The next Grilled Grandma

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It's the Thanksgiving edition of Grilled Grandmas, featuring a fellow blogging grandma whom I'm so thankful to have met in this massive blogosphere: Nina.

She plays Rock Band and is wise in all things tech, which makes Nina one of the coolest grandmas I know.

Now I'd like you to get to know her. Meet Nina, our next Grilled Grandma, here.

If you know of a grandma you'd like to share with the rest of us, contact me here with her first name and e-mail address, and I'll set her up for a grilling.

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Thanksgiving puzzle

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Preparing for Thanksgiving often feels like piecing together a puzzle: making the location fit with the friends and family, the menu fit with tastes and traditions, the green bean casserole fit in the oven with the turkey.

For me, Thanksgiving not only feels like the piecing together of a puzzle, it includes a puzzle.

Let me give you a little background.

When my girls were teens, it was hell -- as the mother of any teen girl will tell you -- to get them to verbalize why they were so frustrated, angry, stressed and hateful so much of the time. Being a girl myself, I know that the teen years just plain suck and the hormones and boys and friends and enemies do a number on an otherwise normal kid's psyche. But I wanted them to talk to me about it.

So I did things to try to encourage conversation. I continued the practice I'd started with them when they were elementary-school age of sharing a private blank book with each one, for filling with thoughts and concerns -- good and bad -- and placing under each other's pillow for reading and responding. Sometimes it's easier to write about things than to say them out loud. For both sides. (I still have -- and cherish -- those books.)

I also came up with the idea of having a puzzle set up on a card table and in the works, in hopes the girls would piece it together with me and spill tiny portions of their guts while we were engrossed in the task, heads down and not looking one another in the eye. I'd read that side-by-side activities (such as riding in the car) provide opportunities for honest conversation more so than flat out "We need to talk" interrogations. Plus, I remembered puzzle-work being the setting for many honest conversations -- and a saving grace regarding the working out of some intense teen feelings of my own -- while living with a friend's family during the second semester of my junior year of high school.

No earth-shattering revelations ever came from the girls during the times one or another would take a seat by me to find a piece or two in the puzzle. But I enjoyed the camaraderie of working on a common goal together at a time when they really didn't like their mom too much (which, as I now understand, is pretty typical of teen girls but was heartbreaking then).

The last puzzle I'd set up in hopes of clearing the air with one of my daughters was one called Catmania. Andrea loved cats and I thought it would be the perfect way to draw out my baby girl. As was the tradition, we each signed and dated the inside of the lid upon starting the puzzle. But it quickly proved to be too hard. We lost interest and I, in my perfect-mother tone, said "Screw it!" I rolled up the crazy cat puzzle (on one of those nifty green felt puzzle keeper thingees) and I bought a Christmas puzzle to do instead.

From that point on, it became a low-level tradition (truly not one of our "must-haves") to begin a holiday puzzle around Thanksgiving with the goal of completing it by Christmas. It was the only time we had a puzzle table set up, and everyone in the family took turns now and then, as schedules allowed, to fit in a piece here and there.

We did that for several years. Except in 2007, the year we moved into our new house, because we closed on the house the week before Thanksgiving and puzzle work was not even considered. And I didn't set up a puzzle in 2008. I was in the throes of being outsourced from my job and I didn't feel like working on a puzzle when I was having a heck of a time keeping the pieces of my life in place.

But this year, I decided we need to have a puzzle to work on. But I told myself I absolutely could not start a holiday puzzle until completing the Catmania one Andrea and I had left unfinished. So I unrolled the green puzzle keeper thingee and opened the box of remaining pieces. Sheesh! The lid was marked with my signature and Andie's and dated November 2002! How could I have left a puzzle sitting for SEVEN YEARS!?

So I've been working on it for a couple weeks now. Brianna's helped a bit here and there, and we're down to just DAYS before Thanksgiving. I gotta get it done so I can begin my Christmas puzzle! Here's what it looks like this morning:

Luckily Andie will be home for the holiday beginning tomorrow night ... and she'll be helping me put the last few pieces in place -- which is fitting, considering she and I started the darn thing together.

So despite the two million and sixteen things I need to be doing right now, I'm determined to get the Catmania creation done and out of here. I've had the holiday puzzle bought for a couple weeks now, and I'm pretty excited to get it started. Here's a glimpse of this year's puzzle venture:

(Those of you who have been to my house might agree that it bears a weird resemblance to my living room -- minus all the cozy, cloying charm in the picture-perfect puzzle setting, of course).

I can't wait to crack open the box. Wish me luck in getting rid of those #@%! cats!

Schedules, stairs and sacrifice

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I'm a very schedule-oriented person. I do certain things at certain times, and I like to stay on track with those certain things at certain times.

One example of my anal, control-issues-on-parade behavior is that I write my daily post at the same time each morning. I allot myself one hour, from 7:30 to 8:30, to get it done, then use the few spare minutes left to read a post or two from other bloggers before moving on to my next scheduled item for the day (walking the dog).

I like to stay on track because as a basically unemployed person, if I don't create my own schedule, I fritter away the day and accomplish nothing. I like to accomplish things. Plus, I know there are a few readers of my blog who anxiously await my post each day and know when I post, and I don't want to disappoint them or throw off their schedules. (Hi, Mom!)

Well, my schedule is now out the window, thanks to a leg in a cast. Not my leg -- Jim's.

(First let me point out that this is not a bitch-session about Jim or his foot/leg/cast/situation. He feels sufficiently guilty about screwing up my schedule, and I'm honestly not writing this to make him feel worse. I just need to explain my schedule snafu -- in the true sense of what that word's an acronym for! -- for my sake, if no one else's. Kay, Jim? I love you, honey-bunny, sugar-snookums!)

So last Thursday, Jim had what we thought would be a minor procedure done on his foot. The out-patient surgery had been scheduled for quite some time. He had several visits with the doctor leading up to the procedure. He received reams of information. My primary part in the plan was that I'd accompany Jim for the procedure since he'd be, 1) on drugs after the surgery, and 2) unable to drive right afterwards since his right foot was the subject.

As we waited for his drugs to kick in, the nurse mentioned something about him being in a cast afterwards (which we knew) and on crutches (which we knew) for six weeks (which we didn't know!). Six weeks! Six weeks? Six weeks of me having to drive Jim to and from his new job? Somehow that little tidbit of information was lost on the way to preparing for this procedure.

(Note to wives/girlfriends/significant others: It's a good idea to attend doctor appointments with your partner if there's any chance his medical condition will have even the slightest impact on your life.)

Okay ... so six weeks of playing chauffeur and altering my blog-posting times (it'll be around 9:30, Mom, by the time you see my posts). I can handle that. I'll complain a little because my schedule will be disrupted, but I can handle that.

But there's so much more to the schedule disruption than just driving Jim here and there.

First of all, Jim has to keep his foot elevated for 10 days. Which means he pretty much does nothing but sit with his foot propped up. That's fine. I understand. I'll alter my schedule and do his chores -- vacuuming, dinner dishes, making the bed, scooping the dog poop -- in addition to mine. I'll bring him his laptop, his water, his cellphone, his snacks, his anything and everything he needs. Not that big of a deal. (Not yet, I should say. We're only on day four.)

The bigger deal is that, as you may recall from this post, that we have lots of stairs in our house. Lots and lots and lots of stairs. Jim is unable to maneuver the majority of those stairs.

He can manage the stairs down to the family room. But he can't manage these stairs:

These are the stairs up to our bedroom. And to the bathroom Jim uses to take a shower. And to his office. And he won't be going up them for probably six weeks -- or at least a pretty good chunk of that. Which is fine with me, at this point, because I have an overwhelming phobia of my loved ones falling down stairs, and imagining Jim trying to conquer these stairs on crutches -- or even sans crutches -- zaps my brain a bit.

So we've set up his main command central in the family room, and he showers in the main floor bath. I pick out his clothes each day and bring them down the stairs for him. And I make a bed on the family room floor for him each night, so he can sleep with his foot propped up on the ottoman.

And I go upstairs to bed -- by myself -- each and every night. And that, people, is one of the weirder aspects of this in-sickness-and-in-health venture we're on.

I'm truly not one of those women who can't sleep without my husband in the bed. In fact, I sleep better when he's not there. Which happens quite often, actually, because Jim suffers crazy insomnia and typically roams the house for much of the night anyway.

But just knowing for a fact that Jim will not be coming to bed, that I'm the one shutting off all the lights and locking all the doors and hitting the sack in a dark and quiet house is weird. And uncomfortable. And unsettling.

And I have to do it for six weeks.

But I suppose I really do have the better end of the deal. How weird it must be for Jim to know he can't see his bedroom, his bathroom, his office -- all up those stairs -- for six weeks.

It's those stairs, in particular, that have us both hoping Jim's foot heals quickly and he's put into a "boot" sooner than expected. Well, the stairs and my screwed-up schedule.