Stories

My sister dropped off a bag of Rice Krispie Treats yesterday and life now seems somehow doable. I crashed yesterday morning from the trip and the food poisoning and the day of running errands to get our lives back in order. When I woke up my eyes felt as if they had been taped shut, my body staple-gunned to the bed. My entire torso is achingly sore from the 10 hour, full-body convulsing of dry-heaving, but by god, my boobs are working again. With working boobs and a bag of Rice Krispie Treats, I can do ANYTHING.

I may have to talk about our trip to San Francisco over the course of a few posts because so much happened and so much of it was wonderful. A lot of it was stressful, but I was going to be stressed out in Utah anyway, why not be stressed out in California? Where there is fog! and culture! and people who aren’t white!

Do you know what else is in California?

Mighty Girl.

Mighty Girl, Internet Superhero, Super Gorgeous Redheaded Goddess of Fire.

Mighty Girl is in California, and here is she holding my baby:

I am sitting across the table pooping my pants because Mighty Girl, Internet Superhero, is holding my baby, and we are eating breakfast in a place where the primary menu item is bacon. If ever there was a metaphor for orgasm, this situation would surely fill that role.

This is B-May, Mighty Girl’s partner in Internet Crime Fighting Superheroism.

He is indeed that pretty in real life, and is the exact type of man mothers everywhere would want their daughters to bring home, and then the mothers would get a crush on him, too, because he is that soft and pretty. Mothers and daughters everywhere, please commence fighting over this man.

Later that evening both Mighty Girl and B-May were (un)lucky enough to witness the goated bleating of Leta’s discontent, and Mighty Girl, wielding Superhero Powers of her Redheaded Realm, was able to stave off the screaming that usually erupts after too many minutes of bleating. Leta was transfixed by her tumbling, ruby curls, and by the fact that Mighty Girl wasn’t throwing things in the general direction of any person or animal. I’m sure Leta was thinking, “You mean there are women in the world who don’t throw things? And why aren’t all the men in this room ducking or running for their lives? Peculiar!”

After leaving that particular gathering of Very Nice and Wonderful People where Leta got to meet her Internet Godparents for the first time (story on that later), we hoofed it back to the hotel to put Leta to bed for the night. Upon our arrival to the room, however, Leta realized that she was no longer in the company of Mighty Girl, and she commenced a 45 minute jag of anguished crying. I cried, too, having had to leave the party before Mighty Girl could braid my hair and pinky promise to meet me after second period behind the lockers in the math building.

When we finally calmed Leta down and arranged her comfortably in the hotel crib, we fired up the Graco monitors and headed down to the lobby to waste away the rest of our evening with magazines and a couple glasses of bourbon. It was 6:15 PM San Francisco time. The Armstrongs know how to P.A.R.T.Y.

About an hour later after we had finished the magazines and were starting to pluck each other’s stray hairs, Jon noticed a tall, dark-haired man enter the hotel lobby. He quickly leaned over to me and whispered, “Heather, HEATHER! Is that Matt Haughey? Is it? IS IT?” And in slow motion I turned my head to witness the tall, dark-haired Matt Haughey setting his luggage on the floor, and I remembered reading that he had said he was taller in real life than he appeared on his website, and this tall man was REAL tall, taller than any website could possibly capture accurately, and it all clicked and within milliseconds both Jon and I were flying across the hotel lobby and sticking our vampire teeth into his innocent, pale neck.

It was like meeting Justin Timberlake, if Justin Timberlake were six feet five inches tall, slightly goofy, and married to a woman whose intellectual brain power could melt paint off walls. We could barely breathe through gasps of air, and I caught myself bowing and kneeling on the ground beneath him, Oh God of The Internet and the Web and the Thing. I so badly wanted for him to reach out and place his hands on my unworthy head and cleanse me of all the sins I have committed against the Internet. His genius wife stood by watching this spectacle — the flailing arms and shrieks and licking of her husband’s boots –and I know she wanted to intervene and tell us to pull our shit together, except she would have said it in a more civilized way, a way that involved complete, coherent sentences, a way unburdened by the restraints of a brain of a mere mortal.

We apologize now for sucking so much of your blood.

(here is a photo of Prime Minister Haughey in the elevator at the hotel, and as you can see, we are not holding our shit together very well)

(and a photo of P.M. Haughey and his wife outside the hotel taken from my stalker, groupie, subservient perspective)

I’ll tell you more about our trip later, including the part about our glorious day, when I have more than a half hour to organize the photos and put into words just how nice people are. Leta is going through a phase where she doesn’t like to be put down. Ever. Not even when I’m brushing my teeth, and she ends up grabbing the toothbrush and massaging her head with Colgate. YUMMY TOOTHPASTE BABY HEAD.

For now, just know this: People are so nice. Today I love people.

Also, here is a photo of Leta in the airport that is so cute it will make you want to puke in a non-dry-heaving sort of way: