Today Is 123-Friday!

In honor of my 123rd post on Squarer Pegs, Rounder Holes, I thought I'd mix it up a little bit and just write about all of the little blurb-y type things as they pop into my head. How is that different from my usual postings? Well, ordinarily I would have to scrunch up my eyebrows a bit and squint my eyes and focus really hard to stay relative-ish to the one subject. And what is the relevance of the 123rd posting? I like simplicity, counting, and while the number 123 is NOT a prime number, it does consist of the first 3 prime digits and so I like that. I like math. And I do hate round numbers so much, unless it's a string of zeros on the left of a decimal point as it relates to a check made payable to me.

Justin Bieber-  Really?! I mean, yeah, I come from the generation that brought us the likes of Milli Vanilli, Nu Shooz, and Tiffany.....but they didn't walk into glass walls and doors and then threaten to walk off of an interview set. Dude! Your following will ALWAYS be 12 year old girls. Game over.

American Football- I don't follow it anymore. Living in Egypt has sort of ruined sports for me since I don't give a crap about Al-Ahly soccer team OR Zumalek soccer team. I've heard people talking about NFL teams that weren't even in existence when I left the US back in 2001. So if your refs are on strike or suck now....I'd like to be concerned, but just can't be bothered. My apologies.

I attended high school (first 3 years) in Stuttgart, Germany and right now as I type this there is an all-year alumni/faculty reunion going on IN STUTTGART in conjunction with the Stuttgarter/Canstaadt festival and some of my friends are there now, reliving memories in our old school, football field, and stomping grounds and I am SOOO jealous that I couldn't be there with them. Hope you guys all have a great time. Go Stallions! Class of 1986 RULES!

Mosquitoes- I frickin' hate them. Especially those little tiny beige almost invisible ones that you can't ever kill until after they've drained at least 2 pints of blood from your fingertips, ears, toes, and legs! And then when you finally do, they explode with YOUR blood splattering all over the walls, curtains, and your skin where you've smacked 'em.

Why do we always run out of garbage bags when there is old food in the back of the fridge that needs to be thrown out? And then you leave it in the fridge because this inevitably happens at night and if you leave it on the counter as a reminder to throw it out, your whole kitchen stinks. But then you forget that it's in the fridge and needs to be thrown out and you don't find it again until you're ...that's right!....out of garbage bags again. Oh. And as long as I'm on the refrigerator  path, could you please...someone, anyone?....tell me what is the friggin' direct correlation between every member of my family and the top shelf of the refrigerator??? I use the top shelf for tall or "careful this is spillable" things or large things that won't fit on any other shelves. My kids (and sometimes my husband) will place the following things on the top shelf:  1 egg, a tiny dessert dish with 1/2 Tablespoon of fava beans, anything that requires use of the crisper drawer (because the crisper drawer is where they apparently hide things that they don't want to share with each other,) and the empty milk container. *sigh*

Word of Advice:  Never accidentally drop the f-bomb in front of your autistic teenager, because while MOST of her verbal skills are learned from movies and tv and books, the shit you DON'T want her to say in front of her grandmother to reinforce your shitty parenting skills, is EXACTLY what will enter (full time) into her vocabulary. *Score one more on my parental WIN card.*

Pinterest is AWESOME/DEVIL- I've now managed to complete 10 items from all the thousands of pinned items on my boards. Hey. That's not so bad considering we don't have craft stores or American conveniences here like chocolate chips, instant-ANYTHING (except coffee) or cool stuff like double-sided sticky tape or stencils. The entire DIY-concept is new to Egypt.

In a conversation on Facebook with my sister, MJ, last week, I decided that my list of favorite words included:  diphthong, bracket, penultimate, frivolous, superfluous, and sublime. My list, of course, is not limited to these. She prefers crapulence, kerfuffle, hornswaggle and canoodle.

I love my family...I want to build a garden-butterfly sanctuary in my backyard one day. Can someone tell me why leg hair after 40 is less frequently in need of shaving but some single damn chin WIRE because it's too coarse to be hair continues to pop out ever week or so no matter how often you pull the f***er out?! Will health insurance cover operations that shave bunions off your feet using lasers so it can be done outpatient? And why can't Rush Limbaugh just frickin' overdose already or spontaneously explode into little tiny piles of Rush-lets that only spew minute bits of bullshit at a time and are all polarized so that they can never be in the same place at the same time like tiny magnets? I think the movie "Idiocracy" should be run as a public service announcement to get intelligent people to do their civic duty and repopulate the planet with more intelligent life and stop waiting so damn long to have kids. You're NEVER going to be better "financially prepared" for kids. They will just suck MORE money out of you if you have more of it. Poor people know this. Just have them.

And I'll leave you with one last irrelevant thought:  Kids who are wearing their very last pair of hole-free jeans three weeks before payday will ALWAYS be able to find a tree to climb and "slide out" of it hooking the ass of their pants on that single spot of tree trunk that ISN'T smooth and rip a hole in the back. Murphy's Law? Yes. Me and Murph go way back.

My Baby Brother

Whenever I think of my sweet face baby brother, I see him as the little blonde-haired, blue-eyed cherub that he was when he was two. He was so ornery growing up but had a soft spot in his heart for his three "guhlies" (girlies) that were me and my two sisters. Mom once told me that when we had gone to spend the night at a friend's house that Lloyd wandered the house crying for his "guhlies" to come home. We dressed him up like a girl and painted his toenails and all sorts of other torturous big sister games that only a little brother would tolerate until his dad came home one day and threatened to beat all three of his daughters if they put one more dress, application of lipstick or hair barrette on HIS boy! Good thing we still have photos, huh?

My brother was always a charming, funny, and ass-kicking machine like I was. He was only eleven when I moved out and I always felt a little guilty leaving him behind. Not because the rest of my family was totally psycho or anything. (Maybe a smidgen of psycho.) But I missed all of his middle school and high school years because I was living and working on the East Coast and he was all the way out in El Paso. (Yeah, the tee-shirt is pretty accurate. El Paso actually IS 10 miles from water and 3 feet from HELL.) And while I got to see him when I went home to visit for holidays every year or two, I missed out on all of his shenanigans and first dates and swim meets and prom and graduation. I wish I could have been there for that....sort of. I wish I could have sheltered him from some of the crazy he had to endure during the years that led to my parents eventual divorce.
By that time, I was working in Greece.

Just before I shipped out to Athens, I drove out to El Paso to drop off a bunch of stuff that I didn't want to take with me for fear it would get lost or destroyed. So I drove for three days with my suitcase of dirty laundry (to keep my sisters from hijacking all my clothes because they CERTAINLY wouldn't wash them before swiping them), a box filled with my high school diploma, awards from work, yearbooks and my mom all packed into my car. (Yeah, Mom only has one leg and I had a 5-speed Ford Escort so she was sort of along for the ride....and to tell me to slow down a lot.) I spent about a week with them and then my brother offered to drive back to Baltimore with me. COOL.

It was a great trip. Except when he got a speeding ticket about 4 miles outside of El Paso city limits. And except for when we stopped to eat cat fish at a truck stop outside of Nashville and they towed my friggin' car basically because it had out of state tags and it cost me about $150.00 to get it back and delayed our arrival to Baltimore by about 6 hours. I still hate Nashville because of that. But my brother and I had the laughing-est, singing-est, fun time during those three days on the road. I haven't seen him but about 5 or 6 times since then. Damn. That was back in 1992.

I'm thankful that we both have Facebook and Skype and email. If it weren't for that, we'd never hear from each other. But thanks to the internets we have an awesome relationship. And the last time I saw him back in May 2010 at a mini-family reunion outside of Austin, I spent several hours just talking to him and it was like we hadn't been apart at all. I love my brother so much. I'm very proud of him. He's a Navy veteran. He's a fantastic chef and butcher and has a plethora of knowledge about cheese. In fact, during the Whole Foods market 2008 "Crack Heard Round the World" attempt to break the Guinness Record for cutting the most wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano cheese open simultaneously, MY brother "cut his cheese" in 1 minute and 36 seconds....which is TOTALLY AWESOME! (Click here to watch Lloyd kick cheesy ass!) (He's the cute guy on the right!)

Lloyd is one of the coolest, smartest, and funniest people I ever had the pleasure to meet. I think he and I would be friends even if we weren't siblings. He's just that great a guy. And I miss him.