Doing our bit for the economy

Goodbye old friend



A preemptive strike to do our part in jumpstarting the economy: replacing old commodes. I'm sure Madonna and Gwynie Paltrow have people who handle these sorts of crucial decisions, but it's these homeowner milestones that make me feel truly alive.

Daughter No. 2, apropos to this story, comments frequently on our wasteful lifestyle (thinks we're squandering all her college money), and was incredulous we were landfilling perfectly good toilets. She hasn't had to stand there over the past six years while plumbers have laughed and scratched their heads when faced with replacing parts or doing maintenance on these dinosaurs. "Yeah, they don't make these anymore because they were recalled in 1979 due to the lead and asbestos they leaked into the drinking water." Or whatever. A friend suggested I break the old toilets apart and make a giant mosaic for said daughter and stick it in her room. This friend is funny and understands how a mother must entertain herself with evil fantasies of retribution and turnaround.

These toilets continue to serve this family faithfully even in their dotage, but their three gallon tanks are obsolete and wasteful and their limescale buildup is making them sluggish and mercurial. It's a sewage nightmare waiting to happen which I cannot afford as we are the closest bathroom to the middle school.

Middle schooler girls think school bathrooms are gross and avoid them for eight plus hours. So an assortment of friends and acquaintances often make a pit stop at our house after school before their perilously long walks home around the corner. Now I've always said I wanted our house to be the house that kids and their friends gathered to hang. I set out bait traps of food and candy for just such a purpose. But being the house that everybody waits to use first and foremost as an alternative to the middle school bathrooms was not anticipated when we bought this house and really, it's just kind of gross and probably violates some city codes for residential plumbing.

They do usually also wander in to eat the bait of Oreos and Hershey kisses and hang around the kitchen counter and in the end, that's what I want. However, I am now putting out a little basket for tips for the washroom attendant to help offset the cost of three hours of plumbing labor.

Good luck, new friend--your work is cut out for you

Behind the jelly, a little jar of love

Since returning home, I'm struggling with a few things. How does a person stay focused, productive, and contributing to the family without a job? A friend said to me, " You can be focused without a job." That's intriguing. Work is a place to hide from feeling that overall I am not fully present and accountable in my own life. And that's how I feel. A lack of being present day to day in creating my own happiness. I'm mulling it over. It's a puzzle.

Meanwhile, using my blog for humiliation and revenge actually makes me sort of happy and present in my own life-- I might be on to something.

This morning, Chip and I had one of those fights that only long marrieds can have. A fight that escalates quickly based on long held prejudices about a partner's habits.

"Where's the creole mustard? Did you throw it away?" (deflated overly dramatic shrug)
"Maybe. There were some mustards and other things from summer in there that had black spots."
"I just opened that mustard. Creole mustard is full of black spots."

OH, he did not just go there, did he? He's going to tell me what mustard seeds look like? "If it weren't for me, you wouldn't know what creole mustard is, sonny jim. You'd be married to some boring yellow mustard girl and never know the spicy, sexy side of life, the one I've created for you with my magical Zatarain's ways...how dare you, sir!"

OK, I do like to throw away marginally edible food, always have--and I admit I may be a bit hasty sometimes. I am a little paranoid about food spoilage. Partly inherited from my own mom's fantastical worry about old food, partly from watching two sisters at Boston Children's Hospital go into kidney failure from food poisoning. But no matter, and I think most people would agree, black mold spots constitute some sort of action that does not involve sticking the knife in the jar and spreading them on one's sandwich.

"Mustard thrower outer!!"
"Mold eater!!"

Is my regular life blogworthy?

Wisconsin wonderland

The key to getting through winter in Wisconsin is to just get out and play in the cold. And these ladies do that regularly. Me not so much. But they have a point. Chat, exercise to keep warm and prepare to replace all burned calories with lots of good food and drink. No early rising, no six hour marathon exercising sessions. Have your coffee, chit chat, get around, drive to the CC ski place, do an hour or two of snowshoe and/or ski, have a giant lunch, do another hour or two and call it a day. Can exercise really be fun? Maybe.

I'll get back to you.

Journey north

As succinctly as I can say it, when people ask how we cope with the temps in the winter, "People just live their lives."

When we first moved here, Kite Fest was an amazing colorful spectacle held on a frozen lake with thousands of people watching all the amazing kite flying. It could be 20 degrees or 0 degree and people went and had a good time. There's not much drama around the weather here. It's just information as you head out the door. And you do head out the door regardless.

So tomorrow this lovely fit friend is taking me with some other athletic ladies for a weekend "up north" skiing, snowshoeing and hopefully a little People Magazine reading. I bought new leggings to wear snowshoeing. By God, if I'm going to blow out a knee, I'm going to look good doing it.

Super Bowl Sunday

A beautiful day in Madison finally. Above freezing, we were out in the driveway breaking up ice with a pick axe and visiting with neighbors.

One daughter sledding and goofing with friends. One happy dog frolicking in the snow.






One daughter dutifully doing homework after a fun night with her youth group in Milwaukee seeing the Bucks.



Our team this year is The Boss. We always enjoy Super Bowl Sunday like the holiday that it is. Cosmos, beer, fried goodies, chips, salsa and guacamole (uh oh, Bruce just told us to put the guac down and turn up our TV, and so we do).



Tramps like us, baby we were born to run.

The shiny ball

Reality is sinking in. School is same, friends are same, homework is same, drama is same. Mid-winter teenage blues in good old Wisconsin, after six months of excitement traveling the globe. A wrestle with the dog might help ease the transition pains. Mom can make it better just by listening. That's new for me. The gnawing boredom and restlessness of adolescence just is what it is and now I do see I can't always make it better. I can finally stand back and say what I should have been saying all along, "I know you hurt. It will eventually feel better." Then quick and quiet, leave the room before I open my yap again and ruin everything.

Boredom, restlessness, argumentativeness, complaints about friends, homework, teachers, hair, skin, etc. Consider them all shiny balls in the kid's pocket, says a person smarter than me about these things. Oftentimes, all she wants to do is hold out her hand and show mama the shiny ball. Then put it away. Then take it out and show it again. And that's how it goes. It's frustrating to just look at the shiny balls--"Why show me if you don't want me to do anything about it?" No touchy. Only looky. It's going to be a long five years with a big plumping shot of Botox at the end of it all to fill in the crevasses developing between my eyes.

The mother of invention...

Regular

My Space

This group I like to call the Quadruple J. All our first names begin with J.

J says tonight, "I tell them (her kids) to at least wait until I get my coat off before you start yelling at me about this or that or what you need."

I had a boss who had a hard and fast rule that nobody could talk to her until her coat was off. She frightened many a resident physician desperate for her help with a withering look, glancing first at them and then her lapels. They would run off and hide until the coat was off.

And so, Quadruple J has come up with a new invention, preliminarily called "Mom in a Bubble" It's an inflatable room, installed just inside any door where a mom comes in from a long day at work. The bubble room has a coat rack, a little chair, a place to put purse and/or briefcase, a hook for keys and a table to set the cell phone, review the mail, check the answering machine and sip the glass of red wine that is placed there each afternoon at 5pm by mystery butler (details to be worked out here). There's a spot to kick off the heels and change to birkies or slippers and a mirror to check on what the hair/makeup situation looked like those last few hours at work, yielding potential information for tomorrow's lipstick and eye makeup choices. Made of a space age vinyl developed by NASA, the bubble is impenetrable to knives, pencils, geometry compasses and other sharp objects that kids might use to try to get at the mom for complaints, criticisms, sibling fights, transportation needs, slumber party thoughts, etc.... Only when the mom is ready and has taken a deep breath, ready to face the enemy, does she unzip the one way zipper from the inside and step into the mayhem. We are pretty sure we have a winner here so copyrights have been filed.