Water Lilly Alley

Sniffles The Reindeer.

Dear Sister La Cienega,

I was farming on Facebook when a Clumsy Reindeer stumbled onto the farm in FarmVille. He had a few accidents while learning to pull Santa's sleigh. Now the other reindeer won't let him join in their reindeer games. He is very sad and could use some friends and a new home. Currently I am way to busy on FarmVille with the new Coffee Barn going up and all, not to mention being The Compost Ambassador for all the neighboring farms is really taking up a lot of my time. I really don’t want to shoot the poor thing but I don’t know what else to do. Please advise.

One too many reindeer in the UK
Sincerely,
Valda.

Dear Valda, as you may know I am not a seasonal holiday person, haven’t been so in the last 30 years or thereabouts. Being a woman and having to deal with the virgin birth was way too much for me. Howver, I need to get over it. So in that vein I have decided to set up caution indicators for all things Christmas in an effort to be of service thus introducing myself back into the Christmas Spirit. (Once again)

Although At this juncture I have no starting point, I shall use your concern over the plight of the wayward reindeer to kickoff the very first of many holiday cautionary indicators and that would have to be BRUCELLOSIS:  Brucellosis is a bacterial disease which is endemic in most herds of reindeer in Alaska and Northern Canada. I fear that it is more than just being clumsy that the other reindeers will not let Sniffles back into the heard. Sniffles may indeed be infected with Brucellosis. The other reindeers may sense this so before you come into contact with your new found friend please have him tested serologically for brucellosis.

The major impacts of brucellosis in reindeer are abortion and sterility. Retained placentas, swollen joints, enlarged testicles (aka blue balls) and abscesses are signs of possible infection. It is believed that brucellosis is primarily spread through contact with infectious uterine discharges following abortion. This is a VERY SERIOUS DISEASE so do take universal health and safety precautions by wearing a surgical mask and latex gloves when first coming into contact with Sniffles.

Shooting Sniffles is not a viable option to your dilemma, I have several bags of reindeer jerky in the shed and let me tell you… it does not sell as I thought it would.

May I suggest hitching up the trailer to the tractor, take Sniffles to one of the adjoining farms, cut the poor beast lose and then don’t log into your Facebook account for at least a week. The problem should go away.
Your friend in Jesus
Sister La Cienega

Sleepy Time Blues

Dear Sister La Cienega

Why is it I'm more alert when I wake up at 6 AM at least in the short 
term? As I write this it’s 9:00 am and I’m groggy and feel like crap.  I have just turned 50 and was wondering if this is a symptom of middle age and is it something I will have to look forward to on a daily basis?

Sincerely,
Zonked in Canada.

Dear, Zonked in Canada,

My child, this is quite normal for someone entering that I like to call ‘The Wonder Years’. You see, when you wake up in the morning, your are awake, and once awake life seems wonderful, peaceful, and in most cases, stress free, however, the body and soul have an internal dialogue going on that you may not be aware of. It goes something like this.

-Wow, awake.
- Hey body, good morning, but before we get started I would just like to remind you that in this journey of what fools call life, we have come further than we are going. 
- What do you mean?
-Well, the path ahead of us is a bit shorter than the path behind us, take a look, it’s quite obvious.
- But what has that have to do with me?
-OMG, you’ve got to be joking.
- No.
- Two words: Scrunch. Time.
- Scrunch time?
- Yeah, things that use to take forever now fly by; things that use to fly by now take forever.
-Really?
- Yes, really, remember as a kid, it was mid-summer and you had that double scoop of chocolate chip mint ice cream and were in heaven for all of ten minutes and then it was, gone, forgotten and life went on. Well with Scrunch Time, you can choose to eat that sane double scoop now and will end up sitting on it for the next year. 
- Damn.

So you see my dear, the body can be so naïve at times and it’s up to the soul to try and smooth things out.  That is where the confusion sets in. Now revisiting your dilemma on grogginess, let’s apply the scrunch time theory here and see how this plays out.

Arising at 6:00 AM you are not groggy because you are awake and once awake, grogginess has a tendency to set in and if you remember with the ST Theory - things that use to take forever will now fly by- however you must be awake for this to take place, you can't continue to tire when sleeping, sleeping creates un-tired.  That is why you went to sleep in the first place. Now with all this taken into consideration it only proves that once awake one instantly begins to get tired or groggy as scrunch time kicks in. Stephan Hawking would like to call this a Space Time Continuum but then again, he is such an attention whore and if I were you I wouldn’t pay him much mind.

To further elaborate my point: Christmas Day for a kid seems like such a long way off from the month of May, and just like summer vacation appears to last forever is because kids have little to associate time with. Time is relative to ones desires , for most don’t see time as now, but as something that has a starting point and an ending point. The ending point of course being somewhere down the line.  The younger you are, the further the destination in question seems to be.

A child’s whole frame of reference is built on a couple years. Every increment is a bigger piece of their life. As you get older, every increment is a smaller piece, the denominator is bigger."

Therefore It is my summation that scrunch time works in the same way when one wakes up in the morning; one feels awake, feels great and then before you know it, bamn, and one is groggy. This is because groggy does not have any notion as to what time it is. So in essence you are going from awake to groggy in what I would like to call a Day Worm Hole.  I know this seems to be a little complicated but in time once the grogginess passes it will make sense, or perhaps not.

Toodles
Sister La Cienega

And How is That?

Dear Sister La Cienega

Recently my 7 year-old asked me ‘With the alarm button gone, what happens to danger?’ Well, as you may have guessed, this question took me quite by surprise. Needless to say, it was just a skoosh above the old standby of ‘Why is the sky blue?’ and telling her that blue is the color of God’s underwear worked when she was 5.  But, my heavens, what is this thing about danger all about?

Lost in New Orleans.

Dear Lost in New Orleans.

Kids are somewhat the curious little creatures aren’t they?  However, you needn’t be alarmed by her interest in the concept of danger. In this time of kidnappings, hit and run incidents, being orphaned, death of a grandparent or kindergarten teacher, life can be downright scary for the little sprogs. 

Just remember that there are times when finagling a tale or two will explain away a child’s curiosity but in this case I think truth is the best policy, but then again, it all depends on how truth is delivered. Children are much more advanced today than when we were kids. 

I suggest that you sit down with her, notebook in hand with the this one item written in crayon

Q: With the alarm button gone, what happens to danger?

Let her mull it over for a few minutes and then have her write:

A: Danger goes renegade.

Then promptly explain.

Renegade danger is like when your Uncle Louie was walking through the park last summer and a squirrel overhead in a tree had a heart attack and fell on top of Uncle Louie’s head, and as the squirrel’s little sinuous paws dug into Uncle Louie’s forehead to stop its fall, and in doing so, the little rodent gouged out Uncle Louie’s eyes.

Or like when we were driving in the country last year and a large bug hit the windshield, and remember how at first we were startled, but then we laughed when the bug’s body had designed a crazy pattern on the glass in its foolish quest to take the highway. And how all the pretty colors in that design had snapped us all up in a fit of the giggles and that I was laughing so hard that I ran off the road and hit a pole, and remember we couldn't call for help because the pole we hit turned out to be a cell phone tower.

That too, my child, is renegade danger.