I need a napkin

Not to be a copycat, but given my love of singing and my occasional tendency to burst into song at the drop of a hat, this post is essential.



These guys are great! You can find tons of their stuff online, and I suggest you take some time to laugh.

Oh, and their website has a script and music in case you want to stage Food Court Musical at a mall near you.

A Call to Arms

I'm not used to certain aspects of the modern dating scene. In fact, I am pretty stinking naive about a lot of the finer points of social interactions.

A couple of weeks ago, had a great time at a concert with some of my friends. At said concert, there was a plentiful supply of attractive single men of an appropriate age. Excellent for a girl's night out, feel free to inquire for more details or for planning an outing. During this particular night, tequila shots were involved. This, I would like to say, is very rarely a good idea for me. Oh, I have fun. I just don't remember all the details and require the vivid descriptions provided by my cohorts to patch together those nights and days. Remember those boys I mentioned? I got pretty friendly with one on the dance floor. He was cute, but that's about all I remember. His cuteness was agreed to by those in my company, so at least our beer goggles coincided.

Flash forward to tonight. Had an excellent time at the Belmont, where I got the opportunity to sing along with a wonderful acoustic twosome who did some great covers of familiar, cool songs. Seriously, with the mic and everything! Will plan on seeing them again April 10 (a Thursday) when they play again, and I invite all to attend. I also invited them to karaoke night. They're cool, so maybe they will come. Following this portion of the evening, was having a good chat with Alicia at her house, when suddenly! A text from an unknown number asking how I was. I replied "Good. But who are you?" None other than mystery cute guy, who turns out is named Adam. My company was solicited, but as it is nearly midnight, I have suspicions that this may not be a "Let's have coffee and get better acquainted" kind of a date he has in mind. As such, I let him know, no. But, I invited him to get in touch for later this week if he would, in fact, like to chat over coffee. He claims that he will. I have my doubts, but will, indeed, go out with him should he actually call. We will have to see. Stay tuned.

Splinter

Yesterday we took the girls to the Fort Worth Zoo. It's a great place! They ran around as expected, waved at the critters, and generally were well behaved. However, all was not bliss on that day. While running her hand along one of the fences, the youngest suddenly came to a halt, looked at her hand, and started to cry. She had picked up about 5 splinters in 3 fingers, and one of them was enormous. Great! My parents and I soothed her, and I took a better look since I was the only one of the 3 who could see without a magnifying glass. I succeeded in immediately extracting one small splinter, but the rest were buried in pretty well. The decision was made to leave well enough alone until we could get the necessary tools at home, and to hasten through the remainder of the zoo.

Just so you know, splinters in the hand of a 4 year old = inability to walk. She gave me the saddest little face, whimpered a little bit, sniffed back some little tears behind her bifocals, and said "Aunt Gigi, can you pick me up?" in the most grief stricken, quavery tones imaginable. God, why did you design them to be so gosh darn cute?!

As soon as we got in the car, she passed out pretty quick and slept until we arrived home. My parents decided that I was the most qualified person to remove the offending foreign bodies, so I prepared my instruments: an alcohol soaked cotton ball and one sterilized sewing needle. I'll say this, she was a trooper. For about 3 seconds. Then I was treated to soul rending sobs as I extracted the little bastards from her hand. The happy ending is that Snoopy bandaids make life a lot better, and she has forgotten the whole thing.

Kids

My nieces from El Paso are visiting for their spring break. They are cute. See included photographic evidence for verification.

It's a known fact that kids say and do the darndest things, and these are no exceptions. For example, the two youngest squabble a bit, particularly when it pertains to sharing. During one of my attempts to pacify an escalating battle, I asked the youngest why she disliked sharing with her sister. Her answer? "But that's my whole personality!" What? It was pretty funny, but I'm still unsure where she came up with that.

Today after church, the oldest was telling us about a "perverted pigeon" that sits outside the little ones' bedroom window when they get dressed in the morning. Everyone laughed, and suddenly the middle one turned to me and asked, "What is a pervert?" Erm... I started to answer, hesitated, started, hesitated, cursed my brother for not explaining this one before me, and finally settled on "It's something that likes to look at naked stuff. Or, by another definition, it means to sully." Whew. Thankfully, they latched on to the word "sully".

Blame it on the rain

There is one definite advantage to eating by yourself. You can go wherever the mood takes you without having to take the preferences of others into account. Today, for instance, lamb in a green cilantro curry sauce with basmati rice and naan sounded great. I had initially thought I was going somewhere for soup, but I realized how hungry I was while sitting in traffic, and I felt I needed something more substantial. Upon arriving to my locale, I sat in the parking lot staring out the windshield into the hazy grayness of cold driving rain until I convinced myself that the food was worth getting wet and cold. The owner of the restaurant must have witnessed this, as his first words to me on entering were "You made it!"

Sadly, my stomach is apparently still in half-size sick mode, as I was unable to complete the Texas-sized (yes, it is called that on the menu of an Indian restaurant) portion, and left a shocking amount of rice, naan, and curry. The place was fairly empty, although I did enjoy randomly picking up tidbits of the conversation being held in the booth immediately behind me. From what I gather, they were in some kind of graphic design field that involved 3D CG graphics, masking, gradients, etc. I only understood about 10% of what they were talking about, but computer nerds always make me feel nostalgic. Plus, they were kind of cute for computer nerds. Seriously, I was the only girl in that place. Right before I left, what could very well have been another team of computer nerds walked in and began to place orders. Who knew that the Roti Grill was such a mecca for apparently single, dorky, not-unattractive males? I need to go there more often.

Trudging back to my car through inches of puddled water, I was very grateful for investing in a pair of waterproof shoes prior to going to Ireland. They work very well. It was one bad thing about my old pair of amphibious Tevas; as good as they were for kayaking and river running (2 things that I didn't do with any kind of regularity, meaning never), they were not very good wet weather shoes if you wanted water to stay out. My current sneaks keep my feet dry and warm.

On a completely different note, while having lunch I recalled an old fairy tale that puzzled me as a kid. The Princess and the Pea. Not to say it's a bad story or anything, but am I the only one who felt this was a bizarre way to judge whether someone was worth marrying? "Oh, honey, she has such delicate skin! You should totally marry her!" Can you imagine how irritating it would be if your spouse was so sensitive this kind of crap could keep them awake? That Prince deserved the special kind of hell he probably went through for being such a putz.

Staying power

Over the past weekend, a fair amount of time was devoted to sitting with a glass of beer surrounded by people wearing green. After all, not even being sick was going to stand in my way of celebrating St. Paddy's Day for the first time since I added alcohol to my life.

On Saturday, Amy, Alicia and myself took up residence at the Old Monk on their covered patio area around 1 pm and didn't leave until 11 pm. During that time, people came and went, payed their respects, and some brought some cigars. To be fair, I had a brief exit while I drove one of our number home so he could get some sleep, but I returned shortly. Their was much tipping back of pints. There was eating of cheese fries. I should have known I was sick when I could barely finish half my burger after only getting through half my breakfast (in the company of little artist and JuJuBe at Norma's, a fine way to start the day). Or to be honest, I should have known I was sick when Amy said the day before, "Gigi, you're sick."

Sunday morning was spent in a haze of illness, followed by a scrumptious brunch at Hattie's and planning for an upcoming trip to Cancun. Well, originally the plan was Puerto Vallarta. And before that, Cozumel. We finally agreed on anywhere with a good beach and drinks included. Drinking is very important on a beach.

Monday rolled around, and again we found ourselves at the Monk. This was less of a marathon sit-in than Saturday, as we only stayed from 4-11, but we did get to enjoy a couple of live bands and even more people wearing green.

Huh, interesting

While perusing some of my back issue postings, I've noticed something. I am addicted to commas.

To be fair, this has been pointed out to me at least once before by my readers. In fact, I am almost certain that this has been going on for a long time. Long, long before I began blogging. Likely from the moment that I picked up my first pencil, the fat chubby kind (mine had Garfield, yes, I still remember), and began to scribble out my first letters. If you go back and look, I'm certain that you would find a comma.

Why, you say? Perhaps this stems back to my speech therapy days, where I was encouraged to envision pauses in my flow of words and to breathe in attempts to slow my lingual velocity. After all, is not a comma a visual cue to pause, hesitate, etc?

Whether this succeeded in slowing me down, well, have a conversation with me and decide for yourself. But I do like commas, so help me. I feel that editors unfairly single them out, plucking them out of phrases in attempts to streamline a passage. Well, I don't want to be streamlined! I want you, reader, to slow down and smell the roses, so to speak.

Granted, if you breathe in with each comma that's in this particular post, you might end up hyperventilating and passing out at your keyboard.