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  • Aging is for the weak, and everyone else
  • More short cuts
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  • What’s the opposite of green juice and deep breathing
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  • The Change
  • 18
  • Ok but ALSO:
  • Midlife POV
  • Influence and Dooce
  • Horse therapy
  • You can’t go home again
  • Obsolescence
  • Before and after
  • A cringe confession on friendship

Archives from 2002-2006

August 21, 2007

I think the best thing about exposing my young son to the flickering, brain-rotting glow of television is the fact that he will often curl into my arms and lay on me like a warm puppy while Blue’s Clues is on, and since he’s distracted and comfy I can basically maul him all I want: snorfling around in his hair, feeling his dimply elbows, and counting each smelly little toddler-toe by feel. Oh, I know, you totally thought I was going to say my favorite part was the stand-in parenting aspect, where I can park him in front of the tube and run off to surf the web! Well that’s the second best thing.

I know I already updated this thing today, and two blog posts in one day is probably enough to make you wonder if the author is perhaps in need of an intervention, or at least a to-do list of productive activities such as tackling the giant mound of laundry lurking in the utility room, but although it may not be obvious right now, I am being productive: I am totally avoiding a freelance project that requires the use of far too many exclamation points for my comfort. It’s so! Relentlessly! Perky! that I had to escape, typing-wise, to this little oasis where I can use words like dicktowel and assbiscuit (random: TextEdit suggests ass-biscuit instead) all I want.

Plus, JB’s out of town and the boy is asleep and I’m bored. Hey, guess what I had for dinner tonight? A bowl of microwaved mashed potatoes, Deli Rye Triscuits, and swiss cheese slices. My nutrition has officially left the building.

I talked with JB earlier and he told me that during his United flight (he’s in the Chicago area for a few days) they offered a meal service, but you had to pay for it. It sounds as though they basically fed him an adult-sized Lunchables for about eight bucks.

Man, air travel is just sucking more and more these days, isn’t it? We’re planning a mini adults-only vacation in October and at first I was thinking tropical sandy beaches, until it occurred to me that any potential tropical sandy beaches would require getting on a plane, and oh man fuck that. The lines, the delays, the inability to pack a useful amount of hair conditioner without having a bored security worker confiscate the bottle, the relentless discomfort and crappiness of it all, fooey. We’re doing a road trip instead, to Tofino, where the beaches might not be tropical but they sure look pretty.

Topic change! I love this idea of Swistle’s, because I don’t believe she’s ever shared any photos of herself and I imagine it’s utterly fascinating to read what people are guessing. I can’t rip off her entry completely, because you guys already know what I look like (about yea high, currently sort of bulgy-shaped), but in a somewhat related vein I thought a Q&A might be at least marginally fun.

If you want to play, ask me one question—as nosy as you like, although I reserve the right to be squirrelly about answering if I think it’s a bad idea (examples would include: “Linda, have you ever spent, like, a whole afternoon flaking off work and surfing kitchen nook furniture suggested by your uber-cool readers?” because I HAVE NO OFFICIAL STATEMENT AT THIS TIME)—in the comments, and I’ll post my answers in the next day or so.

Yes, this game is probably more fun for me than it is for you. What can I say, I’m a giver.

** Updated: you guys asked so many interesting questions, and I think I’m really going to enjoy answering them. I’m closing comments now, just so the number of questions remains doable. Thanks, guys! **

August 21, 2007

I am experiencing seasonal disconnect lately. The calendar says it’s August, but surely it must lie—how else to explain the absence of sunshine, the wet stuff falling from the sky, the horrifying expanse outside my house where the torn-up yard and dirt from the remodel have combined with the crappy weather to create a massive muddy Bog capable of swallowing household pets, sports-utility vehicles, and at least five or six species of plant-eating dinosaurs?

At first I made a valiant attempt to keep the mud-tracking to a minimum in our house, but I guess it doesn’t really matter how many filth trails we create right now, because we have officially entered the most chaotic stage of the remodel. The kitchen is completely torn out—the fridge is in the living room (where its annoying little mechanical blurps and “errrrr” sounds, probably its drawn-out death moans, are disturbingly loud when we’re sitting on the nearby couches, and in fact nearly caused me to fearfully whizz my Old Navy sweats during a particularly harrowing scene in The Blair Witch Project the other night), the stove and dishwasher are stashed in the garage to be dealt with at a later date, and the sink is gone. The floor is being ripped up this week, revealing That Which Lurks Below Linoleum (my . . . my god, people), and every single surface in our house is covered with a fine layer of construction-related schmutz.

On the plus side, our inability to cook anything outside of the microwave has given me lots of excuses to insist on various craving-related takeout meals. Last night it was Carl’s Jr. chicken strips and curly fries. Sure, they say you should only gain 25-35 pounds in pregnancy, but I figure those numbers are for low performers.

I do have a remodel-related design challenge that maybe you guys can help me with: we’re going to have a small breakfast nook area just off the kitchen, and we’re going back and forth on whether to put in a built-in booth or not. I’ve been scouring the web trying to find a really great-looking booth (either to purchase readymade or to instruct our builders to copy) that will go with the modern-style kitchen we’re theoretically eventually maybe someday in the distant future going to have, but most of what I’ve seen has either a traditional/country feel, or it’s a puffy vinyl restaurant type thing. Any ideas are more than welcome, we can always just put in a small table and chairs but the booth seems like a better use of space.

Well, a better use of space once I’m no longer pregnant, that is. I guess booths aren’t a great option during those last several weeks, otherwise known as the Whale Shark Stage.

Lastly, a heartwarming family image (unless you don’t like dogs) (um, or children) (in which case I’m sorry I couldn’t lure Cat into the photo, but it would have been Extremely Problematic and also possibly Quite Painful for the parties involved):

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