Year: 2013

Don’t Drink the Water in Lick Skillet. EVER.

ME Overly simple thoughts , , , ,

I haven’t written in a while and it’s because I’m good and pissed off. Not “I can’t believe you raised the price of bananas, I’m going to take my business elsewhere” pissed off, but more like “I’m going to overthrow your government” pissed off. You know, Viking-level pissed off.

Apparently, my child’s school is so freaking amazing at their jobs that they’ve managed to cure her autism. It’s brilliant, really, and will be a huge savings to the taxpayers and the health care industry. All it takes is simply declaring it to be so. Decide that the child is no longer autistic or the patient no longer has cancer, and they therefore no longer need any services or treatment, and then they’ll be fine. Incredible.

Now the fun begins. It’s revenge-plotting time.

Yes, I had to dig through a couple of drawers, but I managed to find my handy-dandy revenge notebook. It’s filled with all kinds of great ideas, and they range in severity from making sure you have a bad day all the way up to requiring Red Cross disaster relief support to clean up the damage and help the survivors. Sometimes, just sitting down and plotting in the notebook is enough to make me calm down, think rationally, and not end up in federal prison.

But not this time.

While my husband busies himself with revenge that involves hiring an attorney and gathering documentation, I’m unbelievably busy Googling, “How long it takes to permanently ruin your car’s interior after someone fills it with rancid pork products.”

My friend, a former redneck, offered his services by pointing out that he knew where all the really good covered wells are in Lick Skillet. I immediately pounced on this information.  I was a little overeager, because, as it turns out, he was kidding.

ME: Why did you bring it up if you weren’t going to tell me?

HIM: Well, I was kidding, since I didn’t think you would actually kill someone.

ME: First of all, what ever gave you that impression? Second, why would you bring up the wells if you thought I was going to kill someone?

HIM: You know, to hide the body.

ME: Wow. That is actually a really good idea!

HIM: Wait, if you didn’t know that’s a good place to hide a body, WHY did you want to know where all the good wells are?

ME: To poison the water supply, of course.

HIM: (stunned silence)

ME: What?

HIM: I know a really good attorney.

ME: Oh, we’ve already got the lawyer, my husband’s working on that.

HIM: No, the attorney YOU’RE going to need.

ME: Wait a second, wouldn’t a rotting human corpse thrown in a well still poison the water supply? So we could, like, get a two-fer out of this?

HIM: Stop talking. It’s important that you stop talking now. I’m a state official and I can’t be hearing this.

ME: Puh-leaze. You’re a tax collector. You’ve probably already been thrown down a few of those wells.

In the meantime, keep your fingers crossed that I don’t destroy any vehicles with leftover bologna or discard anything in the aquaducts. And keep your fingers crossed that my daughter still gets to be autistic next year.

I Swear I Don’t Ask for Much

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I admit it, I am incredibly high maintenance, but not in the usual way. I don’t wear makeup and I don’t have one of those really annoyingly-cliched shoe fetishes that all the popular women seem to have. I actually think high heels are of the devil. But I do realize that I have certain needs that I insist are met, in a timely fashion, too. It’s gonna get ugly if I have to wait to use my own bathroom, and there are whole bags of potato chips in our house with my name written on the bag in Sharpie marker. The kids just somehow know… don’t touch mama’s chips.

But I do try to balance out the complete all-about-me-ness by being a good person when I can. I brake for squirrels if no one’s behind me and if it won’t make me spill my margarita. My “I own a business, so I need an iPad” tablet’s memory is almost completely full because of all of the kiddo apps and The Wiggles music downloads. And I always throw my change in the little slot on the drive-thru window to make sure it goes to Ronald McDonald House instead of making my purse sound like a one-horse open sleigh.

But today, I’m sitting here with my hand out, hoping you might want to help. If you don’t want to help, I’d love for you to pass this post on to someone you know, someone who doesn’t eat live kittens like you obviously do.

I’ve blogged before about how I’m a teacher in the coolest, most elite private school in the country. Okay, it’s actually a maximum security juvenile detention facility, but that makes it all the more exclusive. For the second year in a row, my classroom was chosen to be a World Book Night donation site. That means the WBN organizers are giving me a set number of copies of a great book for me to pass out to my students. The book will become theirs to keep. The first thing we do is write their names in the book, because it’s theirs and for many of my students it’s the first and only book they own. This year, I’m receiving 20 copies of the incredible, world-changing book, Fahrenheit 451.

We’re a 48-bed facility.

The rules of WBN are 20 copies of the book, and that’s it. And due to the nature of our facility, I have no way of knowing how many youth will be housed in my school on April 23rd. So I’m asking for help.

If you are at all interested in giving one copy of the book, I would love it and I would even write your name in it (but not your address, because that could just lead to problems that nobody wants). If you want to help, I can accept an email gift certificate from Amazon or Barnes and Noble for the paperback edition of the book. Then, if I don’t actually need your copy, I can either a) refund it to you or b) use it to put towards for a classroom set of the novel… your choice. If you wanted to send an Amazon certificate for just the price of the book, I could also purchase any new book for the school library if I didn’t need any more copies of the book. I will be happy to email everyone back the online receipt once the book is purchased, which I could be wrong but I’m pretty sure the right accountant could use on your taxes since we are one of those 501c(3) deals.

If you are interested in helping or sharing this, email me and I will give you the details. And thanks in advance for the book and for not running over a squirrel!

My Unicorn Is Kind of a Pain in the Ass

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Fifth grade girls everywhere are living under the horrible misconception that unicorns are awesome in some way. Despite being specifically mentioned in the Bible (look it up, Mr. Doubty Pants… it’s in Job), they’re not fantastic. They’re kind of bordering on evil.

Evil might be a strong and somewhat libelous word, and I don’t want to be sued by their lobbyists, but I have to share some horrible news with the internets: Unicorns are kind of jerks. There are so many rumors floating around out there about how they’re magical and their horns have special powers and they rescue princesses from orgies (I mean, ogres) but in fact, they just have really good PR people. I have found proof (again, on the internets) that they are jerks.

Exhibit A: They don’t appear at the end of rainbows. They actually poop rainbows. You know those rainbows are just full of E. coli.

Exhibit B: They are of the Devil. Look at those things and tell me you don’t expect Rosemary’s baby to ride up in your yard on the back of one of those.

Exhibit C: Unicorns make people feel bad about themselves for not being as awesome as unicorns are rumored to be.

Exhibit D: Unicorns have joined Fox News in a smear campaign against our President.

Yes, there appears to be only one solution to the rumors circulating about unicorns (don’t worry, I’m not going to call it the “internets” again. I have a neighbor who calls it that, and it was funny the first time I used it but the second time was kind of aggravating, even to me).

My Money Saving Efforts Have Cost Me $73.52 So Far

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Every year when my husband gets a really, really up close look at how much money we actually give the government on an annual basis, he goes on his annual tirade that we spend too much money. Now, when I say we spend too much money, he doesn’t mean on things like kelp-squish skincare products or the expensive peanut butter that doesn’t have salmonella in it. He means on those non-essential items like the pills that keep one of our kids from having seizures. Just kidding.

He did read about this awesome concept where you don’t use any credit or debit cards. The theory is that by actually handing over cash, you can watch it disappear from your wallet. It’s supposed to make you be more careful with your purchases. In theory, anyway. He carefully explained it all to me while my eyes glazed over from the sheer lack of interest in trying this.

Day One: His plan actually cost us $48 right off the bat. I can’t watch the money carefully disappear from my wallet if I don’t own a wallet. Or a purse to put it in. I’m not being all diva here, but I seriously had to buy a purse and a wallet–and I mean at Walmart, not Kate Spade–because he handed me cash for the week and I had nowhere to put it other than stuffing it down my bra.

Day Two: I had to use the credit card at the gas station.

“What happened to the money I gave you yesterday?” he demanded.

“Where was I sitting when you handed it to me?” I asked, my mind becoming a foggy haze.

“In your office,” he said with a growl.

“Then it’s probably on my desk.”

“Why?!”

“Because I couldn’t find the scissors to cut the tags off the new wallet. Oh wait! The scissors should be in the pencil cup. Next to the cash.”

Day Three: I had to write a check out of his account to pay for our child’s baseball uniform.

“What the hell?!” he demanded.

“I had to pay for her uniform, and that was something you budgeted for,” I explained patiently.

“AND I HAD THE CASH TO PAY FOR IT!”

“Then you should have taken off work and showed up for her baseball game. It’s not my fault the soccer moms who run this town decided to schedule baseball games at 11:00 in the morning,” I explained even more patiently.

Day Four: The Great Dry Erase Board Debacle of 2013

My husband actually went and spent money on a dry erase board to hang up in my office so we could keep track of what expenses we had to pay each month. It was a $20 dry erase board, and it only came with double-sided foamy tape that he refused to stick to the wall. It’s now hanging in the garage. You know, where we’re sure to see it every day.

Day Five: I had to use the credit card again.

“Seriously? Now you’re just doing it on purpose to derail the plan,” he argued. “Where did you shop?”

“The liquor store. And my weekly budget doesn’t even cover the amount of alcohol I’m going to need to not care about this dumb plan.”

Sigh. “I hope you bought enough to share.”

“Nope. Go use your cash.”

I realize I sound pathetically stupid throughout this post, but it really just boils down to habit and inconvenience. We had a lovely discussion about how I’m supposed to pay bills from the checking account if I’m holding all of my cash. He stopped me from mailing fifty bucks to Verizon and had to rethink the strategy. I’ll be over here with my Visa-funded booze while he buys another dry erase board.

I Haven’t Worn a Bra in Four Days

ME Overly simple thoughts , ,

I would love to be able to look you in the eye and tell you that I’m boycotting bras like my feminist sisters of the past, all as a form of protest against the current state of ugliness towards marriage equality. Unfortunately, it’s really just because I’ve just been too slack-assed to go put one on.

I did actually wear a bra today in honor of that fact that I finally showered. That shower actually only happened because I took off my sweater when I realized it smelled kind of funky, only to realize that the smell didn’t go away when the sweater did.

All of this lack of personal hygiene and general nastiness should be blamed on my form of protest, but no. It’s just Spring Break, or at least, it WAS Spring Break. I actually had to go back to work today for the first time all week and when I went to get in my car, I forgot where I was supposed to sit and ended up getting in the wrong seat and not being able to reach the steering wheel.

Some Susie Sunshine invented the term “staycation” to gloss over the fact that you got to have some much-needed time off but you were still too broke to go anywhere, probably due to the fact that you like to take a week off of work for no reason other than “you deserve it.” If I’m given a whole week to myself but still can’t afford Hawaii, you’d better believe I’m not bathing. Forget protesting, that’s my way of actively punishing the rest of society for the fact that people who work as much as I do still end up feeding their families beans and rice for dinner. And THAT is a whole other smell you don’t want to know about.

You… You LIED To Me!

ME Overly simple thoughts , , , ,

The entire internet was invented so old people could forward ridiculous emails to their entire contact lists and overachieving (and probably medicated) stay-at-home moms can post pictures of food they cooked for their adoring families. Forget that whole “global launch system” and the stock market, no. The internet is really just for other people’s amusement. And I am powerless to stop it.

If I had the brainpower to write a computer virus, there is one person in particular who would be in grave danger of receiving a malicious email from me. I can’t just block her emails because there is a slight chance I might be mentioned in her will since I was her oldest grandchild’s babysitter, and with the economy in the condition it’s in, I can’t afford to burn any bridges. Apart from the ten emails a day that she forwards that were stolen straight out of Paul Harvey or Reader’s Digest, sometimes sharing a funny story but more often than not accusing Obama of being both a Muslim and the Anti-Christ and sometimes a founding member of the Ku Klux Klan (let that one sink in), she sends out her own original emails entitled, “Happy Thought for the Day.”

First, if you’ve read this blog for more than a week, you would know that I don’t appreciate any unsolicited offers of Happy Thoughts that don’t include Valium.

Second, don’t lie to me on the internet. Despite my daughter’s new favorite commercial with the “they can’t put stuff on the internet that isn’t true” dummy, don’t press FORWARD on crap that is just so blatantly a lie that you become a liar by association. Today’s Happy-Thought-I’m-A-Liar example:

“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss it, you will land among the stars.”- LES BROWN

FALSE. Stop lying to people with false hope. The nearest star (after the Sun, of course) is  Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf star located at a distance of 4.2 light-years away. Even if you were lucky enough to have a rocket in your backyard and clearance to launch, you would die of suffocation and starvation before you made it there. Your carcass would be raisiny and perfectly preserved from lack of decomposition as it floated around the universe for all time under its own frictionless direction. Basically, that quote right there is giving you permission to try to go to the moon but to also be such a monumental screw-up that you waste billions of dollars on your own space program only to go flying right past the moon (probably due to a math error… or possibly a geography error) and end up really hungry and gaspy before dying in a tin can you built out of spare parts.

And THAT is my Happy Thought for today? Someone please write me a virus, quickly.*

*NOTE: that request for a virus was NOT an invitation for someone to infect MY computer with the virus. Please don’t be a douche.

Seriously? You’re GIFTED?

ME Overly simple thoughts , ,

Before you leave ugly comments, I love my children. Really. More than air. But…wow…

CHILD: “I had an English test today. I made an 85.”

ME: “An 85? C’mon sweetie, you speak English!”

CHILD: “Well, it wasn’t a test on talking! It was a test on grammar, and no one cares about that.”

ME: “No, no one at all. Especially not English teachers who are right this very minute driving your skinny butt around a blind curve overlooking a 30-foot drop into a dried up river bed below you and could easily fling the car with enough force so that your door flies open.”

CHILD: “Whatever.”

ME: “Where did the test fall apart for you?”

CHILD: “It was all about apostrophes, and nobody’s gonna use those.”

ME: “Really? Think very carefully about your last sentence and see if apostrophes aren’t important.”

CHILD: “Well, they’re not important to me. I’m not gonna use them ever.”

ME: “Try again. Think about what you JUST said. Think about it sloooooowly.”

CHILD: “What? I told you, I don’t use apostrophes!”

ME: “You’re sure about that?”

CHILD: “I’m positive!”

ME: “Never?”

CHILD: “I’m 100% sure!”

ME: “Let me ask you this: Do you know what an apostrophe is?”

CHILD: (sighing…eye rolling) “Of course I know what it is!”

ME: “And you still think you don’t need them?”

CHILD: “I said I’m sure!”

ME: “Go ahead and describe an apostrophe to me, just to be safe.”

CHILD: “Mooooooooom! That’s dumb. Everybody knows what they look like. They’re this little squiggle thing.”

ME: “To be fair, you did just describe pretty much ALL punctuation with that statement.”

CHILD: “I just don’t see why we have to take a whole test on something that we’re never gonna use.”

ME: “And you do realize that almost every sentence you’ve spoken since getting in this car has contained at least one apostrophe? Sometimes two?”

CHILD: (blink)

ME: “That’s what I was afraid of.”

Just to keep the Apostrophe Awareness going, I really need for all of you to click on this article and read about one man’s successful crusade to save the apostrophe. As much as I am a fan of accurate grammar and I do despise sloppy gone-by-the-wayside attitudes towards grammar convention, I acknowledge that this man MIGHT have taken things a little too far.

Advanced Placement Ramen

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I just found the best food product EVER. It’s like the people at the factory took an already awesome food and made it awesomer, just by making it finally be user-friendly. I present to you: Not Stupid Ramen.

Ramen Noodles are awesome, yes. We can all agree that there’s something great about foodstuffs that will never expire, can be eaten straight out of the package if you’re trapped in a snow drift for weeks, and cost less than a box of paperclips. Steal you some hot sauce packets from Taco Bell, and you’ve practically gone gourmet for the price of a gumball.

Here’s the problem with Ramen, though: it requires a fork and a spoon. It’s soup, but it’s also spaghetti. You just doubled your utensil-washing needs, thanks to a fourteen-foot string of expressed dehydrated noodle. Sure, you can TRY to smash it all up into spoon-sized pieces before you cook it, but more often than not the cheap packaging is going to tear, dropping tiny half-circles of dried up pasta in your lap.

Behold! Advanced Ramen!

Yes, a company has come along and actually found a way to improve on the concept of feeding college students who managed to find 53 cents down in their couch cushions. SpoonIt! brand noodles are here to rescue us all from splattering ourselves in the face with boiling hot fake broth as we try in vain to twirl curly noodles on a cafeteria fork.

SpoonIt! noodles, while slightly more expensive than Ramen brand, send an important evolutionary message to those around you, and that message is, “I was able to find 67 cents in the couch cushions, so I don’t have to slurp cheap noodles like a douche.” Spoon It! noodles come in pre-formed edible shaped chunks, so there’s no crushing or slurping required. It’s for those of us with caviar tastes on a budget intended for…well…Ramen.

Go ahead, laugh. But then start to take notice of the college kids around you. Ramen is for those students who try too hard to look not-poor by purposely looking poor. And unwashed. Like these people would have been hippies if they had been born back in the fifties and didn’t ride $3000 bicycles around campus in order to save money on gas. You won’t find anyone eating SpoonIt! on campus, because it’s only eaten by smart people and you know those guys are eating while huddled over their experiments. It’s like Mensa noodles. You can feel smarter just from eating it because you know that you have found the promised land of compact food. And because you showered today.

I Wasn’t Chosen to Be the Pope. Someone’s Getting an Angry Letter.

ME Overly simple thoughts , , ,

C’mon, admit it. For just a second there after reading that title, you pictured me in the pointy hat, waving at the crowds of people from my Popemobile. I don’t care what you say, yes… you were thinking it.

And if it weren’t for all the stupid rules, I would have made an awesome Pope. Okay, so, I don’t exactly have a penis and I was never officially ordained as a cardinal. Or a priest. Or even a lowly church committee member. But that really shouldn’t matter. The Pope’s real job (apart from protecting the Catholics of the world from burning in hell for being blasphemous scoff laws at all the Biblical stuff) is just to be the “face of the Church.” Kind of like how Michael Jordan is the face of Hanes underwear: he’s athletic, he’s sexy, and he makes me think of panties when I see him.

Michael Jordan = sexy boy panties. Pope = wanting to speak in a hushed reverent voice and tithe.

I do have a really strong qualification that I bring to the table. Face it, the only reason all the heathens even know about the Pope is because of that rhetorical-yet-heretical question smart asses like to ask as a reply to something dumb: “Is the Pope Catholic?” And I totally am. No one ever gives the sarcastic reply, “Is the Pope a man?” or “Does the Pope pee standing up?” No. That would be wrong. You’re going to hell for even thinking it, you blasphemer.

I was really sad to find out that the Cardinal See disbanded and went home after they chose Pope Francis, because now it’s going to be a real pain to get them to come back together and hear my appeal. Of course, all I have to say is “free trip back to Italy for work-related all-expenses-paid purposes,” and they might come a-runnin’, long skirts flapping in the wind behind them.

Luckily, I’ve been doing a little research (okay, I bribed my 12-year-old with half a Twix bar to Google it) and I found out that throughout history, quite a number of people have simply declared themselves to be something important, like, two people might claim the same kingdom, or how there were actually a whole bunch of times that different people all claimed to be the Pope. Of course, it led to beheadings and stake-burnings, but it’s a chance I’m willing to take to get to ride in that big car.

 

Welcome to My Happy Little Ho Garden.

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There is a really short list of opportunities that I’ve missed, like the chance to own the website domain name to a site called DiscountStripper.com or the fleeting hope for utter rapture that comes from almost winning a BeeGees lunchbox on eBay. Those chances for total happiness have evaporated like a frat boy belch; I try not to pine for them, but some days it’s all I can do not to drive my car through a crowded McDonald’s for thinking of all the ways I reached out for perfect joy but somehow let it slip through my fingers.

And then… this happens, and the world is right again.

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Yes, that is a bottle of beer that my husband brought me. It’s called Ho Garden. I realize I’m not spelling it right and I’m probably not pronouncing it right, but who gives a shit? I’m holding a bottle of beer called Ho Garden.

Sadly, this beer tastes exactly like what you would expect a product named “Ho Garden” to taste like. It’s like a cross between day-old thong panties and feet, with a little aftertaste of diesel there at the end.

But again, who gives a shit? I’m holding a bottle of Ho Garden! This will NEVER stop being awesome, even after the crotch-and-diesel taste is nothing more than a memory of beers gone by.