Just Another Day

I try never to do this, but I laughed so hard that I had to share. Mr. P: I think I want a pet dinosaur. Me: Honey, there are no more dinosaurs. Mr. P: Why? Me: Well, they are all gone from the earth. When that happens, it means they are extinct. Mr. P: Es-tinct? Me: Ex -tinct. Mr. P: Ex-tinct. Me: Right. Mr. P: Well, then I think we should trade the skunks for the dinosaurs. Me: What do you mean? Why are you thinking about skunks? Mr. P: The dinosaurs went away because the skunks made it all stinky and that's not very nice. So, the skunks should go away and the dinosaurs should come back. Me: Laughing Ooooooh, you thought that the word extinct meant that it was stinky from skunks and the dinosaurs couldn't handle the smell? Laughing harder Mr. P: It's NOT funny! But it is my son, it is. It seems that every day he keeps adding new dimensions to himself, and I am in awe of this little guy and his development.

If you want to read a cogent essay on what is happening in America, hie thee quickly here . God, I love Jane Smiley.

With all the women here in my chi-chi area putting their children in "preschool" by the time they could walk, I have faced immense pressure to put Mr. Personality in one as well. Even my mother was bugging me, and I retaliated with the fact that preschool ain't free, and if she wanted so badly for him to go, she was welcome to help us with the expense. So last week, she offered. Ok, well, granted it was a bit late as most of them are starting within a week or so, but the sentiment was much appreciated. And actually, I had already been looking into sending him this year, as he is driving me nuts needs the social interaction with other children. But really, all the other moms around here have their offspring enrolled in private preschools that give children homework! At the age of three! Something in me just rebelled at the very thought. In my mind, he will have plenty of years of homework, does it really have to start so very young? There is a preschool run by my cit...

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We went out to dinner the other night to one of our favorite restaurants. It is a large chain restaurant, and is reasonably priced and has a great children's menu for Mr. Personality. Besides, they give you free bread and I'm all over a place like that. Anyhoo, I ordered water since I try not to drink caffeine after 5pm. My water is delivered, and for some unknown reason, I stop to look at the glass before lifting it to my parched lips. There's something kind of black floating under the ice. With my eyebrows practically touching my forehead, I pick up the glass and peer in for further inspection. Well, hello Mr. Fly. So glad you could drop in. I got to deliver a variation on the classic line to our waiter, who apologized yet tried to give me some crap story about how it must have just "flown into" the cup. Dude, the fly was under the ice, it didn't just decide to take a nice refreshing dip. It had to have been in the glass prior to him putting the ice in...

I was at my parent's house a few weeks ago, and Mr. Personality wanted some milk. Like the ever dutiful mother, I go the the cupboard and search for a small cup. Staring at me from the middle of it is a stack of the same Tupperware cups that I used as a child. I didn't know if I should be pleased at the memories or kind of creeped out. They were a bit worse for wear, the particular orange one I chose had been melted a bit on the rim by a decades-ago dishwasher that got a bit too hot. But it was still kicking and useful for its intended beverage-holding purpose. To walk through their house is to experience an odd juxtaposition of old and new. They have a Neptune washer and dryer, yet have a creaky, sagging set of folding doors that hide them. They have a fairly expensive computer system residing on a cheap and rather ancient pressboard computer desk. They have a Bosch dishwasher that of course, washes 30 year old Tupperware. My parents have never been big on replacing thing...

Welcome to the corrupt government edition of Pointless Points Trivia, where the points don't matter! That's right, just like the far right's attempts to keep "Plan B" away from women, they just don't matter! The forcible ejection from office of President Nixon following Watergate was a national trauma for the U.S. Who headed the investigating committee?

I was at my sister's house on Sunday having a girl's day out and we stumbled across a movie that we felt would be a nice cap to the evening. Remember Dirty Dancing? It came out in 1987 when I was a sophomore in high school. Like everyone else, I went and saw it. And I liked it but for whatever reason I had never flagged it as one of my favorites. What the hell was I thinking? Why I didn't fall immediately and madly in love with Patrick Swayze is beyond me. While his acting in this movie was perhaps not worthy of an award of some kind, his physique certainly was. I mean, I'm not sure I care about the quality of the emoting when I am distracted by shoulders and pecs like those gvien every opportunity to be displayed. As for Jennifer Grey, it was so refreshing to see a starlet who was so far from perfect. I know, my age is showing. She was not exactly beautiful, but attractive. And of course, everybody knows about her distinctive nose (which by the way was altered duri...

Not too long ago, I totally stumbled upon a site called Metroblogging. It is blogging about a city and life in that city by people who live there. The interesting thing is, it's rather freeform. As long as you can tie your post somehow into your area, you are good to go. They have cities from Detroit to Karachi to Melbourne. It is an interesting concept, and I began exploring the site. I noticed there was an Orange County Metroblog, and decided to apply and give it a whirl. They decided to take their chances with me, and allowed me into their world of secret handshakes and passwords. Well, actually it isn't all that secret, but I think it sounds kind of fun. So far, I am taking a sort of "throw it against the wall and see what sticks" type of philosophy. Uh, have to say not much of my stuff seems to be sticking, so I might have to change my approach. The level of feedback is not too much, although I know for a fact there are almost a hundred people who subscr...

I was reading an article on Salon about Speedos. The author is a serious swimmer, but was giving in to the social pressures and resisted wearing Speedos while swimming. Then one day when his trunks came off as he did that little flip swimmers do, he basically decided to say screw the social pressures and started wearing Speedos. It seems that there are two camps about Speedos. One camp says, so what? A man's, erm, area is his area and we all know what the geography is, so why all the fuss? The other camp thinks it is disgusting and crude and want absolutely no part of any man wearing one. Yet isn't there a dichotomy between the sexes in swimwear, or even just beachwear for that matter? It is perfectly acceptable for a woman to wear what amounts to three teeny tiny bits of fabric and some floss. Yet, for a man do don something equivalent is viewed as just nasty. And it is the women who make the worst faces at seeing Speedos, not men. Judging from the current trend of bea...

Like a shameless hussy, I stole this from J while she was on vacation. How do you like your eggs? Scrambled, well done. Any other way makes me want to hurl. How do you take your coffee/tea? I take my tea like a real woman, no sugar, no lemon, no nothing. Coffee, I don't drink. Favorite breakfast food: French toast or German pancakes with some eggs on the side. Yum. Peanut butter: Extra chunky. I have been sacrificing and doing smooth lately since they don't seem to make organic chunky that I can find. What kind of dressing on your salad? Balsamic vinegarette or if I'm feeling daring, French. Coke or Pepsi? Coke, preferably Diet Caffeiene Free. You’re feeling lazy. What do you make? Well, if I'm feeling lazy, I will make nothing. What I will do is order Hubba-hubba to make me something. Pronto. You’re feeling really lazy. What kind of pizza do you order? Ok, well if Hubba-hubba isn't around, then my favorite pizza is margherita. You feel like cooking. Wha...

Today I was finally over my malaise, which I'm still not sure exactly what it was. Headache, body ache, just general tiredness. And no, I'm not pregnant. But, it was apparently not enough to keep me from the sale at Kohl's today, so I couldn't have been all that bad. We had done with Kohl's and I made the decision to make a quick stop at Best Buy since we have been needing a new battery charger for our digicam for almost a year now. As I was sitting minding my own business at at T-stop after our Best Buy visit, in which I was the only person with a stop sign, I hear brakes screeching. I whip my head around to see who is doing the screeching as I was busy trying to get an antibacterial wipe for Mr. Personality. Suddenly, I see this car which is supposed to be turning right and yet somehow heading towards me . Right at me. Personally. I have enough time to think of two things. One is, should I move my car up and try to avoid this person coming at me? This was...

Is it a bad thing when your body is tired after simply getting up to go to the bathroom? Or when your head and neck hurt and your nose feels like it slowly filling with fluid? I thought so. I blame the lady at the bakery. On Thursday, when I first went there to see about my mother's birthday cake, she seemed fine. I thought nothing of it as we used the same pen and I grasped with complete innocence the paper with a phone number on it that she handed me. Friday was altogether different, as she coughed into her sleeve and loudly tried to suck in her excess nasal fluid. I recoiled as she handed me the receipt, although in my brain I knew it was too late. The damage had been done on Thursday, and Friday was just an insult, to let me know it was coming. And that there was nothing I could do about it. Even as I made Mr. Personality wipe his hands with an antibacterial wipe, I knew it was futile. Sometimes I wish there was a portable bubble you could put yourself in when you have to...

Welcome to the Monday morning edition of Pointless Points Trivia, where the points don't matter! That's right, just like me trying to deny my attraction to George Clooney, they just don't matter. Today, since I was at the beach this weekend, I am still in an ocean frame of mind. The Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean is the deepest point on earth. In which sea would you find it?

Dear George, Up until I saw this picture today, I thought you were quite possibly the perfect man. Minus the womanizing, anyway. You are thoughtful, handsome, liberal, and you seem to want to make movies with your own production company that are intelligent and lightyears from the usual Hollywood dreck. And that house on Lake Como? That's just gravy, baby. You are on my "cheat" list. You know, George, the one where if we were to meet in a hotel bar and you wink and press your room key into my palm, I would so NOT be in trouble if we had us some hanky panky. Don't worry, Hubba-hubba gets a list too. I'm nice like that. And I'm positive that you wouldn't be mad at me for choosing Grey's Anatomy the other night over a rerun of Ocean's 12. Cuz, I mean, it was Ocean's 12, not 11. I get a pass for that one, right? Hubba-hubba didn't think so, but I know you would be more understanding than that. But, now that I have seen this photo, I ...

Welcome to the silly Friday edition of Pointless Points Trivia, where the points don't matter! That's right, just like my attempts at writing a funny post, they just don't matter! One of my favorite television shows is the British comedy Monty Python's Flying Circus, and watching a few episodes never fails to get me giggling. Alas, Hubba-hubba just doesn't get the humor, I'm going to have to work on him a bit. So today's question will be about the television series as opposed to any of the movies. At the beginning of most shows, Michael Palin, dressed as a shabby old man, would enter the scene and say only one word. What was it?

Today I had my yearly vision exam and the results are in. I have the sight equivalent to that of someone wearing fogged-up goggles. Think around the four hundreds, and you'll be there. I remember being in about the third grade, and the way our classroom worked was that every week, the desks in the front of the rows were moved to the back, and so everyone kept rotating their position. One week I moved my desk to the very back of the room and discovered I couldn't really see the chalkboard. I kept whispering questions to the people around me about what the hell was up there. I was a model student, teacher's pet and all that, so my teacher was shocked to see me talking so much in class, and she had a chat with my parents after me getting into trouble. Off I was carted to the optometrist, as my mother and sister were very near-sighted, it was found that my gene pool straw also came up short. Outfitted with the most ginormous pair of glasses, I didn't get into trouble an...

I don't know if you've noticed, but I have added a button to my sidebar. It is for the stopglobalwarming.org site, and a few days ago, I completed the simple task of entering my name and zip code into their database. Won't you consider adding your voice? As many people who dabble in politics know, there are only a few ways get your voice heard. Either you have strength in numbers or you have a lot of money to donate. Technically speaking, if you are sleeping with a politician, you probably also have quite a bit of sway, but we'll just assume that isn't going to happen for most people. I don't know how many times I have despaired that there is a Republican in office who is hemming and hawing and bascially doing nothing about the problem of global warming. I wonder what life will be like for my great-grandchildren, and George W. Bush's great-grandchildren as well. That is the thing that boggles my mind about this issue, that no one, regardless of race, c...

I got a call today from the photographer whose photograph I fell in love with at the county fair. Do you want to know how much he was asking for the size that was hanging at the exhibition? I bet you do. He was telling me the dimensions and how it was on acrylic or something of the such, and I was just so hopeful that I would be able to afford it that I barely heard him since I was inadvertently holding my breath. A thousand dollars, my friends. A thousand dollars. Attempting to keep my eyes from bugging out of their sockets, I played it cool and said, oh, I would have to check with my husband before I committed to making such a large purchase, and I'm sure he understood? Of course he did, and he supplied me with his cell number and email. Chirpily, I told him I would be in touch. Yet my heart was drooping as I realized that unless I was willing to do illegal things, there was no way I would ever own that photograph any time soon. Even a print, smaller than the original, was...

Today we went to a kid's fair, and if you participated in the coloring contest, you got to color your own button, which they then made for you right there. Upon finishing his contest entry, I asked Mr. Personality "Would you like to make a button?" Affirmative, so we walked over to the appropriate table. The girl working at the table told him, "You can use any of these markers to make your button." With great seriousness, Mr. Personality picks up a marker, and begins to draw. I think perhaps he is drawing a happy face. He adds a couple more things and announces himself done. I look at it, and am totally perplexed. Take a look for yourself: I quizzically asked him, "Honey, what is that?" His reply? "A button, Mommy." Like, duh. So we are now the proud owners of what I like to call the Button Button. Perhaps I should rename him Mr. Literal.

On this last heat wave we had that just ended a week or so ago, quite a few senior citizens perished due to the excessive heat. I read an article that illuminated some reasons as to why the elderly are especially at risk, including the fact that their bodies are less able to feel extreme heat than a younger person. Of course, one of the other reasons was that they were unwilling to turn on air conditioning due to the fact that they would not be able to afford it. When I read of the unnecessary deaths of almost a hundred people, I thought to myself, would it have been so hard for someone who lived near them to check on them? If they were unwilling to turn on their AC, at least let them know of a cooling center or give them a ride to a mall where they could sit in relative comfort? I could just be romanticizing the past, but didn't we used to be a society that interacted more? I live in a community of townhomes that are fairly close together. I know most of my neighbors directly ...

So because Suzanne asked so nicely, I will tell you the story of our engagement. I had alluded to it in a much, much earlier post, (back when I had like, two readers) but I didn't expand much and it is a story worthy of expansion. Hubba-hubba and I met when we were both 19, working at the same city. We began dating when we were both 21, and dated continuously for seven years, perhaps with a bump or two here and there, but nothing serious. We knew very early on in the relationship that marriage was a foregone conclusion. But, we also wanted things to be just right when we got married, and waited for various things like being able to buy a home and finishing our degrees before we tied the knot. In fact, it was such a foregone conclusion that we actually custom-made my engagement ring together, going on diamond-hunting expeditions to the LA jewelry district and finding a ring maker. This, by the way, was back when we had quite the bit of disposable income. So I knew he was goi...

I would like to go over the main points discussed in last week's presentation: How To Get Your Parents To Buy You Whatever You Want In Three Easy Steps! I am currently following my program to the letter, and any day now, the acquisition of that two hundred dollar electric Lightning will be complete! Don't forget to wave as you see me riding by your house. Step 1- Don't Just Meet- Exceed Their Expectations! The key to this strategy is finding out your parent's "currency." For me, I knew Subject A (aka Mom) was wishing I could read a book on my own. Once I knew this, it was easy to pretend to stumble on simple phonetics, making the moment when I did read a book one that will last forever in her memory! Now, other parents might want you to ride a bike, or hit a home run, the variables are endless. Just observe your subject carefully, and it shouldn't take you long to figure out what they are looking for. Then, be sure to capitalize on your knowledge. S...

So, I just want to let you know that if you are depressed or anything, this isn't the post for you. This is from the Los Angeles Times about what we are doing to our oceans. Scary, frightening stuff. Let me put it this way, people have to walk around with masks in order to breathe due to toxic algae in the ocean. And this is in the US! And apparently, it's ok! Because the government seems to be doing absolutely nothing. (if you can't read it without a password, let me know) This is from The Huffington Post on how to change election outcomes on Diebold voting machines. How is it that they have a USB port on them at all? Even if this is a bit more simplistic than it really is, I do not trust those machines at all. My sister went and asked for a paper ballot last election, and at first they denied her! Illegal! She had to press for one until she finally got it. She lives in a majority Repub district, maybe they were mad she is an Independent. Anyhoo, I say a legall...

So welcome to the pirates edition of Pointless Points Trivia, where the points don't really matter. That's right, just like my crush on Johnny Depp, they just don't matter! Eustace was a pirate who fought for King John (Lackland)in his war against Phillip II of France. What was his profession before he became a pirate?

So on Sunday, all of us went to see a show. By all of us I mean Hubba-hubba, Auntie, Grandma, Grandpa, Mr. Personality, and me. As we sat watching, we all would occasionally glance over at Mr. Personality to see his reaction to what was going on. Invariably, he would be raptly looking at the action, with a bit of a furrowed brow. My son is someone who takes absolutely nothing at face value. He doesn't just say, oh, ok, there's a clown doing tricks. Who is the clown? Why is the clown there? Is that his real nose? He is not a child who will screech with joy and point at something that interests him. He is analyzing it, absorbing it, trying to fit what is happening with his so far rather limited, not-quite-four-years-old world view. I have often wondered at this child, who is capable of being as silly as anyone, yet so very serious for someone his age. There was a younger girl sitting a couple of rows behind us who could just not stop being delighted with the show, and w...

So this is me on the phone with my Dad not too long ago: Dad: How was your weekend? Me: Oh, it was really fun. Him: Good, good to hear. Me: Yeah, we went to the beach and Mr. Personality actually did some body surfing! Him: That's great! Me: Then we went out to eat, but the waitress wasn't really very professional. Him: Oh, mmmmm... Me: We had to wait twenty minutes for our check. Him: Mmmmm, I see.... Me: But then, she realized that she had been a bad waitress and gave us our whole meal for free, and even gave us dessert! Him: (pause) Ahhhh, you don't say... Me: Yes, and then our car got stolen in the parking lot and we decided just to steal another one to get home, so now we have a 2004 Mercedes! Him: Ohhh, is that so? You see, about halfway through our discussion, my father made his way over to his computer and from his reaction to the things I said, found his email more interesting than my play by play. Now, I will be the first to admit that it wasn't exactly scin...