August 8, 2007 · 12:55 am

Please Check Your Calendars

Please check your calendar.  Somebody, no… EVERYBODY, please check your calendars.

Can you confirm to me that today’s date is, in fact, August 8, 2007?

And that means it is still summer, right?  At least, technically? 

I mean, I seem to recall that the official start of summer falls somewhere around June 21st on what’s known as the summer solstice.  And then fall doesn’t officially start until September 23rd or so, the date of the autumnal equinox.  And all the days in between… summer.  Summer, summer, summer.  At least, that’s the way it is here in the Northern Hemisphere. 

More so than the dates on the calendar, I have this other evidence to present in the hopes of proving it is still summer…

It’s 100 degrees outside.  It feels, when you walk out the door, like that Jaws ride at Universal Studios in Florida where you’re in the boat and there’s a big fiery explosion and the searing heat is more than a touch alarming and you check to see if your skin might be blistering before your eyes.  In the end, it’s really not, it’s just hot.  HOT LIKE FIRE.

Also, there’s baseball.  As far as I know, the major leagues are still in action. Then again, baseball season is so damn long that it might not be an actual indicator of anything anymore.  Still, I’m claiming it.  Baseball equals summer.

School hasn’t started yet either.  It’s still, for better or worse, summer vacation.  At least for a few more weeks.  And I know this counts because there’s that song with the lyrics, “School’s out for the summer!”  I think Alice Cooper sang it.  And I think, if it’s in a song, then it must be true.

So to recap the evidence:

a. the calendar says it’s August and August equals summer
b. It’s hot out, and HOT LIKE FIRE usually only happens in the summer (well, unless there’s an actual fire)
c. Baseball equals summer
d. Alice Cooper said so

So, if all evidence points to the fact that it’s still summer, then WHY, pray tell, is my local grocery store already pushing HALLOWEEN CANDY?

Why did I get this fall catalog in the mail today?

And most worrisome of all, why today when I bought some LEGOs for my son from Target, did the cashier put them in this large CHRISTMAS bag?

O Holy Night!

Give me some time to buy school supplies first, won’t you?

I don’t know.  Maybe the cashier thought I was buying the LEGOs as a Christmas gift since I was shopping alone and when she asked, I told her that I didn’t need a gift slip for them.  That must mean I’m keeping them, right?  But I’m a grown woman, and grown women don’t usually play with Star Wars LEGO sets, ergo, Christmas gift!

When she handed over my bags, all of my other purchases, like disposable razors and shampoo and Burt’s Beeswax (incredible deal on a 3-pack!) and gauze for wrapping up my husband’s mangled foot, were in regular Target bags.  You know, the white ones with the red Target symbol on them?  She handed over the LEGOs and said “And here is your toy.”  And she kind of winked and nodded at the bag which was not see through.  So I think she was suggesting that the LEGOs should be a Christmas gift and that I shouldn’t hand them over to Snags to play with the moment I walk through my front door.  Perhaps she thinks that giving children toys for no reason, in the middle of summer no less, is akin to spoiling them.

But I like to think I’m fostering his creativity because he got a mini-set of LEGOs and has been spending hours upon hours making things with them and entertaining himself for hours more.  And I was thinking that more LEGOs would allow him to make more things and be more creative and entertain himself for even MORE hours.  And more is better, right?  When you are talking about five year olds playing quietly with LEGOs for hours, more is better.  Just… trust me on this.

But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.  I’m used to seeing Christmas stuff go up early.  It takes a lot of time to set up 20 trees with ornaments and lights and tinsel.  I start the day after Thanksgiving at my house, and I only put up one tree, some stockings, and a wreath.  So stores, with all their twinkling lights and snow globes and dancing Santa’s have to start early.

And then there’s the whole thing where they start selling bathing suits in January.  Now that totally pisses me off because if I wait the 6 months it will take me to lose enough weight to look good so people won’t vomit when they see me in a bathing suit, it would be June before I could buy one.  Only by then there won’t be any bathing suits left except for those on clearance, and those are all in a size 2 and I couldn’t pull one of those up past my ankles even with a weight loss.

But really, I don’t recall seeing Halloween Candy out THIS early before.  I’m especially perturbed at this because it means I have two additional months where I can stock up for trick-or-treaters only to say “Oh, what the hell, just one piece” and then before you know it, I’ve not only opened the bag, I’ve eaten the entire contents, all 240 pieces.  And then I have to go buy MORE.  This is bad enough when I do it through the entire month of October, because after that, I’ve still got Thanksgiving and Christmas goodies I can’t keep myself away from.  So come January and bathing suit sales, I’m in trouble.  Only now I’ve got August and September stretching before me with Halloween candy on the shelves, and with those two extra months, I can do some serious damage.  I might have to tape 20 large Target Christmas bags together just to make myself a bathing suit come January.

7 Comments

Filed under Bathing Suits, Calendars, Candy, Christmas, Halloween, humor, LEGOs, life, Weight Loss

August 6, 2007 · 12:12 am

It’s an Evil World in Here

Snags watches a lot of Scooby Doo.  He’s particularly fond of the movie Scooby Doo in Where’s My Mummy featuring Cleopatra’s Tomb, an army of the dead, and a curse.  Cleopatra’s Tomb, in case you didn’t know, is located in “Ancient Egypt”.  Snags has decided he wants to go there one day.   To Ancient Egypt, that is.

There’s also a necklace featured in the movie; it serves as a key to unlock both the tomb and a curse.

Now I hadn’t given that movie much thought lately, but perhaps I should have paid closer attention. You see, Snags had mentioned something to me about necklaces and jewels, and building a tomb, and unleashing an army of the dead to guard the tomb.  Those broader aspects I remember, but the specific details, not so much.  Because what you have to understand is that Snags, like most 5 year olds (at least I think that other kids his age are like this), can talk and talk and talk and talk until your ears start to bleed.  So sometimes, I’m not proud to admit it, but, uh, I think I’ve more or less confessed to this before… sometimes I’ll nod and agree and hope he tires of the conversation before I’m bled dry.  At any rate, whenever this tomb and army of the dead issue came up, I figured he was probably just going on about the movie again.

Snags also likes to write.  If he’s not talking about a Scooby Doo movie then he’s asking how to spell something so he can write a letter about it.  Or, if he’s thinking really grandly, a book.  Sometimes he asks you to spell just a word or two, and you can breathe a sigh of relief that your work is done.  Other times he’s got whole sentences, whole catalogs, whole encyclopedias worth of things he wants you to spell out for him.  This gets tiring rather quickly, so in those instances, I demand that he tell me the thing he wants to say in its entirety so I can write or type it all out for him at once.  And then he can copy it.  Occasionally I have fallen over from the sheer exhaustion of this never-ending spelling bee and he’s been left to ask his father to finish spelling things for him.

And here I should mention that I find it disturbing that when Snags asks his father how to spell a word, his father spells it for him.  But when I ask him how to spell a word, he tells me to look it up in the dictionary.  And this has been a thorn in my side for oh, the past 14 years.  Because, I think it’s perfectly clear that if you don’t already know how to spell a word, then it’s a bit hard to find it in the dictionary.  By way of example, I have been needing to write the word cupboard a couple of times lately, but the problem was, I didn’t know how to spell it.  I typed it as cuppard, and cubbard, and every strange variation thereof, but I was so far off that my computer spellchecker was no help at all, and the dictionary wasn’t either. 

Do you want to know how I finally figured out the proper spelling?  I read the story Friends Are Sweet to my son and there it was in a sentence:

“Belle turned toward the cupboards and said, ‘Who wants to help make cupcakes for Mrs. Potts?”

And I thought, Oh!  So that’s how you spell it.  Cup board.  Okay then.  And now you see, I’ve used the word here, although this wasn’t the place I’d originally intended to use it.  But no matter. Now at least I can spell it.  So where was I?  Oh yes… 

Snags also likes to draw pictures of the things he sees.  Such as Scooby Doo.  Or the monsters from Scooby Doo.  Or the Mystery Gang from Scooby Doo.  Or… Scooby Doo.  Well, you get the picture.   He has pads and scads and reams of drawing tablets for this, but goes through them faster than you can say “Goodbye Forests!”  He tears unfinished drawings from the tablets while crying, “I need more paper!  I messed up this picture!” And he leaves mounds of half drawn pictures lying in his wake as he sneaks down to the basement to snatch a few more sheets of paper from the printer next to the computer.

And so it was that I was listening to Snags go on and on about Scooby Doo while I was cleaning up piles upon piles of drawings and writings that were strewn across the kitchen table.  We’d taken to pushing the pile back each night so that we had room to eat dinner, but it had gotten so big that I finally had to dive in and start pitching the creative works that weren’t quite masterpieces.  Which I must admit, was most of them.

So imagine my surprise as I was sorting through these papers and came across a page that said, simply “CURSE NECKLACES”.  And underneath that were several pages of drawings of necklaces in red and green crayon.

I was slightly taken aback, because surely I hadn’t spelled “Curse Necklaces” out for him, and yet, there is was.  I showed the papers to my husband who knew immediately what they were, only he said he couldn’t remember the exact curses that each curse necklace represented!

When I asked Snags about them he said, “Oh!  Those were curse necklaces I was making.  But don’t worry, they aren’t real because we aren’t going to build a tomb anymore.”
And that’s when I realized that the last conversation about tombs and armies of the dead might have been about more than just the movie.  And so I said to Snags, (you know, just to be sure) “I think, if we aren’t going to build a tomb, then we won’t need the army of the dead hanging around here either, right?”  To which he confirmed the army of the dead would not be necessary after all.  And I’m pretty certain that the neighbors will be relieved over that.

3 Comments

Filed under humor, Scooby Doo

August 4, 2007 · 5:40 pm

Karma Strikes Back

My husband ran over his foot with the lawn mower.

Yes, you read that right.  My husband ran over his foot with the lawn mower.  I cut the back of our yard on Thursday night, and my husband went out about 7:00 on Friday night to cut the front and the sides. He was out there about 5 or 10 minutes when I heard the mower stop and I thought to go out there and tell him something I’d been meaning to talk to him about, but before I could, he was lurching toward our sliding glass door.  He didn’t look well so I opened the door and he said “My Foot!” and pointed down at his foot where the front of his shoe was missing.  In the tangle of sock threads and blood I couldn’t tell about his toes, if they were still there or not, but by then I’d sort of closed my eyes anyway.

I asked if he wanted me to call an ambulance but he said he wanted me to drive him to the hospital. I parked the car in a handicapped spot, because hey, that was indeed the case, even if we didn’t have the sticker, and I ran and found a wheelchair and brought it back for him. 

Now you might think that when you walk in to a hospital and scream “LAWN MOWER RAN OVER FOOT” that it would spring people into action, but that’s apparently only the case on television.

The emergency room did full triage which really, I think, could have waited considering there weren’t many people there and certainly none besides my husband that looked like they’d run over themselves with a lawn mower.  Someone bandaged my husband’s foot which I think was only so they wouldn’t get blood on the floor, and then someone else asked if he’d lost any toes and when we said we didn’t know she un-bandaged it to take a look.  Then she wrapped it up again.  I kept my back turned the entire time.  After that we had the requisite stay in the E.R. waiting room where my husband was in obvious pain and I tried to call his family on my cell phone.

Word to the wise: put every phone number of everyone you’ve ever known into your cell phone.  I had my sister-in-law’s home number which she wasn’t answering.  I had my husband’s parent’s home number which is presently not working because stupid VOIP phone company went out of business and left all of their customers without phone service.  Until they get it restored by a real phone company, perhaps one that’s been in business since, oh, I don’t know, Alexander Graham Bell invented the phone, they can only be reached on their cell phones.  Only I didn’t have their cell phone numbers.  Nor did I have phone numbers for brother number 1 or brother number 2.  And my husband, who was preoccupied with his pain, couldn’t seem to remember any of these missing numbers.

After 50,000 tries, my sister-in-law’s answering machine finally picked up and I left a message saying “You’re brother is in the E.R. He RAN OVER HIS FOOT WITH THE LAWN MOWER.  Call me back!”  She called back 20 minutes later and said, I kid you not, “Awww!  How is he?  Is he in pain? Awww!  Poor thing!” before hanging up.  At which point I stared at the phone in my hand and thought WTF?  WTF?  WTF?!

Because it seems to me a more appropriate response would have been “OMG! OMG! OMG!  What hospital?  Will he ever walk again?  I’m on my way!”  But apparently, “Awww!.  Poor thing!” is the correct response when it’s your own brother who’s possibly lost an appendage. 

Eventually the hospital workers called our turn and put my husband up in a little curtained area and a Physician’s Assistant came by and said he’d order an X ray to see if any bones were cut off and then he’d clean and suture him up, if you know, there was anything left to suture.

Then he went to the next curtain over to help the man who had some dread skin infection and start him on three different types of antibiotics.  While listening to all this I wanted to scream “Holy Hell! Treat us first!  Don’t get that nasty bacteria on your hands and transfer it to us!  The mower nearly took my husband’s toe, don’t let some flesh eating bacteria finish the work!” 

Because hospitals, it turns out, are a perfect place to feed my neurosis.  My teeny tiny itty bitty germ phobia went into major overdrive and I tried to stand in the middle of the room holding my breath in case any of Bacteria Man’s germs should float over and down into my lungs.  And I tried not to touch anything, but damn it gets tiring standing for four hours straight.

The x-ray, according to the PA showed the bones were okay, but he said he might have to cut what was left of my husband’s toenail away.  They gave my husband a Loratab and some Novocain shots in his toe and set to work.  The PA cut away half of the toenail and then sat there contemplating that he might remove the rest of it to because “the last thing you want as it grows in is to get an ingrown toenail” and because also, the more work he did, the more he could bill us.  So he took the entire toenail off.  If you think you’ve seen that in a movie somewhere, I think you’re right, only I believe it was finger nails and the victim wasn’t given any Novocain.  All I can say is that it’s bloody work and horrid to watch.  I asked the PA how far into medical school do you start having to do things like that, because I was wondering how much money one might have invested before they realize they just can’t stomach the work.  He said that was okay, you don’t quit, you just change specialties.

While this was happening my son and I played tic-tac-toe and hangman where my son had to guess the letters to the words “lawn mower” and the PA thought that was hilariously funny for some reason I still can’t understand.

Now, when he was finished removing my husband’s toe nail, he set about sewing up the end of his toe.  Some of the stitches will dissolve on their own and some of them will have to be removed at a later date.

After that he started trimming the toenail he had removed and then he shoved it back onto my husband’s toe!  Now personally, I believe that’s very much like getting your hair cut too short and then scotch taping strands of it back together because you’ve changed your mind about the whole thing.  But the PA said it was so the nail bed would remain open and hopefully a new toenail would grow back.  Without any nail there, the nail bed might close up and quit. Or so he said. I thought about this a lot and came to the conclusion that I think he’s wrong and I think he made a mistake.  Runners lose toenails all the time, and I’m a runner and I should know, and I’ve never heard of us shoving the lost toenail back into place, but then I thought, well…. I’m not a doctor so what do I know?  But then I realized the guy was only a PA and that means HE WASN’T A DOCTOR EITHER!  Holy shit!

The nurse who bandaged my husband’s foot before we left asked ”How big was the tractor? and my husband said “It wasn’t a tractor, it was a lawn mower.”  So she asked how far it fell and he said, “What?  It didn’t fall on me; I was cutting the grass and ran over my foot!”  And only then did she look properly horrified about the whole damned thing.

Which now in hindsight makes me wonder if the PA thought a lawn mower had fallen on his foot and perhaps the whole toe nail would die anyway, sort of how when you hit your thumb with a hammer, and perhaps that’s why he removed it.  Or maybe he just always wanted to be able to say he once removed a toe nail and now he can.

I don’t know how it goes where you live but from this incident I’ve determined that here, Karma doesn’t put up with much shit.  A friend of ours is a “safety officer” for his job and for some reason, we find this exceptionally funny.  He was once hit by a car as he was crossing the street to his job and so it came somewhat as a surprise when he was actually promoted to the position of “Safety Officer” while still on crutches and in a neck brace.  Part of his job apparently entails sending out daily emails to the company’s staff with little pithy sayings like “Look both ways before you cross the street or you might not live to look at all”  or “Wear eye protection so you’ll continue to have eyes” and one of my personal favorites that I asked him to forward to me because I just couldn’t believe he’d actually sent such a message was, “Anger is only one letter away from Danger”.

Nearly everyone I know has been making fun of my friend and his daily notices. Earlier in the week I had been about to cross the street with him and another friend, and I was going to cross against the light because it’s the city and everyone does it, and because there weren’t any cars coming.  I stepped off the curb and my other friend did too, but our pal the safety officer, did not.  My friend then stepped back onto the curb and said “If the safety officer isn’t crossing then neither am I!” So then I stayed back too because, I don’t know, maybe he was allowed, like Bobby Brady, to hand out violation notices of some sort and I didn’t want to get in trouble. 

My friend the safety officer stood there and simply said “It hurts.” And I thought he was commenting on our teasing, like maybe we’d hurt his feelings but then he pointed at the approaching car and said, “If you get hit by a car, it hurts.”   Which, of course, he knows all about. 

The next day, he sent out this notice: “If you think these daily notes are a pain….try a leg fracture or a head injury.”  My husband and I had a really good laugh over that one and then BAM!  LAWN MOWER OVER FOOT!  So it seems Karma had had quite enough.  Either that or our friend the safety officer has a extraordinary hearing and a voodoo doll.

Four hours after our arrival, my husband was discharged from the hospital.  As we were leaving, there was a man in a wheelchair with his foot wrapped in the same manner my husband’s had been wrapped, and he too had blood seeping through the bandages in the place where his big toe should be.  I said to him, “Oh my God!  Were you using our lawn mower too?” because although I’d pulled the mower back behind our fence (because for some reason, I didn’t want anyone to steal the cursed thing), I hadn’t actually locked the gate and here was a guy who looked suspiciously like he’d had the exact same accident.  He swore he hadn’t been messing with our mower.  Rather, he claimed to have dropped some sort of cabinet upon his foot.  So I figured that explains how the nurses had gotten confused about whether my husband had mowed his own foot off or merely dropped something on it.

This morning, while my husband sat in bed with his foot bandaged and elevated, I went out to finish cutting the rest of the lawn.  I was going to say I went out to finish what he started but then I though that might be tempting fate again so I decided against that.  I’m not sure why I even bothered with the lawn because with this dry spell, it’s hard to tell which of the grass is growing and which is merely pretending to grow.

Also, it was hard not to stare at the scene of the accident, the place where he backed into the fence and his body stopped, but the mower did not.  I found myself looking about for bits of chewed up shoe and slivers of toe, but that was like looking for a needle in a haystack, and it was nearly one-hundred degrees out, so I gave up and set about cutting the grass. 

It’s kind of hard to believe the mower got my husband’s foot like that because I have to say it does a rather shitty job on the lawn.  You have to go at certain blades of grass and clover 6 ways to Sunday to mow them down, yet it ripped up his sneaker like it was a necktie in a paper shredder.  All I can figure is our mower has a hankering for old pairs of New Balances and that’s why I wore my big fat hiking boots today.

The moral of the story is thus:  Don’t mock safety officers and wear steel toed boots when you cut the grass.

15 Comments

Filed under accident, hospital, karma, lawn mower, life, safety

August 3, 2007 · 11:06 am

The Office

I recently had the opportunity to attend a 3-day seminar.  I’d been told by someone whose opinion I value, and who attended the seminar before me, that it was a pretty good one and well worth my time.  It was, he said, rather enjoyable.

Only now I think my friend must have been hit in the back of the head by a baseball bat and gotten all the sense knocked completely out of him.  Because the seminar was awful.  It was a nightmare in that “OMG this is so dull I think I’m going to die!” nightmare kind of way.  And most unfortunately, the whole thing was not a dream.  Unless it’s possible to have dreams that continue for 3 days straight?

I know it sounds cliché but still, I would have had more fun watching paint dry for the rest of eternity than sit through this seminar for three days.  Nonetheless, I was in it for the duration.

The seminar leader had lots of anecdotes to share and he insisted we go round the room and introduce ourselves.

One woman was named Loretta only he thought she had said “Lorrette” and he said “I have a sister named Lorette.  I wasn’t sure if you said Lorretta with an “A” or “Lorrette” with an “E” but I’ve never met any one else with the name Lorrette so I thought “Wow!  This is the first time I’ve met another Lorette!”  Only he was wrong because the woman said, “Well, it’s Loret-TA, with an A, so…”

When he got to me I expected him to say “Oh, one of my aunt’s is named Belle only she spells it B-E-L-L.  You have an extra E on the end I guess, but WOW! I’ve never met another person named Belle…” And I was all ready to say to him “Okay, YOU are a total and complete ding dong.”  Only I didn’t get a chance to because he didn’t have much to add after I’d introduced myself.  And he didn’t have anything to say about my name.

The seminar mostly entailed the speaker droning on and on and occasionally directing us to a particular page in our seminar binder.  Then once we’d found the correct page he’d read it out loud to us, only in a Cliff’s Note’s version, skipping most of what was written and emphasizing anything that happened to be printed in the binder in BOLD.  Because clearly, those of us who signed up for this seminar can’t read.  Or rather, we can’t read between the lines where it said “This will bore you off your ass to the point that you’ll contemplate pinching your nipples in the 3-ring binder just to wake yourself up.” 

At some point I happened to look up and noticed that the speaker was looking at me and nodding fast with raised eyebrows in a “Yes? Yes?” kind of way as if he were confirming something.  Because I was only half paying attention I stared back at him and started to worry.  Had I inadvertently agreed to something?  Had I offered to meet him back at the hotel bar after we wrapped up for the day?  I didn’t think I had, so why was he looking at me like that?  Had I drifted off, fallen asleep?  Had I been caught SNORING?

But then I noticed he was doing the same thing to all the other attendees.  In fact, he raised his eyebrows and nodded his head swiftly up and down after each thing he said, as if to emphasize a point.  The more I watched, the more I realized that thing he did was a tic more or less and that actually this guy had an uncanny resemblance to Steve Carell from the T.V. show The Office.  He was quite tan too.  Like maybe Steve Carell had been hanging out at the tanning salon with George Hamilton.

Once I figured out he looked like Steve Carell I spent the better part of the first afternoon just under the surface of mirth, trying but sometimes failing, not to laugh out loud as I imagined him veering off topic and spouting something inane and politically incorrect.  Perhaps, I thought, he’d tell us how all the women in the class ought to pinch their nipples in their 3 ring-binders to liven the place up.  Only he didn’t.

The second day I imaged we could put on a live version of an episode of The Office and I twisted in my seat and began to search around the room for suitable folks to play the roles of various characters on the show.  I decided I would play the part of Pam or maybe I’d let the lady with the long hair do that and I’d be the person who holds the video camera that everyone talks into on the show.  That way I wouldn’t have to touch up my makeup or memorize any lines.

After that I imagined we were being addressed by Evan Almighty.  Only I couldn’t take that line of thinking very far because I haven’t actually seen the movie.  My musings were limited to the bit scenes I’d caught in the movie’s trailer.

On the third day I racked my brain for other Steve Carell movies but could only come up with The 40 –Year- Old Virgin.  That didn’t work for me because that guy, well I kind of rooted for him in that movie.  He was geeky, sure, but he was endearing.  This guy standing in front of us was just boring.  I couldn’t empathize.

Finally, I resorted to the only tactic I had left.  I clamped the 3-ring binder down hard on my left nipple.  I pretended it was an accident and I left the room in search of a band-aid and some pain killers.  I couldn’t find any band aids but I did find the coffee cart and got myself a hunk of chocolate.  I ate that slowly and by the time I returned to the seminar room, Steve Carell was wrapping it up and everyone got to go home.

Now that I’m done telling you my story I’m going to call my friend who suggested the seminar in the first place and see how his head is feeling.  I’m thinking that to have recommended that seminar he had to have been injured pretty badly.  I wonder if his head hurts as much as my left nipple does?

4 Comments

Filed under humor, office, seminar, Steve Carell

August 2, 2007 · 12:08 am

My New White Skirt

I bought this new skirt.  It’s white, it’s bright, it’s summery.  It falls just above my knees.  The perfect length, I think, for a summer skirt.  It’s not too long and not too short.  Too long and I’d look like a grandmother.  Too short, I’d look like a hooker.  I can even do cartwheels in it if I want.  If I could.  Well, you know, if I could do a cartwheel without ending up on a stretcher in the back of an ambulance being hauled off to the ER for breaking my spine.  Because I’m not that limber.  I’m gymnastically challenged.  And almost 40.  So I don’t do cartwheels.  But if I did, nobody would see my underwear because technically, my white skirt is a skort; it has shorts sewn in underneath, but it looks like a skirt on the outside.  So I don’t need to wear a slip and I don’t have sit with my knees pressed together (nothing to see there folks, shorts in the way, sorry). It also lays well, has a flat front, and so far, I haven’t stained it. Best of all, it looks good on me!

There’s just one… tiny little… totally irritating problem.  What’s the problem, you ask?  This skort has a side zipper.  And 3 buttons, on the side, over the zipper.  Two of the buttons are the hidden kind, hidden under the waistband on the inside of the skort.  Under the best of circumstances hidden buttons like these can be a little… tricky.  Move them to the side of the skirt and they may as well be a combination lock of some sort.  The third button is your run-of-the-mill “button on the outside” kind of button.  Still, it’s on the side of the skort as well.

The side zipper is a great design feature in that it doesn’t interfere with the lines of the skirt.  But it’s awful when you have to use the bathroom.  It’s even worse when you (and by you I mean me) have to go really, really, really badly.  Like when you’ve sat at your desk working and pretending you don’t have to pee so you can finish this one thing and then that one thing and just one more phone call and that other little thing…  Only THEN it’s suddenly an EMERGENCY not unlike those commercials where they sing… “gotta go gotta go gotta go right now…”

I mean, really! Have you ever tried to unzip a side zipper when you are doubled over with your legs crossed trying not to wet yourself as you hop up and down?  It’s much easier to undo entrapments like side zippers and hidden buttons when you are standing still, standing calmly, and standing erect.  That is to say, when you are not doubled over in an attempt to kink your urinary hose so it won’t spill the contents of your bladder all over the floor.

If this was a skirt, I’d be able to yank the whole thing up with one hand, shove down my undies with my other hand, and just… pee.  Ah, the relief, you know?

But nooooo.  Since there are shorts here, the only way out is down, and the only way down is to undo the multitude of buttons and then the zipper on the side.  But I’m short and maybe a few pounds too wide, and not so limber (can’t do cartwheels, remember?). I’ve found that turning to the side to unzip and unbutton this pretty little skort really seems to require the skills of a circus performer, or a magician. A contortionist, perhaps. 

I’m kicking myself now for not getting in on the yoga craze.  It might have helped.  I could start now, I suppose, but I imagine by the time I got limber enough to twist my upper torso sideways and undo this skort in a jiffy, Fall would be upon us, or maybe even Winter, and well, I can’t wear a white skort then, can I?  That would be a clear and utter violation of the fashion rules and I certainly don’t want to be fined. 

So imagine, there I was, having waited so long to use the facilities that I was desperate.  I bolted down the hall, praying not to run into anybody looking to stop me with a question.  Yet at the same time, praying I would run into someone I could accost and demand they undo the buttons and the zipper for me. I wouldn’t have asked them to pull the skort down, mind you, just unhook all the fastenings.  Similar to how you might have someone help you unzip the back of a dress, you know?  But I was at work, and that wouldn’t have been appropriate. 
 
Still as I half walked, half ran down the hallway I envisioned the whole scene in my mind:  barking to someone “Help!  Unzip me now!  FAST. Come on, come on… Hurry up, Franklin! If you don’t make it snappy I’m going to pee right here, right now, and the puddle will be so large it will seep onto your shoes!”  Only there was nobody there.  The hallway was deserted. 

Too bad for me, the bathroom stalls weren’t.  There are three of them and like some cosmic joke they were all taken!  So I stood there, cross legged, hopping ever so slightly, bent nearly in half hoping and praying and muttering to myself as I unfastened and unzipped and very nearly removed the entire skort “hold it… hold it… I told you that you should have gone an hour ago…”  And then, at the last second, a stall opened and I dashed inside and vowed to never again buy something with a side zipper and hidden buttons.  Or, given the clothing designs these days, if that’s not possible, I’ll look for a skort with depends sewn in, rather than shorts.  Too bad that still won’t enable me to do a cartwheel. 

4 Comments

Filed under bathroom, buttons, gymnastics, humor, life, skirt, skort, summer clothing, white skirt, zippers

July 31, 2007 · 12:02 am

The Literal Side of Things

Webster’s defines the word “literal” as “in accordance with, conforming to, or upholding the primary or exact meaning of a word or words”.

There are some people who take everything literally.  Like Greg.  Remember Greg from the Brady Bunch?  Remember the episode where he wanted to use “exact words” and it back fired on him?  What?  You don’t remember that episode?  Tell me then, just what were you watching after school back in the 70s and 80s?  The Brady Bunch was in syndication and it ran on nearly every television channel there was, so I don’t know how you could have missed that.  But anyway…

There are those people who take things literally, and there are those who just…. don’t.

I’d say I tend to fall into the latter category but my son, at age 5, he falls into the former, like Greg.  Or, at least he does some of the time.  It might depend on the situation or on who’s doing the talking.  I’m still trying to figure out the pattern.

He doesn’t seem to take ME literally when I tell him that it’s time for bed or that he needs to clean up his toys.  At those times, he apparently thinks I’m joking.  Half the time he doesn’t even acknowledge that I’ve spoken.  Certainly moms aren’t serious about bedtime or toys, right?  However… 

Last November as we prepared to visit Disney World, I told my son all about the Haunted Mansion ride.  I told him how, when I was a kid I used to like to go through the haunted mansion and how, at one point on the ride, the car rolls past a mirror and a green ghost sits in your lap.  I told him you had to be sitting in the middle seat for this to happen.

So when we got to Disney my son was all HURRYUPHURRYUPLETSRIDETHEHAUNTEDMANSIONNOW!  and so we rode the Haunted Mansion and when we came upon the mirror, the one where the green ghost was to appear, my son would not look up, he would not raise his eyes.  I wondered if he was scared.  Up until that point I’d been busy looking all around and thinking about how this or that aspect of the ride had changed since I last rode it.  I hadn’t noticed my son as much.  Had he been staring downward the whole ride?  I didn’t think so.  He wasn’t crying.  But still, he wouldn’t look in the mirror.

That was the first time we rode it.  He did the same thing the second time, and the third time, and the forth time.  I couldn’t figure it out because he assured me he wasn’t frightened.   So if he wasn’t scared, then why wouldn’t he look in the mirror? 

Eventually, he complained.   “I sat in the middle seat like you said!” he grumped.  And I’ve looked in my lap EVERY. TIME. But I never saw the ghost!  Why won’t it sit on my lap?”

That’s when it hit me.  Snags had told the truth.  He wasn’t scared of the ghost, he was looking for it in his lap, when in reality, the image is projected onto the mirror and he needed to look there if he was going to see the green ghost sitting with him.

I explained again how the ride worked but made it clear that the only way he was going to see the ghost was to look in the mirror, not at his lap.  At the end of our trip, on our final ride through the Haunted Mansion, he looked in the mirror and smiled with awe and relief: the ghost was there!  On his lap!

Most recently we spent a day in Philadelphia.  We saw many things and did many things, including taking a tour with Ride the Ducks.  The ducks, if you aren’t familiar with them, are vehicles that look like a boat on wheels, which is, actually, what they are.  They tour the city on land, driving up and down streets and then they stop, the driver moves aside to let a Captain on, and they drive the duck down a boat ramp into the Delaware River for a short water tour.  It’s at that point the bus turns into a boat.

The tour includes Wacky Quackers; they are plastic duck bills that you can blow into and generate a quacking sound.  Each person is issued their own Wacky Quacker as they board the duck at the start of the tour.  Snags was happily quacking away as the driver boarded and he stopped to ask my son if he would like to be his helper on this tour.  I wondered if maybe there were going to be rules about quacking and perhaps Snags was going to be the example of what not to do.  Maybe Rule Number 1 was going to be:  No over-exuberant quacking! 

Instead, the driver called my son to the front of the bus and asked him, “When we go in the river, if you see water coming up through the floor of the boat here, what do you think that means?”

And my son, little smarty that he his, replied, “It means we have a leak.” 

“Right!”   The driver said.  Then he pointed to the floor again and pointed out all these little handles along the floor that seemed to open hatches every so often.  Trapdoors, if you will.  The driver told my son that his job would be that of “Cork Boy” and he was to watch for water seeping through the floor and if he saw any he’d have to open the hatches and go underneath, find the leak, and plug it with a cork.  He handed my son a large cork to do this with, then sent him back down the aisle to us.

The tour started.  We drove past Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell.  We saw the Betsy Ross House and a firehouse museum.  We rode down South Street and saw the famous (yuck) gum trees, and other tourists, and a tattoo shop, and Condom Kingdom!  We headed back to the historic district and rode along Society Hill and saw famous churches and other spectacular Philadelphia sites. 

Then we splashed down into the river.  After a few minutes I started to worry that my son might be sick.  He wasn’t looking around at the sites.  He didn’t see the Penn Arch landing which is famous only for the fact that it’s builder went bankrupt.  He didn’t see Camden, NJ across the river.  He didn’t see the Navy ships or the historic boat with three large masts.  He didn’t look at the building where Will Smith lives when he’s in town.  He wasn’t even sitting up.  Rather, he was very nearly strewn across the seat, his head near my husband’s lap.  Concerned, I asked my husband if Snags was okay.  He assured me he was.  Snags was only looking down, at the floor.  The entire time we were on the river he stared at that floor.  He was looking for leaks.

Thankfully, the boat was sound.  There were no leaks and we returned to dry land and the end of the tour without incident.  Before we disembarked, the driver called Snags to the front and thanked him for his steadfast watchfulness.  “You saved our lives,” he told Snags.  “Or, you would have if we’d had a leak.”  Snags turned over the cork and the driver gave him a parting gift.  A little rubber duck wearing a life vest.  And Snags, he beamed!  And by that I mean he smiled broadly.  You know, just in case you are one of those people who take everything literally and thought I meant he was emitting light. Although… I have to say his smile was pretty bright!

5 Comments

Filed under boat, Delaware River, Disney World, family, ghosts, Haunted Mansion, Liberty Bell, life, literal, Philadelphia, Ride the Ducks, The Brady Bunch, Wacky Quacker

July 29, 2007 · 11:37 pm

Faster Than A…

How fast is fast?  Maybe it depends what you’re measuring.  Or who you’re asking.

Surely, at some point, you’ve had a passenger in your car tell you to “SLOW DOWN! You’re driving too fast!” 

No?  Okay, maybe it’s just me.  But then I AM used to driving on the interstate everyday and I’m just trying to keep up with the rest of the traffic, officer.  And here’s a little hint I learned from a bus driver.  Sometimes, the slow lanes, especially the ones that merge, actually move way faster than the far left lane, the one everyone dubs “the fast lane”.  Try it sometime.  Only, not on MY highway, okay?  I don’t want EVERYONE to know my secrets.

But I digress, because this isn’t about traffic.  It’s about my son’s perception of how to measure the passing of time, and the quickness with which events can take place.  We were in the car, and I was driving him to school (okay, so maybe this is about traffic) and he was, as usual, talking at me about his current favorite Disney characters from Beauty and the Beast (and yes, I did mean to say “at me”). 

Apparently, the Beast and Belle, along with Cogsworth and Lumiere, (if you’re unclear on whose these characters are, I suggest you rent the movie) were up to some kind of shenanigans in my son’s bedroom (and I apologize here for not giving more details, but sometimes I have to tune out from his stories, especially when I’m driving).  If you’re a parent, his teacher, a neighbor, or a relative who’s spent any time with the kid, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

But anyway, apparently, whatever these characters were up to, they did it all very fast.  “BAM! Fast like that!”  “Faster,” my son proclaimed, “than you can count to 22!  Faster than you can cook!”

Faster than I can cook? “Faster than I can cook what?” I wondered.  Are we talking a seven course meal or Kraft Dinner? Am I watching a pot boil or can I use the microwave?  Because it makes a difference here, it really does.

And so I timed myself.  I can count to 22, speaking at a moderately fast pace, but still slowly enough to enunciate correctly, in 12 seconds.  That’s pretty fast, I think.  Speaking even faster, still believing  most people would be able to understand me, I can count to 22 in a mere 7 seconds.  That’s a whole 5 seconds faster!

You’re not impressed.  I can tell.  But look, I never claimed to be the speed talk guy who reads the fine print on television commercials.  That guy?  Now he’s fast!

Back to my original point though.  Whatever those characters were up to, if it took them somewhere in the range of 7 to 12 seconds to pull it off, that’s pretty good.  I think it’s fast enough to avoid getting caught in the act by most folks.  But obviously, not fast enough to get by my son.  Because obviously, he saw them do this, and not only that, he timed them!  After all, he described to me a way to measure their quickness!  If he was a super hero, maybe he’d be “Stopwatch Boy – The Kid That Never Misses a Trick!”.

Anyway, I guess my real point is  (and no, I didn’t see this coming either. I thought this was going to lead back to traffic), with kids that quick (and yes, all children are so quick that NOTHING gets by them), it explains why parents these days have so little oppurtunity for intimacy.  It’s not like we can grab a quickie, because well, we just aren’t THAT fast.  

2 Comments

Filed under Beauty and the Beast, driving, humor, kids, parenting, quickie, sex, time

July 27, 2007 · 12:11 am

Blue Denim

Thank you, Mom.  Thank you for buying me my first pair of Levi’s when I was in the 5th grade.  My friend Ann had a pair, my friend Valerie had a pair, and even my friend Kathy had a pair, I think.  I didn’t know what Levi’s were exactly, but I knew one thing:  those pants, they wrinkled behind the knees!  I guess they got all wrinkled when you sat down and your legs were bent; like when sitting in class behind a desk all day.  But the best part was, when you stood up, the wrinkles stayed there and that was cool!  Very cool.  At least to me.  My pants, not so much.  Because you see, Toughskins from Sears were not cool.  I don’t think they even qualified as jeans.  Or at least they didn’t in 1978. Certainly they were not blue denim.  They were all large and roomy and funny colored (burnt umber?) and funny patterned (paisley tweed?) and they were made of some kind of strange material that wouldn’t wrinkle behind the knees even if you sewed them into little “behind the knee pleats”.  They may be different now.  I don’t know.   I haven’t checked Sears lately because of that whole thing when I was in the 6th grade and store security thought I stole I bottle of nail polish, only I hadn’t, and I was scarred for life from the accusation and the meeting with the lawyers and all that, so I avoid the store like I avoid the plague, whenever and wherever I can. 

I am pretty sure though, given the school cliques and fashion fads of the late 70s and early 80s that if you hadn’t bought me that pair of Levi’s, I’d have been shunned forever once I hit middle school.  I’d have been one of the nerdy kids without friends who dressed poorly not because they were poor but because their parents didn’t realize fashion was becoming the judge and jury of their kid’s lives.  As it was, I stared at my friend’s backsides the entire Spring of 5th grade, both at and below their waists, desperately trying to figure out just what exactly, they were wearing.  I didn’t understand that Levi’s were properly categorized as blue jeans.  I didn’t understand that Levi’s was a brand.  I didn’t know about brands.  I knew about pants.  Some pants wrinkled behind the knees and some (mine) did not.  It took me a while to understand the word was Levi’s.  I described it to you as a word on a brown square on the back of the jeans above the pocket and that the jeans wrinkled behind the knees and OMG!  I had to have a pair.  Please? Please? Please?!  And eventually I worked up the nerve to ask a friend where she got them and she told me, and I told you, and you took me there and angels sang the Halleluiah because now my pants would wrinkle behind the knees too! 

And from there I was pretty much set.  I came to understood the power of  brands just as they became important.  I learned about things like Izod and Calvin Klein and Gloria Vanderbilt and Sassoon Jeans and Docksiders and Vans and O.P. (who the hell thought corduroy shorts would be a good idea?) and I had just enough of these fashion essentials to get by.  Just enough to fit in.

But that first pair of Levi’s.  I wore them out!  I wore them until they were two sizes too small and threadbare and even then I couldn’t bear to part with them.  I cut the legs off and wore them as shorts for just one more summer and then eventually, I sewed up the bottom leg holes and stuffed them with old rags and clothes that didn’t fit and sewed up the waist and I made a pillow out of those Levi’s.  It was the heaviest pillow in the world, considering I’d stuffed it full of my old Toughskins, but it was mine.  A cool pillow that looked like a pair of Levi’s denim shorts.  My Levi’s. Thanks, Mom. 

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Author’s note:  This essay is an entry in July’s group writing project over at MommaBlogga.  This month’s theme is “Thanks, Mom.” and participants were asked to write about something they are grateful to their mothers for.  A winner will be picked at random to recieve a $30 Amazon gift card.  Go ahead and participate.  You can win!  I know it’s possible because last month, I was the lucky winner!  Yes, Really!  Look here.  So you see?  All you have to do is enter and this month, the winner could be you!  But, uh, I hope it’s me again 😉

16 Comments

Filed under blue jeans, cliques, fads, fashion, group writing project, Levi's, life, middle school, mom, Sears, thanks, Toughskins

July 25, 2007 · 12:04 am

Dead Santa

Tell me, just WHAT do you say when your 5 year old child, riding in the backseat of the car asks you out of the blue, “Mom, does Santa Claus die? And what do they do if he dies? Do they get a replacement for him? How quickly can they get a replacement for him? And what about Mrs. Claus? Does she die? Or can Santa just live forever? How could he be that old to live forever?”

You can only stall for so long. Eventually, you have to answer the question.

After I did as much hemming and hawing as I thought I could get away with, I responded with something like: “Wow! Um… That’s a good question! I never thought about it. I mean, I don’t know. I suppose he might live forever, I mean, he does have Christmas magic. But then, he’d be the only person around that could live forever, so maybe he does die. But if he dies, I mean, they never announce it on the news. At least, I’ve never heard anything on the news about Santa dying.  I’ve never read anything in the paper about it.  And I watch the news and read the paper a lot, so I think I would have found out about that if it happened, you know?  But Santa’s been around as long as I can remember. I mean, they’ve always had Christmas, as far as I know.  I never heard anyone say they didn’t have a Christmas when they were a kid.  I know he was around when your grandparents, and great-grandparents, and great-great-great grandparents were kids. But some of those folks are dead now, so I guess that would make him really old… Or maybe he does die but they find a replacement before Christmas and they just don’t tell us about it so people won’t be worrying about whether there’s going to be a Christmas…” and then, just for that extra special touch, I added, “You must be the smartest kid in the world to ask that. I mean, I don’t think many kids even think about that to ask. I mean, I’ve never thought about it before. Wow! So, um… How was your day at school today?”

Really, I tell you, it’s hard to come up with an answer when your head is spinning from the shock and you haven’t been given a copy of “The Parent’s Guide to Answering Difficult Questions”.  And even if you had a copy, it’d be a little difficult to look up the answer while you’re driving.

After we got home, I distracted my son from his thoughts of a dying Santa with some comic relief in the form of Sponge Bob cartoons on Nick Jr.  Then I pulled my husband into the garage where I hissed “HE ASKED ME IF SANTA CLAUS DIES?!”, and I proceeded to tell him the rest of this horrifying exchange. When I finished, my husband said, (rather smugly, I might add), “Santa doesn’t die, he RETIRES and he trains a new Santa in his place. Didn’t you know that? That’s what all the Santa’s in the malls are, Santa’s in training, hoping one of them will get picked to be his replacement when he retires. That’s what you should have told him…”

And I’m thinking, “No. I didn’t know that. And since you’re so damn smart, YOU answer the question next time.”  

And there will be a next time.  My son was quietly playing the other day, and I heard him talking to himself, something about babies in tummies, and then something that sounded suspiciously like “and the mom eats a babysicle… ”   I closed my eyes and pretended that I didn’t hear him.  But when it comes up again, I’m going to hem and haw and say, “Hmm… I’m not sure…”  Then, I’m handing him the cell phone and say, “Here, call your dad, he’ll know!”

Merry Christmas in July!

14 Comments

Filed under Christmas, Christmas in July, death, humor, kids, life, parenting, Santa Claus

July 23, 2007 · 12:09 am

Different Monsters

Who were the monsters that you believed in as a kid?  Or rather, where did they hide and how could they get you?

For my son and I, they must be different. 

When I was a kid, I was concerned about monsters in my closet, under my bed, and in the basement.  I don’t remember the monsters having a particular form or face, nothing I could describe anyway.  If pressed, I’d have to say they were more of a force, a cold, evil air.  And I don’t ever recall asking my parents to check my room for monsters, because I had my own methods of protecting myself from the beings that lurked in the dark.

To keep the monsters from coming out of my closet at night, I piled the decorative pillows from my bed in front of my bi-fold closet doors.  Somehow, I believed, the pillows would be just heavy enough to stop anything residing inside from pushing its way outside.  And so, any monsters who had hunkered down in my closet hoping to attack me during the night would be trapped there until dawn when I made my bed and removed the pillows.  They wouldn’t dare stagger out by the light of day.  

To avoid the cold and brittle hands of the monsters under my bed, the ones who were surely waiting to reach out and clasp their boney fingers around my ankles, I perfected a gymnastics move worthy of an Olympic gold.  I’d turn out the light by the switch near my bedroom door, take three running steps then leap, eyes closed and arms outstrecthed onto my bed.  One time I leapt so high and so far that I actually jumped over my bed entirely, landing in a heap on the floor on the other side.  And then I had to scramble to pick myself up off the floor in the dark, and get back into bed before I could be dragged into that small dark space where the monsters hid.

I had, of course, a backup means of protecting myself in case that wall of pillows failed.  In case one of the monsters was strong enough to push their way out of the closet after all.  I slept with my entire body, head and all, under the covers, the edges held secure around my face by the weight of my head.  And while I might suffocate and die from breathing in my own exhalations all night long, at least my death would not be at the hands of a monster lurching out of my closet or inching his way out from under my bed.

Beasts in the basement I simply outran.  I hated the basement, even when it was finished with carpeting, lighting, and comfortable furniture.  I could manage the basement just fine if I was playing down there, or watching TV, otherwise distracted.  But I knew the moment I started up those basement steps that whatever hid down there would come after me and pull me backwards unless I ran up those steps at the speed of light.  Luckily, I always made a successful escape, emerging from the basement in one piece, but fairly out of breath.

And dare I admit that I still, to this day,  find myself, on occasion, running up the basement steps, or up the stairs to the 2nd floor of my house at night.  When the lights behind me are turned off, THAT’S when the monsters come out.

And while I am content to sleep with my head outside the covers, and without pillows (or anything else, for that matter) piled in front of my closet door, I cannot sleep unless my bedroom door is firmly shut.  I cannot comfortably nap anywhere besides my bed either, if I am home alone.  The family room is too large a space, the kitchen and hallways opening off it might let in an army of monsters while I rest.  But my bedroom, with the door shut, is a safe fortress.

The monsters that occasionally haunt my son are those he sees on TV.  Mostly vampires, witches, werewolves, mummies, and other creatures (The Creeper!) that he’s seen on Scooby Doo. 

Interestingly enough, these monsters don’t haunt his closet or hide under his bed.  Mostly, he believes, they live in haunted castles or creepy farmhouses, and luckily, there aren’t any of those in our neighborhood.  But my son  sleeps with a few lights on and, to my chagrin, he prefers to sleep with his bedroom door OPEN!  Doesn’t he know, I wonder, that monsters can slip in much easier when they don’t have to turn the door knob?  I cannot, of course, point this most obvious and important fact out to him.  And so, after he falls asleep, I turn out his lights and shut both his bedroom door, and mine.

9 Comments

Filed under life, monsters, Scooby Doo, sleeping