So... what else?

I Got Some Good Advice

2012-01-30T20:44:00.001-06:00

I wrote in to get some advice from Hobo Siren recently. Today she answered my question with an amazing video blog that you can see here. Here's a screenshot of her:

Wait, that's not the best shot. This is better:

Like how straight her teeth are? Anyway, my question was:

Dear Hobo Siren,

There is a woman I see occasionally because she is a substitute teacher like I am. I have known her for years but I don't remember her name. In my head I call her "Wet Head" because her hair is dripping wet when she comes to school in the morning. Seriously, it's like she stuck her head in a bucket right before she walked in the doors. Is there any way I can tactfully ask her her name after all this time without it coming across as totally insulting?

Sincerely,
Forgetful

She gave me some great advice. First of all this:

Coming to Hobo Siren with my query was half the battle. She had a few different options for me to solve my problem, and she reassured me that not remembering Wet Head's name is not my fault. I can't be expected to remember the stupid name of every person I work with for five years, now can I?

No. I can't.

Like I said, she gave me a few different methods, and was helpful enough to tell me which methods probably wouldn't work. That's a real time-saver.

She was even kind enough to act out the scenarios I might use to tactfully find out Wet Head's actual name using real names so as to make the scenarios even more realistic.

Fool proof! Now I don't have to hide behind doors and sneak through hallways when I see the tell-tale trail of drips indicating that Wet-Head is in the building! I have options!* Thanks, Hobo Siren!

*(I'm just going to call her Jessica)

Kira in the Car

2012-01-29T10:17:00.003-06:00

"Would you still drink milk

if it was squeezed from the cow's eyeballs?"

Movie Review

2012-01-27T09:37:00.003-06:00

A few of my lady-friends and I went to see the American version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo last night. Well, it wasn't last NIGHT, it was 5:00 in the afternoon, but the movie takes place in what seems like real-time so we were there for a LONG time. (It's a long movie). If you haven't seen the movies or read the books, you might want to skip this post. You won't know what I'm talking about and then you'll get frustrated and think to yourself, "What in the hell is she talking about? Doesn't she know I don't CARE about this stuff?" and then you'll stop reading this blog. We don't want that to happen.

I saw the Swedish version of all three of the movies made from the Millenium Trilogy. I loved the Swedish version because I thought Noomi Rapace did a fantastic job as Lisbeth Salandar.

Swedish Lisbeth

The only problem with her was that she wasn't waifish enough. The American Lisbeth, played by Rooney Mara was very waifish. She did a good job and was a very convincing Lisbeth, but why did she have blond eyebrows? Why?

American Lisbeth

Nobody looks good with blond eyebrows.

I liked that the American version was very detailed, as was the book, but it didn't follow the book as well as the Swedish version. (Harriet was supposed to be in Australia, not London!) And was Hans-Erik Wennerstrom killed in the books? We couldn't remember but we didn't think he was. The American Martin was very good. Robin Wright as Erika was a good choice. When we first saw her one of my lady-friends said, "She looks ROUGH!" but Erika is supposed to be in her fifties and look like she's in her fifties, and although Robin Wright probably is in her fifties, being an American actress, she looks like she's in her thirties, but for this movie she actually looked like a beautiful woman in her fifties. Oh, never mind, I just looked her up on IMDB and she's only 45. I guess living with Sean Penn will do that to a girl.

What I didn't like, well, no, I guess I can't say I didn't like anything about it, but what made me kind of say, "wha?" was the fact that the little northern island where Mikael goes to write about the Vangers is supposed to be freezing, freezing, arctic cold and they tried to convey that by shivering and bundling up, but right behind the people acting their asses off was a big lake that was obviously NOT frozen. They did that in the Swedish version too. Don't their lakes freeze? Because here in Minnesota people are out driving cars on lakes. Come on, Hollywood. I also was a uncomfortable with the graphic rape scene, but I suppose that's the point of the scene anyway, isn't it? It is integral to all three stories in the trilogy, so we have to know the details of it, don't we? Yes. But we don't like to see detailed rapes, do we? No, we don't.

Oh, and Mikael was supposed to go to a cushy Swedish prison for 18 months and THEN go live with the Vangers, but in the American version, he never went to prison. Why didn't he go to prison? They made a big deal about him getting convicted of libel but then he didn't go to prison. The whole story was wrapped up inside of one year. Not so, Hollywood. It is supposed to take a long time for Mikael to get revenge on Wennerstrom. Then the revenge is sweeter, isn't it? Yes, it is.

The American version didn't even really show the dragon tattoo on Lisbeth's back. Of course, we got glimpses of it, but it was never really the focus.

Oh, you know what I thought was curious? The actors spoke English throughout the movie but with a sort of Swedish accent, but all the signs and writing (except for what we, the audience, were supposed to read) was in Swedish. I kind of liked that.

The end of the American version kind of drags on. The screen went black between scenes and I kept expecting the credits to appear, but then there was more movie, and then more movie, and then a little more movie. I thought they were setting up the big reveal that Harriet really was in Australia, but they never did.

For the most part I liked the movie. Not as much as the Swedish version, but I thought it was very good.

I Got Mail

2012-01-26T14:06:00.000-06:00

I got the mail today and I saw an envelope from Kady. Man, I really love getting mail from Kady, but this one wasn't a postcard, it was in an envelope! What was it?! Open it! Open it! So I opened it and it was a holiday style photo-card of Kady and Summer:

I absolutely love every single thing about this card. I love that they had a professional photo taken of the two of them in their man's-work clothing. I love that they have featured some of their tools in the picture. I love that they both have classic professional-portrait looks on their faces. Look closer:

Look even closer:

Summer is looking off in the distance while sitting in an obviously uncomfortable and unnatural position. Kady looks pleasantly lobotomized. I love their gloves. I love Summer's knee pads. I love that the card is signed, "SL-Serc Ho's, Kady and Summer" At first I thought SL Serc Ho's was some kind of French greeting, but then I read Kady's hat and I am making the assumption that SL Serco is their company. I love that Kady kept this to herself and didn't blog about it as soon as she saw how hilarious the picture is. I love that it was a total surprise. I love that as soon as Mitch saw it the first thing he said was, "Wow, they have a really nice GPS."

Thank you, Kady and Summer. You totally made my day!

Chicken Fights

2012-01-25T06:57:00.000-06:00

The other night Mitch and I were at the hockey rink for one of Kira's games. We were waiting for her to come out of the locker room and he was remembering an out-of-town tournament a few years ago that I didn't go to.

At out-of town tournaments all the families get rooms at the same hotel, usually one with a pool and if possible, a waterslide. The kids go nuts in the pool and the parents (some of them, anyway) party. Sometimes things get pretty wild.

On the trip Mitch was talking about, the one I didn't go to, he said that late one night one of the dads came and got him out of his room to participate in chicken fights in the pool with the other parents. Mitch said he and his partner didn't win. At this point I was feeling a little huffy. He was having chicken fights in a pool with some drunk mom on his shoulders and he never told me about it? What? Isn't this something a guy should mention to his WIFE? I snottily said, "Oh yeah, who was your partner?"

He said, "Kyle."

Oh. It was all dads. And after the chicken fight tournament they had waterslide speed trials.

Kira in the Car

2012-01-22T09:31:00.000-06:00

"I bet if people smoked slide whistles instead of cigarettes
it would be a much louder world."

Bonus KITC!: "If I had a baby and it had cancer I'd name it Cancy."

My New Obsession

2012-01-21T12:17:00.002-06:00

We got a new channel on tv. It's MeTV: Memorable Entertainment Television. They play old shows and sitcoms and I can not stop watching it. Whenever I'm not watching it I think, "I wonder what's on MeTV right now?" and then I go and check. My favorites are The Rifleman, The Dick Van Dyke show, Mary Tyler Moore, The Twilight Zone and I Love Lucy. I'll also watch anything else too. I'm not picky.

Yesterday I was watching My Three Sons and it was the one where Katy wanted Ernie and Chip to show her teenage cousins around town but they didn't want to be stuck with a couple of "clunky girls" so they said no.

But they eventually relented and long story short: Chip learned a valuable lesson about STDs. Uncle Charlie sat him down and told him about the scorching case of the clap he got in WWII and they all had a good laugh. Just kidding. They haven't covered the topic of STDs on My Three Sons. But they should.

My absolute favorite by far is The Rifleman.

I never heard of it before MeTV and I started watching it because of the crazy show opener. Now I'm totally wrapped up with Lucas McCain and his young son Mark and all the people in North Fork. I love how enormous Chuck Connors is, how adorable his son is, and you would not believe how many lessons I've learned! You can pretty much solve any problem you have with a rifle.

I'm actually learning all kinds of things from MeTV. For example, from the show Cannon I learned that it doesn't matter if you are tipping the scales at around 350, you can still knock out a gun-wielding bad guy with a well-placed karate chop.

"These hands are lethal weapons."

From Mary Tyler Moore I've learned two things: Don't be afraid to wear a little more orange, and Rhoda is a fatass.

"creak creak creak" ~ Rhoda's stool

From I Love Lucy I have learned that Latin men are tyrannical hot heads and Ethel is a fatass.

"Maybe it's time to move to the women's shelter? What do you think, Chubby?"

From Perry Mason I learned that court is booooooooorrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnggggggggg.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz..........

And finally, the person in charge of wardrobe for Star Trek was mentally ill.

Gotta go, Kojak's on!

Kira in the Car

2012-01-20T09:05:00.000-06:00

"I bet a blanket made out of kittens would be

the warmest blanket in the world."

Blacked Out

2012-01-18T13:16:00.002-06:00

As you might know from previous things I have written on this blog, I strongly suspect that through some kind of black magic, Mitch is actually about 100 years old because most of his cultural references are from the 40s and 50s. The other night during dinner I was dishing up some peas for Kira and our conversation went like this:

Me: good?
Kira: good.
Me: more?
Kira: more.
(give her another scoop)
Me: good?
Kira: good.
Me: more?
Kira: more.
(another scoop)
Me: good?
Kira: good.
Me: enough?
Kira: enough.

And then Mitch said, "You two just acted out a scene from Chilly Willy the penguin." I never watched Chilly Willy because I suspect it was broadcast about seventy years ago and I'm only 41. So this morning I thought about it and wanted to see when it was made so I could give him a hard time about it, and I loaded up good old Google and saw this:

What? What's going on? Then I went to Wikipedia and saw this:

Holy crap. How am I going to find out about Chilly Willy??? I need evidence to back up my continued harassment of my husband! Come ON, internet! Help a girl out! Then I thought, "Oh well." and heard on the radio that winter has finally descended upon us and we are going to have very cold weather this week so I thought, "I should order some firewood!" so I went to Craig's List and saw this:

Now things were starting to get serious. Because of this internet problem, I could potentially become very cold and much stupider. I had to learn what was going on.

I listened to a story about it on NPR and learned what it is all about. The movie and music industries want a law passed to prevent piracy of their intellectual property. Because gall-dangit, if you watch the movie Chipwrecked illegally on Youtube from a guy who filmed it in the theater and then posted it in ten minute chunks on Youtube for no apparent reason other than the love of Alvin and his brothers, then you should probably be in jail, along with the guy who covertly pirated the movie, and the people on Youtube who let it be posted. If you want to learn about Chilly Willy the penguin and maybe watch a video of it so you can more thoroughly make fun of your husband; well, you better make sure that that's a legally bought and paid-for copy you are watching OR ELSE! If the piracy law was in effect I would probably be considered a pirate because I cut and pasted the above images! If I can't lift images off the internet how am I supposed to write about dickies, or animal hybrids, or Jewish frogs?

Nevermind that I've had to re-buy Sweet's Ballroom Blitz every time it comes out on a new medium and renders my copies obsolete. Nevermind that we are on our third copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone DVD because it gets watched so much and wears out. I, along with everyone else, pay for the movies and music we like over and over. So now because of the internet the playing field is leveling out and the movie and music industries have lobbyists to do their whining for them. Don't let the congress limit our access to information over the internet. It's none of their business. Write to your congressman and let them know you don't want internet censorship.

And btw, does anyone out there have any info on Chilly Willy for me?

Look What I Touched Today!

2012-01-16T22:08:00.000-06:00

Kira and I went to the zoo and one of the zookeepers saw me look in a tank FULL of hissing cockroaches and say, "Oh Gross!" so she went back and got one out to educate me on how wonderful they are. They're not all that great. I touched its shell just to get the lady to leave me alone.

Happy 800th Post!

2012-01-15T10:48:00.000-06:00

Hey, guess what? This is my 800th post! That's pretty exciting! Since I started writing this silly blog three years ago I have written 800 posts, gotten 80 followers, got a troll, got an award and had over 98,000 hits! I don't really have anything exciting in mind for this landmark post so it's just going to be a re-run. I was looking back on some of the posts and I found this one that I forgot about from 2009 and it made me laugh. If I wouldn't have written it down, I would have forgot it even happened.

Tonight on the way to hockey practice, Sam was telling Kira and I about how he thinks Dwight from The Office is so funny when he prefaces things his says with "Question:..." or "Fact:..." Kira caught on to it and would not stop. Every utterance (and there were many) she had was prefaced. Here is just a short sample of her rambling:

Kira - "Fact: It is now 6:30. Question: Sam, what time does your practice start?"
Sam- "6:35"
Kira - "Fact: You are going to be late."
Sam - "Kira, I was kidding, it's not til 7:00. And would you stop doing that, it's getting annoying."
Kira - "Opinion: it was not very nice of you to lie to me. Threat: I am going to punch you in the face."

(merciful silence, driving along, eventually driving past the clinic)

Kira - "Fact: I've been there before. Fact: I choked on a lollipop that the doctor gave me. Fact: it hurt a lot. Fact: you had to give me a popsicle when we got home to make my throat feel better."

This went on and on for about an hour until she eventually said, "Fact: I'm getting very tired of talking like this but I don't think I can stop."

And she hasn't.

That one really should be labeled as a Kira in the Car post, but it wasn't. I'll do it now.

MY BACK!!!

2012-01-14T10:39:00.003-06:00

I used to think people that complained about back problems were weenies. I'm not talking about people who had spinal injuries or anything, just the people who would say, "I can't help you move because of I have back problems." and things like that. So obviously faking, right? But I get it now. I was way out of line being so judgemental. And I've got nothing major to complain about. I've had a muscle spasm in what I think must be my lower trapezius muscle, on and off for about two weeks now.

At its worst it made me want to cry and the only relief I could get was by stretching my top half down over my bottom half and hugging my legs. I'm not flexible, you guys. That is not a comfortable (or attractive) position for me to be in at all. Kills the hammies but is the only relief for the back.

At its best the clenching stops but then I'm so sore all over my whole back from the muscular trauma of having one part literally spaz out. I would not help anyone move right now. In fact if you asked me to help you move, I would laugh in your face and say, "UMMMMMM!!!! WHAT ABOUT MY BACK???" because your back is like the load-bearing wall in your house. You know what happens if you knock down the load-bearing wall to open the place up a bit and put in an island that really ties the room together? The roof falls in. Totally ruins the Feng Shui. So right now my metaphorical roof is balanced precariously and the slightest dusting of metaphorical snow could collapse my metaphorical world. And you want me to help you to move. Are you trying to kill me? What about my Feng Shui? WHAT ABOUT MY FENG SHUI???!!!

Book Club

2012-01-13T07:01:00.003-06:00

It was book club night last night. We met at a quiet little coffee shop where there were several young college types working on laptops. We tried not to be too loud and disrupting and to act as mature as we look, but it didn't last long. We dutifully discussed the book and picked a new book and then things kind of fell apart. One of the ladies told us that she was going to Pampered Chef-like party, but instead of selling kitchen utensils, they sell sex toys. Some of the ladies said they would be too embarrassed to actually buy anything and one of the ladies said that she went to one of those parties long ago and bought some strawberry-flavored edible body gel, but never used it and forgot about it until she was cleaning one day and found it. She opened it and it had apparently gone bad. She said it smelled like Robitussin. She didn't want to just throw it away (that shit's expensive!) so she thought she could still make some use of it and kept it in case her husband was ever feeling amorous but also had a bit of a cough. Two birds, you know?

Then someone noticed a nearby table of three young women who looked like they were in the midst of a Bible study. They all had Bibles, anyway. We know they were Bibles because one of the ladies craned her neck to look and then turned back and whispered, "They aren't dictionaries, I'm pretty sure they are Bibles." because if it's not a Bible study, its probably a dictionary study, right? Always a master of segue and conversation, I said (quietly), "Speaking of Bible study and sex toys, have any of you ever seen the Baby Jesus Butt Plug?

which the second after I said it I thought might be a show-stopper and would cause the our book-club meeting to be abbreviated, but it wasn't! I love these ladies! Unfortunately it did lead to a (quiet) discussion about butt plugs and how they could possibly be sex toys. We don't see the appeal. Hear that, kinky men out there? No matter what your enthusiastic lady-friend says, nobody likes butt plugs.

I learn a lot at book club.

Movie Review

2012-01-09T09:30:00.000-06:00

I saw three movies this past weekend: We Bought a Zoo, Limitless, and Source Code. The kids and I went to see We Bought A Zoo together on Friday mostly as an excuse to eat candy. The movie was a formulaic bawl-fest. Dead mom, sad kids, grieving husband, financial devastation etc etc. Matt Damon is in it so that makes up for a lot, and the little girl that plays his daughter is A DOR A BLE; but still. I don't go to movies to cry.

Oh yeah, the tiger dies too.

Speaking of bawl-fests, while we were there we saw previews for that Tom Hanks movie that is coming out later this month, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, about the wonderful father who dies in the twin towers on 911 and his family is devastated and traumatized. FUN! I cried during the preview. Why do they make movies like that?

Sam and I watched Limitless on Saturday night.

It's about a loser writer who takes a pill and is able to access all of his brain power. His thoughts and memories are suddenly organized and easy to access and he thinks clearly and he is brilliant. Wouldn't that be great? I often think that I would be an uber-genius if only I could organize my thoughts better. I feel like everything I ever learned is somewhere there in my brain but it's like a file cabinet and all the individual nuggets of knowledge are just randomly stuffed into the drawers instead of organized into a neat filing system. Anyway, problems arise when he discovers that the drug is illicit and in demand from some shady characters, and also that people who go off of it die. Then the plot kind of spun out and I don't really know what happened (because I was lying on the couch and I might have fallen asleep) until the end when he has reverse engineered the drug and fixed the quirks and was running for senate. The end seemed a little too neat and happy and all that it taught me was that illicit drugs may cause you some problems in the beginning, but in the long run make your life way better, and that I need to try some.

Last night Mitch and I watched Source Code.

That was the best movie of the weekend. Jake Gyllenhall is an air force pilot on a special mission for a program called Source Code where they are able to put a soldier in the body of a person in the recent past to find clues to a crime. Very Quantum Leap-y. In this case, Jake gets put on to a train that will soon blow up from a terrorist attack and his mission is to find the bomb and the bomber. He can't prevent the bombing, but he can find and identify the bomber who they suspect will do another bombing in downtown Chicago. He has to relive the eight minutes prior to the train bombing over and over and look for the bomber. I am not going to tell you what happens because I don't want to spoil it. But I will tell you this: The train they are on is really cool. It's big and roomy (double decker) and it has a Dunkin' Donuts shop RIGHT ON THE TRAIN. I recommend that you see this movie, it was really good.

Prison is all the rage

2012-01-06T16:15:00.001-06:00

I had my first sub job of the year this week. I worked in a third grade room for three days. The teacher had a death in the family early Tuesday morning so she called in to the automated system which called a different sub for Tuesday. That sub apparently didn't want to come back because I was offered the rest of the week. I like multiple-day jobs and I even like when I have to do all the plans. It's kind of crazy the first day, but after that it is smooth sailing. And I love third graders.

Today they had Friday Fun Time in the afternoon so a group of boys got out the geometric blocks and built a large and intricate prison. They were very proud of it. They had me come over and they showed me where the cells were located in the sturdily built section with no windows, and then there was a corridor going to the fenced-in yard that had a basketball court and a track. I asked why they decided that it was a prison and they all just looked at me and shrugged like, "why not?" Hear that, Playmobil? Oh, nevermind, I see you already know:

The kids are dying to play prison! I told them that I used to work at the jail. They wanted to know all about it so I told them some prison vocabulary words like "shiv," "shank," "keister" and "celly;" I also told them how to start a fire with pilfered paperclip and an electrical outlet; and they loved learning about toilet wine! (Just kidding. I didn't tell them what keister means.)

We also learned about our solar system this week. I told them the mnemonic for remembering the planets, My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas. I had kids coming up to me all week screaming that sentence at me because I told them I'd give them a thank-you slip if they could remember it. It was a very fun three days. I'm sad it's over. I'm going to miss those crazy little nutjobs.

Happy 2012!

2012-01-01T09:25:00.000-06:00

Happy New Year! I hope you had a fun New Year's Eve. Mitch and the kids and I went to Kira's hockey game, then went out to dinner at the Duluth Grill which was featured on that show Diners, Drive-ins and Dives and I had a sandwich that was featured on the show - the wild rice patty melt. It was okay if you are in love with Italian sausage. I'm not really in love with Italian sausage. But it was fun to be out with the fam. We talked about how we used to fool the kids and tell them it was midnight at about 9:00 every NYE, and they never figured it out. Even if they were in a room made of clocks they would still believe it was midnight. "Wow! It's so late and I'm not even tired!"

Then we got home around 9:30 and watched a bit of Dick Clark's Rockin' New Year's Eve. We all shuddered at the thought of being in Time's Square on NYE. We're not crowd people. Then Mitch fell asleep in his chair and I fell asleep on the couch and the kids watched TV and played on their iPods. WILD!
We went to bed at about 12:03.

So how was your 2011? Mine had its highlights and its lowlights. I got to go to Washington DC two times. Once with my kids and once with my sisters. That, of course, meant two trips to Mount Vernon which was awesome. I said something to Mitch about feeling like a time traveler when I go there and under his breath he said, "More like a time stalker." Jealous much? I also got to see New York City. That was pretty cool. Unfortunately 2011 was also the year I lost my last grandparent and had a pretty serious bout of depression. Neither one of those things was very fun at all.

Revisiting last year's Resolutions almost brought on a new bout of depression, but mostly just made me laugh at myself (not with myself). Did I lose 26 pounds? No, but I did lose and keep off about 10 pounds (until December.) Did I work out 350 times? HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! No. I stopped keeping track around April and was not anywhere on track for the 350 workout goal. Did I stop picking my split ends? No. Did I save 10% of our income into an IRA? No. Did I travel somewhere cool? YES! Mount Vernon! New York City! Washington D.C! So 1 out of 5. Not too impressive.

This year I'm not making resolutions that can be quantified. I'm going to be more positive. I'm going to be more thankful. That's it. How about you? How was your year? What are your resolutions?

Baking LIVE!

2011-12-28T14:17:00.000-06:00

Today Kira and I are making apple pie cookies.

It's an idea I had because one problem I have with all apple pies is too much fruit/not enough crust. So now I've cut the fruit to crust ratio by an alarming rate so they are basically crust cookies with a tiny taste of apple. Like I said, it was my idea, but when I googled it I see someone else has already done it. That's where I got the picture. Mine aren't done yet but I thought you should see a "this is how they should look" picture before you see mine. I don't know how they are going to turn out. I'm not following a recipe which would be fine if I understood baking at all, but come on, it was a pre-made crust and I just doused the apples with sugar and cinnamon. It's not brain surgery. Then I egg-washed the cookies after they were assembled and sprinkled them with more sugar. The first pan is cooking right now and then we will test them to see what they need. I'm thinking maybe on the next batch we will coat the crust with cinnamon/sugar before we put the tiny bit of apple in the middle. I'm baking them at 350 but they are smelling kind of burny. I'll turn it down a bit.

So, while we're waiting what should we talk about?

My tree is still up. I hope Sam realizes that my leaving it up just because he wants it up for his birthday is an enormous gesture of love.

Kira is turning nocturnal. She cannot get up in the morning and she cannot fall asleep at night. Last night she was up until midnight and didn't get out of bed today until 10:30.

I think this might be my favorite week of the year. It's a grown up year, no more surprises. I like all the year-end wrap-ups except for the list of people who died. I don't like January because it's starting all over again with a raw, unseasoned year. Ugh. Didn't we just do this? And then everyone is compelled to make it a great year with resolutions and empty promises about making so many self-improvements. The last week of December you know how unrealistic those resolutions were and you are comfortable with the person you really are- the person who is okay with eating half a box of Cheez-its for lunch, or buying pants that actually fit instead of pants that you wish you fit into- and that is alright! Come January first you will become delusional again and set some unreachable goals with ideas about being in the "best shape of your life" next December! It's not going to happen. Last year I told myself I was going to work out 350 times in 2011. That leaves fourteen days of NOT working out. That was CRAZY. It's like I didn't even know myself, and after living with me for forty years I should have known myself better. I was totally on track for about two weeks, but then I saw how stupid it was and didn't want to give up completely so I changed it to 300 workouts in 2011. I stayed on track for about two months. Then I stopped keeping track. I don't know how much I worked out but I would guess it was about 150 to 175 times for the whole year. Disappointing when you consider the goal, but not too shabby if I would have not made such a ridiculous resolution. This year my resolutions are to like myself and be happy and live in the moment blah blah blah. A bunch of stuff that can't be quantified so there will be no failure.

Oh, the timer went off! I better check my cookies... Okay, I set the oven for 15 minutes and I just checked them and they don't look quite golden brown on the top yet so I'll leave them in for 5 more minutes.

Okay, I left them in for a total of 25 minutes. This is what they look like:

Not bad. Not quite as flaky as the picture from the website, but they look good and they smell amazing. Okay, now I'll try one. Delicious. VERY crusty without the overwhelming fruitiness of a pie. I love them!

Let's see how Kira likes them:

She likes them.

We have another crust so she is going to make turnovers. We'll have the turnovers for dessert tonight. Sam and Mitch don't have to know about the six cookies Kira and I just inhaled.

Some post-holiday questions:

2011-12-27T09:03:00.000-06:00

How is it that a Christmas tree that I put up in early December and think is beautiful and majestic, magically turns into a tacky-piece-of-plastic-that's-dropping-an-impossible-amount-of-fake-needles-and-taking-up-a-lot-of-room sometime in the wee hours of Christmas morning? Does that make me a Boxing Day Grinch? Probably. But how efficient would it be to just put all that crap away when your are throwing out all the wrapping paper? I usually take it down on December 26 but yesterday Sam said he wanted it up for his birthday (Charlie Brown's birthday is five days after Christmas). I don't know if I can wait that long. How long does your tree stay up?

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-25T11:02:00.000-06:00

Merry Christmas! Here's a post from Christmas past:

It's been so great this month to get all the cards and letters from people I generally don't stay in touch with well enough. But I'm sad to say I only got a few Christmas Letters, the ones where people summarize the entire year in a one page letter. I love those letters, but one time I got one from a friend I have since lost touch with, in which she confessed to an "almost" affair she had with a co-worker.

Awkward!

But the more I thought about it the more I like the idea of an annual Christmas confessional/too-much-information letter. I think I could easily tell enough about myself and my family to keep people from looking me in the eye until at least Thanksgiving, the hard part is paring it down to a single page. I'd have to pick a theme like "lies I've told this year" or "bathroom incidents." But even that might be a little long considering the millions of lies I've told, and that 2009 is the year I learned that it's very important to take bathroom breaks at work when I can, and not to try to hold it too long. (lesson learned the hard way)

That all sounds too hard when I really just want to wish you all a fantastic Christmas and New Year. I'm happy to say that my biggest problem these days is the ever-present Chex Mix crumbs in my bra (itchy). I hope Chex Mix in your bra (or something of equal seriousness) is the biggest problem you encounter in 2010. I'll work on my theme for next year's letter. You work on yours too.

I should run the world

2011-12-22T07:01:00.000-06:00

When Sam was in eighth grade, I got an email from a teacher saying that she had been having some problems with him blurting out what he thought were funny jibes in the middle of class. He was trying his hand at being a class clown. I told him that if I ever heard anything like that from a teacher again, I would go with him to every class, every day and monitor his behavior until I was sure he had adjusted his attitude about school, teachers and what he was there to do. I told him it would probably take a couple weeks. He was terrified I would do it, and I would have. (I was actually kind of looking forward to it. I love school.) I didn't have to yell, or punish. I just had to let him know in a way that he understood that I valued his education and it was my job as his parent to make sure he took full advantage of his opportunities. We've never had another problem. He takes school seriously now and is a successful student. I'm not delusional enough to think I enlightened him to the importance of soaking up as much education as he could, I know it was because he was worried about his social status with his friends. That's why he was acting out in the first place, to be "cool." He apparently doesn't think that having his mom come to school with him and nag him all day every day is very cool so he adjusted his behavior. As a result of his mortal fear of humiliation, he has come to realize that he learns more with his mouth shut than with it open. Mission accomplished!

Of course, I am totally influenced to be a hard ass on this subject because I'm a substitute. I see especially obnoxious behavior from students every day, and I have a special apprecation for parents who nip obnoxiousness in the bud. But parents can't do anything about it if they don't know what's going on. I regularly call parents when I have an especially difficult behavior problem with a student. When kids have a sub they sometimes have the attitude that they will never have to see this lady again in their lives so anything goes. They are usually pretty surprised when I produce a class list with parent names and phone numbers and ask the sixth grader to take five minutes out of their lunch break to call mom and explain why they thought it was so funny to yell out, "Never mind what my name is, you're not the boss of me!" while I was taking attendance. Usually when I call parents I get a very positive response and when I go back to that classroom, I have very few problems. But sometimes I reach a parents that is at their wit's end. They don't know what to do. They say, "You should see how she acts at home!" What is a teacher supposed to do with that?

This is what I think they should do. I think that if your child's behavior is something a teacher finds she is spending too much time dealing with, they should be removed from the class. Why should a teacher have to deal with your obnoxious kid? A teacher's job is to teach a large number of students at one time. It's efficient and cost effective and if there weren't any behavior problems, it would work wonderfully. Unfortunately I find I am spending more and more time dealing with the rotten behavior of a small percent, while the majority of students sit there and wait. Why should teachers have to spend so much time on kids who don't want to be at school anyway? Sure, they NEED to be at school, they NEED an education, but they don't know that. They're too young. They don't have the perspective to see what a wonderful opportunity they have. All they know is that they are being "forced" to do something they think they are supposed to hate, against their will, and they will fight it any way they can. It's the only way to express any power over their situation. Schools are perpetuating that view by tolerating more and more outrageous behavior.

My solution? KICK 'EM OUT! Sure it's the law that students stay in school until they are sixteen but do you now how many problems a fifteen-year-old that doesn't have any rules at home and thinks he's being oppressed can cause? Do you know how much damage just one kid can do? It's a lot. Why do we put up with it? If they did that at a job they'd be fired. If they acted that way while patronizing a business they would escorted out. When I ask the kids who cause me problems what would happen if they talked that way to their mom, many of them get a glazed look on their face and say something along the lines of, "I don't talk that way to my mom. She'd kill me." When I ask the kids causing problems why they bothered to come to school that day they look at me like I'm stupid. "We HAVE to come to school!" When I tell the high school kid walking around disrupting the class after I have repeatedly asked him to sit down and do his work, that if he doesn't participate and do what he is supposed to do, I will mark him absent (my most effective behavior modification tool for the older grades) they freak out. They tell me that I can't do that because if they are physically present, they are working toward a passing grade and then they spend their time berating me for making such an empty threat. They are counting the days until graduation and assume that if they show up and do a bare minimum amount of academic work, no matter how many problems they cause, no matter how much stress they put on other students and their teachers, not to mention the physical damage many of them do to the school; they will graduate and get their diploma. Why do they think that? Because they see people do it every year. They brag about how little effort they put into their classes. I had one freshman proudly show me his report card last report-card day. I was baffled when I saw that he was getting a .85 grade point average. Why would he show that to me? Why wasn't he embarrassed? Why did he think it was so funny?

Of course, if we expelled kids for behavior problems, we'd have a lot of obnoxious minors running around during school/work hours causing problems AND they wouldn't even have a chance to get some education by osmosis. Okay, how about this? If your child gets removed from class for a behavior issue, he will not be allowed back in until he has a meeting with his parents, teachers and school administrator, and arrangements are made for that student to have a behavior aide with him at all times until it is agreed upon between the student, parents and teachers that a behavior aide is no longer needed. The parents would be responsible for paying the aide's salary. If they can't afford it, they or the kid could work off the cost by volunteering at the school. Sure, being a freshman at a new school and having a babysitter with you at all times would be embarrassing, but so what? The aides would be invaluable to the staff and other students, and I would guess that general behavior problems would virtually stop after two or three kids were seen sulking through the halls with their aides.

Charlie Brown

2011-12-20T17:42:00.001-06:00

We tease poor Sam for living a Charlie Brown life. He's a nice boy, but he can't catch a break. Today on the way home from school we were talking about the Mayan Calendar and the supposed end of the world next year. If you know Sam at all, you know he LIVES to get his driver's license. He has thought about it constantly since he was about two years old. He dreams of what kind of car he will drive, how cool he will look, and having freedom and mobility. He turns 16 on December 30, 2012. He is planning on getting his license as soon as humanly possible after that date.

Unfortunately for Sam, the world will be ending nine days before his 16th birthday, so, too bad for you, Charlie Brown.

Mitchisms

2011-12-19T17:48:00.000-06:00

I love this feature on this blog and this blog so much that I am making it a feature here too. Unfortunately for Mitch, he's the one I live with so it's his 'isms' that will be featured. I can't help what he says, I just write them down as they come.

"I bet David Caruso's skin feels like soft, soft sandpaper."

"...he was taking the numbers down on an Etch-A-Sketch and I thought, 'Oh my god! He's never going to be able to keep up!"

"Everyone knows the three things old people like to do the most is eat prunes, poop, and push their First Alert buttons"

"If you could smell your hand, you'd want people to smell it. It smells weird."

Kira: Did you know I can move a four ton ball?
Mitch: I could move a four ton ball. It's a ball.

Biztown

2011-12-16T07:45:00.000-06:00

I went on a field trip with Kira's class yesterday to Junior Achievement's Biztown. It is a place where classes who have been studying basic economics can go and pretend to have their own town with their own economy for a day. The building was set up like a little downtown with 14 businesses. Each business got a loan from the bank and had the day to run the place and try to be successful enough to pay off their loan. It was so adorable, I almost died. I was the adult volunteer assigned to the newspaper, the Biztown Buzz. We had a CEO, a CFO, some ad executives, some reporters, some photographers, and an editor. They started the day with a big meeting in the town square:

Here they outlined what the businesses were and what each business would be doing. There was a grocery store, a cafe, a bank, two stores, a post office, town hall, a wellness center, a radio station and a construction company, to name a few. They were all so adorable. The postal workers wore post office uniform shirts and had big sacs and delivered letters that the kids wrote a few weeks ago to each other. The construction workers had vests and hardhats and built a bench in the town square. The adorable mayor walked around town in his little tie, glad-handing all day, and one of the kids even brought a briefcase.

In our business we had to run the paper, and at the end of the day we actually produced a town paper. We had to write up the paper, sell ads, take pictures, and the CEO and CFO had to deal with payroll and paying bills. Because we had a fantastic editor, our paper was a success, although at the end of the day we discovered we hadn't made enough to pay off the loan. Oh well, newspapers are dying all over the place. Everyone knows that. Just add Biztown Buzz to the list.

What did I learn? I learned that even though eleven-year-olds can run around and look really busy and impressive, DON'T LET THEM RUN YOUR BUSINESS. They will drive it into the ground. At one point I had to retrieve our CFO from hula hooping in the town square so she could make her bank deposits. And the CEO was way more concerned about sending candy grams to her pals than signing paychecks.

Some Important Milestones

2011-12-13T18:19:00.000-06:00

Two things have happened in the last few days and I feel like because of them I'm starting an important new chapter in my life. First of all, I have gotten 90,000 hits on this blog.

(OMG!!!!!!)

Of course, probably more than half of them are from people googling crazy things like "teens peeing" and "ativan shut up juice," but you know what? I'll take it. So thank you to everyone who comes to visit me at this blog every day or week or month or whatever. I'd keep writing even if I nobody ever read it but if that was the case it would probably be a bunch of craziness and someone would come across it sometime and declare that they've discovered a hidden genius! Just kidding. They'd just say I was nuts. I keep it sane for you, my people. Oh sure, I've reached out once or twice and let you in on what's really going on in my head, hoping that people would read it and say, "What? That's not crazy. I do that." But you didn't. You said I was weird. That's okay, I already knew that. But I don't need to advertise it, do I? So I will continue to keep it mostly sane. Anyway, like I say, I'd still write even if I had no readers, but I am really really glad I have readers. I love knowing people are coming here to see if there is anything new I have to say.

The other milestone is that I cleaned my oven for the first time since we moved into the house twelve years ago. It's an old 1970s Tappan and it's small. It looked so old and crappy when we moved in I thought it would break down so why bother with the cleaning? Is there a worse chore than cleaning an oven? I don't think there is. I almost cleaned it once three years ago but then I didn't. After about ten years the thought of cleaning it becomes absurd. Why would I do that? It's disgusting! So I'd made myself a mental flowchart which I turned into an actual flowchart:

See? It doesn't need to be cleaned more than every 12 years. Next time I clean it I will be 53 years old. I'm glad because it will take about 12 years for these Easy-Off chemical burns to heal.

A Declaration of Independence from my Bladder

2011-12-13T08:11:00.001-06:00

Dear Stupid,

Let's get a few things straight. For 41 years we've been doing what you want and I'm sick of it. I think you need to figure out that I run the show from now on. You were in charge for a lot of years and did a good job for the most part except for that phase in your teens when you would pride yourself on seeing how long you could hold it. It was a long time, but do you remember bladder infections? That was me crying out for help. Did you listen? No. You're an insensitive jerk. We worked well together for a really long time, and I can honestly say it was almost totally because of me. Sure, you got all the credit but we both know who was really keeping things under control behind the scenes. Did you appreciate that? No. You took me for granted. If we had a sign in the break room that said, ___ days since we've had an accident, it would have been in the thousands! (hundreds) But now I feel like we've grown apart and I don't like you anymore. I'm tired of playing a supporting role in your so-called life. If I could live without you, I would. I'd get a little apartment downtown and work at Starbucks and never talk to you again, but we both know I can't do that.

From now on we do what I want, when I want. You don't even get a vote. Capiche? I will get my way and if I don't, I will flood (pun intended) your brain with constant overwhelming thoughts about how bad you have to go, and if you try to ignore me or stifle me by doing the old squat-and-hold-your-breath move, I will embarrass the piss (pun intended) out of you, again.

I thought you knew the score but then you tried to take an innocent trip to Target to get some wrapping paper. Did you really think you could just whip in and whip out without making an obligatory stop at the bathroom? Forget it! I love that bathroom! Yeah, you tried to show your dominance by finding an empty aisle, doing the squat-move with some deep breaths and force me into submission, but it didn't work, did it? Previously, I would have caved under the pressure and just done what you wanted, but I finally had enough. I thought, "That's it, I'm not going to take it anymore! Why do we always have to do what you want? What about my needs?" and then I forced myself to expel approximately one tablespoon of urine. Enough to make your pants wet-ish but not enough to cause real embarrassment. It wasn't easy. I'm conditioned to not let that happen, but sometimes you've got to say enough is enough! Yeah, you've got a pretty good kegel, but it's not going to be sufficient anymore. That single tablespoon of urine was a symbolic shot over the bow. A warning. It was me finally casting off the shackles you've kept me in! Next time you try to hold it when I suggest we make a pit stop I am going to totally unload no matter how hard you try to stop me. God, I haven't done that in a long time. Remember back in Mrs. Nelson's first grade, when we had to go, but you thought we could hold it, and then when the class was lining up to take a bathroom break we couldn't hold it anymore? I really tried to hold it in. I really did. We were a team back then, but I honestly couldn't control it. I had to let it out until I was totally empty. I felt bad that it had to happen on a day you were wearing white tights, but what could I do? I was young.

Well I'm not young anymore. I feel like I've wasted my life doing nothing but holding in your disgusting urine for longer periods of time than any bladder should be expected to hold anyone's disgusting urine. I'm more than a digestive organ you know! Have you ever even bothered getting to know the real me? No! You haven't! What's my favorite color? What's my favorite movie? Did you know I'm a Republican and have been quietly putting up with your liberal bullshit for decades? Do you know anything about me? I have feelings, you know.

Well, from here on out we're living for me and for what I want. Think you can watch a movie from beginning to end anymore? Think again. You better get an aisle seat. Airplane bathrooms make you nauseous? Too bad. Better bring your barf bag in with you. And if you have any ideas about getting into another battle of wills with me just know this: your bowels are getting sick of your shit (pun intended) too and all I have to do is say the word and your life gets real bad real fast.

Sincerely yours,
The Bladder

The Krampus

2011-12-10T09:23:00.007-06:00

I just heard a story on the radio about a mythical Christmas creature called the Krampus. Why didn't anyone ever tell me about this??? I LOVE IT! The Krampus is a demon-like creature who plays the yin to Santa's yang and while Santa is giving presents to the kids on the nice list, "when the Krampus finds a particularly naughty child, it stuffs the child in its sack and carries the frightened thing away to its lair, presumably to devour for its Christmas dinner." (from Wikipedia)

Merry Christmas!

Do you know how much I would have loved to tell my kids that they better be good or the Krampus would come and kidnap them via giant sac and then take them to his stinky cave and eat them alive? That is what Christmas is all about! All I had in my parenting tool-belt was "Be good! Santa is watching! You might not get a present if you're naughty!" Kira was so naughty when she was little,

that the "Santa's-watching!" threat never worked on her. She didn't care. If Santa stiffed her, she would make Santa sorry he was ever born. If the Krampus was in the picture, I might have gotten better results. Oh well. It's too late for my kids. They would laugh if I told them about it now. But it's not too late for my nieces!

And the best part about telling them in disturbing detail about the Krampus is that in their waking hours they will be scared to death to be naughty, and because I'm not their mother, I won't have to deal with the inevitable night-terrors! Win-win! I can't wait to see their big eyes when I tell them all about listening carefully in the dead of night for the clip-clop of cloven hooves on Mom's new hardwood floors,

and that the only way to avoid being stolen and eaten by the Krampus is to sleep IN BETWEEN Mom and Dad every single night of the year.

Wow, this is so great that I might have to start teaching kindergarten again! I'll get this book for story time!

Sleep well, kids!

Book Club

2011-12-09T11:54:00.003-06:00

Hi. I'm teaching high school right now. Well, not really. It's my lunch break and I'm writing on the blog, so I'm not teaching anyone anything. I like this teacher. He seems to have his act together. The kids have been super.

I had book club last night and every time it's a book club day and it gets later and darker, I think to myself, "Oh geez, I don't want to go outside in the cold and drive and freeze my butt off, and park blah blah blah, lazy, lazy, lazy; but every month I do it and I am so glad I did because those ladies are so much fun.

Last night we talked about the book for a while (A Circus in Winter), and the general concensus was "eh." That took about ten minutes. Then we picked a new book (Undead and Unwed), and then we gabbed for about two hours on a variety of topics such as:

- when do our teenage sons start secretly looking at porn on their various electronic devices and what we should do about it and HOW GROSS IS THAT? (answers ranged from "ick, I would pretend I didn't know" to "I'd make him watch it with me and tell me if he thinks the actors' parents are proud of them."

- how some of our kids get bullied at school or are struggling with some pretty awful social situations and what we should do about it. (general concensus: take the low road and make the little fuckers hurting our little angels PAY.)

- if the show Game of Thrones is or is not about lesbians. (is not)

- don't buy boots from CheapUggs.com because apparently the little Chinese children who make them aren't very concerned about quality.

- a general inquiry into when in your life your eyebrow hairs and pubes stopped knowing that they aren't meant to grow long and luxurious, (after the first baby) and what happens when your surgeon sews your C-section scar crooked (long and luxurious pubes grow at a jaunty angle).

- what is anus bleaching, how did it get so stained anyway; and how terrible a job is that?

And my favorite quote from the whole night was

"I've always considered myself low-maintenance but after today I'm beginning to wonder."

That had me laughing all night. Then we picked our next meeting place and went home. I am refreshed for another month. Then today Dana, our leader, sent out an email that summed up the night with bullet points for the ladies who didn't make it. It was so funny I stole the idea for this post. Thanks, Dana! Thanks ladies! See you next month!

Quiz

2011-12-08T09:51:00.001-06:00

Which of the following are genuine Mitchisms?*

A. "Bugs Bunny is just Mel Blanc doing his impression of Jack Benny."

B. "Judging by their circular, I think I love Bed Bath and Beyond!"

C. Me: How much money would you have to be paid to kiss Drew Carey full on the lips with just the

tiiiiiiinist bit of tongue~

Mitch: (interrupting and not even taking one second to think about it) Thirty dollars.

D. Me: When we go to Bentleyville, can we hold hands?

Mitch: No.

E. "Bela Lugosi rarely steers us wrong, but he sure steered us wrong tonight."

* ǝʌoqɐ ǝɥʇ ɟo llɐ

Nutcracker

2011-12-05T08:07:00.002-06:00

The other day when we were putting up the Christmas decorations, Kira opened a bag and after a sharp, startled intake of breath she said, "Oh my god, that scared me." She was talking about the nutcracker she made in second grade.

"Cracking nuts with my mouth is my job. Do you find that disturbing?"

The thing is, I am positive I threw this in the garbage last year. How did it get into its own bag and get tucked away with all the decorations? I thought it was scary before, but now that I know it's haunted and has a mind of it's own, I'm terrified of it. Especially since Kira gave me a tour of what she was thinking when she created it.

Brace yourself.....

Here's a close up of his face. His mouth is off center and and his teeth are clenched because she says he's grunting. Some of his teeth are black because she says they are rotten. She tells me his skin is gray because "he's molting."

I asked her to tell me about his clothes, thinking she would tell me about his buttons, but she tells me that originally his shirt was yellow, like his sleeves, but is now mostly red because of "all the blood."

Here's a close-up of his dirty, gray, cottonball dreadlock.

Kira (at least I think it's Kira) has started moving him around and putting him places to startle me, like on my pillow,

or in the shower. When a girl is naked and vulnerable the last thing she wants to see when she opens the shower curtain is this:

Sweet Jesus!

I want to throw it away again, but I'm afraid it will come back and then I will go out of my mind with terror.

Here it is telling me that it will leave me alone if I give him my first born son. NOOOOOOOO!!!!!

Blog Tutorial

2011-12-03T15:05:00.005-06:00

Hi! How are you guys today? I've had a LOT of caffeine today! I just got back from the Hmong New Year celebration here in Duluth. I earned some continuing education credits for my teaching license by going to it and immersing myself in another culture for a few hours. I was the tallest person in the room by at least five or six inches. It was fun and they were super nice to me. My favorite part was a singing group of Hmong freshman at UMD who called themselves the "FreshHmong"

Anyhoo, I have some bloggy business to take care of because although I've had this blog for almost three years now, I've lately gotten some questions that lead me to believe some of my followers don't know all the neat things you can do on it.

First of all, you can always get back to the main page by simply clicking on the blog title at the very top of the page.

Did you just click on the picture of the title? Well that's not what I was talking about. The picture is only there to show you what the blog title looks like. You need to pay better attention.

The blogger bar at the top, above the blog title, has some features that you might like:

Starting at the far left there is a blank space for you to type in any query you want and blogger will look up everything related to that query on the blog. Try it now. Type in "Mitch" and you will see all posts featuring Mitch. See? Neat!

Next is the follow button. If you haven't clicked on that already, do it now. Cool huh? Don't you feel better now? Next is the Report Abuse button which you will (probably) never have to use for this blog. I don't abuse anyone. The next thing is the Next Blog button. That will take you to a random blogger blog that is somehow similar to mine.

On the right side there are spots where you can click to create your own blog or to sign in.

Underneath the blog title there are eight buttons.

Home is the homepage, the main page, the front page. It shows the very latest thing posted on the blog and then after that the next most recent post etc. etc.

If you click on Reading List you will see an exhaustive list of books I have read with a short review, linked to Amazon where if you are interested you can buy them yourself or read a better review than I wrote. The top entry is the latest book I read and it goes to the next most recent from there.

The Searches button is a list of crazy things that people have typed into to google and have been directed to my blog. I think they are funny.

Under Characters is a list (with pictures!) of the people I talk about on the blog. I should add more.

The Cartoons page features cartoons by Natalie Dee. She cracks me up.

The FAQ button is a page with frequently asked questions. Nobody asks me questions. I made the whole thing up. Actually, I asked people to ask me questions so I could make a FAQ page. I think because I had just learned that FAQ means "frequently asked questions." I was feeling pretty special that day. Some people were kind enough to humor me and sent me some questions by they are not by any stretch frequently asked.

The find me page features links to other places on the internet that you can find me. Click on any one of them and you will get to me. But you're already here with me now, so why would you do that? Are you obsessed with me or something? Just kidding. Friend me on Facebook.

The last button is a list of nicknames because I think they are funny.

If you go to any of these pages and panic and think to yourself, "OMG! How do I get back to the main page? What if she has posted something since I've been reading these FAQs or Cartoons?! I must get back!" then you just click on the blog title, or on the Home button and you will get back to the main page. See? It's not so hard!

Sometime I link to other pages or to previous posts in a post. When I do that you will be able to tell it is a link because it will be a different color like this. If you see that, click on it and I could bring you to someplace WONDERFUL!

After each post is a little box with info in it like this:

Starting at the top left this tells us that there have been three comments on this post. The little envelope thingy can be clicked on if you want to email this post to someone. The pencil is just for me. You don't usually see it. It is so I can edit the post if I want. Then there are some buttons. The M is for Gmail. Click on it if you want to gmail the post to someone. The B is for blogger. If you have a blogger blog and want to blog about this or post this post on your blog, that's what you click on. Next is a T for Twitter. Click on it if you want to tweet the post. And the last one is an F for Facebook. If you click on it you will create a link to the post on your Facebook page. Finally there is a button with a little 1 in it. If you have a google account click on it and you will recommend the post to other google users.

Under that line is labels. This is how I categorize each and every post. They are cross referenced by subject and you can find all the subjects on the sidebar under the heading "Stuff I Write About" If you click on any one of those, you will get all the posts I categorized under that heading.

The last line is for reactions to the post. I just put a "like" button like Facebook has because people are used to that and I don't want to know if people think my posts suck because I can't handle it, so I didn't put a "this sucks" button on. Just like. Click it now. See how it works?

Next let's look at the sidebar to the right. I have too much stuff cluttering up my sidebar but that's just the way it is. The top is widgets you can click if you want to subscribe to the posts or the comments. I'm not really sure if these work properly because I don't subscribe to my own blog and I've never used them on other blogs because I just add them to my Google Reader and they automatically show up there.

Next is a StumbeUpon button. I don't know how to use StumbleUpon and every time I try I feel like a total idiot, but if you have a StumbleUpon account and click on the button you list the post on the Stumble website and I get loads of hits.

Next is a Twitter button. If you click it you will be directed to my Twitter page and you can follow me there. I'm kind of a dud on Twitter. I don't post much. I'm too wordy.

Next is the heading "Sometimes I'm kind of funny" and below that are links to my personal favorite posts that I have written.

Under the heading "Stuff I Write About" is stuff I write about. The headings I told you about before.

Next is a spot for me to brag about my blogging accomplishments. This was listed as one of MBAOnline's top twenty humor blogs of 2010. And I was nominated for a Best Humor Blog for the Blogger's Choice awards.

Next is my complete blog archive. You can see every post I've ever written by clicking on the links.

Next is the followers area. These are people who have clicked on the "Join this site" button. I love when people do that.

Next under the heading "Best Blogs Ever" are links to the blogs I love to read. The top is the most recently updated.

After that are some pictures, a little thing about me, the blogger and my pageview counter.

So there you have it! A Blogger blog tutorial!

The Head of our Fathers or God Bless A-Mitch-ica

2011-12-01T17:32:00.002-06:00

This is what happens when we get cash:

Oh my god...

Jib Jab Jingle Bell

2011-11-30T13:06:00.001-06:00

It's not even December and I'm already getting in the holiday spirit! And when I say I'm in the holiday spirit, I mean that I've been playing with Jib Jab, making my favorite holiday cards. Here's some screen shots from the one I made of my parents, sisters and me:

The Whole Family

Dad and Mom

Dad, rocking out

The whole fam again

If you want to see the whole card, click on this link.

Now I'm at work in a math class and the kids have an assignment and they are actually doing it and being quiet so I was playing around and made another one. I don't have my computer here at school, but I have my own school account, but I don't have access to very many of my own pictures so I just took some off my blog. This one is me, Mitch and a honey badger. Here's some screen shots:

You can see this card at this link. Next I think I'll make one with Kira and a couple of chickens.

Now go and make your own cards and paste them on to Facebook and then make sure to friend me on facebook so I can laugh too.

Snark

2011-11-29T12:04:00.001-06:00

I'm feeling kind of mean today. Well, I didn't think I was until I re-read this post and I'm really giving the business to lots of people.

Guess what I'm doing? I'm sitting in a coffee shop typing away on my computer like a hipster doofus. I had to get out of my house. I haven't been called to work lately. I feel like I'm being shunned from substitute teaching. Can you think of anything sadder than that? All I'm getting called for are special education jobs that I never take unless I know the teacher and the kids (only one teacher), or half-day jobs 35 miles from my house. I don't take those either. I have to figure out some way to hack into the automated system so I can see what jobs come up before anyone else does, and I can take the best ones. That's got to be possible, right? I bet someone has already figured it out and is taking the good jobs and giving the second best jobs to his friends. But from what I've seen of the substitute teaching pool, I can't imagine any of them clever enough to be able to game the system (myself included.) raaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrr!!!!!

I recently applied to be a substitute teacher in the Catholic schools in the area. Ironically, my application is being held up by all the red tape I have to cut through concerning how to act appropriately as an adult around kids. I had to read a bunch of anti-pederasty literature, which was so creepy it only made me want to take a shower (not with a student! Inappropriate!), and I had to take online training. Because if anyone cares about kids and being appropriate at all times, it's the Catholic Church.

Oh great, now I have to go to the bathroom. No, I don't think I really do, but because I have all my stuff set up on this table just how I like it, my bladder is teasing me and saying,

"You could stand to empty me. I feel like I'm getting full. Remember the other day when you were at the store and you thought you could hold it until you got home and then peed your pants in the driveway? Not all the way, but enough to officially be considered 'peeing your pants.' You were so close! You don't want that to happen again, do you? You could take a risk and leave your computer at the table in this public place full of people you don't know and hope against hope that nobody swipes it while you relieve yourself, but you really should play it safe and pack everything up and take it with you. You'd be really mad if you came back and the computer was gone. You could ask the ladies at the table behind you to watch your stuff but they seem like a couple of drama queens and have been talking about "relationships" ever since you've been here. I bet if they watched it and someone came up to swipe your stuff they wouldn't do anything but have a long, deep, pointless conversation about it. Now you can't ask them to watch it because what if they read what you just wrote about them? God, you are such a bitch sometimes. Maybe it's time to bite the bullet and purchase an emergency package of Depends. But would you really be willing to unload into a diaper for convenience sake? It's just pee, so what? Why not? You should do it. I'm sure you're not the only one. It's hardly gross at all. How would you feel when you were getting dressed for the day and put on the adult equivalent of a Pull-Up with the sole intention of peeing your pants sometime during the day? That wouldn't make you feel bad about yourself, would it? Think about it. But in the mean time, you should go to the bathroom before you have a(nother) accident. While you're up, get another coffee."

My bladder is wordy. So I guess I better get up and go. Bye!

Kira in the Car

2011-11-27T14:24:00.000-06:00

We came home from our Thanksgiving weekend yesterday and I had to take a picture of this. This is how Kira holds her iPod when she watches Balto and wants to give her hands a little rest.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2011-11-24T16:01:00.002-06:00

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Remember last year when I liveblogged Thanksgiving? Well, there hasn't been quite that much excitement this year. My dad doesn't have any revelations for us like last year when he shared with us that L.L. Cool J. means "The Lady Loves Cool James," but we did have a nice conversation about mean things teachers used to do to kids back in the good ole days. My dad said that when he was in school he had a little, mean woman teacher that was an ex-marine and he said, "She had skin like a marine, too," whatever that means, Dad. Anyway, one day a kid was tipping back on his chair and he fell over backwards and this woman said ominously, "Pick your chair up. Sit in it. Tip it back." and made him repeatedly pick it up, sit in it and tip it back and fall until he started crying. Beth got spanked in front of the whole class in first grade because she tripped a kid named Rusty when he was passing out papers.

Last year was also the year that my dad and I played that fateful game of social chicken that ended with us both going to the winter parade. I thought he learned his lesson but he wrote me this email yesterday:

Sarah:

FYI: Just read this in the Journal:

"Twas the Night Before Christmas Parade & Parade Party. 7:00 PM Friday evening followed by the All-New After-Parade Family Party. S'Mores,marshmallow roasting, hot chocolate. Just thought you might like to know for your planning purposes. Dad

Dad, don't dare me to go again because I WILL and DAMMIT I WILL BRING YOU WITH ME AND WE WILL STAY UNTIL THE BITTER END WHEN WE ARE BOTH STUFFED WITH S'MORES, HOT CHOCOLATE, NEW FRIENDS AND HOLIDAY CHEER. Don't play with fire, old man. YOU WILL LOSE.

THOR and Twilight: Movie Reviews

2011-11-21T09:19:00.000-06:00

I didn't think I'd ever see Thor because it looked so stupid. Then I saw that Natalie Portman was in it and she doesn't usually steer me wrong. And Kenneth Branagh directed it and he's pretty good, so I thought I'd give it a chance.

Thor is a space god; nay, a NORSE space god. His dad, Odin, wants to retire and make Thor the king but on the very DAY that Thor is going to assume the throne, King Laufey, a space frost god/giant gets in to Odin's weapon's room and tries to steal some glowy blue thingy that everyone is in love with. Thor wants to kick ass and take names, but Odin wants to avoid war so he banishes Thor to the human realm on earth for being impetuous and arrogant. BUT, just to give Thor some hope, he sends his super-duper hammer down too. I don't know if you knew this about Thor, but to him every problem is a nail and his hammer is always the solution. He's heavy handed. He falls in love with Natalie Portman and to save her life and to save earth he has to destroy the rainbow space bridge to earth. With his hammer. Of course. Natalie Portman, you let me down.

I also saw Breaking Dawn Part I this weekend. It was a must-see for anyone who has read the books and already invested time and money in to seeing the other movies. It got horrible reviews, which I can understand because there were some parts during the movie where I was hanging my head and pretending I was doing something else because it was especially embarrassing. Like when the werewolf pack got together in a tense meeting and telepathically yelled/real-life growled at each other. It reminded me of the old Transformer cartoons that I never watched when I was little because they were so ridiculous.

In this movie Edward, the 100 year old vampire stuck in the body of a 17 year old boy, finally marries the love of his life, human 18 year old Bella Swan. They have a gorgeous wedding and then go on a honeymoon and finally consummate their relationship which, if you don't know this about vampires, they are super strong and so Edward is wary of doing it with Bella because he's afraid she'll get hurt, which she does. She gets all bruised up but she's totally in to it because she's a masochist.

Soon she finds out she is pregers with a demon/vampire baby that is consuming her from the inside out. Edward is shocked that she got pregnant because he didn't know that sex sometimes results in pregnancy even though he's been taking high school health classes for about 80 years. Way to go, Edward! He is worried about Bella because the baby seems to be killing her which was disturbing to watch because Bella really did look skeletal and deathly for about half the movie. The gestation only lasts a few weeks because fyi: vampire-human embryos/fetuses/infants/children grow at an astronomical rate. The baby is breaking Bella's bones and when she finally has to deliver, the baby breaks her spine with a kick or something and they can't get the baby out because the birth sac is made of vampire skin and so is impenetrable by anything other than vampire teeth so Edward has to chew the baby out. Literally, chew the baby out of Bella's stomach. Bella is dying from blood loss and trauma and shock so Edward has to try to save her life by plunging a syringe of vampire venom directly into her heart to change her into a vampire which will heal all her injuries and make her immortal. It works. The end.

Breaking Dawn Part II comes out next year and then we find out what Bella's special vampire talent is (she's a shield) and there is the ultimate vampire/werewolf war. Will the Cullen's come out on top? (yes) Will Edward and Bella be happily married? (yes) Will their baby go nuts and kill every human in a 200 mile range? (I wish) We'll see!

Miscellaneous

2011-11-18T21:19:00.000-06:00

I've been sitting here in a chair by the fireplace dozing like a grandpa, periodically waking myself up with snorts, trying to recover from an injury. I somehow pulled a muscle in my groin which makes me think that I must sleep walk or have a split personality who thinks she can actually do the splits because there is no way I did anything to cause myself this much pain while I was conscious. I didn't even know I had a groin. I thought that was in the realm of hernias and testicles, but I googled it, and women do have groins. It's basically just your crotch/upper/inner thigh muscles. Everyone has those. Bet you didn't know that, did you?

Mitch left me. For the weekend. God, I can't believe you thought I meant he "LEFT me" left me. Why don't you have any faith in our marriage? Anyway, he took the kids to the cities because Kira has a hockey tournament. So I'm here all alone and injured. HEAR THAT, INTERNET PREDATORS!?!

I saw a bear this morning running across the road while I was driving to work. It was pretty exciting especially because he wasn't in my yard destroying my property. They are beautiful and majestic when they are in someone else's yard.

I've been spending my convalescing time googling stuff like groin and hernia. (FYI - make sure that when you want to know about hernias, you're not on Google Images because OMG FOR GROSS.) Earlier today I was looking at pictures of tigers because of the book I just read, and I saw a picture of a liger, which is a hybrid of a tiger and a lion and they grow to be enormous. Like 800 pounds of giant scary cat. So then I got interested in seeing other animal hybrids so I googled "animal hybrids" and I spent about the next twenty minutes laughing. People are so funny. I don't know what is real and not real. Here's one I suspect is real:

A cow/buffalo hybrid. Yeah, I can see that. That could happen. Buffalo are a lot like cattle. This looks like a reasonable hybrid. I believe it.

Next, a zebra/horse. Do I believe this is real? Yeah, I think I do. I like it.

But do I really believe that a beagle and a squirrel had a baby with a squirrel body and a beagle head that loves to hold Milk Bones in his tiny squirrel hands? I don't think I do. I suspect someone has photoshopped this.

Okay, I do not believe this one. The reason is that if a chicken and a cat had a baby its head would not be that big. That's just ridiculous.

These two made me laugh. A tweety-bird and a shark. Come on. That's not real. Where does it live? Apparently it's a walker wherever it lives. I can tell by the shoes. And the lion/hamster, I love it. It's so fierce and adorable and again with the shoes. Animals in shoes are hilarious. If my groin didn't hurt so much I would put some shoes on my dog right now.

I think this is supposed to be a camel/eagle/tweety hybrid. Don't believe it.

This one I DO NOT believe AT ALL. For one thing, T-rexs are extinct and even if they weren't, a T-rex would NOT like a kangaroo. If it was real I don't think its arms would just hang out of its neck and what really gives this picture away is that the baby kangaroo doesn't look anything like a T-rex. In fact, most hybrid animals can't even breed, so, there you go. REFUTED. In fact, I don't believe most of the pictures I saw.

No.

I wish.

Ick.

No. (thank god)

Come on.

I'm losing it

2011-11-16T22:28:00.000-06:00

I have a two day job teaching the worst second graders on the planet. I know what you're thinking, "How can seven-year-olds be horrible? They are just adorable children!" To that I say, "Where do you think grown up assholes come from? They come from adorable asshole children."

As I was trying to coax one little boy out of his locker this afternoon, I was fondly remembering how nice it was to work at the jail with rapists and murderers. Sure they had their annoying moments, but at least I got a good recipe for toilet wine out of that deal. I also learned what an eight-ball is (it has nothing to do with billiards)and where I can score one. Useful information! Tit for tat! What are these second graders giving me? A big fat load of bullshit, that's what.

Mommy and Son Time

2011-11-14T18:48:00.001-06:00

I pick Sam up from school every day. It's about a 15 minute drive back home and I think NPR is conspiring to make us feel uncomfortable and not make eye-contact by playing creepy, sexual news stories whenever the two of us are in the car together. Today there was a story all about how this gang in Washington DC is driving runaway girls into prostitution at younger and younger ages. They said that these poor 12 and 13 year old girls will be pimped out 15 or 16 times a day. It's good for the gangs because it brings in thousands of dollars and there is virtually no overhead except for the drugs and alcohol to keep the girls compliant (good business plan!). Sam and I really enjoyed that story so much. Other things we've learned about while riding home from school:

1. Exactly what Herman Cain did to the woman in the car from the woman herself. Thanks Gloria Allred! You're such a great advocate for your clients!

2. Incidence of sexual assaults at Occupy Wallstreet protests.

3. Clitorectomies

4. Exactly what Mr. McCreary witnessed in that Penn State locker room IN GRAPHIC DETAIL.

5. Systemic rape in war-torn Islamic countries.

6. How important it is to give your adolescent children he HPV virus and why, in graphic detail.

Usually we don't acknowledge the stories because then we will be letting the other one know we are listening to it, but sometimes (clitorectomies) Sam gives up and says, "Can I change the channel?" and he changes it to a music station where we can hear all about how Bruno Mars wants to have some really nice sex with a really nice girl, or how Rihanna likes to have sadomasochistic sex. Yay! You might think that these would be "teachable moments" but I never planned on teaching my 14 year old about clitorectomies or sadomasochism so I didn't need the icebreaker, thanks anyway, Radio.

Oh well, when Mitch was a teenager his mom saw an Oprah show about how teen boys were accidentally dying because of practicing auto-erotic asphyxiation. His mom said she'd never forgive herself if she didn't warn her boys of the dangers of choking yourself while masturbating, so she sat them down and they had that awkward conversation. Mitch started walking around all the time with a rope around his neck. He still does.

That's a funny story. I'm going to go tell it to Sam.

Cup O Joe

2011-11-14T07:17:00.002-06:00

Kira has to be outside at the bus stop before the sun comes up. Doesn't that seem a bit harsh? It is. It's brutal. Now it's getting to be winter so it's getting cold and it's still pitch dark when she's out there waiting. She HATES it. She's tired and cold and understandably doesn't want to get on a stupid school bus before seven a.m. The other day while I was pouring myself a cup of coffee she said, "I'm so cold, pour me a cup-o-joe will ya?" So I did. Then she said, "I'm not going to be able to finish this before the bus comes so I'm just going to drink it outside and then I'll put the cup in the grass and you can pick it up later, okay?" So that's what she did. She took her little penguin mug outside and drank her morning cup-o-joe while waiting for the bus. And now she does it every day. Weird? A little bit. I wanted to take a picture of her but it's pitch dark and cold outside. I'm not going out there! Are you nuts?!

I love the internet

2011-11-13T16:15:00.001-06:00

Isn't the internet wonderful? It has made my life so much richer in so many ways, but none quite like this:

These are postcards sent to me by fellow-blogger Kady at A Lady Reveals Nothing. She found a website called Postcardly that makes postcards from pictures you download and sends them to the people you tell it to. Nothing is quite as delightful as being surprised by a postcard made from a horrible picture and sent to you via snail mail, which is a novelty these days. Kady had a comment contest (or something, I can't really remember because I didn't win the big prize) but if you commented on one of her posts, she would send you a postcard of herself. I requested the bikini pic and on the back she wrote:

If it's bikini you want, then it's bikini you'll get (Lesbo.) Thanks for reading my stupid blog. I read your stupid blog too. Every single post. Which means you sort of owe me a 'bikini in a waterfall' photo."

I cracked up when I got my postcard and it has been on my fridge ever since. Recently Kady got a new iPhone that she uses mostly to tell Siri she pooped her pants, but also to take pictures of herself using the Fatbooth app. I love her fat pics so much and I said something about how I would like a postcard of her fat face so she sent me one! Wow! What a treat! Seeing her fat face in my mailbox made my whole week! Thanks Kady! And you will NEVER get a picture of me in a bikini. Sorry!

Book Review

2011-11-12T09:34:00.000-06:00

I am reading the BEST BOOK right now. It is called The Tiger, A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant. It is about tigers and people who live in the forests of the far eastern Russia. About a decade ago a man named Markov, who lived in the woods, came across a dead boar, an obvious tiger kill and he took the hocks. Apparently that is a big no-no because tigers don't like when you steal from them and they know who did it. Markov kept one of the hocks for himself and brought the other one to a logging camp near his home. The tiger stalked Markov for days, destroyed all property with his scent on it, including his latrine, killed his dogs, killed him, ATE HIM, and then stalked the loggers who had the other hock.

The book tells the story of Markov and the tiger and the Tiger Inspection team, but it also tells a very compelling story of how predators and people have gotten along through time. The chapter I read yesterday outlined the idea of ethology, a concept introduced by a guy named Jacob van Uexkull. The idea is that all creatures share a common environment, but their realities inside that environment are vastly different. He says it's like if you blew a bubble around each creature that is full of the perceptions which it alone knows. His example is of a woman and her dog walking down the street. She notices a for sale sign, a policeman coming toward her or a broken bottle in her path, whereas the dog notices the scent of cooked meat coming from a restaurant, urine on a pole and crumbs on the sidewalk. The two are walking down the same path but having vastly different experiences. The same goes for every creature. Predators need to get into the minds (or bubbles) of their prey in order to successfully hunt it. Tigers are especially clever when they do this, so if a tiger decides you look delicious and he's really hungry, or you have wronged him in some way, he is going to get revenge, you are pretty much dead meat. It's fascinating. Apparently tigers and people who live in the same environment have had sort of a deal not to kill each other for thousands of years, but sometimes people or tigers break the deal and then watch out!

I have about half the book left to read because apparently this tiger isn't done hunting people. Yikes! Can you imagine knowing that a tiger was out there coming for you? When the Tiger inspection people were investigating the "crime scene" they noticed fresh tiger tracks all around. They knew the tiger was close, that he considered Markov his kill and the people were interfering with it. When they realized this, they knew the tiger was probably watching them but they couldn't see it anywhere. Just then they heard a deep growl that seemed to come from all around. They left the scene to try to figure out what to do next. SOOOO scary!

There was also another interesting story in the book about predators and prey. A scientist was interested in learning why baboons, who have so much bravado in the light of day, stay hidden in caves at night to avoid big cats. He wanted to see what it would take to get them to go out in the dark, so this man hid in the cave during the day and then after the troop of baboons came in and went to sleep he jumped out and scared the crap out of them. They totally freaked out, but they would not leave the cave so apparently whatever was inside the cave with them was not as scary as what was outside in the dark. I don't know how wise it is to scare a bunch of baboons in an enclosed space, but I guess the guy proved his point. Baboons know how scary big cats can be and will sacrifice one or two inside the cave with the scary unknown rather than risk the loss of the whole troop outside in the dark with the lions. Spooooooookkkkyyyyyy!!!

I highly recommend this book. It is very suspenseful and written very well.

I'm so very versatile...

2011-11-10T09:48:00.002-06:00

I woke up this morning not feeling the best because I am having a mid-life crisis. Why? Oh, because I'm 41, I'm a substitute teacher (OMG), I've never lost the weight I swore I would lose, I have disgusting night sweats/farts and facing all these facts is sobering, to say the least. Then I got on line and saw that Angie at Angie Uncovered has passed on the Versatile Blogger award to me.

Thanks Angie! Actually, to be perfectly honest, when I saw what she wrote about me I thought "Omg, that is so sweet! Oh crap, now what do I have to do?" because that is just the kind of person I am and as a blogger, I'm not all that versatile. I'm kind of a one trick pony. Maybe this is kind of like getting awarded Miss Congeniality in a beauty contest, or winning a "participant" ribbon at school track and field day.

So, the conditions on getting the Versatile Blogger award are to acknowledge the person who gave it to me with some nice words, tell five little known facts about myself, and then pass the award on to five worthy bloggers. So here goes.

_______________________________

Angie

I got wind of Angie's blog through The Fred Effect. He really likes her so I thought I'd check her out. I like her too. She's funny and irreverent and always makes me think. She's feisty and she puts her kids in laundromat dryers if they get lippy.

You gotta respect a lady who has the cojones to do that! She's also written some beautiful things on her blog like this, that I find inspiring. Check out Angie!

___________________________________

Five little known facts about me

1. I always put the salt in the pepper shaker and the pepper in the salt shaker. I don't do it on purpose but when I fill new ones I always think, "okay, I did this wrong last time and I was sure I was right. Do the opposite of what you think," and then I do it again and never change it because they never run out at the same time. So if you ever come to my house for a meal expect to shake the shit out of the pepper shaker to get five measly flakes, and expect to get enough unwanted salt on your food from one little shake to make you thirsty for a week.

2. I once fed my whole family a turkey that when I took it out of the packaging I was pretty sure was past it's prime because of the over powering dead-body smell. I just cooked it longer than usual. It was delicious and nobody got sick, but also, nobody appreciated it when I told them I was sure the turkey was rotten before I cooked it. Lesson: keep your trap shut when you serve rotten yet delicious food to people. Ignorance is, apparently, bliss.

3. My sisters and I stole a bus-tour in Washington D.C. The bus was a double-decker open-top and the website said that it was a "hop on hop off" type tour. You buy a ticket for 31 dollars and then you can hop on or off any of their busses all day. We hopped on and nobody was there to take any money. We toured for about an hour and then hopped off. I felt more invigorated than guilty. I think this might lead to a life of crime.

4. When I was about eight years old I used to put super-balls in my tube tops because I was sure I was convincing the whole neighborhood that I was in the midst of puberty. I can't believe the confidence I had that I was fooling everyone. Turns out I wasn't really fooling anyone because not only was it obvious that a scrawny second grader isn't in puberty, but I wasn't very careful about making sure the superballs were the same size or that they were even. People probably just thought it was a clever place to keep my balls.

5. I love to pick things and peel things which is not a little known fact about me, but what is a little known fact is that when Sam was little and would get scrapes or bug bites, he would never EVER pick the scabs and if left to his own devices would let them heal on their own until the scab fell off (can you imagine?) When he was sleeping I would sneak into his room and pick the scabs that I had spotted that were totally ready to be picked. I'm not proud of it, but if he wasn't on to me, and if he still got as many scabs, I would do it again.

____________________________________

And the Award goes to...

1. Anne at Life Is Good because she is my friend, and I love her and I love reading her blog. She is a great mom and wife and is honest and funny and positive.

2. Kady at A Lady Reveals Nothing because she has just about the funniest blog I've ever read. Her blog is about her life of travels and adventures, tampons and poop, her crazy family and her adorable roommate.

3. Jane of Jane's Junk and Treasures. Her blog is about decorating and organizing. She's funny and has great taste and does some amazing projects. She hasn't been blogging that much lately because she's busy being a good daughter, but she'll be back and when she is, check her out.

4. Lawrence at The Lawrence and Julie and Julia Project. I'm giving him the Versatile Blogger award ironically because of the ridiculous corner he has painted himself into blog-wise. He is watching the movie Julie and Julia every day for a year and blogging about it, much like Julie Powell made a recipe from Julia Child's cookbook every day for a year and blogged about it. He's almost to the end and he's losing his mind.

5. A. from Milk and Cake. I don't know if she wants me to put her name on the blog because it isn't even on her blog, so I just put A. I stumbled on her blog a few years ago by pushing Next Blog and I've read her ever since. She is very Versatile! She blogs about her family, her job, her projects, food etc, etc. I especially love the projects she does. She's very creative and I would love it if she would come to my house and make me some stuff.

Working

2011-11-08T06:56:00.002-06:00

I haven't been subbing nearly as much as I would like this year so I am taking jobs that last year I would have turned down. For instance, gym. I'm not a gym teacher. I don't like noise and I don't like to try to yell over loud echoing noise in humongous gyms because my voice isn't very loud. But I do have my very own whistle for just such occasions! I taught middle school gym last week and they were swimming in the pool. They are very cute in a pool because some of them are soooooo skinny that they can barely float. Fat is like a life vest. My fat is my life vest. I'm only tubby in case I ever find myself stranded in the ocean for days at a time. I could do it. I could tread water for days. In fact, I couldn't NOT tread water. I could never drown because I'm too buoyant. So if you ever hear that I drowned, I have been murdered. I pop up like a cork. Even when I try to be stealthy and swim under water, my butt pops up. Oh well. I'm not chunky, I'm buoyant. Like a bubble.

I taught third grade last week which is my favorite grade, but this particular class is about 1/3 behavior problems so it was a challenge. You know what I've noticed about kids since I've been teaching? Little boys who have mohawks or earrings are little assholes. And I've seen the same boys without the mohawk and they are NOT assholes when they don't have that strip of long hair running across the top of their otherwise bald head. Moms, don't let your little boys get a mohawk. It's not cute and it turns them into little dicks.

Beth's Help

2011-11-04T08:40:00.000-05:00

Amy and Beth and I were determined to get some good pictures of ourselves while we were on our trip. We are constantly taking pictures, but they are usually of our kids who don't really take bad pictures. Beth was a bit stunned by my total inability to take a good picture, which led me to record some Bethisms (thanks for the idea Kady and Summer) so she thought she'd help me out by snapping candids of me when I wasn't expecting it, thinking that maybe if I didn't know a camera was pointing at me, she could capture the real me. These are some of the shots she got.

Walking the streets of Annapolis:

On the train to NYC:

And then: Finally! A half-way decent one!

(That's me on the left)

Bethisms from our trip:

"Amy, you re-ran over that squirrel"

"If I took my kids on a plane, I'd drug them."

"The new cool will be having LESS Facebook friends!"

"What are you doing with your face?" said everytime she looked at a picture snapped of me.

Thanks, Beth!

Does this make you mad too? Why does it make me so mad?

2011-11-03T08:34:00.000-05:00

I got in the car after work and I caught the last five minutes of Talk Of The Nation on the radio and was instantly enraged. Usually I only half listen to the radio but something about this caught my attention. A man was talking about how nobody understands his plight and how much he's sacrificed in his career and personal life, and how his male friends can never understand what he's gone through and how his kids are better because of it blah blah blah blah, and I thought, surely this man must have done some amazing, heroic act so I kept listening to hear if it was something like donating his bone marrow to 1000 strangers, or saved a family from a burning building, but no. What, you ask, could the heroic thing he did that he and Neal Conan both were patting him on the back on a national public radio show? What amazing sacrifice has he made?

He stayed home and raised his kids. Yeah, that's right. There was a show all about how wonderful and unique and noble this guy is because he took on the unbelievably difficult job of care of his own offspring. I was driving, and frothing at the mouth and was digging out my phone to call in to the show and then the show ended and now my only outlet is to write about it on this blog. When a woman stays home and takes care of her own kids BIG DEAL. If anything there are hints that she's selfish because she isn't contributing to the financial well-being of her family because really, shouldn't the woman of the new millennium really be expected to bring home at least half the money AND take care of her kids and family and house? Not only did this man on the radio not express any guilty feelings for not possibly doing enough for the family, but he got on the radio and bragged that he provided the primary care for his own children!

In this same vein, a friend on Facebook posted an article that some idiot woman wrote in to an advice column to ask about how come her friends with kids always say they are so busy. What are they doing all day? How hard is it to take care of a couple of kids? AAAAAAGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!! Here it is:

I love the reply, btw. But why is it that when a woman does a job, any job except maybe race-car driver, the general consensus (from both males and females) is "Eh, so what. Couldn't she possibly do a little more?" But when a man does it he brags about it and pats himself on the back and gets paid more money than his female counterparts. Yeah, women still only make about 80 percent of what men make for doing the same job. Maybe it's because men know how to toot their own horns better than women. I don't know, but it really bothers me. The thing is, I stayed at home with my kids when they were small and I totally agree with the braggart on the radio that it IS a hard job, but I would NEVER go on a radio show and brag that I decided to do a job that millions and millions of other people do every day, and act like I invented the idea of providing primary care of my own children. And the fact that he got a national platform to brag about doing something that women have traditionally done for thousands of years, what the hell?

You know, I don't know why this makes me soooo mad. I only heard about five minutes of the show so maybe the guy really did do something phenomenal. Just a minute, I'm going to look it up....

Okay, I looked up yesterday's show and the guy is named Pat Byrnes and he stays at home with his daughters and he writes a cartoon about being "Captain Dad." The cartoon is kind of cute but again, how many moms stay home with kids and then write hilarious blogs about it? Tons. None of them get on Talk of the Nation. Here is something Byrnes said that exemplifies why he pissed me off so much:

There are more than 150,000 stay-at-home dads these days, according to the 2010 Census, but Byrnes says there's more to it than that. "There are a lot of dads that kind of share the responsibility," he says. "I mean, I know at least two firemen [who] work their, you know, 24-hour shifts. They got a couple of days. You know, they trade off with the mom. So that's becoming more and more common where dads are, you know, manning up and taking care of the kids."

Manning up and taking care of the kids? Seriously? Men who work but also look after their own kids on their days off should somehow be praised for it? Oh my god.

My Favorite Picture

2011-11-02T10:00:00.002-05:00

Oh my god, we are so in love

Russian Samovar

2011-11-02T09:45:00.003-05:00

I have a couple of stories for you from my sister's vacation. We had tickets to see Wicked at the Gershwin theater for Tuesday night, so before the show we planned on eating at Russian Samovar. I chose that restaurant because when I looked up "good placed to eat in Midtown" when I was planning our itinerary, that name kept popping up. I'm not much of a fan of Russian anything, but that restaurant kept getting rave reviews, so I thought we should check it out. When we walked in I didn't think we were in the right place. It looked like a bit of a dive. What caught my eye was the light fixtures with wires hanging out all over the place.

Here's a picture of Amy and you can see the light fixtures, but you can't really see the wires. Oh well, believe me, it was a bit weird.

We decided to be totally Russian and drink vodka and eat caviar. The waitress who was an adorable Russian girl with a thick accent brought us a list of flavor infused vodkas so we ordered some.

The first one I got was lemon and it was pretty good. Next I ordered a chocolate one and the waitress looked me square in the eye and said, "No." I said, "Pardon?" and she said, "No. Is no good." So I told her to get me a good one. She brought me pear. It was good. We ordered our caviar:

See, it's served with little pancakes and onion and boiled egg and sour cream. It was surprisingly delicious. A bit fishy but guess what? It's FISH EGGS! I ate fish babies and they were delicious.

"Thank you ma'am, your babies were delicious."

Sometimes I feel bad about eating meat because I've seen footage on factory farms and how meat is processed and it is so barbaric and gross I can hardly stand it, but I don't think I will ever think of fish as an animal. When we go to the Great Lakes Aquarium and see all those fat salmon swimming around it just makes me ravenous.

Anyway, we had a wonderful time there drinking vodka, and eating appetizers and desserts (cheesecake and little tiny doughnuts with a raspberry sauce that was so good you could have eaten it with a spoon). We loved our waitress and so we were trying to figure out how to say thank you in Russian and when I looked it up on my translator on my phone, this is what came up: Спасибо. I was looking at it for a few seconds and my sisters said, "What does it say?" and I said, "I don't know. I don't know how to pronounce 'six'," but we figured it out and thanked her in Russian like the dorky tourists we are.

Because we are middle aged and have to pee every 20 minutes, we asked our adorable waitress where the bathroom was. She pointed us through these heavy velvet curtains to a staircase and said, "Up there," so we went upstairs to the exact room where Mikael Barishnikov took Carrie on their date on Sex In The City. It was totally empty until a tough-looking man came shooting out of a back room, looked us over and said, "You must go downstairs." We told him we were looking for the bathroom and he said, "Downstairs" and herded us to the staircase. We decided to hold it. When we were walking to the theater Beth said that the waitress probably sends women who she thinks would be good for selling into white slavery up the steps (aww, thanks!) but the guy got one look at us and thought to himself, "No. Too old. Too fat. Couldn't make the profit margins," so he shooed us away. Rejection! We couldn't make a profit as sex slaves. Oh well, one less thing to worry about, I guess. Which reminds me of one more quick story from the trip: One day we were walking around downtown Washington and there was a guy playing a banjo at an outdoor produce market. He was just playing, not singing. He was pretty good until I walked past him and he started singing "Where have all the young girls gone...hmmmm hmmmm hmmmm hmmmmm...." to the tune of Where Have All the Flowers Gone. Hey Banjo Guy, you are no spring chicken either so SHUT IT.

Another picture of MEEEEE!

2011-11-01T07:10:00.002-05:00

Remember when I told you I am the most unphotogenic person in the world and you said to yourself, "Face it honey, you're just not as good looking as you think," but then felt bad for being so snotty? Well, I may not have the face (or body) of a supermodel, but I really really am unphotogenic and it is well known in my family. After my Grandma died and we were super sad and cleaning out her apartment, we were looking through her photo albums and my aunt would giggle quietly to herself and then show me a picture of my Grandma and me where I look like a total fool (every picture) and say, "This is a good one of you." Some of them my face looked like I was a serial killer, some of them my hair was sticking out in tufts from my temples for no reason, and some of them I was in adolescence. Mostly I just looked incredibly fat.

Well, I sent her a picture of my sister and I and Corn Husk Lady and this is what she said, "Whoa! CUTE PICTURE OF YOU! WTF!" and I don't know if she is being sarcastic like when she was looking at the picture of me and my grandma when I was in my twenties but was wearing a polka-dotted dress fit for a toddler and for some reason was making my mouth like I had an overbite and no lips, or if she really means it. You be the judge.

Other than the fact that my left eye socket looks empty, it's not too bad!

Corn Husk Lady

2011-10-31T09:30:00.001-05:00

When my sisters and I went to Mount Vernon last Saturday, it happened to be Family Fall Festival Fun Day, or something like that. That meant that it was rather crowded with people with little kids which was obnoxious. Not because I mind little kids. What annoys me are the super parents who are obviously making up for something by being WONDERFUL PARENTS in public in the loudest fashion they can manage. After we parked the car and were walking to the property, we were sort of in a crowd of people walking the same way, and one of the people was a little girl named Zoe, although I'm almost positive her parents spell it with umlauts, but since I don't know how to make umlauts on the computer, I'll just settle for writing it the pedestrian way, Zoe. I know Zoe was in the crowd with us not because Zoe was being naughty, or running into the street or anything, I knew her name was Zoe because her dad was being SUPER! and kept saying her name. "Having fun yet, Zoe!" "Zoe, let's race!" "Zoe, hop on my back and I'll run and make really loud plane noises in a fun way that's really irritating to anyone within twenty yards."

Before we even got in the doors my sisters and I gave each other conspiratorial looks that said, "First thing: Ditch Zoe." Which we did. It was a gorgeous day to be at Mount Vernon, (but then again, there isn't a bad day at Mount Vernon), so we walked all over the property and saw the gardens and there was a special festival down by the threshing barn and there was a George Washington impersonator talking about the revolutionary war. He was very compelling, but didn't look like Washington. He looked like Henry Winkler. (I wonder if it was Henry Winkler? OMG!)

In one of the barns people in old-timey clothes were helping people make corn husk ladies. Amy and Beth and I made some. Amy's was perfect. (I think she makes them in her free time.) Beth's was weird. It had a tiny pin head and three arms. How do you even get three arms? Mine was okay but only because I re-did it about four times until I was satisfied. I love her with her crazy hairdo and her nutso face.

I took her with me everywhere. Here she is in front of the Washington Monument.

Here she is peeking over a wall at the WWII Memorial.

Here she is with the Empire State Building.

And her she is spying on Amy over the bathroom stall. Oh Corn Husk Lady, you're so silly!

Continuation of my "Gift"

2011-10-29T13:14:00.000-05:00

Directions from the sisters on this self-portrait as we were standing in line waiting to get into the Mount Vernon Mansion: "Let's look up (to minimize double chins) and off into the distance (to look contemplative and beautiful and deep)." Needless to say, it didn't work out! Son of a bitch! I don't look contemplative and beautiful! I look like a dork. I actually look like I'm honking. Amy didn't do much better. She looks crazy. Beth looks okay, but she didn't follow directions. Notice the guy behind us giving us the rabbit ears. If this would have actually turned out to be the only good picture of me in the history of the world, I would have punched him in the guts for ruining it.

Take two: Not much better. Amy is still laughing hysterically about take one, I don't know what I was doing. What is wrong with me? Beth is actually following directions and does look contemplative and deep. Good job, Beth. Connnnnnnngggggggrrrraaaatttuuuuuullllaaaaattttiiiooooooonnnnnnsssssssssssss.

First Impressions of NYC

2011-10-27T08:22:00.000-05:00

My sisters and I took a quick trip to New York on our sister's vacation. I have never been to New York before so I was very interested to see what it is really like. I found it to be very complex and dichotomous. For instance, the women there are slim and trim and stylish and I'm not. So I felt like a butterball rube, but at the same time EVERYTHING is so BIG in New York that I felt insignificant and teeny. So, a teeny butterball rube. Not the best feeling, but whatev.

Another thing I noticed was about the cleanliness. As we were walking the streets of Manhattan we saw people obsessively sweeping, hosing down, and even vacuuming the sidewalk, but take another few steps and you can get caught in a cigarette-butt tornado. Which was super gross. Beth got caught in the middle of one and she was trying to run out of it and was waving her arms and spitting. She said she had grit in her mouth after that for a long time. Gross. Important: when you get caught in a cigarette-butt tornado KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT. Also, do you ever notice on shows set in NYC how "gritty" things look? Like smudges on doors and just general dirtiness that you don't see around where you live? It's really like that. It's an amazing place but it's like the general housekeeping of the entire city is the responsiblilty of an apathetic octogenarian with poor eyesight and a bad back. I don't think anything below hip level has been wiped down in the entire city in at least a decade.

We went to a few restaurants while we were there and the food is GLORIOUSLY good. One night we went to Russian Samovar and had real Russian vodka and caviar. It was so good. I've never had hard liquor that didn't make me cough and spit but this vodka was actually smoooooooth. And who knew caviar would be good? It was served on little pancakes with sour cream, red onions and boiled egg. Of course, rabbit turds would probably also be good on pancakes with sour cream. Later we went to a place called Sosa Borello. We had some appetizers that were heavenly. In the morning we went to the New Cosmic Cafe for breakfast. Fabulous. New Yorkers know how to eat.

We also saw the Occupy Wall Street protester camp in Zucotti park. Zucotti park is REALLY small. I was fired up by the whole thing and was ready to start marching and carrying a sign, but Amy said she wanted to run through the camp and bang on tents and yell "GET A JOB, SLACKERS!" She didn't do it.

I have to stop now because I have to catch my plane to go home, but more later on this, Washington, the Sisters, Mount Vernon etc etc. BYE!

Embracing My Gift

2011-10-23T09:11:00.000-05:00

Amy and Beth and I went to Mount Vernon yesterday to bask in all that is George Washington. Since this is a sister's vacation, it is important to capture the many moments on film (well, not really film, but you know, pictures). Unfortunately for me; not, apparently, for my sisters; I am the most unphotogenic person on the entire planet. I think I've taken about three good pictures in my entire life. I don't know what happens to me. I don't know if it is because I feel self-concious because I know a camera is pointed at me which causes me to make weird faces, or if I actually am hideously ugly on a split-second by split second basis, but seriously, those of you who have only seen pictures of me on this blog, I am sooooooo much cuter in real life than I am in any picture you will ever see.

I've decided to embrace this unusual gift and see just how bad I can look in pictures. My sisters wanted to take a bunch of cutesy pictures of the three of us, but I know I can't do it. When I try, they look at the picture just taken and say things like, "... What were you doing...with your face?" Well, I'm done trying to look adorable. It's not going to happen. So now I'm going to see just how bad I can look. I am shockingly good at this.

This is the first picture that this occured to me. Amy wanted to take a picture of me in front of a model of George Washington's house. In a split second this is what went through my mind: "Oh great, I'm going to look like a moron. No, I'm going to look like a huge moron because I'm in front of this tiny house. Like Godzilla. No, furrier, like King Kong. Screw it." And that is when I decided that if I'm going to look like King Kong anyway, I might as well not look like King Kong trying to be cute because that's pathetic, I might as well just look like King Kong doing what he does best. I think the picture is pretty good.

Then Amy and Beth decided they want to get a cute picture of the three of us together. It's not going to happen. It wouldn't happen anyway, even if I tried so now I'm just seeing how bad I can make myself look. Turns out it's pretty bad.

In my defense, they don't look that great in this picture either.

This one might have been okay if I could take a good picture. But I can't. But boy can I take a bad picture!

More to come! Much much much more!

My New Cloak

2011-10-20T23:53:00.000-05:00

Beth came to Duluth tonite because we are going to Washington together tomorrow for a sister vacay with Amy. She brought me my birthday present. It's a faux fur cloak. When I saw her bringing it to the door I thought she was holding a bear cub. I tried it on and I love it.

I'm going to wear it whenever I'm with her for the rest of my life. Kira asked where she got it. Turns out she got it at a gas station. (That sounds kind of tacky, but I know the gas station she's talking about and they do have some really cute clothes. I've got other stuff from there.) Then I was saying how warm it is and she said, "I know, I used to wear it in the fish house with Lorin," and I said, "How could you wear MY new cloak ice fishing. It's only October." And she said, "Oh, it's not new." She said she bought it for herself not as a joke but she decided she couldn't pull it off because as she said, "The big-breasted woman looks like a tootsie roll in a brown, stretchy cloak." Then we were talking and I got a bit of fur in my mouth and I said, "I got a bit of fur in my mouth," and she said, "It's probably dog fur. Tess really likes to lay on that cloak."

De De De...Depression

2011-10-18T18:24:00.000-05:00

"Where are you?" I've been hearing that for a while now from my peeps on the internet and now that I'm on my way back, I'll tell you where I've been. I've been depressed. (HA HA! OMG, that's such a funny topic for a humor blog!) Well, it's true. In the interest of being an over-sharer with a blog, I'll tell you all about it. I debated writing about this at all because it's about the most personal thing about me, my biggest vulnerability and all, and frankly, that's nobody's beeswax. But maybe someone out there needs a depression buddy and if so: HEY! WE CAN BE DEPRESSED TOGETHER! ;o) !!! LOL! Just kidding. I'm starting to feel better so don't bring me down with your sob stories. Just kidding! Just kidding. (seriously, kidding... boy, kidding looks like a funny word after you write it a bunch: kidding kidding kidding, kidding kidding....)

I've had bouts of depression since college, but I could deal with it and had devised methods of pulling myself out of it, but it got out of control after my second baby was born. I got major post-partum depression but didn't tell my doctor because in my crazy, depressed brain I thought if she had any idea how I was really feeling she would call social services and they'd take my kids away. I didn't want to go on anti-depressants because I thought that was a cop-out and if I was any kind of woman I could beat it on my own. Then one day I misplaced the checkbook and reacted (and felt) like I had lost a child. During this same time period I also tried to cook popcorn on the stove "old-school" and it burned and ruined the pan and I felt like a total loser-failure worthless piece of shit. Yeah, that's right, because I screwed up popcorn.

Then one day I brought my little baby out for a walk in the woods with me on a nice day because I thought that might help lift my spirits. While I was out there I kept having self-loathing thoughts and feeling guilty that my beautiful new baby was going to have to grow up with an insane mother and I had a split second thought that she would be better off if I left her in the woods. Someone would find her and she'd be fine. She'd be better than fine. A part of me recognized the insanity and screamed to me to GET SOME HELP, CRAZY! I talked to my doctor and told her that I had been feeling sad and tired and worthless etc etc. and she gave me a depression screening. According to the test I was clinically depressed and she said it was totally treatable and she didn't once suggest that maybe I should not have custody of children. She put me on Prozac. About three weeks later the darkness lifted. To say I felt better is a total understatement. It was like night and day.

I've had people ask me what it feels like to be depressed. It's hard to explain to someone who has never experienced it. It's not a mood, it's an ever-present smothering darkness. Here are some of my personal symptoms:

being terrified (constant terrifying "what if" thoughts with feelings of terror totally out of sync with the situation)
feeling incredible guilt for no reason
feeling worthless
feeling like I am a drag on friends and family
feeling like a prima donna because I'm preoccupied with how I'm feeling from minute to minute and trying to find some way to make myself feel better. Doesn't leave much room for thinking of anyone else.
feeling selfish
feeling stupid
having physical pain: heaviness in my chest, dull leg/back/headache
self-loathing - constantly sick to death of myself and my stupid brain.
feeling irritating and irritated by almost everything
hopeless - this is it, I'm never going to feel better.
helpless - there is no cure, I might as well accept this as my life.
feeling rage
loss of control
feeling mentally weak
Am tired all the time but can't sleep for more than an hour or two at a time at night. Could sleep all day.
bored with everything
Tears squirting out of my eyes unprovoked at inopportune moments.
joyless

The stupid thing about depression is that when you are in the middle of it you don't recognize you are in the middle of it. You think you can get better if you would just decide to get better. Since I have been dealing with this for so long, I have become more self-aware and can tell when the depression is rearing its ugly head again. It usually starts with fear. I think things like, "what if Kira gets run over by the school bus" or "what if Sam gets hit by a car" (lots of automobile themed fears). When I register these thoughts I immediately try to think if maybe I've not been taking my Prozac regularly and most times, sure enough, I've not been the best about taking the meds. Then, after I get back on and stay on, I feel better again.

I don't want to be on medication. Who does? When I first moved to Duluth I was off the Prozac. I think, if I remember correctly, that after I went on them the first time and got better I thought, "OMG, I'm better. I don't need medication anymore," and I went off them, and I suppose the stress of moving triggered a new wave of depression, and I then had to find a new doctor. My new (not current, thankfully) doctor insisted that if I wanted to continue with my anti-depressants, I had to have a consultation with a therapist. I was about as open to that as a clinically depressed young mom can be and I went only because I had no choice. I didn't see the point because NOTHING WAS WRONG. I didn't need to talk anything out. There was no real stress in my life. My depression was completely biological/chemical/physiological, it was literally in my head. The guy I went to was a total tool. He tried so hard to be hippie/liberal/new age. He had a little fountain on a table and he scotch taped some little plastic turtles to the rim. He was wearing wool socks with Birkenstocks. To work. This was the person I was supposed to turn my mental health over to. Ugh. I got through the consultation, and because of the depression screening he gave me and the unstoppable weeping that seemed to make him incredibly uncomfortable for someone who should be trained to deal with people having mental breakdowns, he concurred with the G.P. that I was in fact, depressed. Um, no duh.

Since then, through painful trial and error of going on and off medication, trying less and more medication, I have learned that I will probably forever have post-partum depression. Pregnancy pushed my already depression-prone brain over the edge. That's depressing in itself, but what can you do? Accept it, medicate the shit out of it, and move on, that's what.

If you are experiencing depression you are not alone. There are LOTS of people that have depression (which kind of makes me feel not-so-spesh) If you have depression, take the advice I gave to myself way back when Kira was a baby, "Get some help,Crazy!" Tell someone. Do something about it because you don't have to live like that. Hang in there!

(and when I say "Hang in there" I mean it like this:

Awwwww.... cute!

Not like this:

Awwwww.....

Btw, I am in no way qualified to give any professional advice or be a spokesperson for depression.)

Jail: Part II

2011-10-16T09:50:00.004-05:00

St. Louis County Jail is maximum security. Meaning that to get to the where the prisoners are, you have to go through three or four guarded steel doors. To get in to the first door you have to go through a metal detector that is so sensitive that it always beeps so then you have to be wanded by a guard with one of those metal detecting wands. There is a long list of things that can't be brought in to the area where the prisoners are even if you don't plan on having them get their hands on it; sharp things, phones, poison things etc, because prisoners are cagey (ha ha, no pun intended) and can do a lot with a little. I loved working at the jail because it was so interesting, for one thing, and I really loved the women I worked with who ran the activities program for prisoners. The leader of these women was Robyn. She was strict and I think now is the big boss at the jail.

One time Kira found a teeny tiny bunny out in the grass in our yard and brought him in the house and said she wanted to keep it.

It was so small I thought it was a mouse or a baby squirrel or something. I've never seen a bunny that small. I didn't think it would live, but I got it a tiny bottle, some kitten formula and read up on bunny raising. They need to be warm and fed about five hundred times a day. I thought I was up to the task and I kept up the pace for a few days but then came the one day of the week I was supposed to work at the jail. I would be gone for 8 hours and I couldn't leave the bunny for that long. The following week we were supposed to take a family vacation to California and I still hadn't figured out what to do with the bunny while we were gone because you can't take a little wild bunny on a plane, can you? What was I going to do with this little bunny that I had totally fallen in love with? Kira couldn't be trusted to take care of it, and Mitch wouldn't so I really had no choice but to see if I could smuggle it into the jail. I figured if I could smuggle it in to the jail, I could easily get it past airport security.

I put on my hideously ugly overalls, stuck some velcro on the top of the chest pocket so I could close it so the bunny couldn't poke his little head out and give us away, I put the bottle of formula in another pocket and off I went. I went through the metal detectors and of course the clasps on my overalls set it off so I had to be wanded. Thankfully there is no bunny-detecting wand! I got in and felt like I had just broken out of Alcatraz. I beat the system! Now I had to avoid detection for eight hours.

About every 20 minutes I went to the bathroom and fed the little bunny. I got through the first six hours and was feeling pretty smug. I wanted to tell someone! I was just so proud! Before my last class I went in to Robyn's office with a ridiculous smile on my face. She knew I was up to something. She said, "...what.....WHAT?" and I cracked. I reached in my pocket and brought out the tiny bunny. The look on Robyn's face was PRICELESS. She was stunned, and pissed, and overcome with the cuteness of the little bunny. She gave me the obligatory lecture about contraband (but Robyn, nobody said anything about baby bunnies that need to be fed every 20 minutes) but then she couldn't help but say, "OOOOOOO! HE'S SOOOO CUUUUTE!" and she reached into a drawer and pulled out a perfect sized plastic cage for him and stuffed it with tissue so it was all cozy and comfy. Apparently I'm not the only one who smuggles in cute animals. She said I couldn't take him into my last class and I would just have to leave him in her office. Fine with me. I gave her the bottle and she snuggled him in her arms and fed him and said, "What were you thinking!" I told her all about how this was a test run to see if I could get him past airport security and she gave me another lecture about how irresponsible it would be if I did that and he got taken away! What would happen to him! She would take care of him! Jesus!

I went and taught my last class and when I came back to her office it was dark. I thought she was gone, but she was sitting in there, in the dark, with the bunny. I said, "What are you doing?" and she shushed me and told me the bunny was sleeping.

So if I can smuggle a mammal into the jail on my person with nobody being the wiser (and notice I said ON my person, not IN my person) what else is being smuggled into jail??? And HOW??? Believe me, you do not want to know. I'll just tell you one little story. This guy got arrested and was waiting to be processed so he was sitting on this out-of-the way bench in the booking area and he was handcuffed. Apparently he was a plan-ahead type of guy, because he was prepared for just such a dilemma. There was a camera trained on him while he got his pants down and grunted out the handcuff key he had shoved up his anus earlier that day? week? part of his morning routine?, and he unlocked his cuffs. TA DA!!! It was quite the production which the guards were so fascinated by that they let it go on to see if he could get out of the cuffs. And then they took his disgusting key away from him and recuffed him.

Jail: Part I

2011-10-14T17:54:00.002-05:00

My friend Anne wrote to me and said:

"Hi Sarah! I have a special request for a blog posting from you. Will you write about your experiences teaching prisoners? (you really did that, didn't you? I mean, I'm so gullible that I'd probably believe you if you said that you taught ASL to chimps.) (which would also be a fun post)."

Anne, I really did teach prisoners at the St. Louis County Jail. I really really did. I taught them computer basics and poetry. We even published a poetry newsletter! I was trying to think if anything really blog-worthy happened while I was working there and I guess I have a few stories.

I taught a two hour class of basic computers for the men, and then a two hour class of poetry for the women, and a two hour class of poetry for the men. The guard would escort about 8 or 10 people in to my classroom and then leave and lock the door behind him. Locking me in the room with a bunch of inmates. If anything happened I was to use the phone and call for help. Or just scream. I don't think I was ever in any danger, but one time during the women's class a couple of the ladies got into a shoving match which threatened to turn into a full-blown fist fight. I got in between them and broke it up. Does that sound brave? It wasn't. They were both tiny and weak and one was about 6 months pregnant, and the other was about 8 months pregnant. They both had big bellies and they were willing to get in a fist fight. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I thought I was on candid camera or something. I only had to step between them and say, "Seriously??? You're going to fist fight while you're pregnant? Really???" Then they sat down and called each other horrible names until the guard could come and bring them back to their cells.

I really liked talking to them about their lives. They were very interesting people. Some were quite intelligent, but had lives where if there was a chance of bad luck, they got the bad luck. And some of them were incredibly stupid. One guy came in and told me that he was so mad that he is in jail because he got busted for being in possession of Oxycontin or something like it. He said he was already on probation and then he got the Oxy and took it but he didn't get high because earlier that day he smashed his thumb with a hammer and the Oxy only took the pain away from the thumb, and didn't get him high. He was more upset about not getting high than being back in jail. Idiot.

There were some murderers in there with me too. Guys who killed their girlfriends. They creeped me out. There was one guy that was there for over a year. He was soooooo creepy. He was in for being 28 years old and having a 14 year old "girlfriend." I think they call that "rape." He says they had a beautiful relationship. I say GROSS. He was skinny and pale and had a devil beard and he became obsessed with me. I can't remember the exact details of all the creepiness, but I arranged it so he wouldn't be brought to class anymore and then he wrote me letters. Ick! The ladies that worked at the jail were really good about not letting him see me or anything, but in the break room they called him my boyfriend and laughed and laughed.

One guy was there because he went nuts one night when he was high on meth. He was having paranoid hallucinations and thought someone was after him so he stripped naked and ran down the fire escape and broke into another apartment and took the baby that was in there and he ran. Can you imagine how terrifying it would be to see a naked guy come into your apartment and take your baby? In his drug addled brain he thought he was saving the baby from the people who were after him. I don't know exactly how it turned out, but I know the baby was returned unharmed and he had to go to prison for about ten years. Whew! I actually liked that guy when he was off the drugs. He looked a lot like Jesus and he had a calming effect on the other inmates. Sometimes they would be rude to me and he could totally defuse any impending conflict and make everything calm and peaceful. I was really glad to see him every week. I'm sure he would have scared the crap out of me when he was on drugs.

There were a lot of drug addicts in jail. Meth was usually the drug of choice and let me tell you, Breaking Bad makes meth use look glamorous. It's not. At all. It's disgustingness can be summed up in two words; "meth mouth." People that smoke lots and lots of meth have little, smelly, rotten, black stumps where their teeth are supposed to be. Apparently it is incredibly addictive because when a new meth head would come to jail, covered in scabs from compulsively scratching at his/her skin while high, the other meth heads would "buy" (with whatever the currency is in jail) the new meth head's scabs, yes SCABS, because apparently if you eat a meth head's scabs, you can get a little meth bump. Here's a little advice for you; if you are ever in the presence of a bunch of meth addicts in withdrawal and they tell you they are willing to eat another person's scabs for a taste of meth; don't say, "Wow, and what would you do for a Klondike Bar?" They don't think it's funny.

I have another jail story but this post is getting too long so I'll save that one for tomorrow! See ya!

Teenagers are Mean

2011-10-10T19:09:00.000-05:00

When my kids were little everyone told me how sweet they were, and then they'd add "just wait until they are teenagers! Whew!" Yeah right, my sweet little boy who was my very best friend was never going to turn on me. Get real!

Well, he did. He finally turned on me and broke my heart. I know it's probably a normal teenager's reduced brain function, or hormones or something, but hey! It still stings!

There is a semi-formal dance at his school on Friday. I asked him if he was planning to go to it and he looked at me like I was crazy. No way was he going to a dance. I thought it was only because he was too shy to ask someone to go along with him and threw out a few suggestions from the nice girls I know in his class. He said no to all of them. I suggested he go with his best friend. He still said no. What could be holding him back? I know he wants to go. Who wouldn't? So I did the only thing a good mother could do. I offered to go as his date. I offered myself up but it's not a truly altruistic gesture. I really want to go to the dance. I LOVED high school dances when I was in high school!

He said, "NOOOOOOOO WAY!!!!" He acted like I suggested he run naked through the homecoming game. What's wrong with me? I've held up! I'd pay for everything! I'd even buy my own wrist corsage! I told him all the advantages of going with his mom and he was not fazed at all! Can you believe it! I even suggested a double date with his friend Andy and Andy's mom. Still, he wouldn't think about it for even one second. He didn't even try to let me down easy! What a monster! It's like I'm in high school all over again.

But I'll show him. I am going to find another date to this dance and just show up! Then he'll be jealous!

Here comes Mommy! Yay!

Kira in the Car

2011-10-09T18:27:00.001-05:00

Kira: Dad, guess what my dream job is.

Mitch: I don't know. What is it?

Kira: Well, it's not really a dream job, but more of a work-related fantasy.

Mitch: ......

Kira: My dream is to quit a job.

Mitch: ... okay

Kira: And if I can, I would like to slap someone on the way out.

Mitch:.... huh? You want to slap someone?

Kira: It doesn't necessarily have to be a person.

Mitch: ...?

Kira: Like, it could be a chicken or something.

Based on this conversation, I can picture Kira getting a job at a factory farm, pissing her boss off, getting into a screaming fight and then slapping her way out of the big chicken pen and a lot of ba-GAWK! screaming from chickens being slapped out of the way. My sweet little baby wants to go postal in a chicken barn. When she dreams, she dreams big!

I have an honest to goodness TROLL!

2011-10-05T17:31:00.005-05:00

Did anyone watch SNL last Saturday? There was a skit on about internet trolls, you know, the people who write mean or nonsensical comments on stuff other people have written, and they do it anonymously because they aren't brave enough to even leave an internet handle. Well, I have one now! I'm kind of torn between being annoyed by it and being happy that I'm getting more comments. Seriously, comments are so great, even the bad ones are fun to read sometimes. That said, I am a little annoyed with this person. I got nine comments from him/her within about 15 minutes on various posts. I wondered how this angry person found me so I looked at my stat counter page. Here is their first entry.

As you can see, whoever it is was in Minneapolis, they were using a PC and Firefox as a browser. They were directed to my blog by googling "girls dad molest" which, Mr./Mrs. Troll, is just a little disturbing, almost as disturbing as the fact that google sent him/her to me. He/she happened upon a post I wrote about how weird I think Prolife Across America billboards are and his/her first comment was "Thank God we can still kill babies in this country. Fuck ya!" Well Troll, thank you for the comment, but I don't think you read what I wrote. I was writing about how weird the "I could ____ before I was (insert fetal age here)" campaign is. Of course, I'm sure my political opinion on the issue of abortion probably shines through, but that wasn't what the post was about because that is an issue that nobody is changing their minds about. This is what I can tell about this troll from that very first comment. He/she capitalized "God" so it is a religious person (probably only when it's convenient, however, because flaming a blog is not something Jesus would do), which probably explains the prolife stance but doesn't really explain the venom. It is VERY sarcastic, obviously, which tells me that this person is angry in a general way. I don't really get the "Fuck ya!" Is it supposed to be "Fuck Yeah!" or more of a "Fuck you!" because I'll take either one, I guess.

Then next comment was made a few minutes later on a post about Kira asking if you startle bees if it makes them poop out a little bit of pollen. He says to that one: "Too bad you didn't abort her. She wouldn't be asking such dumb questions." Okay, more anger but I have to admit, that was a pretty dumb question. Dumb but funny! Which is why I blogged about it. This post has absolutely nothing to do with my stance on abortion, but Mr./Mrs. Troll can't get over that! Still mad about it!

The next comment was on another Kira in the Car post. This one about what kind of plants she would least like to wipe with if she had to wipe with a plant. To which he says, "Stupid children poopin' up our woods. Get the coat hanger!" which kind of made me laugh because the thought of kids poopin' up our woods makes me smile a little. Then "get the coat hanger" which taken in the context of the other comments, I am assuming he thinks that I should abort her with a coat hanger for pooping in the woods. First of all, she's eleven. I can't abort her anymore. She's not part of my body anymore. She's been born. For eleven years. Secondly, abortions SHOULD NOT be performed with coat hangers! I think that's the whole point of the pro-choice movement. Abortions should be safe, legal and available. No coat hangers! Ick! Dangerous!

Nextly, he/she commented on a post about nightmares I was having while reading the book Roots. It's a pretty heavy, sad topic so I was having nightmares about babies being taken away from mothers. My troll said, "Babies taken away? Just think of it as a really late term abortion. See, all better." No Troll, I don't think you get the point. If a woman CHOOSES to go through a pregnancy, she can CHOOSE to keep her baby or put it up for adoption. It's about choice. The slaves in Roots didn't have any choices about anything at all. Having babies, keeping babies, or anything else, for that matter. That's what was so nightmarish about it! They made a baby, loved it while it was in the womb, and then someone told them they had to give it up. No choice! Nobody WANTS to get an abortion. Pro-choice isn't pro-abortion. It's pro-getting-a-say-in-what-happens-to-your-body-and-your-life.

A few minutes after that I got a comment on a post about when my niece was born. My poor troll was starting to lose it and was making less sense. The post was pretty much a birth announcement and he said, "Fucking abortion, man. I keep telling you but you don't listen. When did the fetus become a person? Oh after its born." Nobody said anything about abortion so what does this even mean? A fetus DOES become a person after it is born. The first several weeks of pregnancy it is called an embryo, then it's a fetus, then after it starts breathing on its own and is separate from its mother, it is a baby. So, I guess we agree? I don't get why you're so mad at me.

Then he commented on a post about what my sister was going to name her baby. I wrote a post asking for suggestions. His suggestion was "Abortion," which is not a good name for a baby at all. I think he is still mad at me about the Pro-Life Across America billboards. At this point I've pretty much decided it is a man who is doing this because women who are pro-life aren't generally so venomous. This is the kind of anger I have usually seen in men who don't get what they want.

The next comment was after a post I wrote about possibly the worst day of subbing I ever had. It was in a remedial reading class full of obnoxious ninth grade boys. Troll said, "Fucking Sped kids. Failed abortions." which is not a nice thing to say at all. For one thing, I made a point to say that the kids in the class WERE NOT special ed. kids. They were just jerks. I don't think any of them were failed abortions either, but I have no way of knowing. To be perfectly honest, I don't think abortions fail all that often so I don't know where you are getting your information.

Next he commented on a post I wrote about how I told Mitch about how sometimes if my pants are tight enough I can make farts come out the top of my butt crack and how he was grossed out about that. My troll friend said, "marriage abort! marriage abort! marriage abort!" which I don't really get. What does that mean, Mr. Troll? That we should divorce over back farts? I don't think that is grounds for divorce but if it is, don't tell Mitch.

The last comment was on a post about when Kira asked Mitch what is the thickest piece of beef jerky he has ever seen, which was weird, which was why I posted about it. The troll said, "Its in my pants" which really made me sure it was a man because I don't think any woman would insinuate that her vagina was like a piece of beef jerky, but then again, why would a guy say his junk was like beef jerky? Dry, dehydrated, withered and gross?

So based on the little bit of information I have on my new troll named Anonymous, I think he is probably a man in his 30s living in the Twin Cities and he is mad about abortion because possibly he wanted to have a baby with a woman and she didn't want to. Or maybe he impregnanted a woman and wanted to have the baby, but she opted for an abortion because sleeping with him was a big mistake, but not enough of a mistake that she should have to pay for it for the rest of her life by being forced to parent a child (poor baby) with him while trying to dodge his anger and venom and drama.

And because he has a penis like beef jerky. Yucky!

Puta Flatulento

2011-10-04T12:16:00.000-05:00

I'm back to work subbing again which I am SO happy about. Today I am spending my second day teaching Spanish I and II. These kids don't know jack about Espanol. I sound like a native Costa Rican compared to them and I don't really know jack either. But I do know how to say, "Callate!" (quiet!) "Escucha me" (listen to me), "En Espanol, por favor" (in Spanish, please), and some various swears. The kids seem to be very impressed. However, the teacher has the kids watching Toy Story Uno for two days which means I get to watch the same hour and ten minutos of it five times. So I have a lot of time to kill while the kids watch and try to find phrases they know (none).

I've already planned in minute detail a two day trip to NYC for me and my sisters. Now I'm blogging. I sent a bunch of texts today as well. And it's only 11:15. During my prep hour I took a series of pictures of myself to send along with the texts. Mitch kept ignoring me even though I sent him a picture of me looking like Martin Landau, and kept him abreast of my bowel activity, minute by minute; and then I got a text back that just said, "Dentist" which roughly translated means: "Shut the hell up, I'm busy." I hope he didn't show my cute dentist-boyfriend the picture of me off-gassing. That is for husbands, not for cute dentists, Mitch.

Kira in the Car

2011-10-03T19:48:00.002-05:00

Today on the way to hockey Kira was unusually quiet. Mitch said, "What are you thinking about?" Here is their conversation:

Mitch: What are you thinking about?

Kira: About a pigeon.

Mitch: What about a pigeon?

Kira: I want to get a pigeon and sharpen its beak a little bit every day, and feed it a tiny bit of lead every day.

Mitch: Why?

Kira: Then when its beak is sharp enough and has enough lead, I'll teach him how to write, you know, like a pencil.

Mitch: ....But why???

Kira: Then after he learns to write I'll teach him how to do math so I don't have to do it.

Happy Birthday, MOTHER!

2011-10-02T10:07:00.001-05:00

Today is my mom's birthday. She is the big 5-0! Just kidding. She's way older than that. Remember? I'm 41? I wonder if she would be mad if I said how old she really is today? I don't know. Probably not. Anyhoo, in honor of her birthday I will tell you my favorite story about my mom. She is very practical and not given to a lot of mushy crapola.

When I was 11 years old, we lived in Australia. We were visiting the Apostles Islands National Park, which is a series of beautiful cliffs on the coast.

My mom wouldn't let us go within fifty feet of the cliff edge, obviously, but my dad went up to the very edge, and when he looked down he noticed that there was another ledge about three feet below the main cliff and he thought it would be really funny to jump down to the lower cliff because we, being fifty feet back, would think he jumped the whole way down. I think the joke was supposed to be on my mom because Dad told us what he was up to. He went to the edge, looked down, jumped and disappeared. I remember my mom gasped and put her hands to her mouth and then said, "Oh my god! He has the car keys!"

I'd put a picture of my mom up here but she hates having her picture taken, so I won't. I'll put her Facebook profile picture up instead. It's not her, it's my niece, but people say that my niece looks just like my mom, so you can use your imagination and pretend you know what my mom looks like:

My mom, however, hardly ever wears a pig hat.

Happy Birthday to my wonderful, generous, thoughtful, practical, MOTHER! I love you more than all your kids put together!*

*suck on that, Amy and Beth.

Happy REAL Birthday to me!

2011-09-30T22:33:00.002-05:00

I got an email from my dad in response to yesterday's post. It is the single most shocking piece of information I have ever learned about myself in my life. (What? I'm sheltered)

Here's what I remember about your birthday. In September 1970-do the freaking math will you!........ You were born in a Catholic hospital in St. Cloud with nuns in attendance. Mom was in labor for over 24 hours and she passed out between labor pains. At one point she told the cute little red-headed nurse she wanted to go home. The nurse looked at me and said, "Do you want to take her home Mr. Lindahl?" I didn't. You finally popped out in your own good time and all was well except we missed some insurance deadline for coverage by an hour or two so the good old nuns changed the dates of your birth to get us the coverage we needed. You ended up costing us not much. Whew! You may have been born on the 30th of September but it was in 1970 NOT 1969. Sometimes you acted like a little bastard but you actually are not one. Happy birthday and legit or not, I love you! Dad

UUUUUUMMMMMMMMMM!!!!!!!! TODAY is my actual birthday??? I'm sure mom appreciated that you found the red-headed nun to be so attractive while she was busy passing out between contractions while bringing me into the world. The nuns committed insurance fraud??? (I always knew nuns weren't as saintly as they pretend to be; "I'm married to Jesus, the savior, who are you married to? I like older men. I'm so perfect! Tee hee!")

So today is my birthday. September 30. OMG.

UPDATE on my birthday forgiveness of the girl who let my bunny out when I was seven; I mean, the day before I turned seven: Not gonna happen. I tried. It was too hard. I really do enjoy carrying that grudge. It's a totally legitimate grudge to carry. I'm gonna keep it. Sorry, Asshole, you're still on my shit list. I won't wish you paralyzed or dead, but I will wish you bored and perpetually annoyed. (Oh, and I also will use my magic mind powers to wish that at least once a year you drop (and break) a bottle of oil or a can of paint in your house. And that it splatters under the fridge.)

HA HA HA HA!

I'm 41! (42)

2011-09-29T07:37:00.002-05:00

It's my birthday today! I am officially 41 years old, but I kind of actually suspect I might be 42 because my parents met in 1969 in January, and got married in June. I was born in September. Sounds suspiciously like a "shotgun" type situation, doesn't it? But they say I was born more than a year after they were married. Riiiiiiiiiiiight. And my mom says that empire-waist wedding dresses were all the rage. Riiiiiiiiiiggggghhht.

Oh well, whatever you say, Mom and Dad! I'm not going to say any more about it because I know today is pretty special for them, the 41st (or 42nd) year commemorating the greatest day of their lives.

I would have to say the best birthday I ever had was when I was born. You can't really beat that. The worst birthday I ever had was when I turned 7 (or 8) and that was because I got the gift of carrying a grudge for the rest of my life. It's a heavy burden. Here's what happened.

I was having a small birthday party after school. I think I invited eight or nine girls to come over and play and have cake and give me presents. I lived a few blocks from the school so we were going to walk to my house. One of the girls in my class was not invited to the party because she was a total shithead and she was mean to me. On the day of the party she cried because she missed her bus and then got the other girls who were coming over to beg me to let her come over and at least use the phone to call home. Even then in my underdeveloped, seven year-old (or eight year-old) brain I was wondering why the hell couldn't she just call from the school phone and I was about to say just that when she handed me a present. The manipulative asshole didn't miss the bus, she was crashing my party! But being seven (eight), I was too sweet to be a hardass, so I let her come to the party.

When we were out in my backyard, playing on my swingset, and pinning tails on donkeys, someone noticed that my pet rabbit's hutch door was open. Just swinging in the breeze and there was no rabbit in there. We looked and looked for my bunny everywhere but she was gone. I was so upset. Totally ruined turning 7! (8!) Later someone told me that the asshole was the one who opened the cage door. For that I have hated her with a passion ever since. She didn't do anything to change my mind in the ensuing years either. One time in high school I was at a party and when I was leaving I bumped another kid's car. When I was outside looking to see if there was a dent, this girl happened to be standing there and I asked her to keep it quiet until I could find the kid whose car I clipped. She literally ran into the party and screamed, "Sarah just crashed into Kale's car!" I didn't know it was possible, but I hated her even more.

I hated her so much that whenever I needed to imagine an enemy, her face popped into my mind. One time someone asked me how much I hate her, like, did I wish her dead? And I was about to say yes, but to be truthful, I can't wish anyone dead. To be funny (but not really) I said I wished her paralyzed. Later that year, she got some mysterious, rare disease that left her partially paralyzed. That was when I knew I was magic. And with great power comes great responsibility. I immediately felt bad for wishing her paralyzed and tried from then on to use my incredible mind-power for good. (Turns out it wasn't actually me that made her paralyzed, it was some crazy virus that she probably got from a grimy stripper pole, but nevertheless, I felt bad for wishing that one anyone, even her; the party-crashing, rabbit-losing, accident-blabbing, paralyzed stripper.)

So now, here it is 34 years later, and I'm still thinking about that fateful day when I lost a rabbit and gained an enemy for life. I need to get over it. I think it's time. A 41 year-old (42) woman shouldn't hate anyone, so today, on my birthday, I am going to give myself the gift of forgiving that horrible asshole and shuck the baggage that comes with holding a grudge. Hear that, Asshole! I forgive your freaky, red-headed, loudmouthed, paralyzed ass! Now get out of my head!

2nd Grade

2011-09-27T19:38:00.003-05:00

I've been subbing this week for a second grade teacher. I love second grade. I love kids. I love teaching. I love school. The kids are so fantastically weird, and if I let them, they would talk to me all day and tell me crazy stories. ALL DAY. I am already too indulgent with them because I crave their crazy stories, so I'm afraid that there is a good chunk of our day spent with me sitting at the teacher's desk and the kids lined up under the pretense of getting individual help with their math or reading, but we actually all know that they are only lined up to tell me something strange that they dreamed about, or that they saw on TV or that their parent's did.

Yesterday I got a scene by scene retelling of a movie about a girl who got her arm bit off by a shark while surfing. Surely the synopsis was a million times better than the actual movie because the girl that told it to me was so intensely involved in the telling, dramatic gestures and all. This morning a boy told me all about the show Terra Nova. Dinosaurs! Blood sucking worms! The jungle! Violence! Terror! (I can't believe what parents let their kids watch.)

This afternoon one boy was tired and had a bit of a meltdown that landed him in the hall. I got so much secretive, unsolicited advice about how to handle it. One girl told me she didn't want to see me get my feelings hurt so I should call the principal and let her handle things. Another kid told me to make him sit in a time-out during afternoon recess by the bee hive.

The only thing I don't like about teaching is the hard schedule. And the only reason I mind that is because (and forgive my bluntness) when a girl has to poop a girl has to poop. And a girl can't say to 25 seven-year-olds, "Talk amongst yourselves for ten minutes or so while I drop the kids off at the pool," because it only takes about 90 seconds for them to devolve into a Lord of the Flies type scenario (re: time-outs by the bee hive). So teaching makes me constipated.

I saw something incredibly strange today. There is a student teacher working with another teacher and she is young and thin and beautiful, but today she was wearing the strangest thing. She had on a normal, properly sized, oxford, button down shirt. No pleats, no puffiness, nothing special. What was weird was that she was wearing a thin leather braided belt around her rib cage. Right under her boobs. It looked so uncomfortable, and so weird! Is this a new thing? I've never seen anything like it so I was staring at her under-boobs all day wondering what-the-hell and I'm sure she just thinks I was staring at her boobs, which I kind of was. So who's the strange one?

E Nun C 8

2011-09-26T20:40:00.001-05:00

Tonight at dinner we were all quiet and Sam said, "I got a B on my social studies test," but because he is a teenager and mumbles everything he says, we ALL heard,

"I got a BM in social studies. Huh."

In fact, Mitch, Kira and I could have sworn that's what he said. That is exactly what we all heard. How can three people miss-hear the same exact thing?

Then a few minutes ago Mitch and I heard something on TV about "Cock Robin," which is a poem, but we didn't know it was a poem so Mitch googled it and said kind of quietly to himself, "Oh, it's a poem. I thought it was some kind of pest." As in V.D. As in, "Dammit woman! I have cock robins, AGAIN!"

Misanthrope's Guide to Life: Book Review

2011-09-24T10:57:00.001-05:00

One of my favorite blogs is 2birds1blog. It is co-written by Meghan Rowland and Chris Turner-Neal. They recently published a book called The Misanthrope's Guide to Life. I got the book yesterday and sat down and read it cover to cover and laughed my head off because if you didn't already know this about me, I'm what some people might call an introvert, and what other people might call an asshole. Tomato, tomahto. Now I know it's not one or the other. I'm a misanthrope.

The book is a humorous (or is it?) look at how people like myself (and everyone I share genes with) go through life and try to get along with other people who don't know that solitude and quiet equals paradise. One of my favorite lines of the book is: "Adam and Eve may have gotten along fine, but Cain beat Abel with a rock for being a show-off." This quote is the introduction to a section called "Great moments in Misanthrope History," my favorite point being, "1347-1353 - The Black Death kills millions in Europe. Survivors revel in free clothes and their own rooms."

Rowland and Turner-Neal also give quizzes so you can determine whether or not you are a misanthrope and if so, what kind. I am an "avoidant misanthrope." I am the "patron saint of the locked door and the turned-off phone." The chapters include things like the misanthrope at work, among friends, in transit (Planes, Trains, Automobiles, and Sons of Bitches), at work, in love, as a parent, on vacation, at home and in death.

If you are an introvert you will laugh and laugh when you recognize yourself on every page, and if you are an extrovert this is a good guide to the inner workings of the introvert's mind.

Reading the book reminded me of holidays with my misanthrope-heavy family. Last Christmas my dad and I were sitting in his cozy TV room, watching How It's Made and eating peanuts in the shell, and some mention was made of the local holiday parade that was about to happen just a few blocks away. I said, with my voice dripping with sarcasm, "We should go," thinking the very thought would make my dad shudder in an amusing way, but no, he decided to see if he could one-up me and it turned in to a horrible game of social-chicken that had no winners. Here is the dialogue that led to us standing out in the freezing cold trying to avoid eye-contact with jolly acquaintances chock-full of the holiday spirit (gag):

Me: We should go to the holiday parade.
Dad: We should.
Me: I'm serious.
Dad: Me too.
Me: Okay, let's go.
Dad: Put your jacket on.
Me: Okay, come on. Put yours on too.
Dad: Okay.
(We both go up to the entryway and put on outerwear and then stand there and look at each other waiting for someone to give.)
Me: Okay, let's go.
Dad: I'll start the car.
Me: I'll get in.
Dad: Good. Let's go.
Me: Good. Let's.

Then we actually got in the car together and went. I couldn't understand what was happening. Why was this happening? When was he going to give in and go back home? He didn't. He parked. Should I give? No! I'm way more extroverted than he is! He'll give! We walked into the crowd and waited for the parade. Actually, that's not true. We stood off by ourselves by a wall where nobody else was because you couldn't see the parade from there. Then he lured me up to the curb where we could see the parade better. We spotted a gregarious person from high school that I never liked heading toward me with a big smile on her stupid face and we were both bracing for the inevitable "HIIIIIIII!!!! HOW ARE YOU????!!!!!" bullshit, or at least I thought we both were but when I looked to my side to see how he was going to handle it, he was gone. Totally disappeared like magic and I was left to handle this obnoxious person all by myself. After she moved on I panicked and looked for him, sure he went home, but he didn't. He was standing by the wall by himself. We endured the parade which made us both a little crabby, and then went home and went to separate rooms to try to regroup. Misanthropes? Oh yes.

My daughter has huge cojones

2011-09-23T14:08:00.001-05:00

"Mom, you need to step up your parenting a notch. There's a kid in my class that gets twenty bucks a week for doing NOTHING. I have to weed and empty the dishwasher just to get five bucks!"

This was said immediately after she showed me she ruined her new pants and then had me sign her grade reports which were nothing to brag about.

To Do:

2011-09-21T14:50:00.001-05:00

It's cold and raining and I think I'm getting a cold, and I have lots of bills to pay so you know, not the best day. So I made myself a list because I get so much pleasure from crossing things off the list that it helps get me motivated. Here's my list today:

breakfast
lunch
pay bills
wash dog
wash bird cage
pick up house
wash body
blog
take out garbage
wash hummingbird feeders
watch Modern Family
dinner
spray everything with lysol
drop bag off at Good Will
laundry
wash hands
wash hands
wash hands
wash hands
wash hands
wash hands
wash hands
wash hands
wash hands
wash hands
wash hands
wash hands
wash hands
wash hands
wash hands
wash hands
wash hands
wash hands
wash hands
wash hands (Thanks a lot, Contagion!)

Now that I look at this list I do a lot of washing of things. God, I hate washing things. But I like things clean so I'm between a rock and a hard place. Kira has a disgusting cold so that (and the fact that I am still having nightmares about the movie Contagion) is why I'm so concerned about germs and hand washing and Lysol.

Mitch took the garbage out this morning and when he saw me crossing it off my list he grabbed the pen and said I couldn't cross it off because I didn't do it. I crossed it off anyway and had every intention of taking full credit for it in my mind, but then later when I wasn't sitting by the list he signed his initials next to it so now I guess he has officially made it his.

I'm about half way through the day and it doesn't look like the pets are going to get washed, or the hummingbird feeders either, because although the hummingbirds are gone South, the hornets have been gathering around the feeders and I'm afraid of them. They are very big. I think they might be Africanized bees.

Looks like I'm only going to get about halfway through the list today but I did the hard stuff! I paid the bills, ate meals, blogged, washed my body and am keeping up my hand washing pace! Success! Tomorrow I will make my list easier. More eating, less washing.

Proof that Gwyneth Paltrow is Horrible: Contagion (spoiler alert!)

2011-09-18T17:28:00.000-05:00

I went to see the movie Contagion today because I'm depressed and I decided that watching Gwyneth Paltrow die, even if it is pretend, would make me feel better. And it did. If you don't already know, Contagion is a movie about a flu-like new virus that kills millions of people throughout the world in a matter of a few months. It starts with Gwyneth in an airport in Chicago and she's coughing a little and gets a phone call from the man she just crawled out of bed with (who was not her husband, Matt Damon!) The movie is supposed to be realistic and scientifically-based, but right away I had to suspend my disbelief by trying to wrap my head around how anyone in the world would cheat on Matt Damon. Right! Like that would ever happen! So anyway, if you can get past that, the movie is pretty good. Gwyneth dies a horrible death almost right away but thankfully, Matt is immune to the virus so he is okay! Whew!

The movie solidified my misanthropy and made me happy that I live in the woods and rarely socialize because you know what? People are really gross. People touch their face between two and three thousand times a day and in between digging in their noses and rubbing their eyes and licking their gross fingers in order to more easily open plastic produce bags, they are touching absolutely every gross surface in the world that everyone else has touched. The movie really drove that concept home and as soon as the credits started rolling I went to the bathroom and washed my hands.

The people who work at WHO and the CDC work diligently trying to find where the virus started and to find a vaccine. Jennifer Ehle, who was in Pride and Prejudice with Colin Firth (Mr. Darcy!) played the doctor who comes up with the vaccine. I really liked watching her. She's very attractive in the same way that Meryl Streep is attractive, but with none of the weirdness that Meryl Streep has. Meanwhile a blogger (Jude Law) is throwing a monkey wrench into the mix by writing that the government is hiding the cure so the pharmaceutical companies can make a "vaccine" and get rich when the cure is something called Forsythia which is an ancient Chinese herbal remedy that is cheap and readily available. What I like most about Jude Law is the crazy hazmat suit he wears that reminded me of Bender from Futurama,

and his giant fake front tooth. That's how they make handsome movie stars look like regular people. Giant crooked front teeth. I wish I had giant front teeth.

The movie is pretty good. I would recommend it but bring a bottle of hand sanitizer with you because you will be glad you did.

I didn't know until today that I was a dork when I was a kid

2011-09-17T09:08:00.001-05:00

I have a bunch of photo albums that I took from my grandma's apartment and as I was looking through them I noticed that during my painfully long "awkward" phase, I not only looked like a little dork, but I chose to accentuate my looks by expressing myself with dorky accessories. Take for instance, this picture of my sisters and me:

Here we are, Beth on the left with a look on her face that says, "Hurry up, I really have to poop," Amy on the right wearing the exact same dress as me (awkward!), and me in the middle. Look past the obvious feathered hair (that was in!) and the enormous glasses (also, IN) and look very carefully at what makes my dress different than Amy's. I dressed mine up with a button. I saw this and I thought, hm, weird. Then I saw a few more pictures from this day and the button kept grabbing my attention. Why was I wearing a button? What was on it? Then I looked really closely and I can see that it is a picture of Prince Charles and Lady Diana. Wha??? You can't really see it in this picture and it wouldn't show up when I scanned it, but believe me, it's Charles and Di. Specifically, it's this picture of Charles and Di:

On a button. On my dress.

Fast forward a few years to Beth's eighth birthday (I counted the candles):

There I am on the left. I'd say that was about 8th grade. Easily the peak of the awkward phase. I had gotten rid of the enormous glasses, but I gained a little pudge and turned my cool feathered hair into a permed mullet. I don't think I have to defend my hair choice by reminding you that mullets were in then. It was the early eighties. My cousin Katie who is standing next to me is also rocking an awesome mullet. Now look a little closer:

Again, I'm wearing a button! This time it's a picture of Michael Jackson in his red Thriller jacket:

Why? What was it about Beth's birthday that made my 14 year old brain scream, "Hey! This is the perfect occasion to wear my Michael Jackson button!" Were buttons in style or something? Did I wear one every day? I honestly can't remember ever even owning a button with a picture of anything on it except the ones my kids gave me of themselves in their hockey equipment that I was supposed to wear on my winter coat, but never did because I'm a TERRIBLE hockey mom. When did I decide buttons were stupid? Why didn't I always know buttons were stupid? Why was I so in love with Michael Jackson and Prince Charles and Lady Di? Ugggccchhhhh, I'm disgusted with my adolescent self. The bully in me feels compelled to be mean to the dork in me. Holy internal struggle!

My mom has been sending my kids cool clothes from Hollister and Abercrombie and Fitch because she wants them to look cool to their peers, so the fact that kids want to look cool is on her radar yet she let me walk around wearing buttons with people on them??? Mom! Why??? Do you remember this?

Sting

2011-09-16T10:20:00.002-05:00

I suppose I should write something since this is my blog and people check it and they are probably sick of seeing the picture of my grandma's pills. FYI, I spilled coffee on them so I never got the opportunity to take any. :(

The truth is, I don't feel like writing anything because nothing funny has been happening. My dog has a disgusting skin condition that requires several baths a week which neither one of us is very happy about. And of course, I'm grieeeeeeevvvvviiinnnggggggggggg. There's nothing funny about that. But I have been thinking about how many incredible females (human and canine) I have in my life and I'm pretty lucky (except when they die or get a mangey hide, of course.) My family is heavy on the females. Kind of like a bee hive. Speaking of bee hives, or rather, hornet nests; here is a picture of one in our yard that Kira can't leave alone:

Yes, those are arrows poking out and I'm pretty sure the bees didn't do that. And to answer your next question, I have no idea how many times Kira has been stung. She admits to nothing. She's had a long and contentious relationship with striped, stinging insects her entire life from the time she was two years old and tried to pet a big, fat, fuzzy bumble bee and got her first sting. Over the summer she was helping my sister paint her cabin. She was up on a ladder painting around a window and she called out to Amy, "There's a bee's nest between some boards here!" Amy said, "How do you know?" and she said, "Because bees are stinging me!" It's a good thing she's not allergic to bee venom.

Blehhhh

2011-09-14T09:42:00.000-05:00

Hello Everyone. It's been a hell of a week. My grandma passed away so the whole family met in her home town for her service. I blubbered my way through the service because there is nothing I love more than crying in public. It was great to see all the relatives because that side of the family is a bit crazy (in the best way possible). I helped clean out my grandma's apartment, which I was really happy I could do. She wasn't known for her housekeeping skills so before I vacuumed the carpet I looked it over for paperclips and pins and stuff and I found an amazing amount of pills.

We were trying to figure out what they were because, you know, partay! but I think the brown ones are laxatives, and one of them is a blood thinner. I don't know what the other ones are but I don't think I'll take them just to see because I don't want to pass out on the toilet from low blood pressure while having bloody diarrhea. That might just make me feel worse than I already do. Anyway, after I found all the pills and vacuumed I was walking around the hallway of her senior citizen apartment complex and I was finding pills all over the place! Parents of small children, just so you know, retirement communities are NOT BABY PROOF; but adventurous pill-poppers, make some senior citizen friends! It's like trick-or-treating but instead of the occasional full-size Snicker bar, you might get a Vicodin!

My sister stopped in Rush City on her trip to the service to pose her baby on this fish because, who wouldn't?

Firsts and Lasts

2011-09-08T11:02:00.000-05:00

You know how when you have a baby and you are so excited the first time they do something? Like when they say their first word (which is always "dada," stupid jerk babies) or when they walk for the first time and you call everyone you know because your baby stood up, took one step and then fell and hit her head on a coffee table? Not much of an accomplishment really, but at the time it's so exciting! There are other firsts that aren't so great as well; the first time they get their heart broken, or the first time they get arrested for vandalizing a garage door with sticks of butter on homecoming weekend. (sophomores rule!)

I've been thinking about it from the other side of life lately because my grandma is dying (yeah, I know deja vu. My other grandma was dying last September.) What about people's lasts? How sad it is to think that the last steps a person takes will be their last steps? My grandma took her last steps last week right before she had a massive stroke. Now I find myself wondering what her last words were? I suppose we don't acknowledge those things because we can't look ahead and know when something will be the last. I've been wondering things like; what is the last thing my grandma ate? What was the last thing she laughed about? What was the last outfit she picked out to wear? What was the last thing she wrote? What was the last thing she read? I guess I can only look back and remember the good things and be thankful for all the time we had together.

I remember the last time she went swimming. It was at my parent's lake house and she jumped off the dock ladder into the freezing cold water. I couldn't believe she did it. She was about 85 years old. A couple years later she went to her last movie at the movie theater. She is a Harry Potter FANATIC and we took her to the one of the movies. I had already seen it and I remember sitting there with her, knowing that any second an inferius was about to jump out of the dark water and grab Harry's arm and if I didn't warn her she would jump out of her skin. Did I warn her? No way! She jumped, I laughed, she said, "JESUS!" and I laughed some more.

I LOVED to tease her. In her old age I could get her laughing hard enough to make her wet her pants. That was always fun. (Apparently, after 70 a gal's pelvic floor muscles aren't what they used to be.) There's nothing as joyful as an octogenarian who is gasping for breath because she is laughing so hard at your explanation of the book Twilight, and in between gasps is saying, "Stop it... I'm wetting myself... please... stop it!" In my defense, I still don't see what's so funny about Twilight, Grandma.

When I was a kid I would spend weeks with her and my grandpa in the summer. They lived in a huge, hundred-year-old house with high ceilings, beautiful decorative molding, and two, count 'em TWO staircases. It was a grand, unique, shabby palace and she and I both loved it. It had a wonderful smell of dust, Virginia Slims, Cinnabar, English Lavender, and Ivory soap. It was a great smell. My Grandpa took over a kitchen pantry closet and turned it into a TV room and spent many evenings in there. When Mitch and I were dating and he came over to their house one time, he pulled me aside and said, "Why do you guys keep your grandpa in that closet?" Because he liked it in there!

My grandma loved me and I knew it. She spoiled me rotten. We dressed alike, we liked the same things (Lee Press On nails, Queen Elizabeth paper dolls, and root beer floats; to name a few), and we have the same sense of humor which is why it is so easy for me to make her laugh.

I have a baby niece who is joyfully experiencing her firsts. She started laughing lately, and screaming for the sole purpose of screaming (which, if I'm being honest, I could do without). Soon she will take her first steps and say her first word (dada) and we will cheer for her and celebrate. Maybe we should celebrate lasts like we celebrate firsts. My grandma never has to lose another loved one. She never has to worry about money or kids or illness again. And most importantly, she never has to go to the dentist ever again. That's pretty sweet.

She was my first best friend. I'm going to miss her like crazy.

School starts and I can't tell you how happy I am about it

2011-09-07T20:20:00.001-05:00

Sam started high school yesterday and Kira starts middle school tomorrow. Tonight we went to her open house and got her schedule and learned where all her classrooms are. God, I hate open house night. The kids are stressed because nobody can open their locker (that's the overwhelming source of middle school stress before the first day. Little do they know there are WAY worse things to worry about in middle school! Just wait, kids! You're gonna hate it!) and the building is huge compared to elementary school blah blah blah. And it was hot. Really hot. Like I-think-they-had-the-heaters-on kind of hot. I had sweat dripping down my spine and I'm not much of a sweat-er. And every time I get in a crowd of people I am reminded of what a misanthrope I am. I hate people so much. Actually, that's not true. I really like the idea of people (like internet people that probably aren't even real. Hello, THE MATRIX), but I hate actual people... So I guess it is true. Never mind about when I said it's not true. One lady had a pack of kids with her and she was yelling down the crowded hallway for her littlest to catch up and was screeching at the crowd to get out of his way; she said, "God! Get out of the way! My poor baby is getting rambushed!" Which I assume is a blend of ram and ambush. Or rambo and ambush. You know, now that I write it down, I think it's kind of clever and perfectly descriptive but I don't think she knew she was making up a word and it really annoyed me. Mostly the yelling-down-the-hall-of-a-thousand-people-while-I was-sweating-and-putting-up-with-a-nervous-and-cranky-11-year-old was making me crabby, but still. Don't make up words and yell them at me when I'm sweating.

Kira saw a lot of her friends and I overheard one conversation where she told her friend that when she was buying her school supplies she chose the wide ruled paper instead of the college ruled because there are less lines on the paper so she won't have to write as much as the idiots who buy college ruled. Score one for Kira!

Sam is on the fence about whether he likes high school yet or not. He will. What's not to like? Homework, that's what. He's had homework both nights already. But he's very conscientious so he will be fine. He has a few classes with one of the big bullies from middle school and already, the second day, three of the teachers have told that kid to SHUT UP. In one of the classes his former victims tittered a bit after the teacher said it and then she said to the bully, "Hear that laughing? That's all the people you've picked on." Score one for high school!

Ninth grade, nine fingers, get it?

Mother of the Year

2011-09-06T22:28:00.003-05:00

I have kind of liked the song "Pumped Up Kicks" by Foster the People for a while but I never listened to the words. I thought it they were saying, "something something something, la la la, my bucket." It's such a happy, lighthearted tune, it even has whistling! I just assumed the lyrics were something happy and lighthearted. Something to do with a guy's bucket. When I was driving Sam to his first day of school this morning the song came on and I was singing along with it, and telling him how much I love it, and isn't it great to go to school the first day and hear such a happy song on the radio? Turn it UP! What a great day! I decided I liked it so much that I would download it so when I came back home, that's what I did. While it was loading I looked up the lyrics to see what could be so interesting about that guy's bucket, but they weren't saying bucket, they were saying bullet. The song is about a kid who gets a hold of a gun (a six shooter!) and goes after all the mean kids with the "pumped up kicks." The chorus says:

All the other kids with the pumped up kicks you'd better run, better run, outrun my gun.All the other kids with the pumped up kicks you'd better run, better run, faster than my bullet.
I read that and said, "........ oh." And then I thought about how I sent my ninth grader off to his first day of high school humming a tune about a kid shooting his peers. Best. Mothering. Ever.
I still love the song, and I might love it even more because I find the duplicity kind of hilarious. "Run before I shoot you! Hee hee! Whistle whistle! *skip skip skip* La la la... BTW nice shoes!"

The Snake has been found!

2011-09-04T23:45:00.000-05:00

Remember yesterday when I told you that Sam caught a snake for Kira and she put it in a bucket and then it escaped? Today we found it. It was curled up at the bottom of the basement stairs. So cute! It was kind of cold down there so he was really easy to catch. I wonder how he spent his 24 hours of freedom in my house?

I imagine that soon after he got out of the bucket he slithered into the kitchen and got in the fridge and slithered through all the food, pooping in the butter and and peeing on top of all the diet coke cans. I wouldn't be too terribly surprised to find a disgusting shed skin in the left over baked beans. I bet he got out of the fridge then and took a little tour through the coffee pot and over all the silverware. Then I suppose he moseyed into the bathroom and coiled around my toothbrush for a while and then snuggled up and took a nap among my maxi-pads.

When we all went to bed and the house was dark and quiet, I imagine he got a little chilly so he was seeking some heat. I bet he slithered into my bed when I was asleep and took a little rest in my gaping mouth. Nice and toasty! I probably accidentally swallowed him and he slithered through my entire digestive tract, grateful to emerge in the morning. Best sunrise of his life! Then he probably slithered over every single surface that I clean. Now I have to clean the snake germs off every single thing in the house. You never know how much you don't want snakes loose in your house until there is a snake loose in your house.

A day of crisis

2011-09-03T16:44:00.002-05:00

Three things have happened that are making for a tough day for me, as it would any mother:

1) We gave away our swing set because my children are no longer children, but adolescents. The little girl across the road gets it now which is good. She'll got a lot of use out of it.

2) Both to Kira's and my horror we went shopping to buy her her first bra.

3) Sam caught a snake this morning and gave it to Kira who put it in a bucket and put it in her room. It escaped the bucket and now we have a loose snake in the house.

To deal with the first two things, Kira and I drowned our sorrows in ice cream at McDonalds. While she was eating her sundae she said, "This sundae is so good I want to get its autograph but I already ate its hands, so too bad," which I thought was weird. Why would you want the autograph of anyone, much less a stupid sundae.

Then we went to Animal Allies to pet cats because sometimes that makes us feel better about things. Cats are kind of gross. Did you know they shit in a box right in your house? Yuck. But they are fun to pet if you can avert your eyes from the constant flashing-of-anus. I guess a person who has a snake free-shitting in her house shouldn't throw stones at the people who have cats who admirably limit their shitting to a box.

Then we came home and discovered the snake had escaped. I told her to FIND IT and she looked really hard for about 4 minutes. Then she went outside and now she's playing on the bare spot in the yard where her swing set used to be. I DON'T THINK YOU'RE GOING TO FIND THE SNAKE OUT THERE!

Nora Ephron must be a Dwarf

2011-09-02T13:28:00.001-05:00

(I posted this at The Chunkerson's blog today as well.)

Did you guys know that Nora Ephron is only four feet and five inches tall? Actually I don't know that for sure but I am going to assume she must be comically short because in her book I Feel Bad About My Neck she writes this:

"I go off to college. I weigh 106 pounds. I come back from college three months later. I weigh 126 pounds. I was once thin and shapeless. Now I am fat and, ironically, equally shapeless. Nothing fits except for my wool plaid Pendleton pleated skirt, which makes me look even fatter. It's tragic. My father takes one look at me as I get off the plane and says to my mother, 'Well, maybe someone will marry her for her personality.'"

First of all, in what universe is 126 pounds fat on anyone of average height? I'm five feet and five inches tall and if I weighed 126 pounds I would look like I'd just gone through chemo during a famine, which leads me to assume that Nora Ephron is dwarf-short. I should explain that this paragraph was NOT part of a bigger chapter about what an asshole her dad was. Maybe her dad was an asshole. He probably was but I don't know for sure. She was telling the story as a hilarious anecdote about how good and cold the milk was in her college cafeteria and how she gained twenty pounds in three months and got "fat." Okay, I'll admit that it's not good to gain twenty pounds in three months, but to be a "famous" "successful" "woman" and say that the twenty pounds she gained in college was "tragic"? I can see why we are all so obsessed with the scale. The stupidest part of the whole story is that she is probably lying about the weights! She probably started at 126 pounds and got up to a whopping 146 (which, btw, I would LOVE to weigh) but could never allow herself to admit those numbers in writing. Women lie about what the scale says all the time because other women lie about it. It's stupid, and it's kind of sick but when someone famous like her does it, it is tragic. Thanks for setting women back a few decades, Nora Ephron!

This is part of the diet cycle that is so frustrating to me. I'm a feminist. Our culture is toxic to women. Pick up a Cosmopolitan magazine and see for yourself. It's not a magazine for women to be better women, it's a magazine that tells how you can drop unsightly pounds, and wear eyeliner to look hot, and how to please your man in bed. That's tragic. Even the milder women's magazines are ridiculous. Have you seen the plus-sized models? According to women's magazines the average woman in this country is a fat, disgusting mess. How dare we take up more than our allotted 120 pounds of space!

But on the other hand, I like to be able to breathe when I tie my shoes. So I think I need to drop a few pounds. But then I get into an internal struggle about my motivation for losing weight. Why am I dropping pounds? Is it really for health, or is it because I want to look a little more like Sofia Vergara and a little less like Ed O'Neill?

I want to look less like Ed O'Neill

I don't know. I guess at this point I want to feel good. I'm never going to look like Sofia Vergara. I don't even really want to because getting ogled at this point in my life would just make me want to throw up. I'd like to not wake up with a stomach ache and I'd like to not have the squirts and I'd like to have lots of energy. All that can be fixed with a good diet. I suppose if I lose pounds in the process that's just gravy, right? Make tying the shoes a little easier?

If I ever see Nora Ephron in person I am going to (want to) slap her right across her windsock-like turkey neck.

I got professional

2011-09-01T15:55:00.000-05:00

Hi! It's me again, the professional blogger. Why am I professional now instead of amateur? Because I changed the domain name from linda075blog.blogspot.com to sowhatelseblog.com. See, no more numbers and none of the blogger business. (linda075 was my college password when I took classes a couple of years ago. Too bad you didn't know that back then!) Sleek and professional. So change it in your reader or on your toolbar or whatever. It should automatically redirect, but I just thought you'd like to know that you are reading the words of a professional, not just some wannabe. You could also email me at Sarah@sowhatelseblog.com too, but I wouldn't recommend it until I learn how to access it.

New School Year

2011-09-01T09:46:00.002-05:00

Sam and I went to his high school orientation last night. He starts school next Tuesday. I am so happy and relieved he is out of middle school. Middle school is the worst place in the world after prison and concentration camps. I can't believe we send kids there. Kids that age should not be with other kids that age. I don't know what the solution to the problem is. Don't ask me, I just recognize the problem and complain about it. I don't want to think of solutions. Why do I have to do everything anyway? Huh? Can't you come up with solutions sometimes? Geez.

So anyway, one of the teachers came up to Sam and said, "And you are?" and he said, "Your worst nightmare." Yeah, I couldn't believe it either. Sam is about the mildest, most vanilla person in the world so to hear that come out of his mouth was surprising. The teacher wasn't even fazed. She smiled and said, "It's going to be a long year. For you."

I'm really jealous that Sam is going to high school. I loved high school. He gets to take computers in a really nice lab, he gets to take Spanish from a woman who looks incredibly like Peggy Hill, he gets to read Romeo and Juliet in English class.... sigh. Lucky.

Kira, on the other hand is just starting middle school. This is the sweet little child who just last week thought "pecker" was a bird's beak and nothing but a bird's beak. Over the next three years she will learn countless ugly slang words for genitalia; she will either see, experience, (or perpetrate) bullying; she will see, experience (or perpetrate) sexual harassment; she will hear creative swears that she will be compelled to come home and tell me about because one of her favorite things to tell me is, "I have to tell you something but I have to swear for it." I wish I could just plug information into a Matrix like brain portal on the back of her neck so she would know everything she would need to know to go to high school and then send her to high school instead of subjecting her to middle school. But I suppose it is a rite of passage? I have to try to convince myself of that so I don't feel bad for subjecting her to it.

Our weekend and Beth's hidden talents

2011-08-30T18:00:00.003-05:00

The kids spent the weekend with their grandparents at the cabin on Rainy Lake. One day they went to a souvenir shop to buy t-shirts and they were each told to pick their favorite. Sam casually pointed out to Kira a shirt that said, "I froze my pecker off at Rainy Lake" and it had a picture of a cute bird on it. Kira loves birds so she wanted it. My MIL said it was inappropriate and Kira had no idea why. MIL had to explain the double meaning of pecker to her. She's all grown up now!

My two-year-old niece, Sid, hung out with me all weekend. She is a riot. When I was fixing her hair one morning she was staring at herself in the mirror with her finger up her nose. I said, "Get your finger out of your nose," and she said, "Oh, it's okay, I'm just picking the boogers out." She also sings a song of nonsense words all the time. Like, "Oo ah, bee, dang, pleh, pleng...." and on and on and on while she mimes snapping her fingers. I could NOT get Beth to tell me what this is about but I have a sneaking suspicion Beth is just trying to hide her own weirdness. Why do I think this? I'll tell you the history...

One time back in high school my sister Amy came across a home-made cassette tape and didn't know what was on it so she played it. It was Beth belting out the Cher song "If I Could Turn Back Time" but she changed the lyrics to, "If I could turn back time, I'd give it all to Chri-is!" Apparently she had a crush on someone named Chris.

Fast forward about six or seven years: Amy and I were over at Beth's house for dinner. We were looking at stuff on her computer while she cooked and we saw a home-made sound file on her desktop so we played it. Remember the hamster song that was so popular in the nineties? It was almost exactly like that but sooooo much longer and more complex. It even had a bridge where she said, "Oo ah ah ah Oo ah ah ah" for a long time. Amy and I were literally speechless and couldn't believe what we had found and we laughed so hard we thought we might have to go to the hospital. It was amazing. Beth has hidden talents.

So that is why I think Beth walks around her house singing some wonderful nonsense song that she has made up and Sid is just copying her. I don't know why she won't share it. She could bring so much joy to the world. I might have to put some microphones in Beth's house and steal the joy.

An Open Letter to Nora Ephron

2011-08-27T11:58:00.003-05:00

Dear Nora Ephron,

I'm halfway through reading your book I Feel Bad About My Neck for book club. I wouldn't have chosen this book to read on my own because I never really thought you and I had much in common. And I'm still kind of mad at you for Sleepless in Seattle.

I never thought about my neck before EVER, except to think how easily it could snap if I participate in any kind of sport, but thanks to you, I found myself looking in the mirror yesterday at my neck to see if it was looking gross, like you think your neck looks. It looks okay. It's a neck. It holds my head up. Who cares? What are you going to do about it anyway? Turtlenecks choke me so I guess I'll just have to go around looking like a turkey. I googled your neck yesterday on google images and I don't really see the big deal about your neck. I'm not just saying that to be female-nice either. What is wrong with your neck? I think it would be way worse if you woke up one morning and your neck just disappeared.

Not even Angelina Jolie would look good without a neck, turkey or otherwise. Appreciate your neck for what it is and what it does. Can your turn your head? Your neck is fine.

Right now I'm on the chapter about maintenance and what you do to maintain your appearance. Wow. All I can say is WOW. I liked how you said that you must maintain a certain level of attractiveness on the off chance that you will see one or two boyfriends from your past and you would rather die than let them see you looking bad. I understand that. My sister saw one of her old boyfriends in the dollar store and her teeny cart was full of cans of tuna. Like, dozens of cans of tuna. She loves dollar store tuna and she was stocking up. She said that was kind of embarrassing. I didn't even think to ask if she had been wearing make-up. I bet he didn't notice if she had eyeliner and lipstick on, but maybe he did. Maybe he thought to himself, "OMG, look at all this bargain basement tuna. Is she homeless? Oh, wait, she's wearing eyeliner. She's not homeless, she's just mysterious and exotic, and might I say, looking H-O-T. I can't believe I let her slip through my fingers..."

So I get wanting to look your best, but seriously, I think you should learn how to blowdry your own hair. It boggles my mind that you go to the beauty salon twice a week to get your hair DRIED. You are a very talented woman, YOU CAN DO THIS!

I still don't think you and I have a lot in common, but I am enjoying your book. I'll probably finish it today and then I'll take a shower, wash my future turkey neck, and then I'll dry my own hair like a total sucker.

xxxooo
Sarah

Follow me? (Forget it.)

2011-08-25T11:19:00.000-05:00

I love social media, and waste countless hours on it but I can't seem to grow my skin thick enough for the whole "I'm going to follow/friend you, but then someday I'm going to pull the rug out from under you and unfollow/unfriend you and you will never know why!" And what really bothers me about that is that I CARE. I would say that if I saw about half the people on my Facebook friend list in the grocery store or somewhere out in the real world, I would hide so they didn't see me and then I wouldn't be forced to have a stop-and-chat. (thank you, Larry David, for that term) I know, I'm not a nice person. Or perhaps I'm just kind of shy? No, I'm not shy. Part of the reason is that I hate confrontation. Even fake confrontation. Especially fake confrontation, like so:

Facebook friend I don't really consider a real friend but keep on my friend list because the drama in her life provides me with endless entertainment: (FFIDRCF): Hey Girl! Where've you been hiding?
Me: Oh you know, I've been busy.
FFIDRCF: Ha ha! We're ALL busy! What have you been "busy" doing?
Me: I've been busy with the kids...
FFIDRCF: You only have two kids! How busy could you be? (jovial, jokey-type laughter)
Me: ..... I think I just got my period. Gotta go!
FFIDRCF: Call me! We have to get together!
Me: ... (under my breath)... I'd rather be murdered in my bed.

I guess I am what you might call an introvert and social media fits that so perfectly. I watched a show last night about some crazy family that has a thousand kids and how great it is because "you never have to be alone!" and I couldn't think of anything worse. But I love knowing what is going on in people's lives so lurking on Facebook/Twitter/blogs is perfect to satisfy my social needs (that and of course, you know, having a husband and kids.)

I have recently been trying to figure out Twitter, Stumble and Reddit. Twitter seems to be for people who like to read mini-blogs, but not necessarily write mini-blogs. Some of the people on Twitter are hilarious, but I only actually know about three of my followers/people I follow. When I get an email that says I have a new follower on Twitter I get excited and check them out and nine times out of ten it's a woman from the porn industry that follows eight million people in the hopes that they will follow her and read her very unsexy porno tweets. So, it's entertaining, but like I say, I don't know those people. I read stuff on Stumble and Reddit, but haven't totally figured it out yet.

Facebook is great because I can pick my friends. And if a friend gets annoying in their status updates, I can keep them as a friend, but hide them so I don't have to read their millions of dramatic updates about how their ex-husband is a jerk.

It's all so shallow isn't it? It's perfect for me. Except when I get unfollowed/unfriended. I hate that. I took the follower option off the blog because I was getting obsessed with it and discouraged that more people weren't pushing the "follow" button. That eliminated a lot of anxiety.

What do you like about social media? How do you deal with getting dumped?

Viola Davis is Fantastic

2011-08-24T00:09:00.002-05:00

I just saw the movie The Help which I was dying to see since I read the book, which I loved. The movie was very VERY good, and I'm not going to write a review because I can't really write reviews about movies that are actually good. (Not that the X-Men movies aren't good, mind you. They are super, but for some reason, they beg for a review. Hmm, I don't really get the logic. Just go with it.)

What I really want to say here is that Viola Davis is brilliant. I'm serious. I don't usually rave about movie stars (unless they are put together like Hugh Jackman, know what I'm sayin'?) but she deserves a rave.
Her character in the movie is named Abilene and she is a maid for a snotty white lady in the sixties in Jackson, Mississippi. (The perfect storm of bad jobs.) I don't really know how to put in to words what makes her so great, except to say that when she's on the screen and she's smiling, I'm smiling. When she's crying, I'm bawling. When her character feels like she's been defeated and broken, I'm bawling. When her character finally gets recognized for being brave and wonderful and she feels proud yet humbled, I'm bawling. I guess what really makes her a great actress is her ability to make me bawl. Hardly anyone can make me bawl. (Especially since I've been on my post-partum medication.) I'm like an emotional robot, except when Viola Davis is on the screen. Then I'm feeling every single thing her character is feeling. I hope someday she makes a movie about a woman who feels like being nice to strangers and getting a lot of work done.

Hate your daughter? Buy her this book!

2011-08-23T10:22:00.001-05:00

I was reading blogs this morning and I came across a post by Andie at Inspiration Strikes in the Kneecaps about a book on Amazon called Maggie Goes on a Diet. I thought it was a joke. It isn't. It's a book aimed at 4 to 8 year olds about a 14 year old obese girl who wants to fit into a pretty pink dress so she goes on a diet and through hard work and determination she loses all her DISGUSTING FAT and fits into the dress and becomes a soccer star. I had to look it up. Here's the cover:

I thought maybe it was written by a person named Maggie who is telling her own story of weight loss when she was a kid and how she thinks it changed her life for the better. But it was written by a guy named Paul Kramer. Here are some other potential titles for Mr. Kramer:

Maggie Gives Up Her Virginity to the First Guy Who Gives Her Attention
Maggie Thinks Sexual Harassment Is Flattering
Maggie Hates Her Flat Chest
Maggie Goes to the Plastic Surgeon
Maggie Loves Her Job at Hooters!
Maggie Pays for College (by being a stripper)
Maggie Auditions for The Bachelor
Maggie Makes a Sex Tape with a Famous Basketball/Football/Movie Star
Maggie Gets Her Own Reality Show
Maggie Turns 40, Overdoses, Dies Pretty

Dickies and Roid Rage

2011-08-21T17:21:00.003-05:00

Something funny happened last week but I forgot to take the picture that would go with the story, so I'll just have to tell you what happened. I went to Des Moines to visit my aunt. Shortly after we arrived, I noticed on her bare feet that only the first two toes on each foot had toe-nail polish on them. When asked about it she told me that she had a dressy function to go to an had some open-toed shoes to go with her outfit and she couldn't really be bothered to paint ALL TEN toes (who has the time???), so she only painted the toes that showed. She said it was like a toe-nail polish dickie. You know, dickies? Partial shirts? Like this:

To wear when you can't be bothered to wear a whole shirt under another shirt. (Hopefully under another shirt.) Shoving your arms into one set of sleeves is enough, thankyouverymuch! The whole world thinks you are wearing a whole green turtleneck under that sweater but you know the truth and it makes you feel kind of naughty.

When I was looking up pictures of dickies on google images there were a lot of pictures of old guys who I can only assume are named Dickie. I also saw this:

And I immediately thought "Hey, that's not a dickie," and then I thought it was some kind of contest where you could win a free dickie (the partial shirt variety), but then I saw the picture of the guy and I thought his name must be Dickie and you can have him because he's free and nobody else wants him. Then it occurred to me that maybe Dickie the guy is confined somehow and needs freeing. Poor Dickie. I hope he got free.

That got me thinking about other misunderstandings I've had recently. While in Des Moines I watched that old show News Radio from the nineties. (It's funny. It really held up.) and the Dave character says something about the Joe character having "Roid Rage" and I immediately sat up and paid attention because I have always thought that "roid rage" referred to hemorrhoids and I thought I missed some important plot point in the show where Joe's hemorrhoids were introduced. But you know what? It doesn't mean hemorrhoids. It means steroids. I know because I watched carefully after that and there were references to Joe's muscliness but no references to his hemorrhoids. It seems obvious to me now. But I always assumed that people with hemorrhoids are angry about having hemorrhoids (obviously) - hence "roid rage." I wonder how many times while I was pregnant I complained about my own personal case of "roid rage"? And I wonder why nobody told me that steroids during pregnancy isn't exactly safe? Thanks for nothing, friends, family and acquaintances!