Channeling Jeff Goldblum

This past weekend while moving about in bed, I caught a toenail in the sheets. The toenail just split in half and peeled right off my toe. It wasn’t painful but it’s not pretty to look at, and no, I’m not posting a picture of my toe.

What the heck? How does this happen? Are pieces of my body just going to start dropping off now, like a snake shedding its skin? I feel like Jeff Goldblum as Seth Brundle in “The Fly”, collecting prized body parts as they fall off and safekeeping them in the medicine cabinet.

I just love Jeff Goldblum. Wacky and wonderful Jeff Goldblum. I can quote his lines and imitate his hand gestures. Jurassic Park (“Think they’ll have THAT on the ride?”) and Independence Day ("Forget the  fat lady! You’re obsessed with the fat lady! Drive us out of here!”) are two of my favorite movies. And of course, everyone claims to love "The Big Chill", although, for me, that was eclipsed by the Brat Pack movies that followed. 

And while I love Jeff on the big screen, I don’t think I’d want to save his body parts in a jar like fireflies. 

Falling Frenzy

Ok, so I’m not a gazelle. I did take a few years of “jazz” dance lessons back in high school at the Marcia Anne Dance Studio, owned by our neighbor, Marcia Cooper. Marcia & Bill Cooper were friends of my parents and they would come over for parties all the time. I just loved Marcia. In her living room was a giant oil painting of Marcia wearing a frothy white ballet costume, standing in a graceful impossible-to-attain dance pose. She used to invite me over for spaghetti dinners to meet her nephews, in hopes that we’d all hit it off and get married. The Coopers had a huge black Lab named Mighty Thor who was a bull in a china shop. They used to tape his tail with white surgical tape because when he wagged it he would beat it against the wall until it bled. Marcia was the first woman I ever met who went to the beauty salon once a week, every Friday, had her hair done and then didn’t touch it again all week. I used to go to the dance studio with Marcia just to watch the other classes. Marcia wasn’t my dance teacher, however. The lovely Joanne was my teacher. Joanne was a former student of Marcia’s who became one of her dance teachers once she finished school. Joanne was an aspiring actress who used to tell us stories about her voice lessons (an actor from “Laverne and Shirley” was in her voice class) and acting lessons and modeling jobs (we found pictures of her modeling lingerie in the Sears catalog). One of the other girls in my class was over 18 and she and Joanne would perform their clubbing dance routines for the rest of the class. They looked so perfect I used to think I would be able to do that once I was 18 and old enough to go to clubs. Looking back, those lessons didn’t help me dance in clubs. Alcohol helped me dance in clubs. The dance lessons did make me very flexible, though, and I was able to pull off stretches & splits in my high school gym class during gymnastics season that were well beyond anything I had ever done before. I think there were only 8 of us in class. It’s probably a good thing that Marcia was not my teacher. One time she filled in for Joanne and she was SCARY. Marcia had a very different style from Joanne’s relaxed style of teaching. Marcia made us line up and leap across the studio over and over again. Our arms had to be that way. Our legs had to be this way. The number of steps had to be this many before we flew through the air. No matter, I thought she was fabulous. I loved the way she called her husband Coop and he called her Cobra. After my mother passed away, Marcia and Bill still came over to visit. And after my father remarried, Marcia and Bill continued to visit. However, my father’s new wife referred to Marcia as “that Cooper bitch down the street”. Apparently she didn’t care for her as much as I did. Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that while I’m no ballerina, neither am I a complete Urkel.

About a year and a half ago I visited Alyssa at school and as we strolled across the grass to the parking lot on our way to the movies, I fell. I wasn’t pushed, I didn’t fall in a hole, I didn’t trip on a tree root, I just fell. I think I managed to stay on the grassy area and roll but I landed heavily on my right wrist and skinned my knee. No major injury, just embarrassing. I managed to clean up my knee in the restroom at the movies and I could still function in my daily life with no difficulty.

Then, one evening just after this past Christmas, Ron, Alyssa & I were walking the dog. I tripped, as I inevitably do, over a reflector in the street. Same reflector, same street, all the time. However, on this particular evening, I managed to tear my left ankle tendons with a hard inversion sprain and ended up laying on the asphalt in pain. I couldn’t continue the walk and Ron had to go get the car to pick me up. I went to work the next day and iced my elevated foot. For several days I couldn’t walk the dog and I had to wear flat ballet shoes. I even went shopping to buy an assortment of different colored ballet flats. After a few weeks, although most of the swelling had gone down, it was still puffy and painful. I went to my doctor and he reprimanded me for not seeing him right away to get a cast. He said it would be a few more weeks to heal but it would always be a weak spot for me. He also tried to tell me that flat shoes were nice. Mmm hmm, I’m not buying THAT.

Triple Play – the first weekend in March, after spending most of February packing and moving into a new house, Ron & I were moving boxes and furniture out of the garage into the house so we could finish unpacking and setting up the house. While I was moving a box, I tripped over a shelf and did a little jig to keep from falling, which turned out to be only semi-successful. I ended up doing a jack knife with my body (you know, like those flexible people who can bend over and put their hands flat on the floor without bending their legs), bending straight down from the hips to drop my box on the floor, and I heard and felt something pop in my hip. I let out a horrified yelp and rolled on to the garage floor, nestling my broken body between boxes and furniture. Endless images of ambulance stretchers, body casts, and hip replacement surgery raced through my head. I mentally checked off a hundred reasons why this would be very inconvenient. Ron returned to the garage to see what had happened and asked if we had to go to the hospital. I said no and just laid there a while, wiggling various body parts to confirm I wasn’t paralyzed. I rolled my hips and legs back and forth to measure the pain. I managed to scooch up a few inches and peered out between the boxes to the surrounding neighborhood, wanting to make sure I hadn’t attracted a crowd of onlookers. It appeared that no one was paying any attention to me. Still laying on the floor, I gave Ron some direction on where to bring certain boxes that I could see from where I was. I realized I couldn’t lay on the garage floor forever and made an attempt to get up. Easier said than done. I was able to roll over on to all fours, but I couldn’t apply any pressure on my hip to get into an upright position. I tried to lift myself up using a nearby shelf. Nope. I asked Ron to bring me a nearby ladderback chair and was able to stand up while leaning on that. I used the chair as a walker and made tiny baby steps to move across the garage to the laundry room. It was a little tough to get up that one little step but I succeeded.

Ron asked again if we needed to go to the hospital. I said no. My goal was to make it to the bedroom and lie down. I figured I might not be able to get up again for a while so I decided I should go to the bathroom first. I walked the chair into the guest bathroom and discovered I could not sit down. I couldn’t squat. Or bend. I could move the chair around but my body had a mind of its own. I wondered how long a person could go without going to the bathroom.

Ron asked again if we needed to go to the hospital. I said maybe. Let me take a shower and shave my legs. Just in case. I was able to take a shower, but shaving my legs was not an option. Fortunately Ron was willing to shave my legs for me (yeah, I know, big sacrifice on his part).

Ron asked again if we needed to go to the hospital. I said probably, but I had to go to the bathroom first. This time I tried our bedroom bathroom, which is much smaller than the guest bathroom. I discovered that if I braced my left arm on the windowsill, held on to the door jamb with my right hand, extended my right leg all the way out to the corner of the room, and contorted my body in a counterclockwise direction, I could get my left butt cheek on the potty. Sort of my own private aerial game of Twister.

After Ron helped me get dressed I crawled into the back seat of the car and off to Urgent Care we went. There were lots of xrays taken, (I even received my own xray CDs as souvenirs) and it was determined nothing was broken. Probably just a pulled muscle. I received a prescription for a painkiller and directions to apply ice for as long as I could stand it. I crawled back into the car and Ron drove home to put me to bed. He went out to pick up my prescription and also stopped at a local bakery to buy some delicious pastries. I learned that one of the painkillers would allow me to sleep for 4 hours. I looked through my old Rxs and found some leftover Carisoprodol and found that taking one of those would let me sleep for another 4 hours.

Ron stayed home from work on Sat & Sun to take care of me and do all the stuff I couldn’t do. Walk the dog. Cook. Laundry. Clean. I couldn’t do anything that involved extending my right leg, bending, twisting or lifting. Ron’s schedule permitted him to take me to work on Monday & Tuesday as I couldn’t drive. I simply could not extend my leg to the accelerator or put any pressure on it. I took my ice bag to work and sat on it continuously. There was no comfortable position. I fidgeted, put my foot up on a box, took my foot off the box. Mostly I stared at the clock, willing it to move to 5:00 so I could go home and lay down.  I did some internet searching and diagnosed myself with a torn hamstring. Stupid doctors. It was so obvious when I saw the description on Web MD. Their article could have been written about ME.

This put a little damper on what I had declared to be my birthday month. My plans to stretch out the March celebration from lion to lamb had to be adjusted. My routine became: 1. Go to work (Ron was able to drive me a few times and Shannon from my office picked me up a few times). Sit on an ice pack at my desk. Get up every hour to refresh the ice. Take lots of aspirin. Go home. Take a pill. Go to bed. Repeat. After my first week of being chauffeured, I finally had to drive myself to work. I practiced the night before and was able to drive around the block, awaiting terrible spasms of pain that never happened. The first morning that I had to drive, I left for work 20 minutes early, and drove very very s l o w l y. I braked with my left foot . I was so worried that I would have to stop short and would put sudden pressure on my foot. But I made it safely to work with no injury to myself or innocent pedestrians.

The unpleasant side effect of the hamstring injury was that because I was favoring my right leg, I was putting extra weight on my left leg, which caused my torn ankle tendons to flare up. What a mess.

Now it is five and ½ months later and my hamstring is much much better. I can still feel it if I do some unexpected stretching. My ankle, on the other hand, has turned into a wet noodle. Sometimes, I’m simply standing somewhere and my ankle gives out and I stumble to stay upright! And some days, it just throbs endlessly. I can usually wear non-flat shoes, just little wedges, but I think those days of heels and platforms are behind me.

Of course now I’m seeing all these super cute high heeled shoes that I would love to buy and I can only try on one at a time, because I can't balance myself on two!  Fortunately Alyssa is willing to help me out and let me buy those shoes for her.

Epicurean Endeavors

I make an effort to try a few new recipes every week, partially to justify my ever expanding cookbook collection and my constant perusing, printing, and creating binders full of recipes that I pull from Kraft, Pillsbury, BHG, and Pioneer Woman websites and partially because I think I can be Martha Stewart. Some weeks pass with no new recipes, depending on our work schedules and other commitments, but sometimes we can squeeze in 4 or 6 new dishes. We honestly assess the results and notate the recipe with a smiley face (liked it and would cook it again), an indifferent face (eh, was ok but too much work), or a sad face accompanied by a “yuk!” (self explanatory). We also make notes on changes we think will improve the recipes for our particular tastes.

Recently I was especially pleased because Ron made a mustard crusted steak. Yes, the dish turned out deliciously well, but my happiness came from the fact that he snipped off some leaves from the pots of herbs that I have growing on the lanai. This makes me happy, because every year I plant herbs, and water them faithfully, and brush against the rosemary because I love the smell of rosemary wafting up in the air, but I generally never snip or use them for cooking. It’s almost as though they are just ornamental plants with no specific purpose. Martha would be disappointed in me, I know.

Hopefully this year it will be different!

Everything Green is New Again

I grew up in a green world. Our house was painted a milky green; our family car, a Galaxy, was green; our interior walls were painted green; our kitchen wallpaper was a green print on a white background, and the floor tiles in our garage converted-to-a-den were dark green. I think this was due to my parents’ embracing my mother’s Irish heritage and her 8 sibling clan of McConnells. My father was not as celebratory about his own Slavic background, and instead spent much time working on my mother’s family tree. Of course, he did get to add his personal touch to the décor. The house was awash with gold eagle electrical switchplates and Revolutionary War Fife & Drum Corps upholstery. No, Better Homes and Gardens was not knocking on our door. 

In typical adolescent fashion, I rebelled against the green. I was absolutely entranced by our next door neighbor’s garage, which was painted a hot, electric pink ( I think these were the “mod” color descriptions from the 70’s). I tried to replicate the color in my bedroom. The pink was not quite “hot” enough, so I painted a giant flower shaped starburst on one wall, using leftover paint from previous home improvement projects. I lived with that for a few years, then decided it was too “girly” for me, and after serious contemplation, found my new theme: Jungle Room. I convinced my parents to purchase wall to wall carpeting in a multi colored pile that I thought was perfect for a jungle floor. (My parents could not understand why I wanted to cover up their beautiful hardwood flooring but I was quite stubborn and wanted the opposite of what they wanted – no matter what it was, even if I didn’t really want it.) I ditched my twin beds, convinced my mother I needed a new bed, got a day bed that I covered with a tiger print blanket, dragged an unused loveseat from the garage up the stairs to my room and covered that Fife and Drum print with another tiger print blanket, glued zebra print wrapping paper on my closet doors, tacked up a gorgeous tapestry of lions in the jungle that my sister had given me, and hung a golden spun glass globe light from a chain on the ceiling. The light twirled in the slightest breeze (or at the softest touch) and cast eerie undulating shadows on the walls. Oh, the walls? Green. But not my parents’ green. A deep, dark, forest green. A green that would cause my father much distress years later after I moved out and he had to repaint the room, but maybe not as much stress as trying to unglue the wrapping paper from my closet doors.  I thought it was the Coolest. Room. Ever.  My room was at the end of the hallway, and if you stood at the bottom of the stairs between the living room and the kitchen, you could see inside. Whenever my parents had company, I would open my door, give my globe light a spin, and wait for “oohs” and “aahs”. My parents were not as besotted with my room as I was, and went out of their way to CLOSE my bedroom door so no one would see what I had done.

And now, over 30 years later, we have moved into a new house. I was quite taken with the interior and the lanai, but didn't give much thought to the exterior color. I mean, I did comprehend enough to realize the house was green, but I didn’t overthink it. Now, every time we pull up to this house, I stop and think to myself, “is this house the same freaking color as 1314 Willow Drive??”

What do you think? 



Cat Feet

I just love cat feet! They are so cute and huggable.

I love the long tufts of fur on the bottoms of Trixie's paws, which somehow manage to always stay white:

And Dupree's big paws and little nose sticking out from under the couch are adorable. Sometimes I think we should have named him Sasquatch with his big feet and big head.

Rocky looks so peaceful with his silvery gray feet tucked up under him. Looking at this picture, you'd never know he's a psycho cat who erupts into fits of running and bouncing off the walls. It's hilarious to watch him trying to run on the tile floor but staying in the same spot, feet spinning just like a Road Runner cartoon.

Whenever I see cat feet, I'm immediately reminded of the Carl Sandburg poem, "Fog",  that I read when I was in grammar school:

THE fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

What a perfect poem. About fog. And cat feet.  

Cocofest 2011

Our most recent Coconut Festival's theme was the British Invasion, featuring a Beatles cover band, “Nowhere Band”, and a Led Zeppelin cover band, “Led Zepagain”.  Sounded like a great time to me, and Alyssa came home from school to go with us. The Coconut Festival is always around Alyssa’s birthday so we do like to think of Cocofest as a great big birthday party for her. Ron is not a Beatles fan (I can hear you gasping "NOT POSSIBLE" but it's true!) but he does like Zeppelin, so he was agreeable to going and didn’t have to be dragged along against his will.   You can never predict how big or how rowdy the band audience will be at Cocofest.  One year we saw Starship and there were mellow people lounging in lawn chairs as well as people wandering around, just enjoying the music. Last year we saw Foghat and it was mobbed with people jostling for prime spots by the stage and we just hoped we wouldn't be crushed. This year we hoped for a fun crowd and brought a blanket to hang out on. It was very eerie – there were no lines at the entrance gate and the crowd by the stage was so small it could scarcely be called a crowd. Lots of lawn chairs and blankets. We claimed a spot not far from the stage and right in front of the video screen.   It was hilarious watching people come up during the night and take pictures of  the bands on the screen, or have other people take pictures of them standing in front of the screen. I suppose having a picture of yourself in front of a video screen playing footage of a fake band does have some unique appeal.

Nowhere Band opened (as I’d predicted to Alyssa) with 60’s era songs, dressed in collarless suits. After a short break they changed into Sgt Pepper attire for later songs. After one more break, “John” came out in a white suit and sang “Imagine” before the remaining 3 Beatles joined him for the last set.  It was fun, it was mellow, it was cute. Their first set was not so great but the second two were pretty good. We’ve seen better Beatles acts, but you get out of it what you put into it, right? They were well worth the $5 charge to get into Cocofest. It was funny to me that Alyssa and I sang along with all the songs and Ron just acted like a clown. The Beatles broke up 20 years before Alyssa was even born, so it’s special to me that she knows and enjoys their music.

Ron shared an "aha!" moment with us. When he was in school, he had a music teacher that made the class listen to and sing Beatles songs every day. At his young age he quickly tired of this class and the endless Beatles tunes, and I guess he never got over that. To think that you can still be surprised to learn something new about someone after 21 years together. Hmmm.

After Nowhere Band, we enjoyed the fireworks display. It was a bit nippy so we were happy to have our blankets and jackets.

Alyssa was not familiar with Led Zeppelin, so we prepped her a bit on their music. Ron said he just hoped the lead singer wasn’t some 50 year old guy without a shirt on trying to dance around the stage like Robert Plant. 

Well…………….............................

Umm.........................................

Sorry, Ron, but that’s what we got.

Ok, now I have to throw in a picture of the real Robert Plant just as a reference.

The Led Zepagain singer was a little screechy but we assured Alyssa that the real Led Zeppelin didn’t sound like that. We later played some Zep for her and she heard the difference.

Anyway, the Zeppelin tribute band was not perfect, but they were fun, and again, well worth the $5 to see experience both the Beatles and Led Zeppelin in one evening.  Can't wait to see who’s scheduled for next year!