Weekend Update

We had a fun Thanksgiving weekend! Well, I did. JB had a horrible cold and lost his voice. Olivia had a run-in with a cactus. Lucy and I made out all right, though. :)

We spent Thursday-Friday in Mayberry.

Mom got to do what she loves best: play with her grandbabies:




Ten people came to Thanksgiving. We had 5 pies. That's a half pie each. Friday morning there was 1.25 pies left. We did our duty!



We did a Christmas photoshoot with baby Lilian, who is not accustomed to the camera like Liv:


O tried on her first pair of high heels:



Then when nightfall came Mom plugged in her lightshow. Tommy asked if she had called Consumer's Electric to see if they had enough ampage to power her display. She did not, but no power outages were reported as a result of her Christmas spirit. She lit up the whole front of her wraparound porch. And then a LARGE evergreen tree for each of her kids: she has 7 (I didn't count the trees, but it seemed like that many). And then the massive pine tree. And she had run out of time to do her MSU tree with the green and white lights that were sitting on the kitchen counter.

It wasn't until after she lit them all up that she decided she should redo the lights on the massive pine. She reflected that perhaps standing 20 feet off the ground in the bucket loader with a long pool-cleaning stick in one hand and a string of lights in the other, calling down instructions to a deaf old man who was driving the machine and had been drinking his share of spirits, would result more in a Drunkard's Tree than in a Christmas Tree. I am sorry that I did not get photos of this. I do not have a good tripod (it's on my Christmas list, hint, hint!) so it would not have worked anyway.

After returning home, we put up THREE Christmas trees (one for us, one for Olivia, and then we helped G&G set up their decorations). And outside lights. And I enjoyed a great Advent service at church while JB lay in bed, miserable.

We are officially in the Christmas spirit, yo!

Hit and Run

Krystal called me last Thursday to casually inform me that I was her emergency contact person. Random, I know. It was finals week and she had just finished taking her exams. Now all she had to do was finish up her work week at the school cafeteria, and then pack her things and say goodbye to her beautiful Yakeley-Gilchrist dorm room located on MSU's beautiful old North Campus.

Talking to K this time of year always makes me nostalgic for MSU. Spring at MSU is one of my favorite memories. If you've never been to MSU's campus in the Spring, you're missing out. The campus is laden with trees in full bloom: cherry and apple blossoms, dogwood, magnolia. There are flowering bushes everywhere and more tulips than you could throw a stick at. Students are all out on the grass, studying or playing frisbee, and sharing the lawn with the squirrels and ducks.

Here are some shots from my days there. They don't look very nice because I scanned old photos with my flatbed scanner, instead of having the negatives professionally scanned (I totally missed these when I did a big negative scan a few years ago. Bummer!). But you get the point.

A few short hours after Krystal and I spoke, she calls me again, in tears. She had been riding her bike on MSU's campus when she was hit by a big old green van. A big old green van that KEPT ON GOING after it took my sister down. I was so pissed. She filed a police report but she didn't get the license plate because she was too busy getting whiplash and a concussion, so the police didn't hold out any hope for catching the a-hole.

Krystal said that three other people were around when this happened. Two didn't even stop (you're lucky I wasn't there, JERKS!). One girl asked Krystal if she was all right, and she was in so much shock that she said that she was, and the girl left. After sitting on the sidewalk for a few minutes she realized what had happened and called the police.


She felt pretty beat up but thought she was okay, so she went to work. A few hours later she had a massive headache and got worried. When she called me I suggested that she lay down for a few hours to see how she feels.

"What if I have a brain aneurism?!??" she cried. She was starting to get worked up.

"What?" I said.

"I don't want to end up like Natasha Richardson!!" Now she was really crying.

Who the heck is Natasha Richardson? I wondered. I know that K has a friend named Natasha, but I didn't think she had head problems...

Krystal explained that Natasha Richardson was Liam Neeson's wife who recently died from a brain aneurism after a skiing accident.

Oh, THAT lady. I'm sooo not a celebrity follower. I'm proud of that.


After talking her down, Krystal decided to go to the emergency room. She had been freaked out about making Mom and Dad angry by running up their medical bills, as K has had several trips to the doctor or ER this year. Mom reassured her that if she was hurt, she needed to get checked out. That's life.

So she did. And she is okay, despite the whiplash, concussion, and hurt knee and elbow.

Krystal and I found it ironic that just a few hours before her accident she had put me as her emergency contact, and then an emergency happened.

I am really steamed that the van driver didn't stop after he hit K. She is hurt, and her cool vintage bike is probably totalled (though she wants to see if Dad, the fix-it man, can resurrect it).

Sadly for K, Spring at MSU probably won't have the same whistful, bird-chirping, lovely garden, sunshiny feeling as it does for me. Poor girl...