Twenty-nine days! That’s how long I’ve been living life without writing about it. Well, I still write about the food I eat, but I haven’t been writing about, you know, my vagina or my kids or my bastard husband. I’m not going to lie, I haven’t missed the pressure of feeling like I should write something, but I have noticed recently that while I’m going about my day I’m writing blog posts IN MY HEAD. Clearly, I miss this blogging thing. Not that that means I will update regularly again. Don’t get your hopes up, is what I’m saying. You know, if you are even there anymore! And I wouldn’t blame you one bit if you weren’t!

In other non-blogging news, my most recent written in my head blog post was about how I’m a total douche-bag. Yesterday it was cold and rainy and slippery outside, so what did I do? I decided to get the mail, because like I said, douche-bag. Out I go, wearing my pajamas (because if I am at home, I am in my pajamas. Always.), snow boots, and winter coat. I was looking hot is what I’m saying. So, there I am, at the mailbox when the neighbor comes outside and just stands on his front porch and stares at me. Weird, right? I just ignored him and turn to walk back up the driveway and did I mention it was icy out there? My feet start sliding around and I’m trying desperately to hang on to the mail and keep my balance and save face in front of the asshole neighbor, but no. The next thing I know, I’m laying on the ice, which is rather wet and cold I might add, on my back with my feet up in the air. I don’t know how to react so I just…laugh. Loudly. The neighbor proceeds to tell me that it’s slippery out there (big no shitter, right there) and I should walk in the snow.

So, yeah. That was humiliating.

And, really, I think that’s all I’ve got. A month away from the blog and I come back to tell you that I slipped on some ice. Scintillating, isn’t it?

Here, have a couple pictures:

Cindy-Lu, who happens to have just turned five, looking all pretty and smiley to hide the fact that she is actually an angry, hormonal teenager who would like to roll her eyes at you and then eat your face off.

Eeyore, who is still the sweetest kid ever even though he still hasn’t quite perfected his aim while peeing standing up,  looking irritated with me for insisting that he stand still long enough for me to snap this photo. And probably also irritated about me telling the internet he has bad aim.

My cat is currently outside hanging off the window screen and meowing to be let in. Rather than remove myself from underneath my laptop and let the poor frozen kitty inside, I decided to blog. It’s been awhile, yo.

I think the reason for the blogging is partially Cleatus’s fault. Remember when I used to bitch and complain about him all the effing time? Man, those were the days. He truly has been like some kind of Super Husband lately. HE EVEN BOUGHT ME A NIKON D90 FOR CHRISTMAS. And let me have it two weeks ago because the sound of my whining was about to puncture his ear drum because he loves me so much. Seriously. Super Husband.

However! This morning I woke up on the grumpy side and DO YOU KNOW WHAT, INTERNET? I feel like bitching about Cleatus. Do you know what he did? He came home from work after a 12 hour shift and opened the little cubby/drawer thing where he keeps his keys and wallet and other crap and he put his wallet inside BUT LEFT HIS KEYS SITTING ON TOP OF THE SHELF and! HE LEFT THE CUBBY/DRAWER OPEN. Clearly he doesn’t deserve to live. If he weren’t in bed sleeping right this minute, I’d go in there and fart on his pillow. I guess I’ll just have to settle for farting on his toothbrush.

(Notice how the things I am bitching about now are really only minor inconveniences and I even go ahead and give him credit for the 12 hour work shift? What the hell happened to me? Where did my anger go? I want it back.)

Oh! One more rant (not about Cleatus though, something is wrong with meeeeee!). I listed my old camera on Craigslist, because you know, Cleatus is awesome and super and he bought me a new one. So, some guy was interested in one of the lenses that I had listed and he asked me to come to his tattoo shop(!) to show it to him. Now, I have nothing against tattoos. You go ahead and cover your entire face with a big tweety bird tattoo, see if I care. It’s just…tattoo shops (parlors? Are they called tattoo parlors?) are not my place. I don’t belong, is what I’m saying. I’m a 27-going-on-80 year old frumpy mom who writes a blog, for fuck’s sake. I was feeling out of place before I even got out of the safety of my car.

Anyway, long story short, I stood in there while he bashed my lens around and generally acted like he had never seen a camera lens before in his life (newsflash: you should be GENTLE with them. They are fragile and made of glass and oh my fuck, dude, quit trying to jam it on your camera the wrong way.) and soaked up the smell of incense and biker dude into my clothing. I really hope that smell comes out, because like I said before: frumpy mom with a blog. I do not need to smell like I ride a Harley and smoke dope, thank you.

(I apologize for all the stereotyping in the above paragraph. He just FIT THE STEREOTYPE, OKAY?)

And, all that to say, he didn’t even buy the lens, WHICH I KNEW HE WOULDN’T, because he needed a lens for taking pictures of tattoos, which would be difficult with the 70-300 lens I had for sale. DUH.

Oh, and did I mention that I got the Nikon D90 yet? Squeeeee!

And also:

Y’all sick of pictures of my kids yet?

I’m a big fan of shopping. It’s fun, you get to bring home shiny things, you get exercise from all the walking around and toting heavy bags (heh), and it makes me happy. I’m a shopper.

Once, twice, sometimes even three times a year I go on a shopping trip with my mom and aunt. We head out of town, stay in a hotel and eat at yummy restaurants, and shop until our feet are so sore that we are all in tears. It’s fun!

Obviously, my daughter is destined for great shopping success, right?

Cindy-Lu never really cared one way or the other about it until recently. She got her ears pierced and now “the earring store” (Claire’s) is her favorite place in the world. She picks out earrings and hair pretties and Disney princess paraphernalia. She loves to go to Old Navy and browse their selection of tights (the girl loves to wear tights). The other day I took her in a Justice for Girls store just to look around (the sizes are all too big for her) and she walked in, looked around the room and breathed “Oh, Mommy! Isn’t this store lovely?”

She’s a shopper.

I really wasn’t too worried about it until this morning. You see, we’ve been getting a lot of toy catalogs in the mail recently and the kids both love to go through and circle the toys they want Santa to bring them. I was flipping through one of the catalogs this morning to see what the damage was and there I saw it. An ad featuring a woman standing in a pile of toys wearing gold high heels. Cindy-Lu didn’t circle a single toy on that ad. She circled the gold high heels.

As Cleatus said when I showed him the ad, “We are so screwed.”

I know you’re all dying to hear what happened with The Neighbor and His Hose (which could totally be the title of a porn movie, right?) and so I will tell you.

I sat here and I read each comment that came through about my neighbor and how I should handle the situation. I laughed at some of the sillier suggestions and I nodded and shook my fist in the direction of my neighbor’s house at some of the “slit his hose with your pocketknife” type comments. I did nothing though. I just sat and stared out the window at the hose and I got angrier and angrier and finally, FINALLY, I shouted at Cleatus that I couldn’t take it anymore.

“Go out there and pick that hose up and throw it back into his yard!” I said, sounding not at all crazy.

“Um. Okay,” Cleatus agreed in the tone one would use with an upset patient in a mental facility.

“And don’t just gently lay it on the ground either! Make sure you throw it! Throw it hard!” I gave up pretending that all is well with my mind. Clearly, I have gone insane.

I stood at the window and watched while Cleatus marched out there and picked that hose up and threw it (THREW IT!) into the neighbor’s yard. I felt so much better until I started feeling like a douche.

I mean, really. How old am I? Couldn’t I have just let it go?

No. No, I couldn’t.

I stopped feeling guilty about it pretty quickly and I decided to just stick with hating the neighbor.

WE DIDN’T EVEN TRICK OR TREAT AT HIS HOUSE.

You don’t want to make me angry, y’all. I will just skip right by your house on Halloween. Screw you and your grumpy old man candy. We don’t need it or want it and you can’t make us have it. So there.

AND THEN!

This morning I was sitting in the house feeling all happy that the hose situation had been taken care of (he’s now draining the ditch into his own front yard, the fucking moron.) when I glanced out the window just to enjoy the view of a ditch water free front yard when, lo, my neighbor was blocking the view. He was blocking the view because he was using a leaf blower to blow all of his motherfucking leaves into our front yard.

A little thing I like to call PROOF.

He blew his leaves out of his yard, across our driveway, and into our yard. There is a big ass pile of leaves all down the edge of our driveway.

I fully expect to look out the window later this afternoon to see him standing there pissing all over our lawn.

Seriously, y’all. My life has just gone DOWN HILL. I never expected to be THIS person. This crazy, psychotic, obsessive person. But I am. And it’s all my neighbor’s fault.

Some of you may remember way back in May when I bitched about having to repair the drainage pipe that ran under our driveway from our neighbor’s ditch to ours. If you don’t remember, the short story is that our neighbor is a fucking loon and he decided that his ditch wasn’t draining as fast as he’d like, so he called some company out to auger the pipe thingy that ran under our driveway. He did this without our permission. The company put a hole in the pipe and caused it to collapse so the neighbor’s ditch pretty much stopped draining altogether. He asked us to fix it, we told him no. He was the one who had broke it, so if it bothered him he could call that same company and ask them to come and fix it. He called the city instead. (Did I say this was a short story? I lied.) The city said that we had to fix it within two weeks or they would charge us eleventy trillion dollars. We fixed it.The city inspected it and called it good.

The end!

Except it wasn’t the end. Our neighbor’s ditch STILL wasn’t draining properly and I know, who cares. It’s a ditch. It’s sole purpose is to give rain water a place to live, right? Why are we getting all worked up about the rain water in the ditch?

But our neighbor, the bastard, is very concerned about his ditch having water in it when it rains. It drains on it’s own within a day of it raining, so it’s not like he has a fucking pond or anything, he just has a bit of RAIN WATER, OH MY FUCKING GOD.

Where was I? Oh, yes. Rain water. In the ditch.

So, my neighbor goes out and buys some sort of pump thing and hooks it up to his water hose. And then, oh God, every time it rains he proceeds to get in his wheelchair and wheel himself across his yard in the pouring rain to hook this pump up and he lays the hose so that water from his ditch drains riiiiight at the edge of our driveway.

It’s our property 18 inches over from our driveway, so he is clearly on our property. Now, honestly, I have better things to stress over than fucking rain water, but oh my god. He is doing this JUST TO MAKE ME INSANE, I JUST KNOW IT. Anytime it rains I spend the day staring out my window at the fucking hose and muttering insults about old people needing to GET A GOD DAMNED LIFE.

Clearly his evil plan is working.

Now, my question to you, all two one of you who stuck with me and read this fucking novel about RAIN WATER, FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST, please answer me this. Would you be the bigger person and just ignore it? Or would you haul your ass over there and stomp all over his fucking rain hose and then shove the fucking thing down his ugly wrinkled old man throat so that he chokes on the dreaded rain water? Or, option C, would you just be all tra la la, just out for a stroll in the rain and I noticed your hose accidentally drifted onto my property, let me gently toss that back into your yard in a friendly manner?

I’m leaning towards option C, but I have a feeling that he’ll come out of the house and start bitching about how that rain water is supposed to drain into my yard anyway, so WHAT IS MY FUCKING PROBLEM and at that point I will lose my ever loving mind and end up killing him anyway, so I should just go ahead with option B, right?

Today I took my kids shopping. We were shopping for FIVE hours. Now, five hours of shopping sounds quite blissful until you factor in the “I took my kids with me” part and then you realize that five hours is more like torture.

It didn’t matter that my kids were perfect little angels, five hours is just too long for one woman to spend with two children in a shopping mall.

Five hours in a shopping mall with children is also a guarantee that you are going to have to enter at least one public restroom, because, to kids, public restrooms are like amusement parks, only better because of the added fun of germs and me shouting DON’T TOUCH THAT.

Cindy-Lu and I walked in the restroom by the food court and headed to the one stall not occupied. I held the door open for Cindy-Lu and asked her if she could go by herself or if she needed me to squeeze in the tiny little stall with her. Before she could answer me some lady piped up from the next stall that there was pee all over the toilet seat we were about to use and to just wait a minute and we could use her stall.

Um, okay. Sure. I appreciate the thought and I’m certainly glad that Cindy-Lu didn’t stick her hands or butt in someone else’s pee, but I’m a little weireded out by strangers talking to me while they are urinating.

We heeded her advice, however, and just a second later the lady came flying out of the stall, her pants still UNZIPPED and UNBUTTONED as she held the stall door open and gestured to Cindy-Lu to go ahead.

That’s the next logical step in a relationship right? First you pee while talking to each other and then you zip your pants in front of each other. Totally normal way to start a friendship.

NEXT, because of course there is more to this story, the lady proceeded to tell me about a job she used to have that involved cleaning a public toilet and one time some girl got blood all over the seat and didn’t wipe it off and she had to clean it up and OH MY GOD, WHY ARE YOU STILL TALKING TO MEEEEEEE?

And no, she didn’t wash her hands before she left the bathroom.

So. Today was the first day of Vacation Bible School. It was, you know, bible-y. And there were a lot of kids. I was in charge of snacks and games and have you ever tried playing Follow The Leader with a group of three year olds? I don’t recommend it, especially not after loading them up with hawaiian punch and m&m’s. (Let it be noted that I was not in charge of SUPPLYING or CHOOSING the snack, just the adminstering of.)

Some of the kids were cute (not as many as you would think) and some were snotty and screamy. I’d like to state for the record that I have no problems wiping snot off of my children’s faces, sometimes even looking in to the used tissue with a weird sense of satisfaction, but when it comes to other people’s children? Wiping snot from their faces is a bit disgusting. It makes me shudder just thinking of all the snot I squeezed from noses today.

There was one little girl, though, that I fell in love with.  She walked in the room and I about fell over. She reminded me so much of Cindy-Lu when she was younger.  Her sweet little voice, her chubby hands, her sturdy little body. She was a bit of a whiner, just like Cindy-Lu, but she would stop whining the minute I picked her up and cuddled her. I did a lot of cuddling with her. At one point my heart started breaking when I remembered that Cleatus and I would never have another sweet little toddler running around our house, but then one of the screamers wandered over to me and I remembered that I don’t actually like kids, so I put the sweet girl down and went back to my job of pretending to be cheerful and loving towards all the kids. Even the screamy ones.

The highlight of the day was when this adorable little seventh grade helper asked me what grade I was in. Well, either that or getting to stare at the sexy daddy helper that monitored the playground. It’s a toss up.

I just found this in my drafts folder from a couple of months ago:

I’m trying this new thing and it’s actually working kind of well so I thought I’d share it with all of you.

First, you do a load of laundry the normal way. You know, put the clothes in the wash, put the clothes in the dryer. Easy, right? Here’s where it gets tricky! Instead of taking the clothes out of the dryer and moving them to the laundry room floor a laundry basket, you actually take them into the living room or bedroom or wherever and you FOLD them. After you fold them you put them away in the appropriate dresser drawer. It’s really kind of amazing how handy it is to have clothes folded up and put away where they belong instead of in a big heap on the laundry room floor in the laundry basket!

I’m obviously a housekeeping genius, so I thought I’d share my knowledge with you all. I’m using this blog for the greater good, you see.

I don’t think I need to tell you all that the laundry? It is sitting on the laundry room floor in a laundry basket right now. I think I lasted about a week before I realized that it’s really not worth all the extra effort of folding things and putting them away if people are just going to pull them out and then WEAR THEM AND MAKE THEM DIRTY AGAIN. Can you believe the nerve of my family? Wearing my freshly laundered and folded clothes? It’s enough to make a person crazy.

So, now my advice to you is this: Hire a housekeeper.

Have you ever gotten distilled white vinegar in your eyeball? Yep. It feels about like you’d imagine. Kind of tangy and ouchy.

Would you like a flower?

(Yes, I know. Her bangs. I’m trying to grow them out. It is a long and frustrating process.)

Have you been reading Buns In My Oven? Because, dudes, tomorrow I’m going to be giving AN INTERVIEW (via telephone) to a REPORTER for a FANCY CHEF who wants to feature one of my recipes in a COOKBOOK and, oh hi, I’m famous.

If your neighbor broke your drainage pipe that ran under your driveway and then called the city to complain because it wasn’t draining properly EVEN THOUGH IT WAS HIS OWN FUCKING FAULT and then the city told you that you had 14 days to fix the drainage problem or they would start charging you hundreds of dollars each day that it wasn’t done, would you a) murder your neighbor in his sleep, b) break his knee caps, or c) drown him in the dirty ditch water? I’m leaning towards option C. I’ll have Cleatus link to the news story so you can all read about the tragic ditch water drowning while I’m rotting away in a jail cell.

(My laptop is broken. Again. And I would either fix it or buy a new one, but instead I’m spending my money replacing a fucking pipe so that my neighbor doesn’t have to worry about his ditch getting a bit of water in it, because God knows the world would come to an end should someone have to deal with water in their ditch. So, posting may be light for a bit until I have whined so much that Cleatus finally throws his hands up in defeat and hands me the credit card. Don’t worry. He’s weakening.)

Last summer I wrote a post about what a total pain in the ass it was to get the kids ready and going for Vacation Bible School in the middle of summer. They were used to sleeping in and waking them up early for bible school was KILLING me.  Remember that? (That post is actually the most viewed post on this site! Weird, huh? Go back and read it and just try counting all the grammatical/spelling errors! It’s fun!)

And then, do you remember how I went to a wedding once? In a church? And I was all GOD DAMN IT. Outloud. In front of all these church people? Remember?

Even if you don’t take the twenty seconds to click through and read those links, just answer the following questions real quick:

1. Am I church-y?
2. Am I a good role model?
3. Would you trust me with your precious little bible-lovin’ children?
4. Do you think I’ve ever actually read the bible?
5. Is “bible” supposed to be capitalized?

The answers, in case you couldn’t guess, are no, no, I CERTAINLY HOPE NOT, no, and probably.

You can imagine my surprise when I was dropping Cindy-Lu off at preschool, which just happens to be at the church the kids attend with their grandmother, and her preschool teacher, who I love and adore, pulled me aside to ask me a question.

Y’all. I was totally caught off guard. I expected her to ask me to tell Cindy-Lu to quit using the word “hate” so often or to remember to bring Cindy-Lu’s book bag to school with her. Or maybe she’d ask me why the pictures Cindy-Lu draws of her daddy all contain a third leg. Most likely, she’d ask me to tell Cindy-Lu to stop mentioning how it tickles her ‘gina when she jumps up and down.

I did NOT expect her to ask me to help at Vacation Bible School this summer.

Me. At Vacation Bible School.

I think it’s a good sign that my first response was “Oh my gosh, really?” instead of “ARE YOU FUCKING NUTS?”

I just hope I can keep up the good person act for an entire week. Pray for me, internets.