I watched someone I love die today.

Her name was Barbara but I called her Aunty Baby and she called me Karen Person. She could be difficult, she could be quirky, but she was also the most selfless, giving person I have ever known in all of my life. You never had to ask her for anything, she offered. Some of her quirks could be pretty fun too. I brought her a stuffed loon that made a loon call when you squeezed it. I knew that she had been making all of her nurses squeeze it whenever they came into her room, but one of them told me today that she had also insisted on taking it with on her daily walk down the hall so that she could squeeze it and cheer everybody up.

I didn’t have many relatives growing up, and of the few I had she was the only one I had frequent contact with. In fact, she has always been a big part of my life. This is pretty much the first time I have lost someone I was so close to, and I’m having a hard time understanding so much about it. Not just that she’s gone, but everything about cancer and how horribly unfair, cruel, and wrong it is. I’m so glad I was able to be with her in her last moments, and yet there are some parts that I’m afraid are going to haunt me.

There are always going to be things you wish you had said or done. I wish it hadn’t taken me so long to wake up and start really getting to know her. I wish I knew more about her life, especially all of her amazing travels and adventures when she was younger. But more than anything right now, I just feel blessed to have had her in my life, to have built a stronger relationship with her in the last few years in spite of or maybe because of all that she was going through, and to have been given a couple more good days with her before she passed. I will miss my Aunty Baby.

There have been requests to see our recent furniture upgrades. Yes, it’s true, we have real, not-bought-at-a-thrift-store-or-yard-sale furniture! I think we are finally officially becoming adults. (gasp!) But don’t worry, I have no plans to get rid of my pound puppy, and Nate still has his tauntaun. And actually, half of it was either free or bought second hand. But what we bought cost more than $20! And – it matches. Whoa. So I wish we had taken before and after pictures, but we didn’t, so I’ll just have to describe. Picture this: a full-sized box spring that we couldn’t fit through the door to get it upstairs with it’s mattress, so we just made it the base layer, the foundation if you will, for our bed. On top of the full box spring we put a queen box spring. On top of that we put a queen mattress. It sucked. Every night I rolled into the middle, every morning I complained. So we deemed it necessary to upgrade. And here it is, in all of its grown-up glory: Please note the matching bedside tables. Very exciting. That same week, Caveman Cody moved to Denver. Great opportunity for him, sad times for us. But as luck would have it, some furniture he was trying to get rid of happened to be the same style as what we had just bought! So we gladly took that off his hands, and ended up with I guess what you would call a bedroom set. Weird. Here it is:

Moving on to the next room, Nate and I had bought a dining room table and chairs from an old co-worker a few years ago. At the time, we couldn’t believe our luck, but I didn’t get along with it from the get-go. It was super wobbly, the veneer was ugly and starting to bubble, and it was an oval, which as it turns out is near impossible to find a tablecloth for. During one conversation I said that someday I wanted to get a big, beefy, solid wood rectangular table. And then lo and behold, I got an email from someone at the U who had taken a job out east and was trying to sell a bunch of his furniture, and one piece just happened to be a big, beefy, solid wood rectangular table! I had been thinking more like in a couple of years or so, but what are you gonna do when it just presents itself like that? So now we have this sweet table:

And so ends the tour of our new furniture. Who knows, maybe we’ll eventually even replace the pea green vinyl armchair with the packing tape holding its insides in that’s currently in our living room. But we don’t want to get too crazy.

Ok, I don’t normally do this kind of thing, but it has been brought to my attention that people are finding our blog by searching for Becky Lourey. I’m normally not one to talk a lot of politics, but given my recently raised level of political involvement, and the fact that I can only recall getting even moderately excited about a political candidate once in my entire life before this, I feel compelled to say a little something about my girl Becky. Mind you, I’m not just moderately excited about this candidate. From what I’ve learned so far, I 100% love her. I want her to be president. I want her to be supreme ruler of the world! And here’s why:

• She is committed to universal health care, and wait – hold up, she actually has a plan!
• She prioritizes renewable energy, something that seems to me to be a no-brainer and yet somehow isn’t to most candidates, and isn’t even a blip on the radar to our current leaders.
• She’s all about environmental protection in other ways too, from pollution reduction to support of natural spaces for recreation.
• She was a farmer and went through the same struggles as other family farms in the 70’s and 80’s, having to sell land, animals, and equipment to pay debts, so she recognizes the need to support family farms and sustainable agriculture.
• She has raised 12 adoptive and biological children, several with disabilities – 12! If you would like a glimpse into both the happiness and the heartbreak that has been their lives, read this. I can’t help but think that more mega-moms in politics can only be a good thing.
• She was a leading opponent in MN of the war in Iraq, yet supported her son and his decision to return to Iraq for a second tour in the Army – meaning she recognizes that you can support our troops without supporting the war. Her son was killed in combat in Iraq in May 2005.
• She has legislative experience (served several terms in the House and state Senate) and has a list of impressive accomplishments to show for it.
• She’s pro-choice.
• We agree that the same-sex marriage amendment is ludicrous and an interference into people’s human and civil rights. Considering the state of marriage in this country, people should put more energy into helping marriages survive rather than trying to prevent them.
• I’m itching for more women political leaders. Plain and simple.
• That website of hers is so damn organized! Ohhh, the outline, the bullets, the ease of navigability, the answers to all of my questions only a mouseclick away – you have got to love that!
• And finally, she’s a bad-ass: "Her marksmanship with a rifle earned her an award from Field & Stream magazine in 1960 when she took down a buck in Montana, shooting 650 yards from one mountain ridge to the next."

So now that I have taken what is for me a giant step, endorsing a candidate and caring enough to actually say so, maybe I won’t break into cold sweats, start stuttering uncontrollably, and draw a massive mind-blank if someone tries to actually talk to me about it. Maybe.

Nate and I recently invited our friends Peter and Madeline to become part of potato chip history with us. Last summer when we were at the Uptown Art Fair we visited the Kettle Chips booth, where we were given a free bag of chips and got to vote on what we think their new "happy hour" inspired chip flavor should be. If you are not familiar with Kettle Chips, you should be. They are an awesome company that converts 100% of the waste vegetable oil from their production into biodiesel, they have an enormous rooftop solar energy array, restored wetlands around their facility, and oh, did I mention that they have Cheddar Beer flavored chips? And Spicy Thai? Roasted Red Pepper with Goat Cheese?!? YUMMM!!

Anyway, at the art fair, I of course submitted a suggestion for a bloody mary-inspired chip flavor, of course. The good people at Kettle Chips either took the five most popular suggestions or the five they liked the best (not sure) and made a limited amount of each. They then assembled 500 People’s Choice Happy Hour Party Packs, containing one 5-oz bag of each flavor, a tasting guide and ballots. Needless to say, I simply had to have one. And so approximately two weeks later Nate and I journeyed to Peter and Madeline’s house in negative 20 something temperatures with our box o’ chip fun. On the agenda for the evening? Watching Winter Olympics (did you SEE snowboard cross?!? So. cool.), experiencing the glory and wonder that is the boardgame the Settlers of Catan, and being part of potato chip history. Worthy of risking frostbite and car engine failure? We obviously think so. 

Some of us (Madeline) followed directions better than others (Peter), but in the end, we each judged the following very exciting flavors:

• Spicy Mary
• Dirty Martini
• Tuscan Three Cheese
• Creamy Caesar
• Buffalo Bleu Cheese

We each filled out a ballot and submitted our votes online. Here are the current stats:
Total voters: 4089
Buffalo Bleu Cheese: 3.37
Dirty Martini: 2.61
Tuscan Three Cheese: 3.78
Spicy Mary: 3.28
Creamy Caesar: 3.62

Unfortunately, it’s not looking good for my top choice, Dirty Martini. Buffalo Bleu was a close second for me though, and it still has a chance. I think Nate chose Tuscan Three Cheese. I can’t remember how Peter and Madeline voted, so they will just have to comment to let us know.

And by the way, voting goes through the end of March, so you too can still get in on the history-making.

This weekend Coach Kastler and sidekick Mad-dog organized a little Grim Sweepers retreat at his family’s cabin near Webster, WI. Nate and I weren’t able to make it up there until late Saturday night, but when we finally arrived at almost midnight, we found the majority of the Sweepers – where else? Out on the ice of course! Peter had cleared snow from the ice on the lake to make a nice sized rink for us to play on, and they were out there with tiki torches, playing a modified game of broomball they were calling "Swarm", which sounded like it basically amounted to "everyone attack the guy with the ball". Nate and I joined in the action, and I gave Nate this: Well, actually only the top one. Wendy was responsible for the bottom one.

After one of the worst nights of sleep in my life because of a certain overstimulated puppy, and a hearty breakfast cooked by Chef Pedro, Nate and I headed out to the ice on our skates for our version of the Winter Olympics: ice dancing and pairs skating. It was truly inspiring. While we were perfecting triple toe loops, spin sequences, and lifts, some others cross country skied, snowshoed, and hiked. Our little dog-friend/canine-devil did very well with his first off-leash experience. He played with the other dogs, accompanied friends on trips around and across the lake, and overall got completely tuckered out. He’s been passed out for like the past 5 hours.

And then of course, there was more broomball. We finished with Peter’s new version of broomball, Zombie, where one person walks around like a zombie, and touches other people to turn them into zombies, who then do the same. They can be turned back either by a teammate hitting them with the ball, or by a goal being scored. It was awwwwwesome.

And so another Grim Sweepers season draws to a close, and what a wonderful way to go out. And now we’re sad. It is such a joy to spend time with each and every one of our teammates, and yet some of them we barely see during the rest of the year. Broomball is the glue that maintains those friendships. It’s also our reason for being insanely excited about freezing temperatures, and our means of fending off seasonal depression. Granted, there are a few things I won’t exactly miss:

And I did just this week get quite the urge to trade in the SmartWool socks for some flip flops. But I once again feel like the season went by way too fast, and I can’t help but wish we had more games, more practices, and more times like these: