Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
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M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
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Wednesday, February 28, 2007 Up in the Air The thing I like least about going to the Trader Joe's in our area is the parking lot. There's one way in and one way out, and the fact that every spot there is always taken means that driving in constitutes entering a traffic jam. You know how traffic reporters say a really bad traffic jam is a parking lot? They're talking about this parking lot. Parking on the street is pretty sparse there too, so we try to time our visits with non-peak times. We figured that the weekend of a city-burying snowstorm qualified. Most Trader Joe's customers don't drive Hummers, after all. M. Small's favorite thing about Trader Joes's is that he always gets a balloon. Usually he's willing to wait until we ring out. But today he saw them on the way in -- floating in colorful clusters above the cash registers the way they do -- and started clamoring right away. "He can wait," I told Trash. "It'll build character." Unfortunately, the one who turned out to lack character was me, because when the shopping started to take longer than I expected, I peeled off from the group and filched a yellow balloon from one of the registers. He got a yellow balloon last time, too, but I didn't think he'd mind. And indeed, when I returned to my family, the mocking I received from Trash was more than made up for by M. Small's heartfelt and unprompted expressions of gratitude. "Thank you, Daddy!" he said warmly, with a huge smile. "Thank you!" Which didn't help my character much either. So then on our way out, M. Small had somehow loosened the balloon from his wrist, and experienced the unparalleled toddler horror of watching it soar out of his reach. He even did the abject, arms-spread, "Oh, noooooo!" Except we were still in the store, and the ceiling was low enough that I could reach the dangling ribbon and hand it back to him. Disaster averted. "I want a new one," he said, refusing. I'd like to think that he considered the balloon's accidental touching of the ceiling to be some kind of sullying of its purity. Sadly, I'm cynical enough -- and so is he, sometimes -- that I suspect the whole balloon-losing scene was a ruse designed to score him that white balloon he had his eye on the whole time we were in line. "I want the white one," he reiterated, pointing at it vigorously so as to avoid getting his original balloon returned to him. Do lots of kids do this, I wondered? "That's the first time anyone's ever done that," the cashier chuckled. I knew mine was special. And clever enough to hedge his bets by pulling his stunt inside, so that if the bid for an upgrade didn't work he wouldn't be completely out of luck. He went home with the yellow balloon. I have a little character, okay? Labels: Kajagoogoo, Magna Carta posted by M. Giant 6:56 PM 7 comments7 Comments:
I think one of the most hilarious things about children (myself included, when I was one) is that they're clever enough to think UP schemes like this, but not clever enough to realize some things that are implausible.
By My inlaws live near a Trader Joe's (on Rosemeade in San Gabriel, CA). Like the one you describe, the parking lot is an exercise in aggravation. Do you suppose this is a Corporate objective of theirs?
By I think all Trader Joe's parking lots are like the one you described. I live in Southern California where there are Joe's a plenty. Yet, I have never seen one that has a parking lot one can manuver while keeping their sanity intact. I think you're right, Russell - its a corporate objective - to be cheap.
By That's why I'm glad my Trader Joe's is on the bus line. I have to go more frequently, but don't have to park.
By
The lots for Trader Joe's in Chicago also frequently suck. Fortunately, they also have a pretty good-sized bike rack, so I never had to maneuver it.
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For the record, the parking lots of the TJ's in Goleta and Santa Cruz, CA are fine, but only because they are in strip malls. The one in Santa Barbara, however, sucks massively. (Which is why I'm pretty sure it's gone now?)
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I can only think of two Trader Joe's with adequate parking in SoCal - the one on La Canada (strip mall) and the one on North Rosemead in Pasadena (waves at Russell).
By Sunday, February 25, 2007 Dig It This weekend has almost been like living in Minnesota again. Lemme 'splain. The past few winters here haven't been very snow-heavy, at least by Minnesota standards. The scientific reasons for this have been observed and remarked and hypothesized on by people who aren't me, and I'm not about to start now. It wasn't always this way. Since owning a driveway and sidewalk for whose snow clearance I'm responsible, the nineties were much less "Where is the snow?" and much more "Where are we going to put it?"Not to get all grandpa on you, but I remember one particular year when we didn't so much clear out the driveway as carve a trench along it. The snowbanks on each side were shoulder-high and so close you couldn't open the car door until you reached the garage. When the spring thaw finally came, I was amazed at how wide our sidewalks were. "Were they this wide in the fall?" I kept asking Trash. "Are you sure? I don't remember them being wider than my snowblower." Recently, the snow has been a little more iffy. It's even been in question whether we're getting a white Christmas a few times. We usually do, but sometimes it's the white of a powdered donut in a high wind. The first sign of an old-school Minnesota snowstorm came earlier this week, when an expected visitor from South Dakota cancelled her visit for this weekend due to the forecast. When no snow came on Friday and the sun set on our damp brown yard, I said to Trash, "She still could have come." "The snow's coming tomorrow," Trash reminded me. "She couldn't have gotten home." "Don't see how that's our problem," I grumbled. The snow started yesterday, around M. Small's lunch time. Febrifuge and Teslagirl came over in the afternoon to toast some news and to induct Trash into the cult of Guitar Hero (status: successful!). By the time they left and M. Small had dinner and went to bed at 8:00, it had been snowing nonstop for hours. I waited to make sure he was good and asleep before going outside and firing up the snowblower. It only took me an hour or so. Then it kept snowing all night. This morning, the entire neighborhood was covered in a thick, white, uniform blanket, except for our sidewalk and driveway, where the blanket was about six inches thinner. I keep telling myself that moving frozen snow until ten p.m. on a Saturday night made my Sunday morning a lot easier. M. Small wanted to help too. After I'd done most of the snowblowing and the air was less thick with hurtling bits of ice and driveway, Trash bundled him up and sent him outside with me. "I want to dig!" he told me. "Where's my own?" "His own" refers, of course, to the M. Small-sized snow shovel he has. I had it all ready for him, and he didn't waste any time getting to work and scattering snow from the yard into the path I'd cleared from our back door. Unfortunately, he kind of has the attention span of a two-year-old. After a few minutes he lost interest in shoveling the snow and started painting it instead with a paintbrush he found in the garage (he went with white, which goes with anything and makes the yard look bigger). Then he started bugging the next-door neighbor lady (who was hiking around on her snowshoes), making his first snow angels; riding in a sled towed by me (this is the last year he'll fit into it, I fear), and eventually getting upset about the snow stuck to his mittens and scarf and asking to go inside, where he got today's bath about eight hours early. I didn't expect to be able to keep him on task, really. Now I know that's just because I was doing it wrong. This afternoon, we all braved the elements -- and the impressive frozen dam the snowplow had left across the bottom of our driveway -- to run a few weekend errands. When we got home, he put out some food we'd bought for Squirrel Goodnut (like that fat bastard needs it) and refused to proceed into the house. We went around front, where we'd left his sled, and where the neighbor guy was now carving a notch in the snowbank to place his trash bin for tomorrow's pickup. "What are you doing?" M. Small asked our neighbor in that way he has. Our neighbor responded that he was making some space for his garbage bin. M. Small heard the word "space" and his mind went there. "Build a rocket?" he said. "I help [neighbor]," he told me, grabbed his snow shovel, and left me standing there holding the rope to a sled that nobody in their right mind was going to ride in if there was going to be an orbital vehicle available in a few minutes. He stuck to the neighbors like very unhelpful glue until it was time to drag him in for dinner, and I think he was still half-expecting to get to go for a rocket ride with the neighbors after dessert. I've learned my lesson. From not on, whenever I want him to help me pick up his toys, do the dishes, or put away laundry, I'm going to tell him I'm building a rocket. I'll have to be careful, though. Otherwise when I actually do build a rocket he might not believe me. Labels: Bacon milkshake, ballroom go-cart racing, coin-operated bra posted by M. Giant 6:47 PM 2 comments2 Comments:I'll keep this advice in mind when our boy's old enough to be bribed. I hadn't considered trying to put the lad to work, we just let him play in the snow.
By DO you rent him out yet? Because we have a foot or two of snow that he could shovel
By Thursday, February 22, 2007 Kid Videos We don't let M. Small watch that many videos, but they're so damn brain-drilling, it seems like we do. And yet we're always telling him, "No, no Curious George." "How about Dora the Explorer?" "No, no Dora the Explorer." "How about Blue's Clues?" "No, no Blues Clues." How About Curious Buddies?" "No, no Curious Buddies." "How about Curious George?" "No, no Curious George." And so on. Most of you, especially the parents, are probably already familiar with the chronically outside-voiced Dora and the sloppy-pawed Blue. And I've already written about the new jazz-inflected, Hirshfeld-looking, shamelessly in-cashing Curious George series narrated by Bill Macy. But maybe I should tell you about the slightly more underground titles. We discovered Curious Buddies when we were visiting Trash's mom in Iowa. We'd had the foresight to bring some videos, which was unfortunate because they'd just moved and only had their DVD player set up. We found a Curious Buddies DVD in the Wal-Mart bargain bin and picked it up as a stopgap, with no idea that the series would become a favorite. His, not ours. These videos feature kids playing and running around in keeping with one of several themes, interspersed with the low-impact adventures of a quintet of plush, primitively rendered animal puppets. The Curious Buddies include a dog named Dog, a cat named Cat, a bear named Bear, and a porcine specimen burdened with the moniker -- get this -- Pig. Wait, that's only four right? That's because I forgot Elephant. That's because everybody forgets Elephant. He's not an official Curious Buddy per se. He's more like their roadie. His official job appears to be facilitating scene changes after the Curious Buddies do something fun without him, and stepping in when the Curious Buddies hit some kind of seemingly insurmountable obstacle, for which they'll then offer perfunctory thanks. His unofficial job seems to be trying to get the Curious Buddies to like him enough to join their little club, which will never, ever happen. The poor little stunted pachyderm is doomed to forever exist on the unpopular fringes of Curious Buddihood. Naturally, I identify strongly with him. If M. Small ever starts doing the same, I'll know it's time for him to stop watching them. Currently, he's an even bigger fan of Kipper. Kipper is a British animated series based on a series of British children's books. The title role is a red-and-white cartoon mutt voiced by the guy who played Richard Burbage in Shakespeare in Love sounding as prissy as possible. I think it's the only way M. Small's going to hear British accents until I decide he's old enough to watch Rome. The funny thing about Kipper is not that he talks, or has other animal friends who also talk, or that they all sound too English for the BBC. The funny thing is that Kipper appears to live in a house built for humans on a human scale, yet he lives there alone. How does he pay the mortgage? He also has a couple of equally British friends, one of whom is a pig named Pig (not to be confused with his Curious Buddy namesake) and the other of whom is a schnauzer named Tiger. The thing about Tiger is that he's consistently cowardly, boastful, and selfish, but he never seems to exceed Kipper's saintly patience. I guess the message is that sometimes, boys and girls, you're going to have to put up with a best friend who's kind of an asshole. Tiger's still better than Pig, though, whose main character trait appears to be "congested." If M. Small ever starts identifying with Tiger, it will definitely be time for him to stop watching Kipper. Oh, well, it's still better for him than Battlestar Galactica. Labels: bathtub caulk recipes, embalming disasters, intestinal blockage posted by M. Giant 9:38 PM 7 comments7 Comments:"Between the Lions" rules in our house (although our boys are a bit older than M. Small). Once they start identifying with Cliff Hanger (he can never get off that cliff), then it's time for them to stop watching.
By Do not let him discover Boohbah. Most disturbing kids' show EVER.
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Oobi is another scary one.
By I'm probably a total geek to mention this, but Veggie Tales is hilarious! - JeniMull
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I do not miss those days at all.
By Well, you could do what I used to do, and let him watch Alias (except the make-out parts). My daughter loved it, and we had to promise to send her to butt-kicking school when she gets older.
By I think you should let him watch The Goodies (because let's face it, who doesn't love Kitten Kong?) and Sooty - both with excellent examples of how actual Brits speak.
By Monday, February 19, 2007 Squirrelly The year we first moved into our neighborhood, we saw a white or albino squirrel frolicking in the park a couple of blocks from our home. We saw him several more times since then, of course, and were always glad to see he was still around and healthy. Once I went outside and found him perched in the tree in our own back yard, as close as Phantom usually lets me get. And once I almost ran over him when he dashed out in front of my car. I didn't see him in my rearview, squashed or otherwise, but the next time I sighted him I was quite relieved. I don't like killing small animals anyway, and I would have hated to be the one to have killed one this special. Every time we see him, we think it'll be the last. The most recent sighting was at the park where we had M. Small's post-baptism party last summer. This was thirteen years after we moved to the neighborhood, or thirteen years since we first saw him. At this point, we're beginning to wonder if maybe there isn't more than one, or that the first one we saw died and now there's a new one. I know it's easy to look up the life expectancy of a squirrel, but I don't really want to know. * * * Before my niece Deniece moved up her from Iowa, she had a little neighborhood friend named Buttercup. Buttercup was the name that she had bestowed on a squirrel that came to their yard sometimes. How did she know which squirrel was Buttercup, you ask? Simple: all squirrels were Buttercup. Unless there were two squirrels in sight, in which case it was Buttercup and his friend. While this is a remarkable and excellent thing about Buttercup, his wonders had only just begun. Imagine Deniece's surprise and relief when she and her family packed up everything they owned, schlepped it all north for four hours, piled it all into an entirely different house, and then looked out the window one day to discover that Buttercup had followed them. Not long after that, however, she stopped talking about Buttercup and only mentioned squirrels in the general sense. Whether it was because she realized it wasn't the same squirrel that had followed her from Iowa, or was just too saddened at the thought of Buttercup's friend still living all alone down there, we'll never know. * * * The past few Christmas cookie baking weekends have been menaced by a squirrel. I suspect it is the same one. A few years ago, Trash and Blaine put a pan of fudge out on the front step to cool. They forgot to cover it, and when they went to get it an hour or so later, there was a crater gnawed in the middle of it. There were barely enough pieces without claw marks to go around, and they learned their lesson. The next year, they were careful to cover the pan with cellophane. This probably slowed the squirrel down a little bit before it was able to gnaw a crater in the fudge. When cutting it into pieces afterward, they had to look out for both claw marks and cellophane shreds. The next year, they used a pan with a lid that clips on. We don't know how the squirrel managed to pry it off, but pry it off it did. They weren't messing around any more this year. With space in our house at a premium due to the remodeling in progress and a careening toddler, more goodies had to be left to cool on the stoop than ever before. Fortunately they made use of a cooler with a zipper top. Unfortunately, the squirrel was able to not only ruin several plates of cookies, but a perfectly good cooler zipper as well. All of these years found us using more and more active countermeasures. The first year, we would just open the door if we saw a squirrel face-down in fudge. This year, I was literally chasing the squirrel off the porch, across the yard, and up the nearest tree with a spray bottle. It would perch just out of range and mock me from above, then get back to snacking the second I went back inside. We created a monster. Like bacteria that develop resistance to antibiotics, this sweet-toothed squirrel developed into a ravenous beast with the appetite and diabolical ingenuity of a raccoon. And, if you'll pardon me for being indelicate, an ass to match. When we found some plastic storage bins in the garage that we'd been using to hold cookies completely shredded and no sign of the cookies they once contained, we knew we had to get serious. So, and I'm sorry to say this, all of our Christmas cookies next year will contain prodigious amounts of cayenne pepper. * * * Last week, M. Small and Trash were looking out of our bedroom window at the squirrels in the back yard. When I got home, Trash explained to me that M. Small had given one of them a name, at her suggestion. "First it was Acorn," Trash explained. "Then it was Acorn Nut Squirrel. And now he's decided it's Squirrel Good Nut." Somehow "Squirrel Nut Zipper" never came up. Which is what he's been calling all squirrels ever since, much as Deniece called all squirrels Buttercup. I couldn't help noticing that one of the squirrels in question had a distinctive girth that I recognized. It was probably good that he'd been given a name that was different from the one we'd been using, which was "That Motherfucker." Labels: fetish tailoring, industrial lubricants, Lee Horseley posted by M. Giant 4:43 PM 9 comments9 Comments:
In one day I ran across TWO mentions of white squirrels:
By somehow those fat little critters knew it was baking weekend. batman swore as we got out of the car that he saw the squirrels laugh heartily and start to drool. i think next year we will need to resort to a metal Craftsman toolbox with some ice bags in it. i refuse to believe that something with a brain the size of a hershey's kiss can outwit us!
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<< Labels: fetish tailoring, industrial lubricants, Lee Horseley >>
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This is going to sound overly simplistic, but why don't y'all set down the pans by an open window instead of out on the deck?
By We had a squirrel named Shirley Squirrely who moved with us from Pennsylvania to Texas when I was in first grade. (I still see her sometimes.)
By Once they know there's food there, you're toast. When I was in college, my roommates and I stored our dry goods on shelves by the dining room window (kitchen space being somewhat on short supply, as there were four of us crammed into a tiny apartment). We had a squirrel gnaw through the screen three times before we gave up and kept that window - which had allowed us a nice breeze - closed.
By When I lived in DC during an internship, I found a park where there were at least three albino squirrels. Obviously, they'd been trapped in the middle of the city for so long that they'd interbred and created an entire colony of squirrels with the gene. However, it took me a while to figure out there was more than one of them, much like with Buttercup.
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The Sharks and the Jets like quarrels between the gray and brown squirrel varieties in our backyard is quite the spectacle.
By I cannot help but laugh, my mother, sisters and I also get together for a Christmas cookie baking bonanza. A few years ago we too needed to utilize the back porch for cooling. Well a couple of squirrels had helped themselves to what we now have named squirrel snacks, a yummy mixture of pretzles, chocolate, coconut and nuts. I am glad to know we were not the only victims of this humor filled crime.
By Friday, February 16, 2007 Water Fall Just to follow up on the last entry, it turns out I was wrong about having Yellow Wiggle Disease. Looks like it was just a little fluid built up in one of my ears. It hasn't happened again, in any case. Even better news? I've lost ten pounds since last year! Woohoo! Not only am I no longer nearly obese, but at this rate, I'll reach my target weight well before I'm 80. * * * We take M. Small to this large indoor park at least once a week during the winter months. It has a big gymnasium, swings, balls, nets, this giant complex of climbing tunnels and slides, and pretty much everything else you'd put into an indoor park if you had unlimited money and space. Naturally, M. Small's favorite feature is the waterfall. It's an actual fountain in the shape of a miniature waterfall. It tumbles into a pond, and then under a footbridge, and from there into another little fountain on the lower level. The actual waterfall has a waist-high railing in front of it, but the sides of the little lagoon are protected only by stone walls that are literally one inch high. I always think, Some kid's going to fall in there one of these days. Usually I think it when M. Small is swirling his fingers around in there while I hold onto his shoulder until he yells "Don't touch me!" and I make us move on to something else. The other night at the park, I decided to experiment with giving him a little more space and not being so hover-y. The experiment was not a particular success. While taking his coat off, I told him several times that he would have to stay close to me until I'd hung up both of our coats. Yet as soon as he was free, he ran right over to that little moat, lay down lengthwise on that pathetic little retaining wall and started swirling his hand around. I could see him fine, but that wasn't the point. I told him several times, in tones of increasing severity, to come back. He ignored me every time. Finally, after I got the coats hung up, I started over there to get him. Seeing me coming his way with such a purposeful stride, he giggled mischievously and his entire body twitched. When I got there, I picked him up, gave him a little talking to, then made him sit for a while before starting to play. That'll learn him, I didn't think for one second. After running around in the gym for a while, he started tugging on the seat of his pants in that way that tells me there's a load in them. On the way up to the men's room, I stopped at the coat rack to grab the spare diaper and Ziploc sandwich bag of baby wipes from my coat pocket. Went up and changed him without incident, although he remarked that I was unnecessarily clangy with the metal trash can. On the way back, I let him press the elevator button to go down to the play level. With me right behind him the whole time, he trotted out of the elevator, along the stone footpath, back up on that little moat wall, and right into the water. I don't think he meant to fall all the way in. He probably thought he could let one toe slip off the top of the wall and be fine. But a second later, he was lying on his belly in eight inches of not especially warm fountain water. Oops. At least the back of his shirts and the back of his hair were still dry. I of course fished him right out and carried him back to the bathroom, him dripping and crying in embarrassment the whole way. "I'm wet," he said. "I'm dirty." And, I refrained from telling him, You're screwed. It was maybe ten degrees outside. How was I going to get him out to the car and home without turning him into an icicle? Up in the bathroom, I got him out of his soaked clothes and put my own shirt on him. Just our luck that I happened to be wearing the largest shirt I own that evening. He wanted nothing to do with it, of course. He wanted his own shirt and pants back, as well as his socks and his shoes, no matter how many times I explained that they were too wet to put back on. Even if the noise from the air-powered hand dryers in the bathrooms hadn't freaked him out, drying his clothes with them would have taken days. There weren't even paper towels in there. There might have been fresh clothes in the diaper bag I have in my car, but then there might not have been. And even if there were, I wasn't about to leave him waiting for me in the bathroom in a diaper and my shirt, any more than I was going to carry him out to the car that way. There was nothing for it but to call Trash at home, admit what happened, and tell her to get her ass down there with a towel, dry clothes, dry shoes, and a fresh diaper. "How did this happen again?" she asked me. "Don't talk, pack," I told her, trying to calm M. Small and prevent him from wriggling out of a shirt that fit him the way a hot air balloon would fit me. Fifteen minutes later, she met us in the lobby. M. Small's toes were dangling just past the hem of a shirt I'd buttoned to the collar up his back, and his hands were intermittently poking out of sleeves I'd rolled to the shoulders. He was so happy to see actual clothes of his he could wear that he refused to take his new green shirt off until the next night. After I changed him again and dressed him in his new outfit, complete with black moon boots, I wanted to take him right home and plop him in a hot bath. But he seemed to have recovered, and he insisted on running around in the park for the next ten minutes. It's just something interesting that happened to him now. He tells everyone he sees, "I tripped and fell in the waterfall." He'll say it to you if you ever meet him. I just wanted to explain in advance what that was about. posted by M. Giant 7:50 PM 4 comments 4 Comments:I'm so relieved that you don't have YWD!
By I have a little boy in my preschool class that tells everyone "I peed in a cup" from his doctors appoitment 3 MONTHS AGO! It's amazing what they remember. This is also the kid that somehow drops his mittens in the toilet more than once. Why he had his mittens in the bathroom, I don't know. He's just one of those kids.
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Awesome. I bet we're not too far from the "I meant to do that" stage, too.
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This story takes me back! I had almost forgotten this, but my now-15 year old daughter took a header into a duck pond at about M. Small's age...it wasn't as cold as where you are by a long shot but definitely not swimming weather, and we were over a mile from home with the stroller. Turns out if you get really creative you can put a sweatshirt jacket on a kid's legs like pants!
By Tuesday, February 13, 2007 Yellow; Belly Way too early on Saturday morning, I heard M. Small calling/crying from his crib. Since it was well past my turn to go down the hall, I quickly climbed out of bed. And just as quickly fell on the floor on my ass. I quickly recovered, and I wasn't hurt, and the sound of my bulk crashing into the hardwood didn't seem to bother M. Small at all. But my concern lingered. I hadn't fallen for any particular reason. I hadn't stepped on a toy car or gotten tangle in the blankets, and I couldn't blame my socks for slipping on the floor because I wasn't wearing any. I just thought the floor was at a different angle than it actually was. For the next couple of mornings I noticed some equilibrium issues. I didn't fall again, either because it wasn't as bad or because I was prepared for it, but I was a little bit worried. You may have heard what happened to a member of M. Small's favorite "band," the Wiggles, a few months ago. Greg, the yellow Wiggle, had had to quit after being diagnosed with a disorder that robbed him of his equilibrium. That's fine for him; he got obscenely rich before being forced to retire, plus now he has a great excuse not to have to act like such an idiot in public all the time. But what if the same thing is happening to me? How can I continue to make my living as a writer if I'm too dizzy to hold on to a swivel chair? I was reluctant to tell Trash at first, but I brought it up to her yesterday. "I don't knw if you've noticed," I said, "but I seem to have been having some slight balance problems the past couple of mornings." She had. Apparently 200-plus pounds of solid klutz hitting the floor hadn't escaped her attention. The reason I didn't tell her right away is because I knew she'd probably make me go to the doctor. But I'm going tomorrow anyway, because the prescription on my allergy meds is expired and I have to see her so she can renew it and probably tell me I'm obese again. So even if Trash did want me to see the doctor about this, it wouldn't have to be a special trip. But I was still hoping she'd let it drop. She didn't. "Be sure and mention this at your appointment," she told me. "Great," I said. "Now she can tell me I'm obese and I have Yellow Wiggle Disease." "You don't have Yellow Wiggle Disease," she said. "So you're saying I am obese?" "I’m not talking to you any more." "Of course not. Pretty girls don't talk to fat guys. That's fine. I'll go find a Yellow Wiggle Disease support group. They'll talk to me." "There's no Yellow Wiggle Disease support group." "Then I'll start one. I may have YWD, but it doesn't have me." "And yet, I do." "At least until I'm on the elliptical trainer trying to get less obese and I have a Yellow Wiggle attack and I fall off and kill myself." "I'll talk to you later." "I'll always love you!" Actually, the equilibrium issues have gone away, at least for now. Maybe my YWD is in remission. I'll let you know how tomorrow's appointment goes, provided I don't get dizzy in the elevator, lurch around in it all whale-like, and make it crash. posted by M. Giant 6:20 PM 5 comments 5 Comments:I had equilibrium issues a while back, and it turned out it was just an inner ear infection. It was kind of fun once I had a diagnosis--like being a little drunk all the time.
By I had the same problems, and it turned out it was due to my allergy medicines expiring. So... this may work itself out just fine. (And I've learned to never ever ever let my prescriptions run out again. Ever.)
By My husband had that problem and it ended up being his allergies...
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Ah, yes, the old "I had this really bizarre thing happen and I don't know why, but maybe if I don't say anything, my spouse won't make me go to the doctor."
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I have Yellow Wiggles Disease!!! (Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome).... IT SUCKS.....
By Saturday, February 10, 2007 Small Child in the City The original plan was to not go outside until the cold snap ended. Obviously we didn't stick to that plan, because otherwise we would have been fired from our jobs, the trash would be piling up, and we'd be very hungry. Unless we figured out some way to make those last two problems solve each other. Although it was cold enough this morning for us to decide that M. Small was skipping his movement class again (we may have actually dropped out at this point), we attempted something semi-ambitious this evening, in terms of actual outings. We took M. Small to dinner at a fancy restaurant downtown. But before you gasp in wonderment at our sheer audacity, I should point out that we had a few things in our favor: 1) Because I have a monthly parking lease in a ramp downtown, we didn't have to search or pay for parking. Well, not any more than I already paid for this month, at least. (Note to self: remember to pay parking lease on Monday before they shut off my access card again) 2) We went at 4:30 p.m. on a Saturday, at which time there may have been as many as two other parties in a restaurant that's roughly half the size of a city block. 3) We went to the restaurant where our friend Bitter works, so we had a fair amount of goodwill pre-established with our server, which isn't usually the case. 4) As for the rest of the staff present, they've heard dozens of stories about M. Small from Bitter, so it was like they knew him already. Except that they only thought they were prepared for how charming he is in person. They were wrong. It was a completely successful trip. Bitter understands M. Small's needs better than most waitresses do, and there was plenty of stuff on the menu he liked. Normally fifteen minutes in a booster seat is all he can take, but at that point today he was still facedown in his plate, announcing, "I'm so busy eating!" He got done not too long before Trash did and about the same time I did, which meant he got to hold my hand for a little stroll around the cavernous dining room. We had the place to ourselves by this point, so it didn't bother anyone that pretty much all he wanted to do was blow out all the tabletop candles. I only let him blow out one. Bitter let him blow out the rest. Even better was leaving the restaurant to explore the huge outer lobby of the office building that houses the place while Trash took care of the check. M. Small immediately began burning off his dinner by running around me in wide circles. Not something you can do in the middle of an office building lobby during the week, generally, but since nobody was there except for us and the guys at the security desk fifty yards away, there was nobody to object. After a minute he walked up to something, pointed, and asked, "What's that?" "That's a revolving door," I told him. I still can't believe I got him away from that thing. We'd brought the folding stroller, since the restaurant is five blocks from our parking ramp through the Skyway, but we didn't need it on the way back. M. Small walked the whole way. He stared out of the Skyway over Sixth Street for several minutes, watching the traffic below and announcing, "It's going under me! They're going under me!" He made his mom ride every escalator we saw, to the ground floor and then back. Trash bought him some treats at a convenience store, and he couldn't stop talking about "the nice man" behind the counter for the rest of the evening. Although he may have also been referring to "the nice man" busking with an accordion in the Skyway over Eighth Street. It's hard to say, although I know where my vote would be. This isn't the first time he's ever been downtown; far from it. But I think this is the visit he enjoyed the most. One of the fun things about M. Small is that he never answers a yes or no question with a simple yes or no; he always restates the question as a declarative, in a full sentence, as if he's being interviewed on a reality show. Trash and I asked him if he liked downtown. "I like downtown!" he said happily. He's going to feel kind of robbed when he finds out that Trash and I used to live there years before he was born and will never do so again. posted by M. Giant 8:30 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:One of the great things about kids is their utter enjoyment of things that adults completely take for granted. And what is it with revolving doors? I'm still not over being dragged round one eighteen times in a row by my nephew, who thought it was the most exciting thing in the world ever. I had to sit down afterrwards for fifteen minutes until my face was no longer green.
By One of my favorite memories of my grandmother is when she drove me 30 miles to the nearest revolving door in downtown Houston so I could run run run. She knew I loved it, so she would take me there. Pretty awesome.
By Tuesday, February 06, 2007 Guitar Apprentice? Because M. Small is constantly talking -- including self-narrating just about every waking moment of his life -- it's easy to forget that he's still technically learning how. Sometimes he treats his mom and me like his own personal Berlitz™ tapes, repeating back random things we say on the off chance that it might be a commonly-used phrase that he's going to have to be familiar with. It's a solid theory, especially given the frequency with which expressions like "stop that," "hold still," and "put your bum in the seat and eat your dinner" get tossed around here. Especially when he's around. Even a phrase he's not familiar with might come up again, even if he can't remember ever hearing it before. Except on Saturday morning, I didn't know how to explain that it's pretty unlikely that anyone in the house will have to use the question, "How'd that bacon get under the end table?" too many times. And besides, I might be wrong. * * * The weekend before last, Febrifuge (also known here as ZV) brought over his PS2 and his new game, Guitar Hero II. I would say that I wish I owned this game myself, but if I did, soon I would own nothing else. That's because I would play it and play it and play it until my boss fired me and Wing and Sars fired me and my agent fired me and people I don't even work for any more would call me and fire me, and my son would fire me and my wife would fire me and kick me out of the house, and then I wouldn't have anyplace to plug my game in. That would be sad. Because this game rules. It has about as much to do with being an actual rock star as, say, recapping a season of Rock Star does, and yet it rocks. In case you haven't seen the ads, it comes with its own game controller which is shaped like a half-size guitar. Except instead of frets it's got five colored buttons along the neck and instead of strings it's got this little flippy thing that you "strum" to "play" "notes." At a GameWorks in Seattle a few years ago I played an arcade version of the game, which I haven't seen since except for a brief cameo in Lost in Translation (the scene where Scarlett Johanssen wanders through the arcade past some kid playing it, attended by his girlfriend who's so epically bored that she might as well be watching Lost in Translation). So I was familiar with the concept. But it you're not, lemme 'splain. Basically the bottom half of the screen shows a gridlike representation of the fretboard coming at you, with little colored bubbles indicating which of the five colored buttons you press when the bubble in question reaches the bottom of the screen. Basically the hundreds of notes and chords you can play on a real guitar are condensed into five buttons (four, if you're in easy or medium mode). And thus you're able to engage in all manner of guitar heroics without all that pesky practice or sheet music that can be such a drag. The top half of the screen shows "live concert footage," which is actually a computer-animated character of your choosing playing a computer-animated guitar of your choosing. This can make from some odd juxtapositions, as when Febrifuge's glam-rock androgyne was playing an Allman Brothers solo. There are like forty songs in a character's "career," which counterintuitively begins with arena-rock crowd-pleasers at a high-school battle of the bands and progresses to more technically challenging (read: totally obscure) art-metal being played to packed arenas. And then after every song you get a little review and a bit of cash that you can use to buy more computer-animated guitars. As a sometime musician, this should probably offend me. There's no room for artistry; the game expects you to play the song exactly the way it tells you to play it, and if you miss a note you get this painful (but faithfully recorded) off-key scratching noise while some know-it-all in the fake crowd moans theatrically. Screw up too many times, and the song's over. You lose. But there's also something liberating about not having to wonder whether to play a G-flat minor or an F-sharp diminished, because all you have to play is "green." It's a little weird if a song comes up that you already know; I had so much trouble overcoming my muscle memory on Matthew Sweet's "Girlfriend" that I nearly blew it. "Sweet Child O' Mine," however, was a triumph. I could never say the same on an actual guitar. Taking turns, Febrifuge and I ended up burning an entire afternoon and evening this way. Trash was out of town, and her mom was watching M. Small most of the time, although he did come down for a visit at one point. He's a big fan of toy guitars, after all. When I was driving home the next day, listening to the radio and thinking of the guitar parts in terms of multicolored buttons instead of actual chords, I knew this game had gotten under my occasionally-callused fingertips. I told Trash about it afterward, and she claims that the game doesn't sound any fun at all. I'm hoping Febrifuge will come back some time when she's home so she can try it. Better yet, maybe he can score another controller so we can use the game's duet function. She might even like it so much she'll buy it for us. And then we can get fired together. posted by M. Giant 7:06 PM 4 comments 4 Comments:Clearly Trash doesn't understand what good clean fun is. I understand how addicting guitar heroes is, but for my money I'll buy DDR (the stupid dancing to electronic music on a pad "game"). I've seen two well endowed ladies challenge each other in a head to head best of three songs match. For the last round, I asked them to kick up the level (faster speed = more bouncing). I totally got away with it by feigning ignorance of the game - but I knew what I was doing. The payoff was incalculable, I assure you.
By Trash needs to play it. The game is crack. Any good song you hear on the radio, you're like, "Damn, they should GH that." Think of the versions! Classic Rock! 80's Punk! Power Ballads! Country! I seriously love that game so much that if I owned it myself, I'd flunk out of school. I call it "Guitar Heroin."
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Is this a good time to mention that Teslagrl went and got the first game, plus her own controller?
By Trash has NO IDEA what she is missing. Can't you trick her into playing? Because this game is crack, serious crack.
By Friday, February 02, 2007 A Cold Mess I've read that if you want to get rid of the cold spots in your house, you should light a candle. Then hold it next to the cracks in your windows and doors and watch for it to flicker. If it does, it means the wind is coming in at that spot. If it doesn't, you still have a pretty good chance of lighting your drapes on fire, and pretty soon your entire house will be nice and toasty for about an hour, after which you won't have to worry about it any more. They even tell you to do that in Minnesota. Which is ridiculous. Every year we have at least one four-or-five-day stretch where if you want to find a cold spot, all you have to do is get out of bed. I heard on the radio this morning that once the temperature drops below zero tonight, it's not going back into positive numbers until Tuesday. That's Fahrenheit, by the way. When I got home from work this evening, I told Trash we weren't going to leave the house or even go outside until Monday morning. M. Small's movement class? He can skip a week. Perhaps if I'm feeling particularly adventurous, I might bundle myself up during midafternoon on Sunday, when the sun is high and the sky and the temperature is peaking in negative single digits, and I'll take the garbage out. But aside from that, we're hunkering down. Not that our house is always the warmest place to be. We are lucky that heat rises, which means that our bedrooms stay nice and cozy. But then we go downstairs to make M. Small's breakfast and it's like we left the freezer open all night. I thought that shrink-wrapping the windows would help, and it has. The problem is that the cold air has found another place to get in: under our kitchen sink. That cabinet beneath the sink is the second-coldest part of our house within the outer walls. The coldest spot is inside the closet by our front door. You reach in there and it's almost as if the attached mailbox on the other side of the wall has a fan blowing exterior air straight in. Serendipitously, though, we hit on the idea years ago to stuff that closet with heavy winter coats, so I can't think of a way to insulate that space from the rest of the house better than it already is. And it seems to be working. The sink cabinet is another story. You know how some people are fortunate (or extravagant) enough to have heated kitchen floors upon which they walk barefoot in the morning, like it's a sidewalk on a sunny day? We have the opposite. Our kitchen floor transmits heat from the kitchen and sends it directly into the neighbors' driveway. Some mornings I swear you could skate on it. Still, it wouldn't be so bad if I didn't have to worry about thinks freezing under the sink. So far only one thing ever has, and that's the kitchen drain. But that's enough. The first time it happened, I had no idea what was going on. I thought it was some kind of physical clog that I could remove with Liquid Plum'r. When that didn't work, I tried the toilet plunger. When that didn't work, I tried the shop vac. When that didn't work, I tried a coat hanger. And when that didn't work, I would have tried a realtor if Trash hadn't stopped me. I should have guessed it was a plug of ice, though. It was a weekend like this one, when the temperatures were roughly the same as those found in outer space. I had also had the major brainwave of trying to save some energy by not keeping the basement very warm. We have these baseboard heaters down there which are highly inconvenient for arranging furniture around, but make up for it by putting out about half a BTU each. I'd turned them off, and the ambient basement temperature probably dropped into the fifties (I've got them on at the moment, which means it's at least 60.1 down there right now). Combined with the fact that the pipe from our kitchen passes right by the frigid basement window before disappearing through the concrete and into the permafrost, it was enough to create a long, dingy popsicle somewhere in there. And trust me, you don's know how much you rely on your kitchen drain -- and your dishwasher -- and your kitchen sink -- until you can't use them any more. One feels a bit silly washing dishes in the toilet. You have to squirt in quite a bit of detergent with every flush, and the bottle's empty before you know it. I would have poured boiling water down the drain to melt the clog, but since said water would have had to travel through the room temperature water in the sink (and in the garbage disposal, and in whatever length of unfrozen pipe remained), that would have limited effectiveness. I didn't even know where the ice-clog was. What I ended up doing was spending an afternoon with heating pads and a hair dryer, alternating between upstairs and downstairs while applying heat to whatever part of the pipe felt coldest at any given moment. Eventually the clog melted, functionality returned, and I could put all the poisonous crap back in the cabinet where it belonged. And the best part is that I knew exactly how to deal with the situation the next five or six times it happened. I suppose we're lucky we never had a pipe burst, although at least then we would have been able to get rid of the water in the sink without using measuring cups. However effective this solution may be, on the other hand, it is less than ideal to have to unlock the cabinet containing poisonous cleaning supplies and have them lying around for a few hours when there's a toddler in the house. So it's better to avoid the situation entirely. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, as they say. And I've discovered that when the temperature drops below minus ten, several gallons of boiling water poured down the kitchen drain all at once contains at least an ounce of prevention. Maybe even a whole cup. And the drainpipe hasn't frozen in years. I suppose it's possible that it wouldn't have frozen anyway, that I'm using overkill to obliterate nothing more than a few particles of slush. But the other advantage is that after the water's gone down and there's nothing left but a cloud of steam rising from the garbage disposal opening, I can go downstairs and wrap my hand around that drainpipe, and it's giving off a lot more heat than one of those baseboard heaters. And that makes it possible to comfortably sit and watch down there TV for at least an extra minute or so. posted by M. Giant 8:17 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:I don't know if you've tried this, but growing up my parents were always told to keep a small trickle of water running so our pipes wouldn't freeze.
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That doesn't always work either, as we painfully discovered this morning. Long story short--the pipe leading from the dock to our boat (we live on a house boat)was cracked and leaking (through no fault of our own) and formed a solid block of ice, thus sealing the pipe.
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