Oh, What a Night!

So, I've been part of a sort of "email loop" for a long while now--over 14 years?  There are eight of us now (there were more over the years), and we keep in touch on a Facebook form of our loop.  Some of these women I've known for even longer, from an old breastfeeding board (and an old circumcision debate board).  Well, last night four of the women from our loop converged upon my home, with two spouses and NINE teenagers in tow.

I admit, I was incredibly nervous.  I mean, how were we going to cram 18 people into this place, and be comfortable and able to talk and keep the kids (nine of them!) entertained?

Turns out it just happened.  No fuss, no problems, it just worked.  It worked, and it was fun, and I loved hearing their voices and seeing their faces and it was terrific.

Great kids, too.  Our boy was in heaven--with the ratty kids in this neighborhood, he's been alone other than at Hapkido three times a week.  So to have a house full of kids?  Playing video games, then Guitar Hero, then a little Nerf shoot-em-up?  He had a great time.  And it was a good lesson, too--I think he's always feared that somehow the disaster with the kids on this street had something to do with him?  I think last night helped him see what I've been saying all along--smart, cool people like him.  We just have a dearth of those in this neighborhood.  We had a houseful last night, and he keeps thanking me for it.

And I have to say, I was really impressed with the spouses here--incredibly smart, fun guys.  I really enjoyed their company, and it made me happy to think of my friends married to cool guys.

Now, these ladies came in from a heck of a distance.  One drove six hours from Ohio (Jenni), another six-and-a-half hours from North Carolina (Lara, Scott, and their kids), one for three hours from Maryland (Mary and her boys), and one flew from coast to coast--all the way from SoCal (that would be Annie, Eric, and their boys).  And if that doesn't make you feel special (and nervous!).  And they really did make me feel special.  And they really are special.  And it was an even cooler night than I'd dared hope for!

I hope we can do it again.  Next time with the other ladies from the loop here, too.  My sister, Debbie, and Debra.

Oh, oh!  I have to brag on my friend Lara!  Everyone pooled for pizza (except US, which was hell on me, I don't handle not treating my guests very well, that was hard, but, financially, it was incredibly helpful).  Anyway, folks pooled, and then we sat down and figured how much the pizza would be.  Came to 136 bucks.  But Lara calls the pizza place and she just sweet talks and haggles and lets them know, "Hey, this is how much we have, and we don't want Dominoes of some other crappy chain if we can have you guys instead--here's what we need, can you do that for us?"  And they DID!  They knocked 34 bucks off!

She is amazing!

Anyway, so that's how I spent my night last night--it was happy, it was good, it was fun, and I feel really lucky to know these wonderful folks.

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Now, do you remember a few weeks ago when I was talking about Demarquise Elkins, the kid who allegedly shot the baby in the face down in Georgia?  Remember how his family leapt to his defense, were so eager to provide him with an alibi?  So eager, in fact, that they provided him CONFLICTING alibis?  Remember how his little banger buddies leapt in and claimed that it was "RACIST CRACKERS" who were falsely accusing him?

His mother, aunt, and sister have all been arrested for lying to the cops.  The sister appears to have tampered with evidence.  The mother?  A felon.  If you were wondering where ol' Demarquise got it from, look no further.  They appear to have crawled out of a pit of feces to plague humanity.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/27/justice/georgia-baby-killed

http://www.wptv.com/dpp/news/national/sabrina-elkins-demarquise-elkins-sister-arrested-in-brunswick-georgia-baby-shooting-case

http://newsone.com/2308574/demarquise-elkins-karimah-elkins-brunswick-georgia/

Oh, and on further questioning?  The mom and aunt's answers led to the cops finding the gun submerged in a pond, allegedly thrown there by the sister.  So for all you folks out there who claimed that it was the mother of the baby who did it?  If so, she did it with a bullet in her leg, she did it in the space of seconds, running 2.3 miles with a bullet in her leg, there and back before the neighbors who heard the shots could  make it to where her baby had been shot.  Oh, and then she told Elkins' family about it so they'd know where the gun was.

And one more thing?  Demarquise is up on additional charges for another armed robbery earlier last month.

Principle of Parsimony, folks. The simplest, most reasonable answer tends to be the correct one.  I'm thinking Demarquise is a scumbag gang member from a scumbag family who murdered a baby.

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Well, it's now April fifth, and our Callery Pear (aka Bradford Pear or Chanticleer Pear) out front is just now starting to blossom.  That's almost a full month later than last year.  If you're not familiar with Callery Pears, here's a picture:  

Now, this tree, while gorgeous (not just the blossoms--it turns amazing shades of red and orange in the fall), was quite a let-down for us.  You see, we thought it was a dogwood when we moved in.  It was fall, and all we saw where the dogwood-shaped leaves.  Come spring, that beautiful white bloomfest?  

Stank.  To high heaven, it REEKED!

Turns out Callery Pears stink.  A lot.  I smell . . . old, bloody bandages and dog feet.  A friend last night let me know she smells, to be completely indelicate, semen.  Every spring, the health department in DC is inundated with phone calls from folks complaining about the smell.  These Callery pears are EVERYWHERE out here, and they're very common to the entire east coast and parts of the midwest and south.  They are, apparently, viciously invasive:

http://triblocal.com/glencoe/community/stories
/2012/06/invasive-ornamental-plants-pose-threat
-for-native-wildlife/

So they stink and they're invasive.  Oh, and because the crotch angles are so extreme, they're also particularly prone to wind and snow damage.  But gosh, they sure are pretty.  From a distance.  With your nose plugged!

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Leftover pizza and garlic toast for dinner.  We sent half the leftover pizza off with one of my ladies last night to put in the hotel fridge for munching and/or breakfast.  

And that's about it.  I was going to post about an Arabian horse named Perkal I almost knew back in the early 1980s, but I think that's for another night.  It's time to start dinner and get ready to watch Grimm.  Not a particularly deep show, but it's fun.

Do not reprint without permission. © KAQ

Murder, Grammar, and Dead Ducks ,,,,,,!!!!!????

I'd like to start today off with a grammar rant.  I'd like to talk about ",,,,,," and "???????" and maybe some "!!!!!!" for good measure.

Let's start with the obvious one--the multiple commas.  Like that MEANS anything.  What does that mean?  Is it like stage direction, indicating a particularly long and meaningful pause?  Like a POWER pause?   Because we already have ellipses and commas and semi-colons that do the job super-nice without making you look like you've gone twitchy on the comma button.  Perhaps this is "text speak," but it's creeping into more formal written communications, and it's making people look like . . . well, like texting children.  Who haven't quite mastered the written language.

Now, let's talk about "?????" and "!!!!!!!" for a second.  We all know what "?" and "!" mean.  So are the multi-packs indicative of MORE?  How can you be MORE inquisitive than inquisitive?  What, it's not just a question, it's a SUPER-question?  If you're trying to communicate interrogative disgust, "Are you KIDDING me?" is usually pretty effective.  On the "!!!!!!" front?  Okay, you're excited.  You're REALLY excited!  You're MEGA-excited!  Fine, use two.  But dang, please stop with the 10+ exclamation points, wouldja?  Nobody's that excited without dancing on the edge of cardiac arrest.

This came across my Facebook feed yesterday.  Would be funny if it weren't so close to the truth these days.

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I've been following the news about the toddler shot in his stroller by muggers near Atlanta.  Checked out the Facebook page of one of the accused.  His "about" blurb? "ME IN MY NI**A"S A TURN UR BLO5K IN TO MURDER SCENE"  (the ** are mine, to keep from getting grief from Blogspot).  The photos?  All baggy pants down past his ass and gang signs and obscene gestures.  All "thuggin" and "thug4life fo sho."  Class act, typical.  STEREO-typical.  Living DOWN to that awful stereotype.  Exactly who you would expect to do what was done.

We have a problem.  We have areas in this country that are absolutely disconnected from humanity.  So bogged down in poverty, in substandard education, in violence, drugs, and stupidity. We have one generation of people lost to this rearing the next generation, which will rear the next.  It's self-perpetuating, and this sort of festering gob is what it produces.  We can't just build a fence or a wall--one, that's crap, and two, no such thing as a "forever" fence.  We need to stop futzing around and sort this disaster out before it's too late.  You should SEE the writing of this kid, of his friends and family--barely literate, barely even comprehensible.  It's like a swamp with utterly turned around ideals and goals and ideas of what is and isn't intelligent or right.  Posts hailing a small child dressed as a gang member, calling her "lil thug girl" and proclaiming "SHE A STR8 THUGGG ! ... LOL!" and "lil cuzz killin idth !!"  Some of the posts demanding, in the most broken excuse for English, that the accused be released because "he din do nuthin, crackrs!!"  Seriously.  We need to fix it--it's hurting ALL of us.  Not just the poor little boy who is dead, not just his devastated mother.  We are ALL diminished by this, and allowing poverty and horror and prideful stupidity to take hold in our streets and separate us is what's brought it into being.

We need to fix this.

I'd post a horrific rap video one of the accused killer's friends posted to his wall--all about killing these folks and killing those folks and mutha this and mutha that, but I do actually try to keep things somewhat "clean" here.  Kid's not hard to find, though.  Look him up if you're curious.  As an example of what I'm talking about, here's a snippet from his page, going back to the dressing little girls up as gang bangers:

"Omg ! Ni Av'yianna .... U kno better she look ah hot mess today my granny hve her lookin me kinda way and idk whe she get this fang banging Frm ...lol I love her doe she look so throwed away today! Ugh"

 English?  Mmmm, I don't know.  What I DO know is that THIS is what our poorer-area schools are turning out.  What good does that do us?  Seriously, even if we're not going to look at the lives and the prospects of these poor, barely literate, barely understandable kids, let's look at what good it does SOCIETY to have schools acting as holding pens and pumping out illiterates, many of whom are caught on the "high school to prison" assembly line.  What good do we get from this?

NONE.  NO good.  So let's fix it.

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Hubby and son are off to play paintball today.  Breathtakingly expensive, but it's the BIG b'day present for our boy.  Was supposed to be last weekend, but it was rainy, windy, and in the low 40s.  Today?  Sunny and fifties.  That's better.  I want it to be a good time for him.  It's something he's wanted to do for a couple of years, and it's not something we'll be able to afford again until around Christmas, most likely.  I hope it's everything he wanted it to be.

The Paintball Layout

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Do you like duck?  You know, like eating duck?  I ask because I had a hellish ducksperience when I was a kid.  My dad came home from hunting with two dead ducks and made me pluck them in the kitchen sink.  I was maybe eight?  It took hours, it was horrifying.  See, I liked duck--I liked seeing them fly, I liked feeding them at the pond, I loved finding the stray feather here and there; stuck them in my hatband, called it "lucky."  This?

This was a nightmare.  And my dad kept coming in, checking my progress, and telling me I needed to do better.  I was missing things.  I was messing it up.  I was breaking off feathers instead of cleanly plucking them.  For hours, this went on.  Finally, my dad took over.  Angrily.

I've never liked duck, meal-wise.  But I hadn't had it since my first husband totally screwed one up by COOKING IT IN THE MICROWAVE.  Understand, this was winter of 1983.  Yeah, not quite the defining era of microwave cooking technology.

So, when hubby ordered duck with our Chinese meal a while back, I decided to give it a shot.  I mean, it had been almost 30 years since the microwave disaster, and it had been almost 40 years since the plucking nightmare.  I figured it'd be palatable, at least--after all, it was drenched in orange sauce, right?

WRONG!

I never even got past the smell.  I don't know what other people smell when they get a whiff of cooked duck in orange sauce, but I smell blood and metal and dead and feathers.  I didn't even perceive the orange or other things--just the gore.  It was intense, it was immediate, and it was gut-wrenching.

No way that's just an emotional thing--not when I haven't smelled it in decades.  No, this somehow indelibly marked my neurons, changed my brain in some way.  It was horrifying, and I felt bad because it was my husband's dinner and I literally recoiled, gasped, and clapped my hands over my face.  I said terrible things.  And he had to eat it!

I was going to post a pic of a duck being plucked,
but turns out I don't have the stomach for it.

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Watched a documentary the other night, name of "Kumaré."  In a nutshell, it's about a guy who's had it with religion and had it with the gullibility of people, and so, as an experiment, he starts his own religion.  Or, rather, he borrows heavily from eastern/Indian traditions and adds in his own completely nonsensical gobbledygook.  I won't tell you how it goes or where it ends up.  I will tell you that some of it is painful to watch because there are people who are so pathetically, desperately dependent on being told what is, what to do, what to think, and how to see the world.  People who cannot exist without believing in some supernatural this or that--like they can't just trust themselves, they have to be led.  It was sometimes funny in a not-nice way, and sometimes heartbreaking in a very human way.  I enjoyed it.  Here's the poster--it's a link, too:

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Still no red paneling.  I suck.

Do not reprint without permission. © KAQ