Home Is Where You Hang Your Graffiti.

I bought a house.

This is the house that I bought.

Yes, I realize that, at 35, this is not necessarily monumental.  The happy part is that I own it, not the bank.  Granted, it's sort of a piece of crap, but the point is that it's MY piece of crap, and when it's finished, it will not be a piece of crap at all.  It will be a very nice place to live and the envy of wildlife for miles around.  Until then, the wildlife don't have to envy because they currently seem quite content to call it home  See, right now it's just walls, windows and a roof.  I didn't even have to pay extra for the artwork in the garage!  It just came that way, and I'm sort of thinking of leaving it.  Now, I get to learn how to build a house with my darling husband, and I have a strong feeling that patience will soon be a hot commodity around here.  I can see this being a learning experience in countless ways - construction, zen, the art of letting him think everything was his idea...  I also get the joy of subjecting my (somewhat small, yet much-loved, I promise) audience to the experience of this project.  Start to finish.  You're welcome.

My artwork.  This came with the house!  Can you
believe my luck?!  I didn't even pay extra.

El arte es muy buena.

So, the first part - the buying process:  We found our lovely abode on an online auction website (hubzu.com), akin to an eBay for houses. You bid, they bid, you bid, they bid, you get pissed off and go through the whole, "Like hell you're gonna get my house!" song and dance.  If you bid most, congratulations! Susan (she was born Aishwarya and is married to Raj) is now sending you the paperwork from India to complete the transaction.  Unfortunately, I did not bid most.  Fernando, a shady local investor bid most.  And then tried to sell me the house for $10k more than he bid, before he even actually owned it.  Told you he was shady.  So, I bought it from him and then punched him right in the throat at closing.  Just kidding.  Sadly for Fernando, I did not buy it from him.  (Happily, I also did not punch him in the throat.)  I waited until nobody bought it from him, and he didn't close on it, so my backup offer was accepted by the online Qwiki-Mart of the real estate world.  Lots of boring paperwork, and several hundred signatures later, I was the proud owner of the half-house.  (Please do not confuse this with a half-way house.  Not yet, anyway.)

The inside of my house thus far.  House guts.

Now, floor plan in hand, it's time for the building to start.  I guess the first thing is to install the electrical system.  I either get to learn how to run wiring or hire an electrician.  I'm thinking electrician since electrocution is pretty far down on my bucket list.  Then it's on to walls and all those minor details.  I'm excited, though.  Like insanely thrilled.  This is the first time I've taken on a project like this, and in the end, it will be more like home than anywhere I've ever lived (no offense to my mustard yellow single-wide childhood home).  Wish me luck. I'll post it all, and you can read it if you want.  If nothing else, it'll make for a good bathroom diversion.  Plus, you can come stay with me in my House o' Awesomeness when I'm done, and I'll take you to the beach.  And out for pizza.  In the same day!  It's like you just won the lottery, right?

And now it's late, so goodnight!  I'm off to let visions of beautifully appointed laundry rooms dance in my head!

I Think I Missed the "Sleepover" Chapter When I Read Dante's Inferno In High School

Wow, there is just nothing in the world like hosting sleepovers for your kid's birthday.  Just nothing.  Especially when your kid is 11 years old and a boy, because then you have a home filled to overflowing with excited pre-pubescent boys.  And you hear things like, "Drop the bullet!" and, "Dude, what the heck?! You totally broke it!" , "You fight like a middle-aged man!" and, "Agh! Your foot... It smells!" in amidst all the other screams and taunts that drown each other out like white noise.  Screamy, frightening white noise, punctuated with snorts and thumps.  And farts, sometimes.

My boy - the one being punched in the face.  Color me proud.

I should be nominated for sainthood.  Or committed.  Probably both.

Tonight, I've washed 3 pairs of socks, 6 filthy feet, and I've gone through 5 bottles of soda and 8 Totino's pizzas.  And a glass bottle of wine.  It's bottled sanity, people.  Don't be condescending.  Every time I serve a pizza, things get quiet, but then I run out before the next pizza is done.  Why won't this fucking pizza cook any faster?!

Now they are playing Xbox because it's "too dark to go outside to beat each other up decently."  Damn mosquitoes.  Soon they may be drunk enough to face me in Dance Central.  (Totally kidding, parents of children attending my son's sleepover.  Your kids are definitely not drunk.  They are, however, high on chocolate pie and cherry Pepsi. My bad.)   I do love them, though.  They keep me young.  Or make me old.  One or the other, and the jury's still out on that one.

Freeze Dance.  Moderately less violent than Freeze Kung Fu.

Tomorrow morning, at 6:00 a.m., I plan to wake them up with my best June Cleaver sunshine voice.  June Cleaver mixed with maybe a little Bobcat Goldhwait.  You know, for flavor.  Revenge is sweet.  But I am a nice mom.  I have frozen Eggos and Tang and everything.  And maybe I will even share it with them. 

E I E I O

"Please prove you're not a robot."  These were the instructions I received when I was trying to comment on an article.  Oh, damn.  This might be tough.  Prove I'm not a robot?   How to accomplish this weird task....  Luckily, all I was required to do was read some funky letters and type them in a box.  Whew!  It wasn't as easy as it sounds, though, because I have terrible eyesight, and my computer resolution is set to tiny, and I don't know how to change the settings to "Magoo".  I'd have probably done better if I was a robot.

This is me.  And a cow.
I'm the one on the right.

As a girl, I lived on a small farm.  I like that saying, "as a girl."  As opposed to that time I was a boy for a while?  Or a robot?  Anyway, I did grow up on a farm.  We had pigs and cows and chickens, oh my!  One of my responsibilities was collecting eggs from the chicken coop, and if you don't know, chickens are bastards.  They smell awful, they will flap their dirty wings in your face like an angry Hooter's girl, and they will peck your pretty little ten-year-old hands until they bleed.  This sounds like the beginning of every Rob Zombie movie ever made.  And if the chickens don't send you into hysterics, you can always count on the rooster.  Except for the rooster wasn't ours.  He was named Kellogg, and he belonged to Danny Smith, the crazy guy who had a "farm" next door.  

Farmer Danny in his overalls, y'all

I've never really been able to wrap my mind around Farmer Danny.  See, he was this extraordinarily friendly Mexican man, and he had changed his name from something like Juan Valdez or Jesus Gallegos (you get the picture) to Danny Smith, bought some overalls, an acre of land and a rooster, and he declared himself a farmer.  Witness protection, maybe?  His rooster was the meanest rooster in the history of ever, probably super attack guard poultry.  He seemed pretty pissed that I was messing with his harem (the rooster, not Danny), and he would launch himself at me in a flurry of feathers and talons when I went to get those eggs.  It's no wonder I hardly eat eggs today, but boy how I love me some fried chicken!  So every day when I had to get eggs, I carried a giant stick so I could defend myself from the wrath of Kellogg.  Then one day,  like every day before, I'm out with my egg basket and my rooster-smackin' stick, and again, here comes that damned ninja bird, flying straight for me.  He'd been stealthy this time, so I wasn't ready for him.  I dropped my basket and brandished my stick.  Too late!  In a tornado of red feathers, I awaited my fate, which I was sure involved the plucking out of my little eyeballs and some shredding of my face.  I squatted down, squeezed my eyes shut and threw my hands up over my head.  Suddenly, there was a loud bang.  I assumed it was my sanity giving way, and maybe it was.  But then a soft thump and silence....  I dared a peek, and there lay Kellogg, with a lot less head than he used to have.  My dad had seen the attack coming and was ready for it.  He shot that bird dead like a boss!  Thanks for looking out for me, Dad.

Watch out, roosters!  Here comes my dad.

That's pretty much it.  There's no moral to this story except maybe:  Beware of roosters.  And fried chicken is soooo good.  Kudos to my dad and to Colonel Sanders.

Lord of the Flies: The Parenthood Edition

This was a fun weekend.  I got to go to Chuck E. Cheese's!  Twice.  Those of you who don't have kids, you might not understand this particular joy of parenthood:  the birthday party.  If you have nieces, nephews, or random other little kids in your life, you get this.  Unless you drive a windowless van with the words "Free Candy" painted on the side.  Sir/Ma'am, this blog is not for you.  Move along.  This particular food chain (Chuck E. Cheese's, for those of you who've already lost track payafreakintention) has taken all the joy of a North Miami dive and commercialized it for the.... ummmm.... greater good?  Where else can you find screaming, soda-cracked-out, gambling children and cardboard pizza served with giant rats?  Yes, punctuation Nazis, the pizza and the children are both served with rats.  Yum!  'Cept for here, the rats sing.  It's like North Miami ghetto meets Disney and Las Vegas, sans cockroaches.  We hope.

Jackpot!  Chuck E. Cheese's: Introduction to Gambling

If you prefer, please consider the rest of this blog an advice column.  Or a cautionary tale.  Po-tay-to, po-tah-to, right?  First order of business, skip the toppings on a Chuck E. Cheese pizza.  I know, I know - the first one is free.  Skip it anyway.  Plain cheese cardboard is best, and your money is better spent on tokens and crappy wine.  Trust me, you'll want them both.  In scores.  Second on our agenda, and relevant to the wine, is don't drink too much the night before a Chuck E. Cheese birthday party.  Giant singing rats and hangovers rarely mix.  My husband and I decided to celebrate on Saturday night.  Celebrate what?  Well, I guess the fact that we were both over 21.  And celebrate we did.  Yay, we're old.....

My child, all cracked out on soda and candy
and giant rodent gambling.

Soooo.... party time rolls around on Sunday, and the gang heads to the party.  It was really good to see everyone.  Except Chuck E Cheese.  For a while, I pondered the idea of somehow stealing the costume head and then dashing around the building, holding it high like a weird sacrifice while yelling "hoooo-ahhhhh-yooooo-lah-yoooooohhhhh...." in my best tribal scream. I was deterred, though, by the thought of scarring all those little kids for life (mine included, because I'm a caring mom).  And also by the idea of being arrested.  That would be kinda hard to explain to my cellmates in a way that wouldn't get me a beat down. And it would probably be hard to convince a judge that it was necessary.  And truthfully, I was even a little scared that the children, having experienced my "joke", would not be as amused as I was, and they would possibly stab me to death with forks from the salad bar.

In the end, it all worked out beautifully.  We did have a fun time.  I played skeeball until I was actually mediocre, and the kids had a fantastic time, complete with plenty of "made in China" junk that will break tomorrow.  A good time was had by all.

Omfg, Not Another One!

I know I said I would stay away from the me-and-facebook-don't-mix posts, but it just keeps coming up, y'all.  Like a bad rash until you figure out it's your new organic laundry soap.  Or like Thai food loaded with MSG.  But you read my blogs anyway, because like MSG Thai food, they are delicious, and I love you for it.

This is what happened.  I was sitting at a meeting with a group of other moms, presumably my peers because our surfaces have, like, soooo much in common.  I have kids, they have kids.  I live in a house, they live in a house.  I eat food, they eat food.  This is pretty much where the sameness stops and gives way to a mind numbing difference of all things fundamental, and I generally feel like the odd man out.  Then one of the moms says, in reference to a tidbit of information she had and I needed, "I'll just Facebook it to you."  I replied quietly, "I don't have Facebook."  That's when everyone. Stopped. Talking.  Silence.  Crickets chirping.  After a long pause, one mom found her voice and blurted out, "What?!  Why?!"  Suddenly feeling like a two-headed calf, I told her, "I just, uh, just.....  There was no time for it.  So I, uh, I deleted it." I don't know why, but I felt all weird and uncertain.  Now everyone else found her own voice, and I was assaulted with a barrage of questions.  "How do you keep in touch with people?"  "Where do you post your pictures?"  "Don't you miss out on things?"  And my personal favorite, "Then what do you do....?"  I simply said, "Spend time with family, work too much, call friends, read books, enjoy wine, blog and sleep when I can, pretty much in that order."  Finally, the conversation turned to things other than my being a mutant, and life resumed, but I can tell I fit in even less now than I already did.  Thanks, Facebook.

What do you mean you don't
have Facebook?

Sir, You Smell Like Bologna.

This is long and sort of all over the place.  You probably shouldn't read it.

Over the holidays, we were able to return home to spend time with family.  We flew into Lubbock, TX about 9:00 p.m. (and boy, were our arms tired!  Ba-dum-ching!).  Getting to fly into a tiny West Texas town for the holidays is just one of the benefits of marrying well.  And by "marrying well," I mean "marrying a man whose brother works for an airline and gets us a kickass deal on plane tickets."  And we get the added adventure of flying standby.  With a family of five.  Try not to be jealous.

Sometimes people ask me, "What is this 'standby' you speak of?"  For those of you who've never known the joys of flying standby ("non-rev" in industry speak), allow me to enlighten you.  It means this:  Your ticket works just like any other ticket you bought on hotwire or orbitz or wherever.  You reserve your flight, head to the airport the requisite hour and a half early.  (Unless you're flying out of Orlando.  Better make it there at least two full hours ahead of time because, y'all, that shit is crazy.  Security borrowed Disney's genius style of line-routing, so you basically walk up to the line you can see and say to yourself, "Look at this short line.  I'll be through in no time."  But then you round the corner to be confronted by a massive monster line, snaking back and forth for an eternity, "accidentally" kicking the gentleman in front of you every couple of feet, partly because he keeps knocking into you with his Mount Everest expedition backpack, but mostly out of pure frustration and general pissed-offness.  And because his shirt is weird and ugly and loud, and he smells like a bologna sandwich.  Finally, you reach the end of this weary, shuffling labyrinth to find a badass roller coaster. Just kidding.  It's just a metal detector and a weird guy with a wand.  And a power trip.  And a bad mustache.)  Anyway, (still with me?) so you check your luggage with the nice lady at the ticket counter, who informs you, with friendly, caffeine-induced cheerfulness, that "this bag weighs too much." Smile. Blink blink. Twitch. Smile.  So then you do the suitcase shuffle to cram all your heavy shit into the kids' tiny suitcases.  Now it's time to proceed to the aforementioned security labyrinth, complete with bologna-scented minotaur.  From there, it's on to your gate, where it's clear sailing.  Except when it's not.

Airport hell

And this, my friends, is where the adventure begins.  See, you only get to fly non-rev if the airline has unsold seats on the flight to your desired destination.  If they don't, you're staying right where you are.  It's even better when you get out of the airport where you started, only to find there are no seats on your connecting flight.  That's when where you are is where you'll be until you're lucky enough to catch an open flight out.  That's happened to us before, but not this time.  There were lots of unsold seats on the flight to Lubbock.  I suspect that this is because nobody wants to go there.

Lubbock, TX - This is a new picture, not old like it looks.
It's just that brown there.

So in a kind of circular story-telling, we are back at the beginning:  After an uneventful flight, laden with friendly Texas flight attendants and equally friendly passengers (many of whom were wearing cowboy boots and/or dripping with turquoise jewelry and cosmetics), we flew into Lubbock, TX about 9:00 p.m.  Tired. As. Hell.  So we found a hotel and crashed for the night, none of us up to the challenge of the three-hour drive to Roswell, NM. Yes, the city of aliens.  Also the city of pecans and my husband's grandparents.  I don't think they are aliens, but if you'd ever seen my husband load a dishwasher, it does present the possibility that he may be of extraterrestrial lineage.  The next morning, we all knew we'd made truly made it to the great state of Texas, a state defined by its size (and the size of its hair), its hats, its wide open expanses of remarkably flat nothingness, and its cows.  Oh, and by its weird sense of "I'm an American technically, but I'm actually a Texan, so don't fuck with me (or my guns and/or cousins.")  How were we so certain?  Because our continental breakfast at the hotel featured whiskey, calf fries and Texas-shaped waffles.  Ok, no.  It only had waffles and fruit and stuff, but the waffles were totally shaped like Texas.  No kidding.  Dallas was pretty much the best place to put the butter, for even distribution, you know?

Texas waffles, y'all

Bellies full of Texas waffles, bags packed, we checked out of our friendly West Texas La Quinta and headed out into the high plains nothing.  If you've never visited the West Texas/Eastern New Mexico high plains, you have no idea what you're missing.  It is big, flat and overwhelming in it's level of dry brown-ness, and it's dotted, at any given time, with no fewer than a zillion tumbleweeds, ready to wind-surf out onto the road at a ridiculous velocity and stab right into the paint on your car.  Or into your body if you are walking.  Really, though, one of the most remarkable things about the landscape is how the trees all grow sorta sideways.  This is because the wind blows all the damn time.  Not just a brisk breeze - a howling, gusting constant wall of wind that throws small rocks at you just for fun, like a mean little kid.  And don't bother with chapstick, no matter how parched your lips become (and they will), because the dirt sticks right to it, and suddenly your lips are crunchy, and you could probably file your nails with them.  Yum.  Another impressive local characteristic is the unique aroma.  My dad always called it "the smell of money."  Apparently, money smells like cow shit.  My friend Sean calls it "Eau d' Bovine."  See?  There are lots of cool things about the area where I grew up.

Trees growing sideways - one of the rare days when the
wind wasn't blowing.  They just grow like that.

I got nothin' original to say, so....

....here's a link to an article by someone who does:

http://thestir.cafemom.com/big_kid/148648/25_best_mom_confessions_of

Enjoy!

(I'm guilty of probably about 15 of these.  Also, I would like to add that the unmade bed with a fluffy comforter makes a great nap hiding spot during games of hide and seek.)