People of Earth…resistance is futile. Give me cake.

I walked five miles this morning for the first time in over a month.  I got out early enough that it was still relatively cool (high 80’s) and there was a bit of a breeze but…ack.  I felt heavy and slow the whole way around.  The good news is that I was able to do five miles in 50 minutes, which isn’t terrible but is significantly slower than I was walking earlier this year.  If I can make myself walk every day again, I’m sure I’ll re-gain my time pretty quickly.  Favorite person on the trail this morning:  an elderly woman dressed all in turquoise (hat to shoes!), holding her little hand weights and shouting out a robust “Good day!” to all she passed.  There also seemed to be more pups out than usual which is always a bonus for a dog-tard like me,  although I had to quietly snicker at one chick who passed me, holding her precious be-ribboned little dog under her arm as she ran.  I can’t imagine that’s much fun for the dog but whatever.

Last night, S. and I watched an alarming amount of TV.  At one point, a commercial featuring Wilfred Brimley came on.

Me:  He’s one of those guys who after a certain point, you can’t remember what he was famous for in the first place.

S:    I think he was on one of those Old-West tv shows like Quincy:  Pioneer M.E.

Me:  The Un-paved Streets of San Francisco?

S:    Something like that.

Oh, we slay me.

Another thing that cracked me up this week was when the older charge was pretending that one of his little car dealies had travelled to the moon.

T:  They are now on the moon.  They have landed.

Me:  What are they going to do there?

T:  They’ll shout out…”PEOPLE OF MOON.  WE ARE HERE.”

In other news, I have plans to meet Ms. FREIDA BEE live and in-person next week. This will be my first blog friend meetup since I lived in Chicago and I’m excited. There is also the promise of meeting CRANKY in New York in September and well, this is as close to a social whirlwind as things get for me. Woo hoo!  Will I be able to converse in person?  Will I sit there and crack stupid jokes?  Does anyone but me give a shit about this stuff???  STAY TUNED!

In other news, I could go for a large piece of chocolate cake right now.  In other, other news, I must take leave of you internet and take a shower, for I smell.  Tally ho.

Mid-week.

My Encyclopedia Britannica ticker tells me that today is the anniversary of the day JIMMY HOFFA disappeared.  Think he’s ever coming back, America?  Maybe he and Jim Morrison and Andy Kaufman and DB Cooper are all sitting on a beach somewhere, having a good laugh.  But I somehow doubt it.

Which reminds me of the time in the early 1980’s my mom’s friends whisked her off to Mexico for a post-divorce girls’ week.  Upon her return, my mom was relating tales of the trip to my older bro and me.  One of these involved meeting “That famous guy…what’s his name…Jim Morrison” on the beach.  Older bro and I exchanged laughs and asked if she got his phone number because if he is alive, there’s some money to be made.  The mom got irritated with us and pulled out a wallet of photos because not only did she meet Jim Morrison, he was staying at the same hotel and she and her friends were and he had drinks with them in the hotel bar later that week and here, here are the photos to prove it.  In the photos were my mom, her friends and….Chuck Norris.  I’m going to have to wrest one of those photos from my mom’s possession one of these days because they’d be even funnier now.

I woke up with a great idea on how to push along the mystery interview and I am going to be busy today strategizing phone calls and other stuff.  Wish me luck AGAIN, everyone.  This particular interview subject is not only slippery but very elderly and I am living in fear that he’ll die on me before I can get him on tape.  I could write the story without his participation but it will be much more compelling (and sellable) if I can get him to cooperate.  Doing so would put money in both of our pockets and I think I have finally figured out a way to convince him of that.  Ack.  Between this dude and writing/researching my dad’s life I feel like I have been chasing ghosts for the past two years…because in a very real way, I have.  See, kids?  Writing is fun!  Yippee!

In other news, one of my mom’s brothers is in a Kentucky hospital bed, probably dying.  If he dies, that will make one brother a year for the past three, with my dad’s added bonus death one of those years.  My mom likes to come off as stoic and fatalistic (and she is…) but these things are wearing her down…partly, in my opinion, because she doesn’t give herself the time or latitude to fully grieve.  It’s taken a noticeable toll on her mental and physical health over these past few years.  I have been able to get her to talk about my dad quite a bit, mostly by framing it in the context of the writing project I’ve got going.  But her beloved and adored older brother died last year and she won’t even say his name anymore….So there’s that.

We have now had 38 consecutive 100+ days.  I know this because every time I turn on the radio, someone mentions it.  It’s getting to the point where I don’t want to hear or see a weather report because apparently, it’s going to be 100+ until about November and hearing that we’re breaking records just pisses me off.  It’s Texas, it’s summer, it’s hot.  The end.

Yesterday was another lovely day with the charges.  We started at the Botanical Garden.  Older charge is fascinated by the TANIGUCHI GARDEN and the story behind it.  The short story is that the garden was created by hand, by  Isamu Taniguchi, a 70-year-old man who wanted to thank the city of Austin for providing his family with a home and education.   Yesterday, older charge wanted to know if he could meet the man who built the garden (to thank him) and I said unfortunately not…that the man had died a long time ago, but he could write a letter to one of the man’s sons or grandchildren and we went home and did just that.  Older charge is five but there is an old, old soul rattling around in there.

After the garden, we went over to Zilker proper for another train ride/ice cream outing.  There was a very smarmy dad at the park who latched onto us in line for the train – he kept saying, “Oh, two boys, I don’t feel sorry for you!  These two (gesturing to the two toddlers he had with him) are a pain in the ass…I can’t wait to get them back to their mother…” and other such comments.  Ass.hole.  Believe me, I am fully aware of what a tough job parents have but it is never okay to talk about your kids like that within earshot of them.    We were finally through the line and getting onto the train and younger charge said, in his booming 3-year-old voice, “I don’t want to sit next to that man.  He’s mean.”  Damn straight, W.

So yeah, I have some work to do.  Bye, internet.  I love you.  I’ll miss you.  Don’t forget to write.

Sisterhood of the traveling McBitch Pants.

Ow, my uterus.  I was a little late getting the Advil down this morning and well…ow, my uterus.

I’m not actually feeling that bitchy but this thought passed through my head when I heard an ad for the movie referred to by my entry title:   “I would only go see that if all of the sisters died a horrible, pants-related death.”  Movies about strong women and their friendships generally leave me gagging.  In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie that portrayed strong women’s friendships in any way I could relate to.  Such films are always populated with overblown feminist caricatures (and yes, sorry, I put saints Thelma and Louise into that category) and by the end of these films,  when one of the friends dies her inevitable tragic death, I am praying that the other(s) are right behind her.  Keep, it Hollywood.

I think the strongest woman character I’ve seen in any movie in the past 20 years is the chick who gets put in the well by Buffalo Bill in “Silence of the Lambs”.  In fact, my sister and I frequently use the line, “Hey Mister, I’ve got your dog!” in reference to some rhetorical ass-kicking we’ve done.  Works for us.

Plans today are…well, nothing much.  I have an appointment at noon and that’s about it.  Tomorrow I will spend another day with the charges and then I am non-writing-work-free until about August 25th.  Yay.

Happy Monday, all.

The mutants, creeps and musclemen are shaking like a leaf.

Look at these awesome folders I found today!  I will be sending them to one of my nephews for his back-to-school enjoyment, although I have to admit I was tempted to keep them:

I was at the pet store earlier today and came dangerously close to bringing home cat #3.  In fact, I have been sitting here for an hour, debating whether or not I should drive back over and get it.  The pet shop has a large, built-in window in their adoption area.  I paused and looked in – there were about fifteen kittens, all sleeping — and then one very cute little guy woke up and looked right at me.   These particular cats came from a local rescue organization and each of them had their tragic circumstances posted on little cards outside the window…and well, I’m a sap.

Let’s see, what other excrutiating minutiae can I share – I put myself on a homeopathic regimen designed to lessen the perimenopausal b.s. I’ve been suffering through and I think it is helping.  I know there are a few others out there dealing with the same thing so in the interest of public service,  THIS is similar to what I’ve been taking.  (I am actually taking the Target version of that because it is identical in ingredients and costs about half what the name-brand does…)   It seems to have eased both the mood-related and physical symptoms.  Of course, I am hugely susceptible to the placebo effect but hey, if it works, who cares why?!  And furthermore, if you can’t trust medical advice from a internet stranger with no medical training, what the hell good is anything?!

S. reminded me that today is the fifth anniversary of his getting in touch with me…which was preceded by our fateful meeting five months prior to that…  Did I remember this without prompting from S.?  No.  I am sentimental about a lot of things but I can’t remember a date to save my life.  In fact, I often confuse our wedding anniversary with the date of our first meeting.

A sadder anniversary is looming and I am trying to figure out if I want to just ignore it…or if marking it somehow will make me feel better.  My dad has been popping into my dreams lately – sometimes as himself, sometimes as a bird and sometimes as someone else who represents him.  It’s still a strange feeling to miss someone who disappeared long before he died.   And I know I wrote about this recently but there are times when it feels like he was never here at all.  I G@@gled “second-year grief” last night and was somewhat surprised at the plethora of legitimate sources that stated yes, for many people, the second year after the death of a parent is harder than the first.  But knowing that others go through this doesn’t make me any less alone in my grief.

Happy Hour(s)

Had another lunch date with my neighbor yesterday – she’d had a rough week so we extended our lunch with cocktails and shopping, then came home and drank some more until we both started yawning (at 6:30pm, although to be fair we had been drinking pretty steadily since 1pm).  Not surprisingly, I didn’t do a whole lot last night beyond lying on the couch doing crossword puzzles.  I bought a new NY Times Sunday puzzle collection and either they’re getting harder or I’m getting dumber – (or hey, here’s an idea – maybe the drinks had something to do with it) – because well, I only finished one of the three I started.  Yes, I do them in threes.  If I have three going at one time, then I can go between them when I get stumped.   And yes, this is but one more brick in my solid foundation of dork-dom.

My neighbor is a public school teacher and we had quite an interesting conversation about what it’s like to have to TEACH ABSTINENCE in a state with the highest teen birth rate in the country.  She teaches 6th grade and  last year, the principal at her school told teachers they could veer from the curriculum at their own risk.  If I wasn’t so tired, I would try to compose a more coherent essay on this topic but let me just say this:  way to stick your head in the sand, Texas.   It doesn’t help that our state is governed by a right-wing Fundamentalist who has no problem with repeatedly injecting his religious beliefs into our state’s laws and school curriculum.  Blah.

Someone referred to me as “endearingly creepy” today and I like that so much I may have to make it my new personal motto.  The Lass:  Endearingly Creepy Since 1960. Kinda catchy, no?

Well, I have some exciting home improvement projects on my agenda today – including cleaning out and organizing our pantry, something that will probably take me most of the afternoon.  I am under strict orders from S., who is out of town, not to throw anything away – even if it looks like a teeny speck of something useless – until he returns and can look it over.  (There was a little, uh “incident” with some expensive saffron that got trashed at our old place…) Our pantry looks something like a mad scientist’s stash of goodies.  It’s always in some state of disarray.  I rarely use anything out of it save a can of beans or soup, but I like to be able to do so without an entire shelf of spices and mysterious leaves and small cans of who-knows-what falling on my toes….and so I shall at least attempt to straighten it up a bit.  Woo hoo.

Happy weekend to you all.

Rains and trains.

Spent yesterday with the charges – we were all packed up and ready to head down to Zilker Park when the skies suddenly opened up on us.  We went anyway and had a good time.  The playscape at Zilker is nestled under 50-foot pecan trees and while it was raining fairly hard, not many drops actually made it down through the canopy.  The park was empty because of the rain, something the older charge particularly enjoyed “We have EVERYTHING to ourselves!”.  He devised a game for us which involved putting out imaginary fires on various pieces of playground equipment – younger charge, thankfully, is still at an age where he will go along with having his play directed by others without too much of a fuss.

In the midst of our running around, I found $80 on the ground near the train depot. I figured it belonged to one of the older gents who run the train since they were the only other people around – sure enough, one of them was out there frantically searching.  He was so thankful that we returned the money – “That was my grocery money for the week!”.   He went on and on about how most people these days would have just pocketed the cash, and how nice it was for me to have brought it back…Ack.  Eighty bucks will barely fill a bag at the grocery store these days.

We left the park briefly to meet the charges’ mom for a glasses fitting then raced back to the park and hopped on the train just before it pulled out.  We didn’t have tickets but the guy whose money we’d found waved us on.  After the ride, I went to the ticket window to pay and the other guy said, “Bill said you returned his lost money and the ride’s on him”, then he handed us tickets for a free ride the next time as well.  Unnecessary, but nice.

So…is it that unusual to return found money?  What do you think?  Honestly, if I had found that money on a crowded city street, I probably would have pocketed it.  What if you found money on the bus or the subway?  Would you try to find out who it belonged to?  And why do I ask so many questions?

Happy Friday, America and all the ships at sea.

Hot dog! We have a wiener!

First things first:  the job I never held was waitress.  The one most of you thought I’d never held was personal banker.  Unfortunately, I did do that for a year.  It was when home equity loans first came out and  while I worked for a large, well-known bank, I basically spent 12 months helping people toward bankruptcy.  Karma will surely repay me for that one day.

Also, Hugh Beaumont, people?!  Jeez…did you all grow up without tv’s?  Here is my beloved Hughie:

Yeah, I know he kinda looks like a cross between Fred Astaire and Stan Laurel but I love him anyway.  Don’t you talk bad about my Hugh.  Oh, no.

Anyhoo…congrats to the lovely CAPRICORN CRINGE, who was the first person with five or more right (six, in case you need to know).  Claudia was definitely the most creative in numbering (and in giving more than one answer…tsk, tsk).  Harriet and Cranky – you know way more about me than either of you needs to.  Cowboy, points for creativity and by the way, how do you know who Jay Trachtenberg is?!    Do you secretly live in Austin?  Because if you do, come over and mow my lawn.  Thanks.

Thanks to everyone for playing and if it wasn’t so hard for me to add, I might consider another contest one day.

Contest!

You KNOW you want this book.  More than Amy Winehouse wants to do blow and cut herself.  True, it’s written by Snoop Dog “and David Talbert”…and we know that means Snoop signed something and David wrote it…but you still want it, so, so bad.  Don’t you?  Well, here’s whatcher gonna wanna do:

Take the following quiz.  If you’ve paid just a small amount of attention over the years, these will mostly be easy.  The first response with five or more correct answers wins.  If no one gets five or more right, I’ll draw names.  Number two pencils sharpened?  Pencils at the ready?  Begin:

1.  What color is my hair?

a) red

b) blonde

c) calico

d) brown

e)  You can’t trick me, you’re bald

___________________

2.  What does my husband do for a living?

a)  Indian Chief

b)  Personal assistant to “The Hoff”

c)  Mack Daddy

d)  Chef

e)  TV Spokesman for the University of Phoenix

_________

3.  If you were buying me my dream pet, it would be a….

a)  Koala

b)  Panther

c)  Bunny

d)  Helper Monkey

e)  Tasmanian Devil

_______

4.  The word that best describes me is:

a) misanthropic

b) sociopathic

c) autistic

d) fucking annoying

e) all of the above

_______

5.  Which of the following is NOT a job I’ve held:

a)  Telemarketing scriptwriter

b)  Personal banker

c)  Waitress

d)  Writer

e)  Santa’s helper

_______

6.  What personal motto is engraved on my Ipod?

a)  Fuck you.

b)  Die, you gravy-sucking pig.

c)  Solidarity forever!

d)  Bite me.

e)  Music is groovy

_______

7.  In what state was I born?

a)  California

b)  Illinois

c)  Montana

d)  Texas

e)  This is a trick question – you were born in Hell.

______

8.  How many living siblings do I have?

a)  Four

b)  Three

c)  Eleven

d)  None

e)  One half-sister

_______

9.  “Lass” is to “bitch” as:

a)  “White” is to “rice”

b)  “Ho’s” is to “bro’s”

c. “Osmonds” is to “teeth”

d)  “Sun” is to “Moon”

e.  What the hell are you talking about?

_____

10.  Who of the following do I NOT harbor a crush on?

a)  Hugh Beaumont

b)  David Bowie

c)  Jared the Subway dude

d)  My cat Stevie

e)  Mighty Mouse

Good luck, America!

Soupy.

Ack.  Stupid HURRICANE.  Stupid humidity.  I walked out to get the paper this morning and it felt something like walking into heated fog.  Nasty.  Nastier:  the remains of Stevie’s overnight kills, which were festively strewn across the porch and down the steps.  And there he was, sitting next to some of them, happy to have brought me a present.  Good. Morning.

My deep and persistent love of the internet bore interesting fruit this week.  I was searching for some books on Amazon and a recommendation popped up.  I usually ignore these, but the author’s name caught my eye.  It was the name of someone I worked with long ago and with whom I’d always wished I’d kept in better contact.  So I emailed her and lo and behold, contact!  Thank you, internetses, and hi, Ingrid!

Much fun was had with the charges yesterday – we went to the Children’s Museum, which despite being overrun with bigger kids was a lot of fun.  One of the primary exhibits is on hearing and sound and there was much noise to be made, which is just about perfect for both of the charges.  They are struggling a bit with the changes in their lives, I think, but there is a seemingly stellar new nanny on the way and once she’s in place I expect things will settle down for them.  The older charge wrote me a letter after our visit last week – it arrived yesterday:  “Dear Laura.  When will you come back over?  Please come over when you can because I have so much fun with you.  Please write back.  Love, T.” It’s written in his five-year-old hand across two sheets of paper that were connected with about a half-roll’s worth of scotch tape.  Instant treasure, I tells ya.

For no other reason than this made me laugh my ass off last night, here’s a picture of Mr. Taffy, beloved mascot of SHRIVER’S in New Jersey.  I can’t decide if he’s throwing up his hands in a joyous “Hooray!” or a resigned, “Ok, you got me, coppers.” way.  Either way, I love him.

That’s it for now.  Be sure to check back later for a chance to win the Snoop Dog novel!  I promise the contest won’t be too hard or humiliating.  Maybe.

Half man, half ant….MANT!

The scene:  Our bedroom.  The time:  1 am.  I am sound asleep when S. suddenly throws on the overhead light.

S:  The bed is full of ants!

Me:  (unintelligible)

S:  Get up!  Ants!  They’re all over me!

Me:  Honey, you’re dreaming.

S:  No, look!

At which point I did look and yes, there was a swarm of biting ants in our bed.  They were coming up through one of the floorboards.  Ah…country livin’!!  Sheets were pulled, spray was sprayed inside and outside the house, heebies were jeebied and when we finally settled back in…

S:  I wonder why they swarmed on me and not you.

Me:  I don’t know.  Did you eat any picnic food last night?

Ignoring what was obviously comedy gold, S. shot me a dirty look and we went back to sleep.  I’m quite the catch, eh, America?

The ants swarmed into the house once last year only that time they went straight for the kitchen.  We’ll do some extra poisoning tonight and that, I hope, will be that.  Because waking up with a bed full of ants is not bueno.  In fact, waking up with anything less than a bed full of flowers or money or cake really isn’t worth waking up for at all.

I am doing some emergency fill-in time with the charges this week (old nanny fired on the spot last week and new one can’t start til next week) so I must get dressed and get outta here.

Tally ho, America.