The World

The trouble started with the checkbook. There were ads in the local paper about it week after week and I dunno. It just sounded fun. So, I got one and then I talked MK into getting one and then I ended up leaving messages for Le Shish along the lines of: Hey! Get your coupon book already, will ya? Because I didn't want her to miss out.

It was 35 bucks from The Chamber of Commerce. It gave you this ton of checks in different denominations like 15 bucks towards your bill at ________ or 10 towards your purchase at ________. And a lot of the places are place we go. Or places we've been meaning to go. And they're not coupons. They're checks. No strings attached.

Well, we have already received our full value out of it and we've only used two checks.(I promised my Dad he could have the 10 dollars at Brown Cow Ice Cream for his birthday.) The first one was for Two Fish Art Glass and we three went together and had the most excellent time shopping and looking and talking. We really did. It's a cool store. We found these rugs. Hang on a second. Shish found 'em. You recall her shopping advice, don't you? "You have to dig."

For twenty dollars, this is the coolest thing because it's got tons of color AND made of recycled materials AND if it gets dirty you can just hose it off AND you can use it at the beach or the park. I plopped it in the living room after I finally got the floor swept properly.

Then last night, MK and Bob and I went to Trattoria 224 on Harrison and we had the most tremendous dinner. Two fancy salads and two brick oven pizzas and we each paid about 7 bucks each for tax and tip. We laughed because MK and I are all about the value and Bob was all thinking it was an opportunity to have new experiences. ha. Poor Bob. He's so way over his head when he sits between us.

It took me extra time to get the rug unrolled because I had to get my muffler fixed and no, it wasn't my muffler. It was the pipe that ran between the catalytic converter and the muffler and I didn't break it, it had rusted out. That cheered me up for some reason. And I have been busy.

This blog is going to go into semi-retirement. If there's something irresistible comes up, I'll be sure to put it up here and if I can direct you toward my writing someplace else, I'll be sure to post that up here too. I wanted to see if I could go for 365 days and if you count the weak ones, I passed that goal a long time ago and I'm on to some new ones.

MK was not 100% loving her rug selection. Hey look they're plastic, they are not for everyone but when I looked up from watching teevee and saw this?

Ahhh. Perfect.

The Office

Today I wrote a grant.

Actually re-wrote it. Jazzed it up. Infused it with positivity. And I did it under a tight deadline which was dammed impressive.

Part of me wants to smack it up here and show ya but I have a feeling there's some privileged information in it that's not mine to share with is a bummer because it's a kind of a good and happy story and I'm in it.

I'm sure there's more where that came from.

Lawd willin.

In Front of the Laundromat

While most people are waiting for Spring? I have been waiting to fall.

It's not that I wanted to wipe out because who would wish that for themselves? But I usually manage to wipe out at least once a winter. People assume it's Grantley related but it never is. She's retractable. Plenty of slack.

I've done about 26 of those Fa-joink Fred Astaire Elbow Souflee manuvers where somehow my toe reaches out and saves me from going down. You know like when acrobats fly off an apparatus and that flourish they do with their entire body? I end up like that only without the sequins or the phoney smile.

Today not so good.

(Oops we've activated the Maternal Worrying System. I'm fine Mah. Not to worry.)

I was commuting, just dashing past the yucky 24 hour laundromat and my foot hit the tiniest patch of black ice. Kablooie. Down I went.

Bam. Hit the sidewalk. Knee then hands followed by the rest of me.

The sidewalk is much colder and harder than you give it credit for when you get that close to it.

The happy thing is that there was a car filled with laundry doers and they stopped and gestured to see if I was okay. I gave them the international Good Lawd Have Mercy How Embarrassing signal that it appeared I was going to live another day and then very slowly I got up.

When I got to work, one of the women who said she really missed her children was packing me an ice bag before I could roll up my pants and survey the damage and the rest of the day I was trying to remember if my Dad called these kinda scrapes Strawberries or Raspberries.

The Shish was excited because ya know, any occasion to slather someone with Neosporin is a happy day for her. (In another life she was either a surgeon or medicine (wo)man.)

2009 was the year to fall forward in spring.

The Gym

I sampled a new class tonight at the gym. (Which is another way of saying, who is going to help me get out of bed in the morning?)

I was between something called SPLASH! and something called TurboKick. I asked Grantley which one she'd go for and she remained silent 0n the topic but I recalled that she side-stepped some H2O just moments before(in the blogosphere, I mean)and my Mah? When kickboxing first came out and I said I wanted to do it? My Mah was like...oooh nooooo. That's tooooo violent.

Which (even tho it's like 80 years later)means I had to try it. Right?

Plus I've been feeling very irritated. Not irritable because that would be my fault, correct? Irritated. I think maybe it's the time change or maybe it's those other annoying things.

Yeah you know. People.

But I digress. Off I went to TurboKick. I did my usual 'trying to chat with someone who looked reasonably pleasant and/or nice' as we all waited for Edna (yes, her real name)to complete the previous class which is known as Ab Blast.(Notice I haven't sampled that one yet. There's scary and there's scary, no?) The lady I selected to cheer me up did not fill me with joy and/or optimism. Which was rude because it was so clear that I needed a little bit of each.

I inquired, "Is this really hard?"

And she said, "Yes."

Wow, huh? Is it any wonder that I captured the center spot of the coveted back row? Okay painful learning experience here: Altho you're relatively safe from the rest of the class hooting at your dorkliness when you're safely tucked away in the back row? You also can't see the teacher. So there are layers of spazmosis. There's the 'I can't do this yet' thing layered on top of the 'What is she doing now?' thing. It's bad. Believe me. (Not tooth extraction bad. More like decreased Girl Scout cookie box size bad.)

We got to the '30 minute/considering walking out because we are so incredibly floundering/too afraid to run into everyone afterwards in the locker room' interval and then once you get to minute 31? Well, you're thinking, okay I'm more than halfway done. Might as well hang in there for the next bit. Maybe it'll be good. (Plus there's always the joy of the cool-down to look forward to. It's like a poor mans massage. Kinda+sorta+if you squint. And the clapping at the very end. I like that.)

A first night in a new class puts me in the mind of trying to enter a twirling double dutch jump rope. You oh so totally want to be leaping around like everyone else but no matter what you do there's going to be a period of time when you're standing to the side kinda pawing like a polar bear beckoning for marshmallows.

Beckoning burns calories.

Who knew?

11:27 PM

I think I'm still adjusting to the time change. Am I the only one?

Puddles

Sometimes your dog does these tiny things that amaze you.

We have a trick for long walks and it's called. "Hop up." And that means: let's make this walk more interesting and the phrase is actually shorthand for: "Hey Grantley, jump up on this elevated wall of concrete." You know, like a curb-only something that might be holding a garden in, or just a short wall. She likes it. Hopping up.

We did one near the library where the wall got progressively higher until it was way too high for her to safely jump down so I scooped her up and settled her on the sidewalk and I remember it, because she was all wet and I was thinkin' to myself, how da ya like them muddy wet apples, ya big show off?

We were out strolling post monsoon. It's been so wet that individual sidewalks squares are completely submerged and so, without any prompting from me? Instead of walking through this giant puddle? She hopped up. All by herself.

Good girl.

Taize

Last night was PH which stands for pretty hectic. There was a food drive at the gym and your ticket in-to the first Zumba class ever at this particular gym-was to donate a pound of food for the Greater Chicago Food Depository. Naturally, Shish and I took that extremely seriously and I determined that we'd get the most volume at Aldi.

If you recall, MK and I volunteered on the packing line of the food depository a couple of weeks ago and the first thing I noticed is that when you're getting supplemental food? You don't get name brands and happy colors like the Cheerios they showed on The Biggest Loser the other night. What ends up in the big cardboard boxes of stuff, label-wise is pretty mysterious. In the food depository, Charlie the Tuna turns into Mr. Fishy. That's just the way it is.

I made the executive decision that it would be better to have two big cans of regular-ish Aldi tuna rather than one dinky fancy store albacore. (Hey that's very loaves and fishes of me, isn't it? When you come to think about it.)

Shish was in charge of saying not to get the lite brand of the canned fruit they were asking for. She decided that if people were getting apricots? We were gonna give them apricots. I was good with that. We're an awesome team, no?

You know us. We had fun deciding what to buy. We even sprung for those glamorous 25 cent Aldi bags to carry the stuff AND Shish treated a man in the parking lot to our shopping cart without taking his 25 cents. Everyone derives their joy from different things. We got ours.

We went to Zumba.

If someone had ever mentioned to me that in the year of our Lord 2009, I would find myself in the front row of a 'fitness program based on Latin dance'? You coudda knocked me down with a feather but somehow I got pushed from my comfortable space in the back row right up to the space behind the teacher. Oh. My. Stars. (And. Planets.)

I've been doing this fitness class stuff long enough to know there will come a point within the hour where I will wish I'd never been born. You see the hot cha cha/ooh la lah teacher doing everything so fabulously right and then your eyes reluctantly slide over to your own sorry ass. All frumpy lumpy dump with droopy shorts and an ill-fitting top and physically uncoordinated and a half o rama and then? If you're smart? (or experienced, as I now am) you'll let your gaze slide around to the rest of the room.

You are not the worst.

Glory Hallelujah.

Which brings us to Taize. I was a little late, so MK got us a nice spot and then MK's friend Vanessa's friend(stay with me on this, won't you?)Maria had scored us an even better spot? And so we finally settled in and I started looking around and while you were supposed to have been beginning your deep meditation and mindfulness? I poked MK and whispered: Hey look. A nun.

MK was raised Catholic. Nuns do not come as a surprise to her. So, when I found two more actual nuns with the outfits in a different section of the church and alerted her to their presence? Dissapointingly, she wasn't nearly as excited as I was. Between you and me? I think I was a little too Zumba'ed for the solemnity (is that a word?)of the entire occasion.

It got to the part when everyone is doing this hardcore group prayer shout-out type thing(of course and naturally nobody actually shouts. It's not Baptist, ya know.), in which the leader of the service has gone through a list of very serious requests like, ahh ya know, world peace and the end of needless human suffering and ya know, just assorted stuff like that, and then he asks the congregation in an extremely serious voice,"And for what else do we pray for on this night?".
See if you can find me in this picture. I'm right there. Just behind the nun.

Guest Artist

Tonight's guest artist is Le Shish. The other day she rang me at work-everyone pays a lot of attention to the ring of my cell phone at the Senior Center because I went with the old fashioned ring, so in the rare event that it goes off every single head perks up.

When I see it is Le Shish and that's exactly what I see because that's how I've got the famous artist logged into my cell phone, I answer, "Bonjour Le Shish!" just because I am perennially foolish and when I came back from the hallway where I could actually hear and get some privacy, one of the older women asked, "Just who were you talking to in French?" like it was some sorta conspiracy theory.

This is Grantley as seen by her mother in law at Starbucks last summer. It's not the same expression I get out of her, is it?

Madison St.

Sometime in December is when we noticed it.

I think we were awoken by a quiet rumbling that grew louder by the minute. The street we think of as our own small quiet urban/suburban interlude was quietly becoming an actual landmark. Yeah, there's the video store on the corner but the small, privately-owned video store in Forest Park has just gone out of business and the Jewel has installed one of those red box video dispensers-which even I was kind of excited about until I saw the selection of movies and uhh yeah no thanks-so that's been a good landmark up until now but nothing you can hang your resale value on.

Then there's the 7-11 across the street. Need a Chicago cop? There's always one parked at the 7-11, except when there's a robbery-go figya.

There's The Jewel, of course, but that's not on our actual street. We have a laundromat and Nick's Auto Body and The Car Wash but we have reason to believe that those businesses have been bought out by Fenwick and pretty soon it will be only us.

Imagine our great joy in December when we saw the full length posters in the former insurance office across the street. Just the thing to return my street to greatness. In tremendous lettering we stood back and read: COMING FALL OF 2009 CHICAGO'S FAMOUS...

(and here we insert a drum roll -just for effect)

CHICKEN AND WAFFLES.

Wait what? We thought. They're gonna have breakfast and lunch at this place? That's the idea? The questions sent us to our keyboard where we managed to dig up this.

Now we spend our days wondering if this qualifies our block as having landmark status, we wonder how long it'll be until we're bothered by traffic jams and limos, we wonder what people will do with all that extra time they'll save by consuming two meals at the very same time but most of all, we wonder how long it'll be before we decide to be the first in line to try it.

Gulp.

In The Street

We get out pretty early some days. In the zone between six and seven anyway. Okay, closer to seven. (Who invented the snooze alarm, anyway? God Bless You Sir or Madam.)

We've been noticing three figures trotting down our street for a couple of months now. They look so jolly together. And not in a matchy-matchy outfits sense. Just maybe sort of something you'd observe and think, hmm that looks nice.

Two women and a dog and they jog down the street and the ladies are not exceptionally fit or anything-they are joggers tho, but it's the dog. He's like an attractive piece of luggage between them. White, short hair, pointy ears, very alert. Trot trot trot.

The ladies chat and it seems like the dog kind-of keeps up his part of the conversation by trotting along in the designated space between them. It's always looked kind of appealing from afar.

It depends on how many times we bonked the snooze alarm and when I saw 'we' I mean my partner's not all leaping out of bed either. She's trained to snooze for exactly seven minutes without changing the warm space she's established on her bed. But, for whatever reason, we're usually about 15 feet away from the dog joggers. Maybe in front. Maybe behind. But never within sniffing distance, until today.

They were close to the curb and I had Grantley long on the retractable leash from the sidewalk and I watched her. It seemed like she had been waiting to befriend this fine white specimen-k9 for ages so she does her sweetest/most irresistible/Hail Fellow hello hello hello wag-a-thon thing that she does so well and that white short hair bastard went psycho/nut-job/coocooberry pie on her jovial Welcome Wagon-ing approach.

And it was the coolest thing. She didn't hesitate, consult a life coach, enter therapy, go out for lunch with her bitches-I mean girlfriends, have her chart done, go to the relationships section of the library and drag 900 why isn't this working books home, score some botox, get her nails done, shop for collars. Nope. None of that.

She jacked up her hackles and told him to piss off (in dog language naturally).

I was ever so proud of my brave girl. Taught her everything she knows.

Funny/Sick

Let us now discuss my gentle mother taking time out of her day trying to decipher exactly what the joke was in yesterdays post. It took us 3 back and forths. Myself-I think that is So Funny. Seriously. I'm sitting here like Santa ho ho ho-ing.

I'll try and explain it here. See, whenever I sweep the floor? If I rest the broom up against something even a little bit unstable like let's say for instance, the wall? Grantley is so outta there in a pre-Chicken Little/The Sky is Falling Sort of Way. She's scared of the broom falling on her. And so, every time I see her dash away in fear, I think, if I was going to break into someplace that had guard dogs? I'd just bring a broom. And maybe some hard salami.

Same thing vacuum cleaners. Dogs are frightened of them. So, I've always thought, the intelligent burglar would eschew an Uzi sub machine gun and push an ElectroLux.

Now, I saw this ad for the pet hair repellent dryer sheets (ironically as I was doing my actual laundry at the WLL) and I thought: Eureka! Yet another way to drive animals out of your path. (I know it's an exaggeration and I've told you 10 thousand times never to...heh heh heh.) So, then I thought, yeah, if the burglar wore a Bounce sheet around his face in place of the traditional black bandanna? Would the snarling Dobermans guarding the imaginary diamonds not be officially repelled(not to mention the lack of static and the April Fresh Scent)?

As they say in the art/humor business: It didn't read.Today I have for you a self portrait of my Mah. I am sure you can see the resemblance.

Sunday Paper Coupon Section

Bounce, the fabric softener dryer sheets from Procter and Gamble has come out with a new product that's supposed to get "unbelieveable pet hair repellency for just pennies per load."

I was thinking of a potential market that they probably haven't tapped.Right?

Imagination

You probably didn't know I took Hat Design at the Art Institute of Chicago.
I call this one: Crocheted Tissue Box Head Cover Chapeau 2009

(Red nose sold separately.)