This evening I really ought to go hunt up a long hooded black robe and a scythe, because two — count ‘em, two — of my pets died today. Not major pets, I suppose; if you rated the Crumpacker pets by weight, the turtle was in about third place and the froggie in fourth or fifth. Both hale and hearty, to meet the eye, up till today. And now both deader than doornails.

This happened to me once before, years ago, when I kept birds. There they were, merrily chirping and feathering my carpet and generally doing their birdly thing, when Erika and I left to go to the Strawberry Festival. When we returned a couple of hours later, both of them were pushing up daisies. Never found out why. No apparent reason. Gas leak? Scared to death by — what? The mystery remains.

But it gives me the shivers. Here is one of the perks of being raised Catholic: a persistent sense that this specific terrible thing is specifically and terribly my fault. I have been biting my lip for three hours pondering how I transgressed against these pets, and when they are replaced, how will I avoid unwittingly bumping off our new charges as well? I’ve been researching various reptiles and amphibians all evening, but I can’t seem to find one which appears to be shatterproof.

I suppose it’s not a bad life lesson for the kids. In between their grandmother’s cancer death last fall and the various life forms I’ve apparently felled, they seem to accept without fuss that death is a part of life. And not being raised Catholic, they don’t even blame themselves! And now back to the research. Do you figure a snake this time? I used to have the most adorable baby ball python I carried around in my bra — he lives with Erika now, but perhaps my bra is a safer place than the wide wide world.

Coda: Crying my eyes out, bringing out my dead and burying them together in my back garden, in the pouring rain. I get similar reactions to beloved plants which die. These are signs than I am either hopelessly stuck in childhood or have (or am trying like hell to have) my finger on the pulse of the Universe, or quite possibly both. Humans too often think life other than theirs doesn’t count. I sometimes think other, “lesser” life, being more in need of protection, counts for more.

Either way. There are these men and children whom I love, and they don’t up and die of red leg on me. I’ll take it.

A couple of weeks ago, Ben and I took the kids to the Orange County Swap Meet. I’m not sure if they have swap meets in other parts of the country; when we lived back East, we called them flea markets and they mostly consisted of cast-off used items or purported antiques of obscure background. Our swap meet consists of a large number of vendors peddling items they can’t readily sell elsewhere — if people really wanted to buy their stuff, if they were making a profit, they’d be able to afford a proper storefront. In other words, it’s a matter of wading through acres of cheesy crap. About once every six months, on a Saturday or Sunday, Ben and I have the following conversation:

Ben:  We could go to the swap meet.

Me: Yeah, we haven’t been there in ages.

Ben: It’s a good way to get our exercise. Let’s go.

Exercise, hell. He wants to go because they sell beer. But I always let it slide. This is the secret of the swap meet: Daddies don’t mind walking all over creation while Mommy browses beauty supply shops and discount shoes, if and only if they can have beer.

I’m such a bitch. A real snob. I’m extremely picky about the clientele in the places where I shop. Meaning, for someone of my means, that I turn up my nose at Wal-Mart. I’m a Target girl, me. I refuse to rub elbows with the Great Unwashed in order to buy printer ink and toilet paper. But the swap meet? Makes Wal-Mart look like Fashion Island.

Honestly, where do these people come from? This is coastal Orange County, after all, and these people look like they’ve climbed on a bus from Jurupa or Rubidoux. Smokers. Scads and scads of them, and the swap meet is one of the few remaining places in OC which hasn’t banned smoking. These people figure no problem, we’re outdoors! all the while they’re practically flicking their ashes on my children. It requires a monumental effort of will to not physically assault them. Well, that and the fact that most of them are 300 pounds and covered in tattoos. I don’t think I could take them.

And morbidly obese people. I’m not talking about stuff like my fat Polish ass, I am talking about people who are so overweight they have to ride scooters because they physically can’t walk around. And who sent out the memo to young women who are 30 pounds overweight that it’s cool to wear belly shirts and strappy tank tops? Yeah, that rolls of visible fat look is all the rage in OC. At least I have the grace to keep my fat to myself.

I always spend my time at the swap meet snarking to Ben about these people under my breath, eventually announcing Let’s get out of here. I can’t stand this place one moment longer.  Next time we get the urge to go to the swap meet, I’m going to insist we go to the Santa Ana Zoo instead. There’s lots of wildlife to be observed there, and at least those animals don’t blow cigarette smoke on my children.

Yes, I know, I know! If I still have readers, which after what, 8+ weeks I shouldn’t expect? Apart from the fact that I’ve been employed by the boss from Hell. I mean, guy still is batting off the fresh brimstone when he arrives every morning. What am I meant to do about this?

For the first thing, I have been in this business for 28 years and have always HAD a secretary not BEEN a secretary. That alone should be disquieting enough, right? Except also that this guy is undercutting me by like $25K per annum in pay, and believe me, he ought to be giving me combat pay instead.

This economy puts you to serious issues. On the one hand, I’m glad he’s not trying to undercut me by $35K, which believe me people are anxious to do; I’ve been looking for 10 months. On the other, I ache to call him on the carpet and read him the riot act. Either way, it’s 2:30 a.m. and I’m wide awake, thinking. Mamas and daddies, persuade your kids out of the legal profession, okay? It is no longer an Honorable Profession. It’s no fit place for civilized people. Just ask my husband.

Anyway. I promise to post something interesting just as soon as something happens in my life apart from batshit boss, endless laundry or Oh my God, what did Boolie spill on the Pergo this time? Meanwhile, read The Thirty Mile Zone if you want excitement. They always have the latest Michael Jackson death aftermath news, which is good schadenfreude if nothing else.

Last weekend, we celebrated Father’s Day with fresh guacamole and beer margaritas. They were so good, we gave it an encore this week, and I think I’ve got my recipes perfected. So here you go, and don’t say we didn’t warn you about their addictive qualities:

The Crumpacker Family Guacamole

• 4 avocados - peeled, pitted, and mashed
• juice of 1 fresh lime
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2/3 cup diced onion
• 3 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro
• 2 medium tomatoes, diced
• 1 1/4 teaspoon minced garlic
• 1/8 teaspoon ground cayenne pepper

Mix everything together thoroughly. Place it in the fridge for an hour. Eat way too much of it.

Beer Margaritas

• 1 (12 fluid ounce) can frozen limeade concentrate
• 12 fluid ounces tequila
• 12 fluid ounces water
• 12 fluid ounces beer
• ice
• 1 lime, cut into wedges

Pour limeade, tequila, water, and beer into a large pitcher. Stir until well-blended, and limeade has melted. Add plenty of ice, and garnish with lime wedges.

Sometime after we arrived solidly in middle age, Ben and I separately became aware that we each had become invisible to the opposite sex. You know, when you’re younger, guys or girls passing on the street meet your eyes, they smile. As you get older, you don’t look to strangers like someone they’d like to meet; you look like their dentist. I’m 48 and have had four kids. Ben is 53, somewhat overweight, and prematurely grey. We look like someone’s parents. He’s invisible to girls and I’m invisible to guys. It’s been that way for so long we can’t remember any other way.

Except that recently I picked up some black capri pants. They’re really sort of an exercise tight, I suppose, which is sort of funny if you know how long it’s been since I’ve seen the inside of the gym. But they’re comfortable, and rather form-fitting. Ben opened his eyes wide the first time he saw me in them. Those pants are very flattering, he said. And I caught him staring at my ass for the first time in years. Strange.

Then today I wore those same pants to the grocery store and noticed that suddenly I was visible to men. Every guy I encountered who wasn’t actually in the company of a woman smiled and said Hi to me. Not just senior citizens, either. Guys in their 20s, even. Seven or eight of them. At first I didn’t even realize it was me they were talking to, but unless they had imaginary friends, it was me. I hardly knew how to react anymore. After a few minutes I got the hang of a faint return smile and a quiet Hi back. It was insanely freaky.

Because, of course, I didn’t suddenly turn human. I didn’t suddenly turn female. I just put on some pants that made my ass look good. Those guys weren’t saying hi to me; they were saying hi to my ass. They didn’t even care, apparently, about the clearly fortysomething woman accompanying that ass. And I don’t know which is more pathetic: that fact, or how secretly pleased I was at the attention.

Meanwhile, of course, I’m buying seven more pairs of these pants and will not take them off until someone pries them off my cold, dead ass.

Of course I didn’t mean I would stop blogging. You think I’m ever going to shut up? Think again, flyboy. I have Serious Issues to consider! Like what to do with the black eye Boolie gave me last weekend. (I leaned down to hug her just as she suddenly snapped her head up and bounced it off my browbone.)

This is a serious, serious black eye. Immediately there was a bruise visible on the browbone, and by the next morning it had burst forth in blue and purple from my eyebrow to an inch below my eye. That thing is — was, as it’s finally starting to fade — fucking spectacular. Watching a black eye evolve is like watching a sunset. The shifting patterns, the changing hues. From blue and purple to yellow and green and then to a sort of maroon as it prepares to fade. Lovely.

But here’s the problem. I figure that anyone who doesn’t know us will take one look at me and assume either that I pulled an Amy Winehouse and staggered into something (fist? door? could be anything with that broad), or that Ben popped me one. Which reminds me of a joke. What do you say to a woman with two black eyes? — Nothing. You already told her twice. (And yes, yes, I know domestic violence is not funny, and hereby issue this disclaimer blah blah blah.)

Anyway. So if we are for example having lunch somewhere, should I explain my eye to the waitress when she comes to our table? It seems I shouldn’t, but you have to figure she’ll be wondering about it all through lunch. Possibly the entire wait staff will be wondering: Hmm, she doesn’t look like a loadie. Nor like Nicole Brown Simpson, for that matter. Perhaps she’s part raccoon?

Rather than explain, I’ve taken to keeping my Ray-Bans on indoors when anywhere besides home. This sometimes makes it hard to navigate, and also, it must make me look like some tourist trying to be all California cool. So should I explain that? No, I’m not an asshole, I just have a black eye. But I don’t want you to see it. That’s why the sunglasses. Or something. Ordinarily I don’t give a damn what anyone thinks, but a black eye is one of those things that just screams Think something!

And the eye makeup problem is a real bitch, too. I have to wear eye makeup — trust me, I do. So do I put makeup on both eyes? The bruised one seems to have quite enough colorful pizzazz already, but I don’t want to be asymmetrical. Perhaps I should have blacked the left eye as well, to match? Well, too late.

I told you I had serious issues on my mind.

My good friend Mark of Going Like Sixty, who is mostly absent from Facebook although a member, warned me about this. Facebook and Twitter are going to result in the death of blogging. It’s just way too convenient to post a 20-second tweet or Facebook update rather than actually sit down and think out a chunk of something well-organized and meaningful. If you look at my blogroll, which I have not updated since approximately the dawn of time, you may notice that a lot of my reads have left off blogging altogether in the past year or two.

Part of the reason for this is probably that a lot of people I know write for a living at least to some extent. Oh, I only can claim to know one novelist on a personal level, and that largely because we nursed babies simultaneously. But a lot of my friends write for at least some portion of their gainful employment, and there is the endless legal writing that consumes us legal types, even though we’re not writers as such. Many of us are eager to take a break from writing, not to escape into it, for God’s sake.

Either way, people don’t much want to take the time for words, or an attention span, anymore. We’re all about Twitter and Susan Boyle and 15 minutes of fame, little dribs and drabs of this and that. No time, no commitment. Even as I write this, I’m losing interest in writing it (although this may be in large part for the reason that all three of my young kids are simultaneously running around screaming like loons). Even when they’re not distracting me, there are the glugs of arriving e-mails and the pops of arriving chat messages. And that’s for someone like me — a total misanthropic bitch! I can’t imagine the distraction level for people of normal socialization.

I don’t want to make the point I’m trying to make for fear of lapsing into a reverie about the good old days of snail mail and network television and morning and evening newspapers. But I think it’s pretty obvious. The Internet is a two-edged sword, and people have the attention span of gnats. A bunch of years ago I was on the cutting edge of blogging. Now I’m on the cutting edge of being too lazy to blog anymore. And I’m not at all sure this is a good thing.

See y’all on Facebook.

So last week Ben and I had lunch with his mother. I’ve always had a bit of a thorny relationship with her, although there’s no real animosity between us — apart, of course, from the usual animosity harbored by a mother toward the girl who her only son finally married in midlife.

It’s just that MIL and I are both very opinionated and stubborn, and said opinions are usually completely at odds, especially regarding childrearing. This stands to reason, since she’s a very 1950s buttoned-down, conservative sort of lady who believes in building character and following all the rules, which are many. Whereas I’m a sort of hippie chick who tries to go with the flow, live and let live, you know. Plus she doesn’t mind telling people how to raise their children — in fact, she insists upon it. I just do my thing and blow her off. Also, I was raised Catholic and she (for reasons never explained) is staunchly anti-Catholic.

Despite that, or quite possibly because of it, she started Pope-bashing the minute we were all in the car. You know, that to-do about advising Africans against using condoms. And I don’t mean that she disagreed with the Pope; I mean that she excoriated him. There was much bandying about of some really pejorative terms. I’m anything but a good Catholic, but I’m Catholic enough to feel very uncomfortable hearing this whether I agree with the Pope or not. (I guess she was trying to make me forswear my possibly Papist ways and denounce the Church.)

She kept trying to engage me in the conversation, but I just said Well . . . a few times and got very interested in staring out the window. I really don’t want to start sparring with her. Not worth it, and besides, poor Ben.

But she was just getting started. I have no idea on earth how the topic arose, but MIL brought up circumcision and why it’s absolutely necessary to do it, and what dire results there will be if it’s not done. Both my sons are intact, and she very well knows that. Bear in mind that the last time I birthed a boy was in 2003, so you could say it’s a done deal.

I politely explained that there’s no medical justification for circumcision according to our research. She said the presence of a foreskin leads to hygiene problems. I told her it’s easy to keep clean. (I forcibly restrained myself from asking if she thinks it’s reasonable to cut off a part of the body just because we don’t feel like washing it.) She harrumphed. Stalemate.

But she wasn’t done; she then turned a hawkish eye on the earrings, six in total, dangling from my ears. (I don’t think she’d ever seen me with more than one pair before.) Well, that certainly is a lot of earrings. What is that, three piercings? When on earth did you do that?

Nineteen ninety-three, I said.

Well. I certainly hope you haven’t gone and pierced Julia’s ears! she went on.

Are you following this, people? Jesus hemorrhaging Christ, the woman chastises us for not mutilating our sons and in the next breath forbids us to mutilate our daughter. HOW DOES THAT MAKE SENSE?

Special Bonus Joke:

A man is having digestive problems and goes to see his doctor. The doctor examines him and tells him he’s got a tapeworm. Here’s what you do, says the doctor. Every night for the next three nights, I want you to shove a hard-boiled egg up your ass. And then shove a Tootsie Roll up your ass right after. And come back and see me the day after the third night.

The guy of course thinks this is extremely strange. How will that help? he asks. You’ll see, says the doc.

So the guy does it. Every night for three nights, he shoves a hard-boiled egg up his ass, followed by a Tootsie Roll. The next day he goes and sees the doctor. The doctor immediately shoves a hard-boiled egg up the guy’s ass and grabs a hammer. The guy wonders WTF.

After a few seconds, the tapeworm sticks his head out the guy’s ass and says Hey! Where’s my fucking Tootsie Roll? whereupon the doctor hits the worm on the head with the hammer.

Cured.

I was raised Catholic; more than that, I attended Catholic schools for eleven years, from my earliest education until I escaped to university. The result of all this is, of course, that I am forever haunted by guilt. I feel guilty over everything. About things which are my fault, certainly, but also about things which are not so much my fault as they are accidents. Even about things that have nothing to do with me. The nuns who dogged my childhood and teen years would be delighted.

I’m usually pretty good about keeping the guilt at bay. My life pretty much revolves around my husband and my children. Okay, and books and the Internet. But I’m what you’d call a family girl. I’m always at home, or if out and about, I’m either earning money or doing things with my husband and kids.

But then there are the Basenjis.

I really don’t have time for them, and they are the major source of guilt in my life. They spend most of their time in the backyard, for the simple reason that they need extremely close supervision indoors lest they leap up and eat your dinner, or chew up your $400 purse. (There is really no excuse for having a $400 purse, so I guess I should thank Rudy for chewing up mine.) But they are masters of the guilt trip, and they play on the sneaky aspect of my Catholic conscience that constantly whispers There is misery afoot, and it’s all your fault.

Anytime I enter the kitchen, which features a large window overlooking the backyard, Rudy jumps up on the wrought-iron patio table to fix me with a baleful stare and commence Baroooooooooing fit to wake the dead. I can go outside and pet him and Dollie, and feed them treats, and replenish their food and water, but the next time I appear at the window Rudy will again Barooooooo. Again and again and again.

After ten minutes of this, I’m irritated; I’m cooking dinner or doing dishes, and I don’t have time for quality Rudy time. The truth is, I frequently don’t have time for quality Rudy time. Make that hardly ever. So that dog, and his furrowed brow and his reproachful Barooooo, have become a sort of constant reminder of all the ways I’m failing to be Supermom.

So how do I handle this? By saying Shut the hell up, Rudy a lot and going upstairs where he can’t see me through the window. Because if I go into the living room, he will peek through the blinds at the patio door and scratch on the glass with his paws. Did I mention he knows how to operate the kitchen doorknob? I’ve seen, from the inside, the knob turning as he manipulates it from outside. It’s only his lack of opposable thumbs that prevents him from marching inside and telling me what’s what.

I suppose I should be grateful, though. My mother has passed on, and my kids aren’t even Catholic. And a girl raised Catholic needs a source of constant guilt in her life. Rudy fills that need admirably.

I’m in a hurry, as it’s bath time for the kiddos, but Ben and I were talking the other day about one of our favorite dirty jokes. The best jokes are the ones where you don’t see the punch line coming (as opposed to the ones where you could see it coming even if you were on Mars). This is one of the former. Here we go. *taps mike*

So this blonde walks into a bar. She goes up and orders a Bud Light. And then she just sits there and drinks Bud Lights one after another until she passes out, whereupon all the guys in the bar take her into a back room and have their filthy way with her.

Next day, the same blonde comes in and orders a Bud Light again. Same deal: She drinks them one after another until she’s firmly schnockered and passes out, whereupon all the bar patrons take her into the back and screw her.

Day after that, in comes the blonde again. She goes up to the bar and the bartender says “Want a Bud Light?”

And the blonde says “Naw. They make my pussy hurt.”