What a derned week.

You know, I really have no reason to complain—there are probably about 6,183,891,472 folks who would gladly swap places with me. Sitting around listening to my betters prevaricate and spin wonderfully fluffy meringues of mendacity for hours on-end certainly beats picking through a smoldering trash dump scrounging for old circuit boards or being the former editor of a once well-respected newspaper.

But still, it’s human nature to carp about the high school kid on the ladder above you who gets a million bucks to wear a particular brand of sneakers. I mean, I would wear ‘em too, and I’d do it for HALF that price!

Oh well.

It’s not so bad having a little stress, anyway—everybody thinks the caveguys had it easy, but you know, living with the potential for being eaten by a saber-toothed tiger while you’re minding your own business hunting a quiet place in the woods to take a dump was probably pretty stressful. Although, it’s unlikely the Committee of the Hole had to call a meeting to discuss the possible environmental impact of Thag leaving one of his brown bombers by Big Meeting Rock.

“Why did we call this meeting?”

“Thag wanted go make dirt, but he has issued an objection to using the specified facility due to his being scared of a saber tooth—basically, he doesn’t want to have to go all way to river to read.”

“Saber tooth tiger? We’ll call it an S.T.T. for the report. Reminds me of funny story, stop me if you’ve heard it…two women walk into cave, ask the shaman for a cucumber and a club…”

“Whoa, Ugh—we have business. You can tell it later. Now, Thag needs a place to release evil, but you guys all know the Big Meeting Rock is sacred--we let him stink that up, and then we have to let every other Grok, Muk, and Larry do it. Then the whole neighborhood’s gonna get mad. Why not go some other place, Thag?”

“Look, I just had some real bad meat—I think Grug’s dog licked it or something—and I’ve got go bad to someplace SAFE. Everywhere else is STT-rich because Eeeg seems to be dropping the ball on security.”

“WAIT JUST MOMENT, Eeeg just last week chase away two lizards from Village Tree—you no say me not do good watch!!”

“Well, Eeeg, I’m sure Thag did not mean it THAT way. Thag’s just upset about the STT situation he thinks he see.”

“No thinking about it! Just last week, I saw a gigantic one over by the path to the Wal-Mart!”

“Hmph...Eeeg think we should empower Thag to do own security!”

“Hold on, we’re still not on to business—too many personal issues are coming into the game now. I’m going to put the moose on the table…”

“Wait…before we Speak With Moose, I need a coffee refill.”

“Coffee…that reminds me of a funny story…”

“Hey, late during the last cycle of sun, did we not have an item on agenda about doing QA on the spears?”

“What? What’s that got do with this? And where are YOU going?”

“I heard my secretary—wait and let me see what she wants…”

“Anyway, the deal with spear QA doesn’t have anything to do with Thag, except that Kug distributed the report last month, and I didn’t get a copy, which is like, the second or third time I wasn’t distributed, and I don’t like being unlooped on this.”

“Where’s Thag?”

“Dunno…said something about it being easier to get forgiveness than permission and then he left…anyway, about this STT infestation…”

Anyway, me tired. Me want to konk wife on head and crawl in between bear skins with her and dream for at least seven sunrises. Hmm? Oh, me know…me already dreaming silly dream.

Did get to have lunch and swap car magazines with My Friend Jeff™ today, which was a nice break. We went over to the new Backyard Burger place in Cahaba Heights, which used to be the Mountain Brook Café, which used to be Schlotsky’s Deli, which used to be Jack’s Hamburgers. (Of course, Cahaba Heights used to be New Merkle, so I guess it's apropos. Although I have always wondered where Old Merkle was.) Pretty good burgers which, according to all the marketing ephemera, taste just like you cooked them in your backyard—which is not really that appetizing when you consider most of the time when you fix them in your backyard you have meat that is burnt outside, raw inside, and sprinkled with bits of grass clippings and sand from where you dropped it on the patio and couldn’t get it all washed off.

But these were pretty good, as I said—mine had bacon on it so as to keep the old cholesterol at its rich peak, and Jeff had what they call a Hawaiian Chicken sandwich, which I assume meant that instead of being cooked on a grille it was charred atop a volcano as a sacrifice to Pele. An added benefit that you don’t get at home is having to pay six bucks to a freshly-scrubbed high school girl for your sandwich. (At least not at my house.)

We covered all the normal topics—the ever-increasing speed of our descent into a vile and curmudgeonly middle age; cars; wives; in-laws; kids—they’re going to have their third child in late November. He is coming to the same realization I had after Boy was born—once you have more than two kids, you have to switch from man-to-man to zone, and it’s a totally different game. It’s much faster, and if you play it right you can make it work. People will be in awe of your talent and come to you and want to know how you manage to do all you do and still have time to hook rugs. Slip up for even a minute, though, and there’s a TV crew outside your house and you wind up on COPS. Parenthood is definitely not for amateur players. And even worse, you can’t get a shoe deal out of it.

We covered our dweeby dorkiness; the Wal-Mart Vision Center Guy; architecture—you might remember a couple of weeks ago when I wrote about a church we visited that had a multi-use building for both their sanctuary and gymnasium. My Friend Jeff™ called these sanctuasiums, or, alternately, gymuaries. I like gymuary better, mainly because it hasn’t hit Google yet, and most of the time the gym function takes precedence in use over that of sanctuary. In either case, they remain less like the brunch, and more like the spork of ecclesiastical architecture. Can’t pick anything up with the tines, and soup leaks right out the end.

Onward then, we covered guys who are martinets with thick, cow-pie-looking shocks of Seventies-style middle-parted hair on their oversized-in-relation-to-their-tiny-body heads, and who wear huge, ugly, Harry Caray glasses in order to look like they’re all cool and everything. (This is not a real person. Really. Any similarities between this description and persons which might be known to either of us is purely coincidental. Really.) We discussed Our Friend Mike™, who is probably somewhere in Florida teaching scuba diving or attached to a bong, or a hooker, or various combinations thereof; Delta Burke; cars (again); the Tooth Fairy—I related to him the incredible saga from Monday evening when I had to pull Catherine’s tooth.

It (her bottom incisor) has been wiggly for two weeks now, and by George, she was going to have it out Monday or bust. So, everyone got their baths, and I got her jammies on her and plopped down on the toilet lid to commence the turmoil. I knew, having already gone through this with the other three that it was not going to be particularly sweet and charming. Got a wet cloth—“You SURE you want me to pull it?”

Vigorous head nod, “Yes, sir, Daddy—I wants it out so’s the Toofairy will give me a dollar!”

That danged chick and that fat Santa Claus guy are gonna break me. “Okay, come’ere and let’s see—you know this is going to hurt a little don’t you?”

Look of absolute incredulity...“Really!?” I didn’t want to scare her, especially now that I had her within Vise-Grip range—“Well, yeah, a little bit, sweetie, but if you don’t want to….”

Determined look, open mouth, “ ‘ull ih, ‘addy.”

Grab it, and the struggle ensues. In a tale worthy of a Hemingwayesque, wizened-native-fighting-a-fish story, I pulled and wiggled and teased and jiggled and tugged and torqued and rented a crane in a vain effort to get the silly thing to come out. The tooth, that it. Then, in the middle of that mess, the tornado sirens sounded because there was a line of storms that had just entered the other side of the county.

Rain, thunder, lightning, sirens, and the loudest thing of all—“BWAHHHHHH, ::sniff:: BwwahuhuahWAAAAAAHHhhhh—the TORDANO’S going to get us, Daddy! I SCARED O’THE TORDANO!”

“OH, just go to bed!”

“BUT I WANT THE TOOFAIRY TO COME!”

“Then HUSH!”

“BUT IT HURTS!!”

“Then GO TO BED!!”

“BUT I WANT THE TOOFAIRY TO COME!!”

“Then let. Me. Pull. Your. Tooth.”

“BUT I SCARED O’THE THUNDER!”

You get the picture.

I plopped her on our bed and showed her on the TV screen where the big part of the storm was and where we were—which was a big leap of faith to think that a six year old had assimilated enough abstract thinking skills to understand the concepts of scale and substitution, but understand she did. She finally got quiet again and started pushing and pulling on the offending dentition with her tongue. After a while, I asked again if I could pull on it, this time with the proviso that I would do so slowly.

“You’ll pull it slow and not fast?” A healthy skepticsm, in light of the previous hour.

I got my wet washcloth again and just held onto the tooth with some steady pressure, and being a particularly squigglesome little girl, a moment or two later she was trying to yank her head around to see something on the television, at which time her head swiveled and left the tooth neatly in my grip.

“There it is!”

“You pulled it!? That didn’t hurt!!”

::sigh:: We wrapped it up and put it on her nightstand—the tooth pillow is hiding somewhere in the house and I didn’t feel like staying up another minute to look for it. She hit the sack and was out in about five minutes, and sure enough, some time in there the Tooth Fairy came in and exchanged lucre for enamel, and the world was pretty much okay.

Got through with our lunch and sorta sat there musing about going back to work, something neither of us were really up for. But, you know…gotta go.

Got back here, shoveled out a few more stables full of the junk that got dropped on me yesterday afternoon—I didn’t really mind the seven millisecond advance notice—I try to be ready to go whenever. I didn’t even mind so much that it interrupted me right in the middle of lunch—won’t hurt me to miss a few meals. But, oh lordy me, having to sit there through an interminable presentation by a person who repeatedly repeated the same redundant things and then went back and repeated them repetitiously over and over again just about drove me INSANE. Two hours, and everything of substance could have been said in about five minutes. Over the phone. And then there’s this whole deal where I keep getting tagged at “the guy in charge” when in fact I have absolutely no control over ANYTHING to do with the process. The whole thing has been sliced and diced and discussed by the thousand or so folks further up the food chain—hands have been shaken, backs have been slapped, knowing winks have been exchanged—and none of it involved my hands, back, or eyelids. Grr. Oh well, nothing like a little exercise. Even if it is an exercise in futility.

Maybe this weekend I’ll get some rest.

Hee. As if. There’s six flats of tiny little droopy plants to bury, and piles of clothing to wash, and class schedules and student rolls and teacher assignments for church to fix, and children to wrassle, and a butterfly rug to finish hooking, and another loose tooth to extract, and stuff and things and all that. Oh, and I have to go pick up a pair of glasses from Wal-Mart this afternoon. Middle Girl had to go in for her eye appointment yesterday, and sure enough, it was time for an upgrade. So, I get to go see my buddy again, half finger and all.

SO THEN, as I wrap it up here, maybe next week I’ll have a bit more time to play on the computer and chatter and get around to adding another weevily blogger to the roll, and maybe that shoe deal with Nike will come through, too.

Until then, have yourselves a great weekend!

OOPS! Almost forgot--here's a picture of Chet the E-Mail Boy back in the day (when he actually was just a boy), and here's one of him and his son Timmy.

Man, that's one tough audience...

EYEGLASSES UPDATE: Swung by the house after work, got Middle Girl, slowly drove up Chalkville Road (always choked with traffic in the afternoon--two lanes, residential, everybody in town on it), stride purposefully through entrance to Wal-Mart, surprise garrulous glasses guru. Sit down and wait a bit, and then he comes back out with the new pair. Slips them on Bec's head, and then begins the schtick--"How many fingers am I holding up, sugar?"

She looks him square in the eye and deadpans--"One and a half." (Remember--she's heard this patter before, too--when she went in a year ago, Catherine told him "2", and he corrected her with a big laugh and said "one and a half".) Anyway, this time he goes into the other part of his act that he did with me yesterday, puts on a hurt, hangdog look, "Aw, now I didn't make fun of your ears!"

Rebecca hadn't heard this part before, though. She stared at him, not cracking a smile, and was just about to get horribly shy and self-conscious about whatever it was that was wrong with her ears. I tickled her under the chin before the tears started to well up, and told her he was just joking with her, and he kept messing with her until she finally lightened up a bit.

Boy, you really gotta know your audience!

But, all's well--he poked and twisted her frames and she's happy with her new pair, but most especially with the cheetah-fur patterned case. The rest of the time spent in the store was trying to further explain the joke, and then it was back home--it's pizza night! Hooray!

Anyway, once more, have yourselves a great weekend!
posted by Terry at 4:19:00 PM