I don’t have a theme for today’s blog but I get itchy when I go too long without posting, so forgive the randomness. It’s not that I don’t have anything to write about; it’s that most of my stories lately have been from subbing, and for confidentiality reasons, I can’t blog about those. I can tell you that today I learned the meaning of the word “gyatt,” (borderline inappropriate) the new definition of mewing (surprisingly appropriate!), and that jawlines are currently the funniest part of the body. Oh, and I was accused of making pooping illegal.
Usually when I don’t have anything to blog about I go to my photos and pull some stuff together out of those, but I recently signed up for Ridwell and have lots of questions about recycling, so most of my pictures are of garbage.
(No; yes; no; and it’s complicated.)
Oh wait! I found one! A non-garbage picture, from a birthday party for Kevin’s coworker where we all signed a big poster. Kevin didn’t know what to draw, so I suggested Clippy, since it was a techy crowd. Please ignore the inappropriate drawing above Clippy’s head. There were a lot of those on the poster. Like, a lot a lot.
Kevin has always said he’d get a tattoo if only he knew what to get. Looks like his wait is over!
Fun fact: I’m friends with the guy who designed Clippy! He’s a local children’s book author/illustrator, and an all around great guy.
If Kevin’s drawing of Clippy wasn’t disturbing enough, then I have something truly terrible to show you. It’s from a furniture magazine I got in the mail, and if you want to have a restful night sleep full of untroubled dreams, then you should definitely not keep scrolling.
You’re going to anyway, aren’t you?
Last chance to stop!
I really mean it this time…
All right then, here it is:
I don’t even know what is the most disturbing part of this picture. The crumbs on the sheets? The pending butter stains? The built-in croissant drawer? Or perhaps all the croissant business is just to detract from whatever is going on with the headboard? I don’t have any answers, but whoever came up with this photo spread is definitely flaky.
And now, to cleanse the palate of any unsavory things you have seen or read in today’s post, here are some pictures of my garden.
We blew our big vacation on Japan in February, but I still wanted some kind of a getaway for spring break, so we decided on nearby Vancouver, B.C. Vincenzo forgot to ask for the time off of work so he had to stay back. We couldn’t find another Vincenzo to take his place so we settled on an extra Leo instead.
Vancouver’s forecast was grim but it didn’t matter; all I really wanted was a train trip, and a pool; the rest was gravy.
The rain trip:
The pool:
Actually, I didn’t really care about the pool; all I wanted was to sit in the hot tub and look at the rain pelting the windows outside. Rocco and Double Leo provided entertainment and Vancouver was generous with the rain. Kevin and I watched the boys from the tub, rejoicing over the fact that we don’t have to get in the pool and play with the children anymore.
On our first full day in Vancouver, we visited the aquarium. Other Leo really got into it!
Sometime on day one, the boys started speaking in Waffle, which is where you take all the words in the English language and change them to the word “waffle.” So I could say, “Waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle?” and you’d say, “Waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle!” I’d nod in agreement, then maybe ask a follow-up waffle. The fun thing about this language is it never gets old listening to it, no matter how many thousands of times you hear the word “waffle” in a single day.
The next day the skies cleared and we went to the science museum. Isn’t it cool looking?
The silver globe thing is from Expo ‘86, which 10-year-old Me actually went to! This Me:
Just about everything at the museum was interactive.
There was a thermal energy screen that shows how warm you are, with white being the hottest and blue being the coldest. My hands are the blue ones.
I stood there for a long time waiting to see if there was another blue-handed person in the museum, but it seems I am the only one of my kind. The good news is if I ever run into a snake, all I have to do is hide behind my hands and poof, I’ll be invisible!
We spent a lot of time at the optical illusion area.
(The optical illusion is the spinny thing on the wall, not the look of childlike wonder on the teenager’s face.)
I learned how to spin a plate on a stick! Here I am getting a little show-offy.
Fun fact about Pepto Bismol: it’s derived from the bismuth crystal. We can finally stop wondering where the word “bismol” came from. The chalky pink color remains a mystery.
That afternoon we popped over to Granville Island, which had about 1,000 photo ops but my phone had run out of battery and it wasn’t until we were leaving that I remembered Kevin also has a phone.
On our final day, Rocco, Other Leo, and I biked around Stanley Park, which was the highlight of the trip for the three of us.
Regular Leo didn’t want to bike, so Kevin promised they’d walk through Stanley Park instead. They ventured far enough in to take a picture near a duck for proof, then they went for Slurpees. It was the highlight of the trip for them.
Overall, it was a fun-filled few days that felt like a “real” vacation and not just a token one. Waffle waffle waffle waffle waffle. Waffle waffle?
(Translation: That’s some pretty good gravy. Isn’t it?)
A couple Saturdays ago I had a birthday. It’s getting to the point where the numbers are too scary to say out loud, so I’ll just tell you it rhymes with florty-flate. (Was that you who just gasped, or was it me?!)
Kevin kept “forgetting” it was my birthday because that Saturday it was also Wrestlemania. All week he followed me around with puppy dog eyes until finally I said, “Okay fine, you can invite you friend over for Wrestlemania on Saturday, even though it’s my birthday.” To which he said, “Oh, it’s your birthday?”
I knew Kevin wouldn’t really forget, which is why on Saturday morning I wasn’t surprised when he came upstairs carrying a gigantic box. A gift! For me! With some effort, he set it in front of me on the floor, and when my eyes swam into focus I found myself staring at a gigantic bowl of meat.
It was a smoker, Kevin said. So he could smoke some meat, he said. For Wrestlemania.
Well.
At least I had a giant box all to myself.
Well again.
Okay, okay, you caught me. I’m telling a warped version of the truth because it makes a better blog post. To be honest, it was actually me who invited our friend to come over because I adore this friend of ours and he makes any day of the week feel like a party. I’m the one who asked Kevin to smoke a big piece of meat because I wanted the smell to waft through the windows all day. I’m the one who told Leo to climb in the box and act like a goon.
Just kidding—he did that one all on his own.
Really, the only gift I wanted was to see my boys outside shoveling dirt into my garden. And they delivered!
But there was more! Kevin knows how much I love Builders Bars, so he had the boys write encouraging messages on a few boxes of bars.
They call them “Self-Esteem-Builders Bars.”
But there was more! The one thing on my Japan to-do list that I didn’t get to do was eat a rainbow grilled cheese sandwich, so Kevin made me one on his own.
And so, if we’re being completely honest, it was a perfect florty flateth birthday.
A convo between Rocco and Vincenzo: Rocco: Alexander Hamilton was alive in the 1600s
Vincenzo: No; he was alive the 1700s.
Rocco: Vincenzo, I’m telling you, Alexander Hamilton was alive in the 1600s!
Vincenzo: You’re right. You are telling me that. But Alexander Hamilton was still not alive in the 1600s.
Vincenzo and Rocco are pinning Leo down on the chair, trying to stick a piece of tape on his forehead.
Me: Leo, do you ever wish I had had one more kid so you didn’t have to be the youngest?
Leo: No, but I sometimes wish you didn’t have two others!
A convo with Vincenzo:
Me: Vincenzo, I just got an e-mail that you were absent from fourth period. What was that about?
Vincenzo: I was absent from fourth period? … Oh yeah, I remember now.
Me: Where did you go?
Vincenzo: I realized right before fourth period that I had a test in math that I was going to get like a 1% on, so I skipped it and then took the test after school instead.
Me: *tries to wrap brain around what he just said* Me: So what did you do for that hour?
Vincenzo: I went to my car to study.
Me: *eyes bug out* Me: Okay, just so I understand it, you went to your car to study for an hour so you would get more than a 1% on your math test?
Vincenzo: Yeah.
Me: And how do you think you did on your test, after studying for a whole hour?
Vincenzo: Pretty good!
Me: Based on the kind of math you did right before fourth period today, I don’t know if I’d be that confident.
Vincenzo:*scrolls through his discord feed to show that he can’t hear me any more*
You know how my boys always try to mess up holiday cookie decorating? Like if I make Halloween cookies, they reshape them to look like Christmas or Valentine cookies? This year I decided to beat them at their own game. When they saw this year’s batch of Easter cookies, look on their evil little faces was priceless:
They got right to work.
Here’s Kevin’s best creation:
Here’s Vincenzo’s interpretation of the egg the Easter bunny hatched from before dying on a cross for our sins:
Even I got in on the action this year!
I did make a few actual carrot shaped cookies because every year, Vincenzo does his best attempt to decorate one correctly, and I wanted him to have that win before he goes off to college. This year’s would have been great…
…if it weren’t actually a Christmas light.
The actual carrot cookie cutters got reinterpreted as the sides of the Batmobile.
Rocco really outdid himself this year!
So those were this year’s Easter cookies. To show how far I’ve fallen, this is the tray of cookies I brought to Easter brunch five years ago:
And here is this year’s tray:
Happy Easter anyway, from all the Mouthies and also our cats.
For the past few months, Rocco has been working full tilt on TSA. Not the airport kind of TSA; the one that stands for Technology Student Association, which is kind of like Olympics of the Mind (which is now called Odyssey of the Mind). There are a bunch of teams that make or do something for a big competition—everything from children’s stories to fashion design; from computer programming to silent films.
Meetings started in January. The kids were required to attend an after-school meeting every Monday, with optional meetings before school at 6:30, and an optional meeting after school on Thursdays. Can you guess how many meetings Rocco went to?
All of them. He went to all of them. Rocco is what you might call driven. You might also call it some other things, but let’s stick with driven.
He was on five teams: game design, trebuchet, tech bowl (like a knowledge bowl), systems control tech (where they’re given a box of parts and told to build a specific thing), and robotics. Of all these, game design was his favorite. He and his team made a game called Shift, where each level unlocks a shape that has special abilities, all of which are needed to fight the Evil Square at the end of the game. Often after coming home from a ten-hour day of TSA plus school, Rocco would eat a quick dinner then get back to work on coding. Most weekends he had his team over for 8-hour work days in the basement. They ate so many Oreos, Nabisco could have been their team sponsor. They were peeing straight LaCroix at the end of those days.
After months of toil and troubleshooting, suddenly (finally!), the competition was here. I dropped Rocco and a bunch of kids off at the hotel and recognized the feeling in the air instantly, from all the competitions I did growing up. Forget the “playing for fun” feel of our the boys’ rec soccer games. This–this feeling I knew! Anxious excitement, teenage hormones, and the confidence that out of a crowd of hundreds, I would rise to the top. I mean Rocco would rise to the top. It was intoxicating.
Later that evening, Rocco texted that he forgot his nice shoes at home and could I please drive them down? I asked what he’d do for me in return, and he said, “Win first place.” Then he realized he forgot his laptop too, so I said now he also had to yell, “Hot diggity dog!” when he won first place. While we were (mostly) joking, everyone from the advisors to the other two game design teams from his school knew that Shift was something special.
So it was especially heartbreaking when the next morning the judges posted preliminary scores and Shift didn’t even make the top ten. To rub salt in the wound, the other two teams from his school did. Rocco cried. Strong, tough, resilient Rocco cried.
Their advisor went to investigate. Surely, there was some mistake? The other moms and I got busy trying to find out exactly who judged the video games and exactly where they lived, and also planning a Shift-themed party for when the team returned. As the day went on and the text saying it was all a big mistake didn’t come, our hopes of Shift winning dwindled, then disappeared. I kept picturing Rocco seeing the scores posted, searching for their team number, not seeing it, searching again. I kept feeling the emotions he must have felt: shock, then confusion, then devastation. I imagined his heart, broken in pieces on a tacky hotel carpet.
Then later that night, he sent me this picture from the fashion show, and I stopped worrying about his heart.
To be sure, he was not officially in the fashion show, but he and his friends had made a creation of their own, and Rocco was allowed up on stage to model it. He texted me: “The crowd went wild.”
That’s Rocco for you.
The awards ceremony was Saturday. We went there hoping Rocco would at least make it on the stage for trebuchet, which was his second best event. And he did. Second place!
…and then again for systems control (second place), robotics (third place) and tech bowl (first place!!).
Hot diggity dog!
Rocco returned full of stories, like how for systems control, his team had to build a parking garage that allowed in only three cars at a time, and each car had to be a different color. “That one wasn’t too challenging,” he added. He told of how their robot stopped working minutes before the competition, so he talked with the judges to find there was one remaining spot, 20 minutes later. He discovered the motor had burnt out, then remembered they had an extra motor in their systems control box so he sprinted to that room and back and got the robot working with minutes to spare. For tech bowl, they were seeded 12 out of 12, but they annihilated two of the top teams to make it to the championship, which they won on a triple tie-breaker question.
He had funny stories, too, like how when they were trying to go to sleep, one of his roommates kept saying, “Skibbidy” at random intervals, and how they put all of a different roommate’s stuff in the mini fridge, and how his friend cannonballed into his team’s cardboard boat during the just-for-fun competition.
As soon as we got home, I thought Rocco would crash into bed. But instead, he headed downstairs to start working on the sequel to Shift. His suitcase wasn’t even unpacked yet.
For the first time in over 20 years, I got on a plane all by myself. Me! The one who uses Starbucks stores as a navigational tool. Me! The one who once had a panic attack on a plane and jumped over three rows of passengers to get to Kevin when I saw another plane in the sky. Me! The one who can’t lead the family through the mall without accidentally veering down that one weird wing that has a Footlocker and a calendar store.
My family had slowly been preparing me for my first solo flight over the past couple years, letting me hold my own license at the security check, entering my own birthdate at the kiosk, and tying my own shoes after our bags were screened.
And I did it! I didn’t make a single wrong turn at the airport. I was amazing.
So what all this preparation and excitement lead to?
Mainly holding cats.
And taking pictures of cats.
Once, my friend accidentally got my picture of cats.
But it’s okay because she was shredding chicken, which heralded the cats.
Over our weekend in St. Louis we went to a spa and improv theater; the botanical gardens and art museum. We took walks and made parmesan risotto. One afternoon we went out to lunch and no one even whined when we wanted to browse the home decor section afterwards.
And if you think that is wild, you should have heard our conversations we had about interesting books, compelling documentaries, and healthy recipes that everyone will enjoy.
Maybe “girls’ weekend” means something different when you’re in your late 40s vs early 20s? IDK, it was my first one.
My friends were kind enough to share some selfies so you have proof I did occasionally set the cats down.
The return trip was just as easy as the journey there, except the part where I didn’t know how to get out of the airport and kept wandering between baggage carousels 10 and 14 like a wayward piece of luggage. But eventually I made it out, where Kevin was waiting with my favorite protein bars and a bottle of iced tea, partly because he loves me but also because now that I’m mobile, he’s worried he’s never going to see me again.
He doesn’t need to worry. I’ll be busy reading all those interesting books, watching the compelling documentaries, and trying out healthy new recipes for a while. I’m not going anywhere soon. Less than 20 years probably, but more than one year.
It’s only been a week since my last post, but Japan seems ages ago. It feels less like I’ve just gotten off the biggest ride at the amusement park and more like I’m holding onto a warm mug of tea. One final post, and it will be time to start dreaming of our next vacation.
Speaking of tea…here’s a random picture from Obubu Farms. Feel free to offer interpretations in the comments.
And here we have the tiniest of cream pitchers:
This piece of art in our hotel looked like it was painted by Mr. Hanky, the Christmas poo:
Here are some charming almost-correct translations:
(It should be…but is it?)
(Who know where they’ll be later!)
I hear Nobember is lovely in the spring.
Here’s something you’d probably forgotten about:
Vincenzo’s new “fit:”
Something to make you cringe:
And finally, the boys standing on a red bridge.
So there you have it: ten days of sushi and green tea, temples and shrines, samurai museums and Imperial palaces, cherry blossoms, skyscrapers, trains, mochi, gacha gachas, plus an iconic red bridge. The only thing that was missing from our trip to give us the full Japan experience was an earthquake.
Oh wait, we had one of those too! A 4.6 on the Richter scale that made our hotel shake and started Rocco on an instant analysis of how big the earthquake was and where its epicenter was, as if he were some kind of expert. Irritatingly enough, he was pretty much right.
Welp, looks like we made it to the end of Japan. That leaves me sitting on the couch here, holding onto my metaphorical cup of tea, hoping it stays warm long enough for me to make it to my next vacation, or a singular sunny day…whichever comes first!
You know the nice thing about blogging? I don’t have to carefully craft every word, or bring my rough drafts to a critique group, or obsess over whether it’s good enough or unique enough or perfect enough. I can publish a janky post with awkward transitions and uneven pacing that ends in an unsatisfying way and you don’t even mind. So, with that being said…
From Tokyo we took the shinkansen (bullet train) to Kyoto. The only picture I got is of the boys waiting for us to buy tickets.
The train was moving too fast to take pictures of anything we went by. We passed right in front of an enormous Mt. Fuji, and by the time I told the boys to look outside, the whole mountain was gone, poof!
Kyoto was a nice change of pace. Still a big city, but not a mega city, and with plenty of day trips a train ride away. On Wednesday we visited the deer at Nara Park. They were much easier to take pictures of than the shinkansen, mainly because we had crackers.
If you bow to the deer, they bow back!
(I think that one was just looking to see if it dropped any cracker crumbs, but we’ll count it anyway.)
When you’re out of crackers, you have to put your hands up like you’re under arrest or the deer nip at you.
We fed one deer so much, he thought we adopted him (he’s guy in the back, trying to blend in).
Next thing you know, he’ll be leaving half-drank cans of Bubly around and wiping his hooves on our good towels.
On Thursday, we traveled even farther out to tour the Obubu tea farm so Vincenzo could earn some street cred at his bubble tea shop back home.
Fun fact: green tea is made from leaves of a specific kind of camellia plant.
Unfun fact: In the summer the workers have to wear boots because of the snakes, whose bite is usually fatal without antivenom. Also, there are wasps the size of birds.
Cool fact: The things that look like streetlights are giant fans. When the temperature drops too low, sirens go off in town and the fans start circulating air to keep the leaves from getting damaged. And now you know why this is a cool fact instead of a fun fact.
I love these next pix of V. I can’t believe how grown up he looks!
The tea farm tour included pounding mochi, eating lunch, tasting countless kinds of tea, and making matcha.
Everything was tea-licious.
Especially the mar-tea-nis.
(Dads aren’t the only ones who can make those jokes!)
On Friday we planned to visit the monkeys at Iwatayama Park. We didn’t exactly know how to get there, so we tailed the confident British family in front of us, only to find out too late that they were going to the Bamboo Forest. We did find these three monkeys to take pictures of though.
The other monkeys were just across the bridge, so we got to see them too.
We couldn’t shake the first ones though.
Since the monkeys roam free at Iwatayama park, there are sign warning you not to look them in the eyes, not to point your camera at them, and not to crouch down. This sign below was most helpful in reading their facial expressions.
I think they meant “scared.” It was one of many charming mistranslations from the trip.
On Saturday, we visited Nijo Castle.
Fun fact: The inside has lots of murals, many of which show tigers. Tigers don’t exist in Japan, but Japanese artists became intrigued with them after seeing tiger pelts in the 16th century, so they just guessed.
A sign at Nijo castle said that the Japanese believed every fourth tiger cub was a leopard…but when I fact-checked on-line, everything I find says that they believed female tigers were leopards, which is also a fun fact but you can’t have both, so please pick only one.
Also, the floors of Nijo castle sound like birds chirping when you walk on them. A sign at the castle explained this happened over time due to how the nails settled over time…but on-line research says it may have been designed that way on purpose to alert residents of intruders. Maybe these shouldn’t be called “fun facts” but rather “fun hypotheses?”
We also swung by the Golden Palace, which was originally a retirement villa built for a shogun. You know, something that might be named Shady Groves if it were built in an American suburb today.
Fun fact: The Golden Palace was burned down by a fanatical monk in 1950 and rebuilt. In fact, pretty much every temple and shrine we saw had been burned down and rebuilt one to four times.
On our last day we stopped by the samurai museum.
We learned that samurai soldiers could be as young as 13, so they put moustaches on the face masks to make them look older.
That means that this guy below here—the one in the middle—he’s just one year plus a muskrat moustache away from being samurai ready!
My favorite fun fact from the museum: a samurai’s sword can only slice through a body three times before it needs to be sharpened again.
Leo’s favorite fun fact: The samurai also loved guns.
And like that, our vacation was over. I’ll write one more post of random odds and ends, and then this trip will be all packed and preserved and ready to be stored for future reference.
Oh wait, looks like someone has a quick question before I sign off for today.
Remember in the 80s how when someone went on vacation, they’d invite you to their basement to watch a slideshow about it? Well pull up a musty beanbag and crack open a can of Shasta while I talk through the slide reel here.
On our second day in Japan, we toured the Imperial Palace gardens.
*click*
[For those of you who weren’t around in the 80s, that’s the sound of going to the next slide.]
*click*
*click*
*click*
We had to wait in line to get our picture with this cherry tree, which bloomed two months before the cherry blossom festival. Pfft. Main characters.
[From here on out, you can make your own clicks.]
Here we are taking a mochi ice cream break to keep the troops from rebelling, which usually happened around the 7,000th step of the day (and also at 15,000th, and doubly so at the 20,000th).
Here we are at the Senso-ji temple:
Here’s the crowd leading up to it:
and a crowded street in Asakusa:
and a crowded street in Hanajuku:
If the crowds are this bad in February, I can’t even imagine them during cherry blossom season! But someday I would love to brave them because as lovely as these next views are, I couldn’t stop thinking about them all blissed out with green leaves and pink blooms.
The next day we went to Team Lab, an interactive art exhibit that’s impossible to fully explain. One room had us wading around in knee-deep water with fish and swirly lights projected on it.
This next room we had to crawl into so as not to bump our heads on vines of flowers slowly ascending and descending from the ceiling.
There was a maze defined by thousands of floor-to-ceiling light sticks.
One room had giant balls we could push around.
And the last one was full of giant metal eggs on a misty bed of moss. Naturally.
The rest of the Tokyo pictures are kind of random. Here are the boys in front of some fake buildings:
The boys in front of some real but far away buildings:
A family selfie in front of some close-up buildings:
And a picture that shows why I prefer selfies over a random person offering to take our photo:
I think that’s it on the slide reel. Let me just check…
*click*
Oh, whoops! How did those get in there? Heh heh, well this is awkward…
MrsMouthy's Weblog 
