A Spoiled Girl and Her “First World Problem.”

First world problems are the complaints and woes of privileged citizens of industrialized nations.  I’m not just talking about the Bill Gates-es and the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world, either, although Zuckerberg has his own first world conundrum right about now, what with that whole IPO thing being, shall we say, less than a raving success.  By “privileged,” I’m talking about most of us.

The following are some examples of first world problems:

“I put a band-aid on my thumb and now I can only text with one hand.”

“It’s nap time and my housekeeper is not done cleaning. How will I sleep?”

“Both of my Kindles are out of juice. How am I supposed to read tonight?”

“They took the armchair out of the elevator in my dorm building. Now we have to stand all the way to the fourth floor.”

You can read more examples of first world problems on a website called (get this) first-world-problems.com.

I mention this because yesterday I went grocery shopping, and I do not much care for grocery shopping.  In reality, it’s no big whoop.  I shout to the kids that I am going to the store, that “I have my phone in case you need me,” and it is at this point where the kiddos have a first world problem of their own.  They aren’t allowed to swim when there isn’t an adult around, so now they have to find something else to occupy their time.  I then hop into my nice air conditioned vehicle, turn on the satellite radio, and take 10 minutes to drive to the grocery store.  I grab a cart, and then start to peruse the aisles, where my wondering eyes see about 75 different kinds of peanut butter, a couple hundred varieties of carbonated beverages, and fruits and veggies in every conceivable color and shape.  Eventually, I wait in the check out line, where the wide assortment of tabloids, cooking magazines, and other periodicals all shout out for attention with their headache-inducing, big bold words.

“Best and Worst Beach Bodies!”

My EYES! My eyes!!! HELP!!

“How to Please Your Man!”

Because we’ve never covered THAT topic before…

“75,000 things to do with Cake Mixes!”

Or 75,000 cookies, or things to bring to potlucks, or how to make gifts out of food.  Seriously.  Pick one.

By the time I check out, load up my car, and begin heading home, I realize that the whole process has taken up way too much of my time.  And it is at THAT point, I realize that I am a spoiled rotten brat of a woman who is complaining even though I didn’t have to go out and shoot my own dinner, or even worry about how I was going to feed my family the next day.

I am blessed beyond all possible belief, yet I have the unmitigated audacity to gripe?  Gee, that sounds like a first world problem to me.

How To Crash A Redbox, And Other Silliness

Over the weekend, we inadvertently learned how to crash a Redbox Movie Rental Kiosk.

Apparently, if you accidentally hit the “return” button while browsing the selections, and then upon realizing your mistake, quickly push the “back” button several times while muttering to yourself, “No, no, no, that’s not what I meant to do,” the machine freezes, leaving you without the ability to rent a movie, and seriously annoying the growing line of people behind you.  Now that you are armed with this information, please do not go out some day and crash all of the Redbox Movie Rental Kiosks in an idealistic fit of “people should spend more time outdoors and not in front of their T.V.’s.”

Crashing a Redbox really should not be so easy.

It was at this point that we beat a hasty retreat, muttering something about “the machine being down” to the people directly behind us, and then located…ANOTHER Redbox.

This one was in a Walgreens, situated right next to the display of sunglasses.

While waiting for the man in front of us to make his selections, Tweedledee and I tried on a few pairs of sunglasses.  One pair sat on the display, so big, round, and delightfully tacky that I just had to grab them off of the rack to see if they would fit over my existing pair of eyewear.  Once on my face, my husband said that they looked like Johnny Depp’s Willy Wonka glasses.

No kidding. They looked LIKE THAT. On the bright side, absolutely NO UV rays will hit the upper portion of your face.

It was at this point where I started to sing…”Willy Wonka, Willy Wonka, the Amazing Chocolatier” while bopping my head to and fro, right there in the middle of the Walgreens, prompting my husband to inform our children, “Your mother’s lost it again.  It’s all over now,” while I dissolved into a fit of goofy laughter.

Being dignified is so BORING.

Festivals! We’ve Got Your Festivals Right Here!

I find it absolutely delightful (and amusing) that on this Memorial Day weekend, in St. Louis we have a plethora of Festivals that we can attend:

A Greek Festival.

Chinese Lantern Festival.

An Irish Festival.

The St. Louis African Arts Festival.

You said it, Brad!

Have a Great Weekend!

Memorial Day

Decoration Day

Sleep, comrades, sleep and rest

On this Field of the Grounded Arms,

Where foes no more molest,

Nor sentry’s shot alarms!

Ye have slept on the ground before,

And started to your feet

At the cannon’s sudden roar,

Or the drum’s redoubling beat.

But in this camp of Death

No sound your slumber breaks;

Here is no fevered breath,

No wound that bleeds and aches.

All is repose and peace,

Untrampled lies the sod;

The shouts of battle cease,

It is the Truce of God!

Rest, comrades, rest and sleep!

The thoughts of men shall be

As sentinels to keep

Your rest from danger free.

Your silent tents of green

We deck with fragrant flowers

Yours has the suffering been,

The memory shall be ours.

                              – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“It’s A School Night. Wait, No It’s Not!”

The Tweedles’ last day of school is tomorrow, and Summer Vacation is so close we can taste it. For the past few weeks, with each passing sunrise, anticipation of the Blessed Event has grown to monumental proportions, and not just by the Tweedles.

For, I, too, adore Summer Vacation and the freedom that comes with it.

Behold, the magic!!

Each year, I envision fun outings with the kids, lazy days hanging out by the pool, and having about fifty less things to nag them about on a daily basis.

I am fond of deluding myself.  This uncontained bliss only lasts for about a week.

After a week, I realize just how tedious it is to clean the house with Tweedles underfoot.

My sentiments, exactly. Nobody sits around the Thanksgiving Dinner table 20 years after moving away from home and discusses how clean mom kept the refrigerator handle.

It takes roughly a week before I hear the first whiny proclamations of boredom.  This, despite the fact that I have repeatedly told them NEVER to tell a mother they are bored–we can always find something for them to do.

It takes a week before I start to bemoan my long lost days of youth, when I, too, could sleep in until 10:30 and not have a laundry list of things to complete upon rising.

I’m gonna stay right here until my bladder bursts.

The fifty school-related things that I no longer have to nag them about are replaced with fifty summer-related items, and I find myself saying things like:

“Get off the computer and go outside.  Minecraft will still be there later!”

“My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding?  Really?!”

“Stop splashing!  I’ve got a library book here, ya know!”

“The lawn doesn’t mow itself.  If you want your allowance, you  have to do something for it.”

However, it is still Summer Vacation, and no doubt we will enjoy all of the pleasantries that go along with it.  Late night swims, playing four square in the street after dinner, and impromptu trips to the Zoo just because we can.  Barbequing all the time, eating outside, and saying, “Yes, you can go ride bikes with your friend,  just be home before dark.”  Music from the next door club house will play from noon until 9:00PM, providing a summer soundtrack.  There will be wet, balled up towels and swimsuits on the bathroom floor and flip flops laying all over the house, evidence of a day well spent.

And for nearly three months, I won’t have to say the dreaded words, “It’s a school night.”

Never Use One Word When Ten Will Do

I typically write my blog posts in the morning.  There are occasions when I write them up the day before and save them for later, but for the most part, I do a brain-dump all over Microsoft OneNote when my mind and body are waking up with the aid of several cups of entirely-too-strong Starbucks brew.

Now, THAT’S what I’m talkin’ about!!

And you, lucky folks, are the recipients of that Brain Dump.  (Or maybe “lucky” was the wrong adjective here…)

Then there are the mornings when I cannot string two words together to save my life.  Yesterday was one of those mornings.  Oh, there were thoughts rattling about up there of course, but they basically consisted of “ugh” and “blah.”  Hence, no Monday Morning blog post.

Obviously, this is not a problem for everyone.  In fact, I read a news article this morning about a fellow who uses A LOT of words.

Okay, it’s not really about a guy who uses a lot of words.  The article is actually about how the Federal Trade Commission declared that POM Wonderful LLC was in violation of federal law by making deceptive claims about its pomegranate juice.

Stop! You can’t say that!!

Apparently, there isn’t enough scientific evidence to confirm that pomegranate juice is actually, indeed, a super-food.  The FTC’s Chief Administrative Pontificator told POM Wonderful LLC to quit saying how wonderful their stuff is.  And he used 345 pages to do it.

The hardbound version of The Hunger Games has 384 pages. Just sayin’.

345 pages.  That’s a novel.  He wrote a novel for something that could have easily been whittled down to a Twitter Post:  “@POMWonderful Not enough evidence. Quit it!”  Now, isn’t that nice and pithy?

It makes a person wonder–what could have possibly taken 345 pages to SAY?  A standard 8.5 x 11″ piece of paper, double spaced, with one inch margins, and using Times New Roman 12 font contains approximately 300 words.  A bit of simple math tells us that his tome to POM Wonderful LLC contained approximately 103,500 words.

The Declaration of Independence–including signatures mind you–contains 1458 words.   There are 4543 words in the original, unamended Constitution of the United States, and that, too, includes signatures.

Oh, sure. You know what John Hancock’s signature looks like, but did you know what HE looked like? Quite the dapper fellow, no?

In essence, the Founding Fathers formed a nation using roughly 6% of the words this guy used to tell POM Wonderful that there wasn’t enough evidence to say that POM Wonderful’s Pomegranate Juice  is indeed wonderful stuff.

Words fail me.

Food Network Nonsense

My new Food Network magazine came in the mail yesterday.  I don’t really know WHY I subscribe to it.  I hardly ever make anything out of it, and on those rare occasions that I do, my finished product has never looked as appetizing as the picture in the magazine suggests it should.  Furthermore, most of their recipes either have ingredients that are entirely too expensive to justify feeding them to a family of four, or involve so many steps that it makes the act of cooking dinner a day-long exercise.  I don’t have all day.  Okay, I do have all day but I take issue with choosing to spend it fashioning an expensive meal that will be devoured in 15 minutes while watching a rerun of The Big Bang Theory.

Be that as it may, each month I sit down and glance through it anyway, looking at pictures of pretty food, prettier kitchens, and step away generally feeling like an unsophisticated Food-Featherbrain.  I am not a “foodie” by any stretch of the imagination, but I can certainly hold my own in a kitchen when the mood strikes.  And I bake.  Actual baking, with flour and eggs and various types of leavening agents.  Food Network always gives suggestions on how to make already baked items look like a candy bar or snow cone, but that’s really not baking.  That’s just dressing up food.

After your teeth break from all of the coarse sugar on top, let’s go get a real snow cone.

Copyright infringement laws prohibit me from posting photos or images from the magazine–a fact I wish I would have known before I started snapping pictures with my phone.  (Thank, you, Google Images.)

My husband works with an Israeli lady.  Every time her name comes up, my pitiful, uncultured Western mind imagines Ziva David from NCIS.  I  think that my husband is amazingly lucky to work with someone so completely bad-ass and that surely meetings with her in attendance are devoid of nonsense, out of sheer fear.  She once told Ken that Americans have a strange habit of making healthy foods utterly and disgustingly unhealthy.  I have to say she’s probably right.  We make unhealthy foods even unhealthier.  Ever hear of the Krispy Kreme burger?  Food Network illustrated this unhealthy point beautifully with a whole page dedicated to banana pops.

Of course it’s good for you. It’s a banana, isn’t it?

There was an insert titled, “50 Things to Grill in Foil.”  When I think “foil packet,” I think about camping and Boy Scouts.  I think about throwing in a hamburger and some veggies and eating around a campfire with a Spork.  But Food Network has taken “foil packet” to a whole new level.  #9 is lobster scampi.  #46 is bread pudding.  I ask you, does anything scream, “summer” like a steaming hot foil pack of bread pudding?

No, you’re supposed to cook it IN FOIL!

Speaking of grilling, they featured a patio table with a little charcoal grill nestled right in the middle of the table.  This is apparently for the guy who has drank so much beer that he cannot even stand up to grill anymore.  And you, too, can have one.  It retails for only $2,780.  Gee, I think I’ll get two.

Watch out for Bobby’s new show: “Drunk Boy Meets Grill.” It takes place in the E.R. and is featured on TLC, right after “My Strange Obsession.”

I ran across an interesting factoid, stating that according to a French research institute, beer drinkers were 15% more likely to get bitten by mosquitoes than people who drank plain water.  That’s all we need…a horde of drunk mosquitoes.

“But I don’t get hangovers when I drink Guinness Infused blood.”

In a Q & A section, someone asked about the “proper” way to cut up a bell pepper.  Every Food Network Star has their own way of slicing and dicing a pepper, and she wanted to know which way was the “right way.”  They provided her with pictorial step-by-step instructions.

Um…the correct answer is, “With a knife.”

My subscription runs out in September.

“I Don’t Get Paid Enough For This.”

“Stay at home Mom” is a nice gig, and I rather enjoy it.  For all of the craziness that it entails, it is infinitely better than the last paid job I held before Before Children.  I used to get up each morning, put on something that hid all my tattoos resembling “professional,”  and deal with the fickle public.  When Tweedledee came along, I decided to stay at home rather than go back to work.  One of the very first things I noticed was that even though I was taking care of a wee little baby 24-7, my days were generally a lot more peaceful than they ever were while at work.

Adults like to whine.  To anyone who will listen.  I worked at a bank, so in my case, I was a captive audience.  A captive audience who had to play nice with others, no matter what.  I couldn’t simply say, “Why are you telling me this?” to the stranger who happened to come to my teller window (or later on, my desk), and complain about the interest rates.  I didn’t set them.  I never had the ear of the Federal Reserve Chairman, although one time I wondered what would happen if I told the man standing in front of me grousing about them that I would “get on that right away.”

There were always the customers who complained when I asked them for their I.D. when they wanted to take out money.  The disgruntled customer would always say something like, “But, I’ve been banking here for 25 years!”  Yeah?  Well, I’ve only worked here for 25 minutes, and I don’t know you, so hand it over.  I never actually said that, of course, but there were times when I wanted to.  There was one gentleman who insisted that I get the manager over there to confirm his identity instead of just taking 30 seconds to get his wallet out of his back pocket in order to show me his drivers license.  To him, I did say something like, “I assure you, I will remember who you are after today.”

Sometimes, people are just plain dumb.  One Friday afternoon,  the tellers were swamped, so I had to leave my cushy new accounts desk–people don’t generally open accounts or want IRA’s on Fridays–and work over on the “other side.”  A young man who was not much younger than myself came to my window wishing to deposit a mess of cash into his account.  I say a “mess” of cash because that is exactly what it was.  There were ones, fives, tens, and a boatload of change, and it was all crumbled up and thrown haphazardly into a plastic baggie.  He tossed it onto the counter, and when I opened the baggie, I was immediately greeted by an odor that reminded me of Lollapalooza ’93.  I tried not to laugh out loud–my laugh tends to draw attention–and silently sorted out his cash and made the deposit.  When I handed him back his baggie and his deposit slip, I leaned over and softly said, “You really want to be careful who you hand this bag to.  Might I suggest just getting rid of it altogether?”  It took a second, but a look of paranoid realization finally dawned on his face, he mumbled a quick “thank you,” and hastily left my teller window and fled the bank altogether.

Then there were the line-butters. One afternoon, an elderly lady who had been patiently waiting in line had missed her turn because a man was “in a hurry” and needed to be waited on “right this minute.”  The thing was, he was a repeat offender.  He did this often, because he was deluded enough to think that his life and his time was way more important than the time of anybody else standing there.  He was always in a hurry.  He always needed to be waited on “right this minute.”  The day he cut off the elderly lady, I’d just had it.  I told my manager about him, and asked for permission to send him to the back of the line the next time he did it.  Permission was granted, under the condition that I was not “nasty” about it.  The next time he came bustling in with his air of haughty self importance, clamoring up to my teller window, I sent him to the back of the line.  He stared at me as if I had just lost my mind.  “Excuse me?”  he exclaimed, apparently amazed at my impertinence.  I just smiled sweetly and repeated that there were people in line who were ahead of him, and he would have to wait his turn.  “I’m terribly sorry, sir, but we have to be fair, you know.”  He huffed away to the back of the line, calling me a not-very-nice-name under his breath, but he never did it again, at least not when I was there.

It wasn’t all disgruntled, grumpy patrons.  For the most part, the customers were generally quite nice, and I certainly had my favorites.  People would come in and tell me little snippets about their lives and seem surprised when I remembered them later on and asked them about their job, or how their husband was feeling, or how retirement was treating them.  That part of the job was quite lovely.

The turnover rate for bank employees is enormously high, though.  They don’t get paid a whole lot, and for every wonderful customer who comes in, there is a miserable sot who likes to try and spread their bad temper around.  I much prefer being at home.  I don’t bring in a paycheck, but on the other hand, if someone wants to toss a bad mood at me, I can simply send them to their room.

Pokey Little Puppy

I told Snickers that if he ever decided to do anything except sleep, that I would feature him on my blog.

Apparently, he wasn’t listening.

A Snake Named Neal

We have a little garter snake that slithers around our back yard.  I named him Neal Jr. (More on that in a minute.)  He winds his way around under the deck, in and out of the wildflower beds, and particularly enjoys hanging around our little garden pond, where he can snack on the overabundance of frogs that were born this spring.   The dogs leave him alone, and he leaves pretty much everyone else alone as well, except for those frogs.

One frog is cute. Hundreds of tadpoles in a fish pond equals impending amphibious assault.

It’s a nice little relationship.  I quite enjoy having a snake around the place.

 

I’m harmless. Just give me frogs and I will be on my way.

Last spring, Tweedledee and I happened upon a snake of the same variety–an Eastern Garter Snake–but that one was much larger.  We first noticed him one afternoon while out on the patio.  He was hanging around in what I call “The mulch bed,” under a bunch of belladonna greens, trying to force a large frog down his throat.  It took him 20 minutes, but he finally devoured the whole thing, not caring in the least that he had a two person audience.  Tweedledee and I had never seen such a thing before.  It was absolutely disgusting, yet at the same time completely fascinating.

“Oh, crud monkeys. Not this again.”

I name the wildlife.  We once had a cardinal that came to our bird feeder each spring, and we named him “Jack” because he looked like he very nearly lost a battle with a cat and only had one eye.  After three seasons, he stopped coming to our feeder.  We mourned the loss of Jack.  More recently, we had a very fertile rabbit in our yard, and I decided to call her “Bunnicula.”  She had her babies right where I was going to plant my summer squash.  I was not particularly amused, but planted my squash anyway and put a hockey net around them to protect them from Bunnicula and her offspring.

“I must break you.”

Every summer, it seems I get on a kick, and read nothing but books by one particular author.  The summer we moved here, I read every Dirk Pitt book that Clive Cussler wrote.  I’ve had a summers ranging from Stephen King to Thomas Hardy.  Last summer was “The Summer of Jack Kerouac.”  Up until then, I had only ever read “On The Road,” and decided to give his other books a try.  I read one after another, after another, and finally moved on to something a bit lighter after I felt my head would explode from the beatificness of it all.

I can’t bring myself to mock Jack Kerouac. Really. I just can’t do it.

So last summer, with Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady on the brain, when we found our slithery resident, I named him Neal.  It was the first name that popped into my head.

That wasn’t the only reason, though.  A perfectly horrible pun comes along with naming a snake Neal.

When asked why I decided to name a snake Neal, my reply was always, “Because he can’t.”

“Kneel before Zod!” “But I don’t have any knees, you fool!”