Wacky Dog is gone. I had to take him to the vet last night because he was sick again and they don’t know why. His exam was fine, his tests have been fine. And it was complicated by doggie senility (he was 11 or 12). And all of the crazy, wacky, kooky, awful and awesome stuff that made him both the best and the worst Wacky Dog in the whole world had gotten a lot worse. You couldn’t leave him outside and you couldn’t bring him inside. I keep thinking it wasn’t time. Because I wanted more time. But there is never a good time, we know that. He was not doing well. And he was my dog. As much as my husband and the kids claimed him, he was my dog. So I had to decide and I am miserable now.

Here are some pictures of him. I don’t want them full-frame, but you can go look at them.

I have no perspective on this. He was my best friend and always listened to my problems and even when I would get so frustrated and furious with him (for destroying our house, our yard, my sanity. for eating wood and puking it up. for peeing on my leg) he would still come up and nudge my hand. You know how dogs can never tell when you’re coming home? Since they don’t how to read a watch? I love that about dogs. Because you can be gone for five minutes or five weeks and you’re going to get the same exuberant greeting when you return. So what I am hoping is that all those times I yelled bad dog at him or was mean to him, that maybe he forgot that, too, the way he forgot that I’d always come back home after I left. Even if he remembered every slight, I know he forgave me.

I loved him always and I hated him occasionally and I am feeling so awful because of that. It was like taking care of a chronically ill relative. After awhile, you have caregiver fatigue and find it difficult to make decisions and then once you do, you regret it. Or you wish them gone (not dead, just gone) and then they’re gone and you feel like hell even more.

I have written about him so much.

His life in the witness protection program

His fan club

His ginormous fear of fireworks and bubblewrap

His dislike of Halloween costumes

His health problems

And more health problems…

His scabs

His need for pharmaceuticals

Songs for Our Dog (and Bong Hits for Jesus)

You guys. Happy Valentine’s Day! All I want for a present is for my household to be healthy and happy again. We have not been happy here for a long time now. Wacky Girl has to miss the class party today; she’s still running a fever, pobrecita. (And just blew her nose, loudly, to accentuate the point. She has her head buried under a leopard-print comforter.)

Kisses to you and yours.

WM

Oregon, I love you Oregon. Your deserts — so near. Central Oregon — so lovely. Your beaches — from Portland, only two hours away! Your big mountains, also only two hours away! We can ski, snowshoe, swim and surf. Bring a wetsuit, though, and possibly the Coast Guard. It’s a little rough, our beach. (And I’m talking all of the Oregon coastline, until you hit far, far south.) It’s rocky and often rainy and windy and sunny and gorgeous, sometimes all at the same time.

I hate you, Oregon. Your lousy schools, your rude citizens… (It did not used to be this way, I’m speaking as a native here. However, a new transplant, a woman who moved here from the Bay Area with her pre-teen daughter, recently described Portland to me thusly: “Portland is like a really beautiful woman, and you think, ‘She seems nice!’ Then you find out she’s this rude, evil bitch.” I apologized because, you know, I Am Portland, Hear Me Roar, and told her, “I could not agree more.”)

… your hellish traffic, your mold and mildew that clings to our lungs and sinuses and makes my daughter’s asthma come back…

(We hate you, asthma. Bugger off.)…

…and brings my bronchitis back for its twice- or sometimes thrice-yearly appearance. Will it turn into bronchial pneumonia? Will it not? Will antibiotics work, or will my lungs kill me this time? Stay tuned.

Hockey God and the kids and I have been dreaming — in all honesty, it’s my dream, I’ve just dragged them into it, now — about moving away. We’re thinking Iowa, where his family lives.

“We come from Iowa/
Iowa!/
corn in every hand/
finest in the land/
we come from Iowa/
Iowa!/
That’s where the tall corn grows…”

Do we really need:
7 Bed, 2.25 Bath
3,400 Sq. Ft.
7.38 Acres

???

Do we?

Well hell yes we do, because it’s priced to sell at $269,900, and that is much less than you could get a fixer-upper for here. And “here” would include no acreage, no view, plus lousy schools, bitchy people, more rain than you could ever dream of, and possibly a drug house or two on the block. Because, you know. “The neighborhood is transitional! That’s why we can get you in at this price!” Love, Your Realtor.

We love Iowa. We’ve started job-hunting. The kids are already starting to pack.

More on this later… of to take Wacky Girl in for a doctor appointment. Asthma.

Q: So. How you doin’?

A: Good. Except I’m trying to stuff all these old entries into categories. I have, uh, 327 to go? I am so screwed over here. Why did I not do this before? Every time I read other people’s blogs I’d think, oooh, looky! They have these neat little category thingys. How do you do that? Then I’d la-di-da away from the computer. Why?

Q: Cuz you’re a dingbat?

A: Is that a question?

Q: No, not really. How was dinner?

A: Good, good. We had dinner with friends. I mean, grown-up friends. Actually, it was terrible.

Q: The food?

A: No, the food was great. We’ve been going to a place called Pause, this pub over on North Interstate Ave. Burgers, great pastas, starters, soups, yummy desserts. Decent service, nice setting. We met there. Our friends just moved — they have no kitchen. They’re remodeling. So they have to eat out every meal now — it’s like they’re pretending we live in Manhattan or something.

Q: So it was the company?

A: NO, OH MY GOD. WE HAD DINNER WITH OTHER GROWN-UPS. They’re nice. Smart. Know how to put, you know, sentences together. And stuff.

Q: It was the kids, wasn’t it?

A: THEY’RE MONSTERS. Not theirs — ours. Their kids are great. Ours won’t eat. They crawl under the table. They crawl on the table. They throw things. They spill things. They run around and annoy other diners. I’ve turned into one of those horrible parents who’s all, “honey, sit down honey, please honey,” and looks like she’s just donated her BRAIN or something. Wacky Boy grabbed my friend’s beer and tried to take a big gulp of it. My friend is all, “That’s not yours, guy,” and Wacky Boy is all, “I want beer.” LIKE WE GIVE HIM BEER WHENEVER HE ASKS FOR IT. We don’t.

Q: What’s his favorite toy?

A: (silence)

Q: Spill it. What is it?

A: His father’s Homer Simpson beer opener.

Q: The talking one?

A: Yes, it’s the talking one. It says, “Ummmmmm, beer, YES, OH YES! WOO-HOOOOO!” when you use it.

Q: You are the worst mother I’ve ever met. Interview OVER.

It’s New Year’s Day — happy 2007! I’ve noticed that everyone is writing up cool memes for the new year, listing out resolutions, talking about their plans for their blogs. None of that here at Wacky House, because I am in full party avoidance mood. This always happens to me before we throw a party. I get a bunch of stuff done ahead of time — cleaning, baking, cooking — then the day of I’m all, “Yikes. People are coming over in three hours? Whose idea was that?”

That’s usually when Hockey God swoops in and cleans both bathrooms (which he did), and sometimes does the dishes (I’m still hoping). And it’s when I decide to break out the family slides and re-organize them. You know. In all my free time. No, for real — we were looking for something fun to do with the kids last night, after we had pizza and watched the hockey game. (Do we know how to party over here or what?) I broke out the slide projector, turned an end table around so we could project onto a somewhat blank wall, and found the slides from my Mom’s family.

Way too many slides of Cows in the Front Yard (my grandfather ranched) and not enough of People Acting Goofy. Since I’m the oldest grandkid, and my mom is the oldest kid in her family, you would think that most of the pix would be of us, right? You would be wrong. My grandfather really, really loved his goddamn cows. Here’s one! It’s a cow in the back yard, trying to get in through the sliding glass door. And another — it’s snowing, and a cow is hovering on the front porch, between the house and the spruce hedges. Brrr. Cold cow! Go back to the barn! Here’s my grandpa, cooing at a cow. And my uncle, with a look on his face like he’s thinking, “Cows? WTF? I thought we were going hunting this weekend…”

My favorite pic: My grandma washing her hair in a bucket by the side of the road in Alaska, when she and my grandpa drove up there with their travel trailer for a fishing trip in ’73.

My grandma.

With her head.

In a bucket.

Yeah.

Another large group of slides are of my grandpa, waving various guns around, while he and my uncles are hunting. Ditto: uncles with guns. Ditto: uncles’ friends with guns.

So I’m thinking, “Why am I hanging on to these slides? They’re not of me. They’re boring. Except the bucket picture, which is frickin’ hilarious. Eastern Oregon is pretty and all, but damn, how many photos of ponderosa pines does one family need in the archives? God, I hate cows.”

Then I find a slide in the middle of this jumble, and it’s of my Dad and me. He’s teaching me to fish. I look about three in the photo. Aw. And one of me, holding my newborn sister. Aw. And my mom, looking gorgeous and young (!!! twenty!!! She and my Dad were babies when they got married — he was only 21.) Then I get to a box where it says (in my grandma’s handwriting): GOOD SLIDES. I think, “Hot damn, here we go.”

They’re of the “snow dell trip” “truck in ditch” and my baby sister, posing with two deer heads that my uncles stuck in a detergent box as a joke. (Successful hunting trip, from the looks of it. They must have been in jolly moods. These pix are pre-cow.)

Really, I think this is all you need to know about my family, the essence of who we are. Because truly, she meant it. Those were the GOOD SLIDES. I’m taking all of them, sorting them out in big plastic envelopes, and my uncles get these, my aunts get those, my sister gets the others; my cousins will get a batch. I took a hundred of them to Fred Meyer this morning to be scanned and put on a CD — $38 bucks! Not bad.

My question: What to do with the one of granny washing her hair? I’m thinking eBay.

Happiest New Year’s wishes for organization in your family tree.

Love,

WM

“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” — Anais Nin

How I see it: Dedicated, hardworking, stay-at-home mom who occasionally snatches a few minutes to write. Who sometimes sneaks in a phone call to a friend, or finds a half-hour block to make a series of business calls.

The way my kids see it: There’s the back of her head again. She’s always on the computer. She never pays attention to us. She never hangs up the phone. Here, I’ll scream and tip over the dog’s water bowl — that should get her attention.

I’d like to say that the truth lies somewhere in-between, but that’s not true. Their version is the “real” version. Anais Nin was right. So here I am, stalled out on another manuscript, trying to ignore the fact that Christmas is three weeks from today. New Year’s Day is four weeks from today. My husband and I will have been together ten years this May. Shouldn’t we do something fun? I mean — should we have a party? Take a trip? Get a babysitter for the weekend and go to the beach? The dishes are still undone. The laundry is never done. The house is a mess.

(more…)

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Remember to tell your kids on this great American holiday, “It’s not playing fairsies to go to someone else’s home, grab all their stuff, claim you ‘discovered it,’ then force them out of the house and move in. Pilgrims were not playing nice, dig?”

And now, for the Thursday Thirteen!

THIRTEEN THINGS MY DAUGHTER AND NIECE WOULD LIKE ME AND MY SIS-IN-LAW TO AGREE TO:

1. Let us get our ears pierced when we’re nine.

2. Let us stay up late — ten o’clock — every night.

3. Let us go shopping every day after school.

4. Let us watch “Star Wars.”

5. Let us eat as much candy as we want.

6. Let us do no homework.

7. Buy us whatever we want.

8. Let us eat all of our Halloween candy in one day.

9. Buy us a limo and a driver to take us all around.

10. When we grow up you guys have to let us get a mansion, with a big swimming pool in the backyard and a little yellow kitten.

11. Let us live in Minnesota and go to Mall of America every day.

12. No school.

13. Let us have as many American Girl dolls as we want.

Start with: One riotously fun outing to Chuck E Cheez for D’s birthday party. Both kids: “THAT WAS FUN! CHUCK E CHEEZ IS FUN! WHY DIDN’T YOU EVER TAKE US THERE BEFORE? YEAH, WHY MOM? CUZ CHUCK E CHEEZ IS FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUN. WHEN CAN WE GO BACK?”

Next day, combine: Pinkeye and runny nose in one Wacky Boy.

Following day, add:

(more…)

Let’s say you have a dad who is, eh, for the most part pretty nice. Takes you to ice skating lessons, teaches you to ride a two-wheeler, makes you chocolate chip waffles for breakfast. But he has this habit of saying, “Drink your milk. The whole glass. Drink all of it. All of it. Now. Do not pour it down the sink. I said don’t pour it down the sink. I can’t believe you just poured that down the sink after I told you not to.”

A solution?

How about you stand up at the breakfast table, pretend to pour the entire glass of milk in your ear, then douse the front of your nightgown, the chair and the rug with it. Problem solved! Now you’ve just got to clean up the mess.

“What were you thinking?” HG asks.

“I. Don’t. Knoooooooooooow!!!” she trills, jitterbugging around the house.

I (heart) Wacky Girl and her sheer, unbridled enthusiasm for life.

I love stories. I especially love family stories and stories from my kids. Do you have a good love story? Yours or your parents? Post it if you’d like. Funny stories from or about kids are welcome, too, as always. It’s our 8th wedding anniversary next week and I’m feeling all sappy. (Yes, Wacky Girl was born two days before our first wedding anniversary. How sweet is that? The girl came out of the womb ready to party.)

“I’ll tell you a story every day when you pick me up,” Wacky Boy promised me last week when I arrived daily to get the kids after theater camp.

Most of my friends in college liked “tall tales,” too. That’s why we worked at the student newspaper. You can make up all kinds of stuff in newspaper work and credit it to someone else. (Kidding! Journalists would never do that!)

“You guys are all good at telling stories,” one of the copy editors told me. He was a little mournful about it. He kept trying to write like Kerouac or Carver and it wasn’t working for him. “I can’t tell stories for shit. And C,” (one of the reporters) “he’ll tell ya stories ’til ya puke.” Yep, that’s what I’ve tried to live up to ever since. I keep trying to get the various family members to write down their stories for me. Stories about my husband, when he was little; stories about my twin aunties, who as little girls lived in North Dakota but played in Canada; stories about love. Oh, love. It’s enough to make ya puke.

I want the story of how my mom and dad met — at Yaw’s Drive-In, “home of the Top-Notch Burger,” she went to Madison High School, he went to Grant, in the other neighborhood, it was a scene — I want it written down in her own words. She keeps promising she’ll write it… someday…

And the story about the time Hockey God was dancing with a hippie chick and… Sorry, I can’t tell you that one. But it is my kids’ favorite story about their dad and gets them laughing their little bootys off. Here’s one from Wacky Girl from a couple of years ago — she was 3 1/2 or 4 at the time. I do this a lot with my kids — they dictate, I type. We print it out, then they color pictures to go with it. I still have the first book my mom and I “wrote” together. “A is for acrobat,” “W is for wooly yak.”

My grandma said she’ll let me videotape her, telling the kids stories. She won’t write them down, but I can.

MY STORY
by Wacky Girl

I love you friend, Brady Bunch, friend, be howdy! Love can’t come true. No, love can come true! We be our matey-howdy! Love me true. Be my shadow. Cow loves you! True!

Love,

WG

Me again — so pretty good, eh? Cuz I wasn’t so sure love could come true, but then I confirmed it with my three-year-old and hell, yes! Love can come true! (Emphasis hers and hers alone.) So I’m thinking she should bag the grade-school career and go straight to writing Hallmark cards. Or spam.

Keep writing.

Yours,

WM