clickmom

panic

I thought I lost my auxiliary hard drive today. To make along story short I was incredibly stressed out all day and at the end of the day when I went to retrieve the hard drive from the portfolio I use to transport it to and from photo class it wasn't in there.  Usually I can remember the last time I saw something but not this time. Stress has wiped my short term memory clean.  I had no idea.  I searched the house, I called the art center, I even jumped into my truck with Josh along to keep me calm and searched the art center by myself.  In the end I came home, fighting hysteria the entire time, and after another useless house search decided that the thing to would be to sit still and try hard to focus and remember the last time the hard drive was in my hand.  I sat down at my desk chair, I stared at the portfolio trying to will my memory into action when it occurred to me that the portfolio straps weren't the right length.  Whoops.  I had used my nearly identical other portfolio today and my hard drive was safe and sound inside of it.

Yeah, that's pretty much the kind of day I had ALL DAY LONG and no posh club/sauna endorphin high to help me cope.  Tomorrow I am going to work out hard and sauna as long as I can take it.   They are going to have to drag me out of there.

I'm overwhelmed lately.  Moving, worrying, thinking about Matt leaving me forever and ever and never coming back again because he might marry an anti-family bitchy girl that he meets at hipster college.  It's all too much.  Especially the Matt part.

Green eggs

Abandoned

Today is my birthday.  Sadly, it is a regular day.  Matt has rehearsal until 8 tonight, so there will be no big restaurant dinner.  I got breakfast stuff at whole foods.  There will be french toast for dinner.  It will be low key.  Just Evan, Josh and me.  Maybe I'll light some candles while we eat in front of the tv and watch TMZ or something.

Sometimes I look at the names of the friends of my facebook friends and I imagine writing a book and using some of the more exotic sounding names.  I have facebook friends who have very interesting and international lives!  My new favorite last name of a friend of facebook friend is Whybrew.  Obviously the answer to Mr. Whybrew's eternal question is obvious, because if you don't brew it you can't get a buzz off of it! 

Also, I have a favorite photo caption.  It is "Me and my donkey- age 8."    I thought I was neglected before, and I didn't even realize the other kids had donkeys.  I feel so gypped now.

My new new undead therapist cancelled yesterday and the stretcher got a cancellation too, so I worked out with the stretcher instead of going to therapy.  That was fine.  I think the stretcher feels a little competitive because I keep telling him how much I am enjoying buns' workouts, so the stretcher is trying to extra challenge me.  Yesterday the stretcher declared war on my abs.  I was very pleased about that.  But then this morning when I showed up for buns' contest workout she announced "Today is all about abs!" and I almost hit the floor.  I grinned, I bared it and I may have slacked off just a wee bit on a couple of the exercises.  My torso feels absolutely incredible from the inside.

My photo friend John left for good today.  It was time.  Time for me to start shoveling the junk out of my stepford house so we can sell it.  That is a whole other long and whiny post.  But it seems that my photo friend John left some artifacts behind.  Not sure what to do with them though.  I will not be eating this one, that is for sure.

 

why having my hardwood floors sanded and stained while we continue to live here for the next 4 months might have been a mistake

1. It's an ice staking rink in here.  One cast at a time is the house rule, Evan already has that covered with his navy blue casted  seriously sprained wrist.

2. 20 hours after re-entering the house Josh dropped a dinner plate and now there is a plate shaped dent in the kitchen floor.

3. 42 hours after house reentry I found a glob of all natural (faux jello- just in case jello isn't faux enough) cherry gelatin sitting on the natural stained floor.

4. While licking the dirty dishes in the dishwasher 46 hours after house reentry  bear bait managed to get her collar caught on the lower dish rack, freaked out, and ran away from the dishwasher taking the rack,  the dinner dishes, and the cutlery with her.  I can't bring myself to look at the damage.

 

come on powerball!

If the floor guy tells you he has a dustless sander,what he really means is that he has a less-dusty sander.  I came home to a dust situation late last night.  Oh, yay.  

Also, if you do redo some floors, either do it during a season when you can keep all of your windows open or leave your house for a much longer time than 24 hours after the last coat goes on.  P.U.!

But seriously, now that I have seen the two rooms with brand new fresh floors I feel like maybe I was living in complete squalor before.  My floors were in rough condition!  I'm partially blaming it on my cleaning dude, who no matter how many times I ask not to swab the decks with his nasty chemical ridden mopping concoction and to please use my earth friendly non toxic option that I have conveniently located underneath the kitchen sink for his damp mopping pleasure, I come home to find pools of chemical stench evaporating off my hardwood floors.  When we move to new town I am going to search out a more professional house cleaner.

If you are in the mood to horrify yourself do this.  Lie on your kitchen floor and look up at the molding on your kitchen cabinets and you will see that somehow, magically, everything you have ever dropped on the floor has super bounced it's way onto the underside of the details of your kitchen cabinet where you can only see it if you are lying on the floor, but now that you have seen it you feel compelled to scrub it off, and that is why your already dry like the desert hands are now threatening to crack and break if you don't get some serious moisture onto them fast.

Has any one ever removed the vocal chords from their dog?  I'm tempted.  Some furry woodland creature has undoubtedly made a home for itself in one our neighbor's back yards and bear bait wants everyone to know.  I wish I were a cat person right about now.

Speaking of new town, the house hunting is going dismally at best.  Every house we see is either postage stamp sized (not an option for my larger than average sized family) or completely weird or a tear down.  I was in a house that had a 2 foot wide stair case.  Also, it had a shower stall with a glass block wall that only a supermodel could enter without rubbing up against the cold hard glass block.  Why people?  

Houses are going fast in new town, so I don't even know what to think.  I can't be there in a heart beat, and it's too far (an hour and a half) to be there every weekend.  Maybe, I told the husband, we should just rent any old dump and then try to find something once we are living there.   This was suggested to me from the get go.  Originally I scoffed at the idea.   If I were already living in new town I could go to every new listing the day it came on the market.  The only thing is that this would mean moving twice.  I might have a heart attack over moving twice.  As it is I am wound so tight over the whole moving thing I could burst a vein.  (Is that even an actual saying?)

I got some new lottery tickets today.

Brett pumps iron

My little baby is 10 now.

When Josh was born and the mid wife put him in my arms, I kept going on about how tiny he was.  I admired his tiny little face, and tiny hands, and tiny ears, bla bla bla.  (If you think about it until the second Josh was born, my baby was Evan who was almost 4 at the time.)  Then I looked up from my new tiny baby and saw all the people in the room looking at me like I was on crack.  I said WHAT? and they collectively agreed that my baby was by no stretch of the imagination a little baby.  They were already sizing him up for his football uniform.

So, my not tiny baby turned 10 yesterday.  I had to fight off a stress funk all day.  To make matters worse, contributing to my stress funk was the fact that I had barely slept for 2 nights due to the hurricane force winds that have me convinced that trees are all going to crack in half and take aim for the window in my bedroom.  I also invited some utopian (guess where we are!  We are hiding from the floor refinishers in utopia for a few more hours) friends over for dinner.  

I'm so freaking stressed cranky that there isn't a sight or sound that doesn't irritate me these days.  The husband was doing a good job in the irritate me department yesterday morning when he who has decided that he will not age like the classy guy he pretended to be when I met him and that any and all pants are now too unbearably restricting to wear in the house and it is preferable to prance around in your boxer shorts, slipped his jeans off in the living room right in front of Josh, Matt and Josh's friend.  

Eventually, we all got our lazy butts into gear and the husband took the kids and Josh's pal to the movies while I headed for the local supermarket to lay in some dinner food.  

But not before they had left and I spotted the husband's jeans on the living room chair and had to stop to wonder about the possibility that the husband had taken the kids to the movies in nothing below the waist but his boxer shorts.  I decided that while my kids would have been oblivious to the husband's partial nudity, their friend is more astute and would have pointed it out in the most dignified way possible. But I kind of hoped that there was a chance the husband was at the movies pretending he had red silk shorts on.

My leg/knee had been feeling kind of stiff and annoying for a few hours ever since I had put on my jeans, but I didn't stop to pay attention to exactly what was going on until I was strolling down the supermarket aisle.  What was going on was that there was something in my pants leg right behind my knee.  This would explain both my morning knee stiffness and vague feeling of jean leg strangulation.  

While standing at the butcher counter waiting for my dinner protein to weighed and packed up I tried to slide my arm down to behind my knee via my waistline pants opening.  I couldn't slide my arm down far enough.  What ever it was it was going to have to come out the bottom.  I had my big clonking boots on, so I tried doing some kind of spastic foot to the side stomp as I strolled away from the butcher counter, but that was not going to be effective either.  In the end I just tolerated the foreign lump behind my knee, walking those aisles like my leg was asleep,  until I got to back to the house and then I went to the bathroom, pulled down my pants and found I had been toting around a spare pair of undies.

Seriously, if only I had had an urgent case of the poops while in the supermarket, those undies would have given my story such a happy ending!  You never have a spare pair when you really need them.

The kids came back, the friends came over and dinner was very nice.  That bottle of wine I drank all by myself did wonders for my mood, and then we presented Josh with his cake and a huge stack of birthday cards.  Josh held court, reading the cards out loud one by one (like a pro, loud and clear and with dramatic intonation!).  Josh read the funny brother birthday cards, the sentimental son birthday cards and the cutesie now you're 10 years old birthday cards,  and then just as I had ducked into the kitchen to grab an extra cake fork, Josh read out loud "On your birthday, How'd you like to watch Brett PUMP IRON in the nude?" and I ran back in to the room full of stunned people, plucked the card out of Josh's hand and had to explain that that card was one I picked up for Wildmom's birthday next week.  Oooops.  My bad.

 

foul, not the chicken kind

So, I said to lil  sis today that if only I had another million or so to spend on a house finding one that we fit into and also that I like would be so much easier.

Have I mentioned how satisfying and relaxing house hunting is?

No?

How surprising.

Have I mentioned that if I (I'm 5'6") can touch the ceiling that means it's too low?  Also, if I happen to touch your ceiling and it is wet on my fingers then your house is a tear down, I don't care how much it snowed a month ago,  get real on the price.  Seriously and yuck.  Approaching one house I could smell the gas leak from the outside, one I could smell the musty/mold odor from outside, the family with all the lap tops and ipads on the counter left their front door unlocked (?), and also, "bed rooms" that are too small for twin beds (WTF?) and then there were others ......  seriously, I need a spare million, or two.

Also, why am I refinishing my floors and chipping out broken tiles in my own house when other people can't even wipe last night's rice-a-roni off the stove?  

They don't really want to sell their houses, do they?

Come on lottery!  

Still stressed.  Kind of cranky.

Did you believe the kind of part?  

Me neither.  I'm foul right now.

 

 

bun-less but stealth

I realized that the reason I've been slacking off on the blogging lately is that my photo friend John is STILL LIVING IN MY HOUSE.  It isn't that I couldn't blog, it's just that I feel like I have NO PRIVACY.  The worst thing is how I like to slip into my jammies the second I realize I am in for the night, but now it's 10PM and I am still fully dressed, underwire bra and everything.  It's a drag.  The good news though is that John's visa is running out and he booked his flight back to where he came from, so I will be house guest-less starting on my birthday!  (Next Thursday)  Hooray.

I let the realtor talk me into refinishing the floors in the den and kitchen.  Holy mother of pain in the ass.  I regret it.  We have a lot of crap to get out of the way.  The realtor says that people want to move into absolute move in condition -do no work houses.  I'm all puzzled because .... seriously?  I want a fixer upper so I pick out my own stuff.  I like to choose my own stuff.  Like a gas stove and a big ass fridge.  The husband wants to do no work but I SWEAR I will do ALL OF THE CHOOSING without him.  Cross my heart.

Yesterday was our 20th anniversary.  No comment.  

Anyone want to go jewelry shopping with me?  I figured that when I told him not to get me an iphone (I'm waiting til June) because I'd rather spend the 700 dollars on something like a bracelet he'd get that hint.  It's okay.  He's a man.  I'm all about picking out my own stuff.   I just have to make the time to do it.  But I'd totally have the time to pick out a kitchen sink, or a toilet, or floor tiles.  Just saying.  You know.  In case.  I love home depot.  Have I mentioned my love of all things home depot?  I gutted and refinished a half bathroom once.  Then the husband had the contractor redo it 2 years later.  No comment for real this time.

It was 64 glorious degrees out today.  A bit weird to soak up the rays and see the foot of snow still blanketing the backyard, but still THANK YOU MOTHER NATURE.  Now can we discuss snow's lackadaisical melting speed?  I'm still waiting for the snow to melt so I can find my boots and beat bear bait with them.  Not really.  I might wave them in her face and scream a little though.  Dog's do have memory.  Truthfully.  I scared my old perfect dog away from chewing shoes with one brief hysterical shoe waving episode when he was a wee puppy and he never touched another shoe again.  He was kind of perfect.  Have I ever mentioned that?

I am loving loving loving the workouts with the new weight loss contest trainer.  She has great buns, so I'm gonna risk being charged with harassment here, and name her buns.  The other day buns was demonstrating a glute move and I could barely focus on what she was saying because I was mesmerized by her perfect amazing buns and I asked how many reps I'd have to do before I had buns like her and then the other 5 old ladies in my group joined in on the jealousy fueled harassment and to make our old selves feel better we decided buns was only 15, but then she informed us that her 23rd birthday was right around the corner.  She never did tell me exactly how many reps I'd need to do before I had nearly 23 year old buns, except for not my own 23 year old buns, I want buns's buns.  Oh well.  I could always rock out with some padded underwear.  I got a catalog the other day that no less than 4 different kinds of bun supplementing panties in it.  As if I'd ever!  hahahahaha.

Some good news from the posh club is that I am ready to go for it on the stair mill on level 9.  I'd been doing level 7, which suddenly got too easy, so today I stepped up to level  8 but by the end I was barely sweating,  so next time, it's hello level 9.  I'm pretty astonished that I am getting faster.  Speed is so foreign to me that I never thought I cold attain it.  Ever.

If I had to guess if I was more likely to wear butt padding underwear or be speedy on a stair climber,  before today I would have guessed the underwear, because at least it would give me something funny to blog about.  Now, I'm thinking speedy.  Bun-less but stealth, that is what I shall be.

 

 

 

 

Roses make me sneeze

hot wrist

Evan went skiing today.  The husband called me when they were on the way home to tell me that he thinks maybe Evan broke his wrist.  Since the husband didn't think there was anything to worry about or any kind of  problem those two times I broke my wrists, when I had pneumonia,  went into labor (all 3 times),  slipped a disc, or had heavy metal poisoning, I figured there was a good possibility of blood and jagged bone sticking out of Evan's wrist skin.  I was pretty surprised to see a normal looking arm when they got back. Evan did look flushed though, and a thermometer under tongue read 100.2.

Can a wrist injury cause a fever?

I'm thinking it's going to be another fun week!

3 days until my 20th anniversary.  TWENTY.  That makes me feel really old.