Snakes and snails and jellyfish tales

My son Nick and I went to Fort Clinch State Park on Tuesday, joining other home schoolers for a day at the beach. It rained most of the trip up there (Fort Clinch is an hour north of our house, just outside of Fernandina). Nick was driving, which gave him lots of opportunities to practice not hydroplaning and also gave me the chance to practice not putting my feet through the floorboards in a pointless effort to get him to slow down. We outran the storms and got to the beach in time to meet everyone in the group leaving the beach to go to the other side of the park. Apparently the winds were so strong that no one could swim and they were all getting sand blasted. 

When the thunder and lightning finally stopped, we all drove back to the beach and the kids jumped in the water again, until someone noticed that there were large fish jumping around just offshore. This could mean that the fish were very happy about the storm being over or that something bigger was chasing them so we called all the kids back out of the water again, just to be safe.

After an hour or so, all the big fish having swum away or been eaten, the kids ventured back into the water to play in the waves for a while. Then, just as we were about to pack everything up and head for the nearest pizza place, Nick was stung on the leg by a jellyfish. 

He flew out of the water, and was immediately inundated with advice, all of it strangely similar. "Pee on it!" "Pee on it!" "Pee on it!" While he limped off to the restroom, I gathered up our stuff and tried very hard not to think about the logistics of peeing on your own leg. I also tried to remember where the nearest grocery store was along our route. Did you know that vinegar will take away a lot of the sting? So will urine, which is handier, but of which there is generally a limited amount available.

We ended up stopping at Wal-mart. I had to go in wearing only my bathing suit and a straw hat, but personal embarrassment is not even on the same scale as a jellyfish sting. 

I bought some barbecue chips to cheer Nick up along with the vinegar and also a container of Accent, which is pure monosodium glutamate. Chris, who lived on a boat in the Caribbean for twenty years and so should know, told me to make a paste from it and smear it on the sting on Nick's leg, then wrap it and leave it alone for two hours. Then she said to take a credit card and scrape off the paste, going against the grain of the hair on his leg to remove any lingering stings. 

Nick talked about his injury all the way home (an hour, remember?). "This isn't at all like what you see in cartoons," he said. "In cartoons, they make it seem as though it's like being shocked. Remember in 'Finding Nemo' and they go through the jellyfish and every time a jellyfish touches them you hear a fizzing noise, like an electric shock? It's nothing at all like that. It's more like stinging nettles. It feels like someone hit me in the leg with stinging nettles."

It's one of the things that worried Nick when we first moved to Florida, being stung by jellyfish or eaten by sharks. Well, now he knows what a jellyfish sting feels like and he's proud of himself for living through it. I don't even want to think about the other.

Nick is hoping for scars. "I'll show it to some little kid and tell him, 'Yep, that's where I got stung by a jellyfish.'"

I'll be sporting scars of my own from this experience. Fortunately, they're all on the inside. I'm already making plans to pack vinegar and Accent in the beach bag, right next to the lightning rods and shark repellant.

I'm an asshole

The following is a short story about what it might be like when everybody in the country has a robotic car. Whoopee!

The alarm goes off and I leap out of bed. I'm going to work today!

I hit the bathroom, get dressed as quickly as I can, run into the kitchen to grab cold pizza, slip on my shoes, and then fly out the door. I run to the garage, key in my code and jump in my car. Oh boy oh boy oh boy!

Let's see, what shall I be today? A senior citizen? A crazy teenager? Nope. Today I feel like an asshole. I scroll to "Asshole" on the console screen, and immediately a nasty voice rips out from the speakers. "Hey, buttwipe! Put your seat belt on!" I buckle up and immediately my car is flying backwards out the driveway, narrowly missing my neighbor and her stupid dog, and bumping a bicyclist on the sidewalk. Everyone glares at me and I laugh maniacally! I love work days!

Zoom! Now we're racing to the signal light at the end of my street. It's just turned yellow and I think, Oh poopy! and then sudden acceleration pushes me back into my seat. Whoohoo! My car is going for it! Squealing through the turn, four seconds into the red, we cut off four lanes of traffic and everyone's car honks like crazy. I crank open the moon roof and flip them all off using both hands!

Whoops! We're being tailed. Looks like someone pushed the "Homicidal Maniac" button this morning! Damn! I wanted that option but my wife said we couldn't afford the insurance. It's a hot looking car, too. A big mudder with chrome everything, tractor-sized tires and black window tinting. It looks like pure evil coming up behind us! My heart is thumping so hard I think I might pee my pants.

Screee! The truck comes up to my car's rear bumper and jams on the brakes hard enough to give its passenger whiplash. I try to see into the front of the truck but the windshield is too dark. Is there anyone even in that thing? There must be. Cars don't drive themselves. They drive us! Anywhere, anytime, anyhow!

I can't even imagine how it must have been before, when you had to actually do things to get somewhere! Turn a steering wheel, shift gears, push pedals with your feet, sometimes all three at once! And you had to be so alert and careful! You had to take a test and everything before! This is so much more fun! Every day is like a brand new rollercoaster ride!

Now my car starts swerving in and out of traffic. This is one of my favorite parts of the ride. My body rocks back and forth in my seat and I close my eyes, but not for long. It's so much more exciting when you watch the whole way there!

There are at least four other cars doing the same thing on this stretch of road. "Assholes of the world, unite!" I shout. We come within a frog hair of each other, weaving a tight, four-stranded braid from Old St. Augustine Road right up to San Jose Boulevard. Ha ha ha! My stomach hurts from laughing so much, but I feel so alive! This is such a great way to start the day!

I look at the other cars' passengers. They're all laughing, too. I'm so so glad I decided to be an asshole today!

With a jerk and squeal of the tires we jump a curb into the office parking lot, beating out some poor sod who was patiently waiting for a spot to open up in front of the chiropractor's office. My car yells at me to get out. "What are you waiting for, buttface?"

I'm still gasping for breath, so it's hard to get words out. But I have to. "Take me back home again, car." I've forgotten to bring dry pants again. Damn it! That's the third time in two weeks! Oh well, I'll just have to step on it to back again before it's time to open up. I wave to Mrs. Godin, standing outside the doors to the building. "Be back in a minute," I yell out the window.

Then I scroll down the menu on the console and select "Nascar." Whee!

Mr. Coffee haiku

The coffeemaker is my friend
Faithful dispenser of caffeinated warmth
I don't deserve you.

A Modest Proposal to Help Our Libraries in the Form of an Imaginary Conversation with Sue the Librarian

"Eight thousand, six hundred and forty-two dollars," Sue said, looking expectant.

I stopped in the act of pulling out the debit card from my wallet and gaped at the librarian. 

"That can't be right," I said. "I mean, I know I have some overdue books, but they can't be more than a day past due. Could I see…?" I craned my neck, trying to peer around the monitor in front of her.

"I can print out the charges, if you like," Sue said, helpfully. I nodded and she handed me a sheet of paper. I quickly scanned it and sure enough, there were the four books, there was the due date, and there was the charge per second. Wait. Charge per second?

"The library charges per second now for overdue books?" I squeaked.

"Yep, since last month," said Sue cheerfully. "The board decided that with this new policy we'll be able to make up our budget shortfall in no time at all. I've taken in so much money in the past two days that we've been able to re-instate our staff salaries at the investment bank president wage level, plus go from being open from noon to three to nine to five again and put a swimming pool in the employee lounge. If this keeps up, we may be able to add a whole 'nother day to the schedule! That'd put us at four days a week!" She seemed very happy.

"That's great, Sue. I'm glad about the wages and the new pool and things. It's just I don't think I have the whole amount  in my account right now," I said, apologetically.

"No problem," she chirped. "We'll just put you into our special low interest rate loan program. You'll be able to continue to borrow materials and the monthly payments are really affordable. Now, which card design would you like? The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle or For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway? Of course, you can also choose any favorite book or movie for your very own personal imprint." 

"Um, the caterpillar will be fine," I said. A line was starting to form behind me.  

Sue tapped some more information into her computer. "I'll just transfer all this information from your regular membership card and then pull up your current credit report, and hey, good news! You pre-qualify for the Gold Preferred Benefits program!" 

"Is that good?" I asked uncertainly. 

"It sure is!" Sue beamed at me, then handed me a credit card with a picture of a cute little worm made from bits of colored paper on it. It was still warm.

"You'll get your first statement in a week to ten days. There's no annual fee, zero percent APR for six months on new fines, and it's accepted at all Hooverville Public Libraries. Plus, as a special added bonus, you can pay your fines online and eliminate ever again having to own up to your bad habits in front of God and everybody. Thank you for borrowing from the South Middle Ipswich Library East. Next!"

Alice TV

I click the phone icon in the Skype window on my laptop and hear the funny bloopity blip noise as it makes a call. One ring, two rings, and Alice picks up.

"Hello?"

"There's no video. Are you decent?"

"Not quite."

(Panicked pause) "Are you alone?"

(Laughter) "Yes, I'm alone! I'm just not camera-ready!"

"Oh!"

The video comes up and I see my daughter hastily smoothing down the sweater that I sent her last month. She's got a job teaching English to elementary school students in South Korea. We Skype each other because it's free, fun and surprising. I make a mental note to let her do the calling from now on. It's no problem for me to answer a Skype call. I live with two teenagers, so I'm always "camera-ready."

Alice settles in on her bed with the laptop in front of her. I can see the cherry blossoms coming out from either side of her head, left over decor from a previous tenant who lived in her apartment. To her right I can see part of a tiny refrigerator with a microwave on top of it. On her left are the pictures in CD covers that I sent out in the last package. I notice that she's changed some of them out.

The biggest drawback to using Skype to communicate is that the video also contains a miniature video of me in the corner. My eyes are always drawn to pictures of myself, I guess because I find myself endlessly fascinating.

Right now I think that my nose looks too big, so I scoot back a bit from the laptop and that makes my features more proportional. Unfortunately, my face is now a tiny circle in the middle of a big rectangular space. The graphic designer in me can't live with that, so I angle the laptop cover so that my head is more toward the top of the screen. My daughter is too polite to notice me not paying attention to her while all this is going on and continues to tell me about her day.

She's recounting how she taught her fifth grade class, all boys, how to play a drinking game she learned in college, called the Five Finger Game. Each person holds up one hand and swears that they never, ever did a certain thing, usually something sexual. Anyone else who can't make the same claim has to put a finger down and take a drink.

With the fifth graders there is no drinking or talk about sex. Instead they treat it as an opportunity to punish one of their classmates by deciding in advance who is going to lose the game and then craftily asking questions that will make this happen as quickly as possible. First person: "My name is not (insert name of agreed-upon-loser-boy here)." Second through fourth persons: "I am not holding up (four, three, two, one) fingers."

Alice, being a nice person and with no previous experience of other people's children, is appalled by this ("They're so mean!") and decides to make new rules. No one can use the "I am not holding up however many fingers" gambit and the teacher (Alice) gets to go first. They agree. She holds up one hand and says, "I am not Korean." Much whining ensues and then they pull themselves together and working as a team, eliminate her forthwith from the game. She doesn't care. She got them all down one finger, mwahahaha!

It's two in the morning in Busan, South Korea. I know she's tired but she wants to talk some more and I let her. I am happy to watch and listen while she recounts her attempts to purchase shampoo with only the pictures on the labels to guide her (she doesn't speak or write Korean). She laughs, gets up to check to see if her dinner is done cooking, bounces back on the bed, peers over my shoulder when one of her brothers passes behind me and calls out to him to come and talk.

We take turns showing each other what's new since the last time we Skyped. She shows me some illustrations that she's drawing of "Bob," a cartoon character that she uses in her classes to communicate tricky vocabulary words like "thin" and "fat" and "handsome" and "ugly." I show her the dead shrubbery in the back yard that her father spray-painted gold and silver in time for Christmas.

Skyping with Alice reminds me of when she was in high school and she used to come sit on my bed late at night and tell me everything she was thinking or feeling. I would drink it all in, thinking that it wouldn't last forever and that I should enjoy her company while I could. It wasn't long after that she left for a year to go to school in France. Then she went to Senegal for six months during her junior year at college. Now she's halfway around the world. She's planning to go to France again next year.

With Skype, I hear the sound of her voice and watch the movement of her hands and enjoy the play of emotions on her face. I'm so glad I can have this, so grateful that she shares her life with me this way. It's like having my own little reality channel called Alice TV. I don't know how long it'll be on or when the next episode will be. I only know that I never get tired of watching it.

I'm posting to a different blog

Hey everyone, anyone. I've begun a new blog called Runs, Shoots and Leaves. The link is on the right here. It's more of a photo blog than anything else. I've been taking lots of pictures again and just wanted to share them. So take a look, if you like and let me know what you think.

I've been having some difficulty writing. The pictures are kind of a way of getting back to writing without actually telling myself that it's writing. It's supposed to be fun and it is, it is. I like photography. A lot. Anyway, hopefully this will help me say what I want to say without freaking out about it all the time.

The Dog's Breakfast

Oatmeal, gravy, evaporated milk,

leftover burger or meat of that ilk,

steamed green beans, seasoned with dill,

a mess of corn mush piled in a small hill

Nasty to look at, but a pleasure to eat,

the dog's breakfast is served. Bon appetit!

The Gift

I stare at the candle holder squatting on the table like a malevolent imp. Red and blue beads glare out from behind shrouds of black tar. It was supposed to be a cool-looking, hand-crafted candle holder. Instead it has turned into something nasty. It is "The Candle Holder from the Black Lagoon". I dread showing it to my son. Nick is going freak out.

This morning when I woke I walked into the workshop to see what had been created overnight. I found a jar on the workbench, covered in gray cement. Where was the grout? I wondered.

Last night before I'd gone to bed, I'd left Nick sitting on the stool, busily hot glueing glass beads onto an empty jar. It was going to be his present to his girlfriend, Melissa. Her birthday party was the next day and he was trying to pull off a hand made gift for her.

Actually, the candle holder idea was a compromise. Originally he'd wanted to make her a globe lamp mosaicked with glass beads. I'd convinced him to try something easier, since it would require having a place to plug it in and he wasn't sure how to work the cord or whether or not the base had to be cemented, too.

All of that just seemed like a lot to work out less than 48 hours before the party. A candleholder was just about possible, I figured. Nick agreed. Before I went to bed last night I had brought in a tub of white, pre-mixed, sanded grout, pointed out the instructions on the back and left him to it.

What I was looking at this morning wasn't grouted at all. It was cemented. Seriously cemented. And it was gray. What happened?

I went into the kitchen and started making coffee. Nick walked in then, looking like he hadn't slept at all.

"Nick, have you been to bed?"

"I slept for an hour."

"I saw the jar on the workbench. What happened to the grout?"

"It didn't work. It not only didn't work, it dissolved the glue that was holding the beads on the jar. So I had to clean it off and start all over again."

"I'm sorry, Nick."

"Yeah, so Dad helped me make cement and I used that instead."

"Now what?"

"Now I'm supposed to take a sponge and wipe off all the excess cement."

"I'll help you find the stuff to do that." I felt guilty about the grout. Who knew it would melt hot glue? "This is just one of those journey things, Nick," I said, trying to find a bright spot for him.

I filled a bucket with water and found a big sponge. I put some newspaper down on the kitchen table, got Nick some rubber gloves and set him to work cleaning off the cement from the beadwork.

After twenty minutes or so, still feeling guilty, I offered to take over for a while, which is when things went from bad to horrible. As I rubbed on the bottom of the candleholder, a chunk of cement fell off taking four beads with it.

"Uh oh," I said. Nick looked over at the large pile of cement on the newspaper and said, "Please tell me the beads haven't come off."

"I wish I could."

I told him to go jump in the shower while I thought about what to do next. Cementing the thing again wouldn't work because there wasn't enough time for it to set up. We could always go buy a present, except Nick was already exhausted, and a trip to the store wasn't going to help that.

I took the jar out to the yard and used a hose to clean off the rest of the cement. Most of the beads fell off in the process. There was no way we could use the same jar again. There were globs of hot glue all over it and they weren't coming off. Plus, now that the cement was gone I could see where the grout had stained the glass already. It was wrecked.

I went back into the kitchen and scrounged around the cupboards looking for another jar with a lid. No soap. And then I decided to look in the refrigerator to see if there was another jar like this one that could be used. I found a salsa jar, emptied the contents into a mason jar, then rinsed it out, dried it and waited for Nick to get out of the shower.

When he came back into the kitchen, still depressed, but clean at least, I showed him the new jar. "You'll need to re-glue the beads onto this," I said. He nodded listlessly. He'd already decided that this nightmare was never ending. Now he was just waiting for the next worst possible thing to happen.

I decided that we'd use another craft product to put around the beads. If the point was to make everything dark except where the light would shine through the glass beads then this stuff would work just as well and as a bonus I was pretty sure I could get it to dry before the party at 3:30 this afternoon.

I told Nick what I was going to do and sent him to bed. Then I got to work on the candle holder.

Propping it on its side I took Liquid Leading and started squirting it on the side facing up. It flowed into all the cracks between the beads, clinging to the glass like it was a lava flow going around rocks in the landscape. This might turn out pretty cool, I thought. Melissa was into gems and minerals, maybe this would end up being like gemstones in aggregate. Or something.

By the time I finished outlining all the pretty glass beads, I'd started to realize that the difference between this stuff and the cement was that with the cement, and the grout, for that matter, what you ended up with was a fatter looking jar, with pretty colored bumps in it. A uniform thickness all around. It looked regular and crafted and nice.

What you got with liquid leading was something that looked malformed and lumpy and evil. And there was nothing I could do to make it look any better. I briefly toyed with the idea of removing all the liquid leading again and just leaving the thing to be a glass jar with beads on it. But that would be even further away from what Nick had wanted in the first place. I just hoped he wouldn't be too disappointed when he woke up to see what had become of his gift for his girlfriend.

By two o'clock I couldn't take the suspense anymore and woke Nick from a sound sleep. He sat up in bed, nodded when I asked him if he was awake, then fell over again. A half hour later I told him what time it was and he panicked, getting dressed, running his fingers through his hair, getting dressed again. I hesitantly asked him if the candle holder was going to be okay and he looked distractedly at it and said, "What? Oh, yeah, that's fine, Mom," and went back to hunting for the perfect black tee. "Are there any of my shirts anywhere that are clean?"

We ended up putting the jar in a gift bag with a cushion of tissue paper over the top. I warned him to tell Melissa not to squeeze it for at least 24 more hours to give the stuff a chance to harden up. "Yeah, yeah," he said, and then it was time to go.

Later when the boys came back from the party, I was in bed, so I didn't get a chance to ask how the gift had been received. I had to wait until the next day. When I saw Nick at breakfast I asked him how Melissa had liked it. "Oh, she liked it." "Really? What did her mom say?" "Frances? She said it was 'interesting looking.'"

Art is a process, just like life. It's not what you end up with, it's what you learn while getting there.

Nick is lucky to have a girlfriend who likes him enough that even when she's presented with a black lump of goo masquerading as a candle holder all she sees is that he cared enough to make something especially for her. And I'm lucky to have a son who loves me enough that even when I mess up his life all he sees is that I meant well. It's a gift.

The sweet smell of spring

This past winter we had to replace the motor on the furnace. Of course it happened during the coldest winter on record in northeast Florida. After that, I decided that we should have someone come out to look over the whole system. I didn't want to be without air conditioning in the middle of the summer. So I called the number on the handy magnetic ad that was on the furnace/ac unit, and the helpful woman on the phone scheduled an inspection. Early one morning, a nice young man named Mr. Scott showed up. I pointed him to the furnace and the circuit breaker box and went back to reading my book.

Soon I can hear him whistling. It's not the tuneful whistling that a person does because they're happy and doing something that they like. It's more of a high pitched sound that drops suddenly, like Wyle E. Coyote falling down from a very high cliff onto a very hard surface. It's that piercing "Incoming!" whistle that you hear just before everyone gets blown up in war movies. It bodes.

"What's going on?" I ask and Mr. Scott shakes his head and says, "This is bad. This is very, very bad." He gestures to me. "Come over here and take a look." He pulls a metal panel back so that I can see the coils on the ac unit. They look like they're covered with something nasty, but then again, maybe this is how they always look. I find myself wishing I knew more about air conditioning.

Mr. Scott points. "Look at this. There's dog hair and all kinds of dirt. This is nasty." He shows me my old air filter. "See this? This is no good. If you can see through it, other stuff is getting through, too," he says.

At first I think that he's telling me that I need to change the filters out more often, and I start to tell him that I am very bad at remembering to replace my filters every month, but he cuts me off.

"Use these," he says, holding up a filter with a fan folded center made of opaque white material and covered with a silver metal grid. "Okay," I tell him. I'm still embarrassed that the filter he pulled out, the cheap one, is so darn dirty. It's like having the dental hygienist clean your teeth when you haven't flossed in a week.

Mr. Scott tells me he's going to have to wash the coils, "in situ", because there's no way to take that component out. The unit is too old. It will take him at least an hour and it's going to cost me $250. "Okay," I say again. I'm feeling better about him, probably because he used "in situ" in a sentence. I wonder if it's part of HVAC training, to say "in situ" when you're selling the customer an expensive scrubbing procedure. $250 doesn't seem so bad. I tell him that I'm going to take the dog for a walk and I'll be back before he's finished.

When I come back in the house an hour later, I notice that the air conditioning is on, because it's cooler inside than out. Also, it smells wonderful. Kind of fresh and flowery. I go to find Mr. Scott. "Wow, it sure smells nice in here! You know, I always thought it was my boys that made my house smell like a locker room," I tell him. He chuckles. "Maybe a little bit, but mostly it was all the dirt on those coils," he says. "Glad you're back," he adds. "There's a couple things that you should replace before I do the rest of the cleaning."

He leads me to the back of his truck and shows me some mechanical parts, explaining to me in great detail what they're for and why they're important and how they're going to cost me roughly $150 each to install.

I think for a moment about what my husband Steve will say. This whole inspection was supposed to cost only $139 and cover two visits, one in the spring and another in the fall. He's going to have a fit when he sees the final bill. Still, the house sure smells nice, now. Maybe he'll notice the nice smell and forget to ask about the cost.

Back when we bought the house, there was a room between the garage and the kitchen that we used to call the "stinky dog" room. The previous owner had bred Yorkshire Terriers for extra money and it smelled so bad that Steve had to wash it down five times from ceiling to floor with bleach before you could walk through there without holding your nose. You'd think that a smell like that would be unbearable to someone and they would have done something about it, but it's amazing what you can put up with, if it creeps up on you a little at a time.

I tell myself that Mr. Scott seems like a nice man, and he's spent over two hours here already, and my house smells truly wonderful for the first time since we moved into it. I think I'm falling in love with Mr. Scott. I'm pretty sure that if he'd told me I had to buy another AC unit I'd have pulled out my credit card for it and told him, "Okay."

Up until now, I've always assumed that the bad smell in my house was because I lived with three testosterone emitting males and a mostly dampish dog in the great swamp that is Florida. It's amazing to me that in just a few hours and for only around $700 my house smells like someone's house who maybe doesn't live with any men at all. Or dogs. Or in Florida.

Anyway, I spend the rest of the day remarking on how nice the house smells. The boys give me rolled eye looks and agree with me, just to get me out of the room. I'm already looking forward to October, when Mr. Scott will be back to check the furnace.

I'll have whatever he's cooking

My favorite dish is anything that can be prepared in a half hour or less and that my family will eat without complaining. Cereal tops the list, and then yogurt, pancakes, waffles, eggs, scrambled or boiled, tuna spaghetti, although slicing olives is the sort of fussy prep work that I loathe most of all, and pizza. I can get a pizza on the table in a half hour, just.

Cooking is destined to be a chore for me. I grew up in a household where experiments in the kitchen were generally met with disapproval. It's tough when your audience consists of up to a dozen individuals, all starving and none of whom will eat anything interesting like organ meats or foreign vegetables. In spite of heavy opposition, my mother did try to widen our culinary horizons from time to time. The only person who appreciated her efforts was my grandfather, with the result that she only tried out new recipes on his birthday. So once a year, we'd endure something "icky" like carrot cake, for his sake.

I can see why now, at the age of eighty something, she's no longer interested in putting a meal together. Also, she's more inclined to be picky about what's set in front of her. Maybe it's the backlash that comes from having to put three squares on the table for a mob every day for more than fifty years. It's like she decided it's her turn to say "I'm not really all that hungry," or "It needs salt," or "I think I'll just have a melted cheese sandwich."

Mom's idea of a good time was not to spend any of it in the kitchen. I grew up resenting cooking chores, too. I especially hated peeling potatoes. In our house you had to do endless amounts for a single meal. And my dad had definite ideas about the right way to do it. According to him, my method would've landed me hours of KP duty in the army on account of how much actual potato I wasted. I was in awe of his skill with a paring knife, but not enough to practice using one.

Nowadays, my favorite recipes are the ones that other people make. This doesn't mean I like going to restaurants, however. Even if I like what's on the menu, after a recent homeschooling tour of the state lab, I'm reluctant to put anything that I haven't scrubbed personally into my mouth. There was an especially disturbing story told to us about a high school science project involving bagged lettuce and cat poop, which I will not go into here. Suffice it to say that I'm never ordering salad again. I figure the only thing that's safe is soup ("Make sure it's boiling hot!") and water ("No ice, no lemon.").

My husband is a great cook. He measures and stirs and sifts and grinds and generally makes a royal mess in the kitchen. But the results are worth it: colorful combinations of meats and vegetables, cut into neat, bite-sized pieces and spiced so divinely that I end up moaning like a lovesick zombie after every morsel ("Mmmmm!"). I couldn't begin to reproduce any of it, and until recently, this was frustrating.

I am competitive by nature and it irked me that my cooking never measured up to Steve's efforts, no matter how many good reviews the recipes had garnered on the foodie forums. Of course, sometimes I wouldn't read the reviews until after the meal had been served and found wanting. I've since learned the hard way that this is always a mistake.

For a start, the dishes never look as good as the pictures. And then later, after I've already gone to the trouble of cooking it and having it pronounced inedible, I read the comments and realize that, while everyone loved this recipe and promised they'd serve it again, they weren't actually cooking this recipe, having added lime juice and capers and omitted the meat and the nuts and most of the breading. To me, a caper is something that you pull off and not something that you eat. I've seen jars of them in the store, and frankly, I can't see how something that looks like that can possibly improve anything that it's stirred into. This is likely another reason that I'm not a very good cook.

The final straw for experiments in the kitchen came a few months ago, after I had researched and cooked a dinner so bad that I couldn't even make my kids eat it. Later, when Steve came home, he pointed to the crockpot and asked, "What's this?" "Dinner," I said. "But it's terrible." "Really?" he said, and tasted it. I cringed, wating for his reaction. "Did you find this on the internet?" he asked. I nodded. "And you put the marinated artichokes in it because…?" "That's what it called for," I said. "Well," he said. "If you added a little basil, salt, pepper, sugar and marjoram to it, it wouldn't be half bad." So he did.

It was then that I gave up competitive cookery for good. I mean, I can follow a recipe just fine. It takes a real creative genius to resurrect a meal that was just one step away from the dog's dish. In fact, after Steve got done fixing it, I had seconds.

Hygiene!

On the way to the community college this morning I caught a whiff of something unpleasant and leaned over to sniff at my son who was riding next to me in the passenger seat. It wasn't him. Sam looked at me and raised an eyebrow. "It's me, isn't it," I said and he nodded. It's finally happened. I have worse hygiene than my kids.

When I was young, in my single digits, I showered as infrequently as I could get away with, or whenever my mother caught me and forcibly threw me into the tub. Dirt didn't bother me a bit, especially when it was on me. As I grew older, cleaning myself up got to be more important, so that it wasn't unusual to try to sneak in extra showers beyond the 5 minute one we were each allowed by my father in the mornings.

Dad not only timed us, he'd start flushing the toilets one after the other if we overran our official limit of hot water. And he was so proud of his own tried and true method for getting clean, that he used to demonstrate it to us when we got to be teenagers, acting out all the steps.

He started out by showing us how much shampoo to use, pointing to a nickel in his palm. "You don't need a lot of shampoo! Just a little bit is plenty! Wash your hair first and then, while you're rinsing your hair, take the soap and then work your way down all the way to your feet. By the time you're done your hair is all rinsed and you're done. It shouldn't take you any longer than five minutes!"

Bless the man, he was paying for the hot water contained in two 40 gallon hot water heaters, and there were ten kids to get clean and out the door every morning besides himself. But back then, we didn't use the shower just to get clean, we used it to wake up as well. So it is with my own children now. I get them out of bed, but it isn't until they're midway through their morning ablutions that they actually become conscious.

Maybe the reason that I'm so much less showered than they are these days is that they've actually got places to go. I'm merely the means for them to get there, so cleanliness doesn't really enter into it.

Sam's got classes on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. Nick and Sam have clubs on Mondays and Wednesdays. Already they have reason to jump in the shower five days a week. Some of these classes/clubs have (gasp!) girls in them.

I, on the other hand, am meeting no one of any significance whatsoever in person in any way. I'm a stay at home, work at home, trapped at home mother and destined to remain that way evermore. I've tried looking for work away from my cozy confines and no matter how carefully I craft my resume it always sounds like I'm being smug about the fact that I've managed to make a living for the past twenty years without benefit of office politics and a dress code.

Well, maybe the dress code thing could be useful, especially on those days like today, when I sniff my own armpits and realize that it's not just my t-shirt that's stinking, but the sports bra underneath has that unmistakable sulphurous vapor that comes when you forget to remove a load of laundry for more than a half an hour after the final spin cycle while living in a tropical climate.

And, I'm sick today, which means I'm feverish, which means all of me is warmer than usual and it makes everything about me that much more pungent. Truly, my son is heroic in his efforts not leap out of the car and attempt to flag down any passing stranger to carry him the rest of the way in to campus, rather than ride another mile in the car with me. At least it's not raining. We roll down the windows. The drivers behind us shrivel and die.

Announcing Drawing 101

I'm pleased to announce that Drawing 101, a basic drawing skills course that I'm doing for Not Your Average Homeschoolers, is up and available for your drawing pleasure.

I'm shooting for a new lesson every week, so bookmark this link Drawing 101, and check back often.

Mother on my mind

Woke up this morning thinking about my mother and wishing she felt better.

I told Steve last night that the worst thing about watching your parents decline is that it makes you re-think everything you thought you knew about them. He said, "Not me," and then he said, "Wait. Yeah, it does."

I guess that's not as tragic as I think it is. I mean, I spend most of my life re-thinking what I think I know about something or someone. Why should it be any different with my mother?

Tried to call her last night and this time someone who answered passed the request along to someone who knew who she was and that person went to find her and then came back with the message that Mom would call me back. She wasn't feeling well.

So, maybe she thought it was Mary, because Mary calls more often than I do, or maybe she thought it was me, thinking that I was overdue for a phone call, or maybe she thought it was me the same way that I thought it was time to give her a call. Some people are just connected to each other that way.

I don't like to think about her there. At the psyche unit, on the 8th floor. Joe told me that there are more nurses and doctors running around there than there are patients.

If she'd only. If I'd only.

I spend a lot of time thinking about four years ago (or was it five?) when I found her in her room, stretched out on the bed, hands folded on her chest, like she was laid out for a wake. I stared at her and she opened her eyes and looked at me. "Marie? I tried to kill myself last night." And all I could think to say was, "It didn't work."

If I had said, "Let me give you another opportunity at it, shall I? I'll be back in an hour," then maybe this would all be done. Betty would have gone out when she wanted to.

Instead, there is all this wriggling on the end of a hook going on.

I know she's crazy because a sane woman wouldn't put her kids through this. But how crazy is she?

Because, I think that craziness must be on a continuum, like autism and diabetes and pregnancy. I think you can be a little bit crazy, or only crazy in one aspect of your life. Mom seems to be crazy by turns. Like, she's normal, or at least, placid, for a few months, and then, she's nuts, and wants to die.

I envy my friend's grandmother, who still lives alone. I think it'd be easier to die, or at least, to quit living, if you lived alone.

Mom's wish to quit living is being carried out in front of a live audience, and it's an audience that wishes to have a vote.

Is this being very cynical to wish that she could just get on with dying?

If only she'd taken pills other than blood pressure medication. But that was only because she wanted to show her doctor who was boss.

I remember thinking that it was the most clear sign yet that she was damaged. Because who in their right mind would take blood pressure pills to try to kill themselves, especially if they had sleeping pills right there?

Someone who just needed attention?

But I seem to be incapable of giving that attention to someone. I hoard it, dole it out in bits and pieces. I think Mom needed more love from me than I had to give her.

I wonder if my lack of demonstrative loving made her want to do something to get my attention and the doctor's attention. Made her want to do something like threaten suicide but not actually do it.

I think, What is it you want? and it's like I'm screaming into a big wide dark hole. I don't think there is any answer coming out of it.

But I think that I must know what it is that she wants already and I can't give it to her.

I can stop whenever I want

I used the blue cup today for my coffee. Sometimes the blue cup is dirty and I have to use the white cup with the black handle. The white cup used to have a picture from Alice in Wonderland on it, and the Cheshire Cat disappeared (all except for his grin, of course) whenever you poured hot liquid in it, but I put it in the dishwasher one day and the whole thing just flaked off, so now it's just a plain white cup with a black handle. Shame, too, because it wasn't my cup, it was my daughter's cup, but she says I'm forgiven so I guess it's okay. Now I just like to use that cup because it's at least as big as the blue one.

I am not addicted to coffee. That's a good one. Hah! I only have one cup a day.

Unless my neighbor calls and invites me over for a cup of coffee at her house, in which case it's only polite to accept, and I never have more than one cup of coffee there (in a plain white cup, that's probably close to the same size as my own blue cup or the white cup with the black handle), sometimes going as far as two cups, but only if she's really bothered about something like her troglodyte son who is almost fifty years old and won't get a job and who drinks Natural Light and burns crap in the back yard all day. I mean, it's ridiculous. That lying hussy left him almost twenty years ago, and anyway, that's no excuse for living off your mother's social security income, never mind about mowing the grass. I bet my neighbor could mow the grass if she wanted and it would be cheaper than feeding and sheltering a grown man like her son who just bums cigarettes off her and beer money. It's a shame. And sometimes it takes more than one cup of coffee to feel better about it all.

Anyway, so I'm not addicted to coffee, AT ALL.

Sometimes my girlfriend calls up and I have to go over to see her and she doesn't drink caffeinated anything but if I'm coming she makes a cup of coffee just for me, using a French coffee press. That makes the best cup of coffee! It's not bitter at all and she always has real sugar for me and sets out the half and half. If we're walking she puts it in a thermos container for me and I carry it all around the park, pausing during our conversation to sip, sip, sip at that wonderful, warm coffee. Mmm. She's a good friend.

But she herself only ever drinks decaf because she says coffee just gets her completely wired and jittery. Not like me at all, because I know when to say when. I just have the one cup per day and then I'm good.

It's not like my own cups are that huge. I actually measured how much coffee fit in each cup and it's hardly more than twelve ounces. Not too bad. I've been eyeing the cups that are selling in a little shop down the street from here. They're definitely cups because they have a handle on them, but man, they're really huge. Like soup bowl size. Still, I bet if I measured, they would turn out to be about the same size as the cups I've been using. Probably they just have really thick walls or something.

I used to have a little cup that I bought at a thrift store that was like that. It had really thick walls and the handle fit the crook of my finger just perfectly. It was a genuine diner-restaurant-style coffee cup and cute as a button. It was so small that I used to drink two cups of coffee from it every day. But eventually, I had to stop kidding myself and started using the blue cup (and the white one with the black handle, but this was before my daughter brought that cup home), but just one of those. And I accidently broke the little white one anyway, so it's just as well I'd already gone on to the blue cup.

Still, sometimes I miss that little white one. Especially at times like just this moment, when I've just finished drinking all the coffee from the blue cup. If I still had the white one, I could fill it up again. But I only get one and, since I'm not addicted to coffee AT ALL, that's that.

I wonder if my neighbor might need to talk?

Grounded

When I pick up the phone it's my mother. She asks me if I can reach my daughter, Alice. She says to tell Alice not to come today because she's not feeling well.

“Is Steve there?” she asks.

“No, he's still in Michigan. Do you need something?”

“Does he have a gun?”

“No, he doesn't.”

After a moment, I say, “He's got an airgun, Mom. It would just hurt you, not kill you.”

“Oh.”

“I’m sorry, Mom. There just isn’t any easy way out.”’

“You get a hold of Alice for me,” she says. “Tell her not to come.”

Making allowances

The experts say that giving your children an allowance helps instill in them a sense of the value of money. It encourages them to establish spending priorities, set goals and save up for what they really want.

With this in mind, I dutifully offered my children a dollar a week when they were young and then waited for the miracle of fiscal responsibility to take root in their brains.

It would have been a more effective training tool if I'd actually paid them. What would happen is I'd forget to get cash prior to payday (Saturday) and then offer to take them shopping at Goodwill instead. At the store, the kids' purchases would eerily reflect their frustration with the paymaster. Nick would pick out a toy that transformed into a weapon of mass destruction, Sam would get something sad-eyed and fuzzy, and Alice would fall in love with a bridesmaid's dress which cost twenty times what I owed her.

Eventually, the kids got tired of shopping at thrift stores. Alice went to work at the bed and breakfast down the street and the boys got a paper route. Once my children got a taste of regular paychecks, allowance went by the wayside. Now it's interesting to see how their experiences with the world of money has shaped them.

Alice is frugal, works hard and budgets for expenses. I think this is a natural reaction to being raised by a spendthrift who prefers reading "best of craigslist" to actual work and who balances her checking account by intuition. However, a bad example is still an example, so this counts as good parenting.

My youngest son, Nick, is an opportunistic money manager. There are things he'd like to have but, if at all possible, he'd rather have someone else pay for them. And though he's willing to wait for what he wants, his patience has its limits.

"Mom, when's my birthday?"

"In 364 more days, Nick."

"Oh. When's Christmas?"

Sam doesn't care enough about money, in my opinion, which explains why I frequently find dollar bills scattered in his dresser drawers, balled up under his bed, or being used as bookmarks in his favorite novels. I have told him that this is not interest earning behavior but he only rolls his eyes at me and says that I'm not being properly philosophical towards money.

"You shouldn't think that there's not enough money, Mom. You should think of it as sufficient for your needs."

It's not that I don't get what he's saying, it's just that I don't understand how philosophy will persuade the universe to put money in his college fund.

When I was young, I didn't get an allowance. If I needed money to go somewhere, like a dance or a ball game, I'd ask my dad for it.

"Dad, can I have three dollars?"

"If I had three dollars, I wouldn't speak to you."

"Please?"

He'd reach into his pocket and I'd hold my breath, wondering what might come out of it. Sometimes there were a couple of singles in there, sometimes a twenty, sometimes nothing but a handful of loose change. With Dad's pockets, you never knew. I had a large number of siblings who might've cleaned him out already or he might have had to cover an overdraft on the checking account or there could have been a closing on a house the day before. It was feast or famine at our house, growing up.

Last week the subject of allowances came up again. I asked Sam whether any of his friends still got one. He looked embarrassed.

"Yeah, I think Kerrian does."

"So, what is it? Like, five bucks or something?"

"Heh, no. Actually, it's more like fifteen or twenty."

"What? A week? Are you kidding me?"

He shook his head and smiled and I thought it best to leave the subject alone for a while. My kids are very understanding as far as a dollar a week goes, but I hate to think what they'd be picking out at the Goodwill store if I owed them each twenty dollars come payday.