tidbits

so i haven't been very good about writing ANYTHING on this blog here. my brain is in temporary forget-mode. so i think i'll try writing some tidbits of memory...flashbacks, if you will (and i will).

i remember...



...my mother once calling me at a friends house, begging me to come home and wash the dishes that were piled up in the sink before my father got off work. she even offered me $20 to do it. i said no.

...always having to lose all of the games at my birthday parties. she said i'd have to if i wanted my friends to have a good time. i really did want one of the get-along gang magnets that were the prizes. years later, my friend had one of the magnets on here fridge at home. it was all i could do not to steal it.

...every friday night my parents would have my brother and i "race" to see who could clean their room the fastest. the winner would get to pick out the movie for the night and snuggle with dad in the fake leather recliner. the loser had to go to bed. i always won. but i always requested that paul get to watch the movie and sit in the recliner, too.

...i used to have the problem of not being able to finish the food on my plate. my dad's solution was this: if i didn't finish breakfast, i couldn't have lunch. or, if i didn't finish lunch, i couldn't have dinner. i don't know how long it took him to realize that he was essentially starving me and that was wrong.

...when my family was stationed in west germany we took a vacation to switzerland and france. in one of the hotels where we were staying there was a television, but it didn't get any channels where english was spoken. so we spent the entire evening watching this movie in french, with my dad making up an english narration for the story. it was about this old lady on a journey. she was searching for something. according to my dad, she was looking for toilet paper. she really had to go, but her village had run out of tp, and she was traveling from village to village in search of the good stuff.