I have posted my first paid BlogHer review, and I hope it will reassure anyone who wondered if a review could be both paid and non-butt-kissing. But now I have Nervous Tummy (TM Tess) and wish I had spent more time emphasizing the positive, rather than emphasizing the MONEY part so much and at such length. I even did MATH PROBLEMS. For SEVERAL PARAGRAPHS.

Well. Perhaps you would be willing to click your little mice all over the whole post [note from the future: link deleted because blog no longer exists] so that Sonicare will not regret this entire arrangement. Perhaps you will win the $100 Visa gift card for your merciful actions. (I am kind of excited to think of one of you winning it!) And for those of you who like Stuff About Big Families, there’s a photo of seven toothbrushes in a cluster. Thrill!

Also, has it been about a million years since I posted a photo of Henry? I thought so.

Celebrating first review post with fast food

Jenny in MD wanted to see the whole list from this post. I think if you click on it you can see it larger.

Some of the weirder things on the list are household words for things. We call ground turkey “turko,” for example, and I’d be hard-pressed to tell you why. And “petted eggs” means the ones from “cage-free certified humane” chickens, because we picture the chickens being loved and petted (NO ONE NEED DISILLUSION ME ON THIS) and so of course the eggs would also be loved and petted. “LH” is Paul’s nickname for me, so “LH milk” is skim milk. “Baby milk” and “baby yogurt” just means “the kind the kids drink/eat.” “Pink cereal” is what the kids call strawberry shredded wheat.

I would like to point out that when he put guacamole-mix powder on the list over in Produce, he wrote it as “pow.” So I was even less open to the argument that “Lysol disinfecting wipes, 80 ct, on sale for $2.99 – get 2” was INSUFFICIENT INFORMATION for him to come home with the correct item.

On the grocery list:

Before he left (on the chore which, I will point out, he chooses to do because he prefers it to the alternative of staying home with the children): “Paul, I put something unusual on the list this week: it’s Lysol wipes, and they’re on a good sale so I put down two. But they’re not for us, they’re for the kids’ classrooms, so if they come in different varieties or whatever, it doesn’t matter which kind you get. And if they only have one left, still get it, and I’ll just give it to the teacher of our more difficult child.”

He came home with:

Me: “They only had one left?”

Him: “What?”

Me: “You only got one. So they only had one left?”

Him: “It didn’t say two on the list.”

Me: “It does. And? I also told you about it beforehand. Remember? For the classrooms? Two schoolchildren? Two classrooms? The joke about the more difficult child? Remember?”

Him: *digging in trash for list to prove me wrong*

Him: *finding list*

Him: *looking at it for a minute to think of a way it is my fault*

Him: (triumphantly, as if winning) “Oh, see, it’s because you put the 2 BEFORE on this one but AFTER on this one!”

An expanded view of that part of the list, so you can see what he means:

But notice, he DID manage to see the “2” before the jelly doughnuts, AND he got the glazed ones.

Well, I guess you cannot notice that, because I had already eaten one of the doughnuts by the time I took the picture.

And to think this is with only 14 years of training! Who KNOWS what peaks of competency we will eventually reach!

So this idea DOES need more explanation than the title? Okay, I will give it.

We have a yard, and it is in an excellent location for yard sales: visible from a semi-main road, semi-visible from a main road. We’ve had a couple of standard yard sales there. The more successful one, I spent hours and hours gathering/sorting/pricing things and laying them out attractively, and we spent most of the day sitting outside monitoring it and not getting the things done we’d usually get done, and we made $75. VERY DISCOURAGING. (The less successful one, it was drizzling and we made $7.)

So now what we do is once per summer we put stuff out on our lawn with a big “FREE” sign, and people come and take it away for us. Usually the first few cars of the morning take about half of it, and the rest of it gets picked at over the rest of the day. If we do it during peak yard sale season it goes particularly quickly, no doubt because people are taking the stuff to sell at their own yard sales.

This has ended up being a much more satisfying way to do things. It’s much, much easier: I don’t have to fret about the condition of things or whether something might be broken or missing a piece; I don’t have to put things out nicely; it doesn’t have to be monitored; I don’t have to decide how to price things; I don’t have to deal with people trying to bargain me down to 75c from a dollar; I don’t have to do math in my head; I don’t have to sit there feeling frantically self-conscious while other people poke critically through my stuff.

I like to peek out the window at people and make up little fantasies about what they’re taking and why. I pretend that the person taking the baby stuff is pregnant and has been lying awake nights wondering how she was going to afford the things she needs. I pretend that the person taking the kitchen canisters has been looking for those at antique stores for YEARS, to replace the ones from her childhood. It can be very gratifying to make this stuff up, and far better than imagining that other people are going to make MILLIONS by having a proper yard sale with it.

Our free yard sales have been much less impressive since we (1) had our porch made into a dining room and (2) started using Freecycle. The porch is where we used to dump all the stuff waiting for the day we did the yard sale, but we don’t want to put all that stuff on the dining room table instead. (For one thing, the dining room table is ALREADY covered in stuff.) And with Freecycle, we tend to get rid of stuff as we have it, as opposed to saving it. Still, with a big pre-mother-in-law-visit purge, we get out the old sheets and put out a nice spread.

It was because I was searching Temerity Jane’s blog for more information about her wig collection that I found this video. Here’s the post where she writes about it. Feel happy with Temerity Jane and me! [Note from the future: I don’t know what video used to be here, but it apparently didn’t transfer over when I moved the blog.]

I have been playing with Google Analytics, something I rarely do because I don’t understand ANYTHING on that site and never will. But totally by accident I found out how to do a map that shows how many visitors this blog got from each state in the last month. You know where I am WILDLY UNPOPULAR? Wyoming and North Dakota. So I thought I’d do something to even out the stats a little. Something that might appeal to people from Wyoming and North Dakota, because clearly I have been ALIENATING PEOPLE FROM WYOMING AND NORTH DAKOTA.

I’m going to start with Wyoming, because even taking into account that Wyoming has the fewest residents of any state, it is disproportionately unfond of me. For example, in the last month I have had 10 visits to my site from Wyoming. Nebraska, which has about 3 times the population of Wyoming, has visited 300 times—30 times as many visitors from a state with 3 times the population. Wyoming HATES me.

So! Yellowstone! That’s a great park, yeah? Really awesome! Tourists should totally go there, and then they should spend lots of money while in the state, and they should send me postcards because I would treasure them!

And can I get a shout-out for coal and whatever has to be done to get it out of the ground? Sounds like hard work!

Go, Casper Ghosts! Go, Wyoming Calvary! Go, Wyoming Cowboys and Wyoming Cowgirls!

Did you know Dick and Lynne Cheney are BOTH from Wyoming? It’s true! So is Buffalo Bill! So is Jackson Pollock, he of the splatter paintings! Also: William Henry Harrison! Not the 9th president of the United States, no. Apparently it is a common name.

And you know what the coolest shape is for a state to be? Largish and nearly rectangular! It is way easier to fill in those places on the map, you can’t deny THAT. Not like all those skimpy twisted little northeastern states!

You know what else is great? Being north of Colorado! Wooo!

Wyoming may not like me, but as I read their Wikipedia entry I am liking THEM more and more. Did you know they win first prize for “Feminism Before It Was Cool”? Yes! They were the first state to acknowledge the right of women to vote, and the first to have women on a jury, and the first to elect women to several different positions of political power I’ve forgotten in the time it took me to get back here from Wikipedia. This is why they are called The Equality State, and that’s something I never knew and/or never knew the reason behind and/or was too busy writing notes to my boyfriend to hear when it was told to me in class.

Also, did you know they have a State Dinosaur? It’s the triceratops. That is AWESOME.

Posts currently saved as drafts, because they seemed like less of a good idea after I wrote them but I didn’t quite want to delete them:

1. A post trying to kiss up to people from Wyoming, because I was playing with Google Analytics and found out I am super-unpopular there—even taking into account the low population.

2. A post in which the only part that is written is the title, which is “Free Yard Sale.” It was going to be about how every year we hold a free yard sale in our (wait for it) yard. But after I wrote the title, I felt like I’d already explained the whole concept.

3. A post I meant to finish LONG AGO, with a question from a reader about newborn sleep issues. That newborn is now…let’s see…two months old.

4. A rant post about things that bug me. All the things in the list are things I have already ranted about on other occasions.

5. A post about how using my Wii Fit is like going to confession (“It has been 3 days since my last workout”). I am not Catholic. What do I know about what going to confession is like?

6. A post about whether elementary-school-aged boys should be allowed to wear nail polish if they want to.

7. A post containing partially-written childbirth stories. They kept getting out-of-hand lengthy. Like, novellas.

8. A post about what an obedient person I am. Who cares?

9. A post containing links to postcards I was buying for Postcrossing after asking you guys for suggestions and getting some great ones. I don’t know why I never posted this. Looks like I forgot.

10. A post about Jimmy, only half-written before I ran out of steam with those adolescent-diary posts.

11. A rant about how I much I dislike it when people assume that a family with 5 children NEEDS a 7-bedroom house or tons of other stuff people didn’t expect to have a few generations ago when they had more children and fewer bathrooms. Never posted because I kind of like it when people say, “And you only have one bathroom??????” as long as they say it in the impressed way instead of in the “I’m calling Child Protective Services” way. And besides, now we have two bathrooms.

12. A rant about how on the children’s television show Arthur, Arthur is in third grade before he ever sees his parents bicker. Er?

13. A post about the time I went to my primary care provider to ask if I could be switched to a version of the birth control pill that would make me feel less crazy, and he said I should “do the adult thing” and get my tubes tied. I thought I’d probably already written about that enough times. And besides, then I went to my OB who said there DEFINITELY WAS a birth control pill that made many women feel less crazy, and he gave me a prescription for it, and then he had a highly gratifying conversation with his nurse in which the two of them rolled their eyes at how dumb my PCP was.

14. Yet another post in which I discuss my various methods for dealing with depression-like moods. Repetitive much?

15. A list of things that changed the way I felt about other things (example: Britney Spears’s behavior changed the way I felt about Kevin Federline).

16. A post about how Paul is not a “fixer” the way many men are, but I AM. That is, if you vent to me, I might forget that I’m not being asked to offer a solution. I didn’t post it because I actually would rather not draw your attention to that flaw.

There. That brings us back to fall of 2008.

This is hardly a fresh observation, but let me join the legions who have said it is WEIRD when you run into someone you went to high school with. And it gets weirder with every year.

Yesterday Paul and I were out on a date, and a woman came up to me and said we’d gone to school together, and I didn’t recognize her AT ALL which was as awk as I’d feared in my many times imagining such a scenario, but fortunately I ABSOLUTELY recognized her NAME and knew exactly who she was and THEN recognized her, and all my her-related memories clicked into place, and everything was fine although of course still awk because AWK SITUATION.

I’m in my mid-thirties, and so at this point my high school self is less than half my age. I looked up my old classmate in the yearbook when I got home, and both of us have really left our high school selves behind. Those senior pictures look like CHILDREN. Thin, smooth-faced children. With late-eighties/early-nineties hair (I have bagel bangs!).

This same week, another former classmate died. It reminds me of when I was in my early twenties and a friend of mine got pregnant, and it was the first time I’d realized that I was now the age when I could do that TOO. I know that seems like it should have been obvious, especially since by that age I’d already been married and divorced and also technically could have been getting pregnant for a good decade, but it was still like a light going on as to the ACTUAL FACT of it. I could have an ACTUAL BABY!!!! It was like that. But, um, with death.

Oh, I DO get SO TIRED of the old idea that men are doing a PERFECT JOB at chores, just IN THEIR OWN WAY, and that women are ONLY complaining because the men don’t do the chores IN THE SAME WAY the women would. Oh, yes. Clearly. If my complaint is that when Paul does dishes there is STILL FOOD ON THE DISHES, obviously my problem is that I’m a control-freak who insists he do the dishes My Way instead of his Perfectly Good Alternative Way.

Listen. I totally understand this control-freak argument if, say, a man likes to do the dishes with a sink full of wash water and a sink full of rinse water, and his wife is all over him wanting him to have a sink full of wash water and then a thin stream of running water in the other sink. OBVIOUSLY that is unreasonable: he has His Way and she has Her Way, and why would she be trying to force him to do it Her Way? Ridiculous! The dishes come out clean either way, so why would one adult be nagging another adult?

But why ON EARTH would anyone try to apply that to situations where it doesn’t even slightly apply? I complain that Paul goes to the store and comes home with pumpkin pie filling instead of pumpkin, and people say it’s wrong of me to demand he do things my way, or they say I should accept that he does things differently than I would. This is not a My Way vs. His Way issue EVEN A LITTLE TINY BIT. This is him making a mistake.

If Paul puts our child’s homework in the recycling bin, must I SAY NOTHING because he is doing things HIS WAY? No. He is doing things THE WRONG WAY. The argument people are looking for is the one where I complain because Paul puts the recycling in all willy-nilly instead of neatly stacked, or where I fuss because he likes to take the bin out on Tuesday night and I think he should take it out Wednesday morning.

In those cases, there’s His Way and My Way, and both ways result in Success: recycling is in the recycling bin and is brought to the curb on time. It BAFFLES me that people want to apply this to cases in which His Way results in the papers being strewn across the yard, or placed in the regular trash, or left on the floor in another room, or not brought out to the curb on time. I’m supposed to consider that “his way of doing things” and not say anything about it because it’s not fair to force him to do things “my way”? Ridiculous!

There are two completely different situations here, which some people try to relate. The first is a situation of His Way vs. My Way. That’s the one where we have all now been THOROUGHLY CHASTENED that we are never ever ever supposed to say ANYTHING to ANYONE about their inviolable right to do things exactly as they feel like doing them, no matter how stupid or inefficient, because after all it DOES result in the chore being done.

The second is a situation of Right Way vs. Wrong Way. I think grown adults should be able to do things (HOWEVER they choose to do them) in a way that results in the chore being DONE. And if they don’t manage to do so, I CERTAINLY DO speak up. I am in a partnership with an adult, and I expect the other partner to act that way. I am not in a 1950s sitcom where The Man bumbles around screwing things up and The Little Woman rolls her eyes and says, “Men! They’re just like CHILDREN!” before backing her car out through the garage door.