Dear cat:

Why? Why do you insist on vomiting on the rugs instead of the many wood or tile flooring options available to you? Do you think that your hairballs will be traumatized if they land on something hard? Please advise.

Your perplexed owner

***

Dear husband and child:

I wish I had been at dinner tonight, if for no other reason than to learn first hand how Eliza’s white uniform polo was spotless on the front, and covered in tomato sauce spatters on the back. How does that even happen?

Your perplexed wife/mother

***

Dear cankles:

Why do I suddenly have you? You are not welcome. Kindly go back to wherever you came from.

Seriously,

Die in a fire

***

Dear Brandon Flowers:

Um. Hi.

I love you.

Seriously,

That creepy woman who hides in your bushes

***

Dear Google:

You know how sometimes I look up a term that I’ve heard bandied about and then I spend the rest of my day clutching my head, wishing that I didn’t know the horrifying piece of knowledge that is now in my brain? It would be really great if you could add a “Trust me, you can go to your grave without this knowledge” button to the available options.

Your traumatized customer

(Free advice to the rest of you: NEVER google anything referenced in passing in a Kevin Smith or Quentin Tarantino movie with which you are not already regrettably familiar)

***

Dear Jay-Z et al —

Do you know that one of your biggest demographics is middle-aged white female runners? It never fails to amuse me when I stand next to a 50-ish woman at a starting line and she cranks her iPod and I hear the tinny echoes of thumpa-thumpa “f^*% this F*&^ that f^$^% you” music. Please contact me at your convenience to discuss the valuable marketing opportunities this fact presents.

Your future business partner

ETA: So the compliments on my dress amuse me to no end (and also, thanks!). I have three of these that I bought at Kmart at the start of the summer for $12 each. They are the best $36 I ever spent. Basically, the full extent of my fashion crises this summer have amounted to: do I wear the purple one, the pink one, or the grey one? And because the Kmart neighborhood’s kind of rough and no one goes there, everything I buy there, including the silver shoes the nurse at the doctor’s office tried to charm off my feet yesterday, are unique to most of the people I deal with on a daily basis, making me look like a genius when really, it’s just that sketchiness doesn’t turn me off so much as good deals excite me.

When Eliza leaves food on her plate, especially of the dessert variety, I usually end up scraping it onto my plate and eating it so it doesn’t go to waste.

Today, she came to work with me and afterwards, I took her to eat crepes at a new place near my office.

Though she loved her meal (crepes with Nutella), she couldn’t quite finish, and so I embarked on my usual clean-up duties with gusto.

She looked at me fondly and said, “Don’t worry, Mommy. You’ll always be my vacuum cleaner.”

Greetings from Jupiter’s armpit!

We are in South Texas right now and oh my stinkin’ heck it is hot and humid here. Thank goodness for central air and swimming pools. We are having a delightful visit here with the Grandparents Texas and Auntie Johanna and Co.

Auntie Johanna and I would like to apologize for the Kanye Car Karaoke (complete with arm-waving) during our outing yesterday. We KNOW, believe me. Also: We can sing Gaga louder than you can.

Tonight we celebrated early birthdays for the Grandparents. Eliza printed out some pictures for them to color but then waffled a bit in regard to the artistic direction she wanted to take on the art for Grandpa. Eventually she announced, “I’m just going to use gray. Because there’s no right and wrong in art.”

But I’m not here to recap. I’m here to tell you that the child formerly known as She Who Spidermonkeys Herself to The Nearest Available Adult In the Water can SWIM!

All credit is due to peer pressure and Auntie Johanna’s Awesome Boyfriend (we really need to come up with a more concise blog nickname for him). He and his son are here with her, and aside from offering a delightful playmate for Eliza, the presence of another child has set up a fantastic peer pressure cooker. I think it doesn’t hurt that both of them have more than a little bit of a competitive streak.

So, anyway, my mom had gotten the kids some goggles, and Eliza got into the water strapped into the usual lifevest etc. gear plus the goggles. This is Eliza during hour 1 in Texas:

Somehow, the two kids contrived to break the goggles nearly immediately, and so off the Boyfriend went to CVS to pick up new pairs, which kind of looked like high school science lab gear, with the added bonus of suctioning onto their heads so tightly that if I had posted this picture of Eliza and her new friend uncropped, I would feel reasonably sure that you would only recognize her from the fact that she is wearing pink. The pair of them could go rob banks and never be captured:

Anyway, the added nose-piece of these goggles has turned out to make this a stroke-of-genius purchase, because the freedom from having to worry about water up the nose, PLUS the fact that her new friend taught himself to swim dolphin-style within 24 hours means that, see above: we have a kid who swims. Not far, not fast, and with questionable technique, but: no appendages holding onto or touching anything, horizontal placement in the water, and forward movement!

1. Eliza starts school 2 weeks from Tuesday. Wearing a uniform. I am DED:

2. We went to Virginia to visit Jim’s dad and stepmom late last month and they wanted to expose Eliza to some of our great nation’s history in Colonial Williamsburg. She was underwhelmed:

3. The carriage ride was a bigger hit. She went ride into the Carousel Coma where she looks really bored but has in fact been rendered insensible with joy. (Carousel Coma was first experienced on a Merry-Go-Round, hence the name, but has since been witnessed on other conveyances including subways and hayrides):

4. We also found a lovely beach, where Eliza played in the water a bunch:

INTERMISSION: As I type, Eliza is making “ice skates” out of paper, which she is attaching to her feet with packing tape.

5. We made a sandcastle together and she splashed water on me. My bathing suit has a skirt because I have reached a life stage I like to call Done With Shaving:

6. I asked my husband to put sunblock on my back. Can you spot the areas he missed? WTF, dude! It looks like someone fingerpainted back there:

7. Then we dropped Eliza off at his sister’s house and we went on to Boston and he bought me a drink at a hipster lounge to shut me up about the sunburn. It worked! Also, I can’t believe it took me until I was 38 freaking years old to try a bacon-onion-blue cheese burger. WTH is wrong with me?

INTERMISSION, PART TWO: She finished the ice skates and is now sliding around on the hallway rug like so:

8. After dinner we went to cross one of the top items off my bucket list, if I had one:

9. We were pretty happy to be there:

10. We took photos at the concert venue, which was located by the Boston Harbor. Jim opted for an introspective, romantic vibe in this image:

11. After we finished laughing at that one, we laughed at this one for a while. I had my picture taken by a photography student this summer and I think I drove her a little crazy because I have this chin-tilted-up-looking-down-my-nose thing that I do. You can see that her pointing this out to me has done nothing to break me of the habit. I like to call this one: Judging You So Hard:

12. You know who are even more impossible to get decent pictures of than Kings of Leon? Arcade Fire! It’s like their adorkable-genius-ness wards off the flashbulbs. I don’t know why, but I just want to smoosh them, they are so damn cute. They are also brilliant live and (even though Kings of Leon won this round) I want to see them again, and preferably soon. They played a whole mess of new songs, which flummoxed the audience (which had not, apparently downloaded them from pirate sites so as to study and be properly prepared to ROCK, unlike some other, more committed fans, a-HEM, and don’t worry, fans of the ilk I just described totally bought the album through legal means when it became available) and I suspect that more audience buy-in would make the next “who’s awesomer live?” deathmatch turn out quite differently.

13. The next day we went to the Sam Adams Brewery for a tour, where apparently I needed to hitch up my underpants:

14. And then we drove home. I suspect that Jim is really happy to have my feet off his dashboard: