organized chaos

I don’t really know who other young girls in the eighties held high on the Music Pedestal. In fact, most of the music I listened to came straight from my little square lilac colored boom box. So I, to this day, am dreadfully ignorant of the names of all those rad vocalists who graced the airwaves.

In our double wide, we had a few records. You know; round, vinyl, black with ridges? And we had a few cassette tapes that piqued my interest for many a year. One of them had a song called “Sail Away” which I later learned was done by a band named Styx. I must have listened to that song hundreds of times, always wondering where those guys hoped to sail to and if maybe they would ever consider taking me from East Texas Hell.

Another cassette I found laying around and became totally enamored with was Lynyrd Skynyrd. Especially that one about giving him three steps, Mister and how he spun a tale of a place called The Jug where he found a girl named Linda Lou, who consequently could really cut a rug. For some reason I always pictured them dancing on this round blue and white area rug. I thought on these particular lyrics for hours at a time. Deep and profound.

Then there was our record of The Judds and I really got off on that one because they sang low enough for me to sing along and belt it out. I learned how to sing harmony with those two red heads that were so young and pretty I could hardly tell which one was the mother and which one was the daughter. I dreamed about what a girl’s night out would be like, ’cause Honey there ain’t no doubt, that I would dance every dance until the boys went home.

Then there was the album called The Doobie Brothers, and I didn’t listen to that one much, because on the inside cover there was a picture of the whole band plus some girls, naked with cowboy hats over most of their privates. It freaked me out a little to say the least.

But hands down, the album I listened to and obsessed over the most was My Precious. My crazy, eccentric pretend best friend, Cyndi Lauper. I don’t know how it started. Maybe I got that album as a Christmas gift or something. It was the one with Cyndi laying almost face down on a mirror with her multicolored hair all swept up. True Colors was the name of it. And it didn’t even include the all too famous “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” I got that later on an old cassette someone gave me.

I don’t know if other girls were as obsessed with her as I was, but she just spoke to my oddities in a way no one else ever had. The way she sang with that high baby voice that I would never be able to blend with. The way she wore mismatched clothing and danced around like a mad woman. If only there were girls like that at my school. Then we could’ve hung out in our funky black and white skirts paired with purple leather jackets and thumbed our noses at those preppies!

Then, at the height of my adoration, my mother did the impossible. She got tickets to The Concert in nearby Tyler. My stomach did flip flops. My throat dried out. My hair frizzed more than normal. We were going to see Cyndi Lauper in person. And she would sing all the songs on my album and she might even call me up on stage to dance the funky dance with her. Then she would take me to her fav salon the next day and pay to have my hair colored black, blue, red and maybe even a streak of purple.

But when we got there and she started doing her thang, a little something I like to call Concert Shock happened. You know, when the singer sounds nothing like they do on the record, and they sing off key a little, and you’re like, “Whoa! I can totally sing better than them!”

Then she went a step further and sang a whole slew of songs I didn’t even know. I only had that one album. We were poor. No more albums in sight. I didn’t like any of her new stuff anyway and was saddened that I wouldn’t be making that hair appointment the next day.

I still liked the old gal. I still listened to “Change of Heart” and “Iko, Iko” over and over. I still held her fashion choices up on a pedestal. And she shaped me to this day. Because of Cyndi Lauper, I don’t feel like such a freak.

Thanks, Cynd’s. Give me a call sometime, we could still make that hair appointment and I’d let you wear my orange and red striped capri’s.

copyright 2007 carrielouise

did you miss your weekly dose of this?

A sister can make you or break you.

Mine tried to break me for many a year. Some people are fond of saying that people never change, but it’s just not true. My sister Kristi is a fine example of bad times gone good.

kudos to my mother who made our matching clothes and further tortured me with dressing me just like my inferior siblings

She’s the only sister I grew up with. I have a total of 4 other sisters and 2 brothers, but I only grew up with Kristi and Mitch, who shared a dad with each other, but not with me. I didn’t find that out until mid-childhood, so they were full-on blood as far as I was concerned. Kristi is 4 years younger than me, and I’ve found with my gremlins that 4 years difference is the magical amount of years it takes to reach maximum annoyance to your siblings.

From a very early age, we knew Kristi would be special. I don’t mean special as in, “She’s gonna change the world one day, that one!” special. When we lived in South Carolina I have very early memories of Easter morning. Kristi would have been under the age of 2, and she liked to escape. Without clothing. And run around the hood like a pale red headed streak of glory.

So naturally, when Easter came along, she deemed that very thing the appropriate way to celebrate the sacred rising of our Lord: with a streak up and down our sidewalk. Except the neighbors didn’t see the religious significance of it, and told my mother that they had seen the Easter Bunny early that morning.

That same year, when my brother was but a wee infant, I came home from school one day to find Kristi and Mitch in the bathroom. Baby Mitch was in the toilet, one leg in and one leg out and Kristi was working that flush handle for all it was worth. She was an evil one.

She became my shadow all the way down to East Texas, and that’s where she really came into her own. Those were the days I was desperately trying to shake all semblance of childhood and Kristi was cramping my style. So I let her know. Often.

But instead of telling Mom, she would get revenge. Revenge that only Kristi could think up. Revenge like telling all the high school kids at the front of the bus that we rode exactly what kind of changes puberty was doing to my body. Specific descriptions that mortify me to this day, thank-you-very-much.

I have a very clear mental picture of her little bobbed red-haired self, hand on her hip, spouting with that Texan accent all about the wonders of my ever changing prepubescent body.

And for some reason she thought revenge came in the form of calling me bad names on this tape recorder we used to tape our pseudo commercials on. When I popped that thing in to admire our dramatic skills later, I raged against how Kristi marred our professional rendering for all eternity with her foul mouth.

But now we’re grown ups. And between those days and now, there have been many other incidents that caused my oldest child blood to boil. Sometime after she got pregnant with her first, I finally started to relate to her and she to me. Then she got married and had another kid and we really dug hanging out.

Occasionally she threatens to shout to all the grocery store occupants all about my darkest secrets. But it’s only a reflex. She usually controls herself.

Truth be told, she’s the best friend I have. I’ve made some close friends through the years, and they usually move, or I move and I have to start all over. But I never have to start over with my sister. And she’s turned into the most giving, compassionate person I’ve ever met. Qualities I’m sadly lacking. I spent many a year looking down on her in annoyance; in the way only an oldest child can in that superior way. But now I admire her.

She’s so many things that I’m not. She is evidence that people do change. And no worries, she hasn’t tried to flush any infants down the toilet lately.

I haven’t really seen a whole heck of a lot of magazine headlines that piqued my interest of late. But my friend from work, you know who you are, jogged a memory that had apparently fallen through one of the swiss cheese holes that is my brain, and I thanked her profusely for completing me through a cherished memory.

Before I tell you what that memory was, let me say that I then noticed one headline that boasted 347 Fall Fashions, and I wondered, “Are there really? Three hundred and forty seven of them?”

Amazing.

But let’s do this the Carrie way, shall we? I immediately thought of some of my “must haves” for when I would start school again in the fall. And we didn’t have the cold hard cash that all the cool kids had. So some of these were just wishes. And some of them I got, finally, but only when they were sadly out of fashion.

Carrie’s Must Have Fall Fashions From Roughly 1986-1990

Hypercolor. You know, the shirts that turn color with your body heat. That way everyone could grab you in inappropriate places and the whole school would know. Charming.

Blue eye shadow. My mother was a big fan. So was Cyndi Lauper. Which by the way, I played in this little skit we did in the 3rd grade, where everyone was one of the singers in “We Are The World” and we lip synced to it. Except my teacher, bless her heart, wasn’t rad enough to spell it right. And I was all about the correct spelling of my favorite singer. Oh, I argued with her. It was a serious offense to spell my Girl’s name ‘Cindy Loper’. Mortifying. But I rocked it out anyway.

Parachute Pants. Man, did I want a pair of these something fierce. I dreamed about these things. If I had just had a pair of these, maybe that really cute boy named Brent would’ve talked to me. Because every boy dreams about a girl with bright yellow pants that swished as you walked down the hall, right?

No, Lea Thompson was not a must have fashion accessory. But I was all about my favorite hair tool. The Crimper. Unfortunately, I didn’t come remotely close to the coolness that is Lea Thompson in the 80’s, but I did try to crimp my Barbie’s hair once, and burned it off. It smelled really gross.

And to hold that crimp in my stringy thin hair, I always made sure to use plenty of Rave. Looking at this can of sticky goodness, I can almost smell it. It’s the smell that takes me back to good hairstyles gone bad after a windy bus ride on picture day. It takes me back to the day I wore pig tails with thick rope ribbons and a black and white skirt, purple leather jacket, and blue pantyhose. Oh and jelly shoes. Because without the jelly shoes, you cannot do the 80’s dance.

Guess Jeans. I truly believe deep down in my heart that had I a pair of Guess Jeans in my possession that I could’ve been voted Favorite Girl in my 7th grade class. And maybe, just maybe someone would’ve picked me for square dancing at P.E.

And speaking of jeans

I give you the Tight Roll. The reason for my existence every morning for several years. The reason for my sweat and anxiety every morning before school when it just wouldn’t roll right. The reason for my triumph when it rolled perfect and looked hot. The reason for my vomit to get stuck in my throat when I think about how absolutely idiotic it looks now in all my pictures.

I didn’t know this was how stirrup pants worked. They look nice on this chick. Maybe it was because I was pushing 5′11″ by the 9th grade and they would always try to slip off my hips, looking much like a pair of chopsticks with weird triangular shaped fabric stretched too far up the length. So I remedied the situation by cutting off the straps at the bottom. Then I had those little tabs sticking out on either side of my ankle, and I was good to go.

Now this girl has some skinny legs. But I assure you, mine were skinnier. So much so, that the leg warmers were always too big for me. Like someone had stretched them out before-hand as a sick joke. But I still wore them. Usually with some kind of skirt with fringe and a sweatshirt my mom made with strips of felt attached to the shoulders that resembled pom poms.

So I hope you’ve gotten a few fashion tips for this fall. I hope you remember your early school days without gagging or inhaling your coffee up your nose as you type. Because fashion can be funny. As long as you burn the incriminating evidence, or at the very least hide them in a safe, so you can pretend it looked good on you via your warped memory.

And if you’re looking for Letters From Your Friendly Cashier, scroll down.

My Man has this friend who is so eccentric that when you take his picture, he doesn’t show up on film. We’ve tried. He’s lived with his father up to this point in his life, which is somewhere between 40 and 70 years of age. He also has that ageless quality that makes it hard to pinpoint. And we’ve asked, but he’s not tellin’.

So his father is moving somewhere, I’m sure My Man told me, and I wasn’t listening or something. And his friend, whom we’ll call Mark is rifling through thirty plus years of junk they’ve accumulated in their house. Stuff like magazines from 1976, and old videos of Star Trek episodes on tv from 1996, with the commercials! which are really the best part. There were some old paintings and a whole lot of other eccentricities.

And the best part is, he wasn’t giving any of it away! Yep, he put a price tag on everything in that house. Whatever, dude. Whatever thickens your gravy.

My Man being the vintage hound that he is, did manage to nab one item for free. And what a find.

Meet the Traveler Tumbler. It’s groovy, it’s fun, and man does it smell like the 80’s. At least that’s what My Man claims. He brought this bad boy home and all kinds of nostalgia washed right over me. I could actually hear Hall and Oats singing in my ear as I inspected the box.

So you’re probably wondering, “What exactly does the 80’s smell like?” Or maybe you’re wondering, “Why in God’s green earth is that girl smelling the inside of old coffee mugs?”

Or maybe you’re just wondering, “What in the name of Mike am I even doing on this blog?”

My Man and I are real smell oriented. We can watch an old 70’s or 80’s movie and one of us will always make a comment on how we can just smell the Bud on that guy, or I bet the lady smells like Windsong.

So of course one of the first things he said to me when I was drooling over those happy 80’s inhabitants on the box was, “IT EVEN SMELLS LIKE THE 80′S!”

Ok, maybe he didn’t yell it, but I could tell he was brimming with excitement.

So I smelled inside.

Because this thing was brand spankin’ new, relatively speaking, mint in the box, there was no coffee odor to interrupt my sniffing in the scent of my childhood.

And really, there’s just no way to describe to you what the 80’s smelled like via this cup. It was musty and stale, with a distinct flavor of groove. The kind of smell that reminds you of polyester bell bottoms on the way out of fashion because hey! it’s the 80’s.

And as an added bonus, here’s the bottom of the box. It’s Spillproof! and it only releases liquids when you’re ready to drink. All the qualities one needs for a really groovy cup of joe. And who wouldn’t want to sip their java from plaid cup. My Man can’t wait! to take it to work.

Remember this? I don’t personally, but sure I’ve heard of the ol’ vibrating belt exercise machine of the 50’s. Looks like swell fun. Maybe afterward they gussied up for a sock hop or something. Those were the days. At least they look like the days.

I’m hoping that contraption up there was effective, because I’ve found myself in a similar position lately.

Our old washer broke down a couple months ago, so I hiked it up to Main Street to purchase a new-old one. We only buy used appliances. It’s a religious preference.

Not really. I drool over those really nice front loaders that probably make nary a sound when spinning out or agitating. Because it wasn’t too long after we got our new-old washer, that supposedly is industrial size, when we found out it couldn’t handle a full load of sheets or towels.

You can always tell when it’s going to start. The spinning starts slowly. Thump-thump-thump. And you hope once it starts full throttle that it will even out and just work right already. And sometimes it does.

But then you have the knocking-turned-walking washer issue and you go in there, flip the darned lid open and rearrange some towels. When you close the lid again you pray to the heavens above and chew on the inside of your lip while you wait for the momentum to gain to see if the earth shattering vibration will begin again.

If it does, and you’re a novice at this, you might try rearranging a few more times. Each time getting more and more agitated that your new-old industrial size washer cannot handle a freakin’ load of towels. Even a small load.

Once you’ve had some experience at this, you might try going outside while it spins out. Because if you can’t hear it, then it doesn’t exist. Besides, you’re tired of worrying that the contraption is going to shake it’s way through the old floor and land smack dab on the sump pump in the basement. But then a gremlin usually comes out and interrupts a nice daydream about caramel mocha frappacinos and he’s really freaked out by all the banging and whatnot, so you go inside cause you’re a nice mom.

And when you’re back inside and the monster of a machine starts in again you know the only thing left to do is to sit on it.

If you’re a big girl like me, sitting on it will, in fact, calm the booger down a tad. Oh, rearrange to your heart’s content, but while I was sitting on my washer just this morning I realized that I am probably just shaking off those pounds at warp speed.

At this point, you might be tempted to think that I’m just trying to be funny and ha ha wouldn’t that just be a hoot to sit on one’s washer while it shakes profusely! But do not give it one more thought! At least twice a week, I can be found, at some point in my day, perched atop my vibrating washer waiting out the spin cycle. This is my true life. I don’t have to make this stuff up.

I was going to give Tae Bo a try, but I think this might just be a wee bit more effective.

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.

So I was wondering when we would have access to a transporter system similar to that on Star Trek. It’s pouring rain outside, and I’m a little worried about taking The Cuteness out in the monsoon. You see, we lost our umbrella.

My Man and I were discussing the positives of such a system. He’s all for doing away with cars: you know how he is about accident paranoia. And I just hate cars because they’re a pain in my keister. Plus, who’s not sweating out the constant gas price rise?

If we had transporters, people could get places instantaneously, and would thus solve the impatience issue everyone seems to have, myself included, that causes speeding accidents in the first place.

I mean, we might lose a few people in the experimentation phase, but every good invention does involve some sacrifice.

I’m sure I haven’t thought this all the way through. After all, I’m operating on four hours sleep. Just a thought…