Birds and the Bees Part 2

A week later, same night of the week, same time (I could set my clock to it), my daughter comes in again when I'm watching the Bachelor, says that the dad on Secret Life got really mad. I'm like, humm, now what, wait for it.... I knew this was probably a prelude to what is..... Which it was. She's says, Mom I have another question, (meaning a s-x question) groan! What, is it? I ask her (fear in my voice). She says, no I'll write it, since you get all crazy and stuff. Who me? She takes a pad and writes one word, misspelled badly...masteration. Yikes, will I ever know a peaceful Monday night again, with that Secret Life still on the Family Channel? How do I explain this one? Surprisingly I remain calm. I tell her that it's when you feel pleasure at touching yourself. She's like oh that, I did that when I was 6, but I don't do it any more! OMG! Green tea spraying out of my mouth. More groaning and pulling the covers over my head, wake me up when you're 27, I scream in my head!

My Favorite Links

My favorite links:

www.expedia.com
www.tripadvisor.com
www.foodnetwork.com
www.zillow.com
www.intrepidtraveler.com
www.worldreviewer.com

My Husband the Handyman

Recently our Whirlpool refrigerator/freezer ice maker started making a column of ice from one corner of the ice maker. This column of ice would attach itself from the bottom of the tray to the ice cubes below. Now generally this would not be a problem (I kept breaking off the column) except for two things. The ice column would clump the ice cubes below and thereby not let any cubes into the chamber for release and the column of ice was brownish and had a grit in it. Now how did grit get into the water? So I thought maybe it was time for a new water filter. Got the filter, put it in, then something curious happened. The ice maker stopped working of course. Now why would the ice maker breakdown? The refrigerator is less than 6 years old which by today's standard would mean it's ancient. My husband's parents gold Kenmore lasted 20 years, granted it's ice making capacity was a little tired and sluggish, but it still worked and made ice. My whole family groaned as the ice maker came to a complete halt. My daughter said in a confused stated, "Now what are we going to do?" "Are we going to have to live like hobos? (her favorite word for poor people) as I pull out the plastic ice cube trays from storage. It's probably time to buy a new refrigerator because the plastic veggie bin drawer has been broken for two years (we buy a lot of produce) and now the ice maker is caput I'm thinking. We make a trip to the local R.C. Willey's, on Saturday's its free hot dogs and soda-hey it's free lunch and you don't have to buy anything and check out the prices of new fridges. Of course the one I want cost over $2500.00 with the new French Doors and bottom freezer. Anything with the word French in it will spiral the price upwards. I go home depressed. Maybe we can live without ice making capabilities. Nothing wrong with making ice, my mother did it, my grandmother did it, well maybe she didn't, she's was old world Italian. Well heck, at least we don't have to keep our ice in a block in the ice shed like "Little House on the Prairie". My husband complains that the ice from the trays are too big for the water bottles. I tell him put the cubes in a plastic bag and crush them with a mallet, he's looking at me like I'm crazy. This of course sent him over the edge to try to fix this problem. Now let me tell you, my husband never has nor will be a handyman, it's like he has two left hands and no functioning logic, you know, use a hammer when it calls for a screwdriver. Me, I have more testosterone than my male chihuahua, so I am more capable of figuring out things and I semi-read the directions and I'm Asian. This past week he went on a crusade to fix our ice maker. He called several appliance repair places which tell him the fix will probably cost over $300.00. That tears it! We need to buy a new fridge! He finally talks to one nice appliance guy that tells him that it's the ice unit which is an easy fix and only involves three screws. That excites him! Only three screws he chants! The appliance guy tells him the part cost less than $100.00 and can easily be installed himself. I'm thinking nothing is that easy. He finds the part in town (which is considerably less expensive that ordering it from Whirlpool), we drive to the other side of town, which my daughter exclaims, it this hobotown? We go into the appliance store, I'm still doubtful. There are parakeets flying around and chirping. I ask the guy is this the problem with our ice maker? He's like, look lady, if I knew that, I would be a millionaire. We buy the part, never mind there are signs all over the store screaming, NO REFUNDS! My husband wants to take the part home immediately, no stops at our local Target store for our weekly stop. He takes his prize in the house and quickly starts to work on installing it. For myself, I remain calm, because I know later, I will be screaming that we just blew $100.00 for a wrong part and we need to buy the French door refrigerator, never mind that it will now cost $2600.00! He holds the part in, but his hands are too big to get the tiny screws in the holes, he claims they aren't a match. Oh boy, here we go. I go in, patience still in tack. I place the screw in the hole, he screws it in. After it is in place all three screws home, he says I hope I put in the wire plug in good enough. Great! why would you think that after the thing was all screwed in? We shut the freezer and say our novenas. An hour later we peek. No ice, but some suspicious brown residue at the bottom of the bin. We pull the bin out, my husband says he wiped out the bottom of it (you know husband style cleaning), we rinse it again, by this time I'm thinking maybe we should have rinsed out the ice maker too, you know all that storage dust and all. We carefully place back the bin, I place my finger in the ice maker, it feels like there's ice there, or maybe it's just cold. We shut the door. I tell my husband, I haven't heard the water run through the ice maker and right when I said that, we heard a clunk in the freezer. I wouldn't have registered it, except my husband ran to the freezer and screamed, "We have ice!" I rush with disbelief and peer into the bin, yep, sure enough there's ice at the bottom. Maybe it was a fluke, couldn't possibly be that easy! Hours later and ice is being make a record speed, my husband's chest is puffed up like some sort of pigeon doing his happy dance. I fixed it, I fixed it! He jumps up and down like a seven year old! Boy am I never going to hear the end of it. My daughter is just happy we're normal again, not hobos. Myself, a little relieved, a little disappointed I'm not getting that French door refrigerator and in the background I could hear my husband on the phone to the appliance store-hey do you have a vegetable bin for a Whirlpool?-

How Do You Explain The Birds and The Bees?

The other night when I had finally sat down to the TV to watch my favorite, The Bachelor, lunches were made, exercise was done, homework checked, dinner dishes were put away and all was well with the world, well for at least 5 minutes. I was happily drinking my smoothie and just plain satisfied, with my husband upstairs in his man room watching reruns of Mash and my daughter in the living room watching, "The Secret Life of American Teenager", when my daughter comes in the family room and asks me, "Mom, what is Or#! S#x??" I'm like I didn't just hear that? Hey, isn't secret life on the Family Channel? My eyes bugged out like one of those cartoon characters, I had the greatest urge to pull the cover over my head, but I had to compose myself quickly. Gads, what would I say? I thought of making something up. Something like, if you eat something really really good like chocolate and it taste so great that is what OS is! But I knew she'd ask her friends in school the next day, and who better than her mother to tell her what it is, right? But why am I so squeamish? When she was about 9 or 10 it was time to tell her about the birds and the bees stuff. It was a no you do it game between me and my husband, so we went to Barnes and Noble and bought her a book that would answer all her questions about men and women. We took our prize purchase home, left it in the bag and told her to go upstairs and read it and if you have any question you can come down and ask us. Now isn't that all neat and tidy? So when she wanted to know what OS was, I was tempted to say, didn't that book cover it? But instead, I said, "It's when you kiss a pee-pee," in my most calmest voice. Yuck she says and I think I must have been making all kinds of faces, because she said, Oh mom, you don't have to be so silly about it, like she was 25 or something. Just then my husband comes downstairs and says what's all the fuss about, when my daughter says, I was just asking was OS was. My husband, without skipping a beat says, it's when you s--k a guy's pen!s. Oh my dog! Oh my dog! I'm like major cringing! Geez, do you have to be sooooo blunt! Are there any sane people in this house!?? I then tell in her in no uncertain terms that if you do OS, you can get all kinds of diseases and even cancer (this word is whispered)! So don't do it!!
Why is it so hard to explain these things? I guess I didn't learn well from my mother, (she was kinda of Victorian, bless her heart!). Whenever I mention s-x to her, she would mumble something about dogs and puppies. Ummm, dogs and puppies, that can't be so bad, right?
How did you explain the birds and the bees-I think there should be classes that parents can attend so we can learn how to tell our kids in a rational mature way, instead of either giggling like crazy or hiding out in fear!

Trying to Turn Back the Clock

Tick tock, tick tock, yep, that's my youth quickly slipping away. A friend of mine who is considerably younger than me, (everyone is younger than me) came into work and told me she wanted to have some body sculpting done and the fat that was taken out put into her boob area where it would give her a lift. They can do that? Well, I guess it's better than a boob job. I am almost to the point where I can go either way, telling myself I'm too young (inside) to give into the ravages of time and maybe someday when I get the courage I would go under the knife, no matter what the cost, convincing myself that I must take care of myself like I would take care of my car. Wrong, if my car was old, then I would buy a new one, why bother with the old one? Or I say to myself, well, what's the point, who gives a rat's ass what I look like, I'm just the old lady at work. Nah, not yet. Which takes me to this post. Over Christmas break, I bought one of those chin squeezers thingy bobs that you put under your chin pushing down on a spring that will miraculously get rid of any saggy neck (excuse my neck, as Nora Ephron said). I tried it for a few days only to look suspiciously in the mirror (where's my 10x mirror!) that my marionette lines looked deeper. Yikes! Was ruining my juverderm injected laugh lines? Did I tell you I had that procedure done last year? I did it on a whim (plus the presuasion of some good advertisement, two injections for the price of one). how could I resist? I was just so down in the mouth about those lines, never mind the big luggage bags beneath my eyes (so big, that airlines charge me the extra luggage fee whenever I fly), it was those damn lines that completely sent me running for the nearest senior citizen home . So I did it. Yep and girls, let me tell you it was the best money I ever spent. Never mind your fears about the pain, what pain? The doctor topically numbs the injection sight, pumps the stuff in, 30 minutes later you're walking out of the doctor's office with ice packs on your cheeks. Just remember to have someone else drive you, lest you risk getting into an accident because you want to keep looking in the rear view mirror at the results. The doctor I went to is a seasoned professional and brushed off my fears of injections. In his calm muzak voice he said this is not going to hurt one bit and guess what, there was practically no pain. Did you stick the needle? The injection marks took about two weeks to fade, but they were hardly noticeable since all I could look at was the smooth area around my mouth. Was it rejuvenation? You're darn right it was. It's almost a year later and it still looks pretty darn good. So when I saw that that silly contraption was making my laugh lines deeper, I immediately took it back for a full refund. The lady at the store asked me if I had used it and I told her, honey, look at my face, does it need something like that?

Is There A Santa Clause?

As my daughter gets older with each passing Christmas, I reminisce about the days when she did believe that all the presents under the tree were from Santa. I would sneak home and wrap the presents that Santa brought in special Santa wrapping paper and place them under the tree on Christmas Eve, so that the next day when she came down stairs, there would be twice the gifts because Santa had made his visit. The look of surprise and awe was always so thrilling. She's twelve now and knows there's no Santa, because mommy and daddy are Santa, she tells me. Apparently she has known this for some time now, because, as she said, one time she found the Santa wrapping paper in the garage. Just like the time she knew there was no Tooth Fairy, when I tried to put a dollar in her pillow as I kissed her goodnight, when 5 minutes later she yelled, "Mom, I found the money you put in my pillow"! Damn, and I thought I was being sneaky! It's goodbye to those innocent fairy tale days, gone are the toys from Santa, replaced by electronics from Mom and Dad. Why it seems just like yesterday, when she was 5 and her school took her class on a field trip to the 99 cent store, where each kid got $2.00 to spend anyway they liked. She stood in line and when her friend asked her what she was buying, she held up her hand and showed two boxes of scotch tape. Why are you buying that? her friend asked, with boxes of candy in her hand. "Because my mom likes to tape things" my daughter replies, "So I'm buying her tape". Now that's, sigh is priceless!

Christmas Dogs, Henry and Hazel

What's the Big Deal About Facebook?

Welcome to Facebook, Donna. Ok, so I've finally caved into the pressures of my daughter and my friends and created "our" and I say "our" Facebook page as it has my name, but mostly my daughter's friends. As a conservative mother of an eleven year old, I don't want my daughter on any social networking cite, but after the other Donna did it and said that she could look up her old pals from way back when, I'm like cool. And when I sent an email to my friend Jay to tell him we were going to be on Let's Make a Deal, only to receive no reply back, he promptly chastised me by saying that if I were on Facebook, I would have known he was in Paris, so la de da! That tears it! My cousins back East on are it and they are way more conservative than us. So I did it and now I'm thinking what's all the fuss? Of course my daughter is absolutely in a trance about the whole thing, chattering with her school friends, for me I just don't get it. Probably because I'm so ancient, whines my daughter. I tried looking up some of my old friends from high school. Not many came up, either they're dead or haven't entered the social cyberspace like me, no they're probably dead. I did find one person, a guy, only because his name came up on classmates. When I went to look him up, up popped his picture. Kinda looked like him vaguely. Did I want to send him a message to be his friend? What would I say? High school was like centuries ago. Maybe he's some kind of maniac or pervert, who knows? So I didn't, what would be the point? It's ancient history. Apparently no one is searching for me, oh yeah, they're probably already dead. Facebook looks like a messy teenage girl's room. I like order, neatness and blogging. Guess it's good for sending out messages but other than that, it's just another website to check on. Surprising how many tweeners have their own page. As my daughter whines, when will I be able to get my own and to this I reply, when you're married and have kids of your own!

European Vacation 2009

This year we had the opportunity to take our daughter to see some of Europe's famous landmarks, before myself and husband become too infirmed to travel. According to my daughter, we're practically ancient. Doesn't help that I always ask her when she goes to her friend's house if I look older than her friend's mother. To which she mostly replies yes, but there is that one time when she says I look younger. Ah ha! So I do look younger than some of the other mothers!
As I get older, I have less and less tolerance for traveling. Especially less tolerance for the airplane ride that seems to last an eternity in coach. Going there is not so bad, since you have the trip to look forward to, but coming home, during the last 2 hours of the 13 hour trip, I was practically pitching a fit, wanting to scream and jump out of the plane, not to mention that we had another 4 hour plane ride to look forward to once we landed. I had no tolerance for the French lady sitting in front of me, when only 10 minutes after take off she reclines her seat all the way into my lap nearly knocking down my water bottle. I fumed and stewed until I couldn't take it any more. I'm always a courteous passenger and never recline my seat all the way especially on a 13 hour plane ride. Nothing like trying to eat food out of a tray with a seat in your face. After about 2 hours, my daughter decided she needed to go to the bathroom, so I grabbed really hard on the seat back and pulled it down viciously. The French lady looked at me with contempt, to which I answered her unspoken glaring comment with the reply, "that it is really hard to get out of the seat because it is so narrow because someone has their seat all the way back!" If before she didn't speak any English, she knew what I was saying and promptly adjusted her seat forward and there she remained for the remainder of the flight, not even getting up to go to the bathroom or eat for 13 hours. She must have the kidneys the size of a large bathtub. From then on, I was very careful not to disturb the nice French lady. Careful Madison, don't grab the seat when making your way to the bathroom!
Coming back home is always easier to adjust to the jet lag, because you're flying during the day and once at home, I force myself to go to bed at a normal time. Going to Europe on the other hand is much harder, since I don't have the comfort of my bed and had to sleep sitting up. My mother used to sleep sitting up in her bed, something about her herniated ulcer. Me, I need, I crave comfort. Who can sleep in coach? I don't care if they give you a sleep mask and ear plugs. Where's my down pillow and sleep number bed? It's no wonder it took me 6 days to overcome my jet lag in Europe, I didn't sleep a wink on the plane!