Family Vacation & Texting

Daughter: How about going to Charleston?

Me: I think it is too far to drive.

Daughter: I thought so too. (yet she suggested it - what?)

Son: We could fly!

Daughter: I hate flying.

Son: First Class. Foot massages. Movies. Solid gold cups that are never empty. My kind of plane!

Me: First Class is the best!

Son: Alcohol for days! (Why a 19 year old suggests that is kind of baffling – or telling…)

Daughter: I hate people touching my feet.

Me: We know!!!

Son: UGH! Fine! Live a life of massage less squalor!

Daughter: I ENJOY MY SQUALOR THANK YOU VERY MUCH

Me: Wow, this is getting too hostile for me…

Son: IF YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE HEAT THEN GET OUT OF THE KITCHEN.

Son-In-Law (who had been silent up until now): Can we not

Me: Don’t you mean get out of the airplane??

Son: HA!

Daughter: Airplanes have kitchens.

Me: Do they have foot kitchens?

Daughter: Why would you want to cook a foot?

Son: You don’t know my preferences.

Son-In-law (apparently at work and getting aggravated by all the texts): I will destroy you all!

Daughter: I think we are driving my husband crazy.

Son: Maybe a little.

Daughter: And I do know your preferences. I’VE KNOWN YOU YOUR ENTIRE LIFE!

Son: I’M MYSTERIOUS AND UNPREDICTABLE!

Me: It is a mystery to me why EVERYONE KEEPS USING CAPITAL LETTERS!

Son: If I need to shout – I NEED TO SHOUT!

Daughter: ME TOO!!!

Son: DON’T STIFLE MY FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS!

Me: I about to exercise my 2^nd amendment right if you guys don’t stop yelling at me!!!

Daughter: So, really, are we doing a family vacation?

 

I love my kids and maybe I think this is funnier than it really is, but hey, I just took up 2 minutes of your day when you obviously had nothing to do or you wouldn't be trolling the blog posts!! GET BACK TO WORK!

Go Away "MayMay" (plus a Stay Reboot!)

I posted last night about my awe inspiring “Easterween” decoration. At work it is hailed as brilliance incarnate and beloved by all. Well, most of them ‘like’ it.

This morning, my sister sent me a text that stated that she had noticed that I made a grammatical faux pas on the aforementioned post, so I went to my blog to fix it. It was then that I noticed there was an obvious increase in ‘comments’ on past blogs so I eagerly clicked in to check them out.

I was stunned. Some humanoid with the screen name ‘maymay’ had commented on nearly all my posts. The problem? NONE of her comments were even remotely related TO my posts! I knew the web had a seedy social media side that I try to stay away from (Facebook for example), but this person had crashed into my blog, assaulted my space, posted GARBAGE – verbally looooong GARBAGE – and walked away without a scratch. I was incensed!

Things like this are why I hate people and definitely should NOT be or work in public; and yet I do. How dare this human piggyback their mindless prattle upon the back of my hard thought out thoughts! Consider them all deleted.

While deleting the unwanted rubbish comments, I came across my post about mom and the perfume I had given to her called Stay. I reread the post since I had just visited my sister (and received the awesome Easterween gift) that included a visit our mother (a kind of 2 for 1 special). Mom had come out one morning dressed and ready to go bathed in the smell of that clean smelling Stay – and I do mean bathed in the smell.

I mentioned that she smelled good and it went – like instant delayed replay about Stay – like this…

Me: You smell good!

My sister: Yes, you do.

Mom: It is the perfume you gave me. It smells so fresh and clean. I love it!

Me: Nice.

Mom: What was the name?

Me: Stay.

Mom: Noooo, wasn’t it Gap or something?

Me: No, it came from The Gap. It is called Stay. (as if the name isn’t the bottle she uses every day!)

Mom: The Gap. That makes no sense.

My sister: It makes perfect sense if that is what they wanted to name the store.

Mom: I still don’t understand why they call it ‘Stay.’

My sister: Because the fragrance ‘stays’ with you all day! (she clearly was grasping for straws here – anything to stop this conversation)

Mom: Well it certainly does "Stay" with me because I spray it all over myself.

Me: How many ‘sprays?’

Mom; Oh, I don’t know, 5 or 6.

My sister: 5 or 6?! Isn’t that kind of excessive? I just do a couple of sprays here and here (pointing to the places on her body).

Me: Me too! Wow, 5 or 6 is a lot. You will run out of it so fast! I better send you another bottle.

Mom: Bottle of what?

Me: Stay.

Mom: Stay? I thought we were going out to lunch.

You just can’t make this stuff up people…

By the way, I switched my perfume from Stay to Sunshine, also from The Gap. I am not telling my mother.

Happy Easterween!

And we are back. Did you miss me?

I was sick, depressed, bored, and useless for the last couple of weeks. So I did not think I had anything worth saying. But I am better now. You might want to run…

It has come to my attention – that my attention – to decorating detail has shifted as I have gotten older. They say that the older you get the more your “bad” or “unlikable” tendencies rear their ugly head in direct correlation to the number of calendar days you have on your human frame. I think I am turning Goth as I breeze through my 50’s and I am not sure how I feel about that.

I do know how my mom feels about that. She is sure I am the backsliding on the road to Perdition. My sister I believe, does not care one way or the other – actually in a strange way she is encouraging this metamorphosis. My coworkers think either I am awesome cool or I have fallen off my traditional rocker. (Some of my coworkers actually rarely think at all – if you catch my drift) My husband – well – God love my husband, he tolerates just about anything I do. My kids have learned to go with the flow – no matter how crazy their mother gets.

Bones have become a fascination to me. Not in the forensic anthropological way, in the cool interior design way! Now I must clarify exactly which boney artifacts I prefer. Skulls – definitely out. To ‘gangy.’ Skeletons however have my full attention.

This penchant has been inside me a long time. I had bone earrings when I was in my teens. I loved those earrings. But when I was 17 I hiked 35 miles on the Appalachian Trail with a church group. I wore those earrings so that I would be a fashionista among the bears and snakes. However, the leader of my proverbial pack decided that I might catch them on a branch or a mountain lion claw and wanted me take them off. I protested, but I was taught strict rules of church hierarchy and so I complied. It has been a decision I have regretted for the rest of my life. Because although I placed them in what I thought was a secure pocket of my backpack; one was lost. I was inconsolable. I think I even requested that we backtrack the whole 35 miles to try to find them! But that earring was lost to the ages and those actions of that ‘leader’ have become the closest thing in my life to an unforgivable sin. I still curse him under when my breath when I think of that incident.

So, it started young and is only now coming out in ways I never thought possible. I go crazy at Halloween – because all things boney are acceptable fodder at that time. I did not do that in the past. My children wonder what happened to the mom that would only let them dress up in ‘happy’ costumes their whole childhood. They wonder why now I have turned into the Grim Reaper.

I don’t know what has happened either. But I kind of want to say I like it.

That leads me to why I wanted to talk about this. I saw my sister (the preacher’s wife who let her children dress up anyway they wanted when they were growing up – no matter how morbid – and my kids probably wished she had been their mother for the Halloween season) and she gave me a gift. An awesome, wonderful, amazing gift. A black cast iron skeleton for Halloween that is walking and carrying a stick across his/her shoulders that holds 2 glass pots that you can put candy, or dip, or chips, or tiger teeth, or witches brew in. I LOVE it. So much so, that I just could not relegate it to the attic for 7 more months waiting for the ‘proper season.’ So I eagerly stated to all in ear shot that I could take it to work and put Easter candy in the containers. At least I could then look upon the loveliness that was this Pottery Barn skeleton for a few extra days during the year. We then started talking about how one of my sister’s children decided we should dress up for Easter this year and celebrate “Easterween” instead of just Easter. GENUIS! Well, we had the “Ween” part of that holiday sitting on the table in front of us – all we had to do was add the “Easter” part!

So we did. The results are in the picture below. 

Office View

Home View

I am either the Queen of Easter or the Queen of Halloween - or - the Queen of EASTERWEEN!!! All hail the Queen of TWO (2) holidays! I feel like I am opening a new frontier to holiday enjoyment!

Come by my office and get some Easterween candy....you may or may not feel like this is the best double holiday in the history of the world.

You are welcome!