kdiddy.org

Yes, it’s been a minute since I posted last. I’ve been busy and I feel like I say that waaaaaay too much. But, tis the truth.

The dudes* and I made our annual jaunt to Trax Farms on Sunday. It was a gorgeous day, though a little too warm and while we had the brilliant idea to go on that particular Sunday since the Steelers game didn’t start til 8, so did everyone else in the tri-county area.

I ran into a PhD student from my department there. We managed to chat for a full five minutes while we stood in line for the ladies’ room. During that time the dudes were in and out of the mens’ room and already standing outside getting irritated with me about the fact that women are built in such a way that it takes longer to go to the bathroom and that’s all my fault.

Anyway, I ran into the PhD student right after we had left the petting zoo and I had a fine coating of goat slobber all over me.

Yesterday I talked to her for a few minutes and she told me that two suburban moms got into it later in the afternoon. Something about a place in line. The velour sweatsuits were on fire and phrases like, “Bring it on, bitch!” ricocheted off the SUVs. The police showed up. I’m so bummed we missed it. Even though I’m pretty sure I fall squarely into the “city folk” category, I’m still so amused when urban and suburban people take a trip to the country and forget how to act. We think we’re so civilized and sophisticated compared to people in rural areas, but we’re so not.

Anyway, there are some pictures after ye olde jumpe…

(more…)

My weekend kind of failed. I had grand plans to do all of my homework and reading for the week since I am way behind, do all of the laundry, go grocery shopping, watch the Steelers game, and eat some yummy dinner.

None of that happened. We went out on Friday. Our friends Curt and Amanda are moving to Atlanta on Wednesday and were having a going away party at Remedy in Lawrenceville. I had a good time. I got some drinking done and then a big group of us went to Eat n Park for late night noshing with plastic cups and no silverware. It was awesome. I felt…well, probably like how normal 28-year-olds feel.

My mom came over on Saturday. She and I are not really getting along at the moment and I was in a bad mood because I got a letter from our insurance company stating that since someone jimmied my front window open while I asleep and took a bunch of my shit, my premium is going up. Thanks, dudes! My mom wanted to, like, do stuff besides lie on the couch and nap, so that took up most of Saturday. I did get a big chunk of reading done, though.

But see, Sunday…the baby woke up kind of early and did his usual nagging to get me out of bed before 8 a.m. I don’t know. That kid must really like hearing the words, “Hell,” and “No.” Everything was normal. When I finally came downstairs, I gave him some cereal. He ate a few bites and then curled up on the couch. I asked him what was wrong and he said he wasn’t feeling good…and then all hell broke loose, intestinally speaking. There was puke. There was watery poop. There was even a nosebleed in the midst of all of that. He took a long nap while I washed soiled underwear and tried not to gag. He felt better when he woke up, like it never happened. I don’t understand how kids do that. When I throw up I’m out of commission for the rest of the day. But I’m also a pussy.

I started making some dinner and then worked on an essay when the Steelers came on. The husband spent the next three hours screaming at the TV while I typed away and checked the turkey, which was not cooking. See, I had a frozen turkey breast and didn’t defrost it and oh, I’m an idiot. I did some supplementary cooking of that, so we have dinner for tonight already, but last night we feasted on leftover mashed potatoes, ramen, and pita.

I never did get around to the laundry, really. I washed and dried two loads but they’re sitting in a pile in the laundry room, wrinkling away. We have some food, but I’m really low on WW-friendly stuff.

Ugh. Too much. I’m really hating myself for taking this particular combination of courses. The work load is insane. I keep thinking maybe I should drop one, but I would probably just be prolonging some future hellish fall semester. I’m so cranky nowadays, though.

But the weekend wasn’t total shite. Besides Friday’s tomfoolery, some nice pictures were taken. I snapped this one on Friday night:

Every now and then, I let the baby use the digital camera. He normally takes pictures like this:

You know…still lifes with Godzilla, toilet paper, and remote controls. But on Saturday he managed to snap this very nice picture of our cat:

Bonus: fingerprint dusting from CSI. I guess I should wipe that off. But maybe I’ll leave it so I can point to it and go, “That’s right, bitch,” and impress guests. Isn’t that a nice picture, though? I want to get him a camera for his birthday or xmas. I could get him one of those Fisher-Price joints, but it would be nice if he could make little movies with it, too. Like he told Jamie, “I’ve started making my own Godzilla movies.” You know, branching out from astute observer to director.

Oh, that reminds me. In recounting some of the details of the break-in to a friend, the baby lamented the theft of his piggy bank, sighed, and very seriously said, “Now I ain’t got no cash.”

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, the greatest name EVER.

With that out of the way, allow me to catch up on the past week.

The short version: it’s been kind of shitty.

The long version: A not-so-grim version of Murphy’s Law seemed to descend on our household. This was mostly to blame for the 500 different kinds of sick we all got. The baby was out of school Tuesday and Wednesday with a high fever and headachey/sniffley thing that was accented by a short barfing episode in Incredibly Strange Video and a nosebleed. I am now officially overwhelmed by the amount of paper that comes home with him from school every day and am now apparently delinquent in giving them whatever arbitrary version of his life history they have decided that they need this week.

A couple of times since the break-in, I’ve entertained the thought of dropping one of my classes simply because the reading load is much heavier than I thought it was going to be and with things thrown into upheaval with all of that unpleasantness, I’m not always sure that I’m going to do well in it. I’m staying in it for now, but was more than a little embarrassed yesterday when I tried to b.s. my way through a discussion of genre and made it horrendously clear to everyone that I had no idea what I was talking about.

As you can imagine, I’m looking forward to the upcoming weekend. I need to regroup.

The good news is that there is a suspect in our break-in and it was just some random person. Last weekend I had way too much time to think and conjure up all possible what-if scenarios and by Monday I was certain that a psycho internet stalker was coming to get us. Thankfully, that’s not the case. We were able to get a chunk of our DVDs back from a resale store downtown, which was exciting since there were a number of things that are hard-to-find. We got our Pi DVD back and while that’s not hard to find, we were upset that it was gone because that was the movie the husband and I watched on our first…whatever. It wasn’t a date, we were just hanging out at my house, but for whatever reason psychotic mathematicians bring out the romance for us.

Speaking of the husband, his 28th birthday was on Tuesday. The baby and I gave him some Borges books, the new Chuck Palahniuk book, and the Death Proof DVD. When the husband got to school that day he was treated to a birthday surprise: two pop quizzes.

So, you know, nothing catastrophic, just a lot of minor irritations that built up.

Oh, and I just got a humongous spider bite on my back. Sexy.

We had a little resume workshop in my class this morning and of course our prof came over and listened in on my group while we were looking at my resume and cover letter. After she left, there was an uncomfortable silence as we all wondered just how I managed to not kill myself getting out of the shower everyday, now that my utter stupidity has been displayed for all to see in the form of subject-verb disagreement. Simply put, I wrote my cover letter in lolcat. “I haz batchlurs. I will haz masturs. I can haz job now plz?”

In other words, I’ve been a little busy and my work, all areas of it, are suffering. I knew the cover letter was going to be a piece of shit, mostly because when I tried to recall when I wrote it, I simply could not remember. Luckily, the day job will ease up slightly in the next week or so and I might not flunk out of my grad program. Now I just need to remember where I left my kid…

In cooking news, I made Stovetop Cheddar Mac last night. It was certainly inferior to the homemade stuff that Jwan makes, but it was quick and easy and it hit the spot. I added a couple generous sprinkles of cayenne pepper to brighten the flavor a bit. The other night I made Apricot Poppy Chicken which was really REALLY good. The baby declared it “the best dinner I’ve ever eated.” So there. Also, the new issue of Everyday Food arrived at our house yesterday and there are so many awesome cool-weather recipes this month. They feature meat loaf and I curse any available deities that my husband hates meat loaf, cause I need a baked pile of ground beef with a Heinz ketchup glaze in my life, goddammit.

You Tube: Louis CK’s stupid dog.

You Tube: Louis CK, the cartoon.

You Tube by way of retrojunk.com: I’m the only person I know who remembers Cough Whip. This bums me out.

Frisky Wife: I’m supporting my family while my husband completes his engineering degree. In 1960, this would have earned me a “Good Wife Certificate.”

I think the darling lolcats may have already completed their internet life cycle and have entered the realm of monotonous. However, they still have one or two nuggets of brilliance left in them.

College Humor by way of Tracey: Prank War. Apparently this is real, but it’s pretty wild. If it is, these guys have psychologically ruined each other.

The scene is early on a Saturday morning in a run-down house in the wannabe-suburbs section of the city. A husband and wife, reeking of garlic from last night’s salsa, are stinkily snoring away. Their child walks in and starts demanding breakfast and shocks his mother awake with icy cold hands, the first of the autumn. Their cat runs laps from room to room and when the wife pries her eyes open, she sees the cat dragging her cell phone out of the room by the wrist strap. She hisses at the cat to drop the phone and the cat snaps his head around to stare at her, wide-eyed, with her cell phone still dangling from his mouth. He is also whining at the wife for breakfast. The night before, after the child had been scolded for misbehaving and had responded by crumpling onto the couch and sobbed, the cat had rushed to the child’s side and sniffed his face. Concerned, the cat had grabbed the child’s head and playfully bit at it. What strange siblings.

This a picture of me, the baby, and our associates, SpongeBob and Patrick. This picture is significant because it was taken moments ago by the photo booth application on my laptop. On my (admittedly ugly) couch. In my living room. Yes, after months of incessant whining on my part, something finally snapped in the husband’s brain and he hooked up our wireless router. Now that we have two computers with internet access, this marriage just might make it after all.

This gloriously long weekend has served me well. I’ve slept in past 9 a.m. TWICE, which I haven’t done in a looong time. However, I’ve been doing stuff like school supply shopping and picnicking, so now I have to squeeze in laundry and homework today around spending quality time with the husband’s family. And I don’t think we’re going to make it to a grocery store today so I’m really not sure what I’m going to do for lunch tomorrow. I’m thinking maybe something from the ghastly overpriced salad bar at the UC. Can’t wait.

Saturday I went to a canoe club in Verona for a picnic with some other MAPW types. It was nice, despite the fact that the baby came with me and is still on his Campaign of Terror. He nagged professors, screamed, whined, and flirted with grad students. Sigh. He did get to go canoing, which he enjoyed and was cute as hell.

The baby followed up his fantastic behavior at the picnic by waking me up early yesterday morning, wielding a vibrator he had found in my bedside drawer, and asking me what it was. I think I mumbled something about an egg beater before shoving it back in the drawer, too tired to be embarrassed.

I feel bad for wishing this summer away, but I’m ready for fall.

Wrote this last night

One week of the semester down, 15 more to go.

Man, I really wish I hadn’t just typed that out.

We had another trip to the baby’s new school today to do some developmental tests and whatnot. We also talked to the school nurse about his tree nut allergy and she seemed mildly freaked out. I am not concerned since I think the plan of attack is pretty simple. Check foods for tree nuts and avoid those that contain them. If he happens to ingest some, remain calm, administer Epipen, call 911. Or you can skip those first two steps and just call 911, especially since there’s a fire station with paramedics right across the street. In fact, you wouldn’t even need to call 911, just shout out the window. Eh, whatever.

I know I’ve said before that I’m excited for him to start school and all of those emotional, “Oh, my baby!” reasons still stand, but now I’m really excited because I’m hoping it will mean an end to this end-of-the-summer dementia he’s experiencing. He doesn’t have any playmates close by and it’s been tough getting together with any of his buddies, so he’s been pretty bored all summer. I feel bad about that, but there’s not a ton I can do about it. Consequently, he’s becoming quite the pain in the ass, whining constantly, throwing fits, picking fights with the cat. Stuff like that. He’s currently attempting to play Rayman’s Raving Rabbids on the Wii, despite the fact that it’s a little over his head. He’s obviously failing at all the games and then shouting at the TV. The husband is very helpfully talking on the phone. The cat is scratching the couch. I gave a hearty middle finger to the dishes in the sink.

We’re all sort of resigned to the suckiness of this time of year.

At least the weather was a little merciful today. Having to deal with 95 degree weather at this point is just obnoxious and I’m sick of sweating and being sticky and greasy.

But in less whiny news, the husband picked up a cheap copy of Short Circuit on DVD the other night. We watched it with the baby last night and today and the husband and I had both forgotten how amusing that flick is. And Ally Sheedy was so…squeaky.

And now today, after I had to abandon this post to difuse the Wii situation…

The husband had to go play records last night so I decided to watch The Devil Wears Prada. I had seen the end of it a couple of times, but wanted to watch it from the beginning and I knew the husband wasn’t into it. You know, that movie’s not too bad. I chuckled at the beginning when they contrasted Andy getting ready in the morning with the other glamazons. The unkempt hair, minimal makeup and comfort-over-style manner of dressing is so, so me. Meryl Streep really is frighteningly convincing as the evil boss and Emily Blunt was fantastic. I really think Anne Hathaway has a fantastic career ahead of her, so long as she can break out of the “she’s had to overcome so much…being brunette and all,” roles. Hollywood really needs to quit it with that shit. Coincidentally, both Emily Blunt and Anne Hathaway are starring in separate Jane Austen related movies.

I have some housework and an MAPW picnic to go to today. My mom and I are also heading out to buy the baby his school supplies. I’ve had two cups of Pleasant Morning Buzz and am feeling rather pleasantly buzzed.

I need a shower.

Our buddy Matt has a pretty great post up about his two-year-anniversary trip to New Orleans. I recommend reading it and also checking out his pictures on flickr. One disclaimer: Matt is, uh, not a Republican. If you are, his post might piss you off. Well, the situation surrounding his post SHOULD piss everyone off, but everyone has different motivations for their pissiness.

We went to the baby’s school last night for a Meet & Greet. I think I signed up for the PTO. I’m not sure. But we got to see his classroom and his locker and meet his teacher. I have such a good feeling about the school. Most importantly, the baby really liked it and didn’t even want to leave when it was time to go. I managed to hold back my cries of “HA! THAT’LL CHANGE! WELCOME TO THE NEXT 12+ YEARS OF YOUR LIFE, KID!” and merely snorted at him. But everyone there seems cool and his classroom is the cutest damn thing I’ve ever seen.

There was one family there that squicked me out. The dad had a Larry the Cable Guy hat with a confederate flag on it. Now, I’m not implying that Larry the Cable Guy fans are automatically racist, though I will state that I think that they have terrible taste in comedy and delight in giving money to someone who is basically mocking his audience. But the confederate flag tattoo on his arm gave me pause. The mom, who my husband said bore a slight resemblance to Marilyn Manson, yelled at her three kids, the oldest of which was maybe 7 and all of whom were rather obese. Now, I’m making snap judgments about these people, admittedly, but I have a feeling that we might not get along. Not to worry, though. At least I’m not the confederate-sympathizing moron sending my kids to a city school. Way to make yourself miserable.

Alright, enough being a bad, judgmental person. First week of classes is almost over and I am so relieved. I’m also supposed to weigh myself tomorrow, but we don’t have a scale at the house and I don’t trust the university to properly calibrate the gym scales…or maybe I’m still paranoid about the last time I did a short stint on Weight Watchers last year and in three weeks on the program gained six pounds according to the gym scales. It was around that point that I said, “Fuck it,” and started eating everything in sight. I guess I should have sought a second opinion. Oh, well. I find that periodically relinquishing control over one’s self is liberating, I just relinquished for too long. Or some shit.

The rosy-cheeked dude in the picture is my husband. He likes to bite my style. As such, he has a new blog this is officially debuting today. He is over at infinitestatemachine.com and has a rad interview with Omar-S to kick things off. Check it out.