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  • The Best Laid Plans Of Mice And E Kay…

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    bowl of raisin bran If you are looking for a stock to add to your portfolio, I would like to suggest that you look into any company that produces Raisin Bran.

    Seriously.

    It can be Kellogg’s, Post, General-Mills, Store Brand, or even Happy Fred’s Generic Cereal Company. The real deal here is that it doesn’t matter one iota who it is, just as long as they produce, package, and sell Raisin Bran, and are publicly traded on the exchange, you probably want to grab yourself a few shares.

    Why?

    Well, I’ll tell you. Because E K likes Raisin Bran. In point of fact, not only does The Evil Redhead like – nay, love – the shriveled-up-grape and flaky goodness of said cereal, I am fairly certain she is addicted to it… If not addicted, then damn close, because she goes through entire barge loads of the stuff, and on top of that, it is no less than number 2 on the hit parade for her daily routine.

    THE E K DAILY MEANNESS AND EVILNESS SCHEDULE

    1. Get out of bed and scare the hell out of Satan… Or, scare Satan right out of hell, whichever works. Then stand over him and giggle while he cowers in the corner.
    2. Eat Raisin Bran while watching the morning news.
    3. Feed and medicate cats.
    4. Get ready for work.
    5. Beat husband. Beat husband again if the mood strikes. Then stand over him and giggle while he cowers in the corner next to Satan.
    6. Go to work and generally be evil. If necessary, and again if the mood strikes, be specifically evil as well as generally evil.
    7. Come home and beat husband. Find where Satan is hiding and beat him too. Stand over both husband and Satan and giggle while they cower in the corner.
    8. Lock husband and Satan in basement then go to bed.
    9. Sleep with evil grin on face.
    10. Wake up, start at item 1 and repeat ad infinitum.

    See what I mean? I’m pretty sure number 2 would actually be number 1 if it weren’t for the fact that she takes such joy in scaring Satan senseless. I mean, she is after all, Evil Kat. But, if it weren’t for the amusement she gets from torturing the prince of darkness on a daily basis, I’m sure she’d just have me bring the Raisin Bran to her in bed so she could skip that annoying first step altogether. In fact, come to think of it, on Katsmas when she lets Satan slide for the day as a Katsmas present, she does in fact have me bring her Raisin Bran to her in bed, so there you go.

    Oh, and BTW, she’s always quick remind Satan that he can be the prince of darkness all he wants, but she’s the Queen, so “neener neener”… Then Satan starts crying. Blubbering actually. It’s pretty sad to watch.

    But, anyway, back to this whole Raisin Bran thing. One time when we ate the complimentary breakfast at a hotel where we stayed, I witnessed E K stab a desk clerk to death with a spork because all they had were Corn Flakes and generic Cheerios. You just don’t mess with her two scoops, as it were.

    So, I’m sure you can see that E Kay’s schedule of events is pretty well set. And, if something causes her to deviate from that course, things tend to go awry. Take just the other morning for instance…

    sleepwalk It started out just like any other day. Beelzebub was at the back of E Kay’s closet trying to hide under one of her shoe racks while crying for his mommy. The Evil One had enjoyed her morning giggle, and then traipsed into the kitchen so she could move along to number 2 on the list.

    Now, I have to point out that even though she’s had her morning giggle, E K can be a bit on the glassy-eyed side for the first hour or so after her feet hit the floor. Hence the strict routine.

    Well, for whatever reason, be it that she was wracking her brain to come up with a new husband torture, or maybe even that she was simply drunk with mirth from the horribleness she had already perpetrated upon the whimpering devil upstairs, E K deviated from her routine.

    Yes. The Queen Bitch Of The Whole F*cking Universe made a left at Albuquerque.

    She put number 2 on hold and moved number 3 up a half step on the ladder – meaning she elected to feed the cats first. Just so there’s no misunderstanding I want everyone to know I would have gently nudged her back onto the schedule had I been aware this was happening. Unfortunately, I was preoccupied with putting a spit shine on the shoes E K wanted to wear that day lest I be in even more trouble than normal.

    I honestly had no clue whatsoever that anything was wrong until I heard a loud, exasperated groan followed by E Kay’s voice exclaiming, “DAMMIT!”

    (As an aside, I think she might have picked that whole “dammit” thing up from a friend of ours we call “Helga”. She’s been schooling “Helga” in the ways of evil and husband torture, so they’ve hung out together a bit and, well, ya’know what I mean?)

    At any rate, I stopped what I was doing and rushed to the kitchen to see what might possibly be the problem. Things were going through my head like perhaps I had set out the wrong color cereal bowl, or the spoon wasn’t shiny enough, or the milk wasn’t cold enough, or any of the hundreds of other things that would upset the E K.

    confused My heart was stuck in my throat and fear of an impending beating was already welling in my stomach as I rounded the corner. However, instead of seeing blue fire shooting out of the redhead’s eyes, I found myself gazing upon 4 cats – well, actually 1 grumbling Kat and 3 quite obviously confused four-legged felines. I looked at the furry threesome as they cocked their heads side to side, then looked up, down, and all around. Then I looked at The Evil One. In her hand was an open box of Raisin Bran.

    The problem was, that’s also exactly what was in the feline’s dishes on the floor.

    Of course, as I am sure you already guessed, this deviation from the canonical list of the day was somehow my fault. Honestly, I never really understand the logic behind how I get blamed, but I’ve learned better than to object. I just take my beating, and then go cower in the corner with Satan.

    It seems to be quite a bit safer there.

    More to come…

    Murv

  • Mahwage: Clink! Clank! Oh, Murv!

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    Part 8 of 12

    Continued from: Mahwage: The Wedding Suit…

    … Actually, in retrospect, the title of this entry, while close, isn’t entirely on the mark. Truth is, it was more along the line of, Swish! Clink! Ping! Clatter! Roll Roll Roll… “Oh Crap!” Clatter! *Plink!* Clatter! *Tink!*  “No No No!” Clank! Rattle… (eerie silence)… All followed by a quietly muttered, “Dammit…”

    But let’s not get into a deep analysis of my attack of onomatopoeia just yet. Don’t worry, I promise we’ll get back to it… I mean, given the title of this entry, I really kinda don’t have any choice in the matter…

    we_is_marriedBut first, a picture… Here on the left we have a photo of the happy couple.  Aren’t we cute? E K is gorgeous, just like I said… And me, well, I’m young, no grey to be seen, and  a whole lot thinner than I am today… (I’ve really gotta work on that)…  And check out those Clark Kent goggles… At this stage of the game our official and legal union is right around 4 minutes 27 seconds old. We have not yet had a fight, or even a minor disagreement. No spat of any kind. This is not to say we never have since, or that we hadn’t prior… That would just be untrue.  All couples have “disagree-uments” to one degree or another.  I’ve learned over the past 22+ years, however, that E K always wins… But, every now and then if the planets are aligned just the right way, or wrong way as the case may be, this important little fact slips my mind. And, when it does, I  make the mistake of disagreeing with her. In the grand scheme of things, however, there isn’t anything to worry about. The Evil One immediately points out the error of my ways, puts me back in my place on the end of the leash, and life is once again good…

    But, back to the picture above… At 4 minutes 27 seconds into this odyssey, all was bliss. Given that the “not having a suit thing” could have been an even  bigger debacle than it turned out to be, this was reassuring. However, what you cannot see here is that yet another issue had cropped up shortly before this photo was taken, and it was a bit of a speed bump in and of itself. I shall endeavor to explain…

    Zero hour was approaching fast. In fact, we were literally at T-Minus 60, or thereabouts. Family and a few friends had arrived a bit earlier to help with the last minute preparations. My sister had pitched in and taken over the final cooking so that I could grab a shower and get dressed. Erin, (remember Erin?) was there setting up the chafing dishes… My dad was assuming his role as unofficial photographer while helping with chairs, tables, and setting up the luminaries E K had made for decorations. Things seemed to be right on track.

    My sister, Missy, had finished up with the cooking and was now off in the bedroom helping E K with her hair, since one of Sis’s learned talents happened to be hairdressing. These days she handles video conferencing and support for families of deployed soldiers, and is damn good at it, but that’s one of those “nother blogs”…

    I, myself, was being the somewhat typical nervous groom. Not that I had suddenly decided to bolt or anything. Quite to the contrary, I was still coming to terms with the fact that E K had finally said yes, and my jangly nerves were a product of the fact that I figured I would be waking up at any moment and hearing, “No, not right now,” rolling off  of my betrothed’s tongue.

    In all honesty, to this day there are still times when I think that is going to happen, but there we go with my personal insecurities again…

    So, does anyone remember Service Merchandise? Yeah, I know, that was a rough transition there, but I still haven’t had my coffee quota just yet today, so please bear with me… If you are unfamiliar with them, they are a semi-defunct chain of catalog showrooms. I say semi-defunct because they disappeared around 2002, but from what I just looked up it appears they returned as an online store sometime in 2008. In any event, there used to be a Service Merchandise out at Northwest Plaza (or, N W P). One of their charms was the fact that they sold okay quality jewelry on the cheap. Well, if you haven’t picked up on it throughout this blog series so far, I will remind you here… E K and I were pretty much too broke to pay attention, just like most young couples when they are first starting out. We knew we could have a “ringless” ceremony, but we didn’t want to do that. We were foregoing much of the pomp, circumstance, and religious frou-frou already, what with us both being secular humanists, me with a rich and diverse background in earth/eco-centric religions and Paganism, of course. In fact, we had even written our own secular vows, which her father embellished of his own accord, but I don’t hold that against him. He’s a Baptist minister and he wasn’t about to preform the ceremony without sticking God in there somewhere… I get that. Didn’t care for it, but I get it. So, all was good.

    Anyway, back to this ring situation. We were going secular and eschewing much of the “ceremony” associated with a wedding already, but we wanted to retain at least some bit of symbolism, that being the rings. So, since we were  “poor,” so to speak, we had gone to Service Merchandise out at N W P, and purchased a matching set of plain, 10K white gold bands. Not very fancy, but it didn’t matter to us. They were symbolic enough…

    (On a side note… Even though I have since presented my bride with a much fuller set of precious gold, replete with a sparkly, ancient rock collection mounted upon it, she still wears that simple band on a regular basis. I still have mine too, but it lives on my key chain. You see, it doesn’t fit over my arthritic knuckles anymore, and while I have a newer, fancier ring that I wear when I get “duded up”, that simple band goes with me everywhere… Yeah, okay, I’ll turn off the sappy faucet before there’s a flood…)

    Now, let’s get back around to that hairdo… Why hairdo? Well, you see, while E K was in the bedroom getting even prettier than she already was, (and still is, of course), I was also doing something about my own appearance. In particular, my hair… Y’all who have seen me these days know that I pretty much have a wash and wear, stick it in a ponytail and go, kind of “do”… But, back then, as you can see in the picture, I had 80’s hair. Not “hair band” hair, but just regular old 80’s hair. For you youngsters who don’t remember the 80’s, what that means is, feathered bangs, a love affair with a blow dryer, and a lot of hair product, namely mousse.

    So, there I was, standing in the bathroom in front of the mirror. I was already dressed, sans jacket just yet, and was putting the finishing touches on my “do”. Like I said earlier, we were at about T-minus 60 and counting, so things were starting to roll and I wanted to be prepared so that I didn’t screw up any more than I already had… (remember the hangover, not having a suit, etc… Need I say more?) Well, Scott, the 6 foot 6 inch tall cop, best man, yadda yadda, and his wife had not yet arrived, therefore I had not been able to hand over Kat’s ring to him for safekeeping. So, in my desire to not forget to do something as important as that, I was keeping her ring on my own finger… Now, obviously she has petite little hands, so I had it jammed onto my right pinky finger. It was on there pretty good too. In fact, my biggest worry was actually how much skin I was going to lose when I peeled it off to give to Scott prior to the ceremony proper.

    Now… Have you ever had anything happen to you in slow motion? You know, some event befalls you and it is as if time has dilated for you, and only for you… You feel disembodied, like you are watching everything from above as no more than an observer. It drags on before your eyes, flowing languidly along, unfolding like a horror that you can do nothing about, until it reaches its final, sometimes near devastating conclusion, and then suddenly life speeds up once again? Yeah, just like Hollywood special effects, but it’s for real…

    Well, that’s exactly what happened to me.

    I pulled the brush through my hair, then flipped it back forward to make sure the volume of my “do” was just so, and suddenly I was out of body… Watching as…

    Swish! Clink! Ping! Clatter! Roll Roll Roll…

    In a muffled, slow motion drone I heard myself say, “Oh Crap!”

    Clatter! *Plink!* Clatter! *Tink!*  “No No No!” Clank! Rattle Rattle… (eerie silence)…

    Time sped back into its normal flow and I returned to my body with an unceremonious plop, only to find that I was now kneeling on the bathroom floor and staring in abject horror at the air conditioning vent. This is right about the time the “Dammit” rolled off my tongue.

    The tiny little band that had been wedged so tightly upon my digit had for some unknown reason elected to go on a trip. As I was concentrating on my coif, oblivious to its escape plans, the damn thing had seized the opportunity to eject itself from my finger. Once free it had flown through the air, bounced from the mirror, fallen into the sink, jumped out of the sink, clattered across the top of the vanity, rolled off the edge, plonked off the toilet seat, rolled across the floor, bounced against the wall, jumped up, done a double back flip, followed by a triple Salchow, then executed some other kind of fancy spin, and then did a straight in dive between the slats in the grate that covered the AC vent in the corner, before finally sliding down the duct work and falling silent… All while I groped, grabbed, and stumbled after it. I’m pretty sure I heard the silly round thing laughing at me the entire time too…

    On that note, the judges gave the ring a 9.5… I think I got a 2.

    This was going to be a problem.

    Now remember, I was already nervous, and quite honestly I was still hung over too. So, I have to say I am fairly proud of myself for what I accomplished next. You see, even in my muddled mind angles were now being plotted on imaginary graphs that only I could see, trajectories were being simultaneously calculated, and flight dynamics of gold bands reverse engineered at lightning speed. My brain was ker-chunking like Univac on a mission to save the world. Advanced calculus equations I had labored over when in school suddenly became old hat as I plotted the path of the ring, right down to the millimeter, and within seconds, determined the exact location where it had to have come to rest in the duct work.

    With no time to lose I bolted from the bathroom and out to my car… You see, back then I worked as a computer technician, so I was kind of like Paladin. Have tool bag, will travel

    I was keeping this horrible incident to myself, so as yet I had said nothing about what had happened. Fortunately, no one seemed to have heard me cursing  earlier, so everything was good… Or, so I thought. Screwdriver in hand, I raced back into the house, my sights locked on the basement door. However, as with any covert mission, just when you think everything will go without a hitch, the proverbial wrench gets thrown into the works by an insane howler monkey… Well, maybe not an insane howler monkey, but I just really wanted to say that, because I think monkeys are funny. Especially howler monkeys… And rhesus monkeys… And spider monkeys… And… Well, you get the idea…

    At any rate, I was three steps from the basement door when I came face to face with my soon-to-be-mother-in-law. My mad dash, combined with my inability to keep the wild-eyed “what the f*ck have I done?!” look off my face had apparently attracted her attention.

    “Murv, what’s wrong?” she asked.

    I hemmed and hawed for a second. It seems that the clarity I had found during the period of doing advanced mathematical calculations moments before had now fled, leaving me conversationally brain dead. I simply could not think of anything to say other than the horrible truth.

    “I dropped Kathy’s ring down the air-conditioning vent,” I mumbled.

    At this point, almost-mom-in-law looked at me like I was a complete idiot, and then she said with an unmistakeably admonishing screech in her voice, “Oh, Murv!”

    And, yes… For the record, that was when I discovered exactly where E K learned, “the look.” You know, the one that makes you feel about 3 inches tall…

    I also believe, with all my heart, that this was probably a defining moment which set the tone for my relationship with my mother-in-law all these years. I say that because I’ve heard “Oh, Murv!” several times since that day… But I digress… (Oh, and another for the record note… I really do love my mother-in-law. She’s a wonderful lady. How could she not be? She’s E Kay’s mom.)

    Back to the crisis…

    Kat, still in the process of getting hairdoed, make-upped, perfumed, and dressed to the nines, hears her mother with the keen acoustic acuity only an offspring, grown or otherwise, can possibly have, and instantly pokes her head out of the bedroom door and asks with alarm, “What’s wrong?”

    At this point, whichever vacuum tube in my head hadn’t yet warmed up, suddenly came on line. Flashes of the “one eyed E K stare at the front door,” the “Okay, come with me,” huff, and each and every of my bride’s reactions to all of the other stupid acts I had committed in the past year now flashed through my brain. I knew I couldn’t stop my mother-in-law from selling me out, but I could make it a moot point if I lied through my teeth and turned a screwdriver really, really fast…  So I did the only thing I could do…

    I looked at her and said, “Nothing honey. Don’t worry…” Then made a bee-line for the basement like my life depended on it…

    Knowing E K, it probably did…

    And, just so you know, I had another worry rattling around inside my skull. You see, I didn’t exactly ace my math courses when I was in school…

    More to come…

    Murv

    … NEXT: Mahwage: Fool For Your Stockings…