Biker broads at the DQ

Two old ladies ride up to the Dairy Queen on a motorcycle with sidecar. I watch them in awe while M. drips ice cream over the ketchup she already dripped all over herself. They sit on a bench by their ride, eating ice cream cones. I imagine that's me and my M&Ms BFF one day in the future, just like we have always planned it.

Off the menu

Discussion over what to have for lunch at my parents' house tomorrow fell flat. My mom's sick of pizza, and my dad already made his famous grilled cheese last time. Other than that, we don't have much else on the menu--besides my mom's "gourmet" soup, and luckily I thought of something better before she thought of soup.

Tomorrow, since it is cinco de mayo, we will be having Taco Bell. Si.

Muddling through

Some of us are parenting and others of us are merely "muddling through," as my mom put it to a cousin of mine today, while looking in my direction.

Thanks! I enjoyed that comment almost as much as the one about how if it weren't for the last 5 years with M. I'd still look young.

Grandma's birthday

Had a nice, mostly civilized lunch (because M. wasn't there) out for my mom's birthday today, except for my dad's usual choking attack like he does at every meal where we ignore it mostly except for keeping one eye on him to make sure he doesn't turn blue, and then later when my mom went to use the restroom and my dad got a call 15 minutes later...from my mom...in the restroom...because she couldn't get out of the so-called ADA approved restroom. No automatic door opener button on the wall. Of course, I went to go let her out right away, as soon as I finished my sandwich.

But by far the highlight of the lunch was when I told my mom a funny/disturbing story/gossip I had heard about one of her old church lady friends and her husband. As usual my dad couldn't hear what we were saying, and for some reason he seemed to want to know even though he usually doesn't care what we are talking about, so my mom was trying to explain it to him in a tactful and quiet way, since we were in public, but he kept cupping his hand to his ear and saying "WHAt???" So that left my mom no choice but to yell:

"We're talking about my friend. Her husband is addicted to porn!"
"Huh? Addicted to what? Corn?"
"No--PORN!"

And of course everyone turned to look.

A foregone conclusion (not necessarily)

Forgot to include the ending to the last outing to Burgerville with my parents:

After we got home M. said, "And I didn't punch Grandma in the nose!"

Because last time she did.

Send the Easter Bunny for take out

Highlights: Too much chocolate and Easter egg fu yung. My dad hunting eggs carrying a pink basket. My mom revealing her stash of fancy Easter bakery donuts (decorated to look like nests), which she had kept hidden from my dad right in plain sight--sitting right there plain as day taking up a whole shelf in a cabinet, but in a lower level cabinet she knows he won't look in because of his back pain, so he can't bend over. She is diabolical. And no, we didn't share with him. Figured what he didn't know...

"What???!!!"

Everyone was already pretty annoyed by the time we finally met my parents at Burgerville yesterday. Apparently, my mom had been trying to call me to buy more time because she wasn't ready (she's ALWAYS late) and apparently Cricket cuts your phone off if you're just one day late on the bill (but remember back when people made plans to meet at certain times and there were no cell phones to call in order to buy more time?). So since she couldn't get through to tell me, she sent my dad grumbling over to BV to stalk the parking lot looking for me. And we almost missed him because I EXPECT my mom to ALWAYS be late, so I always have to add about 20 minutes to the meeting time. (It's terrible of her to always do that knowing M. has zero patience!) So we met my dad as he was leaving the parking lot and we were driving in. He rolled down the window, looked pretty mad, gave me a scolding tone about not paying my phone bill, made me feel like a delinquent teenager, and said now he had to drive back home and get my mom since she wasn't ready yet.

So I had to entertain M. (the little time bomb) in the meantime. I asked her to choose, either wait in the car or go inside. She chose to wait in the car, where we played the, "Is that their car?" game at every car that passed by. (Little blue sports car? Grandma and Grandpa? Um, no.)

It takes a long time to get my mom loaded into the front of the car and then her scooter loaded into the back of the car, and my dad doing all the work with his bad hips, bad back, swearing, etc., so with my parents, it is not quick to just run home and get grandma like it might be for other people. It's a painfully slow process. But later that same day, we were all finally inside Burgerville where we left M. sitting with grandpa and my mom and I went to order.

I ordered for M. and me, and the cashier gave the total, but I turned to my mom for her to say what she wanted, and that's when things went wrong and I still don't know why but my mom flipped out on the cashier.

I guess she couldn't hear the cashier over the background noise, and was trying to ask her to repeat the total since it wasn't showing us the total on the register, so since she couldn't hear she was yelling "WHAT???!!!" and making angry faces at the cashier, and assuming the cashier couldn't hear her either, so talked really slow and very loud as if the cashier was either hard of hearing or stupid, and all with a really crazy pissed look on her face.  Then I guess my mom decided it was all just too upsetting to order after all so she would just go without, even though all she was getting was a Coke. Apparently she decided it was too hard to just say, "Coke," and instead insisted on paying right then, all the while throwing a big fit and acting like the cashier had done something wrong. The poor cashier was stuck there while my mom starting tossing her all these BV gift cards with different amounts left on them so the register froze up and we were stuck there so long our food beat us to the table.

After we got back to the table, my mom went back up to order her Coke by herself (cashier probably had quit by then) and while she was gone I tried to tell my dad what happened and thought maybe he would know what the hell her problem was, but right off he screwed up his face and yelled,

"WHAT???!!!"

Happy St. Pat's! How do you corn a turkey?

Saturday afternoon at the folks'. Today's fine fare is pastrami and sauerkraut sandwiches. For St. Patrick's Day. We know this isn't exactly on par with corned beef and cabbage, except that sauerkraut IS made from cabbage. So it counts. What happened was being unable to find Jenny O brand Corned Turkey (because we don't eat red meat), for the "corned turkey and shredded cabbage sandwiches." Closest I could find was turkey pastrami (though I considered getting regular turkey and trying to "corn" it myself, but I don't even know what that means). The pastrami looked nice and peppery and tasty, though, so I got my mom dialed into the decision process right there in the aisle.

me: "Where is pastrami from anyway?"
her: "I think it's Jewish."
me: "Hhhmmm...I don't know. Does it go with cabbage?"
her: "I'm not crazy about the cabbage part.
me: "But you like sauerkraut."
her: "Ooooo, let's have sauerkraut!"
me: "Okay, I guess so..."
(Something didn't seem right about that but it's hard to think with M. always and forever flapping her hand in front of my face)
her: "Sure! We CAN'T have St. Patrick's Day without sauerkraut."
me:  "Um... (???) I think you're thinking of Octoberfest."
her: "Oh. Well, whatever. I want sauerkraut."

At that point M. became shrill in the cart with her "are you talking about me?" routine, then started pulling things off the shelves, so I was out of time.

me: "So then we just say 'screw the Irish' and have pastrami and sauerkraut?"
her: "Yep. Sounds good."

And that's how it came to be that we had pastrami and sauerkraut sandwiches on St. Patrick's Day today, with table discussion regarding where does pastrami come from, and of course, constant interruptions from M. demanding to know if we were talking about her.

M.: "Did you just talk about me?"
me: "Nope."
M.: "Do you say 'nope' lots of times?"
me: "Nope--hey! Look at the SHINY thing!"

M. looks at her shiny bracelet, as if for the first time, and leaves us alone for about one minute.

My dad says pastrami is italian, and my mom still insists it's jewish. But this is the woman with zero ethnic sensibilities when it comes to food. This is someone who stands in the soup aisle, and when most people might pick out one can of Tuscan White Bean with Pasta and another can of Southwestern Chicken Fiesta with Rice, thinking they will then have two separate meals of soup--she imagines how they might taste together! Then proudly serves the goulash to us as 'look at what good soup I made.' The original makers Progresso and Wolfgang Puck be damned!

Then later we were discussing our dreary weather here and how the end of winter, all of spring, and beginning of summer are really just one long season--of rain, cold, gray, etc. And I mentioned how the local weather forecasters must get bored and that is evidenced by the fact that one of our weather guys recently wrote an in depth analysis of the new Van Halen album on his weather blog, rather than discuss the weather. That led to the inevitable: my 81 year old dad asking, "Van-who?"

me: "Van Halen."
he shrugged
me: "You've never heard of Van Halen? From the 80s?"
him: "80s?"
me: "THE NINETEEN EIGHTIES."
he shrugged again
me: "Rock band? Big hair?"
(he can write LOL emails to me when he's making fun of my mom, he asks me how to post pictures to his fb page, relentlessly ask me "what is an app?", but he's never heard of Van Halen???)

him: "So what piece band is it?"

Of course I didn't know how many instruments are included in Van Halen's "ensemble" so I told him that I do not know the answer to that. (While of course at the same time reassuring M. we were not talking about her, and reminding her "LOOK AT THE SHINY THING.")

That's the highlights from St. Patrick's Day with the folks. Our next holiday meal will be the traditional Easter Egg Foo Young. Can't wait!