Bad Decision

Okay, so if you picked the slowest line at Costco at lunchtime and you are standing there growing older and hungrier by the second as your frozen food melts…you may decide to rip open a 3 lb bag of “Dried Plums” aka PRUNES and gorge yourself on them.

Please don’t.

For Everything Else...

Telling the workman who helped hang your pocket doors, “No thanks. We will paint them ourselves. We’re handy that way and besides, we want it done immediately.”

Savings: $75.00

Calling the same workman exactly one year later to see if he will please paint the doors that you and your husband were too lame to get to.

Priceless.

No Photo Today

Sorry for the blog silence. I’ve been occupied with a little science experiment over here. About 10 days ago I got a medium-sized zit right in the middle of my cheek.

I’d like to believe my breakout days are over now that I’m pushing 40, but no such luck. Anyway, in the decades in which I’ve been dealing with zits, I have NEVER been able to just leave one alone. Sooooo, when this thing showed up in the middle of my face, I thought, “What the heck? Why not do what all the magazines advise, and just let nature run its course?”

No poking, no prodding and certainly no picking. I mean, I’m not looking to meet someone special, so no problems there. I work in a church, so I was hopeful people would be kind as my little buddy and I made the rounds.

So, I left it alone. For 10 days. It went on my big weekend trip with me (more details on that another day) and my sister said it was barely noticeable. Tom withheld all comment; I mean what’s the safe thing for a husband to say when his wife is sporting a whitehead for upwards of a week? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Good man.

I think the zit was relatively unobtrusive, but I did wonder if people knew that I knew it was there. I mean I’ve definitely had the secret urge to inform someone if there’s a zit on her face just ripe for the picking, as if she doesn’t realize it. But this time, I was the one w/ the elephant in the room, or on my face, that no one was talking about. The zit was on the other cheek, I suppose.

Anyway, after 10 days of delicate cleansing, toning, and absolutely leaving it alone, my zit showed no signs of budging. It was small, round and innocuous, but it wasn’t going anywhere.

Until this afternoon when I couldn’t take it one second longer. I mean, 10 days? 10 days! There are limits, people.

Now I’m having popper’s remorse.

What promised to be a quick little intervention deteriorated into major excavation. Relief did not come. There was blood. The left side of my face is swollen and red. Little lines of swollen-ness inch down toward my mouth. Bare Minerals ain’t covering this sucker up now. I wonder what Tom is going to say when he gets home.

If he’s lucky: nothing.

Desperate Times

Have you ever got caught in the bathroom without tp? And you need a lot? And the only one home is the cleaning lady? And you don’t feel like the 2 of you are close enough to have her lend a girl a hand in this situation? So you search the trash can for used Bounce sheets and dryer lint? No? Well, you didn’t miss much.

Friday Confession

I am a huge dork. My non-bloggy friends have seen many examples of this in everyday life and need no more proof. For my bloggy friends, in case you have even a shred of doubt that I’m a dork, this post is for you.

Okay, I’ve been doing this blog thing for about 11 months. When I started writing mine, I had never even read a blog. I soon started reading and enjoying other people’s blogs. Not wanting to navigate away from them and lose track of my new friends forever, I decided to save some of them to my “favorites.”

This is before I knew anything about RSS feeds and the “Blogs I follow” function. Actually, I still don’t know what an RSS feed is, but I hear it’s kind of cool.

Anyway, for a good while I would click on my favorites to check out these awesome blogs. I got discouraged when I realized that these women, whose writing I admired, desired, and perhaps even coveted, WEREN’T POSTING ANYTHING NEW.

What was going on? Had they dared to let family time and jobs interfere with their blogging responsibilities? Why were they still talking about the swimming pool when they should have been writing about carpools and soccer games?

It took me a teeny bit of time (precise days, weeks or months are not necessary to divulge here) before I realized that when I saved to “favorites,” I was just saving a particular blog entry instead of the front page of a blog. I kept going back to the same old blog entries I'd read before.

I’m glad to know you are much more productive than I thought you were. I am glad your priorities are much more in line with where I thought they should be—entertaining me-- for instance. And I’m glad to erase any doubt you may have harbored about my immense dork-dom.

Oh, and see those band-aids on Tom's face in this picture, the one in which I'm working a Farrah Fawcett hairdo? He's a dork, too, but that story will have to wait for another day.

Friday Confession

I am a fast-talking person whose mouth sometimes gets me into trouble. Sticky situations happen more than I’d like to admit. Fortunately, sometimes I see God work through the humiliating messes I make and teach me something important.

If you know me personally, this Friday Confession won’t be new to you; if you are a blog friend, I know this post is long, but I hope you’ll have a chance to read it anyway:

My family moved about 5 years ago. I loved my old neighborhood, and I was nervous about making new friends in my new home. As I settled in, I waited hopefully for a family to move into a vacant house a few doors down. I prayed that they would have young children and that we would be friends.

One day, as I pulled into my driveway, I saw people in the kitchen window of the vacant house. It was a family! Instead of calmly driving up to my house and coming back later, I pulled over and jumped out of my car. I had always tried to be super-friendly in my old neighborhood, and I wasn’t going to let two cranky toddlers and a full bladder stop me from rolling out the welcome mat!

As I crossed the lawn, a cute mom came out of the house holding a baby and leading a four year old by the hand. Jackpot! As I introduced myself, the wheels started turning. This woman had potential… best friend potential! I pictured us swapping babysitting, planning Halloween parties, the works.

My kids yelled and screamed, wanting to get out of the car, but I was on a roll. Within two minutes, the woman knew ½ my life story, where I attended church, and where the best parks were.

When I pointed out my house, I launched into an amusing tale that I had told pretty much the whole neighborhood since moving in. Yes, we liked our house, but we knew we had overpaid for it. Why? Well, we got into a massive bidding war with some random couple that jacked the price up 11,000 dollars. The hilarious things was that by looking at the signatures on the documents I figured out I had dated the husband in college. Ha! Ha! She and I laughed together.

A few moments later the woman said something that hit me like a freight train. It became obvious to me, but somehow not to her, that I had been talking about her and her husband. They were the ones who had lost the bid on our house. They were the ones I was gossiping about. Crap. Crappity-Crap. Crap.

I felt sick and ashamed; I wanted to move. My whole life I had been so proud of making people feel good about themselves, and for being loving. Yet here I was, talking about someone, insensitively, right to her face.

At this point I could have fled, but I knew I had to address the situation immediately. Full of misery, I confessed my mistake and asked her to forgive me. Do you know what she said with a warm smile on her face? “That’s okay. We extroverts do that sometimes!” I wanted to kiss her.

This woman, a total stranger, helped illustrate to me, in a very real way, what GRACE means. I did not deserve her favor, her forgiveness, but she gave it to me anyway. I felt low, terrible, and ashamed of myself, but she made it right.

At that point I had a choice to make. I could wallow in my mistake, bringing it up again and again, even though it no longer bothered her. I could try to AVOID her, because seeing her would remind me of my own faults, OR I could accept what she offered and move forward.

This is the way it is with God. He offers us forgiveness and grace even though we can’t earn it and don’t deserve it. If we accept it, there is no need to look at the past anymore. Instead, we can move forward in a relationship.

Since that time, my neighbor and I have become super-close. We are freakishly alike and we know we can be real with each other. When she and her husband had their third child, Tom and I were blessed to be asked to be the godparents. This rich relationship wouldn’t have been possible without her offer of grace, and my acceptance of it.

Why Blogging is Dangerous

Certain people think blogging is dangerous because of privacy concerns. I think it’s for other reasons. I’d like to tell you what happened here last night. My stomach flu-addled self was freaked when we got a call from a mom saying that yet another girl in class has lice. You know how I feel about lice, so I decided to get ready for the onslaught.

My first step was to get out our heavy duty lice combs and boil them so they’d be ready for action. Then, I proceeded to head downstairs to my computer to read some blogs. I got caught up in a blog put out by a crazy in my town, who writes all sorts of inflammatory stuff about our town council members. I am used to reading wildly entertaining and edifying blogs by my fellow bloggers each day, not this vitriol, but I found myself caught up rather quickly.

About ONE HOUR into it, I smelled something burning, and didn’t even bother to investigate. Probably Molly’s sneakers getting a little overheated in the dryer. When I started to gag and choke, I turned around and looked upstairs. The house was filled with thick gray smoke, with the most disgusting burning chemical smell imaginable. In the kitchen I saw the pan that once held the lice combs on the stove. Metal on metal, not an ounce of water or plastic left. All of the plastic had disappeared, apparently straight into our lungs. I put the pan outside and started opening doors. By this time it was almost midnight. The smoke had primarily bypassed me, since I was on a lower level, but had shot straight up to the tippy top of the house where the kids were sleeping. It had been burning quite a while before I noticed.


Now if you are wondering whether that Dateline stuff about kids not hearing smoke alarms is true, believe it! The alarms were going off and didn’t wake either kid or my husband. I woke Tom. He turned off the alarms, opened our window, and went back to sleep.

I went to the kids’ rooms, opened their windows (note to self: get new windows that are NOT painted shut), turned on their ceiling fans, and stuffed towels under their doors. I wasn’t sure whether I was keeping the bad stuff out or in, because it truly was everywhere. Jake’s room was the worst because it was the end of the line, smoke-wise.

After that, I was on watch for the rest of the night. With all the doors wide open, I stayed awake in case some sort of critter decided to waltz in our door. I checked on the kids hourly to see if they were breathing. I toyed with the idea of taking them to a motel, because it was taking hours for the rooms to clear. My husband’s slumber was both comforting and annoying. Okay, it was just plain annoying.

He has slept through hurricanes in this house, while I stayed awake worried about a huge tree coming down on the kids’ heads. He happily tucked them in bed in the 105 degree heat when our furnace whacked out on New Years. Both times I suggested moving them to the basement or our bed, or out of the house. It seems that as long as they are in their own beds, he is incapable of worrying about them. This is annoying because it puts the entire worry burden on me. Why I didn’t move them to the basement last night is beyond me. I just thought of that right now, and it makes me want to cry.

About 4 a.m. I tried to engage him in a little discussion.

“Tom, our kids have always been of above average intelligence! What will a whole night of chemicals do to their brains?”

“Glumph.”

“Tom, the asbestos was nothing compared to this! Ever heard of Chernobyl? 3-Mile Island? Our lungs are shot. We WILL all get cancer, you know!”

“…....”

The good thing about his non-engagement is that he doesn’t say, “What kind of mother almost catches the house on fire because she can’t pull her lazy butt away from the computer for 5 seconds! You haven’t gotten off the couch in 5 days because of the “stomach flu” yet you manage to fill our house with toxins, effectively ruining our lives and our children’s futures when most normal people are already in bed!” or, “If you would quit obsessing about lice, perhaps you would be less likely to burn the house down.” So, although I really need someone to process this with me, I guess it’s okay that that someone won’t be Tom.

Those who know me personally may think I am exaggerating a wee bit in this post, but I am not. I have huge mommy guilt on me right now and worry about what we breathed in. I really think I should have gotten them out of the house last night, or at least to the freaking basement, but I didn’t. There have been plenty of other times in parenting when Tom and I have been slow to face problems, and this alarms me because last night did not prove we are heading in a better direction. It makes me lack confidence in our roles as protectors.

A few positives:

The disgusting table and chair smell are not as noticeable now that the whole house smells like burnt plastic.

The hermit crab lives! Did I hear that they were around during dinosaur times? I believe.

And most importantly, we all appear to be safe, for now, thank God!

Warning: blogging can be dangerous.