I scammed another ten dollar Taco Bell prize on the KMGN trivia contest today.
Q: Only two species of animal sweat. One is human, what's the other?
A: Meatloaf! No, I mean Pigs!
I have no idea whether that's really true, but it scored the prize. A couple more of those and I'm a celebrity*, right?
* Dweeb.**
**Right. Already there.
I got an interesting story from Amanda last night while driving home. It seems Harrison discovered earwax a couple days ago. He woke up and went running to her with a grievous complaint, "Mommmmm, Giselle put something in my EAR when I was ASLEEP!" as he held up an orangey, wax-globbed finger. "She put PAINT in my ear!" Amanda tried to explain, "No honey, that's..." But he would have none of it, "She DID it when I was ASLEEP!" And then as she worked on extracting from his other ear, "She put it it my OTHER ear TOO????" I just about beat my head against the steering wheel from laughter, and Giselle was in the back seat protesting between giggles, "I did NOT do that Harrison! I did NOT!" while he stared accusingly at her. Woo! We've got to keep up maintenance on that boy or he's liable to exact revenge some brooding night.
But hey, I know how it is. One day you're reaming your ears with Q-Tips and the coast is all clear, and then suddenly inside of 24 hours, it's like some reclusive ear-gopher wakes up and starts goosh-kicking a wax mound out the hole. And next thing you know as you're sitting at a traffic light, you suddenly feel the tentative nudgings of your loving wife's finger as she begins excorticating your earhole flapjacks. Yikes. Tantalizing, yet creepy and embarrassing all at the same time. "Hey Bob, check it out. That guy's wife is picking the crumbs out of his ears. Bwahahaha...I mean, on second thought, I think I'm gonna puke...hurrrggghhh..."
Today, while out in traffic, I glanced at the car to my right and caught sight of a lady so heavily jowled that I literally jumped back against my door. Thank goodness the car wasn't in motion, or I might've gone off the road. Afterward, I felt horrible, as the fight-or-flight adrenaline was shooting through me and I fumbled around behind my back to make as though I had accidentally leaned against something pointy. Poor gal...yikes.
I think the lady around the corner from our office is trying to kill us. I'm not saying I can see my breath in here, but it gets cold enough that my hands are purplish and stiff and delicate mouse & keyboard operations are failing me. Apparently, the thermostat for our series of offices resides in her room, and while I understand there are known risks to hormone replacement therapy, aren't there also risks to vaccinations and such? We take these risks so we can minimize the threat to the people we live and work with. The weather has gotten cold enough that I'm not wearing my light jacket as often, so I'm sitting here in my 5 pound innuit whale-blubber coat and I'm nice and toasty, except for my ice-cubified hands. I just need to break down and buy some hobo gloves with the fingertips cut out of them. Because goodness knows I'm too much of a coward to confront Henrietta Hotflash or the crabby building maintenance guy about putting us on a separate circuit when I could so much more easily whine about it.
I reached a breaking point this weekend and told the kids, "I grow WEARY of your lies." To say the least, they were both very put out by this assertion. But the gathering crescendos of blame, accusation and contradiction must come to an end. And I do not wish to accomplish it by expending money placing surveillance equipment in every nook and cranny of the house and then reviewing footage after every 'incident'...as satisfying as that may be..."Ahah! As you can see, Buzz Lightyear yanked off his OWN head out of pure despair; your sister had nothing to do with it. I call shenanigans! Everybody to their rooms!"
Crazy little critters.
I walked in from the store Saturday morning and noticed Giselle sinking behind the couch as I entered the door. The investigation alert went off, but I had to put the groceries away first. As I was putting things in the fridge, I noticed Harrison shuffling into the kitchen, catching sight of me, and turning right back around..."Hey buddy, what's up?" His mumbled reply, "Leave me alone," put the hair up on the back of my neck. "What's wrong Harrison?"..."Go away."..."ehhh...ALRIGHT WHAT DID YOU GUYS DO?" I knew this was going to take some time to sort out accurately, so I went to the bathroom first so I could interrogate and analyze with a clear head.
When I turned the water off after washing my hands, the house was as quiet as a crypt. I began peeking in rooms and finally ended up in the kitchen where I noticed Harrison standing in the cupboard with his back to me, "Okay, what..." He jumped like I goosed him and then went possum-still, maybe hoping I would mistake him for a broomstick or a stack of soup cans. So I reached in and pried him out so I could see what he had gotten into. Slowly I turned him around while he protested and told me to leave him alone, and that's when the great peanut butter travesty came into full view. The clown face of creamy tan smears glistening with saliva almost tickled my gag reflex, but I stamped that down as I jumped back and scrambled for the napkins before he could reach out and touch me or anything else. I made some quick wipes and then sprinted to the couch to extract his sister before she could exude any further peanutty creaminess on her surroundings. She wasn't happy about being jimmied out of her hiding spot either, but there were no evasions to be had this time. I had them both brown-handed.
There were some minor buck-passings of course: "She OPENED it!"..."HE made the MESS!", etc., but those were brushed aside as I lectured on the revolting vileness of finger-dipping and licking out of the jar and how every germ and crumb and particle from their mouths and hands was now festering and thriving in that oozing clot of a peanut butter jar that was henceforth theirs and theirs alone. And that if they wanted peanut butter that bad, I'd be happy to scoop a big lump of it on a plate for them any time they want, but no more raw finger double-dipping. Blehhhhhhh. I said that, "Blehhhhhhhhh!" That was my closing argument. And Giselle just stood there the whole time with her jaw cocked to one side and her eyes rolled up and away from me. Six years too early if you ask me.
Today, I won the daily trivia contest from my nemesis, KMGN The Mountain of Classic Meatloaf. The question was, "What is the average life span of a human hair?" In my wisdom, I realized they weren't talking about the stillborn life span of hair that I'm used to, so I prodded Google and ran across '6 years' and 'from 2 to 6 years' on a couple websites. I got through via the miracle of *-9 redial every 5 seconds, guessed '6 years' and missed. Undeterred, I tried again, since the jokers they were playing on the breaks so far were guessing 47 years and 100 years. And I'm thinking, for Pete's sake, your dialing fingers have GOT to be hurting, can't you guess something sensible for your trouble? So I got through again, purely on account of my masterful dialing and pausing skills. I averaged the second site's numbers, guessed 4 years, and scored the prize. Ten dollars off at Taco Bell. D'oh! When I have my weekly cholesterol-cheating piggie meal, I can tell you right now, it's not going to be from Taco Bell. But still, I can use it to pick up some tacos or Mexican Pizzas any of the people in my life that aren't vascularly challenged. Fortunately, the DJ wasn't expecting me to get all worked up in a lather of excitement because I won, like some of those characters do. "Hey! You just won a five dollar gift certificate to Jake's Plumbing Fixtures! How does THAT make you feel???"
"Like a freaken loser, pal."
But I was gracious. Because, hey, mouths to feed.
The guy did ask me what I was up to. "Oh, just workin away" (...except for all the dialing I just finished doing, buddy). And then he asks the kicker question they always ask, "Where are ya workin?" Whereupon I engaged my cloaking device, "Uh, yeeeahhh, I'd rather not sayyyyyy." "Ohhhh, you work at one of THOSE places, huh? Har har har." And I'm thinking, yeah, and so does almost everybody else who calls in, but I guess I'm the only one who doesn't want to stir up the office cranks, thank you very much.
Right. Gotta go pick up Giselle at school.
Mobile.
Okay people, here's the deal. I have almost completely handicapped myself in the interest of progress and under the goadings of a healthy dose of sudden peer pressure. I switched over to the dvorak keyboard layout a week ago. I've whymsied about doing it for a few years, but didn't have the gizzard for it until a couple friends plunged ahead and set about taunting me to action. In case you don't know, dvorak is a keyboard layout that is actually designed for typing as opposed to the qwerty layout that everybody uses and is a hundred year old Rev-A product that never made it out of beta testing. You don't need a new keyboard, you just have to fiddle with your control panel settings and strap on your seatbelt and helmet for the sudden messy collision with the looming brick wall of lost productivity. To which I said to myself, pffff how could I possibly be any less productive?
But it is stinging mightily. I've gone from 75 words per minute down to 14 and came to clearly appreciate something--My brain-to-keyboard efficiency level used to hover quite nicely around 90%. Now, compare that to my brain-to-mouth efficiency, which is probably more like a measley 40% with laughably sore hope of ever improving. Which means if I really want to muse on something, typing it out is one of the best ways for me to flesh it out. But not anymore buddy. I'm down to negative efficiancy numbers...if that's possible...which, I should know, since I'm the one making up the scale. Thoughts...aren't...flowing...freely......text...disjointed...
I'm counting on it getting better and being glad I suffered through this in the long run.
Bonus news: I finally fired a tranq dart into my no-test-result-mailing doctor's office today and found out that my cholesterol level had dropped in 6 weeks from 257 to 189...
BAM!!
And liver enzymes were back to normal levels for extra happiness.
So now I will rejoice by going to bed and tossling through tortuous typing dreams.
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