Scary Pictures

I think these pictures speak for themselves. There is no rehabilitation for this.

There's a Perfectly Good Reason Why This Jack-O-Lantern Is In My Bathroom.

It's the only room in the house without a window, that's why. You know, to provide the proper contrast for the photo. And I needed to update you on my pumpin carving choice without delay. It's all perfectly logical.

Although logic would dictate that I then remove the pirate pumpkin from the bathroom, and I haven't actually done that yet.

I kind of like it there now.

You Need This.

You need a picture of Annie in her new butterfly Halloween costume, don't you? Just to get you through the day. I dig you.
I haven't convinced Scotty to model his "Lil Devil" costume yet. He will need more convincing. But when he does, you will be needing that, too, I'm pretty sure.

In Case You Were Worried

You'll be happy to know that I got Drew out of his sick bed today and drove him to the nearest gas station to fill my tank.

A good call, because my gas tank was dry. Too dry to make it to Oregon. I would have been one of those losers on the side of the 5, hoofing it to the nearest gas station. Of course, filling my tank would be less scary after a fiasco like that. Or more scary.

Hard to say.

Anyway, you can continue with your regularly scheduled anxieties in progress.

Drew will not be accompanying you on the Tilt-A-Whirl today.

Drew has come down with a rather serious and inconvenient inner ear disturbance that has left him flat on his back with his eyes screwed shut.

He started barfing in earnest yesterday evening while at work. More specifically, at a car fire.

I got to drive him, dizzy, nauseous, barfy, and moaning, (he was moaning, not me), to the ER. He was so dizzy he couldn't walk straight, so I got to push him around in a wheelchair, while trying not to make it, you know, move, because motion made him vomit.

In the ER, he got a 12-lead, an IV, valium, and anti-nausea pills. A whole bag of IV fluid. Drip, drip, drip. I read a six-month-old copy of Glamour. If you could see me, you would know how much I might thoroughly enjoy reading something entitled "Glamour." But now I know how to keep my nails looking nice longer between manicures. There was a TV in the room, but it was behind me, and showing some true-crime show about how bad it is to kill somebody.

This morning I used my last eyedropper full of gas to fill Drew's new prescriptions for Valium and two anti-nausea pills. One of the anti-nausea pills is some high-powered super-pill they give to chemo patients that cost $295.00 to the uninsured. $295.00! Good God! What do the uninsured do?

It's frightening. Gosh, wouldn't have fixing the national health care insurance crisis have been a super way to spend hundreds of billions of dollars, instead of invading a country with a lame-ass dictator with no credible ties to terrorism and no WMDs?

Ah, well. Live and learn. Or invade and learn. Or invade and dissemble. Whatevs.

Now I have no gas and my gas putter-inner is out of commission. This is serious because my gas-putting-in-phobia is worse than my telephone-o-phobia.

If I'm in luck, I have enough to get to the border so that I can get it filled by professionals in Oregon (thank you, Oregon, and your archaic gas-filling-by-professionals-only laws!).

More phobias later.

Elephants Are People Too.

We are producing psycho elephants.

Just thought you would want to know. You might have to sign in or create an account to read this but it won't hurt and it will be free.

In Which I Visit My Good Friend, Craig Ferguson

While we were in LA recently, we popped in on a buddy of mine, Craig Ferguson. You know Craig, he's got that cute, silly-but-thinky late night show on CBS.

Craig and I, we're like this (finger thing). Whenever I'm in town, I stop by his show. I've got a VIP card I could show you if you think I'm fibbing.

Of course, just to keep it real, we line up with all the other audience members on the benches outside the CBS "Television City" studios, and you know, go through the metal detector and everything. They wave me through even though I set it off like I'm smuggling Emmys under my blouse.

Then the littlest producer comes out and begs us to pretend that we are actually several more people because they are shy a few audience members tonight. He says that his job is on the line, and we are the only ones who can keep him from ending up as an extra on The Price Is Right.

Did I tell you that for several blocks around the CBS studios, tourists walk around with their The Price Is Right name tags on their shirts? They don't take them off after the show. They just keep them on like suburban middle schoolers with ski lift tickets hanging from their coats. I find it endearing.

Where was I? Oh, yes. Saving Craig Ferguson's littlest producer from failure.

After we assure him that we will take up the slack, the audience warmer-upper, a fellow by the name of, oh, I forget. Something about Pudgy. Or Tubby. Let's call him Derwent.

So Derwent comes out and tells us some rather elderly jokes, but he seems like a nice enough fellow, and we don't want to make him feel bad, so we laugh heartily. When Derwent is satisfied that we indeed have the mechanics of laughter down pat, we allow ourselves to be herded into the studio. This is where I always baaa quietly to myself. This is also where another producer eyes each audience unit and seats them according to beauty. That's why we were in the third row. Hmmmm.... They probably just figured that in the front row, we would be too distracting.

Derwent comes back to remind us to be loud and laugh heartily. We agree.

Guests that night were: Tim Daly, hoping we would watch his show The Nine. Not likely. David Cross, hoping we would watch his Comedy Central show Freakshow. More likely. And Billy Bragg, who sung a song about stupid people with smart bombs. My kind of rabble rouser.

Craig Ferguson was as funny and Scottish as always, bless his heart. We waved. He nodded. In our general direction. Wouldn't want to be too ostentatious. Lovely. Quite lovely.

We filed out with the riff-raff. I baaaed once more. I was given a VIP card. I plan on having it laminated.

We ended the evening by walking around a Disneyesque shopping center nearby that had its own trolley even though it was no bigger than four square blocks, speakers in the bushes playing Sinatra, and male models posing at the entrance to Abercrombie and Fitch. Apparently abdominal muscles attract shoppers like chocolate attracts, well, fatter shoppers.

Wretched excess makes me wretch. We booked it for the track in South Central, where we felt more at home.

We'll be back, Craig Ferguson! As soon as we can figure out how to do it without having to drive through LA.

I Know I Said No More Boosterism, But Isn't This Pretty?

If I had something more entertaining to say, I would say that instead, but I have tried to stay as quiet as possible today and not move, so that the cold will think I am dead and move on to a new host. Coco the cat has assisted me in this by holding me down.

I fell asleep during the game once, but Dean helpfully called and woke me up so that I could watch the Ducks finish off the Bruins.

Not sorry I missed last week's game against Cal. Heard it was ugly.

No more ugly. More happy! Jump and bump against a yellow O, rampant in a field of green!

Now back to playing dead. The cat is beginning to meow.

Happy Friday the 13th, Scaredy-Cats

I'm not scared. I live with a black cat and she's cross all the time.

Then again, maybe I could have been really lucky if it hadn't been for her.

Damn you, cat!

No wonder I haven't won the lottery!

Are You Happy Now, Fatties? Scoot Over.

Fat loves company. At least that was what I surmised during my younger, thinner years. (Remember those?) Every (female) one I knew who was overweight would look at me with that "oh, she thinks she's so superior" look, eat another cookie, and say something like, "I hate you. You can eat anything and stay so skinny." Then they would smile and their unspoken wish that I would balloon up like a walrus would be so intense it would leak out of their ears.

These days I can only convince myself I am thin by sidling up to an actual walrus. And walruses are hard to come by this far upstream.

Two instances back-to-back have nearly ruined my appetite.

Yesterday, I downloaded the pictures from our LA trip onto the computer, and noticed one of me, which looks like a small head perched on top of a large, shapeless pile of laundry.

Then, this morning, in my cold-drug-addled bleariness, I did not shield myself properly from the sight of my own backside. Oh, the horror.

Something must be done.

Something besides cutting down on food.

Where's a good witch's potion when you need one?

When You Have a Cold, There is No Such Thing as Overmedication

I am conscious on borrowed time, having taken enough Benadryl to end my pain, at least for the next six hours. I made the mistake today of assuming that I could breathe on my own and stopped the near-constant ingestion of elephant-size doses of cold medication.

Then I picked several bushels (if bushels are the size of Home Depot buckets) of grapes from the back yard, washed and de-stemmed them, and began making them into grape jelly until I collapsed in a quivering mass of phlegm, requiring me to put the rest in the fridge for when I am safely tucked back into my cloud of Benadryl, Sudafed, Claritin and Pinot Grigio.

Here's Dean last week in LA at the moment he realized he no longer had The Cold, and had passed it safely on to me. I would post some action photos of the races, but it turns out I'm a lousy action photographer, especially when my son is involved, and people have been landing face down on other people's handle bars all night.

More wisdom later.

Escape from LA

Nothing will make you appreciate your own town and house and hang-outs then spending a week in LA.

More wisdom later.

Whew.

We drove. We rode (some of us). We caught colds (all of us). We kicked ass anyway (I'm taking partial responsibility in successfully fulfilling my job as Dead Weight).

More later after sleep and a few kleenex massacres.

Let's Get Some Shoes

I only wear shoes that rule. In case you were wondering.

Go Dean

My pinot gris-swilling, 400-threat-count-sheet-needing, soaking-tub-loving, privacy hoarding self is going to stumble into the team van tomorrow morning (can you locate the team van in this picture?) at Oh Dark Thirty with Dean, Drew and the team manager, and we will begin to haul ourselves and approximately $30,000 worth of specialty bike equipment down to Carson, California to watch Dean and Norene and the rest of the Rubicon team kick ass at the National Track Cycling Championships.

People laugh when they say I'm riding down in the team van. I understand it has a pretty shady (read smelly) history. I'm sure it has seen things that I would rather not ever see without a cleansing frontal lobotomy. But I want to go. Dean is riding really fast, and barring any unforeseen hip fractures, should do well.

Even though my presence is not exactly an omen of success. Even though I would buy valium out of a grocery cart in front of a pawn shop right now, thinking about the 18-hour drive and subsequent freak-out festival that is watching velodrome cycling. (That would be me freaking out, not the riders. They are usually cool as cucumbers as they donate their skin to the surface of the track.) Oh, and the return 18-hour drive.

So wish Dean luck. And book me a massage.

Everybody Knows I'm Not a Big Fan of "Feelings"

No, not the song.

Actual feelings.

So why did I cry like Tammy Faye through the entire Barbara Walters Special about Steve Irwin?

Thank God no one was here to see that.

Nothing Good Can Come of an Open Bar.

Some impressions from a wedding:

• If you put a doggy flotation vest on your wedding registry, be prepared to suffer the consequences long-term.
• If you plan to wear a long, filmy veil, you might think twice about an outdoor venue in a very windy part of town. Although it makes a cute moment when your dad has to fetch your veil out of a nearby tree.
• You get extra wedding points if your names sound cute together.
• Bicycle racers tend to stretch the bounds of wedding fashion close to, but not past, the breaking point. Although what is allowed of bicycle racers (retro martini-age gear including white shoes and belt) should not be attempted by members of the General Public.
• Despite what you may think, you can get a brew pub, which makes highly regarded artisan beers, to serve Bud Light to your guests.
• Wedding bands are a musical sub-set that should be admired much more than they are. First, they play soft Norah Jones tunes while everybody ignores them and eats their little wedding dinners. Then they try to get everybody interested with some catchy covers of Neil Diamond and Elvis while everybody ignores them some more. Then, after the speeches and the cake and the open bar and the couple's first dance, they let loose with some Tommy Tutone (867-5309) and everybody crowds them on the dance floor and steps on their cords. And they smile and sing pretty much any genre you can throw at them.
• Speaking of the wedding singers, whenever I hear Van Morrison (Moondance), I always think of every Grammy speech I heard in the 80's, because it was cool to thank him for being such a "huge influence" on them, even though none of them sounded anything like him.
• I like to dance. Drew does not. This means that once every two years or so, if he gets caught with me at a function with an open bar and some dancing, he is forced to dance with me, and I return the favor by not just leading, but gripping him so tightly that he has no other option than to do what I am doing. Which is not strictly a "dance," like the samba or the foxtrot, but more like whatever the music is requiring me to do. Kind of like forced interpretive dance, with only one of us knowing the steps. It's my method, and it works for me. He's good natured about it, as long as he can keep it down to once every two years or so.
• Dean is ready for nationals. I can tell because he looked like he was smuggling trout in the utility pockets of his trousers, even though his trousers didn't technically have utility pockets. (Large thighs. He's a sprinter. On the track. The bicycle track. The round one. Well, oval. Is the joke dead yet? Ah well. It wasn't very healthy to begin with.)

Correction

A little clarification after remembering this thing once (and possibly reporting it elsewhere)...

Okay, Sally and I liked Nancy Drew enough to have once attempted to write our own Nancy Drew mystery after noticing what may have been blood on a tree stump (although it may have also been berry juice). We entitled it "The Bloody Stump."

We found nothing amusing about that title.

Some Kid Stuff

Things I was not into as a kid (in no particular chronological order):

• Those girly patty-cake games. Please. I was reminded of these by one of my favorite bloggers, who seems to have enjoyed them. I was bored crazy after about 10 seconds, and could never get my patty-cake partner to go faster, or change to a crazy samba beat.
• Thrill seeking. Some things never change.
• Nancy Drew. Come on. She was a major Nancy.
• That girl who went down the rabbit hole. Who was she? Alice. Yeah. I didn’t buy that whole scene.
• Swimming. My brother and sister were great swimmers. I couldn’t see crap without my glasses, and felt completely out of control in swim class. Plus one of my teachers caught me trying to sneak into class without taking a (freezing cold) shower first and made an example of me to the rest of the class. That sort of treatment just exacerbates my personality quirks, if you know what I mean.
• Tether ball. Fabulously popular in the grade schools I attended. I would have loved playing it if I had been any good at it. Ditto for kick ball and baseball. Ball games were never my forte. Balls just never went where I thought they should have.
• Dodge ball. Who invented that, anyway? A guy for sure. (Fo sho.) I was great at dodging balls, which meant that I was always the last one left on the floor. Unfortunately, I could barely throw a ball past the center line of the gym, let alone throw hard enough to get somebody out. That left me out on the floor by myself, dodging, dipping, ducking, diving, and dodging, while the rest of my team (who obviously had picked me last) sat on the sidelines, begging me to just take one in the gut so they could get back up and play another game. It made for some awkward standoffs.
  

Things I liked when I was a kid.

• Our family’s wiener dog, Fritzy.
• My friend Sally’s gerbil, Tilly. I always wanted to take her out and play with her, but that was not allowed. Dammit, and damn their fascist rules.
• Dancing to the Monkees on Sally’s mom and dad’s stereo. Groovy. When we got tired of the Monkees (does one ever really get tired of the Monkees?), we would listen to her parents’ Roger Miller albums (“Trailers for sale or rent, roooooms to let, fifty cents…”).
• Watching the Monkees on TV. How many times over the years did Sally and I reenact the opening walking-funny scene, or the running up to the waves and running away scene? TV magic, and funny every time when you are 6.
• Playing the maracas in grade school music class when the teacher passed around the big box of sticks, tambourines and other, lamer percussion instruments. I remember once being so into my maraca music that I hadn't noticed that the rest of the class had quit playing some time ago and were all looking at me.
• The Boy’s Adventure Series by Willard Price. Books like Elephant Adventure, South Sea Adventure, and my favorite, Amazon Adventure. I had the baby hots for Hal, one of the adventuring brothers. After reading Volcano Adventure, I decided to become a volcanologist. What happened to that dream? Probably something to do with the thrill seeking issue…
• Going to the mom & pop store up the road for candy. Duh.
• Finger painting. What’s not to like? Messy. Arty. You can’t make a bad finger painting.
• Wile E. Coyote and that crazy road runner.
• A. A. Milne. NOT the Disney version. The original books by A. A. Milne were funny, breezy, and ever so British. And I did tend to identify with a certain mild mannered and stuttery Very Small Animal, who always had one eye open for Heffalumps.
• The comic strip Tumbleweeds. Look it up. Very funny, if not so politically correct anymore.
• Leg warmers. They were like an advertisement that you were a serious dancer, like in Flashdance. I hear they're coming back. Awesome!
• Spelling Bees, at which I kicked ass. In your face, dodgeball players!

Post-Dental Bulletin

This one's for you, Drew:

It turns out that my teeth are fine, but those headaches I've been having? Probably my hideously misshapen temporal mandibular joint, which may or may not need to be taken out and replaced with a baboon joint, or maybe Tupperware. However, he can't really tell me which until he fits me with this tooth-holder thing which I would wear at night to keep me from grinding them, which he says I am doing, which I had no idea I was doing, and of which I am a tad skeptical. He says he can tell from the shape of my tongue. So, obviously my tongue is also repulsively misshapen. He says just let him know when I am ready (to plunk down a grand or so) and he will get going on that mouthpiece. Now, I guess I sit around and ponder my revolting tongue until my head hurts and go back to beg him to relieve me of my subhuman jaw.

What's that new teeth cleaning machine they have? Is that supposed to double as a dog whistle? My ears are still ringing. It looks like a regular pick-style implement crossed with a water-pic, only attached to a wire that goes to a machine that makes it scream. I asked "Heather" about it. She said something like, "Well, there are these two discs inside here (pointing to the handle) that rub against each other and make an ultra-sonic sound (hey, not that ultra) that make the cell walls of bacteria explode. And the vibrations help me get the tartar off your teeth. But it gets really hot so that's why this water keeps it wet (yeah, and keeps me drowning)."

Hows that, Drew? Angry enough for ya?

BONUS: Your prayer for the day, courtesy of me stealing it from Tim Dorsey's book Torpedo Juice:

Almighty Father, please stop making jerks. Amen.