Archive for the Daily Watering Category

I’m becoming more and more like Bill Murray in Caddyshack.  We both wear the idiot expression quite well, and now I have a severe rodent problem in my yard: MOLES.  In case you don’t remember the movie, Murray’s character tries unsuccessfully to rid a fancy golf course of a pesky gopher.  The gopher survives poison, flooding, and explosives, and at the end of the movie, he celebrates his victory with a sassy little dance to a Kenny Loggins song.  Three years ago at Christmas, my mother-in-law bought us the official dancing Caddyshack gopher doll.  It’s in my son’s room, so the impudent rodent remains at the forefront of my mind.  Thank you for that, Debbie.  Until you’ve seen a mechanized gopher doll do jazz hands, you really haven’t lived…in America.

Bill Murray and I are merging into one being.

I’ve been fighting the troublesome moles in my yard for five years now, but I’m still foggy on the the nature of my enemy.  Why do they like my lawn and not my neighbors’?  How many are there?  ‘Cause the tunnels are huge.  He/she/the family/the sasquatch burrows through my entire front yard, creating visible mounds and hidden holes, eating plant roots, destroying grass, and making a general mess of things.  The battle has taken its toll, including me accidentally poisoning my dog.  He lived, thank goodness.  I didn’t even know that he had ingested mole poison, but I’ll never forget the aftermath.  While we slept through what must have been a horrific night for him, his bowels suddenly released and evacuated with all the mighty power of Zeus himself.  We awoke to diarrhea anarchy.  A new world order was created — one that required us to get new carpet immediately.

The dog poisoning was an awful accident.  However, if you would still like to send hate mail, you should know that in addition to being an incompetent dog owner, I am terrified of cats, which causes me to despise them and mumble hate speech in their direction whenever they come into sight.  And I inadvertently killed several goldfish in an unrelated electrocution incident several years ago.  If anything, your hate mail should be thorough.

Moles have been the root cause of the dog poisoning, the new carpet expense, the near-death of a tree, the demise of other numerous other plants, and a two-inch strip of sunburn that included the top part of my butt-crack skin.  (It was 100 degrees out while I was repairing mole damage, and either I didn’t know that I was exposed, or I was enjoying the refreshing breeze.  Are you happy now?)

In past seasons, I’ve fought the moles with a half-assed effort (haha!), much like the U.S. in Vietnam.  However, my husband has put an ultimatum on me: rid our yard of the moles, or he will call a professional.

“NO!” I shouted when he threatened the nuclear option.  “Don’t call anyone!  They will use poison and/or traps and tear up our yard!”  And I can do that myself, for FREE.

I’m rigging up the dynamite tonight.

Recently I’ve tried to change my attitude towards myself and BE NICER.  This all started on the tennis court.  Beating myself up after every missed shot didn’t help my game any, plus my throat would get sore from whisper-yelling “You missed another ball, you sloppy buttchunk!” to myself after every play.  I decided to start treating myself as if I were cheering for my kids, meaning I would stop ranting under my breath, stay cheerful, and remind myself to get ready for the next ball.  The positive approach has worked better.  I don’t know that my game has improved, but at least nobody is saying mean things to me play after play.

(A word of warning: Don’t treat yourself too much like your own kid, or else you might take away all the Halloween candy and make yourself go to bed.)

Anyway, my tennis league includes two elderly women who have mad ball-placement skillz but limited body movement due to frail knees and advanced cases of age.  I see them every few weeks, and in my head, I’ve nicknamed them “Happy Beret Lady” and “Teddy Bear Sweatshirt Lady” because of their tennis apparel.

You would think that someone who regularly displays teddy bears on her sweatshirts would have “Happy” in her nickname, too, but that’s not the case.  Teddy Bear Sweatshirt might be a cheerful person when she’s not on the court, but she spews the most horrible things to herself when she misses the tennis ball.  Her ranting is even worse than mine used to be.  Teddy Bear Sweatshirt is overly competitive with Happy Beret; I think they get on each other’s nerves.  Perhaps they are battling for a Best Dressed award (Creative division) that I am unaware of.

Teddy Bear Sweatshirt and I recently played against Happy Beret and another lady.  Teddy Bear Sweatshirt was meaner than ever to herself, probably because Happy Beret smoked us a couple of times.  Teddy Bear Sweatshirt yelled at herself, and the fuming sounded awful.  I couldn’t stand to hear anyone being treated that way.  If you’ve ever witnessed a parent getting too frustrated with a small child and stayed for a bit longer just to make sure you didn’t need to call Child Protective Services, you know the feeling.  Plus, there is something disturbing and incongruent about a woman in a saccharin sweatshirt calling herself a “stupid idiot who can’t do anything right.”

Can anyone wearing a shirt like this be a stupid idiot? Okay, don't answer that. Frail old ladies who wear these shirts are not stupid--they're kinda cute.

I went up to her and said, “Teddy Bear Sweatshirt, you need to stop saying mean things to yourself, or I won’t play with you anymore.”  She looked at me with surprise, and I explained how I felt about the abuse.  She laughed, and we’re cool.  She was nicer to herself after that, although she told me I was a numbskull pusswhip for missing a volley.  Just kidding.

I think I deserve kudos because I probably improved her life.  Either that, or she went home and dwelled on how she can’t even talk kindly to herself and spiraled into a deep depression.  If she’s out of the tennis league due to her incapacitating misery, then I stand a chance at the Best Dressed award (Creative division), especially once it gets colder and I wear my huge, ratty black parka to the courts and become known as “Homeless Tall Curly” in everyone’s heads.  Homeless is totally avant-garde this season, especially on the tennis courts.

My recipe called for ¾ of a cup of dry, red wine.  That left the rest of the bottle for me.  I’m now sufficiently liquored up enough to tell the story of how the birds and the bees talk went down with my 4^th grade daughter.

It was not a planned talk, like these things probably should be; there was no thinking, strategy, or forethought involved.

No.  I got sick and tired of her dressing like a skank.

When I told my friends about how our talk went down, they all said that they were preparing their discussions, too, by ordering books and discussing it with their husbands.  At that point (strangely not before then) I was kind of embarrassed about my lack of forethought.

Is a weird talk better than no talk?

A visual representation of our birds and bees chat. All these characters magically appeared in our talk, which probably wouldn’t have happened if I’d had a plan.

It started like this:

We had girls over for a sleepover, and they played “pop star” all night. Katy Perry, Ke$ha, and Britney Spears roamed the house looking for singing, dancing, and paparazzi action. The girls remained in character for hours, even into the next morning while we ate pancakes. There was way too much makeup, glitter, and tight clothing involved (and we’re Texans!). After the other two girls left, my daughter continued to talk like Britney Spears. She’s too young and sheltered to know what Britney’s voice really sounds like, so she used her best Valley Girl voice. On top of the obnoxious accent, she was dressed like a ho-bag. It was stuff she had in her own closet — some of it outgrown — all combined in an unfortunate fashion.

I asked her to change before we ran errands, and she politely refused in the Valley Girl voice. She straight up didn’t understand why I wanted her to look like a normal person instead of a glamorous and tightly-clad fashion icon.

After the past two years or so, I have grown tired of this conversation. She routinely mixes her clothes in a way that makes her look like she walked out of Bebe. How she does this is beyond me, as most of her clothes are from Target. I thought I could save myself some future time and energy if I went ahead and busted out the penis talk. Because I’m a great mom, and if I apply some logic to this situation, she’ll totally understand, right?

I thought she knew a bit about sex. She’s old enough to have heard all kinds of misguided rumors, so I didn’t think this would be traumatic. Also, we’ve talked and joked about puberty several times because we get high on all the Axe body spray floating through the air upstairs, and that makes everything funnier.

However, she started crying once she realized that this was going to be that conversation because she was embarrassed and tired. Also, I think she didn’t want to know the truth, and I was about to confirm it. Let’s face it: anytime estrogen isn’t rushing through your veins, the facts sound yucky.

Our conversation went something like this, although I have condensed 2.5 hours down to 20 seconds:

Please note the delicacy, tact, and flow with which I carried on this conversation with my crying 9-year-old daughter.

Me: “You know why I don’t want you to dress like that? Penises.

Wait, wait, wait — let’s back up and talk about women’s rights and how far we’ve come through the ages. We women are finally being treated with more respect! We have more to offer than our bodies, and modern, developed society is finally realizing this!

Oh, and we should probably preface this with a quick science review. Keep in mind that we are mammals, and those eggs have to be fertilized somehow. Remember those orangutan monkeys we saw at the zoo this summer?  You saw how the male monkey was sticking that pink, slippery-looking body part into the female monkey?

And then the male went to the other side of the cage and covered himself with hay so nobody could see him, while the female hid behind her straw pallet and put a blanket over her head, like she felt dirty. [Do y’all sense it, too?  THERE IS A BAPTIST TEENAGER JOKE IN HERE SOMEWHERE.]

Me: “Yep, that’s sex for ya!”

Daughter: “HAHAHAHAHA!”

Me: “Oh, yes!  Hahahahahaha!  The monkey sex was so funny. God is hilarious! The whole process is crazy weird!

Except for that’s how human babies are made, and someday that may sound nice to you.”

Daughter: “WHAT?!!!???”

Me: “Don’t worry — you won’t want to do that until you have estrogen rushing through your body. Coincidentally, you should be married and fully medically insured before that happens.*

Have you seen that story in the newspaper about polygamists? Old men get married to really young girls just for sex. It’s horrible and illegal. That’s why those dudes go to jail. Would you like to be treated like you are only good for sex and don’t have a brain of your own? No way!

Katy Perry and Ke$ha sing lyrics and wear clothes that make people think they are only good for sex, so they are just like sad, hopeless, polygamist girls. Except for the pop stars also sing about excessive drinking and drugs, which is even worse. So now they are sad, polygamist girls who drink Jägermeister instead of milk, which means they will surely develop osteoporosis by age 35.

By the way, I want to touch on this subject again. Don’t do drugs because I once heard about a guy (friend of a friend of a friend) on LSD who thought he was a leprechaun, which was funny until he felt threatened and tried to kill people with a kitchen knife. And meth will make your teeth fall out.**

That female orangutan monkey did not even like having sex. You should definitely take off those tight pants.

I want you to be pretty and fashionable, but stay away from the whore look. 

Good talk!”

*In the perfect bubble we live in

**Don’t worry: we completed the full meth & cocaine discussion a couple of months ago. It was as delicately delivered as this conversation.

I’m not Chinese, but lately I find myself surrounded by all things Mandarin.  A new Asian supermarket opened up in my area, and I go there frequently because I love, love, LOVE to cook Thai food.  All of Asia is crammed into this one store, so they have food from China, Japan, Korea, and more.  Now I have junk food in my house that I would never buy at an American grocery store, but since the packaging is in a foreign language, it’s practically educational!  I’m a sucker for a brand of lemon cookies from China; they’re so strong that they smell and taste like Lemon Pledge.

For health reasons, there are certain toys, fish, or other goods that I won’t buy if they’re imported from China, so it doesn’t make sense that I’m ingesting cookies made in China.  The Lemon Pledge in them must be destroying the brain cells that control logic.

Fortunately, my daughter has not been eating Lemon Pledge.  She took Mandarin Chinese classes last summer and did very well, especially with pronunciation.  She won an award for it, I think; I can’t read the certificate because it’s in Mandarin.  She only knows the basics, but her accent is so good that everything that comes out of her mouth in Chinese is funny to me.  She’s such a white girl, with blonde hair and blue eyes, but she sounds authentic and fluent to my untrained ears.  It makes my brain swirl around! (Or it could be the cookies.)  Hearing her speak Chinese is totally cool, and I make her practice often.

Last weekend, she wrote Chinese characters on my Halloween costume.  My husband and I were invited to a Halloween party with the theme “Princesses and Politicians,” so we made a small political statement.  My husband dressed as a destitute Captain America; his shield advertised that he was trillions of dollars in debt and would hero for money.  I went with him as the country of China.  China, of course, had lots of money to invest in Captain America.  Our tag line was “Who’s screwing who?”  After two glasses of wine, I enthusiastically asked that to strangers each time we explained our costumes.  A few party-goers understood the political joke and laughed, but most tilted their head and wondered if I was serious about the “who’s screwing who” swinger proposition.  They probably thought to themselves “It’s not that kind of party, lady.”

I’m glad there were no Mandarin speakers at the party because my daughter printed the characters for “we are bananas” on my poster.  That wasn’t a political statement; it was the mind of a 9-year-old at work.

To add to the weirdness, the coolly hat at the top of China accidentally looked phallic.

Who's screwing who? I don't know, but China has a coolly hat for a wing-wang.

Zhing phong xiou!

I also talk about feng shui, the Chinese philosophy of energy equilibrium, when I play tennis.  While serving, I like to hold all three balls.  I keep one in my hand for the toss, and I distribute the other two in each side of my tennis skirt to satisfy my obsessive-compulsive desire for balance.

When my partner offers to hold a ball, I politely decline, motion to the balls in my skirt, and yell back my reply: “I like feng shui in my pants!”

I don’t really know much about feng shui, but I know how I like my pants.  I like ‘em Chinese, along with my cookies.

This feng shui building in Hong Kong is a visual representation of the feng shui in my tennis skirt. However, don't let this picture fool you into believing that my skirt is crotchless. Nike doesn't sell that kind....yet.

As a lover of language, I pay attention to lingo.  Some groups are known for it, like the military with their acronyms and techies with computer-coding jargon.  When folks have a passion, the lingo turns funny because they’ll shout things that don’t make sense unless you share their zeal.

My friend J frequently makes bold exclamations about art or design with wide, serious, crazy eyes.  She sews her own stylish clothes, and, once, in a fit of excitement, she shouted, “Caftans are HUGE right now!”  She expected me to reply to the word caftans with all seriousness and jump up and down with her because they were so colossal.

Another friend of mine is a serious foodie who is going to culinary school to fulfill her obsession.  She was wound up about her starch and grain lesson last week and audaciously threatened, “Watch out, quinoa!  Here comes freekah!”

What the heck is freekah?  Duh.  It’s just like quinoa, but better. And it’s gonna send quinoa back down to the pit of oblivion, where it belongs.

My favorite lingo artist is the choir director at my church.  She’s a bubbly, pretty, and friendly lady—think former Broadway star—who takes music terminology up a notch.  She begs our choir to better pronounce hard consonants, and at least once per rehearsal, she fervently makes a clenching motion at her throat and dramatically cries, “Put a fresh glottal attack on it!”

Every time I hear that, I imagine a big, hairy man rabidly devouring a greasy chicken leg and spitting some of it back up due to his glottal attack.  But he’s ravenous, so he ferociously chokes down the meat.

I don’t think “glottal attack” helps me remember to put a hard “k” on Christ.

Sometimes the choir director finds a hemiola in a song.  I have no idea what that means,* but it sounds like hemorrhoids and areolas combined, which makes me cringe and snicker simultaneously.

Last week we had a song section that was marked mezzo forte, which means “medium loud” in Italian.  She didn’t take the time to say “mezzo forte.”  No, with great enthusiasm and utter naivety, she yelled out over our singing voices, “MF, MF, MF!”

That same MF was probably the one who ate the chicken leg and gave some poor girl a hemiola.

Like this guy, but greasier

And that’s why I go to choir practice.

*Wikipedia says this: “In modern musical parlance, a hemiola is a metrical pattern in which two bars in simple triple time (3/2 or 3/4 for example) are articulated as if they were three bars in simple drupal time (2/2 or 2/4).”

But, if I were you, I’d be on the safe side and visit the doctor if you develop a hemiola, a huge caftan, an aggressive freekah, or glottal attack of any kind.