Bear City

We are big fans of SNL. To this day. And we keep saying that we'll put together a playlist some day of our favorite bits. Some of our favorites are pretty obscure, and they're part of our family language.

Example!

The last time we visited the neuro opthalmologist, we exited through this door:

and mrguy said "Thank you for visiting Bear City".

Which is funny to nobody but us.

Bear City was a series of little films on SNL a jillion years ago about bears doing banal things in a world of bears. Maybe 30 seconds worth of things, bracketed by an intro and outro narrated by Fred Willard.

I can't seem to locate a clip of my favorite, about a bear whose wife calls down to the bar and tries to get her husband to come home. If you substitute bears for humans, it reminds me of my parents in the 1960s. 

And bar but not bear related, while we were visiting our family in 1980 we needed to find one of our cousins, who had left the house a while earlier. Our family lived in a tiny town in New York where nobody locked their front door or their cars. This town was able to support three bars, however. One was the Bucket of Blood, one was Gallagher's (I think) and I can't remember the third. Anyhoo, the best way to find one of our cousins was to call one of the downtown bars, since everybody knew everybody. One cousin calls the bar and finds a sibling there, who talks to him, puts down the phone, goes outside, comes back in and says "Well I'm downtown and I don't see him". 

Thank you for visiting Bear City.

Back At Work

I volunteered to be in Phase One of working onsite at the factory because I was worried I'd miss something if I didn't go back.

Glad to see the dinosaur foot is still there on the card reader.

Dave the ficus died. It was to be expected.

What wasn't to be expected was the irony of the cat calendar page I put on my door last February, which reads "Oh hey -- you're home early."

February Birthdays

Our nephew and his eldest daughter share a birthday in early February. This one was a biggie -- her eighteenth. I wanted to do something fun. But finding the intersection of fun for me and fun for other people is always a bit of a challenge. For her fifth birthday I gave her an ocelot muff that my grandmother had had made. This was one of my most prized items as a child. The muff occupied a position of honor in my bedroom, bunking up with the stuffed animals that lived on the chaise longue I wasn't allowed to sit on. When the little one opened that year's gift, her great uncle from the other side of the family declared it the pimpiest thing he had ever seen given to a child at a birthday. Said with a straight face while carrying a miniature doberman pinscher wearing a spiked collar. Really.

Anyhoo, it's kinda become a hallmark of my gifts to her. I love to give this child and her sister stuff that they find puzzling, like my grandmother's opera-length kid gloves, or jewelry that's too adult for them. They just laugh.

This year, however, I thought it would be fun for us to actually *gasp* spend time together. So I've invited her to a mani pedi and lunch. As luck would have it, on the free table that week I found a ziploc bag with 45 fake diamond brooches in it. Score! So we combined heartfelt and pimpy all in one.

Similarly, I am gifting her father with a foot reflexology massage at the spa that used to be a discount party supplies store. Perhaps followed by a beer and some laughs.

This is what 40+ brooches looks like. She texted me that they were "hilarious and beautiful". Mission completed! Now I just have to let my cuticles grow in and find a good date for a mani pedi.

Things That Make Me Happy: The Inappropriate Ice Bucket

I have a thing for things that look like other things. Hence the gazelles, the wig form, the model of foot bones. In my first apartment I used to only stock fake food in the fridge. For many years I kept a rubber head of iceberg lettuce that was a hidey hole for money. You get the point.

So when my turn came at the last department white elephant gift exchange I definitely went in for the ice bucket in the shape of a pair of cut-offs. My hope was to use it in our kitchen in the archives because the only thing that is missing over there is some ice. Also, it's hilarious.

But this gift exchange was in the opening months of the #metoo movement, and my colleagues informed me that the ice bucket was inappropriate. So now it lives in my office, where it is filled with individually wrapped dinner mints. 

Tahoedad: Glorious 2018 Planning Edition

Family vacation begins soon, and I believe we may be happy to see one another after a really rough Spring. In the last few days I've figured out sleeping arrangements, made the schedule for cooking, kitchen cleanup and the mama's day concierge and night care, and now I just have to pack and shop. And pack for Mom. She and I are carpool buddies.

During our vacation the youngest nephew is having a birthday. I made several passes by the free table at work yesterday, and at the end of the day saw some funny stuff on the bottom shelf -- elements for a Star Wars-themed birthday. Not enough wookie and white guy masks for all of us, however, so I've asked one the other nephs to bring his British Royal Family masks. I think the birthday boy will appreciate it, and his girlfriend will either love it or run away and hide.

Chicken Club (tm)

Many stories from the Old Place involve Antwan. He was a 1983 Toyota Tercel -- one of those unfortunate models whose paint started sloughing off within a few years of its manufacture. By the time middlesis acquired him from a friend, he'd already gotten several coats of silver spray paint to augment his rapidly-departing factory finish.

Before he was mine, he spent a fair amount of time in the grittier parts of the City, where his original owner was a late-night copy editor at the local newspaper. Not long after she got the car she realized that people were hanging out in it while she was at work. She'd get into the car after her shift at the paper and it smelled like gum, or there would be a cassette in her tape deck that wasn't hers. Kinda spooky. This happened pretty regularly.

Anyhoo, a few years later I was lucky enough to acquire this prize automobile that did truly change my life with his steadfastness and reliability. And he needed a name. I was reminded of an old friend from the Irish bar who worked in IT at a hospital. When he got bored, he'd run database searches on different stuff. This was *around* 1985. He ran a search to see what the most popular baby names were that month at the hospital. #1 baby name (boy) was Antwan. I held onto that as a favorite name of my own and bestowed it on this new-to-me car.

As I have mentioned earlier, I wore Antwon down to the nubs. He had 183,000 miles on him at the end. But just prior to this I'd come to fully appreciate the humor in what a homely vehicle he was. I'd park around the corner if I was parking at an internship or applying for a job. And I pretended that I needed to carefully lock him, as if anyone would steal him.

I will say that this is wholly unlike the approach used by my old boyfriend's cousin who in 1987 drove a late-60's Dodge Dart with a towing sticker on the window. He kept it there so it looked like the car was going to be towed soon, and there were junk food wrappers and newspapers and a baseball glove and Neetsfoot oil, as I recall, in the back seat. This added to the air of abandonment. One day he drove us to the Met, parked in the red zone, and we looked at art for several hours, before returning home. The obnoxious stuff you do in your 20s...

Back to obnoxious stuff you do in your 30s. One day, while shopping at the 99c store, I came upon a pile of rubber chickens. The bummer was that they were stiff, not like the floppy one I had imagined I would some day own. Disappointment turned to joy as I considered all of the things I could do with multiple rubber chickens that even I, living on State Disability, could own. I bought several. Gave one to my sister, and put one in the car. Not long after, I realized the similarity in shape between my chicken and another friend's The Club anti-theft device. Hence the Chicken Club (tm) was born. Every time I parked I would dutifully whip out the Chicken Club (tm), wedge the steering wheel between the chicken's little beak and put the other part of the steering wheel between the legs. It may not have protected the car from theft, but it cracked me up every time I used it.

Here it is in action, so to speak. Today a friend sent me a portrait of me in Antwan, pulling away from a parking space in front of the Petroleum and Atomic Workers' Union Hall next door to our house, with the Chicken Club in its resting position, on top of the dashboard.

I needed to tell his story.

Fashionable Ladies

Ebay tracks what I've looked at and what I like, theoretically. But cue the sound of squealing brakes.

Just now I scrolled down to find that it had suggested that I buy vacuum-packed spicy duck neck, sold by fashionable-ladies 89. What did I do to earn this suggestion?

Too funny.

Bucket List

If I had thought hard enough, this would have been on my bucket list. 

They say money can't buy happiness, but this was one of my best fifty bucks ever.