This Old House



The other day I found myself watching This Old House not because I wanted to learn about fixing things up, but because I am homesick. They showed a guy working on a house in East Boston, and even seeing the lamp posts with the Resident Parking signs, and the crooked sidewalks with weeds growing made me remember my beloved home. I never thought I'd say it, but the real draw for me watching the show was listening to the strong Massachusetts accent of the host. As a Midwesterner by birth, I wanted my children to have Midwestern accents like Neal and me, but hearing all those dropped "R's" brought back the comfort of home for this displaced New Englander.



How I love that dirty water!

Omaha... Where Coffee is an Errand, not an Outing

We have a great gym at our Club. It's all of 90 seconds from my house (up at the pool) and recently, there have even been a few more people there than just me. Remember, this is Omaha, and people like to stay home, so having people come out to the gym is big.

Anyway, I was on the treadmill the other day talking to a women from my golf league (wow, a friendly acquaintance!) when the assistant manager of the Club walked in. I told him it would be great if the Club had coffee and bagels and maybe a New York Times, Chicago Trib, etc on Saturday or Sunday mornings and people could come up and hang out. My friendly acquaintance said that she'd never go because she doesn't eat bagels and doesn't like their coffee and her husband likes to make breakfast so they stay home. Typical Omaha. How do you meet anyone if everyone stays home?!?!?!

I had to laugh.... in Boston, coffee was an outing. Here, if you go out for coffee at all, it's an errand. In Boston you knew you'd run into a half dozen people en route to pick up coffee and you'd chat and shoot the breeze. It was a nice sense of community. Here no one wants to go out for coffee, or anything for that matter... they just stay home... in their 5,000 square foot house.... alone. Yawn.

We have wonderful friends from Boston, the Spencers, and our two families literally met at a coffee shop when we both started coming on Sunday mornings before our respective church services. We got to know each other and soon we made a point of coming a bit earlier to have breakfast together. How I miss those days, and the opportunity to meet receptive people like that. The really funny thing is that they moved from Boston shortly after we did and miss the urban, pedestrian lifestyle just as much as I do. Hopefully we'll all find our way back to the comfort of the urban jungle, and the neighborhood coffee shop again!

Sophie gave me a haircut!

You can imagine my horror when Maggie came down the stairs and said “Sophie gave me a haircut!” I turned around and there was little Maggie, her cute pageboy cut chopped off completely! My little girl, who didn’t have a ton of hair in the first place, now looked like a boy! AHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Tears started streaming down my face and then Maggie, who was so proud of her new ‘do began to cry too. Sophie knew she was in big trouble and immediately went to the Naughty Corner as I went to the scene of the crime, wondering how this could have happened. Where did they ever get a hold of scissors?!?! Well…..

For those of you parents, remember those nifty child-health kits with the nail clippers, medicine droppers, and thermometers? Well, they also had scissors…. Something I seemed to have forgotten when I put it away in Maggie’s bathroom. Sophie not only cut Maggie’s hair, but both of their shirts, which, of course, matched their cute, and expensive outfits. I am horrified and mortified that, while I thought how nicely they were playing together upstairs as I listened on the monitor, they were causing such chaos!

The moral of the story is to re-check that stuff in your kids’ bathrooms. When they are babies, you put things away, and when they get bigger, you forget what’s there and end up with an unwanted hair-cut!