You guys. I… I can’t even. Because words fail.
A couple of weeks ago someone posted this on Facebook, and I watched it with a mix of horror and delight. Because LOOK:
And I made Otto watch it, too. And Otto said, “No. YOU ARE NOT WATCHING THAT WHEN IT COMES ON TV.” And I argued, and he kept saying no, and then last night I was channel-surfing and it was on and he was upstairs, so I watched it. With Chickadee. (more…)
On Friday night I collapsed into bed feeling decidedly off. It had been a long day and we’d been out in the heat and I figured I was just hot and tired. But on Saturday morning I dragged myself out of bed and was considering a nap about five minutes later. Basically, I felt like I’d been run over by a truck. There was no denying it: I was sick.
Otto, who was skeptical of my crazy diet plan from the start, was convinced I had somehow poisoned myself with the restrictive eating plan I’d been following. He lectured me about how I had “completely obliterated my immune system” and was now reaping the results. I rolled my eyes and agreed to drop the diet to placate him, although that was an easy thing to do as eating ANYTHING would clearly interfere with SLEEPING, which was the only thing I wanted to do for the next two days.
So I slept for most of the day, and then spent the evening on the couch watching quality television with my family. Read: We watched a Hoarders marathon. I don’t know that any of us consciously chose to watch it, it just sort of happened. And then we made an interesting discovery: The target audience for these shows are apparently women with digestive issues. (more…)
The weekend quickly disappeared in a fast-forward WHOOSH of chatting and talking and discussing and many other synonyms for flapping our gums endlessly at one another. True, Kira and I speak several times a week on the computer, anyway, but something about being together, in person, for that one weekend a year makes it suddenly VERY IMPORTANT that we discuss everything from the Good Old Days That Really Were Kind Of Sucky back when we were both single moms and despaired of life ever getting better to how we can possible arrange for her Max to marry my Chickadee and the kids to think it was all their idea and we had nothing to do with it.
Inbetween all of that talking, and also sometimes DURING it, we figured that another benefit of our time together with NO CHILDREN OR SPOUSES was that we could partake of some movies we otherwise might not see. This would’ve been fine if we’d been hitting up our local movie store, but instead, we settled in with my Netflix account to see what was available via livestreaming.
I have a bit of a mental block when it comes to Netflix, it turns out. (more…)
I know it seems like I’m starting this out with a digression, but I promise it’s related: Recently someone suggested a girls’ night out to me, and asked me what I’d like to go do, and I had to explain that it has been SO LONG since I left the house purely for fun and without my children, I could probably go sit at Taco Bell and watch people consume their not-beef tacos and find that totally entertaining. (Oddly enough, I haven’t heard back since I shared that little tidbit. Huh.)
The thing of it is, I’m kind of a homebody, and most of the time I’m very easily entertained. I watch a lot of television. Probably too much television, quite honestly, but I find it soothing and mindless and a good way to unwind after a day of working and child-wrangling.
Okay. All of that is preface to explaining that ZOMG THE ROKU IS THE BEST THING EVER. I was already dangerously dependent on the television before we got the Roku, but now, man, NETFLIX STREAMING. Our typical Netflix M.O. is to receive a disc in the mail and then bicker over WHO put THAT in the queue, and then we leave the disc sitting next to the television for four months before we finally concede defeat and send it back in for the next disc we won’t watch. But we use the live streaming all the time. Which means we are simultaneously reliving our glory days AND finally catching up on modern pop culture. (more…)
We have reached the part of our program—school is closed for the third day in a row, and we are more or less housebound, and the children are crabby and everybody is sick of everybody else—where I am back to my standard coping mechanisms. This means that by the time the kids go to bed at night, I am basically non-verbal and can only handle a bare minimum of human interaction, provided it occurs during the commercial breaks (or fast-forwarding through the recorded commercials) of mindless shows on the television.
In other words: The kids go to bed, I go to the couch. I grunt or mutter in response to whatever Otto says to me, but mostly, the extent of what I can process or react to ends with pointed snickering during CSI: Miami.
I tend to think of this evening couch time as deeply therapeutic. After all, I’m curled up with the dog, I often have a square of good chocolate, I’m decompressing from the day because who can think about anything important while partaking in what passes for entertainment in this country? Sure, I’m probably not very good company, but it beats the evenings when we decide to talk and I just cry all over Otto for an hour or two. (more…)
We have been recording Life on the DVR and then watching it as a family on weekends, as time allows, and everyone has really been enjoying it. What’s not to like about slow-motion views of really long, slimy tongues shooting out to grab bugs, for example? Or watching a bullfrog dig a connective waterway so that the tadpoles stranded in a puddle can get back to the pond?
Much like Planet Earth, Life has stunning visuals, fascinating tidbits about the animal kingdom, and even gets a pass as being educational. Unlike Planet Earth, however, Life is narrated by Oprah Winfrey. Now, I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve watched Oprah, which—to me, anyway—makes the children’s pop-culture-by-osmosis comments even funnier.
So we’d just watched a pack (herd? flock?) of komodo dragons take down and devour a water buffalo, and Oprah solemnly intoned, “This is one family that’s absolutely single-minded,” or something like that.
“Next time, on Oprah!” Chickadee immediately chimed in, getting the coming-attractions inflection just right.
As Otto and I chuckled at her, Monkey threw his arms into the air.
“YOU’RE ALL WINNERS!” he exclaimed.
We lost it. Maybe it was just because he even knew that was the next logical follow-on, or maybe it was because we’d just watched a water buffalo being stripped to the bone and that didn’t seem, well, all that winner-ful. Either way, I feel comfortable declaring our viewings of Life pretty awesome entertainment.
This past week was Spring Break, here in the land of Start School Halfway Through The Summer And Then Finish When Everyone Else Still Has A Month To Go, and that of course meant that the kids went off to visit their dad while Otto and I spent the week in Bacchanalian revelry and various states of undress.
That’s a total lie, of course. The closest we got to a bacchanal was a little wine-and-cheese gathering we had for some colleagues, wherein I tried my hand at a baked Brie thing with candied walnuts and we all ended up face-down in the cheese plate. (Also: When the kids called the next night and asked about it, we told them we ate slices of Muenster and whined about them for hours on end.)
The “various states of undress” part is true, though, if you count “putting on our pajamas and sitting on the couch to watch hours of television,” because sometimes I would, you know, take my socks off during that. Wooooo!
It was last week that we discovered our DVR had a nervous breakdown. Poor thing. I probably should’ve given it some of that Brie. (more…)
The Olympics are pretty exciting stuff, right? Our whole family got pretty jazzed at the prospect of nights spent watching together, seeing the spirit of cooperation and competition, international goodwill, the whole shebang.
Now, it’s our family tradition to watch a recorded episode of Mythbusters on Friday nights while we eat dinner. The rest of the week, we eat at the table like semi-civilized humans, so this is a big treat for the kids, to eat in front of the TV. Last Friday night, we were all “Okay! Tonight we watch the Olympics opening ceremonies instead!” And we were all buzzing with anticipation.
So we sat down with dinner at about 6:30 or so, as we do. But the ceremonies didn’t start until 7:30. So we watched something else for a while. (Actually, I think we watched Man vs. Food which is a truly disgusting show, and therefore highly entertaining.)
We finished eating. Eventually, the Olympics began. (more…)
When I was in middle school, there was a boy I sat near. I always knew where he was and what he was doing and—perhaps most importantly—what grades he’d gotten on any recent tests. I’ve always been attracted to brainy types, you see, and that JERK not only got nearly perfect grades, he used to GLOAT about them.
“I beat you. AGAIN,” he used to say to me, even if his score was only a single point higher than mine.
“Shut up,” I’d mutter, stuffing my test into my backpack and giving him a look intended to melt his face off.
He often brought up things or asked questions in class that even the teacher couldn’t answer, and then sat there in smug satisfaction at having stumped the supposed expert. He talked about things no one understood. He seemed mysterious. (more…)
Our patriotism and sportmanship, let me show you it:
Women’s 4x100m relay swimming event = Sobbing child insisting he has already WATCHED the Olympics, can we STOP now?
Men’s Beach Volleyball = That looks itchy.
Men’s Water Polo = What are they doing? Where’s the ball? Is there a ball? I’m bored.
Men’s 56kg Weightlifting = Awesome! Little men scowling at big heavy things!
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