Today is Mum’s birthday.

Mum is an amazing woman. Wherever she sees a breach, she steps into it. When my Brownie troop needed a new leader, she stepped up and took on a group of first-graders. By the time we hit third grade our troop had grown from six or so girls to about forty and Mum had to recruit a number of other moms as assistants.

She also is an inspiration, going down to Washington without knowing anyone other than my dad and volunteering for the Clinton inauguration committee. She turned that opportunity into an eight-year volunteer gig as well as a full-time paying job (actually, a couple of them). She met a ton of famous people and got to witness a number of cool moments at the White House and at the Vice President’s house, in addition to making a lifetime’s worth of memories.

Mum doesn’t see that this as remotely extraordinary, but the rest of us know how very much it is. We lack her organization and her chutzpah and her ability to throw herself into a task fully.

And when she’s not serving as a role model to the rest of us, she’s busy belting out the tunes, coaxing sun-loving plants to grow in the shade, planning her next deck-building project, and keeping us all afloat, no matter how far away we’ve swum.

Happy birthday, Mum! It was nice to celebrate with you!

My blog refused to give me permission to post the previous entry last night, presumably because it objected to the final sentence of the post,

“In the meantime,
I’m going to
c
u
r
l
up with a cat.”

It apparently objects to that one word, in particular. How weird. I don’t know why. But it forbid me to use it.

The day started early. Our handyman arrived as I was buttering my toast and informed me that I’d need to clear out another third of the living room so he could finish putting down tile.

Since every surface in the house pretty much already had stuff on it, that left one spot — the bed (and the path from the bathroom to it. You now have to squeeze past our bureau, hop over the giant box that contains stuff from the desk, and hurdle a milk crate just to get to the bedroom. There you’ll be greeted by a bag that contains Christmas presents, half a dozen board games, the garbage bag box (that contains only one garbage bag), a manilla folder that may or may not contain Rudi’s political stuff, six loads of laundry that need to be washed, all our winter hats, gloves, and scarves, and a balance ball. Oh, and there’s a travel guitar resting near my head, a laptop on my lap, and piles of videos at my feet. Della, who enjoys sleeping on piles of clothes, finds it heavenly. I, who can sleep on clothes but who would prefer not to sleep on board games, do not.

And the handyman will be back at 9:30 in the morning.

As I just told my parents in the email I sent, it is still yesterday in the town in which I was born. So I think it’s fair if I retrodate this so it shows up an hour ago, back on the date when it should have appeared if I’d been a little more on top of things…

Today marks the 33rd anniversary of the day my folks wed. They got married under autumn trees on a hill in my grandparents’ yard, very near the spot where Josh and I would play on our swingset later on. Mum and Gramma made her dress. Great-Gramma crocheted the decorations onto it, hemmed the veil, and frosted the cake. Uncle David played his guitar. Dad’s brothers stood up with him. Mum’s high school friends preceded her down the aisle.

A lot of people of my generation have parents who aren’t together anymore or who can’t fully understand why their parents married in the first place. I’ve always been very lucky — my parents love each other and clearly are still in love with each other. They’ve never feared showing each other affection — much to Josh’s and my mortification during our teen years.

And while other couples seem to find being together in a whole house too confining, my parents managed to spend 14 years in a tiny efficiency and an even smaller car for 6 of every 7 days a week.

They rejoice in each other’s successes and seem to know instinctively when to nudge the other into action and when just to let them be.

Dad knows how Mum likes her coffee. Mum knows how Dad likes his eggs. He picks up books for her at the library. She picks up Oreos for him at the store. They hold hands when they walk down the driveway to get the paper.

I know that if Rudi and are even half as happy together another quarter century from now as my parents seem to be today, I will count myself lucky and blessed.

Happy anniversary, Mum and Dad! Congratulations on so many wonderful years together — and may even better ones lie ahead.

I arrived home tonight to find half of my living room floor gone. Since we didn’t have any warning our handyman was going to start indoor repairs today. (There’s a crack in the foundation, from the drain in our window well to someplace in the middle of our living room, which explains the flooding we arrived home to earlier this month.)

Poor cats! They really don’t know what to make of this. Jeremiah doesn’t like strangers, so he probably spent the afternoon cowering in the hallway closet. And even Posey and Della probably weren’t thrilled by two guys spending their afternoon in the Burrow without paying any attention to them. So now they’re all over the living room sniffing at the strange sub-floor smells.

So tonight’s task will be to move things out of the living room to someplace else in the Burrow. Since the living room is the majority of our space, that may be a challenge, but Rudi and I have tackled several in our day and will not be deterred by a mere lack of resources.

Another work-related trip looms. This time to Tucson, Arizona, a city I’ve long wanted to visit. I mean, it’s a city with a silent “c” in its name — how can it not be cool?

One of the nice perks about traveling for work is that it affords you the ability to visit people you haven’t seen for a while, essentially on someone else’s dime. I suspect that’s part of the reason Pittsburgh doesn’t thrill me as a destination; I don’t know anyone there.

But in Tucson I have an old acquaintance from college, whom I haven’t seen in many years. (Please understand: “old” and “many” are relative terms here.) She’s pursuing (I think) a master’s degree at the university. I am headed to the university to think about health education with their library school folks.

So, a bit hesitantly, I dropped a line to this fellow Conn alum. I mean, it was a bit cheeky to email her out of the blue (she fell off my Christmas card list a few years back when I ran out of time to finish mailing them) just because I was headed to her town of residence. Would she object to being bothered? Would she think I was using her presence in town as a way to alleviate boredom while I was far from home? (A valid point, even if I was actually looking forward to seeing her.) Would she offer up a thin, but possibly legitimate excuse as to why she couldn’t see me? Would she bother to respond at all?

But today, a return email. She was pleased to hear I was coming to town. Did I need a ride from the airport? Should she knock off work early to hang out one afternoon? It was exactly the response I’d hoped for, but hadn’t dared to expect.

I overthink things sometime. I would be pleased if people I liked during my previous lifetimes looked me up when they came to D.C. Why shouldn’t others be equally happy if I do the same?