Holiday in the Sun

by | Dec 4, 2018 | Being Awesome, Life

Since my daughter was thirteen months old we have vacationed in Atlantis. It’s been a few years since we have been here because my husband has this crazy idea that there should be a direct correlation between my income and the number of vacations we take. He worries about money more than anyone I know. Maybe it’s because I am capable of spending $1,000 while walking through the airport. There is a candy store in the resort that I have been known to spend upwards of $300 at. In my defense, the bulk rate is $5 per 1/4 pound. When the whole family tags along on vacation I go for a run every morning to pick out our spot by our favorite pool just so I can stop at the candy store and Starbucks on my way back to the room. I return sweaty, awake and ready for fun. My family, who are all eating breakfast, never questions why I’m not hungry. I am actually pretty proud of myself for only spending $90 at the candy store this week. You know you have a sugar problem when you can make that kind of statement.

Over the years our activities have changed based on the age of my daughter and if the old folks are traveling with us. Six years ago we started at the shallow, zero entry pools and beaches. We worked our way up to the kids pools, smaller slides and beaches with bigger waves. We have finally graduated to the big slides and dangerously rough waves. My little adrenaline junkie was running out on the closed beach demanding to jump in the waves and dragging me up the power tower to fly air born down a slide on a two person tube. We literally were air born for the first drop. The two of us combined weigh about as much as the average male so we bounce around like a pinball down most of the slides. Fortunately for me her favorite slide is the one that spits you out into a tube in the shark tank. You get to float through as sharks swim all around you. To me, that shark tank is one of the happiest places on earth. My husband joked that if I were super rich I would be one of those lunatics that buys exotic animals. Instead of tigers and llamas I would have an enormous tank of sharks. I would be at parties where people like Kanye West and his giant-assed wife talk about their Ferraris and Maseradis and I would be like “Yeah, that’s cool. I have a nurse shark, a reef shark, two blacktips and a hammerhead”. Thank God I’m not super rich because I am enough of an asshole already.

Speaking of assholes, I never encounter as many as I do on vacation. I remember the very first time my husband and I traveled to Atlantis and a group of twenty-somethings came walking through the aquarium with a boom box playing something awful like Pitbul or Lil’ somebody or other. I thought it was the cast of Jersey Shore but nobody was falling down drunk or taking their clothes off so I think it was just some other random idiots. I also thought this was a one time thing that I would never again see in my life. Sadly, I was very wrong. We encountered several groups of people walking around playing music on their phones. Strangely, they all had the same hair as the guys on that Jersey Shore show. I am beginning to think maybe this is a New Jersey thing. It must be loud with everyone walking around with their phones blaring. My husband overheard one of the women in one of these groups talking about being somewhere that was too classy for them so they had to come over to this pool where it was more relaxed. She was wearing a bathing suit that said “Barbie” on the front. I have far too many things to say about this, so I will just not say anything.

The second type of asshole we encounter on vacation is the woman who feels the need to wear full makeup and false eyelashes to ride on water slides.Seriously, who does this? At least a few dozen women from what I saw this week. My favorite part about watching these women is seeing them at the bottom of the slide with their makeup running and eyelashes hanging half off one eye like a little caterpillar jumped on their face as their tube made it’s way down the slide. One woman stood out even among these clowns. She wore hot pink eye shadow with gold polka dots, false eyelashes that looked like two barbers combs taped to her eyelids and a red swimming cap. Yes, a red swimming cap. My seven year old couldn’t stop laughing when she saw this woman standing a few stairs ahead of us getting ready for the tallest slide at the place. When children are laughing at you it might be time to evaluate how you have become a caricature of yourself. I never saw if she actually made it onto a slide. Somehow I think she is probably still standing there talking about her weave getting wet and asking the attendant why she can’t wear her thirteen bangle bracelets and layers of gold necklaces down the slide. Some people just want to be seen. Others want to be seen from space.

My all time favorite of the vacation assholes is the drunken train wreck. I don’t know what it is about water that can turn your average heavy drinker into a total shit show but it happens. There are a lot of people sitting around the pool enjoying fruity cocktails of the alcoholic variety. They are relaxing on vacation and having a drink or two while they watch their kids play in the water. Then there is the middle aged woman who can hardly keep herself upright making a spectacle of herself. A few days ago my husband came back from a slide with my daughter trailing behind him. He told me a drunk woman almost fell on top of our daughter. My only response to this was it was probably best that he was the one with her when it happened or the woman may have quickly become a toothless drunken mess. I don’t care what you do to yourself, but don’t put my child in danger. An hour later we were standing in line at the bar behind a couple of women ordering drinks very loudly and promptly spilling half of them when they arrived. I pointed at one of the women and asked my husband if it was the woman and he laughed that I could pick her out so easily. It wasn’t that hard considering she was having difficulty holding herself upright at the bar. As we ordered our virgin pina coladas she slurred loudly “Virgin? No, you need alcohol!” to which I loudly replied “You clearly don’t need any more alcohol. You are already embarrassing yourself”. Had she not almost taken my kid out I probably wouldn’t have said anything but I really couldn’t help myself. I don’t think she heard me, but her friend did. I watched as she danced off to a group of cabana boys and started high fiving them. I was mentally preparing myself for when she started stripping because it looked like she might start taking off her clothes any minute. As we walked away, a guy walking behind us commented on how trashed the woman was. He said he watched her almost fall in a pool earlier. When he said he hoped she didn’t hurt herself or anyone else my response was that I hoped she didn’t hurt anyone else, but her hurting herself wouldn’t be the worst thing. Knocking out her front teeth or almost drowning could be the rock bottom she needed to get herself some help. But who am I to say? I’m just happy she was the only person we encountered in our week stay that was that drunk. I don’t drink and I don’t have a lot of patience for people who are too drunk to take care of themselves. That probably makes me an asshole, but I’m okay with that. I’m sure I made someone else’s list of vacation assholes.

Mother

by | Jun 27, 2018 | Parenting

She might fall, but she might fly.

I was watching the news this morning and there was a story about how a toddler was injured at a playground that caught my interest. In the preview they kept showing a picture of a young mom sitting on a slide with her toddler on her lap, all smiles. I was already thinking that the mom was probably the one who accidentally injured the child, and sure enough when the story aired, it was the mom’s fault – although the story wanted to somehow blame playgrounds as a whole. The mom went down the slide with the child in her lap and halfway down the kid’s leg got stuck on the side of the slide and broke.

Things happen. Kids fall. They fall on playground equipment, they fall off of playground equipment. They fall in the grass, on the sidewalk and down the stairs in their own homes on occasion. The world is a giant test course for kids. But this child was hurt because her mom – who barely fit down the slide solo – decided that the child would be safer in her lap than alone. Her leg got caught because there wasn’t enough room in between the mom’s legs for the child’s legs so they were on top, flopping around unsecured. Of course her leg was going to hit the side of the slide and her rubber soled shoe was going to get stuck.

I have done this exact same thing with my daughter and at the time I had two concerns  – her leg getting trapped under me or both of us falling as one unit off the slide. The second situation was probably more likely since gravity and I have never gotten along very well. I remember thinking that I was much too large for the slide and I was about half the size of the mother I was watching on TV. The thing is, I knew that most times when my daughter was trying to climb something or play on something that my interference would muck up the works. She was better off doing things on her own. Me hovering would likely lead to me somehow falling on top of her or tripping her. The few slides that I did descend with her were at least 10′ tall and she was unable to get to the top of them by herself. If one or both of us had been hurt while on the slide I wouldn’t have blamed anyone but myself. This mom was acting as if she had no blame in what happened to her kid. She actually used the “everyone is doing it” excuse. There is some cult member out there just waiting to stumble upon this woman as their newest recruit.

One at a time please!

There are signs at every playground I have ever been to that caution people that the equipment is designed for children ages 2-12. Some even list the ages as 5-12. This mother was advocating there be warning signs at playgrounds of what could happen if an adult were to use the playground equipment. It’s the equivalent of the little pictures on fast food coffee cups explaining that you shouldn’t dump the coffee in your lap because it could burn you. Do we really need more cautionary signs for what could happen if we don’t use common sense? I think we should just start putting up signs that read “Don’t be an idiot.”

I really didn’t want to blame the mom in this story because we moms get blamed for enough already, but when I saw the mom holding her daughter up to hang on to the monkey bars at the end of the story I decided that this particular mom didn’t really deserve the benefit of the doubt. I imagined the child a few years in the future trying to hang by herself from the monkey bars, falling on her face when she couldn’t hold herself up. Kids don’t learn to hang by themselves when their parents always hold them up. I remember the first time my daughter was able to swing from one bar to the next and how proud she was of herself. This was because I told her for several years that if she wanted to play on the monkey bars she would need to do it herself. I wasn’t going to carry her across because that took away the future sense of pride she would one day feel.

Hang on honey, Mommy’s climbing up right behind you!

The most interesting part of the story was how much playground injuries have increased over the last twenty years. Even though the equipment has become safer, there are more injuries. I would suspect a lot of them are either kids falling off of things the first time their parents aren’t holding them up or the parents otherwise mucking up the works. Twenty years ago children were not having their legs broken on slides all over the place because their parents weren’t insisting on riding tandem. Kids can get hurt enough on their own, they really don’t need mom’s assistance in this area. And no matter how much the lady on the news program blames the playground and their lack of signage, her little girl is still going to grow up and tell the story about how her mom broke her leg when she was a toddler. Welcome to motherhood lady!

I wrote this blog while listening to Dropkick Murphys

Girlfixer

by | Jun 21, 2018 | Being Awesome, Life

My daughter was looking through some of my old yearbooks last weekend. As I flipped the pages and looked at pictures of my class, I was a little shocked at how few of my classmates I remembered. I was also shocked that when I saw the picture of one particular girl I was brought right back to being a twelve year old girl and wanting to rip someone’s head off. Not so shockingly, it wasn’t even the girl, it was her mother.

I went to a very small school. There were less than 15 students in my grade and most of us had been in school together since we were very young. One girl that I was good friends with wore glasses the depth of the bottom of a glass soda bottle. Of course when some of the other girls teased her the words “Coke bottle” were often used. These are the words that I heard come out of the mouth of a girl we will call “Judy” that initiated my feelings of ill will toward her mother.

Judy was the kind of girl who defined herself by her looks. Her entire self worth was wrapped up in the emblem on her popped collared shirts and pink headbands. She spent more time in front of a mirror than a book and her school supplies consisted of glosses and powders rather than leads and paper. Looking back, I can’t really blame her for this, it was how she had been conditioned by her mother who was a walking Ralph Lauren advertisement. I think Judy’s mom was pretty, but it was hard to tell what she really looked like under all the mascara and hairspray. Sometimes her insides showed through which is exactly what kept her in the pageant runner up category. She would never be beautiful with all of her insides making an appearance like they did. She was full of gossip and snarky comments. It was no wonder Judy only felt good about herself when she was making others feel badly about themselves.

Judy never picked on me the way she did my friend. I think she knew better than to enter a battle of wits unarmed. Twelve years of smart assery had left me a relative wit warrior. Having an overly healthy self-esteem, her words would have been like paper airplanes attacking me. I threw grenades. And after she called my friend “Coke bottle” that day, I threw a pretty hefty grenade. I don’t recall my exact words but the message was that even the strongest braces were not going to fix her enormous buck teeth. Although I was a skilled verbal swords woman I was also a prepubescent girl so my natural reaction was to go directly for the jugular. She had no comeback for me other than to scream “BITCH!” which was, unfortunately for her, overheard by a nun walking down the hall. We were both taken to the headmistress’s office and our parents were called. I don’t recall any punishment. I do remember that our mothers had a telephone conversation that night.

In that conversation Judy’s bumbleheaded mother informed my mom that Judy was forced to call me a bitch. My mom asked if I had held her down and made her recite the word. I don’t think Judy’s mom understood what “personal responsibility” meant when my mom used the words and she certainly didn’t understand what my mom was getting at when she was trying to find out how I had coerced poor little Judy into swearing at me. Judy’s mom finally let her insides show and said “maybe if you stayed at home with your daughter these things wouldn’t happen…” My mom is a better person than I am. Where I would have said “maybe if you didn’t spend so much time with your daughter she wouldn’t know what a bitch was”, my mom remained calm and continued the conversation until they finally agreed to disagree and hung up. My mom has told me many times that there is no fixing stupid.

I know those words cut my mom. I know she often felt guilty about being a working mom in a land of stay at home moms. I know this because I used that guilt as a weapon on many occasions. Again, I was a prepubescent girl so my natural reaction was to go directly for the jugular – mother or not. Plus, I was kind of a manipulative little asshole. Those words actually provoked me to be a little more like my mom. I was pretty certain that Judy’s mom truly was a bitch and it was probably because she was miserable with her life decisions. I had always thought that my rebelliousness came from my dad, but I realized then that my mom had been bucking the system my whole life.

Stay Off My Lawn!

by | May 26, 2018 | Life

Danger – small children may get lost in grass!

We have a lawn service. They are inexpensive since they handle a lot of the homes in our neighborhood. Because of this I never complain about the little things that bother me. Sure, I swear under my breath when they show up before 8 am on saturday most weeks but I don’t complain. I just shake my head and throw my hands in the air while watching the tweenage boy handling the weed wacker, occasionally beheading my flowers as he wildly swings the machine that weighs more than him around like a golf club, but I don’t complain. I don’t even complain that every year I have to remind them to mow the hump in our front yard that they apparently mistake for a flowerless flowerbed with grass growing in it. Seriously, it’s a hump where a tree once grew that now is covered with grass. I don’t complain about any of this because they are cheap. I understand that you most often do get what you pay for.

I am, however, ready to call and complain right now. This month they have come to do their job once. It’s the end of May and they have done one cut of our lawn, on the 15th. Our grass is so long it tickles my knees as I walk through the backyard. My husband joked that he would be able to do all kinds of cliche family portraits without having to drive anywhere. The field is now surrounding our house. I walked through the grass yesterday and when I turned around there were giant foot prints where I had flattened the grass. Several small crop circles are positioned all over my yard where I dragged bags of mulch to the flower beds.

As I drive down my street it looks like half the neighborhood abandoned their houses. A lot of my neighbors use this lawn service and nobody has seen them in more than ten days. It’s like a zombie apocalypse on our street. I saw some pink and white streamers blowing in the wind and it was the handlebars of a little girl’s bike. The grass had swallowed the entire bike, leaving just the tip of a handlebar unconsumed. If I had a decent script I would break out the camera and film a horror movie in the hood.

The end is near!

The neighbors on either side of me must be losing their minds. They both take very good care of their yards so having the hillbillies with the field next door has to be making them crazy. I noticed that our one neighbor was out on his riding mower for the third time in a week yesterday. I think our yard is giving him anxiety. Maybe he is worried that it’s contagious. I almost told him if he wanted to just keep riding and cut through our yard I wouldn’t complain. At this point though, I’m afraid he might get stuck. I think we are at a level where only an industrial mower will handle our situation. I’m expecting a letter from our homeowners’ association any day now.

Sadly, what I am most annoyed with in this entire situation is that the owner of our lawn care company is a horrible businessman. I could understand him not showing up if we paid a flat rate per season regardless of the work performed, but we pay per cut. Every week he doesn’t work, he doesn’t get paid. Maybe he is like Forrest Gump and cuts grass for fun, but even then I would think he would want to come around more than once a month. So now I am standing around the door waiting for the crew to show up so I can give them a business card and offer them some solid business advice while I remind them that the hump out front is just a hump and needs to be cut. This is going to be a long week!

I Like Food

by | Mar 13, 2018 | Chick Stuff, Life

Sadly, I broke up this childhood friendship.

I very rarely eat fast food. Questionable animal parts in a grease soaked bag is not my idea of tasty. I have an occasional breakfast from a cheap eats establishment before an early morning flight, or pick up a burger and frosty for my daughter after she badgers me for three weeks and I can use it to bribe her into doing a chore without complaining, but those events are few and far between. I can count on my hands the number of times I have ordered food through a little speaker and was able to pay for a meal for three with a twenty dollar bill.

I didn’t always have an aversion to fast food. As a matter of fact, as a child I thought “flay-o” was a kind of fish after getting filet-o-fish sandwiches with my Dad repeatedly. I grew up in the time when sitting down for a meal at a brightly colored plastic table with attached chairs was family fun, not a visitation at an upstate penitentiary. The e coli infested ball pits were not yet a thing. When I was a teenager I became vegetarian and then vegan. I quit fast food when most kids were just really getting started. I have always gone a little against the grain.

Diseases in every color!

My husband was a serious fast food junkie when we met. He awoke in the morning smelling like french fries the same way frat boys awake on Sunday mornings smelling of beer and bad judgement. Neither one of us cooked well and he was not a big salad fan so he was left with few options. We eventually put on our big kid pants and learned how to cook the year I planted a garden and had a kitchen full of baskets overflowing with vegetables. When you are faced with not being able to get out of your house without chasing tomatoes rolling across your kitchen floor, you figure out a way to put them to use. My better half soon went from his old peanut oil scent in the morning to asparagus pee in the evening. I’m not sure I did him any favors.

We were pretty adamant about not poisoning our child with pink slime. We avoided chain restaurants in general and treated anything with a drive through like a brothel, someplace no child should enter. I will admit we were a little over the top, but our fears were realized when my parents started feeding our five year old meals that come with a little plastic toy destined to become landfill within a week. We had opened the door a week prior by making a run for the border. It happens.

Friday night was the rare exception to our general avoidance of food that comes in a bag. I had quite a few errands to run and being that it was Friday in the middle of lent, our options for a quick meal were limited. I gave my family a few choices and they told me to drive through the golden arches. That is the last time I am listening to those fools.

Pick a lane…

Since it has been at least a decade since I have had to place an order through a speaker, I knew what we were getting before I approached the entrance. It was a good thing too. I was so confused by the presence of two drive through lanes that I almost turned around and left. I took the far lane which proved to be a wise choice after I watched a car pull through the inner lane and pull up to the window without placing an order. While turning the corner she took the curb with her back wheel. I ordered my three “flay-os” and fries by yelling my order into the little speaker a foot away from my window. I must not have yelled loudly enough because the cashier replied “what?” several times before asking “is that all?” It was like having a conversation with a cranky old man with his hearing aid turned down.

After completing my order I pulled up to the first window with my money ready. A teenage girl reached her hand out and took my money without a word. She then handed me a receipt and my $.08 change with a dripping wet hand and closed the window in silence. At first I thought maybe it was the restaurant’s policy to not be chatty with the customers. That was until I pulled up behind the car that had taken the curb a few minutes earlier. She had been sitting at the window talking to one of the workers for the entirety of my ordering process. The worker stuck his head out the window repeatedly looking back at me while they continued their conversation. My fast food was starting to take the time of  a seven course tasting menu with the chef. The woman in the car started to pull away at least three times and stopped abruptly to say one last thing. When she finally pulled away I drove up to the window to find two bags sitting inside and nobody to deliver them out the window. The man who had been there was walking to the door on the other side of the restaurant where his lady friend had pulled around and parked. Another teenage girl finally ran up to the window and handed me my bags saying “have a nice night” with a smile. Finally – the service with a smile I was expecting based on all of the commercials I see on the Disney channel.

If the car didn’t need a new air freshener before, it does now!

As I drove home I reached into the bag to eat half of everyone’s french fries. This is the price they pay me for picking up the food. I learned this from my husband. He calls it a delivery tax. It mostly applies to Starbucks and sweets, but my understanding is I can apply it to anything. After eating a handful of fries I dug around for a napkin only to find none. Now I understood why the cashier’s hand was dripping wet. This fast food hell-hole was apparently napkin-free. I guess they have to cover the cost of their ultra friendly labor force somehow. I continued munching on fries for my entire drive home all while wondering how it’s possible that the people who just gave me such sub-par service are the same ones demanding a raise. I can’t complain though. It is true everywhere, you get what you pay for.

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