Cat pee will not make your skin beautiful and more youthful

To cure my dish-pan hands, I grabbed a small amount of lotion from a container my mom keeps near the kitchen sink and rubbed it into my hands. I immediately noticed a suspicious smell. It reminded me of a combination of a hotel pillow mint and cat pee.

Before I continue with this story, I have to tell you about this daily noon-time program devoted to giving seemingly pointless 'tips' to the Japanese public. Tips like if you rub sesame oil into your hair before you wash it, it will get cleaner, or how to improve your health by eating grapefruit chunks in curdling milk. Things like this which my mom totally buys into, thus disgusting concoctions in the fridge and the bottle of sesame oil in our bathroom. Knowing that she has the penchant to take such strange advice only made the smell coming off my hands more worrisome. I sniffed the backs of my hands again. "What's in this lotion? It smells like cat pee and mint."

Her gaze came back steadily to me. "It's ur... urrr.......," she begins stammering.
"NO! Don't say it!"
"Ur....urr....," she continues.
"Don't say 'urine!' Please. No!"
"It's urine," she declares matter-of-factly.

Thankfully though, it was not a home-made addition. She meant urea which, though I suppose chemically the same, I can handle a little better than extract from Tokyo cat box.

Grammar, sense notwithstanding

This morning, my mom discovered that she'd forgotten about a student that's coming for a lesson. But, she's not worried because this student, as my mother expressed it, "She tells what I do."
"She what now?"
"She does what I...tell her." It's in these little moments that I begin to see the blueprint of how the cogs in her mind turn, and it all makes a little bit more sense. Luckily there were no articles in that sentence to be flubbed.

To anyone who thinks that my ardent noting of these tiny errors in my mom's language usage verges on cruel, know that I also make such mistakes (frequently) in my Japanese, to the point where I'm sure that my mom, if she knew about the miracles of blogs and the internet, could certainly have one: www.mycrazyhalfjapdaughter.blogspot.com. Actually, I'd better check that it doesn't exist...I'm in the clear.
An example? I recently misread a sign as we drove past a pet grooming store. The error? I misread ペット ベル (Pet Belle) as ペット ヘル (Pet Hell). You look at it and tell me it wasn't an honest (yet hilarious) mistake?

I'm still laughing.