Called mother and got the machine!  Woo-hoo!  I did my due diligence (doesn't that give just give y'all warm fuzzies when used to describe familial matters?) and am officially off the hook for the year.  I'll try to call my sister in July for her birthday, but she always seems to be conveniently asleep/in the shower/out when I call.  Not sure if that's mother intercepting the calls to try to keep us from talking, or if Steph has just developed the same dread of talking on the phone that I have.

Well, she's chatty enough on FB, so that works, too.

My high school friend Diane pointed out that mother shares a birthday with Alison Arngrim, most famous for playing Nellie on "Little House on the Prarie."  Bless her heart, she said "Isn't it funny that your mom shares a birthday with someone who used to play someone we wanted to slap when we were growing up?"

Uh....um...yeah.

Unfortunately, Di is one of my friends who buys mom's act.  It's almost like I have two sets of friends:  the ones who see her facade, and the ones who know what she's really like.  And Di has managed to cling to a sort of innocence that makes me loath to disabuse her of the notion that I have the second best mother in the world (next to hers, of course).

So...I decided to skip the re-watch of 'Gypsy' and have settled in with a couple of episodes of Little House.  The Hallmark channel has oblidged me by running the very first episodes,

I'm just sitting here, wanting to slap Nellie.  Happy birthday, mother.