Category: awkward

A Cacophony of Noms

Over this past weekend, The Good Man and I got together to celebrate a belated Mother’s Day with my in-laws. It’s always nice to have a chance to catch up with family.

The place we chose to eat was a nice hotel with a Sunday buffet brunch and a live jazz trio to add ambiance.

The family all got dressed up and converged on the hotel. The jazz was lovely. The setting sublime. Mimosas were poured. Chatter happened. Then the waiter said “go ahead and get started” and we were off to wander around the wonderland of food.

I have to admit that at first I could only stumble about with an empty plate. I was both surprised and astounded by all the food.

Prime rib and pancakes, sushi and dim sum, a huge table of seafood of all varieties! And that was only the beginning.

One part of me was like “Yeah baby!” I could easily envision myself much like Cookie Monster, shoveling it all in there while grunting “ahm nom nom nom nom!”

But another part of me was almost turned off by the literal piles of food. Good lord! So much food! A first world problem, to be sure.

After walking around in a daze, I finally dove in. I made the conscious decision NOT to lay right down and devour the entire dessert table (it was tempting). Instead I chose only the things I knew for sure I’d like and in small amounts. I had to remind myself that I could return for more if needed. That ol’ demon self-control.

I think the key to a buffet is if you take something you don’t really care for…don’t eat it. Yes, I know for many the idea of wasting food is terrible, but in this scenario, it’s almost necessary.

In the past, I’ve had occasion to think about the “I have to get my money’s worth out of the buffet!” concept. This plagues a lot of people and causes the desire to eat as much as possible. This is fairly common, actually. I’ve personally succumbed to this thought.

To be honest, the cost of the buffet is less about how much one can eat and more about how many choices the establishment is able to provide. It costs money to have enough people to put on a spread like that.

A buffet is certainly a deliciously dangerous place for a food lover like me, but it’s also a boon for a food lover. A buffet provides a huge range of choices that I’d just never get with a traditional sit down and order off the menu type of meal.

It’s all about balance.

At the end of the day, the intent was to be with family, not Cookie Monster the entire meat carving station. Though the thought did cross my mind…





I’ve Got A Secret

In one of those weird things that sticks with you over the years…

I remember that some dear friends of our family always subscribed to New Mexico Magazine. We’d go visit their beautiful adobe home in the Valley, and when the adult conversation would bore me, I’d pick up that magazine and flip through the pages.

New Mexico Magazine gave me a view on my home state that was much different than what I knew. I’d stare and stare at those amazing full color photographs of Native American jewelry, or locations around the state, or blue sky and clouds.

It was like my New Mexico, only better. I used to devour that magazine cover to cover.

When I became an adult, I started subscribing to New Mexico Magazine for myself. After my move to California, the magazine helped me get through pangs of homesickness. I’d dog ear pages of photos and articles that made me happy.

New Mexico Magazine has been a fixture in my life as long as I can remember. Today, I know something that the kid sitting on the floor in a beautiful adobe home in the Valley didn’t know.

I’ve been keeping a secret. I didn’t want to say too much in case it didn’t work out.

Now the secret can be told. I have permission to share my Very Big News:

I wrote three articles that have been accepted for publication in New Mexico Magazine.

Let me just pause here before I pass out.

Ok, I’m back.

The first article is slated for the June issue. Due out soon!

The other two are planned for the September/October timeframe. Since the magazine is undergoing some changes to the editorial staff, it’s a bit up in the air. I hope to know more soon.

All gratitude to Associate Editor Ashley Biggers (@ambiggers on Twitter) for opening the conversation and working with me through this process. She has a talent for developing writers, and I’m grateful for her patience.

I’m already working on a couple more ideas for upcoming articles. There is so much to know and explore about New Mexico that I’m excited to share.

This is a pretty big honor for a little girl from New Mexico.

Join me now in an epic rendition of the Happy Dance!






To properly celebrate, I wore my Fat Babies to work today. New Mexico in da hoouuuse!


Image from Yippee Farms


There’s a Sucker Born Every Minute

Yesterday at work, I printed a Very Important Document to the shared color printer down the hall. As my company is as cheap as possible, we’re not to use the color printer except for VERY Important Documents, so this was a very big deal.

As I waited for the dulcet tones of the finicky color printer processing my job, a message popped up on my screen. The printer manager was reporting that the “Waste Receptacle is Full”

Um. Ok. I didn’t know printers came with their own waste receptacle, but fine.

I walked to the printer and following the directions on its tiny LED screen. I opened the right flap. I pulled out “tray B”, and emptied tray B of a gooey black tarlike substance, replaced tray B, closed the flap, and heard the printer begin to warm up.

Ah, here we go. My beautiful full color document is just moments away!

“Printer warming up….”

So I waited. And waited. I wondered if I should wrap a sweater around the poor thing because it was clearly really cold if it needed twenty minutes to warm up. I mean, it’s hot like the bowels of hell hot inside our HVAC impaired office, but this little color printer must have a metabolism issue.

When it was finally reporting it had imbibed a hot toddy and was raring to go, I listened again for the sounds of the machine working, filled with happy anticipation.

Another message popped up on my screen. This time is said “Toner is low. Please replace.”

*sigh*

Fine.

Back I went to the machine and again followed the directions on screen. I lifted the main assembly, figured out which toner compartment was low, dropped several blocks of wax toner into the slot, thus using up the last of the supply, and closed the lid.

While the machine drank another hot toddy and shivered its way back to health, I took the empty box over to the group admin so she could order more.

Finally, the printer shuddered and shook and petulantly spit out my document.

This morning I needed to scan a document. Well that requires the big multiplex copier, printer, scanner, fax, coffee maker, photo booth, lube oil and filter change machine in the breakroom and shared by the whole floor.

I figured I was safe…this was just a scan. No toner or paper or other consumables would be required on this one! Scan, send. Easy peasy!

Nope.

I walk to the printer, lay my document in the feeder and immediately a message pops up on the screen.

“Scans may not be clear due to dirt on the lens. Please follow the directions below.”

So I followed the directions and I opened and shut doors and flaps, and found a little wiping tool and I slid it down the lens and then I cleaned the whole damn thing up and shut the doors and flaps and waited the twenty minutes and finally got my freaking scan.

The machines. They know. Evidently no one else on the floor will give them TLC, but I will. They line up and come to me for blessings, ministrations and tending to their wounds.

I’m Mother Teresa of Xeroxistan.






Image is a still from the fabulous movie Office Space.


And Then There Was The Time…

So after having a confession yesterday about my snake flinging incident, commenter Andy D mentioned that if I’d slung the snake directly onto instead of simply near my mom, that likely I’d remember the conclusion of that story a lot differently.

Which reminded me of yet another story that took place at that family vacation house near Ute Lake.

My dad was an avid hunter and we always had guns in the house. Since my dad didn’t want us to be either scared or a little too curious about the guns, he made sure we all knew how to shoot each and every one.

On the small bit of property we owned in Cuba, New Mexico, there was a tree that had been felled by lightening. It was a huge tree, and it made a really good location for target practice. Whenever we’d go camping, my dad would bring along guns and each kid (and mom too) all had to take a turn. Dad supervised while we learned to load and shoot the gun.

I was shooting my dad’s deer rifles from a young age. All this is by way of saying that I grew up fairly comfortable around guns.

So ok.

My brother had himself a BB gun when he was a teenager, and when he went off to college, that BB gun was left at the Lake House. For a while, around age 12 or so, I adopted that BB gun as my own. It had seen better days, but it worked fine and there was a big box of BBs available for my “ping!” pleasure.

I liked to shoot the gun mainly for the sound of the BBs pinging off the side of something like the old metal sided chicken coop.

Not the most ambitious of kids, was I.

On the property was a telephone pole. For reasons I still don’t fully understand, that telephone pole was covered in a very thick layer of tar. When the baking heat of a New Mexico summer day would get going, that tar would soften into a gooey mess.

So in my eleven year old mind, I had the brilliant idea that if I shot BBs at the tar covered pole, they’d stick. Wouldn’t that be so cool?

I filled the BB gun full to the brim and got to work out back shooting at that pole from a fair distance. I wanted to make it sporting. Now, hitting a decently narrow pole from a good distance is tougher than you may think. Or at least it was for me. What I lacked in aim, I made up for with single minded focus.

Well, so there I was, pumping BB’s in the general direction of the telephone pole, and my mom, wearing shorts and a sleeveless shirt, was working out in the back yard pulling weeds.

You can see where this is headed, right?

Sure enough, it was only a matter of time before I pulled the trigger, my aim was a bit off the mark and I…

Yes, I did.

I shot my mom in the arm.

She was, as the saying goes, mad as a wet hen. Quickly enough, a big red welt began rising on her right arm.

Let me just tell you this: I was no longer allowed the use of that BB gun. I was done. For good.

Flinging a snake? I got off easy. Shooting my mom? My oh my. I was in quite a bit of trouble which included a “talking to” from my dad.

That’s never good.

And so in the course of two blog posts, I’ve created quite the Mother’s Day meme.


(I did not, in fact, shoot my eye out. I shot my mom. Whoops.)



Photo is a still from the movie, “A Christmas Story.”


I’m Not Really Sure What Happened There

So I got to thinking about snakes the other day.

(What a way to start a blog post)

It started with this amazing photograph of a cotton mouth in the damp pine plantations of North Carolina.

Which got me thinking about how much I really, really don’t like snakes. I mean, I’m not out to cause them harm, but I really deeply, profoundly dislike snakes.

Which makes it tricky to be a little ol’ girl from New Mexico raised right smack dab in the middle of all sorts of robust desert wildlife.

By way of example….Scorpions? Ffft. I don’t like ’em but they don’t bother me that much. I dislike spiders but tarantulas don’t bug me terribly. I mean, I stay away, but whatever.

But there’s something about snakes. I don’t care if it’s “just an ol’ harmless bullsnake,” I’m NOT ok.

So this presented some, how would you call it, issues, during my summers spent in the rural paradise of Logan, New Mexico.

Logan, located a bit up and to the right of Tucumcari, is home to Ute Lake. My folks bought a mobile home that had the wheels taken off and it was placed permanently on a concrete pad.

We called this tin tube our “Lake House.” It sounded kind of grand to say that my family had themselves an honest to goodness lake house.

During the hot Albuquerque summers, with three kids bouncing off the walls, my folks would plan a getaway to the lake. We’d usually get to go for at least a week at a time.

It was great to get out of the city and clomp up and down dirt roads. My mom would slacken up the Maternal Grip and let us run around on our own. It was great.

But since where our little house was located was truly rural, no paved roads, open lots, shrubs, tall grass and the guy across the road was a gentleman farmer, this all added up to, you know…snakes.

Many is the day I’d be meandering down the dirt road, my flip-flops both flipping and flopping, and I’d spy the last bit of a snake slithering off into the dry grass. I wouldn’t stop to assess what exactly kind of snake that was, I’d simply take off running.

You gotta know something about me: I’m not a runner. This ample body wasn’t build for speed. I’m more of a cruiser than a racer, ifyouknowwhatImean.

But just the whiff of a snake on the wind and I’d best Carl Lewis in his prime getting back to the house.

So all of this is to lay the groundwork as a positively perpendicular view to the event that has been on my mind.

While visiting The Lake, one of my main daily activities was swimming in said lake. All day, every day it was “mom, when are we going to the water? Mom? Mom? MOOOOM!”

I loved swimming in that lake. Before leaving Albuquerque, Mom would buy us each an inflatable swim mattress at the local K-Mart which was supposed to last the season, or longer if possible.

These vinyl mattresses often fell victim to the vast amount of underwater branches and stuff in the lake.

See…in 1963 a dam was built which created the lake. When the water rose, a lot of trees and underbrush were covered up, making swimming both a skosh dangerous and a little interesting.

In addition, the water in the lake isn’t exactly clear. It’s a nice muddy brown all of the time, so running aground in my hot pink swim mattress because I couldn’t see what was below wasn’t unusual.

So there on a hot summer day in something like the month of August, I was swimming and flopping and splashing and having fun. I was in the water but draped sideways across the mattress, kicking my feet below when suddenly I noticed very small greenish brown snake come swimming by. Like, right at me.

And in my abject fear of snakes, they are all rattlers to me.

I jerked back and got out of its way, but in those three seconds the following things went through my eight year old mind:

1. There is a snake in the water!
2. If it goes underwater it might bite my leg!
3. If it goes underwater it might bite my butt!
4. If it goes underwater it might bite both my leg and my butt!
5. I should just ignore it, it’ll probably swim away.
6. But then I won’t know where it is!!! (see points 2, 3 and 4)

What happened next is something I still don’t fully understand.

I reached out, grabbed the hind end of this little snake, and I gave it a fling towards land. I may or may not have screamed “gaaaaghhghhh” as I did so.

Evidently I had a good arm back in the day, cuz I got a pretty good Tim Lincecum whipping action going and that baby snake traveled a good long distance, clearing the ten feet of water and a good eight feet of land. It bounced off the bluff and landed somewhere nearby my mother who was on a towel on shore, reading a book.

Uh oh.

So I hysterically informed my mother that I’d slung a snake her way, and she admonished me, but reported that she’d seen the offender slither on up the bluff and disappear into the grass.

The immediate danger was over, but I never could get comfortable again that day.

It wasn’t until later that night that the gravity of the situation really came home to roost. I’d actually touched a freaking snake? Oh. My. Gawd.

Whatever in the world possessed me, I’ll never be able to comprehend. I’d never do it again, I’m fairly sure.

I get an involuntary convulsive shudder just remembering it.





Photo found at Waymarking.com