Inspired by Ponyo and the fact that I can’t really draw or blog about what is bothering me. Maybe I should channel my feelings this way more often.

The church I sometimes go to has a bounce house sometimes, maybe once a month or so. I’m not sure since I don’t go often enough to know their schedule. I think it’s part of their attempt to attract more children. It’s a great idea. It seemed terribly irreverent to me at first when I was sitting in the service and I heard this horrible loud air-blowing sound but then when Bug begged to go back the next Sunday, I had to agree it was a pretty good idea. Her Sunday school class also put on a little play about creation for the whole congregation and Bug got to stick little felt animals onto a felt board on stage. I thought that was pretty cool.

And more on the pinkness. I think I’ve written enough about that.

Old news! Boo hiss! Bethany has already come and gone. Sob… Oh! Did I tell you about my car transmission going out? I can’t believe I never blogged that story. It was terrible! My car is only four years old and it only has 42,000 miles on it. WAY too young to be having transmission problems already. We knew when we bought a high performance German car we’d be in for trouble in the long run but this is the short run!

I was at a gas station. I had just filled up and was about to put the car in drive and leave the station. When I put the car in gear it went in REVERSE instead of Drive! The gear shift was in drive but the car went into reverse and scared the crap out of me. I looked down at the gear selector and sure enough the lever was on D not R. So I slammed on the brakes (of course), turned the car off and started it again. This time it drove fine but then the gear selector indicator in my dash started blinking. Then my engine warning light went on too.

If I’ve learned anything over the years of being a big sister to an auto mechanic and being married to a car snob, I’ve learned to NEVER ever drive with warning lights on. So I found a parking spot in the shade in a nearby parking lot and parked. Then I called my brother and Toby and a car dealership nearby. (I’m skipping over the part where I freaked out and started crying and couldn’t carry on a conversation with Toby without yelling so I handed the phone to my sister-in-law, CC, and let her handle everything. I love her.)

Toby did some googling and found out that this wrong-gear problem has been happening to a lot of Audi A3 drivers and figured I was probably okay to limp home to my mom’s house (that was my destination) as long as I stayed in the slow lane and was ready to pull off the road if anything funny happened again. Well, I tried that and my car wouldn’t even go into second gear! It was stuck in first and revving like crazy. Of course this happened on the on-ramp of a freeway with several impatient cars and a semi honking behind me.

I pulled off at the next exit and called a tow truck thanks to my brother’s triple-A plan. I’m so thankful to my brother and his family right now. They saved me about a trillion dollars in towing. A tow truck came and drove us all the way back to my home dealership where I left my car for a week and a half. The dealership set me up with a rental car and I was as good as new.

Two weeks later the dealership contacted me and let me know that Audi was paying for the repair (a simple computer program problem) even though my warranty was up in June of this year. Phew!!! That was such a huge relief. We couldn’t even begin to afford to pay for transmission work right now. Toby’s half-tempted to sell this car even though we love it so much and it’s already paid off just because we really can’t afford to be fixing it all the time. But we’ll see. Now that it’s back from the dealership and running great it’s hard to think about offloading it.

I almost forgot the best part of this horrible day! After I got the rental car and was home for dinner etc, I locked the keys in the rental car trunk! Good times!! It took not one tow truck but two to come and unlock it with a funky slim-jim thingy. And because I didn’t want to admit to Toby that I had done such a stupid thing (I have a history) I forced CC and Bug to sit outside in the cold with me while we waited to be rescued by the tow truck. I should have made this its own blog post. I even have photos of our incredibly long horrible day.

But at the end of it all you know what I remember the most? How great Bug behaved and how wonderful my sister-in-law is when you are in the thick of it. You know what they say about people’s true character showing up in times of stress? Her character is golden and mine is a black hole of failure.

Blah blah blah…everyday life.

I’ve been babysitting a lot which is great for the budget. And it’s great for Bug who desperately wants someone to play with all the time. I love it that people will hire me to watch their kids and I can bring my kid along too. It’s a great job for both of us.

And that’s that!

Not too much to say here… Just the usual getting ready for a trip which is tricky when you are a freelancer and don’t really have a vacation schedule. Bug was very excited. The excitement wore off about three hours into our trip. I packed Where’s Waldo books, movies, coloring books and snacks but nothing really fought off the awfulness that is being trapped in a 5-point harness car-seat. I think we’re going to have to move her up to the booster seat soon even though she only weighs 31 pounds. Poor kid is a small fry. She’s probably going to technically still fit a car seat when she’s in high school.

Also, the lake felt wonderful. We went swimming with Bug’s older cousins the first day. It was a blast. They showed Bug how to cannonball off the dock but she never quite got it.

The next day Toby’s other brother and sister-in-law came up and showed us how real rednecks party. It was pretty fun and crazy which sort of made me feel like I was at Lake Havasu, which I’ve never been to. It also made me feel like I was in high school again which was sort of weird with a four-year-old in tow but she thought it was pretty fun.

Sunday Bug and I woke up early and explored the woods while everyone else slept. I taught her how to shoot the dinglebop things off the top of weeds. My sketch is the best way I can describe that. Later we attempted to go out to the Red Neck Yacht Club again but Bug got stung by a hornet on the dock and that pretty much ruined that. She was pretty tough though.

That evening her brave Uncle Anthony busted up the dock and attempted to drown the hornets’ nest with a big stick but they kept coming back.

The next day Toby was on a mission. He bought about five cans of some sort of bug poison, dressed up in the thickest sweatshirt he could find (which happened to be something black with hearts on it that his sister-in-law had left behind) and sprayed them one by one until he killed most of them, or at least what he thought was most of them.

But the hornets came back. So Toby spent another three hours swatting them with a broom. That eventually pissed them off enough to make them seek shelter elsewhere I guess because we were able to use the dock after that with very little hornet dive-bombing.

I also caught three fish right in a row. That was pretty cool.

And the bugs… oh the bugs. We discovered dozens of new species every day.

Everyday we swam and hung out by the lake. There wasn’t much else to do. It was lovely.

I ran out of sugar so I used maple syrup in my coffee. It’s not that great.

On Friday we had a visitor. He creeped us out by driving up the driveway, getting out and looking at something, then getting back in his truck without saying hi, and driving away. He didn’t even look at us. Then ten minutes later we heard a bunch of gunshots and I thought for sure he was out to murder us. But it turned out he was just an inspector guy that the family was expecting. Silly us. We never did figure out what the gunshots were from.

I DID swim all the way across the lake at one point. I was so proud of myself. I’d seen a 72-year-old woman do it the day before so I knew I could but when I was halfway there the wind picked up and Toby got nervous. Apparently I’m a strong swimmer because it was no big deal. I could do that everyday if I had the chance.

That’s pretty much it. Just swimming and boating and more swimming and more boating and drinking and eating and more drinking and being a mother while everyone else is drinking way too much. You know how that goes. It was fun though. I think it was good for all of us.

Wow. These are so old. A whole month ago and I’m just now feeling the tingling of possibly another sore throat. If anything, these sketches are handy for me to keep track of how often I get sick. I thought I don’t get sick very often but maybe I am wrong. The tingling throat could be allergies too, you never know.

Anyway, COSTCO! What a crazy place. I have not figured out whether it is a savings for me or not. I love the prices but I just don’t have the room to store all that much stuff! I’d love to buy a gigantic box of toilet paper for the price of a small pack but I just don’t really feel like storing it all under my bed or in the back of my closet or hey, look here’s another roll in my glove compartment! Nice but not so practical.

And yes, there really was some kind of drama going down at the membership desk. I wish I would have written about it when it happened because now it’s foggy in my memory.

This has all already been blogged about. Yawn, snore.

I’ve been having a lot of bad days for months now. And I didn’t even know half the crap that was going to happen when I drew this. Things have only gotten worse but you know what? Only I can make myself happy. So I am not going to play victim to this. Besides, we have tricycles that can be ridden! (Not by me of course) If that’s not a good reason to keep on smiling, then I don’t know what is.

Ahhhh… oldies in the laundromat, the soundtrack of my life. Sometimes when I hear old top 40 songs from the 50′s and 60′s they comfort me even though the songs are super cheesy and annoying in their repetitive melodies. I think it’s mostly because the songs remind me of my Dad who can be super cheesy, repetitive and surprisingly not annoying. Mostly he’s just comforting. Lots of days I really wish I could cry into my Dad’s shoulder and be a little girl again. But here I am stuck in this thirty-eight-year-old body with all kinds of responsibilities and crap. Blarg.

Why am I bringing you all down? I’m sorry! Happy fun sketches! Face painting! Woot!

I thought about not including this sketch because it dwells on two controversial issues. However both instances completely worked out so everything is fine in the end.

First of all trying on clothes at the Gap was a really bad experience but I don’t think this reflects on the brand at all. I think it is purely the store near my house. I love Gap clothes and I love their style. I’ve found plenty of items over the years that fit me just fine. It’s just that I happen to live in a little microcosm of America that is populated by a majority of size two women. It’s freakish and everyday I wonder if they are trying to squeeze me out.

Secondly, my reunion was fine. It was silly that I had any anxiety at all about gaining 20 pounds over the span of 20 years. Nobody cares! Once I was there I hardly gave my appearance another thought (which is refreshing, really). I had a great time catching up with old friends and acquaintances. Lots of people I met had way way way bigger problems than I’ve ever had and they never stopped talking about them! It was like I had a sign on my forehead that said, “Talk my ear off! I’ve got all night!” My problems slid right under the radar and I felt surprisingly normal for a change. Reunion: in the can!

Sigh… my birthday and babysitting. I have a niggling feeling that the new family I babysat for didn’t like me. I’ve given up on my idea of being a nanny. I’m not really as good with kids as everyone thinks I am. I love kids…I just don’t think it’s my thing. Being a mom is enough for me.

I got a haircut, a trim really. Bug too. I thought I’d save some money and have my hair dresser skip on the styling part. Big mistake. She charged me just as much as usual, which was more than I had so I had to walk down the street to a bar and get money out of those stupid ATM machines that charge you three dollars for the convenience. It was yucky too because I had to take Bug with me.

So there I was walking through a dark bar with a sticky floor, getting money while a group of professional drinkers looked on from their mid-day drunkeness. Thankfully, they were all happy and smiling and not leering at me for bringing my kid into a bar. I got out of there as quick as I could but not without vowing to myself that I better find a new, cheaper hair dresser. It’s too bad too because I thought I really liked this girl. It’s probably not personal, it’s just business. Still, I gotta find somebody cheaper—like maybe my mom and the kitchen scissors if I just want a “trim.”

And next we have sad thoughts. UGH! Why do my sketchbooks give me away like this?!! Yes, I know they are STUPID sad thoughts. Stupid, stupid, stupid thoughts that I would NEVER act on because firstly, I am not that stupid and secondly I don’t have that much willpower. Moving on…

Lillith Fair! Woo Hoo! I can’t wait until you guys get to read my review. It’s getting approved by the sponsors and going through some editing. I really really hope I don’t have to rewrite it again because it was a super fun concert and I think my review rocked! I’ll keep you posted on that.

Lastly, the Irish Princess crown broke. There were tears and tears and tears but secretly I was relieved because I was tired of it. She wore it every day for a week.

And that’s all I drew! Enough, I think.