New Digs

Thomas moved into his new apartment a few weeks ago, after spending some weeks visiting our fold out in the sunroom.  OK, so I all it an apartment, and he calls it a house.  It's actually a duplex, so let's split the difference.  In either event, it's on the southern end of SoBro, which is the southern portion of South Broad Ripple, so he is now one of the cool kids.  Or not.  Oh well, he's close the the library, the police station and the fire station, all within a few blocks radius of his house.

He's living with one of his buddies, Ben, and my fourth child, Chris, who is in his element in his very first apartment.  Ben, not so much, since he had a good job at Lockheed Martin as an engineer or, as he called it, The Restroom Grand Tour, since he basically spent his whole day wandering around the building with the excuse of looking for a restroom..  After a few years of the grand tour, he ditched it all and came to Indiana, and is now tutoring some Indian kid up north, making more money than I do as a nurse.  But I digress.  Chris has the small, corner room and seems to be as happy as a clam.  Thomas got the big room and is still wondering why, since he really doesn't care.

Thomas' biggest complaint was that they needed a table.  Jim tried to give him our smaller kitchen table, but he declined, saying that they didn't have room for it.  Jim doubted this, and I just shrugged, till I was told by the heir to the throne that he couldn't believe that I hadn't seen his new digs yet.  "I mean, Dad has been here, and you haven't.  What's wrong with that picture?"  I went over, and his dog promptly bit me (see previous post), but before I toddled off to Medcheck, The Heir told me that it wasn't that they didn't have room for a table, it was that they needed a bigger table than what Jim had offered.

That afternoon, they followed my advice, went to the furniture store up the block and pad $50 for a dining room table, which was promptly taken home by the four of them, carrying it he-man style down College Avenue.  I wish I had pictures.  Or video.

They needed a bigger table because they like to play games, and the card table they were using wasn't big enough.  Seth spends lots of time over there, hanging out (it's closer to his internship than we are), or just hanging out with his bros.  I suppose when school starts, they will still hang out, because it's only a few minutes from Butler, where Seth will be living on campus.  And so it was that Thomas gave Seth a key to the house:

And Seth loves it.  I thought at first it was plastic, but Seth told me today, as we were waiting to pick up his car from Walmart's automotive department, that it's not only metal, but it has some weight to it, "so when I swing my lanyard around, I thought that maybe it would kill someone if I hit them with it."  This digressed into a conversation about how perhaps this is why Goths love Hello Kitty, because of the danger element.

Who knows.

Deaf-initions

My brother in law is in town from Florida. He's the baby boy of five: four kids in four years, then six year later, there's James. My husband, the former baby of the original four, still has issues from having his baby-dom usurped, forty years later.

When I met Dan, James was 16. Dan told me "you'll have to meet my little brother. You'll like him. You'll just have to talk slow to him." Me and my big mouth, I say to my newly beloved "what? Is he deaf or something?"

Turned out he is. Oops.

So James, being sixteen, was left behind when Dan's parents went to Florida on vacation, so he could go to school. Since I worked nights, I was elected to be the one to go and make sure he made it up and to the bus on time, then I would crash at the inlaws house for the day. One of the days they were gone, there was no school, and in walks James with the phone, waking me up from a blissful day of sleep (I worked nights at the time). Hands me the phone and says "it's Sean."

Well, Sean can hear, so talking to him is no problem, but what transpired was almost surreal, especially when I was half awake. Sean had called for his friend Mike, who is deaf. James gave me the phone so that I could tell Sean what to tell Mike, and they got into this crazy argument. I don't even remember what the heck it was about, but I do remember finally telling him that it was more than a little crazy to wake me up, in the middle of MY night (don't worry that it was 11am), so that he could argue with his friend, and if they needed to argue, they should do it face to face, so there could be some lip reading going on. And that I was going back to sleep.

And I did.

Dan can do a near perfect James imitation, and frequently talks to his brother in his brother's voice. It's funny to listen to, and James doesn't care. Dan will break out in James-ese at random times, like the night that we were laying in bed, in the pitch black of night, and he suddenly broke into Sinatra's "Something Stupid," in James' voice. I almost fell of the bed laughing. But the funniest interaction I think I ever saw between the two was on Christmas a couple of years ago. Dan and James made quite a production of singing the one song that James could sign: "You Light Up My Life." Dan stood in front of the family singing in James' voice, while James signed it, in these wildly embellished signs. It was hilarious, because they were both so exaggerated.

But if you know them, that's how they both roll, so it's all good. And if you want something to light up your life, or someONE to do the same, take a gander at this crazy mad sexy gold bombshell 50s dress, from Blue Velvet Vintage. No argument here, it's gawgeous!