Friday Concoction

If you're wondering, we gave her gerbils. Digger and Squirmy. As far as I'm concerned, they go by Shitter 1 and Shitter 2. I'm grateful they've made it through the first 24 hours without keeling over from shock as Pooey screamed at them with his face pressed to the glass. Based on repeated testing of this nature, they will momentarily quit chewing their empty toilet paper rolls, shake their tiny rodent heads at him and shit.

The birthday party was a success. I didn't have to babysit any of the adults, and the kids didn't tip over the Christmas tree (while I was in the room). We ate pizza, homemade cake, and drank a lot of beer'n'wine. Good stuff. Then parents came at the assigned hour, all kinds of chocolate was secreted away (by me), and at 8:15 Madeleine was told that she had to go to bed immediately. She was suitably, insanely angry, and when she went to her room in an fiery storm of newly-5-year-old fury, there in their new glass cage, on her dresser, Digger and Squirmy sat up on their haunches and shat in her general direction. She was delighted and in love. Pictures will come, but how do you eliminate red-eye in red-eyed rodents?

I'm going to be busy this weekend. We've got some stuff going on... uhh... now what was it I was supposed to do on Monday?? Oh yeah! Detonate a small forest of gaily decorated fairy trees in our living room! I had big plans for wrapping all my gifts in pretty cloth, to recycle for each holiday, but I realized before making that fatal mistake that I don't want my kids to start mocking me this early in their lives. The whole wrapped-in-cloth thing is something my mom would do, in addition to including recycled gifts from a long-lost box of keepsakes from 1978, and she's cornered the market on Loony Tunes gifts. Wouldn't want to step on any toes or anything... (Mom - Pooey loves the Chinese wooden wisk you bought at Uwajimaya in 1988, by the way - no joke!).

Here are a few links Madeleine and I were enjoying this evening. Or, more likely, I was enjoying and she was daydreaming about The Shitters.

- I miss these days. Drugs: fun for adults and kids!

- More from the groovy channel.

- Pretty. I wonder if it comes with tiny people that hold out the skirt like that.

- I used to sing this song under my breath to my high school gym teacher. His last name was Carpenter and he was cheating on his wife, the cheerleader coach, with a senior on the dance team. I was terribly clever, no?

- The ugliest things I've seen all day. Really, are you even kidding me?

- And, finally, to get them all out of my system: The Martians. Yep.

Have a great, long, happy, fattening, guilt-free weekend!

What? My favorite Christmas song? Okay... White Christmas, The Drifters.