Products I Don't Need

I needed to buy a new bathroom scale - we have one that tells me I've lost 6 lbs from one day to the next and another that neither one of us can see without our glasses on. I was looking on the web (where I do all my shopping) and I found "talking scales." Now I think talking scales are a good idea if you are visually impaired, but for the average person? Who in their right mind wants a talking scale? I certainly do not need some disembodied voice announcing my weight at 7 AM each day. UGH. I cannot think of a more annoying product right now.

Roses for Grace

Over the past few evenings the Wife and I have planted 2 rose bushes (a third awaits somewhere to plant it as the place we selected originally is too rocky) - a Peace Rose and a Grace Rose. I bought the Peace Rose last summer in honor of the 100th anniversary of my grandmother's birth (she died 9/12/01, aged 96) but the company didn't want to ship it until this Spring to give it a whole growing season before cold temps come. My sister bought the Grace Rose and the Amazing Grace Rose for me for Christmas and they were shipped at the same time as the rose I had ordered. She picked those particular ones because our grandmother's name was Grace. I'm feeling very protective of these roses. Apparently they represent a whole lot more to me than plants really should. I didn't have any idea that I would feel this way but now that they are in the ground (and if you have ever planted a rose you know it is a labor of love to dig a 2 ft wide by 2 ft deep hole for a 6 inch plant) I have to go and visit them when I get home from work and see how they are doing. I'm afraid the dog will dig them up or dig around them or the landscaper will spray them with weed killer (like they did to the 2 Astilbe last week - dumbasses) or something will eat the roots. We have a rose bush in the yard already. The Wife discovered it under lots of overgrown stuff when we moved into the house and with some fertilizer and sun it's grown into a huge, beautiful bush so I don't think it's likely that anything that lives in the yard will eat the roots but still, I worry. I am fond of that rose bush too and we jokingly say that Grace must have had a hand in its resurgence but I don't feel the same (perhaps because it is larger and seems as though it can "take care of itself" as I do about the rose bushes we just planted.

I still miss her, almost 4 years later, and sometimes I talk to her (in my head, not out loud thankyouverymuch). I'm tearing up just writing this. She was quite the gardener, had the proverbial green thumb. I own some of her gardening books now but most of her knowledge came from a lifetime of observing what worked and what didn't and seemed to be innate. I don't have that same sense. I have to read what we are supposed to do and I don't remember what plants like acidic fertilizer and on and on. I don't have the time she did to devote to gardening, for when I knew her she was always retired. I think she would be proud of the life I've built and the gardening we are doing.

Wherever you are, Gracie, I hope you can see the roses when they bloom.

Adventures of Autumn the Wonder Poodle

The Wife had a major scare this AM. The phone rang and a woman said "Do you have a dog named Autumn?" and the wife said "Yeeeees?" and the reply was "I have her." OH SHIT! The Wife, as is their routine, let the dog out to run (in our large FENCED IN yard) when she got up this morning (I always take Autumn out for a morning wee before I leave for work and then she gets a run when The Wife gets up.) Apparently a landscaper stopped by yesterday to take a look around in order to give us a quote for a clean up and regular lawn mowing and the dumbass didn't properly close the gate. Thanks, Butt Munch. If we hadn't already selected someone else because you've been too slow to give us a quote, this would pretty much seal your fate. The woman brought Autumn home (and when The Wife went out to get the dog from the woman's car, Autumn was sitting very nicely in the back seat.) In the confusion The Wife forgot to get the woman's full name or address or anything. She said she had a dog and she would want someone to do the same thing. The only good thing is that Autumn loves to ride in the car so I'm sure she jumped right in when the woman opened her car door.

The Wife has gone off to the hardware store to get a "Beware of Dog" sign and some hardware to make the gate hard to open from the outside. We have to replace the fence anyway (there go the nice hardwood floors we had been planning to install) so this is certainly the impetus to get it done sooner rather than later.

Even though I wasn't there the retelling of the story certainly gave me a good jolt of adrenaline this morning. On a final note, Thanks to Anna, the woman from Bucks County who brought my dog home safely.

D.V.R.

We finally joined the DVR generation yesterday and, of course, now I say "what the hell took us so long?" We don't often watch shows that start at 10 PM because I'm too tired the next day so we miss "Gray's Anatomy" among other things. Last night we got involved in an episode of "Law and Order: SVU" and at 10:30 we looked at each other and said "hit record." We are such geeks. I'm quite psyched that we can watch "Out of Practice" then the 2nd half of SVU and finally, my favorite show "Mythbusters." Oh I am pathetic. but content.

I'm a blog slacker, I'm a blog slacker

First you must sing the title of this entry to the Wheel of Fortune ditty from who knows how many years ago. As I mentioned in a previous entry I am trying to eat better, exercise (I can't say more as I was pretty much a couch spud before), and lose weight. How is it going, you ask? Eh, I say. I'm losing weight, I'm not always hungry, and the wife suggested that I exercise before we have dinner so that I can relax afterwards (and it's dark after dinner right now in our neighborhood without street lights and sidewalks) so what is my problem? Gas, horribly painful gas is my problem. I feel like crap (no pun intended) right now. Normally I fart with abandon (I even won the Super Bowl farting contest one year at Sarah's ) but right now the gas doesn't make it to my ass. It's an incredibly uncomfortable feeling. I guess it is because I have increased my fiber intake over the past month but it isn't like I went from nothing to 30 grams. I hope it gets better soon.

Praise for the DMV and The Butt Swab Study

Today The Wife and I went to the DMV to renew our licenses. In PA you send in a form with your check and they send you a "camera card" which you present at the DMV (in fact we both paid over the internet). We walked in around 11:30 AM today, got a number, sat down for all of 5 minutes, got called one after the other, and had our licenses within 15-20 minutes. It was amazing. This is a huge improvement over the NJ DMV where everyone has to stand in the same line regardless of why you are there. It can take 30 minutes just to get to the counter. This was absolutely painless. Kudos, PA DMV.

On a completely unrelated topic, The Wife recently came home from a week's stay in the hospital. While there she proudly participated in what we will call "The Butt Swab Study." Yes, someone came in and asked her to consent to having her butt swabbed for resistant E. coli bacteria. If she has resistant E. coli bacteria around her bunghole they will pay her $10 per poop sample (every 2 weeks for up to a year). She gets to deliver the poop samples via a nationally known next-day air courier. Pay for poop. Hehehehe.

Phila Food Police

I have been meaning to blog about this since I read it in the paper over a week ago. The Philadelphia School District is going to allow parents to become the Food Police for school lunches. Parents will be able to make certain foods off limits and then the cashier will be responsible for not selling forbidden foods to kids who still try to buy them (not fair to dump this on the cashiers.) I think this is a horrible idea for many reasons. First of all kids have to learn to make their own decisions about food at some point. The earlier they learn to do it the better. I think it is great (and very necessary) for parents to talk about and MODEL good nutrition and good eating habits but in the end it is up to each individual to select what goes in their mouth. I also think that it is a bad idea for certain foods to be forbidden for kids (unless there is allergy or religion involved.) I have a very personal reason for thinking institutionalized Food Police are a bad idea. My mother was the food police and remains so to this day. She hid food (we all knew where it was but she thought she was being discrete) that was meant for my father's lunch alone. Things like pudding cups, fruit cups, granola bars, stuff like that. She also bought sugarless gum for my sister and me and Juicy Fruit for my brother. Certain cereals (Captain Crunch comes to mind) were for my brother's consumption only. She said things like "If you only ate the food we see you eat you wouldn't have a weight problem." She sent me to school with peanut butter and jelly on Pepperidge Farm Diet White Bread. The kids made fun of me. She sent me a care package at camp full of sugarless dietetic candy. It was humiliating. She also hid food in her dresser so we wouldn't see her eat it. She still does that now and only she and my dad live in the house. I know she does it because when I was home this year for the holidays I found an empty pound box of chocolates in the desk drawer in "my" room. Snacks for us were pretty taboo but my father permitted them (mom wasn't usually in the TV room at night but off doing crosswords in bed). She was death on all pork products because of the fat content (her father died at 66 of a heart attack). Even now she is paranoid about fat and has bizarre eating habits. She also did not encourage us to exercise beyond yelling at me to stop reading and go outside (although most of my memories of that statement are tied up with my grandmother as she was the one who was around after school because my mom was working.) She never once came to my baseball games and I played for 3 seasons at least. She did come to some of my basketball games but never came when I was in the marching band. She came to every (indoor) concert and play. As you can see she talked up a storm but she modeled bad behavior. My siblings and I all have poor relationships with food. My sister and I both became obese in college (and I'm not sure we were actually overweight as kids) and remained so afterwards. I am very proud that my sister has been able to lose over 100 lbs recently. She also walks half marathons, swims, and does yoga. My brother has my mother's relationship with food and takes it to extremes. I am certain that he was bulimic at one time (the toilet in the "kids'" bathroom at my parents' house didn't flush properly and I shared the bathroom with him when we were all home for holidays.) Now he is the food police with his wife (who generally blows him off and eats what she wants). He runs too. I am, once again, trying to lose weight and change my eating habits. I don't blame my mother for my current weight, she didn't force feed me or strap me to a chair to keep me from exercising. However, I think that parents who are the food police (and the Phila School District for enabling it) do the exact opposite of what they are trying to do. Teach your kids to think and to make decisions and the first place to start is with the food they eat when they are out of sight.