Adventures with Hodgkin's

Look How Clever I Was!

I was a budding ironist from the get-go. You'll have to take my word for it--I took some of my dad's old office stationery and my mom's manual typewriter and penned this memo regarding the addition to our household of a new cat. And I do believe I made both cats sit in the room with me while I typed this up.

Can I attest that the mis-spelling of "ingenious" was intentional? Isn't the overuse of exclamation points merely a precursor to the same overuse in emails?

What else from my youth will my mother dig out and digitize for me? A certain series of love letters where the sender used "lick" instead of "like"? Oh, MySpace users ten years in the future, I feel your pain.

Labels: Kidding Around

It's Wrong! Just Wrong!

This is even worse than ordering "ice tea". But grammar aside, I like iced tea, but only if it's real iced tea, the stuff that's brewed. I will ask, before ordering in a restaurant, if their iced tea is brewed. Most places it isn't, it's that hideous reconstituted piped in stuff. But at this restaurant I didn't have to ask--I could see the iced tea dispenser, the enormous metal cylinder that they pour the freshly-brewed iced tea into. (Okay, I worked in restaurant, so it's also the left-over tea from the walk-in cooler.)

But this is an abomination--it's a fake. It merely dispenses the reconstituted crap! Who do they think they're fooling? Not me--not after the first time, anyway.

My love of real iced tea came from the many, many, not-so-hot restaurants in Texas that managed to make their own iced tea. Which reminds me of one of my favorite Top Chef moments--guest judge Rick Bayless chastised contestant for the brick-like consistency of their Velveeta macaroni and cheese. "Obviously, you've never worked with Velveeta before."

I may not know a merlot from a zinfandel if I can't see the label, but I know when my tea is brewed.

Labels: So San Francisco

Anal-Retentive IS Hyphenated

This is a bad sign. This is something that's going to make me crazy. See, I'm the kind of mom who thinks that a toy needs ALL of its pieces in order to be a toy, and a toy that sits on a shelf with all of its pieces is a better toy than one that's been played with and has been spread hither and yon. The missing die from the Boggle game will haunt me and keep me awake. Where could it be?

When Conor was a toddler, one of his favorite games was trash man. He'd take his toys, dump them into the wastebasket, and dump the wastebasket onto the sofa. And I'd dutifully SEPARATE THE TOYS BACK INTO THEIR RESPECTIVE BINS before he did it again. He didn't care--in fact, all my sorting slowed his game down. (The game did not include scooping the toys back into the wastebasket; one of us had to put the toys back into their bins for him to dump into the wastebasket and subsequently dump onto the sofa. Why, oh why, did I spend the time making sure the wooden blocks went into their bin, the Duplos went into their bin, the balls went into their bin?

Because I know anal-retentive has a hyphen and I know how to use it.

Labels: Kidding Around

Another Sign of the Apocalypse

Seriously, do you really need to BUY bags? I know that us crazy San Franciscans can't get plastic bags at the grocery store anymore, but you can get them everywhere else--corner store, drug store, book store, etc. There doesn't seem to be any shortage of bags, and who is so damn lazy that can't reuse a bag?

Of course, I may be biased. I've become one of those people that brings their own bags. To the grocery store, to the drug store, to the books store, even to Target. I carry spare bags with me. Have I become insufferable? Target is the only place where they look at you weird--everywhere else in San Francisco they've gotten in the habit of asking about your bags--do you have bags? Do you want a bag? And at the crunchiest of places, "Do you want a bag" is loaded with meaning--bags are for Land-Rover-Driving, baby-seal-bludgeoning red-state-idiots. Do. You. Want. A. Bag?

Labels: So San Francisco