I had an appointment with U of M dental school this past week, and parking is three dollars and I was broke as a joke. But, my wife found three dollars that she had had leftover from something, so I said, "Oh, praise God." And I had about a quarter tank of gas and said, “Okay, I can get out to Ann Arbor and back on a quarter tank of gas.” And as I'm pulling in and taking my little parking ticket, there's a ginormous new sign, bright red letters that says parking is now five dollars with the validation and that it is credit card only. So, I pull in with my three dollars cash that we've scraped together, literally a dollar of it was in change. And I sat in the parking lot and I start freaking out 'cause I am like "What am I gonna do? I'm gonna have to sit here until" -- well, what happens usually is the last patients -- the clinic shuts down about 4:35 but usually the parking attendant is done by 4:30. So after 4:30, they usually just lift the gate. Nobody has to pay parking that leaves at the very end of the day. But my appointment was at 2, gonna be over at 2:30, so I thought I was gonna have to sit in that parking lot 'til 4:30, 5:00 in the 88 degree heat, you know, 'cause I couldn't run my AC, didn't have enough gas to sit there and run AC. And I was just starting to cry and I was starting to have a panic attack -- anxiety attack, actually.  And then I'm going to put -- you know how our license comes in these little like -- or with our license now they give us like these little, little paper holders, you can put them in. Well, I was trying to put my parking ticket -- 'cause it's the same size -- trying to put it down in there and it wouldn't go down in there. And I pull the parking ticket back out and I stick my finger in there, just kind of pull out what's in there. And it is a crisp, five dollar bill. Now sure, I still don't have anything on a credit card, and it says credit card only, but I've got a crisp, five dollar bill. So I praise…

We have several things in our house that are family heirlooms. We have a number of things, but two of them are kind of interesting and unique. One of them is a set of four di- -- salad size plates, lunch type plates, small. And they are what's called a tea leaf design. They're off-white, and they have a little copper-colored leaf in ’em, in the design. And they are from my great-grandmother's house in Illinois. On Christmas morning in 1903 -- no, I'm sorry, 1913. 1913, my grandmother, who was at the time 18, um, and still living at home -- it was Christmas morning and they had an acetylene power plant attached to their house. And, at about 8 o’clock in the morning, while my grandmother was eating breakfast, still in her nightgown, the power plant blew up. It was Christmas morning, so it was cold. My grandmother ended up across the street in the front lawn. Their house -- half of their house had blown off. Her parents both were not in the kitchen at the time that the explosion took place, but they -- when they blew -- were blown outside but not across the street. My grandmother was fine, shaken up obviously, but fine. And they had to have their house rebuilt after that. But the only -- all the plates and all the dishes were broken except for these four little plates. And my mother had them and I have them now. I just think they're kinda cool ’cause they survived the explosion and, besides that, how many people can say that their grandmother survived a house explosion and blew herself across the street in her nightgown?

I hydroplaned for the first time in my whole life in West Virginia. We just happened to have got -- been driving over a, a spot where the water pooled, and I just wasn't aware of it ’cause you know, you think you're just driving wet roads and you've -- I’ve been driving rainy roads my whole life. I -- and all of a sudden, all of a sudden I lost control of the car, and I thought, "Oh my God. I lost control of the car." I -- the car is headed straight for hitting all of these signs. And the median strip was -- the car just went straight to the median strip off the road and went off the road and heading straight for the signs. And I'm trying to avoid -- I’m desperately trying to avoid hitting all those signs. So I'm turning the wheel, and thank God, I mean, honestly thank God there were no other cars around us ’cause the car went from the median -- the middle -- the median between the east and westbound all the way over to the other side, across the other, the other lanes. And I'm trying to avoid getting -- going off the freeway, and my kids, they're sitting on the passenger side, they can see that if the car -- the car could roll over into the ravine. I couldn't see the ravine from where I was because the rain was -- I mean, the visibility was not -- it was just raining and the kids were afraid. They said, "Mom, pull over, get off the exit. Get off." Thankfully this happened right where there was an exit to a gas station. So we just pulled over to the gas station and waited about half an hour for the rain to lighten up. And we were the first car that pulled in and about five or six other cars just came in after that. So it, it got a lot of us off the freeway, that hydroplaning right there. The kids were terrified, and we -- it was days of thunderstorms, driving through thunderstorms where the visibility was so, so bad, you could barely see in front of you. But we got home safely. We're all alive, the car didn't crash, and we thank Jesus for keeping us safe. We really thank Jesus for keeping us…

Took a couple of days but eventually I figured out that there was a raccoon in his house that he sleeps in, in the winter. And it had been there for a couple of days, alive but eating all the food. It did eventually come out of the house and take off for a little while, but when it came out it looked really, really sick. Its face was all -- like its, like its eyes were almost completely closed. Its face was all drawn. You really even couldn't see its bandit mask. And I felt so bad for it, and, you know, I would see it a couple of times, or come outside and it would be on the porch at night or something, but it didn't appear to be getting better, didn't appear to be getting worse. Then, I didn't see it for a couple of weeks. And today, when I was taking recycling out, I had to make two trips, and on my return of my second trip, as I walked up onto the porch, I realized that there was a raccoon tail kind of laying on the deck from under this bench where I have a bed that the cat can lay on, that's not insulated in his house. And I look and the raccoon's just chilling, laying there. No problems. His face is back to normal. So, from that perspective, that's great. You can see his little bandit mask again, and his eyes are bright and sparkly, and he's still super skinny, and he does not run when I see him. So, I was able to get his picture, and he -- then after I went back inside, he did move. I haven't seen him. Kind of wondering if he's living under our deck, but he's just so quiet, I can't really tell. The cat is no longer afraid of him, the outside cat, 'cause he was sitting right like within three feet of him on the deck and I didn't realize that this raccoon was there. So apparently, he's pretty chill, or else he's just not able to do very much yet. But I guess, at least he doesn't appear to have rabies or mange or anything like that. I don't know if he got hit by a car or what, but we live across from a park and so there's lots and lots of wildlife.…

Note: There is language that is excluded in the transcript but not excluded in the audio. I've seen a UFO. I've actually seen a few. But I'll tell you about the wildest time. And I was 15 years old, and I was at a party. It was, well, it wasn't really a party, a gathering of people. Didn't know each other. But, um, it was a whole bunch of us. We were all between the ages of 12, and I was one of the older ones but I think there was some older than me, maybe 12 and like 17, just a whole bunch of punk ass kids in a trailer park and about half of us were on acid, half of us weren't, so a lot of people were sober. So this wasn't the acid. Um, and we were all out on the front porch, front yard, one of the trailers. My boyfriend [name] at the time and we were just out there shooting s***. I think I was dying [name]'s hair, if I remember correctly. And I just got done dying [name]'s hair and this is gonna sound so insane and so unbelievable, but about six trailers down was the end of the street where it curved to a different street. And behind the trailers at the end of that street was a tree line that there was all woods behind this trailer park and a giant silver disc-shaped UFO came [UFO noise], it made that noise [UFO noise] right down and hovered right above those trees. There was lights going all the way around it, white lights all the way around it. There were windows all the way around it that you could not see in, and the lights were going in like a spinning fashion all the way around it, all the way around it. And but the weird thing was, the trees were not even moving. You would think it would be like blowing out so much air or something to like, what's the word, to hover like that, you know, to sit right above those treetops like that. But the trees were not even moving. And we all start looking at each other. We say, "You f***ing see that? You see what, what is that? What the heck is that?" And we literally start -- some people start screaming and running in the house.…

Today, Tuesday, July 15th, our cat, Elijah. Um... Who is 20 plus years old, 21 or 22, I can't quite remember, um... died this morning. He has been on a downward turn for at least a year, where he, uh, first lost eyesight in one eye, and then eventually started to lose some hearing, and then he lost eyesight in his other eye, and then he seemed to have lost complete hearing, uh, but he's been functioning pretty much normally as, quote, "King of the Castle" over our other cat and our dog. Um, but in the last couple weeks it's been... uh, thoughts of him... dying. Uh, so, last night or yesterday afternoon, uh, he cried out, which he has not done in a long, long, long, long, long, long, long time. So, he cried out. So, my husband and I scooped him up, put him in a bundle of, uh, towels, and a blanket. Uh. He felt -- seemed cold. I held him close to me. We slept with him in between us in the night. Um. And then, he, uh, exerted his last breath at about 10:30-ish or so this morning. He is currently wrapped up in blankets. A blanket. And a towel in my office -- home office here. We are taking him to our vet this afternoon for him to be... memorialized. He'll be cremated and put in a... delightful, wonderful... um, box. A wood box that's polished with little paw prints. And we'll have his, uh, front paws, smushed into clay, um, or something, with his name on it and he will live on a shelf along with a great photograph of him and he'll sit beside our dog, Abigail who died about six years ago, our cat, Jerry, who died about five years ago? And now him. When we got Elijah the cat, he was a teeny teeny tiny little kitten rescued from the Detroit Humane Society. He could fit in the palm of your hand. And this is, uh... the end of a chapter for our family. Eli was the last vestige of our family life when our boys were young, so... it's sad. But I think I have cried enough.

My son broke up with his girlfriend, who was his girlfriend for, like, seven years. And he had invited her here to stay and – had invited her here and I guess they were trying to finish breaking up, but he didn't tell me that that's what was going on. The pandemic had just pretty much ended. It was June of 2021, and things were not going very well for him. She had been an ICU nurse during the entire pandemic and things did not – had been horrible. She had had an affair with a traveling male nurse. A lot of things had gone on, but he had never told me any of this. So, when she came to stay for Sunday dinner to eat, and my parents were – er, my dad and his wife were here and other people were here, I didn't really think too much of it. She had come – had Sunday dinner at our house several times. And, it was really horrible because I didn't know that this was going to be the end. They kind of argued a bit during dinner and we all kind of stared at them, but nobody really, you know, thought too much of it. And so, as everything was being cleaned up and everything, I told her to come back soon and, you know, come back and see us soon. And my son looked at me like, you know, he's going to kill me. And my dad's wife came out and said, "I just don't understand why [name] doesn't put a ring on your finger. You've been dating for a long time." Well, that didn't help things. Then both of them got mad. I – [name], my husband took Dad's wife out of the room, and I tried to make things go better. We all ended up going out to the driveway where they got into each of their cars and left. And I was definitely in the frying pan because I didn't know what was going on. My son, after she left, he eventually came back and apologized to us for not having told us all this was going on. But boy, I'll tell you, what a horrible mess.

So they – because they live in the city. They've never really seen real fireworks before. And I'm not saying that there aren't real fireworks in New York City. I was talking to their mom and she said cause she's from Houston – so she's – not Houston but the Houston suburbs. So she's used to seeing fireworks and she was like, “Yeah, there are fireworks in New York City, but they can only ever do them over the East River. And there's always such a large crowd that it isn't really worth it when you have young kids.” And I was like, "That's fair."  So they never, they never got to see fireworks. Their kids, their oldest is 12 and the youngest is I think six or seven and they never have seen real fireworks in their life. So we went, and the two oldest got – were, like, really bored and they wanted to go back to the camp because one of the families was setting off like, you know, those fireworks you can set off on a driveway, they were doing those kinds of things. So they wanted to go back so their dad brought them there. So I stayed with the youngest and their mom. And those fireworks were so good. They were city fireworks, like the city put off, and we sat in the church parking lot, right? As you know, the typical suburban family would do. And it was – they were beautiful fireworks and the show went on forever, too. Like I was shocked because I mean, especially for such a small town that [town name] is I wasn't expecting the fireworks budget to be that expansive, like it went on for like 15 minutes. It was insane. And it and like, after the finale, we were packing up. There were still, like, stray fireworks that would go off and we were like, “Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh, that's crazy!” They were really not – they were really fantastic. And I was so happy to see fireworks because I didn't think that I was gonna get to see fireworks this year because I mean, I didn't know when they were. Some, some communities do them, like, on the 5th or the 3rd, so I never knew. And the mom, she hadn't seen fireworks in 12 years and – again because they never…