Little Beasties

This is Pancetta.

We are hamster sitting for the holidays. Oddly, Pancetta's mommy is not a second grader or even a second grade teacher, but a full fledged adult, with a job and everything. Frustrated that she has neither the time nor the space to satisfy her dream of having a dog (and naming it Bacon,) she settled for a she-hamster and named her... Pancetta. You with me? Alright.

Pancetta came with her own coordinated accessories including the strawberry you see above that serves as her refuge from the world. The hamster version of a calgon bath and 500 thread-count sheets. She has a matching wheel, and a big vitamin lick shaped like an ice cream cone. Everything a girl needs. Pancetta also arrived with a clear purple ball that she likes to be placed in so that she may roam the rest of Leila's room. I wonder if she's drunk, the way she bangs into things, but I know that she has some sense because she paused for a while on the warm heater vent.

Perry the dog is not amused.

He sits at Leila's door and whines. He knows there's something in there that is smelly and alive, and he cannot stand not knowing what it is and what it would feel like to lick it all over. Also, he loves (and is submissive to) all animals, even animals that can't stand him. (This is absolutely true: he once rolled over for a duck that was crossing our path.)

Pancetta spent a little time bumping into things in her ball today, and made a little pee pee in there. I put her back in her home, and took the ball to the kitchen sink to wash it out. I set it to dry on the counter, and Perry just about had a conniption. I decided it would be a good idea to let him see and smell and lick and touch the ball - WITHOUT THE HAMSTER IN IT - so he could see that it was nothing to worry about, and get on with his life.

I was wrong. Wrong, wrong wrong. Perry is now the proud owner of a hamster ball, and I must now go out and buy Pancetta a new one. Within minutes, the opening to the ball was gnawed to a pulp. A little miscalculation on my part, but my intentions were pure. Pancetta has been very generous and forgiving about the whole thing. At least I assume so, but I can't really talk to her about it because she's barricaded in her strawberry. Maybe I'll write her a nice note.

Perry and his ball. Note the frayed edge of the hole.

In other unrelated animal news, there were 6 bird craps on my car today, and one big, white sloppy one on my back deck. What has gotten into these birds? And don't say that its pinecone bird feeders, because I haven't put mine up yet.

Visions of Sugar Plumbs and Pam

Okay, I'm back. This is what this blog would be like if I had a life. I've been busy making cookies, and throwing parties, and eating crab, and wrapping stuff, and shopping for stuff, and getting the dog his Christmas do done, blah blah etc etc.

None of that is at all interesting, so let me tell you about the dream I had last night. Its a little horror movie-ish, but oddly it wasn't a nightmare even though it sounds like one. Okay: I went to a clinic to give blood with Pam from The Office. (I had a little Tivo Office marathon yesterday) and she was giving her blood the regular way, but they told me they were going to take mine a different way; they were going to take it through my feet. I was not panicked at all. I wish my actual blood giving experience were as panic free as my dream blood giving experiences. So I'm all, okay, and the next thing I know I'm sitting in the clinic wondering why I don't have a bag of blood next to me, so I look down and my feet - with shoes - are in bags that are tied around my ankles and filled with blood. Still no panic. I'm waiting for someone to take the bloody bags off, so I interrupt a meeting that's going on and I say, I'm really sorry for the interruption, but could someone take these bags of blood off my feet? And all the people look at me really weird, and then someone asks me who took my blood, so I describe the guy and they say, Oh, he's not from our clinic, he's from the mental hospital next door. I really think my brain was trying to construct a nightmare for me, but it just wouldn't stick; I was serenely calm. So I start walking around - yes walking, with blood bags sloshing around on my feet - and I'm looking for someone to take them off. I don't know why it didn't occur to me to just take them off myself. I suppose I was hoping that there was a procedural way that wouldn't make my blood donation a big waste. Finally, I find some guy from the clinic who seems like he'll help me, but he bends down and starts licking the floor. Also from the mental hospital next door, I guess. I follow him anyway, and he picks up some plastic orchids and starts shaking them at me screaming "REGRET! REGRET! REGRET!" At this point I woke up and started laughing. I thought it was just hilarious.

That had nothing to do with anything. Sorry. Leila had a sleep over the other night and the girls got up at 6:30 in the morning and put all her stuffed animals under the Christmas tree and played Christmas morning. Isn't that cute? Yeah, whatever, real cute.

I just don't have anything interesting to tell you. I'm going into the city for dinner tonight. I'm doing a load of laundry. You know what I need? I need a drying rack. I have no room for such a thing in my house, but in the winter I have so many things that need to be line dried, and they end up hanging all over everything in my house. I have socks in the bathroom, sweaters flat drying in the bedroom, tights on all the kitchen chairs, its annoying. Alright, enough is enough. REGRET!

Huh?

So Leila got up to go to the bathroom at 1:45 in the morning, decided she wasn't sleepy, and turned on the light and read for the rest of the night. Rob found her awake when he got up at 6:30. Freak. She's cruising on five hours of sleep. The odd thing is, she's been fine all day, and I've been a wreck. I am so sleepy! I set aside some in my busy schedule for a nap, and I'm still tired. I can't actually believed I've typed this much, to tell you the truth. I must be a good typist because in my mind my fingers are going a;powne;tlktda;sdlitnads;lktosntoiasnt. This could get dangerous.

Tomorrow, I have to break the week-long boycott and go to the grocery store. I'm having company on Saturday night, and I suppose I have to feed them. Also, Leila's class holiday party is tomorrow, and I'm on the hook for that. We're making pinecone bird feeders, and tonight, in my zombie-like state, I will hot glue gun twine hangers to twenty pinecones. Exciting, right? I got an email from a friend who just spent a month in a buddhist retreat in Rio and did and saw all these amazing things, and I wanted to email him back and say Oh yeah? Well, I went to the farmer's market and found little gems lettuce, and I walked the dog and yesterday, I wrapped some presents. So there.

I just overheard Leila say to Rob, Today we are going to put on a play called Mess with the Bulls. This is a game where she pokes Rob until he wrestles her to the ground. As long as they're out of my hair...

Mother of the Year?

Okay, I totally get the Mother of the Year award. All you other bitches, back off, because I win.

This afternoon, L and I are making Christmas cookies. Side note: I love sugar cookies with icing. I think they're my favorites. I don't make them very often because, frankly, they're a pain in the ass. You have to make the dough, chill the dough, roll the dough, use the cookie cutters, roll out the dough again, ice the suckers, and then you feel like puking because you ate your weight in dough scraps. Another side note: The other day I was bitching and squawking about how all the Christmas decorations and baking and cards and general messiness of the holidays is a big fat drag (using language much more appropriate for a seven year-old, and much less cynical) and L asks me, So then, what's your favorite holiday? Um, Christmas.

Anyway, so we're baking cookies today, and Leila was already dreading the hour that the dough has to chill in the fridge, because that hour may as well be a decade when you're seven, and I said No problem, I have some leftover dough in the fridge, we'll use that while we wait for the new stuff to chill. So we make the new dough and I wrap it up, and get the old dough out, and it dawns on me that this dough is really old. I look at the recipe and it says "store wrapped dough in the refrigerator for two days or in the freezer for one month." The last time we made cookies was... Halloween. This dough has been in the refrigerator for two months, and it has raw egg in it. This isn't the part where I win Mother of the Year, this is just the part where I'm a lame housewife who falsely believes that the refrigerator is capable of doing magic tricks. The part where I win The Big One, is when Leila, in denial about the wait for the new dough, says Why don't I taste it, to be sure its bad? And I go... Okay!

I let her eat a piece of two month old refrigerated cookie dough, and she just about ripped her tongue out. I thanked her for taking one for the team. What kind of person does this to a child? I console myself with the fact that she had already licked the beater and the bowl, and is on her way to an icing and sprinkle induced fit where her eyeballs will turn into psychedelic swirls like in cartoons. Right now she's in her room playing the roll of the kid practicing piano AND the mom, saying Great job, honey! I guess that's what I sound like when I praise her skills while really reading about Jon Gosselin on TMZ. Is this better or worse than catching her playing with a broken beer bottle at the park when she was four? Hard to say.

You know what else? I went to the effing super marking five times last week, which is five more times that I'd like, so this week I decided I'm not going. We will eat what is already in this house, we will ration, we will subsist on two month-old cookie dough, but I am not setting foot in a grocery store. Maybe Friday I'll have to, but that's it. I got so desperate, I ate leftover nasty casserole that had been in the fridge for a few days. It was still okay, and it didn't kill me, obviously, but it was risky.

I think the dough is done chilling now, and we can get this show on the road. I have to steel myself for lip biting that must be done while L is making the cookie cutter shapes on the rolled-out dough too close together. I'm breathing. In. Out.

Decking the Halls with Balls

Decorating a Christmas tree with an almost-8-year old is havoc for a control freak. I have been saying to myself silently, in my head, Calm down, you can move it after she goes to bed. Just calm the eff down. And of all the fragile things that she took out of the box, I was the one who broke an ornament. It was a good one, too. Oh well, easy come, easy go. Usually, the Christmas tree and all the house decorations and outside lights go up all in the same day, but this year things got spread out, so it seems like a never-ending process. I have been tree-decorating for over and hour, and I still have more to do, but I need a break. Is there a law that says I need to put every ornament I own in the tree? Even the ugly ones? And why -WHY? - do I have so many damned heavy ornaments that need just the right branch? I have vowed never to buy a heavy ornament ever again. In fact, I haven't gotten any new ornaments, heavy or light, in a long time. I think the ones I have now are the ones I'll have forever. That's depressing. The same Crate and Barrel sparkly balls: forever.

Here are my faves, in no particular order:

One of the afore-mentioned Crate and Barrel sparkly balls, circa 1996. We had credit at C&B left over from wedding gifts, and got 6 of them, all with different designs.

This is a dragon fly made out of panty-hose, some kind of coloring, wire, with plastic jewels stuck on it. Leila made it in preschool. Usually most of the crap she makes in school gets thrown out when she's not looking, but I love this panty-ho dragon fly, and I'm sure there must have been dragon flies in the barn where Jesus was born, so it is Christmasy, no matter what you say.

This is the last ornament I bought myself. It was from The Container Store, and I thought it was the cutest little moose, until someone, weeks later, pointed out that, duh, its a reindeer. Sometimes, I'm really stupid.

I took this fake bird off a wreath at my old work. I love this bird, but I think I'm the only one in my family who does. If I remember correctly, I think one of our Christmas traditions is for Rob to say, Do we have to put that fucking bird in the tree again? and, of course, I insist that it be front and center because I love it. Its a pretty life-sized bird, about seven or so inches from the tips of its wings to the end of its tail. Its no small feat to find a good spot for it. I also have a small bird house and a small bird nest with a little cardinal in it (probably also lifted from wreaths from the same office party,) that get set in the tree. Its a tree! Birds go in trees! I just don't see the problem.

This might be my favorite. The picture makes it look like its just an average yellow ball, but its actually a GIANT yellow ball, about five inches in diameter, and the bright yellow paint was swirled around the inside and makes a cool, swirly pattern. Swirly is a very good word. It perfectly describes my religious beliefs: Swirly. Its like a big, bright sun, right in the middle of the tree. The birds need sunlight.

I wish I had a picture of the ugliest ornament I ever had, but I finally threw it out a few years ago. It was a plastic Santa head with clear plastic icicle coming out of the bottom. It looked like Santa's head on a pike. It was disturbing. It occurs to me now that this would have been an appropriate place to put a picture of the whole tree, but I didn't take one so its too late. Maybe tomorrow, when the boxes and the tissue are put away, and the needles are swept up, and my camera batteries are recharged.

I was going to follow up on my post the other day about thinking of one thing Rob could do to improve my experience of our marriage and I came up with something. Only, he doesn't want me to tell you what it is. That's what I get for being considerate and asking first! Suffice it to say that he has made the change, and my life has been improved by a fraction of a percentage point, so that's something. Sometimes I think he just says no to random stuff to prove that he can, that I only get my way most of the time and not all of the time, so I asked him if this was one of those random times, and he said that it wasn't, and that he just didn't need my readers to know what it was I asked him to change. So, the fact that he doesn't want me to tell you can lead you to infer that it is either gross, embarrassing, or both. Let your imagination run wild!

He did give me an early Christmas gift, though: we went to see Brandi Carlile live on Saturday night and sat in the fourth row! It was awesome, and a great present. Someone is getting extra starch in his panties this week!

My Moment of Fame

Today was the opposite of yesterday. I did exactly what I told you I was going to do, and added a little something special.

I made the biscotti (but I still have to chocolate dip them) and I went to the super market - AGAIN - to get the ingredients for L's class' snazzy snack tomorrow (don't ask, you don't really want to know) and while I was there, I bought myself some crab. Rob doesn't really care for crab. He'll eat it, but he is somehow immune to the sheer pleasure of picking the meat and drinking wine and making a evening of it. Maybe its because wine gives him an unbearable headache, but having crab for dinner is one of my favorite things, and he always pees on my parade. And cheese fondue; that's another one of my favorites that he poo-poos. So I bought two crabs, one for lunch, one for later, and I sat at my kitchen table, listened to the radio, and picked crab meat. I dipped it in my favorite mayonnaise/curry sauce, and saved a crab's worth of meat for a snack. Rob is not allowed to have any. He can eat the damn sweet potatoes that are still in the fridge from Thanksgiving. I also bought myself the Vanity Fair magazine with Meryl Streep on the cover. I tried to read it while picking my crab, but that is really ill advised.

When I was done with my crab, I sat down on the couch and started the article, but I fell asleep in the middle and took one delicious nap. When I woke up, I finished the article, and started in on the new Oprah magazine that came today (on time, I might add.) Now I'm feeling frustrated and dark. Oprah is just so much pressure. In every magazine, its LOSE WEIGHT! SECURE YOUR FINANCES! BUY THESE CLOTHES! LIVE YOUR BEST LIFE! NOW, BITCH!!!!! This is not a best life kind of day. I'm in a mood. In a funk. I need to get out of here. I need to stop making biscotti and melting chocolate. I need to find some new energy, some outside influence, I need to jack up my chi.

But here is another thing that I was WAY too excited about. I listen to this podcast almost every day. I'd like to tell you that I'm learning spanish or listening to Eckhart Tolle tell my how to live without fear or whatever, but its a podcast of the morning radio people let off the FCC leash a little bit, talking about sex and porn and coffee enemas, and I am sort of, I guess, addicted to it. So the other day, they were going on and on about this one topic, and I felt compelled to email them with my point of view. Yes, for a few minutes, I was that person, carefully crafting an email to the radio people about a topic that could not be less important. Well: while I was picking my crab, THEY READ MY EMAIL ON THE AIR. That's not even the best part: one of the guys interrupted the girl while she was reading it and she said, wait for it, Hold on, the way this is written is really funny. A SEMI FAMOUS PERSON THOUGHT I WAS FUNNY! That's all I ever really want in this life, just to be funny. I'm not going to be thin, or a genius inventor, or a big philanthropist, or cure cancer, so I may as well be funny. The stupid part is that I should have signed the email with my blog address, but I didn't. Stupid. If you want to hear it, although, really, why would you, listen to the 12/9 podcast on this link, its 13 minutes and 19 seconds in. God, I'm pitiful.

Off to melt chocolate for these goddam effing biscotti.

***ADDENDUM*** I'm done okay? Now get off my back!

Walking in a Shredded Coconut Wonderland

I bet the kitchen in this house is clean...

I need a glass of wine and to not listen to the goddam Nutcracker anymore. Its been Nutcracker central here since L went on that field trip, and now she wants a leotard for Christmas. I just can't listen to it ONE MORE TIME. I am sure I'll turn violent if I do.

Check out what I did today: I was Susie Homemaker on 'roids. I stripped the beds and washed the sheets, I returned some rainboots, went to the supermarket, decorated a gingerbread house with L and my mom, made two batches of orange/almond biscotti, and a casserole. Its a god-awful casserole too, but I love it; broccoli, left over turkey from Thanksgiving, and a can of Campbells cream of mushroom soup mixed with mayonnaise and curry powder. Awesome. Rob hates it, and I don't care. He'll eat it and like it, and then he'll clean the kitchen.

My kitchen is now a mess. I've complained before that my house is small, but the size of the kitchen doesn't really bother me unless I've got a couple of things going on in there like I do right now. The biscotti are cooling on a wire rack right next to a pan of water that was used to steam the broccoli, my to-do list is sitting on the toaster next to a damp dish towel and an advent calendar, Leila's lunchbox is in the mix, next to a zested orange and my sunglasses, and the kitchen table is covered with dry gingerbread house "glue" and grated coconut. This is the time of day when I just want to turn my back on the whole mess and go to bed early. The sheets are not back on the bed yet, though, and I still have to melt some chocolate and dip the biscotti in it.

I honestly don't understand how the alpha moms do it. In the immortal words of Sissy Spacek in Coal Miner's Daughter, one of the best movies ever made, I'm about ready to die. I am reading a really good book right now, not a vampire book (although I'm fairly certain I had a sexy vampire dream last night which may or may not have included Daniel Day Lewis) and tomorrow I'm going to sit on my ass and read it. Bored Housewife has done enough. I do need to make one more batch of biscotti tomorrow, though, but after that, its all ass-sitting, all the time.

But now, I have to leave you kind people and return to the kitchen, where I've been all goddam day, and create some order where there currently is none. Leila's teacher wants all the parents to make two dozen cookies for the holiday party so the kids can have a cookie exchange, and if I can't change her mind on that I may have to kill myself.