Not a bad day

Today it reached 54 degrees outside, so I put Tommy in his rubber boots and let him jump in puddles in the driveway while Danny napped.  Then Ryan got home from school and let me take a shower, and I made mac and cheese for supper. Tom and I are fighting but he's not home tonight so I can pretend we're not. All in all, not a bad day.  I can handle a not a bad day every once in a while.

I like butterflies, he likes bones

Tom and I, trying to decide what to have for dinner.

Me: Well I know I'm making brussel sprouts.
Tom: Would you like pork chops or steak with them.
Me: Steak. I just, I don't like your pork chops. I don't understand them. You can either buy a butterfly pork chop, a full slab of meat, or you can buy one with a bone and connective tissue in the middle of it. Why would you get that kind?
Tom: Price. When you buy the butterfly chop, you're paying around $3.50 a pound.  When you get the regular pork chops you only pay $2.50 a pound.
Me: But you're paying for the bone!  And steak is my other option? Is steak cheaper than butterfly pork chops?
Tom: Well, no.
Me: Then I guess you just lost the "We can't afford butterfly pork chops" argument.

It would be creepy because I'd sign the card, "Grandma"

It's probably a good thing that I'm as broke as I am. I'm too spontaneous and weirdly generous and if I could afford shipping, I'd be mailing anonymous and ridiculous things all over the country.  Last year (2010) we had snow at Xmas and I had a friend in Colorado Springs who was facebooking about how much she missed snow and I spent days trying to figure out if I could afford to mail a freezer bag of snow to Colorado. As it turned out, dry ice is really expensive!  And every once in a while I'll find something that reminds me of my dead grandmother, usually some horrid and cheap hard candy, and wonder for a moment if I should mail some to my cousin. I have one cousin who had that perfect combination of A) living an hour's drive away from Grandma, B) being raised by her borderline Oedipal father to worship Grandma, and C) a selective memory able to completely erase the racism, weight comments, constant criticism, and just plain awfulness of Grandma.  And she will post comments on facebook every once in a while about how much she misses Grandma, which only proves that she has absolutely no accurate memories of the woman, but still if I had the money to do it I would totally order those cheap blue-tinned butter cookies and have them shipped to her.
When your grandmother calls you a whore for having a boyfriend at age 15, on the street, at the top of her lungs, it forms your opinion. Plus, she called every grandkid who wasn't rail thin fat, and told the thin ones they were going to starve to death, and once told my cousin not to sit on chairs anymore because he was going to break all the furniture by being fat.  Seriously, she babysat for a weekend once and had him sitting on the floor the whole time.

Bored and frustrated

I have finished Ryan's quilt top. It is a horrible example of how bad I am at math. My measurements were so off that what was supposed to come out twin- sized is a baby blanket, so I had to add borders to it to make it bigger (I had bought pre-cut packages of fabric so I couldn't just make more quilt).  I would like to sandwich the thing and get going on the quilting, but I only have beige quilting thread so I need to buy some in a more appropriate color. I know what I want, but the closest fabric store is an hour away and I can't go there just to buy 2 spools of thread.  I called the little quilt shop in town and they don't have it.  Ugh.  So why bother laying out the quilt back, blanket, and quilt top and pinning it all together when I can't do anything after that anyway?  So I am frustrated and eager to get going on this. Ugh.

Bootstrap Bill Turner

Tommy walks up to me with a Ken  doll.
"See dis man? He's has bugs in his eyes. And snakes in his tongue. And dey come out his dummack and he's not alive."
I'm horrified and I wonder what on Earth could have given him such violent images. "He's not alive? Why not?"
"He a pirate and he's stuck in the boat in the basement of the boat and he can't leave and he's not alive."
And that was when I decided not to let Tommy watch any more Pirates of The Caribbean movies. Ever.

Toothless Beyonce

All the single lizards! All the single lizards!
If you liked it then you should've put a worm on it!

It's finally done!

My quilt is finally finished. Sorry if you were expecting something with some intricate pattern but I just did triangles. I hand-quilted it, though. If you look at the middle picture close enough you can see that I went all Harry Potter geek on it and made it the Deathly Hallows sign. The last picture shows some of the more detailed quilting. Otherwise I mainly just did loopy little meandering lines all over it.  I like the quilt, Tommy claims it as his own, and I can't wait to start the next one, whatever it may be.

Connie-Monster! Grrrr!

I hope I never forget that Tommy calls Baragon from the Godzilla movie "Giant Monsters All Out Attack" Connie-Monster, even though as far as I can tell, no one in the movie calls it or anyone else Connie. He just looked at this red, bat-eared, mutant stegosaurus and thought, "He looks like a Connie."

A late-night pondering

Kurt Cobain. John Lennon. Hendrix.  Joplin.  Jim Morrison. 

I saw a documentary on Lemmy a couple months ago. The man still lives in a little apartment on the Sunset Strip, and hangs out at a local bar playing video poker.  Fame hasn't changed him (although it did apparently take him out of England).  He hasn't gotten any face lifts or put his face on video games. He;s the same guy he was when he started Motorhead.  I can't help but compare Lemmy, in my mind, to Gene Simmons, the great capitalist willing to sell out for any product placement as long as it gives him a profit, and Steven Tyler now judging reality shows.

If Cobain, Lennon, Hendrix, Joplin, and Morrison had lived, I wonder if they'd be Lemmys or if they'd go the other way, capitalizing on their youth.  Or worse, would they be Elvis, slaves to vice and indulgence, fat and sweaty on a Vegas stage trying to relive the glory days? Where does success stop, become enough, or where does it get replaced with greed and aimless ambition?

I feel bad for you, and also unqualified to fix you

I guess this is bad to say, but I'm going to come right out and say it. Depression is . . . depressing. I know many people who are depressed; I battle with it myself; and I've had friends commit suicide.  I do not think that depression is a mood, or something one can just snap out of, or anything to take lightly.  That said, some folks are just way too into it.  They get all emo on facebook all the time, they cling to depression awareness as an identity, and they're just real bummers to be around.  I mean, we all post our down moments, and like I said, I do have depression issues myself.  But when it gets to the point where every single status update is some variation of "Having a horrible day, just want to die, not that anyone cares" or "Sometimes it's the one who holds everyone else up who really needs the support" you just want to sigh and click unfriend.  And I'm talking about years of this.  Depression is not something that a person can just snap out of, or "choose happiness" or whatever BS platitude anyone read on a tshirt.  But it is something you can choose to fight rather than give in to.  And it, like a drunken revelation, is something you can choose not to status update about.  I love my friends, but there comes a point where I can't fish them out of their pit of despair over and over and over and over and over again. They need medication and professional help, not to be fishing for compliments online.  And to be quite honest, while I am happy to be there when they need someone to talk to, it's a huge buzzkill to check facebook and be worried the rest of the day that your friend will kill herself, especially when it happens multiple times a week.