That's My Bix!

Well, it was another sort of horribly unfun but very productive weekends at Casa Weetabix, although it did have its highlights. I did make it back out for some uninterrupted shopping on Friday night, scoring a new shower curtain liner at Bed, Bath and Beyond (gah, I am absolutely frothing at the bit waiting for them to open one in GB so I don’t have to drive forty minutes just to get my kitchen gadget fix) as well as replenishing my Body Butter supply just in time for autumnal dryness. I still have not replaced my smashed-at-Journalcon Prescriptives foundation because the girl who was working at the counter was the same girl who was there a few weeks ago, when I stopped in and was given attitude as though she really wasn’t interested in talking to me nor selling me a damned thing. Fine. Lanc’me is starting to look like a viable alternative and has the added benefit of being available in town.

It was, however, an evening fraught with suspense. I saved myself from a splurge purchase of a very impractical purse at Banana Republic and then I narrowly escaped getting into a bitch fight with the counterperson at Godiva. She was a step away from the normal snooty Godiva salesperson, who is either posh reserved saleslady with a subtle European accent (and I imagine that she is possibly the princess of a small European country like Luxemburg or perhaps Lichtenstein but now is working in the US in efforts to increase her nation’s GNP, gambling at life and love along the way) or a giggling inept salesgirl who can’t understand what the big deal is anyway. No, this one had teased cotton candy blonde hair with jet-black roots and was wearing a kitty sweater. She immediately got my dander up when she tried to school me on each of the chocolates. Excuse me? I can differentiate between the subtle grace notes of certain batches of the vanilla caramels. I can wax eloquent on the white chocolate candy cane truffle of Aught Two. I have currently in my freezer four Godiva banana truffles stored away in case of nuclear emergency. Bitch, please. I am so not going to bow down to you like some apologetic fat girl. I am too old to be playing petty power games with some minimum wage lackey and sorry, sweetie, you cannot fend off menopause by applying tarantula mascara and three layers of orange cake foundation that stops at your jaw line, but thank you for playing.

By the time I drove home, I was exhausted and crawled into bed where I managed to watch exactly two minutes of the Tivo and then fall into a drooling coma. We slept a little too late on Saturday, but then woke up quickly and ran out the door to make it to the window place where we picked out twelve replacement windows for the house. Ouch. It’s sad that it costs so much for something that is essentially an absence. It’s paying for something to not be there. Man, I could totally party like a rock star with that cash, but yeah, sure, argon filled windows sound much more fun than plus sized pink leather pants and I’m certain that they will be hours of entertainment. In fact, my grandchildren (or grandnieces) will undoubtedly gather around our windows and say, ‘Show us again! Open the window with one finger! Tilt them in for cleaning! Wheee!’

We hurried out of the window place to run back across town to the house, where I scooped up Tilly and brought her to the vet for her yearly inspection/poking. Poor Tilly. She was a trooper, though, quite honestly. Four pokes and she didn’t even flinch. I had a sad moment sitting in the vet’s office remembering my sweet kitty Chelsea’s last day, and then my maudlin brain almost paired with my logic and talked me into adopting one of the nine adorable kittens in the waiting room. Had the little boy buff tiger (who was so adamant about tearing my right hand to ribbons) actually been a girl, his name would be Mabel and he would be probably mauling my Gatsby bear this very minute.

I believe that if all pets were named after old people, the world would be a much happier place. And besides, Cujo wouldn’t have been half as scary a book had the dog’s name been Dolores, and then the Saint Bernards wouldn’t be unduly persecuted by stupid people. But then, I have a serious soft spot in my heart for Saint Bernards. (Or maybe a hard spot caused by eating too much Godiva.)

After the vet, I brought Tilly back home where she had a half-hour emotional eating session, power-bingeing on kibble, and then proceeded to remove everything out of the kitchen save the refrigerator and freezer, as they didn’t fit through the dining room door and were too heavy for us to lift down the stair into the garage by ourselves. After that, we rushed around to get ready for Esteban’s cousin’s wedding, which was held in the basement of a parochial school and had a serve yourself bar. It was my first authentic Belgian wedding and was truly entertaining. There was no DJ, just a mix CD on repeat played over the school’s sound system (undoubtedly accustomed to broadcasting the Hokey Pokey or the attendance policies) and I had to tromp upstairs to pee in a pink bathroom stall best suited for third graders. But it was a delightful evening, just the same, and I got to banter with Esteban’s parents and favorite Aunt and Uncle and when he made a joke about not knowing whether one of the grandbabies was a boy or a girl because she was wearing yellow and he needs those kind of visual clues. I was wearing a blue twinset, so I said ‘Well, I’m wearing blue’ am I a boy or a girl?’ And he stuttered and then his wife said matter-of-factly, ‘Well, just look at that cleavage! There goes your whole theory!’ which then prompted an eruption of hysterical laughter from the entire table while both his uncle and I blushed furiously.

We cut out early because with the mix CD on the third revolution (there are only so many times you can listen to Boston’s ‘Amanda’ without going totally insane) and the fascinating ambiance which included a wall of DEAD NUNS staring down at us disapprovingly (ok, they weren’t dead when the photos were taken, but they are certainly dead now) it was not quite our idea of a good time. However, apparently our idea of a good time was to go home and crawl into bed declaring to the world how much our various parts ached and how much we wished that the refrigerator and freezer could sprout legs and walk themselves out into the breezeway.

In the morning, we went out for breakfast (since we had no choice, given that every heat source was unplugged and stashed in the dining room) and then returned to unload the refrigerator. With help of our excellent friend Markus and a few odd tools to remove handles, we had fully evacuated the kitchen. Esteban sent me to Tarzhay for a mop bucket while he swept and did dusty stuff. This was dangerous territory, given that it was Tarzhay and it had been a sort of unfulfilling weekend and I usually comfort myself by shopping for frivolous things (cute Mizrahi sunglasses? For $15? Insert salivation here.) but I managed to get out the door without delay and with bucket in hand. Ok, I did splurge and buy the $4.99 bucket rather than the $2 or 99 cent buckets but what is life if you can’t treat yourself like a princess?

Esteban scrubbed the floor to prep it for the installers and I ran around the house trying to clean up extraneous rooms for the Window Measuring Guy. This was a lot easier than it sounded, as the library/Computer Room #2 was completely trashed and the Actual Computer Room was a relapsed victim of Esteban’s CTSA (Can’t Throw Stuff Away) disorder. I spent the rest of the day trying to deal with the (fucking) laundry and pick up anything that would be potentially embarrassing (like our Easy Bake Meth Lab and our Pornographic Lite Brite: Ron Jeremy edition) until it was dark outside and I just didn’t care anymore if the Window Measuring Guy saw our cache of VHS ‘Mystery, Alaska’ ‘Xanadu’, and ‘Galaxy Quest’ stacked next to Esteban’s desk. So I went out the garage, got myself an Oreo Klondike bar and then ensconced myself in my bedroom and tried to get lost in the world of saucy runway coaches, Janice Dickenson, Tyra Bank’s strength in the face of torture (she had to wear size 7 shoes, y’all!) and the blind model’s negagivity. Which is apparently the science of stealing things. But I digress.

This just in’ actually, the floor. The floor is in. I haven’t seen it yet. Because I seem compelled to immerse you in my construction hell, here’s what it looked like yesterday. Yes. That was my floor for eight years. Feel my pain, people.

Things are crazy at Casa Weetabix right now. I had grand plans for the weekend, as I have not yet truly recovered from the previous weekend craziness. I wanted to finish up some of my own projects and maybe do some shopping, but as it turned out, I was not the master of my destiny, or at very least, was not the mistress of my weekend (say my name, bitch!). My itinerary: I had wanted to repaint the front door and also scrap the forty-year-old flaking grey paint off the breezeway door and prime that, but ended up instead cleaning out the dining room (aka Where Craft Projects Go To Die) instead. This was a fairly entailed project, as the dining room was sort of horribly cluttered. However, since one must tramp through the dining room to get to Computer Room #2 (soon to be renamed My Office) and tomorrow, there will be much work done on this room, the cleaning of the dining room became a priority.

After filling two 55-gallon trash bags with random crap, I managed to quell the restless storm of good intentions into four big storage containers and shove them into Computer Room #1 (which contains all of our books/shelves and also the stuff that will eventually reside in Computer Room #2/My Office). Of course, that action itself required several hours of organizing to make room for the storage containers, although during that time, I discovered an extra dining room chair (I thought we only had one secondhand chair that went with the secondhand table, but apparently we have two) and also my teenage diary in which I was apparently very very distraught and also incredible overly dramatic. Ok, so I spent an hour rereading that, getting angry at how messed up my world was then (through no fault of my own) and amazed at how different my life is now. In fact, I can honestly say that I don’t think my sixteen-year-old self would recognize my life now.

On Sunday, I worked on the dining room stuff, ran with Esteban to the home improvement store for yet more supplies, and then worked on the areas of my house which do not currently resemble a war zone.

It’s as though the house can sense that I am making progress at putting it back in order, because the bathroom has decided to rebel. First the tub wouldn’t drain (which I fixed with a ton of drain opener and hot water and a plunger), and then the toilet tank doesn’t want to refill with water after a flush, necessitating the random jiggling of the inner works until you hear the tank start to refill. And I discovered that the shower liner had decided to no longer be waterproof, so after our showers, there is a three foot puddle on the bathroom floor.

In solidarity with my house, my body has decided to plan its own coup as well. I had a spontaneous nosebleed in the shower this morning. Like, what the hell is THAT about? The overwhelming scent of Dove body wash overcoming my sinuses? Actually, I blame the Aveda Color Conserve shampoo/conditioner that I selected this morning. I rarely use it because I don’t like how it smells (but the Victoria’s Secret shampoo? Thumbs up!) and perhaps it was the cause of the reenactment of Hitchcock’s Psycho, with the blood swirling around the drain and everything. At first I was sort of happy for the serendipity, because hey, is there a better place to get a mysterious bloody nose? And now I can tell you with certainty that yes there is and it involves a tissue or something so that the blood doesn’t run back into your open mouth, which you have open because you can’t breed troo your dose.

Also, my face is shouting “Viva La Resistance!” as it has countered with the biggest chin zit in all the land. I mean, it’s so big that it hurts, like, all the time. It’s crazy. Also, today the Indian contractors are going back to India and are therefore walking around taking everyone’s picture as though we are characters in a theme park. They’ve taken three of me so far, standing next to me smiling. I’m certain they think I’m a descendant of Buddha or something. Either that or they’re impressed with my rack. It’s a tough call. But I am pleased that evidence of my chin zit will be making the rounds in Calcutta.

This is what I get for being too lazy to wash my face properly with The Soap and resorting to Dove’s premoistened facial towelettes instead. I have been duly chastised and have learned my lesson.

Although, it might just be a Splenda Head.

The woman who lives on the other side of my cubicle has verbal diarrhea. She also feels the need to narrate her entire day to no one in particular. She will also just stand up and lob non-sequiturs over our cursed three-quarter wall and because I am facing my computer to do a quaint little thing I like to call ‘work’, I cannot escape. She will keep talking at me while I work. My mama taught me to be a painfully polite person in most situations, so I feel compelled to distractedly say ‘Mmmhmm’ and grunt attentively when she pauses, but most of the time, I just want her to shut the hell up. Just work in silence. Please. Please. For the love of God please.

The worst is when she’s trapped someone else and starts babbling at them and then they make an excuse to walk away while she’s in the middle of her story. She’ll just turn and finish telling the story to me. The story I wasn’t even listening to in the first place. Perhaps she assumes that conversations involve everyone in earshot because when someone stops by my desk to talk to me, she’ll jump up and insert herself into the conversation or just blatantly change the subject all together about some insipid and inconsequential aspect about her own life.

I have taken to transcribing her inanity to make a type of prose poetry, blatantly typing it out while she is obliviously orating. What follows is an example:

My coworker would like you to know that
she’s sorry that she took so long
but she went to the bathroom
and she went to the stall down by the end
And the toilet wasn’t flushed
and so she flushed it
and then the water rose
all the way up to the top
but it didn’t go over
no it didn’t
and so she had to go tell someone
and that is why she took so long
and but luckily it didn’t overflow
because that would have taken even longer
and oh she forgot to go potty
and she’ll be right back
and isn’t that funny to go through
all of that and not
go potty?

And another, this a direct dictation, apropos of nothing:

When I make noodles
I just put butter on ’em
a little cheese…
butter and salt, ya
and salsa?

You should try it with salsa

And a little… ah, awesome
as a side dish

my salsa had zucchini
a bunch of peppers
brown sugar
and ah
just a really different tasting salsa
but so good

I remember
the second time I made it
I was cutting up the peppers?
ya, the peppers and…
and didn’t put no gloves on
ah
oh my hands?
were burnt up to here
I had to sleep with ice packs
oh
of course you don’t
feel it while you’re doing it

It’s like working next to Rainman, only not as interesting. Feel my pain. Seriously.

I’m going to hell for posting this.

I had a lovely weekend, as weekends go. On Thursday evening, Penny, Carissa and I went out for fondue and martinis and laughter to celebrate Penny’s impending nuptials. I had taken off on Friday in anticipation of The Bar That Is Badness, but Penny had too many wedding things to do and begged off, so I managed to get to sleep at a reasonable hour.

I spent my morning off refining my freelance project and then the afternoon going for one last swim in the parent’s pool before they close it down for the winter. It was out of principle. Sure, it was a blustery 70 that felt like 60 but under the water it was a tropical 93. June made us dinner and then pouted because I was having one of my meat squicks and just ate mashed potatoes, a dinner roll, and a brownie (So very nutritious!) and had to be convinced that five other people were happily eating chicken and just because I wasn’t, didn’t mean that it was inedible. I didn’t even TRY it, so it wasn’t like I was passing judgment on her chicken, but rather the fact that it WAS chicken. Gah. Parents.

After dinner, I cut out to return home where Penny stopped over for movies and libations as I painted her nails a bridal purple sparkly (it worked, seriously) and we watched a movie and allowed the Keebler Elves to show us how much they love us via fudge shortbread.

I managed to get to bed at a decent hour (wow, so much sleep this weekend! It was absolutely glorious), woke up and then went off to run wedding errands, drop off/pick up the dry cleaning, and get fresh batteries for my camera. Back at home, I attempted to catch up on some (fucking) laundry but then the dryer was making a funny clunking sound. I shrugged, figuring that I must have missed the Downy ball when transferring loads, but then when I emptied the dryer, I found that the fuschia bra I had planned to wear with my fuschia/black sweater twinset now had an angry slash through the cup, as though my left breast had gotten tired of all this constraint and fashioned a shiv of some nature and started living up to its name by busting the hell out.

And after some investigation, I determined that one of the weird ledge thingies (which make the inside of your dryer ribbed for the pleasure of your wet and naughty clothing) has partially become detached from the big round spinny thing. How’s that for technical! So I may have ripped to hell out of some of my clothing. I’m afraid to look, quite frankly. I noticed that one of the towels from a previous load is shredded too.

I explained this to Esteban and said, ‘So now I can’t do (fucking) laundry!’ and he responded blithely ‘No, now you can’t dry it! You can still hang it!’

And for that, I hated him just a little bit. Because apparently in his naivete he feels, nay believes that a six-foot length of rope strung across two rafters in a spider-infested basement with no ventilation can easily accommodate our (fucking) laundry needs. Silly Esteban. Silly na’ve hairy manchild with no clue how the world works. Some days, I direly wish I were blissfully ignorant as well.

Thus, I managed to get dressed without wearing the properly coordinated bra with my outfit, but managed to look quite spiffy just the same. And the wedding was lovely. I was happy that I had respectfully declined the invitation to sing a song at the wedding, because I was busy directing traffic or making CDs or steaming dresses or delivering a wedding cake or taking pictures or setting tables or relaying messages or making out with the maid of honor to even think about learning a Penny-approved song and finding a karaoke version of said song and then delivering something more than a breathless croak when the big moment came. And she wouldn’t let me do my fabulous rendition of The Divinyls’ ‘I Touch Myself’ for some reason.

Anyway, it was a lovely ceremony, a lovely reception, and our ‘Dancing Queen’ choreography, while still appallingly amateur, was quite a hit. And also, the hottie Marky Mark-looking bartender bought me a drink while sans Esteban. Of course, Esteban sauntered up later and drinkblocked me. That Esteban! Winning no points this weekend. Good thing that he’s a wildcat in the sack to make up for it.

Yesterday was oddly freeing with the (fucking) laundry completely out of my hands. Instead, I made great headway on my second battle of the season with the Evil Rosebush (thwarted only by the fact that there were bees guarding the one lone thistle, so I couldn’t reef on the m’lange the way I would have liked). It fought back valiantly, drawing blood no fewer than five times, including a rather impressive set of parallel scratches on my arm and two rather obstinate thorns that managed to make their way through my thick rawhide Rosebush Fightin’ gloves. I filled half of the truck bed with ex-Rosebush. There’s still a formidable thicket there, but people, I am but one woman and even I must rest and drink chilled Dasani while flipping through catalogs and watching Mean Girls. But tomorrow is another day.

I like to think that I’m a pretty rational person. When I get on a plane, I don’t worry about it crashing (sure, I might think I’m going to die on that trip, but I’m not pinning the fear directly upon a fiery plane crash. I might just as easily get a knife thrust in the gullet by a crazy homeless person or trip and somehow manage to incur swelling on the brain and then there’s always the threat of the flesh eating virus, which would probably find my luscious curvage quite alluring.) And everyone has rational fears, such as losing a loved one or a house fire or whatever. Those are pretty normal. I have several irrational fears, though, and now I’m starting to wonder how many irrational fears does it take before one can officially be considered neurotic. Let’s tally, shall we?

Basements. I really don’t like basements. We have lived in our little bungalow for almost eight years and as basements go, it’s got a nice cheery little one. With one exception’ the area behind the stairs. There’s storage back there, and I’ve got it shoved full of Christmas decorations, but even still, I’m always certain that there is a man lurking back there in the shadows, snooping in my garland and tinsel. I still take those stairs two at a time about once a month. But if the stairs were open and it were possible for a hand to snake out between the steps and possibly grab an ankle, I would run up them every damn time and perhaps be very fit and athletic because of it.

Bridges. This is only minimal, which is good because I live in a port town and there’s a big giant river that splits it in half. However, if I’m driving over a bridge, particularly one of the two tall highway bridges, I think about losing control of the car and going over the side. I judge if the guards could stop my car at 55 mph. At 65 mph. At 45 mph. I plan if I should jump or just stay in the car. I wonder if I should unbuckle my seatbelt as I go over so that it doesn’t lock and trap me underwater, or if I should keep it buckled so that I don’t slam up against the steering wheel. I wonder if the airbags would trigger. I have dreams about driving over bridges into nothing and then the taste of river water and the icy cold inside my clothes. I think I didn’t take a class during winter semester at Oshkosh because on the way there is a very long bridge with flimsy guardrails across a huge lake and it’s at least a mile and the whole thing just makes me tense. And if I’m walking over a bridge, forget it. I’m certain that I’m going to lose my purse, keys, something over the side. When I was a kid, my aunt used to take me to Pamperin Park, which had a ridiculously high slat bridge on chains, so not only could you see through the slats down to the water (and presumably fall through if you were small and maybe if the circumstances were juuuuust right) but also some jackass fifth grader (because when you’re a kid, fifth grade is the cultivation of jackasses) would be at the end, shaking the damned bridge with all they had, making the middle do a sickening tumble as though it were possible to twist and dump everything into the murky depths below. Gah. No wonder I’m traumatized.

Bats. Bats freak me out. I think I was traumatized when I was six and we lived on our horse farm in sleepy little Lena, Wisconsin. Our house was ancient and my stepfather was trying to fix the stupid things that had been done to it in the past hundred years, so the bathroom was in a state of chaos. And one brisk fall evening, while I was happily ensconced in the tub, playing with my rubber duck (seriously, I really had one. It had a flat back for holding a bar of soap, but which was also handy for crafting elaborate rescue scenarios for my menagerie of tub toys), I saw a shadow on the floor. I looked up and saw a giant fucking black bat. (In fact, it was so startling that my normally chaste and demure six-year-old brain said to itself ‘A fucking bat!’) And I am not exaggerating about the size either. It had a wingspan of at least a foot. Apparently I screamed so loudly that the neighbors half a mile up the road heard it and came running with their gun, thinking someone had just been murdered. Of course, the bats fear has now transferred to include Moths, because of their scarily similar flight patterns and also the way that moths turn into vampires.

Clowns. You knew that was coming. Who isn’t afraid of them? Thank you very much Steven Spielberg and your damned Poltergeist movie.

Cutting the back of my ankle Yup. That one came out of left field, didn’t it? I am so haphazard when shaving my legs except when I get to the back of my ankles, when I get all slow and serious. I’ve even devised a method to reduce the likelihood of cutting that fragile area’ I place the razor above the back of my ankle, run it backwards down my leg and then shave back up. It seems to work, but I still cringe every damned time. In fact, it has transferred out of the shower and sometimes I will be sitting at my desk working and then think ‘Oh no! Nicking the ankle! Ahhh!’ and that’s just not right. I know that this stems back to my senior year in high school when I managed to somehow slice a chunk out of my ankle and it wouldn’t stop bleeding for over an hour. The mark didn’t fade until sophomore year in college. That and Breaking My Teeth are the only physical injuries that really freak me out.

Feet. This isn’t really a fear. I just don’t like them. However, sometimes I worry that I’ll have to touch someone’s feet and then I get a little tense.

Popping the Can of Pillsbury Refrigerated Biscuit Dough See, here’s where it’s starting to get neurotic. I think it’s the suspense with this one. Will it pop? Will it explode? What if I have to get a Sawz-All to get it out of there? You just don’t know. It is out of your control. A seriel killer could pop out of that tube and there’s just nothing you can do about it.

So your thoughts’ am I neurotic yet? Does the Biscuit Dough Can thing put me over the edge? How about this then: Squeezing the Last Bit of Something Thick out of a Squeeze Bottle. Like, when you’re trying to get the last bit of lotion out? Or maybe some dishwasher detergent? It doesn’t just bother me’ I get tense just anticipating that sound. I tip bottles upside down long before they really need to be, just to ensure that there will be a ready supply and no need to engage the ‘Unnnnttthtp! Uuuunnnnpthtph!’ noise. I’ve tried to figure out what and the closest thing I can think of is that maybe it reminds me of painful constipated poops. Freud would just snort and remind everyone that he told us so seventy years ago and then tell me about how I wished I had a penis.

The comments section wants to know what your irrational fears are.

I’m in a weird cooking mood, undoubtedly stirred up by the cooler temperatures. Last week, I bought two teensy eggplants at the farmer’s market, for no reason other than the fact that they looked really cute. They were just so’ wee! And also, I sort of love the way eggplants look. They are a very showy vegetable, quite honestly. They look intentional, whereas so many other vegetables just look like an accident. For example, rutabegas are the certainly wallflowers of the plant kingdom, but their best friends are carrots and beans and jicama. And potatos look more like dirt and rocks than something that could possibly transition into a nice cheesy fluffy kartoffle souffle. But eggplants are showgirls, kicking their purple fishnet stockings high above the footlights.

Of course, I didn’t quite know what to do with the eggplants. I would have been fine with just setting them in the kitchen for the sole purpose of making me happy until they started to go funky. To add to my delight, Esteban walked by them and said ‘Oh, aubergines!’ When I first met him, he thought Mexican food was the stuff you got at Taco Bell and now he’s so continental that he’s referring to eggplants as aubergines. It’s the Weetabix Spousal Culturfication Project, with a turnaround time of a mere fifteen years.

So I made actual official Eggplant Parmesan with them. Just a small portion for me, as Esteban is not fond of the plant which is egg. Or rather refuses to try it. Sometimes it would be so much easier if he could be fooled by loading up a fork and making airplane sounds as it gets closer to his mouth. Ah well, his loss, as it was fucking delicious and I’m still sort of reveling in the wonder that is my cooking oeuvre. And then I wonder why my ass is ginormous. Gah.

This weekend, I got the biggest butternut squash I have ever seen for a DOLLAR. It’s got to be ten pounds or more. I had to heft it around the farmer’s market like a sullen toddler, switching it from the crook of my arm to my hip, to over my shoulder. Again, I haven’t any clue what I’m going to do with it, but hey, it was a DOLLAR. I’m thinking I might try squash soup or something. Or maybe hollow out a small yet adorable canoe and then set my cat in it and take pictures and then howl with laughter as she looks at me with complete disdain. But we shall see.

Esteban is pissed at the office of our local Democratic party. On Saturday, while I was at the Farmer’s Market, he stopped at our Senator’s office, figuring he could show his support for Russ with some yard signs on our corner and hoped that maybe being a Democratic Senator, they would also have some Kerry/Edwards signs as well. No dice. So he drove to the Kerry/Edwards office, figuring that he could pick the signs there and also pick up some extras to bring back to the Feingold office. It appears that the Kerry/Edwards office is not only completely without yard signs but they aren’t expecting to get any in until mid-October ‘er,’sometime.’ They are disturbingly unconcerned about this matter. So each time we drove past the Democratic office over the weekend, Esteban could not help but shout ‘Stupid idiot fuckers’ or some variation therein. He is very well spoken, non? Later, I pointed out that given that we were driving one of the Chryslers, they probably assumed we were Republicans and weren’t compelled to be introspective about why we as Kerry supporters might find our area campaign officials to be idiot fuckers. And the whole thing is sort of a reminder that the Republicans wouldn’t have allowed to happen. They’d charge a daycare and have kindergarteners finger-painting for freedom or something and it would be a fabulous photo opportunity, whereas the Dems are all casual and surfing the internet, looking for cheap fares to Taos. The Republicans run a campaign like a military maneuver and the Democrats run it like a damned bake sale and it’s absolutely maddening to watch it happen.

Being a liberal with a type A personality is difficult at times.

I spent most of Saturday trying to finish projects, as fall is fast upon us and I know that I’m never going to get everything done and will be forced to spend yet another winter with a peeling mudroom door and an eyesore of a potting shed. The wishlist for Saturday involved finishing the white trim around the new red door, perhaps scraping and priming the mudroom door, and also tackling the evil rosebush again. I spent a very long time taping off the trim around the oval window and then ran to the Hundred Dollar store where I managed to escape only having spent $50, and returned with a new paint brush, paint and primer, as well as saw horses for the scraping of the door project. I then set about priming the door and painting it, doing loads of (fucking) laundry in between coats.

We then discovered that we had exactly .3 rolls of toilet paper left, so Esteban and I ran some errands and then went to Target. Esteban pulled up and said ‘Ok, I’m going to drop you off’ just run in and get the toilet paper.’

‘Um, I have to get a baby gift for our friends too.’

‘Ok, check’ toilet paper and baby gift. I’ll wait right here.’

‘And also wrapping paper.’

‘Right’ wrapping paper. I’ll be waiting for you. Hurry.’

‘Um’ I can’t.’

‘You can’t what?’

‘I can’t hurry. Not in Target. I can’t. Target mesmerizes me somehow and I-I-I just sort of wander, zombie-like, throwing things into my cart that I think I need. I just can’t help myself. I can’t hurry. I can’t. Not in Target. I can’t. I wish I could, but they know me too well, those Target bastards. It’s physically impossible for me to get out of there quickly. It’s just too’too’ tantalizing.’

And that’s when he nodded and patted my knee and then started doing his impression of Milton from Office Space, as that is apparently what I sounded like. This of course made me laugh because the line about the squirrels getting married kills me every time. And then I went into Target and had the self-fullfilling prophecy and walked out with the baby gift, the wrapping paper, the toilet paper, new sheets (on clearance!), nine tea towels (also on clearance and all retro and cute and embroidered with dancing tomatoes which will go nicely with my embroidered dancing utensil tea towels) and also Sims 2.

**Warning: If you have not yet purchased Sims 2 and want to get anything accomplished in the next six months, stay far far away from Sims 2! It will suck you in! You will have grown old and real flies will be buzzing around your kitchen and your hygiene meter will be all red and no one will want to make the woohoo with you.**

When we returned, I decided that I’d put just one more coat of white paint on the door. And that’s when I splooched a giant stream of white glurt across the red paint. I busted into the kitchen for a wet towel to rub it off, but it had immediately baked onto the door, which had been exposed to hot sun all day. Thus, while I had been vacillating about painting another coat of red on the door? Well, yeah, decision made. Also, when I pulled up the tape later, the white had bleed under the tape and marred the red around the window too. So yeah. Next time, I’m sending the damn thing to a Maaco and having them paint it for $15 like my father-in-law did with his.

Then we made chipolte burritos, parked on the sofa and watched Matrix Resurrection (which was so not good) until it was dark and I played Sims 2 some more and then went to bed, where we slept until very very late and I woke up feeling crampy and grumpy and fragile and hello would you like some estrogen with your eggs this morning? Gah.

I spent the majority of Sunday in a miserable pained funk, enjoying the mystique of womanhood by mainlining Advil Liqui-Gels and trying to help one of my Sims realize his dream of having 3 lovers at the same time as well as making exhibitionist Sim love. And also did more (fucking) laundry, which is still not done. And there’s a white streak on my front door. So yeah. Happy Monday.