My new charm bracelet

I love charm bracelets and I have several.  They're really the only jewelry that I wear.  I got my first one from John and it started with two charms; one for each of the boys.  I added charms over the years and now it's full.  My next one I found in a magazine and it's has hearts of all types.  The one in the magazine was $1200 but I thought, "$1200?? that's nuts" and started collecting hearts charms.  It's just about full but I can't wear it until I get it to a jewelry store because all the charms are tied on with yarn.  My third one is the "new" type that Brighton and Pandora sells.  It has 5 beads that the boys picked out and gave me for Christmas last year.  My fourth charm bracelet is my "buyer beware" purchase.  I found this bracelet on Overstock.com along with a red heart that I thought I would add to my Heart bracelet.  Well, the bracelet showed up with the tiniest links I've ever seen in my life.  I really don't know what it's intended for; perhaps a child's bracelet??  So I hung the one red heart charm on it and called it good.  Turns out I quite like it.

My latest charm bracelet is from my Mom.  After my Dad died, she put together a Brighton bracelet with charms that reminded her of Dad.  She ended up with so many charms that it was too heavy to actually wear so she divided up the charms between my sister and me.  I was going through the charms with Sam and explaining that they're all the things that Grandpa loved.  There's a golfing charm and an ice cream charm and a coffee charm and a L.O.L charm (because Dad told stories that made everyone laugh) and a suitcase charm because Grandma and Grandpa traveled a lot…..then Sam piped up and said, 'What about napping? Is there a napping charm?"

Best Sign in Town

Picked up Abbey from the kennel and drove past my favorite sign in town.

Because 5 is just too damn fast

Washington DC

At the FDR Memorial, Sam reading Roosevelt quotes off the walls….

"We have nothing to fear but fear itself……and spiders…..definitely spiders."

Who are you in Fiction?

I just took the Book Week Scotland 2013 Personality Test

Who are you in fiction?

and it says I'm Katniss Everdeen

who are you??

Time Vampires

So John found this game, Mansion Makeover, and thought I'd like it.  You fix up your mansion by selling items in your house.  It's a search and find game; you look for silly items in cluttered rooms until you have enough money to buy a new couch.  It's cute and he was right, I did like it.  But it turned out that there are more games in this series and I really liked the garden makeover one.  I ended up with a beautiful garden but eventually ran out of things to fix up.  Game over.  Bummer.  But, oh oh oh, then I found AquaScapes where you build fish tanks and, uh-oh, when you get one tank completed you can build another one.  And another one.  And another one.  And then your kid wants a tank so you start a tank for him.  And you have to keep all of the tanks clean and all of the fish fed.  And you can name the fish.  And they talk to you.  And sometimes when you switch to a different tank they'll be all lined up, smiling at you and telling you that they love you.  And suddenly you've lost 2 days of your life.  Somebody stop me….please…..<sob>

Man, I really hate people….

But some of them are really asking for it.

So I'm at Jo Ann's.  The third person in a 9 person line at the check-out counters.  There's naturally only one clerk working but she has called for assistance to things are looking up.  The lady at the counter has one return, one price adjustment and is conducting some type of hostile takeover/kidnap for ransom/unintelligible transaction involving her phone that has the clerk so baffled she's called for a manager.  And just to round things out, the lady ahead of me has squatted on the floor and said, "Oooohhhhh, don't come now."  WTF?!?  And in comes Little Miss Thing who walks straight up to the register to be helped.  "I dropped something off yesterday, blah blah blah….."  Me, "Excuse me, there's a line."  LMT, "Oh, you don't mind, do you?"  Me, "Well, you know what?  Since you clearly need help from the clerk, why don't you get in line with the rest of us who are waiting to be helped by the clerk."  I know your mother told you that you were the most special little girl in the world but you're not.  And if anyone is cutting in line, it's the lady having a baby.  And only because I don't want placenta on my shoes.

You know you're old when.....

Me:  "Ugh, Sam, you sound like a broken record!"

Sam:  "What's that?"

For like 3 seconds, I was really confused

I help out in the school library two days a week and when I went in yesterday there was this older gentleman there.  He was dressed rather fancy and I figured he was an author waiting to do a reading for the kids.  After the kids filed in and he went up to do his thing, I leaned over to the lady next to me and asked,"Who's he?"

She replied, "Oh, that's Charles Dickens."

Wait…What?

Well, I had thought he was an author, just not that author. "He looks really good…..for a dead guy."

(He was from a local theatre group and was reading from A Christmas Carol.)

Enrique, you asshole

Okay, so I waxed elegant about how much I love our tilers.  Well, the love is gone.  The last day of work was on Saturday, when John was at home.  Uh-oh

Enrique and I had already talked about getting new baseboards because the old ones would look beat-up next to the new tile.  We totally agreed on this.  Well, come Saturday morning, he's convinced John that the new baseboards should be painted while they're still out in the garage.  John totally agreed.  Then he walked in to the kitchen all jazzed that we should paint the baseboards right then.  And he'd even found the paint in the garage that would match the rest of the molding in the house.  "I'll stay out of your way. I promise."  See what happened there? How it went from you --> we --> me?  Clever.

Now, I totally get it.  I do.  It's easier to paint the baseboards in the garage then crawling around on the floor.  It's also a lot less messy.  And I'm sure Enrique is thinking, "you are NOT painted over top of my brand new tiles, bitch."  I get that too.  But here's the thing, I paint inside where it's warm; not outside where it's cold.  And John and I don't paint together because it would require the services of a divorce lawyer.

I dig out my painting clothes, add an extra hoodie and my heavy camping shoes. (When you paint inside, you don't need shoes.  Another bonus to not painting outside.)   My hair's sticking up and I haven't brushed my teeth.  It's awesome.

So here's me, in the garage at 9:06 painting baseboards. And it's 34 degrees out.

John, "Enrique has a drop cloth we can use."
Me, "I'll just use this plastic here."
John, "Do you need new brushes?"
Me, "What's wrong with my brushes?!"
John, "Do you need gloves?"
Me, "I can't paint wearing gloves. grumble. grumble."
John, "This is going to go so fast. It won't take anytime at all!"
Me, "grumble"
John, "It's already starting to dry."
Me, "It's starting to freeze."
John, "Oh my god, you look so cute. I'm going to take a picture!"
Me, "NO, YOU'RE NOT."

Question the Tiler Just Asked Me

One of the guys just came in and asked, "Is it alright if I vacuum up the dust?"

My answer, "Yes! yes yes yes yes!"  Anyone can vacuum my house, anytime they feel like it.  You don't even have to ask, just come right in.

Dude, "Just wanted to check because of the noise."

You know what that means, right?  It means that when they were tiling someone else's house, the homeowner complained when they vacuumed.  Now they have to double check.  Do you think this was a "No, that's my dust! Are you trying to steal my dust?" response, or a "No, I'm not paying extra for vacuuming!" response, or a "Oh, couldn't you possibly vacuum another time?  I have just a splitting headache. I must lie down." response.  I hope it was the later and there was swooning involved.  And a flouncy robe.

Home Improvement

We're having the hallway retiled this week.  Doesn't sound like much but our hallway runs through the entire house in this U shape with all these terrible angles to cut around.  John and his buddy, Jeff from work, stopped by at lunchtime to check out the progress and discuss manly things like hardie-board and joists with the tilers.  Jeff has a lot of home renovation experience under his belt but, honestly, there'd have to be a hole in the wall for John or I to realize something was up.  ("Waaaait aaa second."  "Was that there before?")  After deciding that everything was progressing as expected, they joined me in the kitchen.

John, "Man, this place is a disaster.  Those guys are working their asses off!"

Me, "Yeah, and you wanted to do the demo ourselves."

Jeff, "Nah, you definitely want those guys doing the demo.  They're the experts.  They have, like, muscles in their backs and everything."

John, "Probably take us twice as long."

Jeff, "Oh, they'll have it demo'd faster then we could make it out of the hardware store trying to figure out what tools we need."

(John just read through this and said, "You gave Jeff all the zingers."  Me, "Jeff said all the zingers.")

So Enrique and his buddy are here tiling my hallway and these guys are artists.  I don't know when we downgraded craftsman to the status of day-laborers but it's an injustice.  (It was probably after Murphy Brown was cancelled and Eldin was left without a gig.)  Enrique's been tiling for 20 years and he's younger than me.  I haven't done anything for 20 years.  Except breathe.  And I'm not very good at that.  (John, "You're a terrible breather. All wheezy and open mouthed." Me, "Exactly!")  They're not even swearing.  I know this for a fact because I may not be able to converse in Spanish but I know all the good swear words.  That's what exchange students are for, after all.

It reminds me of when we had the roof redone on our old house.  There was one guy who stood on the lawn and cut the plywood.  He cut each piece once.  And it fit.  Every. Single. Time.  It was sorcery.  It's the same with Enrique.  All the hardie-board went down with one cut and no blood.  They used the exact amount of tiles in the garage and didn't have to run back to the hardware store for more.  Twice.  Not once did they look up and say, "Well, I guess that's close enough." These guys used to have guilds and were kept on retainer by landed nobles.  Who cares if they only spoke Italian? "You must stay here and make my manor beautiful."  And, boy, are these guys making my manor beautiful!

Before:

 

After:

   

Me, "I'm going to make them a cake."
John, "They don't want cake!"
Me, "They deserve cake."

Me, "And that paint's gotta go."
John, "shit."

Best Book Quote this Week

"It's like a good dream.  Sometimes when you wake up, you wish it could have been real.  But it doesn't matter.  You have to get out of bed."

Annabel Scheme, by Robin Sloan

Update

Me, "I'm going to add some links to my blog site.  You know, like funny ones that made me laugh out loud."

John, "You should add one about sausages.  A site all about sausages.  I bet no one would get it."

Me, "Huh?"

John, "Sausages….links about sausages….."

<pause>
<pause>
<pause>
<pause>

John, "Sausage links!"

<pause>

Me, "Oh. That's funny!"

John, "God, you didn't even get it."

Thanks a lot, Costco

We don't belong to Costco but my Mom does so when she visits we make a Costco run.  Actually we make several runs but that's between me, my mom and our therapists.  Mind your own business.  During her last visit, as we were walking up and down the aisles, she noticed kitchen knives.  I'm sure you've seen the same ones; the set where each knife is a different color.   Mom, "Do you need new knives?"  Well, none of my knives are purple, or orange so I naturally answered, "Yes!"  Maybe, all this time, all I've needed as encouragement to cook more often was a set of Sesame Street knives.  This could be what our kitchen has been missing.  Quick, grab the knives before they're all gone!

So we brought home the multi-colored happiness knives.  I stored them with all the other sad, boring, black and silver knives, bringing sunshine to the entire drawer, and awaited the return of John the Engineer, fully expecting to hear his theory on Function Over Form.  Again.  But it didn't come because, damn, if those aren't great knives!  They're the best knives we've ever owned. You know how on the Food Network, they can chop-chop-chop-chop through an onion in like five seconds?  And it makes that awesome choppy sound?  I can do that now.  With my big beautiful red chopping knife, I'm all chop-chop-chop-chop-chop-chop-shit-ooowwww.  Unfortunately, really sharp knives does not a great chef make.

Every time I use these wonderful smiley knives, I cut off a small piece of myself.  Be it the yellow paring knife, the blue vegetable knife, or the strange curvy turquoise one, some small part of my body is sliced off like a little blood sacrifice to the kitchen gods.  These knives may actually be the worst form of suicide ever.  "Well, she got these amazing knives and then 3 1/2 years later she bled out. So sad."  At one point John asked, "Are you turning into a cutter?  Should I be checking your thighs and upper arms?"

This Thanksgiving was a blood bath.  After the third trip from the bathroom with band-aids, Sam told me, "Mom, you have to stop chopping."  It was like having your get-away driver turn to you, after having barely evaded the police again, and saying, "We've gotta go straight, Man. We gotta try."
And the worst part was I couldn't wash my hair because you know how a few strands of hair will slide through the cut <shiver> god, I hate that!

Anyway, this year I offer thanks for my amazing techni-colored dream knives.  I think.

Just a little off the sides, please.