Tons of DIY Inspirational Country Wedding Elf on the Shelf Nail Polish ideas! lol

I’ve been spending some time on Pinterest lately. I've been on Pinterest for a couple of years now, so it's not like this was my first rodeo. Pinterest is a wonderful source of inspiration, and a great way to keep track of cool things from the internet. However, Pinterest has a problem I associate with theme parks, fairs and New Year’s eve in Times Square—if things are open to the public, generally far too much of the public shows up for it. And as we all know, the public is often stupid.

For instance, I was looking over the Holiday & Events board type. The things people pin in this category range from astonishing to moronic and back again. Craft ideas that clearly will not work without a license to Photoshop.  Recipes that sound not only disgusting, but downright lethal (heavy cream, sweetened condensed milk, chocolate chips and vanilla to make “hot chocolate”? Just typing that raised my cholesterol 10 points and gave me three cavities). Crafts that are just dumb—never in the history of ever has anyone looked a toilet paper tube painted white with a hat stuck on it and said, “What a darling snowman!” No, they looked at it and thought, “That looks like a toilet paper tube painted white with a hat on it.” Cakes so elaborate that they require a degree in Pastry from Le Cordon Bleu and a Fine Arts degree from Parsons to create. And then there’s what I call The Tacky, which should be a board type all its own. Rolls of Charmin lined up on the back of the toilet with evergreen branches stuck in them. A wreath made out of sawed off beer cans. Ideas that just scream, “We have a broken washer and dryer on our front porch!”

This has led me to feel that prior to being given access to Pinterest, potential pinners should be required to take a survey that reveals the type of pins they will be contributing. Depending on the outcome of this survey, they may be provisioned for a separate instance of Pinterest. One reserved for complete morons. Below is my proposed survey:

Instructions: For each question, please choose all that apply.

1) Do you regularly use the following when you write?
lol
ROTFLMAO
Best X EVER!
So stinkin' cute!
Totes adorbs

2) Will you use the following labels to describe images?
My Style
For my wedding one day
Someday when I have kids
When we have [stairs, a porch, an extra bedroom, etc] I WILL do this!
Tons of Elf on the Shelf ideas

3) Are you inclined to pin any of the following?
Pictures of cute puppies or kittens
Recipes made with "just three ingredients!"
Recipes made with candy bars, refrigerated crescent rolls, or Hershey's Kisses
Inspirational sayings
Pictures of heavily Photoshopped people in workout gear with a label that reads, "Motivation!"

4) Please indicate which of the following types of pins it might interest you to see on Pinterest:
Creative nail polish ideas
Anything explicitly labeled "DIY"
Crafts that use cutouts of the human hand in creative and unusual ways
Anything "country"
Elf on the Shelf ideas

5) Mark all those you find amusing:
Bathroom humor
Cute overload
Anything that says "ehrmegherd" on it
"Stay calm and whatever" posters
Stills from movies that have the lines the character was saying in that scene typed under them

6) Choose the word to complete the following sentence:
"If ________ too short to reach the shelf, use a stool."

a) your
b) you're

If you selected any under #1-5 and/or picked a) for #6, you are an idiot and must pin on the OTHER Pinterest, where people who have taste, good senses of humor, and a reasonable grasp of English language, spelling, punctuation, and syntax don't have to see your annoying crap.

I really think this approach would go a long way toward improving Pinterest, and will not be the least bit offended if Pinterest appropriates my idea.

Halloween. Boo.

I know plenty of people disagree with me, but Halloween leaves me cold. Costumes, trick or treat, blah blah whatever. For the sake of my children, I try my best to hide this lack of enthusiasm. I buy fake spiders and plastic skeletons. I even throw a Halloween party, complete with pumpkin flinging trebuchet every year (my husband, who does like Halloween, built the trebuchet himself. I don't like Halloween, but even I have to admit that a life size trebuchet that can fling a pumpkin 300' is pretty badass).

My complete lack of interest is probably partly, if not entirely, fed by my own childhood experiences. My mom was a total washout in the costume department. I remember being about five things when I was a kid, all of them lame. The year I was seven it was so bad that I didn’t even have a costume, per se. She pulled out a blue tartan kilt and cape she’d bought me during a previous summer vacation to Bermuda and said, “There. You’re Mary, Queen of Scots.” Because I was kind of a weird kid, I knew who that was (sort of), but seriously—what the fuck?

The last year I recall actually even trick or treating at all was the year I was in 7^th grade. All the girls in my class (about 7 of us) spent the night at someone’s house and we didn’t so much go trick or treating, as go out and see what kind of trouble we could get in. Being the kind of kid I was, that wasn’t much, as it turned out. About the only thing of note that happened was when we were spraying Silly String on the playground at the local elementary school, and a flashlight beam came out of nowhere and pinned us. The guy behind it said, “Stop—police.” And my friend Sarah—for reasons that she has never been able to articulate—shot back, “Who you jivin’?” and the cop replied, “I ain’t jivin’.” Oh shit.

Turned out they were looking for kids who were actually tagging with spray paint. When they saw that all we had was Silly String, and that we had no idea who the spray painters were, and hadn’t seen them, they let us go. And that was pretty much the end of my career as a juvenile delinquent.

I was able to all but ignore Halloween from about 1982 until fairly recently. About the only thing I’d do was give out candy (and hey, seventh grade boys—here’s a tip: don’t go out in the same outfit you wore to school, ring doorbells and hold out your bag for candy with a disaffected grunt. Show a little spirit and put some effort into it, or you can just get your candy from someone else’s house; you won’t be getting any of my Snickers Fun Size, you little assholes. If you’re too embarrassed to say it, you’re too old to do it), and possibly attend the occasional adult Halloween party. I’m not a complete toad—I’d dress up. I remember one year I went as a teenager, which necessitated me buying the first copy of Seventeen magazine I’d had since I was seventeen. You know, to see what the kids were wearing.

But then I started having my own kids, and of course they wanted in on this free candy thing, so I was forced to participate again. This time I went to the other extreme, and started making all their costumes from scratch.

Let me tell you about that. Making a costume from scratch sounds awesome and supportive and dedicated. In reality it is stupid and expensive and stressful. One year I made my four kids’ costumes and ended up spending over SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS on the fabric, patterns, notions, what have you. Six hundred bucks! And I was making shit like Pokemon. I had two kids who wanted to be Pokemon that year, but of course they didn’t want to be the one they actually sell the pattern for (his name is Pikachu, if you care, or if you have an eight year old boy and it therefore means something to you). They wanted to be these other bizarre ones that look like lizards and shit, and for which of course you can’t just go out and buy a pattern. So not only did I have to make them, I had to make them up. Three years in a row I spent the weekend before Halloween in tears, swearing to God we weren’t going to do this again next year (so I was a little slow in actually doing it).

So this year we did buy costumes. Now I see part of the benefit of not buying them costumes. When I’m making them, they can’t possibly wear them until they’re done (which was usually October 30^th at 10:30 p.m.). This year they’ve had them for two weeks, and already they’ve wanted to wear them to about six different places. Mean, mean Mommy refuses to allow this. Know why? I’ll tell you—it’s because if I let them wear them to the zoo, the park, the grocery store, and every other place they wanted to wear them for the 30 days prior to Halloween, at 3 p.m. on October 31^st, they would announce that they were bored with whatever costume they’d been wearing for the last month, and that they wanted to be, “something else.” This would cause me to lose my grip on what’s left of my precious, fragile sanity.

So clearly this is a no win situation. I either stress myself out emotionally and financially, or I spend a month being stressed out because I have to keep refusing to allow them to go to every event dressed as a wizard or Dead Man Rocking (a sort of zombie rock star—don’t ask) because they’d get bored and/or ruin the costume and then have nothing to wear on Halloween proper. About the only thing I can do at this point is just wait until they claim to be too old for such foolishness. Which should take about six more years.

I know when my kids are grown up, there are things I will miss—I already miss that my daughter no longer refers biscuits as “bistiks,” and that one of my twins no longer has that adorable baby lisp that caused him to say things like “fwosting” instead of “frosting.” But I refuse to miss the mayhem around Halloween. I’ve been over it for about thirty six years now.

Dogs and Dingbats

Our topic today is dogs. Not my dog, though. I do have a dog, but he’s not funny. In fact, he breaks a cardinal rule in my household that everyone who lives there is required to give me material or they’re out. He’s on notice.

Anyway, in the past few months I’ve had a couple of interactions with other people who have dogs, and it is they about whom we will be talking.

The first was an experience at the grocery store recently. As I was walking out of the grocery store, a kid on a skateboard came zipping through the parking lot, up to the door of the store, popped up his skateboard and walked in. A dog in a car parked in the lot saw this, launched itself out of the car (and into the parking lot traffic, which was fortunately going slowly enough that nothing bad happened) and ran into the store after the kid. (It was pretty clear the dog didn’t know the kid; it turned out the dog just didn’t like skateboards.)

I saw this, turned around and went back into the store. I alerted the courtesy clerk, who read the dog’s tag and made an announcement over the PA system for the dog’s owner. It happened that the woman who owned the dog was right at the front of the store, and walked up to see if this was, in fact, her dog. It was.

“My goodness!” she exclaimed, upon the realization that this was her pet. “How on earth did you get out of the car?” She kept saying things like, “How did you manage this? How in the world did you do this?” Gee, lady, I don’t know—maybe it was all four of the windows you left rolled all the way down? She was positively mystified as to how her dog was able to get out of the car and into the store.

She wasn’t concerned with why (to be fair, I guess it didn’t really matter), but she was baffled by the idea that a dog could jump out of an open car window. It was a pretty warm day, and it would have been wrong to leave the dog confined in the car, so leaving all the windows open was appropriate, but for the life of her she couldn’t conceive how the dog managed to get out of the car and into the store. Really, you dingbat?

But I seem to find myself often in the company of dingbat dog owners (point for research: is this because dog owners are more likely to be dingbats than owners of other pets?). The other experience I have to relate involves a woman at the video store, and her conversation with the male video clerk. And in this case, the woman dog owner was a dingbat, but the guy wasn’t much better.

The woman was renting “Marley and Me,” and she and the clerk were talking about their respective dogs. Now, point one: the woman talked in a baby voice and referred to dogs as “doggies” (acceptable only if you are under the age of 5), and point two: well, I don’t really have a point two beyond the fact that they were both dopes. They had this exchange in my hearing:

Her: What’s your doggie’s name?

Him: Charlie.

Her: That’s a great name.

Him: Yeah, I like one syllable names for dogs.

So right away my twitdar is going off. It’ll probably come as a surprise, but I have a very low tolerance for that sort of thing.

The conversation moved on to the movie she was renting. Now, maybe I’m just ultra-dialed in (fact: I am not) but even I know the basic tenants of “Marley and Me” and I’ve never read or seen it. Yellow lab, ill-behaved but irresistibly charming anyway, dies at the end. Right? This woman, who was apparently new to Planet Earth, or spent the last five years on a raft in the middle of the ocean with no contact with the civilized world, knew nothing about the movie beyond the name, and the fact that it has a dog in it. I assume she acquired this information from the box.

The clerk told her about his reaction to the movie, clearly trying not to give away the one critical plot point (THE DOG DIES). He told her how moving it is (THE DOG DIES). He told her how it made him feel really emotional about his own dog, Charlie (THE DOG DIES). He mentioned the amusing madcap antics of the main character (THE DOG DIES).

At this point the clerk who was helping me handed me my movie and said, “Due back Wednesday” or whatever. And thank goodness she did, because I was seconds away from turning to the woman renting “Marley and Me” and saying loudly, “THE DOG DIES.” (It took a lot of effort not to do this.)

I suppose it’s possible that I am a dingbat dog owner. I certainly confess that I have my moments of dingbattery. But I like to think that I’m at least capable of figuring out how my dog would go about getting out of a car when every single window was rolled all the way down. And also? THE DOG DIES.

I Don't Care--This Song Could Still Totally Be About Knights

A couple of weeks ago, I was reading a blog entry, the subject of which was, “I always thought…” (people said things like, I thought talk about euthanasia was about youth in Asia, or I thought Kosher pickles had no pork in them, that sort of thing). In the comments, people added hundreds and hundreds of further things that they misunderstood, in some cases for years. A lot of people thought Roy Orbison was blind because he always wears those sunglasses.

One of them, in the original entry, was this:

“I thought the Moody Blues song was “Knights In White Satin”. I couldn’t understand why the knights wore white satin & not armor.”

And I confess that all these years I too had thought that song was about actual guys jousting and wooing ladies faire, not the part of the day when it’s not light outside. I mean, read the words—they really could be about anything:

“Nights (or, if you’re me, Knights) in white satin, never reaching the end,
Letters I've written, never meaning to send.
Beauty I'd always missed with these eyes before.
Just what the truth is, I can't say anymore.

'Cos I love you, yes I love you, oh how I love you.”

Etc. (Sure, there are two more verses, but one is exactly the same as the one above, and the other is just some philosophical bullshit about figuring out who you want to be. Or something. I confess I don’t really know, but since I spent the better part of thirty years thinking that the song was actually about guys who had been recognized by some king or other for their outstanding behavior, I’m not sure I’m the best candidate to analyze the lyrics.)

I mean, seriously all you’ve got there is a generic love song. And the “Late Lament” (the spoken bit at the end) doesn’t really add a clarifying element. It’s just there.

But when I posted about this on Facebook, several people thought I was nuts. Mostly guys who were old enough to remember when the song was a hit. One friend pointed out that the album has a very specific theme that, had I listened to the whole thing, would have made such an error impossible. But I had this specific set of images that went through my head when I heard the song, and the news that they were completely wrong just took the wind out of my sails.

I decided to share this amazing news with someone who I was sure would get it. I went in to talk to my boss. She’s about the same age I am, grew up in the same general area of the country, and has a lot of the same cultural background that I do.

I said, “So, I was reading this blog entry about things you misunderstood And there was this one that said, ‘I always thought the Moody Blues song was, ‘Knights in White Satin’ like actual guys in armor but apparently it’s ‘night’ as in not daytime…’” And as I’m saying this out loud to her, I can see the same look crossing her face that crossed mine when I read it the first time.

It was the look that said, “You mean…it’s not?”

For almost the same length of time, she too had always had an image of guys in white satin suits cruising around doing chivalrous things. So it was nice to know I wasn’t alone. And really, I was even less alone than I’d originally thought, even taking into account my manager’s company in this age-old misperception. It turns out that in the comments section of this entry, there were dozens and dozens and dozens of people who had always thought the same thing.

And the truth about this song that caused me so much angst? Yeah, I actually don’t like it very much. It’s a very irritating and persistent ear worm for me. Even as I write this, I am tortured by it running through my head. And it will be with me for days now, dammit. But on the plus side, I did know Roy Orbison wasn’t blind.

Baby Fat

I just spent [redacted] hours watching the footage of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge leaving the hospital with their new baby. (Although since I guess I just said hours, plural, you know that it was more than one. So much for my ability to conceal information. This—along with about four thousand other reasons—is why I’m not a spy. Anyway.) So yes, I spent a long time watching it on a live feed, and listening to BBC anchorpeople desperately grasp at any straw they could think of to fill air time with chat until William and Kate finally finished packing up their toothbrushes and iPods, saying their thank yous and goodbyes to the hospital staff, and came out to show their new baby to the world.I

I will say right off that I love the British royal family. I don’t care that they’re outdated, I don’t care that they’re ridiculously wealthy and getting richer at a time when the government is choosing to slash budgets and eliminate services and blah blah blah. Sorry, don’t care. I feel for the people who are being impacted by those cuts, but I still love me some royals*. And I love Kate. I realize she has a team of people to help her look great, but at the end of the day, she’s responsible for those people, and they do the job she’s paying them to do. And I don’t think she’s lazy—I think they’re being very, very careful how they bring her into a job that has her living in a fishbowl, and in which she did not grow up, as William did. The family learned a hard lesson from Diana, and they’re taking it to heart with the next generation. They want William and Kate and their children to have a successful family life, because they may be royalty, but at the end of the day, they’re still human beings. Good for them.

But this wasn’t intended to be a rant in defense of the British royal family, nor was it intended to be a dissertation about Kate Middleton’s assimilation into said family. The subject of this is me, of course, and something of which I was reminded while watching Kate meet the press with her new son.

One thing I noticed about Kate during the whole exchange outside the hospital is that she still looks six months pregnant. Which is as it should be. Don’t tell me about that former Playboy bunny chick, the one  who named her daughter Rainbow Brite or whatever it was, who left the hospital in her size 0 jeans and was back to her original -2 size within a week. That’s a lot of bunk. I don’t care if it really happened, it’s not the norm. Most women walk out looking some version of still several months pregnant, and continue to do so for another six months to a year after the baby is born (granted, looking fewer and fewer months along as time goes by). That’s normal.

My first baby was a single birth, and so I followed said pattern of looking a bit expectant for a number of months after he was born, and gradually getting back to a reasonably normal size. My second “child,” however, was twins. I gained the same amount of weight with them as I had with the first (thirty pounds—which is the normal, recommended amount for those of you keeping score), but most of that was baby. (I am proud to tell you that my twins were 6 pounds 13 ounces, and 7 pounds 15 ounces at birth, which birth occurred at 34 ½ weeks, with 35 weeks being considered full term for twins. Thus, they were about as close to term as one could hope without actually being full term, and also very big and healthy. Go, me, right?)

However, because they were such big babies, and because I did, after all, gain thirty pounds, I was absolutely humongous. I have since said that I was visible from space, and that at one point NASA approached me to discuss the possibility that I could be used as a landmark to help guide the shuttles back in to the Earth’s atmosphere. The only reason the deal fell through is that I would have had to stand outside for multiple hours during the whole of the shuttle’s anticipated reentry period, and it was hotter than Hell the summer my twins were born (as it always is the summer one is pregnant).

I think you get the picture—twins, enormously distended stomach, weight gain. Right. So the twins are born (on the Friday before my scheduled c-section because of the early signs of preeclampsia, which bummed me out because I wanted to make it to my actual date, plus I’d eaten a bunch that morning and they made me wait eight hours until my stomach emptied out and I was hugely uncomfortable—no pun intended—the whole time I waited for that to happen, but that’s another story. Which I guess I just told. Moving on.) and because I had major surgery, I’m in the hospital from Friday to the following Tuesday, at which time they let me go home.

So we load up our new infants in their new car seats, snap them onto our new stroller, and head out. We’re on our way down in the elevator, and the maternity ward in that hospital is on something like the 8^th floor, so we have a short ride. There’s another guy on the elevator, along with an older woman who, you can kind of tell by their chemistry and the way they interact, is his mother in law. My husband, being a reasonably friendly sort of fellow, asks if they're visiting a new mother. “Yes, my wife,” the guy replies.

Alex looks at him and says, “Your first?” The guy nods.

“We have one at home, and these are our second—twins,” he tells the guy.

The guy glances at the babies, and at me, and a strange look crosses his face.

“Wow,” he says, “One older kid, two new ones, and another one on the way?”

Huh?

His mother in law is horrified.

“Jim!” she gasps, “This woman just had twins. You can’t expect that she’s going to look anywhere near her normal self! It’s nothing like having only one.”

I, on the other hand, am about ready to bust my c-section sutures. Because any second I’m going to start howling with laughter. Are you kidding me? Dude, these babies are three days old. Do you realize what you’ve just described isn't even biologically possible? How could I possibly be pregnant again? What do you think? That I was actually carrying triplets, but one of them wasn’t cooked enough, so they left it in there for a couple more months to finish off? Priceless.

To this day I giggle about it. I know his mother in law was appalled, but I wish I could tell her how much pleasure that story has given me over the years.  What was to her a major faux pas (“Not only did you reveal your complete lack of understanding of the human reproductive system, but you basically just called this woman ‘fat’ to her face.”) was downright hilarious to me.

I was reminded of that whole episode while I was watching Kate show off her new baby, her puffy belly still intact. I hope Kate can maintain her sense of humor as the eyes of the world watch her (now descending) stomach. I’m sure she will, and I’m sure she’s very grateful. She has a beautiful new baby, and is lucky enough to have all the time, resources, and physical help she wants or needs. And I’m guessing there was no one going down in the elevator with them, either.

*if you’re not already aware—or can’t tell—I am an American. I sympathize with the plight of the British working classes, and those affected, but my love or hatred of the Queen and her brood will in no way impact their circumstances. I have zero power to bring about change in the British social system, since I have no say in the British social system, not being a British citizen. I just wanted to make that perfectly clear.

Into the Crosshairs

This is the eve of the eve of the day I potentially start Crossfit. Two weeks ago I went along with a friend during “Bring a Friend to Experience Our Unique and Strangely Seductive Brand of Sadomasochistic Torture” Week. All that was too long to fit on signs and websites, so they called it “Bring a Friend to Crossfit” Week.

On that day, I posted the following status on Facebook:

“Today I learned lots of things: I now know what a burpee is, I know that I can’t jump more than three inches straight up, I know that I’m really good at anything where gravity is on my side (if I’m working against gravity, all bets are off), and I know that I have the stamina of a waffle. I think ‘sorer but wiser’ sums it right up.”

The comments on this ranged from, “But waffles are delicious!” (a true statement, I can’t argue), to questions about my joining “the cult” and a glowing assurance from a friend that “the cult” was an awesome experience, and I should run, not walk! to the next possible session.

Over the past two weeks I’ve had several conversations with various folks about whether or not I intended to join this insane group. I mean, really, any gym that has to keep a surreptitious barf bucket handy for patrons who might exercise to the point of loss of lunch is letting you know up front what you’re in for, don’t you think?

Of course, FAQ #1 is, “What possessed you to try it in the first place?” and FGA #1 (Frequently Given Answer) is, “I have no freakin’ clue.” Three weeks ago my friend posted a FB comment of her own that this was “Bring a Friend” Week and if anyone wanted to try it, she’d take them along. It stuck with me. No idea why.

FAQ #2 is, “Well, are you going back?” (This is usually asked in the sort of tone one uses with ones’ offspring when they’ve done something spectacularly boneheaded, and you’re asking something along the lines of, “Well, have we learned a little lesson now?”) FGA #2 is, “I really don’t know.” Well, of course, by now I do know.  I am, at the very least, in it for probably 10 sessions, which is the least you can sign up for. Will I go beyond that? I can’t say.

Some people want to know what it’s about. Well, it’s a sort of a fast weights workout (but done safely—they stress safety) that scales to individual ability. In my first workout, one of our “moves” was what they call legless rope climbs (which is to say, climb a rope suspended from a structural beam using only your upper body strength. Sure, great idea). Since that was clearly about ten peskillion light years past my ability, the coach told me to sit on the floor next to the rope, and use my arms to pull myself into as much of a vertical position as I could. I think I got my butt as much as a foot off the floor.

The aftermath, I have to say, was some of the most pure agony I have ever experienced in my life. Given the number of squats we had to do (96 total), plus up and down off of an 8” high box, plus that burpee thing (24 of those), I have to say, I was sore on a new level. I hadn’t experienced a soreness like that since giving birth (and even that wasn’t so much soreness as genuine pain from various incisions in my midsection—there’s a difference, you know, and sometimes the pain is easier to cope with because you take a Percocet and everything is totally groovy, thanks).

To illustrate just how sore I was, on Saturday morning, the day after this self-inflicted madness, I got out of bed (not easy, but not too horrible), walked to the top of the stairs in my house (it wasn’t too much of a pathetic hobble), looked down the 12 steps + landing + 4 steps to the first floor of my house, and thought, “Fuuuuuuuuuuuccccckkkkk.” Honest. That was the sole thought that went through my mind as I contemplated how I was going to get down those stairs. I actually considered sitting on my butt and scootching down like a toddler, and then realized that to do so would involve engaging the same muscles as walking down, so I bit the bullet and walked. To be accurate, I executed a series of moves that approximated “walking.” But I got down the stairs and it only took probably six minutes.

It was three days before I could sit down on without pausing and thinking, “Ooch, ouch, ooch” as my quads reminded me that after a blasting like I’d given them on Friday, they weren’t going to forgive me in a hurry. It was four days before I could walk in a manner that I would describe as normal. It was five days before I was completely back to my usual self (which is to say, I could move in almost any direction without some muscle reminding me that we’d had such a fun time on Friday, and thanks so much!).

So why on earth would I go back? That’s FAQ #3 and FGA #3 is really, I have no idea. I also ran a half marathon a year and a half ago, and I don’t know why I did that either. To say I could? It was a similarly torturous experience, although I have to hand it to Crossfit—I was able to walk a half a mile to Downtown Disney for dinner within 9 hours of running 13.1 miles. In terms of a thorough ass-kicking, Crossfit wins. And did I mention I’m going to have to get up at 4:30 to go to this class so I can get to work in a timely fashion? Yes, well, when do you think I trained for that half marathon? At 4:30 in the morning in a treadmill in my basement. So this isn’t such a very different proposition from the half marathon, it’s just there’s no fixed end point.

So why? While I was doing it, I was saying the whole time, “I hate this, it hurts, I want to stop doing this, why am I doing this? I don’t have to do this, so why am I doing this?” and then I’d finish my round, rest for 3 minutes, and do it again. But when we left I thought, was it that bad? It wasn’t. And then that soreness hit, and the thing is, I kind of enjoyed it, in a weird way. It told me that I’d really accomplished something. I’d really changed something. Not something huge, but I’d made a small change, and if I kept it up, it would be a permanent small change. And if I kept it up, it would eventually be a permanent large change. There’s something kind of tempting about that. To me, anyway.

And I put the question to my friends who do other things—why do you do what you do? I know a lot of people who ride their bikes to and from the ferry, and to and from work on the other side. Why do you ride your bike? Is it because you enjoy riding in the dark and the rain, dodging cars and getting drenched and cold? Or is it because you know it’s a good thing to do for your body and your mind? The people I know who ride their bikes could easily take buses or drive cars. But they don’t. Well, I could easily not torture myself with Crossfit. But for right now, I’m going to try it. And I may find myself out a hundred bucks and just not willing to press on, but I won’t know unless I try, right?

Of Lice and Men

Sorry, this one is going to make your head itch. We’re talking about. Yes. Lice.

It's largely self-explanatory, I think.

From my Facebook status:

H    Husbands: Here's a tip--when your kids come home with lice, and you decide to wash stuffed animals, resist the urge to wash every one they've come in contact with since birth. That 35 year old stuffed dog of your wife's that they've been walking past while it was sitting on the bench in the mudroom for the past month? Yeah, not really a candidate for the Anti-Lice-Wash-a-Thon. Especially since I can predict with a fairly high degree of certainty that it will EXPLODE IN THE WASHER AND LEAVE LITTLE BITTY PLASTIC BEADS ALL OVER EVERYTHING. I'm psychic, you see. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some vacuuming to do.

But just in case, some back story.

I got an email and a phone call from my boys’ after school program. All three of them had them. To improve matters, my husband was at an evening meeting at his office, probably not arriving home until 8 or later.

I went and picked them up, then stopped at Rite Aid to get the tools to deal with the situation. I left the boys in the van with strict instructions not to unlock or open the doors, roll down the windows, touch the radio, mess around with the stuff in the glove box, spill anything from their lunchboxes, or get blood on the inside of the windows. The usual admonitions of the mother of three boys who is planning to leave them to their own devices for anything longer than 18 seconds.

When I went in to Rite Aid, after chatting briefly with a friend I bumped into who winced in sympathy with my plight and then made a mental note to go home and check his daughter who had had a playdate with my daughter two days earlier (he didn’t say it, but you learn to recognize facial expressions, especially the, “Oh crap, LICE?!? Dear god, please no” facial expression), I headed for the pharmacy counter. The girl asked if she could help me, and I said, “Please—I don’t have the mental capacity to deal with hunting around. Just point me to the lice treatments. I have three children with lice. Kill me now.” The pharmacy assistant quickly directed me to aisle 13. You can’t tell me that’s not a coincidence; these drugstore layout people have a bone dry sense of humor, I tell you. Upon arrival there, I learned that lice eradication has come a long way in the 35 years since I’ve had any experience with it. If the current pricing for various lice-elimination products is any indicator, it is now a multi-billion dollar industry.

In my day, when I got lice twice as a child, there was one product. It was called Quell (or something) and it was toxic as hell and smelled just as bad. Your mom slathered it on your scalp, waited ten minutes and then washed it out. Then she went on a cleaning frenzy and rented one of those termite tens and had the house fumigated. Well, that’s what my mom did.  Lice wasn’t that big a deal to me. All I did was itch and deal with the treatment.

Today there are multiple products with clever, wry names like Nix and Rid. There are shampoos or whatever they are, sure, but there are also “comb out gels” and sprays for non-launderbles like furniture and stuffed animals. There are even kits that come with everything you need, including the beloved fine tooth comb (some things apparently never change).

I grabbed one of the complete kits and a bottle of wine (had to cross the store for that; here’s a tip for those drugstore layout types—wine goes directly next to lice treatment. I promise your impulse-buy-add-on sales will skyrocket) and checked out.

After gathering up my (surprisingly lice-free) daughter, I headed home to open what came to be known as Salon Mama (that’s pronounced mah-MAH).

I confess that as a general rule I suck at making unpleasant things fun. My mother was one of those who felt like the way to deal with unpleasant things was just to power through and get them behind you. Never mind trying to twist the situation to make it remotely amusing and therefore less traumatic. Just get it over with. It was very Teutonic of her. Which was sort of understandable, because she was quite German. German descent, you understand, but a combination of German and Dutch, which made her both stoic and tight –fisted, which sounds horrible, but wasn’t that bad because from somewhere she got a decent sense of humor that kind of tempered everything, but that didn’t change her outlook on unpleasant situations.

But somehow I came up with this ridiculous accent—a sort of British Indian thing with a weird twist—and I started calling my children “Sir” and pretending we were in a beauty salon and I was offering them all sorts of treatments—in addition to the hair coloring we were currently applying, which would turn his hair the most BEE-OO-TEE-FUL shade of purple, would Sir also care for a facial? No? Some new makeup?  No? A manicure? No?

You get the idea.

So with one thing and another, I got them all treated, combed out, and into clean liceless pajamas.

While I was doing all this, I had set my husband, who had bowed out of his meeting early, to the task of getting all their bedding through the wash and making up their beds with some makeshift coverings (flat sheets and spare blankets, mostly) that would allow them to go to bed before 2 a.m. Our washer has a sanitize cycle that washes in water that I think is quite literally boiling hot, but it runs for over an hour and with sheets + blankets + comforters + blah blah blah we were looking at an ETA of somewhere after midnight before it was all washed and dried. So we made do, and sent them all to bed under random throws that I’d gotten for $10 at Disneyland because I’d spent over $50 and suchlike. It wasn’t going to kill them for a night, and it didn’t.

However, now we come to the stuffed animal part of the story. Naturally all their “favorite” stuffies were going to have to have a long hot bath. I don’t give a damn what those tags say about surface clean only. My dryer is just this side of industrial—it’ll dry them through. I have no fear of moldy stuffing. Of course this was what they found most devastating—going to bed without stuffies? Unthinkable!

We made a deal to wash them right off and return them to them in their sleep so they would wake up in the morning with their stuffies. It was a compromise that was accepted grudgingly, but it was accepted.

One of the twins has no real concrete attachment to any one stuffy. Oh, sure, there’s Muffin the Moose, and any one of three stuffed Mickey Mouses (Mickey Mice?) but nothing that he really can’t be without. So long ago I offered him Poochy to see if they’d take to each other and he’d have a constant comfort animal. I’m not sure why I felt like he needed one, since he clearly doesn’t feel that way, but humor me. It’s one of my quirks.

Poochy was mine as a child and he’s hung around, He’s a beanbag dog with a stuffed head and a pom pom nose that fell off years ago. He’s brown with white ears and has frankly seen better days. There have been a couple of surgeries over the years to keep his innards from leaking out, some more successful than others. This kid isn’t really a stuffed animal guy, as I’ve suggested. So for a long time (over a month) Poochy has been hanging out on the bench in the mudroom, just watching the world go by, I guess.

When my son was trying to decide what, if anything, he was going to sleep with last night, I tossed him Poochy and said, “Here, take this.” Up he trotted to his room for bedtime.

What happened next will likely remain a mystery for the ages. But you can probably figure out what the result was.

Yes, Poochy found his way from the “clean” pile to the “contaminated” pile, and took a spin in the washer at my husband's hands. I found this out when I went to switch the blankets and comforters from the washer to the dryer. A little tick-tick-tick-tick sound like…well, frankly like little plastic beads bouncing on a tile floor accompanied the removal of the first item, and every subsequent item thereafter. In the middle of the load I found a deflated, damp Poochy.

When I IM’d my husband to tell him what had happened, his comment was, “Oops.” Yeah, oops. And of course, there was the obligatory “dog house” joke. What a comedian.