Discombobulation Station

Mission Accomplished

Ta da! Even through baby blues, job loss, massive turkey fuss, near sewer disaster, and an in-law visit I provided piping hot fresh content every damn day.

Some of my posts sucked, for sure. But what can you do? Blogging every day is like a can of mixed nuts: sometimes you think you've got a delicious cashew but it's actually a brazil nut and then you have to eat a whole bunch of other nuts to get the gag-ack-ack-blech of the brazil nut out of your mouth.  Well, anyway, SOME of my posts were pecans. 

Hope you had as much fun reading as I did writing, even through the slog.

xoxo, A

The Penultimate

My brain is mushy tonight. Every single person I know in Portland is at a godawful jam band show, including the FYD, so it is very quiet around here. I shall watch Knocked Up, eat holiday pudding, and go to bed early in preparation for my last day of work.

Hope you all had wonderful weekends.

xoxo, A

Blerg

Things were going great, and then the toilet gurgled.

Have we talked about my house? Not much, I don't think. Since the in-laws are still here, I don't have time to typetypetype and tell you all about it, but suffice it to say:

Sometimes. Owning a house is awesome.

Sometimes. Owning a house means crossing your fingers and praying that brown water won't come out of your bathtub drain, not showering or washing dishes, and calling family to beg for help replacing a sewer line on a Sunday. 

More tomorrow!

xoxo, A

p.s. Reminder: Thanksgiving night's post was written as an entry in The Girl Who's Great Experiment. Read & vote [it won't even hurt my feelings if you don't vote for me, because some of those other entries are waaaaay good (but please vote for me!)].

Success!

Thanksgiving was 100% incident free (unless you count my extreme irritability just prior to the dessert course an incident).  In-laws are visiting so I must be brief tonight, but wanted to say: hope you all had wonderful Turkey days - and thank you for your loyal readership all these YEARS!

xoxo, A

Hey, Nineteen

Waiting tables at the Sheraton hotel was almost meditative - waves of tourists would fill the restaurant, shovel in their over-easy eggs, and scram. Fill coffee put in order make toast pick up eggs deliver food refill coffee drop check make change over and over and over for hours. The tourists left singles and change for tips. I made it more interesting for myself by practicing my flirting with the married line cook (stammeringly responsive) and the engaged bartender (obviously annoyed). Some guys asked me out on dates -- one whimpered every time we kissed, one was about 5 inches shorter than me, and at 19 I wasn't in the mood to be serious anyway.  I hung around, washed the stains out of my polyester outfit in the sink the night before getting into my freezing car at 5 am to get to the hotel for 6:15 am, counted the dollar bills stuffed into the front pocket of my backpack once a week. I had no idea what I was going to do next.

One week this new guy, Matt, showed up. He announced that my habit of putting skim milk in my coffee was offensive and ridiculous and that I better change my ways. He swore at the ordering computer, wore his UNH sweatshirt over his tuxedo shirt and tie before and after shifts, and I thought he was funny - weird and funny. We started taking our cigarette breaks together (with cream in our coffee of course) and chatting about, well, everything. Matt was from a small town in New Hampshire, and used made up family words like 'strumph' (noun - a strong and healthy feeling, as imbued by a glass of grapefruit juice after a late night of drinking). I didn't think anything of it, of him.

Weeks at the hotel cycled around Sunday brunch. It was the best shift of the week: the least work for the most money, and the best meal for the servers afterward.  All we had to do was deliver drinks and hope no one ordered food from the kitchen.  So we spent a lot of time gathered in the staging area, drinking tons of coffee and snagging pastries from the kitchen.

One particular Sunday, Matt and I got annoying tables at the same time. His wanted to order pancakes, and mine wanted a bottle of wine (this was before I learned that brunch was actually for drinking). I was standing at the order computer trying to figure out how to get this damn bottle of wine when Matt put his hand on my shoulder to get my attention.  It was the first time he had ever touched me deliberately. Heat radiated from his fingers through my body to the ends of my hair. The back of my brain tingled. My breath, my heart, and time stopped for a moment.  When my limbs unfroze I turned around and saw... something different in his face. I didn't know what it was. I was only 19. But I knew I wanted to feel it again, to figure out what it meant.

And I knew I would.

xoxo, A

p.s. This entry was written as an entry in The Girl Who's Great Experiment contest.  Go, read, and vote!

Turkey Daze

Holy heck, you guys. Since Tuesday, I have spent 1 million dollars (approx) on food items. I have baked 4 dozen rolls, 2 loaves of cranberry orange bread, made pumpkin and squash puree, cooked cranberry sauce, roasted & spiced pumpkin seeds, prepped leek & mushroom stuffing, and brined a 20 lb. turkey.

So. I am taking a goddamn Glee break and going to bed early. That turkey ain't gonna get itself in the oven.

Happy Thanksgiving-Eve to you all!

xoxo, A

Kablooey

Done shot my writin' wad last night, so today I'm just going to be all like, This is a post. A what? A post. A what? A post. OH...a POST.

And call it good.

Hope that's OK with you.

xoxo, A

p.s. We are hosting Thanksgiving! What a crazy idea! I might go crazy! Today I bought a tablecloth for the first time in my life! Help!  

And She Was, pt. 4

(Catching up? Here are parts 1, 2, and 3)

Hadn't realized it before I wrote it all down, but my birthing experience actually does easily divide itself into 4:

1. The part where I labored at home while the FYD slept

2. The part where I labored at the hospital while the world slept

3. The part where I rested under the influence of drugs (YAY EPIDURAL YAAAAY)

4. The Dread Pushing & Delivery

And friends, we are at Part the Fourth. Yipes. Again, with the ignorance and the arrogance, I presumed that because of all my prenatal yoga and I dunno, thinking about it a lot, pushing would be a breeze.  That somehow Little A. and I would get into a smooth partnership and out she would pop while I made gentle humming noises.

To which I say: Hey, stupid asshole pre-birthing self -- get a load of this sad piece of humanity sweating and whimpering into her pillow after 3 hours of pushing. YOU THINK IT'S EASY NOW???

I pushed for 4 hours. Docs rarely allow women to do that -- usually after 3 you get forced encouraged to have a c-section.  I was lucky enough to have a kick-ass nurse, Mary (how frickin appropriate) who leaned in after the baby (finally) popped out and said, I wouldn't let them have you, after you did all that work. 

Wait wait - let me back up. OK. So. I was fully dilated before the epidural. That meant all systems go. So we tried pushing. Which is, when you can't feel your legs or lower torso, a very odd exercise. Because we were at a teaching hospital, the room kept filling up with lovely nurses-in-training, doctors-in-training, etc. All women of course. All telling me: push like you're doing the biggest poop EVER! Yes, that's what they said. I was surrounded by this encouraging tribe, everyone with some job -- holding up my legs. Dabbing a washcloth to my face. Telling me to push! like! pooping! Telling me I couldn't laugh about that, and needed to save my energy. Mean! The FYD got to count down the pushing. He was way outnumbered and mostly stood up by my head and tried not to freak out (he did a great job at that). 

In spite of the very clear directions, it became clear that the pushing was getting us nowhere, and that in fact it was freaking someone out - the baby. Every time I pushed really hard her heart rate plummeted. Later my awesome nurse explained is not really that scary, that variability is actually a good thing, but at the time it was all CODE RED. The attending OB was called in, I had to sign a waiver just in case we had to be whisked into surgery.  I got really nervous when my awesome nurse wouldn't let me have my precious little OMG how delicious is an ice chip when you are so so so thirsty. I knew that meant surgery was a real possibility.  I knew surgery was a real, EXPENSIVE possibility, and that I really didn't want it, but god all I wanted was a healthy safe baby so do whatever the fuck you need to do, Doctor Man.

But Mary believed in me & Little A. And so, the epidural was turned off. And woo, baby. I was in a state. For me, once contractions started, I wasn't nervous, because I trusted that my body knew what it was doing, but HOLY SHIT was I so tired of my body knowing what it was doing by walloping me with crazy intense pain every minute or so. CUT IT OUT BODY SERIOUSLY. 

But the contractions built and built, and I pushed and pushed. I pushed on my back while holding a towel over a bar, holding my knees on my side, with my face on a pillow and my butt in the air (and yes, that made me whimper I can't do this anymore, but the FYD told me I could, in fact I had to, so I flipped my enormous body back over and started anew). I pushed away all dignity and modesty.  I pushed away any remaining traces of vanity about my own strength and endurance.  I closed my eyes and pushed out that goddamn baby, with my lips pressed hard together, without any sound.

And, finally, after 19 humbling, exhausting, intense, somehow still wonderful hours, at just past 5 pm on April Fools' Day, Adelaide Elizabeth Dudley Weiss finally decided it was time to join us.

And she was. Perfect.

xoxo, A

Nein More

Well, the party was a success. The surprise-ee was indeed VERY surprised (there were even some tears). There was tons of excellent food & great company and I had a cocktail and stayed up past 10! Woooo party animal! And then Little A. decided she could not, would not sleep in her crib, so we had a snugglefest and slept very well.  The FYD very very quietly stumbled up to bed very very late. And in the morning I counted 3 sleeping bodies strewn about the house.  A very good party indeed.

The only mishap: the cake, 'pon which I had painstakingly candled "30!" (is challenging to write in candles), was...um...dropped.  I won't name names but it was someone who had his very own 30th birthday party in this very house last February and now has his very own BABY living in this very house (HINT HINT). This person may have been feeling a touch, um, enthusiastic, and miscalculated the gravitational pull of the earth on a "best creme"  sheet cake decorated with orange frosting, 36 candles, and rainbow sprinkles. Maybe he didn't account for the weight of the sprinkles, for halfway through the Hap-B-day song, the cake, tipped slightly to show off the candle-work to the birthday boy, was tipped a little bit too far. And we watched in slow motion...

Wha? Eeee! Oh? No! Maybecatchit? HALP! TiltitthiswaymaybeeeeeeAGGHHH NOOOO!!!

Happy Birthday to you! Happy Birthday to you! Happy Birthday dear Bri--oooooh. We all moaned collectively. The cake crashed to the ground, leaving a smeary gash of orange frosting on a bottle of Amstel Light, our countertop, and the knife caddy on its way down. And there was a silent 5-second pause while we all looked at cakefail on the floor. The birthday boy, first to collect his senses, quickly flipped the cake back on its platter and declared it the most perfect cake presentation ever! And the FYD I mean the anonymous cake-bearer shook his head in rue and named himself King of all Assholes.  I plucked the extinguished candles from the top of the cake and cut many many pieces. Everyone wandered away for a bit.

But you know what? That cake got all ate up.  Mostly by the dog, but still. Drunk people love cake. It was a very good party. 

Hope you all had fantastic weekends, too.

xoxo, A

SURPRISE!!

Right now, as in this VERY moment, we are hosting a surprise party for a dear friend. I am hiding out in the den listening to the surprise-ee arrive, waiting to hear whether or not the baby wakes up. Yep, we are hosting a SURPRISE party while the baby sleeps upstairs. Are we dumb? Probably. But it's Saturday night, I guess that makes it all right, and I said, Baby? Have we got enough gas?

And so concludes my Saturday post.

xoxo, A

Anthropomorpherrific

Yeah, I know that squirrels are basically just a cuter rat. But that doesn't keep me from feeling heart-sore whenever I see a wee tossed, broken body from miscalculation on a wrong mad dash across our busy street.

Or, on a much happier note, it doesn't keep me from loving this little story. Didja hear the one about the squirrel on Facebook?

Happy Friday alls!

xoxo, A