The Sorta Great Wall

This is a repost from June, 2008.



Here's why I'm increasingly down on science: I've heard over and over that most of what we think of as "matter," which laypeople call "stuff," is actually made up of empty space.


Well, that's a lot of, as my dad used to say, "bull-lar."

I don't know what "bull-lar" was, but my dad said that a lot of things were "bull-lar." He'd say what we did, as kids, was "bull-lar." He'd be yelling at us for something, and say something parental, old-school parental, like "You think you can just take a car and race it along and jump it 100 feet off the road? Well you can't! That's a lot of bull-lar!" (It was not 100 feet, though. It was 110, at least.)

Between the frequent use of the phrase "bull-lar" and my dad's habit of holding my younger sister, who was only about two, while he yelled at us, very little 'punishment' actually soaked in because we spent half the time wondering what "bull-lar" was and half the time watching our sister mimic dad as he yelled.

I suppose "bull-lar" was one of those things that parents learn to say when their kids are young because they don't want to swear around their kids and are trying to be good role models. I try to do that, too, which was why a while back when I slipped while installing the stove hood and banged my head hard enough to draw blood, I didn't swear or cuss or yell. I didn't do anything for about 10 minutes except try not to explode, and I did it. I didn't swear at all. I just bled. So I'm a good role model, except that while I try not to swear and I never drink, I also regularly let the Babies! watch, on Youtube while they eat breakfast, a clip of Butters from "South Park" singing What What In The Butt, which I think is hilarious and the Babies think is hilarious, too, and it really helps us get through breakfast a lot easier.

I know, I know. I can hear you now: How can you possibly do that? How can you, of all people, possibly expose your not-even-two-year-old boys to copyright infringement? I feel bad about, it, too. But listen to my side: A family is an economic partnership. Everyone has to pitch in. So some people make sure that the Babies! get fed and some people make sure the Babies! get bathed and some people make sure that the Babies! don't fall out of windows. Those people, in our family, are Sweetie. Other people (me) have them watch South Park clips on Youtube and determine what occupations they will have in the future to make sure they make enough money that Other People (me) don't have to work after they're fifty. (Currently, Plan A is them having a Disney show, since if you are a kid and you appear on Disney TV you are instantly worth a billion dollars, and also, I like "Bunnytown.")

Plus, consider this: if someone in the family is going to take a fall for the rest of us, shouldn't it be the infants? Let's face it; someone has to pirate the South Park clips and illegally download music and make fun of Tom Cruise. If, when the hammer comes down, the Babies! take the fall, then they will receive shorter jail terms and lighter sentences because, well, they're cute. Cuteness is still a defense to most criminal charges, isn't it? I should probably know that.

But I don't know that. I don't know a lot of things because all my memory is taken up with everything "science" has filled my head with, like hokey stories about how everything is mostly empty space, how we are all made of "atoms" and that these are very small and are made up of mostly smaller things like "electrons" and "quarks" and "my paycheck" and that as a result of all this small-osity, things that we think of as solid matter, things that seem good and thick to us -- the table, the old shed, Kris Kristofferson-- are in fact mostly empty space.

Well, I'm not buying it. I'm not buying it because nothing is mostly empty space.

I'm not mostly empty space. I've tried, unsuccessfully, fitting into some of my more favorite t-shirts lately, and I've tried going jogging, and I can assure you that I am far from being made up of mostly empty space. Empty space would have a far far easier time lugging it's empty-space-belly up the hill at the end of empty space's running route, and empty space would not fill up a t-shirt quite so snugly. My own scientific analysis has led me to conclude, at this point, that I am mostly made up of Peanut Butter Cap'n Crunch, which also is not mostly empty space.

Another thing that is not at all empty space was our old shed, which is finally down, and which somehow warped time and space in that the shed, torn down, managed to contain more actual material than it had when it was still standing. I can remember when it was standing, and it was four walls and a roof and some old household furniture inside. I would go inside, sort of. I would actually stand just outside the shed and look in, to see if there was a place to put more junk, in between the older junk and the raccoons, and the shed was full of lots of seemingly empty space, because it wasn't full of stuff and according to "science," things that aren't full of stuff are mostly empty space. I wish "science" had been here to help with the work. But, as usual, "science" never shows up until the work's done and the pizza's being served, when "science" tries to prove that it knows something after all by having your pizza remain superhot for longer than it should so that you burn your mouth even though you waited a really, really long time before eating the pizza.

Tearing down the shed was like battling the hydra; every board we tore out created three more. Every wall that came down left two more. It just kept multiplying and multiplying and we just kept hauling it to the second of two dumpsters using our specialized shed-tearing-down-tools of "old winter gloves" and "a garbage can with wheels."


Using that highly technical equipment, we threw away the entire shed which, when torn down created a pile of rubble that took up two dumpsters. Two. When they redid our roof last year, they only used one. So there was more stuff in that shed than there was in our entire roof on our house.

Of course, the roof of our house did not contain, as I found out the shed did, five live raccoons and one very very dead raccoon. At least I hope it didn't, because if there is that much wildlife in our roof, I'm moving.

There is nothing quite like pulling up an old board and seeing most of a raccoon skull sitting there in front of you, not quite attached to most of a raccoon skeleton. The only thing I could think was where's the rest of it? Is it on me? I still kind of feel that way. That's my most common reaction to nature, as I sit here and think of it: Is it on me? I'm not the outdoorsy type. Put me outdoors for any length of time, and I'll begin to think that the outdoors is on me, and not shake that feeling or the way it makes my skin crawl, until I get back inside, take a shower, and watch Newhart on DVD.
But it's done! The shed is down, and where there used to be a sagging, possibly haunted shed there now stands what looks like empty space but isn't. What it is, is a bare dirt area covered with leaves and bits of grass and the smaller debris that I decided to leave there. Trust me, it's an improvement, even if technically part of that dirt area is still made up of shed parts.

There's still shed parts there because I took The Boy's advice, something I only am ready to do when I've been working in the hot sun all day and am covered with raccoon flakes. We were hauling and hauling and I was trying not to think of what the pieces of animal would do to my lungs and, and we got down to the last two items of stuff to haul: the world's largest collection of cement cinder blocks, and a pile of stuff that included shingles but was, in my imagination, made up mostly of dead animal skin, animal skin that was getting on me.


We looked at that, me and The Boy and The Boy's Friend, who I'll call "Q," and The Boy said the smartest thing he's ever said. He said "Let's just let erosion do its thing." Who says kids don't learn anything these days?

I brushed some raccoon parts off my head and decided we'd do just that. We spread the pile back out and hoped for erosion to work more quickly than most so-called "science."

That left the cement bricks, which as it turned out made up a lot of what appeared to be the empty space under the shed. (They may also make up a lot of the empty space in me, if the doctor's scale is to be believed.) There were more cement bricks under that shed than I could have imagined. If cement bricks were money, we'd be rich. But they're not, so we're just tired.

We decided to not haul the cement bricks, and instead to turn them into The Sorta Great Wall. I began stacking them into a line of bricks along the lot line between our house and Q's house next door. I got permission to do this by asking Q "Do you think your parents would want us to stack those bricks there?" He shrugged and said he'd ask them, and then I began stacking them there before he could do that, because people can only tell you "no" if you give them a chance.

The Sorta Great Wall now extends about fifteen feet along the lot line, and about two feet tall, and will hopefully one day be very scenic. Until then, I'm hoping that Robert Frost was a little wrong. "Good fences," Robert Frost probably said, "make good neighbors." I'm hoping that "Crummy fences made up of things you are too lazy to haul to the dumpster" make good neighbors, too. Or least make neighbors not call the zoning committee on you.


That's what I've spent the first three days of my vacation doing: Tearing apart the last of the shed, beginning construction of The Great Wall, and pondering just why science is never right. Because I know now: matter is not made up of 'empty space.' It's made up of cement blocks and raccoon skins, and it's on me.

Throwback THANKSGIVING!

Time to re-run an old Thanksgiving post of mine. HOPE I DON'T BREAK THE INTERNET.  This originally was posted back in 2008, just after our Thanksgiving that year. My comments from today, as always, are in red.

If you want a unique take on Thanksgiving in the form of wildly creative short stories not a single one of which actually involves a family sitting down to eat Thanksgiving dinner, check out my "Some Thanksgiving Stories" which is available for free on Amazon through Black Friday. You'll meet my newest favorite character, "the regular mouse." And there may or may not be a savage horde of beets with swords.  CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD IT NOW FREE.

And now on with your old post for you to leave a generically bland comment about because you only read about 1/3 of the way through, said "How the #*#$%;$ long is this thing?" and then went to read "Beetle Bailey" instead. That Sarge! Beetle makes him SO ANGRY.

Hark! The Thumping Potatoes... Make Change For A $20.


The sounds of the holidays, in our house, include things that you would not hear elsewhere, sounds like the soothing tones of Foghat blasting out Christmas music accompanied by the pounding beat of potatoes being thrown across the room. Also, there was a Thanksgiving pageant in which Sweetie played two parts.

Pageants have always played a big role in my holidays, so it was nice to welcome them back this year. When I was younger, we regularly put on Christmas pageants not just at the Catholic school we attended for a while, but also at home for all the aunts and uncles who would come over and subtly mock us while we put on the Christmas pageants. My memories of those pageants, both official and un-, are somewhat hazy. But I know that for one, I was the Christmas star: a fat kid with crooked glasses holding up a giant star covered in tinfoil and ringed with garland reciting a poem for the whole Church and for the whole family Christmas gathering.

"Christmas Star" was one of my few starring roles -- pun intended -- as a kid. The other starring role was "narrator" at a choir concert in fourth or fifth grade, during which the whole school sang while I stood uncomfortably in front of them and in between songs gave little introductions for the songs. I was, even at an early age, marked as "not leading man material," except for that year that I was the Christmas Star, and even that wasn't really a "leading man" type of role. You can't see Brad Pitt or Harrison Ford playing "Christmas Star" in a major motion picture, can you? Although that would be excellent: " Christmas Star," the story of a Hollywood celebrity whose ego gets too big, so, to teach him a lesson, an angel makes him into the ACTUAL Christmas star, where he witnesses the birth of Jesus and learns a valuable lesson about what's REALLY important. Starring Brad Pitt as "The Star," and featuring Dame Judi Dench in a double role, as the head of "Herod Productions" and as Queen Herod at the Nativity.

I am aware that I am not quite accurate on who was at the Nativity. I'm also aware that so far this really isn't a Thanksgiving post at all.  

The leading man role in the Christmas pageants my mom put on when we were kids was played usually by my younger brother, Matt, who was recognized as leading man material early on, despite having really no acting ability whatsoever. Matt starred not just as Joseph in the family Christmas pageants, but also as whatever leading role there happened to be in the middle school musicals that were put on every year in the spring. So while I muddled through my own middle school years in roles such as "Lord Growlie" in "The Wizard of Oz," and "Innkeeper" in Annie, Get Your Gun, (and as a Munchkin who was part of the Lollipop Guild, making me the biggest, fattest, glasses-wearing-est Munckin in the history of theater), Matt became "Narrator" in The Fantasticks, a role that he played tongue-in-cheek-- quite literally, as whenever he wasn't talking, Matt would stick his tongue in his cheek, something that you could see easily when the stage was the gym floor and the audience sat in bleachers around it.

Of course, I may just be jealous because Matt got all the girls. Girls always want to date the leading man. The Christmas Star gets very few groupies.

None, actually. Gets none.

For the home pageants the stage was our living room, or at least that portion of the living room between the Christmas tree and the dining room, next to the yellow chairs and in front of the glass coffee table.

It occurred to me as I read this that in the 19 years I lived at home, my parents never rearranged the furniture.  Never.  I can still remember the exact layout of furniture in our house and it didn't move an iota during my entire childhood.  I change my house around all the time.  I've lived in our current house for 11 years and I bet I've had 10 different living room setups in that time. The latest includes a hammock, but technically that is there to replace the swing that we couldn't have any longer.  I think it's weird to never rearrange your furniture. My parents were weird.

 As Christmas Star, I stood in between the tree and the yellow chairs and made my speech, and then Matt and my cousin Shannon would enter as Mary and Joseph, and my cousin Jason had a role, too, and some years also I would double as a wise man with my cousin Joey and my brother Bill, three wise men wearing bathrobes

Why are bathrobes a thing? People wear them over pajamas, right? Why do that? I suppose if your pajamas are scandalous or something you want to wear a robe over them but if the pajamas are just ordinary pajamas do you still wear a robe over them? When we were kids we had bathrobes that we wore over pajamas that were pants-and-shirts combos. That's like wearing an overcoat around the house, but one made of terrycloth. Nowadays I mostly wear pajamas (no robe!) around the house if it's too cold for shorts. I don't want to lounge around in jeans anymore.  Jeans are uncomfortable.  It's all pajamas for me from here on out. That's one of the great things about being 45, almost 46. You can just wear pajamas and not worry about whether anyone thinks you're a dork, because everyone thinks you're a dork already, whether or not you wear pajamas.

 over their Christmas pants and shirts, entering from near the front door to take the gifts of the magi to the Baby Jesus, represented by a bundle of something held by Shannon, while Joseph looked bored and stuck his tongue into his cheek. Then we would all get out of costume and prepare to play the holiday songs that we had diligently practiced on our various instruments: I played piano, Bill played acoustic guitar, and Joey played saxophone. Not all together -- we weren't a jazz combo. Instead, one at a time we'd haltingly pick our way through a couple of songs, the family would clap, and then we'd be free to go off and talk about how we hoped we got an Atari 2600 that year.

PS I am fairly sure eventually this gets around to Thanksgiving.

Holidays for me now are a much more relaxed affair, so relaxed that this was the first time I've ever had the kids put on a pageant. They didn't perform for the family, though; they performed to teach them a Valuable Lesson, something I tried because it came up on the Wheel of Parenting, which is the mental image that I get when I consider the various parenting techniques I try to prepare the kids to take on the world successfully:  a giant wheel just like the "Wheel of Fortune," only it has, instead of dollar amounts, parenting methods: Kind-But-Firm. Yelling. Take Away Privileges. The Dad on "Leave It To Beaver."

Interestingly, on my Wheel of Parenting, there is still Lose A Turn. And Bankrupt.

So yesterday, when a fight erupted while I was cooking Alternate Thanksgiving

Told you! There it is, only 14,000 words in: Thanksgiving!

dinner, I moved on from the earlier parenting method I'd spun up (Sarcastic Comments Hollered from the Kitchen) and instead landed on Overly Dramatic Teaching Method.

I'd used up Sarcastic Comments Hollered From The Kitchen while peeling potatoes, something I did accompanied by the sounds of Foghat. I was listening to Foghat because I was playing Christmas music in the background. I'd have dialed up some Thanksgiving music, but the only "Thanksgiving music" I know of is the song "Alice's Restaurant," and I really wasn't in the mood for that. I was in the mood for Foghat, and specifically for Foghat Christmas music.

You know, what with it being Thanksgiving and all.

10 pounds of potatoes wasn't even daunting to me. 10 pounds of potatoes, for me, is a walk in the park. This is because I was prepared as a kid by my parents for such things as peeling potatoes.  My parents prepared me for all kinds of things as a kid: peeling potatoes, someday having a job and responsibilities of my own, and, of course, how to deal with the fact that every person in the world is just waiting to steal your wallet, rape you, and murder you and your entire family.  (Step one: put your wallet in your front pocket when you go into the big city. That stops them cold: they can't move on to rape and murder if they can't get your wallet first.)

I'm never sure that even with the Wheel of Parenting Method I'm actually preparing the kids for life, because instead of the things that my parents did, I do things like let them sleep in a little while I started preparing Alternate Thanksgiving dinner, something I allowed them to do this day until Mr Bunches intervened and forced me to get them up.

I didn't let them sleep in because I'm nice or was being kind; those two slots rarely come up on the Wheel of Parenting. No, I let them sleep in because I wanted to hear my music while I cooked dinner-that-was-actually-lunch because we were eating at 11:30, and I let them sleep in because the holidays tend to increase the friction between The Boy and Middle, resulting in the kind of dumb fights that they would, in fact, have later on thatday, and I didn't want that. I wanted to stay in a good mood and peel potatoes and jam out to Foghat,

I'm so cool.

both of which got harder when Mr Bunches discovered what I was doing, and discovered that potatoes made a good, solid, thumping sound when you throw them.

I was sitting in the kitchen by the garbage can, peeling the potatoes and whipping right through them, something I could do because, as I said, my parents prepared us for adulthood, prepared us better than we could suspect, given that my adulthood actually does include peeling 10 pounds of potatoes on a Saturday morning. I couldn't have expected as a kid that potato peeling skills would be necessary as an adult. Somehow, though, Mom and Dad seemed to understand that kind of thing was in my future, because we peeled potatoes constantly when I was a kid. At least, that's what it seems like, looking back. Every day, it feels like, there I'd be: peeling potatoes at the kitchen sink and looking out the window wistfully at the backyard, where I could be playing if I didn't have to peel potatoes. We probably didn't even eat potatoes every day; Mom probably just had us peel the potatoes to build character or teach us to be self-sufficient, or as a cost-saving mechanism that we would inevitably misunderstand, the way I misunderstood when she hollered at us about crushing up the milk cartons before we threw them away.

"You have crush them up and put them in the garbage," she'd said, stomping it down viciously and then putting it into the garbage can. "Otherwise, they take up too much space in the can."

From that lecture, I took this: We are too poor to afford to buy garbage bags! I did try to crush the milk cartons after that, but not because Mom and Dad said to do it. I crushed them to avoid us having to live on the streets, because I knew that would be embarrassing.

That's why, by the way, I don't worry too much about my parenting methods and/or changing my parenting methods randomly. I know that whatever method I choose, the kids will inevitably entirely misunderstand or misinterpret the message, the way they misinterpret my telling them about the time I nearly failed Chemistry in college, a story I tell them to show them the importance of studying: Study, I tell them, because if you don't, you might be like me and have an "F" in Chemistry before your final exam, so you will have to stay up all night reading 17 chapters of the textbook you were SUPPOSED to be reading all along, because you will need to get an "A" on the final just to pass the class.

"Did you pass the class?" they ask me.

"Yes," I say. "I got that A on the exam, but I wish I'd studied harder and didn't have to risk it."

"What grade did you get for the class?" they ask me.

"A D," I say. "See?" I add. "That's why you've got to study."

The point of the story from my perspective is "learn from my mistakes: study so you don't have to cram just to barely pass a test, and instead actually get some value out of your education and make your life easier."  But what the kids take from it is first, you got a D so I can't be expected to do any better and second plus it's possible to pass a class by half-assing the studying part and cramming at the end. 

It doesn't matter how hard you parent. It's not going to work.  Even kids raised by wolves will misinterpret what the wolves teach them and eventually stop trying to kill sheep and go off to be chiropractors.

Mom and Dad would never have let us sleep in while they peeled the potatoes, no matter how hard Foghat was rockin'. That's just one of the many things I do differently from them and from other parents. Other things I do differently include letting Mr F and Mr Bunches walk around the kitchen while I'm preparing a dinner/lunch that includes the two turkeys that were not fully thawed out before I had to start cooking them. I hadn't even remembered to start thawing them until the night before at about 7 p.m., and I'd had to start cooking them at 7:30 a.m. the next day. They were still partially frozen when I stuck them in the oven, each in their own little disposable tinfoil pan. They barely fit into the oven together, which caused me some concern, too, because there was no time to cook two turkeys one after the other, so it's a lucky thing I was able to cram them in, bending the foil pans only a little. Well, a lot. But they fit in. That's the important thing.

I don't remember why I was cooking two turkeys. It might have been because by the time we went to buy our turkey, only smaller ones were available. I might also have been unsure of how big a turkey might fit in our oven and bought small. I am not very good at Thanksgiving.

Later, as I was desperately trying to finish up the rest of the meal while the guests -- Dad and Grandma and Grandpa and Sweetie's sister and kids -- milled around drinking coffee and eating the Chex Mix I had grudgingly put out for them, Oldest and The Boy commented that I had messed up because I was cooking the meal that morning. They told Sweetie that if it were them, they would have cooked the entire dinner the night before.


I added that to the mental list I keep of Reasons I Will Never Eat Dinner at the Kids' Houses and kept going with the dual turkeys, etc.

I'd had to wake the kids up while peeling potatoes because Mr F and Mr Bunches were roaming around the kitchen and dining room while I cooked and were starting to be too interfere-y. I was able to live with Mr F throwing the chairs to the ground. He can not stand to see a chair standing upright. We have five kitchen chairs and if Mr F is in the dining room, all five must be laying on their backs or sides. He doesn't even care that this makes it more difficult for him to get around. He comes in, throws the chairs down, and then roams around looking for other things to throw, stepping and stumbling over the chairs.

Throwing things down is his hobby, and he's getting better at it. He used to just take things and drop them to hear the sound they made -- soft like a pillow, clanking like the little drain piece from the bathtub.Now, he hurls them, and he's fast, like he was Friday night when he walked into the kitchen and whipped an arm out and knocked my can of soda onto the ground. I stopped baking pies to clean that up, putting the remainder of the can of soda on the other counter, only to finish mopping the spill up at the same time as Mr F threw the remainder of the can down on the other side of the kitchen. Then, while I began cleaning that up, he grabbed the bowl of cat food off the counter and whipped that down, which had to be a nirvana-like experience for him, as it resulted in a giant clang from the bowl, thousands of tiny little clicks from the cat food, and a howl of despair from me.

Saturday morning, he was content with throwing the kids' trophies off the bookshelf and knocking over chairs. Mr Bunches was bored and came into the kitchen where I was peeling potatoes, and began throwing those, enjoying the thump! thump! thump! they made. But he was slowing me down and interfering with my hearing Foghat, so I began calling for Middle, who had been sleeping in but who now had to get up to do her jobs, which were (a) supervise the twins and (b) clean the bathroom.
It went like this:

Thump! And I'd holler: "Time to get up and get the babies!"

Thump! Me: "Time to get up and get the babies away from the potatoes!"

Thump! Me: "I better hear the sound of people getting out of bed and getting the babies!"

Thump! Me: "Let's get moving before I decide to reassign the potato peeling!"

Thump! Me: "For every potato he throws I'm charging a dollar." ("Make a profit off punishment" had come up on the Wheel Of Parenting.)

Thump! Me: "Mr Bunches, come on! Go throw something somewhere else!"

Finally, Middle had come down and taken the Babies! downstairs so I was able to check on the slowly-thawing turkeys and get The Boy going on his job, which was "deep-frying onion and apple rings/complaining about random things," (the latter one not assigned; he opted to take that on willingly) but the stress of the holidays and of doing a chore must have gotten to both of them, because shortly before guests arrived, the fight broke out and I was forced to do some Real Parenting to assist Sweetie, who was running out of patience with them.

The fight broke out, from what I can tell, about no issue; I say that because no matter what I asked about why either The Boy or Middle was mad I got a different answer -- a new answer cropping up every time I solved the first one. During this all, Sweetie tried to resolve things, too, while Oldest, who had arrived, did her best to keep it from being resolved by throwing in little, nonhelpful comments like "I get it; I don't know why she doesn't," which served only to fuel the fire.

The starting point -- not the cause, but where it began-- for the fight was the division of twenty dollars the kids' Grandma had given to Middle when they'd gone to visit her. Middle and The Boy had driven up on Real Thanksgiving to see their Grandma and eat spaghetti (because, why not?) and bring home what looked to me, when I found it jamming open the freezer later that night, like a bag of blood (only it was spaghetti sauce). They'd agreed/been ordered to split the gas by each paying $7 of the $14 cost of the trip.

As of Saturday morning, The Boy had not given Middle his $7 yet, but Middle had been given $20 by Grandma to cover the cost of gas. So Middle asked Sweetie to break a $20 for her and explained how it all came about and also apparently said that The Boy had not yet given her the $7. (I'm a little unclear on the details of the fight's inception, because I was upstairs collecting potatoes.)

Sweetie had then allowed Middle to keep $17 of the $20, and given $3 to The Boy, doing the math quickly and coming up with the correct result -- The Boy was entitled, she said, to 1/2 the $20, less the $7 he should contribute for gas.

That caused Middle to begin complaining, loudly, about things in this order: (1) The Boy never had to pay for anything (2) as usual, she was paying for everything, (3) The Boy is spoiled, and (4) How come The Boy can yell at Mom all he wants while every time SHE yells at Mom she's in trouble.

That last one was a newcomer brought about when I got into the action and told her not to yell at her Mom.

While Middle was having her Complain-A-Thon, Oldest was throwing in little comments here and there and The Boy was getting mad, too. I'm not sure what The Boy was getting mad about; I think he was mad about not really having anything to get mad about. His complaints were, in order (1) Why is everybody mad at him, and (2) What did he do and (3) He gets in trouble more than Middle, so shut up.

Even though the problem really wasn't the division of the $20, we thought it was because Middle kept alternating between "I'm getting ripped off" and "Why can't I yell at Mom?" so I set up my first ever Thanksgiving Pageant, which we can call "The Gift of the Grandma." It starred The Boy as The Boy, Middle as Middle, Oldest as Grandma-With-$20, and Sweetie as "Gas Station Attendant Who Middle Pays $14 for Gas." This pageant told the Magical Thanksgiving Story of "Why The Boy Should Not Have to Pay $7 and Should Get $3 from the $20 Grandma Gave."

As they acted it out, we were supposed to show Middle how it worked that The Boy would get $3 and not pay her, but we ran into snags because Oldest wasn't sure where she should come in, the Babies! wanted to throw things at the Pageant, and Sweetie didn't have the proper cash to actually make change, resulting in us having to pretend that $7 was, at times, $10, $7, $20, and, for all I know, the Christmas Star. But in the end, the Pageant was performed, chairs were uprighted, turkeys were cooked to a point where they were safe to eat, and Middle learned, as we all did, a valuable lesson, which she summed up at this:

I still don't see why The Boy can yell at Mom anytime he wants and I get in trouble just for yelling at her once.

Words we can all live by in this holiday season.

We made it through three holes, and nobody got hurt. (A Photo Essay)

The picture is of the time The Boy locked himself in handcuffs. (Question of the Day, 75)

Is it okay to put mayonnaise on toast?

The Boy, in the midst of what will hopefully be just one semester off from college, is staying with Oldest in her apartment, because we don't let people live at home if they're above 18 and not in school.

Sunday, Oldest mentioned to me that The Boy had cooked breakfast -- the only thing he can cook, outside of frozen pizzas, and he always burns the eggs -- and that because they had no butter, he'd put mayo on his toast. We both agreed that was gross-sounding and that we wouldn't do it -- but then she mentioned that The Boy had then finished up by putting an egg and some bacon on toast, making me wonder first, how can you have bacon in the house but not butter? and, second, why does it seem gross to put mayo on toast... but only if you're not going to put it into a sandwich?

Because I put mayo on toast when we make BLTs, and I like that -- but the idea of just a piece of toast with mayo on it sounds disgusting to me. So the act of turning that toast into a part of a sandwich somehow transforms it in my mind.

Then, I mentioned that to Oldest, and said that I still wouldn't just have mayo on toast. "I like pickles, and peanut butter," I said, "But I'm not going to combine them."

To which she said "Oh, pickle and peanut butter sandwiches are great."


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