Reversing the Bucket

No, it isn't what you might be thinking and has nothing to do with the stomach flu my family was passing around two weeks ago. At Christmas, which is the BEST TIME EVER to be puking sick. But I digress.

I was scouting around the internets yesterday, catching up on reading at some of my favorite news sites and blogs, and it seems that the latest craze to hit the blogging world - now that the nosy, intrusive and self-indulgent meme seems to finally be over, thanks all the holy saints and angels - is the reverse bucket list, the ten things you NEVER want to do before you die.

Some of the things I read were pretty darned funny. Others weren't so much funny as they were relatable, making me shiver in sympathetic horror. "Live alone in a huge mansion with only my life-sized Victorian doll collection to comfort me," was an item on one person's list, and I can spot a person who read Stephen King's The Tommyknockers twenty-five years ago and never, ever, ever forgot about that room full of dolls: I can spot that person from a thousand yards.

The only stipulation is that the list has to include things you could actually do.

So here's my Reverse Bucket List. Do you have one you'd like to share?

Things I Never Want to Do Before I Die

1. Remove 1970s groovy gold flocked wall paper from a room with ten foot ceilings. Again.

2. Stick my hand into the back of a baby's diaper while thinking, "I wonder if she pooped?" (I found out later that it's much easier to determine this status if you just hold the baby's diapered butt in front of your face and take a deep sniff.)

3. Be on Survivor. Because being hot and being hungry are never a good combination with me, plus I'd have to participate in all of those gym-class-from-hell challenges. It's not for me to be the plucky middle-aged mother figure who bosses everyone around and gets voted out either first or second and no one can even remember her ever being there after episode three.

4. Go to a Mass where all the music is the guitar-strummed kind and where we all stand around the altar holding hands during the consecration. And where there's a liturgical dancer. My experiences with being on the viewing end of liturgical dances? Negative, every last one of them.

5. Be a liturgical dancer. Even though I do fit the demographic, which is middle-aged, lumpy, and not necessarily a great genius in the art of dance.

6. And continuing on with the performing arts thing, EVER EVER AGAIN play the piano for a friend's event, no matter how wheedling her voice, how hopeful her puppy eyes. See Item #4 from this post if you'd like to know why.

7. Eat another raw oyster. Grandad once told me, when I was about ten, that he'd give me five dollars if I'd eat a raw oyster. He spoke to me of the horseradishy deliciousness of cocktail sauce, and how oysters were just fishy enough to lend a piquant air of the seaside to the sauce. He pointed out quite reasonably that he himself was eating an appetizer of a dozen oysters on the half shell, which he considered to be a particularly delightful treat. He would, he pressed, be happy to share one with me.

I should have known that there was something behind all this urgency because he was a prankster, a ruthless cutthroat gin rummy player and a twister of fairy tales, where the witch ended up eating Hansel and signing Gretel on as her apprentice. Anyway, I put the oyster in my mouth, which was not piquant at all, but tasted more like something that had washed up on the shore at high tide last week; it immediately grew to the size of a wadded up gym sock in my mouth, and UGH, so slimy. Grandad was laughing so hard, he couldn't even make noise. I promptly went to the ladies' room and threw up, which made me throw up more, because regurgitated oyster? Looks even worse than it did before, which was pretty bad.

Grandad apologized, tried to reassure me that his motives had been as pure as the water off the beaches in Bermuda, and gave me twenty dollars. I allowed myself to be only slightly mollified.

8. Learn to like football. It would make the previous forty-something years of my life, years I have spent telling people, "Look. SHUT UP," whenever they've tried to explain the game of football to me, such a waste of time. I plan to carry on being massively bored by football - and baseball, basketball, hockey and every other sport you care to name - for the remainder of my life.

9. Become a member of a certain political party, which I won't name because I don't want to hurt any reader's feelings or tick anyone off, but my mind just doesn't work that way and I wouldn't want it to if it could.

10. Go to the Indiana State Fair and leave without visiting the horses, the goats, the pigs, the cows and most of all, the zonkey. I don't care how stinky everyone thinks the animal barns are. I don't care if the whole family heads back home without me. I don't even care, much, if I step in something icky. I don't feel like I've had the whole State Fair experience unless I've gone to see the animals and petted the zonkey and remarked on how big the hooves on the draft horses are and how fat the pigs. Some people go for the food, some people go for the midway, but I like the farm animals and I'm tired of having to apologize for that. So YEE-HAW! Wilbur, here I come!

Indiana State Fair Re-cap -- In Which We Fall in Love with Zonkeys

The seven of us (Meelyn, Aisling, Kieren, Dayden, Nanny, Poppy and I) were at the State Fair on Friday. Consequently, I had to sit down for a moment and dry the tears that were welling up in my eyes when I found out that the draft horses, my favorite part of the fair, wouldn't be arriving until Saturday.

I found comfort in an unexpected place with some unexpected creatures. The creatures were zonkeys, a cross between a zebra stallion and a jenny, which is a female donkey. (Here's a nice Wikipedia article about donkeys; scroll down to Donkey Hybrids to read about zonkeys, and if "donkey hybrids" sounds like a vehicle that operates on both an internal combustion engine and donkey-power, I just can't help it.) The unexpected place was the Horse Barn, a place that I did not even want to go when I found out there weren't any Belgians and Percherons in it, but the zonkeys were there and they were the sweetest, most adorable little babies I've ever seen and I immediately asked my dad if he would buy me one of those instead of a corn dog.

He said no, but I can always hope for Christmas.

The zonkeys were all in their little stalls in the part of the Horse Barn that was opened up for petting the animals. All of us except my dad eagerly extended our hands out to pat the pretty little things on their necks, noses and backs, and they responded with friendly curiosity, regarding us with big, long-lashed eyes, their long ears flicking back and forth.

Their noses and bodies were all typical donkey -- white muzzle, sleek grey coats -- but their legs were all zebra, with tall, stripy stockings that came demurely up above their knees.

I was absolutely enchanted and would like to name my Christmas zonkey "Sugar."

Indiana State Fair Re-cap -- In Which I am Totally Offended as a Church Lady by the Prize Winning Photograph

As I stood in front of the prize winning wedding photo in the Home and Family Arts Building, I could practically feel Dana Carvey's Church Lady invading my head and saying, "Well! Isn't this wedding photograph just very speshhhhhhhhal? I wonder who could have been the inspiration for this picture, hmmm? Could it have been....Satan??!!"

(Seriously. I am wound so tight, I am just like her in many ways. I know that is very disturbing, but all I can say is that if the inside of my head scares you, you should see the inside of my purse.)

The photograph was huge, of a bride and groom sitting on the steps of the church where they were presumably just wed. The photographer managed to capture the moment just as her long tulle veil was caught by a playful breeze, lifting it up in the air in a graceful series of swoops that was just magical.

And then my attention was caught by the fact that the bride was sitting between the groom's legs with her back resting against his chest, but her legs were flung as wide as the branches of that chestnut tree in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's ode to the village blacksmith. And not only that, but the skirt of her gown was hiked up around her knees, with the groom's hands tangled in the folds. Near her left leg was a small view that went straight up her inner thigh. You couldn't quite see "all the way to China," as my mother used to delicately put it, but the whole effect was of two people who could hardly wait for the photographer to be finished with his dumb pictures so that they could get down to the business of being married, if you know what I mean. Way down.

It was a graceless and unattractive pose, and unless the photographer was going for the contrast of the faerie-like beauty of that wind-caught veil and the shlumpy, legs akimbo posture of the bride, I just couldn't see the purpose of it.

I sniffed dismissively to Aisling, Kieren and Meelyn that that certainly wasn't a very ladylike pose and her mother was likely not going to want to display it on the piano. (I remarked aside to Meelyn and Aisling that those had better not be the steps of a Catholic church that hussy was sitting on.) I later said to my mother that the photograph could have been such a beautiful study on the joy and innocence AND SANCTITY of matrimony, and instead, it looked like really well-dressed soft porn.

Yes, I said that. Soft porn. And you know what? I'M NOT SORRY.

Indiana State Fair Re-cap -- In Which We Eat So Much Food, We're Banned from Riding the Trolley

Don't worry, I'm just exaggerating. We weren't really banned from the trolley, but we probably would have been if we'd tried to get on, after all we ate. It was disgraceful, it really was. But boyoboy, was it ever good.

Here's what we had. Some of it was shared, some of it we clutched to our chests and growled if anyone approached and said, "Can I have a bite of that?":

1. foot long corn dogs

2. ribeye steak on a stick

3. elephant ears

4. cheese fries

5. Italian sausage sandwich with bell peppers and onions

6. Pineapple Whip

7. deep-fried cookie dough

8. chicken quesadilla with salsa and sour cream

9. corn on the cob

10. popcorn

and the coup de grâce...

11. deep fried Bananas Foster cheesecake on a stick



I personally tried the last item, feeling that since I talked it up so much in this post, the least I could do was take one for the team and eat some. It's a tough and rugged job, but someone has to do it. And I am all about serving the community. That's me: generous and giving.

The bowl of cheesecake on a stick and ice cream was $4.00 and worth every penny. There were three chunks of cheesecake, which were deliciously melty inside their crispy crust. The vanilla ice cream with caramel sauce went really well with the cheesecake, providing cool creaminess to contrast with the warm creaminess of the cheesecake. The banana flavor was really pronounced and it was a totally awesome dessert.

Do yourself a favor, though, and eat this dessert next to one of those hand-washing stations; there's one on Main Street just a little ways east of Urick Concession's main booth. Kieren, Nanny and I all had this dessert and we were all a sticky mess afterwards. I thought I was going to have to take an entire sponge bath afterwards.

The roasted corn on the cob was particularly good this year. I shared an ear with Meelyn -- and it was DIPPED IN BUTTER as the good Lord intended it to be. I love being able to hold the ear by its husk because those little corn pokers scare me. I always wonder if my next bite is going to be the one that pierces my tongue.

My steak-on-a-stick was absolutely delicious, so tender and good. I had a hard time choosing between a pork chop sandwich, but I was glad I chose the steak. You get a lot of steak for the money, too, I felt: it was $6.00 for an à la carte portion, and I got three sticks, each with three or four good-sized chunks of meat on it. It took me forever to eat and everyone got restless sitting and waiting on me to finish.

Nanny got the pineapple whip and pronounced it delicious; Kieren got an elephant ear which he shared with the girls. He offered me some, but I was off sweets for the day after that deep-fried cheesecake. I opted for some Indiana-grown popcorn instead.

This year's fair food was a delicious experience and I enjoyed every single bite.

Indiana State Fair Re-cap -- In which we lose a seven year old, and find him again

Friday, the day we went to the State Fair, set a record for attendance. We got there early enough that the midway was wide open, with no waits for any of the rides the kids wanted to go on, but every other place we went was pretty crowded. Especially at the concessions stands.

The seven of us -- Meelyn, Aisling, Nanny, Poppy, Kieren, Dayden and I -- were leaving the Home and Family Arts Building, where many 4-H projects were displayed, to go to the Hook's Museum and Soda Fountain, which is always a fun place to visit. We were debating whether to walk under the portico of the Home and Family Arts Building, where we would be in the shade, but where we'd also have to go down a flight of steps; I was using my cane, but my knee was getting pretty hurty by that time, plus the ankle I smashed was sending up some warning signals of its own.

As we walked along, deciding, we finally thought we'd just walk in the sun to the corner of Main Street and State Fair Boulevard and go along the flat route. Dayden had been up in front of us, wildly flinging about an inflatable sword he'd won by playing High Striker, that hammer-and-bell carnival game. We were all keeping our distance because we'd all been poked by it several times, but he was right there in plain view.

However, the time came when we needed to consult a map, and while we were doing that, Dayden somehow wandered off under the portico while the rest of us walked on toward the corner. It was a very short distance to the corner, so we hadn't gone far at all when my mother sharply asked, "Where's Dayden?"

We all looked about us, but none of us saw a small blond boy in plaid board shorts and a red t-shirt that read "I Didn't Do It" on the front, carrying an inflatable sword as long as he was. If you've ever been in this situation with a child, you know the immediate sense of disaster that seizes you by the throat and makes it so hard to swallow. Or breathe.

My mother immediately whirled around and went back the way we'd come, calling his name. The rest of us stood like statues, shocked. Finally, I said, "Come on. Nanny went straight. Let's head over that way, in front of the building."

Everyone followed, all of us scanning the crowds and calling his name. We fetched up beneath the portico, still calling and looking around. I was willing myself not to panic. Not. To. Panic. He'd been gone all of forty seconds -- although it seemed more like forty hours at that point -- and he couldn't have gone far.

"I SEE HIM!" Aisling screamed. "He's right down there! I see his shirt!"

"Where? Where?" I cried, swiveling my head around. "DAYDEN! DAYDEN!"

"He's down there, at the other end of the building! Do you want me to go get him?"

"Yes! Run!" I said, and Aisling took off like a shot. A few seconds later, she was leading Dayden back with her arm around his shoulders; I was absolutely stricken to the heart to see that he was sobbing, knuckling his fists into his eyes, his chest heaving.

"Dayden!" I called, and he looked up at me. I wish I could have run to meet him, I was so happy to see him. I held out my arms and he came to me; I wrapped my arms around him and held him as close as I could, kissing his sweaty little head and whispering, "It's okay. You're okay. You're not lost. We have you now. Jesus was watching over you and He helped us find you, honey. It's okay."

Long after his sobs stopped, he continued to shiver in spite of the heat and I said, "Do you want me to say a little prayer, that the Holy Spirit will bring you peace?"

"Yes," he said, his voice and chin trembling.

So I prayed. I don't even know what I prayed, but I was praying for myself as well as for him, I know that. It's amazing how easy it is to torture yourself with all the terrible what-ifs, even when a scary situation has been happily resolved.

Dayden's breathing began to slow down and I gave him one extra hug, just because he's at that age where he doesn't pass out hugs and kisses as generously as he did when he was about four. I let him go and stood up; everyone else was gathered close around us and everything was okay then.

We started off towards Hook's again and as we began walking, I asked Dayden, "Would you like to hold my hand?" His immediate response was a fervent "Yes!" and he clung to my fingers fiercely.

Aisling told us later that when she got down to where Dayden was, two elderly ladies were standing with him and they'd already summoned a state trooper, who was approaching when Aisling ran up shouting his name. I was so glad to know that concerned people had already noticed a small, scared boy wandering alone and that they'd quickly taken steps to reunite him with his family.

So as it turns out, those state troopers aren't just there to make sure you have butter on your corn, they're also there to find your nephew if you momentarily misplace him.

Indiana State Fair Re-cap -- In Which I am Colossally Disappointed by a 40 Foot Colon

Meelyn, Aisling, Kieren, Dayden, Nanny, Poppy and I piled into Nanpop's minivan yesterday and drove to the Indiana State Fair to spend a happy day of riding on rides and eating, playing carnival games and eating, touring the livestock buildings and eating, going through the 4-H fine arts and crafts exhibit building and eating, getting Dayden's picture taken by Tony Stewart's car and eating. And eating.

But one thing we also did was go all the way over to what seemed like Terre Haute or maybe even the Illinois border to go to the Clarian Healthly Lifestyles Pavilion and tour the "colossal colon" I heard about on 93.1 FM-WIBC earlier in the week. I'd like to point out here that I was the only one in the group that wanted to go; even seven-year-old Dayden, whom I had pegged as a sure thing for wanting to go through the colon, was unenthusiastic. So I had to cheer on our little band, some of whom showed signs of rebellion and kept getting sidetracked by deep-fried Twinkie and corn dog concessions, by saying in a perky voice which grew gradually more rebuking, "This is going to be fun. How many people can say that they walked through a colon? This will make a great story for my blog! Oh, you complain now that it's too far to walk, but you will all thank me later. Yes, you will, so stop lollygagging along like that. March!"

Panting, we made it to the pavilion where my dad very kindly held the door open for about sixty people, all of whom were pushing baby strollers that were the size of Volkswagons. There must have been some pre-school thing going on there, and as much as I love to watch the antics of little kidlets, I was totally focused on that colon. We finally made it inside, me forging ahead and everyone else stravaging along behind, as Mary Poppins noted when she walked in the park with Michael.

And there it was, straight ahead. My first impression was the remembrance of a Joan Rivers comedy routine I saw about a hundred years ago where Joan chatted about going to England for the first time. She had gone to Salisbury Plain to see Stonehenge and was decidedly underwhelmed by the experience. "People always say, 'How did they get those stones up there?' and I can tell you how they did it," Joan said snarkily. "They just reached down on the ground and lifted them up. Seriously! Stonehenge was just a tiny little place."

The "colossoal" colon struck me in that same manner. Where was the forty feet of walk-through educational experience I'd so been looking forward to? The only person who could have walked through that colon was my niece Kiersi, who is two. And she can't read, so the depictions of colo-rectal woes and their accompanying explanations would have done absolutely no good. It looked more like a larger-than-life earthworm exhibit built by a sixth grader than a giant colon.

Dayden did halfheartedly crawl through it a couple of times, but he's not at an age where his colon matters much to him. My mother gamely went to the little info-windows that were sliced into the colon tissue (bleeaaaaarrrgghh) and read about polyps and the like, but my dad, Kieren and the girls kept their distance and kept shifting from foot to foot in barely concealed impatience.

I stood alone, crushed. Even a free pamphlet about maintaining my colon health couldn't cheer me.

So I have no story to relate about polyps the size of basketballs and hemhorroids as big as canned hams. I have nothing to tell about Coco, the Colossal Colon, nothing at all.

So if you'll just un-read the preceding eight paragraphs, we'll be back at square one and good to go.

Indiana State Fair -- bring on the FOOD

I'm trying to arrange a before-we-all-go-back-to-school trip to the Indiana State Fair this coming weekend with the girls, my nephews and my parents. The boys are coming to stay and with the State Fair beginning on Wednesday, I was thinking that Friday might be a good day to go and look at all the winning projects, the animal barns and eat. Eat, eat, EAT.

I do love a good state fair.

Here are some tried-and-true offerings that we willingly sample. Oh, okay, let's be honest. We wolf them down like a pack of, well, wolves. Hungry wolves. Hungry, rabid wolves. Who were raised without any manners:

1. corn-on-the-cob on a stick, dipped in butter (also anything else that comes our way on a stick. Stick foods, we love 'em.)

2. funnel cakes

3. elephant ears

4. pork chop sandwiches

5. popcorn

6. milk shakes

7. frozen Cokes - although we give a brief nod to the calorie count of this whole endeavor and order frozen DIET Cokes. Why? Because overindulgence is just wrong. Push it too far and it becomes gluttony and heaven knows none of us wants to go there.

I've also heard about some new foods making their debut at the Indiana State Fair this year, to wit:

1. How about deep-fried Bananas Foster cheesecake on a stick? No, I'm not kidding. Check out this picture if you don't believe me. Besides, what kind of cruel person would joke around about something like Bananas Foster cheesecake? Deep-fried and on. A. Stick. You all know I'm not that way.

Would you believe it's served with a scoop on vanilla ice cream on the side? That's been drizzled in caramel sauce? No? Well, then, get yourself to the fair. Because this entry from Urick Concessions won first place in the 2008 Indiana State Fair Signature Foods Contest, they have an extra booth. Which is conveniently placed right outside the Grand Hall, across from the Pepsi Coliseum.

If you try to cut in line ahead of me, I will break both your legs with no remorse. So help me.

2. To help you down off that sugar high, Barto's Catering & Concessions is offering hickory-smoked pulled-pork sandwich with shagbark hickory syrup barbecue sauce. Okay, so the barbecue sauce is probably sugary - it still packs about a thousand times less of a wallop than the deep-fried cheesecake, so I think it seems like a sound nutritional choice. Don't you?

Speaking of sound nutritional choices, I was listening to 93.1 WIBC-FM, which is my favorite Indianapolis talk radio station, on the way home from taking my husband to work, and I was enraged to hear a woman from Clarian Health Network actually talking about the calorie and fat content of state fair food, right there on the air with morning personalities Jake and Terri.

What kind of sadist would come on the radio early on a Monday morning and tell you that an elephant ear has over 1,000 calories and 61 grams of fat?

As a healthy alternative, she suggested corn-on-the-cob on a stick, except she said that a "good food choice" would be to ask the vendor to HOLD THE BUTTER.

Wha-??!!

This woman can't possibly be from my beloved Hoosier state. Because if she were, she would know that an ear of corn without butter is simply not allowed. You know those police officers who walk around, being all polite and looking handsome in an intimidating kind of way in their uniforms? Well, they aren't there to direct traffic or to provide security detail. They're there to MAKE SURE YOU HAVE BUTTER ON YOUR CORN.

Ms. Bossypants Clarion also smugly announced the calorie and fat contents of a bunch of other foods and it was too bad I was driving, because I wanted to stick my fingers in my ears and sing, "Lalalalala-la-lalalaaa!!!" over and over again. I couldn't change the radio because my favorite classical music doesn't broadcast very far and rock music jars me unendurably in the mornings. She totally dissed the big turkey drumstick, just when I was thinking how thoughtful God was to provide us with a food that comes on a stick of its very own. She was even dismissive of host Terri Stacy's timid suggestion of an Indiana Dairy Famers grilled cheese sandwich.

If this woman had her way, we'd all be eating steamed cauliflour on a stick.

Her big offering, one which she was very enthusiastic about, was for everyone to come to the Clarion Healthy Living Pavilion and tour the giant, 40-foot long colon, complete with depictions of "healthy colon tissue as well as tissue with hemorrhoids, cancerous and non-cancerous polyps, Crohn’s disease, diverticulosis, ulcerative colitis and various stages of colon cancer." Gee, I can hardly wait. Treats like giant 40-foot colons don't come around near often enough, although I'm glad this one came with plenty of advance notice so that I can be sure to miss it.

Although I can see that this is the one place at the fair that my nephews, especially Dayden, would be immediately and irrevocably attracted to. I can't decide which would be worse: eating a bunch of fair food and then walking through the giant colon display (which will nauseate me, because I have a tender gag reflex) or not eating a bunch of fair food beforehand and then having no appetite after seeing late stage cancerous polyps displayed in fiberglass and as big as my head.

The exhibit, affectionately known as "Coco, the Colossal Colon," is free, by the way.

Although I kind of think that Clarion woman was a bit of a colossal colon, myself.




Click here for the Indiana State Fair website.

Here's some interesting history of the Indiana State Fair back when the fairgrounds were out in the middle of the country in 1892, instead of right there smack-dab on 38th Street at Fall Creek Parkway. I never get over the sight of all those livestock sheds there in the heart of the city.