Poetry Friday WORD for tomorrow, and I quickly lose my mind

Tomorrow is Halloween, so it seems silly not to have the Poetry Friday Word be something about that holiday, right? Or...perhaps...I'm taking the easy route here, mainly because work is kicking my butt and I'm the hostess/planner for Girl-child's school Halloween party, and we're still trying to finish up soccer, and Boy-child's school projects that we stayed up waaaaay too last last night finishing, and I wonder why I've woken with a headache the last 3 mornings, and I can't for the life of me be cute and coy about a Poetry Friday Word this week, given that tonight there's more soccer and I need to buy apples for said party and make breadsticks in the shape of bones and rice krispie treats to help out a fellow mom whose MIL died and won't be at the class party and drop off crockpots for a H'ween party we're attending, and....

(slap)

The Poetry Friday Word for tomorrow is Halloween.

On your mark...get set...GO.





Updated: This is flippin' awesome!

Give me a lottery number

Give me one number each...ONE...and I'll play 'em all. If we win I'm buying you all a latte. A big one.

Someday I Suppose

1) Someday I'll look in the mirror and not be able to flap my underarm skin or watch the jiggle in my puddin' belly.

2) Someday I'll be able to write checks for the mortgage, child care, utilities, groceries, and loans on the same day...with money left over.

3) Someday I will open my mouth and clever things will fall out, the things that only rattle around in my head, the things that come out now like so many piles of stinking rambling goo.

4) Someday I will have free time to play computer games, read the stacks of books on the bookshelves, and take naps.

5) Someday I'll be able to do all those things, and I'll probably be unhappy about all of them.

6) So...maybe not.

Poetry Friday: The Sense of Sensing

Today we’re investigating our Sixth Sense: ESP...premonitions...foresight. I have always believed that there’s something bigger out there than we can experience with our five senses…something in the cosmos, something karmic and collective, something that we can tap into from time to time if the wind blows just right and we breathe easy and let go of the things we know.

All sounds sort of hippy-ish, and I’m totally fine with that.

Feel free to open the window of our Sixth Sense in your blog post today, in whatever form gives you a wink and a nudge…story, poem, commercial ditty, video, diary entry, dream, incantation, ghost hunter story….

Have a good weekend, y’all!


Mona’s ESP

1) Hands up…how many of you have “Song-On-The-Radio” ESP? Where you have a song stuck in your head for no reason, you turn on the radio or change the station, and THERE is That Song. I got that.

2) I also have Phone Call and Email ESP. An idea will pop in my head that my husband is about to call me, or I’ll get an email from my sister, or that the school is about to inform me that one of my children has the Creeping Crud…and sure enough…I get the call, the email, the news.

3) I had a Dream That Came True and now I’m afraid every dream will end up in a real-life situation. It wasn’t the dream where you’re naked in public, thank the jeebus. But it was obscure enough that I never in a million years would have dreamed those pieces coming together, let alone see it play out in real life the very next day. I am now fearful of bad dreams. And suspicious of good ones.

4) Maybe this is a Mom-Thing, but I can judge by the atmosphere and relative humidity in the house who is about to get hurt.

5) While driving, I can sense the traffic patterns, which drivers are about to cut me damn off, which ones will turn without signaling, which ones will change lanes in the next block, and which ones will not GO when the light turns green. This is probably not so much ESP as just driving for damn ever and seeing thirty different shades of Driving Stupid.

6) My children, bless them, always sense when I need a hug and dispense them liberally.

7) My premonitions about winning the lottery never come true, dammitalltohell.

Poetry Friday WORD for Tomorrow: Chapter 6: That Certain Feeling

Five senses just doesn't seem like enough, does it? With our big ol' human brains we should be able to have a few more. Of course, we'd need body parts for them...a big antennae on the top of our head to keep track of outer planetary flow, for example, or a TeleTubby-like window in our belly that shows the relative pull of the moon on the earth. Y'know...fun stuff.

The Poetry Friday Word for this Week revolves around our true Sixth Sense...ESP, Premonitions, That Feeling You Get. That weird feeling when you predict actions yet to come, dreams and thoughts that you have no idea how you know...but you just know.

Feel free to sprinkle some magic dusting powder over your blog post tomorrow and tell us about your Sixth Sense...story, poem, recipe, predicted pottery mishap (Gary), dream, apparition, crazy idea for a sitcom about nothing....

Cheaper than Surgery

I need a new nose.

And a new face.

When I had eyeball surgery 2 years ago, to correct a "leaky eye" that was a result of a tear duct gone horribly bad (the surgery that corrected the problem for all of a month? maybe? that cost me a thousand dollars after insurance paid their measly few cents? yeah, that one.)....

Wait...my detour derailed my train of thought.

Eyeball surgery...yeah...in one of the surgical follow-ups, my opthalmologist said, "Did you know you have a deviated septum?" I said no. And I didn't really know. But I did know something was amiss. Y'know how when you look at your nostrils in the mirror to check for boogers (oh c'mon, like you don't), you should see two straight passages of cave-like darkness? Well, I don't. One is all cavernous, but the other has a mountain range blocking my lane, like driving down to Florida at night, and somewhere in the Carolinas you realize you're thisclose to driving into a reeeeally big hill and exploding your car's gas tank and all your measly college-student savings you were gonna spend on beer at Ft. Lauderdale.

Uh-oh...derailed again.

Beer...driving...mountain...oh yesh, my nose.

I can't breathe most times. When I wear my glasses the pressure on my nostrils becomes such that I become a slack-jawed mouthbreather.

I snore. I drive Sergei totally farggin' nuts.

I can't talk a full sentence without some nasal crap running down the back of my throat and making me sound like Peter Brady when his voice changes...mix that with someone gargling with Maalox, and that's it.

My nose shape doesn't help either...like someone tried to make a triangle with a lump of PlayDoh, made something that looks vaguely like a pear with a Quasimodo hump at the base, and stuck it on my face.

Makes you want to kiss me, huh?

The opthalmo...oh crap, what a long name...The Eye Dr. Guy said he could fix my nose.

I'm not sure I can trust him, given that my eyeball thing didn't turn out so well. Not that it was his fault, I'm sure my eye/nose/sinus area is a General Region of Plagues anyway.

And I'm not sure I want to be out of work for 3 weeks, or even one week, stuffing cotton wadding up my nose-al area.

I don't have the Thousand Dollars that insurance will Not Cover.

But I sure would like to be able to breathe again.

Maybe one of y'all could just stick a Dremel up there and carve out that mountain range, huh?

Three-point-two-miles

The kids and I did a 5k yesterday morning...Boy-child ran it, Girl-child and I walked it. We girls had our fastest time ever. Boy-child had his fastest time this year. Girl-child also won a gift certificate to a local ice-cream place, which we attacked with gusto in the afternoon.

After the race I could barely walk. This morning I can't even tell I did the thing. I guess that's good?

Last night Sergei thanked me for doing that with the kids, telling me I was setting a good example for them, especially Girl-child.

Here's the thing...my parents never encouraged sports. Never encouraged working out, or athletics of any kind. They grudgingly shuttled me to 9th and 10th grade volleyball workouts, those dark mornings in the bitter cold of January that neither man nor beast should venture out into. And they rarely complained. But I could tell it wasn't high on their list of priorities (what was? working around the house. which explains my tendency to do just that.)

Our kids, OTOH, have been conditioned from early ages to get involved in physical activity...Girl-child has been taking dance lessons since she was 3...Boy-child got his black belt in taekwondo by the time he was 9. They've both played on soccer teams, baseball teams, and this winter Girl-child is venturing into basketball.

We don't push them. And when they get the hate on something (aforementioned taekwondo, as an example), we make them think very carefully about their decision before they stop lessons, and then we support their decision.

My point?

Not sure I have one.

Other than I should school my own damn self and get my ass moving with some regularity. A 5k here and there doesn't qualify as an exercise regiment. One or two 15-minute walks a day doesn't mean I'm in shape. Looking at the dumbbells in the bedroom doesn't equal actually lifting them up and working out my flabby biceps. I need to Move. My. Ass. On a regular basis. I need to totally discard my parents' disregard for physical activity, and learn from my kids' relentless pursuit of moving their body.

I need to cut the crap.

Poetry Friday: The Sense of Taste

Today's our last day exploring the standard Five Senses (stay tuned...next week we'll do a sixth)...TASTE is the order of the day. Feel free to be all bloggy about what your mouth experiences, what your tongue does for a living, or you may even venture to the alternate variant of taste...what's "acceptable" in society...or not.

I got all listy wid it.

Have a good weekend, y'all!


All Girls Want to Be Debbie Harry, or Ten Things on the Tip of Mona's Tongue

1) I love the taste of fake orange. The flavour used in Children’s Bayer aspirin when I was younger. Growing up in that time, parents weren’t told to keep drugs away from kids, so my ‘rents kept the Children’s Bayer in a kitchen cupboard, next to the peanut butter. When I needed an emotional boost (say, when Josie and the Pussycats wasn’t on), I’d go to the cupboard and shake 2 or 3 of those orange beauties in my hand and chomp them down, savoring the sweet fruity flavour. Nowadays I eat Benefiber tabs that come in that same orange flavour, and it always takes me back to my parent’s kitchen, feeling all shades of pre-teen angsty blue, and the solace in little sweet pills. I do NOT, however, love the taste of fake orange in those bottles of syrupy soda-like-goop that comes with a glucose tolerance test…they make me barf.

2) I also love the taste of hard water. Mmmm…iron…. I also love the taste of peppermint Altoids…mmmm…minty….

3) I love to taste words…roll them around on my tongue and inhale their nuances. I’ve had deep conversations with friends about the subtle flavour-enhanced differences in similar words…words like “snarky”, and “snide”, and “cynical”. I will hear a foreign word or phrase and repeat it over my tongue, delighting in the way my mouth rolls over it (or stumbles), creating an emotion to go along with it to store in my brain file…”Jeux sans frontieres”…."Ich bin ein Berliner"...whateverthehell John Cleese says in this movie....

4) Why do we love coffee so much? It’s bitter. It’s like water filtered through dirt. And yet…nectar of the gods.

5) Smell is so interconnected with taste it can scare the pee out of me. I would never in a jillion years eat a skunk’s ass, and yet when I smell skunk spray…gah…I can’t scrape the taste off my tongue for the lifeofme.

6) Nothing tastes as warm and familiar as your lover’s mouth.

7) Human skin tastes like salt, sweat, and alcohol, and never in a million years could a lab replicate that.

8) Ricotta cheese and mozzarella, mixed together, tastes like barf to me. I ignore that, of course, and eat the damn lasagna anyway.

9) That thing about tastes being concentrated on certain parts of your tongue? Totally false.

10) My tongue has been doing a constant dance inside my mouth while I wrote this, and is now admonishing me for drinking so much coffee this morning that dragon-breath permeates every exhale. Where are my damn Altoids?

Poetry Friday WORD for Tomorrow: Chapter 5: Sweet, sour, salty, bitter...savory?

Well, we're down to our last of the fifth senses, and the brilliant thing about the sense of Taste is it's all about the tongue...one of my favourite organs. (I'm too tired to verify that the tongue is, indeed, an organ, and not just an outcropping of flexible flesh.)

Feel free to tingle your tastebuds tomorrow by spicing your blog post with thoughts, ponderings, creative associations, crude s4xual drawings, on the sense of TASTE.

Did you know that in addition to the general four tastes...Sweet, Sour, Salty, and Bitter...scientists have agreed on a Fifth? They call it Umami, or Savory...it has to do with amino acids, saltiness, meatiness and cheesiness. I'm longing for an omelet right now, and I swear if I could get a panful of eggs-and-ham-and-cheese, I'd go all umami over it's ass.

Those same scientists are also toying with the idea of making Fat another taste. I mean, DUH. My kids beg for a taste of butter, eating it by the fingerful. That shit is da bomb. Who doesn't like fat?

Of course, TASTE has other meanings too. Like this. I saw Ira do a live stage show months ago. I totally love him.

Come and Pet the Kitty

We got a new cat Friday.

The old cat is not pleased. She is hissing. Stalking. Hiding.

The new cat just wants to play. She milk treads my scalp as I sleep. She makes a scarf of herself across my throat. She is very loving.

Can anyone give any tips on how to make a cranky old cat and a spunky new cat get along?

Poetry Friday: The Sense of Touch

Today's Poetry Friday theme is all about TOUCH.

Tell us what you like to explore with your fingers...with your tongue...regale us with story and song, poem and prose. Bonus points if it's dirty...'cause I'm just in that sorta mood.

Have a good weekend, y'all!



Touching not for Sleeping

Never go to bed
With socks on
I’m too hot
Too sleepy
Dreaming up my life
And waking to find a different one
I reached over the cat
To find you
Hard
Waiting
You chuckled thinking
I thought you thought I thought
You
Were asleep
Rubbing you that
Sound
From your throat
Vibratey
Rich and
Desirous
My leg snaked over
Your thigh
Breasts
Touching your
Holding up your
Back
Turning you over
For the magical surprise
Prize
Inside
The cat moved as
The alarum blared
Grabbing the pile
Of clothes and
What
Not
Stumbling to the
Bathroom brushing
Teeth brushing hair.
Stopped.
Cannot remember
For the
Lifeofme
If I seduced you
Or dreamt it.


The Tubes-"Don't Touch Me There"

Poetry Friday WORD for Tomorrow: Chapter 4: When I think about you....

Okay, let's get this out of the way...I had a birthday two days ago. (Work and kid stuff kept me too busy to post it.) Yeah, thank you...Sergei and the kids did it up good, took me out to dinner and gave me tons of gifts and lovin' on Monday night, and on Tuesday (the actual day) we had cake after the myriad of soccer-related activities were done and we reconned at home right before bedtime. The boys at work made me breakfast to celebrate, some girlfriends at work gave me a bowl of cakey goodness and a gift certificate to a local Adult store with the promise we HAD to go shopping...got cash from the in-laws (who love me...and why wouldn't they). If it wasn't for the fact that I'm one year closer to Social Security and Death, it would have been like Christmas!

We're on our fourth sense for Poetry Friday, and since I'm the Birthday Girl this week, I choose...TOUCH. Like that's any surprise to any of you. I've gushed here before about my sensitivity to touch, my overactive tactile urges, my ability to feel things deeply and quickly. I must have very sensitive nerve endings, or more of 'em...or I'm just a perv that allows the gentlest touch of office furniture to send me into quivering shivers of pleasure.

Sumpin' like that.

Feel free to rub lotion into your blog post tomorrow and tell us about the Sense of Touch. Tell us a story, write an epic poem to your backside, whisper sweet nothings in our bloggy earholes. I wanna hear you dish, people...let's hear it! Talk to me about TOUCH.

This is, of course, the first video that came to mind...uh...would someone tell this MILF to give her lips back to Renee Zellweger? Oh yeah, this is NSFW, so please be careful...and turn your sound down.

Poetry Friday: The Sense of Smell

The Poetry Friday Word/Theme for today centers on our sense of SMELL.

I’ve read articles that detail the link between smells and memories. From the HowStuffWorks site: “Because the olfactory bulb is part of the brain's limbic system, an area so closely associated with memory and feeling it's sometimes called the "emotional brain," smell can call up memories and powerful responses almost instantaneously.”

Boy howdy!

Tell us in your blog post today your observations, realizations, creative aspirations, and hallucinations when it comes to the sense of SMELL. Tell us a story…name the smell that gets you horny…write a poem about the smell of Autumn, or smelling your old boyfriends’ cologne on your new guy.

By the way, you smell really good today.

Have a good weekend, y’all!


13 Smells That Make Mona Swoon (in no particular odor…er…order):

1) Cinnamon rolls baking
2) Sergei, when he sprays on Axe, or Tag, or when he steps out of a shower, or comes back from a run
3) Just-cut grass
4) My kids after a shower, or after a long day of playing outside
5) The mixture of toast, coffee, and cigarette smoke…which explains why I love diner breakfasts.
6) Spicy men’s colognes
7) Wet dog…yes
8) Gasoline from the pump
9) The muddy ground during a rainstorm
10) Fresh-peeled oranges
11) Just-washed sheets hanging on the line on a warm summer day
12) Movie theatre popcorn
13) Christmas (spices, balsam, fruit and turkey)


Reveal

I can smell things other people can't.
I can tell when Sergei's left the stopper out of the tub when I enter the house.
I can smell ozone when no one else can (and I force them to sniff the air with me)
I can smell things burning. From miles away.
I can smell when Blonde Co-Worker makes maple-tinged oatmeal from half a building away.
I know when a skunk is slightly concerned.
I know when a driver two lanes over is smoking.
I can tell when the ham will go bad.
Are you like this?

Poetry Friday WORD for Tomorrow: Chapter 3: Yesterday I ate popcorn and then drank decaf coffee and it smelled like....

We're soldiering on with our Poetry Friday Exploration of the Senses. The word/theme for this week centers on the sense of SMELL. Why? Why not! In this part of the country the leaves are starting to turn rusty orange and mustard yellow, there's a hint of smoke in the air, and every store smells vaguely of cinnamon. I never think I like Autumn until I'm in it...then it's one of my favourite seasons. I make big pots of chili and chowder, buy pumpkin-scented candles, pull out recipes for Oatmeal Cake and Sweet Potato Pie. My sniffer goes on high alert, relishing the smells that usher in the Fall, and Holidays, and that tingly feeling in my belly that I hope to jeebus never goes away.

Feel free to sprinkle some spice over your blog post tomorrow with musings, imaginings, and True Life Stories about our Sense of Smell. Too bad Blogger doesn't have a Scratch-N-Sniff capability. Or, maybe, knowing my dad and his propensity for Pull-My-Finger, I should be glad it doesn't.

(Oh, and the title of this post? It smelled like a Bob Marley concert.)

21 Days

It never fails.

I am three weeks away from Free Money From Work.

That is, if I stay healthy. And the kids stay healthy. And I can quell my churning stomach.

My job has many lovely benefits, one of which awards you with a bonus if you go 6 months with no sick days. Before the kids came along, I racked ‘em up left and right. Mo’ money, mo’ money, mo’ money. But damned if I haven’t had one in the last 12 years. I am now the closest I’ve been since…twenty-one days away. And, of course, while I'm valiantly fighting off a raging cold that came on like a team of wild horses, I am now faced with a belly ache that not only made me crawl in bed clutching the damn thing last night, but woke me up at 4 a.m., unable to be patted down. So now I’m squirting Zicam up my nose for the cold, drinking tea for the belly, and hoping to the Almighty FSM that I can make it through this. ‘Cause I'm not gonna let a little discomfort get in the way of me and Free Money.

To make matters worse, this song was in my head this morning. Ohhhhh…the sickly sweetness of it all…somebody bring me a bucket….