My Daily Heart Attack and Other Bits and Pieces

1. I don't actually have a heart attack every day. Only on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. On those days, Willem rides the bus home. It drops him off across the street from our house anywhere between 12:05 and 12:10.

Now, our neighbor who lives in the house that is Willem's bus stop comes home for lunch almost every day anywhere between 11:55 and 12:05. And he drives a big truck THAT SOUNDS EXACTLY LIKE A SCHOOL BUS. I cannot discern the difference between the two, though I can hear either of them coming from almost a block away.

Every day my heartbeat accelerates when I hear that truck pull up. And not only that one; the neighbor's significant other often comes home for lunch around the same time. And she drives a loud pickup too, albeit one with a slightly more subtle rumble.

So every day I hear them and think I'm late for the bus. One day I really was. I was rinsing a dish at 12:03 and I saw the school bus pull up across the street from my kitchen window. I sprinted out to meet it, not even noticing that I was barefoot until I had retrieved Willem and I had to mince my way back across the wet, gravelly street. It's nice to know that in a pinch that adrenaline really will kick in.

2. Shaun and I were substitute Sunday School teachers, and the lesson we were doing suggested illustrating a point with a game of Mancala. I still own the board I had when I was a kid, so I dug it out of the garage. Inside I found an old to-do list on a tiny yellow Post-It note. Have you ever found a list from your old life? It was a very strange feeling. I knew the list was from California and at least 10 year old. It said:

-Sat. car smogged

-practice song

-Fri. night/card for Deb

The song could only be "Love Makes the World Go Round." I sang it at a fundraising dinner for the La Habra Depot Theater as a favor to the director of a play I'd been in there. I protested, but too faintly, and somehow found myself in a musty community center singing to a bunch of inebriated community theater enthusiasts. I'd say eighty percent of them were talking through my song and the other 20 percent were shushing the talkers. But the director surprised me with a check for $50, which is the only time I've ever been paid to perform. So it was almost worth it.

3. We don't have TV anymore. We've been wanting to get rid of the cable, but in order to actually save any money, we had to get rid of our telephone land line as well. So we did. We still do Netflix streaming and a bit of Hulu. But I now fold the laundry in the quiet instead of watching The Soup or some other guilty pleasure. And it's a good thing. Often a little line for something I'm writing will bubble up, or maybe a Bible verse.

4. Take care when naming your blog. I am TERRIBLE at naming things and I just wanted to get started, so I came up with a name that I have never even explained here because the rationale is so lame. Anyhow, it never occurred to me that I had picked something that could be a person's proper name. Let alone the proper name of a defendant in a rather high-profile trial in the UK. I can always tell when there's a new development because my traffic from across the pond goes from non-existent to barely existent. So...welcome, visitors (not that you've read this far), and I'm sorry I don't have the information you're looking for.

5. Today Nels was in a play at school about Martin Luther King, Jr. He would have liked a bigger part, but he did a bang-up job with the lines he had. During the play, the kids just sat and read their lines, so in these pictures he's purely mugging for me before it starts.

He played a student, so his costume wasn't as exciting as some of the others.

I made sure to take some pictures because I have a feeling it's going to be a day near and dear to his heart in the future. I still remember being a cow in my first school play (it was a Nativity). And I didn't even have any lines, much to my despair.

6. A few weeks ago, Willem came home with this self-portrait from the first week of school. He has a mohawk. And...teeth. And he can hang.

Then after Christmas, he brought home this Santa.

Nice Santa.

I'm just waiting for the school to send home a note.

7. We're going to California for a long weekend tomorrow. And Legoland! We can't wait!