Lots of soccer

All of us have our own memories of playing soccer at various stages growing up. What impresses me is how vivid the memories can be. Especially with Dad - he can recount entire games from 1993. We can still talk about fallacious whistles and epic moments whose stories might lead the innocent into thinking they actually occurred in slow motion. It is funny how much fun I used to have with it being as pathetic as I was. I had some strengths, sure, but I was a rather incomplete player. I had some good times though - and it's still fun to commentate.

Anyone else remember how exciting it was to have World Cup 1994 in the US? We were so sure that was soccer's breakout year - America would be forced to realize its superlativeness. Didn't happen.

And then 1998 was better - we watched 2 games a day all summer until we moved. Of course they were on the Spanish channel Univision, so the commentary was sketchy. And there was that pundit who happened puppet with no eyes - just a massive, bushy unibrow. Any laughing I did had little do with what the comedy they were surely spewing. It was purely ridiculous. I remember the World Cup causing some rubs while we were in California that year - we really wanted to watch it, but things like Sundays and families kept interfering with the World Cup. How rude. I remember loving Holland and seeing Beckham botch it and Zidane be an amazing bald jerk. Great stuff.

Alternative Rock in the Trailer Park

Although some people think people like me are a myth, I'm not a music person. I don't often go out of my way to listen to music, and even less often pay for it (this is a trait inherited from Mom and Dad that it seems only me and Tracy got). What music I do like (and still listen to) I started liking when I was 6: early 90's alternative. I could sing the words (under great protest from musical geniuses like Craig and Brian who claimed I wasn't doing justice to the original masterpiece) to quite a few Offspring and Sublime songs. Cake, Nirvana, Beck, Everclear - these were my musical world. Needless to say, this wasn't the doing of my 6-year-old self, this was because I shared a room with Andy, Brian and Craig and that's what they listened to. Brian and I were talking last summer and we came to the conclusion that music peaked in 1994. Thus, the roots of my bizarre musical taste are exactly where the rest of my roots are, firmly embedded in thick, black, Texan gumbo.

Mom Memories

First memory of mom: Mom insisted that everyone earn their Eagle before they could drive. Where did that leave me? Mom decided I had to earn a "Cockatiel" award. The path to achieving the "Cockatiel" award was ill-defined. It consisted of Mom asking me to do spur-of-the-moment "feather" tasks, in which I could earn a "feather" and work my way up to the coveted "Cockatiel." "Feathers," I came to see, were chores Mom needed help with or homemaking tasks Mom wanted me to learn. Not surprisingly, due to the obscure nature of the "Cockatiel" requirements and my feminist sensibilities I never earned my "Cockatiel" and Mom will ever bear an empty place on her collar, where my own noble bird pin should have gone.

Second memory: I wasn't there for this but I heard it from Adam. And it's great. Mom couldn't figure out how to turn off the low battery alarm on the fire alarm. It was getting very annoying so she called the fire department to ask their advice. The fire dept. protocol was to send out the entire fleet any time anyone called about anything and that is exactly what they did, though Mom begged them not to come. What I don't know is whether all those firemen in all those fire trucks managed to fix the alarm?

Final memory: I wasn't there for this either but it is also great. Basically Craig went on like 10 different prom dates and all his dates were hussies and wore immodest dresses so Mom knitted a shawl for them to wear. Did she ever ask any of them to wear it Craig?

Any other memories of Mom?

Love you Mom! Thanks for the laughs!

ice is thrice as nice

I tell my friends now a days that our part of Texas doesn't have winter or summer. It has a dry season and a rainy season. The few examples of winter wonder stick out vividly for all of us. anyone remember freezing rain? everything and I mean everything froze. the wind would blow the long grass until the rain froze it in place. the road was covered in layers of ice. it was like someone stopped time and put distorted glass in front of your eyes. school was cancelled for days because nothing could stay on the road until the ice melted. every step you took in the front yard had a crunch noise to it. my favorite part was the the fields of frozen grass. the wind was gone but the grass was bent like it was still blowing and encased in ice. it was beautiful and deceptively strong. you could actually walk on the frozen grass 3 feet off the ground. i remember breaking off ice and sucking on it while sitting on the grass hoping it wouldn't shatter underneath me. who needs a white christmas when you get 3 days of vacation from school and your whole neighboorhood transforms. what do you guys remember about freezing rain?

Insane Lizard

So, this is a New Jersey story, so many previous readers and contributors will be unfamiliar with it, but those who were there and met the infamous black-with-yellow-spots Colombian Tegu will never forget him. Most of our other lizards were slow and lethargic; they rarely put on the kind of show you hope they will when you buy them. The hope with a Savannah monitor is that it will grow large enough to be put on a leash, taken for a walk, and eat annoying neighboring chihuahuas in one bite if they should venture too close.

Not the Tegu.

I remember the first time I saw it hunt. When food animals - generally crickets, I think, were let loose in the cage, the Tegu would dart all around its large mesh cage, killing anything that moved. But it didn't stop to eat before it darted on; it would kill and leave it for later. It had some major superiority complex where everything needed to either be dead, or . . . well, everything else needed to be dead.

Watching Craig hold that demon was a little disturbing. Onlookers would generally laugh nervously, silently hoping and praying Craig's grip didn't falter. It would open its mouth wide and flop its body as far as possible in fast spasm trying to bite him. He did not abide being held very well. He would flop side to side rapidly trying to find some flesh to remove as punishment for deigning to hold him still - I never held him.

One particular time, he got loose, and we couldn't find him. We figured that little "free spirit" found his way out somehow. I hoped I didn't find him in the tub one morning while groggily getting into the shower because that would freak me out pretty good.

A little background on our stairs: there was sort of a balcony that ran from Mom and Dad's room to the star of the stairs which went out between 3-5 steps, turned right, went down another 7 steps, turned right, and went down the final few steps. This will come in to play in a minute.

I don't remember if it was Mom or Dad who called us into their room, but they found him. We cornered him under the bed. Suddenly the Tegu - whose body was probably under 10 inches long not counting his tail, darted out from under the bed, and all of us chased after him. We got to the balcony, but didn't even slow. He jumped from under the iron railing across the void a solid ten feet up - it would have been like 10 stories for a human height-wise - onto the lower, longer level of the stairs where he continued down. We had to run all the way around, so by the time we got downstairs, he was gone. Eventually, we found him under the brown chest thing in the den, where we cornered him for good and captured him. It was very impressive.

Our biggest fan

One of my earliest memories is of me curled up under a blanket immediately in front of a gigantic metal fan. I actually remember doing this a lot. Part of the reason I could never sleep on a bed was because my body needed to b close to a fan for full resting action. This, mind you, was independent of the weather. Our hearty metal allies were originally recruited against the fierce Texas summers, but I slept right next to one even on cold nights, sometimes with several blankets to make up for the fact that all of my body heat was being sucked away. Crazy? Yes. Very.
We also used them to make wind tunnels by clothspinning blankets together. These things could take up a entire room and stayed up as long as we could convince Mom to let us have them.
Sometime someone discovered (and I think it was me) that if you attached a balloon to your favorite action figure, fired up the fan and tipped it vertical, lo and behold, the ting would hover! On medium you could usually fit a good four or five of these balloon warriors and they'd bounce around congenially, but when you shifted it to high, they'd start thrashing about wildly until only the victor remained. Marvels of engineering, those fans.

Ahhh....Toads.

There are few animals capable of bringing more joy than a toad. Toads had a variety of attributes that made them desirable for Rugglets. For one, they were durable. You could hold a toad all day and it would be fine thanks to its dry skin, unlike a frog. They were ready eaters in captivity, which means you could keep them. You could skip a toad across ditch water three or four times and the thing would swim off no problem. They could even survive Cherish, who would scream "fwog!" until Mom made us go out and catch one, no matter how much we protested on behalf of the toad's well-being (Dad still claims this as Cherish's first word). It also helped that they were easy to find and catch. We were constantly hunting them, partly because they were fun and partly because Dad offered an unbelievable monetary sum (100 dollars, if I remember) for the capture of a rare Houston toad. We never found one, always just the more common Gulf Coast toad. They didn't bite, didn't move too fast and were virtually ubiquitous. You could even catch them as tadpoles and let them grow up. There seemed to be swarms of them in the ditches after rain. My favorite time was a few weeks after a big summer storm when all the tadpoles had grown up into extremely tiny toads, which were (and no other word choice would be appropriate here) adorable. One night we foolishly decided to catch as many as we could and load them into one of our many terrariums. The haul was 34, plus a couple tree frogs. Unfortunately, this was the equivalent of starting a night club for toads and their flirtation consists of loud and incessant ribbiting which effectively prevented any sleep on our part. In the morning we just dumped them unceremoniously into the umbrella grass, glad to be rid of them. I don't think there is any Rugglet that can say he or she hasn't kissed a toad. They served as pets, toys, novelty prank items (Sorry, Mom!), pacifiers, friends (for those of us who had none else), and stuffed animals. To a poor family this plague of toads was manna from heaven.