Category: Uncategorized

Variety

I may have left out some details in my last hasty blog. I am not doing medical transcription forty hours a week . . . in fact, I am no longer doing any medical transcription at all since my other Internet job turned into a full-time job. I work as a Community Manager on a website for moms. When I began, I worked 12 hours a week. Those twelve hours turned into nineteen hours. Nineteen hours turned into twenty-nine hours. Then, remarkably, those twenty-nine hours became forty hours a week, complete with benefits and everything.

I have turned into the mythical stay-at-home mother who works full-time on her computer . . . you know when people ask, “Are there any legitimate work-at-home jobs?” Well, there was one. And I have it.

I absolutely love my job and I am so grateful to have it.

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In other news, three boys are spending the night. How did this happen again? Every time I allow it I think, NEVER AGAIN. And then I relent. I’d rather they all be here driving me crazy than somewhere else doing who-knows-what.

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And now, Six Weird Things About Me, a Meme brought to you courtesy of Smoov.

“THE RULES: Each player of this game starts with the “6 weird things about you.” People who get tagged need to write a blog of their own 6 weird things as well as state this rule clearly. In the end, you need to choose 6 people to be tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave a comment that says “you are tagged” in their comments and tell them to read your blog.”

1. I hate raw tomatoes and Kraft macaroni and cheese.

2. Being too hot makes me crabby. I cannot think straight when I’m sweaty.

3. I am fascinated by Betty Broderick and watched not only the CourtTV coverage of her trial, but also the two television movies made about her which starred Meredith Baxter.

4. I used to consider whether I’d rather be deaf or blind. I alway chose deaf.

5. I have never been to a prom.

6. I own a lot of earrings but I always wear gold hoops.

And a bonus weird thing:

7. I like to sleep in a cold, completely dark room. Night lights keep me awake. Even a crack of light under a door will wake me up.

Oh, and I’m not tagging you but if you want to play, consider yourself tagged.

Work-a-holic

Just so you know . . . working eleven hours (on the computer) in one day will make your knees ache.  You will long for sleep with the intensity of a nursing mother who has a newborn.  Eleven.

That’s why I don’t have time (yet) to tell you about going to Seattle with my friends (dear, dear friends).  I went, I ate, I slept, I laughed, I talked, I listened, I shopped and I bought a lipstick which holds great promise (could it be The Perfect Lipstick?).  And then I landed with a thud back into my regular life, got right to work, washed a load of dishes and never really stopped to breathe (or download a photo or two from my digital camera to illustrate the post I haven’t written about going to Seattle).

Tomorrow is normally an easy day for me (five hours of work), but for various reasons I will be working ten hours.

It’s another case of being so close (to the computer), but so far away (from the blog).  Alas.

Preparations

Here is what you do when your college friend from 1984 through 1987 is coming to visit Monday and you haven’t seen her in eighteen (?) years and you are keenly aware that she possesses exquisite interior decorating superpowers which she demonstrated during the summer of 1985 by using small lamps to make a former Hotel 6 room (with aqua shag carpet) seem homey.  (We lived as roommates in said hotel room during that summer when I first met my eventual husband who is upstairs at the moment wondering if I’ll ever come to bed before midnight.

1.   Borrow a dump-truck and rid yourself of the hand-me-down sectional with the rips and stuffing the children like to pull out and leave in fluffy balls on the floor.  Buy a new couch.  And a matching chair because you can.

2.  Paint over the red stripes in your living room which seemed festive and whimsical in 2002 but which have annoyed you for at least three years.  And paint the rest of the family room and the entry-way while you’re at it.  Consider painting the vivid golden yellow living room, but decide against it because who cares.  (Besides me, I mean.)

3.  Spend Saturday hunting for a replacement glass lamp fixture for the vintage lamp which your daughter broke several weeks ago.  A bare light bulb might be acceptable for every day use, but not for a visit by your long-lost friend–and her husband and his sister.

4.  Re-hook the draperies by the patio window because you put the hooks in the wrong place the first two times and were too lazy to fix it two (three?) months ago.

5.  Remember that you meant to install new curtain rods and curtains in the kids’ bedrooms upstairs.  Oops.  Wonder if it even matters.  Consider ways to keep your friends from going upstairs.  “No, our bathroom is broken.”

6.  While your desk is pulled out from the wall so you can paint, unplug every computer, printer, light and electronic device.  Sort out the cords.  Plug in the brand spanking new surge protector and replug everything.  Dust desk.  Rearrange.  Admire.

7.  Thank God that you had the forethought to lose 57 pounds in the last two years.  Because, seriously, that is the worst feeling in the world knowing that you have no choice but to see people who knew you when you were young and cute and had no idea that you were young and cute.  (“Cute”?  Well, you were young.  And had a ton of rock-star permed hair and skinny legs back when skinny legs and giant sweaters and long shirts were all the rage.)

8.  Hire someone to paint the upstairs master bathroom, even though you don’t intend to let anyone see your bedroom because after twenty years of marriage, you still have four Rubbermaid tubs serving as bedside tables.

9.  Hire a carpet cleaner.

10.  Hire a housecleaner and then spend most of Saturday shopping and seeing a movie.

Shoes

A while back, I was late dropping off a little boy for afternoon kindergarten. Because we were tardy, I had to walk him into the school office to sign him in. I waited behind a lady who was signing in her little girl.

When it was my turn to sign the roster, I noticed that the woman before me had written, “Fight over shoes,” in the Reason column.

I found that very amusing, probably because I have a girl and I can imagine fighting with her over shoes. (Though I am more likely to let her venture into public in crazy outfits because, really, why fight it?). With my boys, a more likely reason for tardiness would be “Couldn’t find shoes.” Even now, my almost 15-year olds constantly lose their shoes. I do not understand this. The only time I lost shoes was when I left behind my pointy-toed boots at a retreat center.

By the way, this errant shoe is still here in my storage room. I never figured out where it came from.

When vacuuming the heating vent near the front door, I found a toddler-sized sandal. I have no idea who it belonged to–probably us, many years ago. Some kid must have pulled up the grate and dumped the sandal inside.  Also?  Perhaps I should vacuum out the vents more than once every nine years.  But let’s not rush into anything.
Speaking of shoes, no one is allowed to wear them in the house anymore because we just had our carpets cleaned and I am trying to prolong the cleanliness as long as possible. Wish me luck.

Farewell, O Christmas Tree

The Christmas tree my husband purchased in Detriot ten years ago has been dismembered.  Its branches lie in bunches, segregated according to size.  Tomorrow, I will drag out the large box, pack it away and send it off to the church, where I hear the youth pastor will appreciate having a seven and a half foot tall fake tree for the youth room.  And I say, “Good riddance.”  Good riddance to festivity, good riddance to the rumpled tree skirt the cats frolic underneath, good riddance to Christmas Past.  I’m sick of it.

My daughter came in as I was yanking off the top branches of the tree and said, “Mom, what are you doing to the tree?” with dismay just like Cindy Lou Who when she caught the the Grinch stuffing the Christmas tree up the chimney.  I said, “Christmas is over.  We have to put all this away.  If it were Christmas all the time, we’d never get to swim in the pool, you know.”

Indeed.  If it were always Christmas, when would we celebrate the Fourth of July?  If it were always Valentine’s Day, when would we go trick-or-treating?  If it were always the beginning, when would we ever reach the end?

In other news, I ate a whole sleeve of Ritz crackers tonight.  Don’t tell my other blog.  Don’t even ask.  I have no idea what came over me.

Dropping the balls, crashing the plates

I never got the hang of juggling. I know there is a pattern to it, that you are supposed to toss the balls in a particular direction, but whenever I tried to juggle, the balls had their own wacky orbits and did not follow any pattern whatsoever.

I am trying to juggle a new full-time job, four full-time kids, three stinky cats, two blogs, a husband and a partridge in a pear tree. Everything’s going swimmingly, except for this blog-thing. (And the cooking dinner thing, which I can’t seem to get running smoothly.) I smack my forehead at about 1:00 a.m. and say, “Oh, shoot! I forgot to write in my blog!” and then I fall into a horrible dream in which someone is chopping off my toes. (Not really that particular dream, but that is the worst childhood dream I can remember.)

And you know that feeling you have when you’re in a room full of loud people and you’re talking in a normal tone of voice to a close friend and then suddenly, you realize you have just said out loud, “And the doctor said the discharge was . . . ” just as a conversational lull occurs and your private confession has turned into a head-turning shouted announcement? Oh, you don’t know that feeling?

Then you will not empathize when I explain that sometimes, now, that’s what it feels like writing a blog which has become somewhat less private that it was in the beginning. My topics for conversation are fairly limited . . . and my children are going through a boring, bickering streak . . . no one is giving me any good material, at least nothing I can use here. I clearly need to mingle with more strangers who have no idea what a blog is.

There’s a book about blogging called No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog which makes me want to clutch my heart in a dramatic gesture and gasp, ” . . . and probably nobody cares what I did today, either, or whether my daughter is driving me nuts with her constant chatter . . . ” It’s tricky to fashion something out of nothing day after day.

And so Happy New Year! 2008! Doesn’t it just seem like yesterday that the nutcases were trying to freak us out by telling us that the world “as we know it” would cease to exist on January 1, 2000? Because the computers would grind to a sudden and lethal halt and we’d all have to beg those fatalists to let us into their bomb shelters so we could eat their stockpiled lentils and oatmeal? I did not participate in that tomfoolery . . . who has time to fret about The End of the World As We Know It when there are more important things to consider such as whether or not there are clean underpants for everyone in the family? And such as whether U.S. Americans can locate The Iraq on a map?

Oh, the late-night hosts are killing me with their writer’s-strike beards! First David Letterman and now Conan O’Brien. Beards always make me think of my dead dad, which is a rather morose thought, but then again, I love to remember him and then shake my head over all the technology he has missed in these eighteen years since he’s been gone. He was one of the original fans of the computer. He built one from a kit in 1977. It had red and blue button and I have absolutely no idea what it did, other than take up all his spare time. He programmed it with cassette tapes, which seems ludicrous, but I promise, it’s true. He would have been in love with the Internet.

So, I know you don’t care what I had for lunch (nothing! I ran out of time between running errands and starting work), but do you care that I painted over the red stripes in my living room? My 9-year old is disgusted with our boring “Wheatfield” walls, but my husband has breathed a sigh of a relief at the monotonous sight. He’d love nothing more than to live in a plain-jane house that looks exactly like a dorm room before anyone moves in. Beige walls, a book shelf, a bed. What else does anyone need?

Well, in less then eight hours, I will be back on the computer, working again, throwing plates into circular patterns that end up spinning wildly out of control. I am a rotten juggler. But I can type without looking at the keyboard and surely that’s worth something.

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In the lull between Christmas and 2008

I am still printing out the last twenty Christmas letters.  I just can’t quite get it together and my newish printer is recalcitrant, and now, low on black ink.  You’d think it would be simple to print out 90 Christmas letters (with three full-color pictures), but the printer has balked from the start at printing more than three pages at a time.
In the meantime, I started painting my family room.  I had painted red stripes on one long wall six years ago when I was pregnant and I am so over the red stripes.  I painted my family room bright gold a few years back to match a bright gold couch (the theory being that if the quite ugly couch matched the walls, it would disappear).  It did work, the couch is long gone and the walls remain gold.  Soon, those walls will be a sedate shade of “Wheatfield.”

I bought a “PaintMate,” which is an ingenious syringe-type device.  You suck the paint into the handle and then the paint dispenses into the roller as you’re painting.  No paint trays, no fuss, no muss.  If only it were capable of taping the baseboards and edging along the ceiling.

I made the mistake of giving my 14-year old a digital camera and now it’s as if we are living with the paparazzi.  I may go stark raving mad and shave my head if the constant hounding does not stop and stop soon.

By the way, I am sick to death of hearing Britney Spears referred to as a “young mother.”  She is twenty-six years old!  Twenty-six, people!  Since when is twenty-six a “young mother”?   The media makes it sound like a  baby of twenty-six years old should be excused from being a good mother on the basis of her youth alone.  How utterly ridiculous.  When I was twenty-six, I . . . walked to school . . . uphill . . . both ways . . . ten miles . . . in the snow.

Well.  Anyway.  Twenty-six is not “young,” if you ask me, nor an excuse for irresponsibility.
Kids have arrived to play, making me think painting a second coat on my formerly striped wall now would be a mistake.  Nevertheless, I am going to start that project right now because the sooner I finish, the sooner I’ll be done.  And a little latex paint never hurt anyone.

Merry Christmas!

First of all, does anyone know where the tape is? No? No one?

Oh, wait. I found it.

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Kids!

The Christmas pageant was tonight. My 5-year old daughter endured a two-hour practice on Sunday afternoon. She dressed up as a sheep, crawled out by the shepherds, did great! This morning she informed me she did not want to be in the play. Then, while we sat in the pew, waiting for 7 p.m. to arrive, she told me she really wanted to be an angel. I reminded her that there were no more angel costumes and besides, it was too late to be in the play.

At 6:59 p.m., she said, “I really really want to be in the play. I changed my mind.” I told her it was too late and realized the glory of her current age. She did not throw a fit or cry or argue. Good thing, because if she had, I would have missed the amusement of the Christmas pageant.

First of all, the beautiful young couple with their gorgeous kids did the Advent reading and lighting of the final Advent candle. Only the young woman couldn’t get the lighter-thingy to light. I saw the youth pastor moving over to assist her . . .  and heard the unbelievably loud CLICK, CLICK, CLICK of the unresponsive lighter . . . and then, her husband finished reading, reached for the lighter-thingy and with one click, WHOOSH, there was the flame. (Hi, Jenn! Oh, that was funny!)

In no particular order, here are other things that made me laugh:

1) “Mary” chewing pink gum while sitting in the “stable” . . . and her mother hissing at her to stop chewing said gum. Two rows of us were in near hysterics. When “Mary” realized our mirth, she got that haughty teenage look of disdain.

2) One unruly black “cow” sucking his thumb.

3) My daughter brought a life-like doll with her . . . and the doll has fresh batteries. The doll was “asleep” . . . until a woman on the other side picked up the doll, waking the doll . . . just as the program started. The doll was cooing, moaning, giggling and the people in the row behind us were snickering . . . my daughter snatched the doll, trying to get it to sleep . . . and I finally, in somewhat of a panic, found the “off” button. But, oh, the hilarity.Perhaps all of this is more amusing when you are tired.

At any rate, Merry Christmas to you all. (Time to go arrange gifts under the tree!)

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The last Saturday before Christmas

My husband taunted me last night.  “What time are you leaving?” he asked.

I said, ” . . . ” and he interrupted before I could say it and said, “Ten?  You’ll never be out of here by ten.”

Oh yeah?  That sounded a lot like a dare to me and I am the girl who introduced myself to Jim Bakker (yes, that Jim Bakker) on a dare in 1985.  I was working on the grounds crew, saw Jim Bakker arrive at the Grand Hotel surrounded by his entourage and said to Kendra, my co-worker, “I should go introduce myself to Jim Bakker.”  She said, “I dare you.”

So, I dropped my rake and marched right over, stuck out my hand and said, “Hi, I’m Melodee.  I think you went to college with my uncle.”

So, Dear Husband, do not dare me or I will, indeed, leave the house by 10:00 a.m.!  In fact, I was nearly at the mall by 10:00 a.m.

And, not only that, but I found a parking spot one car away from Macy’s door.  I was out of there by 10:50 a.m., then stopped by Best Buy on my way to a movie.  (“Charlie Wilson’s War,” an entertaining flick, littered with the f-word and an opening scene replete with with nipples . . . why, oh why?)  After the movie, I drove back across town to Costco where I easily found a parking spot and bought four things:  a spiral ham, batteries, ketchup and mustard.  We consume ketchup almost as fast as we consume milk.

Then, to a department store.  I finished up my day at Barnes and Nobles, spending gift cards on myself.  Yes, myself!  I bought four books I’ve been wanting to read for a long time:

Eat, Pray, Love;

Mindless Eating;

Girl Meets God;

Three Weeks with My Brother.

Which reminds me of something I’ve been meaning to ask.  What book did you read in 2007 that you would recommend to other people?  My book recommendation for the year would probably be Peace Like a River or  The Sacred Journey by Frederick Buechner.

I also urge you to check out Librarything.com.  I use this free site to keep track of the books I’ve read.

Now, time to wrap the last few gifts.  Happy first day of winter!  And now, the days get longer . . . until we will wake up in shock that summer has arrived again.