A Household Blog

We moved into our house almost fifteen years ago. When we moved in, we bought a GE fridge. I have hated that refrigerator for fifteen years. It’s a side by side and both sides are inadequate.

The vegetable drawers on the fridge side always come off the runners and freezer side is so narrow that a square frozen pizza box doesn’t fit inside. That means, when my son wants a frozen pizza, we have to go to the store and then come home and pop it in the oven right away - which kind of defeats the whole convenience of having frozen pizza. I mean, if you are going to drive to the store, you might as well drive to the pizza shop and get something that doesn’t taste like cardboard. Although my kids like the pizza that tastes like cardboard better than pizza that has actual toppings and  little green bits of oregano floating in the sauce.

Anyhow, imagine my delight when I came home yesterday and a brand new half gallon of milk was sour.

“The fridge isn’t working,” I said to my husband. “I think we’ll have to get a new one. After all, it’s fifteen years old.”

Harris cursed. Then, like a true handy man of the new millennium, went on line to try to figure out what to do. Muttering something about coils, he lay on the kitchen floor and issued orders. “Get me something long…a coat hanger…no, a barbecue skewer.” I stepped and fetched. “Do we have an old toothbrush? Can you get the vacuum?”

What he pulled out from under the fridge was appalling. If I had any pride at all, I wouldn’t broadcast to the world that my refrigerator coils were insulated with a thick coating of dog hair, cat hair, my husband’s former hair, dust, Cheez-It crumbs and the general filth of fifteen years of cooking, shedding and spilling. Ewwww….

Within an hour, the fridge had cooled to a chilly 34 degrees.

I wiped out the shelves. Then I went to the store to buy a fresh gallon of milk and a frozen pizza.

Read more here!

Christie Brinkley’s nasty divorce from that cheating creep Peter Cook(what red-blooded man would cheat on Christie Brinkley?? She’s 54 and she looks incredible!) is finally settled. She got custody of the kids and he got $2.1 million dollars. A triumphant Christie left the courtroom clutching “an elaborate dinosaur diorama” that had been used as evidence to prove that she was a good mom.

Apparently, Christie helped her son construct the diorama for a science project. Now, I plead guilty to mucking up several of my kids’ dioramas. One in particular – a recreation of a scene from the book “My Side of the Mountain” – I commandeered until it was fabulous (it was even lit by a tiny flashlight from behind!) and bore no resemblance to my son’s original clumsy execution.

So, forgive me if I am a bit muddled. But it seems to me that if your kid is able to construct a dinosaur diorama on his own – that would be real proof of good parenting.

My Kids are Bored!

Here’s my second in a series of appearances on New England Cable News. It’s live - which is frightening but it’s cable, which is reassuring.

Get this. Angelina Jolie has checked into the hospital to await the birth of her twins. “It is not happening right away,” a hospital spokesperson said. Maybe she just needed some time away from  Maddox, Pax, Zaharra and Shiloh.  Maybe some time away from the brood is worth not being able to see Brad naked and eating hospital food.

Oh, wait. Angelina won’t have to eat hospital food.

She can await the blessed event while eating her vegan, candlelit meals.

I didn’t Regular people don’t get to check into the hospital  early. I was Regular people are told ” Come back when the contractions are three minutes apart.” “Let us know if your water breaks.”

Regular people get Jell-O. And they I like it.

My daughter and I made a brief appearance on local cable television. Here’s a bit of advice. Never go on television with your teenage daughter to talk about sex. Just don’t do it. Even if it’s just a little local station. Even if you just wrote a humorous book on parenting and think that  a few seconds of publicity might sell some books.  Resist.

<code The Public Square - Teens and Sex from Josh Lobel on Vimeo.>

“I have to make something for my “Chefs” final,” Lewis said.

I remember when they called it Home Economics. I made Snickerdoodles. I got a “D.”

Lewis wanted to make Buffalo chicken wings for his final project - “but without the blue cheese dressing and celery sticks,” he explained. “Just the chicken.”

We found a recipe that called for four ingredients and no frying. “Can you put them in the marinade? I’m supposed to make a poster for the project,” Lewis said.

So, I mixed together vinegar, tabasco and oil and put the wings into a zip lock bag to thaw and marinate while Lewis downloaded pictures of chicken wings, printed out the recipe and experimented with fonts and ink colors.

After an hour, I hollered upstairs .”Hey, Lew! The wings are ready to go into the oven.”

“Can you put ‘em in for me?” Lewis shouted over the noise of the printer, “I’m busy right now.”

So I slid the marinated wings onto a cookie sheet and popped them into the oven (400 degrees for 20 minutes). Lewis finished the poster and went downstairs to play XBox.

Twenty minutes later, I ventured into the playroom. “The wings are ready,” I said. “Come take them out of the oven and put on the sauce.

“I will in a minute, ” Lewis said, his eyes never leaving the screen. “Be right there.”

I went upstairs. The wings smelled terrific.

“Lew!,” I called again.

“Coming!” he said.

I waited for 15 minutes, then took the well-done wings out of the oven, tossed them with hot sauce and tried one. Delicious. I ate another - just to be sure. Yep, they were good.

Maybe I’ll get a better grade on these than I did on the Snickerdoodles.

Why are these tiny ships defying gravity?

Because they were on a shelf in my son Nathan’s room. He went away to college and left the little Mayflower and the Cutty Sark on the shelf with a lollypop that had a real scorpion imbedded inside.

The lollypop melted (it must be global warming) and formed a bond so strong that the folks at NASA might want to take note. Freed from its sucrose cell, the actual scorpion corpse (visible just off the starboard side of the Cutty Sark) remained intact.

Ordinarily, I would have just let it sit there gathering dust for another decade or so, but Lewis and Nathan were switching rooms and that meant that the shelves had to come down, the walls had to be spackled and painted, the furniture needed to be dismantled and schlepped back and forth across the hallway, the closets had to be cleaned out and all scorpions were evicted. I brought the shelf with the gravity-defying vessels out to the curb and in 10 minutes a car pulled up and a guy jumped out and put the shelves, the model ships and the scorpion into his car. Maybe he was from NASA.

The difference between having teenagers and having toddlers or babies is that teenagers like to sleep. They are a little like vampires - they go out after dark and then sleep for most of the daylight hours. Teens shun activities that take place before noon - especially activities that involve being seen in public with their mothers. That is why none of my children showed much enthusiasm when I suggested that we get up at dawn and go to the Mystic River dam to participate in a town tradition called “The Herring Bucket Brigade.” Heck with ‘em. If my kids didn’t want to be with me, I knew that I would be welcome by the herring.

Herring (which until yesterday, I had only seen pickled in sour cream sauce) leave the ocean and swim upstream to the lakes in our town where they marry and lay eggs. The only hindrance is a dam which prevents them from reaching the choicest spawning grounds. The role of the Bucket Brigade is to scoop the herring into buckets and hoist them over the dam.

So, instead of my kids, I summoned my friend Beate (Bee-ah-tah), also a mother of teens, and together we snuck off for a morning devoted to scooping herring and hoisting them in buckets over the dam where they could experience connubial bliss and then die.

It was wet and it was really early. But we were rewarded with the thanks of the burly Fish and Wildlife guy and free donuts and coffee. After a hour of saving hundreds of fish, we returned to our own sleeping spawn.

I went on New England Cable News to flog my book.

Me on TV

Okay, it was a three and a half minute segment - but I worried about what to wear. I went shopping yesterday for something normal — something that didn’t have enormous buttons or a pattern that looked like it was from the wardrobe department of “Laugh-In.” There are no clothes for normal women. Who wears those little cropped coats?

I ended up with my own plain blue shirt, and after watching the video - I can’t believe I cared at all. I should have worried about what was going to come out of my mouth.

Happy Mother’s Day!

Turns out that hosting Japanese middle-schoolers is a lot like having more of my own kids. They are all losers. Yuki ( pictured in the center) lost his red “Happy Coat” somewhere between the school and our house. Without it, he would not be allowed to perform the traditional dance that his group had practiced for a Pops Concert at the Town Hall. The chaperones weren’t happy, and I was hearing rumors that I, as the responsible adult, would be stuck with the $200 “Happy Coat” replacement bill. We searched the house, we called

the school, we notified the authorities…no “Happy Coat.”

Yuki wore my husband’s red windbreaker and they put him in the back row at the Pops Concert. (Yuki is on the left. I think the windbreaker is brilliant).

Then, a tiny miracle occurred. Someone at the Pops Concert mentioned to a friend of mine that she knew someone who had found a “Japanese robe - a lot like the one these kids are wearing” blowing around on the street. Two days and a few phone calls later and the “Happy Coat” was in my hands. I am happy to report the the Japanese students have safely returned to their home in Nagaokakyo and that the “Happy Coat” has been shipped by air mail.

Here’s a little Mother’s Day greeting I thought you might enjoy.

Happy Mother’s Day!

Carol