When life gives you lemmings…

The Bug and I were in a food court yesterday and ordered a large lemonade from “Hot Dog on a Stick”, that place where they actually juice fresh lemons every two hours. Yes, the workers wear silly hats and uniforms that look like beach balls. but the lemonade is really good. Let’s just hope the benefits plan includes extra strength sports bras, because the employees, male or female, have to jump, and I mean JUMP, up and down on a pogo-stick-like contraption to do the juicing, and that can’t be easy on the amply endowed.

The Bug watched, all agog (how I’ve waited to use that word!), as a large, enthusiastic worker violently pulverized the crap out of a batch of lemons, then handed us our drink.

Unfortunately, our straw kept getting clogged by a big lemon wedge in the cup, so I pulled out the wedge and dropped it on our tray. The Bug stared at it suspiciously for a moment, then asked, “What’s DAT?”

“It’s the lemon skin,” I told him. “That’s what’s left after the juice comes out.”

“But what’s dat?”

“Oh, that’s just the stem.”

“But how did they catch it?”

I choked on my chicken curry. “Catch what?”

“The lemon. Doesn’t it go into a hole?”

“They don’t have to catch it,” I explained patiently. “The lemon just sits there waiting until someone decides to make lemonade. See what that lady’s doing?” – as I pointed out the bouncing employee dutifully mashing lemons into oblivion – “She’s making sure she gets all the juice out.”

At this point the Bug turned pale and pushed the lemonade away. “I think I’m all done now.”

I smiled to myself as we cleared our table, thinking how nice it was to have a little boy so sensitive and sweet that he felt bad for fruit. Just that morning he had refused to throw away a sock with a hole in the toe, explaining that the sock would be sad in the trash. Kids can be so precious.

It was only when I was relating this little incident to my husband that evening that I remembered:

FLASHBACK: The Bug and I at preschool a week ago. I’m reading him a book, “Tundra Discoveries”, about the animals of Alaska. Caribou, polar bears, arctic fox and (cartoon lightbulb over head here) …

LEMMINGS.

Lemmings that live in holes. Cute, innocent, furry, round-eyed lemmings, just sitting around on the tundra.

Waiting to be JUICED.

I guess it’s not bad enough that snowy owls, wolves, foxes, and lynx hunt them on ground and from the air; now they must also beware of predators in goofy red, blue and yellow striped shirts, stalking them out there in the wild. What’s next? Lemming martinis? Lemming custard? Lemming meringue pie?

My guess: Lemming On A Stick. Just don’t tell the Bug.

I married a superhero.

Apparently my husband has been dreading the day I blog about him, which led to the following conversation in bed last night:

Me: What do you think of my blog so far?
He: (dramatic pause) I like it.
Me: So why haven’t you commented yet?

Tense silence.

Me: (applying ice-cold feet to his legs) WHY NOT?
He: I’m afraid you’ll write about me.

So there you have it. The almighty power of the word – MY word! – is enough to make even a superhero cower in fear.

But just WHO is this superhero, and what is his special power, you ask? It’s so simple, yet so devastating: my husband’s alter ego – let’s call him Captain Lecher – is able to make anything I say, no matter how mundane or outlandish, sound totally lewd in a single phrase. Thus, the following conversation:

Me: Honey, would to take out the trash?
He: (making obscene gesture) I’ll give you something to take out.

And he usually does it when I’m in the middle of some particularly loathsome chore, ideally one that involves being bent over, like scrubbing the toilet.

Me: Hey, hand me the scrubbing bubbles.
He: I’ll hand you something to scrub.

For turbo-boost applications, he also throws in extra phrasing action, along with a special uber-macho voice – dead serious, menacing and lecherous as hell.  Imagine Robert DeNiro trying to pick up, say, Nick Nolte in a gay bar.  Ergo:

Me: I need you to reconfigure this hard drive.
He:  Why don’t YOU come on over HERE and I’ll give YOU a hard drive to reconfigure.

Sometimes – just because he’s crazy that way – he’ll mix up the sentence structure a bit:  “I got your hard drive right here”, or “Lemme show you a hard drive.”  Just think what middle school English teachers could teach bored teenage boys about language skills with this method.  (Reconstruct this sentence in proper grammatical format to create an illegal proposition: “We do not ride upon the railroad; it rides upon us.”)

Those of you who know my husband are probably shaking your heads in disbelief right now, thinking I’m just making this stuff up because that’s the kind of nasty blogging wife I am.  But it’s all true, and what’s more, I wouldn’t want it any other way.  My guy is, in the immortal words of Salt-n-Pepa, “a mighty good man”, and being able to make me laugh while cleaning the bathroom is a superpower indeed.  In fact, I can’t wait to tell him I blogged about him today. 

To which he will undoubtedly reply:  “I’ll give you something to blog.” 

Sun day, bloody sun day

You want to know the worst thing about not being a morning person in Alaska?  Summer.  Because from June to August, it’s morning ALL DAY LONG.  It’s morning in the morning! It’s morning in the evening! It’s morning at night!  The weather report says “cloudy today, sunny tonight.” The lawn needs mowing every two hours. Children go outside to play and come home in September.   The Bug even made up his own lexicon for this phenomenon – “day-day” and “night-day”.  (“Bedtime”, naturally, does not fall within either of those times. )

The first summer I lived in Alaska, I ordered some of those cool tiki torches from Crate and Barrel, the kind you arrange around your deck to create the illusion that you’re not eating dinner on a cul-de-sac two blocks from Walmart but are actually on vacation in Tahiti.  I waited and waited all summer to light them.  Finally, it snowed.  Tahiti, my ass – we’re on vacation in the Ice Age.   Because there’s no warm darkness here; it’s either warm or it’s dark.  Forget 4th of July fireworks, because you can’t see them unless you set them off in the crawl space. 

Yes, there is no escape from a beautiful June day.  That’s why I think we should have state-sanctioned ”sun days”, when schools and offices are closed due to extremely good weather.  Think about it. Most cold-weather cities have occasional snow days in winter, but not Anchorage.  We pride ourselves on driving to work and sending our kids off to school in all conditions, even when the ice on the road can be measured in feet and you have to tunnel like moles out of the front door.  Having sunny summer days off (according to statistics, we get only ten of them, and it’s axiomatic that they fall on weekdays) should be our just reward.

Besides, most Alaskans are unfit for employment when the sun is out, unless they’re landscapers or professional river rafting guides.  The sweet siren song of the outdoors beckons the rest of us to come out and play, rendering our brains utterly useless for anything that involves a) thinking and b) being inside.  There are fish to be caught, trails to be hiked, gardens to be tended, creeks to be waded.  They are precious jewels, these rare and lovely days drenched in shades of sapphire, emerald and gold, days to savor and treasure.

Oh yeah.

You know that book? The one with the cover?

You remember, from back when you were a kid, that One-Page-Story-For-Each-Day-of-the Year book, where the rosy-cheeked children/cuddly animals are all gathered around a grandmotherly person/bear sitting in an armchair reading to them, and the book that’s being read has the very same cover as the book you are reading? And in the picture of the book on the cover of the book is – insert primal scream here – another picture of the book, and so on, into microscopic proportions. Thus leading small and overimaginative minds to their first glimpse into: INFINITY. And later on, MADNESS, because WHEN DOES IT EVER END?

I know you know what I mean.

I relate this memory only because following a math “lesson” at preschool recently, the Bug came home and wailed, “But what comes AFTER infinity?”

Now, what was the name of that book?

The road to Hope

Hope, Alaska, that is.  Our family shares a cabin (in the sense of “three bedroom heated house with running water, microwave, and large-screen television”) with three other couples, which means we each have one weekend a month in this wonderful quaint and quirky little gold-mining town, year round population 100.  It’s just an hour and a half by car, close enough for us to survive listening to Wee Sing Dinosaurs on repeat, and far enough so that we feel like we’re actually Getting Away from Things Undone – unpaid bills, unmowed lawns, unscooped litter boxes.

The Bug fully expects our undivided attention on these weekends, so we take it in turns to play animals/do puzzles/color/build a cabin out of Lincoln Logs.  This particular weekend was spent finding new and creative ways to use my latest purchase on e-bay, dinosaur cookie cutters.  Thus, we baked dinosaur cookies, traced, colored and cut out dinosaur shapes, made clay out of flour to cut out MORE dinosaurs, and set up a dinosaur parade.

Things we like to do in Hope when not engaged in dinosaur-related activity:

1.  Walk to the river and attempt to change the local topography by throwing no less than a bajillion rocks

2.  Eat dinner at Bowman’s Bear Creek Cafe, a local restaurant with food that would put the finest restaurants anywhere to shame

3.  Check out books at the library, where the toilet pipes are frozen all winter and heat is provided by a wood stove

4.  Feed the horses and giggle uncontrollably when they wheeze down your neck

5.  Have a leisurely breakfast at Tito’s Discovery Cafe

6.  Eat Cheez-Its, donuts, and “toucan cereal” (Froot Loops to the old-schoolers), because all food rules are off in Hope

7.  Explore the local trails while singing Hindi songs in terrible accent at top of lungs – guaranteed to scare off bears

Now that the Bug has mastered the art of riding a bike, we’ll be adding bike trips to the ice cream and penny candy shop that’s opening next month in the old post office.

It’s the kind of place that eases homesickness, even if it’s as far from home as an Indian girl from the East Coast can get.