Hobson's Choice
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The Reason for the Season
Eleanor: We wear green on St. Patrick's Day to honor the leprechauns. (long pause)
If we don't, they get very angry.
5:21 p.m. - 2007-03-18
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Ah-choo!
Well, thank goodness it turns out that I'm not allergic to anything. As part of the follow-up to my nose surgery, I had to have allergy testing done to make sure that we were doing all we could not to encourage infection and the regrowth of scar tissue. So along I went for the allergy testing. I came away with a ton of literature and two week to wait for the results.
What I learned from the allergist's pamphlets it that life in Allergy Planet is basically incompatible with life on Planet Jenny. If I had allergies and wanted to suffer less from them, I would have to move house and change hobbies. Here were some of the strictures offered up by a 50 item list of recommendations.
(1)No pets. Ever. In fact, you shouldn't go to the zoo (I shit you not, it said the bit about the zoo). I'm not the world's biggest fan of zoos, but I do love our elderly gentlemen cats.
(2) No gardening and no house plants. Ever. We currently have 20 house plants, and you already know about my thing about the garden.
(3)Your bedroom closet should be as clean as your bedroom. Well, if that means both are fairly dirty, we're good.
(4) No soft furnishing in the bedroom other than necessary blankets and pillows (which must NOT be wool).
(5) Never sweep your porch because it is covered in mold. I've actually been doing pretty good on this for the last months, but spring is coming. What are you supposed to do when your porch is waist-high in this alleged mold?
(6) Never sweep your basement. Same reasons.
(7)Never open a window in your house, especially an older home where window wells are full of dust and mold. Older homes are built on the principles of cross-ventilation and minimal duct work. If we didn't open windows in the summer, we'd suffocate.
By the time, I got to the part about covering all your furnace vents with cheesecloth, being careful to rinse and replace the cheesecloth every two weeks, I knew that I could not live up to having allergies.
And thank god, I don't have to. Turns out that I'm extremely unallergic to pretty much anything. The whole family fell down in gratitude that we didn't have to banish the cats from the bed. The cats, of course, didn't know what a narrow shave they'd had: just one of the many benefits of not being to read allergy pamphlets or anything else.
2:07 p.m. - 2007-03-09
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Spamtacular
Today I got this subject line in my inbox:
My final question is: who is your Mudbone?
There's no way that can be a final question. I've got so many questions already, namely, what is a mudbone?
I don't know if it's sexual and technological or even made up. All I know is that I'm out of the loop even with my spam.
Chris and I realized this weekend that we have reached a critical new stage of pop-culture/technological cluelessness. We are too old to know what's going on, but young enough to know that something is going on. It makes us feel old.
Now we're looking forward to being old enough not even to be vaguely aware of the Craig's Lists and RAZR phones and iTunes of tomorrow. Then we won't feel old any more.
12:44 p.m. - 2007-03-09
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DST -- a coincidence that it has the same initials as STD?
Oh, my god. Daylight saving time is coming early. You know what it's time for: time for Chris and I have to have an interminable, confusing conversation about how the time change works and what it will mean for bedtime.
If we're really lucky and smart, this year we won't have to get out paper and pen just to figure out whether bedtime feels earlier or later.
6:27 p.m. - 2007-03-07
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In the year 2020
Well, Eleanor is a member of the class of 2020. She registered for kindergarten yesterday, which meant that I filled out a hundred forms while she colored with one of the classroom assistants. Graduation year was one of the blanks I had to fill in, and it turns out to be 2020.
The whole time we were walking through the hallways, Eleanor held my hand tightly and whispered, "Wow... cool... wow." She was thrilled by the coloring sheets, which featured Lilly of Purple Plastic Purse fame. She seemed to proud to be sitting far down the table from me, chatting away with the nameless classroom assistant and an middle-aged woman with Down Syndrome who was there with her caregiver (who was registering her child for pre-K).
We got permission from one of the teachers to sneak a peek into one of the kindergarten classrooms. Eleanor was relieved because there was a gorgeous and colorful rug in the classrom, and I was relieved because of the daily schedule listed "Rest Time 12:00-12:30."
We walked home and both kept saying "Wow."
3:54 p.m. - 2007-03-03
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