a story for Lisa

Steven ran into a couple of spiders outside so he grabbed the can of Raid to take care of him. A few minutes later he came back in the house with a dazed look on his face while holding the can of Raid and the flashlight.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“The spider had an egg sack on it,” he explained. “I sprayed it, and then spiders started bursting out of it everywhere — very disturbing. It was like spider diarrhea.”

He shuddered, then said, “I’ve got to go take a shower. I’m going to feel like spiders are on me for weeks.”

where a kid can be a kid

Saturday Steven and I got together with his family to celebrate his brother Kevin’s birthday. It was a relaxing afternoon of burgers, beer, and wine.

As we talked over our meal, we brought up various birthdays of years’ past. Kevin had a birthday party at a McDonald’s once. My sister had one at the Pizza Hut. And we had all been to many at the Skate Time skating rink. Ohh, wasn’t that place grand? I liked the Skee-Ball there. Now that building is an annex for a church.

Then there was Show-Biz Pizza, before it became Chuck E. Cheese — blasphemy! There were many parties there with those creepy old animatronic characters, and ol’ Chuck was just a minor character back then. They had Skee-Ball AND Whack-A-Mole! It was always something special to go there — we had to travel all the way to Vestavia, which is such a long drive for a kid full of anticipation of greasy pizza and the ball pit.

Then the conversation turned into, “Hey, let’s go to Chuck E. Cheese!” I made a bet with Kevin and Steven that I could beat them at Skee-Ball with us all using our non-dominant hands. So we hop in the car and begin the long drive to Vestavia.

The place still smelled the same as we walked in. However, the place seemed to have shrunk a little. The stage where the animatronic characters were is now covered with a bunch of TVs and there was just one moving character — ol’ Chuck. Also, that room used to be closed off like a separate amphitheater but is now opened up to the rest of the area.

The ball crawl is also gone, replaced by a kid-sized hamster tube maze. Everything else was just about the same, including the game machines. There are a few there that I would almost guarantee were there when I was a kid.

We loaded ourselves up with Chuck E. Cheese tender coins and headed toward the Skee-Ball machines in the back. After a three-way tie, Kevin blew us away once he ringed the 10,000 hole in the corner. I owe him five bucks.

I had forgotten about the tickets the games would spit out at you for getting points. Some machines were more liberal with their tickets than others. At one point we stopped our ticket-collecting to chow down on some bonifide Chuck E. Cheese pizza, then we continued in our battle for the tickets.

They were well-won, too. We eventually exchanged our tickets for three rubber bugs that you can suction-cup to a window. Saturday evenings don’t get much more awesome than that.

a memoriam post

Kurt Vonnegut passed away. I don’t know much about him nor have I read any of his work, but this quote struck me. Perhaps I’ll pick up “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” and have a read.

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”

birdcats

Last weekend Steven and I finally got around to setting up some bird feeders. We’ve been meaning to do this ever since we got our first house in Auburn, but life and all that jazz pushed this project back two years.

Half the reason we’ve wanted to do it is for the cats. Both of them, Hermione especially, love to have an open window so they can watch for anything that moves.

The birds have provided great amusement to Hermione, which has amused us in turn. She tries to chatter and talk to them. Then Renton will run up and try to lunge through the window, scaring the birds and earning a disapproving look from Hermione.

And so life goes on.

tunalicious

I come home and feed the kitties some lovely, more-expensive-than-necessary tuna and shrimp flavored cat food. Bon appetit.

Five minutes later, Renton barfs his up right in the middle of the living room rug. Half the house has hardwood and he always shoots for the one spot of carpet. Now the living room has the aroma of warm tuna.

Thirty seconds after he does this, he marches back to his bowl for seconds! I’m just preparing to clean up his spatterings in the living room, and he’s friggin’ hungry again for the same thing that he just spewed up?? WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS CREATURE?!

back so soon?

“Hey, Carrie — what’s going on with your website?”

Over the past few months, this question would pop up from one of my friends every now and again — the server that was hosting my site seemed to be having more and more problems staying online. I had plans to switch but life always had me doing something else first.

“Hey Carrie…what happened to your domain?”

Hmm, must be down again. I’ve got to change servers. I head over to crunchythoughts to see what’s up and . . . ARGGGGHHH!!! I’ve been highjacked by tulip-loving, inspirational quote collectors! WHERE’S MY STUFF??? STEVEN — HELP!

Thus began our month-long journey of discovery on the way to re-establishing crunchythoughts. My hosting provider had not renewed my domain registration despite my records showing they were supposed to automatically do so, hence the tulip-loving inspirational quote collectors.

After we probed a little deeper we find that these people actually have forgotten to bill me for the hosting fee since about last April, yet I’ve still had the service. Brilliant recordkeeping. Once a few emails went unanswered we figured ye olde hosting provider had fallen off the face of the earth, and this was proven a few days later when their own web page suffered the same fate as mine.

No love lost, really — the only problem was they still had my crunchythoughts name by the bits, as it were. Now, I don’t really understand this part much, but the gist of it is other bigger, mightier companies really, REALLY own domain names — so Steven and Steven’s dad got in contact with them about crunchythoughts, explained the situation, and a deal was made so I could have it back in exchange for my firstborn or a scan of my driver’s license. After they saw a picture of Renton, they went for the license.

Then the internet has to talk with itself for a while to let itself know that crunchythoughts is back but with different numbers and it assures itself that everything’s okay. Lastly, Steven had to re-upload all my stuff, which he just did just 30 minutes ago.

That’s what it took for me to get back here because some jokers out of Douglasville, Georgia thought it would be a good idea a few years ago to get into the internet hosting business.

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The worst part about all of this is except for those first few days . . . I couldn’t curse about it. I still can’t. I have given up cursing for Lent. Yeah. And I mean any and all cursing — no words used in an exclamative manner whatsoever, no matter what word. That includes, ‘boogers.’ It’s been tough, especially lately now that spring’s coming which makes for busy times at work.

Poor Steven, though — he has given up meat! Next year I don’t think either of us are going to push ourselves quite so hard. We’re both counting down the days till Easter.

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I’m also irritated about this whole Website Screw-Up because it messed up my streak. Since I started writing, I’ve posted in every month . . . until last February. I hadn’t posted that month yet before the website was highjacked by tulips, so there will forever be that blip, that lack of posts for that month, in all the months I’ve been doing this. Oh, if I could only curse . . .

But I shall make up for it by posting more stuff now. A lot has been going on but I just can’t think of all of it right now and I don’t want to bore you with too much at once anyway. Rest assured, there is firm control now on the crunchythoughts name and hosting service isn’t being provided by a couple of dingbats.

Things are looking up.

one of those times when I wish I had my camera with me

Driving up to work this morning and I notice the driver in front of me is fiddling with something. I look closer and she’s messing with her hair . . . with both hands.

She’s putting large curlers in her hair with both hands while driving down the middle lane of 280.

We’re not stopped at a red light — we are moving. They are those large curlers, too. They’re about two inches in diameter. She’s messing with those and a brush so I can only assume she’s steering with her knees, a la Bubbett. I’m kinda freaked out. Maybe she’s professionally trained and knows what she’s doing but we’re in morning rush hour traffic here.

It was a white Toyota 4 Runner, liscense plate 58H397F. If you see her — run.