Fresh, Hot Wastes of Time

This is a slide from my third grader’s Powerpoint presentation about what the pioneers ate.

Do you see anything a little weird about it? I mean, just slightly off?
Apparently my daughter is laboring under the misconception that the pioneers ate their own.  And she claims she read about it in a book and that her teacher told her it was true.

Now perhaps there was a small blurb in there about the Donner Party, sure.  And I imagine that it was probably a little more educational than the way I learned about it, which was from The Shining:

Wendy Torrance: Hey. Wasn’t it around here that the Donner Party got snowbound?
Jack Torrance: I think that was farther west in the Sierras.
Wendy Torrance: Oh.
Danny Torrance: What was the Donner Party?
Jack Torrance: They were a party of settlers in covered-wagon times. They got snowbound one winter in the mountains. They had to resort to cannibalism in order to stay alive.
Danny Torrance: You mean they ate each other up?
Jack Torrance: They had to, in order to survive.
Wendy Torrance: Jack…
Danny Torrance: Don’t worry, Mom. I know all about cannibalism. I saw it on TV.
Jack Torrance: See, it’s OK. He saw it on the television.

But to list “dead friends” as a regular source of food set me into near-hysterical gales of sputtering laughter for so long that my younger daughter brought me paper towels and a drink of water out of concern. Then, of course, the family joke for the evening became cannibalism.

We are not a normal family.

At dinner, the little one decided she was too full for dessert(!). Hub and I proceeded to bicker over who would get her Worms in Dirt and pretend to be Bear Grylls. Just as the fight started to get heated, Jo said, “Wait, I know! Mommy can have the Worms in Dirt, and Daddy can have a Dead Friend!”

Daddy said, “Hmm. I don’t have a dead friend.”

Caroline said, “That’s okay! We can kill Mr. Baconator!”

Pretty sure my squawk of laughter upset the other dining patrons.

Today I got tested for the National Marrow Donor Program.  Other than fill out a lot of paperwork, all I had to do was swab the insides of my cheeks with some Q-Tips.  Easy peasy, lemon squeazy. I recommend you all do it.  

I also gave blood for the first time.  Not half bad.  It was sort of like a reverse IV.  I may have to do that again sometime.

It was one of those flip clocks that made the tiny little “click” when the minutes changed. It was white. I got it for Christmas, I think.

The alarm would go off.  

He would stand in the door and softly call me to the kitchen.  

Every morning he would make me a cup of cocoa and a small something.  Usually an English muffin with peanut butter and jelly; sometimes cinnamon toast.  

I’d scowl at the fluorescent light and bury my head in my arms and pine for the warm covers.  The hot water heater would pound out a rhythm from its home in the hallway behind the kitchen door.  

He was always patient.  He always had English Breakfast tea and WOAI on the radio.  In February and March we would always listen to “Thirteen Days of Glory” and I would always be proud to be Texan.  

On cold mornings he would go run the car in the driveway for 15 or 20 minutes before it was time to leave, and when he came back inside, his fingers would be blue.

He would tell me “I lub you” when it was time to go.

I still eat English muffins with peanut butter and jelly.

Haven’t been sleeping well for the past couple of nights. Too much to fret about.

Sunday night: Dreamt that my cat was barfing little Mardi Gras-colored piles all over the house. Purple, gold, and green. Every day is like survival?

Monday night: Probably shouldn’t watch Space Cowboys before bed. Bizarre plot-driven tale about having to fly into space to eliminate a Threat. We were in a swanky bordello-decorated house in Los Angeles and somebody used their connections to hire Metallica to play us a couple of songs in the couple of hours before we had to take off. They played “Blackened,” which I felt was in poor taste for someone about to take off in a rocket because I thought it started off with “Blackened in the air.” (Hubby has since set me straight on the lyrics.)

The lead singer for M/A/R/R/S was there and kept talking to me like I should know him. I didn’t. But he did look like Toby from The Office.

 The dream ended when someone gave me a going away present of a Minnie Mouse doll, decked out in a satin, powder blue party dress with “Ku Klux Klan” embroidered in the Laverne font down the side.

I’ve been waking up uneasy. Wonder why.

A quick FYI – I’ll be on a panel this year at SXSW Interactive entitled “You’re Living in Your Own Private Branded Entertainment Experience”. It’ll be headed up by Campfire’s Brian Cain and include luminaries such as Steve Peters (who also likes the word “luminaries”), Brian Clark, and Lance Weiler.

Edited to linkify.

With absolutely no good reason, forethought, or plan, suddenly I found myself in the midst of a site overhaul this afternoon.  My husband says it looks like a lower back tattoo; I think it looks like the Rock Band graphics.  Well, the old one was getting a little tired and this one seems to load quicker, plus it’s sexier.  

I also moved my portfolio pages from static HTML over to the blog site (and now I’m sort of wishing that the entire website were under the loving care of WordPress and I hadn’t just quarantined it to the /blog directory back when I did the original install of Movable Type back in 2002). If you’re interested, there’s a write-up of one of my puzzles for Vroengard Academy with nifty yucko Dee graphic vs. slick professional artist graphic comparison.

We have these cordless phones that have a rudimentary speech synthesizer and read the caller ID information out loud when we get telephone calls. This leads to some unintentional hilarity. For instance, when my uncle calls, the telephone hollers out that we have an incoming call from “Ballscar.” Earlier today a cousin called, and the phone dubbed him “Voiced Monkey.”

It’s the little things.

Porn for women (safe for work).