Peace.

Peace on Earth, everyone.  Spread some love to one another.

Spray Paint. The Be All, End All.

I bought, what I thought at the time, were beautiful mixed greens Christmas wreaths back at the beginning of December.  I swear, not 5 minutes after I hung them, one began to dry out, so by the time this week rolled around it was brown and crispy.  I am not about to go out and buy a brand-new wreath just for another week of showiness.  The old brain cogs began spinning....what better way to fix that problem, or for that matter a myriad of problems, than to pull out the best fixer-upper ever, spray paint?

Yeah, I know it's pretty much one-dimensional in color, but at least it has the appearance of something still fairly thriving.

And I'm not exaggerating.  This is how brown it was.  See that little patch under the bow?  That was the entire wreath not an hour ago.

 

I've seen wreaths this brown hanging on peoples' houses in April.  December 18th is pushing it.  Added bonus:  the wreath is so lacquered-up with paint now, those needles are going nowhere.

So...dried-out wreath?  Hit the hardware store! Nobody will ever know the difference.  At least from a distance.  In their car.  In the dark.

Damn...the mailman just delivered a package to the door where the sad sucker is drying.  Now he knows, too.  I'm sure there was a lot of WTF-ing and "That lady is WHACK" going on in his mind.
 

A Word of Warning: Don't Let Those Labels Fool You!

I was on one of my tri-daily trips to the grocery store (no lie--that happens way too often for me) this morning when I saw something I had to buy, simply for the label attached.  The product was a bottle of dish washing liquid.  It must be considered ultra-fancy dish washing liquid because this was the label that was on it:

Now.  Don't get me wrong.  I'm sure this can be a great gift in the right context.  And by no means am I one to look a gift horse in the mouth.  But I can totally see Jay wrapping a bottle of cleaning product, putting it under the tree and calling it a day.

And so, Jay, this post is written especially for you.  Products with names such as Palmolive, Pledge, Clorox, Comet, etc. are not gifts you want to buy.  The hedge trimmers for my birthday years ago were plenty to satisfy the "HUH?" category of gifting.  Just in case you were wondering.  And while I know you are always stymied when it comes to holiday shopping, your smile is the only gift I truly need.  Yup--I went there.  Got all mushy-like.  I must be listening to too much holiday Muzak while traversing the grocery aisles.  

This Cold Heart is Filled With Sap

I should be cleaning my house in preparation for this weekend when my sister will be here for her yearly pre-Christmas visit.  Sorry, Sharon, the house has to wait.  And while I'm at it, sorry in advance for the smelly-dog-couch (not that any amount of cleaning will take away its peculiar odor).  It's just that my brain sparked a musing and I need to get down pronto.

While on a quick trip to the grocery store to pick up some cleaning supplies (namely furniture polish--why is it that I only dust my furniture with polish on the average of once a month [if that], but when I go to look for the polish it is gone?  Are Jay and the kids doing on-the-side cleaning that I am not privy to?  If they are, they're doing a good job of hiding it.  Snort.  Sometimes I crack me up.).

Anyway, at the grocery store there were those holiday fixtures, the Salvation Army volunteers, ringing their bells and playing Christmas music.  I put a dollar in their bucket (plug for a Jay Vocab Word:  The Imperfectionist: Of Buckets and Sauce, Poopies and Sweet Peas: A Language All Our Own ) on my way past and suddenly got so choked up and emotional that I couldn't even wish them a Merry Christmas back without my voice cracking and me feeling the need to inhale sharply.  I got into the store and realized I had actual tears in my eyes.  Good god.  I'm turning into a sap.

They get me every time.

Now, as Jay would tell it, I am a cold-hearted robot that has no feelings.  This is because I don't cry at the usual things.  The kind of stuff that makes him sob.  Sappy movies.  Doctor Who.  Our wedding.  I can't help it that his empathy gene is stronger than mine (though maybe I could have at least faked a couple of tears by screwing up my face a bit when we got married).  One exception:  we both cried during the ceremony at our friends' daughter's bat mitzvah this past spring, much to the surprise of many people who only know Jay and me to be the merry pranksters we normally are.  So sometimes I am able to match him in the getting-all-emotional department.

And today furthered that fact.  I do believe I am becoming a softie.  A chump.  I also cry at parades.  I can't watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade without a box of tissues beside me.  And that's not even being at it live.  Small impromptu parade-like things do it, too.  I remember the year our high school girls' soccer team won some kind of state thing, the fire trucks and police cruisers drove through town with their lights and sirens on, escorting the bus to the school.  I was sitting in a parking lot waiting for our son to finish basketball practice and saw the whole thing.  Yup, I got all messy-sobbing, simply because it was so overwhelming.  Happily, I was alone in the parking lot, having shown up too early.  That could have easily put the "UNSTABLE" stamp on my forehead with the other basketball parents for good, but c'mon, isn't that stirring?   And no matter how many times it is played from November 30th to December 25th, hearing the Boston Pops' version of Sleigh Ride makes me catch my breath and well up. 

So.....
No matter how much we think we are all tough-skinned and aloof and what-not, there is always at least one thing (and maybe eventually more!) that can hit us right smack in the heart!  

And now that I've aired those thoughts, I'm going to clean.  Here's my advice:  find that thing that makes you go all mushy and embrace it! 

The Pros of Highly Affordable Furniture, or, Safety Pins, Though Safe, Can Still Be Handy Carving Tools

I miss writing.  My days lately have been a series of 24-hour spans of what constantly feels like playing catch-up.  I think it's a combination of spending too much time fawning over our new puppy and now, the looming holidays which are putting me into a cleaning/organizing frenzy, though if you took a look around our house, you'd question the second half of that statement.  It's just all of those little annoying things gnawing at me that eventually cause me to stop in the middle of whatever task I may be doing and, say, clean out the hallway closet or as I did today, attempt to beautify the messy monstrosity my daughter calls her desk.

Every time I step foot in her room, the surfaces of her desk, bureau, nightstand, and every shelf in her bookcase feebly call out to me for help, gasping from being buried under so much crap.  I looked at her desk this morning and cringed.  The majority of it was covered in every color of nail polish conceived in the last five years by Loreal, Maybelline, Revlon, and a host of others.  And Scotch tape.  Everywhere.  Stuck to the top, the sides, underneath...I think she uses it for making lines of color on her nails or something.  Meanwhile, my nails are non-existent from picking at it for a good 45 minutes.


A portion of the collection.  I know there's more lurking in the dark corners of the girl's room.
 

So, yeah, the desk was a huge mess, and is now clean.  Let's see how long that lasts.  I blame YouTube.  There are way too many videos of new and exciting ways to do one's nails.  Come on!  Does anyone really need their nails to look like watermelon slices or candy corn?  When I was thirteen, going for bright pink polish was living on the edge.  Now the nail polish displays rival the Benjamin Moore paint chip display at the local hardware store.  Curses, you Age of Information!  

Looking at the nightmare which is a teenage girl's room (yeah, I know--teenage boys aren't any better...and why do the boys' rooms always smell like Fritos?) this morning made me start thinking of how happy I am that we did not go crazy when buying furniture for our sweet little girl who, when it was time for her "big girl bed" was the perfect image of innocence.  Who knew that a face like this:

Could, in only a couple of years, do something like this to her bed:

I like to refer to those as her Sing Sing years, where at the tender age of seven she decided it was fun to carve her name into any surface that was soft enough, kind of like a lifer in prison.  That bed didn't stand a chance.  Fortunately, we didn't have the desire (nor the deep pockets) to shop for her furniture at Ethan Allen.  And now I can simply sigh when I see her name carved into the foot of her bed, or the desk covered in nail polish, rather than go on an all-out bender like my mother did when she saw that my young 3ish-year-old self colored on my Mary-Had-a-Little-Lamb-lamp with markers.  Now that is a memory from my youth that I'll never forget.   Holy crackamoli, you'd think I had just shaved the cat (I did cut her whiskers once) or set fire to my room (that I did not do).    Not that my creative offspring did not get a good long-winded lecture.  She has yet to carve her name anywhere since.  The nail polish is another story.  I'm working on that one. 

And, yes, I know the majority of you out there reading this are saying, "Fool, why are you cleaning the girl's room in the first place?  Get her to do it herself!"  That happens, too.  But sometimes even a desk needs a full overhaul.  And now she totally owes me.  I just need to think of what.



Happiness Is a New, Warm Puppy.

I feel like I have not written for a year.  But I have a good excuse.  My time has been all-encompassed by this:

Willa.  A very sweet pup.

As well as this (actually this is very subdued compared to their regular wrestling goings-on):

 

Meet the newest addition to our crazed house, Willa.  She fits right in.  The best thing is, she's waaaaay mellow.  She loves to sleep in the lap of the human who is closest when she gets hit by the sleep bug,  has no toileting issues (unlike some other dogs we know...I'm not mentioning names, but sounds like Drip It), and can totally hold her own.  This all balances out very nicely with Lady Neuroses, also known as Pippet, i.e., the afore-unmentioned toileting-issued (among many, many other issues) dog.

When we adopted Willa (big shout out of thanks to Kelley Prichard and her organization, Adopt A Stray http://www.adoptastrayrescue.org/ for sending this sweet girl our way!!) I knew what to expect:  the energy needed to make our little one feel at home, and the time and attention we would have to spend getting her used to her new surroundings.  But even as prepared as I was, much of everything else in our daily routine dropped out the bottom, shall I say, while the doting, learning and training ensued.  Holy crap, my floors are filled with puppy detritus brought in from the yard, which has not been mowed in weeks.  {Alex--MOW THE LAWN!!!!}  Chewed bits of unrecognizable stuff can be found under every piece of furniture in the living room.  And there are no less than twenty toys of various sizes and materials splayed about the floors from one end of the house to the other.  I'm waiting for Jay to roll an ankle on one of them so we can hear a blue streak echo throughout.  And now, Pippet is reverting.  She has decided that paws up on tables and counter tops are totally OK, and anything she finds up on said surfaces is fair game.  She took a tub of port wine cheese off the counter and consumed about half of it before I got to her (and if you are wondering who eats that garbage, well, now you know:  me and Pippet).  This morning I intercepted her schnoz from engulfing an apple core just as it (the schnoz, not the apple core) was readying for the attack.  She has suddenly taken great interest in slurping out of my coffee cup, only after taking a nice, long draw from the toilet.  I'm hoping everyone is remembering to flush while in their puppy-induced haze.  Bad behavior aside, she gets along with her new housemate, so I should be glad of that and just work through the two-year-old-acting-out.

As much as we miss our old girl Scout (who is, of course, still here in our hearts), it is wonderful to see youth and energy in the house again.  Pippet finally has a sister to play with and who actually may have more energy than her at times.  They are both passed out right now, exhausted from chewing on each other for a good hour.  I am so going to take this time to enjoy the peace and quiet.  It's just like when my kids were babies.  Talk about full circle!!

And so I am going to leave this post short and sweet.  So much has happened in the last couple of weeks.  There are Shirtless Running Guy stories, my adventures with DIY at-home mole removal (steady your stomachs for that one), discoveries made during furniture moving, and a never-ending tick season.  All stories to be told another time.  Stay tuned...I'm back at it!!

Shirtless Running Guy...Done Up.

Today as I was having my routine Thursday morning cranky-fest over coffee with my friend, Sue, none other than SRG ran by.  But now that time of year is upon us that I can no longer call him Shirtless Running Guy.  And so I give you...SHIRTED RUNNING GUY:

That  je ne sais quoi is lost once the shirt appears, no? 

Sadly, the hedges prevent us from getting the full effect.  But though he wears a tank top in today's picture, the shorts remain lit-tuhl.  Very lit-tuhl.  I like the baseball cap, too.  I haven't seen him without it in a long time.  Could Shirted Running Guy be having an issue with his hair follicles atrophying?  We may never know.  Unless he ditches the hat.