It's Memorial Day...Have A Good Weekend

I never know what to say about Memorial Day. "Happy Memorial Day" isn't really appropriate, but just saying to a Veteran, "have a good weekend" doesn't convey it, either. 

Pictures I took at the USS Arizona Memorial

This is what I mean, though, whenever I do slip and say "Happy Memorial Day:" Thank you. Thank you for going to Hell for our country. I regret the times in our history that we haven't been a grateful nation. Unless we were where you went, we can't fathom what it was like for you. You lost friends and even pieces of yourself, sometimes pieces that can be seen, but more so, pieces that never could be seen, only felt. If you're here to remember, you returned home changed forever. You made a sacrifice. So this holiday weekend, I hope that during the remembering and the tears, there is a ray of happiness for you, a stray memory of one who didn't come home that always makes you grin. That's them, coming to tap you on the shoulder from the Other Side. I wish you healing this weekend, even if it's just something small. And for the rest if us who didn't go where our Veterans have gone, let's do pause and thank them and remember with them, and be there for them. Without the sacrifices each of them have made, we would have much more than our First World Problems to contend with.

But all that is far from concise. So. It's Memorial Day. Have a good weekend. ((((Hugs))))

I Just Want To Stay Here A Minute

Yesterday, I cleaned a bunch of outgrown clothes out of Zoe's closet. I don't have any reason to feel regretful, because she wore these clothes from last March through the summer and into the winter, before I started putting the "pantsuit" all-in-ones on her. I have lots of pictures of her in all these clothes, but this morning, I find myself with big tears in my eyes every time I think of pulling all those cute little clothes off their hangers and putting them in the box to go upstairs for "maybe someday." I don't think it's so much about the little clothes-they're cute, and we have lots of good memories of Zoe wearing those clothes, but they come out with cute new things every day. It's the little girl who's outgrowing them I'm trying so desperately to hold onto.

I've packed away the little purple and black newborn outfit that fit her all baggy and big when they took her picture on our second day in the hospital, but fit her like an undersized sausage casing before her first Thanksgiving. I have her 0-3m Fluffy Green Dress set aside to be framed (because that one carries special significance). We tried to get extra mileage out of that one, putting it on her when the ruffles seemed to swallow her whole, and finally giving up when we couldn't get the snaps fastened beneath anymore. Now the little orange romper, and the navy blue one with the white embroidery, and the turquoise and brown ones with white polkadots are folded and packed away in the bin, and her closet's full of the next wave of cute little things to wear.

Zoe's ready for the next wave of Growing Up. And here I sit in a puddle, because it seems like just the other day that I could tuck her under my arm like a tiny but chubby little football. I was trying to teach her to roll over and keep socks and shoes on her Feet of Fury. Now, she still climbs up on my lap and grips me like the little monkey she is, and she still delights in going for walks outside, all tucked into her MoBY Wrap carrier, but she left rolling over in the dust a long time ago, and instead, throughout the day, I hear the soles of her little silver shoes she insists on wearing, tapping like a snare drum on the floor as she runs through the house, squealing at the joy of just being her.

She's growing too fast, but at exactly the speed she's supposed to. It's me who's static and getting left in the dust, and I miss her a little bit, already.

I'm a Nerd Girl, and I'm Cool With That

George Takei had a post the other day showing an illustration of a mom and toddler, and the mom was telling the toddler that "Mommy is a nerd, and someday she'd teach [the toddler] about muggles, the One Ring, and the ways of the Force."  George Takei's comment was that Nerd Girls grow up to be great moms.

This put a smile on my face.

See, I've always been a bit of a nerd.  And by 'a bit of a nerd,' I mean a really, really big nerd.  A nerd with the words, especially.  From kind of an early age, I'd read dictionaries.  The first time I set out writing and got hold of a thesaurus, the back of my head just about blew off.  As I've mentioned before, I wasn't so hot at the math and science, especially starting in the seventh grade, but I was definitely interested in the things that math and science do.  For years, I wanted to be an astronaut, and in a pre-Internet world, studied up on all the early astronauts, and what you had to do to become an astronaut.  I never left the Wellsville library without an armload of books on whichever topic I happened to be obsessed with at that particular visit.

In short, I always wandered to the beat of my own drum, always in the back of my head knew I was a nerd, but I wasn't entirely at-peace with it.  Especially when the girls who weren't nerds, even a little, got asked out by boys, and me, not so much.  I can't remember if it ever came out as explicit, or if it was always just an undercurrent, my inherent nerdiness, but in looking over one of my yearbooks, one of my guy-friends wrote "To a cool girl who thinks she's a nerd, but not anymore, really."  Apparently that friend noticed the nerd sticking out since first grade, enough to notice that it was a little less obvious by the end of our high school career.

At the time, I remember thinking 'Sheesh, how much of a geeker have I been all along, for him to say something about it, out of the blue, in my senior yearbook?'  I wasn't at all mad at him.  For a little while, though, I wished he would have taken me aside and told me how nerdy I apparently was, before the tail-end of our senior year.  I felt like I'd had the back of my skirt tucked into my tights all that time, a little bit.  You know that mortifying feeling?  And then you wonder why in the hell none of your friends told you?

But for longer still, that remark in my yearbook has reminded me that I am who I am, and that's pretty all right. 

It also serves as proof that not only was I a nerd before nerdiness was "cool," but that by the time I graduated from high school, I'd already established a long history of being a nerd.

I don't even know when it became "okay" to be a nerd.  Nerds were persecuted in the 1980s.  All you have to do is look at the movies from that era.  In the 1990s, we nerds might have fared better in the persecution department than our 1980s kin, but still.  We had Screech and Urkel out there in the ether of pop culture.  Lovable, yes (from a distance), annoying up close, most especially.  Nothing anybody in their right mind would aspire to be, if they had a choice.

Maybe it was the internet that gave rise to the coolness of nerds?  Or technology in general?  Maybe we don't stick out as much, because a smartphone packing a virtual pocket protector inside looks the same on the outside as the kind of phone the vapid little twits use to text their little friends during dinner.

I don't know when the moment was when being a nerd became cool, but I'm glad it coincided with the time when I grew up enough to stop caring whether or not people thought I was one.  And in case there's still any speculation: I'm a nerd.  A big one.    Besides my friend's documentation of it in my yearbook (besides my appearances in said yearbooks themselves) what's my proof?  Well, here's the evidence:

That whole thing with readin' dictionaries and going gaga for thesauruses.  I taught myself how to play a bassoon.  It's not a sexy instrument like a saxophone or the drums.  I minored in Greek and read the Iliad and the Odyssey in the language Homer wrote them.  And that Homer bastard just made words up sometimes, so it made reading him in his native language an exercise in hurts-so-good.  In grade school, as soon as I figured out how to work the VCR, I'd come home from school and watch Return of the Jedi.  In fact, I had a Return of the Jedi lunch pail from kindergarten until it broke when I was in fourth grade, and did I ever wail on that day!  I was glued to the original Star Trek series.  It used to air on our PBS station.  I grew up to like all things Star Trek and have even endeavored to learn Klingon, which I understand makes me geeky even by Trekkie standards.

In college, it really never occurred to me to go party on the weekends.  I really preferred to stay in and read something fun or to study, and I don't feel like I missed out.  I get nervous and skittish in a lot of social situations.  I kind of hate loud bars and the people in them.  Not individually, in different circumstances, but as a group.  Drunk people are unpredictable, and I don't like unpredictableness.  I've tried to be one of the fun drunk people before (actually, I was drinking to quiet an annoying voice outside my head-unfortunately, drinking didn't make that person go away.  Crap, crap, and double crap, just like the person from whom that annoying voice spews forth!), and as it turns out, I'm just not cut out for that.  I like to keep my wits about me, and a days-long hangover isn't how I want to spend time.  So eschewing a party for reading some Homer, or writing something: if that's not nerdish behavior, I don't know what is.

As soon as I got through graduate school and had time to read for fun, I devoured The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Harry Potter series, and I even read the Silmarillion.  I've been a Battlestar Galactica fan.  I read about string theory for fun, because as it turns out, if I want to be, I can be good at math and science... to a point.

My dream job would be to be an agent on Warehouse 13.

I kind of do go back to the other thing that friend of mine wrote: "To a cool girl..."  Maybe it's a little pathetic, but even as a card-carrying grown up person, I have my moments when I've nerded myself into a corner.  I have my times when the social awkwardness catches up with me.  And it's those words from that particular friend that kind of shake me out of it: he said I was a cool girl who thought I was a nerd, but not anymore much, really.

Right.  I've done a few cool things in my life.  I can fly airplanes.  That takes both cool and nerdiness.  I've safely landed that airplane with a cylinder separating and most of the power gone and limped it back to the hangar.  I've been known to drive a red sports car around (and also an orange Gremlin- a nerdy little car, and yet it radiates a cool all its own).  I can operate with confidence a big tractor with a bucket on the front of it, and I can run a chainsaw.  I live in a haunted house and have the photographic evidence, and that doesn't bother me (much).  I can throw a punch.  Blood doesn't bother me.  I can name off the top of my head most of the muscles in the body because I lift heavy weights and when a muscle starts burning, I look it up to see what its name is.  I collect words like they're money.  I also have a potty mouth, but I can defend those "potty mouth" words back to before 1066, before the Normans conquered England and our four-letter bad words were just Anglo-Saxon "words."  Not that most people listen to that particular dissertation, because their virgin ears are still stinging from my cloud of blue speech in certain circumstances.  But if you DID listen, it's a compelling argument for letting those wonderful, direct, to-the-point Anglo-Saxon words out of the cage they've been in for nearly a thousand years.

I just wish I could go back in time for a minute, meet up with myself, rip off the hornrim glasses I had but didn't need and tell myself to just let that nerd flag fly, that my friends would be okay with me being a nerd, and my nonfriends wouldn't give a rip whether I was cool or nerdy, they'd find something to continue being a nonfriend over.  And in 20 years, none of that shite would matter anyhow.  The hornrims- I've pretty much had 20-15 vision my whole life, but I insisted that Dr. Stagman prescribe me glasses- what I was doing was trying to hide my nerdiness by dumbing down and then wearing the hornrim glasses to make myself look smarter- kind of a double-agent disguise- I couldn't BE a nerd, because hell, I looked like one, and that's just too obvious, isn't it?  At least one of my friends saw straight through that little bit of trickery, though, I guess!

I'm a Nerd Girl.  No two ways about it.  And that's okay.  It's who I am, and I'm cool with that.

Snow White's Heart of Darkness

I watch Once Upon a Time on ABC.  If you're not familiar, its premise is that all the characters from the fairy tales we all know wind up in our world, in a town called Storybrooke, Maine.  In the first part of the season, they were all under a curse, and they didn't remember who they really are.  They just lived in this weird little town where time stood still.  And then someone came and broke the curse.  Now, we're dealing with these magical characters living in our world, more or less, but magic has come back to Storybrooke, and they're all trying to deal with it.

Until a very recent episode, there were two main villains on the show: Regina, the Wicked Queen from Snow White fame, and Regina's mother, Cora.  I couldn't stand Cora not because she was evil, but because her teeth bugged the crap out of me.  My husband's a dentist, and every time Cora would appear for the first time in an episode, I'd ask him if there weren't anything any dentist, orthodontist, or plastic surgeon could do to fix Cora's mouth.  She had straight teeth, but evidence of early buck-toothedness and an overbite.  In other words, I'm guessing the actress that played Cora could at one time eat corn off the cob through a chain-link fence.  She could have been a good character, and I would have hated her, just because of the way she held her mouth.

I'm like that.

Anyway, during this whole show, I've been irritated at how stupid the "good guys" are, because in true fairy-tale hero fashion, they insist on maintaining the high road, even if it means letting a really bad baddy go free.  I've used the word "pussy" to describe Prince Charming/David.  I didn't used to like that word.  But the dude's a huge pussy.  The character demonstrated the apex of his testicular fortitude when he was lying in the Storybrooke hospital in a coma.

During the entire run of the show so far, Regina and Cora have, in one way or another, tried to kill off Snow White. Snow White has had many opportunities to get both the baddies, but lets them go because she believes in the goodness in them.  I've thought all along that Snow White's real name ought to be "Stone Dumb" for this.

Finally, Snow White went against Prince Charming's urgings to continue just wimping out (or the way he put it, taking the high road), and tricked Regina into killing her mother Cora.  And then, after that brilliant show of backbone, Snow White went into a depressive molt and went slinking to Regina, begging the Wicked Queen (or in "our" world, the Mayor of Storybrooke) to just kill her already, and get it over with.  Because Regina's main desire in life is to kill Snow White, followed by regaining custody of her adopted son (Snow White's grandson). 

Regina plunges her hand into Snow White's chest and pulls out her glowing fairy-tale-looking heart- on this show, the hearts of fairy tale characters aren't the messy, blood-pumping things we're familiar with. And the characters can live even with their hearts out of their bodies.  But if the heart gets crushed, the character dies.  For real.  So anyway, there Regina has Snow White's heart, and she looks it all over and starts laughing and shows Snow the black spot on her heart, apparently earned by tricking Regina into killing her own mother.  Then Regina plunges the heart back into Snow White's chest and says she's going to let the heart turn all the way black, because once the darkness creeps into a heart, it just spreads until the whole heart is black.  And off goes Snow White, all blubbery because now she has a black spot on her heart.

Okay.  This is what always irritated me about fairy tales.  The good guys were always good, all the time, and the bad guys were always bad with no redeeming qualities.  On this show, they're a little more interesting.  Slightly more interesting.  The bad guys usually show some redeeming quality, some capacity for good, and the good guys--- well, they're still mostly one-dimensional and paralyzed by their fear of doing something even a little bad, even for a good reason.

Take Snow White and Cora.  As it turned out, Cora's been on a vendetta against Snow White since before she was even born.  And Cora didn't hesitate to kill anyone who got in her way.  Or anyone she didn't like that day.  Or just because she was bored.  If Snow White and her band of heroes weren't so lily-livered and squeamish about stooping to conquer, Cora's run on the show would have been two episodes, tops.  And Regina would have been eliminated nearly as quickly, because the bad guys are always giving the good guys opportunities that the good guys are too afraid to take.

Snow White and Prince Pussy need to get a grip about this heart of darkness thing. Everyone has light and dark in them, even they, themselves.  The trick is to acknowledge the darkness and not be afraid of it.  Use it like a tool.  The baddies do the flipside of this.  They use their light as a tool to manipulate the good guys into letting them off again and again and again, in the hopes of redemption. 

I like a good story of redemption as much as the next girl, but let's be honest.  To stem some of the carnage on the show (Disney-fied carnage, but carnage nonetheless), Cora needed to go.  The excuse that she acted the way she did because she took out her own heart years ago isn't reason enough to give her a Prince Charming pardon, and the fact that she seemed so much warmer and friendlier in the seconds after it was put back in and before she died can be called poignant or it can be called justice, since maybe in those moments, her heart made her realize just how much she'd hurt everyone around her.  If she were allowed to die without her heart, and without her conscience, it would have been a death without suffering a little bit for what she'd done.

It's ridiculous that Snow White curled up into a little ball over what she did.  Even in fairy tale terms, she's in the middle of a war.  Cora was pretty unstoppable, what with all the good guys cowering and rolling to her.  In taking her out, Snow White saved many more good characters than the one bad character.  And really, why was she so guilty about taking out that really, really bad character the way she did, when the whole thing that set off Regina against her in the first place was that Regina was in love with a stablehand, but Cora would have nothing to do with it.  Snow knew Regina was looking to run off with the stablehand and Regina warned her not to tell anyone.  Snow turned around and told Cora, because she trusted that Cora wanted Regina to be happy and the stablehand made her happy, and that was a miscalculation that cost the stablehand his life (at Cora's own hand, right in front of Regina).  That was an innocent that lost his life as a direct consequence of Snow White's inability to keep a secret and just let her future stepmother run off.  But Snow bounced back from that one pretty easily.

That's the trouble with fairytale princesses.  They could save themselves, but they're too busy wringing their hands, waiting for someone to come rescue them.  They're waiting for someone else to come do their dirty work for them. For once, one of them took matters into her own hands.  She might be a little less Snow White now, but she became a whole lot more interesting.  Now she just needs to get a grip and maybe slap some of the spinelessness out of Charming.

Dear Zoe, I Will Always Let You Sit With Me

Today while Zoe was eating her lunch, I asked her if she liked ravioli.  It was her first time trying those delicious little meat-filled pasta pillows.  She got a solemn look on her face and nodded her head, and took a sip of milk.  I followed up the question by asking her if I could sit with her and eat my lunch, and she very emphatically shook her head "no!"

Well, then!

This has been coming for a while now, actually. Zoe's been growing right up and getting a little more independent every day.  It's really nice that she feeds herself, whether it's with her fingers or whether she uses forks and spoons.  I do miss snuggling with her when she'd have a bottle, but even while she was in that stage, I really did treasure every minute, because we both knew it wouldn't last.

She started eating "solid foods" last January.  Of course, "solid" means pureed this and that, and baby cereal.  The second day she got to eat "solids," she took the spoon out of my hand and tried to feed herself.  Then she realized how cushy it is to be "the baby," and at least let me spoon-feed her. That is until this week.

Sunday night, she didn't want me feeding her anymore.  She felt so strongly about it that she grabbed her plate and upended it onto the floor, much to Rozzie's delight.  A defiant little flicker flashed in her eyes, and I knew it was a toddler thing, and that I shouldn't react, because as such, she was partly looking for a reaction.  So I said "I guess you're full then!" and unstrapped her from her high chair and sent her off to play, and while I was cleaning up the dishes from the floor (Rozzie got the floor itself good to go), I humped up and bawled. 

It wasn't the food on the floor that bothered me.  I'm not raising a brat, but I do let her have her toddler moments.  She's seventeen months old.  Sometimes she pulls crap like that just to get a reaction.  Anyway, I'm not getting into a parenting debate with you, so if you're getting all up on your high horse on me, just stop reading and go tell your favorite teddy bear all your theories of how I'm doing wrong by my kid.  But I'm not interested in hearing them.

No, it wasn't the food on the floor.  It was that I realized with no room for ambiguity that Zoe and I have passed some kind of milestone.  She wants to feed herself, or if the look in her eyes as she upended her plate is any indication, she wants do feed her damn self! and I got her message loud and clear.  Our days of her sitting in her high chair and me sitting in the regular chair, blissfully scooping food from her dish into her mouth have passed.

So this week, we've tried it her way, her eating like a big girl.  And she's doing really well at it.  Great, actually.  Mornings, she eats yogurt with cereal mixed in, to make it a little thick, and also to make sure she gets her cereal in (it's recommended that she eats the baby cereal until she's 2, so I give it to her.)  I put the yogurt and cereal mixture into silicone pinch-bowls, because they were always easy for me to grip, and I can also get them scraped pretty clean with just a spoon, and also if they hit the floor, they don't shatter or really cause much drama, other than something for Rozzie to clean up. 

I wasn't sure how a seventeen month-old would be able to handle one of these pinch-bowls, but she wanted to give it a spin and I let her.  She had trouble with it when the tray was hooked to her high chair, so preparing myself for a mess, I took the tray off and handed her the bowl and spoon so she could see into the bowl without having to tip it way over to see what's in there.  She smiled at me, grabbed the spoon in her right hand and the bowl in her left, tucked her legs up into a cross-legged position while she sat strapped in her high chair, and proceeded to scoop the yogurt and cereal out of the bowl and into the mouth, looking at me the whole time as if to say "Bye now! Come back when I'm all done!"

"You doing okay?" I asked her.

She smiled, crinkling up her eyes, loading another spoon of yogurt and cereal into her mouth, and said "Mmmmmmmmm!"

I went and unloaded the dishwasher and got the dishes put away, and when I came back, I was surprised to see that she'd gotten her bowl almost as clean as I could when I fed her.

"Well, Kid, you're hired!" I told her, unhooking her high chair's seatbelt and letting her toddle around.

That's how we've been doing feeding time here at the zoo this week, then.  I turn her meals over to her and then go into the kitchen to get things done, so she doesn't think I'm hovering, but I'm near enough if I should hear that she needs me.  There've been no more upended dishes of food.

Her rejection of letting me sit with her today to eat my lunch while she ate hers won't be the last, I know.  I walked her road before, a long time ago.  I dig where she's coming from. 

Bittersweet.  That's the word for this.  Because it was wonderful having this huggy little snuggle-baby early on- when she was sleeping- when she was awake, even as a newborn, Zoe always had to be on the move, in her swing, doing SOMETHING!  She was like a little dolly.  The very first breakfast I ate as "Mommy" at the hospital, I sat at the table in my room and cradled sleeping Zoe in my free arm, and told her all about all the fun we'd have together, when she was a little bigger.  I told her how we'd go shopping together, and read books and do crafts and play in the yard, but right then, she was too small for all those things, so I'd just hug her and hug her until she was bigger. 

Even at the hospital, though, she was asserting her independent streak.  She and the nurses had a battle over her hat.  Every time she'd come back to my room from the nursery, she'd have on the cute little knitted hat somebody knit and donated (which I keep meaning to do, myself!).  As soon as the nurse was out the door, Zoe would have the hat pulled off.  If she was swaddled with her arms in, she would rub her head up against me until she worked the hat off.  If her arms were out, she'd just pull it off.  This was the first day she was on this planet.  The rest of our time in the hospital, she didn't wear the hat.  At home, she'd wear a hat when we were outside (but she didn't like it!)

So this day, I knew would come, and I know there are going to be many more days when my little chooby-cheeked cherub more or less tells me to skedaddle.  I'm trading cuddliness for fun, and I can accept that.  I just never would have thought these separate moments would take my breath away like they do, when we come to them. 

The thing is, no matter how many times Zoe tells me to skedaddle, no matter how many times she pushes me away, one thing she can count on is that when she needs somebody to sit with her, I will always let her sit with me.  Always.

One Thing A Day

Waaaaaay back in September or October, I wrote a post about how messy my house is and how I need to get it cleaned up.  For years now, I've been getting FLYLady's emails about de-cluttering and chipping away at messiness in fifteen minute chunks.  I will say this, IF you actually do as FLYLady says, and do fifteen minutes of a task, eventually it does get done.  You can't misuse it and just do 15 minutes a day and call it a job well done when your house looks like mine.  It takes 15 minutes of work, 15 minutes of doing something else, and so on.  You have to come back to the task at hand and chip away at it until it's done. 

In FLYLady-speak, I've basically "fluttered" and then "crash-n-burned" over and over.  That doesn't mean FLYLady's a load of hogwash.  It just means I really need a slightly different approach to turning my home from freakin' pigsty to cozy and pleasantly lived-in.

See, I was never good at leaving something only 15-minutes' worth of done.  I was never good at leaving work with anything other than an empty inbox (the physical kind, not the email kind, although...)  Having something hanging over my head just sort of wears on me, and I obsess about it so by the time I get back to the task at hand, I'm burnt out on it. 

It's not the way to be, and I know this isn't what FLYLady intends with her fifteen-minutes at a time approach. 

The other day, I ran across a site that's something along the order of Making Organizing Fun or such.  That woman's approach is to size up all the things in your house that drive you nuts, organization-wise, and then take one per day and fix it.

This, I can do!

You see, it's kind of satisfying to me to start a project, work on it until it's finished, and then be able to be proud of my work.  The key is completing a task. 

I tried this out last weekend on my laundry area/changing table area.  This space in the house, which is really an extension on the far end of the kitchen, put the "hell" in "helter-skelter."  It's always been a difficult space.  Last Friday, I decided I'd had enough of the chaos and decided I'd change things around some.  I moved the changing area into a corner and made a folding area using two Rubbermaid folding tables.  I can store hampers under the tables, so it feels less cluttered. 

It looks really nice.  The space still isn't optimally functional or optimally good-looking, but that's okay, because when Shane got home, he looked around and said "What if we moved the laundry room upstairs to my office?"

I've wanted my laundry room upstairs since we were planning out the renovation.  I made a case for it back then and got shouted down by someone in Shane's family, who apparently gets more electoral votes than I do, on the grounds that "the washer could leak and make a mess."  Well, okay, I thought.  That's fair, because washers leak all the time, whereas toilets, sinks, and bathtubs NEVER leak, ever, and we have 2 bathrooms upstairs.  Yeah.  There are some things I'm bitter about.  I have some issues about this having less electoral votes to work through.

Anyway.  I'm happy that Shane's seen the value of putting the whole laundry kit and caboodle upstairs where we actually dress and undress.  His "office" has always had the feel more of big, disaster-area closet than "office."  It'll be heaven not to have laundry hampers in our bedrooms, to be able to keep everything in one room upstairs, a room with a window and a door that can be closed if we don't want to look at the laundry appliances.

Then I envision the place that is now the laundry room as kind of a mudroom, with one of those benches with storage for shoes underneath, coat-hooks above, and above that, storage for backpacks and hats. 

I mention all this because laundry and its flotsam has been a source of chaos in this house for ever.  I feel like getting that room squared away is going to help everything else get neater in the rest of the house.  Everything having a place makes it easier to put everything in its place!

Other spots I've cleaned up have stayed clean.  The family room's stayed uncluttered since October.  The coffeetable in the living room is not piled with two feet of debris anymore. you can actually set a plate or coffee cup on it - if you're trusting enough not to think a toddler or German shepherd isn't going to steal it.

I have a long way to go, getting my place less disastery.  But at least now, when people come in to my house, the first room they see is clutter-free and pleasant.  The downstairs bathroom is clean.  The laundry room doesn't look like a hiding place for ... I don't know.  Whatever would hide in a pile of wash and jump out at unsuspecting guests.  Eighty-five percent of the time, my kitchen island is cleaned off and functional.  It isn't perfect, but eighty-five still passes!

My house isn't perfect, but it's getting better, one fifteen minutes at a time, one task at a time. 

Crime Eggs- 'Tis the Season

This is an oldie but a Goodie, first written as a note on my Facebook page in 2009.  I've learned very little about moderation in the last four years.
  
In a serendipitous response, a friend of mine saw a mother lode of Cadbury Creme Eggs at Wegmans not long after this post, and took a picture of them and sent them to me with the caption: "April-Crime Eggs for you!" It was an auto-correct slip-up, but we all agree- unless a grown-up  rations out the Creme Eggs to me one at a time, and hides them where I have no hope of finding them, when I see Creme Eggs, it turns into a crime scene. So Crime Eggs it is, because I think nothing of murdering three or four (or more) at a sitting and then going back for more.

I have a little problem with Cadbury Creme Eggs, meaning the kind of problem that I probably should wear a Chocolate Detector Ankle Bracelet and have Jenny Craig parked at the end of my driveway ready to throw me in a van and drive me to an undisclosed diet center if I exceed one Creme Egg a day.

So one Friday a few weeks back, I got up and did my usual routine of working out for an hour, showering, getting around, and coming downstairs for breakfast. Shane doesn't work on Fridays, so he was a little while behind me, coming down the stairs. So, I fixed myself a bowl of coffee, half-caf, with skim milk, a little sugar to take the edge off, and a healthy dollop of Reddi Wip, because coffee should be fun, after all. And what to eat alongside my big bowl o' joe?

On the counter, at that moment were: a bowl of Granny Smith apples, BSN Lean Dessert Protein Powder, and...

A four-pack of Cadbury Creme Eggs.

Guess what won? I'll give you a hint. It wasn't the apples, and I didn't whip up a protein shake.

In the space of five minutes, I'd devoured three of the four Creme Eggs in the box on the counter. The only thing that saved that last Creme Egg in the box was that I'd heard Shane coming down the stairs, and as he's a dentist, he tends to frown on Creme Eggs and candy in general, but gets really high'n'mighty when it's eaten for breakfast. So I hurried to get rid of the colorful foil evidence, and stood there at the kitchen island, eating the whip off my coffee as nonchalantly as one can with that much fat and sugar coursing through one's veins that early in the morning. Shane proceeded to get into the refrigerator, take out some eggs, and make himself an omelet. He did ask if I wanted one too, and I told him I'd already eaten.

Fast forward a couple hours, to Main Street in Wellsville. We've been killing time that morning, waiting for Rozzie to get finished and dried from her monthly bath at the vet's. We're not too posh to bathe our own pet, but she has a skin condition that requires their shampoo and a shot every few weeks, and as we live about 25 minutes from the vet's and it was one of those many days in the winter when about a foot of snow dropped out of the sky overnight, we didn't want to be running back and forth between Wellsville and home any more than we needed to. So we were trying to decide where to go to eat. It was too early for lunch, but I said I was starving, without even thinking.

"You said you already ate breakfast," Shane said.

"Yeah, I had a three-egg omelet," I said, again without thinking. I should learn to think before I speak, I guess. Because Shane stopped walking in the middle of the sidewalk, and looked at me funny. I should have just yelled "anarchy!" and run down the street right then, but I did not.

"Where'd you get the eggs for your omelet?" he asked.

"Out of the carton in the refrigerator," I said. I was already committed to the lie and had to follow through now, because they send people to rehab for things like this.

"The carton I brought home last night?"

"That's the one," I said. "Three eggs, right out of that carton you brought home last night."

Shane shook his head in disbelief and grinned.

"Well, then, I bought a magic carton of eggs at Jubilee last night, because when I opened it up to get eggs for my omelet, all twelve eggs were in the carton, still."

I knew I'd been caught.

"Yeah, about that," I said. "What I really meant to say is that I made myself a three-egg omelet with the Cadbury Creme Eggs on the counter, and I didn't so much make an omelet as I just ate them, one right after another, right out of their wrappers."

"What stopped you from eating the fourth one?" Shane asked.

"I heard you coming down the stairs."

Shane looked a little disgusted, but also amused. No van from Jenny Craig pulled up to whisk me off, but I noticed in any store we went into that morning, I was propelled past the Creme Eggs displays, and when we finally picked up Rozzie and got home, that lonely Creme Egg from that morning had disappeared.

That wasn't my last tangle with the Creme Egg Monster, though. It's a tough addiction to kick, and there is no 12-step program.

In a completely unrelated note, I'm working on losing about ten pounds that seems to have appeared out of nowhere these last few months, so if you see me out shopping and I'm in the candy aisle or eyeing the Reese Cups in the checkout lane, stop me. Use whatever force necessary. I'll thank you later.