I can almost see my house from here….

Back from the reunion, which we survived with only minor bumps and bruises, or rather, scrapes and dings. A little duct-tape, though, and we were fixed right up. Ivan left Alabama in such a havoc that sis and her hubby ended up staying there helping people set up generators and such for Thursday and Friday. We didn’t think they were going to make it in, but they happily surprised us by deciding to fly up Friday night. Of course, that meant that on Sunday, JamesT and I got to go for a little sightseeing ride around Bristol, including buzzing the race track and mom’s house. Unexpected, but fun. Unfortunately, it seems mom’s car keys flew home to Alabama in Pete’s pocket, but she has another set.

Got to meet my nephew’s wife and their son, Chase, for the first time, since I keep missing out on trips when they were up. That was very cool, and I know mom didn’t want Chase to go. He was a pretty cool three-year old, who enjoyed playing Spiderman on the Playstation, and could talk trash as well as anybody about how you couldn’t beat him at Asteroids. Chase loved to have his picture made.

We worked for a while on the Our Family History book, and tried to put as much as we could into some genealogy program Pete found, so we could print out trees. After the reunion, we came home with even more Johnson info, back to 1700 or so, and some interesting insight into how things were done “in the past,” including a slew of names straight out of the Bible, which made James suggest we write out our whole family history as a bunch of begats, and some interesting dates of death which don’t exactly jive with the birth dates of the last couple kids attributed to that father. I suggested next year we call it the “illegitimate, but still claimed by a Johnson family reunion” — which I think mom vetoed.

Speaking of mom, we dragged her out to eat twice while I was there (I think she had mostly been cooking the rest of the week for bro, nephew & fam) — Friday we went to Outback, where I ordered her a glass of wine and really made her self-conscious, then on Saturday we went to O’Charleys, where she sat outside and whined about the wait, and whether we’d all fit into one car if she took hers and left us. Saturday was actually a pretty full day, between getting up and fixing our covered dishes for the shindig, the shindig itself, then we headed up to Dixie Pottery for some random shopping and to buy flowers to take to dad’s grave, then we hit the cemetery, and then we went to dinner. I think mom was just worn out by the time we tried to take her out, because she perked up once she had some food in her. Afterwards, we made a lottery-ticket and various alcoholic beverage pitstop, then went back to Mom’s for our last night of hanging out together, which included some family Asteroids competition and the aforementioned trash-talking three-year-old, that outlasted mom in the staying up late department.