And Yes, I Kept The Tooth

Mar 222012
 

The day was finally here.  TTFH was finally going bye bye.

Although I was a little nervous (normal), I new the Prince of All Dentists would make everything all better.  He had a gentle hand and demeanor and was on a mission to eradicate that rotten tooth swiftly.  But first, he had to pull out the medieval torture device that everyone who has gone to the dentist office is familiar with:

Whenever I see this thing come near my mouth, my eyes get as big as saucers, every muscle in my body tenses up, and my blood pressure goes through the roof.  I just know that first jab is going to hurt like hell, and unfortunately it won’t take just a few shots from this baby.

My body sees novocian as nothing more than Baby Anbesol – it drinks it in, swallows it down and treats it like water.  So in order to properly numb me up, I have to have enough to knock out a horse, which soon became obviously clear to the Prince of All Dentists.

With the patience of a Saint, he kept coming back and testing the effect all the shots were having on me.  When my tongue finally felt like it was made of cement and my lip drooping down to my chin, he gave a couple more quick shots and was ready for battle.

Now, if the needle wasn’t enough to make me shake in my boots, the wrench-like devise that slowly moved toward my mouth about did me in.  I’m not a newbie when it comes to seeing all this equipment, but I’ll never ever be calm about it.  I’ve been through extractions before where I can feel the roots coming loose from my jaw;  teeth breaking apart as they get pulled out; and I’ve even had a dentist put his weight on me trying to wrestle one out of my mouth.  Needless to say, I had reason for being nervous.

But I shouldn’t have been.  After all, the Prince was a pro and in 5 seconds he had that rotten molar out of my mouth.  And I didn’t even feel it.  I wanted to hug the man.

So now I get to take the next couple of days healing and eating mashed bananas and tomato soup, because those are the only soft foods I have in the house since I didn’t think about all this when I went grocery shopping on Monday.

Way to plan, Sandy.

 

Rez Talk 101

Mar 212012
 

When you live on an Indian Reservation, you’re exposed to a whole new way of talking, which I refer to as rez talk.

Moccasin Telegraph.  This is the form of communication that works faster than the speed of light when anything and everything needs to be told.  Got a secret?  Sorry, but there are no secrets on the rez.  Once you’ve told your BFF, it was texted, Facebooked and on the scanner in the blink of an eye.  If you think that having a party line back in the day when people used real telephones were bad for letting everybody know your business, move up to the rez and see those old bitties put to shame.

49er.  If your immediate thought was a member of a football team, you’d be dead wrong.  Instead, this is s get-together that generally follows a local Powwow.  Mostly attended by the “young folk”, it’s a place for people to hang out and relax after a long day of dancing and drumming.  It’s also a great place for snagging that guy you did the Potato Dance with.

Ho-wah.  This expression is akin to “wow”,  “good job” and “I agree”, depending on the circumstance.  If your cousin’s sugarbush boiled 3 gallons of sap, you’d exclaim:  “Ho-wah!”.  If your nephew made it through the school year without getting suspended:  ”  HO-WAH!”.  When your neighbor told you that the ricing on North Lake was pretty bad this year:  “ho-wah”.  It’s a pretty easy word to slip in when you really can’t think of something better to say.

TGB:  This is the meat and potatoes of any rez – The Tribal Governing Board.  Think of it as any local government in any town or city, but replace the “average citizen” with “tribal member only.”  These people make the rules on the rez.  If you come up here and stop at a business that should be open and find a sign that reads “TGB”, that means the person is at one of the meetings.

Shinnob:  Before the Europeans decided to descend on the Upper Great Lakes, the Natives were known as Anishinaabe (meaning First or Original Peoples).  Shinnob is a slang word used by many locals (not just here but all over Indian Country) when referring to other peoples of similar heritage.  Writer Jim Northrup makes great use of it in his books.  Case in point:  What does a Shinnob Santa Say?  Ho, ho, ho-wah!  (Enter cymbal crash here)

Snag:  Here we come with another great slang term, otherwise known as “hitching up” with the opposite sex.  I mostly hear this term coming from the woman around this area, and let me tell you, these gals can be quite a hoot when they see some guy that they like and throw this term around. When they start talking about Snag Bags, you know they have some serious business they’d like to do!

So if you ever find yourself on the rez and hear somebody talking about how they heard on the moccasin telegraph that at the last TGB meeting some Shinnob got up and talked about all the snagging going on at the last 49er, you can say “Ho-wah!” and not seem like an outsider.

Class dismissed.

 

The Not-So-Magnificent Post

Mar 202012
 

Well, today’s post didn’t exactly work out like I’d planned.

I wanted to regale you with how happy I was to have received my plant seeds in the mail and how I got to use one of Rick’s power tools to drill holes into all of the cans I was saving to start my seeds in.

It was going to be magnificent, I tell ya.

Instead, I am using my laptop to write this because I’m running some super duper software on my main computer because I have a nasty virus on it.

And that is the computer where I store all my pictures, including the ones that I was going to use for my magnificent post.  (Pictures = excitement!)

So instead, I will just wish you a Happy First Day of Spring.

With a picture*, of course.

 

*Courtesy of (notmyfriend) Google

 

Rambo I Am Not

Mar 192012
 

In my neck of the woods (pun intended) the best way to know what is going on is to have a scanner.

At least once a week I’ll have someone ask me “Did you here what happened to so-and-so?  I heard it on the scanner.”  There will also be the occasional Facebook post asking if anyone knows what’s going on with the sirens going up and down Blvd (the main street in our community), and someone will pipe up about what they heard on the scanner.

As you may have guessed, we have not one, but two scanners.  Rick keeps one at his shop and he bought another one for us to have at home.  For some reason, this little device is a window of the world that he needs to be tuned into to see what crazy shit is going on around us.  Of course, you don’t always get all the details of who/what/where/why, but sometimes it can be entertaining, kind of like listening to an old radio program.

And I can see his concern, especially when we woke up on New Year’s morning to find squad cars and police canvasing the area around our house looking for some punks that robbed 7 houses in the neighborhood the night before.

This also brings up the topic of guns (which I hate).  Rick bought one at an auction last summer and I’ve basically ignored the stupid thing.  But apparently one gun wasn’t good enough and unbeknownst to me he went and bought a hand gun.  His reasoning:  so I would have something to use if some scallywags came on the property I could defend myself.

Bwahahahahah!  Yeah, right.

Anywho, about a month ago Rick called me from his shop and asked if I had the scanner on.  Ummm… no, I told him, should I?  Apparently 2 squad cars had just gone past the store with sirens wailing and heading straight for our community.  The  next hour was spent listening to the banter of police officers trying to locate a person who might have had a gun who was a few blocks away from our house.  This did not sit well with Rick because he wasn’t home to protect me in case this possible gun toting person decided to venture up our street.

But he reminded me where the hand gun was in case I needed it.  And also, there was one bullet in it.  ONE.  But it wasn’t in the chamber.  So in order to fire the stupid thing I would have to do this, that and the other thing in order to shoot the one bullet.

Suddenly everything changed and I realized my life had turned into a sitcom.  And I was Barney Fife.

 

I Would Like to Thank The Academy

Mar 182012
 

Sometimes the biggest type of flattery is for someone to say that they like you.  I’ve only been at this blogging game for 15 months now, and I know that I’m not the best in the biz (boy, do I ever!).

I mean, I don’t write about my kids crazy antics (they do enough weird shit as adults that I don’t think they’d like the whole world to know about), or do giveaways (although that is something I’ve toyed with), or book reviews.

I don’t really belong to any “niche” that I can find.  I write about me (boring!) and throw in a little splash of humor because I have to laugh at what life throws at me.  And sometimes I don’t even know why I do this schtick?

On second thought, yes I do.  Because many years ago my husband gave me the bestest Mother’s Day present ever:  my own domain name.  But this was back in the dinosaur age of the internet and “Blogs” were just for the elite who could pay for the type of software it took to start one.  So my present sat in the closet and occasionally came out once in a while to be tested on newfangled software that popped up.

On January 1, 2011, I decided to resurrect the darn thing and use it for something besides my email (I must have been really bored!).  But I didn’t really think that anyone would take a gander at it besides family so I decided to just be me and post stuff about our life in the Northwoods.  Easy cheesy.

Over the last 6 months or so (which would be Winter in our neck of the woods which means down time and boredom) I’ve picked up my pace with networking the blog to try and gain more readers and see if anyone else gave a crap about anything that I wrote.  And it finally seems to be working.  People are actually coming here and reading what I have to say!  I’m SHOCKED!!  I mean, I’m not a writer, I’m just a nobody putting my life out there for others to laugh at.  Certainly, that is not something people are going to come back day after day and look at.

A month ago I used (notmyfriend) Google and typed in “Minnesota Bloggers” because, well, I’m originally from Minnesota and I wanted to know if there were other local people that I could connect with that were in the blogging biz.  I came across one in particular that caught my eye and I have been reading her ever since.

Sarah at So… what else? is one amazing person.  This woman has roped me in as a faithful reader.  Family?  Humor?  Real life?  Career? She takes them all and wraps them up in a nice little package with a bow on top.  I knew right away I was going to love this woman because a) she was from Minnesota, and b) she made me laugh.

When I went to her site the other day after work, I was scrolling along the postings and glanced at the sidebar where her Best Blogs Ever are listed and…. WHOA!  There I Was!  My hand went to my mouth and I gasped with surprise.  This was a first for me, people.  No one has ever put my blog in such a place of glory before.  I felt like I had just won an Oscar.

This woman has been in the blogging world for quite some time and for her to place little old me on her site brought rainbows and unicorns to my world.  Thank you Sarah, your kindness has given me a little more fuel to stay in the online world a little longer.

I will try to keep the squirrel complaints to a minimum.

 

 Older Entries  Newer Entries