…because her mama trained her properly, that’s why.

no, she’s not waiting in that way. or at least, not what you folks might think. this is a pet peeve of mine, and on this last day of NaBloPoMo, i thought i would end on a cranky note. (cos that is what folks expect of me.)

i am a carpool queen. i shuttle kids here, i shuttle them there, mama wreke shuttles kids everywhere. as a stay-at-home mom, i tend to take on rides in the early afternoon, when a lot of my kids’ friends’ parents are still working or quite possibly sitting in traffic somewhere, cooling their heels.

i don’t mind it, really. i get some of my best material listening to the kids talk.  i’ve learned more about which boys are awful, which girls are snooty, which kids are kind, and which people should just be avoided at all costs. i’ve listened to silly-ass knock-knock jokes, i’ve listened to retellings of some pretty nasty pop music lyrics. sure, i make the kids listen to whatever is on my mp3 player, though anything with NSFW lyrics gets the fast-forward treatment. i don’t care whether my kids hear these things, but i suspect the rest of the world would be upset if johnny or janie listened to some of the finer verbage from panic at the disco. like, say, this:

anyway, my kids are trained from the get-go: when someone is picking you up, you wait at the appointed time by the window and watch for your ride. when they come, you shout out and let me know, and then you proceed directly to the car. people are kind enough to give you a ride, and you need to be kind and not make everyone else late by dallying.

apparently, though, this concept is not common knowledge. i can’t tell you how many times my kids and i have to come to people’s doors and knock and collect them. worse than that, though, are the times when the person isn’t ready, and when i mean not ready, i don’t mean that someone had to suddenly hit the loo before leaving. i get that, and i’m actually okay with that. but i have had situations where the person had to finish homework, finish texting someone, or finish talking to someone on the phone. and, in all of these cases, the people weren’t immediately trying to wrap things up, either; they were taking all the time in the world.

GRRRRRR!

i get that stuff happens, and so when it does, i don’t get annoyed or upset. but i have noticed as of late that there are recurrences of these sorts of events with the same folks. it really burns me up. am i supposed to be teaching the kids that they need to stop what they’re doing and get in the car if they have any intention of getting to point B? then, of course, i will get the rep as the mean-ass mom who scares all her kids’ friends.

then again, maybe that’s not such a bad thing…

just give me some steam.

wow. i have been struggling to write something every day for a whole month, courtesy of NaBloPoMo. i have actually done this bloggy endeavour now for several years, but this year, it has been tough going. this year, i decided to not to use a theme, probably to the dismay of everyone out there who reads this. in previous years, i have spent the month happily skewering 70′s or ’80s music, pet peeves, and all sorts of other things. somehow, it takes less effort to criticize things than it does to create something.

not that i c a n ‘t create something.

but it’s not as easy now for so many reasons. when i started this blog, almost 10 years ago (yes, it’s true), i mostly threw a combination of funny memes up  as well as tales of my one, then two, children. now, memes end up on my FB page when they end up anywhere; and it gets increasingly tough to write about the kids because both they and their friends are old enough to read and surf teh internetz. once they put two and two together, they’ll realize that them there’s some good fodder in here, if you’re willing to dig. (note to all current mommy bloggers — one day, your children will hate you for writing about their toilet training/bed wetting/nose picking/etc. i’m glad i never went down that path.)

so, with my favorite topics somewhat off-limits, i have to either tilt at windmills, review concerts and music, or simply blather about the weather. well, maybe i don’t do the latter, but i suspect some of my navel-gazing may seem that way to some people… in which case, let me share my two most hated (by others) works with you.

here, for your reading displeasure are:

1) my somewhat ignorant  but historic (in that it is the only bit i ever wrote where i had to cut off comments because people were insulting MY MOTHER, A WOMAN THEY HAD NEVER MET) diatribe on homeschooling; and

2) my feelings about the song wildfire, which, i must tell you, i still firmly believe, even if loads of people disagree with me and send me hate mail over (which continues to come on my old site, so if you’d like to see a total stranger call me an anus,  click here.)

anyway, one more day of the bataan death blog march. hoping i have enough steam to cross the finish line.

lighted in a room, lanky room

lighted lighting laughing in tune

today, we hit the comedy place in ballston where there was to be a special improv show for kids.  BS got some half-price ticket special, which made it even better. (top that off with a buy-one, get-one-free coupon from cold stone creamery and it was even better.) maybe because it was thanksgiving day weekend, but there were literally two other families there (and they were related to each other), so it wasn’t exactly a packed house. this is a shame, really, as the two people running the show did a great job rassling people and humor and keeping it at a disney-level of appropriateness…

which wasn’t easy considering our family. when they asked for something you talk about at the dinner table, the other family yelled out: turkey! we yelled out: politics! when they asked what’s something in your garage, i yelled out: jimmy hoffa! jools, not to be outdone, yelled out: a crime scene!

it’s moments like these where i am super-glad that no one from the division of youth and family services attends these things.

the other family was overly-hammy, which did get annoying to me after awhile. they apparently have been to these things many, MANY times before, sort of comedy groupies. (we’d been to grown-up comedy nights here before we had kids.) but again, if they hadn’t been there, it would have been all us, all the time. and their spirit was fun, so i shouldn’t gripe much.

as an aside, the boy neglected to eat lunch. and now, as it was 3pm and he was separated from video games, he realized he was hungry. he wanted to hit the concessions stand, but sadly, no one was staffing it. he wanted to check back, and he asked us whether he could go to confessions. that teachable moment alone was worth the price of admission.

anyway, we all ended up on stage at different times. i was an utter failure, playing some sort of charades-type game with julian and two other little boys. we were trying to convince the actor who was not in-the-know that we were running a debate, impersonating people from the big bang theory, with podiums that were actually guillotines. all without uttering a single word. (no, i am not making this up. and i am not on any meds that you might think i would be off at this particular juncture.) jools knew BBT, but the other two? not sure.

speaking of jools, i think he has a future in stand-up. both he and the girl were able to make up jokes on the fly during one exercise, and they both did a great job. but the boy’s delivery?

had me laughing. i’m laughing still.

yes, i am cheating by posting a link to last year’s thanksgiving day post.

but i am thankful to those of you who don’t mind.

here you go.

happy thanksgiving!

excepting alice…

i realize i’m not exactly supplying any serious blog post here. i am just highly unmotivated. so instead, i provide you the song which i look forward to hearing each year at this time. it always makes me contemplate the importance of disposing of trash properly.

happy thanksgiving!

if you love something, set it free.

if it comes back to you, it is yours.

if it doesn’t, it never was.

yeah, yeah. you can start laughing at me now. but when this song came out in 1985, i was completely hooked. it’s rock, it’s jazzy, there’s a marsalis in it. how can you not start tapping your toes when it comes on?

lots of my friends felt betrayed when der stingleheimer started on a different musical path post-police. stingerino seemed to start down a path away from the reggae/ska/punk-lite path and explore new stuff, ultimately destined for lite rock stations everywhere. and yet i love this stuff, at least up through the mid-1990s.

and if you’ve ever carefully watched the video for this song, you’ll notice some cool things happening. one person is slowed down. one is speeded up. one is filmed in black and white.  and beloved branford? he’s a transparent ghost of himself.  i just love it.

and as for the hackneyed cliché that graces the song’s title? it has probably seen it’s way onto many greeting cards and needlepoint samplers. there’s a load of jokes surrounding it including these. but me, i’m a purist. whoever said this said it best:

if you love something, set it free.

if it comes back to you, it is yours.

if it doesn’t, hunt it down and kill it.

wow. inboxes can get pretty full.

i don’t often open my gmail account. everything gets forwarded to various places and all is well. but tonight, morbid curiosity had me fire up the old gmail to see what was happening… and what was happening was over 40,000 emails, sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g. well, not really kissing but merely clogging up my li’l corner of cyberspace.

::insert guilt here::

so i started thinking of the major offenders, to which i have subscribed and never cleared out… places like groupon, for example.  search, delete, search, delete, etc. it gets pretty boringly addictive. can i make it below 39,ooo? can i make it below 38,000?

after about 30 minutes, i am only just about 35,000. how the hell did i get this many emails?

i live in fear for when i finally confront my facebook emails. that may require an intervention.

so see you when i come up for air. maybe when i hit 30,000.

and it’s all right, we never met a person we didn’t like in the museum.  we never see ‘em…

today, we had a delightful visit from my BIL, our two nieces, and my MIL. we went downtown for lunch and then hit the spy museum which, for those of you out-of-towners, is a lot of fun. i loved the aston-martin that was kitted out like a bond car, with guns in the front, a wheel cutter thingy, and the works. (wish i had one some days when i am driving the beltway.) there were all kinds of exhibits. i liked the 1960s camera that copied documents when you rolled it over them.  and i was fascinated reading about  the east german woman who bravely spoke against the repressive government, only to get jailed, with a husband who stood by her until the wall came down. then, she ran for parliament, passed a law so that all former east germans could read the files gathered on them by the stasi, read her own file only to discover that the informant who squealed on her was… her husband. (they ended up divorced. i’m sure you’re surprised.)

somehow, though, in this world of buildings dedicated to the knowledge of particular subject areas, we have gone down a road where it’s not simply enough to look at the items and possibly read a bit about them on the walls. now, museums have to be entertaining. they have exhibits where you do things on a computers, or you make things, or you are actively participating in a show. i find it a little disheartening that kids now seem to have little attention span for actually looking at the actual items in the museum but rather race toward the stuff they can do. it’s like they start out with these please touch museums in young childhood and expect all museums from here on out to be places where it’s about their fun and activity.

sigh.

i think i’ll keep trying with my kids anyway. i’ll just have to make sure to go alone to the things i really want to see in the meantime.

what’s in a name?

today, i was having a lovely time on the phone with someone from my credit card company, a company that shall remain nameless, but a company with which i have been doing business certainly for over a decade. the customer service agent had all my information in front of her, and in her pleasant, not-quite-robotic voice, she chatted me up to personally upsell me some service or another. and then, she did it.

she called me shirley.

i kept the name i was born with; but if you think calling me by my husband’s last name irks me, you should just imagine how irritated i am to have my first name mangled.

and it isn’t like i’m really particular about my nicknames, either. Middlebro still calls me boo, which my friend jen-jen is almost too happy to tell people is short for sherry-berry-boo (and yes, she did that once in the middle of the most crowded corridor in high school, much to my total embarrassment.) my family calls me sher; some friends call me by my last name; and of course, my husband has a variety of nicknames for me, all of which i will spare you.  (you’re welcome.)

does your name ever get mangled? i’d love to hear variations on the theme in the comments section. i need a giggle.

ripples never come back.

last night, we tried a new chi chi pizza place.  BC, approaching 13, is pretty open to trying any new place, although this being a pizza place, there’s not any problem with her discovering and trying something new, in this case, a pannini sandwich. jools, firmly planted as an 8 year old dude who doesn’t eat fruit so don’t even try, okay?, was content to share a white pizza with me so long as they took off anything remotely green (basil, which he usually likes, spinach, which he also likes, so why are we removing green things again?) my half was supposed to included additional broccoli and mushrooms, but his side was to remain pristine.  and of course, BS ordered a calzone with something porcine that the rest of us, red sea pedestrians, could not and would not eat.

this restaurant cleverly had some board and card games for families to play while they await their food (which, i would add, is sufficient time to finish two games of uno. at least.) as we sat around, playing cards and arguing over the rules, i managed to glance over at a family a table over from us. their oldest, a girl, looked no more than about four. their younger child, in a high chair, could not have been much over two. their kids stil in pre-game-playing mode, they looked over at us, slightly wistfully, as if they wished they were playing a card game as we were.

i smiled back at them. it will happen soon enough.

we were that family once.