the sound of music
December 22, 2009 — welfareloserso i’ve mentioned that EvilGremlin plays the bass in the school orchestra. he’s really, really, REALLY good. he’s blowing through the hal leonard instructional book. i made the rule that he had to be able to play any assigned exercises three times in a row with no mistakes before he was allowed to move on and start practicing the next exercise. he’s about 3/4 of the way through the lesson plan for the school year. he generally practices 40 minutes a day, and the only time he’s resisted practicing was when he was supposed to play “ode to joy” in 2nd and 3rd position, after he had already mastered it in 1st position. yes, it does sound better in 1st position. yes, switching positions slows you down. but the point of the exercise is to learn HOW to do it before you HAVE to do it… and there will be songs higher up the skill ladder where you WILL have to do it. he was cool with that. and i’m already composing my apologist treatise in defense of the upcoming scale exercises.
PositiveRoleModel showed EG that the 4 lowest strings on the guitar are identical to the strings of a bass, so EG turned PRM’s classical guitar into a bass:
he showed this to the twits, who now also insist on holding their 1/2-size guitars upright:
we keep a third child-size guitar on hand, a piece of crap that has the neck half-unglued, just so MonkeyBeef can bang on it when he needs to, but today he was more interested in playing with the magnetix ALL BY HIMSELF, a rare occurence in the loser household.
then DramaQueen wanted me to take a picture of him playing 3 instruments (guitar, sony keyboard, and schoenhut baby upright) at once:
and this is DramaQueen having a totally metal moment on the 1/4-size violin:
EG’s best friend, DayDreamer, plays the viola in the orchestra, and also plays the shit out of the piano (it doesn’t hurt that his mom’s a piano teacher, and her brothers are in an awesome bluegrass band.) anymore, when he comes over after school, they spend the entire time between school and dinner screwing around on every instrument in the house. they both want to play in the school band next year, as well. DD’s mom plans to have him drop orchestra to start band, because practicing 3 instruments daily might be a bit much… but i can see her resolve is about as strong as mine on this one, which is not very strong. because seriously, how cool is that when your freaking ten year old loves something enough to work on it so hard and get so good at it? i never worked that hard at something when i was 10. if i had started the banjo or snowboarding or fencing when i was a kid, i’d be – well, probably permanently injured, since i had no goddamned sense when i was kid, but i might also be pretty good! so if EG wants a saxophone next year… he just might get one.
and a bass guitar. see, it’s the same instrument as an upright bass, only with frets. and pickups that plug into an amplifier. heehee. see, we need one. because we don’t have one. and we have a friend who works for a guitar store and can get us one at cost. i try not to acquire more instruments. really, i do! but sometimes, they just carjack my restraint and crash my home. against my will.
anyway. the bass isn’t for me. i swear. it’s for EG. just because i will play it whenever i want to doesn’t mean it’s not EG’s. from now on, it’s gonna be EvilGremlin “BitchMagnet” Loser!
hobbies
December 12, 2009 — welfareloserthe current hobbies in this house include:
learning japanese:
after printing out the hiragana and katakana characters and working with all the information they could google for several weeks, i got them some books, too. there are three i’m particularly impressed with:
the “jimi” books, wherein a disturbingly flat-affected manga-monkey teaches you hiragana and katakana, and crazy for kanji, which does a good job of teasing out the poetic etymologies of the much more difficult kanji writing, making it easy to understand and remember hundreds of kanji characters, in a quiz-laden format my ten-year-old finds entertaining.
facebook time-wasters:
if it makes you ashamed of your own lame addiction to learn that my 10-year-old enjoys farkle, my 6-year-olds think feeding and selling fish and pimping their fishtanks is awesome, and they all enjoy mobsters 2… here you go. consider yourself shamed.
tying balloon animals:
EG found a book of 20 balloon-tying patterns, and was pretty interested in scary-clown origami. have i mentioned how much i love my amazon prime membership? i have no idea how their business model works; all i know is that free two-day shipping on everything i need at the lowest prices on the planet is freaking awesome. after 10 minutes of reading reviews, got the “best balloons that all the professionals use,” qualatex, for $7.50 for a bag of 100, plus an incredibly well-designed balloon pump (the thing inflates both when you push the pump in and when you pull out, which is pretty nifty) for another $7.50. and now we have a giant black octopus on the twits’ light fixture, an army of green and purple poodles, and lopsided mice with googly eyes named “P32,” “carbon-14,” and “francium.” and if you noticed that their names have a radioactive theme, then you must also be interested in the next hobby on the list,
chemistry:
“chemistry” sometimes means “mixing all chemicals in the kitchen that seem likely to explode (and if you think there’s no fun to be found there, you’ve probably never added gelatin to a baking-soda-and-vinegar volcano.) sometimes it means “culturing bacteria.” sometimes it means “helping mom cook, especially if it involves yeast.” and sometimes, it just comes down to “attaching yourself permanently to mommy after the 15th baking-soda-and-vinegar erlenmeyer flask tried to eat you.”
on a final note, if you were ever unsure of whether or not my kids were nerds, let me share this: the other night, as i chased a naked MonkeyBeef down to slather him with lotion and throw pajamas on him, the twits sat down at the laptop. as i threw MB in bed, i heard them cackling nonstop. i figured they had either bought some more godawful blinged-out lawn ornaments for PositiveRoleModel’s fishville tank, done a youtube search for footage of newscasters throwing up on live tv, or found the latest japanese porn fad. in fact, they were laughing at, i shit you not, a page entitled “FACTS ABOUT STRONTIUM.” and it wasn’t even the fact that strontium is used in fireworks that tickled them… apparently, strontium’s melting point is in the “hilarious” range.
PART TWO of the most awesome road trip ever!
December 1, 2009 — welfareloserQ: what’s more awesome than a 5-hour road trip that ends in puke?
A: the return trip!
okay. so we actually didn’t have that much cleaning to do upon our arrival in illinois. 99% of the puke was on MonkeyBeef, in his carseat, and on the rubber floormat – all removable and washable. i had to do some scrubbing to get it off the back of the driver’s seat headrest, and wipe the splatters off MB’s window and door, but once that was done, the smell was practically gone.
the smell of THAT puke, anyway. the problem is, we’ve owned this van since the twits were 9 months old. 6 years later, it’s probably been puked in a dozen times, had a hundred sodas spilled in it, endured enough mcdonalds food grease-splats to fatten up entire sub-saharan refugee camps, and has spent hundreds of hours transporting sweaty kids, fencing gear so soaked in sweat that it outweighs me, kids sitting in full diapers, and kids soaked in river water, lake water, and any other kind of water they can manage to fall into. the kids have complained about the “air quality” in the van for years. i clean it, but that can only help so much; it’s not like i can hose the goddamned thing out, right?
yeah. turns out, monkeybeef didn’t just puke in the car on the way to illinois because he was singularly upset and full of angnong poewoe, he puked in the car because that’s what he does now. he gets carsick. he was fine all weekend, and then about 2 hours from home on the way back, *bleah.* we pulled over at a scary truck stop, threw away his t-shirt, wrapped some new clothes around him, tried to convince him that gatorade was the shit, yo, and got home.
surveying the damage in the morning – shit. puke had dribbled down into the little wells where the removable captain’s chair that holds MB’s carseat hooks into the van’s floor. the 4 wells under the other captain’s chair, and the 4 under the bench seat where the twits sit weren’t exactly much cleaner. there were ancient cheezits in there that the vacuum attachments could never quite reach, leaves, playground mulch, drips of soda – always diet soda, so not a completely nasty rotting sugary mess, but still… it was time to clear my schedule and do some serious cleaning.
PLAN A:
so i got out the vacuum, and the steam cleaner. and i pulled out the captain’s chairs. eww. okay, so i grabbed a bucket of hot water with a little pine sol, and a sponge. and then i pulled out the bench seat in the back. and there was a dead. fucking. mouse. staring at me.
PLAN B:
so i put away the vacuum. and the steam cleaner. and got out a bigger bucket. and filled it with pine sol and a little hot water. and i got out the wet-dry shopvac and the garden hose. then i went and got a stick to get the smashed mouse out of the well where the bench seat hooked in, and it didn’t. fucking. budge.
okay, so fuck me. i am not easily grossed out. my last paid job involved running rats on treadmills in the dark basement room of a research hospital, cleaning up their fried turds from the electrical shock grid that motivated them to keep running, and then, after various surgeries, snuffing them, shaving them, putting their bodies in a non-stick loaf pan, pressure-cooking them in an autoclave, removing the steaming bag o rat-jello that smelled like cross between thanksgiving turkey and rat turds, dumping it into a blender, homogenizing it into a turkey-and-turds milkshake, and pipeting out samples of the chocolate-colored liquid. i did this hundreds of times for a year. (and if you’re thinking, awww, poor rats, you monster, well, fuck you, veggieburger. it provided an important step in curing diabetes. so you’re welcome.)
my point: i didn’t drink a chocolate milkshake for a couple of years, but other than that, i wasn’t really bothered much by the job. i have a strong stomach. but this? trying to pick up a squashed mouse that wouldn’t move? and stared at me? fucked me up. so i went inside, called SlutMonkey to tell him about it, because A)i needed a break, B) he’s an ER doc, and thus likely to be home and awake at damn near any time of day or night, and C) i knew he’d laugh his ass off, which goes a long way toward calming me down. (this is also the friend i called in the middle of driving to the ER with my underwear hanging out of my pants on the epic failboat mission. and the time the twits emptied an entire bathtub full of water onto the floor, which i noticed when it began dripping through the basement ceiling, shorting out all the ceiling lights as i sat on the toilet down there, which is of course the fitting karmic punishment for any mother who dares to take 90 seconds for herself for such luxuries as pooping without an audience.)
so. i seem to remember a camping trip many years ago, wherein i later found the edges of my car’s manual chewed, and mouse turds in the glove box… turns out, little fucker checked in and never checked out. and is now five years dead. and petrified. and glued in tight. SO!
PLAN C:
i got the oldest, most expendable pair of barbecue tongs in the house, got a good grip on the little fucker’s squashed body, turned my head, closed my eyes, and carefully started pulling. it came out. kind of. i didn’t look, but i got to hear lots of cracking, popping sounds as mummified body parts, i’m assuming little legs and maybe part of a tail, broke off and stayed stuck. EW.
i threw the tongs and mouse into the garbage can. then i threw pine sol everywhere. buckets and buckets. i mean everywhere. on the ceiling. into the upholstery of every seat. all down the walls and doors. let it soak. hosed it out. was flooding the engine a possibility? fucking might have been! can you guess whether or not i gave a flying fuck at a rolling donut at that point? i’m betting you can! then i threw another bucket of hot pine sol in. let it soak. hosed it out. at this point, it looked reasonably clean, so i was comfortable getting in there to actually touch surfaces and scrub them. then i hosed it out again. then i vacuumed out the excess water with the shopvac. and let me tell y’all something: i loves me some craftsman shit. 3 HP will suck the shit out of some soggy upholstery – the seats and floors were really only damp by the time i was finished. 6 hours later.
so i left all the van doors open all night to air it out. i figured if some rotten-ass little rodent decided to come check it out, the overpowering smell of pine sol would probably drive it away, and if not, i’d set the goddamned thing on fire, so it’s all good either way.
to wrap this story up: we convinced the family to come to us for thanksgiving instead of putting our kids anywhere near a van. van still smells of pine sol a month later. van is awesomely clean. no food is allowed in my van, ever. and CrapFace gets dramamine for the christmas road trip. and no eggnog.
