So first off, yesterday I was jogging up and down my Favorite Older Sister's driveway in a futile attempt to be healthy and in shape, when Rosie and I were VICIOUSLY ATTACKED BY WILD BEASTS. I realize there are those of you out there who might doubt Mojo's Sacred Word, which is why I am glad there are CELL PHONES so that I might record the encounter for posterity. Watch, if you dare:

(Oh, and if you are a Kind Person, don't play this with the sound on when Rosie's around. She gets very upset and thinks I am yelling at her. I WAS, but not NOW. And only "yelling" in the "*sigh*; Mojo's Irish" sense of the word, which isn't really YELLING, but more like Gently Communicating With Volume.)

Part One of this fascinating history can be found HERE. It caused my Favorite Older Sister grief enough that she texted me. It was like a week after I had posted it, which just goes to show how closely she pays attention. Let's see how long it takes her to complain about THIS heap of libel!

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 MORE Mojo! »

Lest the reader think that their beloved Mojo is somehow immune to the siren call of stupidity, over the next couple of posts I will offer the following somewhat chronological list of really stupid things I have done thus far in my life. Perhaps some may learn from my mistakes. Perhaps others will enjoy a cruel, cruel laugh at a naive, doe-eyed Baby Mojo's expense. (You monster, you.)

1. Don’t believe your older sister when she says "Ummmm, this dirt tastes sooooooo good!"

Lesson learned: There is no good-tasting dirt.

2. Don’t believe your older sister when she says the ice on the skating rink is paper thin and covers a bottomless pit and you will surely fall in and die if you go out there.

Lesson learned: My older sister was a big fat liar. Okay, I probably should have learned that from the first rule, but what can I say; Mojo's a bit slow. Incidentally, I have never learned how to ice skate. But I have become very good at clutching the fence for dear life, screaming and sobbing hysterically for my mother. Some talents never go out of style.

To be continued at a later date....

Prior to this weekend, my sole experience with Indianapolis was driving through it on my way home from college sometime in the early eighties. It was three in the morning, in a torrential downpour, and I lost the driver's side wiper on my car.

This was in the days before cell phones or all night convenience stores, so I had to swap in the other wiper blade and rig the bare wiper arm so it wouldn't scratch the windshield. All this in the pitch dark and the pouring rain. So I never really had any fond memories of Indianapolis.

My Favorite Older Sister always yells at me if I bring this story up. She's always the first to defend Indianapolis. She said it had a lovely canal district with lots of interesting shops and restaurants. She really enjoys going there for business, and every time I mention rain or windshield wipers, she smacks me one.

So I decided to kill two birds with one stone. I'd travel to Indianapolis and see for myself what a magical and enchanted city it really is. Plus I'd see the Super Bowl. I realize there are many people out there who would die for a chance to attend the Super Bowl. To be honest, I don't really care one way or another, but through the magic of the internet I have been able to do both, and you have no real way of telling whether or not I actually did it. I now bring my story alive for YOU, so I can rub your collective faces in it and you can have the vicarious thrill of going to Indianapolis and attending the Super Bowl with me. Yeah, you feel like a winner already,  don'tcha?  MORE Mojo! »

Mojo does not always doff her hat to people who write the copy for television ads. For starters, Mojo almost never wears hats. Mojo has one of those GIANT MISSHAPEN HEADS and it is just about impossible to find a hat that will fit her. And if by some freak of nature it DOES fit her, rest assured she will look like a total dork in it. Well, more of a dork than usual.

My Favorite Older Sister, by the way, can slap a moldy piece of lettuce on her head and look SPECTACULAR with it. She's the sort who can wear hats. She can get away with MURDER when it comes to headgear. But Mojo, with her brain-swollen top deck--or, at the very least, she has enough brains to realize that she does not look good in hats--has long ago accepted the fact that she cannot accessorize above the neck. Not without looking like she should be driving trucks for a living. Not that there's anything wrong with driving trucks, it's just that even a couture-challenged gal like Mojo looks at most truck driver wear and quietly says to herself, "Oh, even *I* know better than to do that." She does not say it out loud, for fear of getting a tire iron upside her hatless head. But once again, I digress.

I doff my hat or cap or toupee or whatever to whomever it was on the Nissan payroll who came up with their Labor Day Weekend campaign to sell Nissan cars to those who can still afford to buy cars. Mojo has nothing against Nissan. When I was in college I had a dreadfully ugly brownish-tan Datsun B-210 hatchback that I remember with great fondness. It got over 40 MPG back then (this was the mid 80s) and started like a champ no matter HOW sub-zero the temperature got. A great car. Mojo wuved it.  MORE Mojo! »

After nearly a year of whining about will-I-or-won't-I, my Favorite Older Sister got tired of me talking about it and finally gave me a three month's subscription to Netflix for Christmas. Unfortunately for me (since it meant I had to delay receiving presents) my Favorite Husband wound up in the hospital with pneumonia, which resulted in me totally missing my family's Christmas celebration. (He was healthy enough to visit HIS family, mind you, but come the day Mojo can expect to score awesome gifts from people who share a lifelong obligation to love her despite all the scurrilous things she writes about them, and all of a sudden he's all like, oh, help, I'm dying of pneumonia; please drive me to the hospital, blah blah blah. Which was a total bummer. Plus the hospital ended up costing us over two thousand bucks even WITH insurance, which ends up being over five hundred bucks a day for his little adventure in nearly dying. I've stayed in very nice hotels for less than that, hotels with MUCH BETTER FOOD. But I digress.)

Anyway, this is not about HIM nor the inconvenience of his Brush With Death, except to say that despite my Favorite Older sister's nagging me about my opinion of Netflix I didn't bother to redeem it until sometime in February, when he was well enough to sit up on the couch so *I* could have a place to sit while watching movies.  MORE Mojo! »

So our poor beloved Mojo spent most of the holiday season in the hospital, visiting a loved one and just sort of hanging out reading books while they fought a desperate struggle for their life. Which was rather inconvenient for Mojo, I must say. All of the stress of the holiday season, and pretty much none of the joy. Say La Vee.

Things are going better now, thanks for asking. Enough that said loved one was finally discharged, and Mojo found herself, instead of sitting in the hospital reading a VERY INTERESTING BOOK her Favorite Older Sister brought over, buying loads of prescription drugs at the pharmacy as well as a laundry list of OTC medications. Which brings us to Mojo in the aisle for various cold remedies, perusing the bewildering varieties thereof. And all of this drama and intrigue, and Mojo is standing there in the pharmacy aisle, thinking not so much about life and death, nor narrow escapes, nor the inexplicable love one might feel for loved ones, but instead she stares at the various boxes and remembers a television commercial from her childhood.

Now, you kids won't remember any of this, but when elderly, barely continent Mojo was a wee lass there was no internet. We used to have to lick our postage stamps, too, a practice I no longer encourage. Marketing and advertising lacked the sophistication we now enjoy. Instead, product manufacturerererers had thirty seconds to craft these exquisite little mini-dramas that were just sort of accepted wholecloth, and only now, looking back on them, do they look rather silly.  MORE Mojo! »

Now, you see, if Mojo ever thought ahead about such things, she'd have pictures. But we all know how pointless it is to wish Mojo would do things in a logical and rational fashion. So instead I will force you to rely on your imagination, which will either leave you with a total blank (thank you, television!) or with a picture far, far worse than an actual picture would convey.

Let us begin with Mojo noting that it is now Skunk Season in her neck of the woods. Not that people hunt skunks--not sane people, at any rate--but only that they are now oot and aboot. Since they are universally nocturnal (and Mojo is congenitally anosmic, as we all know by now) Mojo only knows this via her driving around and seeing the many dead skunks along the highways and byways of this great nation. Well, that, and the following:

Mojo's Favorite Older Sister has a yellow lab named Miles. Miles is about Rosie's age and they both share the same sunny, playful disposition. (I can't speak for my Favorite Older Sister, but OUR last dog, George, while he was a nice enough dog, lived totally in his resentful little concrete-filled head. He bore grudges like NOBODY'S BUSINESS. He was pleasant enough toward us, but he was NOT a happy dog, in the doofus-grinning sense. No, George was a snotty intellectual who spent most of his time resenting the limited rights dogs had compared to humans, and grumbling on his bed plotting revenge if he felt wronged. But again I digress.) Both Miles and Rosie enjoy playing with their respective cats--well, Rosie did until Ratty's recent demise, that is. And very recently, one evening Miles discovered a NEW feline friend behind the barn, and tried to entice it to play with him. A black and white one.  MORE Mojo! »

This used to be one of my Favorite Mother's favorite anecdotes, but with the changing of social mores it has totally lost the punch it used to have. I was reminded of it recently on FaceBook when I happened to bring up my Favorite Parental Units' 52nd wedding anniversary. And it goes like this:

Somehow, somewhere, some well intentioned person who had NO IDEA who they were dealing with or what they were getting into befriended my Favorite Mother and her slavering pack of abominable children (ahem--that would be US, minus the Favorite Younger Sister who came along later). Or, probably more accurately, befriended my Favorite Mother and barely tolerated the beastly little rugrats she was legally obligated to have with her at all times. And at some point made the suggestion--or made some calls, or pulled some strings, or whatever--to have the eldest child appear on the television show, Romper Room.

Naturally everyone who is even casually acquainted with anyone even remotely related to Mojo is already shouting, "No! NO! NOOO!!!" at their computer screens, but what can I say? It was a simpler, innocent, pre-reality television time. And my Favorite Older Sister could look and behave in a most cherubic fashion when it suited her. The fact that it RARELY suited her did not come into play, here, for some inexplicable reason. Mojo's family and mass media DO NOT MIX, we have since learned. Media professionals know it is for the best to leave well enough alone. But back then, with Conformity and Decorum as a way of life, we were ESPECIALLY ill-suited to be presented to the rest of society as Examples to Strive For.  MORE Mojo! »

One of the many, many indicators of Mojo's saintlike benevolence is her ability to indulge her Favorite Husband in his occasional lapses in good taste. Not always; he has been known to go to the movies all by himself if Mojo deems something too stupid even for HER. It is a judgment call; Mojo, for example, did NOT want to go to the first "TRANSFORMERS" movie, no, not one little bit, yet somehow whimsically decided at the last minute to go--or was somehow talked into it by the silver-tongued devil she married.  MORE Mojo! »