This is a LITTLE WEIRD. But…I have a Facebook profile now. And so if you want to be friends with “Swistle Thistle,” you can be. What is the POINT of that, you may be asking yourself. AS AM I. But…it seemed like it might be fun. So I did it on a whim. And now we will see if it IS fun, or if it is just weird.
I have a bottle of expensive French perfume. You know how pipe tobacco can smell delicious? That is the basic idea of this perfume.
Swistle: Want to smell my new expensive French perfume? *offers neck*
Paul: *takes deep whiff of neck* Mmmm, nice. Flowery.
Swistle: It’s SMOKY.
Paul: …
Swistle: Want to try again? *re-offers neck*
Paul: *takes deep whiff of neck* Mmmm! SMOKE!
Swistle: …
Paul: Have you been…*waggles eyebrows suggestively*…BARBECUING?
You know what makes me feel a little queasy, and causes me to lose faith in my fellow man? The fact that spammers would not send out spam if it didn’t sometimes work. There are ACTUAL PEOPLE clicking those stupid things and handing over money. I know this observation has been made before, but it keeps hitting me afresh.
And speaking of spam, I was looking idly to see if an email I was hoping for had maybe gotten stuck in the spam filter, and I found FOUR non-spam emails in there. FOUR! Two containing time-sensitive questions! And that’s just in the last month: spams get deleted automatically after 30 days, and I had TOTAL FAITH so I NEVER CHECKED! How many people have I appeared to TOTALLY SNUB over the last year and a half? AAAAAAAAAGH!
And I can’t even say, “If I haven’t gotten back to you, it’s my spam filter’s fault,” because sometimes I do take kind of a LONG TIME to answer, and I HAVEN’T been answering emails for the new baby name site but have just been tucking them all aside for later use. Well, how about this: if you have been thinking, “…Hey, why hasn’t she answered my email?” (unless it’s for the baby-name site, because so far I’m not answering those, just saving them), it wouldn’t hurt to re-send your email. And I’ll start checking the spam filter more often.
Also, look how Henry sucks his fingers:
I’m just going to start saving for braces now. No sense waiting.
I haven’t mentioned the diet for awhile, and you are probably thinking you’re on to me. “Yes,” you nod wisely. “This is what happened with Couch to 5K, and with Modified Couch to 5K, and with that whole Cleaning Program: big talk, and then a Suspicious Lack of talk.”
But no! I am in fact still on the diet. I’m past the stage where the weight loss makes clothes “less tight,” and now I’m into the stage where it makes them “loose and unflatteringly sloppy-looking.” I’ve had many, Many, MANY slips (brownies! cake! clearance Valentine’s candy!), but I haven’t had that feeling of kind of HOPING I’ve blown it so I can go back to eating what I want. I keep thinking, “Okay, Swistle, right back on it now dear.”
It helps that I am a person who likes eating the exact same meals day after day. The less I think about food, the better. I have chocolate-milky coffee (half microwaved skim milk, half coffee, with Splenda and baking cocoa) for breakfast (with cereal or eggs if I’m hungry), turkey-vegetable-chickpea soup for lunch, chicken-vegetable stir-fry on rice for dinner, and fat-free sugar-free pudding for dessert (I recommend the cooked kind, which is an utter pain in the ass to make but I think more delicious than the instant kind). Snacks are milky tea, furtively-eaten marshmallows, various foods purchased “for the kids,” swigs directly from a bottle of booze, etc. (Snacks need some work.)
I have a Freebie Day coming up: Easter candy is the best of all seasonal candy, so on Easter I eat ANY KIND I WANT and as much as I want, all day long. Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs! Cadbury Eggs! Hershey candy-coated eggs! Cadbury candy-coated eggs! Hershey marshmallow eggs! On my last diet, this led to a several-day binge instead of the one-day planned splurge, but life went on after that so I’m not much worried.
In the meantime, Diet P0rrn:
See’s Candies: the centerfold.
10:30 p.m.– Swistle goes to bed and lies awake thinking about something totally stupid.
11:00 p.m.– Still thinking. And now also thinking about how many minutes this has wasted.
11:20 p.m.– Drifts off to fantasy of winning a $1,000 gift card to Target.
11:30 p.m.– Elizabeth wakes up crying. Swistle goes and gets her and brings her back to Swistle’s room, then lies awake again thinking with increasing anxiety about how she would get the kids out of the house if there was a fire.
11:40 p.m.– Swistle gets kicked in the neck by a toddler who wants to lie sideways with her head on Daddy’s pillow.
12:15 a.m.– Drifts off.
12:30 a.m.– Henry calls for service from the 24-hour cafeteria. He would like a refill on his bottomless cup of milk, purchased 9 months ago.
1:00 a.m.– Back to bed. NO THINKING. GO TO SLEEP. STOP THINKING. Swistle falls asleep and dreams about a gentle, pleasant canoe ride. A canoe ride that cruises past a giant, half-submerged, tipped-over, dark-metal boat.
1:45 a.m.– Swistle is actually grateful to be awakened by the sound of a nearby toddler about to barf, and before reaching full consciousness is already halfway to the bathroom with the toddler, who throws up mostly into the sink, greatly reducing barf clean-up time.
2:05 a.m.– Back to bed, with toddler on towel. Swistle lies awake wondering if this means the whole family is going to start barfing. Is she imagining it, or does her tummy feel a little queasy?
2:25 a.m.– Drifts off. Dreams about elevators, and about missing the bus.
5:28 a.m.– Paul’s alarm goes off. Swistle thinks, “Oh, thank goodness I can sleep for another 37 minutes.”
5:29 a.m.– Henry wakes up yelling.
5:35 a.m.– Edward calls, “My get up too?”
6:05 a.m.– Careful not to move her sore neck too much, Swistle puts the coffee on.
6:30 a.m.– Swistle realizes the coffee maker will not work when it is not plugged in.
1) Giant nasty vehicle-like robots that destroyed anything out after sunset. I was out after sunset. I took refuge in a house that didn’t have a working bathroom.
2) I went to Jen‘s house for a mothers’ group meeting that opened with each person doing a little improv a capella singing. Jen’s husband was in the background telling the triplets that he still needed to fix the freight elevator, so they should take the regular elevator. I dream about elevators frequently.
3) Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes were in my bedroom explaining how Scientology could improve my sex life. Tom was being really gross about it.
Meanwhile, a toddler was kicking me in the neck because she wanted to lie sideways with her head on Paul’s pillow and her feet on mine.
Coffee brewing? CHECK.
Edward, as a DVD started up: “YAAAAAAY! Cah soon to DVD!” (coming soon to DVD)
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Me: forgetting to put creamer in my coffee and not wanting to get another spoon dirty. Seeing sippee cup of milk abandoned in living room. Considering. Shrugging. Using.
Paul is crabby with his RSS reader. He’s saying to it, “No, I’LL tell YOU when to ‘mark as read’ KAY-THANX!” Apparently it keeps marking things as read when he hasn’t even clicked on them yet, and that is highly annoying. He shouldn’t give it such a hard time for malfunctioning, though: he should just be glad his RSS feeder is there with him, rather than on someone else’s computer. TEE HEE.
This afternoon I supervised the making of a baking-soda-and-vinegar “volcano.” AND I made a big batch of Corn Starch Muck for the kids to play with. AND I’ve been dumping my used coffee grounds into a gross little baggie every day because William says he needs ” a cup of grinds” for another messy project. Pls send mothering medal kthanx.
Have you ever made Corn Starch Muck? I believe “Magical Mixture” is its preferred name. You take corn starch, maybe half a box, and mix it with jusssst enough water to moisten it and stick it together. You get this weird play clay that will break like chocolate if you snap it suddenly, but will dribble like liquid through your fingers if you hold it still. Freaky! And messy! (Play with it in a bowl, and put the bowl on newspapers. And maybe put the newspapers outside. Perhaps in another state.) But fun for kids. Seriously, they’ll be out of your hair for hours, and then you give them wet washcloths and make them clean up the drying white powdery clumps and flakes all over the floor, and that buys you another hour.
I filed my taxes (*smug expression*) and this year I have too many children for the form. I use TurboTax software, so I don’t fill in actual forms with an actual writing implement, but I saw on the print-out that it had to file a separate form for additional dependents, because the main form only has room for four.
Those of you who have been hanging out around here for awhile know my feelings about Walllmart, which is that it is the kind of place where you take a deep breath, run in, do your shopping as fast as you can, and get the helll out. But look what I found there:
DINOSAUR SHIRTS. Marked down to only $2 each! Elizabeth LOVES dinosaurs; I got her one of each shirt, but then got some for Edward too so they could coordinate.
I am feeling a little shy this morning after spending the night dreaming about David Boreanaz. I mean, not only did I cheat on my boyfriend John C. McGinley, but I know David Boreanaz is YOUR boyfriend. I’m really sorry. Nothing really “happened,” if that helps. And whatever DID happen, he seemed distracted so I’ll bet he was thinking of you.
Yesterday was a busy day, and I was glad that I at least got one load of laundry through the washer and dryer. I put the basket on our bed to fold later, and forgot all about it.
Fast-forward to bedtime. I’m tossing my dirty clothes into the laundry, and Paul says, “Oh, wait. That’s clean laundry in that basket. I put it there to keep it safe.” He and the kids were playing on the bed earlier, and he remembered how much I hate it when clean laundry gets strewn around the room. So he put the basket WHERE WE KEEP DIRTY LAUNDRY IN LAUNDRY BASKETS. And so of course for the rest of the day I’d been tossing wet washcloths, baby-food-saturated baby bibs, etc., onto the clean clothes.
The look in my eyes must have been presenting an Idiot Award, because Paul started trying to do that thing guys do when they get in trouble for being idiots: he said in an injured voice that next time he wouldn’t try to save the laundry, but would just leave it on the bed where the children could throw it all over the room. His tone was of someone who had tried and tried to do right, but had been thwarted by scoffers and ingrates and nitpickers and control freaks at every turn, until now he was ready to lie down and give up this heavy burden of unappreciated righteousness.
I explained as if to a slow child that the issue here was not that he shouldn’t keep the laundry safe, but that he shouldn’t be an IDIOT (*pause to raise eyebrows for emphasis*) by putting it “for safety” (*eyebrows*) in the dirty laundry pile, where it was in fact LESS SAFE than on the floor. And happily, the pants he wanted for the next day were right on top, under two wet washcloths and a peached baby bib, so I could demonstrate with a visual aid—so helpful for slow learners—that this was really more HIS problem than MINE.
Idiot. Makes me feel a whole lot less guilty about the whole David Boreanaz thing.