Friends Forever

My sister got out of the Navy and, by some lapse of judgment, has decided to move to Utah. I'm glad. My brother flew to Florida last week and drove across the country with her and the kids. My sister is staying with us in our little cottage until we can buy a larger house. My blogging will not be as frequent as people are sleeping in the room with our computer (I came to realize that this room is where I do nearly all of my writing, drawing and music stuff).

We are excited for our kids, as they will now have lifelong friends closeby. No more hanging out with the wild boys. Ethan told me the other day that one of them had been choking him with his legs while the other one threatened to pee on him. Ethan wasn't tattling, just describing his day. He said he yelled at the boy not to pee on him, so the boy peed on his bedroom floor instead. It's anywhere, anytime with that kid.

I've been watching all of the kids all week. I took them into the mountains so they could walk on the snow and throw rocks in the raging creeks. I did have one difficult day:

We want to sell our house very soon, so we hired a company to come refinish our peeling bathtub. We checked with Re-Bath and their salesman was rude. He told me our bathroom was "NOT inviting" and that I basically couldn't afford NOT to pay him $4000. No sale, Re-Bath.

The company we did hire sent a guy over promptly at 9:30am. A few minutes after he arrived, my nephew Aaron went running into the bathroom and threw up down the back of the guy's legs. My wife chased him into the bathroom and started apologizing and trying to help Aaron as he spewed over and over. The bathtub man was very non-chalant. He said, "Don't worry about it. It didn't get on my clothes. Just my legs."

With no concern for the puke he went on to make chit chat with Eleanor, "So how long have you lived here? Where are you from?"

To me it sounded like: "Yeah, I just got puked on. It happens more often than you might think. What's your sign, baby? My horoscope told me this would happen."

But he went on working with the tub and Aaron kept throwing up. Eventually, the bathtub guy told us we should leave because of the fumes. We packed up all of the kids and went to get some lunch. When we got home the bathtub guy was finished and gone and we opened all the windows and doors and hung out in the yard.

By then, Aaron's sickness was coming out of both ends. Of course, all of this would happen on the ONE DAY where our bathroom was out of commission (I never put our downstairs bathroom back together). Aaron had to hose off in the back yard and I got him some clean clothes. Then he went downstairs and laid down.

Soon enough, Aaron came running upstairs to use the bathroom. I said, "Just try really hard not to touch the bathtub." The guy said we couldn't use it for a day and a half. Aaron tried but failed. He closed the door and all the sounds that issued forth were bad. I opened the door and the scene was the very definition of "explosive diarrhea." All over the room, including the tub. And that was just round one.

I felt really bad that the tub wasn't working and I just kept handing him sopping wet towels and telling him to clean up his legs as best he could. He was worried about what would become of the tub and I told him just to worry about getting himself cleaned up. Worse yet, I was supposed to drop off all of the kids with Eleanor at her school. It was the last day so she HAD to get in grades and credits for all of her students. Then I was supposed to drop my brother, Joel, off at the airport and then head to work myself.

At this point, I called Eleanor and told her what had happened. She laughed at the story but said, "I'm coming home. I'll finish grades tomorrow."

Needless to say, work was the relaxing part of my day. The bathtub cleaned up fine and looks better than ever.