Sunday, March 27, 2011

Head in the Dryer

Thanks to my Number 2 son, the inside of my high efficiency dryer is purple. 

My husband walked in the the laundry room to remove a load of clothes for Peter to fold when suddenly there was screaming.  "Oh my Gosh, this is awful!" and "Oh, come quick!"

I thought the laundry room was on fire.

Alas, there were no flames or billows of noxious gas. But the inside of the dryer looked like a monochromatic Jackson Pollock experiment.

"Did you check the pockets?" I hollered.

Indignantly and probably correctly my husband responded "No! I told him too!"

"Since when is a 14 year old trustworthy with any large appliance?" This is the kid who turned chicken nuggets into charcoal by microwaving them for 22 minutes.

After the yelling and accusatory statements, it fell to me to figure out how to keep the laundry from turning blue or purple for the rest of our lives. I briefly thought about buying a new dryer, but then I remembered an old Heloise trick for removing ball point pen with hairspray.  So with my head in the dryer and a 14 year old cloth diaper turned rag, I began spraying the inside of the dryer with hairspray.  The fumes were off the hook. I think I saw Jesus in the back of the dryer.  Miraculously, whether Jesus was there or not, the ink dripped down in long blue and purple lines. It came off, mostly.  We decided the next step was to sacrifice a load of kid laundry before we dared wash a load of white shirts.  So far, so good.

I read a short story once about a lady in England who became so depressed that she turned on the gas and stuck her head in her oven.  I wasn't depressed, but angry, and it wasn't a gas oven but an electric dryer filled with an entire can of aerosol hair glue.

If anyone asks, it's art.

Friday, March 18, 2011

Easy Ways to be Sick & Tired

I was laying around today catching up on some stuff that I apparently didn't read back in February.  I don't even remember what I was doing back on February 7th but it obviously wasn't reading the New York Times Magazine. Lucky for me it was buried under a pile of other junk, including but not limited to a Family Circle magazine that I don't remember buying. As soon as I saw the Family Circle I realized why I bought it. "Easy ways to lose 10 pounds fast." What a crock of cat litter. It was a bunch of stuff like "don't eat the leftover fries that your kids leave behind" and "stop swilling wine like a drunken sailor." Really, Family Circle, you can do better.

Back to the NYT, there was an article about a blogger that reminded me that I haven't been here in like a million years and some people must think I'm dead. I didn't enter a deep dark depression after the Squirrel died, but that really did suck.  We cried for days. Stupid $20 guinea pig.  I still blame the cat.

Back to the NYT again, so the article about the blogger made me want to sort out why I haven't been here in almost 5 months, or is it 6, and what I plan to do about that. Sometimes this thing feels like a rock around my neck. I have nothing to say, or I'm too tired to say it. Or, I can't say it because calling people names could make some people mad. I like the idea that if I wouldn't say it to your face, I probably shouldn't say it here.  Since last fall, there's been a lot of stuff I didn't want to say here, there or anywhere.  (This makes a girl's head really noisy.)

So I kind of gave up on the blog thing for awhile because as my mom says if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all. Just easier not to speak. I even kind of gave up on Facebook other than posting weird things like "I'm sorry I cannot hear you, I have a banana in my ear" entirely in Latin. I get a charge out of the people that can translate it.

Before I knew it was Christmas and I was tired. Really darned tired. Not only was I trying hard not to say inappropriate things in an online format that could haunt me forever, but I was really super tired. I even took naps. Lots of naps. Turns out there was a reason for the tiredness which leads me back up to why I still have reading material laying around from early February. I don't remember much of early February. I do remember that A&P turned 14, but I felt so lousy I'm not sure I really noticed. Then glory be, someone suggested a blood transfusion and wow, that was a good idea.

How do you talk about a blood transfusion in a blog? You don't want to freak people out. What if some readers are objectors to transfusions? What if people think you're channeling "Twilight" even though you've never read it?" I guess if you're sick enough to willingly take on someone else's half used up fluids, you probably don't care what anyone else thinks anyway.

Funny thing about being sick and tired is you kind of don't think about it. You go to work and keep doing stuff like going to the store but all the time self diagnosing with horrible diseases from faraway lands that you're pretty sure you picked up the last time you went to the Pottery Barn at the mall.

So here we are, writing some stuff and aren't we proud that blogger didn't just turn us off out of total frustration for the space we are taking up.  I started this whole thing back in 2008 during the financial crisis as a way to avoid looking at my perilously plunging portfolio that started to look like I spent a year in Antarctica on a sabbatical with 10 of my closest friends. So this was a hedge so I didn't look at the crisis and worry all the time. Miraculously, this has been an unexpected outlet except for all the stuff I can't say.