Big Sandy Bottom Best of 2008

Well, 2008 was a year, alright. If change was the theme of this country, it was also the theme of Big Sandy Bottom.

At the end of 2007, Eric and I set out a series of goals to accomplish in 2008. And I'll be damned if we didn't hit every one of them. (Remind me to never again do this. My goal in 2009-accomplish nothing-except embrace calm. Okay, and maybe keep my job.)

Some of the goals were ones we would have to accomplish ourselves (buy a house, outlast my insane boss, get my mom moved here to HMB) and others (get Ivy graduated from college, get Olivia INTO a college) required the help of our wonderful, fabulous daughters.

By December 16, when the Sea Hag announced she would go torment another city for awhile, the list was complete. Ivy-done with college. Olivia-done with high school and off to college. My mom moved here in June (although we still haven't finished unpacking.) We bought our little condo in September. If it weren't for the fact that the economy has gone to hell, and my little town is quietly circling the drain, I'd be looking forward to 2009 a great deal. Eric and I have decided the theme for 2009 will be "Return to Normalcy."

So, allow me to congratulate my fellow denizens of Big Sandy Bottom, and I raise my glass in salute to my fellow "B-team" co-workers. We did it! I don't know how, but we did it! Outwit, outlast, outplay baby!

And now, without further ado, we proudly present:

The Big Sandy Bottom Best of 2008

Best Man Crush: Eric + Obama=2gether4ever
Eric gets positively giddy whenever he sees Barack Obama. It's pretty cute, actually..."That's my President" he sighs with a silly smile on his face.

Catch Phrases of the Year
"And then we killed a kitten with a hammer..." "Helloooo...I am your neighbor!"

Best Hot Tub Adventure
Who knew Kris and Emma were secretly wanting to be on "Girls Gone Wild"...

Best Books
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski . My favorite book of the year, and a strong contender for my all-time favorites list. Take Oprah's advice though (never thought I'd say THAT)-don't read the jacket description, it contains a major spoiler. It's still a great read, but I really wish someone had told me not to read the jacket...
Beautiful Boy, by David Sheff/Tweak by Nic Sheff. Disturbing and heartbreaking books, written by a father (David) and son (Nic) about Nic's crystal meth addiction. As a parent, I identified more with Beautiful Boy. Tweak is a like a train wreck-can't look away even though you're horrified by the carnage.
The Omnivores Dilemma, Michael Pollan. Inspired in me (albeit briefly) an obsessive fear of corn and corn-related products. I love the general theme of this book - Eat Food, not too much, mostly plants. If I could only follow this simple motto, I'd be a lot healthier.

Best Music
Shane Nicholson and Kasey Chambers, "Rattling Bones." I've been a fan of Shane Nicholson for several years, but didn't know about Kasey Chambers. Amazing music from this husband and wife team...Check it out.
Conor Oberst, "Conor Oberst." A late entry to my favorite list, Olivia introduced me to this great album in December. "I don't wanna die (in the hospital)" is my favorite, but I couldn't tell you why. "Sausalito" is a terrific song, too.
Glen Hansard and MarkitaIrglova, Music from the movie "Once." I know this wasn't released in 2008, but I listened to it the whole frickin' year, so it counts. Okay? Especially good when I had my month-long bout with insomnia...this is great music to listen to at 3:30 a.m. and you just want to cry because you're so tired and your brain just won't shut up. Very soothing.

Best Television

Most of the television I watched this year was total crap. One notable exception - "The Wire." My new, most favorite tv show ever... I could watch this show forever, especially when it featured Stringer Bell and Omar...I freakin' love Omar! I'm also pretty fond of "Dexter", one of the few adaptations of a book that is worthy. Michael C. Hall is absolutely terrific in the show as a strangely endearing serial killer.

Best Movies

Not a great year for film, really. Eric and I were just talking about this yesterday - I guess our favorite was"Wall-E", for the first 45 minutes of it anyway. "The Dark Knight" was cool, mostly for Heath Ledger. "Frost/Nixon" was pretty good-and I think that Michael Sheen is a criminally underrated actor. Guilty pleasure movie - "Tropic Thunder".

Best Major Award
Two electric scooters. They're still sitting in the garage, because we don't know what to do with them. But I guess they're pretty cool...

Best Cat
Tough category this year...Should we go with poor Jermaine, left to live with Ivy when we moved to Amesport? Stubby is always the sentimental favorite, but he's a past winner so that's hardly fair. Forrest, for just simply hanging in there? (Everytime he limps downstairs, Eric yells "Dead Cat Walking!") Dishes -she nearly won us a trip to New York in the Purina Happy Bellies Feline photo contest. (Thanks for your votes!) Koko doesn't really do much of anything but sleep and whine. Dempsey's only redeeming quality is that he worships me.

Sadly, this year we are giving our first posthumous award for Best Cat to Corky. That's his butt right up there at the top of the page. Corky was taken ill very suddenly at the end of the year, with an acute liver problem (ever seen a cat with jaundice? Yellow gums-eww) and we had him put to sleep. Poor Corky, the autistic cat. We got him when he weighed one ounce, his eyes were still closed and his ears hadn't sprung out from his head yet. After weeks of bottle-feeding him around the clock and cleaning his butt with a washcloth when he pooped (something his mother would normally with her tongue but obviously we weren't going to do that), he turned into a boisterous big jerk of a cat. He was an asshole, nobody misses him but by the simple act of dying, he wins.

Best Website:

stuffwhitepeoplelike.com. This site cracks me up, and also confirmed for me that Olivia is the whitest girl around. Northface jacket-check. Ugly sweater party - attended at least one. Sea salt-received several bottles as gifts this year. Pea coat? She had one in 5th grade. (And has one now.) Typos on menus? Try going out to dinner with her sometime...This is one seriously white girl.

So that's it for 2008. Sorry for the delay in compiling the list. I've had a bit of writers block. Please post your own "Best of" lists...you guys always come up with great stuff that I've forgotten.

Prevent Unwanted Presidencies!

Title compliments of Secretary of State Debra Bowen, who was the speaker at our conference today. She says someone gave her a bumper sticker with that slogan (tagline underneath it : make every election tally a hand job)...


So greetings from the happiest place on earth. Thus far in my trip I have seen/heard/experienced the following:

• A fellow city clerk entirely too into christmas. This lady was wearing a hideous christmas sweater, on top of a turtleneck covered with candy canes; a light-up Rudolph necklace, tree bulb earrings and a Santa hat! At a conference! I guess someone must've told her it was a bit too much, because today she toned it down and replaced the santa hat with a giant red christmas bow in her hair. And some jingle bells on her shoes.


• I observed an interaction between two women that culminated in one of the women's husband shouting "Bitch, we're here to have a good time so shut your fucking mouth!"
  

And a zippity-do-dah to you too, sir.

I felt really sorry for the woman who was being yelled at, until she berated a young man with Down's Syndrome for not getting on the train in a speedy fashion.

• I rode on the Storybook Boats with a seeing-eye poodle. This dog was totally cool, and may be the only creature on the planet who enjoys that ride as much as I do. (There is some truth to the rumor that I plan to buy an estate with enough acreage to build my own Storybook Boat canal. According to the ride operator, 3 acres should be about right.)

• Eric and I saw just the cutest...well you couldn't really call them a couple since there were three of them...let's just go with the cutest little group of bigamists ever. I don't actually know if they were married, though. Well, anyway, it was a guy who looked just like Dog the Bounty hunter, except his hair was in a long skinny braid. And he had two wives. Or girlfriends. Or hookers, I don't know. Two women, one of whom bore a slight resemblance to the mother on the "Patridge Family," were all over this guy. You couldn't keep track of whose hands were in whose pants. It was really quite gross, all this during the Christmas fireworks show.

So it was a really nice trip. Eric and I had a great time sitting in the lobby of the Grand Californian each night, watching Santa (I swear it was the real Santa) talk to all the little kids. Just really frickin' adorable, it was.

I love Disneyland!

Grand Pappy told my Pappy....

At work today, I was listening to random songs on my itunes. God, I love music. Anyway, there's a couple of songs on there that make me so happy and I'm afraid they are some of the worst songs ever made.

I'm kind of embarassed to admit it, but one of my favorite songs EVER is "Hazard" by Richard Marx. I know! It's totally not cool, but I could listen to this song a million times. And how about this one-even more embarassing - "Waiting for a Star to Fall", by a group that I don't think I've ever heard another song by - Boy Meets Girl.

There's also a couple that totally don't fit in with any genre I'm normally drawn to. I can't believe I'm putting this out there for the world to see, but I know every word to "Beer for my Horses" by (gak) Toby Keith and Willie Nelson. At least Willie is cool...And I have a weird fondness for Jay-Z's version of "Hard Knock Life" (although that just may be the theatre geek in me).

Some other songs on my playlist that don't exactly have street cred:

• Just Another Day Without You - Jon Secada
• Mmm Bop - Hanson
• C'Mon C'Mon - Ben Jelen
• And we Danced - The Hooters
• Runaway Train - Soul Asylum
• Spice up your life - Spice Girls (! Slam it to the left! Shake it to the right!

What about you? Are there any songs that you have an inexplicable fondness for? I'd love to know that I'm not the only dork who turns the radio up REALLY loud when Jakcson Browne and Clarence Clemons start singing "You're a Friend of Mine".

Les Mis and Obama

Came to me via Ivy. This is so cool for those of us who are both Obama and Les Mis Fans!

Yo-GA! Yo-GA! Yo-GA!

So to help with stress, I started going to a yoga class a couple of times a week. There's this cool yoga studio in HMB, right on the beach. My friend Marina invited me to go one night, and three months later I am a yoga slut. Seriously, I LOVE yoga. Since I started attending, I've lost 10 pounds, I can touch my toes again and I'm somewhat calmer.

The yoga moves are challenging, but I can generally keep up, especially in my Wednesday class. It is a "Restorative " yoga class and is pretty much just an excuse to take a long nap while the teacher comes around and massages your feet.

It's the meditation part that's harder. It can be especially challenging for those of us who are slightly obsessive compulsive or possibly undiagnosed as having attention deficit disorder. The brain jumps about, never settling down...in my case, a line or two from a song I heard on the radio will blast through my mind over and over and over again....Have you ever tried to meditate while Grace Slick screams inside your head "We built this city, We built this city-on rock and roll. ...BUILT this City!" Also, some of the concepts of acceptance are hard for me. Even now, when the teacher tells us to "celebrate the infinite light of all living creatures", I have to add "even the Sea Hag (not her real name)" to the end of the prayer. Because I definitely have to be reminded that she, too, is deserving of love, and possibly even a living creature.

This constantly editorializing brain is one reason I don't fall asleep easily. No matter how tired I am, it seems like the second I turn out the light and settle in for a snooze...Zing! My brain is awake and ready to party! I have tried many things to help myself sleep at night. I can't even count sheep, because my crazy brain makes the sheep do all kinds of strange shit, like stop and do a little jig on the fence, or duck under the fence, climb through the slats and get stuck.

This is the situation on the best of nights. If I'm particularly stressed out (and why would I be? twitch, twitch) then forget it. So I've started to use some of my yoga class techniques to help me sleep at night, and the results are....puzzling. Somehow, my attempts at "untethering my mind from the conscious body" have led to an image of a piece of cauliflower adrift in an ocean. I can explain this (sort of). I'm kinda literal, so when picturing my brain, the nearest image I came up with was a piece of cauliflower. The I took it a step further and tried to image my mind floating untethered and of course, there's the ocean.

So now I'm stuck with a meditative practice involving a piece of cauliflower bobbing about in a vast ocean. Naturally, my obsessive brain won't let it be that easy, so I have a little trouble with nagging details - "is the cauliflower light enough to float? Maybe most of the stalk should be trimmed, just to be sure. Just enough so the head stays in tact. But, the water is salt water so don't things float pretty well in salt water? And what about waves? I keep picturing these waves tossing the cauliflower about, sending it on its journey. But if it's way out in the middle of the ocean, are the waves big enough? Or if the waves are too big, will it force the cauliflower to the floor of the ocean?"

Somehow, I don't think this is normal. But hey, it works for me!

An oldie but goodie...

How can we not miss this little goofball?

Yes, we have some bananas

The one upside to Olivia going off to UC Davis -

We can have bananas in the house again! Yeay!

Weekly Address - August 4, 2008 - Nah, nothing much going on here...

Hmm, let's see what has occurred since our last weekly update (May 9 2008)

• Ivy graduated from UCSC


• Uncle John and Lynda Ann visited from West Virginia


• Uncle Jack and Emma visited from West Virginia


• Olivia graduated from Notre Dame


• My mom moved to HMB


• We bought a house (okay, a condo)


• Olivia went to Australia to sing for the Pope


• Three more of my co-workers quit, including my beloved Robin

Other than that, not much happening here.

Sheesh, I am exhausted!

Some highlights:

Ivy's graduation from UCSC was wonderful. The best part for me was the Theatre Arts Department ceremony - a much smaller event and Ivy was, in effect, the salutatorian. We were all very proud.


The night before the ceremonies, a group of us (me, Eric, Olivia, Uncle Jack, Emma and Kris) stayed at a hotel in Santa Cruz and had a grand old time (Despite the fact that we were squeezed into two rooms with a grand total of two beds.) Never mind, we made it work. By the way, the rumors you've heard of scantily dressed youth and topless matrons in the hot tub are...totally true. I'm not naming names, though. After some hot tub shenanigans, we retired to our rooms and Kris read aloud to us...from the latest David Sedaris book. I love my Kris! And my family rocks...

The 3-6 Mafia Moving Crew (featuring a mover named "Squint") that handled my mom's move into the senior housing mobile home park. What a stir those guys made! This was prior to my watching Season 1 of the "The Wire" on DVD, but they looked like they could've stepped right out of the Baltimore project location of that show.

Work continues to be depressing as hell...you know it's bad when the local homeless guy tells you to "keep your chin up." Employees are dropping like flies. I have a photo taken at a work function from two years ago-11 of the 33 employees in the photo are gone now. One of them died, but the other 10? Fired or quit. Things are grim, very grim.

That's it for now. I'm sure we'll have lots of posts coming soon, what with the move, Olivia heading off to college, Ivy going to Europe...I'll try to keep up, but life keeps interfering!

Weekly Address May 9 2008 - Now with Electronic Yodeling Pickle!

If anyone has wondered about my warped sense of humor, please see above link which will take you to a picture and description of the Mothers Day gift my mom gave me. Make sure you click on the sound file too.

Imagine opening that little beauty at work, like I did. Right at the front counter, where the public comes in for building permits etc. One of my co-workers was impressed enough to yell "Siobhan! Your Mom is off the hook, YO!"

I had been anxiously awaiting this package, as my mom has called me every day for a week to see if it was delivered. So when it arrived, I tore into the package right away, saying "Gee, I hope this isn't wildly inappropriate since I'm opening it right here at the front counter." Imagine my surprise when I opened up what appeared to be....well, anyway... It was pretty embarrassing.

In other non-news, I tend to think of myself as a non-phobic person. However, the other day, I found myself chatting with a friend and listing the things that creep me out and I realized-wow, I have a lot of hang-ups!

So for no particular reason, here's a list of things that make me uncomfortable:

• Birds. No big surprise here. Especially this time of year, blackbird nesting season. I've already had my first attack of the season.
  
• Cotton balls. Or more specifically, synthetic cotton balls.


• Anne Geddes. I do not understand what is cute about babies dressed up as vegetables. Why? Why would a person paint a baby to look like a lettuce leaf?


• "Painter of Light" Thomas Kincaide.


• Sarah McLachlen. I REALLY hate her, but I don't know why. I can't even watch that stupid SPCA commercial with all the cute kittens because she's in it.


• Mayonnaise that hasn't been constantly refrigerated. By constantly, I mean for more than the 30 seconds it takes to spread some on a sandwich.
  

Best. Prom Picture. EVER

Weekly Address - April 4, 2007

(ha ha, I have to laugh at calling this the weekly address, since it's been, oh...maybe six months since I've updated. But, whatever...)

Musings on control and lack thereof....
First of all, I'm sorry for not posting more frequently. My daughter and my mother have been nagging me about it. Seems they actually enjoy reading my blog. Go figure...

Those of you who know what's up in my life lately know I've been just a little bit stressed. It's been a struggle just to get up in the morning...Things have at least temporarily calmed down a bit. Better living through chemistry and all that. Plus work is more tolerable, although we'll see how long that lasts. We announced a settlement of our lawsuit. I'm not totally sure that I'll still have a job in July, but I'm starting to accept that the whole thing is out of my control. Accepting that I don't run the universe (my mom does, ha ha) is a hard thing for me to do, but I'm getting better at it.

I'm also starting to come to grips with the whole idea that come September I will officially have an "empty nest." How the hell did that happen? When you spend almost 23 years doing one thing, letting go of it is tough. I have to keep reminding myself that this is the whole point of parenting, right? It's not like I didn't know that eventually they'd leave me.

I'm still sad, though. I actually like my kids. They're the kind of people I'd choose to hang out with, even if we weren't related. It was bad enough when Ivy went off to college, but at least she wasn't all that far and Oli was still around so I was able to prolong the inevitable. Now I have to face it-I have semi-successfully raised two amazing daughters. (I say semi-successfully because I'm not all that sure I can take any of the credit, other than genetic input. They are simply incredible girls.)

So now what? The good news is, I still have a few good years left in me, ha ha. It's one benefit to having your kids early, I guess. Also, we won't have to watch "Degrassi." Our microwave popcorn bill should dramatically decrease. That's pretty cool. I'm thinking I can finally get that nose piercing. (I haven't done it yet, because who wants to be that mom?) But now's my big chance!

So, anyway...lots going on here at Big Sandy Bottom this "week." Olivia is under the gun to decide on a college. She's narrowed her list to 3 schools. We have to somehow fit in visits to all three by May 1. This would be challenging enough, but is nearly impossible due to Olivia's complicated social life, plus we are all going to Disneyland at the end of the month. So next weekend, Olivia and I are flying to LA for the day, to visit LMU. The following weekend, Olivia will go to her prom and then spend the rest of the weekend in Davis, hopefully crashing with Carolyn. We extended our trip to Disneyland by a day, in hopes of visiting UC Santa Barbara. Should be a whirlwind month.

Speaking of proms, remember when you were in high school and if you wanted to ask someone to the prom, you called them up and said "hey, will you go to the prom with me?" Ha! How provincial! If you did this now, you'd be sitting home on prom night. Now it is necessary to develop an elaborate scheme, complete with props. Olivia procured her date via an altered comic book, enlisting comic book store employees to help her out. (I'm pretty sure this was a first for comic book stores everywhere, by the way-a real live girl asking someone on a date....)

Proms are getting more elaborate in other ways. For instance, Olivia and her friends submitted a four-page color proposal to the parents, outlining their plans and requesting that a yacht be rented for after prom festivities. This is what comes with sending your kid to private school with a bunch of rich girls, I guess. The sense of entitlement is strong. And even parents are subject to peer pressure, as Eric and I agreed to the proposal.

Since this post seems to be Olivia-centric, I'll close with a post to a video made by her friend, the always adorable L'il Sherbet. For a class assignment, she had to make a tribute to her hero. Apparently, L'il Sherbet's values are all messed up, since she chose Olivia!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8EpHAtyKm4