I/ve seen the Light! Crazy!!

Blogging from Bruce
July 21, 2008

Vonda Tedford Keon

My sister's ring tone is Patsy Cline singing ' Crazy'. It may prove to my personal theme song before long. Alright! I know you are out there giggling and nodding your head yes. There is a rumor that I long ago reached the crazy stage. But let me tell you why I need a theme song. I am truly searching for the light at the end of the tunnel!

We have been knee deep in preparations to welcome a foreign exchange student into our home for the coming school year as well as preparing to take daughter number one off to MUW for her first year of quasi-independence. Then I got an e-mail from our AYUSA contact and she was frantic. Another host family had backed out and that left a student from Taiwan without a host family. I made some calls to people that I thought might be interested and thought we had a couple of good leads but they didn't work out. Not everyone is as crazy as my husband and I. We tend to be a bit spontaneous about things. So we thought, what the hay? Let's take them both.

Lo Ping, or Margaret (the Americanized name she has chosen) was so excited to hear from us that in her letter to me she said "AWESOME". Teenagers are teenagers around the world I guess. She wrote she was really ready to eat 'Fry chicken' and loved light food and vegetables but no spicy. She is going to embrace Southern Food I think.

Ji-Eun wrote that she was leaving for Los Angeles Saturday morning for her "learning to live in America" classes and would be arriving in Mississippi on August 2nd. I panicked on reading that. We thought it was the 10th. Donna, our AYUSA contact is checking on that for us. So in the event that the arrival date has been moved up we have shifted into high gear getting ready.

Our home is like a house sitting on top of another house. It has a walk out basement that was at one point many years ago, used as an apartment. I have been using it for my 'woman cave' and each time I have fallen down those 15 stairs I have made the statement that I thought we should make the downstairs into a master bedroom suite. It now looks like a work in
progress. How can one family accumulate so much stuff. Instead of just throwing out things when they break they seem to have migrated to the back of the inner most corner of the downstairs. Suddenly an empty room became the dreaded 'Junk' room.

Piles of old puzzles, text books from our 10 years of home schooling, the large scrap basket from our sewing projects, every little Happy Meal figurine from the years 1993 till 1996, the boxes that contain a lifetime of photographs and other small mementos that we inherited when Scott's dad died last summer, and pieces and parts from every computer we have owned since we moved to Bruce in 1996. Each day we are making headway and with each old useless thing that I toss, I feel like a weight has been lifted. The whole family has joined in tossing out things that should have been discarded a long time ago.

Now all of this work is not without some snags. Sunday, the dishwasher has decided to bite the dust. Those things just never give warning. You just open the door and reach in to find that your machine went through the motions and made all the sounds and really baked the grease and food particles on your plates. Thankfully, I still have Playtex gloves and scrubbers
and dish soap and washing the dishes was rather therapeutic after all of the purging I have been doing. I'm pretty sure it's the water pump and now I will be knocking on Brasher's door this week looking for a no frills dishwasher.

We had the pleasant surprise of discovering that Home Depot had some basic little compact fluorescents on sale so Scott has been replacing the outdated light fixtures downstairs with newer eco-friendly ones. What a difference that has made. Now I can really see the stuff I need to throw out. Does anyone need a 6-game-in -1 table? It's in mint condition and has all of its parts. I really don't need a foosh ball table in the house any longer. I've got eBay buzzing with selling the textbooks to other homeschoolers and the family photographs and other mementos will just have to wait. Its still too soon to look at those.

Welcome to America Ping and Ji-Eun. I have seen the light!