a full day

Good morning,
A lot to tell you today. Yesterday like I said, was house cleaning time and I did do a thorough job. It looks great! Wish I had the incentive to keep it this way instead of just when guests arrive. But back to the beginning. At 8:20 am yesterday I get a call from my brother Bruce. He lives in Walker MI, about an hours drive from Lansing. Now I seldom get calls from Bruce, especially early in the morning, so I new it wasn't good, and I was right. My Mom's in the hospital again. She was in a car accident. She's okay except she broke her ankle. Her good ankle. And totaled her/my car. She went to the club(VFW) around 1:30 and the accident happened around 6pm as she was going home. She rear ended a truck at a stop light, careened off that into another car before going across the median and hitting a pole. Fortunately, no one else was hurt. But the/my car was totaled. The police are doing a full investigation which I'm pretty sure isn't going to be good. But now she'll have to go to a rehab facility since she won't be able to walk until the ankle heals. I said she broke her 'good' ankle. Well 15 or so years ago, she suffered a stroke which left her with some weakness on her right side. The weakness has magnified as she's gotten older. She now wears a brace to keep her ankle from giving out on her. So there's no way she can use that leg to walk on without the other. So this isn't going to be good. Several of my siblings have thought she should have given up driving several years ago. They may get their wish now. She's suppose to be released from the hospital today. My brother's Bruce and Louie were looking to find a facility for her. I'll keep you updated.
So I get Craig up, we have our coffee, read the paper and run some errands. We come home and I start cleaning while Craig does laundry and bookwork, when Craig shuts off the dryer and tells me there's a problem. I go into the laundry room and it smells like smoke. Oh great! The dryer's broken. Craig thinks maybe lint is blocking the exhaust vent, so we pull out the washer and dryer to get behind it. I take off the vent, it looks good from this end. Our dryer vent goes out the roof since we have a brick house and didn't want to break a hole in it when we installed the dryer. So I take off the connection to the ceiling, and it looks clear. I take a ruler and reach up to find the floating cap is stuck to the base. Our roof vent has a plastic cap the rests on the base, It's called a Heartland dryer vent closer system, and when the dryer is on 'floats' in the air letting the exhaust out. It works much better then the type that has
vent flaps because as lint collects around the flaps, they eventually never close tight, where as the cap comes back down when the dryer goes off and forms a nice seal. Well, it appeared to be frozen on. So I got a broom handle and gave it a good 'tap'. Of course I tapped too hard, and popped the entire thing off the vent pipe crashing to the ground and shattering into pieces. Soooo while I put everything back together in the laundry room, Craig ran to Menard's to get a new one which I put back together when he returned. At least it wasn't the dryer.
So I get the house clean, Craig finishes his work, and we relaxed with a couple of cocktails and watched some episodes of the Wanda Sikes show and Saturday night live on Hulu while we waited for our friends Tom and Dean to arrive. They're from Wisconsin and we go camping with them a couple times a year. They were in town staying with Deans brother. They came to town to see his Mom who lives near Holly, MI. about an hours drive east of here. They discovered some lesions on her brain and won't know what they are until more tests are done. So they may be in town more often. But they squeezed in a visit with us while they were here. We took them to Clara's for dinner. An old train station converted to a restaurant. They have an extensive menu. I of course had ribs, Craig, a burrito, Dean, nachos, and Tom a steak. There was almost nobody in the restaurant. It was weird. I can't believe everyone was home or in a bar watching the Superbowl! We then returned home for some home made brownies. It was good to visit with them.
Today should be less eventful.