A Funny Family Of Freaks

(and gorgeous creatures too)

My mom and her newly adopted Bernese Mountain dog Nadia. This is my mom's favorite breed. She likes her animals to be long haired, showy, fancy, and very special. Having said that, I must add that she loves our Chick and appreciates our mutt's superfine qualities unreservedly. But when picking an animal for herself she would never choose a dog that's part pit bull. Which is so funny to me because I prefer mixed breed animals and have a queer attraction to pit bulls specifically.

Max and Penny snuggle up. Max is like the cat whisperer. Penny won't let everyone just snatch her up and insist on a snuggle. With Max she just stays with him. With everyone else she squirms away and then finds a high spot from which to groom as though to clean off the unwanted human attention.

I had a nightmare last night that repeated itself exactly five times. Slightly different every single time. I unwittingly end up in a house in which a hostage situation is in progress with random executions. There's a lot of blood and bodies. I escape each time, sometimes with help and sometimes not. I make a frantic dash to get out of firing range running down the suburban street grabbing at plants to help propel me forward since my legs never go fast enough in dreams. Each time I get away I end up in uncomfortably close proximity to the hostage house I'm trying to get away from.

And then I start over. In the house with the crazy executioner.

I wonder if my bad dreams were somehow related to Philip and I staying up late to talk about how great it is to have OCD.

There's a part of me that believes I have these dreams to prepare me for real life events. There's a part of me that believes I'm going to die a very violent death or narrowly escape it.

For at least one entire year* I was certain that my mother or some other family member was going to die. Every time the phone rang I was sure it was going to be the phone call with the news of death. It wasn't that I worried that someone I loved was going to die- I was CERTAIN of it. I spent an entire year waiting for the news that never came.

If I was a witch and had a familiar I think it would be a chicken.

I could never be a "pagan" or a "wiccan" either because they like nakedness too much. I like wearing clothes. I feel most happy when I'm in clothes. Even when I was thin.

It was very hot in our house yesterday and during dessert time Max took his shirt off to cool down. Right after eating dessert he went to wash his hands but came running back and said "I need to put a shirt on really fast!"

I said "Why 'really fast'?"

He says "Because my skin is allergic to the air. If I have my shirt off for too long I get itchy and I have to put a shirt on right away." After struggling to put his jammie top on at lightning speed he adds "It doesn't happen to girls because they don't ever get to take their shirts off. "

("Hmmmph!" I think to myself "Depends what girls you know!!")

The other night he woke up at 3:30am from a spider nightmare. after calming him down and snuggling with him for a half an hour he spotted a spider on the ceiling. It's bizarre to me how he can go through periods where he'll fearlessly (and to my great alarm) pick spiders up and then other periods where he will not eat, breath, or sleep in any room he so much as suspects a spider is also eating, breathing, or sleeping in.

In our house our general policy is to put spiders outside. While I have a mild arachnophobia (which used to be severe, incidentally) I recognize the global worth of spiders and appreciate the immense work they do for the environment. The only time we kill spiders is if they look like they are particularly dangerous (such as bear a striking resemblance to a hobo spider).

And at 3:30 in the morning. I kill spiders at 3:30 in the morning.

So I rolled up a magazine and made a carefully calculated lunge toward the spider on the ceiling. I knew that I had exactly one shot or Max wouldn't ever sleep again. I had to definitively kill it. I was balanced precariously as it was because the spider was directly above the carefully set up Lego battleground that takes up a lot of space and doesn't allow room for grown up feet.

In one beautiful motion I struck the poor spider, dropped the magazine, flew through the air, gracefully landing on a lot of sharp Lego vehicles (crushing them) and in a continuing fluid motion scraped my arm across them as my body kept sliding forward until it came to a grinding halt and broke Max's "favorite" Lego spaceship.

Twenty minutes later I got Max to stop bawling by impressing him with the blood on my arm and the fact that I killed the poor spider dead and tried to set myself up as a wounded hero. His skepticism at the "wounded hero" bit was less than flattering but it diverted his attention enough that he stopped crying to scoff at me. And to be grossed out by my blood.

Which is funny since he's shown me buckets of his and he's never so much as hinted that blood grosses him out.

The first spider nightmare he had was when he was probably about 2 years old. He woke up inconsolably frightened of a "red spider". And then his nose started bleeding for maybe the second time in his life.** Philip came to see what was up, saw the bloody nose, went white, escaped to the hallway where he promptly slid to the floor passed out. Max was burning with a 105 degree fever. So I called our neighbors. I borrowed some fever medicine.

Us Williamsons sure do like to partay in the wee hours.