The Graduate

by | Sep 21, 2018 | Life

Graduation parties are always fun because they bring together groups of people who wouldn’t normally be at the same party. You have the graduate and his friends, family, friends of the parents of the graduate as well as co-workers, neighbors and anyone else the graduate may have come into contact with over the course of their seventeen years on the planet. So you often times have people from all walks of life in the same space for a few hours. It’s kind of like being at the post office, but with cake. I attended a graduation party this summer for my cousin’s son – also known as my daughter’s favorite cousin. He has three sisters so he puts up with a lot of abuse, and he is the sweetest guy, probably because of it.

Walking in to the party there was a group of people coming up that I didn’t know. It’s not that unusual that I would run into people at my cousin’s house who I didn’t know, but one of them in particular was someone I didn’t expect to see in my life. She was a larger African American woman who could have been in the cast of “Orange is the New Black”. It took me a little bit of time in wandering around the party and catching bits and pieces of conversations to put two and two together that she was in fact an ex-convict that was one of the women that my cousin met at his previous job. He worked at a women’s correctional facility as an electrician and they had a program that taught the inmates job skills for when they were released.

I spent a lot of the time at the party shadowing my daughter as she followed the older kids around playing. Most of her cousins are older than she is so she chases them around trying to keep up for awhile. Then she finally gives up and plays with her younger male cousin who is always up for jumping on the trampoline or running around the house. I chatted with some of my cousins and walked around grazing on food.

At some point my cousin and some of his work friends came in to start doing shots in the kitchen. This is normally about the time I leave parties. I don’t drink and I don’t spend a lot of time around people who are drinking a lot unless I am at concerts, and even then, I don’t really interact with people who are drinking heavily. As I was getting my daughter prepared to leave, Crazy Eyes came walking over with my cousin in tow asking “Who is this lady? I’ve been seeing her all day and I really need to meet her.” She said this all swaying a little and smiling at me like she was the big bad wolf getting ready to devour me. My cousin introduced me and she went on to tell me how my cousin saved her life, that she would probably be out on the street if it weren’t for his help. It warmed my heart to hear that my cousin was able to help someone in this way. I had heard many of the crazy stories about the inmates and what went on behind bars. But here was a woman who he helped to guide in the right direction just by helping provide her a skill that would keep her on the straight and narrow once she was back on her own.

I was also very aware that she had been holding onto my hand the entire time she told this story and had stepped in a little closer. A little bit of liquid lubricant and a heart warming story had turned my cousin’s kitchen into a lesbian bar on 8 mile. I told her it was lovely to meet her, wished her the best of luck in her endeavors and headed for the door. It took us another twenty minutes to actually leave since my daughter had found the guest of honor and had to go sign his graduation guest book stuffed dog. They said their goodbyes as we headed out to the car. I just love graduation parties. It is truly the only place I ever get hit on by ex-convict lesbians anymore. I really am getting rather old and dull.

I wrote this piece while listening to the ” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>Dropkick Murphys

Cruisin’

by | Sep 2, 2018 | Life, Parenting

The Woodward Dream Cruise is an annual gathering of grease monkeys, old timers reliving their glory days through metal and rubber and muscle car junkies. What started as a one day event has slowly turned into a week long series of events and traffic nightmare. People line up lawn chairs along the curb for miles waiting for the pageantry as mustangs and bitchin’ camaros burn rubber. Lime green hearses and airbrushed vans also cruise up and down the avenue as well as the occasional 1978 rusted out pinto. It is a giant pain in the ass for everyone else traveling within five square miles of the ten mile stretch for a week.

We are a car family. Fast cars. I have heard stories about my dad’s mom racing anyone who pulled up next to her in her Chevelle. Years later I did the same thing in my mustangs and porsche. I vividly recall my dad waking me up to watch the car race scene in Bullitt when I was a teenager. The rumbling of a big block engine elicits in me the same response as the aroma of chocolate chip cookies coming out of grandma’s oven.

Needless to say, my dad is all about the dream cruise and all it entails. He has rented hotel rooms for the day to have a place to keep snacks and have easy access to a bathroom for his friends and family as we sat under tents watching cars roll past for hours on end. This year he bought VIP tickets to an event at the beginning of the week called “Road Kill” which was drag racing at the northern most part of the Dream Cruise stretch. He spent an entire day with his friends watching cars peel out. He brought home souvenir foam fingers and back packs which my daughter has been carrying around for days.

He has been trying to get her as excited about cars as he and I both get with little luck. She doesn’t quite get it yet, being only seven and not having actually put the petal to the metal. She is a late bloomer in my family. I was on my first motorcycle ride at six months old and wearing my first helmet by age three. I was also driving a motorcycle by this age. This is the first summer that my kiddo has actually started to feel the need for speed. She has driven her dad’s car a few times and the wave runners on the lake.

And this year she went cruising with grandpa during the dream cruise. He picked her up on a Wednesday night in my mom’s convertible and they went driving around checking out cars for a few hours. She even took a few pictures and chatted up some of the drivers. She came home with her first dream cruise t-shirt and has been asking me to tell her stories about all of my old cars and racing. I think she has finally been inducted into the family tradition. Watch out world, here comes another little thrill seeker.

Super Freak

by | Aug 22, 2018 | Being Awesome, Life

My whole family took a little trip to a fun center out by my parents’ lake house this week. The venue had a ton of options including laser tag, trampolines, bumper cars, an escape room, glow in the dark golf and a big arcade. We spent the first twenty minutes trying not to trip over each other while chasing glow in the dark golf balls around the second floor. While doing so I learned two things – my golf game does not improve in the dark and my daughter has not outgrown her poor sportsmanship phase. She makes Happy Gilmore look like a the Dalai Lama. She took about a hundred swings and picked up her ball more than once, but the lights were out so apparently nobody was supposed to see her shenanigans.

While we were checking out the arcade games we noticed a group of adult men hanging around. They were playing an arcade game as if there were valuable prizes on the line for winning. I don’t know if they had perused the prize center, but it was mostly landfill and sugar. Maybe they were anxious to get their hands on a pillow shaped like a giant turd for 2,000 tickets.

As we watched these grown men walk around the place talking to groups of young boys playing games, offering advice on the best way to get their name on the winners board, my parents discussed the probability of them being pedophiles on the prowl. I was ready to agree until the largest of the men turned around and I saw his face. It looked as if someone had taken a sharpie to him after he passed out the night before and etched a thin handlebar moustache on his cheeks.  He was also wearing what appeared to be a Captain America t-shirt that only covered the top two thirds of his beer gut. I questioned whether or not a pedophile would try to draw that much attention to himself. Then again, I have seen news stories of some criminal who got caught robbing a bank due to the surveillance footage of a giant tattoo on his forehead reading “thug for life”.

Jumping on the trampoline was fun but I was quickly reminded that I am a middle aged woman who should not jump around like a teenager unless I do more kegel exercises. Every time my feet hit the floor I peed my pants a little. Some activities really should have age limits. This was one of those times I would have actually appreciated a sign to protect me from myself – specifically one that read “caution! jumping may make you wet your pants”.

Laser tag was mostly me hiding in a corner trying to outsmart my husband as he chased Riley around in the dark. I heard screams of “don’t shoot me daddy!” from across the room so of course I went to her rescue. She apparently takes laser tag even more seriously than glow golf. I hugged her as she sobbed into my blue flashing vest “Daddy just keeps shooting me. It’s not fair” which really meant “I”m not winning and this game sucks”. I promised to help her sufficiently destroy her father before the game was over. We attacked him from both sides as the door to freedom opened. 

We decided it was time to leave when we reentered the arcade and found Snidely Whiplash chatting up a couple soccer moms and their kids. We cashed in our tickets and stood around the counter as my daughter tried to decide between an emoji ball and an unnamed toy that was basically a tube of slime. She settled on a blue slime tube. I watched my daughter trying to ram her entire fist through the center of her new toy while walking to the car, and I realized what all the creepy old dudes were turning in their tickets for. This little unnamed prize was actually very similar to a sex toy for men. I guess the family fun center really does offer something for everyone. If we ever return i’m not going to argue if our pile of tickets turns into a sparkly unicorn poop pillow.

I wrote this while listening to The Melvins.

 

Mother Mary

by | Aug 16, 2018 | Life, Parenting

The other night I told my daughter we were going to church in the morning because it was a holy day of obligation. When she argued that it was a weekday and not a church day I told her we were going to celebrate the virgin Mary. I explained that we have all kinds of celebrations for Jesus but just this one day for his mother who was so important. She asked “will there be cake?” I guess it’s not a proper celebration without cake in her mind. I almost lied just to get her to comply, but I knew that would somehow lead to me actually purchasing a cake, so I stuck with the truth.

When I shared this story with my husband his reaction was “I’ll go to church with you if there’s cake!” Now he is sending me photos of cake ideas. He’s going to be really surprised when he comes home to find 24 cupcakes with rosaries on them. He forgets it is summer and I am home with a small child all day – we have nothing but time. So for anyone who didn’t celebrate the Assumption with a little cake after mass – you are doing it wrong.

 

Hello?

by | Jul 13, 2018 | Life

Photo Credit – Nitro Circus

Last week my parents informed me that Erik Estrada – you know, the guy from Chips – was planning to jump a building in Las Vegas on a motorcycle. My first thought was “I wonder if VH1 has some new pseudo-celebrity series that is airing this”. It’s been a little while since some D list celebrity has had a turn in a boxing ring, rehab or semi-scripted vacation that has aired on cable. Danny Bona-douchebag must be making a living at a drive-thru somewhere. My second thought was “I wonder what the insurance coverage is on something like that”. Unfortunately that is just how my brain works. I’m going to go out on a limb and speculate that my Mom obtained this information from watching Fox News.

A few days later I learned that the exhibition in Las Vegas was actually Travis Pastrana beating some of Evil Knievel’s records. I, of course, learned this while stalking Carey Hart’s Instagram account. It’s a good thing I have social media to report news of the non-fake variety. And of course that obsession with heavily tattooed smoking hot motocross guys helps.

When I first received the information about Erik Estrada’s big comeback to showbiz I didn’t think much about whether or not it was legit. As with a lot of information I get from my parents, I gave it a 50/50 shot of being accurate. You see, this is not the first time data has been lost in translation. My dad has left many newspaper clippings over the years about bands he thinks I like or concerts I attended that made the news (often by the amount of arrests). I determined the old man just didn’t know me at all when he left an article about Nickelback on the kitchen table. I almost disowned him right then and there. Over the years he has informed me of more dead musicians than I can count, and almost all of the names he gave me are still alive and well.

Receiving information from him is similar to playing a game of telephone with a three year old. Every now and then he throws something really bizarre at me that I know can’t be true. Like that time he told me Sammy Hagar was the new lead singer of Van Halen. Unfortunately this was one of the few he got right. He also told me some reality television star who bankrupted six companies was running for president. I wasn’t buying it. Once again, he was correct.

My mom is not a whole lot better than my dad, but her misinformation is usually about someone we know. She sometimes gets my cousins confused and I think the one who is pregnant is getting divorced and the one who is divorcing got herself knocked up. I end up congratulating the soon to be single and dropping hints about a great workout plan for the prego. At these times I would feel embarrassed if I were capable of feeling that emotion.

So congratulations to Travis Pastrana for crushing it. And congratulations to Erik Estrada for… well I guess for still being a household name. My parents think Ponch is up to some pretty exciting things these days.

Lake Life

by | Jul 7, 2018 | Life, Screwing Things Up

The view is worth the work

My parents bought a house on a lake seven years ago. Each year we seem to spend a little more time out there and each year my dad somehow acquires more toys for the water. He started out with a couple of wave runners and started adding rafts he could pull behind the wave runners as my daughter got a little older. Then he finally bought himself a boat. And of course he had to buy a bigger raft to pull behind the boat. My mom acquires her own water toys yearly, mostly of the floating pineapple and alligator variety. It now takes about three hours to get all of the water toys ready for us to use for an hour. My dad actually pulls a cart behind his riding lawnmower stacked 6′ high with every type of flotation device imaginable. But we love it.

My dad and the seven year old are the only ones who drive the boat. My dad is the only one who parks the boat because getting it pulled onto the boat lift can be challenging. Sometimes it takes my dad a few efforts to get there. Because of this he usually loads up the boat with enough people and provisions to stay out on the lake for awhile.

The other day my parents had a party for the Fourth of July. All of my cousins and their kids were there and most of them wanted to go rafting. We jumped in the boat and took a bunch of the littles for a ride around the lake. We went around and around, trading places on the four person bouncing couch until I had a permanent kink in my neck and the youngest was ready to head to shore. When we pulled back in we pulled the boat up onto the lift but didn’t raise it, since we would be heading back out. It had been hard to push the boat off and the front end was far enough out of the water that it wasn’t going anywhere. Or so we thought… 

My dad and husband headed into the house for some food as all of the other adults hung around on the deck and in the yard. The kids all took off to play some lawn games and take a rest from being in the water. Ten minutes later I heard someone yelling “you’re losing your boat! Your boat is floating away!” I looked down to the water to see my dad’s boat bobbing in the water about fifteen feet from the dock. It was in between two docks headed right for a bunch of women and children floating around on their little blow up unicorns and flamingos. Luckily my parents’ neighbor and one of his friends were right there and were quickly pushing my dad’s boat back toward the lift. On a side note – I’m fairly convinced that my parents’ neighbor likes our family so much because we are always ready to turn him into the hero of the day. He is fairly consistently bailing us out of some lake dilemma.

Of course this happened when the two people who would know what to do were nowhere to be found. All of the other guys were not even wearing bathing suits and nobody who was outside could be of much help. So, it was apparently going to be up to me to get the boat back with the help of the neighbors. I ran into the water and started pulling the front of the boat onto the lift as the neighbor pushed from the back. Luckily the boat had just started floating away when they caught it so there wasn’t far to go, but we still had to get it back onto the lift.

Luckily the big guns were there. My family has been calling me “the big guns” for a year. I got the name when three guys were trying to push the boat onto the lift last year with little luck. I walked up and said “get out of the way and let the big guns get it” as they all laughed at me. They shut up a minute later when I successfully pulled the boat onto the lift from the front. Truth be told, my ass did most of the work. I pulled on the front of the boat while sitting down into the water. It just sounds a lot better to be called “big guns” than “big ass”.

On this day, we were pretty much in the same position as the day I got my nickname. And I got myself in the same position as before and pulled as I sat back into the water. My ass once again did the work and my arms got the credit. Sorry ass, that’s the way it goes. I was at the tail end of pulling the boat onto the lift when my dad walked out onto the dock after someone had told him what was going on outside. He got in the boat after we had it in position and raised it out of the water a little bit so it would stay secured.

When the littles came running back to the beach to go for another ride my dad suggested we take the wave runners and pull the smaller rafts. I thought it was a pretty good idea considering my guns were done for the day. The kids like the small rafts even more anyway since they fly all over the place and fall off. I opted not to drive for this round of rafting since I had already run into the neighbors’ dock the day before after not being able to find reverse. I have very much secured my position of brawn and not brains in this operation.

You would think that after seven years of part-time lake living we would all be a little better at it. To date we have almost sunk a boat, almost lost a boat, got a boat stuck on the lift, been unable to get a boat on the lift and I have crashed into two docks and run over my dad with a wave runner. Every time I am at the lake I feel a little bit like Eva Gabor in Green Acres, but somehow that water keeps luring me back.

In honor of my big Irish Catholic family I of course wrote this while listening to Dropkick Murphys