Month: May 2010

Climbing Mt. Hood, Part 2

On May 10, 2010

After almost six hours of stair stepping, the final stragglers in the group (me, an 18 year old Japanese exchange student named Koz, a guy in his late 20’s, and the poor guide who had to stay behind for us slow pokes) arrived at the part of the mountain that made this an official “technical” climb – where being roped together would save our lives. It was a straight up sheer cliff of ice about 20 feet tall that we needed to plant our feet in the toe holes and hold on for our very lives. I was terrified. But I was roped to these guys and I had to go. It went fast because there was a line of people behind us, and the lead guy set the pace. This was Andrew, and he was as scared as I was. He wanted to get the heck done with it.

After we survived the Cliff of Terror, we had only a few steps to go before we reached the top. When we got there, we saw the other 20 people in our group, plus about 80 more crazy people. It was 8:30 in the morning. I was exhausted and just shy of the point of passing out and already dreading the climb back down, plus I had to pee. All that stopping for drinks of water caught up with me. I don’t mean to be indelicate here, but next time you look up at a snowcapped mountain, see if there’s a bush or a tree up there. There’s not a one. I was in a panic, because as miserable as every muscle and joint in my body were, my bladder was worse off. I had to go.

In case you ever find yourself in this situation with a hundred people around and nowhere to hide, here’s what you do. You move a little down slope of the crowd. It’s about 15 degrees, but take your coat off anyway, lie on your back in the snow, arrange your coat discreetly over your midsection, wiggle out of the three layers of clothes that have not been enough to keep you warm (despite what the guides said) and relieve yourself for as long as it took Austin Powers when he was first awakened after being cryogenically frozen for 20 years. This may take a full ten minutes, depending on how many water/rest stops you’ve took. Breathe a huge sigh of relief, and then move a little sideways (remember, you’re still lying down on a fairly steep incline), struggle back into your clothes, put your coat back on, and pretend you don’t know a thing about the steaming yellow river cutting little snow valleys into the snow as it flowed down the mountain right beside you. I’m sure this information will come in handy for you someday.

After all the agony of getting to the summit, nobody stays at the top for long. It’s freezing up there! Plus, even though the view is breathtaking, you can only look out over the vast empty plains and mountain peaks for so long, and then it’s blasé. Seriously. You look at Mt. Rainier and The Three Sisters and Mt. Bachelor for a few minutes; then you’ve seen it. I’ve noticed in movies that the people who reach the summit of Mt. Everest don’t linger around either, and I bet they can see more than we could.

Getting down, for the most part, was more fun than going up. Having a baby and getting a root canal at the same time without drugs is more fun than going up. Going down, you get to slide part of the way. It’s got a technical name, glaceeing, but it’s basically taking out the plastic garbage bag you put in your backpack and sitting on it. Gravity does the lion’s share of the work, but there’s danger in this simple act, too. I saw Kos go sliding at 250 mph straight toward a smoking, belching, stinking sulfur pit that probably went straight to the core of the earth. Luckily our guides had gone over “self arrest” where you roll over and dig your ice pick into the snow to stop sliding. Kos frantically did this repeatedly before he stopped on the edge of the foul pit, and then he had to climb all the way back up to the Hogsback, the narrow ridge we were on.

The guide who herded us slower ones to the top kept telling us we needed to hurry. We ignored him as we were trudging upward, but I found out why he was so insistent as we made our descent. When the sun beats down on the snow, even when it’s cold, the surface starts to soften and get slushy. Gravity and the slush duke it out, but the slush wins and you are no longer able to slide. Plus the snow gets so soft that you sink to your knees with every step. I can’t tell you how difficult it is to walk like this, but it takes forever to pull a heavy foot out of a deep hole and then pull the next one out. This went on for about two days or the last half hour, it was impossible to tell the difference. Everyone else in our group was already at the bottom, and had been there for an hour or more. Even Kos and Andrew were there. Just the guide and I straggled back at noon.

Let me tell you this. I hated climbing Mt. Hood more than anything I’ve ever done. But having survived it, I have to admit I’m proud to be able to say I did it, especially when I’m around a bunch of jogging, weight-lifting, buffed-up people. It’s nice to ask casually, “Have you ever climbed Mt. Hood?” Like it’s something I do for fun on weekends.

But I wouldn’t advise anyone else to climb it, ever. If you’re too foolhardy to listen to me and insist on going anyway, I have one parting thing to say. Don’t drink too much water.

Climbing Mt. Hood, Part 1

By Suzanne Olsen

On May 8, 2010

In Exercise, Uncategorized

When it’s a beautiful day, and Mt. Hood is silhouetted against a royal blue sky, I’ll hear people say, “Wouldn’t it be fun to climb to the top of that mountain?” Let me answer that question from my own experience. ARE YOU CRAZY??

It is not fun. I know, because my brother, the salesman, talked me into attempting the climb. He paid $25 dollars at an auction for the services of two guides to take a group to the summit of Mt. Hood. He invited thirty people to his home, served lots of wine, and then let the guides convince us that it would be “fun” to be part of their expedition.

Both these guides were tanned, taut, and toned. They ENJOYED rock climbing and snow camping. I had absolutely and positively nothing in common with them. They said our climb date would be in May because there’s LESS CHANCE of avalanche (how encouraging). We’d need to rent boots, crampons, and ice axes, and we’d be roped together for the last leg of the climb. Everyone got all excited when they started in with this technical jargon, but I heard the word Crampon which made me think of something bloody awful, and Ice Axes, which made me think of axe murderers, which did not bode well.

I had no desire to climb Mt. Hood. Anybody in their right mind would know that this wouldn’t be fun. Our guides said that we could get in shape by finding a bunch of stairs and running up and down them. Does that sound like fun to you? Also, our group had to be roped together like a string of sausages. Why roped together? In theory, if one person falls the rest would catch him. I wasn’t afraid I’d fall, I was terrified that one of the big sausages would slip and drag us to our deaths in some bottomless precipice. But group mentality and peer pressure overcame our better senses, and all of us signed up to go.

The guides were well worth the $25 investment. They took us on two hikes in the Columbia Gorge, and they took everyone else to the top of Mt. St. Helens. I wasn’t invited to that one, probably because I complained so much during the hikes in the Gorge. For crying out loud, they forced us to practically jog up steep trails in the winter, with snow on the ground. My response was to repeat, “I’m tired. Can’t we slow down? It’s freezing!” I was freezing because I guess I didn’t read the instructions that said not to wear cotton next to my skin (it gets wet from the exertion then makes you cold or some other scientific mumbo jumbo) so one guide had to give me his polypropolenesuperthinbutsuperwarmthermal shirt. That, and the fact that I’m not one to keep my complaints bottled up were probably the reason the guides must have waited until I was in the bathroom to tell the others about the Mt. St. Helens hike. Or it might have been on the instruction sheet that I neglected to read.

Whatever, in early May we were to meet at the appointed time, which was 2:00 a.m. (another reason I did NOT want to do this climb), at Timberline Lodge – so named because it’s so freaking cold at 6,000 ft. even the hardiest mountain trees cannot survive any higher. Our guides told us to go to bed early in the afternoon and get plenty of sleep. You can climb in a bed anytime you want, but if your thinking about being a sausage-on-a- string in an avalanche, sleep will not come to drown your fears.

I met the guides at midnight to hitch a ride almost two-hours to the mountain. I asked as many dumb questions as crossed my mind, mostly about what to do if someone was pulling me into a crevice (pronounced like your snooty aunt would say “vase” as in “crevaass.” They were patient at first but finally told me that if I knew what was good for me I’d lie down and get some sleep.

When we got there, the parking lot was full of climbers. What a bunch of idiots. Our group was doing this because we’d paid a guide, albeit only about two cents an hour by the time you factored in all the training hikes, but these nincompoops were doing it because they wanted to. Crazy. We all signed in so they’d be able to notify the families when we didn’t come back, another reassurance that this was not a good idea. Then we put on our heavy boots and stuck our food, water, crampons, extra clothes, garbage bags, and our trusty ice axes into our backpacks and hoisted them on. I didn’t weigh in, but it seemed like I was 200 lbs heavier than in my birthday suit, maybe 300.

I took the first step and almost buckled under the weight. Those boots weighed a ton, and even though I’d walked in them for a couple of days to condition myself, it was just too much with the backpack. I felt I couldn’t go on. Everyone chided me into continuing, which I did against my better judgment. You are probably wondering why I kept listening to these people. Me too. I guess I just didn’t want to be the only sissy in the group. Perhaps I felt that if I did enough complaining they’d kick me out and I wouldn’t have to feel like a pansy. You’d think they would have said, “It’s obvious you don’t want to do this, maybe you should not go.” But no one ever said that, au contraire! They did the exact opposite – the more I complained, the more they encouraged. Since I couldn’t give up, I just had to try harder to get booted out.

Want to know what mountain climbing is like? I couldn’t tell you. But getting to the top of Mt. Hood from Timberline Lodge, except for about twenty feet, is like this: Remember that movie, “Ace Ventura, When Nature Calls?” There’s a scene in which Ace climbs to the top of an infinite stairway leading to a Tibetan monastery. He puts a Slinky on the top step and gives it a little push. It starts going down the steps, one by one as the camera zooms out like the scene is being filmed from an airplane so that it can get all nine million stairs in. When the Slinky FINALLY gets almost to the bottom, it stops at the next to the last step. Ace raises his hands in frustration because now he’ll have to climb all the way back to the top and start over. THAT’s what climbing Mt. Hood is like. Each time you lift your leg, you are raising it like you are going up another stair. There is never even one step where you just walk. You are climbing the stairway to Heaven, or just shy of it. Plus you’re on snow and ice. Thank goodness for the crampons which keep you from slipping and sliding like you’re walking on a grease slick, though it’s not much consolation.

At about Silcox hut, not too far from Timberline, I sat down in the snow with my head in my hands and said I couldn’t go any further. “You can’t give up now,” the guides said. “It’s a beautiful day; you’ll never get a better opportunity; just keep putting one foot in front of the other.” I know they soon regretted prodding me along – wailing gets on people’s nerves.

The guides told us to drink plenty of water because it helps prevent leg cramps. My legs hurt so much I wouldn’t have even KNOWN if I had a cramp, but I drank water constantly. It was an excuse to stop and rest. By the time I was two-thirds of the way up, I rewarded myself with a drink after every ten steps. Did I mention the air is thinner and you get more out of breath with every step as you go up? That’s about the same time my pleas to go back turned into wails and near tears.

Tomorrow I’ll tell about the rest of the adventure.

Prom Night

By Suzanne Olsen

On May 8, 2010

In Kids, Uncategorized

The subject of today’s blog is also the reason I didn’t do this blog yesterday. It was Prom Day, and my daughter had requested dinner for her entourage at our house. So I had to slave, yes literally slave, over a hot stove AND clean my house for the six sets of parents who would be coming over to take pictures. I’d like to spend this entire blog whining about how tired my legs were but I know, as a writer, that you will not read any further if that’s all you have to look forward to, so I’ll talk about interesting things, starting with the make-up artist fiasco.

Actually, I’ll start a little earlier because those of you who read about the problems we had finding a dress will be pleased to learn that the alterations turned out beautifully – the dress fit like it had been tailored and made my already gorgeous daughter (people say she looks like me) into a veritable beauty queen. Too bad about what happened to it.

The girls all skipped school because they had to get pedicures, updos, and makeup done. I wasn’t too keen on that but my daughter pointed out that, “Everyone else skips school all the time and I haven’t missed a day all year. Katie misses class so much and she’s stoned most of the time and Celina….” They wear you down.

She got a purple pedicure, “it matches my green dress,” and she got curls in her hair. The next thing was makeup. At an auction, Jenna’s mother bid on the services of a makeup artist who would come to the home and do a small group for a special occasion. That was scheduled for 3:00. At about 2:00 the artist called and said she couldn’t make it because her husband was called unexpectedly into work and she didn’t have a ride. “We can come to your house,” Jenna said, to which to artist replied, “Oh, and there are child care issues, too.” “We can babysit.” “That won’t work, look I’ll call you Monday and we can reschedule.”

We live in Oregon, and it normally rains from November to July. On rare occasion, we get a sunny day. Ever rarer is a sunny day AND a warmer temperature. Yesterday it was sunny with a high of 71 degrees – downright Hawaiian for Portland. This may or may not have had a bearing on the artist’s sudden decision to break the hearts of these sweet girls just hours before their prom.

Of course this change in their perfect day was the end of the world. They all decided to call their dates and cancel the whole thing. Well, the thought crossed their minds, but then they rallied and stuffed their own makeup into duffle bags and came to my house to put it on. They crammed themselves into one small bathroom and stayed in there for about an hour with the iPod blaring so loud it drowned out all but the loudest squeals. At one point my daughter came in and said, “Sam put fake eyelashes on me, does this one look crooked?” I’m not a fan of fake eyelashes, mostly because I’ve never successfully gotten them unstuck from my fingers to transfer them to my eyelid. “They look beautiful,” I said.

When the girls emerged in their tank tops and shorts, they were knockouts. I don’t think a selfish, unreliable, flaky makeup/con artist could have done any better. At 5:30 – fifteen minutes before the boys and parents were to arrive, they raced out the door to go to Jenna’s house to get a memory stick for her camera. Good grief! Luckily they were back in 7.38 minutes and dressed in 2.4, so they milled around in their gorgeous dresses, looking for something to spill on them. My daughter succeeded. She rubbed up against something oily, Lord knows where, and had spots on the front AND back of her dress. All that shopping, altering, the tears, the fights, and finally finding the perfect dress (that cost a small fortune) only to have her get it dirty within minutes of putting it on. Kids – you gotta love ‘em or you’d strangle ‘em.

All the parents arrived on time (5:45) and we took pictures of the girls, but where were the boys? Everyone knows that girls are supposed to be late. It’s almost a requirement. But there were strange forces at work – a sunny day in May, false eyelashes that looked real, I hadn’t burnt the chicken – and now late boys. And I don’t mean fashionably late. They didn’t arrive for 45 minutes. They’d all gotten ready together, which means that instead of pulling up their pants, buttoning their shirts, clipping on their ties and tying their shoes at their own homes, they were at a friend’s doing it all at one time. How could they have been 45 minutes late? They blamed it on Luke’s mom. “She kept making us pose for more pictures.” They were awfully cute in their purple and green ties and black shoes so pointed they could have used them for arrows.

We took every combination of pictures you could imagine – serious, funny, girls only, boys only, moms and kids, dads and kids, couples only, couples only on stairs, group on stairs, group funny, couples funny, my daughter holding the dog. Finally, exhausted, the parents packed up and left an hour and a half after they came, and we served the first course – Caesar salad.

My husband was the dapper waiter – carrying plates out of the kitchen and refreshing their sparkling apple-pomegranate cider. Then I dished up their plates with chicken with lemon sauce, herbed rice, marinated green beans and garnishes of snow peas, radishes, petite pear tomatoes, baby corn and tiny radishes. It was pretty, though I knew most of them wouldn’t touch the garnishes. Then we cleared their dinner plates and served a lovely cake on a pedestal that Sharon brought, plus strawberries with whipped cream. A feast!

My kids won’t stay at a dinner table more than ten minutes unless forced, but this bunch wouldn’t leave. My legs were throbbing. Every now and then one of them would say, “Shouldn’t we leave?” and I bit my tongue before saying “YES!” out loud. Then someone else would say, “I’m having such a good time sitting here enjoying everyone’s company.” I don’t know who said that, but I wanted to slap them. My husband and I were just hovering in the kitchen, trying to give them space and overhear any dirt we could but these guys weren’t ever interesting. They didn’t cuss. They didn’t talk about sex. They didn’t talk about other people except to tell funny stories about them. SO LEAVE! I was saying over and over in my head to send the vibe. Typical teenagers – they didn’t pay any attention to me, much less my vibes.

Finally about 8:20 (the prom started at 8) they got up and the guys put on their coats while the girls rushed back into that small bathroom and stayed ten minutes. Then they loaded up into two cars and I took a couple more pictures and went back in the house. I looked out the kitchen window and they had all climbed out of the cars, so I went out to see what was wrong. They were spraying, “Just Prommed” on the car windows. Then my daughter sprayed directly on the car and had to run in and get paper towels because it was someone’s borrowed nice parent car and it might eat the paint off. Finally they loaded back up and I got to go back in the house and spend another hour on my feet cleaning up.

When they came back around 11:30 to rummage through the refrigerator and get the two other cars they left parked here, I didn’t even get up out of the Lazy Boy. “It was SO MUCH FUN,” they all said and took off. The girls were going to end up at Jessica’s house for a sleepover, and hopefully the guys weren’t with them.

And that is why I didn’t do my blog yesterday. Oh, and the dog ate my paper.

Vegetable Banter

By Suzanne Olsen

On May 7, 2010

In Food, Uncategorized

Today I went to the high school to volunteer tutor but I didn’t have any takers for awhile so I pondered the names of fruits and vegetables.

Eggplant. Where did that get its name? Sure, it looks like an egg in shape, but it’s purple. Maybe some purple dinosaur could have laid such an egg, but it seems an odd name. A cherry, on the other hand, is well named. It’s a happy fruit – a cheery fruit, if you will.

But who came up with the name for squash? It’s a word most often used to describe what you do to a bug. There’s a game called squash that’s played with racquets. I guess you could use the rackets to squash a bug, but it would probably crawl through the little holes. The point is, it’s neither a logical nor an appetizing name for a vegetable, and you just have to wonder how it got its name.

Some names don’t show any creativity at all. Green beans is one. You’ve got a bean and it’s green, so you go, “Duh, what will we call this thing. Uh, let me see, uh, I’ll think of something, uh, just give me another second here, it’s going to be a good one, uh, okay here’s what we’ll call it: GREEN BEAN! Star fruit is the same way. And I’ve never seen breadfruit – does it look like a loaf of bread?

If you want creative names, go to the melons. I love the name “casaba.” I’ve never eaten one but they sound exotic, like something you’d eat in your cabana on the beach. There’s also honeydew melons. Doesn’t that sound delicious? And cantaloupe, which sounds like some kind of sailboat – spinnaker sails catching the wind and good-looking guys in deck shoes and microbrews, slurping the juicy summery orange melon and tossing the rinds over the side. All of these are members of the muskmelon family, just so you know.

Also, here’s something interesting. If you scramble melons you get lemons. Did someone look at lemons and say, “These are the same shape as melons but we can’t call them the same thing or it will be way too confusing. I know! Lets rearrange the letters and come up with a whole new word!”

The Legume Family has some odd characters. The little guy is named a chickpea, which sounds sweet and cuddly, but it is also called the garbanzo bean, which sounds like a guy who smokes pot and surfs all day. My daughter was about four years old and had this little orange figurine that she called, “Orangie.” She was trying to be like her big brother, who gave everything nicknames, so she informed us that “his name is Orangie but you can call him “Tail.” We laughed so hard she started crying but we couldn’t help it – the thing didn’t even have a tail. It was two totally unrelated names that made no sense, just like chickpeas and garbanzo beans.

Here’s some names that do make sense: blackberry and blueberry. They at least let you know what kind of berry you’re getting. But what about strawberry? Is it the color of straw? Does it look like straw? Does it at least taste like straw? No. Then what genius came up with that name?

Here are names I like but they’re hard to spell – pistachios, avocado, cilantro, and rhubarb. In fact, my spell check says I’ve gotten two of the four wrong.

Finally, there’s the potato and tomato, so similar in so many ways. You can slice ‘em, dice ‘em and rhyme ‘em.

Here’s a sentence I made up that I think is particularly clever: This thyme lettuce squash and beet the boysenberry them before the news leeks to Rosemary.

Luckily for you, a student came into the library wanting my tutoring services, so my fruit and vegetable musings stopped here.

200 Days Down, 165 to Go

By Suzanne Olsen

On May 5, 2010

In Uncategorized, Writing

This is my 200^th blog! I’m more than halfway to my goal of doing 365 blogs in 365 days. Yippeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

I will take this opportunity to talk about trying to be funny. I mentioned before that I got satellite radio in my Prius for a 3-month trial, and I’ve been listening to comedy stations with really funny people saying very funny things. Oh how I wish I could remember some of them.

These guys are either telling some outrageous story that is funny all by itself, or they use surprise. A comedienne tells the story, “I went to the doctor with an ache in my back. He asked me questions for twenty minutes, looked things up in some books, then said, “Have you ever had this condition before?” and I said, “Yes, a couple months ago,” and the doc says, “Well, you got it again. That will be $100.”

Comedy is about connections – the ones you automatically make in your head and then the alternative ones that funny people throw at you. It’s about the people around you doing odd things, or it’s the way you can connect that odd thing with something else. Remember that old Pink Panther movie where Peter Sellers, in his heavy French Inspector Clouseau accent, says to a guy holding a sweet little dog on a leash, “Does you dog bite?” The guy holding the dog answers, “No.” So Clouseau bends down to pet the cute little thing and nearly gets his hand chewed off. “I thought you said your dog doesn’t bite.” The man shrugs his shoulders. “It’s not my dog.”

These comediennes are great observers of the ordinary. They take the most mundane thing and describe it until it looks absurd and funny. Jerry Seinfeld is great at doing that, and so was George Carlin. Seinfeld points out that studies show that the number one fear people have is public speaking. The second is death. If that’s true, and you’re attending a funeral, he says, then you’d rather be in the casket than delivering the eulogy.

As Larry the Cable Guy says, “Now that’s funny, I don’t care who you are.”

I love reading Dave Barry’s books. He also points out ordinary things and then takes them to the depths of absurdity. For instance, he says that Magnetism is one of the Six Fundamental Forces of the Universe. The other five are: Gravity, Duct Tape, Whining, Remote Control, and The Force That Pulls Dogs Toward The Groins Of Strangers. He makes his words even funnier by capitalizing them as if they were truly some scientific or official entity.

It doesn’t matter how much you listen to comedy, though, to be good at it you have to practice it. That’s why I’m doing this exercise. Sometimes it appears to be simply exercise (I’m sorry), but sometimes I hit on a topic or story that amuses me and I laugh out loud. I hope I’ve given you a giggle or two here and there.

I’m thinking I may make up some people for the next hundred and sixty-five days. I wish I could say that my friends are really funny and I’m surrounded by humor – but frankly I am not. My friends tend to like to bitch about their lives to me because this is what women do with each other – we shop and complain. Others I encounter during the day are usually doing their best to hack me off rather than amuse me. My kids are teenagers, and there’s nothing funny about that. Plus life isn’t a whole lot of fun and games, truth be told. We have these great incidences of fun but they are like oil floating on water – the everyday tiresome repetitive functions are the water. You get out of a warm bed, make the bed, pick up someone’s discarded underwear, feed the dog, do laundry, fight traffic, work for a person who knows less than you do, dodge grocery carts, cook the same old dinner after sitting in the freezing rain watching a track meet. Yep, there’s a lot of water in life.

But when I approach the day with humor, I can find things to amuse me if I don’t let my natural irritation get in the way. So I’ll keep looking for subjects to write about, for another 165 days at least. If you see anything you like, please don’t hesitate to say something.

Dodging Squirrels

By Suzanne Olsen

On May 3, 2010

In Uncategorized

I don’t know about where you live, but around these parts we’re being inundated by squirrels. They’re everywhere, but mostly they’re in the road. When I’m driving it’s like avoiding potholes. I’m gripping the steering wheel, banking the car sharply to the right then to the left to avoid hitting them.

A squirrel is an indecisive creature. Unlike a deer that will run through a field and leap over a fence to spring into the road right in front of you, a squirrel can’t make up it’s mind. It’s not that the squirrel isn’t planning to cross in front of you; it’s just a matter of timing. He’ll wait by the road until you get close, then he’ll dart halfway out, stop, lunge forward a few steps, then run back in the direction he came from, turn around, then run all the way across the road when you’re right up on him.

I have a theory about this. I think the squirrels all go to a school to learn to annoy humans. The young ones gather in some hollow tree somewhere and learn the essentials of being a nuisance. “Now today we’re going to learn about burying nuts. The thing you want to keep in mind is that a nut will bury easier and taste better if it’s stored in a person’s flowerbed. The dirt is already loose in there, and it’s generally better quality dirt. You go over there and pick through a clump of flowers until you can get your nut right in the middle and it will stay safe all summer long.”

When it’s time for recess, the squirrels all head for the nearest playground – our city streets. They hide in the bushes until one gets up the nerve to try and cross. If he goes when there’s no car around he gets taunted. “What a sissy squirrel you are. You’re grandmother’s got more guts than you do.”

The brave ones wait until the car is right there, then they dash out. Some of them get scared and start back, but seeing their friends, they turn right around and try to make it across. This game is like football to Texans. They never get tired of it.

One time a squirrel dashed across in front of me. I slammed on my brakes, but I knew I hit it – the timing was perfect for it to go right under the wheel. I had my two small children in the car, and I was afraid I’d only maimed it. So I got out of the car to assess the damage. I honestly didn’t know what I was going to do – back over it to finish it off? Put it in a shoebox and nurse it back to health?

I dreaded the blood and guts, but when I looked under the front driver’s wheel, I saw the squirrel’s tail, then the squirrel jumped out and scared the crap out of me. Just as quickly it stopped and started running from side to side. I realized my wheel was on its tail – and just on the fur. It wasn’t harmed, but it was held in place.

If I tried to go forward, it might swish in front of the tire – it had a whole tail length of range of motion. Same with backing up.

What to do? I finally made my son get out of the car and terrorize the squirrel away from the tire so I could ease forward enough to free him. My son thought that was pretty fun. “Grrrrr,” he said. The squirrel strained away, and I eased forward a few inches. “Grrrr,” he kept saying, and I kept easing. Suddenly the squirrel was free and leapt across the road just in time to get smashed by an oncoming car.

Just kidding. The squirrel escaped unharmed, and the three of us clapped and cheered at its good fortune and our creativity. I bet that squirrel had some pretty good tales to tell his friends. “And this giant bully of a kid was trying to pound my head off while the one in the car kept pulling forward to try and squish me flatter than a stink bug, but I outsmarted them all and escaped without even a scratch!”

Judging from the roads, some of his friends haven’t been so lucky. Still, weaving in and out of squirrels all over the road is about to drive me nuts (get it?). DRIVE me NUTS! LOL.

User Manual for Babies

By Suzanne Olsen

On May 2, 2010

In Kids, Uncategorized

I wish someone would write a complete user’s manual for babies. There’s no way to know what they’re thinking. They can be laughing one minute and then crying the next and you are helpless to know what to do for them. Then they get these weird physical things to have to worry about.

When my daughter was a baby she was the sweetest thing on earth, she slept well at night and smiled a lot – just a model good baby – but she had a temper if something riled her up. One thing she hated was having her diaper changed. I don’t know why. I was the only one who changed her diaper and I always did it the same way, but at about four months old she decided she didn’t like it and she was going to pitch a screaming fit from the second I started to the time I was done.

I coped by changing her as quickly as possible. I used cloth diapers because I was an earth momma, so I’d get a new one ready along with everything else so I could whip that sucker off of there, do cleanup, then have another one on in seconds flat.

One day I had her on the changing table and, as usual, she was screaming so hard her whole body was red. Her fists were balled up, every muscle in her body was tense, she was pushing against the changing table, her stomach arched toward the sky – her normal changing table demeanor. Anyone who could read body language knew she hated every second and wanted to make that loud and absolutely clear.

I worked as quickly as I could because I couldn’t stand crying. It broke my heart. I had gotten the dry diaper under her and was pinning the first side when she thrust her stomach up and at that instant her belly button popped out. It went from an inny to an outy in one second.

Oh my gosh. I freaked out. “Oh no, oh no, oh no,” I screeched in a panic. I don’t know what I thought. That her innards were going to pop out? It just scared the crap out of me. She knew it, too. She stopped crying immediately, watching my reaction. “Oh honey, oh baby, what’s happened? Oh my gosh.”

I rushed to the phone and pressed the speed dial to the pediatrician. “My baby’s belly button just popped out,” I babbled. “What am I going to do?”

The advice nurse, as always, was very calm. She was used to my calls. “It’s okay, tell me what happened.” When I explained she said, “Well, we’ve seen this before and it will go back on it’s own over time. It’s nothing to worry about.”

“Shouldn’t we come in?”

“No, really it’s quite common. You can press on it and it will go back in, but it will probably pop back out.”

Well, I pressed on it and it was creepy. You know how a balloon looks when it loses some of its air? It has that little stem you blow into? That’s what this outy looked like. It was a little creamy white cylinder full of air sticking about ¾ inch out of her belly. I pressed it back in, but when I let go it popped out like a Jack in the box.

After that she didn’t cry during diaper changes. She probably didn’t want to see me freaking out. It took several years for the outy to go back in. In fact I’d forgotten about it until I heard her telling one of her friends about it a few days ago.

“”When did that thing go back in?” I asked.

“Like seven or eight years ago. It just started going away.”

This is the kind of stuff they don’t prepare you for in the baby books. Someone should have said, “If your child has an explosive temper and pitches an intense fit, be sure to check his or her belly button periodically to see if it has popped out like a timer on a turkey. If so, don’t be alarmed. Besides, there’s nothing you can do about it but if you insist, you can call the advice nurse who will tell you the exact same thing.” This would have reassured me at that hour of need. The user manuals for children are certainly lacking, if you want my opinion.

Why Children Never Learn

By Suzanne Olsen

On May 2, 2010

In Kids, Uncategorized

My son is working for a department store. He was telling me that people come in late and he has to stick around waiting for them to relieve him. “I mentioned it to my supervisor and she said, ‘Oh yeah, Rick runs about ten minutes late.’ Mom, if I did that in my old job they’d fire me. But this is a union and you’d practically have to kill the manager to get fired.”

That got me to thinking about work ethics, which made me think about something my dad used to say: “You can’t get by doing a half assed job. Get in there and do it right.”

When I try to pass that wisdom on to my kids, they say things like, “Stop being so anal, mom.” How come when my dad gave me advice it was wisdom, and when I give the same advice to my kids, I’m obsessing?

I guess I didn’t listen too much to what my parents told me once I hit the teenage years either. I thought they got pretty stupid about then. They didn’t understand what I was going through, my motivations, the pressures I had. Now when I talk to my kids the way they used to talk to me, I see them getting that glazed over look and I know exactly what they’re thinking.

“Here she goes again. Oh my gosh I hope this is a short one. She doesn’t know anything. How can I get out of sitting here? I could tell her I’ve got to go to the bathroom. Maybe she’ll forget by the time I get back. She is ADD. Yak, yak, yak. Doesn’t she have anything better to do? She’s always complaining about how overworked or tired she is or how there aren’t enough hours in the day. She could get about six extra hours every day if she’d just stop with these lectures. Oh crap, did she just ask a question? If she thinks I’m not paying attention she’ll start all over again.”

I know this is what they’re thinking because it’s what I was thinking. I thought my parents didn’t know anything, and so it was almost to my detriment to listen to them. I’d sit there while they tried to tell me stuff and think, first, how stupid it was that I had to be put through it – again – then my mind would wander to some guy I had a crush on McDonald’s French fries – anything but what they were saying. My dad used to tell me, “One of these days you’ll understand.

Now, with my own kids, I try to help them avoid the pitfalls in life, and the more I do that the more they are determined to do the exact opposite of my advice. Because they feel like I’m stupid and it would be to their detriment to do anything I suggested.

What’s that Justin Timberlake song – what goes around comes around? True that!