Hurricane Sandy

Hurricane Sandy gave me a little gift this week. 

Five days without power! Woohoo.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: This is a joke. Being without power for five days with a four month old and a toddler, plus a home office must have been horrible. For one thing, it’s getting cold here, in the 20s at night. And the dog fence doesn’t work without electricity. And neither does the vacuum cleaner…

But it really wasn’t that bad. Unlike last year, we weren’t out of town when the storm came in so I was able to stock up on the necessities, like fruit that is happy at room temperature, potatoes that can be cooked in the fireplace, bottled water, and whiskey. 

Yeah, that’s right. 

The wind was already blowing and fat rain drops were whapping my windshield when I ran my final errands, but it wasn’t so bad that I didn’t notice that while most of Litchfield was a ghost town, the liquor store had a parking lot so full there were two cars waiting in line for a spot. They had their blinkers on and were just hangin’ out in the middle of the road. 

The main problem with no power is that we’re on a well that requires electricity to pump. No showers, no toilet flushing, no drinking water, no way to clean Chef Boyardee Dinosaurs & Meatballs off the sliding glass window. But so what? We lower our standards and move on. 

There are some up-sides. No electricity means no computers, which means no guilty pleasures like facebook and pinterest and no do-I-even-know-you-how-could-you-watch-this-trash pleasures like Couples’ Therapy. (I can’t help it. Courtney Stoddard is my Honey Boo-Boo.) As a result I’m SO PRODUCTIVE. Seriously. With no electricity I had three options: 

1.       Do productive stuff

2.       Read

3.       Rest

During the daylight, I did productive stuff with the occasional rest for a few minutes while I played with my baby or just took in the view of our river. Once the sun went down, I read. I finally finished The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman that I’ve been working on for four months and got a got a good 60 pages into Maugham: A Biography, by Ted Morgan with the help of a candelabra that was a wedding present. Sixty pages may not seem like a lot to you leisured classes, but when you claw away at a book one paragraph at a time the way I usually do, it feels like finishing a marathon.

I feels so great, in fact, that I had a vivid dream in which my purple, bold-face type banner that reads “I GAVE UP FACEBOOK FOR LENT” featured prominently except without the “FOR LENT” part.

Maybe this sans electricity living was a real possibility. 

It wasn’t until today that I gave up. The restaurant bills were starting to add up (thank you dearest brother twin-law for feeding us so much!) and I was struggling to keep the babies warm enough at night. A call to the power company resulted in the demoralizing news that we weren’t estimated to get power until Sunday night at 11:30pm. We booked rooms at a local motel, although it took several calls since most everywhere was full of New York and New Jersey refugees. 

Disheartened, I let the 2 year old choose our restaurant for the evening and packed up the car with luxuries like shampoo and baby monitors. At dinner, P and I shared a bottle of wine and talked about how adorable our babies are. On our way to the hotel, we stopped by the house to make sure Ulrich von Dog was snuggled up in his dog bed alright. We turned into the driveway and gasped. 

LIGHTS.

THERE WERE LIGHTS ON IN MY HOUSE. 

Electricity is a beautiful thing. And while I’m sure the thrill I get at turning on the dishwasher will wear off in less than 24 hours and the candelabra will be once again relegated to the Christmas decorations box, I’ve resolved one thing: less pinterest, more reading. 

I hope that means more writing, too.

Haircut Pt 2

 Old Hair:

New Hair:

Bloglings, you will never understand how much I have suffered to appease your curiosity.

In the process of trying to get this after picture, I discovered not only that I am doomed never to take an even mediocre "selfie" but also that there is no such thing as a simple snapshot when it involves P an my hair.

The above picture is the result of one bicker, three wardrobe changes and at least 10 other attempts at a reasonable picture.

I know. I'm amazed myself.

Insanity

Whoever first said "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result" clearly never ran a house.

To me, that's the definition of laundry.

Haircut

Stress does funny things to people. Some get skinny, some get fat. Some cut off all their hair.

And by that I mean, I just cut off all my hair.

It's not just stress, though. I'm also incredibly cheap and I discovered that if I agreed to donate my hair to Locks of Love I could get a free haircut from a fancy shmancy salon where it usually costs $70. Using Benjamin Franklin's logic, that's like me getting paid $70 for hair I didn't have time to wash anymore anyway. It's a no brainer.

To me, at least. P's reaction was less enthusiastic.


For the record, now, after cutting off 12 inches of hair, my hair is still a couple inches past my shoulders, which is to say, longer than most people's.

And don't worry, P. It'll grow out.

Oh, Sugar Sugar

Tonight I finally got around to making the diabeedus-inducing brownies of heaven tonight and I might add, they are delicious. They are brownie on the bottom, a Ferrero Rocher candy in the middle and caramel cream cheese frosting on top.

Let's all take a moment of silence to appreciate this dessert in all its glory. 

Shortly thereafter, the mess it created in my kitchen had to be cleaned up and the responsiblity fell to HC. Halfway through, she came and flopped herself down on my bed.

HC:What do you want me to do with the leftover caramel sauce?

Me: We could keep it for apples if you want. 

...HC doesn't respond...

Me: Or if you don't want, then just throw it out. 

HC, suddenly sitting up: ARE YOU ON DRUGS?!?! 

I'm pretty sure she's taking her lunch to school tomorrow.

Lost In Translation

In the week preceding baby K's birth, there was a lot of down time. Everyone just sort of hung around.

Her due date had come and gone with no action. Everyone was afraid of venturing too far away from the house, convinced that as soon as cell phone signal was lost (that happens in a pretty consistent two mile radius from here) I would suddenly go into labor.

HC was in the middle of final exams anyway, so she was distracted, but the other kids noodled around the house and found ways of entertaining themselves with increasing desperation.

One afternoon, my mother spent a good hour watching youtube videos of donkeys braying. Just braying. HeHAWWWW. HeHAWWWWWW.

An hour.

 She claimed she was doing it to entertain the toddler, but I saw it as a sign that things were reaching a critical point. I opted for an induction.

My Mom has a hard enough time deciphering anything P says, given his dense accent, and her donkey experience turned out to confuse things even further. Once things were well under way at the hospital, the two of them were having a little chat while we all waited for my contractions to get serious. Conversation meandered around, finally settling on the topic of familial characteristics.

"Well, A is really a lot like my brother, don't you think?" P said.

"How so?" my mom asked.

"Well, they're both basically gentle and  burrow loving..."

"What loving?" She looked at me for translation.

"Burrow loving," I said, and when she still looked totally confused, " BURROW LOVING...like, he loves his house and home and doesn't want to be disturbed."

"OHHH!" said my Mom, visibly relieved. "I thought you meant BURRO loving!" 

I mean...who isn't?

Humble (Frito) Pie

(NB: This is an entry I wrote a while ago and never published, so it's chronologically askew. Have no fear. I'm not really pregnant again.)

I felt about as friendly as Medusa in a fit of roid rage all day yesterday, and maybe it was my body telling me I had a bug. Who knows. That's P's generous theory. I think I just woke up grumpy and made poor decisions as a result. Anyway, here's what happened.

On a given day, I eat pretty healthy. A cup of tea in the morning, with milk and a half a spoonful of sugar. Maybe some toast. Lunch I have some kind of veggie-heavy home made sandwich or panini with some fruit and a glass of water. Often, there's a cheese and cracker or chips and salsa afternoon snack and then we always have a family dinner that I make.

Yesterday was not this way. The day's tranquility fell apart around 9:43am and never got back on its feet. We were one car and two brains short of a smooth operation. By the time dinner rolled around, P had just finished his seriously delayed lunch meeting, HC didn't want to go run at the track on a full stomach and F was just generally refusing to eat.

So there I was, faced with eating dinner alone. No big deal. Easy cleanup.

About an hour later, P and I took the dog and baby out for a walk. We saw a family of ducks and some beavers swimming around in the lake and F got obsessed with them. The "Beabers" as she calls them, were so cool, in fact, that the whole way home she pouted and dragged her feet and kicked leaves and muttered "beabers an'a beabers in'a watahr and da ducks, beabers...beabers 'n beabers..." in an incoherent, toddler type way.

P tried to distract her with a pine cone, and she inquired doubtfully whether it was a beaber. It wasn't.

By the time F was bathed and toothbrushed and read to and tucked in, I was feeling really sick. I wallowed around on my bed for a while.. Then, when things got dramatically worse, I called P who insisted I call the doctor. It wouldn't have been a big deal, except I thought I was getting contractions, so the doctor told me to go to the hospital and met me up there.

I hate calling the doctor.

I'd much, much rather just wallow in my own self-pity behind closed doors than let on that I'm not feeling very well. I'm like one of those dogs that sits on it's own broken leg so none of the other dogs notice and challenge his top-dog status. Except, I never wanted to be top dog anyway, I just feel guilty if people have to go out of their way for me. It's sick, I know.

Not only did I not want to call the doctor, but I didn't want to go up to the hospital for monitoring, either. I knew everything would be fine (and it was). It was a waste of time. To top it all off, pretty much as soon as I got off the phone with the doctor, I started feeling better.

At any rate, I find myself in a room with P, the doctor and two nurses. One of the nurses is hooking me up to all kinds of machines to make sure I'm ok. There are beeping machines involved. It was totally silly.

One nurse pulls out a clipboard and starts to ask me about my symptoms.

"And when was the last time you ate?"

"Uh...a couple hours ago."

She marked something down with her thick yellow pencil.

"What did you eat?"

This was a nightmare. Here I was, in a room full of people who I am inconveniencing over something totally silly, and they're all listening to me answer this question. I wanted to curl up in a ball and hide under the gurney. I looked at the nurse, wishing she would get distracted by something, anything.

"I'm a healthy person, I promise." I said.

"I know,  I can tell by looking at you." She looked right back at me. I was definitely not off the hook.

"...a bag of Fritos and two jelly doughnuts."

The nurse put down her clipboard without writing anything on it. The other nurse stopped fidgeting with the wires they were fastening to little listening devices around my belly. They both looked at me and laughed. LAUGHED.

"Well I think we found the root of the problem, Doc," the first nurse said.

Yeah, I guess so.

The thing is, I don't even like jelly doughnuts.

Especially not the second time around.