Peek-a-boo

I was on my way from Hobby Lobby to Kroger today when my mobile buzzed.

"Hello?" I said after pressing my speaker phone button.

"Hi, honey," my husband said. "I'm on my way home from work. Where are you?"

"I'm headed over to the Cross Street Kroger."

"Well, I'm on Scatterfield getting ready to turn right on Eighth Street, so I'll be home in a few minutes."

Nonplussed, I looked around me. I was on Scatterfield at the Eighth Street intersection. And there he was in his familiar Chevy Blazer, phone pressed to his head.

"Hi!" I sang. "Look across the street."

I saw his head turn and I waved. "Well, hey there," he replied, laughing. "Good to see ya!"

"You too! I'll be home in twenty minutes."

"Okay...whoops, hey, my light just turned green. Love ya."

It's funny how, when you see someone who is as familiar to you as your own hand in an unexpected place, they look somehow different and you think with some sense of amazement, "That's MY HUSBAND." Or wife, sister, son, granny or whoever. It was a funny little incident that made me smile today.

Human nature [mine specifically]

If I were, say, in a parking lot. And there was someone backing out of a parking space who did so in a manner that struck me as being boneheaded -- just shooting straight back with only a minimal fuss regarding mirrors, pedestrians, stray shopping carts and, incidentally, MY CAR -- I would say something like, "Geez, you ridiculous turd! SLOW DOWN and take a look around, how's about?"

But if there was another person who, while I was waiting to park in the space his or her car was currently occupying, s-l-o-w-l-y unloaded the groceries, climbed carefully into the car, laboriously fastened the seat belt, turned on the car and then checked every mirror twice," I would respond by muttering, "Yes, I've got ALL DAY to sit here waiting for you. Please take your time. Check your phone messages! Find another radio station! Take a look at your teeth in the vanity mirror! I've nothing urgent going on and it's SO MUCH FUN sitting here in this parking lot waiting on you to LEAVE, I'm just nearly beside myself with excitement."

I simply cannot be pleased. I don't think this speaks well for my character.

Your daily recommended allowance of indelicate thoughts

This yogurt, I just don't know. Even as much as I admire the Activia spokesperson, Jamie Lee Curtis, I just can't bring myself to buy this stuff, even though I do believe that it is probably very delicious. Because buying this yogurt and walking around in the grocery with it displayed along with your Metamucil and your prune juice and your big ol' box of All-Bran? It is tantamount to announcing over the store's public address system: "The lady in the dairy section with the full cart and the shopping list and the really cute Coach knock-off bag? SHE CANNOT POO."

Honestly, those television commercials just make me cringe, particularly the ones that talk about the "Activia Challenge." The Activia Challenge is a promotional deal the Dannon yogurt people are offering to tout their product by "naturally regulating your digestive system." Seriously. Click here and go watch the videos submitted by Mary Ellen, Toni and Emily if you don't believe me. What you have to do is eat Activia yogurt for fourteen days and videotape yourself during this time and....

See? See, right there, I had an indelicate thought. You know how I am about sharing -- ALWAYS THINKING OF OTHERS -- so I'll tell you that just now I got this mental image of these three women in their respective bathrooms, perched saucily on the potty and saying, "I used to come in here and sit and sit and sit for so long, I could read the latest issue of Cosmo from cover to cover. And all for nothing, except maybe some leaky capillaries in my eyeballs from all the straining. Now I come in here once or even twice a day and whoopsie! There's some right now, slick as a whistle!"

And then there's that commercial where the woman is dressed in a slim pencil skirt, twirling in front of her mirror. In a voice-over, she says something like, "My lifestyle is so busy and hectic, I sometimes don't have the time to eat healthy foods."

Me, silently adding What You Can Read Between the Lines: "Sometimes, you get so backed up, your eyes turn brown."

Woman in Pencil Skirt: "So I eat Activia yogurt to regulate my digestive system and it helps me watch my figure."

Me, again silently: "Because as it turns out? When your colon isn't packed full of crap, it's easier to zip up your six six skirt!"

Okay, well, I don't really want to think these things. I don't really want to contemplate other people's pooing habits at all. I just want to watch HGTV and admire Scott McGillivray on Income Property and roll my eyes at the people on House Hunters who say they want to live in downtown San Francisco in order to enjoy the city atmosphere and then seem surprised and disappointed when they find out that there is TRAFFIC NOISE. I just want to watch television without seeing Jamie Lee Curtis pushing a cart of Activia yogurt through a park and forcing two people to eat some by telling them that it is "beyond tasty" with an unexpressed "AND IT WILL MAKE YOU POO LIKE A GRASS-FED COW" trailing along, unspoken, behind her chirpy words.
My last worrisome bit of thought about Activia came when I was Googling some information on this yummy treat was over Dannon's settlement of a class-action lawsuit brought against them by people who had eaten Activia yogurt and were feeling cheated by the company's claims.

Woozily, I considered the possibilities: Somewhere out there, people ate Activia yogurt and found that it...didn't make them poo? Or worse yet, that it made them poo too much? If you've ever seen that Saturday Night Live skit of "Jamie Lee Curtis" eating Activia yogurt while sitting on a sofa and doing multiple takes of a commercial, you'll understand. If you haven't, let me explain very briefly: There was an explosion of sorts. A big explosion.

As it turns out, the claim, which Dannon settled in 2010, was about the labeling on the little cartons that suggested that Activia yogurt offered immunity to disease through its "pro-biotics," whatever those are. Which, all I can say is thank goodness, because the thought of so many people -- mostly women -- walking around uncomfortably bloated from constipation, or worse yet, in danger of an embarrassing episode of projectile diarrhea -- at work, on the bus, at a child's soccer practice while handing out juice boxes -- was just too horrifying to think about.

Indelicate....

You never know how much you love your oven

Until you don't have your oven.

On Father's Day, I asked my husband what he wanted for his special dinner and his answer surprised me a bit: homemade sloppy joes on sesame buns and tater tots. Or, as I call them, potato puffs, being as how I cannot force the word "tater" out of my mouth; it kind of hurts to even type it. This is because I am a food snob and I know that this is a personal failing and a petty weakness, but "tater" is an ugly word. "Yogurt" is an ugly word too, but since my only alternative is to call it "curdled milk swarming with bacteria," I prefer to stick with the ugly name. "Potato" is a whole different story.

I made my husband's sloppy joes and heated up the oven to 450 degrees with my Grandmother Marshall's huge cast-iron skillet inside it (the only way that potato puffs or roasted potatoes develop a crispy crust in the oven). When it was finished heating, I hurriedly dumped half a bag of potato puffs in it, pushed the oven rack back in and closed the door.

And then I stood there pondering for a moment, opened the oven door again, and grabbed the handle of my cast-iron skillet.

If the oven had been hot -- which it wasn't -- this maneuver would have been accompanied by wild screams and fervent cussing.

I went to the living room and told my husband that potato puffs were off the menu.

A few days passed, mostly because I spent Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of the following week employed in packing for CousinFest. This included not only packing clothes, but also packing a cooler and a hamper, both stuffed full of food. We don't mess around at CousinFest, when it comes to eating. I felt that I just didn't have the time to wait around for a repairman to come and fix whatever was wrong, but boy, do I wish I had.

Because when we got back? I called the Will Will Repair Your Appliance if it's the Last Thing We Ever Do place last Monday, one week ago today. And a repairman oblingly came over, stuck his head in the oven, announced that the thingamadooey was wrong with the whatchamacallit, told me he needed to order a part, and disappeared.

We've heard nothing from him since.

And I have been stricken by an urge to bake things. It's hard, I find, to plan menus around things that can only be cooked on the stove, although I did resort to "baking" some enchiladas in my electric skillet the other evening. In my opinion, the microwave is good for steaming vegetables and melting butter and heating up Thanksgiving leftovers. It even does a passable -- if overly zealous -- job of thawing pork chops; you have to keep your eye on it every second because my idea of defrosting the pork chops means that the ice is barely knocked off them and my microwave's idea of defrosting lies somewhere between nuclear fusion and the surface temperature of the sun. But I do not bake things in the microwave. That is unnatural behavior, I don't care what my eighth grade home ec teacher said.

So! The stove it is. Tonight we're having scrambled eggs, bacon (acceptably microwaveable) and grits. Tomorrow we're having stir fry. And if the appliance guy isn't back with the stove's part by then, we're either going to keep repeating scrambled eggs and stir fry ad infinitum, or start having Spaghetti-O's for dinner.

The misunderstood lyrics of Elton John, or How the Souspane Has Figured in My Life

First of all, I have always loved the music of Elton John, ever since the very first song of his I can remember loving, which was "Bennie and the Jets."


Secondly, I have no idea what a souspane is, and even if you read all the way to the end of this post, you still won't know either. That may either be because there is no such thing as a souspane, or it might be because the souspane is a literary device used by songwriter Bernie Taupin when writing lyrics that were designed to throw us all off and annoy our parents. Or it may be that I'm just challenged in some way that hasn't yet been identified by anyone, up to and including the Brown Dirt Cowboy.


All I know is that I think it must be a noun. The souspane.


The souspane didn't make an appearance in Elton John lyrics until I'd been listening to his music for a while, but the first lyric I misunderstood came right there in "Bennie and the Jets" and I wasn't the only one who was fooled by it.


In "Bennie and the Jets," you have your song about a rock band led by a female singer, Bennie, which is confusing in itself. "Bennie" sounds like a boy's name, and there are so many two-syllable girls' names to choose from, like, say, Shelley. "Shelley and the Jets" rolls off the tongue just as fluidly as "Bennie" does, I feel. Anyway. In the chorus, two teens named Candy and Ronnie are asked if they've seen her show -- the "solid wall of sound" -- by their unnamed friend who is excitedly relating the wonders of the concert.


"She's got electric boots!" he gushes. "A mohair suit! You know I read it in a magazay-ay-ay-ayne..."


Considering that Elton John has that British accent and also that he doesn't feel the need to enunciate his words like an elocution teacher in his songs, could all of us really be blamed for thinking the boy said, "She's got electric boobs! Her ma has, too! You know I read it in a magazine."


Although why we'd all care about Bennie's mom's presumably middle-aged bosoms, I don't know. And wouldn't a mohair suit be really itchy?

There were a lot of us at Parkview Junior High School who were grievously disappointed that there were no boobs in the song.


Once we got that all straightened out, along came "Saturday Night's All Right for Fighting," which is where I first encountered the souspane, but not before I ran into this bit of confusion:

************


Well, they're packed really tight in here tonight

And I'm looking for a daughter who'll see me right

I may use a little muscle to get what I need

I'll just [unintelligble for a few words] and shout out "Chick-fil-A!"



***********


Okay, remember that my ears were only about thirteen years old at the time and therefore stupid. In this song, in which Elton portrays himself as a thuggy kid from the wrong side of the tracks, he's not looking for a "daughter," but rather a "dolly." In my world, "dollies" were things like Betsy Wetsy, not girls out looking for a good time in a bar.


And furthermore, Elton isn't shouting out "Chick-fil-A" as if he's hungering for a Chargrilled Chicken Club sandwich. No, he's actually saying "She's with me." Only instead of pronouncing "me" like "me," he pronounces it like "may": as in, "I'll just sink and little drink and shout out, 'She's with mayyyyyyy!'" So I think my confusion is is understandable.

The last verse of the song -- a really fast and noisy song, with the words all run together -- sounded like this to me for years:

*************

A couple of the sounds that I really like

Are the sounds of a souspane and a motor bike

I'm a juvenile product of the working class

Whose best friend floats in the bottom of a glass

**************

Now I'm older and know better, thanks to my friend Betsy, who heard me sing the word "souspane" one day when we were listening to Elton John's Greatest Hits, Volume I and said incredulously, "What did you just say?"

I oblingly sang it again for her.

"Souspane?" she queried, twitching suspiciously around the corners of her mouth. "What's a souspane? Where did you get that? And what is it?"

"I don't know what a souspane is," I answered with dignity. "I just thought it was one of those Englishy words that they don't call it what it is, like saying 'flat' instead of 'apartment' and 'torch' instead of 'flashlight.'"

"A souspane," she said dubiously, a smile stretching across her face. "The sound of a souspane and a motorbike..."

"I picture the souspane as maybe a kind of musical instrument, maybe like a harpsichord," I said, not yet perceiving that I was being mocked. "Because you know the song 'Daniel'? In that song, Elton sings 'The souspane is pretty, but I've never been.'"

Betsy began to erupt in little snorting giggles that increased in volume and intensity until she was holding onto the arms of the chair in which she was sitting, wailing with laughter, her head thrown back with utter abandonment in her mirth, which was at my expense.

"Souspane...." she gasped, tears streaming down her face. "Souspane, oh....AAAHAHAHAHAA!!! HAHAHA!!!!"

Peeved, I narrowed my eyes and demanded, "Well, if Elton John isn't talking about a frigging souspane in those songs, what exactly is he saying? Do YOU know?"

"EVERYBODY knows," she hiccupped, wiping her smeared mascara out from under her eyes with her pointer fingers. "And please believe me when I say that nobody else in the world has ever heard the word 'souspane' in either of those songs. You are so special." Her quivering voice led me to believe that another avalanche of laughter was about to overtake her, so I raised my voice and said:

"THEN WHAT IS HE SAYING?"

Betsy managed to recover herself enough to say, "In 'Saturday Night's All Right for Fighting,' he says the he likes the sounds of a SWITCHBLADE and a motorbike. Not souspane."

"Switchblade?"

"Yes, and how you got 'souspane' out of 'switchblade,' I honestly cannot fathom. They don't sound anything alike, even allowing for Elton's slurry pronunciation."

"Well, how about 'Daniel,'" I asked, goaded. "He QUITE CLEARLY says, 'The souspane is pretty, though I've never been.'"

She cleared her throat and declaimed, "'THEY SAY SPAIN IS PRETTY, though I've never been.'"

"Oh," I said lamely. "Spain. Well. You can see how I could have understood 'souspane' out of 'say Spain.'"

"No, I can't," she said frankly. "Number one, because there's no such thing as a souspane. And number two, because the CONTEXT of the SONG tells you that Daniel is traveling on a plane and waving goodbye and all that. Unless, of course, you were thinking that he had his harpsichord-turned-souspane boxed up in a crate in the hold of the plane?"

"Oh, shut up," I said ungratefully. And then went off and bought the cassette version of Elton's greatest hits and a Walkman with some headphones so that I could listen to my music in privacy, without any other nosey person interfering with my understanding of the lyrics and the marvelous, magical, beautiful souspane.

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......

Pppppbbbblllltttt to Avatar

Just in case you were wondering, "Ppppppbbbbllllttt" is the official typed rendition of that assortment of phonemes known as "the Bronx cheer," "the raspberry," or "the fart noise," to everyone except my mother, who just read That Word and fainted.

I managed to sneak off to my quiet, cozy bed last night with a copy of the first Percy Jackson novel while everyone else was still downstairs watching Avatar. To my surprise, I only had about ten minutes to myself because I heard a number of feet tromping up the stairs. Everyone came into the room and looked at me.

"That movie," my husband said definitively, "stinks."

"Like a load of crap," Aisling added.

"Talk like a lady," I murmured, briefly glancing up from Percy's struggles with Ares, the god of war.

"You don't," Aisling said pertly.

"Don't speak to me pertly," I said, giving her a look that would have turned Medusa to granite.

"I can't figure out why so many people thought that was a good movie." Meelyn is a pro at steering her sister out of dangerous waters. "What a waste of time. We should have gone to Redbox."

"It was a load of crap," my husband offered.

"Talk like a la-....oh, never mind," I said.

Completely traumatized

See that broken bottle of sherry? Guess where all the wine-fortified-with-brandy that used to be inside it now is?

In me, circulating happily through my veins? No.

Nestling cozily inside a Julia chicken with a little stock and a whole bunch of butter? No.

Adding a little smidge of delicious to a glaze for a pound cake? Nuh-uh.

How about SOAKING INTO THE CARPET ON MY KITCHEN FLOOR? Yep. Yessirree, that's where it is.

The funny thing is, when that bottle of sherry was still in its grocery bag and went into a death-spiral off the kitchen counter, MY FOOT cushioned it from having sudden impact with the floor. I mean, thank heaven for my (bruised) instep, because if this is what happens to a sherry bottle when it glances off a be-shod foot before hitting the carpeted floor, there's no telling what would have happened if my foot hadn't been there. An explosion of glass and vino that would have drenched the kitchen all the way up to the ten foot ceiling, maybe? Good grief.

Well, it's been the very divil of a mess to clean up, to be sure. We did some major soaking with a big towel and then did some further soaking with damp towels and next I'm going to apply some Oxy-Clean and if that doesn't work, I'm going to re-soak the spot with my salty tears and apply prayer, holy water and Bath & Body Works' Summer Lemon Body Splash, in that order.

Because, you see, Aisling's Confirmation open house is this coming Sunday. Not Mother's Day, no. I mean the next Sunday. And I don't want to have a houseful of company coming in and sniffing delicately and thinking that we must spend our time -- me, my husband, the kids and the dogs -- senseless with drink and watching professional wrestling. Although I suppose sherry isn't the adult beverage of choice of the greater majority of WWF fans, I'm thinking. But I could be wrong! I'm a snob! Maybe those fans prefer a nice, dry Pouilly-Fuissé and I'm just as wet as my kitchen floor!

Okay, feel free to stop me and lure me back to my original point with some goldfish crackers or something....

And here is my point: While I don't want the house smelling like a brewery, distillery or a winery, I'm also slightly aware -- okay, make that VERY aware -- that the main aroma of our house is that of dog, which is neither a cozy or a charming smell. So maybe the sherry in the carpet might be an upgrade?

Must think on this while the girls clean up the mess....

As seen on the way to New Castle today

We went to New Castle today for three purposes: 1) to pick up Meelyn's contact lenses from the optometrist's office; 2) to eat lunch with Poppy and Nanny and then go to their house so that I could whip both of their behinds playing cards; and 3) to see Grandad, who is holding steady after his stroke two weeks ago and managed to smile at me today.

As we were driving towards my hometown, I saw a weathered old barn along the side of the road serving as a backdrop to some beautifully colorful spring flowers. I determined that on our way home, I'd have Meelyn pull over so that I could take a picture, and so I did. What I didn't know is that my nature, which seeks out beauty and truth and the higher, finer things of life the way a hummingbird seeks out sugar water, would be vilified by my rotten little daughters, both of whom screamed and gnashed their teeth at having to stop the van for THIRTY WHOLE SECONDS so that I could point and shoot.

And I didn't win at cards, either. But it is a really nice picture, isn't it?

Mea culpa

I was reading back through April's posts and noticed that there was an unusually large amount of hissy-fitting going on. I'd like to blame it on the weather, my husband, the kids or the dogs, but the truth is much closer to what I wrote in my profile over there to the left: I am just an inwardly grumpy kind of person (although generally cheerful on the outside; I think my personality could be described as Attila the Honey) and I seemed to allow her freer reign than usual.

So if reading here in April caused you to flee for the Prilosec or maybe for the tequila, I apologize and will endeavor to be more pleasant in May.

Wrong side

I don't know which side of the bed is the wrong side, but whichever side it it, I seem to have woken up on it this morning.


There's an online definition which says that getting up on the "wrong side of the bed" is an Americanism which leaves one grumpy and unsociable, which in my case is a vast understatement because calling me "grumpy" this morning is kind of like describing Bonnie Parker as "a sassy young lady with a keen sense of adventure."

I need coffee. Lots of coffee.

Stupid freaking recession

The girls and I were running an errand yesterday and discovered that our favorite ice cream place in town has completely closed down: storefront entirely empty, drive-thru menu gone, signage ripped from the front of the building.

The sad thing is that I had just opened my mouth to say, "Hey, as soon as we're done with this errand, let's go get an ice cream to celebrate Easter and spring break!"

The words died unspoken on my lips and we all grimly looked at the former premises where many the happy waffle cone has been eaten. It looked very forlorn.

It's got to the point where I'm almost afraid to look around me these days, for fear of what I'm going to see next that's gone with the wind. Last month it was Blockbuster, now the ice cream store, Noble Roman's, with the best breadsticks in town, bit the dust last fall. Ugh.

New glasses

I got my new glasses about a week ago and it was HIGH TIME.

I've been in need of new glasses for quite a long time, not just because my old prescription was four years old, but also because of Sarah Palin.

You see, when Sarah Palin came on the scene at last summer's Republican convention, people started looking at me with my rimless glasses and saying, "You know who you kind of look like?"

They'd take me in, frowning a little bit and moving their heads from one side to the other, attempting to sum up the superfical similarities: Last summer, my hair was still long and the style I'd adopted was much like the bangs-swept-to-the-side style Sarah Palin wore. And there were the rimless glasses. We were both brunettes and even our eye color -- hers hazel, mine green -- sort of struck some people.

"You look, kind of, you know. Around the top part of your head? Like Sarah Palin. With the glasses and all."

Okay, that was just embarrassing. Not that it's so tragic to be even slightly compared to Sarah Palin in the looks department, because no matter what the political persuasion, I don't think anyone objected to Sarah's looks. Some had honest admiration and others were grudging and gave off the aroma of sour grapes, but we all know she's very pretty.

However, the only part of me that was being compared to her was....the top part of my head? Like, from the eyes up? That stung a little, mostly because it was obvious to anyone who had eyes in their own heads that ANY resemblance we bore to one another ended with the bottom rims of our glasses.

So I started kind of worrying that people were going to think my hair and my glasses were like that ON PURPOSE. Like I was copying her or something, and how embarrassing would that be? Sarah Palin and I might share similar hairstyles, spectacles and coloring, but I'd make about three of the woman, I would. Which is not something I want to contemplate, especially thinking cringe-worthy thoughts like people in the grocery thinking, "That poor large dear must think she looks like the sexy Sarah. How tragic."

So I cut my hair off, and it was high time to have that done, too. And now I have new glasses. And I posted a picture of my made-over self on an internet chat board I belong to and one person said, Oh, Shelley! You know who you look like? You look just like the writer of the Sookie Stackhouse series, Charlaine Harris!"

So now I'm thinking of peroxiding my hair and stepping up the use of eyeliner -- maybe going for some black frames with dark lenses? -- and getting a great big Billy Idol thing going. Just....well. Just because.

An unwelcome surprise

I have a friend, Diana, who has been invited to a surprise birthday party for a friend of hers. Here's some info on the honoree:

1. She's turning fifty, a biggie as far as milestone birthdays go.

2. Her husband left her at the beginning of this month to run off with a twenty-something bimbo and she found he'd been planning his departure since last summer.

3. She and her husband have an eight-year-old son who has been devastated by his father's defection.

4. She is, according to Diana, a mess. As you might expect.

My take on these circumstances is, could there possibly be a worse time to spring a surprise birthday party on someone? Okay, worse is a relative term. Maybe, then, after she returns home from having major surgery? Or finds out that her house has an issue with pervasive mold and has to be razed to the ground? Or discovers that her third grader is actually a crime lord at the front of a major drug cartel operating out of his elementary school?

My firm belief is that surprise parties are only for the ten-and-under set. Children are the people who are best disposed, due to their innocent, eager, rambunctious natures, to the rigors of people jumping out from behind the furniture or out of the PlayPlace equipment at McDonald's, as it were . Mostly because they are the ones the least likely to be caught at the end of a difficult day, slogging home with hurty feet and faded makeup and a headache due to having nothing for lunch but a Little Debbie Nutty Bar out of the snack machine.

Here's a personal example: When my husband and I were engaged with our wedding only a few weeks distant, three people from the small private Christian school where I taught decided to give me a surprise bridal shower. One of them was a person who didn't like me very much -- the feeling was mutual, so one big surprise was that she had a hand in it -- another was a fellow teacher, Linda, who was a grand gal, but one who had the sensitivity of carrot, and the third was my friend Mary Ellen.

Mary Ellen was the kindergarten teacher, and if there's ever been a tiny little woman with a wit that could cut through like a hot knife through soft butter, it was her. To her credit, she didn't give away the secret (she chalked this up to Christian integrity, which at times can be a burden to us all) but she collared me the next day and said sourly, "I hope you know that I had nothing to do with that mess other than ordering the cake. Those other two railroaded me into it because we're such good friends and they needed to use me as an excuse to pull off a party that I told them long and loud you'd hate."

The day of the surprise shower had been a hectic one. I am a very punctual person, so when my alarm clock failed to rouse me that morning, I woke up twenty minutes past my regular time and thus was a little skimpy on the hair and makeup so that I could get to school on time. The outfit I was wearing was utilitarian, to say the least: black pants, a white turtleneck and a pale pink Shaker knit sweater. Not my most attractive ensemble, but I was in a hurry. The only attractive thing about me that day was my engagement ring.

It had been an exhausting day and I was longing to get home by lunch time. The afternoon had never stretched out so slowly, and the students in my class all seemed to be particularly obtuse and ill-behaved. By the time three-thirty rolled around, I was not only ready to quit the day, but also my job and my entire career and go off to find work in a foundry. I gathered up my stuff and headed out to the parking lot, only to see my mother getting out of her car.

"What are you doing here?" I asked, amazed.

She looked shifty, as I recall, but I was tired and stressed out and not too swift on the uptake. "Oh," she hedged, "I wanted to come and borrow that book you were telling me about? The one about the....something? Remember when we were talking about the...something....the other day?"

I just stared at her. "No. I don't remember talking about the something, or owning a book about the something or telling you that I'd lend you my non-existent book about the something."

"Maybe I'll remember by the time we get upstairs to your room," she said hastily.

"Okay," I said unwillingly, and turned around to go back inside. Mom walked beside me, darting glances from side to side like Peter Lorre in some 1930s gangster movie. We got back upstairs to my classroom and wouldn't you know it? She couldn't remember the subject or the title of the book about something, this elusive, mysterious book on an elusive, mysterious subject that we'd apparently conversed about at length at some unspecified time in the past.

While we were walking back downstairs, she said in a voice bright with false enthusiasm, "Hey! Let's go see JoAnn and Fayrene! I think they're in the chapel!"

JoAnn and Fayrene were the secretary and bookkeeper who worked on the church side of the building and at 3:45 in the afternoon, the likeliest place to find them was at their desks, but whatever. We walked down the long hallway that separated the school from the church offices and I heard giggling in the distance. I shot my mother a suspicious glance, but she was making like Peter Lorre again and didn't catch my eye.

We walked into the chapel to squeals and shouts of "SURPRISE!" which caused me to recoil in shock and fleetingly decide to smite my mother for not directing me to the staff bathroom so that I could at least try to do something with my flat hair and shiny forehead.

"Oh, wow!" I said weakly. "Gosh! Gee! Haha ha ha, you all sure fooled me!" The three perpetrators were in the background, Linda jumping up and down and clapping with glee, the co-worker who disliked me standing with her arms crossed and a gloating smirk on her face, Mary Ellen glowering and looking like she'd like to kick everyone assembled in the groin.

There were lots of pictures, of course. They show me opening a display of naughty lingerie -- who knew that little evangelical church ladies could be such skanks? -- right there in front of my mother IN THE CHAPEL and thank heaven and all the angels we weren't Catholics in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament . Everyone else had had the opportunity to freshen up and a few even appeared to have changed clothes. In every picture, I look haggard and tired and even my deepening blushes at opening my third pair of crotchless panties didn't make much of a difference. The only picture I didn't put in my wedding scrapbook was the one snapped right after I opened the gift from the hostess/co-worker who didn't like me: in spite of the fact that I was a very average size 10 at the time, she got me a black lace teddy sized 2X.

"I just guessed on the size," she tittered and as the picture was snapped with me grimly stuffing the absurdly gigantic outfit back into the gift bag, my expression of utter loathing for her was captured forever, courtesy of Kodak.

So I personally feel that surprise parties are the very divil, an opinion backed up by three surprise birthday parties I've been invited to as an adult, none of which went off quite as the jolly little party planner expected. One of them even featured the guest of honor bursting into tears and retreating from the restaurant to sit in her car in the parking lot so as to pull herself together. Surprised? Oh, yeah. We ALL were.

If you still aren't convinced, read this little blurb from a How-To website on throwing the "perfect" surprise party and imagine yourself as the lucky surprise-getter:

"Make sure you have a key so that you can handle last-minute preparations. Preparing for the party while the recipient is at work is a good idea, and then you can spring the surprise on the recipient when she gets home."

What right-minded person would ever feel that this would be a great plan to spring on a friend? You know it's going to happen on the very day when she started her period unexpectedly and had to walk around all day with a run in her hose and remembered after she got to work that she'd meant to put gas in the car, but left her debit card at home on her desk. And you know she's going to want to kill every single one of you and is thinking, even before the sounds of your joyful yodels have faded from the air, about her unmade bed, the dirty dishes in the sink from dinner last night, and the box of tampons sitting there on the bathroom counter.

So my feeling about a surprise birthday party for this woman whose husband just skipped out three weeks ago, who is turning fifty, whose son's life has been turned upside-down because of his stupid father's preference for sex with a chippie young enough to be his daughter, who is "a mess" of emotional pain and worry about her future and her son is that all the invitees should JUST SAY NO.

And then they should all quietly inform the birthday girl about the big, jolly surprise that's awaiting her on her birthday, to give her time to present herself as she'd like to be presented, to nail a smile on her un-shiny face, to give her an opportunity to mentally rehearse her reaction so that her first inclination to pull the hair right out of the head of her witless hostess and go with something a little more socially acceptable like, "Oh, wow! Gosh! Gee! Haha ha ha! You all sure fooled me!"

Sign o' the times

I was up in my bedroom this morning, stripping the sheets off the bed, when I heard a familiar yet too-long-unheard sound coming from outside. Incredulous with delight, I bounced across my room to the window and looked out to behold....THE STREET SWEEPER!!!!

My dears, spring has sprung, at least here in north central Indiana. It doesn't matter what you see first -- a fat, red-breasted robin, a jaunty daffodil, or a noisy, fossil fuel-powered street-sweeper trundling around the block -- any of those three is a true harbinger of le printemps and I've never been so glad to clap eyes on that particular piece of machinery.

I might be singing a different tune three months from now when summer vacation has started and it's still cool enough to sleep at night with the windows thrown open and the street sweeper goes chugging by at the unsprightly hour of seven o'clock a.m., but right now I'm so grateful winter's over that I'd go out and drive the thing myself if I had to. Which would be, you know, kind of fun. Not as thrilling as driving a zamboni, which is one of my life's goals, but still...

Fashionably framed

Aisling and I have appointments with the optometrist this coming Tuesday; she is getting fitted for contact lenses and I am having an exam and choosing new eyeglass frames.

I wear my glasses for everything except reading and I've had these particular frames for, oh, I'm thinking FIVE YEARS. Happy was the day when I realized that they were kind of broken. Not cataclysmically broken, as in sat upon or perhaps ground underfoot, but more like bent. Bent enough that I no longer felt compelled to un-bend them, especially since our vision insurance pays for new frames every two years, which kind of begs the question: WHY HAVEN'T I HAD NEW ONES BEFORE NOW?

The answer to that question is, I have no clue. I mean, we do pay for that vision insurance. It is part of the $500+ monthly premium we part with as part of my husband's employers' group insurance plan. When you pay that much, it is kind of stupid not to avail yourself of every benefit you can claim.

Other than that, I am rocky excited to get some new glasses. What will I choose? What will I choose? And will I be able to trust Aisling and Meelyn to guide my selection so that I won't end up with some frames that will scare the birds out of the trees?

Maybe I should call my mother....

Off the rails

See these foil-wrapped serving dishes in my oven -- and yes, I know, there are charred crumbs from a frozen pizza in there, but I have not been well, remember? And shouldn't be required to clean out the oven when feeling feverish -- heating themselves up at three hundred fifty degrees?

Those are leftovers from last night and they're heating up because I feel like poo on a cracker and I just couldn't bring myself to put together the chicken pot pie that was slated for today's Menu Plan Monday entrée. So! I am reheating the Baked Steak and the cauliflower casserole I made, plus I carelessly peeled a few potatoes because if anything can reconcile my husband to the unwelcome notion of "leftovers," it is the common Idaho potato in its mashed form. Plus I just had Meelyn throw a sheet of store-bought croissants in there and if everybody's not okay with that, I guess there's always cereal and milk.

The ball pit from hell

I've mentioned before the babysitting gig Meelyn, Aisling and I have at a local church's mother's group, right? And I've mentioned about the ball pit in the room Aisling and I are assigned to, the one no doubt put in that playroom by some SADIST who set it all up and then left, never having to lift a single brightly-colored ball up off the floor and if I knew who that person was, I would go up to him and slap him repeatedly until he fell unconscious to the floor.

I took this picture early on, before any children were even in the room. As soon as they burst through the door, they barely took the time to hang their coats up on the little pegs before shrieking, "YAY!! BALL PIT!!!" and flinging themselves in there. Whereupon, as you can imagine, the balls fall out.

Boy, do they ever fall out. They fall out everywhere. They fall out in places that you wouldn't really have expected them to fall, such as by the toilet in the little bathroom that is a good twenty feet across the huge playroom. It could just break your heart, the way those things fall out.

But it could break your back, putting them all back in again. Because, you know two and three year olds? They are not really much on helping pick toys up. I mean, they can pick up one ball at a time and throw it back into the little car and half the time they'll miss and it will roll under the snack table in just the place that will require you to practically have to stand on your head in order to fish it back out.

"Uh-oh!!!" says the child, pointing.

"#$%&!!!" you think, bending over and feeling your middle-aged muscles and spine strike a chord of misery.

Then the child loses interest and goes off to play with something while you're occupied with retrieving the ball and then standing upright again in stages, so you're left there with a ball in your hand and one hand on the small of your back, calling feebly, "Hey! Come back here and help pick up the balls!"

"DON'T WANNA PICK UP BALLS!!! WAAAHHHHHH!!!!" they scream. Like, you know, they're being disemboweled by a rhinoceros. Which, come to think of it, might be an apt punishment for the person WHO THOUGHT THIS WOULD BE A GOOD IDEA.

I am totally middle-aged

Oh, I am an oldster, as my children will helpfully tell you, sometimes even before you ask them. I knew it for sure this morning when I devised a tacky little wastebasket system for the van, consisting of a plastic grocery bag trapped by one handle in what used to be the ashtray, but is now a change drawer. I was so very happy and immediately put a straw wrapper and a used tissue in it and REVELED in my sense of accomplishment and tidyness.

I'm kind of worried about myself.

I'll give you ONE GUESS...

...as to what it's doing outside right now. Just one. Shouldn't be too difficult. Have you got it yet?

Okay. If you guessed "snowing," you are right!

Now, c'mere so's I can pull your hair.