My grandmother is a beanie baby monger.

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Diary: I Feel Pretty

Password: iamloved

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We went to grandmother’s last Thursday and Friday. She’s moving to a condo and needs help sifting through the heaps and heaps of things – some of which are 20, 30, 40 years old – in her house and garage. My grandmother lives in an upperclass LA neighborhood where the houses are alternately ugly and humongous or quaint expensive one story abodes. Apparently, my grandmother and Dustin Hoffman frequent the same Starbucks. This led to my sister’s "Was that Dustin Hoffman?" after every car that sped by.

I love my grandmother’s house. If it weren’t for the LA traffic and its lack of football team, I could see myself living there. The house is a one story with a decently small backyard and a gate out front. Everything smells like grandmother (1970), but in a comfort-in-the-past way. Her shelves are covered in books, audio books, and videos and DVDs. She watches a lot of movies. My sister and I were in charge of alphabetizing the DVDs, but were allowed to take any home that we wanted. We started with 2 shelves of doubled up DVDs and put back only 3/4 of that. To my mother’s horror we threw roughly 40 DVDs in a black pastic bag to take home. My grandmother’s DVD collection wasn’t what I had in mind as grandmotherly. Terminator, 28 days, Hannibal, Hide and Seek, Resident Evil. My grandmother watches zombie movies? I suddenly feel out of touch with my cheesy romantic comedies and lack of scary movie background.

Next, my sister and I were told to sort jewelry and clothes. My grandmother offered these to us as well, but this generation gap is harder to bridge than movies. My sister and I did find a ring we liked, which we agreed to share ("And whomever has it when you leave for college gets to keep it!"). Mostly though, I don’t wear cashmere turtle necks. I just recently started picking out my own clothes again after six  years in uniform. Even so, I have some idea of my generation’s style. Torn jeans and belly buttons. More of the ‘we want to look like bums’ trend. Not exactly my sytle, but I’m not yet old enough to appreciate the put-together look.

Thursday night Sibling and I watched the Terminator for the first time. I found it scarier than The Dark Knight. Perhaps only partly because I just saw my governor’s naked butt on screen. That night, sleeping on the floor because I didn’t want to sleep on the trundle with miss kickboxer, dream me was hunted by a Terminator through ComicCon. There was slow motion running. I hate slow motion running.

Friday we got to the garage. Boxes and boxes backed up against the walls. I knew my grandmother collected things, but little did I know. Sibling and I opened box and box of beanie babies. Disney babies, hand made from Tokyo beanie babies, still in the plastic set bags beanie babies. An entire box held only the beanie baby tag protectors. Cue bug eyes. "Yaya, wow." She wanted to have a garage sale and rip herself off. If she shipped them to someone who knows their way around ebay she has a small fortune on her hands. We made a few boxes for donation to the Toys for Tots, some for future christmas presents she wanted to keep, some to the Jewish Community Center. I kept one of Eeyore. My sister got an awesome black and white mickey mouse.

On the way home we had one garbage back of DVDs, three of audio books (I have to drop them off at the braille institute later this week), one of clothes, and loads of oddities my grandmother didn’t have room for. We’d taken the back seat out of the van to get better gas mileage but on the way home we made up for the lack of seats with the added house we were carrying.

We brought our foster german shepherd mix with us, Banjo, because he is still recovering from surgery and mum doesn’t trust him with anyone else. He also has terrible separation anxiety. I felt bad because my grandmother got a puppy a few months ago and about a week ago it just up and died. My grandmother is convinced the puppy ate a poisonous snail from the garden. The vet doesn’t know why the pup died. It hasn’t been long since Ginger passed and my grandmother kept saying things like "He can sit there. Ginger used to love that." Sad. My mum probably takes Ginger’s death as blessing. My grandmother was too old for a puppy and she was thinking about moving to a condo (where they don’t allow pets).

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Sidenote: We listened to a book on tape on the long road trip. We spent most of the trip wondering why the taping seemed off, like we were missing paragraphs. The story seemed stilted and not well put together. Finally after one particularly odd way to start a chapter my mother asked  in a stroke of epiphany Is it abridged? Well, fiddlesticks. No wonder. Why would anyone listen to an abridged version of a book? The words were written for a reason. If they were meant to be cut the editor would have done so before publication. You don’t get the full story. Abridgments piss me off. I am always careful to check out unabridged versions from the library if we do listen to them (which is rare now that I have my own car. We listened more frequently a few years ago in carpool).

My attempt at cartooning.

So paint isn’t the easiest drawing tool.

So my drawing skills weren’t superduper to begin with.

I thought it was funny. pfft.

(mostly because i have half a mind to "walk" my dog using the car sometimes.)

(Sometimes.)