oh god

Background: M's & my new place (I've NEVER learned how to properly write or say compound posessives like that) is on a nice, quiet sidestreet off a main road. It's basically the perfect location. We're facing a row of houses with a big, beautiful golf course behind them, we're a 2-second walk to the bus stop at the corner of our street, there are two mailboxes within a one-minute walk, and we're basically right in the middle of everything but just off to the side of it. It's quiet around here. All of our neighbors have young families (mostly kids under 6 or 7, from what I can see, but mostly young babies), are older, or are young kids in their 20's who are renting but for the most part keep the noise down.

So I hear this abrasive Boston accent talk/yelling man outside (if you're from the area, you know exactly what I mean... that nasally "rrrraaawwwwhhhhhh" sounding person who talks loudly and harshly and you can't tell if he or she is angry or not). And, of course, I sit next to the window so I can figure out what he's saying. It's this guy probably in his mid-to-late 50's yelling at someone that she is leaving already, and she'll be back in half an hour but FINE, JUST GO THEN but wait and see, you'll be back! and then loudly and indignantly hedge-trimming between outbursts. I figure it's his wife, but then I figure it's his maybe college-age daughter who stopped in for laundry or something. Then I hear two women talking on the porch, and I see a way older woman with a cane hobbling down the stairs with a young blonde woman following her. Turns out the guys' yelling at his MOTHER, who has some appointment but then she wants to stay there for 3 hours, or something, when he thinks she should go and come back and then go elsewhere afterwards, I don't know. But he yelled at her, and then he was all "COME ON, give me a hug" and she swung her cane at him and told him "shhhhhuuuuuuuUUTTTTT UP!"

I nearly burst out laughing, but they definitely would have seen me and it would have been a bit embarrassing... especially since I was sitting next to an open window half-dressed with my hair wrapped in a towel. LOL

God, people are awesome. I just wish more of them came down my street and did amusing things.

Another WTF.

I'm watching an HBO Documentary (yay for My DVR!) called "100% Woman," about a transgendered woman (possibly transsexual? I think she's on hormone treatments, at any rate) who is a professional mountain biker. All of her competitors are trying to get her disqualified because she's not, as they say, "a real woman."

Here I was thinking they just didn't want someone with the unfair advantage of a male muscle-to-fat ratio competeing against them, or something biological like that... but no, it's that "she might go to the championships and THEN what would people think about women's mountain biking???"

Yes, that's a huge concern. One transgendered woman might ruin mountain biking for everyone! Clearly that means all female mountain bikers are actually men.

It's almost funny how people don't realize that GLBT rights are the younger generation's civil rights movement. GLBT struggles are not synonymous with the racial struggles this country (and the world) have faced because the histories just aren't the same, but there's something to be said for the fact that strides have been made in the past 40-50 years towards racial equality-- although we're still light-years away from that being anything near "equal"-- and now we're doing something similar to GLBT people. What? It just BAFFLES me. This is going to be one more embarassing era in US history that could have been SO SIGNIFICANTLY SHORTENED if we just pushed through the paperwork already, made gay marriage legal ("marriage", in my mind, shouldn't be a government concern at all) and started pushing through this to actual social, political, and cultural equality for everyone.

GLBT rights is my voting issue this election. What's yours?

a "WTF" moment

A mind-boggling moment at the park, courtesy of Monday being a strange day all-around...

A young woman, probably around my age, showed up with two kids-- a little girl who looked like an older 3, and a little boy who looked like a young 2. She let the little girl run ahead into the park while she talked to the boy as she and he walked in together about how he needed to have a time-out before he could go play.

Barely 2-years-old, I remind you. As in, still in diapers, short sentences only, limited self-control of emotions and VERY limited reasoning skills.

So she's telling him as they're entering the park area and he's thoroughly distracted that he needs to have a time-out for hitting her in the car. He's protesting, of course, in that angry "How DARE you!" toddler voice, and eventually she tells him that his time-out entails him sitting by himself a good 20 feet away from his nanny and sister while they sit together and eat a snack.

So the kid's sitting there, looking thoroughly despondent at being alone but clearly not thinking about having hit the nanny because, well, he's 2 and he's at the park now. And the nanny and older sister are sitting, laughing and chatting and eating a snack.

So this situation with the time-out is WTF moment #1. WTF moment #2? The snack they were eating. This woman brought a can of peanuts to the park.

I'm sorry, what?

I get that both of those children are now considered old enough to eat peanuts. But... isn't bringing peanuts to a public place that's likely to be, I don't know, full of children thought of as a bad idea??? There are peanut-free kindergarten classrooms because kids will eat a peanut-butter sandwich and not wash their hands carefully enough before touching something that an allergic kid might touch, even if at 5 or 6 the allergic kid knows better than to eat a bite of the sandwich.

So the woman calls out in a sing-song voice, "Okay, Callen/Cullen/Kellen/(whatever trendy last-name-first-name the child had), you can come over now!" And the 2-year-old trudges over to eat peanuts with the nanny and his sister.

They all move over to the sandbox across the playground. I walk over to where they were just sitting. I search around on the ground and what do I find? Yup... fallen peanuts. Not for anything, the ground at the playground is all woodchips, so it's not like they were easy to spot, but... well, I guess it would be too much to assume that a person who brings peanuts to the park might still somehow register that young children drop food when they eat it, and that she should check the ground for stray peanuts another child could find before abandoning the area. So I gathered up a good handful and tossed them out.

I know there's a lot to nannying and parenting that people don't understand or even know about until they get there (and as an additional caveat, I know that nannying, even full-time, is not the same as parenting, nor should it even be compared), but I really think awareness about the pervasiveness of peanut and other nut allergies is a no-brainer. It's right up there with "don't give small objects to babies," "don't leave a kid alone in the bathtub" and "keep sharp objects, medicines and household cleaners out of reach of children." One peanut could be just as poisonous or life-threatening as any of the above.

This all goes back to my rant about cute young college girls who decide to become nannies for the summer because it's good money. They all come out after mid-May. But that's a rant for another day.