I'm Suzi. I live in suburban Mpls/St. Paul, and spend my days working in graphic design and sales. I suddenly find myself caught up in the First Day to 5K, a podcast running program that should have me ready to run a 5K race in October or so. My fridge is filled with organic stuff these days, because I've just started learning about what sorts of dastardly things are done to our food in this country, and it's pretty horrifying. My awesome family includes The First Baseman and a couple of daughters, Rose and Kelly, who are just about grownups. I love the ocean like it's my religion and try to visit it a couple times per year. The girls and I are on a constant quest to change The First Baseman's mind about stuff, like getting a dog and letting me use his name when I blog about him. I see as much theater as I possibly can, and I am the last remaining Minnesota Timberwolves fan. Look for me in section 126.
No, I ain't too proud, but I am too distracted. I'm taking a hiatus, yo. Got too much work, too much graduation party planning, too much nice weather luring me outside, too many bike rides, too much running, too much sending a kid to college (she decided to go away, after all), too many softball games, too many possible remodeling projects, too many Twins games, too much summer socializing on the deck with the neighborhood ladies, too many walks around Lake Calhoun, too many camping trips, too much hanging out with my nephew and my niece…too much real life. Which is a good thing!
I'll start updating again in the fall. Maybe if something ridiculously interesting happens before then, I'll need to pop in and tell you. Meanwhile, I'll see you on facebook and Twitter! And you can always email me, too.
Yep. That's right. I imagine he hippity-hopped right by our house in the wee hours of the morning and thought to himself, "Nah. Those jacktards get NOTHING. They're all too OLD." So he left no eggs, no jellybeans, no baskets of that plastic grass that makes me say naughty words. No fluorescent marshmallow creatures, no waxy chocolate bunnies with creepy sugar bug-eyes, no malted-milk eggs coated in a shell that tastes like fingernail. Nothing!
And you know what? I liked it.
I loved establishing childhood traditions when the girls were babies, and keeping them alive through their childhood, but it feels really comfortable to be in this particular place at this particular time. I always enjoyed amassing a hoard of treats and little toys, and choosing baskets that would delight both girls when they woke up on Easter morning. I even used to—get this, people—sew their Easter dresses!
I dug that, I really did. But I didn't miss any of that this year! They didn't either. I ran it by them, of course, before I let that bunny skate on by. Kelly worked for part of the day, The Referee went to the gym to work out and play hours and hours of basketball, and Rose and I dug out the bikes and went for a nice ride. The rest of the day was spent napping, watching the baseball game, and listening to Rose complain about her sore butt, until it was time for dinner. Easter dinner was burgers on the grill, because that's what everybody wanted. Nice.
I hope all of you got to celebrate or not celebrate exactly as you wanted to today!
Until recently, I had a crazy, nervous old aunt. She was a shivering, paranoid mess, and sometime in the seventies, I remember her wringing her hands and wrinkling up her face to announce that THE BREAD TASTES FUNNY! THEY'RE PUTTING SOMETHING IN THE BREAD! Well, little did we know then, but they were putting something in the bread. They were conditioning the dough with high fructose corn syrup.
A few years later, she made the same sort of agonized announcement about cottage cheese. That was probably about the time dairy cows started being fed hormones to make them squirt more milk, huh?
Maybe she wasn't so crazy, after all. Oh, wait. YES SHE WAS, but maybe it was her crazy paranoia that made her sense of taste so acutely sensitive.
For years, I've been buying organic milk because it just simply tastes better, and I like to avoid chemicals and hormones when I can, while imagining a happy cow grazing in the pasture. I really like the kind that comes in glass bottles, but it's such a pain to remember to bring them back to the store. My second choice, until recently, has been organic milk in a carton, because I haven't ever enjoyed the taste of plastic (I know; picky, much?). Also, paper cartons don't spend as many years in the landfill as plastic, right?
Late last summer, though, I started noticing that the milk tasted strange. I started playing around, buying different brands of organic milk, from different stores. By about Christmas, I had identified Lund's and Byerly's brand organic milk as the only one that didn't have a weird, spicy, foreign taste to it, and I lived happily ever after… until last month, when even that started to have the bad taste!
The Referee bought some non-organic milk in a plastic jug, and it tasted heavenly. There is nothing I love more than a glass of fresh, ice cold milk from the mammary glands of a mammal outside my own species.
So my question to you, blog world, is WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO THE ORGANIC MILK? How hilarious is it going to be if it turns out that they are packaging organic milk in cartons made from non-recycled rainforest-harvested tree paper glued together with adhesive made from formaldehyde, genetically engineered hormones, and veal tears?
Hey, thanks so much to the anonymous emailer who predicted that my sad sad dream the other night is an indication that I am beginning my descent into mental illness. So kind of him/her to email anonymously. And it's also funny that I used "descent into insanity" in a twitter about it! Obviously, the descent began YEARS ago, about the time I married The Referee.
Anyway, I have had a couple of successful, dream-free sleeps. Hallelujah!
Other things I've done this weekend, besides sleep peacefully, include, but are not limited to:
Blow off the Runnin' With the Wolves 5K on Saturday. I had been looking forward to this all dang winter, but when I woke up Saturday, it was TWENTY DEGREES. TWENTY DEGREES freezes up my legs. Yes, I could have done it anyway. Yes, I wouldn't have died. Yes, Mark Madsen of the Timberwolves showed up, even though they had an 8:00 game in Utah the night before, and he probably got home at 4 in the morning. Whatever. I went back to bed, and I don't regret it. Okay maybe I sort of do, but there is always next year. And hey, I looked at the stats, and the winner finished in 10:02. That's not possible, right? That has to be a mistake. 3:15 splits? Did he drive a car? Oh, and my brother wants me to do a triathelon with him this month, so I'm going to need to learn how to swim, and find a bike I can ride. I think I remember how to do that.
Make a real, honest breakfast for the first time in at least ten years. I'm talking about bacon and eggs and pancakes and toast. Yes, toast is redundant when you already have pancakes, but without toast, you cannot have eggs and toast. I like eggs and toast. The Referee was a good sport about it. He walked in the door after a trip to the gym to find 11,000 calories in front of him, and he politely ate it. He ate it while telling us, once again, about the ten-in-a-row games of basketball he won yesterday, at a different gym.
Go for a walk which encompassed two seasons. We got 4 inches of snow overnight. When I left, it was winter. Halfway through, it turned into spring. That's how Minnesota rolls.
Bought two airline tickets from Minneapolis to Scottsdale for under $320. That's not for each; that's for both, including taxes. Kelly and I are going to Scottsdale to visit my parents, Desert Daddy and Desert Mama in the comments section here. Rose found out about it, and scheduled her very own flight, so the three of us will be there for the first five days of May. I can't wait to see some sun! And also, it is Desert Mama's birthday, and it just dawned on me that it is a BIG birthday, so there will be extra celebrating. Let's just say she's turning 50, which means I am 25.
Went to a Timberwolves game. I know! How unusual! I haven't gushed all that much about basketball, because I know most of you blog readers aren't really basketball fans, but let me remind you that I. Love. Basketball games. Tonight, my team lost by oh, 100 or so. And I still loved every moment of the game, until The Referee invoked The Blowout Rule and made me leave with three minutes left. I really hate leaving early. I envision all those hard-working basketball players, feeling sort of down already, looking up and seeing the streams of people flowing out of the arena before the game is done. That has to be depressing to them, no? I mean, they're not down there trying to lose, you know. Only two more home games left, and I'm just glad it's almost spring. Winter around here would be simply unbearable without the Timberwolves to distract me.
Made onion soup. I'm going to eat some for breakfast tomorrow. Croutons are drying on the stupid uncleanable black stove.
At one point in this movie, it becomes apparent that turkey gobble sounds exactly the same as Kelly giggle. The two sounds are indecipherable. I watched it fifty times to try to understand what I was hearing.
Evidently, this phenomenon of wild turkeys frequenting populated areas is nothing new. Jenni tweeted about seeing turkeys on Nicollet one day this week, and then this was posted on Minneapolis Metblogs. I swear, if I find a flock of turkeys in my yard, I'm going to be more that a little freaked out. Those babies are aggressive! Not as bad as a woodchuck, but still.
I've written before about how I hate it when people tell me about their dreams, because BORING. At the same time, I love telling other people about my dreams, because, you see, that's NOT boring. To me.
I'm not going to tell you about the dream I had last night, though, because it was so horrid that I can't bring myself to speak of it. My hope is that it will leave my memory, like all the other more useful things that rattle around in there and suddenly disappear.
This particular nightmare wasn't a scary one, where I was running or falling or being chased, like any decent adventure nightmare. This one involved my sweet Kelly, and it was JUST. SO. SAD. I woke up sobbing, and you can imagine how relieved I was when I realized it wasn't real. Even though I knew it was only a dream, I couldn't stop sobbing. I finally crawled into Kelly's bed with her and held her really tight for a few minutes. She was pretty patient with me, and I couldn't see her rolling her eyes at me because they were closed..
All day I've had a stomach ache and I cannot focus on stuff I need to be working on, and I'm just exhausted. This is ridiculous! Somebody please tell me that you have had a dream like this, and that this heavy feeling went away and you went back to being your snarky self!
A couple weeks ago, BlogHer contacted me and asked if I would like to review one of those online spy-on-people web sites. Uhh, yeah! I have a teenage daughter who likes "interesting people," so that's right up my alley! AND the timing was just perfect. Click here to see what I found out about the current person Kelly is not dating, but spends an awful lot of time with. Ay yi yi.
For the past week or so, it has looked like Animal Planet around here, only significantly less cute. No rescued chihuahuas finding a new home with their very own boy, no baby raccoons being rehabilitated and then released, and no bear cubs being raised in somebody's kitchen.
It all started when I let my nephew and niece choose the restaurant for dinner last weekend, and I seriously need to stop letting them do that. In the past ten days, they've dragged me to Red Lobster AND Old Country Buffet. Those are the two absolute worst restaurant chains among all the bad restaurant chains in existence, are they not? I was sort of excited when our seafood expert, a.k.a. waiter, told me about the wood fire grill they'd installed. That would probably cook up some yummy seafood if they didn't insist on coating everything in a layer of grease and sprinkling on an inch of powdery Dorito seasoning first. Before we could sit down and eat that deliciosity, though, we waited for a table for a few minutes, which turned out to be most pleasant, because a very friendly seafood expert came out and introduced us to a lobster! A lobster who can do tricks!
Please notice the distance at which Sophie has located herself from the lobster. That's as close as her folded-arms, stompy-foot self would get, no matter that it was a perfectly trained lobster that can do sit ups! There was no bribe I could offer that would get her an inch closer. The seafood expert put the lobster on its back, rubbed its tummy, and commanded it to sit up, at which point it did! Then, he stood it on its head, using its claws for support, like a tripod, and rubbed its tail until it went to sleep. So odd. And don't worry, it's not inhumane. Well, not compared to being plunged into boiling water and steamed alive, anyway.
A few days later, Kelly and I went out to run some errands, which included going to the grocery store. Kelly decided that she was craving a hamburger in the worst way, and since it was windy and cold and too late to fire up the grill, I agreed to drive over to Wendy's. We turned into the parking lot, which is actually the parking lot of the Honeybaked Ham Store on County Road 42, and were greeted by a FLOCK OF TURKEYS. FLOCK OF TURKEYS has to be capitalized because FLOCK OF TURKEYS! In the suburbs!
What you can't see from the photos is just how aggressive a flock of wild turkeys in a suburban parking lot can be! Geez! There were times when I thought they were going to try and flap their way into the car. And also, "gobble gobble gobble" is exactly what turkeys say.
Question: do turkeys fly? Oh, sure. I could google, but what fun is that? The reason I ask is that we did not see them flying. Instead, when they were finished rejecting our mushrooms and toasts, they moseyed across the street. We've seen turkeys on the side of Highway 13, along the river on the way to Valleyfair, and I'm just wondering if this is that same clan of turkeys, having been out for their constitutional. Or more like a Turkey Breast Cancer 3-Day. It's short fly, but a looooong mosey.
In any event, Kelly's burger craving went away, and she opted for a turkey sandwich at Jimmy John's instead.
Next on Animal Planet, Grandpa sees a rattlesnake and makes Cousin Bob pose for a photo with it:
Bob could take a lesson from Sophie and fold his arms, stomp his foot, lower his cheek to his shoulder and flat out refuse to get down on the ground with that snake, but he didn't. He's lucky he isn't now sporting two fang marks in his neck.
I guess there is one more Animal Planet show, and that is the story of a little girl who named her sweet hamster Xelia. Xelia Elizabeth Lee. If you want to see the little girl get really upset, you can refer to Xelia as "Fudge," a moniker coined by a fella named Braxton, who, by the little girl's account, is a really super-annoying boy who happens to be a friend of her brother's and eats all the ice cream when he comes over.
Tune in next week and see if Fudge gets eaten by a rattlesnake while on a visit to Arizona with the children to see their grandparents!
Remember when I used to blog every day, sometimes even multiple times? Remember when that was the normal and expected frequency? Ha! Those days are gone, I'm afraid. Twitter satisfies my need to blurt so nicely that I forget to check in over here sometimes!
We are back from vacation, and have been for quite some time. It's rough, I tell you! Back-to-back vacations is really the way to live.
Yesterday, my stats showed somebody arriving here by searching for "zip line death," so I went googling. I found that somebody did, in fact, DIE on a zip line in Honduras in 2008. Even more interesting than that newsy little item, though, is that it turns out that there are message boards devoted to cruises, and people who post on these things have signatures that are 8 miles long, because they list all the cruises they've ever been on. Some of them take 6 or 8 in a year! That's how I want to be, only I want to stay on land, thank you.
I have some photos and interesting stories to tell over here one of these days, so keep checking back. Oh, and start using Twitter, if you're not already. I know you'll love it. I'll even refund your money if you don't, since it's free!
Kelly and I are still in Fort Lauderdale, vacationing away and having a marvelous time, except for a little while this afternoon when a really frustrated mother gave me a stomach ache.
We're at the pool lying in the sun with our Number 45 slathered head to toe, because I have just discovered that when you reach a certain age, there is definitely such thing as "too tan." I have reached that age, and I look like an old leather boot. So Kelly is having her second or third nap of the day, and I am happily reading along, trying to get into a book I'm not loving, and suddenly, right in front of me, a little boy falls down and starts to cry. He was about five, and had been holding the hand of a young teenage girl, maybe 13 or 14. I hopped up, but immediately this hysterical mother came running over, yelling OH SHIT OH SHIT!. She scooped up the little boy, and started to berate the poor girl.
HOW COULD YOU LET THIS HAPPEN? I KNEW HE WAS GOING TO FALL! WHY DIDN'T YOU WARN HIM ABOUT THAT (what? I didn't see anything like a raised tile or curb)? HE COULDN'T SEE WHERE HE WAS WALKING BECAUSE HE WAS CARRYING THAT STUPID BASKET OF TOYS! WHY WEREN'T YOU CARRYING IT? CARELESS!
She went on and on, and I was trying to catch her eye just so I could give her a look that might calm her down, you know? I mean, when your child is physically hurting, let me tell you, it can turn you momentarily batshit, apecrap crazy. If I could have just given her a mom-to-mom understanding look, I thought maybe she'd snap out of the nuttiness. I couldn't catch her eye, though, so I finally had to speak up. I just said, "Hey, now! It was an accident! It's not her fault!" She gave me that high-class Jerry Springer talk-to-the-hand and yelled "MYOB!" at me. She continued to yell at the girl, and since the mom wasn't willing to listen to me, I spoke to the girl instead and just kept saying, "it's not your fault, sweetie. It was an accident, and he's okay. Look, he's not even bleeding. It's NOT your fault!"
The mom told the girl to go upstairs to their room, then she took her little boy back to where her husband and littler boy were sitting, about twenty feet away. Her completely useless turd of a husband just sat there like the doughy brown lump of turd that he is, saying nothing, offering no help in either comforting the little boy or in trying to smooth out the situation with the girl or calm his maniacal wife. The little boy stopped crying right away, and they sat there for what felt like ninety hours while I fretted about what to do.
I know that when you witness somebody being frustrated with their kids, the best thing to do is to make an empathetic comment like, "It's really hard when they throw tantrums in Target isn't it? I've been there! I can tell you that it does get better! Hang in there!" Calling out an abuser is likely to just result in more anger for the abuser and more abuse for the kid.
I wanted to go over and talk to her again, to say something like, "Hey, I know how it is when you're kid gets hurt. There is nothing worse! I know you just love that little boy like mad, and I'm sorry I interfered." I'm not sorry at all, of course, but I'm worried about her taking it out on the girl later.
In the end, though, I said no more. I was torn, because I wasn't sure I'd be able to get her to be calm, and I worried about making matters even worse. And then I sat there second-guessing myself about saying what I did in the first place. But I had to say something! Right?
I HAD to say something. I couldn't let this girl (is she their daughter? Their nanny?) go undefended. That poor child was hurt much more deeply than the kid with the skinned, not-even-bad-enough-to-bleed, knee.
I do wish I'd have told the girl our room number, though.
Gah. I hate this. I hope she's the nanny, and that she has a really nice mama, and that the mama has sent a cab for her and she's flying home right now, and will never see that mean lady again.
Of course, while I was fretting over what to do, I posted a photo of the mean lady on facebook. Didn't do anything to help the poor girl, but it made me feel better.
So, what would you have done in this situation? I'm sure most of you have a similar story of your own. Spill it!
So, more vacation has gone down since I last blogged.
Sunburn blah blah blah shopping blah blah blah long walk blah blah blah mushroom pasta blah blah blah bad Jimmy Buffet imitators blah blah blah and these guys, taken from the cab today:
No, I ain't too proud, but I am too distracted. I'm taking a hiatus, yo. Got too much work, too much graduation party planning, too much nice weather luring me outside, too many bike rides, too much running, too much sending a kid to college (she decided to go away, after all), too many softball games, too many possible remodeling projects, too many Twins games, too much summer socializing on the deck with the neighborhood ladies, too many walks around Lake Calhoun, too many camping trips, too much hanging out with my nephew and my niece…too much real life. Which is a good thing!
