Whistle While You Work

This week has been busy. Really busy. My parents are moving into a new house, and there's been enough cleaning, scrubbing, disinfecting, exploring, unpacking and organizing to keep the whole family busy. (And we're really just getting started! We're moving most of the stuff tomorrow and Saturday!)

The upside of all this has been a lot of time spent with my family. And you know how much I love spending time with my family; my sisters in particular. Laughing and talking with my sisters makes anything go by faster. Actually, only Star was there tonight, but seriously, we're all pretty much interchangeable . . . it could've just as easily been Lacy or Talina (Lacy would've just been a tad more offensive than Star, Talina a bit nerdier.) :-) (Greg just said, "It's true.")

Tonight my Mom, Star and I had the task of unpacking and organizing my Mom's new kitchen. Her beautiful new kitchen, that is unfortunately significantly smaller than her old, spacious kitchen. It was tough. But we perservered. And threw a lot of stuff out. (Usually with my Mom's back turned.) I came across a small ceramic hand that had been busted off it's original sculpture, carefully tucked into a dish for safekeeping, "Can you throw nothing away?! We're keeping severed Jesus hands now?" I asked.
"Well, I love that statue you guys gave me, I really do want to try and fix it," she said.
"Um, you do realize we bought that for like four bucks at the Dollar Store by Cody's soccer field, right?"
"Oh."
She did end up keeping it though. Mom's are so sentimental. (I should know, I have the first thing Annie ever colored on hidden away in my top drawer.)

It is hard to get that woman to throw anything away though. "Mom this expired in 1999. That's not even in this century. That is TEN years ago. It's going in the trash." "Mom, this lazy susan doesn't even FIT in your new cupboards! And looking at the tag on the bottom of it, you got it for fifty cents from the D.I. . . . send it back from whence it came!" (Of course, it could be worse . . . we have to get my Grandpa out of the house, then execute a stealth raid on his basement, throwing out trash, empty boxes and soiled mattresses that are older than I am. Then we tell him, "Oh, we just straightened some stuff up," when he asks if anything is missing.)
At one point, Star came across not one, but two 'Root Beer Concentrate' bottles. I can't even remember the last time we made root beer. "Seriously Mom, TWO Root Beer concentrates?" Star asked.
"Hey, that's stuff's hard to come by," my Mom offered as a lame excuse.
"Yeah, so's crack." Star smartalecked.
I added, "Doesn't mean you need to stockpile it in your kitchen."

Things got progressively wackier as the night drove on, and I could recount a bunch of stories . . . but they run the gamut of 'you had to be there to find them funny', slightly offensive, mildly sacrilegious, highly embarassing, inside jokes or visual gags. It was funny though. At one point Star was laughing really hard at something she'd just said (which cannot be repeated in such a public, albeit private, forum), and she giggled, "I am SO funny." It's true. Y'all just missed out. Don't you wish you'd been cleaning, organizing and unpacking all evening? If you want to swing by Friday or Saturday, I can't promise it'll be the funnest thing you'll do all weekend, but it just might be!