The Thing that Lives in my Lamp

Today's blog is brought to you by:  The thing that lives in the hanging lamp in the front entryway of our rental house.

We moved into this house last fall, and I am ashamed to admit that I have known about the thing in the lamp since shortly after we moved in.  I was just too lazy to do anything about it, you see.

Which reminds me of the Easter card I bought for Chris at the grocery store tonight, that I only just now realized I left on top of the self-checkout machine.  Crap.


I should explain that the card had a picture of a lady sitting in front of a Christmas tree.  The tree had a bit of what I would call an excessive amount of tinsel, but that's besides the point.  When you opened the card, it read, "Mary Lou realized it was Easter, and you know what that means.. time to take down the Christmas tree."


I thought this was hilarious, because one April in 2007 I was that person. 

But enough about my intermittent tendency towards procrastination.  We were discussing the thing in the lamp.  I took some pictures for you.  They are not very good pictures, but you'll get the idea.

 

It looks like some bit of mutant fern.  Or a really, really, really large centipede.  

Here's what I know:

1) It's not alive, because it hasn't moved or changed since the first time I noticed it.

2) I can't reach it without a ladder.  Which we don't have.

3) I am not even about to attempt standing on a chair and trying to fish it out with my hand without being able to see what it is first.

Which leaves us with what I don't know:

1) Whatever the hell it is.

And what do YOU think it is?

Memoir Monday: How NOT to rent a car in France

It's time for a Memoir Monday!  This one is entitled:

How (not) to rent a car in France. In 6 easy steps.




When I was 19, I spent a semester in France. The university I attended was just about 2 hours west of Paris, so at one point, my best friend and I decided that it would be a good idea to rent a car and drive to Paris.

Step 1: You must be 25 to rent a car in Paris. If you are not 25, play dumb until the last minute when the rental car guy asks for your driver’s license/passport/international ID card. At that point it’s too late and he already went through the paperwork hassle. Bring a friend who’s 25 and SWEAR that friend will be doing all the driving.

Step 2: Be prepared to look very uncool. You will not be driving incognito, my friend.

Step 3: Learn to drive a stick shift. It is preferable if you learn to drive a stick shift before you rent the car. It is also preferable if you have more stick-shift driving experience than twenty minutes in your friend’s dad’s 1957 Chevy with a 3-in-the-tree stick shift that stalls out halfway across town.

Step 4: Learn to drive in a roundabout.  It helps if you've completed Step 3 first.  If you don't know, wing it.  Pretend you are a master of the roundabout. Don’t be all scared like “I’ve never driven in a roundabout or anywhere in the continent of Europe or hell, I’ve never driven a stick shift.” Instead be like, “Haha roundabout, take that! Those other cars will move, I'm almost sure of it.”

Step 5: If you get lost, at night time, and you pull into someone’s driveway to turn around, and then you back out, make sure there is no oncoming traffic in case your clever manipulation of the stick shift results in the car stalling out crossways in the middle of the road while your passengers stare in horror at a set of oncoming headlights… (don’t worry, we got it started again in the nick of time)

Step 6: Book a hotel room in advance. Otherwise you may end up at a little hovel next to the "nude dancing girls" venue because it's the only one that still has rooms available.

And a bonus:

When you return the car to the rental place a few days later, intact and unscratched, make sure to go home and say your prayers.

Sometimes you don't even need the Sniff Test

Chris makes fun of me often for my very lax perception of food that can still be considered "edible."  Maybe had I ever had food poisoning I would be a lot more cautious, but the fact of the matter is, if it looks okay and smells good, I'll probably still eat it.   We call this the "Sniff Test."

Today, however, I met a food for which I did not even need to employ my superior deductive powers of smell.

I dug the bottle lime juice out of the back of the fridge for a recipe that I was trying to follow.  I poured the required ounces into a shot glass (hey, I didn't have anything else to measure by!).  (And also, I may have been making myself a margarita.)

The lime juice sat in the shot glass, a sickly brown color.

"Hmmm," I thought to myself, "is lime juice supposed to be this color when it comes out of the bottle?"

I asked my dad.

"I don't know," he replied, "why don't you taste it?"

(Good idea, dad!  Rancid lime juice smells the same as good lime juice, so why don't I taste it?!  I can see we are both geniuses when it comes to the analytical methods in which we can determine the consumptive value of food.)

I stuck my pinkie finger in the glass and tasted a tiny bit.

It tasted funny.

I looked at the bottom of the bottle:

Oh, yeah, that's a definite FAIL.

No sniff test required.  Although, in retrospect, a taste test probably wasn't required, either.

Warrior Dash

So, Chris and I are doing this thing.

It is called the Warrior Dash.

I am woefully out of shape.

That's really all I have to say about that.




(Except that it's a competition, Chris and Payson against myself and Payson's wife.  My only hope is that they are less prepared than us.  Which is a possibility- although I can't discount sheer determination on their part, either.)

Monster Truck Rally

Last night, Chris and I were relaxing in the living room, watching an episode of House.  At one point in the episode, Dr. House has the team meet him in the parking lot of the hospital.  The following scene takes place:

House has driven Colossus, a bright yellow-and-blue monster truck, right into his handicapped parking spot (and several others). He's got to lower a rope ladder from the window just so the team can climb in, which they all do.

As House and his team are careening around the city, discussing medical diagnoses in the giant monster truck, Chris turns to me.

"You know," Chris says, "that's not how you get into a monster truck."

ME: Hunh?

CHRIS:  You don't lower a rope ladder and climb in through the window.  You get in from underneath.

(Pause)

CHRIS:  And also, you can't fit that many people in the cab.  There is no backseat in a monster truck.

Uh-oh, somebody call FOX.  The screenwriters need to brush up on their redneck.

I'd like to file a complaint...

Things have been a little quiet around here lately, I'll be the first to admit it.  Work has been absolutely insane, 12 hour work days six days a week.  There are days when the weather is beautiful and I've accomplished so much and I love my job, and then there are days when I have to go home and cry for an hour on my lunch break.  You know, the usual highs and lows.

And not that there isn't a lot to talk about.  But it's all work.  In fact, a co-worker and I were just commenting on how we could write a book about all the crazy stuff that happens in our jobs.

But I don't talk about work on here, namely because there are a lot of very sensitive issues that we deal with that involve lawyers and the government and blah blah blah.

In other words, you know your job might be a bit high profile if a bomb scare means that Homeland Security comes out to pay you a visit.  In fact, your job might be high profile if it gets a bomb scare.  (Don't worry, it wasn't a bomb.)

But this one thing is almost too funny to be real.  And since I don't have much else to talk about...

In the course of what we do, we sometimes have to employ road flaggers to divert traffic around our operations.  This can cause some delays to the normal traffic flow, which of course we minimize as much as possible, but still it results in some unavoidable traffic stops.  We occasionally get complaints from members of the public who are affected by our work.  

This is an actual complaint.

A gentlemen called to tell us that he had eaten at one of the local restaurants that day.  Unfortunately, his meal didn't sit too well with him.  He was driving back to his house, but it took him longer than usual because of the traffic delays from our flaggers.  And, well, he didn't make it home in time.  And he had an accident.... in his pants.

Oh  yes, you read that right.  He called to complain that we made him crap his pants.

Sexy Pizza Cops

Let's just take a minute to appreciate how much I love pizza.

Although, ironically, I didn't like pizza so much when I was growing up.  This is ironic because when I was growing up, my father owned a pizza restaurant.

When I was about 8 or 9, my parents hauled myself and my younger brother out to this small university town in Kansas.  My father was going to open a pizza place.  He bought a space from another pizza place that was going out of business.  The place was located across the street from campus, and the previous owners had hoped to cash in on all the hungry college students.  The problem was, they didn't offer delivery.  They didn't think this would be a problem, seeing as how one of the main campus dorms was right across the street.  Newsflash: college students are lazy.  Why would you walk across the street when you can pick up the phone?  A-duh.


Here are the three elements for a successful pizza restaurant in a college town:
1) Be cheap
2) Be open late
3) Offer delivery

My father opened a business that offered cheap, tasty pizza, and on the weekends you could even get delivery as late as 2am.

Also there was an often played radio advertisement involving the phone number that was so catchy, pretty much everyone in town had the phone number memorized.

(Oh yeah, if you know what song I'm talking about I bet you're singing it in your head right now.)

And there you have it.  Ten years later, and I was that college student, living in the dorm across the street and calling in my order for delivery.  You see, sometime between 8 and 18 I had fostered a serious fondness for pizza.

After my brother and I had both graduated from high school and my parents became empty-nesters, my father sold the business to a long-time employee and my parents moved to Michigan.

The business is still there, and although competition has diminished its popularity from what it once was, it's still selling pizzas to college students, living on in moderate obscurity.

That is, until Web Soup got a hold of one of their super cheesy (no pun intended) television commercials:



Ah, pizza of my childhood.  May you live on in infamy.