Cranky Mommy

Yesterday I managed to get out for the first time in days. Other than my alley which was a slippery ice slick, the roads were mostly fine.
On my way out to the suburbs, I noticed something I was surprised to see outside of Baltimore. There, right on a major street in suburban Towson, were lawn chairs reserving their respective parking spots. Really, I thought that was the kind of thing they do just in the city. But apparently, the hillbillies, or whomever, have either moved out to the ‘burbs, or learned a thing or two from the city folks.

(Here’s a picture I found of the same kind of thing done in Chicago, although it’s just as popular in Baltimore).
For those of you who are not living in Baltimore, people around here get ballistic if you take “their” curbside parking spot. So, the plastic chairs, lawn chairs or any old chair from the basement, “saves” the parking space.
Never mind the legal ramifications of it, it’s theirs and don’t begin to take it. In our neighborhood, you are taking your life into your hands if you take their parking spot and they will be sure to let you know it! About 10 years ago,we made the mistake of parking in someone’s unmarked “spot”. What was left for us, carefully taped to our front windshield in a nice plastic baggie to keep it from getting wet from the snow, was a little note saying:
Park your van on your own damn alley
Wasn’t that a nice neighborly thing to do.
So for you visiting the Baltimore city area in times of ice and snow, beware the vigilante parking police. Remember a snow-free spot that you have come across is not necessarily yours, so don’t stay long. And by God, you are jeopardizing bodily health if you touch their lawn chair.

For those of you that live in Baltimore and are interested, my friend Joe and I will have artwork at at Common Ground Cafe in Hampden for the month of February. And they make a great latte, too.

Common Ground is located at:

819 West 36th Street
Baltimore, MD 21211
(410) 235- 5533

Hours: 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., 7 days a week

When I first met my husband, I had no idea he was into football in any way, shape or form. It was the mid 1990s, and Baltimore didn’t have an NFL football team at the time. He was uninterested in watching college games or the Redskins games, so I was clueless. And, I thought he was an old punk rocker; and what could be more un-punk rock, than football?
Well as it turns out, I was very wrong. Old punk rockers, to my dismay, can be into football. Once the Baltimore Ravens became our team, my husband became an avid fan. You’d never know by outward appearances (he would never wear a logo tee even though he was given one), but for approximately 3 hours a week during football season, he is glued to the edge of the bed, glossy eyed, staring at the game.
And, all week, all day long I get to hear more than I ever wanted to know about Steve McNair or Ray Lewis or Kyle Boller or Johnathan Ogden. I get the rundown on the injuries list, I get the local news on the state of the team repeated to me. No matter how hard I try I just can’t get into it.
I’ve never been much into any sport, anyhow. I went to a few high school games when I was 15 or 16 but, it was more to hang out at night with my friends, than watch the game. And, I’ve never been particularly athletic. But mostly - I just find it incredibly boring. I don’t get the point of it. Of course, to each their own, and my husband isn’t into Scrabble like I am. So I suppose I could bore him to death reciting lists of two letter words to him or discussing strategies for using up all my letters, right?
I do feel a little outnumbered here. My son has been a bit brainwashed by the whole Ravens thing because of dad. He was all suited up in purple Ravens sweatsuit bought by his half-brother, ready to watch the game with his dad. Which was okay with me, I got a little time to read a book. And dad had a 4-year-old jumping on his back and tackling him for three hours.
I hate to piss off any Ravens fans, but as much as part of me would have liked our team to win the game tonight (for the sake of the city and my husband), deep down I was mostly kinda happy that the Ravens lost the playoffs to the Colts tonight. I thought to myself, ah, a break, until next year (hubby isn’t into the Baltimore Orioles, and they kinda suck anyhow).
But then my husband said to me after the Ravens lost, Okay, well now I have to figure out what team I’m going to root for. So to my dismay, the Ravens being out of the playoffs is not the end of the football season for the Cranky Mommy household.
Damn.

Today was my big do-my-civic-duty-or-else day — I went to jury duty for the first time.
I had been really dreading it all week; mostly because a long trial would require me to put my son in daycare. I kept wondering why I was never called before I had my son. Does the court have something against twenty-somethings? There were not many of them there. Probably not, I figure that a lot of twenty-somethings are college students who are not registered to vote in Maryland, and therefore never end up being called for duty. Either that or they know something I don’t know. I will say that today was one of the few times wish I was still breastfeeding… to get out of jury duty!
Anyhow, I packed up my lunch, 592 pages of nice boring non-fiction that I keep checking out from the library and never finishing, and wished for the best. I caught a ride with my friend who works downtown, to arrive at 8:10 — 25 minutes after I’d woken up (I didn’t look pretty but hey, this wasn’t a beauty contest). And then I sat, and sat, and sat at the courthouse… with 900 or so other miserable-looking people who all look like they didn’t want to be there, either.
I didn’t get sent to a courtroom until 11:45 — so in the meantime I learned about the 54-year-old lady next to me’s fibroid problem, and how her son was shot and killed at age 24 by a 15-year-old who robbed him. And I learned about the woman next to her’s diabetes problem and her fibroids, and the fact that she is a Godmother to a child who is one of ten children. The mother is 31. And we all talked about birth control. See, I will talk to anybody about anything!
I watched parts of a bad movie about a spelling bee. I also learned, from my nice boring nonfiction book, all about the collapse of the earliest settlement of Nordic Greenland and why it failed (And did you know the original Nordic settlers of Greenland didn’t eat any fish? But I won’t bore you with that… you will have to buy the book and bore yourself).
Anyhow…. what was I saying…
So, I got to sit around and look at glorious, but decaying, 100 year-old architecture, and hundreds of grumpy people eating snack food out of vending machines, occasionally laughing at the bad movie. And I had a number, instead of a name, for the day: 36. Just like guys in jail (or one of the characters on Get Smart. Agent 36 sounds much better than Juror 36). I could have ended up on the big local scandal case, a Baltimore city cop accused of rape, but they were understanding of the childcare difficulty. Same with the assault case I didn’t get on.
I received $15 bucks for my day’s labor of mostly sitting, intersperced by standing in line, for 8 hours. Not much, but it covered the terrible $4 soup I got at local cafe and the $3.50 day-pass bus fare to get home (boy the fares have gone up since I stopped riding!).
And, I actually set some kind of personal record for hours spent away from my son. Amazing (and kind of bizarre) to think that I have never been away from him for 8 hours before.
Net profit -$7.50. Not having to go back again tomorrow, or for at least another year — priceless.

For at least the last several years, perhaps monthly (or maybe more often),there has been a group of people stand on 40th Street in my neighborhood waving signs. The signs say “Honk For Peace” and “Bring The Troops Back” and the like (of course, anyone who knows me, knows that I always honk).
They’re pretty darn dedicated: they are out there in all kinds of weather, like today, with the bitter wind chill making it feel like the 20’s. The most interesting thing about them, is their age. Aside from one youthful looking person, I don’t think there is a brown hair in the bunch of them. They all look to be around 70 years old. Maybe older. I’ve seen a few of them in a wheelchair.
I don’t know who organizes this bunch. I imagine they are a group of elderly Quakers who live at the nearby retirement community and want to protest the war. I’ve got to wonder, though, where are all the young people out protesting with them in the icy cold?
Far be it from me to judge, since my standing-out-in-the-cold,-protesting-with-signs days are pretty much over. Still I gotta wonder where are the really young people? Are they too wrapped up in their ipods and cell phones? Too cool to wear their coats, too apathetically hip to care?
For what it is worth, I’ve got to hand it to this group of seniors for standing out in the cold for what they believe. I can only hope I am full of half as much piss and vinegar, when I am their age.

Need Art for Christmas? Sure you do! In fact, buy my art (I have 3 pieces up for auction):

Tickets are on sale now !

Ticket Price:
$25.00 in advance
$35.00 at the door

Buy your tickets @ these Hampden Businesses:

Atomic Books
The Wine Source
Kiss N’ Make-Up

Or, get your tickets
online @ missiontix
http://www.missiontix.com/index.cfm?venue=-hd

for more info go to the Last Big Thing Myspace Page
( http://www.myspace.com/hcclastbigthing)

I don’t think I can get out of this one this time. I’m #36. If my number was 800 I might have a chance, but 36? No way.
Last time I had a jury duty notice, I wrote in a request for an exemption because I had no childcare and I was a nursing mother. I got a notice back stating that I had failed to show. *sigh*
I’m not against doing jury duty but I am not exactly looking forward to it. My husband gets called EVERY year. He did get on one semi-interesting trial several years ago. However it was “interesting” in the wrong way….
A released prisoner was accused of assaulting a prison guard on the street. He was convicted by the jury, but despite his long criminal record he was not returned to jail. Instead, as my husband was leaving the courthouse, the convicted fellow approached my husband on the courthouse steps in a threatening manner. The convicted guy was held back from attacking my husband by his relatives who were attempting to calm him down.
There is a plus side — apparently they do give you a little cash for your day(s) of service… something like 20 bucks. I think it is up from 15 — almost enough for the cab ride home.

There are rare occasions when my neighborhood has a, how should I put it… “special” surreal feeling.
Every now and then I think that feeling is all gone, because so many yuppies have moved in. Then there are days when I don’t — like today, when some odd neighbor put a nasty looking skinned deer, antlers and all, out with the trash. Those are the days I feel like I’m in some wierd movie with Dueling Banjos playing in the background. Or maybe Texas Chainsaw Massacre? I dunno.
The trashmen refused to pick it up (I don’t blame them). Animal control said they would take 48 hours to pick it up (at least it isn’t the middle of stinking hot summer). Gotta love city services!

Update: Thankfully the neighbor who put it there, finally removed it. He thought the trashmen would take it! (maybe they would, but only if you bribed them $20 bucks). I guessed it was one of two neighbors.. and instead of being the rat-shooting one, it was the kids-who-jump-on-a-trampoline-at-midnight one.

Recently we’ve been going to a new playground at the local elementary school. It’s brand spanking new and pretty nice, and just a few blocks away. But it does have it’s drawbacks. Some are the type you’d want your kids to play with and some are the kind you wouldn’t want to touch with a ten foot pole. Not to say that there is inherently anything wrong with the Hampden neighborhood kids that my son might play with… at this young age they aren’t all that different. It’s some of the parents.
There’s been so much gentrification in the our neighborhood that frequently you will see on the playground the progressive, semi-hippie, or upwardly mobile yuppie types parents and their kids. Like the gentrification or not, the kids and their parents are generally pretty nice. And you will see those born and bred in Hamdpen that are genuinely good parents, and their kids. And THEN you see what we call the Hampden “Stroller Girls”.
The typical stroller girl gets pregnant at a very early age, because all of her friends are doing it. 14 isn’t too young. She likes to walk down “The Avenue” (36th Street, the main drag) pushing her stroller showing as much skin the weather will allow, with the lowest cut short-shorts (or tight jeans with something written on the butt), bottle in one hand, cigarette in the other (I think the Stroller Girl thinks it looks sexy). She likes to hang out on the corner to flirt with the guys or show off her new baby. The typical “Stroller Girl” never talks to her child, she always hollers as if the child is deaf or 40 feet away. They carry a very hard look on their faces that makes them look prematurely old.
So…
This past weekend we went to the playground at the elementary. There were just a few kids and parents there. Two kids on the playground, I couldn’t figure out who they belonged to. The one boy who looked to be 5 and didn’t hardly a thing like the other who looked barely 3. The two boys hardly acknowledged each other, playing independently. I asked the other parents on the playground if the kids were theirs, and they said no. I asked the 3-year-old where his mom was and I couldn’t get an answer that I could understand, it was too garbled. The 5-year-old ignored me.
Finally the playground had emptied out and it was only my son on the playground and these two kids and NO parents. I looked across the street to see if there was a parent sitting on their front porch watching them from a distance but I didn’t see anyone. I was beginning to think I was going to have to call the police. Finally their mother pushes her stroller up to the playground. The 3-year-old ran up to her saying “Mommy Mommy” and the 6 year old kept playing. She looked in a bad mood and yelled at the 6-year-old for, of all things, walking up the slide. She had a infant girl in her stroller. She couldn’t have been much more than 20, with three kids.
Soon she was joined by her friend and her little girl. The friend had the letters “Be Be” across the butt of her tight jeans. Her daughter, who looked to be 8, was dressed a little like a Bratz doll, and her bra strap hung down her shoulder from under her tank shirt.
I sat on the bench in awe of this woman leaving her very young kids unattended. Perhaps she was watching them from a stoop somewhere I didn’t see, but I doubt it. I was tempted to open my big mouth and give her a tongue-lashing but for once I kept my foot out of my mouth. Which was totally smart. These women scare me. They are tough girls and don’t like outsiders telling them what to do.
I know some nice kids that will go to this school, but I I have no doubts that THIS mom and the other “Stroller Girls” will send children there. And that is reason #1, #2 and perhaps reason #3 my child will not be going to school here, at our zoned elementary.

Today I got a check in the mail… for 25 bucks. Now 25 bucks really isn’t that much, but it means something.
I got “published”.
Okay, not really published, but I sent some savings tips to a local monthy kids magazine and they chose to publish them. So that kinda counts, right?
(I think I need to keep that day job, still).