The Median Sib

Yesterday I put the “For Sale By Owner” sign in front of my townhouse.  I also buried my St. Joseph statue yesterday - before setting out the sign.  There is a tradition (superstition?) mostly among Catholics that since St. Joseph is the patron saint of the home that if you bury a St. Joseph statue UPSIDE-DOWN in a favored place in the yard of the house you want to sell, the house will sell quickly.

About seven years ago when I sold a house by myself for the first time, a few months went by - and no buyers.  While talking with some friends, someone mentioned the St. Joseph story.  I immediately got on the phone and started calling around and found St. Mary’s Bookstore in Nashville that carried the little statues.  When I got there, I found that they not only had the statues, they had all sizes of the statue and actually had St. Joseph home sale KITS - with a statue, a laminated prayer and a history of the custom. 

I took my statue home, buried it immediately in my favorite spot of the yard.  I read the prayer.  Within 24 hours, my house sold!

Three years later, the same thing happened and one year after that I did it again. 

St. Joseph Home Sale Kit

Now I’m hoping that this fourth time will be the charm.  Each time I’ve moved I’ve dug up the statue, cleaned it and put it in a “place of honor” in my new home.  I have a friend who wanted to borrow my statue because it obviously was a very lucky one.  I don’t know.  It has been 18 hours since I put up the sign, and I haven’t had a single phone call.

Two weeks ago, while my daughter and her family were at the beach on vacation, Sweet Stuff (5 years old) fell and broke her nose.  She wasn’t running, she wasn’t even on the beach.  She was just playing with Sunshine in the condo and was walking from one room to another.  She tripped, and took the brunt of the fall with her  nose.  It hurt and it bled like crazy.  She cried and cried.  My daughter called their doctor here in Nashville who told them that nose breaks on young children are rarely serious and that usually there’s nothing to be done for them anyway.  So he advised them - as long as she seemed to be able to breathe all right - to wait till they got home from vacation and then let him look at it.

A week later when they were back home, my daughter took Sweet Stuff in for him to check.  He started out by telling her how conservative (medically speaking) he is and that it was likely nothing to be concerned about.  Then he felt Sweet Stuff’s nose.  He turned back to my daughter and said, “Forget everything I just said.  She needs to see an ENT immediately.” 

Fifteen minutes later (truly - no exaggeration) they were in the ENT’s office who said it was a “severe pyramidal (??) fracture” and that it needed to be realigned because it would end up making her nose terribly crooked as she got older and would probably cause breathing problems as well.  However, they couldn’t fit her in the schedule that week.

So this morning at 6 A.M., she went to the hospital.  Since she’s so young, they will put her to sleep for the procedure.  I’ve been anxiously waiting for word from them for the past few hours.  It is probably over by now, and I’ll give them about 10 more minutes, and then I’m calling my daughter.

One thing I’ve learned the past five years:  I always knew I would love my grandchildren, but I never dreamed how MUCH I would absolutely adore and cherish them.  Sweet Stuff and Sunshine are bright lights in my world.

NOTE:  9:00 a.m. (Central) The procedure is finished and they’re waking up Sweet Stuff now.  The doctor said it went well and that she will just have to be very careful not to bump her nose until it has a chance to heal.

Later Note: 10:00 a.m.  Sweet Stuff and her mommy are on their way home.  Apparently when they gave her the “loopy” drug before putting her to sleep, she entertained the entire pre-op room of Baptist Hospital with her singing.  She sang her ABC song and the Bumblebee song at the top of her lungs.  My daughter said everyone was about to die laughing.  The nurse said she was a wonderful patient and she wishes all her patients would be that good.  I’m glad the procedure is over - that it went well - and that Sweet Stuff will be home with her mother in a few minutes.  Whew!

The Good News:  The mouse traps work.

The Bad News:  The mouse traps caught THREE mice last night.  EWWWWWWWW!

The Good News:  There are no signs of mice anywhere in the house except that one bathroom where the birdseed (open bag - PawPaw should KNOW better) was stored.

The Bad News: The mouse traps caught THREE mice last night.  EWWWWWWWW!

I’m heading out to buy reinforcements (mouse traps - not mice).  War has been declared.

I put the “For Sale By Owner” sign in the front yard about 30 minutes ago, and my phone hasn’t started ringing yet.  Hmmmm.  Maybe I should check to be sure it’s still working.

Just read a news blurb about a National Guardsman, Peter Damon, who lost both arms in a Blackhawk helicopter accident in Iraq, who is suing Michael Moore.  He is asking:

for damages because of “loss of reputation, emotional distress, embarrassment, and personal humiliation,” according to the lawsuit filed in Suffolk Superior Court last week. Damon, 33, claims that Moore never asked for his consent to use a clip from an interview Damon did with NBC’s “Nightly News.”

In his interview with NBC, Damon was asked about a new painkiller the military was using on wounded veterans. He claims in his lawsuit that the way Moore used the film clip in “Fahrenheit 9/11″ - Moore’s scathing 2004 documentary criticizing the Bush administration and the war in Iraq - makes him appear to “voice a complaint about the war effort” when he was actually complaining about “the excruciating type of pain” that comes with the injury he suffered.

“The work creates a substantially fictionalized and falsified implication as a wounded serviceman who was left behind when Plaintiff was not left behind but supported, financially and emotionally, by the active assistance of the President, the United States and his family, friends, acquaintances and community,” Damon says in his lawsuit.

I was wondering when Michael Moore would finally be exposed as a fraud.

Others writing on this topic:  Hot Air, Sister Toldjah, My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, Blue Star Chronicles

 Thirteen Reasons I Love My Computer

1. Email - such an easy way to keep in touch with friends, family, business associates

2. Blogging - great for venting and sharing. .  . well, and sometimes to just ramble

3. Reading the latest news

4. Looking for directions on MapQuest

5. Online resources such as a dictionary, encyclopedia - so much faster than looking things up in a book

6. Weather information - perfect for planning activities

7. Playing “Tripeaks” occasionally - mindless entertainment, but nice every once in awhile

8. Reading other blogs - I always find such interesting and thought-provoking things in other blogs!

9. Playing Battle of the Blogs at BlogExplosion - I lose a lot, but I keep plugging away

10. Shopping - I probably do at least 75% of my shopping online

11. Banking - Paying bills, switching money around from one account to another

12. Checking stock quotes - very up-to-the-minute information

13. Word Processing - I use that almost every day - especially during the school year


If you read one of yesterday’s posts, you’ll see that I wrote about birds on the bird feeder outside PawPaw’s house.  And what is necessary to maintain a often-frequented bird feeder?  Bird seed.  What other animals, besides birds, enjoy bird seed.  If you thought, “mice,” then you are correct in this instance.  Mice in the bird seed.  Of course PawPaw is rather careless with his bird seed.  He has the bag on the floor of a bathroom that is seldom used, the top of the bag is not closed, and there is bird seed spilled on the floor.  He may as well have sent the mice an engraved invitation.

 This morning he heard the “sqeak, squeak, squeak” of a mouse (or mice) in the aforementioned bathroom, along with the sounds of little scurrying paws.

He brought his cat inside, but that didn’t help.  He left at 5:30 to fly to Indiana for the day on business.  My mission today, if I choose to accept it - and I do - is to buy glue traps and D-Con.  I had planned on spending part of the day at PawPaw’s.  However, the mouse changed my mind.  I have no desire to spend a day in a house with a mouse.  I’ll deliver/set-up the various mouse-entrapments - and then I’m getting the heck out of Dodge.