2012 Countdown with Mother

The conversation with Mom did not go as planned which isn’t surprising since nothing ever seems to work out that way.  My mother just thinks that I am a “good girl” and then she gets tears in her eyes so I hurry to talk about something else.  I had great plans to think hard on my personality but found it boring with the possibility of becoming too time consuming so I let it go.

       How’s that for self analysis? 

       Instead we talked about the end of the year with anticipation since tonight we wind up Downton Abbey Season 2 and look forward to next Sunday’s premier of Season 3.  We are also working out the new diet program which Mom is promising to keep me on track.  She has actually read my book with all the instructions which bodes well as last spring she was simply not on board with reading through all my Weight Watchers’ manuals.  She has already been monitoring my work on the treadmill and has even marched alongside while I did my workout (for about 2 minutes).  The spirit is there even if the body is weak.

       What else did we do yesterday?  Well Mom has been reading her detective novel and even lay in bed most of the morning doing so while I worked away on my writing.  After lunch we watched Clint Eastwood’s latest film “Trouble with the Curve” in which he plays yet another cranky old man.  I said to Mom that the daughter should just do what I do, hit him over the head with a virtual hammer and make him do what she says!  What’s with these giver-uppers anyway?  It’s like on Y&R, Adam must have walked out that door after a brief talk / argument with Chelsea twice per episode over the last 3 months and both of us look at each other and say “who does that”?  Not in this family anyway, we like a good argument and can keep at it for hours.  This walking away when someone doesn’t listen the first time is very ineffective and I say if you are going to argue at least be engaged in the argument, for Pete’s sake!

       Anyway that was the afternoon before I went out to test the weather (which was a lot colder than I anticipated).  I walked around the acreage and looked at the various animal footprints and tried to analyze them (oh, during lunch I was watching Darwin’s Origin of Species so I was all into nature) with poor success.  I saw again those huge claw marks but as they didn’t seem to have a natural start or stop I wondered if they were something besides claws?  I also found a lot of different patches of raised earth and grasses and presumed that I would have new molehills showing up in the spring.  I tried to pull a dead branch out of a forked branch but still no luck – it’s now been hanging there for 2 years.  I think we are going to have to pull the truck around to yank it out.  Back in the house we thought that perhaps tomorrow we would go for a camera walk, batteries charged and ready to take more nature pictures.  After all, tomorrow is another day.

Top picture is me at Bergen, Norway