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It’s scary when you start acting like your parents. Just ask Mugs! Anyway, while Mama was amazingly gifted and creative, she was also extremely forgetful and incredibly disorganized. She could lose a set of car keys faster than anyone else I’ve ever met. Unfortunately, every so often, I display flashes of this talent of forgetfulness.

As I mentioned previously, I’m reworking my routines now that I’ve moved to FOB Marez. Another item in my weekly schedule is laundry. In our compound, we have our own laundry trailer. At the old site, we had 4 washers and dryers. One of the washers was known for leaving rust stains on every article of clothing washed in it. I only learned that bit of trivia after washing a load of my underwear in that machine. When I commented to Curt that all of my underwear got stained in the wash, he said “Oh yeah, you must have used that one machine on the left hand side. It stains everything.” With 3 good washers and 4 dryers, the machines were in constant demand. If you left your load in for too long, it was quickly removed from the machine. In our new site, we have a brand new laundry trailer with 10 new washers and dryers. Currently, supply exceeds demand.

Yesterday afternoon, when I went for my run, I noticed I was using my last clean pair of PT shorts. This reminded me that I needed to do my weekly laundry on Saturday, today. So after lunch today, I shoved my bath towel into the laundry bag with my week’s worth of dirty clothes, pulled the sheets off the bed, and headed next door to the laundry trailer. I found 3 open washers next to each other, one for darks, one for lights, and one for uniforms. I hope Mugs is impressed that I separate! After loading the darks, I realized that the only PT shorts were the ones I wore the previous day.

I searched every inch of my trailer for the other 4 pairs of PT shorts I knew I had. It’s hard to hide much in a 12 ft x 20 ft room. I finally decided that someone had walked into my trailer and helped themselves to my PT shorts. I know, sounds a bit crazy. The only other possibility is that I left them in the laundry room the previous week. But since I had worn PT shorts to run a few other times this week, that really wasn’t possible. I went back to the laundry trailer to check anyway, just in case. No luck. Then for some reason, I opened a dryer and looked inside and found a load of my laundry with 4 pairs of PT shorts in it. Then I remembered that I had washed my laundry just a couple of days ago, because I forgot to last Saturday. I had left the load of darks in the dryer, and because we have more than enough machines right now, no one took them out to use the machine!

Scary, isn’t it?

I had a surprise visitor at MAO today. Just last night, Mugs asked if I had run into anyone else that I knew. At that point, I hadn’t. Then this morning, a familiar face walked into my office, LTC Chris Johnson.

The Manry and Johnson families were duplex neighbors when we were back at West Point. Chris was the Commandant’s XO while I was teaching. Now he’s an Infantry Battalion Commander. I know he’s probably wondering why he always has the hard jobs, while I have the nice, cushy jobs!

My Mother, detecting my sadness as Christmas minus Dale approaches, asked me if there was anything she could do.  “Yes,” I said, “send some chocolates.”  There are certain candies that are a unique part of every family’s Christmas.  We grew up recieving the yearly paper sack filled with an apple, orange, peanuts, and hard candy.  Most years, we shared a box of delicious Cane Lakes Sponge Candy.  Each year I most looked forward to a gift from Jean Demos, a friend of my parents who worked for Fannie May candy in Chicago.  She would send us a box of chocolates.  I’ve been to Switzerland and Belgium and eaten at a fancy chocolate shop in Melbourne, but there is something about a box of Fannie May that always makes me smile.  While my Mom was here for Thanksgiving, I was in the grocery store trying to decide between a box of chocolate from Russell Stovers or Whitmans.  My Mom said to get the Russell Stovers.  I replied that she had always bought Whitmans.  She said that was my Father’s favorite not hers.  Her Mother had always eaten Russell Stovers and she liked it better.  It’s only taken her 65 years to admit it.  When the box of Fannie May chocolates arrived, Zeke helped me open it and then ran through the house yelling, “Everyone! Chocolates!”  There was a thunder of feet behind him.  Zeke grabbed the white chocolate covered truffle and liked it so much, he went to take the other.  Gabe happily ate the lemon filled chocoate and Abby, Josiah, and I divided out the caramels.  Dale wasn’t here, so I ate his milk chocolate covered caramel for him.  The traditional Manry candy is Peanut Butter Fudge and I am quite certain that is what my husband is missing most.  His Mama used to pour out the Peanut Butter Fudge on to two buttered plates, one for the kids and one for Dale’s Daddy.  After Dale joined the Army, he came home on leave and discovered that he was now given the honor of a plate of Peanut Butter Fudge to himself.  Boy did Tommy John complain about that injustice.  Now that we are married, our kids combine his love of peanut butter and my love of chocolate every time they eat their pancakes.  Genetics is funny that way.

The chimney sweep arrived yesterday to insure I wouldn’t burn down the house. My brother-in-law, Rich claims that if you burn your fire really hot, you don’t ever need to clean the chimney. I’m quite certain that this philosophy works well for Rich, but I figured I better not chance it. The chimney sweep cleaned the chimney and the stove, put a cap on the chimney and closed the downstairs damper. He had to sell me on the need for a cap, so he kindly explained all the reasons why I should have one (birds, rain, dead animals). I think it was the dead animals that convinced me. (I wonder how Santa will get past the cap.) I tried to pretend I knew all about chimneys, just like I know all about pellet stoves. It’s easy to pretend when I keep my mouth shut and don’t ask questions like…”Why do you need a damper? How do you know if the damper’s open or closed?” Some things are best googled, but then google keeps forever track of your ignorance. Now my chimney is cleaned to go along with my clean gutters. A few weeks ago, I was laying flat on the roof of the sunroom pulling debris from the gutters. Josiah looked out the upstairs window at me and said, “They should have a show called extreme cleaning.” I used a ladder to clean the gutters on the front of the house and for the gutter in between the sunroom and the garage, I hung out of my upstairs window with a broom. The back of the garage thwarted me, however. Either I or the ladder was a foot too short. You can keep your opinion on that to yourself. I could have climbed up onto the garage roof from the front and walked over the peak to the back, but the garage roof is a bit steeper than the sunroom roof. I stood on the ladder thinking about it for a few moments while images of me falling off the roof filled my head. In the end, I decided a clogged gutter wasn’t worth a broken leg. It had been a bit of a chore for Josiah and I to drag the ladder through the hedge at the front of the house for gutter cleaning, so I decided to cheat on the Christmas lights. Gabe and I wrapped the lights around the porch rail instead of hanging them from the gutters. I am quite certain that next year that will not be an acceptable option for my dear husband. He so loves to hang Christmas lights. They put him in such a Holly Jolly mood. The kids and I also managed to bring a tree home and set it up. It’s amazing how good a tree looks when you can hang ornaments on the lower half. Between babies and cats, you forget what a fully decorated tree looks like. So, I’m almost ready for Christmas. My brother, Mike and his family will soon be arriving to spend Christmas with us. He claims that it is ok to just turn the rugs over for them. So, although my house may be a complete mess, I’ll have a clean chimney and almost all clean gutters to show him. I’m really looking forward to spending time with my brother Mike. It’s always nice to have family visit, especially when they happen to be a foot taller than me.

Mugs sent this picture in a recent care package. It’s such a great photo, so I wanted to share it with everyone.