We came, we saw, we tired
Every couple of years, Otto’s family throws a big family reunion—emphasis on BIG. I come from a family where there is almost no branch you can travel along the family tree and find more than two offspring at any given node. I grew up with one sibling and exactly four cousins (two to each of my parents’ only siblings), and saw them rarely. Otto is one of four, born into a clan of Irish Catholics, so I don’t think you need further explanation. Anyway, Otto has been going to these reunions for years, usually taking one or the other kid along, but I had never been to one before for various scheduling reasons.
This year, it was Time. First of all, I was finally free to go. Second, Monkey is still here with us but moving soon, AND the girls said that if we went, they would come, too. Perfect! (We haven’t all been together since the wedding.) Otto rented a house for the five of us and we began planning our drive, because we are insane. Also because we wanted to bring the dogs. We always want to bring Goose, because Goose is the best and she LOVES car trips, and… uhhh… in our continuing quest to get Turnip to be more of a dog and less of a feral gargoyle, we figured we should bring her, too.
We live in Georgia. The reunion was in Rhode Island. We were facing down a 16-hour trek in both directions, but we were ready! Because Otto loves a long car trip! And Monkey and I love Otto! We carefully plotted out our route, including an overnight stop on the way up in the DC area, and everything looked good for our first Big Trip in a while. read more…
All the things
Apparently the wedding took a little longer to recover from than I’d planned. Ooops! So, uh, hi! Still alive! Mostly! And only a few things have happened since I was last here.
I’m HILARIOUS.
Surely I will forget some stuff, but I will do my darndest to cover the highlights as best I can. Maybe later my husband will come home and say “But what about [insert that super important thing I totally neglected to mention]??” and I’ll say “Oh, yeah!” and actually come back sooner than six months from now. Who knows! Stranger things have happened.
If you’d rather not waste your time, the Spark Notes version is that everyone is fine. Even Turnip! Though she has developed this charming habit (I am lying; it is not even slightly charming) of refusing to eat at mealtimes. I have no idea what that’s about, but basically if we put her dish down (or close her in the crate with it) a while afterwards, she’ll eat. I have since learned that apparently Malteses are notorious for being picky princesses about their food. Seven pounds of neurosis, that one. Anyway.
Here’s what you missed over the last six months! read more…
Picture rainbow confetti everywhere
I popped up long enough, last month, to tell you that I have So Many Wedding Planning Stories and also to tell you about Monkey graduating from college, and then I disappeared (again! I am nothing if not predictable in my slacker-ness!) because it turns out that the last month before a wedding is ABSOLUTE BONKERS INSANITY no matter how well you thought you planned. Those last four weeks, I kept saying “After this task, I’m done!” and I believed it, too, every single time. But I wasn’t actually done until the wedding day itself, because there was always someone who needed me to verify something or give them money or verify something WHILE giving them money, or something that needed to be wrapped in jute (ruuuuuuustic!), or boxes of Very Important Items that needed to be transported somewhere, or… you get the idea.
Weddings, it turns out, are a lot of work.
Usually this is the part where I tell you about the fifty different things that went wrong, but I am here to report, scout’s honor, that the wedding itself was perfect. PERFECT. Like, could not have gone better in my wildest dreams. I have never seen my oldest child so happy and radiant. I have never seen my youngest child—I hope you’re sitting down—rush out onto the dance floor and actually dance and mingle and laugh and act like they’ve done it a hundred times before. I could talk about it for forever and still not cover everything that made it amazing, so suffice it to say: MAH BAYBEE GOT MARRIED and it was magical.
But DON’T YOU WORRY, because plenty of the stuff that happened BEFORE the wedding was… not. So, um, let me just get right into it. read more…
What a(nother) long strange trip it’s been
I have about six million things I’ve been meaning to update y’all on—most of them wedding-related, because HOOBOY planning a wedding is not for the faint of heart or sober, and I happen to be both—but they will have to wait just a wee bit longer. (Those tidbits will be worth the wait, I think. If I had a nickel for every time someone said to me “ONLY YOU, MIR!”… well, I’d have a whole lot of nickels. Not enough to pay for the wedding, you understand, but a LOT.)
Nope, today is not for that, because today I have finally gathered my thoughts (as much as they are ever gathered, anyway) on the end of an era. I don’t write here very often, anymore, and I certainly don’t talk about my kids as much as I used to, but I know there are still a few folks here from the Way Back Times who remember when this whole thing started. I’ve been writing here for almost twenty years. My kids were preschoolers when this site was born. In the same way that you don’t notice your own child growing taller, because you see them every day, much of what has happened over the last two decades seems gradual and normal, because I was watching it, and IN IT, the whole time. (Some of it felt like it took forever, but we’re not going to talk about that right now. Tralala!) And then every now and then, I have one of those weird flashes of WHOA WAIT WHAT because I blinked and suddenly everything changed.
This is all preamble to saying that both of my kids have been adults for a while, now. I know this. Intellectually, this is not a surprise. But. BUT. Last week we hit a milestone that was a loooooong time coming. read more…
Insanity (a love story)
A person might think—had they, say, never met me—that after the saga of the cupcake stands I might have, I don’t know, learned my lesson about “simple” DIY projects. In the end, did I really save any money? (Maybe just a little.) Did I really save any money if we put even the bare minimum value on my time as a factor? (Definitely not.) Was the hassle worth the outcome? (Ask me after the wedding, I guess.) Did I learn that making things myself is always going to take more materials, time, and know-how than I probably have on hand? (Listen, I am starting to feel personally attacked, and I would appreciate it if you would just go back to admiring the stands because they came out great, and let’s just not discuss it.) Tl;dr: No, I learned nothing. NOTHING.
The cupcake stands were completed just in time for me to work on the centerpieces, which I had (of course) figured I could make cheaply/easily and to the exact specs the brides desire, and wouldn’t that make more sense than 1) real flowers (which are finicky, and die, and are expensive) or 2) renting from the venue (which is already costing us… uhhhh, I feel woozy, let’s not talk about it… and everydamnthing you might want other than a door and a floor costs extra)?
Sooooooo. Lemme tell you about the centerpieces. (Which aren’t even DONE.) read more…
Scrambled
Look at me, writing again before a hundred days have passed! I don’t know what has come over me! I think it might be that someone reminded me that I used to write endlessly about the dumb stuff I used to do. And I was all “HA! Used to?? I still do a lot of dumb stuff!”
And now—after decades of earnestly training myself to pay LESS attention to the stupid things I do—I find myself reviewing the past day or week and thinking, “Wow, I am really just not getting any smarter. How unfortunate for those around me.”
So here I am, ready to tell you a story because I believe if you can’t be a good example, you should at least serve as a terrible warning.
In order to fully set the scene and explain how this happened, I have to make a confession which pains me a bit. Intellectually I know this is nothing to be ashamed or embarrassed about, but I’m capable of being both of those things about almost everything, plus I live with an impressive level of mental illness about money (see also: the spending of on anything which isn’t a complete necessity), so just… let me have my delicate feelings, I guess. read more…
My great and terrible summer
Hello! The other day someone came to the blog’s Facebook page and yelled at me. Well, that’s not exactly true; they left a very concerned message asking for an update and if I’m okay, and it happened to be in all caps. So when I responded, I said “Please don’t yell at me!” (I am delicate and have tender, easily-hurt feelings) and the commenter hastened to apologize for the accidental caps lock.
This of course prompted me to check when I’d last updated, because surely it hadn’t been that long, and…. yes it was. Months. I left you hanging for the entire summer. Whoops! Sorry about that.
The short version: Everyone is fine and life is chugging along.
The long version: Wellllllll it’s been an interesting summer. Some good, some bad, mostly ridiculous, because it’s me. I will do my best to catch y’all up. read more…
It could be worse. Probably.
Hello! I am pleased to report that I am still here, and still cranky. Maybe I am not pleased to be cranky, I guess, but there you have it.
A couple of nights ago, Otto and I had iteration number seven thousand or so of the conversation where he says he misses my writing, and I say that nothing interesting and/or suitable to tell the world about has happened because my life is actually super boring, and he says that’s not true, and I tell him he’s not the boss of me. (Being married to me is a treat, I am sure.) I thought about it and realized I actually have plenty of things to complain about, so maybe Otto was right. But let’s not tell him. We’ve been married for 16 years and have known each other for over twice that long, but I’m trying to keep a little mystery going here. That seems like less work than actually, y’know, being a delightful spouse. (That ship sailed a long time ago. Sorry, Otto!)
And so I present to you, in no particular order, all of the things currently occupying my brain/time and creating varying levels of frustration because life is an incomprehensible slog! read more…
I hate eight
In the grand scheme of Big Life Problems, everything is fine. Let’s start with that. Because I am about to launch into a carnival of bitchery and I KNOW someone will want to bright-side it somehow or say it could definitely be worse, and you know how I feel about Hardship Olympics. So. Is my family okay; is anything on fire? Yes, and no. But am I going to complain anyway? You betcha.
Not in the mood for such? That’s fine. Catch you next time when I’m back to being funny, I guess.
Where to begin, where to begin? I think let’s start with the timeline/history of my involvement with this local dog rescue (hereafter referred to as LDR for short). That makes sense, and will be necessary background for the forthcoming bitchery. (This would be a good time to go grab your popcorn.) read more…
Ahoy, it’s a very visual pupdate!
When we last left off, all manner of plague had swept through the house, Goose was about to have an eyeball removed, and I was very busy falling in love with every single foster who came through the door, all of whom Goose hated.
I was very blasé about the surgery thing right up until the actual day. Then I was a nervous wreck. But all went well, they did a great job of making sure Goose wasn’t in any pain during her recovery, and there were really only two noteworthy issues in the aftermath.
First, that Goose just does not understand how to navigate the world in a cone. At all. She would go to get a drink and completely overshoot the water bowl. She would lift a leg to scratch the side of her face and then sit there, waving her little paw in the air and/or scraping it against the cone, thoroughly confused. When I tell you it was a VERY PITIFUL two weeks, trust me.
Second, that I’d felt totally confident in our treatment decision until the final days of waiting for her pathology to come back. And then I started worrying that they’d call and say “Well, that wasn’t anything! Too bad we removed her eye!” I wasn’t wishing for her to have something awful, you understand, but I am SUPER gifted at convincing myself I’ve done something wrong to someone I love. No worries, though, because it did turn out to be cancer. Yay? (As cancers in dogs go, this is the one to have. The eye is gone, the cancer is gone, and that’s that.) read more…