Because Monday's Just Sometimes Roll That Way

It is moaning Monday in my world...maybe 2012 can get here sooner.

If I Drink the Water, Can I Skate Like This?

Boy, this reminds me of the Bonnie Hunt Show...the song I mean, not the babies skating. They are cool. There is a better version on YouTube so check it out.

TGIF~!

Rules for Geezerhood

I probably should post this in giant size print so my future geezer self will be able to read it when I need the reminders.

I started collecting hints years ago when I was only partially geezer...my early 40s. Don't have a coronary out there if you are 40 and sputtering right now. It was my daughter who pointed out that the rules for my future geezerdom could start now. Anyone over 23 is, like, ancient, man. Now that she is almost 20, it is amazing what age qualifies as being a geezer.

Anyway, I started thinking about this because I don't want to be the crazy old lady that smells funny and rants and makes no sense and just generally goes through life oblivious like Mr. Magoo. I like to rant, so that's one strike against me and I do tend to be pretty oblivious so that's my second strike. My only hope is not to smell funny.

I was in line at Target, the express lane, the lane for 10 items or less (maybe it's 15, I don't remember. Oh, no.....) and was behind an old lady. No doubt about it. She was old. And tiny. I'm only 5 feet 2-3/4 inches and I towered over her like Godzilla. She had all her stuff on the counter ready to be rung up by the time I impatiently get behind her. I was in a hurry for some unimportant reason I am sure...kid soccer practice, PTA meeting...who knows and I was practically tapping my feet. She is chatting away to the cashier when the cashier tells her the total. Total? Oh, right, I have to pay. This sweet little old lady reaches into her old lady purse. You know, black, kinda of shiny with a clasp that clicks open and shut? Anyway, she fumbles through this monster purse, fishes around like Mary Poppins looking for a lampshade and finally manages to find her checkbook. Yes, her checkbook. She starts to write her check with shaky old lady writing, rips out the check, holds onto the check, opens her check register (because of course she does not have carbon checks) and fills out her check register all the time chatting away. She finally hands over the check, slowly puts everything away, smiles and leaves.

As I pay for my stuff I am thinking to myself, "I will never do that. I know I have to pay. It's not a surprise they spring on you at a store, I will be ready to pay." The arrogance of us boomers is amazing. Narcissism runs deep. It's all about us. All 70 million of us or whatever that damn number is. I wish I could go back in time and apologize to that lady, but at the same time I don't want to end up irritating the hell out of everyone around me. You know who you are, you old people who drive in the fast lane going the speed limit. If homicide was legal, I would be the World War Flying Ace of the freeways. But, I have morals and common sense and a deep seated fear of peeing in front of strangers so that I would never do anything to put myself in jail.

I have many rules for my future geezer self. Hopefully, I will end up being a cool old lady who only smells a little funny.

Ant Island

A Bug's Life...Pixar

Why are ants the one bug I don't mind squashing with my fingers? If you asked me to squash any other bug with my fingers I would squeal and run away like a little girl. Of course, after watching this movie, I felt kinda of bad doing it. I might be flattening Flik or something. I mean, did you all stop eating pork after the movie "Babe"? That didn't bother me...I like my bacon and sausage, but I felt twinges of guilt like maybe the little piggy ghost of Babe or Wilbur from Charlotte's Web were going to appear. How come no one feels bad eating a vegetable? Broccoli doesn't have feelings? Onions make you cry...they must be sad or something.

What started this ridiculous post was the incredible conga line of ants I have had crawling around my house lately. I haven't had company in a while and now I am going to have my mom, my sister and her son, my niece and her son staying with me, so I have been running around really cleaning. Not pretend cleaning. No sirree. Real cleaning. Vacuuming. Scrubbing. Wiping. And every day, a new line of ants appears.

First, of course, the kitchen. They started in the butler's pantry, went up the side of a cabinet like little sherpas, up to the CEILING, down to the upper cabinets where the honey and molasses and Crisco shortening are. They loved the honey, molested the molasses, but totally went orgasmic over the shortening. Can ants get high cholesterol? If so, we should just leave Crisco out and watch them expire of clogged arteries. I was on the phone with JuJuBeez when I spotted the ants so she had to listen to me beyotch as I cleaned and sprayed. I wield my bottle of Windex (hey, you saw My Big Fat Greek Wedding) and spray like mad. This is kind of nice in a way. I get to clean and kill at the same time. Find where the conga line starts and bring out the big guns. Dum dum dum dee dum...Home Defense Max. Spray like mad and no more ants from there.

The next day...ants in the downstairs bathroom which means they are soon marching into my office and onto my desk. Do you have any idea how weird it is to watch an ant crawl out of a keyboard? Quick, I tell them, go for the delete key. Hee, hee. More spraying, more wiping, more killing. I am starting to feel I need a pith helmet.

The next day...ants in the upstairs bathroom and laundry room. Okay, what on earth is in a laundry room they would want? I don't think dust bunnies are edible unless you are a dust fox. This is getting ridiculous. I'm cleaning things I never imagined cleaning until I moved out. Sheesh.

The next day...well, today actually. Ants in the sink. Windex them and leave their little carcasses as warnings to the next batch. Hey, it's 4:30 in the morning and I don't feel like being the great white hunter. Work for a few hours, sun rises, and go back to the kitchen to make coffee. (I only zapped coffee from the day before earlier.) Arggggg....a giant conga line from the sink, up the kitchen window, to the CEILING (do they know I'm short or something?), across a few feet of ceiling and down to another cabinet where they disappeared somewhere. Spooky.

Now, I can't leave this line of black specks and I can't reach all that well, so I vacuumed the little black specks up, jumping up and down trying to reach them all. I hope no one looks too close. My only hope is that this is it. I have sprayed almost everywhere downstairs....no place to go suckers.

Sigh. Teddy Bear comes in and says, "Mom, did you know there is a giant line of ants in your bedroom?" WHAT?!! Race upstairs and sure enough. Another conga line. But this one is really weird. It started in my closet but they seemed to spring up out of the floor from under a box, went out the closet door, made a left turn, zig zagged across the room to a pile of clothes I had left on the floor the night before and were happily making a new place to domicile I guess because I could not see where the line went from there. Okay, you little insects, this is it. Big guns only. This is where I sleep. No mercy. Spray and vacuum.

So now my upstairs is all vacuumed, I have sprayed all upstairs and cleaned more than I wanted to. I am trying to figure out where they are going to appear next. Probably knock on the front door. That seems to be the only thing they haven't tried yet.

Elephants and Chimps

Sshhhh...don't tell my clients but I played hooky last Thursday to go the San Diego Zoo and see the Elephant Odyssey with my grandson, Little Z, Teddy Bear, Killdozer, and the Hot Tamale. Tell me, do all men stick together? Even when they are 2 feet tall and can't speak yet? Is there a grunting secret code? A special handshake?

I am as out of shape as the floating lumbering hippos in the hippo exhibit. I let the Hot Tamale push the stroller until we got to the Elephant Odyssey exhibit. I whined to the Hot Tamale to let me take Little Z out of the stroller so I could chase him around and just squeeze the stuffin' out of him. He is so damn cute. I had forgotten though that at that age, 15 months, if you zig, they want to zag. He was mesmerized by the horse...which is weird. A horse at the zoo? Temecula has loads of horses. We gave Teddy Bear's horse away to friends who had 5 acres where he could really have fun.

We kept trying to herd him toward the elephants...ha, ha, I made a pun without trying, but he would only let Killdozer take him by the hand and lead him along. Sheesh. A fifteen month old male chauvinist. He toddled along finally to the elephants where one HUGE elephant was getting cleaned and hosed down and spoiled rotten with treats. You could stand right at the fence and watch. That giant elephant was so well trained and sneaky, too. The guy would give him a treat every once in a while so she kept trying to sneak one out of his pocket. Hee, hee. I could have stayed there for hours as long as Z was having fun. He kept standing on his tip toes to see better which was cracking me up. He was right at the fence as you can see from the picture and it wasn't like he could see OVER the fence.

We were there for quite a while when Killdozer leans over and whispers, "Hey, Michael Jackson is dead." What?? Who told you that? His brother had texted him the news, but I did not believe it when a lady in front of us turned around and said it was true, her daughter had just sent her an e-mail that it was true. How ironic and how weird how wired the world is now. You know what I kept thinking as I was standing there listening to the people talk about it? Damn, I wanted my computer. I felt out of touch. I have a stone age phone still so I could not connect to the internet, although I did get a text from a friend of mine telling me the news, too. In a strange twist, I understand how hard it is going to be for Iran to keep their young people down with how connected we all are now. To tell the truth though, I am already sick to death hearing about Michael Jackson.

He is going to be buried or something on Tuesday which is good for me. My niece is flying out from South Dakota with her son and we are going to Disneyland on Tuesday. I am hoping everyone in Southern California will be clogging up the freeways following the motorcade like a bunch of yokels and we can have the park to ourselves. Yes, I like his music. Heck, he is my age, so his music is like a soundtrack for many parts of my life, but please, all the adulation? Why? They are giving away 11,000 tickets to the Staples center for a memorial of some kind. You know, the same Staples Center where Laker fans rioted. Will Jackson fans riot? Do a mass moonwalking? Flood LA with their tears like Alice in Wonderland?

So, anyways, if you are at Disneyland on Tuesday, hopefully we will be the only people there and we can have fun running around the park racing from ride to ride.

Tinkering School

Do you know how to tinker? Take things apart? Put them back together? As kids, my brothers and sister and I were pretty good about deconstructing...okay, that's a nice way of saying we broke a lot of stuff. Sometimes you just get curious and before you know it mom is yelling at you, "Just wait till your dad gets home!" *Gulp* Hopefully, if you hid well before he got home and stayed out of her hair, she would conveniently forget. Heck, she did not want him to be grumpy either.

I so want to go to this school...I want every kid I know to go to this school. I like that there a lot of girls using power tools. Man, I feel like grunting. I must be channeling Tim, the Tool Man Taylor. My brothers got to use power tools and were always in trouble for not putting the tools back where they belonged, but they could use them. I am tired of things in my life being "black boxes." I like the idea of being able to learn to turn something complex into understandable pieces. I mean everything can't be called a doohickey or doibie thing.

Freedom to use your imagination. Oh my. They took those "evil" plastic trash bags and made something out of it. They were inventive. Which, when you think about it, is a good basis for being "green." Reduce, reuse, recycle. They are finding ways to reuse something. They invented new ways to use them.

Invention. Yes, that's a good word. Invention, Imagination, Playing, Fun, Learning.

Damn it, Spock, I'm a Doctor Not a Physicist!

Space... the Final Frontier. I love Bones. I loved this movie. Okay, I guess I better do my disclaimer stuff. I WANT to be swept away by a movie. I have sucker written all over my body. Suspending disbelief--check. I'm all over that. I love when the theater lights go dark and the previews start. What stories are coming up that I just have to see? (Well, I would see more movies, but being as I don't have my own personal TARP fund going, I can't go as often as I would like.) I love seeing the studio logos come up--New Line, Paramount, Dreamworks, Universal, Focus Features.

I did not read too many reviews of this movie. Critics can be so....well, critical, you know what I mean. They get so picky about some things and then like movies so weird I have no idea what they are talking about. They have this thing for subtitles. I think they just want to show off that they can read.

I could not for the life of me imagine how they were going to pull off a young James Tiberius Kirk and a young Spock, which is a good thing I'm not a producer or director. They had everyone, Sulu, Uhura, Chekov, Scotty, Bones. I loved when Kirk rides up to where they are building the first Enterprise and when you see the Enterprise for the first time completed.

I always think of shows like this as reminders of sweeping visions of where man can go, what we are capable of accomplishing. Corny, huh? I truly believe in space as the final frontier. I want my grandchildren and great-grandchildren to explore space and time. I always think of the saying, "You can't see the forest for the trees." We get so caught up in our "trees"--politics, finance, who won American Idol--that we lose track of the big picture.

Besides, I want to travel warp speed, so somebody needs to get cracking on that soon or I'm going to send tribbles to NASA.