Not a bad day

Today it reached 54 degrees outside, so I put Tommy in his rubber boots and let him jump in puddles in the driveway while Danny napped.  Then Ryan got home from school and let me take a shower, and I made mac and cheese for supper. Tom and I are fighting but he's not home tonight so I can pretend we're not. All in all, not a bad day.  I can handle a not a bad day every once in a while.

I like butterflies, he likes bones

Tom and I, trying to decide what to have for dinner.

Me: Well I know I'm making brussel sprouts.
Tom: Would you like pork chops or steak with them.
Me: Steak. I just, I don't like your pork chops. I don't understand them. You can either buy a butterfly pork chop, a full slab of meat, or you can buy one with a bone and connective tissue in the middle of it. Why would you get that kind?
Tom: Price. When you buy the butterfly chop, you're paying around $3.50 a pound.  When you get the regular pork chops you only pay $2.50 a pound.
Me: But you're paying for the bone!  And steak is my other option? Is steak cheaper than butterfly pork chops?
Tom: Well, no.
Me: Then I guess you just lost the "We can't afford butterfly pork chops" argument.

It would be creepy because I'd sign the card, "Grandma"

It's probably a good thing that I'm as broke as I am. I'm too spontaneous and weirdly generous and if I could afford shipping, I'd be mailing anonymous and ridiculous things all over the country.  Last year (2010) we had snow at Xmas and I had a friend in Colorado Springs who was facebooking about how much she missed snow and I spent days trying to figure out if I could afford to mail a freezer bag of snow to Colorado. As it turned out, dry ice is really expensive!  And every once in a while I'll find something that reminds me of my dead grandmother, usually some horrid and cheap hard candy, and wonder for a moment if I should mail some to my cousin. I have one cousin who had that perfect combination of A) living an hour's drive away from Grandma, B) being raised by her borderline Oedipal father to worship Grandma, and C) a selective memory able to completely erase the racism, weight comments, constant criticism, and just plain awfulness of Grandma.  And she will post comments on facebook every once in a while about how much she misses Grandma, which only proves that she has absolutely no accurate memories of the woman, but still if I had the money to do it I would totally order those cheap blue-tinned butter cookies and have them shipped to her.
When your grandmother calls you a whore for having a boyfriend at age 15, on the street, at the top of her lungs, it forms your opinion. Plus, she called every grandkid who wasn't rail thin fat, and told the thin ones they were going to starve to death, and once told my cousin not to sit on chairs anymore because he was going to break all the furniture by being fat.  Seriously, she babysat for a weekend once and had him sitting on the floor the whole time.

Bored and frustrated

I have finished Ryan's quilt top. It is a horrible example of how bad I am at math. My measurements were so off that what was supposed to come out twin- sized is a baby blanket, so I had to add borders to it to make it bigger (I had bought pre-cut packages of fabric so I couldn't just make more quilt).  I would like to sandwich the thing and get going on the quilting, but I only have beige quilting thread so I need to buy some in a more appropriate color. I know what I want, but the closest fabric store is an hour away and I can't go there just to buy 2 spools of thread.  I called the little quilt shop in town and they don't have it.  Ugh.  So why bother laying out the quilt back, blanket, and quilt top and pinning it all together when I can't do anything after that anyway?  So I am frustrated and eager to get going on this. Ugh.

Bootstrap Bill Turner

Tommy walks up to me with a Ken  doll.
"See dis man? He's has bugs in his eyes. And snakes in his tongue. And dey come out his dummack and he's not alive."
I'm horrified and I wonder what on Earth could have given him such violent images. "He's not alive? Why not?"
"He a pirate and he's stuck in the boat in the basement of the boat and he can't leave and he's not alive."
And that was when I decided not to let Tommy watch any more Pirates of The Caribbean movies. Ever.

Toothless Beyonce

All the single lizards! All the single lizards!
If you liked it then you should've put a worm on it!

It's finally done!

My quilt is finally finished. Sorry if you were expecting something with some intricate pattern but I just did triangles. I hand-quilted it, though. If you look at the middle picture close enough you can see that I went all Harry Potter geek on it and made it the Deathly Hallows sign. The last picture shows some of the more detailed quilting. Otherwise I mainly just did loopy little meandering lines all over it.  I like the quilt, Tommy claims it as his own, and I can't wait to start the next one, whatever it may be.

Connie-Monster! Grrrr!

I hope I never forget that Tommy calls Baragon from the Godzilla movie "Giant Monsters All Out Attack" Connie-Monster, even though as far as I can tell, no one in the movie calls it or anyone else Connie. He just looked at this red, bat-eared, mutant stegosaurus and thought, "He looks like a Connie."

A late-night pondering

Kurt Cobain. John Lennon. Hendrix.  Joplin.  Jim Morrison. 

I saw a documentary on Lemmy a couple months ago. The man still lives in a little apartment on the Sunset Strip, and hangs out at a local bar playing video poker.  Fame hasn't changed him (although it did apparently take him out of England).  He hasn't gotten any face lifts or put his face on video games. He;s the same guy he was when he started Motorhead.  I can't help but compare Lemmy, in my mind, to Gene Simmons, the great capitalist willing to sell out for any product placement as long as it gives him a profit, and Steven Tyler now judging reality shows.

If Cobain, Lennon, Hendrix, Joplin, and Morrison had lived, I wonder if they'd be Lemmys or if they'd go the other way, capitalizing on their youth.  Or worse, would they be Elvis, slaves to vice and indulgence, fat and sweaty on a Vegas stage trying to relive the glory days? Where does success stop, become enough, or where does it get replaced with greed and aimless ambition?

I feel bad for you, and also unqualified to fix you

I guess this is bad to say, but I'm going to come right out and say it. Depression is . . . depressing. I know many people who are depressed; I battle with it myself; and I've had friends commit suicide.  I do not think that depression is a mood, or something one can just snap out of, or anything to take lightly.  That said, some folks are just way too into it.  They get all emo on facebook all the time, they cling to depression awareness as an identity, and they're just real bummers to be around.  I mean, we all post our down moments, and like I said, I do have depression issues myself.  But when it gets to the point where every single status update is some variation of "Having a horrible day, just want to die, not that anyone cares" or "Sometimes it's the one who holds everyone else up who really needs the support" you just want to sigh and click unfriend.  And I'm talking about years of this.  Depression is not something that a person can just snap out of, or "choose happiness" or whatever BS platitude anyone read on a tshirt.  But it is something you can choose to fight rather than give in to.  And it, like a drunken revelation, is something you can choose not to status update about.  I love my friends, but there comes a point where I can't fish them out of their pit of despair over and over and over and over and over again. They need medication and professional help, not to be fishing for compliments online.  And to be quite honest, while I am happy to be there when they need someone to talk to, it's a huge buzzkill to check facebook and be worried the rest of the day that your friend will kill herself, especially when it happens multiple times a week.

Maybe, but maybe not either

So I have this friend, and she told me today that if I just found a few craft fairs in the area, and sold my craft things there, then I could take time for myself and not feel guilty for it because it would be for work.  Now, I don't consider myself to be "crafty".  I can't make a wreath out of coffee filters and toilet paper tubes.  I can't decoupage a dresser to look like Dr Who's police box. I'm not Martha Stewart.  But I do sew, and I crochet, and I like doing it and often end up with a ton of crap and nothing to do with it.  Maybe I could sell it.  But I don't want to be the person who buys booth space for $20, brings in a bunch of stuff, and then sells only one or two pieces and makes, after the cost of materials, only half the cost of the booth.  But if I were going to make things, I do have ideas in my head.  I want to make something based vaguely on the ugly fringe bracelet on Project Accessory.  And I think I could turn my back pockets into little ID and phone pouches and maybe rig up some way for them to hook to belt hoops.  I think if I had the materials and the time, I could make decent stuff.  But I'm not sure if people would pay money for any of it.  I do purses pretty well

This year Ryan is very interested in Legos.  We got her a couple Lego things for Christmas, a Harry Potter kit and then just a big box of like 1500 pieces, but I wanted her tree ornament to be Lego too.  The problem is, if you start to look around, all the Lego ornaments kind of suck.  Either they're kits to make a Santa or a tree out of legos, or you can make a ball ornament out of legos, but those would be too heavy, and probably fall apart in storage.  So I made my own, which she seemed very pleased with.  First I found someone on ebay selling the 1x1 bricks in bags of 500 and ordered them in orange, because it was either that or blue.  Then I bought 2 (in case I screwed up one) clear plastic ball ornaments at Michael's. Then I sat down with my hot glue gun.  I did learn that it's hard to keep the line straight when freehand gluing legos to an orb, and also that the melting point of hot glue is very close to the melting point of clear plastic ornaments, so if you push them or move them too much you're likely to push a corner right through to the inside of the ball.  But in the end, I think I came up with something good, and not too heavy either.  I give you, Ryan's 2011 Xmas ornament!  I don't know why the color came out so yellowy. It's more true in the picture where I'm holding it.

Basically all I wanted was a porcupine ball made out of legos, and quite frankly I was shocked that there wasn't one you could just buy somewhere, but I think it turned out okay.

Xnax vs pot, the grudge match

I have some hippie friends.  I don't know, maybe hippy's the wrong word.  I have some patchoulli granola friends.  Some of them smoke pot, some don't, and one in particular who does smoke pot isn't hippy or granola at all and is in fact a total yuppy.  I, however, am anti-marijuana.  I don't like it, don't want to do it, don't want to be around people while they do it, don't want to smell it, and sure as Hell don't want it around my kids.  And I take Xanax almost daily, for the same reason most people smoke pot.*
It has been pointed out to me, that some people view this as a hypocrisy.  I've had the word "pharmaceutical" spit at me with a hatred I'd never really heard before.  As in, "Oh, so you'd rather take Xanax than smoke pot. Pot is natural and Xanax is a pharmaceutical, yet you trust it more."   Yep.  Arsenic is natural, too, and I don't want that either.   But for what it's worth, I do happen to trust medications that have been subjected to rigorous testing and double blind peer reviewed studies more than some potted plant from Joe Bob's double wide.  And I really trust that if I'm pulled over and the cops find a pill bottle with my name on it in my purse that it will adversely affect my family and me far less than if they found a baggie of dope.  And of course, I can swallow a pill while holding my son without him getting any sort of intoxication from it, Xanax is much less harsh on my lungs, and it won't cost me a job should I be spot-tested.  But also, I know a lot of people who live their lives like characters from Dazed And Confused, and they don't act that way from Xanax.  They have no motivation, no ambition, and are perfectly happy to just sit on the couch playing video games and eating Fritos all day.  These are people in their 30s and 40s, people with jobs and families, just floating through life contributing nothing and getting high.  Not that I'm the most productive member of society, and not that Xanax doesn't have its fair share of addicts, but I've known more potheads than I have Xanax addicts so I'll take my chances with my legally prescribed pharmaceutical.  And before anyone tries to tell me that marijuana isn't addictive, I'm going to step up and say that I think it is.  I think it's like cigarettes in that for a long time people insisted they weren't addictive either, and like alcohol in that some folks, the majority of folks, can indulge recreationally and be fine but some just get hooked and need it every day to get by.  Yes I think pot is addictive, and yes I think it's worse than Xanax, and yes I can consider myself to be a far-left liberal and still be anti-pot.  I'm anti-ketchup too, and it doesn't affect my politics.  I just don't try to legislate around my own personal preferences.



*I'm not counting cancer patients or AIDS patients or whatever, just people who get high to relax or unwind when they're wound too tightly.

I have the most boring case of multiple personality ever

Deep down I want to be  Sikowitz from VicTorious. Or Spencer from iCarly. Or Phoebe from Friends.  Or  that weird guy from Taxi who became Doc Brown in Back To The Future.  I want to be the funny one who sees things differently from everyone else, a creative person, artistic.  But there is a very, very large portion of my reality that is Bev from Roseanne, and maybe on a good day, when I'm particularly funny, Sophia from Golden Girls.  I'm a fuddy duddy who dreams of being a freak.  It's an inner conflict I fight all the time.  I always see cute little floral wallets and think, "I should buy that to replace my old worn out wallet."  But my old wallet is punk, with nautical stars and crowns and handcuffs all over it.  My mid-thirties is like a second puberty, in reverse, and I have to find myself all over again.  It kinda sucks, in a way.

I feel so bubonic

Ryan was sick on Wednesday with some 24 hour thing, and better by Thursday. Danny puked all over his bed last night and will be better tomorrow. Now I'm having issues too.  So if anyone out there ever sees pictures from my Xmas and wonders why I'm wearing a plague mask- that's why.  Now if you'll excuse me, I need to write plague mask on one all of Tom's paint-fume masks while he isn't looking.

Even though I aced the interview...

I wasn't promoted. It was a pharmaceutical error. I traded in my pentagons and got my ovals back. No pay-raise is forthcoming.  And, despite having already taken 3 or 4 of the pentagon pills, I still received the full prescription of correct non-XR pills. Because I am that awesome! Yay for free xanax.

Mommy number 2

ME: Danny, what are you eating? Oh, just a crayon? Well, bon appetite.
TOMMY: No. Mommy, Danny not eat crayon. It not nummy, Mommy. It not food.

He's a much better mother than I am sometimes.

Happy Hanukkah!

Tonight, for the fist day of Hanukkah, I made latkes.  Ryan told me she looks forward to this all year, which made me all warm & fuzzy.  Since latkes do not a meal make, I made mac and cheese too but I made it from scratch, with roux and grated cheddar, just to try a new recipe.  Still a little grainy but so yummy!  Even Tom ate latkes and he's always told me he didn't care for them.  Tommy of course at nothing and yelled "I want circle crackers!" at the top of his lungs because he's decided to live off of Ritz crackers for the rest of his life.  He got no circle crackers, poor kid.
I love when I actually cook something people like.  It's so rare.

So it's like a promotion, right?

I refilled my Xanax yesterday and Tom ran up to the pharmacy to pick them up for me. My pills have always been little ovals scored down the middle for easy breaking should I only need half but this time they were pentagons with no such score. In fact, they bubble out in the middle which would make breaking them impossible without a pill splitter.  So I googled and found out that I now have extended release Xanax instead of regular Xanax, but in the same dosage. But I don't know why my prescription got changed.  I am choosing to take it as a good sign, as a progression. I've been bumped up, like a promotion at a job. I expect a raise in pay to come any day now.

Merry Christmas, with Rum!

I have, on my mother's side, eight first cousins. Of those eight, two are genuinely nice to me.  Last year I mentioned on facebook my (then) newfound love of rum balls and one of my genuinely nice cousins posted a quick "Feel free to bring me by a batch. lol"  And so I did. This year I am making him some as well.  The thing is his sister, the second genuinely nice cousin, is a recovering alcoholic so she can't have any. In fact, I don't know if there will be any alcohol at all at my extended family's Christmas festivities this year and I don't want to be responsible for some showing up. (I never attend the festivities because of the 1-4 ratio of genuinely nice to me people there so I have no idea what's there or not.)  So now I have to smuggle rum balls to my cousin.  This has become so much more complicated than I thought it would be.