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I’ve got your Swiss Cake Rolls right HERE.

9 Sep

With an almost six year age difference between us, my sister and I didn’t have much use for each other when we were growing up. We were kind of like Beezus and Ramona. Fortunately, as adults, through the wonder of modern technology, we’ve discovered that we share the same demented sense of humor.

We often chat each other on Facebook in the evening, discussing scenes or dialogue to include in our screenplay. [Note: we don’t actually have a screenplay, but we’re convinced that if we could just focus, we’d be able to give the Cohen Bros. a run for their money.]

Recently Alicia switched her profile photo to this image of Little Debbie:

So wholesome.

I think the impetus for this was that she had served a box of Swiss Cake Rolls for dinner the night before. (Dinner, not dessert.)

On Facebook chat, the person’s profile photo shows up next to every comment they make, and it was cracking me up to chat with this little farm girl wearing a hat. To enhance the visual exchange, I switched my profile photo to this:

Wholly awesome.

Now whenever we chat, it looks like I’m on brink of punching Little Debbie. Which brings me no end of amusement.

See what I mean:

 <–New profile photo = “Welcome to the gun show. Prepare for some kidney thumping.”

 Little Debbie says, “Eat my Swiss Cake Roll.”

  RR says, “F*ck your Swiss Cake Roll.”

  Now that’s just potty talk there, Miss Rosie.

  Rosie don’t have time for pleasantries.

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This one’s all over the place because I wrote it during turbulence.

16 Aug

[This was written on my way to Australia, but I’m just getting around to posting it. More on Australia itself soon.]

I’m not a fan of flying. I’m always about 50% convinced I’ll end up on the wrong side of the statistics. I know, I know. You’re going to tell me that flying is safer than driving a car, and that the odds of being in a plane that crashes are almost as great as winning the MegaBucks Lottery.

Thanks, Mr. Statistician. I’d like to tell you a few reasons I’m convinced the normal laws of probability don’t apply to me.

First: I got hit by a car earlier this year. (You’re probably tired of hearing about it, but you try hitting someone’s windshield and flying off their roof and tell me if you don’t feel compelled to work it into conversation occasionally.)

I’d wager that the odds of getting hit by a car are pretty slim. And surviving it with only a concussion and bruising? Even slimmer. Which is to say: I don’t mistake probabilities for assurance.

And then there’s the time when I was in sixth grade and our family vacationed at Jeckyll Island, Georgia. My dad and I were out in the waves, swimming, and I kept grabbing onto him because I wouldn’t let my feet touch the bottom. A clingy kid isn’t a ton of fun, so it’s no surprise that he started to give me a somewhat stern lecture.

“Babe, you really need to stop grabbing onto me. Just put your feet on the bottom. It’s sandy. There’s nothing here that – ARRRGH!”

His lecture was cut short as he hollered, scowled and began jumping up and down. When he finally lifted his foot above the water line, there was a large crab claw pinching his heel. The body was gone (apparently it had been shaken off) but the claw hung there, precisely summarizing why I wouldn’t touch bottom.

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I think the word for you, ma’am, is “cornhole.”

19 Jul

Actually, ma'am, you might want to rethink how you're handling the corn.

Sunday morning I had just approached the corn table at the farmer’s market when an older woman muscled in next to me with her basket.

I sized up the corn and selected an ear, peeling a small bit of the husk down about half an inch so I could look at the kernels.

“You know, doing that dries it out,” the woman told me.

I had headphones in so I pretended I couldn’t hear her, bagged the ear and did the same thing with another ear.

She started speaking again, only more loudly. “You can get the same result by doing this –” she started working her hands around the ear in a gesture that I’m pretty sure could start a fist fight in New York. Or end your career as a sign language interpreter.

I’m generally polite, and would normally accept someone’s tip with a bashful smile or light apology.  But I grew up in rural Michigan, helping my dad with his sizable garden, making my first $20 selling vegetables (including corn) door-to-door from a Radio Flyer wagon, which I pulled while wearing overalls with a patch that said, “I’m proud to be a farmer.”

So I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I suggest it unlikely that her corn-handling qualifications match or exceed mine.

Which — along with her rich city person’s Williams Sonoma farmer’s market basket  —  is why her advice immediately rubbed me the wrong way.

So you know what I said?

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Well, so much for maintaining an aura of mystery.

7 Jul

For someone who contemplated writing about almost crapping her pants at yoga earlier this week (note: I said ALMOST), I’m a surprisingly private person. I have virtually no boundaries when it comes to things that other people may classify as “TMI,” but I’m fiercely guarded about others. Weird, right?

As a child, I would disappear into our basement for hours on end and refuse to tell my parents what I was working on. (It generally involved a craft book and some contraband. True story: I once tried to sew a leather purse out of multiple gloves I’d stolen from lost-and-found boxes. That’s kind of like trying to build an Ark out of popsicle sticks. Except when your mom finds a dozen mismatched leather gloves in your sewing kit, she’s probably a bit more suspicious.)

So imagine my surprise at being featured on WordPress’s Freshly Pressed yesterday morning: Holy shit.

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I like to think my (gene) pool has a fairly significant deep-end.

27 Jun

Wonder why I’ve been quiet for a few days? Well, I’ve been off doing something people might call “jet-setting” — if those same people would be willing to accept “boarding a plane” as a loose definition of the term.

That’s right. Try not to get envious, but I set out after work on Thursday for a quick jaunt to Michigan, where I was greeted like a rock-star by legions of adoring mosquitos. (It might be over-stating it to say they rolled out the red carpet for me, but there was carpet, and by the time I finished rolling myself all over it to scratch the bites on my back, it was — in places — somewhat red.)

But no, it wasn’t the mosquitos that drew me to my birthplace. It was our Family Reunion! That’s right. We have an annual reunion, organized and championed by my father. Since it fell so close to Father’s Day this year, I thought I’d use the old “my presence is your present” adage and go for the first time in ten years.

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