Y’all, I signed up to be a BeautiControl consultant. Say what???

Was I suffering from a bout of insanity? Probably. It was kind of an investment. I didn’t do it as a moneymaking opportunity (as someone who works in the corporate office of a network marketing company, I get enough of that on a daily basis). I don’t want to be that friend/relative.

I signed up just so I could get the discount. And since I’m not planning to make money with it, I don’t have a problem passing my discount on to anyone around me so my friends and family are actually excited that I’ve signed up. It probably helps that they don’t have to be afraid that I’m going to ask them to host parties every week.

***

I had an appointment this morning for a slimming body wrap. I’ve always wanted one of those and have never been able to afford one – but a gift certificate to a local spa actually made the body wrap an option.

So I showed up this morning for my appointment and was told the body wrap lady wasn’t in today and since my appointment was at the same time they opened for the day, they weren’t able to call me beforehand to let me know.

I don’t know why, but that really irritated me. I don’t have any idea what thought they should have done about it. It was just frustrating to show up and then have to turn around and go back home.

***

After the cops left last night (/early this morning) INWOCA finally managed to control his malfunctioning alarm. We were all too pleased to witness this final golden silence, but after listening to repetitions of 6 different alarm tones approximately 40 times over almost an hour, we were pretty much awake.

Fortunately, I was able to go back to sleep relatively soon, only to be awoken again by a screaming Kaelin at 3am at which point I made my recent habit of migrating into her room for the remainder of the night. I noticed at that point that J had still not returned to bed after being wakened by Idiot Neighbor. An improvement, really, since until last night she had been waking up at 2am. But still.

I don’t handle sleep deprivation too well. One thing J has learned about me over the last 5+ years is UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES IS IT APPROPRIATE TO DISTURB MY SLEEP. A sleepless night leaves me grumpy, angry, depressed, grumpy, mean and grumpy for the entire next day. Fortunately for everyone around me, Kaelin decided to lounge in bed with me from 7-9am this morning and we were both able to get some sleep. By “both” I mean me and Kaelin – J was never able to catch up on his sleep due to an extremely busy workload today. I don’t know how he does that.

***

Kaelin’s vocabulary is increasing every day. I asked her to say Grandmommy the other day and she said it. Once. Then it became “Gummy.” And then it became “Dummy.” We stopped there.

Current words now include (variations of) Mama, Daddo (her word for J), Jon, Iris, Papa, Grandpa, cheetah, puppy, kitty, diaper, butt, bee-bo (belly button), all done, baby, ball, bee, bupp (passifier – don’t ask), butterfly (sort of), hot, moo, duck, up, hi, bye-bye, please, eye, kiss, touch, button, banana, brush, blue, two and uh-oh.

There are probably more, but they’re not coming to mind right now. It’s harder than it looks to actually sit down and list out all the words your child says on a daily basis.

And then think better of it and opt for calling the police.

Remember the idiot whose car horn goes off every morning?   He’s got a New! Alarm! now – one of those fancy zango ones that does 6 different screams and chirping patterns in repetition.

And it’s malfunctioning.

It’s gone off 34 35 36 times in the last half hour.   It’s hard enough to get Kaelin to sleep these days and it’s a complete miracle she hasn’t woken up yet but if she does I swear I’m going over there with a sledge hammer.

And the fool has either left his car in the street while he’s not home or he’s too much of an ass to do anything about it.

The cops are here now and I’d better see that sucker towed away.

Nope.   The car owner is outside now.   After half an hour of listening to his car scream, it takes the cops showing up to get him to do anything about it???

And now the cops are gone and the alarm is still malfunctioning.

Bastards.

I’ve read about it happening to other families. I’ve heard the horror stories, the agony.

My heart went out to those who suffered and yet… there was always that part of me that thought it would never happen to me. Not to my family. This kind of tragedy was just too removed to ever affect me personally. I suppose that feeling of invincibility is natural.

It comes on suddenly and without warning, tearing into the unity and routine of peaceful family life. In an instant, the relationship within the core family unit is disrupted as the one you care so much about transforms into someone you hardly know. Weeks, months go by without relief, without respite.

The constant pain to your loved one is torturous to you both and seems especially to rear its ugly head at night. In the most heart wrenching of ironies, your loved one stubbornly refuses the very medicinal treatments that could alleviate the pain (even if only for a short time) as though you were trying to offer pure arsenic. As sleep evades you night after night, the frustration rips at the very fibers of your being and you find yourself mourning for the way things were.

The life you previously knew and had under control has been ripped from beneath your feet like a slippery rug. What once was is no more and you are now sprawled on the floor, desperately trying to grasp to any small fibers that may remain of the life you once took for granted. But it is no use. What is done is done and there is no hope but to wait out the storm that seems to ravage your dwelling for eternity.

The monster has a name, which will evermore send shivers down my spine: Molars.

Kaelin has two that have broken through, and several more on the way. My predictable, cooperative child has completely forsaken her amiability when it comes to sleeping. She is unable to sleep unless I am in the room. And I don’t mean go to sleep (though that is the case as well). She is unable to stay asleep. Even if she’s snoring, she wakes up the second my presence is no longer in the room, and starts screaming hysterically. This vicious cycle starts at about 11:30pm and continues until morning.

As you can imagine, our household hasn’t exactly been overdosed with sleep as of late so, um, I make no guarantees about the coherence of this and/or future posts.

Just sayin’.

I fixed the feed links in my sidebar.   Apparently the WordPress php I was using wasn’t actually working.   So they should be active now.   I have yet to figure out how to successfully get a feed for the Private/Protected posts, since they don’t appear to be showing up at all in my feed reader.   Are any of you guys getting any kind of indication when a protected post has been published?

I use AN Hosting and my server goes down EVERY. DAY.   It’s only for a few minutes at a time, but it’s still really frustrating, especially when I’ve just written a post or an email and click “Submit” or “Send” and get an error message.

So I’m thinking of switching hosts – any recommendations?

Also, today is my dad’s birthday and I have NO. IDEA. what to get him.   I haven’t been procrastinating – I just can’t think of anything.   He is so hard to buy for.   He’d be appreciative and gracious even if I gave him a cardboard box full of lint because that’s how he is, but I want to give him something thoughtful that shows I specifically picked it out for him.

He has money, so he can buy himself whatever he wants, and usually does.   Which means gift certificates are pretty meaningless.   I can’t get him something useful because he can afford to buy himself the bigger better model that he would like more anyway.

He likes to read and watch movies, but we stocked him up on books and DVDs for Christmas.

He doesn’t really have any hobbies other than work…and the Dallas Cowboys I suppose.   But he’s got all the desk accessories he could ever need, and I can’t get him a T-shirt or a jersey or anything because he’s not casual enough to wear that kind of thing.

So when it comes down to it, we’re usually left with trying to come up with the perfect creative “you would never think of this” random gift – like one year we got him a set of pool balls that were painted in the colors/logos of his 2 favorite baseball teams.

But there’s only so many of those kind of gifts.   This year…I’ve got nuthin.

And I’ve got approximately 5 hours to turn “nuthin” into “sumthin.”   Yikes…

Lately there have been far too many USO’s laying around our house.

Little black flecks of what seems like …hard plastic? Somewhat reminiscent of when the dog chews something up…except that I can’t, for the life of me, find what it was that has been destroyed, and all the flecks are the same tiny size (not characteristic of a chew-up).   See, he never actually eats anything he chews up, so we always find it on the floor in 5 kazillion pieces, but with a large chunk of it still intact.

And in addition to being scattered about the living room floor, the black flecks are in rooms where the dog hasn’t been.

Apparently, The Aliens haven’t been cleaning their shoes before they traipse through our house.

And then there’s the paint flecks. Kaelin keeps bringing me these little pieces of what I can only describe as dried iridescent purple nail polish. No idea where she’s getting them from. Little random bits that seem to have been torn off something I don’t recognize in the slightest. I don’t even own nail polish. When they get wet, they get kind of sticky and really pliable.

Obviously the exterior of The Aliens’ space craft needs a new paint job.

So I vacuumed the living room to get rid of all the mysterious “flecks.” I’ve been wanting new carpet for a while now because the carpet that we have was put in when the house was built and it’s pretty mashed down and dirty and has several stained spots. So after I vacuumed, I looked at my floor. And I just couldn’t take it anymore.

I pulled out “The Beast,” our massive clunky carpet shampooer, and went to work. I cleared all the furniture, shampooed and rinsed. 3 hours and 15 gallons of nasty, brown water later, I had a much nicer looking floor that was no longer mashed down (at least, not nearly as much) and a really tired arm. That thing is hella-heavy and there is nothing built into it to assist you in dragging it back and forth across the carpet.

Afterward, the carpet was quite wet. And try as I might, I could not get it into Kaelin’s head that it was not a good idea to go running across the wet carpet and onto the oh-so-slippery tile, particularly by the fireplace which for some reason was THE PLACE TO BE during that timeframe.

Unfortunately, our living room is constructed in such a way that it simply isn’t possible to blockade her out of it. As a result, she took many, many spills and I eventually had to strap her into her highchair for her own safety. She was none to please about the former, nor the latter.

She hates falling – even if it doesn’t hurt her, it makes her angry to have her groove interrupted so rudely. Her legs go out from under her in two different directions and when she lands on her butt she looks at me like Did you do that? Because I had everything under control. What just happened???

“It’s The Aliens, honey.”

We had scheduled a furniture assembly company to come by today and (10 points to anyone who guesses this) assemble some furniture.   But the desk/hutch/bookcase were in boxes at my parents’ house where they have been since before Christmas.

So J called up Jon and they collected the really big boxes of disassembled furniture and brought them to our house.

And put them in the living room.

I asked J why he and Jon weren’t bringing the boxes upstairs to the office, where the assembled furniture would go.   He replied that he would let the assembly guys do that.

I asked him if he was sure that assembly companies moved furniture – after all, they were assemblers, not furniture delivery men.   He said something about it would be silly for them not to move it where it was supposed to go, in order to assemble it, and that they weren’t going to show up and then leave because it wasn’t in the right place.

Again, I asked him if he was sure about this, and if they would charge us extra for having to move it.   He assured me that I had nothing to worry about and that it would be the assembly company’s responsibility to get the boxes upstairs.

By now, you’ve probably guessed where this story is going.

A short while later, the assembly crew guy showed up.   He took one look at the boxes and informed J that he was not moving any boxes, especially up stairs.

So guess who gets pulled off her butt in the middle of a work-related project to move three 200-pound boxes up a flight of stairs.

Just to be repetitively clear on something…Those things were HEAVY.   I couldn’t even lift my end of one of them.   And all the while, Mr. Assembly Man is standing there watching me break my back with this look of hurry up, I didn’t drive over here to wait.

Not that he would have been much help.   The guy looked like an emaciated version of ZZ Top and seemed to have enough difficulty getting his own bag of tools up the stairs.

But still.

Afterward, he didn’t even clean up after himself.   It’s one thing to avoid carrying heavy boxes up the stairs for liability.   It’s quite another to charge $200 to put a few screws in some furniture and then leave all the empty boxes and debris all over the place.

or “Why I’m the Biggest Dork Alive Vol. #17″

I was my own Southwest Airlines commercial tonight.

I was invited to a “Spa Party,” which I was looking forward to as it fits nicely with my self-indulgence motif. The host’s house is approximately 45 minutes away, so I made sure to leave in plenty of time to get there by 7pm, allowing for “lost time,” and made it almost exactly on time. I was, however, a little curious as to why there were no cars parked outside and the porch light wasn’t on.

The host’s husband answered the door and it took him a few seconds to recognize who this woman was, standing in his doorway looking so expectantly. He gives me a polite, but confused “hi” and then she comes to the door.

When she sees the slightly bewildered look on my face, she makes a pretty good guess at why I’m here.

“It’s tomorrow night.”

“It’s…what??? Tomorrow night?”

“Yeah.” She’s giving me that look that says Stupid people are so cute.

“Are you sure???” I ask. Apparently there is some small part of my delusional mind that actually believes I know more about her party than she does. Like I’m expecting her to say Oh, actually come to think of it, you’re right – it was tonight and EVERYBODY BUT YOU GOT IT WRONG.

“Yeah. …Do you… want to come in?”

“Tomorrow night? What is today?”

“Tuesday.”

“And it’s tomorrow night?”

“Tomorrow night.”

“Tomorrow night?”

Um…We’re just about to sit down to dinner – are you hungry? You could stay and have dinner with us.”

I look past her to see that they are apparently having company. My face turns about 3 shades of red.

“Um…no, thanks. I’ll… be going…now…So it’s tomorrow night?”

“Yeah, are you free tomorrow?”

“I don’t know…I hadn’t even thought about tomorrow night until…now.”

Suddenly, I realize what happened. Another friend of mine was having a party on Tuesday night. I mumble some explanation about Other Party…Tuesday…Jewelry…I’ll be going now…

“You’re welcome to stay for dinner – or are you going to see if you can make it to the other party?”

Actually, the other party was last Tuesday, and I wasn’t able to go. For some reason, the day “Tuesday” stuck with me and I guess I had transferred it over to this party. But in addition to seeming like overkill, that much explanation would probably make her think I had just gotten off the crazy bus. Instead, I just muttered something along the lines of “yes.” And then I left, pausing briefly to scrape my sense of pride off the doormat.

I’ve been on a roll recently with humiliating myself at other people’s houses. Maybe I should just stay home tomorrow night.

This weekend I started a phase of self-indulgence.

J watched Kaelin on Saturday for 4 glorious hours so I could go shopping by myself (and he gave me some shopping money for no reason, so I didn’t even have to spend my own play money – SUWEET). I came home with a new haircut, new clothes, and a trial sized version of a new skin regiment that costs way too much and that I would never splurge for, except that my birthday is coming up next month so if I like it, other people can buy it for me.  

I like it.

To my surprise and relief, Kaelin didn’t seem to care at all that my hair was shorter. A good thing, as part of me was afraid she wouldn’t know me without the extra 6 inches. Yesterday, I took the test one step further and colored it auburn – something I haven’t done in 2 years. Granted, auburn isn’t too far off my natural color, but she still knows her Mama, which makes me happy that she loves me for more than just my hair. I was beginning to wonder…

There’s something about the little things I get just for me that make me feel better about myself. Today I don’t feel nearly as fat, frumpy and past my prime as I did last week. This is important right now because 27 has always been a “marker” age in my mind – where I officially have to turn in my badge of youth and become an adult. I turn 27 on the 27th of next month.

So for now, I’m enjoying my self-indulgence and planning to set an appointment soon at a nearby spa to which I have a GC. Have any of you ever had a body wrap? I’m curious to know if they really work as well as I’ve heard as far as taking inches off the middle.

I’m also considering getting some of that reallyreally expensive MAC makeup to go with my new hair. Just for fun. And ’cause I can.

Well, I think I can. I’ll have to see how much is left in my “play money” account.

It appears that lb has unfortunately inherited my facial recognition skills…or lack thereof. I can watch the same actor in 3 different movies and as long as his hair is different, I have no idea it’s the same person.

I have people come up to me frequently in group situations and call me by name. Knowing my inability to remember faces, I pretend to know them as well. Then after the conversation is over, I ask J who the heck that was. The response is usually something like “You just talked to them for an hour last week in church.”

Kaelin is convinced that everybody with a beard is J. She’ll point to any picture of any man with a beard and proclaim “Daddo!” Oh, and she’s also decided that the bust of Beethoven on my parents’ piano is “Daddo!” too.

She also thinks that pretty much anybody with long hair is “Mama!” She recently spent half a day pointing out Mama! on the back of the Triscuits box (Rachel Ray). Mama! has also been known to grace the Pampers diaper box… despite the fact that I have not, at any point in her lifetime, been a blonde.

So, I’m wondering… what happens when I cut my hair? I’m really not a long-hair person. The only reason I have it is because I’m too friggin’ lazy to get my hair cut more than once a year. So when I finally get it whacked…will my daughter cease to recognize me? Will she go running from me, into the arms of Rachel Ray or the nearest neighbor with long tresses (which in this neighborhood is likely to be a guy)?

I guess we’ll find out eventually.