Did everyone have a good Thanksgiving? I’m up here in the frozen north, burning off calories by shivering non-stop. But despite the best laid table I’ve sat at since embarking on my diet, I was a good girl: just turkey, green beans and celery. No martinis (or other booze) even!

Like I said before, the yummy holiday treats will be there next year and I’m certain they’ll taste better when I’m thin.

Ten and a half pounds gone. Mumble-mumble more to go.

An text message from the Venomous Hubby:
   R U drinking 2nite? Do I need 2 get booze?

A response from his Venomous wife:
   Will we still be married?

Last week, I had the misfortune of encountering a hostile fat woman. I know, I know — for me to call someone fat is like the pot calling the kettle “cookware of color”. But there’s fat and there’s oh-my-God-get-out-of-her-way fat. This woman was big enough to send skinny people in search of solid objects to duck behind as she thundered past.

Some fat people wear their weight like mink coats: they bare it without reservation, dressing it up in clothes designed for much smaller people, tanning it in the summer and oiling it in the cold months. This woman wielded her fat like a weapon, moving people aside with her ass, planting her hands on her ample hips as she stood spread-footed with her belly thrust forward, like she was defying you to notice her size.

There is a stereotype about fat people being jolly. Like if you dressed us up in red and gave us a glass of egg nog we’d all turn into St. Nick. But as someone who’s fat I assure you I’m not happy about it, I’m just lazy. This woman also was not happy, and she seemed determined to make sure we all knew it.

One of the good things about being fat is that you tend not to wrinkle. (The other being ginormous cleavage which, if you’re a male, isn’t an advantage I suppose.) This woman? She’d clearly spent a lifetime scowling at the world, so deep were the crevices alongside her nose, the furrowed canyons that traveled her forehead.

With the overweight it’s always a chicken-and-egg question about which came first: the fat or the misery hiding behind it? Of course, there are some who insist their weight has nothing to do with what they eat or what psychic need they’re trying to feed; they were just born that way. After a few hours in this woman’s presence, I have no doubt she came out of the womb pissed off at the world. If it’s possible to gain weight by sucking the joy out of others, then that’s how she did it.

She had an uncanny ability to chew up even the most innocuous of pleasantries and spit out aspersions. The pattern became almost comically predictable: someone would make a comment on the beautiful fall weather we’re having, for instance, and the woman would bark that it’s proof we’re all going to die in a blizzard this winter.

One lady, tossing out a compliment the way lion tamers toss bloody meat to a snarling cat, admired the fat woman’s admittedly awesome shoes. She responded by noting that yes, she could see her feet, if that’s what everyone was wondering. Which we were not. What we were wondering was how much liquor it would take to turn her into a nice person, and whether we could afford the attempt.

Not that this was an open discussion, mind you; it was one silently held through a series of glances from the woman’s glass to the bar then back to our own drinks. In the end, we all tacitly agreed it would be easier to get ourselves blotto trying to cheer up that woman.

Around the fourth round of cocktails — or maybe it was the fifth, hard to say — a silence descended on our group the way it does sometimes among relative strangers. One minute everyone had been chattering, our voices rising to that shrill pitch drunk women get when we’re trying to be more interesting, more fascinating than those around us. The next we emitted a collective sigh followed by a chorus of “anyway”s (the sign we each knew we’d been talking too loud and too long). Then silence, while we all waited for someone else — anyone else — to take up the conversational slack.

And that’s when it happened: the crinkle.

Not a terribly loud crinkle, mind you, but a whiffling rustle made louder for coming amid that awkward conversational pause. A plastic, manufactured crinkle easily recognized by every mother in our group as the sound of a squished diaper. For those of us who doubted our ears, the bitter ammonia cloud wafting over us confirmed what our brains already knew.

Further confirmation came in the form of the fat woman’s swearing a stream of such original profanity that for a moment I felt more admiration than disgust. Then she struggled to her feet and revealed the wetness that had spread over her pants and chair and, I suspect, was working its way in rivulets of urine down the cellulite gullies of her thighs.

I’ve never seen a woman of her size move as fast as she did in the direction of the bathroom. This time the skinny women among us didn’t bother looking for things to duck behind, they just scattered to leave her a wide berth and, no doubt, to find dry ground.

Not surprisingly, we didn’t see the woman again that night. I assume she went home to clean up and change clothes, but I can’t say I care. After her departure the rest of us finally had a chance to enjoy our evening without her pissing all over our fun, both figuratively and literally.

Let me just assure you, there is indeed a moral here: it is one thing to have physical issues that are the equivalent of a disability and another to be an intolerable boor. You have a right to be respected and treated well regardless of the former, but the latter makes you fair game for laughs… especially when your adult diaper says what those around you had been thinking all night: piss off, bitch.

Sorry about the bad blood. It was martini-inspired. In the light of day, I wish I’d kept my mouth shut.

- VK

Despite appearances, I am alive — I simply feel like death warmed over. (Okay, I look like it, too.) But having spent most of the past five days in bed with what the doctor is guessing was swine flu, I’m fine with looking like crap.

It started Wednesday night with aches and pains that weren’t justified by my day’s activities, which had consisted of traveling between the laptop and coffee machine in my office, and the occasional detour to the bathroom.

Thursday morning it took me three minutes to turn off my alarm clock, not because I was sleeping so soundly (I wasn’t), but because I couldn’t stop coughing long enough to find the damned thing. Although the Big-Eyed Boy and the Venomous Hubby have immune systems stronger than kryptonite, I’m constantly picking up some bug or another they’ve brought home. So, I figured I was just coming down with a cold.

It couldn’t be swine flu, right, because then I’d be dying. Isn’t that what all the hype was about? The warnings of a lethal pandemic? The rallying cry for the immediate and expensive production of a vaccine that all school age children are going to be jabbed with for their own protection? The reason everyone’s walking around with snot- and phlegm-encrusted sleeves rather than using their hands the way God intended?

Then the fever struck, followed by chills, then the fever again — lather, rinse, repeat until I’m sprawled out in bed awash in the stench of my own juices. (And, if you’ve had this stuff, you know that I mean both stench and juices.)

Since I have no memory whatsoever of Friday, you cannot convince me there actually was one.

Saturday, I started making deals with God. Please, just let me feel better. I’ll be a nun. I’ll be a priest. Hell, I’ll turn Baptist if that’s what it takes. Just. Make. It. Stop. The Venomous Hubby wisely decided to take the Big-Eyed Boy and spend the night at our friend Tony’s, rather than risk coming down with it.

At some point in there, I decided to call my doctor. Her response? “Sounds like Swine Flu.” But since it had been over two days since I started showing the first symptoms, Tamiflu or whatever would be of no help. “Drink plenty of liquids, stay in bed, and try not to give it to anyone else.” Nice. I’m glad to know she got her money’s worth out of that medical degree.

I thought I felt better Sunday morning, at least in comparison to how I’d felt for the past three days. I got out of bed, took a quick shower and made myself some soup in the kitchen. Bad idea. Bad, bad, bad idea. So let me just publicly thank the Venomous Hubby for cleaning up what probably looked and smelled like the aftermath of a bad frat party. (We’re even for those skidmarks now, at least for a while, hon.)

Back to bed I went, and I stayed there again until yesterday afternoon when there was just no choice but to force myself to shower, dress in something other than pajamas, and go get my kid from school. Waiting in my van for the kids to get out, I’d cut my engine and unrolled my windows in the hope the 80F temps would stop my teeth-rattling chills. No such luck, and on top of it I was coughing and sneezing almost non-stop. That might be why all of the other mommies ahead of me in line glared at me in their rear view mirrors and rolled their engines up. Yes, I realize now that I could’ve been spreading the pig flu with every cough and sneeze. No, my brain wasn’t wrapping itself around that concept at the time. So, ladies, I’m sorry.

The good news is that my fever finally broke around midnight last night. The bad news is that it was immediately replaced by the hot flashes that have been plaguing me for months now. But that’s fine. I don’t mind them nearly so much anymore, especially now that my body’s stopped trying to liquefy itself through every opening imaginable. I’ve even managed to take a shower, put on makeup and brush my teeth. Oh, frabjulous day!

And now, just to get my revenge, I’m going to go fix me some bacon. Here, Piggy, Piggy.

Researching on the internet is far too easy — and too easily distracting. I could lose entire days simply clicking through links from one page to the next, looking up unfamiliar words only to have their definitions lead me to yet another alley down which my mind races. Come to think of it, I have lost entire days.

Right now, I’m researching Applachian Kentucky. It’s for a book that I’ve been trying to write over the past six months while my blogs have been on hiatus. No, the subject isn’t Appalachia. It’s a fictional novel, but one of the characters hails from there and I want to know more about how his background would influence his thinking, his character.

Above all, I want to avoid stereotyping the character (and, by extension, those who live where he comes from). Perhaps I’m going too far in my efforts, perhaps I don’t really need to be reading all of this information, but my own family’s past — we come from the Hill Country in Texas — makes me particularly sensitive to such stereotypes.

I was still tiny when we moved from Texas to California, so most of the memories I have of living there are actually inherited. I do recall, however, what it was like to be treated as a “hillbilly”, the insulting description people attached to us after hearing our heavy Southern drawls, how we’d refer to others as “y’all“. How we’d express our curiosity about someone’s actions by asking “how come you to”. How we kids would answer “Yessir” or “Yes ma’am” to teachers and other adults, refusing our parents’ friends invitations to call them by their first names and, finally giving in so far as to call them “Miss Diane” or “Mister Jerry“.

One time I invited a friend over to spend the night. This was a very big event for me since my mother, like me these days, didn’t particularly like having other, strange children (and usually ill-mannered) children in her house. I’d fretted about my friend’s arrival all week long, going so far as to clean my room not once but twice, something I’m certain increased my mother’s tolerance of the whole thing. Having heard stories about my mother and her two sisters sharing one bed throughout most of their childhood, I set us up two sleeping bags on the floor so as not to risk being called backwards. I even made us a stash of snacks in the cardboard box between our sleeping bags on top of which I placed a flashlight so we could tell ghost stories without getting too spooked in the dark.

When the big day arrived, my friend’s parents dropped her off just in time for supper. That’s what we called the last meal of the day in our house, even though outside of our family us kids knew to refer to it as “dinner” like all of our peers did. Since my mother was never one to enjoy cooking much — and since family suppers often devolved into us kids eating in silence while Mom and Dad bickered between themselves — it was a big deal that she’d spent the afternoon fixing a nice meal and had instructed my brothers and sister to be on their best behavior.

You know, these days there’s a whole style of cooking known as “California Cuisine”. It’s not particularly new, in my book. It’s simply a style of food born out of the abundance of produce that area’s year-round temperate weather makes possible, along with a heavy dose of health food ingredients that were just gaining hold in those post-Hippy days: brown rice, bulgur, whole wheat, honey in place of sugar. That sort of thing.

Hailing from Texas, eating healthy for us meant having three different kinds of vegetables with our meals — all of them cooked in bacon grease. It meant putting oleo on our cornbread, and eating plenty of rice. Granted, it was Minute Rice and we topped it with butter and sugar, but it was rice instead of mashed potatoes, so that had to be more healthy, right?

My friend sat down with us at the table and started reaching for the nearest side dish. An awkward silence ensued until my dad cleared his throat, put his hands together in front of him, and bowed his head. “You got to wait until the blessing is over,” I whispered to my friend. Her eyes just about fell out of her head. Her parents were the kind of people who considered themselves too educated for religion. But, to her credit, she squeezed her eyes shut and tucked her chin to her chest and waited along with the rest of us while my dad rambled through a prayer just long enough to ensure the food was lukewarm by the time we ate.

Finally, it was time to help ourselves. I reached first for the fried okra, a dish that to this day is my very favorite thing my mom ever made. Now, as I mentioned, my mom wasn’t all that much into cooking, and she had her specific way of doing things despite how everyone else did them. Frying okra was one of them. Instead of the cornmeal-heavy batter favored by most Southern cooks she used mostly flour, adding just a scant trace of cornmeal, then fried the hell out of it. She liked food — all food — well done, as in cooked to the point where it no longer resembled whatever it was supposed to be. Her fried okra, which looked like little brown rocks, was no exception. But I loved it.

I loved the big mounds of fluffy rice she’d piled on my plate next to the meatloaf which, in her case, consisted solely of meat shaped into a loaf and cooked until it was as brown as shoe leather, then topped with tomato paste. Yes, it looked as horrible as it sounds, and no, I don’t make meatloaf that way now that I’m an adult. But back then it was so rare for my mom to make such a labor-intensive meal that we were all thrilled to eat it. To this day, my oldest brother prefers her meatloaf over any other, much to his wife’s annoyance.

Anyway. I was just about ready to dig into my plate when I looked to my friend expecting to see her as gleeful as I was over this huge spread of our family favorites. Instead what I saw was an expression halfway between confusion and horror. “Where’s the salad?” she asked me. “Or the fruit?” None of us in my family were big salad eaters, perhaps because my mother’s idea of salad was some torn iceberg lettuce topped with too much spicy Thousand Island dressing. Fruit? That was what came in those little tin cups in our lunch that we always threw away when no one was looking.

My friend finally started nibbling on a piece of meatloaf in quiet resignation. She even tried a bite of okra, though I saw her spit it into her napkin then push the rest to the side on her plate. Mostly, she ate rice and, despite my efforts to convince her otherwise, she would not try it with oleo and sugar. Her loss.

I’d thought that at least she’d found something to eat, and perhaps the crisis had been avoided. Then my oldest brother spooned himself the last of the green beans out of the bowl and pointedly set it in the middle of the table. All of us kids knew what that signal meant: it was time to count to five then see who was the first to grab the bowl, with the victor getting to claim it.

See, we liked the juice left over after my mother had simmered the green beans in their juices with a little bacon fat, salt and pepper. Pot liquor it’s called, though we pronounced it more like “pot likker” and still all spell it that way. It was, in our family, the prize for being the first one to finish their vegetables, and more than once our struggle to be the one to grab the bowl had resulted in serious injury. (My next-oldest brother used to have a scar on his hand from when someone had stabbed it with a fork in the struggle. I am not claiming responsibility for that.)

Not surprisingly, despite having an otherwise fun time spending the night at my house, my friend spread the stories about our strange family foods and ways at school that Monday. The whole “hillbilly” thing started all over again as my peers taunted me about every little thing, from my Wrangler jeans (which my mother bought because their reinforced knees could take my tomboy ways) to my continued habit of saying “Yes, ma’am” to our teacher (a habit ingrained by so many spankings there was no way I was ever going to lose it).

It took me years of effort and concentration to shed the traces of my Southern accent, to add R’s into words like “first” and “sugar”. To this day, though, I’ll slip into that same cadence whenever I’m around someone from the South, or even when I’m among Northerners but have had one too many cocktails. I never did lose the habit of saying my Yes Ma’ams and Yessirs, and I’ve passed onto my son the rule about not addressing adults by their first names no matter how much they insist. Saying “y’all” started creeping back into my vocabulary when we moved back to Kansas after our years in Hawaii, but it’s a commonplace word around here, just as eating fried okra (heavy on the cornmeal) isn’t unheard of.

There are times when, as an adult, I wish I could go back and grab my younger self by the shoulders and just shake her. “Someday you’re going to be proud of all this,” I’d tell that little girl. “Pay attention and learn your family stories while you can,” I’d say. “They’re your inheritance.” But I was young and determined to fit in, to shed myself of the pain of being thought of as a hillbilly. To be a Californian.

Maybe that’s why this research has grown so distracting for me. I read web sites maintained by people proud of their heritage, glad to hand down stories to their children and children’s children, and I think what a wonderful resource the internet is for making that possible. And I think, too, how great it is that our interconnectivity has made the world a much smaller place, one where there’s no shame in being proud of the unique things from your heritage. One where I can write about racing my son at the supper table to be the first to grab the pot likker, and other folks actually get what I mean.

I know I’ve got to stop clicking and researching, and get down to the business of writing. I set an alarm today to make myself do just that. Only problem is, now I’ve gone and made myself hungry. I’ve got a cornbread to make, and maybe some green beans to start simmering down. Then I’ll get onto writing. Really.

Just. One. More. Click.

Over my doorbell there is what I thought was a rather straightforward, simple sign that says:

No soliciting.
No drop-ins.
No means NO.

Despite this, I regularly get little dipshits ringing my doorbell in search of money for their Scout Troop, their sports team, their band trip to Disney World. (That one was my daughter, so I actually did make an exception.)

Today’s doorbell ringer took the cake. Red pigtails. Freckled face. Perky little birdlike voice that sounded like a screech to my hungover ears. She was about my height and, for the record, I am short. Seriously, short. Unless, of course, you happen to meet the legal definition of a dwarf, in which case I tower over you by almost 2 1/2 inches. And one of the problems of being a short adult is that kids from 4th grade on up are almost all as tall as, if not taller, than I am.

They also figure that, because we see eye-to-eye, we see eye-to-eye. So, rather than getting addressed as Mrs. or even Ma’am, I get addressed by preteens like I’m one of their peers, with none of the formality they usually feign for taller, more imposing adults. I hate that.

I particularly hate it when said preteen is standing on my front porch, looking for all the world like Pippi Longstockings, and ignoring the damn sign to ring my doorbell on a Saturday morning because her Spanish class is going to Mexico but not all of them can afford it and so, would I please, please, pleeeaaaaase contribute to their fundraiser.

I blinked. I glanced pointedly at the sign above my doorbell. I looked at her and blinked again.

“Do you KNOW what ‘No soliciting’ means?” I asked her?

“Sure, it means I can’t sell you anything,” she chirped. Damn if the girl didn’t get a sly look on her face, too. “But I’m not selling” — and here she used air quotes — “anything. I’m just asking for money.”

“You’re a dipshit,” I said.

Her little face grew solemn. She studied her toes. She was caught, and she damn well knew it. “So, does this mean you won’t contribute?” At this point her voice had lost that bright, ear-hurting pitch so favored by young girls.

“Tell you what,” I said. “You come on in and clean my living room, my kitchen and my bathroom and I’ll give you $50 for your time. Then you can use that for your trip if you want, or for an iPod or whatever. Sound good?”

“You want me to WORK for a donation?” From the look on her face you’d think I’d just ripped a kitten’s head off and bathed myself in its blood. “Seeeeeeeeriously???”

“Well, I fucking had to work for it,” I said, “and if you paid attention in school you’d know that begging a stranger to give you money to pay for something you want is pretty much THE definition of soliciting!”

So there’s my Saturday morning so far: I made a little girl cry. How’s your day going?

For years, grocery shopping has been one of the Venomous Hubby’s chores. The reason is simple: the military commissary has the best prices in town and he’s already on post for his job, whereas it’s a 15-minute drive and a major pain in the ass for me to get on post.

He doesn’t have a lot of other chores: mow the lawn, take out the trash, and put the dinner dishes in the dishwasher (not a hard thing, since I make a point to clean up while I’m cooking). He is also the Head Bug Squasher but, for reasons unknown to me, bugs usually only appear during his work hours so I wind up doing most of the squashing.

Anyway.

Although VH has never once complained about doing the grocery shopping, it’s nevertheless served as a major source of bickering in our household. First, it was because he had problems finding things in the store using my old method of listing needed items under headings like Produce, Canned Goods, Boxed Goods, Meats, Dairy.

That, you see, would require READING the list not just once but twice: before he entered the store, and as he was going. And VH would rather gouge his eyes out than read anything not work-related. Seriously. This is, after all, a man who — and, cross my heart, this is true — went for over 2 years with his own first name misspelled on his driver’s license because he hadn’t read what the License Bureau lady had typed into the computer. Nor had he read his license. And, in fact, he probably would NEVER have known about the spelling error if I hadn’t noticed it one day when I was sneaking money out of his wallet. But that’s another story altogether.)

So. I can’t tell you how many times he’d come home swearing up and down to me that he didn’t forget to get chicken, the store was simply out of it. All of it. Every form of chicken whatsoever. Which really meant that he hadn’t seen that chicken was on the list.

After having to change my dinner menu at the last minute countless times, I finally made the grocery list shopping as simple as possible for him by breaking the sections down aisle-by-aisle. This was made possible because VH — who complains that grocery shopping takes too long — took the time to hunt down the store manager and ask for a map to the store.

Fine. I started listing things aisle-by-aisle and duly noting whether there’s a coupon (attached to the list in an envelope) and, if so, what brand, size and quantities we need. I’ve even gone so far as to add thumbnail pictures of new items because — as I believe I mentioned earlier — I know damn well VH will NOT read labels.

Yet, even that wasn’t good enough because, you see, sometimes he’d get to the condiments aisle and I’ve had written:

• Ketchup (Organic, Heinz, 6 oz, coupon)
• White distilled vinegar (1 gal.)
• Dill pickles
• Green olives.

(Those olives are for the martinis which all of this additional stupid-proofing work leads me to drink.)

But VH didn’t like that list, either, because the items on each aisle weren’t listed in order, which meant that he’d walk past the dill pickles while going for the vinegar and then had to backtrack. THE HORROR.

Yesterday when VH came home from the grocery store he plopped down a stack of papers on the kitchen counter, then shuffled off to change clothes while I put everything away. (I’m not complaining about that; as the only person in the house who cooks I’m really picky about where things go on the shelves to the point where I’ve labeled them. And, no, I’m not interested in getting therapy, thanks.)

So, finally, I got everything put away and reached for this stack of papers thinking that it must be the mail, or some flier about an office party or something. But no, it was the last six grocery lists I’d sent him to the store with and HE’D TAKEN TIME TO MAKE NOTES ABOUT THE ORDER OF EVERYTHING ON THE STORE SHELVES.

That’s right: the man who complains that grocery shopping takes too long had stood there, for six weeks in a row, drawing little arrows and numbering items on my grocery lists to let me know that dill pickles come before the white vinegar, and toilet paper is after the kitchen trash bags but before the cat litter.

As I stood there looking at those little corrections, my eyes started bugging out of my head while my pulse started playing hip hop in my left temple, and right about then VH sauntered into the kitchen with a cat-who-ate-the-canary grin on his face.

“Cool, huh?” he asked. “Now you can save me some time by making the lists in the right order so I don’t have to backtrack.”

I swear to God, Internet, I didn’t kill him.

But if VH noticed that those six weeks of grocery lists disappeared, or if he noticed a little extra fiber in his massive plate of spaghetti with meatballs (while I sat there grinning over my plate of steamed veggies) and he finds himself seriously constipated today, what can I say?