Does That Green Thing Look Like Ebola To You?

There have been some great blog posts lately dealing with the economic downturn and learning to find contentment and gratitude for what we have, instead of perpetually yearning for what we want.

This isn’t one of those blog posts.

Today, I’d rather focus on something else to be grateful for, in the midst of this economic crisis.

And that is this:

I have finally found the motivation and the strength to resist impulse purchases like HATS FOR DOGS.




I really have no explanation for it. No excuses. Guilty as charged.

We were at the Stock Show in Denver and there, at one of the little booths in the Exhibit Hall, was a vendor selling these cute little hats for dogs and, surely as a result of inhaling too much hay and goat manure, I spotted them and went DOG HATS? WHY I BELIEVE I’LL TAKE ONE. NO, MAKE THAT TWO!

I’m not really sure where the connection lies between a stock show/rodeo and the sale of dog hats other than the dog hat vendors had to be trolling for good folks like myself wobbling around in too-tight-cuz-I-only-wear-them-once-a-year cowboy boots that apparently pinch off the blood flow to the brain.

Alexis and Bart? They aren’t with us anymore.

Alexis lived until the ripe old age of 15 but I don’t think she ever forgave me for this, this, this … atrocity. Especially since she and John were already firmly united as a couple before I entered the picture. I just didn’t have a chance to bank any goodwill during her puppy days over shared bowls of Quaker Oat Squares eaten off the same spoon.

And poor, poor Bart. He had a hard life.

We rescued him from the Denver Dumb Friends League when he was just 9 months old and immediately had him stripped of his manhood.

"Welcome to your new home and oh, by the way THOSE? THOSE HAVE TO GO." Strike One.

Then we figured out he could jump, like, really really high. And then we discovered he had a THING for carrots. More like a fetish. That’s it. A carrot fetish. His obvious talent for vertical leaping combined with the carrot addiction was a lethal combination of information in our hands as we then, naturally, mostly exploited him like a little flying circus monkey in need of his next carrot fix.

"Circus Monkey Need Carrot Real Real Bad." Strike Two.

And then the coup de grace … the wearing of the dorky Elmer Fudd hat. And the picture-taking in the dorky Elmer Fudd hat. And the parading around the neighborhood in the dorky Elmer Fudd hat. And the jumping, jumping, jumping to catch flying carrots in the dorky Elmer Fudd hat.

Dorky Elmer Fudd Hat? Strike Three.

At that point Bart must have simply decided it wasn’t worth it - this living thing. He checked out too early. Mercifully we didn’t bury him in his hat. I figured we’d let him rest in peace with his dignity intact. Even if his boy parts weren’t.

So Aunt Bea … well, Aunt Bea is just going to have to learn to do without because I am SO OFF the DOG HAT thing what with the plunging stock market and all.

Plus, I took a picture of THIS the other day.



And realized we’re about to make our orthodontist very, very happy as fixing THAT is going to take the kind of budget that would make NASA drool. Yep. Dog hats are definitely OUT.

P.S.

Green stuff between the teeth?

Check.

Spaghetti sauce under the fingernail?

Check.

Weirdly long dirty fingernail on the other hand?

Check.

Excellent. Let's put THAT picture out on the Internet for the world to see.

Just One More Excellent Idea

As the mother of a twelve year old and a six year old you might be tempted to think I've got the whole HOSTING A KID’S BIRTHDAY PARTY thing figured out.

Let me assure you, you'd be thinkin' wrong.

After all, I am the one who invited 25 three year old girls over for a BARBIE BEACH BIRTHDAY PARTY in Colorado in June, where the general idea was to spend HOURS and HOURS slip-n-sliding, splashing around in a wading pool and running through the sprinklers.

Except here’s the problem: Colorado in June can still be quite cold. Especially when you’re wet. Which is generally the goal when one is slip-n-sliding, splashing around in wading pools and running through sprinklers.

So here's what happens when you stick 25 shivering three year olds in to a hot tub full of 102 degree water because if you don’t they will all die of hypothermia right there on your deck and you’re really thinking inside IF I "ACCIDENTALLY" KILL ALL THE KIDS, THAT WILL TEACH THOSE PARENTS TO DROP AND RUN AT MY RILEY’S BARBIE BEACH BIRTHDAY PARTY.

Anyway ...

As soon as their little feet hit the 102 degree water about half of them immediately scream I HAVE TO GO POTTY.

And the other half?

Well, as soon as THEIR feet hit the 102 degree water they would have screamed I HAVE TO GO POTTY except their eyes are all rolled back in to their heads because all of a sudden they are VERY RELAXED.

And don’t even pretend you don’t know what I’m talkin’ about.

Well, we wrestled a sum total of two toddlers out of their wet swimsuits before just sending them all back out to the backyard to RELAX IN THE HOT TUB, IN THE YARD, WE DON’T CARE ANYMORE.

And then there was the time when Riley turned ONE and I invited about 100 people over to celebrate and spent days and days boiling and peeling enough eggs so that every guest could eat their weight in deviled eggs. BECAUSE WHAT ONE YEAR OLD DOESN’T LOVE DEVILED EGGS?

And then I forgot to get them out of the garage refrigerator until after the party was over.

I was so distraught that night I actually let my neighbors talk me in to watching THE WIZARD OF OZ with the sound turned off and Pink Floyd’s THE WALL playing as the soundtrack instead. In exchange, my neighbors agreed to eat a lot of eggs.

Which really has nothing to do with anything except the synchronization of the "Wizard of Oz" and that album was kinda creepy and all those parents who DROPPED AND RAN at my Riley’s BARBIE BEACH BIRTHDAY PARTY should have been thankful I let their kids RELAX in my hot tub instead of turning THAT on and sending their kids home to have nightmares and wet their beds.

So when Wyatt told me he wanted to go bowling for his birthday party I, naturally, said SURE. A bunch of five and six year olds PLUS 10 pound bowling balls PLUS slick bowling lanes oiled up to a glassy sheen? SURE let's go for it.

EXCELLENT idea. BEST ONE I’ve heard today.




And then THIS. THIS here is what you get.



Good thing we're so important we travel with our own doctor at all times ... or maybe he was just one of our guest’s dad who also happens to be a pediatrician. Regardless, Wyatt was triaged right there on Lane 3 after 10 pounds of bowling ball slipped through his hands like a greased pig and fell on his foot and pinky toe.

And he wasn’t the only one either. In roughly two hours time over 50% of our party guests sustained either a crushing or pinching bowling ball injury and/or a blow to the back of the head courtesy of the copious amounts of oil applied to the bowling lanes extra special for our party.

Just so you know, for his birthday party next year we're planning on throwing a bunch of kids in to the back of a pickup truck and speeding across the Mexican border for an afternoon of lawn darts, trampolining, and homemade puffer fish sandwiches. And we probably won’t let them wear sunscreen either.

Jerry Garcia Called. He Wants His Shirt Back.

This morning my kindergarten son left the house in camo shorts, camo underwear, camo pants and his favorite RAINBOW shirt (aka tie dye).

Apparently he’s planning on taking the summer off to travel with the Grateful Dead.



I blame myself.

It's quite possible, given all the old photo scanning I've been doing for my job at Facebook, that he ran across THIS on the floor of my office.




May God have mercy on his soul.

P.S. - I'm loving the 1970's era paneling that totally hides blends the door to the garage with the wall behind the TV. With all that sophisitcated decorating it's a wonder we ever found our way out of the house.

I Am Extremely Important

And I have the email to prove it. But first, let me set the stage for you.

You see, I’m not really a child of technology. I typed my way through college on a Smith-Corona and the only people I knew with access to the campus computer lab were all studying foreign languages like COBAL and FORTRAN.

Those folks, however, spent very little time shopping at Harold’s or sunbathing on the roof of the Kappa Kappa Gamma house and used their time, instead, to invent the Internet so I didn’t really get to know them too well.

Anyway, I went to work for Fidelity Investments right out of college. Now, before you get all impressed it’s important to note a couple of things:

I was a journalism/political science major so it wasn’t like Fidelity recruited me for any top-notch investment position. I basically begged my way in by agreeing to do this for $14,000 a year: spend 6 months working the graveyard shift, on the phone, answering questions about mutual funds in the middle of the night.

Weird people call in the middle of the night to talk about mutual funds. Trust me on this.

But this Fidelity job was my very first exposure to a COMPUTER and having a COMPUTER comes in handy in the middle of the night when India, as in the whole country, wakes up and everyone with the last name of “Patel” decides to call in at EXACTLY the same time. Just for fun.

So, while you may be a TWITTER expert, I’ve just now hopped on to the TWITTER bandwagon. I have decided to formally blame my mother for this as she gave birth to me in 1964 instead of in 1987.

Now that I’m on TWITTER, though, you should know that I Am Extremely Important. Evidenced by this email I received about an hour ago:


Hi, Lori Jackson (LoriListJackson).

Barack Obama (BarackObama) is now following your updates on Twitter.

Check out Barack Obama's profile here:
http://twitter.com/BarackObama


Best,
Twitter


Yes. You read that right. President Obama is following MY UPDATES on TWITTER!

I’d love to say I plan on using this uniquely personal presidential access wisely to give him my two cents on the economy, healthcare and Guantanamo Bay. But, alas, no.

Rather, I choose to ping him throughout the State of the Union Address tonight with this series of TWITTERS, just to keep the mood light:


8:02 pm
CODE RED CODE RED: TOILET PAPER. ON SHOE. DON’T WORRY. NO ONE WILL NOTICE.


8:11pm
Oh, now Joe Biden’s putting up bunny ears behind your head with his fingers. He’s so funny.


8:23pm
Mr. President, three words for you: BARN DOOR OPEN. Stay behind the podium. Repeat. Stay BEHIND the podium.


8:32pm
Nancy Pelosi’s filing her nails while reading People magazine. The one with Rihanna on the cover. She just rolled her eyes but I don’t think it was at you.


8:39pm
That crazy Nancy just taped a sign on your back that says “KICK ME”. Joe wrote it.


8:42pm
Um. Hillary. Not. Clapping.


8:46pm
Now Joe and Nancy are playing ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS. Joe’s wrist is full of welts. Nancy must be winning.


8:51pm
I just checked and FOXNEWS is showing “Gunsmoke” reruns. Question: who’s hotter Miss Kitty or Festus?


8:56pm
Uh oh. Ted Kennedy just took off Michelle's right shoe and he’s going all “Pulp Fiction” on her with the foot rub.


9:00pm
Are you wearing a clip-on? Act Natural.


9:03pm
Hillary. Still. Not. Clapping.


9:07pm
Shoot. Now Bill Clinton’s got Michelle’s left shoe off and he's humming THAT Barry White song. You know the one. There’s oil involved. Wrap it up.


9:09pm
I repeat. Wrap it up.

Like Getting Hit With A Tranquilizer Dart. Only Not As Funny.

I’m not usually one to watch the Oscars but since we managed to catch “Slumdog Millionaire” before they show it for free on Turner Classic Movies I felt compelled to show up on my couch last night to root for them.

Plus I was really, really hoping to hear Anil Kapoor say “Who wants to be a MILL-luh-NARE?” just ONE MORE TIME.

Now, watching the entire Oscars telecast is a little bit like deciding to read “War and Peace” from cover to cover. In one sitting. It’s a serious commitment of time that may, or may not, involve the use of sequins.

So I settled in on the couch around 6:30 to watch all the pre-Oscars coverage, Red Carpet and all. My first clue the evening was not going to end well was when the bedsores kicked in around 9:30. By then I’d already squirmed through Jennifer Aniston’s painful presentation with Brangelina in the front row and used the foil lid from a blueberry yogurt to give myself a fake gold front tooth just like Mickey Rourke’s.

I don’t think the look really works on either one of us.

About the time the yogurt foil zinged me when it hit a filling in one of my upper bipolar-cuspid-molars I realized there was NO WAY I was going to get a decent night’s sleep, given the hours and hours of inactivity I’d already invested in all the Oscars watching. So I did something that I almost never do given that I’m highly sensitive to anesthesia and turkey - they both make me dangerously sleepy – I took a Tylenol PM.

Just one.

Oh, Tylenol PM what have you done to me? It’s now been 19 hours since I put that pill in to my body and STILL all I want to do is put my hair in a ponytail and go back to bed.

So, if you happened to miss Joaquin Phoenix’s appearance on The David Letterman Show last week (or Ben Stiller's dead-on impression of him last night) because you, oh, HAVE A LIFE, you should watch this video BEFORE YOU INVITE ME TO DINNER AT YOUR HOUSE TONIGHT because it’s entirely possible that THIS is who will show up.



Okay, it would be like having dinner with Joaquin Phoenix except without the facial hair. Although I am sporting a couple of whiskers on my chin with some serious potential of developing into a full-on beard that would make ZZ Top proud.

She Gave Birth To Me, She Has To Speak To Me. Right?

Oh. My mom is SO not going to like this post.

I woke up this morning with a zillion blog ideas bouncing around inside my head. Yesterday Facebook hijacked my brain. Today, I think THE CAT IN THE HAT has seized control.

NONE of those original blog ideas, however, involved our SEPTIC SYSTEM until the guy we hired to pump out ALL THREE tanks showed up around 9 o’clock and I’m thinking BONUS! THAT’S NOT SOMETHING YOU SEE EVERYDAY and WHO DOESN’T WANT TO SEE FIRST HAND WHAT’S COMING OUT OF THE JACKSON’S SEWER SYSTEM?

But then my friend Jocelyn begged me not to blog about that. And in spite of the fact that she hardly gave me the time of day time back in high school when she was a rockin’ senior with the big blonde hair and I was just a lowly sophomore growing out a bad Dorothy Hamill haircut …

Come to think of it NEVER MIND JOCELYN.

I WILL blog about my septic system.

Just not today.

So, here’s what happened.

Mistake #1: I got up and logged on to Facebook.

Mistake #2: I never logged off of Facebook.

Mistake #3: I got in the shower thinking about Facebook.

Mistake #4: A terrible repressed memory from high school surfaced in the shower and I shared it with my friend Jeff who emailed back with this: THAT’S A GREAT THING TO POST ON YOUR BLOG.

Caveat: Jeff lives in Missouri. Not in my shower.

So, here’s a warning, my gentle readers. If the word FART offends you … GO AWAY NOW.

With that said, may I remind you that yesterday I admitted how a MEME forced me to admit publicly that I am ANOSMIC. That is, I have no sense of smell. Never have.

Once again WIKIPEDIA comes to the rescue … you can read all about my kind here. In fact, you may want to go check this out ASAP as Wikipedia, the user edited online encyclopedia, may actually have ME listed under NOTABLE ANOSMIC INDIVIDUALS and I have absolutely NO IDEA who might have added my name to this distinguished list. I swear.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anosmia

Generally the no smell thing has caused me very little interruption in living a largely fulfilling life but there have been some drawbacks. Like not knowing I was dragging my kids through the grocery store with hugely dirty diapers and enduring the glares and gags from my fellow shoppers. Rude.

Oh, and fully grasping the reality that FARTS STINK way too late in high school to prevent a humiliating dating experience that has scarred me for life. Or least scarred me for the last 4 hours since I remembered it in the shower.

Because a lot of my friends from high school read this blog, I’m going to call my date involved in this humiliating dating experience “Stuart” in order to protect his anonymity. Plus, maybe he’s forgotten.

I have this vague remembrance of “Stuart” being a pretty nice and pretty respectful guy. He was also a decent kisser who lived in this other worldly house up on the hill outside of town with a grand piano facing a wall of glass looking out over the skyline. Kinda like one of those smooth serial killer homes. But without the serial killing.

Because of the no smelling thing I have to admit for a long time I really believed the "gross-ness" of farts was largely due to the noise they make. Not the smell. I think I always knew, on some level, they had a distinctive smell but not necessarily a bad one. They were only gross in the sense that air had just exited your fanny and everyone knew it. Like little air craps.

So for years I was a big fan and master executioner of what I have come to understand as the SILENT BUT DEADLY fart. If I farted in a crowd and nobody heard it, then it didn't really exist and certainly no one could blame it on me.

EXISTENTIAL QUESTION FOR EVERYONE WHO IS WAY SMARTER THAN ME: If you fart in the woods and no one smells it will the trees still tip over?

Anyway, in smaller groups I always went to the ever reliable THOU WHO SMELT IT DEALT IT defense. Sometimes, just to throw people off, I even “smelled” it first.

But ... and here you will realize that I wasn't always rubbing two brain cells together ... it NEVER EVER occurred to me that if there were only two people in close proximity to each other and one of those people happened to be me and I farted silently BY DEFAULT THE OTHER PERSON WOULD KNOW THAT I HAD CUT THE CHEESE.

Until “Stuart” pointed this out to me one night when we were kissing in his white pickup truck and I cut one loose worthy of a long haul trucker eating pickled eggs.

No offense to pickled egg eating long haul truckers intended.

Sure, I denied it. But it was futile.

He knew.

I knew he knew.

And he knew I knew he knew.

I DEALT IT.

“Stuart” and I were certainly "serious" enough at that point to warrant a formal breakup but, honestly, I have no recollection of it and can't remember if all this took place BEFORE or AFTER he and another date had their pictures taken in my living room. Which was the photograph posted on Facebook that dredged up this horrible memory.

Either way, my guess is one of the reasons “Stuart” is smiling in that picture taken in my living room with another date is because he knows that other girl isn't going to gas him out of his own truck that night.

So, to everyone I went to grade school, junior high and high school with … IT WAS ME.

PROBABLY EVERY SINGLE TIME.

P.S. To my friend JEFF, you can expect a call from my mother any minute now.

A Little Smarter Than This Time Yesterday

Confession.

Up until yesterday I didn’t know what a “Meme” was and all I have to say is THANK GOODNESS FOR WIKIPEDIA.

Apparently Memes have taken over my life in the form of FACEBOOK and ALL THE STINKING HOMEWORK AND PROJECTS being a member there entails.

According to Wikipedia "meme" is a noun and it rhymes with “theme”. But apparently it’s more of a conceptual thing than a physical thing. Which means I have no idea how to use Meme properly in a sentence.

Like I said earlier, journalistic standards and strict adherence to grammar are not priorities for me. I’ve got way too much on my plate right now what with all the scanning and posting of old photographs going on so that Facebook can, someday, put my 1982 prom picture on a box of Wheaties and reap HUGE financial rewards for themselves.

For example, I have no idea if these statements reflect the correct usage of MEME or not:

"John, could you please pick me up a couple of MEMES on your way home tonight?"

or

"Riley, please get your feet off the MEME. You know how I hate dirty MEMES that smell like feet."

or

"Wyatt, please stop picking your MEME. Do you want it to get stuck that way?"

See? I am nothing if not a polite wife, mother and law-abiding citizen.

My latest venture into MEME-ing came in the form of Facebook’s demand for a LIST OF 25 RANDOM THINGS ABOUT ME. As I’m a pleaser and all I immediately complied and there, on Facebook, I confessed highly fascinating yet never before revealed things about myself such as the fact that I have no sense of smell (never have) and I have a tendency to wet my pants at inopportune moments.

Like when my pants are still on my body.


There were 23 other equally fascinating revelations I divulged on my MEME but really, today, I’m just wondering what state of mind I must have been in to think that information would be remotely interesting to anybody else who has not been relegated to the status of CAPTIVE AUDIENCE.

HI EVERYONE. MY NAME IS LORI AND I’M AN INCONTINENT ANOSMIAC.

EVERYONE: HIIIIII LORRRRRRIII

I think Facebook has hijacked my brain and the plane is now parked on a tarmac in some Third World Country awaiting its ransom of pertinent information such as my weight, bra size and HOW COME YOU DON’T LIKE HAM?

Because I don’t really understand how a well-read, college-educated individual like myself could live 44 years without even knowing MEMEs exist.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go check out my MEME. It's starting to smell funky.