On Tuesday afternoon, I received an unexpected and alarming call from my sister. My father, who lives in South Carolina, had broken his femur, and required immediate surgery. And when I say that he broke it, what I mean to say that he BROKE it. In this context, ‘broke’ is to ‘BROKE’ as ‘wet’ is to ‘TSUNAMI’. In light of several other ongoing health issues he has, this was a very. Big. Deal.

I drove all night. He had the surgery the following day, and it was a success. His newly rejoined femur bone is now rubbing its temples, drinking coffee, and slowly knitting itself around an 18-inch titanium rod in his right thigh.

And Senior slumbers on, taking a well-deserved and much overdue sleep - The most stoic and noncomplaining human being… well, ever.

I’ve heard that a broken femur is one of the most agonizing things a person can endure, and he’d walked on his for five weeks, denying pain medication and holding it all in as it steadily got worse and worse (Note added on March 06: He’d been to the ER about the pain in late January, and was told that it wasn’t broken, but contused, and that the best thing to do would be to continue to walk on it - Solid advice, Doc!). Brian Regan does an entire ‘on a scale from 1 to 10, rate your pain’ bit about hospitals and broken femur bones that I can now no longer find funny, thank you, Dad. And you’ll thank me very much to not go into further detail about the specifics of his broken femur. Let’s just say that you’d probably wince and make a “ssssssssss” sound as you closed down your browser and deleted your history.

Remember that guy with the dry-socketed root canal, who was passing kidney stones when he got shot in the belly and fell off that ladder? And as he fell, his nostril got caught on the ceiling hook? Remember that guy? Senior would laugh at that wuss and tell him to man up. Then, he’d explain about his broken femur, and that guy would wince, say “sssssssssss”, and close down your browser.

So, even though I’ve been camped out in a chair in a hospital room for two days, I haven’t had much time to post anything. And Jill, who is home alone with all three boys… she definitely hasn’t had time to post anything. So I decided that while Senior rested, I would stay up real, real late, and post. Anything.

We’re on the 7th floor, and from where I’m sitting, I can see five blocks of stoplights going up North Fant Street. For about three seconds out of each minute, they’re all green at the same time. They don’t know that there are no cars out in Anderson tonight. Anderson is sleeping, just like Senior.

Green, green, red, green, red.

I can hear the distant murmuring of conversation down at the nurse’s station, and somewhere, an IV machine is beeping. It sounds just like a delivery truck backing up.

Green, red, red, green, green.

Senior’s awake now, and he’s telling me a sleepy story about an old woman and an antique pistol. I stop typing and listen to him until his voice trails off and doesn’t start back up again.

Green, green, green, green, green. All are go.

And now, it’s time for me to sleep too.

If they’d never invented the end of the month, then today would be January 733,477th.

“Where is Mum-Mum’s nose?”

Liam’s chubby index finger sneaks out from under his sheets and gently pokes the tip of my nose. His skin smells like apple juice and talcum powder. He smiles at me from behind his thumb which is nestled in the roof of his mouth. (Somewhere, our future orthodontist cackles and orders up a Space Shuttle.)

This is my favorite time of day with Liam. He’s peaceful and unguarded, personality #17. There are no little brothers lurking about threatening to steal his toys or my attention. He’s reclined and vulnerable on his bed, little boy armor checked at the door because it would be far too exhausting to bring so much stubbornness and fight to bed after having lugged it around all day.

Although he can be a wildly difficult creature, I secretly love that he is such a little bull. I see something of myself in his fire and anger. Controlling it without crushing it will be tricky as he grows up. While the fire/anger gene it is not my most admirable or desirable component, it is a component with strength.

“Where are Mum-Mum’s cheeks?”

He reaches out with both hands, presses the flats of his palms against my cheeks, and gently squeezes. I look like a fish. He smiles again and his eyes tell me that he’s in on the game…that he knows that I know that he knows all of these answers. It’s a game we’ve played with him since before he could speak. It’s probably a bit indulgent to have continued on with it for this long, but it’s familiar to Liam and helps him power down for the night.

“Where are Mum-Mum’s eyes?”

His index finger lands on the thin, blue-from-lack-of-sleep skin beneath my eyes. He studies me and I decide to change the game slightly.

“Hey Bean…what color are Mum-Mum’s eyes?”

Liam leans in. He takes his time inspecting me and finally snuggles back into his pillows.

“Ummm… Mum-Mum’s eyes are blue. And, white.”

Indeed. A surprised laugh bubbles out of me. I laugh at how unexpected his answer is as well as how accurate it is. I kiss him. This is my favorite time of day with Liam.

To those of you still checking this site, I salute you.

You may notice a few enhancements. For one, aside from the obvious cosmetic differences, I’ve removed the cheerfully untrue “Uploading Christmas pictures now. Check back!” proclamation from the front page. That three-month unfulfilled promise, and the stagnant content congealing below it, probably killed off all but the hardcore grandmas as far as regular checkers of this site go.

That old design was too top-heavy when it came to updates, and I was spending hours reformatting, resizing, thumbnailing, coding, testing, viewing, refining, photoshopping, altering, and tweaking each addition. If I altered something even as seemingly inconsequential as the order of the thumbnails, it could necessitate a ripple effect of change throughout the entire picture set, and then it was back to square one. Sometimes square two, sometimes square four, but always a square that sucked in its earlier, lower-numbered squariness. Nothing was easy, but I was too busy mopping to turn off the water.

Additionally, I was never quite satisfied with the design, and each time I changed it, I lost all associated content, as it was usually not fluid or dynamic enough to flow easily into the next design. So rather than continue to devote my most precious resource, time, to this flawed process, I decided to buck up.

I had to crash that Honda.

I took an obvious and oft-noted hiatus from updating, and instead redesigned the site from the toes up, with emphasis on the front-end narrative (which was lacking in the previous image-centric format), and the back-end programming (Wordpress now). Under the new design, everything’s automated, and that’s a lot easier. Instead of spinning repetitively for hours on the aforementioned verbs, all I do now is upload raw content, and the site and server will do all the formatting (via CSS and PHP, for you, the acronym-minded). This frees me from the minutiae, and allows me to focus more on content. So we’ll see how that goes. When I say I and me, I really mean we – look for future posts from Jill.

There are also several new features in this, version 1.0, of the new site.

Images. For one, I’ve abandoned the graphics-intensive thumbnail image groups that made up the bulk of the previous site. If I can get the Javascripting to play well with the Wordpress/PHP, I may resurrect that feature at some point in the future and trot it out for special occasions, but it was requiring far too much time as my go-to. I’m going to attempt to upload new pictures to our Flickr account on a regular schedule. Each time a new picture is added, the ‘Recent Photos’ area at the upper right-hand side of this screen is automatically updated with thumbnails of the latest uploads. I’ll keep the pictures posted there in albums grouped by month and year, and anyone who cares to can peruse the archives with that in mind. Sometimes I’ll even post pictures here, within the text. When I do that, I’ll include the category ‘photo’ on that entry so that all posted images can be easily recalled.

Comments. Visitors will now have the ability to leave comments in response to particular postings or pictures, here or in Flickr. Within Flickr, you’ll need to be registered and logged in (to Flickr) to comment, which is kind of an arse pain. To leave a comment on billandjill, just click on the ‘comments’ link beneath each post, and set it loose - no registration or login needed. Feel free to try it out. Please.

Posted By. Bill or Jill? Now it’ll say, right beneath the title of the post. So you’ll know right off if you’re reading something from She Who Keeps the Ship Running Smoothly, or He Who Dresses Them Funny.

Archives. All posts will be archived and searchable. Each new post will occupy the top spot on this page, marching previous posts one spot deeper into the archives. Specific posts can be searched for by keyword, category, or by selecting a month - all these options are available on the sidebar menu. For example, if you wanted to find this post in the archives, you could simply enter ‘hardcore grandmas’ in the search field to the right. (Note: a search on Google for the same term will return slightly different results). I’ll convert some of the older content from the site’s previous incarnations and deposit it into its relative time period here, for continuity and historical accuracy.

The site’s content should grow into a repository of more trivial blathering, banal postings, and personal photos about the goings-on in our lives than any one person would ever care to know. And if I said we there, I meant I that time. I wouldn’t characterize Jill’s posts as trivial or banal. In fact, I for one, can’t wait to read them. Point is, from here on out, everything will be saved and retrievable, if you care about such things.

More to follow.

*saluting*

Was the team of superior competitors victorious? And more importantly, were they from an area to which you are associated, either through geographical proximity or familial connection? I hope they ran well and their aim, if applicable, was true with whatever mechanism acted as a scoring trigger, and that they accumulated many points in whatever increments were relevant to the competition.

“Guess they figure there’s not a big chance of his nipple popping out.”

~referring to the generous screentime afforded Tom Petty during this year’s halftime show