Frustration Smörgåsbord

You know what is a great way to not start a Monday morning? Get on the phone with your cable company and AT&T to sort out your bill and cancel some crap they put on there that you never asked for.  Then start a new phone call asking for a credit from Sprint because you cell phone doesn't work in your own house and then while you're having fun dancing to hold music go ahead and take a call from the hospital and entertain the idea that the two insurance companies that should be playing nice aren't.  Perhaps you could try to get all the insurance companies on the phone with yourself and the hospital and then when your phone is dropping the call you can just cha cha cha you way to the kitchen for a hot cup of coffee and a sink load of dishes.  Follow up with a healthy dose of correspondence with my soon to be ex-husband.  Yeah, that's pretty much how not to do it.

I'll Pick Up My Guitar and Play

Ella: I'm in a play and I'm a fern and I hate it.

Me: Why do you hate it?

Ella: Because I'm the only girl fern... They're all boys... and goofy boys.  Harumph!

Me: Why are the goofy?

Ella: We have to sing rock-n-roll and do air guitar and it's not my style.

I commenced to showing the kid videos of chicks that rock trying to sooth her.

We started with Tina doing Proud Mary, then Joan Jett, and then of course Le Tigre, Bikini Kill and Veruca Salt (ah the classics.)  Still Ella seemed unsure.  We watched my freinds daughter's band (below) and she liked it but nervously mentioned "that air guitar thing" again.



I realized the stupidity of air guitar and decided to find some people doing cool looking air guitar, or something close to it.  So it turns out, the air guitar championship for 2012 had two women in the top three contenders.  We watched the video.  Ella loved the first lady.

 

Spoiler alert!  At a minute forty five the lady smashes her air guitar on the stage.  In the next clip she gets it out again and Ella said "Oh yeah right! Where did she get ANOTHER air guitar?!" and I couldn't stop giggling.  Then she realized what she said and we were both laughing.

She concluded "So it's like miming but to music!" and I said "Exactly! It's mimming!" (she loves mimes.) I'm sure dude-bros all over this nation would just love to hear my eight year old say "I just loove mimes!" in response to their rockin' out to Rush in bars across the land.

When the second air guitar guy comes on, he's pretty good and Ella asks "Why do they keep jumping around on stage?" and I realize the key piece to this whole lesson is that my kid has NEVER seen a lead ax man go nutty on stage.  She has never sat in front of MTV hoping to see Eddie Van Halen or Angus or Slash, she has no idea why anyone is even smashing an air guitar, and there's no context for wanting to  twiddle your fingers near your crotch and to the left of your body while making crazy grunty faces.  She has never experienced the worship of a guitarist.

Yes, we spent the next half an hour watching crazy solos while I explained "No that's not a woman that's a man dressed up like that because he thinks it's tough," and "Yes, the band IS named after him," "His body is shiny and sparkly because he's been sweating all night and jumping all over in velvet school boy short pants," and finally  "You're right, the heavy metal look really never went away, it did just turn into Goth."

While Ella forgot her homework in her desk today, I feel fully satisfied with what she learned at home.

I leave you with this:

How to Scare the Hell Out of a Mother

We went to the buffet Saturday night and had a wonderful time eating everything we liked up until Jack fell backwards off of his chair and whacked the back of his head on the leg of the table next to us.  Like all head wounds it bled, a lot.  I immediately put my filthy, I've been at a buffet on a Saturday night, hand on his wound to insure the most possible germs get a chance at his head but despite my efforts the doctor said he was fine.  No cracked skull, all swelling on the outside, no stitches just some antibiotic ointment and a gauze wrap around his head to keep him from bleeding on things. As you can see, it didn't slow him down at all.   When we finally made it home from the doc, to my horror, there was still at least an hour of couch jumping to be done.  

Butter

also: THIS

Chavez Real Quick

After the hockey game last Thursday, the one that went into overtime and then a shootout, the one that lasted longer than any hockey game I've ever been to, the one that got us into the car and on our way home at 10:15pm on a school night, after that hockey game; Ella announced she had homework, a report on Cesar Chavez.  Luckily third grade reports aren't exactly 100 word essay double spaced with a  bibliography yet.  So she managed to get a good ten sentences on paper before breakfast and it turns out she needed to finish it over the four day weekend... which I just found out at eight pm tonight. So she's slaving and sweating over assembling the notes and facts she gathered last week, meticulously scribbling a number two pencil onto a sheet of blue lined notebook paper.  The erasing is furious and the caterwauling is sublime.  I made hot coco to ease the tension.  I bought good coco yesterday, dark 100% cocoa it says on the side.  I used whole milk and and a teaspoon of sugar.  As I stirred the milk didn't turn brown, it went lavender.  The report is still not finished.  The cocoa is.