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Last night we went through a drive-thru for a late dinner. I handed my son in the back seat his meal. I sat my husband’s double cheeseburger in my lap so he could reach it. I left my single cheeseburger in the bag because I planned to eat my fries first.
Soon a voice from the back seat said, “It has pickles on it!”
I said, “Just throw the pickles out the window and eat your burger.” So Eric threw his pickles out the window.
I then said, “I better check to see if there are pickles on my burger too.” I unwrapped the burger in my lap and began flinging pickles out the window. After all the pickles were gone, I noted that there were also onions on the burger so I threw them out the window too. I sent as much of the ketchup as I could with the pickles and onions.
After that I mashed the burger as flat as I could. I always mash hamburgers before eating them. A flattened burger is easier to fit into one’s mouth. My kids mash their burgers too.
Then I took a big bite out of it.
That was when my husband said, “Where did my sandwich go?”
And I realized that it was his burger in my hand, stripped of vegetables, smashed, and with a bite out of it. I shrugged, handed it to him, and said, “Well, it will still eat.” And I will never hear the end of it.
Today I borrowed my husband’s car to go to the bookstore. When I got out of the car, I noticed that my son’s pickles were stuck to the car, embedded in dried ketchup. I guess he didn’t throw them hard enough.
I imagine this was funnier if you were in the car and saw the look on Shannon’s face when I handed him his burger but I had to tell the tale anyway.
This afternoon I was in the kitchen washing dishes while my daughter was watching Animal Planet.
She came in, as she often does, talking and waving her arms around, telling me all about the mating and reproduction methods of anglerfish. It went something like this:
“The female is ten times bigger than the male and when they mate, the male bites into the female and sucks blood from the female. Each day she absorbs more of him and eventually gets pregnant. Then after she has the babies he is just a lump and he stays there forever. And they stay that way for life. For life, Mom! Then he dies but he’s still there on her back for all eternity and she has to go get a new one.”
“Now, how would you like that, Mom?”
I am somewhat disturbed that my daughter seems to have some idea that reproduction is supposed to be enjoyable for the parties involved.
I just Googled anglerfish and found her account to be mostly true. From Wikipedia:
Some anglerfishes of the superfamily Ceratiidae employ an unusual mating method. Since individuals are presumably locally rare and encounters doubly so, finding a mate is problematic. When scientists first started capturing ceratioid anglerfish, they noticed that all of the specimens were females. These individuals were a few inches in size and almost all of them had what appeared to be parasites attached to them. It turned out that these “parasites” were the remains of male ceratioids.
At birth, male ceratioids are already equipped with extremely well developed olfactory organs that detect scents in the water. When it is mature, the male’s digestive system degenerates, making him incapable of feeding independently, which necessitates his quickly finding a female anglerfish or else dying. The sensitive olfactory organs help the male to detect the pheromones that signal the proximity of a female anglerfish. When he finds a female, he bites into her skin, and releases an enzyme that digests the skin of his mouth and her body, fusing the pair down to the blood-vessel level. The male then atrophies into nothing more than a pair of gonads, which release sperm in response to hormones in the female’s bloodstream indicating egg release. This extreme sexual dimorphism ensures that, when the female is ready to spawn, she has a mate immediately available.
With a title like that I bet you’re expecting some kind of deep, philosophical, serious article. You aren’t going to get it. This is another one of my kid stories.
On Easter my daughter came out of her room with a gift for the young man she has a crush on. The envelope was sealed and had hearts drawn all over it. A package of candy was taped to the outside of the envelope.
Every day she asked me several times a day when we were going to deliver her gift so I figured it must be something special. I hoped it wasn’t something she was going to be embarrassed about later, but I decided not to pry so I did not ask her what was inside.
A few days later I saw my friend, Ellynn, who happens to be the mother of my daughter’s crush. I gave her the envelope to pass on. The next day Ellynn called to tell me what was inside the envelope.
It was a picture of the Grim Reaper. My daughter had drawn the picture. I’m told it was an accurate depiction with the robe, hood, and scythe.
We don’t know what to think. I’m sure the recipient doesn’t know what to think either. I did tell her the Christian story of Easter so perhaps this was a religious sentiment, “The Grim Reaper took Jesus!”
That’s all I’ve got.
This is not really a political article. I’ve had a rotten, terrible day from hell with power outages, hours-long loss of internet service, torrential downpours, children from hell, and so on. My life sucked today but a couple of things made me laugh tonight and I’m here to tell you about them.
About 6:00 p.m. I drove to my polling place. The lines were long. Very long. I didn’t mind the long line; I think that’s great.
Finally, I get my ballot. WTF? Kucinich is on it. So is John Edwards. Didn’t they drop out of the race? “How many people that are uninformed are going to waste their votes on people that aren’t even running anymore?” I think to myself as I fill in my oval for Obama. I also noticed a line for “Uncommited” on my ballot.
Shortly after the polls closed my husband logged onto our local newspaper website to check the returns so far. Sure enough, many people had voted for John Edwards and Kucinich. I have to wonder if these voters knew that those guys weren’t even running. Oh, well. Then we noticed the really funny part, the part that leaves me asking, “Who are these people?”
A great many people had gotten into their cars and driven through a torrential downpour and even occasional hail on flooded streets and driven to their polling place. Those same people then stood in line for half an hour only to cast a ballot for…
Uncommitted.
Who are these people? Why not just stay home?
I originally sent this email to our local homeschool group on 12/14/06.
Go ahead and laugh at me now because you will be as soon as you read this. Add to your list of famous last words, “I wonder what that tastes like?”
Several few months ago we were given a very large cactus. Our neighbor was moving to Florida and couldn’t move it. It spent the summer and fall outside. When it got too cold out I brought it inside. Well, the dog was chasing the cat and knocked the thing over. It shot out this milky fluid all over the place when it hit the floor. And I say, “I wonder what that tastes like?”
Turns out it tasted bad, very bad. It was downright painful, burning like fire, swelling up my mouth and throat. Nothing helped. Not water, not milk, not mouthwash. Then I got dizzy and developed a migraine-like headache. I was sick for 24 hours.
Upon googling I discovered that it is not a cactus at all but a succulent of the Euphorbia family. It is highly toxic. Some euphorbias are used to make poison arrows. I have to get rid of it. We have six cats, one dog, and two small children. This thing is only suitable for a home without pets or small children.
It is a lovely plant and I really think it’s too beautiful to simply put out in the garbage. It is in the laundry room under a fluorescent light until I can find a home it. I had to rescue it after my husband evicted it into the bitter cold and I hid it in there. He’s bound to find it and evict it again. So if you have no pets and your kids are older please take it.
What does this have to do with homeschooling? Not much. Sorry about that. But homeschoolers do have a natural curiosity that could cause a story like this to be told.
My daughter’s ninth birthday is the day after tomorrow. We were looking at cookbooks together tonight choosing a cake to bake for her birthday when I remembered the year of the Broiled Birthday Cake.
I said, “There’s a Gather article.” Then I said, “There needs to be a group for these kitchen disasters.” And now here we are.
My daughter was turning three years old that year. We had invited friends and family over for a birthday party. Because of this, we cleaned the house. Thoroughly. Part of cleaning the house thoroughly involved removing all the knobs from the stove for cleaning.
Then we made the chocolate cake. It went into the oven less than an hour before the guests were supposed to start arriving. We set the oven dial to “bake” and the temperature to 350 and put the cake in the oven.
Shortly after putting the cake in the oven to bake we began to smell smoke. We opened the oven to find the cake being broiled. The house was full of smoke, the cake was ruined and the guests would start arriving any minute. How did this happen?
Whoever put the knobs back on the stove put the oven dial on wrong so that when we turned it to “bake” it was actually on “broil.” That’s how.
It’s been six years so I don’t remember enough details to make this story as good as it should be but I wanted to share it anyway. I am now leaving for the store to buy ingredients for the chocolate cake she chose out of the cookbook. Wish me luck.
Originally published at Gather on 1/19/08.
I used to work in a grey cubicle as a payroll clerk. Two cubes away from me sat the Tampon Lady.
I don’t remember the Tampon Lady’s name. I only remember how much I hated sharing work space with her. She was nice enough. She did her job and had no annoying habits that I recall. There was, however, one issue, and I never figured out how to address it. They just don’t cover stuff like this in business college.
She kept a super-size box of Playtex Deodorant Tampons in her desk drawer. It had to have come from Sam’s Club to be the size that it must have been. I never saw the tampons but I know they were there and I imagine every person that worked on that floor knew the tampons were there.
Playtex Deodorant Tampons have a distinctive odor. If you have ever smelled one, you will always be able to recognize the sickening, flowery scent that they are saturated with. I can smell them in a strange woman’s closed purse when she walks by me at the grocery store. And I could smell them in my co-workers desk.
Monday through Friday, I smelled them, week after week. She kept them there all the time, not just at her time of the month. I was assaulted be the tampons as soon as I arrived at work each morning and I left work in the evening with the scent apparently stuck to the hairs inside my nose. I was not free of it until I had been out of the office for several hours in the evening.
I will admit that I have a more sensitive sense of smell than the average person. That’s surprising since I have been a smoker for many years. Still, the tampons were a menace and made for a hostile work environment if there ever was one.
I am allergic to flowery perfumes. I can’t walk through the perfume department at a department store without becoming ill. I can not read magazines that have perfume samples in them. I used to take the stairs instead of the elevator even when I worked on the 16th floor of an office building so that I wouldn’t be in a crowded elevator with someone who had marinated themselves in perfume and spend the rest of the day with a migraine.
So this was a problem for me and I didn’t know how to address it. Luckily, I got pregnant and had to quit my job. I wonder if the Tampon Lady still works there.
This article was inspired a blog entry I read earlier today.
Were you ever the last kid picked for kickball? Do they even still do that in schools? If they don’t, then maybe I’m homeschooling my kids for no good reason. Oh, yeah. I do have a few other reasons but kickball is pretty high on the list.
A post I made earlier today got me to reminiscing about always being the last kid picked for kickball. I do not look back on this time of my life with angst.
No, I remember the pathetic child that was me, always chosen last for kickball, and I have to laugh. The kid that was me was a “looser” with a capital L. It was not yet fashionable to protect a child’s self-esteem at any cost so no one tried to convince me that being a klutz was a gift. Kids weren’t raised to be praise junkies like they are today in this age of self-esteem run amok so I learned to see myself the way I really was and it wasn’t always a pretty sight.
I sucked at kickball, so of course no one wanted me on their team. At the time that seemed important. There I stood with the dregs of my class waiting to be picked. I stood with the dirty, smelly boy that no one would sit next to at lunch and the fat girl that we all threw rocks at and called names on the playground. I usually at least got picked before they did.
I always missed the ball completely when I went running up to kick it. Think of Charlie Brown, Lucy, and that football. Except no one was making me miss. I was just that clumsy.
One day I ran up and kicked and my foot actually made contact with the ball. I couldn’t believe it. Neither could anyone else. My humiliation was not ended for good like I thought for a nanosecond that it might be.
I ran the wrong way. I took off for third base instead of first. After that I was always picked dead last, not even beating out the smelly boy or the fat girl.
They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I’d like to amend that to whatever doesn’t drive you to suicide makes you funnier.
I now look at most anything that I screw up as a source of amusement and something to write about. I wonder if I would still be able to do that if some nice adult had rescued me from ridicule back then.
There’s a reason I don’t have many local friends. I have found that friends are generally more trouble than they are worth. The main reason friends are more trouble than they’re worth is that they invite you to parties.
I’m not talking about parties that are actually fun. I’m talking about being invited over to listen to a boring demonstration and then guilt-tripped into paying too much for shit I didn’t want in the first place.
It might even be tolerable if it ended there but it doesn’t. After spending money you don’t have on stuff you don’t want you are then pressured to host a “party” of your own and pressure your own friends and family into buying stuff that they don’t want so the cycle of abuse can continue.
Odds are that once this starts in your social circle it isn’t going to end any time soon. At some point one of your friends will sign up to be an “independent consultant” for one of these outfits. At that point you can kiss your friendship good-bye because you will never have a conversation about anything else again. I’ve lost friends to Mary Kay. I’ve lost friends to Tupperware. And so on.
I once fell for this myself and signed up to be a consultant for Usborne Books at Home. I was a miserable failure only selling books to myself because I would not badger my friends and family or spam my entire email address book with my wares.
Then the sex toy parties came along. It was amusing to see some of the goody-two-shoes types in my local mommies group buying anal lube and giant talking dildos. Still, it grew tiresome eventually. I’ve since left all the mommies groups I once belonged to but that’s another story.
According to my local rag, the latest rage in home parties is taser parties. Yes, you read that right. I almost wish I were still in the mommies group. A taser party with young children under foot has great potential for amusement.
