The Mother of All Diets

I just thought I'd start off my Mother Loss Chronicles (MLC) with a look at the bright side. I've always been a half a loaf kind of girl, and this ML whole business is pretty dreary. I don't want to skeeve you out or anything. To catch you up if you're a little unclear on what is going on here, my mother has recently died from lymphoma. And, just so you know, if I seem to be just a little, ummmm, flippant, rest assured that my mother always thought I was HILARIOUS. Well, maybe that wouldn't be her EXACT word. A more direct quote might be, 'You are just too, too much', or 'Very funny', but I'm sure hilarious is what she meant. And since she's dead, well, what I say goes (just another fantastic little side bennie!).

And what I say is that the MOAD is by far the most effective one I've ever seen. Forget South Beach, Atkins, Weight Watchers, that stupid cabbage soup thing or whatever else you've tried. No lie, people, it's effortless. Here, let me show you what I mean:

6 a.m. Wake up with raging headache from extra wine

6:15-8 a.m. Drink pot of extra strong coffee; eat some tylenol, rhodiola and St. John's Wort

9 -11:30 a.m. Raging stomach ache

Noon Drink small glass of milk or ingest a small amount of some non-objectionable food, if available

2 p.m. Force down a lump of food to stave off increasing faintness and hostility

6 p.m. Another food lump

7:30-11:30 p.m. Drink wine while listening to mournful Uncle Kracker tunes and perusing grief websites to learn how bad it's REALLY going to get

Repeat.

See? Simple, yet effective. AWESOME, though I can't really whole-heartedly recommend it. After only 10 days I've had to put my fat pants away. A few more weeks of this oozing, sucking morass of agony and I'll be in territory I haven't seen since the mid-80's, when I could have rocked a leopard print bikini with reckless abandon, but didn't because I thought my butt was too fat. Stupid, I know; just look at Kim Kardashian. I won't make THAT mistake again, and you can take that to the bank. Normally, of course, this would be cause for great celebration, because then I would have to go thrifting for new pants. Sadly, however, I seem to have lost my taste for just about everything, including the thrift store. Damn you, MOAD!

Dead

So, my mother is dead. You probably know that. You might even know how much it sucks. I didn't, not until about a week ago. The handy websites devoted to the 'grieving process' serenely assure me that I'm in shock right now, but that in a few weeks that will wear off, leaving me in almost unbearable pain. Then, they all advise, be sure not to self-medicate, as this will ultimately make it WORSE. HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA, MORONS! Oh, sorry: I am finding that this whole dead mother thing is really rubbing my nerves raw. EVERYTHING is annoying. Today, I hate fruit flies, the fake Duke Boys, and those multi-colored goldfish crackers, just to name a few.

Anyway, if you don't want to read the forthcoming Dead Mother Chronicles, you might want to avert your eyes for a while. It could get ugly around here.

So many inventions, so little time...

Gosh, I have been SO busy lately! New house, new job, this and that and blah, blah, BLAH. I haven't even had ONE second to work on my latest inventions. The first one on the docket is a special clock. I might have mentioned how tricky it is to know if I should be drinking coffee or wine between 6 and 8. Is it A.M. or is it P.M.? Who knows?!?! All those greek words or whatever are way too complicated. No, what I need is an easy-peasy way to tell what I should be sucking down. So here's my idea: a clock that displays a coffee cup symbol from midnight to noon, and a wine glass from noon to midnight. That's just the default setting, of course; it's totally adjustable if those don't suit you for drinking hours. You could have different symbols, too. Martini glasses at night, say, and Gatorade bottles for morning. Whatever floats your boat, I always say!

Then, when I'm done with that, I need to devise a code so Lloyd and I can discuss things in front of the boys. Weston is an accomplished little speller now, so that's out, and Lloyd inexplicably neither speaks nor understands pig latin. Atwhay ethay uckfay, right?? He sometimes tries to use the military alphabet, so 'toy' would be tango oscar yankee, but I don't have the attention span for that. Plus I can never remember all the letters, so it's a good thing I'm not trying to call in artillery support or something. As it is, I'm worried Weston is going to get a remote control can for his birthday. So if anyone has a good code, let me know because I gotta get that clock done soon. Usually it doesn't matter if I mix up my beverages, but I'm starting a new job soon, so it's pretty urgent that I get a handle on that.

Really, Pat Conroy?

I know, I'm the worst blogger EVER. It's so pathetic that Lauren with her newborn can churn out the posts while I sit here and molder like a mildewy pile of laundry. 'Course, she can't drive so I guess she doesn't have anything better to do, but still, it's sad... very, very sad. I do have plenty of good excuses: it's hard to be me, ya'all! The list of things that are suppressing my natural charm and optimistic outlook is long and epic, rendering me unable to blog, cook, clean.... Normally, my house and children would be spotless and I'd have a clever post every damn day. As it is, however, I just sit around drinking coffee or wine (depending on what the clock says; I only get confused in the hours between 6 and 8) and trying to bury my pesky consciousness in books. I'm not even kidding.

So, anywho, the other day I was all psyched when I saw 'South of Broad', Pat Conroy's latest novel, at the library. That should be good for some escapism, I thought. And his characters are always way more screwed up than me; that should be cheery! Man, what a disappointment! It's like he went to Stereotypes R Us and picked out a buggy (like that? It's my southern touch!) full of characters: arrogant white lawyer dude; plucky and smart black folks (two, please!); a couple of junior leaguers with a wild side; a coarse, rawboned mountain family with hearts of gold; and of course, the brilliant, damaged protagonist. In this book, his name is Leo King. In other, much better books, this guy's name is Ben Meacham, Tom Wingo or Will McLean. In this one, his name is.... hold on a minute, I can't remember, and I'm not even done with it yet. Oh yeah, Leo King, that's it.

He must have hired the actual writing out to someone who took a writing workshop from Danielle Steele, because the action and the dialogue is pretty much just jackhammered into your head without any hint of sublety whatsoever. It's so bad that if I didn't know better, I'd think it was Steele herself. I'd give you some examples but I can't bear to even type them. And here's the worst part so far: Leo and his shopworn collection of pals travel from Charleston to San Francisco to find one of their friends who is missing and presumed dying of A.I.D.S in the seedy part of town. They search and search, encountering all kinds of ham-handed ridiculousness, to no avail, until they meet a guy on the trolley trying to rob them. Turns out he's an ex-NFL player that they knew back in SC, fallen on hard times, and guess what? He knows where their friend is! Oh, happy day! Naturally, after they find their friend, they get this poor hapless clown into rehab and promise him a good job back home where he belongs.

Really, Pat Conroy? This is the best you can do? I don't think so. I don't know what's going on with you, but if you're tired of writing, for God's sake, do something else! As for me, I'm totally going to finish this book, that's how bad off I am. I have to go to bed now, but first thing in the morning, with my coffee. Or my wine, whichever.

The Blame Game

I used to live in Pensacola, and there is no more beautiful place than the Gulf Coast. Weston was born there, and this picture was taken in our house there on his first Christmas. We really liked it there- the beaches were gorgeous- white sands, turquoise waters and pale green sea grasses. The oil spill makes me sick, but what makes me sicker is the disingenuous placement of blame solely on BP.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending them; they are a bunch of greedy bastards for sure. This morning, though, I heard someone say that the executives should be lined up and shot, as if they exist in a vacuum created by their own selfishness, and sadly that's just not true. If it was true, we COULD prevent future spills by shooting them. But the truth is, we ALL did this. BP is just the middleman. A dirty, slimy one, obviously, but still just a middleman. BP is only drilling risky wells because there is an insatiable market for cheap oil. They're just going after the money. Gotta keep the shareholders happy, right? What's good for business is good for America, after all. And what's good for business is fast profits. And BP's not the only one: the other companies aren't any better, they just haven't been caught yet.

Yep, we all did this. Every time you take a plastic bag home from the grocery store, you might as well toss a few tar balls on the sand. When you order takeout and end up with a bag of styrofoam leftovers big enough to choke a T-Rex, it's just the same as dipping a pelican in a barrel of crude. Driving alone to work instead of carpooling or taking the bus equals hucking a few water balloons full of diesel at a sea turtle nest.

Now, if we were willing to acknowledge the obvious truth that drilling for oil is environmentally risky, and unsafe (don't forget that eleven workers died on the Deepwater Horizon), and were willing to pay the true cost of our lifestyle up front, say around $10 a gallon for gas, maybe we would have a leg to stand on when an oil conglomerate bungles and/or underfunds a cleanup, because we would have a legitimate right to expect that safety and cleanup costs had been accounted for in the pricing of the product. But to keep sucking up oil at the going rate and demanding Government subsidies to keep the prices down, then heaping blame on oil companies after the inevitable catastrophe is hypocritical in the extreme.

This kind of mess is just going to happen again and again, if we don't change our ways. And we probably won't, but that's okay too. Eventually the oil reserves will be depleted, the oceans will be wastelands and most of the people will be dead, because much of our food supply and almost all of our oxygen depends on healthy oceans. Then the survivors will have to devise alternate energy sources. Maybe they can capture the methane from all those decomposing corpses.

BIG FAT LIES

Hmph. I was just sitting here, killing some time before I go to bed, minding my own beeswax, and I came across this link to a website called Typealyzer. You plug in your blog address and it claims to analyze your personality based on your writing. I have always thought that people totally give themselves away in their writing, even when they think they are being sneaky. This is what makes Facebook so dangerous. Well, one of the things, anyway; vodka and narcissism are also right up there at the top of the list.

Because of this belief, I thought I would get an accurate result when I put my blog in there, but all I got was a bunch of BIG FAT LIES. Here, you can read it for yourself. I got the same spiel from typealyzing both this blog and Stories from Korea:

ESFP- the performer. The entertaining and friendly type. They are especially attuned to pleasure and beauty and like to fill their surroundings with soft fabrics, bright colors and sweet smells. They live in the present moment and don't like to plan ahead- they are always at risk of exhausting themselves.

They enjoy work that makes them able to help others in a concrete and visible way. They tend to avoid conflicts and rarely initiate confrontations- qualities that can make it hard for them in management positions.

Come on! Almost every part of that is WRONG, WRONG, WRONG! Right? Then, they showed this little graphic that says that while writing, I use the 'feeling' rear part of my brain instead of the 'logical' frontal portion. What a crock, man. One only has to read a few posts to realize that my writing is completely, totally logical at all times. Like the turban shaped bicycle helmet! You can't get any more logical than that, people! Try it on your blog and tell me what you think.... I'm starting to get a little nervous that I'll never be a highly compensated CEO, or worse, that I'll swathe myself in brightly colored silks and go around smelling sweet. Ickola.

Of Moles and Men

Hey! How's it going, everyone! Long time, no write, right? Happy Independence Day! Lots of excitement around here; yessirree, LOTS. TONS! MORE THAN ENOUGH, THANKS!

First, Lloyd had an... errr, episode with a remote controlled flying machine, resulting in a Fourth of July celebration in the ER followed by reconstructive surgery. If you're here from the FAA, it was totally not his fault, and not reportable, just so you know. Also, he has never busted a check ride, or put a scratch on airplane. And as long as we're clear on that, we can go on to the leg trap incident, in which contrary to popular belief, I am not to blame, not even the tiniest bit. Apparently, these giant rusty devices (see photos with a shoe and my dad's head for scale) are actually mole traps of some repute. Personally I think moles are kind of cute, especially those pink naked ones at the zoo, but the people who own our garage apartment have a serious vendetta against them and plastered these medieval mole torturing contraptions all over the yard. Unfortunately, they were deployed incorrectly and failed in their mission, unless their mission was actually to snare a small child. In that case, they succeeded admirably. After which they were smashed with cinder blocks and thrown over the fence. The traps, not the small child. Grateful moles can send wine. Soon would be best, and plenty of it! Otherwise, I can't guarantee protection in the future.

Anyway, the small child was fine, because the trap closed over the side of his foot where his extra large plastic yellow shoes had some excess sweatshop material. The shoe was clamped on, leaving a tiny indentation in the foot, though from the screaming you would have thought the whole thing was ripped clean off, leaving a bloody spurting stump.

And on a totally unrelated and way more cheerful note, I've been thinking again. This new idea will finally net me that Nobel prize I've been unsuccessfully angling for for so long, I'm sure of it! Check this out: Vaccuum cleaner bags for charity! Think about it, you send your full vaccuum bag to a family in a third world country. It saves space in the landfill and supplies their every need for a week or more! Popcorn, Cheerios and cheese shreds to eat, toys, dog hair to knit into clothes, fingernail clippings and sticks to fashion into tools to generate income, and when the bag is empty, they can use it to carry their baby around in, or for a home for Grandma. Then the week is over, and you send them another one! The best ideas are the simplest ones, I always say. They pay the Nobel prize in wine now, right?