We are now one hour and 15 minutes into the hellhole known as Halloween, and I’m beginning to wonder if we over-prepared this year.
As a birthday gift to me, Chris offered to man the door. I am afraid of children, so I accepted happily.
Chris bought three giant bags of candy from Target earlier today (marked down, because last year we spent about $30 on candy purchased prior to Halloween, and this year we said let them eat el cheapo gum), and was under strict orders to not let the children choose their own piece (or pieces, depending on how greedy they were) of candy. So far he’s only distributed one bag’s worth. However, the church at the end of our street, which last year was the source of the extra 200 kids we received, is once again holding a “Harvest Festival” which ends at 8:30, so we’ll see if business picks up then.
The dogs do not care for Halloween either.
So far the only exciting costume was a young lad dressed as the squire from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Chris said, “He even had the coconuts!” and “His costume was so good I gave him TWO pieces of candy!” to which I said, “He came last year!! The kid with the coconuts!” and, deflated, Chris said, “Oh. I didn’t see him last year” and I said, “He might have come when you were out buying the emergency candy after the kids threatened to burn down the house when we ran out and I started passing out our own stock of crackers.”
Now that I think of it, I didn’t say all that out loud. But it was certainly what I was thinking.
Today I have had a most hideous day, in which I learned that justice in this country means that a realtor who embezzled your deposit money (for a house that you did not buy because she forged your initials on a purchase and sales agreement) can declare bankruptcy, never has to pay you back, and gets to return to her work-free, rent-free existence (courtesy of her mother who supports her) after having spent your hard-earned money on things that were far more important than a house we’d been saving for; namely, her Victoria’s Secret bills.
But I digress. Today’s post is about spam mail, not sociopathic ex-realtors.
I don’t have an employer-specific email address because I’m a contractor, so I use a free Gmail account. Sure, Gmail’s occasionally tardy with emails, but the spam filter works great and I haven’t had any major issues, especially since I never use this email address for anything but work.
Apparently, though, the spam filter doesn’t work so great on people who deliberately send you email, even though it’s a version of you that you don’t know.
Today’s spam was addressed to a total of three people, including me. All three people were named by first and last name. Rather surprisingly, my first and last name were spelled correctly. I’ll be honest; there are people I’ve known for years and see regularly, and just last week I got an email from one of them and my last name was spelled wrong. This email was from a stranger and read as follows:
Please join us for a BFW post partum brunch potluck, held at Center Space, 420 SE 6th Ave between Stark and Oak, from 9:30 -11:30am on Sunday, November 11th.
Bring your lovely little one(s), a yummy treat to share, and your stories of life as a new parent in Portland!
We look forward to seeing you on the 11th.
Bright Blessings,
Nicole Sanson-Frey & the Moving Through Team
–
Nicole Sanson-Frey
Birth Doula, Prenatal Yoga Instructor, Birthing From Within Childbirth Mentor
movingthrough@gmail.com
www.movingthrough.com
I was a bit surprised to receive this, given that:
- I do not have children.
- I have no plans to have children.
- If I do change my mind, Portland will still be too far for me to attend prenatal classes.
- (Regardless of whether we’re talking about Maine, Oregon, or an entirely different state.)
- (And now that I think about it, I probably would never attend a post partum potluck brunch anyway.)
Perhaps the saddest part was that this was not my first email from Nicole Sanson-Frey. About a year ago I got a message from her, and I remember this because how many post partum brunches do YOU get invited to by name? Imagine if you got a penis enlargement solicitation that ended with, “…and we mean you, [your name here].”
Anyway, when I received her first email, I wrote back politely and said I did not know her and that I was not pregnant nor had I given birth recently. And also, I did not live anywhere near her facility. She apologized and said she would remove me from the list.
After today’s email, I was more irritated. I mean, it’s not like she had a huge email list and had forgotten to remove my name — there were only TWO others on the list.
I still had no idea how she’d gotten my name, and so I came to the only conclusion possible: clearly, I had a doppelganger who was intent on using my email address for evil. And post partum potluck brunches.
I thought about a Magnetic Fields song I’d listened to recently, I Wish I Had An Evil Twin*, in which Stephin Merrit sings wistfully, “All my life there should have been an evil twin.”
I had one, and she came with…children.
*For the more computer-illiterate among you, wait until the screen completely loads and then click on the arrow to the right of “I Wish I Had An Evil Twin.”
Answer: I watch the Bean.
Today the Bean has:
- Carefully put her baby (right now, it’s Tigger) into the brown cube bed, which can squash down to form a bed or stay open to form a cube in which the dogs can crawl. Tigger has been placed inside the cube.
- Climbed on top of the cube, which insisted on staying in cube shape, and attempted to squash the Tigger.
- Shoved the snuggle sack off the bed and onto the ground after watching me push in the top of the cube so that she could get in the bed.
- Attempted to get inside the snuggle sack, even though it’s on the floor.
Finally I took pity on her and pulled Tigger out of the cube, put the snuggle sack on the bed, and held open the sack so she could climb inside.
She’s happy, I’m happy, it’s all good.
We went to my parents’ house for dinner last night, and as usual, my mother sent us home with little plastic containers of leftovers.
The leftovers included pork chops, which were my favorite and apparently also the dogs’ favorite, because I took a piece of pork chop outside with me just now and ordered the dogs to “Hurry up!”
Mina, who just half an hour ago had disdained to do anything outside other than stare aimlessly at the sky, stepped off the stoop and immediately squatted down to pee.
She got pork chop.
Stanley and Paco tried to sniff around her, as though somehow the pork chop was growing from the ground around Mina. Then they danced in front of me.
“Hurry up!” I ordered them again.
Paco, anxiously looking at me to be sure I hadn’t given all the pork chop away, stood over Mina’s pee place and began to pee. He peed just enough so that he could see that I had seen him pee, and then he raced over to me.
He got a pork chop.
Stanley ran around so that he was facing me, and sat. I moved away from him and said, “Hurry up!” while trying to shoo him toward Mina’s pee spot. He ran around again so that he was facing me, and sat.
I backed up.
He stood up and backed up, not taking his eyes from mine, and sat.
He got a pork chop anyway.
As the years tick by and we watch our friends becoming increasingly wrapped up with their offspring, I find myself fearing the time when I will have to admit that I am an old fogey. Some of you will think, and rightly so, that in some ways I have always been an old fogey, but the old fogeyness to which I am referring is not my natural inclination to yell at the neighbor kids to “keep it down,” but the kind which other people manage to avoid simply by having children who will grow up and one day tell their parent, in all seriousness, that “you are totally uncool.”
Since I will have no children to provide these kinds of helpful hints, I only have myself to keep an eagle eye on my fading coolness. So in an effort to stave off impending decrepitude, I did the only thing possible. Yes, dear readers, today I watched High School Musical.
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We have two or three water bowls for our dogs in our house, and these bowls need to be refreshed several times a day. No, they don’t drink that much water, but Stanley has decided that each bowl is only good for one drink, and that drink can only be taken just after the bowl has been freshly filled.
Wait too long to change the water and Stanley will creep up to the bowl, sniff it suspiciously, and turn his disappointed eyes on us. I can’t blame him, though, because the water usually has strange things floating in it by then. (My theory is that the water gets dirty after Mina Bean takes a drink. Because she’s missing a lot of teeth, taking a drink involves essentially rinsing her mouth and letting some bits of dinner float out into the bowl.)
If Stan’s thirsty, I usually grab the water bowl, go upstairs to rinse it, and refill it from the Brita pitcher in the refrigerator. Stanley follows me upstairs and gazes wide-eyed at me as I go through this process, and he will often do a little dance and lick his lips when I turn toward him to put the bowl of fresh water on the floor.
Tonight Chris and I were in the family room. Chris was preparing to watch the Patriots game, which entailed clearing the Tivo for the night and asking Paco loudly, “Are you ready for the game, buddy? Do you think you’re ready for some FOOTBALL?”
I was sitting beside Chris, checking something on the laptop, when I thought I saw Stanley get up from the bed on the floor and head toward the other side of the room. After a while, though, I realized he was strangely silent.
Sometimes Stan just stands by the door to the garage, if he’s decided he want to go out, but I couldn’t see him there tonight. And sometimes, if we don’t change the water in his bowl fast enough, he walks to the bathroom on this level and into the stand-up shower to lick water from the stall floor if we’ve recently showered. But he had been gone for too long now.
“Chris, have you seen Stanley?” I asked.
“Nope,” he said.
We kept doing what we were doing. I figured Stanley had gone upstairs. A few more minutes passed, and Stan still didn’t show up.
“You don’t have Stanley on your lap, do you?” I asked Chris eventually.
“No,” he said.
I got up. I had a sneaking suspicion that I knew where he was.
I peered into the bathroom, and there, in the gap created by hanging our bath mat on the shower stall door, was a tiny, Stanley-shaped shadow peering anxiously at me. Apparently Stanley hadn’t quite worked out that if he could fit into the gap going into the shower, he could also fit into the gap to get out of the shower.
This is the second time we’ve caught him “trapped” in the shower, and sadly, I didn’t think to grab a camera to commemorate the occasion. Next time, perhaps.