Part Three of Joan & Amy's Adventures in San Diego: The Couch Tour

My plan of sitting in long intervals on Savannah and Sydney's couch isn't turning out the way I envisioned. "Well...that was great," Joan exclaimed, leaping up, completely traumatized by her recent introduction to "Shameless" (We watched "Beauty & the Beast" afterwards to balance it out). "Let's go to the store for the ingredients to make hot dog soup and venison strudel for the girls." I frowned. This would require walking. With groceries.  Joan handed me my empty backpack and off we trekked. "This certainly isn't like Belle carrying French bread in her basket," I grumbled a half hour later, stuffing 28 ounce cans of crushed tomatoes in my bag. "You're carrying the ten pound bag of potatoes," I informed Joan. Turns out her backpack full of spuds and marshmallows was no match for my backpack full of sparkling water, double-stuffed Oreos,  canned tomatoes, coffee, cherries, and a pound of butter. A half a mile (up hill) later, I crawled back to the couch.

"Let's take in a game," Savannah said, tugging me back off the couch. "Oh...are we driving?" I asked, happily surprised. "Sort of," she answered. We ended up parking at the top of a hillside park, a ka-zillion blocks from the stadium.  You see where this is going. It was a great game. My left knee was on the Jumbo-tron. And then, as the old saying goes, what walked downhill to the stadium must eventually stagger, breathless and whiny, uphill in the dark. Oh...and fall in a parking lot hole before getting in the car. But I DID eventually make it back to the couch.

"Farmer's Market!" the girls exclaimed. "Isn't that healthy food?" I asked cautiously. Yes. Yes, it was. Again, the farmer's market was perched at the pinnacle of a majestic hill, flowing like a rushing waterfall of organic goodness. Joan immediately bought an almond loaf the size of her forearm and nibbled away while I waded systematically through the four city blocks worth of free samples. Lemon pomegranate olive oil was pretty tasty. Tamponade, a fancy word for diced olives, was pleasant. I was doing okay until I made the fatal mistake of not trusting my tried-and-true snacking instincts and was coerced into sampling a green tea smoothie. Texture. Taste. Philosophical bent. ALL bad. I gagged. Retched. And staggered away. Now gun-shy to snacking. Shockingly, the kale people lured me in. They poo-poo-ed my newly-developed aversion to green things. I learned that the addition of salt and vinegar could jazz up a turnip or, in the case of kale, slightly crispy cardboard. At the bottom of the hill was the Midway AND the iconic World War II Kissing Statue. At the TOP of the hill was our parked car. "I'm thinking of a word," I muttered to Joan, leaning into the 45 degree angle as we trudged up the hill. "How many letters?" she asked. I squinted against the glare of the skin-scorching sun. "Four," I panted as Savannah, Sydney, and their friend Kasey happily scampered ahead. "What's it start with?" Joan wondered. "I'll give you the first TWO letters," I said generously, hitting a plateau only to be faced with yet ANOTHER daunting incline. "F-U!" I screamed.

I finally made it back to my beloved couch. I had only been briefly re-introduced to my native habitat when, out of the corner of my eye (Glasses-wearers, you should get this...) in the frighteningly indistinct space running along my glasses stem and cheek, a fuzzy grapefruit-sized spider raced towards me. Charged like a bull. I did what any other reasonable person would do under these circumstances. I emitted a long moan of deep despair and then log-rolled off the couch. I was going to have to rethink my co-dependent relationship with my couch.

Part Two of Joan and Amy's Adventures in San Diego: We're going to zoo (if we can ever find the entrance)

"Get out here!" Sydney said desperately as her car crawled through the busy San Diego intersection. "Here?" I asked, confused, unlatching my seat belt, and leaping into traffic, "but where is the zoo?"  "Less than a mile that way," Sydney yelled through her open window, "Good luck! Have fun!" Joan and I watched dismally as she sped away.

"Well," Joan said, checking her watch, "the zoo doesn't open for over an hour. Might as well grab some breakfast." Which is how I ended up spending 7.69 cents for each of the thirteen mini marshmallows sprinkled over the top of my Nutella crepes. After watching a grumpy grey schnauzer beat up a confused French bulldog, we started the long trek to the zoo.

The San Diego Zoo  takes up a large percentage of Balboa Park. Should be pretty simple to find. Nope. We saw evidence of the zoo. We smelled evidence of the zoo. But to our chagrin, we could find neither hide nor hair nor hoof nor fur nor feather nor fin. "This is ridiculous," Joan exclaimed, "35 million people visited the zoo last year. They managed to find the entrance. It can't be that hard."  We did successfully manage to tour Balboa Park. We entered a magical hedge maze where, as I skipped happily along, we were swept up by a park volunteer named Mary, a retired acupuncturist who insisted on showing us the hidden gems of the area. "I had a brain aneurysm several years ago," she told us, trotting along, "and I have short-term memory loss." She showed us all the good places to order beer. "Mimi, look at the amphitheater," she encouraged. "Who's Mimi?" Joan asked. "I believe I am," I told her. "Have we seen this fountain yet?" Mary asked. "Yes, Mary." Fortunately for us, Mary easily led us to the zoo entrance.

We spent twenty minutes trying to take a successful selfie before getting in the ticket line.  As I calculated the number of animals I had to see to justify our combined $105 admission fee, I heard a voice say, "I can get in six people." "Why thank you!" I joked to the kindly stranger who was addressing the family with a ba-zillion kids behind us. As luck would have it, the family was already armed with free passes and we were again swept up by a retired woman and granted safe (free) passage into the zoo.

Apparently I have a face only a docent could love because we talked to every zoo volunteer and animal expert in the park. We learned about the orangutan who underwent the first open-heart surgery of the primate world. Or maybe just the orangutan world. I got distracted from the talk about the orangutan by the actual orangutan. We visited the geriatric female elephant compound to learn that one of their girls required all her food in smoothie form. We also witnessed an elephant pedicure. Joan got into a heated altercation with the panda docent when the expert told us that a baby panda weighs three to five ounces which is 1/900th of the weight of its mother. "Well...that must make the birthing process easier," said Joan optimistically.  "You don't know the size of a Panda's vaginal canal," the docent snapped. "You don't know the size of MY vaginal canal," Joan yelled as I wrestled her away. It was an utterly magical day.

Baby flamingos!

Part One of Joan and Amy's Adventures in San Diego

 /My friend, Joan and I are well-versed in traveling together. Fortunately, we find most of each other's quirky idiosyncrasies adorable rather than annoying. I am willing to wait, albeit impatiently, for her to laboriously turn her data on so we can accomplish minor tasks such as texting pictures and she puts up with me racing about like a toddler to exclaim at every exciting distraction within a fifty feet radius. "Joan! Look!" I shout at five second intervals.

 We were surprisingly chirpy for two women who had arrived at the airport at 4:30 am. Joan had hit the lottery, scoring a fast-pass through security while I was held up (and felt up) at every turn. "I'm going to touch your upper thigh," the agent told me. "Is that what we're calling it these days?" I asked her.

We made it successfully to our gate and sat across from a man who was NOT chirpy. Silent. Imposing. But whom , I suspect, was secretly delighted to eavesdrop on our cheerfully inane conversation. When I returned from a restroom visit, Joan discreetly showed me a cryptic message typed on her phone: I think the man across from us is famous.. I frowned, disappointed in her. "Don't be racist," I whispered. "No, not because he's black," she snapped back, "Some young men noticed him and rushed over for some complicated handshake ritual and a picture." I studied our seatmate, who now had his hat masking his face. His calves were pretty spectacular. Sadly, our brush with fame would be but a flicker as he would travel on to bigger and better things in Chicago and we would head to...New Jersey, forever wondering: Who was that masked man with the spectacular calves?

We fulfilled our hot pretzel acquisition fantasy in Newark, stowing them away for the second leg of our plane journey. Seated behind the bulkhead..."Lots of legroom," Joan sighed happily, stretching out, and immediately began searching for some gorilla glue to fix loose parts on the plane. We conducted a pre-test run on compartmentalized seat trays hidden in our arm-rests. "We're ready to take our SATs," we reported to our flight attendant. Our delight at being on time was diminished when we discovered that our pilots were missing. Our offer to help was appreciated but denied. I began to fret that my hot pretzel was growing colder with every passing minute. "You could eat it now," Joan offered but my dream was of an in-flight consumption accompanied by an ice-cold Pepsi. "I feel your pain," my flight attendant empathized as I shed copious tears upon learning this was to be a Coke-flight. Our pilots were eventually unearthed, we waited patiently in line behind 10 planes for take-off, were mistakenly informed that we were heading to San Francisco, the entire plane listing to the side as the passengers rioted and then...air-born with a cold hot pretzel.

Thus began a series of strung-out complaints served up by my seatmate. "I can't sleep on planes," Joan told me after a long bout of bobbing-dog head. She rubbed her neck. "You're just not trying," I told her. "I need a pillow," Joan explained. I checked my watch. "You can have our first round of peanut M&Ms in twenty-two minutes," I said to raise her spirits. She thrashed about in her seat. "How long is this flight again?" Our flight attendant, sensing discord in the bulkhead, rushed over with a cookie. "What the hell is this?" I said in disgust, looking at the round wafer cookie sandwiching a powdery caramel concoction. I watched Joan unhappily eat hers (She was raised NOT to waste food...I had a happily permissive childhood) before taking a teeny-tiny bite of mine, retching a bit and then deciding that we'd waited long enough for M&Ms. Joan's leg suddenly erupted into a cramp. Clutching her spasming limb,  she hissed through gritted teeth, "How much longer?" "We're fifteen minutes into our six hour flight," I said soothingly. The attendant offered us another cookie. "No!" we declined loudly as the plane encountered a bit of a blip. "Don't worry, folks," one of our lost pilots assured us, "the wifi will be up and running again in just a few minutes." "Shouldn't he be more concerned with steering the plane than the wifi?" I wondered. "When's Round Two of our peanut M&Ms," Joan asked, rubbing her leg some more.

How much is TOO much to see a cow?

"What shall we do during your visit?" my friend, Sarah debated. I opted for couch/screen time (I was becoming an enthusiastic fan of Daniel Tiger and Puppy Patrol) but was quickly vetoed. "I know!" she decided, "We'll go to the farm!" I sighed. We've already been through this. Remember "Big Trucks at the Library Day?"

Alright. If this was the price I'd have to pay for getting to hang out with Sarah and her kids, Will and Nora, I would keep my comments (mostly) to myself.

So I hopped in my truck and left my county filled with more cows than people, passing hordes of horses and gaggles of goats along the way. I arrived at Sarah's and we packed up the kids and a picnic before heading to "the farm." "The quotation marks demonstrate that you didn't even TRY to go into this adventure with an open mind," Sarah accused. I admit that I did roll my eyes as we passed the sign welcoming us to "The Farm." I didn't even argue about Sarah paying my admittance fee to enter the paddock of assorted sheep and goats. There was NO WAY I was going to pay to pet a goat when I could walk fifty feet down my road to pet one for free.

It was next that I had to again come to grips with Sarah's fatal flaw. It has been a bone of contention throughout our entire friendship. Other than her relentless insistence of trying to get me to eat healthy, Sarah is practically perfect in every way except this: She isn't all that fond of animals. Shocking, I know. Believe me, I've had YEARS of learning to cope with being friends with a non-animal lover. Who doesn't melt at the sight of a baby duck? Sarah. Whose fingers don't itch to pet a puppy? Sarah.

To her credit, she is trying to NOT pass this terrible trait on to her children but I'm not sure how successful she's been so far. I happily dove into the hay mow to hug a baby goat. While I was showering kisses on a sheep, Will and Nora were watching with alarm. Sarah, on the other hand, was questioning the bulging sides of a nanny goat. Spying the conspicuous udders, I told her it was pregnant. "No," she insisted, "It looked exactly like that last time." I was dubious about her ability to differentiate livestock from visit to visit but stayed (mostly) quiet as she sought answers to her question.

"Excuse me, farm worker," she called as I cringed, "Why does this goat look like that?"

"It's fat," the woman told her bluntly.

"Is it nursing?" I asked.

"Yes."

"So it was recently pregnant," I said indignantly, "And just hasn't dropped the baby weight yet." Shame on us for criticizing her. It's not like she doesn't have enough to be worried about without a bunch of strangers judging her appearance.

After I had pet all of the animals in the...let's just call it what it is...petting zoo, we wandered into a barn where a bunny was being housed in a horse stall. It looked absolutely ridiculous but I have to say the little guy appeared pretty happy with his roomy digs.

"What's in that barn over there?" I asked Will.

"Cows," he told me sadly, "but we can't go in there."

"Why not?"

Looking at his mom, he whispered, "It costs more."

"It costs MORE to see the cows?" I asked in amazement. What world was I in right now? "Sarah, you DO remember where I live, right?"

We ate our picnic (Sarah smathering hand sanitizer all over the children even though they hadn't touched ANYTHING) before heading back to the house. Finally...Puppy Patrol. The type of animal Sarah's family likes best: Animated with a moral lesson. My lesson? Why "buy" the privilege of seeing the cow in the city when you can see it for free at home?

We all put our pants on one leg at a time...well, when we get around to it

We must all be accountable for our choices. Granted...it takes me a while to establish a healthy routine when summer arrives. For a few days (weeks...months...), I tend to sleep in, stagger out to the living room, stare blurrily at the screen for a while, fall into a hypnotic trance (also known as First Nap), to then read drivel.

(Fast forward to this morning when, responding to my annoyance that I didn't know my assigned reading because I like to print it out in a larger-to-read font, Brad asked why I just didn't being my Kindle. "I'm not bringing the devil's device to church!" I told him indignantly.)

So anyhoo...before ALL of this, comes The Choice:  To put on pants or to not put on pants? Very Shakespearean.

The very idea of Summer Break is to be freed from all restrictions. Including an elastic waistband. The morning in question, I made an unfortunate choice. From the dining room, at the unreasonable hour of before 9 am, came a gentle knock and a soft, "Hello?" through the screen door. The dogs tore through the house, barking their enthusiastic welcome. Thank goodness they lack opposable thumbs to maneuver the door latch or I would have been doomed. Meanwhile, in the living room, I was caught...red-handed...er...no pants-ed. I held my breath (my patented strategy for not getting discovered when playing hide-and-seek) and debated my options. I do not have enough friends to risk sacrificing the unknown one at the door who was happily conversing with my dogs who, in their canine language, were, at this moment, attempting to rat me out. Could my blanket double as a passable sarong? What if I belly-crawled through the kitchen to get to my pants-filled closet? Or maybe a series of swift somersaults? Would she notice from her clear vantage-point? Finally, I decided to dash downstairs to wrestle a dirty pair of pants from the laundry. By the time I re-emerged from the dungeon (I fly up the stairs from a lifelong fear of a skeletal hand grabbing me from beneath the stairwell), my friend was gone. Perhaps forever.

I was left with the consequences of my actions. Because of my refusal to put on pants, I may have missed out on a life-changing visit from Publisher's Clearing House. It could have been one of those home make-over shows. Or it could have been a beloved friend looking to share a coffee and some conversation. For want of some pants, a personal encounter was lost.

The moral of this story is pretty obvious. For pete's sake:  Put on some pants!

De-commissioned toe

I bumped my toe. Whacked it, really. I know that this doesn't seem to be important enough to warrant its own blog post but it REALLY hurt. Like stifle-the-naughtiest-of-naughty-words hurt. And then, when the pain doesn't diminish, decide, "Why bother repressing your feelings?" Swear away!

Where, on the shower unit, is the warning label instructing you to hoist your knees up like a drum majorette when exiting the tub? They don't trust me to know the all-important lather-rinse-repeat pattern or to not ingest hand sanitizer or, heaven forbid, be cautious of my hot coffee.

The other day, in the bathroom, while doing some recreational reading--e'hem--I made note of the revolutionary claim declared by my package of disinfecting wipes that this lemon-lime blossom scented product kills the germs associated with Influenza A, Salmonella, E-coli, Strep, and Herpes. And the generic brand says it  KILLS HIV!!! Let's stop talking about my toe for a minute. Do you realize the implications of these advertised assertions? Now, of course, these specially-treated wipes are hazardous to humans and domesticated animals (Apparently no one care about livestock) and can cause eye irritation so we have to tread carefully here but DO YOU UNDERSTAND?!? The scientists have been doing it all wrong! Forget the research and clinical trials based on complex synthetic formulas and whatever you're whipping up in those little petri dishes of your's. All you need to do is figure out a way to safely inject bleach into our bloodstream. Problem solved. You're welcome, World. Back to my toe.

Brad was marginally sympathetic when I told him that I had experienced blunt-force hema-TOE-ma. Minor injuries tend to send me into a hysterical tail-spin (See the Great Kickball Catastrophe of ought-13). As my toe was soon swollen and discolored, I could stem some of the dramatics because, as the saying goes, the toe speaks for itself. Describing the extent of my injury, however, had me flummoxed as it wasn't one of the better known toes. Not the Big Toe. Not the Pinkie Toe. Not even the Ring Finger Toe. No...this was...the naughty toe. Which does not actually lend itself to the dignity the toe deserves.

Having long-borrowed from Seinfeld, the Mosimans are quite comfortable with the premise of assigning military ranking to the toes.

George: "You know how the big toe is the captain of the toes, but sometimes the toe next to the big toe gets so big that there's a power struggle and the second toe assumes control of the foot?"

Jerry: "The coup de toe!"

I immediately decided that the naughty toe should be a corporal because I felt that it lent a ring of authentic to my injury. I had suffered a blunt force hematoma to the right corporal toe. See?

Well...take it to the military men in my life to stage their own little uprising.

"That toe," my dad said pointing, "Should be a lieutenant."

Brad nodded, agreeing with him while mouthing at me, "I told you so." I sighed. We'd fought over this very subject for the entire drive to my parents'.

"No...Dad...," I wiggled my working piggies for him. "Private Toe...PFC (Private First Class) Toe, Corporal Toe, Captain."

My mom frowned. "What's the Big Toe then?"

"He's the BIG Toe...like a Five-Star General." For fun, he saluted my mom.

"This is just ridiculous," my dad snapped. "It would be a lieutenant."

"You can't re-rank my feet," I argued. Brad remained silent, smirking as I could sense his snarky little joke about my rank feet emanating from his mind.

None of this would have happened if I had fulfilled my life goal of becoming a Rockette. Meanwhile, Brad's busy pricing those walk-in tubs.

"P" is for peaches (No...the OTHER "P")

I have long believed that I may live forever as I am packed full of chemically-enhanced preservatives. If you can't pronounce it, I've happily ingested it. I'm also not a big source-to-table girl unless that source happens to be a nationwide grocery store chain with a catchy jingle or, in emergencies, your nearest gas-mart.

I once, in a moment of complete insanity, traded my strawberry-picking prowess for a quarter-side of beef. As I spent the greater part of my time laying on my back, picking shapes out of clouds rather than fruit from the field, I thought that I had brokered the better deal.

"Amy!" shouted the overseer, "C'mere a minute!" I sighed as my plant-picking partner had just started his second verse of "Strawberry Fields Forever" and I was working up the courage to join him. Nevertheless, the overseer needed me and I certainly didn't want to get fired. We walked to the edge of a vast valley, carpeted with long, lush grass. A gentle brook bubbled by. Cows moved leisurely along in this pastoral paradise. I longed for an easel. My employer grandly swept an arm across this serene scene and said, "Just think, one of these will soon be your's. Which one would you choose?"  A quarter side of beef would go uneaten in my freezer that winter and every strawberry I plucked pronounced the death sentence of one of those peacefully-plodding cows. I prefer my meat stacked, shrink-wrapped, and glowing beneath the glare of bad fluorescent lighting, thank you very much.

The notion of fresh fish also departs when I'm around. My husband and his brother are now resigned to the fact that we catch, fillet, package, freeze overnight, and then maybe...just maybe...we can eat it the next day. As long as we don't talk about it.

So you can probably guess that when it comes to organic food, I'm ignorantly ambivalent at best. But a few days ago, I realized that perhaps a person's priorities must play a factor with food selection.

Each Sunday, Brad and I pass a maddening sign. A six-foot long advertisement proclaiming "PEACHES!" Winter. Summer. Spring. And Fall. But the peaches aren't there all the time. Yet the  sign remains. Taunting us. Haunting us. But like a broken clock that is correct two times each day, the sign is finally accurate. A herald of Sweet Summer. Our broker's delicious deliveries follow the coast up. Over several weeks, we will encounter peaches from Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia with a final flourish from the great state of New York. Never has geography been so tasty.

Last week, as I picked my peaches, I spotted a gaze* of raccoon kits shyly peeking out from the nearby ditch culvert. I called Brad over to see but he's still suffering from PTRS (post-traumatic raccoon syndrome) so he refused to gaze at the gaze with me. I enthusiastically called over my road-side peach producer but, he too, was not interested. He should have been. He should have been very, very interested. Because what none of us could have known then, was that those little bandits were planning a caper of such calculating intrigue that the heist of the Hope Diamond would pale in comparison.

I arrived at my usual time to find my peach-selling pal in a state of aggrieved agitation. He'd recently been victimized by those varmints who had procured his peaches Mission-Impossible-style, lowering themselves through a crack in the ceiling. "I estimate they damaged about $200 worth of my inventory," he told me. "That's the pits," I said sympathetically, looking over the glittering fruit as I strove to make my selection. "Don't worry," he assured me as I bagged up my choice, "I washed off the raccoon pee." Time froze. My hand, grasping the bag, wavered. I weighed my options. Pee-covered peaches or no peaches? I shrugged. "Nothing says organic like raccoon pee," I told him, handing over the money. Nope. I didn't even ask for a discount. I'm surprised he didn't actually charge me more. Maybe he should update his sign.

*Who says my blogs don't teach you anything? A group of raccoons is called a nursery or a gaze. You're welcome.