July 21, 2008 | Offspring: ecstasy and agony

The children are home! The children are home! The children are DONE TRAVELING for the summer! AND ALL GOD’S PEOPLE SAID AMEN!

Hey, it’s nice that I don’t have any strong feelings about whether or not the kids are around, dontcha think? It really enables me to just go with the flow and relax. I can just totally enjoy the time while the kids are gone…

… biting my nails down to the knuckle and crying on their pillows.

Anyway! They’re home! They appear to be more or less in one piece! They are quite huggable and kissable and—as we discovered last night in the pool—throwable! And very little says “I love you so much” like tossing someone into the deep end. I’m just sayin’. (Dude. They were both wearing their goggles with the strap so low that their ears were all folded over like elves, and it was nibble said ears right off their heads or toss them. I tried to choose wisely.) (more…)

July 19, 2008 | It's not a regret, it's an "experience"

Otto isn’t here, so apologies in advance for my pictures, such as they are. It turns out that my dining room is both small (hard to maneuver!) and low in lighting (unless it’s the middle of the day, in which case I could probably blind myself in there), so just PRETEND the pictures came out great.

So. The dining room is DONE. Yesterday I put all the furniture back, like so:

Jesus, whose idea was it to have EIGHT heavy chairs that needed to have felt discs attached to all the legs and be brought down the stairs?? (Mine? Oh. Nevermind.) (more…)

July 18, 2008 | It's not a regret, it's an "experience"

The day before yesterday, we had our contractor come back over here so that we could have a little chat about the state of our brand-new maple floor.

Otto and I have become effortlessly adept at playing Good Cop, Bad Cop together. Although, more accurately, I suppose in our case it’s more like Nice Guy, Crazy Melodramatic Woman.

(It’s a real stretch for me, of course, but I didn’t get that degree in theater for nothing!)

Mind you, I’m calm, I’m cordial, I don’t raise my voice, I don’t make accusations. I just say things like, “You’ve done a lot of work for us and you’ve always been extremely conscientious. And I have to tell you, we got back and we walked in here to look at the floor and I cried.” It helps if you visualize your objective, evoke a powerful sense memory, and—oh, fine, you got me. I’m lying. It mostly just helps if it’s TRUE. (It was.) (more…)

July 17, 2008 | The Year of Living Changerously

You’ll have to forgive me a bit of sappiness, today, but this is what happens when I’ve just been to what was perhaps the nicest wedding I’ve ever attended (I’m not counting my own, you understand). While MY “year of living changerously” can be said to have already lapsed, on this last trip I was struck several times by the enormity of such changes for others.

Then, of course, it occurred to me that EVERY year is a year of change, for nearly everyone. But the changes wrought by love are my very favorites. I’m feeling incredibly blessed, today, to have gotten to share in some of these changes with our family and friends. This is especially true because we all know that I have chronic foot-in-mouth disease, and I remain astonished that anyone ever lets me go anywhere with them. (Hey, if I hadn’t shouted, “I THINK YOU SHOULD PULL THOSE PANTS UP A LITTLE HIGHER, OTTO!” during the pre-wedding slideshow featuring my beloved as a child in polyester bell-bottoms up to his armpits, who would’ve?) (more…)

July 16, 2008 | It's not a regret, it's an "experience", Job? Huh?

(Dear Google, You’re welcome! Next time I’ll try to work THREE obscene words into the title!)

Okay, so, the contractor came over last night and we three stood around discussing The Issues With The Floor. He’s a good guy, our contractor. Within the first ten minutes he was able to quell my fear that he’d just plain installed the floor with a crowbar in one hand and a fifth of bourbon in the other, so that was an excellent start. I guess—and wow, does living here give me an education OVER AND OVER or what?—that when you live in a really humid climate it’s incredibly difficult to lay in a wood floor perfectly. Apparently they take the wood outside to do the cuts, and the door is open, and they lay the wood in tight and it looks great… and then you close the door and run the air conditioner and everything shrinks a little.

(My poor floor. Subject to embarrassing shrinkage.) (more…)

July 15, 2008 | My name is Grumplestiltskin

I tried. I really, really, really, really (with extra reallys!) tried to stay cheerful yesterday, I tried to take the annoyances as they came and tell myself that Hey! Coming back from a trip is hard! Keep expectations low! Everything will be perfectly fine!

But by the end of the day I just wasn’t feeling all that fine, you know? I was feeling rather sucky, in fact, and I was tired of trying to pretend that I wasn’t. I had a good cry and went to bed. (In my OWN DAMN BED. I may have whispered sweet nothings to my pillow before drifting off.)

We went away. We had a lovely trip. We saw lots of friends and family and enjoyed the wedding and ate all manner of delicious foods and encountered minimal travel difficulties (you know, if you don’t count my husband’s near eye explosion from the outbound leg) and it was all perfectly lovely. Until we got back. (more…)

July 14, 2008 | It's not a regret, it's an "experience"

We’re hooooooome! There’s so much to tell you, from the trip itself to the airport hijinks (insert card here! just kidding! this machine is out of order! thanks for the card!) to the state of the house upon our return (wood floors! echoriffic!), but there is just one quick tale I have to tell you before I forget because it is STILL making me laugh.

The wedding we went to was held at a swanky country club, and I’m not certain if the wedding coordinator was an employee of said establishment (I think she was) or an independent, but I CAN tell you that she took her job REALLY VERY SERIOUSLY. Because wedding are serious business, people, and chop chop, let’s get those flowers arranged just so and smooth those tablecloths and I swear to you she actually snapped her fingers at Otto at some point when she wanted him to do something. (He was a groomsman, but last time I checked that didn’t actually make him a trained animal, but apparently she begged to differ.)

Anyway, the point is that she was a WEE BIT TENSE. (more…)

July 13, 2008 | It's not a regret, it's an "experience"

Thanks to all who weighed in on how I should do my hair for the wedding. We all know it’s especially important for the wife of the groom’s big brother to look hot, right? All eyes were on me!

Oh, wait. No one noticed me at all (thank God). Also? You know you’re at the wedding of twenty-somethings when there are girls there in full-length ball gowns with their hair in ponytails. SERIOUSLY. (How… interesting… yes?)

Anyway, the wedding was simply lovely; the bride was gorgeous and the groom radiant and I had to physically restrain myself from pinching them both, they were so adorable. Also I may be in trouble with my OTHER brother-in-law for introducing my sister-in-law to Long Island Iced Teas (whoops). But, um, I think maybe that was someone else. I’m not sure. I made sure to leave before the dancing on the tables started. (more…)

July 11, 2008 | It's not a regret, it's an "experience", What do I do all day?

So we’re here in the frozen north, er, in the temperate north, attending to family and wedding festivities. We are staying with Otto’s brother and sister-in-law, who live in a gorgeous house and are always gracious hosts. Usually when we stay here we camp out in their spare room, which is a smallish L-shaped space that has two twin beds catty-corner to each other. I enjoy sleeping in there because I never tire of saying “Good night, John Boy!” when we turn the lights out, but this time they opted to put my younger nephew in his brother’s room and put us in his room on an air mattress. This is awesome for a couple of reasons, really.

For one thing, sleeping on an air mattress with two people is rather like sleeping on a trampoline, because every time one person moves the other person gets bumped around as the air shifts. For another thing, my younger nephew’s three-year-old brain is rather blown by the whole idea of us sleeping in his room. And he wants to talk about it. (more…)

July 10, 2008 | Ottomatic For the People

The fun and excitement and travel and near-death experiences just NEVER END around here. Not everyone could be me, you know, and that’s both because it would be confusing to have more than one of me AND because you need an iron constitution to survive my life. Just in case you were wondering.

So I’ve had this great Love Thursday post planned since last week, back when we’d gone and spent the 4th of July doing patriotic things like letting the children handle fire.

(Yeah, see, I thought I understood patriotism when I lived in New England, but that was before I moved to Georgia, the Let Your Kids Set Off Their Own Fireworks state. Silly me!) (more…)