Nasty.

So, this is one for the story books.

The Kid is all shifty eyed and anxious last night. I ask him what he's up to. He flails and avoids me for about an hour. He comes up to me at about 6:30 and says, I can't even tell you what I did. Just go to my room and look in my toybox.

What am I going to find? A severed head? A hideous stain on his nice pants? Something dear to me cut up to pieces? Who knows, but I know one thing. This ain't good, my friends.

I go down and open the toybox. A hideous stench hits me, and there is nothing in the toybox but one of my bigger pyrex bowls, filled with a nasty yellowish water. You know that part in The Shining when he goes into that bathroom and finds the scary dead body in the bathtub? That comes screaming to mind and I freak out and run out of the room and go get him.

WHAT IS THAT? I ask.. He says, look on the bottom. We go back to the toybox, I pick up the bowl gingerly, so as to spill none of this who-knows-what on, well, anything, and lift it up to look at the bottom of the bowl. There is nastiness on the bottom of the bowl, but I still don't know what the frak it is.

WHAT IS THIS, KID? I say with restrained rage, wondering if I now need to worry about him being a sociopath or something. The Kid replies, "You know in Spongebob the movie how they come back to life with water?"

It instantly comes to me. My mom has a propensity towards tchochkes. I HATE them, but there is shit all over this house, loads of nativity scenes (we are sooo catholic), little pottery pieces and vases, bowls with rocks in them, and then there's this one pretty little round glass vase, filled with shells, sand dollars and yes, a starfish. Or rather, there used to be a starfish in that little round vase. The Kid was trying to revive my mom's dried starfish. A dried starfish I have a feeling she picked up decades ago during a family vacation before I was even born. I made him dump the water out and clean the bowl. Nasty nasty nasty. It smelled like, oh, ancient saltwater and rancid liver mixed together or something. We both wretched about 12 times. It was by far, the most disgusting thing I've encountered as a parent, and you have to remember, I'm the mom of the kid who puked almost daily for four years. I'd clean buckets full of vomit before I ever, ever have to encounter re-wetted ancient dried starfish, ever again. Oy.

Oh, and for the record? I have no idea when he performed this operation. I have NO IDEA how long the starfish was in that bowl, in his toybox, in his room. Ew.

Happy National "Make a Real Effort To Listen To The Pogues Day"

Happy St. Patrick's Day! Is it cheesy to say that I hold this day, personally, in high regard?

I mean, how many people have an actually holiday to point to, that is annually a "I will be nostalgic for college today" day?

I'm not so much nostalgic for the life of college, anymore, but I do miss those great people I met over there. I found this the other day:

My friend Dan, me, and Matt, another good friend, outside the Guinness Brewery in Dublin, April of about 1996. Great guys, I've essentially lost touch with both of them, and well, I hope they are doing well. We had good times. Cheers to them, cheers to nostalgia, cheers to Ireland.

To create a little flower is the labour of ages...

In order to add to the continuing series, "things I've found in my mom's house," I came across this little calendar my sister Peggy made me almost 15 years ago. It was one of those things, made by hand, hitting my tastes right on the nose, loving my quirks and feeding my interests, that only the people who know you inside out can do for you... Well, here are a few pages:

Very few people know me so inside out. And apart from this being a sweet book of William Blake quotes, I have are hard time articulating why I think this truly is the best gift I've ever been given. Finding this again really made me smile. I'm so lucky to have a sister who has given me not only this gift, but the gift of encouragement in following what interests me, above all else. She's always encouraged me, and I think that's the key.

It's just love. Love and love and love. I love that I kept this to find, on my birthday, almost 15 years later.

Total Mysteries

Brought to you by site meter: Why is it that five people, in different places around the US, happened to google "Something in the way he moves me" between 6:42 and 6:53 this evening, bringing them to this site?



Brought to you by AquaNet: Did I actually turn around and play some soccer after taking this picture? Nice hair.


EDIT: Never mind, at least about mystery number one. American Idol, Catherine McPhee, which explains the change in gender in the song. I get it.

It's amazing how quickly life can change.

On January 6, my mom had retinal detachment surgery. This was her seventh surgery of this kind, five having been done on her right eye, which was eventually lost completely to blindness. This surgery was successful, but at some point, shortly after the surgery, she told us that everything was dark, that this time was different from all of the other recoveries from this kind of surgery that she's been through, that something was not right. Her gut feeling was right: on the back of her eye, her retina, a blood clot had formed, blew, and has rendered her almost completely blind. She can only see a little bit of periphery, just around the edges of her retina that was not effected by the blood clot.

As a result, The Kid and I are moving in. It's not a hardship to do this, but it is an enormous change. I've been busy getting ready to move, cleaning out spaces in the house to fit my stuff, cleaning out my house to hopefully free myself from the five years of crap I've accumulated in my house. The Kid is having a harder time, struggling with the rules of my home being imposed in the usual lap of luxury that is, by definition, the way a grandmother's home is run.

So, I don't feel like writing much lately. Go figure.

I have, however, had a blast looking through my old stuff, my mom's stuff, my family's stuff. And so, in attempt to get me back to writing more often, as it is a kind of therapuetic thing for me, I want to show you all the stuff I've been finding... It's great fun.

First up?

A Postcard.

I picked this postcard up in a bar in Dublin in 1996. I decided to make this quote my mantra for all of the things I chose to do that year: break up with my boyfriend of 3 years, finish of that second bottle of wine, make out with that British boy at that party in Wales, travel throughout Europe, drink it in, live deep, suck marrow, carpe diem.

12 years in, I not only don't regret a thing, I'm incredibly grateful that I did have a big, wide open life. Because now, I have a small life. Home and hearth, taking care of family. It's what I do now. And like that Italy/Holland poem, it's not a bad place to be, "it's just a different place." I'm glad I've had it both ways.