Never Stick Your Tongue on a Frozen Flag Pole

No, I've never done that. Thank you I do have a few cells of common sense. Just a few though mind.

*Thought of this because it's like 100 F in DC right now. Ugh.

In addition to living in the middle of nowhere surrounded by nothing but trees and more trees, my parents also have a semi natural pond that my dad has enlarged. There's a hill (which is basically all the sand dug out of the pond) that makes for great sledding in the winter and if the pond froze quickly enough it was good ice skating. Mostly though it didn't freeze quickly enough so the surface wasn't smooth. It would semi freeze and then all the millions of trees would drop the last vestigages of leaves at which point the pond would totally freeze...leaving (ha ha) leaf bumps all over the place. A couple times my dad tried to flood it after it froze to create a smooth surface. But then it would snow again. He also tried, just once or twice I think, to clear the surface with the snowblower. Like our very own zamboni.

He stopped doing that when the snow blower fell through the ice.

Despite these issues we did a fair amount of ice skating as kids. At night my mom would even drive the car back into the woods and run down her battery shining the high beams on the pond for light. Much as with any sport, my sister was always better at skating than both my brother and I were.

I thought I was pretty hot stuff when I learned how to skate backwards. Slowly and very wobbly. Bernadette could cross her feet (and later skated around thusly on roller blades) while Brian and I satisfied ourselves with less fancy footwork. I tried the cross over once. And fell on my face. One time I fell down and just did not feel like getting back up. I'd fallen one too many times that day and just wanted a time out. So after I rolled off my face I lay there for a while contemplating why it was I bothered to bother, while Bernadette zoomed around me showing off her triple lutz.

Ok so maybe she couldn't do a triple lux. It could have been a double axel. Whatever it was it just rubbed salt in the wound after my mom told me that I could not be both a professional ice skater and a nun (one of my choldhood goals). I still think she might have been lying. In any case, I did lay there a good while contemplating my ice skating failures. And then I tired to get up.

And promptly slammed my head into the ice when my curly hair bounced back. Small problem; I was frozen to the ice. I had not considered this possibility during my quiet contemplation. So I solved this problem the same way I solved many problems back then; I yelled for my mom.

After she stopped laughing at me did offer a solution that did not involve cutting off all my hair; that was Dad's solution. She brought over a thermos and pour hot chocolate all over my head.

While I was happy to be free I was less than thrilled to be drenched on hot chocolate. It's really sticky. And my the time I'd trekked back to the house I had frozen, sticky hot chocolate all over my head. Awesome.

So the moral here is the same as with flag poles. If something is frozen, do not allow any part of your body to rest on it for a period of more than about 3 Mississippis.

The Time my Dad Tore off my Thumb*

A million years ago there was this water park in Michigan called Pleasure Island. Unlike the water parks you have visited though there were no overly chlorinated pools. This place was all natural and the water was brown. I think my most vivid memory of the place is a slightly snotty (and shockingly not on my end; I was very taken aback) encounter with a girl who would later turn out to be one of my best friends and eventually a cousin by marriage.

But that has nothing to do with this post.

One of the rides at Pleasure Island involved a sort of zip line swing that went over the water. So you hang from the bar, speed down an incline, and let go to cannonball into the brown pondy thing. We must have praised this things awesomeness when we got home because my dad promptly built one. Not over water though. This one was stretched between two trees by the barns and extended over the driveway adjacent. We climbed up a ladder to a little stand he built around a tree, sit on the bottom bar of the swing and ZOOM!

 Requisite red farm barns. The yellow thingy is the chicken coop/rabbit holder place.

It was fun. All our friends we mad jealous.

We had the thing for I don't know how long and, as things that are left out to the elements do, it got a little broken down. I think that the bottom sit on bar of the swing broke? We solved that by just swinging like we did at the park, gripping tight with our hands and hanging down with no support what so ever. And that was fine.

Until it wasn't fine.

I had a friend over one day and we were zooming and zipping along on the thing. During one of my turns the swing finally gave up the ghost and died. The hold onto bar broke and I took one (of many over the course of not quite 32 years) face dives into the gravel. Side note to clarify that not all my face dives are into gravel. Sometimes it's asphalt or concrete or dirt.

More embarrassed than anything I got up to dust myself off. That's when I notice that my dusting off was rather ineffectual as I was smearing blood down my front. I looked at my right hand and noticed that it was dripping blood and MY THUMB WAS HANGING BY A THREAD!!!

Not really but that's more dramatic, no? There was a big nasty gash though and it was bleeding rather profusely.

On the way to the emergency room we had to make a side trip to drop off my friend and I could hear my mom's internal monologue thanking the Good Lord that it was her daughter's thumb nearly ripped off and not the friend's. The emergency room is cheaper than a law suit.

We finally got the emergency room and the blood soaked/dripping towel wrapped around my hand got us seen pretty quickly. I had some nice drugs and remember only wondering why emergency room rooms need to be that awful green color. The doctors had my hand splayed open to flush the gaping wound and my mom was hanging over their shoulders exclaiming how 'cool' it all was. Until they started picking out all the bits of gravel and dirt and probably the clover that grows in the driveway. Then I totally lost my supportive parent as she had to go away before she got sick.

That is now one of the many scars I have. There are a couple on my knees from the falling down, one on a knuckle from a scythe (yes, I was scything things), one that goes from my lip up into my right nostril, and this one.There might be one on my pinky finger too from the time my brother slammed the sliding van door on my finger and then my mom locked the door while I was frantically tugging and wailing trying to get it out.

That's a different story.

*Re the title...obviously dad built the swing thing so it's his fault. The swing isn't there anymore but the line still is. My dad's dog's leash is tied to it and he runs up and down and up and down and all you hear is zzzzzzhhhhhhh with the occasional bark.

Also he thought maybe it would work better the second time around and built another one. This time actually over the pond. I don't see how this will work out better but me and my thumbs are staying far away from it.

The Strawberry Shortcake Debacle

Baking is one of my favorite hobbies. I started making birthday cakes for people at work mostly so I could bake and try out decorating techniques (that never really worked out) on unsuspecting people who just wanted the sugar. I have always liked to bake and that extended to the interminable summer dinners when I lived with my parents that seemed to consist largely of strawberry shortcake.

My dad is what my mom calls a ‘hobby farmer’ which means in addition to the variety of animals we also had some small crops. Among them were strawberries. Have you ever had to spend your summer under a hot sun hoeing weeds around freaking strawberry plants? Not fun. Although I, cleverer than my siblings, discovered pretty fast that if you weren’t helpful, Dad didn’t want you to help. So a couple perfectly healthy strawberry plants were slaughtered while I feigned ignorance over what was strawberry and what was weed. I was relegated to the house. Drat.

Part of the trade off was that I hulled, washed, mashed and froze the berries when my brother and sister brought them inside. So much easier, thank you. One night I also volunteered to make the biscuits for the strawberry shortcake.  

They came out of the oven and were so beautiful; lightly golden brown and light and fluffy.

We all poured strawberries of the warm biscuits and dug in. And then noticed something odd. Have you ever heard of Pop Rocks? They were this great candy the fizzled and popped in your mouth, kind of like Rice Krispies to nth degree. Well that’s what the strawberry shortcake was doing. And then the biscuits turned purple.

?!?

How strange. What was going on here? 

The mystery of the fizzing purple strawberry shortcake was soon resolved but people were not happy to have their dessert delayed. Particularly not my grandfather. My mom quickly made another batch of biscuits and in end everyone had their non chemistry experiment sweet fix. But what had gone wrong?

I learned an important lesson that day; there is a difference between baking powder and baking soda. Huh. Who knew? Well probably a lot of people did but not I. I do now though.

The Frozen Bunny

In honor of Easter which always seems to be accompanied by bunnies and chickens and bunnies that cluck...

We had lots of animals growing up. Most of which weren't pets. Included in the category of 'not pets' were the rabbits. Them was fer eatin'. I am not a fan of the rabbit meat, quite possibly because taking care of them was one of my chores and I knew all their names.

Rabbits breed like, well, rabbits. So we had lots of them. Mostly Dad tried to control the birth rate but every once in a while a couple of them would get out and get busy ... And if we didn't know one was pregnant we wouldn't also know to put a box in its cage. Which means that we lost a lot of little baby rabbits. Sometimes to the monther who, like all rodents, ate off their heads*, and sometimes to cold.

On one of these occasions my sister Bernadette rescued one of the dead. Bernadette's wanted to go into medicine for as long as I can remember and she wanted to put the dead bunny in a jar with formaldehyde. Until said fromaldehyde could be fetched the bunny went into a Ziplock freezer bag and went into one of the deep freezers. Stopping somewhere on his way home from work to get the fromaldehyde was not high on my dad's list of things to remember so the bunny lived in the deep freezer for a pretty long time. We, being the extremely sick children our parents raised us to be, got it out every once in a while.

We'd wait for company to come over then sneak out the bunny when no one noticed. Then we'd cup it in our hand, stroke it, and approach the poor unsuspecting person and say something like "One of our rabbits just had babies. Do you want to see it?" Almost always the answer was yes and was accompanied but some sort of cooing.

Then as the poor innocent mind reached out for the bunny we'd toss it him. 

The cries of shock and horror and scrambling to try to catch the dead rabbit were always hilarity inducing. And when the person didn't catch it, or did but dropped it after the shock of the cold weight registered, the very very frozen rabbit would thunk on the ground and clatter a little bit.

The looks of reproof and awesome horror only egged on our laughter. We were never repentant and it probably didn't help any that our parents looked on such antics with fond patronism. A friend of mine refers to my parent's home as 'the dark farm' but I prefer to think that we simply grew up with a healthy knowledge and understanding of death.

Interestingly enough people still want to see that baby whatever we have at the moment. Granted the baby whatever is almost always alive now though. Maybe it's time to put the fear back into people. I shall have to think on this.

*Rodents often eat their young. There are numerous reasons for this but for some reason, if the mother is not able to see the young, said young are safe. This is one of the reason that our rabbit breeding boxes were full boxes that allowed little light to enter. I had hamsters once and one got pregnant and I woke up one day to watch her eating the babies. It was quite traumatizing.

The Time I Broke My Neck

I'm not big with the exercising. Partly because of my falling down problem but also because I can think of so many other things to be doing...like reading or sleeping. I have, however always enjoyed a good dance class. I did bellydancing for a years, during the course of which I both broke and dislocated my roommate's ankle. I've also done some strip aerobics and took a lap dancing class once. The new thing these days is pole fitness and I signed up pretty quickly.

I figured my lack of grace and penchant for falling down could only be improved by pole dancing. Why wouldn't I be sucessful? There's a pole to hang on to so no problem, right? It's really great fun and for all the skeptics out there it's also really hard and a killer work out. The sparkly six inch platform heels really add an extra something to the workout too. I particularly enjoy the spinning. So far I have learned (if not mastered) the: catch, reverse hook, pinwheel, reverse pinwheel, fireman, "Marie's", and one leg sticking out spins. I made up the name of that last one; not quite sure what it's actually called.

That's me doing the pinwheel. Wee!!

One night fairly early into my class taking our instructor decided to get a little advanced with her pole 1 students. So we did headstands.

You can already tell that this isn’t going to turn out well for me can’t you?

It really didn’t seem all that complicated. Granted we weren’t able to pull ourselves up from a prone position using only the strength in our abs as did the instructor…but really it wasn’t that hard. We started face down on the floor gripping the pole and with our foreheads resting on our forearms. Then all went up into a kind of downward dog so our backs were flush against the pole. From there all we had to do was kick up and ta da! And the beauty was that you couldn’t really fall over because the pole was there. The pole also helped keep us supported.

Once I figured out the mechanics then I was fine. Attempt number one and I was a rock star.

Attempt number two and Huston was alerted.

I’m still not really sure exactly what happened but at some point during the upright (or upside down if you prefer) back to downward dog transition my neck went one way and the rest of me went the other. So instead of my head being on the floor the left side of my face was.

I knew there was badness as soon as I managed to get actually upright again. I sat out the rest of the class to test my newly limited range of motion and see how much pain I was in. A lot as it turns out. The couple blocks to the metro was torture, only to be compounded by the jerkiest metro ride ever. If you’ve ever been on DC’s metro you know what I’m talking about. That abrupt start and stop driving method many of the operators like to employ. 45 minutes of that. About halfway home I called my doctor, i.e. my sister who’s a paramedic. This is not the first time I’ve called her for a long distance ‘I’m hurt/sick, what do I do’ consultation. I’ve also called my brother from literally half way around the world to demand he fix whatever computer problem I was having. On this call my sister pretty much just confirmed my ib profin and ice diagnosis but I wanted to make extra certain that my neck wasn’t broken. I mean I was a good 99.95% sure it wasn’t since I could move and everything, but better safe than sorry I think. I have to admit that she was pretty nice about receiving a call at 9PM in the middle of her shift from her idiot little sister who thought her neck was broken…I could barely hear her roll her eyes.

We were all pretty surprised when the next day not only was I mobile but I could even turn my head. Well I could turn it to the right but to look left I had to move my whole body. I was pleased since I had plans to participate in a scavenger hunt organized by my church’s youth group. I think the most uncomfortable I felt all day was when my priest asked how I hurt my neck…

Why Peter Washed Pilate's Hands

With the beginning of Lent and Catholic Coming Out Day (Ash Wednesday) having just occured, I have the perfect story to start of the Lenten season. When I was in junior high and high school my mom used to be one of the people in charge of Holy Week activities at my family's parish. One of things we did almost every year was organize a Passion Play on Good Friday.

This particular year I was supposed to play the random servant girl who shows up to do something whenever a main character isn't supposed to be doing said thing. So I went with the Sanhedrin guard to arrest Jesus (I think I held a torch), accuse Peter of being buddies with the Nazarene, was supposed to fetch the water and bowl so Pontius Pilate could wash his hands of Jesus etc...that didn't work out so well for me.

A little back ground...I get headaches. I've had chronic headaches for as long as I can remember. When I was younger they were mostly tension/cluster headaches. Bewteen high school and college I went to a headache clinic for a few months where they got rid of the tension headaches. So yay! But then I started getting migraines. Boo. I'd rather have back the tension headaches thank you very much. Over the counter pain killers never touched my headaches and to this day my standard ib profin dosage is 800mg two to four times a day. My doctor tried out a lot of different drugs to help me deal including, but not limited to: Imitrex, Tylenol 3, and Darvocet. There was also this little yellow pill that made me really loopy and the drugs my mom gave me like Fiorecet and Fiorenol (she likes to self diagnose and treat and that was extended to all of us). Imitrex and Tylonel did nothing for me but the Darvocet seemed to work.

Good Friday arrived and I had, you'll forgive me, a hell of a headache. I hadn't eaten a lot that day because it's a fast day and we were busy getting ready and between the headache and being hungry I was just not in the mood for a play. I got out my new darvocet perscription and noted that the dosage directions were one to two pills. I figured if two was good three must be better, right? And I really had to get rid of that headache. So I downed three of the giant, hot pink pills and went on with play prep.

The headache certainly wasn't a problem anymore.

I got through the Garden of Gethsemane then went to sit in one of the front pews with all the Apostles while Pilate, who was played by the father of this boy we all had a crush on, had his first nunber. Did I mention it was a musical Passion Play? I watched happily from the pew, humming every now and then and grinning big while Pilate dreamed about a man who would be his downfall. I was also getting some odd and concerned looks from the Apostles.

While the play went on I became increasingly euphoric and the people in the crowd cried out for Jesus's crucifixion I became absolutely positive that I could fly. It started tentatively, this idea, first when I noticed that my arms seemed to just float up into the air, only to be batted down by an annoyed Apostle.

Between my floating arms and growing feeling of weightlessness I knew all I had to do was let go and I would be able to fly like Peter Pan. So I did and it was marvellous.

Except all I was doing was standing up and swaying about and making Pilate and Jesus miss a beat in their serious conversation about truth and my mom off in the choir wing be torn between shame, horror, and an intense desire to kill me.

I couldn't have been standing for more than a couple seconds really before the Apostles on either side of me (one being said boy of the crush) grabbed my arms and pulled me back into the pew. They had to keep hold of me for the rest of the play. Needless to say I was in no shape to continue in my role of random, pops up as needed, servant girl which is why when Pilate turned to wash his hands of the sin of condemming Jesus it was Peter who held the ewer and bowl for him. Which I'm pretty sure is not how it happens in the Bible.

The rest of the play went off, as I was later told, beautifully and after we all went to a local restaurant for dinner. I ordered but was finally starting to come down and dizzy and nauseous. You can bet I endured a lot of teasing during dinner, especially from our priest who thought it was somewhat hilarious. When my family finally got home all I could was lay spread eagle in the living room and watch the room spin around my body around and around and around...

I don't take Darvocet anymore.

Star Search!!

Do you remember that show Star Search? Kids and adults who sang, modeled and told jokes? Dave Coulier was on it way back when, Aaliyah (RIP), Adam Sandler, Beyonce, Alanis Morissette, both Britney and Christina....etc etc. Well apparently, CBS is bringing it back!!! That's not what this is about though; it's just an amazing coinidence. In honor of Ed McMahon's birthday (March 6), I should like to recount how we used to re-enact Star Search as kids.

One of the things we did to entertain ourselves was to film everything. We made movies, reenacted TV shows, filmed my dad butchering chickens...it's just what we did. Now most of these videos are trotted out to horrify and embarrass us. This one in particular. Given this penchant for filming everything and our love of Star Search you can bet that we filed ourselves pretending to be on Star Search. For my turn I was one of the models and did the strutting around in multiple outfits and posing in a bathing suit with a fan blowing on me thing.

It all sounds perfectly innocent and I'm pretty sure I did a bang up job imitating the women on Star Search...but it just didn't turn out very well. So not well that they'd have never put anything like it on network television. For starters, my bathing suit was a maillot-one of those suits with the built-in, stand on their own boobs. Why I had one of those at 12 I don't know because there was no way I could have filled it out at 12. Possibly not even at 31.

After the suit everything just want downhill and did it really quickly. The makeup and the fan and the posing and the flirting with the camera...sigh. It is probably the most hilarity inducing family video we have. Worse even than the ballet recital or the Kids Inc. reenactment. I'm fairly certain that had social services ever got wind of it I would have been taken out of an 'unhealthy' environment. Especially since we refer to it as my "soft kiddie porn" debut.

Yup. Yup, yup, yup, yup.