21 December 2011
Merry Christmas Y’all! Another year has galloped by and it’s time for our Christmas Letter/Bethany Hillbillies Update. We’re spending Christmas in Butte this year and have done a little sno-grass sled-boarding impatiently awaiting some major snowfall.
Last year we spent Christmas at the Oregon homestead.
Here was me and ma catching Christmas dinner in the backyard. We returned to Butte this summer for Independence Day.
Attentive viewers will notice us in our protective lawn chairs set up in the middle of the highway waitin’ for the parade to start. Got us good seats! The cars zooming by at speed were not part of the organized festivities. The yellow painted curbs create a perceived impenetrable barrier. (Note the experienced people leaning forward to avoid getting clipped by a side mirror.) We spent the rest of the afternoon playing pin-the-tail-on-the-critter with my mom’s old lawn darts. After dark, we tied sparklers on the darts for safety.
Arianna (14) still has her love of dance, although she’s narrowing her focus just a bit, spending fewer hours at the studio so she can keep her Bethany residency status. She switched middle schools to Stoller, our neighborhood school. The Health & Science magnet school she was attending wasn’t the opportunity she had hoped for. There was a lot of drama for a school that didn’t even offer drama. She’s very happy at Stoller. She filled the summer with dance camps, the church girl’s camp, Wyldlife camp, then off to Shasta for a week with her friend’s family.
She’s pretty much worn out the keyboard on her phone with the endless texting. LOL J Our carrier discontinued their program awarding sky miles for texting—for obvious reasons. In what little free time remains, she’s been pulling down some coin babysitting.
Not only has Shaelin (12) been playing soccer year-round, but has developed an income stream refereeing games as well. Currently indoor soccer is in full swing. Her team is dominating this year. Indoor is a little rougher than outdoor, and Shaelin keeps track of how many goals she scores as well as how many players she “takes out”.
There’s something about those high glass walls of the arena (or, the ‘Coliseum’ as she calls it), offering their opponents no chance of escape, that makes it very exciting. The transition to the slower-paced spring soccer will be tough. Probably for the players as well.
Her braces came off this summer and she went to Vegas with friends to celebrate. They had a great time. Never too young to start partying in Vegas I guess. She brought us souvenirs. She continued with jazz and hip hop this fall and started middle school at Stoller and loves it.
Isen was baptized on New Year’s Day. What a great way to kick off the year! He also started football training this summer.
He dropped hockey, fall soccer, hip-hop and break-dancing in order to do it, but he just loves being in a sport where he can smash people and get praised for it. I helped coach his team this year…>>>cue gasp<<<…even those of you who hardly know me are saying, "But Burke knows nothing of football!" While that may be true, a firm grasp on the rules, regulations, strategies, shape of the ball, etc. is, apparently, unnecessary. All you gotta do is show up and yell. I excelled at that. Eventually, though, I was replaced by a more sports-oriented parent who, admittedly, knew an awful lot about badminton. The coaching staff felt such knowledge was more applicable to football than Dungeons & Dragons and so I was promoted to filming the games from up in the stands.
It was Isen’s turn to drive our Yukon around the track at Portland International Raceway this year to see the Christmas light displays. None of us really ended up looking at any lights other than the ones outlining the track and the tail lights of the car in front of us. We all were lasered in on those. There was a lot of ”Isen…Isen!..ISEN!!” I’m assuming it was a nice display again this year—at least the parts we didn’t drive over.
My wife Mishelle continues to traverse the Einstein-Rosen bridge in order to accomplish all her responsibilities. 3 jobs+3 kids=never quite enough time. But she always pulls it off. A sincere thank you to those of you who assist with carpools, ER runs, etc. Even those of you who bring our kids home 2 hours late...on a school night (don’t worry Andy, no one knows I’m talking about you.) A beneficial side effect of manipulating time & space is that she doesn’t seem to age. J I, on the other hand, am decaying at a good clip. The contrasting age between us becomes starker each day.
We had the most fantastic vacation this year. My mom wanted to get her kids together one last time before grandkids started taking off for college or the circus, so she dragged us all to the pleasant isle of Maui. What a great time! How can you not have fun in Hawaii? And to be with my mom, brother, sister, nieces and nephews—it really was a special time. Thanks Mom!
You ever get the feeling you're not 18 anymore? I get it a lot lately. It’s not just from the various doctors upbraiding me while patching me up, it’s also that I’m losing hair where there is supposed to be hair and growing hair where there shouldn't be hair. I get these thick black ones that I have to yank out like noxious weeds, it’s like I’m morphing into the Fly. Many of the ones that haven’t fallen out are turning…umm, what’s a comforting synonym for grey? And without asking, my body began hoarding calcium oxalate in my kidney, forming a ‘stone’. Sounds benign, but this ‘stone’ isn’t some microscopic remnant of a well-weathered river rock, it’s actually a razor-sharp, jagged crystal just a shade larger than the various passages through which it must squeeze on its journey from the center of Burke. They say the pain of passing one is the closest thing to the pain a man might feel as he transforms into a werewolf. I believe it. I also believe Tom Stoppard when he said, “Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.”
Isen and I learned to surf this year. Some of you may remember the skateboarding incident of 2010...while Doctor “Broken Record” Richardson reminded me, yet again, that I wasn't 18 any longer, he didn't specifically forbid surfing, which, in surfing lingo, is known as a loophole. Anyway, Isen and I, along with my nephew Tanner, grabbed our longboards and hit the waves. Knowing my fortunes in extreme sports, “How is it,” you may ask, “he’s alive to write this letter?” Well, multiple instructors, life guards, shallow breakers and a waist-high water depth took the edge off “extreme”. Still, we learned to surf. Some of us quicker than others. Being the natural athlete, Isen just popped up like he’d been surfing since birth, as if he hang-tenned right out of the womb, so on his second run, our surf instructor, JB—the best instructor on Maui by the way—decided regular surfing was too amateur and had him doing this jump/spin/switch your feet to goofy stance while surfing. Others were clinging to their boards for dear life and did no intentional jumping, spinning, or switching—goofy or otherwise. I was gripping my board like it was the last piece of flotsam from the Titanic.
I'm sure you all remember our mechanical recliner couches we acquired in '99? The "if they're heavy, they must be good" ones? That became the "if we can ever get rid of these, our next furniture will be bean bags"? The ones we should've had craned in, instead of enlisting the help of my friend Herb, who, to this day, regales the story of having to lift them to anyone who will listen as if it happened yesterday? Well, still they stand. More importantly, I'm certain you remember how our (FREE) state-of-the-art Harmony One universal remote went missing in '08, thanks again to those who helped in the search. After a couple years in mourning, we replaced it last Christmas with a significantly-less-than-free one.
Well, when the kittens arrived, (oh, by the way, we got kittens—replacement kittens for the ones the coyotes consumed. We’re trying to keep these ones outside the coyote’s stomachs, so they stay inside the house), they immediately jumped through the recliner openings into the couches, at which time our children immediately began shrieking that they would be forever lost in "The Hole" as our comfy furniture has become known. Many a precious possession has disappeared into the maw of those things. IPods, phones, anything you want to see again, etc., all have to be securely tethered to an appendage before you venture close. Yeah, there's a reason we call it the Hole. Anyway, the kittens are scrambling around in there like it’s McDonalds Playland, and we couldn’t open the recliner parts because of the scissoring action of the mechanism—we already had two cats and we didn't need four, so I'm wrestling a couch over onto it's back like a rodeo steer, tearing off the bottom fabric, groping around for anything furry and moving, finding all manner of prizes: silverware—"But we never eat in here…", crayons, game pieces, car parts, humidifier, etc…and…a Harmony One universal remote. Now, my wife ‘claims’ she looked in the couch back in that dark time. In her defense, I wasn't much help in the search, being too depressed over the loss to do anything, and poking around through all the levers, pistons, and whirling gears inside of the couch, you start to feel like Optimus Prime's proctologist. So, if she says she "looked" we'll have to take her word on that. Thankfully, the screen on the remote was in pristine condition due to a protective coating of melted milk duds and mac & cheese. One less Christmas present I need to buy this year.
This morning Isen woke us with the report that it was “pouring snow” outside, so all is well. We hope our greeting finds you well this season.
The Padburys
