Wednesday Hodge Podge

Wednesday Hodgepodge

Each week the folks over at This Side of The Pond post a list of blogging prompts to help clueless bloggers, like me, find things to write about.  This is my first post using those prompts.

1. What's something fun you're looking forward to on your May calendar? 

Mothers’ Day and our youngest son's (the Marine) birthday.  He will be 22 this year.  My beautiful child bride Suzanne will celebrate her 30^th Mother’s Day this year.  Okay, the first year was with our oldest son, Jared, on the inside but that is not important.  What is important is that she has been a great mother to these young’uns for a long time.

Suzanne Pregnant with David, Jr.

2. What are some images that come to mind when you hear the word mother? 

I am not really an abstract thinker.   It is hard for me to think in terms of images coming to mind.  However, when I think of the word mother I think of seeing Suzanne holding our little ones with a smile on her face.  

My mother with me

3. What's something beautiful you own or have seen that's made of glass? 

Perhaps the most special glass thing that comes to mind is the top to our wedding cake.  It was hand-blown in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, just a few months before our wedding. 

4. Was today typical?  If not, what made it unusual? 

Although retirement is supposed to mean you slow down, it seems we haven’t.  There is no such thing as typical or usual around here.  There is always something going on, as Paul Overstreet says in his song "All the Fun".

However, today would be a little less ordinary that usual.  Suzanne and I try to do our shopping in the middle of the night at Walmart.  I need a handicapped cart because of my foot and it is practically impossible to get one during the day.  So, we went to do some shopping.

When we shop, we shop in two parts. The first part we buy the phone cards we need to buy. We have found that we save over $150 per month by using prepaid GoPhones  rather than the contract plan. You have to checkout through a live, human cashier.

Since most cashiers we know wipe their runny noses on their hands and then proceed to checkout our items, we choose to take our actual food items to a self-checkout.

Well, to make a short story long as I am apt to do, we finished with the non-food items and took them to the car.  I had Suzanne’s keys in my pocket and unlocked the car with them.

We finished putting the stuff in the car and I locked the car with Suzanne’s keys.

We went back in the store and bought our food.  After we checked out, we headed to the car.  I looked in my pocket and had my keys but not hers.

We went back to the register we had checked out at and looked for the keys. They weren’t there.  We took the groceries to the car and locked it with my keys and then went back inside to look for the keys.

Back inside the store, we looked everywhere.  We asked several employees and they stopped what they were doing to help us.  The assistant manager asked everyone that could to help us find them. We went through the store at least four times and then decided to go home and unpack the groceries on the outside chance that I had put them in a bag.  Since Suzanne had packed all but one bag of the groceries, this was highly unlikely.

We went through all the bags and did not find them.  Suzanne frisked me.  Nothing.  I took off my clothes and looked very carefully through the pockets for the keys.  Nothing. 

We went back to Walmart to look again.  The morning shift was coming on, so we asked every employee we saw to keep an eye out for them.  We gave them our business card and asked them to call us if they found them.

Finally, we gave up.  For some reason Suzanne had the idea to look in her purse and there they were.  We know I had them.  We know that she drove to the store with them.  This was not possible.

But as the saying goes, once you eliminate the impossible everything that remains, no matter how improbable it is, is possible.

5. What is a quality you wish you could have more of?

Judging from the story above, brevity.

6. What's the next major purchase you need to make? Will it happen in the month of May?

We have no money to purchase anything at the time.  We need so many major things though.  I would like to say a house of our own in the middle of nowhere.

7. What responsibility/job/work did you dislike while growing up but has proved helpful to you as an adult?

I really cannot think of an answer to this question.  Our family owned a small business.  This meant that everyone had a job to do except my younger brother. No matter how old he was, he was always “too young’ to do anything.

As children, my sister and I were expected to take care of the yard work from about the time I was eight and she was ten.  It was work, but it was fun. 

Today my child-bride and I still enjoy working in the yard when we can. 

8. Insert your own random thought here. 

Mothers’ Day brings many memories.  The year my child-bride Suzanne celebrated her first Mothers’ Day with a baby outside of her was the year my father died just two days after Mothers’ Day.

Here is a special thank you to all you mothers out there.  We husbands and children might not say thank you as often as we should, but we are thankful for all that you do.

Please visit my child-bride, Suzanne's Hodgepodge Post

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