Everybody Knows That a Burrow Owl Lives in a Hole in the Ground

Sweet heaven am I glad to be sleeping back in my own bed, and in my own house.

Wow, I don't remember Dallas/Ft. Worth being so dirty... there was garbage all over the sides of the highway and it was just down right filthy. A lot of the old neighborhoods are starting to become less desirous locales, and it made me sad to see a lot of businesses we frequented when I was young were gone and replaced by chain establishments. Entire fields of mesquite trees and cattle pens were now Best Buys and other big box stores.

I got to spend a great deal of time bonding with my sisters, and got to see a few members of the family I haven't seen in years. We had an overabundance of pie, ham & turkey - and my middle sister (who just turned 17) had an overabundance of tequila - but that's a whole different story.

We spent time out at my aunt's farm, and with my cousin Breanne, who just turned 4. She greatly enjoyed spending time with "her Michael" and he was teaching her how to fish with "loooowwwlllooooooores" (as she pronounced lures). When he caught around a five pound bass she ran up and told everyone in the house that "Michael caught a fish for me, just for me - not for you."

My sister taught Breanne to dance to the Black Eyed Peas song "My humps" and it made me thankful that we're going to live too far away for them to corrupt our child.

We visited with my mom - and I found out that she had a fallopian tube removed when she was only 16, and they told her that she would probably never had children. She laughed and said that she was glad they were wrong, and then got religious on me. That things will work out when it's right, to trust in God, yada yada yada. For the most part, I was stunned - as my mother is not a religious person. She asked if we had considered adoption, but not in the "just adopt" type assvice most people give.

I found out my stepmother tried for five years to get pregnant with my oldest sister, and then the middle girl came easily and the baby was quite a surprise as she was still nursing the middle child.

Of course, everyone else had all sorts of advice to give us ranging from accupuncture and full-body detoxification and green tea to "have you used an ovulation predictor kit?" and "you know you should have sex 14 days after your period starts" and all sorts of other helpful information. The most popular advice of all was that it would happen "when it's time" and that "God will make it happen when it's supposed to."

For the most part, things went relatively smoothly, but I have to say that I'm thankful for the Flying Saucer in downtown Ft. Worth, as we escaped there for drinks when I reached the point that I just couldn't hear anymore about Aunt so and so's new surgery. And I had forgotten how much I treasured Maredsous 10 (and 8 too for that matter - although only the 8 was on tap).

Visiting with the extended family helped to give us a good conversational starting point as to how we would discipline our children, what we would do if our underage kid got shitfaced, etc. etc. And considering we had a ten hour drive back, well, we had plenty to talk about.