The vine kept wrapping itself around my flowers and strangling them, every year for four years. It was impossible to kill, no matter how many times I ripped it out, because its roots are under the deck where I can't reach them.

This spring, as it reached its little tendrils toward my pepper plants, I wrapped it around the deck railing in frustration. I told it I would let it live if it would keep to itself.

It did.

It just bloomed this past week, and now there are at least ten very happy bees belly up at the bar.

In addition to peppers and tomatoes, this year we tried growing cantaloupe. I've never done that before. Initially we had tons of yellow flowers, and we were so excited. Then the heat came, and though we watered and watered, I guess they couldn't stand the weeks of triple-digit temperatures. Because after the temperature fell below 95, we saw little yellow flowers again. And then, miraculously ....

There's even a baby. I never thought of fruit as cute before.

Happy Friday!

It's here. The lead-up to Election 2012. As part of my job, I need to look at it, to look at it with as open a mind as I can muster. I can't hide my head and turn off Twitter and the television, like I'd really, really like to do. It's good, in a way, as it's forcing me to confront the issues of the day and solidify how I feel about them and make sure I get myself to the voting booth on time. 

But wow, I'm really struggling with it. Last night the little angel brought me my bear when I was reduced to tears of frustration and anger at an article I saw on Twitter.

I thanked her and took her to curriculum night at her school and immersed myself for forty-five minutes in all the things that third-graders learn, what sort of help they need and how we can best prepare them for fourth grade by what they learn this year (note: addition and subtraction rote memorization). 

Then we drove home into the darkening sky with the top down. Returned a movie. Got a shake. Walked back into a house strewn with two-hour-old milk and the remnants of dinner scattered across the table because we were so late when we left. 

It is perhaps the collision of such big ideas and issues with the mundane that paralyzes me. Needing to take out the garbage and scoop the cat litter and wash the dishes in the face of such important political movement, knowing I have no time to volunteer nor any money to give -- things are tight all around. I have my voice, and I donate it as freely as I can, but it pains me to tell Planned Parenthood not this time, I understand you've lost your funding again, but I just can't right now. Call back in a few months, maybe things will be different. 

I'm tapped out. That's what I felt when I surveyed the kitchen last night, my laptop still open next to the half-full soup bowl, Twitter updating and updating and updating, the headlines falling off the screen as quickly as they appeared.

Tweet.

Tweet.

Tweet.

---

In less depressing news, I reviewed some prescription sunglasses on Surrender, Dorothy: Reviews!

Beloved is 39 today.

Which means we ARE officially growing old together.

Happy birthday, darling!

Photo Credit: Randy Braley

(This thing? Goes into the Chateau Travolta Banish the Linoleum Fund. Ooh-rah, VTech. Plus I like their phones. Actual post is below this big box.)

I don't know if you do Twitter or Facebook, but if you are friends with me there, or read my tweets or status updates, you know that I like to spend a few minutes a few mornings a week on StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon is a site where people tag cool or funny or beautiful things and you just hit the button like a rodent and it rewards you with something interesting to look at that's been crowd-sourced by the masses. You hit a button to say like or dislike, and it finds you stuff closer to what you like the next time.

I use it as a mood enhancer. Totally Pavlovian, right?

I like to look for beautiful or cool or funny things in the morning to start my day off better. I do this BEFORE I look at news headlines, because -- as evidenced by my post yesterday -- they tend to be complete downers.

Here are my favorite stumbles from the last month or so:

2011 National Geographic Photo Contest

What I can only assume is a monastery on top of a cliff

Awesome paper roll collages

Art made out of words

If you see beautiful things in your travels online, please tag the #morningstumble so we can all enjoy. There's enough ugly out there already.

[Editor's Note: This is political. I understand if you don't want to read it. My politics have always been very clear here -- someone once tried to get me fired from my job because of them. But I have to write this, because to say nothing might be interpreted as disinterest or agreement.]

The little angel appeared before my side of the bed. I didn't look at the clock.

"Mommy, I'm trying to stop a bad dream from forming," she said.

This has happened several times in the past few weeks.

I climbed into her bed with her and put my arm around her. We both fell asleep.

I woke up this morning thinking about my girl and how much I wish to protect her from everything scary in the world. I just read Margaret Atwoods' The Handmaid's Tale this past weekend. The daughter Offred loses would be eight. The little angel is eight.

"What's the matter? he said.

I don't know, I said.

We still have ... he said. But he didn't go on to say what we still had. It occurred to me that he shouldn't be saying we, since nothing that I knew of had been taken away from him." - p. 182

I'm not pro-abortion. I've never had one. I never wanted to have to make that choice. I understand the pro-life stance, maybe not some of the methods used to drill the message, but the message. In a perfect world, no one would ever need to have an abortion. Being pro-choice doesn't mean thinking all pregnancies should be aborted willy-nilly for whatever reason. Being pro-choice means wanting safe, affordable options for pregnant women who were made that way against their will or who will not be able to provide adequate care for a child or for whom a pregnancy is a health risk. Being pro-choice means wanting pregnancy to be avoided in the first place via safe, affordable birth control and sex education. Being pro-choice, to me, means wanting to ensure girls and women can avoid that, the most horrible choice there can ever be, from ever arising in the first place.

We're humans. The women have the babies. If it were any other way, if instead of genders we had blue and green and sometimes blues had the babies and sometimes greens had the babies, I don't think there would be this issue. The way it stands, the women ALWAYS have the babies; it's just the way our anatomy works. And because of that, it makes individual rights very, very tricky. There really is no comparison for the other gender, and I don't blame men for that -- it's not their fault they don't have the babies any more than it is women's fault that we do, or we can. That we are capable of doing so.

But we are not vessels.

There is no way an egg can get inside a man to be fertilized with the sperm, leaving its existence or nonexistence up to the man or to a government that wants to have a say in that fertilized egg's existance.

If a man is raped -- because that totally happens, too -- the government has no say in how he deals with the fallout. A man can get a disease from rape -- all sorts of horrible things can happen to a man -- but the government can't pass an amendment to the Constitution to force him to keep a pregnancy resulting from abuse against his will. I'm not even talking about a child -- I'm talking about a pregnancy. At a certain point one becomes the other, and we can agree to disagree on when that is, but the government is not trying to make amendments about born babies, so to me, it's a moot point.

I realize completely there is really no point in arguing about whether you are pro-life or pro-choice, because such stances are deeply personal and all we can do is disagree civilly and vote to support politicians who we believe will treat us with respect.

It is the respect part I keep getting stuck on this week, any week, when it comes to this issue. My uterus is in early retirement. I don't plan on using it again, have taken steps to insure against accidents. I'm not worried about the government legislating my uterus, because I benched it.

The Handmaid's Tale is a book about a society in which women are valued only for their fertility due to depopulation and a government takeover by a highly religious society. Atwood, in her ending "A Note to a Reader," wrote this, in 1986:

"The roots of the book go back to my study of the American Puritans. The society they founded in America was not a democracy as we know it, but a theocracy. In addition, I found myself increasingly alarmed by statements made frequently by religious leaders in the United States; and then a variety of events from around the world could not be ignored, particularly the rising fanaticism of the Iranian monotheocracy. The thing to remember is that there is nothing new about the society depicted in The Handmaid's Tale except in time and place ... It is an imagined account of what happens when not uncommon pronouncements about women are taken to their logical conclusions. History proves that what we have been in the past we could be again."

I am a spiritual person. I have my relationship with my God. But God isn't writing human laws, people are -- people who are interpreting God. We don't know. We won't know until later. People are fallible, can take things too far, can take their beliefs to unwanted logical conclusions.

I sat in bed for a while this morning, thinking about everything I've seen and read in the past 48 hours regarding abortion and women's health and women being denied services and "legitimate rape," and I, too, wanted to stop the bad dream from forming.

I have a vote, and I have a blog, and this is all I can do. As Atwood also wrote in an interview in the back of my library book:

"After all, this is the United States and it is North America and it is a pluralistic society and we have many people with differing points of view. A number of people would not take this lying down."

We have to keep talking about it. It's important. My daughter is only eight, and she has a whole life of experiences -- good and bad -- ahead of her. I want her to have her rights intact to move forward through life as she sees fit. She is the best thing I've ever produced, but I am more than just her mother. She is more than her someday fertility.

Women are more than that. We are more than one-half of the population. We just happen to be the half that has the babies.

I have a habit of hitting the wrong button on Vicki the Convertible's key fob. It's because she's a 1997 and the pictures have been rubbed off the fob. I know, I know, righty tighty, lefty loosey, but sometimes my brain hurts after a day of work and I want there to be simple pictures, dammit. I've also been known to set off the car alarm, but never more than seven times in one day.

Last Thursday, I set it off in the parking lot of the little angel's new gymnastics studio. I have McKenna the new American Girl and her DVD to thank for this new obsession with tumbling, a problem compounded by the XXX Olympiad. I got the alarm shut off and climbed in to Vicki. I turned the key in the ignition. It made a little sort of zappy sound, and then ... nothing.

Since I had just set off the alarm, I looked at the owner's manual. It said something about disarming an alarm system that would make the engine impossible to start. You were supposed to unlock the doors with the key, or with the fob, or presumably with something other than a broken wire hanger. I tried that. Then I went into gymnastics and got Beloved so he could try the exact same things I had just tried, because I was late to meet a friend for a drink.

Of course, we both locked and unlocked the doors and the trunk with the key and the fob four times each, because maybe, just maybe, what hadn't worked the last seventeen times might work if we tried it after blowing magic fairy dust on the fob. Beloved looked at the fuses or wires or something. I Googled. I found there are many people in the world who break into their own cars and activate alarm systems they didn't know existed. I called the Chrysler dealer. The guy who was working in sales hadn't graduated high school yet in 1997.

I abandoned Vicki in the parking lot. My mind went to all the things that could be wrong with Vicki. I've only had her since March and she is already my favorite car of all time. I almost wept having to leave her there, all alone. 

The next day we had her towed to a shop that told us we'd need to replace the starter because they couldn't figure out what was wrong. Beloved was all RIGHTEOUS INDIGNANT ANGER! And he called another shop, and they said they had never HEARD OF SUCH A THING and that we should have Vicki towed over there right away.

That night, we had to leave town for my in-laws' 50th anniversary celebration. Vicki spent the night in the hospital.

We called Saturday morning. They said they were just pulling her in.

We called Saturday afternoon. They said actually, ha ha! They hadn't even pulled her in yet.

On Sunday afternoon, Beloved got a call from the garage. It was a long call, and as I listened to one half of the conversation, I grew worried. Perhaps it was the stream of profanity emanating from my husband. I'm not sure. The mechanic said, OH HA HA, it actually WAS the starter, and maybe also something called the dashboard cluster, which you can't buy just one part of, hard to tell, we'd have to get it started first to see.

We returned home to an empty garage. I thought this must be how people feel when their last kid goes off to college. Except Vicki doesn't even have any possessions of her own, so I longingly petted the car attachment for the shop vac and thought of myself driving down the highway, top down, hair blowing, through the summer of 2012 when the grass went dormant and the sidewalks cracked and I got a convertible. Was it all over?

On Monday, we called again. Dashboard cluster? 

But oh, for joy! With a new starter, Vicki revved right up, and there was no need for a dashboard cluster. Which is a relief, really, because just last month, our truck couldn't pass inspection because it needed a new muffler or exhaust system or some other thing that cost a whole lot to be all street legal and stuff.

Last night, Beloved and I went to go pick up Vicki. I was lecturing him about the director who jumped off the bridge in California maybe not being to blame for his own suicide because let me explain to you how clinical depression works. And I could see in his eyes he hadn't intended for this conversation to make me yell but maybe he wasn't ready to back down from his position, and generally speaking, it was a good time for us to be in different vehicles. 

I unlocked Vicki with the actual key and got in. Her contoured seats hit the part of my lower back that often hurts. I pushed the button to put the top down and instantly realized the temperature outside was my perfect: 84 degrees. The breeze ruffled my hair.

I was telling a family member about my love for Vicki while Vicki was in the shop, and my relative said her mother bought a convertible and told her daughter it made the mother feel like a different person. Vicki doesn't make me feel like a different person, but the fact the wind and sunshine can get onto my skin directly head-butts me back into the present every time I drop the top. I drove home slowly, listening to the birds singing on the power lines. 

Two weeks from now I'll be over the starter costs, just like I'm pretty much over the muffler costs. Sucks. Nothing I could do about it. The cars are old. At least they can be rejuvenated with parts.

This is what Vicki does for me: She lets me feel the sunshine. I love her. I'm glad she's back. I'm going to choose to focus on that part. I really do want to be a happy person. 

DJ Nibbles celebrates the return of Vicki. Rock on. Celebrate something today.

---

I’ve loved amusement parks pretty much my whole life. I was very cautious as a child, so I don’t remember riding roller coasters until young adulthood, and I think I’ve been making up for it ever since. When BlogHer and Cedar Fair offered me the opportunity to review Kansas City’s Worlds of Fun for free plus some money to spend in the park, I was all in. (And my family was pleased, as well.)

I grew up in Iowa, and thus I’ve been spending summer Saturdays at Kansas City’s Worlds of Fun and Oceans of Fun my whole life. I remember packing up the car and making the journey to Kansas City – the thrill of the roller coasters and the big hot air balloon with “Worlds of Fun” written on it coming into focus on the flat highway. Ah, bliss. “I wish I LIVED in Kansas City,” I would tell my parents. “I would go to Worlds of Fun EVERY WEEKEND.”

Ha!

Now I do live in Kansas City, and we go to Worlds of Fun two or three times each summer. Usually we do the twilight pass, which saves you $10-$15 and the heat of the day. If you’re local, you’re probably good with five hours of amusement park, especially if your kids are younger (mine is 8). Normal rates to get in top out at $45/person at the gate plus $12 parking.

So that’s the past, and now we go on to the present. This summer, the Arens family went to Worlds of Fun!

The little angel wore her special coordinated-sunglasses-and-earrings set.

Beloved made sure to insure important items against water rides.

Note: We got there at 10:45 on a Saturday morning. The gates opened at 10. Note: GO EARLY – there are fewer lines early in the park’s day. True, I went early in the season, but in my experience the park really starts to get busy right after lunch.

One of the things I like about Worlds of Fun are the roller coasters. It’s smaller than the Six Flags parks, but there are still nine aggressive thrill rides in Worlds of Fun and two in Oceans of Fun (read: roller coaster equivalent). This is a picture of my new favorite, the Prowler.

The Boomerang is interesting in that you do the whole coaster forwards and backwards.

The Boomerang has several upside-down turns, as well.

My second-favorite coaster is the Mamba. The first hill is the best.

Despite her love of every roller coaster her 52” self can get herself on, the little angel’s favorite ride is the one that was my favorite when I was a kid: Le Taxitour.

She likes it for the same reason I do – she gets to be the driver, for once.

After we rode the rides, we decided to try out the games, since part of my compensation was some money to spend in the park. In my experience, if you have a small child and you ask the game wranglers where your wee one might win something, they are generous with their information about “everyone wins” opportunities in the park.

Sorry, Worlds of Fun, but the plastic vuvuzela is perhaps the worst prize I have ever seen, on many levels.

We were not that thrilled with the inflatable bats, either. But we kept trying!

When we walked in, we saw some huge stuffed gorillas. The little angel was sure we would win one. The game: Rebound. You had to throw a whiffle ball at what looked like an artist’s easel with a stick balanced on the bottom tray and land the ball in a box at the base of the easel without knocking off the stick. Truly a bizarre game. The little angel tried. She missed the first two times.

And then …

She won. OMG.

The best thing about this gorilla, which we named “Tiny,” was the reaction from the other park goers as we carried her out of the park. One guy mentioned we might need a truck. One teen tried to give us $50 for Tiny. But the little angel won her all by herself, so alas, capitalism didn’t prevail.

There was a tense moment in the parking lot.

 

But we did, at last, get Tiny home. The little angel triumphantly showed her off to the entire neighborhood.

 

Just for yucks, Tiny wanted to sit in Vicki the Convertible.

 

At the end of our exciting Worlds of Fun adventure, the little angel tucked Tiny into bed.

Pros and Cons to Worlds of Fun

Pros:

• Lots of coasters
• Fast Lane available (though we didn’t use and didn’t really need, due to our timing)
• Availability of Subway if you don’t want to stuff yourself with theme park food
• Games your kid can actually win
• Planet Snoopy has a good selection of rides for the wee ones so everyone can have fun
• Ride conductors are comedians
• Rating system for rides makes it easy to determine if you want to go on them before you get in line

Cons:

• The fried food was a bit greasy for my taste (but hey, it’s fried theme park food)
• Not as many misters as there could be for a park in the hot, steamy Midwest
• Many of the lines aren’t shaded
• No hand sanitizers near rides or food (at least that I saw)

What’s your favorite amusement park memory? Ours is definitely the little angel winning Tiny (though I wish she were a little tinier).

Kansas City is in a stage D4 exceptional drought. I've never seen anything like it. The ground has cracked, just like in my daughter's picture book about Africa. The grass has gone dormant, the color of straw, prickly. This grass hurts bare feet. For the first time in my life, I've been watering the birds by leaving out trays of liquid. Some of the trees have gone fuck it and dropped dead leaves on the hay-grass, lending August the appearance of October even as the heat still shimmers on the pavement.

It's been a summer of dry heat, unusual for Missouri. Summers here usually feel like walking around with a wet washcloth stuck to your body. This heat sucks the moisture from my nasal passages instead of clogging them with thick air. When I emerge from the swimming pool or lake, the water evaporates within minutes, the wind thirsty for what clings to my skin.

I have spent the summer vascillating between internal panic about end-of-days weather and reminding myself draughts have happened before. In 1936. The copyright on my yellowed paperback of The Grapes of Wrath is 1939.

I asked my father if the dust would come. He said no, farm practices have changed, but this is the kind of weather that would do it.

Yesterday while I was working I heard a loud motor outside. I couldn't figure out what it was, so I went to look. The neighbor who has been watering his lawn had a lawn service come. And I realized that no one on my street has mowed their lawns since June, because the grass will not grow. It's sleeping.

This week, for the first time in months, the temperatures have dropped enough to open the windows in the mornings. Petunia hovers on her chair, her whiskers pressed against the screen. But it does not rain. 

I'm waiting for it to rain. 

Last Saturday, I spent six hours removing a layer of July from my house. I put Killz on the ceiling where I had *thought* I'd shut the bathroom sink off after hand-washing the swimming suits. I scrubbed Okie dust off the windows. I attempted to open the door that's stuck shut because our house has settled due to lack of rainwater on the foundation. I scrubbed the floors.

Then, because Beloved had taken the little angel to one place I have absolutely zero desire to visit -- the Missouri State Fair -- I went to the swimming pool by myself with John Irving's In One Person. I stayed there for three hours, and in that time, I fell back in love with the writing of John Irving after several novels of "is what we had lost forever"? My John Irving high lasted through date night at Cafe Verona --  where we ate in the little courtyard and the waiter explained the locks hanging from the wrought-iron gates were engraved and hung on people's anniversaries to signify their forever love -- and well into the next morning, when we had a lazy breakfast and headed into the Plaza to get something I needed at Barnes & Noble and maybe browse with my gift card they gave me for Mother's Day, which was at least 50 95-degree-plus days ago.

The Plaza killed my high. I never actually *shop* in the Plaza, which for the uninitiated is a high-end four blocks of shops and restaurants. I love hanging out at the Plaza, but I never buy anything anywhere other than Barnes & Noble, because I don't have $375 for a handbag. We went into at least ten stores, but I realized I have grown really, really bad at shopping, because we've been trying to save money for so long I now fully understand that I really don't need anything and want everything. And everything I want costs more than the balance of the gift card. But everything I need I already have.

It's a quandry.

I ended up in H&M staring at all the cheap crap and ill-fitting clothes that would look good on my daughter but not on me and realizing there was not one thing in the entire Plaza that I wanted to buy. Then I saw a $12 white, gauzy scarf, the exact kind of scarf one would wear if one were riding in an open convertible and wanted to avoid mussing her hair, even if that convertible were built in 1997 and even if that woman were also wearing yoga pants. 

I bought the scarf and we drove home, and I realized I'd forgotten that feeling of wanting to be a better writer that I'd pulled from John Irving's words. And it made me mad -- the Plaza made me mad -- myself made me mad -- I went from feeling inspired and content with my lot to grouchy and jealous of other women's shoes in one hour flat.

The next time I go to the Plaza, I'm spending the entire gift card at Barnes & Noble, and then I'm getting the hell out.

Why do it to myself?