Day in the Life: February 2008 Archives

Feral Girl and I were discussing the Worst Movies We've Ever Seen over lunch today.  As a teenager in a small town in NC, all my friends and I ever DID was go to or rent movies, so I'm narrowing the field to movies I actually saw in a theater.  Here are my all time worst top 3 - and yes, I saw ALL of these in an actual theatre, and without the aid of illegal substances:

1.  Gymkata.  Thank God for all those conveniently discarded pommel horses and uneven bars in shady alleyways!  Otherwise our intrepid hero would have been unable to perform his signature fighting style:  GYMKATA!  I know, okay?  It was 1985 and this movie was the inevitable result of all that excitement over the USA men's gymnastics team from 1984.  Even though it's irrational, I totally blame Mary Lou Retton.

2.  The Stuff.  Killer antarctic Cool-Whip.  Again, I KNOW.  1985 was not a good year for me.  Or movies. Or Paul Sorvino, apparently.

3.  Grizzly!  This is what happens when you're seven years old and you BEG AND BEG AND BEG to be allowed to see a PG-rated movie, because everyone you knew had seen Jaws in the theater but you weren't allowed to go to PG movies before you turned seven, so you totally missed out on Jaws and VCRs hadn't been invented yet and you had to settle for the cheap, quickly made attempt to capitalize on the OMG KILLER BEAST! phenomenon. Description: A fifteen foot tall grizzly bear terrorizes a state park. Christopher George leaps into the carnage to stop it. Well, thank God for Christopher George!

I have more, but I think this is a nice representative sample.

How about you?  Worst movie ever seen in a movie theater?  And The English Patient doesn't count.

So I've been pitiful about posting this week - my apologies.  Yesterday I took half a day off to get a leisurely cut-and-color from my hairsylist, and ended up with something that looks like a cross between Paige Davis' haircut and Katie Holmes bob.  So, it's short and razor-cut and perky and super easy to deal with, and Hublet is bummed, because he has a thing about long hair.  Not that I've actually HAD long hair since our wedding, nor will I ever have long hair again, because HELLO!  Long hair when you're pushing 40 tends to drag your face down and make you look older unless you've got a regular botox and chemical peel regimen, but whatever.

But Hublet's issues are not the point of this post.  No, the point of this post is that my darling Boy is awesome with the compliments.  Because when he saw my hair he said, "Mommy!  Your hair makes you look YOUNG!"

Which, okay.  If I were a pessimistic sort I might ask, "How old did I look before the haircut?" But I'm just going to take this at face value, because it's coming from a 6-year-old boy.

Now if I can just navigate him through the "does this make me look fat" minefield, I will feel as though he has sufficient life skills to make someone a fine husband.

Okay.  I finally had a few spare moments yesterday to devote to cleaning out my car, and I have determined that our next automotive purchase will include an all-leather interior, cows, carbon, and polar bears be damned.

Why?

Because the once-beige upholstery in the back seat of my car is purple.  Well, more of a mottled purplish/red with the occasional blotch of blackish who the hell knows, but you get the point.  Even when it's clean, it looks as though you could catch something if you sit on it without a protective barrier.

The irony, of course, is that when we purchased the car I immediately went online and ordered a seat cover.  And then The Boy immediately wedged the straw from his juice box full of grape goodness into the ONE GAP in the seatcover, and the purple monstrosity was born.  Of course, it didn't help that the seat cover prevented me from noticing the stain until it was far too late.

And I still have no idea how the OTHER side of the back seat got a similar stain.  I'm out of ideas.  The dog chewed the seatbelt, sure, but she wasn't drinking grape soda.

I'm beginning to think that this car has some sort of besmirchment attractor.  It's not quite 5 years old, and we've replaced 2 windshields AND the current one has a rock lodged in the center, had the dent caused by our father-in-law repaired, and have ignored the other divot that prevents the passenger door from opening all the way.  No, I do not know how that happened.  In addition, we have the stainage (we will not talk about the Starbucks Mocha carnage on the front seats, detritus from the Christmas Shopping Stress of Aught-Six), the dog-chewed seatbelt ($300 to replace?  Oh, I think not.  The Boy can just sit on the other side of the car), and an intriguing pen mark on the ceiling--the result of a sequence of events involving Hublet, student papers, an ill-timed yawn and a Tow Mater-adorned pen.

Plus, the cover for the fuse box just randomly flew off one day, as did the plastic doohickey that attaches to the gas cover opener lever thing.

I love this car beyond the telling of it, but it's not going to win any fashion contests.  So I've decided that the next one will at least be easy to wipe clean, since no one in my family has the ability to sit still without causing upholstery damage.

And at least I haven't gone mucking it up by putting bumper stickers all over it, so that's something...

So, The Boy's class did it:  they got postcards from ALL 50 STATES, AND they did it before any of the other first grade classes at their school!

HAH!

Not that I'm weirdly competitive, or anything.

So thank you again to all you nice folks who sent a postcard along - The Boy says he gets to bring home all the ones addressed to him, so I'll get to see them in the flesh, so to speak.  Woot!

First - Happy Valentine's Day!  This is as sappy as I get. (Thanks, Feral Girl!)

Second - Stuff White People Like.  Excerpt:

#62:  Knowing what's best for poor people.
White people spend a lot of time of worrying about poor people. It takes up a pretty significant portion of their day.

They feel guilty and sad that poor people shop at Wal*Mart instead of Whole Foods, that they vote Republican instead of Democratic, that they go to Community College/get a job instead of studying art at a University.

It is a poorly guarded secret that, deep down, white people believe if given money and education that all poor people would be EXACTLY like them. In fact, the only reason that poor people make the choices they do is because they have not been given the means to make the right choices and care about the right things...

Posting will be light today and tomorrow, as I run frantically hither and yon, fetching ice-cold Pepsis for former governors and generally riding herd on the media.

But I will leave you with this nugget of advice, in the event that any of you dear readers become famous:

If you got famous as a member of the media, and then turn around and hide in the VIP room and refuse to do media because it's just "not something you're interested in," then consider yourself warned:  then venom directed at you by current members of the media will be something to behold, and you may want to watch your back.

Of course, this is all merely a long-winded addition to my Beyonce Principle:  If your name isn't Beyonce (or Cher, or Bono--in short, if you aren't so famous that you're a verb), then you don't get to act like a diva.

I know some of you had emailed to ask how the year-long project was going....

We only have 2 states left:  New Hampshire and Alaska!

And if we get those, according to The Boy, his class will be the first one finished. 

So if you have any long-lost Alaskan relatives who might be willing to send a postcard I'll be forever in your debt....

So we have a family friend who originally hails from New Jersey--like most folks around the Raleigh area, nowadays.  He used to regale us with the tale of running around his neighborhood naked after the Giants won the Superbowl back in whatever year it was (I do not know, nor do I care to know - not a sports fact buff, thanks!), in the snow, no less.

I wonder if the fine town of Apex got to see our now older but probably not much wiser--at least when it comes to sports--buddy running around naked last night? 

And that about sums up my involvement in this year's Superbowl, except to say that the highlight of my evening was Hublet pointing at the televised post-game press conference and crowing, "Suck that lemon, Belichick!  Woo!"

Yes, Hublet channels Ric Flair at opportune moments.

Now if I can just make it through the ACC tournament without Hublet or his tiny protege', The Boy, spraining something, all will be well.

So there was this Penguin Project that The Boy had to complete.  He had the Galapagos Penguin.  The instructions were to create either a poster, diorama, or shoebox that would give people facts about your penguin. Parents were allowed to help some, but the lion's share of the work was to be done by the student.

The Boy, in the great non-artistic tradition of everyone in the Big Arm family, chose a poster that he would decorate with photos from the web and facts about his penguin.  We printed pictures, he cut them out and glued them on, then I wrote what he wanted in pencil and he traced the letters, because he said his writing "wasn't big enough."

All was well.  For about five minutes, until he looked at me and said, "You know mommy, I think they'd all be more impressed if we made a penguin out of feathers."

O-KAY!

I explained that I wasn't entirely sure a) how one would do that, and b) how one would secure such a thing to a poster, and added that c) it sure would have been nice if he'd mentioned that BEFORE we FINISHED the project, but promised that I would go to Michael's the next day and see what was possible.

Happy note here:  The Boy doesn't procrastinate, so I was saved having to do this 30 minutes before the poster was due.  I must admit to being a fan of his anal-retentive tendencies in situations like this, although I am doing my best to tone that aspect of his personality down a hair before he ends up on Xanax in 3rd grade.  Seriously.  The child tends toward the stress-ball end of the spectrum and while he gets it honest, it makes me worry about him.  See?  Told you he got it honest!

ANYWAY, the next day saw me in the kid's crafts section of Michael's, trying to figure out how to craft a penguin from random art supplies.  Pom-pom penguin?  Too hard to attach.  Feathers?  Wrong color and wrong texture, unless we wanted a sunburned hooker penguin to adorn his project.  Glitter paint?  Felt?  Clay?  Sequins?  I was desperate, and then I saw it:  a sheet of black foam board with an example of a foam PENGUIN on it!  I was saved!  So I bought black and white foam, and googly eyes--because really, googly eyes are the secret weapon in any craft project--and a few more glue sticks, and headed home.

We were able to find a pattern for the penguin, and there was tracing and cutting and sticking and then the piece de resistance - Googly Eyes.  The Boy was quite excited about the googly eyes.

As were his classmates.

And so I have learned a valuable lesson that I will pass along to you, dear readers:  Googly Eyes make EVERYTHING better.

Maybe I'll stick a pair on my income tax return this year.