Such a Coward…
I’m feeling crappy today because of a dream I had last night that I just can’t shake. It’s one of my best dreams, cinematically. Character is what I have a problem with.
It starts out with me climbing hundreds of steps up a mountain. It’s a setting that looks like a mashup of The Temple of Doom and the Swiss Family Robinson treehouse. Rope footbridges overlooking lush jungle growth around a marble cliffside. Beneath the foilage, five stories of heiroglyphs stamped into white marble.
There are other people like me with their cameras, but no one I know. It must be some sort of remote tourist attraction because there is a stand selling bottled water on the flat and dry mountaintop.
So I go up there for some water and while waiting in line, I spot this colossal vortex on the horizon. It appears as if half the world has folded into it already and it heads straight for us. Everyone scrams for cover except for me. I gotta get some video of this. The wind around me strengthens and I decide to go for cover. I run and run and look for a ditch but find an overpass looking thing. I hide until I hear the earth tremble and no longer feel safe.
More running.
I keep running until I get to a parked SUV. I open the door and get in with a car load of strangers. My heart is pounding, the tornado is almost upon us now, I feel safe, and the car starts when the driver turns the key.
I’ve saved myself AND I have some of the best storm footage ever recorded.
And then…
A little boy comes to the window and asks to come in. I’m about to let him in when, behind him, a crowd of people rush up, all wanting to get in. The others warn if I open the door they’ll mob handle the car and we will all die.
I can see it so clearly right now, my finger pushing down the lock of that door. Through the window I see the boy’s face pressed against the glass. I tell myself he is dead already.
Our car speeds off to safety.
Through the back window, I see the tornado suck up everything. First the boy and the people behind him, then the overpass, the wall of heiroglyphs, the water stand…
When the storm is gone and the sun is back out, we drive back to the scene which now looks like a landfill. News crews begin to pour in and one of the reporters asks if anyone has video of the tornado. I say I do, click some buttons on my camera, and guess what?
No tornado footage. Just video of people waiting in line for water.
Anticlimactic, yes?
I have dreams like this all the time where some big catastrophic event is coming. If there is an ending, I’m always the hero. But not this time. What a nightmare and I feel like such a coward even though it is just a dream.
Lash Crack
I’ve been seeing people with looooong loooooong eyelashes. Ridiculously long. So long I saw a lady getting hers cut at the salon next to me. I asked the hairdresser if something was wrong with her to have all this overgrowth.
Nothing wrong, she’s using one of those new lash products that grows them thicker and longer. I thought I might invest $150 bucks and do a special here, a product demonstration with some before and after pics.
Sound fun?
Okay, so I’m cheap. I couldn’t part with the hundred and fifty clams. I saw somewhere on facebook that a mom discovered how to mix two household ingredients to get longer lashes. Free. F-R-E-E free. So I clicked that link.
And I tried it.
Here’s the before shot:
After just one night, voila! Here is the after shot:
The unibrow (or eyesbrow, as Spanky calls it) is an unintended side effect. Must have smeared this stuff all over while sleeping.
So I shaved it all off and started fresh.
Wait, what the hell? My eyes turned brown? I’d better put some more of this stuff on and grow an eye fro before anyone notices…
That’s better.
But seriously. Ladies. Those ridiculously long freak lashes are horrible. I can understand if someone has short and thin lashes and wants to improve a little on Mother Nature. A little. But not eyelashes that keep knocking you in the eyebrows. It’s just too much.
It certainly isn’t worth a change in eye color, which is a real side effect of the prescription formula Latisse. Actually, it can cause patchy brown spots on light eyes, so not even a uniform color change.
What do you think?
Movember
You know all that pink stuff they sell to raise money for breast cancer awareness and research? I buy that stuff. I have pink everywhere. A pink jacket. Pink socks. The t-shirt. Pink kitchen scissors, two of them. I even have pink baking cups for cupcakes.
I’ve also eaten quite a few too many of the pink M&Ms.
So I wondered all this time what are the dudes going to come up with to raise money for their issues?
They chose the mustache. This month is Movemeber and the bros are going to grow them to raise money for prostate and testicular cancer research and awareness. Friends, family, coworkers, etc. sponsor them to grow it for the entire month and pay up if the participant went through Movember without shaving.
And just as dudes might not feel too welcome to support our cause by wearing pink ribbon things, dudettes might not feel too comfortable growing a ’stache. Nope, I’m not growing mine out, no way.
But my son Blane has joined, Yay! I’ve never seen him wear anything other than a fake mustache as a gag. I have no idea how bushy this thing could become, but I want to see it. I even bought him a present to encourage him. A fifteen inch long gummy snake. And a cat that craps jelly beans. He loves that sort of thing.
Now here’s the trouble. His baby is due November 30th. He says he is shaving it off when the baby is born, so if it’s born early, he’s going to have to pull out that stick-on mustache or do something to convince his sponsors that he really made it.
If you want to know more about this project go to Movember’s website which is partnering with Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong campaign. There is a cool video on there that lists the statistics for both cancers and other valuable information about the diseases.
You can watch that here:
For all you bros out there growing a flavor savor, this sista supports this important cause. Govember!
The Swine
Blane says I’m going to be murdering a whole bunch of innocent people because I’ll be giving out H1N1 flu shots the first week of November.
I don’t know how he got into reading all these paranoia spreading conspiracy theory sites, he’s a liberal, sometimes a bit more than I am. Apparently the idea that this flu shot is unsafe is widespread. But hell, if the government is going to wholesale kill people, the first in line would not be children, pregnant women and health care workers.
I’ve spent enough time in after-school detention to know that those two groups are on the priority list to get into the life raft.
It’s your granny Obama wants dead, correct? There aren’t enough shots to go around and those over 65 aren’t on The List (they have been exposed to something similar in their childhood, so they are less likely to contract H1N1).
Maybe we’re being immunized with some top secret serum for the germ warfare they are going to release after all the desirables get their shots?
I hope you know I’m just kidding, I believe the H1N1 flu shot is safe and I’ll be getting mine as soon as we open the shipment. If I don’t return by Thanksgiving, run for the border, the goverment is going to kill every last one of us.
Test your H1N1 knowledge with these ten easy questions.
For more information on the safety of the H1N1 vaccine and other facts about the flu, the CDCs website is :::here:::
No Hero
I’ve been watching the fascinating clips by Dr. Sanjay Gupta this past week on his “Cheating Death” series that he’s using to promote his book, “Cheating Death: The Doctors and Medical Miracles that Are Saving Lives Against All Odds.”
The clip from last night showed how a woman trapped in cold water without air for over two hours was brought back to life (she is currently a radiologist in a hospital in Norway, so brain function must be pretty good). Her core body temp was 56 degree F when she was rescued, so that makes her the coldest person on record to survive. You can find that article :::here::: on CNN.
It made me think for just a moment, wow, people who’ve lost loved ones in cold drowning accidents must be having some serious “what if” moments right now.
Then it hit me. My niece, Candace was a cold water drowning (December ‘06). In fact, it was so cold, I wondered if that was why the policeman who came upon the accident just minutes after she crashed didn’t go in to save her.
Here’s what happened to her.
Candace was driving home on a mostly empty road. A policeman on patrol who knew her passed her going the opposite direction. He went a mile further and did a u-turn to go back in Candace’s direction. Routine patrol. When he got to a bridge, he noticed her car was upside-down and underwater. He had just seen her about 5 minutes previously.
The back window was blown out and the officer could see part of a baby seat in the back. He assumed Candace got out of the car and took her baby with her. He did not go into the water to check and make sure. He called for backup and then called her grandparents to ask if she had walked home. All this time Candace was drowning right there in the car, she tried desperately to kick in the front windshield, her legs were found up on the dashboard and there was a spot where she had managed to crack the window with her feet.
Let me back up to the part just before the cop got there. A farmer who lived near the bridge heard the accident and went to see what all the noise was. At this time, he saw the car upside-down, but on the side of the ditch. It had not gone in the water yet. He went back home to call the police and get his tractor to pull the car out.
While he was gone, the car slid into the water.
So by the time the backup came and the place was swarming with police, not a single person thought to check the car. They were stunned when they pulled the car out and found her seat-belted in it. That was about an hour after the accident and there were no efforts to resuscitate her.
I’m not angry about this anymore, she’s gone and isn’t coming back. I’ve accepted this. Two chances for rescue were missed, farmers and cops are human, not superheroes. They have moments of stupidity just like the rest of us. (I understand the cop suffered greatly over this matter)
For some good news, over the summer, Candace’s brother and his wife had a baby girl and named her Candace.
You can read about my niece, Candace :::here:::
New CPR
You may save a life.
Here’s a two minute CPR lesson I got from CNN. This is a new way of doing it, NO BREATHS are given: :::Click here:::
It was embedded in the CNN article “For young Mom, new CPR beat back death.“
Working the Cracks
These days, at the free clinic, I wear black scrubs. It’s really strange, when I got paid to work, I wore only whites. There is no hidden message of protest I’m trying to send, I guess I just don’t want to deal with all the stains that white uniforms collect. Now that I wear black scrubs, guess what? I have two white dogs.
Oh well. I still think they are super cool and different.
About the clinic, it is open twice per week and will soon be open three days a week. We can see 80 patients a night, usually. Sometimes we just don’t have enough volunteer doctors on hand. As someone at the clinic told me, “People come to this town to make money.”
It was quite a surprise to me that a free clinic even existed in this town. A friend of mine who volunteers there told me about it, otherwise I would not have known. It is not something that is advertised, but spread by word of mouth.
You might have seen film clips on the news of free clinics popping up in random cities to serve the uninsured in America. I saw one on tv that was set up in the Astrodome in Houston (I think that’s where it was), others at county fairs, some in livestock pens. Our place is in a strip mall right across the parking lot from the Democratic party headquarters for the county.
I don’t know who got there first.
Last time I volunteered, I worked as a screening nurse with my own little office. The patient comes in, I look over their medical history, check their lab work and vital signs, then ask a million questions. Some need to see the doctor, some need more labs, some just need medication refills. Some need to go straight to the hospital, they are way to sick for us. That pretty much sums up screening nurse.
Actually it doesn’t. Some of these people are not sick enough for the ER to treat them, but they are too sick for us and I don’t have the heart to tell them how sick I think they really are because there isn’t anything anybody will do about it.
And they look at me like I can really fix them, the trust they have in me, the hope they have, I can feel it, and I want to push it away but I feel terrible because that is all they have.
“Mercy” copyright Cinemagypsy
What Happened to Deborah
Dammit I’m not one to poke around online and see what is going on with classmates from high school, but I was looking for an old friend and ran across a class roster that mentioned a classmate of mine was dead. Not the one I was looking for, hell, I haven’t even thought of her since high school.
It doesn’t say what happened to her, and I don’t know anyone who would know, so I Googled her name and got nothing. She might have died before there even was a Google.
Deborah J. was my first school friend, and we started first grade during the early years of desegregation in the South. Our teacher had just come back from maternity leave and asked us two girls to stay in for recess to do some makeup work. That is when Deborah and I made friends, during that recess period. When the teacher returned and caught us giggling, she accused us cheating.
I don’t even think we knew what that was, cheating, but Mrs. S pulled out a wooden paddle and called us to her desk. She looked at me and said I could go outside. She didn’t spank me. I waited just outside the door, out of sight, and I heard the three loud smacks she gave Deborah. The little girl came out of the classroom, stoic, but when she saw me waiting for her, a smile stretched her face. I didn’t understand why she got hit and I didn’t, but I had a pretty good idea it had something to do with her being black.
No one liked Deborah, not even the black kids. Everyone told me she was just too damn mean. She might have been mean to them, but to me, she always had my back. She’d also sit behind me in class and braid my hair over and over again. She was studious and didn’t like it when any of the kids misbehaved in class, so maybe a bit too straight laced and strung up too tight. But a cheater she was not.
Anyway, I hadn’t thought about the paddling since it happened. The knowledge of her death brought back that memory. I’m just realizing now that the teacher had probably been on maternity leave for a couple of years as pregnant women were not allowed to teach back in those days. I’ve read they had to take two years off for that.
So this day she returned and kept us in for recess? Her first day teaching in a desegregated school. Deborah, I think, got spanked for more than just being black. She got it for having the nerve to make friends with a white kid.
That is what happened to my friend Deborah. May her soul rest in eternal peace.
Patience SVP
I stood out on the patio in the dark, the cool breeze rushing past me and through the door, over to Blane, who was sitting on the sofa watching tv. I’d gone out there because I could hear a helicopter. I know a care-flight when I hear one.
I think I do, the heli pad was just outside the ICU backdoor, and when one approached or left our hospital, the unit would go silent, the nurses and patients would freeze, even the machines seemed to hold their breath for a moment.
There is a term for this in French, when a crowd goes quiet all of a sudden, “Un Ange Passé,” which literally translates to “An angel passed.”
Anyway, I get this thumping in my chest when I see those helicopters and a million thoughts race through my head. Usually deep dark fears relating to my own life, such as, are they transporting some teenaged driver from a car crash? I’m feeling this phantom ache for some parent out there who might be suffering the unimaginable.
And just as the copter passes directly over us, the blades frantically chopping air, Blane says what he always says in his very best fake British accent,
“You, Yes You, Stand Still Laddie!”
And I laugh as though this is the very first time I’d heard it because he’s just taken me out of a place I didn’t need to be.
I don’t think he knows the mental dynamics of the situation. Why I laugh at that one consistently, while his other ten or so other canned jokes barely cause a change in my facial expression. Like the Kevin Bacon one. Every time he sees that actor he says, “Bacon and eggs.” Blane doesn’t even have to be around, if I see Kevin Bacon, I hear it in my head. I try not to show that it drives me nuts because I am certain he is testing my patience.
Twenty-seven years to the day, and I haven’t cracked.
In my heart, I know this is one of the things he admires most about me. He says both of his parents had absolutely no patience while he was growing up. So, if I ever did explode, it would kill off something magical for him. I would never want to do that to someone who can make me feel like I’m in a Pink Floyd song. Ever.
Wood Fence Restoration
Since the weather has finally cooled down, I decided to tackle the big job of cleaning and staining my wooden fence. I could hire someone to do the job, but I wasn’t happy with the work the last guys did (or pretty much anyone elses’ fence around here). If it had been done correctly to begin with, it wouldn’t look so crappy after just four years.
The reason wood fences, barns, whatever turn grey after being weatherized is because of the mildew. So how do you remove it? Bleach, simple household bleach.
I mixed one part water with three parts bleach and used a lawn and garden sprayer like this:
It’s so quick and effortless, it’s almost like a magic trick. The grey disappears right before your very eyes and without scrubbing. Just spray it on and it works. After about ten minutes, rinse the bleach off with the hose. Here are two fence sections, one before spraying, the other after.
The bleach solution also removes some of the stain from the previous job. It’s like starting from scratch with a brand new fence.
Of course I had to wonder, why haven’t pranksters figured this out and run around with bleach sprayers to people’s fences?
kitty wuz here
Of course it couldn’t be that easy, really. Could it?
Within minutes of me starting this job last week, it began to rain. Pouring down bucket loads of rain. Oh well, fine, I thought, it’ll keep the grass alive (if it is not raining, you need to hose the grass down for a while before and after spraying.)
So I got out there the next day to finish, and again, it started to rain. Flash flood rain.
And the next day. And the next, and the next. Is that seven days? Because I have been bleaching this freaking fence for a week, an hour or two at a time in the friggin’ rain.
And now it’s done.
I’ll let it dry for a week or so and then apply the sealer/stain. I plan to spray it, but I know that damn wind is going to fight me the entire time. I don’t look forward to it, but I know one thing for sure. It will be done correctly.
Scraps
I don’t like giving my dogs human food because they have sensitive stomachs, but every once in a while I am curious to see if they would actually eat what they’re begging for.
So I was eating an apple last week and tested Mireille. She turned her nose up at it.
Then Scrappy came around. She took a couple of licks and then went crazy on it, eating everything but the stem. It’s the funniest thing because I had no idea a dog would eat that.
And enjoy the hell out of it.
We all think it’s funny.
Killer View
The weather has cooled down so much over the last week I’ve been able to get out in the yard and tackle the jungle that is my yard.
I have some flowering vines that grew over the fence and onto the other side. When they bloom, my neighbor gets this lovely view of flowers spilling over the fence. We are friendly with them and the only grudge I hold against her is that she has a large window on her second floor that overlooks my patio and backyard. In fact, she has a better view of my pool than I do.
When we moved here, I hired a landscaper to put in plants that would grow up to give us additional privacy. As long as she can see us in the backyard, I feel as if I’m living in a fishbowl. And view she does. She has a desk by that window and keeps the blinds open all the time. She waves every once in a while. Once time she told me she loves looking down into our yard because of all the flowers and pretty plants. Jezuz.
And you know, five years have passed and all the plants are higher than the privacy fence except the ones in that spot in front of her window.
That just kills me.
Fallen into a hospital and can’t get out
Last week Blane’s back went out while he was at the gym. He was in so much pain he couldn’t move and had to be taken to the hospital in an ambulance. I would have taken him, but he needed to be moved on a board. Sad, really, because the hospital is right across the street from the gym. No kidding, across the street. I haven’t gotten the bill yet, but I’m guessing he could have gotten a better price on a ticket to France.
His x-rays didn’t look too bad, but the ER doc insisted on admitting him for an overnight stay because he couldn’t move so well. I told the doc I’m a nurse and can do anything they can do (better, too, I promise you) but I gave up the fight and agreed to let them keep him. They wanted to do another test on his back in the morning. Fine.
They did his test while I was gone and the neurologist told Blane his diagnosis while he was so heavily drugged that he couldn’t remember that he even saw a doctor. I had to go read the chart to see what the hell was going on. That’s where I also read they were keeping him another night.
What? I was the one getting him up to the bathroom, getting him bathed, shaving his face… What? Nurses would not answer his call bell while I was gone. I was really afraid he’d fall as he is not used to taking strong drugs.
So I fight them and at the end of the ordeal they tell me he needs to be fitted for a back brace the next day and if he doesn’t get it while in the hospital, the insurance probably wouldn’t pay for it.
Dammit I’m angry and I feel like we’re fucking hostages in this place.
I walk the halls and gaze into the open rooms. This is a non-specialty medical-surgical floor and all of the patients except for Blane are elderly. I know this workload, it’s rough, the patients need loads of help for everything and there are not enough nurses, ever, on those floors because it is a shit job. I wouldn’t dare complain about a thing to one of those nurses because it is not their fault. They are some of the hardest workers in any hospital, med-surg nurses. Couldn’t pay me enough to do it.
So, the patients on that floor, some of them are watching the news, the Town Hall Granny-Gate stuff, ironically. People out there screaming about Death Panels and carrying on as if they really care about it with all their hearts while my own heart breaks into a million little pieces because not a single one of these old people had any visitors in two days.
So. Fitting for a back brace. I was thinking this was going to be something they were going to custom make right there, some gadget that involved plaster and carving, you know, fine craftsmanship.
No, no, no. This thing turned out to be a pre-made velcro powered brace. Another overnight stay for this stupid thing? Wow, no wonder insurance companies refuse to pay so many bills.
And I have to wonder if anyone realizes that no hospital in America could really keep its doors open on Medicare reimbursements alone.
So we go through stupid shit like this, round and round while insurance companies and hospital corps play their games with our tax money and insurance premiums while people like me have to make a choice between whether to leave my drugged up hubby alone for the night or go home to watch my kids.
Is this really the best way to do healthcare? Is this worth fighting for? Really?
And Granny? If people had to dig into their personal bank account to pay for her care, how quickly would those plugs “fall out of the wall?”
I’ve worked extensively with the elderly. I KNOW how much most people care about Granny, so don’t even start trying to bullshit me.
The cancer patient in the video below is alive because she is getting her treatment through Medicare (aka government healthcare). She admits she couldn’t do it without Medicare. My tax dollars. Yours. She is arguing against that same government healthcare for others, however, because she likes being able to choose her doctors (no one wants to take that away from her). She doesn’t care that there are people out there with the same exact diagnosis as she, people who can’t even choose treatment at all because of inability to pay. Working class people who pay Medicare taxes to save her life.
Wow, talk about complaining on a full belly.
I volunteer in a free clinic once a week and have seen people just like her who have cancer but no money for treatment. The clinic mostly treats common things such as diabetes and high blood pressure, so we don’t carry cancer drugs. Since cancer is not an emergency, we can’t dump them at the hospital ER for treatment.
I wish I could tell you more stories about that stuff, but I can’t.
So now Blane has a “pre existing condition” to deal with if he ever wants to just quit work and start his own business. That means we probably wouldn’t be able to buy health insurance at any price to cover his back. I feel like we’ve lost some freedom this week. I know we have. And yet, we are amongst the fortunate who have access to care. This is good fortune when it comes to healthcare in America.
This.
This is all due to people continuing to choose fear over courage. If they really cared about their children, they’d do something about this Mickey Mouse system of ours and give us what they have. Some security in health care. I’m paying for them to have it, why can’t I get that too?
Why can’t we all have that?
Strawberry Cake with Never Fail Icing
It is birthday season. Blane Sr. last week and Blane Jr. this week. I made this strawberry wonder for my son after he asked me to surprise him with a special cake.
I started with three layers of white box cake mix. Between the layers I put a layer of strawberry preserves and some fresh sliced strawberries.
The icing is the magical part. It is a meringue type icing, not something you can buy in a tub or box but something you have to actually crank up the stove to make. It is worth the entire seven minutes of your time. That is one of the popular names for it, Seven Minute Icing. But it takes a little longer than that to make. It is also known as Never Fail Icing, but I’ve had it fail on me before. Those failures have much to do with the humidity. If it is rainy outside, it won’t sugar properly and will be sticky.
So, besides sunshine, here is what you need for the icing:
2 egg whites
1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar
1 cup of sugar (granulated, not powdered)
3 tablespoons of water
1 teaspoon of vanilla
You’ll need to make it in a double boiler. Don’t panic if you don’t have one, I ghetto mine with a bowl and a stock pot. Just make sure the boiling water in the lower pot does not touch the bowl.
Put the egg whites, cream of tartar, sugar and water in a bowl and mix for one minute before putting the bowl or upper pot over the boiling water. (hold off on the vanilla for now)
See below, my aluminum bowl fits perfectly over my stock pot with the boiling water.
While the water in the lower pot boils on med heat, use an electric mixer to whip the mixture until stiff peaks form (yes you are doing this over the stove, don’t burn the cord for your mixer).
Like this in the above photo. This takes about seven minutes. Then you take it off the pot of boiling water and add the vanilla. Whip some more until the sides begin to sugar, about a couple more minutes and not over the stove.
Now you need to work fast and you had better have that cake ready because the icing needs to go on now!
Ice the sides first, then the top.
I added some special toys on top while the icing was still wet. What will happen over the next half hour is the outside of the icing will become crunchy and yummy and…
That cake did not last 12 hours in this house.
While the strawberries on the outside are really pretty, I do not recommend you put them on the icing as they cause the icing to run due to the moisture in the berries. (now I know)
Another variation is the banana cake. Blane’s grandmother gave me this recipe years ago, so it is a family favorite. Bake a yellow cake instead of the white, and for the layers between, make a small box of Jello brand instant pudding (small box and only use 1 1/3 cup of milk in the directions). Spread a layer of pudding then a layer of sliced banana between each layer. Frost with the Never Fail Icing and call yourself The Boss.
999 Pieces of Success
Last week I bought a 1000 piece puzzle and dumped all of the pieces on the table.
I got it for several reasons. First, I think it is good for relieving stress. It feels good to spot a piece and just know where it belongs. Snap it in, and it fits perfectly. Each tiny piece a success. Second, I thought it would get people to congregate at the table and talk more instead of everyone going off into their own little space to watch tv or hang out on the world wide web. Something about faces glowing in front of a screen is extremely depressing to me, and yes, I know my own eyes spend too much time bathed in that light.
It’s a good mind exercise, puzzle building. It trains the eye to be more perceptive and is helpful for spatial relationships. If the original is a painting, you can actually learn something about brush strokes.
It’s also pretty cool for slipping on a song by Tool, “Schism”, where the refrain is, “I know the pieces FIT!” and watch to see how long it takes for the others to notice the lyrics. Then sit back and listen for them to hum the song later because the song is completely lodged into their brains!
Revelations in convos such as this one:
Spanky: I’m going to name my band “Bitch Please.”
Me: Why?
Spanky: Wanna make sure my songs don’t get played on Radio Disney.
Me: Ah, Disney. AM620. I’ll never forget the day y’all got in the car and turned the station from pure FM to AM. I wanted to know who the hell told y’all AM radio existed so I could pinch their head off.
Spanky: You serious?
Me: No baby, I signed up for all that, every minute of parenting torture you kids could throw at me.
Spanky: Torture?! I had no idea.
——–
After a couple of days of puzzling, our eyes began to play tricks on us. While driving into a beautiful sunset yesterday, Spanky said, “Ugh, puzzle sky.”
I knew exactly what she was talking about. Everything picturesque had this puzzle stamp superimposed on it. I want to take down every painting in this house because they all remind me of puzzles. Blane said it too, “Everything looks sectioned off.”
He was the main one at the table. He couldn’t even walk by it without making a stop. “Just five minutes,” he’d say. An hour later, he was still there fighting to get his corner done before I got mine finished out. It’s sort of funny how we got all territorial with our spots, unspoken, of course.
Here is the finished work. The image we’ve been staring at for almost a week.
You ever get that feeling while building a puzzle that one of the pieces is missing only to come back to the thing later and find the piece you were looking for? That kept happening to us the entire time because we knew early on one of them was missing. An edge piece with some writing on it.
It might have fallen off the table and gotten eaten by the dogs, I don’t know, we’ve combed the house on our hands and knees looking for that damn thing. We never found it.
Who the hell cares? We have 999 pieces of success and I like the way my family ganged up to solve something. Even if it was a stupid puzzle we never want to see again as long as we live. I don’t care about that one missing piece, either.
But if it ever shows up, I’m gonna frame it and hang it up on the wall and call it “Solved.”
Blane’s Amazing Bubble Show
My son Blane let me use his underwater camera to film his bubble show. It’s an old camera and the battery died on us quickly, but it’s still an amazing show.
Next week I’ll show you the dog’s swimming video. I’ve been busy and my wrists are acting up on me so not much writing these days.
Underwear or Socks?
Today started out just like too many days this summer. Craptastic.
My genius child Spanky failed her driving test. I thought she was kidding when she texted me. This kid has never failed anything. Ever.
So while she’s waiting for me to pick her from driving school, she sits on the sidewalk in front of an Italian restaurant which pipes music outside. She texts me, “I’m sitting outside the Italian place, they are playing Il Divo and it’s too dramatic.”
She’s kinda laughing and kinda crying when she gets into the car. Fast forward to later in the afternoon and everyone thinks this must be the end of times or something because the impossible has happened. Also, Spanky has quite a temper. We have no idea what she will do.
Things were quiet. Her Facebook status was posted, “fml.”
She never once blamed the driving instructor.
So when she asked me to bring her to that soul sucking mall, I agreed. She never buys anything there which makes it seem like a useless trip, right?
We go in a department store and there is a huge advertisement, a male underwear model with… well… Here’s what Spanky says about it, “Is he selling underwear or socks?”
Ohmygod we found it on the internet:
Ridickulous.
We look everywhere for purple patent leather pumps. Not because we really want them, we just like saying, “purple patent leather pumps.”
We see some shoes, sparkly, hooker-looking, platform flip-flops and I say only a gay dude would wear them, but she one ups me on that, “Only a straight man pretending to be a gay man would wear that.”
We notice a lot of women wearing maxi dresses and Spanky says no one under forty wears them (she calls them cougars, too). She’s almost right. There was a 30ish looking chick with one on, but Spanky said “That’s a thirty-year-old wanting to be a forty-year-old so she can hit on twenty-year-olds.”
Not that all women over forty in maxi dresses are cougars, we just like saying, “Cougar.”
So we laughed and laughed and laughed our way through the hell hole mall and it all ended with Spanky saying I should totally quote myself on Twitter, “Keep your fucking hands off my dump truck!”
What that’s all about, I’ll have to tell you another day. I just had to say it somewhere on the internet, for Spanky who fails with grace.
Bizarre
This is the second time in my life that I’ve seen such a thing, a road buckled due to extreme temperatures.
It’s been hot here.
When I was a kid, my mom and I were driving down the highway. There had been a heat wave, the worst I could remember, and while we were out on that road, things began to change. A light sprinkle of rain began. The road was so hot, the raindrops turned to steam. It looked so bizarre.
Then there was chaos. Sections of the highway on both sides began to buckle, hundreds of them. Most of the cars stopped as soon as they could, but there were quite a few cars that got stuck on the peaks of broken road, like see-saws. Don’t forget the steam fog. It looked like a horror movie set.
I wish I had a photo of that.
Not in our town
My kids show me some pretty rotten stuff on the internet.
Like this one via Spanky:
comic by K Beaton.
And this via Blane Jr:
I don’t know who to give credit to for that one, thought maybe Despair, inc., but I couldn’t find it on that site. Must be a DIY poster.
So all this from kids who claim I made them hyper-paranoid about being stolen when they were little.
I was paranoid about that, abduction. Now let’s get serious. What’s coming is a true story, every word. It is hard to believe, I’ve been called a flat out liar about it, so I don’t tell it too often.
Just know that, for me, it is a difficult story to tell.
When I was about ten, I was walking home from school in the rain. Alone. A man in a VW Beetle pulled over and asked me if I knew where a certain girl lived. He used her full name, so obviously he knew her, and I knew the girl, she was a friend of mine. Since he wasn’t offering candy, I figured it was okay to talk to him.
I didn’t know street names at the time, so all I could do was point out the directions. I didn’t get too close to his car and he didn’t try to get me to get in it.
By the end of the conversation, he told me he was looking for my friend for a modeling job, that he was a photographer. He asked if I’d be interested.
He said he’d like to talk to my mother about it. That is when I did a really stupid thing. I gave him my address.
I didn’t see any harm there, this man wasn’t offering candy and he wasn’t offering me a ride home in the rain. He wanted to talk to my mother. Surely he was legit? I was way too young to understand that this creep had calculated no one was probably home, otherwise, they would have picked me up from school on a rainy day.
About a half hour later, the man showed up in his Beetle, parked it in our driveway. We lived in a secluded area, our house to the back of a dead end gravel road. I watched him through the screen door as he sat in his car, as if he was waiting for someone to come out.
I had already changed my mind about the modeling thing. In fact, I was too embarrassed to tell my mom about it. She worked nights back then and was sleeping. I didn’t even wake her. I really just wanted this man to go away.
Finally, the guy got out the car and I met him outside, him in the yard, me on the porch. He was a classic pedo looking guy: Thick black plastic-rimmed glasses, middle aged, chunky, slicked back hair with a side part.
At first he kept his distance, about ten feet from me. He explained his job, who he worked for, and even produced a business card. Then he told me he wanted me to change out into a bathing suit. I told him I wouldn’t do that. So he asked me to go get a bath robe. This was when I realized the man was probably going to try to hurt me.
It hit me that I hadn’t waken my mother, but I should have. He hadn’t asked if anyone was home. He was certain no one was. He crept closer to me. A step at a time. One step toward me, and I’d take a step back, until I was against the wall of the porch.
By now, he was about two feet from me, still talking, and just as he reached for my private parts, a voice from the other side of the screen door asked, “Kitty, who are you talking to?”
The bastard jumped back about ten feet again, “I’m late for my appointment.”
And he was gone.
My mom was only half awake and not dressed, she didn’t come out. I told her he was a photographer for a department store in town and I’d just turned down a modeling job. She didn’t really ask any more questions and I didn’t tell her he tried to touch me. I was too embarrassed.
I regret not calling the police, not then, a couple of years later, when I had the maturity to realize that although the guy did not successfully hurt me, he was going to hurt someone else. I did tell everyone at school to watch out for this guy. Not a single person believed my story. Not one.
Shit like that didn’t happen in our town.
At night, when I was going to sleep, I didn’t worry about him coming back like he was the boogie man. What I thought about was how I would kill him if he did.
And you know what? He did come back. It was many years later, when I was about seventeen years old. This time, I was home alone. I can’t tell you how numb my legs went when I opened that door and saw that man there.
He didn’t recognize me, I don’t think, because he asked me, “Is Kitty home?”
I told him she did not live here anymore and shut the door. I watched through one of the windows as he sat in the car and just waited.
In that little bit of time, I thought he must have hurt someone and got sent to prison for many years. I did not call the police. Never crossed my mind.
I went to the closet and grabbed my dad’s shotgun. Loaded it, and waited by the door for him to return. That was what I had planned out in my mind over the years since I’d first seen him. Kill this man if he ever comes back.
For the first five minutes, I was shaking as I stood behind the door with a loaded shotgun. I broke out in a heavy sweat until I could barely hold the gun. I expected him to kick down the door any minute, this is how the scene played out in mind, that the next time he came, he’d come in like a monster.
Thirty minutes later, he drove off.
After my mom came home, we called the police. He must have been from out of town because the cops weren’t familiar with the car he drove (an orange Nova the second time around) or his description. I’m not even sure they believed me.
Cause shit like that didn’t happen in our town.
Massive Failure
I dropped Spanky off at her driving school only to be called back to pick her up because they had over scheduled drive times. Now if she had cancelled, I would have had to pay a $25 cancellation fee. I know this because I had to pay once when Kara went to that same school and had to miss an appointment due to illness.
So I drove back over there, walked in with my big sunglasses on and told the reception that they owe me twenty five bucks. The lady laughed. I didn’t. There were a bunch in people in there and I could hear a little snickering.
Finally someone said, “She’s right.”
Hell yeah I’m right.
Twenty five dollars is not really what I wanted. I only needed to make a point that if I had to pay up for missing, they did too. So I made a deal with her to schedule two drive times (you have to fight for those, believe it or not, and can only make one at a time and they have to be two weeks apart).
I got two for next week. Yay!
After that we took off for Ross, a store that reminds me of a garage sale of never used items of clothing, shoes, and various housewares. Bargains on crap we don’t need.
One of the reasons they sell name brand things at bargain prices is because the product was a massive failure. Spank and I like to look at items in there and come up the reasons these products failed. Most of the time, the item is just fuck ugly.
Like a white shirt with three gigantic buttons on the front.
The suitcase that rolled in every direction but had skulls and crossbones all over it (I almost wanted that).
Funny screw ups are fun to spot. Look at the animal texture baby book:
Didn’t even bother to match the hair color.
Check out the scribbling on this doggie tee:
Gangsta dog?
What’s coming next is such a massive failure of catastrophic proportions, I don’t know why they didn’t take this out to the trash and burn it.
Fire the people who worked on this shit too.
Seriously, it’s the worst thing I have ever seen and I swear I did not move this product to another area to make it “display better.” This is exactly how i found it.
(I almost didn’t post this, it is sooooooooooooooo bad)
But here goes. The Product Failure of the Year. Of ever, maybe.
That. Is. A. Lunchbox.
