Joy Rush

[Edited to add: Once more Dawn has linked to me without warning me, which is akin to the people at NOAA seeing an F5 hurricane bearing down on some unsuspecting coastal town and not bothering to mention it. Those of you looking for tales about my love affair with Ektorp furniture from IKEA, just type "Ektorp" or "IKEA" into the search bar up there.]


I am accepting Barb's challenge to do a joy rush meme, seeing as how Barb is always so optimistic and loving and makes me feel like a grinch every single time I read her blog (but hey, her daughters are 10 and under). And I think she gets more traffic than me, so maybe there is something to be said for being a less cynical blogger. Therefore, I am going to try to think like Barb tonight. I hope my brain doesn't explode. Here goes...

10 Things That Give Me Joy

1. Fat, squeezy baby thighs (as opposed to my fat middle-age thighs, which do not give me a joy rush at all)
2. Yarn (the possibilities!)
3. Homeschooling catalogs (again, the possibilities!)
4. Birds singing in the morning (but not too early, like some of the crazy carolers who have been starting up before 4 o'clock) (for heaven's sake, that's not even morning yet; knock it off, guys, will ya?)
5. Coca-Cola, on ice (I'm a simple person, what can I say?)
6. The way 2-year-olds talk and walk and giggle and blow kisses (okay, everything about 2-year-olds except the part where they poop on my family room rug like a puppy) (not that that happened today or anything)
7. Listening to A Prairie Home Companion (notwithstanding how I have to scream at the kids to pipe down so that I can hear my boyfriend Garrison Keillor speaking)
8. Watching my kids playing together (happily, quietly, not bothering Mommy)
9. Two more, huh? This is getting difficult for hardbitten old me. How about...um...mountains? I love seeing mountains. Not climbing them, or anything, though. I'm scared of heights.

[It is just now occurring to me that the more I talk, the less sense that I make.]

10. Anything that makes me laugh. (Is that begging the question? The thing that gives me joy is anything that gives me joy?) Life without laughter is not worth living. (Oooh, I could start writing stuff for fortune cookies now, couldn't I?)

Okay, Barb, I did it. I'm trying to be more like you. Lord knows why I've become more cynical over the years [teens], but I will certainly attempt to overcome any and all obstacles [teens] to my greeting each day with joy and anticipation, the way I used to [before my kids became teens] just a couple of years ago.

Especially if it makes my sitemeter stats go up.

Teen Girl Survival Guide

I've just read yet another blog post about insanely-acting teen/preteen girls. Let me shorten the learning curve for all you people whose daughters have just recently been possessed.

Surviving Teens (and Preteens) of the Female Persuasion

1. Do not, I repeat, do not try to reason with these creatures. You could reason better with a pet iguana. They do not want to see your way of looking at things. Because that would make them as much of a loser as you are.

2. Insist on the outward forms of respect. That is, unless you want to live for a couple of years with a screaming, wall-kicking, door-slamming she-monster....

3. Remember! You are dealing with someone who has regressed to the mental state of a 2-year-old. Treat her as one. Short, simple commands work best.

3. Never does the pain/pleasure principle work so well as it does for teenagers. Making a teen write "I will not hiss at my mother while she is speaking" 200 times has more of a salutatory effect than lecturing her. Make sure to take away all computer/phone/IPod privileges until she is done.

4. Carry a hand-mirror at all times to avoid looking in the face of the teen-girl death glare. Confronting the death glare directly has been known to turn formerly rational parents into screaming, out-of-control maniacs.

5. Acknowledge everything she says and agree with it. (Yes, dear, we are ruining your life. That's right, we are losers. Now go shovel off the floor in that hellhole you call your room.) It drives her absolutely crazy.

6. When they complain about simple household chores, give them more. When they complain about that, add even more work. Eventually, it gets through their pea-size brains that there is a pattern here, and they shut up. (Not permanently, alas, but that would be too much to ask for)

7. Do not acknowledge her displeasure when she is standing directly above you, glowering like a summer storm cloud, flashes of lightning emanating from her eyes. Asking what is wrong is just looking for trouble. Instead, smile and say, "My, don't you look lovely today!"

8. Develop an early-warning system with your spouse. Do not let him come home from a hard day of work to be greeted by, "Either she goes or I go!" These sort of histrionics are very hard on the menfolk.

9. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Removing an oft-slammed bedroom door is a reasonable tactic for an otherwise unsolvable situation. So is refusing a driver's license until the teen is capable of thinking in a rational fashion once more.

10. Remember, this is a test of endurance; a marathon, if you will, not a sprint. Conserve your energy. Hydrate well (preferably with something that has some alcohol content). Stay in shape in order to prevent your daughter's doing damage to personal property or a younger sibling. Above all, laugh a lot, especially in front of her. She hates that.

Enough About Me

Nada. Zip. Nothing. That's how much weight I lost this past week. Of course, I could take a glass-half-full perspective and say that that is how much weight I gained this past week. Either way, I don't feel as though I'm getting my 40-dollars-a-month worth. And I'm hungry.

Being hungry makes me really cranky, especially when I start surfing the blogosphere in order to take my mind off food and I run into 2 or 3 blog posts in a row which are going on and on and on about doughnuts and other baked treats. Complete with pictures, wouldn't you know? Blogging can make you fat.

Manic Mommy has tagged me with a meme, or what she called a heme, as she made it all about her husband. Which may not be a bad idea....

1. My husband doesn't like jokes about exercise.

2. He tends to fall asleep in the den with his headphones on, plugged into music on the computer, which makes it awfully tempting to turn up the volume. But I resist.

3. When he sees me relaxing with some knitting for a few minutes, he thinks it is a good time to mention all the different business trips he is planning to go on in the next few months. And then he wonders why I wait until he is asleep to go up to bed myself.

4. He likes to talk to our teen daughter Anna, just to bother her. It's fun to watch.

5. He and I share the same goal of enjoying many boring evenings together once the children have flown the nest. Imagine, no crises, no teeth to be brushed (I mean, except our own), no Berenstain Bears books to be read....I'm just going to sit and knit, and he is going to fall asleep with his headphones on, and our grown children will wonder how we ever got that way.

6. He spoils Susie more than I do. She gets up extra early in the morning because she knows Daddy will give her a treat in the kitchen before I can get down there.

7. He is happy with whatever I make for dinner, so long as he doesn't have to think about it. Cooking isn't his strong point. If I die before the kids are grown, they will have to survive on nothing but hotdogs and pancakes. And pizelles (those flat eggy Italian cookies) - the man makes his own pizelles (how do you spell that?). Last night, in fact, the urge seized him; so he and I were in the kitchen at 9:30 having a mini pizelle-fest. When Brian came down to ask for some Sudafed, I said, "You caught us! This is what we do every night as soon as you go to bed - we have a baking party in the kitchen." Poor kid - he believed me. He hasn't looked that traumatized since the time I left him behind in an elevator.

G'night, all!

Me, Me, Me, Me, Me, Me

I've been tagged! Here are 6 inconsequential facts about myself (or a me, me, me meme) (as ordered by Fannie Mae) (Fannie Mae, by the way, is one blogger who knows how infuriating a teenager can be).

That's easy! Everything about me is inconsequential.

1. I always feel as though I am getting away with something because no one is making me get up and go to work in the mornings....I mean, how cool is that?
2. I think Lysol Wipes are the greatest invention since sliced bread.
3. I used to be in the Navy, and I really miss having a uniform. I liked always knowing what to wear.
4. I majored in History in college, and therefore I was completely unemployable when I graduated. In fact, I had one prospective employer call me long-distance (back when such things as "long-distance" mattered) just to tell me that he had received my resume and that history majors were a dime-a-dozen. I don't know why he bothered to do that. Maybe he was having a bad day and needed company.
5. Before I joined the Navy, I thought that everyone who volunteered for the military liked to kill people. But that's not why I joined. I joined because I pictured myself being a cute Navy sailorette like the nurses in Operation Petticoat. Also, I needed a job (because I was unemployable - see #4, above).
6. My favorite line in all of moviedom is near the end of Operation Petticoat. It is "The Japanese have nothing like this!" If you don't know what I am talking about, rent the movie. You'll understand.

Hmmm....who shall I tag? Bloggers already tell each other so much of the minutiae of their daily lives, it's hard to imagine wanting to know more about any of the people I read regularly. But I'll tag MadMad, because that will make her write another post and I love her posts; and Diesel also, in the hopes that Grundir the Implacable will do the job for him; and, let's see....Mrs. Smith, because I'd like to know more about her life before she dragged her 7 kids off to India for 3 years; and mrs. g., of course, because she always cracks me up with her effortless wit.

Holy cr*p, that's only 4. I don't have enough blog friends to pull this off, I'm afraid. Oh, I know, I'll tag Motherwise (because she was the first blogger to "friend" me, before I even knew what the heck that meant - I felt so popular!) and Planet Nomad, a new blog friend, because she seems to live an interesting life (i.e., a life totally unlike mine). Whew! That was hard. And now I have to figure out all those hyperlinks....

Here are The Rules:

1. Link to the person that tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog
3. Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself.
4. Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.
5. Let each random person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website.

I am signing off now - Larry is due back any minute, and I need to be able to give him the impression that I did something this week beside hang out in the blogosphere.

Hooray, It's Not The Holidays Anymore!

I'm feeding the kids party leftovers all day. They love me. I should do this all the time. Before lunch, we played Christmas Bingo and whoever won got a Christmas cookie. I need to get all the junk food out of the house before the good times come to a crashing halt this Monday with my first official weigh-in. I hate dieting, but I also hate not being able to breathe with my jeans snapped.

I wasn't going to post a New Year's resolution; but last night, while I was having panic attacks over the fact that our computer had frozen up and realizing that I might not be able to access all the articles I've written, ever again (mostly homeschooling crap - not for general consumption), articles that I sometimes manage to sell for genuine legal tender (not much, but enough to buy myself some clothes without feeling as though I am taking food out of my children's mouths)...

Where was I? Oh, yes, last night I made my resolution: back everything up on an external drive. Constantly. Not later. Because "better late than never" does not apply in this situation.

Anyway, Larry wrapped up his nomination for Best Husband of the Year award by staying up late to do a temporary fix on the computer and get all my word docs on one of those flash drive thingies, which I will now keep under my pillow at night (in case of fire). He neglected, however, to tell me he fixed it; and so I discovered his good deed by accident after wandering downstairs in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, my writing career (humor me) flashing before my eyes all the while. Which explains all those middle-of-the-night comments I left on everyone's blogs, okay? I hope they made sense. I was giddy with relief at the time. And I missed you.

The holidays make me sort of sentimental.

And before we give Larry too much credit, let's just say he was making a sensible financial decision by fixing the computer before leaving with the high schoolers on their ski trip today - he knew that if he left me alone for 3 days with a broken computer, well, odds were I'd either call one of those Rent-A-Geek places and pay gazillion bucks to regain access to my world, as it were; or I'd decide to spend those gazillion bucks on a new computer for myself. With just my stuff on it. And I wouldn't share, ever.

We're still having to restart the computer approximately every 5 minutes, because the mouse freezes up. I e-mailed Microsoft for a hotfix and they sent me the link (ooh, don't I sound computer savvy?) and I downloaded a zip file (?) and I unzipped it - rather, the computer says I unzipped it; but maybe the computer is lying, because I can't find all the files I supposedly unzipped. So I'm stuck. Maybe I will just wander by Best Buy today...


Maria has tagged me with a birth month meme, where you take the attributes supposedly associated with your birth month (I'm June) and talk about how they apply to you. Very fortune-cookie-ish, but I like fortune cookies.


Thinks far with vision - I suppose this refers to the fact that I am constantly imagining how I will set up the house when the kids have all flown the nest.

Easily influenced by kindness - Why, yes, I am a sucker...

Polite and soft-spoken - Please. I'm from New Jersey. Get real.

Having ideas - Don't we all? I should hope so.

Sensitive - As in, one unkind comment could ruin my whole day. So, don't. Make fun of Diesel instead.

Hesitating, tends to delay - Hmmm....I don't know....I'll get back to this one later.

Choosy and always wants the best - Anyone who has seen me scarfing up store-brand chocolate chips out of the bag would want to debate this.

Temperamental - I am a woman, after all.

Funny and humorous - But, of course. Goes without saying. Ahem.

Loves to joke - As long as it's about other people (see sensitive, above).

Good debating skills - Don't you hate how anyone with an obnoxious, totally undisciplined, mouthy kid always says their little monster has "great debating skills"? "He'll make a great lawyer!" they proclaim. How about "He'll make a great a**hole!"?

Talkative - That's what my husband thinks, anyway.

Friendly - pathetically so.

Prone to getting colds - Apparently.

Loves to dress up - Yes, just so people will ask me questions that I take unreasonable umbrage at.

Easily bored - Are we done yet?

Fussy - Moi? Just because I can't sleep right if I can't find one of my special pairs of soft wool socks for bed? And the socks have to match, or my feet feel uneven and keep me up? Okay, yes.

Seldom shows emotions - Doesn't my husband wish?

Brand conscious - I don't think so (see choosy, above).

Stubborn - Of course. What? I'm going to let the stupid people with dumb ideas run the show? I don't think so.

Barb, I tag you, of course. You're always funny with these things (putting the pressure on - sorry), and it will take your mind off the move.

'Tis The Season

Bia over at La Dolce Vita has tagged me with a meme, and I'm actually in the mood to play along. Maybe because it's easy. Plus, Anna has been working on an essay for A Christmas Carol for her ninth-grade English course; so the meme theme (hey! did I coin that phrase?) fits right into the Christmas Past, Present, and Future motif. Bia would like me to name 3 favorite gifts - my favorite one from Christmas past (as a child), one I enjoyed receiving now as an adult, and one I would like to receive in the future. No problem!

Christmas Past - I grew up Jewish, but I always went to my friend's house for Christmas Day when I was little. I'm sure I received many lovely, thoughtful, even price-y presents from my friend's parents throughout the years; but the one present I remember, the present that my friend and I jumped up and down in ecstasy over, was a little cardboard box full to the brim with Bazooka bubble gum. And it had a little handle to carry it around with. That's all it takes to make a child happy, folks. Sugar. Portable sugar.


Christmas Present - I always get chocolate with almonds. Always. Because, despite living with me for 17 years now, my husband has no idea what else to tell the kids to get me. When I mention this to him, he mutters, "Well, you don't like jewelry," as if that exhausts the list of gift alternatives to chocolate.

One year, my oldest, in a burst of gift-giving creativity, gave me a little doo-hickey that blows dust off my keyboard. So maybe chocolate isn't such a bad idea, after all.


Christmas Future - A baby. Yup, I love babies. Nothing better than a Christmas baby. I'm crazy.

And I'm dying to see what Barb and Sue and MadMad have to share on this topic.

It's Payback Time

Today is notable in that I got nothing done whatsoever. And our handyman ran away. And our kitchen reeks because there is nothing but smelly 25-year-old plywood on the floor, and if it gets wet it releases into the air every single odor it has absorbed for the past quarter century. And it turns out that the tile guy, who Larry thought was coming tomorrow, is not coming until after Thanksgiving (as in, 2 weeks too late to save my marriage). This bad timing of Larry's might just be worth a sizable Pampered Chef order, what do y'all think?

The handyman whose number was given to us by a neighbor only after she swore us to secrecy as to his identity (this is the sort of neighborhood that has experienced extremely hostile handyman takeovers) and who finally agreed to come to our house to fix (among other things) the coat closet door, the attic door, the linen closet door (we seem to have a problem here), and the missing shoe molding - not to mention building a storage bench to throw all our crap in so it isn't all over the living room - came to our house today, took one look, and decided he would put things off until Monday.

I think I'll add another few items to that Pampered Chef order.

Larry has been downstairs most of the evening trying to get our gas fireplace to light. The instruction card is covered with those international symbols for DANGER and the smell of gas is wafting up the stairway. Dear Lord, please don't let him blow the house up. Although that would take care of the smelly kitchen floor problem. And the centipedes.

Let me mention here that the 2 gas fireplaces were one of his reasons for wanting to buy this house, thereby adding unnecessary pain and suffering to our lives over the past year. Now he's downstairs experiencing a serious case of delayed buyer's remorse. Good.

Hmmm....ordering some sock yarn from KnitPicks might be a good idea also. Larry's feeling pretty bad about the floor; I might as well take advantage of it.

Barb , who manages to be endearingly funny all the time (and riotously funny at least half the time), has tagged me for another meme. Gosh, I feel popular. Maybe tomorrow. In the meantime, go read her contribution. It's great.

(I didn't mention my kids once in this post. That's a first. They'll be back tomorrow, I'm sure.)

Odds and Ends

I have seen the light! I cleaned my oven with that self-cleaning mechanism thingie, and it worked! I wish I had tried that years ago. Actually, I think I did try it years ago, and something caught fire. But this time I managed not to burn the house down, and I didn't have to die a thousand deaths of embarrassment when the Pampered Chef consultant (salesperson, Larry insists on correcting me - he likes to call a spade a spade) opened my oven door to put in the pineapple upside-down cake.

Yesterday evening I held a Pampered Chef fundraiser at my house for a family with a sick baby. (See? Sometimes I do think about someone other than my own sorry self.) My friends and I all sat around my floorless kitchen and looked at fun new cooking gadgets (Suds Pump! Handy Chopper! Nesting Mixing Bowls!), while my husband sat in the living room clutching my credit card and wouldn't let it go. Thanks, honey. I would like to point out here that I've been using a butcher knife for the past year which has a broken handle. Larry claims he can find me a really inexpensive one after Christmas. I proved myself to be extremely forbearing and mature by not bringing up his recent Home Depot purchase.

This morning all the kids had a dentist appointment. At 8:30. And we made it. Thank you, I am amazing. As I've mentioned before, somewhere, we have the most efficient pediatric dentist in the world. Dental cleanings for 5 kids, x-rays for 2, sealants for one, check-ups for all, and we were still out of there in under an hour. All that, and balloons, too. I never get a balloon from my dentist.

Motherwise, a very nice person whose blog posts reassure me that I may just live to like my teenage daughter again, has invited me to tell everyone 8 interesting things about myself.

1. I am very short. As in, people will say to me, "Wow - you're short." Perfect strangers.

2. I didn't like children at all before I had my own. I regarded them as an expensive hobby taken up by people who had nothing better to do with their time than to talk about poop and to wipe gross runny noses.

3. Bugs disgust me. Our house is overrun by centipedes and the sight of one makes me want to puke. Some of them are so large that they could be mistaken for a small mouse, if seen out of the corner of one's eye. And when you step on them, their legs keep wiggling. Excuse me, I have to go throw up.

4. Okay, I'm back. I used to be intelligent. Now I am the stupidest person on the face of the earth. Just ask my teenage daughter.

5. I have no ambition. I have no idea how I ever would have earned a living if I hadn't married and had kids. Career goal: kept woman.

6. I wish I had started having kids earlier in my life than age 28, so that I could have a dozen. You have 4, or 5, or 6 kids, and perfect strangers are still making those stupid jokes: "Don'cha have a TV?" "They know what causes that now!" "You're a real pioneer woman!" But go ahead and have 12 kids, and people are stunned into silence. Which would be just fine with me.

7. My 2-year-old got poop on my coat sleeve today (don't ask). This incident further convinced Anna (my 14-year-old) that she never, ever wants to be like me.

8. I like to stick my head in the sand. I have 5 adults and 12 kids coming over in about an hour, and I'm sitting here blogging, rather than attending to the mess which is my house. Bad idea.

Day 15, and I'm still in it! Go, NaBloPoMo!