Home baked weirdness

My mil came over to take my son somewhere. While she was in another room, my husband said, "I have something from my mom, she gave it to me the other day, I forgot to give it to  you and she just reminded me". In the seconds he was rifling through his backpack for it, I was imagining what treasure it might be. A coupon for $.50 off some pasta I don't use? Some new clothespins? An old tupperware container? Hmmmm. Imagine my delight when he pulled out a snack size ziploc baggie with my name on it. Inside the bag was an end cap from an old bead, and a jump ring. On the baggie it said "For BonBon, found in cookies".

Say what? Apparently, these tiny shards of metal were found in the peppermint meltaways that I made at Christmas. The peppermint meltaways, that my mil enjoyed profusely and told me so each and every time she spoke to me. The meltaways that were finished a few weeks ago. The meltaways that apparently had microscopic pieces of old jewelry baked right into them.

There is just so much wrong with this.

First of all, why didn't she tell me? Why did she send a little baggie with this crap home with my husband? And why did she need to know whether or not he gave it to me? Why did she feel the need to remind him of that? Why did she tell me ten times how much she enjoyed those cookies without once mentioning they had metal baked into them????? Why??????Why did she feel the need to rinse them off, dry them and put them in a ziploc bag?

Second of all, I have been sitting here all freaking day trying to imagine how those could have gotten into anything I made? It was a simple batter, with like three things in it. I used my kitchen aid mixer. There was no way I had jewelry findings in my kitchen. The batter was fluffy and white. I would have seen dirty brass jewelry findings. I am completely flummoxed. I am also incredibly sceptical that those were in my cookies.

I told my husband that this was messed up. And indicative of the crazy that his mother dishes my way. Just a small example of what I am burdened with. I told him that she is messed up in the head. His response is; 'What do you want me to do, I am caught in the middle?' and my response is, 'No you are not, you are on my side'.

I am thinking of running with this though. What other bizarre items can I bake into a cookie?


I had another idea. I will make my mil an ugly necklace with the pieces she returned to me. That will be her birthday present.

To the right, to the right, everything you own in a box to the right...

I have an etsy store! Do I get to say I have a job now? I hired myself. I told myself, "self, welcome to a great team". I told myself back, "thank you for giving me a chance.".

Now, stop reading and go buy yourself a bracelet.

I have a problem

You would think after 45 plus years on this planet, I would be more evolved as a person. I am disappointed in myself. I spend my life in one of two states. I am either on a diet, or eating like I am going to the electric chair. I cannot seem to find a balance. Sometimes I believe myself to be experiencing balance, but it's actually just me being on a diet.
I went back to weight watchers today, or as I like to call it, wsquared. The last time I was there was sometime before Thanksgiving, to try and reign myself in from a fall binge. I was doing really well there for a while, but I fell off the wagon. Food is my drug. I am almost certain that if I had gastric bypass surgery I would be one of those people who turn to some other compulsion. I would be skinny, but I'd be a slot machine fiend, or even worse, a crack head. I am obsessed with Dr.Drew. I would sit and watch Celebrity Rehab and I could totally see myself mingling with the misfits on that show. I would be Bai Ling, on the roof in a silver bathrobe with a box of cheez its. I would be cranky when my food was taken away and lash out at Shelly. She would tell me that there was nothing I could say to her that she hadn't been through. Dr.Drew would  council me and uncover some deep rooted issues behind my compulsive eating and he would totally understand and sympathize with my troubles. He would congratulate me for taking the first step in admitting I have a problem..... He would gently and calmly talk me off of the roof and I would somberly and with complete submission, hand over the cheez its and admit I need more help......

But I have no Dr.Drew and I must learn how to live with food. Honestly, part of the problem is I don't want to give up my food. I like it. But I need to learn how to give up the crazy eating after everyone goes to sleep. Rifling through the closets eating random snack food just because you can, is not really a good habit to get into. It leads to fat. It leads to self loathing. Life is too short to waste hating on yourself.

I gained 9 lbs since Thanksgiving. You know what, I am almost amazed it wasn't more. I am back at the gym. I will 'work the program'. I think of wsquared as my 12 step program. I am on the points, or as I like to call them, 'pernts'. My 9 pound expansion has actually earned me another point in my daily allowance. Damn you extra point. I hate you and I love you at the same time.

I don't want to feel like this. I fear that the only time I will ever be skinny is if I should be so unfortunate as to have some dreadful disease. Then I won't be able to enjoy it. I'm not even sure skinny is a goal to be toyed with at this point. How about 'not fat'. Yeah, that  is a good goal. I would like to step on the wii fit one day and not hear the little Japanese voice tell me I am 'o beese' and watch my little mii hang her head in shame.

I have come too far, and beat myself up way too much to feel like this at this point in my life. I won't let my inner Bai Ling and her cheez it's sabotage me this time.

I Hate New Years Eve.

I always have. As a little girl, I didn't really know why other than the fact that this was the part of the holiday that marked the end. The end of the delicious anticipation of the Christmas season. The end of sugar plum dreams, the end of Christmas lists and endless presents and piles of wrapping paper. It meant back to school. The fun is over.
Now it just marks another year, plodding closer towards our demise. How do we celebrate it? By drinking and watching a large ball drop. By watching newsclips of all the famous people who have bit the dust. By listening to that horribly depressing 'auld lang syne' song. By trying to  come up with a list on how we can improve our failed existence. A list that is usually the same every stinking year, whose embers fizzle into darkness somewhere around march.

Ugh. Just project me to the middle of January. By that point I have accepted my fate.



Tonight I will be eating pad thai. I will drink my favorite wine. I will watch hot tub time machine. I will try not to turn on any ball dropping festivities. I will be incredibly thankful for the blessings in my life. I will shush the bad thoughts out of my head as best I can.

Happy New Years to all my readers, you know, the spam bots in Russia. Happy New Years you crazy spambot cats!

Swag Whore

I got my hair did last week. To be more accurate, I spent an insane amount of money on my hair and sat home and ate cheez its and played words with friends. But I looked awesome doing it.
I have been blessed with naturally curly hair. In other words, I have a huge mess of thick unruly hair. Frizzle frazzle. I have always wanted long luxurious hairs but I was not born with it. My mom used to keep my hair short and manageable. It was an unfortunate hairdo for me, and I believe it shaped me as a person. Even with pierced ears, I made an adorable angelic boy. By the time I was a teenager, I absolutely refused to get a haircut. I was tired of short hair. I did not realize though, that the rats nest I was cultivating was not much better. Somehow, they did not have styling products back in the day. At least, I was not aware of them.
Now that I am old, I have come to terms with my hair. I have embraced my hair and thanks to hair gel, I have learned how to make it look OK.
A few months ago, I had to go to a dinner for my husband's job. I wanted to look good. I shopped for weeks for a nice dress, and I stuffed my big dogs into high heel leopard pumps. I got my hair blown out. Straight. When I say straight, I mean long, smooth silky, orderly sleek straight beautiful hair. I was in heaven. I spent hours looking at myself, running my hands through my smooth wig like hair. I was in love with myself. That was an extremely foreign feeling. This thinking you look good, people really feel like that? I felt like a movie star. I felt like someone else. Someone confident, someone who had long smooth hair. It was like all those years of being the insecure white girl with a fro, were wiped away with a flat iron.
It was a nightmare keeping it that way. Just thinking about steam made it kink up. I managed to keep it straight for a few days with the help of a shower cap. I felt like Cinderella, and the clock was ticking. One false move and I was turning back into a frizzball pumpkin. The happiness lasted a few days. I decided that had they had the ability to do this to my hair while I was in high school, my life might have turned out extremely differently. I think I might have been a cheerleader. Or a thespian. Or someone more outgoing and confident. It kind of made me a little sad, but then again, I am really happy with the way things turned out, so maybe I should stop day dreaming and show some gratitude towards my ringlets. I will admit that it made me sad to wash it after a few days. I was back to my ordinary life.

Last Friday, I decided to treat myself and do it again. I had my hair colored, so I figured since I was already at the salon, I might as well indulge. Somehow, the high wasn't as powerful this go around. Don't get me wrong, it was still nice. I still spent an inordinate amount of time staring at myself in the mirror. It was still silky. I was watching the woman use the flat iron and I thought to myself, if I could get my hands on one of those things, I could feel like a movie star whenever I wanted. I could also fry the crap out of my hair. I decided I needed a flat iron.
I have been lagging on my swag bucking. I keep seeing friends on facebook brag about scoring 8 swag bucks and I think that it's a painful way to earn some amazon money. However, it dawned on me that I could get a flat iron on amazon. A guilt free flat iron. So, now I am back to doing random Internet searches on any weird thought that pops into my head. I am back watching videos on Katie Perry's barely there bikini top over and over again. I am a swag whore. I will sell my soul for straight hair.

The Missing Lynx.

I am seriously concerned about my sanity lately. I seem to do things and yet I have absolutely no memory whatsoever of doing them. It's kind of frightening.

I have been working hard at staying positive this December. I haven't been letting the pressure of the season get to me, or so I thought. Apparently it has been getting to me. I thought I was organized. I thought I was really getting the hang of this 'laid back' business. My mind won't let me be laid back.

I had a great system for my gifts this year. I would buy something, and then bring it up to my sewing room where it would stay till I was ready to wrap. That sounds great, except my sewing room looks like a bomb went off in it, and really calling it a room is kind of exaggerating. It's a more of a closet. A closet with a lot of crap all over the place. So on top of the existing crap, I threw in 26 random amazon boxes, 5 big bags of toys r us crap and lots of stuffed animals. This system has worked for me in the past, but this year it has failed me in a big ass way.

The other night, I took some NyQuil and then decided to wrap my presents. It was 11:00 at night, and I finally gathered the enthusiasm to get started on this crap. I guess it's not a good idea to wrap while under the influence of the quil. I have no memory of anything that I wrapped. Apparently I took things out of the amazon boxes and wrapped them. My brain did not register this action because I tore my already ransacked room apart looking for the box set of the bbc Life series narrated by Sir David Attenborough (not the Oprah version) that my husband insisted we get for my son. While I was looking for that, I realized I hadn't seen the webkinz lynx that I drove around one entire day looking for. I was so excited when I found it in a random card shop by the supermarket. Where was the Lynx? So I started tearing through even more crap. Now I was looking for two missing items.  I gave up after a little bit because honestly, it just hurt my brain to be in that room. I figured I would walk in the next day and the shit would miraculously be laying there waiting for me on the pile of mortgage statements that I was supposed to file three months ago.

Imagine my disappointment the next day when I walked in there and there was no cute little lynx sitting on top of my dvd box set. I had planned to spend the entire day cleaning up that fiasco, but I got sidetracked by my son's school party, a trip to the libarary, then the supermarket and then a search for a new pair of crocs for my son to get from santa. By the time I got up to the mess, I had less than a half an hour before my son's bus pulled up. I started pulling crap out of the bags furiously, digging through piles of papers and books and shoving fabric into bins moving stuff off the floor. I also started to freak out. I started to think that perhaps there was some kind of entity in my home playing a trick on me. I started to lose my shit. Losing your shit when you are alone is not fun. I needed to share this, so I called my husband who at this point, was happily embarked on his commute home.
My husband answered his phone to discover his wife had lost her mind. I was ranting and raving about how the lynx and the DVD were gone. They had evaporated into thin air. I was screaming my head off.  It was totally hard to take me seriously. I sounded ridiculous. I knew I was being ridiculous, yet I could not stop. My husband was laughing at my insanity. He told me to relax and he would take a look. I told him at this point, I didn't even want to find the damn things, I hated them and the thought of them made me sick.

It seems like this lack of being conscious about what I am doing is really taking it's toll on me. I really need to be more zen about things. Not paying attention to what you are doing is very dangerous, and stupid. Today in a span of exactly three seconds, I lost a 20 dollar bill. It was like I took it out of my wallet and put it on the counter, but someone else took it off the counter and stuffed it in a random pocket in my bag. Why did I do that? Why would I do that? I had to sit on the couch at the hair salon and try not to look like a maniac while I systematically emptied every last piece of crap out of my bag.
Tonight, while we were making dinner, my husband took out a piece of Swiss cheese from the fridge. He put it down somewhere and we could not find it. We could not find a piece of cheese in a kitchen the size of a small bathroom. We searched high and low for a good five minutes, like two assholes, for a piece of Swiss cheese. We finally found it. But it's scary. It truly is.

Tonight, after we found the cheese, my husband decided he was going up to find the missing items. I told him good luck, but quite honestly, those things were dead to me. I needed to forget about them if I was going to get through the next few days. He came down over an hour later laughing that he had found them. Apparently, I had wrapped the dvd set. Again, no recollection of that ever happening. The lynx, was stuffed in between random piles of fabric scraps. I guarantee I must have stuffed in there as I was looking for it. I started laughing. Not that happy ha ha laugh, but that laugh you laugh when you might cry, but you are so completely shot that you don't even have the ability to make that happen.

Yeah, bring on Christmas now. I am ready.

My Husband is Trying to Kill Me.

I am not feeling well. It started with a scratchy throat and has now progressed to a completely plugged up and stuffed nose. I am cranky, I am not in the mood. Does it matter? No, of course not. I am plagued with the mom cold. The mom cold stops for no one. The mom cold is the polar opposite of the man cold in which the earth just about stops spinning on it's axis.
I don't expect much in the way of help from my husband or my son when I am sick. But that doesn't mean I am happy about it. My husband was aware of my mood. When he got home from work I was doing homework with my son at the table. On a good day that is not the most of pleasant of experiences. I see him poking around his pile of crap on the hutch. He has an idea. Yes, an idea. He is going to practice his recorder.
Yes, you heard me. He is a man who has held on to his recorder from 3rd grade. Well, his mother held on to it for him and brought it on over to us when she found out my son was taking the recorder as part of his music education. She thought that would be a swell idea.
So my husband decides to bust that crap out while I am trying to do reading with my son. My son who has little or no attention span. He said he was going to practice quietly. Really? Quietly? Really?
I convinced him to wait until we were done with homework and I told him that he should practice 'Jingle Bells' with the boy. He came home with the sheet music for it last week, I kind of think that was a hint that he needed to practice. Quite honestly, the recorder is about as last on the list for me as a thing can possibly be. We have enough on our plate. The only reason I even entertained the thought is that my son's music teacher has somehow instilled the fear of God in my son and he is so incredibly stressed about doing well on his stupid ass recorder test. He told me he stinks at the recorder and he is worried that everyone else is better at it than him. I told him that everyone stinks at the recorder. He did not believe me.
So my husband makes a feeble attempt to work with the boy. He becomes obsessed with the sheet music the teacher sent home for Jingle Bells. I wrote the notes on top of it, so that my son could play it easier. My husband must have played the song 20 times before he started yelling that it was wrong. The teacher put the wrong note in the 'one horse open sleigh' line. It seems 'sleigh' was the wrong note. According to my husband.
By this point, my son was on the computer playing plants vs. zombies. I don't think he practiced at all. My husband sat some more and played it another 10 or 70 times prompting my son to utter some encouraging words. "Sounds good, Dad" he said.
I then proceeded to clean up the dinner dishes, remove a bowl of stuck on ice cream from the coffee table (my husband's), wash up that bowl, give my son a bath, clean up the bathroom, enforce the flossing and brushing of teeth, while my husband asked me to make him a sandwich for tomorrow and went up to bed because he was exhausted. Oh really? Then I took my son up to bed, read our books said our goodnights. I just popped my nyquil and I figure I should be experiencing the lovely numbing effects shortly. Which is a good thing, because I am strongly fighting the urge to take that recorder upstairs and play a lovely rendition of Jingle Bells about a half an inch away from my husbands ears.