somewhere I can’t be found
- Appreciated: the supreme gentleness with which a Starbucks employee handed me back my travel mug, its interior festooned with a crumpled kleenex I had not noticed while giving my order, and the even more supreme gentleness with which he asked, “Would you…like…to…take that out of there?” I wish I had had the balls to say No. Complete with steely-eyed glare: No. I want that IN there, young man. I want you to pour the coffee right on top of that kleenex. How dare you question how I take my coffee.
- Iceland! I am going to force you to look at some photos. They were almost all taken by my kid with a stupid point-and-shoot, and look how good! Should a “real” camera be under the tree this year?
- We had fun driving around, stopping to gawk at ridiculously beautiful natural scenes (seriously, one gets Beauty Fatigue after a few days) and to yell at sheep to get out of the road. LT did all the driving, which is more fatiguing than Midwest American driving given the twisty changes in elevation and how you are often passing sheer dropoffs INTO THE SEA with a Scandinavian handwave-y attitude about things like guardrails. Also the sheep. I did all the navigating and cross-referencing guidebooks with maps and signs and the old-school in-car GPS unit. The teen sat in the back and made time-lapse road videos and told us when to pull over and photograph stuff.
- All the hotels were small and cute and in the middle of nowhere. I kept imagining a blue-and-yellow IKEA helicopter airdropping a “hotel kit,” like it was United Nations food aid.
- Travel is good for learning things about yourself. Like my family’s tendency to just hop out of the car and start hiking around without anyone really considering a Plan. Luckily you can’t get too lost in a national park with well-marked hiking trails, but let’s just say some hikes were a bit…longer than anticipated.
- Iceland food is nothing to write home about, unless you like writing letters about really fresh fish. We ate a strange amount of pizza. Just about every restaurant, no matter what else it served, seemed to also serve pizza. Some of the pizza had lobster on it, so at least that’s something.
- LT did try a horrid liquor there and brought some home to haze people with. Don’t come to my house for a few weeks, at least until he forgets about it.
- Got back 2 days before my child started HIGH SCHOOL oh help. Bitch-Slapped By Time: The Mimi Smartypants Story. First day, the kid came home shell-shocked and near tears. Turns out that nine years of attendance at an incredibly small, one-class-per-grade, K-8 school with a very stable population is not necessarily the best preparation for a large urban high school, especially when you add in terrifying variables like “changing for gym.” Never mind the fact that everyone is enormous and older than you and a stranger. We did an evening of backrubs and brownies, and I hoped things would improve.
- Fast-forward to the fourth day, when I get a text at work asking if it’s okay to get bubble tea with X and Y and Z on the walk home from school. Well. That didn’t take long.
- School seems pretty on top of parent communication. I don’t mind lots of emails but I could do without the robocalls that are in both English and Spanish. On the other hand, since I never answer the phone, I get to read the awesome Google Voice transcriptions of them. Yesterday’s call transcription included this gem: “If depressed, cinco cinco triscuits.” You know it, sister.
- (Please bear with me a moment as I write about cat testicles.)
- We adopted Murphy from a shelter. His kitten paperwork indicates that he was neutered shortly after being found with the rest of his litter on the street. The scribbled vet notes are a little hard to read, but it does say the type of anesthesia and all the right “neutering” boxes are checked.
- The problem is that, as he grows bigger, Murphy seems to have…balls. Or does he? Could he have, like, little ball stumps or something? Could the things that look an awful lot like balls be anal glands, or some other unspeakable part of the cat with which I am not familiar? I mean, it’s impossible that he still has balls, between the paperwork and two different vet visits, right? Someone would have said something? IF YOU SEE SOMETHING (BALLS), SAY SOMETHING (HOLY SHIT, BALLS).
- I seriously do not want to haul a perfectly healthy young cat into the vet just to be told that we are imagining his testicles. My vet is pretty cool about answering questions over the phone, so I am entertaining the notion of trying to get a picture of (what may be) Murphy’s balls and emailing it to her. Obvious problems: (1) getting a 6-month-old kitten to be still for a testicle photo; (2) having a photo labeled something like “possible cat testicles” uploaded to my Google cloud. The overlords at Google will tag me as an undesirable element and I’ll be banished forever.
—mimi smartypants danced this mess around.