Housekeeping

Sometimes I wonder why I even jot notes in my Palm when I never go back and write them up in blog form. So in the interest of freeing up some memory on my Palm, here are the bits and pieces that have been floating around in there.

One of John’s former classmates visited us while she and her husband were on their “memory tour” of Germany over the summer. Hannah loves to play hostess, and she proceeded to tell them all about our apartment and to introduce them to our cats. “Eliza is a big titty baby.” John’s friends are so cultivated that they didn’t even know the expression. This means that John is a cracker x 2, because I certainly didn’t teach her to say that.

I was waiting to cross the street one day, and I heard someone singing along at top volume to Tenacious D’s “Tribute” (aka, The Best Song in the World). It was the last place in the world I expected to hear it. (Usually I listen to it at home on our computer.)

Why did the guy sitting behind me on the bus smell like cigarettes and melted gummi bears? Who can say?

In reference to the class-hijacker: WANKER! (Wish I were British so I could pull that off properly.)

Hannah had a temporary hatred of xmas candy recently. She desperately wanted me to buy her some Jelly Bellies (Bellys? Hell if I know) so she could try out their recipes, and she had finally talked me into it. Except the department store we went to—where we both knew there were floor-to-ceiling bins of jelly beans—had blocked access to the bins with their displays of xmas candy. For 2 days, Hannah would randomly burst out in an angry hiss, “I hate xmas candy!” until I found her a mixed bag of Jelly Bellies at the other location of the department store. Now xmas candy is AOK again.

We sometimes hear some loud scuffling around coming from upstairs, and we used to think it was our 2 cats. Lately we’ve noticed that it also happens when Missy Cat is downstairs (i.e., Eliza Cat is alone upstairs), so John and I naturally assumed that Eliza was merely possessed or deranged or otherwise having some sort of episode. Case closed. But Hannah has a better explanation (or at least more entertaining). An evil gnome who formerly lived on the roof managed to get into our apartment through an open window and now spends his time terrorizing and trying to eat our cats. It’s as good a theory as any, as far as I am concerned.

Hannah found her Disney princess paper dolls while on school vacation this last week and has gotten a surprising amount of entertainment out of them. Each princess—Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty—comes with a prince—labeled “Prince”, how helpful—and girls and boys both come with their own outfits for mixing and matching. The first thing Hannah did was to grant each couple a divorce and pair them back up with a new partner. One prince has gone AWOL, so I think Cinderella is still single. Then she arranged them on the couch so they could 1. watch the video of Cinderella with us, and 2. act in a movie of Hannah’s own devising. I don’t know what the movie was actually supposed to be about, because Hannah spent more of her time on her cell-phone (drawn on paper by herself), telling the producer to get off her back, she’s trying to work! And who can work with the producer calling every 2 minutes?! Sheesh! She quits!

I couldn’t find a correspondingly hideous photo on the Internet to illustrate the horror that my classmate unleashed on the rest of us, so you will just have to use your imagination to fill in the spaces in my description. Picture a purse, made of red “leather”, of the roundish, pouchy variety. Add a ruffled edge, still red “leather”, to the top, along with 2 dark-brown handles. Now add a wide stripe across its width, slightly below the center, a stripe made of leopard print, edged with more ruffles of red “leather”. Did you sprain your brain? Me, too.