weekend report

After our lazy bliss of the morning yesterday, we meandered down to a Sunday breakfast of waffles and eventually got cracking on some of the things that were on our weekend list. You have one of those too, I bet, a daunting compilation of those things that require a larger block of time than the week affords to Get Done.

Though we’re dead in the middle of a very residential area, with neighbors at every contiguous point of our backyard, we have fairly serious deer “pressure,” which is a euphemistic term addressing how many damn deer regularly come your way.

The MPM fenced my garden the first year we were here, after we learned of the deer pressure.  I don’t cry over much, but the overnight demolition of an entire spring’s worth of planting is worth a few tears.  That fence, while having served well for Bambi and friends, has suffered at the hands mouths of numerous ground-level critters, not to mention one tornado and two limb-dropping thunderstorms.  After amendment with chickenwire and abuse of the weather, it’s not been a thing of beauty to behold.

Our plan in place for 2009 is to annex the garden on three sides, so earlier in the fall the MPM bribed an auger and rented a friend (or maybe it was the other way around) to come sink some serious fenceposts.   These posts, which are cedar and rough-hewn, extend 7 feet above the ground, because deer can, with singular ease, jump impressively high.

So yesterday we took down the tired old 1×1 posts, with the Pisa-like leanings they’d adopted over the years, and the tired old polypro fencing, and all that’s left is the new posts.  Put in place by two engineers, they are plumb vertical, which pleases my visually exacting eye no end, and being as they’re sunk in a hefty amount of concrete they will be staying that way.

As anyone who’s viewed sprawling tomato vines and fading bean plants knows, only a mother could love the face of a garden in late summer, but I have a vision of birdhouses perched atop the posts, and other asthetic adornments in place. I’d so love for my garden to be a work of art, as well as a labor of love, and it’s starting to look like that might actually come to pass someday.

I’m excited to start planning the layout of the expanded space, which will be enough to let the squash crops roam, along with my potato bed (because I have that thing about fresh-from-the-earth potatoes), and maybe room for other root crops too, which are space-intensive.

It will be a long time and probably closer to never before we are weaned from our CSA, because they do so much and do it so well, and no matter my efforts it seems like one crop or another manages to pretty much fail dismally. Last year it was cucumbers (squash borer) and the peppers (bacterial wilt), and this year it was virtually all the squash save a few early zucchinis (unknown maladies).  And I have yet to have great luck with eggplant, but I’m going to keep trying, because of Rave-Worthy Moroccan Chicken if nothing else.

Frankly I can’t imagine anyone wanting to read more on this, so that seems like a good reason to stop here.  But the new & improved garden is just getting started, so you’ll be hearing more come spring, never fear.

Training log, stardate 3.942:  82 minutes, one stop-to-chat and 9 miles.  Not bad for my 3rd run in as many weeks.  No tumbles, either.

bliss

If there’s anything in the world better than getting to sneak an extra hour-plus of sleep and Sunday snugglin’ after a late night while your offspring play together happily and peacefully just across the hall, it’s not coming to mind at the moment.

Megan decided that Kira was going to be “sick” and needed her “mommy” to tend to her, which entailed cuddling with her in the papasan chair, reading Frog and Toad books out loud to her, generally being very solicitous of her needs, and dosing her periodically with “medicine” in various forms.

It was purely adorable.  “Kira would really like you to come and visit her, since she is sick,” we were informed at some point, but we were able to forestall the actual sickbed visitation for another half-hour or so and didn’t actually roll on out of our own snuggly nest until, oh, 8:45 or so.  Guilty pleasure!!

I’m thinking it bodes well for the week.  We’re about due for an above-average one around here.

so far

Vacation to date:

Wed:  Kira to dayschool.  Volunteered in Megan’s classroom for what I’d told myself would be an hour.  Stayed from 9:15-12:05.    Frantic drive-by stop at grocery store and 1:00 pickup for Kira.  “Free” morning shot to hell.

Thur:  Took Kira for her 2-year checkup (a mere 3 1/2 months late).  She goes to a family physician we really like, despite being a half-hour drive away.  (Megan’s doc is 5 minutes from our house).  Arrived at 10:25 for a 10:30 appointment and was told he was running “right on time.”  Hallelujah.  Sat 10 minutes, called back, weighed and measured and temp’d.  Waited until 11:30 for the doc to show up.  Left.  Made phonecall to office manager voicing opinion that scheduling 12 patients an hour is a for-profit concept that “not-for-profit” Carilion Health Systems needs to abandon.   Morning shot to hell.

Fri a.m.:  Woke with cold symptoms of my own to Megan crying.  Eyes crusted and a lovely shade of near-neon pink.  Called school to let them know she wont’ be in and I won’t be volunteering.  Kira to dayschool.  Morning day shot to hell.

Volunteer shifts: 1 of 2

Well-child checkups checked off:  0 of 1

Outdoor adventures:  0

Minutes reading to myself: 0

Household tasks accomplished: 0

Costumes completed: 0

Incipient colds: 1

Some vacation.  Where are the cabana boys and umbrella drinks?

fall vacation

I’m going to take a few days to enjoy the beautiful weather (with and without my family), work on some halloween costumes, and take at least a stab or two at the Sisyphean undertaking we know around here as household maintenance.

Don’t go far away.  Given the addictive nature of this blogging beast, I may fall off the wagon sooner than I intend, but look for postings to be light for a bit.

Drop me a comment and let me know how you’re spending your week.  Cheers!!

just a drop

I am a cowboy-up kind of girl. It is a fairly well-known adage in biking circles that riding is essentially a test of how much pain you will tolerate gladly. If you ride hard, and especially if you climb, you will hurt; if you seek out big hills to climb, you are by definition a little twisted when it comes to discomfort. That I chose to give birth without benefit of medication is of no surprise to anyone who knows me.

I do not demand the same level of pain tolerance (or seeking) from my girls. They are little kids, and when they fall or whack or scrape whatever, I’m tolerant of tears, and generous with hugs and kisses. Sure, I commend bravery, and I suggest shaking off what can be shook, but my mommy circle will vouch that I’m pretty soft and cuddly in the face of legitimate trauma.

But to have an almost-six-year-old child who throws a screaming damn hissy fit about getting eyedrops put in, drops that are relieving the discomfort and symptoms of pinkeye that she has kvetched about endlessly for the 24 hours prior to obtaining the drops, drops that DO NOT HURT, do not sting, do not do anything more than feel a little weird for about a second and a half, and to have to endure said SDHF every two hours for an entire day…

… when I managed, as I was finishing up my run this afternoon, to catch a high edge in a sidewalk and land on both knees before managing to roll slightly and hit one shoulder and the side of my face (instead of my chin and nose), resulting in classic roadrash, necessitating removal of quantities of road grime from each of said abrasions through not-insignificant scrubbing — all in front of her, mind you, without so much as sucking air through my teeth — and then to have a screen call for the SDHF mere moments after that…

Well, it must be said that I about lost my shit. I was in the YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME mode, and I leveled it on her. I told her all kinds of things not remotely in the realm of How To Talk So Your Kids Will Listen, a book I love and rely on for many many instances of communication in my Life With Children (and others); however, she was listening anyway, because I was about a foot from her face and speaking very, very quietly.

And you know what? I think that every once in a while a kid needs to hear about children with cancer, children whose entire bodies ache, children who are facing lost limbs and much, much more. Because every once in a while, they need to get a grip on the utter blessed luxury that is their own reality.

And cowboy up.

Training log, stardate 4.8574: One classic pavement splat, 70 minutes in.

didn’t take my camera

But if I had, the shot would have been of the hundreds and hundreds of umbrellas stuck into the evergreen shrubbery alongside the sidewalk entering the Civic Center, a sprouting testament to thousands who braved the chill of a steady rain,  standing in line for hours to wait for the doors to open.  (No umbrellas were permitted inside).  It was an amazing sight, comical and artistic at the same time.

Yep, it was announced mid-week, and it actually came to pass:  Barack Obama came to town yesterday.  He’s the first major-party presidential candidate to come in 48 years, and it speaks to the fact that this is the first year since 1964 that a Dem just might take Virginia’s 13 electoral votes.  And, right, he’s the first candidate ever with both African-American heritage and a real chance of reaching the White House.

So I decided that despite having lost much of the week’s productivity to the everlasting crud, on down the road I probably wouldn’t want to think that I’d favored scrubbing the bathroom floors over being live and in person at a little piece of history.

I’d promised Megan last week that I’d have lunch with her this day, and I count it to my credit that she looked at me and said, “But Mommy, you NEVER break a promise!! And now you are breaking your promise to me!”

So I tried to explain to my skeptical audience, and ended up hearing myself say, “I think when you’re older, maybe a lot older, you will understand why this is important enough to break a promise.”  Because we consider promises pretty sacred around here.

We went late enough that we missed the standing-in-the-pissing-rain part, but we got decent seats due to friend J’s disinclination to be happily herded into the fill-the-stands-for-the-cameras section behind the podium. We sat for not too long doing some great people-watching, heard not overly many minutes from some lesser elected officials, and then there he was.  It was a long ovation, and you don’t feel that kind of energy very often, at least not from a crowd free of standard rock-concert enhancements.

Not surprisingly, he didn’t stray far from stump-speech territory, or say much that I hadn’t heard him say before, and at times a good bit of what he said wasn’t even audible once the crowd got going on a cheering point.   But it was pretty damn cool to be there with over 8000 like-minded (well, at least on this one issue) folk, and see that they represented an incredible spectrum of our smallish city’s population.  And he spoke for 40 minutes, which seemed like a generous length.

I’m glad I went.  And I fervently hope his journey’s end is a Pennsylvania Avenue address.

And I hope he feels the same way about promises that we do around here.

bye, bubbleworld

Yesterday I clicked on the “bubbleworld” link that used to be over there under Blogroll, only to find that Kate, its author, was signing off.  She cited the need to be spending more time doing things like reading to her son, and to herself, and mentioned what a time suck a blog can be.  And how for those of us with a tendency in that direction, it can be downright addictive.  I say Amen, sister.

So she’s deleted her blog, and I commend her for making the good choice.  But I’ll sure miss the easy click to see what she’s been up to.

And I wonder, in the back of my mind, if I’ll reach that point somewhere down the road.   Because it sucks you in, you know.   I marvel at the folks who post thoughtful commentaries, fairly significant literary achievements, every day, or even close to it.  Because I know how much time it takes, and their days have only as many hours as mine, and they — all of us, really — have lives that consist of many many plates spinning up on top of a lot of sticks.

It’s an interesting business, this blogging.  (A word I may never come to love, no matter how much of my time I sink into the process.) A world unto its own, and then some.

pre-debate contemplation

two of the biggest reasons I care so much about this election.

Yes, I’d care tremendously even if I didn’t have these particular reasons… but children vest your interest in the future in such a concrete way.

(And okay, I was about half looking for a reason to post this photo, just ’cause it’s so daggone cute. Fam & friends – enjoy!)

resting up

Thanks to all my commenters and email well-wishers. Pretty much the only not-sucky part of being sick is the sympathy.

Since I was, and am, sitting in bed resting my beleaguered bod, creating a revolting mountain of used kleenex and making generally sad use of four of my eight weekly kid-free hours, I thought I’d do some delving into this extended warranty business.

(Google, you are my god; I have prayed at your feet many hours today. Y’know, I was just wondering, have you gotten into the healing business yet? ’cause I could really use some of that over here. No pressure. But I’m like, devout.)

First, I checked on LG refrigerators. There are indeed a lot of complaints out there, but almost all of them seem to be about models made several years before mine. LG itself, as a company, does seem to rack up some universally poor marks for customer service, however, which is worth noting should you be in the market for new appliances.

Second — and I got no further than this — I want to make everyone aware of the next thing I stumbled across, to wit: if you buy your appliance with a credit card, many of them offer an automatic doubling of your original warranty period and terms. Honest to Pete. We get another full year of coverage on the LG, no additional charge. Just like that. We bought it with our Capital One Platinum card, but our other card, through Chase, apparently has the same policy. (I don’t know about you MC and Discover users; you’re on your own. But I’d look into it if I were you.)

Check the fine print on your original Visa Credit Card Guide to Benefits, visit visa.com/eclaim, or call 24/7, 1-800-551-8472. I got some guy with a dreamy continental accent; just the thing for lying in bed in the middle of the day. Except for when I had to hop up and run downstairs to get the serial number off the fridge.

Now, I don’t yet know all the details (like whom I have to call for service, and how long it takes them to show up, and all that good stuff), and I’m quite sure some of it won’t be entirely to my liking, because that’s the way it is with warranties and such, but for the mo I’m pretty enthused about not giving any mo’ of my money to Sears.

And? If my lovely fridge seems prone to problems over the course of the next year, I have until next October to buy another THREE years of coverage… for less than what the Sears salestech service rep was going to charge me for ONE year.

I’m excited to tell the MPM that we realized a not-insignificant financial benefit due to my being home sick in bed today. Maybe he’ll be so tickled he won’t notice that the entire house is a shambles and he doesn’t have any clean shirts.

extended BS

So when the repair dude arrived today to work on our 359-day-old LG model refrigerator (purchased at Sears, so all the warranty work is done through Sears, a company I have vowed, for a panoply of reasons, never, ever, to purchase another appliance from) and started blatantly trashing LG refrigerators, I was curious. Very curious.

Because each of the service techs, and we’ve had three different ones now, has done the same thing. Robert, today’s incarnation, worked it in nicely, telling my leery two-year-old, “You’ll get used to me, ’cause you’ll be seeing me again since Mommy has an LG refrigerator.”

Is it that the product itself is really so bad? Because Consumer Reports didn’t think so, despite our less-than-stellar record with this one.

Or is it, as I discovered today via this most loquacious fella, that service techs — SERVICE TECHS — are on the hook to sell extended warranties (as are sales staff everywhere, just in case you haven’t noticed)?? Not just encouraged, with the commission carrot, to hawk them, but that how much they sell weighs in for a good bit of their performance evaluation.

Uh, do whut? Come again?

I thought they were supposed to be SERVICING. And REPAIRING. Not selling. Right? Wouldn’t that be, say, a CONFLICT OF INTEREST?? “Sorry, Ma’am, this piece-a-shit is going to break down over and over and over, for as long as you own it. And every service call is going to run you, oh, a couple-three hundred bucks, minimum. But — special to you, today — I can offer you an extended warranty (that you were too savvy to buy there on the floor) at a mere $160 a year!! Sign right here!”

I don’t even know what to think about this, but I know it warrants some additional research. Especially given that we’re actually considering buying the damn thing, with the number of issues we’ve had here in the first year.

Sigh.

Well, we’ve got 6 days to make up our mind.

just a tickle

I sneezed a few times yesterday, for no real reason. The Most Prudent Man has been hacking and such for on along about two weeks now, but I had every reason to believe I’d missed the window of viral opportunity, and was pretty pleased about that.

And then the tickle started, and shortly after dinner I realized it wasn’t going to go away. By the time I went to bed — late, because closest friend and her crew blew in around 7p and we had to try to smush a bunch of catching up into the too-few hours we had coming to us — I knew I was in for it. Massive sore throat. Not much else going on symptom-wise, but this was the kind of colossal sore throat that makes swallowing an act of sheer will and fully negates a body’s need for sleep for hours at a stretch.

I’m sick, and I’m tired, and when I get sick or tired I get grumpy. Nor I do count spiking a fever in the “gettin’ my sweat on” category, so those in the know around these parts are treading lightly indeed. I’d planned a post about my long run from Saturday, but I’m too frustrated about missing today’s scheduled miles to write with any enthusiasm at all about Saturday’s.

So this is it for today’s post. Hoo-eee, aren’t you glad you clicked?

Training Log, Stardate 5.9999999999: Long run, 82 minutes. Two-thirds of the way, more or less, to half-marathon. If I can kick this crud.

in a bit of a netfix

Even pre-kids, husband and I never qualified as huge movie buffs, the type of people who pore over reviews or enthusiastically head to a theater to catch some hot new release most weekends.

As an interesting — or not — aside, I have an astonishing lack of retention when it comes to most movies. I don’t know why, but it’s been this way my entire life. I wonder sometimes if it has anything to do with the fact that I often feel I enter into sort of a beta-zone when watching, almost a dream state. Or if it’s just a strange and annoying thing about myself, that I can effortlessly breathe in, file away, and retain phone numbers and email addresses and generally useless bits of minutiae, but the plot, characters, actors, and even viewing of a movie are quickly wiped from the screen of my memory.

Husband in no way suffers from this affliction, but — diverting back to my intended topic here — overall we generally agree that our choice for two or more hours of our meager free time together isn’t likely to involve watching a screen, either at a theater or at home.

However, very very occasionally that’s exactly what we want to do on a Saturday night when any and everything else seems like far too much effort. So when it came to my attention earlier this year that Netflix was offering two movie swaps a month for like 5 bucks, I did a quick calculation of late fees we’d coughed up over the past year and signed up on the spot. We even watched four or five movies over the course of the summer, though asking me to name them would of course be fruitless.

Before school started back in session, Hotel Rwanda came up in our queue, and duly arrived. After about a month, we still hadn’t watched it and I asked husband if he thought we ever would, given that on several occasions he’d nixed it as too depressing for that evening’s entertainment, and after some discussion we agreed to send it on back and get something a little more, well, entertaining.

Over time we’ve discovered that there’s an overall disconnect on our attitude toward movies, which is that he wants to be solidly entertained and feel generally uplifted when the credits roll, and I rather enjoy sitting on the edge of my seat and feeling twisted and fucked up and generally unable to sleep by the end.

Be that as it may, Hotel Rwanda was set on the corner of the dining room table to go in the next day’s outgoing mail, and “Thank You For Smoking” was queued up.

Mid-morning that next day I came across this, on the floor:

Something's amiss

Which led me to ask 2-year-old Kira, the only possible culprit, “Honey, where’s the disk that was inside here?”

She walked into the kitchen and pointed to the floppy Tyvek sleeve on the floor…

something's a-missin'

… which was, naturally, empty.

“No, sweetie, the shiny round thing. The disk.”

She pointed here:

oh shit

Which, in context, is the housing for the baseboard heat, located just under the pass-through in my kitchen where this computer lives. My feet are inches from it at this moment. At points along its course, where maybe it’s warped, or the wall isn’t exactly square, there’s actually a very, very small gap between the actual housing unit and the wall.

Hands-and-knees investigation, with temple pressed to wall and a bit of squinting, revealed that she did indeed report the precise coordinates for its insertion. I do have to say I’m profoundly grateful for the marvels of young memory, since let’s face it, this is one DVD that — short of realizing my dream of a kitchen renovation which in its rosiest vision includes removal of this entire wall — would have been MIA for the duration.

I’m happy to report that a remarkable feat of engineering involving a brilliant concept, three inches of masking tape and a butter knife meant I didn’t have to spend the better part of my evening completely removing the entire housing unit.

In light of this adventure, however, I’m thinking maybe I should find a slightly more dramatic selection to put at the top of our queue before we send this one on in. Suggestions, anyone?

untelevised

A couple of the blogs I read regularly brought TV onto my radar in the last day or two, and I felt a post bubbling up after commenting on Kate’s Personal Hell yesterday. Fact is I almost never think about television, let alone talk about it, though I know that puts me in a minority position in today’s world.

And I try to stifle the peevishness that comes over me when a perfectly decent cocktail party or book club conversation is suddenly hijacked by a flurry of animation over the latest episode of RealitydujourHouse24GraysWhatever, where others flock to join in, and the hope of any other topic is rapidly obliterated in a blizzard of teeveetalk.

I should say that being on the outside of this sort of discussion is a familiar stroll for me. Although in my adult life, it’s clearly by choice (I simply don’t have inclination, let alone time), the same can’t be said for my childhood. I distinctly remember the mortification of innocently asking, “Who’s Morgan Mindy?” one Friday morning at school (“Mork & Mindy,” you may recall, was part of the Thursday lineup). I was not a Cool Kid to begin with, and such glaring faux pas did little to enhance my image.

I have an early memory of once watching Captain Kangaroo in the upstairs of our house in Indiana, but when we moved to Ohio, where I began kindergarten, the TV did not travel with us. Television didn’t re-enter our home until a timeframe somewhere around maybe my twelfth year. At that point, my brother and I were each allotted 30 minutes, show of our choice.  30 minutes a week, that is.

We could pool our time and watch two half-hour shows together, or an hour-long one. I don’t remember much, but I remember that for a period it was Tuesday nights, with Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley. And then I know I had a phase watching Star Trek reruns. And yes, we would sneak whenever we could. You betcha.

All of our viewing was on a petite screen, in black & white of course. I remember laughing quite hysterically when I first saw the Channel 7 news on a friend’s color TV — I’d had no idea that the anchor (Jim somebody, Dayton Ohio, circa 1980, anyone?) was blond and for some reason it struck me as hilarious.

We got 3 VHF channels and one UHF, none of them very clearly. Some had the tendency to show people as if in one of those funhouse mirrors: wiggly through the middle, with the heads elongated like a Simpson character. Though Matt Groenig was probably still in diapers then.

My childhood deprivation means I am one of the only people I know in my decade who cannot sing the Gilligan theme song (though I can fake most of it and have used “three-hour-tour” quite wittily at times). Nor can I name any of the Bradys, though I’m pretty sure there were 6 of them — 8 counting the adults. (Hey, did her kids retain their given surnames? I just started to wonder.)

There is, in fact, a fairly broad cultural lacunae that exists for me, similar in many respects to the way that my husband describes how he never quite fit in in Sweden when he moved there as an adult — the common culture of reference, rooted in childhood, binds more tightly, excludes more easily, than anyone on the inside ever realizes.

Having suffered through it, and — I believe now — gained immeasurably from it, I fully intend to inflict the same torture on my girls. Fortunately for marital harmony, the MPM, raised on an all-American diet of as much TV as he ever desired, is on board with this wackadoodle notion.

My reasons are myriad. Start with the part where I just never think about the TV. (Along with some exercise equipment that I plan to sell on Craigslist as soon as I get around to it, it lives in the back bedroom, where none of us go.)

But more importantly, I don’t WANT to think about it. I don’t want to have to monitor what they’re watching and what they should be and what they shouldn’t be. I don’t want one more topic for arguments with children in my life; we seem to have a plentiful abundance of them as it is. Call it lazy. Call it sanity. I’m not budging, at least not for a few more years. But unless pressed, I don’t talk about my choice, so I’d like to think that keeps me from the camp of the self-righteous.

I read a fascinating book a few years back called Consuming Kids that gave me a lot of things to think about, such as the vast amount of money that’s dumped into targeting products to children, and how that is Not A Good Thing. No, it’s really not. The book introduced me to a concept known in the industry as the Nag Factor: marketing that teaches your children how to nag you in the most effective way. People STUDY THIS STUFF, you bet your bippy they do. And they turn around and apply it, and it does not improve your life. It feeds the big money machine, but it does not make for happier parents.

This “getting older younger” thing that’s happening, the whole thongs-for-the-under-10-set? Marketing, my friends. You can call it cultural influence, but again, this is closely observed behavior, channeled and directed: kids want to be cool. How to be cool? Act like the older kids. How do the older kids act? Watch right here. We’ll show you, between commercial breaks. And during.

Now. I pay no attention, zero, to what other people let their kids do. I don’t monitor, I don’t observe, I don’t condemn, I don’t judge, I just don’t care. Your kids, your choice.

Well, unless my kid plays at your house many hours a week and I learn that she has been spending a portion of that time that I deem excessive watching something called Noggin. Then I might have a teeny issue with it. But again, only as it pertains to MY kid. And we can work it out in the friendliest of ways, because I know that it’s MY thing.

And some of you regular readers may recall a reference or two to Dora (via DVD), and her contribution to adult fun here at Casa Fraught. And my husband (who will intentionally turn on the occasional sporting event) will likely suggest I might be remiss if I didn’t fess up to my brief fling with Gray’s Anatomy, and my longer infatuation with West Wing, and my interminably drawn-out love affair with Seinfeld. So be assured, we’re hardly purists.

Am I aware that this is not reality? Sure. And in a few years, the pain of not having TV is probably going to supersede the pain of having it, and we’ll start with a half-hour, oh, say every other day. And see where that goes.

Fact is it might be nice to have a few more privileges to toss around when things start getting out of hand around here. But Hannah Montana? Do I really have to?

let ‘er rip

I put out a call early last week to rein in the hateful re: Sarah Palin. I felt good about that post, because I am a nice person and generally a fair-minded one, and because I truly believed that the invectives being slung her way were far, far out of line with the facts of who she was and what she’d done. Not that I remotely agreed with her on, well, anything, but I believed she was just, you know, tryin’ real hard to do the right thing over there in her world.

The last few days, however?

Well. I’ve heard, and I’ve been reading, some very, very disturbing things.

Politics isn’t a pretty parade. I’m okay with that, and I grit my teeth and try to take the mud-slingin from both sides in stride. But you know, I’m starting to think that what’s been coming out of Sarah Palin’s mouth these last few days goes well beyond slinging and crosses the line to blatant hate-mongering, and from there trucks right on along to violence-inciting.

In fact, I’m not sure that it is anything shy of evil. I don’t know that I think Palin put herself up to it, necessarily, but she sure as hell jumped up on that pony and whipped it as hard as she knew how.

For shame, Governor. For SHAME. You too, Senator McCain, for allowing this reckless careening onto the low road by your campaign to continue. I had higher expectations for the mettle of your character.

So for the record, if this keeps up I expect I’ll be rolling out some hateful myself, over here.

my yella fella

My husband is yellow, though I didn’t know this about him until after we’d been married for some time.

Not as in chicken, or cowardly, no.  While definitely risk-averse, he does not shy from a challenge.  He married me, after all, which I’ll just say right here is most assuredly not a job for the faint of heart.

No, what I mean is that he is actually yellow.  Or more precisely, he turns things yellow, particularly sheets and pillowcases.   And pillows, and mattress pads.

I don’t know what causes it, but I wonder if it may be the same thing that keeps his skin looking so annoyingly youthful, and makes him chuckle at the concept of applying lotion to one’s arms or legs.  Some kind of oil or substance that his body manufactures that mine certainly doesn’t, as the white scaliness of my extremities on any given day attests.

And granted, if I were bang on top of the laundering o’ the linens around here, maybe it wouldn’t be quite so apparent.  But while I might, true confessions, let a Monday go by without stripping the bed, it’s not as if MONTHS go by.  And what’s with the mattress pad being yellow too?  And the pillow itself, for heaven’s sake?

I suppose I could probably go out and get pure snowy white sheets and then just bleach the bejabers out of them each time, but aside from being a little boring on the visual front I’d have to say that goes against the treehugger in me.  And I’m not sure the idea of cozying all my skin up to industrial-strength Clorox residue makes me feel real snuggly anyway, not to mention that my girls spend a fair amount of time in those sheets too.

So I’m left rethinking the color scheme of the room, and eyeing sheets on Overstock in mustard and ochre tones.   The only real positive is incontrovertible physical evidence that, as I’ve long held, he is WAY guilty of edging on over across that center line, trespassing on my territory and hogging acreage in our queen-size bed.  Though I haven’t figured out yet just how to spin this to my advantage, it’s always nice to have proof.

Anyone else on this?  Or am I just married to a bizarre freak anomaly of nature?