I had the pleasure of an hour-long conversation with my Oma last night. (If you're not hip to the German lingo, "Oma" means Grandmother. Bling! There ya are, you learned someffing today!) I ended up grabbing a pen and paper and writing down some of the things she said so I could blog about them today, because it was Comic AU all around.

Some of the more interesting snippets included:

*She tells me she brings a radio to bed with her every night, and listens to the radio through her headphones, but she cannot put the headphones on her ears since they "bother her." So, she wears them on her face. "What I do is wear them on my face," she said.

*She has a problem with sugar these days. It makes some condition flare up. (This is probably related to her mysterious sleeping-fits she would fall into after eating sugar. Once, she took Trish and I to see a movie and ate some of our Sweetarts, and then she passed out and snored all the way through "The Little Mermaid.") But she was kind enough to offer me up this very important bit of advice. PLEASE take note of this...

"Stay away from diabetes."

I didn't have the heart to tell her I was sort of dabbling in diabetes these days. I don't think she knows just how hard it can be to stay away from something as tempting as diabetes. And sometimes, diabetes just sees me from across the street and calls to me. Next thing you know, diabetes is running over to me to say hello and asking if I want to go to that open-mic night down at coffeehouse, since diabetes and cyrrhosis will be playing some new songs they wrote. Diabetes can be very persuasive at times.

* In telling me a story about a man who fell asleep smoking pot in bed, she used some very colorful language regarding "cooking." Here's her version of the story (which is a true story):

This man was smoking pot, fell asleep in bed, and a fire started. He had taken the batteries out of the smoke detector "no one knows why he did that, maybe he had another use for the batteries," and he died. Meanwhile, his roommates came home and "smelled something cooking, so they checked the kitchen but there was nothing." So they finally thought to check on this guy upstairs, and they found the room in flames and he was dead. And presumably, he was the source of the cooking-smell.

It gets even worse. I'd better quote her directly for this part. "When the firemen came and tried to pull him out of there, they pulled and he was so cooked his legs came off."

WONDERFUL. All I needed on a nice, relaxing Monday night was to hear my Oma tell me about a man's legs "coming off" because he was "cooked." Yeah, my older family members are always a comfort.

As soon as I finally got her off the phone, I called my sister immediately to share the advice (especially the "stay away from diabetes" thing; I have been suspecting she is getting sucked into diabetes' glamorous lure). She ends up getting the best follow-up to the "cooked" guy story:

"No, Oma, he wasn't cooked... he was BAKED, man." --Trish, laughing maniacally at about 10pm on a weeknight, with the sound of cats meowing in the background.