Switching Off the Targeting Computer

I have not posted in a week, which, in blog terms, is four and a half geologic ages.  Entire species of dinosaurs have been created, flourished, and wiped out by a meteor, all since this little white box and I did battle.  Because the Internet doesn’t have quite enough of people flinging electrons about in a desperate attempt to make their personal lives relevant.

I haven’t been here because there has been a great e-stack and two night classes to teach; also, for the past seven days in a row, total strangers have been stomping through my home, noting the uneven door jamb and looking sorrowfully at the toothpaste-flecked bathroom faucets.  They will not lay down three hundred large for a home containing a suspicious varnish stain by the pantry and a thirtysomething freelance writer curled in the fetal position in the walk-in closet (carpeted!  shows well!)

Perhaps I will run away.

Maybe one of those singles holidays.  Nothing against Josh The Pilot, you understand.  It’s just, at the moment, I require a great deal of alcohol, and for the next two nights at exactly class time I’d quite rather be in Really Really Far Away From Here Singles Holidays World.  Don’t care where.  Don’t care how.  Josh The Pilot can stay here to let the total strangers in, and eat Taco Bell fourteen times a week.

I’m focusing on a UK site here because it will perhaps make me more difficult to track.  I’ll have booked reservations…. by a person who drives on the left side of the road.  The only caps-locks sentences will be on my airline ticket:  THIS PERSON IS GOING ON A SINGLES HOLIDAY, AND DESERVES A GREAT DEAL OF ALCOHOL.  Maybe I’ll even book offshore. (Oh, look, a walking tour of Nepal!  And you can do it online!  Oh crap… they need your full legal name.)

midnight flight at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

Upsetting

Yesterday’s Bengals-Steelers game was the only one all season for which Paul Brown Stadium was sold out.  Why?  Because Steelers fans bought the seats up, and more than likely outnumbered the home crowd.

Well.

That was one long-ass bus ride home to Pennsylvania.  I know that bus.  I’ve been on that bus.  I’ve barfed on that bus, and that bus hurled me beneath it.  I don’t want to be on that bus ever again.  But every once in a while, even if it’s once every four years, it’s nice to make sure your sworn enemy has a first-class seat.

missing Boomer at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

Puff

I was walking through Le Mart de Wal last week, and was actually disturbed by something other than what normally disturbs me in a Le Mart de Wal.  On the end of the single aisle of plastic beads and BeDazzlers that passes for the Crafts Department, I saw a bag of brown pipe cleaners, labelled as… “Fuzzy Sticks.”

That’s not a crafting supply.  That’s the title of a particularly alarming furry fanfic.  I’m assuming the name change has come about because less people are smoking, and Kids These Days What With Their Hannah Dakota and Their Light-Up Sneakers have barely a concept of pipedom.  Well, whooooo, I suppose.  I cannot abide cigarettes, but am rather partial to pipes, probably because my father smoked one when I was a little blonde, just starting out in the world of not understanding anything.  A bit of brown secondhand stickiness was a proper fee for the Captain Smith tins which housed our collection of My Little Pony combs.  The modern equivalent, I suppose, is handing  my Hypnotiq empties over to Will The Smaller Child Nephew as a secondhand sippy cup.

My primary fear is that pipe cleaners will vanish from the Earth entirely– and then what will we do for candy cane reindeer antlers?  I’M ASKING YOU.

next, they come for the clothespins at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

MY GODCHILD

Julie The NephewsMama sustained a hopscotch injury, and suggested to her sons that the family stay home from Mass today.

Jim The Small Child Nephew threw a fit, and insisted upon going to church.

I take full responsibility.

threw a fit when asked to go to church at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

Heavy

I have the most beautifullest wedding ring in the whole wide world.  It’s white gold, and sparkly.  Little tiny sparkles halfway around.  It’s so awesome that I’ve only lost it once (bathroom, middle of the night, wastebasket, handwashing accident, don’t ask.)

But now that I’m discovering what actual married life is like, I’m wondering if Josh The Pilot and I should have held out for titanium wedding bands.  And look at these things.  They’re medieval weapons.  They could double as lug nuts on a monster truck, assuming lug nuts on a monster truck feature beveled edges and half a carat.  These are serious rings.  The dainty little thing on my left hand, I’m beginning to fear, doesn’t bespeak the enormous… enormity of marriage.

My grandmother’s wedding ring is currently sitting in my mother’s jewelery box.  It’s the one she wore for over sixty years, just about the only jewelry she had left after the other few pieces she owned vanished in a home invasion and through the slow erosion of nursing home existence.  Children and dishes and bakery work and scrubbing and holy water and children some more wore it down to a wire.  We tied a length of red yarn around the ring to anchor it to the Earth, fearful it will somehow evaporate entirely.  I was shocked when I became aware of the condition of it; my grandmother oversaw the cross-town construction of an entire house while enormously pregnant and without a driver’s license.  She was not a malleable wire of a woman.  She deserved a stalwart, solid, indestructible lug nut of a wedding band.

On second thought, given my propensity to put as much physical distance between myself and moths on the porch light… maybe the slender little wimp-o-rama band is better for me after all.

find a wheel at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

Corbetted

You remember Mr. Bill Corbett, first of Mystery Science Theater 3000 fame, currently of Rifftrax fame, always of BILL CORBETT IS AWESOME fame.

He’s totally following me on Twitter.

yep at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

Overheard Song Lyric of the Day

“The medicine profiles the line.”

I’d like to know what “medicine,” exactly, was in play here when this was deemed acceptable for placement on a major recording label; but then again, we are also the same society responsible for “Whoomp, There It Is,” so who am I to judge.

Car Talk With an English Major

One of the unexpected outcomes of working on this Top Gear article is that I find myself viewing cars, for the first time in my life, as something other than a great incomprehensible tangle of plastic and metal which, if it decided to stop working– entirely of its own accord, of course–would render me entirely helpless until a person with coveralls and an itemized bill showed up.

But as the Bridemobile (just because I don’t understand ‘em doesn’t mean I can’t name ‘em) and I trundled across state lines last week.  I saw the grille of… some car bearing down on us, and I knew, just by glancing in the mirror, that this was something that I will be able to afford just as soon as the enormous Money Bundles of Serendipity come tumbling down from the sky.  And as it zoomed past, there it was on the back of trunk– four rings.  Which I wouldn’t have been able to identify a few months ago, either, merely chalking it down as a tragic attempt at Olympics-supporting car decor.

Now I find myself wondering about at body lines, brake horsepower, and turning radius, although I understand absolutely none of it.  “What about the color?” I’ll say when purchasing my next car, sometime around the next total eclipse of the sun in both hemispheres.  “And the radio?  And the cylinder head exhaust manifolds?  You know?  Those things that… exhaust… the manifold?”

Sometimes I like to look at less exotic cars, which are no less cool, if only because they don’t possess, as a main feature, a dent made by a deer.  Here’s one– the 2010 Honda Odyssey.  It’s  this BIG ENORMOUS MINIVIAN with a  cute little snub nose, and if you click on the picture tab at that link, you’ll see that if you park it near a hill, the Odyssey will even smile at you.  With dimples.  These things are important to me, as a driver.

This Ford Fusion Hybrid review announces that the 2010 version “has improved interior quality and quietness,” and that’s vital, considering the way I treat car interiors, which is to say as my own personal stress pillow.  Every time I don’t bust a cap in the tires of the line-barging hatchback in front of me, the passenger seat gets a fist-pounding.  So here’s to you, Ford Fusion Hybrid, and your ability to serve my needs.

Now, given my vast auto knowledge, you’d think that I’d be all over the fact that a Mercedes comes in something other than flat little thing, so I was surprised when I came across a Mercedes Benz GLK review and realized that Mercedes come, like twice as large as I’d expect.  Here you can take the car pool to soccer practice… in a freaking Mercedes.  Perhaps I will have a child as an excuse to obtain one of these.  Car seat’s gotta go somewhere.

vroom at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

Completely Awesome Thing That Happened Today #8734

The dishwasher broke.  In a house we’re trying to sell.  It is now the world’s biggest Murphy bed of a drying rack.  It overheard us speaking about leaving it, and instead it has left us.

I must admit that I’m not really sure how to proceed here.  My father worked in the appliance parts industry, so my mother never had so much as a blender down overnight, let alone the driving force of culinary sanitation.  I didn’t have a dishwasher when I lived on the Cape and in Cocoa Beach, but then again, I owned precisely one pot and a collection of four picnicware forks purchased at Le Mart de Wal.  I’ve had a couple bridal showers since then.

on the upside:  heh.  rack at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

Sentences Heard Only in Homes With Small Children

“Please do not send the Etch-A-Sketch down the slide.”

“Did you just PEE?… Well then, I’d like to know what that puddle on the floor is.”

“Point the laser cannon away from your brother.”

“Aunt Beth, look what you’re supposed to do with the water in the back of church.  You go like this:  Forehead, shirt, this shoulder, that shoulder.”

“The bubble didn’t taste very good, did it?  That’s why I told you not to eat it.”

“…ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen… nine…”

“Keep your pants on until you get inside the bathroom.”

puppy dog tails at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com