Halloween, Turkish terrorists and the F-bomb

The manifestation of the malevolent cosmic force

“Has anybody seen my alligator?”

It was the eve of Halloween, or the eve of the eve of All Saints Day, and we were in a pumpkin patch.  Moose was on the loose disguised as an alligator.  I caught him right before he ran into the barbed wire fence.  This is what happens when one lets one’s wild child tag along with his brother to the coolest birthday party ever. 

To be fair, Moose did not invite himself, nor did I on his behalf.  He was invited because he was in the birthday boy’s sister’s class.  And he was having a blast at his mother’s expense.

Six hours later I was about to drop dead from exhaustion when I crawled into bed.  I had purchased a new storm door, bought a birthday present, clipped two sets of little fingernails, laundered two loads of clothes, prepared two meals, survived the birthday party, carved two pumpkins, and drunk half a bottle of wine when Portia called.

“Tell Jax I caught his throw-up.”  It was Saturday night.  Portia had been drinking wine too.

“What?”

“I was catching up on your blog this week and I read that Jax had a throw-up.  Two hours later I had a throw-up.”

“Oh, shit.  I’m sorry.  I forgot that you’re psychosomatic.”

Fortunately, Portia doesn’t hold grudges, and she’s always got a lot to say, so she doesn’t waste time playing the sympathy card.  Somehow we moved from her throw-up to her late grandmother’s sister’s ingrown toenails when my phone beeped.

“Shit, I think my phone is out of juice,” I said, moving it from my ear to see how many bars I had.  The juice was fine.  The beep was for the text that had come in.

I opened the text while Portia was still talking and somehow managed not to disconnect her.  While she droned on, I read Heather’s message.

“Hey. Just tried to go to ur blog. Have u been hacked?!”

“Portia, gotta run.  Heather said my site’s been hacked.”

I turned on my laptop and found that my site had been violated. A Turkish terrorist had commandeered JennyBeansBlog and dropped the F-bomb.

I have no problem with the F-bomb.  It’s one of my favorite words.  But it seems to cause some consternation among more upstanding folk, so when I planned my site, I decided to keep everything PG.  You know, just in case Portia’s grandmother’s sister was lurking from heaven or something—I wouldn’t have to worry about offending her.  And besides, since the birth of the baby Beans I’d been trying to cut down, and have used a new system of euphemisms, facial expressions and code to express myself.

I called Heather.  I ranted. She commiserated.  I raved. She commiserated.  I cried. She commiserated.  Then I decided to call the people at GoDaddy.  It was 10:30.  She was skeptical. 

Allison at GoDaddy is a saint.  All of the reps at GoDaddy are saints.  Within minutes, we were deleting the offending files, and order was restored.  My only complaint is that Allison insisted that I change my password to something more secure than “password,” so I came up with a combination of Hyacinth’s name, Jax’s name and Moose’s name, and then I took the average year of birth of everyone in the family and came up with a new password.  Damn terrorist.  HaJaMo72 ain’t easy to type, much less remember.  Every time I go to sign in, I have to re-average the years.

So it appears that the malevolent cosmic force I’ve been complaining about for the last few weeks manifested himself in the form of the Turkish terrorist.  And I know that as she reads this, Portia is laughing her ass off.  Not because I was hacked, but because I’ve just used the word “manifest.”

One night when we were in college in the years before we migrated from cheap beer to decent chardonnay, we were sitting among a pile of crushed aluminum cans, and one of us—I can’t remember who—began reading aloud from a Harlequin romance—I can’t remember whose—but I can remember the phrase that we still laugh about:  “She felt the manifestation of his arousal hard against her thigh.”

In the spirit of cheap beer and good friends who come to read about my wacky life, and in the spirit of remaining PG, I will end with a message to my Turkish foe: 

Manifest off, dude!