Day two. The pump guy finally showed up around 2:30 yesterday afternoon, took one look at the milky water in the koi pond and pronounced this conclusion: it ain’t the pump that’s your problem, it’s your well.” I called the well digger (again) and now, this morning, I’m waiting on that serviceman.

The RLA and I linked together four or five garden hoses and semi-flushed the pond with water from our neighbor’s well. And yes, they gave us permission. We weren’t sneaking around the neighborhood at dusk looking for unattended pumps.

The problem is finding well water. Even here on the wrong side of Dixie Highway, most folks have city water and a lot of people even use that for their sprinkler systems. City water is not usable for fish, since fish don’t like the flouride, the chlorine, the benzene and assorted other -ides and -ines that modern tap water provides.

Fortunately, my boss understands the demands placed on a two-career family when the children are sick, and so here I am, waiting for the man while the RLA goes off to mold young minds. Today, he says, he is going to teach them the difference between looking and seeing. I always say that that was the single most important lesson I learned in college. Well, that and how to roll a decent joint with only one paper, and not one of those sissy, double sized papers, either.

Last night, after we gave the fish some fresh well water, we trotted off to Books and Books (the finest independent book store in the south, as far as I’m concerned) to hear Christopher Moore speak. In a moment of lame-ass fandom, I gave him the scarf off my neck. I’d just knitted it, too, with some really yummy hand-spun from the Yarn Wench. It was a natural grey wool, with some odds and ends of color and sparkly stuff, but mostly manly. OK, maybe a leeetle metrosexual. But Moore had a runny nose, which he’d had since Denver, and was on the road for New York and Toronto and I felt bad for him. And I’m a total fan geek, all right?

I managed to take way more time than was polite, got my copy of A Dirty Job signed and made an impression by telling him that I think he’s the modern Thorne Smith. That got a huge smile from him and the book store owner, and Moore said that yes, he thinks that he’s channeling Thorne Smith.

For those readers who have no familiarity with either Christopher Moore or Thorne Smith, Smith wrote the original Topper books (among others) and Moore is the author of such great modern novels as The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove, The Island of the Sequined Love Nun, and Lamb, The Gospel According to Biff, Jesus’ Childhood Friend. Most of these (with the exception of Lamb) deal with regular folks, whose lives get turned inside out when the old gods, or minor gods, decide to take an active interest in them. Wonderful stuff.

I used to have an assistant who was useless. No, she was beyond useless, and a back-stabbing idiot. She would constantly come to me to complain about her computer: “It doesn’t want to do exwhyzee,” she would whine. “I told it to do exwhyzee and it won’t, it insists on doing efgeeaitch.”

I would suck in air, count to thirty in a language I don’t speak, and tell her, “No. Your computer is not a sentient being. It neither wants nor does not want to do anything. It can only do what you tell it to do, so the mistake must be a user error. Show me exactly what you tried.”

And then she would, and I would point out that she had/hadn’t held down a specific key, or had her caps lock on, or she had typed a word backwards, or some other stupid mistake and she’d glare at me and talk trash behind my back. But that’s not why I bring her up. No, I am reminded of her today because all mechanical things around me are breaking down.

She was a real whiz at astrology (of course) and she would have said that Mercury went retrograde, or Uranus was in my house of blahblahblah.

But the fact is, I got the lap top back on Monday, and by Saturday it was turning itself off, again. So now, the lap top in on its way to Cupertino, and I’m freaking out. I’m also down $500 dollars, because repairs are a minimum of $300 and I had to buy an external hard drive to back up everything before I sent the machine away.

This morning I woke up to a white koi pond. White with coral and calcium silt, and my pond pump is screwed, and I am sitting at home waiting for the pump guys to come and a) take the old pump away and b) sell me a new one and c) install the new one so that I can flush the pond and make sure that my five 25-pound koi are not dead on the bottom, since I can’t see through the water to check. Nobody seems to be floating belly up, so we’re good so far.

But I’m sitting at home, not at my work desk, and the boss is back from two weeks on the road and he’s pissed that I’m not there today. Not to mention that I missed something while he was gone that I was supposed to be on top of and wasn’t.

Crap.

 

I was at the laptop on Saturday, gearing up to scan in another dozen or so vintage knitting patterns, and maybe a few vintage sewing patterns to populate the old Etsy shop, when, much to my surprise and chagrin, my laptop put itself into deep sleep. And it Wouldn’t Wake Up. I shook it, gently: “Wakey, wakey, computer.” I pressed the reset key. I held the power key down. I struck any number of key combinations. I plugged and unplugged various peripherals. I inserted a cd…or at least attempted to. I pulled the power. I shut the power on and off, attempting to pulse the laptop back to life in an electronic version of electroshock therapy. All of which accomplished exactly nil.

In despair, I did the only thing left to me: I took my precious in to the Genius Bar at the local Apple store. And the geniuses concluded that my laptop was asleep and wouldn’t wake up and they had no clue why, either. All of which is to say that my laptop is still down the street and I am going through major computer/blog/gossip/e-mail withdrawal.

So. On another topic, entirely, I offered a couple of old programming books on the local Freecycle group. They were a couple of years old, but ColdFusion hasn’t changed much. A data base slurper is a data base slurper and PHP is PHP. Right?

I got an e-mail response from another freecycler that went like this:

I can’t believe you have text books for a subject which all reasonable and respectable scientists have dismissed as impossible. Are they really teaching this somewhere?

It took a while, but I responded: HA! Good one. You had me going there for a minute. ColdFusion is a programming language, as I’m sure you know.

 

It’s an obscure quote, from a John Hiatt song by the name of “Ethelyne” but those were the only lyrics I could come up with that had to do with bathrooms. Sorry. Anyway, and without further ado, I present to you my toilet paper collection.

The box. Even it has a certain, uh, camp appeal.

Israel was a very young country at the time, and poor. The kibbutz system was a show piece for American Jews. The toilet paper was the deal breaker, however. Recycled paper with chunks of who knows what. The art director at my office astutely pointed out that you’d pay big bucks today for a sheet of that stuff, and you’d be buying it in a high-end paper boutique. Maybe so, but you still wouldn’t want it anywhere near your ass. The pink stuff was barely better, and came from a very elegant hotel.

This stuff was hard, and coated on one side. COATED, people. As in, slick… non-porous.

Different train. This was also hard, and crinkly, like onion skin paper or tracing paper.

Those are just climate stains, OK? This paper was like crepe paper, with a heavy, crinkly texture. Soft-ish. Sort of.

The famous neon pink, heavy as paper towel. Deeply textured. Ribbed, even. Swiss engineering at it’s finest, eh?

I thought that you’d be able to see, in the scan, that you can read my handwriting, even where the paper is doubled. It was another example of crunchy, hard, slick tissue paper.

Pink waxed paper. Pre-cut, to add insult to possible injury.

And that is your tour of European toilet paper, circa 1966. Thank you, thank you. It was my pleasure.

 

Sorry about the big gap in witty entries, here, but you know? Sometimes even I can’t find life amusing.

And I have been working on something special for you all, really I have. My little scanner and I have been very busy with this project.

It started two weekends ago, when I went north to the home territories for my Auntie Em’s birthday. The RLA and I planned to go up for her party, and come straight home, not getting sucked in to working on the parental units’  home dismantling project. But then my brother came by and poked around in a cabinet in the garage that I hadn’t gotten to yet and he discovered a major lode of vintage photos of family members we had never seen. Both the family members and the photos. Neither were ever mentioned. Of course, that set off a new push in the genealogy*.

But he also found three large boxes of other stuff. My childhood stuff, to be precise. My Barbies. My lavender Ken doll case. Watch for that bad boy on E-bay. And two things which I thought had been lost forever in the mists of time and parental tossing of childhood crap, and another two things which I have no idea why they were even or ever saved.

Item 1: A twenty-foot chain of chewing gum wrappers (why?)

Item 2: A small box of Creepy Crawlers, made one vacation when the Sistergirlfriendgirl got a Creepy Crawler maker for Christmas. I had a lovely color sense even then, let me tell you. The black newt with the red tail is very nice, and so is the yellow and lime green caterpillar.

Item 3: My collection of Beatles trading cards. Almost a complete set of Series 3 (black and white). Memory does not play me false, as I have more John Lennon pictures than anyone else, so I wasn’t impressed with Sir Paul-The-Cute-One even at the age of 10. Although this discovery got me excited, a quick perusal of E-Bay reveals that this is one more Boomer toy that is more valuable in theory than in practice. Guess I’ll be keeping those.

It is Item 4 which turned my world upside down. I thought this object lost forever. I had searched for it for years. There is only one other thing I could find in the house which would make me as elated by its discovery: and that is the drawing of “My Father’s Store” that I did when maybe 7 years old and which features the shoe window (every pair different and includes a pair of bunny slippers) and a view of my father through the doors (where he is fitting a pair of shoes)**

No. What I found, and what I have been scanning in for the greater edification of my readers, is a small box that originally contained coconut patties. I didn’t and don’t much like coconut patties, but my Great Uncle Nat did, and he gave this particular box to my mother when we went to Europe in 1966. I may have mentioned that trip before?***

What the box contains now, and what it held all during that Grand Tour was my special collection of European souvenirs. What I chose to collect, and why, has been the subject of debate around the office since my discovery. My boss, and the PDB both consider this to be a major marker of my mental instability and innate peculiarities (Hello?? Mr. Pot, I’d like you to meet Mr. Kettle). OK, OK, so get to the point already, right? What was it that I collected that long ago summer when I was 11?

Toilet paper.

I had never seen anything quite like the variety and quality of European toilet paper, and I knew that none of my friends would believe me when I told them that on a Swiss train, the paper was hot pink/magenta and as thick and textured as a paper towel. Or that in a French hotel (a four-star hotel, no less) the toilet paper was pre-cut into little squares and the paper itself was thin, stiff and crinkly like tracing paper, or waxed on one side… No wonder the French are always pissed off about something.

So I collected samples, labeled them assiduously and saved them in that little coconut pattie box. They were a hit with all my friends. I haven’t seen that box in 20 years at least, and lamented its loss every time I thought about it.

I’ve been scanning them in, and will post them soon, I promise.

* The Rubes. From Yonkers. They were my maternal Grandmother’s family. Also cousins/uncles to my maternal Grandfather. Somehow. I think through his mother. Is it any wonder that certain members of my family have 6 toes?

**Shoes. Go figure.

*** Yeah, like one or two HUNDRED times.

So. I’m a blonde, although here at the second half of my life, it is more of a rodential sort of brown, liberally salted with white? grey? transparent? Whatever. Anyway. I’m a blonde, and sometimes I act like one.

Take for instance the other night when I was reviewing my credit card bill. There were two very large charges to Apple. I tried to review the purchases, but there were no details. I drew a total blank. I knew that I had bought no new hardware, no new software from Apple. And there were two charges made on consecutive days. I was stumped. It had to be credit card theft, right?

I went on-line to my credit card company and challenged the charges. Done and done. When the RLA came back from walking the dogs, I told him about the mysterious charges and he looked at me like I had grown a third head.

What do you mean, you don’t recognize the charges? DUH. It’s the calendars and books you made for everyone’s holiday gifts. Almost $800 worth of calendars and books.

Yesterday morning, bright and early, I called the credit card company. They had already credited my account the full amount and had closed the file. (Let’s give credit—HAH—where credit is due: American Express.) As far as they were concerned, the matter was over. I said it was fraudulent, they believed me. Done and done. If I needed to pay Apple, Apple would have to re-bill me; I need to call them.

So I did. And I apologized for being a ditz. And I told them that I needed to pay them, but AmEx couldn’t reinstate the charge, and what do we do now?

Apple support escalated me through a few levels of customer service, and then got my e-mail, so they could send me instructions for payment. But they didn’t. What they sent me was a thank you note for being a loyal customer. And told me to keep my order, free of charge.

There’s an old adage in marketing that an unhappy customer will tell seven people about a bad experience, but a happy customer will only tell one, maybe two.

I’m over the moon happy, and I want as many people as I can tell to hear the story of what customer service is supposed to be. Both from American Express (you said you didn’t make that charge and that’s enough for us, here’s your money back) and Apple. I don’t even know WHY Apple made that decision. Maybe it was because of MacWorld. Maybe they looked up my account saw that I’ve been a loyal customer since 1988. Maybe it was just karma. Maybe I was the one millionth customer. Maybe it is just that Apple is the best company in the world.

What ever. I know that today, I’m proud to be a stockholder and a former employee. Steve Jobs, you are my idol.

When I quoted Yoko, I promised that there would be more to come, more things I’ve read that have influenced me, and here it one of the most important. I first read the passage below in a Survey of English Literature, Renaissance to the Present, in 1973. My professor was Ronald Newman (It’s been 35 years, and I still remember his name). He was wonderful, in and of himself, but he made even the dullest of the dead white men fascinating.

But this? This changed my life. Every few years, I go back and read it again, just to make sure I haven’t forgotten anything, to make sure I am still living in the now.

It was one hundred years old when I read it, and in its day was condemned for corrupting a generation of British youth (including and especially Oscar Wilde).

 

RJ, the RLA and I (MJ bailed ‘cause he didn’t think the RLA was coming) went down to the u-pic fields this morning. It’s getting harder and harder to find them, even in the most South Western nooks and crannies of Dade County. Instead of spreading green fields of tomatoes, strawberries and corn, or groves of mangoes, limes and avocados, there are town houses and estate homes. The RLA and I call them mushroom houses, because it seems like after every hard rain, a circle of them sprout up.

They have names like Mediterraneo and Vizcaya, but people, half a million price tag or no, they are still on Krome Avenue, west of which is only the tail end of the Everglades, and they are still in the middle of the great unwashed. I didn’t see a Neiman’s or even a Macy’s in those enormous strip malls today, but there was one each of BJ’s Wholesale Club, Super Wal-Mart, Max’s Something or Other denoting enormous quantities, and Costco. There were Targets and Home Depots and every other variety of big-box supercenters, and maybe two or three u-pics tucked in like stubborn stains of green on the other-wise beige knees of commerce. Or something like that.

RJ’s birthday cake, it all it’s sparkly glory. And yes, it was hot pink on the inside, too. Not quite the perfect maraschino cherry cake, yet, but getting really, really close.

This was in the Miami Herald this morning. It’s part of an on-going exercise in inanity and lameness, but today’s guest diva is someone I admire, and as part of my new year’s gift to you readers (more to come later) I pass it on in its entirety.

How does one become a true artist?

By the fact that you want to be one. I believe that anyone who wants to be an artist can be an artist. It all depends on your outlook on life and about yourself.

You have to know that you have in you all the possibilities that you want. You realize the possibilities by saying to yourself that you are an artist. Start from there and if you do not want to believe that, then why should anyone else believe in you? I always think rejection is temporary. You have a long life and the world is going to go on and on anyway, so you don’t have to be in a rush. Don’t be too impatient; life is very, very long. Realize that now as we speak, and all of a sudden things will happen; good things will come true and the right things will happen. You will get a lot of blessings and sometimes you don’t realize that they are blessings, because they often come in disguise. You are a person with big power and that power has to come out.

By letting it come out, you are actually doing a favor for yourself, the world and the universe.

Yoko Ono

But only on my tongue. In my steadfast belief that one should always get back on the horse that threw you, I spent last night drinking tangerine martinis with the PDB. I think I got up to five, but who's counting?

I did not get sick, despite the fact that dinner consisted of Shorty's BBQ (ribs, vinegar sauce, cole slaw and an ear of Very Greasy corn). I did not even get to the point of laying on the floor.

We drank and paid homage to our fathers and got weepy. We talked about the difference between art and craft. We looked at vintage magazines and analysed the styles, layouts and illustrations. We had fun, in a way that only art-school refuges can have fun.

Chin-chin, sweetiedarlings.

Tomorrow night, RJ is having a birthday par-tay for herself. I've promised to make a cake. I have no idea what cake that might turn out to be, but she's turning 50 and there seems to be a flamingo theme coming on.

I'm thinking that whatever I make, it will have pink icing. And probably be pink inside as well. This is the perfect time for me to find the ultimate marischino/red velvet cake recipe, but I'm not counting on the universe unfolding in quite such perfect synchronicity.

And for the rest of the three-day weekend, I will be sequestered with my code-writing books and I WILL (she says, shaking her fist at the sky) get this damn blog flipped to Expression Engine, because I am back to about 100 spam messages a day, and that, gentle readers, has gotten fucking old.

The Miami Herald's headline, the Boosh White House spin, the AP feed all claim that Gerald Ford "healed our nation" or "united our country" after Watergate. To which claims I call bullshit.

Excuse me, but Mr. Ford's legacy is not some sunny, morning in America era of peace and prosperity (that would have been Bill Clinton). No. Gerald Ford's contribution to American history is: he pardoned that rat bastard Richard Milhouse Nixon. Oh. And he launched Chevy Chase's career.

Let's review. Spiro Agnew was forced to resign in disgrace after it was revealed that he took bribes from contractors while he was Governor of Maryland. Took said bribes IN HIS OFFICE. And then, continued to accept them IN HIS OFFICE in the White House while he was the elected Vice President of the United States. Resigned in disgrace. Replaced, not elected, by Gerald Ford.

Then Richard Nixon, ditto. Forced to resign in disgrace after his role in Watergate and the subsequent cover-ups, stonewalling, demonizing, etc. (Karl Rove learned everything he knows about running a government in the Nixon White House.) was revealed.

And then, Gerald Ford pardoned him... PARDONED the rat bastard. And THAT unified a nation? In outrage, maybe. No, it was just the thin edge of the wedge in the virulent partisanship we see in our country/government today. After the slime and crime of the Nixon era, the Republicans managed to somehow claim the high ground and moral authority they so clearly did not and do not deserve.

Another state funeral for Boosh to preside over, and try to look like a worthy successor to the dearly departed. Considering what a failure Ford was, and what a devious, lying sack of shit Ronald Reagan was (Iran/Contra? Hello? Oliver North? AIDS?), one would think that even the asshat Shrub could look Presidential in that company. He fails completely, even by such low standards.

The only bright spot in this is that Betty Ford will be too classy a dame to pull a Nancy and kiss the coffin. Just make sure that Betty doesn't have a thermos and all will be fine. Maybe Chevy will get a couple of minutes in the spotlight, too.

I grew up in a Very Small Town in the south of Florida. My (extended) family was the entire Jewish population of said small town, and had my grandparent's house burned down in about 1956, the entire shtetl would have been eliminated, since we all lived in that same house.

Christmas time would come, and we would decorate our store (AFTER Thanksgiving, thankewverymuch) for same. We would drive down to Miami to the display wholesaler and pick up garlands, and bells and snowflakes and order our supplies of wrapping paper and ribbons. (Actually, this would happen way before Thanksgiving, the ordering and shopping for decorations.)

By Thanksgiving, my GirlCousin and I were making boxes, and curling ribbons, in preparation for the Christmas rush. Boxes. Hundreds and hundreds of shirt boxes and dress boxes and thousands of curled ribbon balls, neatly ordered like green and red checkerboards inside the tops of said boxes. All of them neatly stored under the display counters. The wrapping table would get set up. We would race each other to see who could wrap a box faster, tighter, and with the least number of pieces of tape. I think the record was 3 pieces of tape and under 30 seconds. Everyone in the store answered the phone by saying "Merry Christmas, Stuart Department Store."

My parents would pile my brother and me into the car and we would drive around town to look at the Christmas lights in other people's yards. Nothing says Christmas like a lit-up coconut palm, and don't try to tell me different. One good hard frost and the oranges would sweeten up on the trees, too.

For some reason, however, my whole life, my Christian friends thought that I "had no Christmas" and took it upon themselves to give me one. I have probably decorated as many or more Christmas trees than any Southern Baptist. I would get an invitation to one friend's home and then another. Come for eggnog and decorating the tree! Come for hot cocoa and tree decorating! Come and help us put up the tree! OK. Sure.

The Sistergirlfriendgirl and her family had Tiggywinkle ornaments. Those were the little hedgehogs from Beatrix Potter books. I LOVED the Tiggywinkles. Flash's family had delicate old glass balls from her grandparents. Another friend made popcorn strings. One year when I lived in New York, Bean and her mom decided that decorating the tree wasn't enough Christmas for a nice Jewish girl, and they took me out in a snowstorm to pick their tree out from a lot on Sixth Avenue, and then Bean and I then had to drag the damn monster all the way across the Village to their WestBeth apartment. Brilliant. One of my favorite Christmases, ever.

On Christmas Day, I always made sure that I had an invitation to the most Southern of my Southern friends' homes, because that meant a slice of left-over ham, pan fried and served up with red-eye gravy and grits with enough butter and tobasco sauce to choke the original pig. Or me. Yummmy. Red eye gravy.

Those are great memories. Thank the baby Jesus that nobody had become so brow-beaten into political correctness that I didn't get to have them. I was not, and my parents were not, hell, even my GRANDPARENTS were not offended that I was asked to be part of someone's Christmas celebration. Nobody thought that my friends were trying to convert me. Especially since I returned the favor by teaching them the freakin' dreidle song, and handing out chocolate Chanukkah gelt.

There was no breast-beating and fretting over whether or not we should say Merry Christmas to our customers. Well, in all honesty, probably because we knew for certain that we were the only Jews in town and so a Merry Christmas would not be unwelcome, but also because in those dark days, it was considered polite to express recognition of another's beliefs rather than trying to pretend that we all worship the same nebulous concept of holiness in some non-specific way that could offend nobody and everybody.

I am growing tired of political correctness, can you tell? I think we need a new definition of it. I think that political correctness should be me telling my Christian friends Happy Channukah and them telling me Merry Christmas and we all smile and say "YESH!" Does it matter? The bottom line is that we are wishing each other peace and joy.

Namaste. The god in me recognizes the god in you. We are all one. Merry Christmas to all, unless you prefer Happy Channukah. Or a bountiful Kwaanza. Or whatever.

Namaste.

I was surfing around on the internets just now, and as usual, ended up on Go Fug Yourself, because those girls are a stitch, and I can never get enough of snark about celebutards. They have advertising on GFY, and I don't mind, in fact, now and then I click through to cute clothes or stuff. Today, though, the top ad is from PETA and it's some claptrap about the "horrendous cruelty in the Australian wool industry."

You know what? Fuck 'em. Fuck every one of those PETA assholes. I mean, what? Shearing sheep is cruel? Is it cruel to cut your own hair? Granted, sheep generaly don't go into the whole shearing process voluntarily, but horrendously cruel? Uh, no.
I am so over PETA. I am over people who think it's OK and desirable to ruin a perfectly good fur coat by tossing paint on strangers. Assault is OK? I don't care if it's assault by cream pie or assault with a deadly weapon, assault is assault is assault. Matters of degree don't matter to me.

I am over people who believe that they have the right to dictate how I live, how I dress, how I eat. It's still, although just barely, America, people. That means I have the right to wear a shearling coat and you have the right to be appalled. You do NOT have the right to make it illegal for me to wear it, nor do you have the right to damage it because you don't like it.

If only that were true, there would be a lot of women on the Metrorail with their makeup bags torn from their hands, their capri-pants-with-spike-heels ripped off their bodies and their weaves snatched from their heads. Not to mention the veritable rainfall of cell phones that I would single handedly cause. But I digress.

If I want to eat fois gras, I should be able to plunk down a thick wad of cash at Chef Norman's and dine on a tender morsel of delicately seared fatted goose liver, by G-d and Ben Franklin, I should be able to. Fuck PETA and their isms. Go chew on your own granola, assholes. I'm with Tony Bourdain on this one. There is something fundamentally wrong with people who don't enjoy food.

And yeah, yeah, yeah. I know that it's really bad for me to wear fur, as much as I love the stuff. Maybe that's why I live in Florida, so I can't give in to temptation. Although, in my own defense, the only fur I own is older than me and came to me from my husband's maternal grandmother. It's a lovely black Persian lamb car coat with (on me) 3/4 length sleeves trimmed in black mink. Or maybe black unsheared beaver. Soft. Thick. Furry. Warm. And, hello? economically speaking, a hell of a lot more efficient than a woven cloth coat. It has lasted 60-some years. It is still in pristine condition and doing a good job of keeping me warm. Find me a down vest with those credentials. Oh. Right. Down is probably cruel, too. So if down is bad, and wool (where the animal fucking lives after its resources are harvested, hello?) is bad, and fur is bad, what are we furless humans supposed to wear to keep warm in the winter? Should we crank up the heat on our non-renewable resource gas or oil or coal heaters? Should we use electricity from the same non-renewable, corporate whore-owned sources? Should we just hibernate?

Just believe and live the way you want, and stay the fuck out of my pantry and my closet. And my bedroom. And my womb. And my liquor cabinet. And my face.

And just so you know? Leather is lovely and pleather is just nasty.

What the fuck is wrong with me? I had two and a half martinis last night at Star's house, along with some yummy latkes and apple pie and I went from loquacious drunk to laying on the bathroom floor to puking out the car window all the way home... in five minutes flat.

On two and a half martinis?!

What is wrong with me? Is it age? Is it her brand of vodka? Is it my liver, finally saying enough is enough?
The last time I tried to keep up with Star, much less Star and her sister, I ended up in a 16-hour power nap. I blamed it on drinking margaritas in the blistering sun on Sarasota beach, but I may have to rethink the drinking with Star.

I just wish I knew what happened. Oh, I mean, I know what happened. I drank too much and had to answer for my bad judgement. But how it happened? How did I go from jolly buzz to sick como un perro in a (literal) heartbeat? If I'd been in a bar, I would have sworn I was dosed. But since I was among family and friends, I just have to sack up and admit that I simply couldn't hold my martinis.

Woof. I remember telling the RLA on the drive home "you've never seen me like this." He was worried that I was going to make a habit out of it. To tell you the truth, the last time I was sick like that was 30 years ago, before I learned that gin and I are not friends. In fact, gin and I don't even like to be at the same parties.