Your Neighborhood Librarian lies back and tries to relax

Why don't I floss? Why don't I FLOSS?

But I don't. So every couple of years, I end up having to have the roots of my teeth scaled, or planed or whatever they call it - I mean, whatever they do call it it amounts to SCRAPED. SCRAPED UGH ROOTS OF TEETH UGH. And you have to get numbed up for it, and now half of my face looks like I have Bell's Palsy again.

You guessed it. This is:

Your Neighborhood Librarian Goes to the Dentist

I had Bell's Palsy once already and it wasn't pretty, ladies and gentlemen! No. Pretty is a thing it wasn't. I looked like I was having a stroke at all times. They need a new name for that shit, "Bell's Palsy" sounds like something that comes in a little yellow cardboard box that you sprinkle on chicken. If I needed to blink, I had to use my finger to shut my left eye. If I wanted to drink through a straw, I had to endure the ridicule of my children. And if I wanted to sneak outside for a smoke after said children were asleep, I had to actually pinch the left side of my mouth closed around the cigarette.

Kim Mulkey, women's bball coach at Baylor,
would dearly like to be able to keep her left eye open.
I feels ya, jocky lady.

You mighta thought I would have quit smoking at that point, but I DIDN'T. NO. I don't have that many vices left, and so I am keeping it up. Here are my vices: I smoke, and I - well I drink, of course I drink, I have little kids - I watch Justified solely to see Raylan Givens with his shirt off, and I don't floss.

Oh, man! Making the f sound with my mouth all numbed up like this makes me make a little fart sound with my cheek. Work tonight is going to be humiliating.

[Once again, Your Neighborhood Librarian is posting from the highway. You live in Baltimore, you see a blue minivan on the Beltway with a woman in it kind of hollering and visibly complaining into thin air, my advice is, give me a wide berth.]

Ok and so I have this not-bad dentist. She is little, and funny, and she's a little bit of a wack job, and she has a nice staff. She's a referral from a co-worker, and I did ask my co-worker first, like, well what do they do while you're an hour in the chair? And she says, "Well just the radio on really, or you can bring your iPod." And I thought, "Hmph."

I'm used to my kids' dentist, with all the little liquid ring-toss games, and the stuffed animals, and the waiting room TV playing Fantasia - which is AWESOME to explain to little kids - well not little kids, I guess my boys aren't little kids anymore. In fact, it is because they're not little kids anymore that we can have these great discussions about the relationship of the music to the images. They totally get it. "The trumpet there is like sunlight!" And it is because they're not little kids anymore that I can tell them the story of the time my friends Billy and Steve took acid for the first time and went to see Fantasia in the movie theater. Except I don't say "acid." I just have to say, "Like, imagine you were a really little kid, or from another planet, and you saw all these symmetrical dancing animal things in all the wrong colors."

Not good when on drugs.

Yeah but Bonnie's office isn't like that. So I get there, and while they are numbing me up - and they numbed me good and proper, I have got to give them that. Man, I am all a fan of being seriously seriously numb for root planing. I like it when somebody is working on my teeth and all that bothers me is the sound. I like it when it just seems like somebody's doing work on a little piece of sculpture somewhere. Tik-y tik-tik tik. That's fine! I don't need any wince-y action. Of course, I end up looking like Frankenstein for the rest of the day, but I don't care that much. Maybe I will later. I gotta work tonight!

[Here I let out a laugh that I'm not sure I ever have heard from myself before - a totally evil cackle. If I could figure out how to put a sound sample online, I would for this.]

That'll be good. But I worked with Bell's Palsy and nobody seemed to notice. So probably no big deal.

So yeah they numbed me up, and the dentist was talking to her assistant, about babysitting her niece and nephew the night before and she said, "You know, I always read them my niece's favorite book, oh she just loves this book! She loves Goodnight Moon!" And I - you know, I been working with children's books for 8 years now, and been sort of critical about them for, well, longer than that maybe, and Goodnight Moon? Goodnight Moon is possibly the children's book I hate the worst in the WHOLE WORLD. Why do we say goodnight to the air? Does that not mean that we're going to sleep in a coffin?

But her 2 year old niece loves it. And she was saying to the other woman, she was saying, "Oh and do you know? they showed me a new one, they showed me Goodnight iPad." And the other dentist was all, "What?! Goodnight iPad, what's wrong with people?" So my dentist says, "No, no, it's really great. It's about turning off all our electronic things. And it's a really good idea, because little Michael, he wants to have that iPad there in the bed with him, he just won't go to bed without it." And I'm kind of spitting out the suction tube to ask, "How old is little  Michael?" FOUR. FOUR and he has his own iPad that he takes to bed with him. But, you know, not her kid, so I can't judge. Although.

So the other woman says, "Oh I was just in the bookstore the other day, and I found a really beautiful copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle." Now, Eric Carle, everybody says Eric Carle is a lovely lovely - lovely lovely man, a wonderful man, but me, I've never gotten the where with the Eric Carle. Yeah he makes the pretty paint splotchies on the paper, nice color sense, and he cuts the pieces out in sort of satisfying shapes, then he collages the whole thing up into, you know, various... tedious... books... for little kids. And I don't want to say that too loud because I know the entire librarian community is going to start revving up to throw shit at me.

This is what they look like when they come for you.

Anyway, they're exclaiming about how great these books are, and I was thinking, "Wow, I'm not even going to open my mouth, really" (except my mouth wasn't anything but open, it was open all that time like I am a fucking gargoyle on the corner of Notre Dame cathedral).

Then the dentist walked out of the room and the assistant, she was like, "Do you have any kids?" And I say yeah, they're 8 and 10, and she says "Well I guess you kind of remember reading picture books to them," and I said well actually I'm a librarian and I do service to children, so I read picture books all the time, you know, 5 days a week probably. And she says, she exclaims, "Oh! That's so great!" and I agree with her, yeah, pretty great. And she goes, "AWW. My favorite book, my favorite children's book... has got to be... The Giving Tree."

And I'm thinking to myself WOW! THREE FOR THREE! I hate The Giving Tree. Everybody who is sane hates The Giving Tree. So then she goes, "Do you have a favorite children's book?" and takes the instruments out of my mouth so that I can answer. And I'm like... Ahh. Umm. No. I - I don't. I - You know? I don't. What do you want me to say? I could say, you know, I love The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper. I could say we're listening to The Sword in the Stone by T.H. White right now and it's wonderful. I could say... but I... nothing will leap to my mind. Nothing like Horton Hears a Who ever leaps to my mind in this situation. Nothing that everybody else can go, "Ahh yes! I know that book and I like that book. No, my mind goes, "Well, Kat Falls's Dark Life is a super-duper book that I would recommend to any child in his right mind..." and that is not the answer that that person is looking for from me.

So. She scales my teeth. Bad. I didn't eat before I went in there because I had a job interview beforehand, so I left home, I'm wearing my cute little suit, I brushed my teeth like crazy and Listerine-d my face all up, and then I had this job interview, and I'm not going to eat after the job interview because I can't make it back home and brush my teeth, and you don't want the dentist to think you're a slob. So I didn't eat anything, and she's scaling away, and I'm listening to Hall and Oates on the god damn office radio. God Damn the Lite Rock.

Which brings us to Henry Rollins. Henry Rollins in a monologue he did a long time ago, that I had on a cassette tape, and this is from when he was younger, and had dark hair and still pretended he was a punk rocker or a "spoken word poet" instead of being a stand up comedian, which, you know face it folks... Hey you want me to blow your mind? Henry. Has a Blog. On Vanity Fair. YES HE DOES.

In this monologue Henry was describing being a teenager and working in Georgetown in Washington, DC. He worked at the Hagen Dasz, which was probably a pretty sweet gig for a teenager. I worked at Baskin Robbins at about the same time and Hagen Dasz was really high-end. That was late 70s, early 80's maybe. It was the beginning of the whole cult of the brand, when the idea of gourmet popcorn and gourmet ice cream was a mind-blowing blast of innovation. Like Thomas Jefferson up in the mass produced snack food industry. What's next?? we were probably thinking. Gourmet beer? HA ha ha ha.

Sigh. We had no idea the words that were about to be slewn at us. "Artisanal." "Microbrew." You know, we never had minibrews. We went straight to micro. There was Anheuser Busch and then there was Sam Adams and then suddenly there were seventy different kinds of Red Hook. Never a minibrew. You know why? I just figured out why. "Mini" sounds feminine, while "micro" sounds all science-y and butch. Men. Fuck 'em.

HENRY - we're talking about Henry right now, keep up - HENRY had this whole little diatribe about how persecuted he was working in the Georgetown Hagen Dasz as a teenager because the manager - Gary or Larry or Kevin - insisted on keeping the radio tuned to the Lite Rock station. "So that the customers of Hagen Dasz could rock litely..." he said. That was probably WASH-FM now that I'm thinking about it. Ha. Actually I should probably back off on old Hank because I would have pitched a fit about that too. WASH-FM. UGH. Henry, you know, Henry is kind of full of shit in a lot of ways, but right here - he's got a point.

And so lite rock has not improved since those times - it's now 30 years, THIRTY YEARS - and it's still Hall & Oates, it's still Phil Collins, it's still Air Supply, and like they've added that A-O song, and uh, Words Cant Bring me down, which is kind of a pretty song... but in the context of Phil Collins (oh my cousin Stuart is going to kill me) and... and...


I'm not talking bout the live-in
and I don't wanna rape your sight
but there's a cold wind blowin the stars around
and I'd really like to fuck ya tonight*

Um. GOD. ANYTHING will sound terrible in that context. So, aw, jeez, I'm Just Fucking Trapped listening to this music, and the tik-y tik-y scrape sounds of the tiny chisel in my mouth... and you know, here's something that doesn't happen anymore - we're not trapped anymore. You know? You go and you have to wait for a prescription, and you have to do something, and you're not trapped. You have your phone. You're doodley doodling, and you're texting your girlfriend, and checking your email, and you're doing stuff. You're not trapped. You're not sitting there staring at the wall. Wishing - WISHING - for a six-month-old copy of People magazine.

That's what they should do, you know, you want a nostalgic drama sitcom, you don't make Mad Men, with all these people and all this plot, and all the getting off and the smoking, NO! You have half an hour of people sitting waiting for shit not doing anything else. Not able to call someone on the phone, not able to multitask, they're just like sitting there. That's what you're missing, boys and girls, that's nostalgia for you. Those are the good old days. Uh Huh.

So um, I said, I didn't eat before I went to the dentist, and now I'm driving home, and now my face is getting all coooold. Anaesthesia wearing off. And I'd really like to stop at Zeke's and get me a nice coffee with a bunch of sugar in it, but I cannot. Because if I try to drink coffee in this face, it will just spill right out of my mouth and down my front. Probably burn my tongue too. And people will laugh at me, because I know those boys at Zeke's, they are my friends, and your friends laugh at you when coffee pours out of your mouth like your mouth is the mouth of a dead person. Complain to the owner, you say? I could not. He would be the one pissing his pants laughing the hardest.

But. So I'm not going to do that. You know what else I am not going to do? This woman she was like "Ok, well," and she's rinsing me out, and squirting some stuff that is like Betadine but not poisonous on my gums, and she is saying "Ok, there's a lot of inflammation here... we were able to remove a lot of bacteria..." and  great, you know two things I like to hear about, inflammation AND bacteria, IN my mouth, "so tonight," she says, "tonight's definitely like an overcooked pasta night, or soup."

And I was like, what is overcooked pasta? Nobody overcooks pasta in my house, there is no such thing. And Also... I'm Starving. And Also... does this mean that before the anaesthesia wears off, I can drive through Taco Bell? And chew things? Running the risk of things falling out of my mouth and onto my shirt, but I am In My Car and I do not give a shit. Or is that actually going to make my mouth bleed?

Oh lovely. There's two guys getting arrested sitting on the curb. Just across the street from where they did a big gun bust.

So. This is your neighborhood librarian. I will not be enjoying any of the treats on offer at the LEGO Club bake sale today. I will not be stopping off at Zeke's to get myself a double Cubano, no milk. I will not be driving through Taco Hell. No. I will be starving to death. Which means I will work tonight and then I will go out with my girlfriends and I will still be starving to death, but that will not stop me from drinking two beers (which is what I do on Mondays, remember?), and getting really really messed up.

I need to sigh right now. Big sigh. God I'm hungry.

Your Neighborhood Librarian. At the Dentist. Signing off.

*all lyrics not guaranteed to be accurate.

GRILL

Thanks, I like yours too! What you have left of it.

When you dye your hair hot pink, as I do (or if you dye your hair Virgin Rose or Fishbowl Blue or Iguana Green), sometimes that is the only thing people can see about you. Fair enough. If I meet a person who has pierced that spot right above your nose between your eyebrows and put a ring through it, that may be the only thing I will be able to see about him or her, at least until I get to know that person a little better.

No I'm not going to put a picture of someone with that piercing right here. Thank me later.

But I feel I ought to document some of the observations I have been able to make while being that person with the cape of long pink hair for I think six years:

• Some people assume that you are WIIIILD and CRAAAAZAY and tell you things you don't want to know. Note to swingers: KEEP IT TO YOURSELF I DO NOT WANT TO KNOW.

• Some people assume that I am a dangerous freak and possibly shouldn't be allowed to raise my own children. Note to customers at BJ's: I'm fine, really. Everyone yells at their kids sometimes.

• Some people think that it is REALLY FUNNY that I am a librarian. Note to old men in bars: you have NO IDEA how diverse librarians really are. Except for the fact that we are almost all women and almost all own cats. So, actually, only kind of diverse.

Also, if you have to ask:

1. Yes it's natural. I was born this way.
2. I get it this color by eating a lot of shrimp, like a flamingo.

So far, nobody has asked my WHY my hair is this color, except very small children. Small children get a pass. Small children get it when you say, "Because I think it looks pretty." Small children sometimes buy the line about the shrimp. Small children sometimes don't even look twice. Tiny babies don't like it though. They are not sure what's going on, but they know it's not supposed to be that color. Older babies assume it's part of a toy, and try to eat it. But of course, older babies try to eat everything, so the color of my hair may not be a factor.

But the most common comment I get is, "I like your hair." Most of the time I am pleased to say, "Thanks," and move swiftly along. I mean, who can argue with a compliment?

That last question was rhetorical. I mean, obviously the answer is, "Me, that's who." I can argue with a compliment. Oh yeah. I can get downright riled about a compliment. Because, you know, it might sound innocuous, but in fact there are at least three distinct versions of "I like your hair."

• There's the actual compliment, which usually comes from a person to whom I can truthfully respond, "Thanks! I like your boots!" 

• Then there's the "I like your hair" that comes from a place of, "I am quite threatened by the fact that you are different looking and I am going to throw it right back at you." 

• Thirdly, there is a species of man who says "I like your hair" but who really means "You have pink hair, I bet you are a unusual in other ways too," which can be further translated to, "I bet you put out." No, I am not kidding about this. Really icky guys have assumed that any female whose physical presentation runs counter to what they are familiar with is EASY ever since... ever since the friggin suffragettes. Ladies - if you have ever been a punk rock girl, a hippie chick, or a goth, and god knows if you're a roller derby mama - you know what I'm talking about.

It's pretty awful. The most vicious, sarcastic responses roll through my mind sometimes in response to the innocuous, "I like your hair."

"My what?"
"Well that's a relief. I did it just for you and I was hoping you'd like it."
"Thanks. You must really know a lot about grooming - I've been appreciating your odor from all the way over here."
"Thanks. I like your attempt to provoke a conversation with me."
"No I will not give you a blow job."
"Thanks. I like your facial sores."
"Well, shit. Now I have to dye it back to blonde."

Your Neighborhood Librarian Has a Monkey on her Back

Oh my god. Here's a saga. The worst kind of saga, really, because a good saga, a really good kind of saga would have some heroes, swords, boats... or maybe it would be a family saga, with adultery and illegitimate children, sweeping landscapes, sunsets, horseback riding, estates handed down.




There would be Kim Cattrall with brown hair (still on her back though I see) and Don Johnson in a ponytail wig. OMG that's who Coach Taylor looks like! Don Johnson! Wow.

But this isn't that kind of saga. No, this story I am sad to say is not the kind of John Jakes melodrama that happens to Randolph Mantooth and Delta Burke, nope. It is instead the kind of saga that happens to you and me, the saga about something that needs to happen but that just... doesn't happen. Something that needs to get done that just... somehow cannot become done.

A thing that is like that square wheel on the wheelbarrow, the worst wheelbarrow ever manufactured - who makes a wheelbarrow with a square wheel I ask you? You push it and push it and it is just never going to roll. It is a story of Fuck You I am Going to Place a Bomb Under You and You Will Move THEN Won't You You Piece of Shit.

Like that.

It's about an old sofabed. Not about Vikings or Forsytes, no, not about bastard children or kidnapped ranis. This is about a bastard couch. One that won't go away.


Your Neighborhood Librarian Gets on the Couch

All right so my old couch, we had that couch a long time. Since... about since Bob moved in with me. I'm going to go ahead and say 1997. He might not. Before that, I had a blue velvet couch, synthetic blue velveteen flocked with tiny fleurs-de-lis, that I'd inherited from my ex-boss at a company that published medical textbooks.

It was pretty awful. That couch was... I was almost proud of that couch being so awful. I was happy that I was the kind of person who had a hand-me-down couch from her ex boss who clearly had NO TASTE. But it was a couch and you could sit on it. You could even sleep on it, as many many friends would attest if they were still my friends. Different story.

Eventually I hated it too much though, and I went into Jennifer Convertibles in New York City and bought a floor sample sofabed in an extremely unpleasant brown and brown brocade. Brown and brown with maybe a little weak green. It had a sheen to it, that brocade. Unpleasant.

Baby, husband, cat. 2001, Brooklyn.

But we had the couch. Very deep couch, I'll say that. Comfortable to sit on. In a small apartment you live your life on the couch. We ate our meals sitting on that couch, watched Buffy. The first pictures of our baby were on that couch, our old baby that is. That means that we watched New York One in September of 2001 on that couch too. But let's focus on the baby.

And then we moved to Baltimore, brought the couch with us. Bought a house, had another baby. Bob's mom came for a visit and we wanted her to have a little more support when she sat, so I found out how to re-stuff the cushions, I bought batting and did that whole little project, plumped them back up real firm. Couple of years later I did it again because - oh I'm telling you, I'm never going to buy a couch with down cushions again. Down smushes.

Soon enough, though, the upholstery of the couch started to get really frayed. That brocade wasn't as durable as one would have thought, given how ugly it was. I mean that.


[Here I whistle Rhapsody in Blue for a while. I recorded this story driving to A.C. Moore to buy a giant block of wax because I was going to make wax hands for our school's Film Club's 90 Second Newbery Award Film Festival entry, Dead End in Norvelt. One of the main characters dips her hands in molten wax to loosen up her arthritic joints and this causes the protagonist to faint, which is a scene we cannot not film, but there's no way I'm directing a fourth grader to stick her hands in hot wax. So I'm doing it myself. Coating a pair of work gloves in wax so that the kid can put them on and pretend to have just boiled her hands in wax. I think my interlude of whistling Gershwin might have been me reckoning whether this was, in the words of the Bard, a Good Idea? Or not.]

2005

So I went to a... you know, I used to research the crap out of stuff. When I think of the trouble I used to go to... anyway I found this warehouse that sold remaindered upholstery material, and I went there with my mom and looked at all their huge bolts of fabric and jeez louise upholstery fabric is so awful, isn't it? Oh my god it's terrible. None of it is any good. That brown-on-brown brocade, we learned, after looking at fourteen hundred bolts of ugly fabric, that brown brocade was pretty darn nice.

2007

Anyway, I picked out a fabric. It had frogs on it. Yep. And we had a slipcover made. And because this is waaaay beyond any kind of expertise of mine, we asked the guys at the fabric place to recommend someone who could do this, and so this awesome little tiny old Portuguese guy with the biggest shears you have ever seen in your whole entire life came to our house and measured the crap out of the couch, every little nook and cranny, and with his huuuge shears, I mean the kind of shears that could snip the head off a baby, cut up the pieces of fabric and took them away with him.

And then for almost as much as we paid for the couch in the first place, we had a very durable custom slipcover with a pattern of frogs on it. Very nice. Very happy with that slipcover. And we had that couch, sitting under its slipcover of frogs, for many years.

In fact, that couch is kind of central to the identity of another project I am involved with. The key image of that project is always the kids and me or their friends or relatives sitting on that couch reading.

Illustration by Todd Brizzi

But eventually, like everything, the couch had to die. The couch got to the point where if your head accidentally clonked back against the back, it was like hitting a railing, because all of the padding was gone from the arms and from the back. And short of taking it all apart and repadding it, there was no way to resurrect it. And it was a sofabed and we didn't need a sofabed anymore. And the slipcover was getting bald and faded and shiny too.

2009

So the kids and I went to a furniture store - hate furniture stores, oh my god I always end up feeling so ripped off. And just... picked out a couch. Like, it kind of took us less than 45 minutes, we walked around and sat on a hundred couches and went like, "Yeah. This one, fine." I mean, it's kind of funny. It took me four years to decide that the green I wanted for the living room walls was the right green, and longer than that to find just the right coffee table, but couch? I was like, 'arms and a back, check; seat, check; not made out of chipboard, SOLD.'

Of course the floor model had a price on it, $728, and we sat down and we looked at all the fabric samples and the books and compared the bla and the bla, and the guy came back and he was like, "$1900."

And I'm like "What the...? How does that happen? Okay you're going to try to charge me a hundred dollars for delivery, but where does the rest of this come from? I am not actually asking you to cover this thing in woven platinum strands, you know. What is that floor model upholstered in? What do you want to to tell me? That that's not actually upholstered, you just kind of wrapped it up in plastic bags? from the Safeway? Because whatever that sample couch is upholstered in, that's what I want. Itchy brown synthetic tweed? Sounds beautiful. We will just not sit on it when we're wearing shorts. I can do that. Because I wanted to pay $728 for a couch and not NINETEEN HUNDRED."

I mean that's bullshit. I would have gone to Design Within fucking Reach if I'd wanted to pay two grand for a couch. Although. I wouldn't. Because at DWR, of course, the most deceptively named company on the planet, none of that stuff is within reach. And then even if you close your eyes and pretend you're like Courtney Cox or some such, the kind of person who buys such things, and you buy a lovely modern armchair, the nicest piece of furniture in the house, then you're going to get two cats for Christmas and they are going to see that gorgeous red bouclé fabric and decide it is just the most delicious thing to sink their claws in ever, even when you put the double sided tape up on the chair and put the scratching post right next to it and have squirt bottles of water always at hand to aim at them when they do it.

And then you're going to have to close your eyes every time you pass through that corner of the living room so that you don't see the little cat-claw pulls in the red bouclé, and with your eyes closed you can't help stepping on LEGO OW OW OW OW and you end up yelling at the kids when it's really your own damn fault for buying nice furniture. It's not worth having nice things.

Ahem. That red chair is very pretty but it's not worth having nice things.


And of course what's on the floor model is "a discontinued fabric." Yeesh. Furniture salesmen. Liars! FURNITURE SALESMEN ERGO IKEA. There's a logical construct for you. Cause and motherfuckin' effect.

Well we end up ordering the couch. In grey. A plain dark grey that I didn't think we'd live to regret too badly.

The new couch, 2011.

Of course, back then we only had the one cat. And that was the cat who ran and hid under our bed the day we brought the first baby home from the hospital and who hasn't really come out since. Her and her late sister both. Really. Of the seventy-five thousand photographs I've taken since the first child was born, there was never a single frame that captured both a conscious cat and a conscious child. That picture above? Kitty crept out after the baby fell asleep so that she could curl up and sleep near her man. She is very attached to Bob. She's a very vocal cat, at night she stalks around the upstairs going "Bob! Hey Bob! Where are ya? Why are all the lights out?" Not very smart. And god when he's out of town she's really confused. "Bob! Bob! Bob! Bob? You down here? Bob? This shoe smells like you! Is that you Bob? No that's a shoe. Bob! Hey!"

And it is not like there is any basis for the skittishness exhibited by herself and her late sister. Nothing Has Ever Happened to this cat. Or her late sister. And it's hard to believe either of them have or had the imagination to think up horrors that small boys might inflict on helpless cats.

And in fact, now that we have new cats, our boys are cuddly and gentle and playful with them. So there, you old bitch. But the new cats do shed on the new couch. Oh well.

The night before the new couch was delivered, which I wasn't there for, I don't know how I was not there for that but I wasn't and that was pretty neat, the night before it came we hauled the old couch out to the porch.

And then immediately after it came, I took off all the back cushions and lined them up on the futon in the basement to make a kind of giant couch for where we watch movies, and I put a whole ton of throw pillows  - oh my god this is the whole other reason we got a new couch I forgot about this part!

HEAD LICE.

My kids' school for a while there got head lice on like a CONTINUOUS BASIS. Once a month the letter would come home from school, some kid had lice and we'd have to scan scalps. All clear though, for years. But last spring I guess it was it was just our turn. Oy. Shaved the kids' heads, suffocated all the pillows and comforters, washed the bedding. And among the things I put in those giant Ziploc bags that they might as well just call the Die Lice Die bags were the cushions from the back of the sofa.

So for a month we just used throw pillows on the sofa, and I got to like it. I don't care for the cushions anymore. Pillows are more colorful, more arrangeable. I am pro throw pillow.

Shaved heads, no cushions, 2011

NEXT

Old couch is sitting out on the porch, and we have a covered porch, it's going to be ok. I figure we'll call for a bulk trash pickup from the city, Baltimore does free bulk trash pickup, they come around once a month and you have to call ahead of time to get on their list but it's a terrific service of this city. In our neighborhood it's the second Friday.

Meanwhile, our annual block party came up, and we carried the couch out to the street and set it up next to the pig roaster. It was cool, it was like having a living room in the middle of the street. At the end of the day, though, after the sun went down, it started to rain. And bless our neighbors and friends, eeeeeverybody pitched in and hauled everything double-quick out of the rain. Most stuff ended up on the closest porch to the party, at an empty house on our block.

I didn't even notice until the next day. The next day, I walked across our own porch and I was like, "Where the hell's the couch?" I had to sort of prowl up and down the street until I saw it under cover on that porch. So I thought, "What difference does it make?" and just figured we'd leave it there until bulk trash day, and call for the pickup from in front of the empty house. The thing is a goddamn brick, by the way. You try to lift one end and it's at least five times as heavy as you expect it ought to be. The lady who owns the place is not trying to sell the house, her renters have moved out, the porch is deep and the thing isn't going to rot in the next couple of weeks, so ehh, I left it there.

Could you call that illegal dumping? Yes you probably could.

AND THEN

End of January we went on a little vacation, a little burn up some frequent flyer points trip. And as we pulled out of the driveway pre-dawn to go to the airport, what should I see but my couch sitting out in front of my neighbor's house. Sitting there. Like a massive grumbling wino. Three weeks before the bulk trash pickup date.

"What now is this?" I griped. "How did that get out there?"

So apparently it's out there the whole time we're on vacation, and a thread starts on the neighborhood listserv about the hobo looking couch on the curb, and my non-neighbor the absentee homeowner, who is still on the listserv even though she's been gone a while now, replies saying that friends of hers pulled the thing off her porch and she has scheduled a bulk trash pickup.

Ok. FINE. She couldn't have known I was going to call it in and have it hauled away. But of course we - we who live here - don't want to leave the damn thing on the street for three weeks, so when we got back from vacation my husband and I carried it back down the street and onto our porch. Only fair. Our couch. Our porch.

And so the night before the bulk trash pickup, we moved the goddamn thing, actually Bob did all by himself, moved it back down off our porch and up three houses to in front of her house. Because you do not, you know, you do not want to mess with Baltimore's municipal sanitation guys who are doing your bulk trash pickup. If you tell them a thing is going to be in a place at a time, you do not have it be somewhere else. Respect the process.

So bulk trash day comes. Bulk trash day goes. The couch stays. Of course.

I call Baltimore's 3-1-1 Center - Your Call to City Hall™ - and I have got to say this for Baltimore, there's a whole lot of crap in this city that is broken, that does not work, that possibly may never work again, but that 3-1-1 system is fuckin' fabulous.

a fictional portrayal of CitiStat

We're a bit famous for it actually. Among city planners. Shut up. City planners have celebs just like everybody else. Back when my husband worked for the city, Baltimore City hosted some kind of international symposium of city planners. They were here to see CitiStat and to learn about 3-1-1, and they had meetings and demos and took a tour.

Bob remembers a couple of the British planners being like, "Goodness, these marvelous computer thingies of yours are quite whizzy and it seems it's just a doddle to report an injured hosepipe or what have you, and it's lovely that the caller immediately gets an electronic mail confirming his or her conversation with your switchboard Susie, but, er, have any of you noticed your streets lately?"

Apparently, potholes in Britain aren't anything like the axle-breakers we have around here and they thought maybe one less ORACLE programmer and one more asphalt truck might be a more strategic deployment of city funds.

What the hell do they know. 3-1-1 is my fucking hero. The woman that I speak to says, "No, I don't see that there has been a bulk trash pickup scheduled for any address on your street in, let me look, THE PAST YEAR." So you know, I assume that my non-neighbor just didn't do it right. Or she dreamed she did it. GOD.

So I scheduled a bulk trash pickup for - you know, I said this saga was boring, did I not? I absolutely did. If you're still reading now, there's got to be something wrong with you. Because, because I don't even have an ending for this story! This is such a terrible saga that the answer is that the couch is back on my porch, where it will stay until sometime in March, at which time we will schlep it back out to the front sidewalk again, and possibly herniate ourselves doing it.

And if somebody gets a hernia? That would be like the most exciting thing that has happened in this story. Right? It's terrible. Terrible! Maybe a raccoon will nest in the couch while it is on our porch. Maybe we'll come out of the house one morning and there will be a junkie sleeping on it. That would be a story.

This? This is not a story. This is Your Neighborhood Librarian. Getting Shit Done. And I love you.

2012. The End.

Your Neighborhood Librarian Goes Out 40

My friend Laurel has so many good ideas she has to dole them out like Communion wafers.

"Body of Christ," she'll murmur. "You should write a picture book biography of Thor Heyerdahl."
Next person walks up. "Sanguinis Christi. You need to open a gelato stand in Collier Heights."

"Mother of God," she said to me one gusty December night getting hammered on tequila on my porch. "You're going to write a series of blog posts about getting shit done."

I had been complaining about having to do jury duty and judge a book award and how difficult it is to slot all this stupid shit in to the crappy December turmoil that is December, and she says, "You really need to make it a thing: Your Neighborhood Librarian Gets Shit Done. Your Neighborhood Librarian Renews Her Driver's License. Your Neighborhood Librarian Gets a Mammogram."

And you know, it's not a bad idea.


Your Neighborhood Librarian Gets the Oil Changed

So there I am and I'm relatively hung over because it's a Tuesday and that's my thing on Tuesdays, I'm a little bit hung over. I spend Monday nights with my girlfriends and recently each of us has had more than our fair share OF DRAMA and we have to soothe each other's way through it, and that usually means a BUNCH of cigarettes and some alcohol. For me that's two beers, okay, two beers. If you think I am immoral or dissolute or something for having a hangover on a Tuesday, I drink TWO BEERS on Monday night. All right so last night I had three.

I have to go out to the car dealership to get my oil changed and that's way the fuck on the other side of town. Past town. Through the county. Into another county. Because that's where we bought our car and the dealer gives us one free oil change for every four. So in order to save thirty-two dollars and seventy five cents on the oil change I spend like seventeen on gas and drive way the fuck out to Ellicott City.

It's ok. I take the highway. I know what I'm doing. I contemplate things. I look at the sky. I do not turn on the radio. I put on my sunglasses EE. Mediately. I get off the interstate at Baltimore National Pike, Route 40 West. The in fact by-god National Road.

Baltimore National Pike from the Baltimore city line out to the Patapsco River is a cornucopia of middlebrow temptation. I wrote that on Facebook. On my phone I did. It's a Cornucopia of Middlebrow Temptation. There is Taco Bell. There is WalllllMart, which I NEVER go in, but Jesus Christ wouldn't some discount fleece pants be just the perfect thing right now? There is the overstock furniture place, which is having a Warehouse Moving Sale, and I haven't bought any furniture made out of chipboard in YEARS, and who the hell do I think I am not buying furniture made of chipboard? That is who I am. I am crappy chipboard chest of drawers people.

There are dollar stores of every stripe. There's Latina Tienda Mercado. There's H-Mart! There's Hanoori, which will have dumplings filled with weird protein shit that I won't want to think about but which will be deeeelicious. Salty and greasy. There's Kabab Hut, although no, I don't want a kebab right now.

There's the hair braiding place. There's NTB, which is like National Tire Something, but I always think it sounds like Off Track Betting, and so I always want to go in just to see. Because I already reek of cigarette smoke and despair, so it couldn't get any worse, right? There are HUUGE beauty stores that my cousin The Talented Cousin Rachel goes into to try on wigs.

There's the carpet warehouse, where they will RIP you OFF like you are a tag on a stolen mattress.

And when I was in high school, there was a place called Color Tile right along here, I forget what they sold, formica or something, and during the campaign for Senior Class President of Catonsville Senior High School my senior year, Scott Clendaniel campaigned on the very solid basis that what you really want in a Senior Class President is the ability to raise a ton of money so that you can have a good prom. "Because I would like to have our prom somewhere great," he said from the podium, "But if you want to have your prom at Color Tile, go ahead, vote for my opponent." He didn't win, but it was a pretty compelling argument, and in fact, if you watch Friday Night Lights, Tyra Collette wins the same office on basically the same platform. Except she is very explicit: "We want our prom to be good so that we can all get laid," and Scott Clendaniel didn't quite have the balls to get up on stage at Catonsville Senior High School and go there. Scott, I know you grew 'em. Out there. Wherever you are. None of us debate team G and T class kids would have had the stones to do that.

Anyway. Where was I? Route 40. So I get out to the dealership, and I'm kind of happy about doing this today, because I'm just going to sit there and read my book, and play Jewel Breaker or whatever on my phone, and I could really use that solid 45 minutes of total bland inertia. Inertness. Inertability.

Um.

I really could.

Plus, since we recently got the car towed, there's still that chalk shit on the windows about what car it is and when it got towed, and so every time I drive the minivan I see that date staring me in the face, 12-24-11, just reminding me of one of the Very Best Christmas Eves We Ever Had. And one of the things they do when they change your oil is they wash your car, so after today maybe we can Put That Behind Us. Although one of my husband's co-workers suggests that for the next six months or so, if ever we disagree about something, I just hiss, "CHRISSSTMASS EEEEVE, motherfucker."

They also check the tire pressure when you get your oil changed, and we've had that little tire pressure light lit up on the dash for about two weeks now, and I just could not be fucked to get out of the car at a service station and get my hands all dirty, kneeling on the wet pavement getting grit on my tights to put the little thing on the tires and pump them up and use about a million quarters because how come it always seems to be me doing that? I'm a lady. I'm a lady and I'm getting my hands all dirty doing that. So I know they'll do that too.

They do. I sit. I sit quietly and everyone else is playing like Jewel Brick Slasher on their phone too, and the TV is on, of course, and of course it is on CNN and they're up in New Hampshire. There are pictures of Ron Paul, who I always mess up and call Ron Jeremy, and Rick Perry, who I swear I thought was the lead singer of Journey, and I get that wrong every time, and I kind of wish it was. Seriously, if Ted fucking Nugent can run for office, how come we can't have a Portuguese-American falsetto singer in the White House?

Anyway, I don't pay any attention to that. I read my book. Which is also a thing that Laurel suggested, there you go Laurel you are just completely running my life, I might as well just hand over my checkbook. Lot of good that would do anyone. And they change my oil. And there was horrible music playing! My God. This is probably where I got the whole Journey thing, I haven't been able to get "Separate Ways" out of my mind since. And then right after that,

You say you stand by your man
Tell me something, I don't understand
You said you love me, and that's a lie
And then you left me, said you felt... shy

There are some things I can't explai-hain away - *

WHAT is that SONG? It's Clash, is it just called Stand by Me? So they play that, which is fine, you know, Clash, I'm singing along in my head, and then the very next song that comes on is Seasons in the Sun! Terry Jacks!

Good bye PaPA please pray for me!
I was the black sheep of the FAmily,
Too much wine and too much song,
I didn't know right from wrong
And... I'm just dying now...*

And if I wasn't quite so hung over, it would be funny, but I'm pretty hung over, so it's not funny, and it kind of makes me want to stick a pin in my scalp.

But the oil change is indeed free, and it's done, and I get out to the car, and they've washed it, but the chalk is not off the windshield. Grease pencil. China marker. Something like that. Not chalk. It still says 12-24-11, subtitled The Worst Christmas Eve Ever.

Although really, I say that, but I was just saying to my girlfriends last night, we have all endured so much drama this holiday season, a lot of fuckin drama - jobs lost and morbid in-laws and spending Christmas Eve in a TRAILER and cats in trees and husbands that couldn't bend their arms for a week - but look, our KIDS have been AWESOME, have they not? And there's really nothing more important than the kids.

No, I mean RIGHT THERE.
Nothing behind us but chain link and Baltimore

None of our kids have been to the emergency room, no kid was, like, asleep in the car when it got towed, no kid actually fell off the lip of Ravens stadium where we were sitting - oh look there it is out the window right now (I was driving and recording this). I was right there, above the sign - above the sign! I'm going to find a picture of that and put it on the Internet. ABOVE THE SIGN. Trying not to throw up or soil myself for three hours. I am phobic about heights. Up high, my body says, "Eject all effluvia and FLEE. FLEE NOW." And it was cold. So cold. I spent three hours clutching the children and wailing softly whenever one of them stood up to cheer.

So, you know, all this crap that has happened, the kids have been great. I'm bitching about nothing. The Worst Christmas Eve Ever is not the worst Christmas Eve ever. Not only were they not in the emergency room and didn't get towed with the car, but they were not dicks. Which can happen.

Where was I? Oh yeah. I picked up the car. And it still had the scrawl on the windshield. And that's when I go to Han Ah Reum. Which I can't pronounce, and they know that nobody can pronounce it, and so they changed it to H-Mart, but I never remember that, and then when somebody says it I think they mean K-Mart, so I just call it the big Asian supermarket on 40. And all I want to do, I want to buy some peeled garlic, because I'm running out of stewed garlic. Garlic jam is what I'm going to start calling it. Like the bacon jam. Garlic jam is even easier to make. And "stewed garlic" sounds gross.

Maybe I could do bacon garlic jam. I'm a genius. I am going to. I am going to make Bacon Garlic Jam! I know just how to do it! I'm going to invent this recipe, and I'm going to... I'm going to once again not be rich. Man. I'm totally going to do that.

So I'm going to H-Mart, and they have got chive blossoms, that's cool, and they've got pears, once they ripen up they should be very lovely to eat, I love a juicy pear. They've got my garlic. I buy the biig thing of garlic, no messing around with the garlic. They've got nice looking onions at a good price. Some fresh pork bones, I think maybe I'll make chili. Chili would be good, I've got a sister in law coming for a visit this weekend, she likes chili. I'll make that.

And I'm scanning all the pork stuff, and you know, I am not squeamish about pork. I just carved an entire fuckin pork on New Year's Day, we roasted a 110 lb pig for 8 hours and then cut it up and ate it and it was just me and this one other guy who cut it up entirely. Including the head, including sticking my knife into the eye socket and fiddling out the meat. From the eye sockets - plural - of a mammal. All right? Not squeamish. This is not a problem that I have.

But. H-Mart. Has. In its pork section, along with the strips of ribs and trays of chops and aforementioned neckbones, in these pink styrofoam tubs just like the ones that the ground pork is in, they have this squiggly looking sort of puffy... inguinal type... matter. And it's labeled Pork Uteri. Uteri. Uteruses. This is a company that cannot spell "bean" right 100% of the time - cannot get its act together on how you spell "okra," and they get the plural of "uterus" correct? Just so that I can stand there and think, "If I were a squeamish person I would probably be running for the exit right now. Or god help me if I were pregnant?"?

I didn't take a picture. They really frown on you taking pictures in the grocery store, I've been kicked out of more than one for that. As if industrial spies go around with 35mm cameras and toddlers. I did however, a couple aisles on, I did see one of those things you put in the sink to keep the crap from going down the sink? And they called it a "sink hole garbage saucer." Which was so perfectly apt for the way I was feeling at the time - and I'm feeling much better now, thanks for asking - that I had to take a picture of that. So I did, and I was really really sneaky.

I pulled out my phone, and I made it look like I was checking my email. I did check my email just in case someone was looking, and I made it look like I was sending a text, I turned my phone sideways even though it doesn't have a keyboard like that, and I held it down and angled like as if I had bifocals - well I do, I have trifocals, but that's not how you do it if you have trifocals. Luckily nobody came around to check - anyway I took a picture of the sink hole garbage saucer very sneakily and got away with it.

I never get why they get so mad about taking pictures in the grocery store. Also Starbucks. Isn't it in their best interest to let me stay and spend my money? Are you really not going to let me buy my goddamn nori crackers and rice scooper and oyster sauce - I can't believe I bought oyster sauce hung over. Can you believe I bought oyster sauce hung over? I was able to contemplate like seventeen different brands of oyster sauce - oyster flavored fish sauce to be very precise - ON a HANGOVER. I am hardy, ladies and gents. I am a hardy, hardy bitch.

So then I left. I put the stuff in my reusable grocery bag. The bag broke. This bag that we've had ever since recycling was invented, the bag broke. Luckily the oyster flavored fish sauce didn't hit the pavement and explode. I might not have been able to hold it together spattered with oyster flavored fish sauce after my encounter with pork uteri. Not that hardy.

And that's it, you know? I am hung over, on a very bright shiny day, and still getting stuff done. I went to the Han Ah Reum and I didn't forget anything. I always forget stuff there, that place overwhelms me kind of a little bit, pork uteri et cetera. And I didn't forget anything. I even found a water bottle in the van. I drank a little bit of water. You know how sometimes you're so dehydrated it doesn't feel like the water is actually making it to your stomach? You can feel it absorbing through your mucus membranes. It hits your gums and you can feel your gums sucking up the water. It hits your throat and you can just feel it trickling into the walls of your esophagus. It makes it sort of to the stomach but mostly it's just sucking into the tissues of your poor dehydrated body.

Two beers, ladies and gentlemen. Two beers.

All right. I'm going to go. Signing off, this is Your Neighborhood Librarian Getting Shit Done. Next up... let's see I'm not due for a mammogram for a while - no I know! Next up, we'll have Your Neighborhood Librarian Gets the Emissions Tested on the Minivan! Thanks! See you then.

Talk to you later.




*Not all lyrics 100% accurate.

ALL THE DRINKS: Index to The Advil Calendar, 2010-2011

I know, I know. Right about now you are thinking in terms of a water-only diet. A detox so comprehensive that not only will your liver be restored to a childlike state, but your skin will glow, your hair will begin to grow out of your head as transparent floss like the hair of angels, your feelings toward all mankind will be tolerant, your actions motivated by kindness and unmarred by ego.

Me too. Really.

But just in case you wanted to see a comprehensive list of ALLLL the cocktails in The Advil Calendar, 2010 and 2011 (there are eighty-two), with links to each post, click the “Read More” thingie.

The Advil Calendar 2011, December 25: BREAKING THE TAPE

IT's Christmas Day and what's in YOUR stocking? If it ain't a prince, an astronaut, Tommy Lee Jones, a secret agent and a Jedi... YOU'RE DOIN IT WRONG

Two-Face and his dual girlfriends, Sugar and Spice

Thanks for sticking with me this long and dark month, this season of insanity, this winter of our discontent and lost items and near misses. Today is Christmas, and those of us who have to do Christmas stuff will either be relaxed and happy, and so we could use a sweetly refreshing, sparkly drink that will enhance our already-effervescent buzz... or we will be secretly, blackly seething, slipping out to the back porch "for a breath of fresh air" far more often than is strictly polite.

And we will be in need of a drink in that case too.

So whether your xmas dinner will be Spice's menu of "a charred heart of black boar, a side of raw donkey meat, and a sterno and grain alcohol cocktail, straight up, baby!" or whatever Drew Barrymore offers Two-Face in Batman Forever (pretty sure there was champagne involved), I've got you covered:

God I hate Radko.

The Moon Walk

Created in 1969 by legendary barman Joe Gilmore at the Savoy Hotel in London to commemorate the first lunar landing, it was the first thing the astronauts had to drink upon returning to Earth. Now that is honoring our servicemen.

1 part fresh Grapefruit Juice
1 part Grand Marnier
2 dashes Rosewater
Shake well, strain into wine glass and top up with Champagne.

Doesn't that sound lovely? Although I might ease back on the Grand Marnier if we are having these with the morning pastries, or if I'm serving one to Mom.

Granted, even Connery could
not have worked that outfit.

We had The Talented Cousin Rachel and her husband, Equally Talented But in a Completely Different Way Tim over for dinner a couple Sundays ago, and Rachel brought a bottle of St. Germain. As is her wont. She kind of doesn't go anywhere without it - we should all aim to be that kind of fabulous. When she gets older she'll probably carry her elderflower liqueur in an ermine purse.

So we tried substituting half St. Germain and half Cointreau for the Grand Marnier in The Moon Walk, and it was LOVELY. Sweet but not sugary, floral but not so girly that Tim and my husband felt their manliness threatened by drinking it. In fact, Rachel renamed the thing The Moonraker, and we all know that there's nothing unmanly about James Bond. Except Roger Moore. So that kind of fouls that up, in a way... but you know what? I may be overthinking this. I'll stop.

But chances are, on Christmas Day I'll have a pot of this warming on the stove:

What? When I hear 'hot ginger' I think 'Prince
Harry with his shirt off.' Doesn't everyone? 

Enraged Cider 

2 quarts apple juice or apple cider1 two-inch piece of ginger, halved lengthwise
2 chili peppers
1 lemon, sliced thin
1 cinnamon stick
1 cup dark rum
Everything but the rum goes in a medium saucepan. Warm slowly, then allow to simmer for 10 minutes. Turn off the flame and add the rum, ladle into cups.

I adapted this last year from a recipe I found on the Sailor Jerry website. I didn't think their Hot Apple Jerry was spicy enough, so I sifted through the fridge and plonked in all kinds of things. The ginger chili lemon combo was the best one for me. Also, I find that the cider gets weird and separate-y if it's on the stove for too long, and I've had success with apple juice instead.


And for the spectators, the bachelor uncles and ancient aunts, those family members who are neither over the moon nor simmering with rage on Christmas day, I offer one from Danny Meyer's book Mix Shake Stir.

And when I think 'kilt' I think Ewan McGregor
hugging a rooster.

The Guilty Kilt

1 1/2 oz blended Scotch
1 1/2 oz brewed English Breakfast tea, chilled
3/4 oz sweetened condensed milk
smoked tea leaves for garnish (no I don't know where you get smoked tea leaves)
In a cocktail shaker full of ice, shake the Scotch, tea, and condensed milk. Vigorously. Strain into a rocks glass full of ice and garnish with smoked tea leaves.

That's it! Is that it? Oh my god I think that's it. Twenty-five days of ranting and alcohol, and it's all over now. Thank you for dropping in, or sticking with me, or even leaving in disgust.

A special thank you to all my guinea pigs and researchers, the commentators and people whose brains I have picked. Or pickled. Guess what? You're going to write this thing next year, because it has nearly killed me.

To your health, boys and girls. Let's have a good year - vote Democrat, eat high fiber, avoid excess packaging, and don't pee in everyone else's pool. I'm out.

The Advil Calendar 2011: ONE: CUT A HOLE IN A BOX Edition

DECEMBER 24 - ROCK IT OUT

The funny thing about all this is I'm really more of a beer drinker.

I'll be drinking beer at the Browns game today. They're playing at M and T Bank Stadium, so I guess you'd have to call it the Ravens game, but my poor husband is a Browns fan so we're humoring him. Do you know how long it's been since any Cleveland team has won a championship? Here's a hint - you google "Cleveland championship" and the first link that comes back is the Wikipedia entry for "Drought (sport)."

The Browns won the NFL title in 1964, the year of my husband's birth, and before that had won the World Series just after the end of the SECOND WORLD WAR.

Miller Lite? Yeah I'll even go there.

But I'm no football fan. I don't hate it, but it's not my thing. My thing really is beer. I love a hoppy old I.P.A. like Dale's or the Green Flash or Long Trail; a caramel-y Belgian abbey ale like Corsendonk or Rochefort; Mexican lager, Sapporo at sushi, and Baltimore's own crap beer National Boh for when we have crabs.

Some of my favorite friends are the friends who homebrew - Lui, Charlene and Roy are automatically on my list of people who get hot sauce when I make hot sauce, just on the off chance they'll reciprocate with homebrew.

Speaking of Roy... Roy's in a band. It's called Pulaski now but it used to be called Sick, and when they were Sick they recorded a version of a traditional Christmas song that I think perfectly distills my reaction to the holiday. Roy has graciously agreed to... shit, graciously? no, not graciously. He's a punk rocker, he doesn't do graciously. And I respect that. Roy has said he doesn't give a shit if I put the song up on the Advil Calendar as the soundtrack to a montage to the greatest and/or most random images I have used this month in these posts. Yeah, that's more like it.

Enjoy.

And I'm working on an index to all the drinks featured in this year's and possibly last year's Advil Calendar - that'll be up probablyyyy.... well maybe by Christmas night.

Meanwhile, I know you're busy, god knows I am. I mixed up a batch of that Scrumptious Coffee featured on December 23, and my friends Paula and Cheryl helped me drink it. It's good. I might make more. The caffeine is helpful, and there's not so much sugar in it that you'll get that sick old sugar hangover. Hopefully.

Oh and one more funny thing courtesy of my high school classmate Mary Kay, former cheerleader and current competitor for Tim Riggins's luscious brooding love. This is John Denver singing "Please Daddy (Don't Get Drunk on Christmas)," a seasonal favorite in the Mary Kay household. Fat chance, Little John. I've got some good stuff lined up for the Big Damn Day.

Oh and Mary Kay - BACK OFF BABY, RIGGINS IS MINE.