What Were You Thinking?

2012-01-27T20:54:00.000-08:00

One Man's Junk Is Another Man's Treasure

2011-06-13T20:37:00.000-07:00

I didn't actually write this title.

I stole it, from the very last student essay I graded before the school year ( finally!) ended, freeing me up to play a lot of Fruit Ninja and mutter goddamn KIWI! every three seconds because they're impossible to see against the 70's rec room wood paneling background, which is apparently very Zen but mostly just pisses me off.

Anyway. Her essay was about recycling, I'm pretty sure, not gay erotica. I'm disappointed in you.

I don't really blame her. It could happen to anyone. Especially now that we text everything, and there are no vowels, or capitals or punctuation needed, and even then the phone gets bored with you and just starts writing its own thing. For instance, recently I sent my daughter a text because she was out of town and missing home.

The text said Your brother wore his tophat to the park to play baseball. (This is what it was supposed to say.)

Only my phone disapproved and jazzed the message up without informing me, and what it really sent her said Your brother wore his gopher to the park to play baseball.

He's a weird kid, but even he draws the line at wearing gophers. If you are new to this blog you may not yet know that I am haunted by the subject of rodents, totally against my will, and now my phone is in on the game. It's creepy.

Also my mother is now texting, and beautifully, I might add. Here is the transcript of our first-ever text exchange:

Me: Rumor has it you are now a texting goddess! Why have you not been texting me? I had a banana for breakfast. Thought you needed to know.

Mom: Th[

She already knows way more acronyms than I do.

By now you may have noticed that this post lacks a certain....substance. I'm disappointed in me. It's like a ricecake post, where the title is the caramel drizzle on the top, and that's okay, but the rest is just air and the promise of indigestion.

Mostly I wrote it so that I could stop seeing a post about poodles and EASTER everytime I opened up the blog. It makes me look like a slacker. They aren't even my poodles, they're my mother's, and I'm beginning to think they're the ones who sent me the text message.

My next post will have a lot of weighty social commentary, probably, like how the failing economy has created an unlooked-for shortage of giant metal dinosaurs, so don't even try to find a 25 foot steel T-Rex to put next to your mailbox. You can't find them except for online maybe, and the shipping is ridiculous. It's sad.

Or.

Maybe I'll start a series for summer! Vic's Secret Shame! Shames! I'll swear you all to secrecy first, so it's all confidential, and I don't lose my job.

Let me know what you think. I've got some kiwi to kill.

Also, I Have Peeps in My Purse. Don't Pretend You Don't.

2011-04-24T00:07:00.000-07:00

Mocha contemplates poking the bunny. No, Mocha, not on Easter!

The One Where I Try to Explain Where the Hell I've Been.

2011-04-20T21:59:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, late at night, I lie in bed listening to the dog dig a hole in the carpet under my bed and think fondly of you, my blog people.

I like to think of you gathered peacefully together, all of you in colorful winter hats, gently adrift on an ice flow. I broke you off from the mainland somehow, and there is a taciturn polar bear by my side, I think his name is Carl, watching with me as you bob off into the horizon.

In my imagination the ice flow is not like the kind where the village has cast you out and sent you out to your death. Don't even worry. It's more like a floating party, like a frozen cocktail party, because the ice chunk you're on is a little teeter-y, and any dancing or highly animated Pictionary games would take us back to the death scenario.

Pretty soon you're just like tiny specks in the distance, and then it's just me and Carl, and polar bears don't get my sense of humor, apparently, so it's quiet. Too quiet.

I think, I wish they'd float back here. Only then I see it in the wise bear's eyes; I'm the one adrift.

I know. It's pretty deep. Also, besides destroying the carpet, the dog is stealing clementines from the kitchen and storing them under there so I need to remember to check for rotten fruit again. That dog loves produce.

Anyway, I had very good intentions for regular posting this year, but then the world got dangerous. For instance. You know how all of a sudden the nefarious nature of teachers has been revealed to the unsuspecting nation? And how we are draining the US economy dry with our opulent lifestyles? ( Seriously, the teacher next to me must have three or four gauzy, Stevie Nicks-style skirts in her wardrobe where one would do. Sheer wanton excess. ) You probably also know how teachers are systematically breaking the spirits of children, and in between acts of cruelty are taking long breaks from the work we don't do.

So, I was trying to absorb this sudden elevation of my status to supervillain, and then the whole news thing with that teacher and her controversial blog entry happened, and it reminded me that teachers are to be seen and not heard.

Which is hard when you write a blog that includes stories from your classroom from time to time, and also part of your head is identifiable in your profile picture, and some enterprising and vindictive helicopter mom could easily piece it all together and come a-calling. I felt like maybe I should delete everything in my blog except maybe the posts about cats and beards, and just hush up.

I retreated from the blog world to the safety of my home, which was okay until the police started showing up in the neighborhood. The first time it was kind of fun, because the NASCAR neighbors got evicted and left the house locked up, and the sheriff had to break into the window in his tight uniform pants and holster belt, not that I was watching or anything, and after he left I went out to "get the mail" and the homeowner said "Hey come look at this!!"

So I did, just to be polite, and she took me in the house to show me all the trash they left behind, like six pairs of broken eyeglasses, and pizza boxes and meat on the counters, and what looked like drifts of yak hair in every room. Are yaks legal in town?

The next time the police came it was to arrest the sex offender we didn't know had come to live in the house behind ours. Imagine our surprise! They took him away in hand cuffs, but I don't know where he is now. I think if someone starts watching loud Doris Day movies at 2 am over there again we'll know to lock up the kids.

I guess what I'm saying is, I've missed you, my floating friends, and seeing as nowhere is safe anymore, I might as well enjoy myself and hang out here with you, if you don't mind. Let's just pretend that I work for the DMV or something for awhile. People love those guys.

I've got clementines if anyone's hungry. Some of them don't have tooth marks.

Hips Don't Lie. Maybe just some little white lies. Sometimes the left hip tells some whoppers.

2011-01-23T22:41:00.000-08:00

So I was doing some panicky last minute Christmas shopping back in December at CVS, because people on my list only get quality, and I saw a box lying on the shelf next to the last shake weight and some pajama jeans, and inside the box was THIS:

I wasn't sure what it was, but it was clearly AMAZING, so I threw it into my cart, rushed home, and then forgot all about it.

Christmas went by and one day I found the box again behind the dresser. The outside said "Hoopnotica" and on the inside, what looked like fancy tent poles was actually a special "travel hoop". For when you go on vacation and have a mad hula hoop need. (Who hasn't been in that dark place at some point?)

I was going to take it back because I'm already one barn purse over my impulse-buy quota, but then I saw that it came with a DVD, so I put it in and there were some gorgeous women on it, and one tank-top man in the back, who were dancing beautifully with their giant hoops, and flinging them up in the air and catching them with their teeth, and it turns out that hoop dancing has been a big thing with all the Hollywood stars, and also hippies, for a long time now, and somehow I was never notified because I live in the suburbs.

I watched the whole DVD and then spent hours watching every single thing on Youtube about hoop dancing. It's totally hypnotic and addictive. I learned from the videos that hooping can whittle your waist, and free your inner creative goddess, and also help you poop, all at the same time. Sometimes hooping can get you on the Ellen show. That's a crazy lot of wonderful, if you ask me.

I also learned that probably at some point, once I get really good, I should wear my hair in dreads and invest in some feathery flare-leg yoga pants with a hip skirt for when I meet the other hoopers at Burning Man, but that's a couple weeks down the road probably.

I watched the demo part on waist hooping and figured I had it down, so I changed into some natural-fiber clothing (for grip!) and put the hoop together, reveling in its shiny, circusy bling. It didn't take long to figure out that the house is not really hoop-friendly, what with the animals, and lamps, and flower-arrangements from the oral surgeon, so I waited until darkness fell and took the hoop outside.

In the front yard I assumed the recommended position, one foot in front of the other, hoop positioned at the small of my back, and gave it a firm swing to the left. The hoop flashed in the glow of the street lamp, spun once around my hips, and, despite my feverish gyrating, landed on the grass.

I tried again. Firm swing to the left. Feverish gyrating. Hoop in the grass. Again. And again. And again. I heard a suppressed laugh from behind me, and turned around in time to see the blinds in my son's room fall closed.

"I see you up there!" I yelled.
Silence.
"Seriously. I know you're there, spying on me!"
Then I heard a soft voice coming from behind the blinds. "What if someone sees you doing that?" it asked.

I chose to ignore such negativity and went back to work. Ten minutes later the front door opened, and my son appeared, holding his old plastic hula hoop, which he laid down on the driveway. Then he stood and watched me as I sweated and stooped.

"Car!" he announced, when an SUV turned into the cul-de-sac.
"I'm not in the street."
"I know," he said, " I just thought you might want to hide behind something until they were gone."

Then he casually picked up his old hoop and began hooping, effortlessly.

My son kept me under contemptuous surveillance for awhile, until finally his hoop ended up in the tree and he lost interest, so now it's just me and my hoop dancing dreams out under the street lamp.

I'm not giving up. It's been several days, and every night I go out and spin my shiny hoop and get all sweaty, and every night it falls to the grass, but sometimes now it turns a few times first. One time I spun it expertly, but accidentally, around my forehead when my foot slipped in the grass. I see that as progress.

Someday soon you're going to see me on Youtube, my hoop a blur on my magical hips, my inner goddess totally revealed due to the "flow" I've achieved and maybe a recent successful bowel movement. That's going to be a great day.

Did I tell you sometimes they light their hoops on fire?

Pimping out the Big Guy. Or, Not Everyone Gets Propofol.

2011-01-09T22:42:00.000-08:00

Today I bought a container of cheese balls the size of an end table.

The cats have been supplementing their diet with a Taco Bell -inspired "Fourth Meal", only instead of getting drive-through tacos they just wait until everyone in the house goes to bed and then throw themselves repeatedly at their food bag until it opens. Then they eat until their eyes bulge and vomit the excess right outside my bedroom door.

Which is why I bought the cheese balls. For the container, not the balls. It was cheaper and way bigger than the kitchen containers I found, and it buys us some time until the cats figure out the screw-on lid.

My intention was to empty the cheese balls directly into the trash when I got home, because they are an affront to nature, but they were discovered too quickly, and now the male half of the household is wearing a glazed expression and a coating of fine orange dust.

Once they've eaten until their eyes bulge, I anticipate they'll just vomit the excess outside my bedroom door.

Also while I was at Target I picked up some other essentials, such as a little felt purse shaped like a barn, and some farm animals to go with it. Also, two Styrofoam swords, six pairs of novelty socks, and an infinity scarf.

All of these things seemed like a must-have when I put them into the cart, which is the genius of Target, but now I am home with the cheese balls and the farm animals, and the swords, and thinking maybe toilet paper and shampoo would have been good too.

Clearly things need to change around here. We need to economize. Make a list and stick to it! Say no to
impulse buys. Even a three year old can resist a felt barn purse, so why can't I? I know this because after I exclaimed, "Oh, look! It's a little BARN!", a woman behind me stopped her cart to get one too. She handed it to her daughter, who promptly threw it on the floor and sobbed, "I don't LIKE a barn!"

So. Frugality is going to be my new watchword.

Either that or find a sugar daddy.

Which reminds me to ask you - does anyone know how much an oral surgeon makes? This is relevant.

Two days ago I drove my husband to the oral surgeon's office to get a a dental implant. After the procedure the white-haired nurse called me to the back.

"He did very well!" she said, patting him on the head affectionately. "The doctor gave him propofol! Not everyone gets propofol!"

Then the doctor bounded into the room like a rat terrier in a bandanna and scrubs. "Hey there!" he said to my husband, who gave him a stoned grin and an eyeball roll from his recovery lounge chair.

Dr. Oral Surgeon turned reluctantly in my direction.

"You must be his driver," he said. Then he turned his back on me.

"So!" he continued brightly, looking into my husband's unfocused eyes. "It went great!" He paused, and his tone grew more intimate, more....playful. "I nearly sewed your beard to your gums, Big Guy! Ha Ha!"

No response from the lounge chair.

The doctor moved in a little closer. "I have to tell you," he continued, " I got to use my biggest implant today. I don't get to do THAT very often. You could take it, because you are quite the big guy, aren't you? That jaw bone had plenty of room to seat that implant. Impressive!"

Then he leaned over and put his hand on my husband's arm. My husband looked confused, but pleasant.

I cleared my throat, and the doctor stood upright again, suddenly all business as he ran through the instructions. Then Big Guy was loaded into a wheelchair clutching his gauze and complimentary chapstick, and we were on our way.

I thought it was a harmless flirtation until two hours later, when the florist showed up at our front door with flowers for my husband. From Dr. Oral Surgeon.

I have to tell you, I was kind of excited. Maybe, if we worked something out, an open arrangement of some kind, the good doctor could help me support my felt barn habit. All the Big Guy had to do was play along.

But then the husband saw the flowers and muttered, "So that's where my co-pay went," and I knew it wasn't going to be easy.

I think if the surgeon had sent my husband an ice axe, or a polishing chamois, the outcome may have been different.

I'm pinning my hopes on the follow-up appointment on Thursday. My barn needs a litter of piglets.

Possum Tarts, Your Time Has Come.

2011-01-02T12:42:00.000-08:00

Because, what is it with you people and possums? Lately there's been a swarm of possum-seekers to this blog, so either "possum" is a porn euphemism (Is it? There was one search for "hairless possum" which makes me especially suspicious), or 2011 is going to be the Year of the Possum. I'm going with the last one. I think it's my destiny.

You long-standing blog friends have looked ahead with me to the day I would finally make my Possum Tarts dream a reality, and I think it's time to roll up the sleeves and get to work. I'm going to the store now to stock up on filo dough and frosting ingredients (what goes with possum? A paprika glaze? White chocolate? Figs?) and then I'll just need to catch a possum for the filling. There's a little one my family has named Andy that hides under the car but I think there's a moral issue with cooking something or someone you've named. Not that that stopped my parents from serving us "chicken" when we were kids, right after our rabbits disappeared. Not bitter, Mom!

Anyway, as soon as I'm ready to do some market testing, (got to work out the gristle problem I'm anticipating) I'll be calling you all over. Stay hungry.

Also, I think the whole domain name thing has finally settled in. Just to clarify, I don't have a new blog, just the same old tired one, but the address is different. Truestarr was right, the address is just ohvic.com, no "www". If you put the "w"'s in, the internet sends you to Siberia. It's cold there right now, I'm pretty sure. So, at some point it would be good to switch your link over to the new address. When you get a chance. I need you here so that my therapist thinks I have friends.

In other news, my gazing ball neighbor has been boring me lately with his lack of attention to his yard. This is because he has been busy single-handedly building a second-story balcony on the back of his house. He's using long sticks, a lady-like hammer, a handsaw and my husband's infamous ladder. He's going to be back there for years unless he falls off the ladder.

On the bright side, there IS one new addition to the flamingo/madonna/majestic lion-festooned yard! It's a three-foot plaster swan next to the front door. He's hung a life-preserver around its long neck. I hate it when swans drown so it's good he's emphasizing water safety.

I'd post a picture for you, but he hasn't had a chance to whitewash it yet, and I know he'd want me to wait until it matches. It's so hard to wait.

I have to go grade research papers now, since school is starting back up tomorrow and I waited to the last minute, as usual. My favorite paper so far is the one about the poem "Batter My Heart, Three-Person'd God", where the girl explains that the poem is about how the poet wants to be covered by God in sweet, sweet batter, like a cake.

Stupid high school students. It's obviously more of a tempura-batter. God's a deep-fryer.

Hmm.

Deep-fried Possum Tart. Like a rodent Monte-Cristo...

I think I need to go back to the store.

In Which Vic Exists, But Only In An Alternate Reality UPDATED

2010-12-31T09:43:00.000-08:00

UPDATE: Okay, so I think things are good now! I have my blog roll back and everything. (Way to tempt fate, Vic...) If you don't update your link to the new address ohvic.com , I think you just see this post until the end of time in your blog roll. That would be bad. So...you'll update your links? And can you also do something about this Monday-coming-around-every-week thing? I'm over it.

I promise I'll write a real post soon, but just in case weirdness has happened to you when trying to get here, I just wanted to say it's not your fault. It's mine. Or Blogger's.

For some reason I decided I wanted to change this blog's domain address, and now it's in some freaky limbo land, halfway between the old one and the new one. Blogger swears it'll sort itself out any minute now, and joy will be restored to the land, but we'll see.

In the meantime, the old address (www.plotthickens.blogspot.com) will continue to work/redirect. The new address is ohvic.com , which is mostly working now, except my blog roll is still out there in the void somewhere. Come back, blog roll...

Also, Happy New Year!

I'll be back.

I'm Not Even Going to Mention the Fact That The Cats Are Eating the Christmas Tree.

2010-12-23T00:58:00.000-08:00

Now that Rudolph's dead, I think it's clear that Christmas is too dangerous.

Probably we should all abandon it for something safer, like Kwanzaa.

I don't know anything about Kwanzaa really, but I'm pretty sure there's never been a Kwanzaa Day parade where giant inflatable reindeer are stabbed in the head by street lamps and die in front of scores of traumatized children.

Which is how Rudolph bit it, apparently.

I just went and looked up Kwanzaa, and it seems like I'm on the right track. It's all about corn and meditation, and maybe a little Motown, so pretty safe!

Seeing a giant corn deflate would not be so bad.

Another thing Kwanzaa doesn't have is attaching thousands of tiny light bulbs to your house with a staple gun and a really tall ladder. There are not many combinations of things that say Bad Idea more than electricity, heights, and sharp projectiles, unless you add wasps, which we did this year.

See, my husband unexpectedly decided to go a different way with the lights, which is to say, rather than putting up half a strand of lights and then growing bored and leaving the other end to swing freely in the breeze until about March, he and my son decided to cover the entire house with lightbulbs.

Right after the two of them finished dragging huge piles of tangled lights out onto the lawn we had an electrical storm. From his vantage point on the aluminum ladder, my husband said the lightening looked pretty close.

So then he came down the ladder super fast and ran inside, and then realized the ladder was still leaning against the house, pointing directly into my daughter's room, and since we already have a family history of ancestors being killed by lightening inside the house, it seemed like a good thing to move it. Then there was a highly entertaining half hour of watching my husband run out in the rain to the ladder, almost touch it, retract his hand, and run back in the house, just as the next flash of lightening hit. After about five attempts he finally hit it with a stick and knocked it into the yard, where it seemed likely to stay.

Then two weeks later, the job suddenly recommenced. I left the house in the morning to go grade papers. An hour later I received a text message from my daughter announcing that her dad had fallen off the ladder after being rushed by a cloud of wasps hiding under the eaves, and that there was "a lot of blood".

When I got home I found the driveway bloody, the neighbor boy overexcited in the front yard, and my husband bleeding on the sofa while holding a bag of frozen chopped spinach to his head.

"I saw him go over!" my son reported. "He just laid there for a long time after his head hit the driveway."

My husband didn't want to go to the emergency room, of course, knowing he would be lining up with all the other shame-faced Christmas victims, but he was overruled.

I made sure to look while we were there, and there were no Kwanzaa-related injuries to report at the E.R, although, to be fair, there were a few of unidentified origin, like the angry old guy in front of us in a wheelchair who kept muttering to the woman at the counter "Don't hurry on MY account! I'm just bleeding internally! I'll be FINE! You just take your time back there!"

Maybe he had a Kwanzaa limbo injury. It's hard to say.

Anyway, after a CAT scan and two X-rays came back clear, the doctor squeezed the back of the husband's head open like a plastic change purse and said "Hmm, that's going to need some staples!"

Oh, the irony.

The lights on the house are still not quite finished, but that's okay. I'm playing Motown and praying Rudolph is the last Christmas fatality this year.

Merry Kwanzaa everyone.

Never Let Pumba Call His Own Witnesses.

2010-11-15T22:36:00.000-08:00

                                                 Or, An Inspiring Courtroom Story
                                                OR, Law, the Hakuna Matata Way!
                                                                   by Juror # 3.

Because if Pumba IS allowed to call a witness, he won't have the slightest idea what to do with them, and then he will suck his protuberant lower lip obnoxiously, paging in desperation through thick binders of material looking for a mysterious thing he lost in there, and then he will ask the witness the same question for the fourth time. And then the judge will yell at him for being an imbecile, and then Pumba will say, in his Jamaican/Texan warthog accent ("Jah Honah, Ah AXE you agen to gimme a moment heah!") that the judge is being NO FAIR! to him. And then the judge will threaten to throw Pumba in jail for impersonating a lawyer and the courtroom will have to be cleared again while Pumba and the judge have a cage-fight in the judge's chambers.

Then, when you and your new best friends, co-jurors all, are finally allowed to return to your swivel chairs, Pumba will be sitting sullen and cowed in his own chair, and his partner Timon will have taken over. This will be better, because Timon has maybe presented a case before. Timon will grill his witnesses (all hostiles witnesses, he will inform the courtroom) aggressively in a heavy, possibly Transylvanian accent, so like Dracula Timon, and he will call all the witnesses by the wrong name. Sometimes he will lean heavily on the podium with his forearms like he is driving it home to Meerkat Manor, but mostly he will prefer to interrogate his witnesses while sitting cross-legged in his attorney chair.

The judge will not threaten to have Timon executed as often as Pumba, but he will roll his sarcastic eyes every time Timon yells "OBJECTION!", and then threaten consequences if Timon does not stop sitting in front of the Elmo machine so that the defense attorney cannot put his papers on it. Eventually Timon will not allowed to have a chair at all because he forgets and drives his roller chair back into Elmo machine territory. The judge will instruct the court attendant to take Timon's chair away. Poor standing Timon.

Timon and Pumba will have been hired by the plaintiff. The plaintiff, you will learn, is a plagiarist and a narcopleptic and also a nurse. He is bald, and whiny and will lie on the witness stand . You will also learn he has been caught illegally taping a meeting, cheating on his nursing class assignments, and taking patient files out of the hospital. (Did you remember that he is the plaintiff? He has been wronged.)

How he has been wronged is that his nursing professors will have thrown him out of the program ( because he cheated, and broke the law, and took confidential patient records, probably for origami purposes.) He will say his instructors were being meanies to him, and also they should have given him accommodations for his ADHD (surprise!!), like extra time on tests and someone to take notes and also provide hot towels and aromatherapy.

Timon will put a defendant on the witness stand. He will refer to her, inexplicably, as "Ms. Runny."   He will ask, while driving the podium with his forearms,

"Miz Rrrrunny. Why deed you say to anotheer student, about my client, 'Eef you SLEEP with thees dog, you weel get some fleas?!? My client ees a Mahreed Man. Why you say thees? He can now neveer SLEEP at night, from so sadness. Why?"

Mzz Runny will attempt to explain a common colloquial phrase which does not imply students have been having doggy-style sex, but merely that Mr. Plaintiff is seen as a bad influence. Timon will shake his head at this obvious lie, and then wink conspiratorially at the jurors.

Meanwhile, in the jury box, you will write rebellious things in your court-provided stenographer's pad and twist,twist,twist in your swivel chair. Three weeks of swiveling will happen, and many days of taking your belt off at the X-Ray machine security check twice a day, and then everyone putting their belts back on in the elevator and the doors opening suddenly so that it looks like people have been getting busy in the elevator, and then it will finally be time for deliberation.

In the Jury Room, the first thing the foreman will say is, "Hey, does anyone else think those attorneys look like Lion King characters?"

A man from the Phillipines will want to punish Mz Runny for being "frowny". He will worry that she scared Mr. Plaintiff in the classroom. She should be nice to people. Give the man some money!

No, no, no! Everyone will shout. Someone will have chocolate. This saves the day! The jury will find for the defendants.

Timon and Pumba will be very sad but it's the circle of life and their client will go on to nurse unsuspecting convalescent home patients even without a big pain-and-suffering payout, and all the jurors will say "We should get together sometime", but you know you won't.

At least you'll have the juror button you accidentally stole from the courthouse to remember them all by.
Hakuna Matata.

Because You Can Never Have Too Many Posts About Sombreros.

2010-10-18T21:56:00.000-07:00

You know how sometimes on your way home from work you see a stranded mariachi band on the side of the freeway, and they always look so forlorn in their ruffled shirts and pencil-thin mustaches? And how they're lined up in the setting sun next to a piebald Ford Windstar with a flat tire, and one them is holding a trumpet in his hand like he's about to kick off a sweet number right there on the shoulder, with the traffic shooting by and hamburger wrappers and left socks swirling in little eddies around his feet?

And you know how you think to yourself, I'd like to help, really I would, but I'm in a hurry, and besides, there's no room in this car for a stand-up bass and eight sombreros?

So you stay in the fast lane, avoiding mariachi eye contact, and then you spend the next two weeks daydreaming about how cool it would have been to have a whole band in your car, the backseat ringing with grateful "AY YA YAY YA!" s and rhythmic guitar?

Only it's too late now, so add another regret to your pile?

I know. I've been there. I learned this one the hard way a couple of weeks ago. I don't normally pick up people off the side of the road, but murders committed by mariachi bands are statistically insignificant, and I think this time I missed out on a chance for true philanthropic joy. It's a decision I'm going to have to live with.

Also today I let down an entire Japanese restaurant. I was getting out of my car, and all the waitresses inside, suburban white girls in red satin kimonos and wooden sandals with athletic socks (authentic!), spotted me through the plate glass window and reached simultaneously for a stack of menus before I even reached the sidewalk. Only I was actually going next door to buy a trumpet (which should have been some kind of sign, now that I think about it) so then they all put the menus back sadly, their gaze following me down the sidewalk. When I came out from next door they perked up until they saw it was me, and then went back to standing in the empty restaurant, their eyes scanning, scanning the horizon for someone who wanted their dumplings.

I could see the desperation, but I just wasn't hungry. It wasn't them, it was me. I almost went in to explain, but it seemed like leading them on.

I'm not sure where I'm really going with all this, but it probably has something to do with the candy corn self-medicating I've been doing all day, or the fact that tomorrow in my birthday, and that's always a time for reflection, and also candy corn, if your birthday happens to be in October.

Another regret I have is leaving you, my valiant readers, with a three-month old cliffhanger while I was out ignoring wedding singers on the interstate . Probably you've been a little bit tortured with the need to know how my neighbor boy's hair was stolen and if you suffered any insomnia or restless leg syndrome, I apologize.

The truth is, it's a mystery about the hair. One day the neighbor boy came over with a big shaved spot on his head about the size of a grapefruit.

"What happened to your hair?" I asked.

"Someone stole it," he said. "I just woke up this morning and it was ga-hn."

"You're kidding! Do you have any idea who would, um, steal your hair?"

"Nope," he said. " I'm kind of hungry right now. Do you got a cheese sandwich?"

So that's pretty much all I know.

My son whittled me a three-inch canoe as a birthday gift and it's very, very pointy, so there's that, and also the dog just strolled by wearing something foul he rolled in in the yard, which is a perfect opportunity to have some canine-bathing bonding time and also launch my canoe on its maiden voyage.

Next time I'll try to remember to tell you about the lawn flamingo thieves that have been stalking our neighborhood. But if I forget, at least you have the consolation of knowing it could be worse; I could have left you stranded on the freeway in your huaraches and shiny pants. You're welcome.

It's 10-10-10. Do You Know Where Your Grandma Is?

2010-10-10T22:10:00.000-07:00

The night we got back from attending my Squirrel 'n Dumplins Grandma's funeral she tried to contact us through the blender.

It makes sense really - she did always love to stir things up. (This was, after all, the woman who was in a constant battle with Mayberry City Hall, loved the slot machines, and once, long ago, according to family legend, spent a night in jail for hiding an arrest warrant for one of her sons in her bra. She was only 4'11'', but she was a force to be reckoned with, a tornado in little canvas sneakers.)

The first strange incident was in the middle of the night. The husband was up doing mysterious dead-of-night man things that are beyond my ability to understand, when, he reported later, the blender suddenly began blending. A blender unexpectedly blending at three in the morning has all the impact of a 747 landing in your kitchen, so after pausing to have a small heart attack, he ran in and turned it off. It was weird, he said, but the husband was ready to put it out of his mind.

Until ten minutes later, when the blender suddenly roared into action again. This was enough to freak out even Phlegmatic Man, so after turning it off a second time he backed warily out of the kitchen and went upstairs to bed.

Then, two days later, when my son returned home from school, Grandma was busily blending away in the kitchen again,and judging from the level of the dog's hysteria, had been for awhile.

All this blending made us hungry for smoothies, but upon inspection it was found that the plastic blades inside had melted into a pungent abstract sculpture.

Those skeptics among you may point to my history of appliance anarchy as an explanation, and you would be right in asking whether the blender was plugged in at the time of the visitation. It was. Probably. But the blender has sat on our counter top for several years, minding its own business and blending only when asked, so I like to think all this sudden coincidental activity is a sign from Grandma. She loved to visit.

The last time I saw her, in July, we were late to a wedding, and she was sitting in the passenger seat, little sandal-ed feet barely grazing the floor, arguing with the GPS lady. The last thing she ever said to me was You and your sister have always been my favorites. I'm not supposed to say that, but I'm old. I can say what I want. Then she patted my cheek and walked slowly into the sunset in her peach dress, the same one she would be buried in a month later.

She left me her desk, the one that sat for half a century or more under the lace curtains in the front room, the one I played "school" at for years when we visited. There was also an old black phone with a rotary dial, and when you picked it up you could eavesdrop on the neighbors' conversations (because Grandma had probably one of the last party lines in existence) but the phone disappeared long ago. It's hard to imagine her desk anywhere but under that window, the light through the leaves of the walnut tree outside making patterns on its worn surface.

Dear Grandma,
It was nice of you to keep in touch. We had to throw out the blender, but I knew you'd understand.
I hope heaven has televised baseball, and vegetable gardens, and that slot machine game you like with the chicken on the top. You deserve that and so much more. It's not going to be the same here without you, for any of us.
Much love,
Vic

Okay, I can't stand it. The mystery is-- someone stole his hair.

2010-06-29T11:31:00.000-07:00

You know how exercise is really important, and you should totally do some?

Well, I know this because I'm all about health these days. For instance, I'm only eating baked Cheetos now. They have all the cheddar-twig goodness of the real ones, except your fingers only stay orange for a little while, which means no more nicotine hands!

Also, I bought the kids some vitamins, only they won't eat them because they aren't gummy and shaped like cartoon characters, but because my kids are too old they have to eat, like, forty-seven of the gummy ones, and that's expensive, so I bought the horse pill kind. They just sit there on the shelf. I'm thinking about feeding them to the dog, just to pep him up a little, and to cut my vitamin-related losses.

I have a treadmill, and it's okay, but it's in a room upstairs and it makes all the floorboards squeak and groan when it's running, and pretty soon the whole house is vibrating. This means that anyone downstairs can't hear what new stupid thing Liz on True Beauty just said, and besides, it's so pretty outside right now. We really should get out and see nature or something, I'm always saying.

So for Mother's Day, I got a new bike. The kind that's ironically retro, and looks just like the one my mother rode around in the sixties, with the basket on the back, and not like the yellow ten-speed with the ram's horn handlebars I rode as a kid (that my pothead stepbrother later dismantled). That one twisted my spine into a permanent hump.

So I’ve been riding my new bike around a little bit these days, and sometimes I force my family to come along. Also the neighbor boy. And the neighbor boy’s personal stalker, a little boy we don't know, with huge, crazy eyes who rides 100 yards behind us on his foot-high bike, and never speaks, just rides behind us. If we stop, he stops. We don't know why. Sometimes he’ll hide behind a row of cars if he thinks we’re on to him.

Don’t feel sorry for him. He’s like a shrunken Lord Voldemort on a Schwinn.

Last week we rode our bikes to the frozen yogurt place (it's healthy!) and the neighbor boy and his stalker came along, and we had to loan the neighbor boy a too-big bike because he broke his riding like a bat out of hell into buildings, and there’s usually foliage jammed in all the crevasses (of the bike, not the neighbor boy) from the last time he ripped through the bushes at warp speed, and anyway, this time he was riding at a full stand, legs pumping, but looking behind him to see if his stalker was gaining on us, and then ...

he was airborne, his body a boomerang with a bike attached. And then the sickening FWOMP!! which signaled the arrival of the neighbor boy’s carcass from space. He lay there in the ditch, underneath the bike, for a few minutes, probably meditating.

As you can imagine, there was an expectant silence.

Finally, his eyelids flickered. Opened. He spoke. “Ima right. Heh.”

I swear that kid’s head is made of titanium. Or foam, I can't decide.

And then we got yogurt, except the stalker boy. I tried to offer him some, but he hid behind the tanning salon next door and ignored me.

So I'm getting pretty fit, I guess, and as long as we can keep the neighbor boy alive I think I'm well on the road to perfect health.

And I might even be a more consistent blogger. Not only is there less Cheeto dust on the keyboards now, but I even have a beginning for my next post. It involves the neighbor boy again, and a mystery. Also some neighborhood updates, perhaps.

Oh, and we're going on a new Family Vic Adventure in a few days, so I'll be sure to bring the laptop and my camera so you can come with us! Yay! A pre-teen and a teenager in the back seat for days and days!! And the dog!! And ADD husband driving erratically!!

Shut up. You're coming.

Jeremy says they taste like chicken.

2010-05-18T20:12:00.000-07:00

Dear Vic,

You know how you're really stressed out, and your clavicles are all achey and probably filled with killer toxins (probably in the marrow or maybe just coating the underside of the bones with a scum of angst and black mold), and you keep looking up from the teetering stack of student papers hoping that the tallest stack is the finished one, but it's not, and it NEVER IS?

And how you foolishly assigned your seniors a group project to design their own utopia (It's impossible! That's the point!), conveniently forgetting how last year at this time this exact same assignment caused you to lose all faith in the human race, you again wanted to cry a little when one group announced you would be free to marry your brother in their society, but a parking ticket would earn you a permanent trip to a big, barren plot of land called "The Dirt" which offered no food, water, toilets, or shelter, and that your slow, torturous death would be televised on HBO as a deterrent to other parking offenders?

And how your freshmen this year have the collective IQ of cottage cheese?

But they don't care, because HAHAHA, Jeremy just bit the head off a cockroach! For REALS!!! ? And how you think that Jeremy, who weighs less than your forearm but is six feet tall, could use the protein to help support his bulbous, mohawk-sporting head?

And you know how you keep thinking about all your nice friends in blogland (who are all writing genius posts about chimps, and naked dinosaur weddings, and bicycles, and prom sex and more), who don't even know that you have recently met a big man who wrestles grizzly bears and lives in a castle, because you have to give a final exam soon that you haven't actually created yet and there's been no time to post?

And how you also wish you could tell them that your neighbor, the Gazing Ball Man, has been targeted by a roving band of international lawn flamingo thieves, and there were police involved?

Well. Chin up, little buckaroo. Ibuprofen is on sale and soon this will all end for another year. In a few days there will be margaritas, and joyous singing of freedom-oriented songs, and a blogpost worthy of your patient friends.

Get back to work.

Love,
Vic

PS. The cats have rolled your red pen under the couch again.

Me and Sideshow Betty Will Be Shaping the Youth of Today. Also Dabbing them.

2010-05-06T21:55:00.000-07:00

So, about that anal gel I mentioned last time.

Anal gel on the horizon.

Which, now that I think about it, is a terrifying mental picture no matter how you think about it, and I'd like to apologize for wherever your mind might have gone due to my irresponsible metaphors.

Anyway, it appears that soon it might be my responsibility as a teacher to apply anti-seizure gel to the rectal area of convulsing students, should the need arise, right there in my classroom. No medical license necessary! According to our school nurse, the California legislature is thinking this would be a good idea instead of paying for school nurses and she says probably we should fight the power on this one. Because otherwise I'll be dabbing gel willy-nilly on anuses in- between my lectures, and I get asked to prom as it is, so it's sending a mixed message I think.

Also she says I could be responsible for injecting students with insulin, but presumably not in the anus. It's a good thing I've been giving my cats antibiotics with a syringe lately, so I'm totally ready for this one, assuming I can grab a student gently by the scruff of the neck and then squirt the insulin directly down the back of his/her throat. It's probably the same.

I'm looking into buying a generator in case I need to administer electro-shock therapy maybe during lunch.

Because I would enjoy electrocuting a few of my students, Nurse Ratchet style, at this point in the school year. I used to think a gentle ether mist from the sprinkler heads would be fine, who doesn't like a little nap in the middle of the day, but at this point in the school year I'm all hostile, and if I can't nap at my desk, no one is napping. Dammit.

Part of my hostility is because of the pop-eyed bi-polar woman they have assigned to my room to "help", which is boss-speak for we have nowhere else to put her. She is now your problem.

She is amazing. For example, here is how my new sidekick has helped me so far:

Dropped into the splits at the front of the class. More than once.
Flipped off the class (I can do a backflip too! See look! Hand behind back, middle finger raised. Suckers!)
Told a dirty Michael Jackson joke during a test
Explained to students where the best liquor deals are (Walmart)
Announced to the room that she is bi-polar, but not medicated, because she likes to feel "energetic".
Announced to the class that, no, she hasn't read Brave New World so they can't get any help from her, but she promises to read it as soon as she finishes the soft-porn book she is currently reading. These were her words, Soft-core porn.
Provided the name of her favorite soft-porn author, in case anyone wanted to check it out.
Scratched her left breast ( hand inside shirt), with gusto in front of a class of fascinated senior boys.

I've tried to rein her in, really I have. If I had that electro-shock generator I could drop her easy, but as it stands she's running amuck.

I think it's also important to note that the woman is built exactly like Timer from the old Saturday morning cartoons. (Remember him? When my get-up-'n-go has got-up-and-went, I hanker' fer a hunk 'a cheese), only put a curly blond wig on him, and possibly some pants.

(For my younger friends, think apple-on-two-toothpicks, if the apple is wearing a curly blond wig. You're welcome.)

I mention this, because it helps when you try to picture what it looks like when she does the splits. There is some huffing and puffing involved, and the eyes go all stare-y, and then the full mass of her torso descends to the industrial carpet, ultimately obscuring all of her leg other than two tiny Croc-clad feet on either side.

I just can't compete with that at the end of the year.

Ted Offers You His Special Gold Tip Shaft

2010-04-26T00:00:00.000-07:00

Remember how I wasn't around much for awhile, and then it turned out my computer was to blame and not even my laziness at all? And then I disappeared for even longer?

It's like every time I complain that my computer is broken, the computer ups the ante.

This time it was blatant computer psychosis, all wacky Pac Man patterns and angry screens full of blather about crash dump this and I can read your mind that. So I gathered it up tenderly and lugged the stupid thing down to the geek powers that be, who giggled and fidgeted and clicked the pen in their pocket protectors and then said probably your hard drive, that'll take 6-8 weeks. Also they said, this is the third one of this model we've seen today! so it's good to know I wasn't the only person tricked into buying the Exorcist 300.

Now I've got a loaner that I had to sign over my grandmother and two camels for, and the thing makes a horrible thumping noise when you turn it on. Probably the fan is going to fly out any minute and decapitate me, and then they'll charge my grieving family for the damage.

I am done now. It was so much more peaceful around here before I showed up all whiny, I know.

How about if I change the subject?

Did you know Ted Nugent has his own brand of arrows? They're called the Ted Nugent Signature Shafts. Gold Tip. Zebra-striped.

I know what you're thinking.

Rednecks. You spray and spray and they keep coming back.

Even here, in southern California, land of movie stars and glamor, and tall , pointy shoes, we have a significant redneck underbelly. Because when you travel east, towards the desert, but not far enough to land yourself in Las Vegas, you will encounter a steady increase in the population of people who have suspicious freezers in their sheds and neon beer signs over the baby's crib.

I myself am not a redneck, despite the banjo-players occupying my father's side of the family tree, and the shameful SPAM-filled years of my adolescence, but I'm excellent at spotting them.

For instance, my son decided, after a brief introduction to archery at snow camp this year, that he would like to take up the sport, and probably medal at the Olympics. We're big dreamers at Casa Vic.

So we signed him up through the city for some beginning archery lessons, and a sweet, tiny Filipino lady with a ball cap and swishy track pants took control of a class of young boys and two girls, all eager to shoot some arrows. The archery range is on the university campus, and at this point it felt pretty sporty and clean, the arrows breezing by on their way to the colorful bullseyes in the distance, the twang of the strings, the cute little quivers.

It was all fine until my husband decided to investigate the closest archery supply store (located at the back of a seedy industrial park) for a beginner's bow (the big twelfth birthday was just around the corner! My son's, not my husbands, although it's safe to say my son is on the verge of passing his father up).

Inside the store lay horror.

My son said "Ooh, fluffy!" and put a finger in one nostril.

This wild boar was on the counter. That's all there is of him. On the walls were the heads of eight of his wild-boar brethren, plus a deer, a rabbit, and a bear. On the walls between the heads were the most terrifying camo-covered cross-bows, and pretzel-shaped hunting bows with sights, and laminated posters of woodland creatures with bullseyes drawn over their hearts and brains, and bowie knives. And Ted Nugent Signature Shafts.

It was kind of a shock. We have hunters in the family, and I'm used to the mental picture of gun-toting guys in orange jackets, like Elmer Fudd sneaking through the forest (BE VEWY QWIET) , but the Filipino lady didn't prepare me for the Killer Elf Supply Store.

The customer next to me at the counter kept looking down the neck of her very large T-shirt, probably because the girls seemed to be free and she was checking on their locations. Both were heading south, as far as I could tell. Below the T-shirt she wore neon purple leggings and a pair of flip flops wedged over tube socks. She was the only one in the store besides our family that was not wearing a bristle hair cut.

It felt like a different country we'd stepped into.

On the way home I saw a sleek woman in a Mercedes next to us who had a doily draped precisely over her headrest, and it was then that I finally felt we had re-entered civilization.

Next post: Anal Gel on the Horizon? I Hope to God Not.

Also, someone in my house had a jawbreaker for breakfast. It's quick energy.

2010-04-06T10:56:00.000-07:00

I have not fallen down today.

I count this as a win, even though it is only 9:30 am, and my motor skills still have plenty of time to betray me. I don’t think they will though, because I am using a mind-over-two-left-feet approach today, so I’m like a ballerina, not Kate Gosselin on DWTS. ( Poor Kate can’t help that she dances like a pterodactyl in a ball gown- I’m pulling for you Kate! Sort of!)

Today is a new day, people. It will not be like yesterday, when, just before I had to leave the house, I broke a stack of fifteen plates trying to get something to rest my toast on.

They made a spectacular noise as the plates exploded on the cement floor. While I was speed-sweeping the shards that were not embedded in the furniture into the trash can I had plenty of time to wonder why we even needed fifteen plates in the house. I think we were only just weighed down by our excessive plate ownership. I liberated us.

Remind me later that we’re out of Band-Aids.

Also, this morning is beautiful, sunny and cool, and as I walked confidently onto campus at 8 am, wearing a new gray dress with blue-gray tights, another teacher approached me and said,

“Hey! I love your uniform! I need to do that too- it would make it so easy to get dressed in the morning.”

I was totally going for “uniform”. It’s inmate-chic. Prada’s spring Penitentiary line.

I’ve been modeling my fashion-forward look all morning on campus, because it’s state testing week, and since I have seniors, who don’t test, I get to be a bathroom break person. I’m assigned four teachers to relieve, but two of them are missing, either in the wrong room, or on a plane to Rio, I’m not sure, so I’ve been wandering around campus like an escapee looking for clues. I know I’m going to find them soon, but not until I finish writing this, because how often do they need to go to the bathroom anyway? Teachers have monster-bladders. It’s in the contract.

I just remembered one of the two who are not missing is pregnant. I’ll be right back.

----

It was close, but I made it there on time. While she was gone I inspected her baby books and ate a little of her trail mix. It was on the desk. Probably she left it there for me, because I’ve been doing a lot of walking.

I’m kind of tired now, but I have to stay focused, because pretty soon the second half of the day will start, and happy students will come flooding in these doors. Three solid hours of testing this morning will not have dampened their enthusiasm for learning. Today we are talking about the meaning of life and Lance Armstrong.

I have a gift for lesson planning. And fashion.

What are your gifts? Feel free to talk amongst yourselves while I go do this whole employment thing. I’ll be around later.

My Amish Spring Break. (Backwards Rumspringa!)

2010-03-29T22:40:00.000-07:00

This last week:

It was Spring Break! I was all poised for a wild time of laundry and reality television and feeding my internet addiction. And then.

Someone unplugged our router with their foot. This caused the router to reset itself to default settings from 1998, meaning only Al Gore could use it, meaning no internet for us.

I spent many days doing some magical thinking and plugging and unplugging cords, hoping you would all come back to me in a backlight blaze of glory and blog posts, but you didn't. Things looked grim in the land of Vic. I lost the will to do laundry.

Instead, I took some naps.
Saw a documentary about a NY man who made his wife and daughter live without toilet paper or electricity for most of a year. They ate turnips and rode their bikes. It was very exciting but did not explain what the family did for wiping.
Thought about Spam quite a bit (Did anyone else used to enjoy a fried Spam and mustard sandwich way back in the day? Before we realized we weren't Hawaiian and that there's, I don't know, pig testicles and ear wax in there? *shudder* )
Had meaningful family conversations. (Me, to Husband: The cats clawed the chair by the window again. Husband, who has not yet gotten out of bed: Hmmmm. Did they circle around the rocket? Me: Are you still asleep? Husband: Of course not. Why would you say that? )

A trip to Best Buy yielded a new router and a headache from the chemical stink in the air (Earnest Salesboy: Circuit City used the wrong carpet glue when they were in this building. It's not our fault.)
Home to sleep off the glue poisoning. Followed the enclosed idiot-proof router instructions, and then the lights of Blogland were on! Welcome back twenty-first century! You all look so beautiful!

Realized my week of dissipation and sloth had left me with nothing to say, and a pile of dirty laundry.

Tomorrow I go back to shaping the tender minds of tomorrow's leaders. I'll see you then.

Sometimes they call it a mouth organ. I don't, but some people do.

2010-03-15T23:48:00.000-07:00

I had a stepfather once who turned out to be a crook, but that's another story, because what I really wanted to say about him is that he used to be a hobo in the seventies.

This was before any of my family met him, and before we laughed and laughed over dinner all the time at his swirly comb-over, and at how he said "stockings" instead of "socks" and "let's build a cake" instead of "let's make a cake".

Sometimes, after we'd mocked his quaint speech awhile, he would start in about how people should never give money to transients on the street because those people actually wanted to be on the street, and giving them money was just encouraging them to continue living a life of unbridled freedom from showers and bosses. He sounded jealous.

He knew about the secret desires of transients, he said, because years ago he had disappeared one day, just walked away from it all and went to live on the street. No good reason. He was kind of like Forrest Gump without the shrimp boat.

He would never say what he did all day while he was a bum, so I had to fill in the details from my imagination. Mostly I thought he probably had a pet rat that loved Cheetos and lived in his jacket pocket, and that he would tie the rest of his bandanna-wrapped belongings on a jaunty stick, and then tip his hat at people when they walked by. Sometimes I figured he would play a little harmonica or give sage advice to young gingham-clad runaways who would then ride their bikes straight home, only to have a tornado suck them up and forcibly relocate them. ( I watched the Wizard of Oz every year when it came on, except for anytime there was witches or monkeys, or disembodied heads.)

And then one day he got bored with the rat and the harmonica, and went home. Either that or his family found him and did a bum intervention of some kind, or the cops stopped looking for him, I don't exactly remember.

So, I guess what I'm trying to say is, if you want to imagine I've been hanging out all unwashed and playing the blues with my Cheeto-lovin' rat friend for the couple of weeks, that would be okay with me.

Sometimes I just get tired.

Anyway, some other quick things that have happened around here lately:

1) Classroom drama update: My little shit friend dropped by a few days ago after school to ask when I intended letting him come back to class. He said the essay he wrote was sort of an "opposite day" essay; it was a compliment. I said, I don't believe you, unfortunately. He said, "No, I didn't think you would, but it was worth a shot."

Then his dad wrote a letter that said he was sure his son did not intend to be "mutinous" or "peculiar" and would I please reconsider? Pshaw, Mr. Father! No way.

Then his new teacher stopped me after school one day to ask me about him. I asked how he was doing. She said he was "slimy". I think he's going to like it there.

2.) I'm going blind. A little bit. I kept thinking the projector in my room wouldn't focus correctly or was dirty, so I kept muttering at it and wiping, wiping, wiping the lens, but it never helped, because it turns out it was my eyes and now I have glasses for distance. After my glasses came in, and everyone lied and swore that my beauty was actually magnified by my new Danny Gokey-esque frames, we went to see Crazy Heart, and I kept comparing and contrasting. Glasses on, glasses off. Aaannnnddd, refocus. Glasses on. Glasses off. Blink. Aaaannnnndddd, refocus.

I decided it was true that Jeff Bridges looked a little crisper around the edges with the glasses on, but then I got dizzy and had to just listen through the whole scene where he runs off stage to vomit behind the bowling alley.

3.) We bought ironic "silverware" at Ikea this weekend. Kitchen utensils are an excellent choice, because they rarely require assembling.

Inside the door a salesperson handed us a flyer with this written at the top:

If Ikea made fortune cookies I would buy them in bulk.

4.) We went and saw our tax guy. His hair plugs are very sparse this year, and he needs new cartoons for his desk, but he was full of light-hearted chitchat about amortization and incremental schedules, so it was another pathos-filled party. I look forward to our time together every year.

5.) Today, in the car, I called home and my son answered the phone. He sang, "HEL-low.......sweet CHARRRR-i-o-o-t.!" Apparently this is how he's been answering the phone for awhile, and I never knew.

He is going to sixth-grade snow camp this week, and I will really miss him if he is trapped in an avalanche.

Maybe some other time I will tell you about how Hobo Stepfather landed in the penitentiary, or about a different stepfather who had fifty identical pairs of fussy ankle boots lined up in his closet and walked like a pony, but this is all I've got for now.

I'm coming to do some blog-visiting tomorrow, and I promise not to panhandle very much.

Peevish. Also waspish and snappy.

2010-02-22T23:21:00.000-08:00

I'm cranky.

I was going to try and write a cheerful-sounding post (fake it till you make it!) but five minutes ago my son called down the stairs, "Mom!! I think I just Febrezed the cat! Is he going to go blind?"

(Sometimes there are impulse control issues around my house, and spontaneous Febrezing occurs. Also skateboarding down the stairs. Also microwaving metal objects. )

After I stomped up the stairs and performed a full physical on the cat, I determined that he had only been misted, so he's not blind, only really fresh. But now it’s way too late for phony cheer, I’m sorry to say. Consider yourself warned.

Things that are currently pissing me off:

Remember my last post, where I shared poorly-written excerpts from student essays? Well. I owe them an apology.

Today I received an email from a teacher's aide at my school. I have copied and pasted the entire email for you here, worded exactly as it appeared:

Eduardo is failing your class. Is she not turning in his assignments? What he be working on now?

What he be working on? Why, nothing! That's why he/she is FAILING.

(It’s okay though!! Gov. Schwarzenegger has set up a special education website, full of helpful information. Thank you, Mr. Terminator! I think it’s really going to make a difference. My favorite part of the website is the header, which reads:

A place for infromation about California Schools .

I keep going back there, hoping they've fixed it, but nope. We be freeing ourselves from the shackles of spelling and capitalization rules here in the Golden State! No wonder we don’t need a budget anymore! )

Four separate people have used the phrase “What a hoot!” in my hearing this week. No. I don’t care what state you’re from, or how funny that crazy George Lopez is, nothing should ever be a “hoot”. I will pinch you. Hard.

An old roommate of my husband’s has shown up on Facebook. He’s almost forty. His new girlfriend is eighteen, the same age as his daughter. There are all these pictures of him, with his receding hairline and stupid grin, standing in a group of high school kids, one arm slung over his adolescent lady-love, or just the two of them, wrapped around each other in glittery pink lust. Last time we talked to him he was married to an age-appropriate person, but now he’s dating Miley Cyrus, and as a high school teacher, this makes me more than a little nauseous.

I sort of hate the neighbor kid. Not the one I’ve written about here before, that hits himself in the head with bricks and rides his bike into trees. He’s okay. It’s this new one that’s shown up. He’s eight, younger than the rest of the kids, but I’m pretty sure he’s evil.

For instance, he stands on our front porch and stares into the house through the blinds like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. You’ll just be walking by the front window, and there he is, just watching through the window and grinning. He-ee-re’s Johnny!

Last Saturday he showed up on our doorstep at 7:00 am, and began ringing the doorbell.

Ring,ring,ring,ring,ring. Ring,ring,ring,ring,ring. Ring,ring,ring,ring,ring. Pause. Ring,ring,ring,ring,ring.

Finally someone stumbled to the door. Me. He wanted my son to come outside.

Me: “He’s still asleep.”
Demon Boy: “When is he going to get up?”
Me: “I don’t know. I’ll tell him you came by. Maybe he’ll be out later.” Attempt to close door. Small foot in Payless ninja sneaker is squarely in the way.
Demon Boy: “When?”
Me: ”I DON’T KNOW.” Attempt to push small foot from doorway. Demon Boy has strength of much larger individual.
Demon Boy: “Can you go get him right now?”
Me: “NO. He’ll be up lat-“
Demon Boy: “Why not? Pull his hair. That’ll wake him up. You want me to come in and do it? You don’t know how?”
Me: “I know how, I mean NO. Go home, Demon Boy.” Almost succeed in closing door.
Demon Boy: “My cousin needs to use your phone. Can he come in? Our electricity isn’t working.”
Me: “The phone doesn’t run on electricity.”
Demon Boy: “I mean, the internet is down. We don’t have any cable. Can he use the phone now?”
Me: “Who do you need to call?
Demon Boy: “Someone. I mean, my mom. He’s coming now.”
Cue teenage, non-English-speaking cousin who appears on our lawn out of nowhere, or possibly from out of our bushes.
Cousin: “You dial phone. I make call.”

Which I did, like someone under hypnosis. Cousin spent five full minutes on my phone, speaking in an unidentified language. Then he handed me back the phone without even glancing in my direction, turned on his heel and left, a grinning Demon Boy trailing behind him.

Also, on Monday, Demon Boy tried to off Accident-Prone Boy with a shovel in our front yard. He’s going to fit right in to our neighborhood. I’m getting better locks for the front door.

I need to go lie down now. Tomorrow, when I get up, everything will be shiny new and sunny once again.

You’ll see. It’ll be a hoot.

Suddenly soup sounds good.

2010-02-17T17:44:00.000-08:00

"So what are you giving up ?" my son asks me this morning, casually, over an English muffin.
"Giving up?"
"Yeah, like for Lent and stuff." He picks the too-brown edge off the side and throws it to the dog. The piece bounces off the top of the dog's head and lands under the table.
"We're not Catholic," I say. "Not even a little bit."
"Well, everyone at school is talking about it, so I'm going to give something up too."
"Okay," I say. "What are you going to give up?"
"Spoons," he says.
"Spoons?" I look to see whether he is kidding, but his face is earnest. Virtuous.
"I really like spoons."

Well, okay. I'm thinking it might be an out-of-the-box kind of choice, but that's the kind of people we are.

This is just a quick check-in, because a couple of people were wondering if I was dead. The answer is no, not dead, but longing for a merciful release from the purgatory of staff in-services. Today I made the presenter's face go all red and sweaty from my insightful questions,and then he just stopped calling on me altogether for some reason, so I had to go back to drawing clear boxes on my handout.

I'll be back tomorrow, after I dig my way out from under a million terrible essays that must be graded by tomorrow. Before I go back to reading and weeping, here are a couple of student essay highlights for you to ponder. Perhaps make them part of your morning meditations.

From a freshman student essay today:

The Irish gave us potatoes. If it wasn't for the Irish we wouldn't have no carbs. Some people think the Irish are always drunk, but I say be greatful for the potatoes.

From a senior essay:

Thick, black, smoke poured into his every orifice, like a feast of buttermilk, or cheddar cheese.

Mmm, cheese.

She Does Not Have the Diarrhea. (Or so she claims.)

2010-02-08T00:00:00.000-08:00

A Poem for Erin

She does not have the diarrhea
It merely was a tiny tootle
"Blame it on my diet, see the
cabbage soup is really brutal."

She's skinny now ("I read my labels!")
Red meat, white bread, candy, Coke,
All are banned from Erin's table,
"Aspartame is not a joke."

Her greatest love is Jeremiah
Ben Folds might be # 2,
"If not for Maxine, Rose, Elijah,
Olivia is Darling too."

Erin wonders why the waiter
Seems to hate her, she's perplexed,
Erin wonders how it works
When ugly people have the sex.

"I'm a blogger, I'm a dork,
I've had some visits from the stork",
Her scarves and hats are loved by all,
er...Jeremiah's pretty tall.

"I do not have the diarrhea,
It merely was a tiny fart",
Writing this was her idea,
Writing this came from my heart.

--Vic

(Love ya, Erin. So......when do I get that cool owl pillow? We don't really need to wait for any other entries do we? Jeremiah? Are you with me?)

(Its eyes are very boobarific- If I win I'm putting it in the front window. All the kids getting off the middle school bus will love it.)

Three Strikes and You're Stupid

2010-02-01T01:09:00.000-08:00

Strike One:

"I know a lot of people with no legs."

I said this to a perfect stranger at Starbucks the other day. I honestly don't know why. In my head, as I said it, I was thinking Really, Vic? A lot of legless people?? Do tell.

I don't even remember what the context was, or if the man was throwing around wild facts of his own, and I felt I had to keep up. He wasn't even handsome, so I had no reason to impress him, and even if I did, claiming to know legions of amputees just says "chemical imbalance" not "woman of the world".

For the record, I do know some people without legs, but not a lot, and maybe it doesn't count, because I think I've only known one person with no legs at all.   The others were at least still partially legged. To clarify, the score is :
               Individuals I Have Known With No Legs At All= 1
               Individuals I Have Known With One Leg, or Portions of Leg Remaining= 2 to 3

So, possibly four acquaintances with leg issues. Is that a lot? It's hard to say what the qualifications are, I guess, but the point is that my social skills have apparently still not grown in.

Strike Two:

At the video store, after a death match battle with another customer for the last copy of "Whip It" (roller derby!) I left the store in triumph, strode with purpose to the car, and got in the passenger seat. Then I buckled in securely, because I'm all about safety first.

So then I was sitting there thinking about Drew Barrymore and waiting for everyone else to get in the car, when I realized that the car smelled a little....off.

Different.

Like diapers.

I glanced casually in the back seat and saw a battered blue car seat, covered in what looked like a year's worth of gummed Cheerios.

Even though my youngest child is eleven, the reality of my situation was slow to sink in. And then, suddenly, there it was.

I was sitting in someone else's car.

And any minute that someone was going to come tearing out of the store and wrestle me and my hard-won copy of "Whip It" to the ground.

I quick unbuckled and climbed out, closing the car door as softly as possible, and tried to look like I had only been loitering curbside, not breaking in to parked cars.

I would have gotten away undetected, only my son was standing outside the car, (which I saw now was not even the same kind of car) shaking his head in disbelief. As we walked to our real car, parked clear across the parking lot, he whispered, "Mom, the door handles weren't even the same! That's so sad."

Strike Three:

I blame Facebook for this one. It's Doppelganger Week, or was, or will be sometime soon, I'm not sure, and you're supposed to change your profile picture to the picture of your famous-person-lookalike. And even though I wasn't going to change my profile picture, probably, I got curious to see what famous person others would think was my doppelganger.

I had absolutely no clue, but back in college people used to say I looked a little like Elisabeth Shue, so I found a picture of her, and then, (here's the stupid part), called my husband over to look at it. His job, obviously, was to marvel at the likeness and then back away slowly, but I forget he doesn't know this.

"Do you think she looks like me?"
Squint. Throat-clear. Twisty, thoughtful mouth squinch. "Well...she's smiling."
"Yeah, I know she's smiling. Does she look like me?"
"Well.....your... hair is the same.... length!" He looks up hopefully at me.
"Our hair is the same length? That's the best you can do?"
"Well, I don't know! Who is that person anyway?"
"Elisabeth Shue! I'm trying to find a picture of someone who could be my doppelganger. It's a Facebook thing."
"Oh! I've always thought you look like Roland Orzabal." He looks pleased. Problem solved.
"Roland Orzabal? The guy from Tears for Fears?!?"
He sees my horrified face, and starts to backpedal. "Well, maybe like his sister. That's what I meant." Beads of sweat have appeared on his forehead.
"This is about that bi-level I had in 1986, isn't it?"
"No, of course not! And it was a mullet".
"Bi-level. 1986 was a tough fashion year! I'm going to look him up and prove to you I don't look like Roland Orzabal."

Then he ran from the room, but I googled Mr. Orzabel anyway, and found this:

I've never felt more beautiful. In case you want to see the picture bigger, you can go directly to the site I got it from. Just google the blog title, which is "The Ugliest Men in the History of Rock and Roll".

I'm not even going to bring up the time a coworker thought my husband looked like Dwight Schrute. Don't even think I will.

I still didn't know who I looked like, so I did a bunch of those on-line picture analysis things to figure it out. This is who the internet thinks I look most like, according to three different, highly scientific tests. I'm equal parts flattered and freaked out.

So, either Roland Orzabal or Sharon Tate.

Also the internet suggests a resemblance to Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela. I hear he's pretty handsome, and mullet-free, last I heard. It's a step up.

Next Weekend I'm Expecting Locusts.

2010-01-25T23:32:00.000-08:00

It started on Thursday with the ice machine, my favorite household appliance. One minute there were lovely half-moon cubes tumbling on demand from the door of the refrigerator, and the next, no cubes, no matter how insistently I pushed the little paddle in with my glass. For awhile the refrigerator still made that grinding sound that meant here come the cubes!, but soon even that pretense was abandoned, and everything was silent.

Little did I know that lukewarm, European-style beverages were to be the least of my troubles.

Friday night the flood came. I was in the shower singing show tunes and checking for moles when I heard a pounding noise coming from somewhere in the house. I stopped singing to listen, and it stopped. Hmmm. Must have imagined it. I went back to my singing. More distant pounding.

Then the pounding got really loud, and my husband burst through the door, (Which I had locked. A lady needs privacy) his eyes wild, a vein bulging in his forehead.

"Water!!" he yelled over the sound of the shower.

Thank you, Captain Obvious! I thought. Men.

"Flood!" he yelled, and pointed to the floor, which I now saw was covered in an inch of water. Where did that come from?

Then, with a little flourish, he opened the door to the narrow elevator- shaft-room that houses the toilet, and the contents of Hoover Dam poured out.

Oh. Flood. Flood! I did some naked panicking then, running in little circles in the shower while I thought what to do, and my husband disappeared from the room, presumably leaving me to drown while clutching my soap bar.

I knew I had to do something (shower time was over), and luckily I was already wet so opening the shower door and swimming through the rapids in my bathroom was easy enough. The rest of the night was not.

Downstairs, in the kitchen, a waterfall was pouring from each of the three light fixtures. One of the lights sparked and crackled festively before going dark and emitting curls of black smoke from under its shade.

The dog's dish was filling up with water and bloated kibble.

Then from the garage, like an avenger, came the husband, festooned with vacuum hoses and old towels, a look of grim determination on his face.

After that it was all night with the shop vac sucking up gallons of water from the upstairs floor/kitchen ceiling, and mopping, and then floor heaters pointed at the ceiling in an effort to prevent the drywall from buckling and swooping like a Salvador Dali painting, ( or just sloughing off onto the floor altogether) and a little bit of swearing and maybe some gentle weeping.

About three in the morning, when we went to turn the heat up to help dry the ceiling, we discovered that the furnace had joined ranks with the ice maker and the toilet, and had given up normal operations.

No heat.

Not only was it wet and cold outside (Stormwatch 2010!!), it was wet and cold inside, and likely to stay that way.

We went to bed.

The next morning, after dreaming I was riding a giant lizard through the park, I awoke to the sounds of my husband in the hallway, banging on assorted furnace innards with his manly- man tools.

The husband is part MacGyver, and has already managed to get our elderly furnace running again two winters in a row, so I had reason to believe he could get it to work, at least for awhile.

And, he did! It was nice and warm for a couple of hours.

Until the fireball.

Apparently one thing MacGyver forgot was to bypass the thingamajig that regulates the timer on the whatchamacallit. This is bad, because forgetting this leads to gas being pumped out willynillly,too many seconds before the igniter ignites, resulting in a house-rattling explosion.

Cats hate fireballs.

Especially when the flames throw the door to the furnace open with shocking force and then shoot out to lick the edges of the Tower of Babel cat tree in which they are reclining.

After that it was all anticlimactic, fortunately. The cats escaped intact (one flaming animal per week is our limit)

the Tower of Babel remains, and the house has not burned to the ground. The kitchen ceiling decided to stick around. The house has a slight indoor-swimming pool smell to it, but I'm hoping that will go away.

Best of all, a two hour drive to see an amused appliance parts salesman (originally from Turks and Caicos) yielded fresh components for the ice maker and the furnace. The toilet has received a stern talking-to.

Also, the rain storm outside, after depositing 400 inches of rain into our backyard, has left for Arizona.

The week is looking up.

Probably We're Changing His Name to "Sparky" Now. Or "Mr. Burns."

2010-01-20T22:52:00.000-08:00

Tonight my dog caught on fire.

Really.

One minute we were having a quiet moment in front of the fire on a cold and rainy night. I was telling him how handsome he is, and combing his Einstein eyebrows with my finger. The next minute, Terrier Flambe.

It was the cats' fault. They slither and slink in tight formation, sometimes rubbing the entire length of their bodies along the side of his head, and my poor little Jiffy Pop Dog interprets this as a feline assassination attempt. So when they did their jazzy approach tonight, the dog backed up. Into the fireplace.

Well, only his tail went in, and we put it out for him right away, so it's okay. I don't even think he knows, but the cats do. They keep licking the singed hair on the end of his tail and smirking.

I'm looking into a therapist for my dog.

Other highlights of the week:

Yesterday our school and every other school in the district was put on lock down. For a change it wasn't because of text message death threats and rumors of snipers on the roof (Snipers are so last year. Last spring, specifically. One of my students hyperventilated because a maintenance man was walking around on the roof of my classroom and she thought it was a man with a gun).

This time we were on lock down because of a tornado. In southern California. It was heading straight for us!! But then it took a wrong turn somewhere and got lost, and we lived. I got to be in lock down alone, because it happened during my prep period and the next class period never came. I did a great job of comforting myself.

I'm calling in fake tornado warnings every week from now on.

Also, I saw this at the junk store on Saturday, and I'm seriously thinking about buying it, even though I'm completely terrified of clowns. Especially driftwood clowns.

If you want we could share it. It would look great over your dining room table. I call him Spartacus. Spartacus the Driftwood Clown.

And finally, (because my last post was really long, and I am practicing the fine art of restraint)--

The verification monkeys are starting to get on my nerves.

It's not like I'm gurgling all the time, it was just that once, and I was really quiet. I kept my mouth closed.

Get off my back, internet spies.

"Heed!" (Does This Headdress Make My Head Look Fat?)

2010-01-18T22:20:00.000-08:00

Someone stole two weeks from me, and I didn't even know.

It can happen. Usually when you're doing other things like explaining what a cavity search is to your eleven year old,

(Me: Are you watching A & E again? A cavity search is... um... when they look for...well...hidden items in your...well, openings... and ....
Son: huh?
Husband : Sometimes people shove something up their butt and the police have to stick their arm up there and pull it out.
Son: Oh! )

and cleaning bubbly gray broccoli out of the back of your refrigerator.

In addition, worrying can eat up a lot of your time. Worrying is stupid, and I know this. For instance, Haiti is bad. Heartbreakingly bad.   Also, my district is facing pretty significant teacher layoffs, along with every other school district in California. I can't fix either one of these things, or any of the other hard things on the world's laundry list, no matter how much I worry, but I can't help it. So I choose to worry about the trivial. I like trivial.

For instance:

1.) I hear Lady Gaga is "sick".   Judging from the news over the last year there is some kind of dastardly plot afoot to kill off all thirty-and-under celebrities, and maybe her crazy shrubbery headdresses and tiny diapers have made her the next target. I think at this point the only thing that can save her is a polyester pantsuit and some sensible shoes. I'm rooting for her. (When I say, Get better soon! what I really mean is Take off those hooker platforms and run, Lady Gaga, run! )

2.) Last year my daughter's orthodontist told me, all smirky, that I have an "asymmetrical chin". He's a rude little man in a Hawaiian shirt, and at first I was going to bring up his shiny bald spot but chickened out, and then I went home and looked in the mirror, and it did seem a little off . Then I forgot about it until recently when I got sucked in to www.ancestry.com, a site that makes it really easy to research your ancestors, and suddenly my chin issue started to make sense.

See, I've been there a lot, (me and all the other eighty-year-old ladies, and some Mormons) and what I found was interesting. For instance, one of my ancestors in the 1600's was scalped by a local irate indian. He got bored half-way through and left her to die, but she didn't, she just flapped the hunk of skin back over her skull and went home. We're hardy people.

Anyway, most of the branches of my family seemed to be doing fine, except when I got into the 1800's. One branch of my family seemed, well, closer than you'd expect, with the same last name appearing on both sides of the marrying line. At first I thought I did something wrong, because at several points all manner of cousins were marrying all over the place, and then an aunt and a nephew. I double-checked.   Everything seemed accurate. Hmm.

So, just a smidgen of inbreeding. Nothing to worry about probably.

(I looked up "effects of inbreeding" on Wikipedia, and it didn't list crooked chins, but I'm thinking they didn't have room to list everything. At least there's no hemophilia or an overwhelming urge to sit on one of the thrones of Europe.)

3.) Also, we seem to be distantly related to the Bushes. I know what you're thinking, but not the inbred branch. I always thought Barbara Bush looked like my great-grandmother, and now I know why.

4.) My biggest trivial worry these days is that I think we've got another epidemic on the horizon, one that no one seems to be talking about, and believe me, I've looked. It may take another twenty or thirty years, but it's inevitable.

I'm speaking, of course, about Panda Head.

I started thinking about pandas (apparently a popular blog topic these days!) over Christmas break while playing Taboo with some friends. The clues were eastern, Chinese, beast of burden. Someone, not me, shouted "panda!". You, of course, know that the answer was "yak", but it got me thinking about how unfair that is, that the yak should get all the hard jobs while the panda, also large, gets to hang around all day.

Why can't a panda be a beast of burden? Sure, you'd have to fit it with some kind of special backpack, and you couldn't be in a hurry to get anywhere, but it could work.

So I looked up pandas on Wikipedia too (let's hope I never commit a crime and then the police have to look at my search history) and it turns out pandas are not considered reliable workers.

What they do really well is lie around and eat a huge amount of nutrient-poor bamboo. They have to eat tons of it because their bodies are actually designed to eat meat, but they don't, because they're stubborn or something. They only eat bamboo, and lots of it, just to have enough energy to lie around all day.
The scary part is where the article said that pandas have developed not only large bodies as a result of their low LOW metabolism, but that their heads have gotten large and bulbous for the same reason.

I think pretty much we're doomed. Because bamboo is nature's cheese puffs. Replace the tree branches with a love seat, and you've got a picture of half of America. We're all just a Saved By the Bell marathon and a large bag of chips away from Panda Head.

This is really bad news for Americans, from an evolutionary standpoint, but great news for me, the forward-thinking entrepreneur. Because not only do I see elastic waist pants as a growth industry, I also foresee a new market for plus-size hats.

Nobody steal my idea.

5.) And huge heads might even be the least of our worries. Pandas are so lazy that in captivity they have to show the males XXX panda porn and give them Viagra just to get them to reproduce. I'm not making this up.

We may just be snacking our way into extinction.

Maybe I've wandered away from "trivial" here.

6.) Did I mention my son has one really long blond hair that grows out of his baby-soft cheek, and when we pull it out it regrows in the same place? If we don't catch it the hair can reach an inch or more of luxurious waving growth. He wanted a razor for Christmas.

Here. I made this for you. And put down those cheese puffs, for God's sake.

Eric Clapton needs a deep-fried Mexican.

2010-01-01T23:41:00.000-08:00

I'm pretty sure that's what he was saying.

Last night we went out to eat for New Year's Eve. I was in the bathroom at the restaurant, humming along to the piped-in music and enjoying the acoustics, and never mind what else I was doing, until he got to the line, I need a deep fried Mexi-cc-aann. I was taken aback. True, it had his signature bluesey guitar sound, and so his need was unavoidably heartfelt and touching, but still it seemed wrong to require anyone to be deep-fried, Mexican or not.

I missed the rest of the next verse, but I made sure to listen really close when he got to the chorus again, and this time the words sounded more like I need a big, strong Mexi-cc-aaan. Hmmmm. Better, but still not appropriate. Why not a big strong American? Or, a big strong Austrian? Austrians are strong and they also wear leather shorts and handlebar mustaches, so they do all your heavy-lifting with style.

I listened to the whole rest of the song, which means I was gone so long that my husband gave me a sympathetic look when I finally made it back to the table. I asked him if he knew the "deep-fried Mexican" song that Eric Clapton sings, and he paused a minute and then asked me if I was sure it was Eric Clapton and not a chicken.

Which was uncalled for and cruel.

For the record, I haven't heard the chicken playing since Christmas Eve, so probably he's picked up his piano and moved on, and besides, chickens are too high-strung to play the blues. Everyone knows that.

2009 was a challenging year.

For instance, this time last year we had one pet. A dog. Sometimes he was lumpy. Sometimes not.

Then there were three betta fish, who started out okay, until one of them developed a gigantic eyeball, so now he's like a different fish on each side of his head. Totally changes his profile.

Then we got two cats, which most of you know, because one of them died, like in a horrible Lifetime for Cats movie, complete with crying, and then we got another one, so now there are two cats again. They probably ride the dog around the house during the day while we are at work, and sometimes when I leave my bedroom in the morning, one of them will narrow his eyes at my outfit and shake his head. It's a lot of pressure.

Still, we didn't learn. For Christmas, my husband and I gave in to the hugely unsubtle hints dropped by our offspring and bought them tiny frogs from Brookstone. ("Frogosphere" is what they call the little plastic aquarium they come in.) We hid them in my closet until Christmas, away from the cats, and I had to keep going in there to check on them, and once when I went in, one of them was missing.

I called the frog, but he didn't come. Then I tried luring it out of my clothes hamper with a pellet of food from the package in the box, but I guess he wasn't hungry. I was pretty close to bringing in the cats to flush it out, but then, just to be sure, I looked in the frogosphere again, and there he was, nestled in the gravel at the bottom, belly-up and stiff.

Did you know Brookstone has a strict policy against returning dead frogs?

Luckily we found an elderly clerk who didn't know this, and so we got a replacement. Here is a picture I took of him, after he was liberated from my closet on Christmas morning:

I plan on naming him Regis.

Also in 2009, I met my nemesis, and spent some time doing A Christmas Carol. I had a really great cane in a couple of "not really blind"-beggar- woman scenes:

It turns out my nemesis wasn't so bad in the end, and I never rolled into the orchestra pit, so I count that experience as a success. 2009 was also the year I finished my degree, almost met the mayor of London, fought off aliens, spied on the neighbors, learned about paprika, and attended four middle school band concerts.

I had my one-year blog anniversary in December, but I forgot about it, and also I have a couple of very ancient entries from before the dawn of time (2005), so it's possible it doesn't count anyway. Maybe I should do a belated celebration with a drawing. I could give away a frog! Or a hoof bottle. I'll give it some thought.

Anyway, I've decided 2010 is going to be great. I have wonderful friends, (both in-person and blogworld varieties) my health, and a job. I have not killed any frogs in the last week. If I ever manage to meet my phantom doctor, I am scheduling myself for a hearing test, just in case.

And I still have that blowtorch my husband gave me for my birthday to break in.

Life is good.

What I Really Mean To Say Is...

2009-12-24T11:46:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas!

(I thought about making some extra-glittery kittens or dancing Precious Moments wise-man -toddlers for you, but the day that happens will be the end of the world, probably. Bringing on the Apocalypse is not very Christmas-y. Instead, have this too-sweet dancing snowman. Can he use your bathroom?)

Hope you all have a wonderful, non-Grinchy Christmas -

Love,

Good -King -Wen-ces-las looked ooout....

I wonder If Chicken Licken plays the banjo? Remind me to ask Santa.

2009-12-23T01:14:00.000-08:00

Santa Claus, you can be a vindictive sum'bitch.

As my grandpa used to say.

(Well, Grandpa didn't exactly call you a sum'bitch, just most of the neighbors, but I think he'd be okay with it. At one point the two of you were a lot alike, what with the beards and the bellies, and also my Grandpa liked to sit in his La-Z-Boy in the evenings and crack filberts, which are more elegantly called hazelnuts by people who don't have them littering their yards, and I hear you make a lot of holiday nutcrackers. If you're originally from Arkansas, we might be related.)

Anyway, as you may remember from my "punch Santa in the nuts" post, I am not feeling too Christmas-y this year, and probably you have removed me from your list.

Also, I know now you are trying to drive me insane.

See, lately, say...the last two weeks or so, just I've been laying my weary head on my pillow to sleep at night, I've been hearing something strange. Sounds. Almost a melody, but so faint, so indistinct that I've been thinking it's in my head. I checked the radio, but it was off. Same with computers, ipods, phones, old toys. Nothing was making any noise. The neighbors windows were closed and dark. No cars with radio playing were driving by. All is calm, as they say.

And yet, just as I lay down, there it was again, a sound best described as a chicken playing a toy piano in another room. Yes, Santa, I even checked the yard for chickens and pianos, and came up empty again.

(By the way, am I the only person who remembers chickens playing tiny pianos? I swear we saw them at the fair when I was little. You put money in a slot, and the chicken would play the piano with its beak, randomly, until finally some chicken feed would roll out of the piano.

This bothers me so much I think I've even mentioned it in another post somewhere, and so I had to go research 'chickens playing the piano' because I was scared I made it up, and at first all I saw were a lot of pictures of cats playing the piano, Apparently cats are proficient keyboardists. Then, finally, I found two illustrious chicken pianists:

First, Beanie, shown here doing her homage to Liberace:

It's possible I might punch Santa in the nuts if I had the chance, but Miss Yvonne is practically a Christmas miracle.

2009-12-17T01:00:00.000-08:00

Probably you have been marveling for the last few minutes at just how Christmas-y it's gotten up in here, what with ostrich Santa hats, and novelty lights, and stuff. Next thing you know I'll be baking virtual mincemeat cookies and sending them to you- blinking, glittery, holiday STD cookie widgets. If I could only get them to smell slightly burned it would be perfect.

Mostly I just pretend to like Christmas. I could happily live without slice-y angel hair and Secret Santa popcorn canisters and Mariah Carey Christmas songs. I don't treasure the twenty years of snapshots of the EXACT SAME CHRISTMAS TREE. We have ornaments I keep trying intentionally to break,especially the Precious Moments praying-toddler-wiseman one that was a gift from my mother-in-law, but that's made of some space-age indestructible material. Once I threw a Disney Christmas CD out the window of the car, and then drove over it. A person can only take so much.

I am a closet Grinch. I was just tarting up the blog to distract you. My blog is my Christmas beard.

Also, I have to keep up appearances at home, because my husband (the Ebay addict) has come home every day this week with Santa hats. There are enough Santa hats in the house now to cover every living head in the house three or four times. No one will wear them, but it's good to know we're never going to run out of seasonal novelty head-wear. That's security.

As usual, I've wandered off topic. Actually, what I really wanted to talk about is the gift that keeps on giving, and that is Miss Yvonne at Yo Mama's Blog.

I was talking to Steamy and Kurt a little bit ago about how great Miss Yvonne is, and we all wanted to write a post about her genius and then, I'm sad to report, there was a scuffle, and Steamy said something about how my interpretative canoeing is strictly amateur-level, and I made a little "mhmm, mhmm" sound like when you french-kiss a tub of cream cheese because she especially loves that, and then I tried to get her in a headlock, but Kurt broke it up with his handsomeness (which is totally ~~not~~ a euphemism) and also by using the tie to his robe as a lasso.

Finally we decided to share Miss Yvonne, which sounds much more lascivious and awesome than I am up for, frankly.

But I love Miss Yvonne.

She always makes me laugh. Every single time. I want to go over to her house and hang out, as long as she doesn't make me help with Christmas decorations. I hear she's crazy-picky about the tree skirt and she probably wouldn't approve of my method of only decorating the front part of the tree.

If you haven't been over to Yo Mama's Blog, you need to go there, because it is a cornucopia of cool. (I just made that up off the top of my head. It's best to leave the alliteration to the professionals.)

For instance, Miss Yvonne listens to werewolf soft-porn audio books at work. Apparently this is a sure-fire way to excite gay men. Also, she decorates corn on the cob with penis-shaped straws, which is a daring design option.

Her renters
a) use her kitchen strainer to clean the fish tank (Somehow Captain Carl managed to herd me out the door before I could grab a paring knife and shank Eco. )
b) are potential kitty rapists
c) live librarian- by -day/sexy- cougar- by- night lives.

She's always on the lookout for her own personal Cheesus,

So I heard a story on the news this morning that some lady found the image of Jesus in a cheeto. And she almost bit into it when she saw the little Jesus face, so she looked closer and she saw not only his face, but also his whole body. She named it Cheesus, which I'm pretty sure is sacrilegious but also hilarious. Then the news lady person said that most everyone will see the image of Jesus in an unassuming object at some point in their life.

I've started looking here in my cubelet this morning, but so far nothing. I thought for a minute I saw Jesus on the peel of my banana, but it turned out to be Christian Bale, which is close but not quite.

but lately she's been stalking Harry Connick, Jr.,

I'll meet you outside your house for lunch when I get into town next week, okay? I'll be the one wearing reindeer antlers and climbing your security fence.

something I'm pretty sure we all can relate to.

When I first found her blog I was excited because her header says she trains monkeys, but so far that's a part of her life she's keeping super-secret apparently. I keep coming back every day, because I know someday soon she's going to tell us all her monkey-wrangling secrets. I hope she hurries up though, because I'm thinking about getting my husband one for Christmas, and I don't know how well they get along with cats wearing tiny Santa hats.

So you should go over there. Say 'hi'. Hit the follow button. (But only if you promise to come back and maybe follow me an extra time. It's like a finder's fee. Also, I'd be lonely here by myself with all those cookie widgets and broken ornaments.)

Besides, Miss Yvonne loves Steamy and Kurt and I too. Here's what she said about us:

I'm just as funny and witty and good looking as all of them, right? Okay, maybe not quite as funny but I'm definitely as good looking and probably better in bed than all of them. Just sayin'.

It's true.

Remember the Good Old Days, When We Lost Touch With People Forever? I Miss That.

2009-12-07T23:34:00.001-08:00

Dear Grown-up Woman I Do Not Know But Who Is Now My Facebook Friend,

You don’t remember me, I’m pretty sure. Some things are best left unremembered, I think.

I spent a lot of time with you in your house, a long time ago. You were four and what is euphemistically known as “a handful”. Maybe you’ve outgrown that now, but it’s hard to tell from your Facebook profile.

I was a teenager. I came over to your house a lot while your parents were gone doing some sketchy seventies “marriage retreat” thing, which was probably swinging or visits to an opium den, but I don’t like to dwell on that and who are we to judge, right?

While they were gone we played Boggle and Concentration a lot and you cheated, but I tried to forgive you because you couldn’t actually read yet. And then after you and your older sister went to bed I would sit on the couch for hours and try really hard to stay awake. Didn’t you have a TV? I don’t think you did. Here is what was on your walls:

Sometimes if your parents were really late from their ~~swinging~~ marriage therapy sessions, I would hallucinate about the cat with the guitar and all the bloody mouse torsos.

One time, as usual, I confiscated a giant glistening wad of Bubble Yum from your mouth before sending you off to bed. Only this time, unbeknownst to me, you managed to find another tempting pack in a drawer. Apparently you chewed most of it all at once while lying in bed wearing your little summer sleeveless nightgown, and then you fell asleep.

I wasn’t in your room at the time, I think I was staring at the cat picture and thinking about Michael S, who was so cute and wouldn’t be arrested for Grand Theft Auto for another four years, but pretty soon your mouth fell open, the giant mass of wet gum rolled from your lips and down your chest, and then came to rest gently in the crevice of your right armpit.

You were so cute wandering out of your bedroom a couple of hours later, all confused and cranky.

“Did you have a bad dream?” I asked.

Instead of answering, you just raised your right arm to a ninety degree angle like a little Hitler Youth, and there, under your arm, were long pink strings of gum stretching from your armpit to the underside of your arm.

I wanted to do the right thing, Grown Up Lady, I really did. I was pretty sure the answer to gum removal was the application of either hair spray, peanut butter, or ice cubes. At least that’s what you did with clothes, and it seemed like it should be the same for armpits.

I looked for hair spray, but it was the late seventies, not the eighties, and big hair and arching bangs weren’t commanding large bulk purchases of Aqua Net yet. Then I looked for peanut butter, but I guess you’d had a lot of sandwiches recently.

You can see I had no choice. I gathered up a big bowl of ice cubes from the kitchen, a dish towel for the run-off, and a paper bag for the picked off gum bits, and then I spent two hours icing your armpit and picking little frozen flakes of gum from your skin.

Sure you screamed some, and maybe, in hindsight I should have found some nice warm baby oil or something, but you and I are beyond that now. We’re adults,and, may I point out, you are currently free of armpit gum, although this is an assumption on my part, as your armpit is not really visible in your Facebook profile either, and you did really love grape Bubble Yum especially. It was like a monkey on your back.

Anyway, last week your mother called me after twenty-five years, out of the blue, after hunting me down on the internet, which was a little weird, but o-kay. My daughters are on Facebook, she said. They’re looking forward to hearing from you. It’s been so long!!

Honestly I had my doubts, but she was so insistent.

See, I meant to just send you a little “howdy-do” message, but apparently I don’t know how to do that without friend-requesting. You accepted, but my ‘howdy-do’ has been left unanswered, and now I am a silent, unacknowledged stranger on your friend list. Kind of a mixed message. It’s awkward, is what I’m saying, and I’m now I’m like a stalker, which hurts a little after all we’ve been through together.

Maybe if I sent you some flair, or a pack of gum, just to break the ice?

Love,

Vic

At least I’ll have fire-eating to fall back on. You know, if the acting thing doesn’t work out.

2009-11-30T00:27:00.000-08:00

I have terrible blog guilt.

It’s been way too long since I’ve been around, I know. (Insert deeply shamed head bow here.)

I feel like that guy in the news that put his kids in the trunk and then went to do a little shopping. I only planned to be gone for a few minutes, and Whoops! I got distracted by shiny things and you’re all still in the trunk, and maybe you’ll still love me after your brains get some oxygen and I get you back from foster care, but maybe not, who knows?

I don’t even know where I’ve been exactly. Just….needed a breather, I guess. We could pretend I was doing soul-expanding yoga on a mountain top somewhere, if you want, with a swami guy, and Richard Gere. I definitely did NOT sit on the couch all Thanksgiving break, eating large amounts of pie and scratching, and dressing the cats in little outfits. (Did I say that I missed you all? I did.)

So here I am! Hopefully this is a good thing.

Some things that have happened in my absence are:

my husband bought a bullhorn off Ebay. He giggles worryingly whenever he mentions a new feature of the horn he’s discovered, such as that it plays “La Cucaracha” at a high volume. I’m probably going to have to break it at some point.
my husband bought me a blow torch, also off Ebay. For my birthday. I think I forgot to mention this somehow. I shook the package and felt liquid moving. I made a little joke about getting a propane tank for my birthday. Haha. He said, “Of course it’s not a propane tank!…….It’s a different kind of fuel!”

I should explain that a blow torch had not been on my birthday wish list, so SURPRISE!, but I think now with the bullhorn and the blowtorch we may be equipping ourselves for the circus.

I dreamt two nights ago that I was running a bed and breakfast. Business was good until I discovered that some guy on the third floor was kidnapping people and draining all their blood out while they were alive. I was really mad that I had to do all that laundry, because there was a lot of blood on those sheets, and once blood sets it’s really a laundry challenge. Then last night I dreamt that my director tried to kiss me. The second dream was creepier.
I have been very busy becoming other people. Not like Chastity Bono. Just a blind lady, Mrs. Fezziwig, and other assorted loud Victorian women. Christmas Carol opens on Friday, and tech week started today, which is also known as Hell Week, and for good reason. For instance, we have dress rehearsals every night this week until eleven. I have five costume changes to figure out. Sometimes I change quickly in the hall. Also the sets are huge, and if you don’t watch where you’re going, you could actually be killed. Fernadette, my nemesis, has reappeared in her caroler’s bonnet and perpetual sneer. She watches me from the other side of the stage, but I just put on my Annie Sullivan glasses and pretend she’s not there.

I realized tonight that I am paying for all my harsh judgment of blind stalkers on this blog. Turns out that seeing anything from behind those dark glasses is really hard! Especially when you are on stage, and the lighting is all swirly-foggy, and you’re supposed to say your blind lady lines right at the edge of the stage, after you’ve walked hunched over wearing the dark glasses and a petticoat that drags under your shoes periodically. I haven’t yet cartwheeled into the orchestra pit, but it’s just a matter of time.

Also I have to wear a horrible grey wig for another scene, and I’ve been experimenting with old lady makeup. According to the helpful Old Lady Face Diagram I got at the costume store, it’s easy! Just a little contouring and shadow, and sallow yellow stipple and age spots, and sunken eyepits, and wrinkles.

Simple.

Last night I spent an hour and a half in the bathroom dabbing and stippling, and frowning at myself to find my forehead creases, and pursing my lips to create old lady smoker lines with an eye pencil. Then I stood back to look. It’s like getting a horrific glimpse of the future you. Hopefully far, far, into the future, but possibly next year when I am an old crone with a face like a shrunken head.

So I figure I did some excellent makeup work, because when I came out of the bathroom, my husband said “Ahhh!! Jeee--sus!!” like you do when someone sneaks up behind you playfully with a large snake and dangles it just at eye level with its fangs exposed.

The dog averted his eyes tactfully.

Also my Mrs. Fezziwig dress is too big in the bodice which means when I lean over to take the tray of fake candied apples (which are going to go into the orchestra pit too at some point) the audience will be getting an eyeful of old lady boob.

This week is going to be a little crazy with the thespianism, so I promise to come by and see you all at your blogs (because I really did miss you all) soon, just maybe not for another couple of days, unless I find a free minute or two somewhere between makeup sessions and hiking up my bodice.

In the meantime, forget I said that thing about dressing up the cats, okay?

Thanks, you’re the best. I mean that.

The one where I finally get my “Up With People” membership card revoked.

2009-11-09T22:54:00.001-08:00

(From Sunday’s lunch. Where are the Coke people hiding the cameras? )

I used to know this man who’d spent hours and hours of his life planning a revolutionary new amusement park. He would tell me about his plans in vivid detail, his hands drawing the shape of genius in the air. Sometimes, in his urgency, spittle would collect in the corners of his mouth as he lectured and I would have to lean away slightly to avoid the overspray.

It’s been awhile, but I remember that the amusement park was built on a huge triangular (isosceles) mountain, but not a stationary mountain, a spinning mountain. Actually, sections of the mountain would spin, in opposite directions simultaneously, and then huge mechanical arms, which were attached to the core of the mountain, would shoot out and flail wildly, thus providing a thrilling experience for the hundreds of tiny people strapped to them. If memory serves, the people were actually strapped into little fuzzy beanbag chairs, which were, in turn, affixed with suction cups to the mechanical arms.

It was all very technical.

Sometimes he drew me diagrams with a dull pencil stub and some notebook paper, and I wish I still had one, but mostly he would have to eat them after he was done talking, because it would be disastrous if the plans fell into the wrong hands.

The best part, the climax, if you will, was when the machine guns came out of the mountain on additional octopus arms. Because everything,( people, beanbag chairs, machine guns) was spinning in different directions, there was a lot of suspense about which riders would be shot. Some would live. Some might only suffer flesh wounds. That was the beauty of this ride. Thrills and suspense. Death-defying action. It couldn’t miss.

Sadly, the amusement park mountain never got built, mostly because the CIA and the man’s mother were involved in a conspiracy to steal his ideas, and so they had him committed to a mental hospital where he spent all his time looking for bugs in the outlets in his room.

I lost track of the man after I quit the job working at the psychiatric hospital, and sometimes I‘ve wondered if he’s still there, with his pencil stub, fine-tuning the plans.

Until this weekend, when I rented a movie named Synecdoche, New York, and I realized that my old friend must be making movies now.

Have you seen this movie? Of course you haven’t, because what kind of masochist would rent this movie other than me? No one, that’s who.

It’s a Charlie Kaufman film, and it makes the spinning mountain seem like a good idea by comparison. Also the machine guns are totally cheery next to the bummer that is Synecdoche.

For example. In this movie, the main character is unhappy. I think because of all the stark, fluorescent lighting. He develops a mysterious disease. It comes and goes, but ultimately has no bearing on further events, just covers him in ugly pustules for fun. His four year old daughter is taken to Berlin by his wife, where the four year old almost immediately morphs into a fully tattooed German woman who is having a lesbian relationship with her own nanny. He learns this by reading her diary, which she left under her pillow. Back in America. It spontaneously updates. He never sees her again.

He then becomes involved with a woman who lives in a house that is on fire for forty years. She marries another man who lives in the basement (he came with the house and wears a wife-beater), and they have twins. Three. Not three sets of twins. Three twins. She dies of smoke inhalation. Naturally.

Then he marries an actress in his theater troupe and they have a daughter too, but he can never remember her name, and then he leaves his second wife to go and clean the pretend apartment of his first wife, who paints miniatures. Nude miniatures.

(If your head hurts right now, you’re getting it! Good job!)

The apartment is pretend because it’s part of a theater set. He’s decided to make a play of his life. And possible there is a play of the play of his life. There are wigs, and multiple versions of everyone, and all the dialogue happens at least twice, like Ground Hog Day only not funny, and they rehearse for a couple of decades and build a replica of New York City in a warehouse, but never perform the play for an audience. Some people die in unexplained ways. A man in an overcoat stalks him. It might be him stalking himself, but only until the suicide.

(This is where my husband sighed heavily and went to look for my son’s Halloween candy stash.)

Later he decides to play the part of the cleaning woman in the play instead of the director because of stress, and then he has a touching conversation with his/her mother, who died a long time ago. A fake priest that looks a little like David Arquette gives a speech while standing on some Astroturf. Then he dies. Not David Arquette. The main guy. Probably. The cleaning lady says so.

That’s basically it.

Be glad I just spoiled this movie for you. You could use those two hours for something more pleasant and productive, like pulling out all your own teeth with a bottle opener.

I’m sure there are those of you that think Charlie Kaufman is a genius, a profound surrealist with a potent commentary on the existential crisis we all live daily, a man willing to present the tragic absurdity of life with unflinching honesty.

You would be wrong.

Charlie Kaufman is insane, and also an intellectual masturbator.

Not that I have any strong feelings about it, but I think forcing prisoners to watch Charlie Kaufman films would be both an effective interrogation device, and a violation of the Geneva convention. His movies make popcorn stick going down.

I’m feeling a little hostile suddenly. Wow. I thought only Andy Kaufman affected me that way.

If you see this movie in the video store, feel free to fling it under the shelving unit. Go ahead and push it clear under with your toe. You’re doing everyone a favor, even Charlie, who clearly needs to be spending his time more productively, like maybe designing amusement park rides and checking his outlets for listening devices.

I’m done now, I think.

Check in next time when I discuss the perennial favorite, why Kevin Costner must be driven out of movies and forced to watch Charlie Kaufman films as punishment for every movie he’s done in which he wore pleated slacks.

UPDATE: I’m pretty sure I have an extra-spongy brain. It’s absorbent. Not like those bargain brands.

2009-11-03T23:52:00.001-08:00

“If the last hair in line at the back of your nose had a hand, it could slap you in the brain,” said my son, while industriously smashing down the innards of his baked potato with a fork.

“That’s disgusting,” my daughter said, and demonstrated how she, also, could slap him in the brain.
A brief scuffle ensued. Threats were issued. Conversation continued.

We were talking about swine flu shots. Actually, not the shot, but the Flu Mist, which the literature says is perfectly safe, even if it is a live virus you’re snorting directly into your brain. So to speak.

And it absolutely can’t give you the flu. That’s just wild conspiracy talk. It’s only that the virus (weakened!) can possibly give you many of the symptoms of the swine flu. So it’s the flu virus, that makes you feel, possibly, as if you have the flu, but it’s not. It’s different. (Try to keep up.)

It might also make you lose all control of your legs, in some cases, and also makes you potentially contagious for twenty-one days, fearsomely capable of infecting anyone around you unwise enough to have a weenie immune system, with swine flu.

So getting the Flu Mist absolutely doesn’t give you the swine flu. Just other people.

This is the best I could figure out after consulting with our doctor, the nurse at work, forty-two incredibly alarmist internet sites, and the women on the phone at the county health services office.

The health services office was where we were originally scheduled to bathe our brains in contagion. I hate going there because the bug-flecked fluorescent lighting and peeled paneling in the waiting room send me in to an instantaneous state of despair. It’s institutional angst with a side of can I get syphilis from sitting in this orange plastic chair?

Chair syphilis. Probably they have a pamphlet on that.

So now we’ve skipped out on the mist, and are contemplating the shot, or alternately, just waiting for someone who’s already had the mist (Swine Flu Time Bomb) to infect us and get it over with. The kids are all for living dangerously, of course.

Also the cats have taken up sneezing as a secondary occupation. (Their primary job is tripping the unsuspecting. This involves stretching out into a three foot long cat-strip and lying in wait) They like to sneeze on your face just as you are waking up, which is just their way of saying Good morning! Here’s direct shot of cat-borne virus to the brain! Or worms!

So now that I’m probably a wormy, syphilitic, potential swine flu time bomb, I’m planning to come visit you at your blogs really soon!

I’ll bring the hand sanitizer and the pamphlets.

UPDATE: Breaking Medical News! Apparently a cat in Iowa has just been diagnosed with H1N1. The news this morning advises that anyone with sneezing cats should visit the veterinarian.

Sometimes I scare myself.

First we made it all red and swollen, and then the Queen showed up.

2009-10-22T23:05:00.001-07:00

Or, Teaching, the Vic way.

Or, Yesterday, Period One, Freshman English*.

*Curriculum addressed: Government bureaucracy, multi-cultural awareness, physical education, natural science, law-enforcement procedures, chemistry, biology, sex education, foreign relations, mental illness, spirituality.

*Curriculum not addressed: English

8 am: Bell rings. Take roll. Explain to roomful of fourteen year olds, again, that a research paper requires finding actual information. Imaginary facts are frowned upon. Yes, really. Student in back row raises hand- how are we going to use this in the real world?

8:05: Morning headache begins. Door opens. Principal, dressed in suit (bad sign) saunters in, accompanied by district superintendent, also in suit. Both smile, copy down everything written on board for future scrutiny. Identical expectant faces. Impress us, their eyebrows command.

8:10: Open mouth to impress visitors with superior wisdom and teaching technique. Door opens again. Special education lackey enters. Surprise!! IEP meeting! Mandatory attendance, come right away! Forgot to tell you!

8:11: Leave official guests and sea of vapid teens with lackey to fend for themselves. Attend IEP meeting. Mother speaks no English. Use wild hand gestures and loud, loud voice to compensate. Probably this is effective.

8:22: Return to classroom just as slightly sweaty officials are escaping. Open mouth. Say Okay everyone, let’s get…Door opens again.

Dean of students, police officer, and women with leash (attached to large dog) enter room.

Everybody clear the room! Take nothing with you! No talking!

8:23 Class led silently from the room. Students take turns alternately attempting to climb tree outside classroom and stomp to death world’s largest black widow spider. Meanwhile, inside, dog sniffs all backpacks for Oxycontin. Jim Beam. Plastic explosives. Meatball sandwiches.

Remember ibuprofen in purse. Hope police pat down is somewhere more private.

8:33 Dog fails to find contraband, leaves room with tail between legs. Students file in, one with spider attached to shoe.

8:35 Students return to seats. Door left ajar due to doggy smell in room. Say Let’s try this again. Open your books to page…

Autistic boy in first row raises hand- “Check this out!”

Opens book to inside back cover. Displays large, elaborate pen drawing of penis, with heavily-veined scrotum. Further inspection reveals penis to be of John Holmesian dimensions.

Students in room silent for first time. Calm before the storm. All eyes on teacher.

8:37: Sigh. Say Here, take this permanent marker and scribble it out. Do not look closely at marker grabbed hastily from desk drawer.

8:38: Student scribbles penis dutifully with marker. Displays effect proudly for the room.

Penis and scrotum now more distinctly defined than ever, and bright red. Appears turgid and hot, and somehow springy.

8:39: Get giggles. Attempt to stifle giggles and confiscate book simultaneously. Struggle to regain dignity. Class erupts in excited babble.

8:42: Suddenly, many well-dressed individuals walk slowly by open door. Student next to door cries Hey, it’s Queen Elizabeth!!

Group of adults stops to look in room and then continue. It is not Queen Elizabeth. (One of them is, however, the Mayor of London. England. Come to see the marching band, as you will later learn. Frightening coincidence.)

8:48: Give up. Instruct students to gather things and pack up. Sit at desk with head cradled in palms of hands.

Hear student approach desk. Look up. Student shyly extends folded paper. Says, I wanted to show you this.

Fear it is another penis drawing. Unfold paper.

Worse.

These are demons that talk to me. I drew their pictures. Do you want to know their names?

8:54- Bell rings.

One period down, five more to go.

Note: I attempted to take a picture of the turgid penis for your viewing pleasure, but when I looked later, the page had been ripped out of the book.

One Year Closer to Death, but at least I don’t smell like urine. Yet.

2009-10-19T00:00:00.000-07:00

It’s my birthday today.

Let me try that again.

It’s my birthday today!!! (Cue release of helium balloons and singing waiters)

Don’t even ask how old I am, because apparently I don’t know.

Turns out, according to my know-it-all husband, I am a year older than I thought I was. He was all smirky-faced when he told me, especially during the part right after I finished counting years on my fingers and looking up with a Whaaa?? expression, the part where he casually reminded me he is fourteen months younger than me. Which might make me some kind of cougar, I’m not sure. An Alzheimer’s cougar.

I don’t know what I’m doing to celebrate. Probably checking the batteries in my Life Alert. Eating Almond Roca while wearing a fuchsia polyester pantsuit with suntan knee-high hose. Ordering a commemorative Bob Hope plate off the Home Shopping Network.

The usual birthday hoopla.

Also a satyr wearing eye-liner and horns glued to his head at the Halloween Store tried to pick me up on Wednesday, so I’ve definitely still got it, right?

Birthdays are good because people give you stuff. Like, my dentist sent a postcard saying “Happy Birthday! It’s time to schedule a cleaning!” because he knows I am extra good at plaque, and not so good at flossing. Also I am probably getting the flu from my daughter soon, since she’s been sick with it all week, and there goes my swinging party lifestyle (Almond Roca, anyone?).

I got a title, too. I am now officially “Co-Dance-Captain”. Of the Christmas Carol Fezziwig dancers. Even better is that I can’t dance, despite my couch-bound passion for So You Think You Can Dance, but it’s okay, because it’s just a bunch of couples doing a lurching, thundering polka-thing around the stage in hoop skirts and Victorian suits. It’s not interpretive dance. I got the job because my partner can dance and he also shouts things like “Allemande left!” and “Do-se-do!” while throwing me around the floor, and I haven’t fallen down yet. I’m practically a professional dancer, I think you could say.

I’m not sure about my duties, but I’m definitely making myself a “Co-Captain” name tag, or a trucker hat so people will recognize my importance.

The coolest thing I’ve gotten so far came from Lana, who sent me a T-shirt in the mail after I won her contest. It’s got a picture of a pickle’s ass:

I’m wearing it to work today. With my pantsuit.

It’s like that song about God riding the bus, only instead I picture a leprechaun.

2009-10-13T23:49:00.001-07:00

But not a leprechaun on a bus, because that would be silly.

Also it would be lacking in magic and pomp, because these days we are entirely too politically correct, and even if He got on a bus in his leprechaun body, holding a pot of gold under one arm and tapping his shillelagh on the fare box, everyone on the bus would just look straight ahead. In case someone caught them staring and then lectured them about cultural sensitivity and treating little people with dignity. Only inside, they’d all be thinking look at the crazy midget in the yellow tights and curly shoes! I’ve got to stop riding the city bus, and God would know they thought that.

I’m not sure where I was going with this.

Probably what I’m trying to say is sometimes I think the Big Leprechaun in the Sky enjoys messing with us.
For instance, remember my nemesis? The one that chased me down to tell me she can only get the “pretty parts” in theater productions because she’s so thin, thereby clearly implying that I am hideously fat and unattractive and specially suited for the “jolly” parts? The one that is BFF’s with the director? The one I may or may not have wished would wake up bald?

Well.

Cast lists were posted a couple of days ago. If this were my own John Hughes-style movie (or “Camp Rock” for you younger readers)featuring myself as the spunky underdog (note to self: stop using the word ‘spunky’ ) I would nervously approach the paper pinned all crookedy to the bulletin board, and there would be my name next to the lead part! What an unforeseen turn of events causing unbearable envy in my nemesis!

So I’d be Scrooge. Maybe not.

Or I’d nervously approach the crookedy list, and there I’d be, next to the pretty part!* - The Ghost of Christmas Past! Oh yeah!Take that Fernadette!

Nope.

I did get a part. Parts. I’m Mrs. Fezziwig. And a blind beggar. And also someone called “Raucous Lady” which calls to mind tropical birds. Mrs. Fezziwig sounds important, but in this version she has only one line about boiled dinner and then she cleans up a lot. I do get to fall down as the beggar, so it’s clear they went with my strengths this time around. AND I beat out thirty other women for these coveted spots. Apparently.

But what about Fernadette? I hear you all asking. Surely she wasn’t cast as the GOCP? Say it isn’t so!

Maybe that would have happened if God were my own personal leprechaun sadist, but it turns out he’s an equal-opportunity prankster.

Fernadette didn’t get a part. No part. Zippo. Too pretty, I guess.

Instead the director told her she could be a caroler if she wanted. The carolers have to trudge up and down the local outdoor mall dressed in bonnets and woolen capes in 80 degree heat singing Christmas carols, thereby inducing sudden Christmas spirit in shoppers at the Anchor Blue store, and propelling them into the theater. No word on whether she accepted so far.

My favorite thing of all, though, (after picturing Fernadette’s springy afro jammed into a bonnet), is the casting of the Ghost of Christmas Past.

The director gave the “pretty part” to a woman who is 6’2”, nearly 300 pounds, and has a voice like a drill sergeant.

I kind of love that little director man.

* I have a picture of the last Ghost of Christmas Past having excessive smoke blown up her…angel robes. Fog machine went a little berserk. It happens. Good one, Holy Leprechaun Father.

I think I might be going to Hell now.

*nobo-dy calling on the pho-o-ne….’cept for the Pope maybe in Rome…*

In Which Our Heroine is Confronted With Pure Evil. And a Dangerously High Stack of Junk Mail.

2009-10-07T22:13:00.001-07:00

Hello.

Perhaps I seem familiar to you. I used to do a little blogging around here, back in olden times.

A week ago, anyway.

I know I’ve neglected you all shamefully, but couldn’t help it, I had some pressing matters to attend to.

For instance, after I crashed from my candy corn high, I realized my house was on the fast-track to a featured spot on a Very Special Episode of “Hoarders” unless I broke out the cleaning supplies. So there was that.

Also there was/is the on-going cat situation. Every night they do an encore performance of the feline Cirque du Soleil in the hallway outside the bedroom where we are attempting to sleep. The husband, rather than speak sternly to the kittens, is encouraging them by building the world’s most complicated cat condo/scratching post/cabana/trapeze/summer home/carpeted Tower of Babel. Pretty soon it will be tall enough for them to see the face of God. (Their sense of entitlement is epic now that both kittens have Facebook pages. The Apocalypse is on its way.)

Mostly, though, I have been very busy composing scathing letters in my head to my new nemesis. Sometimes the letters are extra hurtful, because, people, that is just how I roll now. The beast has been unleashed.

I know. At first, I, too, was taken off-guard when my arch enemy appeared, because I thought only other people have nemesii. Nemesises. Enemies. Not Vic, the Aunt Bea of Blogland, driver of the Partridge Family bus, and yes I know I’m mixing my TV Land references, but it can’t be helped.

And yet, there she was.

Maybe by now it has crossed your mind to wonder what a Nemesis of Vic would look like.

Well, as it happens, my nemesis looks exactly like if they made a Bernadette Peters action figure, only she would be made with an inferior mold so the eyes are extra little and beady, and poorly painted, giving her a slightly cross-eyed stare like Jessica Simpson, and also she would have black hair. The lips would look like she had just sucked the head off a sparrow. That part’s pretty true to life.

My nemesis’s name, of course, is not Bernadette, and I’d use Betty’s name but that would be indiscreet, so we’ll just call her, oh, Fernadette.

Let me explain.

Last weekend I auditioned for "A Christmas Carol". I just do it for fun, and to escape my “Hoarders” house, and yet every time I audition for a production, I’m surrounded by divas, of both genders, all of them overly animated and self-conscious, and all “best friends” with the director. This is annoying to normal people.

Also, everyone has been the lead in Wicked or West Side Story, and has stapled expensive head shots to their lengthy resume. Once the resumes have been relinquished, large groups of auditioning actors are herded into the room, where two or three people at a time perform randomly- assigned dramatic readings for the director and everyone else.

My audition went well enough, I thought. I was especially proud of my reinterpretation of the Ghost of Christmas Past as a disaffected goth teenager, resentful of the time that Scrooge is taking away from her Marilyn Manson sing-a-long time.

So, anyway, after the audition this woman lterally chased me out of the building, tailing me to the car park, huffing and puffing on her four -inch heels.

It was Fernadette.

And then a conversation occurred:

Fernadette: "Hey! Hey you! “ Stops to brush curls from forehead with wrist. She is winded. “I heard your reading today."

Me: "Umm hmm. I heard your audition too." Quizzical Vic eyebrow.

Fernadette: "Sooo…… What part are you hoping for? Are you auditioning for the Ghost of Christmas Past?

Me: “Uh…maybe? Whatever they decide, I guess. I liked doing the physical comedy last time, so a character part would be fun too.” I turn to unlock my car door. When I turn back, Fernadette is still standing there, expectantly.

Me: “ Oh. Um….so….what about you? Ghost of Christmas Past?”

Fernadette: Smirks. “Oh, yes, of course I am!” (a trill of laughter escapes her pursed action figure lips)
“You know..(thoughtful tooth tap with the end of an acrylic nail)…..I know what you mean about the parts you like.”

Me: “You do?” (longing look at inviting car interior)

Fernadette: “ I always used to enjoy doing character parts too." (Significant Pause) "I used to be overweight then. (Long hand flourish up her body) Now that I'm so thin, I just can't do those parts anymore.” (Sad pout) “The directors only want to give me the pretty girl parts now. You're so lucky.”

Oh no, she didn’t.

Fernadette: “Oh, I have to run!! Good luck!”

And then she was gone, a blur of hair and claws, up the stairs to the next level, leaving me winded from the sucker punch.

So now it’s on. I pretty desperately want the director (who’s in my mafia on Facebook, btw. We’re pretty close) to add a sexy new neighbor for Scrooge. And then he would give me the part, and I would be so gracious to little poisonous Fernadette and not even laugh when she does her bit as a street beggar. Who is covered in boils.

Stage make-up, of course. It would be too much to ask for real boils.

Also, I was going to check out “pop-a-prune.com” because who doesn’t enjoy that? Prunes, maybe.

2009-09-28T23:47:00.000-07:00

Things I have done since my last post:

Eaten many, many candy corns. Please be advised that if you buy the little cute bags with only five corns in it, you will be obliged to tear open hundreds of them to get your daily allotment, but that’s okay because cellophane tearing counts as exercise, and think of the upper arm toning.
Graded one-hundred and fifty student essays, five of which included misspellings of the writer’s own name. Wrote passive aggressive teacher-ish comments in margins such as was your character trapped in a cake?
Contemplated new career. Perhaps a seeing-eye ferret trainer. Sky-diving mailman. Something easier than teaching.
Received notifications from school nurse in staff mailbox. Learned following things:
1. Everyone has asthma.
2. Two students have peanut allergies (Even the smell of a peanut on your breath can send these students into shock. Peanuts can kill!).
3. One student has something reassuringly labeled “Sudden Death Syndrome”. (If students falls to the floor unexpectedly, get help.)
Resolved to revise my current “step over body and continue” plan for dealing with deceased students in the classroom.
Bought trail mix from vending machine. Ate nuts first and then raisins. Theorized that raisins cancel out peanutty breath. Was unable to test out raisin antidote as nut avoiders absent.
Discovered large piles of hair in back of classroom. Three days in a row, so three large piles of hair, black and curly. All pieces of hair approximately three inches long.
Suffered unpleasant mental picture of giant swarthy man, say Paul Bunyan, manscaping in back of classroom.
Scanned room for suspiciously balding freshmen. Conducted casual investigation into hairball origins. Possible witnesses refused to come forward. Case cold.
Concluded that today’s teenagers are broken.
Went to the junk store in search of odd things which bring me joy. Developed irrational fear of large Victorian-era portrait featuring a malevolent crone in a bun and high lace collar. Became convinced beady eyes were watching my every move. Looked behind self at portrait. Suspicions confirmed.
Thought briefly about taking photograph of scary picture for blog readers. Remembered that this is excellent way to be stalked by spirit and end up in A & E ghosthunter special with nervous wringing hands and a piano that plays by itself in the middle of the night. Would like to meet Chuck the psychic, but totally not worth demon woman.
Found this for blog readers instead:

Is it just me, or is that baby a little pissed off? Do you think it’s me?

Probably next they’ll get earthworms. Then we could open a bait shop.

2009-09-22T22:41:00.001-07:00

At the risk of abandoning the hard- hitting journalistic coverage you’ve grown to expect here at WWYT, and an even greater risk of becoming the All-Cats-All-The-Time station, let me just get a couple of kitten-related things off my chest, and we’re moving on. Deal?

First, and most important-- It’s been a long time since I’ve been as touched as I was by all of your responses to my last post. It’s such an unexpected thing to be surrounded here in this little virtual cocoon by so many great people; when I started this blog I never expected to have any readers at all. Your comments meant a lot to me, and helped to make a really bad day more bearable. I’m feeling grateful to be here, and to know you all, even from a distance. So, thank you.

Second, I think I owe the shelter lady an apology for making her seem more callous than she was. Her timing may have been a bit off, but she was a very nice woman, and she was concerned about my kids, and the solitary kitten left at home. (In fact, I called the shelter a couple of days ago because we discovered we needed to know whether Violet was gone, so we could let go. The shelter lady had kept Violet two more days, giving her pain relief and cortisone, in the hopes that it was some muscle thing the doctors missed. Sadly, it wasn’t and the kitten continued to go downhill. Ultimately they did put her to sleep, but I was touched that she also didn’t want to give up on the baby with the wise little face.)

Then, surprisingly, my son decided he wanted to get another kitten to keep Vladimir company, so we adopted another one three days ago. Dmitri. Naturally. He’s sweet, but a follower.

Third, to all the people who told me that “cats are easy”, I would like to report that you are all Big Damn Liars. Cats, from my vast experience of a roughly a week, are practically a full time job. They keep us up all night pouncing and thundering and eating meatloaf scented food and walking on the heads of the unconscious. They stalk the dog, who cowers from them, and has the worried eyes of someone whose anti-anxiety medication has run low.

They require a firm hand.

Also, I have been back to my vet twice in the last twenty-four hours toting a bulging Sack O’ Kittens. (One of them escaped the carrier on the way home today - a loose cat in the car while on the freeway= excitement!) Thank you, local shelter, for sending home with us two kittens each with an upper respiratory infection, eye infection, and three (three!) varieties of worms. (One type of worm doesn’t even appear on the wall charts. That’s how cutting edge these cats are.)

The vet sent us home with enough medication to open our own cat pharmacy-- pastes, gels, powders, and liquid antibiotics, all of which I have to force down or rub in the eyes of squirming, irritated cats twice a day.
Enough. Back to the news, because it’s my job to keep you informed about all the crucial happenings.

Here’s one. Remember my neighbor, whose yard looks like this?

Gazing ball man has added to his collection! I know! Luckily he had some extra unoccupied pillars, because now, flanking his door, are two green pears the size of small refrigerators. Apparently he’s moving away from the animals-in-chains/everything whitewashed motif and towards a more vegetarian world view.

I tried to get a picture of the pears (I’m on the scene for you!) but he almost caught me and I had to nonchalantly walk away with my cell phone up to my ear like I was talking to someone, when really the phone was recording a video of the palm of my hand.

One more thing:

Vlad’s shelter mug shot. This is where all the trouble started.
That’s it, I promise. Unless you think he needs a shower cap?

The Dog May Be Lumpy, But At Least He Never Broke My Heart.

2009-09-18T00:36:00.000-07:00

**

Irony: Blogger jokes about cat strollers in post, because cat strollers are ridiculous.
Ten minutes later. Blogger discovers new kitten can no longer walk.
(see also, Foreshadowing)

Tuesday.
We pick up two kittens from the shelter at 6:30 pm. Both are in cardboard boxes. Both have had surgery in the morning. One box is moving, the other not so much. Shelter lady says the female kitten (Violet) is still groggy. She'll be up and back to normal any minute. Really, really, soon.

At home, the male kitten (Vladimir) rockets from the box and roams the room. Violet is quiet. I lift her from the box and put her in the new cat bed. She walks slowly for a drink, lies down and sleeps for the next several hours.

I write a post about Sumeria. Make a joke about cat strollers. Stretch. Yawn. Think, better check on the ~~destruction~~ kittens before bed. Vladimir (kittens were named by the shelter, by the way, and fairly well, considering others were named things like "Wal-mart" and "Plebko22") is stalking a sock. Violet is sleeping.

I pick Violet up. Put her back down. Awake now, she flops straight down on the floor, and then drags entire length of two completely slack back legs behind her, pulling all her weight along with two tiny front legs.

Confusion and hand-wringing, a call to the 24 hour Animal Hospital. Twenty minute drive to pet hospital at 1:30 am. Watch a retrospective on the Night Stalker that is playing on the overhead monitors in the dim,empty waiting room. Assistant at desk wears a nametag that says "Violet". Coincidence. Then,

Vet says:

???? Did someone drop her? No? Odd. We'll keep her here and charge you 700 dollars by the morning. Probably it won't help. See you at 10 am!

Pathos: Blogger drives hither and yon across the city, crying, with tiny paralyzed kitten riding shotgun. Driving and crying. Crying and driving. Not looking in the carrier at the little alert eyes and the long, limp back legs stretched out on the blanket. Paraplegic kitty.

Wednesday.

I take the day off work and drive back to the animal hospital in the morning. Conference with two vets. Both say it's a mystery. They have never seen this happen with a kitten, ever. Both say the prognosis is guarded at best. She can no longer go to the bathroom on her own. I surrender the remainder of my bank account and load Violet up while they toss out words like "neurosurgeon" and "MRI". (They have neurosurgeons for cats?) They say probably that wouldn't help either.

Violet and I drive. Across the city is the shelter, where euthanasia awaits. I can't bring myself to drive there. I call my regular vet. He says "Let me see her".

Hope.

I drive in the opposite direction to vet. Dr. H says, well, hello little lady to the kitten, and to me he says, no feeling. None at all. Seen this twice in thirty-five years. Maybe a blood clot in spine. Hard to know. Kitten 's not going to walk again. Kindest to put her to sleep.

I knew this. I cry some more over a kitten we 've had less than twenty-four hours, and drive to the shelter.

Hand over the carrier without looking inside. Feel like a betrayer.

Shelter lady says, you can pick out a replacement if you want to.

(Do I want to?)

Then I go home to tell my kids.

I Might Be a Little Homesick for Sumeria. Also, a cry for help.

2009-09-16T00:25:00.000-07:00

Conversation with my son (while working on his "Sumerian Family" essay)

Son: "I said here at the beginning that Dad wears a grass man skirt. A BIG man skirt."
Me: "mmhmmmm...That's nice."
Son: "Can I say you're approaching fifty?"
Me: "WHAT? No! I'm not 'approaching fifty'!"
Son: "Well, what ARE you approaching?"
Me: "Just put my age, if you have to."
Son (wearing kindly, pitying look): "How about if I just say you're 'approaching twenty? Then you'd feel young again.'"
Me: Why do I have to be 'approaching" anything? That's way too young anyway. I would have been a mother in the first grade."
Son: (eyes glazed with studious math-avoidance) "Whatever. "
".....hey, Mom, what's a good Sumerian name for the dog?"
Me: "Do I look like a Sumerian name expert?"
Son (clicking, clicking, clicking keys on the computer): "How about ...' Stanley'?"
Me: "Stanley?? That's not a Sumerian name."
Son: "Uh huh!. Come look."
Me: (looking over son's shoulder at the computer): "Look at that. Stanley. Huh."

Then I took a moment to survey the accompanying crayon illustration of the Family Vic circa 1200 BC.

Me: "Where's your dad in this picture? I see you and me, and your sister, nice hairy wrap dress, by the way, and the dog. And a.... er.....gazelle in a basket? Where's your dad?"
Son: "Oh, him. He's in the hut. He's sleeping because he's a night guard at the Ziggurat, and also, I was tired of drawing."

Which totally figures. I'm out by the garden with a hoe in my hand and a generously sized hairdo, laboring away in the sand under a hot Mesopotamian sun, and he's in the hut. What's more, everyone in the family got a cool retro name (Gilgamesh, Endukagga, Aruru, Stanley), except me.

At least I look really hot in my wrap dress and strappy sandals. Seriously. I should have been born a few thousand years ago.

Because right now I am way less stylish than my Sumerian alter-ego, and also kitty haggard. From kittens. In our house. (None of this is a euphemism.) Indicating how big a pushover I am as a parent, because we are really dog people, and the dog is a dog's dog and not really thrilled about the whole idea, although he is pretending to be indifferent until we leave the house, we have brought two small kittens home today. I think one of them has been drinking back-to-back Redbulls judging from the blur of destruction and chaos, and the other is still stoned from surgery and may sleep until next week. Kittens are so cute!

I'm going to need you people as spotters - if kittens appear on this blog in outfits (except a shower cap, which is excellent on any animal), or if I start talking about purchasing a cat stroller, please stage an intervention.

Please.

I bet Jigglypuff could sing that dog to sleep. But then she’d have three foreheads to draw on with her Magic Marker.

2009-09-09T00:35:00.000-07:00

Have you ever had one of those days where you feel the hot breath of hell hounds on the back of your neck? Where you feel anxiety about the uncertainty of the future, and about how the boatman’s gonna row all of us over the river some day, like it or not?

Me neither.

It was just a rhetorical question.

And it’s not like I spent any time this last weekend playing with someone else’s child’s toys, cruelly fitting Wendy upside down in the center jaw, and then Sir Handsome straight out to the side at a ludicrous rigor mortis angle, and then introducing Anonymous Sidesaddle Elf Princess to the remaining jaw, carefully squeezing the plastic dog teeth closed around her abdomen. My friend did that. She even laughed a little while she did it.

I was as shocked as you are. I think she has some unresolved aggression probably. I only laughed too so she wouldn’t be a lonely laugh-er. Nothing’s worse than being a lonely laugh-er. Except maybe a flesh-eating disease.

And just because I took a picture of the nightmarish tableau and then set Cerberus free to wander in a dreamy marsh-like Photoshop environment with his jaws full of human chew toys, you shouldn’t think I was enjoying playing with molded plastic, or that it represents anything. No strained metaphor here, no commentary on the impending death of childhood.

Definitely there was no contemplation on the worry you might have about maybe having to give up your favorite action figures just because you’re in middle school now, and what if the other kids find out you have a box with awesome elves and Harry Potter figures, and maybe even some old Pokémon (oh,there’s Jigglypuff!) at home, and that they still matter?

It’s just a picture. Sheesh. Let’s change the subject, shall we?

So. I was going to write a post last night, but Manson was on the History Channel, and those people feel like family.

Actually, they mostly just look like I remember my cousins when I was little, all long, pointy hair and groovy clothes and mysterious smoking things in their hands. Also an air of danger, and some mindlessness.

Anyway everyone on the show was oddly familiar, and then I had a bad post-simulated –murder- spree taste in my mouth, and no time left to post.

But tonight I’m here, writing a post about (let’s pretend that Manson detour never happened, okay with you?) Greek mythology, and Peter Pan, and some existentialist angst, and a great kid with a box full of childhood. I hope he keeps that box for a long, long time.

Sing us out, Jigglypuff.

Sometimes I Eat Fish Sticks In Front Of Them, Just As A Warning. Also, a Meme Thing.

2009-09-03T01:09:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty sure that fish know what we're thinking.

Probably your brain waves travel through the water and then right into fish, (AKA Thought Receptacles), and therefore we should be really glad that fish lack vocal chords because otherwise they would rule the world. Because of all the sensitive information to which they are privy.

What's worse is that at our house we accidentally blinded one of our betta fish when we went on the Clampitt Family Vacation this summer. In retrospect, it was a bad move to trust the teenager they had working at the pet store who said just dump this stuff in the water and it'll dissolve, leaving time release wormy bits afloat for the fish's dining pleasure. Only, when we returned there was a solid layer of what looked like plaster floating at the top of the water, and underneath was the Betta with a monocle in one eye.

Since then, Roku (that's the fish's name. Don't look at me. I wanted to name it Maury Povitch but I was outvoted) has been swimming into the sides of the tank with its mismatched eyeballs. This is bad for two reasons: one, nothing's worse than a fish with a vendetta (see Jaws IV), and two, blind individuals have stalked me before, as some of you know.

Which brings me to what I really want to talk about today, and that's Pearl's meme. (I'm sending you a fish, Pearl. You can send them in the mail. I checked. Also live chickens, and cadavers. I'm still not sure about beer.)

I usually duck memes when I see them coming, and anyway I still have a couple of awards to hand out at some point, but Pearl might rough me up, so I'm going to do this meme really quick.

So. Now I'm supposed to tell you about seven quirky traits of mine as shown in this blog.
Kindly stifle your mocking laughter.

1. As we have established, I 'm pretty sure fish know what we are thinking. OR, I believe that if I say it enough, I'll convince someone else it's true, and then I can be responsible for developing a full-blown fish phobia in another person. Which would be an accomplishment.

2. I'm a little awkward socially. For instance, I really don't like going to co-worker's TGIF parties, because I spend the time staring at my feet and listening to everyone reminisce about the last time they got together and something hilarious and shocking happened in the hot tub, but the story's all jumbled because they're drunk as they're telling it, and anyway, I wasn't there, so I just go "Ha, ha. ... Ha. Hot tubs are nice... I need to get going, I think."

But then today I heard all about the last party, and I wasn't invited apparently because I'm so good at parties, and I should be relieved, but I'm feeling sort of left out. I'm pathetic.

3. I have synesthesia, which means words and other things have specific colors in my head. September is chocolate brown, and all the months travel in a circle, like a pop bead necklace. Also, I think that people are secretly convinced I just make that up, so I don't usually tell anyone. Except here. I'm secretly convinced I've made you up, so we're even.

4. I have a mental block about liquid measurements. We apparently learned about liquid measurements in the third grade, but that year we moved a lot and I went to a bazillion schools, or maybe it was four, and every time we started to learn liquid measurements, BOOM, we moved.

And now I can't seem to keep them in my head, no matter how hard I try. My recipes come out pretty exciting. Sometimes we have soup unexpectedly.

5. I never paint my fingernails, because the polish makes my nails feel like they're suffocating. They get a little throbby, and that makes me focus too much on my fingers, and I start noticing that they look extra short and stumpy with polish, and if the polish is red it's very much like someone has chopped each finger off at the first knuckle.

6. I would rather be hit by a semitruck, or fall off a cliff, or be mauled to death by a hippo, than drown. Everyone says drowning's such a peaceful way to go, but I don't believe them. Sometimes I have nightmares about drowning.

7. I am not as ditzy as I sound on paper. Probably.

Here's the part where I pretend to forget about tagging seven other people, unless you want to be tagged, in which case You're It.

Who Me? I’m Functioning Superbly! It’s Not Like I’M Wearing the Opium Dress.

2009-08-30T22:02:00.001-07:00

So after nearly a week of killer vertigo, I was finally feeling better. Until yesterday, that is, when we went out to eat.

See the restaurant had those little cardboard coasters. One side had a picture of, I don’t know, a margarita or something, on it. The other side, for some reason, had this:

The universe clearly has it in for me because my kids thought it was hilarious to spin their coasters over and over in my direction. I had to rest my head on my plate to stop my brain from flying out. Lucky for me the garnish was fresh and springy.

(I’m trying really, really hard not to look at the spiral up there too closely, so I’m typing this with my eyes all squinty. It helps a little, and also it’s very Dirty Harry. I knew you’d understand.)

I feel like I’ve been gone a long time. Now that I’m back, I’m noticing stuff. For instance, my last post, as you already know, was a bit on the hallucinatory side. I didn’t actually realize this until today.

Also, I’ve been looking at my new blog header. I sort of remember making that. And I’m pretty sure I like it. Yeah. It’s good. Pretty sure.

The thing is, it’s a little more disturbing than I remembered it being, a week or so ago. Maybe all the Mad Hatter disorientation has altered my perspective, but now I’m thinking it might say things about my psyche that are better shared only with my therapist.

Because the ostrich may or may not be wearing a can-can dress. Made of red poppies, which everyone knows is code for opium; this was totally unintentional. Probably. I don’t remember.

The ostrich, by the way, is a real one I took a photo of at Solvang this summer, just as he was contemplating charging our car with his ropy neck, pursed beak and Manson Family stare. It’s all bald-headed transvestite aggression here at WWYT.

The house in the background is also from a vacation photo. It’s a spooky/cool Victorian house outside of Lompoc that I took a picture of, just after we’d escaped from behind the tractor we’d been following for miles and miles. Several of the back windows of the house were broken out, but I think people live there. Note: If this is your house, can I come over and look around inside? Let me know. Unless you’ve stuffed your dead mother and propped her up in the front window. Then never mind.

Admit it. It looks like the Norman Bates house now that I’ve messed with it. Especially with that shadow from the turret that looks like the silhouette of Alfred Hitchcock with a topknot. It does! Go look. I’ll wait.

Told you.

The man in the window, and the tightrope-walker lady are from old pictures I cut up. The man is supposed to be laughing happily, and in the original picture, he looks happy, like someone told him a great 18th century knock-knock joke. Here, I’ll show you:

See? He’s kinda sweet. The problem is, when you shrink him down and put him in the Norman Bates house, he gets all creepy and threatening, and big, because he’s too big for the window and therefore suggests your blind butler, Lurch, is cracking up and maybe you should give him a vacation before he finds you and crushes you with his gangly hands.

Also, there’s the lady on the roof.

She’s apparently either balancing a sombrero or a giant nacho plate above her head as she skips along the rooftops. That’s not weird.

It’s actually a parasol in the original picture (which I can’t find right now, so you’ll have to take my word for it), but I suppose she represents my fear of falling in front of a hostile south-of-the-border audience while wearing restrictive clothing. It’s a common phobia. Also it represents my love of jalapeno cheese.

Factor in the giant storm that seems to be blowing in, and I think you’ll agree that I’m pretty ~~disturbed~~ deep.

This week I gained three followers, and then just as quickly lost three. I’m sure this has nothing to do with my malevolent blog header. Or my obscure post titles. Or the way I made up the word “resty” last time. Probably just coincidence.

I’m not worried though. My latest fortune cookie fortune assures me that I’ve got it all under control:

“Lovingly, cow larcenist?” she said, to no one in particular. And then she fell over.

2009-08-27T23:31:00.001-07:00

Because of the crazy vertigo. Vertigo! Spinning, spinning, spinning in infinity, and oh, it’s like the Hammerhead after too much funnel cake, and the car windows are steamed up in the rain, and there goes the pavement whizzing by your head again, and the greasiness is coming back up..

…But it’s not the 1980 Lane County Fair (silly!), it’s vertigo!, which hits hard, out of the blue, an hour and a half before Back To School Night. Which she stubbornly tries to attend anyway, wearing a scratchy teacher dress and too-high heels.

I’ll just hold on tight to this podium, she thinks. Easy peasy. Until the school bosses say no, probably it’s bad to appear to have been drinking heavily while speaking to parents. Or maybe it was Go Home, Drunkard. Pshaw. Either way.

And then instead of teacher speeching, she is driven to the Rapid Care, which, SURPRISE! turns out to be rapid, true to its word, only the nurse attendants laugh behind their hands at the weaving and bobbing, and bouncing off of walls like Mario or Luigi in the hands of a novice, and also after a few cartoon Limon cellos. Hoo hoo!!

And, oh, the motion-sickness. Are the walls really green here? she wonders, and then just a little resty of the forehead on the cool, cool greenness.

And then a tiny amused doctor in a little white coat appears, who says “how about a shot for that nausea?” and she hates him a little and also loves him even as she is pulling down her pants and the needle is very, very sharp.

This will make you drowsy, someone says.

But wait, how did I get this?! she calls down the hall, which is rising and falling, rising and falling. Clowns are laughing in the hidden rooms.

“Cilla!” They say. And at first she thinks, Elvis always called her Cilla, but no, it’s cilia, and hers are all bent up wrong somehow from a virus. Never mind.

And then she sleeps. Hours and hours of sleep. There are some dreams of ships on the ocean, a surging ocean, and then the worst is over, except for sometimes the cilia conduct a sneak attack, like when she is discovering the anagram for her name is “Lovingly, Cow Larcenist”, and suddenly the floor is rushing up fast as she is thinking Am I the cow or do I steal from cows?

But it doesn’t matter, because at least from here the floor is still, and she finally finds that earring she’s been missing.

Don’t even get Quasimodo STARTED on her powdered-cheese analogy.

2009-08-24T00:01:00.000-07:00

I’m not really an anxious person.

It’s just that sometimes there are worries. They like to swim to the surface of my brain when I am trying to be busy, like Kraft macaroni in a pot of boiling water. Bloop. Bloop.

Bloop.

I try to push them down with my metaphorical wooden spoon, but anyone knows they just come right back up, and the longer you keep pushing them down, the slimier they get anyway.

My metaphorical noodles of worry, that is.

So, sometimes I just need to fish the little buggers out and line them up on the counter for inspection, and also list them here for you, because what else do you have to do?

My most long-suffering of blog friends know I used to worry sometimes that Carrot Top would somehow weasel his way into the capitol building in Sacramento, but now I don’t even worry about that at all, because CT is much buffer than Arnold these days, and also has a scarier face, so that has to be a good quality for wrestling the budget, and also senators. I think that Carrot Top would like to wrestle senators.

Here’s what I DO worry about, just a little bit, but not in a compulsive or neurotic way, just the normal way of forgetting a little bit to sleep at night while thinking about these things:

1. Why do all of my left shoes suddenly feel loose? What’s up with my feet? The right shoes all fit normally, but I’ve been noticing how I have to grip on super-tight with my left toes, just to keep the shoe attached. Also I have had to adopt a special shoe-retaining walk that involves dragging my left foot (which is bunched up in my shoe due to all the toe-clenching) along the ground while simultaneously sliding my foot forward IN the shoe during the forward thrust. Sometimes this results in accidental shoe launching.

I think that maybe next my left sleeves will get all loose, and that will be proof that I had a stealth-stroke and missed the memo, and now my left side is slowly atrophying.

You have to admit that’s a pretty good worry.

2. Maybe my dog will explode. Not like cartoon dogs, where someone packed all the orifices with sticks of lit dynamite and then the eyes bulge out comically, but more internally, like maybe if I sleep in on Sunday and forget to let him out for oh, say, six extra hours in the morning. And he’s polite, so no mess, but he’s cross-legged by the door, and I’m pretty sure I can see his bladder throbbing though his fur.

Also, for those of you have been sad about my dog’s sprout subsiding, thereby ending the regular updates of Sprout Watch, he now has a mysteriously bulbous right haunch. From behind he looks like he’s got a wallet in his hairy hip pocket.

The vet says an occasional bulbous haunch is nothing to worry about. Let’s see if he still says that when my dog explodes.

3. Can fungus eat your house? I’m pretty sure it can. Especially the kind that erupts from out of the ground in your yard, and is probably pushing up the foundation of your house at this very moment. It’s like an alien army of dinner rolls is invading from below. Dinner rolls with tentacles that reach deep into the ground, probably almost to the mother ship at the core of the earth.

Here is one. There are lots of them. This is not a rock. It is in my yard right now.

I worry they are sentient fungi, and if we talk too loud they will hear us and try to come inside. Or the dog will pop one with his foot and carry powdery spores back inside the house, thereby killing all of us slowly and painfully.

Maybe that’s what’s been happening. Maybe the powdery spore poisoning causes bulbous haunches and shrunken left appendages. Or, or! Maybe the dog’s haunch only LOOKS bulbous because his left side is atrophying too…

This is bad.

This has not been at all comforting. I don’t know why you told me it would be.

I’m pretty sure you said that.

Next time I’m leaving the damn noodles in the pot.

Everything should come with a holster. Or a yeti. Or a yeti holster.

2009-08-19T00:18:00.001-07:00

I’m not proud of it, but for a few perilous minutes this week I was Plunged Into Depression as a result of not winning the metaphorical ashes of Steamy’s cat. I really wanted those pretend ashes.

You know how that is. One minute you’re redesigning your entire living room around a cat urn and imagining the admiration of your neighbors when you throw your first dinner party of the season (for which the neighbors with the indoor ducks would finally have to emerge from their house) and the next that dream is dead and you’re shopping for giant white shoes.

Which brings me to my first instructional moment for today.

1. How to kill your social status dead in the sixth grade:

For PE, choose pristine white shoes straight out of the ‘80’s. Be sure they are extra blocky. (Picture what Herman Munster would wear if he were to take up nursing, and yet still want to do a little cross-training immediately after his shift, so with a little swoosh and net detail, also in blinding white. That’s exactly the look you want.)

Be sure to stubbornly insist on these shoes, despite valid warnings from an experienced older sister, and the attempted redirection of your parents. Pretend, if it amuses you, to consider other, less horrific shoes for an hour or two, sometimes wearing a different style shoe on each foot and then climbing the fake shoe-store rock and leaping off the other side. Announce that the left shoe might feel different than the right, and switch. Repeat with two new pairs of shoes, ad infinitum, or until a parent’s head explodes.

Then announce you are going to get the Munster shoes.

2. How to Draw Unnecessary Attention to Yourself in Target:

Discover that your daughter, who has a math phobia, has neglected to tell you she must have the world’s most powerful calculator for Algebra II, the night before she needs it.

Build up some steam in the car on the way over so you can command the dazed stock boy in the red shirt to “show me where the ridiculously-expensive calculators are”. He will know exactly what you are talking about, and lead you silently to Aisle 13, moving quickly in a defensive, serpentine pattern ahead of you.

All the calculators will be gone, except for the toy calculators, and the one that will calculate the trajectory of the space shuttle, using only three buttons and a toggle switch.

It costs a hundred and fifty bucks, and comes with a decorative faceplate. For an additional 9.99, a holster is also available.

Ask your daughter if maybe it would be okay if you just bought the label maker you passed on the way. It’s a lot cheaper, and has a bunch of buttons to push, so it would look good, like you were busy. As long as you didn’t hit the “equals” button, because then a label would shoot out and then the jig is up. Speculate too loudly about whether the label maker would fit in the holster.

Agree finally to purchase the calculator after indignantly polling twenty people in the store and discovering that purchasing the ridiculously-expensive calculator is an unavoidable rite of passage.

Ask checker if the calculator comes with a padded case. To protect your investment.

In the car, mull over possibilities. A shag carpet sleeve? Bubble-wrap jacket? Have an “Aha!” moment in which you realize old stuffed animals would make a perfect graphing calculator housing if the belly were hollowed out. Like a cuddly friend with wicked math skills.

Come home and throw together a possible prototype for your new line of lovable holsters:

Give up on your dream when your husband points out that a calculator embedded in the belly of just about any animal is going to have unavoidable phallic implications.

Try to avoid the eager, aroused look in the yeti’s eye.

3. A Snack Is Nice After Shopping:

Have one. You’ve earned it.

Unless your snack comes with its own shovel attached. A good rule of thumb is always draw the line at shovels.

Corn Dogs in Hell

2009-08-13T22:51:00.001-07:00

If I were a middle school principal, I would put up whimsical banners for Back to School Night that read “Corn Dogs in Hell- Friday, the 7th” . Because it’s common knowledge that middle school is a trough point in life, and the best thing about it is you only have to be that age once, so why not just come right out with it? And if the Hot Dog on a Stick truck is going to be parked out on the basketball court so you can simultaneously eat dinner and purchase PE clothes, even better.

I’ve been re-visiting my junior high days this week, because my son started sixth grade. Last Friday we showed up dutifully at Back to School Night with the rest of the families, and milled around waiting for the schedules to be posted with the anticipation of Broadway hopefuls waiting for the cast list to go up. We made small talk to pass the time.

“If I get straight A’s this semester, can I get a kitten?” my daughter lobbies.

“If I get straight A’s this semester, can I get a parrot?” my son asks.

Then a woman with a beard appears next to me. It turns out I used to know this woman, back before she had a beard. I am surprised to see her and her husband and kids here, because they have long been staunch homeschoolers. Separatists, armed with worksheets.

“It’s nice to see you,” I say politely, averting my eyes tactfully from the outgrown razor stubble adorning the underside of her chin.

She does some surreptitious stroking of the aforementioned beard growth. It is blond, yet robust. I ask about her daughter, who is enrolling here as an incoming seventh grader. She talks briefly about needing to go back to work, and how homeschooling has become unworkable.

“I feel like I’m sending her into the pit of Hell!” she blurts suddenly.

I laugh. Uh, yeah, it’s middle school, I think. I settle in for some bonding over memories of adolescent acne and drama-laden school dances.

Only, she’s not laughing. She is serious. Really serious. Her eyes have a bleak, hopeless quality about them, and her tone is flat.

I look around me at Pit O’ Hell Intermediate. The school is clean, safe, and virtually new. It sits on a piece of prime real estate (multi-million dollar homes surround it) at the top of a hill, giving the school panoramic views of the entire valley. The teachers are caring and energetic, and the test scores are some of the best in the state. If I could live in this school, I would.

Those waiting with us in front of the office are polite and smiling, and the kids, while a little over-excited, are generally well-behaved.

Only one kid is noticeably loud and disruptive. One imp cavorting on the lawn.

She is the bearded lady’s daughter.

“It’s a great school,” I say. “We’ve already had a kid go through here, and she had a good experience.” I mean to comfort her, allay her fears a little.

The bearded lady looks at me disbelievingly. Her eyes narrow in suspicion, and suddenly I feel irrationally guilty. Of course I would defend the pit of hell. I am, after all, one of the damned, a public school teacher.

“I’ve already read through the science textbook and taken note of the errors,” she said. “I’ll be speaking to the principal.” She turns from me dismissively. I wish I had a pitchfork. Just a little one.

I know better than to try and change her mind. I know it is the accepted wisdom in this country, particularly in some conservative Christian communities, that public schools cannot be anything other than Satan’s playground. I also know that for most American schools the political spin is not true, but I can’t help but take the prejudice personally.

Fortunately, there are corn dogs, (and for the husband, obscenely large bags of kettle corn) eaten under a California sunset to take the edge off, and the concept of parrot-ownership to mull over.

Can you teach a parrot to say “Welcome to Hell”? Would it be wrong of me to send the bearded lady a little Back to School gift?

PS. For those of you who questioned the whole strange concept of a classroom with a patio, whether or not it comes with palm trees, I submit the following picture, taken with my cell phone from inside the room:

(Satan not pictured.)

Check Surroundings For Safety

2009-08-08T00:55:00.001-07:00

I know you think I’m probably dead, because anytime someone inexplicably disappears that’s the logical, go-to explanation. I’ve been gone from Blogtopia since last Wednesday, which might be the longest time ever for me, and I’m pretty sure some of you have already ~~forgotten I exist~~ been searching the local hospitals and obituaries.

The Taiwanese porn link that was waiting for me here when I got back was a nice “welcome back”, I have to say. I’m not clicking the link, because I don’t want unsightly lesions, or burning of the retinas, or whatever, but it’s good to know I’m making new, international friends and it’s not all grim news in the world of foreign relations.

Anyway. Remember how I was on the Grisworld family vacation, and when I last reported I was being violated by my mother’s poodle?

Well, I’m home now. There was more stuff that happened, mostly involving additional freak injuries. For instance:

1.) My daughter was stung by a yellow jacket on the hand while we were visiting my Squirrel n’ Dumplin’s Grandma. The hand promptly inflated like a huge hand-balloon and stayed that way for the rest of the trip, all burning and swell-y, but providing hours of entertainment for the rest of us. We coated the Gargantu-Hand in baking soda paste, which drew out some yellow stuff and also made it look like a kindergarten paper-mache project, but still the hand didn’t deflate until well after Sacramento.

2.) While riding dirt bikes with his cousin, my son accidentally mistook the house’s partially-buried water line for an awesome bike jump and rode over it at a high rate of speed, thus severing the line and ending all hope of showers, flushing toilets, and pitchers of ice tea for everyone. He also drove straight into a hidden concrete block. The impact caused the handlebar of the bike to slam into his chest, leaving an angry-looking punch mark directly over his heart; this called to mind the story a teacher-friend of mine used to tell about a boy in her classroom who playfully hit another boy in the chest, accidentally stopping his heart and causing him to drop dead right there next to her desk.

We broke out the bag balm and I tried not to squeeze him.

3.) While at the in-law’s 50th wedding anniversary party, my husband hit me in the head with the car. Well, part of the car, specifically the hatchback door, which he held half-way open at the exact same level as my forehead. He claims he had a good reason, but probably this was on purpose. My forehead made contact with the open car door as I was carrying a bunch of helium balloons (none shaped like hands) in such a way that my vision was obscured right up unto the moment of contact with the car. My head made a hollow thunk sound, and a goose egg appeared. It felt like a serious injury, but the goose egg never developed the altitude and girth necessary for maximum sympathy, so I covered it up reluctantly with my bangs and went back to the party. Later, we broke out the bag balm.

We managed to leave town before any comas or amputations occurred, and the drive home was mostly torturously boring. Highlights of the drive home include stopping for gas on “Jibboom St.”,

and being shoved in the bathroom at a truck stop in Coalinga by a Spanish-speaking woman. She was wielding a baby like a shield with one hand and shoving me with the other. It seems she was in a hurry for the soap dispenser, so I totally deserved it for standing in the way of good hygiene.

Finally we were home, and then it was a house full of unpacked suitcases and madness. Also school starts here in two days, which means instead of reading blogs, I’ve been buying school supplies, and writing class syllabi, and thinking unkind thoughts about Governor Schwarzenegger, and buying three fifteen-foot palm trees for the patio outside my classroom. ( Yes, my classroom has a patio. And sliding-glass doors. Yes, it’s a little weird.)

We bought palm trees for the patio because it’s ugly without decorations, and I already killed last year’s plants. We had to lay the palm trees down inside the car and let them hang out the back about eight feet. They brushed the road all the way to the school, and now the car smells like manure. Here is what it looked like through the back-up camera:

I have to go to bed now. I promise to come by your blogs this weekend, and do some atonement commenting, if you’ll still have me.

Next time remind me to tell you about the bearded lady at Back to School Night. There was razor stubble. But that’s not all.

Poodles are Pokers - “Mocha, NO!” she cried.

2009-07-29T02:22:00.001-07:00

We’ve been in the land of hemp products and gun racks for the past three days.

It’s 107 here. Forty degrees hotter than the last place we stayed. This is unfortunate, because an hour before we arrived, the air conditioner died at my in-laws house. It’s been all sweltery and hallucination-inducing, and the mosquitoes have settled in. There’s really nothing like your home town.

On Sunday the in-laws greeted us with enthusiasm as we rolled up travel-weary and dazed in the driveway, and my husband’s brother immediately talked the FBO (Formerly Bearded One) into taking a spin in his Razor (ATV). Shortly thereafter, the Razor ejected some crucial wheel bolt, did some kind of fancy cartoon Speed Racer maneuver, and then tipped over, throwing both occupants forcefully to the ground. After the Limp of Shame back up to the house, my mother-in-law clucked and shook her head, and applied copious amounts of Bag Balm* and blue ace bandages to the bulbous purple appendage that was my husband’s new right ear. Extra lengths of ace bandage were wound dramatically around the circumference of his head, creating a poignant war hero look he has since worn with pride. When he takes the bandage off to reapply the Bag Balm, the ear sticks straight out, shiny and purple. I want to flap it a little bit, but I don’t because I am a supportive wife who does not flap her husband’s injuries. When he’s awake
.
It really hasn’t been the best trip for the FBO, when you think about it. First there was the leg cramps, then the spittle incident, then Officer Melanoma, and now Prizefighter Ear. Wait, I was so tired last time I posted that I forgot to tell you about Officer Melanoma.

See, the FBO has an on-going adversarial relationship with Humboldt County, in Northern California. There has never, in my memory, been an occasion where my husband has been able to drive the entire length of Humboldt County without being issued a speeding ticket. Never ever. Just as that thought occurred to me, about three car lengths past the “Welcome to Humboldt County” sign, just as I was opening my mouth to say, “Hey remember how you get tickets here?” a police car appeared out of thin air going the opposite direction, performed a dramatic U-turn directly behind us, and turned its lights on.

“Damn,” said the FBO.

The policewoman swaggered to my side of the car and peered inside. She looked very much like a whippet that someone had stood upright and clothed, and the leathery quality of her face betrayed hours of productive ticket-writing in the hot California sun.

“Caught ya doin’ 80,” she said triumphantly.

My husband swears they just make up a random number. All I know is I’m pretty sure they could afford to buy Officer Melanoma some sun block judging from the contributions we’ve made to the county.

So anyway, here in Eugene we’ve been making the required visitation rounds. My mother has a new standard poodle (Mocha) at her house, which brings the total to two standard poodles, one mother, and a bunny. The poodles are, shall we say, large. Large and exuberant. I was greeted at the door by Mocha with a hearty french kiss that I frankly didn’t see coming.

“Mocha, NO!” my mother called from inside. Mocha responded with an excited aerial twist, legs flying in four different directions. I saw the tongue coming at me again, like a slow-motion replay, and sure enough, it found its way into my mouth. There was a quick swipe in and then out, and then a tongue-drag across the cheek before Mocha landed on the floor.

“He’s still really a puppy,” she said.

Mocha took a moment to fall out flat on the kitchen floor with a dramatic THWOMP. Pant, pant. So hot. Then, foolishly, I made eye contact, clearly an invitation for greater intimacy, and Mocha was up, flying furry pantlegs in all directions, and then suddenly, a molestation occurred.

“Mocha, NO,” my mother cried. Mocha looked up briefly, and resumed jabbing industriously between my buttocks with his long sharp nose. “Stop it!” Mocha did a circle around the room, and as soon as my guard was down, renewed his rear attack. I did a few pelvic thrust dance steps in an effort to get away, and then Mocha was bored and THWOMPed back down on the floor. I found a place up against the wall to stand, and kept a wary eye on the dog.

“Poodles are pokers,” she said with a shrug. “Everyone says that.”

I didn’t know everyone said that, clearly, but that’s why it’s good to be here, because I learn so much whenever I come back.

For instance, in the last two days I have learned that if you are a pasty woman the size and shape of a sumo wrestler and you are trying to beat the heat, you should put your hair in a tiny pony tail on top of your head, set up a big plastic pool in your yard in front of your trailer, and hunker down in the water with your cigarette. For fun, scowl at cars as they go by.

Or, if you are unfortunate enough to resemble a circus clown, complete with red fright wig and natural mouth grimace, you can beat the heat and throw people off your clown trail by removing all clothes except for a miniature pair of dolphin shorts, and riding around town on your bicycle.

In Eugene, if you find you need to go to the mall, be sure your ensemble is appropriate. You really need something breezy and functional, and something that also tells fellow shoppers a little bit about your interests.
For example, in Eugene, we have a lot of rivers. Probably you should wear a fishing hat to the mall to connect with your river heritage. Make sure you have a lot of lures dangling from all sides. Facial hair, the bushier the better, is a must. Use some gel to twist a point in the end of your beard.

Shoes should be comfortable. Probably Crocs. Dress socks are optional. Clothing this summer should be loose, allowing for ease of movement, and air flow. A light cotton robe, like a hospital gown, is an excellent choice. Be sure to cinch that belt down securely!

Finish your shopping ensemble with a murse (man purse) and a rolling backpack, for those heavy purchases.
Because I knew those of you who are not here might have trouble picturing the correct mall outfit, here is a picture of a man I chased with my camera at the mall today, a man who knows how to dress for successful Eugene shopping:

His voluminous gown is actually a cheerful lavender, not blue.

I’m looking forward to passing on more of my handy tips, just as soon as I can. Tomorrow I’m maybe picking cucumbers for my 90 year old grandmother, and if I don’t pass out and die in her garden, I’ll be on the job, because this is a full-service blog here. I know you count on me.

Remember, poodles are pokers.

*Bag Balm is used to soothe the cracked udders of milk cows, but is sold in drug stores for use by people even though doctors will act all shocked if you admit you’ve used it. It’s greasy and a little disgusting, but has magical healing properties.

Welcome to the Hotel California.( In Which the Mood Darkens.)

2009-07-26T01:44:00.001-07:00

You know how when you get an opportunity to spend time in enclosed spaces with your family, (and we’re talking DAY AFTER DAY AFTER DAY here) it just brings you closer, and means in your golden years your children will look back fondly on these times of bonding and feel motivated to bring you denture-friendly takeout and terry cloth slippers when you’re in the Home, even if it isn’t a holiday?

Well that’s nice for you, and also shut up, because I’m having a Family Vacation here, and it isn’t pretty. Not pretty at all.

I’m typing this from our third hotel room since we left town on Wednesday. It is close to midnight. The room smells like all the Carpet Fresh available in the world was used to mask possible dead body residue, or maybe someone’s pet alligator, and I can’t stop sneezing. I have had to tell my son four times now not to rub his head on the floor, which, of course, makes him want to do it even more. The lamp shades are wrapped in cellophane, probably to keep mold off them from the briny ocean wind that is blowing through. We are in Crescent City, California. The ocean is, allegedly, right outside our window, but it is so foggy right now ( 54 degrees in July) that I will have to take that on faith.

Maybe I should backtrack just a little. Remember how we were on our way to Solvang? Pretend you remember. It was full of Scandinavia-ness, as promised, and also a lot of elderly white men with alarmingly burned foreheads. I looked around for the perverts that allegedly lurk behind the Belgian lace displays, but there must have been a pervert convention out of town because everyone was behaving okay. Except my pants. I developed recalcitrant pants on the streets of Solvang, which means they had grown very large apparently from the altitude, and were intent on falling around my ankles. I wasn’t really in the mood to frighten Danish people, so it became an afternoon of belt hunting, with a brief stop to photograph the doggie drinking fountain, and a windmill:

Also they have ostriches there, placed strategically by the side of the road to drive my dog to the brink of insanity. His hysterical barking had no impact on them whatsoever, and their insolence was almost more than he could bear.

Back to Pismo Beach. Dinner at Giuseppe’s. Or Gipetto’s. One of those. We had heartburn on a roll. My son(11) disappeared from the table, looking for the restroom. When he didn’t return, I worried the pervert convention was at the beach, and sent my husband in to find him. My son was discovered in the kitchen, hanging with the kitchen staff. Apparently he had gone to explain to them that the meatballs were too spicy. He was drinking a soothing glass of free milk and telling embarrassing family anecdotes when my husband showed up.

That night I slept a total of an hour and a half. Father and son snoring of the Hallelujah Chorus (with actual harmony) kept me awake and cursing the swayback bed.

Next day, hours on the road. The 101 took us through Soledad, which means ‘Loneliness’ because it is in the middle of nowhere, and also it has a signature onion and manure smell, not to mention a lot of inmates down the road. The FBO had to stop at Radio Shack. Twice.

Then some unscheduled loops through the unsavory sections of Palo Alto/Menlo Park, looking for a gas station that was always just ahead, but turned out to be a mirage. This is where the serious elbowing and eye-poking began in the back seat. Also some threatening, and whining. And show-tune singing.

Last night: San Francisco. Family mood by the time the FBO had taken fourteen thrilling wrong turns before turning on the GPS in the car and actually locating our hotel? Surly.

My husband was the least surly, at least until we attempted to walk three blocks to an outdoor restaurant square for dinner (dogs aren’t allowed inside. We’d leave him at home, but he has issues. ) It was oddly cold for July, more like March, with a good wind picking up around the corners of buildings. At one point I thought I actually felt a spray of rain, but it was only a big, glistening glob of saliva from a man on a passing MUNI bus. The glob of saliva passed right by my face and landed on the FBO’s back. Then we were all equally foul-tempered, and after stomping around and bickering for awhile, we gave up and went back to the hotel room.

The hotel room was nice, but everything was an extra charge, and after the humorless bellhop explained that there were sensors on all the food in the display basket and you shouldn’t pick stuff up or you’d be charged even if you didn’t eat anything, my son felt compelled to poke each item repeatedly, inducing an actual nightmare in which I received a minibar charge from the bellhop (now wearing a hat made of paper birds, don’t ask, I don’t know) of three thousand dollars. Another night of fitful sleep.

Today: Eight hours of driving. Northern Californians love to whittle things out of whole redwood logs, like a little house, or Bigfoot, or totem poles. Also they love cowgirl mud wrestling. And dancing topless in a field to summon galactic energy. They have Elk Warning Radio just outside of Fortuna (“Elk can run up to 35 miles an hour. Male elk will attack people on foot. Be alert for herds of elk who may be crossing the highway”) We stopped for a second to visit Paul Bunyon and his Big Blue Ox, Babe. Babe’s head fell off a year or so ago, but you’ll be glad to know it’s been reattached. She looked good.

And now we are here. The wall lamp in the room turned on okay, but once it was on, it wouldn’t click off and it can't be unplugged. Someone did some swearing, but it wasn't me. We may be spending the night with all the lights on. The dog has had Chinese food for dinner. This was a miscalculation on our part, I'm pretty sure.

Night number three of no sleep.

Tomorrow we arrive at the in-laws.

Back off, Seahorse. The Adventure Begins.

2009-07-23T12:59:00.001-07:00

In the tradition of the Griswolds and the Clampitts, the Clan of Vic has taken to the open road.

You may have noticed my absence here the past few days. Or not. It’s been hard to find time to get online, but I’m going to try and sneak in some blog reading and posting over the next week or so while we’re gone, I promise. I miss my blog buddies (that’s you.)

So, remember how earlier I was whining about being trapped in my house with no prospects of a vacation? Poor poor Vic. Then my in-laws called and reminded my husband that it’s their fiftieth wedding anniversary in a week. They live a thousand miles away. Flying was not an option, for reasons not interesting enough to talk about here. School starts for us here in a little over two weeks. There was discussion. Some bargaining and begging. Some selfless, steely resolve on my part (I ‘m like a saint.) Last minute packing and gassing, etc. The dog was thrown in the back along with five suitcases, some beach hats, and my netbook, and we were ready!

Well, not quite. First my husband felt the need to clean out the garage, an hour before we needed to leave, so he could park the other car in there. Never mind that we have been unable to park any car in the garage for the past ten years. (By the way, we have ninja housesitters staying at my house, and also the silent Chinese neighbors are watching the place, so don’t get any ideas about coming over and stealing my betta fish while we’re gone. I mean it. Behave.)

The FBO worked for two hours in the 120 degree garage. He worked up a powerful sweat. Developed a bit of a hydration issue. One we didn’t know about until we were about an hour and a half up the 101 freeway, in an area where you can’t pull over. Have I mentioned that the FBO is prone to leg cramps? Massive, incapacitating leg cramps? Brought on by intense physical labor and mineral imbalance issues? We remembered this, on the freeway, when he suddenly shrieked in the driver’s seat, accelerated abruptly, and went full-body rigid. It was pretty exciting.

So then after a swerve to the shoulder of the freeway, I drove the next few hours, until we got to PIsmo Beach, our first stop. Here’s proof:

(beach below our hotel room)

This morning we had complimentary breakfast consisting of self-serve Belgian waffles (the batter comes out of a vending machine!) and Choco Balls cereal. It’s too cold on the beach this morning, so we’re fulfilling a childhood dream of the FBO’s and visiting Solvang. Solvang, if you don’t know, is a town in California that specializes in all kinds of Scandinavian doodads and the buildings are all kitschy, apparently. I’ve never been. To get to Solvang, so far we have driven through beautiful downtown Guadalupe, population one extended family (home of Chaco’s BBQ Shack), and through miles and miles of dill fields. My daughter has shared with us the very real possibility that we are ruining her life. We are making memories, people!

We were behind this large combine/tractory- thing outside Guadalupe for twenty minutes:

Finally, and without warning, the FBO sped up to around, oh, 700 miles an hour, and then, jowls flapping in the wind, we hurtled around the tractor and down a steep hill.

“I just barfed a little bit in my mouth,” remarked my son from the backseat.

“What did that sign say?” asked the FBO. “We went by it too fast. I think we were supposed to turn off back there where I passed that tractor.”

“It said, ‘Back Off, Seahorse’”, I replied. I know it doesn’t make any sense. I don’t know why I said it. But it may be that I am feeling just a tiny bit passive aggressive.

Next stop, Solvang. I’ll keep you posted.

The Bubble Lid Makes It Funner. Ditto the Optional Replacement Tongue.

2009-07-17T00:55:00.001-07:00

A Starbuck’s barista/wise man told me this as he handed me my coffee today. “We’re out of regular lids,” he said. “But that’s okay!! The bubble lid makes it funner! Right?”

I wasn’t sure at first. It seemed too much to ask from a lid. But then his hedgehog hairdo made me think that this was an individual with great discernment. Could the bubble lid really heighten my enjoyment of my caffeinated beverage?

Oh yes it could, and it did. It did make it funner! That lid was so bulbous and sort of sci-fi, like if I looked in through the top I would see new worlds. Crazy kaleidoscope coffee. Lilliputian sea adventurers in the hot brown surf. Hey little Captain Nemo in there! Watch out for that foam!

I probably spent hours squinting through the hole in the top of the dome. I can’t remember a better time with coffee, frankly.

It’s revelations like this that help me see the bigger picture. To understand the world more completely. Bubble lids are so profound, when you think about it.

So are sex dolls. I never really thought about sex dolls until I watched a movie called Lars and the Real Girl last night. It was a good movie about a guy who falls in love with a sex doll he orders off the internet and then the whole town decides to pretend she’s real too, and they make friends with the sex doll named Bianca but nobody ever has sex with it, and then Bianca dies (oops! spoiler!) and everyone is so sad. And relieved.

But she doesn’t die until way after the sister-in-law loans her some sweat pants, which is good because Bianca came out of the crate wearing some pretty slutty clothes, if you ask me. Also I think fishnet tops are illegal in most Canadian provinces during the winter months. Sex dolls don’t fare well in jail, probably, so that sister-in-law really did Bianca a solid.

Just like with the bubble lids, I was a doubter. Who would think a life-size silicone doll was real and love it? How can you love something that is always gazing off vacantly at the horizon? Okay, the FBO does that sometimes, but that’s not my point.

The point is, the company that made Bianca in the movie is real. I know because I am a quester of knowledge. It’s called “Realdoll” and don’t go there from work or with your kid standing behind your chair, because already on the first page are nipples. I learned a lot about these dolls. For instance, they support 400 pounds. Good to know. They enjoy hot baths and have a convenient bolt at the back of the neck for hanging. Hmmm. Also they come with an optional replacement tongue for a small additional fee. That’s good value.

What interested me the most, once I got over some initial sadness and nausea, were the testimonials. Here are a few excerpts for you from the site:

Jenny's presence here has had a dramatically positive effect on me psychologically and emotionally. A far more positive effect than I had ever expected. During this time, I have done many things that I feel I would never have done if I didn’t have Jenny. - John A.

She’s just a doll, but as I never had a real close relationship, she’s a bit more, some level of its own somewhere in between a doll and a real girl. .This one will even allow me to kiss and hug her, to even have sex with her. - Anonymous in Germany

Having a RealDoll has opened up wonderful new experiences for me and has given me a wonderful peace of mind I could only dream of!!! -CJD

(quotes from www.realdoll.com/testimonials)

These men are in love with their doll-friends! Also the sex dolls are clearly changing their lives for the better.

I feel so guilty now for underestimating plastic. I resolve from here on to trust in the ability of molded plastic to make my life funner.

But probably I’ll just stick to the bubble lids, and maybe a bounce house or something.

Not that I’m judging if you’re heading over to Realdoll to make a new friend. Tell Bianca I said ‘hey’.

I Have Mary Jane Armpits and You Don’t.

2009-07-14T00:49:00.001-07:00

I don’t mean to. I guess it’s a gift, like synesthesia, or like scrambling every watch I’ve ever worn with my natural animal magnetism.

I blame Steamy, because she wrote a post about how great her new deodorant smelled, and I got all jealous, because my armpits smelled pretty average. You know, not smelly, but not delicious either, more like a laminated vanilla bean. This began to feel like settling somehow, like somewhere out there I might find a deodorant that would fulfill and complete me.

At Target I couldn’t remember exactly which deodorant it was she bought, so I picked the one that said “Scent Expressions” in shiny gold foil. That was wrong. Especially beguiling was one called “Coco Butter Kiss”. I should have been tipped off by the less-preferred spelling of “cocoa”, because it’s like when you go to a fast food place and it says “McDorald’s”, which means a Vietnamese family has bought the building and didn’t spring for a brand-new sign, just a new letter, and now they’re serving peanut stir fry instead of Big Macs. “Coco Butter Kiss” doesn’t smell like cocoa. Or cocoa butter. Or butter. It mostly smells like old lady perfume while in the container.

Once combined with my unique body chemistry, however, “Coco Butter Kiss” smells like pot.

Hoobastank. Doobie. Smokage. I have hippie lettuce underarms is what I’m trying to say.

You need to know at this point that my personal experience with pot is nonexistent. I never smoked pot. Not once. I’m like a ruler I’m so straight. I’m like the road to Albuquerque. (It’s really straight. Just trust me on this.) So it’s not a residual cellular thing, unless it came from sitting too close to the percussion section at football games.

But I know about the smell of pot because when I was ten I used to babysit for the hippies next door. They had rhyming names and long frizzy hair and a cup of penis-shaped pens in a jar on the kitchen counter. Ms. Hippie had been a Playboy bunny cocktail waitress in a former life, and still had her ruffled apron and a big stack of Playboy magazines, which her small daughters liked to look at instead of picture books. (One of them was born in the back bedroom. She was handed out the window to me like a wet package only a few hours after her birth, so that I could hold her while standing in the backyard next to their compost heap.) They didn’t believe in deodorant; they rubbed rock crystals meditatively under their arms. They also used a lot of pot. A lot. Of pot.

So anyway, lately I’ve been thinking the Chinese person who lives next door and smokes on the front stoop every night (we still argue about whether It is a girl or a boy; so far we can agree that the person is short and square and inscrutable) must be smoking a lot of weed.

It seemed like every night for the last couple of weeks I’d smell it blowing in the open back window. But then I started noticing it other places as well. Like at the grocery store. And around the dog. And in the car. Pretty much anywhere I was. Everyone seemed to be smoking a lot of weed.

Weird.

Finally, today, as I was reaching for the salt shaker, I had a revelation. Wafting out of my armpit was the distinct odor of chronic. A quick double-check sniff confirmed. What have other people been thinking about me? Probably they’re all calling me “Ganja Vic” behind my back.

So I either have to go buy some new deodorant tomorrow, or embrace a completely different lifestyle. I have to go to the grocery store again anyway; we’re out of food already.

Weird.

You Had Me At "Rectal Bleeding"

2009-07-09T02:04:00.000-07:00

Or, Theater of the Absurd, In One Act.
Or, A Visit to the Dermatologist

Me: "Are there any side effects to this medication? Because I think I've heard there are side effects."

Doctor: "Side effects? No-ooooooo...heh heh. " Brushes meaty jowls expressively with hands. "Maybe just a little dryness, nothing to worry about!"

Doctor scuttles from room like a Kafkaesque roach man in white jacket.

Nurse looks apologetically at me, and daughter, who is actual patient in question. One eye looks apologetic. Lazy eye is more uninterested, I feel.

"Let me just get The Book," she says, and disappears also. Returns with John Deere catalog. Only not John Deere catalog. It is the Book of Dire Warnings.

Nurse: "Now. You'll need blood work every 30 days, two additional prescriptions, registration in a data base complete with social security number, and to take and pass a test. Written. Every 30 days. Also, the blood work must be in an exact window of time, or you will have to begin the entire procedure over for that month. We will need to be able to reach you at any time. Okay so far???"

Me: "Ah. Wel-"

Nurse: " Now. Side effects include: (reads from catalog) Headache, dizziness, stroke, seizures, bowel pain, diarrhea, rectal bleeding, weak bones, stoppage of long-bone growth, hearing loss, vision loss, high cholesterol, joint inflammation, decreased red and white blood cells, diabetes, and serious allergic reactions resulting in severe face and tongue swelling that can stop breathing.... Also, a little dryness and skin irritation. How are we doing?"

Daughter: "Bleeding?"

Nurse: "Many of these can be permanent if not caught early. Also, there are withdrawal symptoms. Mostly occasional rage, and depression. Also suicide." Nurse looks up, closes book with air of achievement. Checklist reading and patient counseling, done and done.

Me: "Wait! You were in the room when I asked the doctor if there are any side effects. He didn't mention any of those. Was he lying to us?"

Nurse: Shifts slightly in rolly chair and taps front left tooth with ballpoint pen. "Maybeeee......I should get the doctor back?" Rapid, rapid blinking.

Me: "Is he going to read to us from the book?" There is a sarcastic tone.

Doctor returns.

Me: Sarcastic tone is now full-blown agitation, in manner of Woody Allen. "I asked you if there were side effects, remember? I did! You said 'a little dryness'. But now we hear there are a whole list of serious side effects. That's not 'a little dryness'! Why didn't you tell us about those? How common are they? I need some idea. Like.....1 in a million? 1 in 10,000? 1 in 100? "

Doctor assumes thoughtful back-of-book-jacket author pose. Crosses feet. I see he has little pointy shoes. Meaty jowls and tiny feet.

Doctor: "Oh, well, uh, not very common, I imagine..... Hard to say.... Heh. But, you know, for her (gestures vaguely in direction of daughter) it could be a 100% chance. Who knows? I certainly couldn't say."

Doctor chuckles at personal wittiness. Leaves room.

Silence.

Nurse: Clears throat. "Um. " Blink. Blink. "My son took this drug. He couldn't stand it. He had...." Leans forward intently, voice dropped to dramatic whisper, "full body chapping. Even the bottoms of his feet. " Raises pen hand in air and pumps twice, as in Can I get a witness up in here?? "Then he had trouble blinking. His eyeballs were all dried out."

Pause. More silence.

"Don't tell anyone I told you this, okay?" Lazy eye, in particular, looks worried. Nurse places John Deere catalog on chair.

And then we are alone. We stand. We race-walk from building.

Daughter, slightly breathless: " So, what's rectal bleeding again?"

Me: "I'll tell you in the car."

Heidi, Forrest, and the Independence Fairy

2009-07-06T01:44:00.001-07:00

It’s after midnight here, and instead of sleeping, I’m up simultaneously contemplating a blog post, and being fitted for a milkmaid’s yoke*.

I can safely report to you, dear readers, that it is almost impossible to type while someone is pushing a pine 2 x 4 down on the tender vertebrae at the back of your neck, and saying things like “Pretend you’re carrying pails of milk. How does that feel?”

Well, it’s a little hurty, actually.

Just prior to the yoke fitting, the Formerly Bearded One was industriously (and loudly) creating mounds of sawdust with the saw in the garage and also alienating the few neighbors that still speak to us after all the after-dark lawn mowing that’s been going on around here.

I can tell it’s going to be a long night here on the cul-de-sac. Just now he came in and asked me if “maybe a little naughehyde” would help pad the part where the neck goes. Like we have a bunch of spare naughehyde lying around the house. Like I know what naughehyde is.

Anyway. To answer the burning question in your mind, we had a good Fourth of July again this year. Hopefully you did too, if you live somewhere where you even celebrate American independence.

We have wonderful old (as in long-standing, not elderly) friends that invite us down to their house in Huntington Beach almost every year for the fireworks. I know this has to be against their better judgment, because my family has a talent for creating unexpected complications at holiday gatherings.

For instance, last year we walked to the beach from our friend’s house. It’s about a mile, which is a nice walk, except for the gauntlet of drunk partiers peeing al fresco alongside buildings and calling out to you to come and look. After we watched the fireworks over the Pacific Ocean, we headed back with the rest of the crowd. On the way up the street a group of hooting guys in a car hurled a water balloon out the window and hit the FBO squarely “in the nuts”, as he reported later. Without warning, the FBO pivoted 180 degrees on the sidewalk, leaned forward on the balls of his feet, and sprinted off into the night. We lost sight of him after he ran out into traffic and turned the corner behind the car in question.

So there the rest of us stood, in the dark, on the sidewalk, waiting for him to come back. Which he didn’t. Come back.

After some awkward and self-conscious chit-chat, we finally gave up and walked the rest of the way to their house. Almost an hour later he appeared at the door, out of breath and still wet. “What happened?? Where have you been?” we asked.

“Oh, nothing. I just wanted to see where they went.”

This is all the explanation he has ever volunteered. I still picture him running up Pacific Coast Highway like Forrest Gump.

This year my fourteen year old daughter and our friend’s son decided to walk to Starbuck’s to escape the adults. Unfortunately they decided to jump the community’s security fence instead of going around to an unlocked gate. Then there was a panicky cell phone call summoning help to the fence.

This is the sight that greeted curious onlookers, and rescuing fathers :

(Artist’s rendering. Shoes have been subtly added.)

Somehow, on the way over the fence, my daughter got the leg of her shorts caught on one of the spikes at the top of the seven foot fence. Unable to lift herself off the spike, and unable to jump down, she was forced to dangle decoratively from the fence**. A few people approached, apparently with the intent of exiting through the gate, but as my daughter was, at the time, hanging from the gate, they rode their beach cruisers the other way. Cars driving by slowed as they passed, faces pressed to car windows. It was like seeing a Fourth of July fairy, I imagine, just hovering in midair. I wish that sparklers were still legal.

Fortunately she was uninjured, and once she was removed from the fence they continued on their teenager way.

There have been other holiday incidents, but I don’t have time to tell you any more right now. I’m being called to the garage for more yoke testing. Pray that he doesn’t want to fill the pails with actual milk, because then I’m probably going to the store.

* The milkmaid’s yoke is a costume element he volunteered to make for the theater production (Oliver!) here in town. I am just a milkmaid dress dummy. At least that’s what he claims and I need to believe him. The alternative is too frightening.

** You may have noticed that I don’t mention my daughter much in these posts. That is because she is fourteen. And a girl. You will be happy to know she has graciously given me permission to share this story. Also, I am buying her things, I think.

At Least I Don't Have an Unexpected Sicilian Baby. That Would Be Hard To Explain.

2009-06-30T23:03:00.000-07:00

Image via Wikipedia

So, the last two days I've approached this blog like I would the high dive at the local pool. I'm all suited up, I've given myself the "you can do it!" pep talk, but here I am still at the bottom of the metal steps, looking up. It's a long way up there.

It just takes a little faith, right?, some resolve, and I could climb up, stand on the springy diving board, knees wobbling. Then I could peer timidly over the edge, see all the people at the bottom waiting impatiently, some quietly snickering. Some of the boys would have already figured out that once I cannonball off this thing, I'm going to lose my bikini top in the twelve-foot pool, and I'll be forced to kick kick kick down, holding my panicked breath to retrieve it from it's watery resting place at the bottom. And once I get it I still won't be able to put it back on in the water without bobbing up on the surface. I think that maybe another time would be better, maybe tomorrow, and I creep back to the stairs, and inch my way down to safety.

I just haven't been able to do it.

I have nothing to say, because my life is cage-like at the moment. The kids are in a play this summer (Oliver!), and the rehearsal schedule for them is crazy. This means we don't go anywhere because there's always another rehearsal coming in a couple of hours. The dog and I have spent a lot of time groaning and getting fatter just lying around, waiting for it not to be 110 degrees outside so we can go to the grocery store. And then it's, hurry up!!! we have three minutes to get there!! and then sometimes I have to sit at the theater and wonder in my head how I'm going to convince my son to wear blush and eye-liner on stage, and my mind goes somewhere else where there are no words, only resignation, and the vague desire for donuts.

This last weekend I actually ordered a dumpster from the city garbage guys, and spent two days finding things to put in it, and then hiding what I put in from the rest of the family, especially the Formerly Bearded One, who has been known to retrieve junk from the trash and relocate it back in the garage for some secret high-priest garbage ceremony. Sometimes I have to throw things out in the middle of the night, or enlist the help of the neighbor's garbage bin to prevent trash from reappearing magically. " I can't believe you're throwing that out!" someone will cry. "It's a perfectly good left snow shoe/brown head of lettuce/lint ball/broken bike basket/insert other options here!"

So that's been the highlight of my summer so far.

I have vacation envy. Everyone else (I'm looking at you Carolyn..Online!!) is traveling willy-nilly, seeing colorful people, and sandy beaches, and the open road. They're Making Memories That Will Last a Lifetime.

I want Memories That Will Last a Lifetime too.

One interesting point: I have this new thing attached to Firefox called Zemanta that helpfully supplies suggested images and tag for blog entries. I've never used it, but here are a couple of images Zemanta thinks would go well with my current subject matter:

Image by rsgranne vi

Image via Wikipedia

Image by Getty Images via Dayl

Clearly I have done an excellent job expressing myself.

I was going to write a post just like Steamy's, because I'm all hero-worshipy over here, and I think I need more controversial content in my blog so people will love me.

I'm becoming the Aunt Bea of Blogging is what I mean. That can't be good.

So I tried really hard to get my dog to let me lift his tail so I could take pictures of his anus, just like she did. I even crooned him a little lullaby and stroked his weary dog brow to make him sleepy, but none of it worked. Terriers are relentlessly high-alert, even in their sleep.

And then I thought about taking a picture of poop, either mine, or someone else's (what about a gas station rest room?! Eww..) but I'm just not advanced enough in the art of shockblogging yet. I think I may need some lessons.

Instead, we went for a walk. Along the way I saw this and filmed it for you all. It is not the same as Steamy's cell phone footage (hers is frighteningly glisten-y and not for the faint of heart) but it's reminiscent of dog butt, I think.

Baby steps.

We are Family, I Got All My Sisters With Me. (Okay, just one sister, but that’s good too.)

2009-06-29T02:25:00.001-07:00

We shared a room until I was in junior high. She was (is) almost three years younger, and from the time she was born I saw her as mine to protect, and sometimes to torment.

(I’m on the left, in the too-short dress and severe bangs. Also, yellow knee socks- the forerunner of my Fanta knee socks. It’s like fate. On the right is my sister, Shannon. She was the cute one in the family. But I could whistle.)

I used to keep her up at night, on purpose, when I couldn’t sleep. If I wasn’t sleeping, neither of us was sleeping. Mostly I would just ask her stupid repetitive questions like “What’s your favorite day of the week?”, or “How many licks does it take to get to the center of the Tootsie Pop?”, questions she would struggle to answer from a dazed stupor. Often the answers were unintentionally funny (a bonus!), but I couldn’t laugh too loud because our dad would yell “Go to sleep in there!”

Sometimes if I was mad at her I would tell her she was adopted and that the police had dropped her off on our doorstep. “Mom and Dad just felt sorry for you,” I would say. “The po-lice! are your parents.”

I blame Bill Cosby for this bit of sibling cruelty, because we had some of his comedy records lying around the house, and I pretty much had them committed to memory. A little sister was a perfect practice audience, and I had Bill’s inflections down exactly. I was so good, in fact, that it’s possible she still believes me.

We had a turn table for our records (Fisher Price, orange and white, at least in my memory). My sister loved story records, especially melodramatic tearjerkers like The Little Match Girl and The Loneliest Christmas Tree, both of which she listened to so often I used to have a recurring dream about the little match girl freezing to death in a forest.

Sometimes she would listen to my Partridge Family album with me, or the jacket-less Bread album that may or may not have been given to us via our uncle the trash collector, or best of all, my collection of K-tel records. We would sing along to “The Night Chicago Died” (na,na,na,na,na) or “I Shot the Sheriff” or “Chevy Van”, which is probably the only song I remember from the time that wasn’t dark or depressing, but was about sex, which we didn’t get. We knew something interesting and fun must be going on in that van, but the specifics were a little hazy. It was a good one to sing loudly while playing Parcheesi in our room.

As we got older we felt the need for personal space. Her side of the room was always messy, and I jammed everything in the closet so I could claim to be neater than her (a technique I continue to rely on). Our mother helped us to string a shower curtain down the center of our bedroom, which was exciting and workable for all of about an hour before it started to get irritating. The curtain smelled plasticky, and was so light-weight that the breeze from an open window blew the “wall” everywhere. One of us no longer had access to the closet, and the other one would have to enter and exit through the window, since the door was in forbidden territory. The curtain was short-lived.

As teenagers, we finally got our own rooms. This was good, because often we drove each other crazy (it’s the law). I stayed dorky, and she was cool, and then I went away to college.

Today we live in different states. Her husband is the man who does yard work with the flamethrower. She once raised a lamb as a house pet; the lamb followed her around the house wearing a diaper and calling “mama- a -a !” In addition to the lamb, she raised beautiful children. She makes me laugh.

Sometimes I will accidentally call my daughter by my sister’s name. In my head, I am still looking out for her, even though she doesn’t need me to do it, and maybe I was the one that needed the looking out for, it’s hard to say.

Either way, today is her birthday, and as usual, I haven’t gotten anything in the mail on time. I am stealing a little inspiration from diane, instead, and using this blog to send a little love her way. I hope you don’t mind.

So,

I promise not to tell anyone how old you are.

Love,

Vic

P.S. Honest, you’re not adopted. And do you like how I didn’t put any horrible adolescent pictures up? It’s only because mine were way more hideous than yours. :)

Welcome to My FANTA-sy! (I’m SO going to be famous)

2009-06-25T01:01:00.001-07:00

“Be The Fourth Fantana” Contest

Deadline: June 30th

Cover Letter

Dear Official Fanta Committee:

I saw your website advertising for applicants to round out your Fantana roster, and I’m really excited!! I think I’m just what you’re looking for. So…wow! Being a Fantana must be a dangerous job if you can lose one that easy, right? That’s like, what? twenty-five percent of your personnel? No offense.

(But seriously, what the hell actually happened to Pineapple Fantana, if you don’t mind my asking? It’s like she disappeared into thin air; one minute she’s there, not the favorite because pineapple drinks have kind of a weird tang to them, but still a contributor, and then gone! No memorial speeches on your website, no “Whoops!” about leaving her at the airport, no “good luck with your new baby”, nothing. It’s just a little disturbing, is all. I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation!)

Also, have Melody, Summer and Isabel been thoroughly checked out? Not that I’m trying to tell you how to do your job, it’s just that I detect some smirking when they go into the chorus. They know more than they are letting on. I think Pineapple Fantana may be dead.

Another thing: I think if I am chosen as your new still-alive Pineapple Fantana, I should get to wear the headband. You know, just to send a message that there are no leaders in Fanta land, even if Summer thinks she’s running things. Did she tell you when she applied that she is Native American? Another suspicious thing, because, no way. I don’t care how much fringe she’s wearing.

See how much I’m helping? Already I’m perfect for the job, right? Ha, ha, ha.

Anyhow, I’m sure there is a good explanation for everything, and even though I’ve never actually had a Fanta, my eleven- year -old loves Strawberry. It would mean a lot to him if he could tell the kids at school his mom’s a Fantana. I would be like a hot-pants role model for today’s youth. (No pressure!) Attached you will find all of the official parts of my Fantana Contest application.

PS. Is “Fanta” pronounced like “Santa”? Or like “want-a”? Because “want-a” rhymes in the song, but when you tell the people at Chick-Fil-A that you want a “Fahn-ta”, they snicker a little bit. I’m just saying.

Can’t Wait to Meet My New Fanta Family! (“Fahn-ta Fahm-ily”)

Vic

1) Personal Photo:

Me on my home Fanta sound stage. It was hard finding foundation that matched my all-over Miracle Tan, but I think I came pretty close. I used to do makeovers on my dog all the time.

2.) Dance Video:

Back on the home sound stage! I heart terry cloth shorts and knee socks. So cute. (Also knee socks hide spider veins– it’s totally a win-win!) Click to start.

(See what I mean about the fringe/headband thing Summer’s doing? Don’t tell her I pointed it out- she’ll resent me even more when I become a bigger star.)

3.) Essay : 250 Words on “Why I Want to Be a Fantana”

Even though I don’t like to travel very much (I get car sick so I’d have to ride in the front seat), and I fall down when I dance, I believe you should choose me for Miss Pineapple Fantana. Why? Well, I will tell you.

I would be so sassy, like the rest of the girls, but also sensible. Like, if someone had a headache on the plane after a big concert, or if Melody tore her hoochie pants again doing a high kick, I would be the one that always had an ibuprofen and probably some duct tape in her purse. I would also carry Wet Wipes with me in case of any sticky accidents. (Fanta!)

I would be a team player. Even though wearing yellow makes me look just the tiniest bit like I have malaria, I would never complain about having to wear yellow every single damn day of my life. But if someone else, like Strawberry Fanta, for instance, wanted to switch, I would be all "sure, if that’s what you want". Because I am always thinking about others.

Also, I don’t really like talking to people because I am an introvert, so I would be, like, “the quiet Fantana”! I could be the one to bring the gift of refreshment to those trapped in libraries and nursing homes, and also I could help the other girls with their homework in between parties with Dennis Rodman and Ryan Seacrest, and other dignitaries.

In conclusion, I

(250 words)

In Which I Am Consumed By Guilt, and Then Finally, a Weight is Lifted.

2009-06-22T00:07:00.001-07:00

I took this picture on my cell phone today. Just a little evidence that my entire neighborhood is not filled with lawn gnomes.

I’m a taker. I don’t mean to be a taker, but I’m also absent-minded, which means I have received some awards in the past month or so from wonderful people here in the Land O’ Blog (like the Land O’ Lakes, but less buttery) that I have taken happily and then, just….well, you know. Didn’t follow the rules. Didn’t pass them on. Some had no rules, which I am totally grateful for (thanks Nikki, and Miss.chief!), and some had strict rules, like chain letters. Now I’m probably going to have a hundred years bad luck, and the next person is not going to get their wish or ten pairs of tube socks, but it’s too late now, because I don’t remember most of the rules. Getting old really sucks.

So. Here’s my plan. My latest wonderful award came from Jules (thanks again, Jules!), over at Mean Girl Garage (home of the pudding pop!), and since it was only a day or two ago I still remember the rules. It doesn’t mean I’m going to follow them though. Just part of them. The first part says I have to tell you, like Truth or Dare in the 6th grade, (only I am NOT climbing a tree in my underwear this time, so it’s truth), five things I am obsessed with. I am doing this as a sort of “umbrella meme” for all the past awards. Pay attention, there may be a quiz after.

1. I am obsessed with random phrases. Sometimes I will whisper an especially good one lovingly to myself, like Rain Man. My latest favorite phrase, said repeatedly to family members and the dog, is “I want to bite your face SIX times!”. It must, absolutely must, be said in an Inspector Clouseau voice. I have no idea where this phrase came from, it was just suddenly there one day.

2. I am obsessed with these:

Sugar wafer cookies. They sell them in the vending machine at work. I don’t especially like them, and yet they call to me from behind the glass. If you ever see me with these, slap them out of my hand. Really. Sure, I might punch you in the solar plexus, but later I will totally thank you.

3. I am obsessed with “So You Think You Can Dance”. Because I do. I do think I can dance. It’s not true, as anyone will tell you, but I will sit in front of my TV clutching my sugar wafer cookies, and in my head I am crumping and tapping, and discoing like a mofo. Never mind that physically I have more in common with a Shetland pony than a ballerina. Plus I want to be Cat Deeley in my next life.

4. I am obsessed with Dwell magazine. I really want to find some old metal shipping containers and stack them all cattiwampus. Then I would take a saws-all and cut out big windows and doors, and in the middle I would leave an atrium, thus creating a quixotic modernist statement of my very own. Sure, in the summertime it might be hard living in a sizzling metal box (because insulation is boring), but the design aesthetics are definitely worth it.

5. I am obsessed with… with……um… Bradley Cooper in “The Hangover” was kind of good looking…? But then I saw some other pictures of him connected to a bio where he sounds like a pompous ass, so, eh…

Turns out I’m only moderately obsessive.

Now I’m unveiling an award that is sure to be an object of desire:

I wanted to give out something with a little class.

Also, “Picked” is capitalized to help you get the subtle double meaning. You’re welcome.

I picked three bloggers (out of many) I admire to receive the first original Vic Award. No rules, except if you don’t pass the award on to someone at some point, it will never become an internet viral sensation, and that’s really what’s important here, right? Seriously, it’s up to you. I just likes ya.

1) Girl Interrupted at A World So Small- Her story about the old Brazilian lady with the “finger of death” was hilarious and terrifying at the same time. She writes really compelling, entertaining stories, and I love her blog.

2) The Jules at The Gravel Farm – The Jules has the best dry wit anywhere. Like Girl Interrupted, his stories are so well-written, and hysterical. I look forward to every post. (Thanks to him I’ve perfected my new hippie ninja look!)

3.) Chelle at Coffee and Zombie Movies - I always wish Chelle posted more, because she makes me laugh out loud. Plus, she can make a really ugly loaf of bread and she describes people in a mosh pit as dressing like “the Hamburgler”. I’m pretty sure she spies on her neighbors too, so we’re like sisters.

Check these three out, especially if you haven’t been to their blogs before. You’ll love them too.

Truly, there are so many blogs that I love and read routinely, it’s hard to choose. Yours is one of them. I mean that.

I want to bite your face six times.

I’m So Over Will Ferrell’s Underpants.

2009-06-19T00:48:00.001-07:00

I’m all done photoshopping my dog. Honestly. It’s safe.

I can see you all peering around the corner. Don’t pretend that it’s just Miss Yvonne, I know you all pushed her out in front of the pack, which is so ironic, because everyone knows Miss Yvonne totally loves a good animal-in-historical–costume gag.

Really, it’s okay. It’s out of my system.

Actually I don’t even OWN Photoshop, so even using that term is probably some kind of copyright infringement, and now Logical Libby will turn me in to the blog authorities. I’m going to go to white collar prison and they’ll give me Martha Stewart’s old cell. Maybe she left some doilies or a pan of prison muffins behind for me, like the Big House version of Welcome Wagon. Remember Welcome Wagon? They never came in a wagon. (I always looked. Also, the ladies all had wig hair that was on too tight and so the “welcome” face was not as convincing as you would hope.)

Also, the dog is de-bandaged and sober as a parson. Still a little pissed off, but that’s because I think one of you told him about the post. I’ve got my eye on you people.

My summer is off to a halting start. Mostly I stay up too late, get up too late, walk around the rest of the day with a painful crick in my neck because I slept with my pillow torqued around in an unhealthful wad, and then talk a big game about sorting through stuff in my house and finally living like real people, with visible floors and all. It’s all so exhausting I want to go untwist my pillow and take a nap. It’s a vicious cycle.

I guess I can’t really shake the idea that I have to go to work, probably because our summer is two weeks shorter this year, thank you very much District Poobahs. I need to relax. I may have to see if there are any dog sedatives left. Or just change the background on my blog one more time. You have no idea how calming that can be. This current one is a little like a cloudy sky, but is actually moldy book covers. It’s symbolism.

One more thing: I foolishly, and with full consent, sacrificed an hour and a half of my life to the atrocity that is Land of the Lost, The Movie. Shut up. It had Sleestaks in it, and yes, they were still awesomely slow, and had an extra set of teeth each, but otherwise? Excruciating. And this is coming from someone who laughed heartily at Nacho Libre. And there goes the last bit of sophisticated veneer…

I felt I owed you this admission after the dog-with-a-kite debacle. Mock me at your leisure.

If I took a doggie sedative, would my feet make those running movements while I slept?

2009-06-17T12:11:00.001-07:00

My dog is just a little bit stoned in this picture. Which is a bad state to be in when you’re a) messing around with electricity, and b) a founding father.

See, when I answered those interview questions the other day, I hadn’t actually Photoshopped my dog’s head on Ben Franklin’s body, I mostly said it for effect, and then I thought, what if I can’t really do that? Maybe I’m a big liar.

Luckily I had my son’s fifth grade Ben Franklin project lying around, and likewise the dog, so this morning I got busy testing my skills.

Unluckily, it was difficult to get the dog to focus his eyes, because we have him all hopped up on pain killers. Sure, it’s fun to see him wobble around the house all drunken and dazed, but beside the fun factor, the drugs are helping him cope with the trauma of having been at the vet’s three times in the last four days.

First he tore a nail completely off his foot playing fetch outside (it was already weak from before). He came home looking like this:

Then they decided to update his shots at the follow-up appointment. Then he had a reaction to a vaccine and started whimpering and falling down. Then they gave him more shots to counter act the side effects of the first shots. Also, the vet recommends he be sedated before he is brought in to the office because he was a rescue dog and is terrified of the vet’s office.

Which I totally don’t blame him for, because when they leave you sitting in the “Small pets/exotic animals” examining room with an agitated dog climbing your neck in terror, and your shirt is covered in reddish dog hair because his body has ejected it all in an effort to make the get-away quicker, you are given only scary things to look at. Primarily posters of the insides of animals coated in worms, and, my favorite, a bleached dog skull. Using the remains of other animals as decorative items sends a message to dogs that you are only there to help, I think.

I’m pretty sure he hates us. He’s being all aloof, but that may just be because of the hallucinations, it’s hard to tell. I don’t think he knows about the Photoshop indignities. Or that he’s on the internet. Maybe we won’t tell him just now.

(I do like how he appears to be balancing on his lackey’s hand though. It’s like Ben doubles as a circus acrobat. Just a little accidental genius on my part.)

UPDATE: C.B. Jones also has mad PS genius flowing through his veins:

Very impressive, Mr. Jones!

Maybe now that I’m a celebrity Ashton Kutcher will follow me on Twitter.

2009-06-16T23:46:00.000-07:00

This weekend I received an email from Andy over at The Thirty Seconds Project, kindly asking if I would do an interview for him. At first I thought maybe my reputation as a leading authority on anti-alien helmet construction had attracted his attention, but no, this time it was the blog. Strange.

Probably the giant sunglasses in my profile picture made him think I was someone important, or just someone with mysterious, super-dilated eyes. Either way, I was flattered to be asked, so I did the interview, and now my face is right there with all the other floating heads! It’s pretty cool.

But that’s not all. Turns out he’d like YOU to do an interview too! I know! We could be spoiled celebrities together, and buy a lot of Prada and plastic surgery, or maybe just talk trash about each other to TMZ for the publicity, but secretly we’ll still be best friends….I mean, we’ll be salt-of-the-earth, every day folk, just like always, right? Maybe with just a bedazzled cell phone to keep people guessing. Come on, you know you want to.

So what are you waiting for? Click on the picture of the site below, and then click on my big head to read my interview. It won’t take long, honest, and you’ll have more blackmail material to use against me. Not that I have any money. Also, anyone can read it, so I guess that sort of ruins the whole thing too. Forget the blackmail.

Okay, you can click over now. And then come back. Because I’ll be lonely here if you forget to come back.

No really, I’m totally done now. Click away! I’ll wait here.

(Thanks Andy! Your site is a great idea, and I had fun contributing. :)

It was like “Apocalypse Now”, only they wore Reeboks.

2009-06-15T01:24:00.001-07:00

Living in the suburbs in southern California has made me forget.

I’ve gotten all soft, clearly, because the idea of my husband wearing a head lamp and mowing the lawn late at night seems rash, and crazy-like, when really it’s only a dim flicker of his former glory.

Because my sister, who still lives in Oregon where my husband and I grew up, called on Saturday night to tell me I’m a big blog-writing baby.

“Right now,” she said to me on the phone, “MY husband is outside, in the dark, clearing the weeds out of the driveway using a FLAMETHROWER.” She let those words sink in before continuing. “He’s wearing shorts.”

(Here is a visual aid, for those of you unable to picture the exact level of overkill we are talking about:)

And then, because we were killing time to see whether my brother-in-law would survive his yard maintenance session, she told me a story about the time he went outside with a .22 to shoot a crow that was eating corn out of their garden. He was wearing only his underwear at the time, and the garden is close to the road. Which is where the curious on-lookers in their cars got to watch the mostly-naked man shoot his gun.

Just as she finished this anecdote, I heard her husband in the background proclaim, “I burned all the hair off my legs!” in an oddly triumphant way.

This is where my husband began. I’d forgotten.

For instance, one of our very first dates involved terror and explosives.

I thought we were going to a movie. Instead we detoured to his house, which happened to be situated on the side of a wooded hill in the country. Waiting there in the dark, lurking behind a stand of giant Douglas fir trees, were his brother and a few friends. Suddenly there was an ear-piercing shriek, and a flaming projectile flew by my head.

Before I knew what was happening, I was being handed an entire open box of Saturn missiles to hold (These are like bottle rockets without the stick part.)

(the box says, “WARNING –SHOOTS FLAMING BALLS”)

The next hour was a blur of Vietnam-action-movie pyrotechnics, Roman candles shooting through the trees, and people “Wooo-hooo!”ing and running through the woods for cover. At one point my not-yet-husband lit the entire box of Saturn missiles while it was still in my hand, and then took them at the last moment, aiming the whistling box of fireworks in a big arc at retreating opponents.

He apologized later, not because I’d thought we were under some bizarre attack for the first fifteen minutes, or because my hair may have been on fire at one point, but because they’d planned on shooting off some M-80’s and had run out. ( I think they’d used them to blow up a wasp’s nest.)

The fact that I agreed to another date after this one still baffles me. I can picture myself standing there in my blue eye shadow and giant 80’s costume jewelry, hands full of fireworks. I want to tell that girl that it will not always be Roman candles and M-80’s.

One day he will mellow, and she will only have the occasional flash of light shining off his forehead to contend with.

Once he chewed a brick of cheese, but cheddar doesn’t have a little face, so this is better.

2009-06-10T00:00:00.000-07:00

The dog did this.

I’m not sure what exactly this guy was before he became a canine taste sensation, but now he’s a metaphor. I am the little bendy baseball-head man, gnawed upon by the surly teeth of daily life, and abandoned in a saliva-coated stupor. The eyes are wary, the hands (powerless without opposable thumbs), outstretched in vain surrender, and the wardrobe is a colorless too-small unitard. And yet, the suggestion of a smile remains.

Because today I am free from other people’s teenagers! At least until August.

Also, I have a brilliantly red candied apple sitting in my refrigerator, a “gift” from my youngest after his all-day trip to Knott’s Berry Farm yesterday. It smells like a giant radioactive Red Hot.

“I bought this for you,” he says, handing me the candied apple wrapped in cellophane. “Here, hold it like this.” He takes the stick out of my hand and rotates the apple slightly.

I take a look around the back side of the apple, and sure enough, there’s a bite taken out of it, the cellophane sucked into the small cavity and glued to small teeth marks with sticky red syrup.

“Oh that! They sell them that way,” he says. “I got it because you are so nice to me!” He opens his eyes wide in sincerity.

“Don’t like cinnamon?” I say.

“No.”

I think that maybe I will feed the dog the candied apple, and then when the red sticky part coats his snout like poorly-applied lipstick, I will take his picture and maybe post it here with a witty caption about Courtney Love and lip waxing.

Or not.

My Superpower is Invisibility! To the French, At Least.

2009-06-09T00:00:00.000-07:00

In an ironic twist, my son’s fifth grade promotion performance today climaxed in a swelling rendition of “Wind Beneath My Wings”, sung in the warbling voices of those on the brink of puberty.

It serves me right for bringing the damn song up in my post yesterday, because what steely-jawed parent could NOT cry under those circumstances?

The entire room was red-eyed and sheepishly digging tissue out of purses and pockets. Except for the guy behind me, who was bent over like a man reliving a bad burrito, and barking angry Spanish phrases into the cell phone between his knees. I so wanted to extend my elbow backwards, in a casual, yet forceful manner, until it made direct contact with the man’s forehead. Just as a helpful reminder.

Unfortunately the Formerly Bearded One (who’s once again flirting with what seems to me to be a dangerous level of five o’clock shadow) gave me a little shake of the head before returning to his videotaping duties. I hate when he gets all mature on me.

They were happy tears, at least. And I know things are going to continue to look up, because the PF Chang gods said so tonight after I ate a lettuce wrap and wondered aloud why all the waiters looked like Adam Lambert:

So, good times ahead! Two days of school left, and I’m free. Here is something I especially will not miss from school:

(Conversation, nearly verbatim, that I have had in the staff lounge with one of our French teachers, THREE TIMES this year. THREE. TIMES. Remember, both of us have been on this campus for TEN years.)

French teacher looks up from vending machine. Eyes focus on me, a rare event that happens as often as the average eclipse.

“Oh, hello?” Quizzical eyebrows, very French shoulder shrug, as if to suggest I am merely imaginary and oh, how very silly of me to stand there.

“Hello.”

Sudden tiny hand on my shoulder, accompanied by an intense look of speculation. “What eez your name?”

“Vic.” I know what’s coming now.

“Because, I do not know your name!” Small casual laugh. “You know, how could I know?? Again, what eez your name?”

“Vic.”

Silence. Her critical brown eyes perform a full body once-over. A barely camouflaged expression of distaste passes over her features. “You are sure?”

“Pretty sure, yes.”

She comes to a sudden decision, and claps her hands briskly, twice. “No, that cannot be right. I think you are, always, Mrs. B____.” Every time I see you, I say Oh, there eez Mrs. B__________! You see how theez eez?”

“Uh….well,”

Another casual laugh. “You, also, do not know my name, yes?”

I think this is a question, but I’m not sure. “You’re Fabienne,” I say. Like I haven’t worked in the same small groups with her multiple times in the past. Not that she ever spoke to me.

Small shocked silence. “But, how do you know theez?!”

Before I can answer she is bored with the conversation. “Never mind! Good-bye, Mrs. B__________!”.

And then she is out the door, clutching her trail mix.

The best part of all this is that there is a Mrs. B______ on campus. And she’s black.

Oh, good. I have to go now, and talk some sense into the FBO, who is mowing the lawn. It’s ten thirty at night. He’s out there wearing a head lamp, mowing in the dark, and pissing off the neighbors.

And you thought we were the normal ones in the neighborhood…

(Kurt, this is for you, because you are my personal up lifter. You're like an underwire bra, is what I mean. Look at that poor little kitty, just holding on! It 's so inspiring!)

I Think I Have Some Old "Smiths" Tapes Around Here Somewhere....

2009-06-08T00:00:00.000-07:00

Every year, something about June turns me a little melancholy. Or "all emo", as my daughter says.

Maybe it's the fog that rolls in here every year about this time, staying until noon, and fooling me into wearing a jacket and long pants to work so that I'm roasting like a pig on a spit by early afternoon.

Maybe it's the end of another school year. I'm so relieved to finally close that classroom door for two months, and yet, it's another year gone. Next year will see big changes, the usual change of student faces, the shift in schedule, and now also the big changes sent from a failing state economy. Today, because our copy machines have gone belly up again, I spent more than fifty dollars of my own money so that my students will have copies of a final exam to take tomorrow. Their grateful response will be payment enough.

Five teachers in my department received the "golden handshake"; their absence will mean I have to be a grownup now. One retiring teacher, a man I rarely spoke with, I will miss in particular. He is one of the last representatives of the aging hippy teacher, with his David Crosby physique, his sandalwood smell and long, frizzy grey hair. I think somewhere in my mind, an unexplored part, he is a much gentler version of my father, who died in 2005.

My son "graduates" from the fifth grade tomorrow. Next year he moves on to middle school. I worry about my kid with the wicked sense of humor, who admittedly hears his own drummer, adrift in the middle school world of do-or-die conformity.

This mood will pass, I know. It always does, once the final paperwork is done, and the beach calls us out.

There is a lot to be grateful for.

The dog has shed his sprout. Suddenly it wasn't there anymore, which probably means he's rubbed it off under the couch somewhere, a little surprise for me to find. It's good that he isn't going to be the Elephant Man of the dog world after all.

This is especially good because last night we rented "Marley and Me". At the end, all four of us sat in a row on the couch with tears running down our face, because we are a family of saps. I wish that the dog knew how to use the camera, because it was probably a great shot.

I'm very nearly well.

Best of all, I'm happy to be a part of this blog community. You are all the wind beneath my wings. We're digging out the tambourines and the Partridge family bus, people.

Come on, get happy!

PS: Expateek kindly asked me to experiment on her blog header, so I did. Go over and say 'hi', because she's a great writer, and has lived an amazing life. I got sucked right in to reading her posts, from way back. Be nice about my header, though, or you're off the bus.

That Sizzling You Hear Is My Brain

2009-06-05T00:54:00.000-07:00

I got lost yesterday on the way to my blog.

I think it's because of lightning.

First, the night before last, at 3 in the morning, a comet hit our house. At least that's what I thought when I catapulted out of bed and whacked my leg on the nightstand, and the kids wailed from distance corners in the dark, and the dog hyperventilated at my feet. The shaking and the noise went on and on.

And then it was over, and my confused mind finally grasped that it wasn't a comet, or even an earthquake, it was just the world's most horrific clap of thunder. After I calmed everyone down except for the Formerly Bearded One (who slept irritatingly through the whole thing), I lay in bed bathed in an adrenalin sweat. After about an hour my mind finally began to drift.

I started thinking about how I was going to keep students so fascinated with my teaching next year that they wouldn't even want to text people from their laps, and I thought, Hey! What about a fake skull?! Not like a skull you could put on your desk and then tell your students that it was the remains of the last kid that pissed you off. No. Way better.

What I would do is paper mache my own head.

It would be excellent! After I made a perfect cast of my head using only homemade wheat glue and newspaper strips (and had remained immobile for hours until the paper mache hardened and adhered firmly to my hair and eyelids), I would slice it off and paint it!

Probably I would just use the top part, I figured, so I could wear it like an actual skull cap and it would look like only the top of my head was shaved and tattooed! I imagined painting it a realistic flesh tone first, and then adding some cool Maori war paint designs for maximum impact and intimidation power.

It seemed like a pretty good idea at the time.

The next morning I filed the plan in the back of my mind to revisit later, and went to work, where I gave my seniors a final exam during yet another unusual thunder storm.

Then, later in the day, a woman who lives a few miles from our house was hit by lightning while standing in the front yard, and died. They found some of her clothes thirty feet away.

According to the newspaper accounts, this happened at the exact same time I was standing in my own front yard for some idiotic reason that escapes me, and now I think the lightning was looking for me and got lost. It's only dumb luck that I'm not lying naked and burnt to a crisp on my driveway.

Because when we researched some of our family background once, my husband found an ancestor who was actually killed by lightening in her house. Really. It came in through an open door and struck her down. That sounds personal to me.

It's pretty much like the shark in Jaws: The Revenge. In that classic movie, the shark was swimming around whole continents in a lather of revenge, just looking for the lady because it hated her so much from all the things she did to it in Jaws I through III, which I don't remember, but the shark did. It's all perfectly reasonable.

So lightning is my Great White. It's like a sky shark.

Note: I just googled "will paper mache stop lightning?" to check if my unconscious mind was really just trying to save my life, because that would make me an accidental genius. Google answered by telling me to make a paper mache rattle out of a broken light bulb, so I think I have my answer.

Yak and Jill

2009-06-03T00:00:00.000-07:00

So I "designed" a blog header for someone! My first one!

And then it was cruelly rejected.

Now it's like the tender shoots of my graphic design glory (dreams that I have cherished for almost three whole days now) have been trampled under the hooves of a hairy beast.

A yak, to be specific.

See, last week, Dr. Zibbs over at That Blue Yak was looking for someone to make him a header that didn't feature a novelty fly zapper, and I thought, I can make a header that doesn't kill flies!

So I set to work with my little paint brushes and crayons and construction paper, mouth open in concentration as I scribbled. And then I sent it over.

To my surprise, it seems that sidestepping the whole fly murder issue wasn't enough for victory. My header was not the winner*, despite my color homage to Dr. Z's love of retro pop culture, and the little vintage station wagons filled with imaginary adoring fans on a pilgrimage (Zibbs loves disciples).

(reduced size)

It was a devastating loss, I'll admit, but I'll be fine. Also, now that I look at it again, I think I would make it less pastel-ish, and maybe also find a way to remove the dagger from the yak's skull. Because maybe when he saw it Zibbs thought, Nice girly header. Is she threatening me?

Anyway it was a good distraction from my husband's constant Fun Facts About Ferrets monologue the last few days. Ever since he saw a black-footed ferret on the cover of Audubon, he's decided he wants one. I don't really know why they've got a ferret on a bird magazine, but okay.

I've told him that they're illegal in California, but he doesn't seem to hear me.

"Did you know a female ferret is called a Jill?" he calls from the bathroom. "And did you know ferrets have pretty much eaten all the birds in Australia? It's a big problem."

This doesn't sound right to me. They definitely wouldn't make a ferret an Audubon cover model if it was a serial bird killer, right? And anyway, I think a kookaburra could kick a ferret's ass, so ALL the birds in Australia are probably not eaten.

"We should get one!" Now he's at the computer, feverishly looking up pictures of ferrets on Google. "It would be good protection around the house, and the dog would like the company!"

I try to imagine a ferret warning us with a ferrety chuckle if there were a masked intruder, or a sudden inferno, but I know better than to argue with him. "We could name it 'Lassie'," I agree. And then the dog would kill it.

There's a pause from the other room.

"Hey," he calls, "come look at these hedgehogs..."

*congratulations to Mr. Condescending, whose cool header won over the doc!

A Quickie (Heh)

2009-06-02T09:22:00.000-07:00

Two things that do not go together: a chronic cough, and a silent testing room.

I am administering a senior final this morning, so this morning's post will be quick and strange. While you wait for a longer post, feel free to imagine me turning blue at my desk as they work.

Also,
Here is what I would look like if I were a Simpsons character:

Click the picture to turn yourself into a cartoon character too. If you want.

Back soon.

Why I Envy the Elderly

2009-06-01T00:00:00.000-07:00

Well, I have to apologize, because I've fallen behind in answering comments and reading other blogs. It's because coughing is my new hobby, and it pretty much takes up all my time.

I really am planning to be healthy again any minute now, just as soon as I can find a way to chip the cement coating off the inside of my lungs. Still no doctor. I'm probably going to have to start looking into alternative medicines, like gargling with goat urine or something equally disgusting.

I wish this one was still available, because I think I'd feel better right away:

Probably that means heroin addicts never cough. You'd think it's because they lack the strength, but turns out it's the throat-soothing properties of opium that does the trick.

One cool thing about my excellent coughing is that I can turn my son's bedroom light on and off without ever entering the room. I'm magical.

Of course, so can the dog.

See, a couple of years ago, after seeing the commercials on television, my son decided he really needed a Clapper (Clap On, Clap Off, The- Clap-per) for his bedroom lamp.

He envisioned how luxurious it would be to be able to turn his light off without having to climb down from his bed and walk over to the switch.

Unfortunately he's got the Clapper set to Code Red, so almost everything sets it off- -neighbors arguing, heavy steps, laughter, the dog barking, the bathroom door closing, and now my coughing from the other room. It's like a disco in his room all day and night, but he refuses to reset it.

The only thing that doesn't automatically activate the Clapper, naturally, is clapping.

Two sharp claps. That's how many the box said. But they have to be exactly the right length and pitch and volume for the Clapper to respond, and it's just too hard. My son has taken to Hoot! Hoot! ing at it to get the light to go off, but I have my dignity to maintain.

The old people in the ads must be experts because they make it look so easy. Maybe they went to clapping school, or they're just gifted. I don't know. I guess I can't be good at coughing and clapping at the same time. Then it would be like God gave me too many gifts, and someone behind me in line didn't get one, and then that person would go to the dark side and become Darth Vader or Paris Hilton and terrorize humanity.

I'm trying not to be greedy here, but maybe one of those old people would trade me gifts? I could do the clapping thing, and they could be good coughers. Sure, it might kill them, but they've lived a good life, and plus they're celebrities. Anyway, probably their doctor will answer the phone, or even come by their room after they're finished with afternoon tapioca.

I'm a little bitter, I guess. Hoot, hoot.

A Heartwarming Medical Tale

2009-05-29T20:15:00.000-07:00

My doctor hates me. If she even exists, that is.

At the very least she's installed a special "Vic-Avoidance Filter©" on her phone system, because I called fourteen thousand times yesterday and all I got after hours and hours of elevator music and advertisements, (thinking about electrolysis?) was a red-hot ear and a weakened will to live.

I've never met this doctor. She's a product of my new HMO group, someone I chose ~~by throwing a dart at the directory~~ after careful consideration of references and a personal interview.

So she's an exciting mystery.

Maybe she's a little person. Or an albino. Something cool like that. I hope she has six fingers on one hand, like in Princess Bride, and she has to order her surgical latex gloves from a specialty shop. I wouldn't even feel bad about staring when she snapped her gloves on (thumb, two, three, four, five....yes!).

I've had two doctors now that wore ironic suspenders, which is a nice idea, but makes me want to offer them some pieces of flair and a hat so they can work the late shift at TGI Fridays.

Maybe she's not answering because it's a test! Like, how bad do I want to get well? Hours-on-hold bad? No? Well, shake it off, sister.

So, no waiting room hilarity for you, sad to say, because yesterday I mostly galumphed around with my smelly self all day and tried not to cough up any necessary organs.

I'm sick of being sick. You're sick of hearing about it. I'm spreadin' the love. Also I have something sharp digging into the tender flesh of my armpit, probably a tiny bit of razor blade that a disgruntled textile worker sewed into the seam of my T-shirt as a way of sticking it to the Man. Woman. Whatever. It's definitely sticking it to me right now (insert joke here. Go ahead. You know you want to.)

Seriously though, can you bleed to death from an armpit puncture? If I ever meet my doctor, I'm going to ask her.