There are several indicators that your daughter’s soccer team may not be ready for professional level play. For instance:
Coach: Zoe, you go to midfield.
Zoe: Ok!… where is midfield?
**
Player: Coach, how will everyone know that I’m goalie if we don’t have a goalie shirt?
Coach: Just turn your shirt around backwards.
**
Player: What kinds of things are fouls? Kicking?
**
The first game of the year is always a refresher game. These girls have been out of practice for several months, but frankly they did great. This is the first year that Zoe’s team plays on the “big fields” rather than the mini-fields. She was most excited when she got to play goalie… of course with her shirt turned around backwards.
She had several impressive goal kicks. No, seriously.
There were a number of noticeable improvements over last season. For one, all of the girls ran in the right direction. Zoe only cried once during the game (wind knocked out of her), and she only “took a break” (lying down on the ground in the goal during play) once.
Deacon was very forlorn that little guys were not allowed to play, as evidenced in this picture.
*Oh ball, how you vex me so.*
But then he realized that you can steal a random kid’s soccer ball and use it as a seat! And after that everything was fine.
A friend of mine sent me to a Facebook page called The Ambien Hotline. It’s basically a group of people who share their stories of Ambien-related hijinks. (One chick said that, post-Ambien, she walked to her mom’s house at 2am and asked to borrow the remote control.)
Anyhoo, this particular Facebook page also had pics and cartoons, and the one cartoon — I swear to you — was drawn with me in mind.
It even looks like me! Quilted grandma robe and all… plus, many times when I’m out strolling around outside the city, carrying my laptop and wearing my quilted bathrobe, I run into three-foot-tall talking rats and their three-eyed frog alien friends. And they often laugh at me.
Come to think of it, maybe sleep blogging isn’t really my biggest problem…
There was a time (about two whole months ago), when I was naive enough to think that once I had a rough draft finished, the rest would be a breeze.
Stop laughing. It’s not nice to laugh at people who are idiots by accident.
So it turns out that revision? Is a JERKY PAIN IN MY BACKSIDE! Going back over the words I’d slaved over for months and months, I read them now and say to myself, “Pshaw, self, you are such an amateur! Who wrote this? A second-grader? On allergy medication?”
Then I get it in my mind that everything I’ve written is crap, and that I should just shred my manuscript and recycle it as hen-house bedding. (y’know… so it can get pooped on? by lots of fat birds?)
But *sigh* instead I try to push my way through it (partially because we don’t actually own any hens). I write different scenes from different character perspectives just to get it all nice and fleshed out, hoping that one day this dumb manuscript will be able to pass for something readable.
Also, I doodle a lot, y’know, when I can’t think of words to write.
Unfortunately, I don’t really know how to draw anything but the swirly-things. So my notebook is full of them. And when revision becomes too much and I desperately need a break, I go outside… where I promptly draw swirly-things on my driveway with sidewalk chalk.
No, seriously.
On a totally unrelated note, I caught someone in our garage trying to steal my car. And though he had the keys, was in the front seat, and knew how to honk the horn… well, he couldn’t seem to figure out how to actually steal the thing.
I went out to get a closer look at the punk.
He was so cute that I couldn’t press charges. I agreed to let him off with a warning if he’d come live with me forever and let me smooch his little cheeks whenever I darn well pleased.
It was an agreeable agreement.
And now, back to drawing swirlies… err, I mean, revising.
I’m lame. Easter this year? I kinda just let it slip.
Because the day before Easter? The kids were being ridiculous. I tried to have an egg hunt in the house. Mostly for Deacon. The older kids and their friends hid the eggs. And then fought over them as they found one another’s eggs. There was a lot of yelling. And pouting. And kicking. And stomping.
Over plastic eggs that each contained 4 jelly beans. I clawed at my own face.
I told Jachin that his Easter was cancelled. About 7 times. Zoe whined, and I put her on notice. She was this close to having Easter cancelled as well.
Deacon… well, he was a sweetie, but I couldn’t find his Easter basket to save my life. Cuz my basement? Have you seen it? So Deacon’s Easter was kind of cancelled because his mom is just lame. And disorganized. And, oy, the basement.
But Deacon’s sort of a baby, so he doesn’t know about Easter and the risen Lord and the subsequent expectation of candy.
But the other two? They know about Easter. They know to flip out when they wake up on Easter morning and find their Easter baskets sitting there on the kitchen table… EMPTY.
yes-huh.
And Zoe came in to my room and woke me up and said, “There’s no candy in our baskets.”
And I rolled over and wiped the drool from my mouth and told her that I’d fill their baskets when I got up. Which was about an hour and half later. Deacon, well, since I couldn’t find his basket, he just carried around a box with a chocolate bunny inside. I didn’t actually let him eat it. Cuz he’s sort of a baby.
Zoe sat at the table writing a story later that day. It was titled “A Really, Really Bad Day — by Zoe Gale”. It wasn’t about her life, per se, but it was based on the life of an 8 year old girl who wakes up on Easter morning and finds her Easter basket EMPTY! And then finds that the pantry is out of her FAVORITE CEREAL! And then her mom DOESN’T EVEN CARE! And then her big brother TEASES HER! And her baby brother MESSES UP HER DS!
It was picked up by Scholastic Press in a six-figure deal, due out this fall.
Number 1 (though not most importantly), it’s St. Patrick’s Day. So I made sure that the kids and I were wearing green this morning. (Jachin would not wear a green shirt, so he walked out the door this morning with a black t-shirt and a lime green Omniture scarf wrapped around his neck. It was equal parts hilarious and oddly stylish.)
Number 2: I’m sort of a frickin wreck. I’m going on nearly zero sleep, because Jon was re-admitted to the U of U hospital last night. He’s still sick. I don’t know what else to say. ~327 sweet, caring people ask me every day how he’s doing, and I have nothing to tell them. Nothing. Nothing new. Nothing different. I finally broke down and flipped out in the car last night as I left the hospital. I was bawling as I squealed out of the parking garage, nearly taking out a family who were having a calm smoke break together on the curb. I suspect they reported me to the front desk, assuming that I had just escaped from the mental ward.
Number 3: I am so, so dang proud of my little brother, Paul. Today he entered the Missionary Training Center (that’s MTC to all of you hepcat Mormons), marking the official start of his LDS mission. He’s being sent to Orlando, Florida. In a few weeks he’ll be walking the streets, sporting the little black “Elder Brandenburg” name tag. If you see him there, please be kind. Feed him a meal, if you can. And if you utterly do not want to hear about the Book of Mormon, at least don’t swear at him and slam the door in his face. (Thank you in advance for that.)
Here he is (green tie and all) with Jachin, in front of the MTC, giving a manly fist bump.
And here is the most awesome picture of both me and my brother… taken by Jachin.
I know, right? I can only assume that the flattering photography is retribution for making him do a manly fist bump with his uncle.
No, I didn’t look at the picture directly after Jachin took it.
Yes, I should have.
So that’s kind of today: sleepy, weary, worried, proud, blurry… and green. Happy St. Patty’s Day.
I’ve taken my sleeping pill for the night, which means that any time now I could start doing/saying some really weird stuff. I have no intention of being your laugh-slave for the evening, so I’ll make this quick.
Chapters? Are being written, guys. Thousands of words… tippity-typed out. w00t! Are they all genius? No, but that’s beside the point. The first draft is just the bones, right? The understructure for beauty. The rewrite is when you go back and weave in all the pretty stuff. At least, that’s my plan.
And also? I’ve written a lovely, moody little tune on my flute. It’s slow and flowing and composed in some melancholy minor key… and it goes along with a scene in my story. (Not to give away too much, but the scene involves a lovely young princess who is stolen away into the woods by the nymphs… the male nymph seducing her with a lovely tune on his wood flute.) The tune was there in my head so I took a little time and figured it out, and then enlisted the help of my flute instructor to get it written down properly. Now if only I also played the piano, classical guitar, and perhaps the harp so I could properly compose the whole thing… *sigh* oh well.
And now I’m off… there are weird phone conversations to be had, and strange items to be eaten, and crazy yoga poses to be contorted into before I finally check out for the night.
You’re a decent guy. You’ve helped bring fame, money, celebrity, and excess (and one or two record deals) to young people who would have otherwise never found such things.
But you and your outbursts of fake percentages — good night! — it needs to stop.
When you say things like, “Yes! One hundred million, three hundred, and a thousand percent YES!”… you sound like there is an 85% chance that you failed 4th grade math.
Here are some examples of real percentages. Please take notes.
* You are 70% nicer than Simon, 95% less crazy than Paula, and 85% more masculine than Ryan Seacrest.
* You have approximately 40% less body fat than you did in season 1.
* Simon has approximately 15% more.
* Victoria Beckham’s bony clavicles are only 35% less deadly than Chinese throwing stars.
* Victoria Beckham weighs 300% more than a teacup chihuahua, which equals roughly 10 lbs.
* Despite all of my snarky comments, I am 45% jealous of Victoria Beckham.
* I can only name 20% of the people who have won American Idol… and one of them I’m only aware of because he lives 15 minutes from my house.
* 75% of the people who audition are terrible singers. You judges will humiliate and crush the spirits of 100% of them.
Now, after looking at these examples of actual percentages, let’s take another look at one of your exuberant “percentages”:
“I like you! You got something. I’m going to say yes… two thousand, million, and forty-six hundred percent YES!”
Let’s put this in terms you’ll easily grasp. Could a person sell two thousand, million, and forty-six hundred records? No, they couldn’t. Not even a really super-duper awesome singer. Because “two thousand, million, and forty-six hundred” is a fake number.
From now on, dawg, if you really like a singer, go no higher than 100% when voting them through to Hollywood. They will be just as happy and jump up and down just as much, and screech and fling around their yellow ticket just as wildly.
I’m a billion, thousand, and ninety-eight percent sure.
I have sleep… issues. Any time stress is introduced into my life, sleep goes out the window. Stress like, say, my husband going into the hospital. Or my baby going into the hospital. Or my husband going back into the hospital. (It was quite a year for medical bills.) Without the aid of medication, it could have been theoretically possible for me to have gone most of last year without sleeping.
I love me some Ambien. (And our bank account loved it when Ambien finally went generic.)
But here’s the deal: one of my super powers is that my body can acclimate to just about any medication. Meds will work for a little while, but then I will invariably require larger doses to maintain any sort of effect. This is true for all drugs. I would make a really awesome drug addict. Or a really crappy one… depending on how you look at it.
Now, here is where the hilarity comes in.
As my doses of Ambien go up, so do the occurrences of odd behavior on my part. As my body acclimates to high doses of sleep aides, I sorta do a lot of weird stuff in my sleep… except I’m not really asleep. (And though I appear to be awake, I’m really not awake, either. I guess I’m kind of like a hypnotized zombie, except with a little less of the rotting flesh.)
For your guffawing pleasure, a list of some things I’ve done after taking Ambien:
* Eaten large amounts of snacks. I wake up covered in wrappers of things I have no recollection of eating.
* Watched a wide array of movies which I have no recollection of watching. (I have been known to say many times “I watched that, but I was on Ambien, so I’m not sure if it was any good…”
* Read chapters of books that I don’t remember reading, resulting in the rereading of many, many pages. This is especially tedious when I have to backtrack through my Kindle.
* Made out with my husband, with little-to-no morning-after memory.
* Made out with someone other than my husband. (kidding… just seeing if you’re paying attention.)
* Confided in my husband that I miss my relationship with my younger brother, and declared my love of tiger prawn shrimp… in the same sentence.
* Held a conversation with my mother-in-law where I explained to her that there is a village in Africa where the birth rate of twins is the highest in the world because the people of the village eat a lot of yams. I then told her of my plan to eat lots of yams in order to try for twins. (Sadly, I did remember parts of this conversation the next morning.)
* Posted blog posts that I had to take down the next morning, due to their incoherent nature. One of them may have been about yams and their impact on reproduction…
* Fell off of my exercise ball in the middle of a set of crunches, smashing my face into the television screen during an episode of Law and Order. I got a good look at Detective Green’s pores.
Apparently this “super power” and odd behavior runs in my family. Talking to one of my aunts at Christmastime, she told me about her post-Ambien affinity for eating make-up, and about the time her kids found her out raking leaves and doing moderately strenuous yard work at 3am.
When I start eating eye shadow, it might be time to dial it down a notch.
Until then, for the sake of sleep, I’ll carry on with the occasional loony behavior… and just hope no one films it.
Sleeping under a dinosaur? Is about as comfortable as you’d expect it to be.
Friday night Zoe and I attended Dinosnorzzz at the dino museum. I could explain all of the festivities, or I could show you a video of Zoe in pajamas where she explains it all in giddy detail while an air mattress pump whirs loudly in the background. Yes, let’s do that, shall we…
(ps, why the crap didn’t I think of the air mattress??)
A few things she didn’t mention:
a 3D dinosaur movie complete with frickin sweet glasses
a near-fatal triceratops attack; proving that they were not, in fact, herbivores
(plant eaters, my butt)
and some dangerous pink dino origami, as well
In retrospect, there was a lot of attacking going on. I’d steer clear of the place after dark… even in spite of their claims that everything there has been dead for lots of millions of years. However, if you throw caution to the wind and decide to go, two words: Air. Mattress.
Hi. Our family loves attention. We need to have it all the time. From everyone we know. And even some people we don’t know.
Usually we acquire this attention by being generally awesome. Winning awards. Collecting trophies. Wearing fashionable clothes. Saving puppies. Thinking of creative ways to alleviate world hunger. Awesome stuff like that.
But when these standard practices don’t afford us the attention we think we deserve, we pull out the big guns. And our big guns are: going to the hospital with some sort of weird condition that has doctors and nurses scratching their heads.
(Our goal is to have one of our family members make an appearance in a medical journal… that would REALLY get us some attention.)
Last spring Jon went into the hospital (he drove himself…) with a weird heart condition. People were all like “OMG, WTF? R U guys ok?” and other misspelled tidings of worry. Facebook was all a-Twitter (get it?). His heart thing gave us some nice attention. For a while. But then summer came and people were paying attention to the nice weather and going to the pool and having picnics and taking vacations, and our family was kinda falling by the wayside and not making much note-worthy headway on the whole curing global hunger thing. We began feeling attention starved.
By the fall, it was pretty bad. Wearing fashionable clothes… not working. Saving puppies… nothing. In late September, sweet little Deac had had enough of people not paying attention. He took one for the team and flung himself off the bed, causing a rad head injury. I don’t know what would have happened otherwise. Without all the pics of Deac with a neck brace and a “brain drain”, our family may have fallen completely off the attention radar.
But then Christmas rolled around. People were talking about this awesome guy named Santa and this really cool baby named Jesus, and our family was feeling really left out again. Pay attention to us, we beckoned. But nay, there was no room at the inn (where “room” = “attention”, and the “inn” = “people’s minds”). So Jon decided to make another go at it. (He’s a real peach.) While, in truth, this latest health issue has been plaguing him for several months, he wasn’t admitted to the hospital for it until this past Tuesday. Which was his mom’s birthday. Because the whole thing was set up to steal his mom’s thunder on her birthday. (We are really good planners.) I even got to burst into her dining room during her birthday dinner, ding a fork on a glass, announce that Jon had a blood clot in his liver, and hand-off my baby for her to babysit. On her birthday.
How’s that for attention?
And now it’s New Year’s Eve and he’s still in the hospital. We are trying to steal New Year’s Eve’s thunder. Take that, New Year’s Eve!! (Note: New Year’s Eve will now be called “Jon’s Clot Eve”. You celebrate by curling into the fetal position, clutching your stomach, refusing to eat, and having intravenous narcotics administered to you. It’s not a bad holiday, really. Oh, but then you also have to have blood thinners administered… and that’s done by giving you a shot IN YOUR STOMACH, twice a day. For several weeks. I guess that part of Jon’s Clot Eve is actually kind of a downer…)
Pay Attention to Us!! We are running out of ideas! Up next, though: I contract Scarlet Fever, gout, and swine flu… perhaps with a side of lock jaw.
Let’s see how many Facebook comments and ward casseroles we can get for that one…
