CamiKaos

I know I wasn’t the only one suffering from a savage case of the Mondays because @mettadore and @kmcdade seemed to be having a problem with it too.

Yesterday was just so very Mondaytastic.  I haven’t had a day so very ingrained in the tradition of monday suckage in such a long time.  Truth is, normally monday isn’t such a bad day for me.  I get up early and that’s not my favorite thing, but once I get K to school and Mike out the door to work I am afforded the opportunity to have some me time, something that I never get on the weekends.

That was not the case with this particular Monday.  The art program I’m helping with at K’s school hit an absolute shit storm and I panicked and was a little less than pleasant.  I think everything worked out well by the end of the day but the really craptastic side effect was that I got nothing done at home that I wanted to.  I spent the entire morning and early afternoon on the phone with various art program related people.

In the midst of all that crazy crap, my darling friend came for a visit.  She pumped me up and let me vent.  We shouted obscenities together and called people names and then we giggled and ate chicken salad sandwiches and fresh pineapple.

That part of the day wasn’t too bad… I rather enjoyed spending time with my friend (who as we speak is incubating an adorable little baby in her tummy that I am sure fawn over as soon as she comes out).

I guess what I’m saying is that one Monday is quite enough for me… can we skip the rest of the Mondays until next year?

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No, I wasn’t talking to you.  Why would I call you and asshole, you haven’t done anything to me.  Unless… unless it was you that stole George, our garden gnome.  We got home from Dim Sum Sunday afternoon with friends only to find an empty place in the rose garden where his tiny little feet once rested.

This is George the morning of our first snow flurry in December…

I got him over the summer and named him George because that was Mike’s grandfather’s name.  Grandpa George used to make benches, birdbaths and gnomes out of concrete, so it seemed fitting.

We looked out the front window and said good morning to him often, and we judged the extremity of the snow fall these past weeks by how much of George was still visible.  K created a little fantasy world for him, once he was covered by the snow completely K insisted that he had a little cave in beneath the snow with a sofa and a Wii.

Now I’m well aware that there are those that think it’s absolutely adorable to STEAL a gnome and travel with it, taking photos and taunting the owners with postcards from the gnomes travel.  There are people who like to go around swapping out people’s yard ornaments, or putting some other art piece in it’s place, there are kids who take things from people’s yards to decorate their rooms.

Assholes, all of them.  It’s still theft and I am pissed off.

What makes me more angry than anything though, is that K is so terribly upset.  When we told her George was gone she cried great big tears.  She loved that gnome, but him not being HERE is not what she was crying about.  She feels sad and hurt that something belonging to us is gone.   She insisted that the heart shaped stepping stone she made for us be brought inside because it’s not safe out there.

“They might come back and take it mom!”

It’s a lesson we all learn at some point, but still.  I’m pissed.

I’m planning to make a sign to put in a yard pointing out that George was stolen from a loving 6 year old girl and asking that he be returned.

Will it do any good?  Hahahahahahaa.  No I’m guessing not, but I’m going to anyway.  Any suggestions on what it should say are welcome, but I’m planning to point out that they broke a 6 year old’s heart.

What an asshole.

Tags:   angry · gnome · home · pissed off · theft10 Comments

I’m feeling kind of surreal guys.  I know we just went through the whole HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! thing, but really… it’s 2009?

What happened to the year 2000?  Do you remember when we were kids and we looked forward to the year 2000 as some far future time with flying cars when dinosaurs would be cloned from DNA contained inside the glass jar with Edgar Allen Poe’s head? 

What, did we have different childhoods?

Now I have to get used to writing 2009 on the one check I write every month… it’s going to take 9 months for me to accomplish that task without having to void the whole thing and start over again.

My point is, if you can follow me on this, is that the future is here.  Now.  We’re in the 2000s.  We’re are the future and it’s not at all like that horrible Whitney Houston song that was so popular when I was in school or the flying car dino thing.  It’s just life.

Happy 2009 to all of you, savor it… and keep your eyes open for Edgar Allen Poe for me, won’t you?

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I’ve spent the day out and about in the city with friends. First a lunch out downtown, then some diabolical video filming in Southeast. Now I’m exhausted from wearing girlie clothes (high heels and tight bolero jackets can really take their toll).

I ramble…

The real point of this post is to tell all of you Happy New Year, may 2009 be the best year yet.

And to tell my darling husband, love of my life (stop gagging people) happy birthday. I adore you.

Tags:   birthday · mike · new years7 Comments

Since my tattoos are so often visible I’ve grown accustomed to hearing that question, “did that hurt?” or a variation of it most everywhere I go.  I’m safe at family functions because although the rest of my family is not as tattooed as I am, or in most cases not tattooed at all they’ve all asked me about the pain level of my tattoos years ago or were smart enough to know that yes, tattoos most certainly do hurt.

Today though while I was laying in the chair at my hair dressers getting my brows hot waxed and then slowly painfully plucked to perfection it occurred to me to wonder why no one asks if THAT hurts.  I have my brows waxed to look like a natural shape so it isn’t like I’m pencil thin brow girl or Vulcan straight brow girl… but my brows are well shaped and nicely done and I’ve received compliments on them from others.  Not by a ton of people.  Only my husband and a few girl friends, but still.  Brows waxed, look nice, people notice.

No one ever asks if it hurts.

Well even though I get irritated and a little huffy when someone asks if it hurt to get tattooed (or pierced) I think someone should ask me about the pain involved in waxing…

When I was in labor with K one of the Labor and Delivery nurses, upon seeing my back tattoo, told me that this would be a breeze compared to getting a tattoo… I looked at her cross eyed and slightly wild with irritation and asked her how many tattoos she had.

None.  Zero.  Zip.  Zilch.

And how many times had she given birth?  You guessed it.  None.  Zero.  Zip. Zilch.  NEVER.

She was lucky I was busy trying to push a kid out of my body and I didn’t have the time to kick her ass because given the amount of pain I was in during labor (my epidural failed) I kind of felt like hurting an idiot might be a good thing to do.

Does getting my brows waxed hurt as much as child birth?  No, no it doesn’t, but it hurts a hell of a lot more than getting a tattoo on your spine, thanks for asking.

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There’s something all of you should know, and I want to tell you this in no uncertain terms…

Ready for the knowledge I am about to impart to you?  Here it is, hamsters are gross, nasty, unhygienic little fuckers who given the chance will lie around in their own shit all day.

Yucktastic.

Bubba is alive and well.  The cats are miserable because they still can’t be in the guest room.  Mike has been amazingly patient given his dislike of rodents.  And K?  K really doesn’t care much.

She’ll watch if we feed him some fresh veggies but then she quickly scampers away in favor of her new robot dog or our cats.

The bad news is we’ve got almost another week with this smelly little fuzz ball in our house.  Another week of him dragging every ounce of cage lining into his exercise wheel and then trying to run in it like an idiot.  Another week of trying to keep the cats from eating him.  Another week of him dragging his cage lining back out of his wheel again and then trying to get comfy on the hard plastic of his wheel… and then?  Pulling it all back into the Wheel again.  I understand that being a hamster must be a terribly boring and lame existence and I should feel bad that he irritates me so very much… but I don’t.

The good news?  K doesn’t seem to want a hamster anymore and if she ever asks for one I have plenty of reasons to say no.

PS:  He stinks even after I clean his cage but I have to admit that occasionally he is kind of cute.

Tags:   Bubba · hamster · k9 Comments

In the last year I’ve gotten a lot more domestic, kitchen wise.  Maybe it’s that K is a little more self sufficient these days.  Maybe it’s that I’m in my 30’s and am searching for something more than I had in my 20’s.  It could be that my high blood pressure has made me truly conscious of what goes into pre-packaged anything and I’d rather make it myself so I can know what’s in my food…

I’ve always cooked meals from scratch.  I’m not a fan of meals or sides that come in a box because I like to know what I’m eating.  Sweets though, have always been kind of an aside.  Since I knew they weren’t good for me anyway I never bothered to make them anything except a secret guilty indulgence.

Like those hostess cupcakes I spent a couple of months wolfing down.

But in November when my doctor told me to cut out the processed sugars and simple carbs for a while it gave me time to think.  And by time to think I mean I went slowly nuts trying to avoid anything sweet except cutie oranges and pineapple chunks and skipped any carbohydrates other than brown rice and whole grain bread.  Very boring.

I got desperate one day and found a recipe for banana nut bread made with honey and whole wheat flour.  As I carefully made it for the first time I was wearing a white kitchen apron, a little black dress and my favorite pumps, the black ones with the pink stitching.

Why?  Because I was a little sad and dressing up always makes me feel a bit better.  Vain?  Possibly.  But I’ve been doing it since I was a little kid so I’m sticking with it.

On Christmas eve I baked my first, second and third loaf of bread.  Not banana bread, that doesn’t count because it’s batter, not  dough.  There is no rising or folding or magic yeast mumbo jumbo prayer so it’s not real bread.

No.

But the bread I made, 3 loaves of Finnish Cardamom bread, was real bread.  And it was good, really good.  I didn’t wear my high heels while I was doing it, but that will be remedied when I make the next loaves.

So marking bread off the list of things I never make I’m feeling the need to move on to something else.  Something different.  Something chocolaty and from scratch.

But I don’t make dessert.

Ever.

I once made the Bacon Geek a lovely birthday cake with crisp bacon on top, but that was yellow cake from a box with chocolate frosting straight from a can.

Well babies times they are a changing, I have a birthday cake to bake this week and there will not be a box in site when I make it.  My darling man is going to be another year older, and for him, I will make a desert from scratch for the first time ever.  I’ll be wearing my favorite little dress and his favorite pair of tall black boots…

Let’s just hope he can have his cake and eat it to, it would be a shame if I went to all the trouble to bake something that turned out so awful that he couldn’t swallow it… or worse yet, he breaks a tooth on it.  Maybe I should buy one of those cute little aprons Lelo in NoPo makes…  I bet it would imbue me with special baking super powers that those white butcher aprons don’t…

Tags:   apron · birthday · cake · mike8 Comments

For quiet a while I posted a toonlet every Friday.  Some how some time  I got away from that, it probably fell victim to my short attention span just like most things do…

But it’s back with a vengeance this week, and not just because I’m tired with a cold.

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I’m on holiday.

come back next week.

Love you all!

Tags: 2 Comments

I realize that Thanksgiving is the time I’m supposed to be thankful for stuff and things and what not, but I can’t help it that it’s now during the winter holiday that I’m feeling thankful.

Never mind the more than 2 feet of snow settled into our yard.  Forget that I have to cancel my dinner reservations for Christmas day because there may be far too much snow for me to comfortably venture downtown with my little one in tow.  Forget that my whole family has been housebound because of the SNOWPOCALYPSE. Forget that stinky little rodent that’s taken up residence in my guest room.

I’m happy.  I’m thankful.  I’m feeling blessed.

Last night when Mike was at the store he saw a rib eye roast that must have been calling his nme because he scooped it up and brought it home.  When he told me he was getting it I asked him to grab some red potatoes too and he did.  I cooked those up, and some green beans too and we had some friend over to gobble the whole mess up.

It was the best roast I’ve ever had.  It was a beautiful cut of meat and I think I did a great job cooking it (I’m just saying…  it was good), but more importantly I enjoyed sharing it with my friends.  Friends I’ve known since I was 19 years old when I lived next door to them in a crappy townhouse apartment less than 1/2 a mile from where I live now.  They’re not just friends, and I’m not the only one who thinks so.

When they left K said “Mama, T is more like family than just a friend”.

Yes.  Yes she is.  “And so are Reid and Ingrid and G” I told her.  She agreed.

It’s a good thing that when I cancel our reservations for Christmas dinner due to the OMG SNOWGASM2008 we’ll have someone near and dear to share our night (and Gumbo) with.

Reid, Ingrid…  I’m thankful for you, and I swear it’s not just the Pineapple Painkillers talking.

Tags:   family · friends · holidays · rum3 Comments