While I Wasn't Looking, Luxury Was Redefined to Include Trailer Homes

I didn't really know if I actually had enough silly in me this week for a blog post. I sort of was wondering if I'd just slap up a few more photos from Israel and call it a day.

But then suddenly last night I saw this sign:


And I thought,

"They've redefined luxury to mean a dilapidated motel in a questionable part of town? How 1984 of them!"

I had to go read Wikipedia and of course it turned out I was mixing up doublespeak and newspeak.

And THEN I saw this sign in the bathroom of the Shakespeare Pub:


And I thought,

"I NEVER hold down flashers in public restrooms! I'm obviously not doing my part to keep the bars, clubs, and music venues of Houston safe from perverts!"

Also this week I found out that royalty resides in trailer parks:


I thought kings' dwellings would be more ornate. But then I remembered that luxury had been redefined.

My mom and 10 year old cousin and I went on a geocaching expedition that included walking through here:

Instead of those giant windows, one of those windows was replaced by this:

Lo and behold, no one was sleeping. Or trespassing. Except for me, of course.

But another window was replaced by this sign:

And if I had a scratch and sniff blog, you would find that the level of compliance was not nearly so great for the polite, almost plaintive request.

And so now we know why so many signs are written in the imperative.

And then last but not least, I saw this book:

And so what can I really have to say about my week except that the silly, ridiculous and even absurd is alive and well.

Thanks to everyone for the condolences and I hope everyone's having a good weekend.

On totally avoiding cannibalism despite a dead battery and a car accident. Plus, bathroom graffiti pictures.

Tuesday, on my birthday, my car stranded me and a friend on the feeder road of an interstate freeway:I'm smiling because I had a friend with me. And plus we were within walking distance of a restaurant, so I was already certain that we weren't about to run out of food and end up resorting to cannibalism or anything.This guy stops to help us and he thinks we need a jump start. But he makes sparks start flying off my battery. He does this a lot of times. Then he tells us it's the alternator.

Triple A comes to tow the car away, but for kicks my friend asks about trying a jump start. Sure enough, it works!

All is well for two more days. Then yesterday while trying to turn right at an intersection, the car ahead of me begins to move forward. I'm all thinking that she's headed through the intersection because her car has moved forward. So I look to my left and decide it's safe for me to go too. But unfortunately for me, I start to move my car forward before my gaze gets all the way back to see that she actually didn't go.

She stopped.

And then I stopped, because her bumper was in my way.

This time I was not smiling at all on the side of the road. Not smiling at all. I was fairly unhappy, actually.

When I told the entire story to my sweet pea she said, "At least you were in a cute outfit while you were on the side of the road!" And it's totally true; I was in a cute outfit. Unfortunately my friend wasn't around to take a picture.

And then like 10 minutes after I run into someone, some other guy comes so very, very close to running into me! And then my car almost didn't start again that afternoon and I think from now on I should just take the bus.

Here are some more honeymoon pictures of Austin bathroom graffiti. Click to read a little better:
Apologies to Bob Schneider, but this next one is my favorite. In case you can't read it to the very end it says:

-Bob Schneider - Don't be such a man-diva. It doesn't become you. Ellen
-I'll second that!
-Well he's not going to see it in here!
-Yes he will its the closest Jon to the stage
-he's also a man and therefore uses the MEN'S room
-Actually, Bob is the anti-Tin Man, full of heart Dorothy

The problem with this type of honeymoon pictures is that actually when you go to print them out for your new mother in law, there's not really all that much to give her.

Too Cold for Crackheads

The-Guy-Who-Knows-A-Song-About-A-Chicken and some friends and I went to Lola's last night and there was no crackhead outside to watch our car. That's because it has yet again gotten too cold for hanging around on street corners here in tropical Houston, Texas.

Dag nab it.

I don't have any really good pictures of Lola's, but of course have a picture of the toilet in the men's room from my bar bathrooms tour:Normally when we go to a bar near downtown, a crackhead offers to watch our car. And then we're supposed to pay him some measly amount that presumably he's going to spend on beer or crack or what have you. But they DON'T spend every penny on mind altering substances. Or at least all of them don't.

I happen to know because one day I was stopped at a traffic light back in the early 90s in my shiny, new red pick up truck. Being somewhere around 22 years old, I also had a six pack of beer rolling around the floorboard of the passenger seat.

A pan handler appeared at my window and asked if I had any change. Change?!?! I didn't have change! Or dollar bills either for that matter.

What I did have was my cute little apartment, the one and only new car I have ever bought, a few snacks, and a six pack of beer. That pretty much precludes the existence of spare change.

Still, I had some things and out of those options, I offered they guy snacks and beer. He was willing to take the snacks. But as for the beer, he told me, "I don't drink."

Even at 22, it was a little embarrassing. HE was the street person, but I was the drinker? Mostly it was a relief though, because that meant that all those people who told me, "Don't give those people money! They'll only spend it on alcohol!" were exaggerating at best.

Even so I had already decided it really didn't matter to me WHAT the bums did with the money. My only worry was whether or not I wanted to give a quarter if I happened to have one. It's totally the street person's own responsibility how to spend all those measly earnings.

I actually don't know what substances they are or aren't abusing, really. I just know that I've always heard the people who hang out downtown offering to watch cars for money referred to as crackheads.

And I know that I'm the one who is going inside to drink, after all. And I know that my car has never been broken into while a "crackhead" has been watching it.

So hopefully it will warm up before we hit the bars again. Because I don't own clothing adequate for 30 degree weather. And neither do the street people. Apparently.

Sleeping-bag-sicles and Such

It seems I've promised a few pictures here and there and thought I'd make good. Here's my cat Sugar, viciously guarding a maxipad. Thank goodness someone guards the feminine hygiene products around here, because I get so tired of Nimue, or "that other cat you never talk about" (as my friend Laurie calls him), eating all the tampons:












Here's Sugar ready for a swim:










Catching up on some light reading:








Fingernails on a chalkboard, dripping sinks, that jingle from some commercial that won't leave your head, a cat licking a sleeping-bag-sicle for hours and hours and hours on end:










Here's "that other cat you never talk about":










What's to talk about? Aside from devouring the living daylights out of every box of (unused) tampons I have ever purchased and attacking my paint brushes with a vengeance, he mostly hides or pukes. Sometimes he multitasks and pukes while he hides.

He's stealthy in his destruction and I can never catch him in the act much less get a picture, but I assume it's Nimue that has the vendetta against tampons and paint brushes because Sugar is not at all shy with his transgressions.

Rainbow pictures are kind of like animal pictures for me. I can't help myself, but I can never really figure out why I took them or what to do with them. I love a good contradiction though and a rainbow ending in a power plant seemed too good to pass up:









Everybody loved this thing and I have to admit the rose petals are incredibly delicate and everything. But WHY?!?!?! Who would do this to a poor, unsuspecting melon? And isn't it sort of a waste of food?












Here's my sweet pea with my friend Gigi's snake Sunshine:












Here's Jared with the same snake:













Last but not least (okay, maybe least), here's another bar bathroom picture. This is from the Continental Club. The wall design is interesting but the floor is all kinds of icky! No bathroom award here!

Need some overpriced crap?

Need any overpriced crap? Because my kids, like children the nation over, are selling it for school. If you happen to be related to my children, you're supposed to feel obligated to nod yes and dig into your wallet.

If you have kids in public school or are related to children in public school, perhaps you're already the proud owner of 7,432 square feet of reversible wrapping paper. Or maybe you merely have magazine subscriptions that don't run out until the year 2126.

Private schools don't escape either. I've already sent home two fund raisers with my preschoolers and the school year has barely begun.

Getting into why or how we have decided that it's a great idea for our five year olds to sell garbage to their relatives and neighbors to help finance their education is probably a stretch for this relatively carefree blog, so I figured I'd just settle for making fun of some of the items my son is currently selling:

As if the shoes weren't ugly enough, now you can have a mini crock that is "perfect for holding your cell phone"...because just setting it directly on the table would assault the senses and all.

For the record, I fully appreciate the practicality and durability of crocs. They make excellent camp shoes. I just don't happen to want one for my coffee table.

Here's a mug for $9 and two plastic magnets for $8. These are worth it, I'm sure.

I'm not actually a big Disney person, but even if I were, I'd have to be a serious collector to buy this $20 timer:


Since I'll need to buy something, it might be this thing. It would go nicely in my purse with the all purpose tool, would replace my lost allen wrenches and it's probably only double what it would cost at Academy:

Here's an inspirational notepad. For a mere $7.50 you can have some 4 inch square pieces of paper, jot a note or two and then deposit them directly into the trash alongside the rest of the stuff in the catalog. Or you could just skip the middle step:

*****

Didn't I promise I still had plenty of bar bathroom pictures left over from summer? This is my coteacher and one of my best friends in the bathroom at Sliders. Unbeknownst to me she'd been waiting to make an appearance on my blog for awhile now. The bathroom at Sliders is pretty clean, and like the rest of Sliders, well lit. Perhaps a little too well lit in the bar itself, but you can never have enough lighting in a bathroom:

Sliders main selling point, though, is not necessarily the bathroom but the fact that it's a great place for dogs to drink while they look out the window forlornly:

*****

On other dog related topics, lunch room conversations today focused on what foreign objects whose dog had eaten and pooped out, up to and including socks, pantyhose, and a fleece blanket.

Generally speaking I can chew, swallow, digest, and even manage to enjoy my lunch during all types of poop, blood, vomit and other biological discussions, but this one for some reason seemed a little unappetizing.

I'm continually telling my son he needs to toughen up a little and not let one little comment ruin an entire meal. He should really sit in on a preschool teacher lunch sometime.

Lola's Update

I called a friend to find out if anyone at Lola's would be upset at me for posting pictures of the Lola's bathrooms and came away with this important information:

Even though the floor of the men's room has nicer tile than the ladies room, it turns out that licking the floor behind the toilet of the men's room is not a reliable method of suicide.

So, if you're seeking death by way of licking the floor behind a toilet, you might consider starting with the ladies room instead.

And look! They also have framed graffiti in the men's room:


This was the first time I've encountered an actual male in the men's bathroom, and coincidentally or not so coincidentally the first time I've had a men's room tour guide.

My guide, Joe, had just been complementing my friend and me on our lack of makeup. So when he took the opportunity to ask if certain body parts were real I said, "People who don't wear much makeup generally sport their own body parts."

I don't actually know if that's true or untrue for most women. The only thing of which I'm certain is that all my body parts are mine.

Here's the problem with a blog...

If you want to write about anything even remotely interesting, you might have to worry your mom and dad. My mom and dad, for instance, did not know that someone died of smoke inhalation looking down the crater of the very same volcano I had looked down a couple days before.

My dad claims to want to know if I was giving the jail portion of my dating advice from personal experience, but my guess is that he only thinks he wants to know this.

Most parents would probably prefer not to know when their daughter accidentally board airplanes with knives and other implements of destruction or whether their daughter unknowingly chats with heroin addicts.

The latest thing my parents would probably rather not know is that a gunshot was fired through the front window of KPFT a mere 12 hours or so after I had the kids there to volunteer. Here's my sweet pea taking a pledge while my son looks on, not that I was proud of her or anything:


Just, y'know, a public service announcement: among all the other good, decent human beings, there are kids in that building folks! Not a great place for target practice.

But that's not what I came to tell you about. I came to talk about the draft.

Oh no, wait!!!!!! I didn't come to talk about the draft. I came to tell you about my summer and the fact that mine's over. I will now be able to return to writing about preschoolers and their bodily functions.

I meant to do something productive with my summer, like write a book or learn Hebrew or something. But I forgot. I did manage to bring my kids to a fair number of museums and some live music too. I went to Buffalo. I testified in court that a friend of mine actually does feed her daughter.

And, of course, I took pictures of bathrooms, mostly bar bathrooms and lots of them. Even though they didn't win one of my bathroom awards, I figure they're still worth a look.

Here's the bathroom at Lola's. The thing about Lola's is that one Lola's drink can be as strong as three drinks anywhere else, so that by the time you hit the restroom, it's cleanliness doesn't seem quite so urgent:



Not bad, is it? The floor is ugly, and the ceiling might be even worse, but look: they've got the graffiti framed!What more could you want from a place that serves $1.50 drinks until 11:00 p.m.?

Bathroom Humor Part II - Best Bar/Club Bathroom

I’ve done a fair amount of research this summer on the Montrose area with occasional forays into downtown and the Heights, and Etro wins hands down.

Here’s a typical Houston area bar/club restroom. It’s has a little more graffiti than most and a little less grime but this is the women’s room for cryin’ out loud! I hate to think what the men’s room must look like in this particular establishment.

I won’t say where this is, because it is a fun place after all, and I’d hate for anyone to be scared away by the picture:

Here, on the other hand is the award winning bathroom at Etro. Isn’t it spotless?

And look at the men’s room! Women can use it without fear when both women’s rooms are occupied as they occasionally are. We won’t speculate as to why.

This guy could be responsible not only for the pristine bathrooms, but for the neatness of Etro in general. He is absolutely relentless, so don’t leave your cigarettes unattended. They’ll be thrown away faster than your lungs can say "Thanks so much!"

The owner, Reese, is good natured about fielding DJing questions for hours on end, and promptly restocks the toilet paper and mops himself. I like Reese, because he denied that I’m a flake. He’s wrong of course, but at least he errs in a flattering manner. This is the type of conversation I have when I go into a club specifically to take a picture of the restroom.

Here's Reese:

Here's Bob:

Who knows what Bob’s exact occupation at Etro is? Perhaps it’s nothing more sinister than to flirt shamelessly with every female that walks in the door. I do know he occasionally ducks behind the bar.

I do know that a Bob Dylan song was playing when he was conceived, and that his mom loved Bob Seger, that his dad’s name was Bob resulting in his mother’s claim that there were four Bobs in the room when he was conceived. I know his cousin, Corey something-or-another played with Townes Van Zandt.

The first words I said to Bob when I met him were, “Where are the bathrooms, and are they gross?” Bob got a kick out of that, and I could see where he would, all things considered.

I told Reese that from now on I was going to stop in every time I was in Montrose just to use the bathroom. He respectfully requested that I buy a drink when I did so. So if you need a bathroom in Montrose, go see Reese. And, y’know, buy a drink. ‘Cause the guy’s gotta buy a lot of toilet paper.

Up next: Best coffee/tea shop bathroom!