Happy birthday Janet! 17 and going into senior year at Grand Blanc High. Like Grandroobly, she’s a cross-country runner but she also does track events. I dunno if he did those or not. Unlike Grandroobly, she can cook and she loves penguins, or at least she did when she was younger :-). Uh, Grandroobly did like penguins and most other aminals. Anyway, Janet is my brother and Karen’s younger daughter and I have a lot of memories of her but they are too many to fit in one blahg entry and since they are mostly little-kid-type memories, some of them just might embarass her. Think salami. Love you Pengo.

Well, I have Rey’s birthday as the 7th, so I thought it was today. The Grand Poohbah says it was yesterday though. Yeah, that would be 666. Anyway, today or yesterday, he is 19 now. Other birthdays I have for June are:

• Pengo Janetto: June 8. She’ll be 17 and I did not forget hers!
• Tatsuo (Roberta’s late husband): June 9
• An Anniversary: Harry and Bubs: June 16
• Teri: June 19 (around my age ;-))
• Radical Betty: June 20 (at least 110)

Who else? Comment or email me to lemme know.

btw: the main source for this stuff is a calendar The Commander gave me at least 10 years ago. That means it’s pretty much complete up through the Fin G4 generation, since the youngest of those kids is 17. And I probably have every Mac except maybe Alec. Jan has to fill me in on the Fin G5, since she’s the only one of us G3ers with grandchildren. The GG and Kathy my sister-in-law are my main Courtois sources.

Look to the right… Look to the left… Look behind you, quick! Tiptoe into the bedroom and peek into the laundry basket… zzzzzzzzzzzgrokka. Whew! Y’all can rest assured that Froggy is still sleeping it off. zzzzzzzzzzzgrokka. So, where was I? Oh yeah, birthdays. Every once in a while, I actually remember someone’s birthday, besides those of my immediate family members that is, and I post a happy birthday. But, for the most part, I just motor along obliviously. And then people alert me to the fact that I’ve missed someone. And I feel bad. So I have begun the birthday project. Which will be a monthly list of birthdays of family and friends that links to this page. Click here for May. Here is where it is up to you: if you are *not* on there and *want* to be on there, please lemme know. Note that I am not publishing full information about anyone. This is the Internet! Right? Y’all know who y’all are. If you don’t know who someone is, you can email me. That is about all I have to say today and I am gonna guess there are those who are relieved about that.

Email from Jim, April 21, 2005, 8:29 AM: “I’m planning on going up for Jack’s B’day. FYI.”

I remember clearly the flood of thought that washed through my brain on reading that message. “Does he want company?” “What do I do about YAG?” I loved road trips with my brother and his dog. But we had performances going on for one play and another play was going up in a couple weeks. May 9th fell during that play’s tech week. It was not the best time for me to be out of town. I knew if I missed part of tech week I would probably return to find some kind of mess that would just make more work for me.

But something, Celtic sixth sense or whatever you want to call it, said, “to hell with YAG. You are not indispensible and somebody else can cover for you. Go north.” And so I did. Jim and Valdemort and Sam (dog, not archaeologist) and I loaded ourselves into Jim’s Honda minivan and headed up. Miraculously, in a region of the country where it can snow as late as June, we had a little bit of summer that weekend. The boys fooled around with their fancy new garage. I kayaked to Cedar Point. When we asked Grandaddy what he wanted for his birthday dinner, “hot dog on a bun,” was the reply. A man of simple tastes. No fish or any of “that green stuff”, aka eggplant parmesan, thank you very much.

I saw my brother alive and walking around one more time, at Mouse’s graduation party. Our next meeting was in a hospital intensive care unit. He was unconscious by the time I arrived to say goodbye. If hindsight is worth anything at all, it’s because those of us he left behind get some comfort from speculating that he likely knew a year ago he was not going to live much longer. The trip to the UP was the last chance to see his parents, visit his garage, and walk the beach.

We didn’t predict that Jack would die before his next birthday. I certainly didn’t expect him to live forever and at 86 years, just about anything can happen at any time. On the other hand, he was pretty darn healthy for an old coot. Living a quiet lifestyle with The Commander looking after him, he might’ve motored along indefinitely. But that changed instantaneously when he slipped on ice January 31. After a mind-bogglingly horrific odyssey through two hospitals and a rehabilitation facility, he slipped away on March 23.

Happy birthday, ol’ man. Wherever you are, I hope there’s a little snort (or two) of Jack Daniels. And a hot dog on a bun. A cookie or two or three. S-A-N-D. A sunny, warm, fly-free beach next to a shipping channel filled with lake freighters. Jim and Sam to walk the beach and look under vee-hickle hoods with. Duke and Don and Lewie and some of the others who went before you. And a few B52 bombers doing a tree-top flyover. Love.

Okay, multiple choice quiz. Choose the one best answer. This is 100% of your grade.

1. Win the lottery.
2. Turn back time.
3. Five week vacation.
4. Early morning skunk encounter.
5. Hang out with Karen.

And, today is Pooh’s birthday, so she has caught up to me. So, y’all know what to say, right? Other May birthdays that I know of: May 1 Ashlan (my 1st cousin once removed) was 17, Jack (dad) would’ve been 87 on the 9th, his brother Don 90 on the 11th, Bolette (my step-grandmother) would’ve been 104 and Anna Raeburn (my great-aunt) 113 on the 16th, and Charlotte (my aunt) would’ve been 83 on the 28th. Anybody else? Who’d I miss? Courtois family? Anyone in May?

A few things, in no particular order:

• Happy birthday Kathy (my sister-in-law)! Sorry I don’t have a big red, white, and blue tricycle for you but have a wonderful birthday anyway.
• Yesterday afternoon I did not take my usual walk because I was sitting around on my you-know-what watching a sporting event. grok grok. Yeah, yay for frog jumping!! grok grok. No, Froogy, it was not frog jumping. Sheesh! But it was no ordinary event and all of us here in the Luxurious New Courtois Cabin were totally enthralled as we watched our nephew Jim and his robotics team, the ThunderChickens, win the NASA FIRST Robotics National Competition in Atlanta. Jim used to be a little kid who was constantly plugging and unplugging things and switching lights on and off. He has come a long way from those days and is now a high school sophomore whose role during the robot games was to work in the pit, keeping the team’s robot in top condition. I have to say, watching robots play a basketball-esque game is much more fun than watching big, ugly neanderthals pummel each other on a football field. Go ThunderChickens! World Champions!
• Thanks to those who sent their own stories about class presentation petrification. It is always good to know that you are not alone.
• A very special thanks to Bob and Jim for making my dreams come true. Well, nice try, anyway 😉 Sincerely yours, Garbage Woman.

There are just a few too many birthdays in April for me to keep up with and today the Twinz of Terror catch up to me at age 52. I dunno what Bob is doing for his birthday but the GG is going to eat at an Irish pub and then watch Japanese drummers so I guess he is having a multi-cultural birthday. Other April birthdays include:

• Steven, our great-nephew, who turned 4 on the 5th.
• Danny, my first cousin once removed, who turned 21 on the 7th.
• Jan, my cousin, whose birthday was the 16th.
• Datura, our great-niece, who turned 3 on the 17th.
• Jack, my brother-in-law, whose birthday was the 23rd.
• Margaret Finlayson, my grandmother, who would have turned, lemme see, 118 I think, on the 23rd if she were still alive.
• Mouse, my daughter of course, who, as y’all have already read, turned 19 on the 24th.
• Last but not least, Kathy, my sister-in-law, whose birthday is coming up on the 30th.

I hope that covers it. grok grok. What about MY birthday? You missed that. grok grok Excuse me a minute. (Froggy, those are just the *April* birthdays. Your birthday is not *in* April. It is October 23rd. Get back in your basket. Take Smokie with you.) Sorry about that. Anyway, it is hard to keep up with all of this all the time. This blahg is really not a birthday blahg, it is a rambling old bag’s blahg. grok grok. An UGLY old bag! grokGROK! (Frooggy, get going!) But I think that everyone should celebrate their birthday by doing just about whatever they want to do, short of committing murder or other mayhem, and I like to recognize birthdays if I remember them. One of these days maybe I will get myself off my butt and create a birthday data base and write a little program that will compare the records in the database to the current date. If there is a birthday, it will make a nice little birthday message with some of that flashing html all the cool web designers are so hot on 😉

Mouse: “Happy You Gave Birth to Me 19 Years Ago Today Day.” I had been a little slow to call and sing the birthday song, so she called me and we both sang at once.

Yup, it was 19 years ago today. Mouse was a couple weeks or so early. Knowing her as well as I do now, I figure she had just about had enough. “Get me out of here!” And that was fine with me. Given that everybody is healthy, the earlier the better. And I sure was ready.

And so began the Mouse that roared. A small aminal with an imagination the size of the universe. A very early talker and deep thinker. She has always had a habit of coming out into the kitchen when I least expect it to tell me something she’s been thinking about that just about knocks me off my feet. She was always dirty! If it wasn’t food or mud or sand, it was paint or markers or glitter glue or whatever. If she was wearing three skirts, she was pretending to be a water spider, not Britney Spears or whoever. Nuclear powered. Just try to keep up with her skiing or kayaking or walking or whatever. I can’t. And I learned early on that if I really wanted her to do something, it was more effective to recruit Chrissy the Police Mouse or some other aminal to handle it for me. That is, any aminal except Froggy, who inevitably makes things worse. grok grok Whaddya mean? grokGROK!!!

I don’t know. The small aminal Mouse is a highly spirited little rodent and there were times when life could be a wild ride around here. But I can’t think what life would be like without her. I love you, Mouse. Where did the time go? How’d I get so old? Who hit fast forward?