The above pictures illustrate not necessarily bad timing on the part of the photographer, but that my daughter has LEARNED TO CLOSE HER EYES before the flash goes off. I am thankful for digital cameras tht show me that I need to try that shot again. And again. And again.

In other news, Uncle Bud thinks that my father is rigging things on the ceiling of the garage to fall on his car. But that is for another post.

Phyllis came back on duty this morning after having the weekend off. Uncle Bud likes to pay the aides up front for their time , but can’t keep their names or time in his head long enough to write a check, so after yelling back and forth between him upstairs and Phyllis downstairs, “How many days?” “Five days, Uncle Bud!” “That’s how many days now?” “Five, Uncle Bud.” “Oh, okay, I’ll come on down there so you can write it down for me.” He gets on his stair chair and rides downstairs while Joe and Phyllis look furiously in Joe’s kitchen counter paper clutter for the scrap that already has Phyllis’ name and five days scrawled on it. Joe turns to me with a joking smile and asks, “you don’t keep a diary, do you?”

“Only on the internet.”

Uncle Joe is worried that our standard sized mailbox is too small for all of the mail coming to this house now that I have moved in. Granted, Uncle Bud does get about thirty pieces a day as he is a great philanthropist and is on many many charity mailing lists. So Joe went to Curry Thomas Hardware and bought a new mailbox.

I think I could fit in there.

We have had a couple of nights in the fifties and days in the seventies. Uncle Joe is cold natured because he sits in his chair all day and doesn’t get his blood moving (He doesn’t have a choice about that anymore, but that is a whole other conversation.) Uncle Joe had Wally the Furnace Man come yesterday turn on the furnace. The thermostat is set at 75 degrees. The ceilings downstairs are twelve feet. Heat rises. The furnace continues to pump hot water through the radiators. Heat rises through the ceiling. I think it is at least eighty degrees upstairs. I live upstairs. Joe does not. It’s hot. I don’t think that I should have to completely change my wardrobe when I move from inside to out…make that strip to nothing every time I enter my quarters. But I do. And I will get over it. For now. Until I see the gas bill. (by the way, Joe doesn’t see the gas bill. My father pays it. Joe can’t be bothered with such things)

We’ll see what happens when Tom gets here (he’s still working on the house in Atlanta.) He gets very cranky when he’s hot. Sounds from what I have typed above that I do too.

The uncles have adjourned from dinner and moved into the living room to watch The Lawrence Welk Show on channel 8. When it’s over, they’ll change the station to channel 25 and watch the same episode all over again.

I’m not kidding. Not even a little bit.

Uncle Joe turned 74 yesterday. I cooked dinner and all three aides were present to celebrate. From left to right: Melissa, Phyllis, and Barbara.

Four generations:

“What I don’t understand is, where does that thing go, when you go somewhere in the car?”

“She has a special seat in the backseat of the car, Uncle Bud.”

“Well then, what happens when you go into the store, do you leave it in the car?”

“No, Uncle Bud, I take the baby into the store with me. She doesn’t stay in the car by herself.”

“Well then. I say. I had no idea.”

There’s a bottle of Dawn dishwashing soap next to the sink. There’s also a Dawn bottle with an almost clear liquid in it. I thought it was diluted Dawn - an almost empty bottle filled to rinse out the dregs.

I was wrong. It’s bleach. Because Uncle Bud insists on cleaning his own dishes(without soap…the aides rewash them when he’s not looking,) and as he does so, he spits in the sink.

Ewwwww.

One of Uncle Joe’s aides, Barbara, is scared of the dogs so I told her that I would either keep them outside in the fenced in side yard or in Tom’s and my area of the house. Tuesday I left them on the upstairs porch while Tom and I dropped off the rental truck and shopped for a refrigerator.

Around 1pm I got a call from Uncle Joe that Louella was wondering about the house and what should he do. I told him to let her out into the side yard and I would head home shortly. While on my way home, she dug under the gate of the side yard. The guard had changed by this time and Phyllis was on duty and put her on the downstairs porch. She escaped again through the door from the porch to the garage which is usually closed but was standing wide open when I arrived home. I went looking for her me and found her on the front terrace. The only explanation that I could think of was that Louella had used her mind control on Uncle Bud to open the door from the upstairs porch to the other section of the house and then she climbed down the front staircase, and then later she commanded him to open the garage doors for her.
Fast forward to last night: I left both dogs on the upstairs porch again and came home to find Rahab waiting inside the east terrace door for me. Just Rahab. Louella was still upstairs.

As I don’t believe Rahab has mind control powers, the dogs must have learned to teleport.

Wednesday afternoon I needed to pick up copies of the house key - I had left the original at the locksmith’s that morning as the copies had to be hand cut.
When I returned home, Uncle Joe was on the phone with Uncle Bud…Uncle Bud (the 96 year-old) had driven down to his house about ten houses down the road to do his shredding. (Someone told him that his identity could be stolen from his mail so he shreds his mail - all of it - even the catalogs - the whole catalogs - and he gets a four inch stack of mail everyday.) When Uncle Bud punched in his alarm code, it didn’t register and the siren went off. He couldn’t get it to stop going off. When the alarm company called, he understood them to tell him to pull it off the wall, so he yanked the entire keypad out of the wall.
So I get home and Uncle Joe is telling Phyllis, his aide, to walk down and sort everything out because the police are probably on their way and he doesn’t want them carting Uncle Bud off to jail. I got the stroller and walked down with her. On the way, George, the mailman (who stops in every afternoon for a piece of cake and a glass of milk), stopped us and said he had tried disconnecting the battery from the alarm, but that hadn’t helped, so he had flipped the main circuit breaker to shut off the alarm. Phyllis and I arrive and Uncle Bud is going on and on about how he now has no power. I flip the breaker and all is fine for 60 seconds, and then the siren starts to wail again. I turn off the breaker, I talk to the alarm people who say that his system is old and they’ll need to send out a sales rep next week to give him a bid for a new system. I ask them to please send someone out now so that Uncle Bud can have power in his house. She transfers me to someone else who says someone will be out the next day at 2pm.(No one shows.) I go in the house and look at all of the outlets in the house for the plug to the alarm. Can’t find it. By the way, Uncle Bud’s house has the wall colors from the 1960s and could be a designer house today. Phyllis asks what’s behind a door in the garage, the one place I hadn’t looked because the baby was beginning to fuss and there was a ladder against the door. She moved the ladder, we peeked in, and there was the alarm plug. I had to find a screwdriver to unplug it from the outlet, did so, Uncle Bud is still going on and on about the house not having power and what is he going to do and that awful noise, I flipped the breaker back on, and presto - lights with no siren going off. Uncle Bud was amazed. I am now the cat’s meow. Kendall, Phyllis and I walked home.