fat kids

Misdirected Feline Aggression, Red Sky in the Morning, and Snot Apocalypse!

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SAMSUNG

There’s an old nautical saying (and why would I know anything about anything nautical when the nearest ocean is 500+ miles away, and I’ve never actually seen the ocean for myself, I will never know) that goes, “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight / Red sky in the morning, sailors, take warning.” 

Usually sunrises (which are seldom seen in Central Ohio during the winter, because the dismal grey clouds usually obscure them) in Ohio are not this blazingly red, but this morning’s was so out of the ordinary I had to stop and click a pic.  Whether it bodes good or ill, I don’t know, but I really don’t buy into funky superstitions.  Murphy’s Law does not need a reason for anything to go wrong.  If it can go wrong, it generally will, even if the sky is green with brown splotches.

bigfanny

Fanny- sort of the “fat kid” at school.

Cats have an interesting defense mechanism when they are bullied or threatened by a larger or more powerful entity.  They lash back at a perfectly innocent and non-involved party rather than to retaliate on the aggressor, hence the phrase, misdirected feline aggression.  Fanny displays the best example of this of all of my cats.  The irony is that she’s by far the largest of the cats, but the most pathetic at defending herself.  Jezebel (all of 5#) takes Fanny (15# the last time I tried to weigh her) down in headlocks frequently, at what point Fanny retaliates (?) by lashing back at one or more of the dogs, who simply give her a dismissive look and carry on whatever business they had been engaged in.  The dogs really don’t care how pissed Fanny is or whether or not she hisses at them and swats at them.  Fanny is declawed, and my smallest dog, and most frequent recipient of Fanny’s angst, (Lucy) is 40#.  Lucy could care less. Clara and Lilo usually just step over her and keep right on going.  Apparently the dogs are a good target for Fanny’s rage, because she knows they aren’t going to bother with her.

I never made fun of the fat kids in school, (there were only three of them, because when and where I grew up, nobody could afford to be fat) simply because my fighting skills were just as bad if not worse than theirs, and if worse came to worse, the fat kids could always sit on me.  I was tiny and scrawny, which usually motivated me to keep my mouth shut around anyone with any incentive to kick my ass. My oldest sister would kick my ass just for sucking up valuable oxygen, so I never needed an invitation to an ass-kicking.  Breathing was more than enough just cause for her to give me a good pounding.  She did not like me breathing.  Not one bit.

medicated

I wish I could score Jerry something stronger than Nyquil.

I don’t understand why, but for him the most minor of head colds or sniffles is a Major Ordeal.  The world is coming to an end if he has the snots for a day or two.  Perhaps I don’t have much sympathy because I am pretty much always either drowning in snot or very close to it, but the incessant and constant moaning inspired me to come home prepared Friday night: two bottles of the really nasty green Nyquil he likes, an extra bottle of snot pills, and some of those disposable ear plugs so that after I medicated him I could get some bloody sleep without hearing him moan and snot and bitch.

super sloppy

Just as a contrast I remember a time when I had an extremely wicked sinus infection as well as a rip-roaring case of bronchitis.  I was a green snot fountain that was reminiscent of the that slime game show that was popular on Nickelodeon in the late 80’s- Super Sloppy Double Dare, if I remember correctly.  Only I was emanating more green slime than even that show could- out the nose and, big thick green loogies out the mouth too.

I was working for a particularly psycho cokehead boss at that time, and didn’t dare miss work for something so trivial as showering fountains of snot both uncontrollably and copiously.  So I drove the 40 miles to work, only to let fly the world’s most horrendous goopy sneeze that completely coated the entire inside of my ’94 Toyota truck’s windshield.

I knew it was going to be a really shitty day when I was trying to scrape off the snot from the inside of my windshield with an ice scraper so most of it wouldn’t dry on there.  As I am trying to scrape and wipe the snot off before it dried, my boss (thankfully not high that morning for a change) saw what I was doing and was horrified.  He sent me home and told me not to come back without a script and a doctor’s note.

When I did go to my doctor that afternoon (lucky me) he gave me nine kinds of hell for not coming in sooner- and four or five different scripts for various sprays, pills and rinses.  It took a long time to go away, but I only missed one day of work, and that’s because I was sent home.

zit

Women can endure bodily discomfort.  Jerry would beg for Vicodin for a butt zit.

An Argument for Psycho Control- and Workouts for Kids

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gun control

One (very rare, may I add) positive to come out of the Obama administration was that his ineptitude and usurpation of Americans’ rights made me very much more aware of my both my first and second amendment rights.  I never dreamed five years ago that I would ever want to own a gun, let alone apply for concealed carry.

Times have changed.

gun-control-compensating-poster

I don’t feel safe going anywhere after dark.  That’s not necessarily Obama’s fault, because the neighborhood where I work has been going downhill for years, so I will give him the benefit of the doubt on that one. I don’t feel safe going out after dark because there are crazy people out there. If the crazy people have guns, then why do I want to be unarmed?  Doesn’t it make more sense not only for me to be armed, but also for me to know how to use a firearm correctly?

This morning there was a shootout just down the road– in the WalMart I’m afraid to set foot in, no less.  The shooter shot a little kid, a woman while she was sitting in the dentist’s chair, (?) and a cop.  Shooting the cop got him killed- and saved the taxpayers some money- at any rate.  I don’t like to see people get killed, but shooting a cop is just plain asking for it.

I don’t blame the firearm, or even the fact that this guy had access to one.  I blame him and him alone.  Triggers don’t pull themselves.

Gun control is holding on with both hands.  Psycho control is what we need in this world, and unfortunately in the trees of civilization, there are more than a few fruits and nuts.

fat-kids1

Really?  Where’s your mother?  In the rhino cage?  That explains it!

When I was growing up (in a rural, poor area…) there were no fat kids, except one.  That was Scottie-Scottie Two By Four.  You know the rest of the rhyme- “couldn’t get through the bathroom door/so he did it on the floor/licked it up and did some more/Fatty-Fatty two-by-four”  In middle school he was well over 200#.  This poor kid was harassed so relentlessly that the summer between seventh and eighth grade he went to football camp, as well as he went on a crash diet and lost well near 7o#.  By the beginning of eighth grade he was still big, but it wasn’t fat any more.  The coaches had ran it all off of him.  His parents were lard asses, which probably explains how he got so large- Daddy was about 400# and Mommy wasn’t far behind.  Yes, the kids made some serious jokes about Scottie’s Mom and Dad having to do the wild thing on a steel reinforced mattress.   There was also much speculation that they had to go out in the garage to do it because the floors in their house couldn’t take it.  I don’t know if that was true or not.  Some things are just not worth finding out.

 fat_people_08

The apple usually doesn’t fall far from the tree.

But most of us kids were thin according to today’s standards.  Even though I was never allowed to play organized sports after I had rheumatic fever, (and nobody wanted me to before, because I sucked,) I still got lots of exercise.  Self preservation is a good workout motivator.

My Mom liked to lock us outside and turn up the TV when she’d had enough, or just when she was spaz, which was a good deal of the time.  Although I was never a fast runner, I was good at hiding. I had to work to avoid getting my ass kicked.

ignore your kids

One of my favorite hiding places was with the Rottweiler down the street.  I wasn’t afraid of him, even though he wasn’t always terribly clean, and his fleas had no problem biting me too.  The other kids were terrified of him.  Ass kicking or flea bites?  Most of the time I took my chances with the unauthorized insect life.  Mom really didn’t like it when I came home eaten to death with flea bites, and smelling like dog shit, but at least it wasn’t blood and broken bones. I did manage to get through childhood without breaking anything.  I did get blood poisoning from scrapes, cuts, splinters and so forth, a few times though.

old bike

You put it together with whatever pieces you could scrounge.

Your bike was your transportation.  Mom didn’t get a driver’s license until I was 12 years old, and even though the state of Ohio thinks she’s cool to drive, I’ll beg to differ.  Riding a bike was safer on many levels than riding with Mom, even though there is a good deal of comic relief to be gleaned from her chronic road rage.

It’s sad but true- my son learned how to fly the one finger salute (age 5) by watching my mother road rage.

one finger

Thanks, Mom!

Now people don’t let kids ride their bikes unless they have so much protective gear on that they look like the freaking Transformers.  And then they can only ride their bikes on the designated bike path, never on makeshift BMX trails in the woods or back along where the railroad tracks used to be.

bike gear

Welcome to the Thunderdome!  Oh, I was just riding my bike down to the carry out?  Really?

I think part of the reason why kids of my generation got plenty of exercise is that we were pretty much left outside to fend for ourselves most of the time.  Most of our families were poor.  Most of our families had two or more kids, so if one went missing, it’s one less mouth to feed.  Oh, well.   Now people treat their kids in much the same way as some of the poor dogs I see in the vet’s office.   They mollycoddle, indulge and literally “love” them to death.

fat_dog_006

It is cruel to let a dog get this fat.

Science is on my side here: obesity kills dogs.  It’s a proven fact, and since a dog lives about 15 years give or take, it’s easy to see what happens when dogs are allowed to be hugely fat.  But there are people out there who just can’t see the correlation, that overfeeding and under-exercising their dogs takes years off their dogs’ lives.  Every time I take one of my girls to the vet’s office, I see obese dogs suffering from preventable health problems.  The vet sees it too and it has to really bother her.

Perhaps people are viewing their kids not as liabilities or money pits, but as pampered pets.  I don’t know which mindset is worse- leaving kids to their own devices and out to the wolves, or mollycoddling and indulging them.

Kids have to get out and get dirty.  Kids have to have limits.  One Klondike bar once a week is fine.  Three after dinner is way too much.

Maybe if we could worry less about the psychos in our midst, we could let kids go out and play and be kids and not feel as if we have to indulge their every whim.

A Blast From the Past, the White Death Arriveth, and Sick Humor

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hair bear bunch lunch

It’s hard to believe they let us have metal lunch boxes in elementary school.

It was a far more innocent time, even though I can attest to the fact that a metal lunch box can and will draw blood if someone knocks you in the head with the corner of one of these things.  I had a Hair Bear Bunch lunch box for awhile. Those lunch boxes always came with a plastic Thermos that matched the box, too.  I think I had Holly Hobbie and Snoopy at one point, though I got new lunch boxes more often than other kids had to.  Lunch boxes didn’t survive more than a year or so for most kids, but mine never survived more than a few weeks.  I had a hard time keeping people from stealing and/or mutilating mine beyond recognition.

lunch boxes

Yes, the Dukes of Hazzard lunch box had a rebel flag on the Thermos.  Just think how that flag would fly in a kid’s lunch today!

I probably had a Dukes of Hazzard lunch box at one time.  Grandma usually had to find me new lunch boxes, and I ended up with whatever was left or on sale when mine got too badly distressed to use.  The worst one I ever ended up with was one with NFL Football on it.   It wasn’t easy to find a new lunch box in April, for example, so I had to take what Grandma could get.  Grandma bought me quite a few lunch boxes to keep me from getting in trouble at home.

In fourth and fifth grades the kids were allowed to go home for lunch (another thing that is unheard of today) if you lived close, and you got back to school in time to make the lunch recess bell.  That was better than eating with the heathens in the school cafeteria for a number of reasons, but I generally went home most days because I could just fix some soup and a sandwich or just forage about at home and eat in peace.  I didn’t mind forgoing lunch recess in order to have some peace and quiet.

High school was another culinary adventure.   During my freshman year I didn’t dare eat anything prepared at school, because the roaches had taken over the cafeteria. There was always a high risk of getting bug parts (or whole bugs) in your food.  The ovens and warmers were ancient as well, so you could get fries that were burnt on the outside and frozen on the inside, depending on where they were sitting on the racks.  Prepackaged food was generally safe as long as you could verify that the cellophane had not been violated, but during my freshman year most of my lunch money went toward my coverless it-would-be-porn-if-it-were-illustrated literature collection.

twinkies

In my high school, the Twinkies were probably the safest item on the menu.

Today I don’t think they allow Twinkies (even though they have been resurrected) in school cafeterias, but that might depend on which school, and whether or not they have been brainwashed by the Michelle Obama campaign to spare the world from childhood obesity.  I wonder why there were fewer lard asses back in the day when you could load up on all the candy and soda your heart desired at lunch.  Maybe it was because you could only afford one pack of Twinkies versus a whole box.

One side of the argument for food freedom is if you make Twinkies and Ho-Hos and such into forbidden fruit, kids are just going to want more of them. From the middle-aged Mom view I agree that kids should eat a healthy lunch, but from my perspective in the early 1980s, I believed the four food groups were caffeine, nicotine, sugar and grease.  You can lead a child to broccoli, and you can warn against the dangers of processed foods, trans fats, refined sugar and corn syrup,  but sooner or later they have to decide for themselves that healthy eating is better.   Sometimes this realization takes a few years of a diet of Marlboros, coffee, Mickey D’s, Cheetos, and crème horns to get the point across.

This is another reason why: If I can’t be a good example, I might as well serve as a warning.

North_Central_Ohio_snow_storm

The White Death Arriveth-

And way too soon, may I add.  It won’t stay Arctic cold forever, but it was a bit annoying waking up to having the car encased in 1/2″ of ice.  Normally I don’t like to let the car sit and idle and waste gasoline, but the only way you’re getting that ice off the car is to pry your way in the driver’s door, start it up, turn the heat/defrost on full blast, and let it melt from the inside.  It would have taken me all morning to try to chip off all that ice.

I think it’s funny to see how many jackwagons forgot how to drive in snow and ice since March.  In the city there was next to nothing on the roads because they had been brined and cleared off all night- for about two inches of snow.  Then again, if it gets really bad, I have ABS and traction control and I just got new tires, so I am probably better prepared than many.

traction-control button

No, I am leaving it on, thanks!

You Might Turn Blue and Die (or Not,) Pharmaceutical Fun, and Science?

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Today’s science is tomorrow’s quackery.  Case in point- the “medicated” cigarettes shown above are in a museum.  I don’t know of any Dr. who would recommend smoking anything for the “temporary relief of the paroxysms of asthma.”  I don’t know of any Dr.s who would use the word “paroxysm,” even though it’s a pretty cool word.  Here’s the definition according to Merriam-Webster:

paroxysm: (n)
1: a fit, attack, or sudden increase or recurrence of symptoms (as of a disease) : convulsion <a paroxysm of coughing>
2: a sudden violent emotion or action : outburst <a paroxysm of rage>
 
In my world, synonyms for “fit” are always welcomed, if for no other reason than to keep me from sounding as if I am repeating myself incessantly.
 
If I do no other service in this world, I can only hope to expand someone’s vocabulary.
 
I would love to find a pic of it, but there was an old patent medicine featured on the Science Channel program, Oddities, that was supposed to contain strychnine and testicles- and 18% alcohol, ostensibly to help one forget that he was not only drinking powdered gonads, but was also poisoning himself.  100 years ago, the testicle tonic would be considered modern pharmacopoeia.  Today it would be considered just plain gross and poisonous, but science, like history, has to be taken in context.  100 years ago, cocaine was believed to be therapeutic.  How any of our ancestors lived long enough to procreate is beyond me.
 
I’m sure that some of the pharmaceuticals we use today will be eliminated or phased out due to side effects.  I just read today that benzocaine- a topical anesthetic found in Blistex and cough drops- can make you turn blue and die if you OD on it.  Apparently if you OD on this stuff you can get methemoglobinemia  ,which sounds like a really scary condition in which you turn blue because you can’t get enough oxygen in your blood, so you die.   I wonder if it’s in Carmex, because that’s generally my cracked-lip remedy of choice.  I would hate to begin my trip to the Great Beyond by OD ing on Carmex.
How many of us remember the old style mercury thermometers- or playing with liquid mercury in science class?  Now mercury is considered hazmat.  Apparently you can touch it and die or something. That would have been handy information back in 1980-whatever when we were farking around with the stuff.   Then again, apparently kids who fail to wear a helmet while riding a bike, pedaling a Big Wheel, swimming or (let’s hope the really paranoid people out there don’t jump on this bandwagon) eating a cheese sandwich, risk grievous head injury should they fall and skin a knee. 
 
No wonder kids are fat, if they have to suit up for a moonwalk just to go out and get some bloody exercise.  We got plenty of exercise back in the Dark Ages, and it was bloody at times, but scars add character.  I must have a lot of character as I have plenty of scars from cuts, scrapes, burns, falls, etc.  Even as uncoordinated as I am, I usually managed not to bang my head on stuff.  My arms and legs, not so lucky- but I have managed to go 42 years and still have all my fingers and toes, which given my complete lack of physical prowess- and complete lack of protective battle gear to play in as a child- is pretty impressive.
I can see some advantages in this kind of protective play gear had it been available to me as a child.  I probably would not have gotten nearly as much sunburn.  I also probably wouldn’t have felt as much pain as I was getting my ass kicked either.  However, I do see some distinct potential for dehydration and hyperthermia (overheating) if one were to wear this on a hot day.
 
I think part of the paranoia surrounding one’s offspring comes in part from the fact that people don’t have as many kids.  When you have three or four kids they might seem a bit more expendable than when you only have one.  People also have to spend a lot more money on kids today, so children just playing like normal kids jeopardize your investment . The calamity factor- and the potential for catastrophic expense- rises exponentially when they go out and do stupid and reckless things. 
 
I know the incident when the POMC had to get crowns and multiple root canals after some “buddies” of his sabotaged his bike (something about 160# of fourteen year old boy hitting the pavement mouth first is really not good for his dental health) cost me over three thousand dollars- and that was after the insurance paid. I couldn’t leave him to go through life with a Billy Bob mouth- and the crowns are lovely- but now I see why some mothers strap a helmet on their offspring at birth and don’t remove it until the child is potty trained, literate and no longer on a parental health insurance policy.  The bad thing about that particular incident is that he would have needed a mouth guard to mitigate this injury.
 
Even if he had been wearing a helmet (which I seriously doubt, knowing him) it wouldn’t have done jack to protect his mouth unless he would have had one of those full face motorcycle helmets. I can only imagine the mocking he would have gotten from his posse for wearing a full face motorcycle helmet to ride a BMX bike.

I wonder if it would do me any good to start wearing a helmet now?  Probably not.

Then again, science has advanced from the days of patent medicines with really gross stuff in them, at least I hope.

Pile is an old time euphemism for hemorrhoid. Another fun fact to share with friends and family, best reserved for conversation over the dinner table,at least if you’re looking for shock value.  I have to wonder if the “active ingredient” in the A.J.P. Pile Cure is kerosene.  It wouldn’t surprise me.   If it’s burnin’ it’s workin’!