The blog post that has nothing to do with babies.

(Our plastic child can sit on the floor keeping company with lighters, tequila, knives, credit cards, car keys, lasers, bleach, candy, pure sugar, razors, scissors, rock music with swear words, prescription meds, a hammer, dangerous reading material among other things and.....nothing. Plastic children are safe, predictable, if not a little boring, and will never cause any trouble. Plus I can decoupage her if I get the urge.)

Hey I'm all for not having the human race dying out but....holy moly there's a lotta babies popping up..er..out...around the blog world lately.
I think it's actually some sort of mini baby boom and we should all satisfy our voyeuristic tendencies by counting backwards 9 months or so to see what was so baby making fantastic back then. I could be wrong but I am gonna guess that all the baby making madness occurred during that dry spell that happens between the seasons of good tv viewing.
That little window of time when one block of shows has their season finales and the next block of premieres doesn't start for 3 weeks. There's nothing on tv, sooooooo a whole new generation of little humans was created. I am secretly going to call all children conceived during this time period "Re-run-lings" in my head.
Do not get me wrong, kids are great (at a comfortable non birthed from me distance) and like I said some one needs to keep the human race going but I feel a little superior at times cause NAHHH NAHHHH aint gonna be me. I'll be sipping Margaritas with the only kids I need. Fuzzy four legged ones that can only sass back in "Meow" language. (Okie, now that was just bragging. And everyone knows the unspoken rule that you can't diss the *beauty and wonder* that is creating life nor can you extoll too much the benefits of forgoing the *beauty and wonder* of creating new life because it'll make all the new Mama's jealous.)
We are not going to have kids.
And there are not many things about that decision I could regret except maybe the mini sandwiches that baby mamas get at baby showers. You can't convince me there aren't a few women out there who got knocked up just for the wee tuna on whole wheat cut in to tiny triangles. Those sandwiches alone are what got me through many a relative's baby shower. Those tiny little minuscule bready delights stuffed with cheddar and ham are what lured to me to neighbor after neighbor's baby shower where we sat around with strangers playing weird games (and not Nintendo based ones) whilst waiting for the food to be unveiled. Those sandwiches alone are also what my Mother hauls out of her Mama torture bag of tricks and takes photos of at all the Canadian based baby showers I can't attend so I can see the sandwich nirvana I'm missing.

(evidence of torture by own Mother, plate after plate of beautiful teeny tiny sandwiches that I can't have)

She's no fool and we've got a good thing. I thrust plastic grandchildren in her face and she tortures me with miniscule food. It's a fair trade.
There's a lot of reasons FOR having kids. Someone to work the farm when you're old and grey..er..or keep you company in your golden years and love and affection etc. BUT in all fairness there's a lot of reasons NOT to.
I couldn't begin to list them all, and I am sure for every one I have, there's a Mama out there who needs no argument against any of my reasons other than the sweet and pure love that only a child can bring. I don't think one decision is really better than other EXCEPT one is better than the other for ME. :)

Reason number 382 why we are not having children.
The *pretend* child we have, aka the only grandchild the folks can expect from us, was given a lovely hair cut the other night. You see I was in the middle of creating the un-dead and realized I didn't have the right shade of blonde hair in my craft supplies. So I fetched our darling plastic daughter that we keep stored in the closet and only bring out at Christmas (reason number 291: storing your children in the closet is probably a no-no) and with hardly any hesitation hacked off a long hank of blonde hair...muah ahh ahh. If there's no rule about butchering your children's hair for making zombies then there ought to be.

Reason number 4587 not to have children. I've never been good at sharing. Seriously, the new Nintendo Wii game.....lets say I could even afford the new game..or the Wii system AFTER all the expense of creating a human being there's no way in hell I could sit idly by and let some one else beat the new Zelda game before me. That's not mean...that's honesty right there. Also, I'm pretty sure there's some Motherhood rule that says parents shouldn't devote 50 plus hours of gameplay to the new Zelda game if they have children...something about matches and cleaners and world domination...I dunno for sure I was only half listening to that parental lecture cause I was distracted by how many rupees I'd collected.

Reason number 784 not to have children. Schedules. Holy fricking Hannah it would seem the entire freaking universe lives by the clock..EXCEPT my sweetie and I. Our schedule slowly rotates around the clock, Slowly pushing further a little later every night, sleep a little later every day. We have no set pattern. Just when you think we are getting up at midnight we're actually getting up at 4 am, or 4 pm. I am thinking kids and a schedule like that don't mesh.... I have heard rumors about the youngins needing stuff like sunlight.....

Reason number 32, I hated school, or at least large chunks of it. I can't imagine creating a human and then sending them off to the very institution I so very much un-enjoyed...and as for home schooling..um, did I not mention the 50 plus hours of game play? Plus margaritas. How many margaritas do parents get? Pbbbt, suckkkkas, y'all work on long division, my hubby and I are gonna make brownies, eat half the pan and then do dangerous things with a lighter we can leave laying out in the open because our cats have no interest in playing with it....muahh ahh ahh.

(Dangerous things we can leave in the middle of the living room floor forever and always should we desire because we don't have children. I'm not saying it's the BEST perk of opting to go childless...but it's definitely one of the more interesting ones.)

Reason number 7, adults who said "Oh you'll change your mind some day" with that knowing smirk on their face as if they knew for damn sure a switch would go off when a woman hits 30 and she will wanna help increase the earth's population. It's almost worth it for that alone. Sort of an "in your face" rebellion, ha HA no grandkids for you!

Reason number 9876. The other day we stepped out on to the patio to stare at the lovely, artistic billows of smoke from the fire way off yonder at the military base. Of course we wanted to snap a photo and of course I ended up flailing my arms and smacking a 500 dollar camera out of my husband's hands to bounce off of the house and onto the patio floor........ I fear children. If I could manage to do that on accident to a tiny camera.....a full size kid? Yikes. I'm pretty sure they're worth more than 500 dollars....

Reason number 17, We don't need to make any kids. The friends and relatives are doing a fine job of it on their own. Producing such wonderful little persons that one could not even hope to compete. (But lets see em produce a pair of cats who can occasionally tolerate each other long enough to bump noses though! Now there's a feat!)

Reason number 865, Babies don't use litter boxes. So far as I know.

I fully realize the Universe is gonna punish me for even thinking up such a list by making me have 19 kids in my next life time. Most likely all of which I'll name variations on the theme of Mario and Zelda. It'll be little Links and Luigis running all over the place and I'll be bewildered why such names appealed to me. The Universe is just sneaky enough to do such a thing. In the mean time I'll baby my cats and make my OWN little sandwiches. It's not just Mamas-to-be who can cut a square into 4 triangles ya know.

Disclaimer: Children are wonderful. I am very happy for all the proud parents out there, but I am happy and proud of our un-parentage as well.
To each their own.

Favorite Flights of Fictional Fancy: Interview with Big Foot

Interview with a Bigfoot.

Me: I think the question we'd all really love to hear the answer to, in fact YOUR answer, is....do you exist?

BigFoot: *sighs* This again????

Me: Is that a no?

BigFoot: This gets tiring after a while you know. How many other mammals do you know have to put up with the utter lack of respect and lack of believability that my kind gets?

Me: So.....it's a yes?

BigFoot: *****moment of strained silence****** YES. I exist.

Me: Lovely! I'd hate to come and find out I've been interviewing a non-existent creature....again. So Mr.BigFoot, what's the deal?

BigFoot: The deal with what?

Me: Your feet! I mean your entire identity is wrapped up in your "big" feet and I'm looking at them and I gotta say.....

BigFoot: What?

Me: Not so big.

BigFoot: Oh for the love of-

Me: Shhhhhh, shh, calm down. Do you want a carrot?

BigFoot: I. AM. NOT. A. RABBIT.

Me: I. NEVER. SAID. YOU. WERE. Sheesh, attitude much? **crunch crunches on the rejected carrot.**

BigFoot: I apologize. I get very stressed this time of year. People popping out of the woodwork like crazed hunters, cameras hung about their necks, that glazed look in their eyes. Constantly dragging pounds and pounds of plaster of paris through the woods to make copies of my foot prints and I never gave any one the right to do that. Sell them on Ebay, they make a fortune and I gotta uproot my family every time the paparazzi get wind of us. I get cranky.

Me: You should have had the carrot. Munching calms the nerves. It's a fact.

BigFoot: ******Another moment of strained silence, this time even longer and
strained-er****** Are we done?

Me: I thought I could paint your portrait.

BigFoot: Sheesh lady, I barely know you. You barely know me and you wanna be painting my portrait. Do I go around chasing you down and asking you all kinds of nosy questions about how YOU smell, and how YOU walk, and do YOU ever shave? NO! I've got to go.

Me: O.k. **hollers to the retreating back of BigFoot as he stalks across the snowy field** It was nice meeting you!

BigFoot: ***Unintelligible grunt***

Bed-lam

Once upon a time I remarked casually to my husband that there were days I wished we could drag the mattress off of our bed, out to the living room where we could plunk it down in front of the fireplace.
And his eyebrow rose so steadily and so slowly, creeping higher and higher on his face that I began to worry. I was having some serious concerns that his eyebrow was going to detach itself and just run away all together. Which would be a shame as Alan has lovely eyebrows. But I am off of my point if not my rocker.
The boldly stated bombshell lay between us. Our mattress in the living room.
Before the word "Why" could so much as begin to pucker his lips in the slightest I rushed forward like a lawyer horse, launching outta the starting gate, racing to fill in the air between us with not just my words but excellent reasoning behind such a move.
"So we could sleep in front of the fire!! It would be like camping only lazier and we could watch tv at the same time!"
The eyebrow halted it's steady climb.
Alan's eyebrow is his barometer indicating his feelings on how crazy an idea is.
"It would be warm and cozy and instead of heating the bedroom we could stay out here where we already have it heated."
The eyebrow lowered.
"Well....." He said, chewing this idea over in his mind and I do believe I fell in love a little bit more.
That is the true litmus test of a soul mate. When you throw an idea out there, no matter how wacky, it's considered. If even for the briefest of moments.
Sure your idea to defect from all North American Countries and creating your own on some small island where we could live on rum and lobster for the rest of our days, whittling coconut shells and writing our National anthem might ultimately be dismissed. But for a half second, that precious half second when his mind leaps ahead with yours to that place that exists only in imagination, the place where he joins you in decorating your new country's flag and helps build a lovely 3 story hut out of bamboo and flamingo feathers, working in harmony, before reality slams itself against your dreams and hauls you back to the here and now....that half second....is amazing.
"I guess it would take up a lot of space....." He finally says. And I see him mentally measuring the living room floorspace. If I could pop inside his brain for a moment and peer out through his eyes I almost bet I'd see faint green lines laid over every bit of anything that could be measured in the living room. And next to each faintly glowing green line would be the measurements, guesstimates of course he's not a computer. And the units would be in feet but not standard's , rather his own size 11's.
I gaze with rapt attention and baited breath as his head swivels on his neck and I can see that he is envisioning our bed in the middle of the living room and I can see that he can see it wouldn't be half bad. I follow the invisible path his eyes trace, as he mentally pushes our King sized mattress around the available space options. I see when he sees that if we push it right up to the kitchen area we could not only access the fridge from bed BUT do dishes. If we had a keen interest in doing so, which I don't but I like options.
If we push the mattress the other way we could press it up against the patio doors and during the hottest days of summer we could open the door and sleep with our heads practically outside. I see his brows lower as he considers the loveliness of a soft cool breeze in the middle of the night during the hot summer.
Now his eyebrows are not only back to their normal position but they are attempting to crawl down over his eyeballs, perhaps the brows wish to see what his brain sees and want a peek inside.
He grabs the tape measure and starts measuring how much space we'd still have for incidental things like walking.
When he speaks, it's with the far off tone of some one who isn't all the way in the here and now. He's in the there, the there where the reality is different than it is in this exact moment. In that there, the reality consists of pretty much everything as it is now BUT with one crucial difference. We could sleep in front of the fire place on our beautiful king sized mattress in the middle of the living room.
"We could always put the sofa in the bed room, make it a second storage area type place......." His voice trails off and now I walk with him through imagination into the room that would formerly be the bedroom and would then be the sofa storage room in the future, should we go down this life altering mattress moving path.
With those words I know he is hooked.
Life fricking rocks.
When you are a teenager they tell you all sorts of overly recited pap like "You can be anything you want to be, do anything you want to do when you are an adult." The unspoken words include the disclaimer "As long as what you choose falls into what is the accepted norm and doesn't differ too much." Meaning chances are no one would reallllly support the dream of creating one's own country with lots of rum based drinks and a 3 story house made from bamboo and flamingo feathers.
So that moment, when you realize you don't actually have to follow the list of "rules". The ones that are unspoken, the ones that say beds go in the bedroom, and your sweetheart agrees with your mattress revolution. That moment when the eyebrows are significantly low on the face and the mattress is but a half second away from being hauled into new and uncharted territory, with unparalleled access to the television, computers, fridge and patio doors. That moment, that's not only love, that's just fricking cool.

Post-Apocalypticness

I do not want to live in a post apocalyptic society.
Or even in a post apocalyptic world that is society-less.
In fact on the list of things I don't want to experience, post apocalypticness is rated very high. Somewhere between laser eye surgery and snake juggling.
And yet I keep things, things I imagine I will need some day. Not tomorrow, not the next day not even 10 years from now but things that would be very handy if suddenly the human race goes boom locka boom and I find myself living in a world that is totally wiped clean of it's technological advances. No electricity, no computers, no phones, no nothing. Strangely enough I never imagine rubble so maybe it's not post apocalypticness I am preparing for but one of them polar magnetic shifts.
The kind the scientists fret over and say will wreak havoc with all of our satellites etc should suddenly the magnetic poles ever get tired of their current magnetic status and decide to switch themselves around.
Can you imagine? I mean I know I can but can you?
So much stuff is tied up with our computers and the internet and televisions and phones that really I feel we ought to be addressing bigger issues than politics and be thinking hard about our technological marriages. We're all polygamists now, me, my hubby and apple computers are living a very happy little life together. And if it's a sin then send me to hell baby.
We research anything and everything at the drop of a hat. We know how much it will cost to run one of those jet packs that run off of hydrogen peroxide and how high we could fly and we can switch tabs and peer mournfully at our bank accounts because jet pack funds are damn hard to grow. We look up what's going to be on tv, then we watch tv ON the computer and we record ourselves and post ourselves on Youtube so other people can watch us. We get recipes and jokes and more fricking stories about Jesus, no offense son of God but you are one popular email forward, than we ever thought we'd need.
So if the earth goes boom locka boom. We are screwed.
How will I know how to make homemade pasta? Or how to change a light fixture or find alternate words for awesome if the world goes boom locka boom?
I'd be forced to rely on the material possessions I have already accumulated.
Now I don't want or need a fallout type shelter. I'm not crazy, just wondering when I stare at an old dictionary and thesaurus that takes up room on my bookshelf and have LITERALLY never had their spines cracked open in this house, why I am keeping them? I look everything I need or want to know up on the internet.
But my hand hesitates, hovering over the faded yellow pages of a book that isn't even old enough to be an antique but is probably old enough to not know the definition of cool as "having qualities of supreme awesomeness". I can't quite recycle it or donate it because maybe I'll need it.
But when?
When would I ever go to the bookshelf instead of using a quick flick of my computer mouse to open another tab in my internet browser and look up my favorite thesaurus site to find alternate words for slimy. Never.........unless......unless the world went boom locka boom and I found myself bored out of my skull because the television was now being used as a doorstop and I had read all of the pocket novels in our bookshelves 18 times each already and there was NO access to any fresh material from my favorite authors because they too were experiencing the boom locka boom and distributing and printing new materials was given up for more practical concerns like researching alternative toilet paper sources and trying to survive in the post apocalyptic magnetic whatchmacallit time.
So THEN, I may be tempted to do some writing along the edges of the paperbacks we already owned and in between the lines, basically entering a new story into the the pages thereby turning the paperback into two books instead of one. And THEN I may have desperate need for a thesaurus because at that point in time my brain will be older and slower and also will have had the words "Holy fricking cow on a stick" etched into the ol' grey matter as will the rest of the world, having experienced the complete and utter breakdown of our technological side of society and all and so a thesaurus will be a very handy thing.
Perhaps in our neighborhood I will be the only person with a thesaurus and what with the world suddenly shrinking in communications size, to basically you communicated with to who could hear you hollering, my thesaurus might provide some level of stature.
Perhaps I shall be crowned the queen of words and I can start a wee little monarchy.
Perhaps a post apolaclyptic society won't be all bad, abominable, atrocious, awful, corked, corky, counterfeit, crappy, defective, deplorable, distressing, dreadful, evil, fearful, forged, frightful, hard, harmful, high-risk, hopeless, horrid or icky after all.

Following thoughts to their natural conclusions......

...even if those conclusions are at the end of a twisted path of darkness strewn with piles of mental weirdness.

On the rare occasion I have to..well....do in a bug.

Now I have to insert the zillion and a half disclaimers before I can get to my point.

• 1. I don't like killing anything.
• 2. I go to great lengths, incredibly convoluted and most likely comical to watch lengths, to safely remove an uninvited guest from our home, depositing them back out into the wild aka the patio. I do the same for bugs as I do for Aunt Frieda.
• 3. We even leave spiders in the corners if they've made a web there because spiders eat little bugs and then that's just the circle of life and me not having to worry about the fate of one less bug.
• 4. We have a dedicated bug catching jar. If you've ever ran for a glass and a piece of cardboard or what ever during a visit by a bug you wish to evict you know how un-nerving it is on every one to be shrieking at ear blasting decibels as you frantically look for proper eviction materials all the while keeping one eye on the bug that is MOVING, and not staying in one damn spot and patiently waiting for it's free ride out the door. Having a dedicated bug catching jar means when we spy a bug, say a moth that is trying to drive our cats insane by having the audacity to flit about in their field of view, we can quickly launch into Plan A:BUG-BE-GONE-BYEBYE and have that moth safely out the door. Before the cats start climbing the blinds whilst yowling and desperately swiping at their desired prey...the moth. Cats, go figure. (That's how you know house cats really are domesticated. Ya don't see the National Geographic people filming a pack of wild lions swatting at butterflies for an afternoon snack now do ya?)
• 5. We have rules, a sort of truce with the spiders. Should they obey the rules of said truce, we leave em be. Stay the heck off the kitchen counters, the sofa, the bed and the cats and we will stay off of them. Now that seems pretty fair, there's been a time or two I saw a spider scuttling along Mission Impossible style in the hallway along the baseboards. I turned a blind eye.

BUT...there are times we have to do the unthinkable and resort to drastic measures. There is much mumblings of "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorrrrrrry" as the deed is done and done quickly. Yecccccck.

So I got to thinking about the taking of a life, albeit itty btty creepy crawly ones.
And I got to thinking about how people say they've seen their dead Grandmothers and Uncles and what not after those relatives have passed over. And how some people, like the Medium/Clairvoyants you see on television say that those passed over spirits are often with us.
So I wondered, are the dead bugs with us too?
And suddenly, when I had that thought I could easily envision a dark cloud of little transparent bugglies hovering about me like a grey aura as I skip through life.
And I wonder, when people say their homes are haunted, why would Great Aunt Bertha be knocking on your walls? Wouldn't the victims, the squashed ones, the dead spiders and ants and icky creepy earwigs have more of a reason to come floating about wreaking havoc than Great Aunt Bertha?
And then I started thinking about how even though I take great pains to not have to *do in* any bugs, that if you added up all the bugs I have *done in* over the years that it's one hell of a lot. And since I'm married and my husband and I share everything I have to add his buggy victims to the pile as well. And the shroud of creepy crawly ghosties expands even further in my imagination.
In fact, I wonder if the whole world, if we could see bug ghosties, would be thick with them. That there'd be not an ounce of free space left, that we're swimming through the souls of all the critters we *done in* and when I thought that I got a shiver up my spine.
It crawled like creepy fingers over my skin until my flesh had erupted into goosebumps and my eyes, which had already stopped blinking 5 minutes ago when I first started my ghoulish thoughts, were watering with the effort to prevent them from drying out. My arms itched, in fact the right one itched the most and I looked down, gasping in disgust at the ant that had mysteriously made it's way through various obstacles like the windows and doors and what have you and before I could even say poltergeist my left hand reflexively slapped down on the little bugger and.....
Poof, one more bug ghost to haunt me.
Great.
One more thought, ants are probably going to be the majority of my bug ghost populace for a very long time. But Black Widows are running a close second. I can't decide which is worse, Black Widows stringing their webs across the foot of the stairs we have to go up and down every day or Black Widow ghosts, most likely very very angry black widow ghosts hanging about my head doing what ever nasty thing black widow spider ghosts do.
HEY! Let's end on a bright note. Maybe the Black Widow spider ghosts are eating all the ant ones. Sweet!