Portlandish: Friendly Reminder from A Fellow Portlander
Custom (and self) painted cars are not infrequent in Portland. This one bears a nice, friendly reminder for all fellow citizens. 🙂
And This Week’s Trip Starts with a Laugh…
If today’s liquid lunch is any indication of how this week’s business trip is going to go, well, color me amused, and kind of disgusted. (And, no, not that kind of liquid lunch, just a caffeine-laden calorie fest to hold me over four hours until I can grab some linner in Atlanta before my next leg.)
Seriously.
The only thing funnier than this picture was this:
The barista popped the top on, this popped out the top and whipped cream shrapnel hit her bangs. She looked at the drink, looked at her bangs, then looked at me and yelped, “Awwww, man.” But then she probably realized it was kind of funny and looked hilarious, so she slid it across the counter to me with a devilish smirk, secretly wishing me good luck and probably already making a mental list of friends to whom she was going to text about giving this lady at work today a pretty phallic-looking frappuccino.
Really, now.
Is there a delicate way to fix this? Do I wipe it off? Lick it? Insert a straw and try to get this ridiculousness to slink back into the cup? Ugh. None of these was a good option. Especially in public. I was going to be victim number two of whipped cream shrapnel no matter what I chose.
Two dudes in the Starbucks chuckled at my drink. Of course they did. It was slightly phallic. Slightly. And the fact that we were dealing in whipped cream here didn’t help matters.
This is a perfect pic for ‘caption this’. Have at it, folks!
Busy, Busy, Busy. With a Side of Cray.
Well, 2014 has come in like a lion. My word.
Work has never been busier. Millions of deadlines and millions of trips so far. And it’s only February. Â Home life is busy, too, but that’s all good. We’re getting to that stage of parenting where each child has their own set of activities / friends / parties, etc., so we’re running all over the place.
But you know what this means? I am having trouble keeping my sh!t together – to a comical fault. I am used to being busy, but I feel like I am operating in a whole ‘nother level of insanity lately.
Case in point?
After picking up the Gs from after school care yesterday, I popped over to the food store to grab a handful of things I had forgotten to get on Sunday. (You know, when I was already food shopping for the week! Ha!) Â I had grand (and planned) aspirations of whipping up chicken noodle soup for dinner, but my mind seems to be thinking of everything at once lately (causing me to retain nothing), and I didn’t get carrots and celery on Sunday. Kind of essential for chicken noodle soup if you want it to have any flavor, right? So here we were at the store. Luckily, my brain was sharp enough to also grab a few more things I would need for other dinners on this week’s menu during food shopping trip #2. Yay, me.
Sometimes, when shopping, I fake like I am a good Portlander and skip the brown paper bag, and just throw everything in my tote (i.e. my purse.) I did this yesterday.
You know what I didn’t do when I got home?
Unpack my bag.
We got home so late, and I had to finish a few more things for work, so chicken soup was out; take-out was in. (I love how ambitious I am with my weeknight dinner plans sometimes. Truly.) Â I literally just threw my bag on the console table, carried the groceries that were in my hands to the kitchen and put them away, and didn’t give my bag another thought.
Until about 10 minutes ago. As in the day after I went to the food store.
I went to grab my lip balm…and saw celery. And a brick of parmesan. And parsley.
Luckily, we really hate to be hot and keep the thermostat turned down low.
Everything seemed to be in OK shape.
We’ll see how Kenny and the kids do with their Chicken Noodle Soup with Purse Celery and Parsley tonight. 🙂
On the Road: Mobile Phones and Restrooms. (It’s a Don’t.)
It’s official.
When it comes to mobile phone use, no where is sacred.
Here’s how I know:
I listened to a mom have an entire conversation with each and every member of her family from the stall in the women’s room at Portland International Airport (PDX) today.
This was after I had to navigate around a woman who was leaning up against the bathroom wall like she was waiting in line for a restroom to open up, when, in reality, she was just supporting the arm she was using to hold her phone up to her ear. I asked her if she was in line and she grinned and said, “Oh, no, sorry. I am just on the phone.”
Great. Hope whoever’s on the other end of the line enjoys the sounds of bladders emptying.
Since I was already delighted by the prospect of my tinkle being broadcast to a listener unknown somewhere in the world, you can imagine how pumped I was to get myself situated only to have Mom / Susie / Jimmy / Dad enter the stall next to me. For. Real. She spoke to her husband, her daughter, her son. Full-fledged conversation in which she told one of them she was actually USING the restroom.
OH. EM. GEE.
There are a few things that will send my father’s blood pressure straight through the roof. Talking on the phone while using the bathroom is one of them. (Hey, he wasn’t raising ignoramuses, yo.) Not having a clean towel for his evening shower and discovering all the towels in the house piled on the bedroom floors of his children was another. Cutting him off while driving is another. Ok, ok. Stopping there before I get too off track. My point here is that I would have loved to see his face / watch his reaction if he was relieving himself and someone started yukking it up on a mobile phone at the urinal next to him. When this happened to me today – twice in one bathroom visit – I definitely channeled him and felt irrationally angry about this.
Seriously, people. This is a PSA – please stop the madness. Let’s all band together and protect the one place that should be spared from mobile phone use of any kind – public restrooms, especially those with lots of stalls. (Not sure the single stall / private public restroom phone use is any better, but at least it’s more discrete.) Let’s act civilized and exercise patience. There’s nothing you have to say while hovering over a public restroom toilet that cannot wait five minutes. Unless it’s a medical emergency. I think that might be the only acceptable use case.
Listen, I get it. Â I am a working mom who travels for her job – so I know first-hand that anytime you can connect with your family while on the road is a welcome one. But that doesn’t include restrooms. For real. They are not a ‘quiet area’ for you to connect with loved ones. Put your phone in your bag, use the restroom as intended, WASH YOUR HANDS, then make your phone call when you are back in a public area. I feel like moms (or parents) should know this more than anyone else – if only to teach their kids civilized behavior by example.
The irony in all this?
In the restroom at Phoenix Skyharbor, my work phone rang.
Obvs, I let it ring.
A woman somewhere in the restroom suggested I answer my phone. As in, “Oh, geez! That frightened me. Can you pick that up? or silence it?”
No. I cannot. I am using the restroom. 😉
Frozen and Friends. (And I don’t mean the weather.)
Grace is slightly obsessed with the movie Frozen.  She sings the songs constantly (sometimes backing her sweet voice with some strums on her guitar). (No, she has no idea how to play guitar, but that’s all part of the fun. Haha.)
Last night, she asked me if she could wear “Elsa hair” to school today. Nope. Not a wig. She wanted me to, you know, “puff it up in the front, then have it in a long, long braid in the back” so she “could throw it over her shoulder, like this” (picture a blondish, big blue-eyed pip swooshing her shoulder-length hair to one side and rapidly finger-combing it into the creation she wanted.)
This tickled me for some reason. Mostly because she was SO excited to have this hairstyle without a care in the world that I am actually quite terrible at hair styling. There was that, and there was the fact that she had no concept that her hair was probably too short to style this way even if ‘dos were my thing. (She personally cut all her hair off about two years ago, so having to do her long-ish hair everyday is kinda a new phenomenon for me. We got by with hair clips, bows and whale-spouts for a good, long time. I imagine most moms of five-year-old girls with long-ish or long hair are well ahead of the styling curve here. 🙂 )
I figured she’d forget after a good night’s sleep and I could get by with the normal pig tails or half-up / half-down look.
Nope.
This morning, I asked her to start brushing her hair. “Ok, Mom, but don’t forget: ELSA.”
Yikes.
So, I tried the Elsa. I did this faux french braid-y thing that was really just an embarrassment to her pretty hair and french braids everywhere. And because it’s kinda too short for that, little wisps promptly started falling out. We undid it.
Next, I tried fudge the Elsa. I swept all her hair into a low side ponytail and braided it. Except it’s too short to braid – so I only got like two braids in. It stuck out from the side of her head not unlike Pippi Longstocking and I knew that wasn’t gonna fly with her. So I left the pony, but took the braid out and said, “How about just a regular pony tail – but on the side like Elsa?” She said, “Let me check.” and pranced to the mirror.
“Uh, no, you need to braid it like this.” And she stuck her fingers in the ponytail and mimed what she thought actual braiding looked like. In real life, it looked like she was giving the pony tail noogies. Hair was flying every which way, and when she was done, she looked like she was auditioning to be a back up singer for a Poison concert circa 1985.
I said I would try again. This time, I put one small braid in the ponytail. She didn’t like that either. Hahaha.
She looked up at me from under her frowny eyebrows and said, “Mom! I need to look like Elsa. So-and-so and I promised each other we’d wear Elsa hair today. I have to do it!”
Seriously? She’s planning matching hair styles with her girlfriends in Kindergarten at the age of five?! And I have to not only pull this off before my first cup of coffee and within eight minutes of the bus arriving, but also live with the mom guilt that I am utterly ruining her scene because I stink at hair and her hair’s too short? I may need Bailey’s in my morning coffee if this is gonna keep up.
I told her we needed her hair to grow some more and that mommy’s hair wasn’t even long enough for “the Elsa”. She sighed and said, “Fine. I’ll take one pony tail. Not high. Low.”
And a low pony it was.
The best part? So-and-so didn’t have Elsa hair today either. That right there is what I call telepathic mom solidarity.