If you live in Seattle, at least you live in Seattle.

Words of wisdom from Hannah, whereupon I exclaimed, "there's a blog title!" (My family probably gets a little annoyed with my continual pronouncements like "blog post!", but rest assured it's not my only annoying habit.)

At any rate, "If you live in Seattle, at least you live in Seattle" may well find its way into my permanent lexicon. Especially during October in Minnesota.


Of course at the time we were talking about -- what else -- the weather which has been, to say the least, disappointing. For days on end.

Our collective gloom was probably also due to the fact that Hannah and I have both spent the last week under it (the weather) and engaging in all kinds of exciting events like coughing contests and phlegm face-offs.



I guess she won, because her cough is still raging and mine seems to have finally slipped away to pester all the people I may have inadvertently coughed on at the grocery store (while aiming for my elbow, of course) --



S
O
R
R
Y





Good riddance.

So I'm going to offer illness as my answer to the question, "Didn't Susan used to write a blog?!" and then also say to myself "Welcome back!" because I spend a lot of my time talking to myself



so such a conversation won't seem a bit out of the ordinary.

My mother talks to herself as well, as does my father (although he mostly sings to himself, inventing a song for whatever the situation may require) so I guess it's an inherited trait. To my knowledge, however, I don't say the kinds of silly things the cast of adults from my childhood regularly interjected (although sometimes those phrases still flit as part of the wallpaper in my head).

If we could turn back the clock to listen in . . .
we would probably find the most tidbits peppering the talk of Aunt Lillie. She not only loved to gab, but also regularly applied one catch phrase or another to punctuate her sentences with the desired emphasis.

There was "By ye saints!", or for even more dramatic effect,
the occasional "By ye saints alive!"

Probably even more common was "By grab!"

I, to this day, have absolutely no idea what "by grab" means. My mother later shortened the phrase to just "Grab!", which leaves me even more bewildered.

Another Lillie favorite was "For the love of Mike!" (I have never known who Mike is, but I suppose one could pose similar questions about the origin of the Pete of "For Pete's Sake" fame.)

And whenever I get a little homesick for Aunt Lillie's house, I have only to think to myself, "Oh, would you EVER!" and I'm immediately transported back. Because that is surely the quintessential Aunt Lillie-ism. Apparently Aunt Lillie WOULDN'T ever, although plenty of people in the world WOULD, since she was shocked into this pronouncement on such a regular basis.

From my mother (also a product of Aunt Lillie's tutelage) we continue to hear "Fudge, call a judge!" and "Well, for dumb!" or the slightly less-politically-correct "El-dumb-o!"

Will someone please stop me if one of these phrases ever sneaks out? I'm only concerned because of all the other ways in which my children insist I'm becoming my mother.

From my rough-and-tumble Grandpa Kenneth, we heard slightly saltier language such as "Holy Muck-eye!" which on one occasion I recall he raised to "Holy Schmuck-eye!" and was immediately and sternly shushed by my grandma because we kids were in the room. It was not a swear that had a lot of shock cachet for me because I had absolutely no idea what a"schmuck-eye" might be, nor had I ever heard another living person say it.

My brother later secretly clarified things by explaining to me that "schmuck" was not a nice word.

My father, being raised by Grandpa Kenneth, undoubtedly heard worse during his growing up years, particularly while Grandpa was beating his tractor angrily with a 2 x 4. But Dad is usually able to limit himself to "Crap, Crud and Criminently!" (sp?) He did on at least one memorable childhood occasion let a "Hell" fly, which to our ears was shocking in its reverberations because in our house that particular expletive existed only as "h-e-double-toothpicks."

But we were also not allowed to say "shut-up" or even unseemly words like "pregnant." Which may be an explanation of how all those other ridiculous phrases got started.

What any of this has to do with today is that when I opened my eyes this morning and THE SUN WAS AT LAST SHINING


and I was neither coughing nor blowing, I was quite literally speechless and couldn't think of a single thing to say that would express my utter delight at simply being alive and living in Minnesota.


Some days you just have to appreciate the little things.

Or as my dad would say,
"it beats a poke in the eye with a sharp stick."