Stumbling Towards Perfect

I have really bad allergies. Now. I never used to. I used to just see people with really bad allergies and I'd think that is so gross; why are they always sniffling? Why do they always look glassy eyed and high? Why are they always clucking in the back of their throat? They keep saying their throat itches -- I bet they're on drugs. They've got to be on drugs! Druggie! Believe it or not, I've never used drugs - smoked pot, hit the hippie lettuce, smoked a spliff, cued the cannibis - I just assumed that if you did that sort of thing your throat would itch. I didn't know that pollen in the air could create that kind of havoc. See, I judged those people. I saw those allergy-ridden icky people gasping for breath in-between sneezing fits thought not-so-nice things and God saw me and said, "Now, that's not nice to judge people. I think you need to learn compassion. Therefore, after the birth of your second child, I shall deliver to you allergies." And ju...

The Bean was made for Halloween. That in and of itself made it an awesome holiday. I knew I hit character paydirt when she wanted to be a monk. She was two. Another year she was spaghetti and meatballs. Then she was a super feathery chicken. With orange skinny legs. All her costumes were handmade. All her costumes were awesome. Now she's fifteen and the only costumes she looks at have the descriptive label "sexy" in front of them. Sexy nurse. Sexy firefighter. Sexy cop. There is no sexy chicken. There is no sexy spaghetti and meatballs. You'd think I could now live vicariously through Dotter - but she wants absolutely nothing to do with Trick or Treating. She hates strangers. She hates strange strangers even more and there's nothing worse than a stranger dressed as a zombie scaring the pants off little kids and rewarding them with a tootsie roll. She doesn't want to trick or treat and she doesn't want to hand out candy. Although she does want to dress ...

Do you know who Maura Kelly is? You will. Go read this article she wrote for Marie Claire: Should "Fatties" Get a Room? (Even on TV?) Go ahead. I'll wait. I'll wait for you to read it, and then I'll wait for you to call all your friends and exclaim you have just experienced the most ridiculous attitude towards overweight people ever. And I'll wait while you update your twitter account with Maura Kelly really IS a size-ist jerk . Maura Kelly writes, " So anyway, yes, I think I'd be grossed out if I had to watch two characters with rolls and rolls of fat kissing each other ... because I'd be grossed out if I had to watch them doing anything ." Ouch. Actually, beyond ouch. I think I'm just dumbfounded. I mean, she gets paid, right? Marie Claire pays her to write. She writes articles and has to update her blog and they actually hand her a paycheck to write whatever she wants. Even if it is incredibly insensitive and hurtful. And...

You know what's gross? Opening your fridge and finding this: No, I'm not talking about the cartoony, sponge-printed green and white moose dishes (although they are listed first on my Things to Replace List). Look closer..... THAT'S gross.

Remember when I told you we had to keep my awesome health insurance because the Bean might have something medically wrong with her that explains why she can't wipe the gobs of toothpaste out of the bathroom sink? Well, we might also need it for Cletus the Used to be Fetus because he might have short term memory loss. This kid is like 50 First Dates  except we can't get through sixteen seconds. I absolutely love Cletus - and I mean love in the sense I want to pick him up and hug him and squeeze him and eat his cheeks and never let him go because I can't get enough of this kid. I absolutely love him because he is the happiest baby on the planet. I thought my sister's youngest was, and he was, but now he scowls (which is frickin adorable, too, but you can't really call a scowly baby happy, you know? Even if he only scowls once in a while. It's a technicality.). Anyway, I prayed and hoped for a super happy baby and that is exactly what I got. He laughs these grea...

I hope I can keep my job forever because I think we're really going to need the health insurance coverage because the Bean may have some severe neurological problems. I think she's suffering from some sort of awful hand-eye coordination issues because she can't seem to get the right amount of toothpaste to squeeze out of the tube. See, every morning, before she heads off to school she brushes her teeth, because as a high schooler you know there's nothing more important than fresh breath. Well, at least to a teen age girl. I've been told that if you have a teen age boy fresh breath is not necessarily their top priority. Usually it's girls and football, with football taking the lead. Anyway, I know there must be a serious problem because nobody can be so disgusting as to leave globs of toothpaste in the sink every. blasted. morning. Like this: Gross, right? That's because it is. And yes, it's there every. blasted. morning . Not in the same spot, and so...

When the Census push was going on earlier this year the government hired some guy to come sit in the lobby of our building to help people who had questions on their census forms. I thought it was a ridiculous waste of money because (1) most the people around here are not full time residents, therefore were sent the form to their permanent address located somewhere far away from here where I'm sure they obediently filled it out and, (2) there were only ten questions. A couple people were sent the "long form" but that was because their life sucked and the government obviously hated them and screw the government, they don't need to know anything about the people who live here. Ever. (Not necessarily my thoughts, but heard nonetheless.) (Isn't that a great word: nonetheless ? I love it and vow to use it much more frequently. "I realize you don't want to take a bath, nonetheless, I am your mother and I told you so." I can so make that work.) Anyway, Gov...

When I was growing up, my mother made a point of doing nothing on Sundays. It was the Lord's Day, meant for reflection and thanks and peace. We went to church. We stopped by Grandma & Grandpa's for lunch. Then we went home. And did nothing. And I mean N-O-T-H-I-N-G. My mom would watch television (usually a British comedy on PBS) and knit, or crochet, or maybe take up some embroidery. My dad would doze off in his chair. And we kids would be bored to tears. There's nothing to do .... we'd whine. It's so boring! I never understood then why my mom did nothing on Sundays. Now I know. She'd bore herself to tears so that she'd want to go to work on Monday. She'd ensure absolute boredom in order to trigger an excitement to  look forward to work the next day. My mom did nothing fun on weekends except clean on Saturdays (and I doubt you would define cleaning as fun). Then she'd do nothing on Sunday except be forced to listen to four kids comp...

I may have mentioned that I have never tried Nutella. After which 417 of my closest facebook friends posted I was missing out on the best food invention the world has ever created. Essentially, they said, Nutella can be used anywhere on anything at anytime. In fact, it was so delicious that I could just grab a heaping spoonful and eat it as is. But I'm not buying it. And here's why.... Nutella, meet Vegemite. They are eerily similar in color and consistency. They both get spread on toast. I've tasted Vegemite before... and I refuse to be suckered into letting anything that remotely resembles that yeasty spread touch my tastebuds ever again.

"I want to complain about my neighbor. He's building a fence out of trees." Trees? "Yes. He's just going around his yard randomly chopping down trees - and parts of trees - and he's creating a fence barrier between his property and mine. He's pulling up tree roots and all sorts of things and just creating this big pile - this, this - well, it's ugly. And he's putting up horrible, nasty signs - signs that say things like private property and keep out and I know they're meant for me because you can't see them from the road, only I can see them from my back yard. He also has a camera trained on me. I think that's an invasion of privacy. Can he have a camera directed at my back yard? You know, he lost a lawsuit to me a couple years ago and now he's just gone mad." Yet another reason why I insist on buying 100 acres of land and putting my house smack dab in the middle.

My mom ran over our cat with her truck. This happened a long time ago when we were little. She was backing up and ran over our big, fat cat, Carmel. I ran over a squirrel once and can only imagine the feeling beneath the floor of the vehicle. Gross . To be fair my mom didn't do it on purpose - it was an accident. It just happened. We lived with lots of animals always under foot. Or under vehicle tires. So it was possible, and also probable, that running over a cat would potentially, someday, more than likely, actually happen. I suppose the miners in Chile weren't exactly stunned at the collapse. They knew it might, probably, someday happen. Maybe not to them, but still. Our cat limped off, crooked, bleeding, screaming into the pasture, out to the field and into the unknown. Days passed. We tried to convince ourselves maybe it wasn't that bad. We went out to look for her but found nothing. We told ourselves if we just kept looking we would find her and then we could help...

I took the Bean to the doctor today because she found a bump and wanted me to touch it but there was no way I was doing that because (1) I had no idea if that thing was contagious and (2) that's just gross. She's at that awkward age where she's kind of too old for me to go in the exam room with her, but also too young to be trusted to sit in there by herself, because snooping through all the drawers and cabinets and taking cell phone photos of herself with tongue depressors in her nose is just far too tempting. So we waited together in the same exam room trying to be all hey, this is just like hanging out at Starbucks together. Except not all of us is fully dressed. I figured it was as good as time as any to ask what the disgusting pile of gunk was she left in the bathroom sink this morning before school. She has a habit of squeezing far too much toothpaste on her toothbrush and leaves a giant wad of paste in the sink every. blasted. day. But today,...

From time to time someone will run up to me all wide-eyed after reading a blog post and blurt out something along the lines of aren't you afraid Big V will kill you if he ever finds out you write all about him in your blog ? To which I usually respond by looking at them with my eyes all squinty and my forehead all wrinkly wondering what the hell kind of relationship they have with their spouse that they think it's normal to hide something of this magnitude from their spouse. I admit I hid the occasional bag of M&Ms (which he always seems to find) but, um, yeah, I'm making a permanent record. That's public. On the world wide web. Of course he knows I have this, write on, and pimp out parts of our relationship for the sake of a laugh, or the sake of my sanity. One of my favorite things to do in the whole world is run up, grab him by the arm and lead him to the closest chair, you have got to hear what I wrote today ! Nine times out of ten he laughs, shakes his head, an...

Last night Dotter went to play with her cousin, A, which is my brother's daughter. She lives about an hour away so we're at the mercy of her visitation schedule. When she's here it's a pretty big deal. She's a spunky little ten-year old who is smart, quick witted and very imaginative . She studies hard and loves school. And she likes to write. That makes her super cool in my book. The irony that she may be the smartest grandchild born to the least intelligent of us siblings is not lost on me. But what my brother lacks in    intelligence  he makes up for in psychological mischievousness. I'm picking up Dotter after their play date and giving my brother a hard time because he hurt his foot wrestling one of his friends on a trampoline and now he's all hopped up on vicodin and trying to maneuver on crutches. "You need to tell your Dad he's too old to wrestle around like that," I tease A. " Old ?" He says, "You're older t...

I'm out of shape and incredibly lazy. Bassett hounds get me. All this talk about people needing to take 10,000 steps a day to be considered "active" exhausts me. Ten thousand steps. That's a lot of steps, people. My extensive research shows I don't even come close to 10,000 steps. Unfortunately, I barely break one thousand. (Thank you, sedentary desk job.) That being said, I've also discovered it takes me 67 steps to get to the bathroom from my desk, with an additional 7 steps to reach the toilet. (This includes one pivot turn required to turn on the light and shut the door.) It takes roughly 74 steps to get back to my desk. That's a grand total of 148 steps just to pee! I will now up my daily bathroom visits to 68 per day to reach (and exceed by 64) my total goal of 10,000 steps per day.

My daughter drove a nail through her nostril. On purpose. I arrived home late after a meeting and, like the loving mother I am, checked in on my precious fifteen year old daughter. I opened her bedroom door and the light from the hall fell across her angelic, sleeping face. Oh, look , I giggled to myself. She's using one of those  Bioré® pore strips .  Except, well, it didn't look anything like the pore strips of my youth, so I flipped on the light switch. That's when 65 watts of lighting exposed the medical gauze taped across her nose. Was she kicked in the face by a cow again?  That's how she broke her nose the last time.  I bent down, straining to see if there was any indication of black and blue bruising under her eyes, silently cursing out Big V in my head because what kind of man doesn't call the mother when her baby gets beamed in the head by a hoof? But there was no bruising that I could see. So I moved closer. A mere inch separat...

Big V was in the hospital for three days. Two nights. Three days. His leg almost fell off. And he didn't call anyone. In fact, he announced (quite sternly, I might add) that "I'm going to call one person and one person only - and that's my boss to tell him I won't be in tomorrow; I won't have any visitors." Then he warned me that he would not under any circumstances tolerate any facebooking, twittering or blogging about his adventures. Wha-?! But I live for this stuff! Especially when the nurse blew out his vein he went, "woah... hold on... now I'm dizzy..." I started snapping pictures - but then he threatened to call security if I continued. He was serious, too. That's one major difference between Big V and me. I would be mass texting while the nurse was playing with my veins. When I was in labor with Cletus the Used to be Fetus I instructed the nurse to feel free to jot down anything blogworthy. As they were rushing me to the operatin...

It's been a while since I've posted. That's because I've been nursing a patient and his bum leg. Big V took a turn for the worse and landed himself in the hospital for 3 days. They sure do take bright red, swollen legs seriously. I think I'd make a great nurse if I only had to deal with the male patients. See, to me he was complaining and whimpering about how this hurt and how that hurt and how his foot was all tingly and losing feeling - but to the nurses he was all chipper and fun loving, exercising stereotypical machismo: " I feel happy! I feel fine! I wanna take a walk! " He was the easiest patient on the floor because nothing was ever wrong with him. The nurses would smile, pat him lovingly on the arm and walk out the door. Then he'd turn to me moaning about how it would be easier if they would just amputate the damn leg already. You can clearly see how easy the nurse's job was as compared to mine. I bet if he had lied to me about the state ...