Last Thursday I had my much-anticipated tear-filled goodbye at Rush hospital, and said goodbye to the staff who were all so kind and helped me so much, in so many ways, over the past nine and a half months. There were tears (not all shed by me!), there was cake, and people said some amazingly nice things to me. Who knew I would be missed so much there? It blows my mind when I find out that I had such a positive effect on people and didn’t know it. Mind = blown.
After that goodbye I spent four days with my parents, which is always a hoot. Observe:
The scene: the subway, 3pm. Mom is opining on the volume of creative beggars offering to hand out their resumes on the train and/or selling poetry, prose, drawings, or other crafts, and how we see so many more when my family is visiting than I do any other time.
Wife: My coworker had a wanker on the orange line last week.
Anne: Yeah, my friend had one yesterday on the blue line, during rush hour!
Mom: A winker? Someone was winking at her?
Anne: Yes, Mom. A very aggressive sort of…wink.
The scene: my living room, 8pm. Mom, Dad, Wife and I are playing Apples to Apples.
Anne: Okay, the descriptor is “Sexy”.
*family plays their noun cards face down*
Wife: *shuffles and lays out cards* Okay, for “sexy” we have…Napoleon Bonaparte, Rush Limbaugh, and…Judge Judy.
Anne: My family is broken. I want a new one.
Meanwhile, Ricky continues to believe he is human and is encouraged by the fact that he convinced my dad to pull a chair up for him. This is him waiting for us to deal his cards.
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The scene: anywhere in the apartment, any time of day, whenever Mom got bored and decided we weren’t listening to her chatter anymore.
Mom: Ricky! Ricky loves me, don’t you Ricky? You love Grandma-chocolate-breath. *continues talking in “kitty language”, which she invented*
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We also went to the taping of Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me!, ate dinner at Fogo de Chao (Bacon Wrapped Filet Mignon…I am not even kidding), had cinnamon rolls at Ann Sather, burgers at Hamburger Mary’s, fish and chips at the Emerald Loop, and ate many little Ghirardelli chocolate squares. I would say that I have a long week of exercising ahead of me to work off all that food, but I still have my foot in a cast and I’m supposed to stay off it. Alas, I shall have to just continue over-eating while there is nothing to be done about it. I will just have to content myself with the fact that I probably laughed hard enough to burn off at least a third of those calories just from watching my mom play Rock Band. Bonus calories were laughed off watching both her and my dad play Wii Fit.
And in cool-family-history news, Wife used her resources from a Chicago History class she took last summer to help track down the actual house where my Grandma Fisher was born in December of 1923. We took a drive down there (Mom: Hey! There are a lot of young men gathered in that park and on the street corners! Anne: Please keep your voice down. Please do not get us shot.) The neighborhood wasn’t great when my Grandma lived there, but it is worse now. Fortunately the only shooting was a few pictures of the house, for posterity sake. (That is my Dad, walking towards me in the picture.)
All in all, it was a good weekend. We ate too much, laughed a lot, and didn’t get shot. I’ll call that a win. Now, who wants to come over and help me catch up on laundry? Anyone?
