Vacation Fun, Including: Funerals, Strippers, and Terror!

I've had a busy last month or so. I needed to return to Michigan for my grandmother's memorial service, and decided to just stay on at my parents' house for a few weeks as an extended summer vacation.

I enjoy just about everything about my parents' house: good food, big house, huge basement that is nice and cool and can be used as a scooter parkway for the kids, hot tub, and free cable TV. There is also a bakery nearby that sells my all-time favorite item: cream horns. Mmmmmmm. Cream horns...

The bad thing about my parents' house is that they live in an INFORMATION WASTELAND. As someone who is used to high-speed Internet access, I was HORRIFIED to discover that my parents were still on DIAL-UP INTERNET ACCESS WITH... *gasp* AOL!

Oh, the humanity!

I was unable to blog, send pictures, or do much of anything online while visiting them. Thus, I apologize for the blogging dry spell. It wasn't by choice.

*Note* Since my visit with it's constant complaining about their Internet speed, my parents have upgraded to high-speed Internet and are loving it. Squeaky wheel gets the oil, right?

On to my first story: FUNERAL FUN.

My parents and my uncle organized a very nice memorial service for my grandmother. Everything went well at the service and then the whole group was directed to follow the hearse to the cemetery for the interment of her ashes. (And my grandfather, too, who had died and was cremated back in 1989 or so. Two for one cemetery hole!)

The hearse was COOL. A midnight-blue Mercedes Benz hearse. With a purple light on top. I am doing my damndest to get my picture of that hearse and post it for you, but I may actually have to send my relatives back to the funeral home and get them to take another shot. Apparently, there are only three of them in the US, and wooooo! They're so beautiful!

Everyone motored serenely out to the cemetery and we heard the priest say a few words. Then came the throw-clods-of-dirt-into-the-grave part of the cememony. I really need to look up the origin of that tradition. Is it for comfort, religious purposes, or to keep the dead from rising? If anyone knows, let me hear it!

When it was my turn, I took Thing1's hand and led him up to the gravesite, picked up my bit of dirt, and pitched it in. Then I realized that Thing1, being five years old, was determined to be in on the action as well. He grabbed a HUGE wad of dirt, did a wind-up, and flung the dirt with all his might into the grave! Unfortunately, he had to get close to the hole to have any accuracy, and his momentum tipped him into the grave itself!

So there I was, desperately bracing myself to keep Thing1 out of the grave (he teetered over it for several seconds) and myself from tipping in after him. Things were dicey for a minute... With a lurch and a scramble, I hauled us both up and out of danger. A near disaster of epic proportions! Pretty funny, though, and he did manage to get his dirt in the grave! My grandmother would have been appalled, which makes it all the more fun.

Next: Attack of the Out-Laws.