It's a good thing you're cute.

When you live alone in a house…every noise sounds creepy.  Especially a new house that you just moved into.  However…after a while you get accustomed to certain noises and they don’t bother you anymore.

When you have a cat, this happens sooner.  Cats prowl at night.  The hunt too…even if there’s nothing to hunt.  They race around the house and knock things over and make noise.  Cats are insane.  So there are noises we have learned to ignore because it’s “just the cat”.

However…some noises you will still get up and check out…because they just sound too scary.  Which brings us to this morning at 6AM.

My husband heard the cat tearing around the house earlier than that but ignored it as her typical behavior.  However…a little after 6, we hear quite a big crash as if she had really crashed into something.  Well, she does this.  We have a sliding glass door and our neighborhood has lots of other cats, so she has been known to crash into the door trying to fight other cats.  We were awake, but not out of bed yet so we were startled but just considered it her usual, silly behavior.  A few minutes later, we heard another crash and some really horrible cat noises like she was literally fighting another cat.  It was an awful sound.  That time it was just too nerve wracking because the crash sounded like someone breaking into the house.  So we actually got up to see what was happening.

In the living room, we found a couple of empty bags of rice cake snacks.  I had collected them in a small plastic bag to throw them away but it hadn’t made it to the trash.  We also found little rice cake snack bits all over the living room.  Behind the couch, in front of the couch, down the hall way and in my craft room.  They were everywhere.  Our assumption was that she had dug into the trash bag and tried to eat the remnants of the rice snacks and gotten her head stuck in the bag and then torn around the house trying to get it off…thus spilling crumbs all over.  ALL OVER. 

What we did NOT find…was the cat.  We looked for her in all of her usual hiding spots and could not find her.  We shook the treat bottle which rarely fails to get her to come out of a hiding spot…but still no cat.  We looked for quite some time.  Finally, I had to give up and go get into the shower.

When I got out of the shower and got dressed, I decided I’d go look for her again to see if she had calmed down from whatever trauma she had experienced so she would come out.  I had looked twice behind the bookshelf but I kept feeling drawn back over to it.  So I moved her little cat sleeping/playing tent and the curtain…and finally found her.  Her eyes were huge and she looked terrified.  There was a plastic Hobby Lobby bag with one of it’s handles hanging loosely around her neck.  She looked at me with a mixture of guilt and exhausted terror.  I had to laugh…even though I felt bad for her.  I tore the bag to easily get it off and moved everything so I could get to her and pet her.  She just sat there and looked at me.  It was so sad.

She had apparently gotten into the plastic bag I’d used to collect some trash…and gotten her head caught in it…I don’t know how long she was stuck or how long she thrashed about and tore through the house trying to get it off.  But I’m sure everywhere she ran, she felt like the bag was chasing her.  Which is horribly sad and slightly hysterical.

I suppose we both learned something today.  I should not leave plastic bags where she can get to them.  And she should not dig in plastic bags trying to eat people food.

For the record, I petted her, soothed her, checked to make sure she hadn’t hurt herself and gave her a treat.  She was a little traumatized but she’s fine.  I’m sure she is at home, sleeping it off.

Now if I could just be at home with her and sleeping it off…life would be much better.

It's not a seizure...

No, I am not having a seizure.

 

This bit of random was brought to you courtesy of songs by Jonathan Coulton  including “Ikea” and “I Feel Fantastic”

 

Ever drive down the road and that song you just LOVE comes on the radio…so you crank up the volume and sing at the top of your lungs?

 

Yeah…me too.  And when I get really happy about it…there are hand motions.  It’s pretty pathetic.  But it keeps me from being cranky and having road rage most of the time.  At least it cuts down my road rage, we’ll put it that way.

 

The thing is…nobody in any other car can hear your music.  So you just look like a total lunatic, driving down the road having a complete spaz out. 

 

For the record, that’s the technical term: Complete Spaz Out.

 

Anyway…if you don’t know this about me…I’ll freely admit it.  I do this all the time.  If I’m having a bad day or a bad drive…I put on music I love and I crank it up and act like an idiot while I drive.  I even have a whole playlist on my Zune entitled “Make Me Happy”.  On my iPod it was entitled “Make Me Happy, Dammit”…but I felt like that was too much pressure on my friend Steve Zalman.  Long story.

 

Anyway, so yeah…I sing and  chair dance in my car while I’m driving.  You wanna know the worst ones?  Happy, boppy songs that make my head bounce side to side like an 80’s blonde bouncing her head off her shoulder pads.  When I realize people are looking at me…I usually crack up laughing…which probably makes me look even more crazy than I already did.

 

I’m having a sudden mental image of Juliette Lewis in that video where she’s in a psychiatric ward and coloring on the walls and crying.

 

That’s probably what I look like to the people in the other cars who cannot hear my amazing, happy, boppy music.  But you know what?  When it’s 7:20 in the morning and you’re tired and you really don’t want to go to work because it’s been a long week…it can really improve the start of your day to listen to something totally happy and mindless.  And there’s just something infinitely funny about driving along and singing a song about Ikea and how it all started with a God named Thor.  That’s funny stuff!

 

And there are few bad moods that cannot be improved by Bon Jovi.  “No Apologies”, “Have a Nice Day”, “This is Our House”, “Raise your Hands”…I mean, there’s 25 songs I could name right off the top of my head that immediately improve my mood.

 

Things are not always going to go your way in life.  Some days just suck.  Sometimes they suck for no apparent reason…especially if you’re female.  But if you can make yourself take that one little step that improve your mood and thus, improve your day…well, do it.  Have a Complete Spaz Out.  Who cares if you frighten other drivers and they contemplate calling 911?  This is not about them, it’s about you.

 

Just make sure you can do all this and still stay in your lane.  Oh yeah…and when people look at you and you catch them…smile and wave.  You just might improve their day too.

Waxing poetic about my daughter...

So…today I was emailing a friend who was talking about bringing my daughter a gift for her new baby and also bringing her something for herself.  I told her that my daughter would appreciate anything that she did because she’s just lovely like that.

 

Then some things kind of washed over me that I felt the need to write about.  Thus…you get this blog…with me…waxing poetic about my eldest child.

 

I was 16 when I had her.  Way too young to be a mother.  But I had my mom to help and my family rallied around me quite a lot.  I was very fortunate like that.  Whatever my aunts and uncles may have thought about me getting knocked up at 15 and keeping the baby…they kept to themselves and they supported me on it and they loved her right away.

 

I can’t take all the credit for raising her.  My mom was a tremendous part of raising both my kids but especially my daughter because I mostly lived at home until she was 3.  And the times during that when I didn’t live at home, she spent a lot of time with my parents.  So my mom gets a lot of the credit.  I finally established and kept my own household from the time she was about 4 but mom was always close by and heavily involved.  My point is…between my mom and I…we somehow managed to raise this truly amazing girl-child who turned into this truly amazing woman.

 

On June 5^th, she became a mother herself.  My grandson Blake came into the world at 4:29PM on that day, weighing in at 7lbs, 2oz and measuring 19.5 inches long.  He is beautiful and perfect and I was head over heels in love with him the minute I laid eyes on him.  But that’s another blog.

 

This one is about my daughter and her unbelievable capacity to love people.  She loves with her whole heart.  She is generous and giving and affectionate.  She tries to treat people the way she would want them to treat her.  She doesn’t hold back.  She is a good daughter…a good friend…and I think she is going to be brilliant at this “mommy” thing.

 

She appreciates the small things in life.  She doesn’t need expensive gifts to appreciate you.  She is as thankful for kind words and love and hugs as she is of money or gifts.  She is grateful for anything she is given.  Yes, of course she gets frustrated sometimes because she puts so much out and gets little back from some people.  I can relate.  I am the same way.  But it never stops her from being who she is.  She doesn’t let life’s hardships stop her from being this beautiful, giving, caring individual.  She has this indomitable spirit about her.  She may get down about things…but she will pull herself right back up and she will pull you right up with her.

 

She is beautiful on the outside…and on the inside.  Her heart is so huge that I sometimes wonder how she can carry it.  And now there’s Blake.  He is going to be an incredibly loved child.  He has a mommy and daddy who are head over heels in love with him and grandparents and great grandparents and aunts and uncles and just a ton of family to love him.  But most of all…he has my daughter.  He has this beautiful person to love him and raise him and teach him how to have a tender and loving heart just like hers.  She will teach him about compassion and forgiveness and how to love with your whole heart no matter how many times it gets broken.

 

He is a lucky child.  I am a lucky mother…and now a lucky grandmother.  Sometimes you just have to stop and look around at this crazy, messed up world…and realize just how blessed you are when you have someone like this in your life.

 

I am truly blessed.

Flashback Friday!!!

Ok, I’ll admit it…I don’t actually have a Flashback Friday.  But it sounded fun!  Maybe I should start writing about a Flashback from my life on every Friday. 

 

Anyway – today’s Flashback is brought to you by my Zune MP3 player and the band White Lion.

 

For whatever reason, we were recently talking about 80’s bands and ended up listening to some old White Lion.  I enjoyed it so much that I went home and downloaded the album onto my Zune.  Today I am listening to it at work and just laughing.  I love old 80’s music so much.

 

The Flashback part honestly hit me last week when we listened to it the first time…but today while at work and listening to it…it hit me again, full force.

 

I had just turned 18 and was living with my boyfriend in Fort Worth in a crappy apartment on Lancaster.  I worked right down the street at K-Mart…which was across the street from an old Fort Worth bar called Savvy’s.  We drove by that bar all the time and I had always wanted to go in but was not old enough to get in.  Now that I was 18…I really wanted to go.  I just had to convince my overly jealous boyfriend to actually take me to a bar where another guy might actually…*gasp* look at me or something terrible like that.

 

Anyway – on my way to work one afternoon, a bunch of long haired boys who were unloading a truck of equipment into Savvy’s, started cat calling at me from across the street.  They were yelling the most idiotic pick-up lines ever.  One of which, I remember being “Damn!  She’s got legs all the way up to her ass!”, at which, I wondered…”Um…as opposed to what?”  Still…they were yelling and cat calling and whistling at me…which my 18 year old brain found quite flattering since they were obviously musicians and that was my thing at the time.  If you had long hair and played an instrument, you were on my radar.

 

So I smiled and waved and they said, “Come see our show tonight!  We’ll be here all weekend!  Come see us!”  They were all waving.  I waved back and yelled to them that I would try.

 

That night I did beg and plead my boyfriend to take me there.  He finally agreed.  When we got ready to go he insisted that I was overdressed and that I should back off on my crazy 80’s clothing and that “nobody dresses like that up there…they all just wear jeans”.  Well, I trusted him and just put on jeans and a cute shirt.  HE LIED!  Not big shock.  There were girls in there in leather and way more outrageous outfits than I had wanted to wear.  So that was “angry at him number one”.  As the evening progressed, we ended up in a HUGE fight…and I basically told him he just needed to leave and give me some space and if he didn’t…I wasn’t coming home that night.  He left.

 

When the band played their second set…I was alone at a table in the middle of the bar.  They played a cover of White Lion’s “Tell Me”…and the singer, who had a wireless mic – which was actually unusually at that time for a bar band – was running around the room a lot.  So he comes over to my table…puts his foot on my chair and leans right into my face and sings to me.

 

Well oh my goodness…be still my heart.  I thought this was just the coolest thing that had ever happened to me and I was totally fascinated.  He sang to me twice that night and I was just ALL about it.

 

After their set I came and talked to them…at which point, my boyfriend showed back up and we had an enormous blow up which ended in a break up.  But that part of the story is boring.  Suffice to say, he left.  The next day I went back to the bar to see them play again and they treated me like I was their biggest fan.  Over the course of the evening, they started singing a song about me because I squeak when I yawn…the song was called “Girls that Squeak”.  Yeah.  I ended up hanging out with them and then let them crash at my apartment that night.  They left the next day and I never saw them again or heard from them.

 

But every time I hear “Tell me” or “Wait” by White Lion…I remember that night and how thrilled I was to get that attention and feel that “cool” on my first time in a “Heavy Metal Bar”.

 

Thanks for reading…this has been…Flashback Friday!  Join us next week…when we will probably forget all about this great idea.

He said, "I like dinosaurs.  I like Superman.  I really like dinosaurs dressed like Superman."

She said, "Challenge accepted."

Improv before I knew what Improv was.

So I’m sitting here thinking in a British accent.  I know…it sounds weird…but it happens to me often.  Playing a character at a renaissance festival for about 8 weekends in a row does strange things to you.  It gets in your blood.  The majority of the stuff we do out there is complete improvisation.  We say whatever pops into our heads and then make it work.  We were given training on how to do this and while I’m FAR FAR FAR from being a pro at it…I do know a lot more than I did before.

That being said…I’m reminded of once doing a little bit of random improv before I ever even knew what “improv” was.

I was at the mall with my daughter.  She was probably 14 or 15 at the time.  We had one of her friends with us.  She thought it would be cool to pretend I was just an older friend of hers and not her mom.  So she asked if she could call me by my first name and pretend I was a friend.  I said yes.  What could it hurt?  So we’re walking about the mall and looking for people she knows…and I am people watching…as I am wont to do.

As we are standing about, near the area formerly known as Gameworks, I see two little boys coming our way.  They are right in the middle of the walkway.  They are holding their arms out as if they have huge guns.  They are crouched down and looking from side to side as if they are hunting.  They are making quite a show of it.  I watch them look around and try to catch the eyes of the people around them.  Everyone is just hurrying past and ignoring them.  I keep watching, amused.

The spot me and we make eye contact and they headed straight for me.  When they get to me, they have these big, fake sounding accents mixed between British and Australian.  In these big accents they ask me, “Have you seen a rhino?”  I make obvious faces as if I’m trying to remember if I’ve seen one.  Then I very animatedly replied to them in an equally big, fake British accent…

“No.  I’ve not seen a rhino…but I did see a monkey.  It had a hat on and it was dancin’ around.  It went that way.” I pointed off behind me.

That was all it took.  Their little faces lit up like Christmas trees and you could tell I was probably the only one who’d responded to this act of theirs and gone along with it.  They grinned like little fools.

“Alright then!  We’ll get it!” they told me in the big accents.  Then they saluted me. I returned the salute and off they went…their physicality even bigger at this point.  I laughed.  I felt like I had made their day.

I turn around and realize that my daughter is now on the other side of the mall, hiding her face and pretending not to know me all.

Oh well.  Can’t win ‘em all.

Her face just looks like that.

Have you seen the movie Juno?  I paraphrase:

“She was giving me the stink eye.”

“I doubt that she was giving you the stink eye.  That's just the way her face looks.”

Great movie…but not what this blog is about.

When I was about 13, I was in the skating rink on a random Friday night.  Because that’s what you did on Friday nights when you were 13 and lived where I did.  I was there almost every weekend.  So on this particular, random Friday night…I’m looking around, people watching…like you do…and this little skinny girl comes stomping up to me with, what I now see was, a face full of false bravado.  She stares me down and says:

“What is your problem?”

My incredibly intelligent and well thought out reply was something in the vein of:

“Huh?”

“Why are you giving me dirty looks?” she demanded to know.  Her false bravado was contagious and it brought mine out.  So I bowed up at her.  (You hear my redneck coming out? “Bowed up”?)

“I wasn’t even looking at you!” I said angrily.

“I just saw you!  You’ve been giving me dirty looks for five minutes!”

“I don’t even know you!”

“Then why are you looking at me?”

“I wasn’t!  I don’t even know what your problem is!”

“Well maybe you should watch where you’re looking!”

“Well maybe you shouldn’t be so paranoid and think everybody is looking at you when nobody cares!”

At 13…this was a really heated argument.  I think I even threw out the “s” word at some point.  Let me tell you…I had false bravado for days.  I had a redneck older brother and I could talk poo with the best of them by the tender, young age of 13.  That’s probably why I’ve barely ever been in a fight.  I got loud and didn’t back down and whoever I was shouting at usually figured out it wasn’t worth it.  This particular altercation lasted a couple of minutes and we both ran out of things to say.  So we kind of stood there…looking at each other.  When she figured out I was not going to back down…we had that moment of:

“Fine.”

“Fine.”

“Ok then.”

“Good.”

This led to the standard “Do you go to school here?”.  Because before it went any further, we had to know if our schools were rivals.  That led to introducing ourselves to each other…and next thing you know…we are hanging out with each other.  We are giggling together like nothing ever happened.

We started meeting at the skating rink almost every weekend…then we even hung out away from the skating rink.  Then she met my family and started calling my mom “Mom”…as most of my friends did.  She developed a crush on my brother…also like most of my friends did.  She became one of my best friends for the next couple of years.  We drifted apart after a couple of years.  I got pregnant and had a baby and she was still really involved in school.  We still talked here and there…but around that point, I started hanging around with a friend who lived closer and had more in common with me.  But that girl was still my friend and we still talked occasionally and even wrote each other letters since I didn’t have a phone.  She signed them all “L.Y.L.A.S.”.  You guys remember that one, right?  “Love You Like A Sister”.

Fast forward to today.  Yeah…it’s a long fast forward.  28 years worth.  I still talk to that girl.  We grew apart and are not best friends or anything…but we still occasionally talk and have very fond feelings for each other.  I haven’t seen her in years and our lives turned out very, very different.  But I still count her as one of my oldest friends and I think about her now and then and we send each other smiles and quick thoughts via Facebook.  And it all started because she thought I was giving her a dirty look…and I honestly had never even seen her face until she walked up to me.

She was not the first person to randomly walk up to me and confuse the hell out of me by asking me why I was giving her a dirty look.  She was not the last either.

I wasn’t giving any of them the “Stink Eye”.  Apparently my face just looks like that.