300-Pound Crazy Lady

My husband, the celebrity

2011-08-23T10:43:00.000-04:00

So Mr. Sane didn't come home last night, instead spending all night running around screaming. No, it wasn't because both our girls were suffering excessive amounts of tween angst – though they were, and it made me want to spend the night running around screaming – nor because nearly two decades of living with a crazy lady has finally sent him round the bend.

Nope, it's 'cause we have a real, live movie being filmed here in Cleveland – The Avengers. This would be Thor, Captain America, the Hulk, and I forget who else, not Mr. Steed and Emma Peel, and therefore, this is not just a movie, but a comic-book movie. So, several weeks ago, Mr. Sane, the comic-book fan, even though he's more of a DC than a Marvel guy, cast doubts upon his sanity by choosing to spend several hours standing in line in the blazing-hot sun for a chance to appear as an extra in the movie. After all, it was the summer; he was available pretty much any time.

Of course, this meant he got the call right before school started back, for a night shoot that happens to correspond with the first couple days of school. So yesterday's agenda consisted of the first full day of school, which usually tuckers him out, followed by a night's work on a movie set. They were supposed to end at about 4, but he called at 6 to say they'd just finished up, and he was heading straight over to the school, since at that point, spending most of an hour getting home and back didn't make sense. I'm not sure how much sense he's making to his students today, though I suppose they're doing mostly review.

He doesn't drink coffee, so I hope he gets his hands on some NoDoz or something. Do they still make NoDoz? Or has it been entirely supplanted by Red Bull and the like? Maybe one of his students can introduce him to Red Bull.

One of his students, though not a current one, has provided Mr. Sane with another source of celebrity, one which far more impresses our kids than playing a biergarten vendor running screaming from the Big Bad. Last year, to occupy the month between taking the AP exam and the end of the school year, the AP History kids were given an oral history project to do. One of the guys interviewed Mr. Sane, who set the record straight regarding an incident he was involved in which has grown to urban-legend status at his school. The student did well enough on the project that it was among those chosen to be archived by Cleveland State University.

The upshot? "Daddy's on YouTube!"* Which is much more exciting to our pre-teen girls than some movie they've never seen.

*While I'd love to share the video with you, Mr. Sane is mentioned by his proper name, which would sort of spoil the semi-anonymity I'm trying to keep here. You'll just have to go see The Avengers when it comes out and keep your eyes out for an excessively handsome bald biergarten vendor in the Schlossplatz.

You must be this tall – and this thin – to ride

2011-08-18T15:48:00.000-04:00

I'vegot a friend who's been in training for a triathlon. The mere thought of doinga triathlon makes me shudder, but I think I found something to train for. Theother day, we took the girls to Cedar Point for the first time. (For those ofyou unfamiliar with the name, it's a huge amusement park here in northern Ohio.It boasts – according to Wikipedia statistics – the second-most rollercoasters of any park, and therefore not surprisingly, at least one coaster inthe top ten of almost every superlative they list.)

Ihaven't been there since before we had the girls – once our preschoolintroduced us to Memphis Kiddie Park, our amusement-park experiences werethere. Mom and Dad couldn't ride most of the rides there, but the kids hadloads of fun. Now the girls have outgrown the Kiddie Park, and we've beenpromising a trip to Cedar Point for a couple of summers. I've been putting itoff, because I knew I was just too doggoned fat to ride the rides, but it reachedthe point where it wasn't fair to the girls. So I looked at the calendar, foundtwo blank days left in the summer, and asked Mr. Sane to take his pick.

Theappointed day arrived, and we headed out. It turned out that both girls weretall enough to ride all the rides. They were all psyched to ride the Raptor (myfavorite coaster there; the seats hang from the bottom of it, and your feetdangle in midair, and you feel like you're flying, which is really cool whenyou do the loop-the-loop), but we thought we'd see how they'd do on the BlueStreak, the smallest regular coaster there, which is about 6 times as high asthe coaster at the Kiddie Park. Sadly, the Blue Streak was my first disappointmentof the day; since the last time we were there, they've put dividers in themiddle of the seats, and there was no way my butt was going to fit in half thatseat. *sigh* The girls, however, were not disappointed. Beta felt the need towork her way up to the Raptor, but Alpha was totally undaunted.

Myride "success rate" was about 50-50. Older rides with bench seatswere OK, unless they'd subdivided the seat as they did on the Blue Streak, orthe seat belt had been shortened by repairs. The newer rides, with their seatsdesigned to encase you while you're flipping upside down or dangling in midairor zooming downhill at highway speeds, were pretty much out of the question. Mostof those newer rides had test seats near the beginning of the line. Either I'mbecoming more comfortable with my fat, or my girls' enthusiasm was infectious, sinceI was willing to try the seats out in full view of the other folks in line –although I did harbor fantasies of being able to try them out in the privacy ofthe guest services building.

Inthe end, Mr. Sane took the girls on the roller coasters, and I took them on thespinny rides, so neither my fat nor his motion sickness got in the way. Ilogged over 22,500 steps, and by the end of the day, I felt it. (OK, I felt ita couple of hours before the end of the day; I'm not as young as I used to be.)So, what do you think? Maybe if I work my way up to being able to 22,500 stepscomfortably, I'll also work off enough of my butt and gut to fit into theRaptor.

Offline

2011-08-12T22:27:00.000-04:00

Last spring, I hit a low that drove me off the computer. Andby the time I was feeling better, computer problems kept me offline. I hadalready had to upgrade my operating system (couldn't run the latest version ofFlash, which meant getting shut out of more and more Web content). Then my Macand I hit the slippery slope.

I don't remember in exactly what order everything hit, butour Internet connection got increasingly dodgy. We had just replaced our DSLmodem a few months before, so we were sure that couldn't be it. It had to beour ISP, right? But nearby friends and family with the same ISP weren't havingsimilar problems, and ours kept getting worse, so we finally gave up andreplaced the modem again.

That seemed to solve the problems getting online, but Mr.Sane's computer was still having problems, and so was mine. Turns out he had avirus... and so did I. (What? A virus? On a Mac? Heresy!) His school's nice ITpeople got his fixed up. The verdict on mine at the Apple Store was that Ineeded to do a complete wipe and reinstall.

Unfortunately, I hadn't backed up in, oh, forever. Even moreunfortunately, I didn't have a large enough flash drive, but I did have a stackof CD-Rs. Oh, yeah, not one of my brighter ideas. So it didn't matter if I couldget online or not -- I was busy spending every free moment for a week or sotransferring files to CD. Obviously, I went into the project knowing neitherhow long it would take nor how cheaply backup drives could be had. (I think the500 GB drive I eventually got cost about $50 or so, and I could have had 1 TBfor not much more.) Live and learn.

So, we finally got the computer up and running again... andthe cord died. I was not about to pay Apple Store prices for a cord for dyingcomputer, so I sent away for something cheaper, which took a little time... andserved me for about three weeks before the computer died its final death, justunder a year after I'd upgraded the system.

Got -- hooray! -- a new computer, and quickly went intoe-mail mode as manager of Beta's hockey team, but in the meantime, myrelationship with my computer had completely changed. In all that time offline,the computer had become a machine I used for word processing and playing games.With no connectivity, I was no longer using my computer as a means ofconnection to others.

When I got the new computer, one of the first bookmarks Iput in my browser was the bulletin board community I had been a regular part of-- but I didn't head there again. When a friend started blogging in January,and later, in the spring, when it had been about a year since my last post, Ithought about blogging again -- but I didn't. My habits had changed, and it wasalmost as if I'd forgotten how. If I had a bit of free time and sat down at thecomputer, well, there was always another game to be played -- and now that Iwas connected again, I could play online, too.

But I've missed connecting with others, and I've missedwriting, and finally, the desire to do those things again has gotten me throughthe "I really ought to do that"s and the embarrassment over how longI've been gone and gotten me back here. I'm sure I've lost whatever tinyreadership I may have had, but I'm here nonetheless.

Friday Fragments: May 28, 2010

2010-05-28T23:23:00.001-04:00

These Friday Fragments are brought to you by the lovely Mrs. 4444 at Half Past Kissin' Time. She has funnier ones there.

Alpha rode in the bike rodeo at her school today, and I went down to watch her. There was a pretty good crowd of parents there — I guess it's not hard to coax people to start their Memorial Day weekend a few hours early. Alpha's bike had several parents reliving their childhoods. "Is that a sissy bar? I had a banana seat and a sissy bar!" "Is that a vintage bike?" "No, it's gotta be retro; see how thick those tubes are?" "Yeah. You know what the worst thing is about how thick they make them these days? You can't clip a playing card on with a clothes pin to make noise." "You used playing cards? We always used baseball cards." "You know, this time last year, in the dollar bins at Target, they had a little gadget that would fit on the bike and make noise. My mother-in-law got one for each of the kids." "Really?"

Another conversation among the parents was much less fun. One of the moms was attacked on her early-morning jog. Fortunately, she and her attacker weren't the only people awake at that hour, and a witness hollering out of a nearby window scared the attacker away. I'm glad the school principal sent home an e-mail warning parents, but I think she went too far when she suggested children should not so much as say hello to anyone they don't know. I think it's possible to be safe without being rude — I'm not talking about engaging strangers in conversation; I'm just talking about saying a simple, "Hello," or "Good afternoon," as you pass someone on the street. If the idea of "don't trust anyone over 30" created a generation gap, I think this notion of "don't trust anyone over 13" is far more dangerous.

OK, I can see how you could possibly get from Point A to Point B, but "Byfuglien" = BUFF-len? Really? This is just going to mess with my mind through the whole Stanley Cup.

The girls are much less thrilled with being in the Memorial Day parade now that they realize they will be among the people throwing the candy, not among the people gathering the candy. (If you sit where we usually do, near, but not too close to, the beginning of the route, you can come home with a haul rivaling Halloween. The kids who sit near the end of the route, though, are lucky if they end up with a couple of Starlight Mints.)

As for me, I don't care if I'm marching or watching, or where I sit, as long as I never, ever have reason to ride with the Gold Star Mothers.

Looking Forward

2010-05-27T13:38:00.000-04:00

Beta's looking forward to the end of school. Well, actually, both girls are, but Beta particularly. It seems like her new favorite words are "looking forward."

She's looking forward to hockey camp in about a month. She's looking forward to the city pool opening the week after school (though she's not sure if she's looking forward to swimming lessons). She's looking forward to marching in the Memorial Day parade with the hockey league. (They get to follow the Zamboni, and they can wear roller blades if they want!) She's looking forward to their rescheduled field trip to the local school for developmentally disabled adults. (They're going to do a craft project together.) She's looking forward to Crazy Hair Day and Field Day and walking up to the Dairy Queen with their 5th-grade buddies.

She didn't want to go to school today, though. I guess she didn't have anything to look forward to.

Getting Back on the Horse

2010-05-21T16:30:00.005-04:00

...thanks to Mrs. 4444s and her Friday Fragments.

I've been on a low lately, hence the paucity of posts. (I've got a few half-written — dare I say fragmentary? — ones, but I haven't been able to muster the oomph to actually publish them. And if you think of how little oomph it takes to make a few mouse clicks, you'll have some idea of just how badly I've been dragging.) On my meds, the lows sneak up on me. I actually talked to the latest shrink after this one hit and told her all was well.

You may notice, if you've been here before, that I've done some tinkering with the layout. The Template Designer on Blogger in Draft does offer more flexibility than the original templates did, but it's still not point-and-click, drag-and-drop, which is what my atrophied technical skills need.

We had a book fair at the school recently, and I helped out. It was great to see that a few kids had clearly emptied their piggy banks to buy books. On the other hand, counting all that change? Not so great.

The local grocery store recently had a special on "Mexican Coke." I snatched it up — yum, Coca-Cola with real sugar! (We don't live in the right part of town to stock up on kosher-for-Passover Coke.) I guzzled a bottle down before realizing that this was not just Coke made with sugar but Coke made with Mexican water! Apparently, however, the old wives' tale does not hold true. My tummy was fine, thank you. (And my taste buds were downright tickled!)

We've had some spring storms lately. One, a couple of Saturdays ago, was so fierce that our power was knocked out for a couple of hours. Fortunately, it was afternoon, and the clouds weren't so dark that we didn't have enough daylight. We dug out a game, and I popped some popcorn on our gas stove. It was wonderful to have all that peace and quiet.... So why on earth did I spend the afternoon working to get the TV and satellite to talk to each other again once the power came back? Apparently, even though I'm the only one in the family with enough technical smarts to make that happen, I'm stoo-pid.

Pet peeve: Click-on-me ads that change position as the page is loading. Nothing like trying to click on a link on a page before it's fully loaded, because I am so antsy I can't wait for my creaky laptop to load it, only to discover that in the split-second between my pointing the cursor and clicking the mouse, an ad has interposed itself in that spot, and I now get to wait for another page (usually, a graphics-heavy, take-forever page) to load just so I can close it and try again to click on the link I really wanted. I need a faster processor... or more patience.

Checked the unpublished posts for fragments to add here, but they're boring even compared to what I've written so far. Apparently, the wit is the first thing to go and the last to come back, even after the physical energy. And if anyone managed to read this far, thanks — I promise to do better next time.

The day they knocked down the K-Mart, part of my childhood died

2010-05-05T21:18:00.003-04:00

OK, so it's not the palais of The Kinks' "Come Dancing," and they haven't actually knocked it down, at least not yet, but a trip to K-Mart today had me waxing nostalgic. It's less than a mile from my Mom's house, the house I grew up in — two blocks the long way — and it was a big part of my growing up.

The girls and I went there after school in a fruitless search for some towel racks for the bathroom. It's my own fault the search was fruitless — I've known about the closing for quite some time and been meaning to stop in there, but as of today, they're five days from closing, and the place was pretty picked over.

There was no sign of the luncheonette that used to sit at the back of the store, in the middle, that served the best grilled cheese sandwiches. Nor was there any sign of the candy counter with its slushie machine. (I think they sold Icees, not Slush Puppies — I do remember they came in Coke or cherry.) Of course, those have both been gone for years, the luncheonette obliterated by sporting goods and the candy counter first replaced by a jewelry counter, then by makeup (not even at a counter). Today, electronics were gathered in front of the snack bar that had belatedly replaced the luncheonette, sitting in the former entrance to the K-Mart supermarket that long predated "Super Kmarts," which I can only spell in the modern fashion, without the hyphen.

I pointed out all these things to the girls, who were at least a little curious about their Mommy's childhood. Fittingly, we were able to pick up a few school supplies: I remember walking up there with my best friend to buy school supplies all by ourselves. I got a set of colored pencils with Snoopy on them; I still have one of those pencils kicking around somewhere.

I told the girls about the sign that used to be out front, with a big neon K rotating on top, and how that K could sometimes be seen from Grandma's back yard, peeking through the trees. I told them about how the Wal-Mart next door (which I'm sure contributed to the K-Mart's demise) used to be the site of a drive-in. I had to remind the girls what a drive-in was (they did remember, vaguely, going to one on the other side of town a couple of years ago, just before it closed, and before my old convertible finally died), and then I had to explain why drive-ins closed. (We don't have one of those minivans with the flip-down DVD screens, or their experience sitting in the car watching a movie would have seemed much less exciting.)

I told them that the bank on the corner used to be the site of a Mobil gas station (where we held drama-club car washes when I was in high school), and the empty space behind it used to hold a Ponderosa steak house (where my fifth grade teacher, knowing my home situation was less than ideal, would occasionally take me for dinner after school).

And then we went home.

Santa Clara County makes me happy

2010-04-29T11:36:00.005-04:00

I have no desire to live in California. I like Ohio, with (among other things) its four distinct seasons, affordable homes, short commute times, and abundant supply of fresh water. (Not to mention that I'm a complete homebody.)

But right now, I'm envious of the folks in Santa Clara County, which has just banned toys in Happy Meals and the like. Their reason, they claim, is that they don't want to reward children for making poor food choices. To me, that's only the tip of the iceberg.

In my experience, the toys bribe children to choose those restaurants in the first place. If our schedule is such that a run through the drive-thru is inevitable, the girls lobby for one place over the other based on who has which toys. (And if we're just going out to eat somewhere, the girls do the same – they just get vetoed by Mommy and Daddy, who prefer something that more closely resembles "real" food.)

Folks argue that this is unwarranted government intrusion. Parents, they say, are free to not feed their children fast food. We can even ban our children from watching TV so they aren't bombarded with ads touting one fast-food toy or the other. I suspect these folks don't have kids. And if they do, and they've never caved when faced with whiny kids in the back of the van, with a couple hours of running errands and playing taxi behind them and a couple more to go, I, for one, would like to know the secret behind their iron will.

But, as I said, rewarding poor food choices is the tip of the iceberg, and bribery into poor restaurant choices is just the next layer down. Because the reason those restaurant choices are poor isn't just the fat, sodium and calories that the folks in Santa Clara worry about, it's the limited food choices: hamburger or cheeseburger or bits of breaded chicken.

They've become ingrained in our culture as "what kids eat." On my kids' school lunch menu, one of this trinity, or a hot dog, or cheese pizza on Fridays ('cause we're a Catholic school) is offered every day of the week as a backup choice. We didn't have backup choices when I went to school, but these days, there are kids who won't eat anything else. Heck, there are kids who won't eat a breaded chicken patty until you explain that it's just a giant chicken nugget. So, at least once a week, the main choice is also from this limited list. You can have a hamburger or a hot dog, chicken nuggets or a cheeseburger. So many kids are picky eaters to begin with; it's murder trying to get them to expand their food horizons when their peers have convinced them that these are the only things that "taste good."

Public pressure got fast-food places to offer fruit as an alternative to fries; I'm sure if more standards were imposed on kids' meals, they could come up with healthier ones. And as for the kids who've been conditioned to choose burger or burger or nugget, a few years ago, researchers at Stanford University (that's in Santa Clara County, folks – but not covered by the ban, which only extends to the unincorporated areas) discovered that children preferred food (even carrots) in McDonald's packaging to identical food in plain packaging. If McDonald's sold carrots, kids would eat 'em.

But if they did that, they might still offer the doggoned toys! They're just clutter, but my girls treat them as if they're gold. When they were smaller, I donated them liberally to the preschool prize box, but their grade school has no such thing. So now, the girls are each (supposedly) limited to the contents of one lidded bucket. The buckets have been great to have for trips – they could leave the whole thing behind, for all I care. However, I said "supposedly" because, as we've been mucking out Alpha's room, I've found enough more to fill a second bucket at least, and I imagine I'll find the same in Beta's room.

So we get to winnow yet again. And what do we do with the toys we cull? Despite being mostly disposable plastic junk, they're not marked for recycling. So we get to fill more landfills, and China gets keep its exports to the U.S. high. Hmm... maybe the next time I'm asked "girl toy or boy toy," I'll say, "no toy" – if I can endure the screaming.

**********

Apologies to those kind folks who commented on recent posts, only to have their comments go unpublished for so long. The DSL's been acting up yet again, and I was only able to moderate the comments today.

We have tenants

2010-04-25T15:47:00.003-04:00

This was pure luck. I'd gotten the camera out to take pix of footprints the girls had left in the dew when a noise above caused me to look up at the robins' nest. One of the robins was sitting there, so I readjusted the camera to take a picture of the nest. When I looked up again, the robin was gone, but I decided to take a picture anyway and was rewarded with this.

Go see Unknown Mami for her city and a bunch of others!

Things to do with your computer when your Internet connection is down...

2010-04-23T17:53:00.007-04:00

It's not Friday any more, and this is more in the way of a list than true fragments, but I hope Mrs. 4444 and the rest of you will forgive me for bringing you...

Things to do with your computer when your Internet connection is down:

• Attempt to diagnose it.

• Curse it.

• Beat your head against it.

• Clean out your e-mail inbox.

• Look up the online help... oh, never mind.

• Burn discs of the songs your kids have been nagging you for ('cause you downloaded them ages ago). (Assuming, of course, that your kids are young enough to not be better at downloading than you or consider discs passé.)

• Clean up your desktop. (You could clean up your physical desktop, too, while you're at it.)

• Discover long-forgotten game applications and waste hours attempting to set a high score.

• Back up your files and files and files of photos. (You could even print some of them out... naah.)

• Print out and fill out forms your children need for school. Be thankful you downloaded them before your connection went down. Wonder how bad it would be to call the school to get rid of paperless delivery on Earth Day.

• Breathe a sigh of relief and do a happy dance when you're reconnected to the outside world!

For more Friday Fragments, click the links up top!

Sundays in My City: Monday Edition

2010-04-19T21:05:00.005-04:00

I'm a bit behind this week, but apparently there were some Linky problems, so maybe it's a happy accident. Anywho...

The building in the center of this picture is the one most Clevelanders think of when they think of Cleveland – the Terminal Tower. When it was built in the late 1920s, Cleveland was in its heyday (it was the 5th largest city in the US in 1920 and the 6th largest in 1930), and the Terminal Tower was the tallest building in the world outside New York City. It remained so until the early 50s, and stayed the tallest building in the US outside New York City until the Prudential Center in Boston was finished in 1964. These days, the Key Tower is taller, but it's not as emblematic of the city.

The "Terminal" in the Terminal Tower was the Union Terminal train station. The main remnant of that is now a rapid transit station. Actually, part of it always was a rapid transit station, as the Tower was designed by the Van Sweringen brothers (Oris and Mantis — no, I don't know what their mother was thinking!), who developed the rapid transit lines.

However, these days, and especially at this time of year, folks outside of Cleveland may be more familiar with the building at the side of the above picture:

That would be The Q, where LeBron and the Cavs play. (You can see Progressive Field, where the Indians play, reflected in the windows.) (This picture was taken around the corner from the first — and it was taken a couple of weeks ago, so I'm sure the trees have leaves on them by now!)

Thanks to Unknown Mami for sharing her city, San Francisco, with us, and giving us a forum to share our cities. For more virtual travel, visit her site!

Friday whuh? Oh, yeah, Fragments

2010-04-16T14:51:00.006-04:00

Friday Fragments are brought to you courtesy of the lovely Mrs. 4444 at Half Past Kissin' Time, where you should go look for other juicy bits of randomness.

My mind is especially fragmented today. This morning, I was so bleary, I went downstairs to get Beta socks ('cause the ones I had already dug out for her were too tight, she said) and opened up the storage freezer and looked blankly inside until I remembered I was downstairs for socks; after I came back up (with the socks), I had difficulty filling the girls' thermoses with ice water (OK, the cold water is in the fridge, and the ice is in the freezer....)

When you're trying to walk 10,000 steps/day, it is not advisable to walk 5,000 steps one day and 15,ooo steps the next. 'Nuff said.

Bowling is not like riding a bike. I helped chaperone Alpha's class trip to the bowling alley the other day, and since I had no place to go afterwards (the parents met the kids there; we didn't ride on the bus), I stayed and bowled a line. Once upon a time, I had an average in the 140s or so. I bowled an 84. That was still almost twice what Alpha bowled, though, so I guess if we went as a family, it wouldn't be totally embarrassing.

My right arm is killing me, and I don't know if it's because I slept on it or because of the aforementioned bowling adventure, or both.

Isn't it a wonderful feeling when our kids reflect our values? No matter how trivial they are? Monday was the Indians' home opener, and Alpha was interested – not only because of the stop at DQ on the way home from school and the ballpark food I served for dinner (I even managed to spot cotton candy on a run to Targét!), but in the game itself. When I found myself explaining to her the difference between a wild pitch and passed ball, I couldn't help but thinking, Ha! We did make a fan out of her!

I posted pictures of fog on (Wordless) Wednesday. We've had gorgeous weather here the past two weeks, and do I have any pictures of it? No-ooo. And we're supposed to get cruddy weather for the weekend. Oh, joy.

The Ultimate Blog Party has been a lot of fun, but I think my laundry (and, more importantly, the people who have to wear it!) will be quite glad for the end of it!

Wordless Wednesday: Springtime in Cleveland

2010-04-14T09:29:00.004-04:00

Wordless Wednesday is brought to you by 5 Minutes for Mom, the same wonderful folks who are bringing you the Ultimate Blog Party 2010 (see my sidebar or previous post, then come join the conga line if you haven't already).

These weren't taken today – today, it's warm and sunny – but I just finally got them off the camera. We're not San Francisco; fog is not a regular occurrence here, but on some spring days (like this one), it'll roll in off the lake.

In this picture, if you look up and to the right of center, you can see the red traffic light two blocks away. Fortunately, the drivers saw it, too.

I am not wearing a lampshade right now

2010-04-12T20:57:00.004-04:00

Susan and Janice over at 5 Minutes for Mom are hosting The Ultimate Blog Party 2010 this week. It's a wonderful opportunity to increase readership... if only I could make myself write often enough for there to be something to read here. And, just as wonderful, as part of the party, they and their friends are giving away oodles of prizes. If you've gotten here any other way, make sure you go check them out!

There are, of course, a couple of things you have to do if you want to win any of those prizes (I'm paraphrasing here, so go see their blog for the honest-to-goodness details): You need to visit and comment on at least 20 of the blogs participating in the party; and you need to tell them what you'd like to win! If you're a reader only, you can tell them in a comment on their Ultimate Blog Party post, but if you blog, the place to do it is in a Party Post on your blog.

Guess what? This is my Party Post!

So, she said, virtually sitting on their virtual knees (and we are all so glad this is virtual, especially 'cause Susan and Janice look from their pix like they are as slender as spun glass!), here's what I'd like for ~~Christmas~~ Blog Party this year:

Given that I'm a newbie at this game, and I really wish my blog were prettier, my top three choices are blog designs. Probably my top pick is the Level 3 Blog Design Package from Mary Hess Designs. Mary's designs seem to have the balance of clean lines and whimsy I'm looking for. However, The Girl Creative sounds like she'd be quite willing to find me a happy medium between her scrappy and modern designs, so her Deluxe Blog Design would be equally pleasing. I'm thinking the Custom Blogger Design being offered by Simply Fabulous Blogger Templates would be great, too, since Lisa offers some sweet looking freebies on that site as well as offering premades on her other site, Premades for a Purpose.

There are other interesting blog design prizes at USC numbers 5, 10, 14, 15, and 16. Other choices I'd be perfectly happy with are USC 37 (Lindt – *sigh*), and, since I like to read, the books and gift certificates found at US numbers 41, 43, 31, 52, 73, 74, 87, and 112 or at USC numbers 7, 8, 25, 36, 37, 40, and 44.

So, presuming you're not either of my followers and are just peeking in from the party, I should let you know what you've stumbled into. Weight Watchers has me a fair bit under 300 lbs these days, and I have nice meds that keep me sane most of the time, but with just a little artistic license, I really am a 300-lb Crazy Lady. As the header suggests, I am also a hockey mom of girls, and my house... well, let's not talk about my house. I'm Roman Catholic, and my girls go to Catholic school ~~just to make their Mommy crazy~~. (My husband, aka "Mr. Sane," also teaches at a Catholic school.) I'm also a third-generation Clevelander who knows nothing of what it's like to live more than a couple of miles from the shores of Lake Erie. And I necessarily try to take this all with a dose of humor, though I'm not above the occasional rant. (Hey, what's a soap box for?) I used to be a technical writer and editor; I hope you'll find this more amusing than a treatise on when to choose welds over rivets.

But enough about me.... Go party!

Chewy urban center

2010-04-09T00:37:00.002-04:00

I live in what social-planner types (the kind that plan communities, not the kind that plan parties) call an “inner-ring” suburb (or, a bit more gently, a “first” suburb). In my parents’ day (or maybe my grandparents’), it would have been called a “streetcar” suburb, because back then, the streetcars ran out as far as these suburbs to take folks into the city. Vestiges of that still exist – the streetcars were long since sold to Toronto, but there’s light rail into the Heights, and in the rest of the streetcar suburbs, sometimes, during road repairs, when the asphalt’s dug up, you can see the remains of the brick pavers and the beds for the streetcar tracks.

My neighbor and fellow hockey mom likes to talk about “all that crunchy suburban goodness with a chewy urban center.” It’s kind of true. She often means it in a more ironic way – we’re happy when our schools make the “Continuous Improvement” ranking, and we’ll be really psyched when they make “Effective.” (“Excellent” is a pipe dream, and that only if you’ve got something pretty strong in that pipe!) We have nearly as many houses being foreclosed upon as they do in the city, it seems. And we’ve got a bunch of empty factories, though these days, you’ve likely got a bunch of those, too, whether you’re in the city, suburbs, or country.

However, the “chewy urban center” has its benefits, too. The other day, while the weather was still warm, our family engaged in one of our favorite activities – one that folks out in the land of cul-de-sacs don’t get to enjoy. We grabbed our umbrellas against the lowering sky and walked to the theater to see “How to Train Your Dragon.”

Yep, we walked. Now that’s a bit of chewy urban goodness.

We had a bite at home before we left, but other times we’ve done this, we’ve stopped along the way to or from. On our path, we pass an upscale pizza place – and a couple of pizza chains, though I don’t think either of the chains do anything other than takeout. A couple of fast-food restaurants are just off our path (the girls would like us to stop at one of those), and a couple that you might or might not classify as fast food are on it. There’s a Chinese place, a wing joint, and a little family restaurant. (I think the family that runs it is Greek, but the menu is the sort of standard fare that you really can’t tell.) Just a bit past the theater, there’s a sit-down chain restaurant. There’s also a kebab place and a coffeehouse that reside in a weird sort of limbo for me – I can see them easily on my path, but actually getting to them requires either a mad dash across five lanes of traffic (and with half the Home Depot in my left ankle, I don’t dash madly if it can be at all avoided) or spending most of the journey there backtracking.

Amazingly, though my friends and I often gripe about the lack of retail around here (if you wanna buy clothes or housewares or books, you’ve gotta head out of town), this clearly doesn’t apply to food. And our local theater has a 3D screen now, though I haven’t decided which I like better yet – seeing a movie in 3D or seeing it in 2D on the 60-foot screen that is a remnant of the time when theaters showed one BIG movie instead of seven or ten or fifteen little ones.

Good food, good movies, a pleasant walk in between... who needs a cul-de-sac?

*Oh, and as for “How to Train Your Dragon”? Go see it, especially if you’ve got kids... especially if they’re at that age where you’re really starting to wonder if they’ve gone off the deep end. Even if the Vikings sound less like Norsemen than Scots (because Gerard Butler and Craig Ferguson are so not Norwegian).

Easter Sunday in My City

2010-04-04T19:26:00.006-04:00

Thanks to Unknown Mami for hosting Sundays in My City. On this Easter Sunday, I wanted to share these images from inside my church.

Lord, by your cross and resurrection, you have set us free. You are the savior of the world.

— Memorial Acclamation D from the Roman Catholic Mass in English

Happy Easter!

Friday Fragments: Good Friday Edition

2010-04-02T22:35:00.002-04:00

Thanks, again, to Mrs. 4444 for hosting Friday Fragments. And now, without further ado....

• The weather is unseasonably warm here in Cleveland. (It broke a record yesterday, getting up to 83°.) These first warm days of spring “bring people out of the woodwork,” as we say. Last year, our neighbors, who had moved in from California over the winter (talk about a rude awakening) marveled at it. They hadn’t seen a soul outside in months, and suddenly, people were everywhere. Today, I saw motorcycles, convertibles with the tops down, lots of folks on bikes (including Mr. Sane and the girls), and a guy on rollerblades pulling his toddlers behind him in a wagon.

• The soldiers don’t get much to say in the Biblical account of the Passion, but that didn’t stop Beta when she made her Stations of the Cross booklet in school. In her drawing for the Ninth Station – Jesus Falls for the Third Time, a soldier says, “*sigh* Jesus, will you please stop falling?” and in her picture for the Eleventh Station – Jesus is Nailed to the Cross, one hands another a nail: “Here you go.” “Thanks.” “You’re welcome.” (I suppose just because you’re nailing someone to a cross is no reason not to be polite.)

• I finally got up the nerve to call for a mammogram appointment this week. I think the thing that finally convinced me was when I leaned over to start the water for a shower, thought my necklace was hitting me in the boob and looked down to discover it was just my other boob flopping around. I figured if they’re that floppy, how big a deal can it be to squoosh them?

• Of course, when I did call, I couldn’t get an appointment because the power had gone off to the medical building, so their scheduling computer was down along with everything else.

• I haven’t posted in almost two weeks. I think I got stage fright, as it were, when I got a bunch of comments. Of course, please don’t let that stop you. It’s nice to know somebody looks at the stuff I’m putting out there.

• Happy Easter (a bit early) to the Christians out there (even the Orthodox at the same time this year!), and, to those of you who are Jewish, Happy Passover!

Spring is coming

2010-03-21T22:06:00.005-04:00

Unknown Mami, in San Francisco, hosts Sundays in My City, so we can all travel through the wonders of the virtual world. While this time of year isn't perhaps the best for visiting Cleveland, it is warming up.

The lake, as seen from the car two weeks ago on the way to Alpha's hockey championship:

Forgive the poor photo quality, but you can still tell it was well frozen over.

Last weekend, things were starting to break up (as seen from the lake shore park not far from my house):

And this week, I had to make sure to get some beach in there for you to see any ice/snow at all:

It's not an unmixed blessing, though. In Cleveland, you can't count on the snow being done for the season till the calendar says May -- and I read somewhere recently that last year or the year before, there was a trace of snow recorded in mid-May. And when the lake thaws, the possibility of lake-effect snow returns. But now you can watch our lake thaw from the warmth of your home, wherever that happens to be. (I'm guessing it's somewhere warmer, but, hey -- you could be in Nome!)

Friday Fragments: March 19, 2010

2010-03-19T09:41:00.003-04:00

Thanks again to Mrs. 4444s at Half Past Kissin' Time for hosting Friday Fragments. (Once I get better at Blogger, I'll put a memeroll in the sidebar, really I will!) Later on, I'll head over and check out Danifred's Friday Night Leftovers at Sippy Cups Are Not For Starbucks.

Whenever we pass through the kitchen lately, we make sure to give the trilobites a brush.

(We have fossils in our kitchen, and I’m not referring to Mr. Sane and myself. Alpha got a block of limestone or some such to excavate for her Challenge class. It’s soaking in a bowl in the kitchen, and she’s using a soft toothbrush to slowly extract the fossils. We can’t resist helping.)

Beta is planning her April Fool’s prank. She has a little spray bottle that looks like a perfume bottle, and she’s planning to spray people with water and tell them it’s perfume. Much better, I think, than doing the reverse. And way better than the plan her friend over the fence has to counterfeit money.

Since nobody had anywhere else to be on Wednesday, we postponed the grocery shopping till then. Having no timetable, we lollygagged around and didn’t leave till the afternoon. We got a late lunch on the way, did our shopping, came home & unpacked the van, and took Beta to hockey practice. Afterwards, we went to DQ. That’s right – we had Dairy Queen for dinner! (I’m talking ice cream – our local DQ is not a Brazier.) The girls didn’t notice till bedtime, when they had a sudden urge for real food.

I helped with Beta’s class art project yesterday. We used irons to transfer pictures crayoned on sandpaper to plain paper. (Hence the need for mommies to come in and help – a bunch of second-graders with hot irons is not a pretty picture.) I detest ironing, but it becomes much more fun if it’s an art project.

Today’s Cleveland Plain Dealer published this fabulous one-sentence pan – “Jennifer Aniston uses one of her expressions and Gerard Butler wears a shirt in one scene from ‘The Bounty Hunter.’” – as a photo cutline to go with Stephen Whitty’s review, picked up from the Newark Star-Ledger. Neither paper’s site includes the cutline, so I have to guess it was a PD writer who distilled Whitty’s review into that one little gem, particularly as the PD headline, "There should be a price on heads of all involved," beats the heds on both websites. Kudos to you, whoever you are!

**********

40 Bags in 40 Days update: I’m now up to 8 bags done, and I still have several partials going. Hmm... 32 more bags in 16 days? Well, I’m not mathematically eliminated....

Women who love food, and the food that betrays them

2010-03-18T17:04:00.004-04:00

The scale did not have kind things to say to me this week. I’m tempted to say I have a love-hate relationship with food, but that’s not true. I loooove food. It’s pretty much an unrequited love, though; food clearly does not love me back.

Actually, food is like my Bad Boyfriend. You know the one – the one who criticizes you “because he loves you.” (“Frankly, your butt does look big in that.”) Who wants you around only on his terms – he expects you to put up with all his friends and their bad habits, but he doesn’t want to be around your friends and family. (They might tell you how bad he is for you – not that you’d listen.) The one who is just So Cool and so exciting to be around – and convinces you that your life would be boring and drab without him – that you, in fact, are boring and drab, and he is saving you from that. Who you know, deep down, really is bad for you, but he makes you feel loved – and he swears no one else will ever love you like he does. (Of course not; they will love you much, much better – but he’s not about to tell you that.)

Unfortunately, food is not going to break up with me to charm some pretty, young thing with his wiles (now that I’m no longer a pretty, young thing). Food is quite capable of charming thousands of pretty, young things simultaneously.

Nor can I break up with food. I need to lose weight, but a hunger strike isn’t the way to go. I need to learn to “just be friends.” When I dip Oreos in dark chocolate to look like pucks for the hockey team, I need to invite a girlfriend along to make sure I don’t do something stupid. I have to call it a night before the second helping. I have to refuse to hang out with Empty Calories and High Fat and the gang. (I’ve really gotta stop going out with those guys for pizza!) I’ve got to stop letting food put the moves on me. No more taking it fast. Wendy’s, McDonald’s – not the place for me. I want a slow hand to marinate my meats and grill them just so and saute those veggies so they’re still firm, and I could lose myself in their bright colors.

Most of all, I need to be the one to love myself much, much better.

The Simple Woman's Daybook — March 16, 2010

2010-03-16T10:53:00.005-04:00

Outside my window... they are taking down the neighbors' maple tree. I don't know how much shade this will lose us, and even if it doesn't make any difference with our oak in between, I am sad. I like trees. And I know the maple in front of our house is in decline. I hope a good pruning will extend its life, but I fear it will need to come down within a few years.
I am thinking... that while my girls are apt to share TMI (nothing gross, just way too much), I need to listen against the day when they don't want to tell me anything.
I am thankful for... the folks who run our hockey program, particularly Alpha's coach, who has worked so hard to build it up. Despite having a small program, we were really successful this year, and the kids recently got honored at City Hall. I'm also thankful that despite the tight economy and city cutbacks, it looks like the city won't be closing the rink.
From the kitchen... not much. Our pantry is darn near bare. Today's task is to put together a grocery list, order Market Day stuff, and hit the grocery store.
I am wearing... a thick, fuzzy pink tunic and black slacks. It's probably a bit too warm for today's predicted highs, but yesterday's cold mist drained all the heat from me, and I want warmth.

I am creating... a new bulletin board for the girls' school library. The theme is, "What will YOU find in a book?" and it's a construction-paper collage landscape with various parts labeled: e.g., The Little House by Virginia Burton and My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George. I got high praise as I was working this morning — the art teacher's son walked by on his way to band and said, "Wow! Awesome!"
I am going... grocery shopping! (Not sure why an exclamation seems warranted; I hate grocery shopping. But as I said, we haven't much food in the house. Putting together meals the last few days has been tricky, and I am running out of healthy snacks — and tucking gladly into unhealthy ones.
I am reading... Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and a bunch of books about blogging/HTML in hopes that I can at least make this look the way I'd like.
I am hoping... that I can get this place presentable enough at some point in the near future to host a girls' night for the hockey moms. Few of their kids will be on Alpha's team next year, and I'll miss them. Fortunately, Beta's team is likely to pretty much stay together.
I am hearing... the grinding of the tree shredder outside and the ticking of our clock inside. I got the clock as a wedding present for Mr. Sane — it reminded us of an antique clock in his parents' house. It chimes the hour and has a third hand for the date.
Around the house... is too much junk. I haven't completed any more bags for the 40 Bags in 40 Days challenge, though I've got about 3 or 4 partials going, though.

One of my favorite things... listening to my girls play together (when they play nicely) in the next room.
A few plans for the rest of the week: Mr. Sane, who teaches in a Catholic school, and the girls, who attend Catholic school, have St. Patrick's Day off tomorrow, though we don't have anything special planned. I'm helping out with art projects in Beta's class on Thursday and Alpha's class on Friday. My brother is taking the girls to the AHL game on Friday; we have two tickets for Saturday's game — we'll have to see if we can get a couple more. Come to think of it, I hope it's an evening game — Saturday is Alpha's team's end-of-season parent/child game.
Here is picture for thought I am sharing... Here they are, finally — pix of the latest library bulletin board I put together. I originally printed the labels of book titles on translucent sticker paper, but the librarian had too hard a time reading them and wanted me to print them larger, on regular paper.
This is a closeup, so you can see the labels.

Thanks to Peggy of The Simple Woman for hosting this meme. For more daybooks, look here.

Friday Fragments: March 12, 2010

2010-03-12T21:33:00.003-05:00

Thanks again to Mrs. 4444 at Half-Past Kissin' Time for hosting Friday Fragments, by means of which I can lure unsuspecting readers to my blog and, yet, don't have to agonize (too much) over what to write!

• I am drinking chocolate-mint tea, sweetened, and with a dollop of milk. Yummy! Not quite a Peppermint Patty, but, I hope, close enough that I’ll lay off the junk food.

• Alpha got some hand-me-downs from the other girl on her hockey team, and I’m finding I have a visceral reaction to the scent. They don’t smell bad – the clothes were all well-laundered – but they don’t smell like ours. I’ve had this reaction before to hand-me-downs from elsewhere. I guess somewhere deep inside me is a mama animal who knows her babies by their scent.

• I was deeply moved at our parish mission earlier this week (one evening’s program didn’t conflict with hockey!). The priest who was leading the event invited the congregation forward to kiss or otherwise reverence the altar. One of the last to do so was the mother of one of the eighth graders. She has MS and usually sits near the back of the church, where the elevator is. She made her way slowly up the aisle with her walker, and her daughter helped her up the steps to the altar. That she would do this voluntary action despite her obvious physical difficulty moved me to near tears.

• We have been living tight the past week – Mr. Sane forgot to record a credit-card payment in the check register, and we suddenly discovered we had next to no money in the account. But it’s payday, so I’ll be heading to the craft store. Food can wait!

• (Actually, it’s change-the-bulletin board time at the school library, and pretty much anything besides construction paper and staples I need to provide myself. It’s not like the public school I attended, with a fully stocked art room. I need to get transfer letters so people won’t have to look at my sloppy handwriting.)

• Food didn’t actually wait – I stopped at the grocery store a few doors down from the craft store. This, however, meant going right past the Weight Watchers center during open hours, so, even though I’ve been looking at the scale this week the way a vampire looks at a silver cross, I went in and got weighed. I asked the receptionist not to tell me what the damage was, though, and I haven’t peeked in my book.

• I’m participating in the 40 bags in 40 days challenge, which I learned about from Jessica over at Shower of Roses. (Not sure I can say she’s hosting, as it’s not a carnival or meme, but....) Anyhow, I’ve managed about 6 bags so far, and by my count, we’re on the 21^st day of Lent, which means I’m doing about as well this year as I typically do when I try to give up chocolate.

• I saw a guy with really bad hair. Really bad hair. Picture Wolowitz on the Big Bang Theory crossed with the mom on One Day at a Time (or any other woman with that .’70s bob). I would have guessed it was a really bad toupée, but it was black with about half an inch of gray roots.

• I don’t suppose anybody knows how to get a “smart” apostrophe at the front of a word (without inserting text the same color as the background)?

• I used to have a change jar, but after the most recent forage for milk money, I have a jar of pennies in which the Tooth Fairy hides her stash of golden dollars. (Don’t tell the kids.)

• That's all I've got!

Worshipping at the Church of Hockey

2010-03-11T11:30:00.001-05:00

Mr. Sane just called. An e-mail at school reminded him that there was a sophomore class family Mass this Sunday, and he wanted to know what our schedule was to see if he could go. I’m sure he was wondering what our schedule was in terms of whether either of us had to be at a particular Mass – I’m a reader, and we both assist with Communion. But my first thought was, “It looks like we’re going to the 12:00.”

“Why’s that?” he asked.

“Because Alpha has three possible times for tournament games which rule out the 8:00 and the 10:00, and her game on Saturday conflicts with the Vigil.”

If you have children playing sports, you have probably encountered the proliferation of Sunday morning games and practices. It seems that no matter what sport kids participate in, they’re going to have something on Sunday mornings. I think even the CYO (that’s Catholic Youth Organization, for you non-Catholics out there) schedules things for Sunday mornings – I’ve seen teams attend Mass together, and while some of those may simply have been for team unity and to emphasize the fact that they are, indeed, a Catholic organization, there have been times it seems pretty clear the team is heading straight from church to a game.

So, for us churchgoing folk, balancing sports and worship isn’t a no-brainer. Friends of ours whose son is on Beta’s team call hockey “the Catholic sport,” not only because it seems half the kids on the team go to school either at St. Anonymous or at Holy Moley, but because we have the option of multiple Mass times. Protestant folks, it seems, often have only one service, and, depending on the denomination, that may last long enough to conflict with just about any game or practice time. The obligation to attend isn’t the same as for us Catholics, but the spirit hungers, just the same.

But Catholics do have that obligation to attend Mass every Sunday (fortunately, the Church celebrates an extra-long Sunday, including Vigil Masses on Saturday evenings). Plenty of folks don’t bother – at one point, I was talking to one of the other hockey moms, whose kids attend Holy Moley, about the need to juggle, and she said, “Oh, didn’t you know? You belong to the Church of Hockey now.” In our house, we don’t ignore the obligation, however. Since we both assist at Mass, we need to be in communion with the Church, and if finding a Mass that fits the schedule is hard, finding a confession time that fits is even harder. (And I don’t like going to Confession, either, not since that monsignor yelled at me....)

So our weekend schedules get... interesting. There have been tag-team weeks, when both girls have had games: “OK, if you’re taking Alpha tomorrow, you need to go to church tonight,.’cause her game’s in the middle of the morning on the far side of town, so that obliterates all the morning Masses – unless you’d like to find one out there. I’ll take Beta to her game tonight while you’re at Mass, and then we can get up early and go to church before her game.” There are the close-call weeks, as when I took Alpha to church in her long johns and warm-ups, so we could then drive straight to her game – and were late anyway, because I got caught in a notorious speed trap that every Clevelander knows. There are the weeks we hunted around for another church that would fit the schedule – the next parish east has a 6 pm Sunday Mass, and one southeast of us has one at 6 pm Saturday. And there’s the total craziness in our own parish.

We try to plan ahead of time, but our parish has just changed schedules – and in between, the bishop came to celebrate Mass, and that week, the schedule was set up around when he could come. So one week, Masses were at 8, 9:30, and 11:30; the next, they were at 7:30, 9, and 11, and the following week, they were at 8, 10, and 12. That middle week, Beta had a 10:00 game, so instead of rushing to get out of gear and get to the 11:30 as planned, we had to roust her for the 7:30. Beta is not a morning person.

But it’s March, and hockey season is almost over. Now the baseball and softball moms can deal with it. Bwa-ha-ha!

Quest for Weck, or something I should have written when I was an Olympics zombie

2010-03-09T10:06:00.002-05:00

I am sure I will say this again, but I am extremely lucky to be married to Mr. Sane. I can’t state for certain that he is the best husband in the world, but I feel confident declaring that he’s in the 99^th percentile. For Valentine’s weekend, we went to Niagara Falls and got a hotel room on Grand Island. (OK, I’ll admit it – our kids were in the room with us; we were there for a hockey tournament.) Being so close to Buffalo, I became a woman on a Quest For Weck.

“Weck?” you ask. Beef on Weck is the Buffalo culinary specialty you haven’t heard about. (I presume you know about the dish they came up with at the Anchor Bar – the one with the chicken wings, and the butter, and the Frank’s Red Hot Sauce.) It is, in my opinion, the Queen of the Roast Beef Sandwiches. It’s hot roast beef au jus served on a Kimmelweck roll. The roll names the sandwich, and the roll makes the sandwich. It’s a bit like a Kaiser roll, only the top is sprinkled with caraway seeds and coarse salt. You slice it in half, dip the cut sides into the meat juices, and put the meat on it. The caraway and salt give the sandwich just the right zing, and if you’d like a little more zing, folks’ll be happy to serve you some horseradish to go with it.

But you can’t get kimmelweck buns – and, hence, can’t get beef on weck – outside the Buffalo area. I’d only ever had it because a college friend took me on a couple of road trips home to North Tonawanda. Some years back, when a Buffalo Wild Wings franchise opened around here – and they were still calling themselves BW3, for “Buffalo Wild Wings and Weck” – I was thrilled. Then I tasted their version of beef on weck. It doesn’t surprise me that they are now simply Buffalo Wild Wings.

But now, we were in Buffalo, or as close as makes no difference. And I wanted weck! I noodled around the internet looking for a good place. Most were far off the beaten path, or at least the path we were beating, but I found one not far from the rink where the girls were skating. So after Saturday’s game, Mr. Sane dutifully followed my directions and finally found the place – which wouldn’t open till dinnertime and wasn’t open Sunday or Monday.

Back to the hotel we went, and I got up the nerve to ask for a recommendation at the desk. “Oh, you want the Village Inn!” And she handed me a sheet of directions to local restaurants. It was a long sheet, but I quickly found the directions. Mr. Sane drove, and I, the navigator, told him to turn right out of the exit and then drive until we got to the end of East River Rd. So we drove... and drove... and drove, until we noticed that the road had not ended, and the signs now said West River Rd. At which point I reexamined the sheet and discovered that my eyes must have jumped to the next set of directions at one point. The directions to the Village Inn said turn left and drive to the end of East River Rd. The directions to the next restaurant said to turn right and drive for a mile or so before making another turn, etc. So, lacking a map of the island – and since we’re Luddites without a GPS (it’s hard to justify the expense when, honestly, I’ve never steered us this wrong before) – we drove back to the hotel, then drove down East River Rd. in the opposite direction.

By this point, it was getting pretty late for lunch, and we were all getting cranky, but, God bless him, Mr. Sane never once recriminated me for the faulty directions, never even grumbled under his breath. And we did eventually find the place, a cute little spot with about a dozen tables and the entire front of the house (at least at that hour) being a really nice guy named Tim. I got my beef on weck. Really good beef on weck.

But as good as the sandwich was, it wasn’t as good as having the kind of husband who would drive a good dozen miles, most of them, as it turned out, out of his way, to satisfy his wife’s craving for a roast beef sandwich.

Friday Fragments: March 5, 2010

2010-03-05T21:45:00.005-05:00

Friday Fragments come to you courtesy of Mrs. 4444 at Half Past Kissin’ Time (as if you didn’t know that already) and my semi-coherent brain.

• I found myself thinking about how school has changed over the years – or more specifically, how school supplies have changed. When was the last time you saw a jar of paste? Heaven only knows what ever happened to mucilage. Kindergartners use glue sticks these days. I can’t remember what grade I was in when they were new, but I remember them being new. Magic Markers and Flair pens were still new enough that having them was a big deal. Now, my kids use a dry-erase board & markers like a 21^st-century slate.

• And in talking to Beta's 2nd-grade teacher about Beta's math troubles, I told her that Beta had tearfully confessed to counting on her fingers sometimes. The teacher assured me that Beta was not the only one, and she was fine with the kids, as they were learning, using their fingers or tally marks or whatever. I said “chisenbop” – then I had to explain it to her, because she wasn't old enough to know. (For you young things: It's, essentially, using your fingers as an abacus. It was big in the 1970s.)

• When my friend’s mother-in-law was admitted to the hospital for tests, her daughter said, “Well, we know Grandma can’t have rabies; she doesn’t go outside enough.”

• Lacking anything to watch on TV (now that the Olympics are over), Mr. Sane put in our recording (OK, I’ll admit it – it’s a VHS) of “The Trouble with Tribbles.” I couldn’t get over how much DeForest Kelley reminded me of Gary Sinise.

So, Hollywood, wha’d’ya think? Gary Sinise as Bones McCoy?

• I knew I should’ve written this stuff down... I’ve got nothing now, and it was overflowing my brain before.

• What, pray tell me, is the point of sports broadcasts having a blimp at the site of indoor sporting events? Oh, look! There’s the roof of the Q!

• Spring training games have started; the chains are down at the Dairy Queen, and they’re starting to take the boards off; Alpha’s hockey championship game is tomorrow, and they’re predicting highs in the 40s for the next week. Soon the orange barrels will start sprouting, and we’ll know spring is really here!

Hi, my name is Crazy, and I'm an Olympiholic

2010-02-26T08:46:00.004-05:00

You should see my house right now. OK, actually, you shouldn’t. I’m a poor enough housekeeper that even in good circumstances, I only let trusted friends into my house, but right now, I’m afraid that even they might be tempted to call the health department. Alpha wanted to make herself a snack after school the other day, but she couldn’t find a spot on the counter to do it. Except for the hours before noon, which are often filled with other obligations anyway, my every waking moment has been spent watching the Olympics.

I like curling. OK, I looooove curling. Several days, I rushed to pick up the girls at the last possible minute, pulled into the space vacated by the school bus, hopped out, opened the sliding door, and, as soon as the girls got out of school (bus kids are dismissed first), waved them into the van, shouting things like, “Hurry up! When I left home, it was tied in the ninth end!”

I’ve got a profile set up on the satellite box such that I can limit the channel selection to the ones showing the Olympics, and from noon to midnight, it’s on one of those. Meanwhile, I’ve got one window on my laptop open to Vancouver2010.com and another open to NBCOlympics.com, so I can see both what’s on TV and what’s actually happening. This can get a bit frustrating, as when I was following the bobsled runs: When Canada 1’s split times went from first to eighth to eighteenth out of eighteen, clearly something was up. But my ancient Mac won’t run Microsoft Silverlight, so I can’t stream the live video. *pout* So I waited and waited, and finally, flipping back and forth between the primetime coverage and the US women’s curling match, I managed to miss both the Canadian bobsled crash and a really good end. I gave up and went to bed.

One of my favorite moments watching the Olympics didn’t occur at home, though. It can’t get much better than watching the first period of the Canada – Russia men’s hockey game on the rink TV with a bunch of hockey dads and coaches – including a Russian and a Canadian. As a hockey mom of girls, I of course like watching the women’s hockey, too. I like it even better when the girls watch it with me. And I like that other people are watching it, too. (I’m getting tired of hearing, “Your daughters play hockey? I didn’t know girls could play hockey!”) I’d like it even better if some of it had been shown in NBC’s main coverage, so it was likely to be seen by folks who weren’t looking for it.

To that end, I like seeing girl hockey players in no fewer than three commercials: Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, and, I think, one of the Chevy commercials. What Olympics coverage won’t do, maybe mass marketing can.

Watching the commercials has become part of my Olympic experience. I can’t get over the “The Ladders” commercial with the office-chair safari, which has the disclaimer: “Do not attempt.” Why? Because an office chair might bite you if you do? Because People for the Ethical Treatment of Office Furniture might get upset? Because there are no herds of office chairs rolling through the African savanna, and if you think there are, we’d like you to stay right where you are so we can shoot you with a tranq dart, wrangle you, and take you to the ~~zoo~~ funny farm?

I want to know why the unseen dad in the Chevy Equinox commercial wants to send his family away on a trip without him. Is he waiting for a big meet-up with his mistress? (OK, this thought may be influenced by all the Tiger Woods coverage recently.)

And clearly, even though I’m a minivan-driving mom, I’m too old for the folks at Toyota to want me to buy their Sienna. I can’t understand why associating your product with people acting like jerks, even (sort-of) funny people acting like (sort-of) funny jerks, would make people want to buy your product. It must take the irony and snarkiness of a younger generation of parents (why, yes, I am an old fogy) to comprehend this.

I don’t waste as much time wondering about this, though, as I do wondering what’s going to happen when the Olympics are over. Will Olympic withdrawal reduce me to a twitching, quivering mass? Or will I awaken from my vegetative state into a new, shiny world?

The end of the Big Blue Thunder

2010-02-09T17:57:00.005-05:00

Once upon a time, about a decade ago, my brother-in-law and his family moved back to the U.S. for a while. The big global company for which he works had transferred him back to HQ. Not surprisingly, his eldest son played soccer. And not surprisingly, the kid who'd started playing "football" as a wee tot in England was quite good. He played for a team called the Big Blue Thunder, and, dutiful soccer mom that she was (though, as a non-citizen, not quite the Soccer Mom the politicians were aiming for at the time), she had a decal on the back window of her minivan: a soccer ball labeled "B B THUNDER."

Global corporations being what they are, a few years later, the gang was headed back to the UK. We were headed into the minivan stage of our lives -- two car seats didn't work so well in my pre-marriage red convertible -- and it wasn't worth it for them to ship the van across the Atlantic, particularly with the steering wheel on the wrong side and all, so they gave us a deal. We became the owners of a minivan complete with B B THUNDER decal.

Not being a soccer mom, and being very conscious of that fact, I wanted to get rid of the decal, but Mr. Sane was very insistent that we keep it. "It'll make it easier to pick out our van in parking lots." Sure, 'cause nobody else has a soccer ball decal. "But nobody else has the Big Blue Thunder around here." Apparently, the personalized license plates weren't enough to distinguish our van from the others. So, for nearly Beta's whole life, I've been driving around supporting a team none of whose current members I know, which might not even still exist.

I made a purchase at our last tournament, though. I've been biding my time, waiting for a thaw, but Cleveland in late January and early February does not experience many thaws. (Forbes.com just named us the city with the worst winter weather -- it seems Buffalo was not big enough to be considered.) So last week, when it seemed to be as warm as it was going to get for a while, I took out the razor scraper and removed the Big Blue Thunder. A couple of the letters came off whole, but mostly there were little shreds of white on the garage floor. I washed the window as best I could then took the van to the car wash (which Beta thoroughly enjoyed). Once we were home, I cleaned up that area of the window yet again (it seems that any cycle that came with a dryer also came with car wax). The consensus on the Web was 50°, so, since it was scarcely above freezing, I cranked the heater up full blast and let the van run until the rear window seemed warm enough. I carefully followed the directions, and I'm no longer following the Big Blue Thunder. Instead, as my van will tell you...

Hockey Girls Rule!

I am not as crazy as the system

2010-02-05T16:32:00.002-05:00

Mr. Sane’s employer just changed insurers, and you most likely know how crazy that gets. Compound that with dealing with the mental-health bureaucracy and it gets even crazier.

I need a refill on my meds soon. Believe me, no one wants me to go off my meds. This is the medication I introduced to my daughters as the “nice Mommy pills,” because before them, I was a screaming banshee. I don’t cuss; my Mom describes me as someone who “wouldn’t say s**t if she had a mouthful,” but when I’m on a low, I go straight to dropping F-bombs. Nah, no personality change there. Not to mention that for this particular med – not one you’ve likely ever heard of; it’s not advertised on TV – going off it can mean that when you go back on, it might not work, and while we took the time to find a new med that did, I’d probably revert to banshee mode. And going off it and back on again increases the risk of its one major side effect, which just happens to be potentially fatal.

However, because this is maintenance medication, insurers want you (in this case, me) to go through their mail-order pharmacies. The prescription has to be written for a 90-day supply; you have to mail it in, yada yada yada. The first problem for me right now is that unlike dealing with a local pharmacy, who is quite happy to take the prescription bottle from your other local pharmacy and transfer your prescription, the mail-order pharmacy wants a completely new prescription. And no, the doctor can’t phone it in.

So, problem number two: I may need to go in for a visit, even though I’m not due for months. I have no idea if/how this is going to be covered. The Summary of Benefits says that coverage for Behavioral Health Services (oh, there’s another rant there; this is SO not “behavioral” – except for the whole banshee thing) depends on the setting in which it is provided. That’s all it says. For any details, I need to check the Certificate.

That’s problem number three. We never got a copy of the Certificate. We got a letter saying that if we sent it in, the insurer would mail us a copy in about a month – or we could check it online. I went through the rigmarole to enroll in their online access a while back only to discover that the Certificate wasn’t available online yet. So I tried again recently – only to be told that to access it, I needed “contract-level permission.” This brought about a call to Mr. Sane’s HR department, who told me to call their insurance broker.

The nice lady at the insurance broker’s kindly e-mailed me a copy of the certificate, which says regarding the company’s ~~mental~~ behavioral health coverage: “See the Schedule of Benefits for any applicable deductible, coinsurance/copayment information.” The Schedule of Benefits says the same thing the Summary of Benefits said. Perhaps Capt. Yossarian could explain it to me, if he really existed.

Actually, the Schedule of Benefits does say one other thing – “Coverage for the Inpatient and Outpatient treatment of Behavioral Health conditions is provided to the same extent and degree as for the treatment of physical illness.” (‘Cause this illness SO isn’t physical.) I take this to mean that I can go to an M.D. in Psychiatry the same way I would go to an M.D. in any other specialty. However, the nice insurance-broker lady said I should call for pre-certification to make sure my doctor was in the insurer’s system.

Which brings up problem number four. I see a doctor at a Major Teaching Hospital, which means I really see a resident. An attending physician drops by, mostly pro forma, at the end of the visit. It’s the resident, not the attending, who issues the prescription. All the attendings at the hospital are listed as in-network; the residents aren’t. I’m not sure of who my resident’s current attending is – they change frequently. And, at the moment, I’m not even sure of who my current resident is – the one I’ve been seeing is finishing his residency, and he said my next med check (at least when it was supposed to be scheduled) would be with a new resident, and I’d get a letter (which I haven’t gotten yet) informing me who my new resident would be.

So – does the insurer care who signs my prescription? What happens if I need an office visit? I call the pre-certification number, and the nice lady there assures me all is well; the docs at Major Teaching Hospital are all on the plan, and the only thing I would need pre-certification for is if I needed psychotherapy. It would stand to reason that if the insurance is OK with the doctor, it would be OK with a prescription from that doctor. But the pre-certification lady can’t speak for the prescription contractor... and very little of this process stands to reason.

So, all it took was a few sessions online, a passel of reading, and a bunch of phone calls to find out that my meds are probably covered. Now I just need to get the actual prescription (which may or may not involve making a new med-check appointment, hopefully sooner than the month or so it usually takes to be seen), get it to the pharmacy, and wait for it to be sent to me. Why on Earth would anyone want to reform a health-care system this efficient?

Works for Me Wednesday: Menu Cards

2010-02-03T12:38:00.004-05:00

In an effort to get my butt in gear actually writing this blog, I am going to be participating in a meme today – Works for Me Wednesday, hosted over at We Are THAT Family. Don’t expect this to be a regular feature – if things actually worked for me, I wouldn’t be in the state I’m in. And I can’t offer any tips along today’s theme, “Tips on Starting a Blog,” since I’m a total newbie. (Though I will be reading avidly.)

However, I do have one thing that works for me: my menu cards.

These are not to be confused with recipe cards; these are about what to make for dinner, not how to make it. In addition to helping with menu planning, they’re a lot of help in making a grocery list.

You don’t get to be 300 lbs without liking food. And I like a lot of variety in mine. I am definitely not a “chicken on Monday, beef on Tuesday, pasta on Wednesday” sort of person. Easy to plan, yes. Mind- (and tastebud-) numbingly boring, also yes. What if Wednesday comes around, and I don’t feel like pasta?

What it is

Like most folks, I have a repertoire of recipes I generally cook. I use an index card for each meal I commonly serve. On one side, I have the name of the main dish (and sometimes sides), along with where I have the recipe (typically, the cookbook and page number). Now that I’m doing Weight Watchers, that’s also where I list the point count, with a note as to whether that’s for the entree or the complete meal. On the other side, I list the ingredients, arranged in grocery-store order.

How it works

• When I’m doing my menu/grocery planning, I sort through the cards to see what looks good. I make sure I have enough slow-cooker meals in the plan for hockey nights, enough meatless meals for Fridays, enough low-points meals to compensate for the times I’ve swung too far the other way, etc.

• Once I’ve pulled those cards, I use the information on the back to make my grocery list.

• I have two snack-sized Ziploc bags tacked to the inside of one of my kitchen cabinets: I put the ones I’m going to use in one and the rest in the other.

• When it comes time to decide what’s for dinner each day, I look at the cards and decide what looks good, given the constraints of the day. If I’m having trouble deciding, I might go to the fridge and see what needs using up – say I’ve got a green pepper that looks like it’s starting to go; I can flip the cards over and see which recipe or recipes use green pepper. Or I can narrow down my choices and hand two or three cards over for Mr. Sane to decide, if he’s home. (I never bother giving the girls the choice – they will inevitably choose different things.)

• Our pantry and storage freezer are downstairs, so I can take the card down with me, so I know which ingredients to grab. And if the recipe’s one I make frequently, or if it’s a throw-everything-in-the-crock kind of thing, I can often make it just from the information on the menu card.

• Once dinner’s done, I tuck the card in the “don’t use” bag until I’m pulling menus for my next shopping trip.

It did take a fair bit of initial set-up time, looking up the recipes I use frequently and transferring the ingredients to the cards, but, for me, it’s been worth it with the time I’ve saved planning menus and grocery lists and avoiding multiple trips up and down to the pantry. In retrospect, if I had the time and inclination, I might highlight the index cards in different colors for different categories. (I suppose colored index cards would do, but then you get into cross-category items: meatless slow-cooker meals and such.)

Anyhow, it may seem to you like something only a Crazy Lady would think up, but, as the meme says, it Works for Me.

On TV

2010-01-31T20:31:00.002-05:00

OK, so this post might better be called “About TV,” but I like the idea of being “On TV,” although not actually on TV, because, really, none of you want to look at my 300-lb crazy face. I mean, there’s a reason I don’t have my picture in that other column.

Anyhow, I’ve been thinking about TV. I covet a TV for my bedroom. I have this notion that, if I had a TV in my bedroom, I could put the girls to bed and then retire to my room to wind down for the evening, changing into my jammies while watching whatever it is I want to, and tucking myself into bed, so that when my shows were done, I would actually go to sleep. This is opposed to what I do right now: put the girls to bed, come downstairs, flop on the couch to watch TV, let inertia overcome me to the point where I’m watching shows I don’t really want to because it’s just so much work to get up and get the remote, finally pry myself out of the couch, turn off the TV, sit in front of the computer and web surf until it’s pushing midnight, then drag myself upstairs to bed.

We used to have a TV in our bedroom, and occasionally, I would use it this way, too. But it was one of those wee bitty analog TVs you used to be able to get at the drugstore for $20 or so. The screen was a bit larger than an index card. So we mostly used it for two things: 1) it nestled between us nicely for watching “Headlines” on Leno, unless we fell asleep first, and 2) when Mr. Sane got the 5:30 a.m. phone call for a snow day, I’d pull it out and check to see if the girls also had a snow day. Oh, and when I had panic attacks, it was nice for pulling out when I woke up in the middle of the night & couldn’t go back to sleep, though, frankly, since it only got broadcast channels, I’d often head downstairs anyway, just to watch something other than an infomercial. But it didn’t make sense to get a digital converter for it, since the converter would probably be larger than the TV, and then we’d probably have to go out and get a digital antenna, and Leno was moving to 10 pm anyway. (Though I have missed the old TV on snow days.)

When you are a stay-at-home mom married to a teacher (and a Catholic-school teacher, at that!), the budget does not always stretch to a nifty flat-panel TV on the bedroom wall, especially on top of hockey fees and a nice new chain for the wedding rings I wear around my neck because I am too fat for them to fit on my finger (but I won’t have them stretched because, really, I’m going to lose this weight).

On the other hand, what do you suppose would really happen if I had a TV in my room? Most likely, I’d put the girls to bed, then turn on the TV and start getting ready for bed myself. Then Alpha would come in and ask if she could curl up in my bed and watch TV, and I’d say no and have to get her to bed all over again. And then Beta would do the same. And once I’d done that, one or the other, or both, would complain that they couldn’t get to sleep because the TV was too loud. And then I’d turn it down and close the door (and the room would get cold because our radiator doesn’t work as well as the girls’) only to eventually have one girl or the other come in again and ask if she could curl up next to me. And I’d probably cave, because I’d be so tired, and then, when Mr. Sane came up to bed, he’d have to haul her to her room (since, whichever it would be, they’re both too big for me to carry), or we’d have to put up with being kicked all night.

So, really, I just need to skip the TV and drag my butt to bed.

Random thoughts generated during a weekend of four away hockey games

2010-01-24T19:57:00.003-05:00

Glad I got, for $3 at W.M., a tote bag big enough to hold a couple of blankets and extra mommy stuff. If I add another bag, maybe I can become that mommy -- you know, the one you turn to when you need a band-aid, or an aspirin, or a Swiss Army knife, or a portable washing machine.

I need a portable washing machine if we're going to come home from one of these weekends and still have clothes to wear on Monday.

Getting audiobooks on Playaway from our library was perfect; when Alpha reads a book in print, she feels the need to synopsize every chapter for me. But plugged in, she just listened, and I had peace and quiet for at least some of that 3-hour round trip.

Couldn't call Mr. Sane for Beta's hockey score when Alpha and I were an hour and a half away because I had his cell phone. Times like this tempt me to get my own, but then people would call me on it, and I'd regret it.

Some of the legendary hockey-mom camaraderie comes from shared hardship (e.g., getting up at an ungodly hour on a weekend to drive your kids to a game hours away); some of it comes from being the only familiar faces to one another hours away from home. Some of it comes from knowing you're not alone when non-hockey moms ask you, "Are you nuts?"

Just how on earth is a quart a "Medium" soft drink? (It even said "Medium" on the Hardee's cup.) If you ask for a "Large," do they just hand a 2-liter bottle out the drive-thru window?

One of these days I'm going to stop at that outlet mall, particularly since I've now been told there's an awesome chocolate shop there.

It's just as well I didn't have time this weekend. I have to remember that if I don't save my WW weekly points, there is nothing I can reasonably eat at a rink concession stand. That said, I'm sure there were healthier choices than the fried dough with cinnamon sugar. (But, boy, was it good.)

If you ignore the Mapquest/Google/Yahoo/GPS directions, the rink that is "really hard to find" becomes really easy to find. (Though, credit to the above, we found the easy way by looking at their maps & satellite images. We just didn't slavishly adhere to taking the shortest or fastest route. Really -- three extra turns in under a mile in an area where parts of streets don't connect any more runs a good chance of getting you lost by more than one minute and 0.3 mi.)

Why don't we have a sculpture of our mascot in front of our rink? *pout*

Beta plays Mite C, which I think is the absolute lowest level of travel hockey possible, and, if anything, I think that as the season goes on, her games are becoming less like actual games and more like Brownian motion rather than the reverse. It's awfully cute, though, to see little guys who can barely stay upright on skates try out their goal-scoring celebration dance.

Thank goodness the girls have pizza lunch at school tomorrow, so I don't have to get up early and make lunches.

Oh, drat -- I agreed to help serve pizza lunch.

I hate homework

2010-01-20T21:17:00.008-05:00

I've got a bit of a TMJ thing going on, I think. My ear is sore, and my jaw pops occasionally. This morning, it finally seemed to be better, but it came back as the girls were getting ready for school. I think it's from gritting my teeth so often.

I am not a big fan of my children's homework. Apparently, they aren't fans of it, either, or I wouldn't have to nag them about it so much. I'd ask my Mom how she got us to do our homework in grade school, but... we didn't have any homework in grade school. I'm probably dating myself by saying this, but when I was a kid, a primary-grade teacher who assigned homework would have been considered totally incompetent. "What on Earth do you do in that school all day?" parents would have asked. Homework didn't start in earnest until junior high.

I don't know where this push for homework came from. I do know that the primary purpose it seems to serve in this household is to drive Mom crazy.

I have this idyllic picture in my mind of Mr. Sane, who teaches high school, coming home around 4:30 (i.e., only staying after school for an hour or so) and doing the bulk of his grading at home, sitting at the dining table with the girls, while they follow Daddy's good example and do their own homework, and I cook dinner uninterrupted. (Crazy though I am, I'm not crazy enough to imagine my girls coming home from school and promptly doing their homework, getting it done before 4 pm because they realize that the sooner they get it done, the more play time they have.)

But noooo. Mr. Sane waltzes through the door around 6 most nights, just in time for dinner. A dinner I have prepared with many interruptions. In addition to the nagging to actually work instead of teasing each other, there's Beta's belief that any reading assignment must be read out loud to Mom and both girls' belief (reinforced by their teachers, I think) that no assignment is complete until Mom has checked it. Yesterday's assignments resulted in unleavened cornbread. No, we weren't celebrating some bizarre Catholic form of Passover; I just got interrupted enough during the measurement of the dry ingredients that it wasn't till I noticed how unevenly the bread was rising that I realized I had completely missed the baking powder. The tablespoon of baking powder. Here's how it looked:

It was rather... chewy, too. Frankly, I'm surprised this doesn't happen more often.

We've encountered a new problem this week -- the "I haven't done my homework because I've been too busy studying" problem. Yesterday, Alpha was busy poring over atlases in preparation for the school's geography bee, so her math homework didn't get done till this morning. The day before, it was Beta who worked on math-fact practice sheets while ignoring her religion homework. Apparently, unassigned homework, with no direct consequences if it's undone, is much more enticing than stuff that will cause you to miss recess or get a bad grade if you don't do it.

Hmm... maybe I can make this work for me. "I absolutely need you to empty out your hockey bags, but if you have time, you might want to put away all the toys in the playroom." It's possible....

Call Me

2010-01-16T23:19:00.003-05:00

Alpha had a hockey tournament this weekend. Actually, the tournament is still going on, but Alpha doesn’t have any more games. They didn’t score enough points to make it into tomorrow’s finals. However, they held their own against teams that play a division above them in the local league. They had a close loss, a resounding loss, and ended up with a resounding win this afternoon.

Our family decided to stop for dinner near the rink before heading home. So, apparently, did the opposing team. We had parked the car and were walking up the street to the Mongolian barbecue, when, passing another restaurant, we were greeted with a windowful of nine and ten-year-old boys, wearing warm-ups emblazoned with the opponent’s logo, hollering, pounding on the window, waving, and calling out to Alpha.

I don’t know if they recognized her as someone who had just helped beat them. Maybe they would have similarly accosted any girl of the same age who walked by. They were certainly in high spirits for a team that hadn’t won any of its tournament games. But the sight of these boys had me laughing. They might have wolf whistled if they were old enough to know what a wolf whistle was and how to make one, and I might have been offended on Alpha’s behalf, but I couldn’t help simply being amused, especially at the little boys who were gesturing (and in one case, saying loudly enough to be heard through the window), “Call me.”

Alpha spent a bit of dinner talking about what she might have done. She wished she’d been wearing team gear at the time so she could point at it and make a face. She wished she’d said, “No, you call me.” I asked what she would have done if one of them then asked for her phone number, and she said, “I would have said, ‘No, you tell me yours. You were the one who wanted me to call you.’”

Thank goodness she’s got that sort of wit about her, because even so, with her red curls and freckles and big blue eyes, give it a few years, and I’m sunk.

For now, though, I can smile when boys pound on a plate glass window and shout, “Call me.”

So who is this woman, and why is she blogging?

2010-01-14T13:45:00.001-05:00

And is she really a 300-lb crazy lady?

Well, sort of. I have some nice meds that keep my bipolar disorder (type II, not the manic-depressive illness with which you are more likely familiar) pretty much under control, and a few months on Weight Watchers has me a noticeable amount below 300 lbs. But I sort of like to think of myself as a 300-lb crazy lady.

Why the heck on earth would you want to do that?

Because who's going to mess with a 300-lb crazy lady??? Sadly, I'm far too easily intimidated, primarily by my children's school principal, but I think that's a story for another time.

Vorpal dust bunnies?

Umm... yes. I'm both a geek and domestically challenged.

Oh, yeah? If you're such a geek, why didn't you have a blog already?

'Cause I'm not as geeky as I used to be. In the years B.C., I was a technical writer and editor. Then I stayed home and had kids. And, being domestically challenged, I've spent most of my time trying to master the basics of housewifery, while my geek skills have fallen by the wayside. I swear, one of these days, I will have a presentable house, be caught up on the laundry, and have dinner on the table in time, all in the same day! Really! Really!!! Don't laugh....

Daughters' hockey skates?

Umm, yeah. I admit it. I'm a hockey mom. (But please don't confuse me with THAT hockey mom. For one thing, I don't wear lipstick.) I have two daughters, whom, for purposes of this blog, I shall call "Alpha" and "Beta." Alpha plays at the Squirt level, usually right wing. Beta plays at the Mite C level, usually defense. Living here on the East Side of the North Coast (that's Cleveland to the rest of you), we are not sufficiently hockey-mad to support separate boys' and girls' teams, so they play with the boys. Of course, so do many other girls, so they have company.

Anything else we should know?

Well, I've been happily married for many years to my BSU ("beloved spousal unit"), "Mr. Sane." I'm Catholic -- that's bound to show up, particularly since my girls attend Catholic school. (The one with the aforementioned intimidating principal -- and, no, she's not a nun.) I suppose anything else will show up whenever it needs to.

OK, so that's who you are, but why are you blogging?

Ideally, to entertain you with a slice of my 300-lb crazy life. And to work on my writing chops, which, like my other geek skills, have grown rusty now that I've spent as many years at home as I did in paid employment. And if the former doesn't succeed, then I surely need the latter.