now fortified with impotent fury!risperdal

I’m just peevish. Which means I’m mentally dealing with everything today in the form of paragraph long rants in my head. Which means you will be subjected to them! Muahahahaha!

So, we’ve lived here well over a month, and it only today processed my thick skull that in addition to the wicked looking eagle on the grocery store bags, there’s a freakin quote from Dubya (“Good will prevail”). The fuck? On grocery bags?! Is our grip on mom, apple pie, freedom and the American Way so tenuous that we must be ever vigilant lest we slip in our unwavering devotion and thus must remind ourselves on that lowliest of things, the grocery bag? Buy food, people, or the terrorists will have won! Come the fuck on! Not to mention, I’m getting a little sick of Dubya being rammed down my throat in the unlikeliest of places (and an apology to my republican readers, but you’ve got to admit. Georgie boy is not the finest the Republican Party has to offer). I’m still cheesed off that we felt compelled to buy a flag for the front of the house (and let me state here that the Lad has always been more overtly patriotic than I) lest we be shunned like Hester Prynne (and possibly forced to wear a scarlet A for ‘Anarchy’, since clearly anyone in this hood who doesn’t support Amurrica must be an anarchist or a commie). I’m more than half inclined to fly the Jolly Roger at Hallow’een and then just leave it up. See who’s ballsy enough to comment.

In other fellow human being baiting, I’m thisclose to buying a Darwin Fish for the back of my car. You have no idea how huge this is for me- I have no bumper stickers, just a lone, tasteful college sticker on the back window. But I’m more than a wee sick and tired of the ‘truth fish’ eating the ‘darwin fish’ bumper thingies (though the irony of that being a nice little representation of natural selection at play doesn’t escape me). I’ve been hesitant- for one, sullying my car, for another there’s the whole let’s not bait intolerant idiots lest they be toting a baseball bat and smash up my car (I have no issue with truth fish. I have no issue with jesus fish. I have no issue with dawin fish or purple fish or any goddamn fish so long as it’s not a pirhana attacking my ankle. But the whole one-upsmanship and disrespect for others’ views that the truth-fish-snacking-on-darwin sort of has grates on my nerves). But today I saw, of all things, a rainbow fish on an SUV, so you know what? No more being wussy for me. I! Believe! In! Evolution! There, I’ve said it! And yet I live in Kansas! How can these two things be true at the same time?

And last but not least, Snarklet is getting such a talking to, once it has, say, ears. Just when I’d mastered the Snarklet Quease Schedule snarklet decided to change it all up on me. Now I can eat lunch during a half hour window, but not dinner. And Luna bars are verboten right now, right when we’d ordered an assload from Drugstore.com and gotten a bunch on sale at henhouse. I’ve been reduced to eating hamburger and rice, which is bland as all get out and nutritionally very simple and easy to digest and so this is why my mother makes it for the dog when he’s ill. Granted, my version uses ground chuck and basmati rice flavored with chicken broth and thyme, whereas the dog gets minute rice and ground whatever bits flavored with a bunch of nasty garlic powder from a can, since apparently dogs lurv garlic powder (perhaps this explains their eyeball melting assbreath), but still, I am eating the people equivalent of gastric-distress dog food. You can imagine how happy this has Ms. “Is this a raw milk goat cheese, and how long as it been aged, and which province is this Prosciutto from?” Despite all of my bitching, we are deliriously happy at being With Snarklet, I just wish it’d let. me. EAT!

House! Work! Snarklet! It just never lets up in the wench household. God almighty, where to begin…

So, my mom was just here for a whirlwind 28 hour visit, during which time she did a complete yard survey and has begun drawing up a 6 year yard plan, complete with plant list and priority notes. God I love having a garden designer in the family. Too bad she discovered that:

-there’s a vault under the patio which needs to be filled, thanks to the moron previous owners removing all the piping from the drainspout on the deck to show and sell the house so it’d look better.

-the moron previous owners- who are a rant unto themselves which one day I will regale you, the dear reader, with- not only left the metal support poles near almost every tree (and so good luck getting them out now- I intend to get the Lad, Lord of the Hill People, and Dog-Faced Boy likkered up this weekend and set them to it), but for some reason never took down the support wire from the cypress, and it has now effectively garroted the cypress, quite probably killing it

-our species honeylocust has (well, we noticed this, but she managed to explain to us that it will regrow every. damn. year) 8-12 inch thorn clusters coming out of its trunk that one cannot permanently get rid of.

-The first large pine in the backyard must come out now, as it has conifer blight which the other pine could catch.

-And grand total, we have about 3 solid weeks of pruning staring us in the face, as the druidic worship the trees previous shithead owners did not a goddamn thing in terms of healthy tree maintenance, and a well pruned tree is a happy tree. I will be 6 months pregnant and wielding lopping shears and a pole pruner because, of course, the best time to prune our varietals of trees is January.

-Oh, and we have poison ivy. And corn as a weed. Yes, corn. We have one big stalk and a bazillion itty bitty late blooming stalks.

On the positive side, the previous owner’s attempt at a birm planting (which I fondly refer to as ‘the earth zit’) reduced her to helpless tears of laughter, and she took me and the Lad to dinner at 40 Sardines, which is almost yummy enough to atone for erwin’s being so far away in Chicago.

Too bad the health front sucks. Snarklet, at this point, is grounded for life for making mommy miserable, as mommy has managed to get one of the wackier first trimester complications, a kidney infection (a different kind of infection is more common). It feels like I’ve got an alien chestburster turned the wrong way and trying to bust out my back, singing a jolly rendition of ‘Hello my Ragtime Gal’. Dewy glow of pregnancy my ass. I love being a girl. Gee whillikers, why did I wait till my late 20s to do this- unending nausea, exhaustion, pizza face and an agonizing organ infection- sign me the hell up! Eve, fuck you very much for eating the apple and getting us all not only banished from Eden but also slapped with all these craptacular ‘bonus’ aspects of pregnancy.

On the positive side, it’s very easy to stick to your shopping list and not overspend at the grocery store when you feel like I do, even if you are shopping for 5 people for a long weekend. I hope they like luna bars.

So, yet again, everything revolves around baaaaaaybeeeeee. This weekend, it was the random pain freakout, which landed me at the urgent care center at the mall (how suburban is that?) I’ve learned a few things from this experience.

-If you walk into a clinic and announce you’re pregnant and are having back and abdominal pain, no matter how mild, you immediately vault to the head of the triage queue. The guy who can’t walk and the woman with an open wound? Tough luck folks.

-My blood pressure truly can shoot up 50 points in under a minute, particularly if prompted by a nurse saying ‘We’re going to make sure you’re stable and then transport you via ambulance to the hospital…. now let’s take your pressure’ or a doctor saying cheerfully, “Eh, you might be miscarrying”.

I went to my regular OB this morning, who sat there in wide-eyed wonder at this new patient cruising right past the dewey glow I’m so excited crap and directly into, “We want a level II ultrasound at 16 weeks, here’s a copy of our genetic screening results, blah blah neurotic-cakes”. So far, despite the alarmist words of yesterday’s doc, all seems well and I just torqued my back out something fierce, and guarding it has caused me to have stomach pain. Jolly! A mere 7.5 months of overreacting to every bodily twinge! I did manage to luck into an OB whose temperament matches mine in terms of pregnancy management. Glass of wine occasionally after about 20 weeks? “Eh, good for relaxing, it won’t kill you, just always with food and I don’t espouse going out and drinking”. An ibuprofen now and then? “Not after 30 weeks, otherwise, fine”. Caffeine? “I cannot exist without my morning cup of coffee and I don’t expect anyone else to, either.” WOO!

Other than that, life is at the calm before the storm point. My mother rides into town for 30 hours tomorrow morning, followed by an invasion of our Chicago crew this weekend. Mojitos for everyone! Well, except me. Foo.

Having drawn a total blank, I asked for suggestions in the 3WA chat room for tonight’s entry. The winners: weasels and regional cuisine. I’ll do regional cuisine anon.

I miss Chicago. Terribly. I miss our friends, my mom, the architecture, the rhythm, the bodegas, the bars, the restaurants, the 8 zillion shopping options. And I miss our weasel. Yes. We had a weasel. We are adoptive zoo parents at Brookfield Zoo, of Carver the Southern Hairy Nosed Wombat (and I miss him, too!), and Twain the Long-Tailed Weasel. Twain, thanks to our parental support, lives in a phat pad of undreamt of weaselish comfort- new additions to his environment on a biweekly basis, brightly colored socks to hide in, playtubes… He’s one stylin weasel. With so much crap in his enclosure, he has a metric assload of places to hide now, and so we haven’t actually seen The Weasel in about 2 years. Usually when we went to the zoo, we’d race to Australia House to see the Wombat, and then over to the Swamp to look for the Weasel. One of the socks would appear to be respirating, and, well, that would be the weasel. Tada! Isn’t it cute? A hyperventilating tube sock! Children would come over to demand to know what we were looking at. “A weasel, but you can’t see him. He’s inside that sock.” You know you sound like a babbing idiot when a 5 year old mutters about you needing Prozac.

I also miss the cheese, in addition to missing the weasel. (Now there’s a joke only a handful of people will get).
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

My random musings for the day… 6 am is butt early to get up, especially on a Sat., and it just won’t be happening again for a while. And whoever decided it was a good idea to have food booths- coffee, pastry, etc- at the city market, I applaud you, but whoever decided said booths should expand to include fresh cajun pork rinds at 7 am needs to be dunked in a spicy cajun oil vat. Nothing like the miasma of pork rinds hanging over the sultry morning to get you going.

Get on the baby train! Gah. I’m sorry, I feel like I’m obsessing- suddenly, my entire life revolves around BABY! I swear, give me a week and I’ll go back to snarking about the ill behaved bratlings in Dean and Deluca and their fucking self-absorbed crap-ass parents (yo, special shout-out to the shithead in the Gucci loafers. Stop obsessing about how your Cobb Salad is being tossed long enough to pay attention to your three children, especially the 13 month old running around without shoes shrieking in that brain-scrambling high pitched timbre and pulling off all the bags of terra chips and stomping on them!). But for now, I’m one track mind grrrl! Sign me up for a minivan right now!- but you know what? When a good 7 hours of your day is devoted to not getting queasy, it’s hard to think about much else. Continuing spirals of fiscal madness by big business? The latest roadblock to peace in ther middle east? Riots in Oregon? Sorry, I’m busy doing deep breathing and visualizing my body accepting my morning coffee, while chanting “i will not hork, i will not hork”. Yes, folks, in under six weeks I’ve gone from the woman Cake described as “touring the facilities and picking up the slack…using a machete to cut through red tape” in my stylish black heels and black swing microfiber slacks and going for beers and snark after work with friends to wearing grey pj pants and a gap ‘big shirt’ oxford with a rip in the right side and taking 2 hours to finish a cup of coffee and a slice of bread.

Yeah, and don’t bother emailing me to tell me coffee is bad for the snarklet. Blah blah blah inconclusive medical studies-cakes, blah blah conflicting evidence, blah blah blah I am a trained biologist and have actually bothered to read the medical literature. Show me someone who tries to take away my morning cup of coffee, I’ll show you a self-righteous nosy-ass dogooder who now has bloody stumps where their hands ought to be.

So we’re in this wacky zone of life now. Pregnant, telling certain sets of people but not others. Finding a doc, finding a hospital- I’ll tell you, that’s one thing about being in a rich ass suburb, the hospitals are swanky. None of this 2 or 4 women to a room jaunt you all over creation labor one place deliver another recover a third. They have- i shit you not- birthing suites, with CD players and DVD players and jacuzzi’s in the bathroom and queen sized sofabeds so dad can sleep the night there and an Epidural Man there 24/7. What is this magical place? Of course, there’s a downside to being so ‘in tune’ with my body that I knew, oh, 4 days after the zona pellucida had a hull breach, that I was el knocked up, and that’s getting to spend the next 9 weeks of my first trimester worrying about all the Random Stuff that can happen in that time. Women who are lucky enough to delude themselves for 11 weeks as to their knocked up ness (and you know who you are!) get a whopping 2 weeks of first trimester fretting. Having taught Medical Genetics twice and having those endless slides of Everything That Can Go Wrong seared into my memory is not helping matters. I remember the chipper “Liveborn Chimera of 69XXY/92XXXXY; A study in Gross Chromosomal Abnormality” poster at the American Society of Human Genetics conference in October 1997- complete with color pictures- and commence to freak. Or, that clenching in my stomach could just be the nausea.

And so on that cheery note, it’s off to bed with me. Tomorrow morning I shall tamp down the queasies to go hit the farmer’s market with some of the KC crew at the jaw popping hour of 7 am, which, for a Saturday, qualifies as ‘o’-dark-thirty’ in my book and is a sign of insanity.

When I am ruler of Kansas (cause you know, there’s such a movement afoot to install a liberal Jewish feminist as the grand high potentate here), there will be some big changes round these parts:

-No radio station that brands itself as ‘Alternative’ will be allowed to play Nickelback, Creed, or any side project involving members of Creed or Nickelback. Creed and Nickelback are approximately as alternative as Pottery Barn. Also, ‘Jessie’s Girl’ is henceforth banned from the radio- I don’t know what’s with the Rick Springfield obsession, but I’m sick of every call in show taking requests for that damn song.

-Television shows will not be interrupted for NASCAR results.

-Cars will be parcelled out relative to body mass. 5-2 size 0 stick figure women will no longer be allowed to attempt to maneuver Ford Expeditions. Similarly, no 6-6 man will be allowed to wedge himself into a miata.

-Any moron who slaloms across 4 lanes of traffic cause they were yappin on the phone and didn’t notice where they were will be stripped of driving privledges and forced to pedal everywhere on a 1890’s style bike in full victorian regalia, including wool, in a Kansas summer.

-No store may begin selling Christmas paraphenalia prior to November 1. August 22 is manifestly out of the question.

-Churches will be required to be no longer resemble giant warehouses of the holy, nor alien spaceships that have recently landed to make friends on earth. There’s really only so much creativity you can express in a building designed to hold 4,000 people all at once, and people, y’all are just building some fugly, fugly things.

-Enough with the cutesy Oz references already!

-Any total and complete stranger asking me if I have received the healing power and love of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ today will immediately burst into flame, their carbonized remants left in a pile to serve as a warning to others. (As a corrolary, any person who asks me if I worry about burning in hell because I have not received the above but my husband has, will be forced to stay home and watch football during church services for 6 weekends running).

Siiiigh.

Well, this will probably be my last entry in The PantsDown, unless I motivate to write the trainwreck one. I’m not doing the hotpants one- as far as I’m concerned, Tygerchild has written the end all and be all of entries on that one, and damnit, now I need to go take a cold shower again. Which leaves us with “What Pants? A Tale of Drunken Debauchery”. Oh. Dear. But there are so many to choose from. My 21st birthday weekend, the night the Lad and I truly began to vector around one another… But I think the topper is the night before Thanksgiving, 1997.

The Lad and I used to host a big honkin cocktail party- and big and honkin refers not to the number of people, but the volume of alcohol consumed- the night before Thanksgiving, on the operating theory that most of us had to come home and face our (or our significant other’s) parents and extended clan the next day, and if we drank enough we’d still be drunk the next day, thus making those icky slobbery cheek kisses from great uncles slightly more tolerable, without resorting to heavy alcohol consumption in front of our families which would get us yelled at by our parents. In years prior it had been an affair limited by a sad lack of a certain piece of equipment- a blender- but as of Turkeyday, 1997, we owned a blender, and a beaut, too, the high powered crush ice like a steroid hopped wrestler Krups model. Suddenly the whole world of blender drinks was open to us! Hurrah! Oh god in heaven, save us from ourselves!

We were also stupid, and started with beer and worked our way up to hard alcohol. We also had a couple of med students there, people who were on surgery rotation and had been awake for 36 hours and really oughtn’t to have been drinking. The Lad, bereft of a bartender’s guide, began making things up, and this was A Very Bad Idea ™. Worse idea, someone (one of our geek friends) said idly, “I wonder what a pan galactic gargle blaster would taste like”, and the next thing I knew the Lad had whipped up a frightful tequila and vodka concoction containing either blue curacao or smurf blood, and asking if it indeed felt like a brick wrapped in a towel. Oh yes, yes it did, and within short order one friend had disappeared for 45 minutes to put his velcrosneakers on and couldn’t figure out how, and one of the med students on surgery rotation refused to let go of the carpet ‘because I will fly off of the earth’, and Matilda had to walk the first guy and King of the Hill People home, because they had each had 3, while Matilda had wisely decided nothing blue could be good for the system. We were a little late and a little slow making it up to mom’s the next day, and our circle of friends, to this day, is hesitant to let the Lad mix the drinks, and it’s always with the invocation, “No Blue!”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So, reality is slowly beginning to sink in, as I take more and more of these little stick tests and that second pink line keeps getting darker and darker. Eventually, a bat will pop out of the non-pee end of the stick, ala the ‘minifridge!’ Bud robot ad, and clong me upside the head. We went to the mall to walk around in non mosquito-y comfort for a bit after dinner at a Chinese place, and ambled into a toy store, and suddenly realized that both of us hate hate hate everything aimed at toddlers, and the thought of years of barney and bananas in pyjamas and blues clues nearly drives us both to 1. unmitigated violence 2. tears. How in hell are we supposed to do this without going mad? Do we just turn off our brains, good sense, and taste for a few years? Closet the child away on a hippy commune? Never take them into a store, lock up the TV, teach them to weave hemp rope on their ‘learn to dress me’ doll?

And while I know most- most- of our friends and our immediate family will respect our child rearing decisions (I fully expect hotsauce to buy us drums, nerf guns, and like, ‘My First Bimbo Calendar’, if it’s a boy) and our decisions re: mass market branded products and such, but it’s not like the extendo clan will know (or, in some cases, respect) these things, and I can’t help but think in some moment of brat-induced weakness I will plug the child’s brain directly into the tv and feed them a steady stream of giant obnoxious purple dinosaur and whatever the equivalent 3 years on down the road is of the teletubbies, just in an effort to reduce them to a silent, staring lump for a few hours of peace, or someone will get them A Toy from one of the shows, and voila! the entire house will be themed wall to wall in mass media pap. I might as well put off replacing the curtains in the dining room for a few years so that I can put up The Little Mermaid or Bear in the Big Blue House or whatever the heck it is.

First, though, we have to pick an Oby and a hospital. We’re doing a tour of the- I am not shitting you- ‘Contemporary Women’s Center Birthing Suites’ at the hospital closest to us tomorrow. I’ve been informed that in addition to all the shiny zippy level II stuff, they have rooms that you labor and deliver and recover and stay in, in soothing tones of wood and sage, and jacuzzis and showers and CD/DVD players and fresh flowers and aromatherapy. I’m having problems getting my head around a hospital room that’s nicer than the hotel room we stayed at in SF for the first part of our honeymoon. If it had a croquet court and a 4 star restaurant, it’d be as nice as the room we stayed at in St. Helena. Doubtful, though, besides, I wouldn’t be able to see the croquet balls for the watermelon in my midriff at that point.

And as the August Pantsdown winds to a close, I have but a few more entries to do. And then I’m on my own, topic wise. Watch this devolve into an accounting of what birds I see at the feeder every morning. Today’s Pants topic: PrincessPants! What brings out my princess side. For one, I am not a princess. I am the empress, the queen, the grand high ruler. Bear that in mind.

Having said that, though, I am a princess, and damn if Mom Wench didn’t make me that way. It’s not that I refuse to get my hands dirty, or whine and squeal. It’s the whole quality thing. I don’t eat cheapass mac and cheese; I make my own, which ends up costing less and tasting better. I don’t buy cheap shoes- they cause blisters and fall apart- and instead save my cash to buy very high quality shoes that last a really long time (hence the array of 5 year old shoes in perfect shape lining my closet). And so on and so on.

But there are 2 things I get real princessy about: travel, and not feeling good. Who doesn’t want to be pampered when ill? But I turn into a mewling, whiny, ‘make it go awaaaaaaay’ little freak when I’ve got a cold or the flu. Strangely, this is coupled with a stoic, “I am not sick! I am not sick!” until such time as the snot is vibrant green or orange and the back of my throat looks like the fjords of Norway in winter (I’m sure y’all needed that image), and then I fold like a snotty used kleenex, balling into bed and watching bad lifetime, television for women movies and begging for ice cream. Want to know how princessy sick I was this past winter? I had the tv on, rolled over, and the remote went flying, and so I sat there and watched “The Wedding Planner” in its entire deep J Lo badness rather than drag my ass out of bed to retrieve the remote.

But princessyness while sick is understandable. The travel thing? Makes no sense. I research our trips exhaustively- restaurant ratings, articles on hotels, museum reviews- and comparison shop and price point and nitnitnit and conduct jackbooted interviews of concierges until we have the penultimate vacation for our money, and the Lad always wonders how I manage to find a lovely small boutique hotel with whirlpool tubs and 400 thread count sheets for $100 the night. It’s because je refuse to sleep at a Quality Inn, that’s how, pal. I’d get in trouble at the old job for finding my own hotels and getting incredible deals on them, because the travel agent would always try to put me up at a days inn or holiday inn at a rack rate. No no no, idiot, not when you can get this for $99.

Part of the reason the move was so horrible was that the hotel just outside of St. Louis on move day gave away our reservation, despite it being guaranteed with a credit card, and the smarmy little bastard at the front desk couldn’t find us another hotel (could it have to do with his cosmically slow dialing?) nor did he bother to inform us it was due to a baseball tourney and came up with 8 thousand lame ass excuses why he’d given away our confirmed they had already charged our card the rat faced soulless wanker. And so we found ourselves at the econolodge from hell, a good 50 minutes further on the road than we’d anticipated, and too late for dinner, in a room so skanky I refused to take off my clothes as I got into bed, and as we pulled out the next morning- bright and early, refusing to spend another moment there (did I mention we had the ‘Executive Suite’, which apparently means ‘now with cigarette burned laz-y-boy’, and the TV wouldn’t change channels, and so we took to calling it the ‘El Presidente Suite’, and saying things like, “El Presidente, we have carefully selected television shows which say nothing negative about your junta- I mean, victorious duly elected leadership”)- we passed by another hotel, this one even more skanky than the one we’d just left, and The Lad, attempting to be jovial, said, “It could have been worse, we could have stayed there,” and pre-coffee I responded, without thinking, “My poontang itches just thinking about it”, which nearly caused my spouse to drive us off the road in response to such crass language from his pretty darling princess spouse and attempt to get me to promise to never say that ever again.

Two good things, though. He’s still feeling bad about the econolodge, and I have a new phrase in my arsenal that can make him whine and cry. Meantime, I’m researching a trip to Vancouver. I’ve found a place with 2 person whirlpool tubs on decks overlooking the water, with enormous fireplaces and afternoon wine service. It might suffice for me, but only if I don’t have to carry my suitcases upstairs.

Continuing the trend of one pants entry, one pantsless entry…So thanks to those who offered up anti-Lunabar suggestions. I’m hitting the grocery store later today. Will report back on the relative assiness of Cliff and Odwala bars.

So when I first started this journal, I thought I’d eventually run out of crap to say. Truly, my rantings could be endless, but who’d want to read that? Then I got nauseous. Then I got exhausted. Then my hair wouldn’t do crap and my face broke out, and Mendi had ‘the psychic baby dream’ and my MIL- and say what I will about her, there’s no denying that woman has a scary-ass accurate connection to some higher level of consciousness in searing moments of vision from time to time- informed my husband apropos of nothing ‘it’s a girl’. Then even saltines made me quease-o-riffic, and I stomped down the hall to take a pregnancy test. Then I got 2 lines- one faint, but it’s also a couple of days before I should be testing fer sure- on a stick o pee and voila! Thank you God for whamming me about the head and shoulders with a clue-by-four. I’d been walking around saying it was bad chicken salad from Hen House. This has, of course, doomed the spawnlet to 8 months of being referred to as“chicken salad”, that is if we don’t adopt R’s very good suggestion of “Our little bundle of snark” or “snarklet”.

And so it begins. A terrifying 8 months devoid of alcohol, sushi, and soft cheese (heh). A whole new world to rant about. No soft cheese? No alcohol? Jesus H Christ on a pogo stick, American Medical Community, get your hysterical heads out of your overreacting asses and look across the pond at France, a country where thanks to certain diseases found in the manure widely used to fertilize farm fields prengant women are told to avoid large quantities of fresh fruits and vegetables and to wash and cook them thoroughly and drink a glass of wine a day for relaxation and eat cheese for calcium. Looky, France is not a country populated by listeria addled FAS cases! (Can you tell I object to extremism in my medical advice? And no, don’t bother emailing me telling me alcohol consumption during pregnancy is The Great Evil. I assure you, I’m not going to be belting back the Beam. I’m off alcohol entirely until week 10, as the spawnlet goes through organogenesis, at which point assuming I’ve stopped queasing at anything containing, say, calories, a glass of wine now and then to calm me the fuck down would be a lovely idea). Yes, I’ll avoid raw fish and raw milk cheeses, but the whole ‘no sheep or goat milk cheese’? Do these idiots not know that there are magical things such as sheep and goat milk cheeses made from pasteurized milk, and so the blanket prohibition is bunk?

Oh god I’m a food snob. And the fact that I have managed to keep two whole bites of bread in me this morning makes this obsession with overturning the crap ass knee-jerk food no nos that much more hilarious.

The march towards the end of the Pantsdown! continues. Today’s topic: Smartypants! Do you love to say “I told you so”? What’s your best I told you so story?

This one’s actually tough, as my entire childhood was devoted to being right, damnit, and as a major form of communication and entertainment, my husband and I will bicker about who’s right on a particular bit of minutiae. Reaching back into the dusty bin of recollection, back in the dark ages when computers had 4, maybe 16K of RAM and there was no such thing as a hard drive, we had an Apple II+ (named Crabby). My mom, early one, became a devotee of smart, text based (well, everything was text based then) games with intricate plots, huge manuals, and 12 or so 5 inch floppies. One such game was Odyssey.

Apparently, in this game, you were a time traveler, and the goal was not obvious- it was sort of like the show The Prisoner in that regard- but you had to run around and get stuff and do things and find your way back to your time traveling pod and jump around and figure out, despite a big lack of direction, when and where the bloody fuck you were supposed to be. There was a ton of history, mythology, and literature embedded in the program- the more stuff you knew about Rome, the Renaissance, ancient Greece and Egypt, China, etc, the better. It, of course, drove Mom batty. I, of course, wanted to help. I knew shit about the Ming dynasty. One fine day my parents and I were driving along, and mom was complaining how she was so close to the end but she was stumped- she’d gotten a key, and had no idea where to use it. It worked on nothing, yet she was stuck and couldn’t go forward. Dad: “Doors?” Mom: “Tried em all.” Dad: “Are you sure?” Mom: “Yes.” On and on, gates and doors and boxes and everything my parents could think to stick a key into. A thought occured to me, and from the backseat of the car I tried to interrupt. “Mom?” I was shushed. “Mom?” “Not now.” “Mom!” At which point Dad ripped into me for interrupting and told me how they were trying to go through this very methodically and my interrupting wasn’t helping and I was too young to understand the game anyway.

“I understand what a key does, and apparently neither of you understand that a key might understandablywork the locked trunk of a car!!”

We stopped the errands we were running, turned around, and went directly home. Sure enough, it unlocked the trunk which gave you the hoodyhaady which let you finish the game. Henceforth, whenever either of my parents were giving me shit and talking down to me, I’d simply say, “Try the car trunk.” Works like a charm, and so much more mature than saying ‘neener neener neener’.