Offroading with Mom...

Apologies for not posting at all yesterday - after a weekend of house rescue/fall cleaning, a full day of errands with Mom, and an epic fit of wheezing sneezies I was beyond out of it. Plus, until yesterday afternoon, all that had been going on was the aforementioned house rescue - I'm kind of enjoying it, but who wants to read about me reorganizing the kitchen drawers and our laundry closet? I was actually out of material.

But then yesterday afternoon's errands happened, when Mom became a trailblazer. No joke - we were pulling out of a drugstore parking lot and she jumped the curb and went with it. Mom's car is *huge*, so I suppose backing it down and off the curb would have been a nightmare (I certainly wouldn't have tried it), and the patch of road we were trying to get to was only a few feet away. And, you know, in this economy we can't be wasting fuel. So forward we went, across the land like that was what she had intended all along, right down a little incline that was just steep enough to make her huge car lurch about in amazing ways. We looked like regal bobbleheads - Mom's a champ at maintaining poise under pressure, and I do my best to imitate her. (In hindsight, I wish I had put my hands up like I was on a roller coaster and mimed dramatic screaming.)

The fun didn't stop once we made it to the pavement, oh, no. The car lurched and then, I swear it, rocked from side to side like it was doing a victory dance. Mom waited it out with perfect aplomb, pulled right into the lane she needed to be in, and got an Altoid. I lost all sense of how a lady behaves in public, laughing so hard I brayed like a donkey while somehow turning myself upside down in the passenger seat. That I was told to sit up right didn't help matters, and neither did the fact that I remembered turning upside down in my seat laughing at a movie my parents took me to see when I was nine years old: "Smokey and the Bandit". (PLEASE tell me you get it, too.) By the time I recovered, my mascara had run, I'd gone wheezy, and dizziness had set in. The incident itself was amusing enough, but I almost passed out when I made that connection. "Eastbound and Down" has been stuck in my head ever since, doing a fine job of not helping matters.

Six hours later I was still laughing so much that that getting to sleep was difficult. I'm giggling about it now, enough to where writing this has been a challenge and I need to regroup before diving back into today's domestic hijinks. It'll be a long time before I can hear this song and not collapse.