Fun (or not) with the phone
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 this is, and I realized it’s because I’m actually incredibly rude: While emailing or instant messaging I can ALSO be talking to the kids, emailing/instant messaging someone ELSE, and/or eating lunch. The multitasker in me is not interested in a singular phone conversation when I could be doing five things at once. read more…
Love slows down
Can I tell you something I consider one of my dirty little secrets?
I love crappy food.
You may be shocked to know that, because anyone who knows me knows that we almost never eat out, and also that I’m quite vocal in my disdain for the lack of nutritional value in most take-out food. But the truth is that there was a long period of time when I was a kid where my dad hadn’t yet learned to cook and my mom was working nights, and my brother and father and I lived on McDonald’s and Kraft Mac and Cheese and Spaghettios and such. We were hardly unique—it was the 70s, and everyone was digging “convenience food”—and even though I hardly ever eat the stuff, now, I still see comfort in a blue box of macaroni or occasionally need some salty fries from McD’s.
(Mmmmm… salt and grease.)
As I feed my own family, now, I’m trying really hard to make the kind of memories that center around good food choices, with the occasional trip to Sonic being a treat of shocking proportions. read more…
For the love of food
I have a new(ish) local friend who is, like Otto, a professor, and therefore is free to do all sorts of things in the summer which she will be far too busy for once classes start up again. Me, I’m all slacker, all the time, but I’m coming to the realization that summer is a mystical time for most people here in Universityland. For one thing, most folks are working a lot less in the summer. For another, you can actually go downtown for pizza or whatever and FIND A PARKING SPACE. It’s lovely.
Anyway, my new friend—let’s call her Foodie, because it will make her laugh—and I have been engaged in an educational project of sorts. Yes. The education is mine, and it has to do with the fact that I’ve lived here for over a year and yet I’d only been to maybe three different restaurants in town, because we hardly ever eat out. But it’s SUMMER and she’s not teaching and there is parking to be had, so we are studiously touring many of the finer local eateries for lunch. read more…
Play on, little virtuosos
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 inferior instrument was tantamount to child abuse. The only thing that would’ve been worse was a piece of cardboard with the keys drawn on it, apparently. And so after some soul-searching I set out to buy the children a Decent Instrument. read more…
Holding tight and letting go
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.) read more…
What I did on my summer vacation
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.) read more…
Requiem for my renovation innocence
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.) read more…
Love changes everything
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?) read more…
Pimpage and floor porn
(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.) read more…
Well, that didn’t take long
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. read more…