Incident #872 Where Val Blames Hick

Darn that Hick! Even in his absence, I couldn't get a good night's sleep.

We'll get to that in a minute. But do you know what he did on Sunday morning, when he was half a state away, and I could have slept in to my heart's content? He called me at EIGHT freakin' THIRTY! A.M.! Sure. Some of you may think that's plenty late enough to call someone on a Sunday morning. But not Val Thevictorian! The night owl. The darkness dweller. The woman who has always been the last to bed, and rarely early to rise, unless a job depends on it. Even as a kid, I was awake late into the night. Listening to the snores and breathing of the rest of the family.

Okay. I was already up at 8:30 Sunday morning. But Hick didn't know that! And I'd only been up since 8:00. having gone to bed at 2:00. But Hick had to make sure he had me under his thumb and out of his bed. Which is where my current problem arose.

Because Hick was not there to stab me with his raptor talon toenail, knock my pillow stack askew by burrowing his arm under it, blast my face with breather air, stab me between the shoulders with his pointy elbow, labor my breathing with his gaseous emissions, and, most importantly, TAKE UP SPACE...I hurt my back sleeping. My back, you see, is accustomed to the hefty sag Hick puts into his side of the mattress. Without is, my back worked overtime while I slept, trying to balance itself in a manner to which it was unaccustomed.

Uh huh. It's that big muscle near my spine, above my right big buttock. Do you know how hard it is to do anything without using your back? PDH. That stands for Pretty Darn Hard. This is no joke, like that cartoon stick man on the back of T-shirts, the one holding the back stick of another stick man, saying, "I've got your back!" Nope. No joking matter. It's PDH to even walk around with a twinge in the back muscle above your right buttock.

So what happens today at school? A little snippet of a girl comes through my door, all cheerful and such, as I'm shambling like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, dragging my right buttock behind me walking to the hall to prop myself against the white-painted concrete block wall for class-passing duty.

"I got a new bag!"

"Oh...good for you!"

"It is SO heavy! Here! Try to lift it!"

"Um...no thanks. You're not going to trick ME into throwing out my back! I can see that it's heavy. You've got it stuffed full."

"So you're not going to lift it?"

"No. But it's a nice bag. Roomy."

Yeah. I hate to disappoint my captive audience for experimental stand-up, but sometimes, Mrs. Thevictorian simply has to draw the line. This is one day she was not going to be left holding the bag.

The Pony Reunites With His People

I am pleased to report that The Pony's reunion weekend was a success. He even took time away from his busy computer-gaming, fanatsy-fiction-writing schedule to sit on the couch and talk to me about his activities. Or so I thought. Until the conversation lagged, and I told him, "You can go downstairs now if you want. I really appreciate you staying up here to tell me about your reunion."

"Meh. I'm not sitting up here for you. I'm up here because of my phone."

Let the record show that in the house of Thevictorian, communications are spotty at best. Cell phones don't work underground, and don't work all that well inside the house. The Pony has true unlimited internet on his phone, so he tethers it and games away to his heart's content on the basement couch. But not at a high speed. This afternoon, he had been grabbing that phone every time it chimed to him.

"Oh, are you talking to your friends from MSA? Did you get some phone numbers this time?"

"Uh huh."

"The old ones from the summer, or did you meet new ones?"

"Two new ones. Well. Three. One guy goes to a school that will compete against us as Scholar Bowl in a couple of weeks."

"And the other two? Are these guy people, or girl people?"

"What do YOU think?" That sly grin above his too-long, Amish-evolving goatee made the gender clear.

"Are they close?"

"One is only 46 miles away."

"Did you have a good time?"

"Yes! We had some workshops, and played games."

"What did you have for dinner?"

"Pasta! Spaghetti AND lasagna!"

"Did you have some of each?"

"Yes, and a single breadstick, and a salad which I forgot to put dressing on, so it was not very good."

"Couldn't you go back for the dressing?"

"I could have. But I didn't, because I was sure I would spill something off my plate."

"How was the Halloween dance? Did other people go in costume? Did they recognize you as a Walmart employee?"

"Yes. Some were in costume. They knew mine the minute they saw the back. For a while, I sat with Alex from Target, and Jake the State Farm guy."

"That's appropriate. You all seem to have the same sense of humor when it comes to costumes."

"Yeah. For the first half hour, people kept coming up and saying, 'What are you wearing, Jake from State Farm?'"

"What other costumes were there?"

"Um. We had three Clark Kents, and an angel, and some Star Trek guys I didn't recognize, and one group came as the whole Wizard of Oz cast. There was an extra Dorothy with a basket on her arm with a stuffed dog, but she wasn't with them."

"Too bad nobody came with a bunch of stuffed cats on their shirt, like that Hanes commercial guy wearing the white kitten T-shirt."

"That would be just creepy!"

"Why? It would be stuffed animals pinned to a T-shirt!"

"Oh. I though you meant STUFFED kittens, like that one dad got you at the flea market."

"Yeah. Well. That's REALLY creepy. So...nobody was Superman, all were Clark Kent?"

"Mom. We're the nerds. They had the Superman shirt on under a plaid shirt, though, so they could rip it open and show they were Superman."

"And some were from Star Wars?"

"STAR TREK! You must never make that mistake around my people! Just, no."

"SORRY! I forgot what you told me. So, did Dad get in the hotel whirlpool?"

"I don't know, and I don't even want to think about that!"

"I'm surprised you didn't stay and go to breakfast."

"Meh. I'm not good at goodbyes. Besides, I woke up at 7:00, and breakfast wasn't until 9:00. What was I supposed to do for all that time?"

"Maybe you could have got some hugs. Did you dance last night?"

"Yes. I danced all night."

"Like...line dances? Or one on one."

"Mainly line dances. But I DID ask a girl to dance. She told me no."

"And it didn't crush your spirit?"

"No. She said she didn't like to dance."

"You could have told her you didn't know how, either, and you could both practice. But at least you asked. I'm proud of you. What are you going to do this afternoon? You could walk the mini pony."

"Nah. There's no grass for him now."

"There's grass right there in the front yard! Or you could practice driving your truck."

"Nah. My legs are sore from three hours of dancing."

Still. Baby steps. Our little Pony is going to turn out all right.

The Unthinkable Val Thevictorian

For all of you worried about Ebola wiping humanity off the face of the earth, or about zombies shambling into your neighborhood to feast on your brains...let me take you away from all that. What better way to forget your problems than to take a glimpse at one of Val's?

Val is lolling about the homestead this weekend, doing what she darn well pleases. Hick and The Pony have gone upstate to a Factory Safety Meeting and a Future Mensa Reunion. You can judge for yourself which of my guys attended what.

Since they were away, I had only myself to feed on Friday night. I stayed late after school, not that such a behavior is uncommon to Val, with her usually staying at least an hour-and-a-half three days per week. So it was shortly after 4:15 when I left. I have to be careful these days. Darkness falls quickly in the hinterlands, what with all those pesky hills blocking out the setting sun before its time. And darkness is very dark in the country. So I wanted to get home before dark so I wouldn't be listening for Mothman flittering about in the woods when I stopped at the mailbox row to pick EmBee's gullet clean.

Nobody wants to cook only for oneself. At least not this nobody. So I thought up something quick that would not require a lick of input on my part. I called Pizza Hut for a personal pan pizza and some breadsticks. Yum. I haven't had a personal pan pizza for years. Mmm...it was going to be SO tasty! I chose beef, mushrooms, and onions as my toppings. It's hard to have a pizza how you like it around here. Hick demands only meat, including that horrid pepperoni, and The Pony will only eat cheese.

So with great anticipation, I piloted T-Hoe to Pizza Hut, which is on the way home, and just the right distance for that personal pan pizza to be ready when I got there. Let the record show that my commute is around 40 minutes, not due to great distance, but due to two-lane blacktop. I picked up my personal pan about 15-20 minutes into the journey.

The window woman brought my eagerly-awaited personal pan to the window in its small cardboard box. The breadsticks were in their own cardboard box, longer, and a bit narrower. The window woman foisted this purchase on me like she was part of the pit crew for Dale Earnhardt Jr. Could she not see that I was without my little helper who rides behind me? I had to reach over my purse onto the shotgun seat and try to balance these unequal sized boxes. As I was finagling them into position, Window Woman growled, "Here!" I turned to see her shoving a red booklet of some sort at me, and a flapping receipt. I quickly took them and tossed them onto the passenger seat.

I pulled away from the window a bit so as not to impede the next pit stop, and grabbed the breadstick box which was trying to jump over the edge of the seat and land on the business end of the umbrella that has rested its point on the floor since Tuesday. I grabbed that awkward red book, and saw that it was a Pizza Hut calendar. I put the breadstick box on the seat, the calendar flat on top of that, and then my much-anticipated personal pan box on top of that. The receipt had fallen to the floor already. Not that I cared.

The tantalizing aroma from my personal pan beef, mushroom, and onion wafted across my nostrils like a silken white thread of eau de PePe Le Pew in cartoonland. Only much more pleasant, I would imagine, though I never had smell-a-vision as a kid. I motored along, obeying all the traffic rules, despite people behind me taking umbrage at my law-abidingness. I was going to arrive alive. None of that speeding for Val Thevictorian. She had precious cargo perched upon her passenger seat. Mmm...that precious cargo was going to taste like the best personal pan pizza that ever personally panned.

It was at the roundabout that the bottom fell out of my fantasy. Roundabouts, I am certain, are the main traffic interchange in not-heaven. Folks around here are not accustomed to roundabouts, even though my route has had two of them for nigh on four years now. You never know whether you will have to slam on brakes because young drivers speed up like they're Dale Earnhardt Jr. rather than let you merge, or, as in my case Friday evening, shoot in front of you when there's no chance in not-heaven that an opening is possible.

I heard a sickening scrabbling of cardboard, and glanced right to see that my personal pan box had taken a dive over the side of the black leather seat, and was now partially visible between the seat and the door, as a$$-over-teakettle as a square flat cardboard box can be. Though I must say, the aroma grew even stronger. I still had ten minutes of my drive left. I surreptitiously glanced at my fallen feast as I had the chance. Plotting. A method to retrieve my treat before it fell to the cat-haired, bat-guanoed garage floor when I opened the door. There was no leaning over to grasp the box from the driver's seat. T-Hoe has a large console. Val has a large...um...everything. Except long arms.

As soon as I pulled into the garage and lowered the door so no neighborhood weirdo could come up and startle me, I grabbed that red, green, and black striped umbrella which I had never properly velcroed back around the handle. I went around to the passenger side of T-Hoe, and laid that umbrella down on the dusty garage floor like a sterilized sheet ready to catch a just-birthed baby. I yanked open the door and reached my hand inside. The Pizza Hut calendar fell onto the umbrella. The personal pan pizza box was wedged in the slot molded into the bottom of T-Hoe's door for placing, perhaps, maps. And books. And magazines. The personal pan pizza itself was not in the box.

MY PERSONAL PAN BEEF, MUSHROOM, AND ONION WAS PERCHED AT A DIAGONAL ON THE FLOOR BESIDE THE PASSENGER SEAT!

Having been fresh and hot and soft when placed in the box and foisted upon Val at the window by the Pizza Hut pit crew, that tender pizza had flattened on one side like a half moon. Did that stop Val from trying to salvage her fantasy? What do you think? Val is the woman who fed her toddler half a chocolate chip granola bar off the garage floor. Don't act shocked. How dare you assume Val never gave her kids anything healthy like a granola bar!

Sorry. I'm feeling shaky from reliving that nightmare. I must wrap up this horror story and let you go back to your own worries.

But let the record show that my personal pan beef, mushroom, and onion pizza, though misshapen, was real, and it was spectacular.

Here's to Hoping That Nobody Experienced Any Shrinkage

I just got a call from The Pony. He is away at the Missouri Scholars Academy reunion. To say that The Pony has been chomping at the bit and pawing at the turf in anticipation of this event would be an understatement. To say he felt the same way about calling me would be a blatant lie. You know The Pony. He's not really all that interested in helping people, and doesn't particularly care about their feelings.

The reason The Pony called, aside from the no-nonsense command of his father, was to report that he indeed had steak for dinner, as he had hoped, and that he also had LOBSTER! The Pony is not adventurous in the food department. Unless it was called a raw fish stick, and served in a sea of ketchup, I could not imagine him trying this allegedly delectable treat.

"We had steak...and LOBSTER!"

"YOU ate lobster?"

"Uh huh. It was chewy."

"Well...ordering lobster in the center of the continent is a fairly brave thing to do. It's not like it was fresh from a lobster trap Kramer pulled out of the ocean in the Hamptons this afternoon. Did you have to crack it open?"

"It was already cracked, but we had to dig it out."

"Did you dip it in butter?"

"Uh huh."

"I'm surprised you didn't shove the lobster aside and drink the butter."

"I used the butter for dipping the lobster...and bread...and baked potato."

"Yeah. You're still a Butterton."

"Uh huh. It was good."

"How's your room?"

"It has a COUCH!"

"Oh. Then you'll feel right at home, laying sideways on it. Do you and Dad each have your own bed?"

"No. There's just one. But it's HUGE. Like a king size."

"Dad told you to call, didn't he."

"Um...no...well...he DID, but I forgot, and then he reminded me when he got out of the shower. He almost burned himself!"

"That's your daddy! I know you want to get off the phone."

"Um..."

"It's all right. It's like pulling teeth, talking to you on the phone. You can go now."

"Alrightbye."

That's my little Pony. He's really excited about meeting up with his cronies tomorrow. I imagine Hick will make the rounds of the flea markets and Goodwill stores while The Pony is locked in with his nerdy egghead friends from 4:00 until 11:00.

They will both be in their element.

The Reveal: Gentlemen, Chunk Your Punkins!

The punkin has been chunked. Or the pumpkin has been chucked. There are many colloquialisms within our tight-knit school community, but no matter what you call it, one and all clamored for a flinging.

We gathered at the end of the building that is not mine to observe this very special occasion. Let the record show that there were four contraptions built to hurl pumpkins. Three were of the same design as The Pony and Crew, and one used a counterweight.

Lest the builders forget their roots, they used a bag of deer feed to weight the front of their chucker. A clever idea indeed, because after a few chucks, the machine had a malfunction. The plumber's tape sheared in half. Nobody was hurt. The team continued to fling by manual methods, which was seen as cheating by others whose machines malfunctioned and didn't think of it.

There was no official winner. Pumpkins were chucked, some were chunked, and a good time was had by all spectators whiling away 25 minutes outdoors before early dismissal for a teacher inservice day.

All in all, not a bad showing for a student-designed and student-built pumpkin chucker.

Ya Gotta Stay Up a Little Later Than Mid-Evening to Fool Val Thevictorian

Last night while sitting in my dark basement lair, whipping up an entertaining tale for the masses, the phone rang. I glanced to my right, in the area where that spider plopped down one midnight dreary and released eleventy-billion offspring upon my countertop computer desk, and saw that the call was coming from Arizona. I know nobody in Arizona, but that state has been calling me off and on for a week or two. So I answered.

"Hello? I am calling about your Windows computer. You know...your Microsoft WINDOWS COMPUTER." It was a woman with a hard-to-decipher Asian accent. The background sounded like floor trading on the New York Stock Exchange

"Yes...?"

"Over the past several days, there has been strange activity showing international hacking attempts on your computer."

"WHAT KIND OF SCAM IS THIS? NOBODY CALLS TO GIVE THAT KIND OF HELP!"

The caller gave an audible GASP. Then hung up.

Val Thevictorian was not born yesterday. She is not her mother's daughter, eager to fix the problem with her computer so that nothing goes wrong, so eager that she stays on the line for 30 minutes and pushes all the buttons the nice lady wants her to push. No sirree, Bob! Val Thevictorian does not suffer scammers gladly.

I could have ignored it again. But when the answering machine picks up, it's just like answering, letting those scammers know that this is a working number. So I thought I'd see who wanted to sell me what. Funny how we never quite got that far.

For her next trick, Val will tell a scammer that she knows it's not raining, BEFORE they have a chance to pee on her leg.

This Actually Took Longer To Write Than the Time It Took Me To Vote

Two years ago, when I voted in the November election, it rained. Two years before that, when I voted in the November election, it rained. This evening, when I voted in the November election, it rained. Guess who's taking an umbrella to the polls in November 2016.

Despite leaving school by 3:45, the skies grew dark and headlights came on. Val is no fan of driving on twisting two-lane blacktop in the dark and the wet. But she did it, of course. Because that's her civic duty. It buys her a ticket to complain for two years. Or gloat.

Many of my teacher lunch table cronies were early voters. Fie on those folks whose polling place is on the way to work! Mine is in the opposite direction. So I wait until the workday is done, lest there be a delay. My voting buddies reported a glitch in the school town election hall. The ballot scanner was not working. Allegedly...it gave a message something like, "You have already voted." Which seems kind of impossible, because mine was working this evening, and it even said, "Thank you for voting." Not that it recognized me or anything. Nor did theirs have any idea who voted. Maybe they were stuffing that scanner too fast, like the father and son and son ahead of me who didn't wait for the green light, and the scanner choked a bit, unable to swallow, until the older son did a bit of a Heimlich maneuver and pulled the ballot back from the clinched maw of the scanner, explaining to his little bro, "You didn't wait until Dad's was in. You have to let the green light come on."

Hick said the scanner at our place was also on the fritz this morning. He went by there after leaving for work at 6:00. He does not have a classroom full of antsy adolescents waiting for him unattended if he is late for work. I made sure to tell Hick how to vote. Normally, I don't bother. He has a mind of his own, and sometimes we simply cancel each other out. Not that he'd tell me. He learned his lesson after confessing to the Ross Perot debacle.

Anyhoo...I had to tell him to vote NO on the education issue and YES on the child molesters and also YES for 9-1-1. Not that the education issue will affect me, because, ahem, I will be retired before it will take effect. The child molester issue is a vote on whether an accused molester's previous record of convictions for child molesting can be revealed to the jury. The consensus at the lunch table was that this is too good for child molesters, the idea being that a better plan would be requiring them to be turned loose in prison to serve their time with the "general public" as one teacher put it. Upon further inquiry, she stated that yes, she DID mean the "general population." Gotta recommend that TV show "Lockup" for her next time. The 9-1-1 issue puts the funding for our county system in a 3/8 cent sales tax, rather than having only the landline subscribers pay for it as a tax on their phone bill.

Hick did not think the child molesters should have to reveal their previous convictions. He thinks the alleged criminal should have a right to be tried only on the merits of his current case. Whatever...you're not going to get a tableful of teachers who devote their lives to protecting kids to agree to that.

So...climbing down off my soapbox...let's go to church. The church where I voted. Chapel, to be exact, as that is its name: Val's Voting Chapel. Almost. I can't reveal its real name, as it might be swamped with looky-loos who want a glimpse of Val's haunts and hang-outs. And speaking of haunts...that was one spooky spectre this evening.

It was a dark and stormy night. Nowhere, a dog barked. The blacktop parking lot of Voter Chapel was full. A big dually truck was trying to back out of a space. An SUV was parked all cattywompus at the entrance, and six cars sat along the retaining wall where they would have to back out blindly onto the blacktop at the risk of cars flying over the hill to pulverize them. I went on past to the gravel lot.

That parking lot used to be gravel. Now it is laced with moss and dead leaves. It's not even a regular shape. No square or rectangle or circle. Just a blob where cars can arrange themselves any which way. Three sat there under the big hickory tree. I knew it was a hickory, because even though the leaves had been rained off, some hickory nuts still clung. Then there were the fallen nuts (heh, heh, I said fallen nuts) that I trod upon as I made my way across the moss to the sidewalk in order to go around the front to the side door and the basement voting area. The dark church loomed above me, its stained-glass windows with their pointy arches mere pastels of what they must be when the light shines out. Darkness had settled in, the woods loomed menacingly along the back of the property, past an unkempt wooden shed of unknown purpose. If not for the multitude of perhaps 35 voters, it would have been an eerie setting.

I lumbered down the carpeted stairs to the church basement and confronted the local election volunteers. That's how it seemed. Like my presence was an intrusion. One guy had just gone down the line, many were marking ballots at tables better suited for pot luck dinners, and the white haired hens were cackling to beat the band. The one at my end of the table, behind the book for OOPS, almost gave away my last initial, which, of course is "T" for Thevictorian, finally turned to look at me. Not in a friendly way. I thought it was going to be a staredown. I wanted to tell her, "Sister, you think you know, but you have NO IDEA what I go through in a typical workday, and I could stare you down until the cows come home." Instead, I spoke first, in order to speed things along, and get back to The Pony sitting in T-Hoe on the undressed set of a real live horror movie.

"Do you need to see my ID?"

"Yes."

"Do I need to take it out?"

"No. Not as long as I can see the picture."

Talk about a horror movie. I withdrew my drivers' license that nobody seems to find the least bit flattering. Thank goodness nobody keeled over when viewing my flat plastic countenance. I signed the book and was shuffled down the pushed-together tables, walking the gauntlet to get a ballot. Other cackling hens stopped when they were darn well ready in order to service my voting needs. One handed me a ballot. Another took the cap off a Bic pen, as if I would abscond with it if given the chance, requiring them all to give chase. It would have been slower than George on a Rascal pursued by senior citizens on other Rascals.

The rest is history. I voted. My ballot was sucked into the scanner. I gave back my pen and snagged an "I Voted" sticker. The Pony had not been attacked, and no bloody hooks were found hanging from the door handles when we got home.

I appreciate the suffering that came before me in order to allow me my suffrage.