Stan tagged me with another one of these lame-o blog memes. I normally gleefully break the chain on these things, but this time around I’ll play along with childish naïveté and do…

The Childhood Meme: What 5 Things Do You Miss About Your Childhood?

This meme requires you to do the following things:

Remove the blog at #1 from the following list and bump every one up one place. Add your blog’s name in the #5 spot. Link to each of the other blogs for the desired cross pollination effect.

1. Lindsay
2. News to Hughes
3. Fluxion
4. Our Obligatory Blog
5. There’s Pie in the Lunchroom

Next, inflict this meme on five new people.

1. Beth
2. Don
3. Peggy
4. Gavin
5. Jim

Finally, list the five things you miss most from childhood.

1. Spanish moss. I lived in rural Florida from age 9 – 12 and I remember the spanish moss being everywhere. Thinking of it takes me back to muggy mornings on Terra Ceia Island, riding bikes all over the island and through what we always called the Indian Burial Ground.
2. A cheap plastic whistle. I lived on a 45 acre spread of woods and rolling hills in Wisconsin from ages 5 – 8. My brothers and sister and I would spend all day playing on the Big Rock, exploring the woods, hiking the hills, and generally just being country kids out in the country. We’d leave the house in the morning and be on our own until lunchtime, when my mom would break out that cheap-ass Zamfir-style whistle, stick her head out the back door, and start blowing on it like a madwoman. I miss the sound of that redneck panflute.
3. Snow. I lived in Wisconsin and Colorado when I was growing up, and I loved the snow. I loved the way the air froze your nostrils, the sound the snow made when it crunched under your feet, the muffled quiet of the morning after a big snowfall. Now that I live in Los Angeles the only snow I see is slushy, muddy, icy, non-powdery manmade crap you find on the slopes at a ski resort. It’s not the same. At all.
4. Waking up in the morning and hearing grown-ups talking in the kitchen. There was something that felt so familiar and safe about hearing those muffled voices down the hall as you first woke up.
5. Innocence. In every way.

There’s nothing quite like folding several pairs of your wife’s ratty old granny panties to completely suck the romance out of a marriage.

Lifted from The Sneeze:

Open up your iTunes and take a look at the “Top 25 Most Played” playlist. What’s the #1 song and how many times have you relentlessly put it in your ears?

The song I’ve listened to — again and again and again and again — is:

Wingnutters are quick to accuse us lefties of being woefully out of touch with what the “majority” of Americans think and/or feel.

With that in mind, consider this from Salon:

According to an Annenberg poll conducted this spring, about 40 percent of Americans consider Fox News talk show host Bill O’Reilly a “journalist” — while only 30 percent of the people surveyed said they considered famed Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward to be one. … Meanwhile, more than a quarter surveyed said that another champion of judicious reportage, radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, was a journalist.

People are stupid. I can live with being out of touch with these waterheads.

Uncle Sam needs YOU, young Republicans!

Don, Tim, other right-wing Lunchroom readers, surely you’ve talked to your kids about enlisting to support the “war” effort, haven’t you? This “war” is “both just and necessary,” after all.

Beth has a recurring bad habit she indulges in that drives me absolutely batshit. She has not one but two cell phones — one personal, one from her new job — and she routinely leaves both of them at home when she goes out at night or on weekends.

It annoys the living piss out of me.

Take tonight, for example. She and Zoe went out for “a little while” two hours ago with the promise that she’d bring some takeout home for dinner. It’s now 9:00 p.m., there’s no sign of them, and I’m freakin’ hungry. So I called her to see what’s what and to find out when she’s gonna feed her man after leaving him home alone to wash the dishes and clean the kitchen disaster area from his Father’s Day dinner last night.

I called her work cell phone. It’s ringing on the entryway table.

I called her personal cell phone. It’s ringing in her office across the hall from me.

Great. Redundant communication modes rendered useless because they’re here and she’s there. Great.

I should count my blessings, though. If she had the phones with her, she would have called me about nothing 19 times already.

Resistance was futile, I have been assimilated. Chez Atkins is now one with the Jack Russell Terrier nation — little Sammy is ours.

There were three other people at the Burbank Shelter who wanted her this morning, so that meant another raffle. After losing Saturday’s raffle for the first Jack Russell we wanted, I had been hoping to avoid another one. No such luck. So now I needed luck. And also people skills: I had to thin the field.

It was me and three women who wanted Sammy. Two of them were sisters and were clearly trying to game the system: only one of them really wanted Sammy but had brought her sister to double her odds. I resented that strategy for two reasons 1) it cut into my odds, and B) I thought of it first but didn’t have anyone to partner with me today. So the old maid sisters were doing the old double-team thing. Bitches.

But the third woman… I sensed weakness in this one. I chatted her up and we got to talking about how cute Sammy was — and then I laid it on: full-thickness guilt trip carpet bombing. How Zoe had cried her eyes out Saturday when we lost out on the other dog. How Beth couldn’t stop talking about this one. How we had visited Sammy here at the pound every day for the last five days. How Beth had bonded with Sammy and knew in her heart that “this is the one.” I laid it on thick, boy. And it worked: she dropped out of the drawing. She leaned in to my ear and murmured that she thought I should have it and that she’d look for a different dog. And so I had cut the field by 25%. I was ashamed. Barely.

Then they passed out tickets and drew the winner and the winner was me and in-your-face, old maid sisters, for trying to game the system! I took your little cheater vote-padding tactic and negated it with my pitiful tales of woe manipulation skills and you were rejected! Whooaa!!! And besides, one of them adopted a chihuahua after I got Sammy, so they got a dog after all.

So now we have to wait for Sammy to be spayed before we can bring her home. She’s scheduled to have it done tomorrow, so we’ll have her by tomorrow evening.

Arf.

Well, Mimi was not meant to be. The Burbank shelter didn’t get the 40+ person turnout they anticipated, but there was still a fairly sizeable crowd that showed up to adopt Mimi and four other dogs that became available today:

It turned out that I was up against 8 other people vying for little Mimi. We were each dealt a raffle ticket and then they drew the winner at random. Our number was xxx558. The winning number: xxx559. So much for luck of the Irish…

Zoe, who went with me, was crushed and cried all the way home. Beth, who stayed home because she can’t go near a dog pound without crying her eyes out, was copacetic about it. Mimi sure was cute, and Beth was sad not to get her, but… Well, Beth said she hadn’t been 100% sure that Mimi was the right dog. She was cute and all — because who doesn’t love a cute Jack Russell puppy named Mimi — but on the other hand, she was … something. Something maybe not completely perfect for Beth.

But a few cages down was another Jack Russell, a white 2-year old female named Sammy. And after we came home from looking at Mimi, Beth kept mentioning Sammy. So today, when Mimi went to someone else, Beth wasn’t too terribly sad. Because she was still thinking of Sammy. So we went down and visited Sammy today, and Beth has proclaimed that Sammy is definitely “The One.”

So meet Sammy:

Sammy is available for adoption Monday morning at 9 a.m. I promised her I’d be there for her. I hope we have better luck then.