kdiddy.org

Here’s what I’m up to:

Geez. Yinzer much?

I’m so angry. For over two months, I’ve been trying to get a contractor/handyman to come to my house. The drywall that the husband and his dad started needs to be finished/sanded and I also wanted to see if that person would be willing to paint the small front room and the dining room. It’s a small job but it requires some skill and precision and would probably only take a few hours of a pro’s time. I’ve talked to four different guys and each one has flaked out. They have all agreed to meet me at my house and then just stood me up and not returned my phone calls. One guy did come out here and gave me a price and then never showed up to do the work and never returned my phone calls.

This last guy rescheduled the initial appraisal/assessment and right then I had a bad feeling. But I kept in touch with him and the husband even told him about our troubles. He was supposed to be here at noon today. Noon came and went and no sign of him. I called his cell phone and left a message. Then I called his house hoping that I might get his wife so I could ask her what the fuck is up with her man. I got voicemail there as well and left a snotty message saying, “You never showed up. I am displeased. I sincerely hope nothing catastrophic happened to you.” I’m certainly past being mature about this because I am very pissed. Like I mentioned the other day, my emotions are constantly on 11 so I’m ready to have a cage match with this turd.

I realize that these small jobs do not equal big money, but I don’t understand why it’s so hard to say, “I’m not going to be able to do the job,” or “I don’t want the job,” or even just, “I hate you, never call me.” Instead, I sit around for WEEKS waiting on these assholes during which time I could have become a drywall apprentice and done the shit myself. The rooms have been sitting half-finished for a year and a half because I can not get anyone to give a shit enough to finish them.

My house is a total dump. But all anyone has to do is spare a few hours of their time (with pay!) to help me and it could be a little bit better. I can’t even find that and that is just so depressing.

My co-workers and I went to Phipps Conservatory today to see the Chihuly exhibit. It was a field trip for grown-ups basically. It was really very lovely and I realized that Phipps is actually quite relaxing if you don’t have to chase after your kid (no offense, dude, but I still have nightmares about our visit there last year when you were having “a time” and ran past all of the expensive, breakable stuff in the gift shop). Since I’m so close to stuff like Phipps and the museums, I should really make a date with myself to just go check out some art every now and then.

I put a post up about this on MamaPop, but I was delighted this morning to read a post from Lee alerting me to the existence of a new Michel Gondry movie. Eeeee! I’m so excited for this! Gondry’s brand of goofy just speaks right to my soul. Though so does Judd Apatow’s which seems like it might make a weird intersection in my brain. Anyway, Mos Def might just be one of my favorite actors. He was awesome in Bamboozled and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Galaxy and looking at his imdb page I’m realizing that I’ve seen him in quite a few things that were equally rad. Of course, who can forget his tour-de-force as the Black Head of the CIA.

I got it wrapped up in this special CIA napkin!

The baby has been working on his first loose tooth for well over a month now. This morning he came running into my room and said, “Hey Mum, my tooth came out! My tooth came out!” and immediately dropped the tiny and newly liberated tooth on the floor. He found it, though, and presented me with the most darling gap-toothed smile I’ve ever seen.

Congratulations, dude!

Gah. First tooth lost and in about three weeks he starts kindergarten.

I think I need a drink.

Dang. Here’s the view from my office a few minutes ago.

The camera isn’t fancy enough to capture the torrential downpour, but it was pretty impressive.

I am NOT going to whine about how hot and humid it is, because many before me have done that. But I will say that the one detail that I am having the most amount of trouble dealing with is when the crooks of my elbows get all sticky and bending my arms results in those spaces sticking together and then peeling apart whenever I extend my arms.

It’s slowly killing me inside.

I’ve been thinking about stuff lately and I’ve noticed that in the past couple of months the thing that I’m having the most trouble with, mentally, is how intense every emotion I have is. I don’t just get irritated, I become furious. I am never just pleased, I’m deliriously happy. I’m never just kind of bummed, I’m abysmal. If I get too many phone calls in a row at work, I’m ready to kill someone. If I get my act together for five minutes and get something accomplished, I’m ready to throw a party. If I screw something up, I’m ready to do myself in. It’s exhausting. The other major problem that I’m having is my tendency to be scatterbrained. I don’t think it’s terribly surprising that I’ve had more trouble keeping track of things since I started taking grad classes on top of everything else, but it’s almost like I have two brains instead of two hemispheres working together. And the one brain is constantly binge drinking and then waking up three days later with its underwear in its pocket and wondering how it got to Idaho.

Hmm.

Well, I’m going to walk to Craig Street to get some Weeds DVDs from Dreaming Ant. Hopefully I will not perish from either the heat or my brain forgetting how to safely cross the street. Edit: Nevermind. Monsoon ahoy.

Shockingly, Baby Einstein videos don’t make your kid a genius. I will be the first to admit that, as a parent, I’m susceptible to drinking the Kool-Aid that is the marketing of children’s products, but I never got into Baby Einstein. Some friends of my parents (incidentally, these friends were very into products and were the type who insist on $800 strollers because obviously that’s the only good and safe stroller) who had their first baby about a year before I had the baby gave me some of their videos, but I was just really uncomfortable with the idea of the baby watching TV. My general guideline was that he wouldn’t watch it regularly until he was 2 and we were able to stick to that more or less. That’s not to say that I shielded him completely from it, but I just didn’t really present it as an option. Now, of course, he seems to be on a mission to make up for those two years that I cruelly kept him from the joys of Cartoon Network.

Anyway, Baby Einstein…it just seemed like bunk and while I guess you could say that they would be a good tool to use with your baby, I have yet to meet the person who can honestly sit through one of those videos more than once. They’re boring.

In other news, PUPPIES!

Completely unrelated to anything mentioned above, I’m finding that I still feel very awkward in this new forum, like I’m still finding my voice. It’s all very dramatic. I need a room of my own!

I’ve not been feeling very communicative over the last few days. I blame the weather. Everything is moist and sticky and gray and it sucks. Walking takes a huge amount of effort.

Yesterday, I read about toxins and carcinogens in personal care products, plastics, and toys on at least three or four different and unrelated sites. Obviously, recently published reports certainly had an impact on that frequency, but it got my wheels turning.

See, here’s where I’ll admit something to whoever happens to read this: I do nearly all of my grocery shopping at Wal-Mart. This is not something that I’m happy about and I don’t enjoy supporting them since they violate pretty much every principle of mine. But for the time being I am the breadwinner for our family and I have a BA in English, so you can imagine that money is pretty tight.

When we first started out on our own, we were shopping at the regular local grocery store and even with coupons, we couldn’t afford more than two weeks’ worth of food there. Bottom line: we need to eat all four weeks out of the month. It is pretty shameful how difficult it is to buy food and other products that are good for you or at the very least not potentially harmful. Just buying fresh produce eats up a large portion of our grocery budget. Buying organic and/or locally-grown food on a regular basis is something that we might be able to afford to do in a few years’ time, but it is simply not an option right now. So I can avoid the chemicals and starve or fill my belly with something and count the days until I feel that first lump. Awesome.

Such is life. If you’re not wealthy, you can’t afford to buy food that doesn’t owe much of its existence to laboratories and mad scientists. That in turn causes health problems, which your shitty insurance won’t cover. But your health problems have to be addressed, so you go on medications that half of the time are later discovered to be more harmful than whatever you had in the first place. Awesome. But it does really bother me that the U.S. government is seemingly just not bothered by this kind of thing at all. The stuff in our environment is so bad for us, but imposing any kind of inspections or regulations would hurt business and be un-American and god forbid human lives win out over businesses and bunk American mythology.

As an aside, have you seen the commercials for the new medication for Restless Leg Syndrome?

It can cause compulsive gambling. I can’t wait until we get to the medications that cause compulsive punching-pharmaceutical-CEOs-in-the-face.

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.

It’s rainy here today. Shocking, I know.

I’m coming down off of a burst of energy that was stopped in its tracks by my lunch. Jwan tipped me off to this new place in the Strip, Big Mama’s House of Soul. My mom and I stopped there last night for take out. It’s goooooood. I got a fish dinner with greens and macaroni and cheese and a big hunk of cornbread. It seemed like I was eating for a good long while but when I went to heat up my leftovers a little bit ago, I realized that I hadn’t even made a dent. Two big meals worth of outrageously delicious soul food for under $10? Rad. Also, the place is decked out in Steelers paraphernalia and pictures of Bill Cowher and Mike Tomlin adorn the walls. The woman who owns the place wasn’t there so her kids were running things. They got a little busy while we were there and when I pointed out that they had forgotten the husband’s ribs they kind of freaked out and started yelling at each other in that way that only unsupervised siblings can. “I’m telling Mama that you messed up the orders!”

Anyway, prior to the soul food road block, I had grand plans to attempt to organize the attic. Not surprisingly, the room that is not the husband’s studio is a wasteland of boxes. We have grand visions of putting the Sega Dreamcast and the old Nintendo systems up there and creating an Old School Video Game Room. I’d also like to clear enough space so I can do some yoga or some shit.

Also, I went to Target yesterday and procured some awesome kitchen gadgets: a meat thermometer, because Alton Brown said so, a vegetable scrubber, because potatoes scoff at my barehanded scrubbing attempts, and a citrus juicer, because Jen showed me hers and I’ve had to have one ever since.