Vacation Thought No. 3

If you were on any of our flights, you may have heard:

Bird’s Lyrics to “Frosty the Snowman”

Fros-ty the snowman!

Was a very joyold soooooul

With a corn-cob pipe and a button nose

And a corn made out of piiiiipe…

.

Vacation Thought No. 2

It was stingray season at the beach. Did you know there was such a thing? Well, ‘tis the season for big giant sheets with mouths in the middle to slink past you in knee-deep water and whack a poisonous barb at your ankle.

Really, I do love the stingrays. They’re graceful and beautiful and alien, their mouths look smiley and they’re really just a gentle thing looking for little fishies to gobble. They just happen to have this unfortunate Wand of Intense Pain hanging off of their backsides.

We saw a big pack of them flopping around right where the waves were breaking. Their corners flipped up and looked like darty, spooky fins cutting the waves, and tricked us into thinking we were standing ankle-deep in shark-infested waters. It was just the type of nature drama we are thrilled to report when we encounter wildlife found outside of the state of Indiana.

Vacation Thought No. 1

Can I brag for a minute? My Bird—THE Bird—was the best little traveler on our trip to Hilton Head last week. Three flights, ten total hours in the car, three different beds and a week in a beach house with six adults and no kids to play with and precious few toys and still. She was chipper and good-natured and cooperative. (Only one true meltdown and one major injury, both of which I will describe later.) She pee-peed in the scary/ stinky airplane potty and was perfectly happy to entertain herself with shells and toys when she needed quiet time in the house. She lavished attention right back at my parents and my brother and sister-in-law and was sweet and delicious and funny. She asked to be excused from the table, used her inside voice, and threw please and thank you around like a raquetball.

Not that two-year-olds should be held to adult standards or manners as a measure of good behavior. It’s not like I have a buttoned-up Yes-Ma’am kid. She’s a spirited little bird and a powerful little joy-force that may or may not be wearing clothes at any given moment. But she is so agreeable, so generous, so thoughtful and of such a pleasant disposition. She’s so much fun to be around, and I am more grateful than I can describe to have had a full, uninterrupted week of her silly, loving company.

Back now, more soon

Birdy's Daycare Provider asked her where she went on vacation.

She said, "We went to LUNCH!"

An end-of-naptime quickie in 4 parts

Proabably four times in the last few weeks, our power has been out at home. Sometimes we're here to experience it, coming in from the backyard in the sunshine and flipping useless switches, sometimes we come home from work to a blaring stereo and blinking clocks.

Every time it happens, we find three or so dead birds, fried right up, piled under the utility pole with the huge gray box on top in the alley behind our house.

++++

I am going to organize a campaign in the fall to banish the word "Best" used alone as a closing in emails and letters. As in,

Blahblah blah blah nonsense blah blah please let me know your feedback and I will relay it to the client.

Best,
Joe Coworker."

I get a lot of these. I fucking hate it. Don't do that.

++++

We are going on vacation in less than a week, with my whole family, and I could not be more ready or more excited. And when I return I have pledged to be a little purging dervish, donating or tossing every single item in this house I don't use or love. I'm thinking of giving myself a goal , like 1,000 things. Ambitious.

++++

My bird is waking up whiny as we speak. Eeeeh. Eeeeeeeeeeehhh. Eeeeeeeeehhhhhhh. I'm going to go set her free again into the world of the fully awake.

This morning she sat still like a little churchmouse, hands folded on the Book of Common Prayer and eyes straight ahead, singing out of an upside-down hymnal. Cutest. Thing. Ever.

The Bridges of Yard Sale County

First of all, thank God for friends who don’t let you get away with getting all dramatic.

Y’all are right. I’m in the right place at the right time, and really, aren’t we always in the right place, even when it sucks? I’m just a little bored, trying to be okay with the decision to stop helping people as a career, and also little embarrassed by my last post. I kind of feel like the high school girl who stayed up all night writing dark and dramatic poems in her journal and then turned it in to the High School literary magazine in a fit of poor, poor judgment. I also like to call this feeling “Vicious PMS.” You can see more of my work in this medium in such classics as "Late Night Nonsense Argument with Husband," "Ridiculously Rigid Toddler Rules, " and the timeless "OMiGod That Commercial Was SO SAD, Where Are the Tissues."

+++++

I have a twitch in my right thumb. It is driving me crazy, this thumb flicking about on its own.

+++++

YARD SALE LIST! That’s what “YS List” stands for. I was going to make a list of yard sales and drag Bird around town tomorrow morning, buying other people’s castoffs and making promises to refinish/ re cover/ rewire. (That last one is funny, I’ve never rewired anything. But I have promised.) I’m not really going to make a YS list—my parents are coming in from Indiana for the weekend. But at one point I sure thought I was.

Here’s a yard sale story for you:

I grew up in an Indiana town divided right down the middle by two-lane Highway 36, also known as Main Street. Highway 36 will take you all the way to Colorado, eventually, but about an hour or so down the road from my hometown is Rockville, home of the Parke County Covered Bridge Festival. It is also the covered bridge capital OF THE WORLD. In your sappy face, Madison County.

If you have either a Tom Petty song or an REM song in your head after reading that last paragraph, dude, so do I. And we are totally old.

The festival is corny and crafty, and most years I never made it all the way to Rockville to walk around the town square and eat caramel apples and browse the nine hundred varieties of cutesy scarecrows made of straw and burlap. My main event was the drive from my town to Rockville along Highway 36, a long straight country drive in the early fall under a fat blue sky. And what could make that scene more appealing than the rural residents of three Central Indiana Counties dragging their crazy-assed junk to the side of a skinny old highway, ready to haggle over old handmade quilts, ridiculously kitschy furniture, driftwood lamps and broken electronics? And some of them even sold homemade gooseberry pie. I loved it. It was like a holiday to me.

I went year after year, sometimes dragging a college friend along, sometimes my mom, sometimes just me alone. I started to realize that some of the yard-salers were setting the same stuff out, year after year. I developed favorites (the gooseberry pie ladies, for example) and ventured down other county roads for even kookier loot and sometimes spookier people. I found the sweet spots, the hidden treasure, the stacks of embroidered pillowcases and ugly landscape paintings.

One year I took Beardog with me, during the period of his life where he went everywhere I went. We were a stinky, hair-covered team, me blowing down the highway singing at the tops of my lungs in the sunshine with the windows down, Beardog exhibiting the excellent dog quality of not complaining about loud singing, both of us hopping in and out of the car whenever something looked interesting.

I was haggling with a wiry old man in a lawn chair behind a long train of card tables over some old camera or belt buckle or brooch, and I looked down to find my sweet floofy dog freely pissing all over a cardboard box full of For Sale Junk—a $1 your-choice bin sort of thing that was stashed under the table separating me and the man with the overpriced broken radios. Having no idea how many precious $1 items were housed in that box, and being at the end of the day’s cash, I ended our negotiation and walked Beardog swiftly back to our car and drove away. I don’t know if anyone ever noticed the piss-box.

I’ve always felt a little guilty and a little victorious about that.

In closing, let's talk about what happens when you edit that story:

I went to a yard sale.

My dog pissed on a box of junk.

I kept quiet and left in a hurry.

YS List

There’s something written on my calendar for tomorrow that says “YS list.”

I have no idea what it means. But I wrote it earlier in the week—earlier in the month?—for that day specifically and I’m wracking my brain trying to remember what I’m supposed to do about it.

I’ll spend all day tomorrow totally spooked that someone will come flying at me demanding my YS list, and I will be grievously unprepared.

x x x x

I got a cut and color yesterday. The answer to “how does the miracle $15 haircut lady make a living?” has been answered: color. It’s cheaper there than at most places, but writing that check still made me catch my breath.

x x x x

Today at work I was coming up with a title for a sewing demonstration DVD, and I was making this huge long list of related words and concepts in a stream-of-consciousness way. I just looked back over it, and one of the words I listed was “demon-sew.” As in Demonstrate + Sew.

But now I’m picturing black, wispy demons with horns and jaggedy wings trying to thread sewing machines and pricking their thumbs.

Now there’s a way to sell a sewing machine.

x x x x

Birdy is the fricking potty training queen. She is also at a stage in her social scene where lots of the kids in her daycare class have pregnant mamas or new babies in their lives, and she spends most of her free time walking around with a baby stuffed in her shirt, asking you if you want to touch her tummy.

It makes people kind of uncomfortable to see a pregnant toddler.

x x x x

I have a photo of her as my monitor’s wallpaper at work, and I’m staring at it right now, missing her like fucking crazy. This week has been long. And boring. As shit. And what’s that? Oh, two hours? I have TWO MORE HOURS to fill in this day, and nothing to fill them with. Doing nothing is far less fun when you have nothing to put off in order to do the nothing, if that makes sense.

I was teary about this job yesterday morning. There has been very little work for me in this past week, and I feel over-payed and under-needed. I miss having people call me and ask for help, and being able to say, “I will help you.” I miss knowing what to do. I miss procrastination; now it’s just boredom.

And also, nothing interesting has happened to me during my eight-hour workdays in the last month. No crazy hillbillies, no bad hollers, no weird roadside shit. No weird requests or desperate pleas. No profound life lessons or cautions. No more squirrely feeling in the pit of my stomach, it’s true, but also no feeling in the pit of my stomach.