Nothing a little DCA cannot fix

Sometimes I get a certain way.
Maybe I'm a little edgy. Maybe I can be saucy on occasion. Maybe.
I'll admit it's possible.

When I get this way, Lucio usually has to intervene. Take me out.
Distract me with something sparkly.
Keep me off the phone with the people who call asking us to support the Police Benevolence fund.
Like 4 cents on the dollar from these cranial giants actually gets back to the local police. And they are so not listening when I tell them 6:10 pm is not a good time to talk. So, yes, call again every night this week at the exact same time...

He usually knows when I am approaching the precipice of cray cray.

Yes, he's a good man. Or maybe, just maybe, the whole reason I married him was because he actually knows what I need before I do. Yikes. Good thing he doesn't read my blog.

Totally serious.
He doesn't read a word of it.

Tangent.

Here's my side of a recent conversation we had after a dinner he claimed to have made.

Technically, he re-heated pork chops I had cooked the night before, steamed a bag of brown rice from Trader Joe's in the microwave and opened a can of green beans and put them in a pot. He gets to count this one as "making a meal" and therefore I am on clean-up, which is redonkulous, because he didn't actually cook anything as much as he made stuff I cooked hot again, but I digress.

"Don't you need to go to DC sometime soon?" Lucio asked with a shaky voice. "I think you maybe need to get home soon."
'
"Why exactly?"

"Um, well," he stammers...

"WHAT?" I snap the cabinet closed. My husband seemingly is unaware that the clicking noise means the cabinet is closed and will stay that way.

Straightening his spine, he clears his throat. "Every 6 months or so, everything about Illinois starts to really bother you. Before it's me or the kid, or in the interest of our mortgage, one of your colleagues, maybe you should try to book a weekend back east."

I cock my head at him and smile. Every six months? Perish forbid I am becoming predictable.

"For how long have you known this?", I ask, loading the dishwasher.

"Since you ran away the first Memorial Day weekend we lived here and you didn't let the ear infection Jack was nursing get in your way."

"Well that was different. Flights were cheap and he could still sit on my lap for free."

"I also remember the following October when he was not under the age of two, nor did he have the slightest interest in sitting on my lap for any length of time and you told the airline he was just about to turn two, even though his birthday was three months prior so he could still be free. But you wanted to have margaritas with the girls and go to some exhibit with Leslie and swoosh - off we went to DC. And none of this is important. Jack told me you used your horn twice today after picking him up from school. There are only three traffic lights between his school and our home. In that space of time, three horn uses seems excessive. You want to wind up in the paper? It's a small town, Heather. You need your east coast fix."

"Fine, smarty, but I went to the library and Walgreens after I picked him up, which involves like 11 lights."

"Are you or are you not the same woman who used dream of a cigarette lighter plug in hair-dryer for your nine mile, 45 minutes commute from the ghetto house to American?"

"That would have been a totally amazeballs inventions and I am for sure not the only one who would have used it. But, yes, maybe you're right."

"I am sorry. Someone used their horn in front of our house. Can you repeat that?"

"You're right. Almost everything and EVERYONE in Illinois is annoying me lately. Present company included."

Silence.
So happy is he to hear these words he's singing a little song as he makes his way down to the basement.

"Don't you want to know some of the things that are making me crazy?" I call after him.

"Do I have a choice?", he replies from the bottom of the stairs.

I can hear his damnable grin from the kitchen.

"You did. Now you don't. In the past three days, our surname has been mangled by no fewer than seven people. Vaz. Quez. Like it's two words. Like there's a pause in the middle. And even when I said it correctly to a couple of these people, they repeated it back incorrectly. They make the QUEZ part "kwez".

Then I went to arrange for a campus car for an upcoming trip and I was told it was a vee-hicle. Not a car and not a vehicle. But a VEE HICKLE. Again with the making two words out of one. Why again can we not call it a car? Turns out, here in Illinois, they are all vee hickles.

Then, while Jack was in Tae Kwon Doe, I chatted with a woman who was so artificially tan - fake bake tan, you know, from light bulbs, who looked like Magda from There's Something About Mary - who tried to give me a free pass to her tanning salon. And she's sitting there the color of maple syrup and I politely decline and tell her I don't like to use tanning beds. I laugh and point to my whiteness. You know what cafe crayola tell me then? "Oh, a tan always make you look better." Um, listen much? So I told her, no, actually, it's the vacation at the beach that usually makes me look better and the tan that comes with it from spending my days languishing in a beach chair watching the boys race cars across the sand is just a really nice perk.

She smiled at me, clearly not understanding, and that's when I realized in lieu of vacations, this raisin goes tanning to look like she's been somewhere! The irony? The only place she looks like she's been is on a watch list for the next George Hamilton dating show! And she had that Illinois Angle haircut. And you know how I feel about that. Then she leaves me the card to get a free tan and says "Just make sure they see my name on the card." Um, hello?

And lastly, I had woman in my office today who is educated in the traditional sense - all sorts of letters after her name - who stood up at the end of our meeting, thanked me for my time, turned around and upon seeing my signed photograph of me with my arm around HILARY RODHAM CLINTON asked me, "OMG! Do you know Ellen DeGeneres?"

I take a deep breathe and wait.

Still waiting. He knows I hate waiting.

"Honey? Are you there?"


He pops his head around the corner.

"They're still getting our name wrong? Really?"


"I KNOW!!"

"You should really tell the girls about this in person. Maybe there's a deal on Airtran?'


Seriously, who's better than him?

Pure Romance

On a warm spring evening in quiet midwestern town, 16 women got together for an evening of giggles, wine, and cheese.

Most knew the hostess from Junior League.

Well dressed. Well spoken. Well educated.

Fine women.
Good, all american women.
Salt of the earth.

As the wine poured and the nibbles were passed around, these women appeared unphased by the appearance of a 9 inch long purple dildo stuck to the windsill of the hostesses living room window.

The x-scream cream raised nary an eyebrow when it was promised to stimulated both partners at the same time.

Whips with delicate pink feathers protruded from the purses of these fine citizens.

Our hostess, who hails from the land of the loud and the pushy was stunned to learn her friends, colleagues, neighbors, and fellow volunteers had spent more that $1,450 on sex toys that evening.

It's possible I've been misjudging Illinois.

Just when I think I have this state completely figured out, it throws me curve.

Women were marching out of our 5 year old son's ocean themed room laden down with handbags they could no longer carry.

The best part?

The hostess orders last, getting 10 percent of the take off her order. Schwing!
And free stuff.
I love free stuff.
Platimum Pete will be all mine by the end of the week.

Oh, yeah, that's right. These same midwestern women bought out most of the supply of absolutely everything.

By 10:55 pm there wasn't a whip to be had, a cream to be smelled or licked, or a on switch in the vicinity.

They came.
They saw.
They shopped.

And then the came again.

That, what they just said, does not exist

I have seen all kinds of weather.
Lived one both coasts.
A few years in sunny California.
With it's sun and it's more sun and it's sometimes wind.
Santa Ana's are rough. Like a coyote cartoon.

Raised mostly in the mid-atlantic, which has sun and rain and snow and sleet. Something for everyone.

Now in the middle of the country.
The middle has the wind. Like whoosh - WIND!!!
I used to be nervous going out in wind.
Now, if it's under 30 miles per hour, we'll still walk the dog.

I have seen a lot of weather.

I made it through Hurricane Isabel in 2003, in the ghet-to, when Lucio had to regularly go out and clear the sewer drains of used diapers and chicken bones so our house wouldn't flood. The only time our lights went off the whole two days? When he was trying to unstick a tire from the sewer. He heard me scream from three houses down. Swear to God. Ask him.

I survived the Blizzard of '96 with only MaryAnn for company and barely two packs of cigarettes between us. For three days. It's interesting to me now that quitting smoking was never a consideration. Hmmm. It's a puzzler.

While we were going to nicotein withdrawl, Vivian was trapped alone in her apartment near AU.

It was in this apartment where just a month earlier Vivian had frozen the pipes to the whole building because she left the window in her kitchen and bedroom open whilst she went home for Christmas.
For two weeks.
To Long Island.

Because...
wait for it...
She was convinced the cockroaches wouldn't enter her apartment if it was too cold.

Like a little chill can scare off a distict roach?

During the 96'r, MaryAnn and I ventured outside while it was still coming down..hoping the 7-11 was still open.
It wasn't.
I am sure we considered robbing one of the old bitties living in our building for her smokes, but none of them smoked Marlboro Ultra Lights.

During our fruitless search for smokes, we sat down in the middle Montrose Road, just off Rockville Pike. Not a car in sight.

Because of 96, I was totally prepared for the big storm in 2001 when Lucio and I lived MacArthur Boulevard in the pre-burbs. While everyone was at the soviet, the social and the unsafeway grabbing milk, we prepared by leaving time for a a trip to the liquor store for Grand Marnier, the bakery for bread, the Italian Store for cheese and the video store for The Godfather, parts I, II, and III. And we got milk and bread too. And plenty of cigarettes.

I also learned how to make lasagna during that one. Jamie and Steve had no idea that I had no idea what I was doing.

Hell, Becca and I trained for the Marine Corps Marathon in 2002, one of the hottest summers on record in our nation's capitol. Running our fat asses from SW DC to Bethesda (and back). Hello? Crossing boarders. In this story, Becca is the real amazing one, as she was three months pregnant with Theo at the time and didn't know it. That's my godchild...the litle Advil baby that could.

I have weathered wind in Illinois that literally knocked Jack off his 18 month old feet walking into Schnucks a few years ago.

Isn't that a ridiculous name for a grocery store? I spent the first two months we lived here thinking it was called Schmucks.

But this is too much.

The forecast for the past few days continues to include FREEZING FOG WARNINGS.

That is made up! There is no such thing as freezing fog!

Like you're driving down the road, and BAM!! Smack right into a sheet of ice just hanging out in mid air?

Fog is what? Really wet air right? I am going to check...

Like I thought. Basically just really wet air.

And here we sit. Day after day. Night after night. The same forecast.
Freezing Fog.

Maybe the people on the news are just making this up.
Is Doug Quick going to hit us with "Gotcha! Fog can't Freeze! Suckers!!!"

When he does, I can say I knew it all along.