The Queen's Rambles

I woke up feeling queasy and was convinced I was coming down with the stomach flu. I’ve gotten three e-mails in the past two days saying “sorry we saw you yesterday! Me/my kid/everyone has the stomach flu!”

I might have stomach flu on the brain.

I cancelled all my morning plans, because the last thing I wanted to do was go on a huge walk when I wasn’t sure if my stomach could be trusted. I also wanted to avoid giving nasty germs to anyone, especially my best friend.

I took stock of the bathrooms and determined they were not clean enough to sleep in. I was 100% convinced that I’d be spending most of the day and/or night on the bathroom floor, so I made it my mission to get them as clean as possible before the inevitable happened.

While I was at it, I decided I should change Erik’s sheets, finish off all the laundry I could get to before the eruption, and clean out the kitchen.

I had a harrowing 15 minutes around 10 am when I was sure the end was nigh, then . . . nothing. I’ve felt fine all day.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m VERY VERY grateful it was all my imagination. It’s kind of funny that the day I took a “sick day” from my normal activities is the one day I managed to get a ton of housework done. Normally I wouldn’t do all three tasks in one day, but I kept thinking “just one more thing, just one more thing”. I have a system for cleaning–nothing is ever clean on the same day, but everything does get cleaned at least once a week.

Not that you’d know I spent all day working my ass off by the look of my house. The living room and dining room are complete disasters. We painted the upper half of the dining room yesterday, so we pulled down cabinets, curtains, wall files, etc. We are letting the paint cure another day before we start messing around with it.

The previous owners loved their chair railing and wainscoting shadow boxes. Before we can re-install the shoe cabinet, I need to stand and paint the lower portion of that wall with all it’s 10000000 pieces of trim. Hopefully I will get the dining room put together before 2014. All this clutter is driving me crazy. If I knew where the screws were, I’d put the wall files back up right this very second. It wouldn’t cut down on much clutter, but it would be something.

I did learn that if I want to make a super awesome play space for Elsa I don’t really need much room. I can just buy a big cabinet, plunk it on the floor without doors and she will happily play for hours in her “house.” I took a picture, but she was buck naked so I won’t be sharing it on the interwebz. Her refusal to wear clothing is the main reason you don’t get any pictures of her these days.

You want to know what she looks like? Just pretend this picture wasn’t taken in the ’70s:

That could seriously be a picture of her. It is uncanny.

Oh, and who could forget this picture. It’s not the picture that’s significant, it’s the event:

This is the birth of an intense fish phobia. I clearly remember my dad was telling me that fish were eating my toes. I could feel the seaweed (is it seaweed when its in a river?) grabbing at my feet and believed it was fish trying to eat me. The older I get, the stronger the phobia grows. Just the thought of going to an aquarium gives me a slight panic attack (even though I went to one this summer! I enjoyed the sea mammals, but the indoor area with the actual fish aquariums was a nightmare. I was huddled against the wall trying to breathe.)

You never know how you are going to damage your kids. Though one would think that if your kid is screaming bloody murder and trying to crawl up your back you might quit with the teasing. My dad was never one to quit with the teasing.

Ok, time to go read some more Magic Tree House. Ugh. I thought maybe I was crazy for letting this whole Morgan Le Faye being a friendly enchantress who makes a tree house (A TREE HOUSE FOR GOD’S SAKE!) bother me. Maybe I was confusing her with someone else. I did research, and nope. It was just as I suspected. She’s Arthur’s nemesis in most tales of Camelot, and an very powerful sorceress. She would not be fooling around with a frick frackin’ treehouse.

I know. I know. It doesn’t matter.

BUT IT MAKES NO SENSE.

I like the Stink books a lot better, about Judy Moody’s little brother. Too bad there are only 7 of them.

Mike and I are going to Hogwarts! Someone mentioned Florida in the comments and I immediately thought why would I want to go there? It seems so far away! I’m still thinking of life in the Pacific Northwest, not the Mid-Atlantic.

Then I remember the world of the Harry Potter world. I’ve wanted to go since it opened, but had no desire to drag along little children. I just figured it would be a dream denied (better a dream denied than a dream ruined by whining children) and never even considered going without the kids. I thought if it was still around when they were old enough to enjoy it we could go then. But would they really agree to go to Harry Potter World when OMG! DISNEY WORLD!!! is right there? (the caps are the way the kids view Disney World. It kind of sounds like a nightmare to me).

Soooooo. . . what a perfect idea for a 10th anniversary trip! I think I would be bored silly laying around in the sun or mooning around at nature. Marital re-connecting can only take up so many hours of the day. We both love Harry Potter, so this is going to be fabulous.

I wanted to stay at the park, but the prices are way too outrageous. We just can not justfify $400 a night in a hotel room, even if the room is completely fabulous. We are going to stay in a much nicer hotel than normal to make it special, but not that special.

Any suggestions are very welcome. Neither of us have ever been to Florida or done much in the way of visiting theme parks. I know we will want to purchase a fast pass for at least one of the days. I’m not sure how many days it takes to cover the theme park. Will two or three suffice? We are planning on staying five full days, but is there something else we should be doing while we are there? We’re going to fly. Should we rent a car and drive out to a beach one day?

I am so giddy and excited! I called my mom to tell her this plan and to make her double triple pinky swear promise that she wouldn’t leave us in the lurch no matter what happened back home. Frankly, a few days of foster care for the kids would probably be the least of their worries if it came to that. I know foster care can be horrific, but their daily life is horrific.

Btw, my sister is supposedly going into rehab next weekend, so she’s disappeared. She finally called her husband (the boyfriend has found a new girlfriend so he’s out of the picture) and said she was going on one last bender before she starts rehab. I don’t think it’s supposed to work that way?

Soooooo. . . if my mom cancels on us I don’t know what I will do. I will be so livid that the cosmonauts up in the space station will be seeing flames shooting up from the earth.

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Resolution to my career as a reluctant prostitute: I haven’t had a call since yesterday at 8 am. A lot of guys want blowjobs at 8 am. I would have though that was the time prostitutes were going to bed for the day, but I guess they can make some morning woody rounds before heading home for the day.

There were three persistent texters so I let them all know they had the wrong number. One was a. . . nice?. . . guy once he found out the ad was a wrong number. He’s the one who alerted me to the fact that the number was in a craigslist ad and he gave me the 10 digit id number to help me resolve the problem (the ad was down before I could even view it).

The other guy just stopped texting, which was good.

The last guy didn’t care that he had the wrong number. “if u hav tits it al good. lets git wit it.” I told him, unless he was looking for a fat forty year old house wife who was chronically exhausted he needed to look elsewhere. I know I shouldn’t have engaged, but I thought that would drive the message home.

Apparently any warm mouth with tits is fine with him because he said it was ok, he was still ready to git wit it. Do I know how to make an attractive offer, or what?

I was starting to feel like the Dowager. I am not accustomed to being spoken to in such a manner.

I listened to all the voice mails and don’t have a single exciting thing to report. Most of them just involved a lot of heavy breathing, which doesn’t seem the most efficient way to hire a prostitute. I suppose they didn’t want to run the risk of being recorded? It could have been a sting operation. There were a few who spoke, but maybe they were speaking in a different language or something because I couldn’t understand a word they were saying.

Guess I better wrap this up and go do my make-up. Mike and I are going to a Murder at the Mansion show. I got a haircut today so a professional could style it and I am not pleased. My regular stylist is on vacation so I had to take potluck. This guy flat ironed my hair, which I hate. I like a little fluff.

My phone has been buzzing all day, but I never use it for text messaging so didn’t realize that’s what all the buzz was about. When I finally checked the voice messages I had a ton of messages from various Tennessee numbers (I have a Tennessee number, which is what happens when you order your cell phone online) all asking for sex. I was incensed. What kind of man thinks he’s going to get a little something something when his opening line is “sup i need head”

I mean, seriously? What self-respecting woman wouldn’t give the guy a swift kick to the head with that kind of behavior? I certainly wouldn’t be rushing over to fill this guy’s needs.

I noticed one guy (I am just assuming gender) had texted three times, so I texted him back “wrong number, pig.”

He texted me right back and apparently he can use proper English. He let me know that my phone number had been posted on Craigslist as an escort ad.

Well then.

I guess he wasn’t a bad guy after all. He may be after a prostitute, but he had some kernel of human decency to let me know what was going on.

There was another guy who was persistent and I texted him back as well, but he didn’t care that it was a wrong number. He still wanted to “git wit it.”

I have contacted Craigslist, so hopefully they can help. I just checked my voice mail and want to delete everything without listening. Ten new messages from today. I can just imagine.

I am kind of chuckling. It is annoying and gross, but it is an adventure. At this point I truly do believe it was a typo or mistake and not a malicious prank since all the numbers are coming from Tennessee.

Holy cats, you guys. I got a taste of the life of a mother of five today and I am so, so glad that it is not my life. Of course, my beautiful children would all be perfectly well behaved and stand meekly by while I took care of business so I shouldn’t compare the life of a mother with my experiences this morning.

Yes, that is very tongue in cheek. I have well behaved children, but it takes a LOT of work to keep them that way!

Anyway, we went to a tour of the recycling facility this morning and then my friend and I headed over to a McDonald’s with a play area. I got out of the van and noticed her car was in middle of the road and she wasn’t turning into the lot.

Then I saw a huge metal thing laying on the road in front of her car.

Somehow the connector thing that makes your steering wheel move your wheels had fallen off and her car was stuck in middle of a very, very busy road.

Thankfully she was only going 5 miles an hour and we were right in front of the McDonald’s. She had her two boys (ages 1 and 3) plus her cousins (6 and 13) in the car. The 13 year old was a pretty good kid. He and I wrangled all the kids into the McDonald’s, all while cars were honking like crazy as if we chose to just randomly stop on one of the busiest roads in the region (355 for locals) to unload a bunch of toddlers.

The toddlers were all really good, though it was a job to keep the 1 year old from wandering off. Ordering five happy meals for kids who have no clue what they want? Not good! I had some dirty looks from other customers, especially when I asked the 6 year old what his name was. Like I would kidnap all these kids and take them to McDonald’s for lunch? Sounds like a nightmare to me.

The only kid that gave me real problems was the 6 year old. He kept screaming “I want soda! I want soda! I want soda!” Ummmm. Yeah, kid, I don’t buy soda for little kids. If your parents want you to have soda, that’s their business, but I’m not a supplier. Especially when you are yelling in my face about it.

The tow truck arrived pretty in a fairly timely manner and my friend’s husband was able to get to us quickly, even though his boss was in a meeting and he had to leave without telling him. He was afraid his boss was going to be mad at him, but somehow I think his boss will be understanding (my husband is his boss and I find he’s a pretty nice guy).

All’s well that ends well, I suppose. It could have been soooooooo much worse. It doesn’t even bear thinking about losing steering while flying down the freeway at 80mph.

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Ellen asked me if I would be happy about my mom moving here if there wasn’t all the emotional baggage involved with my sister’s children. I’ve been thinking about that a lot and the answer is “I’m not sure.” I can see that it would be awesome to have her support so near by. Mike and I could have a weekend to ourselves once in a while, maybe. But I don’t think I can handle it if she wants to spend every single weekend with us. She’s kind of exhausting. I don’t think this plan will pan out at all, so I am not investing a lot of thought into it.

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I am investing some thought into a romantic get-away the first week of April! My mom will be here (at least she has plane tickets purchased) so we want to go someplace before she gets called back to Oregon and scuttles our plans. I would love to fly someplace warm, but we are a little afraid to invest that much money into the plan.

I was kind of looking at Colonial Williamsburg, but how romantic would that be? I don’t know, I’ve never been there. Any ideas for a short, romantic road trip from the DC area in early April?

Will I really be able to leave Elsa for that long? I know Erik will be totally fine, but my baby! My sweet baby! I’ve never been away from her overnight, even though she HATES me at night and hits me if I come near her (she snuggles with daddy all night long).

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I really must go do something useful now. Maybe get dinner cooked, then put it in the crockpot to keep it warm. We have soccer tonight from 5-6 and I’ve already used my pizza night this week. Mike is going out with some old workmates so I am not really motivated to make dinner at all. I guess I could make myself some bean soup and make some little pigs in a blanket for the kids.

Or. . . I could go paint! Actually, I won’t be doing any painting today. I need to spackle, sand and caulk today. I painted the dining room ceiling yesterday, so I’m totally committed to this plan. Our ceilings are awful. We didn’t have them painted when we moved in because all the people who gave us estimates said it was impossible to paint a textured ceiling with a roller and it would have been over double the cost to have them paint the ceiling with brushes. I actually kind of like the look of white ceilings with my beachy colors, but they desperately need something and I am not in love with the idea of trying to keep from getting any paint on the ceiling.

I’ve never been able to figure out why it was so impossible to paint the ceiling with a roller, so I finally googled it. I found out that you can, indeed, roller over this textured mess if you use a high nap roller. I had no problems at all yesterday, except for one big glop in my eye.

My mom painted our house all the time, but she never did it correctly so I never learned how to make things look good. She’s just paint over all the nicks, peelings, etc and hope the paint would fix it.

Memo: the paint never fixed it.

All this spackling is like magic. Such a revelation! It may take me a year, but it is going to make me happy when it is done. I have hated our paint job for four years!

How did I manage to post on LJ almost every day when my computer was in the shop, yet now I have nothing? For one, I’ve been super busy catching up on all my computing tasks. Plus, I guess I feel like I don’t have an excuse to write a super short, crappy little entry. I need to ramble! Somehow I think people prefer the short little crappy entries. My rambles can be hard to follow, even for me.

Erik had a playdate at a classmate’s house this afternoon. I looked up the address on google map and went down a rabbit hole into these people’s lives. Holy shit. No wonder they live in a huge, double-fancy house that I can only dream of. The woman invented an e-mail system before the internet even existed. They are both completely brilliant, which gives me anxiety about my own lack of brilliance.

I’ve volunteered to take over our PTA website and get it updated. Why the hell am I doing the webpage with my hodge-podge, make-due approach when we have freakin’ internet geniuses that have won major global awards for their computery excellence? I suppose they don’t have time to throw together a silly PTA webpage.

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I’ve had major problems with my back since Elsa was four months old. Sometimes it gets better, but then sometimes it is so bad I can barely stand up. This week I think I have found the culprit. Brooks shoes! I ordered my first pair when Elsa was a baby. I wore them to the ground and got a new pair. I like them better than New Balance simply because the colors are prettier.

My back had been fine this week (no gym time, Elsa’s nose won’t stop running so she can’t go to childcare) but then we went on a big family walk yesterday. Five minutes down the trail and my back was on fire.

I hope the Brooks are the true culprit. I just ordered a pair of New Balance and can’t wait for them to arrive. Three years of pain caused by shoes? And here I thought it was because Elsa was so heavy when she was a baby.

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Speaking of shoes, I got a new pair if Mary Janes in the mail yesterday and they are too big. TOO BIG! You people with your normal feet have no idea how bizarre it is for my giant Fred Flintstone feet to be flopping around in a pair of clown shoes. I wear an 11WW. I tried these shoes on and started laughing at the ridiculousness of it.

I am sending them back and trying a size 10W. I haven’t worn a 10W since fourth grade. Hopefully they fit because they felt incredibly comfortable, except for the whole swallowing up my foot thing.

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I have been unhappy with our paint since we moved into our house four years ago. The colors are lovely, but the company we hired did a TERRIBLE job. Absolutely terrible. We shouldn’t have even paid them.

Four years later with two kids and regular playdates with upwards of a dozen toddlers running around and the paint is a complete wreck. I don’t really know what I’m doing, but I’ve been spackling and sanding walls all day. The idea of painting is completely overwhelming when I think of the WHOLE FREAKIN’ FIRST FLOOR. Instead, I’m trying to force myself into thinking in parts. I could totally spackle and sand a wall one day, then paint that wall the next day. It might take a few weeks, but I could get it done. I don’t know how efficient that would be, but it is the only way I can even consider doing this project without giving myself an anxiety attack.

I want to have the painting done before spring break because. . .

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My mother is coming and she’s a terrible painter.

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Mom thinks she is going to move out to the Maryland panhandle (much more affordable than here, but close enough to visit regularly). She is flying in for a month to check it out and rent a place, then she’s going home to collect her belongings and move out here. Her house is on the market. My sister is approved for HUD and just needs a house (though supposedly her husband is going to live in the house and she is going to a rehab program in CA [I really hope that is true but you know their life never works out]). My mom says her plans are set.

I am not convinced this is going to work out. I am pretty irked that she told Erik about this harebrained scheme and now he’s excited. She was mad at me because I told her not to tell him things because he gets very disappointed when they don’t happen. She thought I was saying she is unreliable.

Ummmmm.

Yeah, pretty much.

It’s not really her fault, but she is my sister’s enabler and the only one who provides a stable life for my nephews and niece. She needs to stop telling my kids things are going to happen. Maybe they will (ha), maybe they won’t. Just keep it under your damn hat, lady.

I am not thrilled about this whole idea. It’s her life and she deserves some happiness. She shouldn’t have to be my sister’s keeper (my sister is 37 years old. She needs to grow the fuck up and get her act together, but she’s a meth head). But who is going to be watching out for the kids? That’s the part I can’t reconcile. I haven’t been writing about this because it upsets me so badly and there’s nothing I can do. The state of Oregon is going to have a lot to answer for when my nephews and/or niece turn up dead or sold as sex slaves.

I guess that’s all I’ve got tonight. I need to be in bed right now. I’m supposed to get up at 7:15 every morning, but as soon as Mike pops out of bed at 6 am, I become Elsa’s lovey. I can’t sleep with a child fondling me. Why is this child still in our bed? She starts the night in her bed, but when we wake up in the morning she’s in with us.

My baby is back! I am glad I wasn’t completely without internet while my laptop was gone. I finally learned a lot of the features of my smart phone, so it will be a lot more useful, but I hate thumb typing or voice posting. I can type about 90 wpm on a regular keyboard. Thumb typing is not very efficient compared to my awesomesauce secretarial skills. My 9th grade keyboarding teacher would never believe it, but with modern keyboards you don’t have to correct your errors with correction tape and throw out a page if you mess up too badly. Do you even know what correction tape is? I’m willing to bet some of you have no idea!

Now that my computer is back, I have a lot of work to do. First up, drafting an e-mail on behalf of one of my groups, explaining to a lady why we do not want her to provide birthday cupcakes at our general meeting every month. It is a very nice idea and we appreciate it, but not everyone wants their toddler to have a cupcake at 10 in the morning. It was extremely messy and our guest speaker was not impressed with waiting for us to finish our “birthday party.” This is going to be an incredibly difficult e-mail to draft because this lady is very sensitive (but has no problem eviscerating anyone else, which makes it easier, except I know she is going to FREAK).

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I just got a call that my plans for next Sunday are not happening. We were going to a Murder at the Mansion mystery show thing, but there were not enough tickets sold. We can either go on Saturday or get our money back. Our sitter said she can watch the kids on Saturday, but now I’m sort of leaning toward getting our money back and doing something else on Sunday. I suppose I’ll let Mike have some input, since it is his date too. It would be novel to have some time alone with no kids. I’m sure we could think of SOMETHING to do. Ha. I need a little romance in my life.

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Google ads are freaking me out. An ad just popped up for the exact outfit that Elsa is wearing RIGHT NOW. I bought it at a brick and mortar store months ago!

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I really need to go cook dinner. I’m supposed to take Erik to family game night at school in an hour. How am I going to get dinner cooked before then? Why have I been carressing my laptop keys instead of taking care of my family? Bad mommy. Bad, bad mommy.

UGH UGH UGH. I want to scream and yell and throw a tantrum (we had a counselor at MOMS Club today who said if we don’t want our children to yell and scream and throw temper tantrums we shouldn’t yell and scream and throw temper tanturms. Oh. Point taken.).

My computer has to go to the shop. It will be gone for 7-10 days, maybe longer. We no longer have a desktop. I have a phone. Erik has a tablet that I can’t work worth beans. This is going to suuuuuuuuuuuck. I am trying to notify all the people I need to notify that might need something from me via e-mail, but did I get them all? I don’t know.

I am going to miss my friends. I am going to miss YOU. This is so silly, isn’t it? It’s just a computer. But it’s my LIFELINE.

I didn’t curse out an Indian man about this whole thing, but I sure wanted to. Not his fault. Not his fault. But I DID buy the protection that came with home service. Why doesn’t this count toward that? I don’t understand. I had a guy come out here once and it was a beautiful thing. So why can’t this problem (actually a whole list of problems) be solved with a random guy showing up at my house and making me happy?

At least backing everything up is easy. I have Carbonite, the best money we’ve ever spent. Seriously, if you don’t have Carbonite or some sort of automatic back-up program, do it NOW. You know you are never going to go in and back it all up. Not until you have the BSOD and it’s too late! Carbonite backs everything up in the background and you can easily rebuild your files if you ever need to do so. I think it is $45/year. I swear they aren’t paying me for this commercial.

It doesn’t back up programs so I was even smart enough to remember to find my product key for Publisher and back it up. I hope they don’t wipe the drive, though. What a pain that is. The system is fine. I just have massive hardware failure (CD ROM drive fell out, plastic casing around screen is losing pieces, the computer randomly shuts off if it is not plugged in even though it has a new battery and A/C adapter).

So. . . if you want to see me, you’ll have to be my FB friend I guess. I will probably figure out everything there is to know about my phone during these trying weeks. Maybe I’ll even get some reading done. I’m about half-way through the Matched trilogy and it’s pretty good. It’s another YA near future dysotopia story.

Speaking of reading, I just finished the Night Angel trilogy by Brent Weeks and really enjoyed it, even though he picked some of his world building straight out of Wheel of Time (or else he and RJ used all the same sources; I know a lot of people say WoT is very derivative). I’ve got a little project going on where I am trying to read some of the popular fantasy that I’ve been missing the past 7 years. The best thing about this project is that a lot of these new-to-me authors have completed series out so I don’t have to wait for the next book. I am not a patient person, but in the past at least I could pick up a new book and feel like I knew what was happening. These days I have no freakin’ clue what is happening in the latest book when there are 1-2 years between publication dates.

I feel kind of bad posting this. First world problems, big time. But they are my problems and I am having an anxiety attack and you need to know why I am suddenly ignoring you. I know I am not the best commenter, but I read every single post on my friend’s page every day and I *think* the comments, even if I don’t write them.