My Wife's Weakness

AM is a lady of steely resolve and iron character.

She does, however, have a weakness (this of course excludes her insatiable obsession with Disney movies, DisneyWorld, and all other things Disney). That weakness is holiday/seasonal marketing. To say that she is susceptible to marketing and advertising is like saying that Kurt Cobain was prone to suicidal tendencies. I suppose I always knew this because every time we go to the grocery store she almost invariably rushes excitedly to the seasonal candy section, unconsciously gravitating to whatever candy is being peddled for the next holiday.

My wife, worshiping at the altar of the Marketing gods

"I'm a sucker," she just readily admitted, sitting next to me while she cross-stitches her Halloween-themed pattern and I type out this blog.

I guess I never realized the extent to which she is susceptible until last week when she started asking if we could go to Wendy's and get the Caramel Apple Frosty Parfait. I thought it was a random strange craving, but in the end, I really only have myself to blame for her demand: I have been obsessively watching college football on ESPN3 (not as good as "The Ocho", but still pretty awesome) and they play the same three commercials over and over...one of which is -- you guessed it -- for the Caramel Apple Frosty Parfait. We went last week but they were out of the vanilla ice cream so they couldn't make it. She was VERY disappointed. At long last, we finally got her one tonight.

The assessment: "The apples were crap, but the rest was good."

I have decided to roll with this weakness and use it to my advantage. Starting now, I am launching a marketing campaign to name our first boy "Scotch" (Scotch Dalton -- how strong of a name is THAT?!?). Who's with me?

Scotland Recap: Glasgow & the Bonny Bonny Banks

Day 3 of our Scotland adventure was spent (1) resting our feet from the previous day's mighty hike, (2) doing a whirlwind tour of Glasgow and (3) worshipping with the Glaswegian saints, AND (4) singing "The Bonny Bonny Banks of Loch Lomond" over and over again.

But first, the magnificent and sizely Glasgow Cathedral, built mostly in the 15th century, and Scotland's only cathedral to have weathered the Reformation:

A shot of the quiet interior, moments before a band of middle-aged American tourists invaded:


Beneath the choir (shown here) was my favorite part of the cathedral -- the darkened, creepy crypt, which holds the ancient tomb of St. Mungo (a 5th or 6th century bishop who founded a monastic community here). Not only does he have an awesome sounding name, but apparently it was a miraculously powerful one as well, as medieval folks would make pilgrimages from all corners of the land to be blessed at his tomb.

Overlooking the cathedral (and all of Glasgow) is the Necropolis, a veritable city of the dead. It's a steep, grassy hill shooting up with spires, angels, mausoleums, obelisks, and other stony monuments to expired Glaswegians. The day was far too cheerful and sunny to do the brooding grey stones justice, however:



Before leaving Glasgow we hit up the Kelvingrove Art Gallery, which, among other things, boasted the creepiest grand lobby decor of any museum I've ever visited:

Yes, my friends -- disembodied heads floating ghoulishly in the air!  E'en so, we turned our embodied heads towards the north and west, leaving Glasgow behind.  We had a rather tense 8 mile drive from the loch-side village of Balmaha to Rowardennan, dodging Scottish road-hogs on a windy one-track lane, wincing as we scraped shrubbery on our left side and prayed not to scrape Fiats and Minis on our right.  In the end, we arrived here, at the Rowardennan Youth Hostel, where the road ends along the eastern shore of Loch Lomond

(You can't tell, but AM is, of all things, flossing her teeth. You'd think that during a possibly once-in-a-lifetime trip to Scotland together we'd be doing something not-so-mundane, but the girl does floss 5 or 6 times a day)
 
Rowardennan sits in the shadow of Ben Lomond, and is the point at which intrepid hikers head off into the wilderness of the West Highland Way.  This was our view:

Oh, the bonny, bonny banks! We strolled along before dinner, warbling to ourselves, cooing over bluebells (me), skipping rocks in the loch (Josh), and generally feeling like we'd found paradise:

The sky set beautifully over Loch Lomond, and took its sweet time about it.  Josh snapped this picture around 10pm:

And sunrise the next morning was just as lovely.  I took the below picture of Josh on the dock moments after a rather astonishing revelation from my English roommates.  This hostel only had same-sex dorm rooms, and I shared mine with 5 very cheery middle-aged women hiking the West Highland Way (hard core).  We all woke up around the same time, and the lady in the bunk above me was checking her BlackBerry. 

"Oh dear!  Do you know who's died?  Henry Cooper!" (All the British ladies exclaim mightily with grief and shock; the cheeriest of the lot informs me that Henry Cooper was an English boxer who once knocked down Muhammad Ali).  Then the lady above me speaks again, sort of as an afterthought:

"Huh.  D'you know who else has died?  Osama Bin Laden" (with the "Laden" part pronouced with a short "a" like in "lad"; very English). 

I nearly fall off my bottom bunk in astonishment while the ladies merely make a disinterested "oh" or two in acknowledgment, still reeling from the news about Henry Cooper.  The English and national loyalty.

At any rate, this is Josh down on the dock, moments before I told him my news, initiating a good 12 hours of him trying to read news about Bin Laden on his Kindle: 

Scotland Recap in Pictures - The Borders

On our second day in Scotland we headed south, to the lovely but often passed-over Border country.  This is the region where Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott hail from, and most tourists skip while scurrying off to the Highlands.  The gently beautiful scenery of these counties belie its turbulent and bloody history--it was sacked, pillaged, and burnt time and again during the Wars of Independence with the English.  All that, combined with lame-o King Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries campaign, has left us the ruined skeletons of Melrose, Dryburgh, Kelso, and Jedburgh.  We went first to Melrose Abbey, built of red-sandstone and originally founded in 1136 by Cistercian monks:    

Apparently Robert the Bruce's heart is buried here (the rest of him is buried at Dumferline Abbey--medieval folks had no qualms with splitting up their bodies if they wanted to be buried in more than one place).  The Bruce had always longed to go on a Crusade, so he asked that his heart be taken by his knights to the Holy Land after he died.  The knight and the heart only made it as far as Spain, where apparently it got lobbed at the murderers of the knight in his last ditch attempt to . . . defy the thugs by throwing a dead king's heart at them?  I didn't really get that part of the story.  At any rate, somehow the heart made it back to Scotland and it now lies in ye olde leaden box beneath the abbey grass.

I was sprawled on the grass, taking pictures of awesome old tombstones, and got this awesome view of the abbey and Josh's hair looking suspiciously like a bowl cut.

The exterior of the abbey was designed by a French master mason whose name I've forgotten, but it is delightfully and quirkily ornate.  Dad would have died over all the gargoyles--men, dragons, angels, saints, and all kinds of strange beasties.  I liked these two guys:

This fellow is one of the most famous gargoyles in Scotland.  It is, indeed, a pig playing the bagpipes:

After lunching in the shadow of Dryburgh (we didn't feel like paying for two abbeys in one day), we drove to Kelso, where we saw the humble remains of the abbey there (not enough left for them to ask people to pay), parked our car and began our 13.5 mile trek to Jedburgh.  Here I am, looking cheerful around mile 6 or so:

The country was fairly idyllic--the Teviot on one hand, and all this on the other hand:

And this:

And this:

And this!  Oh glory:

And this is how we started looking around mile 10, until we finally limped into Jedburgh, caught a bus back to Kelso, lurched into a pub, and then inhaled our burger and salmon in an ungodly amount of time:

Scotland Recap in Pictures - Edinburgh

Now that we have returned to humid Virginia, we would like to relive our trip with all of you with some choice pictures. First, we'll be recapping our Edinburgh days, which were days 1 and 10.

This is the view of Edinburgh Castle from Princes Street in New Town, about an hour or two after sunrise. Meanwhile, we had been walking for about an hour trying to find an open bakery at 7am on a Saturday . . . no luck.

The castle from the same vantage point, taken the day before when it was cloudier:

The front entrance to the castle, looking formidable. Almost as formidable as Josh's hair would have been if he weren't wearing that thing on his head:

Another view of the castle coming down from the Royal Mile toward the National Gallery of Art in New Town:


In the gardens on Castle Hill, looking back on the spires of the Royal Mile:

This is a sweet two-tiered, colorful street leading down from the Royal Mile to Old Town via Victoria Square:

Saturday morning we got up before the crack of dawn to be at this place in time for the dawn. We are standing on Calton Hill at the Dugald Stewart Monument, looking out over Edinburgh toward the castle, which you can see in the distance:

The skyline of Edinburgh, taken on our final night in Scotland while hiking Arthur's Seat around sundown. Arthur's Seat is a gorgeous hill that rears up out of Holyrood Park at the end of the Royal Mile, at Holyrood Palace and the Scottish Parliament. Local legend says that when King Arthur returns, he will come to this hill (basically every corner of Britain has its own legends and myths surrounding Arthur). Less fanciful but perhaps more important, Arthur's Seat was the site where Orson Pratt dedicated Scotland for missionary work in May 1840. He asked the Lord for 200 souls and when he left 9 months later, there were 229 members in Edinburgh. Not bad. Neither is the view:

And to close it out for Edinburgh, here is a very hungry and excited Josh with a Scottish lamb shank, served with mash and drenched in bacon and mushroom flavored gravy:

Clumsy Adventures by AM #2

Apparently one should keep an eye on the spoon while eating chili. I was multi-tasking at work (staring at my screen, clicking the mouse with one hand, and shoveling chili into my mouth with the other), which has been known to bring about calamities. Eyes fixed on the monitor, I assumed the chili would go where my blind hand was guiding it: into my mouth.


I was surprised to feel something thunk against my stomach, then strike me in the thigh. Sure enough, it was a ping-ponging, renegade garbanzo bean, leaving a smear of tomatoey chili sauce on my shirt AND my pants. Discombobulated by the thought of all my impending meetings with chili stains all over my clothes, my body decided to leap to action before checking to see if my hand was properly disengaged from in-between the arm of the chair and the desk. It was not.

Sure enough, I stood up while my hand remained lodged between the chair and the desk, resulting in a lovely red welt along one finger to match the lovely red splotches on my shirt and pants. The only good thing about the whole experience is that this time in didn't happen in front of the guy who works in Contracts.

Scotland the Brave

Time is too short, but we wanted to details of a few of our Scottish adventures! We are currently perched on the grassy hillside of Dunflodigarry on the Trotternish peninsula of the Isle of Skye. It is paradise. The view looks directly out onto the water, and grassy hills surround us, with the dramatic, forbidding cliffs of the Quirang at our backs. We've been bless with some uncharacteristically (for Scotland) sunny weather. It's been amazing. AM has indulged me in letting me drag her at various times during the early morning to places where light from sunrises would be nice.

A few highlights of the trip thus far:

*Edinburgh is perhaps the world's most photogenic city. It is a gorgeous old mound of black rock and grey stone, all growing together in a gloriously romantic and organic combination of natural beauty and civilization. It is also beautifully in bloom -- pink blossoms float around the dark stones; lilac grows in the hedges; yellow furs spread across the hillsides. We climbed Calton Hill at sunrise on Saturday (not difficult to do, as we were jetlagged, AND our dodgy hostel was filled with bizarre and shrieking characters; I felt like Jane Eyre, shivering in my bed, listening to unknown persons giggling like maniacal apes at ungodly hours of the morn) to see the lovely spring dawn creep over the hill and shine on the far castle.

*Ruined abbeys are among the loveliest structures in creation. Walking 13.5 miles between various of them, however, is really exhausting. We hiked from Kelso to Jedburgh, and I thought it was only a 12 mile hike when I suggested it; once I had the map in hand from the information office, I decided to keep that little fact hidden from Josh until we were on the road. I thought it would be a fun surprise: "Actually, we didn't hike 12 miles in 4 hours; we hiked 13.5!" (AM seems to think I am some witless and illiterate fool that can't read maps or signs, or tell the difference between 12 and 13.5, but whatever) The first 8.5 miles went very quickly--a little path that wound beside the Teviot River, dotted with heron, swans, and ducks, hemmed in by gorgeously vibrant fields of yellow rape seed. This is Walter Scott and Robert Burns country--lush, verdant, peacefully humming with natural life. We passed the ruins of an old castle and trailed along the old railway line. We ate apples as we walked down a path in-between hedgerows and fields of green and yellow, the hedges springing up with wildflowers in pink, white, and purple. The last 5 miles culminated in a near vertical scale of a hillside on an old Roman road--smooth, rounded cobblestones poking out beneath the dirt. We had a trusty Powerbar to thank for making possible our last crippled lurch into Jedburgh as we raced/limped to make the 7pm bus back to Kelso.

*Glasgow was nice but the street lights were long, and we only spend a few hours there for church and some museums. We did learn that someone from Glasgow is called a "Glaswegian."

*Loch Lomond and the hostel at Rowardennan is still absolute paradise on earth--one of the most peaceful places I've ever been, eliciting happy contemplation in the most effortless way. Bluebells cloaked the forest floor, and the loch sparkled in the evening sun as we took a stroll before making ourselves dinner in the well-remembered hostel kitchen. There were no small family rooms in that hostel, so I slept in a room full of awesome middle-aged English ladies hiking the West Highland Way, and Josh slept in a room full of smelly but cheerful Scottish laddies hiking the West Highland Way. I much prefer the hiking crowd to the drunk, lay-about, maniacally-screeching-at-4am crowd. This is also where we received the surreal news that Osama Bin Laden was done for (one of the English ladies was checking the news on her BlackBerry that morning; Henry Crawford had also died, which was even bigger news to them).

*The Highlands. There are some awesome, rugged old Scotsmen out here. We passed two of them on our way up to the Lost Valley at Glencoe as they were going down. We were heaving for breath and covered in sweat, and they were walking past us in all their silver-haired glory, waving their walking sticks and nodding their hats at us. Hardcore gents! You wouldn't catch me on an incline like that in my golden years; it would spell a broken hip or two for sure. The Lost Valley was well worth the incline, however. The path led up between two of the Three Sisters (rugged peaks at Glencoe), following a babbling brook and waterfalls, affording dazzling vistas of the Highlands the higher we climbed. It led to a hidden valley where clans used to hide their stolen sheep and cattle from raids. To us, it offered a lovely place to picnic and commune with the ghosts of my murdered MacDonald ancestors (Glencoe was the site of the 1692 massacre of the MacDonalds by the black-hearted Campbells).

*Ft. William--although we hadn't counted on having to pay for a 10 minute, 10 dollar ferry to the other side of Loch Linnhe, the view from our inn was well worth it. There had been an inn on that site for 600 years, the present building existing from the mid 18th century after its predecessor was burnt down during the Jacobite wars. Our window looked directly out over the loch and all the mountains that framed it, AND we had a canopied bed (childhood fantasy . . . way too many Disney princess movies).

*Isle of Skye--the highlight thus far was our evening hike to the Quirang last night. It ended up being steeper and longer than we had anticipated, which resulted in a scramble on the way down to beat the fading light, but it was worth it a hundred times over. The Quirang is a mass of soaring basalt rock--grass topped cliffs jutting out against the skyline, looking out over tumbling green valleys below and the sea beyond. Josh told me before we started that he felt like he was about to go on a first date with a girl he liked. I asked for clarification (eyebrows arched). He said that the anticipation and excitement was such that he was afraid he would just end up being disappointed (he's been staring at a picture of the Quirang on our Scotland calendar for 4 months now, salivating over it). His nervous excitement manifested itself in the frenetic pace he took, straight up the mountain. I followed faithfully, cool and steady as a plow. The sun had already passed beyond the Quirang but it was still a little less than 2 hours from setting, so the valley was already in shadow. After turning off the road we wandered on spongy grass sheep trails, past a still dark loch, gaining in steepness as we went. We crested the top of the first incline and wound around the top of a rocky valley, turning right and climbing over an ancinet stone wall. The view at this point was beyond breathtaking--valleys stretching before and behind us, brooding steep cliffs on either side. We headed west, towards the setting sun, and could see its reddish light hitting the summits above us. It was another scramble up to the top of the cliffs, and then I made a made dash for where the red light was striking the rocky chimneys at the top of the cliffs. It was absolute glory--the sunset before me, the sea behind me, endless stretches of green cascading below me. We then moved in the other direction as quickly as possible, for we were after Josh's "first date"--a great grassy plateau in the middle of the Quirang called The Table. This required much more scrambling and heaving over vertical rises, and is where my pace became particuarly plow-like and Josh became an ever-quickly vanishing frenetic dot in the distance. In the end, we made it, staring hundreds and hundreds of feet down upon The Table. But the sun had set, and this meant we had to haul it down before we started breaking ankles and such. It's a good thing we're not superstitious. Those dark, haunted valleys, perfectly still in the falling night, would have been a playground for an imagination not hemmed in by the confines of rational, modern thought . . .

*Hair. Josh's hair is enormous and sentient. The lower parts of it lay flat and silky down his neck (yes, mulletlike), while the upper layers magically take on an astonishing amount of volume, giving it a bouffant appearance. I have many pictures of it in all its varied moods (I have many pictures of Josh in general, especially pictures of Josh taking pictures), and I sense a blog post coming on when we return.

*Food. Hooray for British yogurt! As marvelous as ever. The same for the cheese, the crisps, the chips, the chocolate, and the steak and ale pie. Josh has yet to try haggis, although he is planning on it. I had it when I was in Scotland make in '01 and consider that box checked.

*Happiness. Abundant, in the extreme. This is such a beautiful, haunting, enchanting place--it's no wonder it has been romanticized for centuries. We wish you could all be here with us!

The Old, Weird, Raging Side of my Head

The left side of my head has gone very strange. When I was just 24 years old, I discovered grey hairs up there. I still remember the horror of that realization: I was staring into the small mirror in the small bathroom under the creaky stairs of the old house in Harrisburg where I had recently moved. I pulled them with a morbid fascination, and they would just come out, that easy--wiry, tough, silvery-blond, streaking back like a moonbeam of doom along the left front of my head.

I called Mom in a panic and told her I had a grey streak, and reminded her I was only 24 years old. She asked what side of my head it was on, and I told her. Apparently it was hereditary. "Ah, the McKean streak," she said, as if that made it all okay that the vicissitudes of Time had already clamped their hoary hands upon my young brow.

Over the years I have grown to accept and even like the grey streak. It has stayed only a streak, and sometimes looks blond. Josh likes it, as it reminds him of Rogue from X-Men. I appreciate it as a means of vexing my manipulative hairstylist, who continually attempts to a sell me on more expensive hair appointments, and I have been successful in putting him off these past 2 years.

What I have not grown to accept is the "weird" manifestations on the left side of my head. There are two--one is quite benign; the other far more malignant and menacing. The benign oddity is a little tuft of hair that refuses to grow more than about 3 inches long. It stubbornly trails down the left side of my neck when I wear my hair in a pony tail, too short to make it up into the hair tie, and too weird to curl prettily. It just hangs there, like an askew rat-tail on scrawny little boy from the '80s.

As for the malignant oddity--I had thought that going grey at age 24 was bad enough, but I certainly, in my wildest nightmares, had not banked on going bald at 29. Yes, it's true--I have lost a significant amount of hair on the left side of my head.

It was two days before Valentine's Day, and I was blow-drying my hair. Josh was playing soccer. I had brushed the left side of my hair straight up to dry it, trying to avoid the annoying natural curl that tends to spring up along the sides if I don't dry it vigilantly, and I was shocked to find an expanse of pallid white skin stretching up above my ear where hair should be. I checked bilaterally (a phrase I learned in Sports Medicine in high school), and sure enough, the right side of my head had hair all the way down to and around the ear. My left ear sat with its head utterly exposed, surrounded by an island of baby smooth, heartbreakingly hairless skin.

I didn't know what to do, other than text Josh and ask him if he would still love me if I went totally bald on one side of my head (which I'm sure has been cataloged with other of my "crazy wife" texts/voicemails). Then I went to the mall and started buying things, all the while haunted by a windy feeling above my left ear.

After weeks of moaning like a banshee over every long curly hair hanging ominiously from the bookcase or the couch or nestled in the sink, I eventually chatted with my doctor about it, and sure enough, it was certainly not an uneven bilateral hairline, like I hoped. The diagnosis was "alopecia areata," a result of my Hashimoto's thyroiditis (it would, of course, be named after a Japanese man), wherein the world's most idiotic immune system has gone beserk against our own perfectly healthy body tissues. Apparently my very own asinine but unfortunately well-armed antibodies hurled themselves, giggling and slobbering, into a wild melee against our unsuspecting, outmanned thyroid gland and then turned their clumsy, bloody paws against our very own hair follicles. Friendly fire of the worst kind. Morons. Thus stands my scientific understanding of what has gone on to make me not only dependent on synthetic hormones for the rest of my life but also look like a creepy witch from Roald Dahl's book (my brothers-in-law who are well-learned in the arts of medicine may see cause for correction in my analysis of the situation, but that's the best I can do).

All this leads me to the third adjective--the rage. Apparently the treatment for bald spots is to shoot the head up with corticosteroids. So a few days ago I went to the doctor and sat there while she pumped steroids into my skull. I also have a corticosteroid cream that I get to rub all over my bald spot every morning and night. Now I'm greying, balding, and full of fury like never before. If only I could launch a javelin or two at my misfit antibodies.

*****

JD here. I initially feared what my wife would be transformed into when I heard "steroid injections" -- my initial thought was Starla from Napolean Dynamite ("Forget about it!"). Luckily, I realized that the origin of this fear was some combination of: 1) the fact that Barry Bonds was currently on trial for use of anabolic steroids, thus placing me in that mindset when I heard "steroids"; and 2) my complete ignorance about medical terminology, and medicine in general. Realizing your fears are founded on stupidity rather than reality is ALWAYS a relief.


As for the Rogue from X-Men thing, I was an impressionable 11-year old when the original FOX cartoon came out -- can you blame me?

My Husband, the Somnabulistic Acrobat and Linguist

Marriage has made clear that Sleeping Josh and Sleeping Ann Marie are complete foils to Awake Josh and Awake Ann Marie. Whilst awake, Josh is both physically and vocally relaxed; he doesn't fidget much, he never babbles. I am someone who has never been able to keep still since the moment I burst forth upon the world. I fidget and wiggle habitually; I chatter at trifles.

This contrast between our two modes of movement was made clear the first time Josh took me on a date to the movies. He sat like a rock for two hours, blinking occasionally. I shifted positions about every thirty seconds--left leg crossed over right; then right over left, then slumped a bit in the chair, then cross-legged, then knees pulled up against my chest, then one ankle under my bum, then repeat the whole experience (for two hours). (For clarification, the movie was Terminator Salvation. One possible explanation for my lack of movement may have been because I was paralyzed with disappointment.)

Sleeping, however, is an entirely different story. I sleep like the Bride of Dracula--immobile, flat on my back, with my hands crossed over my heart (a little creepy, I know, but it's realy quite comfortable). Over the Christmas holidays I spent a night apart from Josh while he was visiting his family in North Carolina. I lay down on my side of the bed, leaving his side smooth and unruffled. I awoke eight hours later in precisely the same position, with nary a wrinkle on the covers.

Josh sleeps like a circus troupe. He moves, flails, rolls, twitches, murmurs, talks, and advances across the bed like the Romans across Europe, leaving me squished behind a fragile Hadrian's Wall at the edge of the mattress. The other night I awoke (lying flat on my back, of course, only taking up as much space as the width of my body) to find that at least 3/4 of my pillow had been commandeered by a tousled pile of mighty black hair (and its slumbering owner). It took more than gentle remonstrating to get him to a conscious enough state to roll back to his side of the bed.

My favorite moments, however, are the strange verbal explosions. Josh's capacity for speaking gibberish (or Ewokese) has been well-documented, and I can testify that he reverts back to his language of yesteryear when sleeping. Once, while waking up from a three-hour nap on the couch, he exclaimed, "Is that you, Mama?" (I wasn't sure how to take that one . . .) And then one night several weeks ago, I awoke to some thrashings and mutterings. Josh was lying on his back, with both hands behind his head. He was jerking from side to side, jabbering with each turn. I couldn't make out a word of the babble, until he suddenly burst out with this: "I'm really getting to have a great voice for radio."

I chuckled, scribbled it down, and resumed my creepy vampire pose whilst my DJ of Dreams somersaulted on to somnabulistic bliss.

*****

JD here. I'm not surprised AM resorted to the banal, Western-oriented Roman analogy about me "invading" her side of the bed, but I think a more accurate metaphor in this case, given my Asian makeup, would either be Genghis Khan sweeping across the steppes of central Asia; or, for extra credit points in proper use of metaphors, Imperial Japan bringing the Pacific into what they called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. But whatever. Who am I to critique?

To compliment AM on what she portrayed accurately, describing her sleeping "mannerisms" (if you can call complete inactivity a mannerism) as being like Dracula's Betrothed was spot-on. And creepy. Hence why I stow cloves of garlic stowed under my pillow. And why I sleep with a sharpened, wooden stake in one hand; gun with chambered silver bullet in the other (wait... I believe I am muddling monsters here. Well, you can never be too safe when you think your wife is about to plunge her incisors into your neck and make you part of the Walking Dead at any moment. But I digress.)

I take pride in my active yet nocturnal and unconscious lifestyle. I'll have to share about the one time, while sleeping, that I jumped off the top bunk of a set of bunk beds and landed on my feet. LIKE A CAT.

Recurring Series: Clumsy Adventures by AM #1

As a child I was infamous for my clumsiness. I was one of those sweaty kids that ran everywhere without the dexterity and agility to avoid obstacles like furniture, puddles, gravel, or my little brother's large skull. I have more memories than I can count that begin with a routine action and end with my mother's fuzzy, frantic face leaning over my inert body.

There was the time in Italy when it rained and Sarah's bedroom flooded, and I ran to get a towel and ran back in with the towel onto the wet marble floor, and then I remember no more. Or the time when I was bouncing around in Jeff's crib with him, and wanted to grab the blue plastic cup that was sitting on the low table beside the crib, and I remember leaning and reaching down for it, and then I remember no more, other than the vague sounds of mother and sisters screaming. Then there was the time when Jeff had climbed up onto the kitchen counter, and I had the bright idea of catching him to help him get down. Jeff was 2 years younger but a sturdy lad with a sizable noggin, and I remember standing there with arms outstretched while he jumped, and then I remember no more.

The coup de gras of the Italy years may have been the time when Mom was late to go visiting teaching, and in my efforts to be helpful, bellowed: "I'll shut the van door, Mom!" and proceeded to do so while somehow leaving my left ring finger in the path of the closing door. I do remember how that one played out--the screams, the panic, the rush to the hospital, my own disgust over the next few weeks while watching my nail blacken and fall off.

I shall leave the England years, the woeful Bothell years of puberty, and the painful mission years of Brazilian cobblestones for another time. This is all meant to be background to what I know will be a recurring series on the blog: unaccountable, inexplicable acts of overt and embarrassing clumsiness by Ann Marie (Josh will not be contributing, as he is the coordinated part of this duo), this time without the excuse of being a toddler, child, or pubescent, when I was fairly new at operating a human body, or at figuring out what to do with extremely large feet.

No, I have definitely been an adult now for a good decade and a bit, and have no excuse for any of the events, present and future, that I will share with you.

The one I feel driven to share happened this past week in the breakroom at work. I had gone there with the intent of getting more ice for my water glass and topping off my water bottle, which was about 3/4 full. I stood up to the water machine, and instead of leaving the bottle upright and sticking it under the spout, I proceeded to (literally) upend the bottle, sending an Old-Testament-like gush upon the floor. The bizarre part of the event was that there was no clumsy fumbling; no losing my balance and letting go of the bottle or anything--no, like a strange, even-keeled robot, standing completely still, I tipped the mouth of the bottle down and poured it all out onto the floor. The really awkward part was that the guy who works down the hall in contracts was standing about 18 inches away, filling his coffee mug, and observed the whole thing. He watched me mop up the puddle I'd made, leaving me to say the thing I have found myself saying many times over the years, which still really doesn't do anything to make it all less awkward: "Well, at least it was just water, right?"

*****

JD here. I have nothing to add.

The Problem of Naming (Pilot Entry)

It was no small task deciding on name for this blog.  In fact, I think we almost gave up on the blog because we could not decide on a name for it.  The Herculean laboriousness of the experience caused me to reflect on the whole issue of naming and identity; how it is that we define ourselves and would like to see ourselves represented to others.

“The McDaltons” seemed too drab.  So I thought about symbols of our separate ethnic cultures—something like “Whisky and Soy” or “The Eastern Shamrock,” but those were rejected for obvious reasons.

Then Josh asked me if there was some quote from one of my favorite authors that would do, so I tried to think back on the graduate school days. All that came to mind was John Stuart Mill’s “stupidity is in the world all over”—hardly an encouraging title—and two winners from Thomas Hardy: “Intelligent Intercourse” and “Somnambulistic Hallucination,” two philosophical ideas which, when taken out of their 19th century context, could draw the wrong type of readership.

Then Josh suggested we follow the old fairy tale binary titling format after the manner of “Beauty and the Beast.”  The obvious choice for Josh was “rogue,” for various reasons (the X-Men connection not being one of them, although Jimmy’s suggestion of “Jubilee and Rogue” was appreciated).  We had a much harder time picking a word for me.  Here we ran up against the unfortunate sexism that is too-often implicit in language—there were numerous descriptors for the male that managed to be edgy and complimentary (rogue, rascal, swashbuckler, renegade, maverick).  All the lexically interesting descriptors for the female were, shall we say, reductive: jade, wench, trollop, hussy, slattern, etc.

We waded through some Greek goddesses and literary heroines, but those were quickly discarded as well.  Capricious, mostly one-dimensional, and kind of neurotic, we tossed out Athena, Daphne, Persephone, Cleopatra, Aphrodite, and Dido. 

We thought maybe a flower would work as my symbol, so I pulled out the old “Language of Flowers” book I got when I was 13 and interested in things like that.  It lists the name of a flower and its corresponding message in days of yore.  Unfortunately, all the traits I found flattering were attached to flower names that were hardly fitted for a blog title: “You are divine” = Cowslip; “Poetry” = Eglantine; “Strength of Character” = Gladiolus; “You Comfort Me” = Milk Vetch; “You are rich in attractions” = Ranunculus.

We thought about “The Lady and the Rogue,” but my sister Sarah wisely warned us that it might be a bit too “Quill and the Swordish” (for those that did not attend BYU or that choose not to remember, the Quill and the Sword was the name of the medieval club; if you saw anyone walking around in capes and chain mail on campus, you know what I mean).  Friend Mary Ann suggested “Rogue and Refined,” which we like well enough, but I felt like it was a bit limiting/untruthful on my side.  One cannot always be refined.

So then the other night Josh and my sister Michelle (aka Midge) and I were playing a typical came of Nertz.  By typical I mean it was marked by many verbal explosions from me and a few violent attempts on the person of my husband.  And thus was born the suggestion of “The Rogue and the Fury.”

Truth be told, “fury” is just as reductive as Jade, Refined, or Milk Vetch.  But I suppose it won out because (1) I tend to move at a rather furious pace most of the time; (2) Josh takes pleasure in purposefully inciting my wrath because he likes to tease (roguishly, of course) and therefore sees that side of me fairly often, but ultimately (3) because I liked the sound of it.

I think, sometimes, we like to present ourselves in a way that others may not see us—to defy expectations, or at least, to question them.  It’s boring to always do and say exactly what people think we will.  Maybe that’s why I prefer to tell the mission stories that sound more like war stories (i.e. those that involve damage inflicted on my person by disease, wildlife, and the elements), and why Josh likes to grow beards and mustaches and get perms (to be precise, that should read “get perm,” as he’s only had one).  Perhaps naming ourselves is not just about finding the trait or title that is most obvious, overtly symbolic, or precisely representative.  Perhaps it is just as much about searching out the lesser-known, imperfect, and idiosyncratic parts of our identities, and letting them speak.  So long as it has a nice ring, of course.

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JD here. So the christening of the blog was quite the ordeal -- as far as life ordeals go for me, I think I've ranked it somewhere between "Japanese people asking me if I was mentally retarded when I spoke Japanese" and "sitting through the third Twilight movie in the theater, where I could not make snarky comments out loud." There were points where it felt a little bit like Goldilocks and the Three Bears and nothing we brainstormed was 'just right.' It was all 'too' something or other: 'too forced,' 'too Greek,' or 'too lame' (sometimes the latter two are synonymous. Total burn on Hellenism!) It made me dread the Herculean task it will one day be to name our first child -- I mean, if we can't even name a digital medium like a blog, then how are we supposed to name a living, breathing human being? (While on the topic, my personal vote for our first boy is still for 'Scotch', but AM continues to dispute this with rhetoricals like, "Do you really want to name our child after an alcoholic beverage?", as if this would dissuade me. Silly girl.)

Regardless, I like the name we've settled on here, as it properly conveys the wrath that I incur every time I act roguish or make a snide comment. Just kidding. But not really.

Shameless plug for the entry: see the family's observations on The Lord of the Rings Trilogy.