Wordjanitor Strikes Again

OK, it's New Year's Eve and I'm attached to a keyboard. I have a four-year-old and the stomach flu, so I'm all for uneventful evenings. I had high aspirations of writing meaningful things, but it's just not in the cards, stars, or in the air tonight. And, well, things could be worse! Love me, love my dog? Did they have to send in a police dog? Nude Couple Grapple Over Dog Near Shower Monday, December 31, 2007 (12-31) 19:27 PST Bremerton, Wash. (AP) -- A 25-year-old woman was arrested for investigation of second-degree assault for getting into an argument with her boyfriend over whether his dog should be in the bathroom while the couple were taking a shower together. A police report said the man, 26, wanted his dog to join them in the bathroom, but the woman objected on Thursday night. The woman told her boyfriend that if the dog doesn't stay out, s...

I hereby admit to some degree of grinchdom. And I am the parent of a kid full of the wonder and energy of the holiday season. Were it not for that energy, I might go full grinch on y'all. It's not so much that I don't want to celebrate the season. In fact, that's just it. I'd like to celebrate the season -- the coming of winter, the falling of leaves, the ice on the windshield, the crisp of the air, the changing of the year. I like to see the outside world get all cleaned up for spring. I like to think about what I learned (and didn't) during the year and what I want to do differently (be nicer to myself) or the same (veggies, exercise) in the coming year. I also love getting holiday cards with obligatory letters. I love the lights. I love how all of those things that stretch my patience make my son's eyes light up. We took him to Santa Cruz for the holiday lights train on the weekend. We ate kettle corn. We sang Christmas carols (see above admission to som...

How do I say this without sounding cold, callous, inhuman, etc.? No more effing cancer. Six degrees of separation, percentage of friends/family affected, whatever! It would be one thing if it were all of my Marlboro chain-smoking, 7-11 Big Gulp gimlet-drinking, toxic-waste bathing friends and relatives, but no, it's you healthy people! The exercising veggie eaters. The fresh air breathers. WTF people?! Take a memo to your cells. Tell your cells I'm pissed. I've had all I can take and I can't take no more. Until I have to, then I will take what comes because you have to. I won't shrink away into the corner. I will drive you to where you need to be. I will buy your groceries. I will make you a damn meatloaf. I will stalk nurses in hospital hallways to make sure you get what you need. I will yell at the world on your behalf from the false privacy of my car. I will memorize your phone number and take your calls in the middle of meetings. I will. The photo above has litt...

Literal Bases After tonight's softball game, my son and I performed our ritual of running the bases together. He does this with a massive smile on his face, though he does tend to slow a bit between third and home. (Ah, but this gives me hope that he will actually sleep when we get home...) We played kickball in p.e. in first grade. I was on third base. They told me to go home! I did. All the way -- to my house. Apparently, it's not called fourth base. The first of many experiences along those lines. I spent a long time with a relatively abject fear of embarrassment. Now, strangely or not, I embrace it every week by playing softball. I'm not good at softball, which is exactly why I play. I play to prove to myself that it doesn't matter that I'm not good at it. I play to prove to myself that I can fail with an audience. I play to prove to myself that I have nothing to prove. (By the way, I did hit the ball today.) Not-So-Literal Bases Lately, everything seems like a ...

Sometimes a spot is just a spot. Or it's not. In this case, 'twas not a spot. Or it was, but upon further examination, it wasn't. When my dad had his bone scan after his diagnosis from the biopsy, they found a spot, which they then x-rayed and determined was nothing after all. Meaning, the cancer is not in his bones. Which is good news. Damn good news. This reality shit is exhausting. The physical exhaustion from the weekend was honestly cleansing. It felt much like I did after playing weekend soccer tournaments back in the days before the titanium toe. I'm fairly certain most people think I'm nuts, but I'm fairly certain they probably thought that before I answered the "What did you do this weekend?" question. The exhausting part is all of the little lists in my head. Things to do, buy, decide. Work things, errand things, house things, dad things, and occasionally even me things. Apparently I have a habit of putting that list in the inco...

"I like grasshoppers because they catch the mean bugs in their wings and eat them. Then they spit them out and put them in jail where they can't fly into my eyes. Yeah, I like grasshoppers. They're my buddies. They protect me from the bad guy bugs." --@, Nov '07 As if "Adventures in Shredded Soy Cheese" on the kitchen floor wasn't enough. Or even the color commentary as Benny and George the lizards fought fires in the hallway. @ had one heck of a creative day. In addition to lizards, cheese, and grasshoppers... He supervised my morning housecleaning (from his stepladder perch while wearing his bike helmet) and afternoon cooking (apple pie and chicken enchiladas to stock the freezer). He helped with the shopping ("Mommy, I want to get daddy a Bob the Builder t-shirt for his birthday"). He sat blissfully calm during his haircut while every other little boy in the place was screaming like a banshee in a beartrap. Oh, and before putting on his ...

There may be something to the monosyllabic stupor idea. Certainly less responsibility. After all, if compound words are impossible, then surely no one can expect complex multiclause sentences or thoughts from my muddled brain. Today's annoying realization? What I thought was the normal thundering descent of seasonal allergies upon my sinuses is a cold. Which ticks me off. Or, to be more grammatically correct about it, it "ticks off me." Yes, it's annoying to feel crummy (or have the "creeping crud," as my dad says). It's tiring, frustrating, and all of that, but I'm most annoyed because it's my own dang fault. (No, I did not imitate Phoebe from Friends in an attempt to get my singing voice all sexy and low. And if you've seen that episode, rest assured that is not how I got sick! And if you know me at all, you know I CANNOT sing. Twenty years of Girl Scouts and I still sound like something caught in bear trap.) Back to our regularly sche...

I'm not quite sure when I'll get back to big words. Or complex sentences with internal punctuation. I'm tired. Quite tired. On too many levels. The good news is that I am not learning the ins and outs of life at Starbucks, which means I successfully completed a major project at work. The project was exhausting, but energizing. I got to play a significant part in seeing something prominent emerge from a blank piece of paper. In a VERY short time. It's not so much, "look what I did" as "wow, it worked." It has been a rough few weeks. There's work, but then there's that real life thing too. I've been spending a lot of energy being the protector, caretaker, advocate, etc. Don't get me wrong, it's part of what makes me tick. When Y went to the hospital, it was automatic to me that I should be there to make sure she had what she needed. And before I left each night, I wanted to be damn sure the nurses had her pain meds figured out. But ...

Sometimes you're faced with situations that, well, it's likely no one you know will ever have to face themselves. And sometimes those things are life-changing. And other times they're just freakin' weird. Case in point: Walked into my back yard Saturday afternoon and found a four-foot lizard. An iguana named Iggy, to be more precise. Unfortunately, Iggy was deceased. And unfortunately, I had to figure out what to do with Iggy before @ also discovered this little bit of Wild Kingdom (brought to you by Mutual of Omaha) in the back yard. Where's that safari jacket when I need it? After the WTF moment passed, I removed said reptile from the lawn and fairly nicely packaged it for the neighbor so that, when she returned from her latest experimentation with mind-altering chemicals, she could bond with her green friend before disposing of it. I considered a few alternatives, including leaving it on the hood of her car, but realized that the car has actually been missing f...

@ and I have a running commentary about chickens. When I don't know how to answer him, I bring in the chickens. He likes me to incorporate chickens into his bedtime stories. Sometimes he makes it very clear that I am, indeed, a "big mean chicken." When he barks, I cluck back at him and he generally replies with, "Quit bok-bokking mama!" (So then I meow and wind up going through a litany of other animal noises until I give up and return to the rusted trusted barnyard fowl.) With @'s brother, it's hawks. The relationship is different. I don't get to play the verbal games. But I see hawks in odd places. Or, it's possible the hawks were always there and I didn't see them. Shortly after the boys were born, a young hawk moved into in our neighborhood -- in the mix of Silicon Valley's freeways, expressways, and Starbucks. At first he seemed to spend a lot of time going from tree to tree as if trying to find other hawks or get his bearings. Event...

The guy pictured here is my new best friend. I can't remember his name, but in a relationship like this, do names really matter? I had a horrid week. A week that just got worse like the compounding daily interest on a very bad short-term loan. It was capped off by some arrogant, self-important, female-fearing twit who opted to rip into me about the work I do and suggest that I was in the wrong job, should be removed from my clients, am a complete failure in any sort of collaborative work, and probably wasn't even a nice person anyway. Ouch. Logically, I know the guy has some sort of issue with me or the rest of the planet. Or he's completely stoned on the fictional kool-aid of a pathological liar in the near vicinity (who does exist, by the way). Logically, I know he's wrong. But after a week of multiple challenging conversations, communication judgment errors on my part, and an overall haze of bad attitudes roaming the environment... I left the office early. Quickly a...

Generally, I like it when @ makes new friends. And I like that he loves to be outside and is curious about the plants and critters that populate the yard. But, everything has its limits. Take this morning, for instance. The wee boy opted to use the blissful nine minutes between right-handed alarm clock snooze-button bashing to leap on to the bed and steal one of my pillows. OK, fine. I skipped my morning push-up, crunch, etc. ritual, so I should have been up anyway, but stealing my pillow while I'm groggy can be dangerous. After we sorted out that the pillow thief was relatively benign, we agreed that said thief would snuggle up with said pillow in my bed while I took my shower. A hunch told me that he would not indeed be in the same spot in which I left him upon my emergence from the shower. However... when the dog barged in and the wee boy knocked on the shower door with "Mama, look what I got" I really wasn't expecting to see a snail. But, that's indeed what ...

This morning, @ was looking at CDs in the rack and pulled out two Beatles anthologies, asking what the music was. I told him that it was the Beatles. "Oh," he says. "The ones from the car show." Fuddled, muddled, and suddenly astounded. "You're right, the band from the car show we went to with Grampa Doug." A YEAR AGO, a (very good) Beatles tribute band played at the annual car show where my dad lives. A YEAR AGO. @ was two and a half then and the band probably played for two hours max during a long, hot, chaotic day filled with cars, trailers, engines, people, dogs, music, hot dogs, playgrounds, motorcycles, and such. So, of course, we listened to the Beatles this morning. At the moment, he's measuring the porch. I bought him his very own tape measure this afternoon. I measured the porch to build a deck a couple of weeks ago and ever since, tape measures are suddenly something more than the ever-present boxes on his daddy's hip pocket. T...

Luke is having a slumber party. His bestest buddy Butch is here. Butch belongs to Jeff and Katie down the street. He and Luke can chase each other, wrassle, and otherwise convince the uninitiated that there's about to be bloodshed. If I open my front door, Luke tries to bolt to Butch's house. If Jeff and Katie open theirs, Butch bolts over here. I swear they have cell phones; it's as if they can hear the respective doors open three houses away. I'm trying to decide whether the two knuckleheads can both sleep in the house tonight. They're alternately chilling and then remembering that they're nuts. Luke is nosing a chair across the dining room and Butch is trying to figure out why. It's like watching a cartoon, at least until one attempts to mount the other. Then it's more like Animal Planet. It's good to get insight into your friends' lives. Unfortunately, I now have insight into Jeff's knee. Butch is here because Jeff and Katie are at the...

No doubt about it, my son is a character. Unfortunately, this weekend he chose to be a character from an as-yet-unwritten story about gremlins who take over the universe while laughing maniacally and peeing on the front lawn. Honestly, I don't think he felt well. He fought naps like they were a upstart nation invading his precious homeland. I think he said, "I don't want to" more times today than in his entire life thus far. On the plus side, he helped wash my car and pick tomatoes from the garden. He's convinced we need to eat the pumpkins (two are orange) and was very excited to see that several new ones made an appearance in the garden while we were gone last week. The coolest part of it is that he planted the pumpkin vine and the darn thing is amazingly healthy and prolific. He has an interesting ability to distinguish "snail buddies" from "yucky snails," each of which meet a different fate. The yucky snails are taught to fly (usually unsuc...