It bites you? Then it turns around and it stings you. It sucks, is what it does.
My good intentions snuck up on me one morning last week. I was three-quarters asleep at the time, slumped over on the couch watching TNT. I'd just finished a nutritious breakfast of Tylenol and Diet Coke, so I think it's safe to say that I was caught unawares when my intentions started yammering on about this latest fabulous idea.
"This isn't going to turn out like that whole backyard greenhouse thing, is it?" I asked, shaking the empty can. Good intentions laughed. Good naturedly.
"What?" Good intentions scoffed. "Noooo. We were just in
that for the strawberries. That whole
other thing, that was a fluke."
"Because I still owe the Arizona Insect Control Program like eight hundred dollars," I said.
Good intentions interrupted me. "Whoa, wait, nobody could have seen that coming. Seriously," Intentions coughed, "Did you think that one spider/bee hybrid thing was even fucking
possible?"
"Whatever, man." I tried to sit up. "The state charges a surcharge for mutations."
And I'm pretty sure I would have just gotten up at that point and left my good intentions to entertain themselves with half full glasses and silver linings and crap, but then I realized I was still waiting for the only pair of jeans I have that fit my ass to finish drying, and the meantime found me precariously swathed in a dish towel.
So I sucked it up and spent about an hour on this latest "fabulous idea"-- programming the TiVo to record exercise shows from
Fit TV. "You know," my good intentions said excitedly, "So you can work out when it's most convenient for you!"
Which... okay, sounded kind of reasonable, actually. Significantly more reasonable than "I don't know, try throwing more fertilizer in there." So I nodded brightly and good intentions and I high-fived each other (intentions missed by about a foot and a half because they have their eyes squeezed pretty tightly shut most of the time, but hey, A for Affort, right?) and then we got busy programming another three hours of
Kick, Punch, and Crunch.
So now it's a week later, right, and I'm curled up in this chair and I sort of have to pee, and I'm trying to decide whether it's too light outside to get away with just dropping trow in the yard off the back patio, and every time I have to bypass one of the eleven hundred recorded hours of
Nonstop Step or
Bhangra Dance to get to another episode of
Charmed I hear my good intentions laughing to each other and rolling their eyes behind rose-colored glasses. And so I'll probably get up and just walk alllllll the way down the hall to pee inside the house in the actual bathroom. Mostly out of disillusioned chagrin and a sense of personal disappointment, sure, but partly because I'm pretty sure it's a bad idea to go into the yard without mace or a pellet gun until we get the final "all clear" paperwork from the state's head insect guy.
The Nervous Breakdown
Hey! Go
here and read about that time I went to The Home and Garden Show! Go right now.
I just want my LIFE back!
Over the past couple of days I’ve gotten three responses from three different companies letting me down gently and explaining that the choice was a tough one, but the position’s been filled.
The strange part here isn’t that I wasn’t selected to fill the respective positions, the
strange part is that I haven’t
applied for any positions. Although, frankly, the rejection does sting a little.
Is this some new form of identity theft? Where someone assumes my identity and lands me a sparkling new job opportunity? Because if that’s the case, I’ll stop shredding all of those credit card applications right now. I’ll just start blindly throwing them away unopened, and then someone can steal my identity and refinance my mortgage at a competitive interest rate, maybe hustle to get my FICO score back into the mid-700’s.
Watch, any day now I’ll get a “thank you” from
Save the Children for my generous donation. Fucking identity theft do-gooders.
Annoying Questions To Which I Received No Response: Part 6 of 17
[
Asked by me-- the sister to exactly one sibling-- of my own brain, inside my own skull, at 10:22 pm on July 24th, 2006, for the 28th (or 27th, I'm not 100% sure on that) time in a row:]
ME: "Whoa, when's my brother's birthday again? Wait, is this... I think the... shit, of July? Really? Is this July? This isn't July, Crazy Brain."
CRAZY BRAIN: "Oh, it is. It's July. Crazy Brain may be crazy, but Crazy Brain got a built-in calendar."
ME: "Or not 'built-in', really, but aftermarket. Crazy Brain got an aftermarket calendar. But still. I trust you."
Happy 28th (27th) birthday, Brother! I'll call you just as soon as I'm not referring to my brain as a third party! And when I can find my phone! Shit, is this post over yet?
The saddest Chipoodle in all the land.
As I mentioned previously, Randy had orthoscopic surgery on his right shoulder yesterday. And although I think I made it clear that I-- being inherently full to the brim with raw caregiving instinct-- was counting the seconds until I could drive across town and pick his disoriented ass up, I managed to quell my tender nurturing proclivities long enough to stop and grab some lunch. Conveniently enough there was a
Chipotle Grill right across the street from the hospital, and once I got up to the counter I cheerfully asked the woman in charge of tortillas if this particular Chipoodle was sadder than other Chipoodle Grills.
"You know," I said, "because of the hospital." She responded by asking if I wanted rice. Naturally I took that as a sign that we were on the same page. Then I realized that this stupid restaurant had exactly three tables and ten stools inside, and I was forced to haul my soft Chipoodle tacos out to the unshaded patio and eat-- alone, mind-- in front of ten chilly stool-sitters with nothing better to do than watch me eat from behind the floor-to-ceiling window like a dining etiquette firing squad. Every time a wad of guacamole plopped out or a smear of sour cream leaked onto my hand, I expected one of them to grimace and hold up a placard with a "4" on it. And it was 118 outside. All in all, my stained tee shirt and I are pretty sure we came in last in the Chipoodle Style Olympics.
So then I go and get Randy, right, and he's a little miffed because they decided to discharge him earlier than planned but I was busy speed-eating and shielding my face from the judges' panel. (Apparently when the first thing the patient does after coming out of the anesthesia is lean over and rip the EKG sticky monitor off his chest with his teeth and spit it onto the floor because it's
itchy, damnit, and hey! someone bring me a Diet Coke!, yeah, they go ahead and shave an hour off
that asshole's recoup time.)
"Whatever," I said, tying to keep him from standing up. "You're the guy who missed the birth of his first child because you 'stepped out' for a second to try that new barbecue place." But I was
really thinking that the longer they kept him yoked to the hospital bed, the lower the odds that Mr. "Ew, I Think That Advil I Took Made Me Sick" would yak up his oxycodone in my car on the way home.
"I came right back!" he argued. And right about then he realized that half of the whole top of his body was bound up in a pretty complicated sling, and man, he'd better get to getting that thing off
immediately.
So over the course of the past two days my life has pretty much revolved around stopping Randy from unpeeling the sling ("I just want to stretch my arm out! Geez!"), fixing the entertainment system every time he pushes some button that he thinks means "make it louder" but really means "feed AM radio through the television and set the DVD player on fire", and confiscating the remote controls. I'm also on Cracker Recon Duty, and that's been kind of exciting. We got the variety pack and that turned out to be a good move, I think, despite my initial misgivings.
He's also got some shit going on with his lower back now, too, and with all of the requisite ice packs his core body temperature is roughly 84 degrees. It's fun. We're having a good time. This afternoon, as an example, after Randy got all crotchety and called the cops about a bunch of used cars parked for sale at the top of our street? Yeah, when the responding POLICE OFFICER showed up and wanted to talk to the guy who called the CITY POLICE DEPARTMENT to bitch about six parked cars on a SATURDAY, I got to ask him to "hang out a second, okay? Let me get his pants on him."
And then the cop told me that I looked really, really good for SEVENTY-FOUR YEARS OLD.
L-A-Z-... ah, to hell with it. "Laz" is close enough. I'm beat.
I'm kind of put out that I have to drive across town to pick up Randy from the hospital after orthoscopic surgery because it means I'm going to have to take this towel off my head and stop shopping online for new ringtones.
Whatever. I'm leaving the towel on. I just decided.
Babymented is a girl!
Stace and Sean had their baby today! A girl, Ever Charis. 7 lbs, 12 ozs. Everybody's happy and healthy and fabulous. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that Stace had Ever at home. With no drugs. Yeah, seriously. Don't you get like a red velvet cape or a giant gold belt buckle for that? Go over and wish her well. If I know Stace, she'll have pictures up inside of an hour.
I love you,
Stace and Sean and Ever Charis! And the orignal Charis, Stace's mom, who was kind and wonderful enough to keep us all updated on the comment "message board". Sleep well, everybody! And... I don't know, maybe throw those sheets away? I'm not sure how that all works.
I'm just about to skip out and maybe get some Jack in the Box tacos or something to meet my minimum daily requirement of gross, but I thought I'd mention that I have four VOX standard invites if anybody's interested. I don't want to get a bunch of whiny bullshit comments about how you don't "get" VOX or see the point of it or whatever because this is the internet and seriously, there's no fucking point to
any of it.
If I don't start my period in like the next hour, people may actually die.
Don't download
this game, either. Because here's what will happen:
1) You'll inevitably buy the full version of the game because after fucking around with it for your free hour you'll realize that the storyline takes roughly three years to see through and now that Uruni or Laki or Ukan or whatever finally got knocked up, you find that you're pretty frighteningly heavily invested.
2) Even though the game insists that it continues to advance itself when you're not playing, and that crops get grown and tech points accumulate and babies get made while you're finishing up that code of conduct powerpoint presentation that someone's paying you for, you won't believe it. So you'll inevitably spend the majority of your day blankly staring at little Dani or Truy or Saki dance around the ruins looking for mushrooms and six guys clearing a rock blockage for three hours so you can watch the lagoon fill up.
3) Until it's time to go to bed, at which point you become inconsolably convinced that while you're sleeping the stupid game will suddenly amp up and play itself to death, and without your guidance no one will remember to plant crops or go fishing and then when you wake up there'll be forty little cartoon skeletons scattered willy-nilly around the lagoon and maybe one guy working on a hut.
Seriously. Save yourself. I promise: I WILL TELL YOU HOW IT ENDS.
Jabba the Hut made a reservation. I'm hoping he brings a ladyfriend.
I made the executive decision to cook tonight. Last night I quietly unwrapped the last slice of American cheese and I made six nachettes with a handful of stale, shattered corn chips. That was
my dinner. It veered pretty sharply downhill for everyone else. I think Randy may have had capers.
So tonight I made baked ziti totally from scratch, and as I was trying to figure out how many people the recipe would feed, I did the math: Randy won't eat it (he's a "no carb" guy), Chris won't be home, and his girlfriend works until eight. So let's see: me plus Chelsea equals two people eating.
Trusting my gold star powers of logical deduction, I then doubled the recipe. I made ziti for twenty people.
Tomorrow night we'll all share one Yoplait Light yogurt cup, and then Thursday I think Randy's got a meeting, so that night I'LL FRY SEVEN WHOLE CHICKENS.
I don't care if "ambidextrousness" isn't a word.
So our fantastic vacation was officially over yesterday after we blew a tire on the jet ski trailer about thirty minutes outside of Page. I wasn’t 100% positive about the “officially” part, so I still had my four-day bathing suit on and a pretty fool-proof (albeit cramped) plan to ride home inside the beer cooler, but then an hour later the second tire on the trailer blew and I went ahead and put a shirt on and grumpily resigned myself to riding semi-upright in the passenger seat.
This was the fifth trip I’ve made to Lake Powell with Randy and his kids, and this was the first year that we haven’t invited another family with smaller children to come along with us. This was also the first year that I didn’t plow through eight novels in the first three days only to spend the rest of the week poring over a topography map from 1979 or marveling over the surprisingly eye opening—though admittedly stained—bilge pump owner’s manual.
Several years ago we brought along two very charming, very pleasant children with responsible, doting parents and an inherent sense of when to shut the fuck up. That year I read five John Sandford books and some chick lit thing I picked up out of childless instinct at Costco. Twice.
Last year we brought along four children under the age of ten. Their cumulative weight hovered around ninety-five pounds, pun intended, and while their would-be father was much too occupied giving strange women overnight rides to and from the marina to pay the children much heed, their mother wrapped herself in the matching early-morning maternal cloaks of Dos Equis Lager and Percodan, leaving me to see to the general survival of her brood. Judging by the gender ambidextrousness and the shocking number of “y”s, this is a woman, I fear, who had children principally because she thought they’d be fun to name. That year I read everything Patricia Cornwell ever did, the entire dusty collection of Melville fiction left on board (oh, how droll!), the labels of multiple expired prescription bottles, the Maritime Good Sense Guidebook for Beginner Lakefolk (vols. 1 – 12), and the directions for macaroni and cheese roughly seventeen times. If you’re thinking that the directions should have been committed to memory after, say, the third time, then you’ve clearly never attempted to make macaroni and cheese with one eye on the concave chest of a four-year-old napper, praying that those last eight brown sugar poptarts didn't send him into insulin shock while checking for the slightest sign of oxygen intake.
My only point here is that, if my calculations are correct and A plus B does in fact equal seven, I think that we can safely scrap that whole “Erin’s a voracious reader” stigma and just admit that Erin busies herself with reading as an excuse to dissuade inquisitive children from speaking to her. And also that she’s probably a good person to call if you happen to catch a neighboring lakeman with his anchor less than twenty-seven regulation feet off his stern. Or if you need a babysitter.
Lightning can't get you while you're peeing.
Everything was moving along just swimmingly-- no unfortunate decapitations, no spontaneous amputations-- when, an hour outside of the marina, Randy drove the houseboat over a giant craggly boulder the size of Portugal. He was talking on his phone at the time. And, if memory serves, enjoying a sandwich with his eyes closed. And while it did cost us several hours and a couple hundred dollars for a new prop blade, I'm relieved to report that the blender came out of the incident unscathed.
And then the boys sweated for an hour drilling holes through solid rock mountain and setting the anchor lines straight and tight while the girls waded around listlessly, only interrupting our constant mantra of "hurry the storm's coming and we're all going to die" to pee in the lake.
The end.
I officially apologize to math. Sorry, math.
Seven of us are leaving for the annual
Lake Powell houseboat vacation tomorrow. That's seven down from sevenTEEN people last year. I guess I can stop being a prick to our neighbor, since it looks like my "Alienate Ten People A Year" quota's been met. We've been looking forward to this trip since the day we drove back to town last year, and I'll be damned if I know why, since last year we were all almost killed in a variety of horrifying ways. While driving the highway up to the lake, the steering on one of the trucks went out (ha! ha! WENT OUT) sending the vehicle off the road and into a fence, mercifully not into oncoming traffic or-- as would have been the case had the truck been ten miles up the road-- plummeting into the Grand Canyon. I was
in that truck, and perhaps the worst part of the entire ordeal was having to apologize to Randy after having screamed at him in the moment to, quote, "Get off the goddamn phone and drive the fucking car." Turns out he
was driving the car, and no amount of phone getting offing would have stopped the wheel from spinning freely in his hand like the teacup ride at Disneyland.
Roughly an hour after
that, another truck that was towing the three jet skis behind it suffered a minor setback when the jet ski trailer broke in half (HA HA BROKE IN HALF) and jet skis were bounced and scattered all over I-17 during rush hour traffic. I wasn't in
that car, and so thankfully I wasn't required to apologize for anything. Which was nice.
This is usually when I stop telling this story because the person I've been talking to has by this time determined that someone in our group must have signed a hasty "no returns" contract with The Big Red Man Downstairs. I can't speak for everybody, but I can tell you that I have signed no such contract (at least not that I can recall, but I'm pretty sure I'd remember that and anyway, wouldn't I have something cool like a billion dollars or my own island or
normal hair to show for it?) and also that I've gone so far as to think about maybe saying a little silent apology for all those times in first grade when my friend Shannon and I would lie on our braided nap mats and shoot the bird at the devil because we'd just heard about the bird and we had to shoot it at SOMEbody, right, and the devil was the most deserving guy that our little six-year-old brains could come up with who wouldn't tell on us, or at least who wouldn't tell on us while we were alive.
But I haven't apologized for repeatedly calling the devil a penis with my tiny, giddy middle finger, and we're all still looking forward to this year's trip. Even if we're going to have to draw forced and shaky straws to see who has to tow that newly-welded jet ski trailer, and even if we've all gone out of our way to insure that if there's any kind of weak and warbling cell phone- slash -internet signal bouncing around up there in the middle of nowhere AT ALL, we will be able to harness that fucker and contact the proper authorities. My abacus cell phone, as an example, is now set up to function as a modem. When establishing service for his new PDA, Randy went ahead and signed up for the $119 a month "Apocalypse-- A Long Shot, But Just In Case" service; there's an actual
guy who follows him around in a dusty flak suit and fingerless gloves with a miniature cell tower on his back.
So I guess what I'm saying here is that a) when you next hear from me, I'll be capturing the internet from the deck of a giant houseboat in the middle of what is arguably the most astoundingly beautiful lake on planet Earth, or b) forgiving any basic math errors, I'll be dead by this time tomorrow.
Okay, so, see ya!
UPDATE: Speaking of basic math errors, first sentence. Seven times seven is seventy-seven.
UPDATE #3: Whoops, second sentence. Seven times seven... nevermind.
The Grand Finale Involves a Medical Examiner and Someone Convincing Your Mom To Go With A Closed Casket.
You know those fireworks that are just a bright flash of white light in the sky quickly followed by a deafening, window-shattering boom?
Yeah, if after like the third or fourth one of those it starts to hail and the neighbor's tree goes up in flames, that's not fireworks. That's a major electrical storm. Grab your cooler and blanket and shit and start running.
Abacus: so fun to spell I went ahead and made it a person at the end.
Randy bought the new
Motorola Q today. I danced around the store in a state of teeth-clenched envy, alternately caressing the new sleek, sleek machine and beating on the counter with my own ancient abacus phone. I must have asked the sales guy thirteen hundred tiptoed variations of the same question, and yes-- apparently if Randy is unconscious inside his truck when it is unexpectedly rolled off a cliff into a rocky ravine full of panthers and lava rapids, my number can be transferred to his Q.
"Given that the Q wasn't inside the truck at the time of the accident," the sales guy clarified.
"Well yeah," I nodded, sliding a couple of beads, doing a little long division. "He didn't get the insurance."
"And even if he did, our warranty has a pretty inoperable 'no jungle predators' clause." Huh. Good to know.
"Hey," Randy mumbled, "How do I make it louder?" He shook it a little. Flicked at the screen with his thumbnail.
"You don't," I said quickly, raising my eyebrows at the sales guy and leading Randy back to the car. "There aren't any volume controls on this one."
It's been several hours and I think I've almost got him convinced that the only available ringtone is "Spring Fling Organ" and that Bluetooth technology involves a velcro chest strap and a headband. Me thinks a trade for the abacus in all of its marvelous multi-volumed glory grows more and more appealing. Alas, history dictates that I've only got another eleven or twelve hours to bring my plan to fruition before Randy accidentally bounces the Q off an asphalt parking lot and then stands on it for a few minutes while he looks for it.
We must move quickly! Abacus! Fetch me my coat!
