Don’t Express Your Ferret’s Glands In My Kitchen Sink

Last weekend, we spent our Friday night with our mountain friends. Even when we aren’t in the mountains, we usually spend Friday evenings with them. We have dubbed our Friday night meetings ‘Youth Group’ and it can last for hours. Skype is a wonderful thing.

Last night, however, we had to miss youth group because we had visitors, including our 4 year old granddaughter. We played Cards Against Humanity with my stepdaughter, her boyfriend, my son and one of his friends. When it was my son Joey’s turn to read, I gave him a card that read ‘anal beads’. Another check mark in my ‘good mother ledger’ right there.

Even though I wouldn’t trade a minute of last night, I missed youth group. I’m getting old and set in my ways. I expect my Fridays to have a healthy dose of music talk and a few minutes carved out for Doctor Who conversation, even though it drives Randy and my mountain friend insane. Mountain girl’s husband, the bass player, is also a Doctor Who fan. The bass player and I have tried to convert Randy and mountain girl but so far, they don’t see the light. (The burning TARDIS would help them with that, but they are stubborn.)

Last weekend having a live and in person youth group was amazing. The weather was perfect and the canopy had fairy lights. I love talking about music with Randy and our friends, however, I am the only one who is not a musician. I’m definitely the dumb one in the group when it comes to the technical aspects of music.

The conversation turned and as soon as I heard someone say ‘BPM’ my eyes started to glaze over.

My mountain friend is very kind. She would occasionally look at me and say “I’m sorry, this is boring for you.”

I am very polite so of course I insisted that I was fine and completely fascinated.

Mountain girl: blah blah, garble, descending minor diminished chord change, blah blah.

Bass Player: yadda yadda, blah blah chromatic scale, garble.

Randy: Klangfarbenmelodie, blah blah yadda.

Mountain girl to me: Seriously, this isn’t fun for you, is it?

Me: I don’t care. You motherfuckers keep talking. I’m taking notes for a blog post to make fun of you.

At this point it was very late and much liquid of fermented potato had been consumed.

Me: I hope I can read my notes.

Randy: Let me see them.

Randy: Nope.

He was wrong. While it was true that my notes were barely legible, they were not quite impossible to read. I think I may have attempted to employ shorthand at one point. Whatever thoughts were contained on that page are gone forever. I barely passed my shorthand class in high school 34 years ago. I have no idea what made me think I could take shorthand. Well, other than the vodka. 

I am repulsive to bugs

I also learned that the biting bugs prefer people who talk music because I escaped the evening with nary a mosquito bite and the rest of youth group were part of a mosquito buffet.

We didn’t just talk about music.

At one point, mountain girl told me a story about a horrible room mate who had a ferret. My friend was worried that the ferret would make their place smell gamey but this ferret was apparently odor free.

The reason the ferret was odor free was because the bad room mate expressed the ferret’s glands every day. In the kitchen sink. Mountain girl did not realize this was taking place until she actually walked in and witnessed the process.

This was the part of the evening where my favorite sentence from the entire weekend was spoken: So, then I had to ask her to stop expressing her ferret’s glands in my kitchen sink. 

Finally. A conversation I could follow.

We always have a good time, but I am grateful that this weekend gets to be lazy.

Today my stepdaughter and her family left to continue on their journey. The weather is overcast. My older son is picking up my younger son so they can hike in the woods before the rain comes.

After two weekends of not sleeping in my own bed, I am looking forward to my bed all weekend long and plan to rarely let it out of my sight.

Now, can one of you tell me what the fuck a Synclavier is?

56 Thoughts.

  1. LOVE your headline.

    All four of my kids are musical (my youngest is even majoring in music in college), my father is a musician, and I cannot even carry a tune. So that conversation excerpt made me laugh out loud.

  2. hee hee hee, get them talking about modes, that should really glaze your eyes over, it almost does that to me and I am a musician.
    🙂
    Synclavier was pretty much the sound for the Thriller album, one of the iconic synths of the 80s, Tangerine Dream and Genesis used it as well, fab warm sounds that modern samples don’t seem to be able to emulate somehow.
    I can hear you yawning from here…so I’ll shut up now

  3. A synclavier is a device that helps you gain clarity on your sin. And it’s spelled syn for the same reason wymmen is spelled like that: vodka.

    You should get a ferret.

  4. I once considered how much legal trouble I’d get if I broke open the enclosure at PetCo and filled my coat pockets with ferrets because I felt so bad for them. There wasn’t nearly enough room for the quantity in there, no environmental enrichment, and one of them was scrabbling at the seam where the glass met the floor. I simply decided not to support them with any of my dollars.

    I wonder at people who can play Cards Against Humanity with family. Apples to Apples, yes, but CAH is a friends-only game for me I think!

  5. A Synclavier is a music computer system upon which one can compose and perform things that would be impossible to do physically, with normal instruments. Frank Zappa spent his last few years composing extensively on one, becoming fascinated with the aural “spaces” it could make; some instruments sounding as if they were in a huge, cavernous hall, and others as if you were standing right next to them in your living room, all on the same recording, at the same time. They used to be frightfully expensive. The guitar-controlled Synclavier I saw John McLaughlin use with Mahavishnu Orchestra (which made the sound of a semi-believeable harmonica, mostly) reportedly cost about $70,000.00 in the early eighties…
    Ferrets are cute, but they do stink, or the males do, anyway. Briana had one as a pet when she was a kid, but she (the ferret) ran off with a tree squirrel…

  6. We determined long ago that the anal beads card is the universal cars in CAH. It works for Every. Single. Question. Really, it does. Go ahead and try it out. I’ll wait for you to finish craughing. (That’s when you laugh so hard you cry and become incoherent. It will happen. I promise. )

    • Thank you…

      and I will tell you why, because we all have different things to say and you say your things wonderfully. Don’t sell yourself short or I will flick boogers at you.

  7. Who wouldn’t love a conversation about anal beads, the TARDIS and ferret glands while drinking potato juice? Sounds like a fantastic evening to me.

  8. This post really makes me want to have ferrets again, not because of the anal glands though (I’m not quite that weird) and mountain friends (they sound fun apart from the music talk). Like Wendy of the Rock, any friends would be good, including imaginary ones.

    • I don’t want to have to worry about caring for any creature if anal glands are involved. Imaginary friends are great until they start borrowing too much money from you.

  9. I don’t know what’s more entertaining here…the post itself or the comment thread. I think I just read you threatening to flick boogers at someone…
    I’m not musical at all. I wish I was, but no. I was thinking that I could come with you to Youth Group and since I don’t partake of liquid of fermented potato I could take notes for you 🙂
    Think about it. I’ll be right here.

  10. Every time you mention your mountain friends, I see the SNL skit of Will Ferrell and Rachel Dratch (I believe it’s her) where they refer to the other as their LOV-er. Maybe it’s because of Will’s character’s bushy beard (that I associate with “mountain” living?), I don’t know. But every. time. 🙂

    • HAHAAHAH…omg that is hilarious. I can’t wait to tell them this. I can honestly say that they are pretty far from those characters in real life, but it is still fucking hilarious.

  11. We were given a free piano years ago. The kids and I wheeled it down the street in our town house complex and up two 2 by 4’s we used as a ramp to get it inside. If it was in tune before it certainly wasn’t after that. We moved since then and the piano has just become a part of the furniture (honestly I do have every intention of learning to play one day- it’s only been around 15 years- I’ll get there). Anyhow after living with the piano for only a week I discovered firstly that there was a Dragon Ball Z figurine inside it and secondly that every time it rained you could smell ferrets (the people we got it from had ferrets). As I said it’s been over 15 years and every time it gets humid there’s still a whiff of eau de ferret around the piano. I can’t understand how your friend’s kitchen didn’t absolutely reek of ferret?!

  12. This is why I keep returning: it’s the amazing advice. I would never think expressing a ferret’s anal glands in the sink was a bad thing.

    I’m kidding of course because ferrets terrify the fuck out of me. Spiders? No problem. Snakes? My next door neighbor calls me over every spring to catch the snake in her yard. As a kid I visited an aquarium with my family and was the only person who’d hold the sea cucumber.

    Keep the ferrets away from me.

    • I hate the snakes in my yard. I know it’s a sign of a healthy yard but I hate the creepy little fuckers. I’m also not a fan of ferrets. Or spiders.

  13. Then there was that time that my cat Claude (RIP) was standing on my desk in front of my computer screen, and I used my hand to coax him along and all of a sudden there was a seriously foul odor and what looked like melted butter sprayed on my desk. That’s how I learned that some cats have glands that need to be expressed…

  14. I learned so much about Doctor Who from the comment thread… and way too much about ferrets. Well, way too much about what (crazy) people DO to their ferrets. Makes me absolutely positive that there will be no more pets in my house.

  15. I love that you have mountain friends! If I could have such wonderful friends and interactions by being a mountain friend, I would totally buy a little compound in the Smokey Mountains and learn to play a banjo

  16. One of my ex daughters-in-law (there are two of them) had ferrets. She was allergic to dogs and cats, and ferrets were her snuggly outlet. A) They are NOT snuggle, but creepy. B) She didn’t know about anal gland expressing, apparently, because the smell was enough to gag a maggot. Don’t, for God’s sake, get a ferret.

  17. I saw Zappa in the 80s at The Beacon Theater and he had a synclavier. It’s kind of like a modern day calliope. Expressing anything’s anal gland’s is nasty enough without bringing the kitchen sink into the equation. Oooweee…nasty. I almost expressed my pug’s glands once. No, no, no!

  18. God I love your posts. Do you realize you just mentioned: anal beads, Dr. Who, fairy lights, chromatic scale, liquid of fermented potato, bugs, and a ferret’s anal glands in the same post? And you made it flow like poetry.

    P.S. I also made the mistake of playing Cards Against Humanity with family and had to explain what “a bleached asshole” was to my nephew. Then my sister had to explain “queefing” to me. Good times.

  19. Oy. So much grossness down the kitchen sink. But, like George said on Seinfeld, ‘Drains are drains!’ Elaine insisted otherwise, but what does she know? Better he express ferret glands there than say, in the tub, where she takes hot baths, and didn’t know to clean between expressings.

    Love the inspiration of an overheard comment! Soon, people will begin to avoid us like we’re carriers of the newest bug from Asia. I usually can’t read my notes either, but if I don’t write it down immediately, it is lost forever in the abyss of my memory, which is barely capable of remembering my phone number, anymore.

    I mentioned overhearing the comment that inspired a post I wrote, and after a friend read it, she said she was glad I hadn’t mentioned her name because she might get in trouble. I was outraged and insulted. For several reasons:
    1) I hadn’t spoken to her in several weeks, and she’d never even come close to mentioning the Rastafari. I’m not sure she even knows what they are.
    2) I’ve never mentioned anyone by name, for crying out loud, unless they’re public figures.
    3) She assumed she is my only friend! (This is not far wrong, since my friends keep freaking dying on me, but that’s another issue. )

    http://chezgigi.com/9-things-women-dont-do-in-movies-that-make-me-crazy/

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