The Win

My dog Omar likes to walk around the house with a big rawhide chew sticking out of the corner of his mouth like a giant cigar. The Winston Churchill look, no longer fashionable and not much seen outside of male-only dinners. So, I call Omar 'Winnie' at those moments. As often happens, this concept has rearranged itself and now the chew is called 'Win'. Not so hard to understand, I guess. Almost logical process. Nobody in my family seems to be able to let language alone.

Someone wished a dog off on us many years ago. The dog was part shepherd,and then several dozen other varieties. He was almost full grown and had been spending his day time shut in a bathroom because of an unlovable tendency to chew shoes and clothing. When the young couple who had adopted him as an adorable puppy stopped playing house, nobody wanted the dog. He had been named 'Zoom'. He was extremely uncertain about his place in the order of things.

I was the person who fed dogs around my house, so I became Zoom's hero. To show his appreciation, he would rear up on his back legs like a horse. Without delay, he was nicknamed 'Horsey'. That became 'Horsey Woozus' or just 'Woozus'. Even after he was way too arthritic to stand on his back legs pawing the air and too deaf to respond to any of his many names, he continued as the Woozus. I didn't think I'd miss him when he was gone but I do, incontinence and all.

I'm thinking 'These are the good times' should be my mantra. Why not fly in the face of all adversity?

Keep on WINNING

It rained REALLY hard in California this week. That's kinda rare, so we pay attention when it happens. Because of, you know, floods and mudslides and the inexorability of advancing water.

My basement, which is made of some kind of composite that I would think of as clamshell and clay except that it's probably pebbles and clay. I can't look at it without seeing the odd curves and imagining them swaying, as water makes cracks and seeps through. Home owning is definitely for risk takers and, now that I'm getting old, risk seems less enticing than ever and ever wasn't much.

A week or so ago, we saw part of Bucket List, by accident. Because there was absolutely nothing else watchable, in all the 145 or so channels that was worth a spit. Because Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman? How bad could it be? Well, the devil's in the writing, folks, if not in the directing, and you had to accept a lot of perfectly unacceptable, unimaginable premises in order to go with this movie, which was still relatively pleasant.
Okay, Bucket list. My best friend is sit/lying in a bed across the Bay, waiting to breathe her last. If she put April in Paris on her BL, it would be a crap shoot whether she'll even be around, come April. Could she fly to Paris with her breathing apparatus? Would any hotel offer her space, when she arrived from the airport in an ambulance? That's if she'd been allowed on - or off - the airplane in the first place.
No, her list will need to be small homey things. A morning with her brand new grandchild, watching the chard and crocuses grow in her back yard. The taste of Burmese food on her tongue. She can't eat anymore, since swallowing became a problem and she had the tracheotomy but she longs for taste. Quietude, which is only achieved by shutting off the machines which are keeping her alive. How I wish I was making this up. How I'd love to have her rip out the tubes, stand up, sweep out of the house, flop into the front seat of somebody's car and demand a latte, large, double, full fat, chocolate sprinkles and a whiff of cinnamon, before we go play with clay at her studio and head to a Thai place for lunch.
Why is it, again, that we elders are supposed to fear death panels? Do we think there's some other result possible?

WINNING!

That's how far I got last time, a little rant on WINNING!!! And just to lively things up, along came Warlock Charlie Tiger Blood Sheen, to define and redefine what makes a winner. And he'll tour the country, sharing his secrets with lucky us for only $25 or so per ticket. Is he on a personal mission to evaluate the quality of designer drugs, coast to coast? What a sacrificial lamb! I'm really tired of his snarkiness - can't even watch 2 and 1/2 anymore, though I used to think it was fairly funny. Sometimes.
Now I wish he's shut up and go home. Go brood on the mountaintop. Have a conversion experience. Take a long, long walk off a short pier.

I guess it's good to have that kind of trainwreck happen, in the midst of the other disasters piling up. I think the tsunami upstaged Charlie, though. Bigtime, if only because Charlie couldn't think of anything new to say. Did he even check in on Japan? If he had would it have been so appallingly inappropriate that we'd have to censure him? Why is it that, when you have boatloads of money, you can act out in public all you want and nobody shoots you with a tranquillizer dart and hauls you away in a straitjacket?

I'm not really interested in my X-DIL this week. I don't know if I ever was but I've spent much unrecoverable time trying to figure out her shtick. She's post-McLuhan, for sure: sound bite baby, leave out the adjectives and probably the verbs and she's off and running. Once she wrote a letter to PETA, to tell them how proud she was of her husband (my son) because he did not support the use of animals in medical experiments. Gonna shine in that reflected glory!

I did chuckle the other day, walking home from our upscale corner grocery with a bag full of corned beef and cabbage (yes, we did eat it on St. Paddy's day, baked, with honey mustard and carmelized cabbage) when I realized I could send her a note thanking her for the invitation to Two's bar mitzvah (which we haven't gotten and don't expect) and affirming that we will see her there. Maybe she'd talk Two into calling it off. Rumor has it that he wants to. Wanna start a pool as to whether she'd respond in any direct way? And another pool as to whether she'd actually invite me or tell me to take a flying F?