Category: Humor

A bumper crop of bunnies

Published on by NouveauSoileau5 Comments

This morning I was up early. I drank my coffee, did my internet duty (did you know mandatory surfing is now the law? It’s not.) and hopped into my Sauconys for a hour-long walk.

An hour later I’m back at the computer, driven indoors by the rain. It’s been a dry couple of weeks, but earlier this spring it rained. And rained. And rained. And the most visible result of all this precipitation, in my yard at least, is a bumper crop of suburban bunnies.

The wet weather, it seems, with the attendant abundance of vegetation, has caused the cottontails to multiply. Multiply like rabbits.

Oh they’re cute. Cuuuuute. We love to watch them out back about an hour before dusk, when we’ve spotted as  many as five to seven of the darling things, bunnin’ around and generally being adorable.

See? Adorable.

But they’re also, you know, pests. They eat the aforementioned vegetation, which would include my sunflowers — if I’d planted them yet. They’re still on my windowsill, paralyzed by the fear of bunnies.

I’ve nurtured these shoots, and I’ll be damned if I let the rabbits chow down on them. Not to mention the chipmunks. If there’s anything more populous in my yard than bunnies, it’s these adorable little bastards, who have taken over not only my front yard, but the dank region below my deck. This steamy place now reeks like the monkey cage at the zoo, the result I am positive of a thriving colony of Tamias striatus that would rival the meerkat lodge.

All this might be about to change, however. Upon discovering the below-decks reek, I’ve about decided that it’s time to become a mass murderer and thin the population around chez Soileau.

Image via WikipediaI know. Look that that darling little face. From someone who was hell-bent on becoming a veterinarian (ages 9-18) it’s startling news that I would go from self-appointed guardian of the animal universe to slayer of rodents.

But there is one last-ditch effort that I’m willing to make, which may save the bun and munk populations from certain death.

I’m going to fight hares with hair.

In my garage right now I have stored away, next to the warfarin-laced rat poison, a bag of hair. It’s handy, you know, whenever someone announces that their coworkers are dumber’n a bag of hair, I can just trot out there and check.

No, really. It’s reputed to be a rabbit and rodent repellent, and my hairdresser, April, kindly provided me with a whole bag of mine, plus that of her previous four customers.

So, for the time being, at least, I’m not going to have any blood on my hands — figuratively speaking. When the rain lets up, I plan on getting those sunflower shoots in the ground before it’s August and I’ve got a forest of sunflower seedlings obscuring the view in the breakfast nook.

But if the hair doesn’t prove hair-raising enough, mass murder it is. Just don’t tell April. She’ll cut me off, for sure.

An utter twit

Published on by NouveauSoileau4 Comments

I’ve had a Twitter account for a year or so, and I can unequivocally say it’s never once crossed my mind to use it for anything but writing headline-length bites of marginally interesting information about my life.

Sadly this appears to the apex of Tweeting.

For today, thanks to the disgraceful tweeting habits of former U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner — the worst of them, apparently were photographic rather than verbal in nature — we now can say that completely useless information is spectacularly transmitted in this way. And it has set me to ruminating on the appropriateness of the name itself: Twitter. I therefore propose that those who habitually misuse Twitter be universally referred to as Twits.

I'm a bird. I tweet.

Now, I’m a  blogger. I use some of the latest technology to communicate. Hey, I’m doing it right now, and it’s no great revelation.

But the Twitter love, I admit, does escape me — even though I was initially happy it had a bird theme. Usually if something has a bird theme, I’m  all over it. Sports teams like the Cardinals? I’m a fan.

The actual mechanics of tweeting remind me of writing headlines. When I was a newspaper reporter I had an irrational love of headline-writing. Most reporters hated it. Me, I liked the economy of words it forced upon a writer. It’s the closest I’ll ever get to being a poet, though believe me, very few of the headlines I ever wrote were particularly poetic.

All right, none of them were.

I also enjoy writing titles for the blog posts I write; unlike headlines, which are written after an article’s done, I write my blog titles first, in hopes that it’ll give the post a tone. Generally I’m going for a low tone — possibly a B-flat. (Insert rimshot.) Not much of an aspiration I’ll admit. But juvenile humor has got to be someone’s specialty, right?

Today I discovered, via Wikipedia, that San Antonio-based market-research firm Pear Analytics analyzed 2,000 tweets (originating from the US and in English) over a two-week period in August 2009 and separated them into six categories. What was the top tweet category?

Pointless babble. A full 40 percent. Pointless.

New York Times photo

Yes, Twitter today seems the proper medium for millennial communicators, who want instant delivery of pointless information. Damn the reflection, full speed ahead.

It’s undoubtedly the medium of choice for celebrities, who can instantly communicate their inanities to their followers. It’s also useful for bloggers, she said, calling up the Twitter website, who wish to alert their readers to new posts. (Like how I can so effortlessly lump myself into celebrity category?)

I do have  testify to its effectiveness in promotion and marketing work. If you want to get the word out about something your followers are presumably interested in, it’s a quick to say, “hey, look at this.” The information can be seen, digested and squirreled away for later use. Or ignored.

As a writer, I’m dismayed by the prevalence of tweeting; as a reader, I’m grateful that my array of reading choices are longer than twit-length. Out there in the blogosphere, there are insightful, thoughtful posts on a stunning array of absorbing topics. Like shoes. Or punctuation. (Someone needs to tackle these important topics, you know.)

But if current events are any indication, twit-length is the dominant force out here in Internetland.

Sigh. I think I’ll go outside and do some bird-watching until the whole phenomenon passes by.

Be sure and watch for my tweets about it.

A plethora of tornadic activity

Published on by NouveauSoileau2 Comments

We interrupt your regularly scheduled blog today for an update from the National Weather Service. There is a tornado WARNING in effect for the area directly above your head.

Well, maybe not directly, but that’s just what it feels like when you’re in the middle of a storm and suddenly herded into the basement. In my case, the basement in question was beneath the Cathedral and I was surrounded by about a thousand middle school students.

OK, so it only sounds like a thousand in a basement hallway after we’ve been sitting on the hard linoleum floor for 45 minutes.

But yes — this morning Tras and I were innocently attending Mass, which incidentally was the day that the middle schoolers at the parish school also had Mass. Blissfully singing along, we were — when abruptly the piano trailed off and Father announced, “There’s a tornado warning — let’s all head to the basement!”

When a Man of God speaks, you listen.

So we all trailed downstairs, speaking only in hushed, are-we-gonna-die tones. The children were instructed to sit in the hallway along the wall and, being a good Catholic school veteran myself (although my experience was directly with Catholic School Nuns) I did obediently sit along the wall with them. I yanked Tras down to the floor with me; he, being a newly minted Catholic, wasn’t quite as responsive to instructions from Catholic-school teachers.

It wasn’t our first foray into the basement this tornado season. Last Friday, the first Tornado Warning was issued for our county — a situation about which we were blissfully unaware until I received a telephone call from my mother.

An Aside

This wasn’t the first time I’d gotten a Tornado Warning from Mom. About 15 years ago, the phone rang around 11 o’clock at night. I was already in bed, exhausted from spending the day at the Oaks, which is (for the non-Kentuckians among us) the race for fillies the day before the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs.

Oaks has become a tradition in Louisville as a more sedate day at the races than the Derby, which brings out millionaires and mouthbreathers alike for a day of partying at the Downs. Still, I’d spent a day dressed up and drinking mint julips; I was whipped.

Then, the phone. It was my mother’s voice, and when you hear  your mother’s voice when you’ve been awakened from a deep sleep, it sounds something like the Voice of God. In this case, the Voice said, “Get in the bathtub, Ellen. There’s a tornado headed right for your house!”

The bathtub instruction was added because, at the time, I was living in a house without a basement. But no matter, The Voice had instructed me to get to the bathroom, and get I did. Springing from bed and grabbing baby Claire (now 16) from her crib, I launched myself toward the bathroom. I don’t think I became fully conscious until I was almost in the tub itself.

Back to Last Friday

So anyway, Friday evening Mom again calls, this time with less panic-inducing instructions, which were to turn on the TV and listen to what they were saying. We were again under a tornado warning. Still the dutiful daughter, I complied, and we all sat around listening to the weatherman tell us about the incomprehensible radar information appearing on the screen, which was indicative of tornadic activity.

Now, I’ve heard the word “tornado” and experienced “tornado” first-hand since I was a small fry; I did, after all, live through the Super Outbreak that occurred throughout the midwest and southeast in April 1974. But in all that time, I’ve never heard it referred to as “tornadic activity,” and the term strikes me as frighteningly hilarious and ridiculously verbose.

Indeed, why have a tornado when you can have “tornadic activity”? Tornadic, tornadic, tornadic. My son Christopher remarked with a completely straight face, “I can honestly say I have never heard that word until today.” Me neither, son.

So when Tornadic Activity Weatherman announced Friday evening that the hot-zone for the aforementioned tornadics was between the two very roads which bound my subdivision, I herded my offspring, plus one visiting friend, down to the basement for some quality time with the basketball hoop, toy cars and swing.

No such luck this morning, when all I had to entertain me was Tras, the iPhone and some random middle-schoolers. As Tras and I updated the moving weather map on our Weather Bug apps, the girls sitting next to me wanted to know if I liked to shop. (What is it, tattooed on my forehead or something? Sheesh.)

They also asked if I had any cool apps — a rather non-so-subtle hint that they’d just love to get their textie little fingers on my phone, I’m sure — so I showed them the face melter.

They are cute girls, as you can see, even before I melted their faces. They quickly became bored with making polite chit-chat with somebody’s mom they didn’t really know, and went back to drawing on the paper the teachers provided. After a bit, they trooped reluctantly upstairs for school; we rejoined Father in the church after an hour-long gap in morning Mass. Soon we were back outdoors, which still seemed to contain most of Lexington.

Looking at the weather systems brewing west of here, I have a feeling this isn’t the end of the week’s tornadic activity. But maybe if I just say it repeatedly, I’ll scare all tornadic everything away. It’s scared me enough already.

Pucker up and say moi

Published on by NouveauSoileau6 Comments

Unless you’re someone who knows my husband and I personally — or if perhaps, you hail from Louisiana — you’re probably a little mystified by the title of this blog.

NouveauSoileau, ya see, is a little clever play on words. My last name is Soileau, and I’ve only been a Soileau for a few years, hence I am a new Soileau. A nouveau Soileau, you might say, if you spoke French.

I think it’s fun — and hey! It rhymes.

Wait a minute. What? You didn’t know? You don’t know how to pronounce “Soileau,” do you?

Well, you’re not alone. Most of the speaking population, as far as I have been able to determine, could not correctly pronounce “Soileau” if their life depended on it — but only when confronted with the printed word S-O-I-L-E-A-U.

But you can do it, my learned reader, with a little help from the sure-fire Soileau Pronunciation Method™, perfected by my husband, who has more than 50 years of experience with this.

There are a handful of French words that most people can say, if you put a gun to their head, one of them being oui — or Wii, as it’s currently spelled. It means “yes.”

Another is voila, or as most people write, “wah-la.” It means “here,” not “ta-da” as most people mistakenly believe.

A third is moi, which means “me,” and is not spelled “mwah,” no matter how much time you spend on the internet.

Lastly, there’s plateau, which despite all that Frenchification there toward the end, it’s pretty recognizable to the average person as the word for “a flat place in the landscape.”

So let’s review: moi = mwah; plateau ends in something that sounds like “oh.”

I’ll wait a minute while that percolates.

OK, now substitute an “S” for the “m” in moi. Say it aloud …. swah.

Now tack on the end of “plateau” …. oh.

Now remember that Soileau has an “L” in there somewhere amongst all the vowels. Swah-low.

Soileau = Swallow! Like the bird! It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a Soileau! Nouveau Soileau! Get it? It rhymes!

I’m glad we had this little talk.