organized chaos

It’s true. While this is not the end of the book, it’s the end of what I’ve written. You know, I just sit around all day and stare at walls. There’s really no excuse for me not to write. Nothing like, umm, I just had a baby four five months ago or anything like that.

But I hope you’ve enjoyed your visit to East Texas through my warped perspective. And I hope you leave some feedback after this post. Did you like it? Did you find it disturbing? Did you like it even though you found it disturbing? Whatever. I’d like to hear your thoughts. Even if you’ve never left your thoughts anywhere on this blog before, and I don’t know you from Adam. Go ahead. It won’t hurt. And now to the final chapter for now. (more…)

Commando Demando, a.k.a Zoe, (she’s not so demanding lately), has a thing for naming her dolls.  Not only does she name them, they all belong to family groups and have ages and detailed histories.  Like if they’ve been to jail and how they feel about that documentary Zoe’s dad made her watch the other night.

Occasionally, Zoe will ask me what I think about something or other.  What color do I think is the best for such and such?  What should she draw? What movie should she watch? Should she listen to Beethoven or Mozart tonight? I’m serious.  And usually she HATES my choice.  I don’t really know why she keeps asking me for my opinion.

Zoe has some interesting name choices for her dolls. Dol Dol was an early choice for a boy baby doll that finally bit the dust and lost both legs.  So we buried him, then we dug him up.  Then I finally threw him in the dump.  I’m mean.  What can I say.

There have been many weird names, and many very normal names also.  So today she bought herself a new doll at Walgreens with her newly earned cash and on the way home asked me, yet again, what she should name her.

I reminded her that she would not like any of my choices.  She didn’t care.  So I took a few stabs.

“Mimzy?”

“WHAT???!!!?? That’s so stupid!”

“You asked,” I said.

“What else?” She’s such a sucker.

“Calliope?”

silence

“Penelope?”

nothing

“Violet”

nada

“Margaret?”

crickets chirping

She said, “I like Angel. Your names are too weird.”

I said, “Aren’t you the one that named that one doll December??”

She sighed.  “That’s because she’s a glass doll and that’s what it says on her body!”

Of course.  Now it ALL makes sense.

This is the look I get when I try really hard to do what she asks.

In this day and age of technology, I feel, as a mother, that it’s never too early for gremlins to be trained on the computer.

Here The Cuteness demonstrates that even at the tender age of almost five months, point and click is easily attained.

“Yes, I am cute. It’s true. But one has to have some marketable skills in this world. Besides drooling profusely on one’s mother’s nice pink shirt.”

So I couldn’t really come up with a cohesive theme for this post, but I am all over The Random. It’s what I do best.

I’ve mentioned Cooper, our microcephalic dog. For those of you that refuse to look up the word, microcephalic, let me finally tell you it means someone with a head too small for the body it’s attached to. I’m sure Webster would have a slightly different version, but you refuse to look it up yourself and now you’re stuck with my version. So stop complaining. You know who you are.

So, I got a couple shots of Cooper. Hyena Extraordinaire.

The first time Commando Demando saw him lay like this, she said he looked like a raw chicken.

I love making bread. I don’t really make anything fancy, like 50 grain whole wheat berry nut loaf. I stick with the basic white bread. In this day and age of Atkins and South Beach diets, I feel alone in my pursuit of really good white bread. I suppose it’s the Swedish blood coursing through my veins that creates such an urge to bake breads and sweets and to drink my coffee with real sugar and tons of chocolate raspberry coffe-mate. But, if you were here at my house and could smell the aroma of homemade bread and got a peek at this

you’d probably eat it too. Carbs? What carbs? You would be in heaven.

My Man showed me this spray this morning

It’s a little blurry, but if you look closely at that print, it says: “…and a long lasting fragrance designed to seduce the ladies. If you spray it, they will come.” He says it doesn’t work. Which begs the question, is this why he says he’s so busy at work when I call? Just kidding, hon! I know you’re very busy crunching those numbers.

A friend of mine from church has been cleaning out her basement. Her youngest child is 17 or 18, I don’t know. She brought me some stuff and upon closer inspection, I realized, with glee, that some of it was quite vintage. Like this:

I felt all nostalgic when I saw Mr. Play Doh Kid’s head at the top right corner of the box. I’m not sure if he’s even on the new ones. I stopped buying this stuff awhile back since everyone here thinks it’s stupid. Not sure why. But what really gave me a kick was the Surprise Inside! that is mentioned on the box. As you can see at the top of the box, there’s “surpise mold in every can!”. I don’t know about you, but anytime I find mold, it’s a surprise. A bad one. Mold on the last package of cheese. Mold on the last package of hamburger buns. Mold in the NEW package of pudding cups. All surprises. All bad.

And after a bad surprise, I like to retreat to my little piece of heaven. My ornamental pond.

This was here when we bought the house, but it needed much work. I’m obsessed with this thing. I had fish, that even survived the winter, but in my haste to get them back into the clean water, I shocked every one of them. To death. Oops.

Here’s what’s growing in my pond right now.

Just gazing at my beauties fills me with peace.

Until someone lets the hyena outside

and he barks incessantly at the neighbor kids he sees every freakin’ day of his life or decides to pee on the stroller I accidentally left in the yard.

My grandma got a new digital camera.  My grandpa says she is now a new woman.  I can understand.  She gave me her old one. 

It’s my first digital.  I really like my Canon EOS.  I inherited it from My Man when we got married and claimed it for my very own ever since.  Sometimes he takes pictures, too.  But only when I let him.

But, alas, film is too slow for this highly impatient girl.  I’ve belonged to the Club O’ the Right Now since infancy and have drooled over the instant gratification a digital camera would give me for a few years now.

It’s not one of those fancy pants cameras that you can do all the tricks with or attach the fancy pants lenses to, but it’s just right for me and what I want to do with it.  I can’t wait to read the booklet and find out all the tricks it does do.

Here’s some fun I had with it tonight. 

Here we have My Man wanting me to give him a kiss.  No thanks.  And The Cuteness with his new favorite things.  His fingers.

And this is the face Socrates gives me when I tell him “No more Playstation for tonight, you need to read a book.”

And Jackelope is just happy to have his picture taken because he is fulfilled for the night, having had a significant drop in adrenaline from waiting all week to open his presents.

A macro shot of my trumpet vine that opens in the evening.

Another of the same bloom.

And it’s interesting how much difference the flash can make. This was right after the previous shot, same light and everything.  It suddenly looks like night time.  Very dramatic I think.

Oh, and never ever eat this plant.  I realize you probably don’t go around consuming trumpet vine, but just in case, it’s poisonous.

Geez, I think this whole magazine headline thing is becoming a series.  I made a category for it over on the sidebar.

Before I begin, however, let me just say Jackelope had a smashing party today.  His birthday is tomorrow and we will go swimming for some more fun.  He was a little confused, though.  He kept asking,

“So, when are all the customers going to get here?”

Not really sure when his relatives turned into customers, but hey, I’m sure they’ve been called worse.  He was polite, and gracious, dashing and very, VERY excited about all his cool new stuff.  That’s my Jackelope.  Mr. Charm himself.  Most of the time.  Well, maybe only when he’s getting cool new stuff.  I love him to pieces.

Ok. Enough gush.  Here’s some headline humor. 

Most of the mags were the same as last week, but one I hadn’t noticed caught my eye.  Only part of it was visible though.  And on that part all I could see was: 

“Charles Dumps”

For two hours, inbetween every customer, every time I waited for someone to make their check out, in fact, every time I lifted my eyes, I saw those two words.  Nice.

Then I found out that there are 143 Ways to Rock Summer ‘07.

Really?  143?

Here’s my five.

1.  get to take a bath for longer than five minutes without a gremlin shouting through the door that his brother stole his imaginary friend. Again.

2.  eat way too much leftover frosting from making a birthday cake and therefore propel yourself into the best sugar high EVER, and laugh uncontrollably at your unsuspecting husband’s completely normal questions.

3.  finally get rid of poison ivy that made you look like a leper

4.  your grandma gives you her old digital camera and now you can finally take crazy photos and see them instantly without waiting to get film developed.

5.  And if you really want Summer ‘07 to rock, and frankly, who doesn’t?, stay in a nice, cool air conditioned house because Kansas humidity is not to be trifled with and it DOES NOT rock.

Remember, for the rest of (Almost) Everything I Know I Learned in East Texas, find the category on the side bar. 

Discipline: East Texas Style

I’ve already mentioned the Rubber Finger. While that was not usually a form of discipline, Donnie did cross the line with it occasionally. He had some other fine tricks up his sleeve, as well.

From a very early age I’ve had the endearing habit of laughing uncontrollably. In socially unacceptable situations. Chalk it up to nerves, whatever. One of Donnie’s first disciplinary actions for me happened at the dinner table. There’s something about sitting at the dinner table all together as a family that just cracked me up. I’m sure it had more to do with the pressure of using manners and having to sit in one place for so long. At any rate, I have many memories of getting the giggles so bad during dinner that I would get in trouble. From a man who used The Rubber Finger to entertain his guests. Go figure.

So the obvious discipline for this was to make the child stand for the duration of the dinner. Makes total sense to me. Action: excessive laughter, Consequence: standing while she eats. Gotcha.

Did it make me stop laughing? Nope.

Another favorite for excessive laughing during other inappropriate times was standing in the corner. When I couldn’t stop laughing, I was paddled and laughed through that as well. Now that I think about this, a lot of things are starting to make sense about my persona. But that’s a whole other book.

Just a side note. Later in Jr High School, after we moved back to Kansas, I had a really weird Science teacher that creeped me out. I had this laughing issue in her class also. One day she couldn’t take it anymore and dragged me down to the principal’s office and called my mother at work. You want to know what dear old mom said to her?

“I’m trying to work here, so if you can’t control your students any better than that, maybe you should find a different job.”

Thanks, Mom.

Cleaning up trash in the park may not have been a consequence for any behavioral issues, but we hated it anyway. Donnie had some friends called the Trash Sticks, and they were old broom handles with nails hammered into the ends so that the pointy side could jab at the trash on the ground and one could beautify the park with ease. It still makes my teeth grind every time I think about sticking that nail into an aluminum can. The screech of metal against metal just does me in to this day.

To punish us for getting a sunburn, Nanny, Donnie’s mother, had an old time solution. If we showed up at her house with the red glow of summer, she’d throw back some beer, then break out the cheap white vinegar. I don’t care how common of a trick this is. I know people still do this, and I know it works to pull the heat out. But if you want to torture a child, go ahead and try it. She’d soak a rag in that stuff and stink us up real good with it, then watch out. At any given time, four or five kids would be running full speed around her house all a blur. It was the Vinegar Sprint. That crap burned so bad.

Then there was Fetching The Ice. Oh yeah, that was fun. Down across the big parking lot, past the check in office, sat a fish cleaning station next to the creek. Because Donnie and my mother were trying to raise me up right, they sent me with the little silver bowl to fetch ice. Remember this was back in the day before ice makers or those fancy pants refrigerators with the nifty water/ice combos on front. I’m sure someone had them. All my friends lived in trailers, so it wasn’t us.

So to really train me right, they sent me for ice at night. In the dark. By the creek. Where at any moment a Slimy Monster Thing could’ve come up out of that water and knocked my little silver bowl right out of my hands, ice a flyin’, and snatched me for his child-bride.

It could happen.

I think the whole point of this little disciplinary exercise was to see how fast I could run with a bowl of freezing ice in my hands, and not spill any of it. To this day, I have excellent balance.

So I took the gremlins out to a friend’s pool finally, cause they’ve been begging non-stop.  We actually went two days in a row because really with The Cuteness and all, we can only stay anywhere about an hour and a half since he refuses to sleep anywhere but his own soft cushy drool-stained bed.  It must be the smell that draws him into dreamland so faithfully.

So there we were, floating and splashing and trying to squeeze in as much sweet blessed relaxation before The Cuteness decided his stroller was NOT the place to be.  Socrates was fending off death’s grip by jumping off the diving board and dog paddling to the edge causing my heart to skip a beat every so often.

Commando Demando was sitting atop her giganto black inner tube like the queen that she is.

And Jackelope was still on the stairs inside his baby size yellow tube jumping up and down, screaming in total water-conquering glee.

Now before I tell you what he was saying, let me preface by telling you that Jackelope has darn near drowned at least two times.  Once in my sister’s ornamental pond when he was three, and once a couple years ago in my other friend’s pool.  He hated baths for a long time after that.

So there he was with his big ol’ almost 6 year old body, stuffed into a baby floaty, and he had progressed off the bottom stair that descends into the pool. He hung onto the concrete side and yelled, “I’M DEALING WITH IT!  MOM! MOM! MOM! I’M DEALING WITH IT!!”

It took me a minute to process, since I’m usually thinking about nachos or how I’m going to make 5 gallons of gas last for another week. But when I asked him, “What did you just say?”, I realized I had heard him right.

I’m dealing with it.

And it makes since that he would say that of all things, since he’s probably heard me tell him a bajillion times to “just deal with it.” 

We’re getting ready to celebrate Jackelope’s 6th birthday around here, so I thought I would post a little photo montage to commemorate the passing of six of the weirdest years of my life.

Jackelope came into this world like a rocket, literally.  The doctor almost didn’t get there in time to catch him.  He’s been a little haphazard ever since.

He’s the only one of my gremlins (so far) that lost all of his hair.  I’m astonished at how much Socrates used to cuddle Jackelope. Those days are most certainly gone.

Then like a good little Chia pet, the hair grew right back.  Jackelope spent the first two years of his life smiling at everyone and sleeping whenever I wanted him to.

He ate a lot of bananas, so we made him get a job early on. 

All those bananas eventually took their toll.

He spent most of his time charming the pants off everyone with those hypnotic eyes.

He has his moments of crabbiness sobriety.  Many, many of them.

But after a little time in his cage, all is well again.

My Jackelope came a mere 17 months after Commando Demando and has entertained us ever since.  Although his zany outlook on life is matched only by his potential for being the biggest crab on the face of the earth, we know life holds many adventures for our third born.  Here’s to many more years with the Jackelope.  Happy Birthday!

and for all the recorded antics of Jackelope, check out the category titled “Jackelope” 

I had so much fun griping about magazines the other day on THIS post, that I thought I’d poke some more fun at the topic. I had some down time at work finally last night around 1 a.m. when people apparently decided they’d bought enough John Wayne Ultimate Collection DVD for their dad’s Father’s day gift and cat litter to last the weekend and went home. So then I stared at the mags and spaced out for awhile and laughed to myself over what I saw there yet again.

I learned that the world is indeed going to end on 9/11/2007. That’s unfortunate because #1 I’d like to celebrate my 31st birthday, and #2 I was hoping to visit Washington State sometime before I die.

I learned that I can get inches off in just 8 moves. I’m not sure this works. I know it took 8 moves to:

climb out of my bed,

walk into the kitchen,

open the refrigerator,

bend down to the bottom shelf,

grab the tortilla package and cheese,

make a quesadilla,

shovel it in as fast as possible before the gremlins caught me and begged for some,

then grab my tape measure and balk at the lack of inches missing from my waist.

And last but not least, I learned there are at LEAST 337 ways turn heads this summer.

How about if I just give you Carrie’s Top Ten Ways To Turn Heads This Summer?

in random order

1. renovate your bathroom and leave your toilet on the front lawn for two weeks

2. watch in horror as your child hangs from the side of the shopping cart and almost catapults your infant over the side and onto the grocery store floor, in the carseat, with it still attached.

3. leave a piece of toilet paper stuck out of the back of your pants and go shopping

4. get poison ivy so bad you look like a leper

5. buy a microcephalic dog that chases down motorcyles like nobody’s business

6. take your Spiderman obsessed gremlin to church and watch him shoot webs at the old people in the pew in front of you

7. have a baby so cute the world stops on it’s axis and everyone at Walmart has to stop and say, “Look at all that HAIR!”

8. drive a minivan with a cracked windshield for two years just to be different

9.tell people you took your gremlins to the cemetery for Father’s Day

10. while ringing up your customer’s items, sneeze on his gallon of milk unexpectedly, then act like it never happened

I never said mine were better. I just said they were mine.

Aside from ripping up couches and devouring vats of fruit snacks, my gremlins have an addiction that makes them unique to their breed.

Office supplies.

While some mothers are lamenting the money it takes to keep their gremlins in baseball uniforms, underwear, toothbrushes, juice, and other normal things like that, I’m trying to organize a relief fund to keep my gremlins supplied with a few essentials we seem to always be running out of.

1. scotch tape. I can’t hide this stuff fast enough. You think I’m exaggerating, but at least five times a day, at least, someone is asking me for scotch tape. Or it’s sister, Duck Tape. No, not the duct tape that’s silver and works on everything. I’m talking about the clear packaging tape that has a duck for a logo plastered all over the cardboard roll. So therefore, it’s called Duck Tape. Not this:

2. staples. I don’t even ask what the gremlins need this for most of the time. It might involve a combination of Cooper, the microcephalic barfing dog, an old photo of cousin Joe, and three pencils.

3. white paper. With no lines on it, thank you very much. Commando Demando is the main culprit as far as this supply goes. Look, I want them to be creative, but they’re going to have to start choosing what’s more important: white paper or pink milk. They can’t have both.

4. band-aids. Not an office supply in the traditional sense, but who cares? We have a lot of fakers in this house. You know the type. “My hand made contact with a dull rock, but I still need a band-aid because it hurts.” Then when someone actually bleeds, the gremlin’s are shocked at the fact that there are NO band-aids anywhere. Only the lonely empty wrappers blowing around on the shelves of my linen closet.

5. batteries. Especially AA. I would try to hide these, but like everything else I try to hide, there comes a time when I need them, and then I can’t find them either. Such is my life. The gremlins have figured out how to operate a screwdriver, so now they take my batteries at whim and fill their lovely little noise making toys whenever they get the urge.

6. super-glue. This is Commando Demando’s favorite staple. Before I had gremlins, I went years without the purchase of this little product. If something broke, I threw it away. I’m very un-sentimental like that. If you have gremlins, you know that something as precious as Superman/Clark Kent action figure can NEVER be thrown away, and if someone rams him into a rock repeatedly and *gasp* his arm breaks off, well then, he must be glued.

Ours has been glued four times. In different places. And taped twice.

With Duck Tape.

Here’s number 9, you crazy East Texas Fans!

If you want to read the rest of (Almost) Everything I Know I Learned In East Texas, find the category section on the side bar and click on ‘East Texas’.

Imaginary Friends

If you want your kids to have a great imagination, move them out to the middle of nowhere and drink too much beer, therefore rendering yourself incapable of driving them to any friends’ house they may have made at school.

Back in East Texas we didn’t have playdates or Mom’s Day out. We didn’t have weekly Bible clubs, at least not that I was aware of, but every summer some nearby church hosted a honky-tonk vacation Bible school that we usually got to attend thanks to Grandad and Memom. We did have dances on the pavilion with plenty of Hank Williams Jr. and Willie Nelson. I learned to two step with the old timers.

We had a fish fry every week or so after enough campers caught enough catfish to feed all us hungry yard apes. We had our three channels on television and that was enough for me to form some lifelong friendships that would keep me company during those long off season months when my camper friends were gone.

My obsession with tv characters started early. My earliest memory being one from age seven or so when I lived with my mother’s parents in Kansas. One of my favorite shows was Happy Days. In this memory I’m talking, out loud, to The Fonz. That’s all the specifics I can recall of that. Other than the feeling that I could make myself believe he was really there, and we were buds. As I got older, this sensation didn’t decrease. Instead I added more characters: that kid from Starman the tv show, MacGyver, Mike from Growing Pains, or anyone else I had a crush on. There were girls too and they all thought I was the bomb. The cat’s meow. The life of the party. Solid Gold. I was the center of their universe and I spent many a day flitting about the park, networking with my pals as they flew in from LA or where ever.

My kids have made-up imaginary friends. I had pre-fabricated ones thought up by creative writing teams somewhere in Hollywood. It matters not. In the end, the result is the same. Imaginary friends don’t let you down, unless you imagine it out of a need for conflict. Imaginary friends laugh at all your stupid jokes. They talk about you with your other imaginary friends, expounding about how cool it is to be friends with you.

They come every time you call them, without fail. They never grow old and die. But at the end of the day, they’re not real and you know it. And it leaves an emptiness when you realize you’re a grown up and it’s time to make some friends who have a free will.

Senseless bloodbath or gripping history lesson? 

This might seem like the most obscure review you’ve ever read.  Here’s the bottom line.  I liked this movie.  Was there a lot of blood?  Yes.  Too much?  Probably.  But I’m sure it was an accurate portrayal of the fighting within the tribes of the Maya.  Which leads me to my next obscure observation.

I think Mr. Gibson mixed up his history a bit.  This movie did a good thing for me.  I am now very interested in the history of the Americas.  I didn’t get much of this in school.  The only history I really remember is singing “The Yellow Rose of Texas” in Texas, along with a detailed account of all things Texan.  Every year I lived there.

And then in High School it was all about the U.S of A. and our government.  Even that was a bit dry if you ask me.  Mostly I did what was only absolutely necessary to pass.  Which is why I don’t remember much now.

So after watching Apocalypto, My Man borrowed some lectures from the library about the conquering of the Americas.  He likes lectures.  Usually I don’t.  But these I’ve actually watched.  And I’ve learned that the Spanish didn’t come until about 50 years after the first Mayan empire annihilated themselves. So if Mel was trying to portray the Mayan Empire and then had the Spanish show up at the end, he would’ve been wrong.

But that’s ok.  It’s not like he was making a documentary. It’s film. A movie.  Entertainment with enough truth to make me look up the real history.  And that, in my opinion, is a good thing.

But back to the violence for a moment.  I read many reviews that wanted to flush this whole movie down the tubes because it was too bloody for no good reason other than to capture the shock value on film.  Yes, there were a lot of scenes that disturbed me and some that I actually covered my face so I couldn’t see what they would do.  But it was quite a ride.  The whole time I was riveted.  I couldn’t have turned it off if I’d wanted to.

So there you have it or there you don’t.  I’m not going to say, “Go watch this movie right now.”  But now you have my 4 cents and surely you’re life must now be complete.

I’ve may have mentioned that I like the muppets. Or maybe I just said I feel like I live with muppets. After all, are muppets and gremlins really all that different? I guess it depends on which muppet you’re comparing. Animal, The Swedish Chef, That Guy Who Throws Fish vs. Stripe and his cronies. Now that would be a good show.

Usually when I refer to MuppetLand, I’m picturing a scene of utter chaos: Animal swinging from the chandelier, fish tumbling through the air, flour puffing like smoke all around, Gonzo riding a unicycle through the whole mess while Rolf plays chopsticks over and over and over. I’m getting a headache just thinking about it. Here are several reasons why I think my household is heading that direction today.

1. I still have poison ivy. Badly. In fact, the dr put me on prednisone for it and my own dear sweet mother, when I finally told her about it, two weeks since first getting it, said, “Oh man! You had it so bad when you were a kid you had to take antibiotics and prednisone. You’re very allergic.” I guess I should have called her sooner. My bad. At any rate, any stress is multiplied by 6,000 when you are on fire from an allergic reaction to poison ivy.

2. women issues. I’ll leave it at that since I know there are people of the male persuasion that frequent my insanity around here and don’t really want those kinds of details.

3. The Cuteness spiked a fever last night after his vaccinations. While he wasn’t cranky, per say, he was awake when I longed for blessed slumber. Which brings me to number

4. Where was My Man during all this? I mean, nothing is so bad when you have help right? Well, he was sick with the crud that all the gremlins have been passing around and he promptly put himself to bed early like a good chap.

5. Socrates, the 9 yr old gremlin, has made a decree with the powers that be that he will try to beg, borrow, or steal his way out of his recent discipline that My Man and I imposed on him recently. What’s so hard about understanding that you get 1 hour a day with your friends because you fail to treat the people in your house with any respect? I guess he thinks saying, “I’ll stop. I promise” 20 times a day is enough penance.

Last week My Man and I went on a “date” and discussed my novel-in-progress and some of the road blocks I’ve come up against that have kept me from being motivated enough to work on it. Like having a four month old in the house isn’t enough reason.

He thinks all I need to do is work on it at 9:00 when the kids go to bed. A little each night he says. That’s all. So last night would have been my first opportunity. I took the laptop to my room, cause that’s where I’m comfy. I opened the files and got all ready. Then all my poison ivy rashes ignited in a untied attempt to thwart every effort to think. Ten minutes later, I closed the laptop and went to bed. The Cuteness woke up right when I hit dreamland.

Sorry little novel. I know I’ve neglected you. You hold so much promise. I will visit you again. I’ll try not to wait until the gremlins are married. Really.

It seems that I write alot about my brain.  I’ll admit, it is a source of fascination for me.  My blog stats has a nifty little tool to see search terms that people have looked up, then found my blog. 

Things like clogs, shower hair catchers, ammonia and bleach, bossy women I’m sick of them.  I’m serious.  These are real.  It’s almost like they were destined to find my blog.  And of course I’ve had many people stop by after searching for pictures of the brain and symptoms of a mini stroke.  I often wonder what a shock these people get when they are probably looking for some serious info and find this instead.

So I was blogging earlier and sometimes it is so hard for me to string a few words together.  Especially when gremlins are bent on tormenting me with repeated questions that I’ve already said no about over and over.

Jackelope came up to me one of these times and instead of a repeated question, he asked this:

Jackelope: Is your brain spinning right now?

Me: *after the shock subsided* Why yes, Jackelope, my brain is in fact spinning right now.

I’d like to take this moment and step out of my usually organized (ha ha) system of writing and express some randomness. Weekends aren’t the best for creative thinking for me, since as you probably already know, I work weird night hours three nights a week.

I’d like to vent a bit about the skinniness factor. Last night, I got stuck checking in one of the express lanes, which I normally like, but the downside is that I get to stare at all the magazines right across from my register. For the last week, as in all weeks, super skinny women have plastered themselves onto these and shout at me in large, bright headlines about how I can be like them.

“How the Stars Slim Down”

“Lose 15 pounds in Two Days!”

“Eat Whatever You Want and Still Have One Chin”

One of the women I got to look at for two hours last night was a skinny, toned Leann Rimes in a bikini. It was Shape magazine and it promised to tell me just how she got those rockin’ abs. They were rockin’. And mine are so not rockin’.

Here’s the deal. I grew up so skinny my knees looked like knobby grapefruits with dowel rods sticking out of the tops and bottoms of them. I looked sickly. I was the target of the cool kids.

Then I had kids. Need I say more? Well, maybe I do, because I have a couple of friends who have more than one kid and they are still really, really skinny. I don’t hate them. They just have good jeans genes. Ha.

Usually I don’t have too much trouble shedding the pounds after a baby. But this time I had The Surgery, in other words, “No more babies for you” and I think it messed up my plan for sliding back into my skinny jeans two months postpartum.

I’m really split in half on this issue. There was a time, during a deep depression, when I obsessed over my extra 20 pounds so bad that I could quite literally not think of much else. Now, I can go along my merry way, aware that I’d like to lose some of this weight, but merry nonetheless. Then I get to stare at Leann Rimes with the rockin’ abs for two hours and, by golly, that monster of insecurity takes a big ol’ bite out of me and I pine away for rockin’ abs, rockin’ thighs, heck, I’d settle for a rockin’ chin at this point.

My Man likes me a lot. Age has mellowed him out. I think that’s why this whole thing doesn’t bother me as much as it used to. But security from the husband really only goes so far for women. As long as there are rockin’ women plastered everywhere, we will fight this battle, I think.

The part of me that doesn’t give a rip about skinniness is getting bigger and bigger. Well, internally anyway. I love seeing magazines use “plus size” models, which should be called “normal size” women. They’re the ones that look good, and healthy. They can eat a donut and not feel the need to throw up later, or do the stairmaster for an hour the next day.

Yes, I want to lose weight. But at this point my focus has changed. I just want to fit into my pre-pregnancy clothes, cause I’m too poor to buy new ones. After that, I will battle this issue from time to time. As all women will.

In one of Lisa Samson’s books, “Straight Up”, one of her characters is in a coma and sees her dead mother and grandmother. In one of their many conversations about life, they mention that we will be surprised regarding the issue of body shape when we get to heaven. They said the former generation had it much closer to the truth: think Marilyn Monroe.

One of the characters said something about Eve (you know, from the garden) has a nice plump bottom and a round tummy to boot. And that’s what normal is.

I liked that.

Remember, if you want the other entries on this series, scroll down the sidebar to “On The Brain” and click on East Texas. 

Grown Up Friends are the Best Kind

Donnie and my mother made some choice friends down in Texas. I have several vivid impressions of them that remain solidified to this day. Oddly, I don’t remember names or much of their faces, but rather snippets of how they impacted me.

Let’s call the first one June. A friend of mom’s, she frequented many a beer sloshing party at our house, and sometimes at someone else’s trailer. I liked her well enough, then she won my heart with one single comment. We took a boat out one afternoon, maybe we were fishing. I didn’t think much of myself back then. At school I became invisible, and when I wasn’t blending into the wall pattern I stood out in stark contrast to all the pretty, popular girls with their fancy hair and designer clothes. Looking back at pictures I can honestly say I went through a very awkward stage for a very long awkward time. No thanks to the long bus ride that wrecked my attempts at nice hair on picture day.

I’ve always been very tall for my age; very tall. I ended up at six feet when it was all said and done in high school, just to give a gauge. To boot, I was sickly skinny with knobs for knees and elbows. So, there we were out in our boat and June looks at me and says to my mother, “You know, she’s going to be a heartbreaker someday.” I wasn’t exactly sure what a heartbreaker did, but it swam in my mind forever after that. For the first time in my young life, I realized those boys who ignored me at school were the ones missing out. They were the stupid ones. I would show them someday.

It amazes me that one little compliment, and not a fakey one; a genuine, thoughtful one, could spin a little girl’s perspective of herself that much. After that, I think I made an annoyance of myself by attaching myself to that woman every time she was around.

A friend of Donnie’s, who we’ll call Buck, due to the swiss cheese conspiracy concerning his name, came around most often when there was weed to be shared. He was a big guy, complete with tight Wrangler’s and boots. I don’t remember him ever being sober. The one experience with him that stands out in my mind happened in a way that I’m still not sure of. The executives of the grocery store chain had their own trailer down one of our roads a bit; a place away from the blue collar campers, where they could nosh it up in privacy. Across the road from their love nest was a smaller boathouse, hiding in the trees. It had two stalls, just enough for their fancy pants jet skis.

Buck got it in his weed filled head that we should head down to the little boathouse. Just the two of us. Keep in mind, I was no older than twelve at the time.

 Never one to question an adult, I went along with it, but had my doubts that he should  (more…)

Yesterday I found a hot tip for bickering children over at Living on A Dime.  It was called The Jar of Doom.  I love that name.  The idea is that you get a jar, fill it up with slips of paper that have chores written on them, and when you have a whining gremlin who obviously doesn’t have enough to do other than whine, bicker, complain of boredom, or the like, you break out the Jar of Doom.

I didn’t have any more jars, since they are all employed for our new snail and june bug pets, so I found an oversized black coffee mug and baptized it as my own Jar Cup of Doom.

I thought of little five minute chores, wrote them down, folded the slips of paper, and explained the new concept to the gremlins.  Not entirely new; they’ll be the first to tell you that if they complain of being bored, I can usually find some obscure chore for them to do.

Later, when My Man got home, Jackelope was whining about something, because that’s the way he rolls with it, and I got out the Cup of Doom. My Man was extremely interested and we told Jackelope to pick a slip. 

But before he could make it over to the Cup, the two older gremlins hopped over and picked slips, too.  I said, “If you read that slip, you have to do what it says.  There will be no reading, then putting it back.”

I thought they were just curious to see what I had written. Nope.  They wanted to do some chores.  My question is, Why did they wait till blasted 8 pm?  I’ve had chores all day they could’ve done.  Good grief!

Jackelope was not too happy with his job(s).  He got a couple since he doesn’t know how to stop whining.  But Commando Demando kept coming back for more, and I actually had to take the Cup of Doom away from her.  Or there wouldn’t be any chores left for the next day!

Later, she was in my bed waiting for her turn to read with dad and she said, “I’m going to be naughty all day tomorrow.”

I just looked at her, waiting for it.

She continued, “Because I love to clean.  And I want to clean all day.”

ok then.

The BubbleGum Gang

Jackelope

Commando Demando

Socrates, naturally thinking of his next argument

And as an added bonus, here’s Cooper, our microcephalic, barfing dog. No, that is not a sock. It’s a giganto bone I purchased months and months ago because I was tired of him chewing those other little bones up so fast. It worked, because here we are months later with plenty of bone left to go.

**and just as a technical note. Those of you with fancy pants digital cameras: don’t judge me. I know my pictures have funny lines on them, and they are lacking in crispness. I know the sizes are not always right and the color has something to be desired. I am desperately trying to figure all this out. I use film. So what? They look good before I scan them and upload them to photobucket. My computer is at fault. The scanner is at fault. Photobucket is at fault. *sigh* I could really use a digital camera. Old fashioned film is getting on my nerves.

Poison Ivy, evil leaf

your oil covers now our skin

they say to scratch is not to spread

then why’ve you moved right down my chin

my forehead’s itch, it makes me wimpy

I cut my bangs, I now look gimpy

Benedryl, you’re not effective

the scratching has lost all perspective

Gremlins moaning all day long

yet Jackelope escaped

You cannot touch him, Evil Leaf

no matter how you scrape

Round Up is thy enemy

I’ll shoot you down I swear

I know it’s only temporary

But I’ll do it again next year

You’ll always be there in my yard

waiting for our skin

to thrust your itchiness afar

and rest upon my chin