Flashback

I'm 8 years old, sitting in my bedroom reading a book. My mother walks in holding a wooden spoon. The spoon has yarn hair, googly eyes, and mismatched clothing glued to its handle.

Mom: "What do you think about joining the Girl Scouts?!"
Me: pointing to spoon "Is that what Girl Scouts do?"
Mom: "Well, yeah....this is one of the projects. You also get to learn things and earn merit badges."
Me: "No."
Mom: "Are you sure?! It could be fun..."
Me: "I'm not dressing up utensils. Go ask Jessica."

When I think of Girl Scouts, I think of anthropomorphizing spoons. No thanks. Of course, 5 minutes after Mom took Jessica to the scout interest meeting, Dad walked into my room.

Dad: "Not Girl Scout material, huh?"
Me: "God no."
Dad: "Good. Go sweep the kitchen."
Me: "Damn."

I regretted my decision until Jessica came home with that day's project: a pecan with googly-eyes glued to it.

Boy Scout Motto: "Always Be Prepared."
Girl Scout Motto: "Always Be Prepared...to make inanimate objects look like people on drugs."

Unsupervised

My landlady is having the house painted. She's been having the house painted for a month now, and they just finished yesterday. Thank God. For the past month, I've been awakening to the sound of sanding, ladders clattering on the house, and guys speaking some language I've never heard in my life. It's exhausting, and it's annoying. Primarily because I have a penchant for not walking around my house-where I live alone-in a whole lot of clothing. However, there's a window upstairs that's kind of oddly placed, so there's no blinds and no reason to have blinds. Except now there are painters standing at that upstairs window every morning. Everytime I walk from my bedroom to the bathroom now I have to wear pants. Pants! It's a travesty.

Over the course of this month, my landlady calls me all the time and asks me to do things.
8 AM- "Can you open both your doors?"
8 AM- "Are you going anywhere today?"
8 AM- "Can you move your car out onto the street?"

Why she always has to ask me crap while I'm still asleep is beyond me, but such is my life. So, yesterday I left for work early in the morning. The painters were outside my door painting the threshold. I stepped over them, hopped in the car and headed to the office. Later that night, my meetings were over and I was at a bar with some coworkers. My landlady calls.

"Hey Sam, when are you coming home?"
"I don't know, an hour or two? Why?"
"Well, it's just that the painters had to paint the thresholds, so both of your doors are open."
"You opened my doors?"
"Yeah, cause they had to paint."
"So do you need me to come home and guard my stuff? What do you need?"
"Oh no, I would never ask you to do that. I'm here and I'm checking on everything, so no worries."
"Okay bye."

So, I stay at the bar another hour, get home about 3 hours after she called. I arrive home, the house is dark, her car is not in the driveway, and both of my doors are wide open. In my living room sit Tom's computer and various gaming systems. However, nothing's missing, so Tom and I turn on the lights and the Red Sox game and go on about our business. About an hour later we hear the landlady pull up. She's probably left my stuff unguarded for a good 3 hours...I'm sure she was calling to see if I was coming home so she could leave. But, I hate her, I've already renewed my lease, nothing's missing, I'm just gonna leave it alone.

I've been home for about an hour when I walk upstairs to use the restroom. I walk in, and the toilet seat is up. I freak out. You see, in 14 months of living near Tom and even for the year he would come visit me in Alabama, Tom has never once left the toilet seat up. Not once. It's kind of amazing actually. Plus, he hadn't been up to the bathroom since we'd been home and I know I hadn't left it up that morning. Someone had been in my house. Not just in my house, pretty much in every single room of my house because to use the restrooom you have to go all the way upstairs.

So, I run downstairs and call my landlady.
"Hey, did you let your guys use my bathroom?"
"What? No. I'll call them and find out if they used it."
"Fine. I know they used it though- someone did."
"Okay, I'll call them."

So, she calls them and of course one of the painters admits to having used it.
"What? I had to use the toilet!"

She calls me and insists that she was there supervising them all day...oh, except when she went to get her kid. "He must've intentionally waited for me to leave to go in." Yeah, well maybe you should've gotten someone else to pick up the kid, or someone else to watch the house, or NOT open my frikkin' doors without my permission. Cripes.

So, the painter incident, combined with the fact that I wasn't allowed to close my doors til midnite even though it was 50 degrees out (had to let the paint dry) kind of made last night craptastic. If I get robbed this weekend, I think we all know who did it.

The only good thing? On my way out of the bar last night, I found a $50 bill in the street.

For Lack of a Better Word....Art?

I love this so much.

WOW!

It's late, and I have to go to bed, but I just had to tell someone:

I totally love Bela Karolji. Watching him watch the female gymnastics portion of the Olympics is probably the single greatest thing in sports broadcasting ever.

Oh my God I love him. So adorable.

Olympic Spirit

While I was in Alabama, my sisters invented a new sport.

It all began with the genocide (mass suicide) of the amphibian population in my parents yard. Every day when we go out to swim, my sisters first clean out the pool filters. There are various reasons for this, not the least of which that we have found on separate occasions both a giant rat and a snake in the filters. No one wants to swim in snake-infested waters. So, we check and clean out the filters before we hop in. The first day that we were going to swim in the completely-filled pool, the girls went out to check the filters. They found frogs. Lots of frogs. 17 to be exact. Actually, 19 total- 2 alive, the rest not so much. We're not really sure if it was the pool chemicals or the inability to get out of the water that killed them, but there they were. So, they pulled the filter out, trying to balance the stack of frogs all the way to the fence. What we usually do when we find creatures in the pool, is throw them out into the yard. Far out into the yard because that way they won't be right near the pool smelling bad and attracting more creatures that could fall into the pool and drown. So, we kind of fling them.

Thus "frog-flinging" was born.

Jo would first load the frog up into the catapult:
And then Bear would fling it into the yard:
By the end, she had a whole method. According to Bear, when it comes to frog-flinging, it's all in the legs. She's pretty sure she's going to medal in this event.In the end, all the frogs were dispatched to their final resting place and then we all went swimming.
Tom celebrated by diving headfirst into the part of the pool that's only 5 feet deep. :-p

"All I'm Saying Is, She's Got Options."

Dad (about my sister, Jenny): "I think she'll end up being a cat rancher... or a doorstop."

Won't Somebody Think of the Children?!?

Our plane was set to land in Atlanta Friday night, and my mother and sisters were supposed to pick us up. They had NO idea what they were in for.

I'd forwarded our itinerary to my mother 2 months before the trip, but apparently she didn't look very closely at it. Our plane set down right on time, and I called my mother as we taxied down the runway.

Me: "Hi Mom...we're here. Probably be off the plane in the next 10 minutes or so."
Mom: "What airline are you on?!"
Me: "AirTran, why?"
Mom: "Because your itinerary didn't say what airline you were on, so I dropped Bear off at the curb to go in and see if she could figure it out. But now this stupid cop keeps honking at me, and Bear isn't back."
Me: "Just circle around! Bear's 20 years old, she'll be fine, and we'll be out soon."
Mom: "I just let Jo out of the car to look for her!"
Me: "Why would you do that?! Bear will be fine! Jo's too little to be wandering around the Atlanta airport alone!"
Mom: "Oh my GOD this idiot police officer keeps honking at me. I have to go."
Me: "OK...I'll call you when we get out."

So, we get off the plane and head toward baggage claim where Bear is probably waiting for us. Because the Atlanta airport is an absolute monstrosity, we actually have to take a tram to get there. So, I call my Mom again while we're on the tram.

Me: "We're off the plane. Did you at least get Jo back in the car?"
Mom: "Yes. I have Jo, but Bear's still missing."
Me: "Well, just keep circling and we'll find Bear when we get to baggage claim."
Mom: "Well, I would IF THIS ASSHOLE WOULD GIVE ME MY G_DAMN TICKET!"
Me: "MOM! What are you talking about?!?"
Mom: "That jerk cop is taking his sweet time instead of just writing my damn ticket and letting me go."
Me: "What ticket?!"
Mom: "The one he's writing me because he's a jerk. God, what a jerk. I can't believe nobody's killed this guy! Isn't this Atlanta? People have guns here, right?"
Me: "Wow. Okay, we'll be there in a couple minutes."

My Mom never swears, and I'm pretty sure she was hanging out the window of the car while yelling about the cop, so we tried to get out there as fast as we could.

Tom: "What's going on?"
Me: "My Mom's probably going to be arrested for terrorism."

We get off the tram, and of course Bear is waiting right at the top of the escalator for us. We grab her, head out the door, and spend the next 20 minutes trying to find my mother and Jo. Turns out they've parked in the deck and are looking for us on the curb. The curb a full floor below us. We finally figure it out when Tom calls Mom's cell phone and asks, "Look up. Do you see sky or cement? Cement? Okay. We see sky. Don't move." After trudging with our luggage up four flights of stairs, and then back down one because Mom forgot what level they'd parked on, we were in the car. I elected to drive because my Mom couldn't afford another ticket that night, and asked for the story.

Mom let Bear out of the car to figure out what airline we were on, but Bear left her purse and cellphone in the car. So Mom called to tell her that the cop was making her move the car and instead heard the phone ringing right next to her. So, she sent Jo to the entrance where she'd dropped Bear to find her and bring her back to the car. (All the while letting every pedestrian known to man cross in front of her so as to give the illusion of not parking.) Jo couldn't find Bear, and the police officer didn't like the speed with which Mom was moving her car. He followed her and honked his horn over and over yelling "MOVE YOUR CAR!" Finally, he pulled up next to her and told her that if she didn't move right now, he'd give her a ticket.

Mom: "I can't move my car. My daughters are in there."
Cop: "I SAID MOVE YOUR CAR!"
Mom: "I SAID MY DAUGHTERS ARE IN THERE! I CAN'T LEAVE MY DAUGHTER! DO YOU HAVE KIDS??"
Cop: "MOVE THE CAR OR I'M WRITING YOU A TICKET"
Mom: "THEN I GUESS YOU'LL HAVE TO WRITE ME A TICKET!!"

So he goes to write my mother a ticket. She ended up with a $103 violation and is planning to drive all the way to Atlanta to fight it in court. She insists that she did move the car, and so was never technically parked. The ticket says that she repeatedly ignored the officers instructions, so we'll see what the judge thinks. :-p

We all promised not to tell Dad about it. The next day as she had one foot out the door to go to work, she turned to him and said, "Umm...I got a ticket last night. It's by the phone. Love you, bye." Nicely handled, Mom.