silliness

Faceplant

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We were on the floor after dinner last night when Jack slammed his face into my stomach (on purpose – he does that).  It was a little harder than usual, so it struck me as funnier than usual, and I started laughing.  A lot.  Somewhat uncontrollably.  Jack backed away from me (which was hilarious), and then he rushed me with a big grin on his face (which set me off again), and then he stood over John and said, “Mama….nuh-nuh-nuh HA!”

And then I died.  I am writing this from the afterlife.  Please write “She died doing what she loved: laughing at her child” on my gravestone.

Half-birthdays – a wonderful excuse to eat cake

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For John’s half-birthday on Monday, I made him us (let’s be real here) a chocolate cake with buttercream frosting and topped it with peanut butter cups.  No baking disasters to report – just yummy yummy chocolate cake.  The frosting was a bit much.  Bonus: the house smelled like chocolate cake for a few hours.

We (I) sang happy half-birthday to John, which he insists wasn’t necessary, but hey – whose fake holiday does he think this is?  We gave Jack three bites of cake, hoping we weren’t dooming ourselves to a toddler on a sugar-high with even that little bit, but he went to bed okay.  Poor exhausted baby – without his nap, he’s awake for 12 hours in a row every day now.

A very merry unbirthday to you

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I have decided that we are going to celebrate half-birthdays in this house, primarily because it’s an excuse to eat cake.  No one is fighting this decision.

We started with Jack.  He turned 18 months on March 26th, and to celebrate, we sang “happy half-birthday to you”, showed him the giant bunny head balloon I found (he likes bunnies, calls them “hops”), and gave him a chocolate-frosted cupcake for breakfast.

Resist the urge

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With a new house comes new stuff, even when we’re trying to avoid buying stuff.  I mean, we’ve been buying (and receiving) PLENTY of baby stuff, but most of that is kind of necessary.  But then we bought a new stove because the existing one was a fire hazard (our new one is so pretty!), and then – THEN – I may have gone a little overboard.

I knew I didn’t need it.  I almost bought one months ago, but talked myself out of it.  Too frivolous.  I’ve lived without it for 39 years – I can live without it now.

Except, apparently, I can’t.  There’s a coffee shop nearby that makes a chai latte that is the closest I’ve tasted to the BEST one I’ve ever had (from Shoe’s Cup and Cork in Leesburg).  They specialize in coffee, not chai, so I asked them what mix they use for the chai and promptly ordered it.  But that’s not all.  Boiling water into a powdered chai mix doesn’t recreate the latte experience.

I ordered a milk frother.

I KNOW.  I’ve become one of THEM.  It makes my chai so good and frothy!  I’ve gone off the deep end.

But that’s not all.  You know what came yesterday?  THIS!

I can hardly contain my glee, I love it so much.  What’s next?  Well, I’m eyeing these super-cute rocket and robot nightlights from Uncommon Goods for the baby’s room, but NO.  THIS HAS TO STOP.  They’re expensive and fall exactly in the category of things a baby doesn’t need (certainly not for that much money), especially when my salary is about to be cut in half, and we’ve been trying so hard not to accumulate things after three years of living light and damn it, I’m not going to ruin our streak because of night lights!

But seriously, how cute are these?

There’s always a letdown

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You know how sometimes taking a shower is a chore?  I don’t get why, but there are plenty of times I just don’t want to.

Some of my reasons:

  • I don’t want to get up, I’m comfortable here.
  • It’s too hard.
  • I’ll have to move my arms a bunch.
  • I’ll do it tomorrow.

And in that mood, once I finally do shower, yeah, it’s a chore.  Get it done, get out, go back to doing whatever I was doing (or not doing) before.  Eh.

But then there are those other times, those times when I step under the hot water and realize my whole life has been waiting for this.  I was meant to be in the shower.  I live here now.  In fact, I’m typing this from the shower.  (Okay, I’m not, but I wish I were.)  The water is hot, the bathroom is warm and steamy, my shampoo smells good, I’m warm and comfortable and no, I’m never coming out.

Whoever invented the hot shower should be celebrated around the world, praised be their name.

But then, the sudden but inevitable betrayal*: the hot water runs out, the water goes cold, and I reach for a towel, sad and bereft.

*All sudden but inevitable betrayals boil down to this:

An apology is warranted

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I am not a pizza snob.  I love pizza of all kinds, from all places.  I don’t love all toppings, but that’s my own personal taste – I don’t care what you put on your pizza.

So we went out to a pizza place last night, and for the first time, I’m questioning whether what we had was really pizza.  I mean, it came out on pizza dough.  It was round (not a requirement, but a helpful visual indicator).  It was flat.  It had crust.  But instead of sauce and cheese, it had mashed potatoes, bacon, and scallions.  That’s it.  It was good, to be sure, but was it pizza?

I’m on the fence.  It certainly didn’t scratch my pizza itch (we’re ordering more traditional pizza tonight), but who am I to say it can’t be called pizza?

Mashed potato pizza, I’m sorry I questioned your bona fides.  I apologize for repeatedly telling John today that you weren’t pizza.  I didn’t mean it.  It was only so I could justify having pizza again for dinner tonight.

I am ashamed.

Seems plausible

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It’s raining.  It’s lovely.  It’s a nice day, with real steady rain falling, dim lighting so I can have my twinkle lights on all day long, and the store had my favorite creamer in stock, so I can have coffee all day.  (I blend decaf and regular together – I can’t handle fully caffeinated coffee all day long.  I’d die of a cracked skull from bouncing off the ceiling.)

It’s pouring, and I can’t concentrate.

Like, how-is-there-that-much-water-up-in-the-sky kind of rain.

Let’s forget this whole water cycle thing – that’s too logical.  REALLY, my neighborhood is in a giant shower.  Some alien has decided it’s time to bathe and I can’t see it (the alien) because a) we’re all really really tiny compared to the giant alien in its giant shower, and b) we’re off to the side of the tub so we’re not in danger of getting stepped on.

Sure, this alien must be taking a really long, really cold shower (it’s been raining for hours), but hey, aliens aren’t like us.  Maybe it prefers cold water.  And the shower is going on for so long because it doesn’t happen all that frequently, and the alien has a lot of dirt to wash off.

That river that’s just a couple of blocks away?  Nah, that’s a trickle of water heading toward the alien’s giant shower drain.

And when the rain stops and the sun comes out, I’ll know that the alien has stepped out of the shower and opened the curtain again.

I should be working.

Unveiling

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Bird and Bird (see Figure A), who have been with us for three years now, have been shy about revealing their true names.

Figure A

I can’t blame them – they’ve basically been itinerant their whole lives.  Why trust the people who can’t be bothered to stay in one place?  Now that Bird and Bird (see Figure B) have joined them, though, they’re thawing a bit, and the four of them have let us in on the secret.  (Also, they gave permission for me to let YOU in.)

Meet Maria, Steve, Natasha, and Bucky, formerly Bird, Bird, Bird, and Bird.

They’re happy to meet you.

New additions

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You all remember Bird and Bird, right?

Bird and Bird joined us when our house was on the market during the holiday season in 2014, and it behooved us to decorate mildly but tastefully.  I bought a little abstract sort of tree and a holiday-ish table runner for the dining room table, a green bough of some kind for the mantle, and Bird and Bird for the counter.  The other decorations didn’t make the cut, but Bird and Bird accompanied us to Annapolis, across the country to Eugene, and back the other way to Providence.  We like them.

Three years into our travels with Bird and Bird, we decided they needed friends.

Meet Bird and Bird:

They are appropriately dressed for the weather, and they’re ready to make friends.

Don’t they look like a fun bunch?

Halloween costume

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The only thing we wanted to do for Halloween this year was walk around the neighborhood and see the decorations.  At the last minute, I decided it was silly of us to wander around on Halloween without costumes, so I checked my closet et voila!  I was able to put a totally serviceable costume together using clothes I already own AND that I actually wear, although not in this particular combination.

Side ponytail, off-the-shoulder sweatshirt, high-top chucks.  I even tight-rolled my jeans for authenticity.  Then I topped it off with an overly patched acid-wash jean jacket.

I wasn’t 100% committed (no blue eyeshadow, no bangs), but I think it told the right story.  John put on a leather bomber jacket and went as my too-old-for-me boyfriend.

How did I miss this?

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A friend of mine at work casually dropped into conversation that he’s seeing a screening of Monty Python and the Holy Grail followed by a Q&A with John Cleese and WHAT IS WRONG WITH MY LIFE THAT I DIDN’T KNOW THIS WAS HAPPENING?

It’s totally not okay that I didn’t find out this was a thing until the tour had passed me by.  I am bereft.

But YOU don’t have to be.

Here’s the tour schedule.  (Hint: it’ll be in DC soon and Louisville the week after.)

I need you all to go and have a wonderful time because I need to live vicariously through you.

I am a fascinating person

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I’m not going to talk about work.  Instead, I will tell you what’s new!

(What’s new?)

Um….we joined a gym!  Again, but for the first time since we moved.  Our gym is less than a mile from our house, and it has oodles of cardio and weight machines and some group classes (although mostly at times I can’t go to because of work) and a scary half-circle-shaped room that’s always dark for spin classes – I’m not going near that.  (Spin classes have too much yelling.  I don’t want to be yelled at all, but I feel like if you’re going to yell, you should at least turn the lights on.  It’s weird.)  And they have 5 or 6 heavy bags, so we can resume our boxing workouts.  Yay!

I lifted weights (and by “weights”, I mean “lightweight dumbbells” – let’s not get crazy here) for the first time in months (since May?) yesterday morning, and I am paying for it today.  It’s the good hurt, but it’s still a hurt.  Oh, and then I sliced my finger on the edge of the sugar container lid that John chipped earlier this week, so that hurts too.  I did NOT bleed in the sugar.  (Much.)  At all!  For reals.  The sugar is not contaminated.  (Much.)  At all!  (I’m sorry -can’t help myself.)

So let’s see…what else is new?

Hm.

Well.

I guess that’s all.

Let’s be honest – my mood was already fine

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It’s a rainy, kind of dank, dark day, but two things just happened that brightened my mood.  First, I got this ridiculous, totally incomprehensible email from a customer:

“It looks like we do not have production turned on. So I need to get your metadata chicken figure production”

Total autocorrect fail, and it’s making me laugh.  Metadata Chicken Figure is the name of my new band.

I responded with, “I can provide my metadata chicken figure production, but not until I receive your grounded sailboat muppet configuration.  I’ll need to make sure they match.”  (No, I didn’t.  But Grounded Sailboat Muppet is the name of my autobiography.)

THEN I saw this picture on Tom and Lorenzo.  It’s the hipsteriest hipster picture that ever hipstered.

Let us count the hipster ways…I get to 7 without even trying.  I am amused.

I decided not to say anything

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I was going to comment on how the mugginess of late summer/early fall here in a house without air conditioning means that gear that gets sweaty and, like, towels don’t always feel completely dry after 24 hours, but I decided that it would sound like I’m complaining, and I’m not, so I won’t.

I was going to say something about how our bedroom is set up in a weird way so that our bed either goes under windows, leaving no room for a dresser (not if we want to be able to open the drawers) or against a wall between two doors, leaving no room for bedside tables so there’s no place for reading lights or glasses of water or even our phones except to put them on the floor, but really that’s an opportunity for us to go find a headboard that has a shelf on it, which we’ve wanted for a long time, so it’s not even a complaint and it’s not worth mentioning.

I was going to mention that I’m not crazy about working until 5pm again – what happened to my afternoons? – but it’s the end of the government fiscal year right now and everyone is running around like chickens with their heads cut off, so long (or at least normal) hours are to be expected, and then I remembered that starting work at 9 instead of 6 means I can exercise in the morning again, which I LOVE, so this is a schedule change I can live with.  Especially since I think I can shift back to earlier hours (maybe 7 to 3?) once it starts getting dark and cold in the early mornings, and then I’ll prefer to run later anyway, so it all works out, and I don’t see the point of bringing it up.

I guess I don’t have anything to say.

A little friend

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Updated with Instagram link.

When we moved to Oregon, Will and Christina gave us a keychain with a little 10th Doctor. Now that we’re leaving, Li’l DT is sharing our adventures.  In a fun twist, he has become OUR companion.

Most of the fun is happening in real time on my Instagram feed (which anyone can see online, without an account, by looking up zannah42 on Instagram.com), but I’ll probably compile the pictures here once we get there.

Here, I’ll make it easy for you.  Go here.  You’ll see the captions (because I always include captions) if you click on an individual picture.

Today is going to be a weird one

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I slept with my contacts in last night.  I feel like that doesn’t bode well for the rest of the day.  I dreamed I had to make pancakes at school, and I was going to be graded both on how good they were AND what terms I was able to get for the mortgage I got for them.  I was worried because I was the last in the class during the taste test and my pancakes were going to be cold.  I was not worried about the mortgage.  While I was waiting for my turn, I found out that the entire school was out of coffee and I had to drink ice water, which I promptly spilled on my slippers – because I was wearing slippers at school – so I had to go barefoot.

To recap: I slept with my contacts in and then had a weird restless night with weird restless dreams.  Oh, and we’re basically in the path of totality for today’s eclipse.  If you don’t hear from me again, it’s because our alien overlords took me away under cover of darkness, decided I was too stupid to keep (since I can’t remember to take my contacts out at night), and left me to wander in the wilderness.

Love at first sight

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I have fallen in love with a pair of shoes.  They’re the ultimate Disney princess shoes, and my heart aches for them.

I saw them on Tom & Lorenzo’s site, and for the first time in my life I was compelled to go to the designer’s website to see more.  If it’s possible to fall further in love, I did when I saw them in midnight blue.

They’re calling out my name.  “Buy me, Zannah!  We’ll be so happy together!”  I don’t have anywhere to wear them or anything to wear them with, but those are tiny details.  Are they comfortable?  Who cares?  (Okay, I do, but let’s put that aside.)  Do they come in narrow?  Probably not.  Are they more than I pay in rent?  …..Yes.  Yes, they are more than I pay in rent.

Drat.

I love them, I do, but the don’t-buy-them factors are adding up and the practical side of me says I don’t get to be a princess in $2150 shoes that don’t go with anything I own, that probably aren’t comfortable, that probably won’t actually fit, and will sit in my closet unworn because I don’t have any occasions to wear them.

I will have to find some other kind of princess to be.  Like this one.

But oh, those shoes.