On Pigs and People

This is a picture of a teacup pig, which those flakes and nuts in California are importing as the newest pet craze. My sister wants one. However, since it would be smaller than her cats, they would probably succeed in eating it.

Houston has the same humid, heavy air that has made places like New Orleans and Florida famous for ghosts. On a hot, humid summer night the air distorts light and sometimes you just can't be sure what you are seeing.

This past summer, I was walking Lady Bird around the neighborhood and from across the street, inside a gated yard, I saw a pig the size of an America bulldog. I was all like, "Whoa! Those people are keeping a pig as a pet." I quickly reported this freakishness to everyone I know. Met with their skepticism and my own inability to remember where I'd seen the pig, I began to think maybe I had not really seen a pig at all.

A few weeks later I was walking by a house and noticed that the yard was full of pig themed stuff, including a large statue of a pig. I realized that I had mistaken a statue for a live animal and was a complete idiot. I kept this to myself.

Later that week, Frank and I were sitting on the front porch and someone walked by across the street. She was walking an animal the size of an American Bulldog.
"Frank! Look! That is the pig I saw."
"Are you sure that is a pig and not a dog."
"Yes, well maybe not. It looks like a pig, right."
"I don't know."
"Hey, is that a pig?"

To this the lady replied: "I don't know. Maybe it's part pig. I'm just the dog walker."

So at this point I really did feel like a total idiot. There was no pig and I am crazy. (But maybe not as crazy as the walker of a part dog part pig.)

But then, last week, I was so excited to see that there was, in fact, a real pig around the block from me. I was walking Lady Bird, but this time we were on the same side of the street as the pig house. There is was, a large pig, just standing in the front yard, enclosed by the fence. The pig did not move at all as we walked by. This gave me a little relief. The pig was statueske. To my surprise, Lady Bird had no reaction to the pig. She did not go and sniff its nose as if it were a dog and she did not chase it like it was a cat.

Ta Da. A pig lives around the block from me and whoever is keeping that pig is as much of a nut as I am.

Wedding Photos

Our wedding photos are up!

http://dasophoto.zenfolio.com/f719540946

http://dasophoto.zenfolio.com/f663414146

Northern Exposure

My father has bought himself a vacation home on the Bay where he spend his childhood summers. All of his friends had vacation homes then, and they all do now, and, finally, so does he. To be clear: the Bay is Green Bay, off of Lake Michigan, and the house is half an hour north of the city of Green Bay. It is way far north of Houston, where we all live.

To help my father settle in to the house, change the locks, buy some sheets, and generally make sure things were OK, Frank and I accompanied him up there this past weekend.

We flew into Chicago, spent the night with friends and then drove the three and a half hours North. We got out to the house without issue. Thankfully, the road and driveway had been blowed and the below zero Fahrenheit temperatures had warmed to the twenties.

Lunch time arrived and my dad and I drove down fifteen minutes down the road to a place he said had great burgers. It was closed. The sign said it should have been open on Fridays for lunch, but no one was there. We went back to the house, which, of course, didn't have any food in it because we had just moved in. So, Frank and I drove about ten minutes down the road in the other direction looking for food. The first place we tried was also closed with no sign of explanation. We arrived at a bar that had pizza and I was very hungry. While the bartender made the pizza I ate a mediocre salad from a neglected salad bar and drank a great root beer.

This brought to mind the first episode of the television series Northern Exposure. Joel got to Sicily, Alaska from New York and was shown his cabin in the woods. As his landlady is leaving he asked about good delivery around there. She laughs, because there is only one bar with food and no delivery. That is how I felt at the cottage on the Bay. I just don't really understand how to get myself fed outside of an urban area.


Part of settling in to the house was making sure there were enough beds and sheets and towels for people to come and visit in the summer, when people would want to come and visit. My great aunt recently passed away and my dad's cousin had moved some of her stuff to a basement, holding it for us. To get the bed, lamps, and dishes, my father had arranged to borrow his brother's van. As we drove over there my dad explained that it was an old van that was used mostly for moving around band equitment. Then, he asked who wanted to drive it. I don't really need to drive on snow and ice, and I certainly was not going to volunteer to drive a cargo van. My dad was greatful when Frank volunteered.

We get to my uncle's house and as we are walking out to the garage my uncle asks Frank if he knows anything about cars.
"No."
"Do you know what a manual choke is?"
"No."
"The van has an automatic transmission and a manual choke."

I got pretty confused as he was explaining what that meant. I was pretty glad I hadn't volunteered to drive the van.

To paint a clearer picture of this interaction, imagine that instead of whoever you were picturing as my uncle, picture Cheech from That 70's Show talking about a manual anything. My uncle is a musian in Wisconsin and he acts a whole lot like Cheech. The van had a peace symbol hanging from the rear view mirror and an aged hula girl on the dash.

As Frank was getting into the van, I thought about how if my life were a sit-com the next scene would be a funeral. A funeral for a pet. For a pet's tail. As he backed out my uncle said, "Don't worry, if you hit anything you'll destroy it but nothing will hurt you. It's a lead sled. ha."

We stopped at a gas station to fuel up beacause "the van eats a lot of gas and there isn't any in it, man." Frank bought a Wall Street Journal. Walking up to the van in his New York coat and scarf (i.e. not the Wisconsin rigour bright orange hunting wear), carrying a paper, Frank looked way out of place.

Luckily, we moved the furniture and returned the van without incident. On the way home, we were lucky to get on an earlier flight because the snow was falling so hard all flights out of O'Hare were delayed. The snow falling in Chicago was the biggest flakes I've ever seen.

Last night, happy to be in my own bed, warm with my puppy, I had dreams of snowflakes as big as oven mits falling from the sky. Then I woke up put on a pair of running shorts and a T-shirt and took Lady Bird for a jog in Houston's 70 degree weather. It's nice to go places, but it's even nicer to come home.

On Christmas Shopping

This is my favorite memory of Christmas shopping.

Several years ago, before Frank realized that he could skip Christmas by skipping town, Frank and I found ourselves at a Super Target on Christmas Eve morning. For those of you who have never seen a Super Target, its a really big Target, that sells groceries. This Super Target is across the street from the AstroDome and the two parking lots are similar in size and stature. The Super Target does share it's parking lot with a Sonic Drive In, though.

Not surprisingly, the Super Target contains a full service Starbucks. Frank and I were waiting for our holiday, syrupy lattes when a man walked up with a five year old in his shopping cart. The little boy was wearing a helment. This was not some sort of therapeutic helment and it didn't appear that the man had deemed the dangers of riding a shopping cart to require a helment. In fact, it did not appear that the man had given any thought to the risk posed by letting a child ride in the basket part of a shopping cart: you know, not the part for kids, the part where your stuff goes. It seemed like maybe this child just always wore a helment the way some kids wear capes.

So the man walks up to the counter and asks for 3 shots of expresso with some ice. The little boy is using his fingers to shoot imaginary bullets at other shoppers. The barista asks if the man wants his expresso iced. He replies, "Just put a few ice cubes in there. I just need it cool enough to drink. My partner and I (he points to the little boy) have some Christmas shopping to do."

The most disgusting thing I've ever seen live

After reading this you are all going to be thinking, "she doesn't blog in months and then she posts THIS! Disgusting."

This morning I was reminded of my friend Shirley's thoughts on parents: spending time with babies and dirty diapers makes parents act like children and make poop jokes that only they think are funny. I was reminded of this when my dog licked my cheek after eating her own poop and inadvertently smeared poop across my face. Then she went and smeared poop across my bed while I was scouring my face.

Some of you already knew that I have a dog that loves to eat poop, but that story was to get the rest of you up to date. That wasn't the most disgusting thing ever.

I was sitting in my back room writing thank you cards and Lady Bird walked in an puked a quart of the contents of her stomach all over the floor. Because she had been eating poop, her puke smelled like poop. While cleaning it up I almost puked. It was the most disgusting thing ever.

Then when I ran her outside to get the garbage can she ran onto my neighbor's lawn and had some pretty major diarrhea. This is a neighbor we don't get along with anyway, a neighbor who spends ten hours a day watering her lawn. I think that my dog has food poisoning.

I just made her a bowl of gatorade.

They're playin' my song/I know I'm gonna be OK

Some of you know that I am currently teaching yoga to youngin's at Poe Kids College. Its an experience that I am really enjoying and Poe is such a wonderful community that I understand why at least 2 of my friends have parents that intentionally moved into the neighborhood zoned to Poe.

During spring break in high school, I was staying at a friend's house in Manhattan and we found a little cut out of a Houston map. Her dad told us that that it was the Poe school zone and that he had been told that they had to move into it (from NY) in time for my friend to start school.

Although the classes I'm teaching are not formally Kundalini, I still play "Longtime Sun" at the end of every class. At the end of class today, one of the girls said that it was a really pretty song and then another said that it was so sad.

I guess a children's yoga class just attracts precocious children.

In related news, everyone I know loves the new Miley Cirus song Party in the USA.

I got my hands up,
They’re playin my song
I know im gonna be ok

Although it is Miley, it is just such an inspiring pop song. I love that she gives a shoutout to Britney. 

The Hundred Pushup Challenge

The One Hundred pushup challenge is the hottest new trend sweeping the nation (or at least my limited circle of friends and acquaintances).

Today I did the second set of week 3, and had two questions:

1) If I started in the second column and now my max isn't high enough to stay in the second column, do I have to repeat the week or can I just drop down and do the sets in the first (lower) column? Furthermore, if I am doing the sets in first column and week 6 has only a max of 50, how am I supposed to get to 100 two days later?

2) Why is doing 100 pushups at once even something I am working towards?

A Pixar movie in the making

In one of the frontyards in my neighborhood sit a Great Dane and a Miniature Dachsaund, no leashes, no tethers. The yard isn't on my regular commute, and the few times I have driven by, I've thought, "Those dogs shouldn't be free like that."

Then, the other day I made the mistake of walking Lady Bird on the sidewalk right in front of this house. Now, poor Lady Bird had a really bad day months ago when she into some dog's backyard and we attacked. So, when I realized that I was walking her by this Great Dane, I panicked a little.

The Great Dane took no notice of us at all, but the Dachsaund ran straight toward Lady Bird, yapping the whole way. When it got about a foot from her a beeping noise started. On the dog's collar a red light started flashing. That dog turned around and ran the other way immediately.

These dogs are clearly living behind an "invisible fence" system, and I guess it is working for them. I'm sure that their owners are enjoying the protection that comes from having a Great Dane in your front yard. Maybe the dogs don't have a backyard to live in like most Houstonian dogs do. Maybe they just really love watching the cars go by.

Whatever reason motivated their owners to put up an electric shock system it seems that they overlooked a Houston phenomena: constant blackouts.

I can see it now. This really, really big dog who is a little shy and a little mellow and this small, angry, aggressive, elongated dog always knew it would happen one day and then the power goes out they are free at last. I can hear their little ethnic sounding voices now.

If it is a little power outage from a rainstorm then the story might be about avoiding being re-caught. But this is Houston, and we have hurricanes when the power is out for weeks and all sorts of things go crazy. Civilized, business friendly Houston starts to look like free wheeling New Orleans. I mean a pre-Katrina New Orleans, when everyone still had sense of humor enough to call a drink you put in a foot long plastic cup you wear on a lanyard around your neck a "hurricane."

Now, only in my dreams do I purport to be a screenwriter, but I think we may have something here. A big dog and a little dog go on an adventure in a hurricane. There's lots to find. They could help squirrels whose trees feel down and find cats who are running a criminal underworld.

After the wedding planning is over, I might just pursuit this.

If you like Gutterballer you'll love NRWLobster.com

Gutterballer fans, I apologize for being aloof these past few months. First, it was the MCAT, and now it is trying to get a collection of jobs big enough to support myself until med school. That, and executing a wedding and training a puppy.

Mostly, however, I have been spending my blogging time working on the wedding website NRWLobster. It has all the crap you have to put on a wedding site like location and travel arrangement. But, because Frank and I are storytellers there is a lot about us and about Houston. So if you have been missing this raconteur you can find a little taste over there.

But don't worry, come December I'm sure I will be full up of things that I need to tell. Already there are some posts in the pipeline that I just haven't had the discipline to finish.

On Crocs

Remember a few years ago when everyone was wearing Crocs all the time? Then there was the backlash, then there was the backlash to the backlash. People who wore them said that they were oh so comfortable and people who didn't wear them said that they were ugly, ugly, ugly.

After all that blew over, it looked like the only people left wearing them were in the health care industry: nurses and veterinary technicians. Well, I guess that seeing as how I am pre-med, it was just a matter of time 'till I got some.

And I just did. And they really are super comfortable. I got the ballet flats because I thought that they were less ugly and would slip on real fast. I leave a pair of shoes by the back door and slip them on when I run outside to stop the puppy from eating her own poo. Then, I've been staying out there and gardening. Well, maybe I shouldn't call it gardening: I've been raking the massive leaf pile and putting in into a massive compost pile in the corner of the yard. All that dirt has taken its toll on my cute Keds and it seemed that a pair of shoes that can be hosed off was the answer.

But these Crocs are better than Keds in so many other ways. I have a foot injury that has been slow to heal. My physical therapist had me put inserts into all my shoes. Well, after putting on a pair of Crocs, I realized that the inserts must have worn out. These ugly Crocs really are supportive. I liked them so much that I wore them to my volunteer job walking people across the street. They were better than my old running shoes, support-wise. Then I wore them over to Frank's Mom's house.

I think I may have just crossed the line: the line that divides people who think that it doesn't matter how you look as long as you're comfortable and the people who care how they look. Some of you may be saying to yourselves, "Katie, you always loved to wear ugly clothes." True. True. True. But that was on principal. Now I'm just wearing ugly shoes. They are ugly without it obviously being a design choice. But they do feel good and I love them.

Oh, the irony!

I am so in love with my puppy. She is just the cutest, smartest, wiliest puppy ever and she may have ruined us for all future puppies.

Lady Bird is a digger. She loves to dig. When we met her I asked her foster mom if I should worry about her digging. Her foster mom told me that it was a bad habit she got from watching the other dogs and that alone she was fine, that she didn't dig. She answered as if I was worried about my grass. I'm not. I was just worried that the dog was an escape artist. She was attacked when she got out through a hole one of the dogs had dug.

Well, she digs. She digs all over the backyard. When she finds something she likes in the house she takes it out back and buries it, just like dogs on TV. In the disaster area that is the backyard, she is always digging up new treasures. So far, her favorite treasure is a shovel she dug up.

I came outside to find her digging with her front paws while holding the shovel in her mouth. It was so freakin' cute. It's like she wants to be a person but hasn't quite figured it out. Then, she buried the shovel, and oh I loved that!

Here is a picture of her running away so I don't get her shovel.

My life has changed so much

The house I moved into has a huge, huge Oak tree in the backyard. It is really wonderful, but because the former tenets were deadbeats there is about three years worth of leaves piled up all over the yard. And the major hurricane Ike hit in one of those years. So that is a serious amount of leaves, and sticks, and garbage. It reminds me of the joke: you know that you are a redneck if you have ever moved the lawn and found a car. There is random debris hidden amount the leaves, things like Styrofoam packing material, cardboard, soccer balls, basketballs, metal hangers, and my personal favorite, old garbage bags partially full of leaves. It is as if someone, a long, long time ago started to clean up but either gave up or forgot and ended up contributing to the mess.

Look at the photo of this tree. It is a very impressive tree. What is that metal thing blocking the view? That is a broken space heater left by the deadbeats.


I've been spending a lot of time getting big bags (like fifty pound bags) of coffee grounds from Sbucks and layering them with the leaves in a big pile in the corner of the yard as an attempt at composting. The guys at Starbucks know me and always want to tell me about what I should plant and when I should bring them some on the tomatoes that they think I should be growing. I dig through the piles of leaves and sort out the sticks and the garbage. My puppy, Lady Bird, hangs out and just digs, and my parents' dog, Luigi, just hangs out.

I was out today shopping and registering for Texas shaped cookie cutters when I smelled my hands: dirt and dog. It made me really happy. It is nice to be back to my hippie roots. Even with the unworldly heat, it is nice to be back in Houston where I have the luxuries of time and space to do things like composting and puppy training.
Q: How do you hide something from a hippie? A: Put it under the soap.

Congratulation, Me!

I finished the MCAT, I got a puppy, and I'm getting married in November.
Woo hoo.

Houston, where it's too hot to swim

Yesterday I woke up early and went swimming at Memorial Pool. It's a nice big lap pool with a water slide, and, for the bargain basement price of one dollar, you can lap swim from 6-10 in the morning. I was pretty excited. It is the hottest summer every in Houston and I've been dreaming of a nice, cool swim.

So I put on my googles and braced myself for cool water. I anticipated the nice, chilled out feeling of getting out of a cold pool and into a hot car. But as my body hit the water, my brain was filled with memories of a childhood spent swimming in Houston. In the summer in Houston the pools are only cool in the most relative of senses. The water was very, very warm. Last week my father told me that the water in his backyard pool was up to 90 degrees. That was when the air was 105.

Local news stations are telling people to keep the AC in their houses set to 15 degrees below the temperature outside. Seriously, no matter how environmentalista I try to be, I just can't live in a house that is above 85. I am undeinably a Houstonian and there are things that you cannot convince a Texas girl to do, even if you threaten rolling blackouts.

But, apparently, I will swim in a pool that it that warm. It was like doing a Bikram yoga class. The heat was more of a challenge than the workout. It took me about twice as long to swim my laps and I just gave up after half a mile. Yes, some of that can be contributed to my own out-of-shape laziness, but it was undeniably hot.

Also, the awesome water slide kept pushing me to the end of my lane. It was like swimming in a river, y'all. Then I saw a woman just go up and run in place at the foot of the slide, like it was a water arobics prop or something. That made me feel like maybe my swim wasn't that pathetic, cause I was working in two directions, forward and to the right.

Anyways, I just can't wait until I take the MCAT and I can get out of town. "Where will I go?" you ask. Barton Springs, Austin, TX. Or, even better, San Solomon Springs, way out I-10, TX.

Back in H-town and living the life

This afternoon I went and got a mani/pedi with my sister. We went to a "salon" in a strip center because I cannot afford the fancy place, and she cannot afford to pay double at the fancy place.

Afterward we got dumplings, which were totally great and exactly the right thing at that moment. I wore the disposable pedicure flip flops to the restaurant. Apparently, you can wear whatever you want to anywhere here in Houston. Last night at dinner at a nicer restaurant I saw a girl wearing short running shorts. It was definitely cool that I didn't have to dent my do by putting shoes back on but I felt a little bit like I was cheating.

Then I wore those flip flops for the rest of the night. As I was about to get into bed I realized that my feet were probably kinda dirty, so I rinsed them off in the sink. It seemed ironic that after paying a woman to scrub my feet, I had to wash them off in the sink. Maybe this is a lesson to me about wearing those flip flops home after a nice pedi.

Houston is HOT!

I opened my google homepage today and saw the weather report for the three places I track, LA, Brooklyn, and Houston. It looked like signs of the apocolypse (or global warming):

1) Rain is forecasted for the rest of the week
2) Houston will break 100 degrees F for the rest of the week
3) Current conditions in LA are Haze.

A little over a month ago it started raining in the middle of the night in Brooklyn and hasn't stopped. (Forty days of rain and counting). So I was looking forward to a hot Texas summer. Since arriving I've heard everyone complain about the heat. I just kept telling them that it was summer in Texas, but no one could remember a summer this hot.

Turns out they are right, this week we have broken the heat records set in 1980. It is the hottest June of my life. It is too hot to go to the dogpark in the morning, even before ten am. That is hot.

I went running today in Memorial Park, something I have been looking forward to since January. About a mile in, I stopped and used the restroom. Pulling up my running shorts was as difficult and unpleasant as putting on a wet swimsuit. A one mile run before 9 am had left me completely soaked. It was like I had gone swimming in a pond in shorts and a T-shirt. It is going to be a long, hot summer. This kind of heat is a bad harbinger for hurricane season.

all summer in a day

It started raining in the middle of the night about a month ago and seemingly has not stopped. For the last ten hours is has been pouring. I feel like the little girl in the Ray Bradbury story "All Summer in a Day." We had to read it in elementary school. It was about a girl who lived in a colony on Venus, and she was the only one of the children who had ever been on Earth. She was miserable and it rained every day. It was sort of like when my sister lived in Holland.
The little girl writes a poem: The sun is like a flower/ that blooms for just one hour. The other children are so jealous of her that they locked her in a closet for the one hour in the whole year the sun was out. It was such a miserable story to force children to read. They wonder why kids aren't engaged in school, maybe its because they make us read depressing stories like that.

I'm conflicted about the rain. New York is never better than on a rainy day. All the matching black umbrellas, the sound of tires on a wet road, and the way people huddle together at doorways getting their umbrellas ready and there coats buttoned are some of the things that remind us we are all here together sharing very similar experiences. We are all living in the city. There isn't much better than coming home to a warm apartment, peeling off the wet layers on the way to a hot shower, then ordering takeout and hunkering down. But maybe there is too much of a good thing.

I can't help but feel that maybe Brooklyn is crying because she is so upset that I am leaving. I finally got a sublettor and a ticket home, and while I am so excited about returning to Texas, I do love New York and I'm kinda sad. Maybe its good that I'm getting a few years worth of rainy New York days to store up in case I need on in my Texas future.

Yesterday, I went to Bronx and got shot

Yesterday, I went to the Bronx zoo to celebrate a friend's bday. It was a fun trip despite the pouring rain. There was consensus that the polar bear was the biggest hit. I guess the weather just jazzed him up and he actively played with a big pool toy in his little lagoon.

As we were walking to the zoo from the train stop, we were waiting for a crosswalk light and I felt something sharp hit me. My first though was that one of the boys behind us had thrown something at me, hard. After seeing that they were too far back, I thought perhaps a squirrel had thrown a nut down. But there weren't trees nearby. Then I thought of Forrest Gump describe something jumping up and biting him in Vietnam. I looked at my back and my shirt. There was no bullet hole or blood, but there was a raised welt forming. I thought of Kenneth the Page, "Man, that smarts."

Today, I have a red welt about a centimeter in diameter on my back above my hip. There is a bruise the size of my fist forming around it. I think that I must have been shot with a pellet gun. WTF, people!

Usually, when weird things happen to me I think that it is just because I spend a lot of time out among the people, not following a strict daily routine like people who work 9-5 jobs. So I see different things and meet different people. However, this does not fit into that category. Some kid in an apartment building shot me with a BB gun from his window. No one else got shot, just me.

Ultimately, I think that this bruise is totally worth it. For the rest of my life when people at parties reference The Bronx I will be able to say that I was shot in The Bronx. That is a hard story to top.

The only reality we know is our own

When I lived in LA, I commuted from near downtown to The Valley. I arrived to school early to get all my prep done and tried to leave before 4:25 to beat the traffic. My commute on the 101 took 20 minutes in the morning, driving 90, and closer to 45 minutes driving home with my left leg on the clutch the whole time. If it was a busy day and I didn't leave until 5, that homeward bound time could easily double. However, Fridays were another story. Just as earthquakes are not like hurricanes and you cannot outrun them, Friday night rush hour in The Valley starts before noon. It cannot be beaten.

Rather than suffer all that time in a car without a radio (a story for later) and risk having a left gluteus maximus that was significantly more toned than my right, I choose to wait it out. The Valley is actually a nice place to spend your Friday night. Ventura Blvd. is a great shopping location; they have a Pinkberry and a Trader Joes and a book store made out of an old movie theater (sound familiar?). The Valley is culturally a lot like Houston, and in this scenario, Ventura Blvd. would be the Rice Village. Yes, Ventura Blvd. can boast that it was part of The Camino Real, but nobody's comparing The Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean, either. (Oh, man, the way this is going, I might not get such a warn welcome upon my return to Texas.) I worked hard all week and I liked to treat myself to a Pinkberry on Friday. They are a little overpriced, but its good fro-yo and it comes with a lot of fruit, so you feel pretty good afterward, not that bloated ice cream feeling, ugg.

I would be standing there feeling gross and dirty in my work clothes and waiting behind, like, a dozen private school kids. It was nice that they were not the public school kids that I taught all day, so I didn't know any of them. But still, how much does one have to spend on a dessert before the teenagers are priced out? In The Valley, on a public school teachers salary, I would have been tapped out first. That knowledge kind of made me resent these children. But I didn't resent them too much, because I still remembered being a teenager living in my parents' income bracket and not my own. I remember one of my art teachers complaining about the cars my peers drove and how much nicer they were than her car. Ultimately, watching these teenagers, who I could relate to so much more than my students, I enjoyed my frozen treat and my memories of high school.

Earlier this year, Barack Obama was on The Tonight Show and he told a story about being flown in a military helicopter over the Lincoln Memorial on his was somewhere. He was enjoying the view and the experience and his daughter looked over, not out the window, but at the candy dish in front of her and asked, "Are these Starburst? Can I have one of these?" My mother laughed, but said that you can't expect kids to appreciate more than they know. Then she said it was just like when she told us about something specific in her childhood. Her childhood qualms were quite bigger than the price differential of ice cream, and apparently, my sister and I didn't relate. My mother's childhood is to my childhood as Barack's childhood is to his daughters? Not quite, my childhood is the only one that could be considered normal there, but that was the point my mother was implying. That, and if you are the adult you shouldn't get too upset when your children don't appreciate the things that they take for granted. At least, I think that was her point.

I love going out to breakfast. There are a few places near me that I especially like: Perch, where they serve really good egg sandwiches and Salmon Benedict, and Dizzies, where they put really good mini muffins and fruit butter on your table before you order. Both places are very kid friendly, and I always look around and wonder, "Who are these spoiled kids?" Last time I was at Dizzy's the table next to us had two adults and four children. The children were bad, and I later told Frank that people with that many bad children should just stay at home and feed them mac and cheese, with the money they save on the food they could afford to hire a sitter. Maybe I just don't understand how hard it is to get a sitter in the Slope. Once I heard an eight year old at Dizzy's use the phrase "pallet cleanser." Perch is a full on bar at night, but on weekdays they have a story time and puppet shows. Both are also places that I can justify paying a little more to eat breakfast once a week because I bought disposable dixie to-go cups and make coffee at home every day.

Last night I read the first half of Tori Spelling's book. (I'll see your summer movie and raise you a beach read). Half way through, her thesis seems to be that while her parents did give her a snow day in LA and a room of Madame Alexander dolls, they did not give her the more important things in life, like the skill set needed to leave bad boyfriends. I thought of this this morning when I was eating my smoked salmon at Perch and a man rolled his two year old daughter in in a stroller that retails for more than my last car. The girl was unhappy, to say the least. She was throwing her head back and screaming, "I want to go to Dizzy's." The waitresses were looking over and the dad kept saying, "Shush!" So, yeah, I was a little bit jealous of this little girl who gets pushed around to breakfast at finer diners, but then I thought that to her, she might as well be trying to pick between Cheerios and Shredded Wheat.

On Brooklyn after days and days of rain

Early this week it started to rain in the middle of the night and it just didn't stop.

This morning I woke up and reacquainted myself with the sun. It was a joyful reunion, but there are signs of its absence all over BK.

First of all, I need to comment on an earlier posting about donuts. I've received many comments about those donuts and that picture. Yeah, they do look good. After taking Frank to the source, I was told that maybe that posting oversold those donuts a bit. Well, after today's damp morning and very dense donut, I have come to the conclusion that the awesomeness of apple cider donuts varies inversely with humidity. Yeah, that's right, I'm a math teacher studying for the MCAT, I pulled out an algebra term.

After enjoying my donut I parked myself and my study material at the park (ha!). Being the good Houston girl that I am, I chose a spot right above a big puddle. What Houstonian could forget the joys of standing water for a small child! To clarify, this puddle was bigger than my apartment and covered one of the primary walkways.

When I sat down there were several eight year olds playing in it. After a mom pointed out that one of the girls had a cut on her leg and that she was swimming in bacteria the resisted but quickly vacated.

This freed the pond up for the funniest thing I have seen all summer. A very small child riding a very small bike rode straight into the pond. I saw him at the top of the path and I thought, "Is he really going to do this?" Well, he did. This bike was about a foot and a half tall and the child was probably about three feet tall. He pedaled fast straight into the water. Instead of flying forward upon contact which seemed like a likely possibility, the kid rode right through until the bike was completely under water and half the kid was. But that didn't stop him. He kept riding until the water was up to his chest. Then he must have hit a rock because he was jerked forward and fell into the water sideways.

All this time a man had been walking down the path coming from the opposite direction. He had been looking at the screen of a digital camera and I thought that it was the kid's dad and he was filming. Well this dude just kept walking as the kid emerged from the water screaming and crying. The dude walked up to the kid, picked up the submerged bike and placed it on a rock and kept walking. I guess he wasn't the dad, which makes me feel a little better about parents today. Seriously, can you image just filming as your kid did something so dumb!

After a few minutes some other adult male showed up and took the kid's shirt off and tried to comfort him. I hope that was the dad. I guess you never know. The kid cried for some time. I laughed to myself. Whatever, that's how you learn that if you ride through a puddle that is taller than you you will get wet. We all learned it. I just never saw someone learn it in such a tangible way. You see people on tv drive their cars into to puddles and you think WTF. Hopefully, that kid learned his lesson and will stay off the weather channel.