epic fail

where do we draw the line?

So I went to Borders this afternoon to buy a book. Just a cookbook. That’s all — one of those in and out trips. I knew what I wanted and went straight to the desired section and would have left immediately except for this epic weakness that I have.

I like journals.

It’s a little weird. I don’t necessarily buy them, or even use them. (Well, full disclosure, I do now, rather obsessively. The using, as in actually filling them up as opposed to just standing in front of them and coveting them). So naturally I went to look at the journals and selected a nice sturdy one that would take some abuse.  But I digress, this is not about journals. It’s about the display next to them.

There was this heinous fuchsia sparkly statue of Mary. Oh, and there was a silver one of Jesus. They are banks…with slots on their backs and rubber stoppers on the bottom.

It makes my soul cry a little. I mean, I like kitschy and fun as much as the next person, and I have been known to be a little irreverent. Maybe. Just a little.

But this? Too. Much.

food fail

Evidently John and I have been living rather austerely in the food department. This was brought to my attention by the kids. According to them, there is no food in the house.

Right.

Perhaps, there is no food in the house that they want to eat. You know, like wings, and chips, and cookies. They sniffed at the tasty braunschweiger. 🙂

Evidently all of yesterday’s tastiness is behind us.

(teehee. they don’t know where I hid the Oreos).

today’s avoidance post brought to you by Pop

Well, it’s that time. I’ve hit the wall at NaNoWriMo. Time to do something different…get some fresh air. Do the laundry. (there’s always laundry). Phone a friend.

My dad, he of the million and one email forwards of ridiculous and painfully obnoxious email FORWARDS has struck again. Only this time, it’s funny. Or maybe not and I’m just in that place of desperation. In either case, I’m sharing it here. Because that way I don’t have to think. Thanks, Pop!

A first grade girl handed in the drawing below for her homework assignment.



The teacher graded it and the child brought it home.

She returned to school the next day with the following note:

Dear Ms. Davis,

I want to be perfectly clear on my child’s homework illustration.
It is NOT of me on a dance pole on a stage in a strip joint surrounded by male customers with money.
I work at Home Depot and had commented to my daughter how much money we made in the recent snowstorm.
This drawing is of me selling a shovel.

Sincerely,

Mrs. Harrington

 

presidential seal falls off the podium

Hilarious, you might say. Telling. A sign!

None of the above, or all of the above, but watch closely for the reaction: 1. “everybody knows who I am” and 2. while surely the person responsible for affixing that seal is feeling bad, let’s laugh at him, instead of saying don’t worry about it.

chateaubriand…not

Every night it’s the same conversation:

himself: what’s for dinner?

moi: what would you like?

himself: chateaubriand

moi: try again

himself: beef wellington

moi: um…mac and cheese?

himself: gross!

moi: spaghetti?

himself: nah.

Every night. I got nuthin. Anybody got a recipe for beef wellington?

R.I.P. Loser Cruiser, 2001-2010

It’s true, the Loser Cruiser has finally met its demise. Better stated, it finally met its match on the interstate. Early Wednesday morning in the usual rush hour, a citizen following too close followed much too closely and ate the back end of our noble and trusty steed. Alas, it was a quick end. She went out with a bang, literally, and added some extra flare by creating a sprinkling of broken glass as the back side window was blown out when the wheel-well collapsed, causing the back end to crumple.

Loser Cruiser, or POS van as we were recently wont to call her, lived an exceptional life of service. She nobly carried the children to and from school for almost ten years, and in all those years of service, never once was the cause for tardiness. She valiantly withstood juice boxes, milk cartons, and in her later years, soda pop and slurpee spills. She never complained, instead, she subjected herself to the random assault from surreptitiously placed boogers and stray french fries.

Her service reached epic proportions when, as the children grew and added more and more complex after school activities, she was conscripted into service as the utility vehicle for band competitions, lacrosse matches, cross country adventures, math competitions and chorus festival, and all manner of transport of other people’s children on whirlwind road trips. Of her 200,000 miles, 150,000 of them were easily tallied hauling children from one end of the fine state of Georgia to the other.

She served us well, and went out heroicly doing what she had always done so well: protecting her charges.

Loser Cruiser is survived by Jake, the hardy ’06 Ford pick-up truck, the Green Lantern, a little workhorse Taurus, age unknown at the time of this writing, and the Shitola, the stalwart and serviceable ’93 Toyota Corolla serving generations of Morera-Johnsons.

In lieu of flowers you may send the grieving owner wads and wads of money so that she can drown her sorrows in a brand new convertible Mustang.

I just wanted a gallon of milk…

Do you have a favorite pair of jeans?

Are today’s kids as tied to their jeans as I was when I was younger? It’s not even a matter of finding the perfect pair with just the right rise, and tight enough to fit nice, without being so tight that they obstruct your breathing. There’s more to it than that. There’s the whole breaking them in thing, where they become so soft they are like a second skin.

When you run your hands down the legs they feel like silk.

I have such a pair. They are faded evenly and by some sartorial miracle, they feel silky soft without the thinning or fraying in the seams. It’s amazing.

They do have a little problem, though. The left pocket has a gigantic hole. It’s pretty deceptive, too, because if I put my hand in the pocket I don’t feel it, but just let me put a set of keys in there and they’re toast.

Too bad I can’t seem to remember that detail…

All I wanted was a gallon of milk. I ran into the grocery store and slipped my phone into my pocket. The left one. The next thing I knew, I was standing in produce, in front of the security cameras, jiggling my left leg while I watched my phone travel down the length of my leg like the unfortunate rat being digested by a boa constrictor.

I guess I gave a show to the security personnel. You know I was super cool about it. I mean, I can be very subtle while standing in front of the honeydew shaking my leg. It was the bend and snap when I had to retrieve it that gave me away.

my computer travesty

The most horrifying computer problem that ever happened to me occurred many years ago — in the dinosaur age — before the mouse. Before windows. Back when Steve Jobs had a rotary phone.

On the Friday before the Monday when I had to submit the final draft of my thesis to my advisor (who was a cranky old guy), my top of the line IBM personal computer running Wordperfect 2.0 crashed. It died. The royal blue screen with the blocky white letters blinked out like The Outer Limits taking control of the monitor.

I wish it were an alien invasion. Instead, it was something far more insidious: a dead power supply.

Let me set the scene for you. In those days, my dear sweet ever-patient husband turned on the computer for me and set it to where the wordprocessor would open for me. When I finished typing, he inserted a GINORMOUS floppy disk into the computer and saved it for me because evidently all that graduate education had filled my mind with so much data I was incapable (read that as unwilling and terrified) of pressing a key. It was all so complex. And that state of the art dot matrix printer was so magical, with its draft mode that was even faster than the regular mode, that I was absolutely awestruck to be living in such modern times.

Unfortunately for me, he was on a field trip, I mean, business trip to a technology conference somewhere west of the Mississippi where part of the conference included designing and launching paper airplanes into the atrium of the hotel. If you don’t read a sufficient amount of sarcasm in that statement — where my usual knight in shining armor had abandoned me for  a weekend, leaving me with three very small children and a deadline to write a THESIS, then perhaps you should ramp up what you now know to have been a very high level of stress for me.

So, when The Outer Limits hijacked my computer screen as I was writing the last sentence of that interminable assignment, my breakdown imminent, I was too ignorant of the whole computer process to realize that I was in very big trouble.

Go ahead and ask me.

Didn’t you save the paper? Where’s the back up?

You know that’s what hubby asked. You also know that had he seen the blank look on my face he would have gone back to throwing paper airplanes — at me.

Anyway, he didn’t even have consoling words for me. In those days a dead power supply equalled a very expensive chunk of electronics and tacky cream-colored plastic. “Too bad, honey, you’ll have to retype it. There’s an older version of the paper on a floppy somewhere. See ya next week. Love ya.”

Bastard.

I love my husband. I really do. And because of that I will confess that when I started using computers, and to this very day as recently as last month when he bought me an external hard drive, his constant mantra is back up your stuff.

I didn’t listen. But I sure did learn my lesson the hard way. For some of us, that’s usually the only way.

I did what any young woman would do: I called my daddy, crying and out of my mind. Between sobs and hysteria I asked if I could borrow his computer. Poor guy, I must have sounded like the world was ending, and to have something with such a simple solution was almost confusing to him, but that’s all. A little TLC, some babysitting, and his clunky IBM.

The moral of the story: He is wise who is warned by the misfortunes of others.

Back. Up.

_____

Did you like this? I must give the hat tip to my friend, Sarah Reinhard, who asked this question at CatholicMom.com but I couldn’t bring myself to leave such a large comment/story in her comments. Visit her blog, enter her contest, and share your own story!