What comes around

This email just received from St. Caffeine – over at Baseball, books, and… – in reference to an earlier post.

Sorry, I can’t help you with the the rubber paddles conundrum. You didn’t really expect any help from AL on that one, though, did you?

No, what I’m writing about is the story involving the berries and Ipecac (man, that’s a funny word) I was just wondering if this story might not have some bearing the MUCH later incident in which you allowed your brother and a friend (I think) to have their stomachs pumped because of the over-ingestion of Sudafed when you knew they had not, in fact, swallowed the actual pills. Sort of a “It happened to me, not it’s your turn,” thing.

I started to ask about his in the comments, but I was afraid that VolBro might not know of your complicity in that incident.

Sorry, I have a really good memory for things that happened long ago. Wait, that really happened, didn’t it? I hope I didn’t just invent that whole thing.

No, you didn’t just invent that whole thing. And really that’s not the whole of that story. I’m not as cruel as all that.

OK – my brother and his friend entered my room – without permission- and found my bottle of Sudafed. They proceeded to suck the candy coating off the Sudafed and then when they got down to the nasty tasting medicine bit – they spit the pills onto my bed, leaving a horrible mess of saliva and red food coloring and allergy medicine.

I told my dad, with the intention of my brother being punished for a) trespass, b) theft, c) property damage and d) ickiness. But Dad over-reacted and worried about how the Sudafed “overdose” might affect VolBro’s health and and in his panic wouldn’t listen to how they hadn’t really ingested it. I could see that relief would have been Dad’s reaction at that point if I had managed to get through to him, meaning VolBro would not have learned an important life lesson about respecting others’ property. Besides the ER had already been called, so really it was out of my hands at that point.

VolBro knows all about this now, and he completely understands.

______

In an unrelated incident, just as I was coming upstairs to post this, the Vol-in-Law and I heard a terrible noise and then a splash. My cat Fancy (yes, named after the Bobby Gentry penned, Reba McEntire performed song about a call girl) had been fighting with another cat on the roof of our kitchen extension. Fancy got the worst of it and fell off the roof and then into the fish pond. She’s ok, but a little damp and a little embarrassed.

Final vacation update

Well I have to go back to work tomorrow. Today is the traditional end of summer Monday off.

We did do a sightseeing thing plus I did one of the chores I’ve been meaning to do all summer. Our kitchen is floored with quarry tiles which are kind of like terra cotta and are very traditional here. I stripped and repolished them today.

Our tourist thing was a trip to Hampton Court Palace. It’s about a half hour (non rush hour) drive from our house and we’d never been in all the years we’ve lived here.

The palace is made of brick and at first approach it seems like a rather grand school. The inside is no Versailles, but you’d hardly expect an English monarch to be that over the top. However, it’s plenty oppulent enough within.

The palace originally belonged to Cardinal Woolsey an advisor to Henry VIII who then seized the palace when the Cardinal fell out of favor. Henry did it up in grand style and subsequent monarchs namely William and Mary and the early Georgians added their personal stamps. We toured several of the state apartments but by no means saw them all.

The most amazing room is the Chapel Royal which is still in its original Tudor style with absolutely fantastic painted timber ceilings. It is also still a working chapel though I don’t think many services are held there.

Hampton Court also has beautiful formal gardens and an ancient yew hedge maze (except the yew was planted in the 60s to replace the genuinely ancient hornbeam hedge). The maze is quite famous and was featured in a book I read at Easter called Larry’s Party. (here’s a link to it at Amazon, I really enjoyed it) The character Larry is inspired on his honeymoon trip to England by the countryside hedges and the Hampton Court maze to become a maze designer. Like many things in life featured in novels and built up by expectation it was a little smaller and less exciting than I imagined it to be.

I abandoned the book when I finished it at the Aberdeen airport but I wish I’d kept it because it had the solution to the maze printed within. I would have never got it except we followed a kid who claimed to have found the center, the key, within 30 seconds (it is small) and we followed a group that he was leading in. So I guess I’m saying that even though it was smaller than I imagined and somehow less grand it was still hard.