Yo Mama

Sheesh!  Been awhile, hasn't it?  How you folks been? Ignore the weird font sizes and colors on my blog.  I don't know how to fix it and don't really care, either.

So, how've I been doing? Thanks for asking.  Busy as usual.  Don't know why I haven't blogged in awhile, except that whenever I sat down to do it, I drew a massive blank. 

Also?  In addition to ignoring the blog, I also hadn't updated my facebook status in awhile.  So I had this brilliant idea, see?  I thought, "Wow! Why don't I ask my 280 or so facebook friends, half of whom are hidden because they insist on repeatedly posting political ridiculousness that they refuse to take off even after I've informed them that Snopes says Obama did not steal Girlscout cookies from a Girlscout while refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance, the other half of whom I don't actually know....what my facebook status should be.  (There is another half in there somewhere, made up of my kids and close, personal friends and family - and please don't point out to me that there can't be 3 halves.  I are home teached, it will make no sense to me.)

So (you've really been missing these long-winded sentences, haven't you?) I updated my status with:
What Should I Blog About?

Then I counted to 2 and checked for comments. I had one! Hooray!  Don't you just love facebook?

It was from Joel, my sixteen year old son who was supposed to be doing his geography homework and obviously wasn't and it said:
Yo Momma

And then, because I forgot for a moment, that there can be no such thing as a satisfying facebook conversation with my son, I decided to be all witty and bond with him from the comfort of my bed while he sat in the comfort of the study simultaneously killing zombies and commenting on status updates instead of doing his geography homework.  I said:
No, YO Momma

Endlessly entertaining, isn't it?  By now, we had the rapt attention of my 280 friends.  Also?  Someone had irritatingly given the big old Thumbs Up "I like this!" to Joel's stupid comment.  So he made another one:

I don't have no momma, I fell from the heavens.

I could see that this wasn't going to end well.  Joel literally stays up all night doing this sort of thing, and I was already getting tired.  I tried to end it:

I'm not responding, but I have a lot of good responses I could respond with if I were so inclined, which I'm not.

Kind of like a lame explanation of why I wasn't going to come up with any groovy comments.  I could if I wanted to....so there. So Joel, (did I mention he stays up all night?) said:

Because Yo Momma said you can't use them.

Did I mention he was killing zombies as he did this?  Why, thank you.  Yes, I'm quite proud of him.  Also?  He had two more Thumbs Up.  I had to stop it or it would never end.  So I stupidly said:

Seriously, I'm not responding.  So stop it.

And then?  A Real Person actually responded with a helpful suggestion as to what I should blog about:

Didn't you just have a really busy weekend you could comment about?

Why, yes I did!  Thanks for the suggestion!  On Friday, Camille, Ellie and I dropped off Ellie's car to get its wheels aligned or something very similar to that - something to do with wheels.  While there, a young man asked Ellie (18) if Camille (9) were her daughter.  Ellie was all like, "Oh my god!" and I was all like, "Oh my god, that man thinks I'm Camille's grandmother!!!  We were both thoroughly upset so we went bra shopping.  Bra shopping only upset me further, but I won't go into all the reasons why. 

The NEXT day we drove to Austin for the regional Odyssey of the Mind tournament.  We left at 6:15 in the morning - I don't think Joel had been to bed, yet.  Joel and Jules were on the same team.  Jules played Neo of the Matrix, and he looked super handsome.  He is my handsome kid - sorry - I had to say that.  Long black coat, black clothes, hair slicked back, sunglasses....and the judge said, "Who's Neo?"  Dang.  It always happens to him.  A previous year found him on an Odyssey stage wearing Thomas the Tank briefs over his jeans, and boxers on his head, and when he opened up a suspicious cape to flash the audience and yell, "I'm Hades!  Hades of the Underwear!!" the judge said, "Who's Hades?"  

Anyway - Joel played Captain Ahab and spoke with a lovely accent of some sort - sounded kind of Scottish to me but I'm not really sure.  Joel does accents every year in Odyssey - last year he played Arnold Schwarzenegger.  The year before he was a female Greek muse.  So he had made himself a beard, was wearing my dad's Israeli Naval Surplus Peacoat and a Greek fisherman's hat...and when he whipped off the hat I swear he looked just like Jesus.  But he didn't sound like Jesus.  That is, unless Jesus spoke with a Scottish accent and chased people around saying, "Stroke Me Beard!!"

Camille was on another team and she played a doctor and carried a bloody knife.  Very, very cute.  They had built a rube goldberg machine and one of the hoses came undone and the little engineer was behind it and couldn't see that the hose had come undone but all of the audience and the judges could see that the hose had come undone so when they poured the water into the funnel we all just patiently waited for it to go splatter on the gym floor, which it did.  Man, and that child (Haley, the engineer) kept her cool and rehooked the hose and poured in more water and yeah...awesome.

The boys' team placed 2nd and Camille's team placed 3rd, so we'll be going to the state tournament in Houston next month.

I would have rather been at South by Southwest while in Austin, but there was no time for that.  The Chili Peppers, obviously, weren't playing S x SW, but some of their members were in two films that had first screenings at the event.  One was Bob and the Monster, a documentary about the legendary Bob Forest from Thelonious Monster...all about his drug addiction and recovery and how he helps others get off drugs.  Both Anthony Kiedis and John Frusciante are in the film....lots of LA bands from the 80's and 90's.  The other film is called The Other F Word and it is about fatherhood and rock and roll....features Flea.

So that's what I did last weekend....oh! and Ellie competed in a piano competition.  That's it.

Back to the status update:  Joel was still awake and so he responded to the suggestion with :
Her momma used those ideas already.

He was still getting encouragement in the form of Thumbs Upping....and I confirmed my suspicion that it was his girlfriend and so I said:

Alyssa, stop liking everything he says. It encourages him.

This got a Thumbs Up from Ellie, who wasn't about to actually enter the conversation.  But then, someone else did.  Mike, who is one of Jeff's besty friends from junior high and high school and a groomsman in our wedding 1,000 years ago, who now lives in Houston where he apparently has nothing to do on a Tuesday night said:

Maybe this will settle it.  You could blog about my mamma?

Mike's mamma is a lovely, lovely woman who has earned her spot in heaven.  I have now officially blogged about Mike's mamma.

At this point, my best friend from childhood and Ellie's godmother, Ann, who now lives in Dallas, decided to get involved.  Actually, she wasn't trying to get involved.  She once had an extremely unsatisfying conversation with Joel on facebook about whether or not Batman was better than Superman - so she wasn't really addressing the topic at hand - just did a pop-in where she says something completely unrelated to what everyone else is talking about....which was Yo Momma.  So she says:

Just had dinner with Lee! Boy! Lots of stories there!

Okay, so Lee is Ellie's godfather but he isn't married to Ann.  He's married to Saint Suzy and they live in New Orleans.  He is also a childhood friend...but actually way more than that.  He is kind of like my parents' adopted son even though he had two loving and doting parents already.  My mom used to live in New Orleans and Lee's mom was her best friend and then my mom moved back to Texas and she and Lee's mom had babies at the same time, which would be me and Lee and so yeah....we have grown up together even though we were in different states...our moms remained best friends and my mom had a special place in her heart for Lee, who she called Lee Darlin'...something that always irritated me just a bit.  Anyway - because Lee used to spend a good portion of his summers with us, he was friends with my friends, which is how he came to know Ann (who lived down the street) and how he came to be having dinner with her and her family while they were in New Orleans for spring break.  So....at this point I decide to acknowledge everyone's participation so I say:

Mike - thanks for getting involved.  Ann - LOL - I bet.  Did he tell you the one about his dog and the sausage?

Lee has a new dog and somebody fed it a sausage (I heard this story from my dad, not Lee, so don't hold me to the details).  He had told the dude not to give his dog the sausage but the dude did it anyway and the dog got sick and barfed all over the house and the vet bill was over $100 and Lee thinks the sausage-feeding fiend should pay the vet bill.  Now, my sister, who is also apparently having a late facebook night, pipes in with:

Ann - don't listen to him.

See how we've gotten off-topic here?  But aha!  Another actual suggestion from Susan, who is probably supposed to be working (she designs websites) but is apparently lost in the Suck Hole of Time known as facebook.  She says:

Smelly feet and long car rides...wait, I think you did that one already.

No, I haven't and luckily for you people, I'm not going to now, either.  Let me just say that the smelly feet in question were not mine and may or may not have belonged to Susan's son, whose feet are so big he once received hand-me-down sneakers from a Spurs Basketball Player so you can see as how if his feet had actually been stinking in my car all the way to the Odyssey World Tournament in Michigan, it would have been a Big Deal.  Then Pamela, who is watching all of this nonsense from New York state and who I met through blogging, chimes in with:

Whoop his ass, Carol!

I'm not certain, but I think she fell off her bar stool as she said this, while holding a whopping glass of wine up in a salute.  At least that's how I like to fondly think of her....I gave her a Thumbs Up. At this point, my friend Ann who is from Dallas but still partying in New Orleans, says:

He did not mention a sausage!

I picture her raising a hurricane in salute and falling off a bar stool.  Also?  I'm thinking she wasn't talking about sausage in a G-rated way and god knows I run a family friendly facebook page and blog so we're just leaving her there on the floor at Pat O' Brien's.  My sister chimes back in, this time to make a suggestion.

You could always blog about our trying to chase down info about the car chase the other day!

OK. So the other day my sister and I are driving through our small town (pop 4,011 or so) and all hell breaks lose around us in the form of speeding police and sheriff's deputy-type cars.  Since we were not currently busy updating our facebook statuses, we followed them.  There was yellow tape, television reporters...the whole 9 yards.  We tried to get closer from several angles, but our attempts were thwarted.  So we came home and I e-mailed the local newspaper owner/editor to get the scoop, and she directed me to their website which had just published the story.  Girl has restraining order.  Guy breaks restraining order. Girl calls cops.  Cops come quickly (good job, guys! thumbs up to the cops!).  Guy runs.  Cops chase and invite their friends to join in.  Guy goes back to girl's house.  Guy pulls B.B. gun on cops.  I do not know why Guy would do this.  Cop shoots Guy but does not kill him.  Guy is now recovering in hospital but in a Heap o' Trouble as we say here in Texas.  Not to make light of this, because it was obviously quite traumatic for the Girl and the Guy and also for the shooter....so not to make light, but it did spice up my afternoon.  Now then, Joel had obviously been distracted by a mob of zombies, but he jumped back in with:

Yo Momma was in a car chase.

So then, another childhood friend (I mentioned this is a small town - we tend to stick together) got involved.  Kathy first suggested a blog topic:

With the way these other comments have been going, might I suggest your topic be on the infinite patience, required to be a loving wife, mother, sister, and friend while also maintaining the ability to not need knowledge of how to make their bodies disappear.

So yes, basically it has required much patience to not kill 90% of the people I know.  Then Kathy attempted to address Joel directly:

Joel, you sir, are one brave dude.

He's not so brave.  I never get mad at him.  Even when he misses his geography deadline and we're forced to buy a six-month extension....which is ridiculous, if you ask me...you know, that they offer extensions for you to buy.  What kind of lesson does that teach?  It is like, yeah, it is really important that you learn how to get your work done on time and here is this very strict deadline that you need to be aware of but if you miss it you can pay us $50 and then scratch all that other stuff we just said.  It is kind of like the Catholic Church granting marriage annulments.  Don't get mad if you're Catholic; I'm pretty sure that even the Pope is a tad embarrassed over this one.  Anyway - Kathy soon learned the futility of addressing Joel directly as he then said:

Yo momma's one brave dude.

I saw that coming.  I really did.  And then Kathy said:

Carol, Janet, Mike, would any of you like to educate Joel on my mama?

Kathy's mama was a larger-than-life and very imposing piano-playing first grade teacher of music.  She scared the hell out of me and I would give anything....seriously, anything at all....to watch her have a conversation with Joel.  Now, sweet little Katie, daughter of a friend, friend and former Odyssey-mate of Ellie's, and awesome blogger said:

Charlie Sheen?  Ha ha...Regionals?  Japan?

I love Charlie and he makes me not miss Mel Gibson quite so much.  Regional Odyssey tournament - just did that (see above).  Japan...what can I say.  I'm like everyone else.  Absolutely broken-hearted.  I'm also considering resuscitating my No Nukes bumper sticker.  And on the sobering mention of Japan, Joel pipes back in with:

Yo Momma is Charlie Sheen.

I wish.  Then Jas, who was the first person to actually make a suggestion, chimed in with a good one:

How about how annoying it is to friend your teenage son?

Good suggestion and one I obviously decided to take.  So I said:

And Jas wins. The end.

So Joel says:

Yo momma wins.

I'm about to give up at this point, because the boy has no intention of going to bed anytime soon and I totally do.  But I try one last time to have the last word because I am basically built that way and I said:

Let yo momma have the last word.  Also?  Go to bed.

Would you believe he let me have the last word?  He didn't go to bed though.

Signing off as Yo Momma