Friday, August 24, 2007

Dave Barry Mode

I don't have a problem with the modesty dress movement in general or Mormons in particular, but when you're selling a prom dress on your Mormon modesty dress site called "The Lolita"? I'm going to have to go ahead and have a problem with that.

/not making things up at: mbe@drinktothelasses.com

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Fleet

Behold my very first married-person cookies. Instead of disinfecting the guest bathroom or working on my book proposal or in any way feverishly attempting to save my immortal soul, I was doing this.

The dough was churned by my mother's sparkly hand-me-down KitchenAid mixer, shaped with a space shuttle cutter purchased by my mother-in-law, baked on wedding present cookie sheets, cooled on racks from the registry list, and iced with a knife from the flatware set two high school friends gave us.

Other people own me.

I made the icing. The icing has the consistency of Elmer's paste, the kind in the pot, and would have been vastly improved by large amounts of liquor. I settled for food coloring.

It was a largely successful operation, although the icing application met with horrific property damage. In all I lost two nose cones, a set of main engines, four left rudders, and a propeller. I suck at wifing. At the very least, I need to find career paths with less breakable edges. Like crop circle creation.

BLEG TO THE COMPETENT:
Josh the Pilot and I would like to invite all of The Readers to our wedding by uploading some of our DVD highlights, but I am searching for the best method of ripping from the disk. WMP disdains my laptop. Pfffffffffffft, WMP says, and flips it off. Suggestions?

I would send you a cookie, but given the carnage we've experienced so far, it would likely arrive as a depressing mash of sucrose.

don't even want to know what's going to happen when I try the horse cookie cutter at: mbe@drinktothelasses.com

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Onscreen

Cable capabilities returned today, along with a charming surprise: The company has reset the channel lineup so as to ensure that nothing actually watchable is broadcast. In its place: Nigerian National Television.

WE, home of Bridezillas, is gone, with the result that my weekly means of making myself feel smug and saintly about my own wedding behavior has vanished. Now I'll have to start shelling out for an actual therapist.

Gone too is Style, the fabulousest network of them all, which in its fabulosity insists upon referring to itself with a lowercase "s" in the TV listings, and a period, as though it were some sort of world-changing atheist grammatical statement. Style broadcasts Clean House, which features a weave-brandishing woman yelling at the owners of absolutely horrifically kept homes, like the self-proclaimed Buddhist single father who camped his son out on a broken futon and who, when coaxed to give up a scratchy surfboard, announced, "This sucks ass." Ah, bodhi is truly within your grasp, my friend.

So when I came upon this realization that the angry surf-chunked-hair Buddhist were gone, gone forever I undertook the Jim The Small Child Nephew Official Form of Social Protest, and smacked with both hands the surface upon which I was sitting. And my husband pointed at me and laughed and said it wasn't the end of the world and that I was being lame in the highest degree, and I asked him how he would feel if the Cable Overlords took away his beloved Speed Channel and the NFL Network.

So I sat and pouted and sewed curtains without the help of Yelly Weave Woman, while he flipped channels in silence, a silence broken only by the following:

"What th--"

"Oh, no, they did NOT!"

"THAT'S BULLCRAP!"

We shall learn to love Nigerian National Television. Not.

first time in recorded history a Scottish townhome dweller gave forth a variety of "no you di'ent" at: mbe@drinktothelasses.com

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Snow

Because the area experienced a misting rain and a butterfly farted 600 miles away, the cable went out right about the time Endeavour was performing her first re-entry engine burn. So instead of glorious return pictures on my choice of cable networks, I sat staring at "This Channel Will Return In a Moment." I adore twelve-hour moments.

The frustration was effectively dealt with until this evening, when I was putting away the groceries and discovered that I had forgotten my husband's pudding and then burst into bitter, bitter tears.

We called the cable company, and were told that we may or may not be experiencing an outage. I asked how the representative might find out whether or not the problem was area-wide, and was informed that "if a whole bunch of people don't have service, that's an outage." Well! By the way, Ethiopia is experiencing an outage. You take care of that.

and the DVR doesn't work either at: mbe@drinktothelasses.com

Monday, August 20, 2007

School Supplies

The emails keep coming, all kind, all solicitous, all asking, "How's Virginia?" The state, they mean.

Here's Virginia, the state-- endless townhouses, lovely blue ridges, surprisingly cool mornings.

And here's Virginia:

At the SuperTarget, Home Of A Bunch of Crap That's Marginally Close To What You Actually Need But Also An Entire Aisle of Nothing But Mix-And-Match Jelly Bellys, I keep seeing college students toting full carts, bedspreads stuffed in the undercarriage, and at least one parent.

Most of them are wearing Virginia Tech shirts.

They don't look any different from any other college student in Targets, Wal-Marts, Scam's Clubs across this great land of ours. Their faces hold exactly the same half-hassled, mostly sweaty expression I had ten years ago when my parents towed me to Meijer's for a last minute supply of bottled water before leaving me, carless, to conduct my book research.

But nobody ever burst into Madeleva Hall with an automatic weapon and started lining up my classmates against a wall. These VA Tech families wandered the drapery aisle pushing a burden and a pain and a unique reluctance to separate that I care not to contemplate. Every time I came upon one of these little groups, whatever nostalgia I might have experienced otherwise was swept away by an overwhelming desire to arrange all of us in a prayer circle, or tetrahedron of healing, or something.

Because there's really nothing I could say.

not covered during student teaching at: mbe@drinktothelasses.com

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