Saturday, November 22, 2008

A turkey of a pre-Thanksgiving task

Here I sit, just days before Thanksgiving, and I'm trying to organize my thoughts. Obviously, this requires a new blog entry.

As I gather my mental "to do " list, my mind keeps creeping back to this morning's task which was to remove all the shoe polish from the downtown merchants' windows that the cheerleaders so enthusiastically slathered onto the glass homecoming weekend. That means that the shoe polish has baked in the sun for about 2.5 months, and therefore was dangerously close to being a permanent display. With Festival of Lights quickly approaching (Dec. 6), it would be completely inappropriate to keep our football references visible. It's like having your Christmas lights up in July except even more tacky. Don't get me wrong -- the spirit slogans were very upbeat and everything was spelled correctly, but no one wants to be inundated with tiger paws and megaphones as they try to imagine themselves in a winter wonderland. Even if this is Texas.

Why was I charged with this mission, you ask? Because I am an employee of the Chamber of Commerce (who hosts Festival of Lights) and a cheer mom. There are zero degrees of separation. My daughter needed the community service hours (she has to perform 15 hours for cheerleading and probably some for student council...can't wait to find out what that will entail!) so she earned exactly two hours of credit before she had to be at theatre rehearsal this weekend and last weekend. So that left little ole me scrubbing the windows with vinegar and water plus a dash of Windex. (It makes for a tantalizing scent...in fact, that's why my mind keeps drifting back to this morning. I keep catching a whiff of myself.) So I was left with a dilemma...do I wait for her to help me finish this job or just go ahead and complete it myself?

Well, let's think it through. We're up against the clock (Dec 6). I don't feel like listening to her complain with every stroke of the towel she makes across the window. I can't very well leave a window half-done so that it reads "We are" when it previously read "We are #1". That's just an open invitation for some juvenile reprobate to complete that sentence with his own brand of vulgar humor. So...I concluded it would be best to just embrace this project as my own.

As I stood alone on Main Street, scraping and scrubbing away the Tiger Spirit, passerbys would comment to me such things as "What did you do to deserve this?" and "That looks like fun". Then, it occurred to me that they probably thought I was performing court-ordered community service. I was so embarrased by the prospect of being confused with a thug of some sort that I worked extra briskly just to get out of public view. Humiliation is always a good motivator.

At one point, the shoe-polish writing was so high up on the window that I marveled at how the cheerleaders were able to reach that height. Were they performing stunts as they decorated? It amazed me much like one would be amazed by Stonehenge or the pyramids. With the limited amount of tools and implements that were available to them, how did this result? Was it divine intervention of some sort? Alien involvement? Once I got past the initial amazement, it occurred to me that I too would have to reach radical heights to erase these markings. Crap.

The shop upon whose windows these markings appeared just happened to be open this morning for a few hours so they were kind enough to lend me a chair to stand on. Upon closing time, they repossessed their chair and I was left to my own devices. The window ledge was a good 6 inches, so I hoisted myself right up and began scrubbing. I felt like Spiderman. Then, I laughed as I imagined someone walking by while I screamed "Stay away from me or I'll jump!" That thought, in turn, made me chuckle and I lost my balance, plummeting three feet to the concrete surface below. Like a cat, I landed on my feet and was unphased but I quickly looked around to make sure no one witnessed this event.

Speaking of witnessing events, the four of us plus four of my daughter's friends went to see "Twilight" last night and I have to say I don't get all the fuss. I'm sure it's because I was the only person above the age of 12 who hadn't read the book prior to viewing the film. Half of the trip home from Austin last night was spent discussing what was wrong with the sequence of events and who was completely miscast in the movie. The girls' conversation made me more interested in reading the book than the movie did.

Forget Thanksgiving planning....I'm gonna veg out with Twilight. Then, when we go to the theater to see the sequal, I can wear an Edward t-shirt and audibly swoon when he appears on screen like the 6th grade girls in the row behind us did last night.

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