Time Is a Four-Letter Word

What I've been doing while I've been away from the blog:

1. Strengthening my never-weak grasp of the obvious (as evidenced by this post's title). 

2. Honing my already sharp skills of procrastination (about which, more later).

3. Reminding myself to keep track of all the stuff I keep forgetting.

4. Mastering the fine art of cutting off my nose to spite my face. (After futilely fighting the impulse for decades, I've decided to embrace it wholeheartedly. The good news: all that energy I'd been wasting on resisting the urge is free to be channeled into other pursuits. The bad news: those pursuits turn out to be primarily nose-cutting-off related.)

5. Wasting a lot of time worrying and complaining about how little time I have to do any of the things I actually think I should be doing--writing, for example, on the blog and elsewhere.

Masked Mom's Media Monday: 3-Line Review of the 4 Minutes of Resident Evil: Afterlife I Could Stand To Watch*

Upon catching a scrap of dialogue as I passed through the room: "Did she just call her Kmart?!"

Upon watching Milla Jovovich strut through a field full of abandoned vintage aircraft wearing a bomber jacket and what appeared to be leggings: "Any resemblance to a latter-day, vaguely pornographic Amelia Earhart is purely coincidental."

In response to Hubby's assertion that Milla gets better looking in each movie: "This is supposed to be a post-apocalyptic zombie wasteland and the bitch is still wearing perfectly applied lipstick."

*Alternative title: Why Masked Mom Shouldn't Watch Hubby-Selected Movies While Under The Influence of Severe Sleep Deprivation.

Not-So-Subtle Signs The Universe Is Mocking You

You are navigating slush-covered streets in 20-degree weather, driving what is called (by the clients themselves) the "druggy buggy"--a vehicle used to transport recovering addicts and, significantly, alcoholics, when you punch one of the radio presets (in an attempt to escape the latest from Taylor Swift*) and "Margaritaville" blares from the speakers.

*Truthfully, I cannot be sure that it was Taylor Swift's latest as I am unable to distinguish one Taylor Swift song from another, which I guess is as it should be for people over the age of say, 25.

Sigh...

...of relief. Another NaBlo down.

The bad news is that there was a higher than average number of whiny cop-out posts.

The good news is that with NaBlo it's quantity and not quality that counts.

The even better news is that there are still three or four drafts from November posts I didn't finish which means I stand a better than average chance of posting in December. Yay me?

How's It Hangin'

During the insanity of a NaBloPoMo past, I blogged about Daughter-Only's uvula being stuck to her tonsil while she was sick. In the years (FOUR!) since, "uvula stuck to tonsil" has consistently been one of the top search terms that have brought people to my blog.

Judging from the frequency (sometimes as many as ten or fifteen people a day show up here trying to figure out what exactly it means that their uvulas are stuck to their tonsils) and the widespread geographic area (Britain, Japan, Singapore, India and all across these United States), adhered uvulas are a freakin' epidemic.

To those who are looking for actual medical information, I can only share that Daughter-Only's nurse practitioner said that the most common cause of uvula stuckage is dehydration. So, drink up!

How To Have A Good Day On Less Than Four Hours Sleep

I have no idea...but I'm giving it a shot.

Work 8 a.m. to noon (sneaking this post in from there now).

Driving Son-Two back to college at 1.

Followed by a Barenaked Ladies concert with Baby Brother's Wife and her sister. I figure if I'm so exhausted I start hallucinating it can only enhance the experience, right?

UPDATED POST-CONCERT: Turns out that the way to have a good day on four hours sleep is to attend a concert in a small venue with good company and to have the first song in the set be "Who Needs Sleep" and the last to be "Tonight I Fell Asleep At The Wheel*." HILARIOUS!!! Added bonus: At the attached casino, first timers get $10 in slot machine credits. A free ten dollars in credit with which I won $15 in actual cash.

*Even more entertaining and appropriate in light of the fact that I, sleep-deprived fool that I am, was driving us home.

Another One For The What The Hell Was I Thinking File

I signed on for NaBloPoMo not only after having struggled with it greatly in the past but in the middle of one of the funkiest Funks I've been in in a long time. (Maybe funkiest Funk ever...)

What the hell was I thinking?

More to the point, why don't I just stop? (Stop NaBlowing, not stop thinking, although, now that I think of it, a good portion of my Funk is probably tied directly into all the things I can't quit thinking about.)

Going For The Guinness Record...

...but will be content to beat my own personal high for cop-out posts. How am I doin' so far?

(More) Signs of Aging

As we inch our way ever further into our forties, Hubby and I have gotten into the habit of pointing out signs of our mutual aging to each other.

When I cut Hubby's hair, I can't resist pointing out how the gray has taken over. I'll say, "Baby, you're old."

When I fall asleep four minutes into a TV show I couldn't wait to see and Hubby wakes me up at the end, he will say, "Baby, you're old."

It's a little sad what passes for entertainment around here...

Today, we mark another "because we're old" milestone as Son-One and his longtime girlfriend (three years next month) are hosting Thanksgiving. All we have to do is show up with the sweet potatoes, the cranberries and five extra mouths to feed.

We have a child old enough (and mature enough!) to host Thanksgiving.

Baby, we are soooooo old.

Tomorrow's Turkey Day*...

Maybe that's why I'm feeling so fowl foul.


*Part of my foul mood--I am disproportionately annoyed by the increasingly frequent use of "Turkey Day" instead of Thanksgiving. Not, apparently, annoyed enough to not use it myself in the service of a lame pun.

Maybe Tomorrow...

I will have time and energy to finish one of the several posts I have saved in drafts...

Badass

I found this video over at Miles, etc., a blog I discovered through the NaBloPoMo Randomizer. (This is not the first moving or thought-provoking video or post I've found over at Miles, etc. so check her out if you get a chance.)

As soon as I watched this, I snagged Daughter-Only who was wandering the house rambling on the phone to one friend or another, and had her watch it as well.

She watched and listened in silence and then at the end, proclaimed, "This woman is a total badass." Don't know that I would've put it quite that way, but now that she mentions it...

Sunday Is The New Monday

Due to my work schedule, Sunday has been Monday for about a year.

Monday is as good an excuse as any for a cop-out post, right?

Don't Tell Him I Said So

I spent the morning fetching Son-Two from college, where he is a third-year physics major and currently in the midst of No-Shave November so sporting a sprinkling of facial hair. He was up until four a.m. for some last minute before break bonding with his friends where he lost his last ten dollars in a poker game. He is 6'2" and a month and half away from his 21st birthday, full of a not entirely unwarranted cynicism about the state of the world, but this morning when he climbed into the van, for just a split second, I flashed on him at four.

He was breathlessly enthusiastic about a wide variety of things--sometimes he talked so loud and so fast at that age that I had to translate for other family members who couldn't keep up. He loved mazes and puzzles and anything that challenged his brain, but also ran through life as though in his own action movie or video game, sometimes literally bouncing off walls. He's the only one of my children who's broken a bone--and he'd broken two by his sixth birthday. (Thankfully and a little miraculously none since then.)

Once, when he was four, he and I had a rare moment alone on a moonlit night walking along the creek that ran behind our house . He was holding my hand, looking up at the night sky and he said, "I wish I had a magic pencil so I could play dot-to-dot with the stars."

It was one of those moments a mom holds in her heart forever.

Lost and Found

I've lived in my little town (eagerly awaiting the 2010 census figures, but the 2000 census put us at a little over 5000) for 22 years next month. There are some drawbacks--all the obvious ones--lack of culture, having to drive ridiculously far to shop for anything other than the basics, people minding each other's business a little too much, people a little too conservative (both politically and socially) for my taste--but...practically every day something happens here to remind me why I continue to overlook those issues.

The drive-up ATM at my bank is the kind that retains the card throughout your transaction only spitting it out at the end after it prints the receipt. Most of the rest of the ones I've used recently are the swipe kind or "insert card and remove quickly" types so in the year or so since I've been using this ATM, despite the helpful "Please take your card" message on the screen, I have several times driven away without my card. The ATM is designed with a feature that takes absent-mindedness into consideration and sucks the card back in after half a minute or so, preventing it from being swiped by the next person in line. Theoretically.

When I drove off without my card the other day (when the bank was closed) and realized it within ten minutes, I was irritated with myself and not-so-eagerly anticipating the Walk of Shame at the bank the next day. I was calculating whether this was the third or fourth time I had committed this particular idiocy--shame compounds exponentially so the difference between third time shame and fourth time shame is considerable--when Daughter-Only texted me: "DG has your debit card."

DG is a guy who is peripherally in Daughter-Only's life--they have lots of mutual friends and often end up hanging out in the same place but don't spend much time one-on-one with each other. While I was mentally beating myself up for driving off again, Daughter-Only had received a text from DG asking what her mother's name was. DG then told her that he had my debit card and would bring it to school the next day. We assumed DG had come in line after me at the ATM and retrieved my not-yet-sucked-in card and DG was unavailable to clarify because he was at work.

The next day, when he returned the card, he told Daughter-Only that "some guy" had actually been behind me in line and had remembered that he had seen Daughter-Only with DG and knew he would know how to get the card back to me so he had dropped it off at DG's house. Who this guy was or how he knew Daughter-Only's last name has not been satisfactorily explained but the point is that there are WAY fewer than six-degrees of separation* between people in a small town and, most of the time, I like it that way.

*Yes that's a wide-open opportunity for an incest joke--but come on, it's way too predictable to be funny.

By The Numbers

16=number of minor-ish* crises dealt with today at home and at work

8=hours worked

5=errands completed before I even went to work

4.5=approximate hours of sleep

3=times my daughter has raised her voice at me in the half hour I've been home

2=burning eyes

1=aching heads

0=engaging and intelligent blog topics

*For that part at least, I am grateful.

Expect the Expected

If the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, what is the road to the end of NaBlo paved with?

Cop-out posts, of course.

Like The Little Drummer Boy, But Way More Caffeinated

Since April of 2009, my Day Job has been in a 17-bed halfway house for recovering alcoholics and addicts. I had some concerns when I first applied for the job--but one of the things that has turned out to be the most bothersome for me never even crossed my mind.

I work forty hours a week with an ever-changing cast of men of all ages* from many different backgrounds who have provided me with some of the best material a writer (not to mention a blogger) could ask for--humor, drama, philosophy. It's like working in a laboratory of human nature and five or ten times a day, I think, "Don't forget" that comment or that moment or whatever. But using that material (here or elsewhere--unless it's straight fiction which I have never really written), presents an ethical dilemma or two. It's like being a kid in a candy store, but your stingy and slightly sadistic Aunt Nancy took you there "just to browse."

All that said, I think I can safely share this comment without violating any Federal laws or my own ethics.

Tonight, a few of the younger guys were a little rowdy as they walked down the hall and the one bringing up the rear was playing air drums quite enthusiastically. As he passed, he said to me, "You know what we need around here? Drum kits..."

I said, "Yeah, that's exactly what we need because we could use more chaos and noise."

Then with a devious grin, he says, "Yes, yes, we need drum kits and...energy drinks!"

*In my time there so far, our youngest client has been 18 and our oldest 72.

Monday

I've got nothing.

Monday took all I had...

Sold! To The Man In The Second Row With An Ax To Grind

When I was talking regularly with Mr. High School*, we sometimes talked about his marriage (which ended with his ex-wife's infidelity several years before we were in touch with one another). He called our lengthy phone calls "therapy sessions" and, between phone calls, he would sometimes drop me a note (snail mail style) and ask how much he owed for our last therapy session or tell me how much he appreciated those conversations.

He told me how even before the infidelity, his wife had controlled all the money coming into the house and no matter how many hours he worked or how much money he made, she gave him an "allowance" of thirty dollars a week. According to him, she spent the rest of his money on "crap from Princess House and Longaberger baskets" and when she left, she took all of it with her and left him with an absurd amount of credit card debt, which he paid off as part of the divorce agreement so that he could keep the house they had purchased together (as an added bonus, he got the second mortgage he had to take out to pay off the debt).

About a year or so after the divorce, Mr. High School and the Ex happened to show up at the same estate auction, where the man she left him for began bidding on a "rare" Longaberger basket. Mr. High School could not resist and began bidding as well, hoping to drive up the price. They went back and forth at a furious pace until the price was nearing $400 and then Mr. High School dropped out of the bidding and the Ex's New Man triumphantly claimed the ridiculously overpriced basket for his lovely lady.

The friend who was there with Mr. High School said, "Man, that was crazy! What would you have done if he had stopped bidding?"

And Mr. High School said, "I would've paid for the basket, taken it home, set it on top of my television set and sat in my recliner looking at it and thinking, 'There's one of those sons-of-bitches I paid for that I actually got to keep.' And it would've been worth every penny."

*It's always hard to pick a single Mr. High School post to link to--anyone interested in the whole angsty saga can find the links to most of the MHS posts, in order of their appearance, on the sidebar under Shallow Thoughts On Deep Things...A Masked Mom Sampler.