TheMommyBlog

I couldn’t stand the bangs; I couldn’t stand the jumping when I tried to even them out. I swear, Logan is like a tortise—he sits stock-still until you start to clip and then his head retracts completely into his shoulders.

So. I bought one of these babies and we had ourselves a buzzfest.

Time to go get the rake!

Hi, Gang. How’s your day gone? Here’s mine:

1. woke up early this am because I have no bed and slept poorly on the sofa [on the bed are the entire contents of my walk-in closet, arduously emptied for the painters yesterday, who promised to come and go in one day and didn’t come at all];
2. got to work early (see #1) and discovered that there is a boil water order in effect for all this part of the state, including water for brushing teeth, so learned that my mouth is contaminated already;
3. discovered that there would be no food or drink all day because cafes had to close and drink machines were all raided by 8 am;
4. rebooted my computer while sipping purloined coke, and watched fearfully as my hard drive crashed;
5. was notified by computer services that my entire 2 years of computer files have gone to hell along with the hard drive, and a new one is, quick quick, on order;
6. remembered that I had not backed up computer files in a month;
7. went home early (see 2 ,3, 4, 5, above) to discover that painters had come and slapped putty all around but were not finished, which did not bode well for sleeping tonight;
8. called office of the building to demonstrate how there is no real imagining a [Mindy’s Mom] peeved;
9. moved entire contents of walk-in closet from the bed to all the living room and dining room chairs;
10. answered a call from poobah row: would I be willing to take on additional duties?
11. fixed a stiff drink with no ice;
12. listened to my husband’s instructions about how to reach him in South America in case anything untoward happens while he is there;
13. braced myself for visit to ENT tomorrow, where I will learn state of my mastoid: options range from being socked with more and more and more antibiotics or getting my skull drilled.

Cheers.

Mr. X’s reaction? “So, in other words, tragedy runs in your family, and this is not going away.”

I’ve been reading Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, and am just completely in awe of the chef trade. Now, I have worked in big restaurants, small restaurants, hotel banquet facilities and neighborhood banquet facilities. I’ve worn every waitron uniform from black pants, white shirt, and tie, to more tuxedoed looks with the folded collar and bow tie, to a too-small, red, embroidered dirndl with white apron. So I’ve seen a few kitchens and known a few chefs.

What Anthony Bourdain describes in his book (aside from all the reasons you really don’t want to know much about the professionals preparing your food, or how they may have spent the last twelve hours before their shift) about running a busy kitchen is enough to awe even the most sophisticated diner.

You may think you know a little something about what goes into preparing a dish, and therefore how long it should take to get to you, but you know nothing about what else is involved with preparing your dinner companions’ meals, let alone those of the rest of the patrons.

He describes the setups, the mise en place where each chef must have every ingredient, garnish, and utensil immediately at hand for any order and any contingency for the entire night. He describes the tight little territories each person behind occupies behind the line, and how one’s economy of movement and the ability to stay out of each other’s way while coordinating the timing of every table’s meals can make or break the night, the team, the restaurant.

He describes sharing the range with his saucier. A six-burner range seems roomy, but when you take two burners for the saucier, plus one for pasta water for blanching, the chef is left with three burners on which to turn out a couple, three hundred meals. Right off the bat one night, he receives a ticket for a table that will require nine skillets to prepare. On three burners. Now that requires grace under pressure.

Mr. X and I were talking about this book today, and I was in awe of what it must take to keep everything straight and still turn out beautifully presented meals, meals that must look and taste exactly the same as the last time a diner ordered it. He said that while working on a riverboat as part of an internship, he and one other guy turned out something like 400 meals a night. He must have been very cranky. And talk about survival skills…

...but survival in other areas can require vastly different skills. For instance, after nearly ten years of private chefing with wealthy families and individuals who supplied him with a place to live (penthouse, apartment, whatever) and glorious views from the best neighborhoods in SF, he was he was not quite prepared when changed careers, busted out on his own, and started paying for his own upkeep. Remember, this is a guy who drove a Rolls Royce to the supermarket.

So you can imagine when he quit the chef gigs and became a teacher. He said that he used to walk around the teachers’ lounge, asking, “You mean you have to pay rent every month? And buy your own toilet paper and light bulbs? How do you people live like this?”

Listen, babe, I’ll buy the freaking toilet paper, and you can just cook. How’s that? Does that seem like an even trade?

I just came from visiting my friend and her ten pound, twelve ounce newborn. I had to see this kid for myself. Also? I neeeeeded a baby fix in the worst way.

For the first half hour or so, little Marianna was eating so her mom and I talked and laughed and I was looking at those little feet and tiny bottom and was just dying to hold her. Finally, she burped and started looking around, so I cradled her in my arms and began the bouncy, swaying, figure-eight move. It was bliss.

We were in such a trance, looking at each other (her wondering where her mommy was and me remembering immobile children) when suddenly I felt a tingling sensation. In my breast. Holy Christ.

“Um, you’d better take her back now… my milk is letting down!” I pressed the inside of my wrist against my breast and stared, wide-eyed, at my friend. “Eeeeeeeeeeee!” We both squealed.

“This is wrong. So wrong.” I haven’t nursed in ages, and I swear in a few minutes I’d have been asking for a towel and the baby would have been eyeing me with sudden interest.

I know that seven years of breastfeeding would condition my body, but come on! When does it finally believe I don’t have any more babies?

Much less in the back yard after a couple of glasses of wine?

Logan has been begging me for a haircut that gave him shorter bangs, and I’d say he got one. He looks ok, I think. but Dylan… let’s just say that I got an affirmative when I asked if he had tried to give himself a haircut recently. “No. I mean yes, with the big orange scissors.”

Uh huh. I thought so. Once I cut the bangs back a little I uncovered a whole fringe of ultra-short bangs. Now he has really short, wonky bangs. In fact, he looks like he has a drunk for a stylist. *cough*

After they get out of the bath, maybe I’ll post a pic of the finished product. If nothing else, it’s karmic retribution for Dylan’s remarks earlier.

“Mom, you’re being kind of mean tonight.”

“Well, you are all hitting and kicking and choking one another, and I don’t like to have to ask you to stop more than three or four times.”

“Well, you’re being a little bit of a maniac.”

OK, Kal, here are the pictures!

I was just cleaning out my purse and found a scrap of paper with red ink scrawled all over it. After a few minutes of scrutiny I realized that it was a transcript of a conversation I had one night with my personal chef, Mr. X. Can’t remember where, can’t remember when, but I do remember laughing my head off.

“I never did understand why they call prostitution the second oldest profession—or is it the first? I always thought it was the first.”

“It’s the second.”

“Then what’s the first? Selling? Buying? Farming? [a scrawl that looks like ‘shitting’]?”

“You’re very close.”

“Hunting?”

“Somebody’s gotta cook it, baby, somebody’s gotta cook it.”

These ants are forcing me to go Retro! Garrrgghh. I just spent ninety dollars on half a dozen airtight cereal containers.

After spending the weekend in San Francisco, where we ate too much, drank too much, got sunburned, and laughed ourselves sick over internet dating horror stories, we came home to… good grief, I just Googled ant information to find the scientific name for “annoying, omnipresent, Raid-swilling, tinier-than-fuck, can’t feel them crawling on you until they’re practically in an orifice, black household ant.” Do you have ANY idea how many species of ants there are? And to what detail they are catalogued?

I remember reading that the whole of the global ant population outweighs the whole of the human population. Judging from what I found in my house yesterday, I don’t doubt that.

Mr. X was all set to replace my broken garbage disposal. We stopped at Home Depot, picked up a Disposerator, and came home to swap it out before dinner.

The stench hit us as we walked in the door. Three days of ninety-degree heat + closed house + stuff in disposal put there by well-meaning family members late last week = an express ticket to your knees on the floor.

We also noticed a trail of ants running along the cabinet, widening at the floor bookshelf where I’d moved all the cereal boxes so that my children could make their own breakfasts before camp (You DON’T WANT TO KNOW what I found and how much cereal I threw away), swerving over and hugging the wall through the living room, where it disappeared under the corner of the shag rug and reappearing at the other end of the rug near the toy bins and completing the circuit near the trash can next to the kitchen cabinets. It was like Free Quart of Oil Day at the Kentucky Speedway.

In the end, we laid down a thick trail of suppressive fire Raid all through the kitchen and living room, razed the village rolled up the 8 x 10 rug and chucked it in the garage. I have a feeling that the kids have spilled one too many juice boxes in there to make it entirely possible to repel ants with any success. If the kids weren’t coming home until Monday afternoon, there was no reason to skimp on the poison. We were going for all-out eradication.

So you can imagine how my stomach turned over when my ex called at eight this morning to see if he could drop Daphne with me instead of taking her to school. “She misses you. [pause] Oh, do you have company?” Arrrggghh.

Plus? The exterminators with whom I have a one year contract for on-call service say that they can’t send anyone until Wednesday to check the traps in the attic. “But I’ve heard traps snapping and it’s HOT up there. So I guess if they don’t mind the overheated, bloated bodies marinating up there for the last week, by all means, put me down for Wednesday.”

[Glances at watch] Time to go get the boys! But I have a clean, pest-free house!

For now.

I’m going to blogher! I’m going to blogher!

Oh, yeah, I’ll be slugging ‘em back with the creme de la creme of the blogging world (those that have $99 and can get to Santa Clara on July 30) and living large wit da grrls. I might even propose to Jenny of Three Kid Circus if I get her drunk enough. I know she’s rooming with Jenn the Coffee Diva, but maybe she won’t mind the company. Oh, wait. Mr. X. will be there.

As luck would have it, Jenny can’t go to Roaring Camp’s sold-out Day Out with Thomas and has offered me her five tickets. Dylan, who is turning five the very next day, is OBSESSED with Thomas. Hello? Manna from heaven? I just hope I’m not too hung over to be a good birthday mommy. If memory serves, the train cars are open-air, so I can just politely urp over the side if need be. The kids are learning about ecology and compost anyway, so can masquerade as Educational Mommy.

Anyway, back to BlogHer. Did I say EEEEEEEEEE? And that Mr. X is coming? He’ll be wearing a name tag with that moniker, so don’t go trying to pry. I will reveal his identity in my book…

her: [person we both know] won’t even look at me anymore
me: ah, but he won’t get into heaven
her: hmmmmm are we going to heaven?
her: I always figured we’d be partying in hell =)
me: we will but hell by definition means he’ll be at the same table
her: how are the kids doing this summer?
me: sorry had to take Dylan’s hands out of the DVD slot
me: the boys are at Camp Galileo
me: and Daphne is at summer school
me: so I can look for work
me: and write
her: Camp Galileo…sciencey camp?
me: art and science
me: Logan is in pig heaven
her: oh I’m jealous
me: the guy was all we can’t get Logan to shut up in science
me: I said I almost felt sorry for them, signing him up
her: well he is an expert!
her: on almost everything!
me: and the art? omg
me: we were reading a bedtime story about a mouse visiting the art museum
me: and her favorite was the Degas dancing girl
me: and I said remember when you guys drew her?
me: and then the mouse saw Pollack and didn’t get it
me: and Logan said
me: get this
her: *waiting with bated breath*
me: well there are no objects in his art—he paints what he’s feeling, so you really shouldn’t look for THINGS
her: WOW!
her: I was in college when I learned that crap!
me: I bet that’s verbatim from camp
me: they studied Pollack this week
her: teeheehee wow kids these days
me: no shit
her: well maybe in a year or so you can have him watch the ed harris movie

I am me and me am I,
I never promised apple pie.

I can.

My brain has liquified, leaked down my spine, and is pooling in my thighs; otherwise I’d have something witty and compelling to say. It has been 95 degrees here and I am pouring sweat and my head is compacted with the humidity and loud children.

Sure they were in camp all day, but at least they got to play water ball and cool off. I was in front of this computer, learning how to write a book proposal and getting tag-teamed by my mom and Mr. X. They don’t even know they are doing it, but both have been peppering me with wake-up calls and gentle, prodding suggestions on how to get control of my life. I feel like getting Mr. X to call Mom and back me up when I say that I have cleaned up all the laundry and other clutter in the house just so she’ll believe me.

I have to stop writing about the ants or she’ll send CPS out. I just cannot believe the battle. The intensive spraying and destruction of the colonies has driven them indoors and onto anything they can scavenge. Today I found them eating a dead beetle that flew in last night. So it doesn’t even matter if my floors are clean; now I have to worry about what’s getting in the doors my kids are always leaving open.

It’s just now beginning to cool down, and I’d go sprawl in the grass if it weren’t for the knowledge of the yard having been sprayed this week, and the small matter of my grass allergy. I know I’ve always said that I don’t have allergies, but if I lay down in the grass for a while, I get up with itchy, red limbs. The cut grass? Me no likey.

If I don’t get caught up in household repair stuff tomorrow morning, I’ll head up to SF for a night or two while the kids are with their dad and uncle, who is visiting from Colorado. I invited them all to dinner tonight, but they are having a guys night out since they’ll have the kids all weekend. It feels strange not to be going out too. I’m no longer one of the guys, which is kind of sad.

Can someone please explain something to me? (Mr. X, you will roll your eyes so hard you might fall over, so sit down, please.) Why is it that men who don’t express an interest in me beyond fun dates with no strings attached or phone buddies or whatever, still keep in touch?

There is one friend I dated a bit last year who doesn’t want kids or marriage, yet loves to go out to dinner and concerts and get wild. We’ve agreed that we don’t want the same things, so we just check in on one another periodically to see what the happiness level is. We’re genuinely interested in one another’s well being, but know that there will be nothing beyond platonic interaction because of the choices we’ve made.

Another friend decided at the outset that he didn’t want to date me, but we’ve kept in touch and have a very close friendship. Now that we’ve become comfortable with each other over the past year, he’s into going off and doing things together, but it’s a little late now that Mr. X is in my life. Which is really too bad, since it was something I suggested last year when we were both so sick of the opposite sex that we might have had a great time actually doing things on the road.

Yet another friend is someone I met online through a matchmaking service (have I mentioned that that is how I met Mr. X? I totally recommend eHarmony.com. They run a crack operation and really try to match people well.). In our first email exchange we simultaneously declared ourselves off the market and totally averse to the dating scene. which was really funny. I said I’d never interview him as a suitor or make a pass if he’d promise the same and that way we could go to dinner and movies and not have to say, “Just one” all the time. We’ve still never met, but enjoy talking. He had a hot date the other night so I’m itching to hear how it went. He is very happy for me and impressed that I found someone who fits me so well. It renewed his interest in looking for someone himself. (Have I mentioned that he is also a chef? Do I have a type or what?)

I have explained over and over that these are strictly platonic friendships. but there is an understandable tension surrounding them. At least I am open about it and talk about them from time to time to show that I am comfortable with Mr. X knowing when and with whom I’m in contact. I’ve always had more guy friends than girlfriends; I don’t know what else to say except it’s where I seem to be most comfortable. I’ve always been one of the guys. Unfortunately, they don’t always like me having all the others around at the same time. Mr. X, though, is understanding and sweet and has nothing to worry about.

I was industrious today—did three loads of laundry and put at least seven away (the other four were on the chair in my bedroom)—and was feeling very accomplished I stepped into the shower. I got all clean and shiny and slathered myself in my delicious Bare Essentials Optimism cream lotion. Mmmmm.

As I was running around getting dressed and picking up towels, I glanced down and nearly jumped out of my skin. Ants were crawling up my fucking leg. Covered. Ankle. To knee. They apparently loooove the orangey goodness of Bare Essentials Optimism cream lotion.

What the hell were they doing in the kids’ bathroom?? Don’t answer that. I suspect it has something to do with the rainbow sherbet I cleaned off the toilet seat last night. *sigh*

At least the Pied Piper guy is here to see about the rats. I showed him the corner above my desk where they’re nesting, so he’s up there now. He really doesn’t sound all that different than the mice. Except for the crunching of snail shells, that is.

GAH I keep feeling phantom ants crawling on my shoulders and neck! *runs, scratching, from the room*

I was leaving a comment on the previous post, but as it got longer I decided it was important enough to have a space of its own:

Hold on!

While I agree with both Zeno and Ozarkyn, I do NOT believe I have won the right to trash my ex, and in fact I don’t believe I have done that.

If you read carefully, you’ll notice that I have described events and words, and have not used judgmental descriptors. I do not use pejorative terms or assess his character. I tell the story and any conclusions you draw are your own, and while I appreciate the support, I cringe a little when people use pejorative terms because a) I didn’t go there, and b) it is usually way past where I would go.

I try to treat everyone with respect by not trashing ANYONE. However, I will relate events and I try to stay true to the facts as well as any involved person can.

I have made a promise to myself and others that this will not be a forum for revenge or slander or reckless ranting. (Well, maybe a little, but only on other topics). I take full responsibility for anything I write and am comfortable with all my friends and family reading my words. Comments are the opinions and thoughts of other people and though I may cringe from time to time, I believe everyone is intelligent enough to realize that I do not write those comments.

And now? I must get out of these boxers and into some kind of try-not-to-look-unwashed-and-bedraggled Mommy costume for the camp drop-off.

I was not thinking clearly last night: I threatened to keep everyone home from camp as punishment for running away. Now I’m stuck with them thinking they can misbehave to get to stay home, or somehow implying that going to camp is punishment. Arrrggghh.

So I told them we all had to get out of bed and get cracking this morning. “You can’t stay home because I have to work on my book. I want to see that thing in a bookstore.”

“Mom, who would put a thousand-page book in a bookstore?” Logan asked. “That would be more like a big, huge library.”

P.S. Mr. X drove down here at ten last night with a flashlight and found my glasses two blocks away in the pitch dark. We don’t have streetlights. But I have my glasses again. Thank you, baby.