LUCINDA THE LAPTOP, PART II: (“When Did I Get So Feeble, My Teenage Daughter Had to Become My Caretaker?”)

Photos: Greg Weinerr and Jackie Roman, Sept. 2007 Playgirl Magazine

--Retrospective Breaking News--

Flash – the very same week I recovered Lucinda The Laptop A-Leaping, my son Nick of Bang Camaro but more recently of Canada! experienced a similarly-tragic technology loss.

His Pink Motorola Razor Phone apparently leaped from a hole in his jeans pocket while he was being transported throughout the winding Boston Metropolis inside one of its more reliable forms of public transportation.

Or maybe it was a cab. That part doesn’t matter.

What does matter is that he lost his phone two days before his then-world-touring David Letterman-Appearing Jimmy Kimmel-Approved 24-Man Band Bang Camaro was scheduled to open for Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler at the Boston Music Awards. 

Clearly, Nick needed his cellular device.

Living sooooo close to global-fame was one of the most exciting times of my life. 

I even got to witness the actual call Nick made to Cambridge Police.  To report his missing phone.

Although the ONLY reason I eavesdropped on Nick’s landline-call to Cambridge Police was because he was at my house standing right in front of me, after he'd surveyed vast oaken bureaus I’d offered since he was moving to a larger apartment.  Rock stars NEED this kind of open space -- (the kind you find inside vacant bureau-drawers).

 “Yes sir, Friday evening. That's right, in Cambridge. At about midnight. Uh-huh.  It was a Razor. By Motorola, yes.  In pink.  Pink, that’s right. A dude-gag, that whole I’m In Touch With My Feminine Side Thing Okay you GOT the pink part.  Excuse me? Uh, it was a Razor.  Right.  Motorola. . .”

This went on for twenty minutes.

When he hung up I excitedly offered him my cell phone as back-up in case the temp-phone Verizon was sending arrived late, as he was wildly important in his work and music careers. 

Then I stole my daughter’s cell phone from her purse in the event that Nick or Steven Tyler needed to call me for something.

Two days later, following the stunningly-successful BMA weekend event with Nick Given and Steven Tyler, I return to my house after a long workday teaching eleven-year olds and a triple-promoted eight-year-old how Oedipus murdered his father and married his mother.

Me:  “Phew!  I’m home, Abby!!  What a day. Oh, hey, wow. The house smells funny.  Like – sniff sniff – a dude dormitory.”

Abby: --online—looks up at me in horror – “Uh, this is our HOME. It smells fine…” rolls her eyes. Continues typing.

 “Oh, look, Abby. Nick didn’t borrow my cell phone.  It’s still there in its charger.”

  -- not looking up anymore – clatter-clatter –“Yeah, he found his lost Razor.”

 “Really?  Like, the same way I got my laptop back??  Cool!  When was this? Where’d he find it?”

clickety-clack clack -- “Today and I don’t know” – clack clack—

 So I call Nick on his Recovered Pink Razor.  (By Motorola.)  It still had its Out-of-Service Prompt from Verizon.

“Abby, are you sure he has HIS cell and not the one Verizon sent as a replacement?”

sigh – clack – “YES.  Nick has HIS phone,” clack clack

“But how do you know it’s HIS?”

“He TOLD ME …” cluck, sigh, clack

“When?”

Abby stops typing, turns slowly, and regards me as though I were the sort of idiot who’d leave a laptop on their car-roof and just drive off …

She carefully enunciates, “T O D A Y.”

“WHEN today? He WORKS.”

Using the same tone she once used on Alzheimer's patients during Exploratory Voc Week at BV Tech, she said, "Do you remember that he is MOVING to his new apartment this week and you offered him a couple of huge bureaus?  And that he said he was TAKING TODAY OFF for this? To move them?  TO his new apartment?”

“Oh gosh, you’re right. It’s MONDAY.”

 “It IS Monday.”  She returns to the keyboard, relieved.

“So did you SEE him?”

“Oh my GAWD, Mom, how else did he TELL me he got his CELL PHONE BACK?”

“So THAT’S why the house smells like a dormitory.  Did he have his friends over to help him move the furniture?”

“Yes.  Don’t ask who or how many I don’t remember”  clack clack, click

------------------

Just when did I get so incorrigibly stupid?

And how come SHE didn’t put together that I was smelling her brother and his friends after transporting oversized oaken furniture from my house down many flights of stairs, outside, to the Band-Van?

Huh?

Who’s stupid now?

-------------------

I inelegantly note to her that I need to log onto the family computer to check my email. Which is when Abigail helpfully reminds me that I can just go use my wiggly-hinged car-roof-injured laptop that I had learned to tear out of its Duct Taped Nest back at work.

“But I’m afraid I’ll hurt it, Abby.  I only trust you with my school’s technology.”

She sighs, huffs, logs out, and retrieves Broken Lucinda from her new and heavily-padded transporting case.

Then -- uh oh.

Abby has unfastened Lucinda from the case's sturdy harness-system and hoisted her gently to a nearby desk, so as to devote all of her energy to standing there, hands on hips, to glower.  At me.

She is SO frustrated she cannot speak.

I look around, horrified.  “Abby, what?”

“Mom!  The cord!?  It’s not IN your padded case with the laptop. And ever since those ‘alleged falls’ it took, you killed the Hibernate Button. And you never shut it OFF.”

I wait for the rest of her sentence.

Her eyes roll.

“Mama, this means YOU HAVE NO  B A T T E R Y.  Can you remember, please, next time, to shut your computer down when you are done using it?”

“Yes, I can, Abby.”

“And can I have my cell phone back now, please?”

I cannot instantly recall where I have left her cell phone.  No one had called me on it.  

My eyes dart around nervously.

“TELL me you KNOW where my CELL PHONE is.”

“Honey, it’s not lost it’s … I know.  I put it…let’s look here in my purse.”

She grabs the purse off the kitchen table and roots through it, at first awestruck then visibly disgusted that the five BEST hairbrushes in the house are located, right there, in the void.

“Do you SEE my hair, Mom?  THIS is the reason I looked like this today.  I think I’ll just take FOUR of these back now. You only need one.”

“Thank you, Abby.”

“Oh, look. No WONDER we have to use spoons to eat steak.  Can you please explain why you have seven forks in your purse?”

“Um, like…if I keep my fork with my lunch, the tines pierce my lunch bag then the salad dressing leaks, so I separate the cutlery from the lettuce by keeping silverware in my purse.”

“You need a new system.  Here, you can place your fork ON your salad, if you leave room. Like this. Then seal the dressing up really well.  Line up the yellow line with the blue, until the Zip-Top is GREEN. Maybe you should use two bags. Oh look!  Here’s my cell phone next to a tampon that’s coming out of its wrapper. I think I’ll just throw this away for you. You have a whole new box in the bathroom.”

“Thank you, Abby.”

--------------

That was the year I renewed my special education license. 

My daughter’s early experiences back in elementary school clearly provided her more strategies for success than she needed.

I needed at least one life skill, myself.

If only Abby and I had enjoyed this daughter-mother moment days earlier, I’d have never lost Lucinda in the first place.

(And if he'd played his cards right and hung around that Monday, we might have shared some strategies with Nick.)

Oh, who am I kidding?  If I had ANY success using strategies and life skills, I wouldn’t be enjoying so much unemployment and technological-BLOGGGGGING success featuring made-up emoticons and cell phone photography.  

      ~~~>{               <--- this is Alfred Hitchcock blowing a party horn      

How My School's Laptop Launched Itself Off the Roof of My Car

   The first time I was issued a laptop by an employer, I was an English teacher at a charter school in Marlborough, Massachusetts.  It was a STEM school (Science, Technology, Electricity and Magic).  But as someone who was not terribly fluent with the technology part, I feared my new appliance.

    I was raised to have a healthy respect for technology.  When I got my learner’s permit, my parents told me, “It’s not that you should feel PANICKED about aiming two-and-a-half-metric-tons of lethal steel toward roadways containing children. You just need to respect your power.”

   Oh, I respected my laptop and its powers. In fact, I never broke eye contact with it from the moment I depressed its ON button until it powered down.  And I remained in this heightened state of vigilance throughout all eight hours of my workday.

    It was in this altered state that I trained on an expensive grading program our school had purchased. With my sweaty fingertips poised over the keyboard’s vicinity (the trembling caused my hands to wander, mostly toward my car keys) I somehow caused the program to under-shoot my students’ grade-point-averages.

    The software started reprogramming, regurgitating, re-calibrating and re-calculating until, appearing next to 74 student-names, were digits so exponentially negative, SO infinitely “to the left” of a number-line, they created a black hole – a spinning vortex -- from which light and hopefully, my laptop, could never escape.

    Admin had to hire I.T. staff to come reconfigure my hard-drive.

    It is no wonder that, from this day forward, I cultivated a healthy animosity toward my laptop. 

    Once my school showed me the bill for my laptop’s repair, my animosity turned to a hatred so unspeakable, my conscious mind had no capacity to acknowledge it.

    What else could explain my out-of-body experience when I – without my actual awareness –placed my black-matte-finish laptop onto my vehicle’s black-matte-finish convertible top – and drove off?

   

   The beeping a mile up the road at a red light was disconcerting.  I wondered if there were some medical emergency or biohazard I had inadvertently stopped my car on.

   Oh, there was.

   The kindly gentleman behind all that beeping finally ran up to my driver-side window and shouted, “You left your LAPTOP on the roof of your CAR,” and several biohazards took place right there in my driver’s seat.

   This guy had followed me from the moment I exited the school’s parking lot until I went around a tight turn, where my laptop – like a tragic hero on his deathbed – quietly ‘slipped away.’

   When I returned to school the next day, I was so jealous of my other colleagues. 

   Not the ones whose laptops rested safely in their actual laps.  

   The other colleagues. The ones who were lucky enough to have their laptops stolen.

   

    Our charter school in its start-up year was forced to trim costs, so they did not purchase much insurance for things like… teachers or their laptops.

   Anyone who lost their laptop simply never got another one.  It was much the way many of us were raised as children. You lost the ice cream off the top of your cone and that was that.  No feel-good-replacement scoops for us.  It was the Firm Hand approach.

   Our school’s hand was so firm, it made teachers who lost their laptops – through larceny at gunpoint or in my case, an Act of God – have to log onto giant, coal-fired communal desktops down in the teachers’ lounge.  The kind that, even IF you had a forklift to lower one onto the top of your car, you’d never drive off with it up there, due to the telltale crushed car underneath.

   Just when I was getting comfortable with the idea of logging in and out of my own computerized colossus (I fantasized about sitting by a steam-punk tower taller than the one that leans in Pisa today) my principal sashayed into my classroom, bearing my black-matte laptop.

  

   “Oh shit,” mouthed my lips.

   “Sorry, Carolyn, what was that?”

   “That’s IT,” I gushed. “Where did you FIND it?”

   “Someone from the industrial complex next-door saw it on the side of the road.  They brought it right over today.”

   “How on EARTH did they know it belonged to someone at our school?”

   “The bumper sticker you defiled it with, Carolyn.  The one with your sons' band's name.  Bang Camaro.  Everyone knows you’re its mother.”

  

   This would not be the first time that little 24-man band would act as a bellwether foretelling my downfall.  Meanwhile, down that laptop did fall, evidenced by the wiggly hinge on one side.

   

   “Robert, does it even WORK?”

   “Oh, we had I.T. check it out.  It’s working great.  We were even hoping you’d send an email to the DELL Corporation, about how rugged their product is!  We’re thinking they might offer us a discounted insurance plan.  Just for you.”

   “Aw, you guys think of EVERYTHING.”

   “Just be careful with that hinge.  See how it’s wobbly and bent?  You want to be extra careful not to bang or – God forbid – DROP it, because if that hinge snaps in two, the razor-sharp edges will sever the wires right behind it, and that disconnects it permanently from the motherboard.”

    “Meaning what?”

    “Meaning you’ll have a matte-finish black paperweight.”

    “No kidding... ”

    “By the way, we have a fire drill in three minutes.  And, congratulations!  I’m sure you missed your technology.”  He handed over my laptop and, like that.  He was gone.

  

    So many thoughts raced through my mind, I could hardly track of any of them. 

    

   But I was a professionally-licensed educator and with a fire drill on tap, there was no time for racing thoughts.  Robert had said seconds earlier that in three minutes--WHOOOP WHOOOP!  WEEEE-ew WEEEE-ew!  OOO….WAAAAA-rat-a-tat-tat;  OOO…WAAAAA-rat-a-tat-tat;   Ahhhh-OOOOOOOOOOOOO-Ga!

   Two minutes and forty seconds early.

   I was NOT prepared.

   I was still cradling Lucinda, My Recovered Laptop when – oh no. 

   It all happened so fast.

   Make that slow.  Like a car crash when everything moves in slow-motion.

   My arms lurched from the screech of that Fire Alarm, amplified through surround-sound speakers located six inches from where I stood – and there in mid-air, spinning like a Ninja, was Lucinda – off to Infinity and Beyond – twisting and spiraling ever onward, torquing like a broken dancer then –

    WHOM

   She crash-landed. 

   Right on that broken hinge.

   It took such a direct hit, Lucinda seemed to spring back upright from that triangular point-of-impact, as though the hinge were a pogo stick.

   She spun ‘round four more times before landing, once again, on that broken hinge.  Finally, she collapsed, exhausted, into a pile of her own hinge-dust. 

   That hinge snapped directly in two, just as Robert predicted.

  

   After the fire drill was over, I visited I.T., pointing to Lucinda’s now two-piece hinge.

 

    “It just sort of … DID this.”

   I helpfully pointed out that, probably, the hinge was ‘ready to go.’ 

   And, poof.  Like that!

   Lucinda got duct-taped so those razor-sharp edges came NO WHERE NEAR the motherboard wire. 

   That is because she was duct-taped directly to the Top of my Teacher Desk up in Room 301 where she remained, immobilized, for fifteen more months, until I looped up with my students and moved to a different building.

  

   The moral of the story is… be careful what you wish for. 

  

   None of this would have happened if I had not broken a sacred teacher-commandment and coveted my neighbors’ communal – and permanently mounted to the teachers’ lounge – computers.  The kind bolted down by their own heft to metallic desk units.

   My school’s thoughtful I.T. department fashioned for me my very own.

   Oh, by the way, I did write to DELL.  It turned out that, no matter how many emotional epistles I sent to them, lauding their use of alien technology with a patented hybrid of rubberized-titanium and kryptonite, they never offered my school an insurance discount. 

   I had to get that at an entirely different STEM school a few years later, after the first one could no longer afford the expansion-pack of I.T. staff for my appliance misadventures. 

   My next school was pretty solutions-oriented.  Their "insurance plan" was a student intern named Stefanie. She completed her I.T. Practicum on me and my various issues until she graduated, with honors. 

   Ahhh, that school put the M back in Science, Technology, Electricity and Magic.  I mean LOOK at me, using magic to blog!

   Thank You, Charter STEM Schools Everywhere! Emoticon Hearts to You ALL! <3 <3 <3  <3  <3  <3  <3  <3  <3  <3

Financial Aid Brings Pot Of GOLD ...

  Institutional Cards to Which I Am Forever Indebted 

My children and I shall be forever indebted to the world of Financial Aid.  Indebted until 2031.

It’s not just that their colleges mysteriously qualified them for enough funding to purchase private islands peppered with personal handmaidens. It’s that their debt-ratios make them excellent credit risks.

 Long ago, each of their institutions of higher tuition calculated, very carefully, their credit risks.  And if you can’t trust them for accuracy, well… go visit parking lots of any institution of higher learning to see the kinds of cars financial aid staff drive.  

My kids don’t know any this, of course (unless they’re reading this now, but I’m probably safe). Although, there is a chance my oldest child suspects he possesses super-hero credit.  He and his fiancée recently qualified for nearly twenty ba-skillion dollars for a variety of high-end homes near Ontario, one of which they bought and live in as I write this. 

At first we thought this was due to the metric system Canada uses. But it is technically thanks to Nick’s college and its intrepid Financial Aid department.

From 1998 until 2003 when (YAY!) all three of our sons attended a variety of universities full-time (private schools to boot, since these provide the best loans money can’t buy) they all began receiving mail order invitations to enjoy additional debt, via plastic.

Since our kids list our personal mailbox as their legal address, my mail contained an average of 20 credit card applications per week, per son, for decades.

Our first-born received the most powerful offers. That is because we were the most poor when he started college. If you’ve ever taken a Sociology course, you know that the offspring of impoverished parents tend to inherit that same earning-capacity.  Ergo, with poverty as the key indicator American financial institutions use to calculate ability to pay back loans, Nick had qualified -- by his 18th birthday -- for more than $300 K.

The letters that accompanied his invitations to plastic wealth were monuments to creative writing.

Dear Master Nicholas,

You should be proud of your exemplary credit rating.  It has not gone unnoticed.

Because you take debt seriously, it should please you to know we have included YOU amongst our select family of Executive Gold Card Elitists.

Welcome to the world of Preferred Debt!

Love,

Your Personal Gold Card Team

His cards were all at zero per cent interest for the first twelve months, no annual fee, and each came with Gold Leaf Blanque Cheques. Thrilling executive cheques that promised to “consolidate high interest loans if you simply fill in the blank!”

So I did.  Twenty-three times.  For all of my kids.  For fifteen years.

The most difficult part was practicing their autographs but I pretty much nailed this by Nicholas’ graduation.

In fact, between Nick’s freshman year and our third son’s graduation in 2008, I'd earned a total of 30 Gold Leaf Cards with Companion-Cheques to pay off various credit-lines such as mortgages and things and was never charged even zero per cent!

I have heard some of this is obliquely sub-legal, but credit card companies would not be offering to pay off my other lines of credit if we did not somehow all win in the end. 

Besides.  Those “first twelve months” never transpire.  It says so in the fine print on my Gold Leaf Applications.

But even if my loans do “come to term,” my daughter’s Financial Aid department will qualify her for Graduate School.  And once her institution sees how many Gold Cards her brothers’ colleges won me, Abby will receive scholarships.

 My favorite thing about my 30 Gold Leaf Cards is that I can finally mail all of those ‘Welcome To Preferred Debt’ letters to my creditors.

 They keep sending me remittance hate mail.

Dear "Nicholas And/Or Jacob,"

It has been eight months since we sent your first bill for the Nighty-Night-NOOK you ordered for "J Given" who must surely be your cherished Dad. How we wish we could have been there to see his face! 

Thanks to insightful sons like you, Barnes vs Noble can continue its crusade against dementia by using WORDS to stimulate minds of aging parents LIKE YOURS! 

Because it is people like YOU, "Nicholas And/Or Jacob," who recognize the MERITS of words, we have allowed these eight months to lapse without a remittance reminder.  We know that people like YOU are busy improving our world.

Perhaps your checque and our correspondence crossed in the mail. After all, someone with YOUR exemplary credit would never neglect his obligations.  So we thank you in advance for your remittance.

If, however, you have chosen not to pay, check your mailbox next month for a letter from Phase Two of our Collection Plan.

Don’t make us hurt you.

Love,

Nighty-NOOK Credit Services, Barnes vs Noble LTD

Dear "Zachary And/Or Abigail,"

We are not certain how you can look in the mirror.  Here we are, eleven months after the root canal you agreed to – begged for – for your retired, aging mother.

Thanks to high-tech lasers, your mother enjoys the miracle of mastication with two freshly-capped bicuspids.

Research has proven that teeth are crucial to the continued neural development of our aging population.  Parents rendered toothless by negligent children can no longer think OR chew.

It is evident, "Zachary And/Or Abigail," that you once counted yourselves among children who loved their parents.  Heinously, we realize you lie.

Enclosed find a warrant for your arrest from the Presidential Task Force To Stop Elder Abuse.

See You In The Mail,

Smile-A-While Credit Team 

Dear Smiling And/Or Nookie Loan Sharks, Inc.  

Now, see here.

Attached for your convenience are more than 30 credit references from powerful institutions who find us gods.  As you can see, our entire family is comprised of Executive Gold Card Elitists.

Our Gold Card institutions will not take kindly to your abuse. 

We demand you apologize for your libelous insults, or suffer the Gold Card Wrath.

You shock us, 

The Family Midas

-------------

Dear Consumer X,

We are sorry to inform you we must rescind your Gold Card Privileges.  We are unable at this time to include in our elite circle fugitives from justice like yourselves. 

Had we understood you are wanted by the Presidential Task Force To Stop Elder Abuse, we would have mailed our cards to your neighbors.

We spit on you,

Your Ex-Gold Card Benefactors

I recommend that students with financial need avoid student loans entirely and go on the Monthly Installment Plan offered at institutions of highest tuition.  Your  paychecks or those of your parents will be electronically tampered with on the first day of each month by Sven at a Sviss Bank.

If there is anything else I can do for you in the world of high finance, send your questions to my new P.O. Box at MCI. (Not the bankrupt cell company. They folded after extending me credit in ‘97.)

I’m at the Institution for Higher Learning a la Massachusetts Correctional, where I learn many important new things, each day.

Love,

Nicholas And/Or Jacob And/Or Zachary And/Or Abigail 

WALKING FOR STIMULATION (New Year Fitness Routine with Lily and Emily Lisker)

Running Shoes, Coffee Mug and New Year's Resolve

After last week’s marathon ingestion of eggnog-fat and buttertarts frosted in caramelized lard (combined with the resulting 72-hour coma), I am ready to revisit my ‘routine.’

I don’t mean my old routine, from back in 2012.  In those days I’d get up at the crack of noon and race to my cushioned blogging-chair to tally page-views, balancing Nutella and a loaf of toast on my gut.

Well, no more.

Today’s new and improved gut has too much girth to balance anything on, except itself. 

Indeed, now that my gut is able to sit upright on my lap, unsupported, like a lumpy toddler with no soul, its resplendence occupies the breadth and depth and height my thighs can reach.

My new gut, in fact, is so numbly independent of the rest of my body, I had to register it with the federal government to get it its own social security number.  (It plans to vote for Biden.)

Plus it is so eerie, it’s being studied by the stars of the TV show Ghosthunters for the vertigo and paranormal energy it generates. Why, just last night, the local TAPS Team (The Atlantic Paranormal Society) recorded multiple EVPs off my gut (electronic voice phenomena).  Everyone thought they'd heard demonic swearing, the kind from the movie, The Exorcist, but my gut was just asking for “fudge.”

Speaking of exorcising, I read in this morning’s New York Times that working-out is responsible for a startling outbreak of physical fitness. Not only does it aerobicize the brain and tighten adipose. It releases a bunch of ‘endorphins.’

Endorphins are these fun brain chemicals – they look like carpenter ants – that exercising bodies make to create an LSD high. They increase wellbeing, suppress appetite and stimulate creativity, and it’s hard not to see why. 

Power-walkers, for example, can be observed at dawn pounding pavement with their heels, breathing truck exhaust and chilled mold spores – sweating organs through their pores.  Without endorphins to cheer and addict them, they’d be home eating bread dough with me.

Recently, a walking friend was having so much fun with her endorphins, she tried to impart hers on me. “Tomorrow morning,” gushed Emily in her daily email to me, “you must walk with us.  Lily and I get started around 7.”

And I would seriously consider walking.  Until she emailed again.  “Carolyn, you should see Lily now. She is TEEMING with muscle-tone, plus our post-partum neighbor lost 20 pounds.  And I’ve started PAINTING again!” I was so intimidated by all of their successes, I developed anxiety insomnia. Which is when Emily noted that endorphins aren’t the only brain chemical walking releases.  “There’s also SERATONIN!”

“I spike seratonin from chocolate, Emily  – zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz –  See?”

“—and walking burns calories.”

I glanced at my breakfast Yodel (on clearance from Hostess).  It resembled my Eating Arm.

I clicked out of my email, despondent.

I thought long and hard about endorphins and seratonin. Enough to realize they are controlled substances.  Intoxicants the Republican Congress might decide to make a felony.  (But only AFTER they finish their power-luge off the fiscal cliff.)

You see my point, don't you?  I wanted my brain to manufacture its own illicit chemicals, quick, before they got outlawed.  So I just did it.

One morning, I got up, cleaned the overturned trash from a cat with a better nightlife than mine, kicked a pile of guest-towels molding on an upstairs floor in the general direction of a laundry basket, woke my 22 year-old to let her know I was off to Emily’s, then I brushed my teeth, combed my hair, and went back to bed.

(Exercise is something to ease into gradually.)

Once, in my previous life (July of 2012), I tried physical fitness.  I ran with my video game Wii Fitness Trainer (both of us in color-coordinated sweatbands, my Wii controller secured to my wrist) until I got out-of-breath.

But not before I blew PAST my entire family’s previous running scores and became the fastest runner in Wii–Level-One.    

Once I’d hooked myself up to my asthma inhalers and oxygen tent, I tried to turn the game off because I didn’t want to ruin my high score. But I accidentally hit ‘re-try.’ 

Then I couldn’t stop the game. 

My Wii Trainer ran on ahead without me, then he noticed I wasn’t with him, so he stopped, turned, and glowered, hands on hips. But I remained sofa-bound to watch the game time-out.

My trainer refused to run without me.

Our family’s Mii Avatars all did, though.  One by one, Nick, Jake, Zach, Abby, Ace, Bridgette-the-Cat, a made-up family member named Bilb-ono my son fashioned using albino skin color and the dimensions of a malnourished rat, all blew past me.

Each family member smiled and waved at first, then frowned at me before fleeing off-screen.

Weirdly, Abby’s Mii started a new run every few seconds.  Her original Mii never returned to the starting-line first.

This also happened with her father’s Mii avatar.  For a while, it was comforting to see those two familiar faces pop up unexpectedly to run past me again and again until I timed out. Until, of course, her father returned from one of his runs with a date.  Some super-fit Indian chick in green eyeliner and a burka. NO idea where they were off to.

Jonathan is no longer permitted to play Wii Fit Running to either beat my high score OR run with Wii-trollops because I gave the game to charity.

Which is how I discovered the art of walking in real life, outdoors, with Emily and Lily.

Real Life Walking with Emily and Lily does not involve finish lines or timing-out or trollops.  It may not involve physical fitness, but it does provide generous amounts of beautiful scenery and stray dogs and – when you’re done observing dogs and scenes—there’s Emily’s homey kitchen filled with hot cinnamon coffee and homemade brioche.

Emily bakes her own bread every day, but for her guests, she grills them on a cast iron griddle, (the bread, not her guests) with butter and real maple syrup.  From trees.  Due to the fiber content in bark.  (She is SO health-conscious.)

And her coffee.  Man, I don’t know where she and her husband Bill buy their beans, but they are amazing.

“Are you sure these are LEGAL?” I asked Emily, mug atremble under the pot. 

After my third refill, I reflected back on a conversation Emily and I had shared weeks earlier, before the holidays.  Walking, she reported in a beautifully-rendered e-poem, has ”a mystical way of unfolding time. It creates the time to balance, plan the day, enjoy.”

Emily was wrong.

After eleven cups of coffee I unfolded time by force. “YO, move, I got STUFF to do,” then I vaulted over Emily and jitter-jogged to my car.

Once I learned to mix endorphins with caffeine, I required sedatives for my drive from Woonsocket to the Mass-border, so as not to breach the sound barrier from excessive highway speeds.

Mundane tasks that ordinarily occupied an entire day twitched by like lightning.  I violence-shopped at Shaw’s, speed-washed towels by going from ‘load’ directly to ‘spin.’ By 1 PM I’d already eaten supper and an evening snack.

I had EIGHT HOURS to kill until Dexter.

(. . .time unfolds – time to balance, plan, enjoy . . .)

I unfolded three Yodel wrappers, planned an hour of poker with Abby, then enjoyed a sustained stimulant crash, balanced face down on the sofa.

Abby had to program the DVR to record Dexter.  I never woke up until Wednesday. 

JUST in time to rev up the car and time-travel straight back to my mug.  Ooooh baby, this fitness thing’s SO fine.

"Happy New Year" from Super Metroids, Level 4, Land of Norfaire, Planet Zebes

December 31, 2012:  New Year's Eve Stop-Action Ice Art

The thing about our Family Holiday that struck me deeply this Christmas season – the thing many families were equally touched and awed by – was the epidemic of killer icicles that broke out Friday through New Year’s Eve.

Rogue, mutant icicles were apparently super-sized by temperature-fluctuations so vast, one minute our roofline burst forth with waterfalls and song, and the next, arctic gusts transformed them into stop-action ice art.

(These arctic gusts were similar to those Kurt Russell spat into in his arctic movie, The Thing, where airborne spittle got so brittle, it shattered in loud shards upon impact with tundra.)

By yesterday morning, every overhang on our house was adorned with morphing, stop-action ice spikes in various stages of birth and death.  It was like living inside The Science Channel.  Or the movie Inception, down in a Limbo Layer where twenty-four hours pass as slowly as one thousand years.

We were so busy from 10 PM on December 27^th until roughly 59 hours later, working a variety of moments that morphed from protracted warmth to frozen stop-action, it was stunning to ride the layers back up to real-time last evening when I came face-to-spike with a Death-cicle at midnight.

It was dizzying. Although, it was difficult to discern from whence my vertigo derived, after a day of a different stop-action, caused by the car we were stunt-driving through Boston in.  (I think in a “cloverleaf” pattern.) 

The TomTom GPS we borrowed instructed us to “Turn around … as SOON … as possible.  Turn around … as SOON … as possible . . .” until all five of us were vomiting and my son proposed to his girlfriend so we could stop and visit wedding-reception venues that did not spin on their own.

Five of us ventured into the city.  Only three would return. (Our two missing passengers kept the TomTom with them to ensure their return to Canada.  Or Guam.  We'll see.)

So there the remaining three of us were at midnight last night, so bereft of a TomTom, we had no idea how to get from the parked car to our front door without guidance.  We clung to each other, disoriented from lack of direction, lurching like a six-legged epileptic ant, clawing at the door-handle with our thirty grappling-fingers.

“Finally,” I sighed through clenched teeth, arms wrapped around decorative woodwork surrounding a load-bearing column. "We're safe."  Which is when a killer icicle I’d not previously appreciated for its beauty or lethality snapped off the entry's overhang and slid neatly down my back.

What this season lacked in temporal-accuracy, it made up for in icicle carnage.  

The icicle I eventually retrieved from the base of my spine -- trapped by new Christmas leggings -- was the kind that only houses on Neptune can grow: Sabertooth Dagger Prong Dart-Shards From Space.

Today they are affixed like jaws of death to every possible form of egress, making entry and exit to our home impossible without chainmail and a Spartan Helmet.

This morning I learned that these sentry’d stalactites are identical to those encountered by Samus Aran in Super Metroids, Level Four, Land of Norfaire, Planet Zebes. 

You remember the story. 

Samus had just made her way to the research facility, only to find the building in ruins and the Metroid Larva nowhere to be found, when out of darkness came a group of Zebesian Space Pirates and their leader Ridley with Metroid Larva in tow, who – upon this chance encounter with Samus –fled swiftly to the rebuilt planet Zebes where Samus followed, resolving to finish them off and save the hatchling.

Our icicles were of the same treacherous strain Samus could only defeat with a Grappling Spazer, two Morphing Balls and Brinstar Spore Spawn.

Plus they far transcended the official icicle definition rendered by the World Home-Book of Cold.  “Icicle: frozen ex-water drippage that transforms barren architectural awnings into delicate crystalline fringe.” --  See Doily, Vol. 6; Pg. 32

This hardly depicts the weaponry severing scalps outside my slider.

My 22 year old just snapped one off an awning outside her bedroom window.

She used a pulley system and a lasso.

She is now outside transporting it via snowshoes and electric toboggan to bury it in snow to keep it cold for tonight’s Anime New Year’s Eve Costume Party.

It is seven feet long and was snapped off midway between its dagger-tip and awning attachment-point.  Even at this halfway mark, its severed trunk measures two feet in diameter.  More than a half dozen little neighbor boys are asking her now if they can come over later to base-jump it.

She is explaining to them how she needs to keep it intact, so she can whomp it through gin-entranced guests this evening announcing, “Behold, I am Samus Aran. I bring you Isis, chopped by hatchet for our Brinstar Spawn-tinis.  All Hail Isis.”

Speaking of entranced, those little boys look positively enchanted out there now.   

Hmm.

Uh-oh.

It looks like Abby is dragging out plastic mailing-wrap from the Christmas trash.

Oh, will you look at that?

 She is rolling the boys in bubble wrap.  They look like blistered dwarves. 

Hang on.

[ABBY! Stop that. You’re Samus Aran, not Snow White And The Seven Burn Victims.]

Wait.  I get it.  She is dressing them up like Metroid Larva so they can transport Isis to the party, much in the way that Cleopatra was transported by Egyptian Elves.

[SLAVES, Mom, not Elves.]

I am not liking the way these icicles are shaping our New Year’s Eve. Excuse me while I venture out with protective fruit cake over my head to round up a girl posse and their Totally-Hair Barbies so we can Blow Dry this town’s awnings back to safety. 

Actually, if we dress up the blow dryers like little Grappling Spazers and Morphing Balls, I bet we can turn Abby’s Metroid Larva against her and make them our elven minions.

[Let that be a lesson to you, Samus Aran.  ZZZZAP!!   KerPLOW!!  ZOINK!  HAZZZAAAH!---]  

 -- ring --    

"Hello? We were just talking about you.  Did you guys make it back to Canada even close to on time AND on the right continent hey?  Mmm hmm.  I see, well great.  Happy New Year's Eve back and we'll talk on the New Year tomorrow!"

They made it back to Canada early due to the metric time up there. (Also because the TomTom was confiscated at Customs.)  And since ice does not stick to Toronto, they have no killer icicles up there, so I have to hurry up and post this, along with a photograph, so my family in Canada can know what's going on.

Happy New Year to All, and don't forget to take your morphing balls and blow your awnings for safety.  

Love, Carolyn