You know what they always tell me: It always works out. This party was no exception.

No matter how much you fret and worry and freak-out about the severe storm warnings, the wind, the lack of space, the unknown-non-rsvp-ing mystery guest list, the kids who get bored in five minutes if there isn’t a bounce house and all the many many things you wish you could fix in your old broken-down mobile home…it all works out. It all worked out perfectly thanks to many whispered prayers.

Of course everything started really early in the morning. I was making the stump cake (which by the way came together exactly how I imagined and completely architecturally amazed me. I think I’ll do a whole post on that.) my mom was making her little cherry-tomato-ladybug cracker things, my dad was hanging lights in the carport and Toby showed up which turned out to be quite providential because right then Bug and I had a pretty big disagreement over her costume for the day.

I had thought she was going to wear her blue leotard with this really pretty light purple tutu that my friend Wendy gave her. It was perfect for the party. It was gauzy and had flower petals inside the layers. Except there was one problem that I guess Bug and I had discussed already and somehow in my absentminded party-planning-craziness I had forgotten.

It was the wrong color.

Now in a normal family the mother would say to the daughter: Tough. Get over it. I am the mom, you are the kid. And then the daughter would pout for five minutes and sneak a cupcake or something. Not this family. Color is EVERYTHING. If you’ve been following this blog for the last five years, you know how Bug feels about color. First there was green, then there was fuschia and now there is this peacock blue/teal/turquoise family.

Bug has her dad’s perfectionist eye when it comes to color. They can both see shades and nuances in color that even bees and hummingbirds can’t see. Seriously. If you know Toby you’ve probably heard him discuss how a photo has a green cast to it and go on and on about it until your eyes roll back in your head. Like father, like daughter.

So, apparently sometime in the last month or so I had told Bug that I would sew her a blue skirt to match her leotard. I’m sure I did. I had waxed on about all sorts of costume ideas and I’m sure she overheard me talking about them with all sorts of people. There was a time when I was thinking of sewing material to the leotard in waves to make her look like a water fairy and then I had this idea that I would sew up an old 60′s pattern my mom had in a pretty turquoise raw silk…But when it came down to the week of the party and I had way too much to get done (plus work deadlines), I just shelved all those fancy costume dreams and figured she was okay with the purple tutu. She had worn it several times before and flounced around so happily. I thought we were good.

I was wrong and Bug has a memory like an elephant.

Just when I thought it was going to be a whole day of “It’s-my-birthday-I-can-cry-if-I-want-to” Toby showed up. Of course he took her side, he always does. So I hatched a brilliant plan. If Toby would take her to the fabric store and buy her some blue tulle in the perfect color, then I would sew it right then and there. Never mind that I had 50 cupcakes to ice, animal masks to cut out and assemble, counters to clean, a hot cocoa bar to set up, craft tables to be set up, lemonade to make…blah-ti-blah-crazy-party-zilla rant here.

I figured either Toby would refuse to go to the fabric store on principle (places like that give him the willies) and then he’d be stuck convincing Bug that the purple tutu was perfectly fine OR they’d go together and have a wonderful father-daughter bonding time over color and fabric and they’d both be out of my hair for HOURS.

As you can see my plan worked brilliantly. They were gone for hours and everyone was happy. And yes, I can totally sew a tutu out of a yard of organza (not tulle) in five minutes flat.

Next came the spread. Amazingly, I was able to get everything done at the last minute. My mom went completely crazy over-the-top with these super cute little bug appetizers that I did not really get a good photo of. (That is my one big regret of the day. I never handed my camera off to someone else to take photos. And all my regular photographer friends weren’t there so the only photos I have are blurry ones. It breaks my heart too because I think this is my favorite party and all I have to show for it are a dozen blurry photos. Oh well.)

My mom made ladybugs out of cherry tomatoes, ants on a log, snails out of cucumbers wrapped around some kind of cream-cheese-sundried tomato mix and some green leafy-looking tortilla pinwheel things. I never got to taste them but I heard everyone else raving so I guess they were really good.

I was just so happy the cake turned out. The mushrooms my aunt made and these funny little malt ball acorns we made by rolling one end in melted chocolate and chopped nuts were so cute!! It was the best cake ever. I’m just so sad I didn’t get better photos.

Anyway, you get the idea.

But you know what else turned out? Everything else!!! I was so happy and relieved.

I had cancelled the bounce house because all morning it had been drizzling and the weather report forecasted nothing but rain and wind. But then one hour into the party, the sun came out and my Aunt Keren called the bounce house company back up and told them to get there ASAP. I had really given up on the idea. The driveway was full of cars, it just seemed monumentally impossible but never under-estimate the power of a short red-head. They get things DUN. Cars got re-parked, the bounce house people showed up and five minutes later we had kids bouncing in a giant fairytale castle in the sunshine. I couldn’t believe it.

Really, I should include one other thing in this story. Earlier in the day, probably around 2pm, I had remarked to my Aunt Keren (who had gotten there early to help) that I really wanted to brush my teeth before the guests arrived at 3pm. I hadn’t eaten breakfast, I hadn’t even had my coffee…things were crazy. All my kitchen counter-tops (which is really only one counter) were a mess and I was starting to get a tiny bit snappy at my mom because most of the mess was her mess—which I love her for dearly because LADY BUGS! SNAILS! ANTS ON A LOG! All not part of my plan but so WONDERFUL!!! Actually, I take that back. I did ask her to make the ladybugs but the rest were her creative embellishments. Super super cool but sort of worrying me because now we had about five thousand things to do at the very last minute. You can imagine my party-zilla distress.

My aunt pulled me by the arm into the bathroom and made me brush my teeth. She physically made me do it. I’m sure partly because I had horrible breath and partly because she knew I was going to explode and yell at my mom if she didn’t. So there we were in my tiny bathroom and while I’m brushing she held my hand and prayed out loud. I don’t remember what she prayed but I know it was something about it being a wonderful party for a happy little girl who we love so much.

And that’s why when the sun came out and my counters were all perfectly clean and there was a giant pink bounce house in my driveway that I felt like God was smiling at me. I hate being a gushy Christian going on about how God makes things “easy” because he doesn’t but for one moment I realized that if I just throw up my hands and let Him take care of things he totally does! It wasn’t supposed to be sunny!! It was rainy and cold and people were freezing. I did actually have to hand out blankets to the moms who sat outside and watched their kids in the bounce house but it was wonderful. It was cozy. We had hot chocolate and the lights my dad hung in my carport made it feel warm and inviting.

We had sun.

The fairy house kits were a hit. (Thank you Momfluential for that wonderful idea!) Some of the kids were baffled by it, others were engrossed. It’s really fun to watch how creative some children are naturally. They don’t need any prompting at all. The others didn’t get it at all so they went bananas in the bounce house instead, which was perfectly fine with me.

The lemonade turned out perfectly. You should really use this idea at your next party. The hole-punching was a bit of a chore but so worth it.

The hot chocolate bar was wonderful, thanks to my friend Deb who acted as bartender and some tasty six dollar amaretto from Trader Joe’s.

The masks were a fun photo prompt. I always like to have some silly thing like this to prompt people to take photos. You can download your own copies over at Alpha+Mom if you were thinking of having a woodland creatures party. (I strongly recommend it!)

Some people don’t need much prompting. Love her.

And of course there were presents…

And everyone fit in my tiny house!!!

And cake!

I love these candles that don’t burn out. They give you plenty of chances to get a photo even if you are the hostess with the mostess and you’re too frazzled to check your camera settings.

Blow little Bug, Blow!

She finally got them all out and everybody cheered. It was great.

Carrien cut the cake for me because I was afraid of it. I’ve never made a cake that big before and the chocolate sticks were in there making it all weird and unpredictable. I just let the professional take care of it. Do you know what else Carrien is a professional at? Cleaning stoves. Yeah. She’s has OCD about it. It was so funny. As the party was dying down and we were cleaning up, she started cleaning my very dirty stove. At first I tried to stop her, but then she got in there with a little bread-tab scraper and I figured I better shut up because that stove was going to be cleaner than it’s ever been in it’s entire life!!!

So that was pretty much it. These photos are from the after party. I love the after party. Chatting, cleaning, kids playing dress up…it was just a whole bunch of wonderful.

A very long, tiring day of wonderful.

I have to admit I’m solar-powered. You always wondered why I’m full of enthusiasm and great ideas. Well, that’s my secret. It’s the sun. When the sun goes down so do I. So I get plenty of sleep which is awesome. I’m like Wall-E when I wake up. I have to situate my face so that the sun can fill up my battery reserves and then BVrrroooong! I make that sound a mac makes when it starts up and you forget to turn off the volume before shut down last time (Don’t you hate it when that happens at the library?).

This also goes for my moods. Sunny = Happy. Cloudy = Sad.

It’s great that I live in Southern California where it is sunny 90 percent of the time but when it’s cloudy I suddenly become like the rest of you sad people on anti-depressants and I don’t know what to do with all this gloom! It’s so murky and, and…awful!!! How do you cope?!! How do you get anything done? Ugh. I feel like I’m wearing cement shoes and my arms are stuck to the ground with strings of chewing gum. I just want to go crawl into a hole and die.

This is all not very fantastic when you’re planning a birthday party for a little girl who is turning six and birthday parties are what you are good at. There is no failing at birthday-party-planning in this house. No sadness allowed! We eat obstacles for lunch. Bring on the challenges!!! Fifty people in a small mobile home with muddy feet?! I can do it!!!!

As you can see, my winter-wonderland of backyard fun with stumps for chairs and bedspreads for tents might not be happening. My visions of tulle strung from the trees and girls sipping lemonade is vanishing before my very eyes. All I can see are freezing cold fairies with muddy feet running in and out of my house and tracking mud all over my peach-colored carpet. Which I hate anyway so I guess it’s not that big of a deal but I’m still getting hives over it. Ugh! Mud! Kids! Hyperactivity! The bounce house people won’t deliver the bounce house if it’s going to rain!! What am I going to do?!!!!

There is a thirty-percent chance of rain predicted for Saturday. I know in Portland that would be a perfect day for an outdoor party. You might even throw a pool party on a day like that and wear a bikini but here? We are weeenies! We are freezing our butts off!!! We are seriously shivering and moaning. It’s sad and pathetic and majorly cramping my party-planning style.

Well, until the sun comes out. When the sun shines I can think of all kinds of crazy ideas. I can do this. We can have an indoor party. I am excellent at crafts! But when the sun goes back behind a cloud again I shrivel up. The obstacles! It’s too hard! I just want to cancel the whole thing.

Such crazy talk.

So here’s my plan: The bounce house people said I can decide on the day of the party whether or not to have a bounce house. If it’s raining we’ll just move on. If it’s not really raining we will move the bounce house to the front yard and put it on the driveway where there is no mud. I don’t know where people are going to park but that’s their problem.

Inside: I’m going to move all my furniture to the side and create a big open space in my living room/office. Maybe I’ll talk Toby into letting me borrow the giant heirloom Persian rug that he has rolled up in Bug’s room at his house that is not getting used. He won’t mind too terribly if it gets chocolate cake ground into it, right? Hmmm…that probably won’t fly.

Then I’ll use all that tulle that I was going to put in the trees outside, inside. It will be like prom night! I’ll just hang it from the ceiling from an old hula hoop or something.

I bet you wondered why I have a whole bolt of tulle. That’s a good question. I’m weird. I used to do flowers for weddings back in the 90′s and I had a much bigger budget back then. I guess I just bought a whole bolt of tulle and I still have it to this day. I have a whole shed full of floral supplies leftover from those days. It’s coming in very handy.

So with the tulle and these stars it could be magical, right? Bug and I made silver stars the other day with card stock and glitter. I was going to hang them from the trees outside with my fairy orbs but now I think I’ll just hang them inside. Maybe I’ll get crazy with some sheets and make fairy tents inside too. That will be super fun when the kids pull them down along with the sheetrock from my ceiling. Oh boy.

I wish I had a man around the house who liked to build things. That would be so awesome. I could probably install a giant branch in the middle of my living room and bolt it to the ceiling. The cats would go crazy. (Note to self: If ever dating again make sure to date someone handy.) But I have no man around the house and my dad is working until Saturday so I’ll probably have to scale back my visions. That’s okay. It’s gonna happen. We’ll make it work. It always does.

Ugh. How am I going to make this work? You see this kitchen? Charming you think? Shudder. The wallpaper offends me so badly that I think I’ve blocked it out. It’s like a weird vibration in my head that makes me only see white where the little flowers are. But then I got this idea that I would rip off a part of the wallpaper near the sink. It had some water-staining and was really driving me crazy. I thought I would do what I did in my bedroom and go with the whole I-live-in-a-run-down-Parisian-apartment look where the ripped wallpaper reminds me of an Anthropolgie ad.

It did not work. Now I have a big blank spot over the sink that is still water-stained and your eye is drawn to it because it is NOT wall-papered!!! I might as well install neon signs pointing at all the ugliness. This would not be a big deal if the weather was great. I would just route everybody straight to the backyard and they would avoid the kitchen but now all my guests are going to be filing through my kitchen and silently judging me. I just know it.

If I had a man around the house I would ask him to paint all the wallpaper red for me or maybe pistachio green to match the cupboards. (Boy, don’t I seem like a catch?) I would do it myself except all those shelves would have to be removed (and the screw holes are puddied) and there is this light fixture contraption near the sink that my Grandpa installed that is bent on electrocuting me. I already tried to de-install it once and it zapped and ker-powed at me like a comic book villain. I’ve decided to leave it alone. So I don’t think this kitchen eyesore is going to be magically beautiful before the party. Back to blocking it out.

Did I mention that we went to one of Bug’s friend’s party this last weekend and they had a huge perfect house where they regularly host weddings in their living room? Yeah. No pressure. None at all. How does one go about canceling a party at the last minute again? Can I just board up my house and pretend I don’t live here?

Let’s talk about what is working. The craft ideas for the party are going along swimmingly. I know it’s hard to tell when I’m being sarcastic and when I’m not but here I’m actually happy about something. I decided to use Momfluential’s idea for fairy house kits. All those floral supplies I have on hand totally saved me. I didn’t even have to buy one thing to make all these bags up. It’s kinda scary that I have that much crap on hand but hey, it works out. I get to get rid of a lot of stuff and the kids get make fun fairy house with odd bits and bobs. I hope they are into it. I know I will be. I am all over this kind of craft like a fly on…nevermind. You get the picture. It’s going to be fun.

I think I’ll give each kid a stump disc and maybe some putty to stick things into. I was going to be on glue-gun duty but I decided with thirty-some kids they’d probably all want me to glue something and one of them was bound to get burnt. Since I don’t know every kid as well as I usually do I think I’ll pass on all the possible lawsuits. I think they can manage with sticks and putty and chennile stems and string. It’ll be fun.

The next thing that is working are the fairy drinks. I bought a whole bunch of canning jars and covered the printing on the lid with some silk flowers.

Then I punched a hole through the metal lid with my trusty metal hole-puncher and my super human man-hand strength. Actually, I only did one. It was pretty tough but it can be done. I’m leaving the rest of the lids for Saturday and I’ll let my Dad do it. Or any other random strong person who comes around.

Then I filled the jar with ice, a lemon slice and some delicious homemade lemonade from my backyard. I screwed the lid back on, stuck a pretty striped straw through the hole and presto! A perfect fairy drink!

So I’m making it work. When the sun comes out I’m pretty positive.

While I’m working on that really hard heart-felt post I thought I’d let Bug entertain you with her usual silliness. Do you know anybody who does this? Is your life an ap?

We’ve been struggling with homework lately. To be honest, I think homework has been a challenge from the start which is silly because it’s kindergarten! How hard can it be, right? Hah. Kindergarten schmindergarten. I think these three-inch packets of busywork they send home as “homework” are a trick to see if parents are paying attention, that’s what they are. If you don’t help your children do the homework correctly then it must mean you don’t love them! The homework police are watching! Fail! Fail! Fail!

For example: that black rectangular smudge on this thrice-copied xerox that someone hand-me-downed from the eighties is a van, right? V is for van? Or maybe it’s a sink. Is there an S on there? Hmm…let me squint and read the miniscule directions along the side of this really crappy worksheet copy…oh, the directions got cut off. We’re just supposed to know what to do because we’re grown-ups and kindergarten homework is for five-year-olds. Surely 39-year-olds can handle simple letter-recognition exercises? I have a degree in English dadgumit!

So my inability to comprehend kindergarten homework directions coupled with my five-year-old’s highly-effective homework resistance efforts have moved the actual homework completion process to a fairly volatile situation. Meaning, the morning that homework is due has turned into full-on bootcamp craziness, complete with me yelling my head off and the five-year-old running off to her room in tears. And this is just kindergarten!! Whatever are we going to do when she gets to word problems and science projects and book reports?!!!

My feelings exactly.

I don’t know.

We’ve tried everything. We’ve tried sitting down and doing little bits daily. She pokes at it. Spends probably 45 minutes procrastinating and picking all the berries off my centerpiece and gets 1/32nd of it done. We’ve tried me sitting next to her coaching her kindly. That lasts about 45 minutes and then my face melts off and I retreat to go text or something on my phone. We’ve tried comedy hour with me making jokes about every little thing. Haha! Isn’t the number seven so funny the way it slants to the left so that all the little children can slide down it and go to the front of the line! HA HA HA HAA HO HO HO HEE HEE HEE!!! She loves that method. We spend hours laughing our heads off and get about nothing done. And then when I don’t make jokes she thinks I’m the meanest mom in the whole wide world.

I’m such a cruel mom! I’m NOT funny AND I make her do stuff. Like pick up her dirty laundry and brush her teeth. It’s so unfair!! Why does she have do EVERYTHING!!!

Does anybody else out there struggle with kindergarten homework?

Do you have any tips for me? Anything has got to be better than how we’re doing it.

I keep telling myself I need to get in the habit of writing every day about the little things instead of waiting for big things to happen and then documenting them as if I’m writing a book report on my life. But days slip by as they are wont to do and my great ideas on blogging are in vain. As usual.

So here are the big things:

Bug has a two-wheeler! She inherited SuperChic’s old bike. My mom had it sitting around at her house and a neighbor offered to fix it (flat tire, stripped screws where the training wheels needed to go…it just needed a major tune-up) so my mom paid her neighbor and now we have a new bike that is old but totally cool because I didn’t shell out a buncha bucks at Walmart or somewhere even more expensive.

Recycling at it’s best! Bug totally loves it and it has not even crossed her mind that I could have bought her a shiny new Hello Kitty bike for only five hundred some bazingas. Rusty princesses for the win! Actually, it’s not that rusty, so don’t worry about Tetanus or anything. I know somebody out there was worried about that. They don’t call me a seasoned blogger for nothing.

She’s still a little bit wobbly and scared to death of how the whole bike shifts from left to right when she moves her weight from one training wheel to the other but I have no fear that before long she’ll be whizzing around faster than I can yell at her to slow down. Right now I’m thankful for her fear. Even though we live on the American Dream cul-de-sac, I have nightmares about her getting run over by some crazy moron driving down our street too fast. So we are proceeding with the bike-riding with utmost caution. If she takes all year to learn I’ll be a happy momma. But considering how long she took to learn how to scooter I think she’ll be out of training wheels by next week. Sheesh.

I just wish she’d slow down with this growing-up business!

Did you notice her dark blue corduroy jumper? If you read my post about Bug loving hand-me-downs over on my review blog, you’ll have to chuckle at this outfit. It’s Rapunzel’s from ten years ago. I never expected Bug to like it and I almost tossed it in the goodwill box when I was going through old clothes, except she pulled it out and begged to wear it. Shows you what I know.

You know why Bug likes it? Because she thought the red ladybugs at the bottom were red spotted mushrooms from Mario Brothers Mushroom Kingdom. How does my kid know about that? We don’t have Nintendo. It’s not the 80′s. I guess in today’s world all red spotted mushrooms mean super fun musical games or something. Go figure. And yes, she was a bit disappointed when I pointed out that the red mushrooms had black heads and antennae. But she still wore it anyway.

Next big thing:

My Grandma turned 85 on Wednesday. EIGHTY-FIVE!!! How is this possible? It’s really true that when you pass thirty time speeds up to warp speed. I hate the fact that I’m being so clichéd* and moaning about it. But it’s true. My Grandma is so full of vim and vigor, I’m not ready for her to be old and frail. She’s taking it gracefully though. If ever there was someone to emulate, it is my Grandma. I want to be just like her when I grow up—which should be in about five minutes by my calculations.

So we went over to her house for dinner because that is all she really wants. Material presents are not important, just spending time with family is what she really enjoys. Good thing too because I am the worst at remembering to buy thoughtful gifts when I am navigating motherhood at warp speed. Actually, I think I was bad at remembering to buy thoughtful gifts even when I was young and bored but that is neither here nor there. The important thing is that we were all together and it was super sweet.

My Aunt Keren thought Grandma would enjoy some kitten-time so my mom brought over all six kittens that she has right now. She’s babysitting my kittens until they find homes since my carpet is freshly clean and she has wood floors and she has three other kittens from a feral cat who abandoned them in her yard. Isn’t my mom nice? Yes. And I’m really trying hard not to take her for granted. By the way, five of those kittens have good loving homes and now there is only one left! Phew!

Anyway back to Grandma and the kittens. It was so sweet! The little black one curled up on her chest and slept there for a half an hour. It was adorable and I think Grandma enjoyed it but then one of her eyes started turning red and itchy so we removed the kittens and decided Grandma might be allergic to the adorable little fluff-balls. It was fun while it lasted though.

We also had root vegetables, which we all love. Best dinner EVER. It was like old times. We missed you, Aunt Kathy.

Last big thing:

I found a trench coat at Target. You guys thought I already had one didn’t you? Nope, I didn’t. I never have. It doesn’t rain here, what do I need a trench coat for? Streaking? Hah! Like that’s gonna happen. It’s all part of my made-up Secret Agent Josephine character in my head. She doesn’t have a double chin either. Bet you never noticed that. Oh you did? Blarg. Well, she’s my made-up character so I felt inclined to improve her. Them’s the perks of being an illustrator. I can draw myself any way I want to be. Be all that you can be!

Stupidly, I got rid of my knee high black boots a while back because I didn’t like the pointy heel so I will probably be investing in some new boots soon. I’m so glad that pointy-heel-pointy-toe trend is over. But knowing me, by the time I get around to shopping for some again will be back in full force. I hate fashion sometimes.

But who cares about that! How funny is Bug? She’s the best model ever. I hate to exploit her cuteness on this blog but as you can see she steals the show without even trying.

So here we are in our official garb looking so very spyish. It’s almost like we didn’t just throw on some trench coats over our sundresses and pull an impromptu photo shoot in our driveway with the neighbor who actually doesn’t know how to use my camera but did a pretty good job anyway! It’s almost good enough to put in the back of my books as my author shot I think! In fact, I think I will just do that.

Keep calm and spy on, Secret Agents!

* That d is for you, Bethany.

What do you do when you are buried with work, deadlines are falling all around you like giant redwoods in a timber harvest, you have guests coming in from out of town and you decided to have a great big fiesta on Saturday with lots and lots of friends? Do you knuckle down and get your work done so you’ll have plenty of time to clean your house and get ready for the party before your guests arrive OR do you walk around your house and dream up some impossible last-minute DIY home-improvement projects? The latter of course!

Because you wouldn’t want your guests to see the bathroom floor looking like this:

The horror! Actually, it looked much worse than that. The paint had come up in spots and it was soooo dirty. Muddy kid bathing, running-over sinks (that’s another story) and dogs with hair and claws do not do well on painted pressed wood (not to be confused with plywood, that would be a step up). It was the floor that could not be mopped. Oh, I tried to mop it. Believe me. But scrubbing seemed to just make it worse. You know you have a problem when you moisten the wood and it just comes up in crumbs in your hand. It was icky.

So I decided to paint the floor! Giant deadlines be damned. (Don’t worry clients, all’s well in the end.) My mom had taken all the girls over to her house for Camp Grandma so I decided to attack the floor with wild blood-shot-eyes of craziness and then get my work done on the side. That’s how we get things done around here.

Oh yeah.

First, I was just going to paint some flowers to distract from the ugliness of the dirty mint green paint. I drew them in with a sharpie and was quite pleased. Then I painted the flowers and leaves and some odd purple paisleys around the toilet area and discovered that the new fresh paint made the old dirty mint green paint look like a hot mess of awfulness. It didn’t detract at all! It pointed instead and screamed, Look! Look! It’s dirty in here! You’re probably going to catch something awful if you walk in here barefoot!

Oh woe is me.

Did I mention that I was using old house paint from a craft project from a long time ago and I didn’t have enough paint to cover the whole floor and definitely not enough for more than one coat? Good thinking, that thar me. But I tried anyway. I tried and tried to skimp out every last scrape of “lemon icing” paint to cover the ugly mint green but there was just NOT enough.

This is about the time I started walking around my house naked doing a one-woman stand-up comedy show all by myself for myself and the dog. I really wish I could have recorded that because I think I am pretty funny. But there was nakedness and blood-shot craziness so no recording was going on.

I did jot down some notes for this post though. I’m such a blogger like that.

Here are my notes:

1. Don’t have a dog, with hair when you are painting your floor. No matter how hard you sweep and wipe up the hair with a wet paper towel, you will miss about 80 thousand of them. That is why they call painting white wash. You are washing the hair with paint. Check your OCD at the back door.

2. Don’t paint with old paint from a past project because you WILL run out and you won’t be able to match it with your home stash of acrylics or the kid poster paint.

3. Do not leave the phone on the counter where you can’t reach it later without stepping in wet paint.

4. Do not forget to paint behind the door. Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

5. Do not paint in your favorite nightgown.

That’s all I wrote down but I’m sure there are about 95 more things not to do when painting your floor. In the end I went to Home Depot, shelled out 88 trillion bucks for a gallon (They don’t sell smaller containers. Gah!) of “lemon icing” matched paint and a gallon of epoxy garage floor paint for cement to put over the top and hopefully make the whole mess more mop-able. I really hope it works and doesn’t peel up my masterpiece when I roll it down Friday morning.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention how drying times had to be factored in. You know how I am so great at math. Ha ha. Imagine me with a calculator and smoke coming out of my ears. It turns out I do have enough time to get it all done before the party on Saturday (when my guests will mostly likely need to use the restroom!!) but it was close. So close in fact that I had to step aside and painfully not paint more detail so that I could give it a whole 24 hours to cure before laying down the garage floor epoxy laminate clear coat, or whatever that stuff is called. It was hard stepping aside. I desperately wanted to add more flourishes and scallops and maybe some tapered dotting but I started stepping in paint in places I couldn’t cover up and I knew it was time to cut my losses.

My original plan was just to paint some flowers as a temporary measure until I could put some groovy old 70′s linoleum down but now I’m kinda liking the flowers. They’re bright, they’re crazy. They make the rest of the bathroom look like an old lady running away from a flower child on acid but I kinda dig it. If this clear coat thing works out, they might stick around for a while.

At least so I can tell this story over and over.

Dude. The over-100-degrees weather I dreaded since I moved out here to the sticks (aka desert), is here.

I’d say we’re coping quite well.

Fitting in with the natives.

But then it’s not like we didn’t have practice.

So far so good.

By the way, my dad is here. He was even here on Father’s Day! Which was really cool. We didn’t do anything special for him which pretty much sums up my dad: We love him to pieces and we take him for granted. Rapunzel is baking him an entire batch of chocolate chip cookies for him to take on the road with him. So there’s that. But it’s not even a drop in the bucket compared to how much he does for us. He fixed my swamp cooler and killed about 99 black widow spiders I had living around the outside of my house the first day he got here. The rest of the time he’s spent helping my mom move back into her old house. (Yes, we’re kinda sad. More on that later.)

I love my dad so much.

And I didn’t even make him his own Father’s Day cd or buy him that Archies album he’s always talking about (which one was it again Dad?) Sheesh.

He’s been raving about my sugar snap pea garden and begging me to blog it. So this is for you, Dad. Here’s a picture of me behind my row of sugar snap peas, or were they snow peas? I always mix them up. Anyway, they are not supposed to grow in the desert. It’s like some kind of freak gardening event and my dad has been flipping out about it because they remind him of living in Northern California where they grow all the time and bring back memories of his childhood.

See! Sugar snap pea harvest!

Truth be told, my mom and I had a whole mess of seeds. Some I had ordered off the internet blindly, not paying attention to what region of the earth I live in and others were just random things that people had given us from 1986 and beyond. Most of the seeds got left in this little wheel-around card/stool thing my mom has and were the unfortunate victim of a hose accident. They got soggy, they molded, the end. But some of them survived and that is what we planted. That is how we came to have about 20 pea plants growing in my backyard. Usually they would have croaked and died under the scorching hot desert sun but because we had such an unusually cool spring they survived! You could even say prospered since I’ve picked them twice now and there are still more flowers coming.

They were delicious in dinner.

p.s. I’m posting about my weight and working out over on my review blog. But there’s also a little video of my dog poop and weed infested backyard you might want to spy on so you don’t get too jealous of my mad gardening skillz. And of course there’s $$ dangling at the end to make you comment.

My brother came to town and he’s staying in my house. I love hanging out with him but it amazes me how adding one person to my household can totally screw up my very ordered day. But then it’s my brother so I shouldn’t be surprised. He’s always liked to screw with me.

There are twice as many dishes to wash, half as much food to go around (he eats everything in sight, like a WHOLE BLOCK OF CHEESE IN ONE SITTING!!!!) the bathroom stinks, his room stinks, he stinks (he can’t take a shower because he has a cast) and THERE ARE KITTENS IN MY HOUSE!!! That I am stuck feeding every four hours. How did that happen?!!!

But how could you be mad at this face, right? Of course I’m not. I might sigh heavily and make snarky remarks all the live-long day but I really do like having him around. I find myself forgetting to lock the door at night and then just shrugging, Eh, Shawn’s here. He’ll squash the bad guys with his bad breath.

There is something about my big, bad, little (he’s two years younger than me) brother that dispels all fear. He’s just one of those kind of guys. He can look at other guys and make them whimper in fear. He’s good to have around. Even Bug is minding better. My brother doesn’t even have to say anything, he just raises his eyebrow and she obeys.

Anyway, you’re probably wondering why there are kittens in my house. Wormy, little, sick, infant kittens with gooped-up eyes who need to be bottle fed. (Yes, we are washing our hands like crazy.) Here’s why: They were abandoned at my mom’s other property by a feral mother cat and we’re just taking care of them until my brother and my mom take a road trip back up to my brother’s home in northern California. He’s got a friend up there who wants them so we are taking care of them until they have a proper home and a much-needed trip to the vet.

It’s a lot of work but I have to admit I’m falling in love with them. We all are. They started purring this morning. Their little bellies vibrate your whole hand. It’s the cutest thing ever. I’ve gone around and around in my head, thinking that maybe it would be okay to keep one. But I just can’t do it. I’ve been down the long cat life with too many cats and it’s just too hard. They get so sick when they’re old. They pee on the carpet and that smell! It just never goes away.

I vowed to myself that I would never have another cat after we had to put Maddy down. We still have Pounce and Lily at Toby’s house and they are starting to show the signs of old age. It’s going to be hard to lose them. So, I don’t know…it’s such a tough subject for me. I want Bug to have the experience of owning a kitten at least once in her life but I just don’t know if now’s the time. I’m catted out. You know?

So we’re just enjoying the time we do have with them. And when I have to wake up at 3 a.m. to make them a bottle, I just remind myself that it’s only until Friday and then I won’t have to do it anymore.

It’s good having my bro’ around too. I’m going to miss the whole stinky lot.

OH! I almost forgot to add there are chickens here too! Weird stuff happens when my brother is around. Chickens, kittens…I wouldn’t be surprised if tomorrow there’s a donkey in my yard.

A neighbor in my mom’s neighborhood gave my brother two chickens for free. He’s going to take them up north and start a real farm I guess. So they’re hunting and pecking all the earwigs in my yard until they make the trip up north. That’s going to be one long interesting road trip.

I’ll be staying home, thankfully. Phew!

My ninety-two-year-old grandpa fell and broke his hip last week. He was just out walking/hobbling in the garden area with one of the nurses from the assisted-living home that he resides in and he took a fall. Nobody knows why exactly but unfortunately there was a good bit of time between his fall in the afternoon and when he was actually taken to the hospital via an ambulance.

My mom stayed with him all night in the ER waiting for him to be admitted. He was finally admitted and put on pain-killers sometime in the wee hours of the morning. I’m sure it was horrible for him. My mom called me several times and I could hear crazy people wailing in the background. Somebody was drunk, somebody else over-dosed on drugs. It was a crazy night in the ER like usual. My poor old grandpa.

When I went to see my grandpa the next day in the hospital, he was pretty high on morphine. But he’s been slipping in and out of dementia for a while now. Last week I went to visit him and he was in tears trying to tell me a story that was so important it could change the world, he said. It took him forever to get the story out and when he did it wasn’t really a story at all. But I’m going to share it here because I promised him I would.

He has this painting (or photograph, I’m not sure. It’s a reprint) on the wall of an old man praying over bread. It’s a very popular picture and has been around for ages. (Google tells me it was taken by a photographer in Minnesota in 1912). My grandpa has talked about this picture many times before but lately it’s taken a new twist.

When he was in the service back during World War II, he was in London and had dinner with a man named Old Brother Ball who looked exactly like the man in the picture. Same hair, same clothes, same bread, the book was a bible and in the bowl was something he called mutton which was like lard. My grandpa remembers having dinner with Brother Ball and he took a knife and spread the mutton on his bread. Grandpa says the mutton was horrible tasting and turned his stomach. He smacks his lips in disgust and tells me that he can still taste it to this day. “Disgusting stuff.”

Anyway, my grandpa is now convinced that this picture is actually of Old Brother Ball and nobody in the world knows this. He desperately wants to tell the world that the picture isn’t a mystery anymore. The man’s name is Brother Ball and he lives in London in a town called Rickenberry (I didn’t write it down so I have to double check this because I have no idea what town he was talking about.)

Before he always told the story as if the man in the picture looked a lot like his old friend but now he’s convinced it is Old Brother Ball and it’s my job to tell as many people as I can. Maybe we could even make some money off the story, he says, which is just like him always trying to find a way to get rich quick (it runs in the family). Over and over he frets, Do you think we can do this? It’s such a big story. We have so little time. Can you print it? How many copies can you make?

In the hospital he must have seen on television that there was a ballgame this weekend and he was adament that I get the story printed in the newspaper and hand deliver it to the ball game attendees. I kept telling him over and over that I could put it on my website and thousands of people would read his story. (I exaggerated slightly for his comfort.) He’d pat my hand and thank me and then one minute later he’d start over again.

It was crazy-making. I started putting my story-telling skills to work and told him big fat yarns about how I would print the story two-up at Kinkos and then stay up all night long rolling the half-sheet flyers inside newspapers. Maybe I’d even set up a table and hand out free cups of coffee with the newspapers. His story would get out I assured him. I’m sure his hospital roommate was thoroughly amused/confused about what was going on.

It was so hard. I wanted to comfort him but the distress just wouldn’t go away. I’d convince him that his story would get out and he’d calm for a few minutes and then start up all over again. Do you really think you can do it? It’s so important. We have so little time. Maybe you better go and get started right now.

So finally I did leave. I told him I’d come back in the morning and show him the printed story. I figured I’d just print out this blog post and hope he didn’t have his glasses on, which have been lost for a few days anyway. I don’t know if he really knows how much time is passing. It seems like he is in a perpetual state of the last five minutes.

The good news is he had hip surgery last night and he came out of it like a champ. My dad said he was more lucid than ever. He knew who was president. He wasn’t talking about his story or the ballgame at all. He was happy to see my dad and just wanted to get some rest and see everybody later. So who knows, maybe he’s got a few more years left in him.

I just hope they’re good years. I’m so happy to have him still with us. I love him so much but I don’t know how long I can go on making up stories about making copies at Kinkos and handing them out at ballgames. But I’ll do it because someday somebody is probably going to do it for me. Or at least I hope so.

So! I almost got an oven this last week. That would have been exciting. The oven here has been broken since I moved in. The gas guy came out to fix it and sent us off on a wild goose chase for a 1970′s thermal couple that doesn’t exist anymore because they don’t make them anymore. He did say I could sell this old Okeefe & Merritt for a couple thousand dollars. I wish that was true. Does anybody know anybody who collects old ovens like this (the one on the left)? It’s really cool and green! It’s also very narrow but I didn’t care. A narrow oven is better than no oven.

But as things always go, the exhaust pipes for the new oven didn’t quite fit so now I have a new oven (which is actually an old one from my mom’s old house) hole in my house that is not quite hooked up. It’s okay. I’ve waited this long, I can wait a bit longer. My dad says he can fix it when he has home time again which might be as soon as this coming weekend. Woot! If it really happens, I’m sure I’ll be posting all kinds of pictures of me making lemon bars! You don’t know how many times I’ve looked at my lemon tree wistfully thinking of all the lemon things I could bake if I just had an oven!

The new old oven is kinda cool and funky too. It even has a clock in it that all the cool cats are making into screen savers these days. I don’t care. I just want it to BAKE!! I tried making cornbread in my mom’s toaster oven a while back. It did not work. The top burned and the middle was raw. There might be a way if I just adjust the temperature and time variables.

The coolest thing is that my dad was home. I wish he was home every weekend, but you know how it goes. He’s a long haul trucker and the more you drive the more money you make. So them’s the breaks.

Hmmm… what else is new? St. Patricks Day was pretty fun. Bug wore green from head to toe which brought back old memories. I whipped up a really quick Leprechaun treasure hunt in the backyard for her. It wasn’t that special really but she thought it was fun. I just painted some rocks green and then put them out strategically so she could follow a trail to an old Easter Basket filled with some leftover green taffy I already had on hand. When she questioned the item’s familiarity, I told her the Leprechauns are probably just like Santa Claus and they like to borrow stuff from us like wrapping paper and old baskets and things. They’re very resourceful, those seasonal characters. She seemed to buy it but I think that explanation won’t last much longer.

Speaking of Bug and her many outfits, I have found a solution for the constant pink. You might recall that she will only wear a particular shade of hot pink and sometimes I feel like whipping out the pantone book and telling everyone who gives her gifts to match it to a number (Pantone 233 if you’re curious). It’s that bad. But sometimes she likes to play act certain characters. Her favorites are Sleeping Beauty and Barbie, of course. Occasionally she will dress up as me and put together an outfit that looks amazingly like mine.

Recently we have been having wars about how she wants her hair done. She always wants two braids at the top of her head pulled back because that’s how Barbie does her hair, apparently. That’s all fine and everything but her long long hair gets sticky and tangled and all I ever want to do is chop it all off or put it in a high-up pony tail. Her dad doesn’t want her to cut her hair at all, which I can kind of relate to since I too had really long hair as a child, so that’s not an option. A pony tail is the obvious solution but I guess I just haven’t put enough Barbies in her path wearing a pony tail.

I thought I’d take a different track so I showed her a video of Lara Croft kicking butt and it worked like a charm. Now she wears boots and shorts and wants her hair up all the time. The back yard has become a tomb and she’s always hunting for treasure. Whatever works, I say. Kids are funny and sometimes require parents to be even funnier.

This weekend while Bug hung out with her dad, I tagged along with my friend Deb to a cool antique store. Except it was sort of like a cross between a thrift store and an antique store and they had all kinds of “junk” out on the sidewalk for super cheap. I wasn’t going to buy anything but the ladies working there were so nice and kept pawning things off onto me. “Here buy this purse, it looks so nice on you! What a great shape!” “You like that chair? I’ll sell you both of them for twenty bucks!” etc etc… it was kind of fun and silly. I would love to own a shop like that and sit around with a bunch of girlfriends drinking coffee and encouraging suckers to buy stuff.

I could find all kinds of old forgotten gems (aka junk) out in the sticks where people don’t know what they have and then sell them for twice the price at the beach. Now if someone could just rent me a store front for next to nothing. That would be the thing to do! I could have a little espresso machine in the back and probably do graphic design on the side. I’m not sure where Bug would hang out though…Lara Croft kicks might not go so well with glass lamps and fine china. But it’s a nice day dream.

It was a great place to take 7days shots, there were mirrors everywhere! Which by the way brings me to how much I hate my new haircut. Every shot I take of myself, I hate. I guess this is just part of getting older but please tell me next time I get a haircut that I’m NEVER allowed to have layers above my ears again. It’s taking forever to grow out. I guess you can’t really tell in these photos, which is intentional. My delete key sees way more photos than anyone these days.

I found my shot and bought this silly mirror thing for five bucks. It’s pretty cool I think.