Hallo,

One of my friends wrote me that she is making a note to herself not to read my blogs at lunch. She was relieved that she'd eaten her jello BEFORE she "got into the thick" of reading all the sinus jazz on yesterday's blog. I have to agree with her. When she mentioned jello, I instantly thought how I could have described my FB as a see -thru thin membrane ball full of a greenish yellow jello-like substance, not unlike those interesting soft malleable (sheesh, took me a long time to track down malleable in the dictionary, strictly guesswork) gooey balls schools give as prizes (torture devices for parents) for fundraisers when a child sells X amount of candy bars or rolls of wrapping paper. I have to say, I'm SO glad those child peddler days are behind me, aren't you, if they are? One year, DTD, before she was a T, sold so much of whatever that she won a very nice bike. I was proud of her entrepreneurial (oh for Corn's sake, I have looked up how to spell this word and its cousins MILLIONS of times, ev-a-ree time I get it grossly wrong) spirit, but not so thrilled that we had to hit up our same neighbors over and over and over. OH NO!, neighbors cry, not cheezy Christmas ornaments AGAIN. Gads! My grandfather was a sensational salesman, Proctor & Gamble's top salesperson. He could SMILE, shake hands and say, How DO you do?, his merry blue eyes all the while closing in on that sale. He was the perfect gentleman, except for the times he'd lose his temper. It wasn't often he lost it, but you and I getting out of town was the best option when it did happen, because what he lacked in rage quantity he made up for in quality. During the depression my mother, a little girl at the time, asked for more butter at the breakfast table. That lit Grampa's fuse, he grabbed that butter and rubbed it all over her face, which made no sense whatsoever, as the butter was wasted one way or the other. Granny said, THAT'S IT, I'll have to divorce you. But she didn't. Grampa could repent in great sorrow, Oh, I'm such a wicked man, oh, Jesus forgive me. How COULD I have done such a thing to my precious little darling?, I'm SO ashamed. So, anyway, he maintained employment with P& G throughout the Depression, because I guess everyone still needs soap no matter what, at least I hope so. I, however, could not sell peanuts to an elephant. I'm telling you, I'm just missing so many ancestral genes. DTD got that sales gene, she's certainly sold me on anything she's ever wanted. But seems all the genes are skipping a generation - me. DTD and I are diametrically opposed on EVERYTHING. Well, this makes sense, when I think about it, if we don't share any of the same genes, which we don't. I say God has a tremendous sense of humor, to have created this mother/daughter pair. We may be a sight, but we are never bored with each other. Furious, maybe, but bored? Never. So, when Grampa eventually quit P & G, they begged him to come back. They regularly gave him new cars, and he would make it a point to see how fast he could wreck them. FINALLY, P & G said, NO MORE CARS FOR MR. BOWYER. On one family transit from Michigan to Florida, my grandfather drove off the road, and my mother remembers her mother screaming, WE'RE ALL KILLED! Another car saw the accident and the remains strewn all over the place and was CERTAIN that no one could have possibly survived. But they all did, and I'm hear to vouch for that. Life is SO interesting. If they had not survived I would hardly be sitting here jabbering on a blog.

So, those gooey balls, they're composed of the same material throughout, which I'm really searching here to figure what it is, it's like shaped slime. They're quite smooshy and roll and squish in the grossest gel-like fashion but always spring back to a perfectly round ball in the end -- it's unreal -- but also exactly how you would imagine a FB to behave. Does anyone know what I'm talking about? DTD, when she won one of those, she promptly tossed it up to the ceiling and the ball came down but the pink color stayed up -- sticky is another of the ball's attributes. We had a big bright hot pink spot on the living room ceiling for years, it was a smeary spot as slime ball must have skimmed the ceiling. My dad, who is very particular and notices everything, and others would come in and look up and say, What's that? Of course I had to confiscate the hot pink gooey ball. I envisioned hot spots all over the house -- a new look, big irregular polka dot paint job. Which reminds me of the time my former husband and I came home from church one Sunday evening. I went in the den and noticed a black round smudge on the wall, approximately the size of a tennis ball. I made a mental note, What is this? Then as I walked through the house, I saw black round smudges everywhere. Hmmm, clearly these weren't here two hours ago, so what on earth? I'll tell you what on earth. Because suddenly a big black thing with a webbed wing span whizzed by me. It was a flying rodent, a bat of the earth, to be exact. I'll tell you what else. I am PETRIFIED of bats. They are just below roaches on the Totem Pole of Horrible Earth Things. When I used to swim in my parents' pool in South Carolina, we'd swim at dusk and every night the same exact drama played out. A bat, then another, etc., would come whishing (made-up word, but it fits) out of the trees and swooping over the pool, skimming the water, and I would scream BLOODY MURDER (I have erred, I DID inherit one gene, the Scream Gene, my grandmother and mother could have been professional screamers for the movies. DTD did not inherit it, that would be impossible since we do not have any of the same genes, as stated above, so when I scream her disgust is profoundly profound). So, I wasted no precious time by hastily swimming to the edge and climbing out like a civilized person, I would just shoot straight up out of the water like an Olympic synchronized swimmer and lunge for the pool deck, I didn't have to suddenly sprout powerful thunder-thighs for this maneuver, I was born with them. I turned into a sort of human waterspout. It wasn't graceful, I was a clumsy lunatic, but, hey, it worked. Then I would throw a towel on my head to prevent a bat from building a nest and race for the house, ducking low to the ground, hoping against hope to avoid contact with the little nightmares. Hey, don't say a hair nest can't happen. If I'm involved, it not only can, but WILL happen. Once we were spending the night with friends and the hostess was so gracious and showing me my room, this was in GA, but just barely over the FL state line. Unfortunately, a flying roach visiting from Florida winged by. Now, isn't that just par for the course?, it only happened because I was in the house. The lady was so embarrassed and ran to get something to do away with it. A few seconds later she came back but now no one in the group, because where there's excitement a group forms, could locate the roach. Hmmm. I casually ran my fingers through my long hair because I thought I felt something. Oh boy, I felt something and there ends my story because you have figured it out.

Now I shall end the bat story. It didn't take long, .02 seconds, for me to decide that if a bat were careening all over my house, which, make no mistake, it was, those black smudges didn't just invent themselves, then I was no longer in the house. I tore out of there faster than fast and ran two long blocks down the street, never with a backward glance (I could have taught Lot's wife a thing or two) and trembling like a leaf. Husband called church friends who arrived shortly in their big automobile, armed with a giant butterfly net. They thought the whole thing was hilarious, and thereafter referred to their car as the Batmobile. I'm glad they had fun, I'm glad someone did. I didn't. They did capture the bat, which must have entered the house through the chimney, and then I had the un-fun of scrubbing off the bat smudges. I told my jello friend above that not all my blogs are gross, she just happened to read the sinus one first because there it was. But I'm afraid maybe my blogs ARE edging perilously close to the gruesome side. Hmmm. I shall have to think of something sweet and delicate to blog about tomorrow.

I like to learn something every day, don't you? Every night I use a nose watering pot (neti pot, if you must). It's a fun little addition to my already crowded Things Necessary to Advance Life Routine. But with chronic sinus, the watering pot has preserved me thus far, not particularly well, of course, but better than Life Prior to Nose Watering Pot. If you don't know what nose watering entails, please Google SinuCleanse, because if I detail it for you, you can rest assured my jello friend will be reading it while she's trying to drink her lemonade or something. What I found out last night is that it doesn't work out real well to water one's nose while laughing uncontrollably. Drowning comes close. Just another little jewel for my Crown of Knowledge.

'Til We Meet Again,
KEM