One hour and ten minutes. That’s how long my twelve mile commute took this morning. The first fifteen of that was spent driving 20 miles per hour down the icy service road, looking for a gas station with power. Rolling power outages. New least favorite thing. It’s not much of stretch to say that yesterday’s snow day – home with the Boy, my laptop, a down comforter, homemade chicken soup and brownies and some uh, afternoon delight – kicked some very serious ass by comparison.
This hot chocolate from a powder mix while sitting at my desk in a wool hat and scarf nonsense is total crap. I’ve seen the glory of a snow day and now I want more.
Totally Off Topic Tangent in the First
Know what’s really fun, you guys? Yesterday I did a quick run through of traffic/site views for the first month of the All! New! Totally re-launched fishblog! and just like a snow day with afternoon nookie, you all kicked some very serious ass. Page views were double what iVillage had said they’d been before I left. Double. One day, when that kick-assness translates into zillions of dollars of ad revenue, I’m going to buy you all a car and even pay all the taxes on it, because that’s how much I like you.
Totally Off Topic Tangent in the Second
Quick survey: how many blog posts do you prefer to see on the first page of a blog? I’ve currently got five up there – but I’m starting to think that’s an awful lot of scrolling. Maybe that’s okay?
Alright, stay warm, friends. Enjoy your snow days, if you’ve got ‘em. And if not, remember, turn in the direction of the skid.
On Friday afternoon, when I got the email from a local community center looking for volunteer math tutors, I thought, “What kismet! The Dork Lord and I are perfect for this gig!”
The Boy is well suited because over the last year and a half, he’s been back in school doing math. And I’m qualified because I’ve been right there helping him. You know, by standing over his shoulder going, “Uh, yeah, I think it’s SOH CAH TOA.”
Those kids are so lucky, they don’t even know. Experts. We even have a graphing calculator! Nice, right?
Actually, for all my tongue-in-cheek and despite my 16 year absence from the math classroom, I’m pretty good at the basics. I figure, they’re 7th and 8th graders so at most, we’ll have to tackle some proofs (long and windy, but logical) or some algebra (I confess, I love algebra in a sick, sick way). Totally doable. Pythagoras is my boo.
The year before I started this blog, I volunteered for a similar project in Boston. It wasn’t math specific, but once a week I’d carpool out to some town that started with an N and help two 8th grade girls with their homework. My goodness, they were precious. And frightening. The things they knew! And we’re not talking curriculum here. At 22, fresh out of BYU, I was considerably more naive about the big bad world.
Angela was tall, brash, holy-cow-smart, Puerto Rican and anything but naive. Every night for months after our second or third week of tutoring, Angie would call me to talk about anything but homework. “Mami,” she’d say, “you will not belieeeeeve what happened.” She was usually right. It was all pretty unbelievable to a recovering Mormon kid who had done precisely nothing that was not strictly prescribed by The Rules.
If I was good at the school stuff, though, I excelled at the extra-curriculars. My whole life I’ve been a sister. It’s not something that requires a refresher course. So many times, my end of the phone would be one long sigh of relief – and pride, I’ll admit – when Angie would relent, “Well, fiiiine, mami, I won’t do it.” Smoking, boys, whatever. I hoped I was doing something good and lasting.
And then she was gone. Just like that. It was weeks before word got back to me that her father, out of prison and angry, had murdered her mother on their doorstep in plain view of her children and the next day, Angie was sent to live with her grandmother in Puerto Rico. Another thing I could never quite believe.
I had essentially forgotten about Angie until Friday – about what happened to her - even though I keep her school photo (signed with hearts) in a box somewhere in my closet. I run across it every few years when I move. I’m harboring these hopes of tracking her down on Facebook one day, but regrettably, of all the things I knew about Angie, her last name was not one of them.
Thanks to Craig, who I don’t know but know feel very compelled to buy lots and lots of beer for, and with the assist by Brooke*, the Herculean task is achieved. The comments from the last 8 years are restored! Some of them – the, “I hate you and now I’m never reading your blog again!” kind, – I could do without, but hey, you take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have…
How’s that for an earworm? Eighties theme songs for the win!
Thanks again, fellas. You’re my heroes.
* If you are looking for part-time work and you haven’t been to Hour.ly, please hop on over. This thing is brilliant. Hooking my little sister up with a writing gig in Austin as we speak.
After my coworker Jimmy intimated that our friendship was on the line (though, I guess it’s not exactly intimating if the words, “you’ll be dead to me” are used), I went home last night and after pacing in and out of the bathroom six or seven times, finally bit the bullet and yanked that fan cover right off.
I know. What was I thinking? I don’t even own any Kevlar body armor.
Thankfully, the Thing was nowhere to be found. Which is not only disappointing – because how am I to document for posterity just what trying to scritch, scratch its way into my domicile - but also terrifying. Now I know with a certainty that it is not dead (just firmly coiffed) and living in my walls. Deep, deep in the walls where the exterminator currently paying a visit to chez moi will not find it. Further disappointment: Jimmy wasn’t at work today and therefore, I receive zero bravery points. I see how this works.
This is, as the kids say, no bueno. This is also, as anyone reasonable would say, the perfect time to go away for the weekend.
First, the good stuff – your favorites, thus far. For the most part, I really liked going back and reading these. Girl, You’ll be a Woman is a warm night in New York, walking up Second Avenue again, holding my skirt tight to my knees against the wind gusts. Some of them, though, are still painful. Gritty. Neverland, for instance, because of how uncomfortably close I stuck to the truth and how after reading it, I can’t stop hearing the sound of someone’s laugh or get the smell of that house out of my nostrils.
If you have any favorites from 2007 or 2008, this list doesn’t have anything from that time period. Which, on actually, now that I think about it, may mean I didn’t write anything during those years that’s worth re-reading. I moved to Dallas, drank martinis and worked jobs I didn’t care for, so the likelihood is high. We’ll just call those The Years of Boring.
Ok. Now for the gross. Remember this? I don’t do bugs in my house, so after that discovery, the Dork Lord immediately called the apartment management company and an exterminator came to visit. A few days later, all was right with the world again. No more bugs. That was a number of weeks ago. This morning, I was taking a sleepy pee in the downstairs bathroom and this odd scratching sound caught my ear. Scritch, scratch. Scritch, scritch, scratch. Wasn’t the cat – he was drinking water out of the sink.
“Aw, man,” I thought. “Please don’t let us have mice in the damn walls!” I mean, there’s only so much I can take.
And then I looked up.
That is the cover to the uh, courtesy fan. It measures something like eight inches across. And that thing try to get out? It has a body length greater than a third of those eight inches. He was too. big. to get out of those slats. I have goosebumps all over just thinking about it. Watching him methodically trying to escape, I did everything I could not to throw a massive fit (I think you can hear me appealing to some deity or other) and immediately start packing up our belongings because that right there is just too much for me to handle. Instead, I nuked that mother effer with some hairspray and sent an email to my beloved, who was sleeping soundly in our upstairs bedroom.
You know how you know I love you? I didn’t wake you up while this was happening.
I feel like I need another shower. At someone else’s house.
