Monday, September 27, 2010

A Lesson in Cultural Mores

Or, What Happens When I Send Carl off to the Celtic Faire in a Sexy Kilt with a Cute Kid

Wendy: There was a nice lady there. She had a husband but then they had a fight and I told her that she could come home and play at our house-I have a great idea!! What if Daddy had two wifes?

Me: *laughing*

Wendy: Mom, fights with husbands are not funny. So, okay, I think she should come and be Daddy's other wife, because she was nice and looking for some new friends, and she was nice.

Me: Yeah, that might be fun. Does she clean bathrooms?

Wendy: She let us use her bathroom in her apartment.

Me: Really. Her apartment.

Carl: Her hotel room. We were only there for a minute to use the bathroom!

Wendy: SO, Daddy told her about you are his girlfriend and you live at our house. And then she decided that maybe she didn't want any new friends today, and she had to go.

Carl: I'm kind of insulted too. Like, just because I have a girlfriend, I'm not even worth talking to anymore? I don't have anything to offer, as a person? She totally objectified me.

Me: *bland stare*

Wendy: She can't have Daddy, cause you already have him, right? That's silly, because if she wants new friends, she could share him. Wanna see my sheep magnet I made? This other girl was really nice and helped me make it....

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Between Us and Mr. Insane (cont)

I didn't really expect a nutcase jerkface stellar human being that is the owner of this pony to actually take care of this animal just because he was told to by some bleeding-heart liberal activist organization like the Humane Society, even if that pansy-ass officer was carrying a police badge. This man thinks he's a farmer from the 1800's. Farmers from the 1800's don't get told how to wrangle their animals by no uppity townfolk.

I guess old-tymey farmers think it's okay to let ponies rot their hooves in their own shit for four months, and then trot them out onto our winding country-ish roads, pulling jaunty carriages over pavement. Old-tymey farmers also apparently wear goofy straw Sunday hats whilst doing this. Goofy straw hats of evil.

So anyway, Farmer Insane stopped putting her out after a week or so.

A Sunday or two ago, we were out of cheese danish, and I was feeling particularly cranky. Staring out the window, across the yard at the closed pony stall, I got all hormonal and pissed off. The kind of pissed off where you stand there arguing with imaginary old guys until you want to go kick some old guy's ass, but can't, because there is no one actually standing there.

I stalked out, opened the stall, and led her to her paddock so she could have a bit of the gorgeous day. HA. West Nile Virus in your ear, old man.

Carl and I packed up some stuff to go fishing (it was a GLORIOUS day for saving mammals and killing fish!), and loaded ourselves and Wendy into the car. As we pulled out of the driveway, I glanced smugly over to the paddock, where the pony was grazing happily. Or should have been.

Except that the back gate-the gate around the corner of the barn and thus not visible from the front gate-was open. And the pony was not in the paddock.

"HOLY SHIT! STOP STOP!! TURN AROUND HOLY SHIT!"

Carl yanked the car around right in the middle of the road, and tore back into driveway, and bumped over the yard to the back side of the barn.

"That gate is NEVER open. Why would it be open now? WHY???"

"Well, maybe you shouldn't interfere!"

"Yes I should! You know I should!"

"I know! I KNOW!"

He found her in the neighbor's yard, peaceably munching on the carefully manicured lawn. Personally, I think the neighbor owes this pony some grass. I mean, the neighbor is buddies with Farmer Insane, and condones his animal abuse by proxy. Neighbor Lawn Boy comes over at Farmer Insane's invitation to weed whack around our front steps and walk, because he agrees that we just don't do it right...but doesn't mind living sixty feet from a large animal who is slowly starving to death.

The latest development in all of this: Farmer Insane has begun again to let the pony outside again, but not in the enclosed paddock. The past few days, he had her roaming the yard behind the shop building, sort of penned in by his parked SUV on one end and some ladders (OF CARLS) that he tied together as a sort of makeshift fence on the other.

I'm not sure if I should do something about this. She is getting grass, and that's good. However, I fully expect to see her grazing her way across our front yard and moseying down the street one of these days.

I suppose that on that day, I can decide whether the time has come to blow this taco stand and ride a pony to Canada?

Friday, September 17, 2010

Between Us and Mr. Insane

I haven't been writing much lately. Most of the stuff that's actually going on with me right now, the stuff I want desperately to write about, I shouldn't. Law suits that I'm not sure would be great to talk about online. Serious family upset that is not my story to tell, and too touchy to air publicly, anyway.

I can tell you about this, though. Or, at least, I think I can. I don't know. Let's see if I can get myself sued.

One of the many ongoing awkward aspects of our current living situation (you know, the situation where a guy is wrongfully trying to throw us out) is the pony that the owner keeps here.

This guy has a whack job very curious notion of what it means to take care of an animal. He goes for weeks-sometimes months-without cleaning the pony's stall. Keeps her in this disgusting environment for weeks on end, though there is a paddock for her to graze in not twenty feet away. Waters her in an algae-coated bucket. Gives us the delightful choice between complicity in a serious case of animal abuse and the potential fallout of turning our landlord in for it.

Over the years that we have been here, Carl has taken it upon himself to put her out to munch on grass and get some sun from time to time, and clean her stall when it gets really really bad. As things became kind of testy between us, the whack job owner of the pony and property responded to Carl's interference (and apparent rude condemnation of the owner's mad pony care skills) with a padlock on the stall door. He claimed at one point that he doesn't want her to be out to graze because of "West Nile Virus." He also claimed that giving her apples and carrots will cause her to "get founder." He says these things with the stubborn-old-German-man tone in his voice that suggests his absolute knowledge of all things, and indicates that we can just go to hell.

I think this man is insane. (What is that that I just did? Libel? Slander? Well, it's too late now. He's evil too. And probably a closet cross dresser with a baby chicken f**king fetish.) (No offense to cross dressers. I like you folks. You're fun.)

This is where the awkwardness has come in. We are leasing our home from this insane person. We were supposed to buy it this year. Things over the past two years went from fine to tense to outright hostile, and now he is doing his best to get us removed from the property. And oh yeah, we're not sure he's stable. We're not sure we won't come home to our stuff on the lawn and our doors and windows boarded over.

This year, I poked around with some animal PA rescue/advocacy groups, to see if there is something they could do, but with no luck. Carl and I constantly stew in a soup of our own guilt-I mean, we have visions of late-night rescue missions, with ski masks and horse trailers, where we liberate the poor thing and...I don't know...what? Drop her off at the animal shelter? Spirit her to Canada where she will be taken in by kindly Canadian pony herders? Get her adopted by circus folk?

Wendy and I feed her handfuls of grass and apples (I checked with some relatively sane horse people that I know-Hi, B!-apples are in fact okay for horses) from time to time when chicken f**ker the owner isn't around. I haven't really known what else to do about it without making the already bad situation between us and Mr. Insane more confrontational. And possibly get our cats abducted and made into cat sausage over a fire somewhere.

Well, it doesn't get much more confrontational than a guy wrongfully trying to get my family evicted. Awkwardness solved!

I don't know if you know any other six-month pregnant chicks, but we are totally willing to get confrontational right back. Last month, after emailing and calling a few different entities, I finally emailed the right person at the local SPCA, and a humane society investigator showed up the next day! Like an avenging angel! Well, not really. But still-

HOORAY! JACKPOT!

This benevolent protector of creatures everywhere had a badge and a bucket of reassurance that I had done the right thing by contacting him. He didn't take the pony away to her new life as a little girl's best friend, like I hoped he would, but he did issue a warning and threaten fines and whatnot.

Mr. Insane cleaned the pony stall, put the pony out for a week...

...and then stopped.


*****to be continued*****

Thursday, September 09, 2010

Kid Brains. A Magical and Bizarre Place of WTF and OMG, I'm Dumber Than I Thought.

Watching Wizard of Oz the other day, Wendy observes that the Munchkin babies are sitting in a nest, surrounded by broken egg shells. She casually glances up at me, musing, "Wow. I guess Munchkins are not mammals."

tick...tick...tick...

Forty-five minutes later, people, around about the time the witch is setting Scarecrow on fire, and I'm all, "OH! Because they came out of EGGS!"

"Yeah, they didn't come out of a belly-door, like our baby. I wonder if Munchkins have boobs...Hey, if they followed the purple brick road, where would they go?"

Dude. I don't know. Just enjoy the magical wonder of...


"If the monkeys take out Scarecrow's straw, will they make him dead? If Scarecrow is leaking his straw, is his spirit leaking out, too? He should keep that stuff in better."


...

?

Tuesday, September 07, 2010

Irritablility; Brought to You By Five Hours of Sleep

Things you should not attempt while pregnant:
1. Moving.
2. Being wrongfully evicted.
3. Getting a divorce.
4. Buying a house.
5. Going to court for problems related to any of the above.
6. Losing or looking for a job.

I mean, you can go ahead and attempt them. I'm telling you from personal experience (and from watching the other two preggo women in my life), the resulting headaches, bad sleep, and several kinds of digestional upset are like, twenty-seven times more sucky, because you can't even take the edge off with a maitai. Or two.

Do you know what the medical world wants you to do when you tell them that you are stressed, and you have a headache from too much/not enough vomiting/pooping?

Take some Tylenol.

These people want to poke around in your vag, steal your blood, and stick a nine foot needle in there right next to your baby's skull (LE SCREAM!), but the best advice they have for you, as they stand with one hand on the doorknob of your examination room, is to "try not to get a headache."

Do you ever get the impression that people in lab coats really know dick about dick? And that they also don't care about your problems, because they are too busy envisioning their after-work tequila sunrise?

It's cool, though, because all that time Dr. KnowsDick spends leafing through my chart that he has obviously never seen and going over the same handout about not eating hot dogs and sushi that I got last time? All that time? I'm envisioning giving him a swift kick in the jimmies. And then stealing his friuty booze drink.