Every couple of weeks over the past couple of months, I’ve gone back to my hometown to help my mom with things she needs help with as she’s selling her home and preparing to move. (She’s staying in my hometown.) I was there this past weekend, and I’ll be there for a bit over the next couple of weekends as she finally closes on both her current house and her next.

The two-hour trip gives me some really good quiet time to think and create, but without being able to actually put my thoughts to paper (or computer file), the time and thinking tends to get wasted. But even so, it’s two hours of quiet time that feel so wonderfully refreshing at times. Since having children, I’ve sometimes come to really miss quiet time. Time when no one wants or needs my attention. Time to just sit with my own thoughts, uninterrupted.

The trip from my current town to my hometown is pretty boring from a sight-seeing point of view. Once I leave my current, “big” town, it’s most all highway and green trees or fields. I do pass through a few small towns — so small it only takes about five minutes to get through.

There’s been some new road construction at about the half-way point of the trip, where they’ve made it so I have to get off my highway to stay on my highway, if that makes any sense. This last time, Friday evening, I apparently missed that turn off. I was driving along and started to notice things, churches, barns, a gas station, that I didn’t recognize. I turned around at the first chance and headed back to find where I missed the turn. But the crazy thing about it is that on my way back, I found myself on the correct highway going in the correct direction, without having to turn off anywhere. It was like the world just shifted and changed to help me out.

I appreciate the effort of changing time and space to accommodate my trip, but why couldn’t it have morphed the first time so I didn’t end up 10 minutes out of my way?

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

My mom is moving soon, and so is clearing out a lot of her old unnecessary stuff. Over the past couple of weeks she’s been getting things put out in her garage for a sale. The sale date came this weekend.

I drove up Friday night. I was going to arrive around 10:30, and I expected to just come in and go to bed. I knew garage sales start early, and I knew I’d probably have to wake up around 6:00 a.m. Well, when I arrived, my mom and some family and friends were still working, setting up the tables and items for sale. Arranging things, sticking price tags, etc. So I set to trying to help.

We all worked to past midnight, and we didn’t get to bed until about 1:00 a.m. We set our alarms for 5:00. After four hours of sleep, we all bounced up and out to do the final set up for the sale. At 6:00, the first shoppers arrived.

There was a lot of stuff for sell, and much of it was nice items including some big furniture. We had up to as many as 20 shoppers in the garage and drive way at one time. The people just kept coming and coming. I was amazed. People were buying things left and right, but it seemed like the tables and boxes were never clearing. It was a few hours into the sale before we could tell the sale stock was depleting.

By 1:00, the steam of shoppers had started slowing down. At 2:00, probably 80-90% of our stock was sold, and there were only 1-3 shoppers at any given moment. At this time we started clearing up, packing unsold stuff in boxes and bags to take to Goodwill. We still had a couple shoppers looking through the packed up bags and boxes in my mom’s business van at 2:30 — we ended up just giving some of the last stuff away. By 3:30, the “shop” was completely cleared and closed.

By 4:30, all friends and family (other than myself) had gone home, with lots of thanks. There were four or five furniture items that people had paid for and were coming back to pick up, and my mom and I waited, tiredly, for them to come by.

It was a long (early) and tiring day, but the garage sale was a big success. We got rid of a ton of stuff that we now didn’t have to move or pay someone to move — and we got people to pay us to get take the stuff. Garage sales are amazing.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

One of my high school best friends spent a week in my hometown hospital a year or so after I did. Our group of friends went to visit him every couple days or so, and we had some fun times in the hospital. Near the end of his stay, we would all go gallivanting about the hospital on various adventures. Our favorite toys were the wheelchairs.

There was one floor of the hospital (of a total of five floors) that was closed at the time for some reason. We’d take a couple of wheelchairs up to that floor and have our races. Two of us would sit in the chairs, and another pair would push. The halls were plenty long for getting some fun speeds, and since there were no other people on the floor, we only had to worry about running into walls and doors (which we did on occasion — sorry Mom).

Sometimes one or two of us would wheel ourselves around the hospital in a chair. In hindsight, it was kind of a jackass thing to do, as polite people would often go out of their ways to open a door or otherwise help us in our struggles to get around.

But hey, we were teenagers, everything existed for our amusement, and the hospital is an unusual environment — we had to fully explore it while we had the chance.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

June is the month for graduations, so I should do at least one post on the subject. But since there isn’t any grad’ ceremonies in my life right now, let me tell you about an old graduation.

I graduated from high school in 1985; I was 17 years old. I wasn’t feeling real well that day, but we (my family) went to the school ceremony anyway. My step-sister was in my graduating class, too. I felt awful by the end of the pomp, and when we all got home, we took my temperature. 103 degrees.

My mom took me to the doctor the next day. By then I was full on sick and dehydrated, so he sent me to the hospital. I had mononucleosis, or “mono,” or “kissing disease.” I spent the full week after my high school graduation in the hospital.

Funny now, but not so funny then, the main hospital was full so I was bedded in the pediatric wing. Although I didn’t appreciate it then, the peds wing is actually a pretty nice place to be hospitalized. The nurses seem to have a more happy demeanor, the colors are brighter and more cheerful, and Ronald McDonald came to visit one day.

My friends all came by often to hang out — we gabbed like normal, and even played some games, including a short session of Dungeons & Dragons. After the first couple of days, when the IV fluid had restored proper hydration, staying at the hospital was pretty cool. I didn’t have any chores to do — I didn’t even have to make my own bed. Although, I found being waited on for everything a bit uncomfortable — I didn’t particularly like having to sit in a chair and watch a nurse change the sheets on my bed when I felt perfectly capable of taking care of myself.

Although I would rather not have had to go through that illness, it did give me a mildly interesting story to tell about walking across my high school graduation stage with a 103 temperature.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com