February 07, 2007

This is your first rodeo

But first, why speak of calf roping? Wayell. Maybe because guest posting can be quite a calf rope. I can't cuss. I can't take on any dicey comments. I don't want to invite troll nonsense while Kelley is totally out of pocket. That would be rude, like coming to her family reunion and riduculing her mother's cooking. Bad form.

WhilePJ was very close, there is no resolution to a calf rope. The meaning is to be without options, a calf rope.

Although I am no rodeo expert, I did grow up going to the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo each year. My mom, and lots of folks in Houston, have run that rodeo on an almost purely voluntary basis for years and it is a massive three week production. A very cool Texas tradition, people serve on rodeo committees and leave their places of business like it's jury duty.

Anyway. One of the great events is always the calf rope. You have probably 20 young kids competing at any given time. They let a bunch of calves loose on the field. The kids have maybe 7 minutes to catch a calf's hind legs in a lasso, jump down on top of the calf, turn it on it's back and tie three of it's legs together. I think to be a bona fide winner, the calf has to be sufficiently held in that hooves up position for a full minute or count or something. The kids who successfully rope a calf in the given time win a few hundred bucks and it is probably the most entertaining event at the rodeo. Young greedy cowboys mud wrestling calves in the cow poo? Oh yeah, good times.

Other synonomous cliches would be "stuck between a rock and a hardplace" or the slightly darker "BOHICA". Just trying to help Texans gain a bit of understanding. Knowledge is power, and now you know.

The fight for blight

How incredibly rude of me. I should have told you all from the get go that Kelley is doing great. She's juggling now, as modern mommies all seem to do, but she makes me proud.

And she has the same great attitude. I call her often with my too lame to blog about life and she is a reliable friend, always.

However, no (zero, zilch, nada) computer access at home and the "big brother's watching" issues most of us have developed at work have cost all of us our regular blight fix.

No one is sorrier than I, believe that.

Anyhow. Back to our irregularly scheduled diversion...

February 05, 2007

Calf Rope

Hey there, fair blighters. How you durin, churrin?

No Kelley for you today, sorries. I just wanted to see if her shtuff still works. If you are still parking a lazy eye on this site, hoping after hope each day for some sign of life over here, then you are my blown-eyed bretheren. And blightloves, this one is for you.

Is anyone out there familiar with the phrase 'calf rope'? It's a rodeo euphemism of which we throw around as commonly as uhs and thes in central Texas. I suppose my favorite three rodeo euphemisms would be 1)Calf rope 2)This ain't my first rodeo and 3)I stepped in it.

Why bother you important folks with this query? Easy. It's been a calf rope over at my place lately. The more I thought about it, the more I got to wondering, are these geographically based cliches? Are folks in Montana & Wyoming accustomed to these phrases? Are you? If so could you give a little shout out in the comments, where you hail from and what a calf rope means to you?

Any contributions towards this important research will be rewarded. Now let's breathe life into suburbia, folks. Get on it, dawg gone it.

August 18, 2006

Arrival

Please join Pete and me in welcoming to the world our newborn son, one Christopher Lee (insert our last name), born on August 17, 2006 at 12:20 p.m. at Atlanta's Northside Hospital. Chris and I are both feeling fine - he's sleeping peacefully, and while I am a little logy from lack of sleep and various medications, I'm obviously able to sit here blogging when I should be using every spare moment to rest. What can I say? My baby-torn bottom is stinging, and my epidural shunt bruise is quite sore, but emotionally and mentally, I'm ready to go dancing! I love not being pregnant!

I'll write more later; doubtless I'll not be able to refrain from describing to you the labor process in excruciating detail, narrating everything from our nightmare trip to the hospital in rush-hour traffic to the five-minute interval between when the spinal-block kicked in and when Chris popped out. Northside has free wireless connectivity, and Pete's laptop is actually available (most unusual), him being on paternity leave at the moment - so you may actually see me a bit over the next two days...at least until we are discharged from Northside.

For now, know that we are all healthy, happy, sassy, and extremely appreciative of all of the good wishes and positive vibes being sent our way. If you're trying to get in touch with me at the hospital, know that I'm registered here under my maiden name - that's what's on my insurance card, so that's what I'm using. If you don't know that name and need to get me, ask Key or Kate or V-Man or someone.

The percodan is starting to kick in, and I'm tempted to ramble...so I'll close rather than embarrass myself with gushings and bad grammar. So - blight on, blighters. Love you guys. More soon.

July 30, 2006

Checking In

Rumors of my demise are somewhat exaggerated, but not so terribly far off the mark.

This is going to be one of those posts in which I explain why I haven't been blogging lately, one of those posts of the type that certain of my bloggy peers find so objectionable. Sad, but true. I'd have been here with it sooner, but my trusty Old-Faithful of a computer has finally, after years of dedicated service, died a horrible death. For reasons/excuses why I cannot blog, that'd be Thing One.

Thing Two is that I have entered and am now firmly ensconced in that segment of pregnancy known as constant bloody misery. I will deliver this child into the world sometime in the next three weeks; my belly is so huge that, when I lay on my back (which I don't do often), I can't breathe. The heartburn is constant - even so much as a sip of water sends me running for the Tums. I have an inguinal hernia on my lower right abdomen, which, in combination with that whole "baby in my belly" thing, hurts like a bitch pretty much constantly. I can't eat anything good without stuffing my face with protein or protein-analog afterwards, due to the gestational diabetes, and if you add to that catalogue of ills the World's Largest Hemmorhoid, you can pretty much imagine my state of mind.

I am still working full-time, but my doctor has insisted that I begin my maternity leave (due to the hernia) this Friday; I hope that I will be able to repair my computer once I am staying home and have a minute or two to really concentrate on it. I need to put myself back in action, blog-wise, because I miss you guys. And I miss having e-mail. Under normal circumstances, I would just buy a new machine - the old one is pretty old - but we just purchased a house, got a brand-new car for Pete, spent a bundle on repairs to my old Volvo, and are getting ready to have a baby. A new computer for the family milch-cow is, as you might imagine, pretty low on the priority list.

So, all this is just by way of saying hello, checking in. As I mentioned, I don't have access to my e-mail for this site right now; anything sent between the last post (June 28) and last week is locked in my old mail-client on the dead computer. If you've sent me something to which I have not responded, I apologize. I'll ask Pete to post something when I am delivered of our son, just so's you guys know, and maybe a picture or two. Otherwise, I'll be back when I've got both my technology and my body sorted out, speed the day.

For now, I have a date with a blood-sugar meter and a tube of Preparation-H Cooling gel...

June 28, 2006

Memorial

So I'm sitting in this meeting on Monday afternoon when my phone begins to ring…and ring, and ring. One call after another, one blogger after another, starting with Key and Velociman and proceeding from there. I knew that something must be wrong – everybody knows that I don’t take social calls at work – so as soon as I could get free, I called Key, and she told me the news. Rob Smith, the Acidman, was dead.

I find myself surprised at how deeply Rob’s death has affected me, how much I’ve cried and moped and struggled to understand the meaning of it all. I can’t stop thinking about it, can’t stop imagining what his last hours must have been like. I mean, look - I’d be lying if I sat here and eulogized him, tried to fill the page with tripe about what a great guy he was and how much I adored him. I didn’t think Rob was a great guy. I didn’t adore him. We weren’t close anymore, hadn’t been for at least eighteen months or so. Truth be told, in my entire relationship with Rob Smith, I probably spent more time pissed off at the old fart than I did feeling friendly and mellow towards him. His overt misogyny infuriated me. His self-destructive bent, the relish he took in wallowing in self-pity, his overweening ego – all frustrating, all enough to make me back away from the close relationship I’d established with him in 2003 and 2004. In fact, in early 2005, when Rob starting hitting the bottle extra-hard, it was like he became a different person. He wasn’t just ill-tempered any more – he went beyond being just a charming curmudgeon or a cranky cracker. He became vicious. Cruel. He lashed out, repeatedly and publicly, at the people who loved him the most – myself included - like an animal so crazed with pain that it bites the hand that has petted it for so many years. I knew he was hurting, but I hadn’t caused it, and I wasn’t willing to allow myself to be whipped to make him feel better. So…after that? I wrote him off, for a good long time. Can you blame me?

No, I can’t say that I admired Rob…but – and I’m having a hard time expressing exactly what I feel, here – Rob mattered in a way that most men would kill to matter. He was a presence, a force. He had a charisma that projected his spirit far beyond his slight stature. Somebody – I don’t remember who – spoke of Rob with a football metaphor, which he’d have loved, stating that Rob Smith was a man who played above his weight. That’s the most accurate description of Rob that I’ve ever heard – it ought to be his epitaph. Here lies Robert Marion Smith: He Played Above His Weight.

Rob stood for a lot of principles that I value highly. Hard work. Tenaciousness. Family. Responsibility. Honesty. Jesus, honesty…unless you wanted the naked, brutal, unvarnished, God’s-honest, Southern-Fried-Harlan-County-Coal-Miner version of the truth, you’d best not ask Rob. I can only imagine what he’d have done with a “Honey? Does this dress make my ass look big?”

Rob extended that brutal honesty to the written word, totally hanging everything he had out there on the line with virtually every blog post. Sometimes that honesty manifested itself in a profound sense of fun (we didn’t call him the Crapblogger King for nothing, you know), and sometimes it prompted him to rip out his innards and parade them and the attendant suffering through the public square. Like it or not, Rob’s trainwreck life was all out there, on display for all lookers. Like Lady Godiva, he just didn’t give a shit who saw what.

I don’t know if it helped him or not, that insistence on examining and re-examining his every foible and failure. Rob seemed to be under a compulsion to exorcise his every demon on the Gut Rumbles page – and I sometimes wondered if he’d have been better off shutting down some of those emotions instead of indulging them so fully. You know, maybe he could have suppressed some of the pain that he lived with, sublimated all that negativity into something else, something positive. If I’d been through what Rob’d been through in the past five years, it’s sure as hell what I would have tried to do. But then again, I ain’t Rob Smith, not by a long shot. I have no right to judge him.

If Rob had died a year ago, I wouldn’t have been surprised at all. If you’d seen the way he looked last fall, in Helen...you’d have been convinced, as I was, as everyone was, that he was virtually at death’s door. As things were, I’d just seen him in Austin, two months ago, looking as fit and fine as ever he looked… He’d gotten a handle on the drinking and the pills, he’d cleaned himself up, and he looked downright sharp. So, when the news came that he was dead, I was shocked. I’m still shocked.

I just can’t bring myself to believe that the old goat is gone.

Rob and I mended our fences in Helen in the fall of 2005, and actually spent a good bit of time together this past spring, in Austin. Him being sober and me being pregnant, we kept each other company in the teetotal section of the blogmeet. Even so, I was hesitant to allow myself to really reestablish those ties of friendship – he’d burned me once, and while I’m quick to forgive, I’m slow to forget. I don’t regret my reticence; it’s part of my nature, and Rob himself would have been the first to encourage me to go with my gut feelings, with what I honestly felt. I’m just thankful that I had the opportunity to sing and laugh with him, on good terms, one last time. Sitting where I sit now, that feels like a blessing.

I’m way too far along in the pregnancy to travel as far as Savannah for Rob’s wake and memorial, but I’d give my left arm to be there. All those bloggers, drinking and smoking and telling tall tales? That’d have been Rob’s heaven, right there. That’s what he’d have wanted, and it hurts, a dull and frustrating ache, not to be able to be a part of it.

Love him or hate him, Rob Smith was a fixture of this artificial salon we call the blogosphere; this end of the neighborhood will not be the same without him. For a lot of folks, Rob was the Blogfather; for me, he was more like the crazy old uncle than any sort of father figure, but still. He was family, and that’s all that really matters.

Rest in peace, Rob Smith. We’ll miss you.

May 30, 2006

Disconnection Notice

Just a heads-up to anyone who may need to get in touch with me: tonight is our last night in the old house, and I am going off the air, computer-wise, at about eleven o'clock p.m. eastern time . It may be as much as a week before I am able to get online again, and it may be less. I'm just not sure right now. So, if you have something you need to send me or whatever, you may want to do it this evening.

Another note regarding my sudden disconnection from the world-at-large - my cell phone is broken. I can receive and make calls, but the display is completely dead. If you've sent me a text, I can't see it...so don't be offended when I don't reply. I'll get a new phone soon, but I have a few other priorities at the moment.

Catch you later...

May 29, 2006

Remembrance

To every man and woman who has ever served this nation's Armed Forces, thank you. For everything.

May 28, 2006

Interior Landscapes

A few posts ago, I went on at some length about my dreadful lack of the girly-girl gene, and the consequent inferiority complex that I am developing over my personal appearance. I mention that post only because I am about to tackle another one of the feminine hot-issues in which I am almost totally deficient, an area of life that simply has not mattered until today: interior decoration.

Let me rephrase. I don't know that I have no decorative skills, but if they are in here somewhere, said skills are surely buried in a thousand layers of dust and totally atrophied from disuse. Until we bought this new house, I didn't care what my furniture looked like, or whether the window treatments matched the china. I've never had the time, the money, or the inclination to worry about that kind of thing - and besides, our house itself was so incredibly crappy-looking that anything I spent money on, interiors-wise, felt like hanging a Christmas ornament on a dog turd. So, why bother? Right?

In the current house: a dinette set my parents bought when they got married - circa 1964 - and a mismatched set of Pfalztgraaf stoneware that dates from the late 70's. Add some of Target's finest dish-cloths and oven mitts, and voila! You have my kitchen decor. In the living room? What once was a beautiful, matching, jacquard-upholstered sofa and love seat - now Georgia-clay-reddish, dog-hair covered, misshapen lumps that we sit on when we watch a movie. Curtains? Thrown out of my auntie's house for being too dated. Accouterments? Pete's impressive liquor display. A nice humidor. And five thousand dollars worth of Legos and Transformers. Need I go on? No? You have the picture?

Ahem. Needless to say, we are having most of our old furniture hauled away by a combination of charitable organizations and junk removers. It's time to let that old stuff go - and it feels wonderful. Do you know the joy, the release inherent in tossing a piece of furniture you really, really hate onto the midden heap? It's wonderful. Therapy. I recommend it for everyone.

However, I now find myself in an interesting position. Part of the deal we got when we bought the house included several thousand dollars in free furniture from a national chain. I also have the opportunity to choose my own fabrics for draperies, linens, and for the seat-bottoms on my sainted Grandmother's antique formal dining-room suite (resurrected from storage, because I've never had room for it before). I can paint accent walls, if I want to, and I can apply borders or wallpaper, should I so desire. I get to start all over again with all our towels, our everyday dishes, and other items, everything from artwork to napkin-rings. Really, I can do anything I want to the house, within certain financial limits. And - not to put too fine a point on it - I find it all pretty daunting. I am at a total loss.

I am within spitting distance of forty, and I've never considered things like texture and color and detail in terms of home design. I've never had the opportunity to shape my surroundings in really meaningful and personal ways. I am flummoxed by the array of choices, of styles, and overwhelmed by the range of possibilities. I have no idea what I want the house to look like, I just have a good "how not to" manual. Um, I don't want my house to look like a penniless college student lives there anymore. That's my whole design perspective, in a nutshell. Where'm I supposed to go with that? I just don't know.

I could have one of my friends who does possess the girly-girl gene help me, but then the house would look like she or he thinks it should look, rather than how I think it should look. Ditto my Sainted Mother, whose taste is far superior to mine, but who is not me. And, really, ditto a decorator. I think a decorator would cost too much, anyway. And, really, I want to do this myself. I really do. I just have no idea how to go about it.

Is there such a thing as Decorating for Dummies? I think I'll go to Amazon and check.

Naming Conventions

So I see that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have finally reached their long-awaited Blessed Event; their daughter, Shiloh Nouvel, was born yesterday in the protective embrace of the government of Namibia. I understand that the Namibians began denying visas to celebrity photographers in the days leading up to the birth - unless these members of the press had credentials from the Jolie-Pitts stating they were approved to be there to cover the birth of the baby, Namibian entry visas were denied them. Damn. And they say money can't buy happiness.

A couple of things I want to address, here. First of all...Shiloh Nouvel? New Shiloh? Now, I don't know about you guys, but where I come from, Shiloh is kinda synonymous with "horribly bloody battle". Maybe that's just a Southron thang, and Shiloh means something really beautiful in, like, ancient Aramaic or something, but when I hear the name, I have visions of homespun butternut infantry uniforms oozing viscera, and stuff. Dysentery. Body lice. Starvation and terror. Shiloh - arguably the scariest battle of the Civil War. Not what I would name my daughter...but who am I to judge?

After all, celebrity kid names always amuse me. Suri Cruise - "Pickpocket" Cruise in Nippon, "Get the hell away from me!" Cruise in Tel Aviv. Penn Gilette's kid, Moxie Crimefighter. Jason Leigh - Pilot Inspektor. Bob Geldof - take your freaking pick of Fifi-Trixibell, Peaches, or Pixie. The always-inventive Frank Zappa, who sired a foursome and cleped 'em Dweezil, Diva, Moon Unit, and Ahmet Rodan. Or even Apple Martin, Gwyneth Paltrow's kid. The name Apple isn't so bad in itself, it was the rationale for it that bugged me. "It's biblical," declaimed Gwyneth to the world, on Oprah. Well, shit...that's, um, not a biblical character, Gywn. That's a fruit. Using that reasoning, you extend biblical names out to stuff like "sandal" and "oxen" and "serpent". And that's just silly. At least Gwyneth and Chris hit closer to the mark with their most recent production, Moses Martin. Now that's biblical.

But, back to menage Jolie-Pitt - you gotta wonder about those kids. I mean, not in an "ohmygod my mom is Britney Spears and might forget my car seat is on the roof of the Lexus and just drive off" kinda way - I am casting no aspersions on Angelina as a mom. No, I just wonder about those kids as teens. I mean, how do you rebel when your mom is Angelina Jolie and can "been there, done that" your scrawny adolescent butt no matter what you do? How you gonna top Angelina? Refuse to get tattoos? Become a republican? I don't know.

Ooh - that reminds me: I read the funniest thing on Slate the other day...The Brangelina Baby:

Mommy, what's the Brangelina baby?

It's a question no parent is ready to answer, but one that is being asked by younger and younger children. As parents, it's our job to help them.

Understanding the Warning Signs:

How can parents know if their children aren't coping well with the Brangelina baby? Stay alert. Monitor your kids' television viewing, Web surfing, and glossy celebrity-weekly reading habits. Also, look for nonverbal signs: moodiness, anger, silence, anxiety, regression, nightmares, bed-wetting. These may be indicators that your child is struggling with the Brangelina baby.

Why can't I be the Brangelina baby? The first thing many kids want to know about the Brangelina baby is, "Why not me?" Research indicates that children as young as 3 months old are sensitive to their own status. And even the dimmest children know that the Brangelina baby is receiving a lot of attention and praise. Older kids might look at the photos of the Brangelina baby and wonder why they were featured on so few magazine covers or news reports at the time of their birth.

Parents should patiently explain that all babies are special. The Brangelina baby might seem like the most important baby in the world, but it wasn't so long ago that everyone was talking about Violet Affleck, Sean Preston Federline, Apple Martin, or what's her name, Brian Benben and Madeline Stowe's kid. Make sure children understand that they are special, too, albeit in a much more narrowcast market sort of way. Not every baby needs to be on the cover of OK!, but if your child feels excluded, experts suggest using computer-imaging software to mock up "pretend" magazine covers featuring your kids. Eye-catching cover lines like, "America's Favorite Plate Cleaner Comes Clean: 'I Love Broccoli!' " will help stifle any anxiety.

It goes on - brief, hilarous, creepy. Holds a cracked mirror up to us peasants and our reactions to the doings of our celebrity class. Do read it.

As for me, I am not "having trouble with the Brangelina Baby" - I sincerely congratulate the Jolie-Pitts on their stork delivery, no matter what they name her. Babies are a joy. I am actually having trouble with my own baby (who is kicking the shit out of my bladder even as I type) and with the cold reality that I can't buy a government to relentlessly police a stretch of private, luxury-hotel occupied beach for me to calve upon. Dammit.