Do you think you know what you would do in the middle of the night when the smoke alarms start blaring? I thought I knew. Then, at 2 A.M. Sunday, I got a big, fat "F," in fire safety. The "F" stands for fucktard, of course, which is exactly what I acted like a fraction of a second after the alarms started wailing. I started out okay, by punching my snoring husband in the head and screaming "GET UP," but that was the last smart thing I did before I lept out of bed, flung open the door that I should be feeling for heat and ran as fast as I could upstairs to my son's room with three dogs in tow, without so much as smelling for smoke or reaching for a light switch.
Hard to believe that I would flunk fire safety, seeing that I, Lola Ebola, am PREPARED for just about every disaster that can pop up in the home or the car or while I'm walking down the street. Don't all of you have tools for cutting your seat belt and a center punch for breaking car windows in the console of your car? What about kickass first aid kits or water, snacks and blankets in case you get stranded in a snow storm? Oh, and I don't carry a giant purse because they're trendy, you know. I need my supplies just in case.
Since building our house back in 1993, I've played out every single scenario for emergencies; ie, fire, carbon monoxide poisoning, home invasion, hurricane, tornado, just to name a few. We've got an alarm system connected to the police department and the fire department with panic buttons in case an intruder gets past the dogs. We've got smoke detectors that are hard wired into the house, as well as the ones that alert the alarm company to immediately send the fire department, as well as the simple battery-operated ones in each bedroom, cuz, duh, a fire could start in the bedroom and not just right outside the closed bedroom door. Oh, and there are carbon monoxide detectors on every level of the house and outside of all bedrooms and one of those escape ladders in my son's room in case he gets caught upstairs and needs to escape.
My nightstand contains various survival kits, which had to be made a bit more secure after baby arrived, but still include weapons that I know how to use to kill someone if they dare to break in in the middle of the night or, say, incapacitate and subdue them if I'm not in a killing mood. I've got flashlights and fire-resistant blankets in case I have to run through fire to get to my kid. I almost purchased those oxygen masks that the firemen wear a few years ago, but I must have thought maybe that was going a tad bit overboard or maybe I just forgot. Most likely, I forgot.
So, you think I'm paranoid? Maybe. I like to think I'm prepared. I certainly don't obsess about bad things happening once I've put the survival kits and emergency plans in place. We've gone over our fire drills a couple times a year with the boy since he was a tiny tot, decided on our meeting spot outside. It all went to shit, though, when the alarms violently jolted me from some crazy dream Sunday morning.
I forgot to let the dogs out of the french door so they would be safely outside. I forgot to grab my flashlight and fire blankets. I forgot to feel the bedroom door for heat. I simply freaked out, hit the husband and took off screaming into the darkness to save my baby. He's upstairs, and we're downstairs, which has always worried me; hence, the fire blankets, alarmed windows, escape ladder and the survival scenarios.
In the 2.5 seconds it took for the dogs and I to wake and get to the boy's room, me screaming, dogs barking, I thought I'd find the boy standing at the end of his bed, maybe rubbing his eyes a little or scratching his balls while he pulled out the escape ladder. Yeah, not so much. He was sound asleep and only sat up after I screamed to get up NOW. Not seeing any smoke or fire so far, I ran all through the upstairs, sniffing like a basset hound, trying to find the fire and surveying what I could grab in two seconds. I grabbed my steno machine case that also contains a laptop so that I wouldn't be put out of work if the house burns down. Then I ran back to the boy's room, expecting him to be ready to go. He was sound asleep again.
Not only can he sleep through the blaring alarms that are six feet from his bed, but he can go right back to sleep after being told to get up because the house is on fire. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I dragged him out of bed and got all of my "kids" downstairs and out in the garage, since there was a violent lightning storm going on that I hadn't noticed until we got out back. Then I found the husband down cellar, and we tried to find the fire somewhere, anywhere, since the fucking alarms were still going off and there was no smell of smoke. We even checked the attic.
My brain kicked in at that point, and I realized that the smokes that are tied in with the house alarm that will send the fire trucks and the police cars without so much as a frantic 911 call from me were not going off (and yes, these alarms get the entire town to your front door in mere minutes I found out when you burn a bagel or have your hardwood floors sanded.) The cheapo battery-operated alarms weren't going off either. It was just the hard wired, whole house alarms that were shrieking incessantly.
So, we decided that maybe the lightning shorted out something or other, and we went looking for blown fuses or anything that would make the hideous noise stop. Half hour later, after unplugging every detector, we found the one that seemed to be the problem, unplugged it and even had to take the battery out to get the fuckers to shut up. The kids were brought back in, and the boy and the husband crawled back in bed and instantly fell asleep. I was wide awake until 4:30 thinking.
I thought about how grateful I was that this was just a "drill." I went over every mistake I made, and I wanted to puke thinking about how an eight-year old can sleep through incredibly shrill alarms that are supposed to wake him up so he can use the training we've done and survive a fire. Then I got out of bed and ordered this alarm that I had read about years ago and never got around to ordering.
I can't claim ignorance here. When my son was very young, I had read the study about how kids sleep so deeply that they don't respond to much of anything but the sound of your voice telling them to get up. I guess their brains get used to your voice telling them to get their asses out of bed from a very early age, and that's your best bet in an emergency. Being the psycho that I am, what with all of my alarms and survival kits, you'd think I would have ordered one of these alarms way back when and recorded my voice telling him to wake up and repeat the fire escape plans until he was safely out of the house and could hear me in the flesh, but I must have forgotten or maybe I thought three different smoke detectors within ten feet of the boy would work. Now, I know they won't work.
So, my dear blog friends with kids in your houses, do yourselves a favor and read this article, and then go buy one of these for each kid in your house and record your wake-up calls. If you have teens, you can have a little fun and record things like, "We're late!!! Get the fuck up NOWWWW!!" or "If you're not out of that bed in one second, I'm pouring water on your head." The possibilities are endless.
Whatever it takes, please learn from our little fire drill gone wrong. I did.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Summa Skool...
Having an eight-year old boy who sees school as nothing more than time to socialize with other kids is challenging, to say the least. Having an eight-year old boy who is stubborn as hell and sees no reason why he has to come up with three ways to get to an answer, regardless of what the teacher tells him he has to do, leads to a battle every night when it's homework time.
Let's just say that my son is not a fan of education today. Neither is his mother. After spending a day out and about and having to deal with many charming and ever so polite teenagers at cash registers and restaurants, I'm convinced that these kids are way dumber than even the slowest kids I graduated with way back in the day when you memorized your facts and only had to get the fucking answer right. Nobody asked how you know the right answer, unless you were suspected of cheating, because what's the point.
"Showing your work" and explaining in a sentence how you know that 4 + 4 = 8 has turned these teens into idiot zombies who cannot do simple math or carry on a very basic conversation. When I'm in the checkout line or the customer service line, the only thing that matters to me is that you come up with the right answer as quickly as possible. I couldn't give a fuck how you get there, and I surely don't want to hear your "logic." The kicker was the college student waitress who admitted after watching me finesse my John Hancock on a receipt after three delicious margaritas, mind you, that she has no idea how to sign her name unless she prints it.
So, why am I spending my summer trying to teach the boy cursive writing before he starts third grade and is expected to pick it up in the three months they spend teaching it so that he can use it to do his work exclusively in fourth grade, only to be told in fifth that he can print again, because everything becomes about the computer? Um, because my friends with older kids told me to, just like they told me that I was supposed to teach the boy his math facts, because they don't do that anymore in school. Unfortunately, they told me too late, so we spent our summers having fun instead of learning what he will never learn in school. Seems like a letter home at the end of each school year, detailing what they will be expected to have learned at home or by osmosis would be a good idea.
Of course, that would be too much to expect from our school system, you know, because they're too busy overthinking every speck of minutia because the test they're teaching to requires overthinking everything to death, and we can't have low test scores in MA, after all. The funny thing about that is since the schools began the whole new math and nothing can be correct unless you write an essay to explain why you know the answer, I've noticed that many kids that are graduating are not all that smart. Maybe their minds went to mush, as mine would have, if you made me learn that way or maybe it's a flawed idea from the get-go, because some kids just can't learn that way and aren't so great at writing a paragraph in answer to a simple yes or no question.
I was an A student, honor roll most of the time, but I'd probably flunk right out of high school with this sort of teaching. My brain doesn't work that way. I was and always will be a memorizer. What's wrong with that? The answer is the answer is the answer, unless you're an engineer or a scientist, and in my job I've witnessed how hard it is for some of them to think their way out of a cardboard box. Simple common sense gets lost when you overanalyze too much.
Old math worked just fine, people. I mean, we managed to get men on the moon and build incredible bridges and buildings way back when it was okay to carry the one when adding, and even though I hump my calculator 99.9% of the time, I can still write out a good, old-fashioned math problem if need be and come up with the correct answer. Oh, and I can do my times tables up to twelvesies and short division in my head. You'll get no explanation out of me as to how I came up with the answer beyond the obvious, "I memorized them in fourth grade," and I won't show you three other ways to get there, but I guarantee I'll get there faster than most of these poor kids today.
Sure, some kids can handle this way of teaching and thrive, so you parents of math geeks and critical thinkers need not tell me just how wrong and stupid I am. You happy-go-lucky overthinkers just keep on keepin' on. I mean you no harm. I'm just a mother of a kid who could have such a better experience with his school years if there wasn't this one size fits all, every brain must work the same way mentality in public schools today. In my day, there were general classes, and there were AP classes for just this reason, and the system worked much better. We all got a decent education that way, and some of the most successful people I know were in the general classes.
Will I throw in the towel and all of our savings to send the boy to a private school some day? Maybe. Will I say "fuck that," save my money and homeschool him? Highly unlikely, since I value my sanity and don't want to become a pill addict, but if his spirit keeps getting crushed by attending school, I'll swallow a handful of pills each day and gives him a fine edumication. That will be the last step, however, because we're simply not meant to be together all day, every day. We're too much alike.
For now, though, we're spending a little time each day at Lola's Summa Skool doing workbook pages designed to get him ready for third grade, and he's seeing his reading tutor weekly, in hopes that we can get a jump-start this year and avoid the shitty report cards and dire warnings of years past that he's not meeting grade standard. He's not happy about it, and neither am I, since it's becoming pretty obvious that my math skills are not up to third grade level.
I swear, if I have to watch the poor kid draw another number line to plot out the answer to 60 - 25, my head might explode, and I'm trying desperately to bite my pencil and not teach the kid to carry the one so he can do simple fucking math in a timely manner. It's KILLING ME, but we wouldn't want him to be suspended over using outdated math practices, now would we?
Let's just say that my son is not a fan of education today. Neither is his mother. After spending a day out and about and having to deal with many charming and ever so polite teenagers at cash registers and restaurants, I'm convinced that these kids are way dumber than even the slowest kids I graduated with way back in the day when you memorized your facts and only had to get the fucking answer right. Nobody asked how you know the right answer, unless you were suspected of cheating, because what's the point.
"Showing your work" and explaining in a sentence how you know that 4 + 4 = 8 has turned these teens into idiot zombies who cannot do simple math or carry on a very basic conversation. When I'm in the checkout line or the customer service line, the only thing that matters to me is that you come up with the right answer as quickly as possible. I couldn't give a fuck how you get there, and I surely don't want to hear your "logic." The kicker was the college student waitress who admitted after watching me finesse my John Hancock on a receipt after three delicious margaritas, mind you, that she has no idea how to sign her name unless she prints it.
So, why am I spending my summer trying to teach the boy cursive writing before he starts third grade and is expected to pick it up in the three months they spend teaching it so that he can use it to do his work exclusively in fourth grade, only to be told in fifth that he can print again, because everything becomes about the computer? Um, because my friends with older kids told me to, just like they told me that I was supposed to teach the boy his math facts, because they don't do that anymore in school. Unfortunately, they told me too late, so we spent our summers having fun instead of learning what he will never learn in school. Seems like a letter home at the end of each school year, detailing what they will be expected to have learned at home or by osmosis would be a good idea.
Of course, that would be too much to expect from our school system, you know, because they're too busy overthinking every speck of minutia because the test they're teaching to requires overthinking everything to death, and we can't have low test scores in MA, after all. The funny thing about that is since the schools began the whole new math and nothing can be correct unless you write an essay to explain why you know the answer, I've noticed that many kids that are graduating are not all that smart. Maybe their minds went to mush, as mine would have, if you made me learn that way or maybe it's a flawed idea from the get-go, because some kids just can't learn that way and aren't so great at writing a paragraph in answer to a simple yes or no question.
I was an A student, honor roll most of the time, but I'd probably flunk right out of high school with this sort of teaching. My brain doesn't work that way. I was and always will be a memorizer. What's wrong with that? The answer is the answer is the answer, unless you're an engineer or a scientist, and in my job I've witnessed how hard it is for some of them to think their way out of a cardboard box. Simple common sense gets lost when you overanalyze too much.
Old math worked just fine, people. I mean, we managed to get men on the moon and build incredible bridges and buildings way back when it was okay to carry the one when adding, and even though I hump my calculator 99.9% of the time, I can still write out a good, old-fashioned math problem if need be and come up with the correct answer. Oh, and I can do my times tables up to twelvesies and short division in my head. You'll get no explanation out of me as to how I came up with the answer beyond the obvious, "I memorized them in fourth grade," and I won't show you three other ways to get there, but I guarantee I'll get there faster than most of these poor kids today.
Sure, some kids can handle this way of teaching and thrive, so you parents of math geeks and critical thinkers need not tell me just how wrong and stupid I am. You happy-go-lucky overthinkers just keep on keepin' on. I mean you no harm. I'm just a mother of a kid who could have such a better experience with his school years if there wasn't this one size fits all, every brain must work the same way mentality in public schools today. In my day, there were general classes, and there were AP classes for just this reason, and the system worked much better. We all got a decent education that way, and some of the most successful people I know were in the general classes.
Will I throw in the towel and all of our savings to send the boy to a private school some day? Maybe. Will I say "fuck that," save my money and homeschool him? Highly unlikely, since I value my sanity and don't want to become a pill addict, but if his spirit keeps getting crushed by attending school, I'll swallow a handful of pills each day and gives him a fine edumication. That will be the last step, however, because we're simply not meant to be together all day, every day. We're too much alike.
For now, though, we're spending a little time each day at Lola's Summa Skool doing workbook pages designed to get him ready for third grade, and he's seeing his reading tutor weekly, in hopes that we can get a jump-start this year and avoid the shitty report cards and dire warnings of years past that he's not meeting grade standard. He's not happy about it, and neither am I, since it's becoming pretty obvious that my math skills are not up to third grade level.
I swear, if I have to watch the poor kid draw another number line to plot out the answer to 60 - 25, my head might explode, and I'm trying desperately to bite my pencil and not teach the kid to carry the one so he can do simple fucking math in a timely manner. It's KILLING ME, but we wouldn't want him to be suspended over using outdated math practices, now would we?
Monday, July 6, 2009
He Still Doesn't Get It...
Since we're heading off to the zoo today, and since my mind has turned to mush after a horrific weekend spent cleaning up mushy, fluorescent yellow, toxic dog shit and much alcohol, I'm re-posting this little ditty detailing one of last summer's trips to the local zoo.
Ah, shut up. All the cool kids are recycling posts these days, and some of my new readers probably aren't so infatuated with me that they went all through my archives. Hard to believe, I know, and shame on them. I was way funnier a year ago. Plus, if we bring my nephew with us, today will probably be a repeat drama where punches are thrown over a fucking snow cone. This year, I'll get pictures of the brawl for you, I promise.
So, without further ado, we'll start with a loverly shot of my husband...
Turns out my husband still doesn't understand why I got so mad yesterday at the zoo when he got one blue cotton candy and one pink one for a five-year old boy and a seven-year old boy, which lead to a very loud argument and punches being thrown. He thought my post last night was unfair to him because I referred to him as "my genius husband." That's a photo of him above pouting and looking to pick a fight.
This was our conversation in words and pictures:
Him: "Why did you have to write a post about me?"
Me: "Did you actually read it, because it had almost nothing to do with you?"
Him: "You called me stupid."
Me: "No, I didn't call you stupid. I was merely pointing out that you
did a stupid thing, which lead to a total scene between the boys."
Him: "Oh, like they weren't being annoying before that."
Me: "Umm, yeah, they were. That's the point. Why make it worse, when you know how they fight over everything in their little macho man competition?"
Him: "That's what the lady handed me."
Me: "And that's when every mother on the planet would have asked for two blue ones. It's called anticipating the problem and fixing it before it blows up in your face."
Him: "They only had one blue. I asked."
Me: "No, you didn't. Don't even try it."
Him: "Screw you. I did ask."
Me: "Then you should have gotten two pink ones, and that would have solved the problem."
This is what his face looked like, because there was nothing he could say to that...
This last one is a bonus because I know that, like me, all of you always wanted to know just how a giraffe picks its nose.
Ah, shut up. All the cool kids are recycling posts these days, and some of my new readers probably aren't so infatuated with me that they went all through my archives. Hard to believe, I know, and shame on them. I was way funnier a year ago. Plus, if we bring my nephew with us, today will probably be a repeat drama where punches are thrown over a fucking snow cone. This year, I'll get pictures of the brawl for you, I promise.
So, without further ado, we'll start with a loverly shot of my husband...
Turns out my husband still doesn't understand why I got so mad yesterday at the zoo when he got one blue cotton candy and one pink one for a five-year old boy and a seven-year old boy, which lead to a very loud argument and punches being thrown. He thought my post last night was unfair to him because I referred to him as "my genius husband." That's a photo of him above pouting and looking to pick a fight.
This was our conversation in words and pictures:
Him: "Why did you have to write a post about me?"
Me: "Did you actually read it, because it had almost nothing to do with you?"
Him: "You called me stupid."
Me: "No, I didn't call you stupid. I was merely pointing out that you
did a stupid thing, which lead to a total scene between the boys."
Him: "Oh, like they weren't being annoying before that."
Me: "Umm, yeah, they were. That's the point. Why make it worse, when you know how they fight over everything in their little macho man competition?"
Him: "That's what the lady handed me."
Me: "And that's when every mother on the planet would have asked for two blue ones. It's called anticipating the problem and fixing it before it blows up in your face."
Him: "They only had one blue. I asked."
Me: "No, you didn't. Don't even try it."
Him: "Screw you. I did ask."
Me: "Then you should have gotten two pink ones, and that would have solved the problem."
This is what his face looked like, because there was nothing he could say to that...
Then there was me...
Then there was him...
Then there was me...
This last one is a bonus because I know that, like me, all of you always wanted to know just how a giraffe picks its nose.
Now we know...
Friday, July 3, 2009
Shit Happens...
I'm supposed to be here partying with Ted Kennedy and my "friends in high places":
Instead, I'm here (I have no idea what the "Emo" reference in this illustration means, so let's just pretend it says "Memo," since the rest of the drawing is tragically accurate, except there should be three dogs spewing shit on me instead of one. Being the luckiest bitch on earth, only the puppy was spewing vomit):
I thought the exploding asses were due to the fact that Mama was packing up the truck on Wednesday morning. Having evil geniuses for dogs, you learn that they'll try just about anything to keep Mama from leaving. They see suitcases, and they freak out and behave like rotten little brats. Evidently, life is no fun without me around, so they plot against me and cut their paws open deliberately or fake limp around the house with their sad eyes following my every move. This time, they pulled out all the stops and, well, you know already.
As it's been explained to me by two vets and four vet techs and Google and my trusty vet dictionary that helps me diagnose every single dog illness, it all started when Rebel (name a dog Rebel, and what do you expect) went on his morning jaunt and ate some rabbit shit or raccoon shit or whatever delectable appetizer was on the menu in our Backyard Wilderness Restaurant. Who knows what he ate, but the joke was on him or should I say me, because someone's shit contained these kinda cute flagellated protozaol parasites, a/k/a Giardia intestinalis trophozoites.
I love their frowny little faces. Don't you? Anyway, they took over his body, and like a snot-nosed little kid who can't wipe his butt correctly and then doesn't wash his paws correctly, he passed it on to Mojo, and they both passed it on to Stella, the pup. She got really, really sick late Wednesday night. We thought she was dying, had maybe eaten a stick or a Lego and now she needed surgery. After staying up with her all night, dressed and ready to head off to Thieves University School of Veterinary Medicine to drop a minimum of $2,500, which I avoided by having her lick ice cubes to stay hydrated, thank you very much, I ended up spending a mere $350 at our regular vet yesterday morning. Of course, I'm not happy about the 350, but seriously, the emergency visit to Tufts at 1 AM would have been at least five times that. It always is.
She got a shot to stop her vomiting, and I was told that Giardia has moved in for the weekend. No Cape of Cod for me. No stalking the Kennedys for me. No clam chowder that I've been dreaming about for days. Instead, I get to be on toxic shit patrol, which means trying to pick up all the piles that have been rained on non-stop for a week, disinfect the grass and, most importantly, bathe all three dogs after they finish their meds on Saturday.
Oh, did I mention that these loverly little parasites can be transmitted to humans? I must have blocked that little tidbit out of my brain for a second. Silly me. Since the threat of massive diarrhea hasn't kept the boy from sticking his face right in the dogs' faces, things could get a bit more interesting around here. Can you imagine a better holiday weekend? No? Me either.
I've told you before how awesome my mother is, but just in case you didn't believe me, I'll tell you that she offered to do all of this toxic clean-up from three dogs so that we could head off to the traffic capital of the world for our annual Fourth pilgrimage with our great friends Penelope and Skipper. Now, I may be a self-absorbed bitch of a person, but I'm not pathetic enough to dump that kind of mess on a 73-year old woman just so I can go party at the ocean, even if it might be the last summer I can talk big Ted into making me an honorary Kennedy before he writes his final will and testament.
Ahh, don't cry for me, Blogentinaaaaa (I know you're really laughing at me). The truth is I'm not all that upset right now. I've accepted that shit happens and plans have to change, especially when you have kids or animals. I'm mostly pissed at my usual procrastinating self for going against my tried and true wait til the last minute ways and packing up my entire truck Wednesday morning so we could leave early on Thursday. Every single thing is packed, except my makeup, and the truck is sitting out in the driveway waiting for me to unpack it all. I will never pack early again! Procrastination is the key to survival.
Of course, yesterday our son was devastated, because he expected to be at the ocean with his best friends, but the husband might take him later today after work; although, they're both saying they won't have any fun without me there. Awwww. Yeah, right. I'm really not that much fun, REALLY. My "kids" just like to have me around to feed them and clean up after them.
What will I do on the Fourth all by myself, you ask? Well, after I bathe all three dogs and disinfect the grass, I've got parties to attend. See, I've got friends with waterfront property all over New England, friends who have parties on the Fourth. There won't be a boat parade with the Kennedys, and there won't be huge fireworks displays over the harbor, but I'll be able to get drunk and obnoxious on our friends' deck while their neighbors have the annual fireworks showdown over the lake.
I so love bellowing, "Is that all you've got" across the lake at the Podunkians. Neighbor guys with fireworks is like a Who's Got The Biggest Dick competition, and I've been known to get a tad bit carried away with my cheers and jeers. Hey, I don't have to live there. I just get to cause trouble and go home to my toxic paradise on the hill.
The "kids," the trophozoites and I wish you a wonderful, parasite-free holiday weekend!
Instead, I'm here (I have no idea what the "Emo" reference in this illustration means, so let's just pretend it says "Memo," since the rest of the drawing is tragically accurate, except there should be three dogs spewing shit on me instead of one. Being the luckiest bitch on earth, only the puppy was spewing vomit):
I thought the exploding asses were due to the fact that Mama was packing up the truck on Wednesday morning. Having evil geniuses for dogs, you learn that they'll try just about anything to keep Mama from leaving. They see suitcases, and they freak out and behave like rotten little brats. Evidently, life is no fun without me around, so they plot against me and cut their paws open deliberately or fake limp around the house with their sad eyes following my every move. This time, they pulled out all the stops and, well, you know already.
As it's been explained to me by two vets and four vet techs and Google and my trusty vet dictionary that helps me diagnose every single dog illness, it all started when Rebel (name a dog Rebel, and what do you expect) went on his morning jaunt and ate some rabbit shit or raccoon shit or whatever delectable appetizer was on the menu in our Backyard Wilderness Restaurant. Who knows what he ate, but the joke was on him or should I say me, because someone's shit contained these kinda cute flagellated protozaol parasites, a/k/a Giardia intestinalis trophozoites.
I love their frowny little faces. Don't you? Anyway, they took over his body, and like a snot-nosed little kid who can't wipe his butt correctly and then doesn't wash his paws correctly, he passed it on to Mojo, and they both passed it on to Stella, the pup. She got really, really sick late Wednesday night. We thought she was dying, had maybe eaten a stick or a Lego and now she needed surgery. After staying up with her all night, dressed and ready to head off to Thieves University School of Veterinary Medicine to drop a minimum of $2,500, which I avoided by having her lick ice cubes to stay hydrated, thank you very much, I ended up spending a mere $350 at our regular vet yesterday morning. Of course, I'm not happy about the 350, but seriously, the emergency visit to Tufts at 1 AM would have been at least five times that. It always is.
She got a shot to stop her vomiting, and I was told that Giardia has moved in for the weekend. No Cape of Cod for me. No stalking the Kennedys for me. No clam chowder that I've been dreaming about for days. Instead, I get to be on toxic shit patrol, which means trying to pick up all the piles that have been rained on non-stop for a week, disinfect the grass and, most importantly, bathe all three dogs after they finish their meds on Saturday.
Oh, did I mention that these loverly little parasites can be transmitted to humans? I must have blocked that little tidbit out of my brain for a second. Silly me. Since the threat of massive diarrhea hasn't kept the boy from sticking his face right in the dogs' faces, things could get a bit more interesting around here. Can you imagine a better holiday weekend? No? Me either.
I've told you before how awesome my mother is, but just in case you didn't believe me, I'll tell you that she offered to do all of this toxic clean-up from three dogs so that we could head off to the traffic capital of the world for our annual Fourth pilgrimage with our great friends Penelope and Skipper. Now, I may be a self-absorbed bitch of a person, but I'm not pathetic enough to dump that kind of mess on a 73-year old woman just so I can go party at the ocean, even if it might be the last summer I can talk big Ted into making me an honorary Kennedy before he writes his final will and testament.
Ahh, don't cry for me, Blogentinaaaaa (I know you're really laughing at me). The truth is I'm not all that upset right now. I've accepted that shit happens and plans have to change, especially when you have kids or animals. I'm mostly pissed at my usual procrastinating self for going against my tried and true wait til the last minute ways and packing up my entire truck Wednesday morning so we could leave early on Thursday. Every single thing is packed, except my makeup, and the truck is sitting out in the driveway waiting for me to unpack it all. I will never pack early again! Procrastination is the key to survival.
Of course, yesterday our son was devastated, because he expected to be at the ocean with his best friends, but the husband might take him later today after work; although, they're both saying they won't have any fun without me there. Awwww. Yeah, right. I'm really not that much fun, REALLY. My "kids" just like to have me around to feed them and clean up after them.
What will I do on the Fourth all by myself, you ask? Well, after I bathe all three dogs and disinfect the grass, I've got parties to attend. See, I've got friends with waterfront property all over New England, friends who have parties on the Fourth. There won't be a boat parade with the Kennedys, and there won't be huge fireworks displays over the harbor, but I'll be able to get drunk and obnoxious on our friends' deck while their neighbors have the annual fireworks showdown over the lake.
I so love bellowing, "Is that all you've got" across the lake at the Podunkians. Neighbor guys with fireworks is like a Who's Got The Biggest Dick competition, and I've been known to get a tad bit carried away with my cheers and jeers. Hey, I don't have to live there. I just get to cause trouble and go home to my toxic paradise on the hill.
The "kids," the trophozoites and I wish you a wonderful, parasite-free holiday weekend!
Monday, June 29, 2009
Lola Ebola, Weather Girl Extraordinaire...
So, I have a cousin who is a pilot for a big, shitty airline. Her husband is also a pilot for the same big, shitty airline. I know, all airlines are shitty, but theirs is particularly shitty. They have no kids, so they've got plenty of time and money. They've been in Hawaii for some ridiculous amount of time having a grand old vacation for themselves. This afternoon, she dropped me an e-mail detailing their fun in the sun and asking how I was.
I sent her this as my reply:
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I replied: "My tits are awesome!"
She replied: "They're all right. Your attitude could use a little work."
I replied: "Says the bitch sitting on her ass in Hawaii. Did you park your bucket-of-bolts plane out in the hotel parking lot?"
She replied: "Nahh, we flew first class and let someone else dodge the birds."
I replied: "How come I've never used you to get me bumped up to first class? What the fuck is wrong with me? I've got a cousin who's a pilot, and I'm in the cheap seats."
She replied: "Probably because weather girls are stupid." I think she threw in some lame "Hee-hee" at the end.
I replied: "Weather girls aren't stupid. They just act stupid so no one throws shit at them when they're out to dinner. Getting paid a lot of money to stand there and be wrong most of the time is a sign of genius.
"Oh, now I remember why I've never called in my first class favors. I hate your fucking asshole airline, and I don't dare risk being held hostage on the tarmac for ten hours while the toilets overflow because of some scheduling mistake."
She replied: "You'd be escorted off the plane in handcuffs within the first hour, I'm sure. Hee-hee."
(I know what you're thinking, a person entrusted to land a plane with your ass strapped into it safely at your destination of choice writes "Hee-hee" more than once? Don't worry, she was probably drunk typing. I'm sure she never drinks before she flies or says "Hee-hee" when she's telling you to buckle up and prepare for a bumpy ride.)
I replied: "Yeah, for punching the stupid pilot in the face."
She replied: "Hee-hee! Enjoy the weather, bitch!"
I replied: "Later, bitch."
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