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.
