MORRIS FAMILY YEAR-IN-REVIEW: 2013

JANUARY

The year began with a death in the family. My grandma, Dorothy, passed away. Perry’s granny died just a few months before. Our hearts were heavy.

FEBRUARY

Perry got a promotion. After more than 20 years of working for 14 WFIE in news production and assisting the sales department, he became a digital advertising designer for Raycom, our parent company. Perry still works at the station, but now he’s at the corporate level. I was accepted into the 2013 Raycom News Leadership Class and began a year-long quest to improve my management skills. I’ll celebrate my 10 year anniversary at 14 WFIE in February 2014.

MARCH

Perry and I saw P!nk and Bon Jovi in concert in Louisville. Mom came along to Bon Jovi, too, of course. I flew to Charlotte, NC for my first leadership class. This was one of two airplane rides I would take this year. The other was to Alabama in June for the 2^nd class. I drove to the 3^rd class in October, also in Alabama.

APRIL

Mom and I went to see Fleetwood Mac in Louisville. Perry and I returned to the Florida Keys and stayed in a little mom-and-pop resort on the bay. A few days after we returned home, Bug had a stroke. We didn’t think he was going to make it. His head cocked to the side and he had trouble walking in a straight line. He also started having accidents in the house and being picky about food. But he was still with us.

MAY

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers came to the Ford Center. I believe Perry, Mom and l all went to this one. My cousin Sarah’s wedding was in Indy and I did a reading during the ceremony. This was a very hard month at home with Bug. He became extremely difficult to take care of, testing our patience and strength. Vet visits increased, and so did the bills.

JUNE

More weddings! My cousin, Rachel, and my co-worker, Katy, got married on the same day. So we went to Rachel’s ceremony in Tell City and Katy’s reception in Gibson County. We spent our 4^th anniversary in the Leavenworth, IN area. We stayed at our first B&B and had lots of fun on a canoe trip, my first.

 

JULY

This was apparently a low key month. I couldn’t find anything exciting we did on Facebook (my record of all activities) except the annual fireworks show in Newburgh. FB showed me that I had a Blizzard from DQ and took Jack to the riverfront a few times. J

AUGUST

We planned a staycation that included a few days in Brown County, IN where we ziplined for the first time. We also enjoyed some of our favorite libations at Big Woods Brewery. Our friend, Chad, married his partner in Minnesota and we went to their reception at Aztar. Our neighbor, Judy, passed away and we went to her funeral at a local church.

SEPTEMBER

Bug hung in there for five months after his stroke, but one morning, it came time for him to go to the rainbow bridge. We buried him on a Friday on a hill at my mom and dad’s. We spent the weekend in tears and isolation. A week later, we attended the wedding of Perry’s friend, Ben.

OCTOBER

We look forward to our trip to the cabin in Georgia every year. This time, it was bittersweet because Bug would not be with us. Just the three of us packed up and headed south. Jack had a wonderful time on the trails and curled up with us at night by the fireplace. When we got back, it was time for “bar Halloween” and we dressed up as Wayne and Garth from “Wayne’s World” which was a big hit!

NOVEMBER

We celebrated Perry’s birthday weekend by going back to Brown County, IN and later in the month I got a pug cake for my special day. We also had a cookout at home for my co-workers. They were introduced to my mom and dad’s grilled chicken and creek fries, also a big hit!

DECEMBER

We went to our 2^nd ever Colts game and watched the boys win against the Titans at Lucas Oil Stadium. I also took Mom to see “Mamma Mia” at the Centre. Perry and I saw Bill Cosby there just a week earlier.

AND THEN…

I have 3 cousins who are getting ready to have babies next year. The Malone family continues to grow.  As for our little family, we plan to adopt…a pug next year. It’s only been three months since we lost Bug and we’re still healing. But we definitely think about it from time to time. We’ll also be visiting new places and stopping by our old favorites in 2014. One goal is to take Jack to the beach or maybe even spend the holidays in Hawaii. We’ll see. We’d also like to do a little home remodeling, but we’d have to stay in one place for a bit to do that. J

We hope you’ve had a great year and the next one is even better! -Perry, Mitzi and Jack Morris

Dream for an Insomniac

You can’t make this stuff up. That’s a phrase we often use in the news. The story is so outrageous, so stupid, so unbelievable...it can’t be true. But it is.

That’s how the dream I just had went down. So many people were in it. It was so weird and unexplainable at times. But it happened. And I had to write about it immediately or I would forget. It’s 4:30 in the morning, by the way.

Pmo and I were living in a house (not a van) on the bank of a river, with a considerable slope down to the water. Next to us was another house, but it was a houseboat. And not your typical houseboat. Picture a mobile home with the floor cut out and plopped down on the deck of a boat. I’ll call it butter dish boat. You can see it now, right?

This next-door butter-dish boat must have been floating on a man-made pool of water, like a casino boat that’s legal in Indiana but doesn’t actually sit on an existing waterway. There also had to be some sort of canal from this pool of water that led to the river below because of what happened later. I’ll get to that.

In our house, we were getting up to make breakfast and coffee because we had friends stay over: Rachel, Nick and Andrea. I couldn’t find the coffee cups, someone had moved them (I’m looking at you Pmo). I could only find huge cups you would get in a specialty shop. Like the cappuccino at the start of the movie “So I Married an Axe Murderer” if you’ve ever seen that.

I think I finally found the normal cups and was setting them out, but then I realized I needed something else, so I went outside. We had some things in storage right next to our neighbor's property. But at that point, I discovered our storage was actually on the neighbor’s land and not on ours. And when I say storage, I mean a pile of things lying on the ground. Like a pile of trash you would bury at the landfill or a mound of leaves you would set on fire. I suddenly had the urge to move everything back to our property: each item, one by one.  

There was a group of kids playing nearby: tag or flag football or something. They pretty much ignored me. Then I remembered I needed something else from another storage area, which was inside the butter dish boat. Again, why am I storing things at my neighbor’s place and then realizing I shouldn’t be doing that? And why are they letting me? So I left the pile and went to the butter dish.

Once inside the butter dish, I started to pick apart the new pile to move back to our house. For some reason, my boss was there, Scott. He had two brothers who looked just like him, but they had Duck Dynasty beards. Scott’s wife, Shelley, was there, too. They were all helping me get stuff out of the boat and back where it belonged.

All of a sudden, we started to move. And I realized the butter dish was now in the river. I panicked and went to find someone to stop the boat. But it was run by the military (what?) and they couldn’t stop until they arrived at their destination, wherever that was. There was another boat in front of us that was on the same trip. So I ran to the front of the butter dish (there was room to walk around the edge with a railing, in case you were wondering) and yelled at them to stop. They had a megaphone and yelled back for me to back off the front of the boat, or else.

There was a large group of African Americans inside the butter dish. It was either a really big family or some kind of church congregation. I'm leaning toward church because I vaguely remember some pews. Scott, his wife and brothers had disappeared. Instead, there was a little Caucasian girl with blond hair by my side who would not let go of my leg. She had been sitting along a wall with my aunt Betty. They found a phone for me and I called Pmo. I told him what happened: that I didn't have my phone, or money, or anything but the clothes on my back. Yes, I distinctly remember using that cliché. I figured Pmo would panic, too, but he was relatively calm. Almost too calm. 

We eventually pulled into to a town, a touristy place like Gatlinburg, TN. And when I say pulled in, I mean like Venice, where the roads are made of water and there are buildings on each side of you. I thought they were going to let me off the boat so I could get back home. But just as I asked somebody and was about to find out whether I would be free, I looked up at those buildings and woke up.

Where did all of that come from?

Rachel and Nick did spend the night with us last week, but I don’t know what Andrea had to do with anything, except that she was off work on Friday.

The pile of stuff outside? I do have a tendency to get obsessed with something like that and have to drop whatever else I'm doing and tackle the new disturbance right then and there. Last night before I went to bed, I was flipping through an Eddie Bauer magazine, saw a blouse/sweater combo, and immediately went to my closet to match up my sweaters and blouses. If I don't act on an idea in the here and now, I'll forget. Or at least write myself a note.

The pile of stuff in the butter dish? I still need to get my Christmas decorations down from the loft in the garage. That’s definitely been weighing on my mind. And it's sort of in an out-of-the-way place. Like the butter dish boat.

I've also felt an overwhelming need to purge things from this house lately. With our birthday presents from Mom (and the tons of stuff she gives us every time we see her in general), recent trips where we've brought back things, Christmas coming soon, etc., we have or will have quite a bit of clutter. It's not like hoarding where everything is out in the open and you can't find the toaster. Believe me, everything is tidy and put away in its place. But it still suffocates me because I know there are things lurking in a closet/drawer or under the bed that I really don't need and should give away. And valuable things I still need to sell.

The rest of the dream: Scott, Betty, the church group, the military, the little blond girl, Pmo not being too concerned, Gatlinburg…I have no clue. I’ll chalk it up to having a brain that is constantly in action and a sleep schedule that is forever out of whack. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a craving for some toast. With butter.