Fries With Mayo

This morning, when Dear Sweet Son and I went for our morning HyperHund walk, we ran into a little girl and her dad, who was holding a tote bag.  The little one was about two years old and gave me a huge smile. "Hi there, sweetie!" I said enthusiastically, "Look at you with that big smile on your face!" "Oh yeah!" the dad answered cheerfully, without skipping a beat, "She's smiling because we're walking to the liquor store and she gets a piece of candy when we get there!" Now, you may be thinking that I might secretly be judging that dad for walking his toddler to the liquor store at 9:00 a.m. with an empty tote bag, ripe for the filling, but let me tell you something:  in a pandemic, anything goes. Dude clearly needs a drink by 10:00 a.m.   I'm not judging. Kid needs candy at 9:00.  No judgment (except if you spell judgment this way: "judgement," because then I'm totally judging you for sucking at spelling "judgment...

As you may know from my article on Scary Mommy , I have decided to take a leave of absence from teaching this year to homeschool my son during "these uncertain times."  I'll let that article speak for itself since I don't usually write in a serious manner, and seriousness has no (or at least, very little) place here. Lest you think I am forgoing a year's worth of salary because I am a superdeeduper lazy teacher and I like to loaf around in my multi-million-dollar home on my ginormous savings account while my son panders to my every wish and feeds me grapes and bonbons between Pinterest-worthy homeschooling sessions filled with cute crafts and and intellectually-stimulating science experiments, let me correct your thinking. People. Teaching 25 angsty tweens belonging to someone else in a classroom is actually infinitely easier than trying to homeschool my one kid who wants to be back at (pre-Corona) school. Lately, I have been depending mostly on worksheet type boo...

When I first started this blog ten years ago, the HyperHund was two years old, and by herding breed standards, this was the pinnacle of his hyperness. Now, he is almost 13 years old. Time has taken its toll on his old bones, and he has gone progressively deaf, to the point where he can pretty much no longer hear anything. This is both a sad and a good thing.   On the sad side, the highlight of his life was pretty much hearing me tell him he was a good dog and running to greet me when he heard the door open when I got home from work.   Now, the only way he can hear that he's a good dog is if I put my hands on his head and holler very loudly, "WHAT A GOOD BOY!!! WHO'S A GOOD DOG NOW!?!? YOU ARE! " so loudly that the neighbors can hear me and that sound waves travel directly down my arms and into his skull. Then, he wags his whole body and he tells me life is good. Most times now, when I open the front door, there is no one running to greet me.  Dear Sweet Son will...

I speak French as a first language, though my French sounds more and more Frenglishy with all the years that pass.   French is a super useful language because not as many people speak it around these parts as they do Spanish.  So whenever there's a problem or a socially awkward situation going on, I can revert to French with my family.   A fond family tradition passed down from one generation to the next in my family is switching to French to shout thinly-veiled threats to kids who are not following parent directions. My son does not speak a whole lot of French, but he understands it well.  It brings back an adorable anecdote from his first visit to a public restroom (this one at the library) when he was a wee lad. Dear Son  ( in the middle of the library, loudly in semi-English ): Mommy! Me want to go poopoo in library toilette! Me  (in French): OK. OK, let's go! (We walk into the bathroom and start the "keep your hands off everything!" routine. ...

Today, I posted this onto my dad's Facebook: "You can take the Belgian out of Belgium, but you can't take the herring out of her fridge.  Or the mayo out of her fries." My dad had just posted a picture of the maatjes he'd had for dinner.  Maatjes are raw herring.   At this point, an acquaintance of ours replied something to the effect that herring made him gag, which is weird because I think he's German or something, and who even knows what they're eating because everything there sounds like "Veenerkugelschnitzelweiner," so by default, herring actually sounds more appealing even if it is more specifically raw baby herring soaked in milk. I chortled heartily at my own inner dialogue and then posted a picture of the ubiquitous jar of herring I keep in my fridge for those midnight herring cravings (don't judge...).   Then, I became bored with Facebook, called my mom, and talked to her about herring, and she said she had a jar of it in her fridge...

As someone who speaks two and half languages,  I am well aware of false cognates.   Wiktionary.com describes a false cognate this way :   A   false friend , a word that appears to have the same meaning as a given word, but that does not (without regard to whether or not the two terms are   cognate ).   Once upon a time, a long time ago (I'm guessing in the early 1950s), my grandmother learned about false cognates in a way that could have led to a tragic ending. My grandmother was a French-speaking Belgian, and as most ladies in her neighborhood did, she had a maid who cleaned and cooked for the household.  My grandmother's maid was from Spain and spoke mostly Spanish. (Hey, don't get all snippy on me about maids and equal labor and all that... I have nothing to do with maids and everything else... different time, different country... I'm just telling the story.) My grandmother, like me in my previous post, fancied her Spanish much better than it p...

I like to fancy myself a polyglot.  I speak French, English, and, I believe I speak Spanish. The only problem is that others do not always agree with the latter.  Actually, I take it back.  I can fake a  really  good Spanish accent and I know a lot of Spanish words (both of these because I speak French), which lulls people into a false sense of security that I can actually understand what they are saying and that I can respond in a meaningful way. I live in a neighborhood that is half Caucasian Americans and half Mexican-Americans.  Many of the wives in the Mexican-American families do not speak English, so I enjoy blithering on in Spanish in the hopes that someone will understand me. A truly epic moment in my Spanish-speaking career occurred several years back when a Mexican-American family lived in the rental house next door.  They were super nice, they had a cute baby, and I liked to chit chat with the husband (John), who spoke fluent English. ...

Every once in a while, I come across funny memories from my old journals.  Throwback Thursday seems like a good excuse to post those old memories here.  This one comes from when my son was 5 1/2. Dear Child : Mommy, why don't you like brownies that much? Me : I don't know. I just don't. Dear Child : But,  why ? I just need to know: why? Me : It's just a matter of taste. Why don't you like sardines? Dear Child : Because the inside is meat. Me : You like salami. Salami is meat. Dear Child : I just don't like ham. Me : Huh? Dear Child : I don't like ham and the inside of sardines is made of ham. Me : Um... Sardines are made of sardines and ham is made of pigs. Sardines are fish. Dear Child : Well, I just don't like the taste of the insides of the sardine, and the looks of the outside, and the gross water of it, okay? Me : Okay. That makes sense. Dear child : So why don't you like brownies? Me : They're too sugary tasting. Dear child : Okay. The mora...