Friday night blogging Whilst Beer

First of all this:



You need to play this song very loud and dance around and wear a tight pencil skirt and buy a Hammond piano. All these things will make you teh happy. Especially if you are usually a man.

Second of all, I'd like to institute a Friday night beer blog bash where bloggers have a few and write stuff just like in high school or college or whenever it is you started using mind altering substances - beer...wine coolers...pixie stix...food coloring...MSG...and etc. - and then got all deep and poetic.

I'ld like to institute this except now it's Saturday morning early and it's just too late for Friday night now.

Third of all, have you hit replay on that video yet?

I honestly think - and I say this in all sincerity, I've picked this from my "good ideas" bin and boy oh boy is it loaded with good ideas - but I think that what the Democrat party could really do for Teh Unity after the horrible divisions and multiplicacities of this past primary season is to have Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton sing this song as a duet on television in black and white on the old Ready Steady Go set. Seriously. I'd so vote for them then.

Have you hit replay on this song again yet? you should. I did. I can sing this song. Not well. but I'll do it and that's a promise and a threat.

hey...sometimes I wonder who is reading my blog. I mean, all those other times when I' m not posting photos of myself in dissarray. I see the hits from Dubai and Sao Paolo, but I know they're just looking for that naked photo of David Suzuki.

I'm trying to think of some way to gauge this other than a contest to win my toaster. And that's not just because i'm trying to get rid of my toaster as an excuse to buy a new one.

Damn...the song is over again. How about this one. This one is good too. Dang...YouTube won't let me imbed it. Open it in a new window, would ya?

I was thinking that everyone could post in the comments with...uh...their favorite word. And then I'd take all those words and use them to write an epic poem. Or a new Mark Ronson song. Or a play. Or a word search puzzle to send to George Bush to keep him busy until January.

No?

Okay. Now listen to this. really...it will make you feel all...all...one in the morning. I don't know what's up with the video, but thesong is melty warm.

Now...one last thing I need to say before I head to hit the hay.

BlogHer.

It makes me weep big goofy tears all down the front of my blouse to think that I can't make it there yet again. This big problem, as I see it, it that San Francisco isn't in Philadelphia. Because if San Francisco were in Philadelphia then I would be there even if there were a cheese steak store and some big guy in and Eagles jersey puking on the corner of Haight and Ashbury. The second problem is that I am not Dooce's valet. Because then I'm sure I could be all like "Hey, Dooce, let me valet for your laptop and you can write my plane ticket off as a business expense and I promise I won't go network while you need me to plug in your laptop and fetch you pretzels and more Sharpies to sign autographs."

As it is, a plane ticket to SanFrancisco from Harrisburg is like as much money as a new 40-year shingle roof and a pair of allegator skin contact lenses.

So like, next year, what's say BlogHer is somewhere closer for me and MamaTulip to drive to? I hear that the Camp Hill Mall is nice. Or Lancaster, PA what with the Amish and all...there would be little competition for bandwidth, right? But my vote is Philly.

Anwyaw, I'm going to be at the DC mini BlogHer and I hope that you will be there, too. It's only one day to fit in three days of partying conferencing and networking.

Will you be there? Wanna be my roommate? I don't snore and I won't play this song on my iPod steroe all night, I promise.

But if there's drunk BlogHer karaoke, I can't promise i won't try to sing it.

I hear Sweetney does a wicked awesome version of Photograph, but I'm not sure if it's the Ringo Starr version or the Def Leppard version.

Allright.

Time to take my contact lenses out and say nighty night.

OH! and next week, I'm going ta be gone with my little doods and I need someone to tend house here with a blog post or two. Any takers? The keys to the Halushki kingdom. Think about it.

Night night. Kiss kiss.

PSA: That Stuff To The Right

That mish-mash of links and ads and buttons and widgets and gadgets to the right of the written test will be cleaned up soon.

(Heh...I wrote "written test" instead of "written text". And I woke up this morning with the song "What I've Been Looking For" from High School Musical stuck in my head. I have no idea what this means. But I sure hope I get a date for the prom.)

Right now, I'm just tossing things up on the right sidebar just to get them tossed up. For now.

Really, I'm not supposed to point out or alert you to some of the ads. That's what the fine print on the ad contracts says, anyways.

But in way of alerting you to some of the ads...what's up with all the sausage ads?

I understand the Discount Hotels in Lithuania since I mentioned my fat Lithuanian-Polish head in my last post, and supposedly there is a little robot that now visits my blog, crawls the text for content, and then posts relevant ads based upon what I'm writing about. Thus the Lithuanian vacation sites.

(The little robots, by the way, make me feel all itchy just thinking about them. Any other time there's been a small anything visiting my content and crawling all over, it's required hours of nit-picking and a dose of permethrin to get rid of it.)

I suppose that posting the word "Polish" did it as far as the sausage ads. "Polish" set off a robotic word-association game that goes something like this:

Polish
Polish Jokes
Stereotype
Bang & Olufsen
Bangers and Mash
Monster Mash
Monster Trucks
State Fair
Pork Product Vendors
Kowalonek's Kielbasy Shop
Easter
Parade
Exercise
My Sweaty Armpits
Smell Like
Sausage

Or something like that.

There is one ad up there right now that I do wholeheartedly and strongly recommend that you take a look at - besides Kowalonek's Kielbasy Shop...seriously, the best kilbo in the world -
and that's the ad for Barefoot Books.

I love these books.

I'm a bookseller (for another book selling establishment, namely the largest retail book selling store in the entire universe) and I know my kids' books. And Barefoot Books rock-a-doodle-doo: stories out of the ordinary, multicultural stories, outstanding illustrations, and all from a mom-and-poppish shop that lovingly handpicks each product for outstanding quality and high OOOOOhhhhhhhhh! AAhhhhhh! factor.

Anyway...more about that later. Eh-hem.

So, before I end this post and begin chasing Terzo to grab the marker from his hand - the marker he's been entertaining himself with while I've been blogging, and the marker that he's been using to draw all over the front of the fridge - I have to clear up one thing....

It seems that there has been some misunderstanding based upon my roundabout and confuzzled ramblings in the post below, and that somehow, some of the commentors - male commentors especially - are wishful thinking under the impression that I will be starting a pole dancing blog.

I regret to say that this is not going to happen. Not in your wildest dreams.

I may start a Polish Dancer blog, but that's something else entirely.

However, as a sort of consolation prize, I will offer you this.

Just don't watch it at work.

And don't tell your wife or girlfriend...or mom...that I showed it to you.

Thnxkbai!


EDIT TO ADD: Well, now the sausage ads are gone. But I swear, there was a big ad covered in meat about ten minutes ago.

ANOTHER EDIT TO ADD: I just clicked on the Kowalanek's link with the computer speakers on. Evidently, there was a song I'd missed before. A song about kielbasy. And that's one way to get any High School Musical song out of your head.

Instead of a cross, this writer's dross....

I must say, that was a thoroughly enjoyable holiday.

Mostly.

For the most part, the holidays were just grand.

Sigh.

Well, actually, there was this…thing…that happened. Not a horrible thing, but still sort of mildly discombobulating. Although, at one point, I will admit to feeling a bit out of sorts. More than a bit out of sorts.

I’m being cryptic, I know.

I can’t help it. I promise you.

I’m one of those partially “outed” bloggers, and in this matter of which I cannot really speak, I’ve been sworn to real life cryptitude so as not to startle the neighbors with the breadth of my...lateral thinking.

Which begs the question “So why write about it if you can’t write about it?”

Because I’ll tell you why:

Because every time I sit down and try to write something fun or funny or funtastic, this thing drops down on my keyboard like an albatross holding a cinder block upon which is scrawled “I AM THE THING FOREMOST IN YOUR MIND AND YOU WILL WRITE ABOUT ME OR ELSE I WILL BRAIN YOUR MUSE WITH THIS HEAVY OBJECT.”

That’s why.

(I really wish I could find a picture of an albatross holding a cinder block, because that would be just the perfect graphic for this entry.)

So now I’ve sort of kind of written about the thing, and I hope the albatross is satisfied and will fly off (very low) to some place else and go harangue mariners or something.

I’ll just say this, because otherwise I know you'll worry:

Everyone here at Chateau Halushki is, knock wood, healthy in mind and body - praise be - and, no, no one in my family was attacked by a tiger, nor were they caught in crossfire in a war zone, nor did they get caught by the paparazzi upon exiting a car while wearing no underpants. (By the way, those horrific events are not listed in any particular order of quantifiable suckitude.)

And finally, the discombobulations of which I am barely speaking of are over and done with and a new day is dawning and it’s all sunbeams and star shine and whipped cream puddings from here on out.

Still too cryptic?

Let’s just say that as a family, we were in a sort of temporary severe cash flow slump. We knew it was going to be temporary (although not quite sure how temporary at one point) but the timing of the whole matter just simply was not the bestest. Two weeks before a major celebration of consumer spending is not a good time for low cash flow, especially when some members of the family still believe the fruits of this consumer spending are actually the result of magic as wielded by a right jolly old elf and not connected in any way to rock solid greenbacks.

Still too cryptic?

Then may I just further say in the way of tantalizing innuendos that I was also temporarily and necessarily engaged as a full-time member of the workforce, the experience of which was in no small way responsible for my giddily arrived at decision to display ads on my blog, as if Google Adsense were my way to a golden ticket.

For, you see, I’m no longer cut out for full-time, 9-to-5 wage earning.

I’ll do it if I must.

But I’m much better suited as a “lady of the manor” type.

You know…up by 11:00 AM, breakfast of bon-bons and champagne spritzers, and then back for a nap until my lady’s maid wakes me in time for me to give direction as to whether to prepare the lamb or the lobster for dinner.

Work is hard.

It’s even more hard when you’re doing it because you have to do it or else someone big and burly will come repossess your car and your heat and stuff. It’s even harder when the work you’re doing pays close to minimum wage and so you have to do a lot of it to make the money you need to allow everyone in your family to take lukewarm showers and without setting a timer in the bathroom. (Although somewhere Al Gore is shedding a tear of bliss after reading that last sentence. Because Al Gore reads my blog, you know. All the presidential hopefuls do.) (Heh-heh.)

After I returned home and had completed my temporary full-time tour of duty in pantyhose, there was of course the consideration of my continuing some full-time work of a more permanent sort and for some pay substantially higher than retail wages. We could become a two income household and make sure for certain that any potential future cash flow slumps were knocked out at the knees and for good and forever, amen. However, after factoring in the eventual cost of summer childcare for three children, gas money, and pantyhose stipend - because I can go through four or five pairs a day easily - I’d have to be earning somewhat more than any job I am currently qualified for would pay. Other than pole dancer at a truck stop. Because, from what I understand, I could bring my kids along with me to a job like that to bus tables and what not.

Certainly, though, there aren’t many well-paying jobs listed in the newspaper for English majors who write sentences for which prepositions are the ending in. So for all my talking in circles, and until Little Terzo is in school full time, we’re most likely going to remain a one-and-a-half income family and continue our rice and bean diet...with lobster and bon-bons only every other Friday.

Although…

I did have this kooky idea.

Naw…it would never work. It’s just this crazy notion I had one evening after painting the bathroom ceiling with Killz paint and forgetting to open the window to vent the fumes.

Well…okay. I'll tell you.

I was thinking that, you know, even though there are something like 78,453 writers out of work right now, and another couple thousand on strike in LA, I was thinking that maybe - just maybe - I could still do some kind of job where I could sit at home in my pajamas and string words together in magical and fantastical arrangements, and then post those words on The Internets - where people don’t care so much about prepositions - and then maybe, somehow, a big genie would occasionally appear from my CPU and hand me a dollar bill. “Occasionally” meaning every five seconds or so.

Wouldn’t that be neat?

And maybe, after a while, I’d turn my magical, fantastical writing site into a dot.com site. Not that I don’t adore Blogger with every fiber of my Granny underpants, but ________.com just flows better on a t-shirt. Or a bumper sticker. Or coffee mug. Or Goodyear balloon.

And maybe, someone who knew something about how to do all this crazy, complicated computer stuff would give me some hints and pointers on how to turn a blog into a .com. Since I know nothing about such things.

And then, someone else would point me in the direction of another someone else who knew things about funky graphics and eye-catching banners and who had a powerfully cool idea for revamping and updating my blog. Because, I have nonesuch.

And THEN I’d go really crazy and start a SECOND blog that was…ooooh, I don’t want to spoil the surprise since I’ve already got my bold soul cryptic on. But it would be a site with a focused theme (unlike this site, where I talk about albatross and cinder blocks in the same sentence) and which offered useful information on a specific topic (other than waterfowl and building supplies) and to which readers would flock (get it? flock?) to hear all the amazing things I had to say about…certain things…and stuff…and the readers would actually be grateful to be put in the way of advertisers who sold that kind of…thing…and stuff.

And no, I’m not starting a cinder block review site.

The thing is that at this point I’m all ideas.

But! And this is an important But! so pay attention:

But! This most recent foray into the out-of-home workplace has energized and motivated me - inspired me, even - to never work full-time outside of the home again if I can help it.

Finally, to all those people who have in the past said,

“You know what you should do as a job? A job that is a cosmic calling but also a job that puts greenbacks in your hand and warm in your shower water and sugar in your coffee? You know what you should do as a job like that kind of job is…

WRITE!

GOL-DAMMIT, YOU SHOULD WRITE AND WRITE AND WRITE!

WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU! DON‘T YOU REALIZE YOU CAN AND SHOULD BE MAKING MONEY WITH YOUR WRITING, YOU IDIOT?!!! HOLY HECK, WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO GET IT THROUGH YOUR FAT POLISH-LITHUANIAN HEAD! DON’T MAKE ME CALL UPON THE UNIVERSE TO THREATEN YOUR BANK ACCOUNT THE WEEKEND BEFORE CHRISTMAS IN ORDER TO MAKE YOU UNDERSTAND THAT THE TIME TO DO THIS IS NOW, NOW, NOW! CRIPES, GIRL, JUST DO IT ALREADY! NOW WHERE DID I PUT MY RED BULL?”

To all those people who have in the past said stuff like that, I say

“oh…i get it now.”


Because I’m really e. e. cummings.


Psyche.


So anyway, it’s a new year.

And as I watch the albatross fly into the distance, cinder block skimming off the roofs of cars and setting off alarms as the bird wends its airy way toward the open sea, I feel…buoyed.

And buoyant.

Ebullient!

I’m going to try a few new things with my blog, try to get my writing to earn some money - even if it has to pole dance for a few months while I’m figuring out what size pantyhose it wears - and who knows?

This time next year, I‘ll be writing about my thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyable holiday.

And showering in hot water.

At the same time, even.


Amen.

NaBloPoMo

That has to be the worst acronym in, like, forever.

It sounds as if it has something to do with a National Organization of Teletubby Sodomizers.

But, it's not.

No, it's the acronym for National Blog Post Month.

For the entire month of November, bloggers who join the movement (or perhaps it's a cult, mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha) take a blood oath to sit in front of their screen- be it large and flat or tiny and expensive - and once a day, to crack their knuckles thricely, stick the tip of their tongue out of the corner of their mouth, squint their eyes and knit their eyebrows, and then tap, tap, tap away at the keys until they finally click on PUBLISH POST (or SEND, or whatever) and, in effect, post something to their blog EVERY SINGLE DAY FOR THE ENTIRE MONTH OR ELSE!

Don't ask me "or else what?"

You can't HANDLE the "or else what?"

Just think thumb screws and water boards, that's or else what.

Okay, not really.

Just think a big "KICK ME! I DROPPED OUT OF NABLOPOMO!" written on a giant yellow Post-It and stuck to the back of your blog for the entire month of December. It's true. These organizers aren't messing around.

And what if you DO post every day for an entire month?

Well, my friend, you have the satisfaction of a job well done.

And maybe there will be another widget to add to your sidebar. Something like "I NaBloPoMo'ed and all I got was this grayscale widget. And a rash on my Tinky Winkie."

Anyway, I signed up. And I'm forcing my sister to sign up, too. I'm the older sister, and you may think that by the ages of 40-something and 30-something, big sisters would no long wield any bully power over their younger sisters, but you would be so, so very wrong. In fact, watch how easily I can blackmail my younger sister into posting to her blog every day for a month.


"Hey. Hey, Seestor. Hey, c'mere I want to tell you something...

Perrier Water.

That's right...Perrier Water.

Yeah, that's got your attention.

I knew it would.

So. Now. Hows about you buddy-up with me and write something every day on your blog for a month, and that story will go no further. No farther, either."

Of course, the downside to bullying my sister is that my sister not only has an equally and infuriatingly obnoxious story she can tell about me, but she's also much stronger than I am and can hold me down and do that thing where you grab the other person's hand and say, "Why are you punching yourself? Huh? Why are you punching yourself?"

Also, she's a natural blonde. Which is neither here nor there, but bears mentioning as a super power.

SO.

Here's the plan.

NaBloPoMo suggests that to make this endeavor a bit easier so as to not "run out of gas" around day 14, bloggers should blog on a theme. My Summer Vacation or Thirty Ways To Cook Toast or What I Found In My Driveway This Morning.

I, however, had the wildly brilliant idea of co-blogging with my Seestor. And because I'm hyper-organized and a pain in the ass, I came up with a easy-to-follow template for each day of the week with revolving topics and writing prompts. Boy. Am I fun or what.

Anyway, it's going to go like this:

MONDAY: Random Noodlings. A little of this. A little of that. Stray thoughts and scrambled eggs.

TUESDAY: Get to Know The Ugly Sisters! Where we get all autobiographical, tell some Remember When type stories, and reveal which one of us has a peg leg. Just kidding. It's only a peg toe.

(Yes, back in the day when we ran with a group of rock-n-roll hippie yonkos, my sister and I were lovingly dubbed The Ugly Sisters. Our friends told us that they were being ironic. However, there does exist a photo of me and my sister with underwear on our heads and frizzy perms. So, it has crossed my mind that our friends were being ironic when they told us they were being ironic. Anyway, we embraced the name as a good moniker for a rock band at the very least, and yes, The Ugly Sisters is trademarked. Not by us, mind you, but that's not stopping me from using it here.)

WEDNESDAY: Best of Awards. Because everyone likes to give an award.

THURSDAY: Question From My Sister. Where we ask each other questions and answer them. Duh.

FRIDAY: Geek Of The Week. Don't be an idiot, and we'll all get along just fine. Get up in our grills, and, boy oh boy...oh boy...why I just outta...don't get me started. Who will the Geek of the Week be this Friday? Stay tuned!

SATURDAY: Ugly Sister Smackdown. Started here. Ended here. To be continued.

SUNDAY: Sisterly Advice - Our weekly advice column. This is the part where we take questions from the audience and offer you the wisdom of our combined years. Ask us anything! We'll give you a thorough and well thought-out answer. Or not. Maybe we'll just make stuff up after giggling over your dilemma. That said, we have a whopping 27 years of parenting experience between us and can adequately cover (i.e. tap-dance our way through) most topics from diapering babies to homework blues to answering "Band-Aid or stitches?" to teenage drivers, as well as philosophizing over more general questions such as "When should I be supportive, when should I discourage, and when do I pretend she's someone else's kid" and "Glitter! What the hell?!" We've both had encounters with possibly rabid animals, and my sister raises goats and wild horses, so right there, a wealth of information. If you need recommendations for beverage pairings to your favorite entree, or music to whittle by, we can help. Problems with noisy neighbors? Wondering whether to dump that dude? Got bunions? We're your gals. Drop us a line at
TheUglySister@yahoo.com or post your question in the comments section at any time and we'll do our darndest to point you in the right direction. (Your mileage may vary.)

So there! Doesn't this sound promising?

Here's to NaBloPoMo!

It's a dessert topping! It's a floor wax! It's a Peruvian poet!

It's whatever you want it to be!

Now, get thee to the buggery bloggery!

It's not easy being meme.

Okay, I’ve owed Julie this for, like, ever. She memed me waaaaaay back in May, and I didn’t even call her the next day to thank her for the nice evening and maybe we could go out for drinks again sometime. I’m an awful, thoughtless date is what I am.

I mean, I'm an awful, thoughtless memer.

Memee?

Anyway, since I’m not feeling particularly inspired, but because I’d like to get something up here at least once a month during this difficult time when my 13-month-old is bent on running out the front door or tossing himself down stairs every five minutes -

I don’t need a nanny or Mother’s Helper so much as I need a small sheep dog -

since I don’t have much time to get all creative right from a blank slate like, I thought that now would be as good a time as any to grab Julie’s writing prompt and go all gung-ho and see what happens.

So here are the question(s) from the original blog

Your mission: Give one or more these questions a stab in a post (or series of posts), and then tag three more writers. If you don't mind, please link back to this original entry—we'd LOVE to track the progress of this meme with trackbacks.

1. Go back to first or early post. How would you describe your voice back in those early days? Who were you writing to? What was your sense of audience (if any) back then?

2. Do you remember when you received your first comment? What was it like?

3. Can you point to a stage where you began to feel that your blog might be part of a conversation? Where you might be part of a larger community of interacting writers?

4. Do you think that this sense of audience or community might have affected the way you began to write?

Oh…wait a second. These are like real questions where I’m going to have to think and ponder and cogitate maybe even use a few more five-dollar words that mean “think“ and “ponder“. And I swear, the baby ate my thesaurus, so there goes that Sound All Smart And Stuff resource. I so need help these days when it comes to Sounding All Smart And Stuff.

Seriously, do you know what I did today for about 20 minutes straight?

For almost an entire half hour, the baby and I took turns chasing each other around the house yelling “BAH!” at each other with varying inflection and intonation.

Bah?

BAAAaaaaah.

BbbbbAH!

BaaaaAAAaaaah.

bah.

There was a time right around when my second child was young toddler-age that any duration of diaper-wrestling, or extended sessions of floor-time building block towers to be knocked down again and again and again and agin, or reading Goodnight Moon for the brazillionth time, would cause my brain to rebel and demand that I spend an equal amount of time exercising my cerebral cortex in some more highly-evolved endeavor such as word-smithing a sonnet or jotting down the first few scenes of the libretto I’d been turning over in my mind (it was for a rock opera in the spirit of Tommy except instead of being about a deaf-dumb-and-blind boy who was a wizard at pinball , my rock opera was about a girl with a lisp who was really good at Gnip Gnop) or just about any higher-order-thinking activity that would silence the persistent voice in my head that screeched like Linda Hirshman on a chalkboard: “YOU HAVE A COLLEGE DEGREE! YOU HAVE A COLLEGE DEGREE! YOU HAVE A FREAKING COLLEGE DEGREE!”

Nowadays, I just pour another cup of warm milk and stare at the pretty pictures. Good night, moon! Oh, what a red balloon! And look, there is the red balloon again! Bah! Oh, what a funny balloon! After nap time, we’ll sit at the purple kiddie table and make sippy-cup coasters from happy round cookie-cutter slices of my frontal lobe. Let mommy do the shellac, honey! Weeeeeeeee!

Bah?

So, you can see that this answering-real-questions-meme going to take a lot of energy. I hope Julie appreciates this.

Here goes….

1. Go back to first or early post. How would you describe your voice back in those early days? Who were you writing to? What was your sense of audience (if any) back then?

My first post.

My first post was actually a cheat. It wasn’t even really a blog post, but something that I had written for a local NPR station writing contest. I received an honorable mention with that essay, I’ll have you know. I even attended a reception and had wine and cheese and everything. Of course, the awards reception was only intended for the winners, but that’s a minor point when considering the demands of my ego.

Who was I writing to?

You know, as with most everything I write, I write first and foremost for myself as audience. If I’m not cracking me up or making me go “hhhhmmmm” or poking me in the ribs and making me say “Ouch! Hey, quit it!” then nobody else sees what I've written.

I write to entertain me.

There’s a word for that, I think, and that word begins with “m”. But I already get at least twenty hits a day on the phrases “wallpaper behind toilet” and “caulk joke”, and I don’t need any more "home reonavtion" weirdos hanging around here - if you know what I’m saying - so I‘m not going to type that “m“ word. Let’s just say it rhymes with “plasterbatory” and leave it at that.

Other than that, I read my posts with the question “Would my sister enjoy reading this? Would this make her laugh that kind of laugh that sounds like our grandmother laughing?”

And if my sister isn’t home, I wonder, “Would this here stuff I’ve written make Amy giggle and, perhaps, even snort?”

Amy being The Most Erudite And Well-Read Person In The Whole Wide World (well… definitely in Schuylkill County) and whose connoisseurship of the absurd sets a high bar that just can’t be vaulted by a few tired Monty Python references or a couple of poop jokes.

Although, I bet she’d laugh at this. And this.

Pfft. Plebian

And when Amy’s not around, I think to myself “What would my dear husband think of this here epic post I’ve written? Would he enjoy it? Smile? Snicker? Guffaw? Read it between fantasy baseball innings?”

But then I remember his weird hang-up about subject-predicate agreement and the annoying way he always corrects me when I use improper pronouns in dangling clauses - or whatever it is I do while torturing the English language - and I recall the parting advice of my favorite college writing teacher way back when my future was so bright that I…uh…I had to…ummm…borrow someone’s sunglasses…and those words were

“Never marry an editor.”

Now, I just lie to my husband and tell him that this is my new blog. No dangling persnipple gerundas there.

Anywho...did I answer the question?

Oh! My writing voice.

My writing voice is a bit bouncy, a bit raspy like I’ve had too many beers too late at night. A squidge self-deprecating, a tad “goose up the rump“. Butter melts in my mouth, not in my palm.

2. Do you remember when you received your first comment? What was it like?

My first comment…hmmm…no, I don’t remember it. Let me go look-see.

Oh yes! Jorge Jazzar commented! I work with Jorge. Jorge is a mind-bending and generally awesome writer if he’d only get off his ass and write more. And he doesn’t have half the good excuses I have for not writing more. Oh what, Jorge? You just told me that you only do laundry once a month, so it can’t be that. (And I’m hoping that you own 31 pairs of underwear, ‘cause otherwise I don’t want to even know.)

The first comment from someone who I didn't know personally (or paid to read my blog) was from a poster by the handle of Rox_publius. How did this person find me? I don't know. I wasn’t even making caulk jokes back then.

3. Can you point to a stage where you began to feel that your blog might be part of a conversation? Where you might be part of a larger community of interacting writers?

Uhhhhhhmmm…uhhhhhh…hmmmmmm.

Some time after I joined Crazy/Hip Mom Bloggers…I think…?

Uuhhh…I suppose I began feeling part of a larger community (i.e. "stalker on the periphery") around then. Along with reading my gal-pals who lurk under the Daily Special placard along the right sidebar, I started getting turned-on to a bunch of other super-dooper women bloggers who were talking about kids and work and issues important to mothers besides making frontal lobe sippy cup coasters, except my gal-pals and these new women were all so articulate and eloquent and…damn, where’s my thesaurus…uhm…they were having all these great conversations about feminism and motherhood and the meta-issues surrounding blogging, and occasionally I‘d jump in, too, and wave my hand around and say, “Ooh! Ooh! Yeah! I thought that once, too! Be my friend, huh, wouldja, huh?”

And every once in a while they still humor me and comment on my blog even though we all know I’m mostly just dancing around in my bloomers with a balloon hat on my head while they’re off having incredibly intelligent conversations with Gloria Steinem and winning Pulitzer prizes and taking over the world and whatnot.



Bitches.


Heh. Just kidding.


4. Do you think that this sense of audience or community might have affected the way you began to write?

Uhhhh…I…uhm…I personally believe…that U.S. American blogging communities are affecting the way I write because, uh, some people out there in our nation don't have blogs and, uh, I believe that our, uh, audience like such as in, uh, South Africa and, uh, the Iraq and everywhere like such as, and I believe that they should, uh, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S. bloggers, uh, should help South Africa and should help Iraq and the Asian blogs, so we will be able to build up our future for our children.

The end.

*************************

Now's the part where I tag some other people.

How about my sister, a friend, and this other chick who is a hot, sexy writer that more people should be reading.

And all of whom should be writing more. For the Iraq. And the Asian bloggers.

A Perfect Lemony

While I’m holed up with a fussy baby, walking and joggling, sitting every forty-five minutes to nurse, and having given up entirely on trying to type one-handed (Okay, baby! Okay! I hear you down there squarking in the swing! Give momma one more second with her computer!)

…trying to type really fast with two hands to the tune of a grumping little grumpus…

See, this is why I have blogarrhea. Why I don’t write anything for two weeks and then BLAM I put up a 45 page post on breastfeeding or bats. (Just be glad I left out the footnotes and index.)

Anyway, I’m giving out another Perfect Post Award, this time for the month of September to my dear friend Lemony at Lemon Parade.

I love my Lemony.

A few years ago when I was just getting back in saddle what with the words and the phrases and the stringing them together to make sentences, Lemony and I were in a writers’ workshop together. We tweaked each other. We nudged each other. We told each other “You can do it, you can do it! Knock that dust off your knuckles and get down, sister, get down!”

We said, “Tell me more. And now a little bit more. And now tell me even more about what you don’t think anyone has the patience to listen to, what you thought couldn’t - or rather shouldn't - be time wasted on words; the notions and feelings and times of your life that you think are just too ordinary, too humdrum, too just-another-lone-woman-with-kids-in-a-house-somewhere that they aren’t worth the keystrokes. I want to hear what you have to say. I want to hear your voice tell your story from your corner of the living room."

The story of grocery shopping with a child…

The story of a broken sink…

The story of a little girl whose definition of “ordinary” is painfully unthinkable...


And the story of her own little girl putting on her backpack and new sneakers and with absolute faith in the world, walking on toward her first day at school.


Sometimes, it’s all so sublime, these ordinary moments.

Sometimes, you start to write it all down, all this ho-hum, humdrum ebb and flow of everyday life, and the ordinary beauty is so overwhelming that mere sentences aren't enough.

Sometimes, it’s all so wonderful... you break into poetry.

And it becomes something extraordinary.


And sometimes, you say it all perfectly in 50 words or less.


A Perfect Post for September

Space from Lemon Parade

Smooches, Lemony.

You're perfectly out-of-the-ordinary.


Check out Petroville and Suburban Turmoil for the entire list of September's Perfect Posts.

While I'm Sleeping...

...I mean, writing a new post - I swear to Aunt Betsy I am - here are more babies to look at.

BABIES!

My cousin Ernie and his lovely, amazing, strong and clever wife, Nancy, have gifted our wonderful planet with two of the sweetest baby boys you'll see this side of Halushki.

And now that Nancy has been able to post to her blog - and her with newborn TWINS! - I have no excuse. I'm perfecting my one-handed sleep-typing and will make it a point to not only write something, anything, but to begin checking back with my favorite bloggers to see exactly what's been happening in the world since I've begun spurting milk and walking into doors. CNN...pffft. I need to know what's up with Mom-101 and Omega Mom and Go Fug Yourself these past three weeks.

Do we hate skinny jeans yet?

I sure hope so...oh lord, my butt hopes so.

Quick "Where's the Baby?" Update

Before "more about bats", I will answer the question I know is on everyone's mind:


Did Tom and Katie really have a baby?


Okay, maybe not that question.

How about this one...


Question: Did you have that baby yet?


Answer:

No.

No, no and finally, no.


The baby is still very comfortable inside me with his enormous head resting on my lungs.

He kicks, he beats his fists against me, he hiccups.

Ocassionally - usually between the hours of 11:30 PM and 7:00 AM - I have contractions. Very big stomach-tightening contractions which wake me up and make me press my hands across my hips so that they don't explode in opposite directions.

I count the contractions: every 15 minutes, every 10 minutes...every 10 minutes, 10 minutes and holding.

And then, I get up to walk around or bake some late-night zucchini bread, and the contractions stop.

All gone!

So...we have a baby who still won't turn, a body that thinks contractions are a lot of fun as long as they're not real work, and a c-section date of Monday, July 31.

On Monday, July 31, at 1:00 PM this child will be evicted.


Which leads me to the second question I know is on eveyrone's mind:


Question:

Are you going to the super fabulous BlogHer Conference this weekend? Everyone, but EVERYONE who's anyone will be there! Girls, girls, girls! Blogs, blogs, blogs! Fun, fun, fun! C'mon! It'll be great! Someone there should be able to deliver a baby!


Answer:

No.

No, I will not be there.

I don't want to talk about it.


And finally and most importantly, a big THANK YOU for everyone's suggestions on how to turn a stubborn baby. I have tried just about everything at this point. The baby scooted down a few times, but ultimately he seems to find the pillow that is my lung to be more comfy than the pillow that is my bladder. So, unless he flips - and yes, I will make sure to have an ultrasound before going under the knife - this baby will be delivered the good old-fashioned way: much pain and bodily fluids on my part, many cigars and martinis on my husband's part.

And a double THANK YOU THANK YOU to everyone who read through that monster post that was not about bats, and to eveyrone who offered their sympathy, empathy and camaradarie. And blueberry Stoli.

I've calmed down a bit since the orignal incident. I think rabies shots do that to you.

Anyway, I just wanted to acknowledge all the wonderful comments and the support I've been receiving over the past few days, both on-line and in "real life".

Although, the two do blur at times.

Most times.

But...you know...thank you. Sincerely.


And now to write that bat post.

And then have a baby.

IT'S GREAT TO BE BACK!

Phew!

I was having serious, serious, Internet withdrawal.

What to do with all this time on my hands?

Some days I’d aimlessly wander around the house in a sort of unplugged daze until I found myself just sitting in front of my computer staring wistfully into the dark screen. Occasionally, I’d turn it on and move the colorful icons around - sometimes organizing them according to width and height, sometimes just going for a random but aesthetically pleasing desktop pattern - but always absently wondering what it is I used to do with my computer before the Internet. By day five, I had rediscovered solitaire, and then a day later, another version of solitaire called Spider Solitaire. I’m now up to playing with six decks, but it’s just not the same as a daily dose of Rude Pundit or Bitch Ph.D. And the suicide kings just made me think of how much I missed reading I Blame The Patriarchy.

And you may not know this, but here at Chateau Halushki we don’t subscribe to cable television, either. And no local access unless you open the garage door, stand on one foot, and hold the TV antenna at a 45 degree angle in a northwesterly direction, 40.13N and 77.01W to be exact. I’ll tell you all about our television eschewing some other time. For now, it’s only important to know that for the past twelve-ish days my only access to weather forecasts, news, and entertainment has been the radio.

That guy on NOAA Weather Radio All Hazards has some sexy voice, let me tell you. He gives good weather.

But I miss me my radar maps and 10-day forecasts with the little cloud icons.

They make me giggle.

Anyway, I have had a lot on my mind while I was away and need to clear my palate before I launch into a proper blog post. So bear with me. And fasten your seatbelts. This is free association at its most dangerous.


The Weather

Let’s start with the obvious, shall we?

It’s been raining here.

A lot.

A real, real lot. “A lot” in the Biblical sense with arks and floating animals and my kids forgetting to say “Oh my gosh!” and instead saying “Holy Jehovah On A Dingy!” every time we crossed the surging brown waters of the Conodoguinet Creek.

And without access to my radar maps or 10-day forecasts, really, this large amount of water dropping down took me completely by surprise. It was sort of quaint, actually. Sort of an endearing flashback to those days when my grandfather used to forecast the weather in his folksy way by pointing out the upturned leaves on the neighbor’s maple tree, predicting that within the hour we’d have a thunderstorm. Or when he’d pick up a wooly bear caterpillar, examine the width of the stripes, and then tip back his hat and - with the confidence of someone who considered conversing with caterpillars as scientifically sound as reading a textbook on meteorology - declare that the winter would be a long, hard one with many snow days and a late thaw.

Which didn’t matter a whit to me because the nuns would never,
ever, ever cancel school for a snow day. No siree, never. If St. Agatha could suffer having her breasts cut off for refusing to accept customers at a brothel, and St. Lucy withstand being enucleated, burned and then stabbed to death for not accepting her pagan bridegroom (and on top of being a pagan, I hear that he also smelled of wet oxen), then by Mary, Joseph and the Blessed Infant, you better believe that you’ll be walking to school in five feet of snow in nothing but your plaid skirt, knee socks and a snorkel jacket. And when you get there, you’ll start the morning with a joyful prayer of thanksgiving that you had knees at all, followed by a prayer of forgiveness for coveting the public school students’ pagan snow day celebration when your good father has been saving pennies in a rice bowl and sacrificing new leather shoes, and your sainted mother making due with her tattered undergarments with the stretched out elastic bands and all just to pay for your Catholic education.

And there’s no way to segue back to the current local flooding after all that, but I warned you that this would be a bumpy ride.

Anyway, it’s been like that with our media blackout.

Surprise! It’s sunny!

Surprise! It’s cloudy!

Surprise! There’s two feet of water and a family of beavers in your basement!

I suppose I could have learned a little down-home weather forecasting from my grandfather if I had really paid attention. But I think that I once saw him put raw onions under his armpits to ward off the flu, so I took all his down -home hocus pocus with a grain of caterpillar dung.

And before I move on to the next random note, I have to tell you something truly hilarious:

At the same time we were being soaked to our skivvies with just about all the water we could bear to soak up (and I have pretty large skivvies, let me tell you), the Pennsylvania-American Water Company announced that the water from our faucets - the water we actually did want in our house - we couldn’t use.

That’s right.

Water, water everywhere, but just not from our sink.

My lordy, my sides are splitting just thinking about it.

Oh, we had the option of boiling the tap water and stockpiling it for cooking, brushing teeth, washing dishes, drinking, and so on. Other than that, welcome to New Delhi what with the monsoons and the dicey drinking water and the electricity just coming and going as it darn well pleased.

Luckily, because I am a doomsday fanatic and get all warm and fuzzy thinking about all things end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it, I had about 20 gallons of bottled water already stockpiled in the basement. (I’m planning on a very short doomsday.) I began collecting my H20 shortly after the last Pennsylvania-American Water Company fiasco when some employee tripped over his drooling lower lip and accidentally knocked 372 gallons of hydroflurosilic acid into the water system. That’s fluoride to you and me, and let me tell you, I can now crush steel pipes between my front teeth. It’s a great party trick.

So yeah, good times.

I’ve dried out a bit, but am now re-moistening in the 99% humidity. And gosh-golly-gee, being enormously 8-months pregnant during all this?

I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

For the first time in my life, I’ve had to use antiperspirant under my boobs and between my thighs, and man oh man, I’ve never felt more like a woman.


Other Randomness

Girth
My daughters approached me with a tape measure and asked to measure me belly. Prima was concerned that the tape measure was only 3 feet long and that it wouldn’t reach all the way around. I rolled my eyes (because sometimes kids only understand sarcasm) and told her to get real.

And then, as she measured me, we quickly ran out of tape measure.

The girls rolled their eyes at each other and said they’d be back with something longer. They returned with the 300-cubit measure I was using to build our ark.


Zucchini
Right about now, most everyone who has planted a little vegetable garden in their backyard will soon be knocking on your front door looking slightly wild-eyed and bearing gifts of zucchini.

If you live in any of the recently flooded areas, the quantity of zucchini they will be trying to unload on you will be massive. Huge, green tubers the size of The Jolly Green Giant’s…forearm. And the zucchini-bearers will be a bit more than wild-eyed. In fact, you may be accepting zucchini at gun point.

I recommend this site for recipes.

And remember, zucchini bread freezes real good. I have a Mennonite recipe that includes something like forty eggs and ten cups of sugar, and really, you don’t try to go the healthy route with this stuff. You’re going to be eating a lot of zucchini. Make it fun.

Of course, those real big zucchinis might be hard to chaw on no matter what form. In that case, here’s a few other creative ideas.


Some of my favorites are

“Spray paint them a lovely gold and arrange them into a festive wreath a-la-Martha Stewart. Top with a wonderful red velvety bow. (I just know she's going to steal this idea). ~ Brenda “

“Give the really big ones to my mechanic husband to put behind the wheels of the car, on a hill. ~ Eileen “

“Invent a zucchini gun (like the spud gun, only longer calibre & longer range). ~ Mrs. Corvette “

And for the college-aged children living in your basement, they may find that in a pinch, a large zucchini and a few carrots can be fashioned into a refreshing summertime bong, like so (except of course with a zucchini, not a pineapple):



Kids! Who Knew!

Babies are wonderful. So soft and innocent and a joy to behold.

And toddlers! Oh the joy of toddlers and their endless creativity and open-armed, chubby-fingered hugs.

Sigh.

Little kids. There just ain’t nothing like ‘em.


But lets get real for a second.

At some point - after all the diaper changes and scrubbing crayon off the walls and slathering peanut butter on bread for the 135, 006th time - you begin to wonder

“Sure, these kids are great and all. But what’s in it for me? When is the big payoff?”

Well, friends, for me it happened a few days ago.

Now, my kids are 5 and 7-years-old, so granted, I’ve put in a lot of years in the doesn’t -do-much-more-than-a-loaf-of-bread stage and then the “NO! DON’T LICK THE OUTLET” stage and then the holy-tantrums-when-is-Kid Jekyll-going-to-turn-human stage. Even up until a few weeks ago, I was walking around the house ranting that some children were treating mommy like Cinderella, and Prince Charming wasn’t off work to save her until another five hours, and if they wanted a second snack they could darn well fix it themselves or wait until the talking mice appeared to fix it for them.

But that's all changed.

One rainy day, while liberating yet another wall from its evil wallpaper, I was interrupted by my darling darlings and their plaintive plea of

“Weeeee’rrrreeeeeee boooorrrreeeeeeedddddd. Whhhhhhaaaatttttt ccccaaaaannnnn wwweeeee ddooooooooo?”

Music to a mother’s ears. Really. Like tiny crystal bells…scraping across a blackboard.

I turned back to my DIF and my scraper and huffed, “I’m working. It’s Saturday. Go find the other parent.”

“Buuuuuttttt weeeeeeeeeee wwwwwaaaaaaaannnnnntttt tttooooooo heeeeeellllllllpppppp!”

Now, normally, I’m not fooled by this. Normally, “we want to help” means either “we’ll help for two minutes and then go chase the cat” or it means "we’ll help until the 'help' becomes chaos' " and now a ten minute job has become two hours of damage control as Mommy scrapes pancake batter from the ceiling.

But for some reason - some moment of weakness or inspiration or delirium - I said

“Okay. You can help.”

And after stripping them down to their skivvies and handing them spray bottles of hot water and plastic scrapers, they got down to the job of soaking the walls, soaking each other, and peeling off the paper and throwing it on the floor.

EUREKA!

Water and destruction!

The perfect kid job!

And the toilet in the room provided hours of good-natured ribbing in the form of “You’re next to the potty! You’re next to the potty! Potty girl! Potty girl!” and nostalgic stories about the time that so-and-so threw up macaroni and cheese in the potty and the other time that whosit didn’t put the seat down and fell into the potty butt first…

And during that time, they stripped the paper from two entire walls.


I love my children.

I can’t wait until this next one is old enough to grade the backyard.



So, that’s some of what I’ve been up to while sans Internet.

For now, the baby is still staying put which is good. He’s only 35 weeks along and we still need to spackle and paint, put together a crib, bust out tile, wash baby clothes, clean the gutters, buy more diapers, and replace the subfloor of the bathroom.

(I wonder if we can use zucchini to do that?)

Ah, nesting!

In the meantime, if anyone wants to watch my kids for me while I’m tackling my nest, they come with their own spray bottles and scrapers. Take advantage of the offer while they still think that wallpaper removal is fun.



(In her comments to this post, Her Bad Mother mentions a, uhm, genital-sized vegetable. It would be this one. I have no idea whether it's organic or not.)

Mother of the Week

What?

What the…?!

After all my moaning and whining about not receiving any blue ribbons or tiaras or certificates of achievement since grade school, I suddenly find myself thrust into the limelight by the good women of Crazy Hip Blog Mamas.

(Okay, okay…maybe squeaky wheel gets the grease.)

Truly, truly I am honored.

I love writing and it’s wonderful to know that somewhere out there is someone - a small bunch of someone’s - who is reading and enjoying what I’m putting down. Award or no, anytime a reader tells me that I’ve made them laugh or giggle or crack a smile, I feel a little more sure that I’ve somehow earned the bit of Halushki-shaped real estate that I take up on this planet, that I’m not using up precious oxygen for no good reason.

So, sincerely, from the bottom of my laptop, thank you all very much.


Now…what a week to be voted Mother of the Week.

Tomorrow Today (damned procrastination -- Ed.) is Seconda’s birthday party and I had intended to go all Martha Stewart with the theme of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, creating pink tulle wings for all the girls and angel food cupcakes decorated in butter cream icing with the likeness of Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth and Mustardseed. The party was to begin at twilight as my husband, dressed as Puck, pranced about the yard twittering upon his pan flute while the girls danced barefoot beneath rosy arbors, the fireflies darting hither and thither amongst flaxen ringlets. We’d have played well-organized games of Higgeldy-Figgeldy and Twirls O’ Twinkles and Loop-the-Lolly-Loo, and then as the last rays of sunshine slanted through the white pines… There! Appearing through the evening mists! A white unicorn with glittering rainbow hooves!

Oh such laughter and squeals of delight were never heard before!

A birthday party to remember and, verily, the work of a Mother of the Week!


However, that a party like that would take a lot of planning.

And money.

And a unicorn.

And lately, I haven’t had the energy to encourage my daughters change from their pajamas before noon, let alone convince my husband to dress like a goat-footed piper.

It’s hot here. And humid. And I have someone’s feet in my lungs making it very difficult to do anything other than huff and puff from chair to chair and sigh, “Honey, get Mama a glass of sweet tea, there’s a dear.”

So, I’ve slacked-off and the party will instead be themed Fairy Free-For-All. The guests will arrive around dinner time, eat pizza, make flowered fairy wands, and then be encouraged to run wild for an hour and a half, perhaps occasionally beating each other with the wands. There will be some tears, much laughing, and if all goes well, around sunset the cat will make an appearance from beneath the shrubbery and the girls will commence to chase it through the yard for the final half hour. We’ll sing Happy Birthday and cut the Tinkerbell cake that I ordered from the Giant supermarket, after which it will be just about time to hand over eight sugar-crazed, wand-wielding fairies to their parents, and time for me to sit down again, long and hard and with a “whoompf” sound.


On second thought, both parties sound like fun, don't they?

Who doesn’t love beating other party guests with wands?

I never liked Loop-the-Lolly-Loo, anyway. As a child. I was always lollying instead of looping, and next thing you know I was on my butt with a patent leather party shoe in the punch.

So maybe, after all, this is a good week to be awarded the Mother of the Week title.

I mean, I don’t want to set the bar to high for myself.

In fact, now that I’ve been bestowed the title MOTW, I can relax a little.

Next birthday, the party theme will simply be “MUD!”


****************************

In other news, I need to mention that my Internet service is down completely. Oh the irony of receiving a blog award and having no access to my blog! It’s kinda funny if you think about it.

Okay, it’s not.

At this time, however, I do also need to mention that Verizon.net DSL customer service SUCKS GOAT FEET!

Pardon my French. I’m sorry I couldn’t be more poetic, what with just being recognized with a blog writer award and all.

My darling husband is at this moment doing me the biggest of favors by posting this entry from an undisclosed location which is not where he works. (Hi Honey! Thank you!) (As Vito Corleone once said, someday - and that day may never come - I'll call upon you to do a service for me. But until that day, accept this justice as a gift on my daughter's wedding birth day. -- Ed.)

I should be up-and-running again in seven to ten days, although I may be able to post now and again from the library. We’ll see. I suppose that I should also let people know that I’m also without email. How quaint! It’s like being Amish except without the bonnets and mules.

In the meantime - and in the spirit of Mother-of-the-Week-ness - here are a few links to blog entries gone by in which I wax poetic (sometimes literally) about that thing I do and do and do and do and do. Peruse at your convenience throughout the next few days. Don’t gobble these down all at once because I‘m not cooking any more tonight, what do you think I'm running here, a diner?

Whoops!

See what a great mom I am? I just can’t stop myself.


Enjoy!

In which I write a poem about doing laundry

In which I take my children to Hershey Park on Good Friday and feel the wrath of God

In which I introduce my daughters to Speed Racer

In which I have a panic attack at the beach

In which my 4yo wrecks my car and says the "Sh" word

In which we go to Disney World and I don’t choke anyone

A Perfect Post. ACK! ACK! ACK!

Did I ever mention how much I love an award?

I think I did.

Yup. I did. Here it is where I mention my deep affection for awards.

Sure, I also go on and on about how the last time I got an award I was wearing a plaid uniform and standing before the Catholic Daughters reading my winning essay “Why God Doesn’t Want Me To Be An Altar Girl”. We were a little slow on Vatican II back in my hometown.

Anyway, if there’s nothing I like more than getting awards, it’s giving awards. I could give an award once a day. I think everyone should get an award for something or other. And to those who say, “Giving out awards for every burp and sniff only cheapens awards altogether and makes them meaningless” I can only reply with a hearty and heartfelt “Here! Here’s your award for being The Biggest Killjoy Downer Poopy Head! Enjoy it! Or don’t! Congratulations!”

Now this particular award I’m handing out today is for The Perfect Post, meaning a post on a blog. It’s sponsored by Petroville , and I’d like to first hand them an award for “Most Headscratching Blog Name”. Petroville? I’m not sure what it means, but I think it’s one of those smells you either love or hate. And I love it. Runners-up, of course, go to Finslippy and my sister’s Almost Quintessence , both of which keep me awake at night trying to untangle the puzzle of their monikers. These blog names are like so many copies of Da Vinci Code wrapped around a Rubik’s Cube inserted into a childproof bottle full of tangram shapes and then locked in my powder room. Because once that door gets locked, there’s no getting back in unless you remove the door from the hinges. What I can’t figure is that the door doesn’t even have a lock. And yet it does lock.

So, The Perfect Post.

My Perfect Post for May is being awarded to the lovely and talented Ms. Julie of The Ravin’ Picture Maven for her post What scares me? Jokes and science experiments


Now, what do I look for in a Perfect Post, you might ask.

Honestly, I don’t know.

I mean, I'm handing out my very first Perfect Post award, and I have no set criteria. I sort of based this month’s choice on a mood and a moment and my serious appreciation of a splendid use of interjections in the awarded post. Like so:

“ACK! ACK! ACK!”

One ACK! is so obviously not enough. Two ACK!’s, now that’s good. That first ACK! catches you, but it happens so quickly that you just need to hear it again, hear the exploding then stopped-up disgust of it all. And, normally, you’d think “Whew! Two ACK!’s I can end right here and feel as if I’ve really had an encounter in this post. Those ACK!’s are going to stick with me till dinner time. Now that’s writing!”

But, hold up. Hold the phone.

Who in their right mind would add -you know what I’m going to say, and you still can’t believe it, I know - who but the most crazy and foolhardy of writers would dare mess with perfection and add on, yes, a third “ACK!”, throwing caution and convention to the wind in four quick strokes of the keyboard. It’s too much. Too much bravado. Too much of a good thing. Too much flashy flaunting of the rules and elements of style and don’t we all know it.

Or…or do we?

Yeah, Julie’s crazy alright.

Crazy like a fox.

“ACK! ACK! ACK!”

Hemingway never did it better. Hemingway in “For Whom The Bell Tolls” with his lazy two “ACK!”s in chapter four, and then in the final chapter he goes all Faulkner with four “ACK!s”, and really that’s where he lost me as a reader.


Okay…let me get all seriously here for a moment.

Seriously. You gotta go read Julie’s post.

It’s a perfect recap of one of those parenting days we’ve all had. Maybe not specifically the princess-in-the-toilet part, but here, this part:

The elder says, "It's a science essperiment, Mom! What will happen when you flush a barbie in the potty! And it's a joke cuz it's SO FUNNY!" More shrieking laughter.

My hand is somewhere over my eyes as my brain endeavors to process What Is Happening Here.

The children get quiet. Uh oh. No laughing mom. They wait, will Screaming Banshee mom emerge, or the scarier version: Very Quietly Furious Mom?

Quietly Furious Mom emerges. The truth is, this is Incident #12 of the day. Mom has no more energy for mad.

You know that feeling, right? You know what Julie's saying:

If the princess got dipped in the toilet at 10AM, if this were the first incident of the day, Mommy might suppress a giggle, maybe need to put on her “stern mommy” face so as not to let on just how fascinating it actually is to watch a doll spinning in a toilet. Sort of the thing you might pay money to see at MoMA or on late-night cable TV.

But, when it’s been one of those days?

You know, one of THOSE days. One of those days that started with your kids cracking 12 eggs to make an omelet and moved headlong into doggy haircuts and then sister haircuts and then measuring the perimeter of the house with a roll of paper towels and it’s still only 10AM….

Then, after all that, you are called in to witness the princess spinning in the toilet and it’s like staring into the parenting equivalent of The Eye of Sauron. You feel your soul (and possibly your college degree) being sucked-out right through your own pupils.

And the only thing that might possibly save you, the only thing that makes it even a little bit better, gets you through to another day…oh hell, the next “parenting moment“…is the knowledge that you can tell someone about it (someone beside the hearing-impaired parent).

You can blog about it.

And someone will hear you and answer. Someone out there. Another parent will read along with you, nodding her head in agreement, knowing that she too has stared into the abyss and has felt the utter aloneness of a spinning-toilet-princesses or a 12-egg omelet.

And that other parent will reach out her hand (or his hand, let‘s be fair) and pull you back from utter despair (and morning martini number three) with those five healing words of salvation through supreme empathy:

“Me too, sister. Me, too.”

So go read the Ravin’ Picture Maven. Read her Perfect Post and read some more. She currently has up a knee-slapper about eating at Denny’s.

And don’t forget to give her a hearty high-five and, of course, a “Me too, sister”.

Because we all have a long day ahead of us.

ACK! ACK! ACK!

Enjoy your award!

And thank you for telling it like it is.

Write On, Allomom!

HerBadMother has put out the call for big Internet love and hugs and sloppy kisses to all those mothers we seriously dig and who we first met via the Apple. Or Windows. The Mother Board. The Mother Ship. The big cyber-bunco parlor, out there, somewhere.

She's directed us to heap a helping of love on some of the fabulous moms we first met in pixilated text, bonded with through words on a screen before we ever - if ever - met face-to-face, bob-to-ponytail, minivan-to-sedan, lowrise-to-Lee Rider, pump-to-hillbilly barefoot. That woman we befriended, learned to admire and respect through her cogent, sometimes shoot-from-the-hip wordsmithing of “what is on my mind”, and not because of what was on her behind.

Or the size of said behind.

C’mon, now.

We all have knee-jerk reactions to the woman in the minivan, the woman with nineteen kids, the woman who scrapbooks and makes muffins from homegrown wheat, the woman who carries a briefcase in one hand and an infant in the other, the woman who shows up at the PTO meeting with tattoos and dreadlocks - or tattoos and a wallet with a chain strapped to her dungarees - the unmarried pregnant-again woman, the woman whose partner is another woman, the woman who never smiles, the woman who laughs too loudly, the woman who just doesn’t look like anyone we’ve ever met before, who does that thing that is different, that we don’t immediately understand. We have those snap reactions that maybe, sometimes, prevent us from buddying-up because something on the outside puts that mom firmly into the “one of them there kind of moms” cubbyhole instead of leading us to think “Whatever. I bet we both like grape Kool-Aid.”

Well, I do, anyway.

I mean, I like grape Kool-Aid, but I also have the knee-jerkies.

My knees are faster than my brain.

But that's all changing for me. One blog entry at a time. One new online-writer discovery at a time. One message board discussion at a time, whether a sharp, point-counterpoint debate on women’s health issues replete with JAMA links, or a meandering discussion on whether or not to wash a pacifier once it hits the ground....

This is supposed to be about Mother’s Day, right?

Or, Allomothers’ Day.

Okay, let me swing it back around. Grab a seat.

Well, you know, yes of course…my thoughts about motherhood, my ideas and ideals have been tested and stretched, my understanding challenged and broadened, my levels of tolerance, well…a little more tolerating, my comfort zone redecorated with a few more beanbags, a few of those art-is-painful Philippe Starck chairs for those times I need to sit up straight and pay attention. But it hasn’t been just one kind of mother, one sort of woman, doing the poking and prodding. It hasn’t even been women with children who have made me consider long and hard my definitions of "mother", my feelings, who - through their words - have forced me into accommodating revisions, shaking out the rugs, or even in our disagreements saying, “you know, you made me think.”

Which is a rare feat in and of itself during the humdrum hum of my “mommymommymommmymommymommmymommy” and pick-up-toy/sock/dish/shoe/cat/another toy/paperpaperpaper/etc.-and-transport-to-another-spot-
in-house-again-and-again-and-again days.

But, yeah, allomother.

I just learned that word while reading a book about evolution’s effects on motherhood. I’m so proud of myself. For the first time in a long time, I’m reading something that requires me to reference a dictionary five times in each paragraph, and I’m sticking with it, and I’m not even being graded or trying to impress the cute TA with the ironically hip facial hair.

Allomothers are, in simplest terms, all those other women in our life who also take care of our children; but even more simply, who enable us to better do our jobs as parents. As mothers.

And many of the most important allomoms in my life, the women who have helped me and who are continuing to inspire, educate and challenge me to be even gooder…uh, better…are women who I’ve “met” on the Net.

And at this point, I’ve rambled on long enough, so let me just get to the good stuff and point you, Dear Reader, in the direction of some of my favorite Cyber Chicks, Broads of the Infobahn, Damsels of the Databoard, and Muthers spelt with a CPU.

First, if you lookie to the sidebar there, you’ll see a long list of links to blogs by women, many of whom I first met over 5 years ago on the message and debate boards of an evil empire called I-Village. I think about these women daily. I used to say things to my “real life” friends like, “There’s this woman I know from the Internet and who has a baby who won’t sleep for more than 5 minutes in a row, and we were talking…er…I mean…writing…and uh….” And of course, my real life friends would fear for me, thinking that I was unknowingly consorting with axe murderers and 80-year-old men pretending to be soccer moms.

However, now when I mention Julie’s gorgeous professional photography or her work with Katrina victims, or Kaliroz’s writing and her skyrocketing success toward becoming the Queen of All Media, or the woman who is my favorite cross between Rock-and-Roll and Donna Reed, I no longer say, “this mom I know from the Internet who I never met, but, like, we‘re on this message board together and I read her blog and, uh, well, I feel like I know her and okay, why are you looking at me like I just told you I turned over my credit card numbers to some nice looking man I just met at a bus stop….”

Instead of that, I just say:

“Hey, let me tell you about my fabulous friend!”

And I just did.

And now, I’m going to put a few more in the spotlight, if I may.


Lemon Parade

“I was not feeling the sunshine by 6:30 p.m. EST, and when Lemony Mutt spit my running shoe out at my feet - minus a lace and a tongue - at 6:35 I was really not in the Happy Place. I parked my ever-expanding ass down right there in the kitchen with the carcass of my shoe and started chanting.

'My head will not explode. My head will not explode. My head will not explode.' "

This gal kicks butt when it comes to doing the one-word-after-another thing.

Here she is raising a teenage daughter, getting it spelled-out straight that she’s right on target when it comes to raising a teenage daughter: She’s Too Good For Him Anyway

Here she is getting her kids to poop in Tupperware and ruminating on just how lucky we are to be able to take clean water and Peidalyte pops for granted: Not Your Average Bug

Here’s her youngest child taking after her mother in the best way possible: Hands Off The Mumma

And here she is in the midst of caring for her beloved friend, a friend who eventually died during his battle against AIDS: Something To Fight

This is one woman who lives life out loud from A-Z and who arranges those letters like no one else.

Now, get thee to the Lemons. Sweet, tangy, and always delicious.


View From The Valley

“But I've recently had an incredibly freeing, liberating realiza