Sundays with Stretchy Pants

I think I’m supposed to talk about the Experience Columbus blogger thing that a bunch of us local bloggers were invited to the other night. The event was put together in order to show us big-mouth bloggers the new ad campaign designed to bring more leisure travelers to Columbus. We’re supposed to love it and then use our super-human blogging powers to get the word out to everybody in a 3-hour away radius that Cols is swingin’, baby! It was pretty fun except for the part where somebody without a nametag, read my very fancy pre-printed nametag and said, “So Abby, tell me about Sundays With Stretchy Pants,” and then I peed a little in my pants and said, “Der…I like dis here ice creams.” I didn’t know what to say about SWSP. I’m not a legitimate blogger; they told me there would be ice cream, so I showed up. Also, the lady didn’t have a nametag on and I felt that was rude. Was she above having a nametag? Did she not want strangers walking up to her and calling her by name because that’s just a little bit disconcerting? Uh, yeah, it is. Everybody knows that.

Ok, here are my thoughts on the campaign: I get the joke, and I liked it a lot at first, but now I just think there isn’t enough pointing to what Columbus has to offer. Look at the sidebar ad here. I like that because it makes you wonder where the hell the ad is going and then it pays off with a lot of pretty pictures of some fun things you can do here. The print ads are good, too. The videos? I’m not a fan. I like the premise and I get the joke, but there needs to be more indication of what we can do here. We like flashy, pretty pictures of stuff. Without flashy, pretty pictures of stuff, we find ourselves wondering, “Hm. Where do you suppose that cheese rolling festival is? Is it far from here?” Everybody at the shindig pretty much said all that, but I doubt the ads will change at all. But, we all got free t-shirts and ice cream and brownies (oops, I don’t know where the brownies came from) and mouse pads, so whatevs. And I really love Columbus, even if their youtube channel is kind of lame.

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Like most of the other Columbus bloggers I know (and some I don’t know), I spent part of my weekend at Comfest listening to good music, admiring painted breasts, and drinking giant cups of beer. I had a moms-only night on Friday with Dawn and Kristen, and every time a young lady walked by with pair of uncovered breasts that were sitting up high where God put them, without the aid of any industrial-strength materials, the 3 of us couldn’t help but shake our heads and say, “Enjoy them while you can! They won’t always be like that,” and then we’d lament the fact that we didn’t appreciate our bodies back when we were young and perky, and now we’re stuck having to appreciate them for stupid reasons, like creating life and sustaining life and all that bullshit. Bitter.

We also found a perfect spot to sit and eat, and then we just couldn’t bring ourselves to leave the table because it was such a great spot for people watching. It was fun for me to see people that we see at the library, the pool, the grocery store, the farmer’s market, and everywhere else we go around here. It made this big (to me) city feel like such a small town. That might be why I like the Clintonville area of Columbus so much. It has big-city convenience with a small-town feel. A small town where people don’t freak out if you carry your baby in a sling or homeschool or homebirth or breastfeed a toddler. I love that about this place.

On Saturday, we went back to Comfest as a family just in time to see Kristen’s kids do their Grimaldi circus performance for 2 minutes until it got cut short because of the major thunderstorm that was on its way. It wasn’t raining when we took off, but by the time we were about 300 yards away from our van, the downpour was heavy, the wind was pushing us around and we dove for cover in a food tent near the North Market. The wind was rocking that tent back and forth in a very menacing way. I realized then that I only think thunderstorms are cool when I’m safely indoors. I was extremely uncomfortable with the amount of lightening, rain, and wind. My kids and my niece were all scared shitless, but they were playing it cool in front of each other. I was grateful for that because the cherry on top would have been desperate, “I wanna go hooome!” whining and that would have sent me over the edge. Bryan kept saying, “Let’s just run for the van!” But I wasn’t about to listen to him because he drove through Chesaning’s great tornado of ‘98 (Or was it ‘97?) all the while thinking, “Hm, that’s quite a lot of horizontal rain.” He didn’t know there was a tornado going on, but he was about a mile away from a barn that got destroyed by it. I didn’t think he could get that lucky twice, so we stayed put. Until the short man in the official uniform poked his head in the tent and told us there was now a tornado warning and that we all needed to find a building to get into. At that point, I looked at the kids with an isn’t-this-quite-an-adventure smile plastered across my face and told them, “Don’t worry, the North Market is right there and it’s a huge brick building. We’ll be fine. Isn’t this exciting? RUN!!!!” We ran into the North Market (It’s important to note here that Riley and Liberty almost got backed over by a police cruiser during this run. I had to verbally assault the cop. It’s not like he had his sirens on. I totally would have sued.) So we ran again with Bryan still saying, “I think we should just drive home,” and me saying, “You are a retard and if you keep it up I’m going to get all hysterical in front of the children. I’m trying to act like it’s an adventure, but I’ve already peed my pants from fear. You don’t know that, though, because we’re in the middle of a raining-ass tornado that has washed my pee away so shut up about driving home. We’re never going to get home. We’re all going to die and our home has probably already been destroyed by the tornado anyway!”

We waited inside the North Market for a bit and then people were saying, “I didn’t hear the sirens,” but my niece and I thought we did hear the sirens. I didn’t care one way or another because those stupid sirens were broken last week and they wouldn’t shut off after our tornado warnings were over, so how did I know they weren’t broken and wouldn’t turn on this week? You can’t trust technology! Except when it’s Dawn using her handy-dandy computer to tell us the weather. Yes, it finally occurred to us that we could call Dawn and she would tell us what to do. She told us that Short Guy was lying to us and told us we were safe to get the f*ck out of there, so we did. And then it turned out to be fun. We had our own little community festival with cozy, dry jammies, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, candy, chips, and card games. Best. Comfest. Ever.

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Today is Liberty’s last homeschool art class until fall. And since gas costs a billion dollars and the class is not within walking distance, I have to say goodbye to Java Central. *sigh* It really is the most beautiful coffee shop in the world. And now that they’re carrying AmyD stuff, they’re even beautifuller. If you’re local, and so rich that you can afford to put gas in your mini-van, you should go there and buy stuff. While I’m there today, I will be weeping into my iced java chip and drying my eyes with one of AmyD’s gorgeous aprons. *sniffle* I’ll buy it if I get it too snotty.

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Kristen and Dawn have introduced me to the wonderful world of thrifting. You would think it would be a no-brainer for me: I’m poor, I should buy used clothes on the cheap. But I don’t like to shop and I absolutely hate to shop in chaos. I <3 T@rget so much when I absolutely have to buy something, not because it has good stuff, but because it is neat and orderly. Order soothes.

I thought the thrift store would be very chaotic, but it was lovely. Everything was sorted by color, which I didn’t think would be a good enough system, but it was. I kept getting butterflies every time I saw something that I liked that was in my size for $1.50.  A dollar and a half! I had to really work at keeping my excited squealing under control. We ended up spending more than 4 hours in a single store. I don’t spend more than 4 hours Christmas shopping without a food break. Actually, if I were ever to shop in regular stores for 4 hours in a row, that would involve 1 lunch break, 1 coffee break, 7 potty breaks, and a cheesecake break. And I would spend 3 times the amount of money and come home with 1/8 of the stuff.

By the time I came up for air and decided to look at my watch, I thought it might be around 2:00ish. It was 5:15. I was in a thrifting-related time warp of some sort, the likes of which I haven’t seen since 1991 when Bryan bet me I couldn’t drink a fifth of Jack Daniels. (The last thing I remember from that night is slamming down the empty bottle, standing up and saying, “Somebody owes me TWO DOLLARS!” And then I woke up and it was 1993).

Anyway, yeah. Thrifting is fun. You should totally do it. But set an alarm or something because the time warp will get you and then you’ll realize that you’re starving and you didn’t get groceries like you planned to and then you’ll decide that you and your thrifting friends and their husbands and children should all go to the Chinese buffet for dinner (since you saved all that money at the thrift store) and then you’ll try to run the next morning with a pile of buffet food in your guts. Not a good idea. But the thrifting was totally worth it.

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I wrote about this before, but it still annoys me. The AP is again talking about the fact the people like to complain about the book And Tango Makes Three. Ignorance annoys me. And ignorance for the sake of the children annoys me with the power of a thousand suns. The parents who complain about this kind of book are the same type of parents who can’t bring themselves to talk about s3x* with their children, or even call their body parts by the appropriate names, instead giving them nicknames like woo woo or whatzit. Ridiculous. If you can’t say the word p3nis* to your son, good luck. Good effing luck with your head in the sand. That’s the kind of thing that puts the subject of reproduction (or *gasp* intercourse for purposes other than reproducing!) on a very high shelf, which makes it more intriguing and more attractive and then the kids find out about an awesome book like It’s So Amazing and find themselves feeling ashamed, but titillated. That is not a healthy combination. Pretty soon, because they got a taste of this forbidden subject, they’re desperate for more and since they can’t get their curiosity satisfied in a healthy way, by asking their parents about it and being provided with good age-appropriate books on the subject, that’s where p0rn from the neighbor or the dad’s stash comes in really handy (because, mark my words, the households who protest so much are the households where the dad definitely has a stash that his wife probably doesn’t even know about). And it’s not a good idea to learn about the birds and the bees from materials that are not age-appropriate and do not treat s3x as the important thing that it is. Can you say, deviant behavior?

S3x is a normal part of life and should be discussed as such with people. Children are people, just in case you didn’t know. And they have reproductive organs, even if you don’t want to believe it. Homosexuality is a normal part of life for some people and if kids were allowed to learn about it, they might feel they could come out with dignity and love, or if they’re not gay, they would be able to give their gay friends dignity and love when they come out, then we’d have less Ted Haggard situations in the world. Yeah, heaven forbid your child should be allowed to feel that his homosexual feelings are ok. It’s better if he tries to deny them and gets married and has 5 kids only to be living on the down low and blowing apart his life and his wife and kids’ lives in the process. Messy. But at least you didn’t have to explain homosexuality to a child. Horrors.

*Because there is so much deviant behavior in the world, caused by stoopid parents who won’t provide their children with non-judgemental information about one of the most normal things in life, I have to type those kinds of words like that so the deviants who google certain things don’t stumble upon my site. Stop being stoopid. And buy some books for your kids. Then let them read them whenever they want so it takes the mystery away and it becomes no big deal instead of this thing to simultaneously covet and feel ashamed about. You can start by calling their parts by the right names because if you can say those words, it’s much easier to say all of the other things you need to say over the course of a lifetime of parenting.

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I haven’t been this sick in a very long time. I can’t remember the last time I had a fever, but it must have been in the 80s because, darn it, this fever has set off such a hankering for peach Hi-C. A hankering that is destined to go unsatisfied. Unless somebody out there has a bomb shelter set up with all kinds of Hi-C and Spam and whatnot. That would be awesome.

My mom didn’t usually buy Hi-C or anything fun like that when I was growing up, but when I was sick, she would buy me a giant can of my favorite peach drink. That, and a can of Planters cheese balls. Or cheese curls, depending on which texture I was after. I can still remember the smell of those cheese balls when I peeled the foil back. Yum.

I’ve been dreaming about peach Hi-C in a can, opened on 2 sides (to avoid the glugging when it’s poured) with that little thing that used to put triangular holes in the many varied tin cans that held our liquids in the 70s and 80s, and popsicles for my sore, sore throat. I called Bryan at work this morning at about 7:00 and tried to communicate to him with my nearly non-existent voice that I would need him to bring me some popsicles on his way home or else he shouldn’t bother coming home. Only I couldn’t really talk that much, so I didn’t get to threaten him and be all dramatic. So I just used my scary voice to say, “Redrum” over and over and he got the hint. Then I staggered back to bed and dreamed that he couldn’t find any popsicles anywhere because they stopped making them when they stopped making peach Hi-C. After waking up from that nightmare about 23 times, he finally came home with my precious yum yums.

So sad that I’ll be missing the Chair is Art show at Gallery 202 tonight. Bryan will be there with the girls because Liberty worked on a couple of chairs with her art class. Some of our friends also have chairs in the show. It will be fun and I hate to miss the fun. Boo.

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It’s art day and it’s nice out. I suppose t’s possible that there is a cloud over the beautiful coffee shop, but I’m choosing to believe that Oprah heard my prayers and has forgiven me. Feels good.

We’re very excited around here to be having some more awesome company for the next 3 days (Mechelle, her kids, and one of my nieces–yay!) We’ll be wandering around doing the fun things that we can do in Columbus, so I won’t be around here checking my blog stats obssessively. Much. I don’t know how the 8 of you who check my blog regularly will get through the week, but I’m sure you could read a book or maybe interact with other humans to pass the time. I know those things don’t sound like viable alternatives, but I read on the internet that that’s how some people choose to spend their days. For real. Ok, bye.

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Bryan screwed the front license plate on our cars. Did you hear me? Do you know what that means? He paid $2.50 for the proper screws and he screwed our Ohio license plates onto the front of my mini van and his falling-apart-type beater thing. We’ve been living in Ohio for 3 years now. We came from Michigan, land of the single, back-end only license plate. Apparently, there is no point in having one on the front and one on the back when there isn’t any money in the state budget for highway patrol.

So we’ve been driving around with our front license plate tucked on our dashboard for 3 years. Last year, Bryan was issued a $40 ticket for this very infraction, yet he still couldn’t bring himself to permanently attach the license plates. This type of to-do list inaction is so against his character as a man that even he, King Literal, Head of the Knights of the Anti-Allegorical Order, could see the symbolism. As Bo Schembechler, rest His soul (yes, that’s a capital “H”) would say, he’s a Michigan Man. He loves that when he looks at his veins, they’re running blue. And he tries to never actually bleed because, well, the blood is scarlet. Nothing makes him more annoyed than Buckeye fever. That’s hard when you live in Columbus. Attaching the license plates? That’s some permanent stuff.

This move was supposed to be temporary. It was a way to get out of the shit-hole AT&T customer service job that he had been in for 6 years. A voluntary transfer to a better department in a city that we were bred to hate. My dad said, “Columbus? I raised you better than that! Divorce him!” Not really, but close. Indeed, I never would’ve agreed to a permanent move. We lived in our hometown of Chesaning, near both of our families in a house that we transformed from a run-down hovel into a gorgeous historic home fit for Chesaning’s now-defunct Parade of Homes. Move? MOVE? “I never would’ve married somebody who was going to move me away from my family,” said I, Queen Co-Dependent, Head Lady in Charge of Seeking Approval from Extended Family At All Costs. Ouch.

Then we moved. I was ready to look at this as temporary to get him out of that job, and just do what I could to get by for a couple of years and then move back home. But Columbus, she’s a seductress. She found many, many ways to my heart. Usually food is the only way to my heart, and she definitely has that covered, but let’s just take homeschooling as another for instance.

Homeschooling is a huge part of our lives and in Chesaning, we were a very lonely minority. I had no idea how lonely until we moved here. Homeschooling Community, you had me at hello. The Homeschool Gym, Homeschool classes that are offered at art galleries, science museums, recreation centers, the zoo, the metro parks, and anywhere you want them. Seriously, you just call places and say, “we want a homeschool class/tour,” and they fall all over themselves to make it happen. The roller skating rink? Some homeschooler called up and said, “We be homeschoolers and we desire to trade cash for services. But the cash shall be of an amount that is less than what they who are not homeschoolers pay.” And the roller rink (and the ice skating rink, btw) said, “Let it be written. Let it be so.” Support for homeschooling instead of blank stares and defensiveness? I. Had. No. Idea.

Oh, and there are fun people here, too. We like you guys.

**Oh my, you should feel how my blood pressure went up and my pulse quickened and my brain screamed, “Don’t talk about how much you love your Ohio friends! The people in Michigan are going to think you don’t like them anymore! What if they call you and yell at you for making new friends? Omigod, you are going to be abandoned!”**

That reminds me, one more thing we love about Columbus is the many options for psychotherapy.

It’s ok. It’s really ok. It’s hard to come out, but we’re doing it…

We love Columbus: The people, the stuff to do, the stuff to eat, the therapists. Not the buckeyes. We’ll never love the buckeyes. But we have 2 license plates on our vehicles now and, dammit, it feels good.

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I voted for Obama and most of Ohio didn’t. I was truly undecided on the issues, so what it really came down to was the fact that his father was a goat herder. Seriously. And now a goat herder’s son is running for president of the United States of golldurned America? That’s some crazy shit, yo. That, and the fact that his kids are about the same age as my kids made me feel like he would be more in touch with me and my family. My dad could’ve been a goat herder. You don’t know.

Here’s a nifty little article that shows each candidate’s net worth. Obama is barely a millionaire. Just like us! We’re barely thousandaires. He feels our pain.

*sigh* Anyway, I’ll totally be on board if Hillary is the candidate. She gave that speech tonight in Columbus right next to Bryan’s building and he called me while he was walking to work from his parking lot several blocks away to tell me about all of the news trucks and whatnot all around. I had to work hard to restrain myself from waking the girls up and speeding down there just to be in it, you know? I got choked up when she talked about hearing from a mom with daughters who were 2 and 4. The mom sent her $10 and told her that she and her daughters cheer and chant for Hillary and, I don’t know, it just choked me up. I mean, she’s a woman. I’m a woman. My daughters will most likely be women. I hate to reduce it to gender, but my goodness it does feel special.

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Ohio’s primaries are tomorrow and I’m still undecided. I’m going to try to definitely decide who to vote for before I vote. I think that’s a good plan. I have goodies from each side because I went to the gallery hop with Alissa and Amy to see Sharon’s and Melissa’s awesome arts all up on display Saturday night (Yay!), and both Hillary’s and Obama’s people were out and about on opposite sides of the street, chanting at each other and everything. It was so cool and so very big city! On the west side of the street, I was sure I was voting for Hillary. The volunteers gave us all stickers and they even gave me three extras for each of my little girls (cuz Hillary’s a girl, you know). Then we ended up on the east side of the street where Obama’s volunteers gave us some stickers *and* a button! A Button! So I wore both stickers and the button and I was confused. And then when I got home and tried to take the stickers off of my sweater, Hillary’s stuck like a mother effer, and Obama’s came off super easy. I keep trying to read more into that. Like political tea leaves or something.

Anyway, I gave the girls their super cool Hillary stickers today. Maya ended up with all of them because Lena and Liberty informed me that they were voting for Obama.

Me: Why Obama?

Lena: Cuz he’s black.

Me: Well, Hillary’s a woman.

Liberty: (excitedly) If there was a black woman, I would pick her! Besides, Hillary already got to live in the White House and Obama never did yet.

I’m pretty sure I’ve heard that same argument on Meet the Press or something.

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