Oh, hello! Do you know what? It’s possible to use “computers” in “other people’s houses” to “post blog posts”! Isn’t that WILD?

I’ve been using my cell phone to use Twitter occasionally to send little updates (the Twitter box is somewhere in the righthand margin), but GEEZ that’s time consuming and my thumbs aren’t yet good at it, so it’s all, “I……a…..m…..FORGET IT.”

The quick update is that I am having a WONDERFUL TIME, and Niestle is THE CUTEST EVER and The Place Where They Live (I never know how careful to be with info, do you?) is TERRIFIC and I want to MOVE HERE and play with Niestle all day and hang out with my brother and sister-in-law so much they start to wonder when I will go HOME! This is just the best vacation ever and I love it, and my flight here couldn’t have gone better (unless they had FED US, but luckily I’d packed lots of yum snacks), and I’ve been sleeping luxuriously, and they have been buying me treats left and right (ice cream cone from a cool ice cream place that had flavors like “Honey Lavender”! fun meal with all the dishes named after the cities they came from! a truffle cake for after dinner tonight!), and we have been watching 30 Rock which is hilarious, and I have been snuggling and snorfling and squeezing babies like crazy, and it was a totally good decision to come here, and let me see if I can find a picture. I’m using my brother’s computer so I have to snoop around a little and hope I don’t come upon anything Embarrassing. …Okay, here we go, here’s a picture he took of me and Niestle:

I have of course bitten off all those delicious little toes by now, so it’s good he documented them before they were gone.

I am in such a pre-travel fret! Last night I took sleeping pill from 2002 because I was sitting (read: standing) there in our bedroom saying, “Oh! Wait! I should have done a load of laundry this evening! I forgot to try on my pedal pushers! Are my new pink sandals going to arrive in time and why does UPS say they don’t recognize the number when Lands’ End says they shipped? Which of the ten paperbacks I bought at the library book sale should I bring with me? Oh, dang, I meant to paint my fingernails! I should bake another batch of muffins just to be sure there are enough.”

Then I was reassuring myself in a way that wasn’t particularly reassuring, thinking, “Even if I totally forgot to pack, and then woke up late and couldn’t shower, and had to rush to the airport with nothing but my purse which let’s say for the sake of my peace of mind had my boarding pass and ID in it, I could still SURVIVE a 4-day trip. I would just go to a store there and buy a package of underwear and a thing of deodorant and maybe a t-shirt, and everything would be FINE JUST FINE ABSOLUTELY FINE.”

*pant pant*

I kind of love this kind of Anticipation Fret. It sure gives chores a little boost in the butt when I can think, “I should wash these clothes so I can TAKE THEM ON MY TRIP!!” and “I should bake muffins for the kids to eat WHILE I’M GONE ON MY TRIP!!!”

I do have one thing I’m genuinely fretting about, and that is the carry-on situation. Southwest says I can have one carry-on and one smaller personal item such as a purse or a laptop. When I was more distant from Flying Time, I casually interpreted this to mean I could have two carry-ons: my “as big as possible carry-on so I don’t have to check any bags” carry-on, and my regular “magazines and snacks” carry-on.

Now that I am flying TOMORROW OMG IT’S TOMORROW, I’m worrying that no, they really mean one carry-on and one purse, and my regular carry-on will be my carry-on and so they will make me check my big carry-on.

Surely SOME of you have flown Southwest and can tell me The Scoop. Meanwhile, I will be running around going “OMG OMG OMG OMG” and cycling laundry and sorting paperbacks and digging out another 7-year-old sleeping pill for tonight.

Oh and p.s.: I checked in at the very MINUTE it would let me do it, and I was still number 25! But I’m in A group! Woo!

You may recall that soon I am GOING TO SEE MY NIECE OMG I CAN’T WAIT. I’m flying Southwest, which has open seating rather than assigned seats. This fills me with anxiety. I don’t even know what seats to hope for! I don’t know what I should choose. That is, IF I get my choice rather than getting stuck with whatever dregs are left—or, oh dear merciful Target, a MIDDLE SEAT.

Should I hope for an exit row, which I think has more leg room but also requires lengthy fretting about whether I really would be up to the task of assisting the flight attendants in an emergency, considering I am the kind of person who freezes up when asked unexpectedly what she wants to drink? (OMG, what if I say “diet Coke” and they’re a PEPSI establishment and the server corrects me???) The front row, which has no one putting their seatback on my knees but also has no underseat place for my bag and gets all congested with people waiting in line for the bathroom?

What if I can choose between window and aisle? If I were alone in the row, I’d sit in the window seat. But I hate being trapped in the window seat by someone in the aisle seat. And I also hate being the one who traps someone else.

Okay, I made a list.

Window seat:

• I can lean on the wall to sleep or to scootch away from rowmates
• I can go to sleep without worrying I’m blocking someone in
• I can look out the window
• I don’t get whacked in the elbow by everyone walking up the aisle
• I have to make my rowmate(s) stand up every time I need to go to the bathroom, or else suffer because I can’t bear to do it YET AGAIN
• What if my rowmate GOES TO SLEEP and I NEED TO PEE but CAN’T?

Aisle seat:

• It’s a 7-hour flight and I can get up to walk around without disturbing anyone else
• I have to get up every time someone else in my row wants to get up
• What if I fall asleep and LOLL, either into the aisle or on the center-seat person?
• What if I fall asleep and trap my rowmate(s)?
• Getting brushed against and/or mouth-breathed on by every single germ-infested person who walks up or down the aisle

I made a poll, over to the right. What’s better on a nonstop 7-hour Saturday flight, a WINDOW seat or an AISLE seat? [Poll was unfortunately rendered invisible/unobtainable by poll-maker update.]

I finished American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld. I loved it.

I feel like I should rush to point out that Curtis Sittenfeld is a GIRL, and the reason I’m pointing that out is that I almost didn’t read Prep, which I also loved, because I generally don’t like to read a book with a female narrator and a male author. Some of them make it clear the male author thinks the female brain is “Shoes shoes shoes SEXY MEN shoes shoes BRAND NAMES shoes shoes!” So if that bugs you, too, you might skip this book thinking it’s one of those, just because you think Curtis is a boy’s name. It’s not! She’s a girl!

Anyway. Where was I? Oh, yes. The book. I almost didn’t read Prep because I thought it had a male author, and I almost didn’t read American Wife because I thought it was going to be mean. I don’t like to read mean books. But it was not mean.

My mom and I both like to have a mild to moderate awareness of celebrity goings-ons. That is, we both read People magazine, and we sometimes talk a little about celebrity news. And sometimes, the official version we’re reading doesn’t make sense to us, so we talk about it until we think of an explanation that DOES fit the situation. Sometimes we think we may even be RIGHT—that is, that the reps of everyone involved are trying to spin things to look one way, but that details don’t make sense with that explanation, and our explanation is the one that makes sense and is in fact more likely to be true or at least contain more of the essence of the truth.

This is a FICTION book. It is not even “biographical fiction,” where the author tries to write as accurately as possible but is forced to fictionalize certain elements such as private dialogue. This is JUST FICTION. BUT! It seems to me that it was MORE TRUE than an autobiography or a biography would have been, in the same way my mom and I sometimes feel like we’ve come up with an explanation that rings more true than the one the celebrity magazines are giving us.

An autobiography or an authorized biography would be the same carefully-spun information the public is given through magazines and press releases and scripted interviews. And an unauthorized biography tends to be spiteful, making use of quotes from all the people who are eager to speak up for something unauthorized. But this! This is different. This seems MORE TRUE than any of those other things would be, even if the guesses are WAY OFF. I can imagine Laura Bush reading it thinking, “Well, no, heavens no, that didn’t happen………but actually, this does give the GIST of the reason why I did that.”

What I get what I read this book is that the author had a lot of the same wonderings I had about George W. Bush and about Laura Bush and about the two of them together, and that the released details didn’t make sense to her, and that she went over it and over it and over it until she thought of a context in which all the details WOULD make sense. When things clicked into place, she wrote it down as a story of Charlie and Alice Blackwell, but making no attempt to be coy about it: she makes it clear who they’re supposed to be, but also that she made it up so she uses non-real names.

One detail I could have lived a happy life WITHOUT was the fictionalized (ONE HOPES) description of “Charlie Blackwell”‘s penis and what “Alice Blackwell” thought of it. I mean, srsly. How am I supposed to recommend this book to my mother?

(More spottings of Mr. Pickles at The Chicken Game Flickr Group, to which you are officially invited to post your own photos of Mr. Pickles—or of Mr. Pickles’s brother, Mr. Pickles.)

Oh hello! I’ve been SICK! Like, “lying on the recliner all day, too tired to get the kids a snack” sick! Sore throat and coughing and fever and aches and exhaustion. Yeah.

Yeah.

I’m sure it’s nothing.

Besides, I felt a lot better today. And I got a lot of reading done. I finished The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky and I’m almost done with another book.

I liked The Perks of Being a Wallflower, though I was occasionally aware of being outside the target market: I generally don’t like young adult fiction, or books written in letter/diary format, or books written from a disorienting point of view (alcohol, drugs, mental imbalance). I liked the book anyway. It’s interesting and absorbing, and I thought it was a good story.

I finally figured out that our library lets you reserve books online, so I can put myself on the list and then Paul can pick up the books for me on his way home from work and I don’t have to try to manage small children at the library.

Well, but I got a little carried away, because I thought I’d be way down the list on some of the new releases, and that did not turn out to be the case. So when the library said they had some books for me, this is what Paul came home with:

The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky
Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell
Screamfree Parenting, by Hal Edward Runkel
The Blue Cotton Gown: A Midwife’s Memoir, by Patricia Harman
When Difficult Relatives Happen to Good People, by Leonard Felder
The Duggars: 20 and Counting!, by Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar
Certain Girls, by Jennifer Weiner
The Guy Not Taken, by Jennifer Weiner
American Wife, by Curtis Sittenfeld

So, um, see you in a few months. Well, or in two weeks, because that’s when they’re due, and most of them are on a Hold List and can’t be renewed. (Also: Paul says he thinks he should get MAJOR POINTS for having to pick up some of those titles, particularly The Guy Not Taken.)

Speaking of stacks of paper, we were out of printer paper. Usually I buy the recycled kind, simultaneously wincing and preening as I spend nearly twice the price to get it. But the shelf space for it was empty. Then I saw this:

Non-recycled paper—that COMES WITH A PACKET OF TREE SEEDS. Ha ha ha ha ha! Is that the cutest/silliest? Of course I bought it. The seeds are planted as of this morning. I’m going to have a whole FOREST in our back yard.

Paul is always finding Cool! Internet! Stuff! and then showing ALLLLL of it to me, especially when I am concentrating really hard on finding a good baby name. When he first showed me the below video (which is in a group of similar videos, and I saw alllll of them), I said what I usually say, which is, “Uh huh. Very nice and/or funny.” But then he kept playing it in the background, which is another thing Paul does when he finds something he likes, and before I knew it I was not only humming it but also…well, TOUCHED by it. The visual is unimportant—it’s the speech I like. I have a little crush on Winston Churchill now, and there really isn’t anything Paul can complain about since he’s the one who so forcefully and repeatedly introduced us. And so I give it to you, but on its own rather than in a sea of other such things. “Best of Paul,” we can call these.

You remember my care package swap with Japan? Well, Lisa is willing to do swap with someone else, too! (Not necessarily the SAME EXACT stuff. But FROM JAPAN.) Sadness: it has to be someone in the U.S., because otherwise the shipping costs would kill both you and Lisa dead. (Lisa’s in a military family, so if you live in the U.S., the shipping rates are similar to mailing within the U.S.)

The deal is that you’d mail her a box of stuff, and she’d mail you a box of stuff. Lisa and I did it kind of free-form/surprise style, with both of us mentioning a few things we’d love to get, just to give the other person the general idea. Here’s what I sent her. (I used a military flat-rate box, which is even less than U.S. shipping costs. You can get the boxes free online, or many post offices can give you one. You’ll need to fill out a customs form, so allow a few extra minutes at the P.O., and write down everything in the box so you’ll remember.) (Don’t be overwhelmed. It was no big deal.)

I feel I should warn you that I had a TERRIBLE TIME trying to unpack my box. As of several weeks after I’d received it, it was still sitting on the dining room table, full. The only things that had been removed were (1) the ice cream scoop, (2) the teeny cute cookie cutters, which Paul used to decorate the kids’ lunches, and (3) the bag from Thailand, which I’m using as a library bag.

Am I really supposed to just OPEN these and EAT them and then THROW AWAY the cute packages? The potato is wearing a potato banner! And what if I LOVE them and can NEVER HAVE THEM AGAIN (unless I go to Japan)?

Here’s the ice cream scoop I actually did manage to unpack, and HOW WAS I LIVING MY LIFE WITHOUT THIS ICE CREAM SCOOP? I have tried many an ice cream scoop and I always end up using a soup spoon instead, but this scoop is TEH (ice-cream-related) BOMB.

But what am I supposed to do with the packaging? I can’t just throw it away! It includes the instruction “Do not carry the metal part of a knife to your lips directly.” That is valuable advice!

Also, I see you lusting after my scratched, stained, metallic-flecked, genuine 1960s countertop. BACK OFF IT’S MINE.

And am I supposed to just let the children USE these cute straws and then THROW THEM AWAY? (The straws, not the children.) Unthinkable.

And how about this? The packaging says “Tea Spoon” and “tea time,” but the cup says “coffee” on it! Also, the description: “A well-functioned sophisticated and best in quality created exclusively for you.” Exclusively for me! And the instructions: “Do not apply onto metal luffa to avoid hurts or residuals on articles.” I might need those instructions later.

And the cool clothespins. “Caution with using this product”! “Do not use it in a manner other than regular use”!

I did finally unpack everything and incorporate it into our household, and frankly a lot of the motivation was so I could take pictures for this post. So if you want to do a care package swap with Lisa, your package might ALSO contain SUPER-CUTE STUFF, and you too will have conflicted feelings about throwing away the wrappers and putting things away.

Well, if you want to do it anyway, you can’t say I didn’t warn you. Leave a comment on this post if you’re interested, or on Lisa’s post, and Lisa will choose someone as soon as she wraps up another project she’s working on (I’ll bet it’s unpacking her shopping: that would take me FOREVER if I lived in Japan).

GUESS WHAT I AM GOING ON A TRIP SEE MY BABY NIECE!!! I have already started buying twee travel sizes: I have not flown in ten years and evidently Rules Have Changed. Plus, I don’t want to have to check luggage, so every inch of space is valuable. Or so I tell myself when I’m cooing over the cute travel sizes.

Awwwww! Baby Degree!

Travel sizes! Because I will be traveling!

I can hardly believe it, even though the evidence is all around me! Look, I bought a suitcase!

Because I am going on a trip! So I need a suitcase! And could they have made that TAG any BIGGER?? It’s so huge, it makes the large carry-on look like a cell phone case or something.

I’m really, really happy about this. I’d been thinking of it as if it were an impossibility—as if there was an actual barrier between me and my niece. But it turns out that if you give $300 to Southwest and $50 to Marshalls and $1 to Target, you can have a round-trip ticket and a pink suitcase and a travel-sized deodorant and time with a niece!

Awwww! Baby Niestle!

And please, will you imagine this: I am going BY MYSELF. I will READ on the plane or if there is a long delay. No one will be requiring my feeding assistance! No one will require me to carry their things or their person or their safety devices! No one will TALK TALK TALK at to me! (I am packing a gag in case my rowmate tries to start a conversation. That’ll go through security, right?)

So! That is the answer to the contest: I am showing you a travel-sized deodorant because I am going on a trip to see my niece.

A handful of you guessed the trip part, and if no one had guessed closer than that I would have chosen among those for the prize—but only ONE person guessed correctly that it was a trip to see my niece, and that was so right-on I made the little “We have a winner!” ding sound. It was Halloweenlover, of lots and lots of nonsense. Yay! I’m going to email you, HL, and we’ll talk food allergies and stuff. [Follow-up: you can see the care package if you’re interested.]