You know what happens when you decide to be that asshole American who’s all, “If you people elect Bush again, I’m so totally moving to Canada”, and then you DO IT? Karma sees fit to deport your ass straight to his backyard, that’s what.

But if you’ve been really good at some point in your life, even if you can’t exact think of one single thing that would qualify you for karmic goodness, but it has to be there because karma decides to dish you out some goodness, you can at least get deported straight back to the backyard of the president you never had very kind words for which also happens to be occupied by all of the bloggers.

Or at least the comments on the last post tell me so. So for all of you who left nice words; thank you. For all of you in HOUSTON who left nice words; thank you, and I’m sorry I didn’t respond to every one of you like I meant to, but I just plain suck right now.

Also, I’m taking your asses up on it.

December 4th, downtown Houston, you, me and happy hour. Details are here. Be there or be somewhere else entirely.

But really, please just be there.

***Completely unrelated***

When I was 11 or 12, I sat in my bathroom sink one night with a roll of scotch tape and a bottle of Elmer’s glue and I tried, so hard, to find a way to make that tape sticky enough to put on my nose and yank out all of that crap clogging my little bitty pores.

I could be a kagabazillionaire right now, but then I’d be knee deep in the business of other people’s snow-capped miniature paper-mache forests, and not wasting everyone’s time changing the world as a blogger.

So I became a blogger. And met a guy named Jim. And we talked about opening a kids martial arts/UFC style studio, because he likes it and my kids like it and my husband likes it, but then we remember that someone had done that, too, and it didn’t end so well for the asian guy.

And then we had the epic idea to start a line of kids cooking utensils, because yeah, someone really should do that, except someone already did do that, but our kids did start a kids review blog and no kid has ever done that before and the people who made the kids cooking stuff gave them some to test and the resulting carnage is right here.

The day before I left Canada, I went into my Safeway, just to say goodbye. There were hugs and tears and well-wishes. Man, I love those girls at my Safeway.

Now that I think about it, many of my most meaningful relationships have been forged in grocery store check-out lanes. It’s where I spend most of my time. I do what I have to.

So tonight I had to run into the grocery store by the hotel, which is either spelled HEB or H-E-B or H.E.B., I’m not totally sure, but they make the best cannoli I’ve eaten outside of Brooklyn, and I don’t know any of these people yet. I don’t know what check-out lane Audrey works in on Sunday night, or which day Dallas works the customer service counter, so I don’t yet know which lane to use for which trip to the store.

I hop into the express lane with my four items and get to the check-out and hand over my purchases to the guy, because they were all guys, and what the hell are the odds of having only men checkers at the grocery store the exact night I am buying only one wine key, Tampax, Kotex and a box of Apple Jacks?

This is how it goes in my world. All the time.

So I say to the guy, “Sorry for making you touch all that stuff, dude” and he says, “Oh, it’s okay, but I have to admit…the wine key is kind of throwing me here.” And I turn all sorts of red and nervously cackle a little and don’t at all make eye contact with the guy again when I shell out my $13.48, which is actually a pretty good price for 20 tampons, 30 pads, a kitchen tool, some sugar coated food coloring and a single serving slice of utter humiliation.

I grab my bag and mumble a rushed “thank you” in his general direction and get about 2.58 steps away when I realize that I am physically incapable of leaving it like that, so I stop, look back over my shoulder, and with an over-exaggerated wink say, “And just so you know, it’s the Apple Jacks you ought to have been worried about.”

And I’ll never, ever go into that store ever again.

Orange is my favorite color, and that’s why I love fall.

I love fall because the air is thick with the smell of burning wood. In the fireplace way, not the Californageddon way.  I love fall because I don’t have to shave my legs, ever, and I get to break out my fuzzy socks. I kind of have a thing for socks. Bet you didn’t know that.

I love fall because it’s laced with traditions. We go back to school; lunch boxes are lined up on the counter every day, story time and dinner time and shower time and bed time all happen on schedule. We let go of the hap-hazard, fly by the seat of our pants summer days and we pack up the pastels and the florescents in exchange for the earth tones. My little green eyed babies, my one blue eyed boy with olive skin, they look so beautiful in shades of green and brown snuggled around their necks that it hurts to look at them sometimes. My husband rushes home on his early nights to fill our house with the grunts and the woots! that football season brings. Beers are cracked, crotches are scratched, and the men take over for a while.

The first truly cold day of the year is coming, and that means the first pot of chili and the first batch of cornbread are imminent. Fall means that you can watch a season crawl across the planet, inching towards you, leaving dustings of snow on the highest mountaintops that it passes in its slow decent to earth.

I love fall because, rather than shoving and screaming at each other for the good tv spot, or the stool in the washroom, my children stumble down the stairs in the morning, huddle together under a blanket, and stare silently into the flames from the fireplace warming their little toes and noses awake. We spend more time on the floor in the fall, because we can’t resist the fire. We eat dessert on the floor, lay on our tummies and play on the floor, hold each other and read stories in front of the fire.

I need the fall to prepare for the winter. The cold will come, the snow will fall, and I’ll hide inside until it stops and life resumes. Fall is my dose of life before the world hibernates, and I with it. And the pumpkin spice latte is back, which is really as close to godliness as you can get.

I’m curious….what’s your favorite season? And why?

Because bricks are quite handy. You can throw them at thy foes, you can trip over them, breaking your big toe and getting to use the crutches that you’ve always thought everyone looked so cool using, and all you have to suffer through is some armpit chaffing. Also, a broken big toe. You can deliver that crucial memo from the 14th story of your office building to the 3rd story of your office building with lightening-fast efficiency by using nothing more than a $0.002 rubber band and any old brick you find laying around. Or kill your boss. Either way, you’ll be in line for a promotion.

I like bricks. More specifically, I liked aesthetically pleasing configurations of bricks. Did you know that I once had an aptitude for and a very promising career rut carved out for me in mechanical engineering? True story. You wouldn’t believe what I could do with a ruler. In fact, if I had enough balls to go digging through my storage closet that is most likely, by now, host to 3 out of 5 of Canada’s most deadly spiders, also my Christmas decorations, I’d be able to find a stack of old blueprints with, like, 1990 written in the date. And drawn in pencil. *gasp* See, back in the stone ages when I was dipping my pen in the blueprint ink, people still used drafting tables and mechanical pencils and T-squares. Now there are twenty four versions of Autocad out there. I once bought Autocad for Dummies, thinking it might be fun to try my hand at it again, and I couldn’t understand the acknowledgments page of the book.

You know, it’s kind of messed up that the very same people who can doodle out an entire city, or an aircraft, or a satellite in their spare time can’t think of a way to make the lead in mechanical pencils stronger than a dried spaghetti stick.

An then I married an Ivy League architecture major and we’ve been happily employed in the restaurant industry ever since. At least my wasted education was free.

But we do both find ourselves drawn to the linear. The only pictures we have hanging in our living room are of houses, or parts of them. My bathroom has a big ass schematic of the Brooklyn Bridge hanging in it. All of the furniture is square and all of the frames are level. We’re sort of neurotically straight, actually. The clutter all over every square inch of our lives offsets it nicely, though.

I also find myself, on occasion, taking pictures of buildings. I’m normally a portrait sort of girl; I wouldn’t take a picture of grass or water drops unless there was someone in it. Every know and then, however, I find some building that strikes my fancy and I can’t help myself but shoot it. Like in Mexico, when I found a cathedral with this entrance.

I actually love the fact that there’s a big, fat thumb smudge right in the middle of that picture, so shut up. There’s this building that I stumbled across in Chicago this summer.

Pretty freaking cool, isn’t it? There’s this shot of the Chinese Gardens in downtown Vancouver, and I love it because I can’t decide if it’s the very essence of serene or if it’s the fucking creepiest sort of “crawling out of these trees to get you” picture.

Either way, I’ll take it. My neighbor Anjou took this one in Cairo, but it’s all rights reserved so if you want to see it, you’ll have to click. It’s totally worth it.

And this one I love, I love so much, because if there’s anything I appreciate more than gorgeous detail, it’s religious irony.

But holy crap is that every gorgeous. Even if it is in abject defiance of the second commandment.

Every night at dinner, we sit together and I ask each boy how their day at school was. They both say, “humnaschmurna.” Then I ask 2of3 what his favorite part of the day was and he says recess. I ask 1of3 next and he says quantum physics.

I have vastly different children.

At this point, we usually eat and talk about that kid who got in trouble or the new toy in the Scholastic flyer or which dead animals they’ll be dissecting this year. Last night, I wasn’t feeling up to pig-gut talk, because I am an old fuddy duddy and no fun at all, so I asked 2of3 if he’d made any headway with his girl.

Last year, he fell in LOVE with a grade 4 girl. Like, wrote her sonnets and shit. This year, she’s in 5 and he’s in 4 and maybe the kid stands a chance, right? It was worth asking. We talked about her for a while and then I asked 1of3 if there was anyone special in his world. He said NO. I said, “Really, no one? And he said NOMAWMNO. I told him I wasn’t trying to tease him, that I really, honestly wanted to know and he said, “I know you’re being sincere, mom, but JUSTNONOWSTOP.” All one word.

I said Huh. I said that wow, I had my first major crush when I was 6 or 7. They asked about him and I told them that he was the popular, rich-ish kid who tormented me from the first day of first grade until the last day of fifth grade. I told them what a bully that guy was, that I have dreams about him still, I just beat the snot out of him in them now. I told them that I didn’t know why I had such a hang-up for Mr Matt Crowers, asshole extraordinaire, but I did.

Then I told them about Keith Scheshpin, and I know for a fact that’s spelled wrong but I can’t for the life of me remember how to spell it right. I told them out how cute he was, and how responsible he was, and how much older than me he was, so much that he didn’t even know I existed. But he went to my church and I luuuuurved him, for a very long time. And now I can’t remember what he looked like, not at all. Not even hair color. Love is fickle.

And then I told them about Jason Morawski, my very first “boyfriend.” I was 13, he was 12, and I still have a metric shitton of pictures of him in my keepsake box. He was my first kiss, if you count a very tightly-closed lip-bump a kiss. I told them about how much Jason and I liked each other…like, we’d totally hold pinkies when no one was looking. I told them about how Jason’s sister was my best friend, so I could never totally be swoony over Jason because I had to share my heart with him and his sister as equally as I could.

1of3 interrupted me and said, “So, he was just about my age, huh?” and I so totally threw up because man oh lordy, maybe I only tapped lips with that boy and just once, but I thought about much worse and he was the same age that my baby boy is almost now and that is just gross and wrong and I cannot believe some girl is going to think those thoughts about my baby like, next year, and still have his school picture from this year in the bottom of a wooden crate in 2030. God help me.  God help ALL OF US.

And then I told them about Chris Sanders, the boy in my church congregation from New Jersey who was my first very much so real kiss, and who was very much so older than me, but the kiss was totally called for because we were close friends for a really long time but since he was so very much older than me, we never could “like” each other. But he came to hang out with me the night my mother snuck out while I was in the shower and took my brother and sister with her so that, when I left in a few hours for the airport to move in with my dad, I couldn’t say goodbye to anyone. Not the best night of my life. So Chris came over, helped me un-child-lock the MTV and get the buckles on the suitcase closed and he kiiiiiiiissed me before he left that night. Like, ’soap-opera, arm around the waist, been waiting two years to do this’ kiss.

Dude, first kisses are the greatest kisses in the history of kissing mankind. So are last ones. Especially when they happen at the same time.

And then I told them about Andy Ritchie, who went to high school with me and was as close to a ‘boyfriend’ as I had in high school except that he didn’t go to my church and in my religion, you don’t associate with people who weren’t also a member of that religion, so I couldn’t ever be his girlfriend. But I wanted to be, oh god did I ever. He was Irish and Portuguese, making him just about the most beautiful human on the planet, with the best hair, and he was an artist. He introduced me to Jane’s Addiction and camouflage clothing and he actually came to visit me after I moved to Colorado in our junior year of high school. But I never got to have the first kiss, or the last one, with him.

I kept talking, because I don’t know when to shut up, as if you didn’t notice that by paragraph 83 of this post. I told them about a boy I met in high school named Scott who didn’t really like me so much but I was infatuated with. Over the moon for. Obsessively stalking. Whatever. I told them about how much I wanted that boy to like me, and how much he didn’t until after high school, but then he asked me to marry him one day on some train tracks behind my house.

And then I told them about this other guy I met, right after I broke up with Scott, and how I knew the very second I saw him that I wanted to marry him and have a bunch of babies with him. It took him a while to warm up to me, but eventually he came around and we fell in love and his name was Josh (our last name). They giggled.

And then 2of3 said, “Jeez, mom, I was wondering how long it was going to take you to get to our dad.” Great, my kids think I’m a ho.

As if that’s not bad enough, 1of3 said, and I wish I was kidding, “Mom, I think it’s kind of weird that you’ve always had crushes on boys who you couldn’t have.” I said, “whuu?” and he said, “Mom, all of the guys you liked were either too old, or hated you, or went to your church, or didn’t know you existed. Why didn’t you just like someone who liked you first?”

You know what? We’re eating in front of the tv from now on.