A Neverending Winter

I remember a time in my life when I actually looked forward to the month of February. Coincidentally, this was also about the time that I didn't have my own driveway to shovel during a what-the-fuck-how-much-snow-can-possibly-fall winter, didn't mind having birthdays and definitely didn't have other people's illnesses creep up just in time to destroy happy hour plans.

February is only 28 days long, and February of 2011 will officially go down in the record books as the month known as Sucktastic Cough Cough Cough Science Project Plowhump. Seriously, it was that bad.

When I say that Zoe has been coughing for 30 days straight, I am not exaggerating. I swear the girl has coughed up her entire body weight X 3 in phlegm, has mastered the turn-and-hack-into-elbow maneuver as to not freak out other individuals, and has even been spotted carrying around an item that has been labeled Coughing Towel.

In addition to her having pneumonia the first week of the month, she has managed to wake up with a short-lived low-grade fever every Saturday morning (which, as a result, obliterated every Saturday night happy hour), I managed to acquire two colds within three weeks and Charlie got strep throat for the first time in his life (which, contrary to what he believed would be the outcome, he managed to survive). Our evenings, in addition to the usual yelling and shouting and assorted sounds of chaos, now include the appetizing sounds of sniffling and coughing and gag-reflex-triggering. It's all a little much, and pretty fucking gross.

Since those who know me well know that my house isn't exactly at risk for being featured on Hoarders and that I've been known to smell of a perfume best described as a combination of Clorox and Pledge, it makes me wonder where all this illness is coming from. I know there is a lot of shit going around and everyone knows someone that is or has been sick recently, but come on! This family does NOT get sick!

I knew that Zach wasn't the carrier, since he has actually managed to dodge the phlegm/strep-fest. It couldn't possibly be Doug because considering how much time he has spent at the office or quarantined in his office at home work work working, he isn't around any of us long enough to actually breathe the same air or lick any doorknobs. My colds always appeared after Zoe had them first and Charlie had strep throat after me, so this narrowed it down to the shortest member of our family. But seriously, the girl's hands are cracking because she washes them so often, so how much could she possibly be bringing into the house?

A couple weeks ago, during a brief time when the temperature crept above 45 degrees and some of this 627 feet of accumulated snow was forced into melting, I took our dog on a walk. It was a slushy, gross, stinky, sometimes slippery walk but still, it was exercise performed outdoors.

Without intending to, I ended up near the elementary school at the exact time that Zoe would be outside at recess. Since she had declared the day before as The Worse Day of Recess in the History of Recess, I decided to stop by with the dog and surprise her, hopefully turning that day into the Best Day of Recess EVER! Sure enough, as soon as I walked up with the dog, she threw her arms into the air with joy and was so excited that I was there. And I brought THE DOG! And all of the other snowpantsed, mittened, booted kids were excited to see THE DOG!

That was when THE DOG noticed all these children stumbling toward him and he started to feel fear. And let me tell you, he wasn't the only one.

The kids moved in a sort of skitterish, slow-mo, twitchy manner that was completely unpredictable. They formed a little mob scene around my poor dog, scaring the piss out of the poor thing, literally. I reached down and picked him up so that he was above most of the kids, but then they just closed in a little tighter and made noises similar to "Oooooh, a dawwwwwg, can I pet your dawwwwggg?"

The worst part about it is that they were all coughing. And I mean all of them were coughing. One boy said something like "Oh, that's (cough) a cute (coughity cough) dog I wish (hack hackity sneeze sputter) I had a dog like (cough) that (cough sniff cough) can I come over (cough hack) and play with Zoe's dog sometime? (cough cough)" Me: NO. And now I know why I'm sick. It's because of walking petri dishes like YOU!

But here's the best part...I don't know what the hell they served at lunch that day because my February lunch menu went into the recycling bin exactly five days ago, but I'm 99.9% sure it was stewed brains. It was clear that none of these kids know how to use a napkin, and that all of them (except Zoe, who had dined on a mom-made ham sandwich) had eaten this conglomeration of brains for lunch. I know this because the evidence was all over their faces, dried in a crusty red glaze around their mouths. Some of them even had a chunk or two up around their eyebrows, which made it really difficult to look them in the eye. So here I was, holding this cold, muddy, terrified white dog while a hoard of coughing, brain-dining children hovered around, all maneuvering in such a way that they could get close enough to me so that they could use their germ-covered hands to pet THE DOG!

And that was when I felt like Wichita in "Zombieland," being attacked by really short brain-eating zombies and just trying to make sure that me and my little dog got out of their alive and without any other diseases. And Zoe? Well, she would be one of the kids from a painting that hangs in her brother's bedroom because after all, she did have a pink shirt on that day:

Parking Problems

Since my existence as a mom requires me to spend approximately 63.879% of my life in my minivan (or in the case of this weekend, 89%) I witness a lot of bad, and I mean bad, driving. The most frustrating thing is that while some people are just naturally bad drivers, it seems that the majority of people that drive like shit do so because they obviously just don't care. They don't care that there are other people around them that would like to get to their destination without being run over, smashed into, cut-off, run into the median, or killed. These inconsiderate drivers are usually guilty of one, if not all, of the following:

• Texting, updating Facebook status, Twittering, checking basketball scores or emailing while occasionally looking up to see where they're going. Limiting these activities to when they're sitting at a stoplight doesn't help because then they never notice when the light turns green.
• Talking on the phone. I'm not referring to every phone call because obviously sometimes an emergency comes up that requires a 30 second conversation. I'm referring to those conversations that are clearly not about anything other than holy shit can you believe what Bonnie wore to the PTO meeting last night I can't believe anyone would own earrings like that and what are you bringing to the Bunco party on Friday and isn't Bonnie's kid stupid? Personally, my favorite thing to see is when these women are holding the phone with one hand and then use the other hand to either wave at someone they know who is driving by or make hand gestures that accompany the conversation.
• Cruising down the freeway in the left lane, but then they suddenly realize that they need to exit. So instead of dealing with their error by taking the next exit and turning around they decide to slam on their brake, say fuck you to everyone else on the road and cut across three lanes of traffic so that they don't miss the exit. Inevitably, these morons are usually on the phone or have an ear piece hanging off of their head, and that's a thousand times more annoying than if they were just not paying attention.
• When the Buick in front of me is only going 40 mph at the bottom of the entrance ramp (And there is nothing I can do about this. Believe me, I've tried.) and the car behind me is not only right on my ass honking like a lunatic, but thinks that maybe I don't really want to be on the freeway, so they try to merge into traffic before me.
• Failure to perform the difficult task of using a turn signal, usually because one hand is busy holding a phone and the other one is busy making a hand gesture. Guess what: I can make a hand gesture too.
• Driving 53 mph in the left lane. This is usually because the driver's brain is only able to do one task at a time and of course the most important task at the moment is not driving the car, it's the phone conversation about Bonnie.

Sadly, the idiocy does not go away once the car is put into park. There are obviously some people who seem to think that the other cars in the parking lot are there to act as a suggestion as to where they should park -- kind of like safety cones -- but without being neither orange, cone-shaped nor moveable. My husband's car was recently mistaken for a safety cone but, unlike a malleable slab of orange thermoplastic, his car did not snap back into shape. At least the person that didn't know how to park and hit Doug's car was kind enough to leave a note. Just because Doug never actually found an apology note anywhere near or on his car, I'm sure that this person was moral enough to leave a note and it just happened to blow away. Or was eaten by zombies.

Two excuses that this idiot could have used are: the downtown Minneapolis parking lots are tight and until recently, the surface of this particular lot has been solid ice. Still no excuse for a dent-and-run, but I'm sure that Doug's car is not the only one that suffered an unclaimed gouge this winter.

Since most of my parking lot adventures take place in uncrowded suburban lots with plenty of space between the lines, I have no trouble maneuvering my minivan into spots without hitting other cars and kind of despise people that can't park and knowingly take up two spaces. Sort of like this person:

The sweet, forgiving side of me thought that maybe they had to park like this in order to avoid hitting the car on the passenger side. Uh, no, that was not the case. Four feet away from the other side of this car was the decorative, rock-and-shrub-filled curb.

I don't know if this driver is also responsible for shoving the blue shopping cart into the car across from it, but I'm going to go ahead and assume that they are.

869 Down, Four To Go

The second trimester of school is over, which means that the school year will soon be over and exactly three months from today, I will be enjoying a much-needed week of vacation on the Gulf of Mexico in Florida. Before my boarding pass is scanned, though, I will need to survive one more choir concert and an orchestra concert plus extra rehearsals for both of these, a high school tennis season, two piano recitals, six tennis tournaments and four more science projects. Yes, you read that right...

ONLY FOUR MORE SCIENCE PROJECTS!

In the past, the thought of having to do four science projects in an entire school year would have been enough for me to consider homeschooling. Since I'm not insane I wouldn't have actually followed through with it, but I would have considered it for about three minutes. Now I'm at the point where the news of having only four more projects is like hearing that a money tree has sprouted in the backyard. Or that Ketel One has decided to give me a lifetime supply of vodka. Or that the fries at Five Guys are now fat-free.

Then I found out that the fourth-to-last project is a group project, and it kind of felt like someone had just taken a chainsaw to my recently-sprouted money tree. And then Zach informed me that he was hosting the first group meeting at our house, and that was like the Ketel One prize turning into a lifetime supply of Jagermeister.

He scheduled the first meeting for an afternoon when I would be gone at Charlie's violin lesson, and that made me happy. While I've never been a big fan of leaving the house when my kids have friends over, I figured this was an ideal time to become a fan. After all, these kids were all old enough to be left alone, but young enough to not deviate from the original purpose of getting together (science project) into something else (hey, there's a wet bar in your basement).

Since these teenagers came to our house straight from school, I threw a random assortment of snacks on the coffee table, pointed at the bar fridge, said help yourself, call me if you need anything and goodbye. As I was going up the stairs I heard a couple boys say "Awesome! Gimme a Red Bull." Note to self: One kid's friends have officially outgrown juice boxes.

While I was sitting in the car waiting for Charlie's lesson to get done, I got a call from Zach. I would have welcomed a phone call for the following reasons:

• We're all hungry again, so can we order pizza?
• We're done with the project because we worked extra hard.
• We ended up playing video games the whole time and forgot to do the project. Could you do it for us?
• Just calling to say that I miss you, and my friends think you're really cool.
• The house is under attack by zombies.

Instead, Zach started yelling about how the dog had taken a dump in the house and "Oh my god what do I do now?" I could hear the other kids in the background laughing their asses off and saying "Oh man, it smells! Like shit!

I told him duh, grab some toilet paper, pick it up, throw it in the toilet and flush. "You mean with my hands? I have to pick it up with my hands? GROSS!" As soon as he said this the background laughter got louder and I'm pretty sure I heard Zach make some faint gagging sounds.

Apparently the thought of having to pick up dog shit made his brain shut down even more than normal because when I told him that there was a can of Lysol under the kitchen sink, along with some Clorox wipes and if the smell was really bad he should just crack a window open, all he heard was "blah blah blah my dog shit on the floor blah blah girls are laughing at me blah blah" and all he could say is "WHAT? WHAT? WIPES WHERE? WHAT? OH MY GOD!"

It really doesn't matter that there are only four projects left, because I hate science projects. In fact, I hate them almost as much as I hate knowing that my dog is getting really old and keeps crapping on the floor, and I hate all of these things almost as much as the fact that the fries at Five Guys will never, no matter how much I wish they were, be fat-free.

A Little Known Fact About Rock Stars

On Thursday, Zoe wanted to color a picture but was sick of coloring turkeys, arguing in-laws, pilgrims, cornucopias, bottles of booze, and anything else that had a Thanksgiving theme. After rifling through a coloring book, she managed to find a suitable picture, hauled out the vat of markers and went to work.

When I saw the green face she had colored, I thought I was praising her work when I said, "Hey, that's a cool zombie!"

"She's not a zombie. She's a rock star! See the orange hair? That means she's a rock star. Rock stars have orange hair, Zombies have blue hair. Jeesh." At this point, she walked away with her arms in the air, shaking her head in disbelief at how clueless I was.

Not being known to pass up a good debate, I said "Oh. Well then what's with the green face? I thought only zombies had green faces."

"No mom, rock stars have green faces too. Miley Cyrus has a gray face, but Hannah Montana has a green face. So rock stars have green faces."

End of debate, and she won. How was I supposed to argue with that?