shh, don't wake the DRUNKEN HOUSEWIFE

the Aga and I

2012-01-29T19:18:00.000-08:00

Cooking with both hands with my beloved Aga

odds and ends

2012-01-27T19:43:00.000-08:00

- There is a new rule: in my car, Florence and the Machine must be blasted at top volume at all times. This rule pleases one child, who loves this music, but displeases another child, who gripes, "I don't see what is supposed to be so great about this Florence person."

- The foster kittens I've had since late September are back, since one developed an upper respiratory infection at the pound. The Sober Husband called this kitten "a flopper", because since he tore out of the cat carrier, he's been racing around this house like an Olympic athlete and appearing to be in the finest of health.

- I went out clubbing for the first time in memory (how many years has it been?), and after my companion got distracted, I ended up dancing in towering high heels with a cute gay boy of only about 24 years old for aeons. I discovered to my delight that someone out there has created at least one dark, danceable Shriekback cover. After my tortured feet finally gave out, my new friend and I were sitting in a booth when an adorable drag queen, also of only about 24 years old, threw herself across my friend and me, draping her arms around both of us. After we all chatted until closing time, the beautiful drag queen, kissing first me on the cheek and then my new friend, said longingly, "Wouldn't it be wonderful if we all had a house together? If the three of us lived together in a house?" I came so close to rudely laughing and saying, "I do own a house, and I live in it with my husband and children BECAUSE I AM OLD ENOUGH TO BE YOUR MOTHER."

- In other midlife-crisis related news, I got dressed up very fancily to go out, sans children, recently. Little Lola was obviously struggling to find the right, most tactful wording to bring something up, and delicately, gently she said, "From this angle, it seems like I can see your bra in that shirt." I said, "Lola, that is kind of the point of this shirt." Oh, the horrors of a middle-aged mother dressed as a skank!

- But do not fear, all these fashion, grooming, and exercise efforts do not go wasted. On a recent date night, I commanded the Sober Husband to give me a compliment, because I had put a lot of work into my appearance. After looking me up and down, he said, "You have much less cat hair on you than usual." Romance is not dead!!

Narcissus, Part II

2012-01-22T21:40:00.001-08:00

Last week, two people I know, unprompted, remarked favorably on the muscle tone of my rump, one referring to it as a "toned butt" and the other as a "firm ass." These remarks were, of course, received favorably by me, whose two chief hobbies these days are working out and making my husband admire my muscles.

Sadly the week before, in a special moment between spouses, I had asked my dear husband if he could see a difference in my posterior, confiding artlessly, "I've been really working on my glutes lately." Put on the spot, he froze up and couldn't answer. It's a good thing others are taking up the heavy burden of noticing my muscle tone for him; the poor man is flagging beneath the weight of this onerous chore.

how the children exceed their parents

2012-01-21T14:33:00.000-08:00

This morning Iris uber Alles breezily shared with me, "At my school yesterday, we learned meditation, and the leader said I reached enlightenment!" I asked who this "leader" was, and it turned out to be a fifth grade teacher who deemed Iris enlightened. Seeking to share this new interest, I mentioned that once, thanks to my dear old friend Kate, I meditated with the Dalai Lama. "But YOU didn't reach enlightenment!" Iris jeered.

Narcissus

2012-01-19T17:44:00.001-08:00

Since September I've been weight training with rigor, and the results are unmistakable. Well, to be more honest, the effects would be less noticeable if I weren't always calling people's attention to them.

"Prod my quadriceps! See? Now prod your father's! His is just a bunch of gristle! Mine is like steel! Like titanium!" I commanded obedient little Lola, who asked, "What is 'gristle'? What is a 'quadriceps'?"

On a date night, I reminded the Sober Husband: "Feel free to remark upon my muscle tone at any moment!"

Out with a friend at a party, I was dressed in my crazy steampunk skirt cut up to the upper thigh, and by chance I found myself by a full-length mirror. I had to stop for a moment to admire my own upper leg, usually hidden in more modest attire. "Look at that," I immodestly marveled. "It's so firm." A less indulgent person would have pointed out that admiring oneself in a mirror in public is unbecoming to an adult, but my friend was kind. "It's okay, you've worked hard for it."

The best audience by far has been my gay neighbor, himself an example of devotion to the gym, who humored me by admiring my upper arms. "Now flex! Now make a muscle! Now move your arms like this!" he said, then adding kindly, "Look at that! I'll bet you could throw me on the floor and sit on me." Of course that was a gentle fib, my neighbor being like a Greek god, but I reveled in it. "Now feel my quads," I demanded.

termites termites termites

2012-01-12T20:55:00.000-08:00

This morning I was dreaming about candy, beautiful, technicolored candy, and my husband woke me up shouting, "You gotta come see what the carpenter found when he pulled off those shingles! There's a whole nest of termites we didn't know about! Come see!" I affixed him with an eye, a baleful, sleepy eye, and he backpedaled. "Let me get you a cup of coffee first."

no no no, don't make me look at any more termites

2012-01-11T09:06:00.000-08:00

The time had come, in my opinion, for some repairs to be made to our over-100-year-old home. The deck had some highly questionable spots in it and was the home of a thriving community of Pacific dampwood termites which caused Lola to go into hysterics whenever one got into the house. (We had to cancel a date and come home early when our normally intrepid babysitter called to report that Lola's bug hysterics were too much for her). The Sober Husband's theory was these termites were not a risk to our house, because they only attack damp wood and supposedly our house's wood is nice and dry, but I wasn't buying it. Additionally the top of our house needed to be powerwashed (we powerwashed ourselves the parts which we could without risking our necks), a strange screen door frame, without any screen door attached to it, was crumbling and termite-infested, some shingles needed replacing, and arguably some parts of the house should be repainted.

To begin with, I hired one of my campmates from Burning Man to do the work, an unlicensed contractor who earns a living of sorts doing this kind of work. He took care of the door, removing the old door frame, fumigating the shell, and creating a new frame. He also did some initial probing on the deck and showed the skeptical Sober Husband just how bad things were. My Burning Man friend proposed just replacing half of the deck as a conservative measure (he seemed to have mystical feelings about redwood and wanted to dispose of as little of it as possible). All appeared well, until the Sober Husband requested an estimate. "I don't work that way," said my Burning Man campmate. "I'm just not comfortable working that way. I just like to be paid by the hour."

"But he just wants to have an idea of how much it's going to be," I said.

"But what," my campmate said with emotion rising in his voice, "if I open up that deck and it's worse than I thought? What do I do then?"

"You call the Sober Husband and say it's going to cost more than you thought," I said calmingly, but it was to no avail. "I"m just not comfortable working that way," he said. "And I don't like to drive all the way to your house." He did admit that he enjoyed eating lunch with me, but the charms of lunch with the Drunken Housewife were not enough to cajole him into giving the scary Sober Husband an estimate.

Later I laughed with the Sober Husband. "You broke my Burning Man carpenter, what with your fancy city ways! Estimates!" We laughed, but the Pacific dampwood termites were gnawing away. "Now it's your turn," I said. "You broke my carpenter; you have to get a new one."

Subsequently the Sober Husband did bring in a new contractor, one who enjoyed a manly laugh with the Sober Husband at the expense of the Drunken Housewife and her Burning Man carpenter. Now this contractor is hard at work, exposing the horrors of termites to the poor Drunken Housewife. Yesterday several times I was called away from whatever the hell it is I do around here all day to go see newly uncovered termite atrocities. "Look! Look! And it's RIGHT UP NEXT TO THE HOUSE!" was the refrain. The subtext of each of these little show-and-tell episodes was "this here, this scary thing, is going to cost you another thousand dollars." And there is no joy for a Drunken Housewife in looking at a termite. None.

I have seen the termites. I have seen the hell they hath wrought to the supporting structures of my deck. And to the side of my house, by the laundry room. I have witnessed the devastation. And all I can say is I just want to curl up in a ball on my bed, possibly with some chocolates, and never look at another termite again.

like Schrodinger's cat

2012-01-05T11:26:00.001-08:00

The other day, during the children's vacation, I broke off from all the family togetherness to go out for coffee with a friend from Burning Man. This bothered the children. They couldn't see the point and were judgmental, with Iris going so far as to mumble darkly about her mother "going out for coffee with creepy friends."

"You people think I don't exist without you!" I said. "You think I'm like Schrodinger's cat, and when you're not looking at me, it's questionable whether I exist or not. When you're in school, you think I flicker out of existence. Newsflash: sometimes I go out for coffee! Sometimes even lunch!"

Iris glowered, but little Lola took up the discussion. "I think Muzzy exists," she said. "I don't think you go out of the house, though. I think you spend the day feeding the cats and reading a book."

as promised: the attempt to muzzle the Drunken Housewife

2011-12-26T11:11:00.000-08:00

In September 2010, a few days after I returned from Burning Man and just at the beginning of the school year, my phone rang. It was someone calling from Iris and Lola's school, asking me to meet with the head of school. As any mother would, my first assumption was that something had happened to either Iris or Lola, but no. The head of school wanted to meet with me about my blog, along with another administrator. The tone was definitely negative.

That very day I had written on my blog about an argument I'd had with Iris uber Alles. Iris was slightly sick but wanted to go to school anyway, and I had forced her to stay home because there was a new girl in her grade, a girl recovering from bone cancer who still had a very low immune system. All the parents from that grade had been severely cautioned not to send their children to school with even mild symptoms. I looked at what I'd written. From my point of view, it was clear that I'd had an excess of care and concern for this other little girl, but I had written in my usual sarcastic style, and I could see how it could conceivably offend someone. I deleted it. I'm not usually one to back away from causing offense, but a child who'd had cancer was a sensitive subject.

Before this meeting, I stewed. I was sleep-deprived and cranky to begin with, having left Burning Man before I was ready. I longed to be back padding through the dust with a bottle of prosecco in my hand, gazing upon crazed art and making cocktails for my campmates. For a while, I determined to bring an attorney with me. As a former attorney, of course I know plenty of them. I felt I was not being taken seriously in this situation and that having an attorney with me would add gravitas. The Sober Husband strongly disagreed with that and said simply, "I will go with you." He, unlike me, has always been quite popular with the school's administration.

My falling out had come earlier. At the annual fall festival, Iris and I had been horrified to see toy kittens being sold... covered in real cat fur. The grotesquerie of cats being murdered to make cheap toys, which were then sold to benefit our school, was greatly disgusting and upsetting to Iris and to me. (Note: whenever you buy something from China containing fur, take a good, long, hard look at the fur. It is usually labeled as "rabbit" but normally is either cat or dog fur. As a certified crazy cat lady, I can tell rabbit fur from cat fur, and it wasn't particularly hard, given that plenty of the fur was orange tabby. Rabbits do not come in orange tabby). I had never seen fur things sold before at our festival, and I thought it was a terrible idea. I wrote the head of school a letter, asking that the school adapt a rule forbidding the sale of fur. I noted that fur is controversial in our society and that surely we would not want to upset those students who are huge animal lovers. I received a very short reply saying that the school had no control over what vendors sold and which ignored every point I'd made. This made me furious, because the "vendor" in question who sold the fur toys was a group of parent volunteers, and surely the school had immense control over this vendor. Acting as if it were some remote entity with no real ties to the school seemed ridiculous. I wrote another letter, which was not answered. Subsequently I wrote about the fur foofaraw here on this blog.

After that, there was no love lost between the head of school and me. I had had no problems whatsoever with the prior head of school, whom I admired, but this one had no use for me and my delicate feelings about fur.

When the day of the meeting came about, the head of school and the director of communications gushed over the handsome Sober Husband and gave me cold looks. My dignity was compromised by the fact that I was still wearing my Burning Man extensions and had bright green braids all the way down to my waist. After the initial greetings were done, the head cleared her throat and said, "Many would consider this meeting long overdue" in a self-pleased voice. The Sober Husband laid a calming hand upon my knee.

The major points made by the head were "Many people here consider it unethical that you keep a blog" and "You may not realize that your ability to form relationships is harmed by your blog."

The major points made by the Drunken Housewife were "any institution threatened by one person's blog which is mostly cat stories appears weak" and "is the school going to institute a new screening policy for potential parents? Add the line 'no mommy bloggers allowed' to the application form?" and "I am completely confident that in this day and age, I am not the only blogger here in this parent population", as well as "I've been told by more than one teacher here that they wished there were more parents like me at this school."

Getting down to specific instances, the Head was rather superior in discussing the post I'd made about the new student with a shaky immune system. "Yes, after I reread that, I saw it could be taken the wrong way," I said, "so I took it down. I would hope anyone who read it would see that it was motivated throughout by my concern for that girl's health, but I took it down anyway." This visibly took the wind out of the head's sails. "You took it down?"

The other example brandished about was the time I wrote about a fourth grader who wore a micro-micro miniskirt and fishnet stockings to a school event. Here I contended that as a feminist who was deeply concerned about the premature sexualization of girls, I was going to write about that kind of thing if I saw it. I viewed this as part of an important moral issue of our day.

Eventually the meeting ended, with nothing concluded. The head expressed some bitterness that I'd written on my blog about the fur issue, and I made the point that my blog is normally a silly, personal one but that animal welfare is my hot button item and that the school could have handled the issue differently. I refused to stop keeping my blog. I pointed out that I'd had severe problems with one of the girl's teachers the year before, culminating in my unsuccessfully asking to have my daughter transferred to a different classroom, and "I never wrote about that on my blog, because it wouldn't have helped any of us." This point was not taken, but rather the head portrayed the staff as quivering in fear that they would be victimized by me on my blog. I said that anyone who had an issue with me was welcome to talk to me, but evidently they were afraid of me. I thought that was a bit silly, given that there are truly intimidating parents lurking about the place, as opposed to a mommy blogger who calls herself tongue-in-cheek a "drunken housewife" and who volunteered in the playground, lunchroom, library, and art room.

The next week, my phone rang again. It was another staff member at the girls' school. At this time and the year before, one of my daughters was having a very big problem at school (it was her prior teacher's failure to do anything about this huge issue which was the source of our problems with her the year before, which we had brought up with the head). She cried desperately each morning not to have to go to school, and the Sober Husband and I were feuding about homeschooling. I was in touch with homeschooling groups and had set a deadline with the poor Sober Husband by which, if things were not improved, I was pulling this child out of the school, with my husband's agreement or not. This new caller told me that she "had an idea on how to help" my daughter.

Excited, the Sober Husband and I raced over to the school to hear this new idea about how to solve our child's problem. The staff member, smiling, explained to me that the staff wanted to help my daughter but were paralyzed by fear of me because of my blog. She had been nominated by the staff to approach me and share an idea. This exciting new idea was for me to quit keeping a blog! Then the staff would have the confidence they needed to try to help my child.

This completely blindsided me, and I exploded. "ARE YOU PEOPLE GOING TO CALL ME EVERY SINGLE WEEK AND PRESSURE ME ABOUT MY BLOG? EVERY WEEK? IT'S JUST A BUNCH OF STORIES ABOUT CATS AND THINGS MY KIDS SAY!"

The staff member's jaw dropped open and she stared at me in shock. We quickly put the pieces together. She had no idea that I'd been called on the carpet just the week before and leaned on about the blog. She felt she'd been made a patsy under the circumstances. We parted with hugs and remonstrations of mutual admiration. (The Sober Husband's head was spinning by how fast this reconciliation came about).

By this point, I was feeling distinctly alienated at the school and not wanting to deal with anyone there. The child in question had a birthday, and I asked the Sober Husband to be the parent who brought celebratory snacks for the classroom. I knew I needed to calm down before I was in a position to speak to anyone there. I was red hot mad over the idea that my child's problems were not going to be addressed because I keep a blog (never mind the over $20,000 paid per year for her tuition). The Sober Husband came home smiling. He told me that another high level administrator had attended our child's birthday celebration (which is extremely unusual) and taken him aside to tell him that I was always welcome to come to her with any problems whatsoever. And then, laughing, he told me that, as I'd requested, he asked our daughter's main teacher if she had any problems with my blog, and this sweet woman looked at him blankly and said, "Blog? I don't even know it." We laughed.

We ended up meeting with the teacher, who formed a thorough plan to deal with our child's problem. This woman, who is indeed one of the finest teachers I have ever met, did such a skillful and caring job working with our child that by the time the deadline came about I'd set for homeschooling, it was obvious that there was no longer any need. And around that same deadline, the head of school gave notice, as she was returning to the Deep South to become the head of a larger school.

In retrospect, it all made sense to me then. The hassling and pressuring of me to take down my blog --- was it all so I wouldn't write anything that might embarrass her while she was under scrutiny for this new and better job? My dear friend Melissa (known here as the repeated winner of the Drunken Housewife Semiannual Photo Contest), who is a teacher in the Southern state in question, opined that the head should have been glad to have my blog, as what would give her more credibility in the Deep South than having pissed off a San Francisco animal rights loon?

the migraine that nearly stole Christmas (and did steal your promised story)

2011-12-25T20:41:00.000-08:00

On Monday the 12th, I drank a little port after dinner. After the children went to bed, I worked out on my rowing machine but quit a little early because I had a pounding headache. The Sober Husband sniffed at me judgmentally. "I would expect you to have a headache if you were drinking port and then exercising. Just seems like the kind of thing that would give you a headache." We squabbled for a bit over the wisdom of consuming port before exercise and then went to bed.

Most of the night I lay awake, tormented by a truly hellish migraine. In the morning I was a wreck. Iris uber Alles also reported feeling ill and stayed home from school. In the afternoon I drove to get Lola, but otherwise I did nothing all day except swallow huge handfuls of ibuprofen.

Again in the night I hardly slept, my head hurt so much. In the morning there was no question of me driving the children to school-- obviously I wasn't fit to drive. I stayed in bed. Later in the day, using all my willpower, I did get myself up out of bed and drove a couple of miles to the home of an artist who had suggested painting my portrait. I had already had to cancel sitting for my portrait once, and I had the distinct feeling that if I cancelled again, the portrait wasn't going to happen. I figured that I could sit still with a headache just as well as I could lie in my bed with a headache. I got myself over there, swallowing ibuprofen all through the sitting, and then picked up the children. I told poor Lola that I didn't feel well enough to take her to the cafe we frequent, and she was a good sport.

Once again it was a hellish night. Just rolling over made my poor brain reverberate with agony. The next day the Sober Husband said repeatedly, "You know I can take you to the hospital whenever you say, right? Just say if you want me to take you to the hospital." We decided to try going to a doctor. The doctor I had previously seen at my practice group had left, so we went downtown to a different office to try a different doctor. Each step made my brain ricochet around in my skull, and I couldn't face eating or drinking coffee. Indeed I was pretty dehydrated by this point.

The doctor, whom I liked, made the point that once a migraine gets to this point, it's pretty hard to break it. It would have been easier if I'd come in the first day. Of course I never go to a doctor the first day I have a migraine, because I have no reason to believe that I am starting a multiple day-migraine (it's much more normal for me to have a single day headache). He prescribed me a tryptan, a drug which will for some patients end a migraine, and advised me to take it with benedryl and ibuprofen and try to spend as much time sleeping as possible for the next few days. This thoughtful doctor firmly addressed the Sober Husband and told him I wouldn't be capable of doing anything for the next few days.

At home the Sober Husband was a treasure. He forcibly rehydrated me by periodically bringing a glass of water with a long, bent straw. Putting the straw in my mouth, he would not relent until I'd taken a few swallows of water. The tryptan worked slightly; about an hour after I took it, I was able to sit up and check my email and desultorily talk. I even managed to eat much of a salad (which turned out to be the only meal I ate in three days). But soon the tryptan would fade, and it was back to lying in bed with a damp washcloth on my forehead, trying not to move. The pain grew worse, and I considered going to the hospital and begging for some fentanyl. The Sober Husband called the doctor I'd seen. I didn't feel well enough to go back to the doctor, who called in a prescription for a different tryptan for me to try. Over the weekend I tried both tryptans, as well as enough ibuprofen to sedate an ox.

Meanwhile I had missed several holiday parties I had very much wanted to attend, as well as the Christmas concert at Lola's school. "Give me lots and lots and lots of latkes," little Lola sang as she came home, and I moaned and adjusted my cold washcloth on my forehead.

The poor Sober Husband left his new job early again, and we went back to the doctor. This time he took some bold moves, proposing an eight-drug cocktail (some over-the-counter, most prescription). He assured me that he could see me again on Friday, the day before Christmas Eve, if need be, to try another mix. During the consultation, at some point this daring man of medicine's nerves quailed a bit, and he said, "We haven't done any workups." We both looked at the list of medications we were proposing I take and at the large syringe where he was mixing me up a shot. "I"m a little worried about your kidneys," he said. I assured him that I'd had a lot of bloodwork done the year before when I had surgery, and my kidneys and liver had been in topnotch form. He gave me the shot.

This bold new regime began to take effect. My headache faded to a lower but still bothersome level. I started moving around the house (whereas previously I had spent five days without coming downstairs except to be taken to the doctor). I resumed eating and drinking coffee (but not alcohol. I went two weeks without a drink). I fretted about loss of muscle tone. Here on the blog, readers wondered why the hell I offered them the choice of a topic if I weren't going to bother myself to write anything. I hired an unemployed friend to drive Iris to a party down the Peninsula (now that Iris goes to school in Hillsborough, she has social engagements all up and down the Peninsula).

The day before Christmas Eve, I still didn't have the energy to go to the party in the East Bay I'd planned to attend. But on Christmas Eve itself, I was able to get up, walk into the kitchen, and make our traditional Christmas Eve meal. Let us all praise brave men of medicine, who fear not the prescription of drugs but deliver us from our twelve day migraine. Merry Christmas to all of you, darlings, with love from the newly recovered DH

yer choice

2011-12-11T19:06:00.000-08:00

Darlings, I know I've been neglecting you, and I am deeply apologetic. It's been a weird year for me, with dramatic ups and downs, and I haven't always been up for my customary blend of cat and child anecdotes sprinkled with TMI and swear words. I do have stories, plenty of them, but I've not been writing them.

For the patient readers, who come back even when yer old DH is not entertaining, I'd like to offer amends. Pick a topic and I'll write it at your command. Serving suggestions:

-my ex-cat, Bob Marley got lost this fall, and everyone blamed me, even though he's had a new owner now for half his friggin' lifespan;

- I went out carousing with hundreds of people dressed as Santa and captured a pair of strikingly handsome European academics;

- the head of Lola's school strongly suggested I stop blogging;

- Iris uber Alles is now an officially gifted child and the impact this has on the rest of us;

-you tell me.

xxoo, yer neglectful old DH

where have all the children (and leftovers) gone?

2011-11-28T09:03:00.001-08:00

I'm having Thanksgiving withdrawal. The leftovers have pretty much all been eaten; there's one slice of pie left and some homemade cranberry sauce, but nothing else. I'm craving lantulaatikko, the Scandinavian rutabaga Christmas dish, and drunken beans (the way we do it, the green beans are cooked in Ketel One with lots of salt and pepper and an onion). These are things we eat only on Thanksgiving and Christmas, but I want them NOW. Would it destroy their specialness if I made them for dinner tonight?

The children are back at their respective schools. Lola was shocked last night to hear of her imminent return to school; evidently she imagined she was off until Christmas. It's lonely with only my weird little African grey parrot, who mixed up her normal cawing like crows, meowing like cats, and constant shouting of "Step up!" (her one tried-and-true English phrase) with a perfectly-enunciated "Whatever!" this morning. Her "whatever!" was delightfully dismissive, obviously modeled after cynical tween Iris uber Alles, and I wished Iris and Lola had been here to hear it.

This fall I've been on a health kick, eating lightly and exercising heavily. The heavy exercise fell by the wayside the week before Thanksgiving, which was the second week I had the flu. The first week of the flu, I insisted on working out every single time I felt halfway decent, but I noticed that the next day I'd be feverish and miserable again. The second week, I decided to try rest. It's not clear whether either of those strategies helped, keeping fit or resting, but eventually the flu faded away, leaving me free to return to my rigorous exercise schedule, but my healthy eating regime was felled by the Thanksgiving fabulosity and a round of parties.

So how healthy was my Thanksgiving?

Slices of pie eaten: only 2, but each with lots of fresh whipped cream

Exercise over Thanksgiving weekend: strong, hard workouts on 3 days; milder exercise one other day (we took the children on a hike up Mt. Davidson. Iris complained strenuously all the way. "This is unfair!" she shouted, while I thought to myself, "What is unfair is that I am trying to drag my hangover up this steep hill and I have to listen to yer friggin' whining all the way"). One day of absolutely no exercise (Thanksgiving itself).

Cocktail parties attended: two

Hangovers: two (but one was so mild as to be barely noticeable)

Black Friday shopping done: NONE! YES! I hate crowds and crazed commercialism!

Number of pomegranate margaritas drunk on Thanksgiving Day itself: unclear, but definitely more than my share of the pitcher.

Days of overeating: two, but it could have been a lot worse.

I'm afraid to weigh myself. I lost thirty pounds this fall, and it's going to devastate me if much of it sneaked back on. Sigh. It's good for my healthy regime to have Thanksgiving over, but there's no denying that it was delightful and no one really wanted it to end. Even the children got along for the most part, except for one terrible evening when a convenience store owner gave Lola a free Toblerone because she is so damn cute. Sibling rivalry caused horrible, heartfelt tears to flow as some children never get Toblerones from strangers due to cuteness, and the tears weren't even eased by the kindness of the cute child generously turning over a full half of the Toblerone to the unchocolated sibling.

Onward, towards Christmas.

our Thanksgiving

2011-11-24T21:59:00.000-08:00

This was the best Thanksgiving meal I've ever cooked. It wasn't the most elaborate. That will probably always be the year I made curried risotto in little pumpkins. That required using a power drill to hack open the stubborn little pumpkins (thus I learned that jack-o'lantern pumpkins are very different from pumpkins sold for eating), which we cleaned and rubbed with butter and garlic and then baked in stages, as we couldn't fit many in our oven at once. That same Thanksgiving I made celebrity chef Hubert Keller's vegetarian faux caviar, served in eggshells, which meant, before even starting to make the faux caviar, painstakingly blowing out and cleaning eggs. I served those caviar eggs in an egg carton I'd spray-painted chrome. There were also multiple desserts and side dishes, but primarily what I remember is those damn pumpkins.

So why was this one the best? Because it was a wonderful festive meal, but it was effortless to make. Of course, my darling Aga was a big part of it: I used all three ovens. The Aga was the key to the success of the one fussy thing I made, a mustard-onion monkey bread which tends to burn on the top before the bottom is done even if you put tinfoil over the top. Now that I have a fancy European range, I can cook monkey bread in an oven heated only from below, and the result is perfection.

Our menu:

Lantulaatikko (rutabaga pudding)
Tofurky (haters gotta hate, but we love it) with roasted vegetables
Garlic mashed potatoes
Green beans cooked in Ketel One
Monkey bread
Homemade cranberry sauce

Pomegranate margaritas and Martinelli sparkling cider

Cranberry-raisin pie with fresh whipped cream

My only regret? I went to the trouble last year of saving my Tofurky feast box all damn year long and taking it to Burning Man and having it photographed by the Man in all his neon-lit glory. Why did I do that? Because the Tofurky box always has pictures of people who took the box on their vacation, and those pictures are always lame. I thought a Burning Man photo would be sure to make it on the box. AND MY FRIENDS WHO TOOK THE PICTURE NEVER SENT IT TO ME. I love all my Burning Man friends with a passion, adore them, but you cannot rely upon them to send you yer photo of the Tofurky box in front of the Man. And thus we had a bitter moment, the children and I, looking at the dull and annoying pictures of other people taking their Tofurky boxes on their vacations when it should have displayed OUR tofurky box which went to Burning Man. I bitterly drank my pomegranate margarita and turned back to tend the monkey bread as the children ridiculed the pictures which did get on the box.

well, we got that over

2011-11-22T18:30:00.000-08:00

I hate my birthday, and this year I had a new, proactive approach to my annual funk: hold a cocktail party which would force me to spend days preparing, rather than lying around sobbing in the throes of a deep depression. Out of my birthday phobia, I didn't tell anyone I invited it was my birthday.

This actually worked, for the most part. I slaved over my beloved Aga and made a huge mountain of food, expecting to have days of leftovers, but a swarm of friends and neighbors descended upon us and ate everything, except for the last of the homemade caramelized onion dip and homemade salsa, only because both the potato chips and tortilla chips ran out. The children joined in very kindly, calling themselves "Chubby's Catering Service" and making two kinds of cookies. I objected to the name, saying everyone would assume that it was a slam on my weight, but the children asserted that it referred only to the generous size of their cookies and gratuitously flattered me with compliments to my size and shape.

The poor Sober Husband, still recovering from the debacle of giving me soup bowls for our anniversary, gave me an AC/DC cd (win!), necklace shaped like a caffeine molecule (also a win! but I still want the LSD molecule necklace), and ... a pair of slippers which turned out to be lined with real fur. From real dead lambs. This was a difficult moment, as I truly did not want to return to the awkwardness of us fighting over a well-intentioned gift. I tried to make nice facial expressions while the poor mortified Sober Husband swept the slippers away and vowed to return them.

At our cocktail party, I had so much fun I did that horribly obnoxious thing I haven't done since I was in college, making people prod my gym-toned muscles. "Look! Feel my quads!" I commanded. "What is a 'quad'?" asked an old Burning Man friend.

Finally the birthday was over. Next year I may need to deploy this same strategy again.

annual funk

2011-11-20T10:28:00.000-08:00

I really, really hate my birthday. It triggers an annual depression, stemming from a lot of things in my early life.

This year I've been largely successful at minimizing the depression by distracting myself as much as possible, but here the day is, and all I want to do is curl up in a dark corner and cry. Can't wait until the day is over.

the anniversary debacle

2011-11-11T12:07:00.000-08:00

This week the Sober Husband and I reached another milestone, our 13th wedding anniversary. I like the number 13 and it felt auspicious. Additionally, we've been getting along like gangbusters lately. My solo trip to Burning Man really sparked up our already-lively marriage, and overall the fall has been well-nigh unbearable for nearby onlookers, with the two of us likely to break out in a display of public affection at any moment. So you would expect this anniversary to have been pretty damn delightful.

The first problem came when I took Iris for a flu shot at the flu clinic so conveniently held at her school. I needed to drive down the peninsula and pick her up early that same day to take her to the upscale girl-boy dance classes she wanted to take and now bitches bitterly about, so nipping in for a flu shot was a no-brainer since I'd be on campus already. By bedtime, I was feverish, with an aching head and aching joints. By the next morning, I was miserably ill. A week later, I'm still feverish and achy and miserable.

The Sober Husband is handsome, brilliant, funny, brave, resourceful, industrious, and generous. However, he completely sucks as a caretaker for a grown-up (or at least for me). If I'm sick, he'll dote on the children, making them dinner every night (their choice: Ramen or spaghetti with Ragu sauce), but it does not occur to him that I might want a meal as well. Similarly it does not occur to him to buy anything for me to eat, although he will nip out to the store to get supplies for chocolate milk, Ramen, and spaghetti for the children. While I've had this miserable flu, I've survived off popcorn and lost five pounds.

As one can imagine, being hungry and tired of eating popcorn makes a sick person crabby. By the time our anniversary rolled around, I was in a foul mood. Meanwhile the Sober Husband had a crisis: he keeps a folder of gift ideas for me, and he left it on Caltrain. So, at the very last minute, without any ideas (and without asking me for any), he picked up some beige soup bowls at Pottery Barn as my anniversary present. Meanwhile I'd gotten him something way back in September, which I'd kept hidden.

The bowls irked me. They seemed to be sending me a message: "get in the kitchen and make me some soup." That wasn't a stretch, because I'd made a big pot of a very fussy, pain-in-the-ass-to-make soup a couple of times recently, and the Sober Husband wasn't shy about complaining that there hadn't been enough of it. The first batch I made for a friend who was conducting a deathbed vigil for a dying parent, and I kept out just a bowl's worth for my husband. He complained plentifully about not getting enough of this magical soup, and my response was, "You want me to go down there and take it back from the death vigil house? No way!" The second batch I made after hearing plenty of complaining that there hadn't been enough of the first batch. When I looked at the gift bowls, they seemed to be screaming, "Get outta yer sickbed and start roasting those four different kinds of peppers", and they annoyed me.

My reaction, which I tried to mute, pissed even me off. It led me into a spiral of shame and guilt. "What kind of a horrible person can't accept a gift gracefully?" I pondered. "God, I suck." I apologized to the Sober Husband for not being a more gracious recipient, but he was still upset that I hadn't liked his gift.

He ran out and got me a small bouquet of flowers as an afterthought, to compensate for those bowls, but the drama wasn't over. We scheduled a date night to celebrate, a couple's massage at the Nob Hill Spa, and I cancelled. I was running a fever, and I felt really horrible. On top of feeling awful, I felt it was inappropriate to expose a massage therapist to my germs. The Sober Husband was disappointed and leaned on me to go anyway, which made me feel guilty. We had to pay even though we didn't go due to the Nob Hill Spa's strict cancellation policy. This waste of money made me feel extra terrible.

Then, on top of that, a new level of hell broke out: I asked the Sober Husband if he had another gift for me, because I wanted to know whether to give him the second gift I had for him or not. He got quite angry, because of course he didn't have a damn thing and was still secretly pissed I hadn't liked the bowls. At this point, he said I'd done "emotional violence" to him over the bowls (I really tried to accept them nicely, and I apologized for being unenthusiastic). To make a point to me, he left work early, returned the bowls, and gave me a $600 handcrafted necklace I'd admired before, even though I'd said on the phone, "Don't spend that much. We can't afford it right now."

Of course I can't keep the $600 necklace; it's not in our budget this month (especially since we're paying for those expensive massages we didn't get), and I would never enjoy wearing it. It would forever remind me of my selfishness, inability to accept those stupid soup bowls, and profligacy. And, as Lola and Iris said, "It looks a lot like that other necklace you have." It's not that different from other pieces I already own. So it's turned into a pesky, unpleasant errand, returning the duplicative necklace.

Meanwhile the Sober Husband LOVED one of the presents I gave him (although he rejected the other one as "too scary"). "It's perfect!" he exclaimed, and he wasn't exaggerating. I knew months ago what to get him. "But you ended up without a gift," he said, "and your birthday is coming up. I can't get you a gift for your birthday. I can't." My displeasure with the damn bowls (which I explained weren't a present for me, they were a present for the people who'd be using them to eat soup they wanted me to make them) has given him a present-giving block.

It's a wonder two people, who are still very much in love after thirteen years of marriage, two children, and several mortgages can have such a horrible anniversary. Given that my birthday is traditionally a day of great unhappiness and depression, I can hardly wait for it, especially now I know that my husband plans on getting nothing for me.

you may find this hard to believe

2011-11-05T18:32:00.000-07:00

I quit playing Warcraft, and I've been exercising like a fiend.

No, really. Not joking. I may even change the ancient description at the top of this blog, where it says I don't get enough exercise.

What happened? First, my raid team, which had seemed like a solid group of mature players with good sense of humor, fell apart in a sudden onset of drama. Without a raid team, there didn't seem much point in grinding away on my main character, making money and running the daily dungeons. After all, I'd been playing Warcraft for something like four years, usually for several hours a day. At some point, it's time to take a break.

Sadly I miss it. I've come close to logging back in many times. And I don't have a replacement hobby or game. So what have I been doing to fill my time? Working out and talking to my husband, who says, "You're much more interactive as a wife now that you don't play Warcraft."

Iris, nosily reading over my shoulder as I write, says "Put in there that EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED. Because I have a new school, and I'm learning the trombone." She's also learning Japanese now and has taken a very superior attitude to her little sister, once shaming her by saying, "You don't even know how to label the axes on a linear graph! You can't graph!"

Meanwhile the Sober Husband and little Lola continue the same as ever, except that Lola's school has adopted a new practice of "mindfulness." The children must meditate and write in a "mindfulness journal", drawing pictures of themselves "being mindful", and Iris views it all with suspicion. "She's being taken into a cult!" Lola hates mindfulness, hates it with a passion, but Iris still worries.

the guilt trip

2011-10-29T18:12:00.001-07:00

Tonight, barring acts of God, the Sober Husband and I will leave the children at a friend's house and drop by a party for a while. This troubled the children, even though they love the friend in question.

"I just want to get out of the house sometimes," I said. Turning to the Sober Husband, I said, "You spend all day in Mountain View. So when you come home, you like to stay home, because you're not there as much."

The Sober Husband made a face. "I think you are romanticizing my day." Putting on a fake voice, he ridiculed me extensively: "Oh, look, here I am in glamorous Mountain View! It's a magical land, called Mountain View!"

"What I mean is you get out of the house!"

Lola pointed out, "You can get out of the house. Just take us!" The children agreed that this was the optimal way for me to proceed, to never go anywhere without them.

Iris took it further: "By wanting to go out without us, YOU ARE REJECTING US. You are saying you don't enjoy our company!" Building up a head of steam, she continued in that vein for some time.

"We are rejects!" mourned little Lola.

"God, what a guilt trip!" I said. "I have been a stay-at-home parent for OVER TWELVE YEARS, and I have spent more time with you little freaks than any other child has had with its parent!"

Lola took the point. "I apologize for any trips, guilts, tripping guilts, or guilting trips I have given you at any time."

We drove home with relative parent-child peace, until conflict broke out over a certain child reaching across the center of the backseat into the other child's territory. "And you wonder why I want to go out without you!" I said sharply.

oh! wad some power the giftie gie us to see oursel's as ithers see us

2011-10-20T19:31:00.000-07:00

I went out for drinks the other night with Michele, my longest-term friend in San Francisco. We've known each other since the mid-eighties, when we were both hot young punkish things. As we made our way through a number of drinks down at the Rite Spot, the poet Burns' wish to learn how others perceive us came true for me, with the added bonus of seeing how others perceive my chosen mate, the Sober Husband.

Part I. Michele and I were holding forth in fine fettle, and a man drinking near us remarked to me, with great emphasis, "I like you. You say what people think but are too polite to say."

I was rather nonplussed at that. I always think of myself as polite. But Michele roared. "That's Carole! She's always so brash!"

Part II. Whenever I get intoxicated and get into a long, drawn-out conversation with a hitherto-unknown man, I always talk about the Sober Husband a lot. It's a reflex. It's largely not needed (it's not as if people hit upon me nowadays with the frequency they did a decade ago), but it's a habit I can't get out of.

Somehow this reflex of mine led to Michele describing the Sober Husband to our new found drinking companion. "He's very generous, makes a lot of money, is socially awkward, and has good hair," she said.

"Good hair?" asked our new friend. "French hair or Italian hair?"

"Jewish hair!"

"But in a Jewfro?" Our friend made a face of disgust.

"No, he cuts it really short."

I was silent during this lively exchange about my life companion's hair, due to a bit of shock over "socially awkward." Is that really one of the first things that comes to mind when one thinks about my husband? I usually start with "tall" or "brilliant."

I couldn't deny that there was some truth to it, though. The Sober Husband himself is quick to admit that he often misses the social nuances in any setting. Sometimes that's handy, as often he completely doesn't notice that someone is hitting on him. For example, at a recent dinner party, a single mother was coming onto him strong, having dismissed me entirely as a featherweight loser based upon my stay-at-home-mother status. I however came roaring back, arguing her into submission in a strong debate about the subject she devotes her life and career to, ending with her trying to save face, murmuring "I should talk to you about this more some other time" while the Sober Husband himself, the subject of this little cerebral pissing match, wandered off obliviously into another room. In the car on the way home I explained the nuances to him: "It was like when guys are trying to see who has the biggest dick, but it was women trying to see who has the biggest brain. I have the biggest brain! I have the biggest brain!"

But yet sometimes the man has James Bond-like savoir faire. I will never forget the time when we stumbled into a very nice restaurant on a cold, rainy night, to be confronted with other cold, wet, hungry couples waiting crankily by the maitre d's station. The Sober Husband, with amazing presence, made his way to the maitre d and understatedly said, "My wife and I would like a table," shaking the maitre d's hand in a manly way. To my surprise, within two minutes the maitre d said, "I've found your reservation" and whisked us off to a very good table, leaving behind all the cold, wet people who'd been there for God knows how long. Laughing, my loved one admitted that he'd secretly passed a folded up twenty to the maitre d' when they shook hands.

I've seen that trick play out on other occasions, the suave passing of the hidden twenty, and it never fails to achieve its goal. "Did they teach that to you, growing up in Chicago?" I've asked. It always leaves me weak at the knees.

And then again he has flashes of brilliance in the field of romance. There was the time he wanted to get me a $1,000 gift certificate at my favorite clothing store, but he instead got it for $1,072.50 to account for sales tax. (Everyone who worked at that store wanted to see who the femme fatale was who had inspired a man to get the single biggest gift certificate ever known there, and every one of them looked at me with disbelief when she found out who it was. I suppose they were expecting Angelina Jolie). And again there was the recent time when I was angry and sulking in the shower, and he climbed into the shower, fully dressed, to embrace me. No other suitor has ever equalled these moments of romantic excellence.

So is the man "socially awkward"? I suppose so, but with areas of surprising genius. And am I rude? Perhaps so, perhaps so.

the eternal mystery surrounding my friend N.

2011-10-18T20:11:00.000-07:00

Right before I went to Burning Man with my friend N., the Sober Husband was puzzling over childcare options for my absence. In general I was not helping him figure things out. Besides the fact that I was pretty damn busy with my last-minute Burning Man preparations, my philosophy was that I have covered 99.9% of the childcare to date, and so he's due. Also, I bore a grudge for a couple of years after I had to find childcare for my own hospitalizations and surgeries when I was seriously, severely, on-the-brink-of-death ill. Finally, I felt that he'd appreciate my regular, everyday presence more if he had to scramble to make up for it. However, I did throw him a bone. I suggested that he ask my friend N. if her new au pair would be available while the two of us were off at Burning Man.

The Sober Husband went off to telephone N. I noticed he was speaking loudly and repeating himself frequently. Eventually he came into the room and reported with disgust, "She isn't going to remember a word of that tomorrow. She was high as a kite."

When we said our fond farewells the morning I was leaving, the Sober Husband carefully instructed me, "Don't let N. drive if she is high." He looked me sternly in the eye to emphasize this. "If she's smoking, don't let her drive!"

During our long drive to the desert, N. mentioned, "[Sober Husband] was really strange on the phone the other night. He kept repeating himself."

I burst out laughing. "He said you were 'high as a kite'!"

N. was chagrined. "I was sober!"

It turns out this is a recurrent problem for N. The other day we had lunch together, and N. recounted more incidents of people, like the Sober Husband, mistakenly assuming she was high. "Make sure [Sober Husband] doesn't think I'm always high," she instructed me. "I don't know why everyone thinks I"m such a stoner," she mourned. "Is it because I'm so mellow?"

having a very hard time

2011-10-16T18:49:00.000-07:00

I took in a litter of very small foster kittens, just barely three weeks old, and two of them have died. I sat up from two a.m. 'til six a.m. last night, being with the one named "Yertle" as she passed away. I gave her our last-chance-Lazarus kitten treatment, which consists of subcutaneous fluids, a hotpad, and some Karo syrup on her gums (and which really does work at times to pull a little kitten back from the brink of death), but I knew there really was no hope. I stayed by her side until it was all over, in case having me there was comforting. She had loved me, after all.

Lately it seems I can't get along with anyone and I can't keep my kittens alive. I'm having a very hard time focusing on the positive side in life.

I did drag the rest of the family down to the Occupy San Francisco march, as part of the 99% "National Day of Action", but the children, as always, wore their favorite and completely inappropriate footwear (Oprah flipflops for one and tiny, battered shoes long outgrown and replaced but repeatedly fished out of the trash for the other child), leading to multiple complaints of foot pain. The Sober Husband and I squabbled tiresomely about what the goals of the Occupy Wall Street movement are and whether anything was likely to be accomplished, and life seemed so dreary, full of hurting feet and little arguments.

a rough day, a lousy date

2011-10-13T20:09:00.000-07:00

For a variety of reasons, I'm as crabby as all get out today. Last night the Sober Husband and I had one of our semi-occasional date nights. I'd actually planned our favorite date evening-- dinner and a play at one of our favorite small local theatres -- so spirits were running high. However, during the play the Sober Husband got a text message from our babysitter saying that a bug got into the house and that Lola was in hysterics. A later text message said that quite a few bugs were coming into the house, crawling under the door jamb from the backyard.

Up until now this had been a lovely date. The day itself had been dreadful for me (I was stuck at home with Iris, who was running a fever and crabby), and I needed an outing. We'd been revisiting an old plan, to ditch the poor children with some chump and fly off together to Barcelona for a much-needed romantic vacation. We even have enough frequent flier miles for one free ticket to Europe. We'd had a lovely dinner at a place with a lot of romantic significance from our earliest dating days, before the play. But after the text, the Sober Husband immediately became cold, withdrawn, preoccupied, and judgmental. While he was texting during intermission, I bought myself a beer, and he then accused me of drinking too much. "Two and a half beers over four hours?" I said incredulously. "That's too much?" He wanted to get back home to Lola, and I was irked. "It's just a bug. I want to see the end of the play."

Noticing our conflict, a snoopy usher said, in a failure at sotto voce, "She sure is high-strung." I dumped the undrunk beer into the recycling container and stalked off. "Leave me alone!" I hissed at the Sober Husband. "I guess we aren't going to Barcelona, since we can't even get through a three-act Edward Albee play."

At home, I tried to just go to sleep and, as Shakespeare so wisely noted, let sleep knit up the ravell'd sleeve of care, but then the independently wealthy fellow who bought that horrible modern house on our block started up his giant Tesla coil. Evidently the man has hired some Burning Man type to build him a massive Tesla coil, and, being a man of independent means who can sleep whenever he wants, he only enjoys playing with it very late at night, in front of his house (and I happen to know he has a small backyard he could use). On a prior occasion I sent the Sober Husband out to find out the cause of the hellacious racket, only to get the report, "That guy has a giant Tesla coil. It's really cool. We talked about Tesla coils. I told him how I used to build them in college." Last night around midnight I freaked and ran out, in my sushi print pajamas and bare feet, and told my very rich neighbor that "MY ALARM IS GOING OFF IN SIX HOURS" and "DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW MUCH NOISE YOU ARE MAKING??" He, defensively, said, "[Sober Husband] said it was cool] and "[Sober Husband] didn't say it was too noisy." I wanted to say, "FUCK [SOBER HUSBAND]", but refrained. Instead, in the delicate tones which years of law school and litigation taught me, I informed my rich neighbor that it was far too late to be making such a hellish racket when the rest of us have early-morning obligations, and then I stalked off with as much dignity as possible for a middle-aged, barefoot woman wearing flannel pajamas with little pictures of sushi all over them.

And now today, for no reason, events are conspiring to remind me nonstop of my first marriage. At my gym, "Love Will Tear Us Apart" by the Swans was playing, the song which, stupidly enough, my ex said was "our song." Then in the car the Bryan Ferry song played which my ex said was the only thing which could comfort him the first time we broke up. These are both fairly obscure old songs which a person could spend a decade without running across, so the coincidence seemed odd. Then yet another old song with particular sentimental significance from that failed marriage came on the radio. I changed the channel with vehemence, while my own current Tesla-coil loving spouse sat, aloof and unnoticing in the passenger's seat.

urban life and how it is enhanced by a certain semi-suicidal outlook

2011-10-05T09:24:00.000-07:00

Episode I: Not too long ago the Sober Husband, the children and I were walking home from the Castro, when we passed some homeless people on the benches at Harvey Milk plaza. That's a completely normal experience, but what happened next wasn't. One of the street people -- a very unclean and unhappy looking man in his twenties -- got up off the bench and came up to me, pleading. "I really need a hug," he said, fixing me with a really crazed look and ignoring the Sober Husband at my side. I hesitated briefly, and the thought that this guy was going to stab me entered my mind. Ignoring that thought, I opened my arms and let the homeless person hug me. He clung to me gratefully, tearing up and burying his filthy head in my shoulder. After what felt like a very long time I disentangled myself from him. The man said sincerely, 'Thank you! I needed that so much!" and kept calling out his gratitude as we walked away.

"I thought that guy was going to stab you," said the Sober Husband as we walked out of earshot.

"I kinda thought that, too," I said, "but I decided to give him a a chance. After all, I was probably the only maternal figure available to him."

"You're very brave," said the Sober Husband approvingly.

Episode II: Recently I was walking home from working out at the gym, walking up a hilly, quiet, dark residential street. A cab began to follow me, driving slowly up ahead of me, waiting until I got close again, and then jumping ahead a bit. This went on. Obviously the cab wasn't looking for my business, or it would have pulled up next to me and asked if I wanted a cab. It was equally obvious that I was the object of its attention, because there were no other pedestrians on the street. And obviously it wasn't just trolling for business, because just a block over lay a street chock full of restaurants, bars, and cafes which would be full of cab-craving drunks. Clearly something creepy was going on. The prior weekend I'd taken several cabs, and I thought back to that time. I didn't think I'd undertipped or insulted the cabbies or left anything behind (indeed I'd bonded with a Filipino cabby, professing my deep and unswerving love of the Philippines).

During one of the cab's odd leapfrogs of me, a car honked irritably as the cab suddenly stopped to wait for me, without putting on its blinkers. I assessed the situation. I was carrying a largeish, heavy bag, which contained, among other things, a sturdy metal drinking bottle full of water and a large hardback book. I decided that if I swung that bag as hard as I could at either the cab or its driver, the odds were pretty good I could break a side window or a nose, depending. I continued up the hill, holding my bag in a ready position. At the crest of the 17th Street hill, at the big complicated and well-lit intersection, the cab was lying again in wait for me, but as I caught up, heavy bag at the ready, suddenly the cab changed its mind and cut across three lanes of traffic illegally, racing in the opposite direction from me and causing many, many cars to honk crazily in protest. "Huh," I thought. "Changed his mind." I walked down the hill without seeing the cab again.

At home, the Sober Husband was alarmed by this story. "Did you get the cab's number? Let's call the cab company." I hadn't bothered to pay attention to the cab's license plate number; I'd only prepared myself mentally for potential pedestrian-cab violence. The Sober Husband was a little nonplussed at my outlook. I confided, "Urban life is actually easier when you're still just a little bit suicidal."

just like in the movies

2011-10-02T20:25:00.000-07:00

I was upset with the Sober Husband over something he'd said, something rather amazing in its oblivious insensitivity, and I was sulking in the shower. The Sober Husband came in to talk to me around the shower curtain but then realized how upset I was. "I'm coming in," he said, but I refused. "There's not much hot water left, anyhow," I said. "It'll run out by the time you're ready to get in."

He paid no attention to that and, after setting down his iPhone on the sink, climbed into the shower fully dressed and put his arms around me. Of course I couldn't stay upset as he got drenched in his button-down shirt and Levi's.

"It's like something from a rom-com," I said as the shower poured over us and we kissed.

who is the grown-up?

2011-10-02T19:48:00.000-07:00

Twelve year-old Iris peered superciliously over my shoulder as I was downloading "Pumped Up Kicks" by Foster the People. "That's a song about shootings at a mall," said Iris judgmentally.

"Actually, it's about school shootings, and I still like it," I said crankily.

Iris sneered.

"I like the song, Iris," I protested, but her disgust was unmoving.

International Day of the Lola

2011-10-01T08:25:00.000-07:00

Unbelievable as it may sound, Lola turns nine today. As the Sober Husband said mournfully, "She's halfway to eighteen."

All praise the Queen of the Passive-Aggressives (as beloved commenter Silliyak once dubbed her)!

security husbands and impulse ink

2011-09-29T18:45:00.000-07:00

I'm just back again, from another solo trip. Even though only a few weeks had gone by since I'd just abandoned my poor husband and children to run away to Burning Man, my first true solo vacation since meeting the Sober Husband, I once again callously left the poor things alone to fly up to Seattle (neglecting the poor old readers as well). This trip was poorly timed, given that poor Lola hadn't even recovered from her mother's Burning Man absence, but I felt obligated to make it. My mother (traveling from Texas), beloved aunt (traveling from Maine), and a friend from high school (flying up from LA) were all going to be in the Seattle area at the same time.

This trip was harder than Burning Man, paradoxically. I found myself missing the temperate influence of the Sober Husband, who truly does keep me on an even keel. I know it seems to so many people that the two of us are a pair of misfits, completely ill-suited to each other and constantly squabbling, but he truly is my security husband. There's a small, odd thing we do, where I put my hand on his bare stomach under his shirt, which calms us both down completely, even if we're so angry either of us could happily sever the other's carotid artery with our own teeth. We've been together now for about fifteen years, squabbling and stomach-touching and rolling our eyes at each other all the way, and for a mouthy independent feminist, I have certainly become pretty damn dependent upon him.

On the bright side, a trip away from my security blanket of a husband gave me a great opportunity to get an impulse tattoo. The man hates tattoos in general and mine in particular, but I really wanted one to cover up some scars. I browsed the art of an adorable young woman in a trendy tattoo shop in the U-district, but it was my mother who got a recommendation for a great old-school tattoo artist from someone in the International District. Luckily this fabulous artist had an open slot on a weekday, and soon I was under the needle.

I learned something which should have been blindingly obvious: I have a much higher pain threshold if I'm being tattooed by a dangerously attractive man, especially one who whispers in my ear while he's working that he's going to tear up the flash art for my tattoo so no one else can ever get that same tattoo again. Usually two-three hours under the needle is more than enough for me, but I spent nearly six hours, getting the new tattoo and also two old ones touched up, and I could have easily done more. "You thought I couldn't get this all done," I smugly bragged, and my artist sweetly said, "Sometimes you're surprised that a soldier walks in the door."

Back home again, the Sober Husband was a good sport about the extra art. "I can tell it makes you happy," he said gallantly. That was a far cry from his reaction several years ago when I got a piece on my right arm, when he was spitting mad. Absence must make the tattoo-hating heart grow fonder.

quote du jour

2011-09-18T11:30:00.002-07:00

Eight year-old Lola says, "I feel like a person in a Guatemala prison right now... but less unhappy."

the slow, sad re-acclimation

2011-09-17T10:22:00.000-07:00

I'm not transitioning into Real Life easily after my sojourn at Burning Man. It's a common problem amongst Burners, a real cliche, but that doesn't make it easier for me.

And could you blame me? Here's a little snapshot of my vacation at Burning Man: I'm sitting in my shade shelter with my friend N., who accompanied me to Burning Man, as well as some new friends we made out on the playa. One of our new friends is massaging my poor, dust-tortured feet with lotion. We're drinking chilled cava. Someone actually asks me to explain the differences between cava, sparkling wine, and champagne (virtually never does anyone want to hear me prattle on about this sort of academic alcohol knowledge). Two good-looking men get into a debate over which one of them should get to fix my bike. One wins by informing the other firmly, "I will fix her bike. You rub her feet." My friend N. laughs and says, "Is there anything else you need, Mistress?" A new acquaintance of ours, a family physician from the Deep South who is at Burning Man for the first time, is speechless and stares, jaw visibly dropping open, as my friends trade places and one goes off to fix my bike while the other spends about forty-five minutes thoroughly massaging my feet. I just take another sip of my cava and lean back more deeply in my chair.

And here's a little snapshot of me back at home: I loaned the Sober Husband my car for the day, so he could attend an important, transit-unfriendly meeting after work, and I'm trying to get between little Lola's school and the pick-up point for the bus from Iris's new school by mass transit. The bus I was counting on vanished from the schedule (I later learned this was due to another one of those horrible Anonymous protests downtown). I call the Sober Husband on my cellphone and vent. "I can't get Iris on time! Muni's fucking me over, and there are no cabs anywhere!" If I don't get there in time, Iris will be driven back down the peninsula to her fancy new school, and I will be assessed a fancy new fee.

A poor, beleaguered middle-aged person can't help but pine for the dusty playa.

not a cat whisperer

2011-09-11T05:31:00.000-07:00

The other day I was standing on the sidewalk and crankily shouting at the children as we arrived home after school (why won't they get out of the car when we come home, without being told one million times to get out of the friggin' car, and why won't they pick up their thousands of tiny possessions? Mysteries of life, mysteries of life). As the children in their snail-like way slowly, slowly, slowly opened their car doors and slowly, slowly, slowly unbuckled their seatbelts and slowly, slowly, slowly picked up their school things, I wandered over to chat to my neighbor, B., who had the air of one who wanted a word with me.

"Are you missing a cat?" he asked.

"No, I saw all three today."

An incredulous pause followed. It is difficult for my neighbor, B., to believe that I have only three cats. True, I have had as many as five permanent cats, and with foster cats, the number has sometimes slipped up into double digits. But these days there are only three cats who live here.

B. gathered his thoughts and took a deep breath. "I think there's a cat breaking into my house again. I sense there's a cat in the attic."

"Well, if it were one of mine, he'd come back out again."

"It won't let me look at it, but I sense it's up there."

A discussion ensued of all of the known neighborhood cats and which one might torment B. by going into his house (my own Henry has been known to spend quality time in B.'s garage). Finally the children were lurching up the steps to the house, squabbling amongst themselves as they went. I reassured B. "Let me know if you want me to come over and look up there for you. If there is a cat there, Iris and I can catch it."

B. shook his head sadly. The children and I went into our own house, where our cats frolicked about our feet.

wait, wait, wait

2011-09-07T20:40:00.000-07:00

Tonight one of my favorite dads from Lola's school said to me, nervously, "If you don't mind, Carole, I'm going to wait to call you until Burning Man wears off. You're kind of scaring me right now."

laughter is not so medicinal around here

2011-09-07T03:02:00.001-07:00

After the children finally went to bed, I was sipping a glass of red wine in bed and talking to the Sober Husband. He made an ill-timed witticism which made me guffaw exactly as I was swallowing a big mouthful of wine. A large amount of very tannic red wine went down the wrong way (why couldn't this have happened while I was having an innocuous glass of water?? Or even my usual friggin' sparkling wine?)

I spent the next forty-five minutes hacking, retching, and gasping for air while the Sober Husband reassured the disturbed children. Hours later my throat still burns. It was a really full-bodied red, alas (and funnily enough the label touts this particular wine as "a ballbuster").

After I was able to breathe somewhat normally again, I remembered how Iris uber Alles once read in one of those weird fact compendiums children love so much about how many people die laughing. "I want to die laughing! How do people die laughing?" she'd say, over and over again. The next time she brings that up, I'm going to say, with new insight, "Oh no, you do not. Drowning is so much nicer."

Burning Man

2011-09-05T21:41:00.000-07:00

It. Was. Frigging. Amazing.

More later, my dears.

did you ever want to do an interactive art piece at Burning Man without having to go there?

2011-08-26T14:37:00.000-07:00

Once again I'm heading out to Burning Man, to pad around barefoot in the dust and marvel at world-class works of art, to make champagne cocktails for my campmates, and hopefully to keep my tent and shade structure erect no matter what storms come. (Meanwhile the Sober Husband, who will be holding down the fort at home, vows that he will turn the house into a model of cleanliness and order. Poor Pigwidgeon the dimwitted parrot will be restricted to her cage, and the children will be performing much more housework than normal. The children quailed at this pronouncement).

I have an offer to make the readers: send me interesting mail at Burning Man, and I will do something artistic with it and document it here, giving you due credit. It's your chance to join the premier interactive performance art festival without having to drive all the way out to the middle of the Nevada Desert, get dirt on your clothes, or risk seeing hippies in person (incidentally despite what "South Park" says, Burning Man isn't a hippie event. It's no Grateful Dead concert; it draws more of a Wired magazine type. It's not surprising to me that Jeff Bezos held a staff retreat there).

Many of you are devoted readers indeed, and how do I reward you? Aside from the occasional "Comment of the Week", I don't. Here's yer chance!

How to play: mail your thing to

Hass (Carole)
c/o BRCPO 2.0 in the 9:00 Plaza
Undercity
5:30 & D
Black Rock City, NV 89412

The sooner, the better, as Burning Man ends on Labor Day.

love, the DH

p.s. Do not send me anything which would get me arrested. That is all I ask.

the Apocalypse is here, plus quotes from Iris and Lola

2011-08-25T09:58:00.000-07:00

Yesterday the Sober Husband came to me with a grave, drawn expression. "Steve Jobs just resigned," he said in tragic tones.

I understood his angst. The man is a diehard Apple enthusiast, an early adapter to each new fabulous iProduct to come along. "Who will make our next thing?" I said sadly to him. "We had iPod, iPad, and iPhone, but will we ever get a new iThing to love?" We took a moment to honor Steve Jobs's contributions to the world.

At roughly the same time the Sober Husband came in with his somber news, a number of friends of mine had turned to Facebook to express their feelings about Steve Jobs. But that was nothing compared to the newspaper this morning. The Chronicle treated Jobs's retirement as though it were Armageddon. Virtually the entire front page was given over to it, with huge headlines and giant fonts that reminded me a lot of the Pearl Harbor Chronicle front page which hangs on the wall down at my favorite bar. "Look," I said to the Sober Husband. "It's World War III! It's the apocalypse! It's a zombie war! Steve Jobs is stepping down!"

People, how will we survive??

Iris and Lola's bright spirits remain undaunted (although they are so devoted to their iPad, which is known in the household as "Mr. Pad", that they should be mourning). Yesterday we went to the Santa Cruz boardwalk in honor of Iris's birthday, and they rode together in harmony on a variety of nausea-inducing rides. Only the Ferris wheel broke up what was, until then, a day of unprecedented sibling harmony. Iris was upset that Lola had rocked their car. "I didn't mind being stuck up high," she said, "Until Lola was rocking it! She kept rocking it, which is forbidden, and she said, 'I am a bachelor and this is my pad!'"

She got little parental support. "Iris," I said, "What part of, 'Lola is a bachelor, and that is her pad' do you not understand?"

Iris took the point well. She did see the humor in Lola's phrasing. Or maybe she was just in a good mood from getting presents and being taken to Santa Cruz. The day before she'd been quite impatient with little Lola. I give you, without comment, a verbatim partial transcript of a conversation that went on for what felt like to me, the only grownup in the house at the time, many long hours:

Eight year-old Lola: "That is so demented!"

Iris: "Stop using the word 'demented'! You keep saying everything is demented! It gets old!"

'That is a perfectly good word! The government uses it all the time!"

"The government does not call things demented!"

"Yes, it does! All the time!" Lola then listed a variety of things which allegedly the U.S. government has denounced as "demented."

A short silence followed, broken by Lola saying to herself, "No way! No fucking way!"

Iris: "Stop saying that! You're not supposed to say that! Momdude, did you hear what Lola said?"

Lola (with especial relish): "No fucking way! No fucking way!"

decisions, decisions

2011-08-18T09:22:00.000-07:00

As lifetime members of Burning Man, the Sober Husband and I get two tickets every year. This year I'm giving his ticket to our friend N., who was on the fence about going to Burning Man until the event sold out. Then she realized she did want to run away from her responsibilities to pad around in the dust but she thought it was too late, and I was happy to be able to inform her that I still had the extra ticket.

However, people are getting more and more creative in their attempts to wheedle tickets out of those of us who have them. A very special offer has been passed along to me, for my consideration:

In exchange for your Burning Man ticket, I offer you the extraordinary experience of having your DNA activated to its full energetic potential, up to 24 strands, your youth and vitality chromosomes activated, your abundance gene activated, your death gene de-activated and reimprinted with the pattern of immortality, your enchantment gene activated (creates harmonious relationships with anyone and everyone you wish), and your manifestation gene activated (enhances ability to create instantaneously by the power of intention). I can also deactivate and repattern any limiting belief system that is keeping you from experiencing all of the love, joy, success, and goodness you desire. This will take 2 to 3 hours, and will be permanent.

I am not fooling around. Since I've learned to do these things and practiced them on myself, my life has accelerated like a rocketship. My perception of reality has deepened, broadened, and intensified for the better, and I have more energy and stamina than I ever imagined. The activation of our DNA is a scientifically proven thing, and is happening gradually planetwide, but with the consciously focused techniques that I practice, you can put yourself on the leading edge of human evolution.

I am happy to share my gifts with you in exchange for the extraordinary opportunity to experience the magical mystical field of manifestation on the playa. I think that's a pretty good trade, don't you?

Ah, decisions, decisions. Burning Man or DNA activated to its full energetic potential and death gene de-activated?

it is a poor workman who blames her tools

2011-08-16T16:28:00.000-07:00

On Saturday the Sober Husband decided to take my knives to be sharpened. It had been a very long time since I'd had them professionally sharpened, and they needed it. The complication was that I was cooking for a dinner party that night, but for whatever reasons of his own, the Sober Husband was hellbound on sharpening the knives that very day.

I put off making the dishes that required chopping and instead made the cake while he and the knives were gone. After he came back, I moved on to the chopping. Right away I got little cuts on three fingertips. I had never touched a knife so sharp before. The professional sharpening service I'd used before didn't do anything like this. I moved on to mincing an onion. It's my habit when chopping up something fine to rest my left hand along the top of my big chef's knife, to work as a counterbalance to the heavy handle. I've never before, in decades of cooking and mincing a variety of things, hurt my left hand chopping, but then again I'd never worked with a knife fresh from Saucy Joe's mobile knifesharpening service. As I minced, the tip of the knife, sharp as a barb, went straight into my left hand, very deep into the palm. I shouted in pain. I pulled the knife out, and I shouted again.

I ran over to the sink. It hurt like hell washing my hand, the soap and water going into the inside of my hand where nothing should ever enter. I shouted, this time out of drama-queenness, until my husband finally got tired of listening to the hellish racket and came down. "I stabbed myself!" I said. "Knives should never be this sharp." I showed him my wound. It was not very long, but it was very deep. It was bleeding very heavily.

After wrapping the poor hand in a clean dishcloth, I sat on the couch and rested at the Sober Husband's insistence. "But I have to keep cooking," I said plaintively. "The guests will understand," he said firmly. "We can call for takeout or something." I took an ibuprofen. It took a very long time for the bleeding to stop. Lola ostentatiously brought me a glass of ice water, and after the bleeding finally stopped, I used the glass of ice water to ice my hand.

At this point, I looked at my hand somewhat objectively. The wound wasn't long enough for more than one or two stitches, really. There wasn't much point in going to have it sewn up. The question was more about what had happened inside the hand. I didn't think the flesh inside the hand was supposed to have knives slipping into it, and the flesh of my palm was swelling up. But what would any doctor do I could see on a Sunday afternoon do? Probably nothing, after I'd sat around waiting for hours. And I knew from reading chefs' memoirs that real, true cooks mutilate themselves all the time and don't even step out of the kitchen. I went back to work and finished all the food for the dinner party.

different perspectives

2011-08-08T21:20:00.000-07:00

The leader from my Warcraft raid wrote a description of the members of our team. I was surprised to see myself described as "the maternal figure of the team. She is quiet, for the most part, good natured, willing to help and encourage people, and someone you can go to with issues and will offer a listening ear." I'm much more accustomed to hearing myself described as "bitchy" than "quiet and good-natured." In my litigator days, I was often called "a pitbull."

Later I asked eleven year-old Iris uber Alles, "How would you describe me?"

She thought. "I'd say, 'Interested in cats, cooks a lot, plays a lot of Warcraft, good at sewing...'"

I cut her off. "That describes my interests, but not me! My personality. Like, you could say 'bitchy' or 'sweet.' It's okay to say something that's not too nice; I'm asking for it! Or something nice, like 'caring and shy.'" We took a moment to laugh about the time her little sister described the two of them as "caring and shy" and I, their hellbound mother, laughed so hard I nearly choked.

Iris thought again. "I'd say, 'Weird but surprisingly awesome.'"

"Well, the leader of my raid group described me as 'the maternal figure of the group.'"

Iris laughed uproariously. "You're the mother of the group?" Laughing harder and harder, she choked out, "YOU'RE the mother of the group? You? You? You're the MOTHER?"

My own child does not view me as a maternal figure.

sleeping with the fishes

2011-08-08T13:33:00.000-07:00

On Saturday we did something I've been wanting to do for years: we slept with the fishes as part of the Aquarium of the Bay's Shark Week. Iris and Lola and I love the Aquarium of the Bay very, very much. When Lola was a little toddler, she became besotted with the leopard sharks and sevengill sharks there, which she called respectively "Giraffey" and "Biggy." Over and over again she'd beg me to take her and on each visit, she'd cry ecstatically "Biggy! Giraffey!" at each and every sevengill and leopard shark which passed by.

The best part of the A. of the B. is the tunnel: you are surrounded by fish-filled water on three sides, as you glide through on a moving walkway. The fish have so much room to move around, and there are so many of them in this huge tank designed to replicate the San Francisco Bay. I knew that you could rent out the aquarium for the night for a largeish sum, and I had toyed with the idea of trying to organize parents to do it with me, but I'd never made a stab at gathering the funds. Then this year I was lucky enough to score us spots at the Aquarium's Shark Week sleepover.

As usual, the Sober Husband was game but reserved and not particularly enthusiastic. We started the evening with him slightly pissed off at me, as I was busy playing the World of Warcraft when he wanted me to help sort out the bedding. I defended myself. "It's a big moment in my guild, give me a minute! People have been working on this for months!" Two of the players from my guild got married in Stormwind Cathedral, which was pretty tricky given that we are Horde and Stormwind is the human capital. Hundreds of players worked together to secure the cathedral and to hold it, while others in tuxedos and party dresses listened to the solemn vows at the altar. As I tried to listen to the ceremony and the warnings over our live chat that the alliance players were getting closer to breaking through, the Sober Husband got sarcastic over my lack of caring about our shortage of sleeping bags. "Just two minutes!" I hissed.

I closed up my computer as soon as the bridal party started to file out of the cathedral, and I volunteered to go without a sleeping bag myself. "I'll wear my cat," I said, referring to my thick, heavy cat costume pajamas complete with long tail and hood with ears. "I won't need a sleeping bag." We gathered up some blankets, the two air mattresses (dating from that pre-child era where the Sober Husband and I used to go camping together), and pillows.

My one concern had been that the event might be overcrowded and noisy. I was really happy to see that there was a small, reasonable number of families. Evidently the A. of the B. knows what it is doing with these events. Even more happily, all of the children were charming and well-behaved.

Down at the A. of the B., things got off to a slowish start. We spent much of the evening in a conference room, being educated about sharks by a pair of lively naturalists and eating cheese pizza. While I was examining a display of shark teeth, a small child confided in me that he had once discovered a piece of poop in a swimming pool. Things picked up around 9:00, and we spent two hours going around the aquarium when it was virtually empty and so quiet. This was amazing for us. I love that place so much, and normally the crowds get you rushing along. With no pressure, you could really stand and gaze at the moon jellies (I'd never noticed before that there are a few mutant moon jellies, with six stomaches instead of the regulation four). Iris uber Alles most enjoyed a lot of time with the chinchillas, who were highly lively at night, as opposed to during the day, when they generally just gaze out blearily at the visitors.

Around eleven we changed into our pajamas. A sweet little girl was taken with awe and amazement by my cat outfit, and I waved my tail at her. One of the other adults was less charmed and ostentatiously whispered about me. Then we went down to the tunnel, carrying only our bedding, and settled in for the night. Virtually everyone wanted to sleep in the part where the sharks live, which was literally packed solid with no room to spare. Meanwhile we had the entire first half of the fish tunnel to ourselves entirely. The Sober Husband was particularly taken by the huge deep sea bass, while Iris and I loved the schools of anchovies (so perfect, so beautiful. It was seeing these lovely fish at the A. of the B. years ago which got me to swear off eating seafood once again).

Self-sacrificing parents as always, we gave the children the inflatable camping mattresses, and the Sober Husband and I bunked down on the hard ground. Needless to say sleep was scanty. However, lying awake in the night, gazing up at the shadows of passing fish is really charming. I felt like I was in a nature documentary.

The next morning as we went up to get dressed and have breakfast, a naturalist asked little Lola what she had learned, no doubt expecting some nugget about sharks. Instead Lola said, "I learned to always carry the pillows." She demonstrated how she was able to loll her head onto the pile of pillows in her arms.

Upstairs I skipped the bagels and muffins and gathered up my clothes. Somehow while walking from the conference room through the gift shop to the bathroom, I dropped my clean underpants. I immediately retraced my steps, but the underwear was gone. I asked a janitor if he'd found any clothes, but no. "Someone picked them up!" I said to the Sober Husband. "I retraced my steps within two minutes!"

He looked at me like I were crazy. "Of course they would throw them away, like any normal person would."

"I think any normal person, knowing people were spending the night here, would pick up a piece of clean clothing and ask if anyone dropped it!" I hissed.

I asked him to see if they'd been turned in while I retraced my steps again. He didn't, but he did check around our luggage and confirmed that I had indeed lost my underwear, which I already knew. I asked a naturalist if anyone had turned in any clothing. "What kind of clothing?" Swallowing my embarrassment, I said, "A pair of black underpants with skulls all over them." Diplomatically she visibly choked back her laughter. Later she reported that none of the staff had had anything turned in.

A friendly fellow could see I'd lost something and asked. I explained what had happened, and he said sympathetically, "Someone must have picked them up and kept them. That's sick." He shook his head sadly. Meanwhile my own husband had no sympathy. "I don't see why you're reacting this way."

"I think any normal person who dropped something and immediately retraced their steps would be annoyed," I said. "Plus, they're my favorites."

I gave up and went along to the morning's activity, feeding the animals in the touch pool. The bat rays were so charismatic, raising their heads high out of the water to peer at us. We oohed and ahhed. One looked like it was going to jump out at me, and my friendly acquaintance said, "He's going to kiss you!" The naturalist in charge of feeding that room of animals distributed an assortment of weird thawed things for us to feed the skates and rays. I got a little squid to drop in; the children got bits of frozen fish. I forgot my missing underpants in the happiness of the moment.

Later we waited until everyone else took their luggage, in case those panties (which the Sober Husband was sick and tired of hearing about) and Lola's little flashlight, which had also gone missing, turned up. Another mother said to me, slightly condescendingly, "I'll bet someone just thought they were theirs." She looked me up and down. "After all, a lot of people have black cotton underwear. I have a lot myself." I could see where her guess came from, as I was wearing a black cotton dress over black cotton leggings with a black cotton hoodie, but she was wrong, and I pointed it out. "Actually, they weren't just black. They had Day of the Dead skulls all over them." She was visibly deflated. "Yeah, I guess that is different."

Afterwards we dragged our things over to the end of Pier 39 to watch the sea lions before going home. It was cold and foggy, the best weather for massive sea lions, and they were cavorting and snapping at each other and diving around. It was enchanting... until a very large sea lion, poised right at the closed dock to Pier 39, enjoyed a voluminous flow of liquid excrement. All the tourists recoiled and fled. Iris in particular was disgusted and disturbed. "I really wish I hadn't seen that," she said, shuddering. "And it smelled so bad. Why couldn't he do that underwater?"

Final judgment by all: if you ever have the chance to spend the night at the Aquarium of the Bay take it. But don't bring your favorite underpants.

what they talk about when I'm not there

2011-08-03T06:19:00.000-07:00

The other day the children and I were at a cafe, and eleven year-old Iris left the table for a while. When she returned, she asked her little sister and I what we talked about while she was gone. The truth was that we hadn't said anything of any substance, but Iris wasn't sure she was was getting the full truth. "I want to know what you people said when I'm not there," she said crankily. "I always want to know what people talk about when I'm not around."

"Usually we talk about Lola," said Lola modestly. I agreed.

Turning the tables, I asked the children, "You two talk a lot, and then you get real quiet when I come around. What do you guys talk about when I'm not there?"

Lola was happy to answer that. "Usually we talk about doughnuts and pizza and how they are basically the same thing." Nonplussed I looked at Iris. "It's true, we really do talk a lot about that," she confirmed.

Lola merrily continued. "They really are the same thing, but sometimes people confuse it. Like when someone who usually gets pizza goes to Dunkin Donuts. That confuses the issue of pizza and doughnuts being the same in ways that words can't explain, that you would need a graph to show."

breaking parrot news

2011-08-01T21:20:00.000-07:00

Pigwidgeon, our irritatingly stupid and slow-to-talk African grey parrot, has learned to make the sound the microwave uses to tell you that your food is done. So now I can have the experience of having a little microwave on my shoulder, next to my ear.

Miley Cyrus's new tattoo

2011-08-01T08:37:00.001-07:00

Miley Cyrus had an equals sign tattooed on her ring finger, as a sign of support for the gay marriage movement.

I strongly believe that gay people should have all the same rights and obligations that hets do, including marriage, and I'm fairly heavily tattooed, but this leaves me nonplussed. It's not the tattoo itself; it's the quality and the fact that she already has another crappy little black tattoo on the same hand. The girl's not even legal drinking age yet, and she's already covering herself in poorly done little tattoos. With all the money and fame she enjoys, can't she get a decent tattoo? She should be able to have Ed Hardy himself (and no matter what you think of his clothing line, the man was rightfully worshipped as a tattoo artist back in the Modern Primitives day) fly out to her home to make her a really nice piece of art, instead of this jailhouse-looking thing. Do Miley and Tish sit around giving each other tattoos in the evenings, like a pair of cellmates?

win a trip to Burning Man

2011-07-29T17:22:00.000-07:00

My theme camp is raffling off a ticket to Burning Man. Ten dollars enters you into this raffle... which is a pretty damn good deal as the tickets are sold out and are currently selling at well over a thousand dollars a piece. This online raffle will shut down in one week, and there are other fabulous prizes as well.

Help the poor old Drunken Housewife's cohorts. We're trying to raise money to add on to our bar, transport our camp to the desert, and improve what was already last year a lovely oasis. Our camp is based in part on the World of Warcraft, and we'll be giving out quests again this year. Earn fabulous rewards, drink intoxicating cocktails... it's all so damn magical and gives yer Drunken Housewife a rare opportunity to abandon her children, husband, parrots, and cats for a moment of irresponsibility and joy.

yet another parroting fail

2011-07-28T10:40:00.000-07:00

I read recently that a good way of disciplining a parrot is to flick the parrot on the beak with a finger. The rationale is that in the wild, the alpha parrots bite the other parrots on the beak to express disapproval of their behavior. I was happy to read this tip, as disciplining parrots is very difficult. The sorts of disapproval so potent to the children (particularly forceful stares, pointed remarks, threatening the withdrawal of video privileges) are meaningless to a parrot. Shouting at a parrot is stupid, as parrots love nothing more than noise. Swearing at a parrot is a terrible idea, as parrots who learn to swear are unpopular and often cannot find new homes if need be.

The only real parrot-discipline tactic we have is time-outs in the cage, and that only works if you and the parrot are both near the cage at the moment of parrot naughtiness. If you're upstairs when the parrot misbehaves, plenty of time elapses before you get the poorly behaved bird downstairs and into the time-out, and with a less-intelligent parrot like Piggle, it's dubious she understood what caused the confinement.

Another technique for getting parrots to submit to a person's authority is to physically tower over the bird. Like flicking the beak, this is also based upon the psychology of the species, as parrots perch according to pecking order, with the alpha bird always up top. But again success is dependent upon where the parrot misbehaved. While I have been known to climb on top of a chair or even a table to make a point to our green parrot, there isn't always a suitable piece of furniture nearby.

So while I would never strike a pet (and I've never spanked either Iris or Lola), a flick on the hard shell of the beak struck me as potentially a good idea, and I resolved to try it. This morning Piggle flew from her tree over onto the bed before I'd gotten up. She was rowdy and unpleasant, being a bit rough, and I flicked her on the beak with my finger. She immediately pecked me on my nose. I flicked her on the beak again. She pecked me harder on my nose. There was then an unpleasant standoff, both of us glaring at each other.

Evidently parrots do indeed naturally bite each other on the beak to express disapproval, and evidently Piggle thinks I'm in need of some beak-biting discipline. This all reminded me of a bad parenting cliche, spanking a child to punish them for having hit another child, all the while shouting, "I don't know where you picked up that behavior!"

a conversation with Lola is like being on drugs

2011-07-19T17:38:00.000-07:00

"My breath smells like Izze," said little Lola pensively as she finished her Izze mandarin soda. She blew out her breath in a gust. Her thoughts continuing on this track, Lola babbled happily: "You know what? Izze smells like Izze!"

Lola's older sister and mother were happy to humiliate poor little Lola for this rather obvious remark, and Lola defended herself. "It's the perkiness! I'm suffering from perkiness! It's making me say things like that!"

a day of British culture

2011-07-19T05:58:00.001-07:00

Here in San Francisco, everyone but us regularly flocks to Stern Grove for free entertainment on summer Sundays: concerts or dance performances. In particular the annual ballet and symphony performances are insanely popular. In the past I'd brought up going to Stern Grove shows, and the Sober Husband was always dismissive. "Save those seats for people who can't pay to go," he said. But on Sunday it was one of my favorite bands from the eighties, the English Beat.

There was a considerable lack of enthusiasm in the air when I suggested a trip to Stern Grove. "Who is this again?" and "I wanted to go to Harry Potter today" were the main responses. Lola had a better offer, to spend the day with her best friend from preschool.

Rallying the troops, I bullied them into getting dressed and packing up a blanket, some books, drinks, fresh bread, and some nice Havarti. Poor Iris was discovered moping in front of a computer, sadly reading online reviews of the new Harry Potter film, and I energized her only by going on Fandango and buying some tickets for an evening show.

We got to Stern Grove long after much of it had been occupied by the more industrious. We climbed up the hill behind the performance lawn and scrabbled for a bit of dirt to call our own. Feeling optimistic, I called a steeply slanted spot with a nice view, but the more realistic Sober Husband refused. "It's too angled. We can't sit there." We found a surprisingly flat spot no one else had taken, right behind a huge tree. What no one else had realized is that if you just leaned a bit, you had a fabulous view of the stage. We were happy.

The hours went by, with more people streaming in. Iris was deeply envious of a man down the hill who'd brought a hammock and tied it to some trees. Soon we were packed in solid. Finally the English Beat took the stage. They had a set which refreshingly included each and every one of their hits, unlike other bands who refuse to play their most beloved songs on the grounds that they're sick of playing those same damn songs over and over again, year after year. But the man on my right, who'd been drinking wine all afternoon, was crazy-making. He sat, silent and perfectly behaved, between each and every song, but inevitably during each and every song, he'd start lifting a nearby toddler up repeatedly, shouting to the toddler every time he swung him up crazily overhead. So every time a song started, I would recognize it and be filled with joy, relax and smile and relish the music... until this annoying man started shouting to his toddler. Then I would grind my teeth together in silent rage.

"This is why we don't come to this," I hissed at the Sober Husband. "Here we are sitting in the dirt, with this drunken guy making a hellish racket during all the songs!"

"That doesn't happen at the ballet," he agreed.

"Yes, and there, you get a seat all to yourself, and a little piece of paper proving it's yours in case someone else tries to sit there. And a little zone of space."

"And you don't have to go hours early."

During my very favorite songs I hopped up to dance, and oddly enough my getting up caused my annoying neighbor to hop up to dance, along with a friend of his (while meanwhile their wives sat, talking, sometimes quite loudly, to each other and ignoring the show for the most part). Of course the Sober Husband and Iris stood up as well to humor me, so this meant every time I was moved to jump to my feet, a big clot of us in that section were dancing on the slanted hillside. "Look," I hissed at the Sober Husband. "I control them! They don't get up and dance unless I do."

He pointed out another phenomenon. "Look over there. It's other middle-aged mommies making their tweens enjoy the music!" He was right. There were a sizable number of women in their forties, who had obviously loved the Beat back in the day, and many of them were actually forcing their own reluctant daughters to dance. Somehow it was a female-only phenomenon: there weren't any middle-aged ska dads or male tweens partaking in this odd parent-child ritual. We watched one gray-haired mother, who was obviously extremely happy, forcibly waving her miserable tween's arms to the music. "I don't insist Iris like this," I said in my own defense. "As long as she's not actively complaining, that's all I ask."

"You bribed me with Harry Potter tickets! That's all I needed," said Iris smugly.

Later I mused, "It's our day of British culture. First the British music of the eighties, and now some current British cinema. Maybe we can watch some 'Dr. Who' later to top it all off."

"Yes! And we need some British candy!" agreed Iris, who is an aficionado of European sweets. "I've been very good, I need chocolate!"

Wow! what a great haiku man! (by Iris)

2011-07-16T15:58:00.000-07:00

So I'm going to this really awesome art camp, which is two weeks long and on Friday we go on a field trip to some destination in Golden Gate Park, and this Friday my group went to the Japanese tea garden, and we sketched different stuff we saw. I wanted to sketch the koi pond (duh) and it doesn't have any benches around it so I went to the top of the moon bridge to get the best view. The moon bridge is one of the biggest tourist attractions in San Francisco, so there are always tourists climbing it. In case you have not heard of it; here is a picture.

As you can see, it is "quite tall." (English accent deployed)

While I was sitting there, three English guys who must have been in their early 20's who must have been high on something were "inspired" by the beauty of the park. So inspired, in fact, that one decided to write a haiku--

Weird English guy #1: I am on a quite tall bridge. It is cold outside. The End.

Weird English guy #2: Whoa, dude, that's awesome. What a great haiku, man!

Weird English guy #3: Wow, you should be a poet, man, wow!

You'll notice it isn't even the right number of syllables. More proof they must have been high on something.

ON ANOTHER NOTE:

Passive agressive notes is arguably the funniest website of all time. The funniest thing on there must logically be the arguably funniest thing on the internet. So look at this!!!!!

Ted's Rice

Ted's goddamn fucking rice! Stay the fuck away from my goddamn fucking rice! HAHAHAHA

the more things change

2011-07-14T09:08:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading "Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition" by Daniel Okrent, a meticulously researched and sprightly written history. I learned so much from this book (did you know the Founding Fathers were sots? Jefferson, Washington and the rest drank like fishes. Did you know the oh-so-Puritan Pilgrims drank heavily and brought more alcohol on the Mayflower than water?).

But what struck me the most was how, due to a lack of education, I have been misperceiving American politics. I went to school in a very rural school district, where our "social studies" education covered the same limited ground every single year. Every September we opened a new social studies text and started reading about the Pilgrims, and every June we stopped midway through the book at Reconstruction. Never, never, never did I hear a word about either World Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, or even suffrage or Prohibition. None of those topics were ever raised. I often think of my own education when I hear other countries criticized for what they leave out of their education (I have repeatedly heard Japan harshly ripped for failing to teach its children about the wartime excesses committed in China, but meanwhile in my American school we never studied how we dropped not one but two atomic bombs on Japan).

Anyhow, beyond learning how closely suffrage and Prohibition were linked (I had no clue that the great suffragettes were Prohibitionists and indeed some of them turned to suffrage after being rejected, on the basis of their gender, from the Prohibition movement), I was most spellbound by how much the politics of that age reminded me of current times. I have for some time been deeply concerned that politics have become too religious and that the far right is moving into new territory, injecting religious doctrine into textbooks (and again I note about my own childhood: the word "evolution" was never spoken in my school. We never learned a thing about it), making "family values" a fetish. It turns out that there is no new thing under the sun. American politics were just like that back in the 1910s and 1920s. Schoolbooks contained horrible, morality-based, science-be-damned falsehoods about alcohol, such as the "fact" that a single sip of alcohol tears flesh off a drinker's throat and that all habitual beer drinkers die of "dropsy." Religion and arguments about the family, the poor, beleaguered, threatened American family monopolized public discourse. It was all so very, very familiar.

I feel considerably educated now about an era of time I knew so little about, and I feel reassured, in an odd way. Our current "culture wars" are nothing new. As a nation, we've bungled and bumbled through much the same thing already.

anonymous children, saying unattributable things

2011-07-05T21:19:00.000-07:00

Today the children and I were hanging out on our deck, enjoying a rare warm San Francisco day. A child, who wishes to be anonymous for this, asked the other child in all seriousness, "What is the best way to sit in these chairs without hurting your butt and having your feet on the ground?"

I couldn't resist teasing her. "Seriously? You have to ask how to sit in a chair? Do you think, 'Hey, SHE looks like she's good at dealing with these flat surfaces on four legs; I better ask for advice!' It's that hard?" The child was offended by this and attempted to explain why these chairs, perfectly normal chairs, are so much harder to sit in than other chairs. The explanations seemed lamer than the original question, and soon I had laughed so much that I was in tears. This caused the affronted child to draw herself up. "Momdude! You are not very supportive!"

Later we were discussing the children's afternoon art class, wondering what the theme would be. Another child, similarly one who prefers a lack of attribution, said direly, "I bet it's medical-dental week. You know, drawing doctors, dentists, offices, medical things." This child put her head in her hands and sighed sadly. "I hate doctors and dentists."

"What?" I said. Usually the theme is something like "mermaids" or "fluffy animals."

"I read it in the brochure," the child said. "Medical-dental week!" Then, after a moment, the child relented. "Okay, I lied."

what I read on my vacation this year

2011-06-25T13:48:00.000-07:00

Spending a week in the wholesome fresh air of the Sierras, with no internet connection, a person can have a lot of time on her hands. This year I decided to do my "guilt reading", and I hauled along the books I've been meaning to read but never get around to opening, plus books from two of my all time favorite authors (Jonathan Coe and Jon Ronson), which I couldn't resist treating myself to.

"The Psychopath Test" by Jon Ronson (Riverhead Books 2011): I love Jon Ronson more than just about any other nonfiction writer (and I was a fan long before George Clooney made "The Men Who Stare At Goats" into a movie), and this is his best book yet. You should all rush out and pick up a copy. Ronson became interested in madness after he was asked to solve the real-life mystery of who was sending cryptic yet expensively printed books to random professors. Ronson visits a man locked up potentially for life after being diagnosed as a psychopath, spends time at L. Ron Hubbard's English country estate with psychology-bashing Scientologists, interviews hippie psychologists who held naked encounter groups for mass murderers in a Canadian prison, and becomes so obsessed with the idea of finding psychopaths that he starts diagnosing his friends and acquaintances. Highly thought-provoking, educational, and extremely witty.

"Opium Season: A Year On The Afghan Frontier" by Joel Hafvenstein (Lyon Press 2007): It took a while for me to get into this dry book by a well-intentioned, energetic fellow who worked for an aid agency tasked with getting Afghanis to stop growing opium poppies, but I was so glad I kept reading. Soon I couldn't stand to put the book down and was thoroughly frustrated that no one around me was also reading it and could discuss it with me. I wish I could command Pres. Obama and the entire Congress to read this book. Hafvenstein explains the difficulties of working in Afghanistan better than anyone else, with the customs, terrain, history, tribal rivalries, etc... His book illustrates so vividly, among other things, the age-old problem that people on the ground -- actually doing the work in war zones -- know better what is going on than those who command them from air-conditioned offices on the other side of the world. Hafvenstein and his colleagues refused to work in a particular town and developed a huge mistrust of that town's tribal elders, but were overruled and sternly scolded by their superiors. The results were heartbreaking and predictable, with several aid workers being killed by Taliban with the obvious collusion of the mistrusted elders. He also explains so clearly why farmers insist upon growing opium poppies: the gum is resilient and easily transported (as opposed to, say, tomatoes, which a farmer laments get shaken to bits in a truck traveling for hours over unpaved mountain roads), the traffickers will finance a crop (who pays ahead of time for carrot-growing?), the crop is easily gathered (as opposed to, say, strawberries, which are backbreaking to harvest). Afghanistan is a big problem, but Hafvenstein has a lot of ideas about what could be done (such as prioritizing training professional police, which he convincingly shows is an ignored yet crucial problem).

"Ritual" by Mo Hayder (Atlantic Monthly Press 2008): I just recently discovered Mo Hayder, and I can't believe I hadn't before found her tightly written crime fiction with its real and engrossing characters. In "Ritual", African traditional medicine practiced by immigrants seems inscrutable to the British police, who find a severed hand which, to their dismay and disbelief, was used to bring good luck to a restaurant. Strongly recommended.

"Long Drive Home" by Will Allison (Free Press 2011): This was the first disappointment of my vacation reading. This book has been so well-reviewed and so lauded, and I'm a sucker for its particular genre, the "one-bad-day-caused-my-whole-life-to-fall-apart" novel. So I got this for myself as a special treat, and then I hated it. SPOILER ALERT: The plot was not believable to me Really? A detective will devote his life and energy to prosecuting someone with no prior record for the murder of a teenager who drove into a tree while over twice the legal blood alcohol limit and talking on a cellphone at the very moment of the crash? And a loving, happy, devoted wife will divorce her husband, the father of her child, the moment he gets into a car accident to protect herself from liability, because her lawyer father raised her to be cautious? I AM a lawyer, and I think that's ridiculous. Aside from the issues I had with the plot and the characters, this book also pissed me off for being too short to be a hardback. (I fully realize that here I sound like the fussy eater from jokes: "the food was so bad, and there wasn't enough of it"). A waste of time and money.

"The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim" by Jonathan Coe (Alfred A. Knopf 2010): Jonathan Coe is a genius, and this isn't one of his finest books, but it's an enjoyable read if you can let go of your sorrow that he'll probably never again write anything so perfect, so unforgettably flawless as "The House of Sleep" or "The Rotters' Club" or "The Winshaw Legacy." Coe's protagonist is a deeply depressed toy salesman/customer service representative who mulls over his divorce, his estranged relationship with his father, and his growing obsession with a man who faked sailing around the world.

"Lit" by Mary Karr (Harper Collins 2009): the third memoir from the well-celebrated author of "The Liars' Club." This is no "Liars' Club", but I guess there is an unsatiable demand for memoirs from Mary Karr. Here she writes about her alcoholism, a stay in a mental hospital, her unsuccessful marriage, and her conversion to Catholicism. I enjoyed the first half of this book but got really irked and frustrated by the end. Her account of the failure of her marriage was so one-sided that I longed, longed for some objectivity. In particular Karr lost my sympathy when she refers grandiosely to "remembering the day of my suicide." What suicide?? All she did was buy a freaking hose and have a drama queen freakout on the phone to a friend about how she intended to hook up the hose to the exhaust pipe of her car. That is not a suicide. That's not even full-on suicidal ideation. Anyhow, I will always love Mary Karr for "The Liars' Club" (one of the most moving and powerful memoirs ever written), but this book was irritating. Unfortunately I can't even sell my signed first edition because Lola knocked my glass of red wine over it. Sadly I think my own cold, workaholic ex-husband (I'll take on Mary Karr in a Battle of The Standoffish, Selfish, Emotionally Withholding Ex-Husbands any day) took my copy of "The Liars' Club" when he moved out.

"Serpent Box" by Vincent Carrella (Harper 2008): I usually hate fiction set in the Appalachians which indulges in folksy writing, elegizing old women who know "medicine plants", and endless yammering about the Bible, but somehow Carrella sucked me in for all 455 pages. I should have hated this book: it kept telling the same story over and over again of how a pregnant woman is caught out in a thunderstorm and crawls into a gap in the trunk of a hanging tree to give birth, including from the point of view of someone who wasn't even there. And then there was the flowery, overly-stylized country writing. I can't believe I finished a book containing such sentences as "She did not know that autumn's first snowfall ripens that part of a woman where the lifeseed will catch, or that the wandering spirit of a true love will seek out the first child of spring." But yet somehow I was hooked, hanging in there for all those 455 pages. This is undoubtedly the best novel in the "deformed Appalachian child whose ambition in life is to be a snake handler" genre.

Camp Mather this year

2011-06-24T08:45:00.000-07:00

Because the Sober Husband had workish commitments, I ended up taking the children to Camp Mather alone. The Sober Husband had helped us pack the day before, and frankly that turned out to be a mistake. By the time he left for his own trip in the afternoon, we'd been working for hours at packing, and it felt really wrong not to be leaving ourselves. We drifted about for the rest of the afternoon, disaffected and out of sorts, finally wandering down to the Spaghetti Factory for some pasta.

On Saturday we had only our last minute cleaning to do. Because I use the world's most professional petsitter, one who worries greatly about my poor mangy cat Al and about my parrots' nutrition ("Most people have me cut up fruit for their parrots." "Umm, my parrots hate fruit"), I have to try to hide my shame. I had both girls restrain poor Albert while I throughly groomed him, and I tried to give the parrots' cages an extra good scrubbing. I made sure to put out the parrots' calcium supplement very prominently, sort of a Potemkin Village of avian nutrition.

We hit the road with our car loaded so heavily that there would have been no room for the Sober Husband. "I thought we weren't bringing more than last year, but we must have," I said. The car was so densely packed with things that I couldn't extricate the Harry Potter tapes I'd planned to play on the road. We stopped at a supermarket for some snacks for the road ("We can't get too much, "I cautioned. I don't know where you're going to put it"). At the store, I realized I had forgotten my checkbook, and I always pay by check for the children's riding sorties. I drove back home. My beloved next door neighbor, whom we'd cheerily bid farewell earlier, laughed at me. "Didja miss me?" he called.

I ran into the house and quickly got both some checks and a different set of Harry Potter tapes and spent a few minutes giving Frowst, our most glamourous cat, some belly rubs. "I hope you don't see us again," I called to the neighbor. This time we really were on the road.

We made record time driving up to the Sierras. "See how much faster it is when Mommy drives," I gloated. Ahead of time I had cautioned the children that since they were traveling with only one grownup who had no sane adult backup, it was very important that they not plague me with cries of "how much longer" and "how far are we", as is their custom. With unbelievable self-control, only once were the syllables "how much" heard, and the child who spoke them bit them off before uttering "longer" and quickly changed the subject. I was never so proud.

With the Drunken Housewife at the wheel, we were able to stop for lunch. (The Sober Husband, for mysterious reasons of his own, is bitterly, solidly opposed to ever stopping at any restaurant while driving between any Point A and Point B, regardless of how far apart those points are or how whiny the children may be).

Up at Camp Mather the children rose to the occasion and helped me unpack the crammed car and set up our cabin. I was initially a bit dismayed to see our cabin. The last couple of years, we've had really plum locations, cabins with plenty of space and pleasing views. This cabin was jammed check-to jowl with other cabins, and the picnic table from our neighbors' cabin was right up by our tiny front porch. I recognized the neighbors, who were grimly playing cards on that picnic table abutting our cabin. It was a large family who have often been at Camp Mather the same week as us, a multi-generation family which is given to lots of shouting at the children. I quailed. “It's going to be SO NOISY,” I whispered to Iris. “Listen, that woman has SUCH A LOUD VOICE.”

This reaction made me feel horrible about myself and guilty. A better person, a warmer, friendlier, kinder person, would have been happy to see these familiar faces. After all, every time I'd ever interacted with that family, they had been polite and friendly. Only a bitter hag wouldn't welcome being next to a large and exuberant clan. [And of course my higher self was right: these people were delightful neighbors. I'd love to be next to them again].

We decided to move our picnic table behind our cabin, which would hopefully be quieter, and create a hangout zone there. I hung up our two hammocks by the picnic table, and Iris helped me figure out how to set up our bug tent, which was tricky. We moved the furniture around in our tiny cabin and unpacked all our things, organizing everything as we went.

And then we were done. “Look! We got everything done faster without Daddy!” It was amazing. “I want you to be sure to tell Daddy that Mommy got you here faster alone and got our camp set up faster alone."

We tried out the hammocks. The children swung in reclining ecstasy. Then we were off to dinner and the welcoming bonfire.

At night we heard the unmistakable sound of bears poking around the outside of our cabin. We were home here, all right.

The next day the children swam a lot and ate a lot. I read and enjoyed the hammock, as well as watching the children. We called their father collect from the little payphone by the office, and it turned out that he'd been worried we'd gotten into an accident. “We got here in record time! And we had a really great lunch in Oakdale on the way. I found a great Mexican restaurant, “ I bragged.

The mother in the cabin behind us (not the big, noisy family beside us, but another, less friendly neighbor) had a meltdown of sorts in the evening. “You will find me much more accommodating after I've had a gin and tonic,” she said repeatedly to the many small children surging around her. Her language grew plainer and plainer, until she sent them all away and forbade them to approach her until she'd had at least one gin and tonic. Over her gin, she fretted to her husband about how they'd manage their cocktail hour the next day. Evidently they had planned a daytrip, and the woman was really tightly wound over how she'd manage to fit in her drinking. “Should we bring the stuff for cocktails with us? Can we do that? What time will we get back?”

“And your father thinks I drink too much, “ I whispered to Iris. “Get a load of that woman!”

On Monday the Sober Husband was due to arrive, riding up with the father of one of Iris's friends who were coincidentally also at Camp Mather that week. All morning the children were on edge, waiting for their father. The other family's wife told me that she “wondered if they were going to stop at our favorite thriftstore on the way up. Chainsaw and I got three bags of stuff there on the way. We always stop.” She predicted her husband would be excited to show this thriftstore to the Sober Husband.

I said to Iris later, “I can't imagine them thrifting.” I thought it was more likely they'd stop for ribs on the way up, before the Sober Husband was reunited with his vegetarian family. As it turned out, they had only stopped for gas. The other husband drives slowly, like an old person or my husband, and doesn't like to stop for lunch or snacks, also like my husband. “You're my husband's driving soulmate,” I said to our friend. “He's much better off driving with you than me.”

Having their father back made the children lose their industrious, uncomplaining attitudes. Soon they were lolling on the hammocks and calling for their father to bring them chocolate milk. These were the same children who had taken turns being a self-proclaimed “Service Robot” and laboring for the good of the group. I suggested to the Sober Husband that he was influencing the children to be lazy and poorly behaved, but he instead took credit for their prior good behavior. “They did that stuff because I told them to. I told them to be good on the drive and help Mommy.”

The reintroduction of the Sober Husband brought up another age-old source of conflict: waiting in line at the dining hall. The days he wasn't with us, Iris and I waited patiently in line for each meal. “We are linefolk,” observed Iris. We allowed Lolz to read her book nearby as long as she kept an eye on us and joined us when we got to the front of the line (there is a tall rock near the dining hall where last year Lola had the best reading experience of her life, “The School of Fear”, and she was determined to recapture that magic). But the Sober Husband thinks lines are for idiots, for sheeplike people. On one morning I chose to skip breakfast in favor of a quiet cup of coffee outdoors alone, only to have Iris storm up in a state of outrage. “Daddy won't wait in line! He says that if we wait long enough, there will be this magical time when there isn't any line but they're still serving food! And Lola just ran off!”

I advised Iris, “Ignore them. Just get in line and get your own breakfast. Let them do what they want.” Iris trudged back, still in a rage.

Later the Sober Husband tried to make up for this. He pandered to Iris by getting into line before lunch began, so the children were practically the first ones in. “See how good I am?” he pointed out.

“We waited in lines every day before you got here!” Iris and I informed him. “And we didn't brag about it!”

no internet, only quality time, first with children and now with Al

2011-06-22T09:00:00.001-07:00

Last week was our annual week up at Camp Mather, the rustic retreat run by SF Rec & Parks. For one week we have no internet and no cellphone, and we spend our days swimming, playing board games, waiting in lines for meals, reading in hammocks, and interacting with one another.

Afterwards we have a passionate reunion with the internet and our pets. Henry and Frowst were especially glad to see us, but Al, my weird skinny freaky cat who normally spends his whole live sitting on my chest and shedding, was standoffish for a couple of days. Al has a special relationship with Rhonda the professional petsitter, while I think Frowst doesn't let her touch him at all. After a few days of not going near me, pining for Rhonda, Al is now back to spending every possible minute sitting right on top of me.

Rhonda falls into that small category of people, people who are not repulsed by poor dimwitted, literally drooling Al and who imagine that if he were their cat, they would transform him into a sleek orange beauty. (The Sober Husband has suggested that I pawn Al off on the next person I meet in that tiny category, saying to them, "Why don't you give it a try?"). Al was found covered with oil in a commercial garage as a kitten, and his only sibling didn't survive. He has never weighed more than five pounds and usually weighs in around four, a skeleton covered in cheerful orange fur.

Many of his problems come from one underlying issue: Al is allergic to plaque, the bacteria that form on teeth, and as a result, he has a sensitive mouth and drools. This may be why, unlike most cats, he does not groom himself, but he did manage to clean himself for the first year or two of life before giving it up as a bad job. I have to cut the mats off him, brush him, and clip off soiled fur, which he hates (once he bit me on the arm when I was grooming him). His health is a lot better since we paid a huge sum of money to have almost all of his teeth removed (keeping only the front teeth so he can defend himself if necessary). Before that, he regularly became very ill and had low energy, but he's been perky ever since he recovered from that surgery.

There are other weirdnesses about him, though. For instance, he can't wear a collar because, unlike every other cat in the world, a plain, non-flea collar will cause his fur to fall out. Due to his extreme skinniness, I used to fear people would mistake him for a stray, and so I kept a loose collar on him. Even though this was a very loose collar, he lost the fur on his neck, and although it's been over a year since I gave up the collar, he still has a wide naked ring of pink flesh around his neck where no fur will grow.

He also has oddly waxy ears. I used to mistake this peculiar condition for ear mites and haul him down to the vet, but it never is ear mites, even though it looks just like it. Often I have both children pin the poor orange freak down so I can clean out his ears (it's especially important to do that before anyone comes by who will think I neglect him and don't take care of ear mites).

Al is also like sugar to fleas. Even though he virtually never goes outside (he only ventures out on the few truly hot days a year; he's too thin to be comfortable outdoors), he all-too-regularly gets fleas. The other cats almost never get a flea, but Al is infested every few weeks. How? How? How? I put those once-a-month flea death drops on him regularly, but they don't last an entire month on poor Al. I worry about the dosage given how thin he is, but we can't have fleas. I tried rolling him like a biscuit in nontoxic diatomaceous earth for a while, but it's such a nuisance.

Despite his skinniness, he's the worst moocher. He often manages to steal food from the children (you'd think he'd put on some weight), as no one wants to eat anything which has been touched by the drooling orange skeleton.

He also is the only one of our cats who pees out of the litterbox. When we have extra cats here, I put up extra litterboxes, and Al seems to believe that this means that wherever a litterbox has been, he is authorized to pee for life. There are two spots upstairs where he routinely pees, though even an idiot cat should be able to see there's no box there. (So why don't I just permanently keep boxes there? I would, but the Sober Husband strongly objects. He wants as few litterboxes as possible in the house, in as few rooms as possible).

So what does Al have to offer? He loves people, far too much. As I write this, he's purring on my chest. He spends as much time as he can sitting directly on me or a child or a favored visitor. His affection is so vast that it's annoying. I get so tired of having him on me, and I'll try to pawn him off on a child, but they never want him sitting on them due to the drooling and spattering (Al often whips his head around to clear up his drool, and this results in some spraying of whoever he's sitting on).

Sometimes, though, Al takes a strong dislike to someone. One year we had a housesitter, a friend-of-a-friend, whom Al disliked so much that he moved into the backyard and lived out there like a stray for a few months, refusing to enter the house for weeks after a sensible cat would have realized that the feared housesitter was long gone. After I finally lured him back into the house, he followed me around like a skinny shadow.

Even though the children don't want Al touching them, they profess a huge love for him. Recently there was some thought by the grownups about whether we should get rid of this poor dumb animal due to the peeing-where-once-a-litterbox-stood problem, and the children were appalled. "We love Albert! You can't get rid of Albert! We don't care if he pees in our room." Their protests were so strong that we gave up any thought of rehoming Al (and honestly I can't imagine who would realistically want to take him on).

The children's love has limits, though. Iris has taken to talking about how when she is old enough to move out, "I will take Frowst, and Henry, and Pigwidgeon." I protested: "But then I won't have any pets!" "I'll leave you the evil green bird and Al."

not smarter than lab rats

2011-06-10T13:06:00.000-07:00

At the Maker Faire this year, I spotted a reasonable looking line. Meanwhile a nearby line for watching the "Battle Boats" was intimidatingly long. It turned out that the short line was for a sensory exploration environment housed in a truck. This sounded fun to me, but no one else wanted to wait in a line, even a short line. The day before the Sober Husband and Lola had spent over an hour and a half waiting in line so Lola could go into a "Space Treehouse" for kids. Lola still felt that the Space Treehouse was the best thing she'd done at the Maker Faire and worth the wait, but the impatient, line-hating Sober Husband (who was too large to go into the Space Treehouse) didn't want to spend one more minute waiting in any line.

I encouraged Iris to try the sensory exploration project, and I got into the line. Although the line was very short, it was a very long wait. The people in charge of this exhibit often walked along, silently holding up a sign which explained that the activity took five minutes per person and encouraging us to count the people ahead of us and calculate our waiting time accordingly. There was also something heavily crossed out on this sign. The delicate, pashmina-swathed woman holding the sign explained to someone that "this was a rule we had to have yesterday, but we don't need it today. It's a different population we're getting today." Intrigued, I asked. She rolled her eyes and laughed. "Yesterday we had a lot of people making out in the middle of the maze, so we had to make a rule: no making out for extended periods of time. Today we're not having that problem." We looked at the line together. It was all pre-making-out-aged kids and tired-looking, middle-aged parents. None of us in the line looked ready for a moment of passion. After she moved on with her sign, Iris and I turned to each other. "So it's a maze!"

While Iris and I waited and waited, the Sober Husband and Lola napped on a nearby patch of grass. They looked happy. Iris sometimes felt like quitting our line, but I encouraged her to stick it out. Ahead of us a young teen freaked out when it was her turn and came out without finishing the maze. She was really upset looking. "There was something by my foot, and I just couldn't handle it!"

The boy just before Iris bolted through the maze and came out in record time. I fully expected us to finish quickly as well. Iris went in ahead of me, after I asked if we could go in together. I thought we'd have more fun doing it together. The pashmina-wearer turned out to be the creator of this environment, and she recommended that we go in separately. "It's better to do it alone. We like to have someone get halfway through, then we let the next person in." Iris went in, and I waited. The creator shared a funny story with me. "My dad was here yesterday, and he couldn't solve my maze! He was in there so long. Finally I told him we needed to get him out, because it was taking too long and there were so many people waiting. He couldn't do my puzzle!"

Finally it was my turn to go in. She put a whistle around my neck so I could call for help if I freaked out. I climbed awkwardly up some boxes and slid down a short slide into complete darkness. I fumbled about, crawling and groping. After some time I found a sliding doorway, which I managed to open and crawl through. Around this time I heard Iris blow her whistle ahead of me. She shouted that she was stuck and couldn't get out. I didn't worry, because I knew from my conversation with the artist that people could be extricated midway through and because I heard a calm voice from one of the assistants (who was outside the maze, monitoring people's progress) reassuring Iris.

Then I became stuck. I could not figure out how to progress, but I stayed calm. It was completely dark where I was, and I concentrated on methodically fumbling in every direction. After a while, a voice asked me if I was okay. "I'm fine, just figuring it out." After a while longer, evidently I was judged incompetent to do this unaided, and the assistants turned on a lighted arrow showing me which way to go. What I had failed to figure out was that I needed to climb up and out of where I'd been crawling.

After I got out, I felt humiliated that they'd needed to turn the arrow on for me. Iris felt humiliated that she'd felt stuck and called for help. Humbled, we discussed our shortcomings together. "I really thought we'd be better at this," I said. "We are dumber than a pair of white rats in a lab." Iris agreed heartily. We took a moment to ponder our relative moronic-ness compared to the boy who went through just before us (whom we now considered a genius), as well as to lab rats. "Still, that was really great", we said. "Best thing we did today."

Squirrels of the ocean (by Iris)

2011-06-09T12:58:00.001-07:00

Sharks are awesome. They are like squirrels of the ocean. Here is proof:

-Iris

a very different sort of child indeed

2011-06-03T09:25:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I took eleven year-old Iris uber Alles on a special visit to the school she'll be attending next year. Iris has been deeply concerned over whether to continue Mandarin or switch to Japanese next year, and I got permission to take her down to sit in on some sixth grade language classes.

In the Mandarin class we visited, the kids told us why they had picked Chinese over the other languages. "I want to learn Chinese because there are so many particle physicists in China," one said.

I can't imagine a child at the girls' current school giving that answer. The closest would be one of Iris's friends, who picked French because so many clothing designers are French.

be careful what you wish for

2011-06-02T08:05:00.000-07:00

Pigwidgeon the dimwitted African grey woke us up this morning, shouting her first words over and over again: "STEP UP STEP UP STEP UP STEP UP" as the sun rose.

so very very wrong

2011-06-01T13:46:00.000-07:00

My dear, angelic-looking little Lola is a terrible influence on me. She's leading me straight to hell (which may be appropriate, as around the age of 5 she kept informing us that she was the devil).

Last night eleven year-old Iris uber Alles told me that one of her friends has insulting nicknames for her parents. Iris felt it would be funny to make up an insulting nickname for me as well and started trying different ones on for size. "Two can play at that game, Iris", I informed her. Pulling out all the cliches, I went on: "I wouldn't go down that road if I were you."

Iris was unmoved by that threat. In response to her insulting nicknames for her mother, as well as her failure to do her chore for the day (sweeping around the parrots' cages), I informed Iris that from thereon she would be referred to as "Crapchild", after "Betachild" failed to get enough of a rise out of her.

"Hey! That is not fair!" shouted Iris.

"Finish your chore, 'Crapchild," I said. Lola, having already done her own chore, basked in a sense of superiority, giggling nearby.

"Don't call me that!"

"I won't if you stop calling me things and if you do your chore," I said. Iris balked. I upped the ante: "I can think of worse names than 'Crapchild.'" Angelic babyfaced little Lola leaned in and whispered confidentially in my ear, in a lilting little voice, "Like 'Fuckchild'?"

I spat out my Vitamin Water.

"What? What?" an incensed Iris demanded. I shook my head at her. "I'm not going to repeat that," I said. I looked at sweet little Lola. "How can a cute little child like you say things like that? How do you even think of them?" Lola beamed proudly.

Iris glared at me even more fiercely after getting Lola to whisper the nickname into her own ear. I tried to defend myself. "It's not me, Iris! It's Lola! I didn't even say that." Fighting back, Iris tried calling Lola "Gammachild", but it failed miserably as Lola found it pleasing to the ear and failed to pick up on the more insulting implications. Iris's anger reached greater heights. Pandering, I offered, "Finish your chore, and I'll promote you to 'Sugarchild.'"

big progress

2011-05-30T17:01:00.000-07:00

After years of disappointingly failing to learn to speak, our witless African grey has a phrase! Today she's been working hard, repeating over and over again in a hoarse, croaky voice, "la la la la" (which we are not counting as a word) and "step up" (which we are claiming as Piggle's First Phrase). This is as though a dog had learned to say "heel": "step up" is the basic parrot command, used when you want your parrot to stop doing whatever the hell it is doing and step onto your hand (or off your hand and onto a perch or another person).

"You must be so proud," said the Sober Husband after his skeptic nature had been overcome. He had assumed we were imagining this through wishful thinking until Piggle croaked "step up" intelligibly at him.

"I wouldn't say proud," I said judiciously. "I'm less ashamed."

"Step up! Step up! Good bird!" said Iris lovingly.

"You're breaking that as a command," the Sober Husband said chidingly. "It's not going to work any more."

"Yes, it will!" Iris and I shouted him down. He left the room quickly, saying on his way out, "Very proud."

Oprah! Oprah! Oprah!

2011-05-25T11:22:00.000-07:00

I don't know why, but Iris uber Alles has been a passionate Oprah follower since she learned of Oprah's existence. Neither the Sober Husband nor I have any idea how she became so fixated on Oprah. To this day the Sober Husband has never watched an entire Oprah episode (Iris forced him to watch most of the episode about the dangers of using cellphones while driving and bullied him into signing Oprah's "No Phone Zone" pledge). Likewise I had never seen the Oprah show (I'm not much of a television watcher in general. It's extremely rare for me to voluntarily turn on a television). But somehow Iris became a fan.

In the second grade, Iris was supposed to make a painting in art class of an imaginary planet, and she created "the Oprah Planet", populated by Oprahs. This picture (and the pillow made with the same images) disturbed all of the white people who saw it in our house, inspiring guilt and shame in the white liberal heart. It begged the question: had the Sober Husband and I unwittingly raised our child in such a racist way that black people looked like space aliens to her? I wanted to tack up a disclaimer that we'd had African American families over to our house and that this was not my fault. Eventually we tactfully moved the painting, but not before I'd shamefully blurted out to people looking at it with an eyebrow raised, "I really tried to raise her in a multicultural environment."

But of course the adults' reactions and worries were all baseless. Iris didn't think Oprah looked like a space alien. She just loved Oprah. By the age of 10, Iris was using her own saved-up allowance to pay for a subscription to O magazine. She was hounding her parents to apply to be on the Oprah show (I have sent in applications for shows themed "my parents need a makeover", "worst dressed couples in America", "my dream is to meet a celebrity", etc.., etc... at Iris's behest, but somehow the producers have failed to select me as a candidate for revamping at Oprah's expense). On a visit to Chicago, her chief desire was to see the Harpo Studios, and she treasured the Oprah flipflops she bought at the gift shop. Her Chicago grandmother sent her Oprah sleepwear, which Iris wears nearly every evening (this grandmother, not an Oprah fan, asked me about Iris's obsession, saying "Where did she get this Oprah stuff from?").

Of course, nothing lasts forever. Back in the eighties I was crushed when the Talking Heads broke up, and so I feel I can relate to Iris's angst as the Oprah show ends this week. Today is the last new Oprah show's airing, and Iris is heartbroken.

Her only consolation is that Oprah herself is moving to our state, and Iris has been agitating for a roadtrip. Again though her parents are failing her. "Iris, I am NOT driving you down to LA to stalk Oprah," I said firmly, as I rejected a plan to spend vacation time lurking outside Ms. Winfrey's SoCal estate. Iris's lips thinned. Clearly if she could, she'd leave us all behind and go off to live the rest of her life with Oprah, "living her best life", as Oprah herself would say.

my motivation

2011-05-18T09:38:00.000-07:00

Frankly I am sure that the world on the whole would be a happier place without me. The world has too many people as it is. My family of origin has never liked me (I was always told that they didn't want another child and that I was an unhappy mistake, and additionally I was told on many occasions as a child that everyone would be happier if I died in an accident. One parent went so far as to threaten on several occasions, "No jury would convict me if I killed you now"). Because I was thoroughly loathed by my very own family, I grew up as a result of that believing I must be loathsome by nature. Magically in my late teens and early twenties I morphed from despised child into a fine example of that particularly valued, welcome everywhere member of society, a Hot Chick, but those days are over. Now I'm a middle-aged former lawyer, not something anyone particularly thinks adds a lot of value, and no longer a femme fatale. On the bright side, no one is stalking me any more (my three former stalkers having presumably moved on to younger targets of freaky obsession). But! I feel like I'm holding the Sober Husband and children back: if they didn't have me, the Sober Husband (who is aging very well) could easily acquire a superior second wife who would fit in well at the children's private school, wouldn't bother everyone with her pesky vegetarianism and animal rights beliefs, and wouldn't fill the house up with messy, noisy rescue animals.

What keeps me going? This:

U.S. and Swedish investigators compared suicides, psychiatric hospitalizations and violent crime convictions over 30 years in more than 500,000 Swedish children, teens and young adults (under the age of 25) who lost a parent to suicide, illness or an accident, on one hand, and in nearly four million children, teens and young adults with living parents, on the other.

Those who lost a parent to suicide as children or teens were three times more likely to commit suicide than children and teenagers with living parents. However there was no difference in suicide risk when the researchers compared those 18 years and older. . . .

In addition, those who lost parents to suicide were nearly twice as likely to be hospitalized for depression as those with living parents. And those who lost parents to accidents or illness had 30 and 40 percent higher risk, respectively, for hospitalization.

Losing a parent, regardless of cause, increased a child’s risk of committing a violent crime, the researchers found.

My husband would arguably be better off without me, but not the children (and not my stupid parrot).

depressed again

2011-05-17T09:51:00.001-07:00

When my parrot, Pigwidgeon, was lost, I sunk into a deep morass of depression. I felt like such an incompetent and horrible person for having lost my poor, witless little bird. Even though we got little Piggle back again, thanks to the kindness of a complete stranger who saw her, tired and hungry, on a busy street in the Mission, I haven't been able to climb out of that funk.

To add to that, I have three little foster kittens right now (named "Elvis", "Pumpernickel", and "Jubjub" by the children), who are endlessly messy and noisy. I got them from my rescue before they could walk, when they needed to be bottlefed, and as a result I have become their mother. That means that, like a real mother, I have to bathe them and clean up their horrifying messes and listen to their crying. The noise can be relentless: the kittens set off the parrots, who then shriek and shriek.

And the sounds the parrots make are irritating to no end. Piggle has recently added to her meows and horrible-child-snuffling-up-snot noises with a disturbing and realistic gulping sound, like an unmannered child sucking down a chocolate milk furiously as though a Nazi-like parent were posed to snatch away the cup. The green parrot shouts, "Anton! Lola! Anton! Lola!", the gray parrot makes noisy snuffling and gulping noises, and the kittens cry, and meanwhile a person is trying to serve a civilized meal of fettuccine with asparagus in blue cheese sauce. It's truly nerve-wracking, and there's no one to blame other than myself for acquiring these noisy, noisy animals.

Both of the children have been going through rough patches as well. Thankfully the Sober Husband has perked up. He spent the last year in a funk himself, but his new job has rejuvenated him. It's nice that someone around here has some energy, although he expends a lot of it on nagging. He seems to feel that a person in a depressive state can get nagged right out of it, and he's not above calling in reinforcements. Over the weekend I caught Iris staring at me in a judgmental way. "What? What are you looking at me like that for?" I asked. "Daddy thinks you need some nagging," was the artless reply.

being accepted as one is

2011-05-07T10:23:00.000-07:00

Last week in my Warcraft raid, I was afraid I had offended the Canadian members of the raid team. The team sought to reassure me. "There's always a place in a raid for a drunk gamer girl," one said. The rest chimed in with strong agreement.

a memory

2011-05-05T18:07:00.001-07:00

Iris and Lola love to reminisce about their toddlerhood, a magic time when there was no homework and no early mornings, just plenty of toys and their aged mother taking them to play with other children at their part-time preschools. Recently Iris unveiled an interesting memory.

"Once you came upstairs, and you said, 'Iris, I have good news for you,'" recalled Iris uber Alles. "I thought you got me a toucan for a pet! I was so excited! I thought I was going to go downstairs and see the toucan. Then you said, 'Uncle T. is here.'" Iris laughed heartily at her own heartfelt toddler disappointment.

"You honestly thought I'd bought you a toucan?" I asked curiously.

"Yes! Yes, I did."

in my car

2011-05-03T08:18:00.000-07:00

My main duty is driving these days, driving the Sober Husband to the train station (with his new job, he takes the "Baby Bullet" commuter train down to Silicon Valley), driving the children home from school, driving here, driving there.

Yesterday in my car, the following things happened:

- one child spilled a Snapple all over the car;

- said child scolded another, younger child until the younger child was tearful. The offense drawing this scolding was "getting my stuff wet" -- relating to the Snapple the first child had spilled herself;

- a condescending husband turned the radio off in the middle of a really good song and made annoying remarks about how he needed to turn the radio off "because traffic was stressing" him and he "needed to keep an eye out" when he wasn't even driving;

- after radio is restored to its proper on position by the driver, husband makes condescending remarks about the song "Eff You" to wife. "I bet you didn't know this song was heavily censored";

- husband made loud, passive-aggressive remarks in a very self-righteous tone of voice about not being able to have a conversation "until Mommy turns the radio down";

- smaller child vomited all over self;

- after I made inquiries about how the small child feels, whether she has a fever, etc.., and the husband superiorly said it's clear "she's not sick; she just choked on something" when the child wasn't eating.

As I filled the tank with gas at that really grungy gas station in the Mission which gives a nine cent discount for cash, I contemplated walking away from the car and checking into a bar and then a hotel. However, I have a litter of tiny, bottlefed kittens and Lord knows none of these music haters, Snapple-spilling scolders, and vomiters would have managed to make a bottle of kitten formula. Tiny lives hung in the balance. I got back into the car of passive aggression, spilled Snapple, and vomit to drive back home to feed the mewling babies.

awkward

2011-04-29T16:07:00.000-07:00

Yesterday when I came downstairs for coffee, I saw that the green bird, the Amazon parrot who loves the Sober Husband and hates me, was clinging to the Sober Husband's finger with her beak while lying across his shoulder. "She won't let go of my finger," he said, demonstrating on how he tried to pull his hand away but the bird clenched it all the more tightly with her beak and one claw.

We both regarded the parrot. It was splayed across his shoulder, with a death clench on his finger, throbbing and making cooing noises. These noises built until the parrot appeared to reach a peak, after which she exhaustedly let go of his hand and slumped quietly on his shoulder.

An awkward silence filled the room. I turned to the coffeemaker without comment.

excess, in its various forms

2011-04-26T04:03:00.000-07:00

Over the children's spring break, we took them down to see the Hearst Castle. My original idea was to drive down to Death Valley and go camping. Back before I had children, I loved backroads camping, and Death Valley was my favorite place to strike off and set up camp far from any other human being. I also wanted to make a run up to to the Pacific Northwest to visit a slew of friends up there, including my best friend from high school, but that was going to either $2,000 in airfare or thirteen hours in the car with the children. Death Valley would be about a ten hour drive.

As the time grew nearer, I started thinking more realistically about what road tripping with the children would be like. Also, the Sober Husband has only been at his new job for two months, which is early to take much time off. I couldn't face the idea of thirteen hours of driving the children without adult backup, and camping with them by myself was even scarier. I imagined curling up with the children at night in a tent, with them nonstop complaining of the cold, the hard ground, the lack of television (on Iris's part) and the presence of feared cryptids (Lola). So instead I decided to take the children to the Hearst Castle. Iris uber Alles, who is insane for Oprah, has been wanting to see nearby San Luis Obispo ever since Oprah explained on her show that San Luis is "the happiest place in the United States", so the matter was settled.

I booked our tour of the Hearst Castle ahead of time, since these tours often sell out. There are four different tours to pick from, each visiting a different part of the Castle, and I selfishly didn't want to take the first, introductory tour because I've done that one before myself. Less selfishly I picked the tour which features visiting the bathrooms of the North Wing, because Lola is obsessed with bathrooms. Particularly nice ones are called "lands of wonder", and sometimes she draws pictures of imagined lands of wonder.

When we got to the Hearst Castle, I noticed a middle-aged woman on our tour was holding a Barbie and a Ken while we were waiting for the bus to drive us up from the visitor center to the castle. She carefully put them into a large ziplock bag before the bus came. Up at the Castle, she took them back out of the bag so they could see and be photographed in front of the magnificent Neptune Pool. I noticed she was wearing a Warhol-styled Barbie shirt, with four Barbie faces.

As the tour went on, the Barbies went in and out of the ziplock. Sometimes the Barbie enthusiast would give them to her male companion to carry. I found this oddly fascinating, but it soon turned to annoying. The Barbie woman explained loudly to our group that the Ken she was carrying was "the first brown-haired Ken", from the sixties. She explained what made this Barbie so special and worthy of mating with the first brown-haired Ken, but I didn't pay enough attention to absorb that. Whenever something in our tour reminded her of the Barbies, she'd speak up in a loud, carrying voice. Some reference to travel made her, in a world-weary voice, explain to the world in general that she attends Barbie conventions every year, which take place "wherever they want us."

The children were dumbstruck by the Castle and said nothing (later Iris confided that she had so loved the Neptune Pool that she had been considering staging a fake fall into it). They kept close to the tour guide and moved quickly, their eyes wide. Meanwhile the Sober Husband, who hates tours and groups, lagged at the back. His strategy was to linger in a room after the tour had moved on, so he could feel he was exploring by himself. (Back when we were touring elementary schools to pick one for Iris, he used to break off from the group altogether and go into completely different rooms of his own choosing).

We arrived at a room in the North wing famous for its portraits with following eyes. The tour guide explained that because these portraits (of rather stern nobility) had been painted facing straight on but with no apparent light source reflecting in the eyes, wherever you were, you had the feeling that they were watching you. The group made the kinds of jokes you would expect about how it was a good thing these paintings were in a sitting room, rather than a bedroom, but the Barbie woman had a world-weary attitude about it. Addressing the group she explained that she was "used to it. In my bedroom, I have over one thousand Barbies. All watching." Her male companion said nothing.

grounding Pigwidgeon

2011-04-19T09:34:00.000-07:00

The conclusion the Sober Husband and the children came to, after our African grey flew away and was lost but then found and returned to us, is that Pigwidgeon's flight feathers need to be clipped more often to try to ensure she won't be lost again. I had a different take. After she came home from her big adventure, she's been flying around the house constantly. She gets so much joy from flying that I find it highly depressing to clip her wings.

The take-away lesson I got from losing her was not to take her into the garden (which I find sad enough; the green parrot's happiest times are spent in the backyard. She spends hours climbing around in our magnolia tree, and on the few truly hot days we have, we spray her with the hose, and she spreads her wings out wide and beats them happily in the spray). I felt that if we were careful, she could have a happy life flying around in the house. We already have to be careful with the doors, as we more often than not have undersocialized feral cats staying with us from my volunteer work, so I felt it wasn't a big increase in surveillance and caution.

The Sober Husband found this attitude of mine maddening. "I refuse to be held responsible for the parrot escaping! If she gets lost again, you have to promise that you will never say it's my fault!"

"I can't make that promise; I'm a lawyer!" I said. "I can think of lots of scenarios in which it would be your fault."

"But what if it was an accident?"

"If it was your fault, it's not really an accident; it's negligence," I quibbled. He looked disgusted.

Later he said, "I just really don't understand it, because when we got the green bird, I was on the other side of this. I thought it was sad to clip her wings, and you were so firm about it."

"That's because Amazons really aren't great fliers; it's really enough for them to be able to climb. But Piggle's not an Amazon; she's from Africa. She's not as much of a climber." The children broke in to back up my statement, reminiscing about the time I put Pigwidgeon in the magnolia tree and she fell out.

In reality I have all along had Piggle's wings clipped, just not very frequently. I wait until her talons are too long, and I take her to have both her wings and talons done at once. The Sober Husband argues that now she should be clipped regularly, "every two weeks. It was stressful and expensive when we lost her." At the time we got Piggle back, he was happy to write the reward check, but now that time has gone by, the joy of the reunion has faded but the memory of writing that $500 check remains strong.

After some very intensive nagging from him, I took Pigwidgeon down to be clipped yesterday, even though her talons weren't yet in desperate need of a trim.

For the children, this was not done soon enough. In the morning I asked Iris to get me a cup of coffee, and a crazed, caffeine-craving Pigwidgeon flew directly at the cup in Iris's hand. Iris jerked her arm reflexively, and the coffee splashed everywhere, but still Pigwidgeon managed to get a few swallows of it. Iris went for a refill, and the same thing happened again. "Pigwidgeon's going to be terrible this morning; she's had coffee," predicted Iris direly. In actuality she wasn't discernibly different (she's usually manic in the mornings and then settles down by afternoon), but the children, who are usually at school of a morning, thought she was too noisy and crazy.

In the afternoon we took Piggle to get her wings clipped. To add to the general inconvenience of having the bird trimmed, the man I take her to has become semi-retired and now grooms birds only two afternoons a week. There's always a long wait (you can't make an appointment).

Another reason to dislike taking the birds for grooming is that I always get a guilt trip of some sort or another from the bird experts. Usually it revolves around my giving Pigwidgeon too much freedom (and yes, I am fully aware that the bird people have been proven right on this). Once they told me off for giving her an entire banana, which so impressed the children that they thereafter have treated bananas with the utmost suspicion and tried to stop me from bringing this suspect fruit into our home. Yesterday I was luckily able to head the incipient guilt trip off at the pass. The bird grooming man raised his eyebrows and looked at me over his glasses. "Don't you have two parrots?" Clearly he was expecting me to confess that the other one had died or been lost. "Oh, that one's my husband's bird," I said airily. "I can't get it into a carrier without him. And we're more worried about this one." Thankfully that went over well, and there was no guilt trip. Indeed I looked like a model bird owner compared to the ones who were ahead of me, who brought in four tiny birds in a shoebox. One escaped and had to be stalked and captured.

But there was no escaping the final thing I hate about taking Pigwidgeon to have her wings clipped: the same horrible, eternal conversation. "Oh! I see you have an African grey! How many words does she know?" It is so profoundly humiliating to be the only stupid owner of a stupid African grey whose stupid parrot doesn't talk. Yesterday was no exception, with the proud owner of a roseate cockatoo looking shocked and disappointed in me after his admiring sally, "You must have such conversations with her all the time!", was met with a shameful confession that the parrot only knows how to make cat noises.

At home, Piggle was effectively grounded. She can't fly more than a few feet with fresh, severely cropped wings. I felt sad for her, but everyone else felt that it was high time indeed. The children cited the coffee incident as proof that Piggle had gone too far. "She drank coffee!" Iris said repeatedly. "She flew right at me and stuck her beak in the cup!"

games night

2011-04-18T07:51:00.001-07:00

One of the main benefits of having children is having people around to play cards with. Iris and Lola and I often play crazy eights or a delightful game called "Rat-a-Tat Cat." Lola refuses to play poker because it is too heavily identified with Iris (once Iris had a marathon poker session with another child, ending in cleaning out the other child's accumulated allowance entirely, which we made her pay back later). We've tried many other games, but veering away from crazy eights or Rat-a-Tat Cat usually ends in disaster, and last night was no exception.

Last night after dinner I started up a game of Fan Tan, a card game we learned a few years ago when visiting relatives. Lola, who had wanted to play Apples to Apples, was indignantly fussy after her father's victory at Fan Tan. I said, "Lola, if you said, 'I'd like to get Apples to Apples' now, that would be a lot nicer than your screaming and crying, 'I wanted to play Apples to Apples." Lola cut me off in midsentence: "Please, darling exalted Lord Mommy, I would like to get Apples to Apples."

Sadly Apples to Apples didn't go any better for Lola than Fan Tan had. At one point it was the Sober Husband's job to judge, selecting the best fit for "protective", and he was determined to select Lola's card because she hadn't won a single hand yet. He peered closely into Lola's face, looking for a tell to see which card she'd played. Unfortunately however Lola was charmed by the card I'd played and reacted most to that one, so he chose that, and Lola burst out in tears. "Oops! I made a mistake! 'Flying Squirrels' is what I meant to pick!" he said.

Iris was outraged. "Flying squirrels, they aren't even protective! Why did you play that? Flying squirrels!"

"Flying squirrels are famous for how protective they are of their young," I said.

"I've watched as many nature shows as you have, and I don't remember that," said Iris fiercely.

"I don't just watch television, I've traveled," I said. "I've been to places like Borneo, and flying squirrels are famous for being so protective of their young. They will just FLY AT YOU."

Iris grew more and more indignant, not accepting this. I continued. "And don't step between a flying squirrel and its nuts! That would be a terrible day for you, indeed."

Around this point it became clear that carrying on a civilized game of Apples to Apples was no longer possible. The children wandered off to create their own Apples to Apples cards, with such curiously-omitted-from-the-real-game subjects as "Lola's Buttocks."

readjusting to home

2011-04-13T05:12:00.001-07:00

So Pigwidgeon, our affable yet dimwitted African grey parrot, has been home for a week after her harrowing freakout and flight from our yard, resulting in her traveling a mile in the middle of San Francisco, spending a night and a day outdoors, and being caught by a stranger and staying with him and his roommates for three days.

I can see some side effects from this experience. The most noticeable is that she flies everywhere, all the time now. We actually have her flight feathers clipped from time to time, so she isn't as strong a flier as a wild bird (in general these kinds of larger parrots aren't great fliers; they use their beaks to be gifted climbers. This makes sense because they aren't migratory birds, and in the wild they spend a lot of time climbing up and down in trees). Previously Piggle got around in our house mainly by walking on the floor. Sometimes you would be startled by a little peck on your foot, meaning that Pig had walked up to you and wanted you to pick her up. But now, it's like how in Harry Potter Fred and George would apparate across the room once they got their apparition licenses. No matter how much more sense it would make to walk, she's going to fly. To compensate for the trimmed flight feathers, she beats her wings extra hard, so it's sort of frantic.

The first morning after she came home, she flew into every room in the house, touring the house crazily. Then she settled down on my shoulder and groomed herself extensively. The next day was spent intensely grooming as well on my arm. Those first few days she was incessantly noisy as well. "I can't believe I missed this bird so much," I said over the racket.

Now she has calmed down, but yesterday she flew into the upstairs bathroom and settled down on the shower rail. She had never before gone into the bathroom alone. In the past, she'd ask, by incessant screaming, for me to bring her in there when I was doing my makeup, and she liked hanging out in there with me, but she'd never go in by herself. But in the apartment she stayed at last week, she lived in the bathroom perching on the shower curtain rail, and yesterday she went in and stayed in there by herself. In the bathroom Piggle made every noise she knows how to make at top volume, perching on the shower rail and making a hellish racket. Was she reminiscing about the apartment she stayed at? Or just enjoying the acoustics, like a person singing in the shower?

the truth about pugs

2011-04-12T10:39:00.000-07:00

More Warcraft talk, as it seems that certain readers who would never be caught playing the online sensation can't get enough of reading about it!

I've written before that for years I was frustrated in Warcraft because I couldn't reliably find other players to help me do things which require more than one person to work together. I usually quested in those days, and it was a red letter day when I'd find a stranger or two who worked well with me. Whenever this did happen and I was able to get a lot of group quests done, I was very happy indeed. In the early years I never did belong to guilds who had it together enough to run high-level dungeons as a guild (which requires five high level players), but I did belong for a long time to a guild where a player would run our lower level characters through dungeons. This fellow had an amazingly powerful Warcraft character but was himself really lacking in social graces. I didn't care, though, because while I was leveling Chlonnaa, a draenei mage, he'd take me through Zul'Farrak and the Scarlet Monastery, and all Chlonnaa had to do was scuttle behind him picking up loot from all the corpses in his wake. Later he was kicked out of our guild, and I complained fruitlessly. "Who else will run the lower levels? Who?" I said in guild chat, and of course, the answer turned out to be nobody.

Once Blizzard created the "find group" tool, enabling players to get matched up with others and put into dungeons appropriate for their skill level, I was happy not to have to beg for runs on any of my characters. It was much more interesting, after all, to fight the elite monsters on your own, rather than just pick through their remains. But a problem remains, which is beyond Blizzard's ability to solve: a lot of Warcraft players are really awful human beings. There is nothing like a pug (a group of strangers is a "pick up group" or "pug" for short) to make you have sorrow for humanity.

Many players enjoy insulting their fellow players as much as completing a dungeon run. It used to be that the word "noob" was the most common insult, but currently the adjective "fail" is the most popular, as in "fail tank pulled the whole room", "fail healer sucks", "fail shammy doesn't know how to rez", etc.., etc...

And there's the equipment snobbery. This has become worse and more ubiquitous since Cataclysm came out. There's some underlying justification: a character's powers are largely determined by their armor and weapons. As you run more and more dungeons, you can get better equipment, but the catch 22 is that if you aren't geared very well, no one wants to run a heroic with you, and thus it's hard for you to get geared. When I was just-geared-enough to run dungeons in Cataclysm on heroic setting (harder than normal and with better loot to be had), I sat them out after a couple rough ones. I waited until I was mediocrely geared. Now the character I play most is really well-geared, and I don't get any criticism, but it was a rough haul getting there.

In order to prevent groups from being stuck with a truly awful player, pugs can vote a player out. This, however, can be really disheartening and disorienting. You don't have a chance to argue your case; you simply find yourself outside the dungeon, alone, with no warning. I remember the first time I was voted out. I was stunned. Another time I found it crazily maddening: I waited for an hour to get a pug, and then the pug took two hours to complete the Lost City of the Tol'vir. It was a fractious group, and we were having a rough time, but we were finally on the last boss. We wiped (all the players died) due to the mistakes made by the worst player, a hunter who didn't speak English and didn't know the dungeon. Then, for reasons which were completely mysterious to me, I found myself out of the dungeon. I was so angry at having spent an entire afternoon trying to get this damn dungeon run, only to get thrown out in the last few minutes. It was profoundly unfair to boot, because the recounts proved I'd been playing much more effectively than the hunter. It was extra maddening because while the others had been squabbling, I'd kept a shut mouth and stayed out of the fighting.

Studies show that everyone considers themself to be a better than average driver, and likewise Warcraft players tend to think they are all more fabulous than the rest. I, however, will admit that I am an extremely uneven player. I have my moments of brilliance (for example, in one pug everyone died but me on the boss, but I pulled out my earth elemental and got that boss down by myself when no one expected it. "So epic!!" typed the other players). I also have moments of stupidity. The one pug where I most truly should have been booted I wasn't. I logged on to do a daily random pug after a boozy dinner party I'd hosted, and I landed in Deadmines. I was so inebriated that my character could not make her way up the series of rickety gangplanks onto the ship coming back from Vanessa's nightmare. So the other four players had to kill the final boss without me, while enjoying a laugh at my expense (which I freely admitted to them was their right). I shouldn't have gotten the credit for that run, but then again, I shouldn't have been booted from that Lost City run, either.

Sometimes a player wants more people out than he can vote out or he can't get the others to agree on voting someone out. Once a tank [a tank is a player who has the strongest kind of armor and who knows protective spells. This player's role is to draw the attention of all the enemies, so they will focus their efforts on attacking the tank, while the other players attack the monsters with impunity and the healer tries to keep them all alive] threw a giant hissy fit. He didn't think the rest of us were up to his standard, and there was a particular bit of loot likely to drop on the next boss which he wanted. He sat his character down and said that if the rest of us had any decency, we'd each and every one of us leave the group voluntarily so he could get new players in and win that trinket he wanted. Of course we voted him out instead and had a good laugh at his expense.

In another pug, a pair of players were rude and obnoxious. One kept saying "I'm a god! I've downed Cho'Gall! You are all fail!" and trying to get everyone but his friend voted out. The group instead voted that player out after we'd wiped, and he childishly refused to resurrect his character and leave the dungeon. The other player in that horrible group with whom I'd bonded purposely sat his character down upon the bones of the rude, voted-out character, and we laughed with each other in little typed whispers. Finishing that pug felt like a triumph of the human spirit (and yes, I realize I should get outside more often).

Lately pugs are usually a joy for me, because my character is well-geared, powerful, and I've put a lot of work into refining her equipment. It's been a very long time since anyone ever voted me out. I've done a lot of reading online about my character's class, and I've put so much time into reforging her gear, changing her glyphs, getting the right enchants, etc.. Even a particularly immature stranger can't normally find something to complain about with me. However, I hear my guildmates complaining constantly about their rude pugs, being rejected for being insufficiently geared, etc.. "There, there," I type to them. "Don't listen to those idiots. There, there."

miracle on 17th Street

2011-04-07T07:46:00.001-07:00

My idiotic parrot is home, safe and sound!

Last Saturday, in the late afternoon, the Sober Husband and I were working in our postage-stamp sized garden, replanting things which had been temporarily moved due to the neighbors' construction project, weeding, and cleaning. My not-very bright African grey, Pigwidgeon, freaked out during this and flew crazily off, up over a neighbor's roof and out of sight. We went in pursuit, and until it was too late to bother people, we went into as many yards as we could on our block. I told every dogwalker I saw and asked them to keep an eye out.

We made a poster and put it up around the neighborhood. I put Piggle's cage outside, to help her find our yard. Lola and I stayed up until nearly 3 AM, periodically calling Piggle. The next day we searched more yards and talked to more neighbors, and I posted a $500 reward on Craigslist.

The children and I were concerned that we didn't have good enough pictures of Pigwidgeon, but the Sober Husband scoffed. Noting that all African greys look alike, he picked a photo off the web for our "LOST PARROT" poster. I followed the same strategy with my Craigslist ad. I did find a blurry picture of Pigwidgeon standing next to my laptop as I typed, and I held on to it to use as evidence of ownership if she did turn up somewhere.

On Monday, after the children went off to school and the Sober Husband off to work, I spent the entire day crying. "I feel like such a fuckup," I confided in various friends and the Sober Husband. "I lost my parrot. All my life I wanted a parrot, and I lost her." I quickly gave up on calling for Piggle during the day. PG&E is replacing all the gas lines in our neighborhood, and on top of that, the city was replacing all the water meters, which involved digging into the cement in front of each and every house on our block. If Piggle were out somewhere, she wouldn't be able to hear me in all that hellish construction racket.

The Sober Husband came home early from work, and we went on another parrot search once all that construction had stopped for the day, expanding our area and combing yet more yards. We stopped when it got dark, as I had learned from a "Parrot911" volunteer that there is no point in looking for a lost bird in the dark, as they hunker down and will remain silent, even if they hear a beloved owner's voice ("Parrot911" is a charity existing to help reunite lost parrots with their owners, and they contacted me after seeing my Craigslist ad. Parrot911 gave me some useful information, such as that lost parrots usually double back on their tracks and are therefore typically found in the opposite direction from where they were last seen and that African greys in particular are usually found within a 1-2 mile radius of their home. The Parrots911 people also kindly cross-posted my information to a variety of other lost-animal resources online).

Tuesday was a cold and windy day. Early in the day I decided that I'd make a last, gala search, but as the day wore on, cold and windy, I gave up. It had gotten down below 50 degrees the night before, and rationally there was no point in searching outside. I was in tears all day again. There were no sightings of the bird. Then late at night, I got an email from someone whose friend had found a tame gray bird. "Oh my God, Piggle may be alive!" I told Lola (in all the sorrow, bedtimes had been completely ignored and everyone was living off junk food from a convenience store run). We ran up to tell Iris. I talked more rationally to the Sober Husband. "Either someone has an African grey, or they want to mug me for my reward money," I said.

On Wednesday I was REALLY riveted to the phone, but no call came in. Finally just as it was time to go pick up the children, a friend of the person who'd found the bird called. The bird's finder was having cellphone troubles (it later emerged that his cellphone had been cut off that day). After emails and calls after I got the children, the finder's friend arranged that I would go see the found bird after 9:30. My heart sank when I heard the address, which was in the Mission. The Sober Husband also felt it was unlikely to be our bird, but as far as I could tell, no one else in the city had lost an African grey (African greys had gone missing in Gilroy and Oakland since ours had, but not in San Francisco).

The Sober Husband cynically suggested that we take whatever parrot we were offered, "since it will cost twice as much as the reward to get a new one, and we need another one." Later, after thinking it over, he changed his mind and cautioned me not to take a parrot if I weren't sure it was mine. "We won't know anything about its personality." He was highly skeptical that I'd be able to recognize my own parrot. "All those African greys look exactly alike, how are you going to be able to tell?" "I will know my bird, and my bird will know me," I said confidently.

We hung out in the Mission (the children at home with a beloved babysitter) until it was time. I had a longish chat with the owner of a used bookstore about Philip Zimbardo's findings on institutionalized evil and Victor Frankl. This was interrupted by a very tall and slightly dazed looking young man, who informed us that "at the concentration camps, there were four or six people who could heal themselves with the power of their minds. Whatever was done to them, like cutting them up, they could just use their mind to heal it." He demonstrated by holding out one of his arms and staring at it meaningfully. "Afterwards they came to California to show people." The bookstore owner and I, nonplussed, were silent for a moment. Then the owner went back to showing me a fascinating and obscure study of behavior in concentration camps, written by a Dutch psychologist who was himself imprisoned in a concentration camp and then wrote the book afterward. The book was spellbinding, but I couldn't bear the idea of reading something so depressing in my Piggle-mourning state of mind, so I just paid for my not-that-much-cheerier books about horrific invasions of personal privacy by the U.S. government and the nature of evil.

When the time came, we walked over to see the parrot. I felt very fragile, and the Sober Husband was preparing me for the worst. "I don't think this can be her," he said. "It's just too far." A friendly man came to the door and showed us in. He'd put a piece of paper labeled "BIRD" on the bathroom door to warn his roommates. There on the shower rail was Piggle. She stepped right up on my hand. She made her familiar chirps that sound like a smoke detector with an expired battery, and she bent her head over for me to scratch her neck. "It's Piggle, it's Piggle," I said over and over again. The Sober Husband looked skeptical. The bird's finder showed us in to the kitchen, which, very studentlike, had a large number of liquor bottles standing about. When Pig did this very peculiar thing she often does where she holds my fingers in her beak while frantically whipping her head up and down, the Sober Husband reached for my checkbook to write a reward check. Even he had to admit that it was easy to tell that this was the very same bird we'd lost.

Somehow she survived a night outdoors and made her way down through the Castro, over Dolores Park, and into the Mission. Our good Samaritan saw her outdoors. "She was obviously exhausted, I think that's how I could catch her," he said. She nipped him, but without breaking the skin, and luckily for her she had been found by a persistent and kind person who didn't give up until he'd brought her home. "It was hard finding something she'd like to eat," he said. "She's kind of fickle."

Once we got the parrot home, I woke up the children to see her. They were ecstatic. Piggle ducked into her cage quickly for a snack but didn't want to be caged, so we brought both the parrots upstairs for the night. The green parrot had been very noisy and needy during the grey bird's absence, and they settled down nicely on the parrot tree together.

This morning the Sober Husband expressed a new concern that she'd sneak out again. "I'd like to think she learned a lesson," I said, "but probably what she learned was that if you get lost, someone takes care of you and you have a big adventure and then go home again."

my heart is broken

2011-04-03T10:10:00.000-07:00

Yesterday the Sober Husband and I were doing some much-needed yard work in our tiny, tiny urban garden, and we were careless. My sweet, stupid parrot, Pigwidgeon, flew away.

Mind you, her flight feathers are clipped -- and she's never before reached any impressive altitude -- so we didn't think it was possible that she could crazily fly away down the block, over roofs.

Immediately we went around the block, calling her. I got a couple of neighbors who live in the middle of the block to let me go in their yards to call her and look for her. A very game neighbor got out a big ladder and risked his limbs (ours is a block on a steep hillside) to climb up to look into some adjacent yards. Unfortunately the people who live at the most promising spot on the block weren't home, and there was no way to invade their yards without going through their homes.

We made posters and covered the area with them. I asked everyone I saw walking their dog to keep an eye out. One woman had seen a gray bird in some bushes on the next block, but after investigating, I think it's most likely she saw one of the mockingbirds who live in front of my house. Lola and I stayed up until 2:30, periodically going outside to call her. I put her cage out in the backyard, thinking that if she found her way back to the yard, she'd find it reassuring.

Please, no shame or guilt trips. Everyone feels really terrible and ashamed, and plenty of tears have been shed. All my life I wanted a parrot, and I finally did get one as a generous gift from my husband (I'm not counting the green bird here as "having a parrot" as that one is my mortal enemy), and now she's lost. I worry that she may have already passed away, and it seems wrong to me that she could without my knowing it. The parrot-human bond is so strange and intense, a bit like identical twins. (Watching the Sober Husband with the green parrot is always fascinating, as they appear to be able to read each other's minds). Pigwidgeon and I have a language together and a way of being together, me skritching around her neck, Piggle combing my hair with her beak and making her meowing noises. I can't bear being without her.

Pigwidgeon's speech report

2011-03-31T10:13:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I was ignoring noisy Pigwidgeon, our moronic young African grey parrot, who was in disgrace over a nipping incident, until she croaked out a rough, "Hel-lo?" Delighted I cooed back, "Hello! Hello! Hello! Hello, Piggle!"

"Meow? Mrrow! Myow! Meow?" retorted Pigwidgeon, following up these cat noises with some unnerving imitations of a child with a headcold snuffling up snot. The word "hello" was not heard again.

counting them down

2011-03-31T09:45:00.001-07:00

Fifth grader Iris uber Alles has been irritated all year long by her math class. Last fall Iris brought up the subject of her math class and said unhappily that she must have done terribly on her standardized tests last year, because she'd been put into a math group that was too easy for her. We parents made inquiries and found out that, for reasons which remain completely inscrutable to us, the children's school doesn't do ability grouping in the fifth grade for math. Iris wasn't, as she thought, cut loose from the higher achieving girls' group; that group didn't exist any more.

The result has been that Iris has been severely underchallenged and bored all year. The Sober Husband, who is the self-designated Math Parent (and indeed he's overqualified for that job -- the man has a highly respectable Erdos number and has taught math at the college level), reached out as tactfully as he could a few times to the math teacher, hoping to get Iris harder work, but it hasn't panned out.

In theory mixed ability groups give the regular students the opportunity to see and learn from more advanced kids, but I doubt Iris's presence is inspirational to anyone. While some of the children are truly struggling with the material, they are confronted by a bored and sarcastic Iris, no doubt sighing and rolling her eyes.

Iris gleefully shared the other day that "we're doing fractions, and the teacher asked, 'I have five fifths and I take one away; what do I have?' and a girl said, "Umm, three sixths?'" Iris laughed heartily. I felt a twinge of sorrow for the child who drew Iris's scorn in her mathematical struggles (I have talked to Iris a few times about the need to be tactful and polite to others in these situations, but I don't think it sinks in).

I feel for her teacher. I can understand that presented with a group of students with a wide variation in abilities, a teacher naturally ends up focusing on the lower-performing end. Additionally, she needs to try to get these students interested in math and to believe that they can be good at it, and how can that be helped by having Iris huffing over the indignity of having to do the too-hard-for-them, too-easy-for-her work?

Yesterday Iris reported indignantly that her teacher taught them a rather time-consuming method for reducing fractions and gave them a big sheet of fractions to reduce. "Momdude, it took forever! Like ten minutes for each fraction to write all that out! So I raised my hand and said, 'I can do all these in my head, so do I have to do that method? Can I just write the answer instead?' and the teacher said no!" Iris was outraged.

"Well, you only have about two more months," I said.

"Nineteen more classes," she snapped back.

"Wait, you figured out how many more math classes?"

"No, the teacher did," Iris informed me. "When I complained, she told me there were only 19 more classes."

I laughed. "Oh, Iris, she probably has a calendar where she's crossing off how she's getting rid of you. Maybe on the last day, there's a smiley face. Or a little drawing of you she can scratch out." We both laughed. (Of course, I am sure the teacher is far too professional for that, but I'm also sure her life would be easier if Iris weren't in this class).

a house full of little dogs

2011-03-23T02:34:00.000-07:00

Last weekend Pigwidgeon the idiotic African grey parrot was making a racket during my Warcraft raid. Although I was using a headset with its own microphone when I talked to the raid team, evidently they could hear Pig when I spoke. "Oh! You've got a little dog there!" said one of my team members. "What kind of dog is it?" I could hear the others laughing after I sheepishly said, "That's not a dog. It's a demented parrot."

Recently Iris, a huge fan of "Pearls Before Swine", called into a radio talk show and got to play Trivial Pursuit with cartoonist and fellow recovering lawyer, Stephan Pastis. Iris felt a bit shy and got me to help her, and little Lola shrieked uncontrollably with excitement. "I see you have a little dog there," said the affable Stephan Pastis. "Uh, no," I said. "It's a little girl." Lola shrieked all the louder with joy and amusement at being mistaken for a dog by a famous person.

news, happy news for some which others can use to their advantage

2011-03-22T10:12:00.000-07:00

So the big news around these parts is that eleven year-old Iris uber Alles was accepted to a school for gifted children down the Peninsula. When her acceptance packet came, it was filled with glitter, and Iris and I threw the glitter in the air as she shrieked and hopped about.

Iris has always had a staunch, unquestioning belief in her own personal superiority, and now she has had outside confirmation. I myself also had a staunch and persistent belief in my own brilliance as a child, but I was alone in that possibly mistaken belief. (One of my parents notably sneered at me, "You think you are so smart, but you're ordinary." Around that time I won a National Merit Scholarship, which would seem to support the idea that I wasn't exactly ordinary, but no one seemed convinced). I don't know what it would have been like as a kid to have people actually say to me, "You really do have a lot of potential, and we want to help you work to your best ability." Looking at Iris, you can see it looks pretty heady. She's drunk on her acceptance letter, and she's pouring over the school's website, agonizing over whether to switch from Mandarin to Japanese and pondering which of the many exciting activities she'll pursue.

The Sober Husband is less pleased. He doesn't see any need to send the child to a special school. He seems to think she should just do projects outside school hours, preferably projects in his areas of expertise: physics, math, and chess. The child herself prefers to knit in front of reality TV on her off hours, pointing out with great feeling that it is unfair to expect her to do extra math when she already puts in plenty of time at math classes during the week.

The Sober Husband keeps asking, "Are you suuuuure about this? You're going to have to take a bus, you know. A loooong bus ride!" Iris pointed out that lots of girls in South Africa used to spend over two hours on a bus to get to school before Oprah created a boarding school, and they were happy to do it because they want a good education. Like Oprah's students, Iris feels that a bus ride is a small price to pay for more challenging classes. I noted that as a child living in a rural area, I had very long bus rides to school, and at the end of my bus route was a crappy school. The Sober Husband rolled his eyes at me. "And it snowed, too! We were cold and wet on the bus!" I informed him. He rolled his eyes more.

But the Sober Husband is, if nothing else, resourceful, and he found a way to use this acceptance to further his own hobbyhorse, making the children do difficult math in their free time. "When Iris couldn't figure something out," he told me happily, "I said, 'I bet all those other children at the other school can do it.' And she wanted to use the iPhone calculator, but I said, 'I'm sure all those other kids can do it without an iPhone, and you'll need to be as good as them.' And then she did it! I'm going to use this all the time to pressure her."

going to the gym

2011-03-21T22:26:00.000-07:00

The Sober Husband has taken a new job, which is a good thing. He needed a change and some new challenges, and his old company was sadly declining. Once that job had been a dream job, a job that fit him like a custom-made leather glove, and then it turned into a depressing set of hassles and annoyances.

Overall he's much perkier and happier, but no job comes without its hassles. At this job, the employees all work out together a couple of times a week. The Sober Husband despises organized exercise and complained to me, "They didn't tell me during the interviews that I was going to have to go to a gym!" On the days the office works out, he complains, "I have PE class today", rolling his eyes.

Today he had trouble finding the shorts he wanted to take "for PE class" in time for me to drive him to the train station, and that probably contributed to him not paying attention to which T-shirt he randomly pulled out of his drawer. It wasn't until it was too late that he realized he was working out in one of his weird Burning Man era T-shirts, a relic of the days when we were cutting-edge urban hipsters. This particular T-shirt blares, in huge block capitals, "SUBJUGATE THE GENETICALLY INFERIOR." As I was laughing heartily at his expense that evening, he reminded me that the gym his office goes to is part of a Jewish community center.

the language developments continue apace

2011-03-18T17:26:00.000-07:00

Pigwidgeon the moronic African Grey parrot continues to fail to learn to speak. By this age, she should have a rich vocabulary, but she doesn't have a single word. On the other hand, recently she learned to meow and purr, which has been profoundly irritating. And as of yesterday, she has learned to imitate convincingly that horrible noise children with colds make when they are snuffling up their mucus in order to avoid blowing their noses. Evidently she was paying attention the last time the children had head colds.

I find this deeply unsettling. I keep looking at her when she does this, trying to make sure she herself doesn't have some kind of discharge which is going to cost me big money at the vet's.

the drunken housewife and her time consuming hobby

2011-03-14T10:16:00.000-07:00

Several people (including my own Sober Husband) have requested that I write more about Warcraft. Evidently people, like my husband, who find Warcraft uninteresting and have no desire to play it and who may even make fun of me for playing it so much, cannot get enough of reading about it (probably this is so they can ridicule me all the more).

Over the last couple of months I've been playing Warcraft far too frigging much. Why, pray tell? Because I have entered the more elite ranks of players; I've become that glorious creature, a regular raider (for another point of view, substitute the word "obsessed" for "elite" and "pathetic" for "glorious"). "What the hell is that," you might wonder. Fear not, for I shall explain.

The World of Warcraft is a very large and flexible world. Millions of players around the world participate in it. We are housed on various servers, which are based upon our geographical region and our presumed language of choice. Servers also have distinct personalities: you can choose one where the players can attack each other at any time, or you can pick one where you can turn off the ability of other players to attack you until and unless you yourself make an aggressive move first. There are also "role playing" servers, including a very infamous one known for its cybersex, which I have not myself visited.

People play Warcraft in a number of different ways. You can just quest all the time, which is how I largely spent my first couple of years in Azeroth ("Azeroth" is the name for the virtual world in the game). You can join battlegrounds and fight it out with other players, which I love to do. And you can join with other players to enter dungeons, which we call "instances", to do more complicated and difficult fighting against harder monsters.

I never used to be able to run instances, because I was either not in a guild or in a "social guild" where we just yammered to each other all the time but never grouped up to do anything seriously. (I still miss my old Alliance guild from Drenden, where the wit was always sparkling and the conversation always extremely inappropriate). But then Blizzard brilliantly created a tool to enable players to join up with strangers, either for specific instances or for random ones. Servers are grouped together in "battle nets" or "battle groups", which means that when players join together in these random groups, they meet up with players from other servers whom they might not ever see again. (Random groups are called "pugs", an abbreviation for "pick up groups", and this morning I pugged with some lovely players from Chile, who adored me because I am that rare creature, an American WoW player who speaks Spanish and doesn't go off on a tirade if Spanish is the main language of the pug).

Before Blizzard created that tool, it was very hard for me to get a group together for an instance. I remember the day when FINALLY I was running Zul'Farrak with a decent group when our tank had to quit because his mother insisted he get off the damn computer and go outside to play. Now I run a random at least once a day (by running random dungeons, players earn points which can be amassed and used to trade for really good armor).

Even though I spent far too much time playing Warcraft, I was always what the other players call disparagingly "a casual player." For more serious players, there are two much more challenging ways to play Warcraft, both requiring players to form teams which regularly work together. First there are arenas, where teams of different sizes attack each other. There's a sexist saying in Warcraft, that "chicks quest and guys arena", and there's a lot of truth to that. I've never joined an arena team, although I have talked idly of forming one. Blizzard tries half-assedly to turn arenas into a true sport, with actual seasons and rankings and what-have-you, but so far, like a chick, I've sat it out.

Then there are raids. We call anything a raid which requires a lot of players and which is supposed to be hard to accomplish. Raids are usually either ten players or twenty-five players (although years ago Blizzard created several forty player raids, they seem to have given up on the idea of trying to make us herd 40 catlike players). They need to be well-equipped and to know what they are doing. And what do they do? Blizzard purposefully designed parts of the World of Warcraft to be so difficult that it would take a group of ten or twenty-five players several weeks to conquor them, slaying every monster and gleaning every bit of loot.

The places you go on a raid are beautiful and strange. The developers spent a lot of time and energy on them, and the graphics and ideas can be breathtaking, funny, disgusting, disturbing, or deeply moving. The level of difficulty can be huge: one person's fuckup will usually mean that everyone dies (and when you die, you have to run back as a ghost to your body, and your equipment is damaged. You'll be less powerful until you're able to pay for expensive repairs to your gear).

Currently I am on a ten man raid team. My raid team meets twice a week, from 9:00 to 11:30 p.m. my time (the players are scattered around the world). This is my second raid team, the first fell apart after a month or two, but thankfully one of the other players from that first group took the lead in organizing a second raid team for that time slot. I love playing with this group: the players are intelligent, adult, and respectful of one another. When I tried raiding on another server with another character, I got upset regularly as a couple of the other players, extremely experienced raiders, tended to lord it over the more casual players. I felt there was a healthy sprinkling of sexism in that, as well as arrogance which was often appropriate (these players were indeed strong and highly experienced with better equipment), but at times misguided. For example (and here I get more technical), another player was always trying to micromanage my paladin's buffs, despite the fact that he had no understanding of the paladin class mechanics. Every time he'd bitch me out for not giving raid buffs, when at that time paladin buffs were by class only. No matter how many times I explained that paladin buffs were class buffs, not raid buffs, he never learned that and continued to try to correct me. I felt my intelligence was always being insulted, and it was maddening coming from someone who never could be made to realize that he was making factual errors in his criticisms. But my current team is composed of only gracious players, who have nothing but politely worded encouragement and gentle constructive criticism.

Being on a raid team is like having a part-time job. You need to be on time and prepared. You should be logged in, fully repaired, with plenty of expensive elixirs and food (elixirs and top end food give your character heightened abilities for an hour). You should study the fight ahead of time (there are endless tutorials players create on Youtube). We talk to each other both by typing and by speaking; I bought an annoying headset with a microphone and headphones just for raiding. (My family members are united by a hatred of hearing my fellow raiders talk on the voice program we all call "vent", but they love hearing my isolated, out-of-context remarks. Their amused laughter often forms the background when I'm making cogent remarks into my microphone such as "he blew me right off the platform" or "I'm putting my mammoth up for repairs").

And you need to have the time blocked out, without interruptions. I could never have raided when the children were smaller. I remember trying group things in the past and having to have the Sober Husband explain to my group that I'd been called away for a child emergency. Now that they are older, I can shout directions at them while still manipulating my elemental shaman. I do still run into more trouble than the average raider, though. Often I have to ask, "Could you please repeat that? I have a lot of parrot aggro over here; I can't hear you over the birds." This past weekend during a particular intense moment, Pigwidgeon the idiotic African grey parrot decided to join me. I already had Al the moronic orange tabby kneading my chest and Frowst, our majestic trophy cat, leaning against my arm, and Pig divebombed us all, landing on my head. The cats flinched. Al dug his claws in my cleavage. Piggle squawked and awkwardly looked for footing around my head. Through it all I kept playing, not missing a beat as my shaman waged war against a massive air spirit with a rather threatening pelvic undulation. After all, a raider must maintain focus.

the parrot, the hoarder, and the disrespectful mother

2011-03-10T16:20:00.000-08:00

The other night Iris, Lola and I were all hanging out at the dining room table with Pigwidgeon, the African grey parrot. Lola asked my permission to give Piggle a pencil she'd found on the table. I hesitated. Recently I'd gotten into a mild dust-up with the Sober Husband over that exact same scenario, giving a perfectly good pencil to a parrot to destroy. I love pencils, and I want to keep a lot of them around the house, handy for my Sudoku puzzle or for writing down lists of ingredients. But as the Sober Husband pointed out, I also pay top dollar for parrot toys, and it would be cheaper to let the parrots chew on pencils (and they do want to gnaw on pencils; they find them irresistible).

Remembering that debate, I said it was okay for Lola to give Piggle the pencil. Pig immediately began destroying the pencil with great gusto, and Lola just as quickly became distraught. "Can we take it back?" she pleaded. "There's no point in taking it back now," I said.

I went into my stash in the kitchen and found a pencil covered with hearts. "Here, Lola," I said. "Have this one to cheer you up!" Lola took the pencil and curled up on the kitchen floor in a fetal position, cradling the second pencil and crying hysterically over the death of the first pencil.

"Lola! I just don't get this," I said. "It was YOUR IDEA to give the pencil to the parrot in the first place!"

Sobbing Lola said, "I just didn't realize how much I would love him."

"Him? Him?" murmured Iris in a low voice to me in the next room after I returned. "She is such a hoarder, Momdude. She is going to be a hoarder when she grows up." We both took a moment to remember "the Cupy family", a large group of used slushee cups Lola had insisted upon keeping in the dining room for years, which mysteriously vanished while I was in the hospital. Lola's wails continued as she mourned the fallen pencil, which by then was just a memory, a memory and a mess of tiny shards on the floor which I instructed Iris to sweep up. "Momdude! That is so unfair!" said Iris.

"Iris, I can't ask Lola to do it; it would be too upsetting," I explained.

Iris began a lengthy set of demands and negotiations aimed at requiring a huge amount of disgusting work to be performed by Lola in exchange for her cleaning up the pencil mess. Lola sobbed in the next room. Finding this situation so ridiculous, I found it hard to keep a straight face, and Iris was incensed. "Momdude! You are making this harder than it has to be! You are not very respectful!"

the parrots are talking, all right

2011-03-08T04:59:00.000-08:00

Pigwidgeon the idiotic African Grey parrot taught herself how to meow convincingly, and it's crazy-making. Last night I was cooking furiously, trying to get a spinach lasagna done in time for the children to eat before bedtime, and I was continually interrupted by stressed-out, trapped cat-sounding meows. As a reasonably dutiful and doting cat owner, every time I heard one of those I'd automatically spring into action, looking for a cat in trouble, before realizing, "It's just the stupid bird again." Finally I called the children and made them take Pigwidgeon away upstairs so I could finish the lasagna in peace.

And then the Amazon parrot, the one who is not supposed to be a good talker, showed off with a new phrase. "Iris! Lola! Come here! Iris! Lola! Come here!" she shouted, mimicking me perfectly. The children, who refer to her as "the Evil Dinosaur", ignored her (unlike their poor stupid mother, they can tell when a sound is made by a parrot and then ignore it accordingly). I made them go to the living room and and acknowledge that she'd called them, to be polite.

the parrot is talking... just not in English

2011-03-05T14:02:00.000-08:00

Pigwidgeon, our moronic African grey parrot, has utterly failed to learn to talk so far. But! Over the last few days she has taken up meowing and purring. She sounds exactly like our cats.

This seems to be a linguistic development, just not the one we wanted.

training up a child

2011-03-03T12:03:00.000-08:00

Yesterday Iris uber Alles's fifth grade class spent the day touring three hospitals, courtesy of the numerous parents who are surgeons and physicians. At one point the girls were shown a machine designed to teach surgeons how to perform a particular operation, and they were encouraged to try it. Iris reported that she was the only one who could do it correctly.

"You were supposed to be moving these kinds of scissors, like you would in an operation where you have these things you're moving with remote controls [I understood this all too well, having once awakened during exactly this sort of surgery. It was like an alien abduction, mysterious gowned figures bent over huge machines]. No one else could do it, because your perspective was off. You were seeing it from above, kind of from on the side and above. But I have World of Warcraft fingers, and I could do it! It was just like playing World of Warcraft."

"Did they say you'd make a great surgeon?"

"Yes. Yes, they did. It was so easy, because I have World of Warcraft fingers! And I was the only one who did it right!"

another edifying conversation with Lola

2011-03-01T08:52:00.000-08:00

Yesterday eight year-old Lola was feeling chatty as we headed to Iris's orthodontist. "Why don't cars get to go to spas, where they can be pampered?"

I said that cars do, and we call that a carwash. I was starting to explain "detailing" (a concept foreign to the children, as their parents are too cheap), but Lola cut me off. "No, I mean fancy, with special baths, elemental baths. When cars have hair, then they won't be denied!"

"What are elemental baths?" asked Iris with genuine curiosity.

"A bath where there is only one element. You know, different ones with different elements, just one element."

Iris very superiorly pointed out that water itself is composed of more than one element and went on a lengthy rant about the scientific impossibility of Lola's imagined spa, with its elemental baths, but I cut her off. "Iris, you're ignoring the most important part, that the cars have to grow hair first. Cars with hair? And does that mean that bald people can't go to the elemental baths? What does hair have to do with these elemental baths?"

two words

2011-02-23T22:08:00.000-08:00

Today I took the children out for lunch. We had a lovely time together for once (usually at least one of the three of us is cranky). Towards the end of lunch I made up a game. I made the children look away, and I tore a paper napkin in half. On each half I wrote a word, a word describing each child. I put the pieces of napkin away and set the children to guessing. "It's a word I use, a word that describes you. Something I say to you."

Lola cocked her head to the side and said, "Two words that describe us? 'Caring' and 'shy.'"

Iris burst out laughing. I said incredulously, "When has anyone ever described the two of you as 'caring' and 'shy'?"

(The words I had written down were "whackjob" and "loon").

the dark that lurks in the hearts of children and an interesting job opportunity

2011-02-18T08:27:00.000-08:00

Lola, who just finished reading "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone", remarked out of the blue to me the other day, "The sorting hat would put Iris in Slytherin."

I thought that was a bit rich coming from a child who is scheming to put together a criminal gang. Lola has become obsessed with security cameras. Wherever we go, she locates the security cameras and points them out to me. In a local business she became excited, blurting out, "Cut cords! Cut cords!" when it looked like a security camera had already conveniently been disabled.

Lola feels that she has a natural affinity for finding all the security cameras. Now "I need a kleptomaniac", she says frankly. "A kleptomaniac will be used to stealing things." Lola used to think she needed an extra gang member, "someone to figure out what they do with the security cameras", but I explained that in most places the cameras just record what they see. Lola had imagined there was always a person somewhere, or at the least a computer, concentrating on the live feeds, and she thought she needed a gang member to deal with that person. She was relieved to hear that the cameras aren't normally attended and that she didn't need to hire some muscle. "Now I just need a kleptomaniac," she said wistfully.

Henry's outing

2011-02-16T05:56:00.000-08:00

The other day the children and I were making a fuss over Frowst, our most glamorous cat, as is our wont. Frowst spends most of his time outdoors (a petcam we fastened to his collar revealed that he spends much of his life lying in the crawlspace under our house, broken up by occasional bursts of energy spent climbing various trees), and when he comes inside, he likes a good meal and a good petting. Because he is so beautiful, a luxurious-furred black animal with a regal bearing, we are more than happy to oblige. The one naysayer is the Sober Husband.

"I don't see why you guys make such a big deal out of Frowst," he said critically.

"He's so beautiful!" we chimed.

"I think Henry is more perfect looking."

"He loves to be petted so much."

"If I even touch Henry, she sticks to me like glue. She craves attention."

Spurred by the accusation that she might not appreciate Henry enough, eight year-old Lola spoke up. "I love Henry, too! Don't you remember that tantrum I threw when Henry was going to spend the night out?" She spoke with pride, as though a good tantrum were a thing of beauty to be marveled at. Of course we remembered, although not with that same admiration and pride.

Recently some friends of ours who live nearby and know of my proclivity for rodents had an issue with mice. They were working at keeping all food secured and at sealing up all entry points, but those are difficult tasks in a large, older home where a baby lives, a baby who drops Cheerios with abandon. I suggested predator urine crystals, which scare off any prey animal and are non-toxic. I also said that getting a cat wasn't necessarily going to fix things, particularly as we've had cats who loved to catch mice and then release them in our bedroom in the middle of the night to showcase their hunting skills. (Once I had a wild mouse in our bedroom for three days before I managed to catch him and release him, and there was a particularly horrible night involving a partially paralyzed mouse dragging itself along our floor. The cat responsible for this had gone downstairs for some cat chow, satisfied with a good night's work). Oddly enough getting a pet rat is a much better mouse deterrent, as mice are rightfully afraid of rats and will stay away from territory which has been claimed by a rat. All the time I had pet rats, I had no mice, even though our old neighborhood was heavily populated with both mice and wild rats.

But of course getting a pet rat is a big step, and a much lesser commitment would be a loaner cat. I offered the services of Henry as a deterrent for a few days. Henry was the logical choice as the children refused to let Frowst go anywhere, and our other cat, Al, is frankly incompetent as a cat. We brought Henry over with some food and a litter box, and Lola fretted as Henry settled in. Henry paced about and let out some yowls, but she seemed to be settling in and she definitely had a strong interest in the air vents which were the suspected mouse entry point. I kept reassuring Lola that Henry leads a dull life and needs some adventure, a little shaking up, but Lola was fretful. Then the Sober Husband suggested closing the glass door leading to the deck, worried that Henry was going to harm the screen. As Iris held Henry, our friend opened the screen door in order to close the glass door, and Henry was off like a shot. She exploded out of Iris's hands, across the deck, and down the stairs at the back. I followed her down three flights of stairs, calling her, and Lola was on my heels, crying hysterically.

"Lola! I'm not going to be able to hear Henry with your crying," I said. "Go get your father!" But Henry was not to be found on any of the levels of the decks or in the fenced yard. I could see a place in the high fence where Henry could easily have gone into the next yard, and from there, over the neighbor's lower fence. I called Henry, but with no luck. Lola's sobs were deafening.

The Sober Husband proposed setting up camp right there in our friend's yard (I felt terrible for our friend, having all this melodrama breaking out), but I wanted to go back home and look for Henry on the way. "Henry will be disoriented, she's never been this far from home," the Sober Husband said direly. Lola screamed even more hysterically. I glared at the Sober Husband and said, "Lola, Henry's going to be fine. She'll run downhill and find her way back home." "Henry's never been to this block before; I can't imagine she'll find her way," said the Sober Husband darkly. I shot him another glare. "One of us will need to spend the night outside with cat treats," the Sober Husband continued, as Lola sobbed, crying, "Henry! Henry!" through thick tears

Back at home, I hushed Lola. Iris and I thought we heard Henry's collar jingling. Sure enough, when we called, Henry slowly came out from the backyard and stood at the steps to our house, the picture of affronted indignation. Clearly Henry felt betrayed, and she did not want to go near us or go into the house. I scooped her up and carried her inside, where she settled down on a chair and began an extended, ostentatious grooming, restoring her fur to order after her ordeal while ignoring all of us pointedly. By the next day, Henry and Lola were both back to normal, Lola left only with the triumphant memory of her epic fussing and Henry with more inscrutable memories.

underachieving parrots

2011-02-10T07:49:00.000-08:00

There are two parrots who live here: one very intense double yellow-headed Amazon, a relic from the time when I used to spend a lot of my time working with birds at a wildlife hospital for aquatic birds, where the head of the clinic dabbled in parrot rescue on the side, and a ditzy African grey named Pigwidgeon.

The African grey is the only pet we have who is not supposed to be defective or secondhand; we picked her out as a baby from a bird store. She was an expensive present to me when the Sober Husband and I worked out some problems we'd been having, and she's supposed to be a top-of-the-line parrot, smart, handfed as a baby, and carefully raised.

Meanwhile the Amazon parrot was a lost bird we adopted after her original owners never claimed her. She had an infection when I got her, and she seemed to have been fed exclusively junk food by her prior owners, refusing to eat any fruits or vegetables but perking up dramatically if a bag of chips rustled nearby. She was about four years old when we got her, and she's as mean as a snake to everyone but the Sober Husband, whom she loves with a deep passion. Last year when I severely sprained my ankle and had to use crutches, the green bird saw her chance to finish me off. More than once she leaped off her cage to attack me, me screaming, "Get it off me, get it off me" as I tried to shake the vicious bird off while balancing on my crutches. Originally the Amazon parrot was named Zoe, but after we got Piggle, everyone stopped using that name. Now she's called "the green bird", and even she's taken to saying that. "Green bird, green bird," she remarks.

Part of why we picked out an African grey for the second parrot was because those birds are famous for their wit and conversation. We had seen the videotapes of Alex, the world-famous African grey who challenged scientists' conception of intelligence in animal species. I'd read about parrots who tattled on their cagemates. The children and I were excited to get such a smart bird and couldn't wait until she'd talk.

Two years later we're still waiting. Evidently we picked out the one African grey who was as dumb as a stump. Poor Piggle makes horrible noises which sound like a smoke detector going off, whistles, and screams, but she can't speak. There are plenty of other signs of a disturbing lack of reason as well. Pigwidgeon has a phobia of sticks and objects which resemble sticks. Ladders are also terrifying to her, causing her to scream and collapse in her cage when they are carried nearby. The other day we had an appraiser in as part of refinancing our house, a rather innocuous fellow, and Pigwidgeon somehow found him terrifying and nearly deafened us all with her screams of terror and frenzied thrashing.

She's a sweet bird in her own way, one who loves to be with me and the children and who enjoys grooming us. She's a very companionable creature who likes to sleep on the headboard of our bed. But at a time in her life when she should be learning new words and building a vocabulary, she's resolutely limited to harsh squawks and screams. I am quite defensive when people ask how many words she knows and when they look at me as though I must be mistaken when I say she can't talk, because "everyone knows African greys are the smartest birds there are." "Well, it's like humans," I try to explain. "You can have an Einstein, and you can have an idiot. This bird is an idiot." The children sadly remark, "Pigwidgeon is not as smart as the green bird. Why is the green bird smarter than Pigwidegeon?"

Yesterday the green bird was in a rare chatty mood, and we ended up having a long conversation. "Lola? Lola?" she asked.

"Lola's at school." She asked for the Sober Husband in the same way, and I informed her that he was at work.

"Pretty bird? Pretty bird?"

"Yes, you are pretty birds."

"Green bird. Green bird."

"Yes, you are a green bird."

"Hello? How you doing?"

"Fine! Good morning! How are you doing?" I said politely.

"Lola? Lola?"

This went on for half an hour, this rather stilted exchange of ideas on the riveting subjects of Lola's whereabouts and the greenness and attractiveness of the bird. Meanwhile my bird, Pigwidgeon, was agog. She concentrated and quivered, fascinated. But still she didn't try to talk.

Meanwhile the Sober Husband has upped the ante. He has become convinced that our birds should learn songs. Alex, the counting and reasoning lab parrot, is no longer the role model our birds are compared to. Instead, it's the Heavy Metal Parrot:
"Maybe if we play that song, 'Let The Bodies Hit The Floor', all day, the parrots will learn it," he said enthusiastically.

I snorted. "Good luck with that. I've been trying to teach them to say 'good morning' for two years now."

how to elicit homicidal feelings

2011-01-31T18:46:00.000-08:00

I was having a spectacularly bad day, a terrible, awful, horrible day, which was known to my life's companion, the Sober Husband. As I was having problems using a translation application on the iPad to try to communicate with the Chinese exchange student staying with us, the Sober Husband remarked cruelly, "Even a toddler can use an iPad."

He'll be lucky if he makes it through the next twenty-four hours without being maimed.

drawing life

2011-01-26T17:08:00.000-08:00

I take life drawing classes, where a room of artists (many of whom are extremely gifted) each week painstakingly and silently draw a naked model. The Sober Husband has perhaps not understood the seriousness of this venture, and recently called out to me as I left, "Have fun! I hope you get someone really good looking!"

"That's not what it's about," I corrected him loftily. "It's actually better if it's someone interesting looking, like once we had a fat person and everyone loved it. It was so much better than when we had the really gorgeous body builder."

In truth, the energy in the room had been terrible the time we had the handsome, perfectly toned gym-goer (who spent his break periods perusing a magazine which I swear was called "The Perfect Body"). Normally there's no creepy energy to be detected anywhere, but that time, the model himself seemed to be getting off on having us draw him, and it seemed, well, unwholesome. I felt almost exploited (and also I found it was surprisingly hard to draw true washboard abs without having the washboard-ness of it come out looking like wrinkles).

Last night I remembered that conversation, as I ended up having to eat my own words. I settled in happily at my easel, and I looked up to see the ugliest person I have ever seen naked (and I've been to nude beaches, people, as well as to leather events). My initial reaction, I am ashamed to admit, was "I don't want to see this." The model was a woman of indeterminate but far from young age, who had a small frame but was carrying a lot of excess weight. She had rolls and rolls of fat and horrible, draping, loose, crepey skin. And sadly, she wasn't the kind of fat person of whom they always say, "She has such a pretty face." Her face looked like a child's drawing of a witch: tiny, squinty eyes, a sharp nose, and thin, nearly nonexistent lips, and bags, such bags under her eyes. Her hair was wispy and thin and needed the roots touched up.

I quailed, and I hated myself for it. I reminded myself during the first short pose: "You're not the spring chicken you once were, either. You aren't the same size you were in your twenties, and you always go far too long before you touch up your own roots. You've got no right to be judgmental. " Then the model turned and bent over, presenting me and my companions on either side with a remarkably explicit view of her crotch. I wanted to flee. "I can't draw this," I thought to myself. "I don't want to look at this." I drew a leg only.

Our instructor was trying to teach us (or those of us who want to learn new techniques; many of the more accomplished artists prefer to follow their own lead) a new technique, "massing in", where we would shade in the bulk of a form, rather than drawing its outline. I tried to focus on that, and I made a lot of exuberant, bright, pastel sketches. They were slightly abstracted, and I liked that. Gradually I got caught up in the art, and I lost that horrible feeling of wanting to flee. I drew and drew, losing track of time. I admired the model for her bravery in presenting herself to us.

I challenged myself to find something beautiful about this model, and I did. Her small feet had the most delicate arches, so beautifully shaped. I drew the feet.

Towards the end of the class I was pleased with some of the work I'd done, and I felt I'd gotten a lot out of the "massing in" technique, which I resolved to use again. We reached my favorite part of the class, the longer poses. And then it went all bitter and unhappy for me. The model was facing me directly for a twenty minute pose, and she was watching my every pencil stroke. I was struggling with drawing her face, and I could see her looking at my awful, ugly, witch drawing. I erased the face and redrew it, and then erased it and re-redrew it. I could not stomach having her look at my ugly picture, and I tried hard to make it look more flattering. I felt awful.

After that, I tore off one of my most exuberant orange pastel sketches, one with the model's hair flying about and no face shown at all, to turn in to my instructor, and I left early. "There's another pose, Carole," the teacher said wheedlingly, but I said, as nicely as I could, "Gotta get home."

busy, busy

2011-01-24T19:00:00.000-08:00

I've had a burst of energy lately, which has been mostly channeled into cooking. Here are two observations I have to share with you: first, the next time you make an upside-down cake, instead of melting butter and mixing in brown sugar, instead cook a quarter cup of honey until it is dark and slightly reduced. Add your fruit to that and proceed making your cake. You'll discover that caramelized honey is one of the most magnificent tastes in the world, and you'll wonder, "Caramelized honey? Why haven't I been eating that forever?" Secondly, if you make your own onion dip from scratch -- and I don't mean mixing powdered soup mix with sour cream, I mean cooking your own onions in butter until they're golden and soft, mincing them, and mixing them with sour cream, cream cheese, salt, and pepper -- the results will cause everyone who tastes it to go into a contemplative gobbling state. They will not want to stop eating that onion dip, even if you implore them to save some room because there are four other dishes coming.

As well as cooking, another hobby, reading, has been paying off of late. Thankfully my long, rough stretch of reading God-awful books came to an end, with the excellent "Blind Submission" by Debra Ginsberg. "Blind Submission" is the story of a young, aimless woman who winds up working for an extremely tightly wound boss, a boss who insinuates herself into all areas of her employees' lives and leaves their sanity on shaky ground. This reminded me very much of an over-the-top boss I had for a while when I was practicing law. My old boss used to try power ploys like trying to make us come in at six a.m. "My MUNI route doesn't start running until seven," I said acerbically. "Just roll out of bed and call a cab," said my boss airily. "I am not about to start taking a ten dollar taxi ride to work every day," I said firmly. "That's going to be fifty dollars a week!" But then my favorite colleague, who lived even further from the office than I do, agreed to come in at six. Our boss then decided to up the ante and by the end of the day had forced him to agree to show up at four thirty a.m. Meanwhile I was still scheduled to arrive hours later, after the 5 Fulton majestically began its route and leisurely conveyed me downtown. My friend looked haunted at the prospect of needing to be at the office by 4:30, and I chided him. "You've got to grow a backbone!" "I do have the backbone.. the backbone of a frog," he mourned.

After reading "Blind Submission", I had horrendous nightmares that I was back in that job. But perhaps the true nightmare is that a highly educated, talented person chooses to be unemployed, as though Betty Friedan had never written "The Feminine Mystique." My psychiatrist tried a few weeks ago to push me gently into going back into the law, but I"m resisting. "I can't face it, all that stress," I told him frankly. Maybe next time I'll tell him I'm still having nightmares about one of my hellish bosses from those days. But my psychiatrist thinks I'd be happier if I had people routinely appreciating my intelligence and paying me for my insights. Maybe he's right. After all, that's an occasional cause of strife in the home, my accusations of being treated like a dullard. Here's a cinematic treatment for you all:

get the message

2011-01-18T21:32:00.001-08:00

How I get messages left for me, regarding my volunteer work: "Some crazy cat lady called, wants you to take a crazy cat."

the state of things

2011-01-13T22:11:00.000-08:00

I have been in a deep funk since New Year's Eve, a depression which I haven't felt like talking about. I don't feel entitled to be depressed: I have a lovely life, truly. My immune system has never gotten back up to par after I had surgery last year, but I'm not in chronic pain any more, like I was before I had surgery. I don't want to whine. But yet I have no energy and no joy.

I have been cooking, though, making food that requires me to grind up four different kinds of seeds with my mortar and pestle and finally opening the dusty bottle of pomegranate molasses I'd bought ages ago. Today I bought a bottle of maraschino liqueur so I can make my own maraschino cherries for Manhattans, a good winter drink. Last week I bought a lovely, expensive whiskey on sale for Manhattans, and I couldn't get the fancy, sealed-in-wax cork out. I ended up running down the block in slippers, Lola trailing behind, seeking out the first gym-toned, gay neighbor I could find to extract the cork for me. "Manhattans? That's what my mom drinks," said my buff across-the-street neighbor. I felt humiliated by the matronly nature of my intended beverage and, trying to get my image restored as a sophisticate, confided that I was going to make my own maraschino cherries, before heading back across the street with the bottle in one hand and Lola's arm in the other.

Contributing to the funk, I hit a bad streak in reading, picking up one terrible, poorly written book after another. The only good book I've read over the past month was a terrifically depressing one, "The Good Soldiers" by David Finkel, telling the story of a particular battalion sent to Iraq. This incredibly engrossing and dark account led to a lot of contemplation about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the price paid by individual service members for our national policy aims, and the bizarre split between what is said in Washington, D.C. about the course of a war and what is said by the people who are waging it. It wasn't a pick-me-up, but I was glad I read it, and I pushed the Sober Husband into reading it as well.

The Sober Husband has been in a funk of his own of late, and Iris is perpetually looking on the dark side. Only Lola remains perky, laughing maniacally. Even so, she has become convinced that there is a yeti living on our block, a yeti which peers in the laundry room windows of an evening. I've taken her out to the yard and shone a light around, demonstrating that clearly no yeti lurks out there, but Lola remains convinced that the yeti is nimble and able to evade the beams of the flashlight.

Adding to our melancholic winter mood, we have a pathetic, undersocialized tortoiseshell cat living here. Iris, Lola and I are supposed to be working our magic on her, turning her into a loving, snuggly lapcat as we've done so many times before, but this cat is intractable. She has been here at least three weeks and still is very difficult to catch. I can't imagine anyone ever adopting this cat, which is a depressing thing to think about. She's sweet and, no matter how terrified, will not scratch, but no one wants a cat who lives under your bed and attempts to live without interacting with you whatsoever.

This cat is such a nonentity that even our own cats have not reacted to her presence. Normally our three resident cats, all former foster kittens themselves, hiss at any foster cat for a few days and then accept the visitor into their tribe, but this cat seems to be below them somehow, not important enough to be noticed. She was abandoned as a kitten in the projects, and I don't know what is going to become of her. For now, she's hiding under my bed, lurking about and avoiding the overtures of the depressed people who live here, and we're trying to have some hope for her.

the latest craze

2011-01-05T12:46:00.000-08:00

The latest craze around here is a game eleven year-old Iris uber Alles thought up. We have to be each other and stay in character (although Iris, the director of the game, allows herself to break out of character to rage at Lola for being out of character).

Iris's imitation of Lola is pretty much limited to braying "Hyunnh hyunnh hyunnh" nonstop, imitating her little sister's laugh. "Iris, you gotta swear if you're being Lola," I said (Lola has taken up recreational swearing in a big way lately, although I have urged her strongly to limit this to the home). Iris agreed. "Fuck the fuck on! Fuck the fuck on!" she shouted. "Lola says that in a sweet little happy voice," I criticized.

Lola had trouble getting into character at first, and I gave her too some helpful suggestions. "Remember to shout 'LUCY!!!' a lot. Also, you could say, 'I hate you!'"

They made me play the Sober Husband, and I turned on NPR. A voice droned about biochemicals, and I said firmly, "Be quiet. This is interesting. I'm trying to listen." I went easy on him, though, feeling that it would encourage disrespect on the part of the children if I ridiculed their father too much.

Evidently he felt no such compunctions. I was out much of the evening at my life drawing class, and later he said, "We played a new game all evening. I had to pretend to be you, and they were each other."

"Oh? What did you do?" I looked at him. He was shamefaced and unable to admit the hideous truth, although he did mumble something about saying "I need to play Warcraft now" in the game.

a rough time, a crappy vacation

2010-12-31T15:26:00.000-08:00

Iris uber Alles and I are both under the weather. She's definitely much healthier than me, having had a big headstart on this ailment (we can trace its vector all too well: classmate of Iris goes to school despite being incredibly sick, sneezes and coughs all over Iris, Iris comes home spreading germs to her all-too-doting mother). So then the beautiful expanse of time spent off school is reduced to sitting around the house, fetching kleenex and cold drinks and painkillers for an ailing mother. I offered to drive them to the House of Air, so they could bounce their brains out for an hour while I sat on a couch with my box of kleenex, but Iris didn't feel up to it.

Their father took a little break from work to take them bowling, but he forgot to find out ahead of time whether the alley was open or not, so that outing involved driving across town, staring forlornly at the forbidden bowling alley, and then returning home. I was so glad I hadn't dragged along with them. The next day the Sober Husband took Iris to the Disney Family Museum, having gotten some passes as a present, while Lola and I stayed home. I napped on the couch -- at night, my coughing prevents me from getting any quality sleep, so I am prone to falling asleep during the day. I didn't even realize that Iris and the Sober Husband had been out until after they were back. "I had my Rat yell swear words at you, and you didn't even wake up!" said Lola gleefully (one of her best Christmas presents was a stuffed version of Rat from "Pearls Before Swine").

I've apologized repeatedly to the children for giving them a crappy holiday, but I know that doesn't prevent them from scrawling hate-filled screeds against me in the many diaries strewn about the house. Meanwhile I am having a hard time keeping my own spirits level. Did you know the last babysitter I tried to hire charged $20 an hour and flaked twice on interviews? I'm supposed to pay $20 an hour to some loser who can't even call until two hours after she was supposed to be at my house to meet me? The next-to-the-last babysitter I tried to hire didn't respond to my carefully-crafted introductory email, mentioning our mutual acquaintance, until over a month later, sending a weird, ditzy response asking, "Did I answer this or not? I thought I did, but now I think I didn't."

I'd like to think there is a deeper meaning to this, like that by becoming so invested in my children that I allowed my own life to wither away, that my children will appreciate this and will go on to have fabulous lives themselves, but that is wishful thinking. They are both prone to holding lengthy grudges (Lola still brings up The Pinata Incident from her third birthday party) and they both will probably remember this particular Christmas vacation forever. "Remember that Christmas Momdude was whiny and sick and we were always bringing her kleenex, and we had that foster cat that was hiding under the bed all the time? God, that sucked. We sat around the house all vacation. At least we got a Kinect that year."

ouch ouch ouch ouch

2010-12-27T16:24:00.000-08:00

In one of the world's geekiest incidents, I broke my arm playing World of Warcraft. I didn't break any bones, that would be truly difficult to pull off; but I did harm my right arm, my main Warcraft-playing arm, to the point of agony.

It began on December 6th, the very eve of the long-awaited Cataclysm update to the World of Warcraft. My computer suffered a catastrophic stroke that day in the morning, when I was working on private school admission essays for Lola (Lola may or may not change schools next year, and I wanted to get the appallingly detailed work of the applications done before starting Cataclysm). I called the Sober Husband and asked him, "How bad would it be if I just ran out with a credit card and bought a new computer today?" After some discussion, we agreed to go together to the Apple store that afternoon (the Sober Husband having stipulated that his tech support services would be severely limited for a non-Macintosh computer). I moved up to the study and finished the applications on the archaic dinosaur computer normally used only by eight year-old Lola, a computer which would not be able to handle the demands of the monstrous Cataclysm software.

All that day emails were flying back and forth amongst Warcraft players, many of whom were planning on gathering for a non-slumber party. At midnight Blizzard would release the long-awaited Cataclysm, allowing players to enter new lands and to start characters of new races, and a variety of Warcraft players would do that together at the Burning Man headquarters. I'd planned on going, but my computer's death screwed things up. It would take me a long time to get the software set up on a new computer -- Warcraft is truly huge. On my sad old now-dead computer, it had taken me several tries until I'd succeeded at finishing an eight hour download for the newest version. If that computer hadn't stroked out, all I would have needed was the special code I'd get from a copy of the new software in order to start playing Cataclysm. I couldn't face trying to do that heroic download again, and I didn't even have a working computer capable of Warcrafting.

That evening, my truly indulgent husband bought me a new laptop. "My family has been struggling with inadequate technology for too long," he said, as he impulsively added an iPad to the purchase. The children danced about in a consumer glee, gamboling around the Apple store. Iris hugged the iPad box to her chest all the way to the parking garage.

At home I made everyone a nutritious dinner and got the Sober Husband to skim through the application essays I'd written. Almost predictably I started feeling ill that evening. My immune system has been shot to hell all year. Ever since I had surgery last February, I've been sick more often than not, with one bug after another. On Thanksgiving Day itself I'd been felled with a wretched virus, and then again a new one hit on Cataclysm day. "Are you going to Best Buy at midnight?" the Sober Husband asked, but by ten I felt too wretched to contemplate driving. I just went to bed.

The next day over breakfast the Sober Husband asked, "Why are we not at Best Buy?" He wanted to see me enjoying my lovely new computer. I drove him to work and then bought myself Cataclysm on the way home. It wasn't until well after noon that Warcraft was ready to play, and then it was pretty much time to get the children. But then after we came home, I sank into playing, serious playing, and I played so much over the following two weeks that I virtually destroyed my right arm. Extreme pain in my right elbow had me pulling out my leftover painkillers from surgery. My right shoulder was agonizing, and I had to shamefacedly confess to the Sober Husband that I had incurred these extreme Warcraft related injuries. I spent a weekend alternating ice packs with a heating pad on my shoulder, not touching my new laptop. The children enjoyed their turn and started goblin and worgen characters on Warcraft, playing and playing while I lay on the couch, unable to do really anything.I couldn't even turn the pages of a book with my right hand. Driving and cooking, the things I seem to spend most of my time doing, were completely out of the question. I asked Iris to post on my blog explaining my absence, but she couldn't be bothered, preferring to make the most of her own turns at the computer to play Warcraft.

Thankfully my shoulder responded well to the complete lack of computer usage, massive doses of Motrin, and the hot-and-cold packs, and after a few days, it became pain-free. My right elbow and hand are still fragile, and I have significant pain in my elbow. The Sober Husband asked, "Don't you think you should see a doctor?", but I said, "Aaah, I'm already doing what a doctor would tell me to do."

Ironically I knew other players had played many, many more hours of Cataclysm than I had. My elemental shaman of a troll had reached level 85 and was geared for heroics when my arm gave out, but I was seeing goblins that same level ... characters who had been started from scratch at Cataclysm, while I'd started my troll months ago. Evidently those players, unlike me, had right arms of steel.

Meanwhile another online gaming injury occurred in our family, this one a psychic injury. Little Lola has long been devoted to Poptropica, a children's online gaming community. Like Warcraft, Poptropica opened a new land in December--- one dedicated to controversial creatures of the tabloids. Lola immediately plunged into lore of the Loch Ness Monster, the chupacabra, Big Foot, and the Jersey Devil. After a day or so, Lola was unable to sleep through the night, walk through any dimly lit area, or generally be alone at all due to a consuming fear of the Jersey Devil, and, to a lesser extent, chupacabras. She often becomes convinced a Jersey Devil is breaking into our home, despite the fact that I pointed out that not only is their very existence dubious, but their alleged habitat, New Jersey, is several thousand miles away.

Realizing how unhealthy our familial addiction to computer games has become, for Christmas I went back to that Best Buy and bought a Kinect for our Xbox, one of those amazing new devices which allows a person to become their own game controller and to play games by leaping about. If we're going to be spending far too much time playing videogames, at least we should be getting some exercise at the same time. The children worked up a considerable sweat playing Kinect games right away, and even I, sadly and all-too-predictably sick as as a dog again with a severe chest cold, couldn't resist a few rounds of Dance Revolution, trouncing Iris uber Alles at a Dance Battle to "Poker Face."

And then today a Christmas letter came from graduate school friends of the Sober Husband. I absentmindedly rubbed my hurting elbow as I read the long list of amazing accomplishments of this family. Once we had been comparable to this family, but over the last several years, we stopped achieving while they stepped up the pace. The wife finished her PhD at Harvard this year, took a new teaching position, received a variety of grants, and traveled to many academic conferences. The husband, a professor at MIT, is writing a book on physics and traveled the world, expenses paid, to work with collaborators in such pleasure spots as Japan and Aspen. The children have black and brown belts in karate -- and as the letter specified, these are adult belts, not the usual, inferior, juvenile versions other lesser children earn. They speak foreign languages and perform in jazz ensembles and are silversmiths.

What did we do this year? We didn't travel. I haven't left the country in six years, ever since we realized we couldn't afford international vacations on one salary. Our children do not make beautiful silver jewelry for their friends and family or play jazz; they develop phobias of the Jersey Devil or crackpot theories about the moon landing, and they quit their piano lessons ages ago. All I did this year, other than have major surgery and approximately one thousand minor illnesses, was to go to Burning Man and wreck my arm playing Warcraft. I am a middle-aged slacker, too lazy to make my children over-achieve, instead having passed my unhealthy love of gaming on to a new generation. "I LOVE Warcraft," Lola said exuberantly the other day, hugging me in abandon on my left side while carefully leaving my weakened right side alone.

did you wanna buy a book for someone for Christmas?

2010-12-13T09:21:00.001-08:00

As we all know, yer Drunken Housewife reads far, far too much. I've always got a book on the hop. The children have inherited this tendency, and the Sober Husband always needs to have a book going as well. Between us all, we've got a lot of perspectives covered. And so, herewith some recommendations for your help if you were looking to buy a book for someone and had no idea what the hell to get:

For the youngest readers:

the Skippy Jon Jones picture book series by Judy Schachner. A kitten is obsessed by the thought that he is in reality a chihuahua. Iris and Lola sing and act out parts of the first "Skippy Jon Jones" book; it's just that entertaining.

Older children (say, grades 4-8):

"The School of Fear" by GItty Daneshwari. An extremely eccentric former beauty queen runs an odd school for children with extreme phobias. Lola loved this book so much that she became very upset towards the end as she didn't want to finish it. We spend a lot of time talking about this book and its sequel, "School of Fear: School Is Not Dismissed." There's a lot to love here: Lola says that this is her favorite book because it's the only book where she couldn't tell what would happen next. Highly recommended for children who, like Lola, have phobias.

Child of any age or indeed a grownup (particularly one who works in any field requiring client approval for work):

"The Tiny Art Director" by Bill Zeman. Zeman, an extremely talented artist, is often commanded by his little daughter to "make me a picture of a dinosaur" or "paint a poop airplane." He goes off and creates an amazing work of art, suitable for the cover of the New Yorker, and then gets his work ripped up one side and down the other by the Tiny Art Director, who usually says something like, "Are you always stupid, Daddy? More blood! I want more blood!" Absolutely hilarious, and the art is amazing.

FIction lovers: I read a lot of novels this year, and these three were hands down the best. I loved them dearly.

"The House of Tomorrow" by Peter Bognanni. A teenaged boy is kept isolated in "the House of Tomorrow" by his homeschooling grandmother whose life mission is to keep Buckminster Fuller's ideas alive. Awkward, lonely, overeducated but extremely sheltered, the protagonist is naive and hungry for life experience. I loved this book so very, very much: all of the characters are very human and very real with their own perspectives. The redemptive powers of punk rock were never so clear and harshly beautiful. My only complaint was that the ending seemed a bit too tidy, following all the all-too-real messiness of the character's situations, but it's a brilliant book.

"Broken Teaglass" by Emily Arsenault. A young man takes a job at a famous dictionary publisher. It is a strange and silent place, where the word-lovers toil in quiet monotony interrupted at times by calls from cranks and bored prisoners arguing about definitions. Then he begins to discover some very strange things in some of the definitions. I cannot recommend this highly enough for the intelligent, word-loving reader.

"The Full Catastrophe" by David Carkeet: an overeducated linguist finds himself at loose ends after his research lab looses funding. He takes a job at an innovative marriage counseling service, which sends qualified linguists to live with and observe troubled married couples on the theory that their communication must be causing their woes. An unbelievably smart and witty book, with a highly likable, fish-out-of-water academic stranded in a middle class family in the Midwest pretending that he's going to be able to help his squabbling hosts.

People who are insane about reading:

"Running the Books" by Avi Steinberg. Steinberg is a Harvard graduate who is floundering and careerless, a disappointment to his Jewish family who expected greatness from him. For lack of anything better to do, he takes a job as a librarian in a prison. This memoir is spellbinding. Steinberg portrays vividly the power dynamics and struggles in prison. For example, a prisoner correcting the way another holds a pen caused Steinberg to tense up, as any touch between inmates normally would lead to violence. Steinberg himself is in an awkward position, not part of the guards and not part of the inmates, and at risk from both. Ironically the guards make more trouble for him than the inmates. He bonds, too closely at times, with violent criminals and has troubles that follow that. But beyond being about Steinberg's experiences, this is a memoir about books. What do prisoners read? What is a book, really? To the guards, a book is something that should not be in a prison. To an inmate, a book could be mindless entertainment or it could be a source of redemption, or it could just be something to steal to make rolling papers from the pages. For anyone who really loves books, this is a thought-provoking read about the power of books and their very nature. For anyone with a sociological bent who has not personally been to prison, it's a great vicarious experience of a book. Should I ever need to go to prison, I feel better prepared now.

For the NPR listener:

"Travels in Siberia" by Ian Frazier. I gave this to the Sober Husband for our anniversary, and he's enrapt. Ian Frazier pokes around in Siberia with a dry wit; the Sober Husband is often heard laughing out loud of an evening as he works through this massive tome. Perfect for the person who wants educational value from their leisure reading but who also enjoys a laugh. Not for those intimidated by a long book; this thing is the size of my head.

For the serious cook: [hint hint to the reader that these are what I want for Christmas, I hope someone out there may pay attention):

"In the Kitchen with a Good Appetite" by Melissa Clark. I've been a fan of Melissa Clark for nearly ten years now since finding her recipes in "Food & Wine", and now the whole world is a fan as well since she got a column in the New York Times. I've been making a cocktail called the Melissa Clark for nearly a decade, and many of my signature dishes are from her recipes. She has a new cookbook out, and you can't miss with it. Woman's a genius.

"India: The Cookbook" by Pushpesh Pant. A huge volume of Indian recipes. It looks pretty damn near encyclopedic in its scope. I want it.

Happy shopping, everyone!

but... what am I supposed to do between 2 and 4 a.m.?

2010-12-13T02:25:00.001-08:00

My insomnia is acting up, and the World of Warcraft is down. This is highly irritating to me, as it is my wont to amuse myself during the worst of my insomnia playing Warcraft. I took a look at the customer service forum online, and I saw that thousands of players had already whined to Blizzard about it. Insomniacs everywhere were at various levels of pissed-offedness, but one named Sither, a level 85 Night Elf druid, stood apart:

I can't LOG IN, Blizzard! This is an EASILY SOLVEABLE PROBLEM that could be fixed by A TRAINED MONKEY IN A JAUNTY HAT, for crying out loud! This is THE START OF THE EXPANSION and you have MILLIONS OF PEOPLE who paid to play this game with REAL DOLLARS. They didn't play to SIT IN FRONT OF THEIR COMPUTER AND WEEP GENTLY, did they?

Because WORLD OF WARCRAFT IS INCREDIBLY SERIOUS BUSINESS, I am prepared to attempt to kill myself by drinking TWO ENTIRE BOTTLES of lemonade (I get 2.25L bottles of a lesser-known brand because they are A PRETTY GOOD DEAL) and attempting to AVOID GOING TO THE BATHROOM until my insides rupture.

Since this MIGHT TAKE A WHILE, consider this my ULTIMATUM. If your login servers go up before I DIE OF CARBONATED INTERNAL ORGAN FAILURE, then I will continue playing your EXTREMELY FINE GAME. If not then my death will be on YOUR HEAD because you made BASICALLY THE WORST MAINTANED GAME EVER.

I expect a BLUE POST [a response from a Blizzard employee] in FIVE MINUTES or I am uncapping the first bottle. Drinking from a glass though, chugging from the bottle is for people who are NOT WEARING VERY NICE SHIRTS.

a new crackpot belief held by Iris

2010-12-12T09:46:00.000-08:00

The other day I was carrying in some bags of groceries when eleven year-old Iris uber Alles, long known to believe passionately that the moon landing was faked by the American government, said provocatively, "The pyramids were built by aliens!" I ignored this and continued wrestling the groceries in, but Iris was relentless. She was clearly angling for a fight.

"Because according to ancient writing things they wrote on like walls of the pyramids, they wrote about how they built the pyramids, and it says they built them over a certain time period, and if that time period was read right, they lifted one limestone block which weighed about two tons in two minutes , and obviously they needed help from aliens! Could YOU lift a limestone block that weighs two tons in two minutes? Could you?" jeered Iris. "And you know, they had a lot of people, but STILL.. They must have had one really massive helper", presumably an alien.

These special beliefs are saved for the home. Iris showed me a test on Egypt she'd gotten an A on, and it had nary a mention of aliens.

I tried arguing about the pyramids, but to no avail. My arguments about the moon landing didn't change Iris's resolute belief that it was faked. I'm currently reading "Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History" by David Aaronovich in the faint hope that I'll be better educated and better able to argue with Iris, but I'm pessimistic. Iris is a tough nut to crack.

guest post from Iris

2010-12-07T17:49:00.000-08:00

This video here just illustrates my whole life. I am the baby monkey, and life is the pig.

-Iris