by Jen Logan | Dec 31, 2023 | Life
It’s been a year. We’ve had a little good, a little bad, and everything in between. It’s been a year of change overall. Our address changed, my husband’s job changed, my daughter’s health changed, and even the pets in our home changed. We started new traditions, created new habits and set new goals. I will probably feel differently when I actually have time to reflect but I feel like I just fell out of the washing machine most days after a long tumble. I think I remember the highlights, but it could have mostly been a dream.
January – I spent the month learning how to keep the books for a basketball team which was all kinds of ridiculous for someone who doesn’t even know how many players are supposed to be on the court at once.
February – I spent the month driving my kid to rehearsals for a play, doing tax returns and sitting in a sauna while feeling sick all month.
March – I took my first girls’ trip with three tweens for my mini-me’s birthday. And holy shit, my kid turned 12.
April – We rediscovered the Wi after my parents’ basement flooded and learned to play video games all over again. Saw David Sedaris, Bikini Kill and my kid playing tennis for the first time on a team.
May – I’m fairly certain I spent the entre month talking to teenagers before going to Las Vegas to watch punk rock bands for three days. It may have been the best month of the year!
June – If May was the best month, June was the worst. We lost our little baby boy Brody. I think he was the best cat I have ever had in my life. We also gained a kitten since Milo was heartbroken and needed a companion to help him heal. I think I have been cleaning up messes since Rollins appeared. He is much like having a toddler… on crack. We also saw Paramore, The Circle Jerks and Descendents live, so maybe not the absolute worst month.
July – We spent a lot of the month out at the lake watching the kitten destroy the screens and attacking his big brother. Fireworks are always better on the lake! I also got a new record player for my birthday and have since spent a small fortune on vinyl.
August – We became homeless after selling our house without being able to find a new one after visiting 30 and making offers on half a dozen properties. I think my parents’ pool was finally re-opened after waiting 4 months for their inept contractor to wrap things up.
September – We bought a house! My kid started the 7th grade with her uniforms in boxes and was diagnosed with a neuropathic disorder after months of symptoms that I chalked up to anxiety. I feel a lot like my mom must have when she sent me to school with a broken rib because she thought I was faking (with good reason).
October – My work schedule skyrocketed while my husband started spending more time at home. I feel like I came home one day and my house was full of artwork after my husband got to work in his new studio. We learned that we don’t get any kids trick-or-treating on our street after I bought a literal pallet of candy bars so I stress ate all of them by myself.
November – Every day was Groundhog’s Day… and I’m pretty sure my kid was in a play.
December – I brought out my firehose of glitter and decorated the new house. We had a party, opened too many Christmas gifts and planned for a handful of concerts next year. December has always been one of my favorite months and I spend most of it planning family activities and ways to give back to the world. This year was no exception, but I may have half-assed it a little. Such is life.
It’s hard to believe that the year is over. If 2023 was the year of change, I hope 2024 is the year of peace.
**I bought some vinyl in August that arrived at our old house in December. Maybe I’ll have time to listen to it by February. In the meantime I streamed it while writing this recap of the year.
by Jen Logan | Sep 26, 2023 | Lemonade out of Lemons
We moved into our new house and after a week of unpacking I finally had the chance to use the jet tub. It took about a week to fill up and was so big I couldn’t reach my feet to the end while lying down so I basically floated around while bubbles blew through my hair. It was nice to finally relax after unpacking approximately 7,000 boxes in record time. My husband had packed our old house over two months but somehow we managed to unpack in four days. I think it actually took the tub longer to drain than it took to unpack and my muscles had the knots to prove it. About three quarters of the way through the tub draining, my husband noticed that it sounded like it wasn’t draining properly. He walked downstairs to investigate the sound in the walls and found that water was pooling on the floor in the laundry room on the first floor and dripping out of the wall outlet. He followed the sound further and found water gushing out of the ceiling tiles in the basement. The entire tub had drained down our walls instead of the pipes.
I would like to say I was surprised by this event, but after having to replace most of our appliances, roof and carpet within a few days of stepping foot in the house, I was only surprised that the tub didn’t fall right through the floor. While my husband was mopping up the water, I was trying to scrape the paint off the screws to get into the access panel behind the tub. When I finally managed to open it up, we discovered a giant Christmas platter had been left under the plumbing and all of the overflow pans under the jets were overflowing with water. There was a gaping hole in the tub liner that had a TAMPON shoved in it. Yes, a fucking tampon was plugging the hole in our giant tub. I am guessing this was the work of a 30 year old man after seeing a Tampax commercial.
When we bought the house, we knew we would eventually be remodeling most of the bathrooms. My daughter’s bathroom was first on the list, but has moved down a few notches after my bathtub turned our basement into a rainforest. She doesn’t seem to mind. As a matter of fact, I don’t know if she has even seen her bathroom around all of her unpacked boxes. As my husband and I were running up and down multiple flights of stairs with lamps and boxes of books, she was finding the perfect window to sit in and play guitar. She busied herself setting up her drum kit while I loaded her clothing into her closets and her Grandpa hung her curtains. She was in full-on teen mode the entire move, which put me in full-on mommy dearest mood.
We have been in the house for a little over two weeks and we have had repairmen, deliverymen, roofers, plumbers, electricians and every other type of serviceman performing repairs, cleanups and replacements multiple times a day since we moved in. I feel like I should have just called an exorcist the first day. Just when we think we are done, something else breaks, leaks or falls off the hinges. My Dad has renamed our new house “the money pit” and he laughs until I remind him that once I run out of funds for repairs, I’ll be calling him.
I am learning a lesson from my kid these last few weeks every time I get worked up about something else going wrong. The house could fall down around her and she would still be sitting in her music room, surrounded by half packed boxes, playing guitar. Her drums are set up and she even let me rock out on them the other day. She located her happy place the night we moved in and surrounded herself with the things she loves most. I found my happy place in my office. It was the first area of the house I unpacked and the only room in the house that hasn’t had a major repair. I even hung up my artwork by myself after being told I should not nail anything into the walls due to my inability to measure before hammering and using a hairbrush to do so.
I keep reminding myself everyday that the bones of this house are exactly what we wanted. All of the headaches will be forgotten as time passes. The story of the tub with a tampon will be just a funny story about the asshole who sold us the house not understanding the difference between women’s plumbing and actual plumbing (which explains why he is single), and the groundhog in the flowerbed will be a memory for the cats who have finally found their litter boxes. Until then, I might just hideout in my happy place.
**I have been MIA for over a month, and this move has about put me over the edge. BUT, I have discovered a lot of new music in the process. The new Scowl is one of my new favorites.
by Jen Logan | Jun 14, 2023 | Life
My cat died this week and I’m fairly certain there is a hole in my heart that will never be healed. I think I had forgotten how much you could love an animal until he came into my life. Maybe it’s because I had been wanting a kitten for five years before my husband finally agreed to let another animal in the house after the last psycho kitty we had. Or maybe it’s because all of the girls at our vet’s office got all googly-eyed when he came in because he was just so handsome and lovable. Whatever it was about that cat, he was one in a million and it’s hard to sit on the couch writing this without him in between my knees.
From the minute Brody came into our house, he ruled it. He jumped up to drink water out of my fountain, so I filled it with purified water and disinfected it every week knowing that would be where he chose to hydrate. I even bought him a fancy pet fountain to put by his food dish, which he half-heartedly drank from when he was too lazy to walk in the other room. He wanted to go outside, so we bought him a harness and tent. He was able to explore most of our backyard, dragging me behind him through pine trees and rose bushes tethered by a little green leash. The kids in the neighborhood came over to watch him roll around on a blanket in his tent and soak in the sunshine while he watched his favorite human play lacrosse with her dad. If we didn’t take him outside often enough, he let us know he was displeased by running into the garage and hiding under one of our cars for an hour while we tried to coax him out with treats. He knew what he wanted and did not like to be told no.
Brody was such a spoiled boy that he had his own pet and carried it around like a baby. I had been gifted a stuffed cat that made an angry face when you squeezed it’s head by my husband. I had been asking for a pet for so long that it was actually a joke and he bought me this stuffed animal as a birthday gift a year before Brody came to us. Sometime when he was still a kitten, he decided Fido was his pet and took him away from me. He carried that thing around the house late at night after everyone went to sleep roaring like a lion with an antelope. Sometimes we would catch him rolling around with it on the floor, alternating between fighting it and licking it’s face. After a year of this, I convinced my husband that he was asking for a brother and we got him a real live cat of his own, but he never really let go of his pet Fido. His little brother even found the behavior strange and ran away when Brody brought Fido out to play at night.
Five days after we took Brody into our home I brought him to the vet for the first time and learned he had a heart defect that would probably be the thing that would kill him at some point. He was the most expensive free cat ever, getting his own kitty cardiologist. Our vet was almost unable to neuter him due to the risk of sedation, but they were able to perform the surgery in a matter of minutes and bring him back when his heart started failing mid-snip. He was given a beta blocker for his heart twice a day mixed in with gravy like a little old man in a nursing home. Up until the the day he died, I could tell time by when he started to get needy and demanding, meowing for his medicine at 8pm every night.
The two times we went on vacation my parents had to pet-sit, giving him his meds twice a day and keeping his fountain full of filtered water. It was like handing over Little Lord Fauntleroy each time we left. I may as well have taken him over to their house in a carriage. They loved him like we did though and he even snuggled with my Dad a few times while we were gone. He sat next to Grandma on the couch and cuddled up in her chair at the lake like they belonged to him just as much as we did.
A few months before Brody died he had gone to the vet for a check up and it was discovered that he had a growth under his jaw. It felt like bone, but they could not tell without an x-ray which they couldn’t get without sedating him. They also had a hard time drawing blood from him and we had to wait a week and try again due to his increased heart rate. He had his nails trimmed a few weeks before he died, so at least the girls at the vet got to see him before he left us all. From the time the lump under his chin appeared he started to look like an old cat. His eyes were getting more soulful and his energy was not the same as it had been. He had moments where it looked like he saw something in the room that nobody else could see and I kept wondering if he was seeing little angel kittens coming for him. He just started up and down a wall or pounced on nothing in a corner. At one point my husband thought he was injured because he limped around like his back leg wasn’t working, but then shook it off and pranced away when I examined it. I had begin to wonder if he had some kind of brain cancer or neurological problem. Unfortunately, it’s hard to get any answers without tests that he couldn’t have without sedation.
The night before Brody died he stretched himself out on top of me from right under my chin to below my knees. He never lounged on me this way, only my daughter, and he did this at 3 am. He woke me up out of a dead sleep as he stretched out and snuggled into me and I pet him until I fell back asleep. I don’t know if this was him saying goodbye or if it was just one of the many little strange things he did that made him so mythical, but I’m holding onto that feeling for as long as I can.
Brody Logan – 8/1/2020 – 6/4/2023
*Brody was named after Brody Dalle from the Distillers, and this song will always remind me of my favorite little boy.
by Jen Logan | Dec 21, 2020 | Life
My family has many holiday traditions. Some are fun like watching A Christmas Story 400 times, some are challenging, like baking 800 cookies, and some are straight up worse than a root canal, like going to the mall. My dad insists on this last one every single year. No matter what I do to try to make his shopping easier, he somehow drags me to the mall. The Old Man is not a great gift giver, but he thinks that if he goes to the mall, the world’s greatest gift will somehow find him. I have been playing this game with him for over twenty years and I have yet to see a gift fly out of a store and beat him over the head, but I am hopeful that I will be there if it ever happens.
This year he called me asking “what do you think about those glasses that let you walk down streets in New York City and see the Sistine Chapel?” My first thought was that my mom doesn’t do so well with technology, so virtual reality glasses are about as useful as a unicycle (my dad’s gift to my mom, Christmas 1971). In all fairness, he did know the name of the oculus glasses and told me all about them. At the end of his explanation I said “they are owned by Facebook? No, just no. You may as well ask me to make a purchase at Walmart. Not happening.” My husband also made a very valid argument against such a purchase. He pointed out that my mom fell in a hole without anything on her head obstructing her view. I have to admit, I have watched my mom fall down more times than I can count and have seen her knock things off tables with her purse. We have a running joke in my family about my mom running into things. I can only imagine her trying to navigate a room while thinking she is somewhere else entirely. Unfortunately, my dad had to ask “is this idea up there with the unicycle?” to which I had to inform him yes, it was.
He did have a few other ideas that were actually good, and as it turns out, I could actually order said ideas online while on the phone with him. Unfortunately my dad declined my offer to do so stating that he wanted to touch the items before purchasing them. Apparently his sense of touch is far better than his sense of sight, or judgement for that matter. I searched online until I found a local store to purchase one of the items that was not at the mall, so we drove the 11 miles to the store so my dad could manhandle the gift. After wandering through the store for 20 minutes, we were informed that the item we wished to fondle was only available online. We proceeded to the parking lot where I ordered the gift online on my phone. My dad still claims we purchased the gift at the store to keep his purchasing record clean. I’m fairly certain he believes there is a reward for the effort of shopping in person.
One of the things my mom specifically asked for was a chair. She has a queen anne recliner at their lake house that is just her size. My mom in an average size recliner looks much like Lily Tomlin as Edith Ann, but this small, stiff chair fits her just perfectly. She loves the chair, and asked for another one in a different color, which is kind of a theme for my mom. If one is good, two is better, and you can never have too many chairs. She apparently found one online for $300 and told my dad about it. Unfortunately, she may have been shopping on wish.com because we were unable to find a decent chair for twice that amount at any of the many furniture stores we perused in person (including Macy’s at THE MALL). We eventually found one that I declared too ornate, my dad declared too uncomfortable, and my mom declared too expensive, so it was clearly the perfect chair. It will arrive in 4 months. Happy Easter mom!
I thought I was free and clear after walking through more stores in a few weeks than I have in six months, but I was mistaken. On our way home from what I thought was our final trip my dad declared that he forgot all about her apple pencil. Apparently when he bought my mom her iPad two years ago he also bought her the pencil to go along with it. She tried to use it once and when it didn’t work, she set it aside for two years. My dad decided it would be a good idea to take the pencil back to the apple store at the mall to replace it. When we arrived, we were informed that this was not, in fact, a good idea at all. The security guard who stopped us at the door told us we should go home and take care of it online. I barely contained my smirk as I repeated his instructions like shopping online was a novel idea.
By the time my dad had completed his shopping, every item he purchased was being delivered. This was clearly not going to suffice, so one last trip to the mall was necessary, this time with mini-me to assist. We walked directly to a store with lots of sparkly things where the Old Man immediately pointed at the same thing he bought his wife last year and said “do you think she would like that?” to which I replied “well, she liked it last year…” The child walked him around the store pointing out the items he had already purchased and moved him directly to a display of new merchandise. If only she had been born in the 90s when he bought the same earrings two years in a row and I was too stoned to realize it. We exited the store a half hour later with gifts for my mom, including one from the child that she didn’t even have to pay for, and my kid carrying a brand new fur backpack that she also didn’t pay for (or shoplift). Apparently my father is grooming her to take over my shopping duties by bribing her with free stuff. It took him long enough to get sick of listening to my commentary while fondling mall wares. That man has a high threshold for mockery.
All in all, I think the Old Man did okay this year, as long as all of his purchases arrive on time. I don’t have any faith in the postal service since they have been holding several of my packages hostage in the vortex called “in transit” for a month now. And suddenly I am beginning to see why he likes to do all of his shopping in person. Maybe that old guy is actually onto something.
**After hearing Mariah Carey at the mall and wanting to gouge my eardrums out with a chop stick, I found it necessary to listen to some good old fashioned Christmas songs about sex changes and killing people.**
by Jen Logan | Oct 20, 2020 | Uncategorized
I have had more scam calls in the past month than I have over my lifetime. And let me start by saying, I am the worst nightmare for these people. I learned from a man who made a sport out of telemarketing calls. I have been listening to my dad mess with telemarketers since I was a small child. He kept a New York Times salesman on the phone for a good ten minutes telling him how the paper would be useless in our house because the entire family was illiterate. He talked this guy’s ear off about a cousin who went all the way through school to the 10th grade and then argued that the 10th grade was the end of high school, not the 12th grade. So when telemarketers call me, I usually do my best to keep them on the line as long as possible so they can’t annoy someone else.
Last year I had a guy call and tell me they were coming to arrest me. Since at least ten reasons popped into my head for why this could be accurate, I listened. Apparently my tax preparer didn’t file my tax return, which is weird since I’m a CPA and all. He even ended up swearing at me at one point so I grabbed a whistle and blew it in the phone as hard as I could. I then proceeded to call him back repeatedly blowing the whistle until the line was finally taken off the hook. I can be a little mean if they catch me in a mood. I have told several of these idiots that I am sorry they made such bad life choices that scamming people is their only form of income or I wonder if their mothers are proud of their career choices.
A few weeks ago I got a call from my “computer’s support team” telling me there was suspicious activity on my Amazon account. I asked if I had paid extra for the support team or if my computer just came that way. Strangely, the guy did not understand sarcasm, which seems to be common with these calls. He walked me through downloading a file onto my computer to resolve the issue. I tapped on my keys pretending to follow his instructions and then finally said “okay, I’m all done. I can’t wait to see what your virus does to my computer. Oh, and by the way, I don’t have an Amazon account, but my husband does. Do you want his phone number?” All I heard in response was a click. Luckily for him, I did not have my whistle handy.
Yesterday I received another call who sounded almost identical to the amazon guy. He was also from my computer’s support team, and said I definitely had a virus. He must have heard from his buddy that I downloaded the file! He asked if I had noticed anything unusual and I said that my granny porn had been really slow to load. When he asked what my desktop looked like I told him I had no icons and asked if I should. He said everyone had icons so I must have done something to make mine disappear. I think he just wanted to know if I had any of the granny porn loaded on my desktop. Maybe that question is the scam caller’s equivalent of “what are you wearing?” When he asked me what browser I used I said the blue one because it was way faster than the red one. He still didn’t catch on that I was toying with him. We had been on the phone for at least five minutes when he told me to press the function key along with another key. I asked him what a function key was and he tried to explain as I continued to ask questions. He was trying to describe the layout of a keyboard while I was saying things like “space bar, is it a bar in outer space? I don’t understand what you mean.” He was clearly becoming exasperated so when he said “do you see the key with the Fn on it? It’s right next to the key with Ctrl on it” I almost started laughing, feeling his head ready to explode. Instead I said “OH MY GOD, that key is not there. There is a blank spot. Do you think the virus stole it?” And again, all I heard was a click.
** I knew this album was in my head for a reason. **
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