Also No Durian

Speaking of gifts, my mother got my aunt and me the lovely gift of a food tour through Chinatown. Below is a sampling of foods we did not try.

Dim Sum.

Bird's Nests.

Melon Seeds.

Fish in a bag.

Ginseng.

Shark fins.

Lotus Pastries.

Sea Dragons or Sea Horses.

Fish Maws.

Plastic squids.

???

Eels.

Mollusks.

Turtles.

Razor Clams.

The twice-cooked pork and avocado-green tea smoothie was delicious, however.

Powerpuff Girls?

Good news: Our two-year-old announced today: "I don't like Tom and Jerry." Yay, the nightmarish episodes of cute little mice burning on backyard grills, cats with their fur sliced off their body, and puppies hoisted in the air with the sharp edge of a sword are over.

Bad News: "I want to watch Caillou." Yes, Caillou is back, that shrill little child who is never told a discouraging word, at least not in a direct way.

In today's episode, I believe titled The Emotional Blackmail of the Homemade Gift, Caillou drops his mother's mug and breaks it. Turns out the mug was made by his grandma at a craft studio.

Reaction in My World: Thank you Caillou for freeing me from that clumsy clay mug! I will never again have to feel obligated to keep and/or drink from it just because it was a handmade gift.

Reaction in Caillou's World: Oh Caillou honey, that was my favorite mug because my mother made it. But don't worry about my loss, it was an accident.

Caillou, sufficiently shamed, admits to his grandma he broke the mug she made.

Reaction in My World: Mugs break.

Reaction In Caillou's World: Why Caillou, we can go the craft studio and make her another one. Let nothing in our world ever change and we will all be fine.

Caillou proceeds to make an even clumsier and more lopsided replacement mug and presents it to his mother.

Reaction in My World: Dang it, Caillou—you freed me from that other mug and now you've saddled me with an even heavier burden, a mug you made. How am I ever supposed to enjoy my coffee when I have to drink it out of lacquered lumps of clay?

The episode ends with the characters singing a song whose message is essentially: the best thing you can do in the world is give people gifts because gifts make people happy.

Reaction in My World: Ha, ha, ho ho ho—that's rich! Gifts make people happy!

At this point I want to tell my son, draped over the ottoman, to never, ever think he has to give me a gift, or love a gift I give him, to prove his love. But I don't as I'm fairly sure the entire meta message of this episode has gone over his head.

"I want juice in a sippy," he says.

Weeds

Bad News: USB cord for camera has not turned up. Weed, fork, and taco blog photos remain trapped in Canon.

Good News: Losing USB cord forced me to do what I've needed to do for a long time: purchase a semi-professional camera.

Better News: My Nikon D90 just arrived.

Bad News: I can't use it yet. No extras at all, including no camera bag or memory card. I am surprised there is even a lens cap.

Good News: Nikon's USB cord works on our old Canon. Now I can write my weeds post, my forks post, and my taco post.

On a related note, I am surrendering to the serial comma. When I was in high school, the last comma in a list was optional. The way it was presented to us, it was more enlightened to leave it out. This was the journalistic style, and journalism was worldly and worldly was . . . now all of a sudden the serial comma is mandatory—everybody's using it—and I'm not going to fight this fight. Serial comma it is.

Weeds: here they are, thigh-high weeds growing behind our garage.


Tacky, I agree—especially when you compare the back of our garage to the back of our neighbor's garage.


We are that neighbor whose weed spores flutter onto your freshly sodded turf. In our defense, it isn't as if the neighbors are out weeding behind their garages all day while we're inside kicking the dog. It's that we are one of the few on our block who do not park in our garage. We were even asked by a neighbor: "Why do you not park in your garage?" My parents never parked in their garage, for starters. Where would we store our lawnmower, child transportation devices and stacks of drywall if there were cars in the way, for two? No one else gets weeds because four heavy wheels roll over their wannabe weeds many times a day, stunting their precious growth.

Plus, I have better Sisyphean pursuits than weeding the alley. Other thankless chores I could do 1). take our four bags of aluminum cans to recycling center (thanks City of Chicago for your non-recycling) 2.) mop dining room floor 3.) file bills 4.) weed actual lawn 5.) grocery shop 6.) you get the picture.

But weed the alley I did, with this result:

Much better, but better than what? It's still a dirty alley behind a decaying garage. It doesn't look good in or of itself. Nobody is going to drive by and admire our dirty weed-free concrete. It only looks better than it did.

Postscript: Now I am stalked across the Internet by ads for the D90.

Next: forks.

Cuzzzzzzin

My mother had 52 first cousins. My brother and I have 5. My kids have two. First cousins are going the way of 8 Tracks and Dairy Queens—you see them occasionally. Luckily, there are second, third and fourth cousins, once, twice and three times removed. I can never remember the formula for computing these slices of interrelatedness, though specifying cousin-ness was important in my family. Even my developmentally disabled cousin stood with me in front of my grandmother's casket computing our degree of cousinly separation. He also disagreed that my grandmother didn't look in her casket exactly as she did alive. "What about her does not look the same?" he demanded, hands thrown apart to frame my grandma, his aunt.

Yesterday, at a reunion of three families on my partner's side, the kids called any kid remotely close in age to them cousin. Drawn together like rubberbands, they sized each other up, my 14-year-old cousin (partner's cousin's son) remarking to his brand new 12-year-old cousin: "I bet I could take you down." 12-year-old cousin told us his nickname was Beef Stick because he was skinny but strong. "He doesn't look that strong to me," 14-year-old snarked to me, overly loud, making me giggle. This was his way of connecting. It didn't go over well with the cousin, but it did with me.

Two cousins going into fifth grade attached themselves to each other without so much as a hello. "Are you terrified of your school physical?" one asked the other as they strolled through the grass in oversized swimming trunks. The kids bored immediately of my explanations that so-and-so was not actually so-and-so's first cousin but so-and-so's mother's first cousin. By marriage. They had no use for this prattle, embraced their cousins, and called most any adult aunt or uncle.

My six-year-olds' eyes light up whenever she meets a cousin, and they flashed at the reunion, particularly when five cousins circled her—their configuration a mirror of the weeping willows dotting the algae-clogged lake—while uncle Rod changed the bandage on her foot stitches. "Ewwww," the cousins said at the exposed stitches. My daughter beamed with pride from her white plastic pool chair. It reminded me that cousins are magical, the gaggle of siblings you always wished your parents had given you, holding the potential for more fun than your own siblings whether they actually deliver or not.

Slow News Week

It's been a slow blog week because I can't find the cord that connects my camera to my computer. Trapped inside that camera are photos for the following fascinating blog topics:

1. weeds growing knee-deep out of our garage

2. forks: which of these three forks is easiest for a 2-year-old to maneuver? We took the test

3. a tribute to tacos al pastor

Sad, isn't it?

We did have a 7-stitch night at the emergency room Monday after our six-year-old gashed her foot on a toy frying pan. She spent the car ride to the hospital screaming: "I never, ever, thought this would happen to me!" Yeah, you and me both, sister. She was treated by an easy-on-the-eyes, mellow doctor who looked like he was in eighth grade. We spent half the night at the hospital, the last gazillion hours waiting for the nurse to put on a bandage. Much drama, and brought back memories of when I was five, we were packing the car to leave for vacation, when I tripped and gashed my head on the front step. I got stitches with no pain killer at a military hospital and felt guilty for holding up everyone's vacation.

And four things I don't understand:

1. people who ride motorcycles and scooters wearing flip-flops.

2. why the enter-your-zip-code buttons at the gas pump have to be so difficult to push. I need to get myself a 98.6 degree sledgehammer.

3. handbills left in our door—trash: "Hey I just littered on your property, please call me for an aluminum siding quote." I found out recently these ads left on your property are not legal. I have a friend who got so mad about it, he called the businesses telling them they were breaking the law. He received a call from his alderman asking him to stop harassing the alderman's donors.

4. I have a business email account I pay for and a free account I don't pay for, both from the same popular! ISP. The account I pay for is constantly telling me it's temporarily down; the free one never does. Wha?