Suburban Bliss:: Birth Control Via The Written Word

A twenty minute nap: also good.

I decided to try the 30 Day Shred after seeing a few people talking about it on Twitter. I am inherently lazy of course and I have come to accept that this combined with my love of calorie heavy beer is going to keep me on the slightly overweight side of curvy for the rest of my life.

I've learned a little more about how to dress my body considering this and I feel okay about the way things look on a day to day basis. Besides when I was skinny I didn't have boobs so six of one, half dozen of the other. Or...well you get what I'm saying.

Still, I don't really want to gain more weight and I also find that if I am at least moderately active I feel more confident about the state of my body and who doesn't like to feel confident?

I've toyed around with lots of different workouts and I have hated them all. When I heard the Shred lasted 20 minutes I thought, "Well it'll suck like everything else but at least it's only 20 minutes. I can do anything for 20 minutes."

And I can, I do. I've been using this tape for more than 30 days now, of course not in a row and I am pleased with how fast my endurance increased and you really can't beat 20 minutes.

But Holy Shit I want to kill someone every time I do this stupid thing. I spend about an hour or two talking myself into doing it again. Then another 30 to 45 minutes after the fact willing myself not to pass out. I try to convince myself that if I ride my bike four miles it's "just as good", even though I know it's not. I'll skip the work out today, I say to myself, I'm folding laundry! That's almost as good, I'll just climb the stairs 50 times while I do it.

My mantra is, "Anything For 20 Minutes" The problem is, about 5 minutes in I think, "I really could do anything for 20 minutes, like sit here watching this stupid workout while eating a spoonful of peanut butter. Or I could read a book for 20 minutes. Or I could have sex for 20 minutes. Or I could stick a fork in my eye for 20 minutes. Anything that is not this."

It's very motivating.

There's gotta be an effective way for me to be active that won't require a lot of time, won't make me miserable and that I'll look forward to doing.

In Puerto Rico with Maggie, we'd end each day in the pool gently swimming/walking back and forth across the pool for hours while chatting and waiting for the bats to dive bomb our heads forcing us out. And yes we had drinks in our hands a lot (almost all) of the time but still.

I guess we need a pool. And bats.

(Yes, I'm still on level one.)

Did They Eat It? Sweet and Sour Beef

Oh hey! I cooked a meal for my family!

It was 5:30 and the ground beef I pulled out of my freezer yesterday was still frozen solid. This made my last minute plan to make a lot of meatballs pretty much out of the question. So I pulled out my favorite last minute dinner cookbook, Seat of The Pants Suppers, and quickly found a recipe that would take me 20 minutes or less to make with things I had in the house.

(*This book is awesome, I've made a lot of the recipes before but the actual book is impossible to find.)**(For some recipes see below.)

I pulled out Sweet and Sour Beef just to see who would eat it.

You need
1 - 1.5 pounds of ground beef (not shown, see below)
1 T. vegetable oil
1/2 an onion
1/4 cup molasses
1/4 cup vinegar
1/4 cup ketchup
3 cups cooked rice.

I spent about 40 minutes trying to slowly defrost the ground beef in the sink and that was aggravating. 

I hope it doesn't end up in the basement of the alamo

All summer we've been looking for a bike for me, just something I can ride around town, maybe up to the market on the days when I don't keep the car. I have been using Logan's mountain bike, which is sized perfectly for a 6 foot tall man, for these tasks and that was okay. But I ended up showing Royal Oak my underwear and damaging the delicate area of my womanhood whenever I had to stop or get off the bike.

There were lots of bikes available for purchase but Logan and I are cheap and wanted to spend no more than $50 on this bike. It looked like a bike purchase would be put off for another season and I'd just have to stuff my underwear with bubble wrap to save my lady parts.

Then Friday night we ran a couple errands and found this bike for $30 on the side of the road. I should really let Logan tell this story because he has inherited from his mother a love of finding really great things in the trash or at roadside sales for very little money. He'll talk about his finds for days, weeks, years.

Where I'll tell you, 'We drove down the road and Logan saw a for sale sign on this bike so we turned around, went back, rode it around a little and offered the man $30 for it. He said okay."

Logan's story will go something like this, "It was one of those days, one of those days when you're shopping and you just feel like there's something more, something better, a better deal....you just don't know where it is yet. The weather was beautiful on this particular day, sunny but with the beginnings of a fall chill in the air. It was just about 6:03pm when we drove down Coolidge, sometimes we go another way but that day, we took Coolidge, remember that for later because it's important...."

And so on and so forth.

Additionally you'll sit around for the next day or two and every 2-3 hours he'll say out of the blue, "THIRTY BUCKS! Thirty Dollars! Wow!"

On Saturday he spent a few hours polishing the chrome on my new bike and taking pictures of it and then he made some phone calls, 'Hey, Mike, you gotta come over and see the bike I found for Liss.'

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm excited but my excitement is more like this, 'Hey! Bike! Yay. Let's go ride it'

That afternoon we took the kids for a ride to the ice cream place and then by the aquarium store, a rare day of Burning Daylight during the fall. It was a nice outing until about 1/3rd of the way in when my bike started to make a sound which made the entire city of Royal Oak say, "What The Fuck Is That?"

It was me and my new bike. For reference it sounded a lot like this.

And this marked the first time Max was embarrassed to be seen with me, but God Damn It, my underwear did not show.

(Fifty bucks says it costs $100 to get the squeaking issue taken care of.)

Dog Swim 2009

It had not occurred to me that going to a dog swim without a dog is a little odd. I told our friends about it and a few of them likened it to going to a playground to watch children play even though you don't have an actual child.

I swear I didn't wear a trench coat or offer dog treats to any of the dogs.

I mostly just watched and giggled.

Madison watched and mourned her lot in life; Lame parents with little tolerance for chaos and so, no dog.

Then we went home, I put on my red birthday shoes.

And went out to celebrate. I am 36 now and I like to watch other people's dogs play at the pool.

I'm probably not going to outgrow this.

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growing up

School so far has been going okay. 

Max, I've noticed, is fine as he gets used to school, he just rolls along and doesn't really think too hard about what's different and what's the same. Even riding the bus, something he didn't really want to do this year by himself, he's kind of just accepted he's going to be on the bus and that's that.

His problems come later when he gets overwhelmed by a particular project and spends an hour at bedtime sounding like a mammal in some terrifying mating season call. But let's not even worry about that now.

Madison, shocked me after her first day at school. Going into the building without wrapping herself around my head and grabbing onto my brain stem for dear life. You know, that's progress. Still I worried a little throughout that day. I just wondered how awful pick up would be.

She was happy at pick up. She said "I only got lost once." "Someone liked my shirt." "I felt so popular seeing all my old friends!" (From the elementary school we attended before we moved).

We walked home that day and I floated home above her and she held a string tied to my ankle so my joy, relief and pride wouldn't shoot me right into foreign airspace.

She teased Logan when he called to see how it went, "Well, it was awful. I hate it. I never want to go back." Then, after a pause, "No! I loved it."

We made a fatal mistake that night.

We put her to bed. Where her brain could think about what could go wrong. 

All the things you remember about middle school. Do you remember middle school as clearly as I do? I wasn't normal of course, but everyone I talk to has at least a couple of stories about the terror of getting lost, not remembering their combination, the thrill and the terror of all this new independence.

To avoid all of this we should have given her a little cocaine so her brain would never slow down. She'd have gone to bed last night thinking, "I'm in a whole other amazing dimension and it's sparkly and full of pulsing light."

Yes I realize that's weird but come on. The tears....they're heartbreaking.

Last night Maddie asked, "You know, I just don't understand why you can't just have the same teacher all day in middle school? Or at least have them walk you to your next class?"

And we said, "But this is independence. This is your first chance to be a little more grown up. To try different classes and to learn even more about every subject."

"But it's really hard to get used to."

Today I was running late after having lunch with a reader in Toledo, (Hey! Staci!) so I asked a friend to pick Maddie up at the school.

When Maddie didn't see me or my friend, she decided to start walking home by herself. It's very close and that's the plan eventually, to have her walk. But we didn't want to push it.

When she walked up to the house she said, 'I walked home all by myself, can you believe I didn't freak out? I feel so grown up!"

Then later, "I was thinking I'd take that dollar you gave me to use at lunch and get ice cream on my way home. Can I do that next time?"

Yes you can baby girl. Yes you can.

Not really naked but the point is I could be.

All summer long people asked me, "Oh boy! Middle school! Are you nervous?"

And I laughed and said, "I'm about to kill my kids, that's all I'm nervous about."

This morning I woke up and a wave of totally unexpected anxiety washed over me.

I don't typically indulge in a lot of "MY Bayyyyy-Beeeee" stuff but.

My Baby! Is in middle school!

So it was a momentous occasion dropping her off. She's struggled with school anxiety for most of her life and this year was of course no exception. Her best friend from preschool is at her school for the first time since they were 4 so that helped ease things and unlike years past we didn't have to surgically remove her from my head.

She had decided she wasn't going to cry, it's middle school MOTHER.

I watched her face, knowing exactly how those gears were shifting in her head. "I don't want to do this. I am going to do this. I don't want to do this. I am going to do this."

I know exactly how she's feeling....and I'm surprised how hard it is to watch.

I mean it's hard, even though I'm sitting here in my living room naked eating all the cookies out of the cookie jar.

Vocabulary Test

We grew up in the kind of neighborhood we lived in last year. Where there were always kids running around, your neighbors had a key to your house and everybody was happy to help you watch your kids. So sometimes I'd head down to the neighbors house down the street.

I've mentioned these neighbors in the past, the Hippies everyone called them. Would you like to know why?

She breastfed, didn't smoke in the house and they made her kids wear seat belts in the car, unlike everyone else who would literally let us try to "surf" in the back of a conversion van or sit in the front seat on the arm rest so in case we were in an accident we could be easily ejected through the windshield.

I BET THEY DIDN'T DRINK AND DRIVE EITHER.

Hippies.

So one day when I'm 4-ish my mom leaves me at this neighbor's house, in spite of their really wacky lifestyle, and runs out to do errands or smoke crack in my baby sister's face or something normal like that. 

While she's out, the neighbor calls my mother and says, "Something's just not right with Melissa today."

My mother asked for more information, "Is she sick?"

"Well no, it's not that. She just doesn't seem herself. She has a touch of melancholia."

I know my mother is the butt of a lot of my jokes and I accept that someday I will be the butt of Maddie's jokes. But my mother is a reasonably intelligent woman who maybe didn't have a huge vocabulary back in the 70's. 

I don't know what my mother thought I had, she didn't know exactly what melancholia was but it sounded a little like cholera or melonoma so she raced home to pick me up from our neighbor's house ready to rush me off to the ER or call an ambulance if that's what it took to save me from this horrible illness.

She arrived terrified and breathless, with my sister strapped to the roof of the car (she wasn't a hippy). She raced into the house to evaluate the situation and found me sitting on the sofa, quietly.

"Does she have a fever?"

"No, she just seems a little quiet today."

"Wait, you called me because my kid was quiet?"

Fucking hippies.