Whenever life gets super stressful for me, the voice in my head shuts off and I have problems coming up with anything to write about on this weblog.  This is one of the main reasons why when people tell me I should quit my job and try to be a writer for a living, I laugh at them.  Because, my dear, when you are a Writer with a capital W, you tend to be required to... you know... write... even if you're uninspired.  When you are a blogger with a lowercase b and you're uninspired, you can always skip a day or two and no one misses a meal because mommy couldn't come up with a good potty training story.  And... as a blogger, if you absolutely must post something, you can always phone it in in the form of photo essays and minutiae posts.

Like this one.

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While downtown on Easter Sunday, my mother and I took The Caterpillar and walked from the Smithsonian metro stop to the Lincoln Memorial and back, which, as it turns out, is a little over three miles altogether.  If I'd bothered to look it up before we walked that far with a three year old and no stroller, I would have balked at the distance.  But since none of us knew any better, we didn't notice until after we boarded the metro and headed home.  Ignorance is bliss.  

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The Caterpillar was a great trooper on the Toddler Bataan Death March we forced her to take and made the entire trek without a single complaint.  But had we walked any further, I might have had to tape her mouth again because she narrated EVERYthing that happened as it happened.  

We're a verbal group.  Everyone in our family talks a lot and I know overall that's a good thing for kids - they're less likely to be molested by a family friend or priest because everyone knows she's a talker.  Mostly we put up with the constant verbal diarrhea but there are times when YOUR EARS JUST NEED A REST, DUDE.  She Faulkner-esque-ly described everything she saw and/or every thought she had from the crud between her toes, to the color of the cement, to the relative number of items or clothing on women compared to men.  There is not a single thing about which this child does not have an opinion.  I can't even fathom what she'll be like at sixteen.

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On the way back from the Lincoln Memorial, we made a quick stop off at Signers Island, which is maybe one of my favorite places on the National Mall.  We pointed out family of ducks swimming along like they owned the place and stopped to take a photo while The Caterpillar began extolling and expounding upon the virtues and qualities of different types of water. 

This water is "duck water:"


While this water is "alligator water:"


Good to know.

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The KingofHearts interviewed for a couple of jobs last week on the off-chance he can improve his employment and/or commute.  Both prospective opportunities are much closer to home and with gas being over $4 a gallon, even if he were to get an offer at exactly the same salary he's making right now, the savings in fuel costs each week could pretty much be equivalent to a raise - not to mention getting almost two hours of his life back every day.  

Yesterday, he came home and announced, "Sorry, I'm late, I had a job interview on the way home."

Me:  "How'd it go?"

"Well, the interview went really great.  They seem like they're interested and I could see myself working there, buuuut..."

"But?"

"I finished the interview, walked out, got in my car, looked down and realized my fly had been down the entire time."

Call me crazy, but I don't think any offer he gets is going to involve legally-approved transactions.

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Since the day I was born, the music I gravitate to has always come from generations before mine.  Not that I don't like current music too, but the music that speaks to me tends to almost always come from decades before my birth. The KingofHearts bought us tickets to see probably my all-time favorite musical group, Manhattan Transfer, at Blues Alley in Georgetown this week.  I love the Manhattan Transfer because they can take just about any era or musical style and best even the greats who created the style.  But mostly because they sing music I love:  Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins, John Coltrane... all the stuff I want to listen to, but the big plus here is the members of this band are all alive.  So you get to see them do it in person as opposed to a remastered CD recording of an old 78 record.

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Blues Alley is a tiny, dark, intimate, old-style jazz club that looks very much how I imagine the original Birdland to have been, so for me, it's almost like going back in time.  The best thing about it being so tiny, is that there isn't a bad seat in the house.  While waiting for them to take the stage, I texted Monica, "At Blues Alley, waiting for show to start.  I'm so close I could spit on Manhattan Transfer."

She texted back, "I'm so not-old, I don't know who Manhattan Transfer is."

Bitch.

Of course, then I looked around and realized that the three people at our table - me, The KoH, and Uncle Matty - were probably the youngest three people in the entire room with the exception of the servers, whom I'm reasonably certain didn't know who Manhattan Transfer was either.

It's like that time we went to a Rush concert and someone asked the waitress what was going on and she said, "Oh, some old-people's band, I think."

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So we turned our attentions to finding an appropriate cougar for Uncle Matty. But he was all, "I don't need a cougar, I have a girlfriend" and stuff. 

Jerk.

That cougar could have bought him stuff that I could have used too.

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Manhattan Transfer was excellent, by the way.

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Don't ask me how this came up in conversation (how does ANYTHING come up in conversation in our house?) but The KingofHearts claims the term badonkadonk is an onomatopoeia and comes from "the sound it makes when you drive over a bump with a lot of junk in your car's trunk. You know, 'ba-DONK... a-DONK.'  And since junk-in-the-trunk is also a word for a big butt, well, you can make the correlation."
Uncle Matty and I called bullshit on this theory and yelled, "Cite your source!"  Then I spent the better part of the next hour ignoring my amazing plate of flan trying to find something, anything, on the interweb that either proved or disproved his theory.  And yes, I know the earliest known mention of it was in a Missy Elliot song (not a Trace Adkins song as some would try to tell you), but that still doesn't speak to the etymology of the phrase.  
Finally, I announced, "Well, I can't find anything one way or another, so I'm going to ask the Tweeple and the FacePlace.
"Well, that's not gonna be accurate," he whined, "because you're just gonna post something like 'my idiot husband says this, tell him how wrong he is.'" 
He has so little faith in me.  I totally removed the word idiot before posting that tweet. Also: Twitter's 140-character-limit wouldn't leave me the room for tell him how wrong he is.
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So I told him that in the absence of any real data, if even one person could, in fact, corroborate that they too, had heard this is where the phrase came from, I would be willing to concede his point.
There you go, internets, prove me wrong.