Monthly Archives: May 2011

Kansas leaves me speechless and I can’t help but wonder who is living there. I know many wonderful Kansans and they don’t appear to be the sort of people who hate women. I’m assuming their neighbors are.

In Topeka Kansas a bill has been approved that would require women to get separate insurance to cover abortions. This way businesses that are pro life will no longer have to pay for coverage that includes family planning.

This should enrage everyone. Right now the only terrorist group I see in America is the religious right. These hideous, angry and ungodly people are on a campaign of terror that I absolutely equate with the stoning of women in the middle east. People like Republican Pete DeGraaf put our peers and our daughters at risk every time they pen a new law.

Outlawing abortion does not stop women from having abortions, it stops them from having safe abortions. I don’t care if you believe life begins at conception, it’s just a belief, it’s not science and your beliefs cannot legislate my country.

Somewhere, somehow the Christian Coalition got together and decided that this country belongs to them. It doesn’t, there’s room for them here, and our laws have been set up so that folks can worship any way they see fit. I will always defend your right to worship. Right now I’d say that Pete DeGraaf has more in common with an Al Qaeda terrorist than with a good American.

From The McPherson Sentinel:

Rep. Barbara Bollier, a Mission Hills Republican who supports abortion rights, questioned whether women would buy abortion-only policies long before they have crisis or unwanted pregnancies or are rape victims.

During the House’s debate, Rep. Pete DeGraaf, a Mulvane Republican who supports the bill, told her: “We do need to plan ahead, don’t we, in life?”

Bollier asked him, “And so women need to plan ahead for issues that they have no control over with a pregnancy?”

DeGraaf drew groans of protest from some House members when he responded, “I have spare tire on my car.”

This is such a great discussion, and frankly I could use everyone’s help. The girls are all wearing bras and when I roam the aisles at department stores I am unable to find a small sized bra that isn’t padded in some way. Fortunately Abercrombie has the good sense to stop marketing their girl’s bikini tops as “push up“.

Those “molded cups” that’s padding, and it’s insanity to call it anything else. Those bras make the girls look larger and can’t possibly be comfortable. There’s also this ludicrous argument that the thicker bras keep girl’s nipples from showing. Young women don’t have that issue the way adult women do. I won’t go into complete details because this post comes dangerously close to being a pedo heaven, but they don’t.

In any event, Shannon, Janice and I talk about putting our daughters in bikinis. Janice and I don’t see eye to eye at all.

This weekend was long. We had drives to Costa Mesa and back both days. Saturday I put 130 miles on my car. Mr G and I did a little divide and conquer, but by mid morning Sunday we were just plain beat. When I say “we” I was referring to Mr G and I. The kids still had energy for things like bike riding, hockey and eating me out of house and home.

Then, of course I’m following Justin on Flickr and he somehow leads me to a bunch of images of Mille Bornes and I looked at it and thought, “I can’t raise children without Mille Bornes.” Clearly it’s too late for me to feel like a success with Jane, but Alexander is still just nine, he won’t know that I’m late to the game. So I pick up the telephone and start calling local toy stores. Well, I call the toy store. To be perfectly fair, it’s not really a toy store so much as it is a comic book shop with a few toys here and there. They don’t have Mille Bornes, they don’t ask how to spell it, I assume they know their inventory well.

I call Target and there is a lot of confusion about how to spell and how to pronounce it. While on hold with Target I check Target.com and find that they don’t carry the item. I hang up.

Now I’m scouring the internet for Mille Bornes and I see that Toys R Us is my last best hope. I call the one closest to my house (which is not particularly close) and we have the following conversation:

ME: Hi, I’m calling to see if you have a toy in stock. It’s called Mille Bornes. [pronounced Mil Born]

HIM: Um sure, let me check. [some typing happens there is dead air, a little more typing, a prolonged period of silence and then...] um, do you know how you spell that?

ME: M-I-L-L-E new word B-O-R-N-E-S

HIM:  The system says that we have six of them.

ME: Oh great, can you do me a favor and put one of them on hold for me and I’ll be there in half an hour?

HIM: There’s six of ‘em, we’re not going to run out.

ME: Right, but I want to be absoultely certain that you have it. I don’t want to drive all the way there and not be able to pick it up.

HIM: Do you have internet access?

ME: Yeah.

HIM: If you just order it online for an in store pickup we’ll have it waiting for you. All you have to do is show your ID and like flash the email or print up a reciept or something.

ME: Okay, but it looks like that takes two hours.

HIM: It never takes two hours. It’s always ready.

ME: And you’re certain you have it in stock?

HIM: Yes.

ME: I’d really like you to have it in your hands.

HIM: There’s plenty of them.

Then I did the unthinkable. Based on the recommendation of a guy who answers the phone at a big box store on a Sunday afternoon I hopped in the car to come pick up Mille Bornes. When I walked to the customer service counter I could hear the conversation on the walkie talkie system, “I’m looking for Millie Born-nes and the system says there are six of them…”

I tried to keep my smile, but when the manager turned to help me I said, “I think I’m here to pick up something you don’t have.” He looked confused so I told him that I’d ordered Mille Bornes online at the behest of his employee on the telephone. I explained that I’d asked him to get it in his hands.

The manager looked pissed. A pissed manager is not what I was looking for. A seven dollar card game is what I was looking for.

The manager and I left his corner to go have a look for the game. As a duo from the sales floor read the product titles to themselves in a whisper I scanned the aisle, found an empty slot, looked at the tag and saw that Mille Bornes did indeed go there, and it was in fact sold out. I showed the manager. He called the other two over to the area to look and see if it was hanging behind any of the other card games. Once again the whispering began: Bingo, Old Maid, Skip-Bo they said the name of every item out loud. In the interim I’d scanned the products and could see plainly that there were no packets of Mille Bornes hanging behind Skip Bo or Uno.

I told the manager that I didn’t have any more time, he said that they were looking. I explained to him that I’d already looked, nothing was there. The manager was really irritated and explained to me that he would be writing up the employee who I’d spoken to on the phone. Then I felt badly for him even though he was clearly not very good at his job.

The other two are probably mouthing the words Yahtzee and Monopoly as we speak.

 
Photo courtesy of lochnessjess via creative commons

Like Jane, Alexander is signed up for sleep away summer camp. It was a bit of a stretch to find a camp for him because none of his school friends are going to camp and the few friends we knew that we headed off to camp are going to the east coast. We settled on one that’s a short week, four and a half days, and as I wrote out the check my heart sank and my stomach was tied up in knots.

I’ve fought against every maternal instinct I have, and I’m letting my son leave home. I’m even encouraging it. I’m all relaxed about the camp issue and talking with the other moms like it’s no big deal. Inside my head the Mom Voice is screaming this is a VERY BIG DEAL.

This morning I went to wake Alexander up for for school and he rolled over towards me, didn’t open his eyes, put his arms out to hug me and said, “I love you Mom.”

I bent over, hugging my son, and smelled the sweetness of his shoulder. I’ve decided that the Mom Voice wins and that from this moment on I’ll be on a campagin to emotionally cripple that boy so that he can live with me forever.

This has been the week for weird exercise. Earlier this week I went to a yoga class where I was clearly party crashing. There’s a group of about a half dozen gay men and women who seem to frequent this class every week. They were all very familiar with one another, and they’re all in on the same joke. It was really nice to be there, and somehow I didn’t feel left out, just entertained. The class was a very basic level 1/2 flow and it moved along nicely until the instructor got really into it.

The more the instructor got into her teaching, the more her voice began to change. This is not unusual in a yoga class, but the manner in which it changed was odd. Her words became longer, slower and more exaggerated, and after about twenty minutes she completely dropped all the long vowel sounds. When she was telling us to point our toes to the back of the room it sounded like, “bring your taaahhhss to the bouck of the raum.” I wanted to giggle and I kept waiting for someone to come out and say, “Live from New York it’s Saturday Night!” But no one did and I had to keep my giggliness to myself.

It was a great claaaahhhhsssss.

I tried a different yoga studio later in the week and I knew it was going to be different. It’s one of these rock and roll yoga studios where they’ve made it into a workout. This type of exercise has never been my favorite, but it was a dollar a class with Groupon so I figured I’d give it a go. I was happy to find myself rolling out a mat next to a really nice lady I know from the kids’ school and I was just behind Melissa so I knew I was in a good place.

Shows you what I know.

Along the left side of the room there’s a small counter for storage and I noticed that there was a paperback that had something to do with Buddah. I figured it probably didn’t belong to the lady with the fake tits and trout pout, but I hadn’t really expected our instructor to try and read during the class. There was a very limited warm up and then a series of exercises on the left side of the body. Then our instructor said, now do that on the right side three times and meet us in down dog. I was totally confused. I didn’t realize that I was supposed to memorize the flow, so I sort of got his attention and shrugged. He looked back at me and shrugged so I said, “I have no idea what’s next.” He replied, “Someone invented this flow thousands of years ago. Invent a new one, it doesn’t really matter. Just do yoga.”

So I just did yoga. But as I created my own series (because I am NOT a quick study) I had to remind myself that I’d only paid a dollar for the class. Then I had one of those stupid internal discussions. You know, the kind of discussion you have with yourself that is so totally annoying that you go to yoga to shut your brain off.

It’s a good thing that this class was only a dollar. If it cost more than this I’d be bugged.

But it very well may be a $24 class. I don’t think I want to come back here and I paid $24 for 24 classes.

You can’t be so judgy, maybe the other instructors are great.

They probably all suck, look how happy everyone is with this class. This is a terrible class and they love it.

OMG me don’t look now but the instructor is reading a book.

I was stunned, just when I thought he couldn’t get any more mediocre he picked up his Buddah book and started reading the pages while absentmindedly saying, “repeat the series three more times and meet us in child’s pose.”

As annoying as he was, I was still getting a semi decent workout so I didn’t leave the class. Which is good because while we were cooling down he started to talk about community and that our happiness contributes to community. “This is blog fodder”, I thought, “it’s worth a dollar”. He then went on to talk about his senior year of college and how all his friends were freaking out that they didn’t have jobs, but he decided that to be a good member of the community he wouldn’t freak out about not having a job. Then he went on to tell us that his mother was very upset that he was graduating college without having a job. One phrase that was oft repeated was, “But Mom, you told me when I was a kid that you just wanted me to be happy.”

He went on to talk about how yoga could help us regain our youth even if we were really old, like sixty. I’m pretty sure the oldest person in the room was close to fifty and I couldn’t possibly have been the only one who thinking that they were relieved to not be 22 again, wearing Lululemon and talking to a room full of strangers about how I’d disappointed my parents.