My cat is yelling at me again. The reason my cat is so upset  is the speech recognition program I am using.  The program is stupid.

I need to use this because of the increased pain in my hands.

I haven't been using blogger or face book because of the pain in my hands.  Speech recognition was supposed to make things simpler, but instead even with very expensive headsets, its certainly been a nightmare.

I take pains to enunciate very clearly when using voice recognition with a spendy headset. However, no matter what I say, this program takes one out of every two sentences I speak and turns everything into gibberish.  If I relax instead of enunciating, what gets printed on paper is probably phonetic Martian, as spoken by a denizen of the Andromeda Confederation and then printed on toilet paper with off-market printer ink.

So, if you can't read this, blame the goddamned cat.

Ollie Plays the Piper

Playing the Piper -- A man walked into a bar pulling a wagon on which was a huge a salt water tank with a cute little octopus in it. He bellied up to the bar, with the wagon behind him, and announced, "My octopus, Ollie, can play any musical instrument you hand him and I have 60 bucks that says you can't stump him." A skeptic handed a violin into the tank and after examining it for a few seconds, the octopus played "The Flight of the Bumblebee." His partner tossed an olive into the tank and Ollie snatched it and ate it; and the skeptic handed over 60 dollars to the fellow with the wagon. Next, an accordion was dropped into the tank. Ollie grabbed it excitedly and fumbled around it briefly, then played "Lady of Spain" on it.  His shill collected another 60 bucks and backhanded him a fish fillet which was grabbed and eaten tout de suit. An ocarina elicited a British hornpipe,  the man collected another 60 and Ollie nibbled down a pickled starfish.  In barged a fellow with a set of bapipes. Ollie grabbed the instrument and began to fumble with it; his movements become more and more frenetic, with more and more splashing and the splashes going higher and higher. The seconds became minutes while the thrashing and splashing continued. A few minutes stretched into almost half an hour. The guy who'd brought in the bagpipes said to the guy with the wagon, "Well, give me my 60 bucks, dammit." Ollie's owner said, "Not, gonna happen, bub. As soon as Ollie figures out he can't fuck it, he'll play it, and when he does, I'll owe the little bastard a a double order of bouillabaisse."

Water Wings and Other Things

This is the second very cold, more overcast than usual spring here where I live.   Luck starting anything from seed last year and some this year has been ludicrous.  Things just end up mildewing and never sprouting, from *wet *cold.  Temps have hovered just above freezing at night for a month longer than usual, making this the coldest spring in WA state recorded history, colder than last year, which was dank and mildewey enough.  Climate change has begun here.  Today it started out promising and has finally turned to heavy rain. 

I had 11 tomato plants going, only two of which were actually red tomatoes -- most being black, yellow or green or striped varieties, and between the wind and the fact that they're too small to take advantages of the cages, it's a wonder they didn't all snap off and blow away.
My late tulips are beaten to shreds, as are the anemones and the blooming poppies I bought.    All the pots in the garden -- huge ceramic things-- show sprouts from summer bulbs, and from assorted perennial wildflower starts that sprang up from seed nearly 2 months after they were sown in them, but onenever knows.  I have over fifty TINY little poppy sprouts, some Icelandic and others oriental, but they're literally less than 3mm high and almost invisible.  If the heavy and large raindrops didn't beat them do death, the water pouring into the 10 gallon ceramic tubs may have floated them up and then into runoff and up and over the lip of the huge pots.   Poe, my granite crow got pelted hard enough to wash the redwing blackbird poop off his head.   I aquired Poe to startle the robins out of my garden, because they were snarfing ittty frogs, not just worms, and I LOVE my frogs and want them in the yard.  Robins are stupid.  Redwings, on the other hand, NEW Poe wasn't animate.  He's kept the robins out, however.

If this doesn't revert to a more normal weather pattern, the nurseries around here are going to have to start selling immature plants with water wings in order to make people go on and buy them.

::sigh::

Briefly on bin Laden

Everyone and his mutt probably has blogged copiously about Osma bin Laden having been found and killed.  It's been 9 years and 8 months since 9/11/2001, give or take a day or two.

How nice that President Obama kept that promise.  That turd from Texas who's more or less my age didn't keep HIS promise.  He had no intention of doing so. The last plane out of this country before the no-fly edict was locked down after the 9/11 attack was BUSH FAMILY'S MAKING SURE BIN LADEN RELATIVES GOT OUT OF THE COUNTRY ON A PLANE.  They're all friends, all old bidness associates, and are still in bidness with one another as I type this.  You don't bite the family of the hand that feeds you your ill-gotten gains by embarrassing them by hunting down and killing one of their relatives, even if that relative is a sociopathic murdering embarrassment.

So, getting back to President Obama.  He hasn't kept his promise to us in this country.  He didn't clean up the banking industry.  He's sold women and our rights to our bodies down the fucking drain.  He's appointed NO ONE to cancel out the Constitution hating SCOTUS judges and pawns of facist multinational korporations, Roberts, Thomas and Scalia.  Obama's appointees VOTE WITH THEM, as often as not.  Obama's Atty. General, Holder, has smaller balls... and a lot less potent ones, than a field mouse.

Okay, I'm the person I've been waiting for.  So are all progressives.  Or so that's what Obama tells me.  *I've been doing MY job, standing off korporations as well as I can, harranguing my legislators with one-issue letters and calls on issues of importance to me.  I've done the same on human rights.  HE's muttered once or twice impotently and then signed utter raping bullshit into law, god dammit.

So what has killing bin Laden done?  It kept a promise.  It won't make much of a dent in terrorism, abroad or at home.  Most of the terrorists in this country are home grown.  They're teafuckingBAGGERS.  They're goddamned racist Republicans.  They're Christian extremists, facists, anti-constitutionists, luddites, antiscience, deniers of global warming, KORPORATISTS.

And they commit erosions to my poor beleaguered nation's constitution and governmental transparency daily, continue to wage occupations abroad to get oil to line their pockets with, continue to stall any kind of green technology unless they can dismantle it or rape it to the point that no individual can afford it, continue to make it impossible for the middle class and the poor to afford decent health care and preventive care, and continue to lie about it, completely baldfaced.

God dammit.
 

Musing

I wonder what Merry Maids charges to degrease a waterbed?

I Wish I'd Known Haylee Fentress

Something happened this week which really bothered me. Two 14-year-old girls from Lynn, Wisconsin committed suicide. One of them is someone I was related to, though I had no idea of her existence. Her surname is the same as my middle name. She was chubby for her age. She had red hair. She had been bullied at school because she was "fat." During a sleepover at her mother's house, she and her best friend left suicide notes and killed themselves.


The town these girls is from at less than 150 families in it at the time of the 2000 census. It seems inconceivable to me that the people in that town, the adults at least, could possibly have been unaware that they were being bullied. It seems inconceivable to me that the adults in that town didn't know exactly who was bullying those little girls.

The television coverage particularly on NBC television has consisted of denials on the part of the school board in nearby Marshall that they were aware of any bullying, and assurances that there would be grief counselors standing by for the students.

Where the hell were counselors when these girls needed help? Why didn't anyone on that school staff step in and stop the bullying? Why, when she was the target of bullying, was the girl who shares my name expelled from school the one time she fought back?

Even in a consolidated high school where students from several small towns attend, I still find it inconceivable that the faculty and administration were unaware that those two girls were being bullied. By expelling the victim, the school system has shown the nation that it deals with problems by blaming the victim and sweeping the wrongdoers acts under the rug.

It passes me off beyond belief.

Well, what the hell. Wisconsin is the home state of that sociopathic bigoted bitch, Michele Bachmann. I suppose it's to be expected.

However, I STILL wish I'd known her.  I put up with a lot of crap in grade school.  I had a weird name.  I was smart, but I was too people-stupid to hide it.  My mother wasn't a part of the established social circles in the school district and that left me with no mother-friends, children of other mothers the same age.   Everything I felt showed on my face, and *that invited bullying.  My mother made a lot of my clothes.  Most other kids' mothers did not make their clothing.  That left me open to ridicule, though frankly I thought my clothes were better made than store-bought... they were, but the point was not to "stand out." 

I survived public shool, but I'll guarantee you that I hated most of it.  Maybe if I'd known this little girl existed, if I'd known any of her family in Minnesota, had been in contact with them, there might have been something I could have said which would have made her feel less despair than she and her best friend, both felt.

Then again, would having the same name as a little girl be enough to bridge a 48 year gap in our ages, let her feel she could have picked up the phone and called me or Emailed me and asked me to call her.  Had I known her family, would her mother have resented my saying or doing anything? 

I'll never know now.  My name, my given names, have been a source of irritation at times in my life, and at others a source of uniqueness.  To see and read that someone sharing my very unusual name committed suicide -- ended that name, fills me with such sadness. It's as if a piece of me just removed itself.

And yet, I never met her.  Now no one will meet her, will see the promise on her that all youth carries.

And that breaks my heart a little more than it is already broken. 

I wake up so many mornings, go to sleep so many nights, aching with age and less than perfect health, bone tired, alone except for the cats.  I'd love to have given her some of my years, because I've had a bunch of good ones.  I just had to survive a decade and 2/3 or so of privileged asshats and clueless morons to get to the point that I could start having some good years. 

As I said, it pisses me off.  Pisses me off to tears.

Albatross

From a Daily KOS article (permanent link http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/03/07/953664/-NE-Woman-denied-abortion,-forced-to-watch-baby-die ), a woman in Nebraska was forced in December of last year to watch her infant die shortly after she was through with her forced gestation.   Woman-hating anti-choicers are horrible sh!ts.

The motherfvcker (term is ACCURATE in what the law did emotionally to the woman in the article) who rammed that legislation through should have been forced to not only hold that infant for the 15 minutes of its life, he should have had to wear the remains around his neck for six months, EXACTLY like a rotting albatross, as penance.

On Banana Peels

From my perspective on events which swirl around each of us subjectively day in and day out, things remarkable to us which aren't based on subjectively prioritized tasks and needs are based on the skewed up imaginary relationships which those around us make up regarding their invisible friends and the "magykal powers" of those invisible friends: and given that I have a dwindling patience level concomitant with my dwindling remaining lifespan; if I didn't skewer the more idiotic and/or malicious applications of that magykal thinking onto the lives and actions of others by those prone to projective imagination there'd be one more loobie loose in the general world population creating bloody and often fatal havoc on others with various weapons of random mutilation and without regard to the consequences of such behavior.

I wish to hell there were MILLIONS more people applying banana peels to rampant and deliberately irresponsible stupidity of imaginative projection!
For one thing, the competition to lob, lay and otherwise position the banana peels would be not only overt and fierce, but the increased accuracy and efficacious use of those peels would greatly benefit the general public in all things, crucial and incidental alike.

For another thing, those blithely snargling forth day in and day out to spread their imaginary bullspit would be effecitvely neutralized. At this point in time, it appears to me that not only are they seldom neutralized, the fvckers are gaining ground.


Finally, the increased consumption of bananas, metaphoric or actual, would eliminate all but the most medically severe cases of potassium deficiency in the world.

Home Owners ASSociations

The title says it all.

Did I Kill a Rodent?

In the recent dream, the little rodent habitat was deep navy blue and habitat trail tubes came out of it in umpteen directions from its seat on a table by the window up along the ceiling, around the walls of teh room, down a  bookcase and out the door to other locations in the house, eventually joining all its various tunnels in a round ball nexus sitting on a dry sink in the front hall.  The house looked to be full of transparent and translucent segments of "vacuum cleaner tube" through which a rodent could race at top speed, totally safe from cats.  It seemed as much a part of the house as the neutral Kilim beige walls and had been there as long as he walls.  In the dream, at least.

I woke up having realized in my sleep that I hadn't seen the occupants, seen the habitat, seen or thought about the house in months, hadn't fed the occupants, hadn't changed any bedding or put out any water.

I looked around the house for 20 minutes before it dawned on me that the only pets I have or have had for 10 years are the two cats.

But I felt guilty all day.

Ironics 101

Today Spike TV is runnning Band of Brothers from start to finish.  My friend Tina's son Joey is home on leave from a forward COP position in Afghanistan.  I wonder what he makes of this or if he's even aware that it's on. 

I could be watching this on DVD, but then I'd have to mess with remotes and changing disks.  I can tune out the ads and write when they're on.  This was one of Erek's favorites.  As he was dying, without even thinking about my liking it, he gave it and a bunch of DVD's I bought for ME as well as him to his son who managed to get here a day and a half before he died.  I went out and replaced everrything he gave away because they'd been my faves as well.

And it may seem odd that I have such an attachment to a war series.  I'm antiwar. However, this was a part of my father's youth and some of the most intense memories of his life, just as Viet Nam was a part of Erek's life.  It haunts those who survive it.  It buries survivor's guilt into many of them.  In some who survive it, they are motivated to overcome that survivor's guilt by working to make the world a better place.  Sometimes just making themselves into the best people they can be makes not only their world but also the worlds of those around them a better place.

Some don't deal with the guilt.   They just bury it and it rears itself in the consumption of everything without an end to the hunger, because they don't know what the hunger is.

2 winters alone

18 months after Erek's death and I should  be writing an ad for Philips goLITE Blu.  The item is a little full-spectrum daylight lamp with high intensity that one sets a couple of to 3 feet from the side of one's face and sits for 20 to 30 minutes once or twice a day.  It stimulates the endorphins in one's brain chemistry that are necessary to sleep when one is supposed to, that are necessary for one to think relatively rationally, that are necessary to break the depression of long dark winters at a high latitude when one has not been born and acclimatized to months of short days, overcast and long nights.  And they take the place of prescription pharmaceuticals in some people when those folks are faced with a depression so deep and so vast that suicide doesn't seem wrong but instead seems like the only rational way clear of that depression...the only relief.

There isn't an antidepressant on the market -- and several since taken off the market and several that never made it out of trials and on to the market -- that hasn't hit me with every negative side effect listed by the manufacturer, up to and including tardive dyskinesia.

Without that light this post wouldn't appear on this blog.

Grief

My husband's 61st birthday was May 20, 2009. It was his last birthday.

I'll have to back up some. In 2008 we bought what we jokingly referred to as The Redoubt. It's a house. It's a 2009 square foot house with an open plan downstairs, a loft around the stairwell upstairs and bedrooms and bath leading off the loft and hallway, as well as a master suite and bath which are as big as our previous apartment. I shit you not. I have now got a Tony Hill Gazelle, a honking huge pair of Twin XL Leggett and Platt electronic elevating and collapsing frames with Tempurpedic mattresses connected to a ginormous teak or something Vietnamese sleigh headboard, three monster dressers, a desk, a MONSTER of an apothecary chest serving as a fourth dresser, three bookcases, two rocking chairs, a reading table 3 feet across with chairs, lamps out the wazzoo, and you can still hold square dance practice in there. The closet to that room is bigger than one of our former apartment bedrooms, and the bath has a tub that is so seldom used, it'd make a whopping good planter, except that the bathroom is an interior room and there's no window for natural light in it. You can sit in the shower to bathe and most people would or do.

Anyway, it was NOT the house of our dreams after 8 months of looking for land on which to build or put a triple wide manufactured home (there wasn't any, it was all covenanted such that no land with stubbed water and sewage from one border of WA state to the other W. of the Cascades is available for such a thing) or a house within our price range, from inherited money. We found one 60 miles north of where we were living, a neat brand new house, no former resident. The price was doable and we paid for it. Outright. Hey, at 60 or just on the verge of it, a mortgage is just pouring interest money down a goddamned hole.  I knew if we didn't buy this one, Erek would pout and sigh and snipe until I bought a hurricane split, a house with a living room on one level, half a story above it the kitchen, the two baths, a large bedroom (the master, with NO walk-in closet, just one wall of shallow closet with *mirrored sliding doors which made the room look smaller and feel like an apartment rental that had seen better days.  The windows were tiny.  Down a full story of stairs was an UNFINISHED basement with stubs for washer/drier and freezer, a blank space for a bathtub next to a toilet with no wall around it, no sink and then a room with 3 of 4 walls more or less done, including one "wall" which was sliding glass doors to a weedy huge back yard and an itty deck off the kitchen's breakfast/dinner nook with no stairs to the fenced in yard from the deck. The front yard was huge.   The garage was at basement level with room for a pair of cars, a the freezer and laundry an a smallish work room for serious saws sanders, etc., for a guy of course and storage space for yard tools, mower, edger, etc..  I'd have to find a contractor to finish the house which could cost upward of 40K not included with the house cost, I'd have to landscape and do the yards, because Erek claimed allergies.  I'd have to drag the vacuum up and down 3 stories to clean... Mention "hurricane split" to me and I immediately think of sucide.  Seriously.

This house was not what I wanted .  To get mail you have to walk almost a round trip mile to the kiosk -- no post boxes allowed, the houses are full sized homes, but less than 25 feet between them -- in this state that makes them "detached condominiums" which is bullshit.  However it means no mail privacy... No excuses.. disability and age irrelevant, blah blah blah.  The kitchen island is a fucking mess, there's no pantry, insufficient storage for me and food prep after putting spices and machines where i can get to them - well food prep is 1 square fucking foot.  I shit you not.n   I can manage, but a lot of people would go completely bugfuckingnuts.  Stove is a glass flat top because I flatly refused to dismantle and clean one more heat source well whether gas or electric  11 years later I have clean black burner top that is not scarred, chipped or covered with burned food.  I can cook a well with the flat top as most foodies do with gas.  Nyah nyah... the freezer is in the garage. I WANTED IT IN THE PANTRY.  I have no pantry.  The dishes are on a pair of stacked collapsible book cases.   Nothing is where I wanted it.  The living room is tiny, but no one visits so who the hell cares?  

Erek refuse to let me put solar on the roof or A/C in to make the bedrooms livable and workable, as his office was in one of the other two bedrooms -- and we roasted, even with fans.

I put in solar the spring after he died, and had A/C joined to the forced air gas/electric heat that came with the house.  I also had the boiler removed and a hot water on demand heater installed also.  The solar more than pays my electric bill.  It generates enough electricity the utility company is required by federal law to buy that my property taxes are also paid. Thus I only have gas, water/sewage/trashcollection bill to city and bundled single car and home owner insurance bills to pay. and on SS and a bit of savings I intended to get by for a long time..  

I still hate this house, but I have a treaty with it,  I maintain it and I can live here with the two cats; and it won't fall down on my head... so far so knock wood .... hard.

This is the place from which we intended to pass our elder years, from which Erek could work until he retired, etc., etc., etc. And for a year, of frantic unpacking, placement, lugging of barrows of crushed rock for a postage stamp back yard, of breaking down boxes never to be used again, of racing hither and yon for stuff we didn't have from years of apartment living, it was our heaven on earth.   WRONG.  he got kitchen to office meal service, coffee on demand, and he never did a fucking thing to maintain the house, not even dust or take the trash to the curb for pickup every Monday.   He ran no errands, wanted nothing to do with any neighbors, spent all his spare time online with kinky friends, mostly women he mentored (cold fury was building when the roof fell in on us -- and I had an appt. with an atty about divorce and hanging on to the house, I had a prenup to protect my one time inheritance which bought the house -- the appt the day of his birhtday which I did not keep and never rescheduled.)

Two blizzards, well snowstorms with significant accumulation, back to back last winter just at Christmas/NYrs, we had it made. The house was stocked, we had no power outages, the freezer was full, I shoveled the driveway once, took photographs by the bazillions, but it was a hoot. So what if we were snowed in for 10 days? Cakewalk. Erek worked from home. I slogged his lunches upstairs, he came down for dinner. We retired together, got up together, got the mail together,  I explored the itty town we moved to but he had no interest in it, no urban feel to the town, he never visited the library I didn't have a kindle, so I went once a week and came back with 10 or 11 books and read them within a week, the cats had room to run and windows facing every direction. They were cool with their 4 cat trees, stairs, loft rail to vulch from.    I felt trapped, Erek had his online pals and half the time we didn't even watch TV together after dinner -- and on his days off, he went online and stayed there unless there was a movie he wanted to see. I now had room to make art and STILL he would see me pick up a sketchbook or a camera and he just HAD to have something or have me fetch him something.   He never did a load of laundry, never even picked his clothes up off the floor or put the dirty ones in a hamper I'd drag downstairs to the mudroom where the builder put the goddamned washer-dryer hookups right inside before the door into the garage.   I did it all.  He was king in a one-serf castle.  He loved it.  

But last Christmas 2008 Erek's neck began to hurt. I mean REALLY hurt. Occasional painkillers from old Viet Nam war injuries to his back weren't being consumed occasionally and slowly, so he bit the bullet. We decided we'd pay the extra 300 a month for better insurance through his firm starting in January and see our old doc, whom our previous insurance wouldn't allow.

By  March 2009 he was in agony. He went back to Illinois/Ohio and visited his family and went to a small SF con business meeting and came home feeling punk.  

Neck, still.   And he was losing weight.

We got him into his doc's office, but SHE wasn't there a couple of weeks before his birthday. This male NP who was shirty to me, referred him to UW sports medicine. Appointment on his birthday.

So by then, his arm is going numb. He's having trouble lifting it. On his birthday the guys at the specialty clinic in downtown Seattle take a look at his arm on MRI, which he could not lie flat long enough to complete, and his spine is wrapped in 3 places with up with tumors; to which they allude, trying not to freak out, and they insist they must do surgery in the morning.   These two young docs were arthropedic sports medicine fellows, second year of three each.  They were gray at the gills and had a really REALLY shitty time making eye contact with him and when I force one of them to look down into my eyes, he teared up, while the other guy spoke to me about agent orange and tumors and how the Army admitted the Air Force had sprayed the border between Cambodia and Viet Name with agent orange but the NAVY (and Marines) denied it, so his having been Navy, the NAVY would deny to the VA and our insurance that agent orange did anything to his body.   They said their boss would be in the following morning, they'd called him and he said to schedule Erek for 10 a.m, surgery,  admit him immediately, a meal right then (5 pm. but nothing solid by mouth after 10 pm.)  I got a call at midnight up here in Marysville to pick him up or he'd take a 67 mile cab ride home.  I hauled ass, got there and the floor nurse tried to physically restrain me from helping him dress.  Erek just stared silently at me and looking at his face, I took a risk of being jailed for assault and got him into a wheelchair and took him to the garage bundled him into the car I'd sell within 1 month of his death, drove home as if we were sneaking through enemy territory and the next day I got our doc, who didn't want him to come in, to find us an oncologist (neither of us had seen the CD with the images the MRI managed to capture before Erek panicked and in severe neck pain could no longer lie flat.  Off to Seattle Cancer Care Alliance for a formal death sentence, which they tapfuckingdanced him around for 32 days, never did a thing but Rx enough painkillers to fell a herd of wildebeeste, and NEVER EVER LET ME HAVE A COPY OF THE IMAGING OR LET ME SEE IT, WHICH WAS A VIOLATION OF HIPPA AND MY MARRIAGE CONTRACT AS WELL AS STATE AND FEDERAL LAW, and they turfed him out 72 hours before he died, to avoid having his death on their morbidity hospital report, goddess, damn those motherfuckers.  I rented a hospital bed, an oxygen concentrator for him, made a hospice home visit appointment, and we went to a hair place and got matching cheapass mannish short short hair cuts, because somehow Erek thought this asshole at SCCA wa going to give him chemo... no way, the doc KNEW it was the tail end of stage IV and home hospice would hide him from their failure.

It did.  45 minutes after I signed the contract for Home Hospice and the contract nurse and her trainee had left me with a nurse's aid for help with Erek, he quit breathing.

On June 22, 2009, at 2:03 p.m., my beloved husband, the man to whom I made and from whom I extracted a promise of 40 years of marriage at age 47, ceased to exist.  On this level.  He was now with Kittipuss, several cats of his I never met, several cats of mine he never met,  a few dogs including the one which one of his drunken stepfathers had taken out and stomped to death, his late father who was murdered in Seattle 16 years before he and I married and whose killer was never identified or found or punished, and all the other souls he or I had ever loved, including my late father who might have liked him but told me that he wasn't the right guy for me because in the end he didn't respect me nor I him any longer

In spite of the unfit, I "grieved" until about 2015 or 2016.  One day I got up whenever I got up and I didn't feel guilty for not having a sad-on and no longer blamed myself.  And most importantly, I started drawing and got out the pastels and did something Erek had PROMISED me I could do when we moved in with one another and THEN deliberately sabotaged my doing the entire time I was with him... MAKE ART.  I bawled for three reasons....1) My skills sucked after so many years unused  2) At 67 I felt robbed of almost 2 decades I could have been painting, taking class after class and improving AS a working artist (something I doubted I'd ever become then); and 3) My sadness had NOTHING to do with grief for Erek .... but FOR MYSELF.. and I felt free free free and there was a glimmer of joy under those tears....

On May 20m 2009 Erek got a "happy birthday motherfucker, you're a dead man," and on June 22, he left. He didn't want to leave but as he said, "I'm sorry, but I've outlived my fucking warrantee, Baby. I didn't intend for this to happen."

He was a nice guy.  we weren't a good fit.  One of the other women he met a woman who gave one of my cats a kitten for the cat's Christmas present and who idolized my husband but had too much honor to bust us up which In retrospect, I wish she HAD done, Mary, was a far FAR better fit.

I ran away from my mother to be with Erek.  She was hell-bent on smothering the life out of me.  That's a rotten reason to marry.  A very very VERY bad reason.

java

For all the years of my life, my mother made coffee the same way, in a Revereware percolator pot. I think she must have bought it right after she and Dad eloped and they set up housekeeping. 6 scoops of coffee, a pinch of salt over a filter in the drip basket of the pot, fill the pot to the bottom of the pour spout entrance inside the pot with ice cold tap water, set the basket on its stem pipe and base into the pot, put the top on, put the pot on an electric burner on high and sit around in the kitchen the 4 to 5 minutes it took for the water in the pot to come to a boil and start perking, wait until it was perking steadily, lower the heat to medium, set the timer for 12 and a half minutes and go about one's business until the timer went off, come in, remove the pot from the burner, let it sit for a minimum of 5 minutes, then remove the filter basket, dump the grounds and pour a cup of coffee.

To reheat, one was supposed to put the burner on medium and wait until the coffee got hot, checking from time to time, but not let it boil.

The coffee had to be Maxwell House.

It was an okay cup of coffee, never mud, not particularly bitter. Coffee isn't sweet. It's slightly bitter. It has a coffee taste. Nothing tastes like coffee.

However, as coffee goes, it was bland.

I have a sweet tooth. Most of the time I like coffee that tastes like really strong coffee-flavored hard candy. On the other hand, I *can and often *do drink coffee without sugar or without any diary product in it.

I used to sneak coffee into my milk when I was a child. I liked coffee in my milk on cereal. Particularly tasty was coffeed milk over Rice Krispies or Cheereos. On shredded wheat I didn't want anything but milk. I like that just like it was, crunchy and wet. I'd pour only as much milk as it took to get the stuff on top damp and eat quickly, because it was better crunchy than soggy.

However, I loved coffee. It was my favorite flavor of ice cream after peppermint. I liked coffee toffee. I liked coffee hard candies. I liked just about anything flavored with coffee, except shredded wheat.

By the time I went to Colombia for a couple of years of high school, I was having coffee with milk in it every morning. In Bogota, I had a large bowl (taza) of cafe con leche every morning, along with a hard roll with some butter as breakfast.

The school I attended had no cafeteria or vending machines. One had to bring lunch from home. Where the US kids I went to school with took lunches with sandwiches made form peanut butter or velveeta or bologna on white bread bought at the commissary for military and embassy personnel and their families with a bottle of Coca Cola or Pepsi; I'd have a roll with some local cheese and maybe some mustard or honey, depending on how sharp the cheese was -- or I'd have a slice of pork or beef or chicken (whatever we'd had for dinner the night before) along with a bag of plantain chips, maybe an orange or a cup of mango, and a thermos of hot coffee with sugar in it, but no milk.

Other kids might have been logy after lunch, but I was good to go. I wasn't inured to the caffeine in coffee and tea at 15 and 16 years of age. That came much, much later.

Coffee was bought green, recently picked, unroasted, at an open air market in downtown Bogota. The maid and cook made a huge shopping trip every Friday morning before they went to mass. They'd buy coffee, plaintains, maybe a live chicken, pork or beef, rice, oil, sugar, whatever fruit was in season, potatoes, onions, herbs, flour, several bags of oranges and other citrus, and whatever else Leonilde, the cook, thought would make good soups, entrees, snacks or desserts during the week. Eggs were bought from a little tienda (store) across the street, as were occasional postres (little desserts), dulces (candies, which my uncle loved), milk and cream. The shopkeeper kept chickens for eggs and sold them to neighbors, and she had a reliable purveyor of fresh milk, butter and cream and curds. This didn't taste like the homogenized milk US residents are used to. It was pasteurized, but it had a totally different taste. I kind of went off milk most of the time I lived there unless it had been heated and added to coffee, but I fell in love with cheese for the first time in my life. All the cheese made in that country was delicious, fresh or heavily aged, sharp or mild.

Every bite of food I had in Colombia over 2 years tasted out of this world because I could have it with coffee. FRESH coffee. Tintos (little espressos), tazas with milk, iced with a slice of lemon on the rim of the glass, if I wanted.

Rosa and Leonilde would by 8 kilos of coffee beans every week. That purchase took more time than all the others. They'd walk from vendor to vendor, eyeing the green beans, tasting a roasted bean which the vendor had roasted from each pile in which they were interested, haggling over pesos and watching with eagle eyes to be sure they got every gram of beans they paid for, before they were bagged.

They'd bring them home, put the roaster over a burner on the stove and roast a half kilo to a kilo at a time, hand cranking the beans as they cooked in the roaster until Leonilde's nose pronounced them done -- then they'd dump them on a cookie sheet to cool a bit. Coffee was ground by hand in a metal bur crank grinder as it was used. Thus, whether one was having tintos or they were making an entire drip pot of coffee (they didn't perk it, Leonilde said that ruined good coffee) for service for the family (including Rosa and Leonilde), What one got was roasted that morning, ground just before it was prepared, and it was smooth as silk, piquant as a good wine, smelled like heaven, never bit one's tongue, never left a nasty aftertaste, was never too weak or too strong. It had a slight kick to it, but it never left one's nerves jangling, refreshed one after a long day of housework, school work or office work.

My aunt and uncle and the maids drank tintos all day long. I had my cafe con leche in the morning, fueled up on drip coffee from my thermos at noon and the minute I got off the bus from school and walked the block home, I'd zoom into the kitchen and sit with the maids and talk while Rosa or Leonilde made us all three tintos and told me about the day in the neighborhood and house and I'd tell them about my day in school.

Dinner wasn't until 8:45 p.m. so a few hours later while I was doing homework, Rosa would pop in with another tinto. I drank water with dinner, had tinto or two after dinner and finished my homework, and I still slept like a baby. Coffee didn't keep me up. However it did perk me up.

My aunt smelled like coffee beans when she stepped out of the shower every morning, before she put on lotion or clothes. The house smelled of coffee just faintly, all the time.

To this day, when I smell coffee, I think of my aunt and uncle's house in Bogota. When I think of Colombia, I can smell coffee. When I dream of Colombia I wake up and expect to smell coffee, the dreams are still so intense.

I'll never return, but I still dream of Colombia.  The dream will always smell of coffee.

Coffee, tea or yellow cab?

One year my mother and I made cordials out of everything imaginable. We slaved away at that all summer.

That Thanksgiving I had one of two bizarre feed-the world-type Thanksgivings my then-boyfriend and I put on. We invited everyone who'd asked us to dinner at their house during that year and everyone we owed entertaining to attend an an "in-training" dinner the Sunday before Thanksgiving. We called it an "in-training" dinner because the idea was to stretch one's gut for overeating the following weekend.

We did four 20 pound birds that year, 2 hams all the fixings, including 5 different dessert options. We even made coffee and tea.. All people had to bring was a plate, their own cutlery and drink receptacle and whatever beverage other than coffee or tea they wanted, including their own wine or beer. Over 70 people showed up. Folks were eating in shifts, in every room in our 2 bedroom apartment, the balcony, even on a couple of tables set up outside our front door. People were milling around, there was a lot of hilarity instead of any awkwardness that can occur among those who hadn't met before. The neighbors were also invited and they brought extra folding chairs, etc. One HELL of a party. I had more fun at the second than the first, because I finally blew off trying to get all the food "just right" and took time to have fun instead of hovering over the table replenishing items the second they ran out.

People discovered my cordials after the pig rumps and birds had been decimated. That began a cordial-tasting which decimated what should have been many years' supply of the stuff for one household. We ended up pouring 25 or so folks into cabs after confiscating keys. No one drove home drunk, but there was at least one inebriated person in every car leaving our place.

That summer I'd made cherry, apricot, lemon, almond, peppermint, coffee, chocolate, chocolate-cherry, raspberry, blueberry, cherry-vanilla, orange, lime, ginger-lemon, mango, anise, cardamom-cinnamon, vanilla-honey, vanilla-cinnamon, basil and tomato (YES, with simple syrup.. .haven't you ever had candied tomatoes?); a wierd herbal thing from a recipe of my great grandmother (which we originally used as a base for home made cough syrup along with other healing herbs, honey, and raw lemon juice with cayenne). hat doozy which has in it thyme, basil, marjoram and summer savory (yes, it's sweetened also, and it's delicious with cheese and crackers).

No one got sick drunk, but you should have had to take the "no thanks for the hangover" calls we got for the next few days. Apparently some people had headaches and felt weird clear up to Thanksgiving.

This all began because Mom loved to make her own brandied cherries. Ever the kitchen chemist, I got involved in my 20s when I had my own place. As things were wont to do when Mom and I got a burr under our saddles or a wild hare up our snoots, things just got out of hand the summer before this dinner. We not only brandied over 12 gallons of cherries (I had stained hands for 2 weeks pitting all those bloody cherries), but I took it into my head to make cherry liqueur. At that point is where we both went pretty close to ga-ga. Things went from obsessed to silly.

I spent weekday evenings, and entire weekends either in her kitchen or mine, stirring pots, washing out bottles, begging bottles from everyone I knew, making trips to the liquor stores and buying a case at a time of "high test". One liquor store manager called me asking me if I wanted to buy four cases of a particular brand of vodka because the distributor's rep was in there and offered him a deal. He wanted to know how much extra he should order and offered me a price break. What a pip.

We went through a whole pile of cheesecloth, stained our hands, turned both kitchens into laboratories and had the closets in both dwellings full of bottles from back to door, on the floors. Relatives and friends that year accused us of trying to kill them off.

It's no wonder that completely slipped my mind for 30 plus years.

It's okay to laugh at my boobs when I'm dead, so who gets to light the match?

I see a lot of my mother's family in my brother's face and body type. I used to see a lot of my father's family in my face and body type. The older I get, the less I resemble any but one aunt in my mother's family. She was an unattractive old maid. At death, her breasts were so long that the family who took her clothes to the undertaker remarked that if one could have put mink skins on her long saggy fat breasts, they could have been used to create the appearance of a mink stole. They decided on a closed casket funeral.

The undertaker got into the act. He said he was reminded of those suede bags of buckshot, some of them quite long, used to weigh down blueprints to keep them from curling when one was making modifications. My relatives started it, not the mortician. I think he went along with the flow out of embarrassment at first and then because he got tickled by the black humor.

FWIW, they made her face up, my mother, my grandmother and one of my aunts. The other aunt was in Colombia at the time, as she was most of my life growing up, except for visits to renew her US passport and to shop.

So there I was at the funeral home with a person who hadn't liked me in life and whom I hadn't been old enough not to not like her back. At 12, I was the one who tied her shoes (she wore those ugly square heeled raised one-toned black shoes that laced over the instep), buttoned her best navy print rayon Sunday-Go-to-Church dress and turned down her collar and pinned her jet glass broach across the top button, and threaded her belt and buckled it just the way she did. I found her hymnal and Bible and put them under her hands, too. She detested me. I've often wondered what she'd have made of the respect, and the fact that I choked down my fear of handling a dead body to do it.

She thought I was snippy uppity, too forward (though I seldom spoke, when I did it invariably irked her), too bookish, too pretty, too "polished" thing. I didn't look down when she glared at me. I'd stare right back at her. Her best oldmaidschoolteacher glares did nothing to me, and that pissed her off. She *was a school teacher for 41 years. The city's school teacher had to force her into retirement. She didn't go gracefully. She was angry to be thrown away. She never forgave the school system for that, either. She lived to break up her sisters' and brothers' marriages, made her inlaws lives hell because no one was good enough for them, in her opinion. Not that her siblings were good enough for her, either.

One of my aunts had a cat named (like mine was decades later) Kittipuss. Mom and the other sister used to take this poor cat and dress him up and put rouge and eyeshadow on him because, like a dog, he'd go to the bus to meet his beloved human every day after school. Of course it embarrassed her to have this snow white cat sashay to the corner smeared with rouge and bright blue eyeshadow, wearing a floppy cloth doll's bonnet, oblivious to the smutsch on his phiz, waving his luxurious plume in complete welcome.

My aunt Neil HATED cats and hated Kittipuss in particular. Whenever she came into a room, Kittipuss would get up from wherever he was lolling, stroll up to just out of kicking range, look up at her, glare, put his ears back, then turn slowly and stalk slowly out of the room, with his tail erect and his ears
forward.

Of course Kittipuss was 15 years dead by the time I was born. I wish to hell I could have seen that. I can vividly imagine it. But I didn't dislike Aunt Neil. I think she was a product of her box, her limitations the times, whatever. I stared her back, but I acknowledged her as a complete human being, which is more than she did me. Had she lived into her 90s, by then I'd have been fully adult and my *projection is that we'd have come to an accord. Maybe that's why it occurred to me to insinuate myself into her burial preparations. I can't
remember how I came to be there, only that I *was there, and that the women involved hadn't wanted me there, because they thought it might be inappropriate for a child to be involved in preparing the dead.

I never caught Aunt Neil's eyes twinkling, but there are times when I think that she used to shut herself into her room and have a quiet laugh at some of the things people thought offended her. I could be wrong, though.

My mother was appearing in dreams to me all last month. In every dream she was telling me "Don't forget to...." and I never remember what she was telling me not to forget or forget to do when I'd wake up. It's odd because the dreams are about things here, not in Texas; and she flatly refused to be here. She never came to visit, though she was invited many times. When we were flush, I'd offer to go down, help her pack and fly back up with her. No dice. Never came. Never witnessed that I was happy. Had to remain in denial about it, I think.

I let her ruin the happy, too, sometimes. More than sometimes. She made it clear in a dozen ways, small and large that she detested that I'd married, whom I married; that I chose someone to be with over her. It seems to me that in her books being courted and having beaux was one thing, but marrying someone was a betrayal of one's momma.

And we weren't close when she passed.

By accounts she was well cared-for and gently handled and kindly treated as she deteriorated and died. By that I mean she probably wasn't impersonally handled, not as she drifted toward death, nor in extremis. No one, out of their mind, who dies well-coiffed, with both a pedicure and manicure, without bedsores or a bruise on her, other than that of her post surgical hip and bruises from an IV for the period before she died -- and even dabbed daily and on the morning of her passing with her favorite Chloe is likely to have been "disrespected."

My great aunt Neil wasn't in her shell after she passed. Neither was Mom.

Neither is anyone's anyone when they're dead.

So what if the mortician got a bit silly. The relatives started it, no one was standing around pointing at her remains and laughing uproariously. People say uneasymaking things when someone close to them or close to someone they care about dies. For all that Neil was abrasive on all of us, no one replied to her with equal nastiness when she was breathing and no one handled her body flippantly. I keep remembering how Mom and I were the day Dad died and my brother chose to sit in that house guarding it from the cop who was guarding the body from "interference" by people he was *ordered to suspect having murdered him, while we went to pay cash, to get him picked up, and transported to the funeral home and were bullied (unsuccessfully to some extent) by the young ass at Restland to spring for an expensive coffin when he was being cremated not viewed, and to buy a plot he didn't want to be locked in. He wanted his ashes scattered. Mom and I came up with leaving them in the Caribbean so they could drift under sailboats going from island to island with the currents and wind. He loved sailing and boats as a boy and a young man. He often said if he hadn't married he would have been a boat bum. His words, not mine.

And we were giddy over that choice coming home from the bury factory. We were drunk over our choice to drop him overboard from a boat into a sea he said he didn't get to sail enough when he was young. We were giddy about his joking for years about Aggie funerals with only two pallbearers, one for each handle of the Rubbermade trash can. And of course, under that we were torn up with grief.

And we still had the fucking PO-lice to deal with coming home. That's another story, however.

When Neil died, according to her wishes and because it wasn't illegal in the early 60s in Texas, the mortician took her to embalm her and then brought her back to the house in the coffin for a viewing. That's what she wanted. The
service was held IN the house, then she was transported to the cemetary and buried. She did not want to be prayed over in the church she'd attended all her life because the only pastor she liked had retired (told to leave and he retired) the year before. She was literally laid out in the dining room, on the old mahogany dining room table in that oak coffin with the brass handles, in her Sunday best, viewed then interred 11 miles away.

I figure that since the family went through all that, and it wasn't cheap all that extra haulage and arrangements, and she had a TINY pension and no savings by then, and everyone chipped in, if there were some giggles, it was understandable.

I'm reminded of that Mary Tyler Moore episode (entitled "Chuckles Bites the Dust") in which everyone at the TV station is telling Chuckles the Clown jokes the day he dies and up to the funeral and Mary's furious with everyone at WJM for their horrific puns and wisecracking and laughter. The day of the funeral however, she breaks into giggles at the service and when singled out to stand up and "laugh for Chuckles" she bursts into loud uncontrolled sobs.

There's a reason that episode won an Emmy for best writing the year it aired. Humor after a death, even at the expense of the dead, is very common. It doesn't always denote disrespect, even when it's "disrespectful" humor. It's lighting a match in the dark.

Crazy Alone

Most people learn at an early age to reach out to other people. We do it from the cradle. We reach for something with a pulse before we can even focus our eyes.

We do it at first because we're hungry, we're too warm, too cold, we're wet, our bottoms are dirty or because we need some kind of comfort.

I think we reach out from the very beginning because it's goddamned lonely locked in one's own skin without the contact, the touch of something with a pulse that doesn't quite match our own pulses.

I think that when the fear isn't driven away by repeated and continual touching that's when babies go crazy and grow up into really crazy people.

Anything less than totally crazy, there's usually some way to get or remain in contact with other people.

Maybe that's not such a good thing sometimes.

Maybe sometimes alone and and crazy is better than touched and hurt for having reached out.

Maybe not.

There's a Pussy in Your Pants

We have a cat who, the moment a man is seated on the facility, climbs into his underpants puddled in his trousers between his feet and parks there, grooming herself. It's the only time she has any interest in clothing.

No use shutting the door on her. She'll muscle her way in.

She's impervious to and uninterested in feedback. This is simply part of What This Cat Lives To Do.

Postit Past Tempus Done Fugit

Half a century ago my mother and brother developed a fondness for those itty aquatic frogs one could buy in aquarium shops selling fresh water tropical fish and supplies. I thought they were cute. They didn't grow to more than an inch long.

No matter how the tank was lidded, those little buggers would get out of the tank clamber down off the table the tank was on and crawl off.

I once found one dead in the middle of the living room, a little smudge of soft gray clinging to a frond of cream carpet pile, his tiny forleg over one eye as if he were searching for a break on the horizon of a vast sea of wooly dry arctic. Another was found on the dial to the telephone in the back hall. He was on his back, draped over the hole to the number 8. One expired clinging to the outside of the toilet bowl in the bathroom off the back hall. Others escaped and were never found.

There had been both male and female frogs in the aquarium, so they didn't wander off because mates were unavailable. The aquarium was always clean. The frogs were well-fed. The habitat had dozens of inviting crannies to hide in, varied textured pebbles and plantings to climb over and through, neat gullies to explore, lots of hiding places under the water and fronds to peer through. They weren't too warm or too cold.

However, nearly all of those those frogs seemed to compelled to make break for the Great Beyond. Most of the time, they were caught and gently returned as they climbed over the lip of the tank or were slime-slithering down its glassy side. Everyone did a frog count and a recce every time they came into the den or even passed through it. Yet, escape they did. I always wondered what those little amphibian Vascos were searching for. Maybe they required a change of scenery. Maybe they were suicidal.

Of course their little corpses stank. It was never an overpowering reek. Their decay process didn't pervade the entire room they died in. Some got as far as the kitchen. Often the smell of death was so imperceptible, so transitory, that it went unnoticed or its source was never located. Frog-passage was no more than a secretive little whiff of something rotten somewhere, an invisible exclamation mark that would appeared under one's nose as one walked down a hall or past a closet door. One didn't really become aware of it until one had passed the point at which the whiffette had entered one's olfactories. Often backtracking failed to pick up a repeat of the exclamation.

After a few years my mother and brother got tired of finding corpses and schlepping to the Fish World to purchase spares. When the last one died in the habitat, possibly of loneliness or boredom, the tank was converted into a terrarium for my mother's never-ending campaign of orchids and rare or difficult to grow hairy plants with exotic colored leaves.

My mother passed away in February, 2007. The following September I went to Texas to pick through its remains, after other relatives had ransacked it. All the plants in the house were gone, except for a few dying condiment jars of ivy, which she was always rooting, though she'd run off everyone she could have given them to.

I was emptying the three closets in the den. At the very back of one, wedged between the round molding on the wooden floor and a junction in a corner, was a tiny mummified frog.

There was that leathery little frummie in the farthermost corner of its universe, a closet that hadn't been emptied out for 3 or 4 decades in the room in which the aquarium had been thousands of froggy life cycles before.

The purpose of that closet hadn't hadn't changed in 5 decades. I have changed in five decades. I left my habitat 15 years prior to that trip, only visiting 3 times in the interim.

I went from 59 years of age to 13, in a split second.

That entire week was a series of what could only be compared to acid flashbacks. Finding the frummie was a mild one.

Que tal, quetzal?

From when I was born until I was 3-1/2, we lived in NJ and got FEET of snow in winter. My parents hated it. I was confused by it. Why did they hate that pretty stuff?

Snow was just a fact of early life. I "unlearned" that fact after my folks transplanted us to Dallas. Growing up in NE Texas, snow was the enemy, and ice was a more common enemy than snow. Both were dangerous to drive on and people acted like idiots when either precipitated and remained. Winter in Texas was mostly after Christmas and it was mostly dry nasty cold or wet nasty cold, but not that much ice or snow nasty cold. I liked the cold, but everyone else in the family thought cold was nasty. Thanksgiving and Christmas in NE Texas were, as often as not, crisp and chill, but not cold. They were at least cold enough that decorating a tree or wearing overcoats and a winter wardrobe weren't out of place.

For a couple of years during highs school, I was living where Christmas comes at a warm time of year. Both of those years, my aunt and uncle took us to the Llanos for Christmas. Bogota Colombia is high in the Andes and even "summer" isn't particularly warm. For Christmas, my uncle liked to go to the lowlands, to a town called Fusagasaga because there are these hot springs there which are reputed to be very good for what ails one. One supposedly both drinks the mineral water from the hot springs in Fusa and one sits in the hot springs, boiling like a knockwurst in the water which is even hotter than the humid tropical air of the town itself.

I didn't like Fusagasaga except for the hotel in which we stayed.

It was the first hotel I'd ever been to in my life in which you had to keep the toilet paper on the dresser, because you could sit in the toilet and have a shower at the same time. The showerhead was in the middle of the room. The bathroom light was a bulb encased in an outdoor style fixture which didn't allow water to get into it. The beds were saggy soggy thin mattresses on thin metal strips, with spotless sheets and worn out cotton pillows, BUT there were hammock hooks and a hammock slung on one of the two hooks which one could use instead. And boy those hammocks were comfortable, airy and a lot easier to sleep in than the beds!

However, what made the hotel spectacular were the parrots. The owner of the hotel had a few dozen macaws at the hotel. I think that originally they had been captured or hand raised and kept with their wings clipped, but they had the run of the joint and they flew, so they were no longer "captives" birds.

And they were both pestiferous and wonderful!

That first Christmas in Colombia -- and the next -- I sat in 119 degree sulphurous water in that resort in the Colombian lowlands outside of Bogota, drinking Fanta or cold beer. The air outside of the springs was 103 and humidity outside of the baths was 85%, so there wasn't much difference between being IN the springs or out of them.

I fed most of my breakfast to the macaws at the hotel every morning, and spent most of the day with the parrots chewing up everything of mine they could get their claws or beaks on, happily yelling at me in Spanish, and joyfully soaring from perches to my back or waddling around after me, when they couldn't hitch a ride on a forearm from place to place, because they knew I'd cadge fruit for them from the kitchen help... and I did. I fell in LOVE with 1 to 3 pound birds in loud vibrant feather suits with even louder voices, distinct personalities and a surprising range of behavior.

I siesta'd with macaws. I lunched with macaws. I sang Christmas carols to macaws. I got groomed by macaws. I had macaw crap in my hair. I lost a sandal to macaws. I had enough dropped feathers from macaws to make a full fan.

I shared my salad, bread, fruit, fruit juice, lettuce, fried plantains, potato chips, peanuts and yucca with macaws. I showered with macaws if I let them in the room, and I did. Macaws pulled things out of my purse, gnawed holes in letters, dented and punctured post cards, and snapped pencils in half. Macaws climbed the juke box and sang along with selections people made of music in it. Macaws clung to the nets on the tennis courts, chewed up the pingpong paddles and fought one another over pingpong balls.

Macaws unwrapped my Christmas presents. Macaws were my Christmas presence. For years afterward, I'd think in vivid blue and red and gold, when Christmas came around, not in red, green, gold and silver.

You haven't lived until you wake up in a hammock on Christmas morning with a one macaw on your chest shitting on the sheet and trying to pull it off your arms and another hanging upside down clinging to the mesh your butt's in flapping his wings and yelling "hola! Que tal, quetzal?"