"Oh, I'll catch up on these over the weekend."

If I feel I simply must have a recipe, then I 3 ring punch it and keep it in my oh-so-not-tidy binder.  I do accumulate professional journals at a higher rate than  I read them but I may SOMEDAY get to them, if I didn;t feel guilty about something I would be so lost.

I am addicted to digital clutter.  Where as I can be prudent and disciplined about physical stuff, my digital life is a mess.  I have over 17,000 messages in my yahoo account, over 1000 of which are unread.  They are mostly spam and retail emails that I didn’t delete because they had a sale or a promo code that I might have needed say 5 years ago.  Once it gets this big, you can’t sift through them one by one, it would have to be an all or nothing purge and my sentimental side won’t allow that, the emails when my husband and I were wee lads and lasses, quickbook backups I mailed myself, pictures that I know are there just waiting to be forwarded.

My house is really organized, cds are in alphabetical order, lots of files and tabs, my closet is separated by season, I keep nothing on the counters in the bathrooms but soap.  How is this dichotomy possible?  Let’s talk about digital photos, shall we?  I kept the same iphoto library for about 7 years and never made a new library, it just got so big it would take minutes just to open the program, knowing the end was in sight, I made sure I had backed everything up to an external drive, but what will I ever do with those photos? I think that is why I tried to keep up with Snapfish pictures several times a year, I can order physical copies, have an off-site back-up and pretend that my photo hoarding problem doesn’t exist.  My mother was a photo hoarder and even now she will send off a heavily duct-taped and extremely dense box of duplicates and triplicates of photos from my childhood so I can be a hoarder too.

inevitable

I have to really stop myself when it comes to domain name hoarding, this can get expensive even with the promo codes I have stashed in my 17,000 (not kidding, wish I were) emails.  It starts with a brilliant idea, which leads to a domain name search, followed by a frantic, adrenaline induced buying frenzy.  “It’s available!  I must seize this domain before the internet pirates who are watching my every move scoop it out from underneath my very finger tips!  It’s GOLD, Jerry!”  I do let some of them lapse, though it always makes me a little sad to see them go.  My new thing is to try to sell them, but I am pretty sure that the cyber-world is full of wide-eyed dreamers like me who think that buttermybiscuits.com will make them a fortune!

The memory of being in bed, tuned to 92 Pro FM on my walkman and listening to TNT (the top nine tonight) was so vivid.  When I listened to my music, I imagined some pretty unlikely scenarios. For instance, when “Angel” played I was in the finals of a roller skating competition.  Now, most people would have imagined ice skating or dancing, but I felt that there was a whole world of competative roller-figure skating waiting for me.

it went a little something like this, but in a jean skirt and no guy.

I loved to roller skate, the kind of skates with the big clunky “brake” on the front of the foot that I never quite figured out how to use. If you leaned forward to depress this rubber stopper, you would fall on your face, if you dragged it behind you, you tripped yourself.  The only way I knew how to stop was to gracefully crash into a wall.  I say gracefully because at this time I was still in middle school and I was boy-crazy. I felt that the faster I skated, the more attractive I was to the opposite sex.  I am not sure of the logic here, but I DID insist on wearing a jean skirt when I roller skated. Hot stuff. I hadn’t yet had the high-school realization that I was just not a guy-magnet and that high school boys would never appreciate my wit and humor.

So in my head, I had this elaborate roller skating routine to the Aerosmith ballad and as I am driving, I replay the exact routine in my head.  I actually laughed out loud when I thought of how ridiculous this was, but then the “baby, baby, bay-yay, bay” part came on and I completed three conesecutive singles and ended in a spin.  Is that even possible on a roller-skate? I looked glorious.

In a nut-shell, my son gets it from me.  He is a superstar, a legend in his own mind and I love it. 

I visited my sister last weekend.  This was the first trip I have taken alone in several years, I was expecting a blissful, quiet drive. It was quiet, but 50 mile an hour winds and bridges do not equal bliss.  I arrived safely, slept as well as a country mouse can sleep when there are live people wandering around outside of the city-window shouting at each other. 

My morning was spent having the annual haircut and wandering around stores without using a shopping cart as a child-mover and a weapon. 

As an aside, I hate to have my haircut.  I think it comes from having moved so much over the past 10 years, it’s another relationship that I am not emotionally ready for.  I feel the need to make senseless chit-chat to pre-empt the inevitable “you have split ends have you never heard of deep conditioning and having your haircut more than once every 365 days” conversation.  So on I blither.  I also self-color my hair which from my understanding is the equivilant to telling your dentist that you perfer to perform your own root canals with the aid of a hand mirror and a Dremel.  There is also the guilt about not washing your hair before you go to the salon.  Having unfortunately inheirited the greasy hair gene, I shampoo daily, but twice would really be too much. 

After apologizing profusely for the non-shampooed hair, I then begin the count-down to the  “oh, you must have well water, I can tell from the brassy tones.”

More blithering  from me.  Then comes the “what side do you part your hair on, ” question.  To be honest, I hate to choose sides so I just tell them to part it in the middle.  Probably not the best look for me.  Next comes what seems like hours of blow drying and then inevitable “product“.  I always tell the stylist that I spend about 3 minutes blow-drying my hair in the morning and I never use “product” I don’t like to feel weird things in my hair.  Somehow I always leave with “product” in my hair and everytime I am told that this is special “product” that I won’t even notice.  And every time, I wash this product out as soon as I get home.  Luckily all of this only happens once a year. 

My haircut on this trip was different, she did a great job and didn’t use too much product.  After trying  on some dresses with my sister, I called home to check on the husband and kids.  I could tell from my husbands’ tone that something was amiss.  Normally he is the type of guy that you can’t get off the phone, he will tell you in painful detail everything that is going on.  When I asked how it was going and he said, “fine,” without telling me exactly how many Cheerios each child had consumed, the jig was up.  “How bad is it?” was my first question.  Long story short, my son puked all over the couch.  He insisted that I didn’t need to come back, he had it under control.  I return home, my son seems ok and our couch does not. 

Fast forward to Wednesday, the baby woke up bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and covered in puke.  Having watched a lot of CSI, I estimate the time of pukage to about 9PM, it wasn’t a fresh kill.  She seemed totally unfazed, I didn’t know whether to strip her or the bed first. Haz-Mat clean up completed mu husband now tells me that he feels nauseous.  Fortunately for him, he has learned the valuable survival skill of finding an approriate place to vomit. 

So here I sit, waiting for this short but powerful bug. They say that you live and learn, I learned that pet-odor cleaner removes the scent of kindergartener vomit.  I dare say the couch smells fresh as a daisy.  I have Lysoled everything that didn’t move and my hands are chapped from Lady MacBeth-ian washing. I even brought an emergency bowl to bed last night, in case the dreaded beast struck when I least expected it, stripping beds is getting kind of old.

Exhibit A

In college I was affectionately referred to as “Hi, ass.”  This was at the University of Chicago where puns and geeks run freely across the quads.  I never realized that I had this high-waisted condition until it was pointed out to me that I “had a shelf back there’ and if I “got tired I could just lean my head back and have a rest.”  It also may have been suggested that I didn’t need earmuffs if I wore a belt.

Having two small (young, not just odd-sized) children, fashion is not at the forefront of my world.  I have had this pair of jeans at least 5 years and I think as they have stretched out, the waist has crept up even higher.  As I type, I can feel the waist several inches above my belly-button which is probably not ideal.  Navel, I don’t like that word, it sounds too much like black matter that someone could get lost in, but I digress.

Having yellowish (some would say golden) and reddish (some might say ruddy) tone to my skin is the unfortunate result of having a Greek father and a mother of Scottish descent.  This makes color choosing very difficult for me.  The yellows clash with the reds and greens and the reds wreaks havoc on the blues.  The shirt that I am wearing was recently purchased, extremely on-sale with the thought that it matched my eyes.  I have green eyes and wearing green does accentuate this feature but usually it makes my skin look yellowy-green and my whole face kind of sickly looking.  That’s the look I am sporting today. Luckily I am not leaving the house and my son is kind of into reptiles right now and it should be pretty dark by the time my husband gets home.