Jennifer's Travels...
I love the ellipse....it's so expressive!! It's one of my favorite punctuation marks, right up there with the exclamation point!!
Yesterday found me criss crossing Shelby county with great abandon. I began my travels at Cracker Barrel in Pelham, chowing down on a free breakfast, paid for by none other than my husband!! See, he does love me!!
We then went to Wal Mart, where I soaked him for Halloween candy, a birthday gift for the party Anna is going to today, and bird seed for my little feathered friends.
Aside: I hate birds. It's not just the Hitchcock movie, although Lord knows the sight of Tippi Hedren beating off those crows is enough to turn anyone's blood cold. Birds are creepy. You can look at one and tell its brain is small and their feet are gnarly. I would never touch one. But I do love watching them at the bird feeders outside my kitchen window. They are so cunning and dear, as they crack open sunflower seeds with their powerful beaks, beaks more suited to gouging out eyeballs, but still....Of course, the bird feeders being where they are, you do hear the occasional "THUMP" as one cruises a little too close to the window, but hey, it's the circle of life!!
Anyway, from Wal-Mart, we came home, and then I proceeded solo to the shopping center in Brook Highland, in search of something suitable for the dreaded Girl Scout sit upon. Fortunately, God smiled upon me and I found nothing. Then I went to Inverness to plan the Daisy meeting with my co leader. Daisy meetings are easy to plan; you basically only have to talk for 10 minutes, because the whole rest of the meeting is nothing but telling the Daisies to sit down and stop swinging off the rafters. For the uninitiated, Daisies are 5 and 6 year old girls, so you can imagine there is not a whole lot of instruction going on!
From there, I met Tim for lunch, again a meal I did not pay for! See, he talks big, but in the end, he can always be relied upon to fund my habits! Then it was home to wait for the bus. As soon as the girls got off the bus, we had to pack up and rush off to Pelham, to drop Anna off at Grandma's house. When we got there, I realized I had left her soccer cleats at home! I was going to let her play without them, but her footwear choices consisted of crocs or cowboy boots, neither one of which lends itself to soccer playing. Great, another trip!
From Pelham, it was on to Alabaster to drop Abby off for basketball practice. The practice was waaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyy out in the country; I heard the distant twang of banjoes as we traveled those country roads, and many of the residents came out of their cabins to eye us suspiciously as we passed. We were near the Wynlake subdivision and you know that is in the sticks....just kidding!!
From the practice, I went to visit Roseanna and spent a nice couple of hours watching HGTV and making fun of the couple profiled on the show. I seldom watch TV and it's always nice to see what I am missing. Unfortunately, I had to leave before I got to see if Debbie and Jim worked out their differences regarding the yellow (his take) gold (her take) paint in the living room. I will say Debbie had a remarkably prominent rear end and should not have been wearing a t-shirt that clung so lovingly to every fold of her body. See, I could be on TV too! Oh, and it was some show about a "Life Coach" helping people work through their differences. He is an obviously homosexual man (not that this is a problem, but they do get all the good gigs on TV) who rides around in a motor home and spies on people via his laptop. He then pulls them aside individually to teach them mantras regarding things like yellow paint. In the case of Jim and Debbie, he taught Jim to say "it could work" about the paint. Hmmmm....life coach/life event coordinator....it could work!!!
By this time, it was 9 pm and I had spent more hours on the road than a traveling Bible salesman. I longed to go home to bed, but my day was not done yet. From Alabaster, I had to go back to my house to pick up the cleats and then run them to Inverness to leave them with Anna's coach so she could play soccer in the morning. Anna's coach works at the Beverage Place which sells spirits of the alcoholic nature. We passed a pleasant five minutes discussing the difference between single barrel whiskey and double barrel whiskey and why it was permissible to charge three times more for the former.
On my way out, right in front of the store, was a large flying cockroach. There is one thing I count on in cold weather: the disappearance of the roaches. I am positively phobic about them. I realize it's irrational, but they disgust me on some deep, primal level. Snakes and lizards don't bother me, mice don't faze me, but show me a roach, and I will be in a tree before you can count to three. I was deeply pissed off that a roach was out when the temp had dipped below 60. I believe Kristie is right and the end times are upon us: Vandy beats Georgia; North Korea has nukes; global warming has emboldened cockroaches to defy temperature extremes and come out and harass the innocent. Damn Global Warming and the Republican Dogs who created it!!!
From Inverness, I had to go to Berry Middle School to wait on Josh who had to play at the Spain Park football game. It was close to 10 pm and I was exhausted. I was sitting there in kind of a haze when Abby started mewling that she had to go to the bathroom. She had guzzled an entire Gatorade and then a large Sprite after basketball practice. Idiot. Finally, I had enough of her, so I had to take her ALL THE WAY HOME!! Then I had to go back to Berry to resume my waiting!!! Auuuuuuggggggggghhhhhhhhh!!!
At 10:15, Josh finally gets in the car and we can go home, where I collapse in exhaustion. The fun part is I get to do it all again today: 8:30 game in Gardendale; 11:30 soccer party on Acton Road; 2:00 birthday party in Pelham; and 6:30 Halloween carnival at OLV. And where is Tim during all this merriment, you ask? Rest assured gentle reader, he is NOT sitting in an easy chair channel surfing. No, he is freezing his ass off, camping with the boy scouts at Camporee. Camporee is a fun word used to describe a gathering of hundreds of teen age boys running around like hooligans all hours of the night. So Tim actually has it worse than me. Tee hee!!
I'm off to Gardendale; stay tuned for the further adventures of the Globe Trotting Soccer Mom!!
