What Makes Me Laugh

So, that was a short sabbatical, but I had to break it. I’ve been dying to write about food, which is better than dying because of food, which is the other option on the table for me. At the beginning of the month, I was diagnosed with Celiac disease (also known as Celiac sprue, which is where the title of the blog post came from). This means that if I eat wheat, or other forms of flour with gluten in it, my body gets really angry and starts doing crazy things to my small intestine that nobody but me really wants to hear about.

 Chances are you know someone like me, who can’t have any gluten, and you think, as you’re chewing on something delectable, ”God, I hope I never have to go without my bread.” I seriously don’t hope that for you either, but I’m happy that the cure for my “disease” made me feel a lot better.

Anyway, going “gluten-free” wouldn’t be so difficult if I didn’t have a few other teeny weeny food problems to deal with. Namely, I’m also allergic to all dairy, eggs, peanuts, bananas, and cane sugar (and maybe almonds and asparagus, not really sure yet). I’m basically a vegan who eats meat, but no Kung Pao. Does that make sense?

I used to bake. A lot. Which makes sense now, because a lot of times you actually crave the foods you’re allergic to, and boy did I crave pizza. Which, BTW, if you’ve never heard Mike Birbiglia’s monologue about pizza, you’re missing out. Download it on itunes.

The good news is that I do feel better and I’m losing weight like a banshee. The bad news is that  I took a pledge to not complain for 49-days, so I’m trying to be all up-beat and positive about the whole thing while reading gluten-free food blogs like a porn addict. I’m not kidding about this. I could look at photos of gluten-free brownies for hours and contemplate whether it would be better to use date sugar or .

 I even considered starting my own gluten-free food blog, but then I decided I would really just go to the dark side and not think of anything else all day except for how to find the perfect sugar substitutes for baking something without eggs or wheat. I’ve already spent hours trying to find pure chocolate that hasn’t been processed without nuts or dairy or cane sugar. Good luck with that one. It doesn’t exist.

The other bad news is that my grocery bills jumped exponentially, which is weird since you’d think that now that I’m making all of my own meals (and I mean all of my own meals – I even contemplated buying my own grain mill this morning while driving to work) I would actually save money. However buying fresh, organic, and unusually hard-to-find foods is hard on a budget. But, I’m not complaining. No sir-ee. Especially since Doug has taken on my allergies as if they are his own, and is eating only what I can eat (what a man).

The good news is that I am eating all sorts of yummy things. Agave syrup, apricots, avacodos, strawberries, salmon, cherries, melon, brown rice chips, coconut milk, hemp milk, wine, brown rice cereal … hey, you get the picture.  People should be so lucky to have my kind of a problem.

Anyway, my sense of humor is back, in full force, and I’m trying to laugh at the fact that I just called our local wine shop to find some gluten-free wines (don’t ask – something about the oak barrels and paste) which made me feel like a freak. You never know, I might throw in a recipe section on this blog for Celiacs with a sense of humor (I have to admit, this is a very very small crowd with Celiac sufferers – mostly because they have a hard time getting people to take them seriously and stop waving pizza around in front of us).  Sigh.

 No complaints here.

I haven’t been up to blogging much lately in part because I wake up to National Public Radio. News about the oil spill in the Gulf nearly kills my day. I just want to pull the covers over my head and go back to bed. It doesn’t put me in the mood to laugh.

But, my friend sent me a news clip from USA Today about the Gulf that made me laugh. In fact, I get a chuckle out of it nearly every day. Hundreds of thousands of hair clippings from pets and people are being stuffed into used pantyhose and shipped to the Gulf to help soak up the oil. This is the idea of Matter of Trust, a tiny non-profit in San Francisco that helps recycle and reuse natural fibers. You can learn how to donate to the cause at their website.

To date, I haven’t seen anything that confirms that cleanup crews will use the natural fiber booms, but the idea of stuffing our collective hairs into used pantyhose for cleanup does make me feel like there is a way our cats and us can help. The only problem is our rate of hair loss is not nearly fast enough for this process. By the time I filled one pantyhose leg with my cat’s hair it might be a month from now. This is not because they don’t shed like crazy, but mainly because I can’t get them to sit still long enough to groom them for more than five seconds at a time.

Anyway, if you’re wondering what to do with all of your unwanted hair, well, get your combs and scissors out, someone wants it!

Peaches checks out Blue Heaven and Whisper Yellow

Dear Whisper Yellow,

It was love at first sight. There we were. In the hardware store. I was looking at Butter Cream, wondering if she was the one when I saw you and all thoughts of Butter Cream flew from my head. I knew, deep down, that you were the one for me.

We brought you home and put you on our wall. Right above the white wainscoting that had been there for 100 years but we thought we could fix it would look nice. Later we bought new wainscoting to accent your sunny smile. You looked beautiful. Your cheeriness made me feel happy. I started to compare you to all my favorite lemon and cream desserts. I wanted to write poetry. You looked like lemon chiffon pie. You looked like Schwan’s vanilla ice cream. I wanted to eat you.

But then, we put our Blue Heaven Marmoleum on the floor, and I started to fall out of love with you. Believe me. It’s not you. It’s me. Seriously. Don’t Cry. We can still be friends. I’ll tell my friends about you. You’ll find another love. What’s that you say? Just be honest? Don’t beat around the bush?

Well, here’s the thing. I started to think: Whisper Yellow. Blue Heaven. Whisper Yellow. Blue Heaven. What does that remind me of? Oh no. Not that. A nursery. I just turned my bathroom into a nursery! I realized that I don’t know you that well. We barely started our relationship and there we were, talking about kids. It was just too soon. I’m not ready for that kind of commitment.

I think it’s time we ended things. I hope you can forgive me. If it’s any consolation, I’m heart broken too. So heart broken, that, believe it or not, my new color is called Desolate.

Love,

Janelle

Our clawfoot tub, now in the kitchen.

Our extended family may not agree on religion, politics, or sports teams, but they can agree on one thing: “You need a new toilet.”

Every family member who visits says this to us and we always have the same response: “We know.”

It’s funny. I don’t remember noticing the toilet before we bought the house, but as soon as we moved in it became the primary topic of conversation.

“Why do you think it’s like that?” I asked, staring down at the brown, blue and green stained porcelain bowl.

“Minerals,” Doug said.

Our house was built in 1918. The toilet looked like it was built in 1818.

Still, it worked. Okay, so you needed a plunger for anything besides number 1, but as long as you were careful, it worked. We nicknamed it the Geyser because of our close proximity to Yellowstone and its strange colors and ability to shoot water.

I tried various cleaners on the stains until I could no longer stand the thought of flushing another toxic chemical down the toilet. We had other remodeling priorities, we thought, and as long as we warned visitors it was no big deal. Turns out, when you live with something long enough, you forget to warn people until it’s nearly too late.

“Um.” Tap, tap, tap on the bathroom door. “Sorry to disturb you, but we really need you to know that the toilet was like that when we moved in here and if there is any doubt in your mind about whether it will flush please use the plunger.”

We forgot to warn my mother-in-law before she visited, and she was waiting for Doug on the porch when he arrived home.

“What happened in there?” she demanded.

“In where?” Doug asked, genuinely confused.

“The bathroom.”

“Oh.”

When my father-in-law came to visit he immediately offered to buy us a new toilet. “C’mon,” he said. “We’re going to the hardware store and we’re getting you a new toilet. Shouldn’t cost more than $75.”

This was a kind offer, but we gently explained that actually a new toilet in an old house would mean ripping out the existing floor, and once you go there, an entire remodel including plumbing. We didn’t want to ruin his vacation entirely.

Because, you see, this is our only bathroom. That’s right, and we are currently in week two of the remodel, which did include removing the clawfoot tub, ripping out the cheap  flooring put in by the previous owners, and taking out the toilet. Not an inexpensive undertaking, but a necessary one.

Our toilet is not gone, however. It’s currently a big part of our lives in the garage, where we are employing space age technology to take care of our waste until a new one can be properly installed.

The Geyser, now in the garage

I’m not kidding. A local company called Cleanwaste sells “Go Anywhere Toilet Kits” which includes a bag that fits over a toilet seat with a powder in the bottom called Poo Powder. They also sell Wag Bags for camping and emergency situations. According to their website, “Poo Powder is a proprietary blend of a NASA-developed super-absorbent designed to gel and encapsulate liquid and solid waste, and a natural deodorizing agent and decay catalyst.” Which means, that you can poo in the bag, it biodegrades, and you can dump the sealed bag into your garbage without having to worry about it exploding or smelling. I know, eww. But a bigger eww would be not having something like that around in this situation.

Where are we bathing? At the gym. Doug claimed that he could go without a shower for a month, which I told him not to brag about, and he broke down after Day 3. Remember, Doug was a river guide for many years and bathed in a river the whole summer, but even he admits that this is different since he is doing the entire remodel himself and is covered in construction materials by the end of the day.

I try to remind him. “When it’s finished the bathroom will be gorgeous, just like our kitchen remodel, and we won’t have to knock on the door when people come over for dinner. Won’t that be nice?“

Yesterday I got an unexpected call from my massage therapist. “Hey, I’m looking for Doug. He hasn’t shown up for his appointment yet and I can’t reach him on his phone. I’m just wondering if he’s lost.”

Lost? In Livingston? This was theoretically possible since it was his first appointment with her, but I thought I had provided adequate directions the night before when he asked me if I knew how to get to her house.

“Oh, she lives just down the street from Mary,” I said, with a wave of my hand as if that wave would fill in the necessary details.

“She said something about turning down an alley,” he muttered.

I should have known then that I needed to be more explicit.

He called me fifteen minutes after his appointment had passed and I asked, “What happened?”

‘”I’ve just spent a half hour driving around a three block area,” he said. I could tell he was frustrated. “I still don’t know where she lives. I finally flagged a woman down in her yard and asked her, ‘Do you know a woman named Allison? She’s petite? Blonde? She gives massages.’”

The woman denied knowing Allison even though they lived next door to each other. “Don’t you get it?” I laughed. ”She probably thought you were a stalker!”

“Especially since I drove around the block slowly for a half hour.”

Anyway, Doug had to reschedule his appointment because he was so late, and he’s certain to have started a neighborhood watch alert in the process, but this is not something that typically happens to him. It typically happens to me.

My sense of direction is literally nonexistent. When I have to guess, it’s almost always the wrong guess. I once got lost during a run where I only made two right turns, and ended up causing my in-laws to be late for their daughter’s wedding rehearsal dinner. 

 This happens to me all the time. In fact, I now have to deliberate over whether I should go the other way just because my intuition told me the opposite.

My mother has this problem (so it’s inherited), but she is absolutely sure she’s right when she’s telling you which way to turn while driving. “Right, turn right,” she commands, and you do it, and then you spend 15 minutes trying to get turned around so that you can go left again.

Whereas, my brother inherited my father’s directional gifts including a superhuman talent that enables him to find his way anywhere in any city around the world without a map. He’s like a walking GPS unit.What I could do with this power!

I, on the other hand, struggle to grasp the concept of north, south, east, and west. Right now, I am in terror of anyone asking me which way is north in Bozeman. Seriously.

 Combine this lack of direction with the unwillingness to ask for directions (my pride will not suffer such a fall) and you usually have a recipe for disaster. Let’s just say that I have to add in an extra half hour for any appointment at a new place, and I could use a GPS unit in my car. Doug wouldn’t need one if I gave better directions.

My friend Amy posted this on her facebook page and I had to steal it. She says it’s her favorite commercial of all time and I have to agree. This post is dedicated to my father, who is the ultimate cowboy cat herder in our family, especially when my mom is out of town. Truly, I watched it three times and laughed every time. Take a look and have yourself a laugh too.

I’m giving up watching male figure skating for Lent. It’s really not fair to make fun of them. Honestly, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel (not that I even think shooting fish in a barrel would be that easy, let alone fun to do, but you know what I mean).

But before I purge, I need to binge. Here’s a sample of our in-home commentary watching the Olympic male figure skating competition last night.

Doug says, “It’s hard to believe that’s a triple, huh?”

I say, “It’s hard to believe that’s a man.”

The real commentator says, “That was hot.”

I came of age in the era of Elvis Stojko and Kurt Browning, when male figure skaters still had some sex appeal to women. But sadly, things have changed, and I’m finding it more disturbing than sexy.

Last night I discovered that the new trend in male skating costumes are fancy gloves, the kind your grandmother wore to hide liver spots, not to keep her warm. If this wasn’t bad enough, some skaters wore oversized mittens, as if the skater suffered from chicken pox and needed to wear gloves to keep from scratching himself during the event.

Even the “most masculine” of the United States figure skaters, Evan Lysacek, wore gloves with feathers on them. When he put his hand up to his face he looked like he was holding a feathered fan. It wouldn’t surprise me if he wore a feather boa in the long competition tomorrow night.  

To keep cringeworthiness down, I think at least one judge should be completely dedicated to rating the costumes, and deductions should be given for any costume that inspires you to say things like, “I think he’s wearing a bodice. Is that a bodice?”

Close to the end of the competition, one skater appeared behind the rink to talk with his parents and from what I could see of his top half I thought he might provide some relief. He didn’t have his hair gelled, and his shirt was flannel. What I couldn’t see was the bottom half of his costume, which was meant to look like a carpenter’s overalls, only with one of the suspenders hanging uselessly by his side, making me think he was really going to put on a stripping show on ice.

Despite the temptation, the commentators largely ignored the flamboyant costumes and provided such wise directions to viewers as, “His costume looks overpowering. It almost looks burdensome for him, but look past that.” This was the man who was dressed like a medieval soldier in a ballet. He was wearing skates that looked like leather go-go boots. It’s hard to look past that, let alone at that.

But, one commentator summed up the evening perfectly with this statement,  ”He just rocked the tassle.” Yes, indeed, of that I’m sure.

After we watched the Winter Olympic opening ceremonies last night, I could hear Doug chuckling spontaneously for a couple of hours. He wasn’t laughing about the technical failures of the torch lighting (anyone who has ever had a powerpoint presentation fail on them right before the presentation feels sorry for all involved). He wasn’t laughing about Bob Costas and Matt Lauer’s comments that organizers discovered Canadian talent “at the circus” and “on YouTube” or that so many Canadians seem to be Scottish dancers recently released from prison.

Heck, he wasn’t even laughing about kd Lang, whose body was hidden somewhere in a giant white suit. By the way, just as an aside, if they were going to show someone while they were singing, why couldn’t it have been Joni Mitchell? I’m not sure that Joni was actually there, but I would have put her up on the stage if she was.

Anyway, back to Doug’s chuckles. He was really laughing at the look on Anne Murray and Bobby Orr’s face as a Canadian opera star ruined the Olympic Hymn and scared everyone involved. She looked and sang like a woman on fire. At least her hair looked like it was on fire. And I like Opera!  It was hilarious how uncomfortable all of the special Canadians holding the Olympic flag were. You could see they just wanted to lean over and say to the next person, “Can you believe this shit? I think she’s off her meds!”

I must admit, I cried during “We Are the World,” and the prairie dance to Joni Mitchell, and the moment of silence for the fallen Georgian athlete, but I also cried laughing over that Olympic Hymn. If that was a hymn, it might have scared a few people away from singing at church tomorrow. Wow!

I can’t even type the word “tradition” now without hearing the song from Fiddler on the Roof  and wanting to follow the first with another, louder, “Tradition!”

Last weekend I traveled to Canada for the second annual mother-daughter get-together over the Martin Luther King Jr. long weekend. This year’s entertainment highlight was an Off-Broadway production of Fiddler in Calgary.  I’ve been humming, “Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match! Find me a find!” ever since. It’s really hard to get those songs out of your head and I’m not kidding.

In the vein of traditions, Doug and I stopped at my parent’s ranch before heading north. A night at the ranch means a.) the early morning wakeup call from the rooster and chickens; b.) the real wakeup call from KSEN, the local radio station my parents listen to over breakfast. I woke up during the middle of the Swap-n-Bulletin board.

“This is Sharon, and we’d like to sell our dishwasher. It runs pretty good, but it has a little problem with the soap tray staying open — shouldn’t be too hard to fix. We’re asking $50 or your best offer.”

I put my pillow over my head. I’m not a morning person.

KSEN has always had an entertaining morning radio show, complete with a police report, a discussion with the local used car dealer, and a daily polka that my mother delighted dancing to just as the school bus pulled up in front of our picture window.  Talk about embarrassing!

Anyway, it woke me up in time for us to cross the border at a little border station manned by my least favorite border guard. This guard loves to come up with paranoid theories. Even though he has seen me a thousand times (okay, maybe not a thousand, but a lot) in past crossings he has rerouted me to a different border because he thought that my nephew wasn’t really my nephew, but a man I had married to help me declare Canadian citizenship after crossing the border (Real Story: My nephew was going home from college with a lot of stuff and I was going to a conference). He also detained Doug and I because he thought he had kidnapped me because our last names are not the same.  He took Doug inside to interrogate him and asked, “Who’s the girl?” in a threatening voice. Real Story: Doug and I were just married, without passports (no need for them yet) and on our way to a Bob Dylan concert.

Once we reached Cochrane, Alberta (our final destination) we melted off our border anxieties with a trip to the salon for a mother-daughter pedicure/manicure.

I was good and relaxed before the all-female let’s-help-our-friend-get-through-her-divorce party where we sampled (I’m not kidding) drinks called Sour Pusses. Did you know they have napkins for this kind of party? Awesome!

Canadian women are lovely, but I spent a good chunk of the party either getting attacked by the hostess’s cat (I thought the cat was purring when I petted it because I couldn’t hear over all the loud female voices, but it was actually growling at me), or trying to avoid talking to a Birther conspiracist about Barack Obama  (this was my sole contribution to MLK day).

Between the early morning chickens, KSEN, the Birther theories, and the Sour Pusses I ended up so exhausted that I had to lie down on the hostess’s couch to put my feet up, hoping that I could either fall asleep or convince the rest of my party that 10:00 wasn’t too early to go home.

On Sunday, Laura and I headed to Hot Yoga for a sweaty session of stretching (if you’re curious, hot yoga is like going to a yoga session conducted at a military boot camp in Florida in August but somehow relaxing). Then we all took quick showers before Fiddler, which was awesome (thank you Mom!), and finished the day up with a fried turkey dinner cooked up by the men in our life (and no, I’m not kidding about this either).

What else would you expect from my travels?

Word to the Wise: Don’t drink rum, then champagne, and then beer unless you want to end up singing both the Doxology and every lyric of Jon Bon Jovi’s greatest hits in one night. Not that the singing wasn’t enjoyable, but the morning after hurt me bad. I think it was the champagne.

The day of my friend Kayb’s wedding could be summed up by Billy Crystal’s famous Fernando character (think  Spanish accent). “It is better to look good than to feel good.”

Whereas, my impromptu birthday bash in front of the Jon Bon Jovi cover band was all about feeling good. Too good.

But, back to looking good. I used to think that men had no idea the torture women put themselves through to look beautiful.

But then after the wedding, when we were complaining about how our feet hurt, a friend of a bridesmaid told us that he could see our pain and we did look a little like, “cripples with severe hemorrhoid problems” walking up the aisle.

I certainly felt crippled after a day in heels and a dress that seemed to dig into me in all the most uncomfortable places on my body.

The pain began with the curling, ratting, twisting, and pinning of the hair. Then there was the underwear – which included itchy cheap pantyhose since none of us got the memo to bring black instead of nude hose and thus Kayb’s brother-in-law had to save the day (bless the man, buying ten pairs of pantyhose at a Walgreen’s is not exactly on the list of things to do to boost your male ego. Hopefully the store clerk didn’t think he was a pantyhose-obsessed tranny).

There were also the boobs — which in strapless outfits can be painfully smushed in several different torturous ways. Two bridesmaids managed to breastfeed while wearing it so I guess strapless had some advantages. Between the squeezing of my rib cage and the screams coming from the balls of my feet I think I felt more pain getting ready for that wedding than I did while running a half marathon.

Fortunately, the pain was for a good cause. The bride and groom are genuinely besotted with each other, and perfect for each other in every semi-strange way. Kayb’s quite petite (5′3″?) and he’s not much bigger (in fact, she said he’s only one inch taller). They looked like little wedding cake toppers together.

The clincher for me was his allergies. Kayb has an allergy to gluten, and has had friends (including me) and others in her life with many food sensitivies. So, she took it completely in stride that Will is deathly allergic to all foods derived from a cow (dairy and beef) and committed herself to a near-vegan-wheat-free existence for their marriage. Think a lifetime supply of chicken stir fry. Now that is love!

The gorgeous rehearsal dinner

Ocia, Kayb’s sister, made a delectable-looking gluten-free, dairy-free cake for the two of them to eat at the reception. Will couldn’t eat his Star Wars-themed groom’s cake (which actually looked like it could have doubled as a  Lord of the Rings Mordor cake). I’m just hoping they survive their Italian honeymoon. So much butter and cheese to avoid!

Cassie, one of the bridesmaids who actually is a southern belle, saved the day in so many ways. She made the stressed bride laugh with a throaty rendition of “Delta Dawn” and when she found out it was my birthday she came up with a plan to celebrate. She asked her friend Jimmy to make a stop at the liquor store and buy some rum shooters for us before the reception. We tossed them back behind the Christmas tree and it eased all of the pain and stress of the day away instantly.

After “buffeting it” — as they say in the South, at the reception, Cassie and Jimmy took me out to see the best Jon Bon Jovi cover band in Chattanooga (well, maybe all of the U.S. – who knows – I’ve never seen another Jon Bon Jovi cover band). The lead singer had had reconstructive surgery to look just like Jon so it only took a few beers for me to get my clogs a dancing while still in my bridesmaid’s dress (I shed the high heels) — playing air guitar and singing “Living on a Prayer” at the top of my voice. All I can say is, those southerners sure know how to show a girl a good time on her birthday.

P.S. I didn’t take photos of the actual wedding, because I was in it, so y’all will have to wait for Kayb to return from the honeymoon for the wedding photos to appear.