Category: Uncategorized

Today on my usual drive to pick up J, I ran across a homeless man laying on the sidewalk asleep. His shopping cart of belongings were off to the left. He was laying on some sort of bedding and had on a decent pair of shoes that seemed to fit. His feet were dangling over the curb as the cars drove past. His skin was golden brown from the sun. His arms folded up over his chest in what seemed to be a form of protection. We are at our most vulnerable when we are asleep. 

I drove to the studio, picked J up and then once she got in the car I grabbed my wallet to see how much cash I had. I found a $20 bill. I raced back to the place where the man was sleeping, hoping he would still be there. When I saw him, I pulled into the parking lot behind him. As I stopped the car, J asked what I was doing. I said I was going to give the man on the street $20 and to wait in the car.

I walked up to him and noticed he was fast asleep. I hated to wake him but wanted to give him the money. I said, “Do you want money?” It didn’t wake him. I asked again. Nothing. I looked at his stomach to see if it was going up and down to indicate he was breathing. It was. I asked again. I was tempted to just place the bill into his hand, but I thought he might jerk awake, startled and afraid. I asked again and this time he woke up. I said, “Here, some money.” He squinted into the bright sun, looked at me and took the money. He thanked me. I said, sure. I went back to the car. J was on her phone. The guy from the Cross Fit workout place, opposite of where I parked, walked out of his gym and asked me if the guy was okay. I said yeah. “I just gave him $20 bucks. He was just sleeping.” The Cross Fit guy seemed concerned, sort of or maybe just concerned for me. I figured the homeless man was a regular. 

As I walked to the car, the homeless guy was up, straightening himself out, and as I slowly drove to the exit, he walked over to me. I stopped the car as he walked toward me. 

He could barely talk. His mouth appeared swollen, like he couldn’t get his tongue to work with the rest of his mouth, everything was packed together that he couldn’t enunciate a word. It all mumbled together. But I heard a few things. He pulled up his sleeve to show me the watch on his left arm, and he said the money I gave him would be spent well. He mentioned drugs, as if to say the money would not go to drugs and said something like giving food to people like him was what they really wanted. I listened and nodded and looked squarely into is his face as he spoke. Moments ago it was dead asleep and now he was awake with gratitude and seemed to be determined to ensure me that he would be responsible with this gift. 

I thought he was handsome and wondered what his life may have been like for him before he got to this place. He was once the baby boy of a proud mother, I thought. How did he get here like this, now? What happened? He had pretty blue eyes that reminded me of my friend Paul. In fact, he looked a lot like Paul, I thought. 

He seemed a bit in shock yet so appreciative to get a decent amount of money, not a token few bucks. I smiled at him and said it was okay and to take care. And then we drove away as he walked back to his shopping cart.  J still on her phone. I hope she took in some of this.

I will never forget his face and how much he wanted to let me know that the money would be spent well. I wish I had a $100 bill in my wallet that day. I’d rather give money to people like this than go to the moon. 

—SBM

I surprised the telemarketer just now who called to sell me an extended warranty for my car. I interrupted him before he could get started with his sales pitch by blurting out, “Will you marry me?” Surprised, he replied—a bit confused, which I could understand, as it’s considered on the unusual side for a woman to propose marriage and it is very early on in our relationship. He said, “A… what?” 

I said, “I really want to get married, so will you marry me?” And he said, “Yes!” Oh, I am so happy! 

We are complete strangers, but I don’t care. Technically I am engaged. The only problem is I then pressed the two keys to block the call and now I can’t get back in touch with him to get wedding plans started . . .

I was previously engaged when I bought a taco at Taco Bell and on the hot sauce packet they gave me, I noticed, when I ripped it open with my teeth (your body’s pliers), it said, “Will you marry me?” I said yes in the car as took a bite of my taco. But the marriage was never consummated. 

—SBM 

You have done everything you could to avoid the painful step on a Lego piece with a bare foot, but the Lego dilemma doesn’t end there. Even if you (like me) have never stepped down hard on a Lego brick in the dark in the middle of the night on the way to the refrigerator to get a glass of water, there is more work to be done with Legos. 

Don’t get me wrong. Legos are a wonderful educational hands-on activity for kids of all ages! Love these things. Kids love them. They are satisfying and therapeutic, with easy and reasonable instructions that you never have to throw across the room (unlike IKEA instructions with that annoying useless little man who instructs you to call a number if you get stuck that sends you into phone tree hell). Legos are a great activity for parents and kids since the instructions are so easy to do that a parent can have a cocktail in one hand and make sense of page 7 in the other hand without ever having to get up off from the couch.

And while there are those times when little ones will need to reverse engineer their creation (in angry tears and possibly a few thrown Lego pieces) to rework a part that set the whole bloody thing off track, this, too is a great learning opportunity.  

So what’s the problem? Nothing. Really. Until you realize that you have empty Lego box upon empty box with the instructions inside stuffed under the coffee table. Or maybe you have a plastic bag with the pieces of a particular kit along with the instructions (if you are that dang organized type of parent with time on their hands to take the thing apart and put it all in a gallon size plastic bag). You may have a giant basket of all Lego pieces all mixed together like one giant colorful Lego soup or little containers of pieces in plastic containers all organized by color.  

What do you do with all of this crap?

Here’s how it goes down. Your kid gets a new Lego set for Christmas. She opens it up and does the entire thing in an hour or two. Done. Now you have an empty box, a Lego creation built, and your kid is wandering out of the room asking to use your phone. 

See, that’s it: $50-ish for about two-ish hours of entertainment and then what? You get more for their birthday, Christmas, and the inventory increases… more pieces, more plastic, to the point where you question your purpose for life itself. We all were that parent that said, “We are not going to have toys all over the place.” How do those words taste now? Add a little salt and pepper, melted cheese … and get used to the toy parade that begins to march into your home (uninvited) come the first birthday. It’s all toy downhill from there. You are going to be make trip after trip to Good Will and cuss out loud (regardless of whom is in the car) when you see the sign that says they are “not currently accepting any donations.” This, after you had to sneak all of those tired and no longer used toys in to the bag as your kid looked the other way.

But I digress. No, there is no answer. As I said this is a dilemma.  

—SBM

Today, I discovered, the cat shat in the basket of Lego pieces J and I have been separating —by color—into nice little silver bowls of organization, a task that I’d say is oddly therapeutic. There is little opportunity to do it wrong (white pieces go into one bowl, red pieces into another, and so on) and a very simple effort equates to great success. Until . . .

This morning I discovered where the cat poop was. We smelled it the other day, could not find it, but I knew it was there somewhere. And I found it this lovely morning.

Louis the cat had dug into the white Lego pieces basket he had mistaken for a litterbox and left me a nice gift all over many a Lego pieces.

Not only that, he shat on the rug (next to the basket). Huh?

I put on the pet rubber gloves. Dumped the basket of Lego pieces onto the bathroom floor rug. I found the soiled ones, a shear pleasure, especially the little connector circles of the Lego bricks filled to the brim with Louis’s rejected material.

The dirty ones I rinsed in the toilet, another most pleasurable experience, if you have never tried it I suggest you never go there. Then, after getting off as much off as possible in the toilet bowl swirl that smelled divine, I dumped the pieces into the sink of hot water and Pine Sol. I swished around, praying I didn’t have to get out toothpicks and Q-tips to remove it all.  

Back to the carpet, I sprayed on carpet cleaner (never ever do I run out of this stuff) after removing large pieces and scrubbed the rug clean. Back to the bathroom. Then to the laundry room to get plastic bags for the color-separated Lego pieces … no more Lego litterboxes (baskets or bowls). And yes, the thought went through my head to throw it all out after seeing what Louis had done, but those dang pieces go to the umpteen boxes of Legos (with instructions) that are all over the house. The point of this great organization was my idea to J to “put them all back together” vs having all of these empty boxes hanging around.

I figure if I missed a Lego and it is sitting on the carpet tonight when I come downstairs to lock the door in the dark and I step on the Lego, my day will be complete.

Yes, today I earned a stripe. Who cares if done could start a fire with a couple sticks in the wild, today I survived the Lego shXX basket.

—SBM

Staying at home more (we still get out as much as possible), keeping little one off her phone, out of YouTube’s thousands-upon-thousands of tweeners and teens  doing a dreadful number of pointless, meaningless (and extremely annoying for parents to overhear) videos that include many screams (over nothing, believe me), yells, annoying pronunciations of words such as adding an “a” at the end of words: not “Hi,” but instead “Hi-a” and not “No” but “No-a” and “Let’s get started …”  is enough to make a parent swear. Ditto on some of these annoying kids on Disney shows, kids that mock their parents, rule the household, the sassy shxts (20 cents) that treat adults like they are uncool, pointless, meaningless (making the connection here?) and unnecessary.

Come on, own it mom.  I do. I try not to swear with this stuff sweltering inside me at times. But sometimes I just can’t help it.  There is so much swear about now.

So, we have (make that J has) come up with a plan to help me “control” my instantaneous urge to blurt out unsavory words that I know shouldn’t say in front of her. And now  I pay for my indiscretions; the money goes into a jar for J.

Here’s the cost breakdown:

• Shxt – 20 cents
• Mo Fo – 2 cents
• Damn it – 10 cents
• Hell – 5 cents
• F bomb (any form, though I must say this one is costly since there’s usually several said in a row: noun, verb, adjective, adverb – 25 cents (each)

There you go. By the time masks are no longer required, J should have a down payment for a condo.

—SBM (owning it and not feeling quite as guilty as I did before now that I am creating a revenue stream)

I do not want to wear a mask. I believe they do more harm than good. And why is there  no coverage—anywhere—in the media on building up one’s immune system (garlic, lemons, for starters), and today in Safeway, when a woman said to me “No mask?”  and I said (sarcastically, I admit), “Yep,” she told me to eff off. Under her breath. I wanted to pop her one.

The mask thing is over and above anything people walking on the street or into stores need to do. I’m sorry. Keeping some distance between you and strangers (which we do anyway) is sufficient in protecting you from becoming infected from someone who is infected with anything. Normal, reasonable distance we maintain with people—who we don’t know—works perfectly well.  Now that every checkout has sneeze guards, we are further protected.

Alternatively, wearing cloth over one’s mouth makes that person inhale their (supposed to be) expelled Co2 compromising their immune system, and further it creates a moist environment around one’s mouth, basically a welcome mat, neon Las Vegas flashing sign that basically that says to germs and bacteria: “Come on in and bring your germy friends and hang for a while!”

How is it that the medical profession is not acknowledging this? And further, no one wears their mask correctly! Cloth masks are just for show, really. Droplets that can infect are so tiny they’d fly right through the weave. Wearing a mask is like putting up a chain link fence to keep out the mosquitoes. Today a doctor told me: “The masks are to protect others from you infecting them.” If I sneeze, cough, or spit while I talk, my mask catches those droplets before the fly away.

Why not just use a tissue when you cough or sneeze? And don’t stand too close to someone when you talk. Problem solved. Masks be gone!

Meanwhile, my friends are inviting me to get-togethers “masks” or “social distancing” (a term I effing  loathe) “required” and BYO drinks and personal snack. Eff me!  I am with the Safeway lady on this one: Eff off. I come with no mask and I share my snacks and wine. I will sneeze or cough into my bent elbow or a tissue. Take me or leave me, or, okay then. I’ll stay home.

The vaccine thing, gives me night tremors. No—Safeway lady, again—effing way! We don’t do flu shots at our house and since we stopped, we never get the flu! Go mediate on that one …

How do I clear my mind? How do I handle this? I need to go on a walk and get bitten by mosquitoes, even that sounds better than this.

—SBM

Tonight after our evening walk (namely, to calm me down, which worked well these walks we do each day during the Twight Zone times in which we are living), we arrived home and I noticed a frog on one of the glass panels of our garage door. These are the windows on the top portion of the door that let the light in. And on one of these panels there was a wee beige frog. Little buddy.

To show J, who was on her Razor scooter still wearing flip flops, I placed my hand lightly over the little guy to carefully (carefully) pick him up, when he jumped and landed and J’s Razor wheel apparently caught his leg and him.

“Wait, don’t move!” I screamed, but it was too late. The frog was injured. I rushed to him on the ground and picked him up. His leg was hurt and maybe more of him. I was crushed. Why did I mess with him at all? I cried. I should have just let him be on the glass and pointed him out to J! but truthfully, I wanted to share him with her, to show her there was nothing to be afraid of.

My good intentions turned into a disaster, as good intentions can often do, to our utter surprise. He was frozen in my hand, probably in shock, and I called myself an idiot, a fool, stupid, all the words one should not use in front of a child. I was devastated.

I immediately started to cry. I couldn’t believe what I had done. This was all my fault 100%. This frog was hanging out on the glass in the night probably waiting to snap up a bug and thenI came around, tried to handle him, and now look what happened. His leg was limp. I was a wreck, feeling selfish and stupid.

J blamed herself since it was her Razor and I said, “No, no, no! This was my fault, entirely all my fault, not yours, but it was an accident.”

Holding him in the palm of my hand, I tried to do whatever I could to help. He didn’t move but he was still alive. I told J to go inside, turn on the porch light, and wait for me. I bent down and placed him on a bed of leaves I created and watched. He didn’t move.

For the rest of the night, I went out to check on him, every 30 minutes or so. He moved a bit, but that was it. I brought him a milk carton cap filled with water and moved him back farther in the bushes for protection.

Back inside I looked up “injured frogs” on the internet. It said leave the frog alone and let it heal on its own. It said frogs with injured legs can survive. Frogs eat worms, mosquitoes, and crickets.

Tomorrow, I told myself, I will check on him. If he is still hanging in there, I will move him to a more secluded area in the garden and will go to the pet store to get him some worms or look for a mosquito.

I hope he survives the night. I feel like a complete idiot. Everything was fine with him until I came along. I did this.

I can’t stop crying.

—SBM

Every day I contemplate leaving the house in search of toilet paper (even though we have plenty at the moment) and I think to myself: am I becoming the hoarder I criticize, those succumbing to their own paranoia that is causing them to irrationally snatch up every last plastic-wrapped pack from store shelves? Or, am I the “reactionary” hoarder who is concerned that the former cohort is causing me to mimic their behavior simply because I am afraid they will snap it all up and the rest of us who are not paranoid are going to be out of luck and out of toilet paper due to the irrational behavior of hoarders?

Do people have spare guest rooms they are filling with toilet paper? I wonder. Under beds, in closets? Do I really have to get up two hours before a store opens and wait in a Black-Friday-like line of masked and gloved people standing six feet apart (and freaking out if you sneeze or cough) so I can buy one pack of toilet paper? If I order it online, must I wait one month to get delivery? Venting… and being rhetorical. I know the answers.

If everyone just continued their normal shopping habits, wouldn’t there be enough toilet paper, rubbing alcohol, hand sanitizer, paper towels, and flour for everyone? What is going to be unavailable next? And when this is over, will we ever look at toilet paper the same way? For me, I think I am going to buy an extra pack every time I go to the store— from now on—so that I have months upon months of toilet paper and therefore will never run out.

And why? It’s not a big deal? Come on, let’s be reasonable.

Before the advent of modern toilet paper in 1857 by Joe, many different materials were used depending on the country, weather conditions, social customs, and status. People used leaves, grass, ferns, corn cobs (this one I don’t get, it seems un-intuitive, painful and who came up with this?) fruit skins, seashells (what?!), stone, sand (seriously a mess), moss, snow and water, and a left hand.

The point being, fast forward to 2020, there are better alternatives should we run out of toilet paper. We can get through this, it’s not the end of the world if we run out. But should the worst happen and you are facing your last roll, let’s break this down. I present to you alternatives for toilet paper in the order of most pleasant to the most egregious:

• Tissue (doesn’t break down like its kissing cousin TP, so flushing them is a risk, better to place in bag and toss)
• Paper towels or paper napkins (no, no, no! don’t flush these, place them in a bag and toss)
• Paper (wet) wipes (obviously don’t flush unless it says on package that they are safe to flush)
• Old newspaper pages (okay, officially getting desperate at this point)
• Yellow pages (yeah, right, good luck on that one), but if you happen to have one sitting around from the 1970s, don’t toss unless you have your plumber as a contact in your phone
• Wash cloth (wipe, place in bucket of soapy water with lid, wash and reuse)

And, I think we have a winner with the wash cloth. Think of the trees we could save! Right? Would this really be that bad?  We can do this if we have to. Think cloth diapers, that was not that long ago.

There are 10,000 ways this could all be worse. If having no toilet paper is the worst you got going, thank your lucky stars.

—SBM

Today I did the dumbest thing possible just after having lectured J about watching where she was going (and not looking down at her phone). As I was waving good- bye to her at school and blew a kiss, and a huh… not looking where I was going, yep, I walked right into a pole! As her 6 –7 grade classmates looked on while running laps around the yard.

(Enter streaming tears emoji, shock faced emoji with huge opened eyes, startled mouth opened wide emoji.) Yep. Right in front of a bunch of 11, 12, and 13-year olds that are ready to laugh and tease at a moment’s notice. All I could overhear after it happened was the word “pole” that accompanied some snickers and finger pointing.

Eeeek. So I did what you are supposed to do when you walk into something, trip on something on the ground, or bump into a pole:  you look back at it like, what are you doing there in my path?

I am going down as the mom who walked into a pole.

Eh, tweens, they’ll forget by tomorrow.