Squeak’s Squeals

I received an email from Roo’s second grade teacher.  She says Roo is “very disorganized, unprepared for class and frequently off task.”  While my initial response was ‘be grateful you don’t live with her,’ I opted for a slightly more gentile approach to the actual reply.

So, we now send a notebook back and forth everyday (cheesily titled “My Travel Book” by a teacher who doesn’t want to single Roo out and make her feel different from the other children… I personally think a couple days of making her feel different might be the kick in the pants she needs to get her crap together… but what do I know?  I’m just her mother… it’s not like I’ve had seven solid years of dealing with her behaviors and habits or anything…. ).

Regardless of how I feel about the hippie-dippy, politically correct, happy horseshit nonsense they try to force feed the kids in school, I still have to play along or risk being branded a “bad parent” and frowned upon for my child-rearing techniques.

So, every night, I sign the damned notebook and Roo and I discuss its contents and “how it makes her feel”…. it’s a load of utter crap.  Not to sound like some horrible, insensitive, evil bitch of a mom, but I don’t really CARE how it makes her feel.  If the teacher says to clean your desk, you need to clean your desk.  Period.  End of discussion.  We do not need to attend therapy to discuss what emotional stresses are causing her to not clean her desk.  I can tell you exactly why she doesn’t clean her desk… it is the same reason she doesn’t clean her room… she doesn’t want to.  And as long as the fear of punishment doesn’t exist, she will continue not doing what she should be doing.

Why DOES she clean her room?  What prompts such miraculous behavior?  She is afraid she’ll lose her .mp3 player or won’t be allowed to stay at a friend’s house this weekend.  She is afraid I’ll get mad enough to crack her rear-end and have a go at her room myself…. accompanied by a trash bag.

Maybe I’m too ‘old school’… maybe I’m just more bitter and jaded than I realize… maybe it is my mother’s constant ’shit happens, deal with it’ attitude reborn… but one day these kids will be out in the world with no one to coddle them, no one to care if they’ve had their feelings hurt, no one willing to discuss how something makes them feel.  And they’ll have to survive.

When Roo is 16-years-old, donning a brown visor and a nametag and scrubbing the machine-gunned diarrhea of a sweaty, middle-aged, fat man off the bathroom wall at McDonald’s, no one is going to consider her feelings.  No one is going to care if it makes her feel like less of a person.  They will only care that the job is done.

And when her shift is over and she comes home in tears, I’ll dry her big blue eyes, hug her close and whisper softly, “Shit happens.  Deal with it.”

Everything's explosive at humor-blogs.com!

The kids and I were chasing each other around the first floor earlier this evening - running from one room to the next until someone wised up enough to go the opposite direction and cut the runner off as they lapped the area - when I was viciously attacked.

No, I was not attacked by my children, but by something much smaller and more sinister.

You see, it was my turn to be chased and as I ran through the entry, I felt the stabbing pain of pierced foot flesh beneath me.  I fell to the floor and turned my left foot toward me.  There it was… small, evil, vile, sinister…. it was a butterfly-shaped mood ring… firmly attached to whatever bodily tissues live in the soles of my feet.

The ring was shaped much like my crude little drawing to the right, with giant, pointy wings on top and small, pointy wings on the bottom.  I was lucky enough to land on the upper, giant wing which cut right through the flesh and slid roughly half an inch into the ball of my foot and embedded itself quite firmly.

After forcibly removing my temporary, new appendage, I left a lovely trail of blood across my tan rug and up the stairs where the wound was cleaned and bandaged.  The hole is about as big around as a pencil and hurts like mad.  I could probably use stiches, to be quite honest, but that’s a medical bill I really don’t need if I can avoid it.

And just in case you were wondering, the evil little beast was dark purple, as in “Very Happy”.  The little bitch.

Accident prone?  Find like-minded individuals at humor-blogs.com!

I have been sick the last few days. Yesterday, my temperature peaked at 103(F). This morning, it was still at 102. The bottom line: I feel poopy.

But life must go on and since I was not spewing forth nastiness from any of my orifices, I went about my daily routine as usual.

• Feed kids: Check.

• Everyone dressed: Check.

• Kids on the bus: Check.

• Car keys: Check.

• Four fully-inflated tires: um… well…

I had a flat. Not just a low-on-air flat. A pancake-on-a-rim flat. In my driveway.

I started digging through the car. I pulled out the dummy tire. I pulled out the pathetic looking little jack from the secret Subaru jack compartment. I looked it over. I put it down. WTF!? I don’t know how to use it. I’ve never seen one like it.

I went inside and called the office. “Boys, I’m gonna be late. I don’t know how late. Just late. Really, really late.”

“What’s wrong?” asked Bull, our resident tech.

“I’m stuck in a catch 22 at the moment. I have a flat tire and a jack I don’t know how to use. I can’t afford to pay someone to change my tire until I get my paycheck and I can’t get my paycheck until I get the tire changed so I can get to the office.”

“No problem,” my savior replied. “I have an appointment out your way in half an hour, I’ll swing by and change that tire for you when I’m done.”

“You, sir, are my freakin’ hero!” I replied.

I wandered around the house, straightening and tidying for about an hour, but there was no sign of Bull. I called his cell… his appointment was taking longer than expected, he had no clue how soon he’d get to my place.

Time for Plan B. The Internet. (Now, I realize with every blog post I write, I prove myself more and more the dumb blond I try NOT to be, but if it didn’t end with me doing something completely bizarre or utterly stupid it wouldn’t make much of a story, now would it?) So, I hopped on the internet and looked up instructions on how to use my weird little car jack contraption.

I changed my tire. All by myself. I was so proud! And all while running a fever that could fry an egg.  Now, if I could just get the grease monkey marks off my hands…..

Humor-blogs.com: More tales of personal achievement from short bus riders.

And now, an update on the continuing saga of Officer Sludge…. (and for those of you who are utterly confused right now, read THIS first)….

I just finished another phone call with our favorite, most obliviously unintelligent city cop, Officer Sludge.

He has informed me that he would like to have a list of wanted criminals posted on the website. Fine. Not a problem. [Note: Had I been talking with anyone OTHER than Sludge, I probably would have recommended setting up a database, but I truly think it would have been a lost effort on a man who can't find Windows on his Compaq.]

He proceeded to tell me that his secretary is currently in the process of piecing together the list in question. [Note: My initial thought: "Good. Cuz Lord knows what you would produce."] He then described to me the methods being used in the list’s creation. My question: is it POSSIBLE to have a negative IQ score? And if so, how is one able to function as the head of a special police task force with such a score? Then again, maybe it depends on your definition of “special.”

He and his secretary, he said, had taken every possible avenue to make the final list as efficient and easy-to-use as possible. He and his secretary, he said, printed - FROM THE COMPUTER - all the images of the criminals for the list. Then, he says, he had his secretary HAND WRITE the details about each person next to their picture. At the moment of our conversation, he said, his secretary was in the process of scanning - BACK INTO THE COMPUTER - the pages with the hand-written text and the images they had JUST printed. The secretary would be emailing me the list ASAP, he said.

Fast forward five minutes: a new message in my inbox. Great! Let’s see the masterful work first hand! Uhh… big negatori there, chief. Seems the secretary emailed me a blank white nothing - no message, no text, no images, no attachments…. just the bleak whiteness of an empty message. I replied to her empty message and let her know she had sent me absolutely nothing. She replied to my message… with nothing. There was blank white nothingness, followed by my original message, followed by her original message of nothingness.

These are the people sworn to uphold justice and protect the people of the land. These are the people we rely on - day in and day out - to provide us all with a sense of safety and security. These are the people who catch the bad guys and give them what they deserve. Is it any wonder the internal functions of the local, state and federal prison systems are FUBAR? THESE are the people responsible for running it! Be afraid! Be VERY afraid!

What could be more terrifying than humor-blogs.com?