Breaking: Pot Smells!

Finally, after five years of living in Vermont, Dr. Moo came face-to-face with some Maryjane. It's safe to say that dairy farmers aren't keeping the pot industry in business in the Green Mountain State; neither are college professors, another group the Moo hangs out with on a semi-regular basis.

It's more college students and aging hippies, neither of which were around the weed that Moo was around. I'm not going to tell you who Moo was around because-well, come on.

And no, Moo of course did not inhale or even so much as touch a pipe to her lips. (Though she did say the pipe was pretty.) It's the secondhand smoke she found stinky.

Thankful

Another Turkey Day has come and gone and I am thankful for several things. I learned a new phrase from cousin Michelle. When she saw the big green ring I was wearing she asked if I was wearing it to keep my pimp hand strong. I correctly surmised the reason for keeping a pimp hand strong: ho-slappin'.

Despite my advanced age, I am still relevant.

I purchased a new vacuum cleaner on Black Friday at Tarzhay. It was normally $45.00 but marked down to $28.00. I'd been sucking up the incredible volume of hair and fur one long-haired kitty and one even longer-haired lady generate with a stick vacuum I bought six years ago whose handle had been twice Gorilla-Glued and whose sucky suckability meant I spent a half-hour or more vacuuming one hall and one living room but still had to get down on my hands and knees to rub the hair up from the carpet with a sponge.

But no more! The $28.00 model sucked up a whole bunch of ick, and in a see-through container for viewing the fruits of your labors and a flip-down lid so you don't have to touch them. I was so excited I started calling people but as it was a Friday night, nobody was home.

Finally, I am thankful for this:

When I was on the porch loading my plate with turkey for my nine-o'clock feeding I noticed Ethel the Spectacular Barn Kitty was watching me through the door to the barn. I went inside and grabbed one of PolackPappy's shirts because E the SBK is a bit of a violent cuddler. She likes to knead her sharp paws into your thigh while rubbing her face up and down your arm and smooshing it in your armpit, drooling in ecstasy all the while. I gave her pats for a good 20 minutes, and then left the shirt on the floor for her because it was warm from my lap and it was cold in the barn.

The next morning McMumsy informed me E the SBK had left me a gift, seen above, placement of the body courtesy of Ethel.

I need more grace and flowers

It's a time of changes in the McPolack family. We are in a baby-having arc in the circle of life, the second (well, third, really, if you count when I was born) I've experienced, and I am grateful because in the next cycle my aunts and uncles, and my parents, die. That's how it works.

As I must whine about things to get them out of my system, I would like to call the whambulance because I hate the holidays right now. McMumsy would tell me that I hate the holidays every year and she is right. But this year is worse! Waaaa! I do not have a baby, and neither does my sister, and she lives in Vermont anyway, which means there are no babies nearby for me to get my hands on. And if things go as they have been, there never will be. I wish I had a husband with a lot of siblings who had a lot of kids so that I could recreate the holidays of my youth. But the past is easy to make rosy, especially when you were a kid for most of it. I know for a fact things weren't as wonderful as that jumble of family felt.

I also know that relationships can sour, irrevocably, even much later on in life.

So that sucks.

Really I think what I'm up against is a hill. Life is all about climbing hills. At the top of one hill is another one, of course, but the view gets better.

This weekend I discovered Mumford and Sons and g-d are they amazing. I like this set of lyrics especially...

get over your hill and see what you find there/with grace in your heart and flowers in your hair

Great Care Has Been Taken...

...is what it says on the back of some paratha I purchased at the Indian grocery store and they are not kidding. The final thing that impressed me about the food is the writing. While the marketing department unfortunately fell victim to the Mistaken Idea That Capitalizing Every Word Makes Things Classier, their word choice is in fact classy enough without initial caps. They took the time to select adjectives like "convenient alternative to time consuming(they forgot the hyphen but it's OK) and tedious work." Or how about gentle & even pressure? Or this sentence: It Is Generally Enjoyed With Yogurt and Indian Pickles. They didn't capitalize the "and" which makes me think they're shirking a bit on the proofreading front, but other than that, wow!

Further Frozen Indian Food

Had to go to the LNFU and couldn't finish the post prior to this one. I am grateful for the job but I am having a hard time making time to write. The blog, believe it or not, takes time and forethought and research. I don't like just throwing stuff up on it. Although today I considered storing my notes about the Europe trip on here just so I wouldn't lose the memories. For example, I was walking back from getting some apples from my favorite Polish apple farmer when I saw a guy with weird-looking shoes. They reminded me of some shoes Cousin B and I saw in a store window in Cologne.

Those shoes were long and flat and black and shaped at the front like pieces of pizza that suffered a McMumsy attack. On pizza night at the McPolack homestead, McMumsy will eat a couple of regular pieces of pizza and announce that she is full. But she is not really full. If you decide to eat your pizza later you may find the tips have been cut off and consumed by McMumsy. She'll go a good two inches up. It's a little infuriating.

(Her sneakeating of the tastiest morsels of things isn't confined to pizza. Sometimes when you're eating her fluffy-haired face will appear over your shoulder and then a hand sneaks in-zoop!-and the tastiest bit of whatever's on your plate disappears down her piehole. This is followed by a giggle.)

Anyhoo, I later spotted those detipped-pizza-slice shoes on the feet of a Tmobile salesguy, also in Cologne.

And now I've gone completely off-topic. I'll write more on the Indian food later.

Frozen indian food

An Indian grocery store recently moved in to a building right next to the Basket. I was glad to see them, although a little nervous since apparently the Basket fought them tooth and nail-not because of the financial competition, but because of the parking competition.

Anyhoo, they seemed to have worked something out, and there are signs up saying you'll get towed if you park in the Basket spots, but I get around this by going to the Basket first.

The point of all this is that I found some really durn tasty frozen Indian food. I started off with some chapati and it was so good that yesterday I went back and bought two more bags, along with paratha, spinach pakora, and more. I'm considering checking out the pickles next.

Breaking!

So, Prince William is engaged. It was, naturally, all over the morning news. Unlike the tacky, disturbing, commercialized Disney characters, the princess figure when I was a little girl was William's mother. I remember well waking up-and I was 7, so it was early-to find McMumsy and Auntie P watching the royal wedding live on the telly. And I remember coming home to news from McMumsy that Diana had died.

Anyhoo, in an interesting twist, Auntie P's own son finally proposed to his girlfriend after many years, just three days ago. I'm sure that's what prompted William to take the plunge. :)

It's getting harder and harder to come up with decent titles

I'm just sayin'.

Anyhoo I am feeling rather full of feelings these days. Sadness, anger, anxiety, worry. I think it's probably time I went back into therapy. In other McPolack news, I took my third crazy-ass movement class today. It's 90 minutes of things like moves the KGB uses to prepare themselves for jumping out of the trunks of cars and shooting people, and exercises Tibetans use to promote immortality. It's a nice balance: I am prepared either for the shooting or, if I am the shootee, survival.

Everyone else who takes the class is a dancer, it seems, although there is one flabby older dude who sometimes takes off his shirt, and one slightly flabby lady in her 40s who paired up with me in partner exercises today. This made me happy because I did not want to press myself against a shirtless man's gut nor did I want to crush one of the tiny women with my gigantic Polishness.

One key discovery I made whilst doing the partner exercises is just how far I've gone into self-reliance. We were supposed to tuck our head into the side of our partner (or so I thought), who was on hands and knees, and then flip ourselves up into a handstand and over them into a backbend. (It's kind of hard to explain.) I was thinking are you f'ing kidding me and was feeling very out of shape until the teacher came over and explained I was supposed to lean most of my weight into the other person.

I don't lean even an eyelash into others these days, physically, metaphorically or otherwise, without feeling guilty and/or bad. All I can think about is how I can I stop needing anything from anybody. So the idea of letting a total stranger support very nearly all of me just didn't occur to me, and I kept failing at the exercise until I realized that allowing myself to be almost completely supported was the only way to do it right.

Animal husbandry

Dr. Moo called Friday wondering when I'd be arriving, and worrying that Mr. Moo might be in a bad mood. Why? Because there was a sick calf in a Rubbermaid tub in their living room. The calf-who, if all went according to plan, would be dinner in three months' time-"keeps trying to die," said my sister. She'd had him on IV fluids, was holding his head up so he could nurse, and when she discovered his temp was low she decided he'd be better off inside by the woodstove.

Fortunately, Mr. Moo did not get mad. Unfortunately the little fellow did not make it.

But his two friends are doing just fine:

What I did/saw/learned this weekend in Addison County

Did
Ate chunks off a nine-pound block of cheddar cheese that was a Vermontah's wedding present.

Saw
Watched one of Chino the cow's teats squirt milk every time her bag (this is what Dr. Moo called it) hit her back leg and she ran for the gate. Thump-squirt! Thump-squirt! Thump-squirt!

Learned
When you're loading 50 bales of hay from a hayloft into a truck and you see a clump of turkey feathers with some meat still attached on one bale, and then a mess of feathers from a much smaller bird on another, this isn't from birds getting caught in the baler. It's from owls and hawks flying on into the barn and using the hay bales as dinner tables.

Family Gossip Line

Cousin Molls called last night when she heard I wouldn't be at Thanksgiving (owing to the babies). She wanted to know how the Europe trip went. We chatted for almost an hour and it was not nearly enough time to catch up on all that is in the Mc side of McPolack. We did discuss the new babies and I asked Molls if she would have skipped Thanksgiving if she had a newborn and she said no but then we're not her in-laws. Also, her mother hosts.

But when I told Molls about how I let my niece suck on my finger she was horrified. She said when her child was little she wouldn't have let ANYONE stick a finger in his mouth. And then I remembered ah, yes, cousin Molls became a bit of a freakazoid when her kid was born.

As OSB wisely noted, babies make everyone crazy. What power they have! I am much, much bigger and also smellier, but my crazy-making abilities pale in comparison.

Which is a good thing.

Two McPolack Half-Breeds

Met my brother's babies yesterday, a bit shy of their 24-hour birthday mark. They are of course more than just McPolack owing to their momma being of a different mix of nationalities. Really what they are is American. (Though the commie pinko leftist socialist hippie in me wants to say United Statesian.)

I've always loved me some nice warm baby and these two did not disappoint. My nephew is about 1.5 pounds smaller than my niece (neither have names yet) and was sleeping when I met him. He made gurgly sounds and twitched beneath his blanket burrito like a little kitty. My niece was awake and kicking her feet and, post-diaper change, squawling and pissed. I felt an immediate kinship to her. As she lay in my arms sucking furiously on my index finger I thought honey, I feel your pain. This spiritual plane of existence really blows sometimes.

But there's good stuff in it, too, of course. I didn't get to hold my nephew as long as I would have liked owing to McMumsy being a baby-snatcher and terrible backseat baby driver who I believe would have her grandchildrens' bums wiped by autoclaved vestial virgins using organic cotton loomed by unicorns (and I am only exaggerating slightly), but I got to spend a fair amount of time with my niece. And there may as well have been nobody else in the room because it was all about that little moppet. I snuggled her and stroked her wee arm and whispered to her until she drifted off to sleep.

Oh did my ovaries ache.