Can't Eat Home Again

Had a lovely visit at the parents' house a couple of weeks ago, but next time I'll have to bring along a travel pantry of steel cut oats, Organic Frog greens powder, ground flax seed, brown rice protein powder and a truck load of vegetables.

Once was, we were not allowed to eat white bread, sugared cereals or anything that wasn't healthy. Hated that dry, crumbly bread back then, but now whole wheat/mulitgrain is the only bread we keep in the house.

Nowadays, Mom loves the buttermilk white bread, mass market cereals with carcinogenic BHT preservatives and even pork rinds - a lovely birthday gift from a friend. Thoughtful friend, eh?

We had ribs for dinner a couple of nights & one night Dad made delicious BBQ corn. Our last night in town, we had amazing salmon and a great salad. Certainly not a bad menu, but some of us need a little more fiber in our lives. Consistent like.

Other than the salad, I don't think I saw a single vegetable. (Corn is a grain - wah wah!) On top of that, Mom made a decadent "coke cake" - a chocolate cake made with cola and frosted with an entire box of powdered sugar. Just one piece can cause diabetes.

Dad made his amazing lemon pancakes & sausage one morning which lasted me all day, but for lunch, Mom offered homemade potato onion soup. It smelled wonderful, but after the pancakes & sausage, I wasn't hungry! If I had been, what I needed was some sort of high-fiber colon blow buffet.

There was fruit - peaches, bananas, melon & berries. I found instant oatmeal in the pantry and had that with fresh fruit for breakfast. I also found the Costco mixed nuts - that was handy - and the dry scrub growing behind the house really packs a fiber whallop.

I don't know how they do it. They're in excellent health, enjoying cocktails every evening at 5pm, wine or beer with delicious low-fiber dinners followed by Box O Sugar cake and coffee. I would be in rehab with life-threatening intestinal blockage. They really are the stronger generation, in so many ways. Time to take my Metamucil.

Mother's Day Phone Call

Selected, paraphrased favorites from today's hour+ chat with Ma:

[while catching up about a niece who's preparing for college next year]

"You know, Hillsdale College in Michigan doesn't accept any government funding, which is great - they don't want the government telling them what to do. There's plenty of private sources for money for school." [annual cost of Hillsdale College is about $30K - good luck with that]

"I don't understand these silly things like Women's Studies and Ethnic Studies - if I'd come home & said I was going to major in Women's Studies or Ethnic Studies my father would have told me I was crazy."

"Oh my god, you're not going to believe this - there's a 'desert rat' eating from the bird feeder."

I don't know why I don't call more often.

Sope Baux - Bad Parents

Here goes:

I just read The Mommy Files blog on SF Gate about a mother who's upset about her kids being scared by the dogs in Pixar's new movie, Up!

Are you effing kidding me?

Her kids are six and four years old and were apparently terrified by the dogs chasing after the bird. Her four-year-old son actually scolded her for taking him to "an inappropriate movie." That's so ridiculous I don't even know where to start with that one.

It's not the children I have a problem with, it's the coddling, sniveling, spineless, self-involved parents raising children who not only can't handle a movie MADE FOR KIDS, but they're growing up thinking it's in any way OK to scold a parent. Totally totally TOTALLY unacceptable.

It's true I do not have kids. I would have eaten them right out of the womb. I spent many years as a babysitter and nanny to cousins, nieces and nephews.

The way I cared for the kids was exactly as their parents did - lots of love and fun activities, but as far as rules/behavior goes, no negotiation and no tolerance for bullshit of any kind.

Those weren't my rules, those were the rules of their parents, parents who wanted responsible, polite, respectful kids to grow into productive adults, not whining, insolent, ungrateful remoras.

The truth of the post is revealed when the author says:

"I was so desperate for a mellow outing that I didn't even check the reviews ahead of time to see if the movie was deemed appropriate for little ones. I longed to sit for an hour and a half, munching on popcorn and sipping diet coke."

Longed for a mellow outing. Hey, I know, HIRE A BABYSITTER and go to the library. Or, find an activity appropriate for the age of your kids, dumbass. A movie isn't the answer, regardless of its rating.

At the end of the post she reveals:

"My kids were both knocked over by a dog a few weeks ago and my son was bitten on the back. My daughter, who has always been fearful of dogs, was especially traumatized by the incident and has had a few canine nightmares."

I peed myself laughing at this. Not at what happened to the kids, but that she took her kids who were just attacked by a dog to a movie that has hundreds of attack dogs in it. And she wants to blame the movie?

The sad thing is, there are capable parents all over the country trying desperately to adopt children who need homes, having to clear myriad hurdles and approvals that take forever, but all this idiot had to do was get knocked up - no special test, no certification. Unbelievable.

And why would anyone take a four-year-old to a movie? A toddler cannot sit still long enough to pee properly on a toilet, let alone sit through a 1.5 hour movie. Evidently, she was too excited about popcorn and diet coke to think this through.

We made the mistake of going to an early show filled with toddlers. Toddlers who could not sit still and could not stop whining at their parents for one thing or another. Their parents have likely never used a play pen, said "No" and meant it, or enforced real consequences for bad behavior.

It was bad enough working with "kids" right out of college a few years ago who expect all the rewards & fat paycheck just for showing up to work, because they always got a trophy just for showing up to the soccer game - forget about earning it by winning. I can't imagine how much worse that sense of entitlement will be with the next generation.

I know parenting is the hardest job on the planet - that's why I opted for cats. But for christ's sake, if you're going to have them, do the job properly. If not, keep your legs closed or cut the vas deferens already.

BTW, we loved the movie and were not at all prepared for how deeply we'd be touched by the scenes of Carl and Ellie building a beautiful life together, her passing and his mourning. We both cried like whiny toddlers. The one problem I had with it was feeding chocolate to a bird. We had to wonder how many idiots are going to try that, because you know they're out there and they're going to do it.

Miss Perceptions

I do it - everybody does it. You meet someone and think you get a sense for who that person is or what he/she is about.

Lately I've been made aware of perceptions others have of me. In some cases it's a result of a temporary, casual experience. In others, they've seen all sides, without filter, and they're still off base.

The former makes perfect sense, but the latter is puzzling. I'm guessing it comes down to seeing what you want to see or holding on to old ideas instead of being open to seeing the truth.

One example: I have a friend I've known for years - many, many years. He seems convinced that I only have a good time if I'm soused. Every time we get together he encourages me to drink and drink heavily. He wants me to take a cab so I can drain the bar without worry.

The funny thing about this - the few times we were out with friends many years ago, HE was the one in his cups almost every time. One night he was so blotto he couldn't support his own body weight - he was falling into his plate. We poured him into a cab, gave the cabbie $40 and sent him on his way and went back to finish dinner.

I keep telling him that I don't really enjoy drinking in that way. I have, but I was in college. These days I enjoy maintaining my composure and not puking in a dorm room sink. But in his mind, I'm not fun unless I'm drunk. How flattering!

Another example: Sometimes people assume I'm an idiot. Sometimes I am, but I try to keep that under wraps. I blame the boobs. When people see boobs, they don't see a brain. It certainly isn't in my shirt.

They give it away when they talk to me slowly and repeat things over and over again even after I've said "I understand" (repeatedly) and explain back to them what they just told me. I'm no rocket surgeon, but I can grasp basic concepts. I even know how to put on pants all by myself.

Then there's family. The parents who will forever see adult offspring as children. Seems like a universal issue. But sometimes that lens needs to come off. It's getting tiresome. I may not know who they are through and through either, but I don't act like I do and make assumptions that might make them feel like idiots. At least I try not to.

Do we ever really know anybody?

Travelogue - Sat/Sun (8/5-8/6)

We had dinner with neighbors Sunday night. Really interesting people, and their son is a well-known comic book writer & artist (to those who know comics, that is ; ). They came by for cocktails and then we agreed to caravan to dinner.

The neighbors drove away and my father went to shut the back hatch on our car in the garage so he could pull it out into the driveway. He was lowering the hatch as I was about to get into the back seat when I heard him calmly say, "Oh dammit." When I looked up, blood was pouring down his face. Instead of shutting the hatch, he slammed the corner of it into his noggin, resulting in a deep cut.

I ran him into the house and grabbed a towel. Amazingly, he managed to hold his head out from his body to prevent bleeding on his nice shirt, but as he tried to rinse his head in the sink, it seemed to create more blood. It was a spectacular pre-dinner show. Who knew Dad was such a bleeder?

I kept thinking, what will the neighbors say when we show up late with my dad's head bleeding profusely?

The bleeding subsided after some pressure, then we threw a band-aid on his dome & headed out to chow. Dinner was great, but throughout the evening, I kept noticing the band-aid getting redder and redder. After dinner we convinced my dad to stop at an urgent care clinic to see if they thought it might require anything more than hydrogen peroxide & a bandage.

Turns out the "urgent" care clinic is more of a "hope we're open when you need us" clinic - closed after 6pm on Saturdays and Sundays. We reasoned that my dad would likely still be alive in the morning and if the cut was still bleeding, he'd go back to have it looked at.

As luck would have it, it's already starting to heal and he found an actual doctor to look at it today. Doc said it was doing fine and commended our field dressing & first aid skills. My mother is now known as Nurse Ratched.


That's blood on the floor of the garage.


That's a nice slice of prime rib.

It's strange that just about every time I'm vacationing with my parents, something happens that results in one or all of us getting hurt.

When I was 15 we took a small RV all through the Pacific Northwest and I got my thumb smashed in the door. Then when my dad stomped on the gas pedal I was thrown backward into the corner of the fridge, right between the shoulder blades.

Then at one campsite we were picking blackberries and a swarm of bees came upon us. As I was sprinting back to the RV, I heard my dad yelling, "watch out for snakes!" That wasn't a great time.

While on a road trip in Europe not so long ago, we went to get the car out of the hotel garage and noticed a chlorine smell, but didn't think much of it. As the elevator descended to the garage the smell got stronger and stronger.

Soon we were choking on chlorine gas and running for the emergency exit. Concerned that our car and luggage were left unattended, we all held our breath and ran back in to get the car. Why? I have no idea. We're Americans. We can't leave a perfectly good car AND luggage in a garage. That's stupid.

After waiting for what felt like a day or the garage gate to open, we drove around front and went in to tell the manager they were poisoning their guests in the garage.

They seemed annoyed at us and said they'd check it out, but we were convinced they thought we were raving idiots. They gave us bottles of Evian and sent us on our way. We drove for an hour with the windows down, coughing, trying to sooth our burned throats with French mineral water and cold air.

Another time in Portugal, my mother had the mussels and really shouldn't have. She spent that night in the loo, cursing the restaurant, the Portuguese and our lack of Pepto Bismol.

It's a rich tradition - vacation means adventure, and with adventure, comes the risk of injury. We go boldly forth and keep our first aid kits handy.