The boy is in his crib – whoo hoo! Two-handed typing!
A woman posted to our neighborhood email list on Monday that she was having a moving sale, of antiques and ordinary furniture, at reasonable prices. We were hoping for dining room stuff – I’d like a buffet and maybe a nice china cabinet/hutch, to help populate my enormous and mostly empty dining room, for when we have the Queen to tea and all. (Also to give me an excuse to satisfy my china/plate/dishes jones and fill up said china cabinet.) I don’t really do the new furniture thing; I prefer flea markets and estate sales. And as far as I am concerned, we *always* need more furniture, but then I am, as Dan often points out, the mistress of the Highland Park Home for Wayward Furniture.
But her list of stuff looked promising so I called and made an appointment to go see it. She had some lovely things – a huge four-poster bed for $500, with a matching highboy for another 500; a gorgeous old sofa with carved walnut arms and feet and matching side chair; a small buffet. Unfortunately, because it took me so long to get twenty free minutes to get the hell out of my house, everything had been sold (Although I am considering buying a watercolor she had for sale. I’m waffling – she doesn’t know much about the artist and I tend to like to know that sort of thing.)
Dan was at the Son Volt concert with a friend and my mother-in-law was over helping me with the boys. So I finally, FINALLY escape the house for twenty minutes without any of my children for the first time in what feels like ages, and where do I wind up? In an old lady’s apartment - full of furniture and lots of other junk, complete with the requisite cat, and reeking of years’ worth of cigarettes…don’t ever tell me I am not living the high life. Sigh.
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Salon’s new blog, Broadsheet, (ok, I know it’s a hokey name) is worth keeping an eye on.
I started Laurie R. King’s The Game but it is way too contingent upon paying attention to or knowing about Russian/Communist politics for my brain to wrap around right now. I dug out The Thorn Birds which strikes me as perfect brain-atrophying reading material. When I finish that, I will probably move onto The Streets of Laredo since Lonesome Dove is about the closest thing to a soap opera/serial I have ever read. Except maybe those Dana Fuller Ross Westward Ho! Series that I plowed through in high school while everyone else was reading VC Andrews (I missed that particular boat).
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A Halloween joke, courtesy of Carolyn:
Why do ghouls and demons hang out together?
Because demons are a ghoul's best friend.
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Jude and Simon keep asking me to print out coloring pages from the Internet. I am *cruising* through printer paper. It still has to be cheaper than buying coloring books, doesn’t it? (Until I have to buy a new black ink cartridge I guess…) And they can get sixteen identical copies of Gordon the Express Engine to color, if that is their heart’s desire – and generally it is. But now every time I sit down at the computer, I get pestered for printouts. And it makes me nuts. I feel better now that I have gotten that off my chest.
Also, Simon has these nervous habits and tics – clearing his throat, making himself hiccup, licking his chin – that are driving me BONKERS. I’m losing my mind. I understand where his compulsions come from – hell, which parent is on medication? But that doesn’t make it any easier for me to watch and listen to him do this stuff. I am a rotten mother.
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I’ve been on a candle binge lately. I think it’s to compensate for the fact that our fireplaces are not functional at the moment and that particular expenditure is not going to happen this winter. Plus I find candles very calming, and they’re pretty. So I do what I can to remain calm. And light a candle. It’s nice. No, I am not a pyromaniac - at summer camp, we all used to fight over who got to go burn the trash and I could never ever get the damn stuff to light. I remember this being a very stressful thing for me at the age of fifteen.
I am a breastfeeding advocate of the first degree (NOT of the lactation Nazi variety, thank you very much). But WHAT is the deal with these Lilypadz things? They sound horribly uncomfortable. Someone wanna enlighten me?
Camilla, you have sacrificed so much – must you sacrifice your dignity too? Poor girl. If anyone should NOT wear a tiara, it’s Camilla. The things we do for men…
Um, James, darling, that is a portion of my anatomy to which I am literally and emotionally rather attached. Owwy owwy ow ow ow.
And tonight’s episodes of “Sex and the City” are the same ones they showed last night. Humph. Clearly the programming director of TBS has never had to stay up with a nursing/screaming baby. Stupid men.
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I am going to add a recipes link, give me a few days. I wish to share with the world my pie crust recipe : ) And whatever else the world wants, food-wise.
8 comments:
I love reading about your boys' Thomas fixations. Having three boys, I am well acquainted with Thomas and the gang. Son No. 2 went through a phase for several months where he would not leave the house without a James in each hand.
Woe betide us when one was temporarily misplaced.
Re the tics. Son No. 1 used to have these big time. It drove me crazy and I felt like the worst mother in the world. I took him to a naturopath/homeopath who diagnosed the tics as manifestations of stress and sadness (at which point I burst into tears), and gave us some homeopathic remedies that worked wonders. He still gets tics when he's nervous (his class play is on this week so he has a tic right now) but having a reason and a diagnosis helped me enormously (and him too presumably, but hey it's all about us mothers, isn't it?) and I no longer stress about them. Hope this helps in some way.
(Suse - blogger still not letting me in so am being 'anonymous' today).
clearly I am young and not a mother with this questions, but what the heck is a nursing pad? I have figured out that it goes between your breast and your bra. Why?
And all this talk of pie makes me want to make one. Of course, the only pies I've ever made have been with store bought graham cracker crust, and one of the recipes came from Structures class (yay for the Buddha on a stick problems)
I remember back when I didn't know any of this stuff either, Katy--only I didn't *know* I didn't know it until it was all upon me. :-)
Your breasts leak when you're nursing, so if you don't use pads of some kind (they make disposable ones that are like round panty liners, and washable ones that are like shoulder pads, and then these new fancy ones, which I've never seen) you get big wet splotches on your shirt.
Good times, there!
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That picture of Camilla in the tiara cracked me up. The article did say, though, that she was *required* to wear it. And that she borrowed it from her MIL.
I admit that I'd *love* to go to a party that required a tiara--just once. :-)
That tiara... OK:
a) It was made for a woman with a much bigger head -- or perhaps just a much bigger head of hair. She looks ridiculous. Poor her.
b) They were entertaining the NORWEGIAN royal family! That was the exciting part to me... having lived in Norway from 1978 - 1981 and still feeling a very strong attachment, even 24 years after we left, to the country and its people. If I were there I could have sung the Norwegian national anthem for them.
c) I am reminded of my clearly contradictory feelings about the royals... I love them, and I love royal history, AND I also think they're all just full o' shit and need to get real jobs and give all that taxpayer- and imeperiously- stolen money away to people who need it. I think both of those things.
I agree with you about royals--they're ridiculous and worse than antiquated, but . . . I still think they're cool.
I mean . . . princes! They EXIST! That amazes me.
Sorry about the furniture all being sold. That stinks.
A is incessant in her coloring page demand also. Only she sits down at the computer herself and then yells, "How do I spell horse coloring pages? How do I spell unicorn coloring pages? How do I spell...?" until I want to scream. My husband just showed me today how to print them in draft mode to save ink.
And her annoying habit (well one of them) is talking in a high pitched voice when she is playing by herself. Nails on a chalkboard, I say.
S hums.
also, no savory crust recipe. but my crust has no sugar in it, so you could tart it up with spices and call it savory. i forget where the recipe is - maybe in septembers archives - after the vacation to the shore.
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