The No Purpose Repurposer

by Cathy

I always knew my husband was an old soul, but sometimes? I suspect he may have lived through the Great Depression.

Our family is all about recycling and repurposing; finding creative ways to use items that otherwise may be thrown away. For example, I save plastic egg cartons, cut them up into sections, and voila! Instant paint palettes for my kids. This, to me, makes sense, since there is a valid purpose for it and it goes in the arts and crafts bin where no one else will see it. My husband, on the other hand? He takes the "art" of repurposing household items a smidgen too far.

Countless times he's said to me, as I am about to throw something into the recycling bin: "Wait, don't throw that out! The kids can use it as a pencil holder/storage container/what have you!"
I stare blankly at the plastic peanut butter jar I am holding, blinking repeatedly at it while I try to process what he just suggested. Did I hear him right?
"Um, no that's okay," I say politely as I toss it. "The kids have plenty of pencil holders."
The kids, on the other hand, are not as forgiving with his suggestions, but rather state the more obvious, unfiltered version of my thoughts.
"WHAT?!" screeches Bella. "We can't use the peanut butter container as a pencil holder! That's so....weird!"

My poor husband. He's just trying to be helpful, doing his part in conservation. So, you would think he knows what truly belongs in a recycling bin but alas, he doesn't. He throws cardboard boxes, aluminum cans and milk cartons in the regular trash, willy nilly, without thinking, that duh, these should go in the recycling bin. So half the time I am carefully (and bravely) fishing these items out of the smelly trash all in the name of our great, green Earth. I am, after all, a purposeful repurposer/recycler.

My husband means well, but really? What's the purpose of his repurposing? Let me tell you.

The other night, as I was making my rounds before bedtime, turning off lights, pulling frozen chickens out of the freezer for tomorrow's dinner, I saw this:

Yes, it's a sawed-off milk carton.

"What's this for?" I asked my sleepy spouse.
"Oh, I need it for something."

Thinking it might be for some kind of marketing research project, I left it alone...until the next day when he announced that he plans to use it for his utensils.
"Utensils? What utensils?"
"You know, my odds and ends. Pens, pencils, labels, phone chargers..."

The girls and I all stopped and stared with our mouths agape. We were literally dumbfounded.
"Um....papi...." started Bella carefully, but before she got a chance to finish, I did it for her.
"Bwahahahahaha!" I blurted. "Are you serious?"
"Yeah, what's wrong with that?" he said, half smirking at our reaction. This made me wonder if he just does these things to get a rise out of us.
I promptly took it and tossed it in the recycling bin. "That's what's wrong with it," I said. "I have plenty of decent baskets and containers to give you if you want to store stuff."
"I don't want those."
"Why? Because they're not sawed-off milk cartons or empty beer containers?"

Yes, ladies and gents. Here is what he uses as his other knick-knack caddy:

So what do I make of this? Here's what I know:
His life's work is marketing, so he's always looking at different and unique approaches to packaging and the way things are used and sold. He's always brainstorming, always innovating. There's a reason he has founded two companies and ran a franchise operation: he's an entrepreneur at heart. A purposeful repurposer he is not. But, he gets points for creativity and good intentions.

Anatomy Lesson Gone Wrong

by Patti

A few months ago, Gaucho got his balls chopped off. Before you roll your eyes and think, "Oh, great! She hardly ever posts anymore, and when she does, it's to talk about her dog's balls?" fear not. This is not about my dog's balls at all. My dog's balls only serve as a backdrop to the story I am about to tell you. You see, Gaucho had a pretty, uh, obvious set of cojones, and they were the perfect opportunity to teach S about anatomy. "What are those?" she gasped.
And I, always one to get straight to the point, answered, "Honey, those are balls."

Flash forward to present day. S and I met my mom for coffee and sandwiches at Starbucks, when my mom asked me what was in my sandwich.
"Oh, some tomatoes and cheese, and it's toasted.."
My mom suddenly leaned in, her eyes wide. "Testicles?" she whispered discreetly.
"No, mom. TOASTED."
S began to laugh, 'Nono, you don't have to whisper it. It's no big deal! See? Testicles! Testicles! TESTICLES!" she shouted out freely, her arms waving above her head for dramatic effect.
I, in wonder at the lack of embarassment most 11-year olds would feel to even THINK such a word, much less shout it out in pubilc, joined in gleefully. "Testicles! Testicles! Testicles!" And then, feeling adventurous, I threw in a "Boobs! VAGINA!"

At that, S's face grew horrified and she gave me a swift, scolding punch to my arm. "MOM! STOP! That's so EMBARRASSING!"
Confused, I cocked my head at her. "Honey, I don't get it. You were just shouting out testicles. If that is not embarrassing, how is vagina embarrassing?"
Her face grew blank as she pondered this. And then, ever so carefully, "Wait. What's testicles?"
Recalling Gaucho and the anatomy lessons around his pair, I knew what I had to tell her to make it clear. "Balls."
And then her face flushed a deep purple as her hands flew over her mouth in horror. "I THOUGHT YOU WERE TALKING ABOUT OCTOPUS ARMS!"

Let's get it straight: TENTACLES.

Rushing to be Late

by Cathy

We have the luxury and the disadvantage of living close to my childrens' school.

Other kids need to wake up at the ass-crack of dawn in order to be shuttled to bus stops where they have to wait to be picked up by the school bus that will no doubt make numerous other similar stops before depositing those kids at the door of the school.

My kids? Have it pretty lucky. Why is this bad? Because with almost certainty, we are borderline tardy every. single.day. It's a bad routine we've gotten ourselves into and we are NOT proud of it. We are, after all, a seven minute commute away.

Let's work backwards:
Eight-thirty is when the final school bell rings, but they need to be in their respective homerooms by 8:25. That means we should leave the house by 8:05 if they want abundant, leisurely time to go to their lockers first, gab with friends and unload/change shoes, etc. The problem is that they don't roll out of bed until 7:30. Therewithin, the problem lies.

We've tried everything. Waking them up earlier is counterproductive because they see they are being awoken early and lounge in bed for those "five more minutes" despite our threats and rants. If I've had a dollar for every time we've said:

They're going to bed too late at night!
They need to get in bed earlier!
We need to wake them up earlier!
Tonight we are going to bed early!

Even *I* am getting tired of hearing myself speak.

Don't get me wrong, we've made concerted efforts where we all really rally together and get to school in time with the rest of America's children. But that lasts for a week, tops. Then we are back to our old habits.

Every morning we screech up to the drop-off door, usually the last car to do so. (The doorman knows our car and patiently waits for it - although we are plowing towards while flashing our headlights from blocks away so he doesn't shut the door and send us the way of the main office, where a tardy slip will no doubt be issued. But the drop-off door isn't always a sure bet.

"I got a tardy today," said Bella to me once.
"But, why? We made it to the drop-off door just in time!" I defended.
"Yeah but mom, I need to be in my advisory room BY 8:25," she says.
"But I thought if you got to the school by 8:30 and you make the drop-off door, you don't have to go through the main door and get a tardy."
"NO! My teacher STILL sent me to the main office for a tardy because I wasn't in the room by 8:25."

Dang. We're Johnny-come-latelys no matter WHICH door we enter. And what's worse? We hustle, bustle, stress, fly, go hungry, forget necessities just to rush our way to school and STILL be late. And by how much? By FIVE stinking minutes. It baffles me - and I've said this over and over as well - that we can't get our shit together by FIVE minutes so that we can be on time.

The other day, I saw a car with these plates:

I laughed out loud at the notion that misery truly does love company. Greeks and Latins are known for being on "their" time (i.e. late) so together, yo, we're definitely tarde. And some are more proud of this than others. 

The Mother of Invention

by Patti


Have you ever had what you thought was a stunningly originally idea; the kind of idea that makes you think, “I can’t believe nobody has ever thought of this before?” There you are, feeling all smug and clever, you and your idea. And then, something or someone makes you realize that, uh, that “original” idea has actually been around forever, and wow! You are JUST discovering this?

My mom was over at our house the other night, and she was keeping me company at the breakfast bar while I peeled zucchini. Yes, we eat zucchini. My kid is weird. Remind me to sometime tell you about the time when she was five years old and complained at a birthday party that pepperoni pizza was being served because COME ON, isn’t there any ASPARAGUS around here?  So, yes. We eat lots of healthy things at home because my kid – through no work of mine and only sheer luck – loves them.

Anyway. So there I was peeling away with my potato peeler, when my mom leaned in and said, “You know what?” She had a twinkle in her eye – one that told me she was about to share a very valuable secret with me. “I use that to peel potatoes instead of a knife!” She leaned back and crossed her arms over her chest, completely satisfied with herself. Confused, I looked around, looking for something other than the potato peeler in my hand that would be a significant discovery to ease the peeling of potatoes.
Seeing nothing, I motioned to the potato peeler in my hand. “What…this?”
“Yes!” she threw her arms up in a can-you-believe-it kind of way.

And this is where I had to be careful. Because there she was, so proud of her obvious resourcefulness; so willing to share her secret tips with her daughter; so sorry for me and my own sad lack of cleverness. I was missing out on so much. But I couldn’t help it: I was about to be one of those “ruiners”; those people who delight in setting others straight.
“Uh…mom?”
“Yes?”
“This? Is a potato peeler. You’re supposed to use it to peel potatoes."

The next Big Thing

She looked confused for a moment. I had in one simple sentence rendered her completely incapable of comprehension. And then, as it dawned on her, she started laughing - and could not stop. And I joined her. Because, really? How freaking cute is she?

Let Sleeping People Lie

by Cathy

'If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?'

We've all heard some variation of the above phrase.
Therefore, I got to thinking that similarly, if we snore/whisper/talk/scream/fart/teeth-grind/walk/jerk in our sleep, do we realize it?

We've all no doubt been told by those who sleep in the same room with us that we _______ in our sleep.  And of course, we vehemently deny these antics occur because, duh, we're asleep...what the hell do we know? Yet we insist:
"Hell, NO I don't _________ in my sleep!"

Now, I know that I don't scream in my sleep. How can I be so sure, you ask, since I'm asleep? Because when I've tried, I've awoken myself in the half-ass throes of a scream that won't come out and ends up sounding more like a crackled moan, as if I've been crawling through the Sahara for days without water.

For this reason, what happened the other night baffles me to no end. While in a rare, deep, much needed sleep, I hear a faint whisper.  

"Cathy....Cathy..."

Now if anyone experiences this while asleep, they would no doubt wake up fully expecting to see the Blair Witch and her Project. This is exactly what happened to me. I awoke with such a freaked-out start, scaring myself even more by expelling the loudest, longest, most horrifying gasp I ever knew I was capable of making, while my arms formed continuous air circles out in front of me.

WHAT THE F@*$K????

I opened my eyes way wider than normal, frantically searching for the source of these eerie whispers. In full-on horror flick mode, I swear to you, I made out the figure of my older daughter Bella hovering over my bed clutching her pillow and Cuddles. But she was just standing there, not speaking a word.
"What. What?!!" I kept saying so as not to scream as my instincts were telling me to.
Bella is known for silently sneaking into our bedroom at night, standing by my side of the bed and whispering at me if she can't sleep/ feels sick/what have you. I thought this was one of those moments. But why would she call me Cathy?

With every blink of my crazed eyes, the outline of her figure was diminishing. My brain was desperately attempting to sort out the dream/reality/mirages of what it was being overloaded with within that one minute. Then I figured it out. I turned to Joe.

"Did you just say my name?"
"Yes," he replied flipping his ass towards me in exasperation.
"WHY?!"
"Because you were screaming in your sleep."
"What?!" I replied, again desperately asking myself if I was still dreaming, because, of course, I know that 'Hell, NO I don't scream in my sleep!'
"You were screaming," he insisted.
"No. I. Wasn't! What was I screaming?"
Then he says: "Honey...Honey..."
WTF? Was HE the one dreaming now?!?!?
"Is that what I was screaming out?" I had to verify before I diagnosed one of us as officially cray-cray.
"Yes." He clicked his teeth with his tongue in that annoying, freaking way, as he was now annoyed because I was asking him why the hell he whispered me awake like the Poltergeist to tell me that I was supposedly screaming in my sleep.

"Are you sure YOU weren't the one who was dreaming this? 'Cuz I never scream in my sleep. I can't even if I wanted to."
"No. Just go back to sleep."
"How the hell am I supposed to sleep NOW? I was sleeping sooooooo good..." I whined as I fluffed my pillow.


As I lay there, listening to my eyes break the silence with every blink, trying desperately to find that sweet slumber that has now cruelly escaped me, I gave some thought to the consequences of waking people out of their sleep. I concluded that we should all just let the snorers snore, the teeth grinders grind, the farters fart, the screamers scream, the walkers walk. After all, if they can't sense it, they're not doing it. It's just so much easier if we remove ourselves from the proverbial forest and pretend we didn't hear that tree fall.

In Memoriam

by Patti

I have a dead hamster in my freezer.

Remember Gus? Oh, Gus, may he rest in peace. Early last summer, Gus started acting strange. We'd find him oblong against the side of his cage, his furry little body gasping for air. Several times we thought "this was it"; that Gus had gone to run the big hamster wheel in the sky. But Gus stubbornly lingered. One day my mom came over, and she held vigil with us as we waited for the inevitable. Finally, knowing that S was not giving Gus the kind of attention he needed in this now frail state, especially now that we had Gaucho, I offered my mom the opportunity to take him into her own special brand of hospice. She at first declined. After all, she had adopted S's goldfish and her guinea pig, falling in love with each of them, only to find her self heartbroken at their respective demises. No way was she prepared to do this again. One hour later, she was headed home with a cage, a hamster wheel, and a dying hamster.

But Gus flourished. Under my mom's care, Gus's coat became once again shiny, he had a new pep in his tiny little steps, his precious, twitchy rodent hands once again eagerly foraged the seeds out of the mix my mom fed him every day. Gus was, to our collective amazement, miraculously on the mend, and it now seemed he would live forever. All through the summer he rallied, running that hamster wheel, delighting in the special freedoms my mom allowed him as she let him explore her bed while she cleaned out his cage.And so, we kind of forgot about the inevitable.

Then came the call. I was at Target buying snacks for S's sleepover. It had been a long work week, I felt a migraine coming on, and I was bracing for a tween scream fest as I threw packages of preservatives and red dye no. 4 into my cart.
"Hi, mom."
Sob. Sob. Sob.
"Mom, what's wrong?"
"I think Gus is dead!"
"Oh, no!"
"He's not moving! I was only gone for a couple of hours; he was fine before I left. I can't touch him. COME OVER."
"But... S is having a sleepover..."
"Please! This is more important!"

How could I say no? After all, she had taken Gus into hospice; she had given him life and joy for seven months. Gus had been ours for nearly two years before that. Wasn't his final resting place my ultimate responsibility? So I promised to be there as soon as possible, paid for enough junk to sufficiently poison S and her friends into comas later that night, and raced to my mom's. On the way there, I called S to explain that Gus had died, and she called my mother to promise her she and her friends would give him an appropriate funeral that night.

Once there, I approached the cage, and there was Gus - a furry lump. Ironically, he looked more plump and healthy than ever, except for that he was perfectly still and stiff and you know, not breathing?  As my mom sniffled in the background, I wrapped the plastic bag she had given me around my hand, and gingerly attempted to pick him up. Sufficiently freaked out, I may have accidentally flung him from my grip and back into the cage, inadvertently causing him to tumble into the fluff and onto his back, his stiff feet now skyward. Once again, I dipped my hand into the cage, and willed myself to muscle up and pick him up for CRYING OUT LOUD. After three mini-seizures, four screams, and five attempts that ended with hamster flinging, I finally managed to successfully transport Gus from his cage to the makeshift coffin my mom had made him: an empty check box now filled with fluff and a few of his favorite seeds.  We said a small goodbye, then closed the "coffin" with the lid, tied it with ribbon, wrapped it in a plastic bag, placed it in a shoebox, wrapped that in another plastic bag, and I headed home, a dead hamster in my passenger seat.

At home, I hosted a small "viewing" for S and her friends, then respectfully re-wrapped Gus back into his coffin, but not before, I'll admit, snapping a picture for memory's sake  Just as I was about to announce burial time, M reminded me that the ground was frozen solid and did we really think we'd be able to bury him? I could hear my mom's voice, "Please don't throw him away!", and my mind raced for solutions.

And that, my friends, is how I ended up with a dead hamster in my freezer. There he sits, among the Freschetta naturally rising pizza and Hot Pockets, patiently waiting for his proper send-off. You'll get your day, Gus - I promise.

R.I.P., Gus

We Walk the Line

by Cathy

“I’ll tell you a secret. Something they don’t teach you in your temple. 

The Gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.”- Achilles, Troy

Because we can all appreciate a visual when it comes to Brad Pitt as Achilles

I had the pleasure of seeing this film again recently, thanks to my daughters' school curriculum and their study of Greek Mythology and the Trojan War. So I watched it with my kids. Yes, I realize there is abundant violence and a smattering of nudity, which I explained as such: "Honey, everyone slept naked back then. Why? Because they didn't have pajamas." However, we were quickly drawn past those distractions and got to the heart of the great story behind it - the lessons, the sacrifices, human empathy in the face of fame and glory.

This quote from Achilles drove home for me a thought I've had for a long time: There is a very fine line between living and dying. Just one moment, one second, can change your life or take your life. I've always been cognizant of this, especially, as I've driven past cemeteries.

Safely from the confines of my car, I view this fence as the figurative line which we must all cross

We drive past these eerily silent resting places of people who were once as vibrant and full of life, hope and dreams as we are today, whizzing by with our music blaring, our voices singing, our kids laughing and our thoughts racing to what we get to do today. It's a fine metaphoric line and a fine figurative line - that fence which divides and defines. It's the fragility of luck that allows us to be on one side rather than the other, depending on how you see that proverbial glass of water.

I've come to realize that not only is there a fine line we walk between life and death, but in every other aspect of our lives we take for granted: a fine line between being healthy or sick; between having a job and losing it; between having a house and losing it; between having your loved ones and losing them; between landing an opportunity and just missing one that could potentially change your life.

We all walk these fine lines every day. If we keep ourselves in check about what we stand to lose in a given moment on a given day, yes, we will live in a sub-circle of fear, but one that is the sweetest of all fears. This is what Achilles was saying: We live with that notion that something can always be taken away, which makes everything more desperately real.

There is no joy to be had in something that you know you will always have and fittingly, take for granted. Included in this is our youth. Like many of you, I fret about getting old, day by day making out the lines on my face, the wrinkles around my eyes and the generally more haggard face that stares back at me in the mirror. Yet no matter how old we are, we are younger today than we will be tomorrow. I will try to keep this in mind myself, as vain thoughts will no doubt compete with my daily affirmations.

So, while this may appear as a gloom and doom message, interfering with the sparkling, promising new year we are in the throes of, it's cleverly disguised as a life affirming message. This message is part of my goals for the year: be positive, laugh, sing and dance more (preferably with my children), be more cognizant of those small moments with loved ones, live my life to the fullest my capabilities will allow and mostly, cherish it all.

Let's make the most of this life, like we're gonna die young.