Friday, March 30, 2007

Stickin it to da man

A few months ago, I checked out my husband's credit report through the glory that is annualcreditreport.com (try it! you'll like it!) and was horrified to discover that he probably could not qualify for an auto loan at Joe's Crappy Car Emporium, home of the we-say-yes-to-everyone car loans at only 24% APR! His credit was a bad math SAT score or a really good but still possible batting average. Further investigation revealed that one of my stepkids' doctors offices had been sending bills to my husband in his name, but at his ex-wife's address. Bills he never authorized, for accounts on which he was not the guarantor, and (again) at an address where he does not receive mail. FIVE of them had gone to collections and been reported to the credit reporting agencies by the time we discovered the depths of the problem.

I took a deep breath - this was just a mistake, and surely the billing people would want to resolve their mistake so they could get paid, right? Oh, stop laughing. I was thinking the best of people, I promise not to do it again. One zillion phone calls later (and that's only a slight exagerration), we finally wised up and started complaining in writing. Except wisdom got us nowhere, and we never received any acknowledgment of our complaints, and every time we called we had to start over from scratch. To make things more complicated, the turnover at this billing department is insane, and literally every time I called, I got yet another new person in her first week on the job. I was starting to have to inform these clerks of their own policies.

I finally turned to my crisis resolution center, Google. What did people do before Google? I can imagine life without indoor plumbing or central heat or (god knows) functioning transportation, but no instant-gratification-provider-of-knowledge-of-questionable-reliability? I love me some Google. And did Google come through for me - it turned me on to Credit Boards, a collection of credit information and experienced credit fighters who volunteer huge amounts of time to help visitors with their credit problems. I learned about the Fair Credit Reporting Act and the relevant portions of HIPAA. I suckered some poor account supervisor at the health care provider into giving me her email address, and I started emailing her. Often. With thinly veiled threats of legal action. She loves me, I assure you.

Today, I received notification from my poor harassed buddy at the health care provider that they have sent a request to the credit bureaus to have the erroneous entries removed from my husband's report. I feel like I just ran a marathon or won an election for public office or some other life changing and incredibly unlikely accomplishment. I won't feel completely better until the entries are gone, and they said it could be up to 45 days, but it's progress, and I'll take progress.

Especially since my van is a big, fat, stupid paperweight again, sitting in my driveway unwilling to start, and too close to the house to light on fire.

Thursday, March 29, 2007

From the depths of despair to the peaks of self-congratulation

Whew. I so remember now why I quit working in IT and swore I'd never go back. After I got that site certified the other day, I was riding high on puzzle-solving endorphins. I came crashing back down the next morning when I discovered that our overall goal was still not accomplished (the certificate was one part of a larger puzzle, and although I thought it was the final piece, I was incorrect). I spent three hours onsite yesterday, and several more online last night, only to find that not only had I NOT fixed the new thing, I'd broken a couple other things that had worked before. Lame lame lame. That's when the awful feeling came back, the one I remember from my working days, of stomach acid and burning eyes and desperation. Knowing you have to fix something and don't know how and there's nowhere to turn, you just have to keep plugging away at it.

Here is yet another foray into really arcane and uninteresting computer crap. I was trying to set up RPC over HTTP access so the clients could get email using their Outlook software over the internet without opening extra firewall ports. This is a built-in function of Exchange, and Microsoft gives pretty easily followed steps for setting it up - configure the service, set up the access, change a couple ports, add a certificate, configure the client. Kind of a lot of work, but not hard once you find the directions. Unfortunately, it doesn't work. I did everything I was supposed to, tested, and...nothing. Went back over every step, assuming I missed something, typed something wrong...nothing. Went to discussion boards, googled "RPC over HTTP sucks" and...nothing. I undid settings and redid them, removed DNS zones (that I'm grossly unqualified to be mucking about with anyway), called my network engineer friend for a consult, yelled at my husband, lost sleep I desperately needed, and... NOTHING. Finally, I followed all the steps again from the beginning, as if I'd never done it before, but this time added about twice as many port entries as Microsoft calls for and changed the authentication method in the client, both per some random guy on the internet's suggestion, and...success! What???? WHY???? Stupid. Fucking. Microsoft.


While I am happy and relieved that it's working, I'd feel more comfortable about it if I understood WHY. Still, this has been a voyage of self-discovery for me. I have put my husband on notice that any dreams he may have of me ever contributing financially to the family again should be laid officially to rest. Work and I just do not get along.

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Self-certifying an IIS site

Or, Why Microsoft Blows.

My husband asked me for help with a consulting job last night, so I dusted off my incredibly old and rusty skills and tried to remember things I did 4 years ago and then translate them to another platform and two generations of operating system later. And I did it! I think. I did something, anyway, and I think I know what else I NEED to do to finish the job. Vague enough for you?

This won't be interesting to anyone but me, probably, but Microsoft annoys me so much that I have to vent it anyway. In my former life, I worked on Lotus Domino servers. They don't have as much market share as Microsoft, which makes no sense to me, as Lotus is more secure and just plain makes more sense. Certificates are a case in point.


Well, let me back up. A certificate is something you add to a web site that tells visitors (or their web browsers) "you can trust this website, its authenticity has been verified." You can get a certificate in two ways. 1 - There are a handful of globally trusted verifiers, whose business it is to verify (duh, and how many times can I say "verify" in one paragraph) that a website is legitimate. So, if you want to make your website look trustworthy, you pay one of these companies to check you out, make sure you're legit, and issue you an electronic certificate to put on your site. 2 - Alternatively, if you're just setting up the site for your own personnel, for example, you can authenticate your own website, and give yourself a homemade certificate. If you do this, people accessing your site will get a message that the certificate is not from one of the big trusted companies, but it will work just the same.

So, I was working on option 2 - creating my own certificate and verifying it myself. In Lotus, which I used to use, there's an easily followed and logical set of steps for doing this. The software designers recognized that this is a common need and made the process as painless as possible. Microsoft, on the other hand, seems to have taken this opportunity to play a little game of hide and seek with web admins. First of all, Microsoft blows in general, and there is no central admin console except what you cobble together yourself out of "snap-ins" (which sound like snap-ONS and make me want to do unnatural and painful things to the morons who developed them). Once you stumble, through trial and error, upon the correct snap-in, you then have to check the properties of the "default site" (hoping it's the right one), then pick one of like 10 tabs with similar and ambiguous names, then finally request a certificate. Now, you'd assume the process for verifying the certificate would be at least a little bit the same, but you would be completely wrong. To verify the certificate, you have to go to add/remove programs in the control panel. WHAT??? You scream in frustration, pulling out your hair! That makes no sense at all! You are correct, sir.

Anyway, I wandered and roamed throughout the operating system on this poor unsuspecting company's server (I had their permission, they were unsuspecting only in their unfounded trust in my abilities) until I finally figured out how to recreate, using a retarded software, that which I could do in my sleep four years ago using an intelligent one. And then my brain exploded, but I had my pride to comfort me.

Monday, March 26, 2007

What's in a name?

As some of you may have seen on my husband's blog, we got a mini dachshund puppy this weekend. Although this may be a sign of our ever-declining mental health, it wasn't quite as impulsive as it seemed. The puppy is really for my mother (who lives with us), who had a dachshund while we were growing up and has missed it ever since.

My mother doesn't like naming things (which I don't get - naming rights are half the reason for having kids!), so she told the 5 year old he could pick the puppy's name. He took the responsibility very, very seriously, and the process took 2 days of discussion followed by one hour of intensive review of all contenders. He came up with this list of contenders (some of them suggested by others in the family and many of them created on the spot) - the notes next to some of the names indicate why the name was NOT ultimately chosen:

Crystal - his sister has a pet mouse of the same name
Angel

Diamond - the dog is not clear
Chloe
Hermione
Curious
Snow - the dog is not white
Tootsie
Sheba
Zuron - too boyish
Kaminia
Azakra
Peanut
Azalea - too purple
Clementine
Tabitha
Amelia - this was his great-grandmother's name, and he didn't want to besmirch her memory
Ashanta - this one was deemed too scary, but I can't remember why
Leia
Sacra
Lorelei
Vivian - also 'too scary', as it sounds, to the 5 year old, too much like "oblivion"
Genevieve
Bailey
Celeste
Joy
Emerald - the dog is not green
Aquamarine - the dog is not blue-green
Opal
Ruby
Sapphire - the dog is not blue
Topaz
Zeckrimiah - we really had to talk him out of this one
Mariah - a bad singer
Citlalli - a classmate, who might not have appreciated having a dog named for her
Rackimiah
Esmerelda
Flower
Blossom - the name of a friend's dog, too copy-catty
Takra
Amiah
Cherry - too edible
Strawberry - ditto
LaFawnduh - Daddy's Napoleon Dynamite inspired contribution, shot down quickly by the boy
Flash - too boyish
Jekra

Through much prodding, he narrowed this list down, first to 30, then to 11, then to 5, and finally to 1 - Hermione. We're all happy with this choice - we're all Harry Potter fans, and my mother's old dachshund was named Herman, so it's similar enough to be a tribute. Now to teach it to the dog...

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Other people's poop

Spring has been coming and going around here lately, and today was beautiful and warm. We took the four oldest kids to a gigantic newish playground north of the city. Before turning our city bred crew loose on the county kids, with their shiny SUVs and well-manicured mothers, we made them use the port-a-potties in the parking lot. The 3 year old required some urging to enter the foul blue hut, but quickly became curious about his surroundings and ultimately observed,

"Look! It's other people's poop!"

Story of my life, kiddo.

Saturday, March 24, 2007

How is a restaurant like a washing machine?

I've been eating out a LOT the last couple weeks. My husband got a new job (so we had to celebrate), I had a birthday (so I needed to drown my aging sorrows), we went out with friends, and overall I've just generally stopped feeling like cooking. Eating out is just more fun. And less mess.

On my way home from last night's oh-my-god-good dinner, I was thinking in my post-drunk haze of how lovely it is to eat good food in a place where people cook it and clean it up for you. I didn't learn to cook until a couple years ago, so before that I sort of ate out by necessity. I mostly eat in now, and I really do like to cook, but I hadn't realized until this latest round of decadence how much I still really enjoy eating out. I likened it, in my head, to washing clothes in a machine instead of beating them on a rock or something. Yes, I technically COULD wash my clothes without benefit of a washing machine (yes I could, hush all you naysayers), but aren't washing machines so much nicer?

In the same vein (not to be confused with, "my efforts were invane," quote taken from an email a friend just received from an idiot), I wish Baltimore's zoning laws allowed quail, as I had quail eggs for the second time in my life last night and I looooooooove them. Sadly, I will have to stick with chickens. That's okay, I like chicken eggs, too.

Friday, March 23, 2007

I forgot how fun bars are

I have, inevitably, caught the twins' cold. When they were sicker at the beginning of the week, I marveled at their capacity for whine, but now I marvel at my own capacity for sitting upright and participating in inane child-led conversation, so perhaps their cold was worse than I thought. Or maybe I'm just a weenie.

I had planned on going to a girls' night out karaoke thing last night, but as the evening approached and my whole self clotted with mucus (come on, you know you want me), I had doubts about how much fun I would have. I went anyway, in an ongoing effort to not be a flake and instead actually do what I say I will do, and surprised myself by having a fabulous time. It's like the bar atmosphere itself lifts my spirits. Even before my first drink, I felt lighter and happier than I have in a while, and my husband (who is not a girl and who we included, generously, nonetheless) laughed at my transformation into a much younger, livelier version of myself.

I love my friends, my friends' friends, my husband, and alcohol. I love my mother for watching my herd and my herd for not giving her too hard a time. I love that I'm going out again! Tonight! For dinner with friends. And again again! Tomorrow! For an art fundraiser at my son's school. It's a revelation, that the world has been out there waiting while I've been living the same day 260 times over with few variations.

Monday, March 19, 2007

The Money Pit

I seem to have a strong, unmanageable, perverse psychic gift. If I think to myself, wow, [something] is going really well! then almost immediately, that thing will turn to shit. Examples:

1) Last month, I said (out loud, very bad idea) that it had been a long time since our craptastic van had had one of its patented spectacular flameouts. $1100 and 8 days in the shop later, I am resolved never to even mentally comment on its good behavior again.

2) In early February, everyone around us was getting stomach flu, and we were well. "This winter hasn't been too awful, illness-wise!" I foolishly remarked. We have not been well since, and the past month has included RSV, pneumonia, sinus infection, strep, and scarlet fever. You know how the IRS now feels compelled to practically pay US, because we are so many? I think Blue Cross should take up a similar plan, though I admit I can't figure what would be in it for them.

3) Just last night, I thought to myself how fortunate we are to own a home, and how our positive balance sheet owes entirely to the increased value of said home since its purchase. Today? I had my neighbor (a contractor) over to give estimates on the long (looooong) list of long (looooong) neglected home repairs we need done. He hasn't given an estimate yet, but he shook his head over each room in a fashion that reminded me of an oncologist with a very bad bedside manner. My house may have cancer.

In related news, my neighbor is working on drumming up business and said he'd give me a discount if I got him referrals. He is a really nice guy, for whatever that's worth (since I have no actual ability to evaluate workmanship, it's worth a lot to me), he's licensed and insured, and he seems responsive. So, if anyone in the Baltimore area needs work done on their house and wants to get me a discount a referral, let me know!


The tide may be turning. In our house, in addition to the typical sock eating monster that leaves us with one of each pair, we have a binkie eating monster that secrets away pacifiers in dead of night. I think we've bought 400 of them, and we only ever know the location of one, max, at a time. Tonight, as I put the twins to bed, I asked my husband to look behind girly's crib and he found SIX of them. Things are looking up!

Silver lining

I am on a commission (as my three year old always says) to be more positive and productive, to whine less and live more. Call it a new year's resolution, dating from my birthday instead of the actual new year. The twins are making it difficult, however, to see the good in life or have the energy to live it. It is 5:30am. I fell asleep at 12:30 and have now been up since 4, courtesy of a one-two punch of suck from my lovely offspring.

This may all sound like whining, but wait! Here's the spin I finally came up with, after much unseemly despair - isn't it amazing what the human body can withstand? I mean, I look like crap, the twins seem to have finished off the demolition my older children started on my body, I'm exhausted all the time and I can hardly finish sentences my mind has become so vague, but the fact that I'm still able to walk and talk at all is a testament to...I don't know, to something. Human resilience. The ability to live for months at a time with little rest. The fallacy of the 8 hour sleep.

Hmm, I reread that and it still doesn't sound all that positive. I may need to try anew another day. I would say tomorrow, except that it already practically is tomorrow, and I'm afraid days begun on less than 4 hours of sleep hardly ever turn out all that well.

Saturday, March 17, 2007

Latching on

I know I've been slacking on posting, but it's been a fairly crappy week, and if you want to hear me whine you can always reread my previous 354 consecutive whiny-ass posts. Summary: van is out of shop after only 8 days in, new water heater is installed (and only cost a teency bit less than our honeymoon, which included a much larger quantity of hot water in the form of the Gulf of Mexico), approximately one half of the family is on antibiotics for reasons ranging from scarlet fever to sinus infection (although I did not pass the test and am suffering, as stoically as you might imagine, without benefit of prescription medication), and I am now 31 years old, blech. In better news - my husband starts his new job Monday (yay him!), my children are being generally not-sucky, and the twins have (knock on everything wooden) been sort of sleeping. Hurray!

As is my wont, I am latching on to a new obsession. At least it's not cloth diapers! Not that I'm not still obsessed w/cloth diapers, of course, but I have pretty much all I need for now and so have been casting about for something else to spend unreasonable amounts of time and money on. As my husband just said, when I latch onto something, I really mean it. Today's candidate is.....

Raising chickens. My husband has been lobbying for chickens for some time now, but I've been slow to see the light. Now that my eldest is at an age of quasi-reason and loves all things outdoors and alive, the time may be right. I must sign off now to research chicken coop building plans, but I leave you with a picture of my leading candidate, the Red Orpington:


Why yes, it has occurred to me that I'm insane, thank you for the suggestion.

Monday, March 12, 2007

So much for spring killing pestilence

I'm enjoying the warmer temperatures, but so far the much-anticipated death of plague has not materialized. My mother has a sinus infection so severe she's actually going to the doctor (this is nearly unprecedented, she's very opposed to anything less than 100% self-sufficiency and is, what's the word? STUBBORN), my 5 year old has scarlet fever (scarlet fever is such a romantic sounding name, and so old-fashioned, I feel like Laura Ingalls Wilder) and a double ear infection, and - oh, there's no and. The rest of us are still incubating, I guess. I assume our turns are coming. This just in - my husband feels like he's getting a cold. And is supposed to start at his new job any day now. Damn the plague!

Oh, and our van, after 2 service dates last week and $1000 out of pocket, now stalls when you stop at lights or turn corners. Fun!

In other news, my daughter has learned to crawl, which has greatly reduced the number of words I can write without having to get up and rescue the electronics or the cat from her clutches. She got a tooth, too. She's so fancy.

Friday, March 09, 2007

Maryland charter schools being targeted by proposed legislation

My son goes to a charter school. Charter schools are funded like public schools (and are free to students) but are independently operated. In the case of the Baltimore City Public School System, under whose umbrella our school falls, this really can only be a good thing. This is a school system that recently "lost" 50 million dollars (as in, actually misplaced), a school system that has struggled with overcrowding, decrepit facilities, high dropout rates, poor test scores, and violence in schools. The Baltimore City school system has driven families out of the city, where their only options have, until recently, been failing public schools or insanely expensive public schools. Charter schools offer an alternative to those families - to my family - and yet they have been under attack from the very beginning.

Charter schools in Maryland are only in their second year of operation. There is a court case pending already to try to force the school systems to actually fund the charter schools appropriately - right now, the charter schools are operating at several hundred to a few thousand dollars less per student than public schools in the same systems, and yet they are doing a better job educating students and keeping them safe. Now, before that case is even settled, some of our state senators are proposing legislation modification that would further reduce the charter schools' already inadequate funding.


I guess I shouldn't be surprised that government doesn't support education, but I don't get the push behind flogging charter schools. I can't imagine they'd make much money if they succeed - a lot of the families currently attending charter schools would choose private schools or move to a better school district or homeschool if the charters were no longer available, so those funds would be lost to the public school system anyway. Obviously, what is best for the students and community is not the driving force, I just can't figure out what is. It's so short-sighted, putting kids last. What are we supposed to do in 20-30 years when there is a shortage of qualified professionals to take care of us and a burgeoning prison population? That may sound overly dramatic, but it seems to me that the old adage about an ounce of prevention applies here - the current system is not working well (at least here in Baltimore City), so why not try something different?

I wrote to my state senator and all the misguided sponsors and signers of the proposed legislation and all of the committee members who will be debating it this morning. If you are so inclined, you can email them too, and ask them to vote NO on SB 669:

Sponsors/signers (just add "@senate.state.md.us" to the end of each name to get the email address):
roy.dyson
gwendolyn.britt
robert.hooper
lisa.gladden

Committee members (just add "@senate.state.md.us" to the end of each name to get the email address):
joan.carter.conway
richard.colburn
janet.greenip
andrew.harris
mike.lenett
paul.pinsky
jim.rosapepe
bobby.zirkin

Fight the power, man!

Thursday, March 08, 2007

Unfun ways to blow a lot of cash

1) Broken (wait, let me look it up) front wheel bearing on the world's lemoniest lemon of a craptastic piece of shit minivan. Surely, you may be thinking, a "bearing" isn't expensive? Aren't bearings just little balls? Ah, but you (or your friendly shmos at Goodyear) can only obtain these made-from-rare-goose-poop or something bearings as part of a "larger assembly". For $499. Good. Grief.

2) Hot water heater. Frequent visitors to our house have probably noticed an increase in body odor over the last month or so, as our showers have gotten shorter, colder, and rarer. Today, we are conceding defeat and engaging in a (cold, smelly) quest to find an adequate replacement. Quickly.

Oh, and the installation for the water heater is the same price as the heater itself! What was with the hard sell on college, parents? Clearly, if financial solvency is a factor in your career choice, you can do no better than auto mechanic or plumber.

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

1:56am

This is my second night making the twins go four hours between feedings. In the sober light of day (and perhaps this is why sobriety is so overrated), it made sense to say, "surely chunky 8 month olds do not need to eat every 45 minutes at night." It is in everyone's best interest for them to learn to sleep, and I have tried everything except really committing to letting them cry. I have read possibly every word in the English language ever written on making demons babies sleep, and even the theories diametrically opposed to each other agree that consistency is key.

Last night, night one, wasn't that terrible. I fed them before I went to bed at 11. Boy twin woke up at 12:10 and screamed his head off for 30 minutes and then did go back to sleep until 3, when I fed them both. His sister took her turn screaming from 4:30-5, then they both got up at 7. Not terrible. Neither twin was noticeably emaciated in the morning (sadly, neither was I, but that's another issue), and I had had two chunks of two hours of sleep, which enabled me to do puzzles with my son, clean the house a little, and make dinner. All in the same day!

I went to bed feeling foolishly optimistic. I kind of go to bed every night feeling foolishly optimistic, come to think of it - despite 244 consecutive nights of them not sleeping (that's the actual number, not an exaggeration, by the way), every night I think to myself that maybe this will be the night they realize that sleep is not out to get them, that it might be nice to have a mother they see outside visitation hours at the asylum, that there is no way in hell they need to eat again. Anyway, I had hope, because I am dumb. It must be like pregnancy amnesia - I have horrible-night-with-babies amnesia, which allows me to continue trying to survive the twins' infancy against all the evidence pointing to the unlikelihood of that survival.

I fed the little monsters darlings at 10:45 and went to bed. Because I am constantly tense from forcing myself to stay awake, I can never fall asleep quickly at bedtime (though I can nod off in seconds any other time, like while driving a car), and I fell asleep around 11:30. Boy twin started screaming at 12:45. It is now 2:13am and he's still at it, although he does take occasional 5-10 minute breaks to make sure I try to fall asleep again - it's most effective, apparently, when trying to break down your enemy emotionally, to not just keep them awake but to jerk them back up out of sleep repeatedly. Twins? The Supreme Court would like a word with you regarding the applicability of the Geneva Convention. I think I'm raising little Republicans, talk about insult to injury.


I'm going to go suffer the noise horizontally again for a while. I hate this sound more than anything - it makes my heart race and my stomach churn, I actually feel like throwing up. Why are my babies so awful???

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Adrift in the land of no sleep

I'm so tired, and I never sleep, but I'm bored of never doing anything because I'm tired. Here's where the poor judgement and clumsiness and erratic behavior come in. I decide that I MUST just go on with life, and stop this futile waiting for rest that is clearly not coming, so I make plans to do normal things like a normal person - get together with friends, go grocery shopping, knit (okay, not sure normal people knit, but I like knitting). I really enjoy doing these things, but then the wall of exhaustion hits harder and earlier than usual, because I squander my extremely limited energy on behaving in a manner unbecoming to the living dead, and then I just have to collapse in a moist desperate heap of hopelessness until the next 20 minute snippet of sleep I can snatch from the clutches of my evil twins (my twins are fraternal in genes but identical in evilness)(evility?).

I keep thinking of things to do, then fizzling out when confronted with actually accomplishing anything. Examples:

1) Starting a business. I have an actual idea (rare). I have a possible company name. I started doing financial analysis. I even submitted a quote request to a hardware vendor, but they haven't responded (possibly due to my lack of an actual, real life business), and so the steam, she has worn off.
2) Actual parenting. My three year old needs a 12 step program for video game junkies, so I have been trying to distract him from his addiction by plying him with mom activities like playgrounds, puzzles, and other fun things starting with the letter P. Peanut butter? Whatever. Anyway, his focus and will far exceed my own, as is only natural given our relative levels of sleep (him: 12 hours a night. me: 20-45 minutes, 2-3 times in each 24 hour period).
3) Writing the great American novel. In my head, in the dead of night (and let me tell you, as a regular visitor to the dead of night, it truly is a morguish and unpleasant land), I think of not just ideas but whole paragraphs of elegant and compelling language that I intend to commit to paper (or pixels) ASAP - but the ideas are ephemeral as dreams (and may, in some cases, actually just BE dreams) and never make it to the writing-down stage.

I'm sure there are more, but my brain is proving my point (do I have one?) by not remembering the rest. I need sleep. And maybe chocolate.

Sunday, March 04, 2007

PMS is a bitch

And so am I. Holy crap, am I. I seriously can hardly abide my own company. My family's reward for letting me sleep in this morning (is it really sleeping in if you don't get properly to sleep in the first place until 6am?) is my glowering face and yelling, cursing reaction to absolutely everything. During one of my late night sojourns in the living room last night, I thought wistfully of the children's fleeting dependency and sweet innocence and resolved to be a kinder, more engaged mother. That didn't last three minutes into breakfast.

If I'm really done having children (and I believe that, for the mental health of everyone in the family, I had better be), WHY must we all suffer this every month? Here I am, menopause, come and get me!

Thursday, March 01, 2007

I like bacon

For hormonal reasons, the details of which I will spare you all (I'm not pregnant, I assure you), I am more than usually jonesing for fat and grease. I really wish I had some bacon right now.

In other, unrelated news, breastfeeding the twins is really starting to wear on my nerves. Especially (and this should come as no surprise) in the dead of night, when I am once again sitting in the babies' dark, boring room with nothing to do except try not to fall asleep and drool on whichever twin is taking its turn to torture me.

Last night, while I was trying to cling to consciousness long enough to shed my offspring and return to bed, my wandering mind wandered back to my own goofiness as a kid. I remembered thinking that the following things were new - to the world - the year that I was seven:

1) The color purple (not the book, not the movie - the actual color)
2) Plastic

I don't know how old I was when I realized that both of these amazing discoveries predated my own brief existence, but I think I was in my teens. I'm a bright bulb.


(household items made of plastic, per the wonder of wikipedia)

This explains a lot

So, my Jack Nicholson-in-The-Shining phase is over (for now), and I'm moving past crazy and desperate into spring. It's March, hurray! I hate February.

The Today show (aka, my contact with the outside world) is running a series on sleep this week (see why I love them?). Yesterday, they said if you don't get enough sleep, you lose what you learned that day. At least, I think that's what they said - I didn't get enough sleep last night, and I'm a little fuzzy on the details. Actually, I haven't slept enough in about eighteen months. No wonder I feel like a dull blade these days.

In other news, I shaved my son's hair into a mohawk. The obvious question is, why does my husband let me near the children with razors? I think it turned out really cute, actually, and I'm very proud of the boy for asserting some individuality - he's spent the last couple years trying to be a herd animal.