Around Town

It was THAT kind of day, the kind of day when dinner rolls around and you’re returning dishes to Linens and Things, dishes you bought earlier THAT day, while your Costco rotisserie chicken gets cold on the front seat of your van.

On the bright side, it’s a good thing the chicken’s cold because when the kids start begging for food, you can tear off chunks with your bare hands and toss them into their little mouths without burning them.

And now I can’t sleep but I can’t think clearly either. I can think clearly enough that the list of things I didn’t accomplish today and likely won’t accomplish tomorrow play over and over in my head in vivid detail, but not clearly enough to actually do any of them.

My kids ate raw spinach leaves and Costco chicken shards in the car for dinner because apparently we are on the mobile Atkins diet. For breakfast tomorrow I think I’ll load them onto a ferry somewhere in the Puget Sound and throw sausage, eggs and chicken livers at their heads.

Sometimes Magoo talks with a not-splickable Southern accent.

Magoo loves hills.

The Seattle area is full of them.

When he sees one coming up in the distance, he points and strains hulk-like at his carseat straps, yelling, “MOMMY!!!! GO TO HAY-ULL!!! GO. TO. HAY-ULL!!!”

I don’t really want to go there.

A traveling sales person who was “not selling anything” came by my house the other day. He was “not selling” home security systems. They were the best security systems ever and would change my life for the better and possibly prolong it. It was a good thing that he was “not selling” them because I was interested in “not buying” them. When I told him as much, he proceeded to glance around my yard.

“Yeah. I chose to come to your house because it’s so far away from the street light and located by that grove of trees.” He proceeded to tell me all the reasons why he’d determined that my house was a prime target for criminals.

Seriously? Was he seriously trying to scare me into buying the product he was “not selling”? Yes. Yes he was. As he listed all the ways he could break into my house, I started to wonder whether he had previous experience working in the burgling industry. I wondered if he would break into my house and steal the money from my bread canister if I didn’t just fork it over as payment for the security system.

Our pest control guys did the same thing. They showed pictures of ROUSs and gave me a ridiculous list of all the diseases rodents are known to carry. If I didn’t want my children to die the death of characters in a British nursery rhyme, I’d better cough up the $3000 for the rat vacuum.

Just yesterday we took our car in to the shop because the brakes were squeakish. We’ve used the same shop for years and trust them completely. When I dropped off the car, I noticed that the parking lot wasn’t nearly as full as usual… and the store sign had been replaced with a garish neon marquee. The classic car in the show room had been replaced by a pile of sale-priced tires and the general manager was nowhere to be seen. I asked the new guy what had happened to Rick. “Oh, the previous owner retired and sold the place. It’s under new management.”

Hmmm… I might as well have picked a shop out of the yellow pages for all the experience I had with this guy. Not sure what to do, I left the car with him anyway. What I thought would be a $500 brake job turned into $2400 of “necessary” but unobvious repairs.

He asked if we wanted him to go ahead with the repairs, assuring us that if we didn’t do them, our car was a proverbial time bomb rolling around the streets of Seattle. What could we do? We don’t know anything about cars. He could have told us that our radish was lazy and we would have told him to fix it if he said it was life threatening.

I’d like to see this kind of scary sales tactic spread into other industries.

At the makeup counter — “Dang! You’ve got some seriously bad skin. Did you know that if you don’t perform microderm abrasion on skin LIKE THAT, your face will start turning purple at age 37?”

In the smoothie shop — “People with (How many do you have? 3?) 3 kids who live in the Seattle area are 30% more likely to develop fibrous tuboflomia than werewolves living in Athens… UNLESS they ingest dandelion fluff in liquid form twice daily. Would you like me to add some to your drink for just 2 dollars more? You’d like your mommy to maintain long-term use of her earlobes, right little girl?”

I’m late but hope this still counts. Shannon has been doing Works for Me Wednesday for ages. I think it’s a fabulous idea but I never quite get my stuff together on the actual Wednesday so then I feel silly posting something that works for me on a day that the alliteration wouldn’t work as well.

Then Wednesday comes around and nothing seems to be working for me so I don’t post anything. Now I have read and loved Shannon since long before she became the mighty force of internet rock-stardom that she is today and it tickles me pink to present my very first WFMW 3 minutes before midnight Pacific Standard Time.

It works for me to have diapers, hand sanitizer and fruity cheerios on hand when I need them. If you don’t think you could ever NEED fruity cheerios, then I think you should check your kids to see if they’re cyborgs or hippies or something.

I usually keep the essentials in my giant diaper bag of an excuse for a purse, but every once in a while we’re out on the town and I notice I forgot to remember to restock my bag. Never you fear because I have everything I need right at my fingertips in a little plastic basket beside the driver’s seat.

Today I was driving around and Magoo said, “Here you go mama!” and gleefully tried to hand me a rather ominous booger. I pulled a piece of toilet paper from the basket, snagged the goob and disposed of it in my very own suspended garbage receptacle, an item that also works for me quite nicely.

Dan was the first to install one of these in the car and I find it simply ingenious. Instructions for installation are as follows:

1. Make a grocery list.
2. Gather up the children and rubber lizards from your house, put them in the car and drive to the store.
3. Unpack the kids, force them to hold your hand across the street and take them into the store.
4. Jam their writhing wriggling legs into a shopping cart and strap them in.
5. Buy milk, at least three things from your shopping list, Diet Dr. Pepper and cookies.
6. Just say no to 3 types of high fructose insanity in the checkout line while reading about all the celebrities who may or may not be pregnant.
7. Pull the money out of your shirt and pay for groceries.
8. Head for home.
9. Let your kids pull all but one bag of groceries along the cobblestone driveway until the bags shred and the food spills all over the place.
10. Remember to put the milk in the fridge within 4-6 hours of arriving home.
11. Smell it each time you drink it until you imagine it’s probably rotten and then throw it out, even though it just smells like milk.
12. Take the one grocery bag you saved from certain death back out to the car.
13. Thread the handles over the arm rests of the front captains’ chairs.
14. Fill it with debris, wrappers, boogers and polly pocket shoes.
15. Repeat.

These things work for me. And it’s Wednesday.

When you’re driving through town and you get stuck behind some obnoxiously slow unshowered driver still wearing pajamas at 2 in the afternoon, give her the benefit of the doubt.

She may not be a drunk crazy psychopath. She may just be a sleepdeprived crazy fish lady, transporting the family pet in a bowl full of sloshing water to the vacation fish sitter. She may need to go 15 miles per hour to keep fish ish from splattering all over her carpets.

She may be going crazy getting ready for a week-long camping trip with her family and your exasperated gestures from the car behind may just send her over the proverbial “edge”.

Really really loud music in the library maybe sometimes sort of can stop the rock… if you’re attending the concert with small people, people who have tiny and delicate ears.

I’ve been boiling over with excitement to see my favorite literary-themed garage punk band Harry and the Potters live in concert ever since I was blown away with their original hit song This Book is So Awesome a few months ago.

Apparently they planned to hold a concert in their shed but when all the bands canceled, they wrote an entire CD in the course of an hour and performed it that night to an audience of themselves and their 5 friends. Out of that evening was born the legend that is Harry and the Potters.

Now they’ve released several albums and have all kinds of merchandise for sale. They’re touring the country to huge “sellout” crowds at mostly free concerts.

We took Laylee and Magoo and stood in a gigantic line on Friday night outside the Seattle Public Library. The kids danced for money but were thrown none. I don’t know what this world’s coming to but when I see a 2-year-old in downtown Seattle, spinning on his head while waiting to get into a rock concert, I tend to throw down some coin.

I’m pretty sure our family would have won the award for the oldest AND youngest people in line. We would also have won the award for Least Obvious Wizard Costumes and Most Likely To Wear a Color Other Than Black.

After dancing in line for an hour, we made our way into the library, up the giant lime green escalator and into the atrium. Music played on the speakers and Magoo rolled and boiled around on the floor, alternately playing dead and break dancing. At one point the ultra cool security guard said, “Nice moves man,” and at another I said, “Watch out dude or you’re gonna get squished by a goth tween.”

Then the Potters came out.

They sang Voldemort Can’t Stop the Rock.

We cheered and plugged little ears. Laylee cried that it was too loud and we headed home because it was bedtime and because I like standing in line for an hour to listen to 2 minutes of a concert. I am what they call “a mom.”

My only regret is that we didn’t hear them sing This Book is So Awesome.