Almostgotit.com

Three Cheers for Three Wednesday Women:

Wednesday Woman #1:

Michelle Allen, of Middletown, Ohio was arrested last Saturday for allegedly chasing children and blocking traffic while wearing a cow suit. 

The Middletown Journal did not speculate on the reason for the cow suit, besides the obvious fact that it made for the best mug shot ever.

Ms. Allen reportedly wore the cow suit again on Tuesday morning for her court appearance.

Why? you might ask.

Well, I might ask in return, Why the hell not?

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Wednesday Woman #2:

I do not know the difference between a functional saxaphone and good martini, but University of Tennessee music professor Connie Frigo sure does. 

And this week, Dr. Frigo went to bat for my 12-year-old daughter, who  is taking lessons from one of her graduate students.   The student teacher reported to Dr. Frigo that my daughter, a first-time sax player, had been provided with a seriously defective saxaphone by a local music store. 

Dr. Frigo fired off an email to me: This hits a nerve with me for many reasons!  and asked us to allow her to communicate with the music store on our behalf. 

She called the manager, and spoke with the repair man, whom she knows, and insisted they make things right for us. 

I will come down there, she told them, and look at the instrument myself, if I have to.

She called me back.  Take the sax in and ask for the manager by name.  Here’s his name.

And tell him Dr. Frigo sent you… 

(Wow, marvelled my daughter when we went to the store. He sure got NICE all of a sudden when we said her name, Mom…)

Ah, how much a woman after my own heart is the  Professor Connie Frigo.

Frigo is featured in this month’s issue of The Saxaphone Journal. 

She is also featured in this month’s Almostgotit Family Gallery of Heroes.

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Wednesday Woman #3

Superfunny supergenius Sarah Haskins, for her video, Feeding your F—ing Family.

Hat tip to Beyond Help for this video on my favorite (not!) topic, which more politely might be subtitled “How the Media are Messing with Our Mommy Minds.”

A line attributed many times to Shakespeare but actually it’s from American author/critic/poet and wit Dorothy Parker. She is reported to have exclaimed “What fresh hell is this?” when her train of thought was interrupted by a telephone. She then started using it in place of “hello” when answering the phone or a knock at her door.In many ways she can be considered the patron saint of all tech support workers.   (Hat Tip)

And patron saint, too, of all people who work at home — especially those of us who need to answer anyway in case it’s one of the kids. 

Yeah  I know: “Must get caller ID… “

I’m on a deadline this week, so am pulling things out of the mailbag instead of actually writing anything myself. 

Gene left this comment for me, over the weekend, on an older post, but I loved it so much I’m giving it star treatment today.  

Dear Ms. Burman Almostgotit,

I regret to inform you that we will not be able to post your latest blog entry regarding rejections on either our website or our Facebook page. While we recognize you did not actually ask that your entry be posted on any of our internet real estate, we thought this “Bush doctrine-inspired-pre-emptive” letter of rejection would be a good idea should you possibly have entertained any notions of making such a request.

Personally, Ms. Burman  ALMOSTGOTIT, your non-request was given serious consideration, and indeed you were one of two finalists in our deliberations. We chose not to post the entry from the other leading candidate whom we favored over you because we did not receive her request before we didn’t receive your request.

We hope you can understand the complexity of our situation, and we wish you the best of luck with your blogging career.

Most sincerely,

Gene Murrow 

Who sez Tennessee is in the Boonies?

After all, it looks like it was one of our own who had the sophistication to hack into Sarah Palin’s email account.  Moreover, it’s looking more and more like the job was done by the son of one of our own rare but “Vile Democrat” Representatives, too.  Those people!

Not that it was hard.  The password reset feature on Palin’s webmail account apparently only required the hacker to answer some easy questions — e.g., what is your zip code and birthdate? — which only required a few minutes on Google to acquire. Webmail users, take warning.

On the lighter side.

A friend of mine sent me some delightfully Boony-ish news and said I could share it, though not with her name.  She lives out in the county, and wanted to update me on the status of the stray miniature goat she’d rescued a few years back.

Yes, really. Stray.  Miniature.  Goat.

The goat roamed around my friends’ property for several weeks as they looked for its owner to no avail.  Finally, after luring the feral creature towards them with some food, my friend and her husband were able to catch the mighty little beast.  The two then bundled the loudly-protesting creature into the family Lexus, voiding all warranties by so doing no doubt, and took her to a neighbor who’d offered to add her to his own small herd.

The news is that there are some new kids on the block.  Happily sharing quarters (and obviously other things as well) with her new herd, Nervous Nellie (aka Jumping Jane) has recently given birth to a pair of miniature goat twins.

If anyone is interested in the real names and locations of the parties involved in this little TAIL, they’ll have to hack into my webmail account, where they will also find several other juicy tidbits, including the name of the Japanese designer who made my fabulous contact lenses. 

. 

It may still be in the mid-nineties out there, but according to farmer’s markets all around Knoxville it is officially Autumn.   The first home football game this weekend clinches it.

Fall means pumpkins, those round bundles of love that I have a positive fetish for.  The plumper and rounder the better.  Probably some latent lesbianism on my part, or maybe they just remind me of sweet little babies, so fat and yummy…

Anyhoo, for your weekend pleasure, I have snagged a top-secret recipe from none other than The Institute that Shall Not be Named (TITSNOB) . 

And heavens, it’s yummy, too.

TITSNOB Pumpkin Bread

• 1 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 can (1 lb can) mashed pumpkin
• 1 3/4 cups flour
• 3/4 tsp. baking powder
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/3 tsp salt
• 2/3 tsp cloves
• 2/3 tsp nutmeg
• 2/3 tsp allspice
• 3/4 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp vanilla flavoring
• 1/3 cup water

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Grease and flour two loaf pans.  Mix together sugar, oil, pumpkin and eggs until well blended.

Add all dry ingredients to pumpkin mixture and blend thoroughly.  Add vanilla and water, mixing until all ingredients are well blended.  Pour into prepared pans.

Bake at 35o degrees for one hour.  Remove from oven and place on cooling racks for 1o minutes.  Carefully remove loaves from pans and allow to cool before slicing.

TITSNOB actually sells these.  So let’s pretend this is like that  Neiman-Marcus Cookie Recipe , and that it cost me, like, several jobs to get my hands on it, and thus as my bitter revenge I’m now passing it on to as many people as I can. 

Go bake pumpkin bread.  That’ll show em!

It was a good weekend chez Almostgotit.

The neighbors have all received my newsletter, and there have been no death threats. A few probably have concluded I’m dangerous and should be left alone (hurray) while a few others have called me on the phone to say “bravo.”

One even brought me some flowers.

Almostgotit made great strides in sorting out some things in the attic, getting rid of several piles, and finally opening the stupid box for her stupid new computer and even putting the stupid thing all together (NB friend Betsy!!)

The rest of the family, feeling a little less ambitious, nonetheless also seemed to have a pleasantly relaxing couple of days.

The New College Student, too busy lately even to trim his own toenails apparently,  came home and spent virtually all of his time like this. 

The 12-yr-old  , whose official weekend chore is to clean the bathroom, found interesting things to do with the bathroom mirror instead .

Cat #1 helped make the beds in her own way.

The dog (a purebred Rhodesian FridgeSnack, FYI) carried his blanket around all weekend, finding many comfortable places to sleep as well.

And I did tell all y’all, did I not, that the adults have a lovely new mattress for weekend sleeping, as well? 

Life, in other words, is pretty good. 

Just go read this post over at Working Girl. Right now, because the contest she mentions ends TODAY.

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. ~Thomas Edison

Try again. Fail again. Fail better. ~Samuel Beckett

One fails forward toward success. ~Charles F. Kettering

With our eldest finishing his second week at college, we are all quickly getting our first college failures out of the way. This is good news. It’s good to fail as quickly as you can, to learn as quickly as you can, too.

For instance: we thought we could manage without his having a cell phone. I hate cell phones on a visceral level, and they are bloody expensive, besides. And didn’t *I* manage college without having a cell phone?

But it turns out that our son does need a cell phone. Moreover, his parents need him to have a cell phone. Our 18-year-old has not yet activated the phone in his room, nor does he regularly check his email, nor does he write letters, either. Too busy, too overwhelmed, too inexperienced, too new? Whatever the reasons, we’ve been largely out of contact with him for these very important first few weeks of his college experience, and guess what? There have been some problems. Together, the three of us have failed to manage that much separation, all at once, this soon in the “growing up and leaving home” process.

Furthermore, all of his friends arrange their meals and other social activities together by cell phone. (Or on Facebook, but you can only go into so much detail with so much efficiency on Facebook. )

Turns out, too, that cell phones are herding devices, serving the same function as the call of migrating geese, who honk constantly back and forth in order to organize themselves in proper V-formation.

Who knew? We only learned all this, about cell phones, by failure.

I also learned (again) that my own successful experience (going to college without a cell phone) does not necessarily make me an expert about someone else’s experience. The problem is that I was successful in college without a cell phone. All of us were, back then, of course. But things are different now, and consequently my husband and I had something new to learn, right along with our son.

But we had to fail, first, in order to learn it.

The dentist’s office called yesterday to remind me of my Cleaning scheduled for this morning.

I felt like a cross between a venereal disease and a Toyota.

Being scheduled for a Cleaning is far more serious than being scheduled for a mere Tune-Up, because of the many moral issues that are also at stake.

It’s so good of my dentist to employ these altar-(phone)calls for filthy reprobates like me.

Otherwise I may have spent the entire day chewing sticky candy and ice cubes instead, and have you read the news lately? Poor dental hygiene is now associated with everything from heart disease to Altzheimer’s. Plus, if you don’t floss, you are pretty definitely going to Hell.

But today? Verily I have been Cleaned, washed in the blood of flouride. They fumigated the Hell right out of me too, thank God, with a microbial gum wash that tasted, appropriately, like insect repellent — about a 97-proof DEET with just a hint of mint at the finish.

There was the Requisite Sermon on Flossing, my appropriate semi-annual dosing of guilt, followed by the deep, soul-cleansing pain of gouging and scraping.

Finally, I met with a spiritual counselor to go over my Personalized Treatment Plan which over the next two months will cost me approximately $50,000.

Have I mentioned here lately, at all, that I need a job?

I used to be a normal person. Somewhere along the line, though, I met a man from Laramie, Wyoming, a place where people actually wear cowboy boots and hats even when they’re wearing a suit.  And their music? Country-western, of course. 

Lord, how that once made me wince. 

But true love and all that, blah blah. So I started listening to Lyle Lovett.  Emmylou Harris.  Mary Chapin Carpenter.  It wasn’t so bad, really. Did you know Mark Knopfler sometimes sings country?  Then I moved to Tennessee. Did you know Mark Knopfler sometimes sings country with Emmylou Harris?

Carrie Underwood is still a bit twee for me, however. But my daughter wanted to share one of her mucus music videos with me this evening — “Jesus take the wheel” — and since I’m currently trying to be a very attentive, caring parent (otherwise they leave the nest forever, you know)  I sat down to watch it.

Okay, it’s really sort of sweet, isn’t it?

Well, turns out my sweet little daughter is almost as wicked as I am.  She’d really only played the Carrie Underwood video for me so I’d be better able to appreciate the following, which (I must say) is TRULY a work of lyrical Southern genius.

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Bonus treat for those who really don’t want to start the work week quite yet:
Country Western Song Lyric Generator