tequila

I? Am drunk.

My father-in-law took me and my brother-in-law's wife out for a drink and the three of us had just a tiny bit too much tequila.

Wow.

What kind of mother puts her Kindergartener on the bus while hungover??? I am SO going to Hell.

So. How was your Sunday night?

a me meme

I have been tagged by the fantabulous Jen, which is a very good thing because A) I really like Jen, and B) my blog has been languishing. Why is so hard to write something every day, anyway? You’d think I have a life or something.

Jen wants to know Five Things About Me, so I sat down and thought about which five things people didn’t already know and came up with…not a whole lot. It’s not that I’ve shared everything, it’s that everything I came up with made me sound either like a freak or a total bore.

Which I guess I am. So, here goes nothing.

~I have a touch of OCD. Okay, okay. More than a touch. In fact, I have such a huge touch of OCD that:

• The throw pillows on my couch have to be alternating patterns. If two pillows with the same fabric are next to each other I have to fix them. Immediately.
• The chairs around my dining room table need to be lined up exactly right or I can’t sleep.
• I clean my kitchen floor every night. With hot water and Windex.
• The knick-knacks in my house need to be on a diagonal. When the people who clean my house are finished cleaning, I go through the whole house and re-align all the knick-knacks.
• Toothbrush holders go to the left of the sink, soap to the right. Always.
• Toilet paper goes OVER. Over, I say, and if it’s under I can’t pee until I fix it.
• Once I make the beds I don’t like anybody to sit on them. It makes the quilts look saggy and messy.
• I get anxious when in a room with naked windows. Put curtains up already. Please.
• The blankets I keep thrown “casually” on the couches are actually placed with great care. I even adjust the fringe if it doesn’t “look right.”
• Towels need to be folded a certain way and stacked according to size in the linen closest. I will refold and restack every last towel if they aren’t.
• Groceries need to “fit” in the cart, sort of like a puzzle. There will be no haphazard tossing of cereal boxes or random stacking of the produce.
• Shoes are never allowed in my house. I will make exceptions for service people like the plumber or the cable guy as long as it’s not raining, snowing, or mud season.
• Because I can’t sleep with socks on my feet (I’ll suffocate, you know) I don’t like it when my kids wear socks to bed (they’ll suffocate, you know). I don’t go in and take them off after they’re asleep or anything, I swear, but mostly I don’t have to worry about it because they totally know I hate it even though I don’t say anything to them about it, so they don’t wear socks to bed. They make fun of me and think I’m a nutcase (which, hello, I totally am), but they have naked feet in bed.
• Doors and drawers need to be closed. No closet doors ajar, no drawers with a corner of underwear sticking out from the top.
• In the warmer months, the backyard from the play area to the patio to the lawn to the pool area is cleaned up every night before dark.
• I can’t leave the house if it’s a mess because I can’t come home to chaos, so I schedule a 15 minute “straighten up” block into my getting ready to leave the house routine.
• The dog’s collar must “match” her fur and the season. Right now she’s wearing a royal blue collar with a celestial theme that looks “wintery” to me.

~ Despite my, um, quirks, I am a functioning adult because I’m not OCD about everything:

• Every closet in my house looks like an accident scene. I don’t color coordinate the clothes. In fact, the only attempt I make at keeping a neat closet is to put hats, gloves, mittens, scarves, and other cold-weather crap in a giant Rubbermaid bin in the coat closet.
• The pantry looks like a grocery store exploded in it.
• I do not alphabetize books, DVD’s, or CD’s.
• The mail basket is constantly overflowing.
• I stack magazines and catalogs on the counter in front of the toaster oven and they sit there for weeks.
• The windows almost always have dog schmutz on them and I don’t care.
• Speaking of the dog, she is allowed on all the furniture as long as she hasn’t just come in from playing outside in the rain.
• I don’t really want the cats on the kitchen counters, but I don’t freak out if I catch them up there.
• I’m not high-strung about germs. I mean, we wash our hands after we use the bathroom and before we eat, but I don’t carry anti-bacterial stuff with me everywhere and whip it out in ten-minute intervals.
• I absolutely loathe overly-matched/themed rooms. Every room in my house has a hodge-podge of stuff scattered around. Yeah, I like things on a diagonal, but I don’t care if the picture frames don’t match or if there’s a blue knick-knack in a red room.
• I have 3 kids. Chaos is normal and tends not to bother me too much…as long as they don’t sleep in their socks.

~I have green eyes and freckles.

~I make really yummy gravy (spaghetti sauce) and meatballs, and my chili ain’t so bad, either…but I can’t bake anything that isn’t a pie from scratch to save my life. Hell, I’m not even good at making brownies from a box. I almost always burn them no matter how careful I am not to.

~I am one of those annoying people who talks to her dog all.the.time. She gets a running commentary of what I’m doing and I tend to use that stupid high-pitched voice people use when they talk to a baby…”awww…hi, puppy, look, there’s a bird outside, where are the kids, are they in school? Find the kids, baby…find your toy…let’s go to the kitchen and find something for lunch…wanna go for a walk? Wanna go for a ride in car? Who’s a good girl? Who’s a smushy faced sweetie dog? Who’s my baby dog? Hi puppy! Hi! Are you wagging your tail? Awww…who’s a good baby dog? Good girl! I love my doggie!”

You all think I’m a total freak now, huh? Who wants to tell me about themselves so I'm not feeling all alone in Freakdom?

CCW? Jumper's girl? Jouette?

Anybody? Everybody! It's fun!

overheard in boston

~ while waiting for a pedestrian light on Washington Street:

"I can't believe you thought your first visit to Boston should be in February while wearing those shoes. Not too bright, Annie. Not too bright at all."

"Maybe if you'd told me..."

"Exactly what did you think I meant when I said It snows here??!!"

"I thought you were alluding to the drug culture."

"I can't believe we have the same parents."

heard just now...

"Forgive me if I seem out of liii-iiiinnnne then she whipped out a gun and tried to BLOW ME AWAY! Nahnah-nah-nahnah DUDE LOOKS LIKE A LADY!

...baby let me follow you around...do me do me do me over here...do me do me do do MEEEE!!!!

...what a funky lady, she likes it likes it likes it like that...ooooooooh....he was a LADY!! YOOOO! YAHYAHYAHYAHYAH!!!!

...due-due-due-dude looks like a Lay-DAY!!!!"

~ Lemony Child, Family Room Vocalist Extraordinaire and Steven Tyler impersonator

(i think we need to start listening to different music on the iPod before my MIL thinks we're unfit parents)

i hate winter

Not because of the weather. Really. I like snow (not that we've had any this year, which sucks) and I don't mind the cold (which it has been VERY). So my eyeballs freeze when I step outside. Big deal. They thaw when I go back inside. So my lungs crystallize when I breathe outside. Ain't no thing since they melt when I inhale inside.

I don't mind the dark. I just put lights on. I don't mind the chill in the house. I just put the heat up. Or make a fire in the fireplace. Or turn the pellet stove on. Or wear wool socks.

I don't even mind when I fall down on the ice. It's funny that I'm a weenie.

No, I hate winter because of the mutant germs that seem to survive in cold far better than they do in the miserable humidity of summer.

Lemony Brother is sick. Puking. Home from school. Again. And because I'm such a good mother I'm feeling cranky about it because I have not had a day alone in this house, not even an HOUR alone in this house, since before Christmas. Between school holidays and sick kids and finals and half-days and Mr. Lemony's office closing down because of a Norovirus outbreak, somebody has been here all.the.time.

And February vacation is coming up in like two weeks, so it's not looking good for me until about, oh, July.

I'm going to hell, I know, because what kind of mother gets cranky on a Thursday when her kid wakes up puking? What kind of mother says, "Are you kidding me? I had PLANS today! Today was the day I was supposed to finally get some time to do something NOT for anybody else."

Yep. Hell, here I come.

At least it's never winter there.