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.

Welcome to another installment of what Whitney and I call ‘collective blogging.’  This means that we have each written a blog post on the same topic – but we wrote our posts separately.  Her take may not be the same as mine, and that’s the fun of it!  If you’re interested in reading past collective blogs, please click here.

Today’s Topic:  A Day in the Life of a Geeky Kid (and her mom)

To read Whitney’s post about her experience as a geeky kid, please visit her blog, My New Chimerical Kit.

This won’t surprise those of you who know me personally, but for those of you who don’t, when I was a kid I was a bit of a geek.  A nerd.  A goody-two-shoes, if you will.  I NEVER did anything to make a teacher call home, or get sent to the principal’s office, or get detention.  Technically I did have a teacher tell my mom that I wasn’t prepared for class once during parent-teacher conferences, but that was my AP English class and that teacher hated me because she once asked me what I thought about the book TESS OF THE D’UBERVILLES (PL 25) and I told her I didn’t care very much about the book.  That might be a separate blog post at some point, because that class was horrible and I hated it and someone could probably write a sitcom about it if they wanted to (right, Jen?!).

Anyhoo, there is only one time that I am aware of where a teacher actually sought my mom out to let her know I had done something rather… geeky.  The teacher’s name was Mrs. Gorman, and she was my preschool teacher (age 3 and 4).  Ah… preschool.  It’s such a wonderful time.  You get to play, make messes, and take naps.  There’s snack time.  Your biggest concern is whether or not you’re going to get a good seat in the “music time” circle, and the day you got to make a new letter picture (and by letter I mean A, B,C) was more exciting than anything else you’d ever known.

There was this one time when the whole preschool class was finger-painting for the afternoon.  This was, in retrospect, probably not a great call on the part of Mrs. Gorman.  Twenty-five 3-year-olds with paint on their fingers and no sense of the consequences of putting those fingers places other than the paper?  Probably not the best idea.  She must have realized this halfway through the activity, because she called out to all us little kids,

“Don’t get the paint on your clothes, your moms won’t be happy!”

I’m going to overlook the fact that she suggested only moms can do laundry.  That didn’t bother me too much at age 3.  Besides, I knew MY mom would be just fine if I got finger paint all over my cute little outfit (did I mention that I ALWAYS had to wear a cute little outfit when I was in preschool?  And that it absolutely HAD to match, or else I would pout and be upset all day over my mismatched garments?).  To little, geeky, 3-year-old me, it seemed that my mom could get dirt and paint and food out of all clothing.  So, being the darling child that I was, I stood up and told Mrs. Gorman,

“Don’t worry!  My mom will do everyone’s laundry if they get paint on it!”

I’m not sure what exactly happened after that – Mrs. Gorman may have had to leave the room so-as to not laugh in my face.  Years later I found out from my mom that when she came to pick me up from preschool that day, Mrs. Gorman had pulled her aside and told her that her daughter had volunteered her to do the entire class’s laundry for the day.  I think my mom said they had a good laugh over the whole thing.

Something tells me a child less geeky then myself would have kept the bragging about her mother’s laundry-doing abilities to herself.  Bragging about having the coolest new Barbie, yes, bragging about laundry, no.  But to me, this was information everyone needed to have – it was COOL.

And yes, to this day I am still convinced my mother has a laundry secret she has not yet shared with me.  I’m thinking perhaps she’s saving it for my wedding night.

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

You know what I love about the week before Christmas?  The way holiday decorations pop up on all the houses, in all the neighborhoods, all around the country.  I’m not sure what it is exactly – maybe it’s just the festivity of it all, maybe it reminds me of the way my dad used to decorate our house when I was growing up – but something about all those lights and lawn ornamentation just makes me giggle.

My most favorite aspect of holiday lights and decorations on neighborhood houses is when Christmas happens to throw up all over a house. You know what I mean: the one house on the street that has outdone everyone else in at least a three block radius; the house you could see from space if you had the ability to look for it from there.  I call that Christmas throw-up, and I love it.  What constitutes Christmas throw-up is largely subjective – my completely over-the-top house may not be the same as yours.  However, there is the rare occasion where everyone can agree that Christmas has thrown up on a house, and I will give you a couple of well-known examples.

• There is the Bronx Christmas House, which goes to the extreme of putting Rockettes on the roof.  Tacky, but also weirdly cool.
• There is the show Crazy Christmas Lights on TLC, which highlights some extra thrown-up-on houses.
• There is the Crazy Lights Tour, where you can see houses that have had Christmas throw up on them all over the country.

Like I said above, when I was younger my dad used to decorate our house for Christmas.  What I know now, that I did NOT know then, was that our house was a fantastic example of Christmas throw-up.  We had lights EVERYWHERE.  They were on the house.  They were on the trees.  They were on the bushes.  And then there were the light-up holiday lawn ornaments.  Santa Claus, a complete nativity, 2 giant candlesticks, and a Santa with a sleigh and 8 reindeer is what I remember – there’s a good chance I’m forgetting something.  I thought this was all normal.  When people came by to take pictures of our house with all the lights ablaze, I thought that’s JUST WHAT PEOPLE DO.  I never realized it was Christmas throw-up until I was an adult.  So I feel I might be a good judge of what constitutes being excited for the holiday, and what constitutes Christmas throw-up.

Here are a few examples of houses with nice decorations that I either took myself locally, or had a friend elsewhere in the country send to me:

In the next category are houses that Christmas hasn’t quite thrown up on, but that went a little too far.  This especially applies when you have something that blows up on the lawn.

To be clear – I don’t think any of these houses are owned by crazy people who waste electricity.  I GET IT.  And what I found as I started looking for places to take pictures was that houses like these tend to cluster together.  It’s like a “keeping up with the Joneses” thing.  And I don’t see anything wrong with that.  Especially if you have kids, who will grow up with a wonderful tradition to look back on.

Which brings me to my next grouping of photos.  These are DEFINITELY houses that Christmas threw up on.  I consider them all runners-up to the centerpiece of this post, the winner of the prize for Christmas throw-up, 2009.  (To be clear – there is no actual PRIZE.  Only fame and glory.)

This next one is actually ONE HOUSE.  But there was so much to photograph I had to split it into two pictures:

After that, I bet you’re wondering what the Christmas throw-up winner could look like.  Here it is, in all it’s glory… please note, this house also plays music for all to hear!

If anyone out there knows about even better examples of houses that Christmas threw up on, feel free to share!

© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

Every year at Christmas, I make cookies to give away to my family and friends. Usually it’s on a small scale – a couple of kinds of cookies or cupcakes. This year, though, I have a lot more people to incorporate into my giving. Initially this freaked me out, because I had no idea how I’d get it all done. Then I realized this was an opportunity to have fun with the baking, and I began to see it as a challenge. So… I have decided to make 15 types of cookies/candy and 3 kinds of bread in the next 12 days. I will give away almost all of what I make to family and friends (I suspect some of it will disappear mysteriously overnight when little elves in my apartment get hungry). With any luck, the next 12 days will chronicle my attempt at making this happen – or else it’s going to document my horrible failure!

Christmas cookies are a tradition in my family. Every year since I can remember, my mom would start baking at least a week before Christmas, and she would make us all help her.  I learned a lot about baking from her – and I also learned a lot about how NOT to bake from her.  I remember this one time I put the sugar in with the flour and OH BOY was that the wrong thing to do.  It took a whole year for her to let me help again.

I digress.

One type of cookie that is an absolute staple in our family is the peanut butter cookie.  They are simple and delicious, and I don’t think there has ever been a holiday season without peanut butter cookies.  So it’s only natural that I include this recipe in my 12 Days of Christmas Cookies series.  If you’ve missed the first 3 days, you can check out Day One, Day Two, and Day Three when you have time!

Peanut Butter Cookies

1 cup sugar, plus extra for rolling

1 stick of butter, at room temperature

1 egg

1 cup smooth peanut butter

1 tsp vanilla

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp baking soda

1 1/2 cups flour

Hershey Kisses, out of the foil

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.  Grease a cookie sheet.  In a large mixing bowl, cream together butter and sugar.  Beat in the egg.  Mix in the peanut butter and vanilla until smooth and creamy.  Stir in salt, baking soda, and flour until well combined.  Roll dough into 1 inch balls and then roll in sugar.  Place on cookie sheet and flatten with a fork.  Bake for 12-15 minutes.  If desired, press a Hershey Kiss into the center of cookie while it is still warm.  Allow cookies to cool before storing.

First, one of the things this recipe (from Food Network’s website) does not tell you to do that I always do is combine the dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, and salt) in a bowl before adding them to the wet ingredients.  That looks something like this:

That said, it’s a pretty straight-forward recipe. Make sure the butter is at room temperature, or you will have major problems with creaming it!

Once the dough is ready, you roll it into balls, then roll the balls around in a bowl or sugar.  You place the rolled cookies on the cookie sheet, then press them down with a fork.  I make crosses with the fork on the cookies, but you can press them down however you like.  You can also make the balls whatever size you like, but you will have to adjust the baking time accordingly.

Once the cookies come out of the oven, you should stick your Hershey Kisses on right away, to ensure they stay put once everything cools.  I don’t like putting the Kisses on every cookie I make, because I often find I don’t actually WANT the Hershey Kiss when I want a peanut butter cookie.

The recipe above will make about 24 cookies if you make them the size I did.  Hopefully the little elves in my house will keep their hands out of the cookie jar until we get a bit closer to Christmas so I don’t have to make more!

© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

Welcome to the fourth installment of what Whitney and I are calling ‘collective blogging.’ To refresh everyone’s memory, we will both be writing blog entries on the same topic every Friday as a sort-of exercise to see how different our thought processes and memories are. Hopefully it will be good practice for an idea we have for NaNoWriMo 2009 – to write the same novel, but separately.

This week’s topic: Worst Public Humiliation Moment

I have to say it took a great deal of soul-searching to come up with my worst moment of public humiliation. I feel quite certain that this was not a problem of a lack of humiliating experiences; rather, a lack of resounding memories about them. Because I was such a geek growing up (see last week’s blog for full details) I developed a pretty thick skin about certain things and it now takes a lot to embarrass me to the point where I would remember it forever.

But that was not always the case, and there is one event in particular that I believe was not only my worst moment of public humiliation, but also shaped a big chunk of my personality in social situations.

The year: circa 1985. I was about 4 years old, and we were having a bunch of people over to our house. It was a family gathering – it might have been my brother’s second birthday, or it might have been Easter. I was in a cute little dress, complete with matching tights and hair barrettes. My hair was curled, and I was wearing white patent leather shoes. I was always a bit anal about everything matching and looking “just-so,” and this occasion was no exception. I remember prancing around like I owned the joint at that party because I knew I looked fantastic. My grandmother (my dad’s mom) arrived with her usual odd assortment of gifts for her grandchildren. Sometimes she brought us bags upon bags of sour cream and onion Lays potato chips. This day, though, she brought hideously ugly, brightly-colored plastic sunglasses. They were much too big for any child to wear, and the lenses were a bizarre grey color and popped out of the sunglasses if you so much as touched them.

Being the princess I was at the age of 4, I was less than thrilled when I was presented with my pair of bright red plastic sunglasses with lenses in the shape of hearts. They were awful. I hated them. – - – - As a side note, I do see the irony in my attitude towards these ugly sunglasses at the tender age of 4, knowing as I do now that I was destined to work as an optician for 9 years and develop a true disdain for cheap sunglasses. – - – - Despite my loathing of the heart-shaped horrors, I had some sense of propriety at age 4, and I knew that if my grandma was giving me a present I better use it in front of her. So I put them on and put on a grand show of prancing around in my fancy dress with my fancy shoes and my new sunglasses.

And that is when my whole family started laughing at me.

To be clear, a family gathering in my family at this time did not mean my parents, my brother, and my grandparents. They were there, but they were not the only people there. My aunts and uncles and cousins were there. So were my parents’ second cousins and their kids. So were our next door neighbors and their kids. And not to be left out, my mom’s best friends from college and their spouses and kids were there, too. And they were all laughing at me.

For the life of me I could not figure out WHY they were laughing. I was just dancing around the steps to the basement, singing and wearing my sunglasses. It wasn’t THAT funny. But people were laughing. Laughing hard. That’s when I reached up and felt the sunglasses on my face. The sunglasses I had put on upside down.

That’s right, perfectly put-together 4-year-old me had put her ugly humongous plastic sunglasses on her face upside down, and didn’t realize it, and proceeded to prance around like the queen of everything. My family found this quite humorous, hence the loud and long laughter. They were still laughing when I took off the sunglasses, turned around, and ran up the stairs crying. I was more embarrassed in that moment than I have ever been in my life. I went in my room, closed the door, and would not come out until my mom came in and told me it was OK and no one was going to remember that I had put them on upside down. But I remembered, and from that moment on I refused to be outgoing or silly or anything that would draw attention to myself in groups – because I never wanted to be the center of attention and therefore subject to ridicule ever again.

If you want to read about Whitney’s most humiliating moment, you can read about it on her blog here.

© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

As part of an ongoing project my good friend Whitney and I are working on, I will now present you with collective blogging entry #3: The First Time I Realized I Am a Geek.

First I think we need to establish what is meant by “geek.” The general definition of a geek according to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary is: “a peculiar or otherwise odd person, especially one who is perceived to be overly obsessed with one or more things including those of intellectuality, electronics, gaming, etc.” And here’s something you may not know (I didn’t): the term geek used to refer to a carnival performer billed as a wild man whose act usually included biting the head off a live chicken, bat, snake or bugs.

I don’t think being a geek is bad. Being a geek myself, I suppose I am probably biased, but that’s OK. However, when I was younger – grade school age – being called a geek was horrible. The only thing worse was probably being called a nerd. There is a fine distinction between the two, I think it has a lot to do with whether or not you are capable of socializing with others. Nerdiness is definitely worse than geekiness though. It didn’t take much to get called a geek or a nerd in grade school. Kids are mean. So if you got a better grade on a test than they did, or you answered a question right in class, or if the teacher always called on you to read aloud because you wouldn’t stutter and make the four-sentence paragraph take twenty minutes to get through, there was a good chance someone was going to point at you and call you a geek at recess. And that would mean it was the end of the world.

Unfortunately for me, I always did get the highest grade in the class, and I always answered questions right when called on, and the teachers picked me a lot to read aloud. But I also played sports and was moderately funny and had the dubious distinction of being called the “prettiest girl in class” by Seamus in fifth grade. So I was not cast off as a geek for most of grade school. I think it’s because it took the other kids so long to realize my geeky nature that it took me so long to realize it myself. So it’s difficult for me to point to one particular moment in time and say that was the moment I knew I was a geek. It was more of a gradual awakening to the geekiness that is now an integral part of who I am, that I would never, ever seek to eliminate from my personality. And so now I will now attempt to chronicle the realization of the inevitable: I am a geek.

• Second grade, June: It’s the end of the year. The entire student body of St. Peter’s School and their families are gathered in the parish hall of the church to watch the principal (Sister Marita Daniel – a terrifying, old-school nun) hand out end-of-the-year academic achievement awards. The highest honor is General Excellence, which is a fancy way of saying “smartest kid in the class.” It was the last award to be given out for each grade, and when they got to the second grade awards whose name should get called out for General Excellence but mine! I went up and took my plaque from Sister and sat back down. I didn’t even really understand what the award meant. I did understand that the nasty looks I was getting from some of my classmates meant it probably wasn’t a very cool award to have won. My parents assured me it was very cool, and then my friends came over to play and I was fine.
• Fourth grade: one of my best friends is now Tommy (also my first boyfriend and second crush). Our favorite pasttime? Talking about outer space, and planning how we would both one day join NASA and be astronauts together. When we had to make model solar systems, mine was extra-accurate and detailed, as was his. We got teased a lot for our love of astronomy. I believe this was probably the first time anyone referred to me as a geek.
• Eighth grade: by this time most of the kids in my class had worked out that I was a geek. I didn’t have very many friends. Everyone hated that I was so good at school. I was starting to hate that I was so good at school, too, to be honest. But I couldn’t stop being geeky. In eighth grade my school science fair project was good enough to make it to the finals of Science Horizons, a major science competition in the area, where you got some huge prizes (I think one was a trip to space camp) if you won. When I stood on the stage at the finals, looking out at the crowd and around at the people also on stage, I realized that a) I had no friends there, and b) everyone on the stage was a certifiable geek. My project (a math-based probability project) did not win, by the way.
• Junior year of high school: I get put into the Advanced Biology class and it becomes my favorite class immediately. Not art, or study hall, or even Spanish with the most popular teacher in school. Nope, my favorite class was Advanced Biology. This confirmed my mounting suspicions that I may be a geek.
• 2004: My friend Jessica (college roommate and fellow science geek) comes to visit me from Virginia. We go to Borders and spend a good two hours wandering around, picking up books we think look interesting. Then we sit in the cafe with lattes and look through the books, choosing the ones we like enough to buy. I ultimately choose to buy The Coming Plague, by Laurie Garrett. It about four inches thick and about emerging pathogens the author believes are likely to cause major epidemics worldwide in the next decade or so. I go up to the register and hand my purchase to the teenage boy working the counter. He looks at the book. He looks at me. Then he says, “Are you buying this for school?” I tell him no. He says, “Then why are you buying it?” I tell him that I want to read it, then I pay him and hurry away. I had just confirmed that I am a huge, huge geek. But instead of being upset and feeling like my world was coming apart, I relayed the story to Jessica and had a good laugh. I had no qualms with my geekiness. I didn’t even care if the cashier-boy called me a geek, or even a dork, when I left.

I am a geek. And I like it.

If you want to read Whitney’s blog about the first time she realized she was a geek, go here!

© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

Whitney is one of my oldest, closest friends. We have discussed writing together on and off for a few years now, but it has not exactly come to fruition. We’ve helped each other survive the last 2 NaNoWriMos, but that’s another story. One of these writing-together thoughts we’ve had was to come up with a plot and characters together, but then write the story separately. As a prep for that exercise, and also because one of Whitney’s other friends recently tried this out with her BFF, we have decided to blog on the same topics from time to time.

Here goes… today’s topic: First Crush.

First grade rocks. You’re six years old and life seems pretty darn good. You’ve worked out the mysteries of the toilet, you’ve graduated from blocks to Barbies, and the teachers think you might even be able to learn to READ soon. My most favorite teacher ever, Mrs. Pepin, happened to be my first grade teacher. One of my still-best friends today, Laura, was in my first grade class. My point is, first grade was awesome.
But perhaps the best part of first grade was the presence of my first crush, Wayne. I had known Wayne since 3-year-old preschool, where we used to hide under the book rack and giggle together. He had blonde hair and blue eyes and he was oh-so funny! All the girls liked Wayne, if I remember correctly, so my crush was by no means unique.
Then the day came when Mrs. Pepin told us we had to move our desks. This was always an exciting and terrifying day. Moving desks meant we would move our desk (or “clam” it) next to a new person, in a new row. There were so many unknowns: would you get put next to the person who smelled funny? Would you get put next to the door, where the principal could see you whenever she walked by? Would they let you sit near your best friend? Would you get a clammate who had that Rose Art set of crayons with more colors than the 64 pack of Crayolas you had begged your mom for in September? As my luck would have it, my desk was destined to be clammed with Wayne’s. I still remember how flustered I felt, how much I blushed whenever he looked at me, and how lucky I thought I was to have scored such an amazing desk spot.
Wayne, as it turned out, did have the Rose Art crayon pack. It was a pack, not a box, and it was made of red plastic and you could stand it up on its side as a hiding device if you wanted to. Wayne offered to share his crayons with me – all I had to do was knock on my side of the makeshift hiding device and tell him the color I wanted to borrow. Now, I was never a huge fan of Rose Art crayons – they were waxy and weird when it came down to it, and Crayolas were much better – but the box was cool, and Wayne was offering to share (that never happened). So we shared crayons.
Alas, it was not to last. A few days later we were sitting at our desks eating lunch and Wayne turned to me and squirted his Yoo-Hoo juice box in my face. Blinking through the chocolately drink in my eyes, I cried out, “Oh, Wayne, you’re so cute!” Yeah… everyone heard that, and saw me dripping in Yoo-Hoo. So for about a week it was a class joke that I liked Wayne. The teachers thought it was adorable, but I was mortified. I convinced myself I was over Wayne and from then on was “just friends” with him.
I hear he got married recently. I bet he didn’t squirt her in the face with Yoo-Hoo…

© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.