Bye Bye, Pie!

The rest of the stuff I ate today

In case you didn't tune in this morning, I have decided to photograph everything I eat this week. Because I am a giant freak.

So when we left off, all I had consumed was black coffee, and I didn't want you to think I was a ballerina or something.

At mid-morning, I had some homemade cinnamon bread at my desk.

I brought it from home, although I didn't make it. Have you met me?

It was deee-lish. Actually, about halfway through, I sort of convinced myself I was having an allergic reaction to the cinnamon, and I Googled allergic reactions to cinnamon and read all sorts of dreadful stories, but I ate the whole thing anyway and here I still am, so I don't think I was really allergic to cinnamon.

Then at noon I had a healthy lunch.

Um.

I like to sit in my car and listen to Howard Stern at lunch. I nourish my mind as well as my body.

In case you were curious, I didn't eat all of my Hardee's combo meal. I'd say I ate 2/3 of it.

For dinner, I had a Lean Cuisine of potatoes, broccoli, and cheese along with apple juice and a banana. Which kind of sounds like something you'd eat at the nursing home. Marvin was at a meeting, so he was not here to make fun of my Shady Pines dinner.

So, that was it. So far this little experiment has not influenced what I have eaten, but I guess we'll see as the week progresses.

Thank you for joining me on my gastronomic journey.

Scientific Survey

Marvin's alarm goes off at 5:15, and he is one of those people who BOUNDS out of bed as soon as the alarm goes off.

My alarm goes off at 6:15. As soon as he hears my alarm go off, Marvin gets in the shower. Scientific survey question number one: How annoying is Marvin?

Scientific survey question number two: What is Marvin DOING between 5:15 a.m. and 6:15 a.m.? Is he plowing the fields? Baking bread? Going for a big jog? I see no evidence of any of these activities.

Stampeding to another topic, I read that people eat healthier if they have to photograph every single thing they eat. So for the next week, I am going to show you everything I eat. I won't, like, open my mouth and show you that way, or anything, I promise.

Here is the first photo, of my healthy, substantial breakfast:

Black coffee. French Roast from Starbucks. How much detail do I have to go into about what I eat? And yes, that is a baby picture of me in the background. Nice hairdo.

Don't you love that coffee mug? My Aunt Mary sent it to me, and whenever I get to pick it that day from the shelf, I think, "Ooo! I get the good coffee mug!" She also sent me one in black, which gives me a similar thrill. I need to get out more.

All right, I must go face my day, fortified with such nutritious food. Please complete my survey.

Apparently I've taken up impressionist photography

I am back in Greensboro. It was 66 degrees and sunny when I got here, as opposed to gray and really ding-dang cold in Michigan. Why must it be cold in Michigan all the time?

Anyway, our tree in the front yard bloomed all purpley pink while I was gone, so that was good. It was a lovely afternoon to bury our cat.

We planted a day lily, a red one for Ruby, on her grave, and I took a terrible picture of it, below. 

   

I do not know why it is blurry.  I hate everything.

Although the weather was lovely and things were bloomed and I was glad to see Tallulah's blonde self, I was NOT glad to see that she ate a black Sharpee on our comforter, a thing Marvin did not notice. HOW did he not notice it? I walked into the bedroom and noticed it in half a second. I said, "Did you have an affair with a squid while I was gone?" There is black ink all over the pink and green comforter. It is ruined.

At any rate, today I have to go to court to pay for my stupid traffic ticket for having expired tags on my license plates. If you hear that someone just hauled off and slapped a traffic judge somewhere in North Carolina, you will know I have reached my limit today.

Thank you all for writing in and saying nice things to me. It's nice to have cyber friends all over the place. I'm glad my uncle has positive thoughts going on everywhere. I hope he will be back to saying awful things very soon. I'd hate to have to take over that role for him. At traffic court.

June's blog. Where you come for fun.

So, my Uncle Jim officially has cancer. It sucks, is what it does. If you knew my uncle, you would understand how bad it sucks. I mean, no one should get cancer. Why do people get cancer?

When he was going in for surgery, he told my Aunt Sue, "There's some money that I had hidden away. I want to tell you where it is."

"This is nonsense," said my Aunt Sue. "There's no reason to tell me where you've hidden any money. You're going to come out of surgery and go home and get the money yourself."

"Still, I want you to know where it is. It's $500. I was planning to spend it on our anniversary. I was going to get you something for $200, and me something for $300."

Really, every story about my Uncle Jim is like that, and yet you can't help but like him. We were all sitting around telling stories at the hospital, and he was telling about a time when he was young and working something like 80 hours a week. He was making a fortune, and he was about 21, so he thought this kind of money would last forever. He and my aunt bought a house, a truck, and a car. Then General Motors started cutting hours, and he was having trouble paying everything. A bill collector called about his truck.

"I just paid my house payment," my uncle explained. "I'll get the truck payment to you as soon as I can, but they cut my hours at work and things are tight."

Well, this didn't sit well with the bill collector, who gave my uncle a hard time. Uncle Jim started yelling at the bill collector as my Aunt Sue was coming though the door. "You come down here, then," my uncle said on the phone, "Come down here and just get it, and I'll kick your ass when you do!"

When he hung up, my aunt asked him, "Were you just talking to your mother?"

I just keep hoping this is some terrible nightmare, and that I am still making monkey faces on the plane ride here. I wish you could all know my Uncle Jim. Because he would yell and stomp around and say tasteless things, and you would just love him.

And to make matters worse, my cat Ruby died today. Marvin is waiting for me, and we are going to bury her in the back yard tomorrow when I get home.

My life is like a country song, isn't it?

Say yes to Michigan

Geez, Louise, 1962 called, wants its computer back. I'm on my mother's speedy computer, can you tell? I only had to wait 16 centuries to get on here. And the thing is still mooooaaaning, like it can't believe I want it to actually perform at this hour of the day.

I read an article in The Onion recently called Everything Taking Too Long, and it was the story of my life. Do you ever read The Onion? If you don't, I don't know why. Go into the search bar at The Onion and read the story written by the lobster. You will die.

At any rate, I am here to see my Uncle Jim, who is ill. I will not splay his whole medical condition across the Internet. But you know what I hate? Illness. Scares me to death. Why must people get sick? Particularly people I'd rather think of as sticking cigarettes up their nose at the dinner table or hiding in empty rooms to leap out at me once I emerge from the bathroom.

In other news, my mother's dogs are fat. F-a-t. I just took Tallulah to the vet for her shots last weekend, and the vet was careful to point out how svelte she looked, and she told me they are discovering that fat is an organ, and in pets as well as people it leads to inflammatory issues, cancer, and a host of other dreadful things, and when your pet is fat you take two years off its life.

Do you know what's annoying? A new dog owner such as myself.

So far I have seen my mother give these dogs leftover salmon, cheese, and of course I brought them treats that I bought at the airport, so I am an enabler, too.

And I should add that my own cat Francis is 820 pounds, so who am I to talk. Still, these dogs are hefty hefty hefty.

I slept on the plane ride here, because I had terrible dreams about illness and tumors the night before and woke up 50 times. In my dream I was seeing monkeys, and I know why. It is because Marvin took his class to the zoo the other day, and when they got to the monkey cage...well. Let's just say it's spring. And the spring love that was going on may not have been heterosexual, necessarily. And were the kids completely obsessed with the monkey exhibit?

The zoo. An enlightening experience for all fifth-graders.

So I was on the plane yesterday and I woke up making monkey faces. I am certain the people around me did not think I was berserk at all. I can only hope I did not try to violate my seatmate.

That is all that is new with me. Thank you all for your nice comments about my uncle.

My mother's chubby dog Gus has been nudging me to pet and/or feed him this entire time, which has not been irking me at all. When I blog at home, Tallulah just sleeps and sighs at my feet.

She is probably too underfed to nudge me.

No June

My uncle Jim is really sick. I don't feel like posting anything. I may go home for a few days if I can.

And guess what? Spellcheck does not recognize the word "Ikea." So that wasn't annoying just now when I went to check my spelling.

We had a lot of action around here this evening. Faithful Reader Jessica (see below) came and got our microwave stand from Ikea, for one thing. She didn't break in, she actually asked me if I wanted to go to Ikea at some point in the near future because she needed a microwave stand. I said why go all the way to Ikea when I already HAVE a microwave stand from Ikea standing there doing nothing in my back room?

(Hey, you come to my house, you gotta pretend to love the dog.)

Because as you may or may not know, my kitchen is so small there's not even any room to change your mind in there. Thank heavens I don't ever need to go in there to, you know, cook. But when we lived in Burbank, we had a huge kitchen that I did not cook in, but because it was built in 972 B.C., there was not enough room between the cupboards and the countertops for a microwave.

Honestly, how did women in the olden days microwave with that tiny counter space?

And when I lived in Burbank I was like .09 seconds from Ikea. This did not help, however, as it still took 900 hours to park at that Ikea. Oh, it was the busiest Ikea ever. I remember going there one time to buy that microwave stand, and I made the fatal mistake of thinking I'd remember the name of the item once I got to the room where you buy stuff.

Because if you've never been to Ikea, it's like this. They herd you through this place like cattle, through all these chic minimalist kitchens and living rooms and bedrooms until you start thinking you too are chic and minimalist-like, even though in real life you decorate like a gramma in 1947.

But if you LIKE something at Ikea you generally can't just pick it up right there and put it in your cart, oh no. You have to write down the item, which has a complicated Swedish name like Frëudihëuën.

In fact, when you walk into Ikea, they give you a tiny, minimalist piece of paper and a teensy chic pencil like you're going to play miniature golf so you can write down that you like the Sweedeeheedee desk and the Foooderhooder bed and the ABBA dresser, then you go to the stockroom where you buy said items in 47,000 pieces and put them together at home. Because you also become convinced that you will just know how to do this.

But what I did, see, was think, "Oh, how hard can it be? It's the Frëudihëugën microwave stand. When I get to the stockroom, surely I'll remember that." But when I got to the stockroom? And there were 49 microwave stands, all named Freuidenstein and Freidycaten and Frission? Oh, I got confused. So I had to go BACK upstairs and be herded like cattle AGAIN until I found the microwave stand of my choice.

And now it belongs to Faithful Reader Jessica. As does my treadmill, which I haven't gotten on since August.

And our back room looks so much less like a junk room now!

When you used to look into this room, you saw the ding-dang folded-up treadmill. Now you see the Mooglesweedle desk from Ikea. Actually, I kid. This desk belonged to Marvin's mother. I think she had it when she was a kid. She got it at Ikea in 1962.

In other news, I got a new pair of shoes for the dog to eat.

See the chains? Break these chains! My friend Sleeping Beauty pointed out once that an inordinate number of '80s rock ballads mentioned the need to break these chains, a thing she said in passing in 1990, but which has haunted me every time I hear a hair-band song to this day. Anyway, I am pleased with my shoes, and if you have read my blog for awhile you may notice I own many silver metallic shoes.

In college, Marvin had a girlfriend before me, and she looked exactly like Molly Ringwald. When I started dating Marvin, she was jealous and was apparently not crazy about me. One day I went to the mall, and who did I run into? Was it Molly Ringwald II, over there? I will never forgot what we both had on.

She had on this white sort of jumpsuit thing, which I know makes it sound like she was walking through some sort of HAZMAT situation, but in 1986 when this took place, it was the height of chic. She also had on silver metallic shoes.

I had on--I am not making this up--brown plaid knee-length shorts  along with a yellow button-down shirt and brown loafers with no socks. Could I have looked more drab and plaid next to her white coolness? I am just figuring out as I write this that I must associate silver shoes with being cool due to that one encounter.

Oh! And the final piece of big news is that poor Tallulah has an injury. Well. The "poor Tallulah" part may be a matter of opinion. She got injured because she was pulling Winston through the back yard by his head, and Winston got fed up. Although I would like to point out that Winston usually ASKS to play with that dog by rubbing up against her and such, but Lula kind of doesn't know when to give it up. So she has a scratch under her dog eye. And she richly deserves it, if you ask me.

I guess you can't really tell it's a scratch, there. But it is. They seem to have already made up, however.

In summation, I hope you will give this matter serious consideration. Thank you for your time.

Sincerely, June

Sorry. I forgot what I was doing. In summation, I was trying to find you a photo of our back room with the treadmill and I didn't find it, but what I did find was a picture of Tallulah the first week I got her.

Who was a muffin? Who was innocent and incapable of dragging the poor cat by the head? Awww.

Pink pink pink pink. Drink.

Right up there with kittens, Barry Gibb, lilacs and the song Pink Moon by Nick Drake? Is the cranberry limeaid from Sonic.

House of June

In my eternal quest to humiliate this dog, I tried to force her into week-late St. Patrick's festivities.

 
Rock this, mom.

Anyway. When I was humiliating myself over at knitting class this weekend, I passed a house for sale that I liked, so tonight Marvin and I drove over to look at it.

Because we can so afford a new house.

And because we just bought this house last year, so what could be more practical than thinking about buying another house?

And because the economy is so special.

But what the hay. We didn't have anything else to do.

Well. Except I brought work home. And we have to practice Tallulah's dog training things. But other than that.

Anyway, we took the dog with us, and put her in Marvin's hatchback, where I managed to get another humiliating photo of her. Because you know what Tallulah hates? She hates riding in the hatchback part when there are two perfectly good laps right there in the front seat to plop her 47.9 pounds on.

Smell this. I ain't ridin' in no humiliatin' hatchback part.

 
And she didn't. Jerk.

Anyway, I like this house that is for sale near the knitting store.

Does it NEED to be so light blue? No, it does not. But that can be fixed. It has all my things. A picket fence. A wooden screen door that makes the flappy sound like the wooden screen door in The Waltons. A porch swing. Big old windows. THREE FLOORS. Do you know how many pets we could have if we had three floors?

Marvin said, "It probably costs $250,000." And then we laughed, because we both would have gleefully stampeded on our mothers with a herd of giraffes for a $250,000 house in LA. And now we act like that is such a costly amount. But now it is. Because we make ninety billion dollars less than we did in LA.

All this house needs is a little fixing up. A little landscaping. A little less blue paint. Oh, I could sit on that porch swing and never be sad again. With my 20 new pets. I could flap that screen door open and shut all day. I could go to the third floor while Marvin watches a Who documentary on the first floor. Tallulah could stand behind the picket fence and wag at everyone who walked by, unless they were little dogs, in which case she could bark. She kind of discriminates. I don't know what to tell you about my sizeist dog.

Yeah. I guess I am not buying this big, blue house. I guess I will not be letting my sham rock in all those rooms. I'll bet it's cool inside. Don't you think?

Crap.

KY, Miracle Whip, yarn. I'm all over the place, really.

A few days ago I showed you a photo of the inside of my fridge, because Carpoolqueen asked to see a photo of the inside of my fridge, and apparently I will do anything you ask me to.

Speaking of which, I keep forgetting to tell you that I had a dream that all of you, en masse, sent me a onesie and asked me to wear it, photograph myself in it, and put it on my blog, and of course in the dream I happily did it. Do you think this is a part of my exhibitionism?

So, getting back to the point, which you know is so easy for me to do, when you got to see the inside of my fridge you got to see a container of mayonnaise--which some of you take issue with, as it was Miracle Whip, and some of you acted like I had the spawn of Satan in there or something--and I said whoever had the story of HOW the Miracle Whip appeared in my fridge got a lovely June prize.

And aren't you sorry now, those of you who got caught up in your snobbery over MAYONNAISE, because now you are NOT the winner of the Totie Fields pleated dress, as Melanie from KY is. Melanie's guess was that my dad and Marvin went out on Christmas day to get wine and came back with mayo, which was close. My stepfather and Marvin did.

If only you knew how much I pleaded and begged Marvin to pose in the Totie Fields dress for all of us today. Wouldn't it have been a lot funnier had the above photo been of him?

At any rate, congratulations, Melanie of KY. And we would be thrilled if, when you got it, you too posed in this lovely garb and emailed me the photo. I will put it right up on this sophisticated blog for everyone to enjoy. And I would like to point out how mature I am for not making any KY jokes thus far.

In other news, we have a new comment of the week, and this week the coveted award goes to Aubrey, who tells us about her dad, Wayne, and his lack of fountains.

And by the way, neither Marvin nor I even EAT mayonnaise, nor Miracle Whip. You'll notice, if you click the link above and look at my fridge, that that container is still unopened from Christmas. Which ADDS to the mystery of why Marvin and my stepfather got mayonnaise instead of wine.

I have many more things to tell you, like about Tallulah's personal training session yesterday, and details on my knitting lesson, but I must go practice first.

I am ONLY sticking with it because you guys told me there is a knitting gang sign. That is the best thing I have heard, ever.

Cast off.