A Day in the Life of.........me!

So today was a barrel of monkeys. First, I took my van in for service - an oil change, tire rotation, and replacement of my defective stereo system. The dealership is located on the infamous "highway 99" which, if you're not from around these parts, also doubles as the main drag for streetwalkers and drug dealers (not that I have personal experience!). So, there I was, faced with two hours of waiting time, when I decided to take a jaunt down to the nearest Starbucks (several blocks away) and bide my time. On the way, I decided to stop in at "Value Village". Again, for those of you non-natives, Value Village is basically a thrift store, set up like a department store. I perused the racks (and for some reason, it seemed really skeevy, not like my favorite rinky dink thrift shop up the street). Anyway, I bought a couple of things and continued my journey to Starbucks. As I clomped down highway 99, swinging my Value Village bag a guy in a sports car honked at me and gave me a big smile! Can you believe it? Solicitious jerk. Oh well, I made it to Starbucks unperturbed and bided my time.

After, I had just enough time to get to the high school and pick up Hayley. We were off on an adventure! It was "Get your driver's permit day". Oh joy. The DMV is dismal on ANY day, and apparently Friday afternoon is the most popular and busy day, as we pulled our number (496) and they were serving somewhere in the 420's. So, we waited. And waited. Thank God we brought books. Our literary reverie was broken by a sudden, vivacious rendition of "The Mexican Hat Dance". It was a cell phone. Belonging to Juan. Or Pedro. Or Enrique. Minutes later, another cell phone rang (this time to a lively country tune) and was answered by a woman (older than me, remember that because it's important later) who had a very loud and personal conversation. "Did you know I was pregnant? Oh, yeah, but I miscarried it, and it freaked me out a little bit, even though I didn't need it. Oh, and then? They removed this cantaloupe sized tumor in my ovary! Yeah, my ovary. They're gone now. They took out my ovaries." And so on. Soon after, the very large gentleman next to me started to make small talk. Apparently he had been waiting since noon to have a driver's test (this was 2 p.m.) and was "bored". He said the seats were killing him and turned and twisted until he adjusted himself comfortably. Unfortunatley, his comfort was my undoing! As I turned toward him to answer his question, I shuddered to find that I could see his........ahem........MANHOOD hanging out of his shorts. Oh yes, the family jewels. The nads. The boys. In all their glory (and let me tell you, it was NOT glorious!). What I would not have given to have a (large) pair of Fruit of the Looms in which to house this guy's junk. But how do you, politely, tell a very large man that his stuff is better off contained in whitey tighties? Ick. Thankfully, he soon ambled off and was out the door. Poor Hayley. I'm pretty sure she didn't glimpse the indiscretion (although I whispered the infraction loudly to her as it happened). But on the way home she speculated what would have happened if his guys had gotten stuck to the plastic seat in the heat of the day (haha - kudos to her for having a sick sense of humor!). Hard to beat (pardon the pun) the flasher, but then a lady appeared. I'll call her Dottie. She sported a bright red dress with white polka dots, a matching polka dot belt, a black and white polka dot purse, and matching polka dot earrings. She was spot on (hahaha!)!

Soon enough Hayley was up for her photo. Minutes later she was presented with her learner's permit, which she inspected and promptly said "eww, that is a disgusting picture!" I reminded her that having a horrendous photo was a requirement of the DMV and we exited that stale, horrid environment, FINALLY. Whew. Now, we have to do it all again in a year when she gets her "real" license. As we got in the car, she asked "can I drive home?" to which I gave her a resounding NO! She has not even been behind the wheel of a car. She has no idea how to drive. And I just got her legal permission to do it! What was I thinking?

Bad Dog, Shade!

As you may know, we have a large, old, black dog named Shade. Shade is part hunting dog, so, technically he's Jeff's hunting dog, but once he flushes a pheasant out of the brush, he wants nothing else to do with it (he's no retriever!). When Shade first took up residence in our home, he had been exclusively an outside and garage dog, with occasional forays into a guest bedroom with the door closed, lest he growl like Cujo at unsuspecting visitors. I, frankly, was terrified of this dog. And suddenly he was a permanent resident of my home! He growled at Arlie and Harrison at every turn, and I had to put a stop to it. I had to be the alpha dog! So, one terrifying day, after a particularly nasty show of teeth and a guttural sound (from Shade, not me!), I grabbed his collar and growled back, albeit it not as formidably as he. That was the beginning of a long transition for Shade, which up to today has reached a new level of "freedom" for this son of Satan. He's actually allowed to roam around the house a little instead of being tied up to the leg of the couch (seriously!). That was our compromise to letting him be part of the family in the family room. If not there, he was outside or in the kennel. Kind of a prison-like existence, no? However all that is with good reason. Let me tell you about Shade's antics. Before he was "mine", he was Jeff's (and we still argue, along with Hannah, over who he loves more!), and he performed some amazing feats. Like one day he ate the siding off one huge section of Jeff's house. Yes, he ATE it. He didn't tear it up and leave it strewn about. No, he was kind enough to consume his destructiveness and suffer no ill effects. Soon after that, he was left in his dog run overnight with Jeff's truck. Upon awakening, Jeff discovered that Shade had chewed up all the wiring to the lights under the truck. Since he's been in my house, he has refrained from structural damage, but his antics are unique just the same. He has "unzipped" a ziploc bag and eaten a sandwich out of it, leaving the bag behind with nary a tear. He consumed two entire one-pound bags of Easter chocolates, foil wrappers and all, with no ill effect. He once stole a banana off the counter and peeled it, consuming the inside and leaving the peel just perfect. Last night he repeated his banana trick, only this time no peel was to be found, only a slightly chewed stem. This dog will wait until everyone is occupied and then sneak out of the room, foraging upstairs in the kids' rooms where he is sure to find a few cracker crumbs left in a box or a package of Reese's Pieces left over from a birthday party. (Let me stop here to say that my kids are NOT ALLOWED to eat in their rooms, but they break the rules all the time, clearly!). If there is no delectable delight to be found in his favorite haunts, he is just as content to eat lip gloss, toothpaste, breath mints, and lotion. He has never once been to the vet for anything except a regular checkup, having an iron-clad digestive system that seems to handle what goes in. On top of that, he is always "verbal" making whining sounds, barking incessantly, or just breathing loudly. And to top it off, this huge dog, weighing in, I'm guessing, somewhere between 80 and 90 lbs. thinks he is a lap dog. He will climb right up into your lap or on the bed and snuggle, head on the pillow and everything! Which might be cute if he didn't smell so bad and have dew claws that could gut you in one swipe. In people years, this dog is like 75, yet he still managed to attempt getting amorous with Georgette right in front of us yesterday, even though he's had his manhood removed years ago! I kicked him off, saying "you dirty old man!" Yes, Shade is unique, the quintessential "bad dog". Some days I could just leave him on a freeway off-ramp. But somewhere inside my stone-cold heart I have a soft spot for him, poor fool that he is. And so I offer him a blanket at my bedside and saved an old pillow just for his comfort. But if he eats another banana off the counter again, I'm going to kick him to the moon!

September 11, 2008

At about this same time in the morning, on Sept. 11, 2001 I remember exactly what I was doing. I was awakened by a phone call from my mom. She alerted me to watch the TV, something bad happened in New York and they were saying it was possibly a terrorist attack. Like most people who had settled in to relative peace and calm in my life (terrorism? that only happened in the middle east, right??) I couldn't imagine what had transpired. Turning on the TV, I was horrified at what I saw. Hayley was in third grade, and Hannah in first. Harrison was in preschool. The girls started to come in my room, but I didn't want them to watch anything on TV, so I sent them out and then I went downstairs to watch the coverage. At one point, the girls were at the top of the steps saying "can we come down?" and we said "no!" I didn't want them to be scared. Then, I wasn't sure if we should send them to school. Phone calls started coming in from my friends asking if I was sending my kids to school? Finally we decided they would be better off in school than watching the TV coverage at home. So, they went. And I went on with my day, which included walking with my neighbor. The day was such a brilliant blue and completely cloudless and it was so hard to imagine something so unspeakable had happened. As we walked past another friend's house, she came running out saying her cousin had been in the World Trade Center when the planes hit. She was waiting for word (we later learned he had died). It was all so surreal and scary. One thing I remember was that I did not watch much TV coverage at all. It seemed the kids were always around, and I just didn't want them to see it. So, I felt like I missed a lot of what was going on. Many months later, I watched a special with coverage I had never seen and it put a lot of pieces of the mystery together. At the time, though ,I felt like our world was insane. It felt like something horrible and huge was going to happen (and I guess, in a lot of ways, it did - the war, for example, stemming from this incident). I also felt bad for all the misconceptions and rage and raw emotions everyone felt, and those who were innocent being attacked because of their heritage. It seemed too crazy. And for a very long time after, it seemed nothing would ever be the same. And nothing is, really. You go back to your life and your routine, but the world was irrevocably changed on that day (as it was on many other days in history) and you are a bit more jaded from it. Knowing you are so vulnerable is scary and if you dwell on it, it can make you crazy. So, we go on, remembering and not forgetting and hoping.

Scents

You know how a certain scent will take you back? Back to being a kid, back to jr. high, back to something? Well, today I was washing my face with one of those apricot scrubs and it just made me think of jr. high! And that got me thinking about the scents that define spaces in our lives. For me, it was paste, crayons, playdough, and the rubber of pencil erasers in elementary school. In junior high, it was apricot face scrub, Noxzema, Love's Baby Soft, watermelon Jolly Ranchers, AquaNet hair spray and Bonne Bell Lip Smackers in Bubblegum. That lip gloss was pure heaven. I had a tube of it the size of a jumbo glue stick and I used it excessively. In fact, it smelled and tasted so good on my lips, I was tempted to take a bite (ok, once I actually did, and it tasted horrible! You know how vanilla extract smells so heavenly but when you taste it it's like putting paint thinner on your tongue?). In high school, Tabu perfume, Secret deodorant, Dep hair gel, chocolate snappers (a cookie we baked a lot!), my mom's Chinese food (ick), my mom's chili (yum), Old Spice (my dad) and Arctic Circle fry sauce are all things I can still recall. I can still inhale Baby Magic baby lotion and think of Sydney when she was a baby, or rub Icy Hot on one of the kids and remember my backaches in high school. Once I bought Love's Baby Soft just to see if it was the same as I remembered it. It wasn't. When my kids were little, I sometimes used their Johnson's baby shampoo just because it smelled so "baby" and sweet. I even remember the metal smell of my dad's watch - the cool one that made a strange high-pitched whiny sound and wound itself just by moving your arm (so state of the art at the time, who knew there would be cooler things like fax machines, cell phones, iPods, and digital mammography in years to come?). Just yesterday my friend Carla brought me a candle that was called "baking cookies" or something like that. Don't blame me if I'm whipping up a batch of snickerdoodles next time I light it.

My Husband is so generous!!

I believe I must print a retraction. In light of my post "How cheap is my husband?" I received several comments, mostly favorable. However, my husband actually read this post today and felt I gave him a bum rap (but he also reminded me of some of his other "cheap" habits like recycling clothes - for example, wearing the same pair of biking shorts for two years, yes YEARS, before he realized they could be washed! Read the tag, genius!). Anyway, he pointed out the many ways in which he is also very generous and I promised him I would print a retraction of sorts (actually, I don't "retract" what I said, because it's all true, but perhaps this could be seen as the editorial section?). For example, one Mother's day he gave me a laptop computer! The next Mother's day he gave me my coveted Nikon D60 digital camera. For my 40th birthday he took me to a fancy hotel and spa. For my 39th, to Teatro Zinzanni, a wonderful dinner show. One October weekend he surprised me with a plane ticket and a weekend away to visit my sister and when I got back, he had furnished our room with new furniture, bedding and art! I was led up the stairs on a trail of rose petals and met with a candle-lit, brand-new bedroom! Sounds romantic? You bet your sweet patootie! There are many more of those stories (but I won't bore you with the details, or make you jealous!). So, I guess using that sliver of deodorant that fell on the floor was done with the best of intentions. Maybe he was saving up to buy me a mocha? I love you, Jeff!

Hayley takes driver's ed!

I picked up Hayley from her second day at driver's ed. I asked about what she learned ("we learned signs and lines"). She also got to experience "drunk goggles" in which she was asked to walk in a straight line to retrieve a ball of paper. After bumping into the white board, desks and students, she simply dropped to her hands and knees and crawled to the ball! Passed the sobriety test? Nah, I think not. But the best part was when we were driving home and she said "I have to change a TIRE! I mean, HELLO??? Triple A!"

Things I Found In My Car

This morning I did one of those quick car cleanings - you know the kind you do lightning-fast because someone is going to be sitting in your car in a second and you just remembered you haven't cleaned it out since 1992? Yeah, well I was driving myself and my friend Amy to yoga and I had something like 43 seconds before she came over so I decided to do a quick sweep of the back of the van. These are some of the things I found: a can of chicken noodle soup (?), three water bottles in various stages of "empty" (or "full" if you're an eternal optimist), four large sticks, a huge leaf that had dried up and gone crispy and fell apart in many pieces as I removed it, a green jacket, a broken pink purse, a juice pouch missing its straw, two DVDs with no covers (Enchanted and The Bee Movie, if you wanted to know), and a "Hangman" notepad with a half-finished game on it. That was just in a few seconds. Often I find a McDonald's cup with some type of pop in it that has actually corroded the bottom of the cup and is now sitting in its own puddle of muck in one of the (13 or so) cupholders. I've found sticky pennies, petrified french fries, a coupon for a Teriyaki joint long past its expiration date, dirty socks, forgotten video games and Starbucks bags with bits of butterhorn still in them. That's the trouble with a minivan. You can spit and polish the front and never lay eyes (or hands, or body) in the cavernous back, which is only occupied by those mysterious small people. Which could explain why I found ski gloves back there in July and a sand bucket in December. For all I know, there could be an actual, living child hiding in the back of my van and I wouldn't know until I was surprised by the little moppet popping out at a stoplight. No wonder women my age lust for a smaller, more compact, faster, sleeker, shiny sports car. It's not for show. It just has less space for kid clutter. Oh yes, someday when I get my pink, 1957 T-bird, there will be nary a french fry on the floormats. Of course, by the time I get that car, I won't be eating french fries. But there might be an errant can of Ensure rolling around the back seat.

Back to School!

Another school year is upon us. Ah, the promise of fall and the first day of school. Remember the waxy smell of new Crayola crayons? Those bright pointed tips just waiting in anticipation for a blank slate of white paper on which to spread their color? Remember the new pink pearl eraser? So unblemished and angled just perfectly? The bright yellow pencils, smelling of graphite and wood, with perfect erasers? And the paste? Remember paste? All that white, creamy goodness that smelled of peppermint? You just had to taste it. And it tasted good! Alas, we've moved on to mechanical pencils and glue sticks, but the lure of new school supplies is the same. I kind of wish I got new supplies every year. I'm tempted to go out and buy myself a crisp notebook and some newly sharpened pencils (they actually come pre-sharpened now!) "just because".

So, the kids set off on Tuesday, Sept. 2. Hayley to the high school, in 10th grade this year, Hannah back to the jr. high in 8th grade, Arlie and Harrison to the elementary in 5th and 4th grades respectively. (I will attempt to attach a photo of each of them - I've never done four photos before, so we'll see!). Everyone agreed they had good teachers and the year was filled with promise.

Cut to day two. Arlie stayed home sick with a fever, stomachache, headache, sore throat - the whole package. Turns out she has an ear infection and left the dr. office with antibiotics and an inhaler for her asthma symptoms. Me? I called in "sick" to my sub job and stayed home. Day three - all four kids are home with various ailments. Luckily I didn't have to work today, but I am missing yoga, coffee and lunch with friends (can I get some sympathy?). No soccer practice this afternoon and no opening day football this evening, either. Oh well, some days are like that.

Second Anniversary!!

Today is our second anniversary! Jeff, in true romantic form, actually researched "second anniversaries" and found out that it's the year of cotton, the color is red, the gem is garnet and the flower is cosmos. So, he presented me with a gift of red dish towels, a red t-shirt, a white t-shirt, and a garnet necklace and earrings to match ("don't worry" he said "it's cheap jewelry"). All of this was presented with a card in a red envelope ("I stole it off another card, because this one had a blue envelope"), wrapped up in a red bag with red tissue paper. So sweet and thoughtful. I was really impressed that he actually put some research and thought into this anniversary. On the flip side, I had absolutely nothing planned, not even a card (who's cheap now?). And to top it off, I ended up staying home with Arlie who was quite sick. So, I took advantage of having to go to the grocery store to pick up her prescription and bought ingredients to make lasagne, garlic bread, salad and brownies for dinner/dessert. Oh, and a card! And for a "gift"? Well, in keeping with the "red" theme I chose to take him to Red Hook brewery for dinner and live music on Saturday night. That's the kind of "red" my husband will like! Anyway, it seems like a lot longer than two years that we've been married, but we both agreed it's still fun, we're still in love and we still find new things every day to admire about each other. Who can complain about that? Happy Anniversary to us! (Oh, the photo is of our engagement! Taken after Jeff did his first Olympic distance triathlon. He hid the ring in his bag the whole time and asked me to marry him at the finish line!)

How Cheap is My Husband?

Some people are thrifty. They clip coupons, don't waste food and utilize hand-me-downs. Other people are just cheap. They feed their family from feed-store gallon buckets of oatmeal, and wrap gifts in the Sunday comics. I belong to the former, my husband to the latter. This is the man who installed timers on the bathroom, garage, laundry room, pantry and kids' closet lights. Sounds thrifty, right? Except that, for example, I am the person who spends the most time in the laundry room, folding, hanging and sorting clothes. And not only do I have to listen to the clicking timer the entire time, but often when I am mid-fold, the lights go out, startling me. Hey, it's a real nice wake up call in the early morning. Nothing like a good startling first thing in the a.m. Or when the kids take a shower, and inadverently forget to leave themselves enough time on the light timer. Mid-shower the lights go out with an audible "click" followed by a "HEY!" and "someone turn on the light!!!" Inevitably, they have locked the door, causing the would-be rescuer to wrestle with a bobby pin before shedding some light (quite literally) on the situation. I swear, while all this is going on, I've heard an evil laugh (not unlike that Boris guy on "Rocky and Bullwinkle"), coming from - you guessed it - my cheap husband.

Once, I decided to clean out the pantry. It was a good thing my husband was gone on this particular weekend, because, had he not been, I might have beaned him in the head with one of the canned goods that were years past their expiration date! Canned goods! Don't those last FOREVER? I had actually never seen a canned good with an expiration date before, but I threw away at least a dozen of such items. Shortly thereafter, I was making a recipe that called for chili powder. Did we have any? Oh yes, answers cheap husband, right here. I looked at the container. The antiquated label alone should have warned me, but had I not noticed that, surely the brick-red block of solidified chili powder might have clued me in to it's age. When I inquired as to the origin of this spice, I was told "oh, I think my mom gave that to me when I was in college." College? This man is 40.

But my favorite was just the other day. He was getting ready for the day (sans shave or shower, because it was a weekend, God forbid one should shower on the weekend!). He opened up his deodorant and you know that little chunk that falls out when the product is EMPTY? You know, that "enough additional product to hold product in container"? Well, that piece came flying out and landed on the floor. I said "well, I guess you used that deodorant up to the last little bit". Did he pick it up and throw it away? No, he did not. He picked that little oblong chunk of white off the carpet and proceeded to apply it to his underarms, rubbing it like a bar of soap along those hairy pits. I said "this isn't the Depression, Jeff, we can afford new deodorant" to which he replied "Waste not, pay not." Thrifty? Cheap? You decide!