1. Tiggertreating

Weirdly, in light yesterday’s boy-band photos, Eliza was repeatedly referred to as a little boy tonight. Apparently, only boys can be Tiggers. Will try to resist feminist tirade about proscribed gender roles.

2. Shameful confessions time: How many of you beside me just ate your toddler’s Butterfingers, on the specious reasoning that she cannot possibly appreciate its gustatory finer points and therefore said candy should be consumed by a more deserving glutton, er, gourmet? Also, Swedish Fish and Sourpatch Kids.

3. Where ARE my manners?! I meant to mention before and spaced out (I hit myself in the face with a HAMMER. I have brain damage!): My mother, the estimable Grandma Texas, won her town’s Runner of the Year award this weekend. Big ups to her!

On a related note, we are signed up to run a race together when she comes to visit us next month, and by together, I mean, we will START together, and then I will see the back of her briefly before she goes zipping away.

4. A-ha! So he DOES read my blog. Jim wishes to make it known that, in fact, he LIKES Van Halen. I forget his exact words, but something along the lines of Eddie being the most accessible and tune-smith-y of the shredding guitar heroes, and thus a guilty pleasure. I stand corrected.

5. Jim is a bit gravelly-voiced this morning. He ended up sampling high and low culture in equal measure on yesterday’s Van Halen excursion to Boston. He met up with two friends and he blew his mom’s birthday money on a ridiculously fancy bottle of wine and braised lamb shank, then walked into the arena right as VH was starting to play. He reports that Eddie looked pretty good for a guy who has had cancer and been through rehab, and that the scary picture seems to have been an anomaly. David Lee Roth, on the other hand, “was kind of like a creepy uncle.” Before he left, I had asked him jokingly if DLR would be riding the giant inflatable microphone, and yes, by golly, he did. He had a great time and found the evening as symbolically resonant as he had hoped for.

6. I thank you all for your amusing and supportive comments from yesterday. The more I look at the picture of boy-band me, though, the more creeped out I am getting. I look way too much like the kid I had a crush on. Hair cut, color, shirt, etc. :shudder:

7. I have this thing about copying, you see. I had copycat friends in middle and early high school, and it really bugged me. However, I am socially inept and have myself crossed that line and gone beyond merely taking a friend’s advice. I am horrified every time I realize that I have done it, to the point where I freak out even when I didn’t do it at all but it just looks that way. I actually debated suspending Operation Future Eliza when a friend told me she was pregnant, even though we began that particular operation months before I learned they were engaged in similar efforts. I’m neurotic that way.

8. Just for comparison’s sake with my photo from yesterday, here is Eliza at 6 months. The weird thing is, now, looking at this image, I can only see how different we are. When she was little and more limited in her self-expression (scream: ON and scream: OFF) it was easier to see the ways she looked like me. People still say we look alot alike and I guess it’s still true but I have a really hard time seeing me, now, for all the Eliza that’s there.

9. We have discovered an animal The Small Person does not like: Ticks. I took Jim and Eliza out to lunch for Jim’s birthday yesterday and she joined me at work, after which we explored, among other things, a cool Stonehenge-y sunwheel located nearby. She loved it. Because I am a geology nerd, I told her how the rocks were formed (”Well, inside the ground it’s very hot, and sometimes the rocks that are hanging out there decide they want to be cold and they JUMP out of the earth through a special mountain called a volcano!”) I apologize to the US Geological Survey.

Anyway, she must’ve picked up the tick in one of her tumbles in the grass there, because when we showered last night I noticed it sitting on her wrist. She flipped out, holding up her poor, contaminated little arm and screaming, “Should Mommy GET IT OFF!!!!!!!” Then we talked about how some bugs are good and others are very very naughty, and this was a very naughty bug. She didn’t talk about it today, though, which means it must not have been too traumatic.

10. NaBloPoMo

Which starts tomorrow, eep.

Last year I opted for random posts, which got a little thin and meme-y toward the end.

This year, I decided on a theme: Shuffle Posts.

Every night, I’ll hit random shuffle on my iPod, listen to whatever song comes up (no skipping!) and write on whatever the song prompts, whether it’s about the lyrics, experiences I’ve had, people it reminds me of, etc.

And so NaBloPoMo doesn’t become The Activity That Ate My Life, I’m setting a time limit of 30 minutes to write.

Ready, set, GO!

1. Happy birthday honey!

Though I was sorely tempted, in the fun spirit of birthday-related humiliation, to scan in pictures of infant Jim holding his toy phone to his ear upside down or post-collegiate mullet Jim, I am being nice. I hope to coax a Van Halen concert review out of him, though. I must note that for someone who doesn’t like the band, he was quite excited to have landed some 10th row tickets in a late drop from Ticketmaster.

Which reminds me, a valuable concert-going tip: If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Concerts are never as sold out as they seem to be. Usually, artists hold back some of their best seats until days or even hours before the show. So if you really want to see someone but you strike out in the initial rush, don’t despair. Try again in a couple of weeks. We got right-in-front-of-the-stage tickets to Bruce about 20 hours before the (allegedly-sold-out-for-months) show on his very popular Rising tour, and we are not the only people we know who’ve had this happen.

***

2. Who’s the doofus who had her camera with her and forgot to take pictures of my friends’ kids, the tiniest Yoda, the beautiful mermaid, the dashing pirate and the awesome robot, at yesterday’s Ragshag parade? Oh, that would be me.

I think LT will agree with me here, our friend A totally won for Halloween Mom on the basis of the incredible robot costume she made for her 4-year-old son E, with whom we walked the parade. (Although we lost you all after the candy melee. Sorry!) Handmade, painted, complete with outlets, bolts, and excellent hat, this thing was so awesome that a local chef who owns a robot/space themed restaurant offered E a gig as mascot on the spot.

Eliza was semi into it, more so after she got her bag of candy. “Want to take off Tigger MITtens!” she shouted, because she knew that she couldn’t eat with them on. I handed her a Twizzler to work on, which kept her happy for most of the ride back to our car. Her poor little hands were ice cold, and she was much pleased to discover this newfangled innovation I presented her with at home. Something you people call hot chocolate.

***

3. On to today’s cringe-fest.

Here are some photos I scanned of myself.

Here I am being 6 months old:

The haaaiiiiiiiiirrr. Oh, God, the hair. It’s too long to be a mullet, but did you see how my bangs take up HALF MY HEAD? The ballet teachers at my dance school were all, seriously, Sasquatsch, you want to dance for us? LIGHTEN UP on the bangs.

Sadly, things got ever more dire there for a while as my buck teeth grew more and more rabbity and then were accessorized with some attractive metal work. (My theory about all those rappers with the grills is that clearly, they never wore braces because why-oh-why would you do that to yourself on purpose?)

I seem to have lost all photos depicting myself between 10 and 17.

Here I am with short hair my senior year in high school, after having bleached the top layer with sun-in. I look like a man, baby! Also, this bold move did nothing to impress Brad-my-crush, who remained as oblivious to me as ever. Posibly, this is because I now looked creepily like him.

There are some pictures of me looking (relatively) cute and skinny in late-high school/early college. Unfortunately, I can’t show you any of them because I had this annoying habit of posing in front of guys that I thought were hot but was too lame to talk to, and I can’t crop them out. The whole stand-in-front-of-the-leaning-tower-of-Pisa-and-pretend-to-hold-it-up paradigm of picture-taking does not translate well to actual people. Please note almost complete lack of boyfriends during this phase.

I like to call this my “hotchacha” look. Sophomore year of college. I dunno, was I trying to reject the patriarchy by looking as ugly as possible? I wouldn’t put it past me. As a public service to the rest of us, could someone be in charge of reminding me how bad I look without bangs next time I consider going there again.

This is my senior year in college picture. Crocheted sweaters were all the rage that year. Also, apparently, middle parts with lanky hair:

In this picture, it may look as though I am leaning back. Sadly, I am not. I was huuuuuuuuuuuuge when I was pregnant. And 22 pounds of it was water. I kid not — 7 days after giving birth to an 8-pounder, I had lost 30 pounds. Thank you, toxemia! Sadly, that STILL left 40 pounds to lose.

Just the whiskers, not the fur.

See this attractively bruised fat lip?

It’s my house’s fault.

As part of “Project Omigod WHAT Kind of a Sty Have We Been Living in for the Past 4 Years?” I have been ripping up the dirty, peeling linoleum in the side entrance. So far, I have not cut off any appendages with the ugly little grim reaper tool that cuts the linoleum, but I’m sure it’s coming. Clumsy people+home improvement projects = bad.

Today, I was trying to remove the metal thingie that caps the edge of one of the stairs. I had 7/8ths of the nails out but the last one was giving me trouble, so I had the claw of the hammer wedged under the metal and was trying to lever the metal up, and the nail with it.

It gave way quite suddenly and I whacked myself in the face with the hammer. In case you’re wondering, that feels unpleasant. Because I could feel blood inside my mouth as well as on my face, I had a brief horrible moment of thinking that I had actually bitten a hole in my lip, but thank god, that was a no.

Then I tempted fate and Jim and I tried (for the second time — long story involving ineptitude and Home Depot) to install a new chandelier in our dining room, except something went wonky and now even though the outlets are registering that we have power, they won’t turn on anything that’s on that circuit breaker. Tomorrow, I will be calling the electrician you recommended to me, LT.

On the upside, the part of the new floor of which I have already installed looks good. Thank god for self-stick linoleum tile!

Jim’s birthday is Tuesday.

He is taking the evening off from work.

He will not be spending it with me or Eliza.

Instead, he will drive to Boston with a friend and attempt to score scalped tickets to the Van Halen show.

He doesn’t like Van Halen.

However, Van Halen was his first concert ever.

This is his 40th birthday.

He feels that this confluence of events — VH concert, 40th birthday — is too symbolically important to ignore.

And in case you are wondering, he has my full support.