Dear Trash Man,

I wanted to thank you for spilling half of our trash in the street at the end of our driveway during your last pick-up. It was cool that you just left it there, instead of making any attempts at all to get out of your truck and pick it up. I think that it is awesome that all afternoon long my neighbors got to walk by with their dogs sniffing through all of the bags of private trash. Like the several pregnancy sticks with only one line on them. My next door neighbors are sad that I’m apparently not pregnant this month. But then they saw the box of ovulation tests, and they are glad we are still trying. I think that it’s so cool that whenever I walk outside now, the elderly couple across the street look at me like they’re wondering whether or not my husband and I were just getting it on.

I also think it’s rad that everyone saw the 65 Diet Coke cans; which, when you divide that by the seven says since the last trash pick up, shows that I still have a real Diet Coke habit. (Tsk, tsk, not a good habit to have when trying to get pregnant.) Oh and also, why are we not recycling all of those cans? Why are we throwing them in the street? The man three doors down with the black lab wants to know…

And the pre-approved credit applications that I forget to shred, well, all kinds of people are thanking me for those. I mean, we weren’t going to use them… why not put them out there for identity theft??

At least the trash bag with the steroid needles and broken crack pipes made it into the back of your truck, and wasn’t strewn down the street in the direction of the dump… and the daycare center. Thanks for being an A-1 trash guy. You rock.

Love,

Suz

ps- I was never going to tell you this, but I’m ticked enough at you that I’m putting it out there: The mailman is way cuter than you. I wasn’t ever going to say anything so mean, but there it is. 

Jon went in Saturday to the tire place to have new tires put on his car. His tires were bad; completely bald. Metal sticking out of them, in fact. So new tires were bought and paid for, and an alignment was also paid for. But the tire place was too busy to do the alignment on Saturday. Jon was told to bring the car back in on Monday morning, when they could get to it promptly.

Monday morning, of course, was Jon’s first day at his new job. So he and I switched cars for the day and I was instructed to take his car in for the alignment. It was already paid for, I just had to take it in and let them do their thing. Simple, right?

Not exactly.

Because if you’re me, you know that I always, always do poorly in these types of situations. Service people see me coming from miles away. I am that girl.  The girl who doesn’t know that it shouldn’t cost $400 for a certain $6 repair. (It didn’t help, either, that until about 3 years ago, I perpetually looked like a 16 year old.) I have overpaid for almost everything I have ever tried to do on my own. But hey, this time would be different because it was already paid for! All I had to do was drive the car into the stall and sit in the waiting room until it was finished. Very simple. Even for a dumb girl.

But about 20 minutes into my wait, the man comes out to me with a picture showing me the helter-skelter un-alignment of my husband’s wheels. He sighs, like what he is about to tell me is really hard to get out… like the car may have terminal cancer. He shows me the picture, because girls do better with pictures than big words.

He tells me that the “toe” is off by .45 degrees, and that it will be an easy adjustment.

Okay… I’m still waiting for the bad news…

But see this right front wheel? Well, the “camber” is off by a lot. And, because you have ovaries instead of testicles, the only way to fix the camber is to buy an additional ”bolt retro-fit kit”… for $65.

Excuse me?

I said, because you have breasts, it will cost extra to fix. Here, let me show you on a different picture.

He takes me over to a large poster hanging on the wall. It is a picture of a bolt. Ohhhh, riiiight, a bolt… see before when you said bolt I was thinking of something totally different, but now that I’m looking at the picture of the bolt, I totally get it.

I told him to take his manly “bolt retro-fit kit” and shove it up his man-butt.

Not really. But I was thinking it. Dang it, I was not going to come in here for something that should have been a free repair and leave spending a bunch of money. I said, “You know what, this is my husband’s car. If he wants to bring it back in later to have that done — and if it in fact still needs to be done once a man starts driving it again — then he can come in and have it done. ”

Okay, I didn’t exactly say that either. But I said something passive-aggressive and emptied all of the free popcorn from the popcorn machine into my purse. I did not give them any money for anything.

When I got home and showed Jon the picture of the horrible state of his right front  camber and told him what happened he said, “Man, that looks bad. You should have had them do it.”

What a dumb girl. Of course I should have…

It is 5:30pm here (forget the little time stamp at the top of my posts… it’s never correct). I have been asking Zoe since 1:00 this afternoon to clean her room. Plain old asking didn’t work, so I tried a few other things… cajoling, pleading, bribing, and writing up a fancy check list for her, complete with boxes to check. Normally this check list thing really gets her psyched into stuff. But not today, today she’s giving me nothing. And I want to scream. Actually, I kind of was screaming. Well, I wouldn’t really say screaming, but my voice was definitely raised and higher pitched than usual, and I had visions of spanking her ever-lovin hiney. After 4 and a half hours of dodging my requests, and stalling, and more stalling, and five thousand of her “oh-mom-I-just-want-to-ask-you-one-more-thing-before-I-start-cleaning”’s…

I was done, people. Done with it. I told her I didn’t want to hear one more thing, I wasn’t going to answer one more question, I wasn’t going to talk about snacks, or her taking any “breaks” from the cleaning when she got too tired to put away her clean socks. I wanted her to go clean her room. NOW.

So yeah, there was lots of crying. Crying about there was just one more really important thing that she had to tell me. *sob* But I wasn’t buying it, the bee-yotch that I am to my daughter. I told her that she was grounded from TV for the rest of the day and her butt better not leave her room until it was clean.

She slowly walked back the hallway, tears streaming, tiny sobs still chocked up in her throat. Her sweet-head brother walked up to her in the hallway and handed her a note. It said: Here Zoe, I did this 4 you. He opened her bedroom door and ushered her in, and showed her that he had cleaned up nearly half of it while she was out in the family room trying to tell me just one more thing.

“I felt bad that you were crying, Zoe,” he said sweetly.

“I just wanted to tell mommy that I love her….” Zoe said, her voice raising to a squeal.

Yep. Total. Bee-yotch.

(but ps.- her room is still not completely clean.)

Jon was laid off a few weeks back. It was no huge surprise; we knew it was coming at some point. While Jon was a little stressed about the situation, I was calm in the knowledge that my husband is smart, resourceful, good at what he does, and he can really turn on the charm when the situation calls for it. Honestly, I wasn’t too worried about him finding something else. And so it was, emails were coming in left and right offering him interviews. He schmoozed and interviewed and “lunched” and kept his options open. Eventually he decided on a good, solid, stable company with decent pay and great benefits. He told them that he’d start on the 4th, giving him a couple of weeks of “vacation time” with no more worries about where the money was going to come from. A couple of weeks to just relax. That’s when we decided that it’d be a great opportunity for a family vacation. We decided on Disneyland and left for California two days later. It’s possibly the most spontaneous thing we’ve ever done in our married lives. Generally we are more of the slow, boring “planner” types. (Except for all of those times when we didn’t plan…) So we took a nice trip and had fun together, totally recharging the family’s collective batteries.

Last week we returned from California and the kids resumed their normal routine. Jon, though, did not have to resume any sort of routine for another week. And I completely “unroutined” with him. It’s been fabulous! The kids go to bed around 8:30 each night, and Jon and I stay up until all crazy hours, cuddling and watching movies together — the bed overflowing with bags of popcorn and other movie treats. We sit up and blog next to each other, all laptops and pillows and fuzzy socks and not a care in the world. At 8AM the kids get up and I get them ready and take them to school. If it’s not a volunteer day at the school, I come back home and climb back into bed and snuggle a couple of hours more. I pick up Zoe at lunchtime and we go to lunch with Jon, or the three of us go to the Rec. Center and play basketball. We play Guitar Hero. The days are kind of lazy and nice. The house becomes kind of a wreck… but in a good way. Bedtime rolls around again, and the kids go down, and we stay up and watch Seinfeld and Good Eats and all types of movies. We have gone through A LOT of microwave popcorn. With white cheddar cheese topping. And Dove chocolate. We are now both kinda chubby. And happy.

Jon starts his new job tomorrow. He’s excited and maybe a little nervous. Tonight he is going to bed at a reasonable hour and rising with the rest of us in the morning. We cleaned the messy house and purged the bedroom of empty popcorn bags and chocolate wrappers. Tomorrow I will drop the kids at school and come back home to an empty house. I’ll make the bed instead of climbing back into it and cuddling with my hubby. I’ll return to the normal old routine.

I’m not going to lie, it’s been so nice. Just the sheer amount of time I’ve gotten to spend with my husband has been wonderful. But it had to end sometime. Time to step back into the real world. It’s not like I wanted to spend the rest of my life being nocturnal and chubby and lazy… but I’m really sad that the time is over.

Bad Mom posted up this fun fill-in. She gave it to her creative writing students with interesting results. I decided it was meme worthy and copied it accordingly.

If I were a:

If I were a shoe, I’d be a brightly colored tennis shoe.

If I were a city, I’d be a seaside resort town.

If I were a season, I’d be spring.

If I were a car, I’d be a  ‘73 VW Beetle. Convertible.

If I were a vegetable, I’d be a cucumber.

If I were a fruit, I’d be a melon .

If I were a color, I’d be bright green .

If I were furniture, I’d be a park bench.

If I were a song, I’d be smooth jazz.

If I were a country, I’d be Switzerland (neutral due to fear of conflict).

If I were a beverage, I’d be  mountain spring water .

If I were clothing, I’d be fuzzy socks.

If I were weather, I’d be full to partly sunny.

If I were an animal, I’d be a sea turtle.

If I were a dessert, I’d be pumpkin pie with whip cream.

If I were a plant, I’d be an orange Gerber Daisy.

If I were a word, I’d be a verb.

One of the coolest things at Disneyland: the Jedi Training Academy. A few Jedi came out in brown robes and pulled some kids from the audience. Since it was January and the audience was sparse, both of my kids were chosen.

The Jedi give some brown robes to the kids, and these “padawans” are trained in the ways of the force. Then — very suddenly and without warning — two Storm Troopers bust onto the scene, followed by Darth Vader and a very menacing looking Darth Maul (no joke… he was very creepy). The newly trained padawans must put their new skills to the test! Will they be strong enough to defeat the dark side??

Few things are more depressing than Las Vegas in the early morning. (Sorry if any of you are from Vegas.) We got the smaller-town version of this last week when we passed through Mesquite, Nevada, another casino town about an hour north of Vegas. Mesquite boasts all of the same lost hopes and dreams of Vegas, but with fewer naked girls on billboards. We decided to stay at this Junior-Vegas on the way to California. We pulled into town at about 10:30pm Thursday night to the welcoming flash of bright lights and the empty promises of the loosest slots in Nevada. We pulled into the casino/motel that advertised “rooms from $24.99 a night”.

If you’ve ever wondered what a $24.99 room looks like, I can now (sadly) tell you. It looks kind of like a room at the Bates Motel, only not as clean… and the stains on the carpet are a mystery; not necessarily blood, but possibly just as gross. As I sat in the small bathroom (after four hours in the car drinking Diet Coke and painfully listening to the rain hit the windshield),  I studied the pummeled bathroom door, wondering about the sad souls who had stayed there before me. Why was the door broken from the inside? I imagined a sad, drunk girl, locked in the bathroom by some jerk whom she wasn’t all that well acquainted with. I imagined how hard she was wishing that she had made very different choices. Choices that would have led her anywhere else but a gross bathroom in Mesquite, Nevada.

The emergency sprinkler head was pulled from the ceiling and dangled by some cords. I turned on the faucet at the sink to wash my hands, and yellow-orange water sputtered from the tap. We brushed our teeth with toothpaste and apple juice we squeezed from juice boxes.

The kids were excited to be on vacation, to be sleeping in exciting, foreign beds that weren’t their own. “This hotel is awesome!” Zoe exclaimed. I did not get into the semantics of hotel/motel, but rather allowed her to be impressed with our horrid surroundings. “Look, we get our own heater!” She turned the knob on the independent heating unit by the window and the fan churned loudly. I can’t say for sure that the air pumping out was any warmer or cooler than the air already in the room. We climbed into bed, doing our best not to touch anything more than necessary.

In the morning we woke early and dressed. We opened the front door to dreary, rain drenched streets. Gone were the flashy, colorful lights of the night before. The town that touted excitement and riches looked bleak and empty. Trash littered the sides of the streets. A few people milled around in front of the gas pumps across the street.

“I wish we could stay here for our vacation,” Zoe said.

“Disneyland will be even better than this,” I promised, wholeheartedly.

At 7:45 AM we walked through the casino to the buffet. The slot machines stood in rows, with cracked, empty seats sitting in front of each one. The bartender slowly wiped glasses, and one lonely soul sat at the bar, drinking whiskey and filling out a Keno sheet. He still had a few dollars to gamble away before going to sleep in his car.

Sitting at a table in the restaurant, the kids glanced around at the gaudy decor. Jachin remarked that the huge ”gold” picture frame hanging above our table must be worth a fortune. No doubt it was purchased with money that spilled from the loosest slots in Nevada. Zoe looked around the restaurant at the other early morning patrons. She then scooted closer to me in the booth and whispered, “Mom, mostly everybody in here is really old except for us.” It was true. We were the only people at the breakfast buffet under 65 years of age. At 8 AM, all of the young people had gambled away their money and passed out in a $24.99 room. Only the old fogies were up for breakfast. They gambled away their saving during the day, like rational, mature people. I looked at their old, sad faces. This was where they thought they were supposed to be. This is where you came when you retired, to either ”have fun” with that retirement savings, or for those who didn’t plan ahead, to win that retirement money. They slowly ate their pancakes, bored and unspeaking, and tried to think big.

The kids were excited that the guy working at the long buffet table made their pancakes right in front of their eyes. Each pancake was uniform and fluffy. It was culinary magic. 

We pulled away from Mesquite 20 minutes later, leaving behind the sadness that drained the soul. Behind us were the unlit casinos and drunk people and unlucky people.  We set out through an hour of empty desert. We finally passed through Las Vegas, with the skies clearing and the sun peaking out of the clouds. Billboards advertised sales at the Adult Mega Store, and sultry young girls with pouty lips and heavy eyeliner promised the best show in town. Even poor Toni Braxton had to advertise all but the very sweetest of her parts to get you go come to her show; her long, bare legs beaconed: come hear me sing. Please. I can still sing.

It was still trashy, even in the sunshine; the bright, flashy lights that made it all seem exciting were missing, and now it just seemed sad. I turned on a movie for the kids to divert their attention from the “Thunder From Down Under” billboard, and we pressed on towards Disneyland. I reminded myself for next time why flying is better.

First let me tell you that if you want an uncrowded, line-free Disney vacation, January, mid-week, is the time to go. Even better, go after dark. For the last two hours prior to closing, you’ve practically got the place to yourself. My kids loved the one kiddie-coaster in Toon Town, and one evening they rode it over and over without any lines.

  And I do mean over, and over, and over.

Secondly, let me tell you that Disneyland becomes even less crowded when it is pouring down raining. And for good reason. If you’re thinking, “oh, big deal… a little rain can’t spoil Disneyland”… well, you couldn’t be more wrong. Disneyland can be quite un-enchanting and frickin cold when it’s raining in January. Disneyland sells Disney brand rain ponchos for $50 (or some such crazy price) but we laughed in the frickin cold face of big business and instead packed an umbrella from Target.

It’s hard to tell just how entirely soaked we are… but Jachin’s jacket is normally light blue.

The umbrella worked alright when we weren’t on rides, but what about keeping dry when actually riding the rides? Well, I was one of those annoying people who didn’t want to ride the log ride because the water would make my hair all big and Chia-pet looking. I bundled as best as I could. I thought of wearing the shower cap from the hotel room, but figured that may have looked silly. I opted for this more chic look:

 (ps- my butt got soaked)

I learned on this trip that my children are very brave. Jachin was finally tall enough to ride California Screamin’ on this trip, and he rode it three times in a row. Here was his first time out of the gates:

The key to working up courage for big rides is to first browse the gift shop for courage-encouraging swag. Like this:

Zoe took on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, Space Mountain, and a bunch of other scary rides. Her courageous attire looked a little different.

 That’s one badass, pink cowgirl. 

She drew the line, though, at Tower of Terror. She would. not. do. it. So I wandered around the gift shop with Zoe, checking out cute Jack Skelington garb while Jachin and Jon rode Tower of Terror. Then I rode the T.o.T. by my lonesome. Jon took a blurry picture of the screen:

That’s me with fun Chia hair on the front row,  grinning like a dork. If I would have known that the flash was coming, I would have done a sweet thumbs-up like the bell-hop in the second row, or a “shocked” face like the other bell-hop in the front row.  But no, that terrified glee was my real face.

Mostly we stuck with the rides that the four of us could do together, which was a lot of them. The kids are both tall enough and gutsy enough to ride mostly everything.

 I love my family.

The ride home was NOT fun. The usual 9 hour car ride took a full 11 hours. There was heavy snow for hours. In our attempts to make “good time” we didn’t stop for meals. The kids ate crackers and Chewy bars and fruit snacks… for 11 hours. It ended with Zoe throwing up in the car. She gave me just enough warning to empty the Target bag (holding all of the snacks) and put it under her mouth. Poor sweetie. On top of the barfing, the windshield washer fluid stopped working. Each time a truck passed us, spraying filthy snow unto the windshield, we were pretty much blind. Jon had to pull over repeatedly and manually pour washer fluid on the windshield to clean it off. It was tedious and a little scary. When we finally pulled into the garage at 11:30pm, the kids cheered.

As we tucked ourselves into our own beds in our own home last night, Jachin said, “It’s nice to go to Disneyland, but it’s nice to sleep in my own bed again, too.” It was the perfect amount of trip; just enough to make home seem really nice again.

We returned late last night from our trip to Disneyland. I had intended to blog daily while there, letting you in on all of the rides, and making quips about the price of all things Disney. But because of the price of all things Disney, we had to forgo the $14.99 daily internet fee.

I will sit later today to do a proper Disneyland blitz post. A small teaser, though, the trip included lots of Dramamine, lots of rollercoasters (my kids are brave!), rain, hotel shuttles, more rain, and an 11 hour car ride home last night that featured heavy snow, an inept driver flipping us the bird (when he really should have had both hands on the wheel), and vomited Cheez Its in Target bags. Have I said too much??

I’m off to put in a load of darks.

Jon got a wild idea about doing our part to conserve energy. It wasn’t so much in order to make smaller our carbon footprint or any such nonsense; it was in hopes of making smaller our power bill. I know, we are shallow and ignorant. Anyhoo, we went to Costco a few weeks ago and bought 5 boxes of the compact fluorescent bulbs and replaced every single bulb in the house. (We then filled up 1/5 of our local landfill with the old, non-economical bulbs. Take that, carbon footprint.)

The immediate impression that we had was that our house was overall “dimmer”. The compacts aren’t as bright. I now find myself walking into things, knocking over plant stands, and banging my shins on furniture corners. Which is kind of weird, because the furniture hasn’t moved or anything… But I now walk around my house with a perpetual squint, which really does nothing to improve the crow’s feet around my aging eyes.

The second thing we noticed is that there is a nano-second delay when you flip the light switch, which also feels a little foreign when you are used to the light flooding the room immediately upon flipping the switch. When I walk into the bathroom and flip the switch, I will occasionally walk into the toilet bowl before the light comes on. I think the toilet bowl may have actually been moved, though… aliens or prankster pixies or something. The bowl seems — in the dull glow of the bathroom light — to be situated about 1/8 of an inch further to left than it was when we moved into the house. (I will further investigate this anomaly at a later time.)

The third thing I noticed is that the light in the master bathroom is terrible. It has a yellow, pallid glow that makes me cringe when I look at myself. (At least, I think I’m cringing; like I said, it’s hard to see myself.) Each morning I imagine that I look jaundiced and therefore overcompensate with the blue-hued make-up. The end result is me leaving the house looking like this guy:

He had to drink colloidal silver daily for 8 years to look like this.

I only had to change my light bulbs.

The plus side to all of the shin-whacking and hideous outward appearance is that over 10 years time, we will save about 46 cents on our power bill. Again, I’m kidding… it will actually be more like 96 cents.  Which is nothing to shake a dim, jaundiced stick at.