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How could I forget how happy music can make me? I’ve been feeling kinda angsty this morning, I think mostly it’s the end of a week back from vacation, house is a mess, kid is sniffly and Richard and I are feeling a little sleep-deprived. Still wondering why I’m uninspired to design. Feeling as though I’ve lost whatever design talent I had, blah blah blah. But I’ve got my headphones on and I’m listening to a beautiful band, Margot and the Nuclear So & So’s. Their name might make you think that they’re some sort of female-led rockabilly group but that would be a wrong assumption! Richard Edwards sings mournfully over lovely folky orchestration. Billboard.com describes them as “cinematic chamber pop songbook of what was once and what might have been” Download a few of their fine tunes at Myspace

Spin.com says :
The tracks act as mini-screenplays which unfold into romantic sagas ("Skeleton Key," "Jen Is Bringin' the Drugs"), or include detours into dialogue ("On a Freezing Chicago Street") are highly literate with the exception of the saccharine "Paper Kitten Nightmare" which features Edwards crooning "meow meow meow" -- seriously. On "Quiet as a Mouse," nearly every member of the band gets a turn in the spotlight with string-heavy sections, a horn solo, a piano-driven opening, and a grizzled, guitar-heavy chorus in which Edwards warns, "Wake up, the sun is rising without you."
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I say that I forgot that music could lift me out of my own moody head. It can also be my own form of Ritalin. Folks might tell ya that I’ve got a short little ol’ attention span. At work, before the blogosphere, I would sometimes find myself up out of my office chair wandering about. Now I find myself clickity clicking from blog to blog. It’s mostly that I can’t stand to wait for Photoshop to finish a task, or waiting for a website that I’ve been working on to finish uploading. SNAP. I’m wandering off web-wise. Put on some good tunes and suddenly the antsy child fidgeting in the corner of my head is occupied. At least for a bit. Check out the new CD links on the sidebar there. Dig in and groove!

oh the many sordid ways one will entertain a child whilst awaiting their hamburger to arrive. (Also check out that totally bizarre sunburn on the girl in yellow! Drunken sunscreen application is ALWAYS a danger!)

Oh I love that man of mine!

If you have never tried dressing and extricating a toddler from a house in the morning, try bathing 3 irate cats... everyone walks away mad!

Dear Mr. Inventor-of-the-portable-DVD-player,
Thank you very much for inventing the mighty motor midget morphine unit.
Without it, I surely would be on valium by now.

Yours Truly,
Pagalina

We have returned from the wilds of Charleston, SC. I am slightly more beige than when we left, a whole lot more freckled and actually rested! Ruby loved jumping into the pool and she love Love LOVED her grandma and grandpa. It’s hard to describe how happy it made me to see Ruby loving and being loved, that warm nest of kindness is priceless. A week’s visit really allowed them to connect. I was a little self conscious of my parenting at times. Nothing like having a mother-in-law who raised 3 children and works with small ones everyday. They don’t say anything critical or even raise an eye brow at the number of french fries my child ate on vacation, but since they see ruby’s cousin, who is probably perfect, all the time, they see all the ways that I must be ruining our girl. I should just get over myself, and I will one day, it’s on my to-do list. I don’t really like that “mother-in-law” word anyways. It has built-in antagonism. Richard’s mom and her hubby, Patrick totally ROCK. I wish we lived closer to them, they’re so easy to hang out with and I get a lot of hugs, always a plus. 

As I said, they were awesome to hang out with and I would live in their neck of the woods, north of Seattle, in a heartbeat if it wasn’t rainy or foggy or chilly 90% of the time. I’d have to have a room full of those full-spectrum light boxes in which to bathe myself daily in order to not be a limp little sad rag doll. It’s the closest thing I have to a mental disorder. I’ve been trying to think of ways to get EVERYONE to move to one pleasantly-climated place. Southwest anyone?

So, now I’m back at work again. While we were spending 7 hours in the car, in between feeding Ruby jelly bellies, one at a time, I contemplated career choices. Actually for 5 seconds, owning a dollar store sounded like a great idea and then Richard mentioned the realities of managing minimum wage workers and trying to keep all the goddam air fresheners hanging straight on their little hooks. That would make me insane. Why are there toilet brushes strewn about? Did someone have to test drive all of them? I would spend entirely too much time grumbling under my breath.

There is nothing wrong with what I do, except I’ve been doing it too long. WOOHOO, I get to do ANOTHER business card design! Wheeeeee! Being in advertising is not saving lives, if you hadn’t already figured that out.  Ideally, I’d win the lottery and then I could work part time somewhere for fun and then do volunteer work. I think I’d have a funky hair color and dress weird just for fun too. Wait, scratch the weird part, I’d dress expensively! That’s much better.

Yep, this is my last day at work before vacation and I have high hopes for a fun and relaxing time! I may be overly optimistic about the beach week, but I'm still a little worried about that 7 hour car trip we're facing. I think I'm loaded for bear with portable DVD player, new toy laptop type game, new books, snacks etc, but I still feel like I'm headin' down into a scary cave of darkness and doom! I'm also afraid that I'll forget to pack my own underpants.

In other news, I look fairly retarded with this haircut I spent $40 on yesterday. My bangs were cut all wrong (straight-haired people just don't get curly hair) and I had to "fix" them, which just made them shorter. I look like Princess from "Father Knows Best" and I am not pleased. I wish there was a way to revoke my 18% tip. "cough it up, sister, I look retarded."

Ruby has been going through a lot lately, we've been steadily working on the whole potty-training thing and it's amazing what you can get a kid to do for a couple of M&Ms. We've been talking up this big vacation and she's getting ready to change daycare. I think she might have been a little stressed out by all this because all of a sudden she's having bad dreams of somebody chasing her. Poor lamb.

We went to visit the new joint and she LOVED it, jumped right in and started playing! It feels like this is part of a big developmental step for Ruby, we'll be able to get her totally out of diapers soon and she'll be introduced to lots of different foods and activities. She's definitely not a baby anymore. Did you see her recent pics? 

<>So, I'm off to see how much beer and freckles I can accumulate in my body in a one week experiment!  Toodles

Now THIS is my kind of obit.... I think i'll start working on mine. (don't worry, there's no imminent use planned!)

"...When his family was asked what they remembered about Fred, they fondly recalled how Fred never peed in the shower - on purpose. ...."

Hamburger Lunch:
$45
Swimming pool paraphenalia:
$24
Commisserating with other parents about children's whining:
Priceless

Today we had two little girls and their parents over for a swimming pool playdate and lunch. They are all within 5 months of eachother in age. It was so lovely to learn that noone is always graceful in the face of toddler-whining. Everyone has found themselves in the same dark "open a vein" territory and it's a comfort to me.

As if the girls had arranged in advance, each took their turn whining, crying for attention, in time out, or screaming. Not all at the same time, fortunately, but strangely orchestrated. I know Ruby couldn't have called them up because whenever you put her on the phone all she can say, in a very small voice, is "hi....hi.....hi" so she's out as the great Toddler Whine Jam organizer.

We've had quite a few vigorous melt-downs this weekend. Just can't WAIT to be in a car 6 hours next weekend on our way to Charleston. wheeee! Maybe I should find some valium for the trip. Or at least a whole lot of beer!

 

I was three or four months pregnant and working a new job that was proving to be awful. Just plain awful. Lovely coworkers, all totally unhappy and one sorta insanely unpredictable boss. We were temporarily living in an apartment that was unfortunately within spitting distance of a train track. This is not an exaggeration, we were LITERALLY able to spit on the tracks. Well, I could've if I tried. And if I was, like, Wonder Woman or something. Or maybe the Bionic Woman, she could probably spit really far, right? Well anyway, it was so close that at night whilst tossing and turning, I could hear the squeaky wheels squeak their way down the squeaky tracks. It was a miserable time.

So I was stressed, and pregnant, away from my husband who was closing up our old house and not sleeping. So you can imagine that closing on two houses was a very stressful event. We’d gone to Arlington the previous day hoping that it would only take a couple of hours when it ended up taking the entire day to close. And now here we were signing over our lives for a new house, but what we didn’t know was that our profit from the old house had to be in the closing house’s account before we could buy the new one. “WHAAAAA??? M-f’ing piece of... goddam...” – not very motherlike language ensued. Our furniture was going to be delivered TOMORROW we had to close today. Please, please! Goddess-of-all-that-is-not-bad, please help us. We’re sitting in the closing office waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Finally! The money has indeed gone through, the day is saved, I retract all nasty things said and we sign our life away. sigh! We have a house!

If I wasn’t knocked up I would have certainly knocked back several alcoholic beverages to take the edge off, but I’m so relieved I can barely see straight. So Richard and I head out of the closing agent’s office to go check out our new place. As we step out of the door, Richard says “Crap. They towed the car.”

People. What kind of man pulls THAT kinda joke on his stressed out pregnant wife?
After I punched him in the arm a few times, I laughed pretty hard. What a way to start a new life with a man who always makes me laugh!

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Scene:
Ruby, our two year old, is pretending to walk a dog, she has an improvised leash around her little stuffed monkey’s neck.

Me: Whatcha doin?
Ruby: Walking puppy.
Me: What’s his name?
Ruby: Monkey ( duh...)