Vicki Shockey

I’m Vicki Shockey and Chicken and Sponge is my blog. This endeavor represents my attempt to justify my B.A. in English ( against all practical parental advice, dashing my dad’s hopes of a promising career with UPS), and to help support my family. This blog is about my odd little household and the various opinions I hold on everything from social issues to the best and worst products I run across. This should prove interesting for me, and maybe for you, because I’m normally content to keep my opinions to myself and let others believe whatever stupid thing they like.

So here we are:

I graduated from the University of Montana in 1988, fully intending to be a novelist. I haven’t abandoned that plan, though I have procrastinated for more than 20 years gaining “life experience”. I am also still haunted by nightmares of having to take finals for classes I registered for, but never attended. I wish these would stop and I’d gladly replace them with those nightmares of standing in front of the class and realizing that I forgot to get dressed that morning.

In 1990 I moved to Pelican, Alaska, escaping from a very bad boyfriend and boredom. I went to work at the local seafood plant and also became president of the local unit of the International Longshoremen’s Union. This is what led to my jaded view of the world and a very large headache.

It was in Pelican that I fell in love with Mick Shockey, a commercial fisherman, and married him in 1994. Mick surprised many by actually being quite intelligent. He is a great and fearless fisherman, an enthusiastic oral storyteller; he has an astonishing talent for creative profanity, and is just amazingly LOUD.

I was looking forward to fishing with him and cleaning fish in the glorious outdoors instead of the dismal indoors. But Mick had other plans. Because I was expecting our first child, he decided that he wanted a job “on the beach”, so we bought the Pelican Bar and Grill. In hindsight, fishing would have been much easier.

After an outstanding first year with the bar, the seafood plant closed it’s doors and business went down the toilet. The plant has changed hands a couple times, each time being purchased by an irresponsible entity, so that the toilet flushed. However, not everything went down.

Life in Pelican was tough--Charles Dickens-like tough. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”. Pelican is a tiny, boardwalk fishing village, population about 100, and is accessible by float plane or boat. That’s right: no roads in or out. The beauty of this place is nearly indescribable and when you step off the boat or plane it feels as though you’ve stepped into another time and another world. So though life was tough, we persevered, diversified a little, and renamed the business the Wheelwatch Lodge and Lounge. Check us out at www.wheelwatch.net.

Our first daughter, Miranda, was born in 1995. She is a petite brunette with an elfin quality and she would hate to hear herself described that way. From the start, Miranda amazed people with her emotional intelligence and social perceptiveness. She always fit in better with adults than with kids her own age. She is now fitting in well and mastering her eye-rolling and sighing skills.

Samantha was born in 1996 and has always been our robust, red-headed Amazon child. She’s also considered severely autistic. She’s a fascinating, humorous, quirky, and exhausting character. Don’t worry--this isn’t just another mommy autism blog, though there certainly is no ignoring that there is an autistic in our midst. While Sam is unashamedly the center of Sam’s universe, around here she is just another member of a rather odd family. Miranda is a model sister and the two girls are very close. And for the record, no, they weren’t named after characters on Sex and the City.

The Big Move:

My children were becoming lost in Pelican. Miranda wasn’t getting the education nor the social life and other opportunities that she needed. ( How a school with only 13 kids, two teachers and two aides provide a lackadaisical education and allow kids to fall through the cracks is beyond me). We were feeling desperate for Sam. She had a good program on paper but we were losing her--a scary prospect with an autistic kid because they can slip into themselves where you can’t reach them.

Grim circumstances, ( the untimely death of my birth mother), allowed us the opportunity to relocate. My deathbed promise to her was that I’d get the kids out of Pelican before the next school year started. So in August 2005, the girls and I moved to Dallas, Oregon and Mick followed in October.

Now we split our time. Mick is in Pelican for six months of the year and the girls and I go up for summer break. This is starting to get a little old, so we’d like to sell the Wheelwatch. Any takers?

Our other household members include 2 gorgeous, but cute exotic shorthair cats named Hecate and Hedwig, an English bulldog named Louise who is a love, but a bit of a freak and a French bulldog named Zeus who is definitely a freak.

So you ask, “why 'Chicken and Sponge'”? Naming a blog is harder than naming a child, but credit for this one goes to Sam. Every Friday when she gets off the little bus, she wants us to go pick up Abby’s Pizza’s famous chicken and spuds. But you see, Sam always says what she thinks she hears, so she always demands “chicken and sponge”. Being irresponsible, we don’t correct her and have started using the phrase ourselves. So Chicken and Sponge it is. It kind of sums us up.