July 28 '06

Meggie is eleven today. Eleven! Wow. I swear an hour ago she was hopping around the living room in her favorite ratty dolphin t-shirt playing hide-n-seek with her dad... ...but nope, it was nine and half years ago, and now she hops around the living room while she watches Project Runway.

She requested blueberry coffee cake for her special birthday breakfast today, and as luck would have it, Finny spent all day yesterday at a blueberry farm with his buddy and came home with 2 pounds of fresh berries. Kismet, right?

So last night I mix up a big batch of batter, enough for three, count 'em three (I intended to give one to the woman who brought Finny to the farm) coffee cakes, toss 'em in the oven and go get Molly into bed. She did not go to bed easily, in fact she was having a wing-ding of a meltdown which is why she had to go to bed so early in the first place. Just too much sun the last few days, aiight? Oh, that reminds me... she and I spent yesterday afternoon at the pool and when it was time to go home, I gathered up all our stuff, looked up she was gone.

"Molly...Mol.." Need I tell you that losing your little one at a pool is nerve wracking? But then I saw her; she was standing outside the food cabana, peaking in at a different little girl (no one she knew) who was being serenaded by her friends as she blew out her birthday candles. Can you imagine how hilarious/heartbreaking a picture that would've made from inside the food cabana? A fun birthday party, and in the background you can see another little, uninvited face peeping into the window.

Anyway, I get little miss Molly all tucked in and as I'm walking back down to the kitchen I'm thinking, "Huh, this coffee cake doesn't smell normal, in fact it doesn't even smell very gooduh oh." There on the counter was the brown sugar, unopened.* Any fool knows that brown sugar is the key to coffee cake of any variety. Without it you've basically got a biscuit.

Ding...the oven timer goes off, the damage is done, I pull three big, flavorless biscuits out of the oven.

A) I have ruined my first born's birthday breakfast

B) I have wasted half of the blueberries my son spent five hours picking out in the blazing ninety degree heat.

I still have a lot of blueberries left, but I don't have any more pans, so I dump the offending cakes down the sinkPLEASE DO NOT LECTURE ME ABOUT STARVING CHILDREN I KNOW ALL ABOUT THEM, OK? IT WAS THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT.**

Imagine trying to stuff three sugarless blueberry coffee cakes down one garbage disposal. It wasn't pretty; in fact very quickly purple goo started to seep up the other half of the sink. It was like Nightmare on Elm Street meets Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which come to think of it is a pretty decent description of my entire life.

But I re-made them, they are delicious, and all is well. Hooray!

*the author is aware that her "wanna hear about my latest kitchen disaster" shtick is wearing thin, but she also believes that the culinary successes simply don't make very good stories. Example: "Hey everyone, last weekend I made this super great pasta salad! It was delicious, and everyone who ate it was sated and happy, not to mention impressed."

See? Boring.

**OK it was 8:30 but still.

July 25 '06 nightime

Got my tushie handed to me by quite a few over that last post. Tough noogies, I'm stickin' to my guns. So whaddya think of the new 'salad? Cool, eh? What do you mean you don't notice anything different, you can't tell the look on the frog's face has changed from disgruntled ambivalence to good old fashioned constipated? The devil is in the details, people.

Has anyone been watching My Fair Brady, that show where a white trash model is engaged to the guy who played Peter Brady? Me neither, but I did get sucked into last night's big wedding finale spectacular. WOW!

What I gathered about the story thus far: some girl who won the first season of America's Next Top Model went on to a season of the Surreal Life, where she met Peter Brady, who is 25 years older than her and has spent all the years between The Brady Bunch's final taping and yesterday gulping steroids, getting his face lifted and buying ugly shirts, which he never buttons up all the way. They decide to get married, even though they clearly hate each other.

I thought winning America's Next Top Model was supposed to improve your life, or at the very least your modeling career. I have to say, being saddled with Peter Brady for eternity seems like a punishment. What happened to the runner up, is she married to Urkel?

July 18 '06

Sitting on the deck at the Bayside Grill the other night, I got into an interesting argument (well, all right, but it was an argument never the less) with my brother about the song "Teenage Wasteland" YES I KNOW IT'S CALLED BABA O'RILEY AND THAT'S WHAT THE ARGUMENT WAS ABOUT.

I object to people calling it that even if it is, technically, the name of the song. My stance was that everyone recognizes it as "Teenage Wasteland" and therefore that's what it should be called. Majority rules, and if we can make a citizen's arrest than we should get to hijack certain pop-culture darlings and rename them in the public domain. Actually, that's not even really how I feel in general, it's just this one song title that chaps my hide. Hear me out:

Haven't you ever noticed that people who call it by its real name tend to do so with the same sort of know-it-all sanctimony as those jerks who can't wait to tell you that Chipotle is owned by McDonald's? Like they're just waiting for me to call it by the wrong name or for me to say, "Baba O'Riley, what's that?" so they can pounce...and then they launch into some convoluted explanation of why it's called that, because nothing gets a party going like a long bloviation on the musical influences of a rock anthem.

Smartypants rocker chick: "Omi--did you just say 'Teenage Wasteland?' It's called Baba O'Riley, you non-song title knowing philistine. You were obviously too busy listening to your mom's Ronnie Milsap records to know stuff about a cool band like The Who. Everyone who is anyone knows the song's title is a combination of the names of the menblahblahblahblahblah."

What I heard: "I like to sit in the dark and harvest my zits." And anyway, I'll tell you why it's called that, it's called that because Pete Townsend was baked like a bread pudding when he wrote it and probably thought it would be funny.

I stand united with the rubes. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearing to breathe free...Nucular! Orientated! Figggggglio! Teenage Wasteland!!

I've never felt so free.

There's been some complaining about the lack of posting here lately, and all I can say about that is, why does that surprise anyone anymore? Expecting regularity from me is like trying to solve a problem like Maria. No, for reals, I'm always touched and happy when people say they miss me, and I've been undergoing growing pains here....I switched hosting companies and it was a headache and a half. The new company has promised me hot fudge love and cherry ripple kisses, so we should be back and better than ever in no time.

July 14, '06

Hot enough for you? HAW! I love that bit. I don't know where you're reading this, but here in the heartland it is H-O-T. And I tell you what, I heard the sweet and welcome rumblings of thunder a few moments ago and then they stopped, and I WANT THEM TO COME BACK.

It's no longer a matter of my yard looking like a parched patch of ass, it's a matter of actually cutting my feet when I walk on it without shoes.

What's that, you say? You're saying I should put my sprinkler on it? Well that's easier said than done, my friend, since that would mean going out and moving it from area to area every few hours. Find shoes, walk outside, turn it off, move it to the next dry spot, trudge back to the spigot, turn it back on, try to get back inside to my sweetly air conditioned sanctuary without getting wet....so much work! What am I, a farmer?

You know, I always thought it would be fun to be a farmer. I mean I know it's a truckload of work and all, and the pay can be lousy and it often involves mucking around in unspeakable things that come out of large, snorting animals, but we used to visit a family who had a farm when we were kids, and it was soooo much fun.

We'd chase pigs and play hide and seek in the hayloft and ride around on the tractor and eat and eat and eat and eat and when we'd leave, all full and tired and scratched up (there was a family of super cute, totally vicious kittens that lived in the hayloft, and we wouldn't leave them alone no matter how much they hissed at us or bit us right in the face. Good times...I needed rabies shots for 6 months but it was worth it) I'd think to myself, "I'd like to be a farmer."

I didn't consider the fact that our hosts had to get up four hours after we left and tend to the grueling jobs of feeding America, I was only thinking of the yummy food and the kitties and the possibility of wearing a cute square-dancing dress around the house, conveniently forgetting that whenever my mom so much as asked me to weed the garden, I'd lose all the motor functions in my body except the ones responsible for bitching and moaning.

The closest I've ever come to actually experiencing that sort of life was watching "Frontier House" two summers ago on PBS...anyone else watch that? It was great; the show took several families and made them live off the land for several months, maybe a year, I don't remember, and they learned and grew and hugged and were appreciative of all they had, and of each other. Jeesh, it's makin' me tear up just thinkin about it.

It inspired me, I was so fired up to have a Frontier House summer!

C'mon kids, we're gonna grow veggies and tend the garden and sew our own clothes and read by candlelight and make pesto from scratch! Turn off the television, let's go gather wood for the fire I said turn off the TV did you here me we're gonna paint the fence TURN OFF THE G**D*** TV.

Well, we did try, it didn't last all summer, more like, um, maybe nine hours? But I did succeed in making them think weeding the garden is fun.

July 10 '06

I'm sitting here in the tv room, listening to Mike argue with some fly-by-night phone company he mistakenly signed a contract with eons ago and that has, surprisingly, provided him with terrible service at premium prices. I cannot tell a lie; listening to his impotent ranting is pretty entertaining. I wish I had a video camera on him; this entire exchange would kill on YouTube.

On the telly, an ad for Time Warner cable, featuring two horny old ladies who apparently want to hump the young cable technician. Seems like a strange way to try and sell HBO, but what do I know? Moving on.

Last month's Interview magazine did a piece on this acclaimed British "artist" whose defining work is an installation that consisted of all the unsavory components of her filthy bedroom.

She explained it by saying she awoke one morning after a protracted bender and was at first disgusted by the state of her surroundings, but then it occurred to her that the vomit covered sheets and condom wrappers were not disgusting at all, but beautiful, life affirming, even, and by all means should be moved into a white gallery space where people could pay good money to line up and appreciate it. Now, while I can get on board with waking up from a wicked good time and thinking, "Wow, that was fun," hell, I can even understand taking a few pictures and bragging about it to my friends, but I cannot make that leap necessary to think of it as art.

This is an argument no one can win, I understand that. As long as someone thinks its art and can convince other people it is, too, then art it is, at least until some hard, fast, defining rules are put down and that will never happen. If that were possible, it would've happened already and anyway I don't even want that to happen, because I know I live in a glass house and fear that the day some committee finally says "Hey guess what, world? We've finally come up with an answer to what was thought to be unanswerable, that age old conundrum, what is art?" they will point at whatever I've just done and say, "Well, it isn't that." *

Well. I may live in a glass house but fer chrissake (are there 2 esses in "chrissake"?) at least it's clean, which got me to thinking...if her grubby bedroom is indeed a look into her beautiful soul, then what does my neat-as-a-pin bedroom say about mine? Surely my hospital corners, matching shams, pillow-topped mattress and allergy- filtering pillowcases speak to a deeply disturbed psychosis, right? So why don't I put it on display and call it art? Because it isn't art, putting it out there would be an exercise in psycho-masturbation and why would I want to follow this kook's lead and work out whatever deep seated, unacknowledged mental problems I may have in such a public way?

Sort of like writing a blog, you mean?

Touche.

I have no idea whether or not this girl's show was funded by the British government or not, so I won't go there, (finding out is but a google search away, but I don't feel like it) maybe there's a huge market across the pond for a peep into the bedroom of a slovenly slut. And if there is, well, more power to her for finding an easy way to finance Girls Night Out and get into Interview magazine.

Molly just walked in with her face completely marked up by a red pen.

"Mom! How do you like my glasses and my unibrow and my pimples!!?" She asked me, giggling wildly.

Now that's art.

*I know it's silly to imagine that I would be important enough for that phantom committee to notice, but it's the chance that it would, the possibility of that sort of dressing down that keeps me in line. And anyway, it could happen, it is my imagination, after all.