Tennis the Man

The barely two-year-old waited for her mom to serve up her dinner. She turned to me and said, "Mama's gonna hook me up."

According to the same, the fellow below is Tennis the Man. Dad is the scarecrow, Mom is the lion, and she, of course, is Dorothy.

"Wankees" and Other Spoonerisms

I started to ask a question this morning: "Did the Wankees...?" You'll understand why I was unable to finish the question due to fits of laughter. The questionee helped me out by not making me try again. Instead she just confirmed that the Yankees did win.

And it started me thinking about fun language slip ups I've had. Like the time I called the music shop and asked if they had someone who could "toot my flune." What I really wanted was someone to tune my flute.

And just last week, as I watched my favorite high school football team fumble ball, after ball, after ball, I thought up a cheer to encourage them to hold on to the pigskin. In my head, it went like this: Put on your sticky fingers, hey, hey, hey!" It came out of my mouth like this: "Put on your sticker fingies" and I never even got to the heys.

I know I'm not the only one with language slip ups like these, so I wanted to hear yours. Go on, put it out there and we'll all have a laugh.

Darth Vader Messing with the General

In honor of my 150th post, I decided not to write at all. Rather, I'll post this video:

Central Park

There's a song on my IPod with a play count of 42. It is, of course, "Central Park" from King Kong. Forty-two frankly seems low considering how much I've sought it out for the last two years. Even the other songs on my top 25 most played list (like "Kothbiro" from The Constant Gardener and "God and Nature" from Amazing Grace) come in a distant second in play count. I found the track by liking the composer, James Newton Howard, not by watching the movie. So when I listened to it, I heard and pictured only what the music itself moved my soul to hear and picture.

The trouble is, I watched King Kong last week and today, as I listened, I pictured King Kong holding a laughing Ann Barrow (Naomi Watts) and sliding playfully across the skating rink in Central Park. Curse you, oversized (but totally endearing and lovable) gorilla!

Guess I need some new suggestions for a soul-stirring instrumental song (or one with non English lyrics). Anybody? Hello? Are you still reading, people?

P.S. I know I've been silent a while, but come back tomorrow, I'm going for two days in a row.

Multiplication tables and Model Ts

Grandpa uses what he calls the "HP method" of typing. "You know what that is, don't you?" he'll ask. Even though I do, I say, "Tell me, Grandpa." And I laugh every time he delivers the punch line: "That's the hunt and peck method." He has MSNtv, which is a very basic email service delivered through his television set. He sits in his Lazy Boy, leaning over the keyboard in his lap and "hunting" for the right key—pointer fingers ready. When he finds it, he "pecks" and then looks up to see if the letter made it to the screen. That's why he doesn't use the thing for what it was intended for. It was a gift from his kids so he could stay in touch. But instead of telling us about his health and wellbeing, every person in his contact list gets each piece of mail that's delivered to him. So I find myself opening emails that say if I forward it to eight people I'll get a free laptop or if I don't forward it to every person in my contact list, I don't love this country.

When he says, "Have I told you about the time…" chances are, he has. One of those stories is about how he still got checks from Grandma's pension after she died. When he finishes, he'll say, "I still get that check, but I'd rather still have your grandma." He still wears his ring and his license plate has four letters: her initials and his. One brick on his walkway (built after her death) commemorates their wedding day. They were married for 60 some years, but the last decade was marred by Grandma's Alzheimer's. As is characteristic of the disease, it got worse over time. It started with Grandma asking the same question repeatedly and progressed to her holding math "class" for the nurses at the retirement center. That's the peculiar thing about Alzheimer's. Multiplication tables were preserved perfectly in her brain until the end, but the names of those closest to her were locked away in files she could only occasionally find, no matter how hard she looked. But even as those files retreated deeper and deeper and even as the one with Grandpa's name faded and disappeared, he sent the story that keeps me opening his forwards to this day. Below is a re-telling, as I imagine it:

Gerald's first car was a Model T Ford he bought for five dollars and twenty-five cents. Or "five and a quarter" as he was fond of saying. He took Lucille for a ride to the ice cream shop in that Model T in 1941 and they married in '43. If he'd passed his physical to go into the service, the story might be different, but due to a perforated eardrum, he stayed home and built a family while his brother went to war. On Gerald and Lucille's 50^th anniversary, they fell asleep at their party, holding hands. They woke as their grandkids carried a cake with the wax from 50 candles dripping onto the lettering: "Here's to fifty more years for the golden couple." They ate cake and told stories and then Lucille turned to her son and asked where the bathroom was for what felt to him like the 50^th time that day. A few years later, when Gerald found her wandering on the front lawn in the middle of the winter night, he hired someone to help him care for her. Her memory, which had already begun to reshuffle itself, then scrambled inside out and outside in until her grown sons were still babies and lemonade was grape juice. They couldn't take care of her at home anymore. Gerald visited her every day at the nursing home even as her children's names, and finally, Gerald's too, fell out of her head. He brought her eggplant pie and flowers for her nightstand and anything else she used to get a thrill from. One day, as he checked in at the front desk with a bouquet of lilies in full bloom, the receptionist asked him why he came every day. After all, "She doesn't even remember who you are," the woman had said.

"Yeah, but I remember who she is" he said.

And that was enough.

When Word goes awry

What would I do without Techie Pal? And what would you do if opened every blog post with a rhetorical question? Would you still read it? Sorry, moving on.

See, I was working in Word and had a thought I wanted to set aside from the main text. So I made a few consecutive underscores and then hit enter. It transformed into a thick, dark line and I wrote my mental note below.

I returned to the main body and everything was fine until I wanted to use the text below the dark line. I cut and pasted it into the appropriate place. When I did, the thick black line followed AND remained where it was in the first place. I tried to delete the black line the way I always delete stuff—by hitting delete. Nothing. Then backspace. Nothing. Then I highlighted a whole section surrounding the line (for good measure) and deleted the whole thing, intending to write the text back in after removing the offending line. Black line remained and text disappeared.

Then I had the idea to copy the text above and below the lines and paste it into a new document, while leaving the black lines in the hideous original, which was now riddled with them from all of my cutting, deleting, and reorganizing. I would subsequently banish said document from my PC kingdom and move on with my project and my life. The black line followed into the new document. I tried the help button, which didn't help at all, and then I pulled a friend into my mess. It went on in much the same manner except that I was now wasting his time too and ready to quit the PC altogether and resort to hieroglyphics or a stick in the sand.

And then, I called Techie Pal and sent him the offending document. He sent it back clean and beautiful with the following message, "I did Ctrl+A and chose the formatting style Normal. That seemed to remove whateverthosewere. Dang evil lines. I have seen them before, and they haunt me to this very day. *shiver*"

The lines were gone and I went back to work wondering what I'd do without Techie Pal. I hope I never have to find out.

Falling Fonts, Social Networking, and the EXTREME Cockroach Squishing Championship

The bad news is that if you're looking at this blog on September 21 or September 22, you're seeing some of my construction mess--like colors flashing from one to another and a logo that doesn't quite fit its box. It's almost what I want it to look like--all fancy and color coordinated with my website. But there's some work left to do, so if you're still here, thanks for hanging in there.

Some more bad news is that I said I'd make dinner for the household today and then got lost in HTML, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook and neglected it entirely. On the up side, I did update all of those sites--some for the first time in six months. Oops.

I also wrote some fiction today and pulled a bit from real life. That's where the Extreme Cockroach Squishing Championship comes in. One of my favorite people in the world came up with the game to help her overcome her fear of cockroaches. Here's how the scoring works:

I can't help but think of B, the vegetarian who wouldn't hurt a fly (literally actually--he's a catch-and-release guy). Sorry man. But please understand, these buggers can walk away from a full cycle in the dishwasher! If we don't do something, we're all at risk. Honest.

Oh, and speaking of extreme stuff...

So all that leaves me with some questions for my 14 readers:

Have you ever tried messing with HTML (or had it mess with you)? If so, what have you learned?

More specifically, have you ever had your changes only show up for seconds before the site reverts back to its original colors and style? How did you fix that?

What's the most creative way you've ever killed a cockroach?

Hello Winter!

I hear there's a season called autumn, but I'm pretty sure Colorado skips it. Yesterday, I wore a tank top, a skirt, and flip flops. Today, September 21, it's snowing. Goodbye summer, hello winter. Autumn, maybe I'll find you in another region.

But the snow makes it a good day for a blanket wrapped around my shoulders and a cup of joe and a laptop in front of me. So now I'm off into the world of Lily. See the rest of you when the sun pokes back out again.

Six Words Saturday: 143 posts, 56 drafts, no quirks

The idea, which I got it from Susan at Stony River, is to sum up what's happening in your life in exactly six words.

As a I write, I have 143 posts and a mountain of 56 blog drafts. And there's the other unfinished writing—half-complete journal entries, email drafts stopped in mid-sentence, character names with no story to put them in, and a book proposal with two incomplete sample chapters.

But maybe I'll finish some things right here and now by posting a few of the ideas that just haven't quite come to fruition. Do come along for the journey, won't you?

"I'm full, I just ate a big bowl of sand" would have been about communication errors. The speaker meant to say she'd just eaten a bowl of oatmeal, which is very similar to the word for sand in Spanish. The post would culminate with a few of my embarrassing moments in England. The tamest was when I was getting ready to go out with some of my British pals (or mates, you might say) and I said I needed to change my pants before we left. To my lovely companions, trousers are pants and pants are undies. So that left them questioning why I needed to change my underwear as well as why I felt the need to announce it.

"Angry Jess" would be about spammers if I had ever finished it and was inspired by an email (rightfully delivered to my spam box) from Angry Jess herself.

"Fatty, Another Creature Loved and Lost" would be about a friend who accidentally killed her hamster by dropping him down a makeshift slide. See, she was bonding with her new buddy and since she liked the playground slide, she wanted to share the joy with him. That's the loved and lost part. The "another" part refers to the time I tried to save a chipmunk and well, see for yourself.

Another would have been about my seriously quirky friends—like the roomie who leaves cabinet doors open because she's going to come back to them at some point. At some point could mean a few minutes or a few days. I wouldn't have appeared in this post because I don't have any quirks myself.

I do, however, hate clutter—both in my physical and electronic surroundings. I delete emails as soon as I'm done with them. If I need to keep them, I file them into their appropriate folders. Same goes for my phone and my Word documents. After today's post, my folder called Blog has four fewer items. Ahhhhh, that feels nice. Nope, no quirks here.

So now, my Saturday in six words is: 144 posts, 52 drafts, no quirks.

Liver Cheese

The package of this meat says it's made with real pig snouts. That's comforting. Because artificial pig snouts wouldn't be appetizing at all.

One Last Burrito and a Grammar Lesson Too

So a friend sent this gem of a headline (Hungry suspect caught in Taco Bell parking lot) and then the very next story provided another laugh: Rotten office fridge cleanup sends 7 to the hospital. The first line is "An office worker cleaning a fridge full of rotten food created a smell so noxious that it sent seven co-workers to the hospital and made many others ill." I understand the worker was cleaning, but it doesn't seem fair to blame the noxious smell on her.

See why semantics matters? It does, it really does.

A Talk with Techie

His primary language is HTML, he sings the praises of the PC, and he knows every line of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, extended edition. He's a geek. So naturally, when my computer wouldn't work this morning, I called him for some help.

Our conversation went something like this:

Techie Pal: What are the symptoms?
Me: It won't let me log in, it pretends it will and then I try and then it goes back to a white screen and then a blue screen and then...
Techie Pal: Did you say a blue screen?
Me: Yes, a blue screen with white letters scrolling all down it.
Techie Pal: We call that the Blue Screen of Death: B-SOD for short.
...long pause...
Me: "Death" as in total and permanent cessation of all vital functions?
Techie Pal: Yep.

Luckily, the computer was only mostly dead, which, as Miracle Max instructed, means partly alive. And like Max, Techie Pal performed a miracle and the computer is now up and running at full capacity.

Thank goodness, now I can get back to watching Lord of the Rings working.

Great American Marketing

At a shopping plaza, between a store called Children's Place and another called Motherhood Maternity, stands the best example of marketing to a target audience that I've ever seen: Great American Cookie. They sell giant cookies of all varieties.

On one side, you're most likely to go in if you're pregnant. And if you're pregnant, you're hungry. On the other side, you're likely to go in if you have kids in tow. And if you have kids in tow, they're hungry.

Seriously, Great American Cookie, that's some great American advertising.

All Bark

It began as these things often do--with a few barks from the dog whose yard we were passing. Mad Dog pulled on her leash as the other dog ran our way. I held out hope that the approaching dog (I later found out that her name was Lizzie) would stop at an unseen underground fence or that her owner would succeed in calling her back. Neither happened.

I was nervous as they sniffed each other, but thought they could get to know each other and then move on. So I let them pause a moment and relaxed just a bit myself until something set one of them off and they were at each other's throats. Both had their teeth bared and the hair on their backs stood straight up. In just a moment, Mad Dog was pinned under Lizzie and all I could think to do was scream no repeatedly over all the noise. I pictured all the worst possible things and was convinced that I'd be bringing a bloody dog home.

Lizzie's owner was able to pull her off and I checked Mad Dog's ears and neck. I found only slobber. Mad Dog seemed to shake it off quickly, wagging and sniffing as she normally would, but I just plain shook the whole rest of the walk.

That was my first experience with all bark, no bite and I'm so glad.

A Blade Song

A reed is a wind instrument with a single or double reed like a saxophone or an oboe. But I bet you wouldn't guess the simplest kind of reed instrument I know--a blade of grass positioned between your thumbs.
Yep, you can make your very own mechanism of music by stepping outside, selecting a wide piece of grass (a reed, if you will), and placing it taut between your thumbs.

After you've handcrafted your apparatus, purse your lips and blow through the hole. The wind will cause your reed to vibrate and make a high-pitched sound, similar to a small animal in distress. Eventually.

In the meantime, you'll most likely produce more spray than song. And once you do get it, you run the risk of the vibrating blade cutting your lips. Oh and also, the small-animal-in-distress noise can attract predators like mountain lions and coyotes.

Remember, all musicians make sacrifices for their craft, so forget about the risk of death for a minute and consider this: with practice, your new instrument can have a range of up to three octaves, depending on the blade you select, the intensity of your breath, and the position of your hands.


Making music from nature--does it get more poetic? I submit that it does not. So come and blade whistle with me, my friend. I'll take melody, you take harmony.

Could You Go to Jail for This?

Last night, at a friend's birthday get-together, we told our teenage mischief stories. We talked about pranks we played, cops we ran from, and people we high kicked. The best came from the guy who attended a private, all-boys Catholic high school. Incidentally, he was the one who started the whole thing when he asked, "Could you go to jail for this?" before launching into one of his many stories.

All that talk made the dish-soap-in-a-fountain prank seem pretty tame (earlier in the day, the white froth reportedly stood taller than three feet).

I still hope the perpetrators didn't drive by and secretly pat themselves on the back for providing Labor Day entertainment.

The auntie I was with encouraged this little one to pull her dress up before she played in the water.

She complied, not realizing that a few inches off the ground would have been plenty.

After the stories I heard from my respectable, grown-up friends, I'm not going to pass judgment on the pranksters. My only real complaint came up when I bumped a buried bottle with my foot and then ran my feet along the edge, finding nine more.

We took them home and disposed of them, hopefully teaching the blondies to be environmentally-aware pranksters when they grow up.

Strictly Ballroom

Never, EVER would have picked this one off the shelf, despite my passion for dramatic dance scenes. But as it turns out, this film is well worth its weight in sequins.

Lost and Found

Lost and Found is a short animated piece about friendship and is definitely worth a look. Here's a trailer. I haven't read the book that inspired it, but I bet it's a gem too.

Made a man in his mid-40s weepy (twice) and made me exclaim, "Please don't be a bad giant octopus!"

Now if that doesn't make you want to see it, I don't know what will.

Ten Things Not Worth Losing Sleep Over

There's not much rhyme or reason to this post. Some items have explanations or suggestions, some don't.

10. Choosing party favors for weddings, birthday parties, or bar mitzvahs. Just forgo snacks with pretzels and you'll be fine.
9. Getting a bad haircut.
Mullets are the exception--totally worth losing sleep over, as I have myself. I once dreamed that I clearly told my stylist to do whatever she wanted, except a mullet. The more she cut, the more I looked like Joe Dirt. Woke up in a cold sweat from that one.
8. Losing sleep.
There's an interesting thing that happens to me when I know I have to wake up early (say 5 a.m.). I get totally psyched out thinking, "If I can get to sleep right now, I can still get four hours of sleep." And then I never fall asleep until the next night, when I have the freedom to sleep all I want, at which point, I wake up at 5, because I am, after all, a morning person.
7. Awkward hugs.
You know how it goes. You see an old friend and think, Do I give a side hug (one arm) or a front hug (both arms)? Do I linger a while or do a catch-and-release hug? Then you go for the front, they go for the side and you each try to accommodate the other, changing hug-style midstream. Then you practically kiss each other's ears. Not fun, but also not worth losing sleep over.
6. Sports
5. High school reunions (this one also goes under the category of things not worth losing weight over, but that's another day).
4. Fear of diarrhea--if it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen. Blame this one on the FHP boys.
3. Reality TV
2. Shark attacks
1. Having so little to blog about that you resort to top ten lists.

Pause!

It was just the three of us--as one little guy in diapers refused to eat any of his peanut butter and jelly sandwich and the other little guy in diapers threw his sandwich across the table.

After dinner, we had some play time, including dancing to the upbeat "Chanda Mama." It was slow to load, often pausing on its own accord, so we had to improvise. When the music stopped, we froze in whatever position we were in--hands in the air, in mid twirl, etc. The bigger little fellow would say "pause!" and then giggle as he waited for the music to resume. When it did, so did we.

At bedtime, the bigger little guy was missing Mom, so I stayed and waited for him to fall asleep. As I lay there next to the crib with his Curious George blanket covering only my shoulders, I wondered when it changed--an evening with only people under three wasn't always my idea of a good time.

Top Five Things to Love about Skate Night

5. Dancing to the "Cupid Shuffle", "Thriller", and the "Macarena" in skates.
4. Men in their late 30s break dancing in the middle of the rink and yelling, "spin me, spin me!"
3. A cold bottle of water after an hour of serious skating.
2. Tripping over your own feet as you try to remember how to walk after removing the skates.
1. Kids in the community having a chance to do something fun and healthy while meeting new people.

Why I Love Stories

I was working on a client's project today and one of his sections is all about the power of emotion. As I was writing and researching for it, I remembered scenes from movies and lyrics from songs that demonstrate the idea. Like when Alicia Nash decides not to sign John Nash's commitment papers in A Beautiful Mind, and when Andy plays opera over the intercom in Shawshank Redemption and every inmate feels free. It's what Billy Elliot sings about in the song "Electricity."

That's the beauty of the arts--they reach a deeper place and we can't always even articulate or understand it.