and the survey says...

Two questions, please, both being asked by Andrew. He has requested responses from you, my readership, please. Even the lurkers.

1. Remember when I invited the Mormons in for cookies? Well, one of us contends that it was perfectly safe and one of us contends that they could have been faux-Mormons-slash-serial-killers, despite the name tags, and that it was dangerous. Opinions, please.

2. Over dinner, one of us (the one who puts the air conditioning on by mid-April for fear of sweating in his own home) had the balls-out nerve to call me High Maintenance, while one of us (the one who had recently spent three days and two nights camping and eating s'mores with four children, only two of whom were my own) contends that, despite affiinities for nail polish and lobster I am, at most, Medium Maintenance. Your opinions would be appreciated here too, please.

Oh, for crying out loud. Now he contends that the setup implies preferred answers. He says that, no matter what you say, he already finds this experience "scientifically flawed beyond redemption" and totally invalid. He wants me to lie and tell you that I am filling out some fucking Cosmo Quiz or something. Just be truthful, folks. I can take it.

Camping pix and The Tale of The Great Strawberry Jam Jam to follow later in the week.

Love and kisses.

what would you do?

Dear Miss Manners:

A nice lady just called to say she had my phone! She found it in the shopping cart at Wal-Mart. Andrew is going to pick it up on his way home from work in a couple of hours. I can't do it myself, because I'll be taking Mr. My Ear Hurts to the pediatrician just then, on the other side of town.

Obviously, I can't send a gift with Andrew today. Do I drop a giftie off tomorrow, after the fact, or do I just chalk it up to karma...the universe rpaying me for the time that I found a phone and got it back to its rightful owner...?

Love,
Terry, aka Phew!

knee slapper

I read this on echo this week and, God help me, but it cracks me up...

What's the opposite of Christopher Reeve?

Christopher Walken

Conservative Talk Blogging

I find myself a little mystified and confused this afternoon. Now and again, when I've found myself with a few free computer-minutes, I've been doing a little surfing via BlogExplosion. We've talked about this. It's kind of a "you read mine, I'll read yours" thing. You get 30 seconds to read a random blog and, I guess, if you like it, you bookmark it, and everyone's traffic goes up. Voila.

But, seriously, at least 50% of the blogs that come up are these hate-filled conservative journals. They're all about Vote for Bush This, and Kerry Sucks That. What is up with the proliferation of Conservative Talk Blogging? It's very demoralizing.

Myself, I am feeling desperately hopeful, but ultimately pessimistic about the election. If you have a friend in Cleveland, call her today and tell her to vote for Kerry. Twice.

Speaking of conservatives, I know that we've talked about my pal the contractor, who likes to listen to Rush Limbaugh in my basement. It gives me hives. This week, we finally came out to each other. Well, I came out to him. His particular bent was pretty well-known to me. The hatemongers on the radio were yelling at each other, and I muttered something about angry people with microphones, and he said I love it and I said Oh, I know and then I said Know what's going to happen on Tuesday? and he said We're going to cancel each other out? and I said We might as well stay home and then we had a lovely chat and that was that. Mostly.

Yesterday, while we were talking in the garage, Jonah started messing with the radio. I said What are you putting on, Jonah? Al Franken?, and the contractor said Heh. NPR. Really, that just floored me. Truth be told, I listen to NPR at some point, even if it's just nice music in the car, almost every day. I listen to All Things Considered when I'm cooking dinner. I thought everyone loves NPR. Really. I'm that stupid. I mean, I guess I'd heard around that conservatives think it's too liberal, but it's one of my primary news sources and everyone I know (see also: Liberal Democrats) loves it, and I'd never actually heard anyone snort when he said "NPR" before. It was rather shocking. To tell the truth, it felt a bit like hearing someone insult my mother or something.

Want to hear a funny NPR story? One time, more than a year ago, Emily had printed out some postcards from a Barbie website. She had a pen and asked me how to spell "Robert," because she was addressing it to Robert.

Robert Who, Honey?

Robert Siegel.

We don't know any Robert Siegel, Darling.

Yes we do. The man on the radio.

She was addressing it to the host of All Things Considered. A good little Liberal Democrat in Training. No Blogging for Bush for her!

what did she say?

Note the fourth paragraph from the bottom of this Yahoo! News story.

Personal to writer Sarah Hall: Please note the following definitions, both courtesy of dictionary.com.

An epitaph is "an inscription on a tombstone in memory of the one buried there."

An epithet is "an abusive or contemptuous word or phrase."

I suppose that something could be both, but it seems pretty unusual.

Now, can someone please explain to me how come this dingus gets paid to write, and I do it for free?

update: Don't bother following the link, unless you feel like reading about the Wild and Wacky Hilton Sisters. A very angry editor The writer caught it already.

fragrance free

Earlier this evening, Andrew was getting ready to give Emily a bath, and he asked her if she wanted to use some of her bubble bath...the bubble bath that someone other than I gave to her, and that smells of her choice of peach, raspberry, or strawberry. I gently reminded him that she should have bubble bath only once in a while, that it was unhealthy for her to have it too often.

He asked why, and I explained that it is unhealthy for her vagina.

He wanted to know how I knew this, insinuating that I was making things up. Again.

I told him that I just know. I know because my mother told me it was true, and her mother told her. His mother's mother told her, and then she told his sister. Everyone knows this. It's somewhere in the first chapter of the Oral Manual of the Care and Feeding of Your Vagina. No scented tampons, and perfumed bubble bath on infrequent occasions only.

He gave me that look, and went up for bath time.

I thought for a second about searching for some more definitive proof, but I was afraid to google little girl +bubble bath +vagina.

So I ask those of you who own vaginas of your own:

• are you also under the impression that you're not supposed to put smelly stuff near it?


• do you know that because your mother told you so?

sticky, ain't it?

A question:

You have a 12-year old child. She is very friendly with one half of a set of twins, and hardly knows the other, and has been invited to their b'nai mitzvah.

Do you gift only the one she knows? If you gift them both, do you gift them equally?

I will reveal my answer, which, for the record and maybe for the first time ever, is diametrically opposed to both my mother's and to Julie's, later.

see what you see

I'm a little apprehensive of posting about this in too much detail, because I don't care to share Salman Rushdie's fate, but want to see something weird?

Google Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman (the mastermind behind the 1993 WTC bombing), Sheik Ahmad Yassin (the assassinated leader of Hamas), Abdurrahman Wahid (President of Indonesia), and Abu Hamza al Masri (currently busting balls in Iraq).

What is up with that?

the pain of gas and bloating

I have gas on the brain.

First I am thinking of the gas that I am refluxing up every eleven minutes or so...a penalty for having eaten at the world's most charming roadside stand, with the world's worst food, for dinner last night.

Second, I am thinking about the gas tank in the Odyssey. Can someone please explain to me how come, if we're fighting a war in the Middle East, and Halliburton is running the country, the Sunoco is charging TWO DOLLARS AND THIRTEEN CENTS for a gallon of gas?

A girl can hardly afford a pleasure trip to the mall these days!

if i shower, why spring flowers?

So, here I am in sunny Florida, at my mom's house. Like every year at this time, I think that I am totally fucking flat-out you-belong-in-BOCES stupid for living someplace where there's winter. I don't ski; I don't ice skate; I don't even think that building snowmen is very much fun. So why the bloody hell am I in Connecticut? Andrew swears that the schools down here are crappy, but I'm not even sure I care about that. I just want to wear shorts every day for the rest of my life.

I did some laundry tonight. I veered away from my usual compulsive sorting, and just tossed it all into the drum. Then I threw what I thought was a capful of soap in there, but it turns out it was some kind of Spray and Wash laundry booster, so I found the soap and threw that in, too. Now, the thing you need to know is this: I am adamant that my laundry products be completely fragrance-free. Ever since my first pregnancy, when just about everything in New York smelled like a urinal, I am very sensitive to smell, and I don't like the dreaded combo scent of Tide and Downy clinging to my clothes. So, as I realized what I had tossed in there, I thought to myself, "Oh, great. Now all of my clothes are going to smell like a douche."

But then I thought to myself, "But I don't really know what a douche smells like, do I? I just assume that they smell like Tide."

True confession time: while I have made about a jillion jokes about douches and their attendant bags in my lifetime, I have never actually contemplated, purchased, or used a commercial douche. I do have a vague memory of having used a medically-ordered iodine douche before a "maybe it's endometriosis, so we'll just scrape your uterus to be sure" d&c when I was about 19, but I may be confusing it with an enema. Or it may be one of those therapist-induced false memories or something.

So, then: what on earth is the point of these things? Am I to believe that it would be better if my vagina smelled like Spring Flowers? Or is it my uterus that's supposed to smell like Spring Flowers? I don't even understand how the thing works. Just how far up my hoo-ha does it squirt and rinse? I do know for an absolute fact that that's not even what Spring Flowers smell like.

Let's assume that I am not the only one here with this experience and these questions. If that's the case, then here is the biggest question of all: Just who is buying enough douches to stock an entire section in the HBA department of every drug store and discounter in America? Wal-Mart sells them; CVS sells them; even the last Rexall in America is selling them, I'm sure. But who is buying all those douches?

Or maybe my experience is singular and it's the rest of you skulking through the checkout with them...Ok, yeah, some cheetos, a box of pencils, wd-40, Spring Flowers...I'll bet you wouldn't even tell me if you were.

Douchebags.

back to normal tomorrow

It's Mardi Gras today, everywhere, but especially in New Orleans, where Julie's Aunt Betty lives.

I wonder if she's spending the day hiding under her bed or showing her tits to frat boys...Middle-Aged Aunts Gone Wild!

post-feminist electronic riddling

Can someone please explain to me why, in this day of seven email addresses per paid account, I still get emails from "John and Marsha So-and-So"?

Rule around here: My email is my own. Don't even *think* about reading it.

is she really a gay man?

Cast the controversy aside for just a moment, and compare these diet tips.

The first is from Ted Allen, the food dude on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy*:

The only diet most people will ever need:
Eat anything and everything you want,
so long as it's natural.

Just don't eat so damned much of it.

And this next one is from Julie:

everything i know about nutrition can be summed up in these few phrases:

eat vegetables all the time
eat from a broad variety of foods
eat crap only in moderation
don't eat as much as you want to, you fat pig

See, now I happen to think that "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy with Special Guest Stars Terry and Julie" would be a terrific program...I'm just not sure how to "package" my pitch to Bravo.



*Check your local listings if you feel like it; boycott it if you don't. Whatever. I don't really care.

i'm on fire

How can it be that, after a dinner of 12 tater tots, a bowl of rice krispies and banana, and a glass of red wine, I have heartburn?

why me?

After finishing my last entry and whining about my bites, I wondered, well, why do the mosquitoes like me best? A bit of poking around on the good old internet provides us with these insights:

The reason some people get bit more than others has to do with the amount of odors that come from their bodies.

Women are more attractive to mosquitoes than men. Particularly women when they are ovulating.

In general, adults are bitten more than children, and larger people more than smaller. People who do not sweat do not get as many bites.

The bloodthirsty bugs apparently are drawn to foot odor as well as a light layer of sweat and higher body temperature.

Dark skin and dark clothing are more attractive to the critters than light clothing.

One new study from Japan might even put a damper on certain kinds of outdoor merrymaking. It suggests people who drink alcohol attract more mosquitoes than those who stick with soda.

Apparently, the problem is that I am a hot, sweaty, stinky, fertile, black-t-shirt-wearing, drunken broad.

But we knew this.

And, finally, some cold-hearted freak offers this suggestion for the rest of you:

If you can figure out who, among your friends, is attractive to mosquitoes and be sure to invite that person to all your outdoor gatherings, you might be able to spare your other guests from mosquito bites.

I'll be waiting by the mailbox.

itchy, itchy, very itchy

Ever since I was a little kid, I have been plagued by mosquito bites. I was always the camper with the most spots, scratched until they swelled and bled and scabbed over. How I managed to go all those years without giving myself impetigo is a complete mystery.

Now, thanks to the rainiest season in history, I am covered with bites, despite daily dousings with DDT. Specifically:

* back and shoulder, 6 bites
* right arm, 4 bites
* left arm, no fewer than 9 bites (Andrew says that, thanks to my night time scratching, it looks like Trainspotting. Nice, huh?)
* ass, 2 bites
* left pinky, second knuckle, palm side, 1 bite
* right ring finger, first knuckle, dorsal side, 1 bite
* right calf, 1 bite
* left eyebrow, 1 bite
* crown of head, 1 bite, old and scabby
* right cheek, 1 bite, looks like giant pimple

But here's the incredible thing: I didn't feel a single bite occur. Not one. I haven't slapped a mosquito since last year. Haven't even seen one.

I am fairly certain it's some sort of insect-based conspiracy. Either that, or I have bedbugs.

oxymoronic

what is fat free half and half, anyway?

tongue in cheek

Q: How much watermelon can Jonah stuff into his mouth at once?

A: How much have you got?

mom was right. it's a 4-letter word.

Is anything more tedious than ironing table linen?

vegetables: good for you!

This week's Big Y circular says of the 99¢ per pound green beans:

Fat Free! Low In Calories!

To whom, exactly, did that need to be pointed out?

the weighting is the hardest part

Yesterday morning, the scale said 138.0.

I had two small muffins for breakfast and a good-sized bowl of onion soup (ok, croutons and cheese) for lunch, bur really didn't snack all day long. We went out for a big restaurant dinner -- shared appetizers, spinach salad, sea bass with potatoes, creme brulee, and two bottles of wine shared between three people.

I was curious, so I got on the scale again at bedtime.

143.0.

I ate five pounds over the course of the day?!?

more than one is called a troop

How can a person, having presumably graduated from high school and college, think that the plural of daisy is daisy's?

no pain, no gain

Why was it so important for me to have a baby without an epidural when I don't even like the dentist talking to me until he breaks out the novocaine?