Mushy banana peels and squished buns.

 

That’s my daughter, Shelby.  Isn’t she cute?  Doesn’t she look so sweet and innocent?  I admit it, she actually looks like she is about to chew out her construction crew.  And, when this picture was taken last week, she was probably preparing to do just that.

I’ll tell you.  She used to be sweet and innocent.  I’m not real sure when that changed.

I’m certainly not sure what happened today.  I don’t know if her daddy fed her horny goat weed supplements or what, but she became the problem child.  It started at the restaurant today when we went to lunch with some friends.  Shelby was standing on the booth between her dad and I.  A lovely young couple with a new baby was seated at the booth behind us.  They very innocently set their child’s carrier on the booth while he slept; it was like leading a lamb to slaughter.  I saw Shelby looking at the baby, but I didn’t think she could reach him.  We got to talking and next thing I know, Shelby was holding a baby toy in her hand!  The delightful young parents had hung toys from the carrier’s handle and my child was pulling the toy so hard that the carrier was lifting off the seat!  I apologized to the poor parents profusely.  The dad had a pretty good sense of humor.  But I got the feeling that the mother was not amused.  Especially when she flicked a fry into my eyeball.

A little bit later, I took Shelby to Wal-Mart to get some groceries.  Shelby likes to stand up in the big part of the cart and point the direction like a ship captain.  She also likes to laugh and shout orders out so she can hear her little baby voice echo off the metal shelves and concrete floor.  The problem with this arrangement is that it puts her in the ideal position to chuck the bagels out of the cart onto the floor and say, “uh-oh”.  Really?  Uh-oh?  I do not think it is an uh-oh when you chuck a bag of bagels over the side of the cart.  So to show her irritation at me for taking the bagels away from her, Shelby proceeded to gnaw a hole through the bottom of the box of macaroni and cheese.  To distract her, I gave her the bananas.  Now, to be fair, I did see her chewing on one of the bananas, but she wasn’t complaining; and who knew that a little kid with three teeth could chew through a banana peel?  Well, my three-toothed kid can.  She ate half a banana, peel and all.

I proceeded to the checkout and put what was left of the banana peel onto the bunch because they are sold by the pound and I didn’t want to get busted for larceny.  I put the mac and cheese hole side up onto the conveyor and pulled the hot dog buns out from under Shelby’s feet.  (Wonder brand hot dog buns hold up surprisingly well under 19 1/2 pounds of baby.)  All’s well, right?  Well, the kindly grandmother-type ringing me up, held up the bananas and proceeded to tell me that, “You really should bring a graham cracker in for her to eat next time.  Bananas are sold by the pound and you aren’t supposed to eat them until they are weighed.”  So I told her, “Yes, I understand.  I turned my back on her for about 3 seconds without realizing she could do that.”  The woman told me, “You should really keep a better eye on her.”  OKAY!  I get it!  Would you like to call Wal-Mart security and charge the child with shop-lifting?  I hear juvenile delinquent school is very effective on one year olds!

Throughout this whole discussion, Shelby was standing there with a big old tooth-showing grin acting all angelic and waving to the nice couple behind us.  I swear I could see a crooked little halo above her head.

 

 

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Vintage Thingies Thursdays on Wednesday.

  

I know I’m not supposed to post this until tomorrow but, as most of you already know, I am an overachiever.  At any rate, I chose my childhood doll for Vintage Thingies Thursdays this week.

I guess she isn’t technically vintage because I got her in 1982, but that’s 26 years so I hope it counts.  My parents bought her for me at a Village Inn Restaurant in Kentucky when I was about 4 years old and I named her Spoon.  From what I am told, I carried her around a lot.  I don’t know why I named her Spoon – probably for the same reason I had 4 imaginary brothers named Sock, Dock, Kirk, and Cheese.  My first bus driver (the next year) was named Janet, but I could never remember the name Janet and always wanted to call her Spoon.

I recently found Spoon residing somewhat lonesomely (is that a word?) at the bottom of my daughter’s closet (I had “cleaned out” that closet before my kid was born, but I did a crummy job of it).  My kid wasn’t very interested in Spoon, so I made a shadow box with some 1980’s-ish looking paper and chipboard letters.  Spoon measures about 4″ wide by 6″ tall and now resides on top of my television cabinet.

To see more Vintage Thingies, visit: http://anapronaday.blogspot.com.  Of course, you will have to wait until tomorrow to see this week’s!

 

 

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Opus to my alert friend Jackie.

My alert friend Jackie recently took a trip to South Dakota.  Being so alert and in possession of a camera, she got some great sign shots for me.  I don’t know if she took any real shots while she was shooting pictures … dang, that was the start of a great pun, I wish I could think of an ending.  At any rate, Jackie went to South Dakota.

What we have here is a church turned gift shop.  I guess the former pastor of this church didn’t want anyone within a 42 mile radius to have any excuse for sleeping through church.

 

I really wish we had one of these King’s stores in my town.  I hate having to go to two different places every time I need to get meats and pasties.  Really, there’s nothing more annoying than having to get the kid out of the car seat once to buy our meats and again to get pasties.  Plus, it’s kind of embarrassing to have my truck parked in front of the adult store all the time.  If I had a meat and pastie store, then I could just tell everyone I was buying meat.   It wouldn’t be so suspicious that way.

Here is a national historical landmark.  Calamity Jane was the first white woman to see this substation.  WIld Bill Hickock came along a couple weeks later but he took all the credit for discovering the substation.  Men were sucky like that back then.

You know when you’re giving directions to your house and you say, “At the second big curve, you turn off of the paved road…”?  Well, this is the name of the road you turn off of the paved road onto.

Be sure to check back later in the week.  My husband is watching “John Deere Live” on the Rural Channel.  It promises to get exciting.  A guy with cattle in Michigan (who talks funny) just called in asking what kind of tractor he should get.  I hate to leave you with such a cliffhanger, but I haven’t seen the ending yet.  Don’t worry, I’ll keep you updated.

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I can’t help but think I’m a big disappointment.

I was just sitting here thinking about stuff (stuff being the technical word for it).  I wonder how many people are sorely disappointed when they run across my blog.  I was perusing (fancy word, huh?) my blog stats and what people googled to find my blog.  There are many people who google “organized scrapbook room”.  Sheesh, I’ll bet they want to cry when they see the pictures of my room.  It’s more of a how not to organize post.  There’s five minutes of their lives that they will never get back!

I’m also surprised at how many people google “Jello wedding”.  Here’s a hint – for pete’s sake, do not serve Jello at your wedding!  Unless your nuptials are on Jerry Springer, of course.  Then all bets are off.  And, once again, what the heck is a toilet pan and why are all you people googling it?  One more hint, no you can not wear a t-shirt under a tube top!  Gee whiz.  If you have to have an engineer tell you that you have no fashion sense, then I just don’t even know what to say.  That’s bad.  I hate to disappoint these people who are obviously looking for guidance from my superior intellect, but what can I say?  I don’t like helping people – it’s my one character flaw.

I was also thinking about some of the stuff my mother used to tell my 2 sisters and me.  Besides telling us water would run uphill, of course.  She used to tell us all the time that she knew a girl who stuck her arm out the car window while they were driving down the road and it fell off but the girl didn’t know it until she pulled the bloody stump back into the window.  To this day, I’m scared to let any appendages stick out the window.  I nearly have a panic attack when I see people with their arms sticking out the window while they drive down the road.  I want to scream at them, “When your arm falls off for no reason, don’t wave your bloody stump at me!  I warned you!”

Now that I think of it, I think my mother had some strange obsession with our hands.  Once we wanted to help her drop cookies and she told us that we couldn’t help because you had to have “special wet hands” to drop the cookies.  Now that I’m a mother, I can totally understand why she didn’t want the help, but what a dorky excuse; especially since she does have a very good imagination.  I think of that every time I make cookies too.  Not that I often make cookies or anything.  She’ll probably come comment that I’m making this stuff up, but my imagination really isn’t as good as hers.  Plus, if she wants a t-shirt tote, she better not!

Another thing I was thinking about was “What Would Ronald Reagan Do?”  Or WWRRD?  I love Reagan’s ideas; the smarter I get, the smarter he looks.  I wish we had him as a presidential candidate today.  But I gotta think that if he saw what a mess the federal government is today that he’d probably have a fit.  Turns out, what he’d really do is kick back and have a smoke and then he’d cut the front off the carton and send it to his friends as a beautiful Christmas card (or is that Martha Stewart?  I’m always getting those 2 mixed up).  I have proof of this thanks to my alert friend Dorrie (who makes awesome posole, by the way).  Well, I don’t know if she actually makes awesome posole because I’ve never had any that she made, but I used her posole recipe to make it myself and it was awesome.  Anyway, here’s the proof.

 

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Fun With Signs: How My Mother Made Me Siphon Water From The Pool.

The other day I was watching my kid play in her little wading pool.  Isn’t she cute?  You must say yes or I will have secret Bush Administration Operatives come sabotage your next birthday party.

So, anyway, I was watching her splash around and I had a flashback to one summer when I was 11 or 12.  We had a wading pool on our back deck and I needed to drain it because it was disgusting and I wanted clean water.  No neighbor-kid-pee-filled pools for me.  No sirree.  Well, my mother decided that she would teach us about science (or maybe she was teaching us how to steal gas so we could join some underground criminal ring working for the Bush Administration, who’s to say?).  She showed us that if we put one end of the hose into our pool and the other end into the garden, the water would magically siphon through the hose.  After hours of watching water fantastically not flow uphill, I asked her if we could just drain it the regular way – by standing on one side and letting the water flow.  My mother informed me that, if we hooked up the hose to the faucet, ran it for a minute, then abruptly shut off the valve, the water would flow backwards towards the spicket.  Once again, I watched for hours but all I saw was the water getting deeper in the pool.  I will grant you, though, that I have terrible eye-sight, so that could have had an effect on our little experiment.  When she wasn’t looking, I stepped on the side and then ran in to tell her how awesome the experiment turned out.  I relayed this childhood memory to her the other day and she swears I made it up in my head.  According to her, she does not even know how to siphon fluid.  The good news is that, if I ever get a hired by the Bush Administration to steal gasoline from B. Hussein Obama’s official campaign roller skate, I know how to do it.  All you do is get a hose, plug it in a spicket, let the water run into the gas tank for awhile, then shut off the valve, and presto! you have free gas!  Sadly, I’ll never be able to put this knowledge to good use; I hear the official B. Hussein Obama campaign roller skate runs on reconstituted chicken beaks and bat guano instead of petro products.

Speaking of free gas … okay, not free so much as cheap … alert reader named my friend Jen sent me this sign spotted outside her local burrito joint.

You should always buy burritos from a guy with a sense of humor.  That’s always been my motto: Never buy a bean burrito from a non-funny dude.  Speaking of joints, if I were a lawyer, I think I’d open up an office at this intersection.

Those signs, incidentally, were sent to me by my alert mother, the water siphoner.  Can you imagine if I were a lawyer with an office there?  “Hello.  Thank you for calling Mary, Mary, and Mary attorneys at law, conveniently located at the corner of 52 and FU.  How many I fu- I mean help you?”

Which brings us to the inevitable lawyer joke.  I know, I know, it’s so cliche’ and beneath me; you are sorely disappointed that I would stoop to the level of lawyer jokes.  But I think you’ll forgive me when you find out the lawyer is none other than B. Hussein Obama and the signs were sent to me by alert reader my friend Karena.

 

I don’t know Bud Gregg, but I think I like how he thinks!  I wonder if he’d buy me a bean burrito at a little joint I found at 52 and FU.  I hear they have a pool.

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Sadly, I have nothing funny to say today.

 

I know all my faithful readers will be sad to hear that I cannot think of one funny thing to write today.  Seriously.  Nothing.  Nada.  Zilch.  Null set.  The big … oh never mind, you get the point.  I was reading the “Rules and By-Laws of Serious Bloggers” and realized that I am contractually obligated to write something about Brett Favre and the New York Jets.  But I know nothing about Brett Favre or the New York Jets, so all I can say is Brett Favre got traded to the New York Jets.

I made another tote bag last night.  I like this one way better.  I made it out of a camisole that I picked up at the thrift store for a quarter.

 

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In case you thought I was more bunny-kicker than bunny-hugger…

 As it turns out, I have a bit of bunny-hugger in me.  Or do I?  That could be the chip in my head talking.  At any rate, I take my own bags into the store to carry my purchases out.  Up to now, I have had to depend upon the kindness of strangers (okay, not really strangers so much as my mother) and Etsy-ers to make me cool bags to carry.  It’s because my sewing skills are seriously lacking.  I’m pretty crafty – Martha-ish, if you will; but I have a hard time sewing a straight line.  That’s partly why I was so impressed with myself for making this hand-made bag.  It is an old t-shirt.  I lopped the end off and then sewed a triple seam at the bottom.  I cut the sleeves off and widened the opening (neck-hole) with pinking shears to finish it.  I really like the results!  I haven’t load tested it, but I have faith that at least one of the three seams will hold.  At least I hope they will hold.  It would be very embarrassing to have to chase rolling cans of beanie weenies around the Wal-Mart parking lot while irate mini-vanners wait for me to vacate my spot.

**If anyone knows how I can get my pictures centered up, I’d be forever in your debt if you would share that little tidbit with me.  I know as a serious blogger I am also expected to know a thing or 2 about computers.  And I do, I’m actually a computer genius in disguise.  I’m just testing you to see if you know.

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