Lonely Leftovers

The container of leftover stuffing had one bite left in it. And it was going to stay that way. That's because whoever ate it last did not want to wash the container. As we all know, there are some unwritten rules of etiquette for interacting with the food in the refrigerator. Among those: He who eats the last bite must clean the Tupperware.

Of course, there's one way to try getting out of this even if you do finish the last of the food. The container needs to soak! Yes! Remnants are glued to the edges and just won't wash out unless it all sits in the sink for, um, long enough for someone else to happen upon it and need to use the sink.

"Who left this Tupperware soaking in the sink?" can be shouted near and far throughout the house, but there will not be an answer. So, the hapless sink-needer will have to decide whether to work around the murky mess or just clean the darned thing.

The minute I have made the last sponge swipe resulting in a sparkling container, the perpetrator will materialize and say: "I was just going to clean that!"

The Art of Driving in Miami

We didn't realize Art Basel in Miami had started already. That was our big miscalculation. It actually hadn't officially started yet, but there were pre-parties and pre-openings for the VIPs. And apparently, the same way everyone in Lake Wobegon is above average, everyone at Art Basel is a VIP.

We were just trying to get to the Heat game, and traffic was backed up everywhere. As an added challenge, every single highway in the Greater Miami area is under construction at the same time, and then when we tried to avoid that by heading into the downtown local traffic, there were people swarming art galleries that had appeared out of nowhere next to dilapidated storefronts. Colorful walls and draperies and twinkly lights adorned the mish-mosh of buildings while white-shirted valets stood next to propped up signs letting the glitterati know where to park.

If you want to drive in Miami, you should be required to have a different level of drivers license. Requirements: at least five years prior driving experience, and perhaps a stress test. The license could be called Premium Level Drivers License or Platinum License, Titanium License, or even Handcrafted License. License Plus!

That's because driving in Miami is a challenge of the highest level and only for the brave. It's very different than even in places like Manhattan or L.A., because in those places the traffic doesn't let you build up any impressive speed. In Miami, however, you hum along on a series of highways at an average of 80 mph, until you get to something called the Golden Glades Interchange. This place, where you will come to a complete stop at pretty much any time of day, is quite the misnomer, because it is neither golden nor in the Everglades nor allowing for any interchanging, especially of lanes.

But say you make it through the Golden Glades and you're going 80 again. You will soon encounter road signs that not only don't help guide you, but that actually create confusion even if you know where you are going. Sometimes a car will just stop in the middle of the highway while the driver tries to figure out which is the magic lane for him. You would think this was mess enough, but then the DOT decided to improve I-95 by adding express lanes. Now, they did not do this by actually adding more road space. No. Instead they took the two left lanes and sectioned them off from the rest of the road by adding...poles. Just imagine bumper cars, and you've got the idea.

Fortunately for me, I had the Human GPS driving, and he was in one of his primary, preprogrammed, comfort territories. But even he was having difficulties! Our first route was backed up, so he recalculated. Then that way was backed up, too! But, after dodging traffic and poles and a guy on a motorcycle with a sidecar (Yes, for real!) and homeless people and hucksters and fancy-assed art people and valets and confused people stopped in the middle of the road, Ricky got us to the Heat game in time.

And then the Heat lost to the Pistons in a really ugly game. But the giveaway was a team poster, so we left Miami with our own piece of art. That was very VIP of us.

Lenny Kravitz and Me

I think we can all agree that Lenny Kravitz is one of the coolest people alive. He was biracial before it was trendy. He's got that styled 'fro, face jewelry, and rock musician cred. Cool, cool, and cool.

That's why I was delighted to find, as I read toward the end of an interview with him, that he is MY AGE. Not only that, he is four months OLDER than I am. There he is in a full-length picture wearing black leather pants, sunglasses and a dark metallic-grey sport coat with a black satin lapel.

Thus, using the associative property in math:
If Lenny Kravitz = my age, and Lenny Kravitz = cool, then I = cool. It's math! You can't argue with math.

Now, I know some of you might be thinking: But, Rhonda, you've never, ever been cool not even for one minute of your life ever. Not even when you were what would be more traditionally considered a cool age, like in your teens or 20s. Not even during the 1980s when big hair was cool and you had big hair. Not even when you were on a show on MTV! Never. Been. Cool.

So, let's say you have a point. Even so, the mere fact that someone my age can be one of the coolest people alive still provides me with a certain validity. And I'm sure all of the extremely cool math teachers out there will agree with me. Rock on, associative property. Rock on.

P.S. If you are a math teacher, and you are opening your mouth about to utter: "But wait, that's not how..." Just stop right now and go find some calculus to do. Or the Sudoku.

Hair Density

I made a horrible tactical mistake. After coming in from a run and cooling off, I hopped into the shower at 7 p.m. I meant to just rinse off my body, but I was distracted, daydreaming, and without realizing it, I submerged my head under the shower and started shampooing! I don't know what I was thinking! I have long known that I should never, ever wet my hair unless I have at least a five hour period for it to dry, and there was no way I was staying up until midnight. There was no possible fix for this now; I was going to have to go to bed with wet hair.

You may think I am exaggerating about how long it takes for my hair to dry, but I will now tell you a TRUE story. I warn you that it involves childbirth, but please stay with it. I promise it's short and worth it and there will be no mention of body fluids.

When I was nine months pregnant with one of my assorted children, I got up in the morning and took my usual shower, washing my hair. (Curly hair must be washed in the morning in order for it to settle into a shape identifiable by mankind.) Right after I got out of the shower and put on my clothes, I went into labor. We rushed to the hospital, checked in at emergency, went up to the delivery floor, labor, labor, labor, yadda, yadda, yadda, child born, wheeled to room. AND MY HAIR WAS  STILL WET FROM MY SHOWER.

True story. Next time you see me, ask me if my hair is damp, because the odds are pretty good that it is.

Giant goldfish, photo printing, and duvet covers

What do all the items in this title have in common? They are all random thoughts generated by my brain. Here we go:

1. Can giant goldfish live in the canals in South Florida? Because I'm pretty sure I saw one the other day.
2. I recently found out it is possible to print photos from Facebook at CVS by logging into your account right there in the store. Convenient yet oddly unsettling.
3. We had the trees trimmed, which really upset the Evil Squirrel and Eviler Mockingbird. But somehow the nut tree is dropping nuts all over the driveway again. How many times per year will it do this?
4. I have discovered that I am highly skilled at sorting through an elderly person's medical insurance printouts and putting them into logical piles.
5. You can put any kind of comforter you want into a duvet cover. It doesn't just have to be one of those white down comforters.
6. I will do anything my dog wants if she sits and stares at me.
7. Ricky and I ran an errand together by going to Sears to buy more vacuum cleaner bags. Somehow this seemed romantic, because we wanted to go together to do it.
8. I now only view/rate clothes and shoes by how comfortable they are. Only.
9. The toilet paper holder Ricky and I fixed is so loose that it swirls around in circles like clock hands. Sigh.
10. At the Veterans Day parade in NEW YORK I saw people wearing shirts that said Wounded Warrior Project. I looked it up on the Internet. A week later I got mail in FLORIDA from that organization. Should I find this creepy?
11. It kind of freaks me out when the full moon is brighter than the streetlight.
12. If you use the phrase "think outside the box," you are actually not thinking outside the box.

Sleep Denier

Let me state unequivocally that I love to nap. No...more than that. I adore napping. Napping is bliss. Just a little snooze can do so much for a gal's disposition. I actually adore sleeping in general, and I am very grumpy if I get less than eight hours a night, but actually prefer nine.Yes, that's a thing! Some people like nine hours of sleep a night, okay?

My husband, on the other hand, is a sleep denier. I do not mean that he denies others the opportunity to sleep. And I do not mean that he keeps himself from sleeping. I mean that he denies it when he has been sleeping, as if there is some sort of stigma attached to it.

We'll be watching "The Daily Show" on the DVR when I'll notice a slight rumbling/snoring sound emanating from the other side of the bed. Ricky will be dozing with the remote control clutched tightly in his hand. As the show goes to a commercial, at which time fast forwarding would be appropriate, I look over at the snoring Ricky and wait for a moment. I do not do this out of consideration; I do this to have evidence. After a half a minute or so, I will wake him.

"Ricky!"

This startles him awake, and his first reaction is to make sure he is still clutching the remote. Once he is relieved to find it still there, he will begin fast forwarding through the commercials.

Me: "You were sleeping."

Ricky: "No I wasn't."

Me: "Yes you were."

Ricky: "No I wasn't."

Me: "You were snoring."

Ricky: "I know. I could hear myself snoring. That's how I know I wasn't sleeping."

(Do you see what I have to contend with here? This is why I needed to accumulate evidence.)

Me: "So why didn't you fast forward through the commercials right away?"

Ricky: "I did."

Me: "No you didn't."

Now just to pull this all back for a minute: Keep in mind that I am not accusing him of doing anything wrong! I am merely stating the fact that he had been sleeping. Why does he need to deny this? I ask him this.

Me: "Why are you denying sleeping? There's nothing wrong with sleeping."

Ricky: (No response.)

Me: "Ricky?"

Ricky: (Snore.)

Group Psychosis in the NFL

You know it's bad when the people who keep talking in an attempt to make it better only keep making it worse. This is how I feel every time I hear yet another experienced member of football culture explain to those of us uninitiated, weak, know-nothing, sadly clueless outsiders how incredibly normal it is to abuse teammates.

"Yeah, we chop each other's arms off with a hatchet all the time, but it isn't done maliciously!"

I just finished reading -- in "New York" magazine of all places -- an article by former Denver Bronco Nate Jackson. He talks about being hazed and being a hazer, listing many of the crazy behaviors that have been reported lately relating to the Dolphins, Richie Incognito and Jonathan Martin. It's all one big N-word festival filled with equipment-toting, check-paying rookies who need to be tough, because, you know, you have to be able to count on them in the fourth quarter. Jackson implies that there is some sort of correlation between being able to hold the line on third-down-and-one and giving up your place under the shower when you're soapy.

His article lists a wide array of activities that are part of an unwritten code that surely was created by a bunch of depraved middle schoolers. It's a warped view of manhood, a warped view of camaraderie, a warped view of what it means to be loyal. But Jackson argues that fans can't expect players to be animals on the field and then shut that off in the rest of their lives. Well, perhaps he's right on that one. It's become apparent that the players are so entrenched in this group psychosis that they don't even realize how crazy they sound when they are defending it.

But what about the sports writers? Where have they been all this time? They're not supposed to be writing as fanboys; they're supposed to be reporters. None of the sideline specialists or locker room insiders knew about these behaviors? I find that a little hard to believe. Maybe someone needs to straighten them out, toughen them up, show them how real reporters do it. I'm sure if someone would just tie them up and shave their heads, that would make them much more reliable.

Man vs. Toilet Paper Holder

The toilet paper holder broke. Oh, no! This is a reason for widespread panic in the Weiss household. We cannot fix anything, no matter how minor, and reattaching a toilet paper holder to the side of a cabinet seemed like a very advanced procedure. It requires making holes, permanent holes, into a permanently installed structure in the bathroom.

It also requires going to Home Depot with its aisles and aisles full of parts that need to be assembled and tools that are used for that assembling. Parts and tools all separated and spread around the cavernous store. Many of these parts look exactly the same and go by names that are nothing more than measurements. There are nails and screws and pieces of wood and plastic.

How have Ricky and I survived this long without knowing how to fix anything? By our wits, that's how. And hiring people. Yes, that's a good strategy, too.

But sometimes it's just too ridiculous to hire someone, like when you need to attach a toilet paper holder to the side of a cabinet.

"Why don't we just get one of those toilet paper holders that stands on the floor?" Ricky said.

"No!" I said. "That's giving up!"

We headed to Home Depot and took the broken toilet paper holder with us. We have found this to be a good technique in the past. Rather than trying to explain what we need, we can just hold the item up and point at it until a nice man in an orange apron walks us to the correct area of the store. Then the nice man will say words like: butterfly nuts, paint thinner, rubber mallet, two-by-four, drill bit, and hemi. No, wait, I think that last one was a car word. Anyway, we will just nod a lot and then buy whatever the man touches while talking.

This time, we bought a new toilet paper holder that looked exactly like the old one, and we were able to install it with minimal hysteria. Success! And it only wiggles slightly.

Death and the Genius

When I read The Last Lecture, the bestselling book containing the uplifting final words of computer scientist Randy Pausch who died of pancreatic cancer, this was my reaction: How ironic it is that a man who was brilliant in scientific thinking spent his life and impressive brainpower creating games instead of going into the medical field where he may have been able to discover a cure for the incurable disease that killed him.

I thought about this book again recently when I read an article about the computer game industry and the hours and hours of manpower spent trying to satisfy the ever-more-demanding denizens of the gaming world who are relentless in their quest for the most realistic explosions and depictions of blood-spurting dismemberment as they murder their way through their leisure time. In the name of entertainment arts, or I should say, Electronic Arts (because that is one of the companies for which Pausch worked), people who can write advanced code are creating fantasy lands of killing instead of trying to heal the world.

Earlier this week, I quickly glimpsed on the front page of my local newspaper a picture of a hand touching a computer screen. My first thought was that the article must be about the measures being taken to fix the healthcare website, but then I realized the computer screen in the photo had a felt green background and a smattering of playing cards. The story was about Internet gambling games that are appearing in casinos. Of course!

Let us direct the true geniuses among us toward the great halls of learning about tech fun. Let them create for us screens we can tap for entertainment, especially the kind of entertainment that panders to our most violent selves. Have them figure out a way for us to wear our computers on our faces or talk to our TVs so we don't even have to lift a finger, literally.

But this is a reality I don't like. If only I could design a game...

There is no sagging in space

Depending on how old you are, you will think this title refers to either:
1. oversize pants
2. aging body parts

If you were thinking aging body parts, then you win! Or lose, depending on how you look at it. This weekend I went to see the movie Gravity in 3D. My first observation was that 3D technology has come a long way since I last sampled it at The Muppets attraction at Disney-MGM Studios in Orlando approximately 10 years ago. My next observation was: Wait, how old is Sandra Bullock?

I already knew in advance that George Clooney was unrealistically old to be an astronaut. He owns up to it with his salt-and-pepper hair. Plus, men in Hollywood are allowed to be old. Women, however, are not. So I had a rather nebulous suspicion that Bullock was too old to be an astronaut, but I wasn't entirely sure. My unresolved thoughts about her age were floating around in my mind as I watched the movie and saw her floating around among the stars.

At first she was clad in the usual astronaut gear of bubble-helmet and baggy spacesuit. But then she stripped it off and was suddenly up there on the big screen in nothing but a clingy tank top and some kind of Spandex undies. And there was no flab! Or sag! In high definition! And 3D!

I know there's been much written about the computer-generated special effects in this film, but I thought that only related to the weightlessness and visions of space. I am now entirely convinced that there was some CGI involved in Bullock's butt (among other parts).

But maybe it was all part of the realism of the movie, because, after all, there is only one culprit responsible for our body parts' heading south, and that's GRAVITY.



 

This is about sports

In case some of my readers may start to think that this blog is not rugged enough, I've decided to devote this post to giving my analysis of some of the more popular major sports.

Hockey
Good: The athleticism needed to play a full-contact, team sport while zipping around on ice skates is really impressive. The first time I saw a hockey game in person, I was amazed by how fast they were skating. They also play in a pleasantly cooled arena.
Bad: Any sport that has so little scoring that there's a statistic for how many times they tried to score has a problem. And there are abstruse rules like something called icing that requires keeping track of if the puck crossed a line first or a player did or something like that. And it's common for players to lose teeth. Really?
Final: I can see going in person occasionally.

Soccer
Bad: Similar to hockey on the scoring thing and rules. Just let them go offsides, okay? And the game running-time has an element of the mysterious to it with the unknown extra time added.
Good: Love the civil nature of showing someone a card after a foul. "He has been shown the yellow card." Even though like hockey there's not much scoring, since there are no helmets and pads, fans can entertain themselves by commenting on the players' hairstyles and muscular legs.
Final: Worth watching in bits.

Boxing
Bad: The objective is to knock a person unconscious. Please think about this. That is the stated objective.
Final: It should not exist.

Tennis
Good: Love the fashion! Fans can really see the players and feel close to them.
Bad: It's hard looking at only two people for a whole match, so the players' families and friends are shown constantly on TV giving boring or nonexistent reactions. How much do I really need to look at Brooklyn Decker? (Okay, maybe that was a bad example.)
Final: The pop culture element makes it worth it.

Baseball
Good: America's leisurely pastime. Let's face it, when we think baseball, we think food: hot dogs, pretzels, cotton candy. It's a family day out.
Bad: Americans no longer have the attention span for leisure. Snore.
Final: It's a day in the park. Literally.

Golf
Good: There's still some amusing fashion trekking around on those fairways. And for people who enjoy gardening, the views of the courses are better than watching the Home & Garden channel.
Bad: See baseball.
Final: It's a walk in the park. Almost literally.

Football
Good: There's a ton of strategizing to keep everyone entertained due to all the squads, which are mini-teams within each team. There's the offense, the defense, the kicking team, the punting team. There are substitutions after each play. Someone's always running in and running out. Different skills, different plans. Will they throw? Will they run? Will they kick the field goal or go for it on fourth down? Drama!
Bad: Concussions. Parkinson's.
Final: I watch it, but I feel guilty watching it.

Basketball
Awesome: They run a lot. They score a lot. The players' athleticism is on display every second of the game. Alley-oop plays are pure, show-boatin' entertainment. No helmets or pads (similar to soccer) allows for better viewing, with the added bonus of tank tops showing off more muscles complete with tattoos which can be deciphered if you want something more to do. Players keep all their teeth and don't suffer brain damage.
More Awesome: The best NBA team right now just happens to be the one I root for.
Final: The best sport ever.

The Food Happens Diet

I don't understand diets. Diets make people think about food MORE. Isn't that counterproductive?

If I'm trying to eat less, I'm pretty sure it's not going to help me to plan my shopping list, add up calories, think ahead about all of my meals, all of my snacks. What am I going to eat for every meal today? Diets generally suggest that when I have that meal, or even a snack, that I need to think about that snack and analyze that snack and evaluate that snack and record that snack.

There's an endless array of diet books out there, too. Books filled with food and ideas about food and the calories in food and the health benefits of food. Food, food, food. Wow, I'm getting really hungry now. I want to eat because I've now spent 50 percent of my day thinking about what I am supposed to eat and not supposed to eat. And reading about it. And talking about it. And writing in a journal about it, because I have to record everything about the food that I've read about and planned for and shopped for and prepared and actually eaten.

None of this makes sense to me. That's why I live by the following dietary philosophy: Food happens.

I actually wait until I am hungry, and then I think to myself: "I am hungry. I should eat something now." Then, if I am home, I will look in my refrigerator and I will eat whatever takes the least effort to prepare. If I am not home, I will purchase food from a food establishment that is somewhere nearby. I will then eat until I don't feel hungry, and I will go on to think about other things that have nothing to do with food, like all of the activities in the other 22 hours of my day.

Now some people might say, "But don't you ever have to cook? Like for other people? Like your family?" And to those "some people" who may or may not be my husband and children, I answer: "Define cook."

My family doesn't know how lucky they are, because I have done all of the not thinking about food for them so that they never have to go on a diet. You're welcome, family.

All of us are the media

When was the last time you or someone you know blamed the media? Was it when you were reading all those stories about the twerking Miley Cyrus? Or maybe it was when they got it all wrong about your favorite politician or sports hero or even someone you know personally. Yeah, it's really ridiculous how they gave Miley so much attention. Miley, Miley, Miley. You just had to keep reading about it because the stupid media just wouldn't stop going on and on about her and her twerking, twerking, twerking.

So, people of America who are so sick of the media, answer me this. Who exactly is the media these days? One by one we're losing a mainstream news agency here and a mainstream news agency there. Who's got the monopoly on what the public gets to read about or hear about? Who, who, who? Hmm. (Thoughtfully tapping my finger on my chin.)

Well, if you posted a status or tweeted a tweet or shared a link or uploaded a photo or video in the last week, I'm here to tell you that the media is you. And me. And all of those anonymous commenters who always seem to be so angry about everything. If you feel misinformed or overwhelmed by inane, incredible, inconsequential, inaccurate information, it's because all of us are voluntarily spreading the ridiculous info-crap that we claim to be so offended by.

Yes, there was a time not too long ago when we could reasonably blame the media for certain missteps like, say, causing our government to start an unjustifiable war. But those times have disappeared. Because for every fact or lie published now, there's a whole pile of other facts or lies immediately thrown at it.

Here's a real, true recent news item: Miley's got her first ever No.1 Billboard hit. I think that's horrible. And I blame the media.

It's Always Sunny in Florida

Even though South Florida is composed of an exceedingly diverse and crazy population that can never, ever agree on anything, there is something in the air this time of year that brings us all together: excessive humidity. Remember how Herman Cain had his 9-9-9 plan? Well, down here we have our 90-90-90 plan: 90 degree temperatures, 90 percent humidity, and 90 percent sick of it. We are all united in our despondency and misery.

When it gets to be the end of September, there's the universal feeling of: Enough already! We start seeing pictures from other parts of the country in which people are wearing pants and maybe even long sleeves, and those people are not sweating! The foliage in the background of these pictures is starting to change colors. And to make things worse, the retailers down here start selling leather boots and wool sweaters and corduroy pants that somehow carry the scent and feel of autumn with them, without bringing the pleasant coolness.

At 6 a.m. on school days, I step out into the darkness in my tank top and boxer shorts to walk Daisy the cockapoo, and while standing in sleepy stillness on my driveway, I begin to sweat. Standing still! Wearing a tank top and boxer shorts! This is something the tourism bureau does not want you to know. (And by this, I mean the sweating, and that I go outside in my boxer shorts.)

This sticky feeling will continue for another two months. That's right, we'll have Humid Halloween and Thick Thanksgiving. So, enjoy it while you can, people elsewhere in the country. And then we will chat about this again in December.

An Instabrain Full of Snapthoughts

When I was a child I developed what is now considered the rather eccentric habit of thinking. Just thinking. I would sometimes sit and stare out the window with my chin resting in the palm of my hand.

I would also think while walking places in my suburban New Jersey neighborhood: crunching my way through the orange-red, fallen leaves in autumn; sloshing through and squinting at the mushy, bright snow in winter; and sneezing my way past undulating, freshly mown lawns in spring and summer. I have such vivid memories of how quiet snowfall is and how sharp the scent of cut grass.

These habits have carried over, manifesting themselves in different ways. I make my 20-minute drive to and from work each day without turning on music, and I go on my exercise runs most of the time without the wires of any electronic device sticking out of my ears. If I'm home alone, I never turn on the TV. (I will admit part of the reason for this is that I stopped knowing how to operate the remote about three entertainment systems ago. But there is definitely an element of protest involved in my ignorance.)

I was prompted to reflect on this strange habit of quiet reflection that I enjoy when I read a Q&A in the business section of The New York Times recently. They have a feature called "Corner Office," in which they interview a seriously attired CEO who discusses his or her methods of success. Something about the man's picture pulled me in this time; his eyes had a rather un-CEO-like gentleness about them. Daniel Lubetzky has an interesting story (his father was a Holocaust survivor who immigrated to Mexico), but what I found most interesting was his answer to the last question of the interview: "What career advice would you give to a class of graduating seniors?" His answer is too long for Instagram, Twitter or Snapchat, but I'm hoping you'll read the whole thing here.

The most important is to make sure that you talk to yourself, that you think hard about what's important to you and gives you meaning. When I was 19 and walking between classes, I didn't have a phone, so my brain would take me in different directions. And it's so healthy and important to be thinking, "Oh, I could have done that better." Or, "What about this idea?" But nowadays, we're on our iPhones all the time, and you don't have time to talk with yourself, to analyze.

It's very important for people to know what gives them meaning. But it's hard for people to figure out if you're not connecting with yourself and taking the time to just be introspective and daydream.

Daydreaming is outlawed in the dystopian science-fiction novel Fahrenheit 451, in which everyone is forced to speed on the highways, lulled into watching giant TV screens filled with a fake family, and, of course, required to destroy all their books (or the "firemen" will do it for them). But citizens are also viewed as suspicious and subversive if they just want to take a slow stroll. It's amazing how prescient Ray Bradbury and the other early sci-fi writers were. While our government is not the one that's speeding us up in order to dumb us down, it is still happening as we do it to ourselves.

Just think about that.

10 reasons why people need to stop making this kind of list

1. Sometimes a thought or point requires more than one sentence.
2. Or more than a fragment.
3. One or more points on the list are really forced and not clever or interesting because the writer is just trying to fill up the list.
4. It's a lazy way to pull in readers.
5. It's overused so it's gotten harder to make the lists funny.
6. Just because you can make anything into a list doesn't mean you should.
7. Usually there are two points on the list that are really the same thing just worded a little differently.
8. Readers forget everything on the list the minute they finish reading it.
9. Two of the points are often the same but just sound a little different.
10. There's a big expectation that the last point be super witty, but it just can't be. Although, perhaps it can be ironic.

Fat Lizard

An open letter to the fat lizard that is living on my patio

Fat, curly-tailed lizard living on my screened-in patio:

Why do you torment me so? Why do you stare at me through the glass of the sliding door, nay, glare at me, nay, mock me, daring me to come after you? I am used to the little geckos that roam suburban South Florida, but you are different. You are bigger, fatter, curlier of tail. You are an invader! And you have taken over the patio, skittering like a reptilian flash of light into the safety of the bottom track of the hurricane shutters whenever we try to come near you. Surely, you have set up a rather cozy camp in there, probably hosting all sorts of fat lizard raves, laughing at the people who live in the house, not caring in the least that you've caused conversations like this to occur between my husband and me:

Ricky: I've set up a blockade.

Me: What do you mean?

Ricky: I put a piece of broken cement on each side of the track, blocking the two openings.

Me: You mean to keep it out of there?

Ricky: No, I saw it go in there. It's trapped!

Me: But it'll die in there!

Ricky: We want it to die. (Ricky gets look of confusion.) Don't we?

Me: (I get look of confusion.)

Ricky: But it makes big doodies all over the patio. You don't want doodies all over the patio.

Me: No. (Still looking conflicted.) Maybe we can write to The Ethicist in The New York Times Magazine.

Ricky: It eats the bugs, right?

Me: Yes! It eats the bugs. (Ignoring the fact that the patio is screened-in, so there aren't really any bugs.)

Ricky: So, you don't want it to die in there?

Me: I don't want it to die in there.

Ricky: (Goes back out and removes the blockade.)

So, fat lizard living on my patio, I hope you're happy with yourself.

Trashy Behavior

My teenage daughter Amy and I were sitting in the optometrist's office waiting for her pupils to dilate. A father walked in with his 10-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son. The man was clearly flustered, telling the woman at the desk that his daughter had broken her glasses, and he produced the mangled evidence.

"That man looks so flustered," I said to Amy.

"I can't see anything," Amy said. "I don't have my contacts in and my pupils are dilated."

A second person, let's call him the glasses guy, was enlisted to take a look and told the man that the frames could not be repaired. The father mumbled something about his wife and took out his cellphone to make a call.

"See, I bet his wife normally handles this kind of thing. He's out of his league right now," I said.

"I can't see anything," Amy said.

In the meantime, the now unattended 8-year-old boy helped himself to a piece of candy from the dish on the counter and walked over toward where Amy and I were sitting as he unwrapped it. He paused near the toy area, the wrapper crinkle-crinkling in his hands. I noticed something fall and land on the perfectly clean, carpeted floor. It was a shred of the wrapper. I assumed the boy would instinctively bend over to pick it up, but he was still unwrapping the rest.

"I wonder if he saw that he dropped that," I said to Amy.

"I can't see anything," Amy said.

Then another, larger chunk of wrapper fell to the floor. There was no doubt the boy saw it fall. But he was still unwrapping.

"He definitely saw that," I said to Amy. "But maybe when he finishes unwrapping the candy, he'll pick it all up."

By now, the boy's sister had walked over while the father looked anxiously out the store window hoping his wife would appear. The man kept inching closer and closer to the front until he actually walked out the door and stood on the sidewalk gazing out into the parking lot.

The boy took this moment to shove the remaining piece of wrapper into his sister's hands. She then threw it at him, but it just bounced off of him and landed on the carpet next to the other two pieces of wrapper. The two children then walked away.

"I can't believe that!" I said to Amy.

"I can't see anything," Amy said.

"What kind of person is that?" I continued. "I don't care if he's 8. How do you just throw trash on someone's floor like that? Not only that, here the people are nice enough to put out candy. He takes the free candy that they have kindly put out and then, to repay their kindness, throws trash from that candy onto their floor. And the stupid father is standing outside waiting for the mother instead of watching his kids and making a decision about the broken glasses."

I turned to look at Amy. She looked like a Powerpuff Girl.

"Wow, your pupils are really dilated," I said.

The Lost Month

The Lost Month: Sounds like it could the be the title of a wild, drunken adventure like The Hangover, Part 17. But my lost month started on July 27 when my elderly little mother fell and broke her hip, and it is ending today as she is ready to go home to her apartment and be pretty much independent again.

The time in between is a story many families have experienced. You know, the one about how incredibly screwed up our country's healthcare system is. The one about how not only does an ill or injured person have to struggle through his or her illness or injury, but the insurance denials, the paperwork, the miscommunications between healthcare personnel and institutions, the lack of information, lack of kindness and lack of patience from people who control your destiny at one of your most vulnerable, frightening moments.

Of the multitude of medical people we've dealt with this past month, there were some who were compassionate. There were some who remembered that my mother is a human being and not a widget. But those people were just a few distant, dimly-lit beacons in a giant, foggy morass.

My mother is 93 years old, and prior to falling, she bowled once a week in a league, drove herself to the supermarket, the bank, and other activities. She is a quiet woman, not even 5-feet tall any more, whose brightly colored outfits always match from her shiny clip-on earrings at the top all the way down to her neatly laced floral sneakers. She fell while attending a luncheon awards ceremony for one of her grandchildren on the campus of the University of Miami. She didn't realize there was a step down.

The one lucky part of this was her falling literally across the street from the hospital that handles the orthopedic needs of every professional sports team in South Florida. (I kept alert every time I walked past the therapy room, but Dwyane Wade was nowhere to be seen.) She received a partial hip replacement from an excellent surgeon, whose demeanor indicated that this procedure was not particularly challenging or worrisome for him, though he didn't make much of an effort to calm or console us.

So began my mother's odyssey of being shuffled from hospital to nursing/rehab to hospital back to rehab, and then to my house. And today Mom is incredibly happy to be going back to her apartment. 

As our Lost Month runs its closing credits, unlike the makers of The Hangover series, we will all hope and do our very best to prevent a sequel. But here's an idea for a fantasy movie: How about someone fixes our healthcare system?

Hitting It in the Park

I thought for sure that the lady singing opera while walking around the Central Park reservoir track was going to be the weirdest part of my day. She was dressed in all black, yoga pants and T-shirt, with hot pink headphones like earmuffs covering her ears. I jogged past her as she paused for a moment, slapped her knees in self-admonishment over some error I could not detect, and then once more belted out high notes with a force and clarity I had never before heard up so close in person.

But after I exited the track, as I walked alongside the softball fields, my day got a little weirder. A 20-year-old woman from one of the co-ed league teams warming up waved at me and asked if I would play so they wouldn't have to forfeit.

I did a quick internal analysis:
My softball experience consists of playing a few times about 30 years ago.
I can't throw the ball far enough to reach second base from first.
I am a slow runner.
I have no upper body strength.

"Okay, I'll do it," I said.

I suspected that any team that was recruiting in such a manner was either pretty bad or had a sense of humor or both. And since I am pretty bad and have a sense of humor, it was the perfect fit. As I said yes, a wiry, leathery man wearing a white baseball cap and smoking a cigarette came over to us and said, "You're going to play? Great! Thanks!" Then he took a drag and walked over to tell the others.

They gave me a size large red T-shirt that fit me like a boxy dress and then sent me out to right field. So of course the very first swing was a hit that took a bad bounce in the infield and skidded its way right into my area of responsibility. I chased after the ball and tossed it, underhand, to the second baseman. After that, they put me at catcher.

As the game progressed, I realized my team had a bit of a Bad News Bears vibe but they seemed to be pleased that they were not being "mercy ruled" as usual. I was bringing them good luck! Sure, there were whiffs at the plate and drops and misthrows in the field, but we got to play the whole nine innings. Final score: 16-11, a respectable loss.

This day that started with unexpected opera ended with a grand finish. As I bid my teammates goodbye, I told them what fun it had been to play. And that's when one of them said: "Hey, are you available next week?"

Liquid Brunch

New Yorkers love their brunch. Every single restaurant in Manhattan offers a brunch menu on Saturdays and Sundays, no matter how unbrunchlike its normal menu may be. Brunch runs pretty much all day, and I've noticed that the most crowded places always have one common offering: drink specials.

Bloody Marys, mimosas, and oh, the hell with it, straight up vodkas and just about anything else that can get a person drunk are the real attraction to getting those bodies in the seats. Having an excuse to liquor it up in the middle of the day on the weekend is the real draw here, not the stuffed French toast.

And since this is a dog town, water bowls and doggie treats don't hurt either. Sleepy people and their sleepy pooches stroll into burger joints, pizzerias and steak houses with last night's dreams still floating through their heads (yes, dogs dream, too), plop down at a cafe table outside whenever weather permits, and pretend they are on the Riviera for a couple of hours while slowly drinking their brunch.

It's Sunday morning, so Ricky and I will be on our way shortly to meet some people as part of this tradition. And just like men who claim they read Playboy magazine for the articles, I will tell you that I go to brunch for the food. That's right, THE FOOD. While I'm munching on my blueberry pancakes this morning, I promise I'll be thinking of you. Cheers!

The Punk Emperor Has No Clothes

All over Manhattan there have been bold pink-and-black banners advertising "PUNK: Chaos to Couture" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, so I was ready for a subversive, in-your-face artistic display as I entered the exhibit space last night.

I was at first pleased to be assaulted with loud music, floor-to-ceiling static-filled video screens, and towering mannequins topped with brightly colored afro-type wigs that changed with the color-scheme from room to room. But after the initial pleasant shock, I started to focus on what was actually on the mannequins and the explanations that went with them. There were original articles of clothing from the 1970s displayed next to updated versions from more recent high fashion. And that's when the whole thing started to feel like a practical joke.

The bands were given credit for channeling the besplattered drip art of Jackson Pollock though they are quoted as saying that they had painted without wearing coveralls and just happened to get paint all over themselves. And their use of safety pins was an iconic look, though one musician says that they were poor and needed to just hold their clothes together.

Of course, these seemingly accidental looks were then followed by others' purposeful splattering and ripping, but then, how anti-establishment are people who are establishing a pattern? In the world of punk, giving someone the finger is no different than giving a salute; all you're doing is following a trend instead of following orders. If you care about looking like you don't care, then you are not subversive, you are self-satirical.

My disappointment was sealed when I got to the section where couture was made out of found objects and, yes, trash. There were trash bag dresses, and then there was a dress made out of material made to look like trash bags. That's right, some designer made material that simulated the look of trash bags. The phrase you've been punked started to take on a new meaning for me.

After leaving the exhibit, I found my time was much better spent at "Photography and the American Civil War," and at "Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective." But, for those who think they will enjoy the "PUNK" exhibit, all I can say is: I salute you.

Underground Comedy

Maybe you love Barbra Streisand. Or maybe you love making fun of Barbra Streisand. Or maybe both. An added bonus would be if you used to watch Ugly Betty and are familiar with the actor Michael Urie, who played office assistant Marc St. James. And, okay, it would also help if you are gay and/or Jewish.

Last night Ricky and I went to see Buyer & Cellar, a one-man show about an imaginary out-of-work actor who takes a job in the not-imaginary, perfectly-staged, fake old-town shopping mall in Streisand's Malibu basement. (The mall is real! She wrote a book about it!)

Urie completely engages the audience as the actor/narrator who sometimes falls into other characters while recounting conversations between him and: his boyfriend; Streisand's female assistant; James Brolin; and, yes, even Barbra herself.

In the neon-deprived, angled and sometimes curvy streets of the West Village, we found the quaint Barrow Street Theatre, with about 100 seats, simple blacked-out walls, and, for this show, a sparse set of three small, easily movable pieces of  white furniture. The show runs for an uninterrupted 95 minutes, and Urie makes the audience feel like it's just us having a little visit with lots of laughs together, our interest never lagging as he presents writer Jonathan Tolins' monologue/dialogue that somehow makes Streisand seem nuts but not nuts, mean but not mean, unsympathetic but sympathetic. I'm not sure how the production pulls this off, but it does.

Intimate theater setting. Sharp funny dialogue. Great acting. Fun night. Go!

Conversations with My Husband (Sample #3)

Ricky and I were listening to music when a Bonnie Raitt song came on. Bonnie started crooning about falling under the spell of a green-eyed jackal and being roasted on a spit of love.

"Have you ever been roasted on a spit of love?" I asked Ricky. (We had drunk a whole bottle of wine just the two of us.)

"No," said Ricky. He was trying to program the new cellphone he'd just gotten that day and did not look up from the phone.

"Have you ever fallen under the spell of a green-eyed jackal?" I asked. He seemed to be unaware that he was supposed to answer yes to this question since I have green eyes.

"No," said Ricky.

"But I have green eyes," I said, helping him out. "I'm not a green-eyed jackal? You haven't ever fallen under my spell?"

Ricky stopped focusing through the lower part of his progressive glasses and looked away from his phone, turning his head toward me.

"If falling under a spell can be a good thing, then, yes," he said.

"I don't think that would make a good song lyric," I said.

"I don't think I would be a good song writer," Ricky said.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because I overthink everything," said Ricky. "You have to just feel it."

"You don't think that Bob Dylan overthought things when he was writing songs?" I asked.

"He probably wouldn't have been popular today," said Ricky. "Would people want to listen to all those long lyrics now?"

I thought about this but could not do the proper analysis to answer this question. Ricky decided to answer himself.

"Well, maybe if he was a rapper," Ricky said. "Rap songs have a lot of lyrics."

Apparently I was never going to find out if I was, indeed, a green-eyed jackal.

In Search of Licorice at Trader Joe's NYC

The line starts where you walk in the door. Two lines actually. And these lines have one employee each standing at the ends holding up signs that say: end of the line. Should I take this as a warning to flee? But I am in search of licorice!

I am about to take you on a journey with me into the Trader Joe's food market near Union Square in NYC. Grab a shopping basket or push a mini cart and just get on the line. That's right. Don't shop first. Just get on the line that snakes throughout the store, up and down and around many, though not quite all, of the aisles.

While making my way through the store, I pass cereal and cookies, salad dressing and bags of flavored popcorn, turkey patties and chicken apple sausage. I did not realize I wanted all of these things, but as I am forced to linger alongside all of these items, they somehow wind up in the basket I have hooked in the crook of my arm.

Everyone around me is doing the same thing, shopping while creeping along in the line, and a camaraderie begins to develop. The person in front of me puts her basket down on the floor and asks me to kick it along while she goes in search of organic cherries. I try not to let it show on my face that I find this to be an odd request, and I comply. But it is only a matter of seconds before I go from finding this behavior weird to doing it myself as I realize my line has bypassed the pasta aisle. Without shame, I drop my basket to hold my place and ask the same favor of the man behind me. This is how I score some gnocchi. Yes!

But where is the long, chewy red licorice that has caused this visit? (We had received some as a gift and it was time to replace it.) When I realize my journey on the line is nearing the end without a licorice sighting, I drop my basket again with nothing more than a casual nod to my line-buddy-best-friend and dash up an aisle that seems to have candy and other goodies. They are out of licorice!

So what! I no longer care. Look at this container of all-natural fruit jellies! I sprint back to my self-sliding basket, and I see I have reached the bank of more than 20 cash registers. Situated at this juncture atop a step ladder is an employee whose sole function is to direct the next person in line to whichever cashier is ready.

"Number 17," the ladder lady says to me.

I look up to see a cashier at the far end waving a paddle with a big 17 on it. Off I trot there, swinging my overflowing basket, feeling like I just won the grand prize. And as I exit after paying, I walk past the end-of-the-line signs again and know that, actually, it is just the beginning.

Make Mine a Manhattan

"Why do you like being in New York? What do you do there?"

Some of my Florida friends have asked me this question whenever I talk about waiting, wishing, longing for my next trip to Manhattan. I try to stutter out an answer, but it never comes out right. It's like trying to answer the question: "How does the universe work?" You might mention the sun and the moon and,oh, there's something called a black hole and infinity, but you can tell your listeners are just not feelin' it.

"Everything is entertaining in New York," I say.

They wait for elaboration. (Most of my school friends are English teachers, with one very open-minded stray math teacher thrown in. I can actually tell by the way they are looking at me that they are literally thinking the word "elaboration" in red ink.)

I'll then start with my big go-to example: Central Park. I like to walk in Central Park and watch the people and the dogs. Or the league softball games. Or I'll bring a camp chair and sit in line to get free tickets to Shakespeare in the Park at the outdoor Delacorte Theater. And there are musicians of all sorts pretty much everywhere and exercise groups and pre-schoolers in camp and birds and people watching birds.

"Even doing nothing is doing something in New York," I'll explain. "Just walk out your door and there's action and characters and energy."

In a one week period, Ricky and I saw FOR FREE: a cast of famous actors including Matt Damon, Jesse L. Martin, Alan Alda and Vanessa Redgrave read excerpts from Shakespeare followed by a discussion lead by a Harvard ethics professor; a concert by Suzanne Vega; a production of Chekhov's The Seagull in which scene changes required that the audience follow the actors to different locations within Central Park; and an exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum in which the art displayed was composed of projections of light.

New York transports me -- and not just figuratively. I buy my unlimited Metro Pass and hop on a bus or a subway train from East Side to West Side, uptown to downtown, right into the middle of the hubbub when I feel like it, and away from it all when I don't.

So while most people enjoy their vacations on the beach with sand between their toes, I'll be bumping my way through the turnstiles and hitting the cobblestones and other bumpy pavements of New York, because...that's what I do there.

Conversations with My Husband (Sample #2)

"Look at how big those whitefish are," Ricky said as he munched on his sesame flagel loaded with egg salad.

Ricky and I were enjoying breakfast at our favorite Upper East Side bagel place, the deli counter filled with its glistening mounds of cream cheese varieties, salad mixtures and smoked whole fishes unfurling across from our table.

I turned to look at the glass-encased counter.

"It says sturgeon and sable," I said, reading the little signs near the fish.

"Those are whitefish," he said.

"But it says sturgeon and sable. Maybe that's why they're so big," I said.

"Those are whitefish," Ricky said. "They're really big whitefish. I don't care what the sign says."

"How do you know?" I said.

"Because I've been a Jewish male my entire life," he said.

I considered this and determined that, yes indeed, he had been a Jewish male his whole life.

"I know my way around sable and sturgeon and whitefish," he said. "You know how my mom used to pick out whitefish? You have to pick the one with the little head and the fat body."

I pictured Ricky's mother, who passed away years ago, elbowing her way up to the deli counter. I could see her five-foot-tall, broad-shouldered frame, topped with bright-red, hair-sprayed beauty-parlor hair, wedging up to the glass and telling the man to give her the whitefish with the small head and fat body.

"This is an art form that is becoming lost," I said.

Clash of the Suburban Wildlife

Wherein the author witnesses an epic battle between the Evil Squirrel and a very aggressive mockingbird that then goes on to target the royal cockapoo. 

Shocking! A clash like this has never before been seen! Squirrel squawks! Mockingbird squawks! Cockapoo -- who is 12 years old and has questionable hearing -- remains oblivious! She has no dog instincts whatsoever!

This has caused me to rethink my whole opinion of the Evil Squirrel because she was clearly getting her ass kicked by the mockingbird. Have I misjudged the Evil Squirrel? Did I just not understand squirrel squawk?

First there was the epic battle a few days ago. The Evil Squirrel was clinging vertically upside down along the trunk of her usual palm tree in my front yard when the previously unknown Eviler Mockingbird started to dive-bomb her! Swoop, swoop, swoop. The mockingbird was relentless.

Then, the next day, I took Queen Daisy, the royal cockapoo, out in the front yard. The mockingbird, that had been sitting atop our mailbox, took flight, zipping from tree to tree around Daisy. She swooped past once, then again a little lower. Each time she swooped lower and lower until I started to think...no, that bird is not going to actually confront the elderly, oblivious cockapoo who is minding her own business while doing her business. And that's when the mockingbird swooped so low that it bumped Daisy!

Just like in those made-for-TV movies in which the schoolyard bully wants to pick a fight with the whimpy hero, the mockingbird gave Daisy, the 14-pound ball of beige fluff, a body bump. But this was a FLYING body bump! Daisy got startled and looked up. I finally reacted by lunging toward Daisy while flailing my arms trying to scare the Eviler Mockingbird away.

For the moment, Daisy was saved. But what will happen next time? Who will be the victor in the end?

I think, therefore iPod

When I first got my iPod, I had no inclination to figure out how to load music onto it, so some nice people started me out by putting music on it for me. Over time, I started to load music myself, but my total playlist is a bit of an anomaly compared to most people's. After all, what is our iPod but a carefully curated image of what we think of ourselves?

Certainly as teens, we all know that music equals identity. How cool am I? My music will tell you that. What group am I in? What fashion do I like? The iPod houses our playlist of identity, of coolness, of self-image. Our iPods are the personal artifacts that will tell the archaeologist everything about us as individuals.

So, how to explain "Groove is in the Heart" on mine? Who put that on there for me? It's kind of fun when I'm taking my exceedingly boring exercise walks through South Florida suburbia to hear a song come on that I would never have chosen and try to guess who put it on there for me. I also frequently find myself squinting at the tiny letters on the screen trying to find out just what it is I'm listening to. This is how I learned that the soundtrack from Spring Awakening could cause pretty much anyone to become suicidal, but that I really like the Goo Goo Dolls. Or that, while I somewhat like the Talking Heads, I don't need the extended, live version of every song they've ever done. Please, just "take me to the river" and drown me after the second minute.

As a personal identity machine, then, my iPod is not doing its job. While I can tell you all about the music I liked as a teen, I've gradually lost my grip on who does what music now. There are no albums with interesting covers and lyrics to study anymore. There's just this ethereal downloading process of a song here or a song there. When I hear a contemporary song I like, I know I know it, but I couldn't tell you who is singing it or what it's called. Music has become random, difficult to connect to, and my iPod in particular is a random collection put haphazardly together by not just me.

So, the next time you see me walking with my earbuds in, please don't judge me if I'm humming Britney Spears. Because as Sting would say, "you still know nothing 'bout me."

Let's have some pun!

Wherein the author tells of the time when her husband's phone made the train whistle noise at 4 a.m. indicating he'd received a spam text, causing the author to become wide awake and only able to think nonstop of puns.

"Ricky, I can't fall back asleep!" I stage whispered. "For some reason I just keep thinking of puns. Why is this happening?"

Ricky then snore-mumbled something about my having a "fertile mind" as he buried his head under his pillow.

Since we've been having so much rain, my puns started out all water related:
No pain, no rain
Rain Street U.S.A.
A mother-water day
Rain of Terror
The Valley of the Damp
Soggy Dog Mysteries (starring Soggy Doo)

But then I started thinking of puns about puns:
And she'll have pun, pun, pun
Forever Pun
All I wanna do is have some pun
My Pun and Only

All of this was dancing through my head at 4 a.m. continuing into 4:30, and so I decided that if I got up and wrote some of it down, maybe it would stop. I grabbed the nearest piece of paper on my night table, which was yesterday's crossword puzzle, and started scribbling puns in any available space on the page.

It didn't really help, though. And now, here I was facing another dreary, soggy day along with being sleep deprived on top of it all. But what does it matter really? For tomorrow may rain, but I'll follow the pun.

Please don't rain on my dog

My dog dislikes moisture. She avoids the little puddles left by the sprinklers. She has to be strongly encouraged to step onto dewy grass. And if it's raining outside, well, she'll just wait, thank you very much.

This past week in South Florida, we've had monsoon-like weather. Our usual pattern in the rainy season is: dry in the morning, clouding up in the early afternoon, then thunderstorms between 3-6 p.m. Intermittent thunderstorms. Storms that feel like someone has turned the hose on at full force, pointing it directly at you for several minutes, followed by complete shut-off, until a few minutes have passed, and then repeat. For this reason, a good strategy to employ is the wait-it-out technique. If you are about to exit Publix with your cart full of groceries and find that it is monsooning, you can just wait it out. It will subside soon.

However, our usual weather pattern has been nowhere in sight. Instead, it's been raining all day, every day, for so many days I've lost track. This has made many aspects of life challenging lately, one of which has been getting our little fluffy cockapoo to go out.

I am the one who takes her out first thing in the morning. I open one sleepy eyeball to see her sitting at attention next to my side of the bed, staring at me in that urgent way dogs do.

"Okay, Daisy," I said this morning, then stumbled out into the darkness of the entryway, slipped on my dog-walking shoes, opened the front door, and stepped out under the cover of the overhang as Daisy trotted alongside me.

That's when we both realized it was pouring. Daisy stopped short and turned to look back at me.

"Nu uh," Daisy's look clearly said.

"Go ahead, Daisy," I urged.

She hung her head low, tail tucked down in misery, and slowly stepped out onto the path into the rain. She paused for less than a second, then turned around and trotted back under the eave to me without taking care of business. By this time, I had snapped out of my sleepy stupor and came up with the alternate plan of going  through the garage and walking out with her with an umbrella. Mission accomplished!

But a damp Daisy is an unhappy Daisy. So on behalf of all the soggy dogs and dog walkers of South Florida: Hey, rain! Enough already!

A Lack of Vision

In third grade I was sitting in the back of the classroom next to Valerie Luckewicz who pointed out something that was written on the board. I looked at her, turned and squinted at the board, and then looked at her again.

"Wait, you can see that from here?" I asked.

"Want to try my glasses?" she asked, and she started to take them off and hand them to me.

I took the glasses and started to very skeptically put them on while saying, "I don't think other people's glasses are supposed to work on...hey, wait a minute. I can see everything now!"

And so it began. My never-ending journey through glasses then contacts, then different types of contacts, and  newer pairs of glasses, and then finally, the beginning of the end: reading glasses. There's a sort of irony in not being able to see into the distance so poorly that you eventually can't see close up -- even close up becomes too distant. I know, I know. Farsighted and nearsighted are two different things. As we age we all need reading glasses. But if I can't see far, and I can't see near, what the heck is left?

I've been going through a rather intensive dance of the vision corrective devices for a couple of years now. Monofocal, bifocal, what-the-focal. My astigmatism can astick it up my, ahem. Anyway, I'm tired of the whole which-is-clearer-1-or-2 experience. I'm tired of the wetting solutions, the cleaning solutions, the scratch-free, glare-resistant, transition, tinted, slanted, glassy, plastic choices that I keep buying while still wishing that I could just wake up and SEE.

I'm not a candidate for laser surgery, though I may be too chicken for it even if I were. So instead, I now have the following eye apparatus: glasses for distance, reading glasses for my naked eyes, reading glasses for my contact-lensed eyes, contact lenses for distance. I feel like I'm always taking devices off and putting devices on, and blinking and focusing. There's no way that all of this can be helping my ongoing stress-induced eye-twitch.

But instead of complaining, I should probably be thankful. What if I lived during Little House on the Prairie times? (I loved that show when I was a little girl!) I would probably have had to wear 100-pound magnifying glasses strapped onto my head, and those would have only lasted until I was about 12 at which time I would have accidentally stepped into a mountain lion's den and been eaten because I couldn't see where I was going.

Yes, I'll stop complaining now and get ready to enjoy the upcoming summer break.I'll just grab my floppy hat and my prescription sunglasses and be on my way.

The Things They Left Behind

Parents of Weston, have you been wondering where your Tupperware is? Well, it's in my classroom!

Now, you might be thinking: "But my child does not have you as a teacher, Mrs. Weiss."

Ha! That doesn't matter! Your Tupperware is still in my classroom. All sorts of students I don't know eat lunch in my room all the time. They say, "Hello, Mrs. Weiss." And I respond, "Hello, person I don't know." And then they leave Tupperware in my room.

It's the end of the school year, so it's time to clear out the lost-and-found area, also known as the pile of junk on top of my bookshelves. In addition to the textbooks that have nothing to do with journalism, there are notepads, binders, calculators, crumpled papers, highlighters, hair clips, phone chargers, earbuds, knotted-up plastic bags filled with P.E. clothes, art projects with pieces peeling off, math homework, Tupperware, coffee travel mugs, a rather nice black jacket, a pair of fashion glasses with clear glass, a knit hat, an application for National Honor Society membership, a prom ticket permission form, and someone's bat mitzvah T-shirt.

From my list of found favorites of the past, I will share two examples:
In the category of Most Valuable Item Ever Left in My Room, the winner is...a laptop.
In the category Most Inexplicable Item: an inside-out, balled-up pair of jeans.

The laptop was retrieved at the end of the same school day. The jeans were in my room for a couple of months. Periodically, I would hold them up and say, "Who the heck left jeans in here?" Finally, a boy responded one day with, "Oh! Those are mine!"

There is also in a constant state of flux a collection of Flashdrives that pile up on my desk throughout the year. Since I am in a computer lab, students who come into one class period invariably find Flashdrives stuck in the back of the iMacs from the class that just left. As soon as one gets retrieved by its owner, one or two more get turned in and tossed onto the heap. One day, I may just find myself buried in Flashdrives. Though if I really need to store them, I do have plenty of Tupperware.

The snails are back in town

The snails are back again. This is not a metaphor. The slimy flower-eaters were in full display last night on our walkway as I took Daisy the cockapoo out for her last pee of the night before bed.

"The snails are back!" I declared to Ricky as I walked back inside. He was already kind of sulky because the Heat had just lost Game 2 to the Pacers.

"Do you want me to go out and kill them?" Ricky asked. "What are they even eating? We don't have any flowers left."

I did not respond to Ricky, who last summer had turned into the big, tough snail stomper after we tried everything we could to save our flowers. We tried organic repellent, dangerous poison, even BEER. Everyone told us to try beer, but that only yielded one semi-drunk mini-snail. So then Ricky turned to stomping on them as a last resort, and, as you can imagine, that was not a very effective solution. It mostly just gave him a small sense of satisfaction as he heard each one go crunch.

Our flowers were goners, and we gave up on ever planting any again. We kill all plant life! We have tried and tried over the years, but last year was the last straw. The snails won.

But we still keep some houseplants inside. They mostly stay alive, except for the ones that haven't. This is why I put on my best brave face when my graduating newspaper seniors gave me a beautiful terrarium containing five air plants. I looked at the sweet little flowering things perched delicately in perfectly-sized holes in a glass bubble/dish and the following thought went through my head:

"My students don't know that I'm a plant killer!"

As I held the terrarium gingerly, wondering what to do, one of the girls said, "There are directions in there on how to take care of it."

I smiled. It's such a lovely gift. It's so pretty. I am an undeserving plant killer!

I went home and read the directions: "Remove air plants from container and soak in a glass of water for 5 minutes 2-3 times a week. Let dry out for 3-5 minutes before placing them back into container."

"Okay, air plants," I said to them. "I can do this."

It's now been a couple of weeks and they are all still alive and still have their pretty flowers. And the best part of it is, there are no snails inside my house! So, as the summer weeks come along, and Ricky stomps a few snails here and there out on the sidewalk, I will keep my little terrarium safe and sound.

I hope.

My new buddy Francisco

Here's the ending first: LeBron James scored the winning basket with 2.2 seconds left in overtime, and the 6'2," 230-pound man sitting next to me scooped Ricky and me up in his arms in one giant bear-hug. We had only just met this man about three hours earlier.

Now back to the beginning: Ricky sat on the aisle with me to his right in American Airlines Arena in Miami. It was almost time for the 8:30 p.m. Eastern Conference Finals Game 1 to start when six Hispanic men in their late 20s filed into the seats to my right, each holding a beer in his hand and looking pretty happy.They were talking and laughing and seemed to be led by the young Papa Bear that wound up in the seat right next to me.

It didn't take long for the beer vendor roaming the aisles to determine this was a profitable spot to visit. Each time he went by, Papa Bear -- decked out in a backwards cap saying NBA Champions 2012, a white-hot Heat jersey, and black-and-white plaid Bermuda shorts -- held up six fingers and passed a little wad of money past me, never forgetting to include a substantial tip.

"I love you, man!" said the beer seller after about the third round, and then he gave my seat neighbor an appreciative fist bump.

Papa Bear turned to me (not for the first time, since he'd been chatting about the game all along) to say, "I always give a good tip. I used to be a waiter way back. Before I was a teacher."

"You're a teacher?" I asked, tilting my head upward to look him full in the face for the first time.

"Not anymore. I used to be," he said, and he introduced himself as Francisco and smiled his big, round, dimply smile at me.

"I'm a teacher," I said.

"You're a teacher? What do you teach?" he asked.

"Journalism," I said.

He then made the slightly confused face everyone gives me when I say I teach journalism.

"I'm actually an English teacher," I always have to explain.

"I taught math," he said. "Algebra and Geometry for eight years at MacArthur alternative school. I was also a basketball coach. That's why I know all the rules. Where do you teach?"

"Cypress Bay High in Weston," I said.

"Weston?" He furrowed his brow. He thought about it. "Oh, that's in Fort Lauderdale, right?"

"It's west of Fort Lauderdale," I said, making a sweeping gesture with my arm as if to indicate westness. Keep in mind, this whole conversation was being shouted over the LOUD NOISE IN THE ARENA.

The exciting game continued with lead change after lead change. The Heat were ahead. The Pacers were ahead. Francisco and his friends kept drinking beer and getting up to use the bathroom.

"This one is Yoda," said Francisco as a short, bald buddy of his exited the row. "I know him since I'm 12. I know the other guys since we're born. If the Heat lose, I'm not bringing them to any more games."

He said this smiling and laughing while his current beer sloshed around in its cup. I started calculating costs. If he brought all these guys, then the seats must have cost him a total of about $1,200. He'd purchased at least $300 in beer in front of me. Who knows how much they had consumed before they got to their seats? These guys were drinking beer the way I breathe air.

Throughout the game, Francisco kept turning to his left to talk to Ricky and me instead of turning to his right to his buddies. After one big play, he twirled toward me, his palm high in the air waiting for a High 5. I am not a person who normally gets solicited for a High 5, so I was flummoxed for a second before swinging my arm up high above my head to give his palm a rather girlie slap. (By the end of the evening, I was doing jumping two-hand slaps with gusto.)

When the game went into overtime at 11 p.m. on this Wednesday night, Francisco declared: "That's okay with me! I don't have to work tomorrow."

So just what does a former waiter/former teacher do that enables him to spend gobs of money at a Heat game with his friends? He didn't say. And while our relationship status did reach bear-hug level by the end of the night, I wasn't about to ask.

And now for an update

Following up on previous posts...

The Evil Squirrel still keeps making squawking appearances in the tree on our front lawn.

The nut tree is out of nuts for the moment.

The dog's fleas have not come back.

The Miami Heat's season is still going!

I went back to NYC for a weekend and ate another cupcake at the Plaza Food Hall. The banana cupcake with cream cheese frosting was just as delicious as last time.

I still have a red mark on my face where I had something cut off over my eyebrow. I think it gives me street cred.

Instead of just sharing the link for my last blog post on Facebook, I also tweeted it!

I have yet to get a satisfactory answer about why anyone is a member of the NRA.

There are 80 people out of over 1,000 who have not picked up their pre-ordered yearbooks, so I am not done with that paperwork.

The last flight I took was delayed three hours, so flying yet again earns its F.

I still suck at relaxing, though I'm really, really ready to give it a try once school is out.

The homeowners association where I live is considering approving metal mailboxes to replace our constantly disintegrating wooden ones. (They surveyed us about it.)

I'm making a face right now, but I'm not going to tell you which one.

For the next couple of months I will not have to try to keep other people's teens off of their cellphones. Let them text until their thumbs turn blue!

I continue to eat glutens, though I'm still not sure what they are.

The I-75 ramp onto Griffin Road is still under construction (since August), causing Bob of Bob's Barricades to have record earnings this year.

The Dream of Gatsby

It has everything that makes a movie a movie in the very best sense: the dreamlike quality that lifts the viewer out of reality and into a world that isn't a real world. The scene in The Great Gatsby where we first meet Daisy had to compete with the image in my mind, but the flowing drapes -- white, undulating, flying, covering, revealing -- are better than in my own imagination. Any film based on a beloved classic novel has a lot to contend with, to match up to, to surpass without changing what the devoted reader has created. But an iconic tale of a time period has an almost impossible task in trying to please its audience.

For the most part, Baz Luhrmann's version released this past weekend accomplishes what I didn't think it could. Tobey Maguire as the narrator is perfectly cast as the man who is there but isn't there. Carey Mulligan works as the vulnerable Daisy. The parties, the music -- I do admit I was concerned in advance about the music, about Luhrmann's potential to ruin the Jazz Age by using not jazz. But the wildness of the parties, the dreamscape of debauchery, the sparkle, the flare-up of fireworks real and metaphorical carry the audience to the past, yes, but not a real past. In the real past, the eyes of God didn't watch over the racing decadence of the 1920s, just like they don't today.

The one weakness of the film, though I hate to say it, is Leonardo DiCaprio. It could be that no actual human being could ever be Jay Gatsby. That level of charisma may not exist in anything other than the written word. DiCaprio is handsome, yes, and dazzling in those suits, in that car. But he doesn't look at people the way narrator Nick tells us he does. He doesn't capture them.

Still, for me, seeing the glamour was enough. The rainbow of shirts spilling onto the bed. The flowers overwhelming Nick's cottage. The dives taken into the pool, the streaking cars, the contrasting grayness of the in-between. The Great Gatsby takes us away to the land of dreams, where we want movies to take us.

Funny Face

People I run into in the hallways at school keep addressing me as follows: "What's wrong?!" Apparently my natural expression the last few weeks has reflected some degree of misery I wasn't aware of. So, I've been answering this question with: "Oh, just tired." And then they respond with an urgent lilt: "Why?"

They think I'm tired because of some catastrophe. "Just the usual end-of-the-year tired," I say, trying to rid myself of any false scent of the tragic that I am emitting.

It's those darned faces, again. The ones I make without realizing it. I make them when I think people are idiots. I make them when I'm impatient. I make them when I am asked to do something unpleasant.

Today's unpleasant task was proctoring a standardized test. If you've never had to do this, let me help you get the sensation of it by bringing up this familiar saying: "It's like watching paint dry." It's like that. The proctor is watching people think. For hours. Hours and hours of watching people think.

I suppose there may be some circumstances under which watching people think could be a little bit interesting. Watching a supermodel think might be interesting. Or maybe an actor, like Robert Downey, Jr. Yes, I could definitely watch Robert Downey, Jr. think for awhile. But even that would have its limits.

As we head toward summer, which should make me very happy, I will start working on banishing my miserable/funny/annoyed/baffled/bored/sassy face. The next person who runs into me in the hallway will say to me: "Wow! You look so happy! Are you thinking about Robert Downey, Jr.?"

Never a cross word

Ricky is the math guy and I am the word gal, but sometimes the twain do meet. I am not a math hysteric, and Ricky has been known to use words like opine in natural conversation. Interestingly, most newspapers house their crossword puzzles and KenKen puzzles on the same page. Ricky is drawn first to the boxed-in numbers of the KenKen, whereas I head straight for the clues of the crossword. But who gets that page first?

The equanimity of our marriage depends on the way we resolve this issue. Ricky usually digs out the puzzle section and knocks out the KenKen pretty quickly. He will then leave the page open and neatly folded to the crossword for me. Often a pen will even be nestled in the crease, clearly an offering of love.

I then plunge into the crossword, never starting in the upper left-hand corner, which for some reason causes Ricky angst.

"Why don't you start with 1 across?" he'll say after noticing I've filled in a little chunk in the middle.

"I don't know. One of the clues in the middle caught my eye first," I'll answer.

At some point I'll pause and set the crossword down; Ricky will happen by and pick it up and fill in a few answers. Then he'll leave it somewhere and I'll pick it back up again. It's a silent partnership. Or sometimes not so silent if I get stumped on a clue that Ricky is certain to know such as: "Left-handed Hall-of-Fame pitcher allergic to pine nuts." He will definitely know that one, so I'll ask.

As a matter of fact, for a math guy, Ricky knows an awful lot of fairly useless random information. He's great at Jeopardy!, even in the categories that should rightly be mine. He will sweep categories like Literary Arthropods, while the wheels of my brain keep spinning, visualizing the answers I cannot get out of my mouth fast enough. He will beat me in getting answers about books that he hasn't read but I have!

But somehow, it all works. Occasionally, I will get a Final Jeopardy answer that he doesn't know. (Ha!) And the KenKen and crossword wind up filled in. This element of our marriage is a puzzle we have solved together.

Prelude to Summer

My students are awesome. Okay, I know I shouldn't be using the term awesome, but I'm around teenagers all day, so give me a break. As I'm grinding my way toward the end of another school year, I think that I just can't do it. I can barely make it to summer. How will I ever be able to come back next year and DO THIS AGAIN? How? How?

Well, the answer is partly a good dose of summer vacation. Yes, that really helps bunches. I rest. I tan. My eye twitch goes away. I start to forget. But the bigger part of the answer is that my students are awesome.

I know in my last post/rant I complained about standardized testing WHICH IS AWFUL. But...the good part, the best part, the bestest of all the best parts is my students. They are smart and funny and kind to each other. They're polite -- to me and to each other. I am a lucky teacher to have such students. I am lucky to be in a school and a community where the students care, the parents care, the teachers care, the administrators care.

I am reminded of this at just the right moment, the end of the most exhausting year of teaching I've ever had. Earlier this week we had our end-of-year banquet for the newspaper staff. There was a slideshow of happy pictures of great memories: deadlines and field trips and friendships. There were presentations and awards. There were kind words beautifully written and spoken. There were more pictures and hugs.

So, I will do my best to stumble through the remaining few weeks of the school year. I will say my goodbyes to my sensational seniors. I will rest and forget about the tough days. And next year I will be...

You know what? My eye twitch is not really letting me say it yet, but you know where I'll be.

Standardized People

It's testing season: That time of year when students calculate and bubble and read and underline and write. That time when high-stakes, stress-inducing moments burst into the lives of children of all ages and the adults who are more and more impacted by the results. Testing season used to be just a few days, then a couple weeks.

Then something happened. Someone somewhere decided that better education is synonymous with more testing. Someone somewhere came to the conclusion that tests are infallible tools of measurement that can quantify the quality of and degree of talent and brilliance in a person. I don't know who that someone somewhere is, but it is certainly not any of the outstanding, caring, hard-working, constantly embattled teachers I know personally.

So testing season has expanded. Weeks and weeks of testing go on seemingly endlessly. There are practice tests and pre-tests and tests and post-tests and make-up tests and re-tests. There are resulting scores made from complicated formulas using mysterious, sometimes even imaginary, variables. The system wants standardized answers taught in standardized lessons by standardized teachers in standardized schools. But human thought isn't standardized. Creativity, innovation, problem-solving, invention, imagination, humor, beauty are not standardized. Problems and challenges that we all face are not standardized. Life is not standardized.

The national trend in education is depressing, demoralizing, deadening for all the good teachers out there who still try to do the right thing by their students in spite of our march toward Bubble Nation. Florida has been the epicenter of much of the experimentation. The experimentation is wrong. It is a failure. But there is no standardized test I can come up with to prove that to anyone.

Social Media is #Exhausting

Snapchat, Instagram, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Flickr, Pinterest, Google+, Friendster, Goodreads, Vine. Creating a username, password, and complete profile. Making sure to have pictures, videos, posts, statuses, followers, friend requests, comments, likes, check-ins, endorsements, updates, hashtags. Does anyone else find all of this exhausting?

When does anyone have time to do anything else? Like #takeawalk? Or just, I don't know, #think? I keep waiting for the stopping point, like when TV hit Blu-ray.

I have begun to get suspicious of why so many of these innovations are named with two words slapped together, often with a missing letter or a weird capitalization in the middle. That's not very innovative. I'm concerned that it's all becoming #mindnumbing. Here are some suggestions: BrainFart, DumbDwn, NoThink, StatusHunt, BragFest, EgoGo.

Vine is the one that recently pushed me over the edge. My reaction was: ANOTHER ONE?! Not that I have all the others before it. I'm frozen at Facebook level, which is probably at least seven social media trends behind. I'm at the equivalent of "Soulja Boy," when there's been "Jump on It," "Gangnam Style" and "Harlem Shake." Or maybe I'm still at "The Electric Slide."

Perhaps other people have a greater capacity for updating and ditching than I do. Oh my blog. What's happened to all of us?

Come here, my little cupcake

Ever since my last trip to New York a few weeks ago, I've been dreaming about the most wonderful cupcake in the universe. It was in the basement of the Plaza Hotel in the Food Hall at Billy's Bakery. And the most amazing part of this whole story is that the cupcake WASN'T EVEN CHOCOLATE. I know! Hard to believe, right? What could possibly be better than chocolate? (As a side note: I am always suspicious of the true character of any person who claims to not like chocolate. Alien being? Most likely.)

But back to the cupcake. The cake part was banana and the frosting on top was of the cream cheese variety. It was sensational! The perfect density. The perfect level of moisture in the cake. The firm-yet-creaminess of the icing.

I have begun a pre-next-cupcake exercise routine just so I can eat more of these the next time I go to New York. Notice I say these, as in, plural cupcakes. Oh, New York, why do you have to be so fattening?

Here's a link to a story about the Food Hall. I don't think most tourists know about it, and it's a great place to eat, even if for some insane reason you don't want a cupcake.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/23/dining/the-food-hall-under-the-plaza-expands.html?_r=0

Conversations with My Husband (Sample #1)

This morning in the bathroom while I was brushing my teeth and my husband was shaving and reading the sports section, he posed a question to me.

"Who are the only three players on the Heat to never be a part of March Madness?" he asked.

"Hmm," I said as toothpaste burbled out of my mouth. "Well, the first one is easy, it's LeBron, because he didn't go to college."

(I will pause here for a moment, because I know all of you ladies out there are thinking: "What a lucky woman! Her husband is obviously a romantic." Yes, it is true.)

My analysis continued: "Definitely not D. Wade, because he was at Marquette. Not Chalmers, he hit that big winning shot."

I tried to gauge Ricky's silence over the buzzing of his electric razor. I took it as a sign that I was correct so far and continued.

"Norris Cole has the whole green van thing, the one that went with him to different championships, and he went to college four years, so not him. Um, Udonis and Mike Miller were teammates at UF, so..."

Here Ricky jumped in: "So you have your answer on them. If you have two NBA players on the same college team, you know they were in the tournament. As a matter of fact, they were in the Final Four."

I was a bit perturbed by his interruption. I hadn't quite gotten there about Udonis and Miller, but perhaps Ricky was getting impatient with the slow pace of my analysis. My mind started wandering to the centers. Birdman (Chris Andersen) had joined the team mid-season.

"You know, I don't really know much about Birdman," I said.

"That's No. 2," Ricky said, once again a bit more quickly than I would have liked. "He went for one year of junior college. The last one is Rashard Lewis. He came right out of high school, like LeBron. Remember, that's why they said he's already been in the league 15 years."

I hadn't actually remembered that, and I don't think I was ever going to guess Rashard Lewis. But Ricky and I had finished our grooming, and, you know, these romantic moments can only last so long.

Mrs. Cleanest

Hey, germaphobes! If you were ever going to visit my house, now is the time. I have the world's cleanest dog and the world's cleanest house right at this very moment. The process of de-fleaing our little Daisy dog entailed spring cleaning on steroids. Every inch of carpet, every throw rug, every pillow, dust ruffle, mattress pad, couch cushion, bath mat has been vacuumed and/or washed and/or thrown in the dryer at inferno-grade temperatures and then vacuumed and/or washed and/or dried again. And maybe again.

The dog herself has been dipped and medicated and dipped and brushed and dried and scented. She is a delicious little ball of beige fluff decked out in her new hot-pink collar.

So, come on over and breathe in the smell of freshly washed linens. I just hope you don't mind if I check behind your ears first.

Cut It Out Already

Florida is a great place to be a dermatologist. Continuing on my spring break fun-fest, I had something cut off my face yesterday. I am trying to determine if it looks more or less horrifying with the Band-Aid on it. My choices are: exposed red divot over my left eyebrow, or bandage that won't exactly stick on the right way over my left eyebrow. When I left the doctor's office, I had a circular Band-Aid on it that looked like a bull's-eye. Right now I'm rockin' the red divot look. If you see me out and about, try to pretend you don't notice it. Maybe if I wear lipstick today, that'll distract people. Or I could try some asymmetrical emo bangs that come all the way down over my left eye. Bright side: This could be the beginning of a new fashion look for me.

My Dog Has Fleas (and other Spring Break adventures!)

Chaperoning 13 high school students on a trip to New York City is full of pressure. Even when the kids are wonderful (which mine were), you've got 13 humans with 13 sets of needs. On top of that, my own personal children back in Florida were kind enough to keep updating me on the home front.

Leah: Informed us of a hold on her account at college that needed to be cleared before she could register for fall classes. Me: "What's the hold? I thought we were all paid up." Leah: "I locked myself out of my dorm room." Me: "They charge for that?" Leah: "Um. A few times. But don't worry, I wasn't completely naked!"

Jonathan: His friend's dog ate his wallet that was given to him by his girlfriend who bought it while in Italy. And the dog ate his driver's license, too.

Amy: She called about our dog. "Daisy has bugs on her!" Me: "What do you mean bugs?" Amy: "Live bugs! Crawling on her!"

Meanwhile, back in NYC...JetBlue lost one student's luggage, apparently forever. Another felt the flu coming on. Three didn't get off the subway fast enough and got lost on the mean streets of Central Park West. (Watch out for nattily dressed doormen and highly paid nannies from Sweden!) None of them was dressed warmly enough. And it was practically mandatory that someone had to be lactose intolerant.

Though our journey to New York for the Columbia Scholastic Press Association convention was a success, my long-awaited reward of spring break (which started while we were on the trip) did not work out as planned. Did you know that fleas in Florida have developed a tolerance to Frontline repellent? Ha! Well, I sure do now! The bugs Amy spotted on our 12-year-old, inside-the-house Daisy turned out to be the Super Bowl of flea gatherings. We got home late Saturday night, and Sunday morning I was up giving Daisy a flea bath while Ricky vacuumed and set up fogging canisters around the house.

I guess I'll get to rest eventually. It's only about nine more weeks until summer, right?

Newsies knows its audience

Idea for a Broadway show: Gather a bunch of handsome, athletic, young (or young-looking) men who can dance masculinely and athletically while singing and winking flirtatiously at the audience. A hit? I think so! The distinctly high pitched cheering and squealing coming from the audience at the end of the big numbers and the equally high pitched cheering and whooping at the end of the show would indicate that someone had a really, really good idea on this one: Newsies The Musical.

Let's see. Who really adores Broadway musicals? People who adore cute boys adore musicals, that's who. Someone noticed that Billy Elliot was doing well in spite of the fact that no one has any idea what the heck the labor/union plot is in that show set in a coal mining town in Northern England. Just what are they complaining about in those British accents anyway? No one knows! But look at those adorable boys!

So, replace faces smeared with coal dust with faces smeared with newspaper ink, move from Northern England to New York City, and swap the British accents for the old-timey "dems" and "dose" of the Big Apple. Disney has even managed to give us a strike we can understand while humming along to the score.

Newsies, I tip my plaid newsboy cap to you.

Actual video of the Evil Squirrel!

Since my daughter Amy is a teenager, she always has on her person enough technology to launch a satellite into orbit. Therefore, filming a quick, impromptu video of her mother's arch nemesis was no problem. Because of Amy's alert reaction while she was taking our dog out one morning, I now am able to share with all of you the infamous Evil Squirrel who continues to torment me ever since the Tumbleweed Incident. No daughter has ever given her mother a better gift.