What's goin' on

Nothing much, how 'bout you?

I took the girls to their Halloween dance last Friday--ah, the overwhelming joys of a grade school dance. The first 1/2 hour was horrible, the next 1/4 hour was tolerable, the next 1 hour was much better, and the last 1/4 hour was horrible.

After 10 minutes, I offered the girls a bribe of each their own fullsize candy bar if we could leave. Allie said yes, Julia said no, so we stayed.

In other news, yesterday it snowed. Yes, by god, it snowed. Big chunky flakes that melted when they hit the ground.

Thank goodness it only lasted about four minutes. Our snowblower is still in the shop and besides, it's October!

BTW, Happy Birthday to my sister, Claudette!

Not too full

Today is the 12th anniversary of the day that Greg and I married. Last night, I arranged for one of our exceedingly rare babysitter visits and we went out to dinner to commemorate and celebrate and all that.

We ate at a relatively new restaurant in Madison called Samba. It's one of those Brazilian meat restaurants. The kind where there's an amazing salad bar and then you turn over a disk (or in this case, hourglass type of thing) from red to green and men with large skewers of meat keep coming to your table and slicing off pieces and chunks for you until you turn your hourglass back to red. They had 8 different meats on the menu last night.

Barbecued chicken, flank steak, duck, lamb, tenderloin, sirloin steak, and so on. Greg and I joked during our meal that we should bring Dan and Kerry to try it if they come and visit again (bad joke, sorry Kerry--she's a vegetarian and I imagine that anyone who wasn't a dedicated meat eater would have been literally sickened by the skewers of meat walking around). But if you're a carnivore--mmmm, it was really good. And then they had these little rolls that tasted like Yorkshire puddings--it was quite an event, actually.

So 12 years ago today at this time (11:15 a.m.), I was at the beauty salon with my bridesmaids, getting our hair done.

At 12:15 or so, I was arriving at the church to get dressed for photos. A friend got sub sandwiches and no one ate them.

At 2:00? 3:00? (oh my god, I can't remember what time!) we got married.

At 5:00, we arrived at our reception and had a little popcorn from the popcorn machine. This was hours before my Uncle Jim, who had been doing a wonderful job helping us out by running the popcorn machine, got a little distracted by the amount of beer he'd drunk and forgot a bunch of popcorn and it smoked up the hall a little--not too bad.

At midnight, our feet sore from all the dancing we had done, we left the hall and discovered that our "friends" (I use the term lightly, at this point) had filled the interior of our car with those little circles you get when you 3-hole punch paper and the exterior of our car with written congratulations. We didn't have time to clean the interior before we left on our honeymoon, so we still had those little circles blowing around more than a week later. And more than six months later, I was still finding them when I vacuumed out my car.

It was a wonderful day and so many wonderful things have happened since. I love you, Gregory. Happy Anniversary!

Campfire songs

Last night, me and the girls went downtown to the senior center for a campfire sing-along. The logs were made of cardboard columns, wrapped with brown paper and decorated with squiggly lines. The fire was shapes cut out of orange and red paper, propped into the "logs." It was about 55 degrees outside, but I guess Allie's school didn't want to risk frostbite or something. So the sing-along was inside on the carpeted floor.

The music teacher, the principal, and a friend of the teacher had instruments and the 40 or so assembled kids and 30 or so assembled parents sang folk songs that the kids have been learning recently in class. I guess that's a good reason for being inside, so that people could read the song lyrics.

We weren't very good, but Allie liked it and Julia liked that they had cookies afterward. Gosh, it's only two months until the December All-School Sing--I guess I'll just have to bear the wait.

A nice offer

We had guests this weekend, so we ran through a few pantry items and we hadn't yet had time to hit the grocery store to restock.

Allie: Mommy, we've been out of napkins for a few days now. Should I bring some home from school in my lunchbox?

She's studying up to be a petty thief in her spare time, I suppose. I declined the offer. Allie shouldn't consider stealing from her school until she's in college and she takes off with dormitory linens, right Greg?

Raspberry picking

Raspberry picking this weekend was not as much fun as I remember it being when I was a kid. This weekend, it seemed that the berries were either well past ripe, not yet ripe, or non-existent. It was to the point that I stopped eating as I picked because I wasn't really getting enough raspberries to chew on and besides, if we didn't all start collecting them, we were never going to be able to fill our little berry container.

When I was a kid, my sisters and our neighborhood friends and I would go to the wild raspberry patch adjacent to "our" city park. We'd have to wear sweatshirts even in warm weather, and we'd pull up the hood and cinch it tight around our faces--because we were, no doubt about it, going to get eaten alive by mosquitoes as we picked.

Nonetheless, we girded our loins and braved the bugs because there were a lot of beautiful, ripe, delicious raspberries to be had. Mmmmm. Raspberries that were picked 20 minutes ago, smashed slightly and with a little sugar, over vanilla ice cream. Now that was good.

Allie's latest nightmare

I walked into your bedroom and there were millions of fans on high and I walked in your bathroom and saw Hello Kitty and she had killed Julia and she was covered in blood.


Amateur psychologists, feel free - - -

I'm not sure how to title this

Greg was picked up by some co-workers today for a seminar they are all attending. Me and the girls stood at the dining room window, as usual, and waved goodbye. Two men that the girls don't normally see waved back in a puzzled but friendly way from the front seat of the car.

Allie: Who was that in the car picking up Daddy?

Me: I don't know for sure, but it looked like one of them was Daddy's boss.

Allie: Oh, I know him. He has a face with interesting hollows and stuff. Like his face is sucked in.

Me: Hmmm, OK.

Allie: I wonder what it would be like to have hollows in your face like that.

Julia: I wonder what it would be like to be a boy.

Allie: Well, for one thing, you would have a lot more stuff in your privates.

Redo done

This week I painted our master bathroom. Instead of being a creamy white that the builder selected (with chipped areas on the exposed corner), it's now a light greenish grayish color called Boulder. I like it.

In the spirit of renovation, Greg and I decided to put up a new shower rod. It's one of those rods with an arc so that when you have a shower in the tub, you can keep the shower curtain from getting familiar with your private parts. I love it. It tends to feel a little too spacious, actually, after the years of close quarters, but I'll be happy to get used to it.

And since it's been 5 days now, my body parts don't ache anymore from the weird positioning required to paint a bathroom. On my knees, reaching behind a toilet in a confined area--not my favorite way to paint. Standing on a ladder with my neck arched in a weird angle--not my favorite position. But it was worth it.

Now we're thinking of tackling the living room and kitchen. Be still, my heart.

Anticipation

This morning, on the way to school, the girls started talking about Halloween. They're already looking forward to Halloween, in the way I imagine a heroin addict looks forward to his or her next fix. They weren't excited about their costumes or the adventure of Trick-or-Treating. Oh, no. They were focused on the CANDY!

OH MY GOD, THE CANDY . . . they said. They talked about chocolate and lollipops and SpongeBob marshmallow treats in the kind of tones that most people reserve for something they're drooling over. I didn't look back to see if any napkins were required. Then Allie spoke the words that brought the conversation to a place of horror.

"I hope we don't get any apples."

NO! NO! THE INHUMANITY!

Not that the girls have ever gotten an apple while Trick-or-Treating. That would be a pretty unlikely treat in these cautious days. And their tone of dread ignored the fact that Allie loves apples and in fact she had one for breakfast today.

I'll admit it. I loved the days when the girls would go Trick-or-Treating and then Greg and me (mostly me) got all of their chocolate treats because all they cared about was the fruity and chewy stuff. Now, Allie actually likes chocolate. Fortunately, I still have the power to forbid her to keep her candy in her room. That means after 8:15 or so--fair dibs!

Snackin'

If your cats had the opportunity to get at some food other than their own, they'd take it, right? Like dogs, cats are pretty omnivorous. Cats chew on plants, bits of leftover breakfast cereal, tuna packages, carpeting (don't ask, but Rabies should have gotten drop kicked for that one).

So if your cat had the opportunity to get at a plateful of dinner that one of your kids (Julia) didn't finish, and that plate contained mushroom pork chops, au gratin potatoes, and broccoli, you wouldn't be surprised to see a piece of pork chop on the floor, would you?

Nope. It was broccoli.

Weird cats. Sneaky too. I was about four feet away with my back turned.