“I love you! Drive safe!”

leaving.png

Saw this on xkcd.com this morning, and I know exactly how this works. I remember hearing once about Madame Curie’s last words to her husband. He was asking her if she’d be at the lab that day, and apparently she was busy with their children, so she said something along the lines of, “Oh please! Are you kidding?” Then her husband headed out and was run down by a carriage. Ever since hearing that, I always say two things to my husband when he heads out the door. “I love you! Drive safe!” I’ve said it so often, the kids have started saying it too.

Anyway, just my random thought for today.

I Can’t Do It All…

Sunday is normally the day I cook dinner for the week. I do it early in the day so I have it ready to reheat by 6PM. This strategy assumes, of course, that I will be up around 5AM so I can get a jump on my daily to-do list.

Well, today I slept in. And that felt wonderful. And because I slept in, I got to have sex with the Hubster, because you know, I was actually in the bed when he woke up! And that felt wonderful too. And of course, there was more sleeping after that, and then a wonderful breakfast of eggs, potatoes, fruit, toast and hot tea. I managed to grab a quick workout before having to change so we could go out to an early movie. We saw Night At The Museum 2, which I really enjoyed, and then we came back home for a late lunch, and then I squeezed in a couple of hours of work that just had to get done, and as a result of all of this…

We had cereal, pizza, and hot pockets for dinner. Oh, and fresh fruit.

I was supposed to cook teriyaki chicken and sauted green beans, but I couldn’t do the cooking and sleep late and have sex and see a movie with my family and get my work done. Something had to go. And that something today was dinner, because dammit, I deserve to get all that other stuff done every once in a while. Although to be honest, I always make time for work, and maybe I should concentrate harder on making more time for the other stuff.

Tomorrow is Monday. I will get up at 5AM, write, clean the house, cook, exercise, and chase after the kids. There will be no lazy morning sex, and no afternoon movie. Because I can’t do it all. Thankfully, today I didn’t even want to try.

Redecorating = Love and a New Toilet

The Feng Shui in our home is off.  Or maybe it’s the Wang Chung.  I dunno, I always get those two confused.  Anyway, everything is all higgledy-piggledy in la casa de Madden to the point that I don’t know what goes where or what happens in each room.  And why is that, you may ask?  Because…

We are redecorating.  Nothing major, just a fresh coat of paint on the downstairs walls.  And new paint on all the trim.  And the doors.  And then Michael’s tearing up the floor in the foyer and the downstairs bath so he can put in new tile.  And then maybe when all that’s done, he’ll finally put the toilet back in downstairs.  You know, the one he took out two years ago?  Right after our darling pixie Sam was born?

Yeah, that one.  So it’s not a BIG job because we’re not replacing furniture, but maybe it’s a big job because Michael’s doing all this painting and ripping up the floors and tiling and re-toileting stuff.  Oh, what am **I** doing?  The most important job of all – keeping the kids out of his hair.  And out of the fresh paint.

I love my husband, and he loves me.  And I will be so grateful when we get that downstairs toilet re-installed that I think I will take that man to bed…

And let him sleep for a week.  ‘Cause he’s gonna need it.

October nearly killed me…

And November doesn’t look much better.

I got trampled by kindergarten and doctor’s appointments and Michael’s business trips last month, which is why I wasn’t around much.  For some reason, the simple world of kindergarten exploded with homework and class projects at the beginning of October.  It started with the Letter Notebook, which requires Cassie to practice writing the Letter of the Week and then finding pictures that start with the Letter of the Week, which she has to cut out, paste and label in the Letter Notebook.  It’s been taking us half an hour a night to do this project – one night for practicing the letter, one night for finding and cutting pictures, and one night for the pasting and labeling.  This is ON TOP OF any other homework that walks through the door, like more practice writing on worksheets and books that she’s supposed to read for her Reading Log, plus art projects and Things She Must Bring In For Class (like an empty water bottle, a white adult t-shirt, an egg carton, etc.).  It’s been killing me to keep up with all of this.  And the ON TOP OF all this, I volunteered to chaperone field trips and co-host a class party.  Lots of work, I gotta tell ya.

But Cassie loves that I’m active in her class activities, so it’s not a bad thing.  But then I had a bunch of medical appointments ON TOP OF that.  Two of these appointments were for me – my annual pelvic exam and my annual mammogram.  These are the kinds of appointments I prefer to go to sans children, meaning I needed a sitter for Sam those mornings.  Michael was supposed to stay home those mornings so I could get to my appointments, but then he had one business trip after another and I had to keep rescheduling my pelvic exam until I finally threw a screaming fit and he told me when he was going to be home.  And then the doctor’s office called me to cancel THAT appointment because the doc had to go out of town.

I eventually did get my mammogram and my pelvic exam done, and I even got a flu shot to boot (my gynecologist gave it to me, a nice little bonus to go with the speculum up my… well, you know).  Then I had to get flu shots for the kids and guess what?  The pediatrician was booked solid on flu shots.  She does them on specific days and you HAVE to have an appointment.  I finally ended up calling in to have Cassie looked at for something else, a rash on her face, and the receptionist asked if I wanted to get flu shots for both kids then, since we’d all be there.

“Was this all I needed to do to get a flu shot for my kids, have one of them come up with some weird skin ailment so I could make an appointment to bring them in?”

“Yes,” the receptionist replied.  “They’re going to be here anyway, so…”

So next fall, I’m going to scribble all over Cassie’s face with a green marker to give her another ‘rash’ and get our flu shots again that way.

Beyond that, I’ve been overloaded with work.  You can read about that at my work blog – http://www.helenehmadden.com.  I’m working to cut back in preparation for the holidays.  Don’t quite know how I’ll do that yet, but I will.

Meanwhile, it’s story time now with Sam.  I’ll blog some more later, I promise.

Unless November eats me alive as well.

Some Mornings

Some mornings, I get up waaaaaaaaaaay to early to do stuff. Like today, to work on the podcast. My knees are killing me and I’m dead tired. Do I go back to bed, or do I tough it out?

Like that’s a hard decision.

Zzzzzzz…

Randomness – Pass It On!

Okay, can anybody tell me exactly what the hell a meme is?

Sparx over at Notes From Inside My Head is doing one and by virtue of reading it I have apparently become infected with it.  Willingly though, because I could just pretend I didn’t read her meme and thereby not have to pass it on to you.

Okay, so Sparx’s meme (meme… me-me… meeee-meeee… what kind of weird ass word is that anyway?) is to write 6 totally random things about yourself, or myself, although if you read this, you have to do it to now because I said so and we all know who’s in charge around here, don’t we?  That’s right, the kids.

1. Seriously, I don’t know what a meme is beyond some form of internet cooties, and I have no idea why people on Twitter keep writing “I can haz…” What is that?  Bad grammar disease?

2. I love soft boiled eggs. I just finished eating a soft boiled egg on toast for breakfast. It was gooey and yummy!

3. I also love coffee, but I think the General Foods International stuff is just as good (if not better, at times) as the real thing.  That’s because I’m lazy and if I’m tired or I don’t feel like it, making real coffee is a pain.

4. Speaking of coffee, when I was at Camp All American in Fort Bragg, my junior year of college, all the female cadets would get sooooo tired that we would open up the packets of instant coffee crystals and tuck the coffee inside our lower lips.  It tasted nasty and we got in trouble for it because our TAC sergeant thought we had all started doing snuff and you know snuff is only for boys, but that raw coffee sure did help us stay awake.

5. By authority of me, there is no number five today.

6. Sometimes I miss being single. It was waaaaaaay easier for me to take care of my tiny one-bedroom apartment and my three cats than it is for me to take care of this big ol’ house with husband and two kids.  But I didn’t think so at the time. I thought cleaning the apartment and feeding the cats was a heck of a lot of work.

And there you have it. Six — no wait, five (because I have decreed 5 illegal today… but wait, if I decree five illegal how can I have only five random facts… Oh hell…) – six random facts about me today.  And now six of you who are reading this have the internet cooties known as ‘meme’ and must pass it along or your dog will go bald and you will grow a third arm.

Which, if you have kids and a house covered in dog fur, might not be so bad.  I mean, a third arm to help out and no more dog fur.  Not a bad deal, right?

My Ideal Day

0500 – wake up, go downstairs, start the laundry, feed the cat, make a cup of coffee.

0520 – sit down at the computer and work on my podcast, undisturbed.

0645 – finish up work, head upstairs and wake up the rest of the family.

0715 – have everyone dressed and seated at the dining room table for breakfast.

0745 – get the kids upstairs to brush teeth, hit the potty, and get ready to leave the house.

0800 – at the bus stop.

0810 – Cassie gets on the bus.

0815 – Sam and I head out to exercise, either a walk and karate practice or swimming at the Y.

1000 – finished with exercise, showered and dressed.  Heading outside to play for an hour.

1100 – back inside the house to make lunch.

1130 – lunch.  Sam actually eats what I serve her (this is my ideal day, remember).

1230 – sit down with Sam for story time.

1300 – put Sam down for a nap.  She falls asleep the moment her head hits the pillow (again, this is my ideal day).

1305 – 20 minutes of yoga practice and physical therapy for my knees.

1325 – make another cup of coffee.

1330 – sit down at the desk to answer e-mail, handle finances, etc.

1400 – enough with the busy work, time to write for three hours!

1700 – go back in time and take Sam to pick up Cassie from the bus stop at 1530.  In alternate time line, make snacks, discuss day at school, help Cassie with her homework, and the go outside and play for an hour.

1700 again – after re-synching alternate time line with actual time line, head to the kitchen to start dinner.

1730 – husband comes home and kisses me lovingly, nay even lustfully!  Giddy with thoughts of romance, I serve the perfect meal to a couple of happy children who never fight over a red bean bag chair that just so happens to look exactly like the other red bean bag chair that Grandmama bought to keep said two happy children from fighting over the first red bean bag chair.

1830 – dinner is finished.  Husband volunteers to clear the table, do the dishes, vacuum the downstairs and give me a French manicure while I relax on the couch.

1900 – magically transport myself to the dojo where I enjoy a refreshing hour of karate class.  Somehow my aging knees miraculously make no weird crunching noises whatsoever, and I can jump six feet straight up into the air and do a double back-flip for good measure.

2000 – magically transport myself back home (because I would really like to not have to burn gas to get around).  The children are already in bed asleep and husband is waiting in the bed room holding a bowl of Godiva double chocolate ice cream and wearing nothing but a smile.

2400 – after a few hours of quality time with my darling husband, I am refreshed and relaxed and ready to go back to work.  I head up to the office to blog, answer e-mail, and most importantly, cartoon!

3100 – seven fruitful hours later, I have completed my masterpiece.  I post it to the web and await the admiration of my dedicated and enthusiastic fans.

3200 – after three quick encore cartoons for the fans, I retire for the evening.  A luxurious bath, a glass of wine, more chocolate ice cream (which magically has no calories), and I am set for the night.  I may or may not read for a few hours before nodding off.  I expect to get a good twelve solid, uninterrupted hours of sleep so I can wake up refreshed the next morning at 0500 and start the whole routine all over again.

And yeah, that’s my ideal day, which is why it never happens. 

 

 

A Non-fan’s Review of a Bruce Springsteen Concert

I went to see Bruce Springsteen in concert last night at the Richmond Coliseum in Virginia. Let me state up front that I am not a raging Bruce Springsteen fan. That would be my darling husband, he who bought the tickets and still has the t-shirt he got from a Bruce Springsteen concert TWENTY YEARS AGO. Oy. Anyway, here are my reviews of ‘the Boss’ in concert.

First, the short review:

IT WAS VERY, VERY LOUD!!

Now the long review:

Okay, so we had just gotten back from a trip to Pennsylvania to see my cousin’s daughter get married. Honestly, I need to get up there more often, and it’s a shame I don’t because my aunt Adele is like the sweetest person in the world and she always has something ready for folks to eat whenever they come over, although we stayed in a hotel, not at her house, so we didn’t get to gnosh like we would have had we actually been the–

What? Oh right, the concert. So anyway, we got back from Pennsylvania the night before, and that was a nine-hour drive with two screaming kids in the back seat, and both Michael and I were sick with some sort of weird flu bug (yes, I know, you want to hear about the concert. Hold your horses, I’m telling a story here!) that had us hacking up our lungs like a couple of old geezers, and we didn’t get home until after 10 PM. So we were not in the best shape the next morning when we got up, and we just draaaaaaaaagged through the day until the babysitter showed up and it was time for us to leave. Now, the Richmond Coliseum is about an hour away from where we live, so that meant another road trip (joy) after the one we’d done the day before. Fortunately, we had a babysitter for the evening, which meant NO SCREAMING KIDS in the back seat. Even more fortunately, this was only an hour drive, which was good because Michael wanted to play Bruce Springsteen all the way to the concert and I did not because hey, weren’t we going to be hearing this guy in a few hours anyway? But Michael insisted so I pulled out my iPod and listened to Phil Rossi’s “Notes from the Vault” which is an awesome collection of horror stories and quite frankly Phil Rossi could read a grocery list and I’d get goose bumps. Seriously!

So where was I? Oh yeah, the Bruce Springsteen concert. Anyway, we got to Richmond and found a place to park that didn’t cost us an arm and a leg and yet still looked like we would find our car with all four wheels still attached when the concert was over. We parked and walked over the Richmond Coliseum and saw lots of people with wrist bands on milling around the place. The wrist bands apparently meant you had bought a seat on the floor. Only there were no seats on the floor. I know this for a hard cold fact, because that’s what Michael bought us — two not-seats on the floor, for the bargain price of $99 a ticket, not including those ridiculous fees that darling hubby got charged for the **convenience** of buying our tickets online. The **convenience** of buying online? What kind of assbackward idea is that? Of course it’s more convenient to buy online! Who the hell would want to stand inline for hours on end to buy a ticket from some snot-nosed rude little punk at the cashier’s window when they could simply buy the damn thing online? And yet, because we’re smart enough to buy online, we’re going to be charged **extra**? Have these people not heard of Amazon or iTunes or the rest of the frikkin’ digital age? Sheesh!

So anyway, if you had a grey armband, you paid for the privilege of standing for three hours on a hard cement floor while listening to ‘the Boss’ and his band play. And if you had a pink armband, that meant you were dumb enough to show up five or six hours earlier to stand in line so you could stand for another three hours even closer to ‘the Boss’ on the same hard cement floor. Thank god the babysitter couldn’t show up until 4PM at our place, ’cause if Michael had insisted on showing up that early to get a pink band, you’d be reading his obituary instead of this really cool review.

Which has not even gotten to the actual concert yet. I know. But I want you to fully understand what I went through last night, and if I had to suffer through all that crap, so do you. Okay, where were we?

Oh yeah, the concert. So anyway, even though we had floor non-seats, we had apparently arrived too late to get our grey wristbands, so we just sashayed over to the nearest door that did not have a line a mile long in front of it and there we waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And then a couple of people who were definitely not anybody important showed up and pushed their way to the front of the line that had formed behind us and tapped on the door and some jack-ass inside let them in, and man, you could feel the air conditioning coming out of that place, but WE who were also not important but apparently didn’t know the secret knock on the door, could not get in so we just had to stand outside and make faces at the jerks who got in ahead of us and stood there ignoring us while they enjoyed the AC.

And then one of those jerks, a woman, came in and out a few times to smoke a cigarette right in front of us and oh that was precious. Look, a bottled blonde who’s so addicted to nicotine she has to come outside every fifteen minutes to blow smoke in our faces. Or up our asses. Or whichever direction the wind blew.

And this went on for half an hour until some of the event staff came out and everybody cheered. Only the event staff didn’t come out to let us in. No, they came out to hand out grey wristbands to those poor fools who had paid $99 for a non-seat on the floor. Oh wait, that was us. Yea, I got a wristband. It was grey. How lovely. And then the event staff went back inside and locked the doors again, except to keep letting out that stupid bottled blonde who just had to have another half a cigarette every five minutes. Geez! Not even a whole cigarette, just half a cigarette and she left the rest of it smeared on the pavement!

After another half hour of waiting, just about the time when the mob behind us started getting really ugly and talking about things like breaking down the doors and crushing everybody in front of them (like me and Michael), the event staff opened up the doors and let everybody come screaming in. Michael and I hurried inside and found our way to the non-seats on the floor and discovered that we would be spending the rest of the evening lined up behind enough people to fill a small country in Eastern Europe. And all these people were taller than us. And that meant we couldn’t even see the frikkin’ stage. So it was a good thing that there were these HUMONGOUS TV screens overhead, because otherwise we would never have seen the concert.

And Michael paid $99 a person for those tickets.

Yeah.

So anyway. We found an unoccupied spot on the floor and Michael claimed it and I went back out to find a potty (and yes, I call it a **potty** — I have two kids five and under and we’re still dealing with potty training so that’s what we call it, now go soak your head) and something to eat because we left for the concert at 4 PMish and it was now going on 7 PM and I was hungry. And while getting into the potty was no big deal — the Richmond Coliseum actually has enough stalls to deal with a mob of women all doing the potty dance — finding food was not so easy. Everything offered for consumption had a huge line going out the doors, except for…

Pretzels and Dippin’ Dots. And since I cannot eat Dippin’ Dots for religious reasons (and no, I will not explain that because if I did, we’d never get around to talking about the actual concert) I bought two pretzels and two bottles of water. The price was actually half-way decent, but for some odd reason (religious perhaps) the cashier would not let me have the tops to the water bottles. So I had to veeeeeery carefully pick my way back down to our spot on the floor without spilling two open bottles of water, which made me realize that it was not for religious reasons that they had kept the bottle tops; it was a marketing plan. Because if I dropped my water bottles, I had to go back and buy new ones. Very sneaky.

Anyway, I got back to our spot and Michael took off for the potty (yeah, he calls it a potty too), and then he came back and we ate our pretzels and drank our water and we…

Waited.

And waited.

And waited some more.

Apparently the concert was supposed to start at 7:30 PM. Not. 7:30 came and went and there was no sign of life on the stage, or at least I think there wasn’t any, because you know we couldn’t actually see the stage from our non-seats. So we kept waiting and the floor kept filling up and slooooooooowly the actual seats started to fill up. Then around 8PM I heard a guitar riff and a wild roar went up from the audience and I jumped up and down with everybody else struggling to see the stage and guess what?

I saw a roadie tuning a guitar.

And this happened about eight or nine million times. Some guy would come out, fiddle with one of the guitars, the crowd would go into a feeding frenzy, and then the guy would leave the stage.

After about two million years of waiting, I decided to make another break for the potty. I got in and out in under five minutes, which made me think that if I could move that quickly, why couldn’t Bruce? But just as I was thinking that, guess what happened?

Yep. Another roadie tuned a guitar.

Eventually, the crowd got so big I could pick up both my feet and not fall down. We were wedged that tight. And wouldn’t you know it, some jackass still found a way to shove himself through the crowd to stand right in front of us. Not “right at the very front of the part of the pit where if you only got a grey wristband but not a special pink one that was as close as you were allowed to get to Bruce,” but right there in front of us. He was big, and he was religious, and he kept making jokes about “wouldn’t it be great if he held up a sign about some weird Bible verse,” and wouldn’t you know it he brought his PARENTS with him and so he shoved around some more until he made enough room for them to stand in front of us too! Wasn’t that special. Oh, but what really made it all special was that he ended up standing right next to me and that was when I discovered that I had a new, least favorite smell and it was…

Big guy who shoves people around and smells like rotting baloney.

Oh. My. God. The odor was just strong enough that if I turned my head in this guy’s direction, I could catch a nasty whiff, but not strong enough to make me vomit on the spot which actually would have been good because maybe then this jackass would have moved someplace else! But no, the best I could do was turn my head away and ask Michael (who has NO sense of smell) to switch places with me So I turned my head turned away from him, only just as I was about to do that someone cut the lights, and I thought, “Oh my god!! We’re all gonna die, packed like rats in this place!”

And yep, there was a bit of crowd surge as finally, FINALLY, the Boss himself, Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band, FINALLY showed up on stage.

And I would love to describe what the music was like at this point, but after the first opening chord, I was stone deaf and bleeding from both ears.

My GOD it was loud. Bruce came in and he hit hard. I mean, that music just felt like a fist to the face, and it drove me right back into Rotting Baloney Guy. Eeeeeew. And this went on for about 20 minutes straight. I can’t decide if it was just one really long song or a bunch of songs run together. The Boss just kept hammering at that guitar, and then Clarence Clemmens (or was it Clarence Thomas? I always get those two confused) kept screeching on his saxophone and some chick with big blonde hair kept shaking her maracas like there was no tomorrow, and Bruce had not one but TWO skinny bald guys on either end of the stage playing piano and keyboard, and those guys sort of reminded me of George Hrab, who is an excellent musician and songwriter and has never made my ears bleed, and you know what? I’d pay $99 for a seat, or maybe even for a non-seat, to see George Hrab (and Phil Rossi too for that matter) because I know I’d enjoy that show. But then just as I was thinking about how awesome a combined George Hrab/Phil Rossi concert would be, Bruce started doing high kicks!

Oh my god, no Bruce, don’t do it! Don’t kick! It was terrible! It was like watching my dad trying to stomp on a possum that got into his barn and ate all the horse feed. It was like watching George Bush trying to be funny! It was painful, it was agony, he’ll never make it into the Rockettes so my god why does he keep kicking, and oh my lord did the Rotting Baloney Guy just FART?! Oh! It’s disgusting, my eyes! My nose! My ears!! Why is Bruce Springsteen trying to beat the audience to death with his music?! Oh the humanity…

But. BUT! After the first twenty minutes of all of this torture, Mr. Springsteen actually did something that I thought was rather cool.

He stopped.

And took requests.

Yep. He waded into the audience (well not actually into them, more like above them on a catwalk, and I don’t blame him because quite frankly I think those people would have eaten him alive) and picked signs from people, and each sign had a request for a song on it, usually accompanied either by the reason why that person wanted to hear that song or some weird freaky decoration to get the Boss-man’s attention. And after picking up a bunch of signs and chatting with the audience (and he really was kind of funny when he was chatting, I have to admit), he picked the first song from the pile of signs he collected, set it up in front of his mic stand, and he and his band played that song.

And it was the first song I heard that night that I actually liked, and I will probably go out and buy it if my Springsteen-obsessed husband doesn’t already own it. It was called Stand On It, and it was a really good rock-a-billy song that I could have danced to if I had had room to dance. As it was, I was still squashed up against Rotting Baloney Guy and I didn’t even have room to breath.

And so the concert went. It was a lively show, and I heard some stuff I liked and the Boss did give a very enthusiastic performance (but my god, those flat-footed high kicks! **shudder**) and the crowd absolutely loved him, and I did manage to save some of my hearing by pressing my left ear against Michael’s shoulder. I would have taken turns with my ears, putting the left one down for a song and then the right one, but anytime I put the right one down on Michael’s shoulder, I caught another whiff of Rotting Baloney Guy and that sort of killed that idea so now you know why I’m completely deaf in my right ear.

Oh, and Rotting Baloney Guy farted at least six times during the concert and I think it’s a wonder that you aren’t all reading about how everyone who attended the Bruce Springsteen concert in Richmond last night died from asphyxiation or carbon monoxide poisoning or something. Really, something crawled up inside this guy’s ass and died. But not before making a nest under his armpits, which I saw every time he raised his arms as he sang along with Bruce. Ugh.

The show lasted three hours, and by the time it was over, including the encore which was a really rollicking version of “Twist and Shout”, it was closing in on midnight. We got out of the coliseum pretty quickly, found our car with all four tires still attached, and headed home. Miracle of miracles, we did not spend hours in traffic waiting to get onto the interstate. Someone was smart enough to bring out the traffic cops to direct the exodus and so we managed to make it home by 1:30AM to wake up the babysitter and send her home.

So, in conclusion, I spent a lot of time on my feet in overpriced non-seats standing next to a guy who smelled like rotting baloney and farted a lot. And if you see me yelling at my kids this week, it’s because I AM STILL DEAF from the horrendously loud but otherwise enjoyable music. It was a good show, even for a non-fan in a non-seat, and I would do it again but only if my husband pays for real seats and I have ear plugs and nose plugs for the concert.

The End.

Now We Are Thirty-Nine

The past two weeks have hit me like a steam roller. First, everyone had the stomach flu. Then Michael left town on business for a week — more work at Johnson Space Center. Then we had Cassie’s fifth birthday (the day Michael left) and of course I had to plan a party. I am one of those moms that refuses to do a huge party where Cassie can invite all of her little classmates from preschool. I don’t have the time or energy to invest in that sort of 3-ring circus, and quite frankly, I hate those sorts of parties anyway. I don’t know any of the other moms of Cassie’s classmates. I live in an entirely different world from these people. I’ve been to a couple of the parties they’ve thrown for their kids and quite frankly, I’ve either felt like a complete outsider (a feeling I should be used to, but still don’t enjoy) or else I feel overwhelmingly disgusted by the sheer excess of a party thrown for a four- or five-year-old that involves an inflatable moonwalk, an over-priced magician, some clown doing balloon animals, face painting, a five-tiered cake, pony rides, and a visit from Spiderman/Sponge Bob/Dora the Explorer. Cassie would love to have a party like that, but you know what? I can’t afford it, time or money-wise, and I think that kind of excess for a kid’s party is just a really bad idea. Birthday parties should be spent with family and close friends. They should be a celebration of life, not a gift grab. My girl got presents all week long anyway, and I swear her grandmother knows no limits on sending presents. On her birthday, Cassie received more Barbie dolls in one day than I ever owned in my entire life. Yep, she got five Barbies… IN JUST ONE DAY. A bit much, neh?

But we did have a party, and though it was a small affair, it was just big enough to nearly kill me. Since my birthday was Saturday, the same day as Cassie’s party, I decided to do two cakes. Cassie wanted this princess cake from one of her kids’ cook books, and I thought that would have been too small to feed all the guests (but in hindsight it probably would have been just right). So I decided to do a cake for me as well. The only problem was, I had almost no time to do it in. Cassie wanted to help make both cakes, and while I am not huge on over-indulgent parties, I am big on mommy-daughter bonding activities, and cooking is one of them. So I set up a schedule that a) allowed Cassie to participate in the making, baking, and decorating of both cakes, and b) nearly insured that we had no cakes at all in time for the party. See, she could only help me when she was awake, and given our hectic schedule the previous week (remember, Michael was away), my free time during her waking hours was just about nil. I actually got up at 5AM on Saturday morning, the day OF the party, to bake my own cake. Then Cassie got up around 7:30, and by 9:30 we were all dressed and ready to make her cake. Unfortunately, we needed to leave the house at 10:30 to meet people at the Virginia Living Museum for a pre-party play date, and one hour just ain’t enough time to bake and frost a cake.

We did get the cake baked, but then when I tried to remove the layers from the pans before racing out the door to the museum, the bottom layer split, in half, horizontally. Imagine the swearing that accompanied that event. Then double it, because by that point, I was ready to tear out my hair and someone else’s.

Fortunately, Michael was home by then, although he had to go to VIRTUS training for the Catholic church. Boy, was I swearing about that too. Of all the mornings to not be available to help, that was a baaaaaad one to pick. I let him know that later. What made it worse was the fact that he did not get home from his business trip until almost midnight the night before, so I only got to see him for five minutes the next morning before he headed out for the church. But he did get home before the party started and he did manage to fix and frost Cassie’s birthday cake, and he ordered all the pizzas, so we did manage to pull off the party, and Cassie enjoyed it even if we didn’t hire Ringling Brothers to provide the entertainment.

My biggest disappointment over all this is the fact that all I can remember of the weekend is all the swearing and shouting I was doing, and the momentous struggle I felt like I was going through to make things happen. The same damned thing happened over Christmas — illness, business trips, too much work, not enough sleep — and the holidays were gone like that. I didn’t get to enjoy Christmas, and to be honest, I didn’t get to enjoy my birthday either. I had a brief period where I got to enjoy Cassie’s birthday, but that was only after all the screaming and ranting were over and we were in the middle of the party. The whole mother-daughter bonding while baking thing just added to the stress, so I didn’t even enjoy that like I thought I should have.

So what to do? Obviously, things are out of control here at la casa de Madden. I’ve got too much work, not enough time, not enough sleep, and Michael will be heading out on even more business trips in the upcoming months. It’s killing me, and I need to find a way to slow things down. But it’s going to take some effort.
The first step will be to clear some of this work off my desk. I’m proofing one book, writing another, putting together three art commissions, putting together articles for ERWA and doing the podcast. Plus I need to work on promoting my writing, and I’ve got EPIC VA events to coordinate. That’s a lot of work. I need to winnow it down, and then I need to not take on anything else for a while.

I wonder if it will ever really slow down though. I’ve already been approached to do some artwork for a major website, and I’ve got some conventions coming up that I’ll be participating in. And I don’t want to turn away paying work or promotion opportunities. I’m going to have to make a decision soon on how to handle all this. Cassie is going to be home this summer before starting kindergarten, and I don’t want the entire summer to steam roll over us the way our birthdays did.

I Love Socks!

In the course of revamping my wardrobe, I have developed a thing for socks. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I never had cool socks growing up. Yes, I know, I was badly deprived as a child. So anyway, I found a couple of websites that sell really cool socks, including Sock Dreams and The Joy Of Socks. So far, I’ve got sushi socks, cappuccino socks, mermaid socks, dragon socks, koi fish socks, red and white stripy socks, and a pair of really neat red knee highs with a skull and cross bones print that almost looks like an argyle pattern.

I also got some very nice sneakers from Onmyodo Online. White creeper style with a Japanese rising sun and pink cherry blossom stitched onto them. Too cool!

Yeah, I know. Aren’t there more important things I should be talking about, besides my footwear?

Well, I am on a quest for new undies…