Kanine Krunchies can't be beat, they make each meal a special treat. Happy dogs are those who eat nutritious Kanine Krunchies.

Yet another productive Thursday running errands sans the hoodlums.

I finally managed to mail my little brother’s Christmas presents, which since most of the box is actually for my six-month-old nephew really doesn’t matter that it’s a month late. Because what does he know? He can barely sit up by himself. What’s he know from Christmas? Bah!

I also managed to stop at the dry cleaner’s. This is roughly eight blocks from my house, and for some reason I find it almost impossible to get there. I put it off and put it off and one of these days the dude is going to just donate my clothes to Goodwill.

Speaking of donation, I finally cleaned up the playroom. I threw away about six bags of trash – all those little McDonald’s toys (how did we accumulate FOUR Country Bear stuffed toys? Did I really allow my children to eat McDonald’s that often in the space of a month? I am clearly a BAD parent. Broccoli and broiled salmon from now on!), and the gajillion colored-in Thomas coloring pictures and broken crayons (never again, as now we only buy Twistables) and broken toys that I have decided I will never fix -- if indeed you can fix broken plastic anyway. (Secret: I also pitched the hideous broken ceramic reindeer. Because they laid around with their pathetic broken-off ears for a month and a half, and I couldn’t get the top off the crazy glue tube, so I finally just threw them away. And it was so freeing. I felt liberated and fresh – like one of those panty-liner commercials.) And I packed up all the annoying-noise-making cars (who thought it a good idea to give us a tractor that growls??) and that are obviously possessed by the devil anyway as they make all this noise when they are ALL ALONE in the playroom, and left them out on the porch this morning for the Vietnam Vets, along with all of my size-eight jeans and tapered-leg khakis. Which DESERVE to be growled at by tractors.

I kept all the Legos and TinkerToys and Magnetix and Lincoln Logs and Matchbox cars – multi-function toys. Toys that require you to build things and use your imagination. Things that really really hurt when you step on them in the middle of the night. If a toy hurts when you step on it in the middle of the night, it’s a safe bet that it is educational and imagination-provoking. Big ugly plastic things that only do one thing never hurt when you step on them. That’s IF you can step on them.

Oh, and of course we kept the Thomas trains. (If we ever decide to get rid of them, oh, say, when the boys are forty, we will sell them on eBay to fund our grandchildren’s education.)
Because Thomas trains are our life. See? The tracks surround the volcanoes Primo built when he was obsessed with volcanoes a few months ago and we finally blew them up yesterday with the measly four tablespoons of vinegar left in the jar. What a freaking time to run out of vinegar, honestly! And don’t those volcanoes look more like roadkill than anything?

Oh, but back to my fascinating errand-running. Because I had to take back my black 9-1/2 sized Skechers. Except the nines were way too small. So I kept the others. Because I am a freak who can’t decide if a shoe fits her or not. But I can decide if pants fit me or not which is how I wound up with a pair of straight-leg chocolate-brown side-zip pants from the Fat Girl Shop which are just a weensy bit too big but look so great that I bought them anyway. Unfortunately the FGS only starts at size 14, so I can’t get them in size 12. If these had belt loops it wouldn’t be a problem but they don’t and I’d hate for my pants to fall down. So I may have to return them. And then I bought a pair of grayish/brownish straight-leg pants at Old Navy for 10 bucks that look great but need to be hemmed. Even though I am 5’9”. But they are a size 12. So the only thing we know for sure is that my ass is big – we are just not sure how big.

Then I had to go pick up H.’s shoes that had to be special-ordered. And the toy store right next to the shoe store? Had the Polar Express engine, and the Hot Chocolate car that PLAYS that damn Hot Cocoa song?
I bought them, gentle reader.
Even though NEXT Christmas is, um, roughly 340 days away.
Aren’t I…well, *I* like to call it organized.
Although others may prefer different terms.

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I started to read this really good book I think I was going to like very much, that was going to affect me deeply, called A Wild Ride Up the Cupboards. But I had to stop. Because it is about a little boy who is autistic. Or actually, the process of him becoming autistic, which in his case was not a process at all, but a sudden descent into silence and strangeness. In the words of his novel-mother, one day he was a laughing, singing boy and the next day he was cold and grey and mute. And I have a wonderful, beautiful, laughing, singing 2-1/2 year-old and I am terrified by the specter of autism. We even toyed with the idea of not giving Primo his immunizations, but we did, although we made the pediatrician split them up instead of shooting him up all at once. Segundo has had his immunizations as directed, as it were. The threat has passed for Primo – true, he may turn out to be a psychopath, or bipolar, or clinically depressed, or even, God forbid, contract some sort of cancer (a friend’s four-year-old daughter died from a glioblastoma, and I still have nightmares about it. I can only imagine what *they* go through.) But the autism threat is past for his five-year-old self. But Segundo at almost three, and Terzo at a measly four months – the threat still lies ahead, and I am terrified by it. I know some of you guys have kids who have autism, or Asperger’s, and I would be happy to hear from you anything you want to tell me, and I KNOW I am being irrational. But I felt as if I was tempting fate by continuing to read this book, so I put it down and picked up The Alienist instead. Because I worry less about mutilating serial killers. Not much less, but somewhat.

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Book Snippets:

About the non-fiction finalists for the National Book Critics Awards…I have not read any of the other books but I HAVE read Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster and it should win. I can’t imagine a better book. It was amazing and sad and well-written and everything a non-fiction book can and should be.

The Morning News Tournament of Books, sponsored by Powell’s Books, is a cool thing. And they at least got it right last year even if the Booker people did not – David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas won the 2005 Tournament of Books. This year’s tournament is gearing up and they need books (published in 2005) to be nominated. I nominated Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian and Mary Doria Russell’s A Thread of Grace.
In my words: Because there is no shot clock, this is much more fun than collegiate March Madness.
In their words: This is going to be fun. Bloodthirsty, but fun.

Primo will be delighted to discover this comic strip all about the Moomins, as he is a huge Moomintroll fan. I might as well get it for next Christmas NOW. See? How organized I am? Again? Ha!

The Thin Place by Kathryn Davis has crossed my radar several times in the past few weeks. I am going to request it from the library. Which, I might mention, is about the same distance from my house as my dry cleaner’s and yet I manage to get myself *there* at least once a week.

This blurb-y article on reading over other people’s shoulders in the subway...I can totally relate. If someone is reading a book in a public place, I go nuts until I see what it is. But for the record, I have never ever encountered someone else reading anything in French or Hebrew. Not that I can read either one of those languages.

Today’s Boondocks comic strip made me to laugh and laugh. (It's the Jan. 19th strip.)

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Snippets:

In line with the Barrymore Boob Disaster Gina posted about: I love this crap. It entertains me to no end. But then again, I CARE that Jennifer Anniston was dumped by Brad Pitt.
Go Fug Yourself also has a good piece on this particular fashion Debacle of the Stars.

I am wearing tan pantyhose with black shoes and grey pants. The epitome of frump. Which I did not realize until I got to work and looked down at my feet and they screamed "Fru-mmmpy!" at me.

My eye-candy patron whom I have mentioned before? I realized today that, gorgeous as he may be, he has enormous gums. So sad.