Oh, be proud of him ['cause after all, he's just a man...]

In the last 13 years, I've had four jobs. Four jobs where I sit at a nice desk and type a lot, and one of the biggest irks is when someone empties the coffee pot and doesn't start brewing another.

In the last 13 years, my brother-in-law Shawn has had one job. And his one makes all four of mine, even added together, look pretty paltry.

After 13 years, he made his last run on an ambulance for the St. Louis City Fire Department this week, and tonight we celebrated. My sister invited M and me to Shawn's going away party, and we were there to see the steady stream of friends flow in and out to say hello and goodbye and congratulations. We got to meet his last City partner, who has been his partner for four years. They joked that by this point they are like an old married couple, and I can totally see how that would happen.

We got a peek into the STLFD family, and it looks pretty amazing. These are people who have seen shit that most of us never will, things that we couldn't even imagine. These people have stories.

And in that vein, I'll share my favorite story from Shawn. Now, it's way better to hear it told in person, and Shawn is really the person who tells it the best, but you'll just have to bear with me. Some of you have heard this before, I'm sure, since it's one of our favorites. Some of you have probably heard it multiple times.

Shawn responded to a call and arrived at the scene to find a large black man with a gaping head wound. He said it looked awful. So he and his partner did what they are trained to do: they got the guy patched up and on the ambulance to take him to the hospital. After making sure he was okay, while they were driving to the hospital, Shawn asked him what had happened. He had never seen a head wound like this before and he just had to know. Apparently the patient had gotten into an argument with his wife/girlfriend/baby mama.

"Da bitch hit me wit da smoov."
"The smooth?"
"Yeah, man. Da bitch hit me wit da smoov."

Shawn must have looked confused, because the man then went on to explain.

"You know, man. Da smoov. What you use to smoov out your clothes." He made a motion like he was ironing.

Shawn lost it. "Dude, she hit you in the head with an iron?!"

Yep, that's what happened.

Last year our family started a habit of saying a Hail Mary every time we hear sirens. We learned it from someone on one of our ACTS retreats and thought it sounded like a good thing to do. For a long time, I thought we were praying for whomever was being helped. After all, that's how it was presented to us.

But here's the thing: the people driving those ambulances and fire trucks and police cars...they need our prayers just as much. We go about our business every day, commuting to work and running our errands and bitching about a rough day at the office or the asshole who cut us off on 40/64. We don't usually give those people - the people driving the ambulances, fire trucks and police cars - a second thought.

Until we need them.

Then, they're there. They show up and they take care of us, no matter what color our skin is or what kind of car we're driving or what kind of clothes we're wearing or how much money we have in our pocketbook. The first responders are just that: the first ones in, and they very often risk their own lives to help people they've never met and most likely will never see again.

I looked around the room tonight at people who look just like you and me. They have regular clothes and they were drinking beer and they were singing karaoke, sometimes really, really well and sometimes not so much.

If you didn't know them, you'd never know they are heroes.

Hail Mary,
Full of grace
The Lord is with thee
Blessed art thou among women,
And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus
Holy Mary, Mother of God
Pray for us sinners now,
And at the hour of our death

Congratulations to Shawn on his new job. He'll still be saving lives; he just won't have the bat-shit crazy stories that come with working in the city. Let me know when you're ready to tell your tales, brother. I'll be your typist, editor and ghost writer. I love you.

(Today's pic is Shawn, belting out Tammy Wynette's "Stand By Your Man," because his goofy sister-in-law made the request. Ever the good sport, Shawn went up there and sang with gusto. "Sometimes it's hard...to be a woman...")

Just call me Julia Child. And Molly Maid.

 

I woke up around 7:30, but stayed in bed until 8. I love that morning time when I can lay in bed and not have to get up right away. Only I knew that I had a lot of work ahead of me so that kind of ruined the mood. At 8, I got up and started cooking.

I cooked and cooked and cooked. I cleaned up and cooked some more. I cooked straight through until 1 p.m. I made five meals: chicken tetrazzini, beef stew, parmesan turkey meatloaf and mashed potatoes, Tex-Mex bean and chicken casserole, and chicken and broccoli casserole. I boiled and browned and steamed and sliced and chopped and rinsed and drained and minced and measured. I opened a lot of cans: beans, diced tomatoes, fire-roasted diced tomatoes, beef stock, chicken stock, cream of mushroom, chicken and celery, tomato soup.

I portioned everything out and wrapped it all up and wrote out final directions. Bake this at 350 degrees for 45 minutes. Heat that and eat it. Bake this and then sprinkle cheddar cheese on top and then eat it.

Then, after that was all finished, M and I cleaned the house. I dusted while he swept. I dusted all the shelves in the great room. There are a lot of shelves. I cleaned the dining room table and dusted Zoe's piano. I put things away that have been lingering since Christmas. Then I dusted our bedroom.

By this point I was feeling pretty disgusting, so I got cleaned up before delivering the meals to my parents. Dad joked that I was like Meals on Wheels. My mother gave me a perfume bottle that was my great grandmother's, for whom I was given my middle name. Then, through a random conversation about my parish's sister parish in North St. Louis, we cleaned out their coat closets and bagged up about 10 coats for donation.

Mass at 6 p.m. was just what I needed. Even though my head was pounding, I was able to look around with so much gratitude. In a circle, all around me, were wonderful people that I have gotten to know through Zoe's school and through our ACTS retreat program. All of these people support me and care about me and my family. I could call any one of them if I needed help and they would not only rush to my side, they'd recruit 50 more people to help, too. This almost brought me to tears. I stopped feeling overwhelmed and started counting my blessings (of which there are many).

We ate dinner tonight at our newly cleaned dining room table. Beef stew. It was a new recipe, and it was delicious. Turns out that's what my parents ate, too, and Dad called to tell me how good it was. He sounded surprised, which made me laugh.

I have laundry going, and The West Wing in the DVD player, and I remembered to snap a photo in the middle of all the cooking chaos today (it's the steamer, full of broccoli). My house is clean and my meals are made for the week and I don't have to worry about what my folks are eating. M is on his computer yet again, but this time he's planning a summer Corvette trip out west for us and it's sounding pretty damn spectacular.

Yep, lots and lots of blessings.

1 & 2 of 30 (Gratitude Project)

Day 2
Every morning I walk my daughter to school, and then I walk home. It's not far, but it's just long enough for me to walk past the huge line of cars and be thankful that I don't have to sit in it.

Day 1
I am so thankful that I have the opportunity to design and build my dream home, and with my best friend to boot. We are in the design stage and while I realize that the road ahead will be fraught with stress and detours and speed bumps and even a fender-bender or two, I'm looking forward to growing and learning and loving and creating the life I want to live.

(The image that went with this is the one of the house plans below. I just wanted to be sure I captured the text from the 30 Days of Gratitude submission on Flickr, to go with the others I'm posting here.)

6 of 30 (Gratitude Project)

Waiting for mass to start and we were both bored. I looked around at the architecture (we were not in our church so there were new things to observe) and whispered to my husband, "Do you think it'd be okay if I did some Instagrams while we're waiting?" He scowled a proper Catholic scowl and said, "You need to find something to keep yourself amused that isn't so obvious!" He looked away, Zoe and I looked at each other, and out came the iPhone. We used the front camera and held it down in our lap so no one could see. An unintended bonus was the flare we caught off the spotlights high above. I'm pretty sure we gave ourselves away after we started making funny faces and cracking ourselves up, which is when I got the sharp elbow from hubby. That only made us laugh harder.


Then the music began to play and the iPhone was tucked away and we snuggled, happy as two peas in a pod.

Today I'm grateful to have a partner in crime.

Note: Yeah, this is Day 6. I do have days 1-5, but I haven't gotten around to boosting them from Flickr to here. Hang tight...they're coming.

I'm not really gone, I'm just hanging out somewhere else

While it may seem as though I've been dormant (lazy) (absent) (quiet) (invisible), the truth is that I've only been those things here.

My on-line world has exploded since Camp, and I've been participating in a lot of other forums (fora?) with other photographers. Facebook (private group), Flickr, Instagram...

I've also been a shooting maniac, although mostly for others. I'm still capturing Zoe's soccer games, but I've also done a Halloween party, a play, and today, a football game. Most nights are spent editing, and it has been really, really great. I'm hanging out at Flickr a lot, so if you want to see more of my stuff you can check me out there (my username is the first letter of my first name, followed by my whole last name - yeah, I know, not so creative). All my work that involves children, or rather, other people's children, is marked as private, but I can send you a guest pass if you want. And if I know you and know you're not some pervy freak.

One of my groups on Flickr is a 30 Days of Gratitude project. Every day participants submit an image showing something for which we are grateful. It can be a new image shot that day, or an old one from your archives. You can write about it, or not. You can even skip a day if you want. In other words, there are no rules and that's appealing to someone who is living daily life under multiple deadlines. I've posted every day so far, and am using this as a trial run for a possible 365 in 2012. It takes a lot to commit to creating a photograph every day for a year, and I'm not entirely sure I'm up for it. Especially since we'll be doing things like moving out of our home, wrecking it, rebuilding it, then moving back. Then again, this might be the perfect year to document our daily life and the huge changes we're making.

Anyway, I've been thinking that perhaps I should share my 30 Days project here, and not just confine it to Flickr. I've been writing a graph or two for each one, which is what I typically do here, so I may as well kill two birds with one stone.

In other news, Zoe's soccer team won their game today, and her BFF scored their two goals. M has been hard at work on Christmas, and not only will this year completely blow everyone's minds, but it all seems to be going remarkably well (fingers crossed this continues after the multiple debacles of last year). Meeting with the architect again Tuesday afternoon. I've got a fire in the fireplace, two snoozing cats nearby, a husband with multiple hand tools and wires and other electrical paraphernalia hanging out on the other couch, a clean daughter sound asleep for the night, and a shitload of new images to edit.

Life. is. good.