I fought the lawn… and the lawn won
There’s no better ice-breaker than moving into a brand-new housing development with ten other families. It’s an instant, equalized community where everyone has exactly what you do: extreme mortgage payments, dirt back yards, and sheet/blanket/beach towel window treatments.
Grown-ups went trick-or-treating tonight.
They brought their babies: sweet, adorable creatures fresh from heaven, none of whom had any concept of candy or the ability to consume it.
A few of the adults held babies; a few more held pillowcases. The baby-carriers showed us their tiny bundles, then their partners stepped forward and held open the pillowcases.
When my boys were little I told them 7th grade was the cut-off point for Trick-or-Treating. “Nobody goes out begging for candy after they hit junior high,” I’d say, and their eyes would grow wide as they contemplated this tragic consequence of aging.
Yeah. Well. I was wrong.
In our neighborhood even high school seniors go Trick-or-Treating. The girls go out dressed like can-can dancers or french maids. The boys usually go out as psychotic murderers or psychotic murder victims. Neither gender is ashamed of itself, either, not even when some of the boys sing “Trickertreat!” in baritone.
I guess this okay, as long as they still aren’t holding out pillowcases to strangers when they’re in college. And I suppose it’s time for me to confess: I used to profit from this extended childhood in a most shameful way.
Armed with the Official Child Safety Mandate to protect my children from poisoned candy and razor-bladed apples, I’d search through their pillowcases, secretly pocketing some of the best goodies for myself. (Mounds, Peppermint Patties, Reeses — hoo yeah.)
I can still wrestle a bulging pillowcase from a sweaty teenager, too, but now they’ve read this article, I think they’ll fight a little harder.
Despite e-mail warnings, scary stories, and Ann Landers columns to the contrary, there have been only two confirmed cases of children being killed by poisoned Halloween candy, and in both cases the children were killed not in a random act by strangers but intentional murder by one of their parents. The best-known, “original” case was that of Texan Ronald Clark O’Bryan, who killed his son by lacing his Pixie Stix with cyanide in 1974.
There have been a few instances of candy tampering over the years—and in most cases the “victim” turned out to be the culprit, children doing it as a prank or to draw attention. With the exceptions noted above, no child has been killed or seriously harmed by contaminated Halloween candy.
[SNIP]
Children are in far more danger from being hit by a car on a dark street.
“Candy Fears are Mere Halloween Phantoms,” by Benjamin Radford, the Skeptical Inquirer, 25 October 2005
Yeah. Well. There goes my best source of free chocolate.
On second thought, maybe I can just confiscate all the chocolate with my Official Bulldog Safety Mandate, instead. After all, chocolate is dangerous for dogs, right? And our bulldog does get into everything, right?
And if concern for our Mojo doesn’t work, I’m pretty sure I still outweigh the younger kid. Poundage — combined with years of pillowcase thievery — is on my side. I’m not out of the game yet.
They can cruise like natives through Morrowind’s capital city of Mournhold. They can accurately describe every golf course from Torrey Pines to the Royal Birkdale. They can draw maps from memory of the Covenant’s High Charity.
So how is it that in the real, non Xbox world, they can’t find their way out of a paper bag?
Exhibit A: Eddy
Wolfie: (answers the phone) Hullo?
Eddy: It’s Eddy! I missed the bus!
Wolfie: Squirt and Tiger already left with their mom. You need a ride? Where are you?
Eddy: Um, you know, on La Costa Avenue.
Wolfie: Dude, that’s a big avenue.
Eddy: Just turn from your house onto La Costa Avenue!
Wolfie: Dude, you don’t know your own address? Give me a cross street.
Eddy: JUST LOOK FOR ME ON LA COSTA AVENUE!
Wolfie did find Eddy and get him to school, but this kind of thing happens to Bloodmoon warriors more often than you’d think.
Exhibit B: Joe
Squirt: Mom! Can you take Joe home today?
Bonnie: Sure! Where do you live, Joe?
Joe: First get on the freeway.
Bonnie: Sure! North or south?
Joe: Hunh? Oh! Um… north! No! I mean south! Oh, uh, erhm… Forget the freeway!
But what really gets me is how some of them act so certain when they tell you where to go. Like they’re one of those expositional game characters who fill you in while they fit you with your new armor. I fall for it every time.
Every. Single. Time.
Exhibit C: Tiger
Tiger: We always take this shortcut on our team runs! It’s way quicker. Turn right!
Bonnie: Okay! Now, do I go straight at this intersection? Or right? Or left?
Tiger: Straight! (several minutes go by, as well as lots of lovely scenery) Ooops. I think we were supposed to turn left back there.
Bonnie: Okay! I’ll make a u-turn.
Tiger: (several minutes go by) Yeah, here it is. Okay. Turn right here… (we turn) … I think. Maybe we should’ve turned left. Yup. Definitely left.
Bonnie: I thought you said you take this shortcut all the time!
Tiger: Why are you sounding all irritated?
Meet my neighbor, The Ghoul. He’s trying to have me for dinner.
“No, really,” I told him. “I just ate.”
I offered to pass out his family’s candy while he escorted his little Ghoulette during the Halloween trick-or-treating process, but when they returned I could tell he thought I’d eaten it all.
Untrue, of course. I only ate the good stuff. Continue reading “Phantom Shmantom”
I drive an afternoon carpool of teenage boys.
“So?” you might say. “No big deal!”
Yeah? Well listen up. I drive an afternoon carpool of teenage boys in a school district that no longer requires mandatory showers after P.E.
Perhaps now you comprehend my ambivalence to carpooling. Perhaps now you might even grasp the reason why my car seats smell the way they do. And perhaps — just perhaps — you might understand the message I got last Friday: “Mom says to tell you she died so she can’t drive anymore.”
Continue reading “Strong Enough for a Man, But Made for the Carpool”
My old hand-held showerhead was a champ. It outlasted one dishwasher, two refrigerators, three cooktops and four kitchen faucets. Hubby and I weren’t the only ones using it, either: for several years it was the power tool I used to scrub the boys squeaky-clean — until the sad day they realized they could outrun me.
Now they’re lots stinkier than they were back when I was in charge of hosing them down. I think my old showerhead died of despair.
I needed a new one, but the Home Depot guy was getting kind of personal about it.
Continue reading “The Right to Remain Silent in Bathroom Fixtures, Aisle 7”
There weren’t any in Minnesota, and visiting family members from Ohio rolled their eyes when they first saw one outside our Carlsbad supermarket. This makes me wonder if it’s just a California thing.
These islands of disinfection are in all the supermarkets I visit, and I’ve seen them in Orange and Los Angeles Counties, too.
They first showed up this winter when the flu vaccine shortage was headline news. The attached signs told us the wipes were for wiping off shopping cart handles, but seemed to really be saying, “Quick! Come inside! You’ll be safe from the flu in here!”
It’s summertime now. The flu and its flaming sword is long gone. And yet the disinfectant wipes remain.
So do all the signs apologizing for any solicitors who interrupt our pursuit of double coupons. And so do those self-checking machines that replace living cashiers and baggers—thanks to them, we don’t have to stand in line with other shoppers if we don’t want to, or have to tell the checker “credit” or “debit” if we don’t want to, or even answer that age-old question, “Paper or Plastic?” Not if we don’t want to.
And now these little disinfectant wipes stand guard at all entrances, ensuring our protection against any ickies left behind by careless, germ-laden shopping cart users. We don’t even have to come into contact with other people’s fingerprints if we don’t want to.
I sense a trend here.
Hot and smoggy and me stuck in L.A. traffic on the I-5. The exhaust fumes were so bad I had to roll up the windows. And since I couldn’t run the air conditioner without overheating the car, the air just got thicker.
I turned up the radio but after a few seconds it was drowned out by someone who pulled up beside me, someone with a loud, mufferless engine filling the air with an immense throbbing that made my ribs vibrate like our washing machine on the final spin cycle.
For a moment I wondered if I’d been squished by an 18-wheeler and deposited in Hell, only to learn it was staffed by demons on mufferless Harleys. If so, Hell looked a heck of a lot like the I-5 on a smoggy summer day in stop-and-go traffic.
But no, it was the regular ole’ I-5. And as I waited patiently for the chopper to pass so I could more fairly question the owner’s ancestry… I realized the chopper demon wasn’t a he, but a she.
She finally pulled up ahead of me and I could breathe again without rattling ribs. The picture is blurry because I was moving and my windshield was dirty (the bees are swarming in Carlsbad) but you can still see what I saw: a woman who waits for nothing and no one.
Me, I’ve spent my life waiting to lose some more weight before I do stuff like go to a pool party and actually go swimming, but I’ll bet this gal goes swimming at ALL her pool parties, and wears the tiniest bikini she can find—maybe even a thong.
Frankly, she appears to be the kind of woman who told the world the hell with it, I’m gonna get me some tattoos and a tube-top and some low-rider jeans and the biggest, baddest Harley sold in America today, and while I’m at it, the hell with the damn muffler, too.
Nobody gets in front of her at in the “9 items or less” line with 32 items and a fistful of expired coupons, nobody whips into the parking space at the mall that she was waiting for, and nobody EVER dings her van when she’s sitting inside it waiting for kids to finish swim team.
And even though I was taking a picture because it would last longer, I knew she could easily poke my eye out with her little finger if she was so inclined—so I didn’t spend any time trying to get the perfect shot. I just put the camera back into the bag and continued my stopping and going on the I-5, all the while wondering how big my butt would look on a Harley.
I’m offline as I wait for swim practice to end, unless I piggyback onto somebody’s unsecured wireless. And what if that connection is owned by a hot-tempered someone who might see me and take a baseball bat to my windshield because he thinks I gave him the Melissa virus?