Things Overheard at the Pig Pickin' 2007

Yep, we went again this year and collected plenty of blog-worthy lines. Remember to use your best North Carolina accent:


Grandma: “I can’t hear a word you’re saying! It’s gotten to where I just can’t hear at all anymore....but I figure I’ve heard enough.”

At KFC where we stopped to get “a snacker.”

Grandma: “We like to get these little snackers…you have to try a snacker.”
Elsa: “What if I don’t want a snacker?”
Grandma: “Well, you’re gonna get a snacker!!”
Frank: “I’d like to try the Buffalo snacker.”
Grandma: “No!! You get the regular snacker. You don’t need a fancy buffalo snacker.”
Aunt Mary: “Oh, Lib. Let him get the buffalo snacker. It’s the same price.”
Grandma, to the people in front of us: “What’s taking so long?”
KFC patrons (who have been trying to act like they don’t hear our snacker debacle): “The credit card machine is broken.”
Grandma: “You mean they can’t add two and two? They have to have a calculator! The calculator breaks and nobody can do anything!”
Elsa: “I agree. Look at all that chicken and we can’t have any because the calculator’s broken.”
Grandma: “What? You want chicken? NO! You’re getting a snacker!”

While eating the snackers:
Grandma: “Elsa, what are you doing? You just ripped your sandwich in two! That’s not how you eat a snacker! You have to hold the whole thing in one hand.”
Elsa: “Only my grandma would tell someone how they have to eat a sandwich.”
Grandma: “You mucked it up! That’s what we used to say in my day. You mucked it up!”
Elsa: “We say something similar now.”


Elsa, to Grandma’s neighbor, Pete: “Oh, you got a new dog. What’s its name?”
Pete: “Well, I’m not sure. Let me think about it.”
Elsa: “You don’t know your dog’s name?”
Pete: “No, I know it. Let me think…it’s something like Crystal.”
Elsa: “Maybe it’s on its tag…”
Pete: “No, it doesn’t have a tag…let me think.”
The little yorkie stares at Pete with its head tilted.
Pete points at the dog and yells, “WHAT IS YOUR DAMN NAME?”
We ended up calling Grandma to find out. Her name is Cricket. Grandma will never let Pete hear the end of this. But for the rest of the weekend I would point at people and yell, “WHAT IS YOUR DAMN NAME?”

Elsa: “Grandma, you’ve got company in all your beds tonight. Where will you sleep?”
Grandma: “Oh, I’ll sleep around.”


Aunt Mary: “Frank, you must be really smart.”
Grandma: “He IS smart. And you know what else? He seems to think Elsa’s smart too.”

Grandma: “Did you hear that? HE said that HE was going to make HER breakfast. I’ve never heard of such a thing!”

And the last thing Grandma said to me when she dropped us off at the airport:
“Goodbye…don’t let your boobs slip out.”

Now we’re cooking!

I’m trying to get Frank to eat more vegetables so when I saw an article in a magazine about how you can sneak them into meals—although they probably were referring to outsmarting a child, not a husband—I bit.

The recipe was for Heart Healthy Po' Boys. It basically involved some type of fish and a bag of coleslaw mixture. When I was breading the fish I had Frank help. (I mean, they say you should involve your children, or in this case, husband, in the meal process.) As we dipped the fish in the egg and cornmeal batter, Frank said, “Now it’s like we’re really cooking!”

That's right. We were REALLY cooking. And they turned out so good! I forgot buns so we used tortillas. Check out these bad boys. I mean, po boys:

Of course when Frank went to put his together he pointed to the vegetables and said, "I don't think I'm going to put any of those on mine."

Kids. Whaddya gonna do?

Smelling bath towels makes me nauseous

Today I was doing laundry and for some reason I sniffed the bath towels. Okay, fine. It was because I was wondering how dirty they were. When I sniffed them I had a weird childhood flashback. I thought of vomit. Here’s why:

When I was a young WG I had issues with nausea. I woke up nauseous and everything I looked at made me gag. Of course traditionally barf-inducing things were triggers like dog poo, dead bugs and barf itself. But then there were other things like this poster my parents had hanging up of a Spanish bull rider, the painted ceilings at Moody mansion in Galveston…come to think of it, art in general made me nauseous.

The good side of having an overactive gag reflex is that you get out of gross chores like cleaning the cat’s litter box.

The bad side is that you could potentially throw up in embarrassing places like, let’s say, the school bus stop when you’re 12 years old. Perhaps when someone who calls himself “The Brettster” tells a story about a kid who always has snot running down his nose and that his dad also had snot running down his nose…like maybe something like that could make you puke all over the other kids’ back packs.

Hey, I said “potentially.”

Anyway, I didn’t actually spew chunks that often. It was more the nauseous issue most of the time. But if I did get sick it wasn’t because I was actually ill; I just got grossed out. But just in case it should happen again while I was at school, my mom sent me on my way with a little protection—a bath towel. If I were to feel nauseous again and I couldn’t make it to the bathroom, I was to let it out on the towel. So I would seriously carry that towel around school with me. I remember even walking into the cafeteria with it one day and some kid (probably the Brettster, he was always on my back), saying, “Why are you carrying that towel around?” Oh, and I might add, it’s not like she gave me the best towel. Natch, it was an old ratty towel since chances were I was going to destroy it anyway.

So on those days when I would start to feel nauseous, I would put the towel over my mouth and breathe deeply. It seemed to help.

That’s why whenever I smell bath towels I feel nauseous. And now (as Paul Harvey would say), you know…the rest of the story.

And if that story made you a little bit queasy, you might want to grab a towel.

A Gilmore Goodbye

Lorelai. Rory. I love those Gilmore Girls (or as Frank calls them “The Girls of Gilmore.”) And tonight is the last time I’ll get to hear their rapid-witty-mother-daughter-but-more-like-college-roommates banter. I’m bummed.

Here’s where I need to back up and admit two things:

1. I haven’t exactly been a religious Girls of Gilmore watcher for the last seven seasons. In fact, I think I only watched the odd seasons. Not odd as in weird-odd like Britney-shaving-her-head but odd as in odd numbers as in seasons 1, 3, 5 and 7…and maybe six which is an even number but I don’t think I saw every episode so I’m sticking with I only saw the odd seasons. (That’s my attempt at a Rory rant. You’d have to be a GofG fan to understand.)

2. I didn’t even know this was the last season until a few days ago.

But nonetheless, I love those GofGs. And not just Rory and Lorelai. I love Luke (hot), Logan (interesting character and a pretty good actor who you can also see on Veronica Mars which I’ve actually only seen once but he was on it), Paris (intense), Mr. and Mrs. Gilmore (I learned how to unfold my napkin from Emily.) I’m not crazy about Lane’s storyline but Frank likes it because when she’s around we can usually see Sebastian Bach. Oh, and I like Sookie, Lorelai’s b-fry. And really, I just love their town, Stars Hollow even though it wasn’t until season three that I realized that they didn’t live in a town called “Gilmore.”

And how about that theme song? GofG was one of the last shows that actually played the whole thing. Here’s a little sample (purely based on my odd-season-watching memory so this could be a little off):

If you’re out on the road feeling lonely and so cold
All you have to do is call my name and I’ll be there on the next train…
Where you lead, I will follow
Anywhere that you tell me to
If you need, you need me to be with you
I will follow…

I’m totally singing this right here at WG headquarters. So glad I don’t work with co-workers in a cube environment.

And besides the interesting characters, awesome theme song and clever writing, everyone in the GofG cast is a darn good actor. Okay, Alexis Biedel sort of seems like she’s doing scenes in high school drama class but everyone else is superb. If it were up to me they would all get Emmys. Especially Lauren Graham.

But I can’t get them Emmys nor can I make the GofGs stick around for another season. Tonight’s the end and I plan to have a big party for it. But since I don’t know that many people here and it’s last minute, I’ll probably just watch it. But not with Frank because he doesn’t really like it. So I guess I’ll just Ti-faux it and watch it later. It should be a big occasion.

I think we should end this with a recent Rory-Lorelai exchange:

Lorelai: “It’s totally doorknob.”
Rory: “As in ‘dead as a?’”
Lorelai: “That’s right.”

HGTV ADD

It’s a condition. Some may call it a disorder, even a disease. Not sure if you’ve been stricken with HGTV ADD? Here are the symptoms:

You have a strong desire to improve your home but not a strong desire to actually do anything about it.

On Day One of “Project: re-tile your kitchen” you leave, thinking it’s going to be done for you when you return 24 hours later.

When a problem arises with your home office renovation, you keep looking around for some shirtless stud to solve it.

While watching shows on HGTV, you use your Ti-faux to fast forward through all the work so you can see the before and after shots.

When tackling home improvement projects you find yourself wishing that your life was in speed-cam and that everything you did was in fast-motion video (Except for the part when the sun goes down and comes back up in five seconds—then you’d miss out on sleeping.)


If you’ve got three or more of these, you’re HGTV ADD. You probably thought that by sitting on your couch and watching hours of HGTV, you would become a home improvement guru. Instead, it’s had the opposite effect. Now you equate home projects with lying around in your underwear, remote in one hand, fistful of Oreos in the other. You can’t stand to do the actual work. Because in real life, this work takes more than 22 minutes. Sometimes it takes 22 hours. Or even 22 days. It sucks.

How do I know so much about this disease? I’m not only the founder, I’m also a victim. I watch “Design on a Dime” and I think that I, too, can spend $92 and have a whole new living room. I watch “Design Remix” and think that I, too, will randomly find some discarded fabric under my bed that can be easily turned into curtains. I watch “Trading Spaces” and think that my neighbors could quickly transform my dining room and it wouldn’t be tacky. (Yes, that’s on TLC but I blame them too).

So what’s the remedy? There are two options:

1. Continue watching home improvement shows but adopt the motto “don’t try this at home.”

2. Stop watching home improvement shows. To do this you’ll have to get rid of the channel altogether. You can’t be trusted.

Actually, there’s a third option and I think it’s what I’ll do: continue watching HGTV, send in videos to every single show to convince them to re-do your house, room by room. If you’ve got a sob story, try “Extreme Makeover, Home Edition.”

Since there’s no known cure yet, we'll always have HGTV ADD. But at least we get to watch shirtless studs while we suffer.

T-Day

Some folks call it May Day but I call it T-Day as in “Teeth Freedom Day.” It’s the first day I’ve had nothing on the bottom of my teeth since June 28th, 2006. I wore my retainer last night and this morning after I ate my Kashi I didn’t put it back in my mouth. I just left it on the counter. I didn’t even brush it! It was so liberating!

But to tell you the truth, I feel more naked than free. It’s like I walked out of the house without my purse…or without pants on. (And by the way, in junior high I had this irrational fear that I forgot to wear pants to school. I would look down and tell myself that I was indeed wearing pants but just to be sure I would always ask a friend or a bus seat partner, “Am I wearing pants?” Maybe that’s what happens to the people in the drive-thru lines. Wow. FCM. Full Circle Moment.)

I’m just nervous that my teeth are going to spread apart again. And if they do, it’s Braces Boulevard for Writinggal. But for now, they’re as together as they’re gonna get. Here’s a closer look:

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Yes, there’s still a tiny space but I’m certain that my “you’ve got some spinach in your teeth” comments will go down at least 80%. And what’s going to go up? My grazing ability! I’m gonna sample food at grocery stores, nibble at parties and munch on chips and salsa! Oh, that sounds so good. I think I’ll head out and hit a Mexican restaurant for lunch.

But wait…am I wearing pants?