Mythbusters Moment

One thing I love about Mythbusters is the notion of Mythbusters Moments. The Mythbusters team will be setting up some usually complicated test to prove or disprove some really oddball piece of common 'wisdom', like whether droplets from a sneeze will really travel thirty feet, and the absurdity of the moment will strike someone, who then looks into the camera and says "What in the hell are we doing??"

We've had several of those around here in the last six weeks or so, but the best so far was when Mr. B started taking his chemo, Mr. Yuk-colored capsules with Extremely Dire Warning Stickers plastered all over the bottle.

The instructions warn NOT to TOUCH the capsules with ones fingers; rather, shake the capsules into a small cup, then dump them into ones mouth and swallow. NO CHEWING ALLOWED!

Mmmmkaay....

So, whatever you do, DON'T TOUCH THEM, but please do feel free to put them in your mouth and SWALLOW them.

Riiiight.
 

Normal, new & improved!

I thought Mr. B's diagnosis was rough enough, but his sister, who moved to town last year, also just got a Very Bad Diagnosis. So, as Mr. B and I deal with his stuff, we are also trying to help Sis as much as we possibly can.

Stress, much? Let's just say it's a full life.

I'm alternating between Control Freak Mode (working myself into a lather trying to anticipate and solve every single possible upcoming problem) and Withdrawal Mode (curling up in a ball in the corner, paralyzed by the conviction that nothing good will ever happen again). I'm hoping there's a happy medium in there somewhere. Happy, hell; I'd even settle for a tolerable medium. I don't think there's enough diet soda in the county to help me reach a happy medium.

But, as with any major crisis, the initial wave of shock and awe passes. The survivors scrape up whatever's left and start piecing things back together into some semblance of normal, trying to figure out what 'normal' now looks like. We have kind of settled into what passes for normal these days. Even though we know more THINGS are going to happen at some point, we can't do dick about it right now. Except wait.

So wait, we will.

In the meantime, we're scraping together what we can, going to work, and trying to get stuff done. What else can we do?
 

You may have already won!

All three entries for the hat contest were wonderful, although I am having a tough time sourcing entry #2. Mr. B couldn't choose a winner, and if I'd'a had three coupons I would have sent you each one, so I turned to Random.org.

Belle is the lucky winner of the woefully inadequate yet pathetically cheap prize of the two fast food coupons peeled from my diet soda cups.

Belle, if you want 'em, just email me a snail mail address at hiitsjustmee -at- yahoo -dot- com and I'll send them your way.

Thanks for playing!
 

It's time for a random contest!

Lookee -- the monkey on my back has a silver lining!

As I feed my addiction for 'diet dark', I keep getting these coupons for free food (from a national fast food chain whose name rhymes with Lurger Fling) but so far, none of the things I've won are things I eat.

That's where you come in, Dear Reader. We're going to have a contest!

See, Mr. B needs more fun ball caps because Sweetie keeps chewing his up, but he's having a hard time finding cool ones. We need your help.

In a comment below, post a link to a funny yet tasteful ball cap (see guidelines below). He will pick his favorite and I will mail the winner the two coupons I have so far (for a Croissanwich and Apple Pie) plus any others I win in the meantime.

As for guidelines, the cap color should be tan, brown, olive, or black; be of a regular ball cap shape (no antlers, etc.); and should have some extremely clever and hilarious image or saying on it. Overall, it needs to be something he would actually wear in public.

Mr. B will choose a winner Sunday night, July 18th, before we go to bed (usually 9 pm* Pacific Time.)

Are you up for it? I knew you would be! Remember, Mr. B's scalp is counting on you. But no pressure.
:)

*Yeah, shut up. We're old. Haven't I mentioned that before?
 

Ladies, look at your man...

Time for some fun and games, people! So Isiah Mustafa, the Old Spice Man, is blitzing the interwebs today in a viral marketing campaign for my least favorite man-scent ever. But you know what? I bet on him it doesn't small half bad.

Heh heh.

If you don't know who the Old Spice Man is, you must watch this:



Here's my favorite clip from today:



"Monocle smile." Priceless.

You can see the rest of the clippy goodness compiled on Urlesque. And trust me, you will want to see it.

My question for Old Spice Man is: How does he manage the pressure and demands of being the role model for the entire male population? I know from experience that being the center of the universe can be quite a burden, but to be the sole example of manly perfection... whoa. That's heavy.
 

Mama's little helper

OK, so you've probably gotten the sense that The News was pretty bad. Yeah, it's freaking scary, and we are getting a sense of the full scope of the problem but we don't yet have all the puzzle pieces fit together to figure out WTF it all means. We are now smack dab in the middle of one of those weird times where nothing seems real and it is almost impossible to remember that everyone else is just chugging along with their daily lives while we thrash around helplessly in the muck, our toes scrabbling desperately for a hint of something solid.

I have already learned some interesting things, though. Did you know that when someone in your household gets a really bad diagnosis, one that has the very real likelihood of being life-threatening, you still have to go to work and talk to customers on the phone and care about their problems? And, you still have to go grocery shopping and feed people and take out the trash. And those flower beds don't weed themselves, you know. And if you don't keep up with the housework (read: you don't have the cleaning lady come often enough) your son will break out in hives from his low-level dog allergy, which makes you a Very Bad Mom on top of everything else.

Who knew? I can't say I think it's fair. I always kind of assumed that when something happens that FREAKS you the hell OUT like that, you get a "Get Out Of Shit Free" card. Well, mine hasn't shown up in the mail yet.

I have to confess that I have discovered how weak I really am. I have found myself self-medicating on a regular basis. It started out fairly innocently, just once or twice that first week when things were super fucked up, and I swore that I'd stop as soon as we found ourselves on solid ground, but I'm afraid it's turned into an almost daily thing. I rely on it now, even after I swore earlier this year I was done for good and I'd never take it up again.

Yes, I'm drinking diet soda again. And not the stuff in the cans, either -- it's gotta be the stuff from the fast food places on ice. Sometimes I even get a large, which doesn't even fit in the cupholder of my car and takes two hands to maneuver.

Of course I'm ashamed of myself, but it's not enough to make me stop. I know my body will pay for the chemical abuse I'm heaping on it, but I don't care.

I need it and it helps, if even for a few minutes.

Then again, if that's the worst habit I pick up during this, I think I'm doing OK.
 

To Do list

One item of unfinished business haunting me lately is having The Talk with Young Son. He'll be eleven soon and I know it's been coming for some time, but for some reason I just have not been able to nut up and get through it. I'm guessing it's because I'm not ready for him to (gulp) enter puberty, and maybe my inner magical thinker believes delaying The Talk will delay the process.

I wish.

I was thinking back to what I thought about sex as a child and concluded I didn't think much about it at all. Other than a few attempts at playing Doctor, which wasn't even connected with the word "sex", the first time I remember it coming up was when I was maybe eight or nine. A group of us -- probably Elaine, Ann, Michelle, Mary Helen, and Holly were playing Barbies on Holly's patio on a hot Indiana summer afternoon.

BTW, when was the last time you used the word "patio"?

Mary Helen, second eldest in the only Catholic family in the neighborhood, decided it was time to show us how babies were made. She stripped Barbie and Ken and stood them face to face, with full body contact.

The group fell silent.

"But where do they do it?" someone asked.

"At the hospital," Mary Helen stated with authority. "They go to a special room and take off all their clothes and stand right up against each other like this. Then they get dressed and go home. When it's time for the baby to come out, they go back to the hospital and the doctor cuts it out."

The cutting out the baby part didn't bother us too much, but we were fascinated and repelled imagining our parents doing that first thing. Especially Mary Helen's parents whom, by my eight-year-old criteria, were not particularly attractive people.

Ew.

No one had any better explanation, so it had to be the truth. Besides, Mary Helen had six kids in her family so she should know. What can I say? This was back in the late Sixties.

All together now: It was a much simpler time.

Thanks to the tsunami that is today's media and entertainment industry, I'm pretty sure that Young Son, almost 40 years my junior, has probably seen and heard more sexual innuendo than I had when I graduated high school. He's seen enough animals mating on TV and recently learned that humans also mate, so it probably will be no big deal to connect the dots for him. Piece o'cake!

Ummm yeah... I'm sure I'll get to it eventually.