5.31.2009

A Little Drunks Story

Early Saturday evening Susan borrowed her little sister's membership card & set out with her children to the local discount warehouse to purchase $170 worth of olive oil, dog biscuits and Craisins. The husband was left in peace to watch his beloved Yankees from a favorite seat,
the chair in their bedroom. It's a nice set-up, the chair is close to the TV and next to the window, the ledge of which he uses as a perch for his cup of tea and whatever trash he produces while he sits there.
The view from the window looks diagonally across the street to the front of the Drunks' house.

Susan recalled that she had seen Mr. Drunk earlier in the afternoon, shirtless and slightly unsteady as he stood in the front yard surveying his newly varnished fence.

The husband soon became aware of a small commotion in the street. Apparently, Mr. Drunk had wedged himself into a child's Big Wheel. Susan doesn't understand how Mr. Drunk could fit himself into a Big Wheel, but this is what the husband told her, which was later corroborated by her next-door neighbor, so obviously this is possible. Anyway, Mr. Drunk rode the Big Wheel between his house and another house a few doors down the hill connecting them, which triggered a shouting match.
It's Susan's understanding that Mr. Drunk and the resident of the other house have a history of mutual aggitation, so it's natural that Mr. Drunk would wheel himself back home cursing and yelling.

The object of Mr. Drunks' adolescent tirade did not follow him up the hill, so Mr. Drunk stood alone in his yard spewing a sloppy soliloquoy of threatened ass-kickings.
At some point Mrs. Drunk came out to calm him down. This was a new role for Mrs. Drunk, she must have been a few cocktails behind her husband and therefore held on to some semblance of normal thought.

Susan's husband reports that Mr. and Mrs. Drunk continued yelling at each other for 20 minutes. Susan doesn't know how it ended because when the husband realized she was going to blog about it he stopped giving her information.

Blessed? Shut Up.

Blessed is the word that bugs Susan the most and unless Jesus is speaking she doesn't want to hear it.
Other things that bug her are;
modern baby names
the bagels in her neighborhood
TV news
when she breaks a tooth
the price of the NY Times
being interrupted
Drew Barrymore
LOL
wet laundry left in the machine long enough to be washed again
the bastardized American version of any foreign movie
political pontification
small dogs in shopping carts
Frank McCourt's books

To be continued...

5.30.2009

Susan Likes Kate Gosselin

She's not saying that K8 isn't a b*tch because she certainly appears to be one.
Susan likes K8 because she's not a fawning idiot like everyone else is on TV.
Susan likes K8 because she's real and frustrated and personally limited, and knows it.
She's scared of surprises & doesn't like the outdoors.
She gave vomiting children their own pails and set them up for naps on the floor in the laundry room.
She washed clothes based on which kid they belong to, not by color, for organizational purposes.
Susan likes that K8 drove the very pleasant Steve Thomas to say she was hard on the outside, like her oatmeal cookies.
Most of all Susan likes that K8 cracks the whip,
she's no cool mom.
Susan doesn't like cool moms.

5.28.2009

Where's The F*cking Craisins?

Susan bakes to relax. She likes things in loaf pans because then she can take a slice with her for breakfast.
Susan's current favorite things to bake are cranberry orange bread, zucchini carrot bread and banana bread with Chinese 5 spice powder.

Lately she's been in the mood for soda bread,
it's moist & sweet with lots of raisins & caraway seeds. Susan ran out of caraway seeds around St. Patrick's Day for obvious reasons and hasn't been able to pick any up, particularly when they're $3.99 for a few teaspoons. Anyway, she eventually found caraway seeds for a price she could live with and was all set. Except for the flour, she only had whole wheat in the house. She would be making whole wheat soda bread.

Susan keeps a bag of Craisins in her cabinet because she likes the option of throwing them into her baked goods. There's always a bag up there. Sometimes her son finds them, or the husband and then it's not unusual for the entire bag to be eaten in one sitting. Susan has gone f*cking insane often enough when someone eats the last of something & doesn't include it on the shopping list,
it shouldn't be an issue any more. I mean, she's not asking for anything crazy, just write the sh*t down on the list. It's always in the same spot, centrally located, not hard to find.
And where's the bag of Craisins?

Susan went through her normal TWISTED hystrionics; shouting, slamming, cursing, slamming and cursing. When she was done she cut up some figs, or dates, Susan gets them confused. She threw them into the whole wheat flour and baked her soda bread.
It came out good.

5.26.2009

Susan's A Weight Watcher Again

Susan is back in WW but she doesn't mind. She doesn't fight the process; the meetings, writing down what she eats, watching her portions. Susan draws the line at weighing her food though, that's a bit too much.
She eyeballs things.
Susan's on board with the whole healthy eating scene anyway, she just veers off course every once in a while. Like, from Thanksgiving to spring and all summer.

Susan is attending the same meeting she's been to in the past. Even with a whole new group of participants she's noticed an unusual pattern.
Oy, they're boring.
Now, Susan can sit and talk about food endlessly. No manner of food related conversation has ever bored her. Tonight, one girl told a painfully detailed story about how her husband speculated to a stranger purchasing a large brownie that it likely had many points. Everyone roared. Susan wondered if she were being watched from Heaven by Allen Funt.
No one who spoke had any thought for those who were listening. At one point two people were speaking at once, no one was listening and all was chaos.

The last time Susan joined WW she shared the weekly meetings with a thirty-something woman who talked oppressively. Susan cut her alot of slack because the the thirty-something woman baked 1 point treats for the group and gave out good recipes. However, a terrible thing happened; the thirty-something woman's husband died suddenly leaving her with two young children.
Everyone felt bad, including Susan. How could she not? Nonetheless, Susan enjoyed the silence for the short period of time that the thirty-something woman stayed home from the meetings. When she came back she was angry, sad and didn't bring treats.

Susan couldn't take it. Every time the WW widow began to talk Susan covered her ears and dove under her chair. This wasn't therapy, Susan had no obligation to listen to the person who was slowly driving her mad. Ultimately, the WW widow was responsible for chasing Susan away.
Susan ran fast and hard.

5.24.2009

West Side Story

Susan has already bored her family talking about West Side Story, so they can just skip right over this post if they want.

Susan is able to trace a few aspects of her personality back to their roots in her childhood. For example, Susan's parents used to drive their children down to D.C. during the steamy month of August to stand on long lines and be dragged through museums. The grown-up Susan loves museums and architecture and cities.
Loves them.

When Susan's mother wasn't screaming at Susan or breaking a wooden spoon across her ass, she would let Susan sit with her and watch the Million Dollar Movie on Sunday afternoons. The grown-up Susan loves old movies.
Loves them.
She also loves tragic movies, the sort that leave her with real grief for fake people.

When Susan was in Junior High she sat downstairs over the course of two nights to watch West Side Story.
She doesn't recall what attracted her to West Side Story, she just remembers that it took two evenings and left her devastated. Wrecked. Destroyed.
Susan walked around for weeks with a broken heart. She knew what tragedy was because she FELT it. Deeply, like a suburban thirteen year old.

Anyway, fast forward thirty five years. Susan is lying in bed late one night and finds West Side Story on the TV, three quarters of the way through. Susan hasn't watched it since that first time when it left her broken and crying in silence, praying not to be discovered.
(Sidebar: the grown-up Susan will still not cry in front of anyone unless it's completely unavoidable).

Susan was powerless to change the channel.

Tony had already killed Bernardo and was in Maria's room. The next scene found Tony in Maria's bed without his shirt on. Maria was draped fully clothed, cross intact, alongside him.
Susan knew what had just happened. Good for Maria!
Tony sings then Anita knocks on the door.
The lovers arrange to meet later that night and Tony jumps out the window. He's running down the street as Anita is let in and figures out what just happened.
Anita angrily sings to Maria about her choice in boyfriend and Maria sweetly sings back that she's in love and Anita should be able to relate, even though Anita's boyfriend was just killed by Maria's boyfriend.
Oy!
Guess who's lying in bed crying?

5.22.2009

The End Of A Long Week

How is it possible that as soon as Susan pours herself a glass of wine there's a dead fruit fly in it? There's not even any fruit in the house unless you count limes.
Susan removed the wee fly undeterred & continued as if it were still in flight.

Long ago Susan drank a whole collection of fruit flies in the bottom of a glass of sherry. She mistook them for some fruit pulp. It took a few sips to realize there's no pulp in sherry. But, that was back when she was more in the habit of drinking and a little slow-witted. Now she's right on top of the situation & aware of what's floating dead in her glass before she drinks it.

In her youth Susan had a few bad habits, but let's just stick to drinking and smoking tobacco for now.
Being Irish, Susan was in love with alcohol. She was also in love with cigarettes although that was more love-hate. Susan has alcoholism in her family and wanted to avoid that route so she entered into a drinking awareness partnership with her friend *the undertaker, who has a similar background. Together they helped eachother emerge intact. Then came motherhood for Susan and the cigarettes went out the window.

Nowadays Susan is happy with her reduced alcoholic intake, as long as she can still have some sort of intake. Susan never missed the cigarettes although she likes to smell the dirty smokers as they file back in from their break.

*Susan's friend used to be an undertaker now he does this.

5.18.2009

Susan Has A Monkey On Her Back

And it looks like little bags of peanut M&Ms.
She's been hallucinating because sometimes her monkey looks like Hershey Kisses or teeny bars of chocolate with crispy rice inside, none of which she really likes but neither does she really care.

Susan was toying with this bad habit during her sabbatical from the working world. She used to have a problem back in the day, but thought she could handle it this time.
Poor sap.
Susan fell face first into back into the life around Xmas cookie season. Lately she's been scoring during regular business hours, it's easy to get strung out when the hard stuff is all around her.

Susan is going to reach out before it's too late, while she's still a size 12. She knows some people the next town over who can help.
Every Tuesday night at 7pm, up on the scale.
It's going to be tough but if she's lucky she'll lose a pound a week and be outta there in two months.
God help her.

5.13.2009

More Sloppy Sisters

Over the last few days Susan has seen some appalling examples of fat ass peek-a-boo, nipple protrusion and boobage overspill.

Susan hopes that she doesn't offend anyone who might object to the term fat ass, she'd just like to make the point that this particular ass was truly fat.
As were the boobs. Neither was fat enough to attract attention on their own, not unless they were completely unrestrained beneath the most threadbare combination of
t-shirt and capri pants, held up by a worn-out elasticized waist band, of which the ability to function properly had been extremely compromised.

Susan could not take her eyes off the large woman,
sans brassiere and underpanties, who was removing something from the trunk of her car,
as her bosoms slapped against everything within reach,
and her pants slid so far south that Susan was actually looking at the top half of an ass in broad daylight outside her son's Tae Kwon Do school.

The nipple protrusion, in tandem with boobage overspill, was witnessed by Susan in the middle school auditorium. The perpetrator was a mature woman, one who should already know how to determine the fit of her brassiere or use a mirror to assess her outfit before she walked out the door.
Unfortunately for everyone she didn't and left the house with two sets of busoms and one gigantic set of nipples, which presumably had been drilling their way to fresh air for some time.

The final, and most egregious example of boobage overspill was provided by a perfectly lovely young woman,
adorably attired in jeans and clingy layered t-shirts.
There is no reason why the upper portion of her boobs should spill so far out over brassiere that they rival the amount of boobs contained within the brassiere. Be assured, Susan's not talking about cleavage here, she's talking about sloppy boobie muffin top.

Ladies, check yourselves. Check each other.
Don't let your girls travel sloppy.

5.11.2009

Save The Date!

Does anyone else hate these vile little things?
Susan doesn't need to be told, eons in advance, that she'll be getting an invitation to something she doesn't wish to attend.
Another wedding?
Spare her, Sweet Jesus!

Two smiling, hopeful, untested faces peeking out from within a refrigerator magnet imploring us to Save The Date!
As if.
The only thing Susan might be even remotely excited about is the cake.

Her childrens' dentist should send her a magnet, it takes six months to get an appointment.

New love.
Susan's husband is fond of saying that it turns to old hate.
It's a little pessimistic, she knows.
But funny, considering how happy he is being married to Susan.

Save The Date!
But don't let Susan find one of these things in your kitchen.

5.10.2009

Mother's Day

Susan spent a lovely Mother's Day with a number of her girl cousins at the New York Botanical Gardens,
located within the borough of her birth, The Bronx.

Susan's cousins are one of the great joys in her life.
They see each other quite regularly even while having to sit in a car for an hour or two to do so. They've been lucky with the two who married into the group and all enjoy a pleasant camaraderie although Susan will admit that she's not the first one to warm up to anyone new.

Anyway, the gardens.

Susan hates the tropics but loves all manner of palm trees and the conservatory at the gardens was filled with them;
towering palms and big leafy things.
There were beautiful, colorful, fragrant flowers, a few with very suggestive looking parts.
Impressively pointy succulents, some tall, some round but all BIG. And orchids everywhere.

Susan really liked the carnivorous plants and discovered a centipede trapped inside a pitcher plant.
The pitcher plant is sort of test tube shaped with a little lid, anything making their way in won't get out again
and may look forward to being digested.
Except for this little sonofab*tch.
Perhaps spurned on by the attention, he extricated himself, hit the floor and legged it out of there.
Very exciting stuff for a garden.

Afterwards everyone met back at Aunt Eileen's house where they sat in the late afternoon sun eating, drinking, telling stories, taking pictures and having fun.

5.02.2009

Sangria

Susan loves sangria.
She makes it exclusively with cheap red wine and whatever fruit she happens to have on the kitchen counter, except bananas.
She adds plenty of orange juice.
Her little sister prefers to use orange soda.
Lately Susan has been adding some homemade limoncello, which is essentially pure alcohol infused with lemon peels, and simple syrup. It adds a wonderful tarty sweetness. However, Susan's little sister commented that it made the sangria too strong. So, in went more orange juice.
Susan has a bottle of Portuguese firewater
which is totally undrinkable and when added to sangria,
it makes that undrinkable too.

5.01.2009

In The Dressing Room

Susan's daughter has been requesting new clothes for weeks. The weather is getting warmer and the kid is still wearing her winter clothes. Plus she's growing out of them. Last week, in an effort to buy a little time, Susan cut off some sleeves and turned a pair of jeans into capris, making nice hems and everything.
Eventually Susan could put her daughter off no longer and took her shopping after dinner.

Susan likes to shop with her daughter because she's a good kid, doesn't beg or act bratty, and is generally a pleasure to be around. Do you know why that is?
Because that's how Susan raised her.

Susan's daughter was extra modest in the dressing room trying to conceal the teeniest little beginnings of breasts. Susan is sure they weren't there last week.
Susan waited until the end of the evening to mention her observation. She took her daughter over to the juvenile underwear aisle looking for a 30A brassiere with just a whisper of padding.
The daughter was not happy but went along because Susan's will was too strong to resist.
Plus the daughter was tired.
Two brassieres were tried on as if they were made of sandpaper. However, when Susan asked if she could purchase one 'just in case you want to wear it later'
her daughter replied 'I don't know', which meant yes.

Susan bought her daughter her first brassiere and used the short drive home to discuss close mommy-daughter things even though her daughter's participation was minimal.