Camp Mather, Part II

The second of two overly verbose descriptions of a week spent at a rustic resort. Feel the pain of the Drunken Housewife as her children chant, "Are we there yet? Are we there yet?" Thrill along with her tales of boredom and alcohol amongst the frolicking bourgeoisie:

Day 4

Iris, Lola and I slept through an earthquake and almost slept through breakfast. In line at breakfast, the earthquake was all everyone could speak of. Joyce became fearful for her cat Bobo's safety back in San Francisco, while her husband longed for news to come that it was in fact a neutron bomb. He admitted to a survival strategy for neutron bombs, but a failing in his plan was that he estimated canned food would last him only the first three years or so and he had nothing set up for thereafter.

For the first time since I arrived at Camp Mather, I had some energy. I took Iris for a shower and then organized our cabin, draining the cooler and getting fresh ice. I rinsed out Iris and Lola's tie-dyed shirts, which turned out to be satisfyingly garish, and did a load of laundry. After lunch, my energy was gone, and I was left to beg the children to nap with me.

I perked up, though, later, and we played badminton. My sister and I hated each energetically throughout our whole childhood, but in the summer, we used to play badminton. We were good at the game, and on the rare occasions we played someone outside the family, they were usually surprised at our prowess. Playing badminton with Iris and Lola is very frustrating. Lola just wants to throw the birdie back and forth with her father and brandish her racket threateningly. I taught Iris how to serve, and she could do it quite competently, but she'd take five or six practice swings before each serve, and it was rare that she could return a shot. Finally the children tired of badminton, and Anton and I were able to play. For a while, I was playing quite well, but then at the husband's requests we moved to the other court, where he'd no longer have the sun in his eyes and I occasionally had it in mine. My performance sank as a result.

At night, it was family bingo night! Iris and I had been traumatized the year before when we couldn't find seats (various people were hogging huge swathes of tables and chairs for their imaginary friends and families who were supposed to show up later. Eventually a kind man made his wife yield some space to us, but for a while, we were sitting on the floor). This year, we went very early. Iris was so excited that she kept singing, "B-I-N-G-O" to the point of insanity. I won a round of Bingo, gratifyingly enough, and it was a "good neighbor" game, meaning the people sitting near me, Iris and Joyce, also won certificates for ice cream cones. Iris was beside herself with joy. "I like life! Life is great!"

When I went to perform my evening ablutions, a mother was screaming at her children in the women's bathroom. "Goddamn you!" She was sitting on her generously proportioned rump, screaming at an older child to help a younger one get into pajamas. "She's only eight! She needs help!" I didn't understand that, as nearly-eight Iris has been dressing herself since she was a toddler. I wondered how this woman talks to her children in private, if she's willing to scream "Goddamn you!" in a women's bathroom.

Day 5

I woke up, and Anton was missing. I assumed he'd gone to check his voicemail and email again, but it turned out much later that he went exploring around by bicycle for hours. He told us that he wanted to return to somewhere he'd hiked to with a naturalist's guide in order to to identify a flower he saw. The children found that plan repugnant. Iris complained of boredom. Anton asked her if she'd like to go see his flower, and she retorted, 'I want to reduce my boredom, not add to it!"

At breakfast we ran into Jack, a man I'd had a spirited conversation with on a prior day in the breakfast line. His attention had been caught by the the book I was carrying, "Send In The Idiots" (a book written by an autistic man who sought out his former classmates at a pioneering program for autistic children to see what had become of them in adulthood). Jack told my husband how fascinated he'd been to hear about this book from me, and the husband was embarrassed to have to admit that he had no clue what I was reading. "She reads so many books."

After breakfast, we imposed a hike on the children. It doesn't take long to hike away from Camp Mather to quiet trails near the canyon, with bees, birds, and wildflowers everywhere. The husband and I were enthralled by the nature, but the children whined incessantly about the heat and perked up only when we're back to camp. "I hear Camp Mather!" said Lola ecstatically as we drew within earshot of the dusty little playground by the badminton courts.

Anton cooked up a plan with Joyce for her to babysit Iris and Lola. His plan for us: a very long hike. My plan for us: to go to the bar at the Evergreen Lodge down the road from Camp Mather. But first, horseback riding for me and Iris and a burro ride for Lola. At the stables, the other two children signed up for the same ride wore helmets. Anton and I exchanged a familiar, long look, the look of underprotective parents surrounded by overprotective parents. A girl who looks about 12 was extremely distraught over having to wear her bike helmet on the ride. Her father clearly still thinks of her as a little child, because he tried to cheer her up by offering to blow bubbles on her stomach, going so far as to tug at her shirt and bend over towards her stomach, but she became nearly hysterical with embarrassment.

The ride, billed as an hour-long beginner's horseback lesson, was over a surprisingly rough trail. There are branches so low over the trail I had to repeatedly duck. At a couple of points, the terrain was covered with large rocks and indeed, boulders, over which the horses pick their way carefully and bumpily. On one of these stretches, we went downhill at such a steep angle over the boulders that I became highly alarmed and gripped the horn of the saddle so hard that my hand got cramps. Iris admitted later that she was a little scared at that point, but I suspected it was only because I poisoned her mind by describing it so floridly to Anton afterwards.

When we returned, Lola jumped up and down with excitement at seeing her mommy on a horsie. Anton explains that they led Lola's rented donkey, Jingles, over to Joyce and Phil's cabin, where they had to be very quiet because two year-old Violet had just gone to sleep. Anton and Lola fed Jingles a whole bag of apples, and Jingles slobbered voluminously all over the steps of Joyce's cabin, and Anton had to clean up the donkey spit. (I resolved to hear Joyce's side of this later).

Lola was sad at being babysat, but Anton was thrilled and even shaved in preparation for our date. We drove away from Mather, seeking a particular trail to some highly-touted waterfalls, but we thought we drove too far and end up walking by the Middle Fork of the Tuolumne River. I was paranoid about bears because Claudia the Camp Mather manager told how there used to be a campground at the exact spot we were hiking, but it was relocated due to too many bear run-ins. We didn't see any wildlife, but it was peaceful being away from the bustle of Camp Mather, middle-class San Franciscans everywhere you look.

After our walk, we went to the bar at the Evergreen Lodge, a cute, rustic bar with $10 cocktails. I had a couple of Moose Drool ale and Anton an Arrogant Bastard. Eager to gather news of the outlying world, I asked the bartender my two burning questions: "What was the Richter of that earthquake, and is Paris Hilton still in jail?" [Answers: 4.6 and yes]. We split a couple of appetizers and a single entree. I was tempted to use the internet at the lodge rec room, but I resolved that it was good for me to be on an internet vacation, so I virtuously paid attention to my husband instead.

We got back to Mather early, and Lola was in fine fettle, running around and climbing rocks with Baby Violet (who will be called "Baby Violet" by our family until she's old enough to be offended, at which point HOPEFULLY we will be able to drop the "baby" sobriquet. I hope that unlike the stomach-bubble-blowing father, we're able to treat a 'tween with dignity). But poor Iris was very upset and having a hard time holding back tears: she suffered a trifecta of insults in our absence. First, as Lola described it: "Iris was just holding Joyce's hand when a MEAN, VICIOUS BOY came riding along this fast on his bike [Lola demonstrates by running as fast as she can] and RAN RIGHT INTO HER. And she cried, and I cried." Then at dinnertime Phil and Joyce mistakenly assumed the corn dogs were vegetarian, and Iris accidentally ate some, which was extremely upsetting to this vegetarian-to-the-bone child. (Lola, in contrast, remarked the other day that she wanted to try "chicken and meat", which I did not answer. Iris shouted, "That's gross!", though). While Iris was very upset about having eaten meat, a girl from her school, came by and cross-examined her about her vegetarianism, unable to understand Iris's being upset. "If you were starving to death and there was meat next to you, would you eat it? How do you feel if meat touches you?" and on and on. This made Iris feel freakish and all the more upset. Poor Iris was in a funk all night.

At night, I had some insomnia again, and I decided to execute a previously-thought-of plan of watching for bears. Reportedly bears prowl through Camp Mather every night, and in my wakefulness, I could hear a sound like a bear in the distance trying to open a dumpster. I wrapped up in a wool blanket and left the cabin. However, I soon lost my bear-observing nerve, feeling naked without my wooden exoskeleton, and decided to go back to bed.

Day 6

We nearly slept through breakfast, and I didn't feel like making the kids go to the dining hall and instead authorized them to watch an episode of "the Simpsons" on Anton's laptop while I showered. This made Anton cranky with me, and he made the girls get dressed and go eat a bowl of generic Cocoa Puffs (after giving in on the going-to-breakfast issue, I had them eating scrambled eggs and hash browns, but Mr. Nutrition brought them Cocoa Puffs, which stopped the nutritious eating cold).

After breakfast, Iris and I hiked to a nearby "lake" (they call every body of water greater than a puddle a "lake" here. I would call this particular geological feature a "small pond" myself). Last year, this "lake" was the most vibrantly alive natural spot I had ever seen, with frogs, birds, bugs, fish, and even water snakes teeming about. However we just had a dry winter, and so the pond was only about a third of the size it was last year. We didn't see any snakes, but we heard bull frogs and occasional splashes signifying fish or frogs. It was a hot, dusty walk back to "Birch Lake" (another modestly sized pond) to rendezvous with Anton and Lola. They had achieved the goal of capturing a polliwog, putting it into a bucket to admire it, and then releasing it back into the wild.

At this point, I became overcome with a head cold. I've never had a cold hit me so suddenly. I arrived at the pond feeling hot and dusty but healthy, and within a short period of time, I was severely congested, groggy, and miserable. I spent the afternoon in bed with a box of Kleenex, utterly miserable.

Anton took Lola to the nearby Evergreen Lodge to check his email. Lola found this boring. Anton wanted to discuss the drama going on at his start-up employer, but I was feeling too miserable to hear it (bad spouse!). I had only enough energy to sit around reading, and Iris kept me company with volume eleven in the Lemony Snicket series. My ten year-old acquaintance stopped by and ruined the ending of the entire series for Iris, informing her that "they kill Count Olof in Volume Thirteen." Iris had held an irrational distaste for this child the whole week, and now finally she had a reason to get her hate on.

Some days earlier, Joyce and I had committed to volunteering at the T-shirt table this evening, and Iris was keen to help, wanting to outsell Joyce. "I'm a cute little girl! I can sell more!" I felt so miserable, but I dragged myself down with a box of Kleenex. It turns out that the two oldish men who were representing the Friends Of Camp Mather in the merchandising department had a lot of emotional attachment to how things were done at the table. I set up the t-shirts, but it seems I did it all wrong, and it had to be redone by one of the men. I'm not sure why we were recruited to work at the table, as our superiors pretty much remained there the whole time, surveying us with an eagle eye. We couldn't run our foreseen raffle ticket sales competition, because only one book of raffle tickets could be used to sell under the established system (this was to keep the tickets in numerical order and thereby have a record of which numbers were sold, but it lowered our efficiency hugely and was frustrating, as someone would actually want to buy raffle tickets at the table and we'd have to say, "See that little girl over there? As soon as she's done selling that ticket, you can buy some from her."). Perhaps the gentlemen knew what they were doing in staying about, as surely Joyce and I would have broken out the other, forbidden raffle ticket book in a drive for greater efficiency.

Iris and Lola fought over who could be in charge of holding the money envelope with the raffle ticket proceeds.

The older gentlemen in charge of the table generously bought buttons for the girls and presented Anton and me with Friends of Camp Mather Volunteer buttons. One of them reminisced about what Camp Mather had been like after the end of WWII. It seems that back then, it was all about volleyball, no basketball, and the returned WWII vets loved to play volleyball. It was played on asphalt, as injuries were not considered so important back then. Other than that, apparently it's still much the same.

In the evening, the talent show Iris had signed up for finally happened. Iris knows a good magic trick (I shall conscientiously not reveal how this is done), and I was her assistant. "Ever since Iris was born, she has been a magical child with amazing powers! Iris, how would you like to demonstrate your powers this evening?"

"I would like someone in the audience to hold up fingers for a number from one to ten." Iris then disappeared backstage, and I cautioned the audience not to speak the number out loud. I chose an adorable little girl to pick the number and summoned Iris back, and she easily got it right. This was highly satisfactory for Iris. After the children's talent show, I went back to the cabin, soon joined by Lola, feeling too miserable for more society.

Day 7

I woke up feeling miserable and skipped breakfast. After breakfast, I had an unsolicited, hemorrhagic nosebleed which lasted much of the morning. Mere tissues were meaningless to this nosebleed, and I ended up using a bath towel. Later I managed to drag myself down to the pool to meet the children and husband. I had another gigantically profuse nosebleed in the afternoon, and I felt groggy and miserable.

Later I rallied somewhat and drank some Prosecco and mixed up some margaritas with the strawberry-infused tequila I'd dragged along, plus some simple syrup I'd made the night before leaving and some Cointreau. Joyce and Phil were a bit shocked by the strength of these margaritas, served on the rocks, but I credited their vigor with getting me down to the family dance. Iris had looked forward to this dance all week, but her mood was dampened after an altercation with her father over whether she could get a CD called "Italian Cafe." Iris had somehow gotten an employee of the camp store to let her take this CD on the promise she bring back the money later. Anton lost his temper for awhile over this, but the shared Italophilia of a mother and child who once shared the joys of Rome and Venice cannot be denied.

At the dance, my ten year-old acquaintance kept doing the robot over to Iris and me and making rather suave eye contact, then roboting off. Iris, her spirits still quashed from the CD altercation, asked to leave early because she was tired, and given my cold, I took her up on it.

Day 8

I woke up feeling utterly miserable, with a pounding sinus headache and a runny nose. Thankfully the ever-energetic Sober Husband was more than up to the task of bundling up all our possessions, loading them into our U-haul, and driving us posthaste back to the city. We were on a tight schedule to get Miss Lola back in time for the pirate-themed party of her preschool paramour, the boy whom she intends to marry some day (the nominated groom is himself silent upon that issue). Upon our return, all the pets were living, the house was clean, the poppies had burst into glorious bloom, and I said, "Best. Housesitter. Ever!" to the husband.

And herein ends our tale of Family Fun amongst those famed thrillseekers, the middle class families of San Francisco. Stay tuned for next year's installment!

Camp Mather, Part I

Camp Mather is a rustic mountain retreat owned by the City and County of San Francisco. How it came to be: back in the past, the rich men who ran San Francisco had a mighty plan to take the gorgeous, spectacular, cliff-enclosed valley of Hetch Hetchy (John Muir called it "the Little Yosemite" and mourned its passing) and turn it into a water reservoir. Melting snow from the Sierras would be collected in this reservoir and then carried to the far-off city via aqueducts. In order to do this, first a railroad had to be built to ferry up the building materials for the mighty dam. In order to build that railroad, men had to be brought up, and they needed a place to stay. So a collection of little shacks and a large dining hall were built near Hetch Hetchy, and today those aging shacks are the vacation destination of that elite and elusive demographic, the middle class families of San Francisco.

In order to get a week-long space at Camp Mather, one has to enter a lottery, provide proof of residency, and pay a not-insignificant-but-less-than-a-more-exotic-location fee. Every year there is more demand than spaces, but there are two winning strategies: if you're willing to live in a tent for a week or if you're willing to go up for the first week, before the public schools get out, there's always room. We have gone the first week for two years in a row, and I suspect it's going to become our tradition. The place is insane enough as it is without being full to capacity; I can't imagine what it's like later in the season. We already have to wait in line at mealtimes for long enough and risk our lives walking on the paths beset by children intoxicated by the freedom of bicycles. You take these city children, unable to cross a street without a grown-up's scrutiny, and put them on bicycles, and they become lunatics.

This is an ideal vacation for small children. There are arts and crafts, donkey rides, archery lessons, tadpoles to be caught... Whenever I talk to someone who went to Camp Mather as a child, that person always gets misty-eyed and speaks in a hushed voice full of superlatives. They may as well say there were unicorns frolicking under the rainbows who let the little city children ride on their silky backs.

For me, it's not a real vacation. My idea of a vacation is that I leave the country and go somewhere exotic, where I explore during the days (I always lose weight and come back with fabulous thigh muscles) and consume exotic foods and drinks at night. Bonus points if I see monkeys (the very best vacations include monkeys cavorting on tropical beaches at cocktail hour. Nothing spells relaxation like sipping a drink while watching monkeys). But nonetheless, in the interests of raising my native San Franciscans, I organize and undertake the annual Camp Mather expedition. Herewith my report:

Day 1.

We had a last minute frenzy of cleaning the house, packing, and loading the minute U-haul. Anton was inexplicably pitching an attitude about our housesitter (a friend of a friend I' met once before), and pissily informed me "I intend to write down the man's last name", as though he suspected me of arranging for a felon to stay in our home. When I overheard Anton telling Lola that "he's housesitting for us because he's homeless," I shouted "He is NOT HOMELESS!" down from upstairs. I informed the husband that if he wants to bitch about my choice of housesitter, than he can be in charge of recruiting and screening all housesitters in the future. This squelched the husband, but Lola had picked up the husband's attitude and yelled, "The stranger is here! The stranger is here!" when the housesitter arrived. The housesitter, an artist who reminds me very strongly of someone I dated in college, was too tactful to remark upon this, and indeed managed to charm the husband by volunteering his celphone number and last name to the crabby old husband, as well as committing to moving the husband's car to avoid getting a parking ticket on street cleaning days.

Throughout the entire four-hour ride, the children constantly yammered, "Are we there yet? Are we there yet? How many hours? Will we be there for dinner?" There was considerable tension in the backseat over whether the Camp Mather dining hall would still be open for dinner when we arrived. I had four bags of groceries and there's a little general store open until late, but one would think the children were on the Donner party fighting over that last femur.

We arrived in time for dinner, and we found our friends Phil, Joyce and the Baby Violet had beaten us to camp. After dinner, we unpacked. Lola took command of the U-haul and insisted that we carry only one thing at a time to the cabin. We obediently trotted back and forth carrying a single flashlight or a single pillow.

Later, we went to the opening night campfire. I brought a glass of wine along that I was nursing, as did Phil. The campfire is always modest and it's still daylight out 8 p.m. Iris toasted marshmallows and made a s'more. Lola arrived later, after the chocolate bar supply was exhausted, which made Iris's whole night. "She didn't get a s'more! She only got a marshmallow and crackers! I had a s'more!"

A boy shouted, "Let's throw that wine in the fire!" referring to my glass. He's not a teetotaler; he's excited about a possible flare-up, he explained. Joyce noted that the wine wouldn't have much impact, and the boy suggests that we get some rum. He runs down a list of alcoholic beverages which are high proof and would theoretically make an exciting addition to any fire. "How about grain alcohol?" I suggested. "Oh, ethyl alcohol would be great!" "Can I ask how old you are?", I said impressed by the breadth of his knowledge of alcohols. "Ten." He says his knowledge of alcohol is from a book he read.

At the cabin, Lola asked me to draw the curtains more tightly "so a bear won't see me."

Day 2

I woke up exhausted, severely sleep-deprived. Lola slept extremely badly, and we ended up sending Anton to her top bunk and sending Lola over to sleep with Mommy in the double bed. She thrashed, woke up panicking over and over again, and generally kept me awake much of the night.

It was mindbogglingly hot, and we went to the tiny, icy pool. A twenty-something rode his bicycle right at me looking weirdly intense, which was alarming. It turned out that he had borrowed a bicycle helmet from a friend, and he wanted me to unbuckle it as he couldn't do it himself. I obliged. As he left, he shouted back, "I'm a lifeguard! It's my first shift!" We shouted back some encouragement.

Later as I was walking back to our cabin with Iris and Lola, who were on bikes, we ran into my 10 year-old friend from the campfire, the one with the age-inappropriate knowledge of alcohol, who called politely, "Excuse me, ma'am, but that situation may be dangerous! " At that moment, Lola was fussing because her ankle-length skirt was uncomfortably hiked up, and the boy kept trying to talk to me. "You may want to move your children; that area may be dangerous!" After all that build-up, a tiny preschooler biked by us. I got my children under control and as we passed our friend, I said, "Doing some dangerous biking?" In grave tones, he said, "Did you see that kid wipe out?" He shook his head to convey the horror of it all, the gore and danger of the Camp Mather paths.

After we passed out of earshot, Iris said bitingly, "I've seen that boy before when you weren't around, and he wasn't impressing."

In the afternoon, we managed a short nap, but my sleep deprivation was too great to be helped much. I drank Red Bulls all afternoon and finally perked up around supper time.

We took an evening hayride past the Camp Mather electrical substation and the maintenance are, where there were abandoned picnic tables and other debris cluttering up the natural beauty. With all the abundant natural beauty and picturesque little cabins, the hayride manages to take in all the Shame of Camp Mather. On the way back, one of the cowboys told another about how a prior summer, some staff member had made an effigy of an annoying child guest.

The Sober Husband is not much for vacationing and found a soulmate in the draft horses. "All those horses want to do is work. They only get to work an hour a day. They were pawing at the ground, wanting to do something, and there was some guy just standing there to calm down. It's just like me. I want to be working. Those poor horses."

Afterwards, we checked out board games night in the dining hall. "There's that boy," hissed Iris, who has formed a disapproving attitude towards my ten year-old friend. As we left, my ten year-old acquaintance furtively watched. I have the impression I'm somehow imprinting on him. I predict that eight years from now, a dark-haired, tattooed, buxom girl will make mincemeat out of him. Lola won at Junior Monopoly; Iris lost. Iris was bitter that she had guarded over the Pictionary set but our friend Joyce never came over (once Joyce partnered Iris at Pictionary, and this was one of the most satisfactory moments of Iris's life to date). It turns out that Joyce fell asleep around eight.


Day 3

The breakfast was pancakes with sausages, and I had some communication problems trying to obtain four plates of pancakes with no sausage. Alas, I am always a bit of cholesterol in the Camp Mather food line, clogging things up along the entree point as I pursue either vegetarian or picky eater needs.

At breakfast, Iris told me that she has a recurring dream that Lola is chasing her around the house with a knife. Lola loved this and brandished a knife, greasy with toast butter, at Iris.

We tied-dyed t-shirts (tie-dying is a time-honored ritual of Camp Mather, probably dating from the sixties).

Iris took her first horseback ride:

There was a cowboy named Tony right in front of me, so it wasn't too scary even it first. My horse was named Modoc, she was light brown. We went on some hills, and rocks. We passed the lake... When we came there I started to look for Joice, I didn't see her.

Later Iris talked about good weirdness versus bad weirdness. She wants to be good in a weird way, but she says I, her mother, am just "weird in a normal way, not really weird." After a lifetime of being considered weird, my own child thinks I am normal. How can this be? "Well, you're not really like other mothers," Iris admitted, "But you're not really weird."

"How am I not like other mothers?" I asked, always happy to talk about myself.

Iris stopped to think. "Well, you let me color my hair." She thought more. "And you're more outgoing! Yeah, that's it. You're more outgoing than most mothers."

Anton, at a loss with nothing to do, strung up the Christmas lights I had forced him to pack (he first refused to pack them, despite their inclusion on the Official Packing List, because of his alleged concerns with "the planet and visual pollution, you know, all the stars." This concern struck me as misfounded given that there are STREET LIGHTS RIGHT BY THE CABIN, so I overruled him). Conveniently enough, there were little nails over the lintel, undoubtedly put there expressly for hanging such lights (which are a bit of a tradition at Mather). Inconveniently enough, he learned that there were hornets living under the shingles, in the very facade of our cabin.

We debated what to do about the hornets. I felt they needed to be reported to the camp management, but Anton contended that "we are a guest in their home." This argument spilled over into a visit to Phil and Joyce's cabin, where Phil made the cogent point "but the hornets are living in a manmade structure", which undercut the guest-in-hornet-home argument. I found it ironic that I, the PETA donor and committed vegetarian, was advocating for the destruction of these insects, while Mr. Carnivore was pleading for tolerance and acceptance. As the very debate raged on, I noticed Claudia the camp manager walking by, and I ran over and narked on the hornets. This fait accompli caused the Great Hornet Debate to peter out.

At night, there was a camp fire, with s'more fixings (Lola ate two). A child burned my leg with his fiery marshmallow stick. There were considerable announcements made, including, most thrillingly, the fact that someone left a cooler containing cherries and hot dogs on their cabin's tiny porch, and a bear was witnessed breaking into said cooler and consuming the food with gusto. This seized the imaginations of the child guests.

Subsequently there was a staff talent show, which was significantly lamer than last year's. Irritatingly enough it appears that many of the skits and shticks are traditional, repeated each year, and this year's staff was considerably less endowed with stage ambitions. (Last year there were two saxophone players and a number of singers). The lifeguard with the borrowed helmet turned out to be "Random Forrest", who had a number of "Random Forrest Moments" in the talent show. For one, he ran on stage with 32 clothespins affixed to his face.

home is the sailor, home from the seas

We're back, and we're cranky. I have a head cold. The house is filled with dirty laundry, soiled sleeping bags which need to be taken to the dry cleaners, stacks of unread Wall St. Journals, and other charming assemblages. All of this needs to be cleaned up by tomorrow afternoon, when guests will arrive at cocktail hour expecting tapas (oh, and I need to make the tapas, too).

On the other hand, my beautiful poppies bloomed while I was gone, and all the pets survived, thanks to our conscientious housesitter.

do not worry your pretty little heads

I'm probably not going to post for the next week; I'm off with the children and the Sober Husband to spend a week in a rustic cabin sans internet access. Do not fear, my friends; I will take notes, and I will have plenty of stories to tell on my return.

smooches,

yer Drunken Housewife

gentlemen, to your grills

So some time ago I read an article in Food & Wine about the amazing dinner parties the owner of famed Tao throws in his perfect backyard, where he achieves heights of wackiness with the grill. To wit, he has created the grilled caiparinha and the grilled Caesar salad. I could not get these ideas completely out of my head, but yet I virtually never grill here in San Francisco. On my block, it's virtually always windy in the afternoons, with gale force winds increasing as the afternoon goes on. (In the mornings it can be quite lovely, but by the afternoon you're back indoors. My neighbor Brad once confessed that he wished he lived in the Mission, where the weather is always perfect, and indeed I myself have been wondering why the rich people choose views for prestige over weather. In ritzy Seacliff, it's usually about 20 degrees colder than in the heart of the Mission. Of course, our whingeing must be kept in perspective, given that we don't live in the fog belt, and also are spared the agonies of blizzards, tornadoes, and locusts people routinely endure elsewhere). So yes, we are spoiled and weak, but we miss the joys of summer grilling outdoors.

The husband, a product of the Midwest, believes firmly that on all major holidays, what one does is make a fire in the backyard and barbecue. It has taken years for him to come to enjoy (or convincingly fake enjoying) having my kind of barbecue, which is an upscale vegetarian feast. (At a family reunion of his, the husband's brother was cooking an actual leg of some animal over an open fire. There it was, an entire leg, poor little hoof and all. I think it was a goat... an animal I particularly admire and love. Worst of all, I couldn't just ignore it, as we all spent most of the day sitting by the slowly cooking leg, and the brother-in-law was so enamored of his cooking abilities that he kept hounding me to admire. "Isn't this the greatest? Have you ever seen a better barbecue? Aren't you amazed?" This unhappy vegetarian-at-a-barbecue feeling only added to the general malaise of being the-only-in-law-at-a-family-party-where-the-family-doesn't-consider-
in-laws-real-family).

On major holidays when the husband is determined to grill, I usually make a shallot-port sauce for basting, and we grill corn, potatoes, onions, and other vegetables. Of course, this Memorial Day I had the grilled potential atrocities, salad and caiparinha, in mind, despite the husband's frank admission that he did not think they sounded appetizing.

He was not the first to be unenthused. Previously in the year I had been contemplating going on a group camping trip, and I aired the possibility that I'd make grilled Caesars and caiparinhas from grilled limes, and there was a distinct, unapproving silence following this announcement. I ended up not going on the trip and not inflicting any grilled oddities on anyone, but yet the urge lingered.

And so, I finally scratched this months-old itch, and it turned out to be peculiarly satisfying because, as I am here to tell you, grilled caesars satisfy, to the point where they may be said to kick ass. It was so good that even seven year-old Iris ate heartily (and not many salads are loved by a seven year-old).

The grilled drinks were less of a sell. They were fun, and I sucked down three, but I don't think I'd go to the trouble to make them again (How they were made: cut limes into thin slices, toss with caster sugar, then grill until the sugar caramelizes on each side. Put into highball glasses and muddle the hell out of them after adding a couple of tablespoons of sugar, then build drink in the same glass).

A few weeks later, I read a restaurant review where the critic was marvelling at how one ultra-trendy new spot grills some greens to accompany grilled meat. "If you read 'Food & Wine', critic, you'd have already known about that," I thought. I believe we are on the cusp of a new trend, and what can be more satisfying than to do something before everyone else does it and then move on to the next thing? (Don't answer that; it's rhetorical).

Grilled Caesar Salad

Obtain several heads of Romaine lettuce. Cut each head so that you keep the heart but remove much of the fluffy outer leaves (just lay the intact head on the cutting board and make a horizontal cut about a third of the way down). Preserve the removed leaves for a more conventional salad. Now cut each truncated head in half vertically, through the heart. Brush with good olive oil and sprinkle a little salt and pepper on. Put on a hot grill, and grill each side about 20 seconds (our coals were not very hot, so we left it on several minutes). You're looking for it to have some grill hashmarks, but you don't want this to get overdone. Serve with Caesar dressing (preferably homemade and fresh) and with curls of Parmesan or other hard cheese (like the Tao guy, we used Manchego, which was orgasmic). [To create curls of cheese, instead of grating, use a vegetable peeler]. Que se aproveche!

cute or stupid

As I was getting the girls out of the car this afternoon, Lola kept uncharacteristically staring at me. "Why do you keep looking at me?" I asked.

"Because you're as stupid as a fruit face pancake."

Not sure I'd heard that correctly, I asked, "What did you just say?"

"I SAID because you're as cute as a fruit face pancake."

"I thought she said stupid," offered Iris critically.

Later, Iris asked Lola, "Why did you say she was as cute as a fruit face pancake?"

"Because she's soooo beautiful," said Lola.

(I still think she said "stupid" the first time).

a man, a plan, a canal - Panama!

Iris and Lola were roughhousing, and every five minutes or so one would whine to me. "Iris hurt my hair!" Then they would jump back into their roughhorsing, giggling, until the other one complained, "Lola shoved me!"

I tried to set them straight. "Are you just going to keep playing rough and complaining about getting hurt WHEN YOU KNOW YOU ARE PLAYING ROUGH ON PURPOSE AND YOU'RE GOING TO GET HURT? Is that your plan?"

Lola listened attentively while I was speaking, and her face lit up. "A plan! THAT IS OUR PLAN!"

ummm, thank you, UPS. I feel much smarter now.

Today I was skimming through the Wall St. Journal, as is my wont, when a rather large ad spanning much of two pages caught my eye. It would seem that UPS "partners with Knowledge@Wharton to bring new and simplified insight to your business." ("Knowledge@Wharton"?? I am just waiting for my own graduate school alma mater to create some asinine, Web 2.0-ish nickname for itself and take up running silly ads. That would truly make my day. If the ad were foolish enough, I might memorize large chunks of it and quote it at parties).

Today's topic of enlightenment is "How VCs Capture Value From Start-up Firms." Now, this is a subject of frequent debate and great interest in my very own home, which is funded solely from income from a series of start-up firms which manage with varying amounts of luck to obtain and frivol away venture capital cash. As one can imagine, I read on with some interest, eager to hear the words of Associate Professor Andrew Metrick of the Wharton School:

When entrepreneurs want to start a firm, what sources of capital can they tap? According to Andrew Metrick . . . there are three. "The easiest is if you have the money yourself," he says. ["Duh", says I]. Second, angel investors -- people who know and trust the entrepreneur -- could provide funds. [I hate the recentish convention of calling investors "angels." That's a perversion of the old usage, where investors in plays or the arts were called "angels." One who invests in a play does so largely out of a love of the art, which is vaguely angelic as plays certainly do bring joy and interest to our lives, at least when we can hire a frigging babysitter. But someone who dumps a hunk of cash into a high tech start-up is just a more well-heeled lottery player, hoping to hit it big. That is self-interested, not angelic].. And third, institutional sources such as banks and venture capitalists (VCs) are professionals at giving out money to start-up companies.

Have you learned anything yet? I didn't think so. Next, Associate Professor Metrick, part of that awesome thinktank, "Knowledge@Wharton", turns his attention to a topic which has peculiar interest in our home, "Valuing Start-ups." He purports to explain the arcane reasoning by which a venture capital firm assigns a value to a company. The Sober Husband and I had a discussion on this very topic over the last week, precipitated by an offer from his CEO to buy out his small stake in the company. When I, a mere drunken housewife, argued with him that he should take the goddam offer before it evaporated, I used such concepts as net present value, the effect of inflation, and the statistical uncertainty of there ever being another event, such as a successful IPO or acquisition, which would yield another chance to turn those paper options into cash. But how would a real professional cover this ground?

Professor Metrick explains that VCs often use a 'quick and dirty method called the venture capital method of valuation. They look at the company and ask themselves -- if everything works out for this company, what will it be worth in five to seven years.

In other words, they guess.

Welcome to Silicon Valley, my darlings, where we all drink the Kool-Aid and talk as though we all knew things which are, in the final analysis, unknowable.

awww

This week is the last week of preschool. Lola and many of her cohorts are "graduating"; they're leaving behind the carefree days of preschool to go on to kindergarten (or, in Lola's case, pre-k).

Today I came in to pick up Lola and saw that the director of our preschool was looking very upset and teary. This woman is normally a model of equanimity. Concerned, I asked one of the parents who'd worked at the school today whether there had been some family tragedy. This mom laughed and said, "Oh, it's because it's the end of the year, and so many kids are graduating." Awww, that just melted my heart: what a wonderful preschool director to be crying over saying goodbye to the little hellions.

After school, one of the other mommies remarked, "I don't remember her getting so upset last year at the end of the year."

"Maybe our kids are cuter than those kids?" I speculated.

brace yerselves

I've been getting a lot of inquiries about the fate of my runt, my failing foster kitten, and no, it's not a case of "no news is good news." He didn't make it, and I have been stalling on writing here because I felt guilty about having gotten this blog's (smallish, but devoted) readership emotionally involved with him.

Things go in waves in the feral kitten population of San Francisco. We see the same things over and over again in a season. Two years ago, it was the year of Incredibly Stubborn Fleas, where pet stores were selling out of Advantage because the fleas just wouldn't die, and it was also an epic year for ringworm. Last year, it was calicivirus: kitten after kitten came down with that weirdest of feline diseases, which usually starts with a swollen front paw and a limp. There was the season when there were so many eye infections that there was a shortage of the topical eye medication we use, and people were being solicited to bring it back from Mexico. This year, six or seven kittens died in one week, and their last days followed the same pattern. The kitten crashed (we call a state of near-death "crashing", which is unmistakable. Kittens go into shock and lie in strange postures, stiff and contorted, with low body temperatures), was revived, crashed again on the second day, was revived again, and then died on the third day.

This kitten had been separated from his mother at only about four days of age, so his survival was always in question. I'm trying to focus on my success stories: the kitten's tiny, frail brother is still alive, and he ate independently yesterday for the very first time (I've had him for nearly two weeks, and I've been force feeding him as I tried to wean him from the bottle, and FINALLY now he will eat by himself, but only if I stay by his side. If I leave, he stops eating). Also, one of my biggest success stories ever, the runt from my first litter of the season, now weighs 2 pounds and will go up for adoption this weekend. She was a poor eater and chronically dehydrated, so for about three weeks I force-fed her and gave her subcutaneous fluids several times a day. This saved her life, and now she is perfect: an uncommonly beautiful, friendly and healthy kitten who would be a joy in any home.

The first couple of years I fostered kittens, I blamed myself and felt like a cat murderer any time I lost a kitten. But now, I know what I'm doing for the most part. I know a lot about ringworm, calicivirus, and kitten diarrhea. If something goes wrong with one of my kittens, I can often treat it myself successfully without involving a vet (I have a supply of the most commmonly prescribed medications, which I get replenished from my rescue program). Sometimes kittens have crashed and come very close to dying, and I have been able to save their lives. This time, I couldn't.

The head of my foster program has a saying: "There's a reason cats have more than one in a litter." Not all kittens survive. I'm very sorry my little gray feral kitten didn't live; he was a good kitten. On his last night, I had the feeling he wasn't going to make it. That evening I let him doze on my chest for hours, and I made him a separate bed so the other, more vigorous kittens wouldn't trouble him. I got up at 3 AM to check on him, but he had already shuffled off this mortal coil.

Nature can be harsh to little animals. Last year, my rescue program saved about 500 feral kittens, but we can't save them all, alas. RIP little gray feral kitten; I wish you could have lived longer.

sagacious

I overheard Lola saying to her father very knowledgeably, "Mommy knows everything, but you almost know some things."

not regular

All day, Iris and Lola have been playing the same game. "We are aliens, we are twins who are babies and who are rock stars! And we have rubber butts, and we snore real loud!" says Iris.

"Babies who are rock stars! And we snore REAL LOUD!" shouts Lola.

fear of the sky

Four year-old Lola says, "Aliens are werry, werry dangerous. They land on earth, and they are mean. Mean old bells!"

Life or Death, part II

I had insomnia, resulting in my getting up at 5 A.M., and once again my tiny runt was in shock. I ran through the drill (corn syrup on gums, subcutaneous fluids, heat up the warming pad), and fed the other kittens as well. Sometime after six I fell asleep on the couch, which caused Iris to cross-examine me.

"Where did you sleep?"

"Upstairs, in the big bed."

"Then why were you here?"

Later, after I told the Sober Husband he had woken me up by raising his voice at Lola, Iris said ominously, "So you admit you were asleep on the couch."

Where I sleep is meaningless, at least to me. The fact I sleep, even the small amount I do, is troublesome. That runt can't currently make it between the last night feed and the morning feed without going into shock. I may need to set an alarm for two or three A.M. I can't face that prospect, given how tenuous my relationship is with sleep, but it seems there's a tiny life hanging on it. Sigh.

Lola sez

"I was just bouncing on my bed, minding my own business..."

somehow, I don't think this saying is going to catch on

Four year-old Lola described something as being "as busy as a butt" tonight.

it's life or death

So last night I had trouble getting to sleep, which is not uncommon for an insomnia sufferer. However, once I was asleep, I had no trouble staying asleep, and the Sober Husband let me sleep in, which was kindly meant indeed. But when I did wake up... I went downstairs to discover that one of my foster kittens had gone into shock. This is a very small kitten, one who is at most three weeks old and who was separated from his mother at only around four days old. Meanwhile all the other foster kittens and adult cats were clamoring for breakfast, and the kittens' pen was hideously fouled as it always is, AND because it was a half-day at Iris Uber Alles's school, I had very little time to deal with everything before leaving to pick up Iris.

The kitten was lying with its head at an unnatural angle, looking as though rigor mortis had already set in. As a seasoned crazy cat lady, I knew what to do: I put corn syrup on the kitten's gums to get his blood sugar up ASAP, I administered subcutaneous fluids (this was complicated by Lola interrupting me and the other hungry kittens squawking), and I heated up a warming pad for the kitten (he had lost a lot of body heat already and was cold to the touch).

For an unemployed person, I am remarkably important. If I oversleep, someone could die.

postscript: The kitten is hanging in there as of 6:45 p.m. Earlier in the day I conferred with the head of my rescue, and we agreed that there was no reason to take him to the vet other than to euthanize him as no one would do any more for him than I could.

she makes me nervous

Seven year-old Iris Uber Alles just walked in and asked, "How do you spell 'j'accuse'?"



p.s. It turns out she is writing a note to her teacher, reading in part, "J'accuse, Mr. Hopper, and I really mean it."

kittens and magnolias

Every day I get up and instantly I am incredibly, horribly behind on everything. As soon as I get downstairs, I hear the cries of my newest foster kittens (I have seven foster kittens at the moment. Of these, two are pushing the envelope of kitten fostering technology, having been separated from their mother at only about four days old. Amazingly enough it looks like they are going to make it, although one came with a nasty abscess and is on antibiotics). The kittens are starving and have fouled their pen and themselves. The adult cats and parrot are screaming for breakfast. The kitchen is a wreck. For the sake of sanity, the coffee needs to be made.

Giving the parrot breakfast is the Sober Husband's job, as he has developed a ritual which is viewed, by the parrot, with an increasingly over-developed sense of entitlement. In the immortal vernacular of the eighties, "I don't mean to brag, I don't mean to boast, but my parrot likes hot butter on her breakfast toast." The parrot takes a well-buttered English muffin, consumed perched on the husband's shoulder, casting the evil eye towards everyone else who dares approach the sacred breakfast table. Until said English muffin is served up, the parrot screams and screams (the next door neighbors told me that for years they used to think, "God, Iris is sure loud in the mornings"). Now, to add a soupcon of stress to this charming ritual, Lola has developed a sibling rivalry with the parrot. Through the various stratagems of pouting and nearly crying with angst that her father can momentarily not hold her on his lap, Lola manages to achieve another victory for homo sapiens over the animal kingdom, getting the parrot prematurely banished back to her cage so that she may eat her own breakfast sitting in the paternal lap.

After their breakfast, the kittens are clingy and want to climb on me, but I need to shrug them off so I can clean their pen. I also need to clean their meat off my clothing and floor, as they are messy eaters (and my nice vegetarian home! It's defiled every morning!) It takes me roughly one hour each morning to feed the animals, clean the kittens' pen, make the coffee, get Lola's breakfast, and do what little chores must be done, such as running a load of laundry. At the end of the hour, I myself have not had breakfast and have not glanced at the newspapers. The feelings of stress and being behind remain all day.

Right now, I can hear a periodic, slightly wheezy sound, and I cannot track it down. I cannot get rid of the nagging suspicion that it's an ailing animal somewhere which needs my attention. It's a fairly logical conclusion in this house that a wheezing sound signifies the presence of an animal which will need chauffeuring about to the vets' and the administration of various medications. I think, though, that it's more likely a sign of increasing neurosis on my part. We have also now entered into the time of year when the motherfucking magnolia tree rains its foul seed pods down upon the back deck, and the intermittent thuds are working what little nerves are left within the raddled shell of your old Drunken Housewife. Kittens and magnolia trees: they seem so pretty and innocent, but they're destroying what little is left of my brain.

Memorial Day/honoring the troops update/Update to the update

With no plans for Memorial Day, I was struck by the idea that perhaps I should do something with my children in the intended spirit of the day: honoring those who have given their lives in military service (regardless of whether or not we approve of any particular war, each soldier's death is a tragedy).

Commentator Chaos Control had an excellent idea: adopt a service member. I have signed up to adopt one, but there's a bit of a delay before one receives the name and address of one's assigned soldier. So that's in the works, but not likely to pan out before Memorial Day. If I get a male soldier, I promise to send all sorts of obnoxious porn I disapprove of on feminist grounds (that's the very purest sort of gift, when you send something the recipient wants which goes against your own grain). Our Ms. Drunken Housewife title holder TexzMissy is adopting one as well; join us!

And, in breaking news: This morning I received my adopted soldier's information. I have been assigned an 18 year-old private from the Bronx, stationed in Iraq. I'll put a package together over the weekend for him. Excited, I told the Sober Husband, "I got my adopted soldier!" He gave me a disapproving glare and said superiorly, "Perhaps I'll adopt an Iraqi." "Oh, I'm all for that," I said. "Go for it!" My friend Joyce suggested later that perhaps we could get my soldier to arm-wrestle the husband's Iraqi.

I don't know about the rest of you, but the fact I strongly disagree with the Iraq war makes me feel worse for the troops there. They are being asked to risk their lives and health in a stupid war which increasingly looks hopeless. At least the WWII soldiers could feel that they were making their sacrifices on behalf of a truly good cause, while veterans of unpopular wars are seen as chumps or villains. Having read "The Lucifer Effect", Zimbardo's brilliant analysis of how regular people behave evilly when placed in the wrong circumstances, I have all the more sympathy for the U.S. troops. If we think we would do better, we are most likely kidding ourselves. Iraqi civilians, U.S. military stationed in Iraq: I have sympathy enough for both sides.

I can't see a difference yet

This morning was a hectic one, and I was darting about feverishly trying to do laundry, bottlefeed tiny kittens, clean litterboxes, feed the parrot, make coffee, water the garden, pack Lola's lunch, etc.., etc... despite a fever and sinus infection causing a pounding headache. As I did this, Lola followed me around, waving a pretend magic wand at my rump and shouting over and over again, "Turn this butt into a fairy!"

do me a faaaaaavor

Yes, I know your Drunken Housewife has been oddly demanding of late. Read "The Lucifer Effect", help me honor the troops, etc.., etc... When will it ever end? Well, I have one more request, and then hopefully I'll shut my favor-seeking yap and get back to snarky anecdotes.

Yesterday out of curiosity I checked this blog's Google pagerank (not that I'm obsessive; it was only the second time I've done that). The pagerank had gone up, which was nice, I suppose, but that and two dollars will buy me a Red Bull. Then I had a wild hair and checked the pagerank of the Sober Husband's company, and I discovered that it has the same pagerank as this blog. That just slayed me. I had a good laugh at that, at the expense of this poor fledgling start-up (of course, the joke's on me as they had some good sales this week, and what cash have I generated? None).

Now I have formulated the frivolous ambition of increasing this blog's pagerank so that it exceeds that of the husband's high-tech start-up, the source of this motley household's income. I think it would be hi-larious if my little hobby blog were deemed, by the sacred measures of online commerce and search engine statistics, to be more important than the online presence of an award-winning, publicity-gathering, venture capital-spending high tech company. You, my dears, can help me achieve this goal. Just jam some link to www.drunkenhousewife.com somewhere where the precious little spiders will creep over it. Put a link on a blog, a bulletin board, a comment somewhere... flattering, unflattering, in English or not, it's all peachy. If this blog advances in pagerank, I'll be oh so motivated to thank those who made it all possible for me to lord it over my husband; why, I'll just slave my little fingers to the bone typing out little stories for y'all.

umm, how about a My Little Pony-themed piece of plastic crap instead?

"I want to buy a toy gun," said four year-old Lola, "a plastic one."

"Why?" I asked, surprised.

With the air of tired patience a genius must have when dealing with an imbecile, Lola said, "So I can pretend it's a real gun."

brainstorm with me a mo', readers

Today I was driving Miss Lola home from her swimming lesson (thankfully she'd just finished her lesson and showered off before some less happily potty-trained little minx took a crap in the pool, resulting in the rapid forced evacuation of the pool and the immediate deployment of the staff, who clearly have well-defined individual roles in such "brown-out" emergencies. This occurs several times a year, and I've never been on the premises before when it happened; I've only been the recipient of the rapidfire, curt courtesy calls informing me NOT to bring my child in as the pool is being drained and disinfected. The industry and energy of the staff was truly something to behold, and I had to force myself not to stand about gawking) and I was contemplating the Memorial Day weekend. I have no plans to go out of town. I had earlier in the year contemplated driving a few hours north for a large annual camping party organized by friends and acquaintances, but when it came time to reserve spaces, I was feeling too blackly depressed to have the energy for the party (and God knows driving anywhere with my children can test one's will to live). "So what shall I do all weekend," I wondered, and then it came to me. I should do something in the true spirit of Memorial Day, something to honor those who have given their lives in military service.

There has been a war going on in the background for several years now, and every day there are more and more casualties. I am personally deeply, deeply opposed to the war in Iraq (but in favor of the war in Afghanistan, about which we rarely hear), and I am sobered and saddened by the loss of each life. More and more American military personnel are deployed, possibly never to return again.

How should we honor those almost incomprehensible sacrifices? Suggestions? Can I encourage you, my darlings, to join with me in this? I realize that it's easier for me to draft you along on my whimsies when they are actually whimsical, e.g., y'all will send me pictures of cleavage but aren't about to rush out and read "The Lucifer Effect" with me, despite my ringing endorsement that reading about the Stanford Prison Experiment is engrossing enough to keep a suicidal person alive. Nonetheless, let's mull this over and generate some ideas.

poop

Iris waxed rhapsodically: "I love kitties because they are small animals, and SMALL ANIMALS ARE PART OF LIFE!" The Sober Husband, ever prosaic, began animatedly, "And their poop is full of life.." until I interrupted, sick of hearing him go on about the kittens' crap: "All you talk about is poop! Talk about something else!"

Lola laughed hysterically. "All you know about is poop! ALL YOU KNOW ABOUT IS POOP! You need to learn about something else!" She paused to think, and then finished triumphantly, "Like ponies!"

a conversation with my neighbor

"I'm going to tell you something that reveals just how sick I am," said my neighbor, B. He stopped, adjusted his glasses, and hesitated before continuing. "The day after 9/11, I turned to L. in bed and said, 'Now's the time to buy some property. Anything. Just buy.' And I was right. There was nothing happening in the market for six months. It was flat. And then the prices went up. But that shows just how sick I am. Everyone else was flying to New York to help out, and I said, 'Now's the time to buy.'"

listen to the wisdom of the small child

Kindergarten teacher to class: "What do you do when you're bored?"

Angelic-looking kindergartener: "Destroy my brothers."

And let us not forget our own Lola, who proclaims, "I love my feet because they can take me anywhere! I love my butt because it lets me poop!"

Lola has also remarked several times lately, "I know how to say 'hello' in Hawaiian! HELLOHA!"

parents of our lives

Every now and then, I'm reminded how much fun mommies can be.Usually they all seem so stressed and tired and rushed, but every now and then, you can get a glimpse of the wild woman under that maternal exterior. Today I wore my beloved Elvis Herselvis t-shirt, depicting the delightful lesbian Elvis impersonator sneering with elan. It turns out that one of the mommies at my preschool "used to hear Elvis Herselvis having sex with my roommate all the time." This was back in the day, when this mommy was a funloving young woman living in the Castro with four lesbian roommates, and evidently the hijinks never ended. There should definitely have been a sitcom made of that material.

Last night at the annual arts festival at Iris Uber Alles's school (Incidentally Iris's most prominent contribution to the festival was a picture of an imaginary planet, Planet Iris, populated by Oprah-headed aliens. I had never realized my child was so taken by Oprah), I saw a fun looking mommy in a red-and-black African cap. Later she initiated a conversation with me, inquiring about my primitive silver necklace, a relic from my bellydancing days, and we hit it off. This other mother mentioned that she had noticed my husband and I as standing out in the parent population as "artsier" parents (she took a moment to seek the mot juste). I shared that at the beginning of the year, our kindergarten teacher from last year told me that I should "reach out to the new parents" and let them know that not all the parents at our school are cut from the same cookie cutter set (at our school, the relevant cookie cutters are probably best described as hedge fund manager & extraordinarily thin blonde trophy wife). As I related to the fun looking mommy, my reaction was, "How am I supposed to do that? Should I send them notes? 'Hello, I am weird and I can be your friend?'" Then, after that little moment of connection, we both went off to search the grounds for our respective offspring, probably never to see each other again.

This may well have been my Annual Moment of Connection With A New Private School Mommy. Last year I worked a volunteer shift at the fall festival with someone who looked at first glance like a staid trophy wife who'd be afraid to damage a Manolo, but who turned out to be the most amazingly fun person who throws parties with live blues, on weekends when her children are at the ex-husband's. (This did illustrate, of course, that one must never judge a mommy by her appearance. Indeed, not everyone who looks like a trophy wife is a trophy wife, and further indeed, many trophy wives can be a rollicking good time). I loved her, and she gave me her card, but somehow I lost it and never called, and the moment passed when it would have made sense to call and say, "Hey, let's go get embarrassingly drunk together."

Back at the preschool today, I had to use the bathroom at pick-up time just as today's working parents were cleaning it. "Watch out, the seats may be wet", one mommy cautioned me, as she'd just disinfected them. I said, "Don't worry, you don't have to re-do them. It's not as though someone used it like Paris Hilton, where our delicate maternal sensibilities would be troubled if our children had to put their butts there after her." "But isn't she in jail now?" answered the other mother. Our Hiltonian schadenfreude devolved into a spirited discussion of the merits of trashy celebrity gossip sites, wherein it was revealed that two out of three preschool mommies are addicted to dlisted.com, but only one out of three mommies has breathlessly followed the ongoing dlisted.com coverage of Hercules the morbidly obese tabby:

Now of course, it's not all fun and games in the world of parents. I was aggressively tailgated by a rude SUV driver today for about a mile... and it turned out to be one of the other parents from my school (or an agent thereof; conceivably it could have been a roadraging au pair). And then again this week one of my favorite parents from our preschool breathlessly passed on the news that a mountain lion had been seen in the canyon, which led to many parents panicking and demanding that the children be kept inside at school. My initial reaction was that some excitable person had seen a raccoon or an obese house cat (Hercules II?) as there is no viable wildlife corridor linking this urban park with any feasible cougar habitat. There are mountain lions in Marin, but I can't imagine the mountain lion who would make its way across the Golden Gate Bridge and half the city to our park. (Indeed, out-of-town drivers find negotiating the toll plaza and its lane merges to be stressful, and they're not on foot). On the other hand, there once really was an alligator in Mountain Lake back in the nineties(note for the non-San Franciscans: "Mountain Lake" is a small pond near a modest hill in northern San Francisco. Everything is named grandiosely here). Secretly, I was rooting for a mountain lion sighting, but I knew it was about as realistic as the fears of those crazy Brits who opposed the opening of the Chunnel, arguing that rabid French dogs would run down the tunnel and cross the Channel. I know I wasn't alone: if we must be conscientious and caring mothers who put our children first, no longer living in households with pop icons having sex in the next room, we can still keep an eye out for whatever thrills may be readily available.

our never-ending case study of a four year-old hypochondriac

"I have a boy's voice, NOT a girl's voice," complains Lola. She feels this is a biological mistake, an error which cannot be fixed but must be borne by the afflicted. Indeed, contemplating her sad fate, she sunk her head in her arms and mourned.

life goes on

I stopped by a bookstore in search of my idol Jack Bishop's new, seasonal vegetarian cookbook (which was not there, alas), but I did discover that my greatly beloved Donald Westlake has given the world another Dortmunder novel. I actually thought to myself, "It's a good thing I didn't kill myself last week." Pinning my life to Donald Westlake publications is not a good strategy, however, given that the man has got to be pushing one hundred. (A perennial item on my to do list is "Write Donald Westlake before he dies", which hopefully is a very, very long time in the future, but still, I should get a move on that, as well as "Find new dentist and make teeth-cleaning appointment", which is becoming a perennial).

It was not just sheer joy in the bookstore, however. This bookstore has branched out into carrying the seductive Melissa & Doug line of toys, and Lola was quite insistent upon getting a magnetic dress up princess (a sturdier sort of paperdoll, with magnets instead of little tabs). I refused to drop $20 on this when we already have analogous toys at home, but I did spring for another nauseating volume of My Little Pony pablum for her. So: the joy of Dortmunder is counterbalanced by the angst of being compelled to read aloud the doings of the My Little Ponies over and over again... and by Lola's pointed reminder that "I am getting that Princess dress toy for my birthday", spoken in a firm, no-nonsense voice as we walked to the car.

what's eating yer drunken old housewife, part II

The hideous truth of the matter is that the number one thing causing a normally witty and likeable (albeit lazy and eccentric) woman to turn into a suicidal and insanely touchy hag is that (deep breath) I'm hot flashing like no one's business. I feel like a cartoon, like a living illustration of all those sexist jokes about menopausal witches.

Now, this is occurring over a decade ahead of schedule, and I'm cool with that. I was happy at first, since I'm unbelievably fertile and ready to call my reproductive career over. I'm so insanely in love with the amazing Lola and Iris Uber Alles that I'd be happy to have another child of their ilk, but I couldn't face another complicated pregnancy (ask me about bedrest and premature labor sometime), and of course, my schedule is so complicated already that adding any prenatal appointments, well baby visits, or source of child enrichment activities would be disastrous. It's kind of freakish, but it's to be expected I suppose, given that my older sister was done with menopause by age 40.

What I'm not cool with is constant hot flashes and mood swings. I'm also usually in the closet over this (odds of me deleting this are extremely high). It's not from any inherent shame; it's from societal pressure. I found that when I artlessly confided in people, "I'm having a hot flash right now, so excuse me" they would look at me as though I had said, "My leprosy-ridden finger is just about ready to come off, so forgive me if it falls in your lap." No one loves a menopausal woman. Why is there no blues genre which covers this?

Yes, I suppose I should entertain the idea of going on hormones, but I don't want to. First, there's the whole animal ethics thing (the more prevalent hormones are made from urine taken from tortured pregnant horses). Next, there's a complicated relationship between breast cancer and taking hormones, and I don't want to buy myself a ticket to chemo. (Not to mention that I may not be aging gently, but I have unusual green eyes and a great rack, and I don't want to lose either of those. Leave me something to be vain about, please).

I never believed in the whole crazy, hormonal women stereotype as a young feminist. I never personally suffered from PMS, and I doubted its existence. I didn't run around bashing anyone, but internally, I was rolling my eyes when a friend would bitch or share some anecdote of extreme behavior where the punchline was "And the next day I got my period!" I felt that was the sort of ridiculous whininess which held our gender back. Then I got pregnant and learned what it was to be hormonal. (Now I'd like to give all the PMS sufferers a hug and a nice chocolate bar). Back then my obstetrician told me something which should have frightened me more: "For some women, pregnancy is a foretaste of what menopause will be like." In retrospect, there should have been some kind of ominous background music swelling up as she said that.

I was really kind of insane during both my pregnancies, eating pints of ice cream, whining about not being able to have a gin and tonic, and calling my husband on the phone to instruct him about what to do in the event of my death. Then there was the time when, bedevilled with insomnia and pregnancy cravings, I made the husband go out for doughnuts around four AM, and unforgivably enough I had fallen asleep by the time he got back. Of course, he was richly rewarded for all that with children of the highest calibre. What does anyone get in return for bearing with me through the current rollercoaster?

a taste of what's eating yer drunken old housewife

I've been so depressed lately, with only my book about human evil to cheer me up (and I'm on the penultimate chapter, so that's going to run out). There's no one big reason I've sunk into this morass, nothing like cancer or death of a loved one (although the other great certainty, taxes, figures into it). It's a series of insignificant-in-the-big-picture things which are stressing me, and I personally find that shameful. I should be more resilient. (Oddly enough, when it has come to the Big Things, I have been fairly tough, weathering divorce, death of loved ones, being the victim of violent crime which triggered post traumatic distress in me and my ex, etc...) I will share a small taste of the stress with you, but I'll spare you much of it.One large source of stress is that I'm constantly running about, ferrying the children hither and yon. Our schedule, the one for the children and me, is so ridiculous it has conflicts built right into it. The most blatant example of scheduling madness is that Iris Uber Alles has a piano lesson which directly conflicts with picking Lola up at preschool one day a week. (So why not stop the piano lesson? Because she really wants to play the piano and practices so willingly, and if we screw around this teacher, a very talented young pianist who lives five blocks from Iris's school, we'll never find such a conveniently located one again. And because we started piano on the advice of Iris's music teacher at school, another longish story). So one day a week the Sober Husband has to leave work early -- and of course it's one of the days he's required to be in Palo Alto an hour away -- and deal with one of the children. I'm always stressed that he won't remember (and indeed, the man does get involved in his work and lose track of time, relying upon his celphone alarm to startle him out of his consuming focus, but sometimes he forgets to set the celphone alarm).

We also have just re-started speech therapy for Lola, which conflicts with Iris's loathed softball practice. And of course, this falls upon a day the husband must be in Palo Alto, as well. This is a short-term conflict; softball is close to an end, but in the meantime, it's another source of stress.

Then there's Tuesday, where for eight weeks running (eight! weeks!), I've been scheduled to work at Lola's preschool. That makes Tuesday mornings stressful for us, with me having to chivvy poor Lola constantly to hurry along, as we have an extremely tight schedule to get from her delightful child gymnastics class to school early (working parents are supposed to arrive fifteen minutes before school starts). Normally I try to "plan for success with my spirited child", as the parenting catchphrase goes, and my planning for success largely involved allowing Lola a ton of extra time. She's a dawdler, an extremely slow walker (although, in a marked display of lack of self-knowledge, she proclaims herself to be "fast as a squirrel" and is completely puzzled over why the other children are able to get to school before her when she is walking as fast as is humanly possible). I like to allot half an hour to make the 1/3 mile walk to her school (and no, driving it is not possible, because the whole point of this preschool is that it's located in a quiet canyon where children and dogwalkers cavort in nature away from the hectic city). When we can't do that -- as in these eight consecutive Tuesdays -- our walk is transformed from the most relaxing part of our days (Lola and Mommy in nature! observing red-tailed hawks! looking for the baby owls which were born in a eucalyptus tree right by the trail! walking on logs! picking leaves off the stinky monkey flower plant!) into nasty old Mommy nonstop nagging poor, poky Lola. "Lola, we have to walk faster. Mommy has to work today and she's going to be late! It makes your teacher unhappy when Mommy is late! Please, Lola, for the love of God can't you keep walking?? Godamit." And of course, once I am at the preschool, I need to be patient, calm, cheerful, energetic and observant to work with the children, plus I need to keep my normally truck-driverish vocabulary G-rated.

There's not much time in the day for me to be alone or with other adults sans children. Iris's alarm goes off at 6 AM. Lola goes to bed around 10:00 or 10:30 p.m. That is a loooong day. (Don't start with me about how I am a bad mother letting Lola stay up so late. Lola is one of those freaks of nature, like Bill Clinton or Thomas Edison, who require very little sleep. As a baby and toddler, she was a non-napping paragon of wakefulness. In addition to her relatively tiny appetite for sleep, the child lives for the time of day when Iris is already asleep and she, Lola, rules the roost). Some days, I have a block of time of nearly two hours of free time without children, and I usually squander it going to the grocery store or running other mindless errands.

I used to relieve stress and maintain morale by a series of money-wasting beauty treatments (pedicures, professional eyebrow shaping, Brazilian waxes, expensive haircuts, etc...) plus buying books almost as frequently crack addicts buy rocks of crack. Then the Sober Husband and I had the realization that we were living way beyond our means, and the first thing to go on the economic chopping block was the poor old Drunken Housewife's personal appearance. Sigh. (Less sadly, I rejoined a delightful private library, enabling me a better source of books than the dreary and depressing public library).

This leads us to our next source of stress, the Almighty Dollar. We were recently hit by an astounding tax bill, which was completely unanticipated by stupid old us because we'd just paid a large amount of money in estimated taxes in January upon the advice of our tax attorney. These are taxes upon extra income earned in the distant-seeming past by the Sober Husband from doing some side consulting work, work which has dried up and indeed work from which we are owed $25,000 in unpaid fees (this is an entertaining story in its own right which I have long meant to get around to telling). Currently we are living outside our means, and Something Should Be Done. Of course, the most natural possibility that comes to mind is that the Drunken Housewife get off her curvy rump and obtain paying employment, but given that we already cannot get the children through the week without making the husband come home early from work at least one in five days, how the hell am I supposed to manage getting to a job? Not to mention that I am currently unwilling to do the work for which I am trained (litigatrix), and I'm woefully over or under-qualified for anything else. (I have graded practice bar exams for cash, as it's something semi-flexible which doesn't require putting the children into daycare, but it sucks in its own right. There's nothing to cause one to despair for the future of civilization like being put to grading a few hundred essays on a more obscure subject, such as corporations, which the aspiring attorneys of tomorrow have completely failed to master. And then again the pay for this is not generous, and indeed collecting it requires numerous long-distance phone calls and emails with increasing tones of nastiness. Funnily enough the bar preparation people are completely capable of receiving all emails EXCEPT the ones with my paysheets, which invariably are not received no matter how many times they are sent).

The last straw recently was when, on a day when I was already stressed and depressed and had only enjoyed about 2 hours of sleep, due to chronic insomnia (and indeed, it was a Tuesday morning, the worst time of the week), I received a note from my mother-in-law (with whom I have a spectacularly stressful and crappy relationship):

REUNION 2008

Dear family,

I will turn 70 next year, and I would like to have a first-ever family reunion sometime in the summer. You are all invited with families, spouses, significant or even insignificant others. This is a heads up way in advance to get your input on available dates during July-August 2008. Do you have any specific plans for those months that would prevent you from coming?

Here's the general plan: I will rent a place for a week, big enough for everyone. I'm looking on Martha's Vineyard but probably won't be able to confirm rental for 6 or more months. Whatever I get will have beach access and other activities available. I'm hoping everyone can be there for a big cookout on a Saturday night, vegetarian and vegan options available. Then you can stay for as much or as little of the rest of the week as you wish.

I look forward to hearing from each of you.

And here's your Drunken Housewife on the Martha's Vineyard ferry to the "first-ever family reunion":


Now why should this bother a reasonably sane person? First, the last time I went to one of these family reunions (this is actually not the "first-ever" one; there was one for a landmark birthday for the husband's now-deceased grandmother), it was one of the worst experiences of my entire life. Secondly, at least at that one (horrific as it was) I had insisted upon staying at a hotel, so I was able to have a few bits of time here and there where I could escape from the inlaws and stare blankly at the walls in private, contemplating death as a feasible escape and pondering why, why, why did I think it was a good idea to carry that particular family's genes forward into the new millennium. I was so horrified at the idea of having to be in a house with these people (and a statement that it will be "big enough for everyone" is meaningless coming from a person who thinks a one bedroom house is large enough for a family of four to visit comfortably, particularly as they could use a futon in the basement) that I completely missed at first the spine-chilling fact this was a house on an island. Not just any old, conveniently visited island, but one with no bridges and only an infrequent ferry. Thus if yer crabby old Drunken Housewife were stressed and wished to escape, there would be no escape short of wading into the sea.

But most of all, the fact remains that we haven't had a vacation in over three years, a proper vacation. We did go to Camp Mather last year and will return this year (Camp Mather is the city-subsidized mountain get-away, consisting of extremely rustic cabins by a pond in the scenic Sierras), but that is a vacation for the children, not their cranky old mother. Our last vacation was wonderful, a couple of weeks in Panama (so underrated as a destination. Just as brown is sometimes the new black, Panama is the new Costa Rica), but that was years ago and poor Lola can't even remember it. Travelling abroad is the most important thing in life to me, my greatest joy and pleasure, even eclipsing reading and drinking (and of course, you can read and drink abroad! discover new and exotic alcohols!). Due to monetary constraints, international vacations are not part of my life as a stay-at-home crab, and there are no conferences or calls to action for a cranky old Drunken Housewife to heed which would entail flying her abroad. At the present time, going from California to Martha's Vineyard is completely not in the budget and would conclusively exterminate any hopes of a more enjoyable outing elsewhere in the foreseeable future. I can't live in a world where my only vacations are spent being miserable with my in-laws. What mistakes have I made to put me in this position?

I am not being paid enough to be cooped up on an island with people who hate me. On "Survivor", at least they have tropical splendor to gaze upon and the hope of winning a million dollars... and the joy of voting out despised enemies.

And today, as the icing on the cake, my mother-in-law arrives for a visit. I am so dreading any discussion of this "first ever family reunion." If things get bad, I am going to have to run away from home (readers: I am entertaining offers! I have a valid passport and credit cards, albeit no ability to pay them off).

everybody say "awwww..."

My foster kittens have just outgrown the awkward, ton-of-work stage. When I got them, they needed to be bottle-fed constantly (I was staying up late and then getting up early for a 5 am feed). It was like having a baby, except I could leave them unsupervised without fearing CPS. They were not capable of cleaning themselves, and they didn't understand the litterbox (also, they had cranky little kitten bowels). I had to do a load of kitten-related laundry every day. Also, the runt of the litter was a poor eater who was always dehydrated, and for two weeks I gave her subcutaneous fluids several times a day, and I was really stressed and concerned that she wouldn't make it.

Now they are just a joy and no work. The two larger kittens come when I call them. They are all so snuggly and dear and as cute as a Hallmark card. Of course, the cruel day is soon arriving when the two large kittens will be packed off to go up for adoption, and the runt will be separated from her siblings. The horrible part of fostering is the guilt of dropping the kittens off at the shelter, where they cry pathetically, obviously sending the message, "Mommy, why are you leaving me in this little cage? What is this nightmare? Don't leave me here!" I feel terrible abandoning them to the vagaries of life.

Last year my rescue program raised roughly 500 kittens, the overwhelming majority of which were tiny, feral kittens. If this program did not exist, many of those kittens would have been euthanized. So much fluffy joy in the world... contact me if you want some of it to be yours.

Lola-isms

Conversation with Lola is always most interesting when we're walking after preschool. Yesterday Lola was in a cheerful yet morbid mood and hit upon the happy-for-her thought of her big sister's eventual demise. "She won't be able to boss me around any more! No more bossy old Hassie!"

Today Lola had thoughts of personal glory. "I want to be a rockstar first, and then I want to turn into a roommate. A rockstar, then a roommate!"

bloodthirsty children

We gave a ride to Iris Uber Alles's fellow first grader, a child addicted to asking strange questions. "Iris, would you rather stick needles in your eyes or kill someone and go to jail?"

"I would kill someone, but only go to jail for a moment."

This talk of death inspired the listening Lola, who skipped down the sidewalk, shouting happily, "I want someone to kill George Bush! I want someone to kill George Bush!" I cringed, fearing some nearby Republican would report my four year-old assassin to the Secret Service.

the dark flirtation

I've been in another round of dancing with my personal demon lately, and no, the demon's name is not alcoholism, despite what one might assume (cue my latest idol, Amy Winehouse, singing, "They tried to make me go to rehab, and I said, NO, NO, NO"). In my case, the nameless demon (and yes, some demons do have names: my somewhat combat-addled first fiance called his "Tobias") is suicide.

Somehow I think I've always known my personal story will have that ending [although to date my near-death experiences, of which I've had many, have had different themes, such as robbers armed with machetes in the Andes, undiagnosed gallbladder disease, household accident ending in dramatic scar on right wrist (how ironic for one of my flirtation to have only an accidental wrist scar!), careless drivers, meningitis, nearly drowning after getting caught in a riptide, etc...]. It doesn't sound bad to me; it seems like a natural fit, much like how when I got divorced back in the nineties, I told everyone who offered their condolences, "Eh, I always knew I'd be a gay divorcee." (What I didn't know was that my projected life of a single urban sophisticate was not on the cards, but instead a life featuring Mortgages and Small Children).

This makes sense to some. When I was engaged to the man with a personal demon, a hard-drinking member of the Special Forces who kept a lot of weapons stowed about our apartment, I told him that when I did consummate this flirtation, I was going to stage it so it looked like murder at his hands. In all seriousness, he said to me, "I'll fall more and more in love with you as I go through the criminal process." Ahh, sweet first love.

However, I have to spurn my suitor in this narrative or, at the very least, postpone this ending until I'm elderly and/or on the losing side of a medical crisis, due to the plot twist of small children in this tale. It's not just that, under the Sober Husband's stewardship, they would never be presented with a green vegetable ever again. I have a close family member who killed himself two years ago, and I can't put Iris and Lola through the aftermath. (The horrible thing is that in the case of my nephew, I think the only family members who were really bothered were me, his aunt, and his siblings. Of course, his high school friends and girlfriend were devastated, and their suffering at the funeral contrasted with the calm of the family members hideously).

God, the demands of parenting never end: must not kill self, must drive softball carpool, must work shift at preschool, must remember to bring check for afterschool enrichment program, &tc., &tc...

yes, I realize how insane this sounds

I've been extremely depressed lately, and the only thing which perks me up is reading "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil" by Philip Zimbardo. "Huh?" you might think. "What the . . . ?"

How this works: this book is so enveloping and so thought-provoking, that it makes me feel that it is good to be alive in a world where there are such interesting things to read and so much to learn. This book is making me want to make a visit to the local medical library so I can find the journal articles listed in the endnotes. I haven't been so involved in a topic in years.

In college, I took a number of psych classes, but it seemed to be 99% crap. I've never bought the artificial id-ego-superego thing, or all that Freud nonsense, such as penis envy. While taking a course in "Theories of Personality", I concluded it was all bunk and invented my own "Theory of Personality", known to my college friends as "the Weirdness Scale", which I contended was just as good as any of the theories covered in my class. Zimbardo, however, is on another level.

Currently I'm reading a chapter about obedience. Here's one insight: it has been conclusively shown that people tend to obey others in their life most when they act out of character. This is a big part of why abused women obey their abuser: the acts of abuse are "out of character." We tend to have a gut reaction that if someone who is normally intelligent and loving acts abusively, then there must be some core truth to their atypical reaction and we should fall in line. (Sadly this makes me think of the one time I lost it with Iris Uber Alles and screamed at her after a morning of conflict, and she instantly scurried to obey. At the time, I made a joke of it, saying "Who knew bad parenting was so effective?", but it's an illustration of the abuser being a persuasive authority figure. For the record, I didn't lift a hand-- I just raised my voice -- but yelling angrily is out of character for me).

The last book I read which was anywhere near so absorbing and thought-provoking was "The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2" by Jane Poynter. That was a book which gave me material for thought for days and made my mind buzz in a hundred different directions. In the end, did that book change my life? No, not beyond making me squabble with my husband over whether the Biosphere 2 had any scientific import, but it gave me some happy hours of reading. I suspect these authors are hoping to change the world significantly, and I doubt it would be meaningful to them to learn that they have assisted one middle-aged sot in killing time, but anyhow, cheers, Professor Zimbardo and Ms. Poynter. Thanks for the books!

my challenge to all of you

Get yerselves a copy of Philip Zimbardo's "The Lucifer Effect" ASAP. I'm about a quarter of a way through this unusual and riveting book.

Zimbardo, a psychology professor, is best known for having created the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, where male college students were randomly assigned to be guards and inmates in an ersatz prison created in a campus basement. The guards quickly became so sadistic that the experiment had to be aborted early. Zimbardo had a book deal to write about the Stanford Prison Experiment, but he was unable to face writing about it until thirty years had passed. Since that famous experiment, Zimbardo has been involved in the Abu Ghraib scandal (he reports that the infamous pictures we see are NOTHING compared to the unreleased ones he has seen) and other instances of regular people becoming evil. He believes that we all have the potential of great evil within us, which can be easily drawn out by a horrible situation.

Join me in reading this important and interesting book.

"why I don't blog" by the formidable Lemonjuicer!

The delightful Lemonjuicer, one of the winners of our First, Possibly Annual, Reader's Photo Contest, has stepped forward with her prize, a day of guest blogging. I have interspersed a few comments hither and yon.

why i dont blog.

i know... this guest blog entry is horribly overdue. [More shamefully I still haven't written the two prize entries for the winners who assigned me topics for a prize. I know, I suck. -DH]. i have been suffering from a long spell of writers block, otherwise known as 'my husband travels a lot and i am brain-dead from child care'. i am currently lubricating my mind with a cocktail - the world's most perfect margarita, of which i posted the recipe some time back in the comments section. i invite you to mix one up and drink with me, as i am far more interesting when you are drunk.

i feel honored that my rack has vaulted me into this position - for once the girls pay off!! ok, i lied. they have paid off before. that story involves a stripper and the man i currently call my husband. alas, i digress.


i apologize in advance for my lack of punctuation and capitalization. you will get used to it. i do in fact know the difference between it's and its. if i ever need to compose a letter to someone, say, Bill Clinton, i will tidy up my writing. if he ever visits me i will also flip the couch cushions to the 'visitor' side. the rest of the world gets all lower case and grungy furniture.

so, back to the title 'why i dont blog'. what do i have to blog about? despite having lived in the hearts of the gay communities of nyc, LA, and SF (yes, another former castro dweller!) i have been calling rural wisconsin my home for the past 4 years. i also went from monthly international travel to being a stay-at-home-mom of 2. and, considering our illustrious hostess - the formidable drunken housewife, has cornered the market on the drunken ramblings of a woman slowly losing her mind, what could i possibly have left to offer? apparently a sentence with far too many commas, thats what.

my husband suggested i write about blow jobs. wow, thats a shocker. i am not sure if its a 'stick with what you know' or more wishful thinking on his part. [This reference is going to win the charming Lemonjuicer even more fans!]

so i give you the blog entry about absolutely nothing.

cheers,
lemonjuicer

And in Lemonjuicer's honor, let us all make the daily drink a margarita and toast her digitized image. Cheers!

"I can dream about wearing them"

Lola is obsessed with getting Homer Simpson slippers:
"I want them! I can dream about wearing them! Can you dream about me wearing them? Tell me when you dream about me wearing them!"


(art courtesy of Hughman!)

the minutia, the excrement, and all the driving is going to kill me

It's a rough week to be me, although in the great scheme of things, being me any particular week is not so bad. I live on one of the most beautiful blocks in one of the world's most gorgeous cities; I have more than enough to eat; I get laid on a regular basis. The big picture is lovely, but the small picture is sucky (and smells bad at times).

Monday: one of the working parents was scheduled to drive the frigging softball carpool, but a work issue came up forcing her to cancel. It is the lot, indeed the calling, of the stay-at-home parents of the world to step in and cover for those who have the dual stresses of work and child, so I volunteered to drive the despised softball carpool. So on Monday after driving Lola to her swimming lesson (and just as I was heading out the door, I discovered that one of my foster kittens had taken a giant crap all over Lola's swimming bag, resulting in a rather gross last minute clean-up AND me feeling stressed about getting to swimming on time), I had to make Lola spend an hour in the car for the softball carpool. Lola tried to make conversation with the bigger girls, trying such gambits as "I'm four!" and telling them that she goes to preschool, but they completely ignored her. In retaliation, Lola chose to shriek all the way to softball. Anton, who had completely blown off softball practice all season, had agreed to meet me at practice and relieve me from responsibility for supervising the girls (practice starts over an hour after school lets out, which I personally consider idiotic, but then again our coach is a highly successful hedge fund manager and I but a mere Drunken Housewife). He wanted to make it to at least one of the practices to help out, as the more athletic parents are roped into throwing balls and jogging with the girls and so on. (To date, I have been recruited only to walk girls to the far-away facilities. Evidently when a coach looks at me, he thinks, "She doesn't look like she could throw very good, but damn, I bet she's great at walking to the bathroom"). I was thrilled to see Anton and turn over my carload of first graders, who at that point were gawking lasciviously (children are so advanced these days) at a boy being made to change clothes in a nearby car. However, Lola, already sensitive by being shunned by the big girls, was deeply wounded by the idea that the Sober Husband would be spending time with Iris, not her. So Lola screamed and sobbed all the way home and for the next forty-five minutes, not being distracted by kittens , the prospect of cartoons on television, or even a desperate offer of ice cream. I finally calmed her down by helping her write a letter to Anton about how upset she was, which she illustrated with a picture of a frowning Lola with very big hair.

On Monday night, as on Sunday night, I had hellish insomnia, resulting in me spending much of the night sitting on the couch surfing the internet and reading old Parker novels. Oh, if it were not for Donald Westlake/Richard Stark, my life would be so blighted.

Tuesday: Lola is enrolled in a parent co-op nursery school, which means that a parent (read: me) must work one afternoon for every five afternoons Lola attends. The only day of the week it is difficult for me to fit working at the preschool into my schedule is Tuesday. It's not impossible; it is just highly stressful. I didn't ask for special scheduling accommodations because I know the scheduler has been so over-asked and harangued with accommodation requests that it's very difficult for her to make any schedule at all. Damn, did I regret being so mature and nice when I WAS SCHEDULED TO WORK TUESDAYS EIGHT WEEKS IN A ROW. Eight fucking consecutive weeks. Fuck me sideways. So, as it happens every single fucking Tuesday in a series of eight Tuesdays, I get Lola ready for her preschool gymnastics class, meaning she must hurry through breakfast, get her hair brushed and in a ponytail, and put on a gym suit. I drive her to gymnastics, attempting to arrive on time. Then I'm free to sit in the uncomfortable, filthy bleachers with the other parents, so long as I remember to buy Lola's apple juice and faux fruit snack for after class. This week, a three year-old boy pulled a little girl towards him by the arm and hauled off and bitch-slapped her like a born gangsta (before you condemn your Drunken Housewife as racist, be aware that none of the persons involved were of African American descent). The little girl cried hysterically, and the parents were all abuzz with gossip that the offending child's lesbian parents have adopted an extreme parenting philosophy, believing in home schooling and no discipline whatsoever. Your faithful correspondent tried to insert some compassion in the proceedings, noting that perhaps we, the gossiping parents, were merely lucky to date that we'd given birth to well-behaved little girls, but the other parents were hellbent on finding the little felon's mother to blame (this boy's mother does not choose to mingle with the other parents, instead sitting aside in her oh so cool Asian Film Festival t-shirt and black cargo pants, and hence gets no sympathy from the scorned masses). Also, Lola's beloved gymnastics teacher was out due to a soccer injury, and this caused Lola much concern.

After gym class, Lola always walks very slowly and is interested only in consuming her snack, but she must be hustled home. We had twenty-five minutes to clean our kittens' enclosure, check the runt of the litter for dehydration (and indeed, I needed to give her some subcutaneous fluids before leaving again), get Lola changed into preschool clothes, make Lola's lunch for preschool, make the Drunken Housewife (who had skipped breakfast) a lunch for preschool, make Lola's circletime snack, and get Lola and all our lunches and crap packed into the car. During this time, a kitten had diarrhea while I was holding her, which got into my hair. I had no time to take a shower and had to quickly rinse the fecally contaminated hair in the sink, disgustingly enough. We drove to school, where we must park and hike in a third of a mile. Lola typically takes half an hour to make this walk, choosing to alternate skipping with dawdling and outright balking, but on a workday, I need to be on time and must nag the child steadily down the trail.

So then, after all that rushing and nagging and stress, it was time to supervise a crowd of small children. I got into it with a five year-old boy who refused to eat his sandwich, but other than that, I did all right, despite the fact that I was so dog-tired from insomnia that I could hardly stand upright.

Seeing some friends of hers playing with a little rubber ball after school, Lola became extremely worried that she herself would become mutilated. Her gymnastics coach's injury may have spawned a soccer phobia.

When we got home, it was time to clean the litterboxes and feed the kittens. The Sober Husband expressed unhappiness that a kitten had pissed all over his favorite blanket (a gold comforter given to me by my friend Jewelz when she was purging possessions due to a bad roommate situation, it possesses the magical property of actively repelling cat hair). "What will I use for a blanket?" he complained, feeling that no other existing blanket was adequate as a substitute. I had almost finished a quilt I'd been working on intermittently over a year and a half, so I spent the evening feverishly sewing until quite late. "A cat peed on my blanket, so you made me a new one!" said the husband admiringly.

Wednesday (today, sigh): I woke up to discover cats had had bowel movements of various consistencies at diverse spots along the stairs. God, cats are such filthy creatures. Iris Uber Alles was remarkably rude to her sister, shouting "What the hell are you talking about!" when Lola expressed her concerns about the fallen gymnastics coach, victim of soccer violence.

Forecast for the rest of the week: extreme stress and outlandish amounts of driving children expected. On Thursday, I have to bake cupcakes for the celebration of Iris's birthday at school. Her actual birthday is in the summer, but her class will celebrate it tomorrow, which is fine for everyone except me, who has to bake the frigging treats and perform superhuman feats of driving: drive Lola to preschool, race home & get cupcakes & other crap, drive to Iris's school, celebrate Iris's birthday, drive across town to Lola's school, get Lola, drive back to Iris's school to pick up Iris. On Friday, it's more of the same: my kittens will be making a guest appearance at kindergarten, visiting the new class of Iris's beloved kindergarten teacher. I'll then need to race home, drop off the kittens, and drive Lola to preschool. Later, Iris has a piano lesson and Lola needs to be picked up and brought home. In between all that driving, I'll have to clean up various amounts of excrement. As long as it doesn't get into my hair, I will hopefully maintain a reasonable level of sanity.

such contempt for an innocent species

At the breakfast table today, the Sober Husband promised Lola toast and tea, but then wandered off to check his email, leaving me to take over the reins. I spread the toast with butter and honey, and I made the tea weak, with milk and sugar. This turned out to be all wrong.

"I like honey with peanut butter!"

"It's good like this; try it! That's how I eat it," I cajoled.

"This is MILK, not tea."

"It's tea with milk. White tea. Milk tea."

After quite a bit of sulking (I said, "Aww, you started out with a fabulous Daddy breakfast, but Mommy turned it into a crappy old Mommy breakfast!"), Lola ended up loving the breakfast. Anton offered to make her fresh tea, but she insisted, "I love this tea!" Charmed into a better mood eventually, Lola deigned to entertain me:

"What do you call a big dog that has brown spots all over on him?"

"A Dalmatian?"

"A CRUMMY OLD DOT-FROM!"

She laughed uproariously at her own inscrutable wit.