Is This Thing Still On?

I haven't written a real post since carrier pigeons were forced to haul my messages to your door, because the internet hadn't been invented yet, and for that I'm sorry.

I just can't keep up. Do you ever feel like there is so much media and not enough time, and you can't keep on top of everything you want to consume, much less everything you should consume? I have podcasts that I love languishing on my iPod for wont of time to listen to them. I have blogs that I've had to "mark all read" or simply unsubscribe from, even though they're good, because they're too wordy. I often read the first paragraph, and if it doesn't grab me, I hit "N." Not to mention the books! I have an embarrassing number of books in my Kindle that I have to read (including Audrey Niffenegger's new book Her Fearful Symmetry She wrote The Time Traveler's Wife, which I loved). I also want to read What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures, which Dad gave me in hardcover form. Oh, and SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance. I read the first one, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, and it was extremely good.

Oh look! Convenient graphics which you can click and then purchase and be overwhelmed just like me! Yay!



In a perfect world, those would've lined up single file. Oh well.

Not to mention the projects. I still need to make a new vat of bran muffins, because the holidays seriously derailed the diet. In spite of being so very, very good, I gained back 10 pounds. I think most of that is water - ham and nuts and crackers and popcorn are all very salty. Hopefully if I drink lots of water today, I'll be back to good in a couple days. It couldn't hurt, anyway, because my skin is extremely dry. Stupid winter. It wasn't terribly hard to behave. The one food I really missed was the chocolate orange that you "whack and unwrap." I love those. But my mom doesn't make cookies anymore because she's gluten intolerant, so I don't have to face great heaping plates of beloved cookies. I had exactly one scoop of ice cream with fudge and caramel and nuts (and the cleverest presentation - she soaked a sugar cube in lemon extract and then set it on fire!) on 12/23 at The Program, one small piece of pumpkin pie at home on 12/24, I had a cinnamon roll at home, then I had a thin (1/2") piece of apple something on 12/25 at BJ's mom's. I didn't have a single cookie until I got to Jen's on 12/26, she had made some chocolate chip cookies, but they were small and I only had two over the course of two days. At meals I tried to stick with veg and fruit, and to limit the amount of meat and carbs. I really thought that I was good!

How does six sweets spread out over 5 days make 10 pounds? That is some ridiculous math.

So, anyway, I have to spend all day making muffins, drinking water, and doing what will inevitably be the consequence of adding lots of bran and water to the diet. Yay. When I'm not doing that, I need to clean out and reorganize just about everything in the house. The day after Christmas Jen and I went to Ikea. Then we went back to her new house and organized everything, and now I want to be organized too. I have nearly 7 years of accumulated detritus in the backs of all my closets and cabinets, and it's either get it gone or burn down the house.

With the influx of new toys, we need to go through the toyroom and find homes for them. Hopefully we can lose some old stuff along the way. I got a few shoebox sized bins at the grocery store yesterday. I would love to find a better organization system for the toyroom. I dream of things like this system from Ikea, but I don't think we can really afford as much as we'd need, and they don't allow online purchases for the stuff I'd need/want, which is ANNOYING. Hey Ikea, my whole house would look like your showroom if you allowed online shopping, but I'm not driving to Schaumburg again until spring. I'd rather pay for shipping. You are losing my money by not allowing online shopping, dumbasses, because I'm going to get annoyed before spring and I'm going to go buy something else.

As if Ikea reads my blog.

Anyway... Christmas was nice. I've enjoyed having BJ home. He bought both of the girls gifts that you wouldn't expect girls to want - none of them were pink. He got LEGO Mindstorms
for Mary Grace (yes, she's only four - they're doing them together), and Claire got the Fisher Price Manny's Repair Shop. I love that he doesn't buy for them based on gender. Either that or he's given up on having a boy, and he wants to mold each of them into someone more fun (for him) to play with. He also bought Claire a jewelry box and filled it up with..... rocks. Claire loves rocks, and will pick them up wherever we go, so we bought pretty ones (like rose quartz and peacock ore) for her. She really likes them! According to Amanda and Matt, who came up yesterday, the geologists they know make six figure salaries, so this is a passion we're willing to encourage!

BJ and I kept it simple with each other - we're planning to get new carpet in January, so that will be our big gift to ourselves. I got him a couple of camping items, and a "rock paper scissors lizard spock" t-shirt, which is only funny if you like the show The Big Bang Theory (which he got from my mom). He got me a popcorn popper and some Pyrex storage stuff for the kitchen.

My favorite part of the holidays has been spending time with my friends. I got to spend time with best friends from middle school, high school, and college. (Barbara Dahling is the only one missing - hopefully I can convince her to come down here and see us soon). I could digress into a whole thing about my friends from different eras of my life, and how they're all kind of similar to each other, but BJ wants to go out for lunch so I need to stop babbling and get in the shower.



(FTC Disclosure Statement - some of the links above are Amazon affiliate links because the percentage of a penny that I might get if someone chooses to buy one of those items might as well go to me instead of Google.)

The Food Coma Is Lifting

Hi again, Internet. The fog of the carb coma is beginning to lift, and we're planning on getting out our Christmas decorations today. I think we may have to put the tree in the middle of the living room, because there's really nowhere else for it to go.

Hey, it works for Marshall Fields. We'll just start calling the living room the Walnut Room. We'll serve cocoa. I can make this work.

On the other hand, I've never seen a dog at Marshall Fields. Maybe not.

The toyroom is an unholy mess. We're probably going to have to tackle that before much longer. The stuffed toys are in there having litters of stuffed toys of their own, I'm sure of it.

Claire's eye looks awful. She wouldn't let us clean it off, so the scab is about twice as big as it needs to be. It doesn't seem to be hurting her anymore, though, thank goodness.

BJ's cousin's wife, Pam, had a dream that I was pregnant with a boy. As far as I know, I'm not pregnant. I wanted to write it down though, in case she's right and I have a boy next August. How strange would that be? She says she's never been wrong before when she has dreams about pregnant people. I'm just thankful that she didn't dream twins - I think that twins would send me right over the edge. For one thing, my baby strategy is to wear it in a sling until it's old enough to get up and walk away. That would be tough with twins. I think it can be done, but it would be a lot of babies to haul around.

We went out shopping for a little while yesterday. We only bought one Christmas gift, though. I got Mary Grace some jeans (hers were way too small on Thanksgiving - I didn't realize she'd grown so much!). They were on MAJOR sale at Penney's, so I got her a pair of brown and a pair of black cords. I think they were $4.88 each. Claire's jeans were $3.88. She only got one pair because she has a lot of pants, and because I couldn't find the cute cords for her. Then I got them each a fleece shirt for $6.99 or something. I got out of there with 4 pair of pants and two shirts for about $37, not bad!

People are freaking crazy on black Friday, though, and after Claire got hit in the face with the fifth giant bag full of bargains wielded by someone walking the opposite direction and not paying one bit of attention, I snapped. Looking back, we would've done better if we'd had the stroller. We played in the germ area play area for a little while, after meeting up with BJ's dad and his wife, and then we headed back here for some leftovers.

What are you doing with your long weekend?

Holiday Gift Idea - Constellation Night Light

Once upon a time, there was a queen. At first she was kind and pleasant, but her two princesses were afraid of the dark. They forced the king and queen to sleep with the bathroom light on, and the queen became wicked because she didn't sleep well and woke up with a headache. The queen was desperate, and so on a trip to the Children's Museum, she purchased one of these:

...a ladybug that projects stars onto the ceiling of the princesses' room. She told the princesses that the stars wouldn't work if they turned on the bathroom light. The princesses totally bought it, and they stopped screaming at the queen to turn the bathroom light on, and fighting over how wide the door's opening should be. Instead they fell asleep peacefully, gazing upon stars of blue, red, and green, and they all slept peacefully ever after.

It also comes in land and sea turtle styles, and seriously, folks, this was the best $30 I ever spent. It times off after 45 minutes. The buttons are big and easy, so if the kids wake up in the middle of the night they can turn him back on without waking me up! I wish we'd gotten this years ago.

You can buy him here. He'd make a great gift for any kid. Or any sleep deprived parent!

Moichindizing

I am annoyed about something.

I know you're thinking, "REALLY?" in that sarcastic tone of... thought. Just hush. I know you really come here to read my rants of impotent rage.

Anyway, I've noticed a trend in the marketing that has been directed my way lately that is annoying the snot out of me.

The False Sense of Urgency is a powerful marketing tool. "Act Now!" or "Supplies are Limited!" are familiar refrains. But this new trend I'm seeing is the False Sense of Urgency combined with the Implied Irresponsibility of the Consumer (me).

BJ gave money to McCain's campaign last year. (And can I just mention on the side how lovely it was to have an election day come and go without a bunch of shrill screaming and nasty ads and fighting and partisan bulloney? I didn't even notice that it was the first Tuesday in November until the first Wednesday in November, and it was delightful). Ever since, we get weekly mailings from the Republican Party asking for "just" $50. Snort, whatever. Fifty bucks is only "just" anything to Republicans! But the most recent mailing was in a blue, windowed envelope that looked just like a bill, and it had "PAST DUE" stamped on it in red.

Like I'm some kind of flagrant bill ignorer! I ripped it open (yes, it was addressed to BJ but I do the bills in this house, and he hasn't touched mail that wasn't a magazine or something from Amazon in months - and if the postal police come after me for that, they're probably going to have to go after half of every other married or partnered couple in the country) without looking at the return address. I saw the figure ($50) and my heart-rate skyrocketed. "How did I miss a bill for fifty bucks??" I chastised myself, as I flipped it over to see who it was from.

The Republicans.

So I chat BJ, "Did you promise the clucking Republicans money??" I asked. I may or may not have used a word that rhymes with one of those words...

"No..."

Then I started ranting about how seriously sneaky and dirty and underhanded it is to send a "past due" notice asking for a contribution, and how there are probably old people with poor eyesight who pay these things without reading the fine print (that you don't actually owe them money, nothing is due, past or otherwise). Dirty pool, folks, dirty pool.

I called the 800 number listed on the "bill" and no one answered. I was not surprised.

And then I got an e-mail from an appliance parts distributor to the blog's e-mail address, that included the words "FINAL OFFER" in the subject line.

I just wrote back to that one and said, "I don't think the scope of my blog includes appliance parts," even though they were offering me money.

Let's just be clear, I am completely for sale, but it has to be at least tertiarily related to kids or parenting or school or toys or something that has something to do with Pretty Babies. I mean, if Scholastic or Toys R Us or Disney or The Children's Place or Kohl's or any number of fine retailers wants to come along and offer me product and/or cash to pimp their wares to you, I will start dressing like this guy (Weird Al?). I will sell right out for free clothes, Beloved Readers, because these kids are growing faster than I can keep clothes on their butts, and I mean that quite literally. Mary Grace has already outgrown the jeans I bought her a month ago!

I feel like we're close enough, like we have an honest and open enough relationship that I can tell you that and you'll still respect me. I mean, you'd do the same to me, right? Come on, if someone offered you $100 worth of cute kids' clothes, you'd throw me under the bus.

But appliance parts?

Maybe I'll start a spin off blog - Stuff You Should Purchase - and I'll throw all the appliance parts and whatnot up there. That way I can maintain my "integrity" as a blogger, and still get money. Best of both worlds.

In other commerce-related news, I've opened an Amazon Affiliates account, which means that if I link to something... Like, oh, this Kindle right here, and you click on my link and buy it, I get a little bit of money.

I can even make fancy pictures, like this:



So, um, ACT NOW! Supplies are Limited! You are Past Due for buying your favorite reading enthusiast a Kindle! (Actually, I have one and it would make a fantastic Christmas gift for anyone who loves to read).

Kids love to read. See how I sewed that all up, there? Related to kids? Check. Disclosure? Check. Integrity? In tact. Hooray!

Holiday Gift Idea - Prima Princessa

It's October 25, which means that Christmas will be here in two short months.

That makes my head hurt.

Fear not! If you have little girls in your life, I've got a super gift idea. It's the Prima Princessa Nutcracker video!

We also have the first Prima Princessa video - Swan Lake - but since we're talking about Christmas, I thought I'd feature the Nutcracker one, instead. (Disclosure: The fine folks at Prima Princessa sent me both of the DVDs free of charge so that I could review them and tell you about them).

My kids love both of our Prima Princessa videos. I feel good about letting them watch these videos, too, because they're educational, unlike other princess videos we own which are merely entertaining. Mary Grace loves ballet, and when she watches these videos she's exposed to classical music, ballet terms and phrases, and even French (pas de chat is a ballet move, and the name is French).

I thought about giving away the videos, but we honestly love them too much. I can't part with them. So if you want them for your own princess, you can get them at Amazon.com. The Nutcracker is here and Swan Lake is here. As you'll see, they have great reviews at Amazon too.

So if you have little girls in your life, I highly recommend that you order a copy of The Nutcracker for them for Christmas, which is only two months away. Eek.