I had an awesome weekend but I have some catching up to do workwise before I’ll have time to blog it. Hopefully tomorrow. In the meantime, if you would like to read my mom’s take on the Crazypants, she wrote something up (with pictures) about her previous visit with Eliza, this past December. It’s kinda big and includes pictures, so I am linking to a downloadable word document. Read it here.  

Major Bedhead tagged me for the Six Words meme.

This is based on the Not Quite What I Had Planned memoir, put out by Smith Magazine.Here are the rules:

1) Write your own six word memoir;

2) Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like;

3) Link to the person that tagged you in your post, and to the original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere;

4) Tag at least five more blogs with links; and

5) Don’t forget to leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play!

Since I had ample time to ruminate on this subject when I woke up at 5:44 this morning (my brain is now so used to rude awakenings thanks to Miss Up-with-the-chickens that it doesn’t wait for her anymore), I offer the following:

My life: A work in progress.

Or, since I recently rewatched the last Buffy ep:

Buffy: “I’m cookie dough.” Me, too.

Tags: Meredith, Jo, Liz, Tausha, Claudia

But if you want to play, let me know!

***

This morning on the way to work NPR had a story about curse words and they discussed “suck,” and the expert said something offhanded about little kids not knowing it’s a reference to a sex act.

What, now?!

Seriously, I had NO IDEA that was the genesis of the term.

All through my education I was harassed by prissy teachers (I am looking at YOU, Mr. Z) who simpered, “Only a VACUUM CLEANER sucks,” every time a student expressed his or her frustration thusly. And I have spent lo these many years wondering what the heck was so darn offensive about equating a vacuum cleaner with a non-optimal situation.

I hope you all don’t mind, but I am still going to use the term. As in, my toddler giving me early-wake-up insomnia SUCKS.

***

Foie gras, c’est moi.

Not 45 minutes after Grandma Texas’s arrival, Eliza had figured out which side her bread was buttered (the choco-tastic grandparental side, that’s which one) and pushed me away, saying, “Should Mommy GO AWAY!” so she could play with her slave Grandmother some more. (Usually, she alternates between telling me or Jim to go away, depending on who is trying to bathe/change/dress her.)

***I may possible have discovered the world’s perfect food: Mo’s Bacon Bar, a chocolate bar with bits of bacon in it. Shut up, I know I sound like Elvis, but Jim agrees with me, and he only likes the scary hair-on-your-chest dark chocolate stuff usually. We will be having a cage match for the rest of the bar tonight. Seriously: AWESOME.

The only way it could be better is if they figured out how to put cheese in it, too.This reminds of of the time I was having an argument with a co-worker about what was the world’s perfect food. I said it was cheese, he said it was chocolate. We compromised on Mexican molé dishes, since they tend to have both cheese AND chocolate. (Which is to say, the cheese and chocolate thing can be done, candy bar people. Get on that!)

Auntie Johanna is on record as complaining about the lack of niece photos lately, so here, have some Easter pictures!

Eliza and I dyed the eggs on Saturday night while Jim was pulling a rare weekend shift. It’s easy and cheap to make your own colors, so that’s what we did. I’m glad I didn’t spend too much money on fancy dye kits because when you have a toddler as an assistant designer and enthusiastic tosser-into-the-dye, the eggs tend to come out sort of murky. We got a couple of good green ones, but most of them were some form of brownish-reddish-purplish:

Originally, Jim and I had decided we’d do the Easter egg hunt after the Easter drag in the afternoon, but then I discovered a problem with this plan since we intended to have some of the hard-boiled eggs as part of breakfast. (Is this universal or a Euro-thing, eating hardboiled eggs on bread for breakfast on Easter? Because Jim always seems mystified by this, and I can’t tell if I’m the weirdo or if he’s a heathen.)

Anyway, so we scotched that plan and he distracted her while I hid the eggs and some little gifties, and then I made loud crashing noises and yelled for Eliza to come see what was going on. In the very near future, I must make time to upload the video footage he got of her saying, “Ooooh!” and “BEOO-dee-ful” when she spotted the Most Expensive Easter Trinket Ever:

Properly fortified with eggs and Easter bread (AM and Jim) and/or hopped up on chocolate (Eliza) we headed out for the Easter drag. We are always the first ones out there because we head out right at 11 and most of the churches don’t get out until at least 11:30, but it’s fun. Basically, everyone parades up and down the street in their finery. The firestation rolls out its trucks and lets the little kids crawl around in them while one of the firefighters hands out candy (since it’s always a young-looking guy I suspect some sort of rookie hazing ritual at play). Merchants hand out stuff to the kids (see green bunny ears clutched in Missy’s hands):

and there’s facepainting:

a clown who makes balloon animals, and a bunny:

and a hotdog:

If the latter seems incongruous, well, that’s how we roll in our hood. Also, HQ for the festivities is a locally beloved old-time hot dog place. The hot dog made a really big impression on Eliza this year. Tonight, she took off her shirt, rolled herself in a blanket, and impersonated various sandwiches, including a hot dog and a grilled cheese sandwich, as well as something with mustard on it.

One of the bigtime bloggers recently posted a photo of herself as she looked first thing in the morning, before she put on her make-up. She put it out there as her truth, the real her, and challenged others to do the same, to offer warts-and-all portrayals of themselves. A number of women participated. I looked at the photos and have been pondering this for a few days now, and I confess that I was baffled at the way they congratulated each other for their bravery.

What’s the big deal?

Maybe it’s because I post pictures of myself looking like an idiot all the time (head-wound, anyone?).

Maybe it’s that in perusing the gallery, I experienced none of the “Oh, God, it’s HIDEOUS!” recoil all the build-up would have you believe. Bloggers without make-up are not like those Stars Without Make-up! issues of the Enquirer. They were all perfectly lovely, nice-looking women.

I think about this a lot because of Eliza, of course.

I like to wear make-up and jewelry and pretty clothes and high heel shoes, and I have a long and checkered hair-dyeing past. I also glory in the things I do that fly in the face of traditional femininity.

I think my stance can best be summed up in the fact that I tried to keep my toenails polished in the brightest possible colors for karate.

I let Eliza play with my jewelry, perfume and make-up all the time. I don’t know if this is the right call; I hope it is. My reasoning is that if it’s all just there, it doesn’t become this big rite-of-passage thing, that one day she will hit puberty and put away childish things and ornament herself in order to become a proper woman. Make-up is just decoration, I tell her all the time. Sometimes, it’s fun to decorate yourself, and sometimes you don’t feel like it. Either way’s fine. Now let’s go put on tiaras and ogle the tarantulas at the pet store.

And if you want to put purple stuff on your face, have at it:

Here, have two applicators, it’ll go faster:

It’s not a mask hiding the ugly truth. It’s not the key to womanhood. It’s not the key to self-worth. It’s just some paints and powders.

I think the thing about the Bloggers Without Make-Up photos that haunts me is that with their talk of “bravery,” these lovely women remind me that articulate and outspoken still don’t count as much as flawless complexions, and that I seem to be living in some lala-land thinking my daughter and I could escape it.

My trip to NYC scuttled my opportunities to do any elaborate kitchen projects for this week, so I am heading off in another direction this week. Stay tuned for next week, though, when we will have a new cooking project with special guest star Grandma Texas, who is coming to visit!
In the meantime…

About 5 or 6 years back, sensei had us blackbelts do an experiment in class. He handed me a rubber gun and had me tuck it in the waist band in back of my pants. Then, he asked me to stand in a relaxed position, hands at my sides, and had one of my classmates charge at me from 15 feet away. The challenge was to draw the gun BEFORE the charging classmates reached me. He asked everyone in the class to try their hand at it. We are karate-kas, some of us very good at it, and we knew an attack was coming. Not a one could draw and aim our “gun” before our assailant reached us.

The point he was trying to make was not anti-gun — he’s a police officer and a gun safety instructor, after all — but that you cannot assume that just because you have a gun in the house or in your purse, you are all set as far as personal safety. Same thing goes for mace and pepper spray. If you’re particularly unlucky, any of those items can even go from being useless to being used against you. I took a gun safety class, but that little class experiment cured me of any romantic gunslinging notions I might’ve had. Guns are a legitimate means of defense, but in a series of escalating options, they should probably be in the “last resort” category. There’s a lot you can do to keep safe that doesn’t require a deadly weapon, or even advanced training. Even most martial arts experts don’t whip out flying spin kicks at the first whiff of danger.

Try these first: 

1. Just don’t be there. Sensei says this all the time, and its applications are wide-ranging. In blackbelt class it relates to evasive maneuvers you need to take against certain types of attacks, but he also applies it more generally to mean that if something doesn’t feel right about where you are, LEAVE. Trust your gut; it probably picked up something your conscious mind hasn’t had time to process yet. It also means that when possible, be smart about where you go. Pick the well-lit path over the shadowy one. Pick the bar with the good reputation over the one with the bad one. That won’t guarantee that nothing bad will ever happen to you, and it ALSO doesn’t mean that if you do go to the skeevy place, that you deserve whatever happens to do. But you’re playing the odds here, so why not try to tilt them in your favor?

2. A piece of specific advice if you think burglars are in your house: Don’t turn on the lights. You know your terrain; they don’t, which gives you the advantage. That gives you the possibility of escaping and getting help without them noticing until it’s too late. And if you cannot leave, well, a burglar who has just tripped over your coffee table he didn’t see in the dark is easier to whomp over the head with a baseball bat, if it comes to that. Although, once again, the “Just don’t be there” idea trumps a head-whomping any time from any number of perspectives. 

3. If you’re traveling in a city you don’t know: Plan out your routes in a safe place like your hotel room or, second choice, a restaurant. Fold up your map so it fits in the palm of your hand or into a book or magazine you are carrying so that you can consult it without looking like a big rube with a “mug me” sign on your back. ALWAYS walk with a purpose. Don’t swagger, but step like you have someplace to be, even if you haven’t a got a clue. If you get lost, look for a safe place where you can consult your map in greater, more obvious detail. DON’T unfold the damn thing while standing on a street corner in, say, the red light district. This drives me cuh-raaaaaaaaaazy when people do it.  

4. If you get into a bad situation and have no means of escape, try talking your way out of it first. Eye and verbal contact can have a deterrent effect.  

5. If that doesn’t work and it comes to a fight, punch or kick the shadow areas. Your best target areas on a human body are those that would be in shadow if a light source shone down directly overhead: Eyes, groin, solar plexus, armpits, throat, etc. The exception is the nose, which sticks out. Getting hit in the nose is distractingly painful. Trust me, I speak from experience. 

6. If you end up in a grabbing situation, try to get your hands on his pinkie and bend it back as far as it will go. Also distractingly painful, I promise you. Other fingers will work too, but the pinkie is easiest.