• Previous posts

  • Aging is for the weak, and everyone else
  • More short cuts
  • Smol Ketchups
  • What’s the opposite of green juice and deep breathing
  • Living through it all online
  • The Change
  • 18
  • Ok but ALSO:
  • Midlife POV
  • Influence and Dooce
  • Horse therapy
  • You can’t go home again
  • Obsolescence
  • Before and after
  • A cringe confession on friendship

Archives from 2002-2006

What’s on your weather app? I mean, if you use a weather app. What I’m wondering is which locations you have saved, and why? I’ll go first:

• Eugene. Because it’s where I live. Right now it’s 55 degrees and drizzly, which is kind of a depressing gear-shift from all the sun we’ve had lately. (But these guys seem to be enjoying it.)

• Coos Bay. JB’s hometown, where his parents live, a place we visit pretty regularly. I took the boys there for Mother’s Day weekend to stay with JB’s mom, since JB and his dad were hog hunting in Florida. I know, right? A hunting trip on Mother’s Day? I’ve given him his allotted amount of crap for this, but I’m still eye-rolling our calendar:

Oh yes I will be SURE to remember Father’s Day thank you for CIRCLING IT here I bought you a weekend spa getaway FOR ME.

• Elkton. The tiny town that’s closest, weather-app-wise, to our family cabin on the Umpqua River. I still can’t get over the fact that it’s only 90 minutes away, instead of, like, seven hours.

• Bellevue. Where we used to live, and I only keep this location so I can compare the weather and feel smug when it’s sunny here and raining in Seattle.

• Sunriver. A spot in central Oregon we like to visit. Sunriver is essentially a big sprawling planned resort-like community which sounds sort of awful but isn’t in the least. We just booked three nights in a rental house as part of our July road trip vacation and I cannot WAIT.

• Galice. Galice (pronounced gah-LEESE) is less of a town and more of a general area in southern Oregon on the Rogue River. We have a family camping trip there next month (at the Indian Mary campground I wrote about here), and we just made an impromptu trip there last weekend to 1) meet JB’s father and brother coming off the 43-mile trail, and 2) stay the night in a cabin. It was an amazing time, and I barely need to keep this location saved because I swear the Rogue weather is always the same: SUNNY AND AWESOME.

Okay, your turn!

Many years ago, my brother-in-law was working a high school summer job that involved … oh, I don’t even know what it was. Something like landscaping, I guess. His crew had stopped for lunch near a school sports field in order to ogle a girls’ soccer practice, and my brother-in-law — let’s just refer to him by his name, which is Joe — saw that a seagull was trying to steal his sandwich. With the intent of scaring it away, Joe picked up a screwdriver and threw it, but some horrible twist of fate sent the tool flying end over end and plunging directly into the bird’s back. Like, impaling the damn thing. So here’s this seagull with a screwdriver gruesomely embedded into its flesh, staggering around with its wings splayed out, and Joe figures it’s going to die and better to end its life quickly before it tries to fly off with a fatal wound. So he picks it up by the head and starts swinging the body around and around in order to break its neck. That’s the point where Joe looks up and notices, for the first time, that all the girls are staring at him — a freaky-looking hunched-over guy who’s got a death grip on a seagull and is whipping it around in a circle, and it looks like he gouged it with a screwdriver first, what the fuck — with open-mouthed horror. As Joe carries on, feeling caught in a nightmare, some of the girls start crying.

I have no idea what happened after that. I’m only telling you this because you know how the trend with blogs lately is to have a super meaningful conclusion to a random story? Like my kids melted down at Target but that’s okay because parenthood is like a box of beautiful chocolates lying in the sun or whatever? Don’t you kinda miss when people just wrote about whatever, and there didn’t need to be a nice tidy ending?

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