04.30.06
The Best Damn Beef Stew… Period
Sunday sucked. Sunday was terrible. Sunday, I almost burned down our house.
Due to Mike’s imminent departure, I decided to cook something decent for him for dinner. Flipping through my rather limited recipe collection, I decided on beef stew. Number one, we had most of the ingredients. Number two, it’s been awhile since we had it. Number three, I felt like playing Emeril and wanted to give Mike a day to relax before he has to leave for BFE.
So I’m following the directions, put flour and a couple spices in a bag and add stew meat, shake and put in a double broiler to brown meat. Then the rest of the recipe calls just for spices and veggies, some cooking wine and broth to be put in at different intervals. Okay, I can do that. I’m not a slouch in the kitchen, though I’m often uninspiring. I’ve never used a double broiler, and the recipe said, ” heat cooking oil on medium high and brown meat in double broiler”. I don’t have a double broiler, so I was just going to use a stock pot, a strainer and a pot lid. I put the oil in the stock pot, put the meat in the strainer, put the strainer in the stock pot and put the lid on the strainer. Yeah. Those of you who know how to cook with a double broiler know right away what I did so terribly wrong.
I lifted the lid to check on the meat and noticed the smell of the smoke was off. It was a choking smoke, a suffocating smoke that permeated the kitchen and roiled into the living room, not at all the savory smoke I remember from my childhood when my parents would make this recipe. I put the lid back down and the strainer bounced in the stock pot. Yup, bounced. The small gulp of oxygen my lifting the lid gave the oil brought the flash point on and poof! My stock pot was on fire. I managed to get the strainer with the meat out and in the sink. After that, all I could do was shout to Mike, “Help! FIRE!” I knew better than to throw water on an oil fire, but I couldn’t remember what to put on it. Mike got the lid on to snuff out the oxygen supply. The whole time the fire alarm was going off, and we know that damn thing works because it goes off every time we open the oven, so closely is it situated to the kitchen.
Yeah, I was supposed to put water in the stock pot, and use the oil in the strainer or better yet, a skillet that would have fit over the top of the stock pot. Instead, I heated the oil to its flashpoint and poof. Fire. Nice trick, huh? What’s totally awesome about this is that Gabe was napping, and he didn’t wake up through my screams of “Fire!” to Mike, or to the blaring fire alarm. While I’m really glad he didn’t wake up, I can’t help but think sleeping through a fire alarm isn’t exactly a good thing.
After Mike took the burning pot outside and sprinkled flour into it to put out the flames (oh yeah, that’s what you’re supposed to use to put out an oil fire!) and he graciously came up with the idea for using our crock pot for the rest of it, and he lit all the candles we have in the house to get rid of the smell of nasty oil fire smoke, I got back to the business of cooking beef stew. Mike disposed of the stock pot, which was ruined, along with the lid (second one of that set ruined, since Mike started an oil fire and ruined our 8 inch skillet last year ~ now why didn’t I remember that when I put oil in the stock pot???) With the browned meat simmering in the crock pot, I decided to rinse up the dishes in the sink. Absentmindedly, I put a hand to the side of the crock pot to move it out of the way. Ssssssssss. The sound of searing flesh, for I’d placed my hand on the little metal strip of the heating element under the ceramic insert. I yanked my hand back and put it under the coldest water I could get from the sink, rested my forehead in my good hand, and started to cry. After a few minutes, and a couple ice cubes later, I went upstairs to ask Mike if he wanted onions in his stew. He looked at my face, my limp hand with an ice cube in it, and back at my face.
Mike: You’re not having a good time of it, are you? [sympathetically, gesturing for me to come closer for a hug.]
Me: No. [muffled into Mike's chest]
Mike: You need help?
Me: [muffled] No.
Mike: What’s left?
Me: Simmering and chopping vegetables. I’m scared to get out a knife. I’ll probably cut off a finger. This better be the best damn beef stew you’ve ever had. I’m going to go cut onions while I’m still crying.
On my way out of the room, I grabbed the camera to record for the blog the damage I’ve done to myself, the mark of a true blogger. While I iced up one hand, I tried to cut up vegetables with the other. Didn’t work so well. Also, one handed typing sucks.
*edited to add: I found out later that my dad, who wrote the recipe down for me, accidentally wrote double broiler when he meant dutch oven. So the bloopers just kept on coming.
04.28.06
Impeccable Timing
Hey Hubby! At least your company’s timing for sending you out of town every other week isn’t as bad in one aspect! Aunt Flo is plopping her cranky, attitude- and bloating-inducing butt on our couch all week for her monthly visit to our abode, so you don’t have to deal with Her Tetchiness Who Takes Me Over while you’re gone! When you get back, she’ll be finished wreaking her havoc on me and I’ll be waiting for you with open arms and an attitude scrubbed clean, having gotten it all out of my system in the week you’re gone for work. Lucky you!
And I may as well have announced to all home invaders that hey! I’m home alone all week with a young child and I’m easy pickins’! But beware, Oh Creepy Lurky One thinking of invading: our burglar alarm is in sharp working order and I have a young ‘un to protect, so think twice, ye Home Invader, because Bodyguard Mama is one mean Mama, and with Aunt Flo backing her up, you’d be better off finding another neighborhood with an unsuspecting loner. Just walk on by…
The Doctor Recommends…
Gabe is fascinated with the stuff I tell him is mine or Daddy’s. Like Daddy’s or my cell phone (don’t know if Sprint’s free long distance covers calls to Outer Mongolia and I don’t want to chance it), my Harry Potter Light Wedge that allows me to read in complete dark without disturbing Mike (best invention ever!), or a thing of deodorant. What is that thing anyway? A tube? A roll? A stick? A bottle? We’ve always just said “get me some deodorant at the store,” or “toss me that deodorant.” But I digress. If Gabe’s not supposed to have it, you can bet he does the second our heads are turned.
When Gabe gets his chubby little hands on something he knows he’s not supposed to have, one of us sternly tells him to hand it over. He thinks if he tells us to whom it belongs, “Eeeet’s Mommy’s!” and then runs away that he won’t get in trouble for getting into my cross stitch bag despite multiple warnings of sharp things. (No matter how tightly I wedge the bag to almost behind my nightstand, or how far under my bed I put it, covering it with blankets and shoes and other diversions, Gabe will find it.) Gabe will always find the things he’s not supposed to drag all over the house. This is true for obscenely full cups of soda, a fork with spaghetti sauce on it, or worse, the spoon from the bowl of sauce off the counter. My little genius has figured out how much taller he can be with a little more effort and something on which to stand. Out of reach in our house is a thing of the past. Once, he was carting around a green ink Sharpie, lid off, and he stooped to color the carpet.
My reaction, you wonder? [calmly, for I know freaking out signals to him that the thing he's playing with is the best toy in the world] “Gabe, bring the pen here.”
Gabe: Eeet’s Daddy’s!
Me: No, it’s both Mommy’s and Daddy’s. Bring it here.
Gabe: NO! [taking off running, must be good toy]
When I caught up to him, I took it from him, recapped it, and put it in it’s little cubby hole by the phone, far from even toddlers on a chair. Then I went for the peroxide. Yes, I said peroxide. Confused yet? Here it is:
The absolute BEST carpet stain remover in the UNIVERSE is peroxide!!!
Peroxide = $.98 bottle of clear liquid Mama of Toddler stain relief, cheaper than any of a dozen carpet cleaner products by about a 1000%. It will get ANYTHING out of carpet with a squirt bottle of peroxide, a dampened washrag, and a little patience. It doesn’t even take as long to dab stains out as Resolve carpet cleaner. Accidentally smear a bit of poop from that exploded diaper on the floor? No problem! Code Red Mountain Dew? Pssssh! Spaghetti sauce stains? Blood? Sharpie Permanent Marker? BRING IT! You don’t even have to worry about the peroxide stripping the regular carpet color*. I’ve even bought 5 bottles of it and put it in my steam cleaner, 50% diluted, to do more than spot clean the carpet. Works like a charm, so I thought I’d pass on the secret to you wonderful folks. Now I don’t have to be militant about carpet stains the way my mother was. “You’re bleeding! Get off the carpet!” Little Bald Doctors highly recommends peroxide as a carpet stain remover.
Just don’t accidentally get the peroxide spray bottle mixed up with the water bottle you use to flatten your child’s bed head hair in the morning. That could require some explaining to the hubby.
Got some foolproof tricks around your house that make you feel all Martha Stewarty? Lemme know. I can always use good ideas that cut corners-I mean work!
* If you have a darker colored carpet, you just might want to try the peroxide out on a small swatch somewhere semi-hidden to make sure it doesn’t strip darker carpet dyes. I’ve only used and seen peroxide used on carpet colors like teal, tan, ivory, and white. The teal was relatively bright, and the color didn’t strip, but I haven’t tested it on darker colors like green, blue, red, or black. And if you have that color of carpet, send me a picture of that room. I’m always impressed by bold decorating ideas, and dark carpet strikes me as bold.
04.27.06
A Gallon of Milk
I’ve been wracking my brain for the last couple days trying to think of a good, thought provoking post to write about, but it seems like when I come up with a good idea, when I sit down to write about it, it fizzles. I try to put humorous spin on things, but I kinda have to be in the mood to be funny. Usually that’s no problem ~ I find myself chuckling at my own jokes anyway, which may be a sad form of funny since I don’t really know if I’m able to pull off funny or not ~ but it seems the last couple days I haven’t the sunny disposition for funny. I’ve actually been down in the dumps a bit. This happens to everyone, and I know I’ll snap out of it, but in the meantime, my downer moments take over my point of view and all I can think about are depressing things. I finally decided to post about that, because this blog, while a way to keep in touch with my far-flung family, is like a dry-erase board for me to get it all out. Almost magically, writing about things seems to wipe the dry-erase board clear and I don’t seem to be so bothered by it all anymore.
What happened to courtesy? Seriously, and I’m not trying to be antiquated talking about how it was back in the day because I’m only 28 years old so back in the day really wasn’t that long ago for me. I am the worst hypocrite when it comes to talking about judgmental people because I can’t help but make judgments on what I see daily. However, isn’t judgment just another word for opinion? In my opinion it seems many people have become so much ruder since I was a kid. I was raised to say “please” and “thank you”, to hold doors open for people slightly behind me on their way through the same door, or to say “excuse me” if I found myself in someone’s way or needing to squeeze by someone in the tight quarters of say a store aisle or between cars in a parking lot. When I worked as a grocery store cashier, I didn’t try to find out peoples’ innermost secrets in the five minutes it took me to ring up their food, but I did say hello, thank you, and have a nice day. I even started at that grocery store as a sacker, the person at the end of a checkout lane who bagged the groceries. It says something to me that when I worked that job, it was expected of us to take the cart out to the patrons’ cars and load them into their trunks for them, and now only one of the three grocery stores I regularly patronize even employs a group of sackers. Maybe it’s a regional thing since I live in a different state than the one in which I was raised. Last night after picking up the child, I stopped for some veggies and chocolate syrup since Gabe doesn’t like to drink milk and I thought I’d try some child crack (chocolate) to get him to ingest his dose of Vitamin D. He’s on the small side on the weight charts, so a little more junk, if he’s getting something good for him in the process, isn’t out of the question. He obviously loves his Flintstone’s vitamins so maybe if I sweeten the milk deal, he’ll go for it more. (Yeah, tried when we got home and he didn’t really care that it was yummied up for him. Sigh.) The sacker didn’t ask me if I needed help to my car. I only had two plastic bags full anyway and would have refused politely had he asked, but on other occasions when my cart was full, I haven’t been asked. Apparently there’s an age quota for the help to your car question. I only hear the sackers asking the elderly if they need help, and bravo to them for doing it, but what about young mothers with children? What about people with carts full, spry adults who could do it themselves but it’s nice to have help offered anyway? Maybe it’s a small thing, but it seems to me that the small things that are falling by the wayside are summing up to be one great big rude society. Or maybe help out to the car no longer garnered tips so the practice is no longer done, like gas station attendants filling up your gas tank and washing your windows.
This morning, while driving Gabe to the babysitter’s, I got stuck behind a slow moving, trailer-towing landscape truck. Okay, they have as much right to be on the road as the rest of us, but people were gunning their cars around the guy like that extra three seconds wasted were cataclysmic to their schedule. I pulled into the next lane to pass him myself, apparently in front of a woman who thought I cut her off. I had checked over my shoulder and she seemed to have been more than two car lengths behind in that lane, so I went. Whoo, was she mad. She got on my bumper within about a foot, which burns me to begin with but especially with Gabe in the car with me. I refused to speed just to get away from her and when I was past the landscaper, I got back into the right lane. She rolled down her passenger side window to yell at me as she passed me, gunned around me and cut me off, slamming on her brakes in front of me to avoid running a red light since she was too busy yelling at me to notice it had turned yellow before her lane change. Then, to prove her point, she sat at the light for a few seconds once it turned green, flipping me off out her window while her six year old or so daughter watched from the back seat. I honked, getting angry myself because now she was holding up me and the four cars behind me. She was too impatient to sit there for long and off she sped. Luckily at the next stoplight, I turned and she continued straight through. What happened to sharing the road? Was she entitled to have that whole lane to herself and I infringed on her space when I was one of several who wanted to get around a slower-moving truck? Was she that mad that I wasn’t going to whip around the landscaper like everyone else going ten or so over the speed limit, so my five miles over the speed limit slowed her down? And what is her daughter going to be like on the road in ten years? I have to say it took some effort not to shout bad things back at her, but I don’t want Gabe emulating my poor reactions when I lose my temper, and we learn it from the ones we ride with the most, right? I will not say I’m a perfect driver who hasn’t lost my temper ever, but I’m trying to be better about it. The little one watching has done a lot to shape up my driving behavior. He asked what happened when I honked my horn, and I just said, “It’s an impatient woman not driving very well and she’s mad at Mama for getting in her way.” Gabe asked, “In her way?” A piece of my heart shaved itself off and tucked itself away for future lodging in my throat when Gabe gets behind the wheel in 14 years and has to learn to share the road with fools like that insane woman this morning.
There are many more examples of times I’ve become aggravated with strangers. Maybe living in a more populated area means people are more protective of their space and more enraged when it’s invaded. Maybe the values of the area I live in now are different than those of the area in which I grew up. I didn’t think so when I moved here, based on my husband’s family values that he learned while living here most of his life. I probably just didn’t notice it as much when I was a kid, too busy begging my mom for a candy bar or Fruit Roll-Ups, or a salad from the salad bar that I would load with olives and pickles and tons of sunflower seeds. It just feels to me, and more so since Gabe was born, that the collective public persona we’re faced with daily is surlier, quicker to anger, and in general can no longer be bothered with courtesy. Many of my run-ins with rudeness come from the retail or restaurant industries. I was a waitress at a country-club in my youth. In fact, I bailed that job in favor of the grocery store cashier when I couldn’t handle the yuppies anymore. I only stayed at that grocery store job for two and a half months. Turns out the regular public was much larger and in a worse mood than the small cluster of yuppies, so I went back to the country club where I got paid better to be treated like vermin. I understand how hard waiting tables can be. Try doing it when you’re supposed to remember names and drink preferences so you can bring regulars their orders without being told. And they expected this. But that’s a whole ‘nother post. I know it sucks monkey butt to wait tables, working your ass off for the pennies people throw in your direction, dealing with the groping drunks and the messes left after small children tear through your section (thus my extreme attention to the messes Gabe makes in restaurants that I always try to clean up before leaving). With good service that allows me to relax, I’ve got a big tip for the person kind enough to relieve me of my cooking duties that night. My big tips are fewer and farther between lately due to aggravated wait staffers either taking it out on my family while we dine or trying to regale us with their woes as they sit in our booth and prop up their feet, attempting to explain why they don’t have time for drink refills or why our appetizer took an hour to get to our table.
I’ve been in retail too. In the jewelry department at Wal-Mart during Christmas, no less. But every odd job I’ve had before my degree allowed me to get a professional position, I was always trying to be attentive to customers, trying not to let my boredom with my job (for who doesn’t get bored at work sometimes?) show, or worse, take my boredom and angst over having to work out on the customer.
So to the fast food worker who can’t be bothered to speak clearly while working the drive thru and doesn’t look at me when I hand over the money, the shelf stocker who can’t be bothered to show me where the tartar sauce is rather than just point and say, “It’s a couple aisles over”, the counter girl who doesn’t want to stop talking on the phone to her friend when I have a question about a makeup product that’s overpriced anyway: WE ALL HAVE TO SHARE THIS SPACE. Maybe things would go better for all involved if we just exerted a little more effort to be kind. Maybe that smile you don’t feel like offering is just the thing I need to realize my day wasn’t so bad. Maybe my holding that door open for you, woman with three young children in tow and another on the way, really helps you not have to juggle your brood for three seconds. Maybe those comments the lurkers choose not to post could make this blogger feel a little less like my words are going to oblivion. Maybe they’re not “pay it forward” caliber kindnesses, but they can make someone smile, and that someone could then reach that top shelf for the shampoo the short girl with the braces on her legs can’t quite reach, and that girl could hand the homeless man outside the store a spare five dollars that means his belly will be full that night, while he tips the waitress who let him eat inside the diner instead of kicking him out because he hasn’t showered in a week the remaining $2 from the $5, and that waitress can then afford the gallon of milk she was wondering if she could get on the way home to her young child… Maybe that’s pretty idealistic, but in the face of such rudeness all the time, I can’t help but hope that this isn’t the best of it, that maybe there is room for the ideal.
04.26.06
I Neeeeed It!
Flintstones: Gabe’s drug of choice.
He threw himself into self-destruct mode for half an hour last night when we told him he could only have one a day. I’ve never heard “I need it, Mama,” come from his mouth before we introduced the candy-like chewables to him last week.
04.25.06
Seriously, I Wanna Know
So the blog makeover has been done, and I wanna know what you think. Please drop me a comment and let me know your opinion. If you have your own blog and would like the Blog Makeover Diva to revamp yours, click here. But leave a comment before you check her out!
04.24.06
Meet Robert
Robert grew up in Houston, Texas and now lives in Louisiana. He is the 25 year old married man who hijacked my MySpace account. He works as a Pawn Broker making a scrawny pittance a year, and has a little bit of a college education that he’s certainly putting to good use with his computer hacking hobby. Robert likes to do laundry, but detests actually putting it in drawers and closets, as evidenced by the clothing mess on the bed behind him in the profile picture he posted on my MySpace account.
A little background on the hijacked MySpace account. My childhood friend Becky emailed me a few weeks ago to ask if I recognized the person in the picture she’d attached, from a MySpace account. She thought it was one of our (most obnoxious) grade school classmates but wasn’t sure. It certainly was the Obnoxious Classmate, about whom we then continued to not-so-fondly reminisce. This exchange started me thinking. What if other childhood classmates had MySpace accounts, classmates I would actually like to talk to? Hmmm. So I signed up. Being the busy mother of a toddler, I only had time to register and create a password before I had to go make sure Gabe wasn’t emptying Daddy’s wallet on the stairs again. I promptly forgot about it.
A couple weeks later, I got an email, “Hi, Robert! Thanks for joining MySpace! You have a new message from McNasty! To view, click here, blah blah blah.” I scratched my head, wondering who Robert was as I signed back into my MySpace account. Lo and behold, this is the profile I was greeted with! Isn’t he just handsome, with his stringy long hair and creepy hide-my-identity mustache? It doesn’t say what he drives, but I would imagine either a conversion van (for the abductions) with darkly tinted bubble windows (if it has windows at all) or a sooped up 1970s era hot rod with no muffler and several rust spots. But you can bet the radio is in good working order. Now, I don’t know Robert from Adam but considering his scruples about taking over things on the Internet that don’t belong to him, I think I can safely assume his moral integrity.
Robert has three friends, one of whom is McNasty. I originally thought McNasty was a woman, but I it’s pretty hard to tell from just a picture of the eyes. I was afraid to check the messages from McNasty, but in the interest of laughing at Robert on my blog, I had to find out what it was about McNasty that drew the two together. Imagine my surprise when I clicked on McNasty’s profile to find a man, supposedly straight, also in the Pawn Broker business in Louisiana. I’ve learned from them that the Pawn Broker business isn’t that lucrative, since McNasty also makes less than a scrawny pittance a year.
Because of Robert and his hacking hobby, I now have to monitor my credit report to make sure he didn’t get into my other accounts, the ones that mean a lot more to me. I have called the various credit card companies to keep an eye on my charges, and have taken steps to ensure any potentially compromised information has been changed. Since I only had the time to register and set up a password, there was no detailed information about me on MySpace before Robert set up shop on my account, but I’m not taking chances. For once I’m thanking Gabe for Getting Into Things He Shouldn’t Be Into. It appears that Robert stopped with my MySpace account, but because he’s caused me to learn far more about identity theft than I ever wanted to know, I thought I’d plaster his identity on the Internet a different way, introducing him around for the scoundrel he really is. Since this takeover, I’ve heard of several other people having their MySpace accounts compromised, so if you have one, you might want to check to make sure it’s still yours.
And to the Pimp Daddy who found your double parked hooptie locked while it was running after blocking in cars in Kristen’s neck of the woods, you’re not that far from Louisiana. You could probably keep Robert and his friend McNasty on retainer to break into your car for future double-parking escapades. God knows they could use the money.
*please forgive the font. Blogger is having a brain fart and won’t let me change it to my usual.
04.21.06
Pulitzers No More
It is a sad time, Dear Readers, sad indeed. An institution is dying a slow, torturous death, and a well-informed citizenry will suffer the loss. I can remember as a kid, my parents both coming home, changing out of their work clothes, and sitting down to read the day’s newspaper. My mother would begin to set out the makings of supper while my father leisurely perused the inky pages which stained his hands and imparted information on his conscience. This memory of him reading the paper, and my mother reading after dinner, is so imprinted on my childhood I can’t imagine early evenings without that familiar rustle in the background, and the occasional holler, “Hey, come look at this!”
But what happens when the newspapers are mutated to a medium no longer resembling the nobility with which they began, no longer accommodating the demand of the public for accountability of authority, for a place to air their opinions, for local sales to be perused? The Pulitzer winners will be replaced by scrawny, overworked and underpaid sweatshoppers who report the “news” as their employer, a monopoly of McJournalism with a reputation for cutting work forces and salaries while demanding more output, sees fit. The reporters dedicated to bringing the news to the public will become dejected and dispirited by the quantity of stories forcing them to forgo quality. Then, unable to find other work in their geographical area because all the papers there are owned by the McJournalism Company, these poor souls will continue to write multiple stories with no time to polish their talent. And competition for a beat or a story? There will be none. McJournalism Company will own most of the papers in that area, so instead of several reporters for several papers responding to a story, there will be one, whose story will run in multiple papers, offering only one perspective over a wider populace. With one reporter doing the job of many, the staff cuts will be severe. With the perspective of one reporter funneled through one editor and one set of management, that management can poo poo or force any spin they wish. Objective news isn’t supposed to have a spin. What’s next? One publisher telling us which books are appropriate? One TV station, telling us what to watch? Where does it stop? This is happening right now, beginning in California and spreading across the country like mold across drywall after a leaky pipe drips long enough. A close family member who is a reporter (who I will call Miss Story so she doesn’t get dooced) for a paper in the northern California area, wrote me a few weeks ago to tell me that the owners of her paper, Knight-Ridder, had been forced to sell themselves because of a few unhappy stockholders. A few. Knight-Ridder was an institution nearly as big as the industry itself, starting up decades ago, and they were brought down by the childhood bully named Wall Street who didn’t think he had enough milk money in his pockets. The bottom line and dividends were more important to Wall Street than the integrity of the news, which is now on the chopping block as the buyer of Knight-Ridder has decided to sell off 12 newspapers around the country, the three in northern California to the McJournalism Company, even to the exclusion of others who are willing to pay a premium purchase price so their papers will remain locally owned. Words like anti-trust, monopoly, and content control are being disdainfully slung like saliva from the maw of a pit bull at a dog fight. Money will soon be driving the news, and John McManus, a contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle who directs GradeTheNews.org, which evaluates a random sample of the San Francisco Bay Area’s news over the course of a year, commiserated in the March 17th issue of the Chronicle:
“Imagine one grocery chain operating all of the outlets surrounding San Francisco. There would be no incentive to compete on either price or quality. But news is a commodity like no other. It’s the only product with the power to define reality. That power is magnified when multiple newspapers speak with a single voice. Also consider that [McJournalism Company] has a reputation for running thinly staffed newsrooms paying such low salaries that journalists cannot afford to stay long enough to become expert in their area of coverage. This is an ominous week for journalism.”
Why is this happening, besides the greedy milk money bully, you ask? Technology is one of the reasons. Why would people spend the money on a newspaper subscription when they can go online and read a dozen papers with a few clicks, many for free? The ones that do offer an online version for a subscription rate are losing customers who no longer want to pay for their news when other papers are offering news free of charge, and as a result, their advertisers are jumping ship, heading for the greener pastures of Craigslist and eBay. Online readership is on the rise, but with less physical room for the ads on the pages, as well as more websites to place their ads, the advertisers aren’t paying as much to one medium to peddle their product to their consumers.
So far, seven reporters have left Miss Story’s paper. The general mood is one of depression tinged with panic. Even if her office will remain, for the most part, unscathed by overlapping with other McJournalism Company papers, many of their satellite offices may not be so fortunate. Some of her coworkers are no longer motivated to do the job they once did, the backlash against their new owners who have shunned them to the McJournalism Company. Others have become uber-focused, not letting the disheartening events mar their creativity or their love of bringing the news, eloquently written, to the public. It’s a noble effort, but one described by some as akin to rearranging the deck chairs in the Titanic. In a few short months, Knight-Ridder will be no longer, and as this spreads across the country to more papers, snatching up multitudes of talented writers and spitting them out disgruntled and angry and looking like a camel sucked on their spirit, we will see the decline of the news as we know it, the beginning of control over the information we are to receive. This, Dear Readers, is a sad, and scary time indeed.
04.20.06
Contradictions
Every night I give Gabe a bath, he fights taking his clothes off. Once I wrestle him much like a monkey wrestles with a branch (getting smacked in the face a few times), my naked boy will run to the tub and peer in, choosing the toys he wants and watching the bubbles if I’m kind enough to put them in. He’ll holler and whine if I don’t, but then soon forgets as he putters his boats in the water and sinks the buoys only to empty them out over his head. Once his scrubbing is done, I let him play for a couple minutes and then take him out, wrapping him in a towel before I carry him burrito-like to his room for his diaper and jammies. To stay in the tub, he fights me and the towel with Herculean effort. In his room, he hangs onto the towel, which he had just refused, for dear life, not wanting clothes when just before his bath, he refused to have them removed. Freshly diapered, he shakes his head vigorously against the towel, creating a nest of hair-straw on the back of his head I darn near have to get out the detangler just to get a comb through. Once I have succeeded in jammying him, he laughs, saying over and over, “Jammies, Mama. Jammies,” and points to his chest, to the pattern on his pajamas. Happy as a lark, he runs from me and the comb, knowing I’m about to cause him pain from the birds’ nest he created on the back of his head. After the comb, we read, play on the floor, sometimes watch “dragon” better known as Shrek, and many times I have to chase him down before he loses his comb that he now wants to put through his hair, and then he falls asleep. In the morning, I get his clothes gathered up before I wake him, so dressing him is as painless as possible. While he refused his jammies the night before, when I start to peel them from his hot, sweaty body (why is it that children sweat like they’ve slept in a volcano?) he cries, saying over and over, “I wan jammies. I wan jammies!” He demands, “Night night” when the night before, he swore to me he never wanted “night night” again. He hits my arms as I change his diaper, kicks at my stomach as I try to put his shorts on for the day, and head butts me when I sit him up to put his shirt over his head. Once he’s dressed and a little more awake, he stops beating me up and starts refusing to walk, wanting to be carried down the stairs, through the house and out the door to the car. When I drop him off at the babysitters, he often doesn’t want me to go, doesn’t want me to leave him there, doesn’t want me to put him down from my lap. The only thing he knows he wants is juice, which he demands every morning. I sneak out, sometimes with a goodbye kiss and sometimes not. On the nights that I stop back by to pick him up on my way home from work, when his daddy doesn’t finish work early enough to beat me there, Gabe runs from me, never wanting to leave his babysitter’s house again. He runs, hides, and cries when I finally catch him to take him out to the car. Sometimes, I just wish he’d make up his mind.
