Life in the Cheese Drawer

today my mom took charlie back up to regions hospital where they have his skull flap piece in frozen storage. yesterday he’d had the worst headache he’d ever had and nausea, so they went in to mayo, where they told him he had air on the brain. bad news. tomorrow they will get in his head and see what needs to be done about the air on the brain. 
so we’ve gone over charlie’s previous encounters with car accidents; let’s pause for a moment on previous head injuries. well, just one for now.
cha’s always hung out with people who are highly suggestive, and he is highly suggestible. in gradeschool at religion classes, it was nothing to see him and his friend dustin racing wheeled office chairs down the church halls. even now, it’s nothing to get him to try something a little questionable. last summer at a family reunion, his cousins (and brother-in-law…) got him to hitch himself to a tent fly and jump off a small hill during one of the windy evenings.
so when his gradeschool friends brought up the idea of flying headfirst into a wall on one of those roller scooters everyone’s used in gym class, he was all over that.
thankfully, someone had the foresight to make him put on a helmet. 
so his friends rolled him toward the wall and he ran into it (with the helmet). next thing you know, he’s in the nurse’s office and mom has been called. after a visit to the doctor, turns out he definitely smashed a vertebrae. 
and to this day, we keep reminding him he could’ve been a half an inch taller. (or a baller. or had a girl who looked good; he would call her. a rabbit? a hat? a bat? a ’64 impala!)

i’m baffled that it’s almost december. in my head, it’s barely mid-october; my halloween was interrupted, and the weather sure isn’t helping. so now that thanksgiving is over the the department stores have decided it’s christmas time, i’m wondering how that even happened. 
on the plus side, the days start getting longer in a little less than a month, and shortly there after is actual christmas. maybe by then the weather will have settled into a colder pattern and there might be snow on the ground. (speaking of which, i need to figure out if my snowblower runs.)
i know where november went; i just wish my internal clock would catch up with the news. 
 
seasons wax and wane
bud to leaf to husk to sleep
it’s november yet
 

welp, liz is still contracting with no baby out yet. charlie is sleeping 18 hours a day. and we’re going to have thanksgiving on thanksgiving, i guess! we’ll see how jane and i do.
(i know we’ll do fine. i did thanksgiving on my own back in 2011. that may have been the easiest thanksgiving ever! i ate at the time i wanted to eat, took pictures along the way, and it was grand.)
tonight i made a pumpkin pecan tart for the first time ever. we’ll see if it was worth it to replace the pecan pie. then i decided to make two pumpkin pies for the heck of it.
why? cuz we like to eat (that’s why i run), and although life has thrown a lot of crap at us the past month, and i mean a lot (5 other things on top of cha), there’s still a TON to be grateful for. 
let’s spatchcock this turkey. BRING IT ON.

while charlie was in high school, i was out in the world working and dealing with crappy roommates and meeting nate and all that jazz. i wasn’t in new london and hearing everything that happened to charlie on a daily basis. 
oh sure, i heard the highlights. his friends drinking cough syrup and him abstaining (“i don’t need cough syrup to get my jollies”); his encounter with a girlfriend’s enraged father (i hear he barely made it out in his skivvies [heh, barely]); the summer from hell in colorado helping paul hardwick stripping wallpaper (…or something…). 
and then there were the cars. 
i think it all started with liz’s buick. (yes, liz had a buick. this is what happens when norm wallace decides to buy you a car: he buys you a car HE wants.) charlie crashed the buick, on an icy patch if i remember correctly. this turned out happy for liz because she got to put some money toward a car SHE wanted (a white mazda), but it started a chain of events that were undeniably weird.
then during the prom parade around green lake, charlie ran his buddy jimmy’s cadillac into the car in front of him. granted, they were only going like 15mph, but he still did some damage. 
and then there was the time he ran into a deer with the jimmy’s pizza owner’s van while delivering a pizza. (NOT technically his fault.)
after all that, my parents decided it was a good idea to buy him his own car for some reason (all their daughters had to wait until college to get a car). i had put a good amount of money into my chevy celebrity to fix the rack and pinion, but i was still looking to buy a new car. so dad bought my celebrity that i would have sold either way, and charlie got my old chev celeb. which he then ran into a light post in the local lutheran church parking lot.
and EVEN THEN, the parental units got him another car. (i dunno; at this point it may have been prudent to think about letting him ride with friends or suffer the indignity of driving the wallace safari van.) (also, there is something weird about this. it kind of irks me. but you can read about that here.)
the next car was a nifty little manual black mazda, sunroof, drove well, for $500. good little car! well, cha decided it was a good idea to race his buddy (jimmy again, i think) around green lake. along the northeast end, there was a holding pond next to a curve and an intersection. charlie had passengers, and took the curve too aggressively and ended up crashing the car into the pond. after many people looked at the crash site, they all agreed it was a complete act of god/higher power/allah/earth mother that they didn’t end up upside down and all drowning. 
that’s what it took. charlie didn’t get another car until after college. biking works. 
so you can see the complete irony here with his car accident. here’s hoping his next car will last him a very long time, and he’ll be able to sell it to some teenager when he’s ready to upgrade.

when it rains, it pours? 
so here’s what’s happened in the last 23 days.

1. charlie, obviously, is the huge one. now that he’s home, it’s weird looking back and thinking his entire ordeal so far has only been 23 days. unreal. 
2. my cousin on my dad’s side had been battle cancer for a long time, and they quit chemo last month. just two weeks ago she was given one-and-a-half to two weeks to live. she died last tuesday and her funeral was on friday.
3. liz is at the hospital as we speak ready to give birth to a kid. at least this one is a big positive!

so yeah. not quite sure why everything is happening right now. wow. at least we’re in the home stretch?

guest post by jane!
Living in Austin for the first 7 years of my life didn’t leave many memories. I have more memories of living in New London (and almost none from living in Spicer).