Eighty-six

One of two things happens every single dingle time Mike leaves town: Either someone pukes or a drain backs up.  Came down to finish the laundry last night after Sopranos, did anyone out there watch?  Anyway, the laundry sink was full of muck water.

Uhhhhhgggg. I put in a call to my mom's sewer guy, Sam. I say my mom's, but he's actually been here three times so I guess I could call him mine now.  Sam is a character. I remember him sitting in my mother's house tearfully describing how his ex-wife had gambled away their retirement, so he had to keep working and he really wanted to find someone but he was having no luck.  I swear, he sat there for two hours and drank about three pots of coffee. My mom's just the kind of saint who'll sit there and listen to a total stranger who smells like sewage’s troubles all morning.

So the first time he came to my house, I thought, OK, this is my moment to shine and be nice to someone.  I'll make coffee and muffins and listen to Sam cry. He was all business. Tromped in, snaked the drain, handed me a bill.

"Um, do you want some coffee or a muffin?"

"No, thanks, I just had my breakfast.  That'll be seventy dollars."

"Oh...are you sure? It's Starbucks.  How's the sewer biz? How's the dating scene? Anything you wanna get off your chest? I'm here for you."

Sam shrugged on his coat and wound up his snake machine thing.

"Don't throw so much food down your disposal." He opened the door and left.

“Don’t throw so much…” He got into his van and started driving down the street.  I chased after him, yelling, "Hey! Hey! What about your wife and her gambling! What about your estranged daughter! I was gonna wash your feet with my hair!"

This morning was different, though. He called at seven o'clock, for one thing, and I'd bet dollars to donuts he was drunk.  I'm not kidding. He kept asking me the same questions over and over, and he couldn't remember where I lived or understand me at all.

"You live on Westin?"

"Washburn.  Washburn Avenue."

"Westin?"

"WASHBURN."

"Weshtin?"

He called me twice more from the road to ask me for my address. When he got here, he was all glassy eyed and smiley and chatty. When he was done clearing the drain, He sat down at the kitchen table and started talking about how much he hated bus drivers.  I was a little nervous, but I figured I could take him if it came to that, I mean he's sixty and about five foot one.  I offered nothing, just stared at the newspaper.  He finally left when Molly came into the room and tried to sit on his lap.

 Eighty-seven

Mike and I have decided to clean up our act and go organic everything.  He’s kicked his soda pop habit completely, I’m super proud of him. We bought a quarter of an organic cow to stick in our new downstairs freezer.  Well, actually, Mike ordered it, forgot to tell me, and then left town.

So Farmer Groovy calls me right in the middle of Arrested Development and tells me the shipment will be ready on Tuesday. I was a little distracted, perturbed if you will, I mean yeah, I want to eat healthier and save mother earth and all that but I really love that show. So I say maybe with less enthusiasm than I could have “Great, we'll catch you Tuesday,” and try to hang up.

Farmer Hairy Armpit senses I'm not a true believer and tries to talk me into some milk. OK, I'll take a few gallons of skim, I say. There's a big pause and Crunchy says in a somewhat disappointed voice, "Oh...skim...OK, we'll getcha started on some skim, we'll slowly work you into the good stuff, heh heh." Now, c'mon, who hears that and doesn't go for the bait?

"Whaddya mean, the good stuff?"

I can practically see Farmer Tofutti sit up a little straighter and he launches into this whoooooole deal about good fat/bad fat processing is the enemy unhomogenized whole milk is the only way to go and by the way have you ever heard of the Tesla Society?

But the vision of unhomogenized milk won't leave my mind. I'm seeing a bottle full of cottage cheese with pus on top and I say as much only I phrase it more tactfully, I think what I said was, "I can barely drink the wine at church (sorry God) and you want me to drink lumpy pus milk?”

And he says, "Well, you just shake it up a little," in a small, hurt voice.  Then I felt bad and I ended up ordering everything under the tuscan sun.

But the cow was the only thing we've received so far. Gotta say, I was expecting a little more actual meat. There's like four steaks and ten thousand pounds of hamburger. Are you supposed to specify which quarter you want?  "I want all the steaks, nothing else."

I suppose we're lucky we didn't get its head in a bag, a hunk of leather and a pot of glue.

The kids named it. It's Harry the Dead Cow. So loving. I did make some yummy meat loaf.

Took the crib down yesterday.  Decided I'd try and get Molly used to a big girl bed before Mike gets back to town. We took a nice warm shower together, which she loves and she totally hogs the water. If I block the stream at all she shrieks that she "needs a warm back". Last night she started yelling "I need a warm body, mommy! I need a warm body!"  Tell me about it, sister.

Anyhooz, we get on her fuzzy jammies,  get her dolls, her books, snuggle up in her new big kid bed, all cozy, all toasty...the second I tried to get up she hollered "I can’t sleep!" and scrambled out.  

This went on pretty much all night and she's been a zombie all day.  Time to go try again.

Eighty-eight

Happy Lent.  Is Lent supposed to be capitalized? Tryin' to give up chocolate for the thirtieth year in a row. Probably won't work, I'm a weak person, what can I say?

We had our big splashy church dinner/auction Saturday night.  It was very nice and I bid on a few little things, but most of the stuff was way out of our league. There was a twenty-thousand dollar sport court and it went for about three grand, great deal but still three grand more than we have. There was a puppy that went for about six thousand dollars. Can you imagine? 

A sure sign you've had too many cocktails is you wake up and find a six-thousand dollar puppy in your house.  I have to hand it to the ladies of Edina, they all looked spectacular.  I can't dress at all. It's become a joke amongst my friends, half the time Mandy can't even look at me without laughing.  How come Queer Eye doesn't do girls? You know what I meant, smut-mind.  Actually, as long as we're on the subject, the whole queer eye thing has gotten way out of control.  Fellas, it's one thing to clean your bathroom and brush your teeth, it's quite another to start wearing the drapes.  I feel like every time I turn around I see a guy in a puffy shirt and whiskered hip huggers.  And it's not the fab five's fault, (say that ten times fast,) they told you to buy some flat front pants, not a tutu. Total overkill. But again, my sense of style is non-existent so don't listen to me.

That's why I usually stick with one on my four hundred black t-shirts. And those are my 'going out' clothes.  Anyway, since I needed to look nice for this auction, I had to take Liz shopping with me and she basically picked everything out including shoes and purse. To thank her, I passed my stomach virus on to her and her children.  I know I promised no more vomit stories so I won't tell you how on Mike's birthday I went to Byerly's to get something yummy for dinner but had to leave empty handed because Molly ralphed all over the seafood counter. Or how I had to drag her out by the hood of her jacket because she had morphed into a pink puke volcano. Or how I had to have the inside of our car hosed out. Or how Meg then caught it and then I did and Mike whined that he wanted ito get it because he just bought a pair of size 32 pants and they didn't fit.  I'll spare you all of that.

Mike is super close to fitting into thoses 32's, though, I'm really proud of him.  He just turned 38 and his dad's first heart attack was at 39. He's dropped ten pounds on his new organic approach.  For breakfast, he now drinks two glasses of wheat grass juice. The down side is, our house is starting to smell like a goat farm.

Totally bawled my way through the last Sex and the City, it's become fashionable to knock it but I loved it like a sister and I miss it bad already.  Mike is leaving basically for all of March on Friday. We thought maybe we could take the kids somewhere for spring break, but it doesn't seem that will happen. We'll see. Now just biding my time until lunch. Fasting....hungry...not supposed to complain...hands weak, can't type anymore......I'm slipping away......

I gotta go fold some laundry. Finny had to wear inside out underwear to school. I wonder why we keep getting sick?

Eighty-nine

We hit  the road for Denver at five a.m. yesterday morning. The kids were so excited they were bouncing all over the inside of the car for about oh, ten seconds before they all passed out again. We decided we weren't going to stop for breakfast until we needed gas, which was forty minutes later.  The luggage carrier thingy on the roof was not attached real well and was basically just a big parachute.

"Hmm, why won't the car go? What's that burning smell? Why are we floating?"

This is Mike and me we're talking about, and we just aren't good at stuff like attaching things to cars.  I remember years ago, before we even got married, we decided to take our bikes to Wisconsin for some trail riding. We basically just plopped them onto the bike rack which consisted of two black metal sticks on the back of my car and away we went. Several minutes later, we were surprised to see our bicycles bouncing down the freeway in the rear view mirror.

Anyway, once we handed the egg mcmuffins out to our sleepy and confused children, Mike and I tried to secure the straps on the carrier thingy a little better so it didn't catch quite so much wind.

Then the kids wanted to watch a movie. We were way too cheap to spring for a little dvd player for the trip, instead spending probably three times what one would've cost jerry rigging Mike's laptop to play them.  Plus each kid had to have their own set of headphones or they couldn't hear, but the only ones we had were adult sized and kept falling out of their ears and making them cry.

We came up with a truly McGyver worthy solution: each kid had to pull their t-shirt over their head, creating a sort of headband that would hold the phones in place. It looked like we were conducting some weird science experiment on them. But let's go back to even watching movies on a road trip, I mean c'mon. I never even got a seat, I had to sit in the way back of my parents’ giant boat of a station wagon with a farting dog. I only got to read the Archie comics when Billy and Andy got tired of punching me.

Once they got bored of movies, though, man it was a long trip.  Chess quickly turned into lets-see-who-can-bean-mom-on-the-back-of-the-head-with-chess-pieces, cards turned into let's-throw-cards-out-the-window, reading turned into let's-beat-each-other-with-books. Finbar kept blurting out alarming things like, "I think I have head lice, it feels like something is crawling in my hair" "I counted eight warts on my knee"  and  "My feet are sweating, I'm taking off my socks" which he did, nearly killing us all with the stink. And after Mike threatened, "You do that one more time" for the  eighteenth time I yelled, "I'm gonna come back there and..... spank you silly!" which was met with sniggering and then ignored. So five minutes later, at my wits absolute end, I bellowed "I'm gonna club your head until it bleeds!" The whole car burst out laughing.

I have never driven through Nebraska when it wasn't the worst possible weather.  We hit a storm that made Mount Doom look like a big fakey movie.

Got to Margy's, they weren't home.  The kids were, though, so Mike and I had the pleasure of babysitting our four nephews after our ten million hour trip. I just assumed they had eaten dinner and stuff, so I fixed my kids bowls of cereal, located sheets and pillows and the McCollow clan went to bed.

Ninety

We went  to the zoo yesterday.  It wasn’t fun. Going out in public anywhere with seven small children is a bad idea.  It always seems like a good one when the day is just starting and you’re all caffeined up.  But everything seems easy then. It’s what I call the golden hour. The hour before you turn back into a pumpkin and curse out all your parenting magazines.

Loaded everyone into Margy’s big Suburban and didn’t even feel guilty about driving the big honkin’ car because all the seats were occupied, felt downright smug in fact.

“The Suburban is totally necessary, we’ve got seven kids in here and a stroller and a cooler  full of food, oh wait  we forgot the cooler but that’s ok, we’ll just buy a hot dog when we get there and we won’t think about  the fact that it’s probably made from ground  up dead  koala bears,  anyway we totally need this car so Al Franken can just fuck right off is what.”

We got to the zoo and the parking lot was naturally under construction because there’s a law that says anytime you bring kids anywhere it will be all torn up, so you’ll have to park really far away and walk forever through hot rubble and it will give your kids more things to whine about . The saving grace is that walking through a hard-hat area means you’ll probably get a whistle, and if we’re being honest, who doesn’t look forward to that?

I got nothing.  I wanted to yell, “Where’s my whistle?  Oh, like you could do better, is that it?” So my mood was not great by the time we got our tickets.  Nine bucks apiece.

Like I said, we forgot the cooler and we were all starving, so the first place everyone wanted to go was the food stand.  My three kids and I got chicken strips, a corn dog, a turkey sandwich and two milks.  The bill was twenty-four dollars.

On to the animals.  The first thing we saw was a Tapir.  I’d never heard of a Tapir before; it looked like an Aardvark wearing a diaper.  Anyway,  this Tapir was sitting in his dusty, treeless little squalid corner of the world looking about as bored as I felt. The little  card  on the fence said it was endangered and that it thrived in moist,  tropical climates.  It didn’t say anything about how it did on a hot spring day in Colorado being gawked at by people whose only real concern was where they could find some ice cream.

Then we saw some Bactrian camels. Those are the kind that have two humps and are extra hairy to keep them warm because they live where it’s freezing.  It was eighty degrees outside.  I could go on, but you get the picture.  Lots of big animals with bigger smells stuffed into small places.

Lest you think I’m some vegetarian PETA  nut,  I’m not.  I have nothing against animals, mind you, as long as they stay out of my yard,  and I certainly wish them no harm. I just think zoos are places people bring their kids because they think they’re supposed to.  I didn’t see anyone who looked particularly thrilled to be there.  Everyone I saw looked  hot,  annoyed and hungry,  and the animals looked exactly the same way. No one wins. Those Imax movies are way cooler  and more educational  and the animals  get to stay where they belong.

We go home tomorrow, and then it’s only two more months until summer!  Can’t wait. Molly’s almost three. 

I can’t believe how fast they’re all growing up.

© Katie McCollow, 2004 • katie.mccollow@mac.com