Because A Rundlet Is Tiny

This morning Caroline asked for oatmeal. OK, I said.

"With a spoon," she continued.

Well, of course.

"And some milk."

Like always...

"In a cup."

Caroline reminds me of a boss I had once who would dole out work to me in thirty minute increments, thus insuring that I was just bored/busy enough to devise but not implement any of my numerous plans to murder her. Not murder Caroline, of course, because she is mommy's own little rumbly-tumbly sweetie sweet girl but my former boss, who was... not. My point is that Caroline is a micro manager, a mini micro manager, and it is a disconcerting to have someone 34 inches high (growth spurt!) not only telling me what to do but exactly how to do it.

Patrick dressed her the other day, which is why she wound up wearing a hand-me-down flowergirl dress that is two sizes too small over a turtleneck and leggings. Patrick kept asking her if she was a pretty princess ballerina girl in that squeaky-high baby voice most people reserve for addressing dogs of the toy variety and she spent the entire day twirling and walk en pointe.

 

I guess she is a pretty princess ballerina girl. Who knew? I always think of her as more of the kevlar-and-keds type but if she wants to let her older brother treat her like a particularly spoiled cotton candy Pomeranian who am I to interfere.

We went to the playground yesterday and I took this picture and I like it.

And I took this picture the other week and mentally bookmarked the fact that I wanted to post it, along with the comment that Edward is such a tidy, careful child that he even paints neatly.

Which was true as far as it went but as far as it went was Tuesday.

Note the feet. It's like he's rebelling.

Back when my days started around noon and ended with off-brand Kahlua milkshakes my roommate Doug and I used to play a lot of Balderdash. Balderdash is a board game based upon the premise that your vocabulary is not nearly as large as you think it is and it introduced me to the word merkin. A merkin is a pubic wig and it is such a pretty-ugly gnome of a word that I have loved it ever since. Merkin. Merrrkin. Unfortunately outside of the Regency (a ribald and artificially hirsute era) you don't encounter it all that often. Even if a dear friend does succumb to complete alopecia you don't offer to accompany her merkin shopping; if anything you promise to cancel her Brazilian and take her to lunch.

Anyway, when Steve said that his friend Ted (married to my friend Noelle) had invited him to something called a Firkin Fest the first and last things I thought about were merkins. Firkins, merkins... I liked the idea of Steve and Ted strolling past booth after booth admiring all the latest in short-haired wiggery. I am simple and it amused me. After numerous peevish repeats, "No Firkin. Firkin. With an F. FIR-kin. Fuh fuh fuh FIRKIN, you idiot, stop talking about pubic hair... it's a beer tasting, damn you, called Firkin Fest" I finally gave up on merkins - however and alas - and turned to the concept of the firkin.

"You mean a puncheon," I said with the confidence of a former Balderdash champion who likes both history and liquor and the history of liquor.

A puncheon (or tertian. or firkin. not merkin) is a measurement used in the casking of wine and it equals 84 gallons which is a coincidence because I am pretty sure that is the exact amount Steve consumed on Saturday. Noelle dropped them off in Saint Paul and I agreed to pick them up and in between she and I commiserated over the fact that we felt like it was prom night and we had agreed to turn a blind eye to their implied inability to behave in exchange for knowing they were not going to be endangering themselves or others.

In general Steve is an abstemious man but he does have his moments and I think on Saturday he had about twenty of them. I talked to him a little after one in the afternoon because he had tried to convince me to pick Villanova in the suicide pool and I had said that I had a bad feeling about them and went with Cornell and it was important to me that I call him in the middle of his beer tasting to gloat. So I did. And he sounded fine and was properly appreciative of my overwhelming basketball bracket awesomeness. A few hours later I called again to tell him I would be packing up the children and coming to get them and the conversation was a little less... lucid. First it took four tries for him to even answer his cell phone and then when he did he yelled "Hello! HELLO! HELLO! HELLO!" into it about fifty times like someone who has never before used a mobile telephonic device. Once he shut up long enough to hear me telling him to stop shouting Hello at me he said, all surprised, "Oh is that you? Did you call me?"

Good LORD.

I read once that men around the age of forty are a billion times more likely to cause their own accidental deaths than any other age/sex. It's like they reach d'un certain age and their brains short-circuit and they suddenly decide that they might have a knack for chainsaw sculpture after all.

Is this sexist? I suppose it is. God knows I love men. A LOT. My brother is a man and he's one of my best friends, not to mention Steve to whom I devote my slavish adoration. But sometimes - like when I am rolling a specific someone out of his coat because he has "fallen asleep" fully dressed after Firkin Fest or when that same person climbs on the icy roof with pitchers of hot water to melt the snow off the satellite dish - I wonder about them. Do I ever drink one too many glasses of wine and wake up with a slight headache? Sure. Do I ever drink so much in the middle of the afternoon that I am unable to figure out why my pants are ringing? No I do not.

Huh. Am I going anywhere with this? Apparently not. Do you want to tell me a story about the dummy dope(s) in your life? Of course you do. Then we can all sit (safely and daintily) on our couches and drink a (small) glass of wine and smirk at each other. Prissily.    

Comments

[kcc]

"not to mention Steve who I adore"

Really, Julia, really?! I expect better of you -- it's not enough to be witty, to forever be able to create some fabulously creative turns of phrase, but for heaven's sake, you and I (and probably Patrick) know that you meant to write "whom". Ahem.

[kcc]

Oh, and for what it's worth, my 41-year-old husband still comes home occasionally (every six months or once a year, maybe?) and must spend some time worshiping at the porcelain god's altar. I find that shocking -- I learned a good 17 years ago that if one has an evening like that, one feels like death for the entirety of the next day. I cannot understand the appeal of that level of inebriation anymore! A glass or two too much of wine, an ill-considered tequila shot, some saucy banter, fine, but vomiting? Just say nooooo.

[Anjali]

Second time posting and just to gossip about the husband. I just could not resist it. :)

In 2003 a day before New Year's eve, husband drank one too many Hurricane's in New Orleans. Which led him to behave like a lunatic while passing a huge Police station (we were walking). Somehow got back to the hotel room and he proceeds to throw up the entire night.

I DO NOT understand the appeal of drinking too much. I did warn him that if he repeats performance on New Year's eve, I will personally hand him over to the said Police who he found so amusing the previous evening. :)

I have been your devoted reader for over 4 yrs now. Love reading your blog.

[Julia]

Aw cut me some slack. I learned grammar on the mean streets of DC and I write posts with small people hanging off my elbows. It takes a lot of concentration for me to get whos and whoms and between yous and mes all squared away, you know.

I have changed it, though, and I appreciate the correction as now I have limited my embarrassment to a select few early readers.

[HereWeGoAJen]

My husband can't find the remote, ever. And about fifty percent of those times, it is on his chest.

[TeacherMommy]

I'm divorcing the dummy dope, but then I don't adore him and he was the prissy one. I was the one with the wild edge and that edge has become a little wi[l]der and thus I found myself spontaneously skinny dipping in a heated pool on Halloween because I had had too many jager shots and It Was Hot. There weren't people around, though. At first.

May I still sit on the couch with you, though? Because I'm trying to avoid the jager and stick to safer things like Sex on the Beach and Hurricanes.

[unexplained]

No particular stories jump to mind, but my 40-ish hubby and his two 40-ish best friends ARE leaving early tomorrow morning for 3 days in Las Vegas... He asked me to hasten to add that he hasn't worshipped the porcelain god from drinking in at least a year :-).

[Candace]

Hmm. Another drinking story from me. Many years ago (I think our youngest child, now nine, was about three?), my lovely husband went out with a friend, someone he doesn't see very often. They went to a bar; fine. No problem with that. Until it became THREE A.M. and he wasn't home. And wasn't answering his cell phone. I started calling hospitals and was just about to call the police when he sauntered in. I think it was 4:30 a.m. I started shouting, he was taken aback. Seems he was *going* to call me but his friend talked him out of it because it was "too late to call." Meaning, he would wake me up if he called. Did I mention his friend was single? And hadn't had anyone waiting up on his return since he lived at home, in high school?

Yeah. I wouldn't have minded the 4:30 a.m. thing if I had known he was ALIVE. Phone calls = good.

[Kate]

My dummy dope went out for a night with the boys a couple of months ago and the next morning admitted, in a hungover sort of way, that he was pretty sure someone had a picture of his bare ass on their cell phone. I haven't seen it show up on Facebook yet, though, so I think he's in the clear.

[Denise]

Ha! Funnily enough, "merkin" and drunk husband coincided for me, too, on a recent weekend in NYC. I can't really explain the backstory, but I spent a whole sleepless nght saying the word "merkin" over and over in my dreams, while my husband was about eight Scotches to the wind. I don't know..is it any fun to be that drunk?

SInce that weekend, I"ve seen "Merkin" on a vanity plate AND a hospital wing.

[Sarah]

I find it entirely odd that I just learned the meaning of merkin sometime in the last week. And here it is again. Strange O Universe.

My husband forgets that he can only drink so much, having been a heavier and perhaps less dumb man when he was younger. The ones I remember least fondly but most hilariously was a wedding when he couldn't stop vomiting at th after party at the bride and groom's house. (Luckily, in my mind, it was their fake wedding and not their real wedding night, long story.)

More recently, he did this beer in the woods orienteering thing. And forgot that they did hard liquor afterward. he was shocked when he couldn't stop being drunk and vomited and then was hungover all weekend.

I now designate him the designated driver for most heavy drinking events.

[Brigid Keely]

Merkin is totally a fun word, isn't it?

My husband gets buzzed very quickly on wine, and never remembers what a lightweight he is until he's drunk half a glass and then comments loudly and at length on how strong the wine is "this time."

His family makes slivovitz (basically, moonshine) and he drinks that with no problem at all. Wine is his weak spot, apparently. His achilles drinken'.

[ellbee]

Oh lord. My husband decided a few months ago he wanted to lose some weight. While he usually enjoys beer, he thought that switching to mixed drinks would be less calories. After a few Jack and Cokes at bar trivia one night, he came to the brilliant conclusion that the mixer is most of the calories and switched to straight Jack with a glass of water on the side. Fast forward to the end of the evening, which found him passed out in our bathroom at home. I had just about decided to take him in a blanket so he could sleep by the toilet when there was a tremendous crash--he'd fallen asleep ON the toilet and fallen off. He then proceeded to crawl into the shower stall and moan for two hours.
Ahem.
Did I mention that prior to this, I always considered my husband the smartest man I knew?

[Kate]

No particular dummy dope stories, but in my younger days I used to take music lessons at a school that had a "Merkin Concert Hall." It always made me laugh.

[susie]

My dear husband spent the wee hours after our engagement party puking his brains out while I tried (and failed) to sleep in the adjacent room. He succumbed to impressive peer pressure from our parents (!) and his best man, so I don't really blame him, especially considering he is my ever-ready DD most of the time - as I definitely have the wild streak in this relationship.

OOOOHHH but once way back in the day before we were even considering dating one another (but when we were friends), he was VERY inebriated and got - no lie - SEDUCED into having a threesome (!!!!) by two of our friends with whom we play ultimate frisbee. This from the man I had to talk into having sex in the shower.

I just took your comments section for a more licentious turn than I intended; I do hope it amuses more than it offends...

[April]

LOL TeacherMommy makes me laugh; all the more so because of the screenname on her story. Forget small glasses and swing for the fences...

[Ellie]

Haven't really got anything to say about the husband/drinking.

I am wondering about your health and the results of various and sundry labs you were to be subjected to when last we spoke (wrote/read)?

[Jackie]

I dropped my husband off at the bar with two other friends (so three of them in total). I told them I would pick them up again at 2am on the corner when the bar closed. I arrived at 2am, and they had doubled. There were SIX of them waiting for me. Apparently my husband ran into friends and kept offering everyone rides home.

By the time I got everyone home, we landed in our driveway, and when I prodded my husband awake, he looked up and said, "where are we, how did we get here?" I laughed, and pointed out we were in our driveway, and since I was in the divers seat... it was a far assumption that I drove us here. hehehe

I got him upstairs, and put him to bed, only for him to fall out, not once, but THREE times, until I finally let him sleep on the floor. Then while he was, um, praying to the plastic bucket (as the bathroom that was 5 feet away was too far for him to crawl too) he kept saying, "I got nothing left to give babe, I don't know what THEY want from me?"

"Ya dear, I don't know what THEY want from you either" lol

I still bug him about that night...

Also, a quick story from personal experience, if you are out, and have decided to share a couple jugs of beer with another lightweight friend, and you are less dancing, and more trying to stay up-right. If a creepy old man asks if you two are gay, the correct answer is always "yes". Consider that a public service announcement. lol

[Alexicographer]

Um, do the dummy dope stories have to involve alcohol? My DH's is funny not least because it's the sort of thing that (sigh) I'm prone to doing. We were working (and living) in different states. He flew up to visit me for the weekend and then had to drive (using a rental car) to a workshop for his job about 4 hours away. I dropped him at the airport to pick up his rental car. He took a taxi back to my apartment, 5 minutes behind me (this being pre-cell-phone days) because when he handed his license over to the woman behind the car rental desk, she asked, "Sir, do you have a VALID driver's license?" Um, no. No, he didn't. He had recently celebrated his birthday and forgot that his license needed to be renewed before he turned ... whatever. And as he was now in a completely different (and not neighboring) state from his state of residence, there was no way he could renew it until he got home. Which wasn't to be until after a week and another weekend had passed ... the plan had been for him to drive to the workshop, then drive back up and spend another weekend with me, and then fly home.

*I* drove him the 4 hours, then drove myself back. Fortunately the hotel where he was staying was near the conference. He was there the week and then we made arrangements for my college roommate, who lived near where he was, to pick him up and take him to her place until I could come get him (I'm not kidding, and she's a lovely wonderful person).

So ... yeah. Again, I do stuff (more or less) like this all the time, but still ...

[Helen]

I love the pictures. The last one is the best.

[Leslie in Toronto]

This post and the ensuing comments are the a great example of the why I am so very glad that blogging was invented. All hail the blogging goddess.

On another note, I too have been the wild child in a post-divorce-the-priss situation (solidarity Teachermommy sistah!), and have done more than my fair share of tequila shots with beer chasers (yes, that is backward, I know). I would love to join you all on the couch sipping a martini and laughing at the man-folk, cause they really are laugh-worthy, aren't they :)

[tgsdmom]

Amusing narrative, as always, but the real gems of this post are the pictures. Mmmm... and Hahaha as well.

Still waiting for an update on latest health concerns...

[Heather]

A couple summers back, I was worried sick when husband hadn't come home from the bar by 3am. At least I knew he'd walked there, but with the kids I couldn't go searching. Finally I heard something out in the backyard, and found him sleeping in one of our lawn chairs. Apparently he'd been home for hours, but found it easier to alternate sleeping and vomiting outside. A "hi honey, I'm home, I'll be out back" first would've really helped!

[Lori]

OOOHHH..if I could only send you a picture. Of my fourish one, that is. Daddy came home a little punch-drunk once and little one saw him bowing and scraping in the bathroom. Not long after that, little one gets sick--pukish sick. After throwing up his toenails, he murmurs from within the bowl, "Do I look like Daddy?" I admit to abandoning the child to roll on the floor of the bathroom.

[Lizzy]

OMG, these are funny.

My hubby rarely drinks to the point of excess, but... On a business trip to China got pretty plowed, and proceeded to vomit his new temporary dental crown right down the toilet (the crown was a front tooth). Looking like a hillbilly with the shakes was apparently enough to keep him from ever repeating that experience. So far.

[Pam L]

We don't drink to excess , well I don't ever anymore, and the DH only does so when he's home and being quite generous with his home made wine. Summer nights with neighbors converging outside can result in him going back into the house several times to retrieve yet another bottle, and then he complains that everyone drinks the red wine (His favorite, I generally prefer the white). He doesn't get sloppy drunk though, although I have had to tell them to quiet down so I can go to sleep. The last time he was THAT drunk, it was before we had kids and he went to the company Christmas party alone as I was sick. He had to be driven home, helped in the house, and then he crawled up the stairs and spent the next while wretching in the bathroom across the hall while I covered my ears with the pillow and did not feel sorry for him, silly man.

[Pam L]

Oh, but the real Dummy Dope story we tell about the DH is the time he was showing how manly he could be by eating about a teaspoon of Dave's Insanity Sauce (super hot) without reading the warning label, which said put one drop on a cracker, or your food. He went to the bathroom and I heard a thud and found him passed out on the floor between the toilet and the sink, not a large space. i was all "Oh my God, are you OK" panicking until I realized he was asleep and snoring happily, I guess. Happy to be out of his painful misery I guess. I tried to get him out of that tiny space but could not lift him so I put a towel under his head and straightened out his neck a little bit as it was kind of twisted funny, and he was OK after a little while.

[Heather]

My dummy dope chose our wedding night to really show me what happens when he has too much to drink, like he had it in the bag so he was letting it all hang out or something. After begging, pleading, reasoning, and finally screaming to get him in the car to leave the reception he was stuffed into his seat by the best man and we were off to the hotel where he sat in the car while I went up to take off my wedding dress all by myself. Much fighting ensued in which he broke up with me a few times and accused me of wanting to be with the best man (who I had met for the second time the day before) and ended with a very uncomfortable gift opening brunch the next morning.
I still don't remember how we made up after that but we obviously did and it's an unspoken rule in our house that, if we are together, I am the one who will be doing the drinking unless I'm knocked up. I'm a much more pleasant drunk and manage to puke only in the toilet and not all over the house. The same cannot be said for him.

[jan]

Why would you braid your, um, personal nether hairs? (A random reference to The French Leutentant's Woman, which I recommended to a fellow comp lit graduate student decades ago, who had a high crew cut, smoked dark skinny European cigs, and had worked with Ezra Pound's daughter. He told me it was such a bad book that he was too embarrased to respond.) Yah, I wash and trim. This does relate to drinking and ... responding....

[Anon!]

I can honestly say having suffered from that particular form of alopecia that my husband would have strongly objected to a merkin- lack of hair in my nether regions (and legs and armpits for that matter) was somewhat of a positive for him- despite it being very weird for me. But I would have appreciated the offer of a shopping companion, lol!

[Jennifer LB]

Yea Cornell!! You must have willed it to happen just to make me care about the NCAA - something I had never considered until reading your blog.

Sorry I can't come up with any drunken husband stories. Just a 3 hour wild goose chase through the barren countryside of Southern France looking for a cathedral that turned out to be a dilapidated 1 room chapel.

- a fan from Ithaca (home of Cornell)

[winecat]

Well my dumb dope has done more stupid things than I care to name. The last one being getting the Gator (go check out the John Deere site if you don't know what it is) which ended him in the hospital with a hip replacement and the bone just below his knee being rebuilt. Fun times.

And yes that tiny sweet dictator of yours looks exactly like a fairy princess. Great job Patrick. Now she just needs wings.

[Miss M]

Oh dear. Well, I'm the dummy dope in this story... Just this past Saturday I proceeded to get obliterated drunk with a boy I really like and then spent most of the night vomiting copiously into his kitchen sink. SEXY.

[Olya]

I am from Russia, where it is not a party if there is no alcohol poisoning afterward, and when I was about 13 my Dad crashed our car and was consoled by a friend a few days later. The count was in litres of vodka per person. They got so drunk they went all the way to appearing sober again. About half-way home Dad decided we should leave the bus (so that he could throw up) and walk an hour home through a dark park, where he attempted to steal flowers from other people's flowerbeds so that I could take them to school the next day (September 1, first day of school, all good Soviet children brought flowers to their teacher). He tried to get me to sing songs, but bought my terrified excuse of "let's go home and have Mom sing with us" and stopped. Fun times. For years, I would freak out whenever my parents had a drink, and I think I was 18 by the time I was able to drink at a party. Which made my already pretty awkward teenage years more so - try to explaining to belligerent drunk people that your non-drinking ways are NOT a sign of disrespect (because nothing says respect like getting so drunk you can't remember what you did the night before, right?). Needless to say, I was not invited to many parties ;-)

My American husband don't normally drink, but we had this discussion once after I came to pick him up from a friend's party:

spouse: "Does American vodka have less alcohol in it than Russian vodka?"
me: "Nope, same percentage."
spouse: "Then I am drunk."

And then there was a 3 am phone call from GenCon one year: "I am at the bar, we are drunk, this hot chick is totally trying to pick me up, but I said NO." Good for you, dear ;-)

[Chi-An]

About 8 years back, my husband went to a bachelor's party. He arrived back home at about 3 am and stashed the groom-to-be in our basement. The next morning both of them were slightly hungover, nothing too bad.

I asked my husband what they did at the party.

"Well, you know, we went to this great steakhouse, went to a pool hall, then went to a strip club."

"Uh-huh. So did you have a good time?"

"Yeah, the steak was FANTASTIC. The pool hall was okay."

"What about the strip club?"

"Eh, whatever. But that steak dinner was incredible!"

One of the moments that illustrates why I love my husband.

[RocketGrl]

My dear dummy dope.... About seven years ago we held a dinner party consisting of another couple, their six month old and two additional male friends. Short version, lovely steak dinner, red wine and an awesome chocolate tart with homemade berry sauce. DH added vanilla ice cream. Lovely rich dinner, right?

Around midnight, the women carried the sleeping little tyke upstairs to bed. The men decided to have a 'blind' taste test of seven types of Cognac. I returned around 5 am to see them still sitting around the dining table with 2 empty cognac bottles on the table and the others half empty. Seeing me walk in the room must have been a shock as the vomiting commenced -- right back into the wedding crystal cognac glasses. Funny, I cannot even think of drinking from them.

One of the guys wound up in the middle of the room asleep with the trash can on his lap, his head in the can, snoring. So DH locks himself in the bathroom. Drunk geek interchange: "Ping"... "Request timed out.""Ping"... "Request timed out." "Ping"... "Request timed out".
For. Two. Hours.

Funny memories, but my lesson - don't leave the bottles ON the table.

[Sally]

My beloved, like so many others, doesn't tend to go out drinking too much any more. When he does, it's with clients, and he works in the type of job where not keeping up with "the boys" (both in drinking and in general shenanigans) is seen as weakness. Therefore these evenings tend to end... badly.

The last time he went out with clients, he woke up the next morning in a real suffering state, and eventually admitted that the reason for his headache just might be the fact that at some point they had started SNORTING HORSERADISH SAUCE "to see what would happen."

No, that doesn't make any more sense in context. I have no idea what they thought they were doing.

He's out tonight at some form of dinner-drinks-overnight stay thing. I expect to have another story in the morning...

[Special K]

I locked myself in the bathroom (the bolt broke clean off in my hand) when I was home alone and my darling fiance was out drinking with workmates. Yeah yeah, so I needn't have locked the door when I was home alone... force of habit. I knew there was a chance he wouldn't be home for another three and a half hours, and that when he DID roll in, he's be too rat arsed to come to my aid (it transpired that I was correct on both counts). I ended up using a pair of tweezers as a makeshift screwdriver, and took the entire bloody doorhandle off. It took 45 minutes.

I was sooooo unsympathetic when he was puking his guts up the next morning.

[Andrea]

My fiance called me, drunk as a skunk, at 12:30 a.m. a couple Fridays ago. I had been solidly asleep for 1.5 hours and was running a large work event the next day. I was not impressed.

I was even less impressed when he proceeded to tell me, incoherently, that he had tried to walk home (we live in the suburbs, at least a two hour walk from downtown where he'd been) and had subsequently gotten lost. And he wanted me to come get him. But he didn't know where he was.

How someone who's an intelligent lawyer by day can turn into a slurring, directionally-challenged loser by night never ceases to amaze me.

[Callie]

Oh, have I got a drunk husband (well, fiancé actually) story. Last March we went to a friend’s birthday party. Our son was 9 months old and it was the first time I’d been out past 7 p.m. without him so it was kind of a big deal. You would think I would have been the one who went crazy and drank a few too many, right? Nope. Jason, aforementioned fiancé, proceeds to drink like a frat boy at the encouragement of a few other (childless) men at the party. He insisted on going in with me at my parents’ house to pick up the baby, where he babbled incoherently about wanting me to take him to Denny’s. When we pulled into the parking lot of our townhouse, he threw up outside my car. As my son and I were going to bed (we co-sleep) Jason was in the bathroom retching his guts out. Then I hear the shower come on. And more retching. Then a plunger. Finally I got up to see what the hell was happening in there and I find him naked in the bathtub wading in his own vomit because he got sick in the shower and it stopped up the drain. At that point came the apologies. “I’m so sorry. I’m so stupid. I’m a bad father.” Yadda Yadda. The next day, when he was still quite miserable and attempting to sleep off his hangover, I decided to let him wallow in his misery alone and took Cash to my parents’ house and out to play for a while, where I was met with my mother’s questions about Jason’s drinking habits. Jason woke up and panicked when we weren’t there, thinking I’d left him for good. I told him if he ever pulled that nonsense again, I just might.

Men.

[MJ]

My goodness, this gives me a whole new perspective on our former President Bush and his references to "my fellow Merkins."

[Jenthecatalyst.wordpress.com]

I love love love this post!

Quoth my dear 39-yr-old young man, after his requisite Lyon's pub Summit EPA on Friday night- then Fogo with his pals- then Mission American Kitchen- then a hotel bar (he doesn't "remember which one")- and upon his return home I was laughing at his absurdity:

"turn off your laughing valves until tomorrow morning when you can let out a hearty chortle. That's how I roll. That's right."

[Melificent]

Can I recommend that Steve try using a super-soaker water gun filled with hot water to get rid of the snow on the satellite dish? It's my boyfriend's recommendation and will make the process safer without losing the boy-appreciated-fun of it all.

[SarahB]

Oh, it's too much that comment #3 has a who/whom error! The police "whom" he found so amusing!

It's just too much.

Meanwhile, to poke some fun at myself after being an obnoxious grammar queen, I have been the one of whom care needed to be taken, when I had three very large drinks on an empty stomach the weekend after my husband came home from his deployment. And he was the DD, so he had to endure my antics sober.

[Jana]

Have you seen the blog/book "Tiny Art Director"? Your description of Caroline reminded me of it.

the blog: http://tinyartdirector.blogspot.com/
about the book (on Boing Boing): http://tinyurl.com/yhopjfm
the book on Amazon: http://tinyurl.com/yf5atvx

[Val]

My dummy dope, whom I love dearly, made me so mad one night, by getting stupid drunk and then walking out of the bar for some fresh air, which turned into him walking home but neglecting to tell me. By the time I found him walking on the side of the road, and told him to get his dumb ass in the car, he was mad [at what? who the hell knows.] and refused to get in. So I said "fine" and I peeled out leaving him to walk the rest of the 8 miles home. Screw that, I'm not going to argue with him about "get in the GD car already" at 1:30 AM just so he can go on and on about how he's fine, he needs the air. Dummy Dope.

[ali]

Julia, you make me laugh! Thank you.

[Kate (Bee In The Bonnet)]

Um, my husband is German (like from Germany, not like "my ancestors came to America from Germany 100 years ago"...), and thus thinks he is master of the beer. And typically, that is true.

But he also teaches in the German department (and is friends with several other Germans and Austrians from around the school), and so is surrounded by colleagues who have a grand appreciation for booze, and an overestimation of their tolerance of alcohol. And they like to get together and drink every so often (if by "drink", I mean "DRINKDRINKDRINK").

Back in December, we were gathered at a colleague's house, who lives about a mile from us, and as I was in the early part of a twin pregnancy, it hit 9:30 p.m., and I was just too tired to stay any longer. But my husband was having a great time, and someone offered to drop him off later on their way home, and so I took the car and left. It's worth noting that when I left, we had been there for several hours, and my husband had consumed maybe 5-6 drinks, and was very mildly buzzed, but nothing too serious.

Less than an hour later, I was happily snuggled in bed, totally zonked, when I am awakened by our doorbell (which is shrill and vibrate-y, and set to a ridiculously loud volume due to the age/hearing ability of the former homeowner). I stumble to the door, and find my husband standing on the porch, keys in hand, unable to unlock the door. He's accompanied by the kind wife of a friend who had come out of her car to try to help him get the door unlocked, and she is holding him up, because he can't stand on his own. And she apologizes and helps shove him through the door.

Husband and I had arranged in advance that he would sleep in the guest room so that he wouldn't wake me up when he came in (HAH), so I went back to bed as he set about making preparations to go to sleep. It got quiet for a while, and so I presumed that he had made his way upstairs into bed.

Instead, twenty minutes later (just long enough for me to have fallen back asleep), I am awakened AGAIN by the buzzy-loud doorbell, and I jolt out of bed, race to the door, wondering WTF is going on, but it's just my husband, who had decided to go and sit on our front porch and smoke a cigarette. He stumbled when trying to open the door to come back inside, and caught his hand on the door frame, which is where the doorbell buzzer is located. I just looked at him and said, "GO. TO. BED... NOW." Which he did.

He got the full tongue-lashing the next morning (and he agreed that he wasn't interested in drinking like that EVER again, which to his credit, he has not), but still, we couldn't figure out how he went from slightly buzzed to completely effing OMG-DRUNK in less than an hour. But anyway. Ten weeks pregnant with twins, so tired I couldn't see straight, and my husband repeatedly awakens me, so drunk he can barely walk, using the most jarring, irritating noise in existence. It's as fun as it sounds.

So that's my drunk-stupid husband story. That's almost as good as the time that we sent his colleague home from our house shitfaced, and his wife found him the next morning passed out with his pants around his ankles in their walk in closet. Or the time that same colleague came home drunk from a different colleague's house and woke his wife up and asked her, "Hey. HEY. Wanna do it?", which she politely declined. Wow. Yeah. The department clearly drinks, a LOT...

All I can say is that I cannot WAIT for this pregnancy to be over so that I can stop being the designated driver (and maybe have my own little revenge midnight-bell-ringing episode... I'll wait till the husband is desperately sleep-deprived, and the babies are finally snuggled down asleep, and then stand on the front porch all night randomly ringing the bell, waking up the whole house...).

[Anne]

Four years ago, when I was about six weeks pregnant with our first child, at about 3AM on MOTHER'S DAY, for god's sake, I woke to realize that my husband still wasn't home from a bachelor party he had attended that night. I called his cell phone three of four times. On the fourth time, he picked up.

"Hi," I said. "Where are you?"

"Uhhhhh, I'm not sure," he replied.

I will not bore you with the details, but it turned out that he was so drunk that not only could he not find his car (a good thing, upon further reflection) but he could not even get up from the bus stop bench where he was sitting with his head in his hands to tell me what intersection he was at. Luckily, I knew the general neighborhood where he was located, and he was able to crane his neck and locate the name of the business he was next to, so I called 411 while driving around at 3:30 in the morning and located the address.

He spent the next twelve hours on the bathroom floor, at which time he told me that he thought he needed to go to the ER. Luckily, with IV fluids and some injectable anti-emetic meds, he was fine within a couple hours.

But SHEESH.

Might I add he was 37 years old at the time?

[Perrymoffitt]

While I adore my DD, he imbibes too much. He is in the theatre and these people lubricate every situation with booze. That being said, I will share with you my favorite.
We had a plumber doing very big sewer work in the front yard and somehow my husband convinced this otherwise lovely man to leave him the keys to the backhoe for the weekend. I came home from work around 4 on a Saturday to him and 3 friends taking turns driving the backhoe around the front yard in much the manner of a bucking bronco. A beer in one hand, the extendable bucket waving in the air in "interpretive dance". Entertaining, except my husband saved his most impressive jolts and bucks for the moment he was directly under the power lines. I toyed with the idea of pulling back out of the driveway and leaving for good but in a moment of genius, I went into the house, got a cold beer and distracted the DD with it long enough to get the keys out of the backhoe. The next day he asked me if I had the wisdom to video tape any of his "dancing" before I ruined their fun. Sadly, I did not.