Last night was a typical Sunday night 'round here, which is to say that the children were bouncing off the walls and Otto was trying to finish up some work to prepare for the week and I was realizing exactly how much I hadn't gotten done all weekend long. That always brings all kinds of joy and rapture, and also (in this case) a bunch of banging around in the kitchen. Otto and I are trying something new, owing to our rising grocery costs and my complete inability to think more than a day or two ahead---we're doing weekly menu planning. I know, right? it's like we invented this novel concept!...
Guess what happens when your husband calls and says you have a typo in the link in your post, and you try to fix it from your iPhone? You delete the entire post! Whoops! So now this is all you get. I was trying to tell you that I'll have a new post up at Scholastic later today, and it contains one of my favorite words. See if you can spot it. You also get this: Via Verbatim, the greatest YouTube video I've seen lately:
This afternoon, Otto and the kids headed out to the library and I finally cleaned my desk. It's time to clean my desk when I can't actually, you know, find my laptop on it. The laptop connects to a monitor, so it's not like I can't USE the computer if I can't actually FIND it. Still, if I'm thinking of unplugging the laptop and taking it elsewhere and can't do it because touching any one of the teetering piles of papers or books might set off a chain reaction that will potentially cause my desk to collapse, my office to implode, or me to utter many, many non-child-friendly words, that means...
Something has been niggling at me ever since yesterday, and I just have to get it out of the way before I can move on. I'm sorry, that's just how I am. Ask anyone! And yet, the words "let it go" pass my husband's lips so often, you'd think his 19 years of knowing me and my utter INABILITY to let it go were just a figment of my imagination. Okay, so here it is: There were so many comments on yesterday's post, and that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy, but I would say that approximately HALF of you insisted that the clothing sorting is best done when the children are absent. And I just want to...
School starts tomorrow. (And all of God's people said "AMEN." And possibly "Thank you, Jesus!" And maybe even "I love you so much, now GET OUT OF MY HOUSE.") Last year, we were new, and the school the kids' attend was somewhat in flux for a variety of reasons that aren't important or particularly interesting. And the amount of information we---as a new family, having no idea what the heck was going on---were given was... well, I won't say they gave us NO information, but it was... LACKING, is all I'm saying. We did find out about back-to-school night, at least. But we were never given a bus...
503 days ago a realtor came to my house in New England and put a giant FOR SALE sign on my lawn. Five. Hundred. And three (don't forget the THREE!). Days ago. For 397 days I have carried two mortgages. More accurately, for 397 days Otto has graciously both paid the mortgage on our house AND listened to me whine and wail as I paid the other mortgage. This morning the sale of that house closed. It sold for almost 20% less than the original asking price. My "net proceeds" don't even cover the conservative loan I took against it so that we could buy THIS house. Negotiating the equity split with...
When I was a teenager, I LIVED on the phone. My father used to joke about how it was permanently attached to my head. I can remember calling friends so that we could watch television together (over the phone). I was All Phone, All The Time. And then the internet happened. The lovely, lovely internet. I'm still a big fan of constant connection, but the advent of the internet changed things for me. Oh, sure---when I haven't talked with a friend in a long time, nothing but an actual conversation will do, but in general? I much prefer email. Or chatting online. I was trying to figure out why...
Okay, so, I mentioned in passing that after deciding to get the kids a real piano that I thought I'd had the situation taken care of, and then there was a little snafu. But I didn't tell you the whole sordid tale. And CLEARLY, you need the whole story. Because my life is JUST THAT FASCINATING. To recap: The kids started taking piano lessons a year ago, and all we had here for them to practice on was a small keyboard. This keyboard not only lacks some of the keys they needed, it doesn't have hammer-action (weighted) keys, and so according to the piano teacher, forcing my children to use this...
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.) So that up above is a pretty decent view of how the...
