Forwarding jokes and the like

Tags

appreciation, blogs, jokes, postaday2013, posts, writing

My blogging mentor and friend Tilly from The laughing housewife posted such a funny joke today. She posts jokes everyday which I am in awe of because you really have to do your homework to find a fresh joke every single day. Today’s joke at thelaughinghousewife.wordpress.com/2013/03/07/joke-714/ describes the trial and tribulations of AAADD or Age activate attention deficit disorder. I forwarded it to my mother and my sister. My sister called me but never mentioned the joke, she had bigger things on her mind, such as my niece home sick from school with a head cold. That kind of childhood illness is the roughest on the parent. Why you ask? Because a head cold is never severe enough to make the child want to spend the day in bed sleeping, they are too ill to go to school but not ill enough to not be easily bored in no time. My poor sister, my poor niece of course, she is miserable, but nevertheless I have more sympathy and empathy for my sister.

Now, my mother read the forwarded joke and boy did she get a kick out of it. She felt that at last she found the correct diagnosis for her own daily happenings at home. Since I found the joke so relatable, I knew that my mother would definitely find a commonality with it. There are days where I am exhausted without a single thing accomplished besides a lot of coming and going for no purpose to show for it. It feels good to laugh at one’s self. I excel at it. Hee, hee.

So after my mother and I had our laughs, my mother started talking about a potential trip that she wanted to plan for the future. She has for her bucket list, dreams of a trip down to the Amazon Basin visiting Brazil, Chile, Argentina and perhaps Peru. As we were talking about the logistics, we were encountering all sorts of memory lapses; we couldn’t remember the capital of Brazil or even the famous city where the beautiful people hang out. It was so sad. In our defense it was late in the afternoon, when our brains aren’t very fresh, so our geography was in fact very hazy. After I got off the phone, I went on Bing to see the map of South America to refresh my memory and I couldn’t believe that I had a memory blank on Rio de Janeiro and Brazelio, the capital. My mother remembered the city of Buenos Aires for Argentina which she was happy about, sad isn’t it? When we are happy to remember just one city in a country. Tilly’s joke was so apropos for our conversation today.

What were you doing that year?

Dig through your couch cushions, your purse, or the floor of your car and look at the year printed on the first coin you find. What were you doing that year?

Wow, I found out that soon I will need to go to the eye doctor for a vision test because my eyesight isn't was it used to be. It took me a few moments but I was finally able to decipher the year 2000 off the bright shiny penny that I had found on my hubby's dressing table.

The year 2000 was a good one. At it's inception everyone was relieved that the Y2K thing hadn't happened where all of the world's computers were going to crash and civilization as we knew would cease to exist. In other news I spent a few serious weeks planning an epic trip for myself, the babies and my mother-in-law overseas that summer.

I think that I had scared my mother-in-law with my stories of backpacking through southern Europe with my little sister because she gave me a list of demands before going; the first was no second class anything and the second no shlepping luggage anywhere. There were other demands but I forget them now, those first two were ingrained in my head. The trip later came to include my mother-in-law's childhood friend, who turned out to be such an easy-going, lovely traveling companion and kept my mother-in-law occupied, and my hubby.

I have to say that this was still before the high speed efficiency of DSL so I am still proud of how well the whole trip turned out, not one hiccup and every single place that I had booked, whether it be the hotel or the method of transport, passed my mother-in-law's standards. If any of you ever watched the sitcom "Everybody loves Raymond" my mother-in-law was the carbon copy of Raymond's mother Marie and I was her Debra. My hubby stood up to his mother when it was necessary, but no one can change a person like my mother-in-law or the character of Marie. They just don't get it and moreover they can dish out all of the critiques and barbs in the name of honesty, but they cannot take it if you do it to them.

That trip got me back into smoking big time, I had stopped for quite a while but between being with my mother-in-law for weeks on end and being in France where everyone smokes, I weakened and started again. It doesn't take much to get a former smoker who isn't happy to start again, thankfully I have learned how to channel my stress and unhappiness towards other things such as writing on my blog everyday. I didn't know that then.

I do know that my babies loved that trip, they visited Paris, Bordeaux, the seaside near Bordeaux, we even went to London and they traveled well for two little ones. I on the other hand came home exhausted but happy because in all the traveling, I had put aside time to visit with my family and that was wonderful. It was also funny because they didn't quite know what to make of my mother-in-law because she never changed her ways, no matter where she was so in certain situations, it was quite funny.

One of my favorite hotels during that trip was Le Crillion in Paris at the Place de la Concorde. I left my mother-in-law and her friend, they didn't want to come with us while we went to meet my cousins, at the Hotel on the 14th of July, Bastille Day, They didn't mind because even though all the surrounding streets were cordoned off for the Grand Parade, at the Hotel they were still able to sit and have a nice lunch. They were even invited by the President of France to dine with him and his party. That is what she told me, but she kept referring to the President as De Gaulle. The President at the time was Jacques Chirac who was very tall like De Gaulle, but still not De Gaulle. I wondered just how much wine she had had with lunch. Good times, I tell you.

That was the year 2000 for me in a nutshell.