Backsies Is What There Is Not: The Haygoods

Saturday, December 12, 2015

Oooh! Ahhh! Christmas Lights And More Thankfuls

Shhhh! My family is still asleep and I'd like to keep it that way for a little longer. Here are some thankfuls for the week:

1. We drove to the lake house yesterday. No one has been here since my mom fell right before Halloween, but everything was fine.

2. My parents have really great neighbors across the street. They keep an eye on the place and have a key, just in case (for example, just in case there's a tornado warning, as we have a basement and they don't). They turned on the heat and set the thermostat very low, so if the weather takes a dive, the pipes won't freeze.

3. Ordinarily, I am not a big fan of unseasonable weather, but the 70 degree day yesterday made for a really nice visit to Silver Dollar City last night to enjoy their spectacular light display. We didn't have to wear coats and hats and gloves, which meant I didn't have to carry anyone else's coats and hats and gloves when they didn't want to wear them.

4. While there are shows to be seen at Silver Dollar City, such as a production of "It's A Wonderful Life," our plan was just to walk through the park, enjoy the lights, and get the free pewter ornaments we earned by using our season passes the correct number of times (don't ask me what that number is, because I have no idea; I just know that we qualified). I asked the kids if there was anything else they really wanted to do while we were there, and they both said, in unison, "decorate cookies" (we've only been doing this since College Boy was about 3, and I'm sure somewhere I have pictures to prove it, but I'm not where the pictures are, so use your imagination about how cute he was as a little guy, frosting a cookie with green [always green] frosting and sprinkles and devouring it.)

5. Turkeys were on sale for 73 cents a pound, so I bought two for the freezer.

6. The College Boy is finished with finals and home for a whole month.

7. He brought his (REALLY BIG) tv home with him, carefully packing it in the original packaging for the trip, fretting over making sure it stayed upright, per warnings on the box, carried it inside the house, set it in the living room, next to a wing-back chair that contained one Ruby, and was in the process of carrying some things up to his room when there was a big WHOMP from the living room. He returned to find Ruby sitting on the arm of the chair and the tv jelly-side down on the floor next to her. Hysteria ensued, and he rushed the tv up to his room to make sure it still worked, vowing there would be one less cat in the house if it didn't. It did, and Ruby's place in the family is still secure.

8. Emma and I are enjoying the perks of Area Appreciation pricing and going to see a music show tonight. (Branson is known for its music shows, among other things.) This is a big deal, because we don't go to shows; that's for tourists, as far as we're concerned; besides, tickets are pretty pricey. She and I are going to see The Haygoods, whom we love, and we will wish my Person and her daughters were with us, because we never would have gone to see them the first time if it weren't for them. Two thankfuls for the price of one!

9. I don't have pneumonia. I do have bronchitis (its name is Dayn).

10. I didn't have to go to the doctor to get a diagnosis. We had our preschool Christmas program Thursday night, and Dayn the Cold, which started on Monday, had turned into Dayn the Horrid Cough and Dayn the Laryngitis. One of my preschool moms (yay for awesome preschool moms) is a nurse who is also studying to be a nurse practitioner. She brought her stethoscope to school the next morning and listened to my chest, pronounced that it was tight (it's been making a weird noise when I breathe), but it wasn't pneumonia. Whew!

Work hard and find some thankfuls for the week. If I can do it, so can you!

Your hosts

A Fly on our (Chicken Coop) Wall, Amycake and the Dude, Considerings, Finding Ninee, Getting Literal, I Want Backsies, The Meaning of Me, Thankful Me, Uncharted, The Wakefield Doctrine

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Friday, June 6, 2014

An Eating, Talking, Laughing, Thankful Week

I don't mean to brag or anything, but I'm writing my Ten Things of Thankful post an entire day early. Okay, totally bragging.

Last Saturday afternoon, my daughter and I drove to Branson to meet my person and her kids at my parents' lake house. We hadn't seen each other since March, so we've been counting the days until this trip! Our drive was two hours; their drive was 8 hours. Guess who almost let her friends arrive at her house before she was there herself? It was a close one, and only the beginning of a week chock-full of thankfuls:

1. Terri used to live in Branson and performed in several different shows in town. This means she has CONNECTIONS and was not afraid to use them. End result was that we got to reap the benefits of her connections and attend a myriad of shows and events, either for free or at greatly reduced prices.

2. While Branson is a huge tourist destination, our family uses it as a place to be complete sloths. Not this time. We hit the ground running from the time our friends arrived and didn't stop the entire time. Saturday night, we attended the Haygoods Show. Five brothers and one sister, all talented musicians, singers and dancers. I am always in awe of talent that runs through a family like that (think Osmonds, if you will).

The girls with Matthew and Michael Haygood.
They are each scheming to marry Michael.

3. Monday morning, armed with a pocketful of quarters for the food dispensers, I took the kids (all 15 and 16 years old) to the Shepherd of the Hills Fish Hatchery. I failed at getting a video of them, which saddens me a little, because I wanted to record their giggles as the fish lunged at the food pellets they dropped into the pools.

4. Tuesday morning, I took three of the kids to the Ralph Foster Museum at College of the Ozarks. This place is a gem: admission is free for kids under 18 and only $6 for adults, and it's filled with local artifacts, from furniture and dolls to stuffed animals (the real kind, not the toys) and weapons and more.

The pièce de résistance of the Ralph Foster Museum is this:

Yes, kiddies, it's the REAL Clampett car from
The Beverly Hillbillies.

5. Terri's son was in seventh heaven at the sight of all the guns on display. I don't know nuthin' about guns, but I do know there were old pistols and rifles and such. At one point, after staring intently into a huge display case of weapons, he turned to me and said excitedly, "If this place ever gets attacked by zombies, THIS is where you go!" I think he was only partially kidding.

6. Wednesday, we packed a picnic lunch and headed to Moonshine Beach on Table Rock Lake. In spite of the following, it was a fun time:

I got bitten by a housefly on my ankle and the little bastard drew blood.
The sand was not that ultra-fine beach sand you might be used to, but rather hauled-in sand that was coarse and rough and made it feel as though you were scuffing your feet on coarse-grade sandpaper. Which you kind of were.
There were rocks in the sand. Sharp ones.
It was windy. And sand being sand, it blew onto you and stuck in your sunscreen.
The water was pretty cold. Which didn't matter to me, because I had no plans to get in it, but it mattered to at least two of the little angels who were with us.

7. The amazing Terri also scored us tickets to see Jonah, which is, you guessed it, the story of the guy who was swallowed by the whale, told as a musical. I know, I know, but it was really good! The scenery and special effects were spectacular. The cast was talented. I would not have believed I would enjoy the production, but I was wrong and stand corrected. She also arranged for us to go to the Dixie Stampede, another show that I wasn't too sure I was going to like, but I did. Plus, they feed you so much, you sometimes were so busy eating, you forgot to watch the show.

8. Thursday, we went to Silver Dollar City, an 1880s theme park, which is my happy place. After a morning of severe thunderstorms, a power outage that lasted about an hour and a half and caused four teenagers to huddle in the living room with us, because they were varying degrees of scared, we ended up with a delightfully cool, non-humid afternoon at the park. I made it my mission to eat my way through the park and did a pretty fair job of it. The kids rode rides and ate THEIR way through the park. I stopped to listen to the Homestead Pickers, people watched, rode the steam engine train, as Terri had never done it before, got cheese in my hair, and enjoyed sitting in a shady spot and talking and laughing with my person.

9. We visited a lot of folks. Like Freddy (as in Freddy's Frozen Custard & Steakburgers), Billy Bob (as in Billy Bob's Dairyland), Danna (as in Danna's BBQ), Andy (that would be Andy's Frozen Custard). We had lunch with Terri's former boss, Buck Trent (that was a hoot). We sat up late and talked. And talked. And talked.

10. Sadly, Friday morning arrived and they departed, but not without one last meal at Freddy's before they left. We spent a long time saying goodbye in the parking lot, and Terri, who is not good at such things, tried to take a selfie of us.

Her daughter, either feeling sorry for her or disgusted by her failure to take a decent selfie (or some combination thereof), took command of her mom's phone. We were just posing for the picture when Terri made some rather unladylike sound (a burp, maybe, or possibly a throat growl), and we fell apart. Because that's what best friends do.