Canned Laughter

I have big news for my Dallas/Ft. Worth area peeps! I’m meeting a certain on-line Superstar this Saturday July18th for dinner and YOU ARE INVITED! Shoot me an e-mail at cannedlaffs@gmail.com and I will get you all the deets.

I’ve been window shopping on E-bay again.  What do you think of these?

Turn of the century doctor’s carriage from North Carolina.

My doctor drives a Hummer and apparently it’s still not as sturdy as this since he can’t make house calls in it.

Toy piano with five keys. Still plays!

I just think this itty bitty piano is beautiful. Note the cheerful red paint with the “wood grain”.

Mechanical keys for toys and clocks.

I love how orderly they look on the graph paper.

And my favorite item for when your muff gets out of shape

(Don’t you hate when that happens?):

A Muff Block!

Used by furriers for shaping hand muffs. It comes apart in sections for removal after the fur is sewn to the correct shape.

I think it’s rather a shame that muffs have gone out of fashion. As a child I carried my white rabbit muff everywhere during the winter and used it as a soft pillow for sleeping in the car. Nowadays you hardly ever see women sporting pretty furry muffs.

I blame the Brazilians.

I spent the entire weekend sitting on my rump. With temperatures hovering around 105, my get up and go got up and went. It was so bad, on Saturday I went to the grocery, realized I’d left my wallet at home, turned back around and never returned. We ordered Chinese. Sunday, I didn’t even bother to leave the house, I just ordered pizza.

I believe the only  time I stepped outside was to go to the dollar theater with the family last night to see Monsters vs. Aliens. It was a cute enough movie and the kids really seemed to like it. Personally, I was more interested in sitting in a dark air conditioned room for two hours stuffing my face with popcorn and Thin Mints. Oh yes, I did.

And today, I’m paying for it. Not to exaggerate, but my rear end feels like it grew two sizes over the weekend. It’s as if the gym is mocking me. “Bah hah! Told you so!” Ugh.

So tonight it’s Move My Rear Night. I get to stop at the grocery after work, grab some soup and salad, then hit the gym where I fully expect to have an attack of apoplexy or some other sort of poetic demise. Because if I’m going to die in a puddle of my own sweat? I want it to be poetic.

Oh, and please stop by my review page to win a  copy of a fun book.

I’m giving away Eileen Davidson’s Dial Emmy for Murder a Soap Opera Mystery over here.

Because I’m still too hot to string two words together, I’m recycling a post from May 2006 that still amuses me.

Little League: The Real Competition Is In The Ice Chests

Last Saturday was Bunnie’s turn to bring the after game snack for her Little League team. She has been impressed with some of the treats the other children have brought. She liked the juice drink that had a baseball player on the box. She liked the snack with the novelty candy. She liked the goody bag full of cookies. She liked the snack with Bazooka Bubble gum. I took notes.

I found all the things she liked. I made up pretty colorful sacks with nifty stickers. I put together the best snack pack yet. I packed my cooler and headed out for the game.

It was a rain out. I rushed home and sent a hurried e-mail to the mom doing snack at the next game. “If you haven’t already put something together, I’d be happy to bring this already packed ice chest to tomorrow’s game…” There was no reply. On Sunday I found out why.

Bunnie came home with the most extraordinarily beautiful goody bag I had ever seen. Not only did it it contain all of the required chips, cookies & candy, the bag itself was right out of Martha Stewart’s Workshop. She had used her computer to print up the team name with a “Way to Go” and then carefully cut the design out with special pinking shears and finished everything off with color coordinated baseball stickers. It was spectacular. I was green with envy.

My turn at snack has been moved to this Saturday. Well I’m ready to kick it up a notch. I am headed out to the party store first thing in the morning to find small baseball themed toys to stuff in the goody bags. Ha! Toys! Nobody else has done that yet! And I can use my computer printer too. If she can print out the team name, I can print out the team logo! Ha! Logo!

I know, I know, I’m so ashamed, but still….

There is a spirit of friendly competion in all of us. Even Snack Moms.

This weekend I pottered around with my super secret recipe for one of the state fair contests. Batch number one was mighty tasty, but I’m going to continue tweaking until I get it blue ribbon ready. I’d tell you more, but the contest sponsor requires that I keep it hush hush until after the fair. I promise I’ll share with you then.

On Saturday I went to the big barbecue at my parents  where batch number one was gobbled up in record time. The family 4th extravaganza was surprisingly pleasant and the only negative of the day was contracting Pink Eye from one of the bazillion kids. Not a big deal, but it put the kibosh on my plans to put up cherry preserves on Sunday. Anybody want a little conjunctivitis on toast?

In other news, my 14 year old neice asked me to teach her needlepoint. I took her up to the notions store last night after work and got her a pretty little kit. Naturally she picked one of the most complicated designs, but I hope she has fun. After dinner, I helped her get her materials organized, then we spent an hour or so getting her started with basic instructions.  I hope she wants to come back next  week for dinner and more needlework. It reminds me of pleasant childhood evenings with my own aunts.

Finally, here’s a shout out to all my peeps on the Spectrum, check out Shannon’s piece on Identifying and Avoiding Autism Cults. It’s worth a read.

Speaking of Autism Spectrum Disorder, I’ve signed up to walk for Autism Speaks in the fall WHEN IT’S COOLER. Thank you to the anonymous sponsor who kicked off the fundraising. I know who you are ((HUGS)).

If you are interested in learning more about Autism Speaks, you can click the scrolling tally box to the left or the Listening/Together icon to the right.

Annnnd… if you want to hear some good music, Click Diane Birch’s icon on my right sidebar. If you like what you hear, she will donote $1 from the procedes of downloads and cd sales to Autism Speaks if you clicked through from my site.

Now I’m off to go look at hunky men. I intend to blame my winking on the Pink Eye.

I hate summer in the Cotton Bowl. Being landlocked in a crowded city where temperatures hover over one hundred degrees is miserable. I don’t want to go out into my garden. I don’t want to drive with the top down. I don’t want to hit golf balls or walk my pooch. I don’t want to leave my bed. I just want to vegetate in a dark air conditioned room until Autumn.

The worst part of my summer malaise is that my Spouse just doesn’t get it. He wants to be outside ALL THE TIME. I can remember how exasperated he’d get with me during our years in New England. During the winter, I wanted to be outside playing in the snow while he just wanted to hunker down and sulk. Now that we are in the land of perpetual sunshine, he is in his glory and for a few months out of the year, I’m a very cranky broad.

This past week we looked at lively, beautiful Myrtle Beach as a possible winter site for our Snowbird retirement. I was thrilled that he wanted to compromise with me by spending summers in Nova Scotia and winters on the Southern Atlantic. Then he dropped the bomb. “When I said we’d split our time, I thought you understood that I meant 6-8 weeks in the North and the rest of the year in the South.”

No. No, I didn’t. What kind of souless sun-worshiper wants to spend tulip season and leaf peeping season on a bustling boardwalk with sweaty tourists? This changes everything. I never considered divorcing my beloved Spouse, but as gawd is mah witness, I will not be denied my cool Northern solitude.

What’s more, if a cold front doesn’t come right here to THIS forsaken dustbowl soon, I’m packing my bags and moving out and he can retire to the beach alone. Or maybe I’ll just take another cold bath and rent some more extreme snowboarding videos. Either way, don’t bother looking for me outside. I always say if the Good Lord had wanted us to suffer in the heat, he wouldn’t have given us air conditioning.

My Dad traveled constantly when I was little. Mum worked through her loneliness with enormous projects like wallpapering every room in the house and repairing antiques and refinishing furniture and maintaining the most beautiful garden in our neighborhood. The woman could do anything and she did everything.

The thing is, she would work until she lost track of time and collapsed in an exhausted heap. For us, this meant she skipped dinner and fed us McDonald’s at least twice a week, sometimes even four or five times! As a kid, this was Heaven.

I loved everything about McDonalds. I loved the ads with Mayor McCheese, Big Mac the cop and the Hamburglar. I loved the jingles: Mc Donald’s is your kind of place/ It’s such a happy place…. or as we kids sang it: McDonalds is your kind of place/Hamburgers in your face/ French fries beteween your toes/Green pickles up your nose…

I faithfully memorized the ingredient list for a Big Mac and ran every time the phone rang in hopes it was the contest man calling to give me a prize for reciting it in under 30 seconds. Two all beef patties,special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun!

I loved the the promotional gifts. The Happy Meal with a toy did not start until ‘79, but we had much better goodies than those back in the day.  We had painted drinking glasses full of lead, viewmaster reels of national parks and of course Ronald McDonald adventures, and dolls stuffed with sawdust that leaked everywhere with the slightest hug.

For me, it was never about the food. I’d scrape the nasty mustard and onions off my hamburger and toss most of the cardboard flavored bun away. I’d scoff down my fries and my orange milkshake- yes! back then they had Orange flavored shakes!-but I would never have asked for McDonalds if they did not have the coolest kid friendly marketing strategy ever.

Every so often today I will still get a hankering for an All American Meal: small hamburger, small fries and a soda. It’s 500 calories and more grease than Johnny Depp’s hair, but it makes me feel warm and fuzzy and just plain happy.  According to some experts that is a big problem.

In Brazil, there is a movement afoot to ban Happy Meal toys from children’s fast food. A Sao Paolo Federal Prosecutor contends that the “abusive creation of emotional associations”, effectively brainwash children into becoming life long eaters of high fat, non-nutritious food that is linked to diabetes and other health concerns. I have to say from my own experience, there is something to that.

What say you? Do you think that aggresive marketing directly to children is unaceptable, or are Brazilian authorities all wet? Have Happy Meal toys run their course or are they an innocuous and pleasant part of everyday life? Should parents have to battle fast food chains for influence over their children’s eating habits?  Should fast food chains be penalized because individuals make bad eating choices? Chime in and let me know what you think. I’m very interestred in reading your responses.

First, thank you to all who sent e-mails, phone calls, comments and private messages regarding my last post.  Because of you, I’m back in control and feeling like myself again.

I spent the week hiding out and feeding my Spymaster addiction. I can’t tell you why this stupid game has turned me into a button pushing monkey- gimmie a treat, gimmie a treat, gimmie a treat, aww…no treat, gimmie a treat…, but obviously it is like crack to compulsive types  like me who enjoy fantasising about blowing things up.

When not otherwise involved in international assassination plots, I’ve been coping with thunderstorms, power failures, doggie seizures, over-enthusiatic yard guys (RIP my beloved Camellia), and planning for our vacation next week.

That’s right! Next week is beach week! Yay! My favorite (sshh, don’t tell the others I said that) niece is coming to stay here with or without her beau while we’re away. It’ll be good for her to have a few days privacy and good for our pets to have someone here with them. I’m not too thrilled about the beau, but what’s a cool aunt to do? I’ll tell you one thing, I may be cool but I’m also installing a keyed lock to our bedroom door and I won’t be giving her our alarm code. Her I trust. Her friends…

Today I went to Cross & Stressed For Less looking for a new sundress to pack, but no joy.  I tried on seven dresses and they either had severe gapiosis with flappy pits or they created three or four boobs where there should only be two. Feh. The worst one of all was a gorgeous maxi that clinged to every lump, bump and roll. I told Bunnie that I had no intention of wearing a girdle on vacation. She asked me what a girdle is!

What is wrong with girls’ PE teachers these days? Don’t they still tell teenagers that they should wear girdles to thwart potential rapists? Next thing you know they’ll stop telling them to keep a dime hidden in their shoes to call home in an emergency.  Tsk, tsk. I don’t know what this world’s coming to.

Now if you’ll excuse me I need to transfer some more funds into my Swiss Bank account. There is a darling little Safe House in Barcelona I’m saving up for just as soon as I pay off my latest stash of high tech explosives. Just call me Mata Hari.

Bad habits are like zombies. Every so often, even when you think they are dead, old habits will rise up to consume you. I’m battling some old demons lately, and it’s hard to stuff ‘em back where they belong. I’ve told you before that I grew up in a house of women with eating disorders.

It’s no fun opening your Snoopy lunchbox to find half a tuna sandwich and a Tab while your classmates are gleefully sucking the cream filling from their Ho Hos and Devil Dogs and pounding back chocolate milks like it’s last call at a Shriners’ convention. To this day, the smell of chocolate makes me anxious.

I learned early about hiding food, crash dieting, and purging with laxatives and a toothbrush handle down the throat. I learned how to go for days on nothing but diet soda and handfuls of Tylenol. I learned how to feel worthless after eating and vowed every night before going to sleep that tomorrow would be a better day because I wouldn’t put food in my mouth.

As a teen I spent most of my weekends in bed with a book, afraid if I left my room I might go into the kitchen and eat. When I wasn’t reading, I was exercising- repeating tummy crunches over and over in hopes that my little pot belly would go away. It never did.

College came and I couldn’t keep hiding. I went jogging every morning and dancing every night. When I was told that I was too big to participate in a charity fashion show, I redoubled my efforts. I began putting laxatives in all my food and putting drugs up my nose to try to drop more weight.

And then I crashed.

Since then, I’ve been big and with the help of pregnancy, illness and yes, the prescription diet drug that killed my gallblader, I’ve been less big. I haven’t ever gone back to that teenage size 12. Right now, I’m big. The same big I’ve been for the last 8 years. The same big I am whether I go to the gym or sit on my bum. The same big I am whether I take my thyroid replacement pills or not. The same big I am whether I eat sensibly or treat myself. It’s disheartening.

So here I sit with diabetes and a goiter and bum knees and I start thinking about how much better my life would be if I just skipped eating for a few days. I wonder, do I have enough laxatives in the medicine chest? Ooh I feel uncomfortable after eating, I’ll bet my stomach would feel so much better if I just went into the bathroom and purged.

Then I remember the sounds of my childhood. I remember the bathroom doors locked for hours. I remember the sounds of gagging and heaving. I remember the crying and crying and crying. I’ll bet my mother thought she was keeping her purging a secret, too. I have a daughter. She has never seen or heard the sights and sounds of a house with eating disorders.

I think I’ll have a glass of water instead.