I Am Kind Of The Normal One

Did you guys know my sister and her family are visiting from Australia? Goodness! If I would stop blogging about tennis for even one minute, I could have filled you in on this important fact. They landed a week ago today, and I had them all, plus my mom and dad, at my house for a few days, and then they went up to mom and dad's mountain house, where the kids and I joined them for the weekend. Apparently the weekend lasts through Monday because we are still here. Anyway.

A campfire is a necessary ritual.

Foil-roasting the s'more leads to better melting.

This happened: my father roasted and ate a cricket at our s'more campfire. For some reason, little crickets kept leaping into the flames, maybe drawn by the heat? It was a disturbing thing, this cricket suicide. We saw one on the rocks, poised to leap, and Dad said, "Wait, I will eat him!" The kids reacted with shock and squeals of disbelief. They didn't think he would do it. I squealed because I knew that he would indeed do it.

He caught the cricket in his hand, and finding it to be too small to properly skewer, he stuck it to a half marshmallow left on his stick.

That bothered me more than the outright eating of an insect, the mixing of the cricket with another food. Ew. I think there are some food cultures where the eating of insects is acceptable, but I am pretty sure they don't mix the bug with marshmallows.

Then he roasted it and ate it. The kids were very, very impressed. Then he ate another one. Then the little boys wanted to be shown edible plants. I ate a second s'more while this was happening.

Later on, the kids were tucked in bunk beds in the basement, and I was lying down with Hank for a few minutes. I started to receive a flurry of emails and texts from upstairs, summoning me to come play cards. I hauled myself up stairs to see that Amy, Jason, Mom, Dad, and Aunt Kathy were all arrayed at the table with the cards shuffled and dealt.

They waited for me as I went to the kitchen and started making tea. I wandered to the table, played a card, and went to get my tea. They made noises of impatience which I ignored. I was ready with the tea, but then I espied a chicken leg in the fridge, so I pulled it off the bird and hastened to the table. There was much protestation from the assembled company: "Oh now we're going to have chicken grease on our cards!" and "Don't you want a plate? Gross!" Like I was the one who ate a bug.

I gave them a no-chicken-grease guarantee and then sat at the table to play my turn. But just then I had a chicken leg malfunction. As I bit into the chicken, the whole top part of the leg separated from the bone and was dangling from my mouth. Obviously I had to go to the kitchen to tend to it, even though by now I was taxing their patience to the last reserve, and I can assure you, they were annoying me way more than my chicken situation was delaying them.

So I handled the chicken problem and came back to the table, and Dad passed the deck to me. It was my turn to deal. But I found that the vigorous wiping I had given my lips had left them feeling chapped. I said to the gang, "I really need to go get the Burt's Bees, my lips are chapped. Do I have to shuffle these right this second?" And they all died of vexation. And they were dead. The end.

No, that's not the end. My dad pulled his Carmex out of his pocket and said, "Shuffle!" Then he dabbed his finger into the Carmex and applied it to my lips. I leaned towards him so he could get good coverage and I shuffled and dealt so they would stop bitching for one tiny second.

Then, as we all looked at our cards, my dad said, "I used the cricket finger."

Cricket finger!

I said, "But you took a shower!" He said, "Yes, but I kept it wrapped in a bread baggie."

And then those people had the nerve to gripe about how poorly I'd shuffled.

There is no moral to this story, but it is something that happened.

Amy stuffing a s'more into her face. Ha! Revenge.

I hope you had a good weekend. Look out for Cricket Finger.