I’m too dependent on praise. I want someone to pat me on the head and say “Good girl!” I want to feel that people like me and that they think I’m doing a good job. [Read More at Parenting]
Save Me From Myself
SUN!!!
Thank you all for your comfort, ideas and cyber hugs yesterday. It’s amazing what good a little time, sleep, perspective and chocolate chip cookie dough will do. I got a recommendation from my doctor for another naturopath she trusts and I’ll just cross my fingers, prepare to delve into the details of my personal and medical history and try again.
I’m worried about Laylee’s hearing, even more so because in the past couple of months she’s become obsessed with sign language. I thought it was really cute until yesterday when the initial hearing tests showed a problem. My mind is prone to spiral out of control with “what ifs”.
What if she loves sign language so much because she’s in the beginning stages of a profound degenerative hearing loss?
I loved sign language as a teenager and always had a feeling it was because I’d someday have a deaf child? What if Laylee’s becoming that child?
What if I never lose the baby weight from Magoo?
What if American Idol ends up in a tie between the two Davids?
I could go on like this forever. I am truly much more calm today and much more in touch with reality. It just seems like the more things that go wrong, the more things seem wrong and you start to notice problems where they don’t exist.
But truly this bad weather does exist. It has existed for far too long, even for Seattle. I’m starting to think that this global warming stuff is all a lie and that living more green is plunging my family into the depths of eternal drizzleish winter.
I’m seriously tempted to turn on every light and appliance in the house, go through the McDonald’s drivethrough in a Hummer, kill a few slugs and spiders with acid, slather my arms with paraben-full lotion, hire a few slave children to help me flush a couple hundred rolls of bleached toilet paper made from ancient Amazon rainforests down my high flow toilet, feed chili beans to some cows and dump a chemistry set over the fields of my nearest organic hemp farm.
If green stops the warming, then I’m gonna live black or red or whatever’s the opposite of green for a while. OH SUN, WHERE ART THOU!!???
**Megan, Jenny, All Adither, Isabel, and Renae have all promised me sun tomorrow. If it rains, I’m burning their blogs to the ground and dancing amidst the flames.**
Are you?
Not Even Recycled
I have sad news friends. After less than 7 years of marriage I have parted ways with my wedding bands.
I came home from my trip and found that my purse was absolutely crammed with dirt, crumbs and mysterious chunks of mystery. I removed all the non-trash items and shook the bag vigorously over the trash can to remove the rest of the grime.
Then this Friday I realized my fingers had un-swole after returning to the Pacific North West. For some reason the always swell up like melons when we go visit family in Utah. So I went to get my wedding bands out of the zipper compartment of my purse and found it unzipped and empty.
Suddenly I remembered that over a week ago I had dumped all the “trash” out into the garbage can. I’m 99% sure the rings went with it. So off they go to a landfill somewhere. Two more pieces of metal that will never be recycled.
I’m sick about the loss but Dan says, “Everyone makes mistakes.” Marrying him was not one of them.
Insomnia
I’m up in the middle of the night rearranging furniture so I figure I might as well pause and write a post about it. The interweb needs to know these things.
I was laying in bed listening to Dan breath and wondering how he can sleep so peacefully when my cookbooks have no home to speak of. I shift them from cupboard to cupboard forever dreaming that they will someday have a place to call home, a place in the sun, far from the madding cupboards.
Recently, I’ve come to the conclusion that I can live in this house forever and would kind of like to live in this house forever though it’s not as big as I always thought I needed. It’s big enough and I’d like to live a simple enough life that I could find a way to keep all my junk in the space I have or get rid of it. Oh, do I have a lot of junk. And I feel like I’m always getting rid of stuff.
So I shift things from room to room.
Tonight I borrowed a bookshelf from the office and carried it downstairs to the dining room without waking anyone. I filled it with my cookbook friends who breathed a sigh of relief and then I moved the table and chairs every which way to see how they looked best and if it was possible to fit them in now and still walk between them and the wall without first undergoing gastric bypass or chopping off my butt. I think I’ve found a way.
But one of my dining room chairs is antique white and all the rest are stained oak and I feel they must match but I want to make do with what I have so maybe I’ll paint all the rest of them and the table antique white to match the one lone wolf chair. Maybe Antique Mommy can help me out.
And I want to weave baskets out of the tall weeds in my yard… and maybe a muumuu. But it’s too dark to harvest. And I want to dig up the garden plot to plant the Aspens and Birch trees I bought last week. But I’m afraid of finding more moles. And I want to fill every unused container in my house with dirt and plant things in them. But I don’t have any dirt. And my little slave laborers are sleeping. And I want to use the wood from the fallen-down section of fences to make extra planters. After I pressure wash them. And let them dry for a few months. And I’d like to fold some laundry. But that is not fun.
You know what is fun? Blogging. And swimming in chocolate. With your mouth open.
Come Friends, Let us Gather Around my Fridge
My fridge is very clean right now. I hosted a rave/baby shower with some friends last night and I had a ton of stuff to get done to be ready. Bathroom to clean. Games to plan. Carpet to vacuum. Food to bake. Gifts to wrap. Disco ball to hang. Glow-sticks to ignite. Plastic babies to freeze in ice cubes.
I went to get some ingredients out of the fridge and noticed what I’ve been noticing for the past few weeks but haven’t cared much about until I had a million other things to do. My fridge was absolutely disgusting. Some unknown substance had spilled and it’s sticky brownness had been spreading throughout the various shelves and racks. As I’d move a bottle from one place to another, the sticky brownness would follow it, make friends and multiply.
What if one of my guests asked to put something in the fridge and saw the mess? This would not do. So instead of cleaning my bathroom, vacuuming or making food, I spent over an hour cleaning every square inch of my fridge. Then I ran around like a decapitated chicken for the last hour before the party, neglecting to feed the kids and begging Dan to take them somewhere offsite and feed them.
Oh the lengths to which I will go to procrastinate. It’s like the time I redid my filing system before the Today Show crew came out to film at my house. What if I needed to put a piece of paper away and they caught it on video? Never mind that the windows had greasy fingerprints at Magoo level and I had absolutely nothing to wear. The files needed to be reworked!
And the kids were twerked off about the party too. The house was covered with balloons, streamers, lava lamps, glow sticks and chocolate and they could have none of it. They should know by now that fun things are only for mommies.
Whoa NETI!
As someone who has been known to vomit when faced with the sound of my husband blowing his nose and who swears they know what phlegm smells like and is sickened by the scent of it especially when it’s coming from my own body, I don’t know what possessed me to take my naturopath’s advice and buy a Neti pot with which to flush my nasal cavities.
Nasal cavities contain phlegm. Sometimes I gag just saying the word phlegm. I’ve certainly never been capable of coughing it up because then it would have to enter my mouth and my mouth is a dwelling place for taste buds and nerve endings, making it a completely unsuitable home for noxious goo. Granted, phlegm is 100% natural and possibly organic, depending on what I had to eat that day, but so is bird poop and I don’t want either of them splattered in my mouth.
But the doctor told me to get flushing with Neti so I got to the store and picked one up. When I got to the cash register, the Whole Foods clerk smiled and asked, “Is Oprah running her show about Neti pots again?”
“No.” I gave her a 3-snaps-GIRRRL!-I-belong-here smile. “My naturopath suggested it to me. Does Oprah do a show about Neti pots? I haven’t watched her in a while.”
“Oh. Yeah. This is the third one I’ve sold today and we usually sell a bunch right after they run that episode.”
I smugly tucked the pot into my fabric shopping bag and headed home to cleanse myself. I looked at the box. That girl flushing her sinuses looks so HAPPY, I thought, “This can’t be that bad.”
It can. Trust me, it can. You fill the pot with saline solution which you then pour into one nostril on your tilted head. The water then runs through all of your sinuses and, if the angle of your head isn’t precisely correct, into your mouth.
Have you ever tasted saline solution? It sort of tastes the way I imagine phlegm would taste, warm, salty, disgusting. And I know where it’s been. And I know what it’s supposed to be flushing out… or in to my mouth. And I cough and gag, compose myself, re-tilt my head and repeat.
The drips in this image were NOT photoshopped (at least by me) Brownie’s honor.
I certainly wasn’t grinning as the goobers ran down MY face and the only reason I kept my mouth open was to let the solution run out.
Maybe I’ll try again in a few weeks… or years… or at some point when all of my taste buds and nerve endings have been fried in a terrible taste-bud-and-nerve-ending-frying accident.
Disguise
Do you ever dress yourself using items you find on the floor of your car, only to look in the rearview mirror an hour later and wonder why you’re wearing a costume?
Biggest Loser – EXPOSED
It has come to my attention that the entire Biggest Loser franchise, Jillian Michaels specifically, is not working to help overweight Americans but rather attempting to kill fat people.
I started watching last season when Dan was working a billion hours and there was nothing on TV Tuesday nights and heaven forbid I do anything productive after 8 o’clock at night. I was inspired by the alleged “transformations” of the “contestants.” I even softened my stone-cold veneer for a few moments and cried once or twice…
every episode… for the whole season.
Now I’m somewhat fluffy myself and after watching several episodes while chowing down on my favorite snack foods, the propaganda started working on me. I thought, “I could do that [snarf, snarf, crunch crunch gobble gobble]. They’re so inspir[munch munch]ing! If she could lose that much weight, I could totally [swallow gulp gulp] shed the pounds I have to lose and tone up like a swimsuit model.”
Am I the only one who can’t stop eating while they watch that show?
So I bought the Biggest Loser Fitness Plan book, which was approximately as uncomfortable as purchasing my first box of tampons. You know if someone sees you buying feminine hygiene products they might know you’re a… a… a girl and if you buy a BIGGEST LOSER book, they might suspect you of being overweight because I’m sure they couldn’t tell by the pinchable pudge of your too-loveable-for-a-person-over-the-age-of-2 cheeks.
After doing the workout one time yesterday, I’ve finally figured out their master plot.
It’s true that the producers want to decrease the number of overweight Americans. They plan to accomplish this by convincing us to try the diet and exercise routines, effectually picking us off one by one like puffer fish in a barrel when we can no longer raise our arms or effectively move our legs.
It seems fairly obvious to me at this point that the so called “contestants” are really just smoking hot athlete/models in remarkable stage makeup for a show that is to weight loss what the WWF is to real wrestling. No real pinchable overweight person can live through these workouts.
~Kathryn Thompson~
A Quick 70 Bucks
I drove out to a nice hotel by the airport tonight and made a quick 70 bucks. I sold my music tastes to a big market research company in exchange for enough money to pay for the heart rate monitor and exercise mat I purhcased for my yearly trip into hard core exercise mode. Did you know I work out? Why yes, yes I do. Since January 3rd 2008.
I worked out a little last year but this year I’m hard core. I have a heart monitor for the love of Pete’s Dragon! I use it to monitor my heart and things. I love it. This weekend Dan and I played a rousing game of Super Mario 3 on my Christmas Wii and I measured my heart rate throughout the evening to see if I was getting an aerobic workout simply from stress and thumb strain. It’s fun to check your heart rate during all kinds of activities. You know. Just because.
Which doesn’t really bring me back to my evening of market research but I will talk about it anyway. In a 2 hour period, I texted Dan a couple of times, drank 20 oz of water, avoided putting my kids to bed and rated 550 popular songs on a scale of 1-5 of how much I liked them and a scale of A-C of how tired I am of hearing them played on the radio. It was quite emotionally taxing for me.
I’m someone who’s fairly private about my listening preferences because in part but not limited to the fact that I am embarrassed about what I like. My everyday music choices are not exactly highbrow and sitting in that room full of 25-35 year old women rating the songs I like in a computer database that will most likely go on my personal file somewhere where they keep permanent personal files of embarrassing things had me worried. I thought, “If I had not been born in Canada and were thusly eligible to run for President of the United States one day, and had also not seen every episode of the West Wing, therefore learning that becoming the POTUS is the last thing I’d ever want to do besides, you know, other things I’d less rather do, and I was one day running in a political race for the aforementioned office, would it somehow surface in a vicious smear campaign that I think The Police are overplayed but I somehow remain strangely charmed by Ace of Base?”
I also thought as I listened to one Hip Hop song that it would be cool to have one of those Hip Hop sidekick people following me around saying, “Unh, yeah, uh-huh uh-huh, GIRL, sing it Kathryn, UNH!” every time I opened my mouth, you know, with the approving grunts and such.
As I left they gave me $70 cash which I tucked away somewhere where cash should be tucked and headed home, feeling a little weird about exposing my music tastes in such a reckless and feckless fashion.
When working out at the gym as I am wont to do, I have been known to occasionally trip on the treadmill and go flying off the back end. Rather than worrying about possible injury or the fact that I look like a flailing spaztard, I’m generally just very anxious that my MP3 player not get disconnected from my headphones, thus turning on its external speaker and revealing to my fellow gladiators that I work out to a mix of Gwen Stefani, Carol King, Out”k”ast, Abba and Milli Vanilli. That’s just private.
My current blogging heart rate is 75, temperature 98.6F.