The Princess: I don't know that I would let him lie right there where the dog is going to kick.
C-Man: (trying to move baby) But apparently he would.
The Princess: That's because he doesn't think about the future very well.
Boy Detective: I think about Skynet ALL THE TIME!
Note that the baby will hereafter be called MK.
C-Man: MK, you're so wiggly.
MK: I've been lying here for an hour and fifteen minutes with nothing to do!
Me: This is what happens when you run your minions into the ground, MK.
C-Man: You need to cultivate your minions as a resource.
MK: Dance, minions, dance!
C-Man, to baby: Your mom's mad at me.
The Princess: It happens. You get mad at me too sometimes.
C-Man: I get mad at you less often than you get mad at me.
The Princess: You have low standards.
The Princess: What are you whistling?
C-Man: Mad World.
The Princess: Oh.
C-Man: You don't believe me?
The Princess: I thought it was The Dreidel Song.
C-Man: Did you know that the shoulder joint is held together by your bicep?
The Princess: Huh?
C-Man: (insert long technical explanation here)
The Princess: I know nothing about the human body, so I did not know that.
C-Man: (more technical information)
The Princess: Wait, I lied. I know enough about the human body to sing "Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes" and point to the right parts at the right times.
Of course, later that day I held up my hands to do "Itsy Bitsy Spider" and started singing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" instead, so reliability is low.
After the baby with a terrible cold had successfully avoided having his nose suctioned out...
The Princess: Yes, you won. It's a pyrrhic victory, though.
Baby: A parrot victory?
C-Man: Son, you're a ninja, not a pirate, you don't need a parrot. You can have a parrot if you want one, but they're a lot of work. It's not all yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.
Yet another overheard conversation between the baby and his dad:
C-Man: My son, what is it? What's wrong?
Baby: I'm mad that I only have two feet with which to kick you in the nuts!
C-Man: When your jaw makes that crunching noise, does it hurt?
The Princess: No.
C-Man: Does it ever lock up?
The Princess: No. It's just a sound effect.
C-Man: Those are some awfully jumpy legs you've got there, son.
Baby: Southside Jumpylegs Crew! Southside Jumpylegs Crew 4-ever!
C-Man: Don't you wish you were doing some calculus homework right now?
Baby: I laugh at calculus homework, give me some diffy q's! I'll knock 'em down!
C-Man: How can a 14 pound baby have a five pound diaper?
Baby: Dad, you've seen Doctor Who! It's like the Tardis!
The Princess, removing Cheerios box from cabinet: (annoyed noise, hard to transcribe)
C-Man: What?
The Princess: I put it away upside down.
C-Man: It wasn't me, I didn't do it!
The Princess: I said, I put it away. You were on the moon, with Steve.
C-Man: What?
The Princess: This is one of the things that depresses me about my life. You refuse to watch Eddie Izzard enough times to learn all the jokes, so you'll know when I make one.
C-Man: I'll trade you if you learn how Virtua Fighter works.
The Princess: You know what would be awesome? To live in an alternate universe where all women are strippers.
C-Man: You don't think that one wearing a maid outfit was actually a maid?
C-Man: What do you need out of there?
The Princess (digging in change jar): Eleven cents.
C-Man: Dare I ask why?
The Princess: How are you?
Dog Two: Fine.
The Princess: I ask because we've been outside for a while, and the mosquitoes are kind of biting the fuck out of me, and you haven't yet gone to the bathroom.
Dog Two: I'm eating a leaf right now.
The Princess: I can see that.
Dog Two: Can we go in?
The Princess: I don't think so. Remember yesterday when you went inside and then we had to clean up after you?
Dog Two: Hey, there's a bird!
The Princess: Yes, it's very nice. Do you need to do anything out here?
Dog Two: What's this on the pavement?
The Princess: A dead bug, and you don't need any.
Dog Two: Hey, I have to pee!
Co-worker # 1: Her colors for her wedding are silver and blue. Those are her favorite colors.
The Princess: Silver isn't a color.
Co-worker # 2: Yeah, do metals count?
The Princess: No.
Co-worker # 2: My favorite colors are zinc and aluminum!
Boss: Can I ask you to do me a really huge favor?
The Princess: Hell no!
Boss: I'm late for a meeting, but can you just recheck the math in this email?
The Princess, lying in bed: I left the computer copying your folder, is that ok?
C-Man: Pillowmumble what?
C-Man: I just had a veggie burger for dinner yesterday.
The Princess: I didn't. I had...umm...
C-Man: Junk food?
The Princess: A handful of jellybeans.
C-Man: That's what you had for dinner?!
The Princess: And I didn't feel all that great afterwards, I tell ya. I probably won't eat jellybeans again for about 24 hours.
C-Man: I'm not leaving you alone in the house to eat dinner anymore.
The Princess: I am not commenting on this post.
C-Man: Thank you, I feel so much stupider after having seen that page. I need to go listen to Mozart or some shit to undo the damage done to my brain.
The Princess: I'm just sad that there are no other words in the English language to convey weakness except for words referring to women's genitals. It's such a restriction on talented writers like this fine gentleman.
C-Man: For $30 for a 6 pound package, that better show up tomorrow wrapped in gold leaf . . . .
The Princess: It better have a pie in it.
The Princess: I think I would like you to get that bitty laptop up and running for me.
C-Man: To take to BlogHer?
The Princess: Yes. And to put stickers all over it.
C-Man: What kind of stickers?
The Princess: I don't know. All I know is that at BlogHer, everyone had laptops with cool stickers on tham and I was SO JEALOUS.
C-Man: I'll see what I can do. It might need a wireless card.
The Princess: Actually, it probably doesn't even have to work, I could just put stickers all over it and put it on the table in front of me and pretend like I didn't feel like using it right then.
C-Man: I could definitely make it available for that purpose.
Friend: Hello! Am I waking you up?
Princess: No, I'm at work. Oh, did you think today was a holiday?
Friend: (pause) No, I don't have any idea what day it is!
Sister: Mom has some maternity clothes for you from me. Don't get too excited.
The Princess: She warned me. I told her that I was glad it was going to be summer, since your pants would be capris on me.
Sister: I actually think I only sent capris because I knew my jeans would be too short. So, I guess they'll be shorts...
C-Man: Did you get any more sleep?
The Princess: No.
C-Man: Was it because of The Dog?
The Princess: No.
C-Man: Was it because you're a cut and run Democrat?
C-Man: We got a big bed so the dog could spread out, right?
The Princess: No.
C-Man: I didn't think so.
The Princess: This is where I keep the key to the safe deposit box, in case I croak and you need to clean it out.
C-Man: I'd rather you didn't.
The Princess: I'm not planning on it, I have too many hobbies.
Me, to Mom: In other news, we put an offer in on a house yesterday. I looked for one day and a house turned up that made C-Man so happy I couldn't say no. The transportation situation is not ideal but since I will not exercise unless compelled, perhaps it is better to have to walk further to the bus stop! We'll see what happens. I'm sure it's full of radon and right in the path of an annual frog migration.
Mom: Possible new house - that is exciting news! The radon has probably killed all the migrating wildlife year by year so you should be OK with the inspection.
Me: What did you do while I was gone?
C-Man: I killed a giant pudding.
Me: This spider bite is itching like crazy.
C-Man: Want me to cauterize it?
C-Man: If I won a million dollars, would you let me buy a Jag?
The Princess: No.
C-Man: Why not?
The Princess: A million dollars is a lot of money, and we would need to make some good decisions about how to manage it for financial security so that I wouldn't ever have to work again.
SOMEONE complained that I haven't blogged recently. So sorry, I was off in another city contributing to the democratic process. Also, I had very little to say because I was tired. But to prevent lawsuits stemming from withdrawal, I present this scene from our evening.
C-Man, to The Dog: (singing) You're a dog, you're a dog.
The Princess: That's good, because when I left this morning she was a dog, and if I arrived home to find she was an alligator I'd be a little concerned.
C-Man: I'm voting for manticore, personally.
(Although I have to admit he did not say it with the Wikipedia link included.)
C-Man: Do you have a preference for where I should solder?
The Princess: I don't know what soldering is.
C-Man: (something something something about lead and a source of heat)
The Princess: Then my preference would be for outside-
C-Man: I can't do that, because I need to be able to see it well and my fingers are going to be up close to it.
The Princess: But as I was about to say, you may not be able to do that because it's gotten dark. But couldn't something catch on fire and isn't it dangerous to inhale lead fumes?
C-Man: Yes to the first, and yes to the second.
The Princess: Then I don't know what to tell you.
C-Man: That's a very honest answer.
"I thought about you this weekend. We made some granola."
I am reading through blogs while waiting for C. to pick me up for more wedding dress shopping. C-Man enters the room, followed by The Dog.
C-Man: The Dog says she'll help!
The Princess: With what?
C-Man: Connecting your brain to the keyboard.
C-Man: In the interview they asked me what kind of things I did with my Macintosh, y'know back when I was 8, and I said "Oh, y'know, draw little pictures of stuff for my D&D characters and try to teach myself Motorola 68000 series assembly language with absolutely no context for it."
The Princess: I am blogging that. From now on, my blog is things C-Man says. I'm going to have to move it to thingsc-mansays.blogspot.com.
C-Man: You don't like apple pie at all?
The Princess: I don't like apple pie at all.
C-Man: It's not just because you're racist against the Dutch?
C-Man: You hate Fantasia?
The Princess: I hate it. I especially hate that part with Mickey Mouse, because I hate him more than anything else in the world.
C-Man: Really?
The Princess: Really.
C-Man: How about Eminem?
The Princess: OK, I hate Eminem more.
The Princess: I wish everyone had trackback.
C-Man: You mean like built into their skulls?
C-Man, reading website: What?! I think I need to go to this guy's blog and tell him some shit.
The Princess: Please don't tell people things on the internet. It never goes well.
The Princess: You're lying on me.
C-Man: That's unusual.
The Princess: No it's not.
C-Man: Yes it is, because of those one whatever Batman laptops y'all have.
I should either be throwing away my current stylesheet and starting from scratch so I can stand to look at my own site, or I should be writing up my BlogHer notes into posts.
Instead, I give you this, from a conversation my sister and I had when I was contemplating flying to Chicago to see a fantastically cute boy I met in a bar:
Sister: So how's...Pete Smith? Joe Black? Tom Ford?
The Princess: Umm, Tom P-----?
Sister: Ha, I got his first name right. I knew it was something generic.
The Princess: He's fine. I really want to go up there, but he's not havin' any of it.
Sister: You should come here. (pause) The kisses you get here will be different, though. I just think you should know that up front.
I'll get to the other stuff when I'm not so tired. Maybe that will be today, since I was asleep by 8:20 last night.
The Princess: I never wore lip gloss in high school, I don't think.
C-Man: Why not?
The Princess: Because I was a hippie girl or a metal chick, and it didn't go with either.
C-Man: I think hippie girls are allowed to wear lip gloss. If it's made of quinoa.
DJ #1: Here's a song by Toni Price that she learned off a Billie Holiday record, and I have to say, as good as Billie Holiday is, I like this version better.
DJ #2: I will stab you in the heart.
SCENE 1
Setting: C-Man and I are lounging on the couch watching Farscape. One disc ends, and he turns to The Dog - who is skulking about, lamenting the bad luck that brought her, 8 years ago, to a home with free food, clean water, medical care, toys, and treats.
C-Man: Dog, change the DVD!
The Princess: If you can teach her to do that, I'll make my parents give you a dowry.
C-Man: Cool. (pause) But hey, is the dowry going to be a cow?
SCENE 2
Setting: C-Man and I are lounging (which we apparently do a lot judging from this writeup).
C-Man, with a serious look: I need to tell you something important.
The Princess: What?
C-Man: I love you.
The Princess: Oh. Good.
C-Man: What?
The Princess: You looked so serious. I thought you were going to say something scary.
C-Man: Like I've been lying to you all this time and I'm actually a high seas pirate?
It's taken me a week to recover from this bizarre incident sufficiently to report on it.
OK, just kidding. I have very little to excuse the one week delay in blogging this. Aside from the new job and the insomnia, I have lots of highly intellectual quality time to write up bizarre incidents from my personal life in an engaging manner.
The Scene: El Mercado, a middling Tex-Mex restaurant in the vicinity of the apartment where the landlords apparently still haven't realized I'm living for cheap without a lease.
The Prelude: C-Man's graduation from the UT School of Arguing A Lot, my attendance at which resulted in a scolding from the man sitting in front of me for talking too much with C-Man's mother.
The Incident:
C-Man and I are eating.
A woman walks up to our table.
Woman: "I just have to ask, we've been talking about it at our table, are y'all dating or are you brother and sister?"
The Princess, in no mood for chatty strangers but trying to be polite: "We’re dating."
Woman: "Oh my god that is so weird, and you know, if we had to make a choice in our group we would have said brother and sister."
The Princess: "Well, we just consider it a nice coincidence." [Meaning: that we both have red hair. I was a bit taken aback and having trouble forming coherent thoughts.]
Woman: "Seriously, though, if y'all are going to get married and have kids you really need to have genetic testing done because you might be related and not even know it, and then your kids would have horrible genetic deformities."
HELLO?
She was laughing as she said it, but I'm not sure any amount of laughter in the world would have been enough to make that ok for me. I gamely tried to be pleasant (mostly because I was in shock) as she continued to badger us, pointing out to C-Man that he needed to be "playing footsie" more often to remove confusion for onlookers.
As she walked away, she made a comment to us about how the people at her table were now trying to pretend they didn't know her because they didn't believe she would actually come over and ask us.
Somehow, I think there might be a deeper reason.
...and I'm not even going to check first to see if one of the two other people in the conversation or the other witness blogged it first. So there.
The Princess: Hey, you should check out this thing that B. sent me, it's a series of recorded science fiction lectures from some online university thing. I'll send you a link.
I-ROCK: Yeah, I think I saw something about that on BoingBoing.
The Princess: That may very well be where he got it.
D: OK, I
Conversation was then impossible for a couple of minutes due to the uncontrollable fits of laughter.
(This happened on Friday during dinner. I kept fighting the impulse to blog it, but my willpower finally collapsed.)
Mom: So did you end up with a lot of stitches?
The Princess: I think it's 3? 4? In a 2-inch incision.
Mom: That's not bad.
The Princess: They're ugly looking, all scary and black.
Mom: That's the way it is, it always looks kind of Frankenstein.
The Princess: I don't think I'll be walking around going "raarghh" any time soon.
Mom: Not the bolt through the neck thing?
Also from the family reunion, nothing to do with God:
Aunt: I remember visiting San Antonio many years ago, we tried to go to one place and they wouldn't let us in because the lady I was traveling with was wearing shorts.
Mom: Was it a chapel or something?
Aunt: No...
Mom: A mission?
Aunt: A mission...or a mausoleum?
Mom: Or a coliseum?
Aunt: One of the above.
Scene: Bus, as noted above. Enter 23? year old guy, cute, very cheerful, vaguely alterna, carrying a bag with 2 or 3 bags of generic cereal.
Driver: What'd you get?
23: Cereal. But no lady.
Driver: What?
23: I went to the HEB, I hoped there would be a lady there for me, it being Valentine's Day and all.
Driver: Did you get milk?
23: I didn't need milk! I needed a lady! To go with the cereal.
Crazy Man: You should go to church.
Driver: He's on his way home.
23: Maybe that's it, maybe all the ladies went to my house and they'll be there when I get home!
Names withheld to reduce negative ramifications should one of them find this blog.
Relative: "It was terrible, the circus got shut down and all the animals were going to be turned into horse meat!"
Relative: "I guess it was fine, if you like watching people shoot other people with bullets."
The Princess: "As opposed to with what?"
Relative: "I'm just explaining how I understood the plot."Relative: "That store, Half Books. You buy half the book there and you have to find the other half somewhere else?"
The Princess: "Half Price Books."
Relative: "You get every other page there..."Relative: "That pie recipe, I tell you, I think it came down on the stone tablets."
The Princess: "On the back."
Relative: "Exactly."
The Princess: "So in the Bible it's begat begat begat...pie."
Relative: "No, in Prophets, which is really more about telling you what to do to avoid being sold into slavery."
The Princess: "So, making pie."
Relative: "Exactly."Relative: "...there's a soft place in the sheetrock, which tells me that there's either a cockroach back there spitting on it, or there's a plumbing leak."
Relative: "The problem is that the Devil made the threads in [the faucet], and his best friend made the threads in [the hose], and it really improves your cussing ability to try putting them together."
Relative: "Surely it isn't a continuous plumbing leak or you'd all be drowned by now."
Relative 1: "What he noticed was that all the trees in Virginia were the same, there was no variety."
Relative 2: "What kind do they have out there?"
Relative 1: "Well I don't know, I know it was something coniferous."
Relative 3: "Some firs are carnivorous. Coniferous."
Relative 4: "No wonder they only have one kind of tree, those ate all the other ones."
Relative 3: "He's not even a plant person and he can figure that out."Relative: "Oh great, she's going for a pen and paper, she's going to use all this at the commitment hearing. Are you going to keep writing?"
The Princess: "Are you going to keep talking?"
On Route #3 Burnet/Manchaca, southbound, morning, re: admission to the University of Texas at Austin:
Girl: I just need to be a foreign student and then I'll get in. Don't we have a quota on foreign students or something?
Boy: Ummm....no, I don't think so.
Girl: Or people from Delaware or something?
The upside to the whole funeral thing (she says, making it a separate post for no apparent reason) was quality time near two of my mother's cousins. After a long and stressful week and a few glasses of red wine each, they treated me to the following snippets of conversation:
Female cousin: So at my wedding-
Male cousin: Which one??
Female cousin: Hey! Did you hear that, he's asking which wedding?
My mom, to male cousin: Hey, use a little tact. Shut up!
This from the woman who forbid me to use the phrase "shut up" until it became apparent that it was a lost cause, because it was "an ugly thing to say."
Male cousin: I still remember Daddy making you walk around the block.
Female cousin: I didn't have to walk around the block, that was D., she was really drunk. She had the vodka, and it was a bigger bottle.
Male cousin: So who took the minister's kids home?
I looked at my mother and told her I didn't feel bad at all for any of my behavior during high school.
I like Mighty Girl as much as I do (which is a lot) because she so often captures tiny but hilarious snippets of conversation. Less is more, and less is a riot. I am jealous of her ability. But I think this ranks, and I'm not making it up:
Me: Are you sure you heard coyotes, or was it actually Coyote Ugly?
I-ROCK: Well, I didn't hear anyone dancing on tables. And I didn't hear any breasts.
