rubbing her Thorazine patch.

But the mountain is dead silent. We pulled into our driveway and stood for a moment just to watch the fireflies light up all around us in the bear-saturated forest. The last two days we spent living on the mountain last week, we had more than 6 bears walking through our yard and driveway. We had two coyote pacing hungrily in our backyard. We had to keep the kids on the deck and watchful. In town, the dangers are very different.

"Are you sad anymore about leaving this place?" I asked my sweetheart.

"Not sad anymore. It just feels like I threw away $40,000.00," he sighed, speaking of our down payment.

"Like we saved for nothing," I said.

"Yeah. For someone else to live here much cheaper than we did. That's irritating. And there are all the comforts of living in a house that is brand new," he said. "Central air, excellent insulation."

It has been said to us, by an attorney, that the investor behind the loan probably doesn't want the Spanish name in his neighborhood where he also invests in several other mortgages. Who can prove it? I don't know. But it is not hard for Lee or I to believe.

We both remember the times in our 1905 house, before the new one was purchased in 2005, how difficult it was to heat without a pellet stove. How we lost our heat for four months, because we just did not have the $400-plus a month to heat the leaky place. We learned some tricks, but all utilities on the mountain only totalled $225.00 at its peak through any season. Those things are hard to give up.

"And the kids had all the room in the world to play," I noted. Our five year old has become very difficult as of the last 7 days. He has nowhere to run around when he becomes cantankerous. We have to walk to the park or drive there for him to have all that play time. That can be hard when you have medical chronic fatigue as I do. But, we have already walked to our favorite library in the world without having to pay for parking for once. We have gotten pizza at our favorite pizza shop a couple blocks away. Our children are haggling for ice cream from their favorite candy shop. So, our disadvantages have been replaced with advantages.

But none of these issues are the end of the world. None of any of this is the end of the world. It isn't even the end of our world. We know that most of the stresses we are currently experiencing will be gone the minute our home is sold to the investor who is very eager to purchase it.

What irritates me, and has finally begun to irritate my husband, is the pure discrimination we have faced with home ownership and renting since that day in July, 1995 when we got married.

Our first place assumed that we were not married and openly said so, "Because your husband is 'Spanish', we just thought you were living together. Does he have any children who will be visiting?"

What? It was assumed at our first apartment that we could not be married, because a Hispanic was involved in the relationship. It was assumed that the Hispanic had other illegitimate children hanging out somewhere who might need to be put on the lease in the future. I was incensed at these thoughts. Lee just ignored them.

The second place was fine, because it was in town and full of Hispanics and African Americans and immigrants from Eastern Europe and Africa. They didn't even notice Lee and I or my brother when the three of us moved in. A great place to live, and we had friends there and a huge courtyard.

The third place put us in an unready apartment with no updates, because they "assumed that it would not matter to us, because surely your husband grew up in the city and would be grateful for what he gets." You can argue such things, but every attorney I have ever spoken to says that white America still very much denies their prejudices, and it would be our word against theirs. That's not evidence.

We were poor and had a baby by now, so we just lived there with all the bug infestations, the bees who made a nest in our master bedroom, the mice we had to kill ourselves - even though our friends lived in the same complex (as did my brother) and they had all these great updates and services and paid less than us to live in a much better four walls. Even my pal, Yulia from Gorky, (Russia) said, "Why is your apartment so dark and ugly? I have white everything. New everything. I think they do not like Hispanics here."

And they didn't. Lee got a new job an hour and a half away and so we moved there. This time, into a beautiful town home community. Everything seemed fine until we went to sign the lease. The manager had written up a new clause just for us. "We need you to sign this agreeing that there will be no loud music, none of those low rider cars, and no riffraff. We absolutely will not tolerate any riffraff."

"I have a degree in Music Education from the second best school of music in the United States, ma'am. I am a claims adjuster for Allstate Insurance. I don't have any riffraff."

The crooked haired woman looked dubiously at my husband and just tapped her hand on the paper. About three months later, we got a continual pile of literature on our front step from the American Nazi Party and the Aryan Brotherhood - located just 10 miles away. I called the office and told them to have this stopped. They were quite incensed that I should bother them with such a command. They insisted they could not stop someone's freedom of expression, but they promised a white neighbor whom I had shown the literature to that they would stop it at once. "We do not want our residents feeling uncomfortable in any way!" the same woman from the office insisted.

When we moved out, we had the carpets steamed, the place repainted - all at our own very tight expense. But they refused to rent the place for several months after we left, replaced everything and charged us for rent and fees for months after we had moved out and purchased our new home. "I said no riffraff!" the rental manager wrote on one of our bills.

Our first home was humble, built in 1905, but we were immediately excited that it was our own place finally. Behind us lived a nosy PA Dutch couple who spoke to me and the kids at every chance. They offered us their Sunday papers after they had finished reading them. "Then you can just recycle them for us," Eva (as I called her) suggested. I really didn't care to read the newspaper, but I wanted to be neighborly, so I agreed. The minute Eva spotted my Leonardo coming home from work in his dress clothes and tie, she withheld the newspaper and all conversation for the next 5 years. She told our realtor how disappointed she was that he had sold the place to a "dirty Mexican with a gaggle of loud children".

We had three kids. The American average, and we weren't home very often. No matter that my husband is not Spanish or Mexican. He's Puerto Rican. How hard can it be to get that simple fact correct for an educated American public? The neighbors were rude. Eva and Adolph, as I called them proudly.

We moved to "the mountain" and all of our neighbors, immediately, refused to speak or wave to us. Except for an Italian-American girl at the bus stop and her Puerto Rican husband. Their house had been burned down by the adult son of a local township board member, when they tried to move in, and homemade signs like, "Spic Trailer Park!" lined the road leading to their home. Our road.

My husband is big, and so no one ever threatens him personally. But our very rude neighbor next door has never returned our waves or face-to-face conversation. Now all the rude people who never acknowledged us even when we were speaking to them, see our home almost empty, us moving, and they wave and smile uncontrollably.

When we were moving into this new rental home (which we are very grateful for) we were warned that the old grouchy man next door might not like Hispanics. Sure enough, he doesn't. He liked me until he saw Lee. Now, he doesn't even wave to me. He smiled at my oldest son - who is my coloring, but he doesn't acknowledge my darker children who look more like their father.

Recently a friend asked me, (and she is not the only one who has asked me this), "What do I say to my children when they hear people speaking Spanish in the store? What if they are illegal? How should I suggest they treat them?"

"Mind your own business," I said to her. "If they were speaking English it would not be your business what they were saying."

"But what if they are taking American jobs?"

"You mean crawling through mushroom fields, changing old people diapers at a nursing home, working far below minimum wage to build a multi-million dollar suburban home for some American family?"

She just looked at me, "Yes. What if the economy gets so bad I need those jobs one day?"

I just laughed. "Be serious. If you could live with less you not be overtaxed and overspent like you are now in every area of your American Dream life. You would not be worried about illegal immigrants, desperate for a better life, eager to take your job."

Whatever.

And three out of four of the women who have asked me this very same, very strange, question in the last couple of years, are way behind on many of their bills. Way behind on paying their credit cards. Way behind on making church attendance a regular part of their lives. None of this bothers me, none of this bothers their credit scores too much, but Leonardo has to reach so much further just to get the respect most of them were simply born with. The ones who have asked me this who are up-to-date on all such things told me once that when she sees her Puerto Rican neighbor walking down her street, she runs inside to lock up her antique silverwear. These people are supposed to be my friends, and they wonder why I sometimes find it hard to spend a lot of time with them.

Leonardo is getting kicked out of his home and he paid his mortgage, paid off his cars, pays his credit card bills, pays his tithes, has served every church he has been to, is a proud son of a US War Veteran, and is a proud American - as all Puerto Ricans are. Americans.

And I grew up in Los Angeles where 1 out of 3 people are foreign born. But I have yet to meet an immigrant - outside of most Canadians (but not all) that I have known - who didn't proudly call themselves American and dream of becoming a citizen one day, even if they did so desperately, coming here illegally and speaking Spanish. The language that made up half of the US long before the South West belonged to America. Think about it...Texas (Spanish for "tiles), Colorado (Spanish for "brown"), New Mexico (duh), California (Spanish for "beautiful island"), Nevada, Arizona...all Spanish and Spanish/Indian names. Long before there was a Baltimore or a New York City there was a Nuestra Senora La Reina de los Angeles (The City of Our Lady Queen of Angels - or LA as we white people shorten it and call it).

I wish I could just tell bigoted America to grow up. But it is stupid and has a long way to go. And I assume that Lee and I might face such further insults in the future. If I could encourage just one American - non-Hispanic - to view the language and people they don't understand as human beings looking to care for their family just as good native-born Americans do - to see Hispanics as mostly Christian with pro-life values and an extremely strong, unmatched work ethic - then, perhaps, I will have accomplished something for my Hispanic children in the future.

I do not like all her politics, but hats off to Judge Sotomayor for working her way to the Supreme location of the land. My olive-skinned/Indian-haired 9 year old daughter cheered when she saw the news last night. "Look, mommy! She is Spanish like me and she is a judge on the Supreme Court!"

I didn't even know she had been paying attention. "Why isn't she pro-life, mommy?" my daughter asked. "Isn't she Catholic and Christian like us?"

It is a true rarity to see a pro-choice Hispanic in either party. And it is just as rare to see the Republican Party not slamming Hispanics at every turn. My party - the Good Old Party. In the last election, out of respect for my husband and my children, I had to turn off the radio - turn off Rush and Beck and Hannity, because every show was about how Hispanics (all of them are illegal or refuse to assimilate according to these shows) are the greatest threat to the American way of life.

I am assuming these conservative Americans do not know the truth? That the largest number of illegal immigrants in America live on the East Coast and are Russian Jews or Israelis. A far greater number of illegal Chosen People live in this country than Catholic Spanish speaking ones. I wonder how many conservative Christians would hear Russian, see a Chassidic black hat and think, "That rabbi refuses to speak English and he is going to take my job in the drycleaner/deli/or Yeshiva!"

An Open Public Thank You

Thank you, pals, Bob and Jennifer for the use of your home! It is beautiful - even with us in it:)

Thank you, pals, Bob and Jennifer for the recommendation to the investor who may purchase our home.

Thank you, Bob and Jennifer for the clawfoot tub. I feel like a millionaire in the golden age of Hollywood even though I just got kicked out of my home:)

You are beautiful friends (especially Bob with is Larry the Cucumber T-shirt), and we appreciate you more than you know:)

Soon, we will have you over for dinner or something edible...in your kitchen. (There are going to be a lot of jokes like that. Just warning you...)

Chicken Ice

I had a doctor's appointment today. A visit to the pain specialist who had helped me two months ago very successfully and without to many meds. I was thinking of cancelling the follow-up since I was feeling so much better with regards to my back/sciatica/crookedness/dystonia...all exactly the same thing with various names depending on the location of discomfort and the doctor involved.

Anyway, I did not want to pay the "failure to show up" fee either. Usually that's pretty high. So...I drove contented to the office 45 minutes away.

"So you still have some pain?" asks the doctor.

"Sometimes."

"So it's not complete relief?" he probes.

"Not complete, but what in life is perfect?"

"I recommend another shot."

Now I am not one to shy away from needles - God knows I have had my share of spinal taps and I get iron infusions for hours at the cancer center at my local hospital all the time. I am the queen of kidney stones and get IVs at the ER several times a year, even if I don't get anything in the IV.

But...I didn't want another shot. I told the doctor so. He recommended again anyway, suggesting that the pain would be completely gone if I were to get one. This is the point where the smarter patient starts to hear equally faulty statements inside her head like, "This won't hurt at all."

In less than 10 minutes I found myself lying flat on my stomach with an 8 inch needle in my spine. Last time it hurt a tad, but within minutes I had very minimal discomfort from the procedure. Today? He did not numb me adequately and I could feel the jabbing of my vertebra the way I have in one of those many spinal taps or epidurals. Only with those procedures I am often given a heavy medication to make me think of sandy beaches and flying penguins. Today I got nothing but a fast talking humming doctor.

When it was all over I was told to go home.

I could barely walk across the room, drive home, or even cross the street to my house. I prayed - the entire 5 minutes or so it took me to walk the 20 feet from my car to my front door - I asked God not to let a car pass while I hobbled along.

I took a very slow walk to the top of the stairs, popped completely inadequate pain meds, and lay in front of the television in my bedroom (placed there against my loud better judgement), and yelled occasionally, "Mother of God, save me!"

I asked my sweetheart (who is a true cranky heart when he has to care for children alone on a hot summer day) if he could make me or get me an ice pack when he went for pizza. Because I was flat on my side (never again my back) then, he saw no reason to assume that his family might eat dinner.

"What are we going to do for dinner?" he asks me.

"There's ground turkey and BBQ sauce. You can make sloppy joes."

But he did not like this suggestion, crying that it was too hot, and so when his work from home day ended, he drove the block to the pizza shop to buy extra large pepperonis and cheeses with an order of hot wings. The place is very cheap, so that was my consolation.

I read lots of children's books to occupy my five year old, and I let my daughter watch some stupid "I woke up pregnant, but I don't how it happened," Lifetime movie with me. But mostly because I could not move over to reach the remote.

I got up every few minutes, hoping that movement would keep me from stiffening. But I have a strong sense that the lay flat for 4 hour rule that applies to spinal taps applies to this procedure as well. I could have called my doctor to demand stronger pain meds, but I have a feeling that this will all be gone tomorrow, and I can returned my three year overdue books to the library on a short walk tomorrow with the kids.

Since I am still waiting for the ice pack from my easily distracted husband, I hobbled for 10 minutes down the stairs to make my own pack. Realizing that I had no Ziplocs with which to zip my ice collection, and no ice because the trays had been emptied in my absence from the kitchen today and never refilled, I grabbed 3 lbs of iced-over chicken tenderloins and now have them thawing behind my back. They come in their own handy Ziploc and so I grossly wrapped them in a stained kitchen rag and every now and then I think how disgusting I have become today.

I am not allowed to shower for 24 hours and I smell like rotting jiggly chicken.

Thank you, husband.

Thank you, children for using the ice as hockey pucks and the empty trays as space ships...so says my five year old who has been dressed in an Iron Man suit all day while running up and down the stairs fighting evil spiders.

Tomorrow is a new day! Amen!

New Bishop in Town

We, in the ever-increasing churchless Northeast, have a new RC bishop in our diocese. I am quite excited about this. I have heard he is a "house cleaner". Finally! Even though I am switching rites. I have had enough. In fact, the more I try and attend any one of the local RC parishes within walking distance of my home - either home - I experience something sharp and painful and I am reminded why I love the Divine Liturgy and of why I have left the West for the East.


I had so hoped to convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, partly because Orthodox priests had warned me that the Byzantines "could not be trusted", and I was told that I could still love Il Papa and pray my Rosary daily. I would just need to keep it secret - on the Catholic down low. I took this information to a Byzantine priest - identical in liturgy and feasts to that of their brother Orthodox - and he said,

"The Orthodox have had a burr up their butt for centuries now. "

It made me laugh and I realized that I believe this to be true as well. Though I love EO, I love hearing, "We pray for our Holy Father, Benedict..." as a regular part of the Divine Liturgy. So, I am switching rites and not churches. I just can't get over the words I continually heard in the EO, "We have long memories." Everyone else, it seems is bound to forgive their enemies, except, the EO who is allowed to keep a long list of the wrongs committed against them. Now, I am certain they would argue this point, but since my Catholic Church is the brunt of their struggle and anger...I have to scoot quietly out of the room. Too Roman. Too Roman...

Thank God. Because I just cannot leave Peter behind. No way.

I love my new priest. So does the rest of my family. He is smarter than 10 priests I know. Forget about rabbis and pastors. He blows them all away. Whatever question I have, he just answers with that Catholic authority that seems to be lost on may of our RC parish priests around here these days. He reminds me of why the Truth is the Truth even if you twist, detract from it, make it all your own...The Truth stands aside from our opinions or personal revelation and authority.

"On this Rock I will build my Church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it..." So said Christ. You can cut yourself off from it, reform it, protest it...but the Truth is still the Truth no matter what winds of change are blowing or selling these days.

"I am not here to help you get in touch with your feelings," my new Byzantine priest says about the Sacrament of Confession - too rarely practiced by we Catholics anymore. "Just tell me what you did and how many times you did it. If I need to talk to you about it, I will. Otherwise, get over it, quite sinning, and move on in grace."

Reminds me of the priests of my youth. I am old now - 35 remember? Memory is becoming rusty in parts, but not in the parts that matter. I remember what a priest is supposed to act like. That he is supposed to love his job and make his focus Christ and not employment and career advancement.

So...have fun with the new bishop, my fellow RCers. You won't see me around all that much. Not since I started making the Sign of the Cross from the opposite direction. Enjoy all those guitar Masses. Enjoy all those hippies in collars. Not that any of you will notice I have not been in attendance in months. I have the Dormition of the Mother of God to decipher and fast through now. I am busy moving and praying and begging God for all the help He can spare me.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a big, fat sinner.

You Can Still Go to Heaven

So said Brother William to me about 20 years ago...



I was notoriously excellent at achieving the highest grades possible during my high school academic career. Especially at my Catholic high school in Southern California. Not the Evangelical one just a year before, and not the public high school my senior year. I was okay at both those locations, but I hated both equally and therefore, did not "apply myself" to the standards of anyone who was paying attention.



Not too many adults were paying attention...except for Brother Edward and Brother William and Fr. Barney and Mnsgr. O'Gorman (Fr. Charlie to my family) and all the nuns who taught me music and art and morality and sacraments and Earth science, etc...

They were my teachers at my Catholic high school, and while my grades excelled there, I sucked at math. Royally. In fact, until I had to budget a grocery bill for the Velez family which formed in 1995, I was convinced that I could not even add. Now I can add the price of every item, including the occasional tax, down to the penny every week. I am that talented at being cheap with sausage and bread. If Brother William were alive today, God rest his Latin soul, he would probably sob with shocked pride.



But, in my junior year, in my Geometry class (should have been Algebra II, but I took Algebra I twice and never got beyond a D), Brother William from Amsterdam was filling in for Brother Edward (also of Amsterdam) until his sudden vacation back to Holland was over. For two weeks, I had Brother William - the ever smiling monk - frowning and actually wiping sweat off his forehead each time I scooted in my Catholic school girl uniform to his desk with a confused look on my face.



"Brother, I don't understand this," I would say about adding 2 and 2 or multiplying 1 and 3. "This doesn't make any sense."



He would stand up at the edge of his desk, bend over with both hands behind his back and search my paper for answers. Then he would look up at me,



"Teeefahnee, you are a special girl."



Then he would smile at me knowingly, as though I should understand why the subject suddenly changed.



"In all my life I have never known anyone as confused as you with simple math."



And then I realized he was talking about "special", not exceptional.



It went on like this for a while. Finally, a midterm test came and Brother William (who was often the brunt of stinky European jokes and would find a fresh bottle of deodorant on his old wooden desk with a red bow around it) would invite all "special children" to join him for a late afternoon study session.



He would call Fr. Barney to bless us, and then we would work for two long hours underneath the stern missionary face of the Fr. Serra painting. Everyone obtained "ahah!" moments except for me. I would leave with a fake smile on my face, but without any understanding still of adding 2 and 2 or multiplying 3 and 1. I could not fool Br. William (of the Brothers of Our Lady of Mercy).



In fact, the day of the midterm test came at some point in autumnless Southern California, and I remember wearing a red sweater and my lucky ill-fitting brown leather shoes my mother had bought me at some Dutch (truly Dutch, not the PA version) from some store in Solvang.

I was the last to complete my work, and I was so engrossed in my mathematical equations that I failed to notice everyone was waiting for me to finish so that Brother William would let them leave for the day. It was as though I had been involved in one of Brother Edward's Church History courses like any other young nerdy liturgical addict might be. I had studied to the point of forsaking all TV and hang outs at the A&W across from the Fox movie theatre in Ventura. I prayed more Hail Mary's and Glory Be's and Our Father's than I had ever allowed to accumulate outside of Mass and Stations of the Cross.

But I failed none the less. Turning in my test long after even the other "special children" had done so. But I had the utmost confidence in myself.

"We shall see," Brother William said as he took my test from me.

"I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me!" I yelled inwardly while everyone else planned their drunken Catholic high school bashes for the weekend. God would not let me down, as I was the star of all the religion classes. Every nun and oblate loved me above all others.

But I failed.

Did I mention that I failed?

Worse than I had every failed, even with Brother William's undivided sweating and aide.

When the day came, a week later, to hand out the tests in the order they had been received, Brother William had the widest smile on his ever-smiling face that I had ever seen.

He carefully placed my paper on the cira 1940's dented wooded school desk as though it were my life thesis on the Shroud of Turin.

"No matter what, Teeefahneee, you can still go to heaven, and you are truly a special girl."

F

The only F I ever obtained in high school. Yay me!

But Brother William's words echo inside my head today as I fight with my credit score to make it raise above the place it lived just after I left Hannemahn with a $60,000.00 a day hospital bill for several weeks of Guillian-Barre treatments in ICU. I should have an excellent score by now. But it has budged very little. And I cannot figure out why. Perhaps, I will always be "special", but at least, if I accept all graces given me and go to confession this weekend, I can still go to heaven.

Yay God!

To Him, I am worth more than my mathematical failures or my credit score. And in this present family crisis, I had to admit that this last parting line of Brother William's to his "most special" student of all, is the one that comes to me at night when I am most conflicted with stress. Even more than he was a consultant to NASA, and a few other highly important mathy locations, he was a Catholic brother and he put the eternity of my soul above my incredibly low math score. He knew of my potential in other areas and in the fervency of my crazy amount of Hail Mary's. He must have seen me at the chapel during the morning break and in the library every lunch (nerdy me). High school is not fun for the liturgically obsessed, but it is memorable and we Catholic obessed tend to remember the life-enriching parts.

Cause we were not fun enough to create any other sort of memories...

*I tried to find a picture of Brother William with his genius hair and eteral blue faded sweater, but no luck so far. I will keep hunting.

The Future

We have sort of moved into our new home, while still living half in our old home, and cleaning both homes at the same time.

I am stinking tired. I need a vacation again.

Our old home is beautiful, and the buyer will be quite happy. We already have three investors who are seriously interested and begging for our permission to haggle with our mortgage company already.

Our new home is beautiful, and we will be quite happy here once we are truly moved in and the extreme stress of an unsold home on the mountain is long gone.

I cooked the first home made meal in weeks for my family last night - BBQ country pork ribs, cheesy/onion cornbread, green beans and rice, and walnut fudge brownies. I think they were happy and feeling a little more like normalcy might be in our future.

I woke them all with breakfast this morning, taking orders and serving them all so that they would not look for distraction inside a fast food joint. Last Friday night, against my strong objections, my family chose to eat at a local burger place and three out of four of us got food poisoning. And we all still had to move and carry heavy objects all day the next day.

I have painted a fresh coat of paint in just about every room of the old house, steamed all the carpets, washed all the windows and bathrooms, and vacuumed four million times. Tonight, we go there to get more stuff and mow the lawn. In the new home, I have been working on training my children not to run up and down the stairs and scream at will when playing. The nearly deaf old woman next door says we are not loud, but she can feel the thumping around.

I think it has been more than a decade since I have felt such stress. We have all lost weight and there are migraines and stomach ailments abounding - though there is very little complaining. It is a very strange adjustment. It is as though we have only been renting our home on the mountain and now we are returning to our 1905 home in the last town that we lived in. Both older homes are very similar - though this rented one is nicer. The only thing I am really obsessing about at this moment is selling our other home before foreclosure and making our rented home economically sound during the winter. I have lots of tricks I employed at the 1905 house that may work here. We shall see...

Who knows anything about the future? Not me.