Flights & Fanciness.

What's better than enjoying a beer with your loved ones? Enjoying THREE beers with your loved ones!

(Or, if you are under age 21, enjoying a glass of juice and a jolly conversation with your loved ones.

(Or, if you are under age 21 and have diabetes, enjoying a glass of juice and a shot of insulin and a jolly conversation with your loved ones.

(Or, if you are under age 21 and have diabetes and hope to go into a diabetic coma so you can meet a handsome ER doctor, enjoying a glass of juice that you have spiked with a few packets of sugar and a jolly conversation with your loved ones and the fact that you are still on your loved ones' insurance plan.)))

I had the privilege of enjoying what they call a "flight" of beers at a restaurant with no fewer than three of your grandparents not long ago, and it about made my eyes pop out of my head. Luckily, they did not. And if they had, there was a good chance they would have landed in a glass of beer, which would have killed the germs. RIGHT? RIGHT??

Two Sets of Best Friends.

Because you're young, children, you probably think of baking soda and vinegar as merely the ingredients in homemade volcanoes. But when you get to be older and more interested in eradicating soap scum from your life, you'll come to see these two powerhouses as best friends and warriors in the battle against household grime*.

I had a glorious few hours this weekend scrubbing the tub and chrome bathroom fixtures, and managed to restore them to something resembling cleanliness. As a bonus, these powerful cleansing ingredients are easy on the environment AND on the wallet. But they're not the only pair of best friends who experienced extreme cleaning this weekend.

Your dad was out of town, children, which meant I had an opportunity to put my childhood stuffed animal, Kringle, through the laundry without enduring endless mockery. So I did. And he came out so fluffy and bright that I couldn't resist letting him sleep on your father's side of the bed. Just until he gets back, you understand. 

Probably.

Before the bath. Note the dirty, mangy coat.

*Or, if you're not prone to personifying inanimate objects, you'll just see them as baking soda and vinegar.

Just Me and 500 of My Favorite Morning Beverages...

[Written in the style of a young adult novel.]

Ding-dong.

The doorbell snapped me from a reverie of writing keyword-rich online content intended solely to satisfy the insatiable spiders created by search engines. I turned briskly from my standing desk and hurried to the door. As I fumbled with the knob, the bell rang again, twice. Ding-dong, ding-dong. I scampered down the dusty front stairs.

"Package for Brenna," said the delivery man. I signed for it.

I'm Brenna, as you probably guessed. And I had a pretty good idea what was in the box, seeing as I'd ordered it from the Internet about a week before. I bounded back upstairs and dropped the package on the kitchen table, then sliced it open with a steak knife.

If my life were a movie, a golden light would have glowed on my face from the open box, while a heavenly chorus sounded in the background. Unfortunately, I'm just a freelance writer who lives in Chicago. But what did shine in my face was green tea. Five-hundred bags of it, to be precise.

I felt the grin spread over my face like a bout of impetigo through a preschool. At last. The days of jittery java gulping were over. I turned to the camera for a closeup.

Hiiiiiiii, Mooooooommmm.

Some Evidence for When You Want to Commit Me.

Children, I may be a bit off my rocker, but I am always fair. Which is why I have decided to graciously offer you evidence to use in case you should ever decide to have me committed (you know, if you decide you want a little more leg room on car trips and a little less chocolate chip cookie in your life).

Here it is.

What you're looking at is an actual snack I made and ate. It contains a soy-based hot dog product, rice, nori, lettuce, and ketchup. It is soy-hot-dog-sushi. What's more, I planned this snack in detail as I walked home from the bus, based on my knowledge of what foods we had available. This was not an act of impulse. This was not a heat-of-the-moment snack decision. It has been lovely knowing you all. Please come visit me from time to time.

P.S. Today is your dad's birthday! He's 28 on the 28th!

A Horse of a Different Color (A Gold Color, to Be Exact).

Last weekend, your Lemieux grandparents came to Chicago to visit us, children. And how did we thank them for the lovely visit? We showed them Chicago's famous tiny gold horses. Luckily, they're stored in the second-floor lobby of the hotel in which your grandparents were staying, so it was convenient.

As is custom, your grandmother listened to the horse's nostrils to hear whether he would breathe a valuable and much-coveted equestrian "AuGury*" into her ear.

Your father, in complete defiance of customs, tried to climb on the horse to ride it. To where, John?! Unless you're trying to get to the second-floor lobby of the Chicago Hilton, it's not really a great mode of transportation.

*That was a chemistry pun, for those of you who like that sort of thing.

Lord, Preserve Us...

...said these squashes. But since nobody named Lord lives here, I decided to step in. This time tomorrow, these salted and peppered zucchini discs should be ready to satisfy your craving for snackfood AND part of your daily vegetable requirements.

I know. I'm quite clever.

Stretching It.

As you undoubtedly know by now, children, your bloodline is cursed with both severe injury-proneness (Clark side) and extreme clumsiness (Lemieux side), which, we can all agree, is not the best combination for people with limited health insurance. Perhaps these traits should have been a warning sign against our having you in the first place, but we just figured if our genes were that awful they wouldn't have come with the velcro-like substance that allows them to stick together and form new humans*.

Anyway, just in case you thought you were the only ones who ever had to sit on the sidelines** icing your hips while all your friends had a raucously good time, here's some evidence to the contrary.

You see, your grandfather has stress fractures in his feet. And now as part of his recovery, he has to do elaborate stretches every day instead of running around the house and playing outside.

(Does he have to do them on the dining room table? I don't ask.)

*My understanding of genetics is cursory at best.

**Of the Scrabble court

Promiscuous Parrots.

So I was watching TV last night and it turns out there's this really unusual type of parrot that has a lot of Australian outdoorsmen very excited because (and apparently this is a big deal) the female is bright red but the male is bright green.

The way the Australians were talking, you'd think they'd discovered a parrot that could accurately predict the future or lay eggs that cured baldness. But no. Just parrots of remarkably different color. I admit I was lured into the show, especially when the Australian man explained that these parrots are highly promiscuous: the women sit in their trees all day and let different men regurgitate food into their mouths, and the men fly from tree to tree feeding as many lady parrots as they want.

Be honest, kids: am I turning into one of those crazy nature-show-loving people?

Inspirational Quotes from Great Literature.

You know that James Wright-y feeling you get when you look back on the last year or so of your life and see it amounts to nothing more than staring at a screen writing words nobody will ever read, both professionally and for pleasure? Well, a heavy wave of that burnt-retina despair washed over me last night, children.

So I did the only thing a person can do under the circumstances. I poured a glass of whiskey and I got out The Long Winter for inspiration. Because as pointless as contract-writing life seems, it's like a day at a beauty spa compared to the Blizzards of '80 - '81. As usual, the reading worked like a charm (the whiskey worked like an alcohol.)

Here are the most inspirational quotes I came across.

1. How brave Laura is here. "Just" buying something, she says. As if buying something were easy! As if it were something people did every day of the week! How can a person not be inspired in the face of such heroic stoicism?

2. You may have thought that only 20th and 21st century people knew how to "peace out," but Pa Ingalls was doing it long before it was cool. (And long before the spelling change.)

3. See what I mean? I may think it's boring to stare at a computer all day--BUT AT LEAST I DON'T HAVE ICICLES IN MY MUSTACHE!

Inside a Vegetarian's Festival

What do you call it when thousands of vegetarians get together and talk about how much better they are than people who eat meat?

Veggiefest!




















If you've never been to a Veggiefest, the best I can describe it is a place where the people are crunchy and the vegetables are blended into an easily slurpable smoothie.

Oh, and inside none of the vendors accepts standard U.S. currency. If you want to purchase anything, you can either barter or use Veggiefest tickets. Can't wait till next year!

Flag of Italy?

 

...or sunburn plus skin plus mesh shorts? I'll let you be the judges, children.

Colored.

Children, if you clicked over to today's post eagerly, thinking I was going to make some vulgar joke about race, you're about to be sorely disappointed. And I must say, I think you deserve it, with attitudes like that. What were you, raised by wolves?

Anyway. I had one of those days yesterday, the kind where you're just sick to death of all the home office politics and on your commute to kitchen area of the house from the office area you get all kinds of dirt on your feet because you keep forgetting to sweep the hall, and all you want to do is unwind with some blank paper and the box of colored pencils your mother sent to you as a gift for your 21st birthday and which you've been saving for a really special occasion, a time when you needed a BIG pick-me-up, and you know that time is now. You know what I mean?


So anyway, I was all ready to be cheered up by the soothing act of drawing pictures, but once I got started, it became painfully obvious that I have not drawn anything for more than six years. I mean, I am bad at drawing things. So that was a good lesson. In how now to become a really talented visual artist. And also in relaxing.

"Bikini Frog," by Brenna (age 27)

Peter, You Left Your Shadow at Our Place Again!

... and it won't stop imitating me.

I kept trying to take a picture of it, but it was too fast--I couldn't catch it in its natural shape.

So anyway, if you want to stop by tonight, I'll tell Wendy to keep the sewing basket* out.

(Bring your fairy dust.)

*I was going to write "bar of soap" here, but I figured people who didn't grow up on the Mary Martin Peter Pan** wouldn't get that.

**Is this even a real group of people? I kind of doubt it.

In the Deep End

I will let this visual pun speak for itself.

P.S. If it seems like we've been spending a lot of time with your Clark grandparents, that's because we HAVE! Because they're practically our neighbors now! It's so super-cool, children. You should definitely consider living near us when you become adults, so we can beat you in pool and Scrabble and then make you feel better about yourselves by plying you with food and wine. It's totally worth it.

"You're Just a Bunch of Dirty Tree Huggers!"

You know that old cliché about people who write blogs dedicated to their unborn offspring, the one that says we're all a bunch of hippie tree huggers? Well it's true! And I don't care who knows it.

In fact, I noticed looking through some of my photos, children, that I really fit the old stereotype better than I ever realized.

For example, this is a tree I admired when I lived in Ireland.

And here are the Dr. Seuss trees I traveled to Germany to see.

And this tree I found at a rest stop in Utah when your father and I were driving across the country.

And this, of course, is the tree of a man I married. So sorry if you have roots instead of feet, children. Soooo sorry.

A Momentous Occasion.

Sometimes, in the course of human events, the stars align in such a way that highly unusual and even extraordinary things happen. Yesterday, two such events took place simultaneously.

The first was that your father deemed a tee-shirt dirty enough, after two all-day painting projects and years of ordinary wear, to actually throw it away. He has has this shirt since, according to sources, only 2005, which means it had a shorter shelf life than most of his sock collection (and by "sock collection," I mean "collection of threads that he wraps around his feet").

The second was that I lost to your grandmother at Scrabble.

 

She may seem like a sweet lady, children, but don't believe for a second that she's not a "strategic" player, no matter how convincingly she lures you into a feeling of security. The woman played "booze" on a triple word score, for crying out loud. She means business.

Mama Got the Stink-Eye.

You may imagine that the life of a blogger whose target audience exists only in the future is all glamor and launch parties. In fact, children, it's somewhat less exotic. And the act of blogging itself is not all caviar brunches and eating pudding from golden spoons*. In fact, because it requires staring at a computer screen for hours on end, sometimes even the most lauded bloggers get what's called the Stink-Eye.

It got me real bad, children. Real bad.


Luckily, I have a wealth of homeopathic remedies at my disposal. I will begin with a warm salt-water rinse and if that doesn't work, I'll sip ginger infusions and rest with cucumbers over my eyes until the stink eye is banished.

*I don't think I have an accurate idea of what the rich and famous actually do.

There's Storms a-Comin!

Children! Hie thee to the storm cellar, for a tempest is upon us!

Really, though, I think the most troubling thing about this weather pattern was that the neighbor across the street probably thought there were paparazzi outside because of all my attempts at capturing the scene. I still don't really understand flash photography. Hopefully, you will all be born with internal light sources so I don't have to worry about adjusting lamps and things when I try to document how cute you are.