Title: Recovering from family togetherness
Hearing: Mary Chapin Carpenter, Party Doll and Other Favorites
Tasting: Coke
Seeing: My nifty new Windowmaker theme from
themes.org
Miss Me?
Well, I'm back from the home front with no broken bones or major mishaps to show for it. The plane didn't crash in a ball of flame, I didn't get run out of town on a rail by any of my kinfolk, and my parents didn't stab me in the neck with a number 2 pencil when I told them I was joining the great unwashed masses of The Divorced. I'd call it even.
I did have several run-ins with my parents' lame-ass ISP. Since my father works for the Evil Ones, he uses their "family friendly" ISP, whose motto apparently is, "We ain't never met a Web site we didn't hate, y'all." Due to my parents' firm agreement on the family-friendly content filter ("If the filter blocks it, you don't need to look at it anyway."), my pleas for a real dial-up connection fell on deaf ears. Among the sites the filter blocked:
The Jon-Jon Diaries. Maybe
because Jon-Jon is gay? I put all kinds of queer keywords in the index file
for snerk.net too, but it didn't block it. I dunno.
Yahoo! Chat. All chat rooms are evil
and frequented by pedophiles, you know.
JenniCam. Yeah, you never know when
Jenni is gonna be nekkid.
Heartless Bitches. Well, that
one was kind of obvious.
First Person Particular, a journal
written by a lovely middle-aged suburban lady. The hell? Don't ask me; I don't
know either.
I behaved myself, really. Apart from vague mumblings about censorship, I pissed and moaned for ten minutes and then left it alone. No use bitching about it when I'm at my parents' house using up their only phone line so I can fulfill my Penguin Dust and e-mail fixes.
Cute Young'un Stories:
So I got to see my niece and my little cousins this past weekend. My niece continues to get cuter all the time, I tell you. Yesterday everyone congregated at my brother's apartment (now his former apartment, I guess) to pack the U-Haul for his family's move to North Carolina for his new job. Deanna (the niece) tugged at my clothes with great urgency and beseeched me to "come upstairs and see my tent, Aunt Joy!" What could I do about that? I traipsed up the stairs after her to her room. Deanna's tent is a Blue's Clues blanket that, when you tuck one side behind her toy chest, can drape over her bed and form a little crawl space about two feet wide by three feet long, and maybe two feet high. I could just about fit my head and shoulders underneath when I stretched out on the floor.
Deanna crawled under and informed me with great solemnity, "Big people can't fit in here."
"I see that. I can get my head in but that's all. But you fit just fine, don't you?"
"Uh huh. But, but, but my feet stick out. They stick out."
"Your feet stick out?"
She nodded vigorously and stretched out on her back with her head next to my arm. Sure enough, her little feet poked out the other end. I clucked and cooed in admiration. Suddenly she sat up and whispered conspiratorally, "Aunt Joy, we need to go tickle Daddy!"
I stifled a giggle. "We do, huh?"
"Uh huh. Me and Mommy act silly and we tickle Daddy, and he laughs."
My brother is one of the most ticklish people I know. "I bet he does laugh. That's a great idea, and you should tickle Daddy all the time." I am a bad sister.
"We have to go tickle Daddy now!" Deanna jumped up and ran downstairs. I followed with an evil chuckle in my throat.
In fact, we did not end up tickling Daddy, because three year old munchkins are easily distracted by shiny objects, so he got off easy. But just this once. My niece and I will gang up on him next time.
-- marcie.