Category Archive

Anothermad tagged me, and you know how it is.  When Anothermad says, “Jump!” I say, “How high?”

“Rules”  After posting these rules, each player proceeds to list 8 relatively random facts/habits about himself/herself.  At the end of the post, the player then tags 8 people and posts their names, leaving them a comment on their blogs to let them know.

1.  When I’m depressed, I eat a lot of peanut butter sandwiches.  I eat peanut butter sandwiches when I’m happy, too–I really like peanut butter–but when I’m sad, I must have peanut butter sandwiches.  I think I ate a peanut butter sandwich every day I was pregnant with Mister Bubby.  Believe it or not, that was not my saddest pregnancy.  But it was the most peanut-buttery.

2.  I have a flat spot on the crown of my head, about two inches in diameter.  And when I say “flat spot,” I mean that if I were to bow my head, I could balance a glass of water there.  Not that I’ve actually tried that.  I try not to think about my flat spot.  It actually gives me the creeps.  Every so often I have to scratch my head or something, and I accidentally feel the flat spot, and it’s pretty gross, actually.  You can’t tell I have it just by looking, though, because I still have my hair.

3.  When I was a senior in high schoo, I won an award–I actually think it was a Bank of America-sponsored award, or something–for “Most Promising Student in Foreign Language.”  The foreign language I studied in high school was German.  I took it for four years.  The college I went to didn’t offer German, though, so I took Spanish.  It was a lot easier than German.  But where was the challenge?  That’s why I never got any good at Spanish, and why I’ve forgotten most of my German.

4.  I am allergic to bee stings.  At least that is what I understand.  I’ve only been stung once.  I don’t think it could have been a very bad reaction, but then I was only about six and the whole sequence of events is very blurry in my memory.  One minute I weas running across the grass at my grandmother’s apartment building, and then I was in extreme pain, and then everything went black.  I suppose if I went under hypnosis, I could remember what happened next, but suffice it to say that I survived, and my mother kept a prescription of something I was supposed to take in the event that I was ever stung by a bee again, but I never was stung again, and after a while my condition, as it were, was largely forgotten.  At least we no longer had a bottle of something-and-such in the event of bee-stinging.  I don’t know how these things work, but I try not to get stung by bees anyway.  Bees are scary.

5.  I’ve seen the movie Staying Alive five times.  No, not Saturday Night Fever–though I have seen that, too–but the utterly stupid and forgettable sequel, Staying Alive.  Well, it would have been forgettable except that I saw it five times.  In the theater.  In my defense, this was back in the day of the double feature.  I think that movie played with just about everything else I saw that summer.  And yes, I do have the soundtrack.  It’s around somewhere, although it hasn’t aged quite as well as you’d expect.  Which reminds me, my older sister was at a public event around that time, and Frank Stallone was there.  She said she got his autograph for me, which was interesting, because it never would have occurred to me to want his autograph.  I only remember her showing it to me.  What happened to it after that, I don’t know.  I think she kept it.  I must not have seemed sufficiently grateful.  I have no regrets.

6.  I like to eat raw potatoes.  Not like a whole potato, but you know, when I’m cutting potatoes for a recipe, I usually eat a slice or two of raw potato, sometimes salted, sometimes not.  I can’t eat too many of them, though, or I’ll start to feel sick.  I’m the only person I’ve ever met who likes to eat raw potatoes.  I think that someday I will find more of my kind.  Maybe that time is now.  Come out of the shadows, raw potato-lovers.

7.  The person who drinks the most milk in this house is me.  Much of this is due to the peanut-butter habit, but even aside from what the peanut butter requires, I drink a lot of milk, much more than anyone else in the family.  Except when there’s powdered Ovaltine in the house.  Then my kids drink milk like it’s Kool-Aid, and all I can think is, “Augh!  You’re drinking all my milk!”  So the truth comes out.  Several people, including health professionals, have tried to talk me into switching to skim milk, but skim milk isn’t actually milk and thus I do not6 like it as well–or rather, at all.  I can tolerate 1% milk, if I have to, but 2% is really my preferred version.  (Whole milk, which delicious, is just not necessary, but I did drink it all through college because the dining hall only offered skim and whole.  I know where my priorities lie.)  So I may get fat and die of heart disease, but I will have some kick-a** bone strength in my old age.

8.  I don’t know how to drive a stick shift.  More precisely, I cannot drive a stick shift.  I certainly understand the concept of how the stick shift works.  I was highly motivated to learn how to drive a stick shift when I was a teenager because all the cars my family had were stick shifts.  My sister tried to teach me.  My mother tried to teach me.  My father tried to teach me.  I wanted to learn.  I really did.  But I couldn’t ever do it.  I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was 19 because that’s when my parents finally bought a car with an automatic transmission.  (Not especially for me, but eventually they did give it to me.)  No one who can drive a stick shift believes that I understand how the stick shift works, because surely if I understood, I could drive one.  If you are one of those people who can drive a stick shift, you are doubtless thinking to yourself right now, “She’s full of crap.  She just doesn’t get how the stick shift works.  You ease up on the clutch as you press down on the gas.”  And you’re probably moving your hands in front of you to show me how one goes down as the other goes up, as if I’ve never seen that before.  No, I’ve seen it.  I just can’t do it.  It’s a coordination things.  My father once asked me how I could play the piano so well and yet not have the coordination to operate a stick shift.  The thin about the piano is that it doesn’t have a transmission.  If I make an error in timing, it isn’t going to refuse to play for me. The piano is a very forgiving instrument.  The stick shift is like a woman scorned.  I won’t play her games.

The last few times I’ve tagged people, about 75% of the people I tagged were already tagged by somebody else, and I felt really lame.  And when it comes to feeling lame, I really don’t need any help.  So if you wanna be It, be It.  Declare yourself.  I’ll chase you down afterward.

Elvis was sick on Monday, throwing up and running a fever and all that good stuff, and he spent most of the day and night out of commission.  Early Tuesday morning, I think around 5:30, he jumped out of a sound sleep, screaming his head off and running downstairs.  I was in the baby’s room, Sugar Daddy was half-asleep, groggy but aware that Elvis was screaming and also that his voice was trailing off, as if he’d…left the house.  Only we hadn’t heard the front door open.  Only we couldn’t hear him anymore.  So SD went looking, and sure enough, Elvis had indeed left the building (again).  He’d run all the way to the park behind the assisted living center in our neighborhood and was frantically searching for his soccer ball.  Well, at the time SD didn’t know what he was looking for, just that he was crying and screaming, “Where is it?  Where is it?”  SD brought him home, where Elvis immediately ran into the back yard, found the soccer ball and heaved a huge sigh of relief.  Unfortunately, I don’t think he went back to sleep again.  I don’t know.  It’s all a blur.  That was Tuesday.

Aside the crazy running-away-from-home-in-the-wee-hours-of-the-morning incident, Elvis seemed his usual, not-sick self.  (Not that running away from home in the wee hours of the morning is completely out of character for him, of course.)  His fever was gone, he hadn’t thrown up since Monday morning, he was terrorizing my home, and so I sent him to school.  He came home from school, not particularly hungry for lunch, which didn’t seem unusual, but he played and terrorized the home for a few hours before finally passing out on the living room floor at 4 p.m., which was also not surprising, given that he’d woken up at 5:30 that morning and had been running himself ragged thence-forward.

The surprising thing was that he slept straight through the night and woke up at the godly hour of 7:00 Wednesday morning (i.e. yesterday).  Again, he was acting his usual self.  So I sent him to school again at 11:00.  When he came back home, shortly after 1 p.m., he went straight to his favorite spot on the living room carpet, pulled his giant stuffed Sully on top of him and passed out.  That’s when I knew something was awry.

For a while SD and I thought the rest of the fam would just have to miss my tap recital that night–which was okay because I’m a big girl and it was being recorded and we were planning to buy a DVD of said recording anyway, so whatever.  But then Elvis woke up, played, had some dinner, seemed his usual self–so SD brought him and the other kids to my tap recital.

The performance went very well.  I felt good about it.  I was confident, I didn’t forget what I was doing and look stupid and helpless like a deer under stage lights.  I was at the apex of my career thusfar.  Most of my happy mood could be attributed to that, and also to the fact that before I went onstage, I’d spent the entire evening in the practice room, blissfully unaware of the fact that Elvis had started throwing up in between the Irish dancers and the hip-hop girls.  Between their numbers, I mean.  Not their actual persons.  No, thank goodness for that.  He only threw up on the gymnasium floor.  Fortunately there was a quick-thinking janitor nearby.  (Or as Mister Bubby said, “the mop person.”)  Also, Princess Zurg was able to tend to her younger siblings while SD took Elvis to get cleaned up.  Also, that there was a spare shirt in the minivan, due to MB’s habit of taking his clothes off in the car on hot days.  Everyone was there to see my class’s performance.  And I never smelled any vomit.  Until I went to the car, of course.  But it was too late to be upset by then.

So Elvis is staying home from school today, despite the fact that he seems his usual self and is back to terrorizing my home.  I have hung up the fuschia sequins and the gaudy jewelry and returned to housewifely duties.  Well, sort of.  Right now I’m blogging.  Maybe I’ll do some housework later.  If I’m not cleaning up vomit.