Fun with Fruitcake

Our family has a thing for fruitcake. No, no fruitcake has actually been consumed in the telling of this story, but we have a fondness for fruitcake that borders on a fetish. Some people would be embarrassed to admit this. I, however, figure that anyone reading this post already knows that my family is filled with fruitcakes anyway.

For those of you who don't know the story, I'll give you the abbreviated version. One year for Christmas my sister sent my younger brother a fruitcake. Not actually wanting to digest said item, he proceeded to send it back the next year. Long story short, this fruitcake has been making the rounds for several years with added embellishments along the way such as a card and a t-shirt. As happens with most jokes, this one is probably taking on a life of its own. No, not probably. It is taking on a life of its own.

This year, I have been double timed on the fruit cake front. Today, in the mail, my husband and I received a completely inedible fruitcake from my sister and her family. We think there may have been some violation of the fruitcake laws as rules clearly state that the receiver must be in possession of the fruitcake by Christmas day in order to be responsible for it for the upcoming year. However, we'll be good sports and consider this bending of the rules as a little leeway to bend them next year.

The second fruitcake came from my brother and is one of the original fruitcakes. Along with it were the card and the tshirt. The down and dirty part was that this fruitcake and paraphernalia were disguised as a gift for my baby boy. As such, we sent the following picture to let him know that Gabriel was putting his gift to good use:
I was laughing so hard as my son lay on the changing table that I almost didn't get the picture. I started to promise him that I would never include him in our lunacy again, but then I realized that that was a blatant lie. After all, he was born into the insanity that is our family, he might as well get used to it now.

And that my friends, is the story of a fruitcake. Quite frankly, I am not sure you're supposed to have this much fun with a doorstop of a confection.

A Slackard for a Mom

Someone mentioned to me recently that I've been negligent in posting Baby Button pictures to my blog. I also promised my sister that I would share pictures of him in his lovely outfits she sent him as soon as I had the chance. I'm going to take the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone and post pictures of him in his outfits. Maybe not every day, but attempt to do so a little more often.

This one just seemed appropriate for today. The outfit didn't come from my sister, it came from my friend Rachelle, but I thought he looked adorable sitting under the Christmas tree looking at his presents.

Merry Christmas!

An Organ and a Kia

This isn't really my story to tell, but some things in life are so funny that you have to share. Hopefully I'll get the basic narrative correct, but you'll have to pardon me for any oversights.

My mother had a Hammond Organ. Those of you who are familiar with the instrument know that it's not very large, as in the way of church organs, but it's still an organ and a fairly heavy instrument. It's been sitting in her living room for quite a few years now and she's been asking around to see if anyone is interested. No takers. Finally she decided to list it on Freecycle. (I think that's the correct site. Can't keep all of them straight these days.) About three weeks went by and she heard nothing. As it turned out this wasn't technically correct as apparently people had been emailing but the emails were going into the junk box somewhere. In the interim, one persistent gentleman called stating that he wanted the organ and wasn't sure if it was still available. After some basic discussion, they set up a date and time to come get the instrument.


Fortunately it was one of those days when my brother didn't have much else to do. The gentleman got lost about two or three times on the way to the house. When he finally did show up it was about four o'clock in the afternoon and he pulls up in a Kia. My brother looks around thinking he has a truck or something stashed up the street. Nope, he plans to load the instrument into the Kia. He tells my brother that they'll be able to fit it into his car. Dan looks and says, um, no you won't. The guy insists that they've fit larger items into the vehicle. Deciding to humor the guy they begin trying to shove the organ in the trunk. When that didn't work, they put down the back seat and give it another go. Eventually they opt for shoving it into the backseat ... also unsuccessfully. By this time, I can just imagine what the neighbors were thinking as they tried to shove this thing into the car several different ways.

Finally, the guy looks at Dan and says, "guess we're going to have to roof it." Dan turns around to look at him incredulously and sees that his wife is already crawling on the roof to try it out. She comments on the fact that the roof is buckling a bit under her weight and she's not sure if it will take the organ. The guy replies that the organ weighs less than her and it will be fine. I don't know about anyone else, but I can't imagine how frosty things would be in the car on the way home if my husband dared to state that I weighed more than an organ. Pretty gutsy. Being resigned to the fact that this guy was going to drive away with this organ, and being prepared to leave it at the curb if he didn't, Dan and this rather scrawny fellow begin hoisting it onto the roof while his wife shouts instructions about not scratching up the paint. Dan, at this point, is trying to avoid throwing something out and she's worried about scratching the paint. Sure enough, though, they get the organ up there, strapped on and the guy prepares to drive away. With amazing presence of mind, Dan dashed into the house and grabbed this picture before he drove away. Some things just have to be seen to be believed.

Getting Lost in Sicily

Being able to explore Sicily is one of the great advantages of living here. I must admit, though, I find the driving over here just a bit scary. Most of the rules here seem to be more suggestions rather than hard and fast rules. I have seen my husband try some crazy stunts on the road since we've been here. The scary part is that no one bats an eyelash. The other day we were driving down the road and I saw him pass two cars at one time. Once we got back into our appropriate lane, I realized that another car was heading straight at us in our lane. The funny part is that I didn't even blink. It's then I realized I've been here for too long. Point being is that to get along around here you have to just get used to the way traffic goes. And to get around you have to be willing to get lost a little.

Ben and I finally developed a theory on getting lost here. It was sometime after our trip to Erice which is on the west coast of Sicily. We drove there with some friends and it took about three hours by car. After that we figured the most we could get lost in any direction was three hours. At that point we'd hit the coast and we could just turn around and come back. Took a lot of the fear out of getting lost. What I didn't count on was the date factor ...

Now, one of the interesting things about getting lost around here is that there are no clear indicators of north, east, south or west. You're also not sure where you are in relative distance to any one given landmark. In other words, if you see a sign post pointing towards a specific town, you don't know if you're 64 km or 3 km away from said town. If you're 64 km then you probably want to head towards that town if you're 3 you may not want to be heading there any more. Since you also have no idea which direction you're heading, it could be relatively confusing unless you're intimately familiar with every bit of flora and fauna on the Sicilian country side.

That being said, you can imagine my consternation when I was coming home with my sister one afternoon and missed the exit we wanted to take. I was so busy paying attention to the traffic (see earlier paragraph about Sicilian driving) that I had not realized it until I was a town or two beyond. The problem with this is that once I hit this town, unbeknownst to me beforehand, the tangenziale came to a sudden and abrupt end. This caused a bit of an issue as there was no discernible spot to turn around. I was quite proud of myself and my copilot as neither of us panicked.

Unfortunately, I was supposed to be home for a date with my husband (my very generous sister was offering to babysit) and we were already running late. Fortunately we saw some of those signs saying this town this way. I know we always head towards that town coming home from the airport, so it seemed like a safe bet. Until we were driving out in the middle of the country with nothing looking like civilization in sight. Still, we were heading that way, might as well keep going. After following the markers for this town for a good 15 to 20 minutes we finally hit another pair of sign posts at a traffic circle. It seemed like we had headed in this direction long enough and it was time to change our heading, so we did. Imagine our surprise when we headed in that direction and it turned out we were 2 kilometers from home.

My lessons for the day were this ...
1) The don't panic theory is always correct
2) We were right, you can't get too lost in Sicily
3) Keep number two in mind as long as you have no where specific to be. If you do have to be somewhere, make sure you don't miss your exit.

Now the sad part to the ending of this story is that we raced around like mad, zipped over to the movie theatre, made it there just in the nick of time ... only to find out that they had never received the movie we wanted to see. Isn't that just my luck? Our hot date became dinner and grocery shopping. Ahh, yes ... what I have learned from my sister.

Circle of Friends

Andrea over at Arise 2 Write sent me this award. This is probably way bigger than need be, but hopefully I at least got it up there this time. That's a work in progress for me. I'm supposed to share 5 things I truly love to do, which is very hard to limit to five! I'll do my best to whittle it down to my top five:

1) Spend time with family and friends. There's nothing like people and those wonderful memories from life.
2) Read a good book. Or several good books.
3) Spend time playing on the beach or just watching the waves. (Rather a strange one for someone who can't swim.)
4) Paint, scrapbook, make cards, color in a coloring book ... Basically any vent for my creative side.
5) Travel. I love seeing new places just not getting from Point A to Point B.

Now to pass this along ... Well, there's only a select group of you who read my blog, so I pass this award along to all 10 of you.

Feeling Creative

A friend of mine here is having a baby soon. Just so you know, this happens fairly often around here. They say there aren't a lot of babies born in this hospital. However, I think if you looked at the number of babies born compared to the size of the population it would come out to a rather large percentage of people having babies. But I digress.

The friend of mine who is having a baby is being thrown a baby shower today. There are also an awful lot of these. (See above for digression.) I wanted to do something a little different for her baby shower present, and she had been asking for a painting for a while, so I killed two birds with one stone. Her theme for her nursery is a jungle theme so I painted her a jungle picture.

It's nice to be able to sit and paint for a short while (even if it's not my concepts). It's one of the few things that I do that doesn't have to be perfect. Probably also why I rarely give a painting to anyone else. If we were looking at Maslow's hierarchy, this is probably the closest I ever come to self-actualization. I can sit down to paint for just a few minutes and discover that an hour or two has passed before I realized it. This is one of those marvelous times in life when I get to do something for someone else and myself at the same time.

For Brianna

My lovely niece at By The Way blog has awarded me a Gorgeous Blogger Award. (Yes, I'm behind in responding to this.) I would post the little award thing here, but I'm not quite certain how to do that still. Sad part is, that I think this bright young lady told me how at one point in time and my brain lapsed. *sigh* If the Gorgeous part applies to me (hence me being the blogger) then I'm very flattered. If the Gorgeous part applies more to the blog itself, then I owe all the credit to Brianna. Which makes it rather funny. In either case, I am supposed to post "six things about myself that no one knows." Does this go along with posting your biggest secret on the WWW? In any case, I'll give a good shot at listing six things about myself that are worth sharing at all ...

1) Most of the women out there would probably think me strange, but I'm really not a huge fan of sweets or chocolate. In fact, it was one of the strange things during my pregnancy because I wanted ice cream almost every night.

2) I could spend an entire day curled up reading one good book after another and be perfectly content in my little world.

3) My husband and I have driven across country three times together; we talk about driving across again and incorporating some stops along the way.

4) So far in my life I have managed to see quite a few countries in the world. Somehow I have managed to miss the areas closer to home such as Alaska, Hawaii and Canada.

5) It took me until just a few years ago to finish my Master's degree. Now that I have it finished I dream about going back to school to do something more artistically inclined such as cooking or interior decorating.

6) I have 16 nieces and nephews at this point in life. It always seems to take people a moment to digest that half of those are from one sister.

Now to pass it along ... Well, I give this award to my Canuck Friend Heidi. Hopefully she's reading this and gets the award ... or at least reading a little more than I am these days.