Those of you who read my blog last year at this time, know that Memorial Day is my favorite holiday. I will be busy today trying to fit in the Annual Memorial Day Pancake Breakfast at the Palmyra, Michigan Fire Department, a Memorial Day Parade in Blissfield, Michigan, and a BBQ Chicken lunch at the American Legion Post 325. Oh, how I love Memorial Day. I hope the weather is nice.
And now, I present you with a parting picture for this fine holiday. Enjoy:)
MEMORIAL DAY IS HERE AGAIN!!!!
My Fake Family
Growing up, I was the only child of a single parent. I was creative with a very good imagination. So naturally, I always imagined having a large family. The earliest imaginary family I can remember, I had six sisters (Brady Bunch influence?) and one brother named Hellmann (Yup, like the mayonnaise). All the girls lived in the attic together (Boy, would that be totally NOT fun in real life!). Hellmann would come up and run through the room very fast and we would all spin around and our belongings would fly every which way (Yes, just like in a cartoon) and we would all yell “Hellmann!”
There were various other imaginary families after that. But once Punky Brewster debuted on NBC, it was important that I somehow work her into all my imaginary adventures. (In case it isn’t clear, I viewed myself to be Punky:) So, here is the Brewster family I created. There were so many kids with so many names, I had to make a cheat sheet family photo. Then, because I lived to draw, I made many, many family photos. I think part of it may have been to see if I could draw the same people over and over to look the same each time, like Charles Schulz did with his characters. All these pictures have just been sitting in my file cabinet for like 28 years (Yes, I save everything). In the real world, my mom is a hermit and not big on keeping in touch with family. That means, at a point in time, I knew more about these imaginary people than I have ever known about some relatively close member of my own real family.
Family Photo with names and ages.
House Floor Plan. Wow, 4 bathrooms! Must be David & Sheri got married if they started sharing a bedroom!
So, here are some pictures of my fake family. I drew them when I was young. Yes, some of the names are badly misspelled. The fashions are very 80’s. You probably can’t tell from the scan, but from the info on their T-shirts, the family seems to live in Greenville. Greenville: where families have a mom and a dad, older brothers have a nice, pretty girlfriend, younger brothers are always covered in mud, people have look-alike cousins, newborn babies eat cookies, ponytails are sideways, both grandma and grandpa are alive, and houses have four bathrooms. The burning question that remains in my mind, looking back on these pictures so many years later—why the fuck didn’t this family have a dog?!!
Oldest brother David’s girlfriend Sheri. Notice how she signed AND kissed the picture;)
Newborn picture of youngest sister “Mealisa”. I even did this picture on an index card, so that it would look smaller, like a real picture. Notice she is holding a rattle AND a cookie.
Petrisa “Punky” (me), look-alike Cousin Ann (equals twice the fun), and friend Prisilla
Older sister Julie going to a dance. Awesome 80’s fashion. Truly outrageous.
With Grandparents
Dad macking on the oldest son’s girlfriend. More awesome fashion.
Family at the hospital for birth of Mealisa.
One more. This picture is incomplete, but I felt it necessary to show that imaginary Mom could get dressed up and look damn good:)
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Squirrels Cannot Be Trusted
Doesn’t this totally look like a pot-smoking squirrel, using his nut as a bong?
I hate squirrels. I see them as worthless vermin. Some people feed them and think they are cute. Not me. Some people buy greeting cards with pictures of squirrels on them. I use those cards as a dart board.
My distrust stems from an encounter I had with a squirrel when I was young, a preschooler. Apparently someone in the small town I lived in had raised a squirrel from when it was a baby. Hence, eradicating it’s natural fear of humans. But it grew up and they released it into the wild. Now, I refer to this as half-tamed. Apparently the squirrel had attacked a girl down the street. But no one tried to catch it.
Then one day my mom and I were sitting on our front porch, minding our own business. She was reading a letter from her friend in California. Luckily for me, they wrote each other thick letters. The half-tame squirrel ran up and attacked me. I don’t really remember it, I remember my mom telling me about it. (I probably blocked it out of my memory for continued sanity.) He scratched and bit me. My mom beat him off with the letter.
Our next door neighbor was an RN, so she fixed up my wounds. My mom rented a live trap from the DNR and finally caught the thing and they hauled it off. I have hated squirrels ever since. Which, is like, over 30 years. I am good at holding a grudge.
One time I was taking a walk at work with my green-haired co-worker while we were on break. We saw a squirrel and she threw a stick at it. The stick hit close to it, bounced, and the squirrel ran—in the direction that the stick bounced. Hence, the stick totally hit him right in the head. The funniest damn thing I have ever seen! I wish we had taped it for YouTube.
In my current house, we have a big old maple tree in the backyard that the squirrels love to live in. If we were in the country, I would shoot them with a gun. The squirrels drive my German Shorthair Pointer nuts. They sit in the tree and “bark” at my dog. Sometimes they sit up there and scratch themselves. I just know they are flicking their fleas and lice down at me. Yuck. Filthy, gross beasts. The worst is probably when the dogs are on the 20 foot lead. The squirrels know that. They will stay just beyond where my Pointer can reach them and taunt him.
My house if over 100 years old. Several years ago, we redid the dining room ceiling, removing the plaster. As we hit the ceiling to break up the plaster, we could hear nuts up above the lathe. In the past, those nasty animals were living IN my house. Last year one squirrel moved into our garage. It isn’t a finished and nice garage, but I still don’t want vermin in it. I would open the garage door and startle the squirrel that would scurry away, in turn startling me. Sometimes he would dive across the small distance between our house roof and the garage roof, just as I was letting dogs out, driving them crazy.
A couple months ago, I let my dogs out into the backyard and was standing around, minding my own business while the dogs tended to theirs. Just then there was a commotion and all of a sudden I had a squirrel running at me at full speed, with my Pointer just inches behind him. Parker must have smoked him out of his hiding spot by the house somewhere. I screamed and jumped, which is the natural reaction when you think a squirrel is going to jump up your leg. The squirrel, realizing I was between him and his favorite tree, made a hairpin turn and headed for the garage instead. He leaped up onto the fence gate, that is attached to the garage. He stumbled, and Parker almost got him. But no such luck. The squirrel clawed his way up the garage siding, leaving me and my dog with our hearts beating out of our chests.
When I envisioned this post six months ago, I didn’t have a good ending for it. Now I totally have great closure. The stupid squirrels would use a barrel that sat next to the garage to help them climb to the roof. I had not noticed the squirrels jumping up that way for a few months. Then our neighbor realized there was a dead animal in the barrel. Everyone thought it was a raccoon. When my husband removed the carcass, it turned out it was two dead squirrels. Wow. Mother’s Day had come early. I couldn’t have been happier. Couldn’t have happened to a nastier animal. Except maybe bats. One time we had one of those drown in a storage container in the attic. But, that’s a different topic.
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What I Learned This Week – 5/20/12
I think this week I figured out how the apocalypse will happen. I think all the women on the planet will have their “cycles” in sync at the same time. December 12th, 2012, anyone?
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Hippie Pictures
Flower Child
Photo of me from 1991. It was Woodstock Day during Spirit Week at school. (I wish I was still that skinny.)
During my hippie time, I also drew pictures. Do you know that song “Hippie Chick” by Soho? (Ya, I had to look up who sang it.) Well, these are “Hippie Pix.” I think I envisioned that someday I would work at Lisa Frank (maker of colorful school supplies and stationary for pre-teen girls). These were sort of my first stab at that. I did so many of these drawings that my markers ran out of ink. Thirty-one drawings in all. I actually kind of miss making them, although I guess, when I think about it, it was a giant waste of time. They have just sat in a folder in my file cabinet for twenty years.
My Favorite
So now, I expose them on my blog, to the world. Or, at least the handful that I scanned. Please do not steal them. Although I can understand how you would totally want to 😛
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