Okay, now.

Well, first up, let me just say that somebody, somewhere is living right. Today is one of those absolutely gorgeous early fall Southern days that makes you wish you were in a musical. Especially when you jump up onto a fountain and start singing, and grab a couple of bums urban campers and start a chorus line.

Bright blue sky, with the sun still high enough so that it looks like summertime, but with a nice cool breeze and temperatures right there at optimum—still warm enough for flimsy sleevelessness among the womenfolk, yet not so chilly as to require a sweater. This is the time of year when even Birmingham, if you squint just right, goes from urban to urbane. Just hard to beat.

Now then, on to the show. Friday turned out to be one of those days one wishes one could take a do-over on. Reba got home in ill humor, and just plain ill. Bad headache, irritable, moody, angry, perturbed, nauseous, tardy—you name it. So, no getting to see Miss Reba kick the soccer ball.

Loaded up Boy and Middle Girl and beat it up to the park and got us all out and sent Rebecca down to the field while I got Jonathan and myself some food. Better this time—got the grilled chicken sandwich, which was actually not too bad and had that great fresh-microwaved flavor. Got down to the lower field and sat down and spilled my drink in my chair, tried to wipe it up an promptly gave up and started watching the girls. The kids didn’t quite get as excited as I figured—they were all seriousness and as the game got going, I have to say I was very surprised at how competitive their mamas became. What started out as a lark pretty soon turned into a real live game, and even the, er…ahem non-anorexic women whom I would have figured would have the slows, managed to play very well.

They played for twenty minutes and took a break, during which time the little girls started messing around and one of them began doing cartwheels. Bad move. She slipped and as it turned out from later examination, sprained her wrist. Not that it stopped anything—she just sat out for the rest of the game with her wrist on ice. It got close to the end and I sent Jonathan on back to his field for his practice and folded up my chair and started walking around to the end of the field—by this time the youngsters had gotten to 2-0 and the moms had begun playing dirty to attempt to level the competition—shirt grabbing, lifting up and carrying away, threats of grounding—that sort of thing. Rebecca missed playing against Mom, but she enjoyed getting out and playing, until. Yep, once again, a big wish for a do-over. She was running along and stepped off wrong into one of the many shallow depressions in the field and rolled over on her ankle. ::sigh::

She limped off and I went to see about her, and she was just miserable. After the game was over, she limped all the way back up the steps to the upper field and all the way across it to the concession stand—I helped her a bit, and I wish I could have carried her, but she’s as dense as depleted uranium and I didn’t want to keel over and have to rely on her to carry me. (Not that she couldn’t.)

Got her to the concession and iced her ankle down and paced back and forth between her and Jonathan, whose practice was still going on. FINALLY they got done and it was off, not to home but to the drug store to pick up the prescriptions somebody’s wife was too fiercesomely indisposed to pick up (which was fine, because I now had to pick up an ankle brace, too, and horse liniment). Back when I was a youngster, there was only one thing to use on sprains and for smearing into someone’s jock strap—Atomic Balm. Oh, there were others, but this was the thing. (Of course, we also loaded up on salt tablets, too. You know, because we was real smart like.)

I was overwhelmed by the choices of hot/cold muscle ache junk available today—including the one alluded to in the tagline up at the very top of the page, which has all the rich goodness of emu oil—Blue-Emu. It has 7% Pure Johnson’s (not J&J, just Johnson) Emu Oil, you know!

Hard as it is to argue with the efficaciousness of antipodean flightless bird schmaltz (and the unknown curative power of the color blue), I figured I would save my 20 bucks and just go with another old favorite, Icy Hot. Well, the store brand version, at least, known as Arctic Heat. No fresh squeezed emu, to be sure, but lots of that nice gooey petrolatum, and it only set me back $4.

Home then, where Reba has just gotten back from taking Oldest to go to her friend’s house to spend the night—even though Reba was sick, she carted her all the way nearly to Branchville to drop her off. So she was still not in the best of moods.

Boy in the tub and I started doing maintenance work on Bec—twenty minutes of warm bubbly water from Mommy’s foot tub, a nice massage with the goop, several test fittings of her ankle brace to figure which way felt best, then the tub and to bed with her. What a long, long Friday.

But, then, there was Saturday!
posted by Terry at 2:51:00 PM