Leg Cramp!!

Oh, no, wait. That was real.

A Big Twister

So I'm visiting some old neighbors when the tornadoes hit. Everyone hides in the basement, but I run back upstairs to get my computer.

The next thing I know, I'm being marched through wartime Berlin by a female Nazi, who has just captured me and another woman for spying. The other woman takes off down the subway stairs and escapes, but I'm locked on the top floor of a house with an LIU colleague and an acquaintance from high school.

The plumbing is terrible!

We try to go downstairs to use the bathroom, but we are prevented from doing so by an invisible force field--that and the Nazi woman at the desk with a gun.

So back upstairs we go, to continue our spying. My high-school classmate calls me aside and explains that, while we have to get along now, once we get back home we're not going to be friends.

Pride and Prejudice and Hogwarts

So there are two new books out that I'm dying to read: a novel by Jane Austen and the eighth installment of the Harry Potter series. I go for Jane first--and it's a total bust: skimpy on text and big on paper dolls with period fashions. But just as I'm about to get to Harry, I find I have to go down the street to a wedding, where I spend much of my time helping our department chair take care of a goat that wants to be carried everywhere. When I finally hand him off, I go outside to find my father, who is supposed to be taking care of George. He's fine he assures me; sleeping at home only three houses away, and the baby monitor is a good one.

Too Much Top Chef Before Bed

So my grandfather makes a batch of candied almonds.
With ketchup.
And we all think it tastes great.

Not For the Faint of Stomach

So my maternal grandmother (dead now these twenty years and more) is visiting with her dog--essentially a sausage with a head and tail--to whom she has apparently, and inexplicably, fed a bottle of baby formula. The formula and the dog disagree, and I follow footprints of doggie vomit all the way up the stairs.

They lead into my sister's room.

"Ha!" I say to myself. "She can deal with it. I'm going to bed!"

And then I go into my own room, where I find that the dog, clearly under the influence of Jackson Pollack, has redecorated my walls. And my carpet. And my bed.

My sister is attempting to clean it, without much luck.

"See ya," she says. "I've gotta pack up and go."

I look out my window to see that the street is filling up with parked cars, especially on the side reserved for tourists.

Mad (Mob) Men

So sometime in the 1960s, the mafia buried a woman alive on a beach. (In the flashback scene, we learn that she's the wife of an uncle I never knew I had.) They left her mouth free to breathe, but it was a deserted strech of sand and the off season and she isn't found for forty years. When she is discovered--along with her strangely well-preserved turquoise satchel and bright-red suitcase--the case is turned over to the precinct where I am working as a detective. I have to take the luggage to a different building to be examined, and I'm not even out of the lobby before someone is after me to get it back.

Too Much Reading Before Bed

Fought Nazis
Ate a raw onion
Stored peeled oranges in my desk drawer

Not Sure Where NY and NJ Have Got To

So Wayne and George and I have decided to drive to Florida--in our golf cart. When we get to South Carolina, we discover that we're lost, and the only map we can find is on a tourist postcard. The lady at the Sutckey's won't let me look at it until I've paid for it.

"I think we need to go through Pennsylvania," Wayne says.

We look at the map together.

"See," he shows me, "and then into Connecticut."

Turns out, they're contiguous.

"No," I argue, "that's the way we go when we're driving from Ohio."

In the end, we decide to drive the golf cart back to New York and get the car. It looks like rain, anyway.

The Dead

So I'm shopping with my ex-inlaws. The store is creepy, stacked floor-to-ceiling with used clothes; my ex-mother-in-law is wearing a long green dress (think Morticia Adams), and while I'm trying to get out of the building I run into one of the English Department secretaries, who died several years ago. She's nine months pregnant.

"But you died," I say.

She waves this away. "I got better."

Thieving Monkeys

So Wayne and George and I are travelling, and when we stop at a roadside store there is our boss, who insists we go out the back way so that we can steal some boxes of Coke for our next department meeting. As we start to speed away in the getaway car (in the trunk of which is packed the entirety of my wardrobe) I realize that we've left George in our convertible in the front of the store. He's rather larger than when we left him, but somehow we fit him into the car seat and make our escape.

When we get home (sans boss and hot cola), Mom is in the kitchen cooking and Wayne and I have George in the family room so that we can look out the picture window at the monkeys in the backyard. This is the house where I grew up, and someone has displayed my frog collection under the picture window. And oh no! The monkeys are stealing my frogs! But how? Of course: the window has been eaten away by termites--so that's how the mosquitos are getting in at night!--and I wake up trying to figure out how we're going to pay to get a new one installed.