Long Commute on the Bus

“The bus was really slow. It sucked. There was a crazy guy on it,” he said, stabbing roasted beets with his fork.

“What kind?” I said.

“He was talking about Regan.”

“Okay, like ‘good old days’ or ‘bad old days?” I said.

“Like ‘bad old days,” he said.

“Hmm,” I said.

“There was a ton of people, so I decided to talk to him. He asked me what I did, so I said I write algorithms for controlling cruise missiles.”

“HUR.”

“Yeah, that shut him up.”

I knew I loved him the first time I caught him fucking with people. It’s like me, but with peens. I need to tell a story about how I fucked with someone for two years, but that will have to wait until tomorrow.

PS, I tried to link to a story about me convincing someone on the bus I was colorblind, but I think that got et. Now I have another assignment! Currently I am trying to convince some Canadians that plasma banks are hot pick-up places in the States. It’s totally working.

As my fourth grade teacher said, there is NO EXCUSE FOR ME OR MY BEHAVIOR.

ALSO, will you please tell me if there is some kind of freaking academic term for “fucktards who use their children’s names as online handles” e.g., “Patricksmama” or “NayNaysPoopswabber.” I am striking out. Thanks, ilu.

Report on World War One

Franny: WWI started when a Brtitish man shot and killed the heirs to the throne. His name was Archduke Fronklet. Isn’t that a weird name? Archduke Fronklet. That’s the only part I really remember.

The airplanes above, they affect almost the whole entire war by dropping bombs. Oh, wait, they killed almost 137 people. I think. I’m not sure. Isn’t that a lot of people?

Me: Well, are you sure it’s that many?

Franny: I don’t know. But if it is 137, it’s a lot, right?

Me: What else happened?

Franny: I forgot. Wait, there was a flare gun, which the French invented. And a machine gun. And a broom hand shotgun. And I know what their elevator looked like. They used rope and put wood on the bottom.

Me: When did you give this report?

Franny: I give it today! I’m really nervous.

Me: Godspeed, kid.

Weekend Round-Up from the Non-Sucky Domestic Angle

Well, it’s not all hair-pulling and freaked-out barfing and loose teeth around here. We still find time to designate for a dizzying array of domestic distractions. Companion has been on an absolute canning spree, which either means he’s secretly pregnant and nesting, or there’s something about the apocalypse he hasn’t told me about. Don’t you hate it when they hold out on you like that?

As Xtian Materialism Day is approaching, he decided to do the roll call of all the jars.

Plum! Blackberry! CROOOOOW!

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Just kidding. There’s no crow flavor.

On Sunday some friends came over and one half of the couple made quince jam and jelly with him, while the remaining lazy people indolently rolled around on the couch, discussing Britney Spears and law school, being glad that their interest in jam began and ended at eating it.

They worked for about four hours, and because the quinces were overripe, it only yielded something like seven jars, three of which were jelly. The jelly is very beautiful. There was leftover jelly that did not fit into a jar, so it was placed into a dish. This prompted me to get out the goat cheese, the gruyere, some crackers, and the chorizo. Chocolate may have been involved. I am a food hedonist.

Here you see quince jam and jelly, with chorizo in repose. Chorizo is fashion.

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Companion, house baketress and seamstress and who knows what else, has delved into the world of pain au chocolat. He says this was to use up the quality leftover Halloween candy, but I know better. He just likes to bake.

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We rounded the weekend off with everyone’s favorite, hand turkeys! It’s not Fangsgiving without hand turkeys.

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I finally realized that every dopey tradition I do comes from the time I was happy when I was a kid, which was before I was six and still living with my grandmother. I think I am thisclose to making one of those crochet dollies that hides the extra TP. Someday we are going to own a beautiful house and the inside will be wood-panelled and done in trailer decor. Could it get classier around here? Probably not.

I have five minutes, so I will say that mediation kind of blows. That was the most time I’ve spent with my ex since I moved out four years ago. One thing I didn’t expect was for us to not just have totally different goals, but totally different perspectives as well.

(See, now I’m reading it, and this sounds stupid. Of course we don’t agree. But it was like two people in a room…one thinks you should eat peanut butter sandwiches for every meal, and the other thinks everyone would like to wear puce every day. And the goal is to get the farmer, fox, and chicken across the river. Where do you go from there?)

I was all excited on Saturday about how much progress we’d made, and then he sent an email undoing everything. If he doesn’t recant, we are back to square one for our next session.

Well, I will know what to expect. One less thing to fear.

Moar later.

Please Excuse Me From Gym; I’ve Got This Terrible Cold Coming On

I am very excited to tell you that I am supposed to be getting pregnant right now. No wait. Right. NAO.

Just kidding. But we were making plans. I had heard that people planned pregnancies, and I was about to join their ranks. WOW! Do people really do that? I guess so. I was taking vitamins and laying off the smack, and I was pretty sure I was going to know who the father was.

Anyway. It’s always been hard over here. It’s kind of like having one-and-a-half kids, since the big one was only here half the time, would have to integrate in, was sad on the way out, and then all the other times we had an only who missed her big sister. We always told ourselves that it wasn’t about replacing the big one. We fretted that Der Strudelnator would form some kind of alliance with the supposed new one, and the big one would get shut out. We thought the big one could spend more time here in the future, and then we would have a boodle of kids. Or she could decide that her dad was the best thing ever and we would hardly see her. It was complicated. We had to brace ourselves for every outcome if we were going to add another kid to the mix.

But sometime this summer, I think when we went on vacation, we brought it up and kind of went, “NAH.” Did we want to start over? Did I want to be a boobrancher again? Did we want to be outnumbered? NAH.

It feels weird. It’s like a little taste of death. No more making babies. That’s it. Here comes the grave. I am no longer a maker of life. Now my kids will grow up and trod over me and make their own kids and they will eat my liver and push me out on the ice floe.

Part of it was turning thirty, too. Someday I can be a wise old lady, or at least trick people into thinking I am, and say, “Yeah. I had kids in my twenties.” And then I can jump into my yacht and get greased up by jiggly deck boys. Or something. But two is the magic number; I’m so happy to say I’m shutting down the baby garage.

In Other News

While I’m feeling maudlin and stupid, I will tell you something I remembered this morning. Once, about a year before I left my husband I was whinging about the lack of sex (so a normal day-to-day activity) and he said something that stuck with me.

“Sorry. This can’t be fun all the time. After a while, marriage is boring.”

I am laughing as I am typing because I remember how crushed I was when he first dropped this revelatory science on me.

Soon, after all this is settled the hard way or the easy way, I will go back to hardly thinking about him, and only sometimes will the dumb things he said pop into my head.

HAW!

My Blog Store: Let Me Show You It

My blog store. Between you and me, I like the way it sounds. I like working it into conversation.

“Christmas is coming. Have you seen my blog store? Let me send you the link.”

It was inevitable, wasn’t it? Am I selling blogs now, you ask, coyly? No. Are you new? I am selling blog merchandise. Or “blerch” as we say in the “biz.” Did you see what I did just then? You can use that casually, but if I find that word with your handle attached to it on the Urban Dictionary or worked into something on Metafilter, I am sending my readers after you. For reals. I don’t want to DoS attack your server, but I will.

ANYWAY. Nothing provides the kind of geek cred that you wish to attain like wearing the merchandise from some website that practically no one’s ever heard of. It will give you cachet at work, though frankly I don’t know why you’d need it, surrounded by WoWers as you are. They wouldn’t know REAL geek cred if a level 55 Druid came up to them and cast a cool buff on them, would they? I didn’t think so. You can feel smug wearing my blerch when you know they are just going to go home and fap to lizard women. On second thought, I guess I wouldn’t want them reading my musings anyway. Pearls before SWINE.

I suppose you would like to know what sets my blog store apart from other blog stores. Other blog stores throw some image file at a tee-shirt company that goes through a currency-fencing middleman service. Not here, at my blog, “What Fresh Blog is This?” You can be assured that my blerch is made by local artisans in my tri-state area who are paid a fair wage to screenprint my witticisms and my menstrual-experience art onto quality organic cotton tees. Well, to be fair, one shirt reads “Blogging is happy agony,” which is a twist on everyone’s favorite hottie be-piped dead French philosopher, but my readers are so clever I don’t have to pedantically attribute anything.

Further, as subscribers of my videoblogging experiments can attest to, I am a voluptuous woman, and frankly, the large “ladyfit” tee shirts sold by other companies are better suited as leg warmers on someone with mammerjammers like mine. And I know I’m not alone. So on the order form after the choices “organic” and “free range” you may also input your exact bust/waist/hip measurements, because I wish to exclude no one from the opportunity to wear my blerch with pride. No one should feel too scrawy or too voluptuous!

Finally, let’s talk about payment. It’s an uncomfortable subject, but the artisans need to eat, too. We must also be thankful for my wonderful nanny who makes all this possible. How else could I update WFBiT? six times a day? Face it, you think you could get by, but around three o’clock you would start wondering what I had for lunch and how the carpet-cleaning company responded to my angry yet professional-sounding letter to their corporate headquarters. Not everyone can make the soap opera of their lives fascinating, but I have the blog touch. The blouch.

So, please, as you are visiting my blog, check out my new blog store linked off my sidebar, entitled, “What Fresh Blurch Is This?” Says it all, and locks down that new word as my intellectual property (read my Creative Commons license if you don’t believe me). Isn’t it time to show the world your obscure and eclectically-geeky tastes? Remember, there are only a little over 40 shopping days till Christmas!

And It Was Uphill Both Ways

It took me twenty minutes to walk the block or so home today. As soon as we rounded the first corner, Strudel had a cataclysmic meltdown. People were looking out their windows at the screaming child in the street. Then she came home and screamed for another half-hour. Bonus!

I have been taping her for the past couple of weeks with no real plan in mind, until today.