Clinched!

Well done, fellas.

I Have to Keep Them, They Crack Me Up

Because they are so very helpful, the DemiGoddesses have been keeping a running list of items for me to pick up the next time I’m at the grocery store:



It reads:

Jelly
Bread (?)
Ramen
Yogurt
Head On Apply Directly to the Forehead!*
Spaghetti! (Smiley Face)
Mild Cheddar Cheese
Parmesan Cheese
Tuna**
Malt Vinegar**

*Clearly there was a little too much TV watching this summer.
**Items added by me before I noticed #5, which, somehow, made it even funnier.


And, In Other News from My Refrigerator Door…

One of Demi the Elder’s drawings from art class made the 2007 School District calendar!



(Hers is the third from the left.)

Déjà Vu All Over Again

Remember this?


Well, the Twins returned to Fenway Park last night. Circumstances were a tiny bit different—as in, a game out of first place, five games up in the wild card race, and simultaneous possible MVP, batting title and Cy Young awards—this time around. My Ho had just secured our post season tickets that very morning, and I had begun to allow myself to believe that maybe, MAYBE, we might actually get to use them.

But even so, when Torii Hunter took the field in Boston last night, I had a funny feeling of dread.

The rain poured down, and I thought, that grass looks awfully slippery… I hope Torii is being careful…

And then, in the seventh inning, this happened:


And I very nearly lost my sh*t. Again.

But this time there was no cart--Torii managed to walk, er, limp, off the field unassisted. And then the Twins won, and Detroit lost, which means that now my darling beloveds are half a game out of first in the AL Central (while still 4.5 games up in the wild card race), and when that happens, it's very hard to succumb completely to post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Although, for some reason, every time I think of possibly facing the Yankees in the playoffs, my hands start to shake and I have trouble breathing. I wonder what that could be about...

Anyway, even you non-baseball-fans will get a kick out of the Twins rookie hazing recap that young relief pitcher Pat Neshek (who, at my house, is known fondly as “Spazzy McDancypants") wrote up on his blog. I especially love the bit about the security at Jacobs Field not wanting to let them into the stadium until they saw Johan Santana. Check it out here: http://eteamz.active.com/patneshek/index.cfm
You have to scroll down a bit, but trust me, you’ll know which post I'm talking about.

A Friend in Mom's Clothing

-----Original Message-----
From: CombatGirl
Sent: Thursday, September 14, 2006 9:23 AM
To: EverydaySuperGoddess
Subject: Thought for the Day

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow. - Alice Walker (1944 - )


-----Original Message-----
From: EverydaySuperGoddess
Sent: Thursday, September 14, 2006 9:26 AM
To: CombatGirl
Subject: RE: Thought for the Day

Mmmmmm... not even if that person is your mother? And she has a headache? And you have been talking non-stop for the past 45 minutes?


-----Original Message-----
From: CombatGirl
Sent: Thursday, September 14, 2006 9:33 AM
To: EverydaySuperGoddess
Subject: RE: RE: Thought for the Day

It's more of a figurative silence... But no, when Johnny Rotten has "just one more thing" to tell me and it's 10:15 at night, demanding silence is the friendliest thing I can do for/to her.

"Serenity"

Photo by my fabulous cousin Catherine and her spiffy new Canon EOS 30D.

9/11

This morning over breakfast, DemiGoddess the Younger announced that I must take her to Target tonight, to purchase some special pencils that she is required to bring to 8th grade art class tomorrow.

But tonight I have a class of my own that I have to attend, and my mind had already been whirring with plans for coming home over my lunch hour to put something in the crock pot for the Demis to have for dinner. An hour out of bed, I was already feeling pinched for time.

I told her there would be no Target trip tonight, and I reminded her that I had told her last night about my class. She said I knew she needed the pencils. I said that if I had known she needed them by tomorrow, I would have bought them over the weekend. She pouted. I got defensive. Things deteriorated from there.

As she left for the bus, I told her I’d go to an art supply store over my lunch hour today to buy her pencils. But my tone made it clear that I resented having to rearrange my day on her behalf. And the kiss goodbye that I gave her as she went out the door was an insincere peck on the cheek.

Later, in the car on the way to work, NPR reminded me what day today is.

I wish I had given her a real hug.

Biggles! Put her in the Comfy Chair!

A new Pilates studio just opened up the street from my house. It’s right next door to the bakery, and don’t think for a moment that I don’t appreciate the irony of that. The DemiGoddesses suggested that we go up there, buy some doughnuts, and then stand outside the Pilates studio and eat them while we watch people work out through the window. Clearly, I have raised them well.

When my neighbor, Leah, invited me to attend a Pilates class at the new studio with her, I thought, I find Pilates utterly humiliating at home in my living room, when I’m completely alone. With an audience? Oh, ho, ho… I think NOT.

But she reassured me that it’s no problem! They have equipment there that makes the exercises seem so easy! It’s amazing! It doesn’t seem like a workout at ALL! And then she promised to e-mail me the link to the studio’s website, so I could see for myself.

So this morning, I checked out the link, where I found this:

And this:

And this:

And THIS:

And as you can see, she’s totally right. It doesn’t seem like a workout because it's not a workout... It's the Spanish freaking Inquisition.

Johan Santana Bear

Already on his way to Africa, he is almost as cuddly as the real thing.

Three Gray Hairs

New ones. Right there on my right temple this morning. The tweezer is never far from my bathroom mirror these days.

I’ve promised the woman who cuts my hair that soon, very soon, I will visit her and ask her to do The Coloring. I have never done The Coloring before, ever. There are precious few aspects of my physical appearance that I genuinely kind of like, but the color of my hair is near the top of the list. I’d like it to stay the way it is.

My neighbor Leah has a lot of friends who live in lakeside homes in the more affluent Minneapolis suburbs, friends who sail competitively on the weekends, wear designer fashions, and have dazzlingly white teeth and perfect manicures. They’re all married and have small children, and are not (SO not) my usual crowd.

So last weekend at Leah's birthday party, I spent most of the night outside on the deck with the smokers and Tammy, who is also from our neighborhood. Tammy sails on the weekends, too, and she drives a BMW, but she, like me, is a single mom with older children, and after hearing about her Home Depot adventures, I knew she was one person at that party I could hang with.

Well into the evening, out on the deck, the topic of conversation turned to botox. One party guest confessed to getting regular injections around her eyes (“I get them every three months. They only cost about $300 each!). Another said she gets them in her chest (!). My favorite, though, was the woman who said she was going to have collagen put in her heels because her feet are ugly. Tammy and I exchanged a look before she said out loud what I had been thinking. “You pay someone $300 every three months to inject poison into your face? I really don’t get that.”

At first, didn’t get it, either. But then I remembered an evening a couple of weeks before, when Tammy had mentioned some kind of magic lotion that she’d picked up on a recent trip to New York. “It’s like botox in a lotion!” She had exclaimed, applying it to the skin around the corners of her eyes. “See? My face doesn’t even MOVE!” And then I remembered my own tweezers. I’m pretty sure that botox isn’t for me, not even in lotion form, but really, isn’t paying a colorist to hide my gray more or less the same thing? Aren’t we all, in our own way, dreading something, whether it’s the wrinkles or the ugly feet or the gray hairs? In the end, the unfortunate truth is that I’m no less superficial than any of those botox babes.

I haven’t decided yet how many gray hairs I will tolerate before I make the appointment for The Coloring. I guess it will be when I can no longer keep them at bay with the tweezers. Until this morning there were only four gray strands I was keeping a regular eye on. Every time one of them grew long enough to be visible, I’d yank it out again. But today there were three more, all at once. They, like the others, have been temporarily banished. And I know exactly where these new three came from:

#1—Parent orientation night. And probably the post-orientation heavy drinking.

#2—Two days’ worth of family drama involving my sisters, my sister-cousins, a couple of second cousins (one of whom is a convicted felon, and the other of whom is an overbearing ass) and the cabin that we all jointly own.

#3—Yesterday’s visit from the contractor and the insurance adjustor, who decided that the outside wall of my sunroom, the one with the water damage, will need to be completely knocked out and rebuilt. Look! Carpenter ants! Oh, and, by the way? Insurance isn’t going to pay for most of this. Sorry!

So at work this morning, fully tweezed but still teetering on the brink of completely losing my sh*t, I couldn’t help but be impressed by my own super-human powers of self control when the Marketing Deity plopped his generously-kissed seat down into the chair in my cubicle and tried to entice me into a wager on this weekend’s Twins/Yankees series.

I said to him, “Did you come here just to torment me? Because the Yankees are already in first place, Silva is pitching tonight, and I am in NO MOOD.”

He took me at my word.

Huh. Maybe I Should Have That Checked.

The rocket ship lunchbox was really only the tip of the iceberg.

Last Tuesday was parent orientation night at the high school. The principal welcomed all of us freshman parents, and congratulated us on having done such a great job of raising the class of 2010. As soon as he said that, I nearly started to bawl, right there in the auditorium.

The entire time the chemical guidance counselor was speaking, about the occasional school-wide sweeps with drug sniffing dogs, and about how we, as parents, must model responsible behavior, all I could think about was how much I wanted to get home and consume uncharacteristically large amounts of vodka.

When it was over, I went to the grocery store (for limes and club soda to mix with my vodka) and I saw a man walking in the parking lot, holding the hand of a little girl. And I nearly started weeping again.

In the checkout line I ran into DemiGoddess the Elder’s Girl Scout troop leader, who had also just come from the parent orientation. She, unlike me, seemed to have been completely unscathed by the experience, and was surprised that I had found the whole thing so distressing. She reassured me that Ms. Elder is a terrific kid, and I have nothing to worry about with her. Which was comforting, but really, I already knew that.

Clearly, something is going on here that is deeper than your run-of-the mill parental angst, and it has very little to do with Demi the Elder herself. I’m not sure what my issue is exactly, but I do know it’s mine. And yeah, I’m taking it to someone who can help me name it.

We're All Still In High School On The Inside

Shopping for school supplies for the DemiGoddesses has evolved beyond markers and crayons, school glue, tape, and safety scissors. The scientific calculators I bought them for school last year still work fine, so during our shopping trip to Target last night, all we put into our cart was a pile of composition books, some loose leaf paper, a supply of pens and binders.

DemiGoddess the Younger’s binder is one of those elaborate canvas-covered, multi-zippered and pocketed organizer systems, complete with accordion-style colored plastic dividers and a clip-on shoulder strap for portability. (Yeah. It’s THAT big). DemiGoddess the Elder, on the other hand, opted for your standard 2-inch, heavy-duty, vinyl three-ring binder. It opens. It closes. It's white. Her binder is utilitarian and, most imporantly, customizable. She'll embellish it herself later with Sharpie markers.

I’ve been surprised to find myself far more daunted by the idea of Demi the Elder entering high school than I ever was by kindergarten or even junior high. And my worries go far beyond the obvious perils of her upcoming entry into driver's ed class. High school is when life starts to get real. Her high school experience, for better or worse, can have major fallout well into her future. For the next four years, doing or not doing her homework will directly impact her grades, which will impact her eligibility for scholarship money and her college options, which will, in turn, impact the career path she’ll be on for the REST OF HER LIFE. We're about to enter the parenting home stretch, the time for making any last-minute corrections is running out, and the overwhelming prospect of doing it wrong—of ME allowing HER to do it wrong—has me practically paralyzed with anxiety.

And, obviously, I would very much like the social aspects of her high school experience to be an improvement over my own (not that that would be difficult). Like any parent, I'm trying to learn how to walk that precarious line between allowing her live her own life, and doing everything in my power to prevent her from making mistakes that she might look back on, twenty years from now, and regret.

I do realize that all of these issues are more about me than they are about her. And I’ve tried to keep them mostly to myself. So far, I think I’ve done a pretty good job of keeping a lid on my insanity. But last night at Target, the lunch box aisle completely blew my cover.

DemiGoddess the Younger had already selected a sassy pink two-handled tote style insulated lunch bag, complete with it's own mini freezer pack. But when it came to Demi the Elder, I wondered out loud, “What do high school kids carry their lunches in? One of these insulated things? Brown bags? Do the cool kids just take hot lunch?”

Demi the Younger looked at me skeptically. “The ‘cool’ kids?”

“I don’t want hot lunch,” Demi the Elder said. “The cafeteria food is gross.” Then she took a colorful rocket ship-shaped lunch box off the shelf. “This one is cool,” she laughed. And it was. But the ninth-grader that I apparently still am, somewhere, deep down, was having none of it.

“You’d bring your lunch to high school in a rocket ship lunch box? Won't the older kids make fun of you?"

"They do that at the high school?" asked Demi the Younger.

"Sure they do," I said. "'Hey there little freshman, what did your mom pack in your rocket ship lunch box for you, little freshman?'”

Demi the Younger’s look changed from skepticism to sympathy. “You were really traumatized in high school, weren’t you?”

It’s going to be a long four years.

Waiting to Exhale

I’ve been anxious lately. I’ve turned to every one of my worst nervous habits—nibbling on cookies, shopping for things I don’t really need, spending way too much time online—to no avail.

My fate has been in the hands of the Chicago White Sox and the New York Yankees. And that? Is not a happy place to be.

But today, finally, I can almost breathe again…


P.S. Today my anxious nibbling will be on a Blizzard® treat, because that way I'll be helping out my local children's hospital at the same time. Would you like one too? More info is here. Find the location of your nearest participating DQ® location here.

Mmmmmm... Blizzards...

These Are The People In My Neighborhood

Last night I got a call from Leah, the neighbor next door, inviting me over to have a glass of wine with her and a couple of her women friends from the neighborhood.

Leah is the former neighbor I wrote about last summer. When she and her husband moved a few years ago, they kept the house next door to mine and rented it out until last spring, when they finally kicked out the Boy Toys (much to my relief) and put the house on the market.

For months, Leah has spent time at the house, getting it cleaned up and re-painted and ready to sell. Potential buyers have come and gone, but the house has remained empty. I'm sure our torn-up street didn't help matters.

Then last Thursday, she left me a voicemail saying, “Hey, guess what, I’m your neighbor next door again. Come on over when you’re home.” My former neighbor and her kids had moved back into their freshly-painted former house, minus one alcoholic husband.

She's remarkably composed about it all, hopeful that they might reconcile, but also very clear that she can no longer live the way she has been. Her family and friends have been around a lot, offering support and whatever household items she forgot to bring with her.

One thing I had forgotten about Leah is that she is such a friendly, outgoing person, she has no problem stopping passersby in front of her house, introducing herself, asking where they live, and taking a moment to get to know them. I watched her do it on her first day back. My own operating style in the neighborhood has always been to keep to myself, nod and say hello when people pass by on the sidewalk, and then pretty much leave it at that. It turns out that she has several neighborhood friends from her three-year stint next door, while I, in my nine years on the block, have gotten to know the people who live on either side of my house, and that's about it.

Last night when she called, I had just returned from having dinner with My Ho and Batgirl and Jeb (Mr. Batgirl). It was the second goodbye dinner of the summer for me--the first was just before Dr. Dave moved to Maryland, and next week Batgirl and Jeb are moving to Massachusetts--and with that on top of moping about missing BlogHer, my plan was to spend a quiet evening nursing my abandonment issues in front of "Sex and the City" reruns. But some wine and socializing with people who live close by suddenly seemed like an excellent alternative, especially since the Demis are up north with The Ex's parents this week, and I had a bottle of Two Buck Chuck already chilled in the refrigerator.

At one point during the evening, Leah proudly showed the four of us who were there the array of tools, picture hooks and nails she had picked up in the Dollar Spot at Target earlier in the day (“My very own screwdrivers!”). This prompted her friend Tammy, who lives around the corner from us and is also a single mom, to observe that Home Depot can be a very sexy place, if one knows how to work it.

“I just walk up to one of the employees and tell him I need a good screw," she said. "He’ll go on and on about the long screws, the short screws, the hardwood screws, even the self drilling screws. The electrical department can be really fun, too.”

Certainly, the circumstances of Leah's return to the house next door are unfortunate, and there’s no knowing how long her stay will last. But I have to admit, it's fun hanging out with the neighbors.

Did Someone Say Ennant-pay Ace-ray?

This afternoon I stumbled from day three of yet another agonizing three-day meeting to find that while I had been locked away in the depths of a hotel meeting room, lulled to a stupor by the soothing glow of PowerPoint, the outside world had moved on without me.

The street in front of my house is no longer a muddy trough, it has honest to goodness black top on it now.

Everyone in the blogosphere appears to have left for BlogHer except for me, because I am poor, and the boy bloggers, because of that whole lacking-a-uterus thing.

DemiGoddess the Elder has acquired her very own case number with the city police, although not because she did anything naughty. Some bad, bad boys stole her bike from the park, and she, all by herself, filed a police report. And then she found her bike in some nearby bushes a short time later.

And then there’s the baseball.

Like Ozzie Guillen, I am speechless. There are simply no words. And even if there were, I wouldn’t write them or say them out loud because I am a deeply superstitious Goddess and have no doubt that if I did speak or write the words I would jinx the whole thing. And until the matter of this pesky little half game gets resolved, you'll get nothing out of me on the subject.

But oh.

Oh my goodness…

Beyond Codependency

To: Little Nicky Punto, Tiny Superhero
From: EverydaySuperGoddess
Sent: Tuesday, July 18, 2006 11:33 p.m.

Dear Nick:

Tonight our friends at Fox Sports had a microphone on you during the game. How thrilling it was to hear firsthand what really goes on on the field every night. I so enjoyed your pre-game conversation with Gardy, when you assured him that you were, in fact, well enough to play. Your willingness to push on through your pain for the sake of the team was, well, inspiring.

And then, when you went to the mound and made it look like you and Francisco were having a conference, all so that he could have a little bit of a breather after running to make that out at first base... even after he told you he was okay, you insisted that he take a couple of extra seconds, just to be sure. It was so good of you to take care of our sizzling young starter that way.

And when Luis Castillo made that fantastic diving catch, you were right there with the positive reinforcement. You told him, “Suave para ti,” which means “smooth for you” (according to DemiGoddess the elder, who speaks fluent Spanish). Translating your encouragement into Luis' native tongue was an especially nice touch, even if it doesn't really make sense.

Later, you made certain that Mike Redmond fetched the ball after Josh Rabe got his very first major league hit, which was so thoughtful of you, because I’m sure Josh will want that later.

You were there for everyone tonight, making sacrifices and putting the needs of others before your own. It was most endearing. But, the thing is, I’m a tiny bit concerned about you.

So I’m sending along my Melody Beattie book collection for you to read. I think you’ll find “Codependent No More,” particularly useful. And the daily readings in “The Language of Letting Go” will make excellent pre-game meditations. Because you can't take care of anyone else without first taking care of yourself.

Remember Nick, you didn’t cause it, you can’t cure it, and you can’t control it. Not even with a head-first slide into third.

XXX OOO

--ESG

P.S. How do you tell all those Jasons apart? They all look the same to me!

This is What My Heart Looks Like

(Photographic evidence that my family is capable of producing a male child.)






(And THAT, my friends, is the view from the outhouse...)


Photo credit goes to my sister Meghan, who took all of these...

It’s Too Hot For Baking, We’re Eating ‘Em Straight Out The Box

I gave up any gardening ambitions a long time ago, partly because I have no green thumb, and partly because I’d much rather visit the Farmers’ Market in downtown Minneapolis for fresh produce. You have to get up early, and parking is a nightmare, but it’s one of my very favorite places to be on a sunny Saturday morning.

The market is made up of six or seven covered walkways, each one the length of a city block and lined on both sides with vendors’ tables. A few stands sell things that were obviously shipped in (last I heard, pineapples and mangoes don’t grow in Minnesota), but most of the tables are covered with cardboard boats that overflow with locally grown, seasonal produce. This time of year, the variety is amazing—summer squash, potatoes, fresh herbs, cucumbers, snow and sugar snap peas, onions, sweet corn, watermelon... even strawberries, raspberries and blueberries. Plastic buckets of water are crammed full of bunches of every kind of flower, and a few potted garden plants are still for sale, many marked down, since planting season has been over for a while now. You can buy real maple syrup, honey, home-made salsas and jams, olives, cheese, fresh bread, free-range chicken, grass-fed beef and organic eggs. At the south end of the market, artists sell hand-crafted jewelry, wooden birdhouses, and children’s dresses made from flour sacks. For the person who has everything, you can buy a tie-dyed T-shirt, a knockoff Kate Spade handbag, or alpaca-wool mittens imported from South America. Some booths are there every weekend, others come and go.

The aromas of roasted corn, fresh herbs, smoked sausage and coffee mingle deliciously. Here and there, musicians play for dollar bills thrown into their instrument cases. Vendors and shoppers of every ethnicity speak an array of languages. There’s no haggling, and please don’t squeeze the tomatoes.

Saturday morning, the DemiGoddesses and I arrived at the market at about 8:00 a.m., which is a little later than I usually prefer. By 9:00 on weekends, the place is so crammed with bodies that it’s hard to move. My usual strategy is to start at the south end, where the artists are, and then walk through the produce stands, looking everything over once before going back to buy what I need at the stalls where the merchandise and prices seem the best. But since the crowd was growing, and also because it was already close to 80 degrees (on its way to hitting 100 later that day), in the interest of speed I picked things up here and there as we went along the first time through.

I tried to spread my purchases out among several different sellers. $1 for lettuce here, $2 for green beans there, $2 for zucchini from a man who spoke English to me, but asked for change for my $5 bill from an older woman behind the table (his mother?) in Hmong. The tote bag over my shoulder grew heavier with each purchase.

An extra-squeaky taste sample enticed me into buying a bag of cheese curds (fresh from Wisconsin). We resisted the giant cinnamon rolls, but eventually succumbed to cherry turnovers, and the three of us dribbled a trail of pastry crumbs as we walked along. We also bought fresh-squeezed limeade, which tasted especially good in the heat. By the time we had seen everything, my tote bag was full and all three of us were sweating. But before heading for the car, I had to go back for one more thing.

It was a splurge, and I may live to regret it, but given my passion for fresh cherries, a 20 lb. box doesn’t seem completely outrageous. And at $1 a pound, even if the Demis and I only eat half of them, they’ll still cost half what they do at the grocery store.

Anybody got cherry pitter I can borrow?

The End of an Era

In August of 2002, on the night we first met, Dr. Dave and I went to a Twins game. We arrived at the Metrodome late, so we missed most of one of Johan Santana’s few starts of the season, but we did see Torii Hunter’s sixth-inning home run, which also scored Corie Koskie to put the Twins ahead of the Mariners 2-1. David Ortiz and Everyday Eddie Guardado made appearances, I was as yet undecided as to which player I harbored fonder feelings for—AJ Pierzynski or Doug Mientkiewicz (it would later prove to be enthusiastically Doug)—and their win that night brought the Twins' magic number to clinch the American League Central division down to 13. It was an exciting time to be a Twins fan.

That turned out to be the first of many regular and post-season games that Dr. Dave and I attended together. He was very much a stats-head while I, on the other hand, was all about the sass, so we made a yin-and-yang sort of baseball-watching team. He understood my appreciation for the aesthetic aspects of the game, at one point offering the brilliant suggestion that I design my own line of baseball cards featuring photographs of the players from the back. (He’s for sure getting a cut of the first million I make on those.)

Having grown up in Chicago as a Cubs fan, Dr. Dave’s playoff excitement in 2002 was understandable and contagious. He ordered the tickets for us both. I gave him a Cubs Fan Barbie for Christmas.

In 2003, when Hideki Matsui tried to kill me by hitting his first post-season home run directly at my face, Dr. Dave ducked right along with me.

In 2004, during a 14-strikeout Santana start (on the day I first met Batgirl in PERSON), Dr. Dave helped hold the “Santana/Nathan ‘04” campaign sign that got us on TV.



By then, he had become known in Batgirl’s comments section as“TwinsProf.”

When the Twins three-peated that same year, Dr. Dave and I were at the Dome, Homer Hankies in hand. And when, after they incomprehensibly surrendered a four-run lead to be eliminated by the Yankees (AGAIN) in game four of the ALDS… as I found myself standing on Washington Avenue trying very, very hard not to be one of those people who cries actual tears over something so stupid as BASEBALL… Dr. Dave was there, graciously pretending not to notice.

Even after My Ho had become my primary baseball buddy, Dr. Dave and I continued to attend occasional games together. Last May, on cap night, we were at the Dome once again, and although I knew he had accepted a new job in Maryland, it didn’t register at the time that an era was coming to an end. Not until a few weeks ago, when we met for dinner and he presented me with his bobblehead collection as a parting gift, did I realize it will likely be a long time before he and I go to another Twins game.

We’ll keep in touch. He e-mailed me just the other day to say that he arrived safely and is slowly getting his bearings. Always a true friend, I wrote back and said that if he decides he hates Maryland and comes back to Minneapolis, he’s totally not getting his Doug Mientkiewicz bobblehead back.

Thanks, Dr. Dave. It was an exciting run. And if the Twins ever see post-season play again, rest assured, I'll have a ticket for you.

I’d Invite You Over, But You’d Have to Park in Duluth

The street in front of my house has been torn up for a couple of weeks now. What used to be blacktop is now a wide muddy trough full of bulldozers and blinky hazard markers and large men in orange vests. The trough is a good three feet below where the street used to be, and the curbs and driveway aprons are completely gone, so a steep gravel ramp temporarily allows me to get in and out of my driveway. Assuming that an earth mover hasn’t parked in front of my house, that is.

The work is scheduled to continue through the summer, and the thought of that is exhausting, because I never know from one day to the next what I’ll find when I arrive at my street. Some days one end is open, some days that same end has a huge hole full of workers in the middle of it, and I have to circle the block and try the other end. Sometimes that end turns out to have a giant pile of gravel blocking the way, and I have to circle back around and try the other end again. A more evolved individual might find this recurring challenge exciting, but I am not a person who likes having my routine f*cked with. At the end of the day, I just want to get my sorry self home, I don’t want to have to strategize new ways to get into my own blessed driveway on a daily basis.

To make matters worse, the parking lot of the building where I work is also being re-surfaced. Half of the lot looks eerily like the street in front of my house, which means that the number of available parking spaces has been cut in half. Yeah. You do the math. I’ve been arriving early enough in the mornings to find a spot without too much trouble, but on the one day when I made the mistake of leaving for lunch, the only available parking space when I returned was next to a dumpster. In Winnipeg.

Last Friday, after dodging a steamroller and weaving my way through the orange cones, I arrived home from work to find a bright pink notice attached to my front door informing me that, due to some utility work, the water would be turned off for most of the day on Monday. The notice included instructions for filling the bathtub with water, which could then be used to keep the toilet tank flushing until the water was turned back on.

The DemiGoddesses are astonishingly capable young women, but I really didn’t want them to have to deal with that all day. Knowing that one of The Ex’s sisters was in town with her new baby and would be staying at The Ex’s parents’ house, I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone, and called The Ex’s mother to see if the Demis could spend Sunday night and Monday at her house as well. That way they could visit with their aunt and the baby, and be away from our house until the water was back on.

It seemed like a reasonable plan, except that making the arrangements turned out to involve much more hemming and hawing, taking of votes and general drama than I had anticipated, for reasons that rest entirely on shoulders of The Ex and the Universally Hated Step Psycho. Though the details are highly entertaining and I would very much love to share them, it seems that The Ex has been reading this blog for some time now and has taken issue with a few of the things I have written here. In spite of that, relations of late have been cordial (sort of), and for the sake of the children and my own serenity, I am trying to play nice. So I’m not going to post the specifics of what transpired. If you want the dirt, you’ll have to e-mail me.

In the end, the Demis did spend the night at their grandparents’ house. They had some quality time with their aunt and the baby, and enjoyed a lovely day with their grandmother on Monday, including going out for lunch. So I was feeling pretty good about having handled that mini-crisis until I arrived home from work on Monday to find another notice on my door, informing me that the water was going to be turned off again on Tuesday.

A Porch Full O' Patriots

Highlights of the Smackdown included this creation, by Tiffany for Betsy:


Amazing what one can find on Cafe Press when one performs a search using the words "USA" + "Jesus." All Tiff had to add was the lamp fringe around the hem, and a little marabou boa for flair. Tim Gunn would be so proud.

In the "Best Use of Iron-On Transfers" category, we have this piece by Kerry, created for Meghan:


That is a picture of Neil Diamond, in all his sequined, long-haired and sweaty mid-70s glory. The lyrics to his anthem to immigration, "America," are written in glitter ("Freedom's Light Burning Warm..."). Note the silk flower detail around the hem. This ensemble came complete with glow-in-the-dark earrings, a visor, and stars-and-stripes flip flops, winning Kerry an additional nod for "best accessorized."

From the back:

The bottom ribbon is obscuring the signature lyric, "TODAY!"

And then there is my own magnum opus, as modeled by Kerry:

It features two strategically placed, fully functional spangly pinwheels (how long can she keep them spinning?), accented with metallic red, white and blue streamers. Each sleeve sports its own authentic American flag like a proud wing, poised to take flight on the slightest Fourth of July breeze.

And on the back:

...a cape of flag fringe completes the look.

We really did wear them to the Marenisco fireworks. It was about 55 degrees out that night, so we all ended up wearing jackets over our T-shirts which, while disappointing, was probably for the best.

Had they been able to see our patriot wear in its full glory, the rest of the town would have felt really self-conscious about their own conspicuous lack of pinwheels, lamp fringe and Neil Diamond lyrics. And we certainly wouldn't have wanted to make other people feel bad about themselves on the anniversary of our great nation's birth. That would have been downright un-American.