You should totally come visit me. I am such a great hostess! Your every need will be solicitously attended to, and the overall feeling will be one of complete and utter specialness. Why, just ask Joshilyn. You can’t ask her right this second, because she is driving home, but once she gets there and detoxes from the splendor of my presence, I’m sure she can tell you with only a little bit of twitching.
Your marvelous Casa Mir experience starts even before you arrive, when I get it into my head to clean the house so as to best pretend that I normally just keep it clean rather than occasionally sentencing my children to bathroom detail when they’ve misbehaved. While you blithely travel towards me, I am lugging the vacuum cleaner up the stairs and vowing to render my daughter’s bedroom just as beautiful as possible for your stay. I will put fresh sheets on the bed, plump the pillows, line up her dolls in a pleasing yet hopefully not-spooky manner (all of those eyes looking at you, dude, it’s not good), and set to vacuuming. This is when I will discover that the vacuum cleaner is busted.
As you continue in your travel, I will then try to contact my husband, who is unavailable. Then I will skip vacuuming and do things like make up the spare bed for my daughter, as she is being evicted from her room. I will noticed more clutter upstairs and vow to tidy it up later. (I never will. I will see it again the next morning and be mortified. Oops!) My husband will become available and we will engage in a spirited discussion about who broke the vacuum. He will assure me that it is NOT in fact broken, and that he will fix it for me later. Fortunately, I will decide to keep him. Unfortunately, I will never actually vacuum the room in which you’ll be staying.
I will then head out to meet you at An Official Lunch, and you and Leandra and I will play telephone tag on our cell phones as we each one discover that our directions for reaching said location are a bit, shall we say, creative. Eventually we will all reach the destination. I will sit next to you as if I belong there, and eat a sandwich and listen to you talk. I am eating that sandwich in an official capacity, so I have some chips, too. When the lunch is over, Leandra and I will whisper about how we feel as though we’ve been elevated to entourage status.
Rather than heading over to An Official Bookstore Thing with you, because I am such an excellent hostess I will yammer about needing to get some work done and be home when the children get home and say goodbye and leave you to find it on your own. You will call me later while you are trying to find a place to park. I will sympathize but assure you that I am no better at finding parking. This will seem to reassure you somewhat, and you will find a place to park.
Later, when you finally arrive at my house, you will attempt to relax for a few moments while my son positions himself two inches from your face to ask if you would like to discuss Pokemon with him. You will assure him that you have your own son with his own Pokemon cards and you are, indeed, all Pokemon-ed out. He will continue trying to convince you that his cards are EXCITING and NEW and you will continue to debate with him absolutely seriously and he will be delighted.
Because we haven’t seen each other in a long time and you’ve just had a busy day of being “on,” I will afford you the very finest opportunities for relaxing and unwinding, such as dragging you first to Tae Kwon Do class and then across town to a soccer practice that was canceled. Fun! We will then sit in traffic for an hour and eventually pass what looks like a big chemical spill.
We will grow gills.
Then we will stop to pick up the pizza, because I COULD’VE made you a nice home-cooked meal but really didn’t have time, what with the going to soccer for no reason and all.
Back home, you and my husband will consider the matter of which bottle of wine to open. Because we are fancy. And we need some wine with the pizza.
My children will demonstrate all of the table manners I have painstakingly instilled in them, bringing their general level of comportment up from “rabid lemurs” all the way to “feral goats.” You will tell them a story about your leftover pizza crusts and how you use them to build houses for homeless Mexican orphans, and they will almost believe you. You will later stuff those crusts into the trash with great haste because my husband threatened to photograph them.
Once the children are in bed, we will retire to the living room and eat brownies and talk and laugh and engage in multiple endless logic loops wherein you equate me complaining about my hair to you complaining about your weight, and from there we (obviously) end up talking about the nature of attraction and relationships and maybe children and jobs. It’s hard to remember, but I’m pretty sure it all made sense at the time.
The next morning, you can get ready for your day by washing up with the mismatched towels I’ve set out because I don’t think I have any matching ones anymore. I will brew a pot of coffee which you will wander around my kitchen in circles trying to find, and then you will insist that my coffeemaker would be better suited as a spaceship. We will go out and meet Tammy for breakfast because it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy when my friends meet each other, and also because I know that between the two of you I will hardly be able to eat for laughing so hard. It will help that we are seated next to this lovely item and our gorgeous waiter tells Tammy he’ll be squeezing her orange juice himself. The jokes are almost too easy.
After breakfast we’ll go to the bookstore, and I will point to a wild-haired person on a book cover and insist that THAT, THAT IS WHAT MY HAIR LOOKS LIKE, and you will first say that you cannot speak to me anymore, and then find a book with a building on the cover and point to it and say THAT, THAT IS HOW LARGE I AM, and then we will giggle our way through and eventually come back here and you will collect your things and then leave to go home.
And I will promise to vacuum and maybe even cook, the next time you come. Probably I will still do neither. But you don’t care, probably because I have brownies.
Good times!
I don’t see what’s so bad about that. I mean, sure, traffic stinks and chemical spills are no walk in the park, but the traffic means you had time to talk and gills will come in handy in the pool! And you had BROWNIES. Quit yer whinin’. ;)
I so want to come to Georgia now. Even though very scary bugs live there.
Haha sounds like fun! ;-)
What is this vaccuuuuum that you speak of?
Now that you’ve grown gills, we can start calling you Fishy, right? Otto has aleady secured his new name as The Snake, so you can all live happily ever after with Monkey and Chickadee in a home that has no bench on the porch. Quite a lovely image.
on my planet, casa mir would be a 5-star hotel ;-)
I wanna be your friend you sound crazy like me ((((HUGS)))
Oh sweet baby jeebus I want some damned brownies.
I think you are a LOVELY hostess! But you know the only thing that scared me? The fact that I saw about 14 zillion little toy vehicles with wheels in Monkey’s room. Because Jackson is, what, 5 years younger than Monkey? And that means all the little trains and cars and Things That Go in my house will only multiply. You will come to visit my house and find me drowning in Thomas the Freakin’ Tank Engines.
At our house, the pre-visit broken-vacuum-discovery time is the “90-miles-an hour, fluffin’ stuff” period — TM Jeff Foxworthy, because yes, we are classy – why do you ask?
Sounds like an awesome visit. And who eats pizza WITHOUT wine? Honestly!
You need to make t-shirts that say “I came to see Mir and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.” Maybe you could replace “t-shirt” with “brownies.”
— says Melissa, for whom Mir made cookies when I visited. In August. In 105-degree heat. (I doubted your sanity, but the cookies were good…)
I think it will make Josh9lyn feel more relaxed next time you go to HER place – I’ll show you my squalor if you show me yours!
Oops, JOSHILYN!
So what wine DID you select? Personally, I think wine goes great with everything…
Sounds as if it were a perfect visit on all accounts. Who wants to go and be with a bunch of stuffy, perfect people? Ummm, not that you’re not perfect, Mir… Ummm, I think I hear my cat begging for a bath…
Actually, I feel kind of mortified that the whole thing was kind of kerflooey, what with the wacky directions and the crazy parking. I thought the luncheon was nice, though, after we finally found the place!
Okay.. I’m so jealous I could scream. I want to come up to north Georgia and hang out with Mir too :-(
If this blog thing doesn’t work out maybe you could open a bakery.
Okay, rabid lemurs and feral goats made me snort. This whole post reminded me a bit of “If You Give a Moose a Muffin.” Spectacular, really.
(Weeping into hands). I am just so jealous.
Friends don’t give a rat’s a$$ if you vacuum. I’ll be testing that theory tomorrow.
The only thing I retained out of this entry was that you said I was fat.
OMG YOUR HAIR LOOKS GOOD—REALLY GOOD.
Shut. Up.
J
That’s not true.
I also retained water.
J again
To follow “The Other Leanne” … whether or not a room is vacuumed, a rat’s a$$ is probably best left out of the picture. They get stuck in the bendy parts of the vacuum, along with hair, powder, marbles and itty-bitty pieces of Transformer toys.
And this is different from normal everyday entertaining…how? Oh, wait, the brownies.
I want to come visit. :)
You had me at “we’ll grow gills.”
Hilarious. You are indeed the hostess with the mostest. Also, I was unaware that you are friends with Joshilyn Jackson who is, quite possibly, my Very Favorite Author (or at the very least, my favorite author alive today) and now I am really confused because I am unsure whether I should be jealous that you are friends with her or that she is friends with you. And so I guess I will just be jealous and leave it at that!
Can I come visit? I have my own GPS. Well, not really but I am good with maps. And parking. And I live in The House of Cat Hair so how bad can your house be? You don’t even have pets. (Do children shed?)
Hey – that’s the same kind of stuff that happens around here. You can come visit me any time! You’ll feel right at home!
xo
LBC
you thought you’d scare everyone away. nope, now we all want to visit and enjoy your awesome hostessness.
But did you gather boxes with her from surly liquor store clerks?
I don’t know if children shed, but I know that I do!
Wait…why didn’t the Roomba vacuum the bedroom?!