|
My Profile
Because I can't bear to eulogize Doug - 2008-08-19
|
11:53 a.m. - 2004-06-16
I’m trying to get moving this morning, but moving is kind of ouchie. I know it’s mostly the kind of sore which would work itself out after I got busy for a while, but the desire to get up and unkink my knotty muscles is nil. I put in many hours on my garden yesterday. I did pace myself, but hours of work are still hours of work. Perhaps I’ll do some yoga. Perhaps I’ll just sit here and moan. We’ll see. There was a re-vote on the school budget last night and it was shot down again. Hellooo Austerity Budget. No field trips. No new text or library books. No speakers or special assembly programs. No SPORTS BUS! (A year of schlepping their kids home after daily practices and weekly games and I’ll just bet the budget passes next year.) The referendum to purchase 6 new school buses was shot down too. I was chatting with the woman in front of me in line at the polls (quite a line there was too, everybody turned out to vote) and she was crabbing about the need for new buses. Her accent pegged her as a newcomer. I smiled politely and asked how long she’d been here. About a year, she answered. I smiled again and said, “Yeah? You and about 900 more families moved into the district last year. And just how are all the new kids supposed to GET to the now horribly overcrowded and under-funded schools?” She just sort of gawped at me. Duh. Fricken new people. They understand NOTHING. Things have calmed down here on the home front. Mike sulked for a while then it dawned on him that his sulking was pretty stupid as he was the one who’d stomped all over my feelings in the first place. We’re going to a wedding in July. Do you know what this means? I get to buy a new outfit! YAY!!!! I haven’t bought any dress-up clothes since ever. All my old fancy duds are gone to the Goodwill. I got rid of ALL my old clothes. Refuse to have them in the house. I’ve left myself nothing to grow back into. A motivation which works especially well for me. I’m cheap. More than the disappointment that I’d gained weight, it’s the bucks it would cost to cover my bloated bod which would piss me off. It’s not going to be a super-fancy wedding, but I’ll need something classier than a t-shirt and yoga shorts. I have no idea what’s out there. Kind of have my mind set on a dress. A dress with nice lines and a flippy short skirt. I can’t believe I’m excited about clothes shopping. How cool is this? The garden deities have demanded my fingernails as sacrifice. Thanks to picking rocks like a sharecropper I lost most of them in the line of duty. Cutting off the few decent nails I had left was kind of a wrench, but 4 long nails and 6 stumpy broken ones looked damn stupid. So I’m starting over and this time will keep them short until fall. I realized this might have been the first time I’ve actually cut my fingernails. I have a vague memory of my mother trimming mine with a nail scissors when I was 3? 4? and what a painful bloody process it was. She always jabbed. Probably why I started biting them in the first place. To spare myself the agony of my mother going after me with those terrible scissors. Am I so old nail clippers weren’t invented yet when I was little? Or was my mother just a sadistic whack job? I do know she was wildly resistant to change. Far more so than I am and I’m pretty stubborn about changing my ways. For example my mother continued to use mascara which came with a wee tube of goop and a tiny brush like a toothbrush for elves long after the kind with a wand in the tube was invented. I was wearing make-up myself before she made the switch. I don’t even know where she found that old style mascara. She liked to buy stuff in bulk, maybe she had a lifetime supply of it stashed in the linen closet. Long before warehouse clubs made the scene my mother was a big fan of stocking up. There never fewer than a dozen rolls of toilet paper on hand. Shelves of shampoo and household cleansers. We had a whole wall of shallow pantries and they were full to bursting with canned and dry goods. All bought on sale and all purchased by ME, the family quartermaster. As a teenager I found this goofy hoarding embarrassing. I’d blush when I plunked down 4 cases of dog food on the conveyor. I remember being sent to Shoprite one fine June afternoon to purchase 2 dozen rolls of toilet paper, 3 cases of baked beans, and 25 pounds of pasta (all on sale, of course). The women behind me in line were buzzing about my weirdly laden cart. Finally one asked me, “Are you opening a camp?” (There were several summer camps in our town.) Mortified that my mother’s penchant for hoarding sale items had been mistaken for a start of season buy for an entire summer camp I told the woman I was NOT shopping for a camp, I was from a family with 14 kids. (I have 3 sisters, that's all.) Why 14 kids? I dunno. Sounded good at the time. Such large families weren’t unusual in our Catholic town and the woman accepted my explanation with a nervous smile and a hastily made sign of the cross. I’m guessing that but for the grace of God she might have had her own platoon of children and she was damn grateful to have not been so fulsomely ‘blessed’. Okay. Enough slacking. Time to get to work. ~LA
|
