I know, it’s been a long time. Nothing blog-worthy has been happening, though. You don’t want a boring recital of my daily chores, right?
Right.
However, today, I have something to share. Actually, I had something to share last week, but I messed up and waited too long; missed the chance to get pix. And I’m sure you’ll all agree; pictures were an absolute necessity.
Allow me to explain the title: Okay…..I can’t. Except to say, “EW” again.
I went outside for my morning cigarette and discovered that one of my flowerbeds in the front of the house is sprouting some kind of peni. No, seriously.
Click here for pictures.
I just stared at it, shuddering in revulsion. It’s like a car crash or something really horrible happening that you just can’t look away from. And I kept going back to make sure it was as quintessentially awful as I remembered. It was. So, always one to share the wealth, I called Randy.
“Hey, our flowerbed is sprouting a penis,” I announced.
“It…..what?”
“A penis,” I repeated.
“Where?” Randy asked, perplexed.
“The flowerbed in front of the garage,” I said, waiting for him to get it.
“There’s a…..what?”
“A penis,” I said patiently.
“Okay, wait,” he protested. I waited obediently.
“What’s really going on?” He asked after a long pause.
“How should I know?” I demanded. “There is a penis growing out of the flowerbed. That is the extent of my knowledge and understanding.”
“Uh-huh…..”
“Where’s the camera?” I asked petulantly. “I’ll send you a picture.”
“The battery is dead,” Randy told me, trying not to laugh.
“Dead? Why is it dead?” I bleated.
“Because we haven’t used it in forever and we can’t leave it in the charger all the time,” he informed me.
“Oh, well,” I said airily. “It’ll still be here when you get home tonight.”
Wrong.
A couple of hours later, I went back outside to see that the penis was…..erm…….flaccid. Like a deflated balloon. An hour or two after that, it was nothing more than a little, shriveled red….thing. My own vocabulary deserts me. By the time Randy got home, it was all but gone. Apparently, it doesn’t like sunlight.
Which…….ew.
This morning, I went out again, and lo, there was another one. I ran back inside to grab the camera, only to discover that while it had a charge, the memory stick was gone. So, I called Randy again.
“We have another penis!” I crowed when he answered his cell phone from upstairs.
“Huh?” he asked dazedly.
“Penis,” I replied. “Where’s the stick?”
“Stick?” He repeated, still sounding dazed.
“Yeah, the stick. For the camera. Where is it?” I demanded excitedly.
“Wait….go back to the beginning,” he pleaded.
“Memory. Stick. For. The. Camera. And hurry,” I added.
“But, I’m in the shower,” my husband said plaintively.
“Just hurry!” I yelled and hung up.
A few minutes later, the door opened to reveal my drippy wet husband, holding a small, purple memory stick. “Here,” he said, thrusting it at me.
“I don’t know how to put it in,” I told him.
He sighed deeply, installed it into the camera, then went to look at the penis-garden. And shuddered.
This thing is seriously repugnant. And neither of us has any idea what it is, beyond (maybe) some kind of mushroom. The fact that it shrivels (shudder) in sunlight bears that out, but we’ve never seen anything like it.
And now that I finally have pictures of it to prove it’s real, I don’t care if I never see another one. Because…….ew.
I have this thing for bacon. I looove bacon. Crispy bacon. On sandwiches, with pancakes or those little cheddar tater tot things Schwan’s sells; in the event that I don’t have anything to go with it, I make a spaghetti-parmesan dish and crumble bacon in that.
But here’s the thing with bacon: it’s an hereditary taste. Who knew? I didn’t know, until I suddenly found myself fighting tooth and nail for my bacon against my own son. That boy can smell bacon cooking from six blocks away during a basketball game. And will run home to snatch a strip or two (or three) between free-throws. He can also smell it when he comes home after football practice - which runs until 5 PM after school - when I cooked it for breakfast. And there is hell to pay if I didn’t save him a strip or two (or three). I can wake him up from a sound sleep behind a closed door just microwaving some. He’ll run down the stairs, careering off walls because he’s still half asleep, shouting, “I smell BACON!” like the giant at the top of the beanstalk.
Now, he’s fairly restricted when it comes to bacon. When we have pancakes for dinner, Randy will use the griddle to fry a whole pound of it, even though he knows he’ll have to snag some before we get in there. Anyway, DaBoy is only allowed two (or three) strips at a meal. I like his arteries and sodium levels to stay nice and normal. This is what he is allowed. However, that doesn’t include how many strips he can sneak on the side when I’m not looking - or off my plate when I AM looking for that matter.
Tonight, we had breakfast for dinner. I hadn’t gotten around to putting away the leftover pancakes and bacon yet, I was innocently reading email in the batcave when I heard an elephant stomping around in the kitchen over my head. Knowing the worst, I dashed up there to save my precious leftover bacon…..too late. The Bacon Marauder had already struck.
So I called him back downstairs, building up a good steam of righteous indignation while I waited. When he arrived in the kitchen, I went to town:
ME: There seems to be a problem here. There is a piece of bacon missing, and I heard you come down to the kitchen! What could possibly explain this, except -
DABOY: I took one.
ME: That’s right! You took one! Now there are only three and a half left! How am I supposed to be all magnanimous at breakfast tomorrow when I finally agree to split them with you?
DABOY: Well, that one half is more like a small piece. So, it’s really like there are four. We could each have two.
ME: That is so not the point. The point is, I can’t use them to bargain with you now, because you snuck in here and took one! And that’s a half.
DABOY: (making puppy eyes) I’m sorry.
ME: That is not the point eith…….what?
DABOY: (adding the lower lip to the puppy eyes) I’m sorry.
ME: (listening to the huge whoosh as the air leaves my sails) Oh. Well….
DABOY: (blinking puppy eyes and sticking the lip out a little more) They looked lonely.
ME: (knowing when I’ve been beaten) Awwwwwww…
Yeah, he’s 14. Yeah, he’s taller than I am. Yeah, his hands and feet are actually bigger than mine. And he’s apparently smarter than me, now, too. *sigh*. But, damn, he’s good at the whole manipulation game. I’m so proud. *sniffle*
The Sleep Fairy is slacking on the job. Missed my house entirely last night.
I spent the night in a semi-doze from which I kept waking up. Not enough to actually get out of bed, just enough to realize I was awake, look at the clock, groan and roll over. Needless to say, I’m sleepy.
I’ve had problems with missing the Sleep Fairy most of my life, so this is really nothing new to me. Plus, I’m on some new medication for Restless Legs Syndrome which can either cause insomnia or drowsiness. Or both, who knows. Anyway, it appears that insomnia is the side-effect of choice here.
What is frustrating the most right now is that not only did I get lousy sleep last night, I missed a party.
Apparently, Randy couldn’t sleep either: he got up at 2 AM feeling hungry, so he decided to head downstairs and have a bowl of cereal. As he got halfway down the stairs, he began to realize that his footsteps were causing an echo. He turned around to discover that DaBoy was two stair-risers behind him. So, without speaking much at all, they both marched into the kitchen, sleepily munched their respective ways through their respective bowls of Corn Flakes and then went their respective ways back to their respective beds. Randy went back to sleep, but DaBoy isn’t sure if he did or not. He says he may have dozed. All I know is that when I finally gave up and got out of bed at 6-ish, DaBoy was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. This is the same kid who, yesterday, slept until I went to get his little butt up at 11:30. And that was a challenge.
So, here we are. None of us got enough sleep, we’re all tired and fussy and I missed a cereal party. Tell ya what, though…..I am going to be taking a nap.
Anyone know of any snacks that will attract Sleep Fairies? I could set it out on the fireplace mantle.
Okay, seriously? I am so unbelievably sick of the word “ban”. And it amazes me how people throw it around so casually. It’s like they have no idea what they’re actually saying and that it could someday have a negative effect on them.
Ban smoking in restaurants, parks and anywhere that has a roof, even if there are no sides! Ban smoking in cars! Ban pit bulls! Ban fireworks! Ban firearms! Ban cellphones for cars! Don’t like it? Ban it!
I heard a jogger yesterday complaining about being “forced” to jog through somebody’s lawnmower exhaust because the homeowner was *gasp* MOWING his LAWN when this jogger, who was jogging for his HEALTH happened by! As they passed my house, I heard him tell his jogging partner that they should ban - something. I did’t catch what he thought they should “ban”, but I’m sure it was self-serving and probably involved forcing people to go back to the old-style push mowers that only had blades and wheels, no motor. And no exhaust for him to run through. Maybe they should ban jogging on public sidewalks. It’s a hazard to the joggers (obviously), they’re hard to see at night, and do they have any idea what jogging does to their knees? Not to mention the traffic problems they cause. Ban jogging!
This, to me, is how we abuse our freedoms.
If we don’t like something someone else is doing, why, we just get enough people together and ban it! Ban auto emissions! Ban saturated fat! Ban religion in schools! Oh, wait…….that one never happened. It was only teacher-led prayer and proselytizing that got banned.
And now, the newest bans, for your reading pleasure: Ban plastic bags! Ban bottled water! I mean, seriously. What happened to the days when you just told people, “Hey, those bottles take 700 years to break down in a landfill, and also, the plastic leeches something into your water, so you shouldn’t use them” and then let them make up their own minds? Now they want to ban plastic bags - as far as I can tell, there’s no real reason for that, especially since almost everyone reuses them as trashcan liners or cleaning out litterboxes or something - except that on a windy day, you can see them flying around everywhere and they get caught in trees. I think the reason given here is that one of the geese that hang out in the city ate one and died. Which is sad, and yes, people need to be more careful of their garbage, but for heaven’s sake!
As I recall, when animals were turning up strangled to death on the plastic rings that hold six-packs together, we were simply told that the best way to avoid that is to cut the rings up before we throw them away. Nothing (that I heard, anyway) was said about banning them; just be responsible.
But now we have to BAN everything because there is no personal responsibility anymore. People can’t think for themselves; we’re too used to having the government doing it for us. And human nature being what it is, people can’t resist the power to control someone else’s life, regardless of the effect that person’s choices make on them. “Do it the way *I* want it done, or I’ll arrange a ban!”
I think we should ban bans and go back to letting people screw up and taking the consequences. But that would involve too much thought.