Sneaky

Yesterday I engaged in one of my favorite activies, which is waiting until my husband leaves for work and then finding random items around the house to spray paint. If he's not here, he can't say, "WAIT just a minute! You can't spray paint that! Put it back! NO!" As it turns out, he's sometimes right, but if he's safely off at work, I can usually clean up the mess or otherwise rectify the damage before he gets home.

Sometimes he wishes I could be content to watch game shows and soap operas on television. He feels that would keep me out of trouble, and argues very convincingly that the paint fumes probably do as much damage to my brain cells as too much TV would.

The tale of two blue pitchers

I am really drawn to two specific shades of blue -- a kind of cobalty and/or periwinkle blue. First of all, I just like to say periwinkle. It's one of those names that belongs to a fairy, isn't it? I feel that Will really missed out in A Midsummer Night's Dream by not naming one of Titania's fairies Periwinkle, although Pease-blossom, Cobweb, Moth and Mustard-seed are all very nice indeed.

Secondly, I have these two pitchers, both in pleasing tones. The one on the left is a new one purchased for FOUR WHOLE DOLLARS a couple of years ago. Although it's made of plastic, it has a graceful design and holds almost a gallon of shivery cold water or iced tea with lemon or whatever else you care to put in it. The other pitcher is very old, having been passed from my Grandmother Marshall to my grandma to me. It is of a more rustic design, glazed inside and out, but with no kiln mark on the bottom: my great-grandmother loved pottery and bought whatever caught her eye and I have to admit, that pitcher is a beauty. I estimate that is is maybe sixty or seventy years old? Hard to tell.

Unfortunately, neither one is very usable.

The new pitcher, the plastic one? It looks very nice sitting on the dining room table, filled up most of the way with ice and the rest of the way with water. The problem is that any liquid left in the pitcher for longer than, say, the time it takes to eat a family meal begins to take on the taste of petroleum or whatever it is that plastic pitchers are made from. Which? No, thanks. If I want to drink harmful chemicals, I'll just open up a can of diet soda.

My great-grandmother's pitcher is fashioned out of thick, sturdy clay. The very bottom of the pitcher is unglazed and the clay looks pretty red to me; could she have bought this when traveling out-of-state somewhere? The thing that worries me is the glaze, though. I wonder about the vast quantities of lead that might be leaching from the interior into our lemonade. Not to mention that the pitcher, empty, must weigh ten pounds. Yes, ten pounds. At least eight. Serving drinks to guests from that thing -- and I always picture sangria -- would cause the hostess to emit an unladylike grunt as she hefted the thing off the picnic table, and pouring would definitely be a two-hand maneuver.

So while both of these pitchers are beautiful, tinted in a hue that always suffuses me with well-being, I can't really use either one. Instead, I use a big ugly gallon container with an aesthetically offensive red lid that I got at Wal-Mart. Its functionality is unquestionable, but its appearance leaves a lot to be desired.



[I took this picture behind our house on our lovely little slate path, original to the house, which a roofer smashed into pieces just before we moved into the house by dropping a bundle of shingles on it. I'm always so torn about the clover that's growing in the cracks. One the one hand, weeds growing in sidewalks cracks is yucky; on the other hand, have you ever seen anything cuter than that clover growing in the cracks of that bit of slate?]

Here's who I sat next to at lunch

Meelyn had to work today, so Aisling and I went on a little shopping expedition to Hamilton Town Center; she had some birthday money burning a hole in her purse (her birthday's not until Friday, but we had her family party early due to Pat and Angie's vacation plans with the kids) and was longing to spend it. On what, you ask? Why, clothes! And makeup! And purses! And shoes! And bath and body unguents! And jewelry! And hair do-dads!

Me, I used to spend my birthday money on books, and when I informed Aisling of this, her eyes welled up with tears and she put a sympathetic hand on my arm and whispered, "Oh, Mommy, I'm so sorry."

Hmph!

Shopping wore us down to a fine frazzled version of our former energetic selves, so we stopped by Paradise Café to split a sandwich and chips and have a cold drink. We stopped by numerous times during the winter for their truly delicious (and surprisingly inexpensive) coffee, but this was the first time we'd ever eaten lunch there.

The Paradise Café is one of those places that looks like either Tuscany or a very pukka sahib Bangalore, it's hard to tell. It's a cute place in kind of a self-conscious way, but they bake their own giant croissants, so who am I to quibble. One thing that does bother me is that all the tables are really close together: it's not the kind of place where you'd want to tell your lunch companion about your last moustache waxing or how your pedicurist had to hone down the corns on your toes with a belt sander, know what I mean?

Anyway, we sat down at a table for two near this pig, who had just sat down with a large cup of iced tea and a book. It looked like she was waiting for some companions to come in, at least this was my surmisal since she was at a table for four. Since she was so close, I was right there watching her empty two packets of Splenda into her iced tea, take the paper off her straw wrapper, stir the tea and then take a drink. Nothing unusual so far, since this is an action often performed by many non-pigs around us.

What startled us so much is what she did next: The pig put the plastic lid back on her cup and then casually swept her torn-in-two Splenda papers and her straw wrapper onto the floor. Just....onto the floor.

I was raised in a household where it was strongly intimated that if I so much as let an stray eyelash blow off my cheek onto the grass, God would smite me. Remember that television commercial that featured the American Indian shedding a tear as he looked around at how polluted things were? Well, I took that commercial darned seriously, my friends. And we have raised our kids to be the same way. Eyelash fall out? Well, CATCH IT AND DISPOSE OF IT IN A TRASH RECEPTACLE, GIRRRRRRLS.

So when the pig pushed her trash off the table onto the floor, Aisling and I looked at the trash, looked at the pig and then looked at each other, mouths open like goldfish. We looked back at the trash.

"I'm just shocked," I said. "Shocked."

Aisling whispered, "She's all, like, 'Hello, Guatemalen immigrant working at a menial job, bend over and pick up my garbage because I'm too good to sit at a big table that has two torn Splenda packets and a straw paper on it. I am clean and tidy and you are here to serve.'"

"I know!" I said fervently. "I wonder what her house looks like?"

"Maybe she has help that comes in a couple of times a week to pick up her used tissues and coffee filters," Aisling hissed. "Or maybe every day."

I scrutinized the woman closely. "She doesn't have daily help; her handbag and her shoes aren't that great."

"It must be ankle-deep around her place."

Honestly, I couldn't take my eyes off that trash on the floor for the rest of the time we were there. I seriously wanted to tap her on the shoulder -- our tables were so close, I could have reached out and touched her -- and say, "Excuse me, you seem to have DROPPED SOMETHING" in a sweet voice, but darn you, Mom, for raising me to be all ladylike and long-suffering. Actually, I also wanted to slap her right in the back of the head, but I've heard that the authorities frown on that kind of thing, so I resisted. But I fumed silently and kinda-sorta sat there hoping that one of the walnuts in her chicken-apple salad would make one of her crowns fall off.

Other than that, our shared Paradise Club was very delicious and it even came with a complimentary chocolate chip cookie, which almost made up for having to sit next to a pig. Which I think is an insult to pigs, but if I called her what I really want to, my mother would call me to say indignantly, "I did NOT raise you to talk like that, YOUNG LADY."

Now with a real Irish-y flavor (I hope)

This past Monday was the thirteenth anniversary of Father D's ordination to the priesthood, so like all good church ladies would do, an email went viral amongst us on Saturday asking that everyone bring in some kind of home-baked yumminess to eat for breakfast after Mass on Monday morning.

I wracked my brains to think of something interesting (well, okay, and easy) to make and came up with the Irish soda bread I made for St. Patrick's Day, only in muffin form for easier serving. I made two dozen out of the linked recipe, eschewing the use of currants and caraway seed (which my friend Katie H. told me is actually called "Spotted Dog"), adjusting the cooking time to thirty minutes instead of sixty. I made some whipped honey butter with a touch of almond, made what I felt was an attractive presentation with a bowl, a basket and a couple of cloth napkins, and headed off to church feeling pleased that I could pitch in at a moment's notice. Doing stuff at a moment's notice is not one of my strong suits.

So after Mass, we were all milling about what Father calls the "doughnut slash conference room" (I don't know who he thinks he's kidding; Anyone in the church could tell you what room is designated as the doughnut room, but ask them where the conference room is and watch them flounder) and the organizer of the little feast, a woman named Elizabeth, came up to speak to me.

"Did you make those Irish soda muffins?" she asked. "They're so delicious."

"Why, yes I did," I responded, pleased as punch.

"Well, there's a woman over there," Elizabeth discreetly pointed, "and she was born and raised in Ireland and she'd like to meet you."

"Oh, how nice!" I said, but inside my head, I was thinking, Wow, that sounds ambiguous. Does she want to meet me because she thinks the muffins were good? Or is she going to berate me publicly for calling my silly little quick bread "Irish"? Is she going to say, How dare you call these muffins Irish, you imposter You are clearly not a descendant from the oulde sod.

I never found out. She left before I got a chance to talk to her, not that I went and hid out in the sacristy or anything. My muffins had a very satisfying dent in them and I got a lot of compliments, so I know that the Americans liked them. But whether they're actually Irish or not, I may never know.

And then I fell to the floor

The girls and I have a summer plan of getting together with Kieren, Dayden, Kiersi and the grandparents on Fridays this summer with the intention of taking all the kids to the New Castle library and having lunch. Sounds fun, whether lunch or the library is your focus.

We're going to the library because of a strange contretemps Pat and Angie have experienced since moving into their house some years back. As it turns out, when you live out in the country surrounded by ALL THAT NATURE, you might not be able to avail yourself of your county's library services, perhaps because your library, with a deplorable lack of foresight, doesn't exist. In their county? The library belongs to the nearest city and if you live outside that city's limits, I guess you're just doomed to illiteracy or boredom. There are no branch libraries like there are in my city.

In New Castle, where Nanny and Poppy live, the library is called the New Castle-Henry County Public Library, which is generous of them, don't you think? Nanny checks items for Kieren, Dayden and Kiersi out on her library card, warning them all not to lose any books or risk her substantial wrath which would be....not getting a cookie for a mid-afternoon snack? I don't know. She scares me half to death, so I've never lost a book she's checked out for me.

So I was telling Aisling our summer plans and said, "Doesn't that sound like fun?" in eager happiness, because libraries have figured largely in my life, just as they have in hers. My mom took me and Pat to the library when we were kids and we brought home stacks of books. Towers. Skyscrapers of books. And that continued on into my adult years when I once checked out an entire tote of sixty books for Meelyn and Aisling, read every single one of them to the girls, and then put the tote box in the trunk of my car and forgot about it until all sixty books were three weeks overdue. Oh, my husband was so pleased! He credits the New Castle-Henry County Public Library's recent renovation and expansion to the fines I paid for that little mistake.

Aisling looked at me in the way teenagers sometimes do, not really with a curled lip and scornful eyebrows, but with the impression of such. "It sounds okay," she yawned, examining her fingernails. "But you know, I don't really like libraries that much, not like you do. I'm not that crazy about reading."

And that, gentle readers, is when everything SUDDENLY WENT BLACK.

Blown away

I've been doing some online research on The Tempest through sources like the IMDb and have finally decided to go ahead and purchase the 1979 production directed by the artsy late film director Derek Jarman -- I know! It was a big step! Now we can all sleep soundly tonight! -- who will probably turn out to be too much for me to wrap my head around: not only does his portrayal of Shakespeare's script include "considerable nudity, mostly male" (why?), but I often find that artsy things frequently strike me as pretentious, giving that air of trying so hard to be avant-garde. In the many reviews I've read, Jarman's Tempest either takes a beating or earns lyrical praise from both professional and amateur film critics, so I guess we'll see. Thankfully, it isn't very expensive.

One positive thought in all this is that no matter how many naked man-bums and willies I'm forced to behold, Jarman's version will have to be better than the BBC's made-for-TV version, directed by John Gorrie and starring no one that I've ever heard of before. This one was released in 1980, and if it can be compared to every other version the BBC filmed for the edification of British schoolkids, it will be a record stinker that will be painful to watch. I might find myself wishing for a little nudity to relieve the unremitting boredom.

HOWEVER, as captivating as all this is, I just found out that there's a new version of The Tempest starring Helen Mirren and due for release by Disney through Touchstone pictures this very fall.

At reading this, I jumped up from my chair and clicked my heels in the air several times. Yay, a new Tempest! Yay, no reports of gratuitious nudity! Yay, a (reportedly) faithful adaptation of the original script! I gamboled about the room until I grew breathless, which was in approximately seventeen seconds. Then I sat back down to read more about this production and felt that I'd been swamped by a tsunami.

This production, which is directed by Julie Traymor, stars Helen Mirren as.....wait for it.....Prospera. Not Prospero, PROSPERA. As in, Prospero is now a woman. Yes. Helen, you traitor! Now, depending upon your level of interest in and committment to the works of William Shakespeare, this news will either make you say, "Shut UP!!! That sounds FASCINATING!" or "I just remembered that I need to go to Walgreen's.com to check out their coupon page." If you're like me, you'll immediately fall to the floor and start biting the legs of the chair you were sitting in.

Okay, I'm assuming you're all back in your chairs again.

Julie Traymor also wrote the screenplay for this production, which smacks of nepotism in a particularly incestuous way. And just read this snippet of a review:

Prospera's throne is usurped by her brother, and she is sent off on a ship with
her four-year-old daughter. They find themselves stranded on an island devoid of
society. A power struggle develops between Caliban and Prospera due to her
efforts to become a father figure to Miranda.

This nearly made me fall to the floor again -- it's like throwing some chicken nuggets on a baking sheet in the oven and basting them with margarine and calling the resulting mess "Julia Child's roasted chicken" -- but the news that Russell Brand plays the role of Trinculo sent the tornado warning sirens blaring in my head at an alarming volume.

Russell Brand, for those of you unfamiliar with his name, is a noted skeevy British playboy who has won The Sun's Shagger of the Year Award three years running. Way to go, Russell, you skank. He's also currently starring in the movie Get Him to the Greek, which just looks.....oh, never mind how it looks. If I just came right out and said it, my mother would shoot me and embalm my body in Clorox. He is reportedly engaged to the American pop-tart Katy Perry, famous for the song titled "I Kissed a Girl," and their union might just cause the apocalypse to rain down upon us. That's Russell Brand's picture up there, by the way, and yes, he always looks that crazed and glassy of eye. That Katy is one brave girl.

Only the fact that Alfred Molina is also in the cast of this movie keeps me from utter despair. But I have to admit, I'm piqued. JULIE TRAYMOR, I HATE YOU FOR SUCKING ME INTO THIS VORTEX! I shall wait for the fall, nibbling on my fingernails and waiting for the storm to break.

Thoughts while sitting in the church parking lot

I had to drive Aisling over to the church for music rehearsal late this afternoon and I decided to sit in the van in the far corner of the parking lot where I could commune with nature without it's getting too close to me. Because I am all for the beauty of God's creation; it's just that I only want to see it through windows. It's hot out there. And sometimes cold. With bugs.

So as I was sitting there looking at a big tree, random thoughts were running through my head as they do for all of us at times, but today mine seemed to have a theme and the theme was "Middle Age is Here to Stay," subtitled "Why I Am a Cranky Old Boot." Can those of you who are near my age (which is forty-six) relate to any of this, or should I put on a little sweater and some pearls with my white Keds tennis sneakers and go sit with my step-gran at the assisted living center?

Please say yes, that you think these thoughts. Just....please.

Here it all is as I scribbled on a piece of paper I found on the floor:

1. Found self thinking about the good old days, particularly at White Estates pool, after hearing the song "Band on the Run" while shopping at Kroger on Wednesday. "Band on the Run" is one of the definitive songs of my all-day-at-the-pool childhood -- I can smell the Coppertone upon hearing the opening chords. Have always believed that wistful reminiscences of one's childhood were the hallmark of the aged, along w/ harangues about walking to school in three feet of snow. Very worried about self. Surely forty-six is too young for this kind of thinking.

2. Have achieved an age where can go to the deli, critically survey an entire display of delicious-looking salads, spreads, dips and kitschy desserts (Jell-O salad w/ grapes, pineapple, carrots, celery; rice pudding; ambrosia) and then turn away with a sigh because I know that, in spite of the effort I'd have to expend, I already have a good recipe for every item in the case and can probably make it better and cheaper. Can clearly remember when spinach dip with water chestnuts seemed like the height of haute cuisine chip-dippery. Silly girl.

3. Find self getting increasingly cross w/ teenagers booming "music" at stoplights in their cars and grimly predicting their impending deafness. O help, what is happening to me.....

4. No longer want young, hip whippersnapper with multiple tattoos and pierced eyebrows named "Chance" or "Mysti" to cut and style my hair -- he/she will make me look like an idiot, giving me a look they would want to see on their own twenty-something heads, but instead on my forty-something head. Much prefer to have hair done by sweet-looking thirty-something who will be respectful of my position as someone who remembers Dorothy Hamill and Princess Diana haircuts and who spent her time off from beauty school reading her Bible instead of getting her tongue pierced.

Aaaaahhhhhhh......

Misty, Sun-In colored memories

This is the page from my high school year book that has my picture on it -- a much smaller version than I am now and I am not talking pixels, if you know what I mean. And if you don't, just shut up anyway. Some things you just don't need to have explained to you.

Anyway, I am in the fifth row down, the fourth person over. If the picture was in color like the one that hangs on a wall at my parents' house, you'd be able to notice that my hair, which has been dark brown since I was in about seventh grade, was a very odd and brassy shade of reddish orange, all due to the indiscriminate use of a hair lightening product called Sun-In.

I was at the pharmacy the other day to buy some allergy medicine and I passed by a display of Sun-In -- I had no idea that this particular madness was still being perpetrated on the innocent public. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Sun-In, here's what it looks like in the bottle. I'm afraid to post a picture of what it looks like on actual hair, although I've learned through scouting around on the internet that it actually works really well on medium brown and lighter heads.

Not on dark brown. No.

The summer before my senior year in high school, approximately one week before my senior pictures were scheduled to be taken, I was overcome with an overwhelming desire to become a delicate, fragile blonde. I don't know why, but I think it may have had something to do with the fact that my grubby little brother Pat, eleven years old at the time, had the most perfectly beautiful blond hair in the world. And it was wasted on him, utterly wasted. He had no appreciation for it and I often wondered at the vagaries of fate and human genetics that left me a dull brunette while gifting Pat with hair that Cheryl Tiegs would have envied.

My mother steadfastly refused to allow me to bleach my hair, so I did what I thought was the next best thing: I went to the Hook's drug store near my house and surreptitiously bought a bottle of Sun-In and casually stuck it in my swim bag where my mother wouldn't see it and carried it off with me to the White Estates pool. Once there, I spread out my towel, sat down, and liberally drenched the top of my head only with the Sun-In. Then I remained outdoors for about the next seven hours, baking my hair blonde.

You might wonder if I was really so stupid as to think that my hair was going to be blonde, a real, true Nordic color, and the answer is, yes, I was. I was that stupid. I thought that if I sprayed half the bottle on my head, my hair would be maybe a lovely honey shade, so if I used the whole bottle, the results would be even more spectacular. Boy, were they.

That night when I took my shower, I was disappointed to see that my hair still seemed very brown, but comforted myself with the thought that hair always looks darker when it's wet. The truly horrible damage wasn't visible until the next day when my hair was dry.

My mother was the first to lay eyes on me as I scuffed out to the kitchen, yawning. "YOUR HAAAAAIIIIIIRRRRRR!!!!" she screamed, nearly dropping the coffee pot. "WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO YOUR HAAAAIIIIRRRRRR???!!!!!"

I ran down the hall to the bathroom and looked in the mirror and burst into noisy tears. My hair was not only not the cool, pale wheat color that I'd been imagining, it was aggressively, obnoxiously orange. Like a clown. But only on top! Because, you know, I was very stupid and hadn't had the foresight to cover my whole head with the Sun-In; now I was stuck with a really frightening two-toned look that was like a physical assault on the eyes. And lo, my senior photos were looming, one week hence!

My mother took me to her hairdresser, her lips pressed into a tight line. She had pointed out some words on the Sun-In bottle that said something to the effect of "Not for use on black or dark brown brunette shades" or something like that. Oh. Whoops!!! I can't remember what the hairdresser did, but it managed to tone down the BRIGHTNESS of it all and by the time I went to keep my appointment with the photographer, I looked passable. Kind of. Still brassily orange, but not looking so much like Bozo anymore.

If the smile in my photograph looks a little strained, now you know why.

Have you ever done anything really stupid to your hair?

Teacher let the monkeys out!

This is what a ninth grade home schooler looks like on the last day of school at Our Lady of Good Counsel high school. This winds up our ninth year of home schooling, and I have to say that it's been a very good year.

This summer will see Meelyn and Aisling finishing up a couple of their courses, since I unreasonably insist on every textbook being finished to the very last page. Meelyn is finishing up the last few lessons in her Traditional Logic text and is carrying on with reading The Federalist Papers and The Great Gatsby. Aisling still has six lessons left in Algebra I and two lessons in her vocabulary book. She's going to start reading The Red Badge of Courage shortly.

We have lots of American Lit reading to do in these next few months, along with an SAT prep workshop the girls will be attending for two days in August. Aisling continues with piano all summer and Meelyn will soon mark her one year anniversary of being a smiling face behind the counter of a local fast food establishment -- she's already got a substantial savings tucked away so that she can buy a car next summer.

Next year, a sophomore and a junior. Phew, that sounds old, for them and for me!

RECIPE: Chicken Salad with Grapes and Walnuts

We have fallen in love with this chicken salad recipe, which makes me a little nervous because why, oh why can't we ever fall in love with carrot sticks? Or more to the point, why can't we ever fall in love with carrot sticks without a delicious homemade buttermilk ranch dip, the kind with two cloves of garlic and some fresh dill?

It just isn't in us.

Anyway, this isn't one of the best food pictures I've ever taken, mostly because of the bread. This chicken salad is much better served on croissants, ditto homemade, with or without the fresh dill. It's also better with homemade mayonnaise or Hellmann's scooped creamily from the jar and stirred in but I have made a concession to the health of our hearts and "light" mayonnaise can be used. If you must. And you should! But just between you, me and the enduring spirit of Julia Child, it's going to be better if nothing "light" in mayonnaise form cozies up to those trusting grapes and walnuts and chicken chunks.

This can also be served in a scoop on a bed of curly leaf lettuce with some pretty grapes and a little slice of soda bread or zucchini bread or some champagne crackers in a retro ladies-who-lunch presentation, or on a ripe tomato still warm from the garden. If you elect to eat the tomato slurping over your kitchen sink and shoveling in a bite of chicken salad out of the bowl you made it in, I will never tell. It is that good.

Here's a major thing with this salad, though: you have to dice all the chunky ingredients very finely, because if you don't, this salad just becomes impossible to eat -- you can't get a bite that includes everything at the same time if you have big hunks of chicken, big hunks of grape, big ol' honkin pieces of celery, whole walnuts, et cetera. It looks better if it's in the huge chunks, but it eats better cut up small.

CHICKEN SALAD WITH GRAPES AND WALNUTS

INGREDIENTS:

4 cups cooked chicken, diced very small

1 cup of LIGHT MAYONNAISE IF YOU REALLY FEEL YOU HAVE TO

4 T sour cream (okay, this can be "light" too...)

1 cup seedless red grapes, cut in half, or in thirds if they're large

6 green onions, including the green stems, diced very small

2 ribs celery, diced small

1 cup chopped walnuts

3/4 teaspoon salt

several dashes black pepper

2 tablespoons lemon juice

1 tablespoon honey

DIRECTIONS:

Carefully stir all ingredients together in a large mixing bowl and allow to chill for two or three hours. Serving size is approximately one-half cup.

See this pretty flower pot?

It has taken me four years of careful tending to turn that flower pot from something that looked like a piece of crap I got at Wal-Mart for $3.99 into an object that I fondly told myself looked like a fine aged piece of Tuscan terra cotta. You can imagine the pardonable pride with which I planted that beautiful geranium, which will have fabulous pink blossoms when it blooms, and then displayed it on my front porch.

Four years of nurturing, developing that chalky and be-mossed exterior. FOUR YEARS.

It took Zuzu exactly thirty seconds to shoot out the front door like a rocket and get her leash wrapped around the little table the pot was sitting on, sending the whole kit and kaboodle crashing down the steps, table, geranium and pot flying every which way. Actually, my pot flew in about fifty different ways and low and fervent was the vulgar language emanating from my ladylike lips as I picked up the pieces and tossed them in the bin.

I kind of wanted to toss Zuzu in there, too, but we already spent that money on her shots.

One mean Nana

Have you ever seen the likes of this badness? Here is my innocent, never-a-moment-of-trouble little Aisling out in Nanny and Poppy's backyard on Sunday afternoon, with Nanny ruthlessly attacking her on the knee with a badminton racquet while Meelyn looks on in consternation, wondering whether she should rush in to defend her sister and risk a drubbing of her own, or merely stand there looking very cute in her new denim mini from Old Navy.

Which course of action do you think she chose?

And is Aisling really the injured innocent she's been portrayed to be?

And what about Nanny? Is she really the sort of grandmother who would whack her own granddaughter on the knee with a weapon-like instrument, like that weird guy did to Nancy Kerrigan all those years ago outside the skating rink?

I'll leave you to ponder the answers to these questions yourself, but let me inform you on one point: Once, when I was being an unspeakable brat of maybe nine or ten years old, Nanny, who was then known as Mommy or Mom or Marmee or Mudgie or WHAT NOW??? depending upon my changeable moods even at that tender age, broke a yardstick across my bottom after a high speed chase around the kitchen.

Soooo.....I'm just saying. Think it over.