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  • Ok but ALSO:
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  • You can’t go home again
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Archives from 2002-2006

November 29, 2006

Okay, I’m ready for Seattle’s cold snap to be over with. Where’s that Pineapple Express, goddammit? It’s far too shivery for my wimpy mild-climate bones. I tried to get in my car this morning to rescue one of Riley’s shoes from the backseat (side rant: I am ready to medically staple a pair of shoes/socks to his feet and remove them only when he’s outgrown them, because arrggh, it doesn’t matter if they involve elastic, velcro, or laces, he can Houdini his way out of anything in .004 seconds, and then he’s waving his BARE ASS FEET around in freezing temperatures like a DAMN FOOL) and it was frozen shut. My car! Was frozen shut! I’ve never experienced that before and it totally flummoxed me. I came inside and told JB that oh my god I need a new car with anti-freezing locks or something because what if there was an emergency and I absolutely had to drive and my car? Was frozen shut? And he got all lofty and Step Aside Lil Lady, A MAN Is Here To Tell You What’s What, and told me to pour hot water on the locks, like duh.

Well pardon me, but I have spent my driving years living in an area known for banana slugs and damp moss, not witch’s-tit thermometer levels. You need some tips on getting smashed banana slug out of the tread of your hiking boots, I’m your go-to gal, but frozen locks are Nature’s way of telling you to stay at home and wear a fluffy robe, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t care if hot water “works” or not, you don’t go fucking with Nature.

JB just called me to let me know that he found a fabric softener sheet in his shirt after he got to work this morning. “I had felt something itchy for a couple hours,” he explained. Heh. The man might be MacGyver, but clearly he’s no match for a Downy Vanilla & Lavender fabric sheet.

Speaking of MacGyver, JB put up some holiday lights on our house yesterday and they look quite nice. I need to haul the tripod outside at night to get a picture, but they’re basically a line of white lights trimming our roof. I like the simple look, although I maintain that this house is the best thing I’ve ever seen, ever (every time I watch that video, I get choked up towards the end from the sheer awesomeness of all those lights and the music and the effort that went into creating the whole display, I’m not even lying) (also, I am a massive dork). Our neighbors have one of those inflatable plastic globes with shit swirling around inside, you know what I mean? They’re full of “snow” and polar bears and whatever? God, I hate those things. If I were just a little bit more of an awful person I would sneak over at night and shoot it with a BB gun, but then I’d get a lump of coal in my stocking.

Doesn’t “lump of coal in my stocking” sound like some kind of filthy – nevermind.

Well, that little train of thought, which I mercifully cut short to spare you all, has led me to Britney Spears. People! Have you seen Britney’s woefully exposed girl parts, caught on film by multiple paparazzi? I mean, not that I’ve…looked at…Britney’s, um…FINE, I have looked at pictures of Britney’s hoochie. It was right there on Perez Hilton, where all the classy celebrity news can be found.

Why forgo the underwear, is what I want to know. I mean, seriously. If you’re going to wear a dress with a hem that ends around the bottom of your ass cheeks, and you’re going to get in and out of cars with approximately ten thousand photographers documenting your every move, then come on. Break out the granny panties. Otherwise your personal Bubble Yum is going to get published all over the internet and comments like this will get posted:

“yo that clam chowder shot you gave the world was crazy it looked like k-fed beat that like it was his trailerpark step son”

Which is officially the only funny comment I’ve seen on Perez Hilton, but if we are only going to get one, at least it’s a blue-ribbon winner.

Enough about Britney’s inexplicable plummet from the comeback-kid pedestal that was so readily offered to her. Back to the weather! (All Vaginas and Weather, All the Time, that’s MY blog motto.)

It’s icy and cold around my house but there’s not much snow on the ground, unlike my mother and aunt’s house in Port Angeles. Check out their neck of the woods:

If my car is going to be Frozen! Shut! there should at least be some pretty wintertime scenery around here, by god. But no, just clumps of slick patches here and there, and a lot of birds who are pissed off because JB made me take the birdfeeder down (stupid rats). The chickadees and junkoes are lining the fence and cocking their little heads at the living room windows, probably planning a mass pecking attack.

By the way, JB’s mom got a video for Riley of various birds flying around, it’s called “Beepers, Tweeters, and Peckers”. Heh. Peckers.

All right, I’m clearly just rambling now, so let’s wrap this up with a picture of a toddler throwing himself on the bed like a total freak:

This boy is going to be Trouble, I just know it. I’m going to find him perched on the roof someday, wearing a cape.

November 27, 2006

It snowed like hell last night and at first I was thinking how awesome it would be if it all froze and this morning I’d call into the office, “Oh, I’m so very sorry, but I couldn’t possibly drive in such dangerous conditions!” and then I’d have the whole day to crank up the heat and pad around the house shlorking up cup after cup of coffee, and then I realized that would probably mean Riley’s daycare would be closed, and if that were the case there would be no coffee, only Zuul Elmo.

Thank god, the streets were clear this morning so I could escape the company of my beloved child and go to work where I can drink coffee whenever I want. Things They Don’t Tell You About Parenthood #23958: snow days are no longer vacation.

I’m glad we didn’t stay in Oregon until Sunday because I think we both would have been paranoid about barreling up I-5 in a snowstorm, even though this is Washington, not Michigan, and what I call “snow” some of you would probably call “practically rain” (followed up by, “you goddamned pussy”).

We had a pretty low-stress journey both ways, which was nice. Leaving in the evening was a good move, because Riley fell asleep after a couple hours, and it also offered the unexpected side benefit of me not recognizing any landmarks in the dark and therefore skipping my usual whining about how we’re only in Centraaaaaaaalia, jesus this is taking forever, god I’m so bored (yes, I admit I am perhaps not the perfect traveling companion; on the plus side I always have to pee, so my presence ensures an exhaustive tour of all highway rest areas, which is great if you’re, say, planning a coffee table book [“Skeevy-Looking Feces-Clogged Toilets on America’s Byways: Portraits and Studies” – look for it this holiday season!]).

I’m happy to be back home, I missed our giant comfy bed and our toilet paper which does not disintegrate when you touch it (seriously, can someone explain the existence of 1-ply? Why on earth would you buy it, and don’t even say cost, because isn’t it worth the extra pennies to have some redundancy when it comes to the task, ahem, at hand?) and our highchair which was manufactured in the last twenty years and therefore actually keeps Riley firmly seated rather than allowing him to crawl right over the back of the fucking thing and you know what, I even missed our yowling cat.

I’m also enjoying the temperature of our house, which I would have previously described as “nipple-hardeningly cold” (HELLO GOOGLERS I AM SORRY TO DISAPPOINT), but JB’s parents have somehow morphed into Infirm and Shivering Elders who leave their thermostat cranked to approximately 96 degrees all day long. I spent the whole visit fanning myself and wishing I’d brought less winter-appropriate sweaters and more sleeveless t-shirts. JB gave them shit about it (“What are you, members of the Senate?”) but in return his dad loftily informed us that he’d been colder ever since he lost twenty pounds, so we were forced to shut up and suffer in (fat) silence.

Well, it is doing something outside right now, snowing or sleeting or slushing or something (my coworker told me it’s sleet because the ice particles are conical, he even had an example that he’d collected on a leaf – do any of you work with engineers? Isn’t it an ongoing strange mixture of annoying/charming?), so maybe I’ll get a partial snow afternoon after all. The vacation part can be my drive home.

(Also, because I CANNOT STOP with the parentheticals today: does “partial snow afternoon” sound like some kind of filthy sex term, or is it just me? Partial Snow Afternoon: when the man snausages partially on the girl’s hair, partially on her shoulder.)

(“Snausage” being used in place of a potentially offensive term, of course. I wouldn’t want to gross you out or anything.)

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