The Last Week of March 2019

I'm mostly writing this as a way to memorialize Spring Break 2019 in a way that later on, when I am old and have forgotten my own name, I will remember last week.

My Spring Break truly began on March 22 because I don't teach on Fridays. My husband and I drove to Chicago to go to a wake for one of my great-aunt's on my father's side of the family.  My Aunt Jan loved the color purple, her dog Violet, Virginia Slim cigarettes, red wine, and her late husband in roughly that order.  We would meet up once or twice a year when I was in Chicago and go out for dinner.  I sent her a card every month with an update about my life.  I will miss my Aunt Jan.

We came home that night and the next morning we drove to Iowa to go to my youngest niece's birthday party. She was so excited to turn five. We read Baby Monkey Private Eye (which is a brilliant book that had us all in stitches from age five to age forty five), ate pizza and ice cream, and I did some Girl Scout cookie business with my almost 10-year old niece (anyone want some GS cookies? I technically souldn't have them in our gluten free kitchen).  Then we drove an hour and a half to my father-in-law's house. 

As we got to the grocery store where we were stocking up on gluten free foods for my husband to eat, I got a text message that my grandmother on my mother's side had died.  My grandmother was 102-years old and so, while this message was not exactly unexpected, it was a bit sudden.

We drove back home the next day, packed a cooler, fixed the cat up for us to be gone a couple of days, and drove past Gary, Indiana.  Then we drove the rest of the way to Pennsylvania in time to get to the tail end of the wake for my grandmother.  My Gram was tough old bird who liked crosswords, stuffed porkchops, salt and pepper shakers, and talking about how many grandchildren she had (a hotly contested number) in roughly that order. I would send her a card every month with an update about my life. 

We went to the funeral the next day before getting back in the car and driving to the Michigan/Indiana border. We drove the rest of the way home the next day. 

Then we came home to the following.

1) The upstairs toilet leaking. This toilet must have a rubber seal that dries out if it doesn't get used every day or so because it leaked when we first moved in, too.

2) A fridge whose motor had stopped working.

Then over the weekend I felt like crap so I stayed on the couch watching Criminal Minds on Netflix and sighing over how much work I didn't over Spring Break.