Sweetie is... Sweetie (Quote of the Day)

"She ordered an avocado sandwich and then took all the avocados off."


-- Middle's report on her lunch with Sweetie.

Sweetie's always right, except when I'm right.

A couple of quotes from Sweetie that I've been saving up for a rainy day.

"If either one of us loses something, it's definitely you."  Sweetie said this one day when I was looking around for something and couldn't find it and was 100% sure that Sweetie had put it somewhere where I didn't want it to be put.

Here's what happens in our house:  I will need to find something.  I will ask Sweetie for help.  She will say "Here's the thing..." and then remind me that if I put things where they belong, I wouldn't lose them.

But here's the real thing: Who can keep track of where things go?  I've got enough going on in my life what with working and sleeping and working out and wondering if there's any pizza still leftover that I can have for breakfast (there is! YAY!) without also having to remember where things always have to go.

Just consider, say, my car keys.  When I get out of the car, I've got them in my hand.  So I come up the stairs to go into the house and from there, I may go one of any number of places.

Some days, I come in and I'm able to go into the kitchen, where there is a chalkboard with a ledge on which Sweetie keeps her keys, and I could put my keys there except (A) there is no place to set down the other stuff I'm carrying, like my coffee cup and iPod, so I don't pause there, and (B) the ledge is right near the garbage and I'm always worried that my keys will fall into the garbage and I will have to find them by going through the garbage one morning before work.

Nobody ever wants to go through the garbage to find something, especially because we always think the thing is in the garbage but it never is, is it?  It never is, making it all the worse that you have coffee grounds and spaghetti sauce and whatever that juice is that somehow spontaneously forms in the garbage.

What is that juice?  When I throw the garbage into the can, it is dry.  When I bag it and take it out to the garage, it is dry.  But when I have to go rip open the bag at 7 a.m. while I'm wearing my suit to see if my keys are in the garbage (they're not; they're in my coat pocket but I don't know that yet) the garbage is wet with some kind of juice that I always imagine is some sort of poisonous Ebola acid and I cannot possibly wash my hands enough that day.

Sweetie doesn't worry that her keys will end up in the garbage, but, then, Sweetie never lost her keys for an entire week once only to find them in the water reservoir of the coffee pot, with no idea how they got there but with an uncomfortable notion forming that all week long somebody had been drinking coffee brewed around a set of keys and following on that notion came the notion that I was probably dying of key poisoning which is possibly a thing.

So I don't put the keys there, I put them in the basket, which is the equivalent of a junk drawer only we cleverly put all our junk in a stack on our counter, because that seemed better at the time and now I can't change the system.

The basket sits off to the edge of the counter, by the coffee, and currently has old magazines, mail, a bunch of bandages for rewrapping Mr F's head, lots of other stuff including a book that you can record yourself reading the story which my Dad gave to the boys for Christmas and which we are still pretending we will someday sit down and record, and sometimes my keys.

That's all assuming that I don't have to go straight upstairs, in which case my keys end up on my dresser (maybe?) where I have a little box for them, or into the living room where my keys will get set down by my Kindle near the computer, and so on.

Sometimes I come in through the garage and then there are even more places to set the keys.

So you see my point: There's no one right place to put stuff, and I win.

I would have more of a leg to stand on with this argument if yesterday I hadn't lost the little admission cards for our health club.

"Just so you know, it's a standing ask."  This was Sweetie talking to Middle, who works at one of her jobs as an assistant manager at a diner near us, a diner that is famous for its pies and cakes.  Middle gets free cake there, and she stopped by one day after work, but did not bring Sweetie cake.

Sweetie loves cake.

In order in her life, I estimate that the things Sweetie loves are:

1.  Her kids.
2.  Cake.
3.  Oxygen.
4.  Me (most days)
5.  Me (a few days when I have not lived up to expectations)
6.  Cake, again.  

So when Sweetie complained to Middle that she'd just come from the diner but didn't bring cake with her, Middle said:

"You didn't ask."

To which Sweetie pointed out that she's always asking.

Also: I think cake might be tied with at least some of the kids.

Let's face it: you kind of suspected this about toes. (Quote of the Day)

More pix like this on Briane Pagel: PWNST

Here are two (I think) clever* things I said to Sweetie while I was painting her nails for her tonight in preparation for her parents' big 50th anniversary party tomorrow*:

"All toes are whores," which really is true, but also which really only makes sense in context, the context being "I was pretending at first to be Oldest Daughter," because Oldest, when she helps Sweetie with her hair, toes, etc., is pretty rude about it and says things like "You have ugly toes," which I suppose is a normal part of the mother-daughter relationship, and then I stopped pretending to be oldest and temporarily pretended to be Middle Daughter, who can be a bit judgmental, but not, so far as I know, about toes.

And

"It's a ca-toe-strophe," which I said when I went outside the lines on her big toe.

See how great I am to live with? You don't live with me, and so you had to hear this second hand.

*That is, I think they are clever, not I think that there are two things I said. In actuality, I said many clever things, mostly on the subject of singers whose albums I might not like, but these are the only two I felt worth sharing.

Not even going to go look and see what this is all about. (Quote of the Day)

"You get back down.  I do not want to see this again.  Get down.  You are NOT the flying panda."

I'm sitting, right this minute, in our dining room, reading.  That quote came from Sweetie, who is upstairs outside of Mr Bunches' bedroom, where Mr Bunches was (I thought) quietly watching Kung Fu Panda.

(He's watching the first one, not the terrifying sequel.)

Leave for goonching?

"Goonch goonch goonch."

I'm kind of guessing at the spelling, here.  Goonch goonch goonch is something we've started saying to Mr Bunches ever since Middle went for a ride with us and exposed us to that word.

Middle had stopped by one afternoon, and we were just hanging around, talking, when Mr F decided that he wanted to go for a ride.  That's how Mr F works: He'll just be sitting around, and then suddenly an idea pops into his head, an idea like this actual list of things Mr F has decided would be a good idea:

-- Go for a ride in the car.


-- Jump on the trampoline for 10 minutes and then lie down.


-- Break all of the cheese puffs into tinier cheese puffs and then throw them on the floor.

(There's a sliding scale of approval to these ideas.)  On this particular day, Mr F decided he wanted to go for a ride even though (or perhaps because) Middle was over.  So we got ready to go for a ride even though (or perhaps because) Middle was over and then we ran into a problem in that Mr Bunches did not want to go for a ride.

Mr Bunches wanted to stay home, and he let us know that by saying "Leave for home," which is how he tells us to stay somewhere.  He doesn't know the word stay yet; we're working on it.  So when you're sitting and watching SpongeBob with him and you decide that it's getting time that you got up and went to work because you have a job, you know, and you stand up, Mr Bunches will say "Leave for bed," to get you to stay sitting on his bed with him, and when you say you have to go somewhere with Mr Bunches and he doesn't want to go, he'll say "leave for home."

On the day we took the ride, Mr Bunches really didn't want to go, and all the usual bribes (he could bring his iPad, or his blanket, or we'd stop at McDonald's and get him a soda, the only thing he eats from McDonald's, usually)(and, weirdly, he won't drink soda from anywhere but McDonald's)(in the picture on this post, he's only pretending) weren't working, and each attempt to convince him to go for a ride made him more upset, to the point where he was crying.

(Don't be too worried about that.  Mr Bunches has taught himself to cry.  On cue.  One day, I was telling him to pick up Mousetrap because it was bedtime, and he said "No," and then I insisted, and he said "I'm sad," and I said "You don't look sad," and he looked at his reflection in the window, staring at it and concentrating until he started crying, and then he turned to me with a look of triumph and said "I'm sad," and I had to agree that he looked sad, so he got to do one more Mousetrap, which he insisted on by saying "leave for Mousetrap.")

For a brief moment, then, we tried to convince Mr F that he shouldn't go for a ride, but he was adamant; he even had his Crocs on, so what could we do?  We picked up Mr Bunches and loaded him into the car, where he cried and sulked, and we got Mr F in, and Middle came along, and we took a drive around town, as we so often do because the Babies! like to go for a ride and it gives Sweetie and I a chance to talk without staring at carpeting full of ground-in cheese puffs, which is nice.

On the ride, Middle was telling us about some reality show she watches in which there was a giant catfish that the locals called The Goonch, and when she got to that point, Mr Bunches yelled:

"No!  No Goonch!"

And ever since then, we will periodically say to Mr Bunches: "Goonch goonch goonch," and he's said "No!  No Goonch!"  And then we will debate the goonch with him:

"I think, yes, Goonch." we'll say.

"No Goonch!" he will insist.


And before you think that I am a horrible person for repeatedly reminding Mr Bunches that there is a goonch, keep in mind that (a) Mr Bunches yesterday made me play a game in which he would sit on the counter and pretend to fall off, and I had to then catch him and lift him over the volcano (which was actually our kitchen floor) and lift him to the other counter, where I would place him, and then we would repeat it.

We did that 20 times.  And even then, he didn't want to quit.  "Leave for volcano!" he told me, even as my arms were ready to fall off.

So sometimes, I figure, he can handle a goonching.  Besides, if he really didn't like it, he'd show me how sad it (pretend) makes him.

And (b) he says it to us, now, too.  He'll come up to me and say "Daddy, GOONCH GOONCH GOONCH."

The Silent O: My new favorite letter. (Quote Of The Day)

"It was either a opossum, or a kangaroo."

-- Sweetie.

Today: The dangers of almost watching a reality show, and also, why you'd wish for chickens in the bathtub.

Sweetie watches The Soup, which I used to watch but I don't so much anymore because most days I begin to fall asleep at about 7:45, which technically means that I am already dropping off a little when I give Mr F and Mr Bunches their bath before bed, but I get woken up by "Cold," which is a game we play in which I dump cold water on them and they get cold water dumped on them.

It's not a very complicated game.

Also: They request it, so don't look at me like that.

Anyway, when I'm not falling asleep or definitely not torturing my 5-year-olds because, again, they like it, so get off my back, will you, I am, in Sweetie's words, "On the Twitter or whatever."

Which is true, but it's to my benefit because that means that last week I didn't watch the episode of The Soup that now gives her waking nightmares of the sort that led to her quote today.

The Soup, if you watch it a lot, lets you quickly gather all the information you need to know about reality TV shows, which is this:

They all work from some kind of Reality TV Show Bible that gives them various storylines to film.

Reality TV is, after all, supposed to be filming people doing their real lives -- just walkin' around, lookin' around -- but it doesn't film that at all because real lives are boring. You know what real life is?

What you're doing right now: You're reading a blog post on the computer. That's real life: You reading a blog post, me pouring cold water over the head of an already shivering 5-year-old who's yelling "Cooolld!")

(When you put it that way...)

So we're agreed that my life, what with the cold water and Twittering, would make a great reality show (TV PRODUCERS TAKE NOTE, and also: We will have to not tell Sweetie, as she nixes my every attempt to get someone to pay me to just live my life), but that your life is probably not a good one for reality TV, which is why when people who are not me get on Reality TV, they have to spice things up, which they do in one of several ways:

1. They Drop A Bombshell: Someone is getting divorced or married or pregnant, or divorced from a married pregnant person.

2. They Go Someplace, like sending Snooki to Italy to pay them back for that terrible night Yossarian had wandering around almost getting killed by Nately's whore.

Or, my favorite:

3. They Put A Chicken In It.1

1. Put A Chicken In It is TM me, Copyright me, and even :() me. It's my new phrase that I just now decided to start using to tell people how to spice things up a little. It'll be a self-help book from me if I ever finish that stupid pineapple story, "This Stupid Pineapple Is...", which I'll probably do some day, "some day" being probably Thursday or Friday. Also:

:()

is the emoticon I invented to express righteous indignation.

That latter plotline was stolen originally from an "I Love Lucy" episode where Lucy raises chickens because "Life in the country is very costly, [so] the Ricardos devise a plan to offset expenses." That plotline was resurrected, nearly two centuries after anyone stopped caring about "I Love Lucy" (seriously: It was a mildly-amusing TV show. Get over it, boomers.) when the Kardashians decided to raise chickens in their house to help save money, leading to possibly the best (but least significant) quote ever to be said on TV: "What's the deal with the chickens in the bathtub?"

Since then, countless other TV shows have decided to Put A Chicken In It, leading viewers to get tired of The Chicken Storyline, which required producers to up the ante and bring it even more Reality Style, which brings me to the episode of The Soup that haunts Sweetie's every moment, the one last week or so where a woman has an opossum living in her house because that happens.

From what I gathered by half-listening/half-Tweeting, a woman has her life filmed, and as part of that life, somehow there was poop in her shower which led her to look in a cupboard under her kitchen sink, where she found nothing, but upon standing up from peering into the cupboard the woman found herself

FACE TO FACE WITH AN OPOSSUM!

THAT DEFINITELY WAS NOT JUST PUT THERE BY AN OFF-CAMERA PRODUCER!

I felt like drama-ing up this post a bit with that.

I thought maybe I had misunderstood the point of the clip, but Sweetie confirmed I was in essence accurate: This woman has a life that is being filmed for some reason, and there was an opossum on her kitchen counter.

Rather than doing what I did with that information (1: going back to Twitter 2: trying to defend myself against the onslaught of feelings that maybe "Cold" isn't, after all, such a great game 3: wondering whether the people who watch that show are really so stupid as to think that the opossum would somehow be able get, undetected, from the bathroom to the cupboard then to the kitchen counter, always being one step ahead of the woman), Sweetie instead stored that information in the part of her mind that makes her see things, which led to the following two actual conversations I had with Sweetie this past week:

The first was after her return from the health club where she'd been working out:

Sweetie: On the way home, I almost hit a opossum.

Me: It wasn't a opossum.

Sweetie: It was either a opossum, or a kangaroo.

And this one, which occurred when I left the door from our family room to our garage open to encourage Mr F to begin getting into the car while I went to find Mr Bunches, who had wandered away:

Sweetie: Why is this open?

Me: So Mr F would begin getting into the car?

Sweetie: I don't want the door open! Things could get in!

Me: Like what things? [mentally picturing maybe wolves or perhaps some sort of alien]

Sweetie: Opossums.

Me: We don't even have those around here.

Sweetie doesn't believe me that opossums don't live in Wisconsin, which brings me to this question: Should I write an opossum, or a opossum? Since the o is silent, after all which, when you think about it, is kind of cool. How many words start with a silent O?

Not many, I'll bet. Or, for all we know, all of them do but we just never heard it.

My toaster is still insufficiently cool, but now it's also mocking me. (Quote Of The Day)(Thinking The Lions)

"We're just a couple of toasting fools."
-- Sweetie.

It has been an exciting and confusing morning for us here, as we try out our brand new toaster, the second of the year for us.

2012 promises to be The Year Of The Toast, and also promises to prove that you can have 737 years of college education and still not be able to work a machine that has exactly three controls, leading you to accuse your wife (Sweetie) of wanting toast that is so lightly toasted that it's just warm bread, and also trying to institute a rule in your household that the toaster dial never be moved.

Yes, when I flex my "head of household" muscles, it is over important things.

I don't ordinarily give much thought to a toaster, other than to ponder why some, but not all, have a marking on it that says "One Slice Use This Side" or something similar, a marking that's always made me want to say "oh, yeah? I'm going to do what I want. You're not the Toast Boss of Me," but then I don't want any trouble before breakfast, or before lunch, or at any of the other times of the day that I'm having toast, because toast is not necessarily just a breakfast food. It's delicious anytime, and you don't have to go all fancy with your marmalades and whatnot: Classic Toast, with butter, is where it's at.

Toast-wise, I mean.

But our toaster has become something of a thorn in our side in recent months, beginning with our decision to replace the lopsided toaster that we'd been struggling with for a couple of months since I dropped it on the floor and didn't tell Sweetie that I'd dropped it but opted, instead, to just act as though our toaster had always had one end sort of wedged a little off-center so that the toaster, when it sat on the counter, looked as though the back-end had been jacked up like a hot-rod.

("Hot Rod Toaster" being a great idea for a kids' cartoon: A toaster dreams of joining the drag-racing circuit like his dad used to do, but finds his way stymied by... um... an angry bunch of adverbs? I'll get back to you on that.)

That happened when, one morning, I dropped the toaster, an accident I blame on not having an automatic coffeepot that would make my coffee before I got up in the morning. I used to have an automatic coffeepot that had a timer and I could set it for, say, 5:45 a.m., and then when I got up at 6 a.m. I'd have coffee ready, but that coffeepot died because we live in some sort of weird electromagnetic zone that destroys any electric appliance that enters it for too long: Coffeepots, popcorn makers, vacuum cleaners, toasters: if it is a simple electrical device, upon entering our household it will be zapped through with cosmic rays of the kind that don't turn one into a superhero but instead mean that eventually your toaster is going to throw off ball lightning.

Which is what happened to our toaster, the one I dropped: When I dropped it, the one side that didn't have the lever-and-temperature controls on it got knocked off-kilter, and I went without toast that day (bravely deciding that I'd let Sweetie make the first toast with the now-potentially-life-threatening-Toaster-of-Death), and the bottom wedged in so that you couldn't empty the crumbs out of it (which is fine because I never did that anyway, because not everything has to be superhigh maintenance, you know. We all, in 2012, effectively work a second job as tech support already, constantly trouble-shooting our supposed-miracle devices, but I'll be damned if I'm going to be a slave to a toaster, which is one of the lowest classes of household devices.)(Household devices being one of the last remnants of the class system.)

That toaster continued to toast bread, which, really, how hard is that? You're just warming it up, rather more quickly than the sun will. (In fact, I'm surprised there's not some eco-nerd group of people out there making sun toast the way my father-in-law makes sun tea, which sounds grosser to me than regular tea, which is saying something, because tea is disgusting, but making it via the sun means making it via nature and we all know my feelings about nature: it's repulsive and ought to have nothing to do with our food chain.)

We lived with the Offset Toaster for a few months, but around Christmas, it got a little worse, and by "worse" I mean "more burny-smelling," which is worrisome when you're cooking a breakfast treat and trying to read the morning headlines but you have to also wonder whether your kitchen cabinets are on fire and, if so, whether Sweetie will catch it before you do so you can finish reading the headlines (in reality, you are reading the comics in that scenario, but Sweetie does not need to know that.)

Then the Offset Toaster began to not just smell burny, but also began to seem burny, in the sense that it got hot and seemed to use all its heat not for toasting things, but for warming itself and its environs up, alarmingly.

That caused Sweetie to unilaterally make the decision to get a new toaster, which she did by going to Walgreen's, which is of course where you'd want to get an electric device, at the same store where they sell you cotton swabs and other things that nobody knows what to do with them.

It doesn't seem right to buy an appliance, even an appliance that's just an electric circuit of the kind we used to make out of tinfoil in Mr Karsten's class in the 6th grade, at a drug store, because... well, just because. There's an order to things and sometimes that order can be monkeyed with (pizza for breakfast) and sometimes it cannot, and buying appliances that use deadly forces at a drugstore is like buying nasal spray at Sears: it's just wrong.

(I don't use nasal spray, and I try to avoid people who do.)

I didn't say anything about Sweetie's ill-advised purchase, except for mentioning about 150 times the first morning she used it that it "smelled plastic-y," and then that it "smelled burning-plastic-y," both of which I said in a very neutral voice that in no way implied that I was better than Sweetie because I would not have bought a toaster at a drugstore.

(I might have bought one at the Dollar Store, but can you blame me?)

That toaster lasted about two weeks in our house, each day smelling more plastic-y and more burn-y, until Thursday, when I tried to make some toast for breakfast. I put in two slices of bread, and set the level of toastiness, which, frankly, I ought not to have to do. You know how in sitcoms all the time but not in real life ever women are always complaining about men leaving the toilet seat up? That fake complaint pales in comparison to the very real complaint I have about living in a household of people who don't actually toast their toast.

Sweetie, Oldest Daughter, Middle Daughter, and The Boy, all like their toast, essentially, raw. They put the bread in the slot, then turn the little toastometer all the way to the left, to its lowest possible setting. Then they unplug the toaster. Then they put the toaster in the freezer. Then they ship the freezer to the farthest reaches of outer space so that the molecular activity in the bread slows almost to absolute zero. Then, after letting that cool off for a while, they eat it.

That's not toast, although it is the worst sci-fi story ever. Toast has to be brown and hot and nobody but me has ever in this household made what I consider toast. (Mr F and Mr Bunches do not, yet, eat toast. They regard toast the way they regard almost every food that isn't a cheese puff, banana, or mac-and-cheese: with a vague sense of distrust and a sly smile, like you're trying to trick them into eating a mousetrap.)

I know this is America, and everyone's free to eat whatever level of toast they can afford to eat (with the 1% in particular eating toast made of equal parts platinum and little kids' souls), but this being America, people (Sweetie, the kids, et al) should also remember that their toast preferences are weird and completely untoasty, and so when they're done making their Not-Toast, they should re-set the toaster levels to "actual toast" so that those of us who are still suffering with a coffee maker that doesn't make coffee on its own ahead of time don't also have to remember to re-set the toaster.

On Thursday, I reset the toastometer and pushed the lever down and went to turn on the computer, and heard my toast pop up.

I went to the kitchen and checked the little dial and pushed the toast down again and walked away, and heard it pop up again. This time, one slice of toast was toast -- browned already. The other slice of toast was bread, toast's lame forefather.

So I pushed the lever down again, this time paying attention, which I don't like to do to things, and saw a flash of ball lightning appear on the untoasting side.

"Fzzrtt!" it went.

(That's a direct quote.)

(That's the sound ball lightning makes.)

I shrugged and went back to work on restarting our computer, as we have to do every morning because, again, we are all tech support now.

After a few minutes, I began to wonder if the toaster was going to ever pop up and I went back out to find that the toaster hadn't popped up but wasn't cooking anymore, so I manually popped it up because my life is impossibly hard and noted that now one piece of toast was burnt and the other was uncooked.

I popped it down again, saw more ball lightning, and had Rice Krispies instead. I did mention to Sweetie that the toaster was acting up:

"The toaster is throwing off sparks," I said, causing Sweetie to try to toast her own bread via the freezer, Deep Space 9, etc.

Later that day, she agreed with me: The toaster was dead, and so yesterday, Saturday, we made a special trip to Target to get a new new toaster, because we'd already gone more than 24 hours without a toaster and frankly, it was killing us.

Sing it with me: "Don't it always seem as though/you don't know what you got 'til it's gone. They paved paradise... and we didn't have a toaster either."

To avoid spending too much money, it was decided that we'd send Sweetie in alone; we had Mr F and Mr Bunches with us, but taking them into a store with us often means that we end up not just getting what we're there to get, but also a lot of other things we happen to see along the way, like the other night when I went to the store to get a couple of things that didn't include "an aircraft carrier with six jets and a helicopter" but when I left the store, I had a couple of things and "an aircraft carrier with six jets and a helicopter," which will be, I'm sure, helpful when we are foreclosed on because we can't pay our mortgage.

"But we have an aircraft carrier with six jets and a helicopter," we'll tell the bankers, who will be twirling their moustache and tying Sweetie to the railroad tracks they have installed the local branch office for just that purpose.

"Tell it to the bank!" the bankers will say, confusingly.

Okay, I'm back.

I sent Sweetie in with express instructions:

"Do not go over $20," I said. "But if you can, try to get one of those cool toasters that we saw at Christmas."

"What cool toasters?" Sweetie said, and so I had to pull out my phone and show her the picture of the toasters I keep on my phone, just in case:



(They're really cool and sometimes I just like to look at them and imagine a life in which I have a cool toaster, with the kind of lifestyle that implies.)

"Okay," she said.

"But don't go over $20," I said, because we live on a budget and we hadn't sufficiently budgeted for the incredible amount of toaster-related expenses 2012 was obviously going to throw at us.

"Okay," she said.

"But don't go too cheap, either," I reminded her. "We already know what a ten-dollar toaster does."

"That toaster cost us $12," said Sweetie, who knows these things, and into Target she went. Mr Bunches and Mr F and I killed the few minutes she was gone via this actual conversation:

Me: "So, are you having a fun day?"

Mr F: [Looks out the window, doesn't answer.]

Mr Bunches: "Please, don't sing."

And soon, Sweetie returned with our new new toaster, shown here in action this morning, cooking my toast



Which, don't be fooled by the shiny black exterior and cool-looking purple glow; those are tricks of the light. This toaster is nowhere near as cool as the ones I wanted, but it is more difficult to operate, because if you look closely, it's got not one, not two, but three controls: the lever, which anyone even me can work, and then two others.

The obvious one is the toastometer, which sets the level of toastiness from 1 to 7, anything above a 7 being military-grade toast that can't be handled by us mortals.

The less-obvious one is the "Bagel Button," which is there and which led to this conversation:

Sweetie: Our toaster has a Bagel Button.

Me: What does that mean?

Sweetie: I don't know.

Me: Are you telling me we have to use an instruction manual to work our toaster?

I then noted that when Sweetie cooked her toast, she pressed the Bagel Button even though she wasn't toasting a bagel. Don't turn her in.

I then cooked my toast, pushing down the button and going back to the computer only to hear my toast pop up and, when I went to look, I found my bread slightly warmed up but still clearly bread.

"What's this?" I said. "What level is this set on?"

"Toast," Sweetie said, defensively, and I explained (again) that for something to be toast it has to change color, and then went to change the toastometer, only to find that there was no marking on it to tell me what level it was set on now, and so I had to turn it all the way counterclockwise and then slowly turn it back clockwise to set my toast level, at which point I realized that I had no real idea what the levels meant. Was "7" pitch-black toast briquettes? Was 5 where I wanted it? Did I want to go through trial-and-error to establish a new level of toast that I liked? Think of the waste!

And then there's still the question of that Bagel Button...

Epilogue: Sweetie told me, after she bought the "Bagel Button" toaster, that the cool toasters were on sale for $25, which I would have said was a definite must-buy even though I said not to go over $20, but I didn't say anything about it because I am an awesome husband who never would insist that his wife not go over budget no matter what only to turn around and suggest that she should go over budget anyway if it's only a little over budget and for a cool toaster. But secretly in my heart I am sad.

The point of all of this is to give me a reason to play the song at the end. (Quote of the Day)

"$20 Cheese."
-- Actual budget item in my and Sweetie's budget notebook.

A while back, Sweetie and I decided to live on a budget; much like we once decided that it was foolish to run to the store every night and get whatever groceries we needed to make a meal that night, and instead began planning our meals,*

*For example, we would sometimes look in our cupboard and see that we had, say, hamburger buns, and decide that dinner would be chicken patty sandwiches, pasta, and a salad, despite having as our only ingredient for that dinner the buns to place the chicken on. Undaunted, we would then go to the grocery store that was nearby, and get the remainder of the ingredients for dinner that night, plus usually some extra stuff that we happened to walk by on the way in or out, plus a magazine or two. That kind of thing will tend to cause your grocery budget to swell, especially if when you get back home you decide it's too late to make all that stuff and instead order pizza.

we decided back in August to sit down and really make up a budget and try to get a handle on what we were spending and how we were spending it.

So now, every week, we sit down on Sunday morning and try to anticipate the week ahead, seeing how much we might need for such necessities as gas, groceries, and the like. We then decide on a budget and discuss how much we're going to spend for such things as "Mr Bunches and Mr F's Halloween costumes" and get set for the week.

That's part one of the budget. Part two of the budget involves going over the week before and seeing whether we stuck to the budget or not, and writing down what we went over, so that periodically we can look back and see what we need to adjust.

(It is that periodic look-back/adjustment, for example, that greatly reduced trips to the Dollar Store, because, whether or not everything's just a dollar, going there 4 times a week can add up.)**

**Part three of the budget involves me being very crabby about the budget. I don't mean to be crabby but I'm naturally kind of a crabby person, plus I hate the budget for denying me trips to the Dollar Store, plus I get crabby because we end up having conflicts over the budget, conflicts that arise because my budget process does not in any way match Sweetie's budget process. Sweetie's budget process is based on a system of looking at how much money we have and comparing it to how much we want/need to spend. My budget process involves a complicated sort of calculus that requires several different pages of notes, circles for "discretionary budget" items, plusses, minuses, text messages when Sweetie goes to the Bank, and, if I truly had my way, a secret handshake. I hate budgeting, but I love budget processes.***

***And secret handshakes.

The last time we went back and looked through to determine how we were doing in living on a budget (answer: not very well, thank you) one of those extra items during the week was the quote today:

$20: Cheese,

it read, there on the little notebook page amongst the other items, like "gas, $10" and "cold medicine, $5".

No explanation.

"What did we spend $20 on cheese for that week?" I asked Sweetie, who gave me a look that I intepreted as "Obviously, the person asking the question is the person who spent $20 on cheese that week," which, if that was the look, then the look was a lie, because I certainly would have remembered any week in which our cheese budget was twenty bucks. That's the kind of week you brag about for years: "Hey, I remember one time, I spent twenty bucks on cheese!" you tell people who find themselves slowly edging away from you at seminars, thereby letting you get on with the important business of surfing the Internet while eating lunch by yourself, and so your twenty-dollar-cheese week had a side benefit of getting people to stop trying to make you be a part of society.

That's what I would use a $20 cheese week for, anyway. What Sweetie, who is obviously the person who invested twenty of our hard-earned dollars into cheese, did that week is a mystery, as she claims not to remember it at all.

But I secretly suspect she does remember it. I am of the opinion that she had some kind of massive cheese party, her and Mr F and Mr Bunches and their teachers and probably the guy across the street that we call "The Professor" even though he supposedly wasn't a professor, according to the kids, who say that he works with computers and isn't a professor at all.*4

*4: The kids, as I've pointed out before, think everyone works on computers. There are three truths that the older kids -- Oldest Daughter, Middle Daughter, and The Boy -- hold to be self-evident, and they are:

1. Every single teacher they ever had from kindergarten on up to present day "hates kids."

If you say "That seems remarkable, that they went into teaching even though they hate kids," the kids will agree with you that it is remarkable but "probably they went into teaching because they hated kids and wanted to make their lives miserable," and if you point out that it's even more remarkable that all of their teachers in a row hated kids, they'll just say "You're rude."

2. Every single person they know "does something with computers."

They say this over and over. Ask what a friend's dad does, and they'll say "something with computers." What does the neighbor do for a living? "Something with computers." I finally asked one of them why they said that: "Why do you say he does something with computers?" I asked, and I got a shrug. My own theory: They saw the dad/neighbor/whoever working on a computer, and made the obvious/wrong conclusion.

So one day I pointed out that everyone in my office, including the guy whose job it is to deliver the mail and get files, has a computer. They just stared blankly, probably because when I say the words "At my job..." their brains protectively shut down.

And the third self-evident truth, to the kids, is:

3. It's not fair.

In their defense, it's not. We set it up that way. Don't tell them.

were all over for some kind of cheese party where they had cheese pinatas and cheese dances and probably a cheese limbo and, for all I know, there was a cheese DJ playing Cheese Disco Duck.*5

*5: I do not actually think Sweetie did all those things at all. Except the Cheese Limbo. I'm on to her.

UPDATE: Sweetie emailed me this about twenty minutes after I posted that:

"I do not have a cheese limbo."

But that's exactly what someone who has a cheese limbo would say, so: Me 1, Sweetie: 0.

For a change, it's not from anyone in my family. (Quote Of The Day)

That was on a bulletin board outside Mr F's classroom; I took the picture waiting for Mr F's parent-teacher conferences.

(By the way: Mr F got all checks for his grades. I assume that's good.)

I expect this story to be optioned into a multimilliondollar movie franchise by the end of the day. (Quote of the Day)

"What kiss-asses."

-- Sweetie.

Both Mr F and Mr Bunches are in 4k, and Mr Bunches' teacher sends home a newsletter each week that updates people on the class and what they're doing. This week, the teacher noted that some parents were saying there should be more homework.

I second Sweetie's emotion, even though Mr Bunches' homework usually only amounts to doing things like this having to draw and/or tell a story about a stuffed animal that was sent home, as he had to do one day, when we created a stunning work of original fiction that I like to call "The Fish Story: A Memoir."

It's sort of Hemingway-esque. First, we drew a fish, as required, me handing Mr Bunches the crayons and him drawing and coloring it in. Then, I said:

"You have to tell a story about the fish. What do you want to say about the fish?"

Mr Bunches thought a second, and then said his fish story, which I helped him write down:

That says "I drew a fish," in case you were having trouble reading it. It's a true-life, coming of age tale.

Dogs speak English, of course. (Quote of the Day.)

"That's silly, lady. That dog doesn't speak Chinese."
-- Me.

I didn't actually say that, but I did think it, and here's why:

We were at the park a while back, and Mr F wanted to do on the swingset, where an Asian woman was pushing her daughter on one of the swings. They had a little dog tied up nearby, and as we approached her, the dog began barking -- at which point the woman said something to it in her own language, which is when I thought the quote of the day.

The dog immediately quieted down, so it turns out I was wrong.

Quote of the Day 62:

Sweetie and I went out on a date last Friday, and part of the date was going to a store on State Street where she likes to get clothes.

The store will remain nameless, the reason being the conversation that makes the quote of the day; we were waiting in line to pay for the shirt she'd picked out, a woman near the front of the store had this conversation with a worker nearby us:

Woman: Claire, it moved.

Worker: It did?

Woman: I was gonna pick it up and it scooted into a corner.

For the rest of the night -- and certainly while we stood in line, we wondered what had scooted into the corner.

And because I know you're wondering, the answer is yes, Sweetie toughed it out and bought the shirt. Corner-Scooting-Monster or not, she wanted that shirt.

Bonus Reason Why Sweetie and I Are Perfect For Each Other: Later on, talking about that moment, we realized that the first animal we'd both thought of when we heard it was... turtle.

Quote Of The Day 61:

For a change, I'm going to put the quote last:

Middle Daughter moved into her new apartment about a week and a half ago, and Sweetie and I went over to help her set up her kitchen table; before we went, I asked Sweetie what the building looked like, as she'd seen it and I hadn't, and we had this discussion:

Sweetie: It looks like Cabrini Green.

Me: What do you know about Cabrini Green?

Sweetie: I've seen 'Candyman'.

Me: I don't think 'Candyman' was meant to be a documentary of the projects.

Sweetie: I'm sure it was real life... except for the Candy Man.

I am about 80% sure that I won this debate. (Quotes of the Day,

"I don't care if it says Firefly or Firefox... or barf."
-- Sweetie, talking about her shirt.

Sweetie had two shirt-related adventures yesterday, although I'll forewarn you that I'm using "adventures" loosely in that sentence, as they were "adventures" only to someone like Sweetie, who, after venturing down to State Street to spend her Mother's Day present from Mr F and Mr Bunches (who gave her $50 to go shopping on State Street) said, later on, that she felt sort of wind-burned and tired from going out.

We gone there because Sweetie, for Mother's Day, gave me a list of things the Babies! could buy her, and the list included "a t-shirt," and also various gift cards, and Sweetie then gave me $50. So on Saturday morning, we were getting ready to go to State Street to take the boys to the Farmers Market and bum around for a while, when it occurred to me that later on, I would have to take Mr F and Mr Bunches back to State Street to get Sweetie the t-shirt she wanted, a shirt I knew she wanted because she'd pointed it out to me on TV a few nights before, and I'd paused the TV and taken a picture of the screen with my smartphone, thereby proving that there is no amount of phenomenal technology that cannot be trivialized in my hands. (The picture I took of the TV to remember what shirt Sweetie wanted is the picture on this post.)

Realizing that I'd be going to State Street twice, and being lazy, I then suggested to Sweetie that for her Mother's Day gift, we simply take her shopping, right then and there, and she could buy herself whatever she wanted, up to the limit of the $50 she'd given me, and Sweetie agreed, which, if you're keeping track, means that pretty much the Babies! did not give Sweetie anything for Mother's Day, the gift of "cash" involving, typically, less thought than even a gift card, and in this case, even less thought than that, in that Sweetie hadn't yet given me the $50.

In short: For Mother's Day, Sweetie got $50 out of the bank and went shopping, and my involvement on behalf of her two youngest children was to suggest that. If it's the thought that counts, then I still got off easy, as I didn't even think very much about that idea.

(Just so you know, she's getting taken to a movie and dinner by the older kids, who although they will likely have to borrow money from her to do that will have their hearts in the right place.)

We'd "gone out," on the shopping trip that so wore Sweetie out, to two stores, and the second of the two was only so that Sweetie could use the restroom. True, we'd also gone sort of out of our way to go past the Old Red Gym on campus, because the Old Red Gym looks like a castle, and Mr Bunches wants to see it, but in total Sweetie was "outside" for about 20 minutes on 60-degree day.

Although, now that I think about it, Sweetie bought two shirts at that store, so technically she had three shirt-related adventures* on a single day

*Again, used very loosely.

The other two shirt-related adventures were, in no particular order**

** other than the order in which I put them, which is a very deliberate order that I chose for dramatic impact, because I'm always conscious of the dramatic impact of the parts of a story I'm telling, making me more or less the Christopher Nolan of blogging.***

***I don't think I actually was thinking of Christopher Nolan there; I was thinking of the guy what everyone says actually wrote all of Shakespeare's plays... Christopher Marlowe? Was that his name?****

****Having now looked it up, it was Christopher Marlowe I was thinking of. No offense, Christopher Nolan.

first Sweetie was looking at a catalog last night, and in it, found a shirt that she liked, and said to me "I like this t-shirt. Do you think I should get it?" and she showed me the picture of the shirt, and I responded, and I quote:

"Ho... Pie?"

That's not usually something I say to Sweetie, as our conversation usually doesn't involve either hoes or pies, except for those occasions when I point out that I am not really crazy about pie, and then Sweetie mentions that I love pecan pie, and I agree with that but say that's kind of a special occasion thing, which prompts Sweetie to then also list the other kinds of pie I also have enjoyed in the past (peanut butter, candy cane, lemon meringue... etc.) because marriage is all about proving your spouse wrong on a point so completely minor that it cannot possibly be blown up into an argument (that's called "winning at the marriage"), so back to the story:

Sweetie said, and I quote:

"What?"

And I pointed out to her that the shirt had "HOPE" spelled out in messy writing on two lines, like this:

H O

P E

Only messier, larger, and on a shirt in a catalog, so that when I'd first looked at it, I thought it read "Ho Pie."

Having just ruined that shirt for Sweetie the way I once ruined her first choice for a wedding dress -- I'd been asked to look at one in a catalog before we got married, and I looked at it, pronounced it ugly, and said that the "antiquiing" effect made it look as though the dress was old and getting kind of rotten, all without knowing what any sane, rational fiance would have known*****

*****What Any Sane Rational Fiance Would Have Known: If you are asked to comment on a wedding dress that is not actually in the act of being worn by someone else, it is probably the one your fiancee is thinking of buying, and also your opinion will NOT EVER help anyway, so just say you like it.

so Sweetie didn't get that dress, and I got no credit for helping prove true the old adage that the groom seeing the wedding dress before the marriage is bad luck, and on this occasion Sweetie did not decide to get her HOPE t-shirt for fear, I guess, that more people than me would wonder what a Ho Pie was and why Sweetie was in favor of one.

The third, but actually the first(*6)

(*6)Remember, I put them out of order for dramatic effect,

t-shirt adventure began with me noticing earlier that Sweetie was wearing a Firefly t-shirt, and saying "When did you get a Firefly t-shirt?" Sweetie then reminded me that she'd shown me the t-shirt earlier but first said:

"I had one," which I knew was kind of a lie because I also knew that she had only recently shown me the Firefly t-shirt online, an occasion I remembered because she'd asked me to come look at it and said:

"What was Firefly? Was that the Nathan Fillion show?"

forcing me to remember who Nathan Fillion was, and briefly thinking he was the guy who'd written all of the Shakespearean ouvre before I got it sorted out and accused Sweetie of wanting to buy a t-shirt solely because she thought the guy who used to star in the TV show which was referenced on the shirt was hunky.

(Which she does.)

When she turned up with the Firefly t-shirt, that conversation had happened recently enough, and had involved enough men who were (are) better looking than me, that I had not yet overwritten it, in my mind, with wondering whether, in the comic books, Green Lantern and Green Arrow had been teamed up because they were both Green superheroes.(*7)

(*7: It sort of seems like it, doesn't it? They really didn't have anything else in common and yet had their own magazine in which they had adventures together, so apparently in the superhero world, having "green" in your name is enough to link you to all other green superheroes, which is I bet how Match.com works, too.)

So I said to Sweetie: "No, you didn't. Did you just order that?" I was being careful, though, because unlike a noncontroversial topic like "You really do actually like pie, so why do you say that?" a topic like "Ordering T-Shirts" can actually be construed as an attack on a spouse, and I didn't want to attack Sweetie, I just wanted to prove that (a) she didn't always have a Firefly t-shirt, but (b) she'd recently ordered one, so (c) she'd sort of just lied to me, which meant that (d) she loved Nathan Fillion and (e) I would get to watch my TV shows later that night, which was important because I'd taped four episodes of Monster Bug Wars and wanted to watch them.

Sweetie just fessed up, though, saying "Yeah, I ordered it and I had it," which is the kind of wifely logic you can't use to get to watch your TV shows, so I had to press on with Point (d) to get to Point (e), and said:

"You just got it to get a shirt that reminded you of Nathan Fillion because you think he's hot."

Which almost makes sense if you don't think about it at all.

Sweetie said: "No, I didn't, I just like the color and the shirt. I don't care if it says Firefly or Firefox... or barf. I'd have gotten it no matter what."

Which left me with nothing else to finish up with but:

"You'd have bought a shirt that says Barf?"




Click here for more Quotes of the Day.

Oldest is celebrating her birthday! (Quote of the Day)

"So you won't have to face God,"
-- Me, to Oldest.

It's Oldest's 24th birthday today, and to celebrate, I'm posting this as the Quote of the Day. I'd post an actual quote from Oldest, except that Oldest's talks with me tend to be limited in nature, because I am way older than her and don't watch Jersey Shore and therefore I am lame.

This quote actually comes from about two weeks ago, when we let Oldest know that as she was still technically part of the family, she was also technically required to go to Grandma's house for Easter Dinner, which we were having the Saturday before Easter because Sweetie and I have a strict "Let's not actually go anywhere on an actual holiday" policy which lets us celebrate all major holidays by (a) sleeping in (b) watching reruns of sitcoms we like, and (c) wearing sweatpants.

Oldest, after learning this trip was mandatory, called me and said "Are we going to church with them, too?"

I said that since we were going up there on a Saturday night, it was unlikely that we'd end up having to sit through a Mass, at which Oldest let out an audible sigh of relief, which she immediately tried to mask by saying "I mean, I was just wondering," at which point I let her know that this particular Saturday wouldn't be her own personal Judgment Day.


click here for more Quotes of the Day

Soon, I'll go back and review OTHER riddles from when I was a kid to figure THEM out. (Quote of the Day 58)

Elefino!

-- Answer to a riddle.


The riddle is What do you get when you cross an elephant with a rhino? I was asked that riddle -- I recall it distinctly -- when I was about 10 years old, by my Uncle Steve.

Uncle Steve was able to, scarily enough, do a spot on impersonation of Jack Nicholson in The Shining; he had the same long-straight hair, the same weird eyes, the same angular face, and if he hadn't been blonder than Jack Nicholson, would likely have had a career as Nicholson's stunt double or something.

But he wasn't mimicking Jack Nicholson on this occasion; he was, instead, simply asking 10-year-old me a riddle.

10-year-old me, much like 42-year-old me, never really got how to interact with people in society, though, and didn't really understand other people, so when Uncle Steve asked me that riddle, and I said "I give up" or whatever it is 10-year-old nephews say to their slightly-scary uncles, and Uncle Steve said "Elefino!" and laughed -- and Uncle Mark and Uncle Bob and Uncle Bill laughed, too, and the other kids, my brothers and cousins, laughed, I laughed, too, but what I thought was this:

What's an "elefino"? Is that like an albino elephant?

I spent the rest of that night ... and off and on for decades after that... wondering about that joke. Why would an elephant and a rhino have an albino baby? I wondered. Or, if not an albino, what was the point of the joke? Simply a combination of elephant and rhino that sounded funny?

Then -- and this is a totally true story -- one day not very long ago, when I was in my forties, I was driving along and talking on the phone and I said to the person I was talking to on the phone "Hell if I know," and suddenly the joke clicked into focus for me and I finally got it.

So that's what I'm thinking about today.

Quotes of the Day:

All the Quotes of The Day! Or at least links to them!

Don't worry, chicken, you're going in the oven.

We are a bunch of toasting fools.

68. "It was either a opossum or a kangaroo."

67: A Cheese Limbo?

66. I give you People's Sexiest Man Alive, 2027.

65. I expect this story to be optioned into a multimilliondollar movie franchise by the end of the day. (Spoiler Alert: It didn't happen.)

64. Dogs speak English, of course.

63. It doesn't LOOK comfortable, but who am I to judge?

62. It moved.

61. Sweetie's urban background.

60. It's Oldest's Birthday!

59. Today you will learn a word in a new language.

58. Elefino!

57. Well, it should have been named this.

56. Roosters don't live in rainforests.

55. Sweetie's right, but I can't let her know that.

54. What do you say when someone had a birthday?

53. After New Year's Sales.

52. You'd think I'd remember a made-up guy.

51. The Boy needs to not talk about stuff.

50. Sweetie makes up a word.

49. Sweetie's more than a homemaker.

48. Apparently, we're running a hardware store now.

47: This is my dinner conversation.

46. Sweetie reaches her goal.

45. Mr Bunches is not a zoologist.

44. Newton didn't say this first, did he?

43. He's ready for law school. Or politics.

42. I hereby apologize to Sweetie.

41. Isn't "okra" a kind of animal from South America?

40. He wants to look cool.

39: The library of the damned.

38: Tiny bubbles...

37: Time travel.

36: I am nowhere near as bad as the kids.

35: Towels.

34: Angsty.

33: Singing...

32: Googlipantz

31: Mango Smoothie.

30: Book Deal.

29: Nose Spider.

28: Leo.

29, um, again: Pizza? Mop?

28, um, again: Joe Theisman...

27: Old guys.

26: Dog food or beef jerky?

25: Matt Stafford is not suffering.

24: Computer Washer.

23: Button his shirt...

22: How you know you did a good job.

21: Lozenge.

20: The library as a friend.

19: Spring?

18: Creepy.

17: He never really got Disney cartoons.

16. Sweetie wants the Babies to drink...

15. Muppety

14. No strikes in the cookie aisle

13. Never a supercollider

12. Love is...

11. Han Solo vests

10. Dipthong

9. Not, technically, a quote.

8. The Boy thinks highly of himself.

7, but I labeled it 9: A quote from Demetri Martin.

6. Superbowl.

7, but there's already a 7, right? Snow & adolescence.

6. Again? Here's a quote from Ben Franklin.

5. Homer says.

4. Ring Lardner says...

3. Procrastination...

2. Proving my father-in-law wrong.

1. Envy & disquiet.

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