Barking Mad

Laboring Away the Labor Day Weekend

 

I bet you'll never guess where we're going this weekend!  Oh come on, give it a try...

What?  What's that you said?  Maine?  Geez.  I guess I'm pretty transparent!

We decided to empty out our piggy banks, scrape all the loose change from underneath the sofa cushions, car seats, and out from the dryer vent, and get then get back over there and make a concerted effort to get rid of as much stuff as possible.   Oh sure, I'm just overjoyed to be busting my super-sized butt over a holiday weekend, but it's in Maine and that makes it all worthwhile.  Plus, we're also going to be camping out.  At the house.  With no electricity.  And no hot water.  But hey, the BBQ is still there and combine that with a cooler full of fresh veggies and fruit!  I'm pretty sure we'll somehow get by.  

Gaby somehow got the impression we were "tent camping" this weekend but if she knew my history with tents, she'd quickly agree that is probably one of the worst ideas...ever!  I don't get along with tents.  Ask anyone who knows me.   It's not an issue of not liking camping in a tent; it is an issue of getting to the point where you can camp in the tent, i.e., putting the tent up!  You could give me instructions so simple that a toddler could assemble a tent and I still would not be able to put it together.  I'm much better at organizing things that will go into the tent, once it's ready for occupancy.   I can clear a camp site of pine needles like no ones business.  Just do not, I beg of you, ask me, or make the mistake of assuming I am capable of, putting a tent together.   It always ends badly.

I'll let you in on another little secret.  It's been more than 15 years since I've been on a genuine camping trip.  If there's anything I feel bad about when it comes to my first marriage, it's the fact that my poor ex-husband had to find that out, the hard way, in the middle of the night after we'd driven more than 10 straight hours to get to the middle-of-nowhere in the Idaho mountains, that as badly as I wanted to go camping and was so excited for that trip, that I had no earthly clue how to assemble a stupid tent!  Besides, I had two 3-year-olds and a 9-month-old that I was trying to look after.  

It was pitch black when we got to the camp site and after two hours of trying to get me to see the logic in putting the tent together, he gave up.  Mercifully, for him, our best friends, Mike and Bobbie, were also there.  Mike came over with a beer and a hammer, and Bobbie brought me a margarita and some tissues.  The margarita was for my nerves and the tissues were for the fact that I had started to sob when I realized that my complete inability to help put up a tent (in my defense, it was dark in them thar deep woods of Northern Idaho!) may very well mean we'd be sleeping on the ground, or in the car!

After all that work, and with the help of our friends, we spent all of two hours in the tent when I realized it was far too cold for the kids or me, and we went and slept in the car!

Despite the lack of a tent, or truly being outdoors this time around, we will, for all intents and purposes, be camping.  And ya know?  I'm OK with that.  We'll be in Maine emptying out our house and transitioning toward the moment when the bank will come swallow it up.  But I'm not going to spend this weekend focusing on that.  I'll be where my heart considers home, with my family and I'm going to enjoy it. 

And I'm going to rejoice that I don't have to put up a tent!

 

A Nip Here...A Tuck There

 

Over the next couple of days I'm going to be messing around "behind the scenes" in order to clean things up around the asylum, streamline the functionality of the blog (although seriously?  I have no idea what the hell that means...but it sure sounded nice when I said it!),  and change a few things.   One of the biggest changes is already in effect.  I've been waitingfor the Powers That Be at Typepad to terminate the bugs with the new comment module so that I could reinstall it so that it wouldn't completely wipe out my comment section like it did last year when I first installed it.

You can now reply to individual comments within a specific comment itself...go on, try it!  I'll wait.

See?  That was easy, wasn't it!

I'm hoping, within the next week, to have buttons across the top that link to other pages within the blog.  However, that may or may not happen because I'm still not sure of precisely what I want or how I want it to look.  All I know for sure is that I want something fresh and clean that reflects my personality and the things I love.  Right now, it's just kind of a haphazard hodge-podge of stuff I've thrown together and um...well it looks like it.

So, if you happen to notice more dust than usual around here, rusty nails lying around (have you updated your tetanus shot lately?), and some 2x4's tossed in the corner; just step over all that crap and try to make yourself comfortable.  I'm hoping things will be back to normal (or just a more organized version of my own personal brand of chaos!), within the next two weeks.

Keep your fingers crossed that I don't end up blowing the blog to hell and back in an effort to prettify things around here!

...And then the Bathroom Ceiling Collapsed!

It did!  I'm totally serious about this.

Well OK, not the ENTIRE ceiling, but a good portion of it.

What?  Don't believe me?  Fine, here are a couple of pictures of the lovely hole in our bathroom ceiling.

 

 

For a couple of weeks now the upstairs bathroom - the master en-suite has smelled sort of strange.  Kind of like someone left a wet towel sitting around in a dark corner.  I keep the bathroom up there pretty clean and I know how musty things can get, this time of year, in the northeast, so I try not to let wash clothes and damp towels linger.  Yes, we go through a lot of towels in the spring and summer. 

No matter what I did, I couldn't get the smell to go away.  The upstairs bathroom has no ventilation or window, so Gareth and I decided we'd just use the downstairs shower instead...that way we wouldn't have to worry about it drying out after we'd used it.  Oh, I forgot to mention that it's carpeted as well.  I know...stupid!

So, we go out for a little while on Saturday and come home and Gaby's sitting in the loo and she yells out, "Hey, someone cracked the ceiling in here!"  Of course my first thought was, "Oh crap!  Not only am I breaking toilet seats because I'm so fat, I'm now gonna crash through the ceiling of the upstairs bathroom.  LOVELY!" 

So I go in to check things out and would you look at that!!! Gaby wasn't kidding.  The ceiling was heavily bowed and damp to the touch with little wet spots forming in random patters. 

This was something we had never ever noticed before.

After saying a prayer of thanks that we're just renting and not the homeowners, I phoned our landlord who came out immediately and no sooner had he laid a tarp down had Niagara Falls burst above his head, and with it, gallons and gallons of stagnant and moldy water!  The house immediately filled with the smell and my eyes began to water and I started to cough.  I can't even describe how bad it smelled.  It wasn't the toilet drain line - just the shower drain line, but apparently it appears that it's been leaking for as long as we've been here...five months.  The landlord bought the property only a month before we moved in and knew nothing about it.  Thankfully he is awesome and came right out and has been working on it ever since.

The thing that sucks about this whole thing (well aside from the giant hole in the ceiling and inability to use the upstairs loo), is that I woke up Sunday morning feeling like someone had set my throat and chest on fire, pain in almost every part of my body,the worst case of the trots I've ever had (I know, there goes the over-sharing thing again), and nauseated and feeling like I'd been trampled by a heard of rabid toddlers.

I laid in bed most of yesterday and moaned and cried.  I've never had such awful body aches before.   Nyquil and Benadryl helped a little bit, but once the fever kicked in, there was not much that would help. 

I'm still feeling like crap but not nearly as bad as I was yesterday and earlier today.   This is embarrassing because the first weekend in May, the one when I brought Meg back here from Maine I had a head cold.  Not a big deal, but annoying.  Then last weekend I came down with a nasty UTI and that was suckage on a pretty epic level and now this weekend?  I'm assuming it's an allergic reaction to the mold.  Do I even want to hazard a guess as to what Memorial Day weekend has in store for me? 

As an example of how yucky I'm feeling, I actually sat down and watched some of The Bachelorette tonight and I have never ever watched (or wanted to, for that matter!), it before, or it's male counterpart.  I find those kinds of shows insipid and highly boring.  I know I know...I myself have applied to be on a reality show, but I like to think of The Biggest Loser as a reality show philanthropy of sorts.  I kinda feel bad for all involved too.  I don't know why, but I do.  Oh well, that's a post for another day.

What's next?  Am I going to start watching Jersey Shore, or even The Real Housewives of New York, or worse yet, Dancing with the Stars?  No...it will probably be something monumental - well for me anyhow.  Nope, the next thing you know, I'll be tweeting about American Idol.  If you ever see that happen, then prepare yourself, either Hell is about to freeze over or Armageddon approaches!

 

Never Let a Four Year Old Be Your Personal Trainer

Some days I don't have the sense God gave a gnat!

Other days I have even less.  Today was one of those days.

 

Every day, Gaby and I exercise together, or at least that's what I call it.  Sometimes it's just dancing along to Yo Gabba Gabba, (hush!), others it's working out to a DVD, and occasionally we run around the house, up and down the stairs, like total lunatics.   Yeah, OK maybe that happens more than "occasionally."

Today was different.  I don't know why.  Maybe it was the gloomy weather outside, the fact that I overdosed on flax seed...again, or perhaps the planets were in some bizarre planetary alignment.  I don't know.  All I do know is that all vestiges of common sense left the building and I let Gaby, a FOUR YEAR OLD, dictate my exercise today.  As a result. I am walking with a slight limp, have a bruised ass, and think I might very well have broke one side of our sofa...one of the sides that reclines.  Sorry honey.

So, do you see how Gaby is situated on the sofa in the above picture?  She wanted me to do the exact same thing and then slam my legs into the back of the sofa, bring them over my head and then rinse, repeat.  And do you know what?  I did it.  Hell, it was fun...at first. 

I had quite the momentum going and we were giggling away at one another and then all of a sudden, I launched my legs into the back of the sofa with such force that the backward bounce off the sofa caused me to go completely ass-over-teakettle!  Meaning, I completely did a back-flip off of the sofa and landed all of my largess onto the floor with such intensity that something cracked...at this point I'm not certain if it was my ass or the hardwood floor underneath the small area rug I landed on. 

I think, from now on, I'm going to stick to exercising with Elmo!

 

It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

Every once in a blue moon I get, what I consider to be, a fantastic idea.  An epiphany of sorts.  Friday was one of these occasions.  I was so happy with myself that I even did what I thought was a touchdown dance of sorts, celebrating my own brilliance.  Gaby mistakenly thought I was having a seizure and asked me, "Mommy, do you need the 911 men?" 

Gaby has a faded pair of jeans that still has a lot of wear left in them.  The only problem is that there are a couple of grease stains on the front of the jeans and I abhor taking my kids out in clothes that aren't clean. I can't do it.  I won't do it.  So I was sitting at the table wondering what I was going to do with the jeans...  Let her run around in mud puddles?  Give her some finger paint and tell her to have at it?  Turn them into a pair of cut-offs?  Then I looked at where the grease stains were and thought that if I'd cut them off she'd end up with booty-shorts and it could just be me, but I think 4 years old is too damned young for booty-shorts!   As I was pondering the fate of the stained jeans, Gaby sat next to me happily coloring away with her Crayola Pipsqueak Markers.  I watched her color Snow White's hair blue (she knows it's black, but she was using her artistic license!) and then it hit me!   Gaby and I would draw on her jeans and color over the grease stains!  Brilliant!

It's not that I was trying to be some sort of frugal fashonista (or would that be frugalista?), but I hate to see something that still has a lot of use left in it, go to waste. 

The two of us sat there and colored on her jeans after I made sure she understood that she is never ever ever ever, no NOT EVER to do this on any other item of clothing unless I tell her it's OK and I'm sitting right next to her.

I'm not very good when it comes to drawing and decided that we should keep it simple but I thought they turned out cute if I do say so myself.  Gaby did most of the work with a little guidance from me...

 

The grease stains were covered up nicely!  I decided to turn them over and let her work her magic on the back pockets as well...

 

Martha Stewart, eat your heart out!  Have markers, will create!

Gaby wore the jeans most of Friday and for a little while over the weekend whilst we were back in Maine.  She took such pride in her handiwork and was certain to point out, to anyone who said hello to her, that she was the brilliance behind the jeans.  

I put a load of laundry in the wash first thing this morning, including all of the dirty clothes from our trip.  As I sat on the couch and folded the warm, clean laundry I searched all through the pile for the jeans with the rainbows and stars.  Gaby asked if she could wear them again.  I even went back into the laundry room and looked in the washer and dryer thinking I might have inadvertently left them behind.

I sat back down on the sofa and looked at all of Gaby's clean jeans and then it hit me, squarely in the middle of the forehead!

D'oh! I'd used these markers to let Gaby color her jeans...

 

And as a result of using those markers, this is what her jeans look like now...

 

 

Crayola washable markers are indeed, totally and completely...washable!