I have nothing to blog about

Correction:  I have nothing I want to blog about.  I’m trying to escape from my real life right now, so I don’t want to blog about how Elvis is turning me into an extra-super-industrial-strength crazy person by coming up to me every one and a half minutes and demanding that I throw a ball up on the roof for him.  That is his favorite game, Throw The Ball On The Roof (TTBOTR).  He likes to watch it roll down.  He also likes to see if you can throw it so high that it rolls down on the other side of the house.  That’s what he loves the most.  But now I’m making the game sound more interesting than it really is.  On Monday I played TTBOTR for an hour and a half.  He threw ten kinds of fits when I finally said I’d had enough.  His need for TTBOTR is insatiable.  After TTBOTR-ing for an hour and a half on Monday, my arms were too sore to play it at all on Tuesday.  Also, Girlfriend was throwing up every 15 minutes or so, so I felt like I had a good excuse (aside from being so out of shape that TTBOTR-ing makes my arms hurt).  He did not appreciate that at all.  And he never stopped asking.

That’s how we spent Tuesday.  Girlfriend threw up every 15 minutes, and Elvis demanded to play TTBOTR every minute and a half.  I was strong, though.  I said no.  It’s easy to be strong when you’re cleaning up barf and your arms hurt like hell.  Elvis would come up to me and say, “Mommy, throw the ball on the roof.”  I’d say, “No, I’m not going to throw the ball on the roof.”  He would squeeze my bicep with both hands REALLY REALLY HARD and say, “Arms all better.”  I’d say, “No, they’re not.”  Then he’d spit in my face.  Not to be rude, just because he likes spitting.  For the sake of brevity, I won’t include all the times he asked me to watch him pee, too.  Also, I said I wasn’t going to blog about this.

Last night I finally took Princess Zurg bra-shopping.  What a nightmare.  I’d forgotten how tedious it is to try to find a bra that fits.  I remembered that it was tedious, but I’d forgotten just HOW tedious.  If I go on about it any longer, you’ll get the idea of how tedious it was.  Maybe one more pointless sentence and you’ll have the flavor of it.  No, make that two more.  On second thought–or is it a third thought?–I should probably keep going until you beg me to stop.  Only I can’t hear you because it’s the internet, so I’ll keep going.  DO YOU HAVE THE FLAVOR YET?  The good news is that PZ is not as well-endowed as ye olde bra calculator said she was.  The bad news is that she wears the same size I wore when I was pregnant, only she fills it out better.  (If only I’d known, I would have saved all my pregnancy-era bras and we wouldn’t have had to go bra-shopping at all!)

I felt bad because I knew PZ did not want to be shopping for bras.  She was afraid someone she knew would see her.  I said I would carry all the bras, and she could pretend she didn’t know me.  She thought that was a fun game.  (Story of my life, kids!)  Incidentally, if there is anything more tedious than going back and forth between a dressing room and the lingerie department and trying on 47 different bras, it is going back and forth between a dressing room and the lingerie department and waiting for an eleven-year-old to try on 47 different bras.  But I’m sure you have the flavor by now!

I thought I would try blogging about current events, but I don’t know any current events.  Now that I no longer listen to talk radio during the day, I don’t hear the news anymore.  Or if I do hear it, it’s because my talk shows that I listen to on podcast have mentioned it, and by then it’s, like, a week old.  I ought to learn more just by surfing the interwebs, but I’m not reading any news or opinion sites lately, so I still don’t know anything.  The only news I get is celebrity gossip via the supermarket checkout and also the little blurbs on the screen when I log into my e-mail account(s).  I understand that the Gosselins are separating.  Do you know that up until about two weeks ago I had no idea who the Gosselins were?  I knew they were famous, but I didn’t know why.  Turns out they had a reality TV show.  Turns out that 9 times out of 10 when I don’t know why someone’s famous, it’s because they have a reality TV show.  Anyway, I kind of feel sorry for the Gosselins, but when I think of the kind of world we live in where people bring cameras into their homes to record the intimate goings-on of their family lives, I don’t care if you have eight children you need to send to college–I kind of want to punch you in the face.

I must say, the appeal of reality TV eludes me entirely.  Isn’t there enough reality in, you know, reality?  How much money do you think I could get for letting them broadcast footage of Elvis spitting in my face and me screaming, “GET AWAY FROM ME!  GO AWAY!  THROW YOUR OWN FRACKING BALL ON THE ROOF!  AAUUUUGHHHHHH!!!!!”

I didn’t even know Ed McMahon was dead until about a half hour ago.  And that was only because I read a news item that Conan O’Brien paid tribute to him.  If Conan O’Brien hadn’t paid tribute to him, I may never have known the truth about Ed McMahon, God rest his soul.

Seriously, who doesn’t like Ed McMahon?  The world is poorer without him.

The other day we rented a Wiggles DVD from the Blockbuster.  It’s the one with Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter.  That’s a propos nothing, only it reminded me of this one time I read a blog by this woman who was disturbed because she found herself having sexual fantasies about one of the Wiggles.  (If it was one of you all, I’m sorry if I’ve brought up a humiliating episode of your life.  Rest assured, I have no memory of who you are.  Feel free to confess, though.  Just because I don’t like reality TV doesn’t mean I don’t have voyeuristic tendencies.)

Anyway, I was trying to remember which Wiggle she had the hots for.  At the time I read the blog, I didn’t know the Wiggles from a hole in the ground, so it’s no wonder the information didn’t stick with me.  I seem to think she was crushing on the yellow shirt or the blue shirt, which made it either Greg or Anthony.  I think Anthony might be the best-looking out of all of them, but actually, I’m partial to Murray (aka red shirt).  Jeff is nice, but only in a goofy, non-threatening way.  Not that any of the Wiggles is threatening.  I dunno.  Greg seems so subdued.  His presence is very soothing to me.  If any of them was going to turn out to be a serial killer, I’d guess it was him.  Not that I’m accusing Greg of being a serial killer.  He’s left the band anyway.  His replacement, Sam, doesn’t seem like the serial killer type at all.  Not that that means anything!

So to answer your question, do I find myself having sexual fantasies about any of the Wiggles?  Not yet.

The comments section is now open for voyeurism.  Confess your most embarrassing personal information, or ask me something embarrassing that I will probably refuse to answer, unless I get really desperate for blog fodder.  Which, by the looks of things, should be any second now.  Go!

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I have been blogging at By Common Consent, but it is all Mormony crap.  For those of you who enjoy Mormony crap, you can read all of my Mormony crap posts here.

Another post my husband needs to avoid reading

I realized today that I haven’t taken my eleven-year-old daughter bra shopping since, like, ever.  She had to start wearing a bra when she was eight, and she wasn’t too keen on the idea, so I just bought her some of those sports bra-type trainers at the Target, and as she…ah…grew, I just got her L’s instead of S’s or M’s.  Then she got some hand-me-down bras from her older cousins, and we’ve just been making do with this motley crew of support garments ever since.

To be perfectly honest, I just haven’t been giving the matter any thought whatsoever because I have a lot of other stuff on my mind on a daily basis–not all of it important, mind you, but, you know, other stuff has been rattling around in the old bean, and it’s not like I’ve done a great deal of bra-shopping for myself over the last decade, and she gets kind of embarrassed about this stuff and prefers not to mention it if she can possibly help it–so it just never occurred to me until this morning that Princess Zurg might be getting a tad uncomfortable and should probably be properly fitted and suitably outfitted (insofar as one can be said to be outfitted in underwear) at long last.  So I got out ye olde tape measure and plugged the numbers into ye olde bra calculator.

And then I said (and I quote), “Holy crap!“

You could fit three of me in there.  (Assuming I stuffed, which of course I do.)

Of course, that’s just the calculator.  We’ll see what ye olde bra shoppe tells us when we have her try on the actual unmentionables.  But still.

Have I mentioned lately that when I started this blog, SHE WAS SIX???

Elvis and the water glass

Elvis seems to have developed this odd anxiety around my drinking glasses.  Unlike all the other members of my family, I prefer drinking water to all other beverages, at least most of the time.  I prefer to drink water out of a glass, rather than a plastic cup.  I don’t know why I dislike drinking water out of a plastic cup.  I mean, I certainly can and will drink water out of a plastic cup, if that’s what I have available.  It’s not like I go to other people’s houses and look down my nose at a plastic cup of water and say, “Excuse me, but don’t you have any glassware?”  No.  But if I have the choice, I prefer to drink water out of a glass.  It just seems…fresher that way.  I know it’s irrational, but lots of things I do are irrational, and I’m not about to start explaining myself to you now.

Anyway, a couple weeks ago Elvis took to setting the table, and when he would set the table, he would fill a plastic cup with water and set it at my place at the table.  He wouldn’t get anyone else’s drink, just mine.  I thought it was sweet that he noticed that I always drink water and went to the trouble of getting my drink for me, as part of his table-setting ritual.  So of course I drink my water out of plastic cups on such occasions.  (In case you were wondering about the depths of my water-glass hangups.)  But when I get my own water, I still use a glass.

But a couple days ago Elvis started this new thing.  He notices when I’m drinking water out of a glass.  He comes and stands very close to me and says, “Don’t break the glass.”

“I won’t,” I assure him.

“Don’t break the glass,” he repeats.

“Okay,” I say.

And the second I set down the glass, even if I’m not finished with the water contained therein*, he picks up the glass, pours the rest of the water in the sink, wipes out the remaining droplets with a towel and puts the glass back in the cabinet.   Of course I don’t like him to do that because, hello, my lips were just on that glass and he hasn’t washed it, just wiped it out, and it’s not clean, so it doesn’t belong in the cabinet.  I tell him not to worry about the glass, that Mommy is still using it and I will take care of it, and he can just go about his business as usual and not give my water glass any further thought.  But he will not be deterred.

Seriously, I was sitting at lunch today, drinking water, and I couldn’t take my hands off the glass, lest he make a grab for it.  I kept saying, “No, that’s Mommy’s.  I’m still using it.  Just–go do something else.  I’m having lunch.  I’m drinking the rest of the water, just not all at once.**  No, really, I will drink it.  I want to drink it.  I want it to stay here.  I just don’t want to be constantly in the act of pouring it down my throat.  Seriously, I want this water.  I want the glass.  Please don’t take it.  I promise to let you have it when I’m finished.”  But he just kept standing there, making anxious noises, saying, “Don’t break the glass!”

To my knowledge, he has not had any traumatic glass-breaking experiences lately.

I finally had to just hand over my glass, still half-full, and let him dump the water, wipe out the droplets and place the glass back in the cabinet.  “All done,” he said.  “I put it away.”

“Thank you,” I said.  For nothing!

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* At this point my husband is saying, “Oh sure, she’s going to drink the rest of the water!  When does she ever drink the rest of the water?  I’m constantly finding half-drunk glasses of water all over the house!  It’s like I’m living in that movie Signs!  Does she think aliens are going to invade the planet?  Should I be taking up baseball?”

[Ed. note:  He finds half-drunk glasses of water all over the kitchen, not the whole house.  Unlike all other members of the household, who, I incidentally remind you, drink things like milk, juices and carbonated sodas AND DON'T ALWAYS FINISH EVERY LAST DROP, I tend to confine my (water-)drinking activities to the kitchen ONLY.  Is it my fault if people leave stuff on the kitchen counter that they don't want to get wet, where they can accidentally knock over a glass that might have some water (not juice, not milk, not three-day-old fruit smoothie) in it?  Is it?  Really?]

** At this point my husband is saying, “Don’t believe her, Elvis!  She always says she’s going to drink all of the water, but she never does!  There are half-drunk water glasses ALL over the house, ALL the time!  For someone who likes to drink water, she sure has a hard time drinking very much of it before she’s forgotten that she was drinking water in the first place and leaves it there for some unsuspecting soul to spill and make a big, unnecessary and totally avoidable mess!  If she can’t take responsibility for that, it’s about time someone took matters into his own hands!”

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So anyway, as I was saying, I don’t get this new obsession with the drinking glasses.  ButI guess it’s water out of plastic cups for me for the foreseeable future.

Random thought

I wonder if olive oil mayonnaise really is an adequate condiment, or if I’m like one of those people in The Sixth Sense who don’t know yet that they’re dead.

Mad’s Book Club: Serial killers and fighting kitties!

You can probably skip the smoking jacket for this edition, as I haven’t been reading anything PBS-worthy as of late.  I’ve been in this funk, see, and when I get in a funk, I like to read books about killers.  It makes me feel alive.  Just kidding.  I don’t know why I read them.  I’m just armchair-psychologying it here, folks.  So if you don’t like books about killers, you can skip to the end, where I talk about Erin Hunter’s Warriors series, or you can skip this blog altogether and do something worthwhile and productive.  Your choice!

(Note:  Every last one of these serial killer books contains unsavory subject matter and unrefined language.)

Sweetheart by Chelsea Cain

This is the sequel to Heartsick, that sick, sick, sick serial killer book that I so enjoyed on my plane ride to Vegas back in February.  Detective and certifiable basket case Archie Sheridan is still trying to get over his issues with Gretchen Lowell, the psycho b-word who held him captive and made him drink drain opener while she practiced carpentry on his torso–but he’s not having much success, unfortunately.  Meanwhile he’s got a few new murders to solve, murders which may be connected to the political scandal that journalist Susan Ward is trying to bust wide open.  And then Gretchen Lowell has to start pulling some crap from prison that I can’t get into without giving away major plot points.  You think you have problems?  Be grateful you don’t live in one of Chelsea Cain’s novels, that’s all I can say.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again–I am a big fan of Chelsea Cain’s writing, and if she wrote the Portland phone book, it would be clever and riveting.  I love the characters that she’s created, and the story is solid, but Sweetheart has an unfinished feel that Heartsick did not.  Heartsick left itself open for a sequel, but it was in itself complete.  Sweetheart just didn’t seem quite complete to me.  The murders were solved and then there was this heartbreaking denoument that left me deeply unsatisfied.  I mean, plot-wise I was satisfied, but character-wise, I was not–which I suppose means that Cain needs to write a third book, and then I can forgive her for doing to my emotions what Gretchen Lowell did to Archie’s spleen.

Last Witness by Jilliane Hoffman

Special Agent Dominick Falconetti and Assistant State Attorney C.J. Townsend (a lady state attorney–they’re sleeping together, FYI) are on the trail of a psycho killer who is murdering cops and mutilating their bodies.  On the surface it seems to be a drugs and dirty cops scandal…but one of our main characters is hiding a dark secret, which she dares not reveal–but if she doesn’t reveal it, people are just going to keep getting murdered.  What a dilemma!

Last Witness is a reasonably exciting book (albeit terribly gory–yes, even by my standards; I don’t recommend a close reading of any passage where a dead body is discovered), but as I was reading it I kept getting the sense that it might be a sequel, because the characters’ back stories seemed a heckuva lot more interesting than the story I was reading.  Turns out, it is a sequel to Retribution, which I have not read and is not available at my local library.  I’m contemplating buying a used copy for $.01 from a third-party seller at Amazon because it sounds good, but I’m also trying to decide how much I care.  I mean, there are so many serial killer books out there, so little I want to pay in postage.

On the other hand, I would certainly read other books by Jilliane Hoffman, if they fell into my lap or something.  Then again, there’s not much I won’t read, so long as it’s on my lap and all.  I think that much is clear.

Book of the Dead by Patricia Cornwell

I had never read any Patricia Cornwell prior to picking up this book.  I’d long been meaning to read some Patricia Cornwell and her Kay Scarpetta mysteries because there are few things so appealing to me as murder mysteries solved by lady pathologists, you know what I’m saying?  Well, maybe you don’t, but trust me, it’s one of my pleasures in life.  So I randomly checked this book out at the library because it was in the bulk paperback section, which is a good place to find sicko serial killer books when you’re in a hurry.  (It does no good to look in the mystery section because you have to slog through so much Agatha Christie/Mary Higgins Clark/F Is For Felony-style stuff before you find something really lurid and wrong.)

I have to say, this book didn’t do anything for me.  It might have had something to do with the fact that it’s a later Kay Scarpetta mystery, and I got the impression that Scarpetta was getting old and weary and not having met her before now, I just didn’t appreciate her angst the way I was supposed to.  I didn’t appreciate the other recurring characters’ angst, either–except for Scarpetta’s niece, Lucy, who I thought was spunky and deserved to be in her own book instead of stuck as a bit player in this middle-aged drama.  To be honest, I can’t remember for the life of me how the mystery in Book of the Dead got resolved.  More to the point, I can’t recall if it got resolved.  That usually indicates a problem, but whether it’s a fault of the book or my own middle-aged memory and the fact I’ve read so many serial killer books in the last month or so, I couldn’t tell you.

However, I haven’t given up on Cornwell or Scarpetta altogether.  I’m thinking I should try an earlier Scarpetta mystery before I write off an entire series of books containing psycho killers AND a lady pathologist.  It just doesn’t make sense to limit my options, right?  Then again, I’m in no hurry to rehabilitate Cornwell’s image in my eyes.  She’s on the back burner for the time being.

Kisscut and Blindsighted by Karin Slaughter

First of all, could there be a more perfect name for a serial killer book writer than Karin Slaughter?  No, there could not.

Second of all, Slaughter really does her name proud.  These are high-quality serial killer books.

I read Kisscut first, and as I read it I realized that it was a sequel to something, but it didn’t matter because the story worked perfectly well on its own.  The book opens with a standoff between two teenagers at the local skating rink; one ends up dead.  The victim is a patient of Dr. Sara Linton, the town’s pediatrician, who is also the county coroner.  Oh yes, she is!  (You see how this book can’t be anything but awesome.)  Her ex-husband, Jeffrey Tolliver, is the chief of police.  They still have feelings for each other, but there’s a crime to be solved here, kids.  Actually, several crimes.  For a small community, an awful lot of bleep goes down.  Tolliver’s top detective, Lena Adams, is back at work after a very traumatic experience that she still hasn’t dealt with emotionally, so that makes things even more complicated.  I can’t really get into more of the plot without giving stuff away; suffice it to say there’s lots of dark secrets and abuse and crime-ring stuff.  But it’s the characters that make the story worth reading (you know, assuming you don’t have a problem with lurid and degrading subject matter).

Which is why I read Blindsighted, the book that introduced these characters.  They are trying to catch a serial rapist/killer.  (Even though Dr. Linton is a pediatrician, there are no children involved in this one.)  Women are in jeopardy.  People have angst.  Even though I knew, from reading Kisscut, some of the things that would happen, it didn’t spoil the plot at all, and it was the characters that I really enjoyed reading about anyway, so there you have it.  You know the book is good because I’m not going on for several paragraphs about how much it sucked.  I will definitely read Slaughter’s other Grant County books (even though it rather strains credibility that so much horrible crime would be going on there and people wouldn’t just abandon the place en masse).

I mean, it’s a pediatrician who’s a coroner who’s got the hots for her ex-husband. How am I supposed to resist?

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

Midnight by Erin Hunter

Midnight is the first book in the New Prophecy trilogy in the Warriors series.  I first heard of the Warriors series from one of you gentle readers (TR maybe?), who suggested it for Mister Bubby after he finished Harry Potter and was looking for something new and exciting.  I have to say, I was incredulous.  I mean, it’s about cats.  Warrior cats.  That is to say, “Warrior cats?  Really?”  No offense to them, but I don’t usually think about cats caring enough about anything to become “warriors.”  No, not even feral cats.  Not that I’ve met a lot of feral cats in my day, but…you know…they’re cats.

Anyway, I filed it in the back of my mind because MB enjoys fighting and he enjoys animals, but he got interested in some other books and I didn’t think any more about the fighting kitties until MB dragged me to the school book fair and announced that he just HAD TO HAVE one of these fighting kitty books, so I bought it for him, and that’s how he got totally into this series and how he talked me into reading Midnight–which he, interestingly enough, has not read, but he had checked it out of the library and knew he wouldn’t have time to read it before it was due but thought that somebody should.  And so, wanting to share in my son’s literary interests, I agreed, even though I really thought I could go my whole life without reading a fighting kitty book and be perfectly content.

So here’s the thing about these fighting kitty books–they’re actually very entertaining.  Sort of like Watership Down meets The Incredible Journey meets…well, I don’t read a lot of animal-based literature, dig?  But though I started with limited enthusiasm, I found myself getting pretty into it.  I liked these cats.  I respected their warrior culture.  I cared about their fates.  Which is more than I can say for some of the books I’ve read this month.

So there’s a prophecy that a great calamity is coming to the forest where these four warrior cat clans live.  The clans are rivals, but they coexist peacefully, so long as everyone stays on their own territory.  They all follow Star Clan, which I guess is their kitty religion–a type of ancestor worship, from what I’ve been able to gather.  Anyway, Star Clan prophesies this calamity and they choose one cat from each of the four clans to go on this quest.  The chosen cats get these visions and they have to go on a perilous journey to fulfill their destiny and save their clans from imminent destruction.

After finishing Midnight, I thought, “I can’t believe I just read 300 pages of cats going for a walk and I liked it.”  I liked it so much, in fact, that I’m currently reading the second book in the trilogy, Moonrise–and I have this sinking feeling that when I finish reading about this generation of fighting kitties, I might have to read about the previous generation as well.  (I mean, how did Firestar go from being a household pet to being the leader among feral felines?  Inquiring minds want to know!)

I’ll try to read more stuff with redeeming qualities for the next club meeting.  But I promise nothing.

Joy Fielding: a primer

Joy Fielding is like Mary Higgins Clark in this respect:  if you’ve read one of her books, you’ve more or less read them all; nevertheless, I read them all.  There is something oddly comforting about their predictability.  Not all of Fielding’s books are thrillers; several are just straight-out melodramas, some of which have been made into Lifetime television movies, I’m sure–or if they haven’t, they ought to be.

Anyway, regardless of what genre Fielding is writing in, here is the book she writes time and again:  A middle-aged woman with two teenage daughters is divorced from their father, a very successful lawyer who left her for another woman.  The ex-husband is a total jerk; the other woman is a bimbo.  Our heroine, the middle-aged woman with two teenage daughters, does not have to work because she got a great deal in the divorce settlement, and it’s a good thing because she married very young and never had the chance to pursue higher education or a career in any meaningful way, though she’s certainly intelligent.  Not so intelligent that she could avoid marrying a complete a**hole, but intelligent enough to know that when mysterious things start happening in the neighborhood, something is up.  Her friends and her family members think she’s overreacting and just needs to get over her ex because seriously, it’s been seven years and isn’t it about time she found herself another man?  They know someone who would be perfect for her.  But I digress.

Our heroine is NOT overreacting.  Something IS up.  She doesn’t know what, exactly, and she knows she sounds completely crazy, that she’s not acting like a sane, reasonable person, but she’s been under a lot of stress lately.  One of her daughters is giving her grief.  Her ex is no help and that bimbo wife of his is always rubbing stuff in her face.   She hasn’t had sex in three years (at least).  Her boobs are sagging.  She hasn’t been sleeping well and she has these crazy, vivid dreams that are very disturbing.  (She also sleeps in the nude a lot, which isn’t really pertinent, but I thought you might find it interesting all the same.)  Not to mention all the weird crap that’s been going on in the neighborhood that she just knows is not a coincidence but something really sinister at work (or is it play? hard to tell).

She gets laid.  The weird crap turns out to be something really sinister after all.  She is vindicated.  There is hope of a better future for her.  The end.

So even though I’ve read all of Fielding’s books before, I thought I hadn’t read this specific one:  Lost .  The synopsis on the inside sleeve didn’t seem familiar.  (I know how ludicrous that sounds, but just bear with me.)  So I started reading it, and suddenly it did seem really familiar.  I know, I know, but I’m talking really familiar–too familiar.  And yet I could not remember for the life of me how the heroine got vindicated in this one, so I thought maybe it was just my imagination–or, you know, the fact that I’ve read any of her other books–and so I kept reading.

Well, after a few chapters it became apparent through various details–detailed details–that I had indeed read this book before.  I couldn’t remember what happened–other than the getting laid and vindicated parts–and it was driving me nuts, so I skimmed through the rest and it all came back to me.  What didn’t come back to me was why I read the whole thing the first time because I have to tell you, kids, this book was awful.  Yes, even by my standards.  Sure, the plot was formulaic and flimsy, but all of that would have been fine if it hadn’t been for the main character, who I know I have met before–many, many times–but this time I actually wished that she were a real person SO I COULD PUNCH HER IN THE FACE REPEATEDLY.  Yes, I know your daughter is missing, I know your ex-husband is an a**hole, I know your neighbors are acting weird, the dog’s peeing on your carpet, your butt isn’t as firm as you’d like it to be, but do you really need to correct everyone’s grammar ALL THE TIME?  Really?  Not that that’s your biggest fault, but it’s so opposite-of-endearing and so representative of someone who is always whining and overreacting to crap that I just don’t care if you ever get your daughter back or the dog-urine stains out of your carpet, and that is the real problem here.  Unfortunately, it’s a serious one.

And that’s all I have to say about Joy Fielding’s Lost.

(Another edition of Mad’s Book Club is in the works and will probably appear tomorrow.  Well, it will definitely appear tomorrow, unless I break both my arms or lose internet access or something equally tragic.  Don’t get too excited, as all of the books are about serial killers or fighting kitties.  If that ain’t your cuppa, you can feel free not to come back tomorrow.  I mean, you’re always free not to come back, but if you specifically stay away tomorrow, I won’t be offended.  Anyway, that’s not the point.  The point is that I’ve read all these books in the last four weeks or so and there are a lot to talk about, even if there isn’t much to say about them–not that that’s ever stopped me–but this one wasn’t in keeping with the serial killer/fighting kitty theme, so I decided to talk about it here instead of there–or now instead of then–sort of a sneak preview of the inanity to come.)

Back to the old house

I lived lots of places when I was a kid, but during those three years my family spent in Portland, we lived in a neighborhood that is not that far from where I live now.  At least it is not far geographically.  Because I rarely have a reason to go to that part of town, it seems almost a world away.  When I lived in Southern California, it was no big deal to drive 15 or 20 miles to get somewhere.  Most people in Los Angeles don’t think in terms of miles anyway; distances are measured in minutes, even if the minutes add up to an hour and a half.  It was strange, once I moved to Oregon, to discover that going all the way across town was suddenly such a hardship, even if we were talking about a distance that was a third of what I used to go to see my dad, who I thought of as living practically next door, even though I had to cross the borders of three suburbs to get there.

I looked it up just now–it is 5.9 miles between my house and my childhood home of thirty years ago.  I drove there this evening, while it was still light out.  I had the two younger kids with me, and I just felt like going for a drive and didn’t know exactly where I wanted to go, and I just ended up driving to my old neighborhood.  I thought I would go to my old elementary school and let the kids run around on the playground, but first I stopped at my old house.  It’s funny that when I returned to Portland as an adult, I didn’t have to look up the address or how to get there, that I just remembered, because I have a very poor sense of direction.  I often forget how to get downtown, for example, even though you’d think getting downtown would not be such a challenge.  I guess it’s because I walked and rode my bike over those streets so many times when I was young, I will never be able to forget where stuff is.

So I turned down the road where the school bus stop used to be.  I remember that when we first moved there, my mother was concerned about me having to cross a busy street in order to be picked up by the bus.  It’s astonishing to me now that this street could ever have been considered busy.  It’s not even a minor thoroughfare; in fact, it’s barely wide enough to accomodate two-way traffic.  Perhaps my mother was concerned about me having to cross any street.  It doesn’t matter.  I turned down that street, and down another, which curved into the dead end that was my old neighborhood.  Back then, the pavement just stopped and then there was this big field.  You could see that the pavement started again on the other side of the field, so it can’t have been that big a field, but it seemed big at the time.  My sisters and I used to play in it all the time.  It was just a bunch of tall grass and weeds.  Once we found an old black high heel someone had lost (or thrown away); we tried to find its mate, because it would have been awesome to have two black high heels, but we were not successful.  Anyway, adjacent to the field (such as it was) was what we called “the forest,” which was just a small wooded area with a lot of tall evergreens, so it was very dark in there.  We rarely traveled the entire length of it.  It seems to me now that at the far end there was someone’s private property where they kept a horse, but I could be mixing that up with some other place.  I just remember it was creepy in there.  And there were a lot of beer bottles.  I reckon teenagers probably partied there at night, though that never crossed my mind at the time.  We were only there during the day and it was only ever us.

Both the field and the forest are gone now; it’s all houses in there.  The street still dead-ends where it always did, but the neighborhood has been built up so that two streets dead-end into each other.  There’s just a paved walkway separating them.  My old house looks very different.  Back then it was a dark brick red color.  It’s some kind of beige color now.  Not beige, but…honestly, I can’t remember, and I was there only a few hours ago.  I just know that it’s light now, and the door is different.  There’s a stained glass window next to it now.  I pulled into the driveway of the house across the street.  We were friends with the family that used to live there.  They had a girl my age and another girl my older sister’s age.  They were Baptists, and they went to private school.  Their grandmother, who lived in a camper in their driveway, was a Mormon, albeit a lapsed one.  My friend and I would visit her in her camper.  She always wore a housecoat.  She talked to us and smoked cigarettes.  She had a twenty-volume set of the illustrated Book of Mormon.  That seemed odd to me at the time.  I guess if she bought them, she wouldn’t want to just get rid of them, even if she was living in a camper.  My friend’s dad had a big truck with a license plate holder that said, “You touch-a my truck, I break-a your face.”  We thought that was pretty funny.  That family doesn’t live there anymore, of course.  And the house has been repainted.  It used to be dark brown, and now it’s a very bright baby blue.  All the houses are painted much lighter colors now.

I had pulled into the driveway to turn around, and I paused before driving away from my old house.  “That’s my old house,” I said to Elvis and Girlfriend, even though I knew it meant nothing to them.  The older kids would have been interested, but not them.  I told them anyway.  “That was my bedroom, right there.”  There used to be a tulip bush in front of it.  That’s gone, too.  The yard looks good, though.

I drove out of the neighborhood and around the corner to my old school.  When I started going there, I was in the second grade.  It was a relatively new school.  The kids in sixth grade that year had entered as first graders the year it was built.  There was no kindergarten then.  The playground was relatively large, plus there was a very large field of grass on the property.  We weren’t allowed to go past a certain point during recess because it was just too much area to supervise.  My family used to go there in the evenings and on weekends.  There was plenty of space to fly kites.  They’ve since added on to the school, and perhaps they sold off some of the property at some point because the field is non-existent now.  The very far end of it is now a small baseball diamond, entirely removed from school property.  Some kind of construction is going on between where the school parking lot ends and the baseball diamond begins.  You can’t tell what it’s going to be or if it’s going to be anything.  It just looks like a mess.  You can’t see the playground from the street at all now.

Across the street from the school are houses that didn’t exist when I first started going there.  That was why I had to take the bus for a few months, even though our house was literally a stone’s throw away from the school–because it was just a big construction site.  The houses which were brand-new when I started third grade are now thirty years old.  They haven’t been kept up well.  The lawns are sloppy.  The school looks pretty run-down, too.  It looks like a bad neighborhood.  It might be a bad neighborhood.  I don’t know because I never have a reason to be in this part of town.  I live in a nice neighborhood in the affluent part of Portland, just shy of six miles away.  Our schools and lawns are pretty, and our strip malls are classy.  We have a Target, a Best Buy, a Trader Joe’s, several Thai and Indian restaurants, and a Jamba Juice.  My old neighborhood has a post office, a public pool, a Hi-School Pharmacy, and lots of beauty salons and day cares with handmade signs.  It’s a place that looks like it’s dying, but it’s not going to die.  Not for a long, long time, anyway.

The school is particularly depressing to me, especially with the construction going on.  Even with the chain-link fences blocking things off, it doesn’t look safe for kids to be hanging out there.  There’s a lot of debris at the periphery of the school property.  It occurred to me this evening that this school is where the poor kids go.  One of those schools where 70 percent of the student body speaks Spanish and 90 percent qualifies for free or reduced lunch.  My siblings and I might have still qualified for reduced lunch at that time.  My father was a post-doc at Oregon Graduate Institute.  I know we were better off financially at that time than we had been while he was in graduate school; I knew it then because I got a lunch box and my mother was finally sending lunch with me to school because we could afford it.  That pleased me very much.  I never sensed any stigma attached to the free lunch; I just wanted a lunch box.  And a sandwich.  I only remember having Caucasian classmates.  There might have been non-white students there then, but I don’t think so.  I just don’t remember any.  Every time I think there might have been this black girl or this Asian girl, I remember that was fifth grade, when we were in California.  I don’t remember taking note of the fact when we moved to California that there were so many more darker-skinned people; I guess kids just don’t think about that stuff.

I didn’t let the kids run around on my old school playground.  I didn’t get out of the car.  I just drove us back to our part of town, where we have lots of public parks with brand-new play equipment.

Sugar Daddy’s Greatest Hits: 34th Birthday edition

1.  “So I can’t get a shirt that says ‘Food is the poop of the future’?”

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2.  “I promise never to leave naked cell phone pictures of you at the McDonald’s.”

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3.  SD: She wasn’t a very good kisser. Aside from that, she was a lot like you in many ways.

Mad: Because she had no sense of direction?

SD: Eh, she had a big butt.

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4.  SD: I gots to learn you how to use a computer, woman.

Mad: No, I think the position you’ve taken is that I’m supposed to sit here and not know anything, and then when I tell you I don’t know anything, you can make fun of me.

SD: Well, that’s closer to the truth.

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5.  Madhousewife:  You know, lots of people seem to like that Mamma Mia! movie, but I just look at it and think it can’t possibly be good.  I think it’s the whole idea of Meryl Streep singing ABBA songs that I can’t quite get into.

Sugar Daddy:  Well, she sang in Out of Africa, didn’t she?  “A dingoooo ate my bay-beeee…”

Mad:  That wasn’t Out of Africa!

SD:  It wasn’t?

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6.  “See that big building that I work in?  Go toward it.”

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7.  “It makes me feel better about myself to belittle others.”

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8.  “My light can only shine brighter if I blow out everyone else’s candle.”

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9.  Sugar Daddy: When I get my new car, I’m going to get a vanity plate.

Madhousewife: What’s it going to say?

SD: Probably “U-P-Y-R-S.”

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10.  “Why would you want to watch a movie without stuff blowing up?”

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11.  Sugar Daddy:  I found the perfect gift for you online today, but they said it would take two weeks…

Madhousewife:  Oh.

SD:  …to bronze my poop.

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12.  “So just so we’re clear–it’s yes on the gun necklace, no on the fishnet shirt?”

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13.  Mad:  I’m going to pray that you stop being a jerk.

SD:  Then you’ll be praying for a long time.

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14.  Sugar Daddy:  If I were God, could I make people with twelve fingers and still be creating them in my own image?

Madhousewife:  What…?

SD:  It would just be a lot more convenient.

Mad:  How so?

SD:  Because then you’d have your number system as base twelve instead of base ten.  A lot more convenient.

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15.  Mad:  Hi, it’s me.  Um, I’m just going to say this.  Our house is on fire.

SD:  Really?

Mad:  Yes, it’s on fire.

SD:  Like, for real?

Mad:  Yes, for real.  Like, actual flames.  There are flames in our bathroom.  There is smoke coming out of our roof.

SD:  Do I need to come home?

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16.  “I’d rather eat cat feces than anything at Applebee’s.”

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17.  Sugar Daddy:  If anything ever happens to you, Mad, I’m going after Nicole Parker.

Madhousewife:  You have my blessing on that, honey.

SD:  Right after the Sleep Country woman.

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18.  “I’m going to create a new TV show called Time for Turds.”

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19.  Magnetic poetry on the refrigerator:

IF EXCESS DELIGHT AFFLICT THEE COME WOO A RUMP-FACED HAG
SUCH AN OFFENDING WRETCH SHALT RUIN THEE  

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20.  SD:  Mad, did you change the lightbulbs in the kitchen?  (Feigns heart attack.) I thought that was my job.

Mad:  Not anymore, Mr. Snide-Smart-alecky-Smartbutt.

SD (chortles derisively, then proceeds to sit on his wife’s head): Hey, Mad, look how smart my butt is–

Mad:  Get off of me.

SD:  I just want you to see how smart my butt is–E=mc squared, baby!

Mad:  That’s enough!

SD:  E=mc squared!

Mad:  Stop!

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21.  Mad:  What does it say about people who watch Letterman, that they always have these commercials for Viagra before the show?

SD:  I think it says that people who watch Leno aren’t getting any.

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22.  “Are you sure you don’t want any Camembert?  It’ll put hair on your chest.”

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23.  “He’s got blonde hair, he’s balding… If I were going to pick a guy to turn gay for, it wouldn’t be him.”

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24.  “Hey, remember I diagrammed the molecular structure of your name when we were engaged.”

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25.  SD:  You just don’t understand the system.

Mad: I think I understand that ’systems’ devised by men are sensible and efficient, whereas systems developed by women are just stupid.

SD:  I would not have put it so eloquently.

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26.  From:  [Sugar Daddy]

To:  [Madhousewife]

Subject:  Wireless Message

Date:  Fri, 23 Sep 2005 16:44:55 +0000

had a dream last night that i was married to oprah.  you and i met up again at one of oprah’s parties and decided to reconcile.  needless to say, i didn’t sleep too well…

-sd

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27.  “You know how TV is always trying to push the envelope with stuff like language and nudity–I wonder what would happen if they made a show that had a close-up shot of a dog pooping.”

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28.  “All I can say is that it’s about time this ward recognized my righteousness.”

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29.  PZ:  What are we having for dinner?

SD:  Monkey armpits.

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30.  Sugar Daddy:  I had a smoothie tonight that contained 50 percent of my daily fiber.

Madhousewife:  Good for you.

SD:  My system’s gonna be–you know, you’re gonna want to live in my colon, it will be so clean.

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31.  SD:  I’m glad I don’t have cleavage.  Know why?

MH:  No, why?

SD:  Because it would be hairy.  Hairy cleavage is disgusting.

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32.  SD:  I’m going to market a PMS drug and call it Menstru-lief.

MH:  That’s nice.

SD (launching into his future advertising campaign):  “Used to be, when I had to menstruate, my life was menstruined.  I would menstrue the day I ever got my period.  But now Menstrulief has turned menstruate into menstrugreat.”

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33,  “I’m going to write a book called ‘The Turd in the Closet.’ … It’s going to be the sequel to my peeing-fire story.”

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34.  SD:  I think it would be fun to teach Sunday School.  Do you think they’ll ever let me?

Madhousewife:  I would love it if you taught Sunday School, SD.  Because then I would actually listen.

SD:  Yeah…but they’d probably want me to teach with pants on.

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SD!

Snippets of conversation

Princess Zurg:  J’Accuse!

“They play a lot of rock music that doesn’t really rock.  If something doesn’t rock, why do they even call it ‘rock’?  That’s just lying.”

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Sugar Daddy has his suspicions

Sugar Daddy:  I’m beginning to suspect that the housekeepers don’t come at all.  That you’re just cleaning the house and pocketing the $200 a month and spending it on…

Mad:  Liquor?

SD:  Liquor.  And fast women.  Or is it loose women?

Mad:  Maybe it’s both.

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Sugar Daddy waxes philosophical

SD:  One of the questions I’m going to ask God is why we have toes.

Mad:  I use my toes all the time.

SD:  Well, I guess you can use these two to pick things up, but that doesn’t explain why we have all these other ones that only move together.

Mad:  I still like having toes.

SD:  Well, yeah, but why can’t you move the second one all by itself?  And what’s with the big toe?  You’ve got this huge toe and then all these little ones.  It’s not like your thumb, which is basically the same size as the other fingers.

Mad:  And it’s not opposable like the thumb is.

SD:  That would be awesome, if it were.

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Mister Bubby has medical insights

“I know why I had diarrhea this morning.  After throwing up so much, my body thinks my butt is my mouth.”

Yeah, you could have done without this one, couldn’t you?  As could have I.

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Madhousewife out of context

“Is it disturbing when your wife returns home from a bar with a thick wad of singles?”

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Princess Zurg is self-aware

“You might say…I’m a pineapple.  Because I seem rough on the outside, but inside I’m really very sweet.  I’m also like a sea urchin.  Because on the outside I’m prickly, but inside I’m soft.”

It’s a miracle!

I just checked my voice mail, and there’s a message telling me that I don’t need to bring dinner to the in-crisis family tonight because they say they won’t need meals brought in for the next couple weeks or so.  Can you believe it?  It’s like a call from the governor–a reprieve!  That means I only have to figure out what to serve six people, not twelve people.  And I don’t have to think that hard anymore because my blog buddies came through for me AS ALWAYS and gave me all these terrific ideas, so now I not only know what I’m feeding my own family, but the next time I say I’m going to bring someone else dinner–like in a couple weeks or so–and I start stressing out over what to make for them, all I have to do is remember the Miracle of June 2, 2009 and GO STRAIGHT TO THIS PAGE.  You people are the best!

Oh, and I suppose I technically owe God one, too.