First of all, thank you for all of the color suggestions and stories and cautions in the last post. I posted that all, "Yellow?" and what your feedback told me was that I needed to put down the crack pipe, as the odds of me selecting a suitable yellow were somewhere between slim and none. Alert (and pretty) commenter Elizabeth said something about full-spectrum paints and I immediately emailed her all "WHAT IS THIS PAINT YOU SPEAK OF?" and with her help I then fell into the deep, expensive rabbit hole of Ellen Kennon paints. Eventually I emerged, bleary-eyed, with a passel of samples on...
In New England, March was always a month to bitch and moan about how spring was clearly NEVER going to arrive. Or there would be a couple of freak 70-something-degree days in amongst the snow storms. I still remember the year we got two feet of snow on April Fool's Day, and with Chickie's birthday being in the middle of April, every year it was a waiting game to see if we could have a party outside or not. One year the day of her party dawned warm and sunny, but I still had to go out into the yard with a shovel and break up an iceberg that hadn't quite gotten the memo about the weather. In...
It seems like---particularly after the first full week of reintegrating ourselves as a family of four and everyone managing work and school and stuff---the weekend should be a time to relax and unwind and simply have fun. We should... sleep! Watch television! Meet up with friends and simply hang around with no set goals in mind! Well, I'm sure that's what SHOULD have happened. You know, if I wasn't such a giant meaniehead. But you know... I am Mom, hear me suck the fun out of everything. HOORAY! It actually started with poor, long-suffering Otto. I'm sure Otto would've LOVED to loll around...
One of the things I love about doing a play is that it completely lifts me out of my regular existence of largely being a hermit, spending my days alone at the computer, spending my evenings with Monkey and Otto and then vegetating on the couch in front of some truly horrible television programming. [Sidebar: So now that we all know that Storage Wars is fake you'd think we'd stop watching it. You'd think we would remove it and Storage Wars Texas from our DVR. You would not think that we would continue popping popcorn and plunking ourselves down to watch these shows every week like they were...
Is there anything better than a Saturday? We can sleep in! We have the whole day to do... whatever! But if you are Otto, the only thing that's better than a random Saturday is the Saturday when the Camper and RV show is in town. Woooooo! Um. What? You don't get all excited for the Camper and RV show? It's EXCITING! [Full disclosure: It is not terribly (read: at all) exciting to me. But it is VERY exciting to Otto, and generally the kids enjoy it as well. Fancy campers have a variety of interesting things inside of them, and that's in addition to the number of small spaces where one...
It's a funny thing about putting one foot in front of the other; it works just fine until you get to a point where you realize you can only keep doing it if you shut out everything else. Then you put one foot in front of the other with your fingers in your ears and your eyes closed and people look at you funny. So that's what I've been doing since last Friday. I'm still doing it, to some extent. My parents are here, which is fantastic, but there is now some question of whether Chickadee is coming home for Christmas, as she has managed to come down with a mighty case of The Crud at precisely...
This weekend it became clear that 1) Christmas is going to come whether I want it to or not, 2) I have about eighty billion things to accomplish between now and then, and 3) I am starting to hate everything and everyone again. What a delightful combination! (STEP RIGHT UP, watch the Amazing Grumpy Woman attempt to get into the holiday spirit! Just don't, you know, breathe too loudly in the same room with her. Just a friendly warning.) In a completely transparent attempt to jack up my holiday spirit with zero effort or personal growth on my part, I gave Monkey this year's LEGO Advent Calendar...
I spent half of yesterday prepping/cooking and then got up at 6:00 to start throwing everything into crock pots. What? You don't do that? It's awesome, because then instead of musical ovens your guests come and say, "What can we do to help?" and you just wave an arm at your counter full of crock pots and say, "Nothing. It's all done." And then they back away slowly. Yay! This year I'm thankful for lots of things, like that I didn't break any other bones while cooking stuff, and that my family and friends are awesome, and my readers (that's you) are lovely and supportive, and that this year...
Yesterday Monkey and I went to the supermarket to start buying all of the things I'll require for our upcoming Thanksgiving dinner, which meant that my cart was full of unfamiliar items (to him, though to be honest I am trying some new recipes and some of it was unfamiliar to me as well) amongst the regular milk and spinach and whatnot. [Note that I said it was the START of shopping for Thanksgiving; Otto will no doubt be sent out to the store at least twice more as I start prepping and discovering what all I've overlooked.] Anyway. We shopped, we came home, Otto was arriving home from the...
