All Hallow's Eve...

It is not officially an awesome Halloween until you have sweated 7 and a half pounds away as you stay in monster character for 3 hours. Coincidentally 7 and a half pounds is how many treats I'm going to eat.

It all works out.

I'm the coquettish looking jack-o-lantern headed creature on the left, the super handsome hunk on the right is my husband.

Happy Halloween.

A stop motion adventure at a pumpkin farm

When we arrived, the parking lot was a field. Row upon row of glistening cars, the sun bouncing off of chrome, glossy windshields and So-Cal bumper stickers, blinding all the new comers. It was un-like any visit to a farm I'd ever partaken in before.
Getting out of the car I was struck immediately by the scent. You'd think it would be animal by-product in nature but it wasn't. If you can imagine what dry smells like, this was it. Dust rose in little clouds with each step we took, tickling our noses and mingling with the clashing aroma of a Piña colada. But alas there were no such tropical drinks on hand, instead I was smelling the people. Slicked up in layers of SPF123, varying scents of coconut and perfumes that every one seemed drenched in. Perhaps they hadn't really showered in essentials oils before arriving though, perhaps years of scented products were being released from their clothes and bodies with every sun-baked minute they stood out there.
We only made it a hundred feet before retreating back to our car for Plan B. Which included more water, our hats and a few moments to wave our hands in front of our faces Southern Belle style and proclaim to each other that "It surely was hot out here today."
"Spicy!" My husband said, and I agreed.
Despite the heat and the insane amount of people who all had apparently decide en masse to get a pumpkin this very day we bent our heads under the weight of the sun and kept our eye on the shadowy glory of the trees up ahead.
As we reached their cover, and a wisp of blissful coolness caressed our flushed faces I found more than comfort under those trees. I found tiny ponies, that I longed desperately to have ferry me about the place like Lady Godiva but with clothes. But whether it was the fact I was 3 times as tall as these gentle, hay munching beasts or because the idea of straddling a hot hairy animal on a hot harried day was melting my brain just thinking about it I can not say.
We spent the first 20 minutes in the fair like atmosphere of the farm taking umpteen million photos of the tiny ponies. Or, more accurately, my husband stood sweetly by my side as I kneeled in the dirt, un-caring about my behind stuck up in the air as I got my 17th photo of a horse eating hay. He was amused at me but understood. It isn't like one can just walk outside and take a photo of a little pony when ever one wants, so when one finds a little pony at their photo taking disposal one should take as many photos as their little camera card can hold.
Eventually I was torn away from the animals by the lure of meeting up with some relatives. We greeted each other in the age old manner of relatives with nods, ourselves reflecting back at us from their dark sunglasses as we traded boisterous versions of "Hot enough for ya?"
It was decided that we'd all visit the straw maze the farm had erected and here I truly saw country living at it's best. The availability of thick strong straw bales to construct a chest high maze was like ambrosia to my slightly citified mind. We ran through at break neck speeds, having adjusted to the heat or perhaps with delirium from the heat.
With the aid of our nephews we found the hidden mailboxes with stamps in 8 different locations and quickly filled our card. Our joy at the completion of the A-maze-ing task was quickly dimmed by the lack of prize. No statue erected in our honor, no small but tasteful gold leafed trophy that one could display upon their mantle. No instead there were the snickers and wide eyed stares from strangers at our baffled arguments that surely there was a prize.
We decided, after a few moments of pondering that the point of the maze hadn't been the filled card with stamps but the journey getting them, and we felt quite clever, giving smug knowing looks to the people who entered the maze as we exited. Newbies, we had come a long way mentally since entering that very same spot not 10 minutes ago.
The family slowly split apart, each doing their own thing and ours involved scarfing down a bratwurst, a straw bale as our seat. Our hunger had made itself known so hugely and violently that we didn't speak, passing the bratwurst back and forth in a fluid motion so that just as one of us finished chewing the tasty snack was handed back. Fittingly, like cows, we chewed constantly for 5 minutes with the sounds of kids and the murmur of crowds of people as background music.
We let our eyes follow the gentle slope leading downwards towards the un-shaded fields and the promising orange globes that dotted them in comforting numbers.
Despite the amazing amount of people I was sure there'd be no pumpkin shortages and I would find my very own to take home with us.
Re-fueled we made our way towards the fields and as we drew near I was amazed. So many pumpkins. I should have expected a pumpkin farm to very well stocked but the sheer number of the fat little fellows, in piles, scattered about, lonely giant ones, squat white ones and itty bitty baby ones boggled my mind. So many pumpkins.
The large ones beckoned me and I quickly found myself in the throes of a passionate hug with a pumpkin I couldn't even get my arms around. It was an enjoyable moment but even as I drew away I knew there'd been no spark. That what I needed wasn't one of those logic defying beasts but something small and perkier.
I scanned the many piles and slowly a strange feeling drew over me. Something niggled at the back of my mind and I looked about warily, trying to see what my brain was already sensing. It struck me suddenly, it looked as if every one was pregnant. With swollen orange bellies as they cradled pumpkins low in their arms and waddled up to the pumpkin check-out.
I shook the strange feeling away and resumed my own search for the perfect pumpkin to bring in to our lives.
Surprisingly, despite the many choices, the thousands of pumpkin possibilities I zeroed straight into the one that would be ours.I suspect it started calling me with veggie mental telepathy as soon as we entered the field. Magnetic field? Hay field? It doesn't matter, what matters is I swooped down and gathered our pumpkin into my arms and waddled my way to the checkout, no longer apart from the pumpkin impregnated crowds but now one of them.
I caught several people just arriving at the field eying my pumpkin with un-disguised avarice but I just smiled, and held little Arnold all the tighter.
Our feet were starting to protest as the sun was beginning to hang lower in the sky, most likely it was exhausted from such single minded burning intensity it shone with all day.
Before leaving we turned in a full circle, tired but pleased with our decision to go pumpkin adopting at a real pumpkin farm.
The stacked bales of hay, the petting zoo, the fair food and kid's games, the endless supply of pumpkins and happy crowd made for a lovely afternoon.
The strange feeling snuck over me once more and it was Alan who figured out what it was.
The people around us did not flow. They stopped and started, freezing in place like statues, fixed grins plastered on their faces and almost half of them stood with their arms raised, co-ordinating little digital cameras in their hands. The other half held their pumpkins and the scene about us moved like a stop motion animation.
Bursts of stillness, a frenzy of photo snapping, strike a new pose, freeze and snap again.
It was so strange.
It was surreal.
It was a day at a pumpkin farm in the digital age.

A selfish grain of sand.....

Blog Action Day 08 - Poverty

Poverty......I had to look up the definition.
Am I going to hell for admitting that? Heaven's no, I'm going to hell for all those uses of God's name in vain. Now look, I'm not an idiot, I know what poverty is, but when I really thought about it...I mean quelled the inner hamster of my mind, racing in circles, distracted by sitcom laugh tracks, coffee and the looming decision of a Halloween costume, I found myself a little stumped. Muddled.
Where there should have been clarity, meaning my brain, one topic to ponder, clear concise opinions should have made them selves available to me. Instead there was confusion and chaos. It made my head hurt.
Perhaps part of it is that poverty, the very idea of people out there starving and dying from horrible diseases with no place to live, is so hard to believe.
Though I do believe it. I see the commercials. Right between mascara and a wonder drug for your libido you can learn all about saving lives for just pennies a day.
I've also been appalled and horrified by the sight of people sleeping on the side of the road. A handy bush as their roof and a shopping cart apparently the house of all their worldly possessions.
Is that real? That really happens?
I do not believe I'm the only one who feels like their life is cushioned by a fog of surreality when it comes to things like war, natural disasters and poverty. There's even a tiny part of my brain, the part that hides it's face from the idea of death, of scary things that are too big for the mind to grasp like what if there's no God.....or what if there is...? This little part of grey matter tries to argue it.
Sad little portion of the brain that it is, trying to convince me there is no poverty. People can not be homeless. There can not literally be thousands and millions of starving people because if there were we'd fix it.
WE, the rest of us.
US, the un-poverty stricken.
The ones who buy 6 dollar coffee drinks, 50 dollar Wii games and 80 dollar shoes.
WE, the ones who inject poison into our faces to reduce wrinkles, put stripes on our cars, cell phones in every pocket and people in to space....
WE surely would not do any of that if there were starving, dying children in the world...would we?
My brain hurts. I think it hurts the most because I know we do, more so because I do. ME.
The guilt of having credit cards and a fridge full of food and gas in our car and the good kind of cat food for our kitties can weigh pretty heavy on my mind.
Then another layer of guilt handily belly flops down on the first and snarls cruelly at my quivering mind, "You think you feel bad? How about not having any food, how about your family not having any food? No bed to sleep in, no house, no car, no work, bad water.....you cry baby."
So my brain does what any cornered animal does, it goes on the offense.
Billions of dollars in space crap?
Problem solved. Lets funnel it in to all things poverty-wise. Lets not see what Mars rocks look like, lets not give a rat's ass if there's water on other planets and deal with the water on this one...and the fact that some people don't have any that's safe and clean.
See how that worked?
See how I managed to tap into a little righteous anger without doing anything personally myself to help the world?
See how it's not my fault and how I can't really do anything?
See how the few dollars I could spare doesn't make a difference, not when there's such a big need and the space people are blasting millions of dollars up to the moon and beyond?
Pretty clever of my ol' noggin eh?
The brain, it's a beautiful thing...and it's evil.
If it weren't we'd have no issues with poverty. If the area a large group of people lived in was horrible, they'd up and move to a new location. Borders schmorders, we'd welcome them with open arms. (The kind that hug, not the shooting kind.)
Bad brain.
See how it twisted it up again? Yes it would be lovely if the world was all about free love and peace. But it's not. Unless every single person immediately decided to completely alter the way humanity exists....it's not gonna be that.
See how my clever little brain made it about people? Not me...but people. Bad, bad baddddd brain.
There's a part of me that wishes I was strong enough to open my doors and invite any who needs a shelter to come and stay. But I'm not. I am admitting that. I like privacy, I like my life. I love the quality time I have with my husband. I am selfish. Most of us are. Even when we do good things, it's not EVERY thing we could. I see the homeless person on the street but I don't bundle them up into the car and invite them to live with us. I don't move from a house to a one bedroom apartment and donate the difference of rent to a worthy cause. I am selfish.
BUT, tricky, tricky, tricky brain....Oh how you like to twist my thoughts into knots. Large, pulsing, blood red knots that squeeze my insides until I feel I am too exhausted to think any more, and I want to escape into the mindlessness of some frivolous book or tv show.
It whispers how I can't really make a difference with the world. I think that could be true. BUT, you naughty brain there is ONE thing I can change. ONE thing I have control over.
ME!
If I was meant to have power over the actions of everyone. To make great decisions about where people could live, how we would alter the every day runnings of human life to save others, I suspect I'd have that power already....so far this hasn't happened. And yet I have this teeny tiny speck of power, nearly drowned out in the crowd of human life. Power over me.
ONLY me. Each of us has the same speck I think. Power over ourselves. And I can make it so I do not hide from fear. Or escape the responsibility of a wounded world and hurt people by shrugging my shoulders.
Instead of doing nothing, I can do something. I can change me. If I throw dollars at a problem that continues to exists, at least I did something. If I think about a problem and my brain starts a slow leak out of my ears, my eyes cross indefinitely and still I'm no closer to the perfect solution to fix the world.....well...at least I gave it a thought.
And maybe, call me a rose colored glasses, glass half full, pot o' gold at the end of the rainbow kind of person but maybe if I do my little bit.....teeny tiny as it may be....and every one else does there little bit, maybe things will change.
Maybe some day some one in the future will look up the definition of poverty too....but they realllly really won't know what it means.
Because maybe all the itty bitty teeny weeny minuscule things we all do, and keep trying to do, will erode away the insanity of the world. If not in this generation...maybe in the next one...or the next...or the next...or....

Dear great great great great great to the power of 57394757494758495 grandchildren of humanity, I will try and do something, I will be the best little grain of sand I can, even if it makes my brain hurt. Love me.....

p.s. having made a conscious effort to try and find some thing I can do to help, even in my own tiny, grainy sand way, it was as if the universe presented me an opportunity to follow through with my good intentions.
And I did.
And it felt good and bad.
I can admit that throwing a few dollars at a greater problem, POVERTY, knowing that some one out there has had it sooo bad, that even a few dollars can make a difference...it's humbling, scary and heart breaking. But knowing I did something, anything, instead of nothing.......what's that I see? Would that be a tiny spark of hope? A glimmer or a shiny future filled with peace and equality for all?
Damn right it is.

All Fired Up!

I have more than a chip on my shoulder.....
You know how a person can rant and rave about how inanimate objects defy them and how the Universe is testing their patience, their will and their sanity?
And how if a person keeps blathering about things like coat hangers that nearly cracked the fragile and tenuous hold some one has on their mighty reservoir of frustrated anger how other people start to raise their eyebrow, just the one ala Spock?
And how it's pretty damn hard to gather evidence of these inanimate objects etc to bring before one's peers to shine the light of truth upon their evil little ways?
Because throwing a handful of coat hangers, carpet tacks and miscellaneous spilled trash before one's friends doesn't prove that they did you wrong. The stuff not the friends, they didn't do me wrong yet but I keep a careful eye on them. If the old adage "keep your friends close and your enemies uncomfortably closer" is true then doesn't it stand to reason that some of the people I consider to be my closest friends must actually be my enemy, or at least I theirs?
It's something to ponder when life hands you small moments to reflect on the weirdness of the world...
But anyways I was rambling on about the defiance of things I face. People with kids think they have it tough? Ha!
Finally I have proof that either the fates are in cahoots with the Universe, or the Universe is in cahoots with the inanimate objects or perhaps I have an alter ego type personality that is constantly trying to undermine my smooth sailing through the day or.....and this isn't just the conspiracy crazed voice of fear just talking here, maybe they're alllllllllll in it together......
How else can I, or you for that matter explain THIS?
(Please read that last word "this" as dramatically as you can ala your favorite mystery movie when the culprit is revealed with much dramatic finger pointing, British accents and Shakespearean flair. Thanks)
These are my corn chips....or they WERE....
Let me take us on a slight detour from my point.
Corn chips are a staple in our household. In fact if there could be some sort of blended cornchip coffee concotion I am pretty sure my husband and I would drink it and enjoy it and never have to eat another thing but said concotion. (I exaggerate for the purposes of expressing how important corn chips really are. We don't like name them and treat them like salty members of our family but we do panic when there is only 2/3 of a 1 lb bag of the delicious lil devils left. They call the 1 lb bag "family size", we call it "barely big enough to get us through the week-end." I'm not going to tell you if I was exaggerating that time.)
So about corn chips and me.
I like em warm and toasty. This is actually a fairly recent discovery on my part. That if you take store bought corn chips and spread them out on a cookie sheet and stick them under your broiler for a few seconds then magical corn chip deliciousness happens. Your home starts to smell like your favorite Mexican restaurant, the chips gets toasty brown and they are so crispy and delicious you will actually risk burning your lips to nibble a few right away.
Well............I am here to confess that in the eyes of every one who is not in the *know* about defiant inanimate objects and Universe ploys to trip me up, I have carbonized our favorite salty snack. Reduced those pretty little golden chips to a fiery pile of ashes. Literally FIRE. It was quite exciting, you can't eat flaming chips by the way....bad, bad BAD idea.
Accident?
Forgetfulness?
Just leave them chips under the broiling hot broiler for a little too long?
Perhaps......
BUT If this is so then explain to me THIS!
(You can apply the same dramatic reading of the last usage of the word "this" as you did to the afore mentioned dramatic "this". Thanks)
NOT ONCE BUT TWICE in one week have I completely destroyed a beautiful pile of corn chips. Watching them burn, burn away their corny goodness and salty exterior as my own face is salted from my tears.
I might accidently set fire to a cookie sheet full of corn chips once....but not twice. AHA! J'accuse you Universe! I accuse the stove, the cookie sheet and...dang it, even those chips if I have to because I know dang well I am not responsible for carbonizing TWO batches of corn chips. I'm just not. The Universe slipped up there, now I have more than two useless piles of inedible corn chips (I tried them they taste like ash...darn it).....Now I have proof.

*****Corn chips really are tasty when they've been lightly toasted....LIGHTLY being the key word here. Do NOT turn you back on these guys under the broiler, they are just waiting to burst in to flame and make you cry. In fact if you do this do not walk away from the stove and check them literally every 5 or 10 seconds for *done-ness*. Seconds make the difference between a "happy meal" and a "muttering bitter infused obscenities at the Universe" meal........