you've all seen this amusing parody, right?

to the islands, and grandma's 80th

09 September 2003 - 11:00 am

i hate it when i let so much time pass that (a) loads of stuff has happened and (b) i don't remember anything but the highlights. enh, well, it'll have to do.

st. thomas (24-30 august). mom and i went for a week to frenchman's reef, our annual vacation. sister dearest didn't come this year because she's in belgium, trying to find a job. also, she's in trouble, because of the $518 phone bill mom got just after she left. she'd been calling belgium, at $3.91/minute. she hadn't bothered to ask mom whether she still had the "low cost calls to western europe" plan. what's worse, really, is that she didn't even offer to pay it. now, if she had, mom would've probably said don't worry about it, or at least split it with her, because sis is broke and mom knows that, but she didn't even *offer*.

anyway, back to st. thomas. we sat by the pool and read, mostly. or floated on a raft ($10/day to rent!!!). we ate out a couple of nights, which is better than eating at the hotel (because the hotel food is expensive and mediocre) but the cab fare to get around the island is insane. they charge per person, not by distance. so, for mom and i to go to a little restaurant 10 minutes down the road, it cost $28 in cab fare (round trip) (but we did have a crazy island driver who was probably high. his cab philosophy was that anything is ok in his cab except throwing up and orgasms). one day we went shopping in charlotte amalie (the capital and main port). one day we went up to Mountain Top, the highest point on the island (round trip cab fare: $40) and got a beautiful view of magen's bay and some of the other virgin islands. we spent our usual one day at the beach (rather than pool), and it rained. on and off all day. but, i swam with the nearly clear, shiny fishes. and watched pelicans dive bomb the water to catch those fishes.

back from st. thomas to rainy, cool philadelphia. i feel totally cheated out of summer. it rained up til the last week in june, and then started raining again on 1 september. that's 2 months and 1 week of summer. then, just as it stopped raining on friday, and the weekend promised to be beautiful, i went down to columbus, georgia, where my mom is from, to celebrate grandma's 80th birthday. it was rainy and cool all weekend. all 4 of her kids, and 3 of the grandkids were there. grandma's doing well. still with it. still gets up and down stairs (but slowly). still cooks. still takes care of the garden. still active at church. so we had a relaxing weekend of eating, seeing my aunt and uncle's new house, eating again, chatting with miz deal and miz johnson (friends and neighbors of grandma), and eating.

speaking of grandmas, today is my other grandmother's (mama's) birthday. she would have been 89 today.

my cousin tony is good with detail (he's an accountant). he's really gotten into the geneology. from this, i know that my great grandmother was divorced and remarried (in the early 20th century) and that she was her second husband's third wife! also, that people tend to be named by their relation, and not their actual name. there's granny (my great grandmother), paw paw (her 2nd husband), brother (my grandmother's half brother from her mom's first marriage), and sister (my grandmother's half sister from her mom's first marriage). grandma found, in her attic, some letters dated 1879 from some distant cousin named adams (who, apparently, is distantly related to the presidents adams) to my great great great grandmother, who lived in north georgia. the letters are about everyday stuff, like how many bushels of corn mr. adams thought he could get out of x number of acres of land in texas that he was thinking of buying. or that they had to buy oats for their horses because there was no grass to graze them on.