I was afraid that the post every day thing wouldn’t last very long—I just didn’t expect it would only last four days. Oh well. I was busier yesterday than I thought I would be. Well, not busy, but Gabe had no interest whatsoever in being downstairs (where the computer is), so I spent most of the day upstairs and outside. It’s freakishly warm here right now. We hit the mid-80s yesterday (Friday—I write these during the day, usually, and then post them the next morning. That way I can just leave Word up all day and type a few sentences when I have time instead of leaving myself connected to the blogger page all day. So, by that timeline, it is now Saturday morning, but I probably won’t get this posted until Sunday—as of right now, I don’t know what the weather will be like today, which is your yesterday. Very confusing). It’s just stupid. If it’s this hot in March, it will be 150 by July. I am not looking forward to that!
Dr. Kip “Snips” Snipowski
“Snips” is a little crab doll. A Fiddler Crab, perhaps? Except, aren’t they supposed to have one giant, unwieldy claw to impress their mates with. “Hey, baby. The beach is that way,” he says, pointing his useless claw to the beach, which he’s already standing on, and to which his claw was already pointing. “Oh, my,” she responds. “Just think of all the egg sacs you could carry with that big, strong claw of yours.” Or whatever female crabs think the claw might be useful for. So I’m not sure what kind of crab he is. Hermit is the only other one I can sort of remember, but I think they always wear shells on their backs—thus the name, because they bring their homes with them. So, he is just a crab doll. And, surprisingly, I didn’t rip the idea of a crab doctor off from Futurama (though Zoidberg is a lobster), it just sort of happened. Plus, “Snips” doesn’t speak with a Yiddish accent like Zoidberg. With a name like Kip, he’s obviously white bread. His inclusion and his occupation just sort of happened. He was a part of the first story I told. The crab doll just happened to be near at hand when I needed to work a doctor in. I’m not sure where this toy came from either. I think he was attached to a present at some point, probably at the shower. I’m a little curious what kind of person thinks a crustacean makes a good doll, though. They aren’t cute and they aren’t even particularly fun.Kip’s story is pretty run-of-the mill. He came from an upper-middle class family. He became a doctor because he could, but he never worked any harder than he absolutely had to in order to skirt by. He ended medical school right at the middle of his class. His specialization areas are somewhat interesting, though. He is classified as an “ears, butt, and foot” doctor. A strange variety of specializations, but a variety that has served him fairly well throughout his career.
Maria “the Eye” Calzone
(Photo not available)
Maria is currently missing, but considering her affiliations, that’s not too surprising.
Maria is an awfully old hard plastic baby doll that, I’m told, belonged to Karen, Libby’s mother, when she was growing up. Like Creepy Baby, there are very few positive things to say about this toy. Maria is much smaller than Creepy Baby—only about a foot tall—but Maria has no clothes. She is naked and she is in pretty bad shape. All of her limbs still work like they are supposed to, but her face and head have seen better days. She has a pair of glass eyes—but one of them is missing and the other one is open all the time. Thus her nickname.
Maria is a member of the Italian mafia that Akiko and Stanley have run afoul of. She’s not the one who’s actually in charge—the don, or whatever—because, obviously, she’s a woman, and where would the sense be in a woman heading up a mafia organization? Am I right? Bah duh bing! She is, however, a local boss of some sort. I don’t know, a street boss? Neighborhood boss? The title I gave her is Straw Boss. She’s that. And she is in charge of sizing up and fitting Akiko and Stanley with their cement galoshes, which she attempted to do for awhile (which will be addressed later), but now, I fear, she will have to be played by a replacement actress, much like Becky from Roseanne (Until not too long ago, I never knew that Sarah Chalke, Elliot from Scrubs, was the replacement Becky. I didn’t know because I never watched Roseanne, but I still think it’s interesting because I remember the uproar when it happened. Yet, here I am, 12 years later, and I know who Sarah Chalke is, but who the hell was the original Becky? Sure, I could look it up, but I don’t have to, because she is nobody to me and she probably always will be. Maybe she should have reconsidered dropping her steady work for whatever it is she’s doing now). Either that, or that bit of storyline will have to include a secret sibling or someone with an eye patch or some other plot device I learned from watching mom’s “stories” for all those years growing up.
Nole Candycorn
Nole is a dog that our foster case worker Jason gave to Gabe, I believe shortly after we got Gabe. Nole was the second character named by Gabe. This one I tried really hard to let him actually name, so I followed him around and didn’t let it rest until he gave me two words that I could use as names. The first one came quickly, sort of. He’s been saying “no” pretty much since he could make noises because, quite frankly, he hears the word a lot. If I had a quarter for every time I said “no” or “be careful” in the last year, I’d be pretty well off. But I couldn’t take “no” for an answer. Ha! Get it? A play on a popular phrase. But seriously, I couldn’t. While I have seen “Noh” used as a name before, it was a girl’s name, and it seemed pretty obvious to me that the dog was a male (he’s not anatomically correct or anything, but he feels like he should be—he’s just got a kind of male scruffiness about him, I think). So I kept listening until he accidentally added another sound onto the end of “no.” Which he also didn’t do, so I just decided to use the power of imagination and pretend he said Nole instead. An unconventional name, to be sure, and I thought about using Noam, but the only Noam I could think of was Noam Chomsky, and I didn’t think this poor scruffy dog character needed to be saddled with that kind of personality reference. So I just settled with Nole and figured anyone who didn’t like it could get stuffed.The second name, Candycorn, was much less time consuming, but entirely a set up by me because I was getting tired of trying to dweedle another name out of the boy by that point. “Candycorn,” actually, was one of many words that Gabe had shorthanded by that time (which, obviously, would have been around Halloween of 2008 since candycorn was even an option). He used to get so excited when I’d offer him candycorn. “Gabe,” I’d say, “Would you like a piece of . . . (dramatic pause while I presented the piece of candy with a flourish) candycorn?” His eyes would light up and he would start doing a little dance while I held the candycorn in front of him, just tantalizingly out of reach. And he would say, “Kuh! Kuh! Kuh!” until I relinquished the corn syrupy treat. As I mentioned before, for a very long time, “Kuh,” was one of Gabe’s favorite words—a favorite because it meant about a dozen different things. In fact, it meant anything that started with a “k” sound at all. “Candycorn,” “Cookie,” “Cracker,” “cushion,” . . . and others. My mind is blanking now. Anything we said that started with a hard “c” became “kuh” to him. In the case of naming the dog, though, because I was tired of trying to get him to say something I could recognize, I manipulated the outcome to make sure I knew exactly what word he wanted as the last name. I brought with me a piece of candycorn, and I showed it to him. “Kuh!” he squealed. “Perfect,” I said. “Nole Candycorn.” Not one of our most inspired names, but a name.
As for story, Nole doesn’t have one yet. He is a named character without a personality. After we named him, he ended up getting stuffed to the bottom of a basket for quite awhile and I forgot all about him. Eventually, he’ll get a story, though. With a name like Nole, I expect he will be a professor of something—maybe English, but something stuffy like Late Victorian or American Transcendentalism. Gah. What a joy he would be. I could see him wearing a suede jacket with patches on the elbows. Of course, he’d have changed his last name to something more urbane sounding—or insisted that it had some foreign sounding pronunciation to explain the odd spelling that just looked like candycorn, something like Cancahn or something. So, obviously, he would be a bit of a pretentious prick. Hmm. Guess I might have just worked up his backstory, now I just need to work him into the storyline.
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