Ode on a Coffee Urn

Ode on a Coffe Urn
By Marianne the Chicago Bogger

Thou still unravished pot of Starbucks bean
Thou foster child of cocoa and green tea
Target bought brewer with brown stains to bear
Set each morning to rendezvous with me.

With dried crust set sweetly around your rim
In need of sayers to determine our fate
You prayed I would simply put you through the washer
But my passion has found your chance too late.

I rinse it out each morning.  And afternoon.  And evening.  I like coffee.

Holy crap, trying to match Keats' meter and rhyme just took all the fun out of expressing my immortal love for that first morning cup.  Because with a 6 am wake-up time throughout the remainder of the school year, I am going to be worshipping the stuff.

The Chicago Public School year begins!!!

So here's what we got:

• Danny dropped off at bus stop for selective enrollment school: crack o' dawn
• Jack picked up by stiff uncle still recovering from roof fall during a fire: slightly after crack o' dawn
• Joey picked up by big yellow school bus: your guess is as good as mine

A few short hours later (and if Joey's big yellow school bus can find us), I reclaim Daniel, Jack and whatever the last one's name is.  There's some kind of special order that I'm supposed to perform this all in, but I just can't keep it straight right now.

Oh, but there's more...

Without a full understanding of how many actual hours I have to work with, I managed to inject daily doses of study in the areas of  swimming, chess, basketball, hockey, violin, and piano.

I know I have no right to complain.  I did it all to myself.  This is going to suck. Yet even armed with that knowledge, I'm still researching a day that can work for us to fit in the White Sox baseball training program. 

If anyone's listening, can you please call Dr. Drew?

In the meantime, I'll make coffee.

One Day More

The gym uniforms have been purchased.

The school fees have been paid.

The teachers have been assigned.

And I have absolutely no information about Danny's bus route or pick-up time.  But that's how we roll here in the Chicago Public School system.

Regardless, I have spent the final hours before the first day of school labeling folders, notebooks, disinfectant bottles, and Kleenex boxes. I grumbled along the way.  Why am I sending postage stamps for the third year in a row?  Why so much glue?  How many kids I am covering because CPS knows only a third of the parents will actually buy supplies for their kids?  Is it too late to switch the boys over to St. Cajetan's?

I had to take out a second mortgage for Back-to-School shopping.  

I go through this every year.  Except this time, there is talk of a teachers' strike and I swear to God, if the politicians and teachers' union can't come up with a fair compromise, I'm just going to home-school, dammit.

That was a joke.

I barely survived the summer with these hellions.  If Charles Manson was the principal, I'd still be tossing them all on the CPS bus (should it ever arrive).   While Joey is on "Track E" for school (they go year-round and already started classes), I've had to wait and endure hundreds more Back-to-School celebrity robocalls before finding my peace.  Finally, at long last, I will reclaim a small snippet of the day where I'm not asked to wipe or wash something. 

I've been playing Les Miserables' One Day More consecutively for 18 hours: 

The time is now
The day is here
One day more!

So please, please Chicago.  Don't allow a strike.  Don't take away my only sliver of freedom and tranquility in an otherwise bleak and repetitive life.  Please.  Forget the children...

Do it for the moms.

Oh Come All Ye Hoarders

Per the usual weekend stops at all of the second hand stores yesterday, I came across a bag of treasures that left me speechless.  The dirty old plastic bag was tossed carelessly on a bottom shelf at the resale shop Bibles for Missions and marked $3.  I quickly grabbed it and ran to the register before anyone could amend the gross negligence of the pricing team.

No, it was not a bag of old coins.

Or a bunch of valuable stamps.

Or even some vintage costume jewelry.

It was better.  Old wooden Christmas ornaments.  I KNOW.

I may be tempted to put the tree up in October this year.

Okay, for those non-holiday junkies out there, let me explain.  I don't hoard in my every day life (outside of vintage Little People and Duplo Legos that is), but Christmas owns me.  Come the Friday after Thanksgiving, my house looks like St. Nick threw up over every square inch.

I can't help it.

And old wooden Christmas ornaments are like my Holy Grail. 

They remind me of all those old Burl Ives Christmas specials.  He went to EIU by the way.  As did Tony Romo.

When I got home and gently cleaned each one, I noticed there were several broken soldier arms and angel wings. Not a problem. Toothpicks and wood glue would do just the trick and keep me up until the wee hours of the morning.  This was love.

I started feeling a little high around midnight.

Bibles for Missions always has the best stuff.  Goodwill and Spree donors tend to be younger, so their stuff rarely falls into the vintage or antique category.  Bibles for Missions attracts grandmas moving into condos and grandpas heading to assisted living.  In some cases, specific instructions are given by the elderly to donate to the shop upon their deaths. 

These ornaments were undoubtedly cherished for many years, and I suppose there is some tragedy in their being cast into a bag and sold to a crazy blog mom for $3.  Yet for whatever reason, I secretly hope that the owners know the vestiges of their youth and own child-rearing years have found a good home.  And in about 40 years or so, my boys will be boxing up my own stuff and commenting:

What was with mom and all the frickin' ornaments, Legos and Little People? 

Hopefully, Bibles for Missions will still by around by then.

American Airlines Strikes Back

Remember our not-so-great American Airlines flight to Las Vegas last month?  The one that took us from Chicago to Tulsa to Dallas to Las Vegas?  While it may not have been as tragic as say Titanic, it did make me recall a quote from the movie, spoken as protagonist Jack glistened with frost while submerged in the North Atlantic with Rose:

I don't know about you, but I intend on writing a strongly worded letter to the White Star Line about all of this.

Inspired, I jotted off a note to American Airlines and had Joey drop it in the mail.  This wasn't just your typical email complaint or "to whom it may concern" letter to a random person at customer service. Nope. I utilized my 10 years experience in corporate America and knew the only way to get my letter read was by sending it directly to the top. The corporate office doesn't want to deal with disgruntled customers, so they typically forward your letter down to some assistant vice-president in customer service or operations. But here's where the true genius lies: whoever opens the interoffice envelope will see that it has already passed through the CEO's office. Your letter now gets placed at the top of the pile and you may actually receive a form letter back before the turn of the decade. Hey, it's something.

Joe trying to make sense of our revised, non-non-direct flight on the plane

What I was NOT expecting was an actual phone call from someone in the corporate office.  Today.  After an afternoon of abandoning my kids with Atheist-Friend so I could run my cataract-surgery-recovering mom around town, I returned home and found a real live person from AA had left an actual message with a call-back number on my answering machine.  Was this some sort of new parallel universe I was now living in?

Part of me is intrigued.  Part of me fears those AA execs know about the blog and I am about to disappear.  Either way, I have to wait until Tuesday to call back due to the holiday weekend.

If anything happens to me between now and then, please tell the police to take a careful look at American Airlines.

Yet if this goes well, I will be happy to eat crow and say that I was wrong in casting all American Airlines representatives as heartless minions (Isabel the desk agent and the Australian beer-producing flight attendant notwithstanding). 

 If this does not go well, you may never hear from me again.

Tell my children I loved them. 

Nancy Reagan vs. Me

The topic of drug use has recently come up in our home. I'm wondering if I missed the Chicago Public School's (CPS) robocall from Michael Jordan telling me I should talk to my kids about drugs.  Perhaps it was accidentally deleted somewhere between the heartfelt automated pleas from AJ Piezynski and Ozzie Guillen encouraging me to get the kids to Day One of school.

(Sidenote: why is it that nobody on these robocalls - including Rahm Emanuel and Jennifer Hudson - makes mention of Day Two of school and beyond? Are they handing out golden tickets on Day One? I guess I'm off the hook for the rest of the year then? To the beach, boys!)

Sorry.  Back to drugs. When it comes to talking to my kids about drugs, I have opted for the time-honored tactic of the "cautionary tale."  While I certainly understand that not every homeless and schizophrenic person on the streets is an addict, I still make that exact case whenever our urban environment creates an opportunity:

Danny:  Mommy, why is that man standing on the corner asking for money?

Me:  He did drugs, never finished school, and now has no money for even a piece of bread.

Jack:  Mommy, how come that lady is hitting her own face and talking to herself?

Me:  She started doing drugs when she was in high school and now she thinks there are mosquitos biting her nose.

Joey:  Mommy!  Dat man doesn't have any wegs (legs)!

Me:  He did drugs and they plum fell off.

I'm sure the experts would tell me I'm misguided in my approach to instilling such extreme fear and aversion to drugs.  To each his own.  And my own are too important to leave to any expert instead of my own gut feelings on the subject. 

Now before everyone jumps down my throat, I would like to point out that most anti-drug messages have their own individual flaws.  For example, let's examine the Cook County Sheriff's campaign.  Daniel and Jack recently stepped into the minivan after summer camp toting plastic bags quoting the Nancy Reagan-era motto of "just say no":

Not nearly as scary as my bag of tricks

The outside of the bag was incorrect as Michael F. Sheahan hasn't been Cook County Sheriff in like 5 years.  The inside of the bag was even more disturbing - it was filled with some cheap plastic toys and a bunch of candy that I am really hoping wasn't 5 years old as well.  Most of the candy didn't survive the ride home as I later found empty wrappers strewn about.  But here's a sample of what remained:

The sheriff's office would have received one seriously angry phone call had that Fun Dip been opened in my car.  While they're off banning assault weapons, they really ought consider Fun Dip.  The stuff is pure evil.

So if I am to understand this correctly, we are telling children to avoid certain vices by offering replacement vices as an incentive?  Candy is the equivalent to crack to the 2nd grade sect.  Talk about your mixed messages.

As someone who is extremely prone to vices herself (chocolate, coffee, slot machines, etc.), I don't find the Sheriff's campaign particularly impactful. I give them a lot of credit for trying to get the conversation started, but a bunch of jaw breakers does little to reinforce the diminished life many drug users lead.   That's where I feel the scare tactics need to come in.

When I was growing up, I heard many horror stories involving drugs: tales of dead teenagers and murdered participants in the drug trade.  Detailed physical descriptions and personal histories of regular kids who made one terrible mistake which lead them down a path of addiction and misery. Whether it was all real or made up, it didn't matter.  It worked.

Which is why I will continue to point to the angry, swearing homeless guy at the 111th street exit. Every time we see him, he aggressively bangs on the minivan window demanding money, terrorizing the kids until they cry.

"You see that guy, kids?  If you ever do drugs, he's going to be looking for you."

It ain't perfect, but it's got to be better than a bag of Sweet Tarts.

Ew

It is ironic that my mother is a nurse, my husband is a certified paramedic, and one of my best friends is a doctor.  Whenever any combination of these folks get together, the conversation naturally drifts to the macabre.  It's one gross disaster after the next: bloody motorcycle accidents, weird things found impaled in people's skulls, strange tumors possessing both eyes and feet, etc. Once they get started, I just have to leave the room.

My mom. 

My 8th grade Biology partner was an equally squeamish sort.  As our teacher merrily dolled out dead baby pigs for dissection, we both turned an instant shade of green and were sent to the library for the week to write papers on farm animals. In high school, I carefully selected the sole serial killer in the entire place who delighted in chopping up dead worms and frogs.  Even in college, I always managed to find someone to handle my dirty work.  If my lab partners agreed to the slicing, I would agree to the diagramming and paper-writing. I probably know more about the phases of meiosis than most doctors.  It was a win-win.

It seems like I should have gotten better at handling all this by now given I've had three c-sections, gall bladder surgery, and constant exposure to 1,000 Ways to Die courtesy of my husband's bedtime television viewing habits.  No such luck. If anything, it's gotten worse.

So much in fact, that when my mother asked me to take her to her cataract surgery on Tuesday, I requested she not use the word "surgery."  We came up with a code word for discussing the subject:  "haircut."  As in, "we need to leave by 7:30 am to make the haircut appointment." And then there was, "After the haircut, let's stop and pick up some coffee."

Of course the doctor refused to play along with our little game and instantly started going on about eye lenses, opacification, and incisions.  I felt light-headed and ran to the bathroom.

My poor mom patiently endured my passing nausea, got stabbed with an IV that looked like it could reach the earth's core, and suffered through her "haircut" like a champ.  As she was wheeled back to recovery wearing a pair of those room-darkening glasses, I lifted my head from between my knees and promised to behave better for next month's second operation on her other eye.

I'm thinking a little Valium followed by a swig of Jack Daniels will do just the trick.  Better keep that cab number handy.