Onward Hoe!

Oh yeah, that's me, BP: Professional Blogger (although technically I don't think I can claim pro status until someone pays me da muneez). The site's not completely finished yet, so look out for changes (they won't be hard to spot), but...

Ladies and Gentlemen, without further ado, I give you onwardhoe.com!!!

Whenever my mom forgets something, she blames it on what she calls "Old Timer's Disease," which of course refers to the memory loss that comes with old age. This is ridiculous because my mom is neither old nor generally forgetful. I just think we all have our moments. I had mine this morning.

I was super-impressed with myself for getting ready so fast. I showered in 8 minutes, got dressed, etc., etc., and was out the door by 8:45. I was, in fact, five whole minutes early to work. I even called Jill on my way to work to make a haircut appointment for this afternoon.

Well, as I was getting ready to get out of the car, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, and OHH. MY. GOSH. I had completely forgotten to put on any makeup!!! I mean, what kind of a southern girl leaves the house without her face on??

I'm not so concerned about the blush or the concealer, but eyeliner. Eyeliner is my one necessary staple. My friend Jeani used to pick on me in high school because I would put on eyeliner just to go to her house. She always wanted to know who I was trying to impress. I'm really not trying to impress anyone. I've just been wearing it for so long that I don't feel like I look normal without it.

Luckily, I happened to have a pair of unnecessary, purely accessorial (non-prescription) glasses in my car, so I put those on hoping that people would just think that they were the reason my face looked different. Nobody said anything, so either they didn't notice, or they were just being polite, but either way, I couldn't wait to leave and go home to put my face back on.

Vanity, habit or professionalism? You be the judge (but remember..."judge not lest ye be judged").

Lauren, my friend/former roommate from New York, has been living in Moscow for the past year, and she's on her way home to Florida for a little bit before heading back across the world to live in Germany for a while. Well, I don't know what's happened in the world of air travel in the last 48 hours or so, but it is brutal. Here's a rough timeline of how her travels have been going.

7:45 p.m. (EST) Tuesday, June 26 - Lauren leaves Moscow

(I don't know where all she went or how long it took at each place between Moscow and NY, but...)

4:00 p.m. (EST) Wednesday, June 27 - Lauren calls me from NY. She was supposed to have a flight from JFK to RDU, then a 40-minute layover, then a flight from RDU to Jacksonville, FL. The flight from JFK to RDU, however, is going to be 40 minutes late, causing her to miss her connecting flight to Jacksonville. She's trying to get a direct flight or a different flight or something, but she wants to know if she can stay with me in the event that she's stranded in Raleigh for the night. I say of course she can.

6:30 p.m. (EST) Wednesday, June 27 - Lauren calls to say that she's getting ready to board a flight that will arrive at RDU at 8:57 p.m. Her flight to Jacksonville is to take off around 7:00 a.m. on Thursday, June 28. She wants to know how much I love her. I say enough to pick her up at 9 and drop her off this morning at 5. She says that's what she had hoped.

9:00 p.m. (EST) Wednesday, June 27 - I make several laps around RDU waiting for her flight to arrive.

9:20 p.m. (EST) Wednesday, June 27 - I evade the pick-up police (who whistle at you and tell you that you have to drive around again, you can't wait at the baggage claim unless you can actually see your party) long enough to get someone to go inside and check on all arriving flights from JFK. He says the next one's not due until 9:55, and the monitor says it's on time. I figure Lauren just got the time wrong because she's been awake for 24 hours and is jet-lagged. I decide to hit up the Brier Creek Target Greatland while I wait.

9:55 p.m. (EST) Wednesday, June 27 - I arrive back at the airport. Lap 1. I ask the pick-up police about the flight. He doesn't know anything, but says if I drive around, he'll check.

10:00 p.m. (EST) Wednesday, June 27 - As I'm starting to make my second lap, Lauren calls. I'm thinking she's calling to say that they've just landed, but instead, she says that they never left. And not only that, they've been sitting on the plane since she talked to me at 6:30!! And because they've been on the tarmac the whole time, they haven't been allowed to use their cell phones or other electronic devices, which means she's been sitting on an airplane for 3 1/2 hours with no iPod or computer or anything. Plus, they haven't been allowed to get up to use the bathroom, an they've been given no drinks or pretzels. They're supposed to take off soon, but they won't get there until really late, and then her next flight is really early, so she says for me to just not worry about it. I say I'm sorry she's in hell, and I go home.

8:52 a.m. (EST) Thursday, June 28 - I am surprised when Lauren calls me while I'm driving to work. I figured I wouldn't hear from her until after she'd showered and slept for at least three full days. I ask if she made it home ok. SHE'S STILL AT JFK. She said that they stayed on the plane like hostages for another hour or so after we talked last night. No bathroom, no drinks, no food (I don't think she'd eaten since about 10:00 in the morning), no electronics. She said there was a woman who was vomitting repeatedly, so they just all passed up their barf bags to her because she kept going through them, and she wasn't allowed to go to the bathroom.

They ended up cancelling the flight after about 4.5 hours on the tarmac, at which point, they took everybody back to the terminal. Lauren said she slept for about 30 minutes. She's booked on a flight that's supposed to leave at 5:00 p.m. today. From LaGuardia. When I talked to her at 9:00 this morning, she was planning on waiting another hour or so to beat rush hour on the subway, and then she was just going to go ahead over there. If she got there around 11 this morning, I'm guessing that now (2 hours later), she's still in the check-in line.

There's no telling where her luggage is.

I didn't intend for this to turn into such a dream journal. But then again, I never planned on dreaming about such bizarre things. And they're just so strange that I have to think that somwhere inside me, there's a fiction writer just trying to get out. Until she breaks through, though, I guess reporting on the creations of my subconscious will just have to suffice.

Just before I awoke Tuesday morning, I had a dream that I was at work. Now, to give you this visual properly, let me explain how my "office" is set up. It's in the upstairs of an old house. You go up one set of stairs, and there is a landing with a big window. Then you go up a few more stairs that go in the opposite direction (horizontally) of the first set, and there's another landing. So the second landing is a little higher than the first, but the railings face each other. And if you're standing on either landing, you can look down to the first floor and the front door. My "desk" area is on the second landing, so I can see people coming up the stairs.

Alrighty, so in the dream, I was standing by my "desk" talking to someone about some papers I had in my hand. I looked up to see that the whole stairway and first landing were full of people looking at me as though they were an audience and I was doing something entertaining. Or as though they were waiting for me to address them. Well amongst them was a police officer, whom I recognized as a guy I went to high school with. So I said, "How d'you do, officer Collins?" He took off his 1982 CHiPs sunglasses and stuck out his hand as if to introduce himself. I said I was Beth, and then he recognized me, which is a little ridiculous because I really haven't changed that much since high school. He should have known me. Well then there was somebody else there who went to high school with us (but I don't remember who the 2nd person was), so we had a wee reunion, and I explained to all the students who were standing around that we knew each other from high school, to which they responded, "Oooooohh."

The whole time we were standing there on the landing, it was getting progressively darker. We finally decided that it was too dark to stay there, and we all started walking down the stairs so we could exit the building. I was walking and talking with Sophie, who I think was a student in the dream.

When we got out on the street, we were walking towards my car when all of a sudden, I was in a department store of some sort, walking down a very wide aisle with a bunch of girl friends from different stages of my life. And as we neared the door, I could see Matthew Krachey holding it open for us, and over the loud speaker of the store, they were playing (very loudly, might I add) "Ain't No Woman (Like the One I Got)" by the Four Tops.

This is so weird.

We found all these books in our book closet that nobody was using, so we decided to just give them away. A lot of them are textbooks, and they cover a wide range of topics from Landscaping to Accounting. We were looking at one called "Diversified Health Occupations" during the break, and we came across a chapter on medical assistant skills. One of the skills a medical assistant must master is safely and correctly positioning a patient for a variety of procedures. There are detailed instructions and pictures for each position. I'm going to type out, verbatim, what one of them says, but just for those of you who, like me, wouldn't get this visual based on these instructions, imagine you're on your knees and you bend over forward so your chest is on the floor with your booty stuck up in the air.



Knee-chest Position

• Used for rectal examinations, usually a sigmoidoscopic examination.


• Patient rests body weight on knees and chest.


• Arms are flexed slightly at the elbows and extended above the head.


• Knees are slightly separated and thighs are at right angles to the table.


• Draping can be done with one large sheet or two small sheets that meet at the rectal area. A large sheet with a hole at the rectal area is also used. Sheets hang loose with no tucks.


• Caution: Never leave a patient alone in this position.

How 'bout that "caution?" Ummm...DIRTY! Does this make anyone else blush?

Let's talk about how many people said something to me this weekend about the blog. Just when I've started to think that my mom's the only one still with me, all these people pop up who've apparently been "ghost readers" for who knows how long. Thanks, ghost readers, for making yourselves known. And thanks to the rest of you who are still out there anonymously. I heart you all. Love, love.


We at "Onward Hoe" are proud to report that such comments as those following have been made about what we do here. (Are other bloggers considered to be press? We'll say that they are just for the sake of legitimacy.)


"Word is getting out. This is the blog to read."
~Andrea


"Andrea told me your blog was funny, so I decided to check it out. I have to say for the record, she was right."
~ Seth


Now there's all this pressure, though, to make the thing funny. I'm not sure I can live up to all the hype. But my subconscious might have a fighting chance. Let's talk dreams, shall we?


Last night, I had a dream within a dream (That's actually a quote from "The Princess Bride." If you got it, award yourself 10 points. It was unintentional, though. I really did have "a dream within a dream."). You see, what had happened was that in my dream, I'd had a dream about being at a mall with my friend Alan. We were sitting at a table in the middle of the mall, and there was a bag on the table, which we felt the liberty to investigate thoroughly. It was a bag of food that someone had left there, we realized, to save the table for their own use. In going through it all, we pretty much destroyed all of the contents. Then we realized the owner would probably be coming back for it, so we ran away and found a booth in a Chick-Fil-A where we could hide out. We ran into some friends there, and we were talking to them when the owner of the bag came in, fuming at his destroyed lunch. As it turned out, he also knew our buddies at Chick-Fil-A, and the whole time he was telling them about it, Alan and I were trying to hide behind our food. I was eating the most enormous orange slice ever. It was the size of a slice of watermelon if the watermelon were cut the long way.

Ok, so in my dream, I told Alan about the mall dream, and Alan thought it would make a good stage performance (this seemed like a great idea in dream world), so we wrote a script and set a performance date. Somehow I completely forgot about it until I was at the theater and I heard the music that was supposed to act as our cue to go on. I figured what I was wearing at the time (my standard winter-wear: jeans, tennis shoes, high school letter jacket) would suffice for a costume, so I headed backstage where Alan was in his very summery costume of a polo shirt tucked into khaki shorts, looking like one of the dudes from "Tea Partay." And onstage we went. With our scripts. Because we hadn't rehearsed.

The thing was a disaster, because, as with much of my life, none of the details had been planned. Everyone completely abandoned the script, and the story took several turns. Nobody knew what to say or where to stand, and finally, I just left the stage and went into an office where one of my old supervisors was sitting at the desk. I don't know what she had to do with any of it, but I asked her what I should do. "How can I end this thing?!" I asked in a panic. She had no idea. Then suddenly, the audience erupted into applause, and I realized, with great relief, that it was over.

The cast came off the stage, and somehow Alan had turned into my cousin John (VERY different people), and he was so happy at the success of the show that he just kept hugging everyone. I wandered out onto the stage completely confused and just trying to figure out how anyone could possibly consider that fiasco anything resembling successful.

The End.

Last weekend was a busy one for me, folks. Obviously. And there's still at least one thing I haven't talked about. I shall rectify that now.

Saturday afternoon, I went to Asheboro to help my sister move. Now, I don't know if it's because the zoo is there or what, but growing up, I always thought of Asheboro as a bigger, cooler place to go. Let's just clear up that rumor right now. I haven't really seen all that much of Asheboro, but from what I can tell, its best qualities are the zoo, a covered bridge and my sister. But that's neither here nor there. On with the story...

As I was leaving to come back to Raleigh (where I would don my very sassy new rocked shirt and head out to a farm in Holly Springs for the weirdest party of my life), I saw a gas station where the gas was much cheaper than I'd seen anywhere else, so I stopped to top my tank off. Pulling up to the pump, I see that the woman pumping from the other side is, to put it politely, multi-tasking. And by that I mean, she is pumping gas while smoking a cigarette. I mean, didn't she see Zoolander? "Just because we have chiseled abs and stunning features, it doesn't mean that we too can't not die in a freak gasoline fight accident."

"Oh well," thought I, "if it's my time, it's just my time. If that pump blows, the whole place is going up, and I'd rather die quickly if I must. Besides, cheap gas is cheap gas."

Well, to ease your anticipation (because I know you're on the edge of your seat wondering), I didn't die. I pumped my gas, and then I headed inside for a bottle of water. I didn't notice it on the way in, but as I was leaving, I saw that there was a sign on the door which read, "OUR SAFE TAKES 10 MINUTES TO OPEN."

Ten whole minutes? Really? That's a pretty long time if you think about it. Does it take ten minutes to go through all the steps of opening the safe? Is it like a really elaborate puzzle box? Or Mouse Trap? Or is there just one thing you have to do, but then the safe waits ten minutes to open? Or is this just a theft deterrent? When I worked at American Evil in New York, we had "security guards" who stood by the door. They didn't have any sort of weapons or authority or security training, really. They were just there to look official so hopefully people wouldn't steal things.

If it is just a deterrent, I'd say it's a pretty good one, though not very creative. If I were a convenience store thief, I wouldn't want to risk waiting ten minutes for them to open the safe. But I'd be even less likely to hold up the place if the sign had said something threatening like, "If you try to rob us, the woman at the pump will throw down her cigarette and we'll all be doomed! Or something just disgusting like, "We wipe with our money," or "Our safe is down Leroy's pants, and he got the herpes last year from that triflin' Sherry." Come to think of it, any money that has touched private parts, y'all can just go ahead and keep. And come to think of that, I wonder just how much money we receive in normal, everyday transactions actually has touched people's naughty bits. Ummmm...EWW!

Aaaaaaaaaaand...going to wash my hands and all my money in boiling Clorox. Yay OCD!

If you're the praying kind, please be praying for my friend Carrie and her fiance, Garrett. Garrett was helping a neighbor with some chores last weekend, and they were burning some brush when Garrett sustained 2nd degree burns on his face and right arm. He's been in the hospital all week, and I know he's in a lot of pain (and it hurts her to see him in pain), but the two of them are SO amazingly upbeat, keeping things in perspective, and trusting in the Lord to be in control of the situation. In fact, Garrett's excited about the possibility of being mobile enough to visit and pray for the other patients in the burn unit. So incredibly selfless. Anywho, like I said, if you pray ever, please pray for them. Thanks.

I don't think it's a good thing when you work out on Tuesday, and you are more sore on Thursday than you were on Wednesday. It makes me feel like I must have done some irreparable damage to my leg muscles. Maybe I look stronger and more capable of doing like a thousand squats, lunges and curtseys than I actually am, but the fact that I still feel like my legs are going to buckle every time I go down stairs would indicate that I wasn't quite ready for all that. Owie.

On a lighter note, I had a very bizarre dream last night that involved me shooting three old people with a triggered flute. To be fair, I shot them in self-defense, and they didn't even die. But still...weird. All of this happened after an extremely creepy encounter with the KKK (I mean, is there any other type of encounter with the KKK?). Apparently I was on my way to Jeani's parents' house, and I was walking in broad daylight. I started to cross an intersection when suddenly I was driving instead of walking. Then a block later, Brooke was in the car with me and she was driving. It was also nighttime. We almost missed the road we wanted to turn on, which in the dream was called Elwel Rd. This is weird because I've never heard of an Elwel Rd. Jeani's parents live on Butch Branch Rd. or something not at all Elwel Rd. like that.

Anyway, at some point after we drove under the foot bridge where the KKK were crossing with their torches, Elwel Rd. had been closed off and was just a big overgrown hill. It was dark, and we couldn't see it coming, so we "ran aground" as it were, which messed up something in the car, which shut off and would not restart. Fearful for our lives (not being rabid racists and all), we got out and looked for some help. We came across a little cabin, where we set up a laptop and tried to get a wireless signal to IM for help. The old, demented, blind woman who lived there mistook me for her husband, George, and was so very happy that I was there. I kept telling her I wasn't George, and then I saw three people approaching the door. I said, "Look! Here comes George now!" but when the three people came in wielding shotguns (and a triggered flute), I decided they probably weren't George. Before I could warn the woman, though, one of the old men with a shotgun shot her.

The old woman with the flute then turned on me, but she was holding the thing with one hand, and she couldn't keep it steady enough to aim straight and hit me. So I told her to give it to me and let me show her how to hold it. The genius turned it over, and I shot them all. But like I said, they didn't die. I think they then somehow found the situation funny, and we all had a good laugh about it. After all, everybody survived.