Twitters Never Win

I just realized that people are following me on Twitter. But, I have no idea how to use Twitter. I don't even remember how I figured out how to sign up in the first place. And the FAQ's on the site don't help, because they are too advanced for me.

Also, I seem to be following a few people on Twitter myself. But how do I know when they've Twittered something? Do I have to keep checking my Twitter page? I've seen some people's Twitters on their sidebars on their blog. How do they do that?

Did I miss the class where we discussed all this?

I lost 5 dollars at Bunco tonight. So I ate a lot of food to make up for it. I also took 2 migraine pills (active ingredient: caffeine) to get through the evening. Now here it is, close to midnight, my migraine is gone, and I'm wide awake.

Hmmm...I could knit, I guess. Or maybe I'll tackle some quilting. Or I could try canning the applesauce that is sitting on my counter. Did you know it takes 84 apples to make 6 quarts of applesauce? And did you know that peeling 7 dozen apples by hand gives one ample time to regret not spending a mere 12 bucks for the handy-dandy apple peeler at Target?

I was going to link to the apple peeler, but I can't find it online. Maybe I can get through this entire post without a single hyperlink. That would be a first, I believe.

Naaah....can't do it....check out this fun news report...and let me just say, I'm not surprised.

Sock It To Me

I've been wondering why I can never find a matched pair of socks for Susie when I need it. Well, the mystery has been solved. I excavated her sock/underwear drawer and analyzed what I found - 2 lonely pairs (over there on the left) and 17 single socks: 6 pink, 4 purple, 3 green, 2 yellow, and 2 white (with lace cuffs). All completely different from each other.



Tell me, how is it possible for a 3-year-old child to already own more than a dozen mismatched socks? Where do the mates go? It is conundrums like this that eat away at my soul, bit by bit, until there is nothing left of me but a half-crazed woman roaming the aisles at Target, searching fruitlessly for a pack of all-white little girl socks.

Fruitlessly, I say, because you cannot buy a whole bunch of socks in the same color. You have to buy them in packages of 6, and heaven forbid that you should be able to find a package that has less than 4 different colors in it. So you buy the assorted colors, and when some socks disappear, you think, "Ha, ha - I'm no dummy. I'll go back and buy another pack of the same kind, and then I'll have spares!"

Well, that's what I think, anyway. I know, I'm so clever. So I go back to Target and buy another pack and I bring it home and discover that the socks are not precisely the same kind as the socks I bought previously, because the evil sock manufacturers change the design every 6 weeks or so. Just to make me crazy.

Yes, that's right - while some women can manage to raise 5 children while governing an entire state, I cannot even manage to dress my kids in socks that match. Which probably explains why no one has asked me to be Vice President...

Vacation Preparation

[Any of you who have wandered over here from The Well-Trained Mind forum: just type "fridge" into the search bar at the top left and you will find what you are looking for.]

After nagging my husband into joining us at the pool this afternoon, I began feeling seriously unwell. So, I left him there. (Good thing we came in 2 vans). I'm sure Larry thinks I lured him to the pool with the intention of leaving him alone with the 4 youngest while I went home and took a nap.

It was a great (3-hour) nap, though. I don't know what hit me. Maybe an entire summer's worth of sunscreen and swim towels and Italian ices, all at once. And I just had to lie down.

We are leaving on Monday for a whole week, which means I need to spend all day tomorrow cooking and freezing dinners, doing laundry, and planning which knitting I need to bring. This last is a very involved process that necessitates itemizing all the yarn I own, perusing all my available patterns (including free ones on the Web), and (quite possibly) making a few trips to Michaels and to the bookstore to pick up more yarn, or patterns, or the right-size needles (which I have but can't find).

And then there is the trip to Target for more underwear. And some envelopes for the books I am finally going to mail. (If you click on that last link, you can still sign up for this week's Bloggy Book Club giveaway.) And some treats to bribe the kids with in the car. And icepacks for the cooler. And...

Actually, I bet there will be 2 trips to Target. I am not the most organized person in the world.

Oh, and then I have to clean the whole house, because heaven forbid we all die on the road...

Parental Guidance Required

I was in Target with Anna the other day (no, I don't know why I repeatedly subject myself to this sort of torture), waiting while she tried on assorted garments in the dressing room. I was wandering around the juniors section in a sort of existential state of despair over the porn star look for teens when - miracle of miracles - I spotted it! A skirt, a full skirt, that went below the knees! Complete with an attractive smocked waistband and ruffled hem! I rushed over to check out the price, and there on the tag were the disappointing words - tube dress. As in, most emphatically not a mid-length skirt. (I would like to note here that, in the store, this garment appears much shorter than it does in the picture in that link. I think they had a midget model it.)

Crushed, I returned to the dressing room, where I held a scintillating conversation with my teen daughter (formerly known as "Beloved") that went like this:

"Why can't I buy this shirt?"
"Because it makes you look slutty. You want to look slutty?" (note: do not ask your teen daughter a rhetorical question)
"Yes." Only she said it "Ye-eh-es", the extra syllables subbing in for what she really wanted to say, which was "Yes, of course I do, anything not to dress like you. Duh."

She tries again:
"Well, how about this shirt?"
"How about we go home and I make you some clothes out of our curtains?"

Oh, poor Anna. Don't worry, honey - in a few short years you will be away at college and free to prance around in your underwear, if that is what your heart desires. In the meantime, your loving parents will make sure you at least give a good impression of being a young girl who respects herself enough not to be shoving her boobs and upper thighs in people's faces. We're sort of old-fashioned that way.

Handbag Math

The few guys who read this may just want to leave the room now. No, I'm not going to be talking about anything embarrassing like tampons or such; but I'm willing to bet that you could care less about handbags. Go check out The Clay Pigeon - Grundir the Implacable is dispensing work life advice, and there's the scariest bunch of trash-talkin' math wizards you could ever hope to meet. You can come on back for the last 2 paragraphs, where I discuss the mean trick my husband played on me this morning.

Anyway, gals, I went to Target tonight for some Vagisil (ha, ha, just kidding, just wanted to get rid of those interfering men) and I spotted a new handbag. It sort of leapt out at me and asked me to hold it and check out its cellphone pocket (isn't this the first thing you do with purses now, look for where the cellphone goes?). It's fun, it's flirty; in other words, it's totally not me. So I was trying to decide whether or not to take a big leap of faith and buy it and pretend to be fun and flirty. I mean, this isn't just a handbag, it's a statement, right? It's saying that I am not going gently into the dowdiness of middle age; this handbag can let the world know that a few wrinkles doth not an old hag make.

[By the way, Larry wonders why it takes me hours to come out of Target. It's because all these philosophical questions arise. They are very time-consuming.]

Where was I? Oh, yes...at that point I thought, hey, why am I agonizing over this decision? The purse cost 17 dollars. The handbag I bought 2 years ago (2 whole years ago!) was also 17 dollars. At that rate, I cost my husband only $8.50 (plus tax) in handbags a year. You know, there's frugal (which I am, believe it or not), and then there's just plain stupid.

So I bought 6.

No, no, no, I just felt like typing that. But it occurred to me that my husband doesn't understand how expensive handbag-acquisition habits can be, because he has been spoiled all these years by his undemanding wife. I'm totally on board for (with?) keeping to our budget and saving for our retirement; but I need him to realize that things could be much worse, wife-spending-wise, you know what I mean? What's the use of unappreciated sacrifice, anyway?

So whaddaya think? Should I buy lots of stuff at once and bring it home and then say, loudly, "But no, that would be wrong!" and then return all of it (except the handbag, of course). Or is there an easier way to get my point across?

Okay, guys, come back in. Sometimes we just need a little girl talk, you know? Anyway, Larry made sure this morning that I would never, ever bother him at work again. So you menfolks may just want to take notes on this. You see, he asked me for our dentist's phone number so he could confirm a dental appointment for later this week, and I asked him to get me a make-up appointment for a cleaning while he was on the phone with them. He sounded a little annoyed and rushed when I asked, but tough.

So, yeah, he got me the appointment. For 7:30 AM. By my calculations, that means I have to be up, showered, and dressed by 7:15. (I'm spoiled, all right? I haven't managed that all winter.) Think I'll ever ask him to schedule anything for me again? I don't think so. He's diabolically clever, he is.

The End of Halloween (I Promise)

Thought I'd grab a moment while the kids continue overdosing on sugar to let everyone know that Halloween here was a rip-roaring success. Larry took the 4 youngest to a zillion houses and they came home bearing approximately 46 pounds of candy each. Which we promptly took away. Just kidding - we waited until they finally went to bed and then we took it away. Except for a few pieces, which they are working on now.

Susie dropped out after about 50 houses and came home and sat on the floor and devoured candy. It was awesome to watch. She ate and ate and ate. At one point, she had 3 different lollipops going, and an open pack of Skittles. What finally slowed her down was when she peed in her (pretty darn absorbent) pumpkin costume.

Anna went trick-or-treating with a neighborhood friend. Because the friend's family is just so cool and not horribly embarrassing like ours. Not that I am bitter or anything.

This morning we walked to the bagel shop for breakfast and the kids picked up dropped candy from the ground. Because they didn't eat enough last night. Happily, they didn't mistake the round piece of dog poop for chocolate.

I chopped up our jack-o-lanterns today - darned if I'm going to let those stupid squirrels eat them instead of us. And before all you slackers start commenting on how you don't even know how to cook pumpkin, let me just point out that it's easy - you hack the pumpkin apart, take off the rind (that's the dark orange part, for you cooking novices out there), and you cut the rest into chunks and throw it in your crockpot on high all day. (Oh, and make sure the crockpot is plugged in. The food cooks faster that way.) That's all there is to it. And it sure beats throwing 20 dollars worth of pumpkins in the trash.

At least, that's how I felt before I spent an hour chopping up one and a half pumpkins and then realized I still had at least 2 hours to go. Now, I'm not so sure. If I'm saving 20 dollars by not throwing out the pumpkins, but it takes me, say, 4 hours (including clean-up) to do it.....that's 5 dollars an hour. I think I'd earn more working at Target, and I'd get an employee discount, too.

But which is better for my career, pumpkin-hacking or customer service? That is the question. I wonder what Hillary would say....

The Sleep Saga Continues

As any of you experienced parents out there know, our story didn't end with getting the toddler to bed at 10:30 last night (by whacking her over the head with a rubber mallet). No sirree, Bob! (I've always wanted to write that.) She woke up at her usual time this morning, which meant that by about 4:30 this afternoon (because of course I wasn't going to let her nap), she was a sleep-crazed little animal who was simultaneously screaming to be put to bed and refusing to let me touch her. It was very sad. She finally yelled herself to sleep a little after 5, before I could get any dinner down her. Which means, of course, that she will be up at 2 or 3 in the morning, hungry as all get out. This is known as the messed-up-sleep-routine domino effect, and it takes a few days to blow itself out. Like a hurricane, only less fun.

Those of you who are still childless can avoid this problem by getting yourselves fixed and only adopting a child who is 4 years or older. This solution may strike some of you as being a tad draconian, but such desperate measures are definitely warranted if you entertain any hopes of remaining sane through your declining years. Take it from me, chronic sleep deprivation can really mess with your brain cells.

Enough already! Things aren't all bad. I managed to escape this evening and go to a friend's house for a Pampered Chef party. (Yes, that is how I socialize, and yes, I am the middle-aged suburbanite loser I had sworn never to become.) I had a great time. I drank so much Diet Pepsi, I'm surprised my friends let me drive home (let's face it - after all those pregnancies, I just don't hold my urine the way I used to). But I managed to drive all the way back to my house without peeing in the car; I even got a little bit of mental exercise listening to some talking heads on the radio pontificating over the implications of our prolonged drought. The discussion may have been irrelevant, considering I was driving through a torrential downpour.

I know, I know - you all want to hear about Anna, the teenage girl from heck. Well, I took her to Target today; so she is actually talking to me again. I don't expect that to last, but it is providing a nice respite from the hostilities. She also made us apple pie. So things aren't all bad.

Well, time to get to bed before Susie wakes up looking for the dinner she missed. Ah, to sleep, perchance to dream....