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June 30, 2005

Frontier Psychiatry

I recently went to a conference for corporate communicators because it was in Vegas and because my company was paying for it, and frankly one would be an ass to turn down a free trip to Vegas. However, Vegas is not so much fun if you don't have anyone to play with. I always think you are going to meet someone cool at a conference and it turns out that most people there have, you know, outfits and nail-dos and take corporate communications VERY FRICKING SERIOUSLY. Fortunately, my best friend's brother was also in town for some other thing. He is the head of a fancy pantsy tech company and like a gongillionaire, so I had a good time eating sushi with them and making fun of him in front of his staff. They might not have known that his version of "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" at his sister's wedding is one of the best performances in the whole history of karaoke, but they do now!

Much to my surprise and delight, one of the seminars was being given by The Wonkette. By the second day, I was in dire need of some relief from the metrics and the retention and the corporate transparency. I just wanted to find a shred of something, anything, cool besides the rap stars of nebulous origin playing craps at 7:30 a.m. whom I passed on my way through the Caesar’s Palace lobby. Rappers! I'm gonna go network with some CEO speechwriters! Who's with me? MC Executive Presentations, are you down?

The Wonkette was indeed cool. As both she and her bio will tell you, she is an "A-list blogger" meaning I guess she gets an A for blogging so well. She is a funny lady and gets mad props for cursing, saying "whores" and just generally being conference inappropriate. What was she even doing there? (For what is worth, I would like to give Mimi Smartypants a triple A plus plus because I love me some Mimi oh yes I do. I would also give the Yeti an A because he is coming over here this weekend and his kid is very tough and might kick the be-diapered booty of my kid if I didn't. Son of Max would get a C- and that's primarily because I have a cute banner made by my cute husband.)

Pishaw. Tonight's post was going to be about how our realtor is like the Eyeore of real estate and how I am having to be a cheerleader for our house ("Come on, it's cute! 2, 4, 6, 8, you know it did appreciate!") while she mopes in her caftan and drives me around in her BMW to all the houses that are better than ours and still sitting unsold on the market. Frink and frank and frunk.

Per her doom and gloom suggestion, we are transforming a third bedroom that we are currently using as an office/den into a dining room just in case people can't think of that themselves when they are looking at the house. I told her I would spray-paint my body gold and pose as a centerpiece if it will help sell the house considering we KIND OF JUST BOUGHT A DIFFERENT HOUSE someplace else.

You've got to love the Seattle housing market. It's crazy in the coconut.

Posted by Max at 05:48 AM | Comments (0)

June 27, 2005

step one

This weekend was a bit of a blur, but a few interesting things stand out. At a salad bar where I was attempting to grab some quick 'n' healthy vittles prior to signing my life away, I overhead two tan, bikini-top clad teenage girls debating whether or not chick peas were really "cow stomach glands". These are the sort of girls that the Bean will one day be groping in the backs of their daddies' BMWs. I'm so going to play an endless loop whispering "band camp" into his room every night from now on. Band girls are cool.

On the airplane back, during dinner, the man next to me dropped a large quantity of something soft and slippery into my shoe, and I couldn't attend to it for a while because our trays were down, trapping us in our seats. The only thing that got me through it was thinking how much more my friend Rocky would have been freaking out than I was.

And I think we bought a house.

Posted by Max at 09:17 PM | Comments (2)

June 24, 2005

Midnight, and not at the oasis

After 45 delightful minutes on the phone with a patient man in India, I am posting from a hotel in Seekonk, MA. From the sounds of it, legless nocturnal monsters are dragging themselves up and down the hall in front of my door. The overall situation is very "mockumentary of a small-town serial killer", where the hapless female traveler checks in solo to a seedy roadside place and never shows up for the free continental breakfast, if you know what I'm saying.

Tomorrow I am looking at houses with a loud woman named Louise. The jury is out whether Louise and I are going to hit it off, but what we are going to is spend some intense time together traipsing through strangers' homes and deciding if they are worthy of me uprooting our entire lives for.

On the plane ride here, I had the pleasure of sitting next to the National Handwashing Expert. At first, I was skeptical of such a claim but it turns out she has degrees in microbiology, cognitive behavioral studies, and food safety. Guess what, people? You aren't washing your hands enough, and the bird flu is going to kill us all because of it! Thanks a lot! She said research shows that almost 50% of all deaths in hospitals were preventable, caused by viruses and bacteria introduced AFTER the person had checked in for something else like rat bites, and that over 60% of hospital staff don't wash their hands often or well enough.

You can read all about her very cool project, Germ City, that educates people about this stuff here.

If you learn nothing else from this blog, please remember this: wash your cantaloupe. E.coli thrives in their textured skins, which rest on the dirty, dirty ground, and then you cut them with knives and it gets on the flesh of the fruit and then you eat it and die.

More tomorrow, with pictures of houses posted by very clean hands.

Posted by Max at 05:26 AM | Comments (1)

June 20, 2005

Dirty rat

My kid got bit by a rat yesterday. Hi! How are you? My kid got bit by a rat. Yes, that’s right, a rat.

Man, do I feel like a craptastic parent. Yesterday we plumbed the depths of bad parenting, bottom-fed there for a spell, and then took it even lower. A rat! How low can you go, exactly?

The day began nicely enough; the Bean and me gaily shaking sprinkles onto cupcakes we baked. My husband was upstairs enjoying a Father’s day sleep-in. All that changed when the Bean toddle-ran into the living room, tripped over his own feet, and fell head-first into a table corner. With toddlers, there are falls and then there are Falls. Right away, I knew it was a Fall. Before I even got to him, I saw blood pooling beside him on the floor. I summoned by first aid training (ha) and started screaming “Emergency! Emergency…WITH BLOOD!”

I suck in emergencies. I thought I’d be better because I’ve always had an interest in the medical arts, but not, apparently, when they involve things HAPPENING to my CHILD causing blood to fill his eye sockets, cascade down his face and puddle on the floor. My husband came running down the stairs yelling “It’s okay, he’s going to be okay” and even as I hyper-ventilated, I was thinking how does he fricking know he hasn’t even seen him! but I was also glad because I needed to hear that even if it wasn’t true or I was going to pass out. We mopped up the blood, put the kid in the bath (seriously, there was so much blood), and administered ice packs and pressure while I tried to rope it in. Happy Father’s day! Would you like a cupcake?

Then later we had a fight about me not really wanting to go to some guy’s house for dinner because I’d never met him and it was, after all, Father’s day not Dinner with Some Fishing Guy and his Bitchy Girlfriend day. We finally went after much, um, debate. The couple had a huge cage with Habitrail-y type things in it on the kitchen floor and I’m like, oh look they have a critter! And Bitchy Girlfriend says, yeah that’s our rat and he is mean and he bites everything. You could tell she liked the rat way more than she liked us for some dumb reason, especially when we were trying to be normal and polite and ask questions about their stupid house and the vermin within.

We ate dinner with the rat about three feet from the table and then Fishing Guy said “Watch me feed the rat!” and gave the rat some chicken. The Bean pressed his little hand against the cage while watching and WHAMMO that rat was on him like rat on chicken. I’ve never heard a child scream that loud and it sucked.

Why my parent-radar, which is usually on Maximum Overdrive, didn’t insist the getting the damn rat out of the kitchen I don’t know. I was in a weakened parenting state I think, what with all the other stuff. The only good thing about was that I was able to shoot terrible, terrible laser eyes unfettered at the Bitchy Girlfriend as we packed up our screaming child and left in a flurry of maybe-needing-to-go-to-the-ER.

I hope other people had better Fathers’ days than we did and that there were no head injuries, verbal fisticuffs, or long-tailed, sharp-toothed rodents involved. That is my wish to you.

Posted by Max at 10:01 PM | Comments (2)

June 18, 2005

Little birdie told me

Yesterday, the Bean and I went to a new exhibit at the zoo with our Texan neighbors where you hold a little seed-covered stick up inside of a giant enclosed bird sanctuary, and tiny, blue and green parrots land on your shoulders and arms to eat the seeds. In other words, it was Toddler Paradise. The Bean was appropriately humbled.

We tried to buy the Bean a toddler bed today, which is sort of a weird mini-bed, but they were inexplicably sold out. Who buys those things? They seem wildly impractical to me, tiny little beds that he will only be able to use for a year or so. But lately he's been marching up and down in his crib waving his blanket like a flag of surrender. He quits! He's not sleeping in there anymore! While we were on our recent Whirlwind Tour of the East Coast, he also quit his Pack and Play and spent every night in our king-sized hotel beds, his feet in his dad's throat, his head beating out nocturnal beats on my sternum. So, a toddler bed I guess it will be, once we can find one.

Tomorrow is Father's Day! The Bean and I are going to make him pancakes in the shape of pin-up girls and serve them to him from a fishing line. He'll like that.

Posted by Max at 10:47 PM | Comments (0)

June 16, 2005

Hey, where've you been?

Someone did smote my former site. A pox on him and his down dirty database deleting ways! That means I’ve been unable to tell you about the little things that have been going on in my life such as: my sis had a baby boy, our trip with my brother and his family to Cape Cod, the conference I went to in Vegas, how a crazy girl at work tried to take me down with lawsuits and lies, and OH YEAH how we are moving across the country. In two months. To Rhode Island. Word to the mothership.

I need beers, maybe ten thousand of them. My husband just called to inform me that he is drinking whiskey tonight and that I shouldn’t wait up. As far as I’m concerned, he can sail his boat down Whiskey River every evening from now until September because after five years of my pouting, pleading, threatening, cajoling, gibbering and yearning, he has agreed to move back East with me, his loving loving East coast wifey. This from a boy who is from Alaska and hates the snow, a boy who has never lived more than fifty miles from the Pacific ocean, a boy who’s own family is scattered up and down the West coast.

Not only has he agreed to move, he is fired up! He’s sending me links to beach houses! He’s discussing what I should serve at the café I want to open! He’s installing new sod lawns where before there were weeds so we can sell our house for mo’monies! I’m swoony with love for him!

So in spite of the fact that said crazy girl is out to get me, things are going pretty goddamn great. I’m quite giddy with possibility myself, in fact. I’ve lived in on the West coast for a mighty long time and am ready to return to the fold, where the men wear madras and the locals eat lobstahs. I fly out next week to look at houses…

Thanks to my husband for fixing both my website and my heart, which has never set quite right since I’ve been away. More as we know it.

Posted by Max at 04:45 AM | Comments (1)