Cuff Him, Danno

          Two weeks ago I blogged about Bob’s incredible luck.  It floated right up to the Irony Fairies in the Constellation Not So Fast, and now we’ve been to the Emergency Room.

          Bob had a doctor appointment recently, so they slapped a blood pressure cuff on him and all of a sudden the room is lit up like the Aurora Borealis.  Lights are flashing, sirens are going off (I assume this is like a casino when you hit the jackpot?) and he is told that when your blood pressure goes over 200 you need to go to the emergency room. Definitely not the jackpot.

          We jump into the car and I take a moment to say, “I am begging you.  Please let me drive like a bat out of hell.  This is my one chance to get away with it.” (You may not know this, but I once called an ambulance service to see if non-medical people can volunteer to drive ambulances.  They can not.)

          Bob looks at me and says, “It will raise my blood pressure even more.”  I start the car, take off, and urge him to recline the seat and close his eyes so he won’t see how fast I’m going, but he refuses.

          “Fine,” I tell him. I obey the law. “But I get to advocate for you when you get there.”  I am, shall we say, a different creature in hospital settings and am not always happily received by people whose decisions I'm questioning.

          Once again, he refuses my offer. In fact, he wants me to restrain myself.  Or “retrain” myself.  I can’t really recall.  Pretty sure it wasn’t “remain” myself.

          We get there and apparently sign up for the deluxe package which means they will run every expensive test they can imagine, starting with an EKG, progressing through lab tests and running for home plate with an MRI.

          It takes five hours, during which time he cannot eat or drink anything.  I try to smuggle him a sip of water but Obedient Bob refuses.

          Finally-- and I am really glad you’re sitting down as you read this—his doctor comes over and says, “Well, we really don’t treat high blood pressure in the emergency room.”  Apparently it’s against the policy of the American College of Emergency Physicians.

          And I want to jump from my chair, get right in his face and scream, “THEN WHAT ARE WE DOING HERE?” Nicely, of course.

          But Bob has put me under a gag order and I have to smile and nod and watch as a nurse whips up a “cocktail” of pain killers for him that will now pay for lifetime docking fees in addition to the sailboat we’ve just bought somebody.  We learn it’s mostly Tylenol and we decide to save a couple of car payments and just take Tylenol at home.

          We leave and Bob is perplexed.  One of us has to be livid, so it’s me. The next day he tops the 200 mark again (it’s a holiday weekend and we can’t see our doctor for three days), so now I take him to an Urgent Care clinic hoping for a prescription, at least.  Nope.  Wouldn’t help, we’re told. Just buy a home monitoring unit and see your family doctor next week.

          So he does, and finally gets a prescription.  Which doesn’t work. His numbers are bouncing up and down all over the place. But we understand these things may take a couple of weeks to kick in.  So if it doesn’t work, “kick in” is going to be my new operative phrase. And you don’t want to be standing in the way.

Yeah, yeah, I know.  You’d think my own blood pressure was high.  Oddly it’s so low that nurses ask me if I’m a runner. Irony abounds.  Oh—and so do my books—buy ’em here.

When King Kong Meets Hong Kong

          Imagine for a moment that you are a filmmaker and you’ve been hired to go to Hong Kong to make a film promoting Hong Kong tourism.

          Now, I’ve been to Hong Kong, so let me tell you it’s a photographer’s dream.  Beautiful junks on the bay:

Tiantan Buddha:

The Peak:

Ladies Market:

The Clock Tower:

          You film it all.  Even the delicious food:

          And then WHAMMO—a rare Class 10 typhoon hits. The entire city closes down like a ghost town for 24 hours.

          You have the good sense not to tell your mother, and you hope she doesn’t hear about it on the news (Thank you, Cassidy).  But the irony is not lost on you—who goes to a location to show how great it is, and then it nearly gets blown off the map?  Yes, that is the Hilton Irony that our youngest son will experience, probably forever. And this is why every one in our family loves comedy.  Case in point, here's our eldest son wearing a shirt that says, "Irony. The opposite of wrinkly."

Check out my humorous books here, especially Sisters in the Mix.

Lucky Bob

          Some people are just lucky.  They always find the best parking spot, they call people who always answer the phone, they win at every game.

          St. Bob is one of these people. He actually has no idea what it’s like to be a regular Joe, to find himself in the slowest supermarket line, or in the slowest lane of traffic.  It’s as if guardian angels are dashing ahead of him, clearing the way for St. Bob.

          And, of course, let’s not forget his incredible luck in marrying me. HOWEVER, his luck has taken a weird twist, recently.  And it has shown up in the form of fortune cookies.

          Here are two fortunes I recently received, which unlike the common “advice cookies” we see today, actually promised me fortunes, even if oddly worded:

          Then, check out the “fortunes” Bob got at two recent business luncheons, both at the same Chinese restaurant:

          Yes, I think Bob’s Fortune Fairy has taken a cruise to the Bahamas, and her dopey cousin, Frieda, is filling in for her.  So far the parking spots and traffic lanes are unaffected, but we’re hoping the cruise doesn’t turn into a trip around the world.

          You can control your own good fortune by purchasing any one of my books.  Lucky you, they’re right here!

The Crazy Handyman

          St. Bob and I have spent the majority of our marriage remodeling.  This is because he is a closet architect and loves to re-imagine spaces and I am a closet supportive wife (very much in the closet at times) and agree to his schemes. I mean his inventive plans.

          When I hear couples anguishing about the stress of a remodel, I think, What must that be like, NOT to be remodeling?

          For years we’ve had workmen traipsing in and out, dust in the air, sawing noises, hammering, and yes—a ladder falling onto our baby grand piano and causing it to be refinished.  It’s not something everyone brags about, but I have probably seen more butt cracks than any human alive.

          So I know a thing or two about hiring contractors and handymen. Now I like crazy people as much as the next person (more, if you ask St. Bob), but here's my advice: You are in for a load of misery if you hire someone who needs to be on medication and who is not.

Next to choosing the correct spouse, this one decision can account for 90 per cent of your future happiness.  Okay, that’s made up, but it’s pretty important.  Take, for example, a fellow we’ll call Barney.  We hired Barney because he was an inactive member of our church and we thought we could help him find his way back.  But Barney can drive you crazy in five seconds or less—faster than many Porsches can hit 60 miles an hour.

If he is in a jovial mood, you will mistakenly think everything is going to go well.  But there is a huge difference between cheerful and hysterically ecstatic.  If you get trapped in a small bathroom while he is loudly extolling the virtues of, say, shower grout, you can go deaf.  Your husband can emerge from this encounter staggering down the hall, wiping spit from his face, and grabbing for something to steady himself.

Laughter beyond any level you have ever heard can echo through your attic and smack into your kitchen, making you bang your head on the  underside of the sink.  When you go to the attic to investigate what on earth could be so funny, you find that it is nothing.

And in this fit of euphoria, the wacko handyman will go easy on himself, and forgive a little quarter-of-an-inch here and there, and the next thing you know, you will be tripping over your own floor.  Your faucet handles will turn backwards and your stove won’t fit its intended space, all because someone was thinking happy little thoughts instead of measuring accurate little measurements.

If said Barney is in a bad mood, he will come over, drop his tools, ladder, and buckets wherever he happens to be (in the doorway, say), and begin yelling about government corruption, cowardly police who won’t arrest his neighbors, and rich celebrities who give nothing back.  Your own neighbors will crane their necks to see who’s about to kill somebody, and you’ll have to yank Barney into the house and slam the door.

His work will be disastrous.  He will emit loud, gaseous noises, and will swear like a crazy handyman.  You will wait as long as possible, and finally you will drive like a demon to Nordstrom’s and buy three new outfits, and stop for a chocolate malt on your way home.  And thus your outfits won’t fit.

And you’ll have to hang them in a crooked closet.  So now you have plenty of advice for a happy marriage and a home that is not shaped like a rhombus.

Much of this blog came from my book, Funeral Potatoes—The Novel which you can buy here.  But there are many scenes in that book which came from my real life, and this is one of them.

10 Times When it's Okay to Let Kids Quit

          It’s the end of summer vacation.  Parents the world over have been hauling their kids to lessons, sports, and music as we try to fill their days with enriching opportunities, right?  And it won’t stop just because school is starting.  Many families continue all these commitments year round.

          But what if the kids hate it, or it just isn’t a good fit? We don’t want them to have a quitter mentality, so when is it okay to let kids resign? After raising four kids, here’s my list of when it’s perfectly okay to say stop:

1.       When the piano teacher says, “Honey, wouldn’t you like to try tap?” (Yes, this happened to me, and yes, I have used it in one of my novels.)

2.      When he starts following the chalk line during a soccer game. (Yes, one of our sons did this.)

3.       When she picks a bouquet in the outfield. (Another sport, another child.)

4.      When it’s clear he only wanted to take karate for the “costume.” (Take your bows, two eldest boys.)

5.       When cats gather at your doorway during violin practice.

6.      When the coach is the most immature person at the pool and throws a chair in anger. (High school water polo.)

7.       When her pet breeding hobby yields 28 extra guinea pigs. (Yep, happened right upstairs.)

8.      When his science experiments involves gun powder or gasoline. (Two kitchens still bear the scars.)

9.      When the coach assigns him to do everyone else’s laundry.

10.     When you’re still trying to get him to break the 20-minute mile.

Let’s face it, not every activity fits every kid.  But books do, and I’ve written something for everyone.  Check ‘em out here.

Feeling Stupid

          Have you ever felt, really and truly, well, stupid?  Hopefully such moments are infrequent, and are interspersed with wonderful moments of feeling wise and brilliant, or at least able to fake it.  But I think we all have those creepy times when we say or do the absolute wrong thing, and there’s no back-pedaling.

          I have many of these, but my stupidity stops short of sharing all of them in one blog post.  Since most kids are going back to school now, I’ll tell you just one of mine.  It happened during my first semester in college.  I had signed up for a psychology class (okay, I figured I would ace it since my dad was a psychologist).  One of the requirements for freshman peons is that they volunteer to help senior psych majors with lab experiments.  I signed right up for a two-hour meeting with an uptight coed I shall call Merda.  I have chosen this pseudonym because by the end of the experiment, I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t have minded murdering me.

          She sat me down and began explaining the binary system to me.  This was before everybody had their own home computer, and decades before we all had them built into our cell phones.  Also, mind you, math is not my strong suit.  Math with alphabet letters standing in for the numbers is such a pet peeve of mine that my brain digs in its heels and resists what is clearly Language Larceny.  But Merda was on a roll.  She explained the entire binary language, then asked me a series of questions about it, to see if I had understood her.  I failed miserably and with every wrong answer she became more and more irritated.  It was as if I were proving her teaching methods wrong.

          Just as an aside, I would like to add that this aversion to such matters is not genetic, apparently.  I gave our eldest son a binary clock when he was in high school and he was THRILLED.  Nobody else could read it, so he was now DOUBLY THRILLED.  Or BINARILY THRILLED.

          But back to Merda. By the end of our session, she had progressed from irritated to incensed to fully angry. She accused me of not trying (I get that a lot, but it’s usually in sports), and of not taking school seriously. Little did she know that I was very likely the most serious taker of school she would ever meet.  Finally she said something about my not being adept, period, and for some INSANE reason I thought about horses.  I thought about how much I loved to ride, how I first learned on skittish Shetland Ponies, and how I knew how to saddle one up and take off, something most kids at my college in Los Angeles would find utterly miraculous.

          As she dismissed me, I decided to defend myself by pointing out that not every praiseworthy skill relates to the binary system, and I said, “Do you know how to housebreak a horse?”

          She stared at me, incredulous.  “No,” she said.

          “Well I do,” I snapped, and with that final “touche” moment, swept out of the room in moral victory.  I got about twenty feet away before I realized I had said, “housebreak,” not just “break.” So now, not only did Merda think I was the dolt of the century, but a squalor-dwelling nitwit who keeps horses INSIDE her house.  Potty trained or not, this is truly not a good idea.  

          Yes, folks, you cannot make this stuff up.  And now, if you’ll pardon me, I’m going to look at pictures of horses on Facebook.  What the hay.

I’ve blogged about other embarrassing moments; scroll through and you’ll see many.  Be sure to subscribe, so you can feel brilliant every single week.

Is There Really a Lid for Every Pot?

          There is a strange phenomenon going on in every household across America, maybe throughout the world. And none of us question it, we just live with it.

          It’s the Mystery of the Tupperware Lids. That may not sound like the next riveting Stephen King novel, but believe me: It’s taking over the universe.

          We all have a stash of these plastic containers.  And maybe they’re made by Rubbermaid or Ziploc or some other company, but the problem remains: Our lids and bottoms do not match up.  At least not perfectly.  We either have too many lids or too many bottoms, many of which have no mate.

          How is this possible?  We buy them in matching sets, the math is perfect.  And then, within days, our world is in disarray.

          Imagine if this happened with your shoes.  Suddenly no two shoes go together—you have a Nike shoe, a dress shoe, and a slipper.  But no mates.  You’d call the police, right? And report shoe theft or something.

          What if one of your bedsheets was suddenly gone?  Or half your shirts?  Sure, we all joke about the lost sock in the laundry, but that’s one sock. Not one of every pair.

          Does plastic decompose faster than we’ve all been taught, and does it literally evaporate into the air? Is there a vast network of tiny elves who worship plastic, and who sneak into our homes (through the vents?) and then make off with various lids? Did someone melt them in the dishwasher, or try to bake them in the oven?

          It makes you want to install a tiny chain from the lid to its bottom, the way banks protect their ball point pens.  Or just use ceramic bowls and plastic wrap forever more.  Or disposable Chinese-style take-out boxes.  Meanwhile, I don’t recommend calling the police.  They’d have time for nothing else.

         Stay home and guard your plastic containers—curl up with a good book and keep one eye out for thieves.