Nebulous Mooch

I like to think of myself as a relaxed, laid back kind of person. I can go with the flow, as they say. I’m great at chilaxing, as long as I have total control over what’s happening. I’m not a control freak or anything like that. I just like things done a certain way, at a certain time, preferably by me.

For example, my husband cooked breakfast this morning. While sitting in the living room, I could hear the oatmeal bubbling away in the pot. He didn’t seem to be stirring it at all, so I kept going into the kitchen to check on it. I didn’t want to interfere, so I didn’t touch the pot the oatmeal was in. Instead, I wandered into the kitchen and looked at him sitting at the bar checking emails for a while. When he didn’t get the telepathic message to go stir the oatmeal that I was trying to convey with my stare, I finally said, “That oatmeal sure is bubbling a lot.”

My husbanded nodded and continued his extremely important email checking.

“Maybe I should stir it,” I said.

“Nah, I got it,” he said, but still he didn’t move. “Go back to what you were doing. I’m making the oatmeal.”

I went back to the living room, but the sound of the oatmeal bubbling and possibly burning to the bottom of the pot nearly made me a crazy person. I know I’m already crazy, but this was making me straitjacket and padded cell crazy. When I returned to the kitchen to check on the oatmeal, he was still checking emails.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to make the oatmeal?” I asked.

“I’m just letting the extra water boil off,” he said.

I couldn’t take it anymore. I gave it a stir. It was just going to be a quick turn of the spoon, but once you start you can’t stop. I was stirring away like a mad woman when my husband kicked me out of the kitchen again. That didn’t matter much though because I had accomplished my mission. The oatmeal was well stirred and was fit for eating.

The craziest thing keeps happening to me every year. I keep getting older. I’ve been trying to figure out how to put an end to this, but outside of death I just can’t seem to come up with a solution. I was thinking that I might want to consider becoming a vampire, but I’m a bit squeamish around blood, and I don’t really like wearing black.

Last week I looked into building a time machine, because anyone who’s watched Doctor Who knows time travel is totally possible, but I can’t even seem to fix my sewing machine, how would I ever build a time machine. A time machine wouldn’t really be a solution anyway, because as I traveled backwards and forwards in time, I’d continue to age. I’d probably have to deal with some horrendous jet lag too. I’m pretty sure that every time you have jet lag you age a year.

After a lot of thought I decided that the best way to stop getting older was to just pretend it wasn’t happening. Denial solves everything, right? So I’ll tuck my gray hairs out of sight and when asked my age I’ll just tell people I’m twenty-nine. Someone once told me that I didn’t look a day over twenty-nine, but that was ten years ago.

Some people say that you should embrace your age. I don’t know what kind of drugs those people have been taking, but sane people like me will fight the advancing years like a zombie invasion.

Picture by Aih

One of the best things about having a life as incredibly interesting as mine is knowing that one day it will be immortalized in a motion picture–a comedy of course. I’ve always known that I would be involved in movie making. I’m not interested in the acting side of things. Halle Berry would probably do a much better job of pretending to be me than I ever could. I know she’s like a million years older than me, but I don’t mind.

I’ll write the screenplay which will be a breeze to do. I think it should feature a lot of slapstick comedy–falling down and pies in the face. Who doesn’t think a good banana cream pie in the face is funny?

Does the lead singer of Coldplay act? I was thinking that he could play my husband. My stepson would play himself, of course. He can really ham it up. I haven’t figured out who would play any of the other characters though. As the screen writer that isn’t my place anyway. I’m sure that once I finally convince Martin Scorsese to direct it, he’ll take care of the casting. I picture the movie being a nice family comedy. That’s right up his alley, right?

Note: I just told my husband about my movie plans and he said that Kevin Bacon would definitely play him. “People tell me I look like Kevin Bacon all the time,” he said. I wonder which people tell him this. I don’t see the resemblance, but who am I?

Photo by M4D GROUP

When we were walking around downtown the other day we saw an interracial couple walking in front of us–black woman, white man. This is the conversation that ensued.

My husband: Look at that. There’s more of that around here these days. That’s good.
Me: I guess we were forerunners for the area.
My husband: Yeah. It’s not like the old days when people in trucks would yell at us while we walked down Bay Shore.
Me: Or the treatment we would get from people in Save A’Lot.
My husband: Yeah.
Me: But I guess we deserved it for being someplace like Save A’Lot.

Note: My husband would have a problem with the first part of this post because he no longer refers to people as black or white. He’s having some sort of issue.

When I was a kid I wanted to be an oceanographer, or a marine biologist, or the Bionic Woman. As an adult, I realized that becoming the Bionic Woman would be way too painful. A skydiving accident and a series of painful and costly surgeries wouldn’t really be worth bionic hearing or being able to run at 60 miles per hour.

The whole idea of being an oceanographer went out the window when someone told me that the job would require math. I struggle to figure out what my change should be when I buy something from the store. I failed Algebra II. I took a course in college called Math for Poets and nearly failed that. Math for Poets involved a lot of long division and adding, subtracting, and multiplying fractions. On my part, it also involved a lot of sweating during tests and a lot of meetings with the professor. What a nightmare of a class! Luckily, I passed and was officially declared a poet.

With all of my other childhood careers out of the running, the only thing left was marine biologist. Here is the thing about the ocean and marine life. On the surface it may seem all peaceful and nice, but the deeper you go the more freaky and frightening everything gets. Maybe you could say the same thing about life in general. Anyway, deep water sea life are the things that horror movies are made up of. Everyone who knows me knows that I’m a coward, so marine biologist had to be scratched off the list too.

Once I had to abandon all of these career choices I needed something else to fall back on, something stable that could make me piles of money. I settled on the only logical choice … writing.

The good thing about Florida is that the heat makes it an ideal environment for all sorts of insects. That’s not really a good thing to me, but I’m pretty sure the bugs like it. At least they seem to when they’re flying into my house and stinging me. I’ve been surprised by the fact that there seems to be less mosquitoes when I’m outside these days, but somehow at night one always seems to have made it into my house to terrorize me while I’m trying to relax.

You probably know this, but Florida is famous for it’s palmetto bugs. Up until yesterday, I had apparently confused the palmetto bug and the American cockroach. It’s an easy thing to do, but now that I’ve straightened this out I thought I’d share the information with you.

A palmetto bug is the disgusting segmented creature I find when I’m pulling up weeds in the garden. They’re slow and look like this:

I figure you can image what this thing looks like when not being eaten by a lizard. While they are horrible they aren’t nearly as horrible as this:

This is the American cockroach. It is the enormous, disease ridden abomination that flew into my house carrying an egg sack the other night. Yes, it flew, like a fighter jet straight from Hell. If you ask him, my husband would tell you it was about two inches long, but if you ask me I’ll tell you it was about a foot long. It landed in the corner of the living room right above my head. I would’ve taken a picture of it, but I was too busy screaming like a little girl to do that.

My husband believes in being kind to insects and prefers the catch and release method of dealing with them, but this one was too fast for that. With me yelling “Just kill it,” in the background he decided to use the electric fly swatter on it. While the electric fly swatter works well on flies and mosquitoes, it is no match for giant pregnant cockroaches. It just slowed her down a bit so my husband could catch her and set her free in the backyard with all her buddies.

Our backyard seems to be a haven for these giant roaches. Herds of them buzz around in the air at night. They give me nightmares. I hope none of them decide to venture inside again.

Palmetto bug photo by kthypryn

American cockroach photo by Gary Alpert

Can you really trust your postal worker? I mean the one who is actually delivering your mail not the one that you buy stamps from at the post office. Today I was out in my front garden pulling weeds when the postman put some mail in my mailbox.

“How are you doing?” he said.

“Good. How are you?” I replied.

He smiled widely. “I’m great. I get to walk around in circles all day. It’s a great job.”

He seemed a bit too enthusiastic about delivering the mail to me. I wonder what he must be up to.

When I lived in Watford I read a story in the paper about a postal worker who was discovered going to the park every morning and opening people’s packages. What he liked he kept, and what he didn’t he threw away. I’m not accusing my postman of doing that, but I clearly remember handing him the envelope that contained the check to pay my internet bill. A few weeks later the internet company claims they never received my check. I wonder.

Now that I think about it, isn’t strange that I chose to pay my internet bill by putting a check in the mail? Who does that anymore?

I learned my lesson and paid my late bill online. I guess my postman was just trying to teach me that lesson as he dropped my envelope in the street while he was merrily walking in circles. I have no proof, but I’m trusting my gut on this one. From now on all my letters will go directly into the big blue box outside of the post office … expect for the water bill that I gave the postman this morning. Maybe I haven’t learned my lesson.

Everyone has a birthday, even if at times they’d like to pretend they didn’t. Whether getting older is good or bad all depends on how you look at it. As of yet I’m undecided, but my husband seems to think it’s a blast. It’s his birthday today. That’s right, on this day 48 years ago the world became a better place.

Happy birthday to the best husband in the world.

Now that we have a house, I’m looking forward to planting some food around it. No, I don’t mean I’m going to bury a cheeseburger in the backyard. A cheeseburger tree would be interesting and I’m sure it would make us the most popular house on the street, but I was thinking more along the lines of fruit and veggies.

We went to the garden festival the other day, where I nabbed a lychee tree. I just love lychees and they are quite expensive. If I can get a tree to produce some fruit that will be mighty exciting. The problem is that I have a bit of a brown thumb. I used to say that I walk into a room and the plants wither and die, but I’ve decided to change my thinking a bit. I mean, you are with you think, and if I think I have a green thumb, I’ll have a green thumb.

When I go to bed at night I imagine that my thumbs are a lovely shamrock shade of green, and that I just look at plants and they start growing, flowering, and producing fruit. My technique seems to be working with the Mona Lavender I have. It’s turning into a regular shrub. I should probably put it in a bigger pot or plant it outside.

All of my visualization and positive thinking has helped, but I think what helped the most is actually reading the instructions. If you look up how to care for a plant and simply follow the instructions, it’s actually quite easy. Who knew? All this time I thought plant people had mystical powers. Apparently, the only power they had was the ability to follow instructions. So I’ve set aside my old ways, the ways that made my kefir making go horribly wrong, and I’ve started following instructions … at least for this week.

When I almost read the book Eat That Frog! by Brian Tracy I realized that I had to make some changes in my life in order to achieve my goals. In the book, Tracy says that contrary to popular opinion the legs are not the only delicious part of a frog. In fact, deep-fried frog lips are particularly good when dipped in a lovely honey mustard sauce. Wait … wrong book. In the book Tracy says you should do the most difficult tasks first thing in the morning. That way you can start your day with a good dose of frustration. Once you’ve completed that hard task the rest of your day is easy.

I’ve taken this concept to heart. That’s why after I roll out of bed at nine in the morning, I pretend to do some yoga. Health should be your number one priority, and you know what they say, fake it until you make it. I’m just wondering how many years you have to fake it before you get Angela Bassett’s biceps. I’ve been pretending to do yoga since college and I still have those flabby arm wings. I swear I’ve had grandma arms since I was eight years old.

Once I’ve gotten my exercise out of the way, I’m ready to retire to the indentation on the right side of the couch that 15 hours of daily sitting has left. I’ve read that too much sitting will kill me. According to my calculations, I’m already dead, so I guess a little more sitting won’t hurt anything.

First, I do the Tweeting on the Twitter. Despite having a Twitter account for years, I’m still not quite sure what to do with it. Then there is so much Facebooking to get done. All of these tasks are of course extremely important and stretch my brain capabilities nearly to the limit. How am I expected to continue on with the day without knowing what’s going on in the lives of people I barely know?

After the hard stuff is done, I can move on to easier tasks, like writing this blog post or editing the new Best of Nebulous Mooch collection that will be coming out next month. I’ve been telling everyone (everyone means my husband) that I was going to put together a collection of greatest hits from the Mooch for years now. Well, because I’ve decided to start doing the hard things first every morning, I’m finally getting that done.