You Can’t Drink All Day if You Don’t Start in the Morning Read Online Free PDF Page A

shitty day at work and a fight with your best friend, and you’ve got eight loads of laundry to do, a little fluff makes a mighty soft landing at the end of the day.
    HSM
isn’t the only trend that adults have practically taken over from their kids. If your coworker asks you if you’d like to see his “love puppy,” or tells you he’s got one “cheeky monkey,” don’t call him a perv; he’s just addicted to Webkinz, stuffed animals that have an online identity that requires you to feed, entertain, and generally take care of them. Or else.
    It’s hardly news that kids love Webkinz. But now the parents are hooked.
    Look around; your coworkers might be angling for “magic forest charm bracelets” instead of Xeroxing their butts or playing computer solitaire like in the good old days.
    “You gotta keep ’em well, happy, and healthy,” a mom friend explained with utter seriousness.
    When her kids went to sleepaway camp this summer, she spent hours making sure that the many demands of their ten Webkinz were taken care of.
    It’s like real life, only it’s not.
    Last week, while my kid checked on the food dish for her virtual pet and contemplated how much “KinzCash” she’d need to buy a virtual swimming pool, her seven-month-old kitten was rolling on the floor below her, slowly and dramatically choking on a three-inch blade of grass that had somehow gotten lodged in her nostril.
    “Hell-o!” I said, pointing to the kitten, now trying to give herself a tiny Heimlich maneuver with her own little forepaws. “Real life happening over here!”
    (Since you ask, it cost one hundred bucks to sedate kitty and remove what I now call the World’s Most Expensive Blade of Grass. I have placed it in a little shadow box like it was one of those face-of-Jesus grilled-cheese sandwiches or something.)
    While neglected Webkinz don’t exactly die some horrible
Meerkat Manor
kind of death (screw you, Animal Planet, for letting Flower die!), they do get the dreaded Webkinz “green snout” or clutch tiny ice bags to their virtual heads when they’re not well tended.
    The only way to get a sick Webkinz well again is to take quizzes or perform jobs that earn KinzCash so you can buy medicine for this virtual pet that, remember now, is actually based on a smallish stuffed animal sitting on your kid’s dresser.
    That’s just shoot-your-preacher-husband-dead-then-demand-custody-of-your-kids crazy, isn’t it?
    Across the country, people of the male persuasion areshirking office work to play Webkinz games online instead of shirking office work to study their fantasy football team’s stats like God and nature intended.
    Username Fluffydad is worried about his ailing Sherbet Bunny. It’s the beginning of the end, y’all.

5
Miss North Carolina Is Too Nice to Hate
    Aside from too many cute guys calling me “ma’am,” my reign as the North Carolina Pecan Harvest Festival queen was, in a word that I just now made up, Pecan-TASTIC!
    My lifelong dream of riding on a float and doing the demure “unscrew the lightbulb” wave was finally realized. I cut ribbons, I extolled the virtues of the pecan, I walked around for two whole days with a crown pinned to my head, I had breakfast with Miss North Carolina at our pecan-TASTIC B and B.
    Miss North Carolina, Jessica Jacobs, is slim and tall and gorgeous. As we chatted, just the two of us, she dined on a small compote of fresh fruit and a dainty cup of herbal tea. I, on the other hand, had three eggs, homemade sausage, toast,juice, two of those compotes, a hunk of blueberry-oat coffee cake, fried potatoes, and coffee.
    I’m fairly certain Miss North Carolina has never, as I did, leaned over to anyone and asked, “Are you gonna finish that?”
    As we sat in matching tiaras at the breakfast table, I was struck by how queenly she was. I had much to learn. I also had butter on my chin.
    I had borrowed three fur jackets to choose from, so I asked Miss North Carolina to tell me which one