The Making of The Making of The Birdonnell Family Blog Blog Blog

Whatever... he's being so dramatic

2006-04-13T19:57:00.000-07:00

So Andrew got "tired" a few days ago, and asked if I would continue with the story of our "abduction" from Coffee Care. Whatever, there was a petition floating around Coffee Care to start a Haole Social Society and to declare Capitol Hill a null and void name. The hill was going to be named Haole Hill or something to that effect. In any event, it was madness and it didn't even make any sense. And nobody abducted us. We just had a very long lunch there.

Andrew just got lazy and stopped blogging, and since my blog's supposed to be about his blogging I got a much deserved break from making observations on his observations.

Anyhow, things are fine in Saipan. My brother came to visit from Phoenix so we had to hide Landy in an empty apartment across the hall from ours. Andrew would slide a tray of raisins under the door every morning, and when we let Landy out of the apartment he was the same little beast we locked in there. Friendly, but odd. He told us he ate a lizard one evening and that it didn't taste like anything. I'd consider that worrisome, but he licks our vacuum cleaner's bag before he'll let me empty it, so... if it's not par for the course, it's not exactly a bogie either. To use a golf expression. Which I hate. So I'm sorry.

Other than that, Easter is just around the corner. Be sure and eat a piece of chocolate for us, because we can't keep it in the house, because the last time we did Landy ate it, and the next thing we knew there was a dead horse in our living room with blood trickling out of its nostrils. Chocolate is on his "allergy" list now.

He promised he'd never try to dance with me again but he did it anyway...

2006-03-06T00:02:00.000-08:00

Well, I find myself in the role of family apologist, yet again. Or family history revisionist. It all depends on how you look at it. In any event, I want to set the record straight on the events of Thursday, March 2nd, 2006.

I was once again dragged by the two boys to the Garapan street market for an evening of saturating my clothes in the smell of roasted flesh. It's not that I'm a killjoy, because I like a proper carnival. But in Saipan, they have this carnival Street Market every week, so at that point, in my opinion, it ceases to be a carnival. You go to a carnival once a year. That's how often it comes, and after a week it is gone. That's what makes it fun: it's rarity. No one would be able to tolerate Christmas every weekend; it would lose all enjoyment for all but the most simple-minded. But as I said, the boys dragged me there again. Fifth time this month.

Here is what you find at the Saipan Street Market: people selling baskets full of either knick-knacks or other, smaller baskets, people selling unidentified "meat" on a bamboo stick, people selling "five choices" of food for five dollars, next to a stand selling six choices for five dollars, next to a stand selling seven choices for five dollars. The more choices you are offered for five dollars, the dodgier the racket appears. By the time you get to the "ten choices for five dollars" booth, you find yourself being served a poorly-woven grass basket full of earwigs by a trained rhesus-monkey in a second-hand tuxedo.

Ten Choices! Ten Choices!

Needless to say, it is not my scene. Also, there was a Filipino Elvis impersonator, as Andrew mentioned, and he was quite good. For an Elvis impersonator. There was something slightly unsettling about him. I don't know if it's because his forehead was unusually large or if his gyrations were off-beat or what the story was, but there was something... not quite right about him. I suppose it might also be because his job is to pretend to be a dead man. There are worse jobs, true, but jobs more confusing to the soul? I'm not sure. He did move the spirits of the boys, though, and Landy started to do that strange dance of his, which I'm never quite convinced won't end with his head turning a 360 prior to projectile vomiting some split pea soup into the crowd. It didn't seem to bother anyone else, though, and the Japanese tourists were snapping his picture madly. I have little doubt that he will have his own gameshow or pop career there before he hits fifteen. The tourists just adore the boy.

The other boy, the older one I'm married to, was trying to dance again. No one was hurt this time, thank God, but my ego was irreparably slashed across the ear. Simply the memory of seeing the man you're married to move in that manner is enough to amputate your soul's arm, so you can imagine how it must have felt in real-time. Horrible, horrible, oh most horrible. We made it out of there before someone tried to break his knees just to make him stop. But just barely.

Hope all is well with you and yours.

I've been writing the blog for Andrew...

2006-02-18T14:29:00.000-08:00

Probably the best thing about this blog is that Andrew never reads it. He goes online and reads his own entries a lot, but he says he doesn't want to spoil the purity of his own blog by reading the works of others. What a purist. It's pretty much the only part of my life that he doesn't rummage around in. The other day, I found him checking the sleeves of my shirts for hidden items. "What are you looking for?" I asked him. And he just muttered, "Nothing." and kept squeezing all of my shirts' sleeves. But he's always been this way. Even his mother told me that he used to dig holes in the backyard just in case anyone had buried something at some point.

So anyway, Andrew's been doing this weird thing where, he'll sit down at the computer and, for some reason, he just falls asleep right away. At first, I assumed it was some sort of narcolepsy, but I'm beginning to think that it's Landy's fault. Andrew won't put in the earplugs I gave him because he says they might misshape his audial ducts, and ever since Landy's gone kind of nocturnal and he's always practicing his triangle, Andrew's been having a hard time sleeping. The thing about Landy and that damn triangle is that he doesn't ever play a song. I don't even know what a triangle solo would sound like, but, regardless, he doesn't even play those. He just hits the fool thing at random. Like just when you think he's finished.....................Ting!

Anyhow, Andrew's been falling asleep at the keyboard because of this, and so I end up walking him over to the couch because I'm always afraid that he'll put his head through the monitor's screen or something stupid like that. So he lies down, and the blog entry page is opened up so I just finish it up for him. Whatever he's started. Sometimes nothing at all, actually, I just write the whole thing down the way I think he would write it. I keep one eye on Andrew to make sure he doesn't know that I'm doing it, but he never moves an inch. He's just completely out. Yesterday, he was so comatose that I found Landy squeezing an entire bottle of Hunt's Tomato Catsup onto his Daddy's face. I towelled both of them off, but you know how Catsup is. It just works its way into the nooks and crannies of everything it touches, so Andrew looked a bit of a mess when he woke up, and sat back down at his computer. Then he checked his blog and I heard him coo, "Amazing" to himself.

Other than that, things are going pretty well. Valentine's Day was its usual atrocity, and ended, yet again, with Andrew's vows to find some way to destroy the Hallmark Corporation. Peacefully of course, but passive-aggresively. Of course.

Hope all is well with you and yours!

Andrew's walking around with his Thesaurus Again

2006-02-03T17:19:00.000-08:00

Well, he's got his Thesaurus out again. In truth, it's my thesaurus, but as Andrew notes, when we got married everything became ours. He's abused this fact on numerous occasions, but in this case, he can keep the Thesaurus. If only he'd stop using it.

He's decided he won't use pronouns anymore, and he won't use "regular" adjectives anymore. He says they're worse than pedantic, they're beyond repugnant; in fact, they are beyond the bounds of banality. I'd throw my hands up in disgust, but I'm afraid he would deem it cliche to do so.

I can't stand it when he calls things I do cliche. Especially when it's things like brushing my teeth. This is how such conversations usually go:
"Ugh. You're brushing your teeth again?"
"Three times a day isn't that much."
"Okay. It's just, so cliche."
"No it's not. It's good for your teeth. I want my teeth when I'm old."
"You'll have your teeth, but you'll lose your mind. The fluoride they put in there destroys your free will. Your sense of outrage. Of courage."
"I'm brushing my teeth."
"I need the Tums."
"Well, get them."
"You're blocking the cabinet."
"Just walk around me."
"Why don't you brush your teeth in the kitchen?"
"And spit on the dishes soaking there?"
"Do the dishes while you're there."
"Brush my teeth and do the dishes at the same time?"
" Just... move. I'm getting the Tums."
"Fine."
"Fine."

Still, the weather has been really nice. Andrew's been thinking of what picture he wants to take next. We can expect it in April I'd expect.

Well, there he goes again...

2006-01-28T16:32:00.000-08:00

I swear. Andrew's such a crybaby sometimes. His mother calls and starts complaining about "that little creature" as if Andrew doesn't have worse names for Landy. Like "Landy" for instance. That was Andrew's idea. Hey, why not take both our names and combine them? Blah blah blah, blah. Blah blah blah. Just like everything else he says. Do you know what my name would be if my parents had done that to me? Russary. My name would be Russary Birdman. Sheesh. And Andrew's would have been Carvin Shelnell. What kind of parent does that to a kid? Probably the kind that lets a kid suck on the window sill. That's a pretty good guess.

So anyways, I'm supposed to be writing about Andrew's writing about his writing, and since I don't want another lecture, I'll try to stay focused here. Andrew's pretty good about keeping his fingers in the asdf jkl; position, but he still has trouble hitting the numbers without a bit of searching. That's all you get, hubby.

In other news, I've been spending some time thinking about the fraudulent memoirist and the Oprah book club. I say, if you want to bend the truth a little while you're putting your life out there, why not? Change your name, make some stuff up, spice it up a bit, why not? If some sucker builds a better life off of your lies, and then becomes disenchanted when the lies are discovered, well, just another nice life lesson: You can't judge a book by either its cover or its contents. That's why they call them books, morons, cause it rhymes with looks. As in "looks like some lies, again." So everyone should just back off.

Welcome to the Making of the Making of the Birdonnell Family Blog Blog Blog

2006-01-21T22:46:00.000-08:00

Hi Everybody! Andrew said I had to be in charge of documenting his progress as he tracks the creation of our family's blog, so I figured a blog would be a pretty good way to handle that. Frankly, I don't know what he was talking about when he said this was hard. It doesn't take a minute to get it set up and published. It's ridiculously easy, in truth. But then, that's Andrew. Mountains out of molehills, that's my love. The other day he told me that a woman at work was trying to kill him with her car. Later, I found out that it was Andrew who tried to run her down. It was front of his entire office practically. But that's just Andrew. He gets mixed up on the details.

Anyhow, things are pretty good here. Landy had a trip to the dentist yesterday, and he was really well-behaved. Particularly in light of the fact that they had to remove all of his teeth. He didn't have many left after that time he attacked the lamppost near my parents' home in Huron. So it wasn't super-traumatic. Still, his smile is a little different now, and when he kisses Mommy on the cheek it doesn't feel very nice. I don't really let him do that much anymore. He's getting too big to kiss other people. That's what I told him. He believes pretty much everything you tell him, or I tell him, anyways. He's my simple little angel.

Well, dinner's getting cold so I had better get back to the table. I don't like to eat at the same time as Landy and Andrew anymore, because they make such a mess of the place. Hope you enjoy this insight into Andrew's insights on the family going-on's. I'll do my best to keep up with it. Lori-out!