OH DUDES. I did not mean to leave that horrible video up for so long, honest. It's just that I've been plagued with a malady of the bladder variety, and it has become all-consuming. I KNOW, you do not want to hear about my UTI, and believe me, I don't want to TELL YOU about it. Because I don't want to HAVE it. But I do. And that is pretty much all that's going on around here.
This morning found me driving home from CVS in the pouring rain, listening to Guns & Roses's "Used To Love Her" on the radio after having procured some magical germ-killing capsules and I am not going to lie, it was a little weird. These antibiotics are making me feel weird too, and now I'm wondering if that pain I suddenly developed in my right lower back this afternoon is a pulled muscle or an exploding kidney. Whee!
Anyhoodle. Other stuff happening lately:
The Saints won the SuperBowl! I thought that was something I hallucinated in my feverish delirium but no! It really happened! (I realize my extensive fan base readers outside the U.S. may not have any idea what I'm talking about here, so I have two words for you folks: American football. See, now you don't care, and I don't have to explain it.)
The boy child has to decide his entire future RIGHT NOW, at the ripe old age of not quite fourteen! Or that is how he feels, anyway. There is some STRESS going on about High School, which starts in August, is what I'm saying.
It has been raining raining raining all the time with the raining. Except on Saturday, which was gorgeous, but I missed it because I was DYING OF THE BLADDER PLAGUE. I know, I should be grateful that I'm not buried under 27 feet of snow like much of the rest of the country, and I AM, but still. Enough with the rain, sheesh.
I bought a pomelo for some reason, back before I had plague when I was still allowed to eat citrus, and now I can't remember why I bought it or what I intended to do with it.
I cannot drink coffee either, and OMG I MISS IT SO MUCH. I was just getting the hang of using a French press, which incidentally has ruined me for drip coffee FOREVER, and now I have to stay off it until the magical germ-killing capsules work their magic and/or my kidney explodes, at which point I imagine I'll have more pressing concerns. (Ha! PUN. INTENDED.)
Yep, so, that's about all I've got for you today. I'm off to drink another quart of unsweetened 100% cranberry juice, which incidentally tastes like radioactive demon piss.
Oh people, I am so cranky today. How cranky? When the cashier at WalMart (I know, shut up) sent me (TWICE!) to a completely unmanned cash register instead of letting me stay in the line she was manning herself (it was NOT an express line, but I only had about 10 things anyway), I accused her of wanting to take an early break. I swear, I'm not usually an asshole like that! Not in public, anyway! In fact, I am usually ESPECIALLY nice to retail people because I know they put up with a ton of shit (see also: waitpersons, flight attendants, etc.) and I don't like to add to that because SECRETLY I AM KIND OF NICE. But not today, bub!
It's just that, well, Day One is IMMINENT. Also, I've had maybe ten hours of uninterrupted sleep in the past week. And the weather has been cold and yucky. And my fibromyalgia is in flare, and since I'm not sleeping, I'm not healing. Also, my grandpa turns 90 in two weeks and in FOUR weeks he is sort of getting kicked out of my uncle's house and into a home of some sort, and I'm a little worried he's going to decide he doesn't want to do that IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN, like "this life has been swell but I think I'm done now," and ALSO I just found out that a friend of mine from high school shot and killed his younger brother back in December! I know! He's in prison now! And he's completely deaf, although I don't know what that has to do with it, but yeesh!
So. Things are a little weird right now, you could say. I dunno. I think a little sleep and sunshine (and skipping ahead to Day Five or so) might help, but these are things I cannot control.
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In other news, I'm not saying I'm not going to buy any new fiction in 2010, but I WILL say, and truthfully so, that I did not buy any in the entire month of January. And I kind of did that on purpose. I mean good golly, people, I have MULTIPLE DOZENS of books piled up on my nightstand, waiting to be read. You don't even want to KNOW how tall that double stack is now. It's ridiculous. I do NOT need any more books! And the idea of whittling that stack down to virtually nothing appeals to me like you would not believe. (I'm in another one of those weird self-deprivation/punishment phases. It's what I do. Beats cutting myself and/or shooting up with heroin, right?!)
So no, I WON'T say that I'm not buying any new fiction this entire year. But I sure would like to shrink the hell out of that pile o' books, and there is some good stuff on there (Revolutionary Road, Memoirs of a Geisha, City of Thieves, et. al.) PLUS I have a shit-ton of previously read excellent fiction that I could re-read instead of buying new. We'll see how February goes, eh?
I should confess to you that long before that whole Babble mommyblogger list happened, I had been toying with the idea of doing semi-regular videos over here. Ever since I got this shiny new laptop with its nifty integrated webcam, in fact. And I was thinking what I would do is: book reviews! In video form! And maybe put a time limit on them? Like two minutes? Or one minute? One minute is a LONG time, as you know if you've ever been involved in broadcasting at all. Or given birth. Or had to wait in line for a restroom. But I am super verbose, in case you hadn't noticed, so a time limit might make things fun.
Anyway, so yeah, I think I'm going to go with that. Book reviews in video form, with a time limit! And maybe some other stuff too, but definitely that. The first book I'll be video-reviewing is The Memory of Running by Ron McLarty, which I LOVED. (Oops! Spoiler!)
Just give me some time to lose this funk and take a nap and put on some lipstick, and I'll get that right out to you.
I think I have told you before that the girl child does not eat food. A few years ago I instituted the Make Your Own Damn Dinner rule, when I got tired of making separate food for the kids at dinner time (while DH and I ate "real" food), and that worked okay at first. The kids were required to eat a protein and a fruit or veg at each meal, and they did, and that was all swell.
But then, after a year or so of this, we got a little lax about requiring the fruit/veg component. At first it was absolutely mandatory. Then it was something you had to do if you wanted dessert. You don't want dessert? Fine, don't eat a carrot. See if I care.
With the boy child none of this was an issue. He likes vegetables, he LOVES my cooking, and he will mostly eat whatever I put in front of him. But the girl -- the GIRL, y'all -- she is not like the boy. She is not complacent when it comes to food. She is a control freak (NO idea where she gets that, heh) who wants to take matters into her own hands.
And so, something shifted somewhere along the way, and all of a sudden the girl child was eating pasta with butter and two strips of bacon for dinner every night and following it up with a handful of mini-marshmallows. I KNOW. I blame myself for bringing marshmallows into the house in the first place, and for being so lax with her, but anyway that is not the real point here.
The POINT is that DH and I finally went from exasperated to CONCERNED regarding her diet, when neither of us could name a single fresh fruit or vegetable that our daughter had eaten in recent memory. And so we decided that she was going to have to start taking vitamins again (they both used to when they were small; something ELSE about which we have become lax over the years). She was fine with this provided I bought her the gummy-type vitamins that are all fruity and chewable and taste like candy.
People, I did NOT buy the gummy vitamins. Not that there's anything wrong with those. It's just that, once I got to the store and was standing in the vitamin aisle, there were so many CHOICES. The girl is petite and waif-like, so I didn't want to get her adult vitamins because I was afraid she'd get too much of something that wasn't water-soluble. But she is no longer a larval-stage human, so I was afraid the kid vitamins wouldn't give her enough of what she needs. (She needs a little extra iron these days. Do I need to say why? I don't think so.)
They had vitamins specifically made for teen girls, so I bought the marketing hype and got those. They are HUGE. You're supposed to swallow them. The girl balked. I told her she'd have to find some way of getting them down. She tried crushing them up in peanut butter, then in yogurt. They taste AWFUL, apparently. She HATED them.
So. DH and I reminded her that the only reason she needed to take the vitamins in the first place was that she was not eating enough fruits and vegetables. Start eating those and you can skip the vitamins. Make me a list of fresh fruits and vegetables you like and I WILL BUY THEM. Whatever you want! I don't even care if it's in season!
And people. Oh, people. IT WORKED. I know! Every night at dinner, she fills her plate with pasta or rice or whatever other starchy white food I've made as part of our meal, and maybe a teensy piece of meat if we're having that (like DH, she is allergic to tree nuts and legumes, including soy), and when she's done I put the bottle of vitamins in front of her. Pill, or fruit/veg? That's the choice, but she has to have one or the other. This week alone she has eaten bananas, grapefruit, carrots, cucumbers and last night, I kid you not, after chowing down on half a grapefruit she asked me where the lettuce was because she wanted to make herself a salad. For dessert. A SALAD. And she ate it!
So. Since I'm now number FIVE on that list of mommybloggers and therefore qualified to give you parenting advice, I say unto you: buy your teenagers really huge, yucky vitamins. And then maybe, just maybe, they will eat their vegetables and/or fruit. It's worth a shot.
In other news, OMG I AM NUMBER FIVE! Thanks to your votes, and the relentless pimping of one Poppy Buxom! How in the WORLD...? I am seriously speechless. Like, wow. I don't even... WOW. Seriously. You? You people? I LOVE.
I promised you more videos if you got me into the top five, and they are coming. Soon, I hope. Probably no flaming balls of yarn (turns out our HOA frowns on that sort of thing, whoops!) but I will try to make them non-boring. Ish. For the most part.
Okay people, there two things you should know before you watch this video.
One, I recorded it on my crappy laptop webcam. The quality is awful, especially the audio. I don't know how to fix that.
Two, I do not own any video editing software whatsoever. So I did this all in one take. Maybe the terrible audio quality will distract you from all the eye rolling and um-ing and whatnot? We can only hope.
Um, dudes? OMG! You did it! I am now at number 16 -- SIXTEEN, PEOPLE -- on that list of mommy bloggers thing! Holy crap! I honestly did not think that would happen. No, really. I didn't. Wow. I am sort of dumbfounded.
Anyhoo, I promised that if I got into the top 20 I'd post a video of me doing something stupid, and I will. Not today, but next week almost for sure. I WILL! I keep my promises, yo. It's just that there are so very many stupid things from which to chose, and I want to pick the RIGHT stupid thing. I want to give you the stupid thing you DESERVE, for all your hard work and whatnot.
So, gimme a few days to think something up and shave my legs and comb my hair or whatever, and I'll get back to you. In video form. OMG.
Meanwhile, please go visit my swell pal Poppy, the one who started all this madness. As of yesterday she is the mother of TWO teenagers, so, you know. Be nice. And gentle. And maybe bring some booze along with you.
So I made this coleslaw last night and everyone loved it, including the girl.
Hang on, that bears repeating:
Everyone loved it INCLUDING THE GIRL.
People, the girl child does not eat food. She lives on, like, wallpaper paste and hair. God forbid you try to sneak a vegetable down her gullet because a young Linda Blair ain't got nothin' on this kid. (For those of you who are new, the girl child is twelve. She's not a toddler, no. She's just the most strong-willed human being you will ever meet in your lifetime, and if you don't believe me, I invite you to come babysit. Try to feed her a vegetable while you're here! You will be LOVING LIFE.)
Anyhow, yes, all the people in my house who hate food loved this coleslaw. And yet, the coleslaw is made of food! I know! CRAZY! And so I decided to share the recipe with you, or what passes for a recipe around here, because although I'm pretty sure I didn't actually invent it (I get all my best ideas from other people; it's the American way) I did sort of make it up in my head as I went along.
Here's what I did: I shredded about one-third of a head of cabbage. (Because again, everyone else in my house hates food, except the boy, and I didn't want it to go to waste. I'll up the quantities next time.) Then I shredded a couple of carrots. Then I sliced up a bunch of snow peas and a couple of green onions and I mixed all of that together.
Then -- this is KEY -- I chopped up a few thick slices of bacon and cooked it in a skillet until crisp. I removed the bacon to paper towels using a slotted spoon but I did NOT drain the fat out of the skillet; instead, I added equal amounts of apple cider vinegar and sugar (1 Tbs. each, I think it was)(be careful when you do this because vinegar and hot bacon grease will spit everywhere) and whisked all that around until the sugar had dissolved and the mixture had come to a boil. Then I dumped it over the veggies, tossed everything around, and sprinkled the bacon on top.
That's right. It's warm bacon-veggie slaw. And my picky family ATE IT.
Maybe yours will, too.
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In other news, my swell friend Poppy nominated me for a blog thingie! It's a ... list of mommy bloggers? Or something? I don't really know, and I thought I was too cool to care, but then I broke into the top 100 and went all competitive and shit. So it turns out I DO care. I care VERY MUCH. As I write this I'm ranked at #85, so if you want to vote for me and help move me up the list, you can do that over here. Just scroll down until you find me and then tell them you like me! You really like me!
I will tell you right now, if I make it into the top 20? I will post a video of myself right here on this very website doing something stupid. Actual video! You can hear my accent! And view my squint! And see the degree to which I talk with my hands! That'll be fun, right? You KNOW you want to see that.
So, yeah. But whether you vote for me or not, go make the coleslaw. Use veggie or turkey bacon, I don't care. It'll still be good. (Do add a tiny bit of olive oil to the vinegar/sugar dressing if you go that route, though. Trust me.)
Conversation in the car on the way to school this morning.
Girl Child: My friend Abby might be related to a famous movie star! Me: Yeah? You might be, too. GC: Really? Me: Yep. There's a famous British actor with our last name. GC: I might be related to someone BRITISH?! COOL! Me: You're related to a lot of British people. Dad's family came from England. GC: Oh, England. Boring. I thought you meant, like, Spain or France or something. Me: Well, no. See, "British" means "from Great Britain", and Great Britain is made up of .... Boy Child: I thought we were Romanian. Me: Well yeah, there's some Romanian and German in there, but you guys are mostly English and Irish. BC: People love me because I come from the land of potatoes. GC: That's IDAHO. BC: But potatoes COME FROM Ireland. GC: Whatever! Me: You know what? Maybe I should have homeschooled you guys after all.
My head is full of so much stuff these days. Literally (achooo!) and figuratively.
I recently found out that one of my best friends from childhood was actually IN one of my favorite movies of all time. I had no idea. I didn't recognize him in any of the dozens of times I've seen it. He's changed a lot in the past 30+ years.
This is a friend I've told you about before. He was one of three brothers, and I let his younger (by one year) brother feel me up at my 11th birthday party. (I'd link to that story but I've since removed it.)
I mentioned in my last post that I'd recently gotten some news about a childhood friend that has left me reeling, and the news is this: the younger brother, the one with whom I went to second base all those years ago, had a stroke in 2007. Forty years old, father of three, massive bleed in the brain stem. He survived, barely. He was actually recovering really well until he maxed out his insurance benefits and got kicked out of the rehab facility where he'd been recovering his speech and the use of his legs and the right side of his body.
(In college I majored in speech pathology before switching to journalism, did I ever tell you? That's what I was going to do -- work with head injury and stroke victims to help them regain their speech. I had no interest in working with kids in schools, even then. The only reason I switched to journalism was that there was a massive redesign of the speech pathology degree track that caused me to lose 30 hours of already completed coursework, and I couldn't afford to stay in college for the additional two years it would have taken to complete my degree. A journalism degree would only take me two extra semesters to complete, and I liked to write and fancied the idea of getting paid for it, so that's how I ended up graduating in December instead of May with a degree in journalism instead of speech pathology. The End.)
So when his insurance company kicked him out of rehab and he was suddenly faced with paying out of pocket for his physical, occupational and speech therapy, he -- my little boyfriend for a couple of weeks in sixth grade -- and his family started looking for alternatives and long story short (too late!) he ended up going to China for three months to receive treatment there, because even including airfare it was substantially cheaper.
And his brother, my good friend from grades three through six, who is now a filmmaker and unbeknownst to me was in one of my favorite movies, made a documentary about it. It's screening in select cities and has been to a few festivals as well. If you get the chance to see it, please do. I will, if I can, even though I know it'll make me cry and cry and cry because just the trailer made me cry.
So. All of that has been on my mind quite a bit. In case you were wondering.
And also I've been thinking about one of my old teachers. I'd like to tell you she was my favorite teacher, but in truth, as is the way with angsty adolescents, I did not appreciate her when I had her. But she was one of the BEST teachers I ever had and she was from Haiti. She was stern and taciturn and had the audacity to treat us, a bunch of TAG English 9th graders, like adults.
It took me several months to realize that her somewhat gruff demeanor hid a wry and wicked sense of humor because she was eleventy gazillion points above me on the I.Q. scale and her humor was mostly over my head. It took many months of her gently poking knowledge and sophistication and maturity into my brainholes for me to even remotely "get" her, but looking back I can honestly say that she was one of the first teachers I ever had who made me feel smart and gave me the confidence to do smart things. You know, occasionally.
I know her husband and children are here with her in the States, or they were back then anyway, but I have no idea what sort of family she left behind in Haiti. And since she's the only person I've ever known from there, well. I am thinking a lot about her, too.
It's a grey day here in central Texas and there is not much else to do but sit in my office, blow my nose, look out the window at the mist and the drizzle, and think.
I don't think I'm handling January particularly well this year. Not only is it the height of allergy season here in central Texas, but like most of the rest of North America, we have been experiencing unusually freezing-ass-cold temperatures for the past week or so. Friday night our kitchen pipes froze, though fortunately they did not burst.
I've been trying to find small bits of joy in the watery sunlight that filters through the bare tree limbs, and in the preparation of hearty stews and roasts and soups to get us through the cold winter nights, but the truth is I am sick unto death of the cold and the wind and that giant pot of bean soup I made last week that no one is eating but me.
Additionally, I am sick unto death of the boy child's malingering whenever he doesn't want to do something, the girl child's pathological need to turn my house into a toxic waste dump, the way metric tons of crap accumulate up in here all weekend long and I'm the one left cleaning it all up Monday morning, and I am SO TIRED of looking out over a brittle brown lawn and an empty garden and not being able to spend time in my happy place. Argh.
Spring cannot come soon enough this year, I'll tell you what.
To top it off, I received some news last week about a childhood friend that has me absolutely reeling, and I've been living in my own head and in the distant past way too much since, trying to snatch at little bits of memory that are eluding me for the most part. It's hell getting old, man.
ANYWAY. In happier news, my dad is 66 years old today and yesterday we celebrated with barbecue and a semi-drunken Skype session with my brother (who by all accounts was completely sober at the time). And Wednesday I'm buying some ridiculous new shoes that I will show you later!
So whatever. Just ignore my whining. Everything's okay. I think I just need a couple of weeks on a warm beach somewhere right about now. Don't we all?
I made Julie's hard candy for Christmas, as you know, and I needed something pretty to put it in. So I headed to IKEA and ended up buying a couple of SLOM jars.
The candy was good (as always), but the jars were AWESOME, and ever since then I've had visions of filling my pantry with DOZENS of them.
Er, so I did. Well, not DOZENS of them, but A dozen, maybe. Hello, they are $3 to $4 a piece! Cheap! I WILL have literal dozens of them eventually.
I didn't like the idea of putting sticky paper labels on them because I wanted to be able to put them in the dishwasher and re-use them for different stuff without dealing with peeling paper and gooey adhesive residue. And I didn't want to go the hanging tag route either, because that seems more appropriate for gifts than for stuff you're going to keep on your pantry shelf and use all the time.
So, I bought some cheap muslin fabric, tore strips of it (so it would fray), and wrote on them with a fabric pen.
Voila! Jar labels! They're just tied around the jars, so they're easy to remove. And if they get gunk slopped on them somehow, I can stick them in a lingerie bag and toss them in the washing machine.
Now I just need to clean out the pantry so I'll have room for all these damn jars.
I hardly slept at all the entire month of December. At first I attributed this to the impending doom of TWENTY-FOUR PEOPLE OMG coming to my house, but even after they were gone I STILL didn't sleep. So then I thought maybe it was just the holidays in general and trying to make a nice Christmas for the kids and making sure we had enough sparkling cider and tortilla chips for New Year's Eve and whatnot.
But then all of THAT was over. STILL. NOT. SLEEPING.
I didn't read much in December, either. Well, I DID, but nothing good. After I finished Joe Hill's fabulous Heart-Shaped Box at the beginning of the month, I sort of meandered aimlessly through an old collection of Christmas-themed short mysteries that I found in a box under my bed (while looking for my copy of Dylan Thomas's A Child's Christmas in Wales, which turned out to be on a shelf in my office WHERE IT BELONGED, oy). And once I'd had just about enough of THAT, I stole the boy's copy of Philip Pullman's Once Upon a Time in the North out of his room and read that. It's the story of how Texas aeronaut Lee Scoresby first met the armored bear Iorek Byrnison (from His Dark Materials, don'tcha know) and it was good but short and shallow and ultimately not altogether satisfying. Not really story-quenching, if you know what I mean.
Well. Now it is JANUARY, I don't know whether you've heard, and I have started reading Markus Zusak's The Book Thief and it is VERY good so far. And long. And absorbing.
Also, I have been rubbing lavender-scented sleep balm on my wrists every single night before fluffing up my pillow just so, curling on my side with my wrists conveniently poised at nose-level, and dropping off like a light.
So. Maybe January will be better, is what I'm saying.
Um, holy crap, y'all. I DID IT. I posted every single day in 2009!
It was an interesting exercise, I'll tell you what. On the upside, I liked the sense of immediacy that came with writing something AND getting feedback on it every single day. I've always been a journaler -- I process my thoughts by writing them down -- and the blog is really just an extension of that but with an audience. I think I was a bit calmer and generally less pissed-off than usual in 2009, and maybe that was because I was venting my brain buildup every single day instead of saving it for semi-weekly posts? Who knows.
On the downside, the fact that I HAD to write something and publish it every day gave a sense of urgency to the proceedings and more often than not I found myself just banging words out to get it done. I didn't post as many photos as I would have liked, and didn't take as much time as I would have liked crafting each post, and that led to a lot of REALLY mediocre blog posts, in my opinion. I was writing every day, but I wasn't writing WELL, and that was a constant source of frustration. Argh.
Well whatever, it's over now! Yay!
I do want to say a HUGE thank you to all of you for hanging in there with me this year. I don't say this often enough: I have the BEST, kindest, and dare I say MOST ATTRACTIVE readers/commenters in all the wide wide world of web, I really do. I don't think I've ever gotten hate mail in the 4.5 years I've been blogging (er ... YET, anyway). ALL of your comments and emails have been absolutely lovely, and you all have been EXTREMELY supportive throughout this entire year and the 3.5 years previous and ... well, you just fucking ROCK. That goes for you too, lurkers! (I can hear you breathing, and your breath is MINTY FRESH!)
That being said, I am NOT doing Blog365 in 2010, as I believe I've mentioned. Hopefully this means the quality will go up SLIGHTLY around here, eh? It's not as if it could get any WORSE, yo.
So! Thanks so much again for hanging out with me this year and for being so swell. Stay safe, have a Happy New Year and I'll see you on the other side!
Gift the girl child received that made her cry: her new cell phone, a red LG enV3 (the boy got a blue one).
Gift the boy child received that made him cry (just a little): the plush Portal weighted companion cube I made him (this was the super-secret handcrafted gift I'd been working on).
Random but completely awesome gifts I scored for DH that were PERFECT for him:
a 1977 copy of a Logan's Run comic book (scored for FOUR BUCKS at the local antique mall)
Most useful gift I received, apart from the phone and coffee mill and gift cards: a collapsible thingie for the cargo area of my badass Hyundai that'll keep my groceries from rolling around all over the place (received from Mom and Dad).
Most unintentionally hilarious gift I received that might actually prove to be useful: a Sandra Lee recipe card collection, chock-full of "Semi-Homemade" recipes (including cocktails!)(received from the SIL who never, ever comes to the family Christmas party and got my name in the exchange this year).
New/old favorite Christmas song that was added to my not-an-iPod for the first time this year: The Jackson Five's version of "Santa Claus is Coming to Town".
Number of Christmas decorations, including outdoor lights, that have been taken down at my house so far: ZERO.
posted by Badger at 4:42 PM
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