Langer Loksh

Bring Lily Home

Blogger Cate wrote a beautiful post about a family adopting a little girl. Check it out and then check out the auction to help raise the funds. I'm bidding on the felt food.

Feeling SLIGHTLY Better

There Was Something Else at the Reunion

A guy from my class planned the whole reunion on Facebook, and did a kick-ass job. Particularly his choice of venue: the preposterously gorgeous hotel where Jeff and I tied the knot.

There was one woman on the Facebook guest list whose profile picture none of us recognized. Let's call her Lashonda Jones. There were two Jones brothers in my class. Speculation grew among FB friends that one of the Jones brothers had had a sex change and became Lashonda.

The first two people I saw when I arrived at the reunion were Langer Loksh reader Lauren H.  and... Lashonda. Who in person didn't look anything like either of the Jones brothers. But still. I was terrified to say hello to Lashonda. What if Lashonda was really Bobby after a sex change? And he/she was like, "HEY GIRLFRIEND!" What would I say back? I darted for the bar and said hello to people who I recognized as being the same gender they were in 1977.

Well, come to find out, Lashonda is really just Steve Jones's wife, and Steve doesn't do FB, so she was the one on the FB guest list. This new factually correct information made its way around the ballroom faster than a nasty rumor in the junior high cafeteria. What does it say about me and my girlfriends that we were absolutely ready to believe the sex change story? Perhaps that 20 years later, we' re not even a little bit more mature?

The New Math Meets the Culture of Praise

This morning, on the way to preschool, Charlie pipes up from the back of the van.

Charlie: Which is bigger, 99 or 20?

Me: 99 is more than 20.

Charlie: 99 wins! But they both get a badge. 20 gets a badge for trying.

These Chickens are STARS

Visit youtube.com/wonderfulpistachios, click vote, search "farmers" and vote thumbs up for my colleague Matteo's pistachio video starring his backyard boids.

A Hole in the Water...

I had a late afternoon dermatology appointment in Foxboro so Jeff took the kids to the shops at Patriot Place and when I finished I met up with them and we went for a nature walk around a cranberry bog and then we made a potentially disastrous decision.

We went to Bass Pro Shops.

Have you ever been to Bass Pro Shops?

With a four-year-old boy who is obsessed with guns and bows and arrows?

If we'd stayed there about a minute longer we'd have emerged armed for bear in head-to-toe camo (pink for Summer). As it was, all five of us kind of glided out the door vacant-eyed and drooling over

THIS.

There WAS One Thing at the Reunion

Richard R. married a woman from Concord. He told me that the house next door to her parents' house just sold for north of $10 million. The rumored buyer: Mr. and Mrs. Bundchen.

That is EXACTLY what we need.

And Now There's Hot Dog Juice on My Keyboard

To close the loop on the egg situation: the girls are back in form, laying half a dozen eggs a day. Jeff set up the lamp to fool them into thinking the day is longer, and immediately they ramped up production. (Except Angel, who died instead.)

There's One More Angel in Heaven

Still haven't made the pigs in blankets.

Just remembered one more thing to tell you. Angel, our cuckoo maran hen, has gone to the beyond. When she took ill Jeff put her in her own cage with fresh pine shavings and fed her a mixture of yogurt, honey, oatmeal, and some other stuff--he got the recipe on some chicken message board on the Internet. The guys at the feed store said chickens get pneumonia, cancer, and weird infections that aren't usually contagious to the other chickens. They'd only sell us antibiotics in quantities that only farmers with 30,000 chickens could buy. They said "Some people even take their chickens to the vet! Har har har!" This was after I'd asked Jeff if he wanted me to call the vet. Not wanting to repeat the Button episode, in which I spent hundreds of dollars attempting to save the life of an animal that cost lest than six dollars, we let her go peacefully, with her beak tucked under her wing in our warm basement.

Angel was our sweetest bird. Anyone could pick her up. She laid pretty speckled eggs, the kind that James Bond requested for breakfast. We will miss her. \

And now back to the previously scheduled appetizer making.

Have I Mentioned

that he will not take a nap?