Mr. Lady once referred to me as her high school sweetheart. Make of that what you will. Suffice it to say, we go back a ways. Supposedly this week Mr. Lady is enjoying a sabbatical and her laptop is powered down and tucked away in a little box under the bed … and the Easter Bunny and Santa really do exist. Also, I have a fine ocean-front property for sale right here  in Colorado. Ahem, so despite compelling pleas from my inner demon, I’ve opted to be on good behavior. I know where she hid the bodies but I ain’t tellin’ – at least not this time around.

Since the advent of  Marge In Real Life, I have made the occasional reference to the CLF. I’ve said once or twice that maybe one day I’ll explain just what that is but then I never got around to it. Why? Well, because the whole story hails back to an era in my life that is sometimes better left alone. Incidentally, it’s an era that owes its finest memories to its main characters – not the least of which would be Mr. Lady, or God’o'Editors as I was fond of calling her in those days. So, I says to myself, what better opportunity to tell the tale than right here on her blog?

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According to the great and sometimes fallible Wikipedia, the term or acronym ”CLF” may refer to any of the following:

• Conservation Law Foundation, a legal environmental advocacy organization
• Church of the Larger Fellowship
• Chlorine monofluoride(ClF)
• Clear Sky Lodge Airport‘s IATA code
• Cleveland-Cliffs Inc., a business firm specializing in the mining of iron ore.
• Clifton Forge (Amtrak station)‘s station code
• Contingency Logistics Flights – Space Shuttle missions STS-131 and STS-133
• Common Log Format – A standardized text file format usually associated with web server logs.
• Contactless RF Front End (also called NFC)

Sadly, it neglected this important possibility:

• Colorful Liberation Front

If you ask him today, my good friend Joshman will likely deny any and all involvement with the genesis of this movement. In truth, it was his idea but he certainly never intended it to become anything real, much less a creature of cult-like proportions. Math class was boring and we were passing a note filled with our usual mindless banter which came to the conclusion that our school was colorless and mundane and it should be the mission of (spontaneously invented) Colorful Liberation Front  to do something about it.

In the days that followed, I would commit many a misdemeanor as I defaced school property and recruited others to do the same. My friend Steph was insanely organized and all of her class notes were color-coded on neat little note cards. I thought she was super cool and before long I had my own little obsession with colored markers. And a new-found use for them. In my shamefully abundant spare time, I designed possibly hundreds of brightly colored, often nonsensical, always whimsical little stickers.

And slowly, but surely an almost imperceptible change began to come about. On locker doors, the underside of stairway rails, inside text book covers, on table legs and chair backs, windows and even smack-dab in the middle of Mr. Bunge’s classroom clock. Ok, that one wouldn’t go unnoticed for long. And when the stapler-throwing, eraser lobbing English teacher did take notice, he simply requested an explanation. The details of the confession are a little fuzzy but when he heard the premise behind the little sticker, he actually didn’t think it was all bad and the CLF badge was allowed to remain.

My morning ride to school was an early one and as I sat around the study area of the second floor watching the sun come up, I cranked out more and more stickers. My little army of rebels did their part too. Soon I was discovering the CLF mark in somewhat unexpected places. One day, as I was walking back through the parking lot with some of the trench-coat clad smoker crowd (no, I wasn’t one of them, I just had friends in every clique), we noticed a car with the window rolled down. Pressing a sticker to the back of the rear view mirror was a small and satisfying act of vandalism.

After two years of this craziness, the powers-that-be reviewed my progress and determined that I had just barelymet the criteria to receive my diploma. I’ll admit it, I’m a dork, and to prove it, I painted CLF in large letters on a bandanna and attached it to the top of my commencement day cap for all the world to see.

After a summer of cheese-keeping and fun in Lake Todd Colby, I entered the adult world of responsibility, employment, and flying airplanes  with nary a thought of the old CLF save for a small collection of undeployed stickers which I plastered onto a cardboard tube for a pencil can on my desk. 

It must have been at least two years after graduation that I heard through the grapevine of a friend that was at a Front 242 concert at a popular local venue and discovered a CLF sticker in the bathroom. What the….?! I wanted to believe it but it seemed too bizarre until I began to hear that the torch was indeed still lit and had been carried by other students at the school. To this day these rumors remain unconfirmed and I’m sure with time the legacy faded away. I’d be willing to bet there are still some relics of the great CLF lurking where one might least expect to find them.

And that, gentle readers**, is the Tale of the CLF. Now let us never speak of this again.

* Mr. Peabody’s WABAC machine
**It’s a Rudyard Kipling reference. C’mon.

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I know I said I was going to be good but then I was down in the crawl space – you know, where the bodies are buried – and I ran across a few gems.

Once upon a time, there was a little boy. The little boy could speak by age 1, and shortly thereafter was dubbed the Funniest Human Alive by all those lucky enough to cross his path.

He had other talents as well. He was the first boy in his class to blow bubble gum bubbles, he can burp a burp that will make you stop, look, and feel general concern for his physical well-being. He is an amazing artist, loves the guitar, and is a fabulous wing man. In fact, in a laundry room in the basement of an old apartment building, he once totally picked up some guy. That guy is now his godfather.

Boy’s got mad skilz, yo.

He has one other god given talent; the Great American Pastime, Baseball. To see that boy throw or hit a ball is like watching poetry get smacked with metal and flung through the air at 60 miles and hour. He’s good.

His momma signed him up for Little League, and due to the world’s most incompetent group of Bud drinkin’ idiots a scheduling error or two, the boys team had no coach. The boys momma volunteered. The boys momma has never played a day of baseball in her life, and was given a group of children to coach who were shipped in from Hades 2 days a week to get some fresh air and exercise. When the season was over, the boy had learned only one thing; he was better than every kid on that team. Not just talent-wise, but, like, character-wise.

The boys momma got down on her knees and cried in front of a candle lit alter to the mother of sweet baby Jesus in all her glory when the season ended.

And then that moron had the boy try out for the select team.  He got on the team.

This weekend, you will not be hearing much from the boys momma, since she’s got to be up well before dawn cracks its ass to get three kids out the door for 2 solid, action packed days of 8 year old Little League Championship games. Which the boys team is not nearly good enough to win, thank god, because if this crap goes on much longer, the boys momma may start hittin’ the drink.

Cross your fingers for the boy, okay? He looks mighty cute in his little uniform.

These are all of the shoes I own:I know, you’re waiting for the other pictures. There are no other pictures. That’s it; just those. That would be totally fine if I were a beach-bum in college, but I am a mother of three in Vancouver, British Columbia where it rains like crazy. Britney Spears crazy. I need shoes.

Today, Josh took me out to fix this little issue, and bought me these:I paid more for those than I did for all over my other shoes. Combined. I’m dead serious; I did the math.

It’s not that I couldn’t have more shoes, it’s just that I am a penny pinching cheap bastard and every time I think I could squeeze in a pair of shoes I then think about next stupid school fundraiser or the impending diaper purchase or replacing the area rug that I have had since I was single.

Anyway, now I have a decent pair of shoes and my husband totally has a crush on them. He’s got a shoe thing. Someday I’ll show you how many pairs of shoes he has.

So, yes; we had a bad go at the store last week. That little incident, however, seems like a nap in a field of lilies compared to the very next day at Ikea. See, I eventually figured it wasn’t so dreadfully important to get baskets right then, in the middle of a temper tantrum, and I did take her home and list her on eBay give her a bottle and put her to bed. I thought that we could try again, the next day, after a good nights’ sleep and a yummanummy breakfast.

Wanna guess how well that went?

We tried Ikea. What kid doesn’t like Ikea? My kid, that’s who. If you haven’t been to an Ikea, how is works is that you find the thing you want and then you go pick it up at the stock area right by the checkout. 3of3 found this: It’s cute and she really could use something like that to lug around her permanent markers and dead insects. And she had a blast pushing it around while I looked for something to get the boys to put their bags and mittens and hats in, because I LIKE the floor in my front entry way and I would like to see it again sometime this century. I was totally going to buy it for her.

Have you ever tried explaining to a toddler that they have put a toy away and go get another one, in a box, somewhere else?

Um, that doesn’t work. She screamed for 30 minutes straight.

The difference between Walmart* and Ikea is that no matter where you are in Walmart, you can find a straight line out in 5 seconds or less. Ikea, however, is a labyrinth. You cannot take a straight line anywhere in Ikea. A full grown adult comes out of Ikea looking like this: Try getting out of Ikea with a demon-possessed kid flung over your shoulder (because that’s the only way to protect your face from punches and kicking and stuff). It’s not the funnest fun ever. It took me 30 minutes to get out, but at least this time I started for the door immediately. At one point, we passed a mom with a small baby and, I’d guess, a 4 year old. The 4 year old pointed at my ape of a child and said, “Mommy, look at that baby!” The mom did the embarrassed-shush-her-kid thing and I looked at the little girl, smiled, and said, “See, honey, this is how not to act at the store.” She nodded a very serious nod to me and that was that.

We made it out basket-less, toy-less, and almost in tears.

I tell you that all to tell you this; you won’t be seeing me in public for a while. This kid is officially grounded until college.

*Shut up; I know. But I’m in Canada. We don’t have Target.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, Josh and I lived in a really awful little duplex in Denver. We lived there until just after 2of3 was born. We had these really cool neighbors in the house next door to the awful duplex, and when they sold it, we were sad. They moved away and the new owners moved in. They were a young couple and after a little bit we realized that they rocked, too. And then we moved away. Bygones.

Fast forward 7 years.

So, let’s all pretend for a minute that my laundry is all folded and the dishes are stacked neatly in the cupboards and that my bedroom floor does not have a large sticky spot on it caused from what I can only pray was a popsicle and therefore I totally have my shit together and am left with tons of spare time.

In my excessive amounts of leisure time, I have signed up to do a few things. One is NaNoWriMo. I tried last year with Andy, but damn that sweet sweet wine. If you could write a novel full of giggle-giggle-giggle, Andy and I would have Pulitzers. But this year, I’m doing it. I am going to write a very stupid book in 30 days. And no one will read it. But I’m writing it anyway. You can mock my failure here.

I am also doing NaBloPoMo. That’s a really hard way of saying National Blog Posting Month. I will bore you to tears for 31 straight days in November. I apologize, whole-heartedly, in advance. The NaBloPoMo site is here. Today, I got a friend request on that site (it’s like MySpace for real people) from someone. That someone didn’t know me, I didn’t know her. She just wandered past me online and asked to be my friend *Gush*.

This is where it gets good.

I clicked on her link, and I’ll be a greased Jesus…I totally know her. She is the very same someone who bought the house next to us 7 years ago. She is the same someone who I ran into on my kids’ school playground last year because she and her husband, well, they went and had a kid, too. And very unknowingly, just this very day, she stumbled across yours truly.

Does it get more random than that? I think it doesn’t.

Anyway, here is her blog. It’s seriously good. Like, it’s way better than mine.