Milk, cookies, corn, and other treats

My family's nuts. I mean, I'm sure y'all could have guessed that anyway, and it's not news to me, but it bears repeating. My family is *nuts*.

My aunt's getting divorced. That makes two aunts going through a nasty divorce right now. She says my mom, brother, and I aren't "spiritual enough" to understand. Like you need a divinity degree to understand "narcissistic creep who looks at other women and whose only financial contribution was debt." I don't understand why she has to hurt others just because she's hurt, but I do know what it's like to lash out. Meanwhile, my mom and the Dorkfish laughed at this T-shirt I saw that says, "Jesus loves everyone, but I'm his favorite."

Dorkfish is really obsessing over his weight right now. He just has a little bit of a belly. We're all apple-shaped in my paternal family; he got off quite lucky. But he always obsesses over his weight when his life's feeling a bit out of control, as it is to him right now. (I can't elaborate.) He hasn't been diagnosed as having a clinical eating disorder, and he gets in and out of those phases, but I don't like it anyway. He also got a mohawk a couple weekends ago, keeping it for the weekend, then shaving it off so he could go back to work. L'Ailee and I laughed at the pictures he sent. But to him, I just said, "That's not your best look." I dimly recalled saying something similar to L'Ailee once, for a similar reason, but she told me to stop making up stories. :-)

My mom likes the panda cub cams almost as much as I do. We've noticed that even though Su Lin, the San Diego panda girl, is a month younger than Tai Shan, she is eating bamboo like a proper little panda lady, while the DC boy is still pestering his mama for milk and prefers it over the bamboo. Mom said she wasn't surprised, because little boys are always harder to wean, human or panda. So now the Yahoo! Answers community is going to think I'm nuts, too, because I decided to ask!

Then again, my mom thinks I'm nuts too, since I shared the "Muslim women on the news" theory that L'Ailee and I formulated. When we look at a newscast from a Muslim country, we always look at how many women are on the street and what they're wearing. We think the women are, like, canaries in the coal mine, and the plumage *matters*. (It certainly matters to mullahs and local morality police.) If they're wearing lipstick and bright colors, and their heads aren't covered or a bit of hair's showing, we know it's a more liberal area with a bit more freedom and tolerance. If there aren't a lot of women in the crowd and the ones we see are all in head to toe black with no makeup, or in burqas, we know things aren't all right there at all, and it's very strict and hard to live over there. Sometimes the women look different in different parts of a country, or even a city. I haven't seen an exception yet. Sometimes well-off women look "Western" while anonymous poor women are swathed all in black--that just shows how there's one law for the rich and one for the poor, which applies just about everywhere.

The redecorating of the little girl's room is going well. It's all medium-pastel shades of lavender, green, and pink, with some white. I may as well have slathered and sprayed on boy repellent, but considering how pesky her ten-year-old brother is, that's probably just as well! I have a zillion drawer pulls because I like to swap them out for a quick fix. I gave her a set of them--white china with violets painted on.

I ran out of painting tape on Sunday morning, and I needed L'Ailee to get me some more. We were both in kind of a bratty mood. I celled her and told her to "get your scrawny butt over here with the tape." Mom uses that for Dorkfish and, now, L'Ailee. (I do not have a scrawny butt.) L'Ailee brought me a frozen lemonade as well as the tape--wasn't that nice? The ten-year-old "whispered" to me, "Hey, her butt's not that scrawny!" L'Ailee turned around, beamed, and said, "Just for that, you should have some root beer cookies this week."
"When did you learn how to make those?" I challenged. Her sole contribution to that recipe is ensuring that no excess root beer, root beer candies, or cookies remain in the house when I'm done!
"Oh, I don't make them. I know how to *get* them made." Big sharky grin. So now three neighbor kids want root beer cookies and are using the term "scrawny butt." I need to be more careful.

Tony Stewart's luck just keeps sucking! After Ryan Newman wrecked him, *while Smoke was leading*, L'Ailee went into Loyal Fan Mode and started defending Newman. I wasn't having it. Some of our friends freaked out. See, while another Smoke-lover chanted "Get wrecked, get wrecked, get wrecked!" to Newman, I yelled, "Karma's a BITCH, Ryan!", and Newman got wrecked almost immediately afterward. L'Ailee forgot she was an atheist and didn't believe in magick for a second, and gave me the oddest look. Several people were convinced that they had just seen a mass display of mal occhio by Tony Stewart's fans. So next week, we all have to use our magick for the *good*, and get Tony back in the top ten for championship points!

I need to answer a couple of questions. Regarding the corn, the reason you soak it is so the husks don't burn up on the grill. I have seen dry husks go right up in flames! But if you spray it with water or run it under the tap, that should work, too. Regarding hyphenation, if you can't get legally married *GRRRR*, you have to go to court. We got it very quickly. This is how you do it in NYC. Which highlights another advantage of legal marriage--it makes a name change *much* easier. You just have to produce your marriage license at the courthouse.

Annnd:

US Trendsetters Go On Strike Gods, I love the Onion!

Nelly Furtado came out as bi. I wish I liked her music more. But she dumbed it down, so other people are liking it for me.

Church Youth Nights have changed since I was a kid!

Buffett and Gates--atheist philanthropists?

New term--"crystallized intelligence"

YouTube's got a GLBT History channel! Here I was thinking the only "history" I'd find at YouTube would be every video Sinead O'Connor ever made, plus tons of 80s New Wave and 90s hip-hop. It's good to see the crystallized intelligence of the community at work. :-)