Getting what you paid for

The Monterey Bay Aquarium

Since my mom is a physician, as a child, many of our family trips were scheduled around her Continuing Medical Education, or CME. I remember many of these trips fondly, especially because it usually meant that we got to stay at a fancy hotel, like a Hilton, or a Hyatt. This was super cool for my sister and me, since usually on family vacations, we were sleeping either in a tent or the more run-down version of a Motel 6. One of the first of these CME trips that I remember as a child was to Monterey Bay.

It was a terrific trip. We went to the aquarium, made new friends, and my parents let my sister and I run wild in the vendor exhibit area, where we would grab free tote bags and tear around collecting as much free swag and candy as we could. Free pens? Branded post-its? Magic folding cubes? Standing desktop calendars? This was before the moratorium on pharmaceutical branded swag, so there was so much of it. It was like trick-or-treating!

Free pharma swag!!!

Our trip to Monterey Bay was also the first time I remember staying at such a nice hotel. When we entered the room, we were amazed that there were glass cups next to the sink. Not only were they glass, but they were square glass cups. We had never seen square glasses before. The towels were thick and fluffy, and there were bathrobes in the closet! It was a sort of luxury that my sister and I had never seen before.

So it was with great reluctance that we packed up all of our things in the van at the end of the trip and started the long drive back home to LA. About an hour into the drive home, I turned around the try to get something out of the back of the car. I noticed a plastic bag stuffed with square glasses, fluffy towels, and bathrobes.

"Mom...?" I yelled, "Is this from the hotel? How come it's here? We have to turn around and give them back because they'll notice that we're stealing!"

My mom paused. And then told me, "Don't worry about it. It's not stealing. That hotel was very expensive, so it's okay."

That's right, Mom. Way to stick it to the man.

Probably TMI - Underthings

One of my first memories is of when my sister and I accompanied my mom up to a lingerie counter when we were little girls. I remember her asking for a C cup, and then for bra extenders. Back then I didn't know what any of that was, but I remember asking my mom why she wore a bra. "To give clothes a nice shape," I remember her telling me.

Fast forward a decade or so, and I finally learned about bra cup sizes. First of all, most of women in my family are not very well... ahem... endowed. And there was no way in hell that my mom was a C cup. My sister and I quickly learned that my mom wore a C cup bra solely to "give her clothes a nice shape" in place of wearing a padded bra. As we got older and started wearing bras ourselves, we kept learning more things about my mom's strange undergarment habits- none illustrated so clearly as the time we all went shopping together in Taiwan.

First off, please reference these posts for examples of my mother's poor fashion choices. So one of the activities my sister and I enjoy is taking my mom shopping. We were in Taiwan when sister spotted a beautiful blue floral patterned V-necked dress. It was not a super deep V, more on the conservative side, and we knew that the belted waist would look nice on our mother. We got her in it and zipped it up, but in order to get the dress to look right, we had to tighten up her bra. Why? Because it was hanging loosely on her, riding up in the front, and peeking out the front of the V-neck. Mom- we told her, we'll buy this dress for you, but when you wear it, you HAVE to tighten up your bra or else it'll show in the front. Fine, fine, she agreed. So my sister bought her the dress. Since it was sleeveless, we even bought her a matching cardigan.

Not the actual dress, but this one is similar.

That evening, we went out to dinner at a nice restaurant with some of our relatives. Excited for our mom to wear her new outfit, we tightened up her bra and zipped her into her new dress. We did her hair and my sister put makeup on her. I probably have photos somewhere, but she looked nice. We were talking to our cousins, and when we turned around, she had her new cardigan wrapped around her neck, covering the front of her dress. Turned out that she had undone her bra, and in order to hide the fact that it was riding up her chest, draped her cardigan around her neck to hide it.

After we left the restaurant, we were like, Mooooooommm, you said you weren't going to loosen up your bra!!! That was part of the deal!

Her reply? "It was so tight! I just can't think because it's so tight!" 

Compost

About 5 years ago, my mom got really into composting. Like really into composting.

In March of 2011, my parents had just bought a condo in Mammoth Lakes. The whole family headed up there for a weekend to check out the place, and I came along to help pick out furniture, give my parents suggestions about what renovations needed to be done, and of course, to get a little skiing in. That year was an epic season, and this is what the walkways in the condo complex looked like:

So much snow!!!

My mom and I were in the kitchen when I noticed her putting uneaten egg yolks from hardboiled eggs into a Ziploc bag containing some other trash- vegetable peelings and coffee grounds that we had thrown away earlier. She then placed the bag into the refrigerator.

"What are you doing...???" I demanded of my mother.

"Oh, I am saving for the compost."

"You are not saving trash and bringing it back home."

"Why not?"

"Mom, that's just gross. Where are you going to put it? Is there not enough trash at home that you have to bring trash home from vacation?!?!"

"Oh the car is so large. We have extra room in the coolers because we eat the food."

"Mom, have you been digging in the trash to get this stuff???" I knew she had been, I had thrown those vegetable peeling in last night, and the coffee grounds that morning.

"Oh the coffee grounds are so good for compost."

"Mom, you can't do this. There is trash at home. You don't need to bring it back all the way from Mammoth!" I grabbed the bag from her and threw it in the trash.

She then ran off to the bathroom and when she didn't reappear after a few minutes, I began feeling guilty. I went to find her, and found her crying in front of the sink. I awkwardly put a hand on her shoulder.

"Since I hurt my knee skiing, I haven't been able to exercise," she sobbed, "I have been gardening and it has become very important to me."

In my mind, I sighed deeply. I was going to have to lose this one. I let her take home her bag of trash. And since then, I've let her take home many bags of trash. Whenever she comes to visit, she digs around for compost in my kitchen wastebasket and puts it in a Ziploc bag that she stores in my freezer until they go home. She especially likes to save egg shells and egg yolks- she tells me that they grind these up and feed it to the chickens. Lots of protein and calcium to make strong egg shells! I try to ignore the obvious weirdness of feeding hens parts of the eggs that they had just laid.

The last time my parents came into town, I tried to get my dad to take a photo of my mom's compost bag since they were staying in a nearby hotel. When I mentioned it, he started huffing about how she made him carry back trash from Europe when they visited Barcelona. "I refused! I throw the bag out at customs!"

The Tennis Ball Can, Part 2

Again, another story that I never thought would have a part two... (See Part 1)

I mentioned to my dad that once we had seen my mom pee into a tennis ball can. He was not really surprised. In fact, he told me about the time when it had gotten really warm in LA, and he started to notice an awful smell in his car. Given that the car is a disastrous mess, he went on a full scale search to find the source. Was it some food that had been left and spoiled? Some green juice that had spilled and was now molding over?

Nope! After an hour of searching, he finally found a tennis ball can in the side cup holder... full of urine.

Homeless van

So I know that this blog is about my mom, but both of my parents have really messy cars. The last time I went home, I got a few shots of the inside of my mom's car:

Cardboard boxes. Good organizational tools.

Woe to anybody who wishes to sit in the back seat

I've gotten on my parents' cases before about how messy their cars are. My mom's reply is always that it is the most convenient for her to have everything in her car because she can never forget anything! My dad says that they are rarely home, so they basically have everything they need to live out of their cars.

So when I got this text from my dad... well- I had to share.

On the loose!

I received this amazing photo from my friend the other day. Apparently she and her husband were walking around LA and ran across this...

Is it the same RV??? No... it couldn't be!

Theracane

A few years ago, my husband came home telling me about a self-massage tool that he prescribes for his patients: the Theracane.

Theracane. Available at amazon.com

He prescribes it for trigger point therapy for headaches with any sort of tension component, but given the $30 price point, he thought the thing was awesome, but not worth the price. I looked into it, and saw that the self-massage possibilities were endless!

A snippet from the owner's manual

So, I bought B a Theracane for Christmas. Except I couldn't keep it secret until Christmas, so he received his Theracane in November. Both of us enjoyed using it so much- and knowing that my parents also enjoy self-massage (my mom is constantly telling me to lie on top of and roll on tennis balls for my back because she does it and it feels "so good!"), we decided to buy my parents a Theracane also for Christmas that year.

Now, I don't know if it's a cultural thing, but sometimes I feel like my parents don't "get" presents. After we gave them the Theracane, they offered it back to us, saying that if we wanted two Theracanes at home, they'd be willing to let us keep the one that we had bought for them. Confused, but wanting them to enjoy the Theracane as much as we had, we refused.

My husband and I still occasionally use our Theracane- especially when we get wicked knots in our shoulders or necks from all the computer work we have to do as physicians. (Honestly, a greater proportion of time spent in front of computers than with patients- while they're awake anyways, but that's not really what this blog is about...) But I had forgotten about the Theracane we had bought for my parents until B went on his early morning walk around my parent's house and spotted this:

Theracane... holding back some old fencing???

B was so angry- we bought them a $30 gift, and it's in the yard holding some old rusty fencing in place?! He went to my mom and told her that we had given her the Theracane as a gift, and if she wasn't using it, he would take it back and use it in his clinic to show patients how it's used.

Expecting some sort of remorse or apology (or embarrassment???) for blatantly misusing a gift, my husband was surprised (or maybe- not surprised?) when my mom replied without any sort of remorse or guilt: "Oh sure, of course. I'll clean it off for you."