May 12, 2008 | It's not a regret, it's an "experience"

Wow, do you people have strong feelings about planting mint. SHEESH. Maybe I REALLY REALLY LIKE mint. Maybe the mint is in containers in the planter. Maybe it is hilarious to me that I am all “Hooray! I made an herb garden finally!” and you all commence freaking out because ZOMG! MIIIIINT!

Yesterday I planted jalapeños and two kinds of tomatoes. Would you like to yell at me about that, too? Because I am pretty sure that the tomatoes said to bury 80% of the plant for best results, see, and I may have only managed to get them down into the soil up to about 76%. I’m sorry.

Yesterday was also BOTH Mother’s Day and Otto’s and my first anniversary, and I need to tell you all about both of those things at some point, but today is going to be slightly abbreviated. (more…)

May 9, 2008 | Offspring: ecstasy and agony, It's not a regret, it's an "experience"

So yesterday we had this big end-of-season soccer thing for, I dunno, six hours? Three days? A LONG TIME, is what I’m saying. It was a SOCCER EXTRAVAGANZA! With extra soccer! And hotdogs! And staying out entirely too late on a school night.

And after you’ve played several billion hours of soccer (Monkey) and run around the fields with your BFF (Chickadee) and eaten your weight in potato chips (both of them), you are maybe a little tired, right? The kids sat in the back of the car, vibrating slightly from the large cups of lemonade they’d consumed (Countrytime Lemonade: Less Lemon Flavor, More Hunks of Sugar), but largely silent and spent after the evening of excitement.

Otto and I held hands (can I just tell you that one of my FAVORITE PARTS about being married is holding hands in the car? AM DORK) and chatted quietly about the week’s events. “I just wish the emails would die down,” I said to him. (more…)

May 7, 2008 | It's not a regret, it's an "experience", Ottomatic For the People

Our pool is still a murky chasm of waste water.

Oh, I know it’s only been a couple of days. It could take up to a week, everything we read told us. Maybe two! I was prepared to be patient about it, except that I’d forgotten something sort of important.

I’m not a patient person. (Surprise!)

And it didn’t help that a family member who also has a pool sent out some pictures to demonstrate that their newly-opened pool was just as frightening as ours, but then they dumped in a gazillion gallons of liquid shock and just 24 hours later the water was fresh and clean and beautifully blue. Hmph. We prefer the old fashioned method of adding only enough chemicals to cause acute neurological damage each day, rather than emptying our bank accounts and all in one day making the water pretty but capable of instantly killing any renegade hippos who might wander by for a swim. (more…)

May 6, 2008 | It's not a regret, it's an "experience", Haven't been hit by lightning yet!

Contrary to what you might think about a woman who writes about her entire life on the internet, I’m a fairly private person.

STOP LAUGHING.

I know that seems a complete contradiction of terms and some of you are thinking that I’ve finally started drinking during the day, but REALLY, it’s true. There’s a reason I blog about the stuff I do from the relative anonymity provided behind the computer screen, and believe it or not, there’s plenty of stuff I don’t write about at all.

Yes, yes, I know. My uterus and subsequent lack thereof, talking to the kids about sex, tormenting my husband into marrying me, and the time I went to a job interview with my pants falling down all seem like things which I maybe should’ve kept to myself, but BESIDES THOSE THINGS, there are things I don’t address. (more…)

May 3, 2008 | It's not a regret, it's an "experience", Ottomatic For the People

Last night, I had my bi-annual dose of Being A Faculty Wife.

Because Otto is a nice guy and also because he likes to entertain and perhaps ESPECIALLY because his department will reimburse him a whopping $8 per warm body (woo! let’s buy the name-brand soda!), we hosted a barbecue for some of his students. I had my inauguration into this ritual last semester, and I have to say that at the time I found it quite amusing. Especially the part where the students who’d been around for the PREVIOUS gathering at his bachelor pad sat around saying things like, “Otto, dude, you have real furniture now! It’s nice,” and then another student followed up with, “But, wait. Otto, you have KIDS now? WHOA!”

So yesterday it was time to mix up onion dip and put out the deck chairs and open our home to a bunch of young people who all regard me as a possible side-effect hallucination of their final projects and hangovers. Because DUDE, Otto isn’t supposed to have a LIFE much less a WIFE. And yet here I am, providing snacks and sliced tomatoes to put on their hamburgers. WEIRD. (more…)

May 2, 2008 | It's not a regret, it's an "experience"

I have mentioned before that I generally have a single cup of coffee or tea in the morning, and maybe one diet coke in the afternoon. I like caffeine. Honestly, I’m ALL FOR caffeine, but I drink it rather sparingly. I am not a caffeine-all-the-time person, at all.

You also may recall that I am all about the bargain and, indeed, count my frugality and deal-sniffing abilities amongst my finest talents, so it’s very rare that I partake of “fancy” coffee because GOOD LORD, $4 for something I can make at home for a quarter? SERIOUSLY?

Nevertheless, it remains a truth of life that sometimes you simply must have A Fancy Beverage out and about, and I try to deal with that as best I can. (more…)

May 1, 2008 | It's not a regret, it's an "experience", Health is overrated

Every now and then one member of the family manages to visit a proclivity on the rest of us, and before you know it, we’re all loving or doing the same thing. Hey, I never used to be a HUGE fan of fish. I mean, I liked fish just fine. I cooked it occasionally. But it was never one of my big things.

Back when Monkey still lived on big cups of milk and butter-slathered bread crusts and turned up his nose at nearly everything else, he refused to eat beef. Or pork. Or chicken. Or anything with any protein at all, which caused me to fret that he would forever be just three feet tall and spindly. And one day I made some fish and put some on his plate and then had a small myocardial infarction when he shoveled it all into his mouth and asked for more. Thus a fish-lover was born, and although he is now three-and-a-HALF feet tall and spindly, we consume a lot of fish.

It also gives our family an awesome party trick; ask the kids what they’d like to eat RIGHT NOW if they could have anything at all, and Chickadee will start rattling off “Cake! Ice cream! CAAAAANDY!” while Monkey’s eye glaze over with longing and he sighs, “Saaaaaaaalmon!” (more…)

April 28, 2008 | It's not a regret, it's an "experience", Retail Therapy

The kids were off with their dad this weekend, so Otto and I immediately set about making fancy romantic plans for ourselves. You know the sort—a run to the hardware store, a few hours spent cleaning up the office, meal-planning for the week and fetching groceries, and a trip to the local flooring place.

What? You don’t express your love for each other through home maintenance? Pfffft.

Actually (and this is probably more about me than you wanted to know) (sorry!) the very idea of tearing up the carpet in our living room really does get me all hot and bothered. (Oooh baby!) There are many, many things I love about this house, but you have to understand that when I first stood in it slightly over a year ago one of the first things out my mouth was “Well, the carpet in here has got to go. OBVIOUSLY.” (more…)

April 26, 2008 | It's not a regret, it's an "experience"

Tonight I had my first experience with up-close and personal gymnastics stars. Yes! Otto and I had tickets to go watch the NCAA women’s individual finals, and so—despite neither of us being super-huge gymnastics fans—we headed off to cheer for our home team.

It turned out that our seats were actually quite good, and we sat back to enjoy the splendor that can only come with sitting in a packed sports arena, waiting for half-dressed girls to come out and begin flinging themselves all over the place.

(I, of course, pulled out my phone to check my email while we were waiting, and then my LOVING HUSBAND felt the need to pull out his phone, snap a picture of me futzing with mine, and then email that picture to my parents, MOCKING ME FOR EMAILING. Can someone please explain to Pot Otto why that is IRONIC?) (more…)

April 23, 2008 | It's not a regret, it's an "experience"

Back when I was Jewish—you knew I was raised Jewish, right? Before I broke my family’s collective heart and became a Christian?—I got to go to Hebrew School and hear all about the story behind Hanukkah every year. If you’re not Jewish, you perhaps don’t know that the holiday celebrates the “miracle of the oil,” in that a tiny bit of oil (all that was left, due to the circumstances of the story which aren’t all that important to my point here) ends up lasting and burning brightly for eight whole days, against all odds.

I am here to tell you that the TRUE miracle of the oil is that ANYTHING YOU DEEP FRY IS DELICIOUS. Hanukkah, schmanukkah. It’s not a miracle when oil burns for days. That’s a waste of a good chance to render perfectly healthy food a heart attack waiting to happen. (more…)