2001-02-21 - 986031987

Who's Who Cheat Sheet
Who I Read

On the internal soundtrack: "We Are The Champions", Queen

I'm back. Happily the weather cooperated and is waiting 'til this afternoon to get cold.

The next two segments were written in Florida, before my brother arrived and I stopped spending much time on the computer.

Well, so, here I am in Florida, being even lazier than usual. I am eating, eating, eating, eating. My wonderful mother-in-law has made the following items for me (and, technically, everyone else as well) to eat:

- Penne with tomato, ground turkey, and turkey sausage with carmelized onions and italian parsley
-Chicken with broccoli and rosemary garlic potatoes
-Burgers made with ground turkey, bread crumbs, and an amazing assortment of spices

[At this point we abandon the healthy choices and move on to the decadent ones:]

-Cheese quesadilla with peppers and black olives and chives
-Raspberry chocolate brownies
-Cream cheese cake with raspberry filling, which is almost all gone, so she is making it again for the weekend with blackberry filling

I am in a permanent state of stuffed-ness. It is very, very, very nice.

Not only that, but we had this whole discussion this morning about eating healthy. MIL is of the opinion (backed up by her hematologist/oncologist, no less) that cancer and heart disease are primarily caused by a genetic predisposition. If you're gonna get cancer, you're gonna get cancer and no amount of vegetables and lack of cheese is going to help.

If this is true, I can stop feeling guilty about my non-healthy lapses, I guess. Plus Papa eats a stick of butter a day (gag), so a little cheese now and then isn't going to hurt me.

(BTW, she doesn't have cancer, she has a hereditary blood condition. She's fine. But I wanted to clarify that it's an oncologist who thinks this.)

OK, so I'm back home now. My vacation was quite lovely. I was too busy socializing with the folks and laying around like a lump to get any further with journal entries. Now I'm trying to figure out where to start. I think I'll have to go backwards.

Day before we left, we went to the local gun range and I shot a gun for the first time. Several of them, actually. I didn't like it at first, but it grew on me. By the end I was digging it enough to want to try it again.

The most surprising thing about a handgun is that it is HEAVY. Even a little one is as heavy as a brick. The cop-type squarish handguns you see on TV are hard to hold upright without wobbling. (At least, they are when you're a puny thing like me.)

My first shot was with a small .38 revolver. Now, I knew that guns have a lot of power in them. I had tried to imagine what this was like, and was braced for it, but it was still something of a shock.

I tried to come up with a way to describe what it's like. Here's the best I can do: Have you ever been in a minor car accident? Fender bender type thing? You know that LOUD noise and how you get a big jolt? That's what it's like. Firing a handgun is like a car accident happening in your hands.

At first I was incredibly jumpy. Poindexter was laughing at me because every time a gun would go off, even if it was in the next room, I startled. I was trying to help him load up a clip and everytime his dad fired in the next booth I jumped a foot.

Initially it was frightening to me to be holding, much less firing, a loaded gun. I couldn't get it out of my head that these things are a tool for killing people. But after a while, I relaxed some and began to enjoy it in a sporting kind of way. It's a challenge to try to hit the target, to hold the gun steady, aim, and fire.

In addition to the .38, which annoyed me because the shape made it hurt my hands, I tried a 9mm for a while, and a .22 rifle. The rifle was really fun, because instead of a deafening boom it's more like a little hiccup, and because it's a rifle it's much more accurate. The scope on it was like a magnifying glass. I have a target that I brought home that has a bunch of little .22 holes all in the black center (about 5 inches in diameter) of the target. I shot them at a distance of 50 feet.

I had a few weird moments:

- While firing the 9mm, a shell casing hit me in the face

- I tried to pick up a shell casing and almost burned my fingers. Guns are HOT.

- I had a fit of the giggles looking at my dear family in their booths, shooting guns. A nice little family outing on a national holiday, eh?

MIL and Papa don't like the "snowbirds". This is their term for the people who come from up north and stay in Florida for six months and a day, thus avoiding paying income tax in any state. The snowbirds are all senior citizens from New York, so you can imagine what it's like dealing with them on the road and in the grocery store.

Anyway. You know how sometimes you'll see an old person behind the wheel and for some reason they are so low in the seat you can't see them? Their head barely makes it to the top of the steering wheel?

Papa calls them "no-see-ums".

For some reason this struck me as hysterically funny. The likening of short/stooped people to invisible bugs just got to me. It would also be a good term for those guys in long cars who slouch waaaaaaay down to be cool. All you can see is their arm hanging out the window.

We had a big discussion about me wanting to go to Haulover Beach, a clothing-optional beach just north of Miami. I can't get my husband to go, since he's afraid of naked men, and my MIL doesn't see the point in going to the beach longer than a half hour. Sigh. Yet Poindexter doesn't want me going to a nude beach alone, and I can't really blame him. When I went with my aunties there were gawkers at the edge where it turned clothing-optional and I wouldn't want to have to deal with any gawkers with the wrong idea as I was leaving, alone.

My brother was taken aback at the very idea and wanted to know what the appeal was. I said, "I like to be naked outdoors, and since I don't have a private property large enough to be naked outdoors, I have to go to a public beach to do it."

(Imagine sunbathing naked on my stoop. It's the only property I've got. I'd be arrested.)

I know that back when they lived in an isolated house in the mountains, MIL rarely wore clothes outdoors alone if it was warm enough. In fact, one time she was sunbathing nude and the dog, a Doberman, started barking. She thought her husband was arriving home, so she went out to greet him. Alas, it wasn't her husband, but rather a UPS man, who was cornered by the dog. Then her husband DID arrive home, and the poor UPS man stared up at the sky while surrounded by a naked woman, a barking Doberman, and what he was probably afraid was an angry husband.

Anyway. I asked MIL why she liked to be naked outdoors, and she said, "It feels nice."

Exactly. It does, folks. You men are lucky, being able to walk around bare-chested all the time. I heard in NYC women can be topless anywhere it's okay for men to be topless. I wonder if that means I could sunbathe topless in Central Park. I think it does.

I fretted a while, trying to guilt Poindexter, that I'd never be able to be naked outdoors again, or at least not unless we buy a 10-acre vacation home in West Virginia near the trailsheaven.com riding area. (Actually, maybe I should look into that. We could leave the motorcycle there and fly there all the time instead of driving 7 hours each way.) Then I remembered Amy. I bet she'll go with me. We can go to Sandy Hook up in NJ, where the beach is sanctioned by the city and they even have lifeguards. Yippee.

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