Wishing You Were Here

Me being molested by three Jack Russells in the Canaryville neighborhood

We spent eight days in Chicago. Besides going to see a show, Motown, going to a wedding, eating every type of food from great to bad, and catching an awful illness, we got to tour the neighborhood that we are thinking of buying a house in. Mark and I also spent an afternoon eating ribs with my mom from her favorite rib joint. Yet the whole time I was there, there was something missing. My dogs. In the past we have driven to Chicago so that the dogs could come along. This time we were only staying a week so I had to leave them behind. Luckily for me, right around the corner is a lady named Mandy who baby sits dogs for a living. So while I was gone, Chandler and Bette got walked three times a day, fed twice a day, and got to sleep with the nice lady in their own bed. Every evening I got a text and a photo of the two dogs lounging around the house. On the first night Mandy asked me in the text if Chandler always needed to be lifted onto the bed. It turns out that Chandler was playing her. For eight nights Mandy lifted that eighty pound mutt onto the bed. I know that is the case because now, every night since we have been home, Chandler stands at the side of the bed and gives me a look that says, "Well asshole, aren't you going to lift me up?" No, no I am not going to start lifting that moose up onto the bed. There will be plenty of time when he is older that I will give in and do things for him, but as long as I know he can do it, Chandler is going to pull his own ass up onto that bed. As for Bette, she literally flies across the room bouncing off the chair and into bed. I really missed those two dogs while we were in Chicago. Really, it got to the point that I was accosting just about every person who I saw in Chicago with a dog. I was boring everybody with my story of leaving my dogs alone in Florida. It got really weird when I started offering to come by and walk their dogs later. That's how much I missed them.

Siri-ously

I don't own one, but I recognize that the iphone is an amazing tool of the twenty first century. You can use it to track buses so you don't have to wait on the corner like some common public transportation user. It allows people to cheat on trivia night at the local bar. I myself have seen it in action here at our house while watching television. All I have to do is mention something about an actor or show that I'm watching and Mark asks Siri to look it up. He also uses Siri to spend hours 'texting' his friends. Nothing like trying to watch a television show while Mark gabs with an overly friendly electronic voice. While we were in Chicago last week, we took a bus downtown. I sat there quietly while Mark pecked away on his iphone. Glancing around at all the people on the bus I realized that I was the only person without an iphone. I was the only one who wasn't listening to, pecking away at, or staring blankly at an iphone. I felt very lonely. You go to a supermarket and almost everybody has their iphone out. People stroll down the street, stepping blindly into traffic, while staring at their iphone. And if they get hit by a car it will be by somebody gabbing away on their iphone. Don't get me wrong, I have a cell phone. It's a decade old flip phone that takes ten minutes to type out a five word text to somebody, so I don't do much texting. Anyway, I think there is a time and a place for iphones, like in bar bathrooms and airports. Any other place and I think that they cause problems. While in Chicago I decide that I needed to do a little laundry, so I took a few things down to the laundry room of my friend Dennis' building. I set my shopping bag full of dirty clothes down on the table and put some detergent into the washing machine. At the other end of the room was a lady yakking on her iphone while holding a small jug of bleach. When I turned to get my dirty clothes I noticed that the shopping bag had a wet spot on it. It wasn't until I pulled my clothes out of the dryer later that I realized that the shopping bag had turned white where it had been wet, and that three pieces of my clothing had bleached out white spots on them. Apparently Miss Gabby iphone user could not talk without gesturing with her hands. She had splashed bleach all over the laundry room. I showed the bleached out clothes to Mark, and asked him if there was anything I could do to fix them. He assured me that there is probably an app for that.

Chi-bola

I'm still sick from our trip to Chicago. Hacking, uncontrollable hacking up of phlegm, a very sore throat, and a throbbing headache. I spent a few hours on the can yesterday doing the Hershey squirts, and threw up once in the kitchen sink. God bless that garbage disposal, it came in very handy. The weird thing is that nobody that I came into contact with has come down with this strange ailment. Not my 92 year old mother, not Mark, not my friend Dennis (who put up with us for a week). As far as I know, nobody. I keep retracing my steps from our week in Chicago, trying to figure out who gave me this bug. It could have been the fat ass sitting next to me on the plane to Chicago. Every time I moved my arm a fraction of an inch, his clammy fat arm moved in to take up the slack. By the time we got to O'Hare I was firmly wedged between him and the sleeper next to me, like boxer shorts in a fat man's ass crack. It could have been from the wedding. There was a lot of hugging and kissing, and many of the guests came from Miami, and Canada. This could be an evil Canadian germ that got me. Also, we stopped at one of those ubiquitous Chicago hot dog stands, the kind with grease everywhere and the long counter of condiments laid out for every fly and bug to land on, not to mention the somewhat hairy, sweaty men who put my hot dog together. I assume that alcohol would kill any germs, but still, after all the vodka we drank last week, who knows what those bar glasses were washed in. There was the riding of crowded buses, and the snarl of the lobby at the theater where we saw Motown. Speaking of that theater there was a beggar at the box office that got right up in my face. He asked me "How much for those tickets?" I imagine that was his way of making me feel guilty for his next question, "Got a couple of dollars mister?" The answer is no, I did not. I taught Mark seventeen years ago to not give money to the beggars. They are like cats. I think they send out pheromones when they score a sucker who gives them money, because moments later you are surrounded by them. My punishment for not donating money to the Chicago beggar troops may have been the germ of this sickness I have. I think he could have flicked it on me as I walked away. So today is the seventh day of my cold/flu/ebola. I can take it though, I've had worse. What I cannot take is Mark getting it. He is the worst baby when it comes to being sick. I swear that if he gets sick and starts ringing that little bell that he has, and ordering me to bring him soup, tea, and what have you, I will shove that thing up his ass so far you'll hear ringing when he sneezes.

Chicago 2014

Mark and I went to Chicago to attend a wedding. We stayed for eight days, eight rather uneventful days. Other than fighting for the armrest with the fat man sitting next to me, I cannot complain about the flight to Chicago. We even landed first class seats on the way home. That was sweet. Mark did not end up in the emergency room this time and didn't spend one day in the hospital. He also didn't spend hours shopping. One book, two dog toys, and a sack of spices from the spice store are all that he bought. There was none of the drama of figuring out how to get a hundred pounds of crap into a fifty pound suitcase. We went to the theater while we were there, and saw Motown the Musical. We had good seats, there was no asshole sitting next to me singing along like there was at Jersey Boys, and I didn't fall asleep during it. So that's a good thing. One thing that did distract me during Motown were the deaf interpreters standing down next to the stage. Am I wrong, but deaf people cannot hear music, can they? None the less, there they were frantically gesticulating and signaling along with the music. So did anything go wrong on our trip to Chicago? Of course it did, and I wrote everything down on a piece of scrap paper, that when I find it will jar some of those things back into my memory and I'll write about them. The one thing I know for sure is that I got a horrific flu like cold just two days before we left. Muscle aches, headaches, coughing, hacking up phlegm balls the size of  macaroons, and swinging from cold and clammy to hot and sweaty. Possibly I have Ebola. We'll know for sure when all those other people from the first class cabin on our flight home come down with it.

We Went to a Wedding

And the babies stole the show.

My mom with her newest, freshest, great grandchild. Right out of the oven.

And then there were the older babies.

Re-blogged from Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Don't Poke at Strange Things

I have written about our rat problem before, so when Mark came in the house and announced, "There's a dead rat somewhere in the yard, and I'm gonna puke!", I wasn't surprised. I was especially not surprised because two doors down from me is an abandoned, foreclosed home that the bank just cleared of debris, denying the neighborhood rats of easy lodging. So I grabbed Chandler, who considers the smell of rat to be a delicious and rare treat, and went out front to search for the carcass. On our first pass, I couldn't smell or find anything. It was when we came back inside the gate that Chandler made a dash towards some leaves and shrubbery, "Thank you boy, I'll take it from here". So with a cookie and a pat on the head I dismissed Chandler from his duties, and continued the search on my own. I got down on my hands and knees to inspect the area that Chandler had been interested in. There was a definite stench, and all around me flies were buzzing and landing, a surefire sign of rat death. My search yielded no dead rat, but while I was on my knees, I came across one of the weirdest things I have ever seen growing out of the ground. All I could think of was movies like 'The Blob', or 'Invasion of the Pod People'. It was like a large red Whiffle Ball with black dimples where the holes should be. I immediately took photos, and then went into the house to research the thing on the internet.So what was it that I found? According to the web site 'Mushroom Expert' it is called 'Clathrus Crispus', which I think might be Latin for crispy rat. Whatever it means, this is what 'Mushroom Expert' has to say about the thing.
"Clathrus crispus appears with some frequency in Florida and along the Gulf Coast, to judge from e-mails I receive. It is an outlandish and exotic looking stinkhorn reminiscent of an orange "Wiffle football"--except for the God-awful stench that results from the slimy brown goo that covers the inside of the lattice. The method stinkhorns use to disperse spores is quite ingenious, though a little disgusting to human sensibilities. The foul-smelling slime is calculated to attract flies and other insects, who land on the slime and gobble it up. Little do the insects know that they have been duped into covering their little insect feet with stinkhorn spores, and have ingested spores into their digestive tracts! Later, these spores are dispersed by the unwitting insects, and the stinkhorn life-cycle continues elsewhere."
There you go, dead rat found, and another great reason to move to Florida.

Re-posted from November 25, 2010