If Yesterday Was Tuesday, Then What's the Name of This One Again??

Day 5 of College Tour-a-Palooza, and here's how it goes.

1) Get up while it's still dark.

2) Squeeze into tiny motel bathroom for your allotted seven minutes of personal care. Dry off after shower with towel the size of that new Apple laptop. Use more concealer than usual.

3) Grab two cups (or seven) of bad coffee and a few of those little cups of liquid plastic -- I mean Coffee Mate -- and get back in the rental car.

4) Get lost due to traffic construction not shown on www.devilspawn.com -- I mean MapQuest.

5) Huddle in a corner of the admissions office while awaiting arrival of the other 497,913 families touring colleges this week.

6) Follow student tour guide who you cannot hear over the sound of torrential downpour.

7) Listen to adult admissions person talk about how painful it is to turn down several hundred totally qualified kids each year because there's just not enough spaces in the class.

8) Thumb through brochures. Spot tuition, room and board expenses for current school year. Lose appetite for lunch.

9) Eat lunch anyway, on campus. Realize reasonably priced meal plan is probably waste of money.

10) Attend class with your child. Discover they haven't made philosophy any easier to understand than it was 30 years ago.

11) Get in car. Take off soaking wet shoes. Drive to next town.

12) Eat way, way too much dinner. Wish you were not the designated driver.

13) Go to another motel that looks just like the previous motel. Attempt to sleep while children attend to important iPod, laptop, and cellphone business.

14) Do it all over again.

By this morning, our asses were dragging, so much so that we definitely needed this Flying Alarm Clock.

"This digital alarm clock launches a rotor into the air that flies around the room as the alarm sounds, hovering up to 9' in the air, and will not cease ringing until the rotor is returned to the alarm clock base, compelling even the most stubborn sleepers to get out of bed on time."


Now that's American innovation. I wonder where the inventor went to college?

The Bird Family Debating Society and Supper Club

Greetings from the Lone Star State!

We Birds flew the coop yesterday on spring break and ended up in Houston, long considered a major spring break destination.

We are actually here because it's our first stop on College-Tour-a-palooza. For the virgins among you, this is the time in a parent's life when you spend a lot of money going around to visit schools that may not let your child in and that will cost you an arm and a leg if they do. The economic irony of the process would be intolerably painful, however, if we focused on that reality, so instead we laugh a lot and throw in some tourist attractions and really good food, thus putting an even heavier burden on the credit cards.

Yesterday, we drove around Rice University. Tomorrow we'll do the official tour and dog and pony show, but yesterday, we were just trying to get a feel for the place. What we felt was hot, which shouldn't have surprised us, this being the southern part of a southern state and all, but did catch us a bit off guard. Ben, who is trying to milk his "I-gave-up-the-beach-for-my-brother" martyrdom for all its worth, persuaded me to buy him some sunglasses to protect his dainty eyes from the Texas glare. This wasn't a problem, as Billy got off the plane with such painfully stopped-up ears that we had absolutely no choice but to hit up Walgreens. (Your travel correspondent is here to report that if you've seen one Walgreens, you've seen them all.) Ben chose some mirrored lenses, Billy downed some 12-hour Sudafed, and we were off.

It wouldn't be a Bird family vacation without an argument about where to eat.

We are all of us about the food, so much so that one of my roles as Mama Bird is to scope out restaurants in advance. I'd done plenty of research using magazine websites and my favorite, Chowhound, and printed off a great list of Houston possibilities. Which, apparently, are still lying in the printer tray back home.

This was a scary situation for a Bird to be in. Well not Bob -- he will eat anything, and as long as it doesn't cost much, deem it absolutely delicious. But the rest of us want to know in advance that those in the know have given our restaurant choice an A.

Thus, it was with a great deal of trepidation that we found ourselves adrift in Rice Village, a shopping area near the campus, trying to choose between an Italian place and a Turkish place, both of which I vaguely remembered from my research.

Billy, the world traveler, was all about the Turkish place. Ben, the picky eater who was already miffed that we weren't at his grandparents' beach house in the first place, thought we should play it safe with Italian. I was just ready to sit down and get out of the sun, and Bob, who's nursing the cold I gave him, just wanted to curl up in a corner somewhere and die.

So the four of us engaged in, shall we say, a spirited debate about which restaurant to choose. This is a scenario we've engaged in about 735,129 times in the past 18 years; the Bird boys can disagree about anything, but usually, it's about where to eat. Finally I proposed a diplomatic compromise a lot better than the State Department could come up with. (Perhaps this was because we were a stone's throw from a college school with a bunch of stuff named after James Baker.) We'd eat lunch at the Turkish place and dinner at the Italian place.

This decided, we went on to discover we loved Turkish food -- even Ben, of course. (It turns out Turks eat pizza.) His stomach full, Billy announced that between his cold and his horribly stopped-up ears and the fact that he'd only slept three hours the night before (we'd had terrifically bad hail storms during the night), all he really wanted to do was go to the hotel and go to sleep.

So we spent the rest of the afternoon not strolling around Rice but napping at a Fairfield Inn in Katy. Now I'll grant you that Katy isn't exactly tour-bus worthy, but it is the former home of Renee Zellweger, so the afternoon wasn't a total loss. And Bob and I were exhausted.

Why were we all the way out in Katy, which is like 45 minutes from Rice? Because we are visiting Houston right smack dab in the middle of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, which we will be attending this very afternoon. All the cowboys and cowgirls got the good rooms, and we are out her in Katy in a motel populated primarily by a European soccer team and its entourage and a bunch of American cheerleaders and pep band members who are apparently in town for a basketball tournament. (Not to digress, but when did it become mandatory for cheerleaders to wear GIGANTIC bows in their hair? In my day, cheerleaders were all about the long sexy hair, and now they look like they're all dressed up for the preschool Easter pageant. And whatever happened to the big pom-poms? Honestly.)

Anyway, back to yesterday ... after two-hour naps, we got up and began the arduous task of deciding where to eat dinner. I mean, you could be excused if you're thinking I could never travel with these people IN A MILLION YEARS. We even drive ourselves crazy, I can assure you. Armed with the names of three Tex-Mex places (perhaps because he'd had pizza at luch, Ben was willing to broaden his horizons and forget about the Italian place near Rice), we left the hotel for another arduous trek back into town.

Our first choice turned out to be located between an AutoZone and a liquor store, which meant there was no way, no how Ben was eating there. I found this a little surprising, seeing as how he was still wearing the mirrored sunglasses and looked vaguely menacing himself, but I was a bit uncomfortable with the parking situation, so we headed back to number two on our list. This place turned out to have limited parking as well, so that you pretty much had to pay $5 for valet parking. Bob and his congested head and chest hadn't been saying much, but no way no how was he paying someone $5 to park his car if he didn't have to. So we drove on, finally ending up at a Chuy's. Here you could park your car yourself for free; you could absorb a little history, since if I'm not mistaken, it was at a Chuy's in Austin that Jenna Bush got busted for underage drinking; and you could get a yummy frozen Margarita, which of course I was in dire need of at this point. It was our kind of place.

Now we're all up and almost ready for our first full day in Houston. (Thank God we've got brunch reservations, so we'll have at least one meal without a debate.) We're going to try to see a bit of the school we've paid all this money to come visit, and then we -- the least roping and wrangling of folks imaginable -- will make our way to the Rodeo. I'd appreciate your thoughts and prayers, because God only knows how many choices of food will be available there.

Bird Baths

The only bad thing about my annual “girl” trip to Palm Springs is that I have to come home. Not that I don’t love my family, but the times I spend with them are not nearly so relaxed as the five days I just spent with my best girlfriends. (Actually, one of those days was spent in an airport, but given that all I had to do was read Middlesex, which is thus far a really incredible book, it still felt like a vacation.) The cost of time away is piles of dirty clothes, a dirtier-than-usual house, and moldy food in the fridge. I can’t describe the feeling any better than one of my fellow travelers did in an e-mail last night.

So I was just comparing:

a random day in Palm Springs (breakfast cooked by someone other than me / hiking / laughing / lunch cooked by someone other than me / laughing / spa treatments / sunshine / laughing / shopping/ chocolate / hot tubbing / crisp white wine followed by a pinot noir/ laughing / dinner cooked by someone other than me)
to
my first day back home (kitchen counter covered with week's worth of mail / scheduling appliance service call / refilling teenagers' acne prescriptions / threatening letter from internist for unpaid bill / SOS call from director of development at local charity whose board I serve on / false alarm from malfunctioning security system / boatloads of unreturned phone calls and e-mails / Whole Foods and Publix / eye exam for daughter No. 1 / arrival of port-a-potty-emptying tanker truck/ prospective parent interviews at school).

Do we have an exact date yet for next year?

Not that my trip was totally problem-free. For reasons I don’t fully understand, I have an annoying tendency to fall down when I’m with these women. The first night we were in Paris, for example, I didn’t see three steps, at the bottom of which I discovered that my right ankle no longer worked. (I’m here to tell you – Paris is lovely even from the window of a tour bus.) I was with these women when I landed on my butt on a foggy beach in Brittany; when I walked straight into a screen door last week; and last Friday, when I fell on my face while hiking down an alarmingly steep mountain. I’m not a particularly clumsy person, and these tumbles all occur long before cocktail hour. After my Friday fall, one friend kindly suggested that perhaps I trip on my trips because I’m looking at the friends behind me, not the road in front of me. I suspect she’s on to something. Note to self: next year, bring up the rear.

But my mountain tumble led to one of the highlights of my vacation. While the rest of my friends went on a desert tour with a Native American guide, I settled my strained shoulder, bruised knees, and scraped palms nto the world’s best bathtub for some California dreamin’.

This was no ordinary bathtub. It’s wide and deep with arm rests, a view of the mountains, and, at the foot end, there’s … are you sitting down … A FIREPLACE!

This tub, and the condo in which it lives, belongs to my friend Jane. Jane owns this vacation haven, as well as a huge house back home, because she works 23 hours a day (22 on weekends). Two years ago, when Jane led us on a tour of her place during construction, she took pains to point out her special tub, which is right off her bedroom. Last year, when I mentioned the bathtub, Jane famously said, “What bathtub?” Which just goes to show that for most of us, the way to get a bathtub with a fireplace is to work so hard you forget you have a bathtub with a fireplace.

As I lollygagged in hot water out in California, the Bird boys were taking baths of a different kind.

The day before I was scheduled to leave for Palm Springs, Billy woke up with The Largest Pimple in the History of the World on the end of his nose. It was so terrible, and so painful, that I took him to the dermatologist to see if she could shoot something into it to make him more comfortable and allow us to avoid homeschooling.

The dermatologist took one look at Billy’s nose, and suddenly my travel plans changed. “That’s staph,” she said, writing out a prescription for a month of antibiotics and casually mentioning that if the “pimple” didn’t start clearing up real fast, she was putting Billy in the hospital for IV antibiotics.

I postponed my trip; Billy took the medicine; his nose got a little better. I took off, leaving behind detailed typed instructions for Bob about staph management.

The next night, Ben woke Bob up to show him the rapidly expanding “rug burn” on his elbow. My husband may not have natural gifts in the healing arts – he is apparently unable to read dosing instructions, for example – but he can follow directions to a T. The next morning he called the doctor, and within hours Ben became the second Bird in 96 hours to be diagnosed with staph.

Again, the doctor prescribed antibiotics. But with staph clearly making plans to establish permanent residency in our home, she offered an additional prescription for Bob, Billy, and Ben: bleach baths.

For those of you yet to be diagnosed with the staph that is eating the world, a bleach bath is a tub filled with water and a quarter-cup of Clorox. (This is one situation where you probably don’t want to pinch pennies.) You settle in up to your neck, soak for five minutes, and emerge (at least temporarily) staph-free. Each family member only has to do this until all cases of staph in the household are completely cured, which quite possibly means it will be a very pallid summer around here.

The Bird boys were incredibly busy while I was gone, and I’m not sure just how many bleach baths they took. But that’s about to change.

Because I’d flown the coop and spent five days away from Staph City, I had figured I was safe. So it was a surprise last night when I discovered a pimple in an area not typically associated with Clearasil.

Just to be safe, I dropped in for a visit with the dermatologist today. (She’s probably already planning her new Bird-subsidized bathtub/fireplace combination.) She looked my bump over and declared it innocuous. “But just to be safe,” she said, “all four of you REALLY need to be taking bleach baths.”

So that’s where I’m headed. The Bird bathtub is rimmed with mildew and mid-70s tile. It has no armrests or fireplace, and the only view it offers is of the toilet. But these bleach baths may still carry me away.

Because for once in my life, I’m going to have a really clean tub.