I Love Preserved Lemons

Diggin for taters

2007-03-11T19:43:00.000-05:00

"Topeka" is Kaw Indian for "good place to dig for potatoes." Wow. That is not what I was expecting when I looked it up on Wikipedia. Maybe "good place to buy crack" or "rundown seat of Sunflower State." I have recently spent too much time in T-Town as we like to call it around my house. Young people making poor decisions have wreaked havoc on my professional life lately and challenged me to use some skills I wasn't sure I had.

Now that the debacle is mostly behind us, I am moving on to more work - starting a new blog specifically for work (maybe 2 since there are 2 jobs), traveling a lot this Spring, finishing the latest painting project, and starting the garden. My goal is to get some things in the ground by the end of St. Patty's Day next week. St. Pat's is the traditional day to plant potatoes in these parts, but potatoes are so cheap it seems silly to waste garden space growing them. Carrots, too. And I have never found homegrown spuds or carrots to be particularly tasty - not like the difference between pithy, pink store tomatoes vs. luscious, homegrown, Eve-tempting jewels that make the best BLT's ever and can turn cottage cheese into a gourmet lunch. No, I'll be saving my weed-pulling energy for the simple tomato. I wonder how you say "good place for picking tomatoes" in Kaw.

'Tis a Gift to be Simple

2007-03-04T21:50:00.000-06:00

It has been just over a year since I started writing this blog, and some days I hate it, other days I am glad for a place to spew the thoughts that come to me, and record some of the things that happen in my life. Like the Anna Nalick song says: "If I get it all down on paper, it's no longer
inside of me, threatening the life they belong to. And I feel like I’m naked in front of the crowd
Cause these words are my diary, screaming out loud,
And I know that you’ll use them, however you want to".

Today was one of the wonderful days where after work I felt like there was nothing insanely pressing that had to be done and I could breathe. Got home from work at almost three with Kiddo and a pal in tow, sat on the berm between the house and the goat/chicken house, soaked up the sun and watched Nibbler jump like a bareback bronc at the rodeo with an imaginary rider he was trying to shake, while the kids rolled down the hill over and over. It was simply bliss.

Introducing Lord Nibbler

2007-03-01T08:40:00.000-06:00

Here are some pics of our housegoat. Sheesh - we have a friggin house goat!
Picked up Walker's ashes today, cried with Erica who works there and whose pet calf died yesterday. She too had a pet goat that slept in her bed even!!!! She swears they can easily be housebroken - I sure hope so!

What would you ask if you had just one question?

2007-02-28T09:19:00.000-06:00

This was last Sunday's service at church for which I was responsible:

Prelude: One of Us by Joan Osborne

Opening Words: LW

Chalice Lighting (while singing #118)

Opening Hymn: #118 This Little Light of Mine

Joy and Sorrows

Children's Story: King Solomon as remembered by a very young Rosie
Story my mom told us from the very big, very special book, that lived in the octagon coffee table. I couldn’t understand why King Solomon would threaten to do such a terrible thing. He was wise indeed. This was the story of King Solomon threatening to cut the baby in half because 2 women were fighting over it. I took it very literally and was horrified as a child.

Choir Interlude

Reading: #642 from Psalm 23

Hymn: #37 God Who Fills the Universe

"Unitarian Universalism's Christian and Jewish Roots"

Roots. When I hear the word root I think of plants almost immediately. Roots that deliver water and nutrients to a living thing so that it can help sustain life on the rest of this big spinning ball. Roots that anchor enormous trees against the fierce winds that threaten to take them down. Deep root that provide energy from deep within the core during times of drought. Shallow roots near the surface that are easily tripped over.

My dictionary told me that roots are the parts of plants that grow underground and deliver life-sustaining necessities; the parts of hair and teeth that hold them in place; or that which is the source of something. I like to think of our Unitarian Universalist living tradition as all of these things: life-sustaining, holding us in place like an anchor, and a source. Our tradition draws from many sources – our own experiences, the words and deeds of very wise people, the ideas of other religions and spiritualities, Jewish and Christian teachings that call for us to love one another as we love ourselves, and humanist teachings that ask us to use our heads as much as our hearts.

This month, our children and their teachers explored some of the stories of our Jewish and Christian roots. I would like to share with you what they learned.

Our preschool and kindergarten class was led by SH and JW. They First learned about Valentine’s Day, and it’s origins in ancient Rome. The Romans clebrated a festival on February 15^th that honored Juno, the Goddess of women and marriage and Pan the God of nature. During this celebration, animals and birds were said to have chosen their mates. Following suit, young women would put their names on slips of paper in a jar and young men would draw them out to choose sweethearts. Eventually, Roman soldiers carried this custom to England. Years later, the first Valentine card was sent in 1415 y the Duke of Orleans who was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Two martyred Christian saints are also celebrated, both having been executed for their crimes against the churches on February 14^th.
This class also celebrated their pets with a lesson about St. Francis of Assisi, who was born in 1182 in Italy. St Francis is considered to be the caregiver to the animals. Francis had been born to a wealthy family, but gave away all his belongings and even his clothing so that he could help others – people and animals. Many congregations celebrate his memory by having a blessing of the animals day in which members and friends can bring their beloved pets so that they can be included in their family and have blessings bestowed upon them. I have been asked if we will do something similar, as we did a few years ago, and I hope that we can arrange to an animal blessing day, maybe in May.
This group also learned about Easter, and the events that are said to have taken place in Jerusalem that led to the crucifixion of Jesus. The Easter that we celebrate focuses on rebirth, and Spring, but we do our children a great disservice if they do not know that most Christians believe literally that even though Jesus died on Friday, strung up on a wooden cross under a scorching sun, he miraculously came back to life on Sunday, three days later.

Our 1^st thru 3^rd grade class was taught by RW and ML. They too learned about Valentines Day and made valentine cards, a tradition made popular in English Victorian times. The following week they studied Palm Sunday, the day that begins the Christian Holy week, which commemorates the last week of Jesus’ life. One week before Easter is celebrated is Palm Sunday. It is said that this is the day Jesus went to Jerusalem, riding on a white donkey. People were really beginning to know who Jesus was – he claimed to be the son of God on earth and was to be the great leader predicted to lead the Jewish people as their king - and cleared a path for him as he neared. It was very hot so people were fanning themselves with palm leaves, which they placed on the ground in front of Jesus and the donkey so that the dust would not rise up and choke all of them as the donkeys feet fell on the dusty earth. Also celebrated in Holy Week are Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. Maundy means holy and this is the day that it is believed that Jesus washed his friends dry, dusty, dirty feet after their long walk to Jerusalem and had his last meal with them, because he was executed on Friday, now celebrated as Good Friday. As a child I thought it was strange that we would call it a Good day when someone was killed, but Christians call it Good Friday because of the Good that they believe came out of the crucifixion of Jesus – their salvation.
Last week the kid in this class learned about the crucifixion of Jesus and how it is said that he came back to life – a big word we call resurrection – 3 days later on a Sunday. They learned a version of The Lord’s Prayer along with a modern UU interpretation from Reverend Barbara Marshman which we would like to share with you now.

Call and response reading of this page…….150 from Special Times

Tim and Tom read back and forth

Our 4^th thru 7^th grade class, led by CR and DH, learned about Moses and the 10 Commandments. Think for a moment about how many of those you can name……

It is said that God wrote the 10 commandments, or Decalogue, into stone tablets with a finger. Moses took that tablets to the Jewish people, but they had grown tired waiting for him to return with them and had melted their gold into an image of a cow and were praying around the cow. This angered Moses and God and they tablets were thrown to the ground and broken. After a while the people felt sad about ha they had done and God forgave them, and made a new set of stone tablets with t he commandments, or rules, written on them. The first four rules are about how people should relate to god – whom they called Yahweh in their language, and the next 6 had to do with how they would behave with each other. Much later, when Jesus was going around preaching about how Yahweh wanted people to live kindly and lovingly, he added a commandment, sometimes called the Great Commandment. HE said that that people should love Yahweh with their hearts and souls, but that they should also love their neighbors as themselves. The teachings of Jesus were the focus of their second lesson.
Some of the teachings of Jesus that they discussed were the idea of turning the other cheek, loving your enemies, not to judge others, the Golden Rule, and the Great Commandment, that Jesus believed could keep people from going to war ever again if they truly loved their god and their neighbors.
Last week the kids in this group learned about Easter and the events that surround Jesus death. Easter is full of strange concepts that can be very difficult to wrap one’s mind around. It may seem strange to us that a kind man was murdered because of his beliefs, and even stranger still that he came back to life a few days later. Yet good people are punished every day for their beliefs by governments that fear losing control when these people speak out and try to make change for the better. Things have not changed much in 2000 years.

A moment ago I asked you think about how many of the 10 Commandments you could name. They are (read list).

The kids had a good time coming up with more commandments that they would add to the list. I invite you to share with us your own additions to the 10 Commandments. Just shout them out and I will repeat them into the mic.

People offered up great rules such as “thou shalt listen and speak carefully” and “though shalt be open and honest about one’s beliefs”.

I would like to thank all of our religious education volunteers who make it possible for our children to learn about what it means to be in this community. Without you , we could not help grow our living tradition. If you are interested in teaching in March – the first three Sunday, please contact me after the service. We will be learning about evolution and I need three more teachers. Don’t worry – you’ll have materials and support and great kids and adults to work with. I would also like to thank SH for her dedication to the spiritual growth of this community thru music.

Hymn: #123 Spirit of Life

Words to Spirit of Life go like this:

Spirit of Life, come unto me. Sing in my heart all the stirrings of compassion. Blow in the wind, rise in the sea, move in the hand, giving life the shape of justice. Roots hold me close, wings set me free; Spirit of Life, come to me, come to me.

Responsive Reading: #639 Love One Another

Let us love another because love is from God.

Whoever does not love God, does not know God, for God is love.

No one has ever seen God; if we love another God lives in us.

God is love, and those who abide in love, abide in God, and God abides in them.

There is no fear in love, for perfect love casts out fear.

Those who say “I love God” and then hate their brothers and sisters are liars, for those who do not love a brother or sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seem.

No one has ever seen God; if we love another, God lives in us.

1 John 4

Closing Thoughts from Rosie

In our prelude music, Joan Osborne asks some interesting questions that are in tune with my Unitarian Universalist views. You see, I have a hard time believing in the vindictive, cruel Creator-God that is often portrayed in the Jewish testament who let his son die to save the people on earth, even those who didn’t believe in him, and teach them a lesson, and I can’t relate well to the God of the Christian testament either. I find more comfort in believing (not knowing, that is different than believing) that somehow we are all connected, like our 7^th Principle says, in an interconnected web of existence. We are somehow all connected, and that to me is God. For me God is love and the spirit of life. The stories of the Hebrew and Christian bibles serve as fables for me – offering me wisdom through metaphor, and I hope that they are useful tools for you as well as we make our way on this spinning rock together.

Joan asks in her song, what if God was one of us? Just a slob like one of us? Just a stranger on the bus trying to make his way home.

What if God had a name – would you use it?

What if God had a face – would you look into it if it meant you would have to believe?

What would you ask if you had just one question?

You may not know this about me but I have taken more chemistry than I probably really need to get thru life. I returned to KU to take undergrad classes years after I had already completed a bacherlors degree in Latin American Studies and found myself in the first semester of basic chemistry again. I remember having a talk with my professor about how chemistry is taught. Without going into the details, I remember her talking about how students are not presented with the entire story of how atoms function up front, but rather a simple metaphor is used at first to describe the placement of all the little tiny parts of atoms. Later, the metaphor changed to something else, and I asked what has happened to the old one. “well, you weren’t ready for that one back then so we kind of lie until you’re ready to understand it more fully” was sort of the answer I got. How annoying was that!? I was just supposed to forget the other way I had learned it and suddenly embrace this new metaphor with gusto. I needed time to process this new metaphor, but also the concept of how chemistry teachers thought we learned. I wanted the real story, the second one, up front. I didn’t want to replace my old idea with something else, that I was not familiar with and that also was not comforting. I also didn’t like feeling that I had been tricked!

This experience reminds me of how we grow spiritually. I grew up in a United Church of Christ community that taught us the stories of the bible, and I believed that these events all happened exactly as I was told. Those WERE the days of miracle after all and doubt was for bad people – I had gleaned that much from sitting thru Reverend Best’s sermons. As I have aged, notice I said aged and not matured, I have been able to slowly replace those stories as literal events with an understanding that they exists as stories of wisdom, rather like Aesop’s fables, but I still feel a little tricked by that church. My gut tells me that many UU’s feel tricked by their former religious communities, and they seek solace with us. It is difficult for some of us to acknowledge our past experiences with other faith communities that maybe weren’t so positive, and while we might embrace Buddhist meditation as a spiritual practice to break the karmic cycle of death and rebirth, we find ourselves scowling and growing stiff when people pray in front of us or ask us to join them in communion. My goal is that our children don’t have to relearn as they mature, but that they learn from the ground up, deepening the meaning of the concepts they learn and not having to replace them. I challenge all of us to examine our rich heritage and traditions as a denomination, a Fellowship, as families, and as individuals.

Roots hold me close. Wings set me free. Spirit of Life - come to me. Come to me.

Postlude: Superstar from Jesus Christ Superstar

Ocean Beach, CA

2007-02-22T08:53:00.000-06:00

This is me hanging 10, while watching the surfers.
Enough said.

I'm going to California and I'm taking a.....

2007-02-18T16:44:00.000-06:00

Remember that game where you had to go thru the alphabet saying what things you were taking with you on a trip to California, until at the end you were repeating 26 things in order that you were taking with you...

Well, I am taking:
attitude - a very bad one that I hope to change while there,
bathing suit - to help get rid of the attitude, not that I love my body fishbelly white and 3/4 nekkid, but some sand in my asscrack might help remind me of what is important,
comb - to detangle my beach-blown hair,
drained spirit - it has been a long Winter
earrings - one pair that I will leave in the entire trip,
friendship - going with a dear friend, seeing others from across the U.S., and making new ones,
good will - something that there is never enough of,
hymnal - I have to plan a church service while I am on "vacation",
irony - it's actually going to be as warm or warmer in Kansas than in SoCal,
jaded self - cynical and worn out,
kansas - I reek of it, and I am OK with that,
liver - my own; there will be some imbibing with old friends but I'll try to rest the liver,
mandate - from Hubby; to relax and have some fun,
non-fiction book for non-fiction book club, Radical Hospitality,
open mind - I am there to have fun but also to learn,
phone - gotta stay in touch with home,
quick smile - not enough smiles in airports,
raincoat - rain is predicted,
shoes - but not too many as I always overpack,
tampons - yay got my period right before vacation,
umbrella - again with the rain,
vibrator - just kidding, Lucile,
work - sadly, yes, I will have to do work, but on the beach is better than the office,
xenophilia - because differences are good,
yours truly - duh,
zest - something that I think I have deep inside me still, although it has been buried.

So there it is. My list of things to take with me on my working vacation with my pal Lucile. I hope to bring back a recharged, less shriveled and exhausted person that resembles the current Rosie but feels less like a person who feelss like Winter will never end.

?- February 15, 2007

2007-02-15T10:40:00.000-06:00

Rest in peace, Walker.
We will miss you.

Winter blahs

2007-02-13T22:56:00.000-06:00

I hate Winter. Bring on the 95 degrees and 80% humidity and I'll be ever so happy. I am waiting for Spring, I am waiting for Walker to die. Every time I am convinced he is gonna go, he perks up a little and wags his tail in that helicopter-ey way that announces his hounddogginess. I am curled up with him tonight in front of the fireplace. He is in his ratty blanket, shivering or twitching, I can't tell which. My sleeves are wet from the snot and tears I have wiped all over them because I couldn't reach the facial tissues ( I wrote that just for you Amy in Texas, not kleenexes).

A pleasant distraction is an unexpected addition, that came with the other new additions. It seems that the new goats came with baggage - at least 2 of them are knocked up. One of them has already blessed us with Nibbler, our housegoat. Nibbler is a baby pygmy goat, which is about the size of a teenage cat. I keep expecting him to purr as he rides around tucked in my overall bib, reaching up to bang his head into my chin. I learned tonight from Wendy the Goat Lady (who has provided milk for Nibbler so that we didn't starve him - his trashy mother abandoned him already) that this banging against that which feeds him is an instinct that actually makes his mama's milk letdown so he can tug at her more and stuff his fat little belly.
I keep thinking that goat milk might be some sort of miracle moisturizer for my skin, so I'll have the softest, youngest looking double chin in all of Douglas County. I also was thinking that it was kinda gross to have this baby goat smearing goat milk all over my face, but then I realized I have had worse things on my chin. Banging me in my leche-swollen teats would not have made my body crank out food any faster for the Kiddo. Goats are weird.

I am looking forward to joining Lucille in San Diego next week. I need some sun and to not have to drive everyone else everywhere for a few days. Cabs. What a great idea. Someone else driving me around for a bit. I like the sound of that.

Ain't Nothin but a Hound Dog

2007-02-09T09:08:00.000-06:00

Walker is dying. He has been experiencing kidney failure for a couple of months, and has gone downhill, losing his chubbiness and morphing into skin and bones, rather quickly. We know he will die soon, but that knowledge doesn't make it any easier. Oh how I wish it did.

I bought him a sweater last Sunday since he is so thin and he shivers all the time. Gypsy said I was for sure trying to kill him by making him wear the thing in front of the other dogs. The humiliation!

He went outside Wednesday night and didn't come home. Hubby was up until 1:30 looking for him, calling him home. Thursday morning we were convinced that he had gone off to die alone, as dogs are programmed to do. Bundled up against the 20 degree cold and the light wind, we followed Mandy as she acted Sacagawea, leading us on their many trails worn into the fields that are part of the vigilant routine of protecting their humans. After looking in and under everything and an hour of the chill creeping into our bones, we gave up. Tears streaming down our faces, we knew we would have to wait until the turkey vultures and Spring told us where he had gone. And as I was driving to school to get the Princess from kindergarten, who do I see staggering up through the front pasture, but the ghost of Walker's old self - old skin and bones meandering toward the house in his ridiculous turtleneck sweater that makes him look like some old, stodgy, pipe-smoking professor.

He has been resting comfortably in a blanket or two since then. He slept with us last night, and I fell asleep with tears and snot puddling on my pillow. This morning he had a little chicken and rice soup, which I had heated for too long in my morning distraction and had to cool with ice cubes so he could lap it up. He is stretched out on the carpet, waiting for a sunbeam to warm his too thin body, but I don't think they will come along today to help him out. It looks really gray and cold, and I feel really gray and cold.

Walker dying with all this time to "prepare" gives our family a chance to love on him, hug him, and tell him goodbye. None of us had that opportunity when my father and hubby's uncle died, and I think we are both dealing with some of those feelings of regret surrounding the circumstances of their deaths. I thought it was very strange when Gracia Burnham, the Kansas Missionary whose husband died in a raid to free them from the Philippine captors who held them hostage, said of her husband "He died a good death." I am not sure I understand what she was trying to say, but I guess that is all we can hope for - a good death.

The stories in my head

2007-01-30T09:55:00.000-06:00

I have some story ideas that roll around in my head, gathering dust, momentum, details. Yesterday I added a snippet to that collection in my noggin and I nearly peed myself laughing about it last night at FSB.
The hubby saw a huge black dildo on the side of the road yesterday and called to tell me about it(isn't that sweet!). Where? I demanded. I drove there and went up and down this short stretch of highway just south of Lawrence. I parked the truck and ran up and down the ditch with a camera in my hand. Someone beat me to it. I thought about calling the sherriff to see if they picked it up. I NEEDED to know about it. I went home, dejected.
I want to know the story of how a huge, VEINED, plastic dick ended up on the side of the road. I also want to know how it came to be that it was no longer on the side of the road. Who in their right mind would pick it up? The hubby informed me that Douglas County is full of weirdos like me and that I am not nearly as unique as I would like to think. Sad.

The story of the huge member and its journey is percolating in my mind. Could it have been stuffed with drugs like the smuggling dildoes in Son of the Circus? Was there a terrible fight in a car zooming down Douglas County Route 458 between a couple, and while driving erratically, he grabbed her buzzing friend (of whom he is jealous), smacked her across the face with it, and flung it out the window into the cold winter night? Was it part of some erotic treasure hunt leading to a crazy orgy at a nearby farmhouse? Perhaps we should have a contest to see who can write the best story for the wayward dildo. Any takers?

My other favorite glimpse of story that I want to use is an ironic tale of a bad man who spits on the ground. I hate spitters. It is disgusting, and unclean. I had a very old health book that cautioned "it is not wise to spit about the home or in public places". I copied that page and hung it up everywhere I could, which was mostly near campus and The Crossing. The ironic part comes in the demise of my protagonist when he slips on one of his own lung cookies that he carelessly deposited on the ground and dies from the fall. Asshole shouldn't have been spitting on the ground - it's not wise.

Happy Kansas Day!

2007-01-29T09:14:00.000-06:00

I love my state. I doubt I will ever call anywhere else home. Travel is fine, but after a week I want to be home with my creatures, my chores, my routine, and my own stuff.

Make sure you eat some sunflower seeds today, and whole wheat bread. Have a buffalo burger down at local burger. Enjoy some local products from the Merc.

My favorite places in Kansas:
*Lawrence (duh)
*Kanopolis Resevoir - we used to go on trail rides at Horsethief Canyon - beyootiful!
*Carl's Bar in Hutchinson - so many crazy nights underage.
*Maxwell game Preserve - where you can watch buffalo roam.
*Fritz's in KCK - food ordered on a phone and delivered by a train. Great milkshakes - dip your fries in 'em.
*House of Sight and Sound (aka Song and Bong) in Salina. Best music store/head shop in the midwest. Salina is also home to the wonders of the Cozy Inn, The Scheme Pizza, and Bogeys' Drive Inn.
*Anchor Inn Restaurant in Hutch (i'm Hutch trash if you didn't know). Best Mexican buffet ever!
*Mr. Nussbaum's house - ancient man who lived around the corner from me a mile or two. When we first moved to the house I grew up in we needed a cat. We were told to go see Mr. Nussbaum, who had at least a million cats roaming his property. He reached into a forsythia bush and pulled out a relatively clean cat - white with gray tabby splotches. We dubbed him Mr. O'Malley and took him home. I thought only old ladies collected cats.
*Monitor Brethren Church. This church was 3 miles around the corner and I went there for VBS for 8 years. There is a parsonage still and the quietest cemetery in the shade that I have ever seen.
*Inman Cafe - every Wednesday was Mennonite food and you could go have fresh verenika and bona beroggi. Heaven!
*Garden of Eden - Lucas. If you have never seen this bizarre tribute to early Kansas politics and one man's take on church vs state, you have got to stop here. I hope I can be this weird with art when I am old.
*White Memorial Camp near Council Grove, named after the family who donated the land. I went to summer camp here for a week every summer thru the UCC church for 8 years. First love with Mike Conrad and first doubts about God.
*Medicine Lodge Peace Treaty re-enactment. This is the turf of my parents, and every 3 years folks commemorate the Peace Council of 1867. Of course, the US Guvment fucked the Plains Indians, but the pageant is stunning and takes place in a nautral amphitheatre in the Gyp Hills. Followed by a huge ranch rodeo and a tornado if you're lucky.

Which brings me to famous Kansans.... I can't think of Medicine Lodge without mentioning Carrie Nation.

Check this out for other famous Kansans:
Cool stuff about Kansas and Kansans

Where I grew up we spent this day biting the corner off of Hershey bars to make them look like our state, we dressed up in pioneer outfits, made butter in a hand churn and ate it on homemade bread. I have asked friends from other states if they took similar steps to learn about the cultural heritage of their home states on the anniversaries of their joining the union, and they look at me like I am nuts. Why are we proud to be from a state that most people think of as a dreadful place you have to drive thru to go skiing? The answer is one of our best kept secrets.

Preaching to the choir

2007-01-28T18:28:00.000-06:00

I preach. Yes, I know you all are thinking, "hell yeah she preaches. She never shuts up about telling other people what they need to be doing." No, I mean I preach. I get paid to stand in front of people and tell them how I see the world. I get to do this once a month at least, and I love it. I was getting bored with my job and had the chance to include this as one way to cover my responsibilites on Sunday mornings. It has been a hit, and gets my job done as well.
I was especially proud of today's little talk I gave. It went like this:

Prelude – “World” by Five for Fighting

(Some random announcements and candle lightings came in here)

Hymn: We are a gentle angry people #170

Opening thoughts:
Good morning. I am ________, the director of religious education for 4.5 years. Welcome to the 4^th Sunday Intergenerational Spiritual Celebration. The 4^th Sunday intergen SC offers us the chance to learn what it was that our children were doing earlier in the month. This month was a little odd, and I might, within reason, be able to stand up here and have the kids show you how they made snowballs and snowmen and somehow relate that to Unitarian Universalism, because my guess is that is what several of our kids did this month on Sunday mornings. Instead of them sharing with you what they learned, I will share with you what they were going to learn had old man winter not come a knocking so loudly this month. Thank you for coming, and allowing me the opportunity to share with you what our children do. There may have been some skepticism about the frequency of these intergenerational programs when we first discussed this monthly format, and I hope that like the recent snow and ice, that skepticism has melted away before too many people slipped on it.

If the children would come forward, ______ will share with them one of the classics of children’s literature: Enemy Pie.

(this is a hilarious story about a kid whose dad tricks him into turning his best enemy into a good friend by making enemy pie, which is a normal pie. The trick is before you can have your enemy over to eat the pie, you have to spend a day playing with the enemy. You get the idea! My reader is a very theatrical guy who reminds me of a young Mark Twain - at least what I think a young Mark Twain would be like)

The theme for the month in Religious Education was Unitarian Universalism. January seemed like a good time, what with people resolving to make changes, hopefully for the better, and touching base with our roots seemed natural to me. Some Januaries see an influx of new faces thru our doors, as we promise ourselves to get up earlier, take better care of ourselves, get involved in our communities, and take time to think about what our place is on this planet.

Our faith, denomination, religion if you can stomach that word, is based around seven principles. I can usually recite 4 of those 7 without much trouble. I go back and forth between the adult's version with complicated words and concepts and the kid's version, which boils these ideas down to something easier to digest. "To affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person" becomes “every person is important”. I like that. It makes sense to me. It makes sense to the kids too, as one day in the car I was trying to explain something to my nine-year-old son using the principles, and I was getting hung up on them. He rattled all 7 off for me quite readily, and I am pretty sure he understands the concepts behind the words. He’s not my UU guinea pig, but he shows me often that what we do here works. We try to create a safe place where our kids can come have a good experience with like-minded people of all ages, and if they learn something about Unitarian Universalism on their journey here, that is gravy.

So we are pretty sure we can provide a good experience for them here on our own property, but what about in the larger world? In the prelude, Five for Fighting (which is really just one guy – not five) sings about the chance to start over and build a new world.

Got a package full of Wishes
A Time machine, a Magic Wand
A Globe made out of Gold

No Instructions or Commandments
Laws of Gravity or
Indecisions to uphold.

What kind of world do you want?
Think Anything
Let's start at the start
Build a masterpiece
Be careful what you wish for
History starts now...

Our history is being written as we speak. Someday when I have the honor and the need to sit in one of our cushy chairs, I hope a few of these kids are the people standing here, sharing their thoughts with us, telling their stories of how Unitarian Universalism has shaped how they function in this world. Our 7 principles may have changed by then. They really aren't very old – having been written and adopted in my lifetime. Our kids will sing hymns, possibly from these very hymnals, really knowing what it means to be gentle, angry people. Hopefully they will harness that gentle anger and be activists as so many of our adults are, passionately defending the rights of those who often can’t speak for themselves. They will work with coalitions, and alliances, and associations, and they will be Unitarian Universalists while they do this work. And if they aren’t, if they become, gasp, Methodists or Episcopalians, or pagans or whatevers or nothings, they will still have the knowledge and experience of having learned that this was a community that cared for them and expected them to make change happen during their tenure on this planet.

During yesterday’s workshop on change, there were the familiar faces of members and friends of the Fellowship who were able to give of their time to learn skills that will help us thru these challenging times of rapid change. Many were the faces that are seen at nearly every workshop or task force or committee meeting that goes on around here. She’s preaching to the choir I kept thinking, about S____ B____, our workshop facilitator. She’s preaching to the choir. I kept thinking about that phrase and what I think it means. I think it means that you’re telling a story that the listeners are already familiar with, and one that they agree with as well. You’re convincing people of something that they already are convinced of, you’re being redundant which can be annoying. It makes it sound like it is a negative thing. I imagined myself as the choir, and I decided that sometimes I rather enjoy hearing things that I already agree with. I don’t have the mental stamina to be challenged to think about all the things that go on that I don’t agree with in this world every single moment. Occasionally, I just want to sit back and hear something that doesn’t get my hackles all up and make my heart race and cause me to take action. Sometimes I want to watch the news channel that only has heartwarming stories of people doing good, or the one where they report that nothing horrible happened today, people went about their lives, did their jobs, hung out with their friends or families, shared pie together, and lost enemies. This morning, you may feel like the choir. But don’t worry, you will only have to sing one more hymn today, and that won’t be for a few more minutes.

Our preschool and kindergarten class, led by Janet and Lynne , learned about Mary Collson, a young girl from Iowa who had a pet hen. Mary pretended a lot, as children do, and liked to pretend that she was a preacher. She would marry her hen, preach to her hen, she even tried to baptize her hen. Maybe that is where we get the phrase madder than a wet hen. She confided in her hen that when she grew up, she wanted to be a minister, just like her 2 female ministers who also were her school teachers. When Mary became an adult, she did become a minister, she joined the Iowa sisterhood and helped spread liberal religion across the midwest. They also learned about Thomas Starr King, who as a boy wanted to ring the church bells on Sunday morning at the church where his father served as a minister. Thomas grew up to become first a Universalist minister, then served Unitarian churches in the 1800’s. Their last lesson was going to be about our local congregation, and we had several photographs of events that had happened here at the Fellowship over the years. They would’ve talked about how long before they were born, and even a little before their parents were born, a group of people, some of whom are still with us, got together to form our Fellowship. How they worked hard to organize and how they bought this building and worked on it and sweated and hauled water here to drink and went thru the challenges of life together as a community of people who chose to spend time together under the same roof even though they didn’t always agree with what was going to happen under this roof.

Our first thru 3^rd grade class was lead by Susan, Mariyln, and Graham. You may have heard about how they imprisoned your children in a dark dingey cell so that they could learn about Dorthea Dix. After hearing William Ellery Channing preach about the dignity and worth of all people, Dorthea had the words to describe what she had always felt. She worked with Dr. Channing and his friends to improve the living conditions of people in prison for having committed crimes and people who were mentally ill. She convinced lawmakers in Massachusetts to build one of the first mental hospitals in the united states. On ice storm Sunday, they would have learned about Jesus’ teacher Hillel, who summed up Jewish law with a simple statement that reflects our second principle – justice, equity, and compassion in human relations: he said “never do to anyone else the kind of thing that is hateful to you.” I like it when things are straightforward and make sense.

On snow day Sunday they were going to learn about Susan B. Anthony. Now I know this is a generational thing, and many of you may have no idea what I am talking about… but I can’t help but sing the school house rock ditty about Susan B Anthony. We were suffering until suffrage, not a woman could vote no matter what age, but the 19^th Amendment shut down that restrictive rule. Susan didn’t live to see the day when women could finally vote, but her work lives on every day as women continue to challenge unfair treatment in the workplace and society in general.

Marie and John worked with our 4^th – 7^th grade group in January. They learned about Joseph Priestly, an inventor who became a Unitarian minister. Not only did Priestly discover oxygen, he invented carbonated water – thank goodness! Priestly fought in Britain for freedom of religion and eventually fled to the US where he preached in Philadelphia. They also talked about William Ellery Channing, who had a terrifying church experience as a youngster that included hellfire and brimstone and the world coming to a firey end. He was so terrified that when he later became a minister, he preached about a hopeful tomorrow, not one of doom and fear. Our last lesson was going to also be about our local history, with guest speakers from our congregation sharing stories of the early days of formation and how things have changed since then.

If you would like to know more about our local history, I suggests that you see Earl, our archivist, to learn more about what and where.

I’d like to quote one of my favorite philosphers – Uncle Ben. No - Not the rice guy.
Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben. You may know Peter Parker by his work name – Spiderman. Uncle Ben, right before his death, which actually spawned the creation of Spider man as a masked hero, Uncle Ben told Peter to remember, that with great power, comes great responsibility. As people living in the United States, we have an amazing amount of power. As Unitarian Universalists in the United States, we have the vehicle with which we can wield that power. There are many avenues available to us to responsibly use our power. We are blessed to have choices. With our great power comes great responsibility.

Please join me in singing a hymn we do not yet know very well, This hymn is about the choices we may face. Please stand as you are able.

Hymn: #320 The Pen is Greater

Reading: Staci read this:

If prayer worked like magic – if I knew the words that would guarantee prayer's power – I know what I would pray:

If I knew the formula, that's what I'd pray.

But prayer isn't magic, and life will be hard. So I pray for our children – with some hope for this prayer:

So may it be.

Closing thoughts: I’d like to close with a personal story. I have a good friend who knows about my spiritual beliefs. He knows that I try to good things not because they will get me into the heaven he believes in, but because they are the right thing to do. When I gripe to him about how someone hacked me off at the grocery store, or how my husband purposefully didn’t do the errand I had asked him to take care of, he would remind me with a pat on the arm. "Now now, We are all god’s children." This infuriated me! How dare he pat my arm and tell me something so ridiculous and contrary to my beliefs. After hearing this many times over, which might mean that I complain too much, I began to appreciate the meaning behind his statement. We are all God’s children. Hmmmm. We are all stuck here together and it is really easier to figure out how to deal with that fact than fight it. I now find myself sharing my friend’s simple wisdom with others who are struggling with someone else’s behavior. So before we hear one of my favorite singing groups – The Sesame Street Singers, I leave you with this reminder:

What kind of world do you want?
Think Anything
Let's start at the start
Build a masterpiece
Be careful what you wish for
History starts now...

Postlude: We are all earthlings (this is a great song about differences in creatures that share Earth.)

We are notorious for jumping up and running downstairs to get our coffee, and no one jumped up. Every single person sat still and listened to this song. No one wiggled in his chair - not even the kids. People sat quietly with their hands in their laps and listenend and occasionally giggled, which is great because it is a funny song. Now if I could just fake it and pretend that I was Methodist for a few years, I could go to Saint Paul School of Theology and get my M. Div. for next to free. I just don't think I can pull that off, no matter how good of a performer I become.

An addition to the menagerie....

2007-01-26T08:05:00.000-06:00

Sean is a sucker. That is one of his endearing qualities. He recently was asked to take in four pygmy goats whose family moved to Springfield, Missouri in the middle of the ice storms that paralyzed a diagonal stripe of the show-me state.

They are cute, loud, and very playful. We have a family of four, including a billygoat. They are BillyBob, Angelina (mommy), Brad, and Jennifer. Both kids are girls, but I have a boy cat named Margaret so precendence has been set and one of them can be called "Brad".

Angelina is pretty wide so might already be knocked up again. We might be turning into a goat farm - my father is rolling in his grave.

I always wanted goats. When I was young, I would go with Dad to the sale barn (where he spent most of his time after retirement. Who could blame him? Great chicken fried steak and even better pie) and the workermen in their wranglers and boots would hustle in a a terrified herd of goats. They moved like a school of bleating fish, scrambling from corner to corner of the sale pen while children shrieked and men chuckled. At one auction in Salina, they brought out a big cardboard box that was sold as a mystery box. Inside was a baby goat, but we only found out after some sucker bought the box for $17. Dad scoffed at me and my obsession with goats. There was "no way were were going to be goat-ropers" he would say. Goats were silly, uncouth, useless in his world of team roping and cattle ranching.

Then Dad retired. He found himself spending every weekend from Spring to Fall running rodeos all across central and eastern Kansas for kids. Little Britches had mostly become defunct, so Dad and a buddy started a new circuit of rodeos to prepare kids for the high school rodeo competitions that would earn most of those kids college scholarships to go to Pratt CCC, Dodge City CCC, Ft. Hays State, and K-State if they were really good (those kids comprised about a third of the people at his funeral). Goat tying is an event at these kids rodeos, which meant that someone had to own goats and transport the goats to every rodeo. You also had to have enough goat stock that you could rotate goats in and out so that they didn't get too used to being caught and tied. Nothing takes the fun out of competition like a tame goat that waits for you to catch it and then lays down so you can tie its legs together. Dad began collecting goats. He caught a lot of guff at the sale barn from his ranching brethren who wondered what had become of the macho John who would never let goats on his property. He had to buy sheep too for mutton busting, a precursor to bull riding. The sheep were not fun, being naturally dumb creatures, but the goats would scamper about a dry lot while the horses nosed over the fence to see why such commotion was being raised. When Dad thought no one was looking, he would get in their pen and play with them, gently stroking their fat bellies and rubbing their heads. They would instinctively butt their heads into his tree trunk of a leg, stand on their back legs in an effort to climb his 6' 3" frame, and bleat their thanks for saving them from an end as live sacrifice or cabrito verde. My Dad was a sucker, too.

California Dreamin'

2007-01-14T21:07:00.000-06:00

I got my ass chewed today by Sandusky for being a bad blogger. I think about it nearly every day, but just have not felt compelled to blog since before Xmas. This is a sign - but of what I am not sure. There has been nothing to complain about - well nothing that hasn't already been complained about; nothing super exciting to share - although the Kiddo flew all by himself for the first time and it was pleasantly uneventful for him; nothing of note that caught my attention and made me ponder human nature, or the mystic occurrences that would lead me to question the existence of something greater than myself. Nope. Nothing. Nothing major going on and that has been really lovely.
December was busy and hard on the liver. My Spring calendar is filling up fast with trips to all the best midwestern cities - Omaha, Des Moines, Milwaukee, Minneapolis. So jetset I am cruising up and down I-35! I get the pleasure of going to a conference in San Diego in February and Lucile will be venturing to the The Golden State with me for the week. While I learn how to run a UU revival, she'll be taking in the beach and Sea World. I have scheduled one day to go to the zoo since last time I was there most of it was under renovation.
I'll look for something compelling to get my "literary" juices flowing.
I'm glad 2006 is over!

pics on the web

2006-12-21T16:19:00.000-06:00

I have been cleaning up my laptop and got some pics on the web that needed to be out there.
So far they include Brewfest 2006 and Lawrence Brewers guild 2006 Holiday party at our house.

You can view them at www.lawrencebrewers.org under "Gallery".

Since Xbar-ranch.com has been down due to issues with the domain name, the rest will have to wait until we buy the domain back.

I DO have pics of Shay's graduation party and Mark's visit while he was on leave this summer.

And super exciting news!!!!! For the first time in 17 years... I went to the optometrist and did not become even more nearsighted!!!! This is HUGE! Of course, I can't really get much more nearsighted than I already am, but this now means that I could be a candidate for lasik surgery. I can't imagine mysyelf having that done, but the fact is, I could and that is what matters.

Have a marvelous holiday or whatever it is that you do this time of year while other people are celebrating Advent, Hanukkah, Christmas, Yule, Boxing Day, Winter Solstice and the other myriad holidays that get celebrated around now that I can't keep track of because I can only be so PC and inclusive. Be well.

Things I learned today....

2006-12-18T16:31:00.000-06:00

1) Fat Free Cheddar cheese is a disgrace to cows everywhere.
2) Hydrogen peroxide burns real bad in your eyes. Trust me on this. DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!
3) My son is blind as a bat. Yeah, I know, bats aren't blind, but Kiddo practically is. He could not read the top line of the eye chart this morning. And glasses for kids cost just as much as glasses for adults - that blows. To quote Moonshine Willy "Every time I get ahead, it's got another mouth to feed."
4) Going to the chiropractor makes me feel better - mentally and physically. My metatarsals are purple and when she pulled my toes this morning it hurt, but is better for me in the long run.
5) New Scooby Doo sucks. Boomarang has not been showing the old ones lately and this bums me out. Sadly, they have been showing all of these terrible new movies that they cranked out cheaply that my niece LOVES and they make me wanna hurl.
6) Mondays in Larryville are fabulous. It is the one day of the week that I try not to do any work that I am paid to do. This lolling about and/or running of errands is usually followed by an evening with pals at FSB for cheap beer night. Tonight should be especially fun since KU has started their break and maybe we will be able to move around inside without being crushed by the throngs of students.
7) The only way to properly medicate anxiety disorders is by smoking pot. At least that is what it said on wikipedia today. While I was registering so that I could go in and remove this information, somebody beat me to the punch, and changed it back to the serious and accurate info that needed to be there. It did get my hopes up for just a second though.

Bang Your Head

2006-12-15T08:56:00.000-06:00

Let's get something straight from the get go - I was NOT a metalhead. Not a glam rocker, either. A lot of music happened and I had no idea it was even going on. I have watched VH-1 specials about the top 100 metal songs ever and Hubby cringes as I ask with every new song "who is that?" or "is that Black Sabbath?" I tried to like metal. I had a friend from work in HS (Dairy QUEEN!) who was a metalhead, and she forced me to buy a Ratt cassette on a shopping trip. I am sure I was reaching for Thompson Twins when she shoved my hand in the R's and made me pull out fourteen dollars worth of one-hit-wonder. Sigh.

Currently, I listen to the mostly drivelschlock of modern adult alternative (105.9 - favorite of cool mom's everywhere) and bounce around all the stations near those numbers, often pausing on 106.9 Country Legends (Dolly singing Jolene gives me the shivers), and I have noticed a song that has come back into rotation. "Come on feel the noise, girls rock your boys" I scream at the top of my lungs with the volume well past 11. I am transported back to a HS dance in the gym where I was dancing with a boy from Buhler and we were rocking to Quiet Riot's Cum On Feel the Noize. I danced a slow one with him next and he asked me what music I liked. My response was "Quiet Wiot". I had just developed a speech impediment AND lied in the same statement.
Metal health will drive you mad.

It's Beginning to Look a lot like Xmas

2006-12-11T11:01:00.000-06:00

I am so excited I can hardly contain it. I have to tell it somewhere, so you all get to know.
I got kiddo the bext Xmas present ever!!!! I ordered it last night online (why would I go out to shop when I can get nearly everything I need right here in my big purple chair?) from Discovery channel and I can't wait until it arrives! Then I have to wait until Xmas for him to open it. Then I have to wait for him to get bored with it before I can play with it!

I ordered him the new Lego Mindstorms kit!!! You know, robots you get to design and build and program!!!! What? You're not as excited about this as I am? Then you don't know how much fun you can have with these things. When I worked in the hood in KCK, one of my pet projects at the school was running a robotics club for middle schoolers. I had never before seen these kids be excited about school. Of course, it took a thousand dollars worth of high tech toys to get them excited, but that's cheaper than more social workers/cops in the schools and a better use of our tax dollars (says the MSW).

I view this purchase as an investment in my future. And I am not thinking of the kind of future that has Kiddo making millions as a robotics engineer so that mommy can fly to Chicago for every home game at Wrigley Field and drink all night at the Cubby Bear. No, I am thinking much more short term - this is something that we can do together and work on our problem-solving skills. We can learn, have fun, and grow our relationship at the same time. I can also practice not being a control freak and learn patience from my son. I tend to over-engineer solutions at times, so children's inate abilty to keep it simple will counter my natural tendency to make things too complicated. Technology is melting the ice around my scrooge-touched heart. I am starting to look forward to Xmas.

P.S. At 10 o'clock tonight, I will have not smoked ANYTHING for 2 weeks. That's approximately 280 cigs not smoked, 3 days added to my life, and $50 saved. I should get some new shoes for that.

Why do We do What We do?

2006-12-11T08:42:00.000-06:00

Driving across the Midwest for three days and logging more hours behind the wheel than I did sleeping can make the mind do strange things. Sleep deprived and numb from looking at vast expanses of dead grass and plowed fields, my brain begins to wonder why I do this to myself. No one made me drive to Fairfield, Iowa and spend time with my co-worker who believes more in sustainable living (read: no car, doesn't like them) than in the church for which he works, so that I could be trained on how to manage my section of our website. He said he could have told me everything on the phone. He has never seen me try to learn without doing, but I have, and I am confident that the phone would not have worked.

I could have skipped the meeting in Des Moines and let 25 teens and adults argue amongst themselves about how much harrassment is OK and whether our "traditions" are really institutional hazing in a party dress. "Why do I love my work?" I wonder as I drive all over my district which consists of eight really big states that are sparsely populated and suffer from inclement weather nearly year-round. I work part-time, have no benefits per se, and sleep on cold, hard, concrete floors in buildings that seldom have wifi so that I can tell teens not to play baseball in the church with oranges while the bruised oranges cover the smell of their leaking pheremones and stinky feet.

This does not sound like a dream job, but I love it. I wish I could articulate why. In all honesty, I wish I knew why so that I could then explain it. I know it is the teens that really keep me going back. The adults I work with are pretty cool, but older than me for the most part and their kids are on their own. I learn from them and they welcome my presence as district staff. Volunteers are the heart of any organization, and I heart them. The teens are total weirdos - they are obnoxious, have hair of unnatural colors in dreadful cuts and styles, full of angst and self-conciousness hidden behind snarky comments, go to alternative high schools, and I really heart them.

We don't get the mainstream kids that play sports, shop at Abercrombie, or wonder if anal sex counts as sex - thus maintaining their "virginity" if they only take it up the bum. We get the kids who are in band, theatre, dropped-out, homeschoolers, geeks, not popular (at least not with mainstream parents), gay, bi, trans, straight, hypersexual but most likely abstinent. We get kids who are dying to prove to someone that they are individuals and can't be lumped in with anyone else. They are amazingly independent and incredibly in need of some care. They are just like I was when I was a high schooler, and I was in desperate need of a place where I could go and be my weirdo self and not feel bad about being so left of center. A place for weird people to fit in, like when carnies all live in the same trailer park.

I guess that is why I love my job. I get to be for someone else what I needed so badly for myself at that age. It's some sort of payback, or pay forward for Kiddo's future, so that safe spaces are perpetuated and we weirdos never have to feel alone.

Beigeville

2006-12-07T09:33:00.000-06:00

Yesterday the Princess had a play date with a classmate after kindeegarten and I retrieved her at 3:00 with just enough time to say hello, how are you, was she good? before shuttling off to pick up Kiddo at 3:25. I was lured into staying with presspot coffee and ginger snaps. Not just Archway ginger snaps, but the really thin crisp kind that a friend sent my hostess from Sweden, from whence she hails. And coffee so strong that my eyesballs were vibrating. Yummmmmmm.

Called the school and got Kiddo sent home on the bus with her older kids and kicked back and talked about a broad menagerie of topics: The use of color in homes, rostra bricks for pool construction, the mixed messages that young girls are bombarded with in our society, and her experience as a foreigner in the good ole USA after 9/11.

She and her American spouse had just relocated to Kansas from Sweden and were living in Overland Park while their house was being moved (yes, picked up from Lawrence and moved to Vinland) and had gone to a party at a house that was beige, surrounded by other huge, nondescript homes that were ecru, mushroom, and taupe. No one would speak to them about their opinions, their lives, the things that define who they are as people. She felt that no one wanted to know in case she and her husband weren't beige too. When people who aren't beige step into a beigehorhood, they might bring crazy notions with them - like putting up basketball goals in the driveway, or sitting on the front stoop to wave at folks as they zoom by sealed up in their SUV's. They have a volvo wagon that looks like a fish. Really. It is covered with scales and has a metal fin on top and has words on the side with a pictogram that represents a Swedish tongue twister that is something about six fish in a fish box. They are fabulously strange!

Please don't think that I am knocking everyone who lives in one of these subdivisions that has a big stone plaque at the border announcing to all that they have reached Stoney Glen or Fox Point. These places are just not for me, nor were they for my friend from Sweden. Her bright orange dining room with a kelly green table and low slung leather chairs that look like they were swiped from the Anchor Inn in Hutch just wouldn't go with beige. Nothing about her goes with beige.

Mixed Metaphors

2006-12-05T07:38:00.000-06:00

I was discussing with Sandusky the fact that I can't keep metaphors straight. I mix em up all the time. I understand what they mean, I even had to explain en espanol for a class what "two peas in a pod" was getting at. In Spanish-speaking countries in South America, you don't pull someone's leg if you are teasing them, you "take Mary by the hair". I really goof up the ones with birds: A bird in the hand should be killed with one stone. The early bird gets to sit in the bush.

As I was driving home from FSB Church last night, I was pondering the Baker Wetlands to my right. I often drive home on Haskell/East 1500/Douglas County 1055, which runs on the east side of the wetlands and has a frighteningly deep ditch full of murky water on my right. Yesterday during the daylight a backhoe from the county was pulling a snowplow out of the watery depths of the ditch, sending chills down my spine as I have great fear of this soggy canyon between me and the wetlands dyke . I am convinced that I will be dead in that ditch, drowning in the water that so many people are willing to fight for. In Summer, I think about how cool that water looks. I could just slip down into it like a baby kitten slips from its mama's womb, experiencing a sudden shock as my body gets jolted from the 90 degree heat to a comfortable yet chilling death bath. I am more scared of it in Winter, because I am convinced that if I didn't drown, I would slowly freeze as my fingers scratch at my seatbelt and door handle, trying to free me from the icy numbness.

Morbid obsession aside, I think alot about what kind of metaphor would describe my interest in this ditch. Gypsy was pushed to the edge of her patience with me a few years ago after I read Siddartha and obsessed about rivers as metaphors for life. "They are just rivers! you don't have to make them represent something!" If I attempt to transfer the river metaphor (flowing, changing path, always the same river but not the same water, blahblahblah) to the wetlands, it doesn't work so well. Maybe it represents life on an evolutionary scale: nothing exciting happens for centuries, the water slowly drains and is replaced at an imperceptably slow rate, diversity is healthy, bird shit accumulates.

I really like to look at the long legged water birds that spend their time at the wetlands. Gracefully picking their way thru the reeds with knees that bend the wrong way, they stretch their necks beneath the surface and gorge themselves on frogs and tadpoles. I took a quiz once in which I had to identify my favorite kind of animal. My choice was supposed to represent how I felt about myself as a sexual creature, but I did not know this until after I had identified my animal. I said birds because I like how they hop around, they are quirky, and fun to watch. How on earth would my fascination with birds have anything to do with my sexuality? I hate those stupid quizzes.

It has been over a week since I had a cigarette, and the smell of the smoke that wafted in to FSB last night was nauseating. I promise I won't become one of those self-righteous non-smokers who nags smokers all the time and thinks I am better because I no longer step outside every half hour to take care of my addiction (which I greatly enjoyed). I do have to practice some self preservation for awhile and remove myself from the temptation, so you won't find me on the porch on Mondays nights. I'll be inside staying warm and nic free.

130 hours and counting

2006-12-03T08:29:00.000-06:00

Yesterday was really hard. I tried to grab She-ra's smoke and just have a little sumpin-sumpin off it but she was too quick for me. Damn She-ra! Quick reflexes even when she's full of Miller Lite. I passed out on the sofa and missed a faboo party but desperately needed the sleep.

The Xmas parade was lovely even if it was greatly abbreviated. Based on the program that was being distributed that listed the entries and their hometowns, my guess is that alot of people were paralyzed by the snow that shut down everything to our southeast.

Our attempts to clear some tables for our use at Johnny's were to no avail. It didn't seem to matter how many inappropriate sexual phrases we bantered about too loudly, those women just would not leave any faster. KU sucked, Sandusky double-dipped (with permission), and Rick called us mother fuckers. I like a bar where the owner calls his customers names and asks them to come in on a different day when he's not so busy. We asked him to make Buy 1 get 1 Pizza on Wednesday instead of Monday so that we don't have to choose between bargain pizza and bargain beer. Maybe he listened.

The End of an Era

2006-12-02T08:55:00.000-06:00

Last night started as a pretty low key evening with me swinging by ye olde public library, getting some work done, running into friends, then parting ways to meet Goddess Going There at FSB for some beverages and to attempt to get a table in an hour. FSB was a zoo, as was the sidewalk outside since nearly every high-octane banjo lover was hanging around waiting for Splitlip Rayfield to start their second to last announced show ever at Liberty Hall, which sold out long ago. I was bummed. I had wanted to go.

Gypsy, TBI, and Sandusky subsequently showed up to join GGT and me for dindin, and in the throng of people attempting to stay warm in FSB we ran into various goddesses and their sundry menfolk. Dinner was great and we gave Sandusky plenty of shit for the cheesy precious moments wanna be picture on his blog and got up to leave. I was headed home, still not feeling SUPER, while the rest of the crew was headed to Pink Kitty for rabble rousing.

Remember how I said I went to bed grouchy and woke up grouchy yesterday? There was a direct correlation between my mood and someone else's behavior, and THAT someone knew it. That someone walked into FSB while I was putting my coat on to gimp 2 blocks to my car and stuck a SLR ticket into my face. I glanced at my friends, said "see ya later and have fun", kissed the Hubby (who had just then dropped way down on the shit list) and told him that I might even have sex with him when we got home (rainchecked it - I was exhausted and he had a Burrito King bag).

What a show, even with the absense of Truckstop Honeymoon who had been thwarted by the snowstorm that blanketed the Midwest. Found Hussy and her pal, lots of LBG folks, lots of people on whom tickets had been wasted, since they were so wasted they couldn't STFU or stay awake to enjoy the show. The mj was being pumped through the HVAC ducts - I swear. Ran into The Lovely Heather who said they had sold 950 tix for the evening, but it felt like more. And at one point pretty early in the set, when Eric asked for lauds for Kirk, everyone stood and cheered and I almost cried.

There is one more SLR show scheduled and sadly I will be in Iowa and can't head off to Wichita to take it in. At some point though you have to say goodbye and let go. The retirement of SLR feels kind of like an early movie screening, where the producers have put together several endings and run them past audiences to decide which one to really use as the final ending when they release the movie. Splitlip Rayfield may have several alternate endings - we'll just have to be patient and see which one they use.

107 hours with no smokey treats. I can do this!

Border Wars

2006-12-01T10:25:00.000-06:00

I woke up very grouchy. Perhaps this has something to do with me going to bed really grouchy.

The lack of nicotine in my body is taking its toll, and the weather only adds insult to injury when it come to my mood. At least the sun is shining today, and the Kiddo's dad is coming to get him at 1:30 since classes at Ottawa U got cancelled for the day, and PeeWee snottily said she didn't want to come to my house today. I can possibly get something done around here besides cook for children who complain constantly and clean up after cats who are having territory wars.

Hubby felt bad for the kitties because of the snow, so they all came in and could not share a catbox, so they took to the rest of the house, leaving treasures for me to clean up. Blake came in last night while I was nestled under the under the down comforter, enjoying my own bed and pillows rather than crappy hotel pillows and polyester sheets, jumped up on the bed and proceeded to bleed and leave ice chunks all over the damn bed.

This morning, after a decent night's sleep, I found yet another cat treasure delineating their turf, so all the cats got picked up and THROWN out the back door into a snowdrift. Mandy had ripped open a bag of garbage that had not migrated to the dumpster and left gnawed up bits of trash everywhere, but at least it wasn't the tampons she dug from the trash and savored like last week. Out she went, along with Walker who peed in the beanbag chair that he has claimed. I then went into the kitchen where I still can't find anything because someone else moved all my stuff, when all the tupperware lids leapt off a shelf and began attacking me. I threw them. I threw them all over the kitchen. I slammed them down and screamed at how much I fucking hated them for not being where they used to be and how dare they stick together and fall off the shelf. I felt better immediately. I am a thower; Not really a door slammer or much of a yeller, but throwing things feels good. It's the Passive-Aggressive aggressor in me.

I have now finished my pot of coffee and had my fill of The Weather Channel. Harley's bedding has been washed (he had an accident and goes to the MD on Monday to get checked out) and mine is in there right now. I have something to do tonight that does not involve people I work with OR people I am related to, and hopefully will not involve too much temptation to smoke. If I can get thru this weekend without smoking, I think I will be free and clear. Now if I can just stop the deluge of bodily eliminations from sending me over the edge...

Slippery When Wet

2006-11-30T18:37:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I rode in a very tiny Corolla with a very good driver to Omaha for a series of meetings having to do with teenagers . The weather sucked and we debated whether to postpone, but we pressed forward. After all, we were driving away from the freezing rain and sleet that were blanketing KC. I am not a good passenger in any weather, and I was operating on about 40 hours with no cigarettes. The makings of a socktopus sat in my lap, as I was trying to use the 3 hours wisely and occupy myself while the 3 of us gabbed about our jobs that have the same titles, even though the responsibilitites are vastly different.

The truck in front of us went off the road and bounced around on the median guardrail. We looked at each other nervously, called our traveling companion in a different car who was at least an hour ahead of us. She assured us that the conditions would improve shortly. We kept on. Soon the windshield wipers were turned off and we were almost going the speed limit, when suddenly we found ourselves sliding across the median, zigzagging toward the oncoming lanes, careening back thru the median, where we precariously paused at the edge of I-29 , then scooched back into the northbound lane and continued on to Omaha.

The whole thing probably took about 4 seconds; After about 5 minutes, I stopped shaking. Another minute later, J from the back seat said "What were we talking about?" and I replied, "I don't know, but I think I just swore alot. " In those 4 seconds I did not see my life pass before my eyes. I DID have the realization that I wanted a smokey treat, I DID thank goddess that J in the driver's seat was calm and a good driver, and I DID think to myself, "good grief, I am about to die and there is a vibrator in my backpack, but thank god they won't find me with any cigarettes."

Our 3 hour drive took about 4. The return drive was not so easy. Getting to KC was not so bad. It was the drive from the Plaza where my ice-encrusted car was waiting for me and the snow was falling thickly and not at all quietly that tested my non-smoker status. A good half an inch of ice covered the car. I could not open the driver's side door so I had go around and push it open from the inside. I had no ice scraper, no hat, no lunch (breakfast meeting was at nine and it was now 3:00), high heeled boots, stupid gloves, and a mother who would not quit calling my cell phone to ask me where I was.

It took an hour to get to K-10. I found 2 peanut butter Lindor balls in my purse that became my lunch. I called Gypsy, I called home, I called Gypsy again to discuss her progress down College Boulevard vs. my progress toward K-10. I called Hussy, who was right behind Gypsy but had to stop for gas (i may not have had anything else, but I did have a half tank of gas). I repeatedly rolled the window down so that I could reach around and yank the windshield wiper after every third swipe and try to knock the ice off it. As I crept away from the Plaza where every car in friggin KC was blocking an intersection, I searched for unsecured wireless networks on my laptop in the front passenger seat so that I could surf the weather online. As soon as I could find one to connect to, I was allowed to slip forward just enough to lose it. I was in hell. After a stop at the farm store in Lawrence for a new heated water bucket for the goaties and some ice melt, I arrived home. My 4 hour drive from Omaha to home took over 7.

Next week I have to go to Iowa for a coupla days. I was going to suggest that Kansas secede from our district that stretches from Kansas to Canada and join the one to the south of us that includes Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, SouthWestern Missouri, and MEXICO so that I don't have to drive north all the friggin time. Then I turned on the Weather Channel (Jim Cantore is almost as hot as Don Harman - what is it with me and meteorologists?) and saw what is going on south of us. I just need to move to Hawaii.

Nearly 72 hours without a cigarette.

Today will be a challenge

2006-11-29T08:56:00.000-06:00

It has been since Monday about 10 p.m. that I have not had any cigarettes. It helped that I felt like yakking all day yesterday and I am still kinda queasy this morning but that is not stopping me from downing a pot of coffee and dumping chipotle salsa all over my sauteed veggies. I'm a glutton for punishment.

I have to ride with other people today to Omaha for a series of meetings tonight and tomorrow morning, then come back with them. I hate winter, and I especially hate going anywhere when there is a winter storm advisory, but even more, I hate it when I am not behind the wheel. And I can't smoke all the way because 1) I quit and 2) I'll be in a car with two (other) non-smokers for at least 3 hours. My goal is to sit in the back seat and sew soctopii so that my time is used wisely.

I hear tell that Sandusky, Gypsy, and GB are all quitting with me. Hmmmmmmm. I can get thru the next coupla days easily enough - I have a boatload of work to do. The real test will come when I get a drink in hand and other people are smoking around me. Even right now with laptop in lap, giant mug of coffee at my side, and the weather channel telling what's in store, I could almost gag one down, but I can break this classical conditioning situation. It's the beer in one hand that knows that there is supposed to be a smokey treat in the other hand that will really push me to the edge of my willpower. How does one deal with an oral fixation, anyway?

Oh Gawd someone please shoot me

2006-11-28T11:40:00.000-06:00

I haven't said it in a long, long time. "I'll never drink again" has not come out of my mouth since way back in college. Not that I haven't earned myself some winner hangovers, I've just learned to shut up and take my lumps. Today I am not thinking about giving up my favorite poison, but I am thinking about laying down the lighter and not smoking anymore.

I have quit smoking several times over the years, with great success at least twice, but the problem is I really don't want to not smoke. Today, even thinking about having a smokey treat makes me run to the hurling throne just in case anything comes out when I dry heave. I smoked too much last night. I have a cigarette hangover.

I was warned by Sandusky that I either need to quit or come clean to Roxarita - all that ridiculous sneaking around on Thanksgiving was almost Keystone Cops. The kiddos are gonna figure out in a few years that I can be blackmailed to keep my mother in the closet if I don't do something about it. It's expensive, too. A carton of American Spirits goes for $50, and we go thru probably 2-3 cartons a month. That's some great shoes and handbags that I could be sporting, rather than a cloud of stinky smoke, a lung cookie-laced hack, and tiny lines around my mouth from all that butt sucking.

Adam quit cold turkey. He said he was an asshole for about 4 days and then he was done with it. I don't even smoke as much as he did. I can do this. I'll have the Kiddo for 2 weeks straight over Xmas before he jets off to NYC to see his Dad, so that will be a good time to not party quite so much and maybe forego the smokey treats. Please help me in this endeavor!

Thanksgivings and Misgivings

2006-11-22T07:46:00.000-06:00

We are upon the time of year that I look forward to most - when friends and family set aside their differences for a day (or not) and sit down together for an all-out gutbuster and the occasional knock down drag out family fight. My family never fights. We don't know how. We were all raised to suck it up when we were upset and turn all that anger into passive-aggressive bullshit. It makes for mellower Thanksgivings and family gatherings in general. Friends would return from family get togethers and tell the most outrageous stories about drunk grandparents hurling insults at their beloved offspring, hairpulling twin aunts who couldn't be nice for one day, and bratty cousins who were baked all day. So foreign to me!
Some of my favorite Thanksgiving memories:
* As a child we met in the basement of Carrie Nation's home in Medicine Lodge, Kansas because we wouldn't fit in any of our houses. I barely remember toddling around and being given fruit from the amaretto sours of the grown ups.
* The time we got my dementia-touched grandma drunk and played Monopoly all day. We were in Conway in the house I grew up in and Grandma had moved in with us because she and Granddad were beating each other after 50 years of marriage. I had never liked that woman (not a fun, cookie baker of a grandma) and that day I kinda softened to her since she was tipsy and not so mean.
* Sometime around 1992 I went to California with Harley's daddy for a wedding. We drove to Ensenada, Mexico and spent Thanksgiving with friends on the beach in their rented house. It was very strange for me since I was young, clueless, surrounded by older people who were hard partiers, and we were all nestled into this amazing house on the beach while stray dogs starved at our doorsteps and the locals were scraping to get by. Definitely a punctuation point on being thankful.
* The Thanksgiving after I got divorced. I hated my family and they hated me (all passively, of course). Boyfriend and I had Thanksgiving dinner and festing at Brenda and Big Harley's house on 6th Street. Jenna's then-boyfriend Gary knocked a glass of red wine over on Bren's granny's tablecloth, so I covered for him and blamed it on the stray cat they had taken in. It worked, Jenna and Gary got married, and we confessed a couple of years ago that it wasn't the cat.
* Five years ago when Sean and I had just started publicly dating and he and his mom came and joined us. He was not a big fan of Thanksgiving until that point, when he realized that you really can just get together with the people you want to be with and not be forced to hang out with folks who make you unhappy.
* Three years ago when Berger was with us for Thanksgiving. "Berger" was Elvis Berger, a World World II vet and retired math teacher from Lawrence who had alienated his family by being an unpleasant old cuss, so I took care of him. He and Mark talked military, Lisa pulled the Jew card on him, and he smiled and ate pie all day long. He died the next summer and is buried in Oak Hill Cemetery. Was that the same year that Shay drove the 4 wheeler into a fence and tried to decapitate himself?
* Two years ago when we over-served Shay and convinced him that it was hot and he needed to take his clothes off. We then posed him with my shearling Santa hat and The Joy of Cooking so that all you can read is "Joy" in this obviously drunk, mostly naked guy's arms who looks like he had an all night ski party (sniff sniff) with Santa's elves.
* Tomorrow. I am sure that by this time Friday something really exciting and fabulous will have happened. Gypsy will call from Dallas, Lauren will call from Southern California. Uncle John's quiet demeanor and practical jokes will be sorely missed. First-timers will join us for the holiday - which starts at noon today - and some folks will make their last appearance here as they move on down the road to different callings. Others will continue a tradition that began many years ago for my family in the basement of a member of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. How far we have come from our roots.

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone. Be well.

Family tradition

2006-11-16T21:38:00.000-06:00

Last Christmas I started a tradition that crazy Aunt Rosie will make each of her nieces, nephews, and her own kiddo a sock creature from the "original rockford red heel" sock. Last year they all got the original sock monkey. To carry on this new tradition, this year they will all get the socktopus, pictured at right. This is what happens to crafty, homecki types when they are doped up on prescription narcotics and they can't get off the sofa without strategic advance planning.

I go to the doc Friday to learn what will happen to the cast on my leg, and hopefully rid myself of these damn crutches which are going to get me more hurt than I already was.

Two good things

2006-11-16T11:17:00.000-06:00

Hound dogs are a good thing.
Walker is a Tennessee Walker Treeing Coonhound mix that I got from the humane society about 4 years ago, and he really knows how to chill. Please take inspiration from his laziness. I certainly have.

The other good thing is on Marisa's blog, so go look at her Fork You blog (from yesterday) which is a cooking show she is podcasting. She'll teach you how to make sushi Philadelphia style.

Regression

2006-11-16T09:01:00.000-06:00

I have discovered that every morning at 9:00 a.m., when Montel takes over after my beloved Fox4 News, I can click the remote a mere four times to wander down memory lane. That's right, I watch Sesame Street for an hour while I write, knit, pick my toes, whathaveyou. Luis is currently carrying a crib with Gordon while Elmo and Big Bird interrogate them about adoption. The child to be adopted is destined to arrive at Sesame Street today. I can't wait to see how they do this - you know, deal with diversity and the rainbow-colored cast on SS. OMG, Bob is on and he is ancient! Oh, here's the baby... and it is a boy from Latin America. He is being adopted by a single woman who appears to be of Anglo ancestry. So on the screen, we have: Asian male, Latino male, African American male, Latina female, caucasian female, caucasian male, Latino bambino, Zoey Monster, Telly Monster, Cookie Monster, Elmo, Burt, a talking dog, and Big Bird. I challenge you to find as diverse a group of creatures interacting without conflict in any setting.
I am trying to think back to the days of Mr. Looper's corner store and determine if SS was as diverse when I was young and was expected to watch it, or has it changed dramatically? You have probably heard about the more newsworthy changes to the show: Everyone can see Snuffalupagus now (not seeing him was teaching children that grownups wouldn't believe them when they were on the receiving end of bad touches); Mr Hooper/Looper died in reality, so they wrote it into the show to deal with loss; Cookie Monster doesn't eat cookies constantly (I always thought he was a bad influence anyway - teaching kids how to perfect an eating disorder by having his throat removed); and Oscar the Grouch is married and has children.
Celebs vie for the chance to guest star on SS, more so than for the SNL host spot, and the writing on SS is better than SNL in my opinion. My favorite episode is where Jamie Lee Curtis introduces Elmo as a new character in the menagerie of colorful, animated fluff.
Obvious changes I am noticing today:
*I am learning sign language - a new word every day, Today's word: exercise.
*A dancing millipede just sang to me about exercise.
*"One of these things doesn't belong" tells me to get up and move; Sitting around doesn't belong.
*There seems to be less emphasis on sharing and learning to count and read, lots of emphasis on cultural diversity, acceptance of differences, and dealing with obesity issues.
* Characters, human and muppet, of all levels of handicapability, family composition, and ethnic background but nobody overweight other than Big Bird, who could be well within the acceptable weight range for a canary of his height. I cannot find documentation on the USDA mypyramid site for him.
*The Noodle Brothers are dancing - a bang over the head about exercise.

I've noticed the McDonald's commercials that air on Nick and Disney stations are all about Ronald being athletic and they really don't try to overtly sell any food to kids. Some of the kids at church indicated that they get the damn message - Move it! Get off your asses! They are tired of hearing it. They get it at school all day long. When did education stop being about the 3 R's and turn toward obesity (school lunches are notoriously fat-filled and carb-loaded), how to turn your parents in for drug use, and using puppets to teach good touches vs. bad? I guess the assumption is that the parents don't have the time, the skills, or the wherewithal (include their perceived responsibility to address the need, which may or may not exist) to face all of the crap that kids have to deal with in our current social construct.

I'll end my rant with one of my fave SS songs, which I have on CD and they just sang: We Are All Earthlings...
Some of us have feathers
Some of us have fins
Some of us are furry
And some of us have skins
We swim and hop and slither
And leap and soar and run
And we all live together
On a planet of the sun

We are all earthlings
We are all earthlings
Spinning around together
On a planet of the sun

We live in the desert
We live inside a tree
We live high in the mountains
Or deep beneath the sea
We live in tents and cabins
In houses just for one
And we all live together
On a planet of the sun

We are all earthlings
We are all earthlings
Spinning around together
On a planet of the sun

Floating down a river
Swinging through the trees
Climbing up a mountain
Going with the breeze
All of us can have a happy healthy place to be
If we can float and swim and climb in earthling harmony

We are all earthlings
We are all earthlings
Spinning around together
On a planet of the sun

Spinning around together
On a planet of the sun

Thank goddess for cooking shows

2006-11-15T14:47:00.000-06:00

So I am offically dying of boredom. As much as I like to lay around, this is not fun. I stink. I have been in my nightshirt for way too long now. I watched all my Sex and the City tivos and I have been wowed by Ming Tsai, Paula Dean, Emeril, Rachel, that skinny italian chick with the enormous head, Bobby Flay (I want to flay him) and an assortment of lesser known foodies who want to teach me how to have a fuss-free Thanksgiving. PLEASE! Thanksgiving is all about the fuss.
I changed my phone ring tone to a rooster crowing because I thought it was appropriate, but all it does is scare me.
I went to Costco yesterday and there is absolutely no room in this house for one more grocery. I am doing my best to NOT eat everything in sight, and it helps that I can hardly get up to roam the kitchen opening and reopening the frig to see what looks like it wants to be eaten. I got smart and bought 15 pounds of grapefruit so I can tediously peel each one section by section because I can't stand the skin that envelops each segment.
Ming is cooking a Hawaiian fish once reserved for royalty called moi. I don't think I could eat it since it is too close to moist, one of the words I dislike. Look back to Oh, How I love words from February 23 to review the list of words I like and words I dislike.
And blogger made me upgrade to Beta Blogger. I don't like change, and I especially don't like change that benefits someone other than me. It appears that this change benefits google and blogger and does not really do anything helpful for the users of either. I guess that is what you get when you use other people's stuff for free.
My ankle feels really crooked and keeps making me think of Misery and that scene where Kathy Bates hobbles James Caan and smacks the shit out of his feet with a sledge hammer, snapping his ankles in one of the most horrifyingly personal attacks I have ever seen in film.
Wow, I like loritab.... and ducks.

So a funny thing happened on the way to the kitchen

2006-11-15T07:24:00.000-06:00

Good morning! Some of you know that I have insomnia. I wake up nearly every night from about 1 to 3, and I obsessively clean, or watch TV. Last night, right on time I awoke at 12:57 and decided to bake the cookies that I am sending to the UUA Washington office (they bought me in a service auction) because I had already cleaned the pantry Tuesday morning. A slight miscalculation of the stairs and next thing I knew, I was laying (lying? - I hate that verb) through the threshold into the mud room, banging on the floor for Sean to come up from the basement and drag my black and blue ass to the hospital. (edit: Sean thinks i made it sound like he did not hear "the massive thump" as I hit the floor. He heard. I was banging the floor as I dropped several F Bombs) Mom came over and stayed all night, and she just made me bacon, eggs, and hash browns for breakfast - this rules! No one has made me breakfast without me having to pay them in years! She probably used metal on my teflon pans - oh well.
So, I am full of loritab and ibuprofen, and I am already hating crutches, and I have a minor break in my ankle with a fiberglass cast immobilizing the whole thing. I need to go to Dr. Schrader to see how we'll proceed but I am pretty sure that I won't be able to drive for a few days since I really can't move my toes. Please come see me! Please chat with me online! On gmail and YIM I am beckihomecki. You might think that I am used to being home alone most of the day since I do 80% of my work in my chair, but this is going to be hard for me. No treadmill, no up and down the stairs a thousand times, no running to the school 3x a day to deposit and retrieve kiddos, no obsessive cleaning of the coffee pot or refrigerator. Oh, I am bored already. I'll post what happens on Montel later.
So Friday - not sure if I'll be up, but I'll bathe nonetheless. David is coming over to smoke some briskets for the Last Tailgate, so feel free to come over Friday after work and entertain me with Yahtzee/Kniffel and dominoes. Maybe I can even pull out a jigsaw puzzle. Ohhhhh, I hate this.

What do you call those pills that make you never have to sleep and you can get lots of stuff done?

2006-11-14T19:21:00.000-06:00

That is what I asked the Hubby a while back when I felt like I had too many things to get done and not enough time to do them in. He refused to answer. Good call.
Reading Gypsy's account of her list-making obsession reminded me of a conversation I had recently about mental illness and mania. My question is this: is it possible to be just the right amount of manic? Can a person be deliriously happy all the time without being thought of as a clueless twit or someone perpetually wearing rose coloured glasses? One of the main points of the DSM IV-TR Edition is that a person could have all of the indicators for any illness addressed in the DSM but if these indicators do not cause the person any problems, it doesn't friggin matter.

So I have felt manic lately, but I don't think it is causing any major problems; it helps me get things done, and I like getting things done. It happens every year about this time - the flurry of all the parties compounded with the stress of working for a church during the holidays. Especially a church that calls the Sunday before Xmas "the Christmas Program" and then tells me I am focussing too much on Christianity. Who's crazy?

Etymology lesson: Mania comes from the Greek mainesthai "to rage, go mad," and from this same root, we got maenad, the name used to refer to the female members of Dionysus' orgiastic cult.
From Answers.com: "In Greek mythology, Maenads were female worshippers of Dionysus, the Greek god of mystery, wine and intoxication, and the Roman god Bacchus. The word literally translates as "raving ones". They were known as wild, insane women who could not be reasoned with.
The mysteries of Dionysus inspired the women to ecstatic frenzy; they indulged in copious amounts of violence, bloodletting, sexual activity, self-intoxication, and mutilation. They were usually pictured as crowned with vine leaves, clothed in fawnskins and carrying the thyrsus, and dancing with wild abandon."

So somehow we ladies made a leap from being slutty partiers with a Greek sugardaddy and a penchant for mob behavior, to being mentally ill women who need depakote in order to function on a day-to-day basis. What changed?

Could have been the whiskey

2006-11-13T09:16:00.000-06:00

Might have been the gin.

Remember that great party song from high school - Wasn't that a Party?

I woke up this morning with that song ringing in my head. Although I never drink gin or whiskey anymore, I sure had me some tequila, hot damn, and my beverage of choice - barley pop. I'm not sure if anything else passed my lips, but it wouldn't surprise me if it did. Despite the cold, the wind, and the snow/rain, dozens of friends showed up, and some fire department vols from Willow Springs Township. We didn't burn up anything really important that was not destined for the fire - that tree in the goat pasture smoldered throughout Saturday and finally died down.

Thanks for coming, everyone. You left some things behind:
Sandra Boynton book Moo, Baa, and La La La!;
A very cute stuffed monkey;
Cobalt blue thinsulate glove, on the smallish side;
Gray Eddie Bower wool jacket, size M, with one glove in one pocket and nested gloves in the other;
Gray nylon glove with black trim, largish;
metal cake pan;
some other assorted dishes (some of you know this will make me crazy).

Update: A platter with "count your blessings" on it;
A pillow in a light blue case;
a clear, colorless, glass baking dish about 7 x 11.

That's just what I found in the house. I haven't even roamed the grounds yet.
Lemme know what else you lost here and I'll take a closer look around.

See you at FSB tonight for Jim's birthday!

Oh Zephyr winds that blow on high,

2006-11-10T13:51:00.000-06:00

Lift me now so I may fly.

It's the day I look forward to every year - almost as much as Thankgiving.

Thanks to Don Harman (whom I still love even though he just returned from his one year anniversary trip to Vegas), who I neglected to invite, we have been cursed today with 15 mile an hour winds. Poor piglet.

We'll figure something out: smaller fire, several smaller fires, burning down house, etc.

The show must go on - who is bringing the elephant to burn in effigy?

It's a great day to be a Liberal on the high plains

2006-11-08T08:32:00.000-06:00

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! We have slain the Republicans!!!!

I'm no political analyst, and I am pretty pumped about yesterday's poll results. Aside from my incredible friend Goddess Going There not winning in the **** district in her battle for state rep (She came damn close - she rocks!), I pretty much got what I wanted. Not only did my candidates win, I have renewed faith in the people of my state, and nation. We came out to vote in record numbers, we fought some incredibly hard battles, we had a near-unknown candidate beat the incumbent who had the Prez stumping for him (maybe not such a good idea to have W and Dick on your side these days), even the nutty Missourians passed ALL stem cell research!

And best of all, Phreaks like Phil Kline have been told how we feel about their misguided attempts to save us from ourselves. Please, fight real crime, stay out of our medical records. Even our neighbors to the North in S Dakota showed that not everyone in the heartland is a conservative kook bent on controlling everyone else's behavior, or making them pay unheard of emotional costs to atone for seeming indiscretions - those sluts should have to raise their babies - right? Especially the ones that dressed so whoorishly that some poor guys had to go and rape them because they were driven wild with passion for their bodacious tatas.

So, my attitude is that things are looking up again: Sarge will get in to Topeka tomorrow, and hopefully we'll get the need to control the Middle East out of our blood soon; We'll have the bonfire Friday and some sort of metaphorical phoenix will rise from the ashes; and the Jabberwock has been slain by the snicker-snack of the vorpal blade of Reason.

Overheard in my truck today...

2006-11-05T17:02:00.000-06:00

First 13-year old Girl: So, what do you think of weeds?
Second 13-year-old girl: Weeds are hard to get rid of.
Me: Are you two talking about boys?
First 13 YOG: We're not very subtle, are we?
Me: Don't worry about it, the boys will never figure it out.

They then explained to me that some boys are flowers, even though some are not the most fragrant or beautiful in the meadow, and some are just weeds - hard to get rid of and growing in places you don't want them to be.

So would the boys figure it out? My first guess is that they were talking about the maryjane, but they are too clever to call it weed, and I am guessing they would never talk about it in front of me. It takes a few more years of trustbuilding before my teens talk about partying in front of me. I scored points years ago with my then-seniors when I turned them onto vitamin B to help with the hangover factor. I figured I could tell them not to party, and they would think I was a ninny and do it anyway, or I could help them recover and get their butts to their jobs and classes.

I struggle with the hypocrisy of drug use and drinking. I partied my ass off, mostly just drinking (thank goddess they invented wine coolers when I was in HS - praise Bartle and James), got great grades, held a job, did extracurriculars, didn't die in a firey wreck, and who the hell would I be if I told my high schoolers to not drink? I sure as hell am not going to encourage it, and I'm not the cool older friend who buys them beer. I honestly think they drink less than they smoke, since the cheeb is easier for them to get, and has less noticeably negative side effects. One of my 9th graders told me last week that kids in his school were doing heroin in the bathroom. HEROIN! What is going on?!! I don't expect every kid to be in their church youth group (if they even have a church/synagogue/coven/whathaveyou), become an Eagle Scout, get straight A's or those other things that are supposed to identify "good kids", but can't they just be kids?

So I spent the afternoon again wrangling teenagers, trying to keep my Mom from ruining all their fun, and listening to one of my friends complain about his father-in-law, the retired marine who forgets that everyone else is not a marine. My mom bought the youth group in the church auction to come out to her house and do some yard work. They drug downed branches around and threw them into the truck for the burn heap, flirted, ate, raked leaves when one of them lost a ring in the grass, and goofed off. At one point they were throwing leaves and jumping in piles of them and Mom said, "They're acting like children." I had to remind her that they are children. They are supposed to act like that, not shoot up heroin in their high school bathroom.
Not exactly what I was hoping for in a Sunday afternoon, but OK nonetheless. What I was really looking for was a beer, followed by a nap. I hope that that the teens learn as much from me as I do from them, and I can always sleep when I'm dead.

And the winner is....

2006-11-01T08:14:00.000-06:00

in the category for Cutest Viking....
The Kiddo.

Aren't you glad he's not a Golem?

He's already decided that next year he wants to be a gladiator, so that I can work on that costume early, and not the day before it is needed.

So, back to planning for Bonfire, Thanksgiving, and The Brewers' Guild Holiday Bash. So many parties, so little time.

Hollow Weenie

2006-10-31T10:00:00.000-06:00

That's right. I am the Empty Hotdog of October. I hate Halloween. I don't get it. I get costume anxiety. I make myself crazy every year trying to make sure that the Kiddo has a great costume, mostly made by my hands, so that he can covet the costume purchased at Walmart by a mom that had no time or just doesn't give a shit. I had that shitty costume growing up, and a mother who wouldn't let us cover our faces and always thought someone was slipping razor blades into our treats and trying to snatch us on the "scariest" night of the year. The only thing making the night scary was my mother's paranoia. One year I was a flower. My mother wrapped me in green fabric so I couldn't move my arms, then stuck some fabricky-elastic thing on my head. I hated it! People thought I was a pickle.

The Kiddo wanted to be Golem, from Lord ofthe Rings. I vetoed it. There was no way I was letting my gorgeous perfect angel be a groveling, slimey, OCD creature with a limited vocabulary. He finally settled on Gimli the Dwarf, from the same showcase of cinema. Someone suggested he be Gimli, our cat, which I thought was much funnier, but I had already made a red beard and didn't have time to make a black mangey cat suit.

No, I don't really hate Halloween. It is just the gateway holiday to Thanksgiving, which is really more my style. Lots of eating, lots of drinking, lots of hanging out with friends. "But Rosie", you might be thinking, "that's what we do on Halloween." Yes, but we don't get days off of work for Halloween, and we don't stuff chickens inside of other creatures only to then be stuffed into a turkey and presented as a treasure of culinary extraordinariness, when really, if we found that thing in the barnyard we'd be very worried and totally grossed out. Yeah, I am looking forward to Thanksgiving, with the traditional drinking all night on Turkey Day Eve, and the attempts to get Shay naked and snap pictures for Xmas cards. Tryptophan comas and lots of football. And the Macy's Parade on TV. And it's a totally American holiday, by timing, that is. Not that I am a jingo about our holidays, but is kinda cool knowing that all across the U.S., families (of all ilks and pedigrees) are sitting down together to celebrate abundance, whether they have it or not.

So if you want to join us for Thanksgiving, give a shout. All are welcome. As for Halloween, have a safe time liquor-treating or whatever it is that you will do. Watch out for snatchers and stumbling pickles, and the paranoid mothers lurking in the shadows.

Fall's Last Hurrah

2006-10-30T09:00:00.000-06:00

Yesterday was one of those amazing days that you couldn't have ordered up perfectly even if it was on the specials menu. It was glorious. Not only did it follow a great tailgate, an evening with a friend visiting from Spain whom I had not see in years, but I got an extra hour on Sunday morning - not to sleep - so that I could write the sermon that I needed to deliver at 9 a.m. Somehow there things always work out for me, and I accomplished what I was attempting: making a roomful of stodgy intellectuals let down their guards and weep in public. SUCCESS! Of course, I had to weep a little myself, but I was able to bite my lip and stare at the floor and scrape myself back into a pile, and get thru the rest of the annual Dia de los Muertos service that I run.

Afterward, I hung out with the Sunday school kids and the high school group, throwing hedge balls while tricking them into cleaning up the church yard. Loaded them up in two cars, and drug them and 2 fourth graders to Louisburg Cider Mill on its last day of the corn maze and punkin patch. I was having so much funI even ate a cider donut - something I would even think about doing if I weren't surrounded by a million families from Johnson County sending me into a crowd-induced panic, and the hormone-bags of teens that I was chaperoning.

And that was the best part. Watching 3 teenage boys and two 13-year-old-girls vie for each other's attentions. They came up with every game possible to find excuses to hug, touch, and maul each other. The smell of the pheremones in my truck was overwhelming - I was gagging! Finally got them out of the corn maze where I am sure they were working at getting pregnant ("not on my watch" I kept telling my chaperoning cohorts) and off to the mongolian barbecue in O.P. They were getting tired - in general, and of coming up with clever repartee to woo the opposite gender. The girls made a LONG trip to the restroom together which did not go unnoticed by anyone in the restaurant, and I noticed their hair was straightened up and fresh lip gloss had been applied. At last, we were back on the road for home, while A and W sat in the back seat, closer than they had to with quiet longing hanging between them.

An absolutely marvelous day. If you can make yourself do it (and they keep their shoes on so you don't have to smell their feet) a day hanging with high schoolers can be a bittersweet way to spend that last really good day of Fall. And we got free punkins!

Now he's gone and done it

2006-10-27T09:24:00.000-05:00

Here it sit in my disheveled kitchen, lukewarm coffee in one hand, no cigarette in the other. That is a problem. The hubby took my pack last night and I am left stranded for the day smokeless. Usually not a problem, since I hardly ever smoke during the day, but today is different. Today my day began coming into a kitchen that has been totally reset. After four years of living in MY house, the hubby decided he couldn't find anything and went and rearranged the kitchen cupboards. I am lost. I am a stranger in a strange land. I can't hide in the living room in front of the TV because the carpets are still wet from the cleaner being here yesterday. So the dogs and I are trapped on hard sufaces that hold the jumbled up mess of our culinary lives.

To top off the morning (ohgodwhatwillhappentherestoftodayohshit), Princess Andrea showed up bawling her eyes out about her breakfast and the Hubby ran one of our cars into the other of our cars. Yeah! Rightfuckingon! At least we had taken the rental back and retrieved Big Blue from Jim Clark Morons. Not that it's fixed - noooooooo. The parts will be in on Tuesday so that they can redo the transmission again. Never buy a Dodge, never buy it at Jim Clark, and if you forget the first 2 rules and do them anyway, always buy the extended warranty.
So Beware out there today. There is something funky in the air, and you can't dance to it.
And Happy Weekend before Halloween! There should be some good parties and haunted houses going on... but my house is scary enough for me right now, thankyouverymuch.

verb it

2006-10-21T14:20:00.000-05:00

I love taking words that aren't verbs and making them into verbs. Is there a word for this process? "Reverse gerunding"? That was one of the best parts of Calvin and Hobbs. Calvin was always verbing words.
I have a new favorite website that inspired me to write this morning....
slangsite.com
I was just sitting here killing time after writing tomorrow's sermon in my PJ's, sucking down full-caffeine coffee, jittering, and chain smoking, when I perused the "M" category and found something I needed to share!

"megan: to laugh until liquid comes out of one's nose
Example: When he told his joke, Wendy meganed all over the lunch table"

How perfect is that!?

So I got to looking more....
"Heather: A popular, controlling person. Inspired by the movie _Heathers_.
Example: The head cheerleader of our high school is a Heather"

"verbicide: An act of word destruction; i. e., a word ceases to exist or loses meaning due to the act
of an individual. For example, some would consider the act of verbing to be verbicidal.
Example: Valley girls haved used the word like so inappropriately for so long that I would
like to charge them with verbicide."

Sadly, there were no especially fun definitions for "rosie", "lulu", "amy", "gyspy", and I even looked to see if "tomasek" was there, but it just hasn't caught on, yet.

There was also this:
"verbology: The study, science, or practice of creating new words.
Example: I decided to utilize my verbology skills, so I logged on to pseudodictionary.com."

Can I get a PhD in that?

What's going on?

2006-10-15T20:47:00.000-05:00

Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that people are behaving differently (i.e., assholish) lately?

Honestly, it could just be me, so I really need to know.

I just keep thinking to myself, "what's going on?", which got me to singing the Marvin Gaye hit from 1971 that was penned as a protest song addressing Vietnam, drug abuse, poverty, and oppression. He made history with it. Where is our current-day Marvin Gaye, asking us without attacking, with a calming voice, WTF is going on? The frenzy of it all is making my head vibrate to an inaudible pitch, and I can't believe that I am the only one who is freaked out, geeked out, stressed, messed, and continually on the verge of totally losing my cool.

My friend Marisa'a sister is the cool folk rocker chick that I always wanted to be. Her modern day protest song/look at American society today can belistened to at:
http://www.neilyoung.com/lwwtoday/lwwsongspage.html
It is definitely worth your time. Last time I checked she was at #20 on the list. Her name is Raina Rose and the song is Nursery Rhymes.

And in case you can't just sing it off the top of your head, here's Marvin Gaye, who left us much too early.

Mother, mother
There's too many of you crying
Brother, brother, brother
There's far too many of you dying
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today - Ya

Father, father
We don't need to escalate
You see, war is not the answer
For only love can conquer hate
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today

Picket lines and picket signs
Don't punish me with brutality
Talk to me, so you can see
Oh, what's going on
What's going on
Ya, what's going on
Ah, what's going on

In the mean time
Right on, baby
Right on
Right on

Father, father, everybody thinks we're wrong
Oh, but who are they to judge us
Simply because our hair is long
Oh, you know we've got to find a way
To bring some understanding here today
Oh

Picket lines and picket signs
Don't punish me with brutality
Talk to me
So you can see
What's going on
Ya, what's going on
Tell me what's going on
I'll tell you what's going on - Uh
Right on baby
Right on baby

Vanity,

2006-10-13T16:55:00.000-05:00

Thy name is burnin'.

Friday, November 10th, Sundown.
My house.
Childcare provided, but they'll take tips.
BYOB. That last "B" means booze and burnables.

Camping encouraged.

Anything else?

Hope you can make it!

These dreams go on when I close my eyes

2006-10-12T10:21:00.000-05:00

I woke at 7:00 this morning, which is a half hour earlier than normal, and also odd since I was up well past midnight with 2 cups of coffee and 2 red beers in me. I made myself wake up because I was having one of my airplane dreams. I only have 2 kinds of recurring dreams - tornadoes and plane crashes. I'll address the tornado dreams some other time. I am never in the plane crash, but I watch them helplessly.
In this one, I was across the road from the house I grew up in (which no longer exists) with my Dad (who exists in memory... deceased 5 years), talking to some hunters. We saw 2 air force jets take off strangely away from us, then minutes later, 2 passenger jets, one larger than the other and joined at the hip (really) came hurtling from the sky and were obviously going to crash very close to us. They skidded into my dad's jobsite (our house came with the job), which was an underground storage facility for natural gas and other petroleum products and not a good place to be crashing any planes. Huge flames ensued.
Harley and Andrea were asleep in the house across Hiway 56 so I ran to the house to get them (they were fine - scared, but fine) and Dad ran to his office. By the time I found all these lost children and mothers (no male survivors except wee ones) wandering around on my lawn and got them cared for, I could not find any flames, firetrucks, Dad or his employees, or any sign of the catastophe other than a big burned skid mark leading to Dad's workplace and some mangled wreckage that used to be where he worked.

I looked at some different dream interpretation sites, and I am pretty good about figuring these things out myself, but I am curious what other people think this all means. So have at it, for fun.
Oh, I forgot... I have snake dreams when I am mad at the man in my life. I dream that there is a bad snake in the house and I am not afraid of it, but I know that it needs to be put out of the house. It hides and sometimes bites my hand, but it isn't poisonous so I don't fear it.

You CAN go back, but no one's there

2006-10-10T09:00:00.000-05:00

Harley and I just spent the weekend at White Memorial Camp on Council Grove Resevoir, a camp complete with cabins and dining hall owned by the Kansas-Oklahoma Conference of the United Church of Christ. This is important because this is the place that I spent one week every summer for eight years. This place is the site of some of the most meaningful moments in my life. Camp is the place you get to go and reinvent yourself. I could go to camp and be slightly less dorky than I was where I came from. I could finally hang out with people who didn't know I was the largest girl in my school, which didn't take much since everyone else was especially thin but I stuck out at an enormous size 11. Talk about your messed up body image.
I could go listen to music that wasn't the same old crap being played at home, because there were kids from Oklahoma City, and Topeka, and KC, and Wichita. This was a big deal for those of us from rural Kansas who seldom got to go more than an hour from home without the parents having dragged you to wherever they thought you needed to be or having taken the bus there - and that usually meant a football or basketball game against some equally po-dunky school also in the middle of nowhere.

So I spent the weekend at the place that I have been scared of returning to for 20 years. Scared because of the ghosts that I thought would be there. Not much had changed - the dining hall has carpet now, the Point is overgrown with scrub and you can't get down to the lake, there is a low-ropes course permanently built on the site, they changed the name of one of the cabins. I slept in Big Red, like I did my last summer there. We carved punkins - me and about 15 kids - on the same back porch where I gave Ken from Topeka a BJ while we slept in a puddle of other teenagers. I walked past the spot where I kissed Mike Conrad from Gaylord, Kansas, and I barely paused. We had a campfire and I handed out s'mores fixins at the spot outside of Green cabin where I downed a jug of Lord Calvert with Toby and Blair and we somehow didn't die of alcohol poisoning. I took a group of children to the Vespers chapel and they proceeded to play "minister" at the pulpit, not realizing that is the place I realized I was an atheist. The ghosts that I expected to haunt me really weren't present. Perhaps I was away so long that they got tired of waiting and went on their way. Perhaps their invitations got lost in the mail. Perhaps they were never there to begin with.
I plan on returning there next summer when we rent the camp for a week-long family event for UU's, and Harley wants to come too. There is a strange full circleness to the whole idea of taking my kiddo with me and knowing that he'll have some of the same kinds of powerful experiences that I did. Hopefully not EXACTLY the same kinds that I have shared with you here, but the kinds where he develops relationships in which he can experiment a bit with being someone different than the kid who people at home think he is. That is one of the beauties of camp.

Living vicariously through my son

2006-10-03T20:36:00.000-05:00

Can you tell that I grew up with a room that had multiflecked gold shag carpet and brown panelling on the walls. The folks said that the panelling would hide thumbtack holes and the carpet would hide dirt. So, now I am having the childhood room that I never got. Mine probably really would have had horses painted all over it, or unicorns - not sea creatures, but the idea is that it looks like a place that an 8-year-old would want to be. I have to admit that I am pretty darn proud of myself for having finished this project, and I think I did a really great job, to boot. You'll have to check it out up close when you come out to the bonfire. It's November 10th. Be there.

On a Bender

2006-10-02T22:17:00.000-05:00

I love Futurama. I am watching right now. I watch at least once a day, usually with the 8-year-old son. Lately I have felt like Bender, the endearing clepto/alky robot who was built to bend. When Bender runs low on alky, he just doesn't function well. I have been low on party time as of late and also am not functioning well. Even thinking of this made me worried about myself. Does wanting to go get loaded with my pals make me an alcoholic? Crap - I just blew the keg of Rosie's Riveting Rye as I paused to refresh the Dala-mug. Anyway, I decided that I do not have a problem with The Drink, but rather I have a problem with The Gab. I miss my friends. I need to do some serious sitting around pounding beers and catching up, especially on all the old stories that we always tell that I haven't heard in a while.
I was lamenting with Gypsy earlier tonight that we are suddenly acting very responsibly: task-mistressing allthedamntime. I joked over the weekend (working in Iowa City) with a person that I met who was fasting, that I am dabbling in a spiritual practice I call sleep deprivation. Like fasting, it puts your mind in a very different place. Fasting is supposed to cut away the superficial flesh of one's daily routine, so that the faster can experience life in their bones. Not sleeping can do the same thing, right? What can bring one more in tune to the mundane cycles of daily living than going thru the motions while one is in a detached state of somnambulance? It's like a chance to step outside of yourself and watch yourself behave in the most vulnerable (to our own weirdnesses and impulses) and preposterous of ways! Like when I started whining at church Sunday about how my brain feels like swiss cheese and my thoughts keep falling out the holes to a man who I knew had suffered a horrible, debilitating brain injury when a steel rod got thrown through his skull and was then successfully removed. I just watched from right outside myself as I said more and more stupid things to this kind, gentle, man, who told me I was under a lot of stress and probably needed to back off a bit on the workload. He was full of Grace. I was full of caffeine. I wanted to be full of bloody maries.

Running with your eyes closed....

2006-09-22T13:08:00.000-05:00

is not a smart thing to do . I don't care if a person is 80 or 8 months old, one knows NOT to move forward, slowly OR quickly, with one's eyes closed. Well, one, except my dearest charge, whom I must remind every afternoon to not get herself more maimed than the average 5-year-old. I am thinking of getting a frequent users punch card for the ER at LMH. At age 5, she has been to the ER as many times as I have in my 30-something years.

Monkey Bars:1
Andrea: 0

Nothing's broken, not even her pride. When asked what she was doing to make this happen, her calm, casual reply: "I was running with my eyes closed on the playground and the monkey bars were in my way." Silly monkey bars! Didn't they know who was coming right at them?! I hope they learned their lesson.

Sheeeesh!

Ahhhhhhhhhh......

2006-08-24T17:59:00.000-05:00

There's nothing like prozac and a massage to make a girl feel all better inside. I couldn't figure out why I was so sore this morning. The chiropractor was gentle on me, I didn't go to bed that stupid drunk, and I know I didn't fall down. Then I remembered that I painted a ceiling yesterday. Duh!
I am taking on the long-put-off project of painting Harley's room. He wants an ocean mural, so I figured I'd go all out and paint the sky, and the water, and sea creatures and all that. Not that I am an artist. No, I am what you call "craftsy". I am terrified of what havoc I will wreak on these walls, but in the spirit of making my kid happy and keeping myself challenged, I will dive in headfirst and make sure that I have access to Kilz when I need it.
I will post pics of the completed project when I get to that point.

Oh, and congrats to Ellen and Hussy for getting new jobs. Send some of your employment happy-vibe to my HumanJukebox pal, Jon, in Detroit. He needs some Ad Astra energy to help him thru this difficult time.

And... Maybe went to live with Roya and Jay, so make sure you scratch her head when you are over there. I miss her already. I guess I'll have to stop taking naps in the afternoon. Yeah, right.

New Leaf

2006-08-22T21:00:00.000-05:00

School has started, my blog has a cool new look (thank you Lucile) I have returned from another near-week trip out of town, and the 105+ degree days have dwindled. People say Spring is a time of rebirth, but I prefer Fall. I can start back into a routine, which brings me great comfort, and get settled into a comfortable rut before the drear of Winter gets ahold of my psyche.

I came back from Maryland an absolute wreck. I read a SAD SAD book on the plane that had me blubbering as we hit the tarmac in KC. The Sea by John Banville tells the story of a man watching his wife die of cancer, and his trip down memory lane in an effort to heal himself. It ripped my heart out! Then poor Sean reminds me that my Dad's birthday is in two days and did I want to do something and all I could do was weep.

It actually felt good to feel something, ANYTHING, that wasn't laughter , ennui, loneliness, or agitation, even if it WAS extreme sadness that was all-consuming. I am pretty sure that I don't have any of the dissociative disorders that make one flee one's identity and/or reality or have major memory loss, but I have lately felt like I am not in myself, nor really outside myself watching me do what I do either. I am stressed. I want a vacation. I need a good cry. I want my job to go away, or the people who make it so unpleasant to FRO and treat me like a human, not the feelingless piece of meat that I feel like when I am working for them. I want some true connection to the world that feeds me, not drains me.

So, I am looking for a way to turn over a new leaf. There is a job I am interested in, but the timing is not good. I am trying to get some of my projects done around the farm, because checking things off my list makes me feel good. I am thinking of doing some major rearranging of rooms and spaces so that I have some space for me. I am thinking of quitting smoking, and I run almost as much as I walk, some days.
Rosie needs more than a new pair of shoes to shake this funk off.
Rosie needs fulfillment, but she is not sure what this will look like.

State Fair

2006-08-12T08:33:00.000-05:00

I remember watching an old movie with my mom when I was young, and you could only get old movies on Sunday afternoon because Ted Turner hadn't taken over the airwaves yet. It was State Fair, and all I really remember is that it was nothing like my state fair experiences and there was a large runaway pig.
Although the Kansas State Fair is in a couple of weeks, and I haven't been since my senior year of high school, I have had the pleasure of taking in some state fair-like activities this week, which explain (at least to me) why I haven't blogged, or been online at all this week.
First, the demolition derby is about as fabulous a redneck goodtime as there ever was. And boy was it fun! The roar and smoke and mudflinging and the most excellent fight between the weenie who thought he won and the guy who won after the weenie got disqualified. I haven't had that much fun SOBER in a long, long time. Damn that's good stuff. There's one coming up in couple of weeks up in McLouth at the Threshing Fields where they'll sell beer.... I am so there.

The latter end of this week was filled with the Vinland Fair. This litle country fair, named for an area that is no longer a town, is in its 99th year. I worked in the PTO concession stand last night, slinging chicken fried steak, mashed taters (which I peeled on Tuesday at another mom's house while we gabbed and the kids yelled), corn, burgers, dogs, and homemade pie (I made four). We served about 400 people and still had a few pies left over. Alferd Packer Memorial String Band played in the background... everyone should have a neighborhood band named after a famous cannibal. Today, I saw the blue ribbon winner of "tallest wild sunflower", which was an astonishing 14 feet tall, making my own pasture and garden look fairly pathetic and weedfree. I participated in a tug-of-war, men vs. women, and we held out until our palms were raw from that nasty rope. We'll get em next year when we remember our gardening gloves. The church ladies served chicken and noodles with green beans and tomato slices and lots more pie. The kids ran races, threw balls, raced three-legged style, and sweated grimey, purple-stained smiles. I am afraid I will have to bow out of the tractor pull tonight - I had my fill of loud engines last weekend at the demo derby. That, and I have to go to Heartland Park in Topeka tomorrow for a drag race dedicated to Uncle John who died in June. I am thinking of an Ebony vs Ivory kind of contrast.... country fair against the roar of the funny car engines.

Stay tuned to hear about that!

Forever Young

2006-08-04T00:18:00.000-05:00

Those of you who read regularly have probably noticed that I talk about songs a lot. I heard a song today (on Jack 105.?) that I am pretty darn sure I have not heard since the summer after my senior year of high school. No, it's not Burning Flame by Vitamin Z, nor is it The Jeweler by This Mortal Coil (that came to me in '88-'89). Not even World Destruction by Time Zone, since I downloaded that from Napster back in the day.
No, it was a pathetically melancholy tune by a band I always assumed was German although I really have no idea from where they hailed called Alphaville and their homage to youth-fullness was entitled Forever Young. I was immediately transported back to a high school dance that I couldn't leave for until Love Boat was over. (You could skip Fantasy Island but Love Boat was a must.) I just realized that I have almost the exact same big mess of hair that I had in high school - it was more feathered and blond, though. Having just had my birthday, I have spent some time reflecting onmy past, and to steal from Gypsy...here are 10 Things That Didn't Suck About High School

10. Totally expendable income - but we shoplifted anyway.
9. Not having to pay for a car, a house, untilities (what were those, anyway?)
8. Not knowing how to pump gas into the car that I also didn't pay for.
7. Clothes. My mom worked retail and we always looked great.
6. Perms - whose mom didn't give them a home perm at some point?
5. John Hughes.
4. Joyriding around the countryside smoking illicit cigs. I still love this!
3. Sex - never even thought about having it...too busy driving, drinking, and shopping.
2. New Wave Music.
1. Being incredibly, fabulously naive.

So, things have changed. I have no money but I don't shoplift, except by accident. I have more untility bills than I can name. I pumped gas today at Costco for $2.98 a gallon - ouch. I wear overalls almost all the time, the more threadbare, the better. I would never think of letting my mom touch my hair OR get a perm, even from a Beauty Operator. What happened to John Hughes/where is Molly Ringwald? Joyriding is saved for special trips with Gypsy and they are few and far between. Sex - nevermind. Soft cell gets sampled here and there, and I Melt with You is resurrected in some sort of remix or commercial regularly, but I miss my pink and purple checked Vans. And I like to think that I am still incredibly, fabulously naive. Not so naive that I don't realize the privilege that I have. My list makes it sound like I was some ditzy shopaholic, brat with no direction. Oh wait, I was.
I hope I am making up for that now. The universe has a way of being patient with some of us slower ones.

So friends, here is Forever Young. Feel my angst.

Let's dance in style, let's dance for a while
Heaven can wait, we're only watching the skies
Hoping for the best but expecting the worst
Are you going to drop the bomb or not?

Let us die young or let us live forever
We don't have the power but we never say never
Sitting in a sandpit, life is a short trip
The music's for the sad men

Can you imagine when this race is won
Turn our golden faces into the sun
Praising our leaders were getting in tune
The music's played by the madmen

Forever young, I want to be forever young
Do you really want to live forever, forever and ever?

Some are like water, some are like the heat
Some are a melody and some are the beat
Sooner or later they all will be gone
Why don't they stay young?

It's so hard to get old without a cause
I don't want to perish like a fading horse
Youth is like diamonds in the sun
And diamonds are forever

So many adventures couldn't happen today
So many songs we forgot to play
So many dreams are swinging out of the blue
We let them come true

Forever young, I want to be forever young
Do you really want to live forever, forever and ever?

That guy is back

2006-07-28T12:38:00.000-05:00

In case you didn't already know, Sean took the position as IT Guy at KSR. He was hoping that, upon giving notice at the bank, he would be escorted to the door by security so that he couldn't hack anything. Alas, they gave him more work to do for his last two weeks. Bummer.
You could still see a difference in him immediately. His dimples came back and he drank a beer and talked to strangers at Goddess Church Monday night. Wednesday he gabbed with me while I downed that pitcher of sangria and chainsmoked in the kitchen. We talked and laughed and had fun together.
Then, he went to work yesterday and they told him to pack his cube up and begone! Oh raptuous JOY! No more bank! No more commute! No more getting a new boss every 6 months!

He is that guy I married two years (even though he insists it has been 3 years) ago again. I thought that guy had been offed long ago, never to be seen again. He was just buried somewhere inside there and has made a triumphant escape. Yeah! Like a dungbeetle crawling from the steaming pile of shit that is UMB, Sean has emerged, ready to have fun again!

So come to the house and celebrate lots of B-Days tonight - me, Meggie, Clinty, Debi, and Sean - who has been born again.

Mi casa es tu casa

2006-07-27T10:10:00.000-05:00

So I guess there is a pre-party cooking party at mi casa tonight. I have to make savory cheesecakes and dolmas, but I drank all the sangria last night. Oooppps!

Sorry ladies. There is plenty of cheep yellow beer in the frig, leftovers from the Cowgirls and Tits Wedding Shower that was thrown for Rikki a couple of weeks ago. I even bought tomato juice for red beers - ahhhhhh, a summertime treat!

Anyone want a kitten? We started calling her Mabel, but that has morphed into Maybe. Maybe she's a girl, maybe we'll keep her. She is real sweet and would look great in your lap. Really, it's true.

And how did it get to be the end of July already? Only 3 more weeks of dealing with these kids all day! It makes me think of that Far Side where the mom cockroach is threatening to step on her own children because they are everywhere under foot. Gah! They are making me nuts today.

Sit tight and listen keenly

2006-07-25T09:50:00.000-05:00

While I tell you about the party.

Directions to XBar Ranch....
South on Iowa/US 59 to one mile south of Zarco. Turn left/east on N 550 Road and go one mile to 1348. Big yellow farmhouse on your left.

Feel free to camp. Please bring a lawn chair. Well-behaved dogs and kids are welcome. I don't think Harley will be present... not sure yet.

Sean made some homebrew and we'll have snacks.

See you there.

My babies

2006-07-23T20:33:00.000-05:00

Harley and Mandy, my favorite napping partners,

even though they both wiggle too much.

Can you tell I learned how to put pics up?

Mandy with Andrea's legs and the kitten I found on the way home at 2 this morning. Want a kitten? - it's really sweet.

I Wish I Were a Princess

2006-07-23T19:35:00.000-05:00

Andrea in all her glory at her B-Day gathering today.

Here is the cake that I made for Andrea's birthday party. About 35 people took over my house and drove me to the edge. It didn't help that I had not enough sleep since I just had to go to Jazzhouse and see Sellout last night in honor of Barth's last show. It just wasn't the same as it used to be. I felt old and not nearly drunk enough; it was too friggin crowded with bimbo's and the class of '86. IF that really was the class of 1986 from LHS, I am looking damn good. No botox here, baby.

You may remember the song, I Wish I Were a Princess which was featured in Hairspray. The song helped define the girl-group sound made even more popular by the likes of the Ronettes (what the eff was Phil Specter thinking later in life?) and the Shangri-la's. Little Peggy March recorded this tune in 1963 whn she was 15, but she was much more famous for her hit I Will Follow Him.

I wish I were a princess
I wish I were a princess
And if I were a princess
I'd make you my prince

I wish I were a princess
So beautiful to see
I’d pass the greatest law
In history

A lovely little law
I hope you’d never break
And it would make you fall in love with me

And if I were a princess
The next thing I would do
Is plan a celebration in my arms

And what a happy day
When people hear you say
"My princess I’m asking for your hand"

I wish I were a princess
I wish I were a princess
I’d have you sit beside me
So handsome so bold

I wish I were a princess
And you were my prince
Oh we’d live happily ever after
As in days of old

I wish I were a princess
I wish I were a princess
I’d have you sit beside me
So handsome so bold

I wish I were a princess to fade

Baggage

2006-07-22T08:49:00.000-05:00

So Lucile, Gypsy and I have been having a conversation abut baggage.
Drew left me with some baggage, and he also left a lot of his shit around my house when I told him it was time to go. A stupid mutt that he finally claimed and I had to deliver to him, 2 really awful cats that he left here for months as well, a piece-o-shit car that we have thought about throwing on the bonfire every year - but it's too toxic to burn.

I just used one thing that he left behind that I thought would never be useful to me, but after holding onto it for 5 years, lo and behold, I used it. It's a Pampered Chef cake tester. A fancy piece of thin metal with a handle. I thought toothpicks always worked just fine, or a quick poke with a finger. I just discovered how necessary this device is since I am baking a Princess Cake for my neice Andrea's birthday party which is tomorrow at my house. She is five, going on 25.

The Princess Cake is very deep, and takes a while to bake in the special pan from the wizards of cakery - Wilton. I hop up every 3 minutes to see if the obnoxious timer on my oven can make it get bake faster so that I can turn the oven off. At least it is cooler outside than inside, unlike during the cookie-baking madness that took place for SJ's fundraising when it was 106 F outside. I tried to figure out how to bake cookies on the grill, but I didn't want to sit next to the grill all afternoon, searing my flesh and chainsmoking.

Drew left behind some other useful things....towels that get used for really nasty messes (dog puke and such, not emotionally nasty messes), his wedding albums from his life with SHE WHO MUST NOT BE NAMED. We actually referred to her as Voldemort. I recently threw them in the trash, and felt horrible guilt about it until the girlfriends told me not to worry. If he wanted his damn wedding albums, he could've taken them when he took his stuff along with some of my things that the weasledick borrowed permanently. He also left me with a great sense that I will not put up with bullshit. At least in theory.

So pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag and smile, smile, smile.

In case you didn't know them

2006-07-21T18:39:00.000-05:00

Marty Robbins has been on my mind a lot lately.
He was my Dad's all time fave. I remember riding in his truck, pulling a trailer full of horses and listening to MR on the ole 8 track player. I was too clueless to know how cool he was. I was into Alabama, George Straight, and whatever new-wave music my pal Scott (of Mysterious Skin fame) brought to us - INXS, Alphaville (more on them another time), B-52's, eurotrash with lots of synth and big bangs. The louder we were screaming Bow Wow Wow out the car, the better.

I recently had the pleasure of sitting with the human jukebox around a campfire. Jon could play anything you asked for. I asked for El Paso and he didn't know it, but 10 minutes later he did. I couldn't remember the words. POOP! Here they are so that you can sing along next time.

Out in the West Texas town of El Paso
I fell in love with a Mexican girl.
Night-time would find me in Rosa's cantina;
Music would play and Felina would whirl.

Blacker than night were the eyes of Felina,
Wicked and evil while casting a spell.
My love was deep for this Mexican maiden;
I was in love but in vain, I could tell.

One night a wild young cowboy came in,
Wild as the West Texas wind.
Dashing and daring,
A drink he was sharing
With wicked Felina,
The girl that I loved.

So in anger
I Challenged his right for the love of this maiden.
Down went his hand for the gun that he wore.
My challenge was answered in less than a heart-beat;
The handsome young stranger lay dead on the floor.

Just for a moment I stood there in silence,
Shocked by the FOUL EVIL deed I had done.
Many thoughts raced through my mind as I stood there;
I had but one chance and that was to run.

Out through the back door of Rosa's I ran,
Out where the horses were tied.
I caught a good one.
It looked like it could run.
Up on its backAnd away I did ride,

Just as fast as I
Could from the West Texas town of El Paso
Out to the bad-lands of New Mexico.

Back in El Paso my life would be worthless.
Everything's gone in life; nothing is left.
It's been so long since I've seen the young maiden
My love is stronger than my fear of death.

I saddled up and away I did go,
Riding alone in the dark.
Maybe tomorrow
A bullet may find me.
Tonight nothing's worse than this
Pain in my heart.

And at last here I
Am on the hill overlooking El Paso;
I can see Rosa's cantina below.
My love is strong and it pushes me onward.
Down off the hill to Felina I go.

Off to my right I see five mounted cowboys;
Off to my left ride a dozen or more.
Shouting and shooting I can't let them catch me.
I have to make it to Rosa's back door.

Something is dreadfully wrong for I feel
A deep burning pain in my side.
Though I am trying
To stay in the saddle,I'm getting weary,
Unable to ride.

But my love for
Felina is strong and I rise where I've fallen,
Though I am weary I can't stop to rest.
I see the white puff of smoke from the rifle.
I feel the bullet go deep in my chest.

From out of nowhere Felina has found me,
Kissing my cheek as she kneels by my side.
Cradled by two loving arms that I'll die for,

One little kiss and Felina, good-bye.

On the Road again

2006-07-13T22:25:00.000-05:00

Oh JOY! I am off to Rockford, Illinois tomorrow morning, but before I go I needed to make an announcement:

Party time! Excellent!
July 28th.
Party on!
1348 North 550th Road (my house)
Celebrate the birth of the house, me, Clinty, Gypsy, and Debi-san.
Leo powers unite, drink beer all night!

Seanie is brewing a special batch of homebrew, but bring more since, well, you know how we are around here.

More details soon.

Independence Day

2006-07-05T14:11:00.000-05:00

I must have had a great weekend because I can't remember most of it. There was a night of bar hopping and bahama mamas; Starlight and drag queens; a wedding shower at my house with 1.5 hours notice; a family reunion. No wonder I can't remember it. That old feeling of not belonging didn't sneak in until I got up Monday morning to drive to my uncle's near Clearwater to go thru the family stuff and disperse it.

I have had too hard of a June to then have to go deal with the neurotic extended family and see pics of my dad as a child. July 1 was the 5-year-anniversay of his death. Five years ago today we buried him. We raised the obligatory redbeers and hot damn shots at Missie B's while the Flo Show carried on with catcalls and insults right beside us. I choked back the tears when I tried to give a toast to my father,who left us too early. I have choked back a lot of tears lately, but I can feel the flood waters rising and the levy is almost saturated with the deluge of emotional exhaustion that is drowning me.
I was greeted by my really cool uncle-by-marriage up from Oklahoma, who hugged me while the hosting uncle and very uncool uncle from Texas insulted me in the only way they know how to relate to their neices - with "cracks" about hair color, marital status, weight, and references to people that we used to be and no longer are. I almost cried right then. He asked how I was and my reply was that I had experienced a really shitty month and was not looking forward to being insulted all day. I kept to myself most of the day. I was summoned downstairs to the warehouse of stuff, and snuck away when I could to return to caring for the children, which was a great distraction.
All I could think of was getting away and returning to my own stomping ground where I am welcomed all the time with loving arms and friendly insults about the person I am. I wanted to go home. Home is no longer where my family is.
My favorite aunt and uncle, having flown in from Virginia, had already established that they were hanging with my brother's family and my cousin's family. There was no room for anyone else in their little gathering. I wanted to go home.
My mother was busy with her own brand of crazy and could only focus on bullying everyone into going to Wichita to the restaurant she had decided we were going to. HER TREAT she kept screaming. She won. We all eventually loaded up to eat a delicious dinner served by a surly ass with a highly coifed mullet who probably is from ElDorado (sorry Gypsy) and knows why the hell the road is named after Nick Badwey. The hubby came down Tuesday to a cool cousin's and hid inside getting to know him most of the day. I sweated by the pool and improved my tan and tried to not get caught up in the argument between his sister and her father about the evening's plans.
We left. We were starving and drove all the way home, attempting to eat in Emporia, Williamsburg, and Ottawa with no luck. We came HOME and scrounged something out of the frig and I slunk off to my own bed and slept like a baby.
Why does family bring out the worst in some of us? Why is it so hard to be the same person I am at my own house when I am with them? Why do I not belong with these people? For the same reasons that I did not get invited to my 20 year high school reunion (which happened after 19 years). "I guess we couldn't find you" was the answer then.
I guess they can't find me. I am someone else and that doesn't jive with who I am supposed to be in their paradigm. I have found me living right at home in Douglas County. With my family - who don't share my last name, my DNA, or my childhood experiences. I am home. Thanks for having me.

I was raised on country sunshine

2006-06-26T21:54:00.000-05:00

I just went to my first national conference for work. This is a big deal that happens every year and this is the first time I have gotten to go in my four years of employment with the UU's. It costs a fortune! The family went with and vacationed while I went to workshops, rubbed elbows, and took naps. Over 4300 UU's came together in St. Louis to argue and drink together. I did some of both. Actually, I did little arguing and much listening as friends spilled their guts into my big, welcoming ears, and spilled tears onto my soft, comforting shoulders. I caught up with some friends whom I had not seen since February, drank some of their homemade wine, and made plans to get together with them when they come to town next weekend. I got promising news that my district position could easily be increased to half-time so I can actually get it done, and I got to try a GREAT beer from A-B, the crusher of all things microbrew in the St. L area.
It's called Beach Bum, and guess what - we can't really get it anywhere but for free at Grant's Farm - the A-B tribute to General Grant and the Clydesdales that draws in frustrated parents and screaming children from all over the Midwest. No really, they have a great biergarten that I would love to mimic in my own frontyard and all kinds of critters running around, like Longhorn cattle and beastaloes. I got to pet a camel and I had never realized what strangely shaped heads they have and what bulbous eyes protruding from their deeply contured faces. Very cool creatures - but they smell pretty bad!

I felt very cosmopolitan as I strutted around downtown St. L in my favorite silk outfit that makes me look faboo. This was the first time I had been to a city where I was not terrifically annoyed by the people, traffic, noise, and lack of fresh air after 2 days of being pushed and jostled and cut off in traffic and lost. I actually LIKED it there. It's only 2. 5 million pushers, jostlers, and cutter-offers, and most everyone I talked to was very nice. But I am glad to be home, and the first thing I did was go weed my garden and pluck 3 homegrown zucchinis from alienlike plants that are dwarfing the roma tomatoes that reside in their shade. I can't wait to make zucchini pancakes tomorrow with mint and feta cheese, ala Joy of Cooking. I recently learned that Irma Rombauer, the original author of Joy is a UU. I think she and I would have gotten along well together.

BLUUUUUUUUURRRRRRRRRRRR

2006-06-17T22:35:00.000-05:00

Hi friends. Sorry I have been away. We had a death in the family and things just went to hell in a handbasket for a week and a half. I finally feel like I can put together more than one sentence at a time that might make sense to someone else AND to me. AND, more importantly, I finally feel like I can process a thought without tripping a breaker in my brain.

While I have been trying to help my family through the practical processes associated with death, life has gone on everywhere else. Goddess church happened without me, Harley had baseball, Har and Andrea had swim lessons, emails came and I ignored them until I can wrap my brain around the idea of answering them. Chelsea and Mike broke up, Ellen got laid off, Martin and Heather had both of their cars die, and I have to go to World's of Fun Monday with 8 high schoolers, then trek to the national UU conference for 6 days. I have every weekend but one scheduled with a meeting of some sort - many of them far, far away - until mid-October.

I am whirling in a sea of craziness, but none of it matters when you think about someone dropping over at age 50. I saw grown men - tough mechanic guys and race car drivers - crying and in shock about the loss of their friend. I stood at a visitation for 3 hours with a half-hearted smile on my face, talking to total strangers, while my family sobbed in the foyer with the minister who would perform the memorial service. I bit my lip and wept when we sang Amazing Grace, and tried not to think about my own sadness over the loss of my father, which is still incredibly fresh in my heart and mind although it has been five years that he has been gone. I told people to remember their mortality and to have a great life, hoping that they understood what I meant. It is so hard to really live your life like you could die tomorrow when we are so caught up in mundane bullshit that doesn't matter at all. We are overscheduled; over-connected by technology; inundated with messages that insist we should be doing more to be thin, well-invested, well-medicated, and living our lives in a responsible, environmentally-concerned, culturally-sensitive manner with time to talk to our kids about drugs and sexuality; have healthy intimate relationships; AND not go crazy while cramming work and self-care in on top of it.

I'll try to see you at FSB Monday night after I squeal my brains out at WOF with the high schoolers. Please don't call to see if I am OK. I am. We are. We just need the phones to stop ringing for one day so that we can have a second to collect our thoughts and restore our souls to some semblance of normalcy. Perhaps "normalcy" will be the return to the calendar slavedom that is my life without the constant reminder that we are mortal, and I really could drop over dead tomorrow. I guess that thing I said earlier about thoughts that make sense to others AND to me was premature. I gotta go flip the breaker back on.

Duane Johnson changed me forever

2006-06-02T15:01:00.000-05:00

In the small, po-dunky high school that I was forced to attend, we had 31 people in my class my senior year. This was large parts of 3 counties and a sliver of a fourth, and this was what we could muster. One fine spring day, while senior fever was oozing out the pores of everyone my age, and probably the teachers, too, who were rejoicing at being rid of my highly obnoxious peer group, Mr. Ellwood, who kicked ass, joined us for music class.
Our regular music teacher was a fat turd of a man. He was a whiney baby who kicked trash cans across the room and threw music stands at people if they weren't showing him enough respect. We made up absolutely horrid songs about him, including lurid details about what we thought sex might be like between he and his equally nauseating wife, also a teacher.
Well, this lovely spring day, Mr. Ellwood, who was still young enough to be handsome and cool, but was married to his super-cool wife ever since he had come to our school fresh out of teacher college, fell in love with one his students, and married her as soon as she returned from college five years later, this fine day, Mr. Ellwood took us into the music room and taught us a bit of musical history. He sat down and proclaimed that he was "really not much of a musician" and self-taught at that, then played Rhapsody in Blue, followed by a montage of crazy music that walked us through the history of musical change in the U.S. Then, out of the Blue, Mr. Ellwood asked Duane "Spanky" Johnson to take the floor. Spanky was a slight, weasel-looking kind of kid. Not a mean bone in his body, but rat-faced with a skinny, pointy nose that set off his too-close eyes in an unattractive way. These features were nestled under his never-freshly-washed or professionally cut hair, that had more cowlicks than a person could count. Bless Spanky's heart. He was from Geneseo, the smelliest part of our own personal armpit of HELL where we all had to live, and I think none of us by choice. We knew nothing about his family, but everyone from Geneseo wanted to be from somewhere else more than the rest of us did. He wore clean clothes, and I am sure bathed often, but had that dirty, hangdog look about him all the time. He was born defeated.
I am not sure how Mr. Ellwood knew this about Spanky, but Mr. Ellwood knew that Spanky had something to offer to us. Spanky shyly stood and walked to the center of the room, while the rest of us slacked in our folding chairs. He lifted a ukelele and said that he had learned this song a long time before and would like to share it with us.
He sang Rhythm of the Falling Rain, by the Cascades, in the sweetest tenor that you could imagine, while self-accompanying on the uke. We roared when he was finished.... giving him an embarrassingly long standing ovation which nearly scared him from the room.
From that day on, I have thought about Spanky every time I have heard that song. I think about how much it sucks to be (from) somewhere you may or may not like, all the while knowing that everyone else hates the place. I think about what it must be like to wash yourself, and still no one can tell. I think of what it must be like to wake up every day thinking that you never had a chance from the beginning. I think about how lucky some girl was to have Duane sing that song to her, and her alone, with a lilt in his nervous voice. At least I hope that happened for him.
And now, Rhythm of the Falling Rain:
Listen to the rhythm of the falling rain,
Telling me just what a fool I've been.
I wish that it would go and let me cry in vain,
And let me be alone again.

Now the only girl I've ever loved has gone away.
Looking for a brand new start!
But little does she know that when she left that day.
Along with her she took my heart.
Rain, please tell me, now does that seem fair
For her to steal my heart away when she don't care
I can't love another, when my heart's somewhere far away.

Listen to the rhythm of the falling rain,
Telling me just what a fool I've been.
I wish that it would go and let me cry in vain,
And let me be alone again.

Rain, won't you tell her that I love her so
Please ask the sun to set her heart aglow
Rain in her heart and let the love we know start to grow.

Listen to the rhythm of the falling rain,
Telling me just what a fool I've been.
I wish that it would go and let me cry in vain,
And let me be alone again.

Oh listen to the falling rain
Pitter patter pitter patter,
OhListen, listen to the falling rain
Pitter patter pitter patter,
OhListen, listen to the falling rain
Pitter patter pitter patter

OOOOOOOOOWWEEEEEEEEEEE!

2006-05-29T07:29:00.000-05:00

Damn, it hs been a rough weekend! The husband is passed out on the sofa, the girlfriend (who has been here 2 nights now) is passed out in the kiddo's bed, and I unfortunately woke up way too early but sans hangover, which I really deserve. The beauty of homebrew is that there is seldom the unpleasant aftereffect associated with drinking cheap beer in a can.
I ache ALL over, but I have gotten two MAJOR tasks done at the house this weekend. On Saturday I replanted my favorite flower bed and unloaded a truck load of mulch on to it. Then on Sunday, the hubby, SJ, and I repainted our bedroom. This is major! The only painting that has happened at the farm in the five years that I have owned it is in the smallest bathroom, which got painted last summer and took me two weeks to put back together. YAY we are getting things done! So, with all the reaching with the paintbrush and scooping with the shovel, I am hurting al over.
Got to talk to Sarge Koch last night! He called for SJ and I talked his head off, and vice versa until he had one minute left on his card so they said their "I love you's" and got cut off. We talked about the crappy workmanship of Saddam's palaces, the unbearable heat (112 F today in Baghdad), the Qi/Chi that works its mojo on some of the guys and freaks them out some days, and my own chi, which he is sure could benefit from some time with Arthur the tai chi teacher/friend of Mark's. It was great to hear his voice and catch up. He'll be back in August for a vacation and there will be much rejoicing (insert Monty Python sound effect here).
So, today will be spent touching up the ceiling paint and cleaning the room up while putting it back together so that we can live in it again. But right now, I think I am gonna go back to bed and try to sleep some more. I am worn out from all this writing. ;-)

My mom LOVES Tom Hanks

2006-05-19T09:58:00.000-05:00

Roxarita just called and asked me to the matinee of DaVinci Code. I devoured this pulpy treat on the beach in Cancun before passing off one of my mom's three copies to Shay. I think we both tried to leave as much sand in it as possible. It was great beach reading.
My mom loves movies. She especially loves Tom Hanks movies, and owns them all. Even Bachelor Party and that stupid volcano thing he made. She has little understanding of demographics - she saw 200 Cigarettes and complained that the characters swore too much.

After having read DaVinci Code, I mentioned that I had a conversation with George (the friend, not the truck) about his Catholic school upbringing and being fascinated by his experience. For my birthday a few weeks later I got three books from her about the Popes.

So, I am headed to the movies, which I don't particularly enjoy. I can only do one thing while I am trapped in the theatre, which bugs me. It is too cold, I always have to pee before the damn thing is over. They tempt me with strawberry twizzlers and junior mints. You have to hold still and not knit, or pay bills, or obsess over the bag of chips that you know are in the pantry.

And I am having a hard time picturing Forrest Gump in this role. Stupid is as secret catholic society does. I'll let you know what I think when this is over. Mom talks through every movie too, but it will mean alot to her for me to accompany her, and it won't kill me to see something that isn't animated. I can't even remember the last adult movie I saw in a theatre. Wait, I tried real hard and remembered that I saw that Firefly TV show movie with my hubby in Shawnee one night. It was entertaining, but not as entertaining as the geeked-out conversations that I heard before the lights dimmed. I was the only person in there without multiple electronica strapped to my belt. Just another reason to NOT wear belts.

Oh the fabulous lazies

2006-05-18T10:33:00.000-05:00

Summer has started. At least the season for sitting around on each other's porches/decks/patios/lawns has started in earnest and I am drinking lots of beer and chatting the night away - two of my favorite things.
Last night was spent lolling about on SJ's deck, discussing matters most important (really), analyzing our relationships, and problem-solving. All of which were improved by ice cold Lite Beer from Miller. Tomorrow night will be gathering on Gypsy's freshly decapitated weeds, Saturday is an appearance at the ex-husband's PhD hooding party (first time to see the ex-mother-in-law since the DIVORCE...hmmmmm), and Sunday is a rousing book club followed by Shay's graduation with his Master of Urban Planning regalia. So many parties, so little time.

So little time. Summer starts Monday and I will be starting a new job - taking care of my my nearly-5-year-old neice while I juggle DRE and YaYA tasks, which will wax and wane over the summer. One a half weeks later, Wonder Boy will be home for almost 3 months, and I will fill my schedule with swimming lessons, baseball games and practices, and what I think is going to be an incredibly organized rotation of tasks such as horse grooming and riding, gardening, and field trips. Riiiiight. I haven't had to set an alarm all week, and I am not looking forward to having to do so next week. Just three more days of blissful, lackadaisical, pondering.

The Boonies

2006-05-17T13:37:00.000-05:00

I had a pretty overwhelming weekend, followed by much drinking and making myself sicker. Alas....I'll never learn.
I spent the weekend at Camp Hantesa (pronounced Han ta shaw) south of Boone, Iowa. Yeah, I know. I go to Iowa alot. When I worked in KC we called it I Owe the World an Apology, but I am growing to love Iowa. It beats driving to Minnesota all the time.
I started by driving up to Ames on Thursday afternoon with a senior boy (freshly showered - YES!) and getting seasick from being shoved mercilessly around on I-35. Felt sicker snd sicker as I drove and he slept. Dropped him off, bowed out of the slumber party at another youth's home, and got a room at the Holiday Inn. Drove over to the Arby's next door to get something to put in my stomach to top off the 8 serving bag of Chex Mix I gluttonously snarfed in the car.
I thought the guy who took my order sounded a bit different, and a little too perky. I pull around to the window and saw my knight in shining polyester who galliently was pouring my diet pepsi. He had a ceasar haircut, accentuated by his handsome visor, a silver hoop in his left earlobe, and a sweet smile, albeit crooked. He reached out the window to take my $7.89 for dindin, and I placed a ten in his slightly crumpled hand. Change came back, he turned and walked to retrieve my sandwich. His hips swiveled unnaturally in their sockets, as he gallumphed across the restaurant. My lip quivered. He wanted so badly to be cool. I felt my throat constricting. He proudly wore his uniform as he told me to have a great evening in his permanently slurred speech, and to come back soon. I wiped a tear away from my eye. Dammit, he WAS cool. Life is very unfair, and seeing this young man, doing what all young people do - trying to fit in - got me. I sniffled my car back over to the Holiday Inn and tearfully wandered to my room. Coolness is like success, and should be measured in our own terms. I spent the next three days with nearly 100 youth who were all trying to figure out what uniforms they are going to wear throughout their lives. Whatever they choose, I hope they can wear them as well as that young man at Arby's and smile as sweetly while doing so.

The Iowa Sisterhood moves southwest

2006-05-04T10:11:00.000-05:00

I just returned from a five day meeting in Iowa City, Iowa, home of the University of Iowa (proudly a Big 10 School) and also the former capital of Iowa. It's not unlike Lawrence in atmospheric feel. It had a Quinton's, It's Brothers, LYS (local yarn store) that looked a lot like the Yarnbarn but not quite as cool, but the owner DID call me "honey". Our conversation went like this:
Me: I'm visiting and forgot all my knitting in a rush to get out the door this morning, then the kids at the front desk of my hotel sent me thru the hood to get over here.
LYS Owner: Did you drive down Iowa Street?
Me: Yes. It looked pretty rough, but I can see that a regentrification program is at work to improve things.
LYS Owner: Oh HONEY! That's where the tornado came down.
Me: Bye! (Duh!)

So I heard a lot about the Iowa Sisterhood, a group of pioneering female Unitarian (pre-merger with the Universalists) ministers who paved the way across Iowa for liberal religious movements, social justice, and women. I've been thinking a lot about ministering. It's hard not to when you drink beer with ministers all weekend. The dictionary says that "to minister" is to attend to the wants and needs of others. Pretty vague there. Pretty common to what most women have to do every day of their adult lives. I like to think that I am a member of my own sisterhood. The I-70 Sisterhood, or Jayhawk Sisterhood we could call it. We ladies, be we Queens or Goddesses or unaffiliated chick gang members who flock together as a gaggle of blondes (that's for you, SJ), minister to each other and spread the gospel of Feminism. I wore my "This is What a Feminist Looks Like" shirt recently, and when my son asked what a feminist was, I told him it was a person who believed that men were just as good as women. If that's the case, then I am not a feminist. I do not really believe that men are as good as women at most things. It's not mens' faults that they cannot be as good as women at the things that we do all the damn time without thinking, but that they do not value the same things. They do not value the art of putting the clean dishes away where they belong. They do not value the simple pleasure of folding laundry. Maybe they do not value taking chaos and creating order, which is frustrating for me as I am a foot soldier in the war on entropy. Does it matter that my husband does not value sitting around with only members of his gender and doing practically nothing for hours? No, it does not, but he knows it has value for me. And that is what matters - respect for different values. I respect that my husband is obsessed with brewing beer, and is right this moment in the basement lovingly wrapping a blanket around one of his carboys, most likely cooing to it sweetly. He respects that sometimes I need to hang with my chicas and talk about absolutely nothing and everything all at once. R - E - S - P - E - C - T! Sock it to me.

Rise and Shine and (clap) Give God the Glory!

2006-05-04T09:00:00.015-05:00

We had a rousing singalong of our favorite bible songs last night at Rick's Place. I remembered one that I sang every summer at the Monitor Brethren Church, the little country church down the road that holds a special place in my heart. There are not too many places from my past that I want to return to, but next time I pass thru those parts of central Kansas, I'll be looking up the Monitor, only if it is to feel the coolness of propane tank under the sagging, tired cedar trees, and pass thru the ancient cemetery where time stands still and moss grows like a tourniquet choking the sounds of nature that mysteriously vanish while you are within it's wrought iron walls.
Yes, I remembered that God's salvation free from tribulation Under every nation be His Love proclaim! We are brothers let us shout to others of the wonderful power of Jesus' name.

I heard the following poem by Stephen Dunn this last weekend and it took me straight back to the Monitor, and the Friday night program that we always performed for our parents. I wonder what they thought as they sang along with us.

At The Smithville Methodist Church

It was supposed to be Arts & Crafts for a week,
but when she came home with the "Jesus Saves" button,
we knew what art was up,
what ancient craft.

She liked her little friends.
She liked the songs they sang
when they weren't twisting and folding paper into dolls.
What could be so bad?

Jesus had been a good man,
and putting faith in good men was what we had to do to stay this side of cynicism,
that other sadness.

OK, we said, One week.
But when she came home singing "Jesus loves me, the Bible tells me so,"
it was time to talk.

Could we say Jesus doesn't love you?
Could I tell her the Bible is a great book certain people use to make you feel bad?
We sent her back without a word.

It had been so long since we believed,
so long since we needed Jesus as our nemesis and friend,
that we thought he was sufficiently dead,
that our children would think of him like Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson.

Soon it became clear to us: you can't teach disbelief to a child,
only wonderful stories, and we hadn't a story nearly as good.

On parents' night there were the Arts & Crafts all spread out like appetizers.
Then we took our seats in the church and the children sang a song about the Ark,
and Hallelujah and one in which they had to jump up and down for Jesus.

I can't remember ever feeling so uncertain about what's comic, what's serious.
Evolution is magical but devoid of heroes.
You can't say to your child "Evolution loves you."

The story stinks of extinction and nothing exciting happens for centuries.
I didn't have a wonderful story for my child and she was beaming.

All the way home in the car she sang the songs,
occasionally standing up for Jesus.
There was nothing to do but drive,
ride it out,
sing along in silence.

What to do, what to do....

2006-04-25T10:05:00.000-05:00

God I'm bored. I need something FUN to do. I don't think I am going to get it in Iowa City this weekend. I'll rub elbows with the right people, schmooze with the district board, have a glass of wine with dinner, and smile, smile, smile. That's what they pay me for.
Meanwhile, back at home... the laundry is not fun, the dishes aren't fun. I can't even skweek any fun out of the treadmill today, with or without Sex and the City. I'm even bored blogging.
I looked at Funjet's website to see if there were any deals from KC to Cancun for $39 a person. No such luck. I need a friggin vacation. I need a beach - that is NOT Bloomington at Clinton. I need an ocean beach, and too much sun, and cute mexican boys bringing me watered-down drinks that all taste the same whether they are pina coladas or funky monkeys.
Every day in Kansas is tasting the same, whether it's guzzling Stormwatch Ale (yummy) at FSB with Gypsy or planting tomatoes and basil and dreaming of far off summer salads on the deck with my chums or trying to find that goddam snake in the henhouse so I can hack it to bits or obsessing over softball sized hail that keeps missing my overly-insured truck.

What to do? Have I been at the top of the roller coaster for so long that the usual stuff is not a thrill? I have had what feels like many trips up the hill, and some scary plummets hurtling along the rickety tracks to the bottom, only to slowly (clickclickclickclick) make the climb back to the top. Right now feels like a slow climb to the top, then you have to go around a bend when you get up there, survey the park from the top for a moment, building even more anticipation of the ride you are about to take back down so that you can ride that momentum over the next small hill, then just when you are used to the jostling you get, you are slammed into the "get off the ride area", where you breathlessly and shakily step out of your car and decide if you're going to get back in line and do it again, or wander around until you find a ride with a short line. The short line rides are not nearly as fun, or scary. And sometimes that is just fine.

Finished

2006-04-24T12:12:00.000-05:00

I just ate a whole bag of soy chips, which I buy because they are not so horrible to eat, but I can also eat a whole bag of them and not feel like I have wasted my fat club membership at the Weight Control Research Project with my pals at the Energy Balance Lab, a grant-funded project of the Scheifelbush Lifespan Intitute at the University of Kansas. Whew!
So, I ate the whole thing while I watched the Weather Channel and prayed for a tornado to wipe out my barn so State Farm will buy me a new one.
I can finish things!
Yesterday, I finished a baby hat.
Two weeks ago I finished with the Home Town - a despisable, inbred armpit in Central Kansas that makes my skin crawl to think about it, and I have had to think about it alot lately.
While having gluttonous family dinner the night before the auction-goers raped me in Topeka, icky-goody2shoes girl from hometown appears by my beaming mother's side, while I wear overalls, pigtails, BO, and a stunning red, white, and blue bicentennial belt, complete with eagle buckle. I looked smashing, and smashed. Had my mother not heard a word I said about how little I cared for all but 2 people in my hometown? Just 30 minutes earlier while we sat at the bar?
G2S girl has recently moved south of me not nearly far enough and she knows the exhusband. GOODY!
Small talk, blah blah blah.....
me: so, is there any news about our 20th class reunion that should be coming up next month?
G2S girl: Oh, we had that last year at 19. I guess we couldn't find you.

Is it that fucking hard to find a person whose name is the same as it was for 13 years of school together (yes, K-12 in the same armpit) who lives in the same fucking county she ran away to 20 years ago? Good Lord - there were only 31 of us anyway! I guess that vote we took 9.87 years ago at our 10 year, which we used to declare our class reunion separate from the Every Five Years on the Five Years School Reunion, was just to ensure that I wouldn't show up for our 19th, because I was waiting for the full 10 years to go by before I had to see all those twits again. I'm done. Finito!

While I was recovering from the shock of once again never fitting in with the hometown crowd, although they chose to remind me before I could shun them, my mother gleefully exchanged numbers, etc. with G2S girl.

So, I will never really have closure with the armpit of my past, but I can smear deoderant and antiperspirant on it and act like it smells fresh as a rose. At least when you have an armpit, you can be pretty sure what part of yourself is going to stink first.

Driving back to Normaltown

2006-04-19T09:54:00.000-05:00

There was a wasp in my coffee this morning. The damn thing was flying around upstairs last night and somwhow decided that crawling into the coffee pot was a good thing to do. I don't know if he died before or after he was drowned in scalding hot caffeine (I have a separate water receptacle so I don't actually put water in the carafe to make coffee). It reminded me of a Sex and the City I saw yesterday when Charlotte and Trey were fighting and she said "We're WASPs, WASPs don't fight."

One of my favorite Springsteen songs is on XM - Hungry Heart.
Got a wife and kids in baltimore jack
I went out for a ride and I never went back
Like a river that don’t know where it’s flowing
I took a wrong turn and I just kept going
Everybody’s got a hungry heart
Everybody’s got a hungry heart
Lay down your money and you play your part
Everybody’s got a hungry heart
I met her in a kingstown bar
We fell in love
I knew it had to end
We took what we had and we ripped it apart
Now here I am down in kingstone again
Everybody’s got a hungry heart...Everybody needs a place to rest
Everybody wants to have a home
Don’t make no difference what nobody says
Ain’t nobody like to be alone
Everybody’s got a hungry heart...

Hearing that reminds me of another of my favorite Springsteen songs - Reason to Believe, but I like the Beat Farmers' version best. Which reminds me of a great Beat Farmers song - Happy Boy. It goes like this:
I was walkin' down the street on a sunny day
Hubba hubba hubba hubba hubba
A feeling in my bones that I'll have my way
Hubba hubba hubba hubba hubba

Well I'm a happy boy (happy boy)
Well I'm a happy boy (happy boy)
Oh ain't it good when things are going your way, hey hey?

My little dog spot got hit by a car
Hubba hubba hubba hubba hubba
Put his guts in a box and put him in a drawer
Hubba hubba hubba hubba hubba

I forgot all about it for a month and a half
Hubba hubba hubba hubba hubba
I looked in the drawer and started to laugh
Hubba hubba hubba hubba hubba

I'll sing it for you sometime. This really all came to mind because Mandy brought up the most leathery, stinky, stiff dead cat yesterday, and I was trying to figure out what to do with it (other than let her continue gnawing on it) and I thought about Country Dick and the Beat Farmers and putting it in a drawer. It went in the trash instead, but now I think I should have buried it, giving it a proper sendoff. I guess I could've called the knacker, but $22 seems like a lot to get rid of a dead stray cat. Maybe they would've taken the wasp, too. I almost got that damn black snake in the hen house cut in half yesterday, but he (of course it's a HE) escaped in its slithery, egg-eating bastard way. I'm on it though, with an obsessive vigilance. He'll wish I had cooked his rabbit in a pot on the stove when I'm done with him.

So, on a lighthearted note today, I will remind you that Country Dick lives on in our hearts and souls, although he died on stage in 1995. He was friggin crazy!
Ain't it good when things are going your way, hey hey.

Whoa. I got way sidetracked by a Springsteen song. Anyhoo, things are getting back to their old weird ways and this kitty is landing on her feet, unlike the one that landed in my trash. Thanks for your support during these wacky times. I'm putting on some boots to patrol the hen house. I'll let you know what happens....

The dam broke today

2006-04-12T17:36:00.000-05:00

To my dedicated readers, thank you for noticing that I have not written in a while. I was busy failing at everything I touched. I liquidated my business and now owe other people another $10K, and while I was devoting all of my emotional energy to getting thru that, my cow died, so we had to have the knacker come get its carcass. Then, because I was not already a wreck enough, I got a letter from the Behavioral Sciences Regulatory Board that although I passed the licensing exam with a great score, I did not take it earlier enough so that my results could be delivered to the BSRB by my deadline and it will now cost me another $100 to get my fucking license that I don't need anyway!!!!!!!

So, my dam broke today. I freaked out on the phone with a complete stranger who was really nice about the whole thing while I sobbed uncontrollably and apologized profusely, when I wasn't berating myself, that is. That poor lady.

I was telling Gypsy about some thing I saw on the news recently, where a cat was way too high up in a tree and someone was videoing the rescue attempt. The newscasters were all atwitter about cats ALWAYS landing on their feet. Well, this friggin cat falls about 50 feeet out of this tree, lands on its back, bounces about 4 feet in the air and twists while up there, THEN landed on its feet and skeedaddled away from the scene.

I have fallen, landed on my back, and now I am bouncing up again and trying to get twisted around enough to land on my feet. In the meantime, it felt really good to throw a bag of green bell peppers across the kitchen, pulverizing them on impact, with nary a mess to clean up since they were bagged! I just finished The Secret Life of Bees, which did not help my emotional state, but rather got me worked into a frenzy about my mother. I am glad that I did not have jars of honey for ammo, as that would've been a real pain in the ass to clean up.

So stay tuned readers, as I attempt to get my shit scraped into a pile and carry on with a year that is actually getting worse than the last one, although my mother-in-law promised it had to get better. Oh wait, that's right. I haven't spoken to her since she yelled at me at 3 in the morning for being a crappy wife, while she was only there to borrow money from me. The NERVE!!!!!!

Don't worry, I am pretty sure that like that Doctor Jean chick on X-Men, I will rise from the "ashes" of the dam breaking and return to open up a can of whoopass on the world. I just want to run off camera for a while and lick my wounds under a lilac bush, lying in the cool dirt against the foundation, where I can see who goes by while I hide in the shadows.

Kegerator Kegerator, oi oi oi!

2006-03-29T08:56:00.000-06:00

Oh no. It has happened and all my hard work to get rid of my fat ass was in vain. The kegerator is up and running and delicious homebrew is on tap. ACK! And it doesn't even live in the basement like in my former life. It is right in the mud room, barely off the kitchen, staring loomingly at me with it's chalkboard painted sides. That now makes 3 refrigerators and 2 deep freezes at the farm. It's out of control!

Take a tour of it at:
http://www.lawrencebrewers.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=110

I am trying to figure out how to get taps run to he deck on the other side of the wall so we don't have to get up at all when we're chillaxin' in the shade this summer.

Slip sliding away

2006-03-28T16:19:00.000-06:00

I know a woman
Became a wife
These are the very words she uses
To describe her life
She said a good day
Ain’t got no rain
She said a bad day’s when I lie in bed
And think of things that might have been
Slip slidin’ away
Slip slidin’ away
You know the nearer your destination
The more you’re slip slidin’ away

April 1 was the deadline set for me by the Behavioral Sciences Regulatory Board, and I met it. Barely. With 3 days to spare I finally took that damn test. You know the one. The one that will allow me to qualify for all kinds of jobs that pay less than what I'm already doing and require me to work more, put my kid in after-school care, and drive at least 45 minutes one way to work. The one that allows me to put this behind my name: LMSW.
It's done, and it doesn't matter if you get a 98 or a 78, you have to get a 70 to pass, and so I passed.
Next deadline?: Monday night. Free State Brewery, 7:30. Cheap beer night and I can have one without feeling like a skanky cheater. The weight loss portion of the diet will be over officially, and I will be out on my best behavior and own recognizance to not gain back every pound I have worked hard to shed. I wish I could have a beer for every person who has said they would like to get me one when this day finally arrives, but I would be blind drunk after just a few of the rainchecks were cashed in and that is no fun for anybody. See you there, but don't feel like you have to buy me a beer. I sure hope Copperhead is on sale! I can feel one slipslidin down my scratchy throat right now.

Feckless

2006-03-23T19:28:00.000-06:00

(w)reckless

I have never been in a car wreck, she told me.
But how many have you caused? I asked.

That was the weirdest feeling ever!

2006-03-23T19:24:00.000-06:00

Last night, I got up at 3:36 after tossing and turning, and ate an orange and watched some weird guy on Food TV hang out in Hawaii and eat fresh pineapple. After the orange, I went to bed and began thinking about this thing I have been meaning to write down for a while now. I'll write it in just a minute. What was so weird, is that while I was thinking about the words, the W felt like it was crushing me. I was watching it push its way into the image in front of me and totally take over. I could hardly breathe it was suffocating me with its doubleyouness. I watched it squish me while I tried to squeak out a sound to ask for help.

Green Beer

2006-03-22T11:04:00.000-06:00

I am not a holiday greeter. I do not say Merry Christmas or Happy New Year or Happy Holidays, and especially not Happy St. Patrick's Day. All these words tumble out of my mouth awkwardly, without geniune feeling. But on March 17th, freezing my ass off in my Dale Evans outfit complete with swishing fringe and my hands curled into cups of metacarpalcicles under vintage lavendar gloves, I found my blueblue lips mouthing these words at complete strangers. But who's the stranger here? The people who so valiently weathered the cold to look at the complete idiots who donned ridiculous attire to ride floats for everyone's entertainment, or the idiots on the floats? I am firm in my belief that the people on the floats are much stranger than the audience, even in North Lawrence.
While my cohorts smiled and waved with their bellies full of gin and Fresca and their mouths watering for the green beer to come, I was without antifreeze except for the shot of schnapps that I sureptitiously and greedily gulped off Becky's flask while in Trinity Lutheran Church. I am getting used to having fun without booze. I certainly do not miss the hangovers. I danced my sober ass off at Kelly Hunt with a dozen other people enjoying our private benefit concert, and then watched the Jayhawks go down in infamy, while the Shockers of WSU went on to the Sweet 16. You gotta love a mascot that is a cut hunk of wheat scraped into a shock and given a crazy mug that only its mother could love. Did you know that wheat and barley look almost exactly the same? You really can't tell the difference when you're driving down the road and their amber waves are swaying in the wind, except that most of the barley in the US is grown in North Dakota.
So KU fans don't get to wave the wheat any more during the NCAA tourney, and barley doesn't grow in Kansas. And would a beer of any other color taste as sweet? Hops make beer bitter, so does losing in the first round.

I am a lawyer and he's a sandwich

2006-03-22T10:49:00.000-06:00

I have become addicted to Sex and the City. Miranda just had her infatuation with the guy in the sandwich suit he kept saying "Eat me" when she walked by, and her response was "I am a lawyer and he's a sandwich." So Charlotte just married Trey even though he couldn't get it up.
So this is what I have been reduced to: blogging about Carrie cheating on Aidan with Big and Charlotte marrying a man with erectile dysfunction.

Do I get Lance Armstrong? or cancer?

2006-03-20T08:50:00.000-06:00

You Are Sheryl Crow!

Down to earth with tons of creative energyWhen you talk, everyone can relate to you"Life springs eternalOn a gaudy neon streetNot that I care at all"

Who's" Your Inner Rock Chick?

Scooby doo life

2006-03-14T17:50:00.000-06:00

So, I am down 28.2 pounds, but according to BMI calculations, I can still lose 75 MORE pounds and be within normal weight parameters. Another 35 gone and I'll no longer be overweight, but back within normal ranges. Once in my adult life have I been within the "normal" category, and I was far from normal. I was scary thin, and obsessed with anything that went into my mouth. I was eating about 900 calories a day and riding my bike everywhere. I was very weird! My mom said I was so much more even-tempered without all that red meat in my diet. I eventually explained that I really had no will to live, and that my even-temperedness was just apathy for everything and everyone around me. You see, at 20, my mom put me on a diet, and spent a fortune to force me to lose weight. I was getting to marrying age and I needed to be made desirable so that some man could validate me by leering at me and deciding that I was worthy of his subtle abuse and less subtle manipulation for the rest of my days. My sister was a spinster at 28, and mom was not about to have 2 daughters who couldn't find husbands.

I was a Velma, and Mom wanted a Daphne. Velma is amazing. Daphne is a ditz.

That's the Best Part

2006-03-07T09:14:00.000-06:00

You know how sometimes when you doctor up a plain old burger with all your favorite toppings, and then it becomes this slippery (especially if you put lettuce on it), increasingly soggy mess that looks like car road splatter (I LOVE ketchup) after an ugly wreck by the time you're halfway done with it? The BEST BITE is that bite that has a little bit of every topping on it, in just the right proprtions, right before it gets to that messy roadkill stage. It's usually right in the middle. It's like the crescendo of a musical movement, or the climax of a well-laid plot, followed by the denouement of wet buns (yes, double entendre please!).
Last week at Queens Holding Court, L said something about "that's the best part", and Gypsy chimed in how she loved that phrase. It reminded me of the time Big Harley gave me the middle of his PBJ, letting me know that I was special because he gave me the best bite. Big Harley was my first attempt at maneuvering an adult relationship. Gaymaker:1, Rosie:0.
I went out with some pals last night and ended up spending the evening with 2 old friends, one of whom was celebrating his 50th birthday. He's technically a boss of mine, since he is on the Board of Directors, but we regularly go out after board meetings to have a drink and smokey treats. He was bombed! Our other friend had to pour him into my car and I drove him to his East LA home, which his ex-step daughter had filled with balloons while he was at work. His cat was trapped upstairs, suffering from globophobia, a fear of balloons, and was desperately in need of a visit to the great outdoors. I think he had a pretty good birthday. There was a party for him last Saturday, and a woman he was being supportive of drove the buick on him, and the sofa they were sitting on. It was red wine, and he kept calling it red velvet cake vomit. I loved the visual. Cake is not like a burger, or PBJ. The best part is on the edges, not the middle. Especially a german chocolate cake (which is not german in origin at all), so you can have more of that coconut goo that could really be eaten without the cake at all. Now that's the best part.

Medicine Lodge, KS

2006-03-01T13:13:00.000-06:00

I just got back from my walk, on which I was accompanied by my guard Corgi, and met halfway back by the super hound, who could not be troubled to walk 2 miles on the dirt roads. I was near the neighbor's pasture full of mules and it hit me. It was the smell of my grandparents pasture near Medicine Lodge, down by the gyp hills. You know, near Kiowa? OK, almost to Oklahoma and west of Wichita quite a ways. We used to go there for a week every summer while Mom and Dad went to square dance camp in Colorado Springs. I hated my grandmother, who was incredibly mean and didn't really need the rest of us granddaughters after my older sister was born. She would scare the crap out of me and make fun of me when I was two-years-old, terrified of her, missing my mommy, and pouting with my bottom lip sticking out and quivering while tears came to my eyes. She'd tell me a chicken was gonna come along and sit on my lip if I didn't quit sticking it out. What the FUCK was wrong with that woman!? Where's the comfort for a freaked out toddler? It's no wonder all her kids were amazingly fucked up and have emotional problems to accompany their intimacy issues. Anyway, later the grandparents moved to Isabel, over closer to Sawyer. We were left to run around like oversized coyotes on the prairie for a week, with no need for baths other than in the crick, or in the pond on a horse's back. They didn't care too much what we did as long as we stayed out of their way, which believe me, WE DID!
The pasture down there has a smell that my pasture doesn't have. Maybe it's nasty chemicals, but I think it has more to do with some sort combination of plants that grows there. My sister, brother, and i would spend hours collecting wildflowers, weeds that were interesting looking, and these really cool seed pods called devils claws. We'd build sculptures out of them, but never had glue to actually make them last. At the end of the week, when we'd nearly driven the old folks to insanity (they had no TV!), we'd present our parents with a flower arrangement that we'd made that morning from our collection.
I'll drive by the neighbor' s place when I run to town in a little bit so I can hang my head out the window and take in the scent of a place and time far far away. It's out of the way from my usual path, but so are memories of my grandparents.

More words to live by

2006-03-01T11:29:00.000-06:00

Here are some other words that I like:
(And I am merely stalling so that I can digest the enormous mango (love that word) shake I just gulped down before I go out for a jog. Yeah, I know, Rosie jogging? It's been happening and I can't figure out why. Run, Rosie, Run!)

burning daylight
kumquat
spunky
smoke a turd in hell (i.e., you'll rue the day)
after eating too much: "I feel like a bloated tick on the hairy dog of life"
MILF - I will address this later
schlep
trundle (have I listed this already?)
chowderhead

Words I don't like:
pisser, in reference to the toilet

Sheep go to Heaven, Lions go to Hell?

2006-03-01T08:51:00.000-06:00

Isn't it March that we are speaking of when we say "in like a lion, out like a lamb"? Well, March is coming in like a lamb, but I will be at the Lyon tonight, so can we say it is coming in AT the Lyon, so maybe it will go out like a lamb? I'd like to think so.
I hate winter, so I am relishing this weather, sitting in the PJ's, drinking coffee, smoking ciggies, hoping my mother doesn't drop by un-announced to catch me, (as she so often does), with the windows open and breezes that have a hint of rain smell (it's really just the ozone layer deteriorating) blowing the smoke back in my eyes. Don Harman is at the marble factory in Bonner Springs today, and Katie says it's supposed to be 81 effing degrees today. Ahhhhhhh!

Soon I will be able to rejoice in lolling about even more, since I am auctioning off the store on April 7th. No more Saturdays at the shop. It was fun while it lasted, but the poopy landlord and the weirdos in Topeka have taken all the fun out of it. The ex-partner splitting didn't help any, not that he was much use anyway.
It's funny how things work out. Some people just sit back and let everything happen around them, and others are action-takers. I am generally an action-taker, but I think I am burnt out on that for a while, since much of the action I have taken has not gotten me anywhere except frustrationville. Doing nothing is not the opposite of taking action, it is just a pathetic way to make choices.
I have really enjoyed the crisis that has come up recently in the girlfriend group. NOT the crisis itself, but the way it got our attention and made us all come together to focus on some common cause. Gypsy and I have spent some quality time together and I didn't realize how much I was missing it/her. She is a completely different person from when we were so tight, and I admire her for becoming who she is, not that I didn't love who she was. It was like this ugly breakup, and now we tenuously hang together with a hint of weirdness in the air that is easier to ignore than to address. I DO intend to address it sometime, when we have time to roll it around together and take apart that giant foil ball that it became.
The new Saveur came yesterday, and there is a great snippet about Clementine Paddleford in it. She was a food writer for years, after she had been a home economist at KSU. Single mother in those days....for shame! She is responsible for my favorite quote: "Never grow a wishbone, daughter, where your backbone ougt to be." I had to grow a backbone at one point in my life. Like a muscle, it atrophys if it goes unused. Mine feels unused, although at times I feel like I carry a heavy burden. Sheep can be used as pack animals, but they are also so stupid that they'll walk right off a cliff. Goats make much better carriers and pullers, because they are clever and can be trained. Sheep have wishbones. Goats have backbones. Sheep go to heaven. Goats go to hell. Did I mention that I hate winter? I love the unbearable heat of summer. It's coming.

MMMMMMM.....smokey treats

2006-02-24T08:59:00.000-06:00

I remember driving to Lawrence when I was a senior in HS in central kansas, and I was going to KU to see my brother, the infamous KenBob, and my mother was having a cow that I was 17 and driving hundreds of miles by myself. That might explain to alot of people how protected my mother wanted to keep me, and at times still does. Anyway, I bought a pack of cigarettes for the trip, becasue we had plenty of gas stations scoped out that we could get ciggies without getting carded. I probably strted smoking the second I hit I-135 North to Salina, and continues the entire trip east on I-70, and had a head rush the entire trip. I got a little freaked out awhile after a had passed a big green sign that said "Topeka 4", and I drove and drove and drove, and still no Topeka. I began to wonder if my mother wasn't right and I really had driven onto the highway to hell and it was dark and I really had only been to Lawrence once before and I was alone and it was dark and Topeka's bright lights weren't on the horizon and I was alone and it was dark and I had driven more than 4 miles and where the hell was I. Eventually I got to Topeka, and learned later that the sign had said "Topeka 47" but the 7 didn't reflect light correctly.
So, I just had my first ciggie of the day. It reminded me of back in HS when I would get a head rush from all that nicotine flooding my precious little virgin body that had already consumed anough alcohol to get Elliot Ness worked up for life. (Carrie Nation I was not.) I still get a head rush from the first one every day, more so now that I have cut booze from the diet for 3 months. I miss the booze. Gypsy and friend and I were out the other night and I was sipping coffee, water, and diet coke (not the kind in the blue can) and I turned to friend and made a comment about how people were not so funny when I wasn't drinking, and that I had very little of interest to say without booze in me. I was hoping that at some point I would have this incredible epiphany that people really ARE funnier when I am sober and that one really doesn't need alcohol to have a good time, but it hasn't happened yet. Maybe I am just out of practice, or maybe I am too old to go back. The husband keeps asking me when I can drink again and I asked if I was less of a bitch when I was drunk all the time, because he seems very concerned about my alcohol consumption, and resumption of it. Maybe that's the epiphany I keep looking for.

I wrote this yesterday...GUTS

2006-02-23T10:55:00.000-06:00

I have a very good friend in Baghdad, serving in the Army Reserve. I have known him 15 years, and his fiance is one of my best friends. Someone from his unit was killed this week. I have never thought very hard about the possibility of him not coming home. I am sick just thinking about it. I know another guy who got sent home after his humvee got blown up. His commander was killed and his buddy lost an arm. My friend is just really messed up in the head. Is it better to wear your injury where everyone can see it, or be able to hide it so that people have to get close to you in order to figure out how damaged or scarred you are ? I was just writing privately about Mark (currently in Bagdad), and how I am so mad at him for having way more guts than I could muster, when I thought about another friend's guts... I took another best girl friend to the hospital this morning so she could have a colonscopy and endoscopy, to hopefully determine why she is sick so much. Her guts are a wreck. She just turned 30 and her live-in boyfriend couldn't be bothered to take her or pick her up. She asked what else was on the schedule for the day, and I said, "well, after I take you to your, uh, uh" and she chimed in "anal probe. If I don't laugh about it I'll scare myself to death thinking about it". She's got guts.

I love mornings, and meteorologists

2006-02-23T10:49:00.000-06:00

Ahhhhh, I have the luxury of working mostly from home. Every morning I sit with laptop in lap, drinking coffee, at least one cat nearby, watching Fox4 News, the only local news in the morning. I can't stand those Good Morning America-type shows. I'll get my national news from a reputable source - The Internet! - thank you very much. I also have a crush on the meteorologist, who is so tiny that I think I could put him in a mayonaise jar with some holes punched in the lid and keep him on a shelf in the kitchen. (Here is where I insert his name so that if he google's himself, he might learn that I stalk him thru the TV and feel flattered, but hopefully not creeped out - Don Harman) I always have a crush on a least one of our local meteorologists, as well as Jim C from Weather Channel. He seems to come to our town alot and broadcast live, although I have never bothered to get out of my chair and go hunt him down when he is broadcasting live. Usually it is snowing like mad when he is here, so getting to him does not seem reasonable. I hate winter so the closest I get to going to see him is gathering some firewood from the porch and nestling back down with the cat. Back to meteorology. I started my undergrad career as a meteorology student, but too many calculus classes that seemed irrelevant got in the way, and I came out 5 years later with a Latin American Studies degree. I wanted to study weather so that I could conquer my unreasonable fear of tornadoes. Therapy probably would have been a lot cheaper than tuition. Years later, I have mostly gotten over the tornado thing, with only a few nightmares about them annually. I think in my dreams they represent forces I can't control. Either I care less about things I can't control, or I control everything and have nothing to fear anymore. ;-)

Tom Tom Club said it best

2006-02-23T10:43:00.000-06:00

The first time I ever heard TomTom Club, Chocolata and a co-worker were dancing in circles around me while I sat on the floor of the co-worker's apartment above Waxman Candles (before it moved downtown). I giggled my brains out as they circled me rhythmically. Thank gawd there was a business beneath us and it was nighttime.

This is my favorite TomTom Club song: Wordy Rappinghood

What are words worth?What are words worth? - words
Words in papers, words in books
Words on TV, words for crooks
Words of comfort, words of peace
Words to make the fighting cease
Words to tell you what to do
Words are working hard for you
Eat your words but don't go hungry
Words have always nearly hung me
What are words worth?What are words worth? - words

Words of nuance, words of skill
And words of romance are a thrill
Words are stupid, words are fun
Words can put you on the run
What are words worth?What are words worth? - words

Its a rap race, with a fast pace
Concrete words, abstract words
Crazy words and lying words
Hazy words and dying words
Words of faith and tell me straight
Rare words and swear words
Good words and bad words
What are words worth?What are words worth? - words

Words can make you pay and pay
Four-letter words I cannot say
Panty, toilet, dirty devil
Words are trouble, words are subtle
Words of anger, words of hate
Words over here, words out there
In the air and everywhere
Words of wisdom, words of strife
Words that write the book I like
Words won't find no right solution
To the planet earth's pollution
Say the right word, make a million
Words are like a certain person
Who can't say what they mean
Don't mean what they say
With a rap rap here and a rap rap there
Here a rap, there a rap
Everywhere a rap rap
Rap it up for the common good
Let us enlist the neighbourhood
It's okay, I've overstood
This is a wordy rappinghood, okay, bye.

What are words worth?
are words worth? - words
What are words worth?
What are words worth? - words

He'll stop ... Don't stop ... Stop.

oh, beautiful etymology

2006-02-23T10:41:00.000-06:00

I marvel at the English language. How does "skinny" not mean "having an excess of skin"?Did it come from someone who had lost LOTS of weight, then they had all this skin that was dragging and so they became known as "skinny" , which someone later turned in to "being really thin"?

And did you know that "cock" come from old english as a diminutive suffix for names? So Hitch's son was Hitchcock. It is then easy for me to translate this diminutive connotation to explain why one's member is referred to as a cock in some circles. Alas, I assume incorrectly, as cock/penis comes from pillicock. And read on to learn more:
pillock n. Idiot. You could almost decide having read this dictionary that any unknown British word is most likely to mean "idiot". And you could almost be right. We have so many because different ones sound better in different sentences. On the subject of the word in hand, I am told by a contributor that it's a contraction of the 16th century word "pillicock" (describing the male member) and by another (who admits to not being completely sure) that this may be a male animal with one lone testicle and derived from "bullock". It's funny, even if it's not true...
(from English2american.com)

WHAT size?

2006-02-23T10:37:00.000-06:00

I wrote this the morning of Valentine's Day...

Last night I went and watched the KU v OSU game at my favorite watering hole - The Red Lyon. I DO mean favorite watering hole, because I am on a hard-core diet that is part of a research study (yes! getting paid to lose weight!) and I am not supposed to drink alcohol for 12 weeks (I goofed once and lost 3.5 pounds that week anyway. Is red wine a mysterious diet drug?) So, I am sitting there alternating diet coke and water while my friends glug down beer/whiskey/and a drink called a duck fart (why would you ever put something called a duck fart in your mouth?) and I notice brightly colored itty bitty pieces of sparkle on our table. Being a magpie by nature, I pick one up to examine it and decide if it needs to come back to my nest. And what is it? It's a "fun size" snickers, barely big enough to bother with. I was starting to lose interest in the game except for all the drunken Eddie Sutton stories that the announcers were telling and I began to become enraged. What is so friggin fun about a candy bar that is so small one could swallow it whole without having melted any of the chocolate off the outside? Is it "fun size" because it is petite, like one of those tart cheerleaders flouncing across the screen? Do things have to be miniature to be fun? Why isn't there a snickers the size of a loaf of wonder bread that needs hacked apart with a chainsaw so that you can share it with 38 friends - now that would be friggin fun! Not this microscopic speck of chocolate with one peanut and 4 mouse turds in it - seriously NOT fun. It's just another subtle marketing campaign designed to undermine my self-esteem and convince me to have drastic surgery to make myself more fun. Well, I have news for the snickers people, I am on to them, their game, and their wicked ways, and I am one helluva lot of fun at 5'9" and 22 pounds less than I was a month a go. Bigger is not better, but smaller does not mean fun, except in the case of baby animals - they are fun. And cute. I like ducks.Happy Vday, and think twice before you put something "fun" in your mouth today. "Fun size" is definitely going on the DISLIKE list.

Oh, how I love words

2006-02-23T10:19:00.000-06:00

I have a problem with some of the words we use in our daily goings-on. I am continually collecting words I like, and words I don't like. Here is part of my collection:

Words entered since the last post are indicated by an asterisk, not an asterick.

The LIKE list:
crotchety
epiploica
symbiosis
tomasek (a made up word that means to schlep around, randomly searching for something when you can't really remember what you were looking for. Ex: I was tomaseking around the house when I found a dead mouse - also remind me of Kimberlee Tomczak who I think is SUPER!)
SUPER
refrigeradora (my favorite word in Spanish)
architecture (sounds boxy)
poop (short and sweet)
personality disorder
willies (as in "gave me the willies")
gruntmeat (reference to poop)
windbag
angina
pie
Pi
artichoke (i wish this was a verb)
frumpy
dulcinea
voluptuous (it feel voluptuous when you say it)
slash, as in I am I am a DRE/YAYA
skidoo (restaurant speak for a collection of napkins rolled up with talc into a snake, wedged into your arse crack to absorb the sweat of standing in the kitchen all day)
sklerglegerkin (something that I tend to blurt out when I have nothing clever to say)
gnu
conoco, but only if it is mispronounced with all long o's and emphasis on the middle syllable. Otherwise it is pronounced like Monacco, with emphasis on the first syllable. A friend from upstate NY always said it like that and I miss her since she moved to Vermont.
albatross
aubergine
syrple (Thank you Roger Miller for "Roses are red, Violets are purple. Sugar is sweet, and so is maple syrple")
lugubrious
scurvy, especially with dog = scurvy dog
balalaika - a Russian musical instrument with a triangular body and three strings that sounds somewhat like a mandolin
bombed, as in real drunk
hurl - as in puke
piecework - one of the best pals uses this to refer to quilting, knitting, etc, and she uses it in casual conversation
buick, another reference to vomiting
womit - more on vomit
divan - a sofa/couch/davenport
crick - small body of running water
sidle - to scootch up next to
scootch
splendid
banjo
jingo
mantequilla - sounds so much better than "butter"
po-po = police
awnry - ornery
impudent
dooblayvay - W in spanish; short (but not really very short) for "whatever"

The UNLIKED list:
moist
ointment
salve
physician (can't we just use doctor? Physician sounds very windbaggy)
constable
plethora (overused!)
forte (overused AND mispronounced by most folks)
plug
slacks
loosemeat (not a refernce to poop, but to sandwiches. And my friends are always bringing this over so they can annoy me with "loosemeat sandwiches").
hose (especially in reference to pantyhose, which are works of the devil)
sm-...the prefix that people attach to the second rhymey word. Ex: education smeducation.
boquet garni
hottie
Fun Size (see other post on What size?) This infuriates me!
Words spelled with a K that are normally spelled with a C. Ex: We ate lunch at the Kountry Kitchen, where someone was giving away Kute Kittens.
lung cookie
nucyoolar (W just can't say nuclear)
reconstituted family (in the 80's, social workers and sociologists used this to refer to a family that was comprised of people who had been in other relationships, and brought their offspring into a new relationship. I think Blended family is what I heard them last called, although I don't know that they need to be called anything other than a family)
Limerance (a bar in my town that some friends are thinking of buying and changing the name to Limerick's where we can have a proper Irish pub. Limerance is a bad name because most people already call it Limerick's)
sweeeeet - comes out of my son's mouth too often
Missoura - it's pronounced Ma-zoo-ree
supper
panties
warsh - we wash cars, not warsh them
Marry - but only on menues. As in "the balsamic spritz marries the subtleties of the truffles and the kelp in a magical relationship". Whatever!

These are just a handful of the things that people say that stick in my craw (Oh, I love that phrase!) and I will forever be gathering and updating the LIST.

Musings of a dieting housewife

2006-02-23T09:38:00.000-06:00

Some thoughts from my kitchen...

I love preserved lemons. I eat them straight from the jar
that I keep in my frig.
I made them myself. Well,as much as I can for living nowhere near sea salt or lemon groves.

I feel exotic. They make me think of Morocco.
They make me forget that I am nowhere near the sea or a lemon grove.
They taste like an electric jolt to my tongue. A jolt of sharp, saline citrus, pungent and clean. They don't leave a bitter taste in my mouth even though they remind me of tears.
I slurp them down at the sink, staring out the window,
wondering if the chicken defrosting on the counter is going to make us sick later.