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Jul

29

Good genes

Filed Under Uncategorized | 8 Comments

My mom’s birthday is Monday, July 30, and my aunt wrote a lovely post in her honor. Will you guys please break all the records of blog-commenting, and visit From the Back Nine in order to wish my mom a happy birthday?

Jul

28

Cowboy horseshoes

Filed Under Uncategorized | 31 Comments

July 28, 2007

Reading through your comments on the subject of neighbors made me realize it’s probably not so bad to be largely unfamiliar with the people who live nearby, because that does seem preferable to knowing their most odious habits (pissing off balconies, displaying The Crazy, downloading porn all day while ignoring the living embodiment of Satan they call children, etc) up close and personal.

Some of your happier stories made me sort of wistful, and not just because I’m jam packed with all kinds of pregnancy brain-bees that make me cry at the drop of a goddamned hat (especially if the hat-dropping scene is accompanied by some heavy-on-the-minor-key music, dun dun dun dunnnnnndundundun *sob, choke*). It seems like it would be nice to live in a neighborhood where people watch out for each other, and there are friendly people down the street to water your tomatoes when you’re gone/trade baby-sitting favors/call the police when the reeking effluvium of your partially decomposed corpse makes its way from the confines of the house.

JB would like to start our Get To Know Our Neighbors Campaign with the elderly lady a few blocks away, who we first observed walking slowly around her yard plucking fallen leaves, one by one. In October, when such an activity must be repeated on an hourly basis (which she seemed to embrace). Eventually she ripped out her entire lawn, and replaced it with—I am not making this up—Astroturf. It’s a perfect expanse of green now, a dark, glistening plastic green, but by god there are no weeds, and any fall refuse can surely be vacuumed with a Dustbuster.

The reason JB would like to befriend her is because of the sleek black 50’s car in her garage, visible only on the rare occasion that the door is open. I forget what model it is but even I have to admit it’s pretty hot—long, low to the ground, gleaming with chrome. JB claims it’s got to be in immaculate condition, based on her lawn and various other OCD tendencies (she once spent several weeks on her roof chipping away the paint covering her chimney, only to immediately re-paint the entire thing once every square inch of brick was revealed), and his hope is that by showing enough friendliness whenever we bucolically mosey by, stroller and Dog in hand, she’ll eventually put him in her will. Her estate gift being, of course, the car.

We should probably try and work on some more selfless reasons to know our neighbors other than vaguely hoping they will die and give us their vehicles, right? Right.

JB is out of town this weekend, backpacking in Oregon with his dad and brother (if you smell testosterone—and kielbasa-farts—wafting out of the Willamette Forest this weekend, you know who to blame), and so Riley and I have been mano y toddler. It’s been kind of nice, actually, having his undivided attention for once. I’ll be honest, spending hours on end with a 2-year-old is not a nonstop funfest by any means, and in fact sometimes I think my jaw is going to detach from my head from all the bone-cracking yawns of boredom (I’m sorry, but it’s a ROCK. Jesus christ almighty, kid, I can only dredge up enthusiasm for the first 94582 times you show it to me, after that the innocent veil of childhood must be lifted and all will be revealed: Mama’s bored shitless, someday KittyCat’s going to die, and Elmo is really a puppet with a hand rammed up its ass), but those moments of sheer joy that break up the tedium . . . well, I’m happy to hog those all for myself.

We explored Riley’s budding artistic genius this afternoon.

Unfortunately, I have now learned that toddlers + paint = DANGER DANGER OH GOD PULL UP PULL UP WHOOP WHOOP *END OF TRANSMISSION*

He was sad when I put the paint away, but I told him to call someone who cared. Here he is trying to reach Jesus via a dead cell phone. THIS IS THE UNITED STATES CALLING, JESUS, ARE WE REACHING?