my head is ready

Today I spent six hours having my hair microbraided, extensions put in, and several skeins of exotic yarn woven into the braids.  My head is Burning Man ready, but the rest of me isn't.

It's early to get this done; I have another two weeks before it's time to go.  But it's practically impossible to get an appointment for braiding the week before Burning Man, and also it's very difficult to sleep on the pained, abused head for several nights after the braiding is done.  I may as well go through the uncomfortable nights here at home, so I can get whatever sleep is possible at the event.

When I drove home, I ran across Iris and Lola trudging up the hill with our friend who was babysitting them.  I honked and called to them.  They were considerably reluctant to cross the street and get into the car, frozen in spot staring at the masses on my head.

At home, our new kitten gave me a wide berth. "Look, Zorro is afraid of me!" I said.  

"I can't stop staring at it," said Lola.

"Can I pet it?" asked Iris.

The negative note came from the poor, patient Sober Husband.  Taking a deep breath, he said slowly to himself, "It's only temporary."

ask the supporting characters, er, stars

"Do you remember when you did 'Ask The Lola' on your blog?" said little Lola wistfully the other day.

"Of course!" I said.

"Can you do that..." Lola began to ask, but she was interrupted by her big sister.

"Ask Iris!  Do 'Ask Iris' again!  That was better!"

So submit your questions, to either Iris, Lola, or both, and we'll get back with answers!

soundbites from around the home

- I talked to the Sober Husband about how this health competition I am in, with friends, has upset my cooking mojo.  Previously I'd been cooking a lot, and the Sober Husband would arrive home to find me slaving over my beloved Aga, but now I'm eating things like low fat cottage cheese with fresh scallions or goatsmilk yogurt for dinner.

The Sober Husband burst out passionately with "I'd rather have a fat wife that cooks than a thin wife!"  I hugged him consolingly.

- One of the offspring was holding forth about how wrong it is that parents can name children before their personalities were evident.  "I should have been named Evil Villain of Awesomeness!"

- Sweet Lola is worried about her mother's sojourn to Burning Man.  "You need to bring lots of sunscreen, water, and A FIRE EXTINGUISHER!" Lolz said repeatedly.

"I'm not planning to start any fires, Lolz," I said, but Lola was adamant and Iris scoffed. "Its Burning Man; there's going to be stuff on fire everywhere!"

"Yes, but I'm not setting it on fire."

Iris rolled her eyes sarcastically.  "BURNING... MAN.  It says 'burning.'  There's stuff on fire everywhere."

the game continues

It's getting towards the end of the first week in the four week-long diet game I'm engaged in, and I'm having mixed results.

The rules allow for one meal off and a whole day off, and these are the only allowable drinking occasions each week.  On our semi-weekly date night, the Sober Husband and I went to Bar Agricole, and I explained my plan to him ahead of time.  "I'm going to try to have only one cocktail and call this my meal off.  If it's so good I have to have another one, it's my day off.  But don't let me go wild."

At Bar Agricole, the drinks were delightfully tempting.  "We make our own bitters," said our waiter proudly.  "It makes no sense to take so much care with a cocktail and then just pour some nasty old bitters in."  He made a disgusted face.  I've never myself been disappointed with store-bought bitters, but I was happy to sample the precious, carefully crafted drinks with the house-made bitters, and after the first I said to the Sober Husband, "We're calling it my day off."

I felt later proud, as I only consumed a bowl of white corn and padrones soup (the single best soup I have ever had at any restaurant), two cocktails, and a glass of Moscato while splitting a cheese plate with the Sober Husband.  "That's pretty good for a day off from my diet," I bragged.  But at the gym the next day, the scales told another story.  Far from losing any weight, I'd gone up six pounds.

How can that be?  Was it hormonal?  Was it the effects of the fattening alcohol upon my alcohol-starved body, just coming off a long month of no drinking?  Whatever it was, it was depressing.  My diet teammates rallied behind me, encouraging me to hang in there.

I tried to remember how far I've come already.  I've been cleaning out my closet of clothes I can no longer wear, as they hang upon me too loosely.  I got the most treasured compliment I've had yet lately, from a friend who mourned, "The sad part about you losing weight is your ass.  You had the greatest ass... so large, but so great."  I don't know why I like that compliment so much, but I do.

Whether I lose any more weight or not on this diet, the game is definitely influencing me.  Tonight we came home late after taking Iris to see "Beasts of the Southern Wilds" (which achieved the previously-unthought of accolade of three thumbs up, approved by the Sober Husband, Iris über Alles, and me in a rare moment of cinematic accord).  While the Sober Husband climbed into bed, I changed clothes and climbed on my rowing machine.  "My opponents are losing weight," I hissed.  "I have to exercise!"

healthy living will kill me

Today I woke up with a pounding headache.  Normally when this happens (and it happens far more than I'd like), my "supportive" spouse points to something I did, usually involving alcohol, which made the headache my fault.  But yesterday I exercised vigorously, ate healthily, and consumed absolutely no alcohol, so how can I be blamed?  "Could you be allergic to something?" mused my husband (no doubt in order to get the blame right back on me, for having eaten something I should have known not to eat).

Healthy living is not helping my insomnia, also.  Last night I was wide-frigging-awake in the middle of the night, bored, and restless.  Usually after I determine that I have no chance of falling asleep again for the foreseeable future, I pull out my laptop (conveniently placed under the bed) and amuse myself online.  But!  As part of my healthy living competition, I am required to get seven hours of sleep a night.  Playing online would mean losing points not just for myself, but for my team.  The rules of the game take insomnia into account, and an insomniac may count her time spent lying awake fretting as sleep, so long as she stays prone, in the dark, with her eyes shut.  Taking one for the team, I laid there in the dark, with my eyes shut, for a very long time.  Eventually some sleep came, but not long after that, the Sober Husband arrived, eager to wake me up (strange as it may seem to some of you, he has a thirst for my company and has taken to waking me up in the mornings in the hopes I will get up and talk to him before he goes to work).

After I dragged my poor, aching, sleepy head downstairs to swallow ibuprofen and drink coffee, as well as to have a healthy breakfast of goatmilk yogurt with some nuts and dried cranberries,  I emailed my team members about my insomnia (the rules of the game require me to communicate daily with team members and our adversaries).  "I laid there and laid there, thinking of the points," I whined.  Thanks poured in by email from team members, who took a brief break from sharing tips on how to largely survive on Greek yogurt to congratulate me on my competitive spirit.

Now my top goal for the day is to vanquish this headache so I can work out (daily exercise is a key component of this health competition).  Honestly I think what my body is crying out for is a bottle of  blanc de noirs and some fried food.  It certainly doesn't seem to thrive upon clean, vigorous, honest living.

so much virtue: does it call for a renaming?

Recently I went to a fabulous tiki party held by a very old friend, someone I met back in the mid-nineties, and I saw a lot of people I used to run around with back when I was livelier and childless (and many of them have, like me, married and spawned and live a G-rated existence for the most part).  At the tiki party my iron willpower was much on display, as I was on a liver vacation (no alcohol for a month whatsoever to let my much-abused liver regenerate long before going to Burning Man).

"You really need to rename your blog," said more than one old friend.

"I know," I said.  "I especially need to change the description, where I say I don't get enough exercise.  Now I exercise all the time; I get panicky if I can't work out."  Everyone laughed.  I didn't mention it, but the "thinks too much" part of this blog's description is, more sadly, no longer accurate.  My brain has atrophied over the years, alas, and I am continually reminded by my spouse and children of how little I think.

And the iron willpower will continue to be exercised, thanks in large part to my attending that party.  A couple of old friends I hadn't seen in years were chatting about a game they are playing.  Being a gamer of sorts, I wanted to find out more about it, and it turns out they were in a diet competition.  For four weeks teams diet, exercise, drink a metric fuckton of water, and taunt one another, and then the winners are declared at the end.

"It's so much fun!" one said over and over again.

"Get ready to pee a lot," said the other.  "And it's so much fun."

I was interested.  "We're starting a new game soon," they told me.  I followed up, and now it's on.  My team is called the Jaguars, and we are taking on quite a few other teams in the "Game On Diet", www.thegameondiet.com.

Over the weekend I tried to figure out the basics of this rather ambitious program.  "Wait a minute," I said after I got the impression this diet banned drinking. "This is terrible!  I'm just coming off a liver fast, and I need to get my alcohol tolerance back up before Burning Man.  How do you other lushes handle this?"

A friend given to the consumption of fine alcohols reassured me.  "You can drink on your day off, have a drink with your meal off, and I usually take a 25 point hit for drinking on another day."  I decided I could live with that.

This diet is more than a diet; it tries to harness the power of competition to reform a person's life.  We are supposed to give up a bad habit and acquire a new one, a habit which is unrelated to food.  I pondered this.  I already took up exercise, cut back on my drinking, and have been virtuous in no end of ways; what else do I need to do?  I'm not thrilled with becoming any more virtuous than I currently am; I know my limits.

Finally I decided to make my good habit writing every day and my bad habit asking my husband to get things for me, a habit acquired after my hysterectomy and reinforced after my terrible ankle injury.   "That's pretty vague," criticized the husband.  But he was able to see the upside.  "Does this mean you'll stop asking me to get out of bed and turn off your bedside light?"  I didn't bother to mention, yet again, that my stubby little arms can't reach the bedside light.  I just said, "Yes.  Yes, it does."  Pleased, he wandered off to do whatever it is that he does of an evening, and I went off to drink more water, eat sensibly, write, and no matter what, not ask my husband to help me with small things I could theoretically do myself.

I am under surveillance

Over the last year I decided it was time to start building a new social life for myself, outside the children.   I had the horrible realization that I was on track for one hell of an empty nest syndrome when the children leave home.  I should have more of a life outside the home; the children are growing up rapidly and needing me less, and my purpose for living is proportionately dwindling.

The Sober Husband supports me in this goal but does not share it.  He mused recently over how he doesn't need to socialize.  "I guess I don't like people as much as you do."

Not everyone is supportive.  Iris über Alles grills me over where I go, what I do, and who accompanies me.  One new friend became known as "Mommy's creepy friend", with a heavy implication that it was stupid for me to spend time with a "creepy friend" when I could be with my darling children.  "Why did you have us, if you didn't want to spend time with us?"

And now the heavy hand of the law has intervened.  Lola has formed the "Fun Police."  Every time I have too much fun (mostly meaning that I go out and stay out past the time Lola falls asleep), I get a ticket and a very stern lecture.  Lolz recently took the time to document the Fun Police's anti-mommy policies:

 This is the guide of the FUN POLICE: STOPPING FUN SINCE LAST WEEK OR SOMETHING.

A ticket
A ticket is a warning from the FUN POLICE. If you stay out too late for an event, you will get a ticket. You need not keep track of your tickets, the POLICE will take care of that for you. If you get five tickets, you get a penalty which is a stern note from the Chief of POLICE, a guilt trip about it, and stern-ness from Lolz.  Your tickets are kept track of in the Ticket List. Each person ha a seperate Ticket List, and your Lists are refreshed when you get five tickets.

What are events?
To put it simply, events are any type of party or bar or camp you go to.

Can I lose tickets?
No. NO-DIDDLY-GODDAMN NO.

Do you like milk?
Yes.
-The chief of FUN POLICE

What do you look like?
We are spheres with arms twice the size of us that fly in the air. We are robots too.
HAHA NOT!

Do you like pastries?
Yes. Continue with important questions.

Resonable hours to come home
Resonable hours to come home are from 6:00 to 11:00. If you come home later than that, you will get a ticket. If you come earlier, you will not get a ticket. If you come home earlier than 6:00, you won’t get a ticket either.

THIS HAS BEEN A BOOK FROM THE FUN POLICE: STOPPING FUN SINCE LAST WEEK OR SOMETHING.

harsh truths

A good friend of ours has four dogs, little bulldogs who are unruly and high energy.  Our friend and her husband have elaborate systems for containing them and separating them (certain subsets of the four dogs are particularly volatile and must be avoided), and essentially the main thing you notice when you enter their home is that these dogs take up so much of our friend's life with their exuberant craziness.

Recently she reached a point of despair and found a powerful dog trainer to visit her dogs.  I stopped by that afternoon, and the dogs looked shellshocked.  Far from jumping up on me and licking me, as they normally would, and whining and whirling about, they were lying scattered on the ground, staring blankly into the middle distance with a stunned expression.

My friend was gleeful.  She told Lola and me about the trainer.  "He said, 'You're letting these dogs make all the decisions, and the problem is they don't make good decisions.'"  Lola and I nodded.  The dog trainer forced the most aggressive dog to sniff the most bullied dog's butt, making the bully to act like a caring pack member.  When he and our friends walked the dog, he scolded our friend.  "Don't say good dog!  These are not good dogs!  They are assholes!"

Our friend laughed and laughed.  The dogs laid still, evidently processing their morning of discipline, their reign of misrule sadly coming to a close.

what is this feeling?

There's something strange going on.  After months of being in a deadly funk, the old Drunken Housewife has been seen smiling and even laughing, sometimes dancing a little in the kitchen while she's cooking.   Could this be... happiness?


It's somewhat of a sudden onset, this feeling of pleasure at being alive.  Just a few days ago I was ranting angrily over the butt-ugly new fence which mars the beauty of my little yard, raised at my neighbor's behest (I had to kill all my beloved jasmine vines AND pay half the cost of this #*@&! ugly fence!!).  Not that long ago, I semi-politely asked the Sober Husband, "Please do not say anything which could be considered REMOTELY STRESSFUL.  Thank you."  It seems like just the other day I was sunk in despondence upon the couch.

What gave me this turn-around?  Some credit goes to the children, who have been so charming and funny and well-behaved lately.  Some goes to our current batch of feral kittens, so clever and smart and beautiful.  The Sober Husband is always a source of support.  I've made some new friends lately; I've been taking some social risks which have paid off generously.  I've been exercising like a fiend (I've lost 37 pounds), and the endorphins are powerful.  But in the end, who can say why a person is happy?  Better to enjoy than to over-analyze.

catching up

I've been off in a funk, except when I was up at Camp Mather for our annual week of rusticating without internet or cellphones.  It's been a rough time lately for me, but I've been doing my best, exercising like a fiend, socializing feral kittens, and reading some good books.  Here's a quick alert of the state of affairs:

Lola has been doing well, enjoying some time now school is out with her oldest friend (sometimes referred to as "Lawyer, Jr." here), which has the added bonus of driving her older sister crazy.  Iris über Alles hates Lawyer, Jr. and views it as a crime against humanity that Lawyer, Jr. is not just allowed but invited to come into our home.

Iris has formed some powerful ambitions for the future after a weeklong field trip to Washington, D.C.  She's studying for the SATs, teaching herself a programming language, and attending a mock trial summer camp.

The Sober Husband is working diligently, dabbling in advising some friends who have start-ups, dealing stoically with a very long commute, and has finally gotten back into hobbying.  He's making me a programmable corset, which will have over 200 lights flashing into various, changing colored patterns.  This is for me to wear at Burning Man this year, where the question is whether it will be sturdy enough for the extreme weather conditions and idiot-proof enough for me to keep it going while he's off in another state.

solving the problems of the future

Iris über Alles has become an expert at a fairly obscure academic competition, "International Future Problem Solvers."  Tweens and teens compete in groups of four.  They are told well ahead of time a broad topic, such as "coral reefs" or "human rights", which they then research in an attempt to gain a broad mastery of the huge topic.  At the actual competition, they are given a word problem from the future (called "the fuzzy" in Futures speak).  The team identifies a manageable part of the future problem, imagines a practical solution, and writes up their solution eloquently in a special format.  At competitions, they must also act out their solution.

Iris's team is a particularly volatile one.  At an especially heated practice, one enraged member of the team, who shall remain unidentified, broke the laptop of another member.  At some point in the season, a coach noted that this team had great potential if they could just stop squabbling, but Iris demurred. "We do our best work when we are fighting."

This pack of twelve year-old hotheads were selected to compete at the state level and entered into a crazed schedule of studying.  The theme was "international trade barriers", and initially I thought I would be able to help.  After all, I did go to Stanford, and while I was there, I got A minuses in International Business Transactions, International Law, and Economics.  So you'd think I could be an asset to a tween learning about trade barriers, and if you thought that, like me you'd be totally wrong.   It turns out that anything I had learned had become completely obsolete.  "You don't even know what the Doha Round is, do you?" jeered Iris repeatedly.  Stung, I went off to consult the internet and learned that my beloved GATT and all its rules and regulations I had so painfully mastered had been replaced while I'd been off breastfeeding.

I took to asking every adult I knew whether they knew what the Doha Round is, and not a single one did.  Meanwhile Iris had nothing but contempt for the idiots surrounding her, and as her scorn grew, so did her stress levels.  The team set themselves a hugely ambitious practice schedule involving hours of work every day, on top of their schoolwork, and soon they were feeling about the way I did when I was a tough litigator who cried in the shower in the mornings before putting on her expensive Italian suits because she felt she could never, never, never get all her work done.

We were all on tenterhooks as the state competition occurred.  I worried that if the team failed, Iris would be deeply depressed ("If we don't win, all this work will have been for NOTHING",  Iris said direly many times) but that if they won, perhaps they'd be even more filled for contempt for those of us who didn't even know what the damn Doha Round was.  In the end Iris's team placed first in the state of California in their age division.  They had been set the problem of solving Italy's financial problems, and Iris's team proposed violently removing all of Italy's minerals, a sort of super-fracking of the future.  I am sure I will be strongly opposed in the future when Italy gets around to this, but the judges were particularly charmed by the skit (Iris played an Italian environmentalist protesting this solution).

Now Iris is at the international level, in Indiana, all week.  This time the team took a more relaxed attitude towards competing and didn't put much energy into researching the topic, Big Pharma.  Supposedly some teams from Connecticut have the thing sewn up, winning year after year, so Iris moved her relentless focus from winning to collecting swag.  The teams all bring little items representing their home region for bartering with the others, and Iris was hellbent on finding the Australians, who supposedly bring little chocolate koalas and tiny tins of vegemite and who are the most desired trading partners.  Iris, armed with Google t-shirts, Ghirardelli chocolates, and an actual California license plate, fully intends to trample the other American teams to capture the coveted chocolate koalas.

Meanwhile on the home front, I got an email yesterday informing me that our share of the bill for having the team compete on the international level was $2,084.04.  I had been expecting it to be more like one thousand and was taken aback.  "For this much money, I better get one of those damn chocolate koalas," I bitched.  "Future Problem Solvers, more like Financial Problem Creators."  Meanwhile Iris, not content with having reached the international level of competition in one academic discipline, plans to take up competing in the Model U.N. next year.  "I'm going to get to go to  New York if I win!" she said.

health, so damn elusive

I've been felled by an annoying bug, which has left me with fevers, pounding headaches, aching joints, and a general inability to go to the gym or do anything much.  You'd think a person who devoted so much of her existence to healthy living would be actually healthy, but noooo.

Luckily I was able to reschedule dinner with one of this blog's loyal readers who came to San Francisco and rally a bit.  Here's what happens when someone who has actually written comments on this blog over the years comes to town:  they are shown the Aga and must stand there while I explain what features I actually know how to use.  Various animals make hellish rackets and wander about.  The Sober Husband has to be nagged to get drinks for people, and as the evening wears on, the reader/commenter starts serving the drinks.  After enough drinks, the Drunken Housewife starts unsolicitedly talking about her sex life.  Good times, good times!  At least you can count on getting plenty to eat if you come over here.

healthy living

For the past eight months, I've been exercising like a fiend. After I gave up the World of Warcraft, I took up frequenting the gym, lifting weights and pushing myself to new extremes on the exercise machines. You'd think by now I'd be a sleek greyhound of a woman, and indeed I have some fairly impressive gym-toned muscles, nestled in amongst the fat, but I'm getting out of breath often. A person who does a full hour of cardio, leaving her literally dripping sweat, nearly every day of the week should be able to climb a flight of stairs without getting winded.

 I have always had a funky heart, and I haven't had a cardiological workout since the 90's. Although my cholesterol, blood pressure, triglycerides and other sundry measures of health have always been fabulous, I've always had an arrhythmia. On top of that, I had a life-threatening infection of the heart in college, myocarditis, which caused me to lose both a fabulous job and a somewhat less fabulous boyfriend, who thought I was being a hypochondriac and took off on an extended road trip, and then felt too freaked out to try to make up for it when he realized I wasn't faking after his return (sidenote: he looked me up a year or two later, interested in trying again, but by then I was with Husband 1.0, the Scotch-Drinking Husband, so I had the last laugh in theory).

 So the question arises: could it possibly take longer than eight months of strict and strenuous exercise to make up for a couple years of Warcrafting sloth? Or is my heart acting up again, and if so, should I be exercising this much without an EMT standing by? Who knows? I went for an EKG yesterday and some bloodwork, for which I had to fast and drive Lola to school in rush hour traffic WITHOUT HAVING HAD A SINGLE CUP OF COFFEE.

 I've had a lot of EKGs in my life, so many I couldn't even estimate them (I had one once a week during my myocarditis troubles), but it's been a very long time, and it wasn't the same. First of all, the technology for attaching electrodes has advanced, and it was a lot less gooey than I remembered. Next, I certainly didn't have the tech need to ask me politely, "Could you please lift your left breast?" back in the old days. Sadly both gravity and breastfeeding have wreaked some damage, and what was once one of our nation's premiere racks is decidedly less perky and awe-inspiring.

 Just going for the EKG and bloodwork made me feel better, as it felt like a concrete first step towards figuring out the state of cardiological affairs.  I finished up the day with a good half an hour of hard, sweaty exercise and not a single drop of alcohol. "You're doing your best," I reflected as I showered. "Fresh vegetables, fresh fruit, exercise... who could do more? Just put on a push-up bra and wait for the test results."

the future! the fabulous future!

So the present is a bit hard for me, and I'm self-medicating in the finest ways I know: endorphins and gin. Six days a week I've been going through a grueling workout at my gym, lifting weights and doing lots of cardio, and it has a huge impact on those around me. "Have you been to the gym yet?" inquires the Sober Husband over the phone. "I think you should go to the gym." Evidently I'm much more pleasant and relaxed on my gym days, and I have to admit, endorphins make a person feel perkier. [It's time to rewrite the description of this blog, since for the past eight months, I've been working out like a fiend. I get enough exercise for 2-3 people].

 I'm also looking to the future. Burning Man is at the end of the summer, and it's a wonderful, crazy relief from everyday life. And! The Aurora Theatre in Berkeley is putting on a play by one of my two favorite playwrights next season. June is a long time away, but a Neil LaBute play is worth some anticipation. I could use a few things between now and Labor Day, as well as between Labor Day and June, for purposes of anticipation. Help me out with some suggestions in the comments for Things To Hang On To See (flying cars? Zombie apocalypse? Election of Iris über Alles as president?]

a rough time, part II

I try not to be a drama queen, but it's a hard time here these days.  Long-term readers may remember that last year at this time the old DH had a bit of a crisis, and as the anniversary of that rough time rolls around, the memories have been hard to quash.  Meanwhile there have been some other stressful events, and during that time, Al, my needy skeletal cat, the being who most loved and needed me in my life, has passed on.

This is why I haven't been writing of late; it's difficult to feel amusing.  I've been devoting myself to exercise and caring for a feral cat named, unimaginatively enough, "CatCat", exercising (endorphins are the best form of self-medication), and ploughing through book after book.  The eloquent Florence of Florence and the Machine has captured how I feel better than I could every say:  

a rough time

I came downstairs one Saturday morning to discover that Al, our skeletal orange cat (familiar to long-term readers of this blog as The Cat Who Is Allergic To His Own Teeth), had suffered a stroke in the night.  Poor Al had lost control of his hind legs, and his body temperature was low.

After a family discussion regarding whether to euthanize poor Al or to keep him at home quietly, it was clear there was no support for taking him to the vet for a clinical way out.  I spent most of the day holding him (which was not the most pleasant of tasks, as the poor animal had no control over his bladder).  At night we did leave him with Iris while the grownups ventured to a party (our party spirit was of course boosted by getting text messages from Iris constantly describing poor Al's decrepit condition).

We got home around 2:30 AM, and I went straight to Al, who was resting quietly.  I snuggled him up on my chest, where he always wanted to be, and held him.  Eventually I dozed off for a few hours, and when I woke up around 5:30 AM, he had passed on.  Rest in peace, poor Al.  You never did get a fair shake in life.

Al was found as a kitten, with one sibling, in a puddle of oil in a mechanic's shop in San Francisco.  His sibling passed away as a little kitten, and Al himself only lived to seven.  His health problems were endless and strange:  he couldn't retract his claws, he never weighed more than five pounds (even when we embarked upon a program of giving him unlimited canned food), he sneezed and drooled, he shedded constantly, flea preventive medicines didn't work for him...  Al's health improved after we finally ponied up $1,800 to have virtually all of his teeth pulled, and he had a few relatively good, but still skeletal, years.  He was always a companion to our various foster kittens (whereas the other cats generally can't be bothered with them).

In a rare moment of grace, Al was captured for posterity just the week before he died, by the amazing Thomasina deMaio:

Al was also active on Twitter:  http://twitter.com/#!/allofalbert  Heartbreakingly his voice has gone silent far too soon.  Rest in peace, Al.  You are missed.

quotes of the day

Twelve year-old Iris uber Alles is stoked to go on a Service Learning expedition to a senior citizen home.  "I don't care if those old people like it; I'm gonna win at bingo!  They get to play bingo all year, and I only play every six months!"

As Iris wandered out of the room,  continuing to mutter about her desire to trounce each and every aged resident at bingo, I urged the Sober Husband to come look at our cats, Frowst and Henry, who were curled up on adjoining pillows.  "Look!  Look!"

"I'm looking," he said in a monotone, without looking up from his iPad.  "Look-how-cute."

"I see you, and you are not looking!  Look!  Look!"

Finally he glanced at the cats and said, "We should take pictures and put them on the internet!"

"Now you're being sarcastic."

"I'm not being sarcastic; I'm being condescending."

sending him off in style

There's a new season of "RuPaul's Drag Race," and the children and I are enthralled.  The Sober Husband has only ever watched one episode, and that was when he was sucking up to me after a spat.  But even by leaving the room when it is screened, he can't escape the impact of this oddly absorbing game show.  Today, when he left, I bade him farewell with a jaunty, "You bettah werq!"  Nonplussed, he looked to little Lola.

"Lola," I instructed her, "Say goodbye to your father with something RuPaul says.  From now on, we say goodbye to him like RuPaul."

"Doesn't RuPaul ever say 'have a nice day?'" said the uncooperative Sober Husband.

Eventually a yawning little Lola let out a "don't eff it up", and the Sober Husband headed off to the more sensible environs of Silicon Valley.

advances in education

When I studied French, we memorized a horrible poem about an ant and a grasshopper and phrases like, "Mom, please bring me a bowl of coffee" (according to our textbook, French teenagers were served coffee in bed by the bowlful by their doting French mothers).  Never did we learn any phrases that seemed realistic.  When I studied Russian in college, my favorite serving suggestion phrase which we memorized was "Since I was a child, I dreamed of working on a collective farm."  One of this blog's readers enchantingly remembered that she'd had to memorize that same phrase as a budding Russian student.  Fun as it was to say, that sentence didn't seem to have any potential for helpfulness.

I'm happy to report to all of you that at Iris uber Alles's progressive private school, the first year  Japanese curriculum is much more practical.  Glancing over a page of Iris's work, I saw that she had been assigned to translate  the phrase, "My ex-husband is an attorney."  "Now there's a useful phrase," I thought.  Many of Iris's classmates will be able to use that, assuming they move to Japan after their divorces.

meowing up the wrong tree

Another crazy cat lady that I know, whom I have grown to like and enjoy, has always taken an interest in the Sober Husband.  The first time we met her, we went to her house to pick up a troubled, undersocialized cat, and after we left, Iris uber Alles said bluntly to her father, "That lady likes you.  She was flirting with you."  The Sober Husband, as usual, was completely oblivious.

Recently I ran into this woman again, and after we caught up by exchanging anecdotes of our current foster challenges, she started asking about the Sober Husband.  "Does he help with the cats? "  Looking very intensely into my eyes, she asked, "Does he have a favorite cat?"

When I came home, I repeated this to that famed cat-hater, the Sober Husband.  "And she asked me, 'does he have a favorite cat?'"  I was laughing so hard I was at risk of choking.  

He shook his head.  "Clearly she doesn't know me.  She may like me, but she doesn't know me."

Tears came to my eyes as I laughed and laughed.  "I felt like saying, 'Sweetie, if he ever wriggles out of this marriage, he's not going to sign on with another middle-aged crazy cat lady.  It's gonna be a cat-free life for him!"