Personal Mascots

Schools have mascots. Professional sports teams obviously have mascots. Even community groups are named after mascots of a sort, like the Lions and Elks and Shriners, whatever the hell they are. I suppose it follows that individuals could have mascots, too. Why not?

I don't know what mine would be. The Screaming Rant? The Angry Buffalo? I don't know. The possibilities are endless. It might be a fun party game to name your friends with the most apt mascot. I'll have to remember that one next time I'm in a group. Maybe you could have two or three hats, each filled with paper on which is written an adjective and a noun or verb. That way it would be like mascot Mad-Libs!

With ideas like that, how am I not rich?

So, if I am on the fence about what mascot would fit me best, I do know what my wife's mascot would be. The Thundering Herd. No other person in the world walks with fervency equal to the clompen-schtompen of my wife. My wife is not an overweight woman, but she walks as though she were making a concerted effort to make sure the ground stays on the ground. Or maybe she is trying to step on, and pop some invisible balloon tied to her ankle.

I don't know, but the knock-on effects are obvious. Among them, I am forever repairing plaster in our old house. It cracks where the walls meet the ceilings as it flexes and vibrates under the strain of Emily's steps. Also, I can tell her mood by the sound of her walk.

Just now, the dining room chair slid back with a particular staccato and Emily's normally metered stump was replaced with a gait that was oddly fleet and powerfully heavy at the same time. She continued this pace up the stairs and I could tell by the sound alone she was skipping stairs as she went. Something got her hackles in a twitch.

"Monday is Columbus Day," she said.
"Is that still a thing," I asked?
"The banks will be closed!" she said, making that face that wives make whose power actually projects across the room and strikes fear into the heart of husbands.
"Dually noted," I said, trying not to let on that I understood that this would mess with the paycheck cycle and require certain adjustments in our spending. I mean she came all the way up the stairs to make a big deal out of this, I felt I could oblige with a little word play.

The other day when we were taking our walk, I broached the subject with Em and she said our friend Greg says the same thing about his wife, also not a heavy person. She just walks like she never fully trusts gravity, or as if that Godzilla movie she saw as a kid disproportionally influenced her step.

"I weigh upwards of 240 pounds, and yet I can move daintily about our old, creaky home without being tracked and you are this little waifish thing and sound like the thundering herd!" I said as we were walking yesterday, the sidewalk behind us buckling and crumbling.

"So what? That's how I walk? I don't know why," Em said defensively.

She then went on to remind me how she does have a history of falling. A lot. Down the stairs. Even up the stairs. And I don't mean the Lifetime Movie kind of falling a lot. I have nothing to do with it.

"Maybe I am just trying to be sure I don't die every time I take a step," came the ultimate decisive response.

Good answer. So, mascots don't have to be attractive or fully welcome if indeed they are apt. And so, if my wife is The Thundering Herd, she's the prettiest, best smelling thundering herd there ever was. And she can cook. Pretty impressive

Oooh, I got one for me. Bucket O' Lard, no, wait, Giant Blister! Blustering Wind? Category IV Hurricane? The list goes on.
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Last night was my night to cook dinner. Em mentioned she had purchased some talapia. I saw it and figured it was one of those things for me, as Em doesn't really like fish so much.

"I want to try it. We had it at Amy and Adam's and I liked it. Will you make it Thursday?"

Of course. So, since Em is sort of new to eating fish, I at least wanted to prepare it in a way that downplayed the fishiness of it, even though talapia isn't really fishy to begin with. So, I lightly seasoned the fish and coated it in a 2 part breading of seasoned flower and seasoned breadcrumbs. It was very light and promised to enhance the flakiness of the fish.

I pan fried it and prepared some linguini and a cream caper sauce.

I had never made this meal before and was sort of making it up as I went along. I didn't have the stuff I would normally have to make the sauce, but it all turned out OK.

Em always talks about her meals, which are universally amazing and I love them. She has multiple recipe books, boxes and binders. They are alphabetized, rated, modified and annotated. If you want to make something, Em has the recipe. For her, a recipe is the key. I am recipe dyslexic. I can't follow one. I have to use my old actor's trick of actually memorizing the recipe so I can recite it as I go along. My brain just doesn't work that way.
I am a guy after all and therefore impotent to the challenge of reading and following directions, maps, ransom letters and the like. I lost a sibling that way. $20,000 in unmarked bills to the southwest corner of the park before 2:00 on Saturday? Southwest corner? Oh, man. Sorry, sis. I can't do this.

So, I just wanted to let the world, (or at least the 16 people in  the world underemployed enough to waste their time on reading this garbage), that sometimes, I make something good, too in spite of my many disabilities, like the inability to read for information.

That is all. I really need to get some actual work done.