The Orkin man now knows too much.

Tom: (in a big booming voice from upstairs) Charlie!
Me: What!
Tom: Come here!
Me: (as I stand up and start going upstairs) You know, when you yell for me like that, you kind of sound like my father yelling for me. It's very confusing sexually.
Tom: (by now right in front of me, shaking his head) I have the Orkin man on the phone. He wants to know when a good appointment time is.
Me: Oh.

This is generally how businesses get to know me as a client, actually.

I must have married for looks.

over the phone:
Tom: So then I'll just buy this carpet remnant.
Me: Won't it get wet on the way home?
Tom: Nah. It's not raining.
Me: But it's rain-y. And the sky is dark here in town.
Tom: It'll be fine. Don't worry.
.....fifteen minutes later....
Tom: Is it raining in town?
Me: It doesn't really look like it. Why?
Tom: Cars have their wipers on. Oh crap, I just drove into the rain! The carpet is getting wet!

How tragic that NO ONE could have predicted this.

Why DON'T yellow cats poop?

A conversation between brothers, standing over the sandbox.

Tommy: Uh oh. It was open over night.
Danny: I think cats pooped in it.
Tommy: I don't see any poop.
Danny: But there are paw prints in the sand.
Tommy: Yeah, but I think it was a yellow cat. And yellow cats don't poop.
Danny: Oh. Okay. (and then he climbed in the sandbox.)

Because they both have to do with imaginary men who watch you in your house.

The other day I bought three things for the new house. I purchased two mezuzahs and a What the shit?! wall graphic.  Here are my issues with these purchases. Completely unpredictable and in no way asinine issues. A) I can't read Hebrew so I don't know which way to hang my mezuzahs. And B) I'm not sure where to put my creepy stalker man graphic to ensure that it gets noticed but it's not in your face that it's completely lame. 

Why does spellcheck flag mezuzah? I think it may be anti-semitic.

It's a tiny pill. Easy to misplace. In my throat.

You know that feeling when you take your pills for the night but you're nowhere near being tired so you grab a Xanax, and then twenty minutes later you realize that you're still keyed up and you can't remember if you actually took the Xanax or not, so you start searching your kitchen trying to think of where you could have set the pill down because you have kids and pets and Xanax would be bad for either of them so you're tearing the place apart even though it's really hard to do because you're exhausted and that's when you realize that you did, in fact, swallow the Xanax?  No? Just me? Hmm.

I just want a monkey butler. Why is that too much to ask for?

I've found a monkey table I want. But it's $180.00, which is a lot of money to spend on a table that will drive Tom nuts and possibly scare the children.  Also, it comes pre-named, and for $180.00 I think I should get the right to name my own monkey table. I certainly wouldn't name it Winston, that's for sure. I think I'd name it Zac Efron. Zac Efron the monkey butler. I like it.

here kitty kitty kitty

1. I know for an absolute fact that Tom would not want me to get a new cat.
2. I know that Tom likes cats anyway.
3. I texted Tom to mention that I wanted to get a new cat.
4. Tom did not answer, thus squandering his chance to voice any opposition to a new cat.
5. Should I go get a new cat?

Conversation between me and Tom

Me: Hey I was reading in AARP magazine how you should invest in forever stamps to save money when the price goes up.

Tom: (distracted) Yeah.

Me: Which is why 200 stamps are coming in the mail. I'm offsetting the one cent price hike projected to come next year with a $1.72 shipping fee. Ironic that they charge to mail you stamps, isn't it.

Tom: (groan)

Me: Why do you always look like you have a headache when I tell you what I've done? You should come home every day and ask me how my day has been so that these things don't blindside you.

Tom: (incredulous look)

Me: For instance, the hammock in the hallway? That was an awesome deal! A hundred and twenty five dollars for a two hundred and fifty dollar hammock. And I know that was the original price because it was written right there next to the sale price. I didn't even have to price compare.

Tom: Mmm hmm.

Me: And did you know that right now we have 3 bath mats coming? Memory foam, Tom! They'll remember our feet! How could you not want that kind of service from your bath mat?

Tom: This is why I look like I have a headache when you tell me what you've done.

I hate platitudes

Pet peeve of the day: people who say happiness is a choice and then talk about endorphins. Either you believe that chemicals can determine mood or you don't, but if you do then give me the most basic level of respect and let me take the meds required for me to choose happiness. For some people jogging is enough, but for others, "Choose happy" needs a little help.

My Barbie Dream House

We're trying to buy a house. A larger house for our family, but a smaller place for us. Make no sense? Well here's the deal. The house is bigger, with a family room downstairs and an extra bedroom to be a toy room. But the master bedroom is much smaller than what we have now. And the master bath, ugh! They took about 2 feet off the end of the bedroom and built a shower stall on one end of it and a 4 or 5 foot closet on the other end.  In that closet they put a toilet facing a sink with a door in between. So when you go poo, you step out and bang your shin on the dresser. When you shower, you step out naked into the bedroom. And between the shower and the pee closet is a giant mirror and vanity just open to the room. We have to wall all that in at some point.  Also, the kitchen is smaller than our current one, but there's a dining room so it sort of evens out. Less cupboard space, a very small single sink so I don't know how we'll wash the pots too big for the dishwasher, and the fridge sticks weirdly far out into the kitchen. But it'll work better for our family and that trumps personal space. Ooh, and it's by the woods! Last night I bought a hammock online! A hammock! With which to flip my kids on the ground. Yay! And trees to walk around between and try to climb and fall out of. Lots of little boy things for my little boys. And Ryan loves to draw trees and can take long walks in the woods with her sketch pad. All around a good thing. So wish us luck on this house thing. The home inspection is in 4 days so if it's all going to fall apart, that'll be when.

Trapeze or clown car?

Years ago I worked at a convenience store and there was a lovely customer who came in every night with her teenage son to get a cup of coffee for her and a doughnut for him (free doughnut with coffee). I don't know why they were out every night at the same time, but they'd stop by and over the years we'd make idle chit chat. She had a very heavy accent (some sort of Hispanic accent) but we'd talk a little. Her older son had left with the circus right after high school. When I commented that I didn't think people really did that she looked confused. A lot of his friends had joined the circus after school because it paid so well and they gave you a place to live and you could travel. I agreed with her and every once in a while she'd come in happy because her older son had called her, or sent her a post card.

One night the teenage son came in alone to get the coffee and doughnut. When I asked him where his mom was he replied, "She's in the car with my brother. He's home for the weekend." "Oh, was he nearby?" I hadn't heard of any circuses in the area but I could have missed a poster or radio ad.  But nope, the brother had flown in with some of his friends. "Friends from the circus?" The kid looked confused. "Noooooo. No circus friends. Why?" "Because your brother's in the circus." Wow, what a clueless kid! Then he started laughing at me! His brother was'nt in the circus; he was in the Army. He'd left home to join the service, and no one but me had misunderstood before. He and his mother laughed about that for weeks.

Everyone wants to be an astronaut; it's so overdone!

My mom took me to a child psychologist when I was 4 because my (childless) aunt thought I was too moody. Maybe I was, or maybe she knew nothing about little kids and I was just prone to crying fits. Either way, Mom took me to the shrink.  I went for a month or so until the guy wanted to meet my dad and my dad gave the whole "I aint goin to see no damn shrink and the kid don't need one either. She just needs to get her ass spanked when she won't quit bawlin," speech and then the bill came and dad saw it and we never went back.

I don't remember anything about the shrink except his name (Dr Houk, which I always thought was dumb because somehow I decided it was Hawk and he was just saying it wrong) and that his office was in a town an hour away and had a deli right by it. And every time we went my mom would take me to the deli if I behaved and talked to the guy. I loved that deli! I loved the high stools at the counter and the bagel and cream cheese she bought me. I felt so sophisticated and metropolitan. I felt Jewish.

See, when I was little all I wanted to be when I grew up was a New York Jew. Brick buildings with doormen, bright yellow taxi cabs, delicatessens, Yiddish in everyday conversation, cocktail parties. I wanted all of it! Apparently at some point I'd seen Annie Hall ( my parents never waited until bed to watch TV) and been profoundly influenced by it, which is probably the least damaging Woody Allen movie for a very young child to be profoundly influenced by. Which is why I loved the idea of being in therapy and of eating at a big city delicatessen. A bagel with just a shmear of cream cheese, please.  I didn't even know what Jewish meant; I thought it meant grown-up, or interesting. I was a preschooler and all I wanted to be was Woody Allen. Not Diane Keaton. Woody Allen. Which is actually a pretty great considering that by third grade I wanted to be a hooker.

Yep, a hooker, because all I knew about sex was that it was a beautiful thing for two people to do together and all I knew about hookers (did my parents never censor what they watched with the kids in the room?) was that they got paid to have sex. Seemed like a win-win to me at the time. Plus, hookers get to stay up all night!  When I found out it was illegal to be a hooker, I switched my career goals to private detective, because I liked Scooby Doo. I wanted to be Shaggy because he got to eat cake all the time and hang out with the cool talking dog. Fred and Daphne never actually did much, Velma couldn't ever keep her damn glasses on her face so she struck me as pretty useless, and so I picked Shaggy. That's right. My lofty childhood ambitions were to be Woody Allen, a hooker, and a half beatnik-half hippy who ate dog treats in exchange for going into the dark, monster-filled basement first.

Take that, ballerinas and firemen! My career day drawings were way more interesting (and disturbing during the hooker phase) than yours were.

For bolting Grandma to the table, of course

I just google imaged this. It's not my actual photo.

My mother had whole brain radiation when she first got sick. They mold a mesh mask to your head and bolt it to the table with you in it, to make sure you absolutely cannot move while they shoot laser beams into your brain. After the treatment was done, she let me have the mask, which I have on my wall as art, and which is the only way I can see or touch the curves on my mother's face.  But this story is not about my mother's death, or about the mask on my wall. This story is about the pins they use to hold those masks to the table. See them up there in that picture- the white plastic Ts? They came with the mask but I didn't need them so I set them on some table or something and they ended up on the floor and amongst the boys' toys and got thrown out one at a time for a couple weeks.

One day, a couple days after I'd gotten the mask from my mom, Ryan walked up to me and asked, with a curious yet deeply disturbed look on her face, just what that thing on the floor was. 

"Oh, that? It's for bolting your grandmother to a table. Why?"  

Then I had to explain the radiation to her and how it was done. And with a relieved look on her face, my 13 year old daughter said to me, "Oh thank god! I thought you'd lost your IUD."

Oh for fuck's sake, he's only four!

Me: Every toy you throw I will throw away. If you throw it, I will put it in the garbage!
10 seconds later
Tommy: (whispering) Don't throw it, Danny. Just drop it.
sound of toy hitting the floor
Tommy: Mo-om! Danny throwed it!

 

How the hell did my senior year start 20 years ago?

Somebody on my facebook feed posted this link: it's a list of 29 albums that are now 20 years old.  Some of them I've never heard of, some of them I seem to remember coming out later than 1993 (probably the single I remember was released later), and some of them are pure nostalgia. 1993, now 20 years ago, was the year I moved out of my mom's and in with my dad. It was the year I went to a new school, the year I learned to play pool, the first year I had no curfew. 
I'd like to explain 1993 to Ryan. I think she would have liked it had she seen it. Had it not ended 2 months before I met her original father. But how to explain such a foreign concept? Libraries without computers, scrambling for coins for the pay phone, learning of new songs from the radio and then recording them onto cassette tapes. My old notes from class, the kind we wrote, not the kind we took down, almost looked like the iphone text messages. I wrote in blue pen and my handwriting and then my friend would write in green pen with her handwriting. Not a whale shaped little thought bubble but as close as our primitive cave painting allowed.
I miss those days. I miss the 90s the way my mother must have missed the 70s. I wonder if everyone gets nostalgic for their senior year and the decade it inhabited. If you do, tell me in the comments.

Introducing Ron Weasley

We got rid of our box turtle on Xmas day. My brother in law had a friend who wanted one for his son and our boys were too rough to really play with it here, so we gave it to the guy for his kid. We also found an inside home on a farm for our outside dog, Cheyenne. It was sad, but she needed a place with more attention and a house big enough for her. So, to dull the pain of loss a little bit, we got a new cat.  And by "we", I mean I brought it in the house when Tom wasn't looking. So now we have the 2 cats, our old ocicat Tat and our new black cat Ron Weasley. Mom's chihuahuas don't get along so well with the cats. Pupper doesn't care about them but Tripper barks at them constantly, not out of anger or hostility but because he wants them to play with him. They don't know this, however, so they hiss and their tails get bushy and they run into the basement.
At night, due to house training issues, the dogs are crated and the cats have the run of the house. I usually wake up at least twice in the night because Ron Weasley is trying to sleep on my face and purring at top volume.. Tat generally stays on the bed a few inches away from my head. I like cats more than dogs, I think. They use a litter box, which is a big selling point.

It's like capitalism, but I'd do it wrong

I wish I could afford to rent a store. I want to open a store and sell cocoa and free books. I want to open a free book store with no goal of making money. And I want to sell cocoa at cost. And maybe wine on weekends, if it weren't for the damn insurance you have to get to serve alcohol. But I think a free book store is an awesome idea. Bring in your old books and take new books, and sit in comfy chairs and read them. No even exchange needed, no requirement that you bring in anything in order to take out anything. Just a place to duck in, have a cup of cocoa (I'll make it from scratch), and pick up some used books for free.

The pantry clock

My whole life my mom's had this wooden clock over her pantry. Way up on the wall, the same color as the woodwork, a flat wooden clock against the orange wall. I didn't even think to take it when I went through her house because, honestly, it's just always been part of the wall. It blended in and I never even looked at it because the digital clock on the microwave was easier to see, brighter and at eye level like it was. But up at Mom's the other day with my brother, I caught a glimpse of the clock and asked him if he could get it down for me. So now I have this clock and no idea what to do with it or where to put it. And I also realize that I know nothing about it. She kept that clock on her wall, never replaced it or took it down, for almost 40 years, and I don't know why. Did my dad buy it for her? Did she fall in love with it at a store or a flea market? Maybe it was her father's and she inherited it. Maybe my dad inherited it from someone on his side of the family. Or maybe it was just some 70s piece of kitsch my mother thought would look good on an orange wall above a wooden pantry door. But the thing is, I'll never ever know. I'll never know the story about that clock, or even if the clock has a story. Because my mom is dead and I can never ask her. And Dad is dead too so even if he knew why she bought that clock he can't tell me. And I swear, this isn't becoming a death blog. But I just really wish I knew why Mom had this stupid clock, because it doesn't look right in my green kitchen. The light hits it different and it doesn't match the woodwork and it goes way better with orange than with green.
I'll tell you guys, losing a parent is hard, but losing the other one is so much worse. Because you're not just losing someone and dealing with that, you're losing all of the stories you never asked to hear, and the name of that lady who picked you up when you fell out of the tree at the family reunion, and the guy with the spider monkey, and all of the other little details you never committed to memory because you didn't have to; they knew them.  And it feels like your whole childhood is gone, too, because you have to go through and dismantle the house and take down all of the pictures and see bare spots on the wall where they used to be and turn a home into a house again. And it just sucks.

Menus were better to think about.

I wanted to have a party. I had the date picked out (Dec 29) and the theme (ugly holiday sweater) and I was on pinterest collecting recipes and decorations and even a party game (stick famous names on peoples' backs as they came in and make them ask around for clues to who they were). And I was dead set on having this party. I had guest lists, I had my outfit picked out, I had a friend all set to loan me hor d'oeuvre plates. And then my mom died. And now I can't imagine having a party. I can't imagine piping sour cream onto mini latkes, or trying to make the nurse at my doctor's office guess Henry Winkler, or trying to find a non-racist way to make candy corn into a Kwanzaa representation (Hey, the term holiday party implies inclusiveness). And when I think back to my imagined and over-planned party, it seems like such a simpler time. A time when a Christmas tree shaped cheese plate was my biggest concern, when a hot cocoa station seemed like a good way to occupy my mind. A time when my mother was alive.

She's dead now. And when I knew she was going to die, I never thought past that. I thought about her dying, about who would watch the boys when hospice called me to come quick, about how I wanted to be there so she didn't have to die alone, but I never thought of her being dead. And now I live in a world she's not in and I can't get out of it. I can't get back into the world where she's up at her house and I can pop in and say hi. And I can't get the image of her dead out of my mind. I've never seen a dead body before, not without make up and embalming and a coffin. And while I am so glad she didn't die alone, I wish so much that I hadn't seen her dead. She didn't look like she was sleeping, or at peace. She just looked gone, and empty, and dead. And I wish I could push that image to the back of the file and put another one up front to take it's place. I wish I could go back to planning my party.

I hope they have a ping pong table

So I've decided what to bring to Thanksgiving tomorrow. And if they think popcorn and jelly beans and pretzel sticks don't fit the Thanksgiving theme, I'm going to ask them how the hell pilgrims made scalloped corn.