Corbin the nephew: "There's more customers coming!"

I ate too much candy, as usual.  But it was worth it.  It always is.

Happy

Halloween!!

"Ugh, I can't wait until Halloween is OVER. Then we can buy all the candy we want for super cheap!!" - overheard at bonfire in the mts.

I'm pretty sure this is the main reason people ever have kids and a hooch:

Good enough for a second place ribbon!

Happy Halloweener!

"The only thought I had, growing up, was Get... Candy. That was my only thought, in my brain, for the first 10 years of human life. Just get canny, get canny, get canny, get canny, get canny, get canny. Family, friends, school, these were just obstacles in the way of getting more candy.

So the first time you hear the concept of Halloween, when you're a kid - remember the first time you even heard about it, it's like... your brain can't even... "What is this?! Who's giving out canny, someone's giving out canny?! Who is giving out this candy?! EVERYONE THAT WE KNOW?!!! I gotta be a part of this, take me with you, I wanna do it, I'll do anything that they want...! I can wear that! I'll wear anything that I have to wear. I'll do anything I have to do. I will get the candy from these fools that are so stupidly giving it away."  - J.S.

I still have this same emotion towards candy.

The truth is scary

[Listening to a girl tell about the time she saw someone hit a dog and put it in their car and rush off to what she thinks was the vet]

"I assume vet, but probably dump." - BAB 

Dog tales

My grandpa found the little black puppy and  named it Cuddles. When my grandma came home, she found Cuddles tied to the bed with a little string and my grandpa napping alongside his new pal. No wonder she loved that man.

Ours is a High Game

And by high I mean 'close to the ceiling.'  JAN noted this at our last racquetball excursion.  It's like we pretend we're giants, or like to keep it close to the heavens, or aren't super skilled.

Either way I love it.

Oh Kanye. And I don't mean that in no nice way.

Remember the Kanye ballerina video, where all the pretty white ballerinas are performing and you're like Where are the black people?

Oh, of course. The African Queen and her royal court. The white people are just entertainment.

I love you eve eve seog day

Oh, to be a 1st grade teacher.

If only you didn't have to wear big beaded necklaces and jumpers.

(The hugging is also a bit much.) But, you do get precious cards like this one I saw on the wall:

Translation:

Mrs. Weber, I love you Mrs. Weber. I love you every every single day.

Bus Tales, thanks for doing it quietly.

Someone sitting behind me on the bus had been practicing his evil laugh all weekend and continued to do so on the bus ride this morn.  I would give him an 8 out of 10 only because it lacked originality.

Animal Cruelty

The best part about the circus was the down-trodden hippies protesting outside. They had a few posters (which didn't seem like much effort went into the production. and the "shocking" pictures didn't look like the elephant was having that bad of a time) and tried to pass out DVDs to the kids. "Here, kids, you wanna have a bad time? Watch this video." PFFFFFF. Everybody just ignored them as we all were giddy. Everyone had the hugest grins on our faces because Hey, dummies! Did you know that there's a circus going on in here?! You should buy some tickets right over there and join the fun! THERE'S COTTON CANDY TO BE GOBBLED (in the most befitting location on earth)!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The American

Yeah, I thought the most admirable character was the hooker. (as opposed to the assassin who only "made" the guns. and often used them). So sue me.

"Ooo, the baby did NOT like that toy...

... probably because it reminds her of the rat that sneaks into her room at night."
"And tells her scary stories."

Flyboy

This is my grammie and my pa. He was taking flying lesson and that mini-Gump took his mom for a ride. But here's where the story turns into a saga: to pay for the flight school he had to take another job. Which left him little time to do homework. And also little time to sleep. So, he slept in class. Then he got a bad grade in math that year and M.I.T. would forever deny his wish to be an astronaut. It's fine though. He's a successful and good man. These days, whenever I talk about a shuttle explosion, he gets a wistful look in his eye and says,

"Man. That'd be a way to go."

My grams isn't doing so good. If you think of it, send a little prayer for some comfort and peace until she gets to go back up.

"It's like a normal night club, only Gayer."

We got an official invite to ping pong night at Tracks.

The best news is, it starts at 5pm, so we can still all be in bed by 9!

Oh Decepticons.

Autobans: "We were a peaceful nation of robots"

SNORT! ... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

25 years and a few hours older.

It’s my birthday. And I brought peaches and yogurt for breakfast, having raced out the door towards the middle school I’m subbing for. Almost late, the usual.

Alas, the peach juice spilled all over my lunch bag and there are no paper towels anywhere. Only thin tissues. Literally, tissue paper. I’m sitting here looking at the mess, and I have a flashback to when I was on a field trip in 6th grade and my apple sauce exploded all over my brown sack. As a 6th grader, I panicked. What the fudge was I going to do!? The sauce was everywhere! Sooo sticky and sweet and cinnamony. I couldn’t just sit there and lick clean my hands and ziplock bags like a kitten in front of my friends. Middle schoolers are creative in cruelty. Like hell I was going to put myself on the spot and go ask a teacher to lend a helpful hand. So, I continued to panic and just kind of tried to ignore that there was applesauce all over everything, in-between my fingers. That moment was recorded in my mental diary as: Trauma level 7, The Worst Lunch I Ever Had.

Here I am, 25 years old, and the same g.d. thing has happened. Although, this morning, I had a beautiful sunrise chasing me and I couldn’t help but shout thank you’s for my family and friends and families of friends and oh-my boyfriend. A thank you for my handmade bookshelf. A thank you for the dinner I get to have tonight with two people who occupy large spaces of my heart. A thank you for a job I generally enjoy right now. A thank you for the fact that each year, I become more at peace, more happy, more excited about the life I am living.

A quarter of a century IS a long time. But, my God, is it nice to be here and be so in love with it all. At 25 years, I’m licking peach juice off my hands. And it’s utterly delightful.

 

A dream come true.

Free reign to the p.e. supply closet.

You better believe I headed straight for the rubber chickens

and the parachute.

Turns out, teaching elementary p.e. is the pits.

The firey pits of hell. 

It feels a little like Seinfeld.

Meet my new trainer, Pop-pa: He's 80 years old and recently acquired a Facebook.

Through the use of resistance bands we will make my 25 year old hips as non-creaky as his.

1990's Mickey Mouse ice cream bars

Makes my mouth water just remembering these things.

You'll have a Dalmatian Plantation, will you?

Right. And Animal Control will swiftly be all up on your butt to sentence you for hoarding.

And then one September day, he became Mr.

This was the part at Jeff's wedding where we broke down. No, not into awesome moves that usually require hightops and parachute pants, but into tears. For the memories of Old Chicago nights and the knowledge that none of us will ever get to marry Jeff now; his beard is no longer ours to rub.

Congratulations to our sweet Bernsie!

The greatest show on earth

Great early surprise birthday present this year, which will be hard for you all to beat. The CIRCUS!! Where I got to eat buckets of popcorn and bags of cotton candy, and had the best seat in the house: right between the cutest boyfriend in the whole wide world and a chubby little mexican boy with a fiber-optic mohawk. Man oh man.

(He got mad at me after he looked up and told me he didn't want to eat the $12 tiger-mug snowcone and I said, "Eat some of the ice! It's sooo good!" and he said, "NNNOOOO! I. don't. want. it."
"Sheesh. Ok, don't eat it.")

(But I think he forgave me because at the end of the night I put on my pink plastic pigtail wig and asked him how I looked
and he squirmed, "I don't know!"
"Do I look pretty?" 
He nodded and ran to his dad.)

There's always somebody drunk on the bus.

I hope one day that somebody is me.

Mood Music

I was walking to the store and got a little entertainment from an accordion player sitting outside a music shop.  

And I thought to myself, "Man, I wish my cousins hadn't quit accordion school."

Do you have something to prove?

People make me nervous when they walk around chewing gum like they're gonna put you in their armpit and make you say, "Uncle!"

20 bites. Count 'em and weep.

A word of advice: don't go to sleep with a really angry bug
trapped in your sleeve.

It will bite its way to freedom.



Mother Confessions

After her car light was on all night, she confided in me:

"I had a really bad reason for the light being on; I had to steal some pepperonis off the pizza."





And now I tell the Internet.

Will yourself not to eat?!

"I always thought bulemia was anorexia... and I didn't even know there was such a thing as anorexia."

How can you not love an innocent little idiot who says this adorable crap?

Impossible.

Sprinkle sammich?

Ah, hell yes!

Not trying to be moles.

It was just over a year ago that the Chilean Mine Disaster struck, and close to 2 months ago when I finally understood that those sunglasses weren't just to look cool afterwards.

This guy was one fast creepy crawler!

Taking the picture was scary.

Speaking of creepy crawlers, today while shopping at junk thrift stores we saw one of the old oven sets. Once upon a time, I made so many of those bugs. And then they came out with the girly unicorn molds! And then I just had bags and bags of two-dimensional rubber things that I never played with. Those things will most likely someday test positive for being the main cause of most types of cancer, and none of us will be all that surprised.

Accept or Deny

My mom theorizes that if she's out of half and half, she could just put a small pallet of butter in her coffee.

Goat in a car.

Gettin' towed.

yeah, there was some unsafe highway driving in order to get this picture.

I just realized why Carmel Delight Trail Mix costs an arm and a leg.

There's not a peanut in it, just cashews and almonds as far as nuts go.
    I think the name of the mix tells you why I'm willing to pay the steep price.

    one of those delicious carmel delights

Thanks, Rodney Harrison Sheets.

For non-funny reasons which I don't want to jump into right neh, I've decided I hate teaching. I kind of knew it the first time in college when I had to sit down and plan a semester's worth of lessons. It became very clear when I was in the vortex of student teaching. And, I made peace with it after a (very successful) semester of (paid!) teaching this past spring. A semester of good kids and good lessons and grand moral support from everyone, allowing me to rest after riding out an initial sea of panic - to stop and say, "Whoa! Man, this job sucks." Sorry, world! The thing is that I'm good at teaching - I'm natural at it and the youth of this world generally like me. I like being funny in front of them. But it's not my gig. It does not make me happy. Not that kind of teaching, anyways. So, I quit. And what was a horrible realization after 4.5 years of money, time, and effort, has now become a peaceful, important decision. I look at my future, happy that it no longer is doomed to be filled with crooked writing on the chalkboard, or giving presentations for 6 hours every day, or alcoholism and early onset wrinkles.

In the mean time as I'm making a new path, I'm subbing! It has been good so far. Except for the hour we were all held hostage because there was a shootout in a nearby neighborhood and my job (supposed to be over at 2:30p) was to guard the door and tell 25 Seniors to cool their shit and sit the cuss down, only to get to release them an hour later. I'm still exhausted by the end of the day but my soul isn't drained! I don't have to come home, cry while I jog, try to choke down my anxiety so I can choke down some dinner, cry in the shower, then spend 4 hours planning for the next day! It's glorious. I get to go have some fun and then leave it all in that building.

Anyways, the point of this is that I wasn't meant to be a teacher. My grandma was. When I got to see her last weekend, I found this letter in her school scrapbook. She taught at a Catholic grade school, back in the day when you were allowed to slap the kids a little. Who wouldn't want to teach back then? Especially when the students write letters for you, such as this:

Video Log Day 7. When we finally had to wash our long underwear.

Gawdy

"She's such a pain to work with. She always acts all Goddy."
"Goddy? As in The Lord?"
"Yeah."

The Peanuts Gang.

Guess who gets to see their bffl today in her natural habitat?

Yipee!!!!!!!!! I'm gonna hug her and pat her and mark her with a B.

Flyball

It's a race where 2 teams of dogs race side-by-side on a 51ft long course. Each dog must run in relay fashion down the jumps, trigger a flyball box, releasing the ball, retrieve the ball and return over the jumps.


We saw it at the Broncos' half-time and I refused to cheer.  But the last dog in the relay is tiny and can barely make it over the jumps, and one team had this little superstar that would always make the race incredibly close.  And I'll be damned if I wasn't cheering at the end.


Curse you adorable Frasier dog!

Kiss me, I'm Polish.

While visiting my grammie this weekend, I looked at hundreds of my favorite old photographs. Ones from way before my time; pictures that have become a part of my memory. They're awesome, I love them. So, I thought I'd do you a favor and share a few good ones every now and then.

These are my great-grandparents. They escaped the Russian army to come over to America. They're 100% Polish and never spoke a word of English. Pretty amazing stories come from their experiences, but the best part? His name was Stanislas Zarzeski. And everytime I hear "Stanislas" I automatically think "Coleslaw." Great grandpa Coleslaw.

"No shit, Miss Daisy?"

Happy Labor day!

Good luck pushing out all those babies, everybody.

Just hangin' with my grandma in Ohio

She and I, we go way back.

Speaking of grandma's, TJ and I might be moving into our own place within the next two weeks! It'll be great to officially be living in sin again.

He uses antlers in all of his decorating.

After a long work day (5 hours to the San Luis Valley, 5 Hours of Migrant work, 5 hours home),  I made my work friend, Gaston,

 stop at Johnson's corner for a giant cinnamon roll.

Turns out he doesn't like frosting.  Our stomachs hurt.  I went home and pooped, I'm sure he did the same.

 I'm good on cinnamon rolls for at least 2 years.

Sittin' on a gold mine

I just thought of a really great idea for a book. I won't give you all the details, but mainly it's about you walking through the woods and you hear voice and they're your indian spirits.


Maybe I'll tell you the end because it's too good. You turn out to be the indian spirit and you've been dead for 300 years but you never killed a buffalo so you're trapped in time until you can guide your memory self to spiritual freedom!