LifePundit

We Don't Show Our Bosoms before 4:00 O'Clock

I'm in a crisis. It's funny, the things that come to you in a crisis. Things you think you remember but can't find any evidence of. And the headline for this post shows how I am already in the midst of a battle I am losing.

First off, I said "we don't show our bosoms."

And now I'm negotiating not to show them before 4:00.

Didn't Mammy say that in Gone with the Wind? "We don't show our bosoms before four o'clock." I can see her talking to Scarlet while the rest of the girls are napping and Scarlet has A Plan. Hence, she needs to show her bosoms before 4:00. Or was it 5:00?

At what time of life and time of day is it all right to show our bosoms? From the look of things on TV, as soon as you wake up is a good time to be showing your bosoms (note -- I am talking about low-cut frocks, not naked skin). Coffee and bosoms every morning on the news. And do hospital administrators really dress like Dr. Cuddy on "House"? My den overfloweth with images of overflowing, button-stressed tops.

A couple of weekends ago Lily and I went dress shopping for a dress for her for church confirmation and for middle-school graduation. (Didn't I already whine about this? Well, if I did, I'm not done.) There were NO dresses that didn't show bosoms. My child is 14. She shouldn't even have bosoms. I think she should leave them home in a box, under the bed. Save them for later. But no. She has bosoms and the fashion designers have plans for them.

They are to be emancipated. Yes, as soon as bosoms sprout, they are to be displayed, set free, let loose upon the world. Yes, the dresses are even pretty. But pretty doesn't equal appropriate.

On our very painful shopping trip, Lily picked out several dresses. Hmmmm. Lots of spaghetti straps. Dresses that were nothing more than bikinis with skirts attached. So I went through the racks (no pun intended) looking for more modest clothes (we were in major department stores, not your local Hookers 'r' Us), and they were not there. There are no modest clothes. We are all hookers now.

So, we tried to do the best with what they had. Lily looked stunning. Like a sexy 25-year-old. She'd have to wear a nametag that ready, "Sorry. I'm really 14." with any of these dresses.

We haggled. We negotiated. I looked back through the racks. There were two other mothers in the dressing room, and we were all having the same argument with our 14-year-old daughters.

"You're not planning on wearing THAT, are you?"

Why yes. And before 4:00. In fact, before I'm 16. Before I'm 18. Before your very eyes.

Well, one of the dresses was marked down to $12 and actually was lovely, except for the fact that there was no fabric across the bustline. So I told Lily she could get it if she wore a camisole. She agreed. And tonight she tried on the dress with a camisole. She said it looked terrible and made her look like a hillbilly.

Better a hillbilly than something else.

Hear that stomping? That's me putting my foot down. I'm getting quite a rhythm going. Pretty soon it will be a real 'ho-down.

I may have a new play, though. Something that will be a real game-changer. Okay. She can show her bosoms.

Two can play at that game. Or would this make it four? I, too, have bosoms. And I'm not afraid to use them. 

The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, though some apples may have fallen a lot farther South than others. But you didn't need to know that.

Yes, I have a plan. Can there be anything worse than having your mother show up somewhere not fully dressed? And there's only one thing that will stop me.

"When I say, 'WE don't show our bosoms,' I mean 'WE.' You show yours, and I'll show mine."

I will win. This time.

I am Not Anti-Yankee. I Imported and Married One.

As I look over my recent posts, I see that I've been using the "Y" word a lot. Yes, I've been talking about Yankees. It happens.

The first time I went to Europe I was very surprised that people there said I was a Yankee. I explained to them that I certainly was not, I was from the South. We rarely made any headway in this conversation, and I was as confused as they were.

And I'm not anti-Yankee. I like them. I even went so far as to import one from New York and marry him. He's lived here longer than he's lived anywhere else. And he likes it here.

Poor fellow. Around here, when he talks, people ask what part of the North he's from. And when he goes up North, they ask him what part of the South he's from. A man without a region.

The other night we were watching some educational show on television about fiber production and I told Lily that when I was in school I was taught that textiles were South Carolina's number one product. Now it's tourism.

Then Paul said, "We used to grow cotton and that's why there were so many mills."

"We" used to grow cotton? I think he's been converted.

Excuse me if my use of the word "Yankee" is offensive. (And just what about that is offensive? I don't understand.) You can call me a redneck, though it's not really true because I don't have useful skills, such as being able to drink a whole suitcase of beer or get a car out of a ditch. Maybe I'll learn.

The Cheapest Man in America Gets Romantic

I think I'm married. Paul continues to turn up after late nights finishing his office renovation. We haven't been away together alone since 2000. It's been a hard several months, so we really do need to have some time together. Alone.

So I was thrilled when Paul asked me if I would go with him on a week-long cruise to the Bahamas (I've never been there so it's time I went) on the Norwegian Majesty (pictured). The thing I love about cruises is that you absolutely have to unplug. You have to relax whether you want to or not. No Internet. No news (except what they let dribble through the room TV). No phone. (Yes, you can get these things but they cost extra and I really don't want them -- I'd pay not to have them for a week.) No man sitting at family supper using his laptop. A romantic week alone -- we've never needed it so badly.

And the price of cruises right now is almost less expensive than staying at home! Go look. I wonder for that price if we're supposed to bring our own sheets, towels and food?

Saintly Brother and his almost saintly wife have agreed to let Lily stay with them. I'm all set for our romantic cruise at the end of January. Time alone. What will that be like?

Then we have this conversation:

Paul: It's all set and Mark can go.

(Note: Mark is Paul's favorite client. I like him, too, and we have vacationed together before.)

Me: Mark can go where?

Paul: On the cruise with us.

Me: But I thought it was a romantic get away for just the two of us!?!

Paul: This way I can expense the trip.

He had already invited Mark! On our romantic cruise! Without asking/telling me!

Me: But then it's not a romantic trip with just the two of us.

Paul: We'll have a private room. I thought you liked Mark.

Me: Yes, but that changes everything!

I'm not sure that Paul every really understood the problem I had with this because to him it was just such a good idea -- bring a fun client and expense the whole thing. But to his credit, he re-arranged things and will be taking Mark on a later trip.

There is such a thing as being too frugal.

This is so awful it's funny. But we will have fun. Paul is cheap, but he is fun.

Merry Christmas!

I Want a Dumpster for Christmas

This year for Christmas, I want the anti-gift. I want a dumpster.

I asked for a dumpster once before. Paul said they are too expensive. Paul is frugal. I don't get diamonds or dumpsters.

I'm doing my big, end-of-year Dung Shui, and Everything Must Go. This feels very therapeutic, especially with so many misbehaving people in my life. I can't declutter people from my life, but I can declutter stuff.

Lily started it. She wants to repaint her room and get rid of all the animal prints and other things she considers childish. She's purged everything and most of it has gone to Goodwill. I got in the spirit of things and sent some fancy evening dresses I no longer have anywhere to wear. The lady at Goodwill was thrilled and said that she would put them out immediately because there were girls looking for party clothes.

And I'm not making this up -- as soon as I got home I received an invitation to a black tie dance. if you want to get invited to a party, get rid of your party clothes.

Still, I'm going to keep getting rid of stuff that isn't useful or beautiful. And though I don't quite know what I will wear to that dance, I hope those girls have a great time in my evening dresses. Something will turn up for me (it's probably forgotten in the back of a closet) and I'm thrilled that things I wasn't using (I thought) will bring others joy.

I guess there's a reason it's called Goodwill.

Tree Cat Adopted by Neighbors

I left a voicemail yesterday for my good friend and neighbor that we'd gotten the cat down out of the tree and now she needed to come get it.

This was a joke.

Last night she came, with her son, and got the cat. I must be better at voicemails than I thought.

While Paul and I were watching a movie last night I saw headlights come up the driveway. "Uh oh," I said. "They're bringing the cat back."

But it was just a car turning around.

Hallelujah!

Cat Rescued after Eight Days in Tree!

She's down! After one week living in a squirrel's nest 30 feet above the good, safe earth, the cat is down.

The Humane Society said not to worry, cats were survivors and would come down. Animal Control doesn't rescue cats from trees. The fire department didn't answer either phone number (I didn't dare call 911). I couldn't find any macho bubbas to help out, either. You could hear the cat crying from our bedroom. It was enough to tempt us to shoot her down, just so we wouldn't feel so bad for her.

After calling anyone I could think of, my hairdresser made two very good suggestions. One was to get a piece of PVC and run a loop of rope through it. Use the PVC to reach up to where the cat is and loop the rope around its body. Tighten the rope and lower the cat down. (This idea was after she called her husband because she was worried about the cat.)

The other suggestion was to call our local TV station that has a program about solving local people's problems and tell them I have a very photogenic problem they can solve. So I did and left a voicemail.

Next I told Paul that I had called WIS-TV, which horrified him because he didn’t want them out here filming (they never called me back) so he sprung into action. Not that he had been inactive before, but he liked the idea of the rope and the PVC and arranged that very thing. Trouble is, he could only get the cat's foot or a neck hooked. It was like fishing for a cat in a tree. The cat was over 30 feet up.

Then Paul did something I couldn’t believe. He shimmied up the tree like Mowgli in “The Jungle Book.” He went up like a squirrel. No grasping of tree limbs (since the tree was bald in the middle section), just arms and legs around the trunk. I thought he was probably going to find out whether or not he could fly, but he made it. Then he caught the cat and climbed down by setting her on different branches as he went down, then would go down a little, grab the cat and put the cat on a lower branch, etc. Of course at one point the cat hung onto the tree and wouldn’t let go.

The cat is FAT! Not obese, but robust in figure. One week in the tree and no food. I don’t believe this cat ever came down. The cat food I left out and the tuna were untouched until Tiger found them. I think it was a 300 lb. cat that is now a 200 lb. cat. She’s got a beautiful coat, lovely green eyes and is so friendly you can’t take her picture. (I’m trying to do a flyer to stick in mailboxes – this cat has to be somebody’s pet.) The first thing she wanted to do was come inside. And she rubs on you and rubs on you and rubs on you and purrs and talks. I could get used to this cat. Of course, that would make 4.

I took the cat to a nearby vet clinic and they scanned for a microchip. No microchip but they confirmed that it’s a female cat. I asked the attendant to check and he pulled up her tail. She squirted poo on him – I didn’t know cats did that. They had a word for it and said that cats do it in the wild when they’re scared. If I even mention this to my husband, I’m sure he won’t even like the idea of a poo-squiring cat sleeping on our porch while we look for a home.

It's so nice to have her out of the tree. She was up there one night when it was only 20 degrees! Now, to find her owner or a home. (Or talk Paul into letting us have four cats, two horses, a dog and a rabbit.)

How Long Can a Cat Live in a Tree?

Last Thursday morning while out picking dandelions for the rabbit that I swore I wouldn't end up taking care of, I heard a mewing. I thought it was coming from the woodpile. Nope. It was coming from 40-feet up a not very accessible pine tree.

A stray cat with a loud opinion. "I want down!" it's been screaming. I'm about to start screaming, too.

This looks like a nice, friendly, sweet, cautious, stupid cat. She (I have no idea what gender this cat is but it appears to have possibly nursed at some point, hopefully not last week) talks to you and writhes around the tree limbs and trunk. She rubs her head on the branches while she talks to you and looks like somebody I would love to pet. If I had 40-foot arms. I've called a few neighbors and nobody knows whose cat she is.

Every day we try to coax her down. Every day she winds around the tree trunk way up high, sometimes going higher but never going lower. She sleeps in a squirrel's nest.

On Saturday Paul stood a 20-foot-ladder at the bottom of the tree, climbed it, and put up another long ladder. Surprisingly, he had enough sense not to climb beyond the top of the ladder on the ground. The cat will put her paws on the top rung, cry pitifully, and wind back around the tree.

We've rattled food. We've called sweetly. We have considered throwing things but haven't done so. The cat's been up there for over five days. It's been cold, rainy and windy. I'm glad to report that the cat's voice remains strong.

Yesterday I climbed partway up the lower ladder and put out an opened can of tuna. I thought that the smell would travel up the tree and lure the cat down. It didn't work.

I told Paul that I'd put the can there. So, it wasn't my fault, was it, when he climbed the ladder this morning for his daily conversation with this cat and the can of tuna cat food fell off the ladder, tuna-side down, and whomped him in the head. He had just had his shower, freshly washed hair and was dressed for work.

I told him that maybe he would be more successful with the cat since he was fragrant with tuna. He didn't find this funny but perhaps he will one day.

The cat was eager to come down. We must have coaxed and cooed for 30 minutes in the cold. Paul lifted the top ladder right to where the cat sat on a limb. The cat would touch the ladder with her paw, then make another trip around the tree trunk, crying.

I think we were all about to cry.

Then Paul got stuck, and realized that the tree limbs he had used to climb up higher than the bottom ladder were dead..... I thought I was going to have to call the fire department to rescue him, but he got down.

Paul had to take another shower to wash off the tuna. The laundry smells of tuna and I have a load of clothes going. The cat's still in the tree.

The tuna-splattered ladders are still in place. Maybe I'll have good news tomorrow.

"You Would Be Totally Irresponsible to Lend Me That Much Money!"

Fourteen years ago Paul and I applied for a loan to build and pay for our current house. After submitting all our financial information, which was not so impressive, the mortgage lender came back with an astronomical figure for how much money they were willing to lend us.

Paul was astounded. He looked the banker in the eye and said with complete sincerity, "You would be totally irresponsible to lend me that much money."

Fortunately, we knew what was good for us and borrowed what we could afford, not what they were willing to lend us.

Don't people know that borrowed money isn't free, and that you have to pay it back? And now we're supposed to pay $700 billion for the people who borrowed more than they could afford?

I know that's an oversimplification, but it's a symptom of a society where politicians seek and retain power by giving away what isn't theirs -- and leaving the rest of us to pay for it.

More later.

She Who Hesitates is Lost

I got invited to India before Paul checked out the travel costs. Did you know that a first-class ticket to India is $14,000? He's not going first class and I'm not going at all. I think if I had flung myself into the whole adventure, had run off to the health department to get my shots and had not asked repeatedly, "Are you sure it's going to be clean and nice like Epcot?" that I probably would not have gotten myself dis- invited.

I'm not great in crowds. I dislike football games for that reason, and also because I really hate football. And I'm a bumpkin kind of tourist, forgetting to watch where I'm going while marveling at the sights. I trust everybody. I have an open kind of face that attracts crazy people. And I try to help them, because I fail to notice that they are crazy. I don't look like I know what I'm doing or where I'm going. I look like a target. Or so Paul tells me.

And then, I'm funny about food. In fact, if I weren't so squeamish and high maintenance about eating at places in St. Martin where there were more flies than people and the "refrigerate after opening" condiments weren't sitting out in 95 degree heat in the sunshine (translation: can't eat there), I probably wouldn't have gotten the, "I think I'd be too worried about whether or not you were having fun to work," discussion. Yes, I'm afraid I'm not the sort you can drop just anywhere and I'll be fine. I'll be fine, but I probably won't eat. (This could be a good weight-loss strategy.) And I have the gift for making everyone with me just as squeamish as I am.

I love Indian food and cook it quite a bit. (One of my favorite cookbooks is Quick and Easy Indian Cooking.) But when it comes to eating it, I need to know what's in it? (My new experiment is with Moroccan cooking -- absolutely delicious. I'll post on that later, once I've gotten the turmeric stains out of my fingernails....)

When we used to go to China Town in Philadelphia, I loved absolutely everything until one day we went to Dim Sum. There were no menus in English. Nobody could tell me what things were on that little cart with all the dishes, but the things I could recognize were chicken feet and duck feet. Nope. If that's what I can recognize, who knows about the things I've never seen before.

I feel a need to apologize for all of this. But I can't help it.

When my sweet mother, child of the Depression, would cook the squirrels that my father and brother would kill, I would skip supper. I didn't eat my grandmother's famous liver mush (what a name!) and in fact couldn't be in the house while it was cooking. I don't eat frogs, though I have eaten snails just because they were a vehicle for garlic. I won't eat goat, prefer not to eat lamb, and wouldn't dream of eating a rabbit. I've eaten Bambi to be polite. I've got a narrow view of what's edible in the animal kingdom. Vegetables and spices are no problem at all.

So what makes this so silly is that I'd probably really enjoy the vegetarian dishes in India. Maybe next time.

In the meantime, we're going to try for a romantic weekend getaway. I have no idea what that would be like.

Why I Have a Toilet and Three Sinks in My Den

(Photo: Not mine but is giving me some ideas.)

I haven't been posting lately because I've been too busy going into debt. Paul's accountant said he needed to quit paying rent and get his own office building, and we closed on his new office building on Friday.

I think I signed a paper saying that they (the bank) could come after me for the money even if I'm dead. There was lots of fine print and none of it warmed my heart. I signed. Then I fainted.

I love the building, a little 1964- built box that backs up to the land where we used to pasture our horses. I have so many happy memories right over the back fence, which is now a new housing development. On the other side of the street is a fancy funeral home.

Of course, Paul, who never pays full price for anything, has been accumulating building materials. When we were in St. Martin, he spent half of the vacation holding his laptop over our balcony railing to pick up an Internet signal so he could bid on toilets and sinks on e-bay.

Right now I have a toilet in my den, along with two sinks. And lots of stained fine wood that will be used for baseboard and probably my coffin. He also bought a pile of doors and windows from a building supply place that went under. He bought all this before he bought the building. If the sale had fallen through, I guess it would be my coffin. Or his.

I put my foot down when toilets two and three arrived. They're outside. I think I may put one on each side of the front door and plant geraniums in them.

Do you have any idea what having your house turned into a warehouse for building materials can do to your brain, especially if you work from home? There is marble in the living room. Lumber in the yard. And every day, some plumbing part arrives from somebody on e-bay.

One toilet arrived broken. It had to be returned in its original box. It's replacement arrived with a broken lid. That had to go back in the original box. The UPS guy thinks I must have the hots for him. I might if he brought me something more than broken toilets.