>This year’s Trivia contest was pretty laid-back at our house. That is to say, we played, but didn’t compete, so we didn’t sweat it when we couldn’t get a question in on time or if point totals were off a little. We slept at night instead of taking shifts to cover the entire 50 hours. We didn’t make any unusual long-distance calls (that’s another story) or bother our family and friends for questions in their specialties.
But this year’s Lawrence Trivia — Amigo and Husband have made friends at the radio station in the past few years. They willingly do double shifts answering phones, a very important job, so the Trivia Masters love to see them coming. Amigo even did a stint on the air on Sunday. He’s added up more than his fifteen minutes of fame by now, if Trivia Weekend counts!
As for answering questions ourselves, sometimes a team effort works best. Da Boys were sitting at the computer Saturday evening listening and researching questions and calling in the answers as quickly as they could. The question gave a long medical term for an illness, and then mentioned that the illness had caused the death of a famous person’s mother. Husband typed it in as the Trivia Masters spelled it, then added “Killed Mother” to the search. He came up with Abraham Lincoln. I walked by at the moment, so he asked me if I knew the name of Honest Abe’s mother. “Nancy Hanks, of course,” I replied, and then walked on up the stairs singing that standard pieceof mezzo-soprano repertoire, “If Nancy Hanks came back as a ghost, seeking news of what she loved most…” In the background I heard Amigo giving his team name over the phone, meaning that he’d gotten it right and gotten in on time before the buzzer.
Ah, the memories we create playing this game… I’ll give you more Trivia Stories, like the midnight phone calls, another day.

>Last year at this time, Amigo’s room was a mess and it wasn’t his fault. His closet had erupted, spewing old clothes and new clothes and toys and books and shoes and everything imaginable onto his floor. We called it the Night the Closet Vomited.
He had an old-fashioned closet — long shelf at the top, with a long pole underneath for hanging. Since Amigo is Joe Casual and owns few hanging clothes, all of the out-of-season coats and rarely-worn items ended up stored in his room. The shelf was loaded with games, toys, and Braille books. Last January, the closet pole decided it had had enough, and pulled itself out of the wall. The shelf followed.
Of course, this happened in the middle of the night. It was loud enough to wake me from a sound sleep (with my hearing aids out!) and scare the heck out of the rest of us. Husband saw the terrified rabbit run for shelter under the china cabinet, leaving a scent trail all the way. Did you know that rabbits, um, exude a certain flatulence when they’re scared? They do. Husband then ran into Amigo’s room, saw what had happened, probably swore, then comforted Amigo so he could fall back to sleep. Peanut remained under the china cabinet.
We gradually cleaned out the mess. The poor kid was tiptoeing around fallen detritus for months. I’m not kidding, it took us months to get it all stored properly or thrown out or set aside. Husband repainted the back wall of the closet, installed a stronger brace for future shelves, and re-built the whole thing in a more updated, practical style. I think he finished in May.
Perhaps I exaggerate, but not much. The rabbit came out from under the china cabinet eventually. We were so overloaded with life in general that we didn’t even get upset about this relatively minor disaster.
The Night the Closet Vomited is part of our family lore. At least it didn’t run a fever.

>I finally gave up the denial, admitted that my foot pain was getting worse and wasn’t going to go away, and visited our family doctor. She ordered an x-ray to make sure nothing was broken, but the symptoms and the location of the pain had pretty much given it away already. The x-ray, as suspected, showed nothing more than the tiny little screw from the bunion-fixer-upper seven years ago.
I see the podiatrist in ten days. The family doc predicts that I may be facing another surgery — the third on this foot.
Well, to look on the bright side, it’s my left foot. I can still drive. Both of our vehicles have automatic transmissions. Since Clutch + bad left foot = slow healing and more pain, the trade-in of my stick-shift Saturn SL2 was inevitable after my first surgery. Sniff. Sigh.
I hope that the foot doc will be able to handle this through less invasive means, but I won’t count on it. With my luck, she’ll want to operate sooner rather than later.
Hmmm…maybe I’ll need new shoes. Darn.

>It’s all in the perspective. I remember the phone call, I remember grieving, holding my family close to me. But most of all, I remember the seemingly never-ending highways under grey skies. Today’s skies remind me of that. I remember making a point of moving my sunglasses into Husband’s car before we left (we took his car because it got much better mileage than my minivan), and then not needing the sunglasses at all. We seemed frozen in time, driving along Wisconsin and Illinois’ highways with endless farms on either side, on that long, long ribbon of highway that matched the colorless sky, keeping our emotions at bay so that we could handle the ongoing miles upon miles. La Petite used her iPod adapter to play it through the car radio. Amigo listened to his own armband radio, finding local stations that interested him. I just listened to whatever they had coming through the speakers and gazed out upon the road before us.
This year, we’re safe at home. No one is sick or injured, none of us had surgery, no one has died. The skies are as grey as they were a year ago, but we’re tucked into our den watching bowl games instead of rolling south and west on the never-ending highways. We’re hanging together, enjoying each other, and appreciating all we have.
May the New Year bring all of us health, happiness, and security. Blue skies would be a nice bonus, too.