How cool is it that my 100th post gets to be a celebration of the election of Barack Obama?! I’m so happy and feeling all warm and fuzzy and I just know I’ll sleep better tonight than I have in, oh, about EIGHT YEARS.
Way to go, America!
Just what is broasted chicken anyway?
That four+ pounds I lost last week? I think it was all from my feet because I’m having trouble keeping my sandals on.
Son One works in a grocery store bakery and the other day a customer’s little girl called him “The Bakist” How cute is that?
We have two different parties interested in maybe buying our house and another showing scheduled for Sunday. Just this week I found a great house for us to buy. Have the stars finally aligned or is this just the Fates getting me all excited once again so they can crap on my head for giggles?
I burned one of my acrylic nails lighting a cigarette in a breeze the other day and don’t have time to get it repaired anytime soon. I guess that’ll be my Halloween costume. You guessed it – I’m dressing up as an IDIOT.
Sebastian was standing on the back steps the other day waiting to be let in when all of a sudden there was a loud noise behind him and he bolted in fear. The noise? His own tail whapping against the back door.
That is all.
This Thursday I will be winging my way to Chicago for a Girl’s Weekend with Daughter, Other Daughter, and Other Other Daughter which will be much with the fun!
Maybe…
See, Daughter has suggested that on Saturday evening we go to Daley Plaza for “a Halloween Thing” going on there. Okay, says me, (dumb ass, trusting me), thinking about pumpkins and candy and face painting and fun, non-scary Halloween things that are innocuous and enjoyable and that make my inner toddler squeal in glorious anticipation.
Then this afternoon I search Google to find out precisely where Daley Plaza is located and find out that for the month of October, it has been renamed Franken Plaza. As in -stein. You know, Frankenstein? And there’s a HAUNTED VILLAGE! OhnoOhnoOhnoOhnoooooo. And that this is all part of Chicagoween. Holy cow. This city takes its Halloween celebration seriously which probably means lots and lots of SCARY.
I don’t do well with SCARY. Or with lower case scary, for that matter. Ask Daughter. She still teases me for screaming and covering my eyes during a Harry Potter movie. This little trip to Franken Plaza may require adult diapers.
If you happen to be at Franken Plaza Saturday night, I’ll be the one quaking and hyperventilating and screaming for my mommy.
Stop and say Boo!
My sister’s cat first alerted us to Starling Day a decade ago. He paced the windowsill, meowing and brrping and finally howling. When I went to see what he was so agitated about, I saw that our dogwood tree rustled and churned with the excited fluttering of hundreds of noisy birds.
After suffering a brief, panicky Tippi Hedron moment, I called a local nature center and described the birds and their behavior. The birds were migrating starlings and they like the berries in our dogwood. A LOT. I wish for the sake of my butt that I could get so excited about fruit.
The woman further explained that starlings aren’t native to the United States. In the 1890′s, a man named Eugene Scheiffelin decided that New York should be home to all the songbirds mentioned in Shakespeare’s works so he brought 100 starlings from England and released them in Central Park. I so love that story. It’s romantic and serendipitous and just goes to show that there have always been people with more money than sense and that that’s not always a bad thing, current Wall Street execs and members of government excepted.
Well, every year since we first saw them and, I imagine, for many years before we noticed them, descendants of those original immigrants stopped off in our backyard each autumn on their way to somewhere warmer.
Once we’d noticed them, I started keeping casual track of their visits and what the timing of their visits might mean for the coming winter. The years they came in September we’ve had bitterly cold, snowy, icy winters. The years they came in mid-October as they did today, our winters have been average – chilly with measurable snow a few times, but on the whole pretty typical for our region. I celebrate when they show up in November because that has meant winters with very few cold snaps, little if any snow, and daytime temperatures mostly in the low 40′s. There have been a couple of years when we missed their visits and I was surprised each time to find myself a little edgy because the starlings have apparently become an important part of the emotional preparation I undergo in advance of my least favorite season.
This morning the starlings were nervous, probably because Yes,Dear and I were sitting outside with the dogs when they arrived. Fewer than usual stopped and those that did stop didn’t stay long, but they came and we were here to see it.
Yes,Dear doesn’t understand why I get ridiculously excited on Starling Day. This morning he asked, Is it fun to be so crazy?
My answer?
Yes. Definitely.
…when I got married 25 years ago. And not in a good way. So, on Saturday, a friend and I joined Weight Watchers.
Of course, yesterday was Yes,Dear’s birthday, so my best intentions were put to the test immediately.
I flunked. In fact, I should probably just take myself down to the principal’s office and give myself a tongue lashing and a detention.
For his birthday dinner Yes,Dear wanted Outback’s Curbside Take Away so as to enjoy a steak dinner without having to interrupt the end of the Eagles game or the start of the Phillies game. God forbid.
Ordering was tricky. I waged an internal battle that left me bruised and battered (batter…mmmmm) and ended up ordering a Queensland salad which I felt pretty good about until I heard that Hungry Little Devil in me ask for steak instead of chicken on my salad. God, it was good bad good BAD! YUMMY! Bad girl.
And then I ate a piece of cake. *hangs head*
But so far today I’ve been Very Good. (Give me CHOCOLATE! I need CHOCOLATE! I’m in HELL! SEND CHOCOLATE!)
I’m going to get through this if it kills me.
Before I lose whatever shred of sanity that may remain…
Let me out, let me out, let me OUT – I need CHOCOLATE!
Go back to the hell you came from and start burning those calories, you pesky devil!
…I want to ask friends and family for their support. Because I Am Going To Need It. Big time. Kindly discourage me from misbehaving even when I look like this:
And soon I will be as sleek and fit as Sebastian. Not as pretty as he is, but still way smarter.
And I’ll look better in jeans.
My vanity will not allow me to post a “before” picture until I have an “after” picture to post right next to it. But I will be posting my losses (hopefully no gains) each week in an effort to remain accountable.
Wish me luck!
…Daughter was in town to attend a wedding which took place in rural Pennsylvania. It’s lovely there. See?
Yes,Dear and I dropped her off at the church and then went to the Wilbur Chocolate Company in Lititz to stock up on these:
Yum.
Then we tried to go here:
But the Royal Parking was full and the parking lot designated for peasants was nearly full and way too far from the entrance for our liking. So we drove around and took pictures. The landscape was littered with cows…
Hi Girls!
And with these:
But we saw many more of these, which we found amusing and rather ironic…
…since we didn’t see even ONE of these:
We stopped to take pictures at a little barnyard and overheard the following conversation:
And fell in love with this little fella. Just watch him kick up his heels!
Donkey Play from The Bigger They Get on Vimeo.
It was great having Daughter home for a few days; we really enjoyed her visit. She flew back to Chicago on Tuesday and I miss her already, but I’ll be visiting her in a couple of weeks. I wanted to get a visit in before winter comes because I am a fair weather mother who has no desire to visit Chicago between November and April. Or maybe May.
Otherwise, this week has pretty much sucked. The financial crisis is hitting home for us, but that’s a story for another post. Also, I have an ultrasound scheduled for Friday due to an elevated liver enzyme that the Doctor wants to check out a little more thoroughly since I insist I am not a drinker. I’m truly not a drinker except for a glass of wine now and then and some egg nog at Christmas, but this anxiety is making me wish I were a lush.
Wish me luck…
It has been bothering me that I have no concept of just how big $700 billion is. I’m lousy at math, but I decided to play around a bit to see if I could somehow tame this outrageous sounding number so I could visualize it or gain a sense of it. Here’s what I came up with:
The current U.S. population is approximately 305,292,874. If we all – every man, woman, and child – split the $700 billion evenly, we’d each get around $2,293.00.
The current world population is approximately 6,726,870,693. Again, if we divided the $700 billion among every man, woman, and child on Earth, each would receive about $104.00.
Scientists believe the earth to be approximately 4.5 billion years old. If someone had stashed $155 under a rock each year since the Big Bang or Creation, whichever is your cup of tea, we’d have about $700 billion just in time to solve the current financial crisis.
A $1 bill is 6.125″ in length. If we had 700 billion of them, they would stretch around the earth 2,717 times in a continuous pile nearly a foot high.
700 billion $1 bills end to end would stretch almost 3/4 of the way to the sun.
The English translation of War and Peace contains over 560,000 words. We’d need to collect 1,250,000 copies of the novel to reach 700 billion words.
Or how about this…
A 5 pound Hershey Chocolate Bar is 1″ thick. If we stacked 700 billion newly minted $1 bills in one amazing pile, we’d need to stack approximately 3,010,001 five pound Hershey Chocolate Bars to reach the same height as our pile of bills.
The average human head has about 100,000 strands of hair. If each hair were worth 7 million dollars the whole shebang would go for $700 billion.
This is making my head hurt.
If anyone has a better way to make this number make sense, please chime in.
If you want to correct my math, go for it. If, on the other hand, you want to debate the math, reread the second sentence of this post and then go get a life.
Which is apparently what I need to do.
Dear Son Two,
Thank you for your patience this week. This letter is late and I’m ashamed of myself. Not because I got drunk at the pig roast on Saturday (turns out I didn’t) but because I should have written this last Sunday. Instead I spent the day visiting Scarlett and Rhett at Tara and listening to Scarlett rave about the funeral she went to last week. The BEST music. The MOST BEAUTIFUL flowers. The TASTIEST lunch. Promise me that when I start viewing funerals as exciting social occasions you will smother me with my pillow.
Then I should have gotten to it Monday, but a good friend’s dear child was experiencing a meltdown and I was needed there.
Then there was Tuesday and I too much work to catch up on from Monday.
And then on Wednesday we were ALL busy helping said friend’s child and wreaking the havoc that shall not be spoken of here. You know what I’m talking about. Wednesday evening I came down with the Black Death and Thursday was a blur of misery. Now here it is Friday and you have been 20 for six days already.
Just because I didn’t write your letter doesn’t mean I didn’t spend any time on your birthday reminiscing about the day you joined our family. The details might be a little hazy to you, but I remember them clearly. You, sweet child, are our favorite souvenir from our two + years in New Hampshire, even if you were born three weeks late during the hottest summer on record. We did nothing but play Scrabble for those last three weeks. I have always been a sore loser and not a particularly good winner and I was fat and grumpy and hormonal and it took Dad 15 years to agree to play Scrabble with me again. Heh.
When my water finally broke, it was Labor Day. I should have guessed that would happen.
You were my easiest labor and delivery and an absolutely beautiful newborn. The time we spent in the hospital would have been perfect if we hadn’t gotten the roommate from hell. She was loud and whiny and had a grating, nasal voice that made me want to stab myself with a fork. She kept going on and on about how beautiful you were and how ugly her baby was in comparison. I found her disloyalty shocking and infuriating. How could she say such a thing about her own newborn child?
And then she showed me her baby.
Oh. My. God. The poor child was proof that Sasquatch exists and can successfully mate with homo sapiens. I think I mumbled something about how cute his fingers were. I was polite enough not to mention his tail or his unibrow.
You were gorgeous, but you didn’t make him look bad, believe me. He did that all by himself.
When we brought you home, you proved to be the kind of baby sleep deprived moms of cranky babies accuse other new mothers of lying about. You slept through the night on your first night at home and every night thereafter (except for some nights during your teen years when I innocently thought you were sleeping but you apparently weren’t home. I’m not quite ready to laugh about those yet, so wait a few more years before bringing that up at the Thanksgiving table, okay? )
When you turned three and began experiencing chronic – ah – digestive upsets, we were scared to death. The doctors tested you for all kinds of horrible scary things and we had to wait days and sometimes weeks for the results. This went on for over a year before you began experiencing migraine headaches and it occurred to the doctors that you’d been experiencing abdominal migraines all that time. On the one hand we were incredibly relieved to find out that the problem wasn’t life threatening. On the other, those damn chronic migraines colored your entire childhood, affected your school experience and social development, and made your life so difficult that we despaired.
You, however, knew nothing different. As painful and bumpy as your life was, your experience with chronic illness helped shaped you into the sweet, compassionate man whom we are SO PROUD of and love so deeply.
Of our three children, you are the one who seems to have been gifted with the most massive quantities of your dad’s redneck genes; you are the NASCAR fan, the one whose political views I sometimes find shocking. But you are a thinker and your arguments are informed and reasoned and your knowledge of so many topics is broad and often surprising. Sometimes I fear your views of the world and certain issues in particular are too bleak and too black and white, so the other day when you told me you thought you might actually vote for Obama after all because you see more hope and optimism coming from his campaign I was thrilled. Not necessarily because you’d vote for Obama (although I’m still doing a happy dance) but because I take that as a sign that your world view continues to mature and deepen. You are already AMAZING and getting more amazing all the time.
You are an incredibly talented photographer. I hope you find a way to make photography your life’s work if that’s what you want. I see how passionate you are about it and how happy it makes you and I wish for you to always be that passionate and happy about many things in your life. Except maybe the Death Metal and the mosh pits. Oh, and the Urban Exploring. It’s risky. You could get hurt. Or arrested.
I know, I know. You’re saying, Stop being a mom.
Sorry, pal. No can do.
Happy, happy 20th birthday, sweetheart. I love you.
Mom
The little Brownie Girl Scout in me who marched in parades carrying the flag in small white-gloved hands, who saluted that flag proudly every morning in grammar school, who laid wreaths at the war memorial on the high school football field, who decorated her bike with bunting and streamers every 4th of July and who grew up so proud of America, believing with all her heart that she could do anything because she was lucky enough to be born here – she’s BACK!
She spent the last eight years curled up in the fetal position sucking her thumb, frightened, depressed and, worst of all, ashamed – and feeling ashamed for being ashamed – but during Obama’s acceptance speech her ears perked up and her heart swelled and she stood up and sang at the top of her lungs:
I HAVE SOMETHING IN MY POCKET THAT BELONGS ACROSS MY FACE,
I KEEP IT VERY CLOSE AT HAND IN A MOST CONVENIENT PLACE.
I’M SURE YOU COULDN’T GUESS IT IF YOU GUESS A LONG, LONG WHILE,
SO I’LL TAKE IT OUT AND PUT IT ON
IT’S A GREAT BIG BROWNIE SMILE!
I was so happy to see her I found myself crying tears of joy.
I’ve really missed that kid.
P.S. I must also say this: While Obama brings many kinds of wonderful to this election, one of the qualities I most admire in him is his maturity. For instance, I know for a FACT that had I been the one delivering that speech there’s no way, upon reaching the word “nuclear” in the text, I could have avoided the temptation to say:
NU-CLEE-AR. GEORGE, DID YOU HEAR THAT? I SAID NU-CLEE-AR.
