Sometimes it takes me several weeks to grow the balls to write a post about what’s really been on my mind.

This will be one such post.

Most of the time, my silence on here can be attributed to me spending time working on things that take me far away from a computer.  Lately, though, my silence has been due to a general pissiness about something I wasn’t sure I should talk about here.  After much thought, and permission granted from Alex, it seems like the cathartic thing to do, so here goes…

The pissiness stems from a very specific topic: BABIES.  Or, to be more specific, me and Alex having a baby.

I’ll give my mom a moment to freak out.

The concept of having a baby is fairly new for me.  Not because I was formerly of the I’m-never-having-a-kid camp, but because I figured it would not be on my radar until well after marriage.  Then I up and fell in love with a man who already has a kid.  I’m not sure I can explain this in a way that non-stepmothers can fully understand, but there is something about being a stepmom that makes me desperately want to be a mother… a BIOLOGICAL mother. This took me by complete surprise, smacking me over the head not too long after Alex and I got engaged.  I spent a lot of time hearing, “No, I want DADDY.”  Or, “No, MY mommy.”  I was also rather taken aback by the attitude so many people — even people you don’t expect it from — have towards stepmothers.  Stepmothers, apparently, are not “real” parents.  I don’t share blood with E, so my opinions, and knowledge, and experiences raising him don’t count for much with more people than I ever anticipated.

It took until after Alex and I got married for me to be sure that I’m ready to have a baby (he’s been on board for a while).  And now that I’m ready, I want it to happen NOW (because, as all my readers probably have figured out, I’m FANTASTIC at being patient).

Which brings me to the reason for my pissiness.

The trouble with “trying to get pregnant” is that it’s not something you can will to happen.  It happens when it’s meant to happen.  I know people who got pregnant on their first try, before they were even serious about it, and I also know people who have been trying for well over a year and have nothing to show for it.  Alex and I haven’t been “trying” for very long at all, so this is not about “having trouble.”  It’s about being totally and completely unable to control the situation.  I LOATHE this, I loathe it with the passion of a thousand suns.

Here is what I’ve learned so far, as I have struggled with the concept of not being about to control this at all:

• It takes 2 weeks from the time you conceive for your body to begin telling you that you’ve conceived.  I had to look that up.  This 2 week waiting period is not part of the normal space-time continuum.  Really.  It’s not.
• It’s really, really easy to mistake stupid things (gas, too many cups of coffee, the smell of nasty Chinese food) for pregnancy symptoms.  Especially when you’re waiting around to see if you got pregnant 2 weeks ago.  You have a big lunch and suddenly it becomes easy to convince yourself that your bloated stomach is your uterus expanding, not the 6 pieces of pizza you just ate.
• People will inevitably come out of the wood work who you never even knew wanted kids and declare themselves knocked up the moment you decide you would like to have a baby of your own.
• The best way to take your mind off the fact that you want to be pregnant and you’re not is to have BARE MINIMUM 3 hobbies with which you can be distracted at any given time of the day.

Right now, that’s all I’ve got.  I don’t intend to write about this much, but I’m interested to know if any readers have words of wisdom, or similar experiences to this, so if you have a comment, do share!

© 2010, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

If you had asked me 5 years ago if I’d ever consider baking my own bread, I would have laughed at you.  I would have laughed at you hard.  Like, milk coming out of my nose hard, if I wasn’t lactose intolerant and liked drinking milk.

There is a reason I would have found your question so ridiculous.  See, it’s not the concept of baking bread that would have been funny.  It’s not even the concept of ME baking bread that would have been funny.  It’s what I would have associated with making bread that would have been the source of my amusement… or rather, WHO I associated with it.

While I was a junior in undergrad, me and a few of my friends decided it was time to move off-campus and be grown-ups.  At first there were 3 of us in an apartment together, and then Whitney moved in, too.  We were a happy little family of friends – at first.  Then one of the roommates went a little… crazy.  She fancied herself Martha Stewart, and started buying all sorts of kitchen gadgets most normal college students have never even heard of.  Things like Crock Pots and bread machines started appearing in our small college apartment kitchen.  None of the rest of us could touch these things, because GOD FORBID we got them dirty.  (For that matter, it also would have been forbidden to eat pizza over the box, or sit on the armrest of the couch, or leave coffee cup rings on the counter… but that’s really a separate post.)  Our poor, crazy roommate made valiant attempts at cooking… attempts that usually left the rest of us running for Taco Bell after dinner, and eating the better-than-what-we-just-were-served-for-dinner tacos in the car in Taco Bell’s parking lot, so the crazy chick at home wouldn’t know we found her chicken and biscuits from a box gross.  So for years, all I ever associated with baking your own bread was a giant bread machine that never got used, taking up room in the kitchen, and Taco Bell.

So, 5 years ago I really wouldn’t have been likely to think bread-baking was a good idea.

Flash forward to present day, though, and I clearly have had a change of heart.

It started with me finding out about a bunch of food bloggers participating in this thing called the Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge, or BBA.  One blogger in particular writes especially inspiring posts on her bread-baking adventures, and the more I read, the more I got itchy to try it myself.  I had mental debates with myself over the idea.  Baking is not one of my favorite things.  It’s too exact.  I don’t like having to put EXACTLY any amount of anything into my cooking – I’m more of an “eyeball it” kind of cook.  But baking is also a lot like following a lab protocol… which is my in-real-life job, so I’m pretty good at it.  And it would be nice to know my bread has no preservatives, etc., too.  Then I read this post on making light wheat bread, and I decided I was going to try this whole bread-making thing and see what happened.

I bought the book that goes with the BBA, since that was the impetus for this undertaking: The Bread Baker’s Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread.  I went to the grocery store and bought bread flour and yeast.  And then I did something dumb.  I decided to start with a recipe I had never read about, because it was one of the only recipes that wouldn’t take 2 days to complete.  My first foray into bread-making was English muffins.  I have no pictures to share, but I will tell you they tasted good!  The problem was that my yeast was dead, and me being a total novice didn’t think that was necessarily a problem.  So I proceeded with the recipe anyway.  Bottom line: use dead yeast only if you desire English muffin hockey pucks, because that’s about how heavy they were.

My second try was better, though.  I made bagels… again, I have no idea why I didn’t just go for the recipe that drove me to try bread-making in the first place.  Sometimes it’s better not to pull at the threads behind my decision making processes.

Here are some shots from my bagel-making experience:

Look! No dead yeast here!

Bagels awaiting the boiling process.

The finished product

This was easier than I thought it was going to be, although admittedly more time-consuming.  Am I likely to continue trying out the recipes in this book?  You bet!  How about any of you?

© 2010, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

A few readers have noticed my blogging drought of late, so I figured it was time to write about where I’ve been these last couple weeks!

Other than working on the new house, I’ve picked up a couple of new interests… new time-consuming interests, I should say.  So the posting has taken a hit.  I will try to do better from now on, though.

As a sidenote, I’ve recently been having difficultly with what I should be posting here, because I seem to be throwing in a little of everything and I’m told that is BAD when it comes to blogging.  Perhaps not all my readers want to hear about family life, or about cooking, or about home improvement and maintenance.  But I can’t seem to commit to just one topic, so I’ve been stalling on writing until I could decide what to do.  My conclusion has been, though, that I’m a better writer when I’m writing about what’s on my mind than when I’m forcing myself to write about something I don’t care about at the moment.  So it seems this blog is destined to remain a hodge-podge of my thoughts.

Glad I got that off my chest!

My friend Tiffany is a very cool chick.  She taught me to knit last year, basically over the internet, with decent success.  And now this year she has managed to give me all the information I needed to start canning.

Canning = preserving food.  I didn’t really know that until I started looking into the concept more deeply.  It totally sounds like something your grandma might know about, but not something you, yourself, would actually take an interest in, right?  That’s what I thought anyway!  But then I started hearing Tiffany talk about making her own jams, and pie fillings, and canning them for use at times of the year when good-quality fruits aren’t as plentiful.  So I got curious.  Then I stumbled on this great blog called Food In Jars, and I was officially bit by the canning bug: I had to learn how to do this.

First I went out and purchase all the necessary canning equipment:

1 Water-Bath Canner with Rack

1 Home Canning Set

Ball Deluxe Quilted Jelly Canning Jars

1 Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving

I thought about cheaping out and not getting the canning kit, but that would have been a stupid move and I’m really glad Tiffany talked me out of being a dumb cheapskate.  My experience has been that you really do need every single thing in that kit.

Then I found out about this great pick-your-own farm near our town, and I dragged my family to stock up on things like peaches and raspberries and other good stuff I thought I might want to preserve.  Truth be told: we ate a lot of the stuff before I could think up a way to can it.  However, I did manage to make 1 large jar of peach jam and 3 small jars of bumbleberry preserves (raspberry and blueberry mixed together) in the last 2 weeks!  I haven’t tasted the finished products yet, so I’m not going to share the recipes or how-to’s right now.  This weekend I’m thinking about trying my hand at blueberry butter, and if that comes out well I will probably start sharing recipes.

I’ve also started to bake my own bread… yeast and all… which I will save for an upcoming post because I had a bumpy start to this new hobby. 

© 2010, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

The last few weeks have taught me that no matter how prepared you think you are for something, if the “something” is home ownership, you are NOT as prepared as you think you are.

I have good friends who have owned homes for years.  They all warned us that it’s a lot of work.  We even heard this piece of advice, which is turning out to be invaluable: “Whatever you think needs to be done to your house, always assume it will cost $1,000,” so I thought we knew what we were getting into when we signed the papers at closing a few weeks ago.  But… not so much.  It’s as though actually OWNING the house we live in has rendered Alex and I into complete boneheads at times, bringing about some of the following little incidents, all of which really happened and are reasons I have not been posting as much for the last few weeks!

• We bought a drill, but forgot to buy the drill bits.  Genius that I am, I thought the bits for my screwdriver would do the same thing as drill bits for a drill.  NOT SO MUCH!!!  It’s hard to install curtain rods with no drill bits, by the way.
• It’s been a long time since either of us lived someplace with a basement.  We’re lucky, because our basement is only a quasi-basement: it’s on the ground-level, and it’s finished.  But the spiders did not get the memo about it only being a quasi-basement.  They also missed the eviction notice I tried to give them when we moved in.  Not wanting to mess up our freshly painted walls, I thought it would be a good idea to suck the spiders up with my trusty dustbuster instead of squishing them.  Did YOU know that spiders don’t die when dustbusters suck them up?!?  Or that they can CRAWL OUT of dustbusters???  Well, I didn’t.  And so I’ve had a few spiders land on me as they made their escape from their dusty prison.
• The house has all new appliances, and they are mostly of the energy-efficient variety.  Something I have now learned about energy-efficient stoves: there is one burner, called a power burner, that is much better at boiling water than the rest of the burners on the range top.  It took me 40 minutes of trying to get water to boil on one of the other burners to learn this, though.  That was a fun night.

Some other things I didn’t know when we bought this house:

• If there is a vital piece of cheap computer equipment, like a keyboard, that your husband absolutely needs to be able to use the computer, you won’t be able to find it in any of your moving boxes, and will wind up wandering around Wal-Mart at weird hours of the night trying to buy the cheapest keyboard possible, because you just KNOW that the minute you buy a new one, the missing one will turn up.
• Attics get hot.  Like, really hot.  And if you have a kitchen cabinet with a vent for a fan that connects to the attic for ventilation, the interior of the cabinet will get hot, too.  Know why I learned that?  Because this was the cabinet I chose to store all my baking supplies in (read this: CHOCOLATE).  Suffice it to say, now I have bags of liquid chocolate (which my husband helpfully suggested I put in the fridge so it can re-solidify into chips… sadly, I don’t think cooling physics works that way).  I have since moved things around to prevent the loss of future bags of chocolate chips.

I’m confident we will encounter more mishaps of home ownership as we do more in the house.  Alex hasn’t even tried to mow the lawn yet, and we have a gas grill to put together!  The chances of at least one of those things going not-quite-as-planned seem pretty high from where I sit.  Will I write about these things?  Absolutely! As long as I can find the keyboard…

© 2010, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

I’ve been neglecting this blog lately, and I am sorry about that! I won’t make excuses — anyone who reads here often knows the month of June was a crazy month over here, and that’s enough said about that, right?!

I’ve had a lot of ideas roaming my head about how to write a post about our wedding.  Nothing I’ve come up with seemed to do the day or the experience justice, and seemed sappy and boring, if I’m being honest.  I heard from several sources that they’d never seen Alex or I look so happy.  I think that sums it up best!

Then I thought… you know what’s never boring or sappy?  Talking about the things that went wrong at the wedding.  Things that went wrong are always a source of entertainment, especially after the fact, right?  So I will now present my list of things that went wrong at our wedding, in no particular order.

** To be clear: there weren’t that many things that went wrong, and most of them I either didn’t notice, or didn’t think about how bad it could have been, until after the fact.  It was downright shocking how smoothly the wedding went, and I credit the people at Tappan Hill for that.  This post is not intended to suggest the day was anything less than perfect.

Item that went wrong #1: Our officiant didn’t show up.  I’m not kidding!  15 minutes before the ceremony was supposed to start, I was sitting in my bridal suite with my sister, trying to stay cool (it was about 90 degrees the day of the wedding), when a guy I’ve never seen before comes in to tell me he’s going to be standing in for our officiant because the guy we hired had car trouble.  In retrospect, I think it was really “car trouble,” because I’d bet a lot of money that the guy really had double-booked himself, and for some reason our wedding was getting the crappy end of the stick.  In the end it didn’t matter, because the guy who came was licensed and had the ceremony the guy we hired wrote for us, but I shudder when I think about how bad it could have been.

Item that went wrong #2: A while back I wrote about how my florist and I had a miscommunication about what does and what does not constitute a pink flower.  I loved the flowers at my wedding, by the way, they were everything I pictured them being.  I had my bouquet preserved, which ought to tell you how much I loved the flowers because bouquet preservation does not = cheap.  Somehow, though, PINK flowers wound up on our wedding cake.  Really pink – I’m talking flaming bright magenta-pink.  I was so sublimely happy at the wedding that I really didn’t care.  But I care now that I see the pictures of the gorgeous (and delicious) wedding cake with stupid pink flowers on it (see below).

Item that went wrong #3: Mom, don’t get upset, but I totally forgot to put a penny in my shoe, even though you came and found me specifically to give me a penny to put in my shoe.  I had my something old (my pearls, which originally belonged to Alex’s grandmother), my something new (my dress, and a bunch of other stuff), my something borrowed (my hair band, borrowed from Tiffany, who wore it on her own wedding day a couple of years ago), and my something blue (my shoes… duh!), but when I thought about it the next day, I realized I definitely set that penny for my shoe on a table and never picked it back up.  Oops.  Good thing I’m not particularly superstitious.

Item that went wrong #4: This one is a corollary to item #1.    We went away for 2 weeks after the wedding, and expected to come home to find our shiny new marriage license sitting amongst our mail.  Too bad, it was not!  It was no where to be found, actually.  It took 4 calls/emails to our officiant (the guy who was supposed to be our officiant, not the one who actually showed up) and a call to the town clerk’s office to find out the license NEVER GOT MAILED OUT TO THE TOWN CLERK.  This was immediately rectified by the guy we paid to officiate our wedding, and we now have our marriage license.  It was a bit upsetting there for a while though!

I’d also like to mention, now that the wedding is over and I sit and think about all the wedding-related things I stressed about and planned for the last year, it all seems so silly!  We definitely had the beautiful wedding we wanted, but in the grand scheme of life some of the things I found myself getting upset over now seem… tiny.  Not worth having gotten upset.  Did anyone else experience this post-wedding epiphany, or is it just me?

© 2010, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a list of things I’d like to tell you all about, if only I had the time.  Today I’d like to tell you all about the #2 thing on that list: the weirdest gift I have ever received.

Let me say this first, though: I am all for the concept of it being “the thought that counts.”  If someone wants to give me, or Alex, or both of us, or anyone a gift, it doesn’t matter to me if it’s large or small, round or square, normal or… weird.  So it’s not what this gift actually was that warrants a whole post about it.  It’s the “?!?!?!” factor that warrants the post.

I’ll take you back to the week before my bridal shower…

We had been receiving mail all week, because it was also the last week to RSVP for our wedding.  We had also been receiving boxes all week, as several people who could not attend the bridal shower had been kind enough to send gifts to our apartment.  So the presence of an envelope in the mail, decorated to make it known that it was something related to the pending wedding, was innocuous to me.

And then I opened the envelope.

Inside I found a card, from a person who is somewhat involved in the wedding, with the following message:

“Heard XXXXXX store accepts expired coupons.  Happy Bridal Shower!”

The card was stuffed with EXPIRED coupons for XXXXXX store (I’m not putting the name of the store, because I don’t know if this whole expired thing is true, and I don’t want to start an internet rumor!).  There was no corresponding gift card, or gift.  Just the EXPIRED coupons.  Oh, and they were expired coupons that had been pilfered from other people’s mail, because not a single one bore the name of the card-sender.

I don’t believe this person’s intentions were at all bad – quite the contrary.  But what do you say to someone when they send you such a thing?    Do I send a thank-you card for the EXPIRED coupons?  Is it a do-it-yourself gift, meant to help me get a $5 discount on something I buy myself?  I still don’t know what the appropriate response is!  All I do know is, this is hands-down the weirdest gift I have ever received.

© 2010, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

I don’t cry.

I know a lot of girls say that, but in my case it’s very, very true.  I especially don’t cry for HAPPY reasons.  Funerals, yes… weddings, no, if you get my drift. I’ve mentioned this about myself before (read about it here and here).

Why do I bring this up for a third time, then?

Because this past Saturday my bridesmaids threw me a wonderful bridal shower, and to make the great shower even better, they gave me one of the best present I’ve ever received – and succeeded in getting me to cry in front of everyone at the shower!

A bit of background information here… I have 6 bridesmaids.  For the most part, they don’t know each other.  Most of them don’t even live in the same state – as me, or each other.  They are scattered through Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Virginia, and Texas.  Each bridesmaid represents a different part of my life.  That wasn’t done on purpose, it’s just how it happens to shake out.  Lisa, my maid of honor, is my sister.  Heather is a friend I made while working in my other life as an optician, and she also became my travel buddy.  Tiffany I met at my very first job, and we stayed friends after she moved away and eventually got married.  Jen was my bestest friend in high school, from the very first day of high school (mostly… there was an incident where we were lab partners and neither of us trusted the other to be in charge of the lab report… but once we squared that away we were best friends forever!).  Whitney was my first roommate in college, and my NaNoWriMo buddy.  Jessica was my second roommate in college, who always seemed to be having boy troubles when I was.

Here’s why this is relevant: the 6 of them got together and made a scrapbook for me as my shower gift from them.  They each were sent a page of a scrapbook, and decorated it with their pictures and memories and inside jokes about our friendships.  They also made pages about my bachelorette party, and about me and Alex, and they left a blank page for me to fill in about the bridal shower.

I had NO CLUE they were doing this.  I’m still shocked my sister managed to get all 6 of them to put it all together.  And so when Lisa handed me the scrapbook, the final gift I was given at the shower, I opened it up, realized what was inside, and proceeded to cry.  Like, really cry.  I’m not talking one glistening tear on my cheek.  And then I cried when Lisa started photographing the scrapbook once the shower was over.  And I cried again when I got it home and started looking through it on my own.

Have the floodgates been opened?  It’s possible!

© 2010, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

Melissa is an awesome blogger.  She is so awesome, in fact, that I am borrowing a format she recently used on her blog for this post, because I have too many things I’d like to write about and not enough time to write about them all properly.  Hope you don’t mind, Melissa!

So… here is a list of stuff I want to write about:

• Weddings, and how people get crazy and act completely irrational – even though they are not actually completely irrational.
• The weirdest gift I have ever received (I’ll give you a hint: it’s a do-it-yourself kind of gift.).
• The death of my trusty lap top, from which I have written many blogs, 2.5 novels, and my masters thesis.
• My new-found fixation on learning how to can,  and also how to make a vegetable garden.

For today, I will just tell you all that my lap top, which I have suspected was getting ready to break for a while now, finally gave up the ghost last weekend.  It does not turn on.  It doesn’t believe me when I tell it I have plugged it into the wall, and therefore has no excuse to not turn on.  I suspect this is the work of the possessed DVD drive in the computer, which has taken to opening up all by itself, even when there is no power to the lap top.

Luckily, Whitney convinced me I needed to back up my computer a while back, and I purchased a Seagate FreeAgent Go 500 GB External Hard Drive, where all my pictures, videos, and other important and irreplaceable files are safely stored.  My lap top is lost, but my data is not!  I was going to wait on buying a new lap top, since right now is not exactly the best financial period for me, what with a wedding, honeymoon, and home purchase all in the near future.  Then I realized waiting would mean not getting to download all my pictures from these once-in-a-lifetime events right away… and let’s just say I’m an instant-gratification kind of girl.

So the plan is to find time to go buy a new lap top before the wedding.  The big question is, do I go PC or Mac?  I can’t decide.  I can use both, although I am definitely less familiar with Macs than with PCs.  Do any of you have suggestions or opinions for me?

© 2010, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

I’ve been horrible about posting lately, and I’m sorry! Unfortunately, there’s a chance I will continue to be horrible about it for another week or so, because Alex and I made a big decision last week and it has created loads of extra work for us in this last month leading up the wedding.

We put an offer on a house. And it was accepted… just in time for the tax credit! We couldn’t be more excited, but now we’re scrambling to get everything done so we can close on the house in time for the tax credit deadline.  Will I write a post detailing the whole experience?  You bet!

By the way, buying a house 4 weeks before your wedding definitely falls into the following category: things you probably shouldn’t do if you want to remain sane.

© 2010, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

A few weeks ago I ranted a bit about how Alex and I were going to have to move right before the wedding.  Well, that has been changed, and now we don’t have to move until the week after we return from our honeymoon.  YAY for us!  Before we found this out, though, something happened that made me suspect the gods were telling me it’s in our best interest to move as soon as possible: birds built a nest in the exhaust vent for our kitchen fan.

Maybe this doesn’t sound particularly problematic.  At the very least, it probably doesn’t seem like a sign from any gods to many of you.  That’s because I left out this one very important detail: I am horribly, irrationally, TERRIFIED of birds.  It’s no joke.  They scare the crap out of me.  I once dropped a perfectly good $5 cupcake into the dirt in Greenwich Village to facilitate my escape from a pigeon that had taken up residence 2 feet from me because my OH-SO-CHARMING friend threw her $5 cupcake to it.

Yes, birds are definitely animals I don’t care to spend much time with, ever.  And there were 3 hanging out in our kitchen exhaust vent.  They sounded like they were doing their damndest to come into the kitchen, too.  One morning I actually woke up SURE I could hear one flapping around in the toilet after having flown into the house via this vent.  It took all my courage and bravery to get out of bed and check it out, armed with my trusty slipper.  Of course, there was no bird in the toilet.  I’m just THAT paranoid about birds.

So I now present you with my big list of reasons why birds scare the be-jesus out of me.  It is by no means a comprehensive list, but it’s a good overview!

1.  They can fly.  I can’t fly, but birds can.  This means they can do things like dive bomb unsuspecting, innocent people.

2.  Since birds can dive bomb unsuspecting people, they can also steal their food in a sneak attack.  I’ve seen this happen.  I was once walking on the boardwalk in Ocean City, NJ, and a seagull swooped down out of nowhere to take a corn dog out a woman’s hand.  The seagull actually bit her to get the corn dog!

3.  My grandparents had parakeets when I was little.  Sometimes they let the parakeets fly around their house.  And one time when I was four, one of these cute little parakeets landed on my head.  It dug its creepy claw-feet into my hair, and wouldn’t leave until my mom came over and shooed it away.  If that’s not traumatic, I don’t know what is.

4.  The goonie birds.  If you don’t know about goonie birds, ask my dad.  All I can say about them is, they come and take you if you don’t listen to your parents in the parking lots of shopping centers.

5.  Once while riding my bike at age 12, a bird pooped on my head.  It was really gross.  And contributed to my fear of the fact that birds can fly.

6.  Birds used to be dinosaurs.  Enough said.

The irony of this all?  I have a flamingo tattooed on my back.  It’s there because flamingos are awesome. But if I met one, I would scream and run away, no questions asked.

Hey – I said it was irrational!  Anyone else care to share their irrational fears?

© 2010, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.