a lost day

I feel like crap. I went to bed last night feeling great and woke up at 3 am going "uh oh". Lets just call it stomach issues and leave it at that. And a fever. And chills. My angel and my devil duked it out in the wee hours, but at 5 am I finally gave in to the inevitable and called in sick. That makes me feel even more like crap, because we've been short-handed lately and I know I just gave my co-workers an even harder day than usual.


But it was a good thing I did. I slept until almost 2 pm, woke up briefly and went back to sleep. And that's been the pattern for the rest of the day. I have a permanent pillow crease on my left cheek. My mental sharpness is about equal to putting ice cubes in a glass, so thinking fast on my feet at work would have presented some problems.


The kids have been great. Surfer Dude even set a can of soup and a can opener next to a pan on the stove for me before he headed out to school. Gumby came right home after school and sat on my bed, all while telling me how I didn't look quite as dreadful as I had in the morning. And Sasquatch took the trash out like he had promised - the first time I mentioned it.


Wow. I think I'm going to go back to sleep and ponder that. And hope that tomorrow starts off a lot better than today did.

middle aged teenagers

It's not easy being female. At any age.


When I was a teenager, I combed lemon juice through my hair, slathered coconut oil all over myself and sunbathed to within an inch of my life. The more tan I was, the less my acne showed, which was always a plus. And any lemon juice prompted blonde highlights in my Roseanne Rosannadanna hair at least attempted to hide the frizz. At five feet ten inches tall, I weighed 120 pounds and was constantly trying to "get" skinny.


I don't try so hard anymore, but I still make kind of an effort. Just last week, I spent an hour or so trying. My hair was piled on my head with a deep conditioner slathered on, I had a biore pore patch on my nose to rip out blackheads, a jar of moisturizer next to me to put on my dry skin after my acne treatment was over...and I was plucking dark hairs out of my chin. Am I in adolescence or menopause? And is there a significant difference?


This is just so unfair. No one should have to buy both wrinkle lotion and zit cream. Long, luxurious tresses should be on your head, not on your legs. You can't even go out and get a tan to cover your wrinkles, since now they tell us that this is how we got the wrinkles to start with. This is not the way it's supposed to be. I try to not fall into the pop culture trap of "needing" to be a size two, or that "blondes have more fun", or that no one over thirty can be as interesting as a twenty year old. I'm comfortable with myself, flaws and all, but even I have limits.


On the other hand, at least my mustache covers up my acne.

bunny suicides

I was on the phone with a kind of casual friend and something I inadvertently said triggered her charitable instinct. "My husband will be home for lunch in about half an hour," she said. "Please let me send him over to help you." I was in my backyard at the time, hunting for the newspaper, and I was cranky.


Absolutely not, said I. I positively refuse to be one of those single women who wear out her friend's husbands with her household needs. I. Will. Not. Do. It. I was climbing on my soapbox when something caught my eye in my peripheral vision. I turned around for a better view. And then I looked yet again, aghast.


It was a bunny. A baby bunny. In the air. A baby bunny being tossed from one Lab to another, with each one taking a big chomp and then hanging on until the other one came to wrestle it out of their mouth. Before I knew it, another baby bunny ran across the yard and Dee Dee, the fattest dog in the northern hemisphere, nailed it as it scurried. I had no idea she could move that fast for anything that didn't involve Milk Bones. Now I had two dogs tossing two bunnies, and I, who can take indescribable grossness in humans and yet cannot stand it in animals, was screaming for the kids to stay inside. (I feel that I have to point out that The Most Perfect Dog in The Universe was in the house for the entire episode. Gee. Like I'm surprised. Hello. Perfect).


And as I stood there , after the fact, shoveling dead bunnies into the trash with kids shrieking at dogs who were truly only following their instinct, I regretted my quick refusal of help. Because I've gotta tell you...I could have used it.

The Thursday Three

It's a day late for Halloween, but as I face the prospect of three kids on sugar highs I'm thinking about fear. So today, how about

Frightening Experiences

as a topic? Just to even the playing field a little (and to keep this post under 200 pages) I'm not going to list anything that directly involved any of my kids. Just because. And health issues. None of those either. I'm feeling very contrary today.




And this picture has nothing to do with anything.
It just freaks me out. I hope the Film Geek never comes home in one of those. But if he does, I'd better have a camera handy. Because those shots are going to be worth some cash.






#1. 1992 Los Angeles Riots. I was at home in the 'burbs with barely a month old Sasquatch and the FG was at his alma mater, USC, doing something or other when everything started. USC is about as close to ground zero as you can be and he was basically trapped. He couldn't get out through all the chaos. It took him almost six hours to make a fifteen minute trip.

I stood on a freeway overpass right by our house and looked toward downtown LA, which was enveloped in smoke. Where I was it was deathly still, at least at that point. It got a little crazed later.

And for six hours I carried my infant in my arms and paced. This was pre-cell phones and he sure as hell wasn't going to get out at a pay phone to call home.

Not a lot of fun. He doesn't get welcome home greetings like that every day.


#2. Bad hydraulics. Summer before last the kids and I were on a flight to LA when the pilot got on the PA system. We had been in the air about twenty minutes at that point. He told us that the plane had had a serious hydraulic system failure and that we needed to turn around and land back in Kansas City ASAP. At first I thought it was a joke, because we were on Southwest and those people are pranksters of the highest order, with all of their weird hats and hilarious boarding instructions. They're capable of anything. Not that this is exactly joke material, but still.

No joke. We turned around and headed back. Sasquatch and Gumby were sitting directly in front of Surfer Dude and I. Gumby had his head stuck in a book and didn't have a clue what was going on. Sasquatch, who has anxiety issues to start with, turned around and looked at me. He didn't say a word. I told them all that everything was going to be fine, it was just a precautionary measure that we were going to change planes.

And then I settled back, with my head resting on Surfer Dude, and distracted myself by seeing how high my pulse could get without him noticing. I had my fingers on my carotid for twenty minutes - while the plane banked very awkwardly to land, when the pilot told us to expect a pretty rough landing, and finally as we raced down the runway past a line up of emergency vehicles with their lights flashing. I doubled my resting heart rate. I bet I could have gone even higher.

And the kid's response? "That was cool!!"

#3. 1987 Whittier Earthquake. Let's just get this on the table right away. I've been in bigger earthquakes. Way bigger than this wimpy little 5.9. I've just never been right on top of one. We were so close to the epicenter of this quake that the first clue I had was a huge sound like lightning hitting something. It was the ground cracking. Right under my feet. Then the shaking started.

I had plants flying through the air. My refrigerator walked across the kitchen. I honest to god thought my house was coming down. My double yellow headed Amazon parrot was freaking out and I couldn't catch him. Of course I was alone, since the FG and I have some sort of an unwritten agreement that he will always be at work if there's an earthquake of any significance.

It was bad. As soon as it was over I threw the bird in his carrying cage and drove to my moms, where we rode out the aftershocks.

I'd like to not repeat that particular experience. Any of these experiences, now that I think about it.

The Thursday Three

The topic today is

Books that have scared the
everlovin' bejeezus out of me.


I like scary books well enough. I guess I liked them more when I was younger, before life got scary enough on its own. These three, for different reasons, continue to haunt me to this day, even though I read all of them for the first time years ago. Just because they're classics, I may reread #1 and #3 one of these days. #2 will never see the whites of my eyes. Ever again.


#1. The Exorcist, by William Peter Blatty. Scared the daylights out of me when I read it. Of course I was pretty young and wasn't supposed to be reading it in the first place, but I did. Then my mom said she'd take me to the movie since I kept begging. The movie didn't scare me. The book was a different story.


Just yesterday I was in a Halloween store and Tubular Bells was on the sound system. Gave me the heebies simply listening to it.
It reminded me of the hysteria when the film came out, with people passing out in the theaters and claiming to be possessed. I thought the movie was on the cheesy side, but the book was really well done. Very tense and dramatic, lots of personal drama and a mood that got darker by the minute.


I still have a copy on the bookshelf. In my opinion it's a classic that totally deserves the acclaim it's received.





#2. Red Dragon, by Thomas Harris. This book scared me so badly that I can't even tell you the exact details of the plot, because I haven't picked it up in over twenty years. And I won't either. It's about a serial killer in the South who targets entire families, and is the "pre-quel" to Silence of the Lambs, which was a great book and disturbing but didn't scare me a bit.

I read this in college and was so terrified that I barricaded my door with a dresser. The Film Geek and I have played a little game with this book for years. I keep throwing it away and he keeps taking it out of the trash and putting it back on the shelf.

He thinks he's had the last word, but that's because he's an absent minded professor. He never noticed that the book somehow didn't make the move to the Midwest with us and ended up in a trash bin in California.

I wonder how that happened.




#3. The Stand, by Stephen King. For me this is the scariest by far of King's books, because on some level it's actually possible. It's about a pandemic that kills pretty much everyone on the planet, leaving just enough survivors to make it interesting.

I read this book for the first time in a doctor's office waiting for an appointment. It was high flu season and all around me was the sound of the sick and the miserable. People were hacking and spitting and coughing up lungs as characters in the book were dying of this disgusting Ebola type illness. It made quite an impression on wide eyed little old me, let me tell you.

King has done plenty of other scary writing, and I'm well aware that most people consider The Shining to be his masterpiece. It's just that I don't feel it's really likely that my family is going to willingly go off to some deserted hotel for the winter while dad becomes more and more tacos short of a combo. But every time there's a flu season, I think of The Stand. Shudder. Hack Wheeze.

Your turn.

The Thursday Three

Irrational fears. We all have them, as much as we might wish we didn't. Sometimes the more irrational they are the harder they are to shake. The Midwesterner who is terrified of sharks, for example. Are they afraid of the idea of sharks or the sharks themselves? And does the fact that they live in a place that won't easily allow them to face their fears make it worse? Why would you be afraid of something you'll most likely never run into?

Why do our brains do this to us?

Three Irrational Fears...


#1. Snakes. Not just poisonous snakes, like the
fine upstanding specimen to the right, but any snake, any size, anywhere. If I lived in the Amazon Rainforest and I was afraid of snakes that would be a sign of intelligence. But lets be honest here. I don't run into too many snakes on a daily basis. Sure my three boys have all expressed an interest in a pet snake, but that one never even made it into the discussion stage. They probably heard my "NO!!" in the Amazon.

What makes me crazy is if you put four legs on them and call them lizards I have no problem at all. We've had several pet lizards and they were great. They didn't bother me a bit.

I've been really big on the whole "Face your fears" bandwagon the last couple of years, and this was the first thing that came up to challenge me. We were at an animal exhibition when someone came walking around with a fifty foot long snake that weighed about two tons. It had fangs longer than my leg and made the basilisk in HP look meek. One of my reptile loving kids, I've blocked out which, looked at me evilly and said "Face your fears, mom" and the next thing I knew I had both hands on the snake, because I'm damned if I'm going to give my kids that kind of ammunition. Thank god the handlers didn't want anyone to hold it or "Face your fears" would've turned into "Run like hell out the front door and let the kids fend for themselves." Ugh.



#2. Siamese cats. When I was about four my mom and I visited one of her friends in St. Louis. This woman had two Siamese cats and they weren't thrilled about me being on their turf, so they just kind of cat vanished during out trip. I never even saw them.

Until...

Our last day there they pounced on me from the top of the fridge and tore my face up so badly I had to go to the doctors. I've been terrified of Siamese cats ever since.

What makes this irrational is that I've had one dog run in after another and I'm not even remotely afraid of dogs. I've had bones in my left hand bitten through trying to stop two German Shepherds from fighting. I got bitten by a dog that hadn't had its rabies shots and I had to sweat it out while they quarantined the dog for ten days. I've been bitten at least four other times that I can think of off the top of my head, mostly as a kid. Yet I have no fear of dogs whatsoever. I will admit that the sound of dogs fighting freaks me out, thanks to a certain aggressive Shepherd from my past, but my dogs never even grumble at each other so it never comes up.

But Siamese cats scare the living crap out of me. It goes without saying that if there's one within twenty feet it's all over me, purring and rubbing up against me. Sadists. They smell fear.

And they like it.




#3. Small, enclosed spaces. Now seriously, how is a space going to hurt you? Is the wall going to punch you in the head? I don't think so. This is one where it's all about the idea of it. I don't like cramped spaces. They make me very nervous.

The summer I was repeating the Face your fears mantra we drove to California for the summer. In South Dakota there are caves. Lots and lots of caves. Everyone else was all gung ho to see this one particular cave that had something stupid about it that was special. I was not big on this idea, but, you guessed it, my little mantra came back to bite me in the butt. I need a new line. I did the tour through the cave (all sixty minutes of it) and only got through because I never looked up. I looked at the ground directly in front of my feet and the shirt just ahead of me. Not very exciting as cave tours go. But I got through it.

But it isn't anything I plan to do again. Ever.

Your turn...