Why It’s Mother’s Day, and not Mother-In-Law’s Day (Part IV)

April 20, 2008

There have been several times in the past week that I have come home at random moments during the day.  Why is it that every time I enter the house it seems the baby is laying on the rug in the living room, crying?  MILfH is busy in the kitchen eating all the yogurt.  I bought the good brand of yogurt, see, and she goes through that like it’s water.  When I bought the cheaper, non-Tillamook brand, that stayed in the fridge, untouched.  She’s awfully picky about her free food.

Part of the deal of her staying here was that we would feed her.  And I make dinner every single night.  I would do this whether she was here or not.  There are very few nights that I do not make dinner for my family.  But now and then I use the leftovers.  I hate waste.  So chicken tenders become chicken fajitas.  Mashed potatoes become potato patties.  Et cetera. 

But MILfH doesn’t eat leftovers.  I can only assume that she is too good for them.  So she instead chooses to leave the house and go buy her food from a “sub-par Mexican restaurant” where she will most certainly “make a point of sending her food back after telling the waiter it was no good.” 

It’s a free country and she can do that, but the problem is that we can hear her complaining on the phone at night about how we aren’t feeding her.  WHAT?  Not feeding her?  On the contrary, MILfH.  I’m actually upset about the huge grocery bill that we’re paying due to your presence.  And I’d normally feel bad complaining about it, except that you are bitching about us to everyone you talk to on the phone at night.  Yes.  She has loud conversations every single night.  Her cell phone must be enormous.  Usually, the subject of these calls is “feel sorry for me” because of “X,Y, and Z.”  Jesse and I often come up in her conversations, about how awful we are, and how uncomfortable it all is, and how we aren’t paying her enough, and how none of her children respect her. 

So why doesn’t she just go home?  To hear her talk about her “conditions” would make you wonder if Jesse and I got our training as guards at Auschwitz.  So leave, why don’t you?  Any rational person would have left long ago, if they felt it was that bad.  Oh, because then you would have nothing to complain about, and if you had nothing to complain about, you wouldn’t know what do with yourself.  You might dry up into a little ball of paper.  Or perhaps you would seem like an actual nice person?  HA.  AHahahahha. HAHAHAHahhahAHHA

(By now I am really losing my mind.)

Every day that I drive home and see her car in front of the house, I get a knotted-up feeling in the pit of my stomach.  I don’t want to go inside the house.  I don’t want to see her.  I don’t want to hear her.  I don’t want to see the mess that is left.  I don’t want to smell her overpowering lotion that has permeated my very skin.

April 27, 2008

My dad calls me to inform me that MILfH has visited him out on our land today.  Why?  I’m stumped.  Sure, she kept telling me that she wanted to go see the land, but I didn’t want to show her the land.  That place is very special to me and frankly, she doesn’t need to see it.  It’s not a freaking carnival, lady.  But she showed up nonetheless.  How?  I couldn’t figure out how she even found it.  No one told her where it was.  No one.  I double checked with my dad.  He was just as surprised to see her as I was to hear about it.

This piece of land is not a place you would “just find.”  No way in hell.  It’s not like Ted Turners spread, anyway.  Maybe it’s like .000000000000000002% the size of Ted Turner’s land.  So I asked her how she found it.

“Oh, I just remembered that it was by <NAME OF WHERE ITS BY>.  I was out for a drive and I saw your dad’s truck.”

Riiiight.  Let me just tell you that in a state the size of Montana, it is easier to win Powerball than to “just be out for a drive” and find property of someone that you just met a couple of weeks before.  And why was she so concerned about seeing the land?  She met my dad when we all went to Butte for St. Patrick’s Day.  But wouldn’t she feel weird, being the insecure person that she is, just showing up out there?  Was it possible she had a crush on my dad?  My mother-in-law?  That was just a fleeting wonder.  Would never happen.

Later that day when I was cleaning up the kitchen, I discovered how she found the land.  It’s the only possible way she could have.  I had an insurance bill sitting in a pile of mail on the counter.  She had to have gone through it.  She could have gotten the address from one of the policies inside.  It wouldn’t have been the first time that she dug through my personal paperwork.  She dug through my entire desk years ago when she was staying at our house, recovering from a bad car accident.   She went through all of my personal paperwork.  I was furious.  So when she did it again, color me unsurprised.  My only regret is that I didn’t have the foresight to scribble notes on all of my bills that said “HA I SEE YOU!  GO HOME NOW.  YOU SHOULDN’T BE HERE.  -GOD”

My husband took a short weekend trip back to Colorado to get a load of things that were still in our house there.  It was blizzarding outside.  I was stuck in the house with MILfH all day long.  I decided to make the best of it.  Maybe we could get along.  Maybe she wasn’t so bad. 

She started in on talking about Greg, the guy she is married to, but apparently doesn’t want to be.  She talked and bitched about him for three hours before I finally said “Okay.  What are you going to do?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you sound like you’re in a bad situation,” I said.  “So what is your plan to get out?”

Tumbleweeds.

I continued.  “Cause I don’t want to be hearing about this six months down the road, and neither does Jesse.  Either you figure out a way to get out of it, or you don’t complain.”  I was semi-surprised at how direct I was finally being with my MILfH.  It just came out.  “Sorry,” I kept going.  “But I’m pretty sick of hearing about Greg.  So just do something.”

Then I decided we should get out of the house, lest I lapse into a coma from hearing one more thing about her life.  I took us all to the Museum of the Rockies.  We all had a fun time, come to think of it.  Then I took us all to dinner at Johnny Carino’s.  The bill came to fifty bucks, but it was fun to be out of the house and away from the drama.

Sometime during the meal she said “You know how I used to work at the <MEDICAL OFFICE>?  That place I quit? Well, if I tell you something can you promise not to ever repeat it to Jesse?”

Oh, shit.  When will I learn?  If someone ever tells you something that comes with a caveat, plug your ears.  Bad juju.  But when it’s your mother in law telling you to keep something from your husband, how can you resist?  I will say that I never promised.  I just smiled.  (If you’re ever telling me something I’m not supposed to repeat and I just smile, you should know what is coming) 

“Well, I looked in <Step -MILs NAME>’s medical records and guess what!  <Step-MIL’s MEDICAL INFORMATION>.”

“Oh,” I said.  I was a little let down.  “We already knew that.”  I was referring to knowing that she looked through the records.  Sheesh, practically the whole town knows that.  Incidentally, my step-MIL knows that too, and her response is great:

“The only thing she can find out about me is that I’m younger and I weigh less.” –Step-MIL

Anyway, what MILfH didn’t admit, but that we all know, is that she was fired from that job for snooping in those records.  We all know, but she doesn’t know we know.  It’s funny.  She tells everyone she quit, but hell-O.  You can’t go snooping through medical records. 

Which brings me to an age old question (at least in this family):  Why the hell does she care?  She’s been divorced from my husband’s father for nearly 30 years.  I don’t understand the animosity that she still holds toward him.  I worry about what bad information she will pass on to my children about their other grandparents.  That is, if I ever let her see my children again…

Anyway, these obsessive tendencies come in to play very soon.

April 30, 2008

I hear whimpering.  AJ must be crying about something.  I thought the whole house was asleep.  I get up to investigate, but AJ is sound asleep and probably dreaming about cartoons.  The sobbing is coming from my MILfH’s bedroom.  My husband gets up to see what is wrong with her. 

She is apparently having a nervous breakdown.  My husband emerged from the room feeling really bad.  “She thinks we don’t like her,” he said. 

“She’s half right,” I assured him.

“Be nice,” he said.  “She is having a hard time.”  He explained what the breakdown was about.  Basically, she is upset because everyone in the whole world “hates” her and she feels like she should go “disappear.”  Okay, so now I feel bad for her, momentarily anyway.  A grown woman…s the most insecure person I have ever met, who pops pills that aren’t prescribed in God-knows-what kind of detrimental combinations.  I am certain that these pills must be creating paranoia and weirdness in her mind, but my husband swears she has been this way her entire life.  Husband does his best to comfort his mommy, and say all the right things, and reassure her that we like her.  Husband decides we should take her out to dinner tomorrow since she is about to leave to go home to Colorado.  I roll my eyes and say “Fine.” 

We’ll take her out to dinner tomorrow.  But I have a gut feeling that this show of tears is a ploy for pity.  I’ll let my husband buy it since it’s his mom, and boys love their mommies. 

But I’m not falling for it.

 

Why It’s Mother’s Day, and not Mother-In-Law’s Day (Part III)

4/15/08

I’m sure I already mentioned that MILfH is the first to bed and the last one to get up.  Sometimes she sneaks out the door and goes somewhere.  The other day she was complaining about how she is running out of money.  Right after that, she said:

“Have you ever been to that Indian store?”

“What Indian store?”

“The little touristy place downtown?”

“No,” I said.  Mostly because I’ve been too busy, I’m not a tourist, and this is a new town for me. 

“Well I guess the Indians in Montana aren’t as creative as the ones in the Southwest,” she said. 

“What?!”

“The store sells mostly Navajo stuff.  So I guess the Indians in Montana just aren’t as artsy.  But I did find a really nice necklace made by a Blackfoot woman.”

“Huh,” I said.  This was quickly becoming my response to everything.  “Huh.” 

Now I don’t know much about the artsy-ness of the various Native Americans in the country, but I’m pretty sure that was some kind of insult.  Hopefully she won’t talk that way out in town, because there are lots of “Indians” still roaming around town.  And if one of them decided to pull out an original handcrafted antler-handled hatchet and used it to split her skull, I think they’d get all time suspended by a Montana jury. 

I hear she is running out of money due to an insatiable craving for souvenirs.

But the weirdest, most insecure show of behavior so far has to be regarding the coffee.   

I made a pot of coffee on our first morning in the new house in Bozeman.  I made the full pot, 12 cups of Starbucks Breakfast Blend.  I made 12 cups so everyone could have some.  I started to clean the kitchen and put things away.  I saw a glass container of coffee grounds on the counter (not mine) so I moved it to the area near the coffee pot.  MILfH saw this and said, “Oh, is my coffee in your way?” 

“No,” I said.  “Is that yours?  You can keep it on the counter.  I don’t mind.”

She stood up and raced to the coffee.  “No, I don’t want it to get in your way.” She had Macy in one arm.  She scooped up the coffee in the other arm (it’s a pretty large container).  I thought maybe she was going to take it up to her room.  No.  Instead she went back to the living room, rocking the baby in one arm and rocking the coffee in the other.  She stood there, holding the baby and the coffee for several minutes. 

Are you going to hold that all day?  I wondered this.  “I don’t mind if you keep it in the kitchen,” I said.  “I won’t take it.”

“Oh, well, if you don’t mind,” she said.  “I’ll just keep it on the counter.”

FINE.  Sheesh. 

The next day I made coffee again.  She finally woke up after her hours of restful sleep and pulled out her own coffee pot.  Apparently this was how it was going to be…two coffee pots making coffee simultaneously.   Whatever.

The next day she was amazingly awake early.  She already had her coffee going.  And she offered me a mug! “You can try my coffee if you want,” she said.  I thanked her and took half a cup.  It was really good!  It must be that Millstone French Roast, who knows. 

There was a little left in the pot.  “Do you mind if I finish off the pot?”  I asked.  “I’ll make some more.”

She leapt off the couch and headed for the pot. “No, I need more,” she said.  She emptied the pot into her own cup.  “I can make more,” she said.  “Where’s your coffee?” 

Okay, I guess we can make more as long as it’s my stash of coffee.  Fine.  Her coffee was good, and I would have really liked more of it, but whatever.  She grabbed my bag off coffee and added some to the already-used grounds of hers. 

Fine.  I swear I won’t touch your flippin’ coffee. 

I also am barred from her Vermont effing cheese, her yogurt, her juice, and anything else that she brings home.  Which I don’t mind in the least.  What I DO mind is that she happily helps herself to everything that I bring home…she was the first to tear into a new box of crackers I bought for Jesse, into the juice boxes that I provide for AJ (I hate it when other people drink those darn expensive juice boxes…they are for PRESCHOOL USE ONLY), the fruit, the snacks.  And when I make dinner, she is always the first to eat…even before my children, who I always make sure are the first to eat.  She even finished off the pan of scrambled eggs I made the other morning for breakfast before my husband had ANY.  The rudeness and general self-centeredness astounds me in this grown woman. 

A couple of days ago she asked me “Do you think I’ll ever find someone?”  (Uh…she is MARRIED.) 

“You found Greg, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, but Greg is stuck in this cycle of abuse.”  I swear, if I hear cycle of abuse one more time…

I yawned.  “I’m surprised you would want to find anyone, after your experiences.”

“Well, it would be nice to find someone nice.”

“The key is to not need anyone,” I said with my 30-year old wisdom of the ages.  “Then you won’t need to depend on anyone, and maybe you won’t take the first person who comes along.”

She nodded.  “Well, I was fine before I met Greg,” she said.  “I was happy in my house with my dog.  Now I’m in debt, have no savings, and I don’t know what I am going to do.”

I didn’t point out the obvious, like well if you were happy, why did you marry that guy, because pointing out the obvious never gets anyone anywhere.  I just shrugged. 

“Huh,” I said. 

That fancy cheese is still in my refrigerator, unopened.  Yet the package of feta that I purchased for myself has been opened and used by MILfH. 

Last night for dinner, she tore into the package…midway through opening, she stopped…and asked me, “Is it okay if I open this?” 

 

Why It’s Mother’s Day, and not Mother-In-Law’s Day (Part II)

4/6/2008

Since Sharon and I were tag-teaming kid duty, the rest of the drive to Montana was fairly uneventful.   Sharon, thank you so much.  The only other thing that happened was that we stopped at a McDonalds in Columbus, MT for lunch on the last day of the move.  Sharon took Macy to the bathroom to change her.  AJ was hungry.  The restaurant was very busy. 

I asked MILfH if she could watch AJ while I stood in line to order him a kid’s meal. 

She shook her head and said “Actually I’m going across the street to look for souvenirs.”

Don’t ask my why she wanted a souvenir at that very moment in Columbus, MT.  But I hung onto AJ in line and ordered him food, though he kept trying to dart off, which was why I needed the help in the first place.  Kids who have to sit in cars all day have lots of pent up energy.  Oh well.  At this point, I was glad to have five minutes sans MILfH.

We got to Bozeman and as it turns out, the landlord was applying touch up paint to the house.  The fumes were very strong and I didn’t feel good about staying there with a kid, a baby, and heck, myself…who was getting dizzy from the paint.  I decided to take my kids and myself and Sharon to Butte, to stay at my moms. 

“But your mom has cats,” she said.

“Yes, she does,” I confirmed.

“Then I can’t stay.”

YES!  Finally a MILfH repellent.  MILfH sulked off to a hotel and Sharon and I headed for Butte.

Things have settled and the paint has dried, and she is still with us in Bozeman two weeks later.  Since Bozeman is such a hot spot to live right now, finding daycare for an infant has been next to impossible.  Most waiting lists are extended into 2009.  So MILfHis “helping.”  By “helping” I mean sustaining life, which I know is important. 

But she lets the baby sleep ALL DAY, and then Macy is awake and ready to party at night.  She gives ZERO attention to AJ throughout the day, and is content to let him watch TV for hours on end.  She leaves him downstairs while she goes upstairs to read her various Montana travel magazines and books. 

I play with AJ as much as I can between setting up house, getting ready for the new job, unpacking, etc. but the poor kid is sad.  Jesse can barely walk because he had to do 99% of the heavy lifting and it’s made his foot problem flare up terribly.  The whole experience has made me feel very stretched and busy and not a good mom.  But I know it’s temporary, and I am on several waiting lists for daycares.  We also have one spot that we are going to try to take at an “okay” daycare just until one of the good ones opens up.  MILfH HAS TO GO.

She said she would be happy to stay if “she could bring her Dukey.”  Duke is her old, smelly ass dog.  Well, it isn’t my choice because we are renting, and they don’t want dogs from their renters.  She does not seem to understand this.  “Just tell them you are desparate,” she said.  “He’s a good dog and I’ll keep him on the porch during the day and he can sleep in my car at night.”

“I think we’d get reported as animal abusers if we kept a dog in a car overnight,” I pointed out. 

“But he loves my car,” she said.  “Or maybe he could just come up to my room at night.”

“It’s not our house,” I said.  “And even if they did allow dogs, there would be a non-refundable dog fee, and it would increase the monthly rent. 

She said “Well, that would be fine,” she said.  “Then I could stay.”

HA!  Right.   

MILfH is the first one to bed and the last one to get up.  It makes me insane.  That of all things, makes me insane.  I cannot stand lazy people.

The news was on, and there was a story about how people in the military follow orders.
“I can’t understand how those soldiers just blindly follow orders,” she said.

I am a former Marine. I said, “Well, they’re all really trained, and the ones that can’t follow orders get weeded out pretty early.”

Her clever response:  “I guess that’s why I’ve never been able to work.  I just ask too many questions.  Like, why do you have that rule?”

I wanted to say, “No, you’ve never been able to work because you are LAZY.”  But I just smiled my most sarcastic smile and thought of all the people on earth slaving away to make a buck, while my mother in law chooses instead to marry the first (and second, and third) men who happen upon her. 

Her current husband is a real tool.  A real jerk.  They are both jerks to each other, and she is an awful stepmother to his two daughters, of which he has full custody.  She was proudly telling me the other day how she really told off the eleven year old before she left to join our caravan.  Wow.  You told off an eleven year old girl from a really troubled family.  How proud you must be. 

Anyway, she’s been touting the “abuse card” for a while now.  How he’s “very abusive.”  She can never tell us just how he is abusive, because I don’t think she knows.  She probably feels abused.  She did hint around how he pushed her during a fight, which does constitute abuse.  She didn’t flat out say it, but she hinted around enough to where I think they hit each other when times get tough.

“I don’t deserve that,” she said.  “I’m a child of God.”

I DID reply to that.  I said, “I hate to tell you, but even if you WEREN’T a ‘child of God’ you  still wouldn’t deserve that.”

She chuckled with non-understanding.  She has already confessed to “making fun of” Buddhists, Muslims, and other non fundamentalist Christians.  I’m pretty sure she thinks all non “children of God” deserve the smackdown. 

We’ve already heard the story (she doesn’t know we know) about how she got drunk and threw a beer bottle at her husband’s head a week after they moved into their new house.  He called the cops on her, and she fled the scene in her CR-V.  She headed for the safety of the Christian retreat up near their house, Rainbow Valley Ranch.  The gate was closed, which is why she left the vehicle and jumped the fence and started scampering across a field, which is where the cops tackled her.  I guess abuse works in both directions.  I’m sure she thinks those police were probably Jews.

The time came to fill up the new refrigerator.  Part of the deal of MILfH coming up to “help” us included me cooking her stupid meals for her.  Fine, I get it.  But I am not a grocery store runner. 

The first trip to the grocery store (she had already been to two) for us was exciting.  As we walked out the door, MILfHsaid “I need some Millstone French Roast.  And I need special margarine, it’s in a green and yellow container.” 

Fine.  Whatever.

I went to the grocery store and I did look for these special items, I really did.  But the Smith’s only carried a couple brands of coffee and while they did carry Millstone, there was no French Roast to be seen.  So I went to the dairy section.  As it turns out, every brand of margarine in America comes in a yellow and green container.  So I didn’t buy that either, as I know I would have purchased the Wrong Kind.  And MILfH would have taken this personally.

She seemed insulted that I returned with nothing for her.  “I tried,” I said. 

A later attempt at a grocery store run yielded another request.  “Will you get me some cheese?”

“Sure,” I said.  “What kind?”

“Vermont White Cheddar.”

FINE.  I went to a new, very nice Rosauers.  The dairy aisle had your run of the mill cheeses, four kinds of cheddar…but none of them white, or from Vermont.  I headed for the deli area, cursing up a storm that I was wasting minutes of my day searching for specialty cheese for the laziest woman I know.  I could have said no, but I’m holding it all back.  I want a peaceful house and it’s already tense enough with a mother in law living in it.  I finally found a block of “natural cheddar from Vermont.”  FOUR NINETY NINE FOR A TEENY WEENY BLOCK OF CHEESE.  Whatever.  I threw it in the cart.

I got home and unpacked the groceries.  “Did you get my cheese?”

“Yes,” I said.

“How much was it?”

“Four ninety nine,” I said. 

Her jaw dropped open.  “Are you serious?  For Cracker Barrel?”

My eyes have started to do a funny thing when MILfH talks.  They jerk around, like I am about to have a seizure, or perhaps a stroke. 

“You didn’t say Cracker Barrel,” I said.

“I didn’t?  Oh, I thought I did.”

“Nope,” I said.  “You said Vermont White Cheddar.”

“Yeah,” she said.  “From Cracker Barrel. I swear I said that.”

I know that this visit from MILfH, while semi-helpful, is shortening my lifespan by several years.  I wanted to stick the fancy Vermont White Cheddar somewhere where the sunlight would never hit it. 

 

This other blog…

Just an FYI…I have so many Montana-related posts to write that I am going to keep them in a new blog.  So if anyone cares to read about adventures in huckleberries, dog poo problems in Bozeman, or the perils of driving around Montana with out-of-state-plates, then click Gold and Silver…

I’ll still write here a lot about my usual nonsense. 

back to regularly scheduled programming…

 

You Gotta take the Good with the Bad…

Things about today:

Good:

1.  I’m going to be a huckleberry farmer.  Alright, ‘farmer’ is too strong of a word.  But did you know that you can buy huckleberry bushes online?  I ordered eighteen.  The first two came today.  They will all supplement the lonely, huck singleton already planted out on the land.  Who knows if they’ll ever make berries.  I guess the plants are easy to grow, but getting berries is the challenge.  I got a box from FedEx today.  Out popped two slightly compressed huckleberry plants in one-gallon buckets.  Packed lightly in foam peanuts.  They have blossoms and everything.  At first I didn’t think they were real and that I was the victim of some Nigerian huckleberry online scam artists.  But then a couple of leaves fell off and I noticed a stalk was slightly wilted.  Cool!  But what will I do if the bushes do make huckleberries?  Nineteen huckleberry bushes?  I dunno…make jam? 

2.  I got my car detailed.  I’ve never had a car get detailed before.  I’ve also never had a manicure, but I imagine that the feeling is similar.  What happened was, my “Check Engine” light came on while I was tooling down I-90 at about 85 mph.  I got a tingle of panic.  Is the “Check Engine” light the bad one? I wondered.  Nah, I think the bad one is “Service Engine Soon.”  Or is it?  Ha…”soon” they say…as your engine drops out of your car onto the highway.   It oughta say “Service Engine NOW, mofo!”  Okay so after my train of thought stopped, I made an appointment to get the “Check Engine” light checked.  I might add that the “Cruise” indicator was also blinking.  As it turns out, some air sensor was going bad and it was going to cost about $350.  The standard warranty for a Subaru ends at 60000 miles.  And here I was at 64000.  Doesn’t that just stink, the service guy said.  Ha! 

You underestimated me, service-guy! 

You and your posse of highly-paid labor-guys who were planning to stand around my car, look inside once or twice and then replace a fuse! 

But I bought the extended warranty!  MWAH HA HA HA! Eat that, service-guy! 

He seemed to be annoyed at my dance of triumph, so I stopped.  “Hey,” I said, “since I’m saving all that money, can I get this?”  I pointed at the flyer sitting on the counter.  Gold Detail.  It listed all the things that they cleaned, which was everything, even the engine compartment.  “Sure,” the service guy said.  He was probably thinking “At least we’re getting something outta her…sucker!”  Anyway I picked up my car and it’s so clean I kind of wonder if they brought out the right one.  It even seems to drive better…maybe because it’s happy.  It’s happy because it no longer smells like a combination of toddler fart and month-old Whopper. 

I vow to try harder to keep my car clean.  In order to accomplish this, I plan to tow my children behind the car on a reinforced toboggan.

Bad:

1.  I bought a new lamp for my office.  My new office at my new job is an “inner” office, and I can’t deal with fluorescent lighting.  Yet the dim, flickering bulb over my desk is woefully inadequate, and I may go blind if I don’t get a lamp.  So I found a lamp for 5 dollars.  Score!  Then I went to purchase some light bulbs. 

All the light bulbs have jumped on the Go Green bandwagon.  I was intrigued.  Could *I* be green?  Might *I* contribute somehow, little ol’ me, to saving the earth?  I picked up a package of those curly pretzel bulbs.  “Lasts six years!” the package said.  “Save $141** in energy with these bulbs!” the package said.  I noticed the warning asterisks, and flipped the package around.  The warning reminded me of the contract that Willy Wonka (Wilder not Depp) made all the kids sign, starting out with normal sized writing and getting smaller and smaller and…anyway, the gist was that if you used the bulb for four hours a day for the next six years, your energy savings would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $141**, if lots of other factors came into play and if nothing went wrong***. 

***But it could go wrong. 

I’m no mathematician, but $141/6 years/12 months/30 days ended up saving me about six cents a day***.  I decided it was not worth paying eight bucks for a fancy, green-packaged, tree-hugging, whale saving pack of four light bulbs when I could get four gas-guzzling, forest-fire starting, blood diamond, DDT-drinkin’, starving children bulbs (that were of a higher wattage, mind you) for ninety-four cents.  Sorry earth.  I love my wattage. 

2.  You can’t buy Bran Flakes anymore, apparently.  I am pissed about this.  I love Bran Flakes.  Before you ask, I am not a senior citizen.  But it is what I grew up on.  They used to be called Kellogg’s Bran Flakes.  Over the years, they became Kellogg’s Complete, and you could get them wheat-bran or oat-bran (I love the oat variety).  Is this because people just want their stupid Froot Loops?  It pained me to spell that out.  It is NOT ‘Froot,’ you dumb toucan.  I miss my Bran Flakes!  The metamucil is just not the same.

Side note:  A while back I did a post on Extreme Bust-Up Flaming Nachos.  I want to apologize to all the pervs out there who keep landing on my blog because they were searching for “extreme busts.”  I feel terrible about all the confusion.  I mean, there are dozens of you every week. 

You all must be terribly disappointed.

 

Brother, Where Art Thou?

Don’t read this if you were expecting any humor today…come back next week.

I don’t talk about my brother much.  I guess it’s because I never have anything to say.  We haven’t gotten along since we were little kids.  Long story.  However, I thought maybe all of that would change now that my brother is the much-adored “Uncle Mike” to my kiddos.  I hope it still will change.

I was an adoring older sister.  I really was.  I don’t know that he remembers, and I don’t know that my parents even remember.  I do.  I liked to impart my childhood genius onto him by pretending to be the professor and making him be the student.  I even assembled “books” of notebook paper and markers together and assigned him homework.  Of course I then became the tutor, teaching him about primary and secondary colors, and what a googolplex was (I was super nerdy).

In third grade, I used up every last Monopoly dollar I had earned in Mr. William’s endless spelling bees and math challenges at the end of year Toy Auction to win a prize for my brother - the snap-together racetrack that every boy in class had been drooling over throughout the year.   (Tough luck boys…you never came close to amassing the quantities of Monopoly money that I did…mwah ha!)  I proudly took the racetrack home and was happy to see my little blond brother’s eyes light up at the enormous toy that I had won for him. 

My brother had a girlfriend for many years.  They dated for like, eight years or some ridiculous crap like that…and she really screwed him over.  I’m talking worse than an episode of Desperate Housewives screwed.  She’s paying for it now…popping out kid after kid with a meth addict loser who already had a football team of his own…and I say he dodged a bullet.  But it took him a long time to get over that major screwage, and I’m not sure if he ever did.  One of the many things that “she drove him to do” was to get a DUI at age 20.

My brother really should have been some sort of model.  He’s a good looking guy.  The kind of guy that has swarms of women throwing (and I mean literally throwing) themselves at him.  It’s pathetic.  But he doesn’t trust any of them, and the places that he’s meeting them don’t exactly foster trust from the get go.  I don’t think he knows how to handle it all.  Who would?  However he’s been spending a lot of time with a particular girl lately.  Said girl just took a job in Casper, Wyoming. 

Since he’s currently living at home with his (our) mother, she of course noticed that he didn’t come home.  He didn’t bother to let his dog out into the yard like he usually does in the morning.   That was the first sign.  He never leaves the dog locked up in the house all day.  My mom goes to work at 4 in the morning, and when she got home at 3 the poor dog was still locked inside, whining to be let out.  He didn’t have a change of clothes with him and his contact lens case was untouched in the bathroom.  He always takes his contacts out in the morning.  It’s the only case he has.  After being missing for a few days, my mom really started to freak out.  He wasn’t answering his cell phone, though it was ringing instead of going straight to voicemail. 

She went out on a drive to search for his truck, but it wasn’t parked at the bar he normally goes to.  He goes out on weekends and leaves his truck parked in front of the bar, where he bums a ride the next day to pick it up.  He’s gone to the same bar for several years without fail.

Remember how I had that conversation with my brother last week?  During that car ride, he asked me to take him to his truck when we got back to town.  I dropped him off at a bar that I didn’t know he went to.  Had he not asked me to take him to his truck at the new bar, we may never have found his truck.  My poor mom very well may have finished herself off with a heart attack just wondering where he had gone.  I told her to drive by the new bar to see if it was there.

It was.  Except the windshield was busted in.  And who knows how long it had been sitting there.

Now everyone was freaking out.  Last December there was a young man murdered in Butte and dumped in his pickup truck after a drunken party went wrong.  My mom knows the family of the murder victim quite well…she also works with all of the people who were accused of the murder.  She’s been watching them all go to trial one by one.  When I was a waitress, I used to wait on the victims mom and dad every single day.  It was their only son.  So my mom is very familiar with some shady areas of the “youth culture” in Butte…and suddenly her son was missing and had a bashed up windshield.  Minds tend to run wild when all these factors come into play.  She called everyone that she knew he knew…none of them had seen him for days. 

I got really worried because of some of the things he had told me during our conversation.  Things that made it even more questionable as to his location or well-being.  I was never going to tell Mom about these things, because they aren’t things you’d even want to know as a mom.  But suddenly they were totally relevant so I had to spill, so she could tell the fuzz.  This did not help the freak out quotioent.

She visited the emergency room.  Was anyone brought in beat up?  Shot?  In a wreck?  It was about to dump two feet of snow on the region.  Where was her son?  Was he okay?  Was he hurt?  Did he need help?  Was he lying there in a ravine, unable to call for help?   

She went to the police station.  She filed a report.  The police went to take pictures of the truck and start the impound/investigation process.  He’d been missing quite a while at this point and under suspicious circumstances. 

I won’t bore you with any more of the details or near-stroke inducing stress that my mom went through.  I was worried too.  I thought of my little blond brother from my youth…not the wild and seemingly reckless brother he became over the years…and was scared.  I got in my car and though the news was saying not to drive if you didn’t have to due to the storm, I kissed my kids goodbye and headed for Butte…if anything, to help my mom calm down.  Her son was missing.  If my son was missing I would call the freaking National Guard and start shouting orders.  My dad was on his way into town to assist with what he could.  However he had spent most of the evening at the bar and now he was talking about going into the bar where his truck was found and getting some answers.  I was speeding toward Butte hoping I could keep everyone out of jail and/or the cardiac ward. 

Eventually he was found.  Safe and sou…well, just safe.  He was found at another bar, where he had been continually drinking, presumably since this girl announced she was moving to Casper.  Though he had told me he really “didn’t like her anyway” and that “she wasn’t the one for him” he decided to use it as an excuse to go get plastered.  Butte plastered, that is…and that kind of drunk is way more intense than I’ve seen anywhere else in America…except for maybe Camp Lejeune during the Marine Corps birthday. 

Which reminds me: every time I came home on leave while I was in the military, my brother would use my presence as an excuse to go out and get drunk.  Apparently my return home was always too much for him to handle, so the only answer was to go pickle his brain.  I’ve had lots of people I went to school with report this to me…he would sit and give the girls sob stories on how hard it was to be him.  What choice did he have but to go drink his troubles away?  I’m totally over that, but it was no fun at all to watch my mom worry about him over the years.  The things he’s done transcend normal worry levels.  I think this past weekend took the cake for her.  The reason I was coming into town was not to look for my brother but to keep my mom calm.  I was worried for him…but I’ll never be as worried about him as my parents will, of course.  I’m pretty numb to certain things, and here is why:

A long time ago I came to realize that half of my immediate family as I knew them are dead.  Not physically dead yet, but dead.  Impostors have taken their places.  Alcoholics have no idea of the pain they cause to everyone around them.  The basic definition of an alcoholic is someone “whose drinking causes trouble for themselves or for those around them.”  There is an entire extended definition that my brother and his dad fit to a tee, which I won’t get into.  I won’t get into how it’s a disease and poor them and get help because guess what?  When you have to see it all the time, it’s pretty hard to have any sympathy.  Neither one of them will ever acknowledge the problems they caused over the years.  Sadly, I have noticed that just their thinking of the problems they caused cause them to go drink their troubles away. 

Anyway, when my dad found my brother, he assured the police that he’d take care of him and take him home.  Whew.  I headed back home.   I called my dad on the way home to tell him to be careful on his drive back to his cabin.  He was still with my brother, there at a bar, and announced that he was going to stay there and “have a beer with his son.”  I guess they decided to stay and celebrate Mike’s discovered safety by continuing to drink to oblivion.  Neither one of them went home that night either.  Never mind that my mom was driving home from a night of hospitals and police stations, sick with fear.  Never mind the fact that everyone was worried and had to spring into action to help find him.  I guess he was too woeful to even care that my brother needed a new change of clothes and was most likely in dire need of a shower.  No harm, right?  Just a couple more drinks.  My mom, waiting for him to come home even then, finally ran out of tears.  When it comes to my dad and brother, I ran out of those a long time ago. 

I should be a better sister, or a more appropriate family member, and refrain from posting the family drama on the internet.  But something has to be done, so this is my way of throwing it to the universe.  When you want something changed it’s a good idea to just throw it out there.  If they decide to read any of it, fantastic.  I’ll go ahead an apologize in advance.  An apology to you is much more than I ever got from having to put up with the behavior my entire life.

I’m sick of the drinking in my family. 

I’m sick of calling them out on it, only to be laughed at, like I’m the one who’s not normal. 

I’m sick of hearing “you gotta die of something.” 

I’m sick that there is a very real possibility that my children will only have memories of their Uncle Mike, because he either died in a car accident, went to jail, or got murdered because he pissed off the wrong fellow drunk. 

I’m sick that my dad will probably die a painful death stemming from his liver.  I’m sick that the dad I will always remember is long gone and has been for years.

I’m sick that so many things could have been different for our family.  I’m glad that I have my own now, and that I can do things differently.  I do do things differently.  My consolation prize is this.  My children will never have to live it or see it, at least not from their parents.  I will make sure of it. 

Maybe someone else out there in a similar situation will read this and do something about their choices before it’s too late.

I’m sick of excuses. 

 

I Blame Homer Simpson

Parents get freaked out when they think their children are in trouble.  I figured that once I reached adulthood, this silly worry would go away.  However, it just gets worse, according to one of my mothers-in-law (I have two…).  Apparently the older your child is, the more there is to worry about.  I guess I can understand.  Parents spend their thriving years raising kids, keeping them safe, feeding them, spending every last stinking dime on their stupid sports uniforms and yearbooks.  Children are a huge investment of time and money, not to mention all that love and DNA crap.  So when it comes to worrying about their children, can you blame them?

Back to me foolishly thinking that it would stop when I no longer qualified for that 18-24 target age group…

I had a house in Northern Virginia when I was working in DC.  Here is what my life consisted of when I lived in DC:

• Wake up (4:30 AM)
• Leave for work (4:50 AM)
• Leave work for home (4:30 PM)
• Arrive home (5:30 if light traffic)
• Simpsons/King of the Hill reruns (5:30 - 6:30)
• Dinner, read, bathe (6:30-8:00)
• Bed (8:00 PM)

One day, a day just like any other day, I came home.  I was in a great mood because traffic was smooth and I got home before dark.  All the neighbors were coming home too.  I was going to make myself a nice dinner and get some reading in before going to sleep and waking up and doing the whole commute thing again.  I took my cell phone out of my purse, plopped it on the coffee table and turned on the Simpsons.  It was the one where Homer attempts to assemble a barbeque in the backyard.  Things go crappily, and Homer begins beating the life out of that poor, unsuspecting grill.  Homer screams like a madman, and the grill is reduced to a pile of nuts and bolts. 

I listened to Homer scream as I changed out of my work clothes.  The doorbell rang.  No one ever rang my doorbell.  I looked out the bedroom window.  The street was blocked off by a fire truck!  Red lights bounced off the thick trees and the neighbors smart yellow siding!  What the hell?!  An ambulance pulled up.  I ran downstairs.  What in the world?

Two police officers were standing on my porch.  “Can I help you?” I asked.  The officer looked concerned. 

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“…Yeah,” I said.  “What’s going on?”

“Are you in the house alone, ma’am?”

“Yes,” I said.  What did I do?

“Do you mind if we come in and take a look around?” said the second officer.  “We want to make sure no one is forcing you to say that you are alone.”

“Come on in,” I said.  “What’s this about?”

“We received a call that someone had broken in and was beating you,” the officer explained. 

“What?!??!?”

The police came in and looked around the house.  My phone rang.  I answered in.  My mother was on the other end of the line, barely breathing.  She was yelling really loud, like she always does on the phone, like it’s still 1910 and we’re yelling into cans.  “Are you okay?  Oh my God, are you okay?”

Curiouser and curiouser.  “I’m fine, mom.  What’s wrong?”  

“Are the police there?” she asked. 

“Yeah,” I said.  “How did you know?”   I had not yet made the connection.

“Why did you call me?” she asked. 

“I didn’t call you,” I said.

“You called me and you were screaming!  Someone was attacking you.”

“…”

“You called me,” said my mom.  “Are you okay?’

I’ll leave the rest of the very confused conversation out to make a long story shorter.  Apparently when I had tossed my cell phone on the coffee table, it dialed the last person I had called (Mom).  She answered the phone and heard Homer Simpson beating up that effing barbecue.  She was sure it sounded like me, and that I was getting attacked, and that somehow I managed to get the telephone to call her.  I mean, who else would you call if you were getting attacked and murdered? 

The cops didn’t really laugh much when I figured out what had happened.  I guess it’s not funny when a Simpsons rerun is responsible for what was probably several thousand dollars worth of emergency response.  I mean two officers, a fire truck and an ambulance.  Impressively, it only took fourteen minutes for them to arrive at my house…a 911 call in Butte, Montana calling about a potentially dire situation in a busy, populated part of Virginia during rush hour.

So I can look back on it all and chuckle a bit now.  I was furious at the time.  All my new neighbors gazing at my house in curiousity…as the 911 crews swarmed in, ready to get the perp.  I was flabbergasted that my mom would think I would be so retarded to call her…a ten digit dial 2500 miles away…instead of a three digit 911 call to a police department that actually had funding.  I understand a bit better today.  If you think your kids are in trouble, it’s hard to think clearly.  It’s hard to think at all. 

Well I haven’t heard my mom panic like that, that barely breathing thing, again.  That is, until yesterday.  My brother pulled quite the stunt this weekend, which I will get to in the next post. 

 

 

Thanks for the Memories

I had a conversation with my brother yesterday.  This is actually a big deal; the last time we had a conversation, it was 1984 and the topic was which one of us had better crayons.  Anyway, my son would follow his “Uncle Mike” anywhere so naturally we have to talk.  AJ was clenching his toy dinosaur during the ride, as he had forgotten Teddy back at home.  Kids love their teddy bears/blankies/whatever.  Psychologists call them “the security object”: as a child enters toddlerhood and new freedoms and knowledge, it’s common for kids to latch on to a “security object” as they venture into their own.  My security object was a ratty stuffed Cougar.  My brother’s was a brown, hole-filled teddy named Picky. 

Anyway, the conversation was about traumatic childhood things.  Not Darfur-traumatic, more like Christmas Story-traumatic.  Perhaps a shade more than that.  Either way, it began like this:

Mike: “Remember when I pushed you down the stairs on roller skates?”

Me: “I remember falling down the stairs on roller skates.  You pushed me?

Mike: (Laughs) “Yeah, I pushed you.”

Me: “I remember when you threw yourself down the stairs and blamed me for it.”

Mike:  “Ha, yeah, I was a little jerk.”

Me:  “Yeah, I know.  Remember when you climbed up on the roof and dropped that rock on my head?”

Mike:  “I thought I threw a rock over a fence and hit <name of neighbor>.”

Me:  “Maybe, but you also dropped a huge piece of quartz onto my head when I was playing in the yard.”

Mike:  “Remember when <relative> was going to burn all our toys?”

Me:  “That actually happened.”

Mike:  “It did?”

Me:  “Yeah, but I don’t think you were even born yet.”

Mike:  “Oh, <expletive>.”

Me:  “At least you had Picky.”

Mike:  “Yeah, but he was my second teddy bear.”

Me:  “He was?  I don’t remember that.”

Mike:  “Yeah, I had a big white teddy bear.   I think we lived in the green house?”

Me:  “The green house?  The one with the dirt floor?”

Mike:  “I don’t remember the floor.  It was the same house where I cut the cat’s tail off with scissors.”

Me:  “That was the house with the chimney fire.  The brown one.”

Mike:  “It was?  Oh.  Anyway, I had a big white teddy bear.  Remember?  He got wet in the snow one day and Mom put him on the stove to dry out.  Remember?  He caught on fire and melted.”

Me:  “Your teddy bear melted?”

Mike:  “Yeah.  He burned and melted right there on the stove.”

Me:  “Holy <expletive>!  That must have really sucked.”

Mike:  “Yeah.”

Me:  “Well this is depressing.  Let’s not talk anymore.”

Mike:  “Yeah.  This <expletive> sucks.”

And there was the end of the first conversation in 24 years.  It’s better this way. 

 

The Next Big Thing

You know how there are those times in life when you are asked to describe yourself?  Maybe it was an “All About Me” essay in the fourth grade.  Perhaps a job made you do a lengthy self-assessment.  Either way, almost all of us will agree that describing yourself pretty much sucks.  We’re always our harshest critic.  It’s also strange when someone else describes you…the “spotlight” feeling is not fun for people that are not actually dancing on a Broadway stage.  The older I get, the more I fantasize about being a hermit. 

Today someone at my new job was asking how things were (we’ve got a LOT going on in life, here at the Speer house) so I filled them in, and they said…

“You’re the most laid back person I know!”

Which made me raise my eyebrows.  I don’t consider myself to be laid back at all.  I have a horrible time relaxing, I’m always strategizing every move (place the empty water glass on the kitchen table instead of the counter and when I come back to this room I’ll have fewer steps to the dishwasher, at which point I will scrub out the pots and pans and let them dry on the half-clean towel and grab that on my way up to the laundry room…) and it’s exhausting, thinking all the dang time.  But I thought about what my life must look like to someone on the outside… 

In one and a half months:  New baby, new job, out of state move, flooded kitchen fiasco, pesky household guests, daycare shortage, the list goes on…and I see what they mean.  Smoke isn’t coming out of my ears or anything. 

But you know what?  It was easy.  Every bit of it. 

The next big thing is always better than the last, especially if you know it before it happens.  Which basically means that you better have lots of faith that it will work out.  And if you do, it will.  The things that go wrong in life are often wrong only temporarily, and they needed to go wrong in order to properly rearrange the events that are waiting for you, just around the corner.  You have to be paying attention to see them though, and you have to expect them.  If you’re expecting the wrong things, your eyes won’t be adjusted to be able to see the right ones.  You know this.  I know this.  Of this I am sure. 

What was in that lasagna?

 

Grizzly Bears, and Other Memories

Jesse is reading a lot of books about grizzly bears.  He’s a landscape photographer, and we just moved to Montana, and he’s taking precautions not to get mauled.  At least, he’s trying to learn what to do, should he ever get into a situation where he is about to get mauled.

At Easter Dinner, my dad was teasing my son.  We had a nice extended family dinner, see.  My mom and I had just cooked up an enormous prime rib roast, and I was cutting off Old 96′er sized slices for everyone.  “That’s grizzly bear meat,” my dad joked. 

My son’s eyes got really big.  ”We’re eating grizzly bears?”

“Yup.  Now what do you think grizzly bears eat?” my dad asked. 

“Photographers,” said my mom, with just the right amount of sarcasm.  This caused me to cackle hysterically.  Jesse’s mom did not laugh.  She had a “is she serious” expression on instead. 

Jesse’s never seen a grizzly bear in the wild.  I’ve seen two.  One was just a couple of years ago in Grand Teton National Park, near Jenny Lake.  

The other time I saw a grizzly bear was when I was quite young.  My dad, mom, brother and I were in the truck headed for Philipsburg.  Suddenly we saw a bear in the field.  My dad stopped the truck.  I can’t remember what was said, but I’m pretty sure my mom would have said something like “What the eff do you think you are doing?”

My dad then got out of the truck and headed for the bear in the field.  There was a large rock in the field.  What happened next went something like this: 

• Bear is on one side of rock, sniffing the air for something strange
• Dad is on the other side of the rock, “sneaking up on the bear”
• Bear grunts (we can even hear it from the truck) and heads to other side of rock
• Dad disappears behind the rock and heads to the opposite side of the rock
• Bear is confused, and sniffs the air again
• Children watch excitedly from car
• Mom wishes she had more life insurance on Dad

This went on for a while, until the bear got bored and went off into the woods.  All part of the weird stories of my childhood that make me who I am today…a very troubled person with an inflated sense of possibility.  Thanks for reading.  Tune in next week to read about the bald eagle incident.

 

Fancy Toasters: Just set your money on fire instead

In fact, holding a slice of bread over burning wads of money isn’t a bad idea, if you want good toast.

 Why is it so hard to find a good toaster?  The toaster of my youth was a heavy thing that could probably survive a direct hit from a meteor.  I wonder what happened to it.  I bet my mom threw it away during the Great Toaster Scare of the 80’s, when the breaking news announced that toasters were spontaneously combusting and setting the neighborhoods afire.  She probably replaced it with one of the cheap plastic toasters that they make today. 

I just want a toaster that makes nice, brown toast.  Every toaster I ever purchased does this:  I set the “level” to 1, and the toast comes out looking a lot like it went in.  I set the level to 2, and the toast starts smoking, and I have to press the Eject button, and out comes a black chunk of charcoal.  The real laugh is that there are levels 3, 4, and 5 that remain untested!  Those must be the settings you use to heat your house in winter.

Our toaster in Colorado was a piece-o-junk so we bought a new toaster to celebrate our move.  It’s a nice Oster four-slice, but it’s four slices in two slots “the long way” instead of a fat little toaster with four slots.  It wasn’t a cheapo $11.99 toaster, either.  I’ve bought my share of $11.99 toasters and they usually die a month later (I make a lot of toast).

Well this toaster is a FAILURE!  Not only does it have the same problem discussed above, but it only toasts half the bread!  The slots, while lengthy, aren’t deep enough.  So with a decent piece of bread, the bottom of the toast will be crisp-erffic, the top will remain soft and unbaked. 

Casey had an antique toaster in his basement. 

 

I should have asked for it instead of those stupid butterscotch disks.  Little did I know that in the case of toasters, like many other things, they just don’t make ‘em like they used to.

 

Born in the Wrong Era, and other unfortunate circumstances

I realized a long time ago that it’s very easy for me to lose any contentedness that I might have about something.  I’d like to think that it’s a problem everyone has; easy to find something to be unsettled about, hard to be content with everything that is right in front of you.  I think lots of people will say they are content, especially if you ask them “are you content with your life?”  If you stop to think about it, you are probably content with your life.  It’s other times, when you just want a shower curtain that doesn’t stick together, or when you wonder what would have happened had you majored in archaeology instead of accounting, or when you wonder what would have happened if you would have gone to college at all…those are the times when little mites of discontent eat at a person. 

If you ask me “are you content with your life,” I will say yes.  And for the most part, it’s true.  My problem is definitely not sitting around harping about the changeable things in my life.  If I want to change something, I change it!  It’s the things I cannot change that keep me up at night. 

For example…sometimes I wish that I was born in a different time period.  I didn’t get to see the invention of the television set, and I think that would have been an amazing thing to experience.  Especially as a kid.  Imagine the brain-jumble that your young mind would have gone through if your Pa brought a magic box home one day, and you turned it on, and there were flat gray people in there.  Wow.  You wouldn’t have been able to stop talking about it. 

Or what about the invention of the airplane?  All those times you ran around pretending to be able to fly, and then one day, you could.  Sheesh.  How amazing would that have been to see. 

Also, I really envy people who got to grow up in the 1960’s.  Perhaps it wasn’t all that great from their perspective, but the 1960’s were such an amazing time in America and their was great music and tumultuous history and cool clothing to boot. 

I would have really liked to have been one of the first people to see the mountains in our national parks.  When you go to a national park, they always have these black and white or sepia-toned photographs in the lodges that show adventurous 1920’s folk climbing a mountain in a petticoat or a suit and tie.  They got to miss the long lines of traffic and the shuttle buses and the really expensive hotel rooms.  They didn’t know how good they had it.  Or maybe they did, because they sure have big smiles in the photographs.

So what’s up with that?  I’m happy with everything but sometimes it really grates on me that my youth is being spent in decades-long periods of housing overdevelopment, cheap crap from China, and increasing poverty in the world.  What’s so great about that? 

A better optimist might say, “Hey, Maleesha…this is a great time to live in the world!  Look at the pharmaceuticals that we’re making!  We’re curing diseases all the time!  And look at the technology we have!  You can talk with people across the world with the click of a button for pennies a day!”  Sure…but call me skeptical.  Those same pharmaceuticals are being excreted into our water supplies…and who knows what that’s causing.  Perhaps the little bits of various drugs that we’re forced to unwillingly consume that will end up being the cause of the increasing autism, allergies and mental illness in the world.  Maybe it’s what’s killing off the bees. 

As far as technology, I will be the first to tell you I love it, but can’t we all agree that there’s so little mystery left in the world?  I never have to dream about what traveling to the Serengeti would be like, because I can Google it and in half an hour, I will know everything I need to know about the Serengeti.  The mystery is gone.  Perhaps this is why G.W. is hell bent on touring Mars.  He’s an explorer, too.   

 

I quit my job today

No, really!  I did.  I’ve never quit a job before.  I guess that I did quit my grocery bagging job when I was 17, but somehow it didn’t seem as monumental a thing.  This is the only job I’ve had since I got out of the military.  I’ve been there 8 years, which is an eternity in the IT industry. 

I feel pretty good about it. 

 

Driver’s Ed

My son keeps asking me for a driver’s license.  He’s three. 

He loves the idea of driving, probably because he’s never commuted.  His favorite thing to do is sit in the driver’s seat and steer the wheel, flip the blinker on and play with buttons and switches.  This usually happens when we get home from the grocery store.  I unload the goods into the house and he “drives.”  Then for Christmas, one of his grammas got him one of those Power Wheels, a jeep with a real radio and a gas pedal.  He loves it. 

It got me to thinking.  Maybe by the time he is ready to get his real driver’s license, he will really know what he is doing.  I often hear “Mom, are you looking at the road?” from the back seat.  When he eventually reminds me to adjust my mirrors, I might just dump him off on the side of the road. 

I jest.  But thinking about this reminds me of my driver’s ed experience. 

Montana gives out driver’s licenses to fifteen year olds (at least they did, not sure about today).  That means that learner’s permits are handed out to fourteen year olds.  The summer after eighth grade, I enrolled in the driver’s ed program offered by the school. 

The first couple of sessions involved watching flicks like Red Asphalt IV and other fine instructional videos.  “Instructional” in the sense that someone out there thought showing teenagers highway brain splatter was a good idea.  I wonder if there will ever be a government-funded study to determine whether or not viewings of the Red Asphalt series resulted in adult violence rather that safe drivers.  Anyway, after we were all sufficiently naseauted, it was time to get in the cars. 

Half the cars were stick-shift, half were automatic.  At fourteen, I had already been traumatized by a stick shift.  My dad had attempted to let me drive his truck, an enormous pickup with an extended cab.  I could barely reach the pedals from the seat.  Stretching my legs to reach them while trying to shift a really sticky shifter was not happening.  After I almost took out several other vehicles in the K-Mart parking lot, the lesson ended. 

Three kids and one instructor per car.  Ann and Jenean were the other girls in the group.  The first couple of times out, our instructor was “Mr. C,” a well-liked wood shop teacher at the high school.  The first thing he did was tell us to put our seatbelts on.  The second thing he did was open up the newspaper.  The third thing he did was tell Ann, the first driver in our group, to start the car and head for I-90. 

Mr. C was the most laid-back driver’s ed teacher in the history of driver’s ed teachers.  One memorable moment occured during a later driving session when we were on top of a ledge on the East Ridge (If you’re from Butte, you know the East Ridge).  I think Ann was attempting to turn around on the cliffy road when she accidently threw the car into reverse.  Jenean and I yelped, certain we were about to roll down the mountain.  Mr. C, never taking his eyes off the newspaper, said “Just tap on the brakes, tap on the brakes” in a calm voice.  I think he may have been possibly trying to set a good example for us, you know, stay calm under pressure. 

One day Mr. C didn’t show up for driver’s ed, so Mr. A took over for our group. 

Mr. A was the high school dean of boys.  He was the kind of guy who liked high school so much, that he decided to stay forever.  (I didn’t know this until I was in high school, and got to see Mr. A in action)  Mr. A didn’t let us get in our usual car, a white automatic.  Instead he made us get in the green stick shift…which none of us could drive yet.  I had the privilege of being first driver. 

I killed the transmission three times before I managed to pull the car out of the school parking lot and on to the street.  Mr. A yelled at me, picking on my inability to push the clutch in while shifting at the same time.  Ann and Jenean sat silently in the back seat.  I glanced in the rear view mirror–their expressions of wide-eyed horror rattled me even more.  Mr. A told me to turn right and I turned left, being as freaked out as I was.

“Don’t you know your G-D left from your right?” he yelled.

 He told me to head for Harrison Avenue, the main street in town.  I shakily navigated toward what was sure to be a busy road. 

Then it started to rain. 

I was buzzing along at 24 miles an hour, just under the speed limit.  Mr. A shouted “Are you in a race?”  I slowed down to 20 and came to a stop sign.  The engine stalled and died.  Mr. A taunted me as I tried to start the car.  A couple of tries later, I was moving again.  Harrison Avenue loomed ahead, just beyond a stop light.  The stop light was green.  I was in the intersection, turning onto Harrison, when the light turned yellow.  Mr. A shouted “It’s yellow!” and I let off the gas.  The car died in the middle of the intersection as the light turned fully red, and other cars were about to start driving toward us.  This really threw Mr. A into a rage.   “G-D it!  Pay some G-D attention! Are you trying to kill me?!” he screamed.  Jenean and Ann were still silent in the back.  I was trying not to cry. 

It’s really a blur, what happened after that.  It must have been so awful that I blocked it out.  I’m pretty sure that Mr. A made me pull over and let someone else drive.  I don’t really remember.  I just remember feeling really, really inferior.

Eventually I got my first car.  I saved up $250 and my parents matched that to purchase the $500 1981 Toyota Tercel one Christmas.  It was red with one orange door.  It was a stick shift.  I learned to drive it after a couple more sessions with my dad.

I still prefer stick shift to automatic.  I like to think that Mr. A would be proud, but I doubt it. 

 

Sports Nonoisseur

An unintended side effect of growing up in Montana is my complete disinterest in sports teams.  For you see, Montana has no sports teams.  We used to have Copper Kings baseball in Butte, a “frontier league” franchise once owned by Bill Murray, but even that has gone the way of the dodo bird.  Sure, there are little teams of some sort or another here and there, hockey and whatnot, but nothing you’ll ever see on ESPN.  There are your odd ball Montanans that somehow forged roots in another state…maybe their Aunt Sheryl lives in Seattle, so they root for the Seahawks.  My parents are from the Dairy State, and my mom is an insane Packers fan…she even has an embarrasingly yellow and green jacket to prove it.  Me, I just don’t care.  I wish I did, because I am no fun at SuperBowl parties.  

But lately I have been watching a lot of sports.  I am a little embarrased about it, actually.  I watched the entire world series, and I was pretty sure it was because the Rockies were playing.  But I found myself turning the channel to the SuperBowl Pregame show (hosted by Ryan Seacrest…barf) yesterday, all by myself.  And then I found myself watching the game.  I’m telling myself that it was because nothing else was on, (although the Puppy Bowl was on, mind you) but then when there was only 39 seconds to go, and the Giants made that last touchdown, I actually felt happy.  And I might have even winced in hope a little bit, moving my arms slightly up in a modified, toned-down sort of cheer.  I really hope Jesse didn’t notice, because I kind of like having a noncomittal attitude toward all sports.  I don’t want to blow my cover. 

I am all for the underdog, and pretty much everyone assumed the undefeated Patriots were going to win.  But since I really don’t have any team loyalty at all, I felt pretty bad for Mr. Belichick when he talked to the reporters about what went wrong.  I mean, he couldn’t even look up off the ground.  That must just suck.  But then they’d flash over to the Giants locker room, where champagne and confetti and feelings of elation were actually coming through the television screen and messing up my living room…and then I was happy again.

Then I was even more happy, because House came on, and featured Antarctica.