Chill Pill

I need to find myself a very large time-release Chill Pill.  The kind that are easy to swallow.  It's not because I'm an angry individual; I'm no grouch.  It's just that I tend to be a bit of a stress case.   Allow me to elaborate:

I subbed in a seventh grade math classroom today.  As I was going through my day, speaking with vim and vigor about Greatest Common Factors and singing the praises of prime numbers, I felt like I was doing just fine.  "What a good teacher I am," I mused.  "How impressive that an English major can use the word 'numerator' in a  coherent sentence."

But then, after the flurry of middle school activity settled at the last bell, my fretful mind found a few things which nearly peeled the silver lining completely away from my subbing victory.  Here is a playback from my inner voice:

• "I think you called on Jackson too many times."
• "Maybe you should have let Max go to the restroom 5 times.  What if he has juvenile prostate issues?"
• "Did I spit when I spoke?"
• "Will pointing out that 5/10 is not the same as 10/5 be the cause of self-esteem ruination?
• "I don't think I called on Nate enough.  I hope he didn't feel neglected by me."
• "Where the heck are my headphones?"

See what I mean?  Now that I see my worries in medium-sized Georgia font, I realize that my inner voice has a tendency to be somewhat of a saboteur.  Was I really bent out of shape by possible spittle?  Is it even vaguely likely that a 13 year-old boy's spirits can be dampened by a sub's mild inattention?

Get a grip, MJ!  You're a substitute teacher, for crying our loud!   You should be happy you haven't been tarred and feathered by a gang of pimply math flunkees!

I'll be subbing again tomorrow.  Same time.  Same kids.  This time, though, I'm bringing my double-shot honey and cinnamon "Chill Pill" latte.  And some Fritos.

Mud Poops and Melamine Plates

You used to make mudpies, didn't you?  I'll bet you used to gather mounds of top-grade semi-squishy earth into manageable blobs and then hand-craft them into miscellaneous "edible" inedibles.  Mud pies, mud cakes, mud soup, and mud casseroles are the stuff of spring and summer kidness.

When I was a kid, my brother and sister and I had a different take on the whole mudpie thing.  We manufactured mud poops and then scattered them across the expanse of our Grandmother's back lawn.  We knew that, if we designed our fake fecals just so, our sweet Cleanliness-Is-Next-To-Godliness Grandma would feel compelled to shovel the offending turds off her lawn and bury them in a seldom-traversed part of her yard.  She'd be murmuring things in Spanish through the entire process.  She'd pray for the poor sick pup.

My Grandma was the best Grandma EVER.  I could try to prove it to you, but you wouldn't believe me because her greatness was too large for human understanding.  Also, you might feel compelled to defend your Grandma's supreme loveliness and insist that your Grammy is as sweet as they come.  Maybe your Grammy is pretty nice.  I'm sure she makes a mean apple streudel; but forgive me for not believing she's as beauteous as my Grandma was.   Let's put it this way: Think about wonderfulness for a moment and then imagine that wonderfulness to the thousandth power.  That was my Grandma.

That's why I had to cry for a few minutes this morning when I broke one of the last of my Grandma's melamine plates.  You see, Grandma used to eat her morning huevo (egg) on a melamine plate.  She'd have a bit of bread too.  And coffee-flavored water (AKA a countable number of Folgers crystals swirled in hot water) in a semi-matching melamine cup.  Since Grandma died seven years ago, eating my morning egg from her plate has been better than the sun itself at brightening my day.

There had been an ominous crack in the pink-flowered plate for a few months.  But I had convinced myself fairly completely that the dish--being that it is made from a scary unmeltable melamine formaldehyde polymer--simply couldn't break.  Plastics of the '50's and '60's were built to last, weren't they?  Weren't they supposed to survive nuclear annihalation?  So when Grandma's plate was cleaved in two, I was shocked and saddened.  I was also embarrassed that I had broken (within only seven years) a piece of tableware Grandma had managed to safeguard for probably 50 years.  What a bozo I am.  What a sad, sad bozo who now has to eat eggs on boring, white, designless, ceramic WalMart plates (circa 2008).

I miss my Grandma today.  I wish she were here so I could apologize for senselessly shattering her  vintage plastic plate.  She'd probably tell me not to worry, and then she'd offer to fix me a huevo.  Maybe she'd even rustle up a slice of Spam.  We'd eat from paper plates and split a piece of Wrigley's Spearmint for desert.

I want to be just like Grandma when I'm older.  (Minus the Folgers Crystals, of course.)  But now I have to imitate her without the help of her melamine.

Darn you, gravity.

Charles Charles Bo Barles . . .

My sister-in-law and brother have an eleven-day-old baby at home.  He's an itty bitty boy complete with wrinkly toes and microscopic fingernails.  I haven't met sweet baby, but I really have a good feeling about us hitting it off.  His Dad and I get along just peachy, after all.  And his Mama is almost inhumanly lovely.  Also, the little guy has such an awesome name, he's simply got to be as grand a child as I can imagine.

Baby Boy is named Charles.  Charles is one of the most versatile names I know.  There are so many ways to bend it and embellish it, and each version reveals a smidge about the person upon whom the name has been conferred.  Here's a run-down of a few renditions of "Charles" and what they mean to me:

• Chuck:  This is the adaptation most loathed by my brother and his honey.  I actually like it because it sounds buff.  Like a fighter.  Or a plumber.
• Charlie:  This name can be used for either a friendly school bus driver or a well-adjusted postal worker.  Charlies are universally amiable. 
  
• Chaz:  So rock star.  
• Charlemagne: AKA Charles the Great.  To be used sparingly.
• Charcoal, Charlatan, and Charger:  These are fantastic nicknames, don't you think?  You can't get quality handles like these with names like "Mike."  

I'm just days away from having the privilege of meeting Charlie Bucket/Charlie Brown/Char-Char Binks.  He's my 7th nephew and a real Charmer, by the looks of him.  I can't wait to give him a wee smooch.

Too Shy For School

Remember how, when you were five years old, you became perilously shy when you visited your paternal Grandma whom you hadn't seen since you were two?  Remember how you'd grab fistfuls of Mom's paisley skirt and stash your face in her ample thighs in order to avoid Grandma's unfamiliar Avon-smudged smile?  That's how I'm feeling right about now.  Oh, what I wouldn't do to be cloaked by Mom's hemline!

Why am I feeling so bashful?  Because I've been absent from this here blog for almost one complete moon cycle.  I'm a stranger here, really.  It'll take me a day or two to quit being self-conscious, and then I'll be blowing your winter socks off again with my wisdom and wit.  I hope you'll stick around.

My vacation was marvelous; thanks for asking.  Husband, Scout, Shawn, and I moseyed through huge parcels of the now-defunct confederacy and got to know more about our American neighbors from Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas.  Please don't ask me to tell you which locale was best, because I'd feel compelled to overstay my welcome here by blathering on and on about how phenomenal each of our destinations was.  And since you're not on vacation, you may resent my prattling and then remove me from your reading list.  I'll have none of that.

Suffice it to say that snorkeling in the Florida Keys made it onto my Top-Ten Life Experiences list, that Cuban food is definitely too good for the likes Fidel Castro, that I know why Scarlett O'Hara thought Georgia was so purty, that New Orleans gets an 'A' for effort (bless her heart), and that Mississippi is really fun to spell.  I learned that southerners have loads of hankerings, that their Bibles are careworn, that gravy is the answer to most of their troubles, that "why" actually has two syllables (waa and eye), that alligator tastes like fishy chicken, and that some people still have a soft spot for secession.  I heart the South.

A bit o' Florida

I've been back in SoCal for a week now, but I'm loathe to give up a few habits I collected while I was a South dweller.  Namely, if you're a lady, I will call you "Maam."  And if there are more than one of you, I'll be calling you "ya'll."  I also prefer to "reckon" instead of "think", and I'm "fixin'" instead of "planning."

It's 8:00.  Bed time.  But tomorrow, I reckon I'll be fixin' to post a little something for ya'll.  I've got a renewed hankering for writing.  Don't know what in tarnation I'll be telling ya'll, but I'm hoping ya'll will drop on by.  I'll be gol-derned if I'm not southernly hospitable.  Even if I am a bit bashful.

Paddles, Please

I haven't forgotten that I'm supposed to be maintaining a blog.  Yes, I nearly forgot what this page looked like, and, yes, my keyboarding skills have gone to ruin in the TEN days I've been away; but I'm still with ya'll.  Mostly.

It's just that we Huangs are preparing to vacate ourselves.  We are, in other words, in the final preparatory phase of Operation Respite.  In three days, we will be lugging our exhausted selves into the belly of a plane and heading over to Florida (and Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas) for a two-week sabbatical.  What are we sabbaticaling ourselves from?  Just stuff.  Like work.  School.  Mice.

So my project for the past ten days has been to try to cram two weeks' worth of work into the space of about a week and a half.  It's harder than you might think.  Camel-through-the-eye-of-a-needle hard.  You'll be glad to know, though, that I've made some progress.  Two days ago, my white board was bountifully adorned with to-do lists in both list and venn diagram forms.  Tonight, my to-dos are more like extraneous footnotes.  And, let's face it--no one reads footnotes.

So the next two days are downhill days.  I reached the pinnacle of panic on Friday.  That was the day I suspected I might need a boost from a pair of defibrillator paddles in order to get all my work done.  Turns out, I was able to get by with a pair of espresso shots and a generous hunk of dark chocolate.

Here's the bad news:  I will most likely not be dropping by any of your net spaces until November 2 or thereabouts.  And if you come a-knockin' on my blog, there'll be nobody here but us chickens.  Mute, shiftless chickens.

So let's put this Tetanus Tomato on pause for a fortnight and then reconvene after I've gathered a few bushels of blog-worthy stories and anecdotes from our southermost United States.   I'll miss you.  Happy trails.

Rodent Revolution

We are still with mouse.  I heard the little bugger scampering fiendishly around my kitchen last night, but I was too cowardly to go mano a mano with him.  I dare not underestimate his deviance. 

I'd like to be able to tell you what's next as far as our rodent removal strategy is concerned, but I suspect Mouse may be intercepting our communications.  Suffice it to say that I'm confident about our eventual success.  I can inform you, though, that once Mouse has been taken prisoner and then promptly exiled to the great outdoors, we Huangs will implement prophylactic measures to make sure no mouse will ever again dine on our Pop Tarts and oatmeal.  We'll plug up all the potential entry points in our home in order force all rodent interlopers to stay away.  As George Washington once sagely noted:  Experience teaches us that it is much easier to prevent an enemy from posting themselves than it is to dislodge them after they have got possession.  (Thanks for the wisdom, Mr. President, sir.)

I appreciate your support, dear reader.  May Huang Family liberty win out!

"All might be free if they valued freedom, and defended it as they should." --Samuel Adams

The Mouse Who Barked Up The Wrong Pantry

I've been told I'm mildly obsessed with rodents.  That I talk about them often and with thick layers of disdain.  That my preoccupation with them may very well be unhealthy.  That it can't be true that all of the rodents of the world have cooperated to create a formidable force of buck-toothed pests whose ultimate and unified goal is to bring me to my knees and then chew off all of my hair.  "Mice aren't that smart," people have told me.  "No, they don't want to build a massive communal nest out of your hair," they say.

Today, though, I shall prove all of you naysayers wrong.  Rats and mice really do have it in for us Huangs.  Here's the story:

My sweet daughter, Scout, (who is more peace-loving and gentle than just about anybody I know) was slowly and methodically checking our dried food stores for evidence (poop) of the presence of a mouse in our pantry.  She had thought she heard a persistent squeaking coming from the shelves therein.  A few minutes later, just as Scout was about to abandon her pursuits, a filthy, black mouse sprang at her from between a box of gluten-free baking mix and a bag of kettle corn.  I wasn't in the home when it all went down, so I can't say I witnessed the ordeal, but Scout tells me that the scream which escaped from her at the moment of the mouse's premeditated attack was so primal--so terrified and guttural--that she almost didn't recognize her own voice.

"It lunged at me,"  Scout insisted.  "It was waiting for me and then it just . . . just . . . jumped!" Scout tells me that her newly-adrenalized self reached for a weapon--a plastic tumbler--and tossed it at the mouse.  She missed her target, of course (because mouse had obviously trained for this occasion), but I think her aggression conveyed to the menace that we Huangs are not to be messed with.  We're on to you, vermin.

Yesterday, Scout was the type of person who scoffed at my low opinions of rodents.  "I think mice are cute," she'd warmly note.  But today, Scout says this of the mouse who attempted a blitz on her face: "I really don't appreciate mouse's behavior.  I just want him out of my life."

Tonight is the night I gain an ally and lose a bedraggled, betailed beast.  My husband has agreed to trap the varmint (we are, as yet, not homicidal here) when he gets home from work.  He says he needs a two-liter bottle of Sprite, a jar of peanut butter, a can of cooking spray, and a box of Corn Chex in order to get the job done humanely.  It's not clear whether he'll use those supplies to construct a trap, or if he's just craving a snack of greased-up, peanut-buttered Corn Chex in a bowl of soda.  I'm confident, though, that he'll get the job done because he's not too keen on mice hurling themselves willy-nilly toward innocent Huangs.

I'll keep you posted.