How high's the water, mama?

Oh, hush. I'm already going to hell for so many things, a black-witted post title won't make a difference.

I've never been to New Orleans, though I've much enjoyed the Mardi Gras episodes of "COPS." I did always think that the Big Easy would still be there when I got around to visiting...but that seems far more dubious, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The people on the Gulf Coast are in desperate, horrific straits. Send your thoughts, your prayers to whatever deity towards which you might be inclined. Better, send your cash if you've got some.

Seattle Red Cross--http://www.seattleredcross.org. I'd link to the national site, but it seems to be overwhelmed at the moment. Keep it coming.

Northwest Medical Teams--http://www.nwmedicalteams.org.

United Way Hurricane Katrina Fund--https://volunteer.united-e-way.org/hurricane-katrina/donate/

The password is "RUDE"

Kim says:
hey, I'm just paying my phone bill online...and you know how they issue you a temporary password to get started?
Sis says:
yeah, I suppose
Kim says:
On this bill, mine is "FATILEG"
Sis says:
nice
Kim says:
yeah. what are you trying to say, Qwest?
Sis says:
at least it's not worse
Sis says:
HERPILIP
Kim says:
GIGABUT
Sis says:
UGLEHO
Kim says:
SAGETIT
Sis says:
ACNEBACK
Kim says:
HARIMOLE
Sis says:
MUMMEHEEL
Kim says:
WAXEEAR

Hier kommt der Sohn

Dear Kai,

First, welcome, and congratulations on getting born! Your mama and daddy sent me your picture, you snoozing in your little blue knit outfit, and you look so fine and handsome and none the worse for wear, after what must be such an arduous journey that none of us, luckily, remember. You are not the least bit pointy-headed! Also, something about your forehead, that thing you are doing with your eyebrows, is entirely your mother and made me laugh aloud.

I have known your mama, Holly, since we were in junior high--we sat next to each other in Mr. Zukowski's sixth-grade homeroom, two gawky, greasy, lank-haired girls; I am sure that, by the time you reach that age, modern science will have done away with the prime horrors of adolescence...or, at the very least, yours will be more intriguingly exotic, in Germany. Anyway. Your mom and I have written lengthy tomes in each other's every yearbook; shared birthday parties, sleepovers, albums, M&Ms, New Year's Eves, spa days, and the flu; cut class (which you must never, ever do--be cool! stay in school!) to run to Ezell's in a torrential downpour for mashed potatoes and gravy. Together we have been camp counselors, gone to Prom, and attended our 10-year high-school reunion, all experiences we wish never to repeat. We lugged my 30-pound electric typewriter to her house and sat up all night typing one of her college application essays in shifts; 15 years later, I proofread her doctoral thesis. I signed your parents' marriage license as a witness. Your mom is the one person I know I could call, anytime, from anywhere, if things every got really really bad...and just by knowing that priviledge, Kai, I've never had to use it. For your mom, I'd take a bullet...or at least a lawn sprinkler straight to the face, as I wound up doing inadvertently during the wedding photos (ask her sometime).

And your daddy, Kai--he is the man your mother deserves, after a string of sub-par turkeys. Andreas is kind and smart and possessed of a dry wit so subtle, it took me a couple years to realize how funny he is. He knows everything about anything, and if he doesn't will research it exhaustively, so I am sure your house is now an impenetrable fortress of baby safety (and stocked with only the most edifying toys, to boot). Even when your mama and I explained "pep rallies" to him, he didn't hold our inferior American high-school educations against us...though he did chucklingly murmur "pep!" to himself, in wonder, for about a week. He also stuck up for me when, visiting, I mistakenly used your fancy German super-double-fat-plus cooking butter on my breakfast toast.

There is something so hopeful about a baby, Kai; you're a vessel of pure and limitless potential, a bundle of joy and of tangible proof that anything, anything at all, can happen. I read the e-mail announcing your birth, Wednesday morning, and while I was driving to work I was thinking, for some reason, about your mother and I, a decade ago. She was living in Portland, Oregon, then, just a few hours away, and I wondered why we didn't see more of each other. I had to push myself to remember us then--we were broke and had crappy jobs and cheap apartments and doltish boyfriends whose names I can barely remember. We were young and our lives were narrow and tough, at the time, and we had little chance to get together. But now look! We have houses and cars and happy grownup lives. Our communications fly around the world with the click of a button...and our selves can fly right after them, without much more effort. Your mama has your daddy, and now they have you, baby Kai...and let me tell you, the sight and the word and the very fact of you gives me new hope, as well. In you, Kai, the world is made over, and anything at all is possible.

I love you already and cannot wait to meet you.

Your "pseudo" Auntie Kim

Moony

I went to Blue C Sushi with my mom, Monday night--it's kaiten sushi, a conveyor belt of delicacies trundling past your seat like an It's a Small World ride for raw fish. I found it both hypnotic and somehow overstimulating--I was sort of grabbing frenetically at things as if they wouldn't come right around again in a minute, and the big-screen anime and dreamy techno music blip-blooping in the background made me feel a bit like I was wandering through an arcade game. But it was fun, and I found that I did in fact have an "Enough Of" limit for California rolls, and I was all right until the morning's soy-sauce bloat set in.

Then I spent the day very fretful and fat and psychotically unstable. I wanted to throw the hott!! housepainter I've hired down on the front lawn and have my way with him, and then cry for an hour, and then eat a cake, and OH MY GOD WHAT WAS WRONG WITH MEEEEEEE?

Well. Since I've been menstruating regularly for nearly a quarter century, you might think that I've acquired a little more hormonal self-awareness, month to month. Alas, you would be wrong. But it is a relief to realize that, no, again, I had not suddenly lost my entire mind. Yet.

It's going to be hard to reach the mouse from down there

From today's editing docket, an example of why correct comma parsing is important:

19. Collapse, and then expand the nodes in the control.

Where is Grandpa's automobile?

Last Saturday was the 13th annual Greenwood Car Show, one of my favorite combinations of cornball civic event and red-blooded 'Murrican passion for any damn thing on wheels. I've been attending for close to a decade, now, and the show has gone from a handful of hobbyists to an astonishing 15-block stretch of street rods, classic cars, and virtually any mode of transport that can be considered antique, unique, or some degree of both.

The best thing about this show, actually, is that it's open to all comers; while many car shows are exclusive, limited to British classics or muscle cars or whatever, Greenwood takes anybody that has the $20 for the registration and the commemorative t-shirt. Got a cherry '65 Mustang convertible or an outrageously customized, pearl-pink '49 Chev? C'mon down. Vespa? Sure. Colossal Mercedes UNIMOG? You're in. One year I saw a lovingly restored General Lee of "Dukes of Hazzard" fame, one of the dozen or so Dodge Chargers the show had had for alternate takes on the gully-jumpin', still-crashin', hood-slidin' antics of the Duke boys. The owner had driven the car cross-country, and provided a photo album of snapshots of the General, posed in front of various landmarks: the General Lee at the Grand Coulee Dam, the General Lee welcomes you to Fabulous Las Vegas Nevada.

Sis has been showing her vintage MINI at Greenwood for three or four years, now. She has a 1963 Riley Elf; it's one of several models built on the MINI chassis, and in the Riley's case features a trunk about the right size to put a croquet set in. It's a deep turquoise with a white top, so it looks like the Pyrex casserole dishes of the same era. It also features right-hand drive; she taught herself to manage the stick shift lefty style. Whenever I ride with her, I always feel vaguely fretful, as if I ought to be doing SOMETHING over there on the left to help, with all that naked dashboard in front of me.

I live a few blocks from Greenwood Avenue, so Friday night we had a Thirty-Something Slumber Party, which involved going out for Indian food and then smearing on our respective wrinkle goops and conking out by 10:30. Girls gone wild! Of course, we had to get up at holy shit o'clock to convoy to the site with the rest of the local MINI club. The processional was pretty awesome, I have to say: fifteen wee British automobiles creeping down the block in a row, the air thick with diesel fumes and Krispy Kremes. I could feel individual brain cells fizzling out in all the exhaust, but nonetheless it was cool. In the other lane, Model A Fords and tricked-out GTOs trundled past us. One guy joined our group in a tiny two-cylinder Mazda hatchback, the only one in the U.S. according to him. It looked like a cross between a Honda Civic and something that Fisher-Price people would tool around in. "What the hell IS that?" hollered a knot of tattooed greasers who'd already chosen a spot, with their deeply-cuffed jeans and their matte black hot rods.

And then...it's eight hours of sitting in camp chairs behind your parked car, getting sunburned, eating chicken wings, shooting the shit with approximately 7,000 clones of My Dad, and everyone's dad. It's a little ridiculous, and a little boring, and a lot of the straight-up evident love love LOVE Americans have for their cars. Does this translate to other cultures, I wonder? Holly, are there classic car meets like this in Munich? It is so dorky and tacky, and somehow I adore it so. There is musical entertainment: good, like the Dixieland jazz combo that set up across the street from us, and...less good, like the pudgy bar band down the block, laboring through the "Grease" soundtrack with gusto if not so much talent. Enterprising little kids come out to hawk lemonade or Tollhouse cookies sealed in individual sandwich baggies, 25 cents. ("Do you want change?" the cookie girl asked me politely when I handed her a dollar, and whoever taught her to say that was a genius because what stingy bastard is going to demand 75 cents back from a third-grader? The kid was raking in bills.) The Masonic Lodge grills weenies, which you can get with chips and a pop for an amazing $2, and they'll give you the most-burnt one if you ask nicely. The boys down at Fire Station 21 have hot dogs, too, and hold an open house for neighborhood kids to climb on the truck and stagger around in giant fire helmets, or take turns aiming the hose down 73rd Street. (Every year, I tell myself this is the year I ask, "Hey, can I play with your hose?" and every year I wimp out and slink past, gawping and trying not to run into anything. Hot firefighters! Damn! Can't form sentences!)

We were chillin' with the MINI club when we noticed a woman gently running her hands over Sis's car. This is a pretty strict no-no for 98% of the show, what with the untold hours most owners spend on blood, sweat, tears, and buffing. I know from experience to peer daintily through windows and under hoods with my hands clasped behind my back and my purse secured in an armpit. But then we noticed the woman's companion, fingerspelling into her hand: she was deaf and blind.

Mom's an interpreter for the deaf. She went over and introduced herself, and took the woman's hands in her own, began telling her about the car. Sis joined them and opened the driver's door; Mom translated between them, as the lady traced the Riley's little cartoon shape, slipped into the seat, gleefully turned the wheel like a toddler would. Her face, Mom's face, Sis's face...all lit up. There was a guy across the street with a 30s Caddy; he'd refused to let her touch it, the man with her said. But she'd really wanted to "see" the MINIs. She beamed, sitting in my sister's bubble-sized toy car. They went to the car show every year, they told us.

That was cool.

Bloody hell

Yet more Oversharing is imminent. Squeamish? You might want to run off and look at outrageously expensive but undeniably gorgeous photos of adorable babies, instead, today. (I told Krispy, "Those pictures made my uterus send up a flare!" which she claimed was patriotically appropriate, with the pending Fourth.)

Anyway. So today, while I was sitting at my desk, my back itched...just in that spot you can barely get at. So, contorting myself appropriately, I scratched it. I could feel a little teeny bump, mole or mosquito bite or blemish, dunno. It didn't hurt...but my fingers came away wet. With blood. Eeek.

I squirmed around, trying to figure out what exactly I'd done, and...it continued to bleed. And bleed. The hell? I finally slunk into the restroom and stuffed a folded wad of t.p. under my bra strap, struggling to align it with the steadily bleeding, miniscule spot I still couldn't...quite...reach. Having stuffed the entirely wrong part of the bra, so to speak, I went back to my desk.

Where after about twenty minutes, I noticed that the t.p. felt clammy.

Because it was SATURATED WITH BLOOD.

I obviously have no dignity left in my life, people. I mean, yesterday I went back to the doctor for MORE examination of my complexion woes, for which I now have two ointments, one of which, the pharmacist announced to the room at large, I must SWAB IN MY NOSTRILS with a Q-Tip. And TODAY, I had to go to one of the female managers, and hike up my shirt, so that she could put a band-aid on my apparent mystery SHRAPNEL WOUND in this place I could neither see or reach.

It soaked through in half an hour.

I IMed Darcy in a bit of a state. "You have got to help me," I said (she works in a different building). Mercifully, NerdCo has incredibly well-stocked First Aid cabinets, with antiseptic wipes and ointments and gauze squares; I was afraid I'd have to tape a maxipad to my shoulder. As it was, I simply had to DISROBE huddled in Darcy's office, holding the blinds and the door shut and holding my bra on and praying that no one would actually come by to DO SOME WORK FOR GOD'S SAKE while poor, dear Nurse Darcy mopped up the inexplicable HORROR MOVIE on my back and plastered me with bandages. I am sure I will have the adhesive remnants of a square outline on my skin for the rest of the summer...but we seemed to get it stopped. What the hell did I do, anyway? Scratch off a mole by accident? Spring a leak? Develop some sort of breakfast-donut-induced hemophilia instantaneously?

"That is so weird," Darcy said. "It's tiny. It looks like this." She drew a wee dot on a sheet of paper.

Just another fun day at the office: deadlines, annual reviews, and two different people seeing me IN MY BLOODY BRA. My genuinely bloody bra! STREAKED AND STAINED WITH GORE! It looks like it belongs to a knife-fightin' whore, people.

Stay tuned for tomorrow, when that nightmare I have where all my teeth fall out PROBABLY COMES TRUE.

A haiku from today's commute

I saw your three-foot bong
Lost, fallen on I-5
Seriously: bummer

What it's like to work here

You know, at NerdCo.

Across the hall, one of the tech writers is tussling with a tightly-sealed box. It suddenly begins to emit "k-pow! k-pow!" laser-blasting noises.

"What are you doing over there?" I ask.

"My Batmobile," he explains, fully wresting the model from its packaging.

Mole-y like the break room at CTU

Because no information is Too Much Information on the Interweb, I shall now share with you my ongoing skin issues. My blemish situation has continued to the point that, after looking up various horror-movie skin conditions it MIGHT be (the Interweb: a hypochondriac's wet dream), I finally went to my doctor. She seemed nonplussed--apparently, at this life stage, I get to worry about pimples AND wrinkles. Supposedly, I have a mild staph infection; I am just grateful that it's not the HUGE JOB-LIKE BOILS variety. Anyway. The doctor prescribed a topical something-or-other that came in a bottle "with a dauber applicator;" this statement made me chuckle as it reminded me of those specialized Bingo pens. Turns out it's EXACTLY like a Bingo dauber, except filled with magical zit-blasting fluid instead of, say, purple ink. (And thank God.)

But! Since I was in there having my cranky flesh examined anyway, I decided I'd ask her about a couple little skin-tag moles on my neck--what my friend Krispy helpfully refers to as "booger moles." "What do I need to do to get these removed?" I asked. I imagined a dermatological consultation, a specialist with little tools for freezing or burning or cauterizing. So I was a teensy bit disappointed when the good doc whipped out A PAIR OF STERILE SCISSORS and snipped off the two worst offenders, zip zap. It was both thrilling and gross. I didn't even require a band-aid.

"That was easy," I said, visions of my nail clippers at home dancing in my head.

"Don't try it yourself. You don't want tetanus," said the doctor, reading me like a book.

Stay tuned for next week's exciting episode of Pustule Theater!

Live long, prosper, have a cookie

An e-mail thread at work yesterday spurred some debate over this kind of snarky article on the pending demise (for now) of the Star Trek franchise. I am utterly indifferent to all things Trek...but it reminded me of a favorite story about my late grandmother that I figured belonged in the blog.

For several years in the early 90s, Grammy was a canteen volunteer for the Puget Sound Blood Center blood bank in north Seattle. She was bored in her retirement, and I'd nagged at her to find something in the community to do. She was so tiny that she didn't weigh enough to be a donor, but she could provide juice and cookies and cocoa to the exsanguinated and make sure nobody passed out over the Xeroxed word-search puzzles the center kept on hand. It was an ideal grandma job, plying a captive audience with snacks and bad riddles, and she loved it.

This one day, though, she came home from her shift and declared, "Oh, we had such a time at the blood bank today, when the Klingons came in!"

The who and the what, now? You can probably picture the expressions on the faces of the entire fam. We KNEW that Grammy was not a science fiction fan; it was HIGHLY unlikely she'd ever seen a single episode of Star Trek, and probably couldn't have picked Shatner out of a lineup. I was grimly certain, for a moment, that this was some menacing symptom of Alzheimer's they didn't tell you about: you lose your keys, forget names...start seeing Klingons.

But. After some carefully worded questioning, the story finally emerged, more or less: apparently there was some sort of sci-fi convention in town, and a group of attendees had decided to do something altruistic before heading off, in full costume and makeup, to bump elbows with the rest of the galaxy. So maybe half a dozen of them descended on the blood bank. Eventually, photographs were pinned to the center's bulletin board: several fierce, glowering interplanetary warriors, several beaming phlebotomists, my tiny cookie-dispensing Grammy. The bulletin board also had little signs declaring "Give Blood" in a dozen different languages; before leaving, the visitors had helpfully printed it out in Klingon, jagged angular characters on a strip of colored construction paper.

I'm still pretty sure that Grammy didn't completely grasp what was going on; I imagine she believed these folks were nice, a bit strange, and some unusual race and/or religious sect. Rastafarians, Hare Krishas...Klingons. No matter. You get poked, you get a cookie and a "Be Nice to Me--I Gave Blood Today!" sticker on your body armor. Be who you are, that was Grammy's philosophy.

I'd give my eye teeth for that picture, now.

Turkeys, lurkey

From MSNBC, in its entirety:

CRANFORD, N.J. - Residents of this New Jersey town say they are being terrorized by wild turkeys.

Police have gotten a-half dozen complaints about the aggressive gobblers, most of them from a letter carrier. He bashed one of them with a stick after a group of turkeys surrounded his mail truck and wouldn’t let him out, the officials said.

Wild turkeys can grow as big as 4 feet high and are fast flyers, reaching maximum speeds of 55 mph.

My grandfather, after his stint in the Navy, was a legendarily hapless postal carrier, frequently lost, dog-bit, or tender of foot. But damn, he was never held hostage by a gang of marauding turkeys.

Though there was an incident in the deer pen at a petting zoo, in which he was savagely divested of several packets of snack peanuts.

Four feet high? Okay, I might be induced to cry and flee a turkey the size of a fourth-grader...that could attain highway speeds. Cripes! We're getting into Night of the Lepus territory, here.

Happy BirthdaAAAAAAIIGH!

Following a Google link to something else (which I've completely forgotten, at this point), I spotted this item on the page, sadly already purchased by some lucky and/or freakish bidder: 1974 Vinyl Clown Head For Helium Machine. Of course I rushed to alert Sis immediately, having wrapped several of her last birthday gifts in Creepy Clown paper (bless you, Archie McPhee).

The seller is really, really into the Clown Head, don't you think? Twice, she mentions what a great mask he would make for Mardi Gras. Or, you know, for when you brutally slaughter your next serial victim.

"He easily slips over your head (I know. I had it on when my husband opened the front door for me when I brought it home)." Counseling. I recommend counseling.

Oooh, agh--look at the other picture, the one of the flesh-toned Vinyl Clown Head interior. SHUDDER.

Easy, breezy, beautiful

Because an excess of junk in the trunk is the least of my problems, I've also had a bit of a blemish situation this week. (Bring on the chocolate-covered pretzels.) Sis, ever helpful, has alternately suggested that I have impetigo, or the flesh-eating bacteria--just like the gals on America's Next Top Model! While furtively searching the Intarweb for various and sundry dermal horrors, I was suddenly visited by another fond memory of our late friend Barb.

As a doctor, Barb was on a number of intriguing mailing lists. Assorted drug-manufacturer swag poured in to her home and office on a daily basis--free samples, or little notepads that posed sympathetic, rhetorical questions like "DIARRHEA?" across the top. One set of lapel buttons featured photographs of assorted people grimacing in agony, their distorted features a rictus of headache pain; she gave those to me and I still have 'em. In addition to all these goodies, Barb received her share of esoteric medical journals. A standout among these was Cutis magazine--a journal of skin disorders. Every month, this thing would show up without so much as a plain brown wrapper, each cover featuring a close-up color portrait of some suppurating pustule or flaky, blistered welt. Cutis was better than a violent comic book. It also proved useful in one of the finest insults in the history of smack-talking, originated by Barb's own kids and gleefully embraced by us: "Oh yeah? Well, you're the cover girl for Cutis magazine!"

Oh, stop Googling. Of course they're now online!

"I'm afraid to click," Sis said when I alerted her to this Intarweb presence. Sadly, this month appears to feature your average brown melanoma--not all that exciting. However, some of the headline links suggest things I want absolutely nothing ever to do with, such as "Multinucleated Atypia of the Vulva." Aaaaaaaah! No atypias, ESPECIALLY of the vulva, thanks much.

On the other hand, "What's Eating You? Fire Ants!" is possibly the best title ever. If anybody asks me what my problem is, I now have a new answer.

What's the calorie burn on administering a bitch-slap?

This isn't a weight-loss blog. There are plenty of other ladies who write with fierce funny brilliance about that topic, some of whom have even parlayed it into a book tour, and to them I say right on! with envious admiration.

That said, I think I can speak with some authority on the issue. To wit: I am kinda fat. This is a known fact, despite my occasional psychological contortions to keep this matter somehow on the down-low. I realize that if someone sees me coming out of the Lane Bryant, or gritting it out on the elliptical trainer, or eating a candy bar, or conversely eating a heap of baby carrots...it's not like my secret will be suddenly exposed: holy shit! Kim's FAT! I knew there was something about her that I just couldn't put my finger on...

It's been a thought, and sometimes a struggle, for virtually all my life. I can remember the first time I thought "oooh, FAT" about myself, spurred by a photograph. In it, I'm six, standing with that swaybacked posture all little kids have, wearing a halter top, tummy out. I'm holding a bouquet of sweetpeas. Not a fat kid. I know that, now. But at the time, all I could see was the soft flesh around my navel.

Dieting was one of my primary bonding activities with my mother, growing up. She wasn't particularly interested in shopping, or makeup, but this was something girly that we could do together. It made me feel adult. We did absurd, ridiculous things, like subsisting on frozen grapes or cabbage soup, or a diet purportedly from the Heart Association that prescribed certain foods for specific days of the week: Thursday, we reeled around light-headed on nothing but bananas and skim milk, and thought ourselves virtuous. We drank Canfield's diet chocolate-flavored sodas and watched Richard Simmons. We "jogged" by sprinting wildly room-to-room in our tiny apartment to the "Fame" soundtrack, howling with laughter. We did some insane workout with Cookie's crazy sister that involved drills with broomstick dowels. We took up figure skating. We went to the drive-in movie with hoagies and Baby Ruths from the little deli up the street. Sometimes we were chubby. Sometimes we weren't.

It gets harder as you get older, another fact that surprises no one. In college, I mixed up SlimFast shakes from powder, but I could never stop supplementing them with buttered salt bagels from Zaro's. I have been on NutriSystem, Jenny Craig (twice), DietPower, Sound Health Solutions, and what Sis calls the "dump diet," where you wither away after an ugly breakup. (I looked fabulous.) I've belonged to three gyms, two yoga studios, and three therapists. For four years, I dated a professional chef; during that time, I put on 50 pounds. And I am here to tell you...it was a fucking BLAST! The entire time! Renee Zellweger gets PAID to have that kind of fun! Since then, I've meandered up and down that 50-pound spectrum. Sometimes, I am slim and active and magnificent, and some days (for example, when repairs cost NINETEEN HUNDRED DOLLARS on a nine-year-old Hyundai, let that be a lesson to all on The Perils of Deferred Maintenance), I comfort myself with a pint of New York Super Fudge Chunk and baby, I use the big spoon, right out of the carton.

My point: I know. I know everything I need to about weight loss, and it all comes down to four words: eat less, exercise more. When I do those two things, I lose weight. When I don't, I put some on. I get it. I don't need to drink potions or abide by Dr. Phil or spend any more thousands and thousands of dollars to learn this again; I get it. I know that I'm the only person who can do this for myself, and I know that I am the only one who can motivate me. And every day is different.

My second point: don't tell me. I GET IT. Don't volunteer the information unsolicited, as if it is some new fact. It ain't. And for God's sake, ESPECIALLY don't POINT at my chosen MEAL and exclaim with cheerful HORROR how many, many CALORIES it has, because I. GET. IT. And also, SHUT THE FUCK UP. Jesus.

I'ma come over there and slap some sense into you my damn self. Soon's I can get my ass out of this chair. Beeyotch.

Way more charming than that Arnold on "Green Acres"

My car needed some work. So, after carefully soliciting friends' mechanic recommendations and researching my choices, I selected the one that most recently sent me a Val-Pak coupon and trundled in. I knew I needed the brakes done, and there were some shrieks and squeals and belt-y noises that demanded investigation.

"Are you the Hyundai?" asked the genial Manager Boy behind the counter. "Yeah, I think I heard you, coming in." Ha ha. So we discussed my automotive needs. I explained that I might not be able to pick up the car that evening, as I was going to the Mariners' home opener.

"Well, bite me then!" exclaimed Manager Boy enviously.

I have to admit, I prefer this approach to being "ma'am"ed to death at the Jiffy Lube, by well-intentioned grease monkeys 18 months younger than I am. It also helped that Manager Boy was cute, enough so that I didn't burst into tears when he called later with the incredible laundry list of things that were wrong with my vehicle, including everything its previous mechanic had botched at the 60,000-mile service. So what if this week's investment doubles the value of the car? I'll put it on my air miles card and be halfway to Paris.

The fam and I clawed our way out of post-game traffic, yesterday, and I actually made it to the shop with minutes to spare. Inside the bay I could see my car up on the lift, significantly lacking in wheels, from which I correctly discerned it was not ready.

So. Two buses to work today. At 3:30, I called the shop to check in and Manager Boy assured me it would be ready for me tonight--"But how was the GAME? I hear we kicked ASS," he said. At least he is sincerely working to CHARM me out of my hundreds and hundreds of dollars.
I left work an hour early, took two more different buses through pre-game traffic, hustled six blocks in the rain to the shop...

...where I noted my car, up on the lift, SIGNIFICANTLY LACKING IN WHEELS, which again implied a state of NOT-DONENESS.

Correct! said Non-Managerial Lackey, who was trying to lock up. A bolt broke off and a part didn't show, they tried to call me at 5:30, so sorry, too bad you don't have a cell phone, could you exit through the bay since we're trying to get out of here, don't slip, seeyoutomorrowbye.

I went back to the bus stop and worked to determine in just how many parts of speech one can deploy the F-word (some you might not have tried: "fucky," "fuckily"). The express #15, by the way, does not stop on 57th, though it does stop on 55th so you can see everyone piling on before it goes roaring past. Also, the morale-boosting, rain-proof company jacket my employer gave me? Is neither. I'm just saying. Adding insult to injury, the Erratic Business Hours Donut Shop at the bus stop closest to my house, on which I had pinned my entire will to live...was closed.

Manager Boy, you had better charm me right out to goddamn candlelight dinner if my Hyundai is still some-assembly-required, tomorrow.

Going to hell in an Easter basket

I miss kid-Easter. We were heathen children, growing up--not even part of the lily-and-poinsettia crowd of twice-yearly churchgoers--but we loved dyeing eggs. Nowadays you can marbleize them, or do Victorian decoupage, or have Martha come over and hand-gild a few when she gets her anklet off...but in the 70s, we just had the Paas tablets, dissolving too slowly in Grandma's most chipped and stained coffee cups. We loved the vinegary reek of it, and tolerated the flimsy bent copper wire that was supposed to serve as an egg-dipping tool but inevitably caused your egg to KONK to the bottom of the cup or slip free and roll off the table. Our post-Easter egg salads were always veined with purple and blue from assorted crunchy mishaps.

When I was ten, my dad claimed me and Sis for the Easter holiday and took us to his sister's, a one-time event that may be self-explanatory, shortly. Dad had remarried a few months before, to a young, pretty waitress almost exactly between he and I in age. She could drink legally, but not by more than a year or two. This was before terms like "blended family" were invented or kids were entitled to opinions: you were introduced to your new Step-Something and then you relinquished the shotgun seat and zipped it, thanks. So...metaphorical elbows were still being thrown as we all jockeyed for position and adjusted to one another.

My aunt had remarried, herself, so that for this holiday there were at least six kids present, half- and step- and regular cousins all jammed into the kitchen and tasked with coloring eggs to grace the dinner table. Maybe it's significant that I can't remember which of us had the idea, only that we all thought it was an excellent one. Someone took the translucent white crayon that came with the dye kit and inscribed one of the eggs:

TURD

We kept it out for last and dunked it haphazardly in every color. It came out sort of an olive-drab shade, not the brown we were hoping for but still highly unappealing, candidly declaring TURD in childish, high-contrast printing. TURD!

Each place setting at the table had a ruffled paper cupcake panty filled with cellophane Easter grass, a few jellybeans, and a festive dyed egg. By silent consensus, we set the TURD egg at my stepmom's place.

Twenty-five years later, Step and I have reached a cordial peace. This allows me to imagine, a little, what that moment must have felt like, gathered at the table with her considerable new extended family, the kids all snuffling and snorting with barely suppressed hilarity. Saying grace over a glistening ham, a cake molded in the shape of a lamb and iced with shredded coconut...and a grimy green ovoid next to her plate hollering TURD! Bless this mess, Christ is risen, a dozen pretty pastel eggs with stripes and bunny decals and you get TURD TURD TURD. You are TURD, child-bride stepmom. You are Other.

I'd like to see Julia Roberts make a movie out of that.

Badfinger

Californian Finds Finger In Bowl of Fast Food Chili

This is the part I like: “This individual apparently did take a spoonful, did have a finger in their mouth and then, you know, spit it out and recognized it,” said Ben Gale, director of the department of environmental health for Santa Clara County. “Then they had some kind of emotional reaction and vomited.”

I imagine that the emotional-reaction spectrum is necessarily very broad, as it would need to be to accommodate my reaction to NEARLY EATING A FINGER.

Welcome wagon

We shuffle offices periodically here at The Corporation That Dare Not Speak Its Name, Or At Least I Don't Lest I Get Dooced: it's an elaborate dance of reorgs and seniority and proportional space and which teams they want to smoosh together and force to be civil to each other at any given time. It's kind of goofy; in our most recent move, a couple weeks ago, one of the editors was made to move just two doors down. He could have lugged his belongings the 20 feet himself in less time than it took to pack them in boxes for the professionals to wheel around on a dolly. I myself lost my window office and am now on the interior side of the hallway; the space is larger but I'm still disgruntled because LIGHT! I NEED LIGHT! I AM COLD-BLOODED, LIKE A LIZARD! This too shall pass...sooner provided I can bump off a couple senior personnel ahead of me, she cackled.

So. New office. I leaned waaay back in my chair, absently stretching...and spotted something affixed to one of the acoustic ceiling tiles. It's one of those "Hello, My Name Is" stickers. It says, HELLO my name is DILL HOLE.

Specsnackular

Gael is searching for Seattle's perfect burger, which has fueled quite the debate.

Different burgers serve different purposes, I think; I was born and raised on Dick's classic little gut-bomb beef pucks, and so I'll always have a soft spot for peeling melted American cheese off the sunny yellow-orange waxed paper wrappers. I kind of love them just by virtue of the fact that they basically make five things. The restaurants each feature a lurid painting of a massive, benign steer...there are no illusions about what you're getting. No, you can't have it your way. No, there are no salad tumblers or character-shaped cookies or any sort of protein-fingers. Next! I think a city ordinance requires that you have at least two Dick's napkins in your glove compartment at any time; god knows they've saved me from many a fogged mirror, wayward beverage, or traffic-induced blubbering jag. One of my earliest memories is of standing in line at the Wallingford drive-in, too short even to see over the counter, hypnotized by the orange, white, and brown mosaic tiles. (Full disclosure: Mom was one of the grand-prize winners in the 50th Anniversary Memory Book contest; she grew up a block away. Hee hee hee!)

Meanwhile I miss a classic New York diner burger, and made sure to have one while I was there: hand-formed patty, cooked to order, an onion ring on top if you're lucky. Have it rare! Melt your brain! They don't give a rip, it's your life!

Anyway. So people are coming out of the woodwork praising the late, lamented Baby Moons at the Triple-X Drive-In in Issaquah: cheese AND jalapeno-stuffed (thanks, Sis!) tater tots. Gael seems...aghast, but I'm telling you, these were one of the two perfect foods in the world. They covered four categories: spicy, starchy, fried, and cheeeeeese. All in one compact, bite-sized unit. God, I miss them still.

Would it be excessive, to try and hand-craft one's own tater tots?

The other perfect food: chocolate-covered pretzels, naturally. Again, four quadrants of snack coverage: salty, crunchy, fatty, chocolate. These are truly the only PMS snack, better than Midol and, thank goodness, readily available.

Hello, again, hello

Just got an e-mail from my mom; the district office at her work "audited" her voice mail account because she was saving too many messages. It turns out that her mailbox was full because she never accessed it, having forgotten her password. THREE YEARS AGO.

Aw, my mum. Guess I'll keep her. And, you know, try to communicate mostly face-to-face.

Idling at the curb in front of Death's house

No longer at Death's door, but.

I was all set to blog my trip to New York, and be all effusive and ebullient about bagels and turnstiles and chocolates on my pillow in The Greatest City in the World...but halfway through, I got sick. Dog-sick, want-your-mommy sick, as sick as I've been since I was a little kid. I crawled under the schmancy bajillion-thread-count comforter fully clothed and shivered. I ordered a $28 hamburger from room service and ended up thrusting it back into the hallway. I forced myself on a death march through art museums, where, hopped up on enough cold medicine, Kandinsky makes all kinds of sense and everything strongly resembles Van Gogh's Starry Night. And I am sorry, fellow travelers, for being That Person on the plane home: the woman slugging back Duane Reade-brand cherry Nyte-Tyme straight from the bottle and collecting the furious glares of other passengers. As we descended over Seattle, I thought the plates of my skull might separate from the pressure. Crashing, I thought, might not be so bad; at least I would no longer feel like this.

Here's how sick I was: every year for nearly a decade now, I've hosted an Oscar party replete with junk food and howling at the television. I did it last year, when my guests all had to sit on moving boxes. This year, I canceled it. And WENT TO BED. I did not even WATCH. I was too sick even to be sad about it.

Here's how sick I was: I went to the DOCTOR. I'm part of an endless line of hardy prairie stock, staunch women known for sucking on kerosene-soaked sugar lumps for a sore throat, for birthing babies in under five hours, for saying "oh, it's just a cracked rib, put some tape on it." I went to the doctor and had to describe the color and quality of my mucus in detail for my file. (At one point, I had crap coming out of MY EYES, virtually every hole in my head engaged in the battle.) The doctor ruled out strep, advised me "Rest. Tylenol. Gargle. Hot compresses," which I hope was not the high point of her twelve years of schooling.

I am better. I am not at 100%, but I'm better. Well enough to work, alas. I'm a bit snuffly, and my ears are still stopped up; my head feels sort of like a half-full novelty mug. When I lean over I can feel everything gloomp and sloosh around in there.

But, like I said, half-full. Ever the optimist.

New York stories are forthcoming, I promise.

Call the rescue squad, part 2

After conceding a point to the yard, yesterday, I turned indoors to tackle a few minor cleaning tasks; I don't want the cat-sitter to see the conditions I actually live in while I'm on vacation.

My little house originally had central oil heat, since replaced by electric baseboards or forced-air units in each room. The hardwood floors have been lovingly restored, but the metal grate for the old furnace still remains in the geographical center of the house, between living room and hallway. Beneath the grate is a flat black surface; I figured it was boarded over once it had outlived its usefulness. Meanwhile, crumbs and pine needles and pennies and cat fur drop through the grate and collect on the surface, the holes in the grate just small enough to thwart my fingers or the skinniest vacuum attachment.

So I decided to pry up the grate--it lifts up easily, not bolted down--and do some serious vacuuming yesterday. Turns out that that black-painted surface isn't a solid board, but an extremely thin sheet of metal. This, I discovered when, while wrestling with the kinked-up vacuum hose...I accidentally stepped on the panel. And dropped straight through, up to my thigh in...well, the FLOOR.

(I don't know what my other leg was doing, frankly; it stayed up on the main level and I ended up sort of sitting on the edge of the furnace hole with the roaring vacuum in my half-lap. Let's just say I was grateful for having recently resumed yoga practice.)

So, hey...hi there, old furnace, as I straddle you. I dropped the grate, fought off the Hoover, and managed to wrestle my leg back out; this was harder than expected because the metal sheet had bent down, as I went past, and sort of pinned me; I had to bend it back in the OTHER wrong direction to pull free. It made a noise like when stagehands whap a metal sheet backstage to simulate rolling thunder. I am not sure the cats will ever recover from me, rolling around on the floor and bashing metal objects around, WHILE still running the Vacuum Monster of Terror.

Incredibly, I did not tear my pants into one-legged Daisy Dukes. I have an impressive wraparound welt of scrape and bruise, though...it looks sort of like I'm wearing a festive purple garter.

This is yet another rationalization of my deeply indifferent housekeeping; obviously such tasks are FRAUGHT WITH PERIL. People with spotless houses are taking their lives in their hands every day, tragedy in the making. Let this be a lesson to you all.

Bramble rambling

If you've got a gorgeous winter afternoon to spend, allow me to NOT recommend deciding to cut back the blackberry vines by the garage while wearing a simple knit sweater--not one of the best ideas I've ever had. I have an Arthur Rackham-illustrated edition of Sleeping Beauty that shows the rag-clad, skeletal corpses of failed suitors snarled in the thorny hedges around the slumbering castle (for kids! nice!); I did have my moments of panic, but luckily did not need to be cut free by the fire department.

I'm gaining an ever-greater appreciation for my late grandmother's yard of ornamental gravel.

Biscuits and gravy and sympathy

Wow. Didja read Dave's post about the jilted Vegas bride he attempted to console at the airport?Go ahead, I'll wait here.

It's like him, really, to walk right into a Richard Russo story somewhere, while my fiction skills atrophy behind a corporate desk. But what really struck me about it is how much it speaks to an absolute core element of Dave, one that I really admire: his ability to trust people. He really has an innate faith in human nature, believes effortlessly that most folks want to do the right thing, and he tries to live that way himself. Occasionally, this philosophy has bitten him in the ass...but for the most part, it's allowed him to travel around the world as he does, making friends on practically every continent, confident that in a crisis, the universe will provide--be it a couch to crash on, or a malaria ward in a Pakistan hospital, or a three-dollar diner breakfast. Whatever it is, you know he'd do the same for you, if he could.

I don't know if Dave would call it karma, or call it anything, this cycle of goodwill he operates in. It's the thing I respect most about him, though. I'm nowhere near as trusting, and it's something I really must work at: to be less timid, to look up from my book on the bus or at the coffee house, to talk to strangers once in a while. I'm glad he reminded me.

Dumpy

I've been kind of in a mood lately, down in the dumps. (What's the origin of that phrase, I wonder and am too lazy to look up? It sounds like a vicious cycle; not only are you feeling sad, but you're moping around amongst the municipal trash heaps, and THAT'S not going to improve your outlook.) Some of it is work stress, as we're wildly busy right now; some is surely post-holiday letdown--it's gray, it's cold, there are no presents to look forward to, but all the seasonal indulgences are straining your elastics. And there's been a little holdover for me from the Valentine's Day business.

I dunno. I know that the Marketing Forces Of Evil have pretty much commandeered Valentine's Day, and that if you're not out there contributing to the global economy by plying your sweetheart with candies and flowers and designer fragrances and whimsical underpants, it's probably just because you are a REPULSIVE HIDEOUS SINGLE FREAK! GET BACK IN THE BASEMENT! Oho, I am on to their commercial scheme. I'm not intimidated by dining out or traveling alone; I can buy my own florid boxes of truffles, and I do. (Though I might prefer to consume them avidly, while lolling about in front of Project Runway, unobserved.)

But...circumstantially, it has been...a long time since I've had a valentine for the occasion. A looooong time. Measured in years, there. And...I miss it. When even the weekly Safeway flier is advertising lobster tails and long-stemmed red roses, well...there's some pressure.

I think I'm a pretty easy valentine. I don't even like roses. I don't want a moonlit carriage ride, or a champagne flute with a big honkin' diamond ring at the bottom of it. Hell, carriage rides just make me think of the Beefareeno episode of Seinfeld anyway. I'm just saying, a double order of potstickers from Snappy Dragon and a stack of DVDs would be groovy to share. With someone. Who am I even writing this to?

Maybe I should link a personal-ad profile over there in the sidebar, like people do with their Amazon wish lists. Date Me! Buy Me Presents!

Ahem.

Okay. I will comfort myself by remembering the crappiest Valentine's Day I ever had as an attached lady. I was dating this guy in college who'd taken a semester off to find himself, so he was home in Virginia while I was in New York. He mailed me my Valentine present...which was the knock-off, grocery-store-brand, heart-shaped box of chocolates. Which he placed in a plain manila envelope. Which went through all the automatic stamping and sorting machines of the U.S. Postal Service. So, what I got was this flattened...wad...of chocolates, with different-flavored...areas, therein...and the occasional ruffled paper thingie, sticking through.

Then he realized he was gay. Overall, I'd rate that relationship...disappointing.

What was my best Valentine's Day? Telling the preceding story made me think about it; I have to say it was probably 1978. My dad had a custody weekend, and took us to see Star Wars at the long-demolished Cinema 150, downtown. (Yes, it came out the preceding summer; we were somehow behind the curve.) It predictably blew our little minds...and THEN, depositing us at home, my father whipped out a pair of identical Russell Stover candy boxes, hearts wrapped in red cellophane, that he'd somehow hidden in the truck all day. Star Wars AND candy! It was a rare shining moment for the Old Man, that.

Would still make a pretty decent Valentine's Day, actually.

Your worst friend ever

I have been so very neglectful of my InterWeb friends. I suck a little bit. Linkery, commence!

Many moons ago, Omega referred to me as "fucking awesomely funny," which still causes a little glowing coal of pride to perk up in my heart. You should visit her diner.

Alyssa's Big Red Blog is already over there in the link list thingy, but last week Mike pointed her out to me like he'd discovered her himself, or something. So, click again!

I knew Erin from college; she was one of the funniest people I've ever met, and I was sad when post-graduate drift made me lose track of her. (Cue calendar pages flipping, a decade whizzing past here.) I figure I laughed at the Fitziechicks' analyses of For Better Or For Worse for probably a month before I recognized her sister's name and cleverly, if not quickly, deduced her identity.

I don't actually know Gael of Pop Culture Junk Mail, but she's how I found the Fitziechicks, so I owe her. Also, I think we are fellow Ballardinavians.

If you're likewise consumed by the jive-talkin' wonder that is FBOFW, I am sure you will enjoy the recently rebranded Comics Curmudgeon, the latest random discovery that nearly got me fired for guffawing inappropriately at my desk. Josh mentions his fiancee frequently, lest I dispatch myself to his home in a bubble envelope.

For more pants-wetting hilarity, of course you can't go wrong with those Fug Girls.

Jesus would HONK, that's what

How I do love the press-on letter readerboards you see outside of schools and businesses and, in this case, a church in my neighborhood:

WALKING IN THE WAY OF CHRIST

Yes, yes...and actually, He'd appreciate it if you would MOVE IT ALONG, there, or at least keep to the right; He's got places to be.

How terribly strange to be seventy...well, added together...give or take a few months

I had dinner last night with David, who's back in our hometown for a few weeks during a break from his studies in China. We went out for sushi, and then enormous slabs of cake and pie at Zoka, and ended up hanging around at my house and talking for four solid hours, catching up.

It occurs to me now that, technically speaking, Dave's my oldest friend; we met in the second grade, and were classmates off-and-on throughout our educational lives. It's interesting, just to look at someone you've known basically since he was socialized and integrated into the wider world. Dave and I both are the sort of people whose basic appearance has changed little since childhood, so it's funny to see his seven-year-old self's features, modified but still utterly recognizable, working across his face; I imagine he sees similar things in me.

We had grade-school crushes on each other; we attended our senior prom together as a sort of in-joke in that regard. I was the straight-A goody-goody, he was...sort of the Ferris Bueller of our high school class. After a mutually inept attempt at dancing, we retreated to the hotel lobby, where we sat mocking the other couples attempting to make out amongst the atrium's potted plants. At the after-party, we stayed up talking until dawn...and ended up dating for several years. Our First Love...and, eventually, Our First Breakup, with all its attendant misery and recriminations. We were 20, 21 maybe. Who hasn't made a few clumsy, hurtful moves at that age, fraught with drama?

Oddly enough, our paths continued to cross. Not often--every two or five or seven years we'd exchange a card, or an e-mail, or I'd bump into him or one of his siblings on the street. Not quite a year ago, I found his website, and we've probably communicated more through this medium, in the intervening months, than we have in over a decade. He suggested meeting, during this visit, and it was so very...pleasant, to talk face-to-face with someone who's known me most of my life, when we're at a stage of our lives where we've dispensed with our teenage baggage.

We're both older and more settled. Rounder. Less agile, feeling the tug of gravity a bit more. He has less hair; I have plenty of gray going on up top. We talked about our parents: not old, but aging, more delicate, collectively stymied by computers (uhhh...hi, Mom!); the days when our parents will be our responsibility are visible. We talked about family and friends, who's got kids, who's passed away, how hard it is to sort through and discard the comet-trail of stuffed animals and albums and Christmas cards that plague you after thirty-odd years. Our lives are wildly divergent, at this point: Dave's elected to travel the world, studying language and culture, caligraphy, music, while he has the means and the youth still to do it. I suppose I've taken a more traditional path, with a 401(k) and a mortgage, a couch, a couple of cats. But we're both really happy with our current paths, a mutual truth we discussed with more than a few grains of wonder, I think.

It's so satisfying, to reconnect with someone who's surfaced throughout your life, a milestone unto himself. I admire his choices; I'm so glad to see him content and doing well. I'm glad to see me content and doing well, too. Life's pretty generous. Good on yer, mate.

My Adidas

There are no limits to my love of KEXP (which broadcasts online--check it out). As I was navigating my carpool into the parking garage at about 8:00 this morning, my devotion was rewarded when John-in-the-Morning slapped on Run-DMC, of all things: "It's Tricky."

Me: Oh my God! (cranking it to 11; busting moves wildly behind the steering wheel)
Darcy: ...
Me: I MET A LITTLE GIRLIE! HER HAIR WAS KINDA CURLY!
Darcy: ...
Me: What, are you not a fan?

What can I say...at those figure-skating events in the mid-80s that I mentioned? Sis and I sometimes frightened the other children. Or their stage mothers, for certain.

Same old, same old

Near the freeway exit I take for my office is a mattress store housed in a former bank. Their outdoor sign still includes one of those date/time/temperature clocks, half its bulbs burnt out. But this one has read "January 13" since...January 12, now (heh). It gives the daily commute an uneasy "Groundhog Day" vibe, certainly.

And gives rise to a question, actually...why are those clocks the domain of banks? I'm thinking of all the local ones I know, now, and I can't recall a single one that isn't outside a bank, or outside something that was originally a bank. What's up with that?

Ornate, elegant clocks-with-hands go outside jewelry stores, this I know--maybe to encourage people to buy watches? (Which...why would you, if the clock's right on the...huh...) But "digital" readout clocks = banks. Come on, Internet, I bet you know this.

The Robertson

So said the sign at the end of their driveway. One of Barb's sons had made it--poorly--in wood shop, the letters slumped and crowding each other off the end of the board, no room for the plural. Whichever kid it was convinced the shop teacher that the singular was in fact the correct Scottish clan designation, no "S" required, and got a decent grade.

My family met Barb Robertson when I was about 13, the first year we were completely consumed with figure skating. So was Barb: in her early 60s, she'd decided she needed a new hobby. She signed up for private lessons and shared the ice with us, turning stately circles in her sweatshirt and knit tam o'shanter while little girls in lycra dresses hurled themselves aloft all around her.

Off ice, Barb was a doctor, and in her spare time had raised five grown children. She was accustomed to a crowded life, and welcomed us indiscriminately into it--kids, coaches, parents, champions and junior- hockey thugs, others who'd drifted into the sport out of love. She volunteered her services at local competitions, ministering to wrenched knees and bonked heads or the occasional nervous puker. On Saturdays after practice, she'd load us into one or another of her never, never, EVER-washed cars and make a pizza run.

We were always celebrating something with Barb: birthdays and graduations, exam results, pregnancies, promotions. Some time in the late 1970s she'd strung Christmas lights around the ceiling beams in her dining room...and then just never bothered to take them down. Flip a switch: instant party. Barb made enormous chocolate-chip sheet cakes and never ran out of ice. We camped out on her living room floor to watch Tentacles on the late-night movie. I had my first alcoholic beverage in Barb's presence, a closely-supervised glass of raspberry champagne...though I no longer remember what achievement had occasioned the event. Barb introduced my family to mu shu pork; she made a noble effort to teach me to drive a stick shift. At a certain point in my adolescence, I was entirely comfortable rummaging through her refrigerator for the soda or snack of my choice. As an adult, I think that's one of the highest compliments I can pay someone, really: I am at home in your home.

When you did open the fridge, you'd find at least a dozen little notes taped to the shelves inside the door, proclaiming "Happy Birthday Mom!" in crayon or marker. Her kids had started this one year and Barb never took them down.


The first check arrived in September of my freshman year in college. One hundred dollars, and a note from Barb, reminding me that I was minutes from the greatest city in the world and I ought to take advantage it. "Don't tell your mother," she said; this was between us; I didn't have to tell anyone what I spent it on, Barb included...though I think, I hope, that I did. I bought a full-length black wool coat with that $100, at Macy's no less, and thought myself hot snot on china. Barb sent me another $100 each month, for my entire freshman year...kept me in bagels and incense and cheap silver jewelry and MoMA posters that, properly framed, now hang in my home and my office. When I graduated, I got another check: $2700. The other three academic years, in a lump sum. "I thought you might need a nest egg, starting out," Barb said, and I did. I secured and furnished my first apartment with that check, bought a bookcase and a futon and the desk I'm typing at, tonight.

When she was diagnosed with lung cancer, Barb was philosophical: "I won't ever have to Christmas shop or go to the dentist again." But radical surgery, performed by an old colleague, spared her to endure those and other jolly annual irritants time and again: this was fifteen years ago. Her hair grew back, mysteriously chemo-altered into poodle-pouf curls; she shrugged and went back to the rink, even though her lung capacity was not what it had been. She lived to see a passel of grandchildren.

And I grew up, all the rink kids did...ended up with cars, careers, spouses or houses. In recent years, Barb and I had become primarily Christmas-card friends, though we'd still sometimes surprise each other at potlucks or restaurants--find time to catch up even as it seemed like mere minutes had passed. She came to one of my Christmas parties. When my grandmother lay dying in the hospital, I called Barb, for consultation and consolation.

When Barb's cancer improbably resurfaced this year, maybe autumn, after more than a decade of remission, she told no one but her husband. In her eighties, she didn't want to endure the rigors of fresh treatment, or wither tragically for months. She kept skating up until the first week in December, when her illness had devoured too much of her muscle tone for her to continue. She waved off worry, implied that a new medication was affecting her badly. She spent Christmas with her family...and stopped taking her meds on December 26th. On December 31st, the world grieved by candlelight for all those who suffer, and then faced forward, with fireworks and confetti cannons...and Barb slipped quietly out with the last of 2004.

* * * * *

When someone we love dies, someone who's been a touchstone and a role model and a savior, a one-woman charitable organization, a friend...I think it's our responsibility, our obligation, to smooth over that void with ourselves. To live for that person, and to play a part in the lives of others, as he or she did for you. In some way I can't well-enough describe, I'm glad I was at Darcy's when Barb died--another place where I feel confident enough to rummage through the fridge, surrounded by another family I've come to think of as mostly my own. We ate cheese fondue and chocolate-chip brownies and drank champagne; the Christmas lights flashed hectically and the kids staged epic, shrieking board games, wired and laughing and up too late. The calendar rolled over, with smooches and bottle rockets, and everything is possible and new.

Happy New Year. Come on over. There are pretzels, and cookies, and I've got plenty of ice.

Joy

Driving home from Darcy's around the lake, this afternoon, I saw at least four little kids, wobbling along the path ecstatically on shiny, shiny, dazzling new bicycles as their parents strolled beatifically along beside.

Aw, Santa, you old coot...you still know just how to get me.

NotMe and Ida Know

Julius is demonstrably my Bad Cat. He eats the plants, he tips over his water dish, he torments his sister daily. He goes knickknack fishing when he tires of the vast array of designated kitty toys; I'm forever stepping on something unexpected in the dark of the night on the way to the bathroom. He surfs on the throw rugs and hysterically trash-talks the benign neighbor cat through the windows.

Tulip, on the other hand, is essentially an affectionate decorative throw pillow. With appalling cat fud breath.

So far, the cats have been largely indifferent to the Christmas tree. But among my decorations are little garlands of paper Scandinavian flags...and for about a week I've been coming home to find here a flag, there a flag, everywhere a slightly soggy chewed-off flag, all around the living room. Naughty, naughty Julius, I thought. I've been lightly scolding him for days.

You can imagine my surprise when, last night, Tulip (fresh from a nap) sidled up to the tree, snagged a flag and started tugging. SHOCKED, I tell you. "Hey! No no no," I told her. And she looked right at me, with huge glowing dilated crazy!pupils, and chomped down on the poor little candy-cane bear ornament, dangling adjacent. (He's already got only one eye--cut him some slack!)

Those who say that pets are not like people, let alone backstabbing, sibling-rivalrous children, obviously have none.

I should be relieved, though: check out the Very Bad Cats indeed Iris and Fern, decorating their own tree.

It's not Christmas until Poppy cries

I got to participate in another long-held holiday tradition Sunday morning, actually, when I attended a St. Lucia brunch. My mom's friend Cookie has been doing this as long as I can remember, hosting hordes of people for coffee and pastry to celebrate "the Swedish Christmas." When we were little, Cookie's daughter, DerDer, would play the role of the Lucia Bride, leading us into the dining room with the crown of candles on her head--tipped with gold foil, when we were very small, and thrillingly, fearsomely lit, when she was older. (Apparently battery-operated ones are now de rigeur.) DerDer married, last year, so the celebration has moved to her home.

There were a lot of new attendees this year, neighbors who didn't know the story, so DerDer and Cookie gave a little presentation. I didn't know much about the actual legend, either, it turns out. Lucia was an Italian saint, and it's not clear why the Swedes so fell in love with her. One story has Lucia, a devout Christian, refusing to marry a Pagan husband and putting out her own eyes. Another has her bringing bread to starving, persecuted Christians hiding in tunnels and caves; she wore candles on her head to free her hands and light the way. Yet another has her arriving in a harbor on a ship, bringing light, bringing food to the hungry.

When I was a kid, the processional part of the celebration seemed interminable--though I envied DerDer the attention, and her gripping role, fraught with danger. We'd gather around the table and listen to the traditional hymn--originally on a record, later copied onto cassette--a choir of children warbled verse after verse in Swedish or Latin or whatever, and some of the grownups would fumble along tunelessly, and all I wanted was to get it over with and get to the food. I was eager to line the pockets of my corduroy jumper with gingersnaps and start running up and down the stairs with DerDer and her three brothers, my sister and all the neighbor kids and cousins, shrieking and slamming each other's fingers in doors while the adults drank gallons of coffee and didn't notice when we kept slinking back to the table, keeping our blood sugar levels just on the frenzied side of a diabetic coma.

I don't know when it changed. I think it's partly Poppy's fault. DerDer's stepdad is legendarily, hilariously sentimental; he weeps at the proverbial drop of a hat, at Hallmark commercials and Notre Dame championships. When DerDer announced her engagement, Poppy cried for an entire year at the mere thought of walking her down the aisle. We mock poor Poppy, with great love...but even as we laugh, he has the power to get everyone else going too. (During the father/bride dance at the actual reception, my particular table of friends and family sobbed so hard the d.j. had to crank it to eleven to drown us out.)

So. This year, DerDer and her husband had actually burned the Sankta Lucia hymn onto a CD for her folks. This is close, but not quite the same version; you have to imagine it dubbed and redubbed off the original vinyl, with the pops and scratches, the needle hissing in the groove. DerDer pressed "Play." The introductory measures wavered across the living room. And...

...Poppy let out an audible, gulping sob and abruptly swiveled his Barcalounger to face the wall.

So. Yeah, we all giggled tenderly at Poppy. But it's a long hymn, and you have a lot of time to look at the tree, and the candles glowing, and the faces of family and friends and the babies they have now. You think about being kids, all in a sugared-up Christmas lather; you think of your Grammy, and DerDer's grandma KittyCoat, neither of whom are with us any more. And let me tell you, you harrumph and sniffle and blinkblinkblink HARD at the ceiling to keep from getting mascara face...

...and finally, thank God, it's time to eat. To laugh at yourself, and blot your eyes with an IKEA napkin printed with a little blonde girl in a fiery crown, and hug your own mom and your extra one, Cookie, and Poppy and DerDer, and then hit the smorgasbord. Cardamom bread, generously slathered with butter. Buttered lefse, rolled up with cinnamon and sugar or with summer sausage. Almond ring. "Spritz" butter cookies. Gingersnaps and coffee with cream and soft yeast rolls with butter. Did I mention butter?

It was so lovely. I really feel like the holidays can now get underway. Of course, I consumed nothing but pastry and coffee and red wine for the entire day, so I could possibly be just addled by my nutritional deficiencies.

I did realize that I was fully in a new demographic, staring down the barrel of 35, when I spent a considerable portion of the brunch in DerDer's kitchen, admiring her retro-look electric percolator from Target. It combines classic style with modern convenience!

It's not Christmas until the little baby angels cry

So saith Jacki, one of the regulars at the fifth (!) annual Ugly Christmas Cookie party, which I happily attended at the home of instigator Megan, yesterday afternoon. I'm sure she'll write about it eventually, but I'll tide you over.

I believe that the first Ugly Cookie Day was inadvertent, owing more to the artistic deficiencies of the participants. It was her college boyfriend's particular genius to make unattractive, disquieting, or downright offensive cookies the thematic intent. So every year now Megan and co-conspirator Erica spend a couple days cranking out dozens and dozens and DOZENS of sugar and gingerbread cookies, shaped like everything from trees and snowmen to cowboys and pumpkins. Megan hauls out her array of every food coloring and candy sprinkle known to mankind, and then a handful of us spend four or five hours drinking to excess and obsessively poking frosting around with toothpicks.

We CAN make pretty cookies, and we usually do--in fact, Megan brought a sampling of those that "met the HR bar" to the office today. But there's just something in our sick, sad minds that makes the little frosted horrors so, SO much more fun. Past alcohol-fueled inspiration has produced cookies iced to look like cat barf, eyeballs, poo (both Mr. Hankey and generic), little "ginger whores," cold-sore-spotted lips, far too many "yellow snow" jokes, and a "snowminatrix" in studded leather harness. (Those little silver "inedible"--heh--dragees really come in handy.) A rocket-shaped cookie cutter gets wildly misrepresented each year... ahem. We have made cookies in the likeness of Michael Jackson, Dame Edna, the Green River Killer (God help us all) and the complete GingerVillage People.

Yesterday did not disappoint. We had a tasteful diorama of the effects of mad cow disease. Ginger Martha-in-Prison made an appearance. (Martha, honey--you know we're just kidding. Stay strong, sister-friend!) I frosted a particularly bloated Jason Giambi, and the devil, complete with chocolate jimmies for his vertical pupils. There were Ginger Calendar Firefighters, with big yellow pants and carefully iced abs. This year's winner, in the category of "makes you gag a little even though you know it's just a cookie"? Loreal, the cosmetic-testing laboratory rabbit.

We are nice girls, really we are.

Anyway, I drank three glasses of wine and consumed enough of my "mistakes" to realize, as I do annually, that Ugly Cookie Day is its own punishment. It was 8:30 before I bundled up and started tottering the four blocks home with my own saran-wrapped plate of obscene baked goods. At the end of the block I passed a house blazing like NORAD with holiday lights; if you listened carefully you could hear the dial on their electric meter whizzing around. I glanced through the living-room window and saw...two trees? Crap, how much cabernet had I had? "Wow," I said aloud.

There was a guy having a cigarette in the driveway. "Hey," he said.

"Are there really two trees in there?" I asked. He rolled his eyes toward the house.

"Not even close," he said. "My mother-in-law loves Christmas. Guess."

I shrugged.

"There are FIVE," he told me. "One's in the basement. And they're THEMED!"

"Oh my GOD," I said. "Well...Merry Christmas!"

"YEAH Merry Christmas," he said, and grinned and stomped out his smoke. And I went on, armored against the cold by my flowered wool hat and fleece mittens, smiling, never wanting to see another cookie as long as I lived. Until about four this afternoon, when I slunk down to Megan's office and snagged an innocuous brown bear off the tray.

Dude, it's all about traditions!

Am I getting enough sleep?

I just arrived at the office and blearily waved my coffee in front of the key-card reader. Hellooo? Let me in, you stupid--oh.

Better turn back and get one for each hand, I guess.

It's beginning to look a lot like OH FOR CHRISSAKE GOD DAMN IT!

Yeah, yeah, I know. That last post just hangs there, piteously comic, doesn't it? And I was gonna write about it; I had some prime material all lined up, me driving home despondent through the neighborhood streets of shattered pumpkins and dead leaves and waterlogged Kerry signs. I spun the needle on the Stages-of-Grief-Ometer more than once, with the denial and the rage and the what the HELL is the MATTER with half of you people? I fretted. I ate far more than my allotment of frozen yogurt. I wondered, what are we gonna do? What are we possibly gonna do for four more years?

Well, if you need a cause, as usual the writers I dream of emulating have done it better. I shall direct you to This Is Not Over.com. Okay then. Get busy. Moving on.

So. Those who know me well understand that I'm something of a Christmas dork. My birthday is December 22; my parents brought me home from the hospital on Christmas Day, and for many years I labored under the delusion that the holiday hoopla had something to do with me: I got ornaments AND t.v. specials AND cake AND presents AND carols AND pretty lights for, like, a solid month. A rented Santa from the Heart Association once came to my birthday party. You can maybe forgive my childhood assumptions.

I outgrew most of the megalomania (she blathered, on the Internet), and I eventually discerned some of the crap parts of having a birthday that close to Christmas, too, such as a) the "combo" present, and b) it's something like gloves. These days, I am typically too damn busy to celebrate the anniversary of my own earthly arrival. That said, I've still never quite gotten over the giddy glee of it all. I love to haul out the decorations. I love the memories triggered by each ornament. Here is the polar bear seated on an outsize candy cane, one of his eyes now drawn on with a pen, from when my parents were still married; here is the glitter-smudged styrofoam ball Sis crafted in Brownies; here is the brass partridge-in-a-pear-tree my friend Gwyn left on my document stand in first-period Typing I in the 10th grade; here is the tiny snowman from Holly's first year in Germany. Everything gets a spot on the tree--the heirlooms and the ugly ones. Hell, I've been known to purchase an ugly ornament on purpose, just because I think it's funny.

I love to feed people. I like to bust out the Johnny Mathis album, and whip up gingersnaps and peppermint bark and my grandma's ass-kicking rum balls. Okay, actually I don't like making the rum balls, with the Karo syrup and the stickiness and the rolling and rolling and rolling up those little bastards in a fog of rum-stink everywhere. By the time I'm done, I can't stand it. I can't eat 'em, myself. But I like to watch the faces of the people who do.

I love the tree. How it makes the house smell, when you open the door after a long day, darkness to darkness, at the office. How the cats are all "the HELL?" every year when you haul an enormous piece of Outside into the living room. How each tree is more beautiful than the last, when you finally get it trimmed to your liking.

Which is best done when you have managed to get the motherfucking tree crammed into the cheap-ass, worthless, catastrophically useless plastic stand from the goddamn Fred Meyer, and get it fixed in a reasonably upright position without tying it to the WALL, because the four flimsy bolts ROCK back and FORTH in the crummy plastic slots and the tree favors a jaunty 75-degree ANGLE, pointing accusatorily at the COUCH, and your hands are raw from cranking those screws with fucking PLIERS while your NEIGHBOR held the trunk, to no avail.

We used to tease my mother, for approaching Hulk-like rages while putting up the tree when we were kids. I remember her threatening to throw tree, stand, and lights off the balcony of our apartment; I remember her dragging us to that same Fred Meyer, incredibly enough, to purchase a completely new set of lights at about 9:30 p.m. one year. Good old Mommy--she came to the rescue last night, with a monstrous eight-pronged tree stand suitable for Rockefeller Center. That baby isn't going ANYWHERE from now to January 1. I think I could climb it.

"How did you do this as a single parent?" I asked her. "I mean, I know you used to get frustrated, sure...but how did you ever manage to put up a tree without help?"Our Broken Home trees were smaller, granted, but still .

"I don't know," she admitted. "But when we were still married, your father used to do it. And he would about lose his mind, and I wondered why."

So. Christmas made my parents get a divorce! Well...perhaps not entirely. But it was a contributing factor. I haven't even gotten to the story about their 3 a.m. toy assembly crisis, yet...or the one about the Nat King Cole Suicide Christmas album. Heh. I love the holidays, but they sure weren't kind to my folks' marriage, now that I think about it.

Home on the range

All right, y'all, I know I don't have to tell you what to do. But I will: get your asses to the polls and send that raisin-eyed, simian, chuckling dimwit bastard back to the ranch in Crawford. I mean it. Move. Let's go.

Sarah Bunting says it better than I can; so does Cary Tennis. So, even if we don't win, take heart. Stick around for the fight.

But we'll win.

Come on, get excited! Democracy, woooooooo!

If I was Mayor McCheese, I'd have the Hamburglar put to death!

According to the local news, several of the folks who helped collar Seattle's Lamest Mugger were given an audience with the mayor and little certificates of good citizenship or whatever. (Check the video links for "Citizen Heroes Capture Would-Be Robber," if you're so inclined.)

Sis must be feeling better, because she's pissed off: where is her commemorative plaque for administering the beat-down? Not to mention, the opportunity to sound off ON TELEVISION...dang! Plus, of course, the opportunity to, you know, thank all those other folks. Apparently she remains unidentified due to being CARTED AWAY IN AN AMBULANCE as intrepid reporters arrived. The cops did call and leave a message at her home, but too late for her to attend the ceremony. "Maybe Mayor Hoss Cartwright will give you your Special Award later," I said.

I am dying to know, however, what the certificates say exactly. What do they Hereby Proclaim?--that you are a member of the community in good standing? An ass-kicking , crime-fighting mutha? What? I hope it at least comes with a couple of Dick's gift certificates or something. That would be awesome. Thank you, Seattle Citizen Hero! Have a cheeseburger, on us!

You should see the other guy

The karmic dump truck continues to unload on my sister: Thursday, she managed to get herself violently mugged, at 9:00 in the freaking morning, at a cash machine on Broadway (a neighborhood renowned for its hipster squalor--junkies and students and street kids, oh my!).

Some background: A year ago last August, Sis was injured in a random freak accident that's an entire Whole Nother Story, so I won't get into it here; suffice to say she's had three surgeries so far on a badly crushed ankle. She's mobile, but not 100% recovered yet; she was in this particular neighborhood for the express purpose of consulting a new orthopedic specialist for a second opinion.

So. Some doubtless crack-addled fuckwit jumped out of his truck at the curb, and just grabbed her around the neck from behind. Had the shithead seen her limping? I don't know. But he chose her, got her in a headlock, demanded her money. It was so sudden, broad daylight, that at first she thought it must be a friend, someone she knew, goofing around. She said "No!" He tightened his grip around her throat, jerking her backward.

And she turned, twisting around in the circle of his arm, and punched the fucker twice, dead in the face.

Ladies and gents, let me introduce my baby sister, one bad. assed. bitch.

Because next, she hooked her foot--the bad one!--back around his ankle, and when he tried to knock her down, he fell too: she dragged the hapless dumbass down with her, punching and screaming and hanging onto her purse all the while. When her mugger (at the end, wailing "Okay! OKAY!" ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha) tried to get away, Sis actually had the presence of mind to wrap her legs around his and hang on, as other people fought to grab him. He did get loose, scooping up the cash dropped in the struggle, and ran...but a pack of concerned citizens gave chase, and by the time the cops arrived, a crowd had the guy pinned under a car, several blocks away. Boy did this guy make a bad, bad choice. "You did a good job today," one officer told Sis.

She was hurt in the fall, jamming her back and tailbone hard on the concrete, wrenching one finger back...whether in the fall or the fight she's not sure. Her boyfriend called me from the hospital; "Her Irene came out," he said of the battle--referring to our late maternal grandmother, a woman who slept with a nine-iron beside the bed and carried an ice pick in her purse, just in case someone was fool enough to mess with her...sort of the Bad, Bad Leroy Brown of the under-five-feet-tall senior citizen set. Anyway, Sis's injuries will heal...though she's pretty shaken up.

I don't know. I keep vacillating between seeing her actions as insane, over $30, in the please-don't-EVER-do-that-again-are-you-CRAZY? vein...and seeing them as heroic, because: girl is BAD. ASS. It got a write-up in the local paper; I was reading the article to her over the phone yesterday and she broke down, sobbing "Why did this happen to meeeeeeee?" And I can't blame her, of course. It's scary, it hurts, she's had a shit-shellacked 14 months already. Why did it happen to her? But I tried to impress upon her the complete bad-assedness of what she'd done, encourage her to see the good in it: look what you accomplished, look how pissed-off and tough and strong you are, in spite of your injury, in spite of feeling still "fragile" from the accident.

I mean, what would I have done? I'm a wimp. I imagine I'd have gladly surrendered my purse, my car keys, and my latte, if I'd had one--and did you need anything else, Mr. Mugger? Could I give you a ride, help you pick out some other weak-lookin' victims, maybe? Sis said that, had he shown or implied a weapon, she'd have reacted differently. ("No she wouldn't," chuckled Holly, later, when I related the tale. She's known Sis since she was nine.) But I don't know; who can tell how they'll respond, in the feverish swamp of adrenaline?

Thankfully, Sis later called me back, yesterday: she'd fielded about 20 "d'ja know you're in the paper?" phone calls, given her official statement to police, received flowers from work, and had at last consumed some sweet, delicious Percocet and was engrossed in an episode of Little House on the Prairie.

All's well that ends well, ain't it?

And I gotta say, I love her, the ferocious little shit.

Ba-dum bum

Found this while looking up assorted Yiddishisms. So timely!

Four friends are sitting in a restaurant. For a long time, nobody says anything. Then, one man groans, "Oy."

"Oy vey," says a second man.

"Nu," says the third.

At this, the fourth man gets up from his chair and says, "If you guys don't stop talking politics, I'm leaving!"

Nu, an entry

When I was a little girl, we used to go with my mom's friend Cookie and her kids to Matzoh Momma's, a deli in the funky post-hippie liberal enclave that the Capitol Hill neighborhood was in those mid-70s days. At first, the joint was hole-in-the-wall tiny, a space narrow as a bowling lane lined with deli cases and two or three rickety tables. The food, though...man, the food. Toasted bagels slathered in real butter--could you get a genuine, decent bagel, anywhre else in Seattle at the time? (You barely can, now; round bread with a hole in the middle doth not a bagel make.) Kosher dogs on poppy-seed rolls. A perfectly golden chicken broth, glowing as if lit from within, afloat with the namesake matzoh balls. Dr. Brown's Black Cherry soda, in bottles...I don't think it yet came in cans. I didn't know from "kosher"; my entire concept of Jewishness came from the All of a Kind Family books (and, thus, I also had a vague notion that New York City was still trapped in the early 1900s, with streetcars and tinkers' wagons). I remember puzzling over some of the Yiddishisms sprinkled through the menu: "Nu, a Sandwich" declared one section. But the food was classic comfort food, suited to a kid's palate, straightforward and pure without messing around. You could get the chicken soup with matzoh balls, or with pieces of chicken, or just a bowl of the plain, luminous broth...aw, man. Excuse me while I get a little verklempt and drool on the keyboard. The proprietor of the place was a big guy named Pip, with a huge, wildly curly black Jewfro. He knew us all by name, at the time. Cookie would call him up, when one of her kids was sick, and he'd deliver, actually appearing at the door bearing soup. I thought of Pip like a superhero.

Matzoh Momma's expanded into a full-fledged restaurant, later, with a full bar and live music. I remember sitting there with friends from high school, still eating that translucent soup and listening to someone navigate "Imagine" on the acoustic guitar, pining madly for the sweet stoner boy I loooooooved who sat beside me but had a girlfriend, not me. (Amusing: a little Googling reveals that Pip Meyerson was a Garfield alum, 1967. Not as amusing: further Googling indicates sweet stoner boy is a strapping, bearded Mac geek who thinks my employer is the AntiChrist. Oh.)

But eventually, the restaurant closed up shop, replaced by a Thai place, which is great because Seattle has only 800 or so to choose from, whew. I grew up and went to college, had to go all the way to New York (which was NOT populated with horse-drawn carts, it turns out) to get my grub on at a proper deli. For whatever random reason, the core group of friends I fell in with at Sarah Lawrence all happened to be Jewish; they assumed I was, too, until someone asked me in our senior year if I was going home for Passover. Nope, sorry--Norwegian-Scots with a multiculti palate, that's all. (I became known as The Honorary Jew for the remainder of our schooling. It's true that I would make an excellent Jew or Catholic, since guilt and shame are pretty much my life's breath.) I came home to Seattle, resigned myself to inferior bagels, occasionally missed matzoh crackers scrambled with eggs but not quite enough to buy a whole box and make them myself.

Today, driving across the bridge to work, I noticed the vehicle next to me: Matzoh Momma Catering. A white van with a logo on the side, a woman, a Momma, lovingly stirring a steaming pot of The Soup! I edged alongside, peering. The driver took a call on his cell, steering with one hand; his hair was steely gray and closer-cropped but still mad curly: Pip. Unmistakable. I nearly drove off the bridge, wanted to roll down my window, shout and wave: Pip! Pip! You knew me when I was in kindergarten! I miss you! I miss THE SOUP!

I didn't, of course. But you can be damn sure I wrote down the phone number.

One foot in the grave

The other night I had a standard-issue anxiety dream about my high school. This happens periodically: I'm wandering the building, unable to find my locker, my classroom, the exit, as the halls and staircases go all M. C. Escher around me...and tomorrow, always tomorrow, the term paper's due or the final exam is coming, and I haven't studied or gone to class in, oh, SIXTEEN YEARS. Pretty basic. They've lessened over the intervening decade or so, thank God.

Anyway. Today I stumbled across Garfield's Web site, inadvertently, and for shits and giggles decided to look at their daily bulletin. Turns out that next week is Spirit Week, culminating in Homecoming; each day of the week, pep-minded students are encouraged to dress according to an inane theme. Hence:

Monday, 10/18—Sports Day
Tuesday, 10/19—Neon Day (I do not know what this means. Bright colors? Clothes that light up?)
Wednesday, 10/20—Twin Day
Thursday, 10/21—70s/80s Day
Friday 10/22—Purple and White Day

Hold up. 80s Day? 80s Day? What happened to the 60s day we used to have? That was plenty, right? Countercultural? All soul-hippie-freaky? So, next Thursday, the kids are going to dress...like we did every day. Because now I AM OLD. Old like MY PARENTS old.

They'll get it wrong, of course. No socks, girls--I don't care if it's October.

Now we are six

When I was leaving Darcy's the other night, her son, a newly minted kindergartener I'll call...Pancake, flung upon the door and hollered after me:

"Bye, Butthead!"

Oh yeah? "Bye, Stink-Pants!" I shouted back.

"Bye, Dork Face!"

"Bye, Freaknut!"

"Bye, Jerk-Freak!"

"Bye, Fart-Breath!"

And I got into my car grinning madly, joyous all out of proportion at calling playground insults across the night-dark, leaf-turning neighborhood street. Love that kid.

A sorry truth

Turns out the flu wasn't as much fun as I anticipated, bink or no bink.

Your science minute

Earlier this week, at lunch, one of my colleagues introduced us all to the fact that, if you soak a gummi bear in water overnight, it absorbs the water and expands in size...sort of like those little novelty-shop pellets that turn into foam dinosaurs in the bathtub. I filed this knowledge away for future reference...

...until yesterday, when I was training our newest writer on all the tools and nuances of Our Exhaustive Documentation Process. He was sitting next to me to view my computer screen, but in such a position that he was not easily visible through the window next to the door. So he was even more surprised than I, when Colleague burst in announcing "Here's your entertainment for the afternoon!" and brandishing a gelatinous, four-inch-long gummi mutant, a-quiver on a paper plate.

So, it really does work! As do we, here at BigOlSoftwareCo, though you might not guess that at first glance.

Bink

Plenty of people call a pacifier a "binky," but it was the ELOML's baby word for "blankie" instead: binky, later shortened to bink. He still had his, a comforter his mother had hastily sewn into a basic red-white-and-blue sack. He called it "the sick bink," perfect for huddling under when you had the sniffles and were capable of nothing more than lying on the couch watching "Hunter" reruns on cable, sipping Theraflu. It had a matching pillow, too.

I'm kind of a fool for binks. I like quilts, know a little bit about the traditional patterns, even though I'm incapable of undertaking such a project myself--the biggest sewing task I've accomplished in my life was making kitchen curtains out of cut-up IKEA tablecloths, and that consisted solely of being able to pin and hem a few rectangles. I have a couple storebought quilts that I love, even if they were cranked out by some Pottery Barn wage slave...she might be somebody's grandma, after all. I have a Mexican wool throw in the back of my car, just in case I get caught in a meteorologically unlikely blizzard on the way home. I have a designated Hideous Pink Picnic Blanket that's impervious to stains, or at least looks none the worse for them.

In a sealed plastic tub under the bed, I have my bink...half of it, anyway. I couldn't be parted from it when visiting Grandma as a little girl, and at some point she cut it in two and bound the edges, ensuring that a portion of bink in each household would alleviate any sleepless nights. It's just a mass-produced, unremarkable quilt, strips of disintigrating blue-and-pink fabric barely clinging to the batting. The corners, however, are reinforced with tough squares of one of Grandma's old housecoats, due to my penchant for drifting off, mauling the blanket corners and occasionally sticking one into a nostril. If I washed the bink, I'm sure it would simply dissolve, its last molecules swirling out with the final rinse. It smells like Grandma's house, though, like Grandma. After she died, sometimes I'd just hold it and breathe it in, for a moment. Then quick, quick, stuff it back in the box, try to preserve that Grandma scent. I'm not sure it's working. It smells more and more like plastic tub, I fear.

A couple weekends ago I went with Darcy to Burnt Sugar in the Fremont neighborhood--what, funky housewares? fabulous retro purses? magnificent soaps? oh, all right, TWIST MY ARM--and there was...a bink. A magnificent quilt, made up of felted patchwork squares of old wool sweaters, in rich shades of rose and burgundy and purple. It had different textures, ribbed and smooth and cabled. It had lime-green rickrack around the hem. Rickrack! I stood petting it with my mouth open until the clerk swished up to me.

"Isn't that wonderful?" he said. "It's on sale." Marked down to $175 from $250. God. No. Must. Not. I looked at the lilac-bright blanket-stitched trim.

"Look--it has a little pocket," the clerk said. One of the sweater squares had a dainty breast pocket still attached; he wiggled his fingers in it, to demonstrate.

I put the quilt and my Visa on the counter five minutes of hemming and hawing later. "Look what you made me do!" I told him.

But we talked about knitting and crocheting and quilting, while the other clerk rang up the sale. About his grandmother, who specialized in tatting: cranking out lace doilies while smoking a Pall Mall and reading her Bible at the same time. "'I'm studying for my final exams!'" he quoted her.

So. I have a new sick bink. I'm eager for cold weather, though summer is dragging its heels outside. I can't wait for a bout of the flu. I'm gonna get on the couch with that quilt and both cats and a cup of tea; I'll put kleenexes in that little pocket. It's going to be wonderful.

Are your ears burning?

Because, yeah, I'm talking smack about you.

Dear person who bashed the shit out of my car in the grocery store parking lot and then, apparently, sped off in guilty or oblivious silence: Fuck the fuck off, you cowardly cocksucker. Yes, it is not a fancy car, my 1996 Hyundai Accent, but I'd prefer that it does not look like a total piece of shit, which is difficult to maintain when you smack your ugly-ass blue vehicle all over the driver's side. Thanks a big bunch.

Dear guy at Starbucks, who when I picked your dropped $10 up off the floor and asked if it belonged to anyone nearby, blurted "That's mine!" and whisked it from my fingers: YOU'RE WELCOME, Rude-y McNoManners. Also? Wearing your sunglasses indoors makes you look like an even bigger jackass. Your mother called and said to tell you she's ashamed.

I am in serious need of a karmic top-off. Sigh.