Mrs. Odie: Crimestopper

My stepmom usually comes over early on Monday mornings and helps me out with my girls. She holds Pringles while I drag Viva through her morning routine of getting dressed, eating, and brushing her teeth. Sometimes Stepmom will take over the morning routine and I’ll snuggle the baby. At the end of it all, Stepmom shuffles Viva out the door and drives her to day care and I collapse in my favorite chair with a fat baby and a big sigh of contentment.

This Monday, I cancelled on Stepmom because Viva had a rough night of sleep due to coughing and I didn’t want to force her out of bed early. Naturally she woke up at 7:00 anyway, but I was happy to have the morning to lounge with her and watch “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic” “Hearth’s Eve” no fewer than three times in a row.

My morning began with coffee and whining: “I wanna watch ‘My Little Pony.’ The one where they get really cold.”

In this thrilling episode, the Earth Ponies, Unicorns, and Pegasi perform a play about their origins. Therein, we meet these creatures who fly around in the clouds feeding on hatred and anger.

“What are they called again, honey?” I tease. “Winnebagos? Wilburs? Windsmackers?”

“WINDAGOES, MOM!” She is only 32 months old, but she’s perfecting the “you are such a bleedin’ idjit” tone.

“Whatsawhoseits?”

“Mom, do unicorns fart?” she grins, then answers her own question. “Nooooo, unicorns don’t fart! They don’t have butts!” I don’t know if this is true. I’d have to ask Kelle Hampton, unicorn expert. I’m pretty sure unicorns fart either glitter or confetti.

Pringles just giggles at Viva and grabs handfuls of her curls every time Viva gets close enough.

It was around 9:15 when I finally belted both kids into my new (to me) Nissan Versa hatchback and headed to day care with track 12 of “Snacktime” by the Barenaked Ladies playing. That day, we only got to listen to track 12 over and over. Viva is big on repetition in entertainment right now.

After a successful drop-off, I stopped at my local supermarket for milk (and yes, gummy bears and ice cream too. There. You got it out of me. Happy?). I decided to allow myself one morning a week to eat my favorite junk food and then be good the rest of the week.

Driving up the hill to my house, I always slow at the intersection where there is no stop sign. Once I see there is no oncoming traffic, I speed up to my driveway a block from the corner. My rented home is on a big corner lot that is quite unkempt because the landlord doesn’t pay for a gardener. As a result, people often throw trash in our yard or, even more annoying, cigarette butts. Sometimes teenagers loiter and make-out there, but not very often. Once I chased away a couple of boys sharing a bong in their car on a Tuesday morning. If you have to get stoned at 9 in the morning, what the hell do you do to RELAX at the end of the day?

As I slowed for the uncontrolled intersection, I noticed two women sitting on the corner in front of my hill. They were smoking cigarettes and chatting happily to each other. They had long dark hair, hoodies, jeans and sunglasses. The uniform of the young. I felt annoyed they were there. Those cigarette butts will end up in my yard, I thought irritably.

I enter my house through the kitchen door at the side because the driveway is closer to that door. My front steps go down a hill approximately 20 yards to the street below. Hedges and trees obscure the view so that a person standing on the sidewalk cannot see my house and I cannot see a person standing on my sidewalk.

With Pringles on my hip, I walked down the winding front stairs and peered around the hedge. The women were still there, smoking and chatting.

“You ladies waiting for someone?” I asked. Both turned slightly and looked at me briefly. Both said “Yeah.”

The one on the right smiled pleasantly and said “Our car broke down up there,” gestured vaguely,”we’re just waiting.”

“Okay,” I replied equally pleasantly. “Just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“Thanks,” one sounded annoyed.

“Sorry,” the other sounded embarrassed.

Back in my house, I realized I’d left the milk in my trunk, so Pringles and I went out the back door to the car again. I looked up the street to see if I saw the broken down car. I didn’t.

And then it hit me.

Somebody ordered a bunch of merchandise with fraudulent accounts opened in Odie’s name when his identity was stolen last week. There are strangers sitting in front of my house. It is 10:30, about the time FedEx usually shows up.

I called the police, expecting the dispatcher to say there was nothing she could do, but they actually said they’d send someone right away. While I waited, I kicked myself internally. Why did I go out there and tip them off? That was stupid. I should have been more suspicious. Now these perps know my face and that I have a young baby. Nice.

I couldn’t see much from my house, but I did see a police car cruise slowly up and down the street. Pringles was overdue for a nap, so I wrapped her up and nursed her, then walked her around, peeking out the window from time to time. I saw a couple more cars and about four officers standing in the street chatting. I love living in a nice town where the police are not very busy so when you call for them, they ALL come.

Damn it! I tipped them off and they got away! So stupid! I didn’t even want my ice cream anymore I was so upset with myself.

That, my friends, is pretty upset. It was Ben and Jerry’s Vanilla Fudge Caramel Swirl. I have to be quite out of sorts to be thrown off my binge.

Pringles was sleeping peacefully in her swing when a burly officer in body armor showed up at my front door. He held open his notebook and showed me a FedEx tracking number.

“This is the package they were going to steal,” he announced.

“You caught them!” I actually squealed. I admit that now.

“YOU caught them,” he chuckled. “Nice work.”

The police arrested two females, one with the tracking number on her, neither with I.D. or car keys or phones. Someone had dropped them off to pick up the merchandise. Probably boyfriends. Girls can be so stupid. I’ll bet they won’t give up the real perpetrators of this crime. They’ll take the grand larceny charge, do their time, and probably be rewarded with some stolen jewelry for their loyalty.

Don’t give me that “it was just petty larceny” shit. You get me.

I wish I could say I was sleeping easier. It’s a total cliché, but I feel violated. Strangers have my address, phone number, my husband’s social security number. They have seen my face and know I have at least one young child. These people tried to steal from me. They were at my home. It’s a terrible, sick, creepy, furious, scared feeling.

Nothing funny about it.

And the bitches didn’t have my popcorn maker.

Mistaken Identity

It happens to around 8 million people, and this month, it happened to us. Odie had his identity stolen.

The first week of January, we discovered that Odie has great credit and so we financed a nice humble little used car. Apparently, we were not the only ones who got excited about Odie’s credit. Within a few days, there were four hard inquiries on his credit report, and three different mail order businesses gave the thief accounts in Odie’s name.

He received a credit alert from freecreditreport.com (you have that song in your head now, don’t you?) and the next day I opened a package expecting a popcorn maker, yet finding a Nintendo Wii, Super Mario Brothers bundle. I stared at it dumbly for a minute. My first thought was “Damn you, Amazon 1-click!” hypothesising I must have accidentally ordered this. But it was addressed to Odie, not to me.

Besides, I would have “accidentally” ordered an XBox 360 Connect (you ARE the controller).

What kind of idiot thief steals stuff with my money and then gives it to me? It dawned on me that these people were not just internet thieves, they intended to watch my house and get those packages before I did. My skin crawled as I imagined being staked out by goodness knows who while I nursed my infant on the couch. Yikes!

Assholes, say hello to my little friend. Actually, my big friend, a 65 pound lab/pitbull mix. She kind of hates people she doesn’t know. Especially men. She’s sort of a first wave feminist that way. And she’s racist. But man, can she cook.

My living room is all windows, and as my sister and her urine-stained trousers can attest, we have an excellent guard dog. She is big, she has a deep, angry bark, and she will spring off the windows so hard, your doubts about their ability to hold will be warranted. As my father can attest, her bark is not worse than her bite. Because she bites.

I never saw any shady types lurking around my house, but I was scared. My local police advised me to call 911 if I saw anyone. Very comforting. I called 911 once. I saw a man in a car punching the woman in the passenger seat over and over and over and over. The phone just rang. No one ever answered.

My house is difficult to find. Halfway down the block, it changes cities, so the numbering is weird. One house is number 35 and the next one is 18945. I have never once invited someone to my house, be it friend or workman, and had that person find my house without at least one phone call to me telling me s/he’s lost. For once, I think this worked in my favor. My house is also at the top of a flight of windy stairs. It isn’t easy to look inconspicuous walking up my front steps and back down with a package. Plus, my neighbors are nosey. God bless them.

One thing did go missing, though. I ordered an old-fashioned popcorn maker. The kind with a crank you have to turn. I read that they are taking microwave popcorn off the market gradually because the lining of the bags causes cancer. They’re phasing the product out gradually between now and 2014. No word on whether the cancer comes on gradually.

I like old-fashioned, popped in oil popcorn, anyway. After reading positive reviews on Amazon, I found one that suited my needs. It just never showed up, despite my account showing that it shipped.

So, it’s Friday night and I just poured a glass of wine. Here’s a toast to the thieves who charged several hundreds of dollars of electronics to my husband.

Enjoy your $26.85 popcorn maker, motherfuckers.

Objects in Motion

I think wives commonly have ambition for their husbands. Some women want to be married to doctors or senators. Others don’t care what the profession is, so long as the result is likely to put them on “The Real Housewives of Your Geographical Area.”

I admit, I feel some esteem from my husband’s brains. He’s genius smart. I feel lucky that I snagged a smart one. Goodness knows I dated enough pretty dumb things. I used to want to be the smarter one in the relationship. I needed to feel superior to another person at all times. It was to make up for the fact that inside I felt inferior to everyone. After many years of therapy, I felt good about myself. Good enough to find me a kind, handsome man with low self-esteem and mathematic genius.  That’s who the Cosmo Quiz told me would be my perfect match.

There was a time when I wanted him to be a college professor, because I wanted to be a college professor’s wife. I’m like some chick from “Game of Thrones” who wants her husband to be king, right?

I’m also insecure and jealous. Therapy, shmerapy. As Lady Gaga would say, I was born this way. I was attracted to Odie the second I saw him, and I don’t exactly have low standards. Now he has a wedding ring, graying hair and two kids. Chicks eat that shit up. If I bought him a blazer with elbow patches, I’d have to also buy a gun and get a permit to carry.

Have you seen how adorable college girls are? And technically, it isn’t illegal to date your professors in college. It’s only unethical. My jealous, insecure and slightly nutty center believes that 20-somethings would hurl themselves at my husband with wild abandon, and though he would duck at first, eventually his back would ache and he’d get slow, and one would land on his face.

My fear of college co-eds writing “love you” on their eyelids during Odie’s lectures tends to rise proportionally with my weight.

Odie decided college wasn’t for him. He got the required education and degree to get on the professor track, but he lacks the passion for it. He likes working with public school kids. I’m not destined to be a professor’s wife, alas.

Today he brought home news that he is being pushed toward the AP Physics job at his high school. Good thing they’re pushing him, too; because according to physics, if they didn’t, he would never move any closer to that job.

“My husband teaches AP Physics” has a nice ring to it. Not that I’m not happy with “My husband teaches high school math.” I’ve just always had a thing for science. Plus, physics is real. No one can convincingly say to a teacher, “When am I ever going to use physics?”

This weekend, Viva told her friend that it was dark because the sun was on the other side of the Earth. And when I watched the intro to “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” she pointed at the globe graphic and announced, “That’s our planet, Mommy!”

He taught her those things. It’s what he’s interested in.

And before you get all snarky, YES, I know that’s not physics. It’s astrology. Duh.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I want Odie to be happy. I’m not the only one in this family who struggles with depression. Math can be so dry in high school. It’s all standards and memorization. None of the beauty and creativity that REAL math is. I think he might enjoy trying something else.

I know I’ll enjoy being proud of him. And bragging. I’m good at that.

And then we’ll get shelves for the garage

It’s January 5, 2012 in Southern California, so naturally it’s 80 degrees. Last year, we didn’t have much of a summer. Maybe we won’t have a winter either.

My street is still a mess from the wind storms that blew through here the first week of December. Giant palm fronds clog up the gutters in front of our house. An apt metaphor for my writer’s block.

Well, not really. At night, after both children are asleep, I have been tempted to write, but even more drawn to watch “Game of Thrones.” I blame Jessica of “The 24 Year Age Gap” (Blogspot) because she brought it up in her blog and I had nothing to watch and I figured, “Okay, I’ll try the first episode…”

Three weeks later, I’ve watched all ten episodes, read all 700 plus pages of the first novel and am about 350 pages into the second. I’ve taken to calling Odie “Milord.” Meanwhile, he is obsessed with “Elder Scrolls V:Skyrim.” Every time I say “I got my husband Skyrim for his birthday” I feel like I’m confessing something dirty.

I want you to know that I’m not going to be one of those writers who starts a blog, gets you hooked, then stops writing. I have been let down by many such bitches in my life, and I will not join their ranks.

The winds came roaring through the first week of December and blew all my mojo away. Yesterday, Odie set a desk up in front of the windows in our living room, scooted the Pack N Play up beside it, and made me a work space. I love him so. I feel inspired. I have a work space now. I used to write in my TV watching, reading and nursing space. Since I can’t see the TV from my new desk, I feel confident that I can get work done.

And speaking of Odie setting up my work space, I have learned the best way to get him to do something is to ask him to do something else. I have been nagging him wife-style to help me make our second bedroom into a play room for about a year. I was going to do it behind his back, but he found the boxes and asked me what they were for, and the only thing I lie about in this relationship is my weight.

If I have a plan, Odie has a different one. We never agree on the way things ought to be and we are both convinced the other is wrong. Even when I think there is no possible way he could disagree with a plan of mine, like putting up curtains to replace the fitted sheet we have hanging from the horizontal blinds, he finds a way. Why would we spend money on curtains when we don’t have shelves in the garage? How can we possibly clean out the junk room and make it a play room until we have shelves in the garage? You know what would help make us organized?

Were you about to say “shelves in the garage”? You’re wrong. It’s a giant toolbox (I’m just kidding. It’s shelves in the garage).

It’s gotten to the point where whenever Odie asks me a question, that’s my answer.

“You know where we should go for dinner?”

“To get shelves for the garage?”

“You know what I want to buy for Viva?”

“Shelves for the garage?”

He knows I’m mocking him, which I guess is mean. But I’m on target here.

So I nag about the playroom until he cleans the kitchen. Because the man is a procrastinator and he will do everything except the thing he has to do. Even if the thing he has to do is easier and more fun, it’s still the thing he “has to” do and not what he “wants to do.” He will do three hours of yard work because I asked him to install curtain rods.

I’m going to pressure him to put up some shelves in the garage tomorrow, because I really need the laundry done.

Happy New Year!

I resolve to keep writing. Hope to see you in 2012 for whatever little time the Mayas say we have left. I’m pretty sure Mayan is the adjective and Maya are the people. Or rather were the people.

Be safe, be happy, be realistic. You aren’t going to be able to keep your resolution. You know it. I know it. It’s freeing in away.

I resolve to take the tree down before Valentine’s Day.

Not cool, Farkle the Elf.

“Elf on a Shelf” is the thing to do this holiday season. Often as I put Pringles down for first nap of the day, Billy Bush and his emaciated co-host, whose name won’t stay in my head, are yapping about where the elf is today. I think there’s one on “Today” also, but all that morning programming runs together for me.

As soon as I heard about these charming little elfs who watch for niceness and naughtiness all day, then use “Christmas magic” to fly to Santa at night and report back, I knew that Kelle Hampton had to be all over that shit. I was not wrong. She had a knee-slapping tale about how her mother-in-law had accidentally touched the elf, and her little sprite daughter screamed at the top of her lungs, because according to the badly written and poorly illustrated book, the elf will lose its magic if you touch it.

I cannot believe Kelle Hampton passed up an opportunity to say to her mother-in-law, “OH MY GOD! YOU RUINED CHRISTMAS!” and burst into tears of grief and horror. That’s what I would do. Instead of getting on the phone and pretending to call Santa, only to remedy it all with some song and dance (literally, a song and dance restored her elf’s magic), I would ring up “Santa” and be all “A blood sacrifice is required? Done and done.”

I couldn’t help but purchase an Elf on the Shelf myself.

Mine is brown-haired, brown-skinned and brown-eyed. Viva named him Farkle. We read the book once, and she never asked for it again. She’s much more interested in Huckle, Lowly and Bananas Gorilla right now. So Farkle was mostly forgotten.

I even touched him, which I figured was no big deal. After the dog took him to her bed as a chew toy, I felt it was a kindness to retrieve him. It turns out, however, that the other elves at the North Pole are like children on the playground. They sense when one of their own is different and they shun him. Farkle is a “touched elf,” and everybody knows it. They know it isn’t his fault, but that doesn’t stop them from treating him like a second-class citizen. It’s very sad. The effects on Farkle started showing up as simple rebellion.

He knows that’s Odie’s “Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim” and he isn’t allowed to touch it. I told him in no uncertain terms, “NOT COOL, Farkle.”

Every night, Farkle flies to Santa to report about how good and bad my kids were, and in the morning, we find him in a new spot. I am not always thrilled about where he turns up.

A) we need a new shower head. Secondly, what a perv!

I think Farkle started to feel my disdain. I say this, because he began to act out.

Cleaning up elf barf does not go on my list of “the joys of the season.”

Damn it, Farkle! That was my last refill!

It’s been a rough week, and I’m glad Farkle will be going home on Saturday. I’m hoping the North Pole provides some sort of counseling for Touched Elves. Maybe after a year in a specialized program, he’ll realize it wasn’t his fault and that he isn’t alone. I feel hopeful because he made at least one very influential friend in my home.

Godspeed, Farkle, and so long. We’re probably going to move in September, and if you don’t get a change of address notice… Hey, it isn’t you. It’s me.

Merry Christmas!

Giving up what doesn’t work

If you, like so many others, got here by Googling “I ate too many corn dogs. Now what?” Welcome. I think we both learned a lesson we won’t soon forget. Yes, in my case they were vegetarian, but I dipped them in ranch dressing, so my suffering is complete.

I’m still compensating for my seven days on The Seventeen Day Diet. What a God-awful waste of time that was. Because every action has an equal and opposite reaction, I counterbalanced my week of egg whites, spinach and fat-free salad dressing with approximately two months of pint-a-day ice cream binges. I guess that’s not really equal and opposite. It’s actually an egregiously out of proportion and opposite reaction. Dieting does that to me every time. Once, I was vegan for four years, then spent approximately ten years eating cheese three times a day. After nine months of abstinence in OA, I am on year nine of sugar and white flour bingeing.

Most people dread the holidays because of all the holiday eating. My solution to that dread? Eat like it’s Christmas all year long, and then you have zero dieting stress at holiday time. You went to a party and ate a whole pumpkin pie?

I did that twice last week.The only thing a holiday party adds to the experience is that mistletoe virtually guarantees my fat face gets a kiss.

Four more months of this and I’ll be carrying the baby weight as long as I carried the baby. I’ve spent nearly 30 years giving myself weight loss deadlines: my birthday, Christmas, a special school dance, a family occasion, a court date. Literally. I wanted to be skinny for jury duty. For thirty years I’ve failed to meet every one of them. I’m nothing if not persistent when it comes to failure.

The truth is, women who are thin for their whole lives are that way for one of two reasons: either they were born that way and will be thin no matter what they eat, drink or how much they exercise OR they work really hard to be thin. They exercise daily, avoid yummy foods, and eschew alcohol.

Clearly I am not the former, and I show no symptoms of being the latter.

And I said thin for their whole lives because anybody can look great for a few months or years on a raw almond and cocaine diet.

What do I do? Surrender to being a fat ass for the rest of my life? Not appealing.

From ages 9 to approximately 18, I believed I was fat and needed to lose weight, but I was wrong. From age 18 to approximately 20, I was quite heavy. The culprit? Corn dogs! I love it when these posts come full circle. I worked in the mall after high school, right across from the food court and Hot Dog on a Stick. My cholesterol was higher than my SAT Verbal score.

Even at my fattest in the 90s, I was nowhere near what I thought I was. I had a terrible habit of befriending anorexics, and that threw all sense of perspective out the window. I usually exercised and so I stopped being fat and went back to being average and normal for about ten more years. After college, I gained quite a bit of weight (cheese three times a day). That was temporary, though. In fact, while I’ve always thought of myself as an overweight person, the truth is I really only had two periods of being fat: after high school, then after college. Hey, kids! Learning keeps you thin! Thinner. I was not born to be “thin.”

Then, being happily married to a “snacker.” I’ve always been a meals only kind of gal. Odie is a grazer. When I lived alone, I had no food in my house. Why keep food in the house? They have it at the store and it never goes bad! I would just walk to the local grocery when I felt like eating. Guinness I always had.

For me, getting married was like pulling the rip-cord on an emergency raft. Twenty-five pounds in about a year. Then I got pregnant. Then I breastfed for twenty months and no matter what those Hollywood bitches say in interviews, IT DOES NOT “MELT OFF”! And I “chase my kids around” all day too, skinny bitches. You lie, and you know you lie.

I’m not giving up. But I am not going to proceed as I have before. I am giving up what has never worked: berating myself, starving myself, punishing myself, stuffing myself.

And corn dogs.

What a week I’m having

My one male reader asked me tonight why the “density” of my blog is “so low.” Apparently, he needs something to read while he’s supposed to be working. So Damien, this is for you.

I could give you this song and dance about how I’ve been “so busy,” but I haven’t. The power went out for five days because of the wind storm, but we went to my father and stepmother’s house and had every amenity available to us. I discovered that my baby will sleep alone in a crib if she is in a room that doesn’t smell like me, and I am elsewhere. My house is so small that you cannot fart without everyone else in the house knowing about it. Viva will announce, “I have a trumpet in my butt!” If Odie sneezes in the kitchen, it will wake the baby sleeping in the bedroom. I have a baby monitor, but I don’t need one.

In my dad’s house, a baby monitor is delightfully essential because once I was downstairs with a pint of Stephen Colbert’s Americone Dream, I couldn’t hear shit but the sound of my arteries hardening.

I loved, loved, loved having my daughters in two different rooms. Viva sleeps in a toddler bed that’s really just a crib with one wall missing. When we read her bedtime stories, we have to sit beside the bed. At my dad’s, she got to sleep in a queen-sized bed, so I was in bed with her, and I really enjoyed that time.

Odie got a few extra days off work due to the power outages, dangling power lines and downed trees that made traveling to school treacherous. It was like two snow days, which he obviously hasn’t had since he taught in D.C. It made our Thursday-Sunday into a four-day weekend and being at my dad’s made it like a weekend getaway. If only we’d been able to have some romance. Like I said before, Odie and I each took a kid and a bedroom. We were ships passing in the night, taking turns with girls: brush teeth, walk and shush, rock and read, switch. I can’t exactly ask my dad to watch my kids for an hour while Odie and I go upstairs and do the nasty.

My dad is still bewildered as to how I got two kids, since I’m a virgin.

Let’s see, we got through Thanksgiving, wind, celibacy, and now we’re at my job news. I slipped it into the last post, but let me be perfectly clear. I received an extension on my leave of absence from my school district, and I get to stay home with baby Pringles until the 2012 school year begins in mid-August. She’ll be nearly fourteen months. There are probably twenty reasons I am pleased as punch over this news, not the least of which is I will never have to pump breast milk at work. I will never have to make my baby take a bottle. All efforts to do so have failed, and now I get to quit trying! Whoo hoo! She’ll be eating cereal in a month, and probably start drinking from a cup.

Viva was supplemented with formula when she was first born. She lost weight, and instead of trusting it was normal and she’d gain it back, I believed a nurse who told me she would silently starve to death before my milk came in, panicked, and bought bottles and formula. I remember Odie giving her a bottle at a wedding I was in three months postpartum, and that was the last time for a few months. The next time I tried to give her a bottle, she wouldn’t take it. Not from me, not from anyone. Viva was done with bottles, and she didn’t have a sweet way of declining them either. Screaming and throwing were her preferred methods of refusal.

It wasn’t until she was seventeen months old and in day care that she asked for a bottle. You see, all of her friends drank milk from bottles, and she wanted to do what they were doing. If that’s the last time she asks to do something just because everyone else is doing it,

I’m not even going to finish that sentence because there’s no way.

Pringles is like Viva. Smart. Who in her right mind would take a bottle over a boob? (Odie says if the bottle has Bohemia, it might be a draw, and why can’t it be both?) Boobs are soft, warm and made out of mommy. They’re attached to the rest of mommy. When she’s finished drinking, she can use it as a pillow. A pillow with mommy’s heart beating inside.

No bottles. No pumping. No getting up and going to work instead of blowing raspberries on her chunky rolls of baby fat, which is my current part-time occupation. I honestly did not know how I was going to make it, having to get two girls to day care by 7:15 and then go teach. I knew I could, but I didn’t know how. Now I have eight more months to figure it out.

This week was Odie’s birthday week. Yes, he gets a week. Not a day. This year, he’s forty. I stayed up after he went to bed and put up a “Happy Birthday” banner in the kitchen. I bought him “Portal 2″ and vowed to play it with him. I’m a giver. My sister bought him mini cakes and Viva and I sang to him while he held Pringles. It was his first birthday where his daughter sang Happy Birthday to him, and he was appropriately moved (cried like a bitch).

His best friend is here for the weekend with his wife and two daughters. We ate snacks from Trader Joe’s, drank beer and mimosas, and played games (board and video) all day and into the night. Last year, I was pregnant with Pringles, working, missing Viva, suffering from morning sickness, and struggling with the pain of continuing to nurse through my pregnancy. Odie told me not to worry about his birthday and I stupidly believed him. I didn’t even get him a card. Boy, was he pissed. He never said so, but I could sort of tell. If he’d been a cat, he would have pooped in my shoes.

This year, I made it special. And we’re not finished yet. His birthday week has one more day: brunch, cake, and more friends await him in the morning.

And frankly, so does a hangover.

Blow me away

Hello, my bitches. I have missed you. Stuff is going on and I am eager to get you all caught up. I’ve been struggling with an old computer and too broke to buy a new one since I’m not going back to work this year. When I got that news, my brain went “wahoo, I’m free shit I’m broke!” and my car and my laptop both went, “We quit!”

Then Thanksgiving happened with its omnipresent family drama. Finally, I got a lead on where I can score a new (to me) lap top, but it isn’t ready yet. I’m typing on my Nook in the dark of my dad’s house, farting all over my sister’s sheets since she is away at college getting all learned and crap and our whole city is powerfree. Have you heard about the wind in California? It isn’t just what I’m doing under the covers after tacos. We’re talking our own SoCal hurricane.

Odie is sleeping in another room with Viva and I’m here with Pringles. I miss them. The beds are too small for us to all share together and the girls would wake each other if we put them together without us, so here we are. The house is gorgeous and perfectly clean . It’s currently the object of a short sale, so it is forever in showroom condition. It’s like staying at a nice hotel where the staff bickers with each other in cront of you, but makes it up to you by playing with your kids. Can’t complain.

Just wanted to check in so you know I’m still here. I have tons to share and I can’t wait. Back soon.

The Hackneyed Thanksgiving Post

This week everyone on Facebook is writing about what she’s thankful for. Some people even do a letter of the alphabet every day. I can already predict I will be irritated at how everyone cheats when they get to “x”. They will probably write adorable things like “x-mas” and “x-tra love from my girls!” And I will gag a little bit x-cessively.

Is being thankful for Xanax too obvious? Probably.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the thankful. I, myself, have been known to be thankful for a few things. Health is now number one, since I am knocking on the door of forty and I have two kids and aging parents. Work is something to be thankful for these days. I’m a UC Davis alumnus, and I am happy that the police who pepper-sprayed passive protesting students are getting called to the mat for their brutality. Justice is something to be thankful for. May more people in the world get it.

A glass of cabernet with thick legs, a baby with thick legs, a toddler with thick hair – the latter two currently asleep. Singing inappropriate rap songs to my baby because nothing makes her giggle harder. Yeah. Especially “Yeah” by Usher et al.

I’m thankful that I don’t know what “You hold the head steady I’ma milk the cow” actually means. I have a vague idea, but I concentrate my thoughts elsewhere. It took me about a year to figure out “my milkshake brings all the boys to the yard” and I was never quite the same after.

Oh, shit, this is turning into one of those “what I’m thankful for” posts, isn’t it?

Damn it.

I’m thankful for my DVR, even though 50% of the time when I tell it to record a show, it tells me to go fuck myself. It doesn’t understand the power dynamic of our relationship. Or, more likely, I don’t.

Thanksgiving is about family and for many of us out there, that is a double-edged sword. I respect my family’s privacy as much as possible here, so I won’t go into detail. I’m saving that stuff for the book. While this holiday inspires joy and longed-for family reunions for many, for others, it’s about reactivating old issues and playing out hurtful family scenarios. Those patterns having worn grooves into my soul, therefore I’m grateful that my stepmom always buys champagne, although I haven’t been able to partake in more than a single glass since 2008 when I started breeding.

I am thankful that this year is not last year.

Odie has a three day work week, and that is my favorite holiday perk of all. I miss him desperately. One of us always has a kid, and once both are asleep, he usually is too. I’m thankful he’s such a great father and that we get a babysitter and have date night every couple weeks. Because he’s also a fine hunk of man.

I don’t know if I’ll have time to post before Thursday. I hope I do. If not, I wish you and yours an excellent four day weekend. Whatever you’re into, be it turkey, football, shopping, drinking, gossiping or pepper-spraying students in the face, I hope the holiday brings you what you’re looking for. I am so thankful for you, my readers, fans and haters alike.