Visiting the Family
What a great visit.
On Monday, I went to pick up the kids (mine) from my ex-mother-in-law in Ontario, Oregon, a few miles from Grandma’s house. We ate lunch and returned to Payette to hang out. I brought an extra laptop, my retiring iBook, to give to them, so we worked on cleaning that off a little bit. After a while, my sister brought her three rambunctious daughters over to play. Wow, kids are loud.
On Tuesday, my Grandmother, my kids, and I jumped into my rental car and headed into the deep country of Eastern Oregon to go pick up my brother’s son so that all the cousins could hang out. My nieces showed up again after we’d returned home and, for the first time in a while, all six of the kids were raising hell in Grandma’s house. Six kids between 6 and 12 years old. They were really loud. I am really really old. Heh.
Tuesday night, my sister took her daughters over to their grandparents house and, of course, my daughter, who doesn’t get to see her cousins very often, wanted to go along and spend the night. So, I had the two boys (my son and my nephew) to hang out with. We played with the computers and ate pizza.
I pressed the boys into service on Wednesday, digging through my still-mostly-full storage box full of junk I left in Idaho 6½ years ago, when I moved to California. I started tossing books out while the boys loaded them into boxes. Before too much longer, we had five large boxes of books full. We loaded them into my rental car, headed to Grandma’s for a quick snack, and made a bee-line for the local public library.
I have two books out from Menlo Park’s library. I kept two books from Sunnyvale’s library overdue three months. I felt my soul needed to make amends (not really, but it sounds funny). In the years that I checked out books from Payette’s library, I never returned anything more than a week late. We were all afraid of the head librarian, who frequently was a substitute teacher at our school.
The two boys and I borrowed their furniture dolly and donated about 200 pounds of books on all kinds of subjects. There were weird astrology books (from when I was into that bullshit). There were language manuals in Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Gaelic, German, Greek (ancient and modern), Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Sanskrit, Spanish, Thai, and Turkish. There were old science fiction paperbacks, books about mythology, college textbooks, and all kinds of stuff. Hopefully, the library gets some good use out of it.
On Wednesday night, we bade farewell to my brother’s son and my friend, Jay, came over again as I finished up cleaning up my children’s new laptop. Jay and I worked on some music, him on the iBook, me on my PowerBook. Then, he started out a breakbeat track, handed the computer over to my son and said, “Okay, man. When I see you over Christmas, I want to hear what you’ve done with it. We’re collaborators now.”
Right on, Jay.
What a great visit with lots of kids, long conversations with Grandma about everything while the kids were tearing up the world outside, and lots of pizza. I’m looking forward to my Christmas trip.
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