Big Old Ugly Flu Bug and Happy Belated 88th Birthday, Mom!

Had to cut short my weekend with my mom. When I felt the sore throat and the achy everything, I knew I had to hit the trail before I gave it to her.

We did, however, party hard for her birthday on Thursday. My sister, niece, great-nephew and I took her out for Mexican food and she and my sister split a peach margarita. They are lightweights. All of us in the Candy Rant gene pool are extreme lightweights with booze. My mother was less than amused when I wrote this on my Facebook status:

In Indiana celebrating my mom's 88th birthday. She had a peach margarita. Yes, things got out of hand. Luckily I had cash for her bail money.

A friend of mine commented "Your mother knows it's not a real birthday until she's read her miranda rights."

The embarrassment came when Mom was outrunning the cops. They let loose the K-9 unit and as she climbed over a fence, she yelled "You'll never take me alive, coppers!"

OK, that didn't happen.

But after the margarita I did make her pose with me as we left the restaurant hanging on my shoulder as though she couldn't walk. Very Otis-on-Andy-Griffith.

That was Thursday night. On Saturday, my niece and I took Mom to Olive Garden. She never gets to go much of anywhere since she goes twice a day to Shiny Meadows Nursing Home to see my dad and that wears her out. She'd been seeing the soup-and-salad commercials and was chomping at the bit to go eat some. So my sister went to feed my dad and we kidnapped Mom. We took more stupid photos. One of them of me clutching Mom in a headlock and forcing her to drink from a wine glass.

Finally we went to a furniture store to try to talk Mom into buying a Tempurpedic bazillion dollar mattress to help her hip and back. Again, my niece and I documented things: Mom lying on a test mattress as I held a pillow threateningly over her head, and so on. She goes right along acting the fool with us. When she said she'd have to go get a job if she was going to buy a Tempurpedic, I told her I'd teach her to pole dance. "Will I have to work the corner, too?" she asked. "Yes," I said. "And I'll teach you how to make change for a quarter."

I hated coming home early. Didn't get to feed my dad his Sunday lunch. Instead I was stopping on the way home for various hot drinks and hacking my skull off. I cancelled classes today and tomorrow. My students have been sending me kitty videos to help me get well. And now, a cozy date with Scott to watch "House." Not too cozy, lest my flu bug aims for him. One hacker at a time is plenty.