Renewed

Posted on 4/28/2007 by cheesefairy

You know that feeling when the hangover lifts? You are in a pit of hell of your own making, sludging around in a stinky puddle of bad breath, tasting fragments of conversations you hope you didn’t blunder too badly and you know you will never be right again; not tomorrow, not next week, certainly not in 45 minutes in time to catch the bus to work.

But then, one moment clicks into the next and you can’t pinpoint it, just: one moment you were incapacitated and fearful it would never end and the next your head has stopped aching and your skin has stopped sweating and your tongue feels like it might possibly return to its normal, svelte size at any moment and you want to shout “Praise Ibuprofen!” from the rooftops.

I have that feeling right now.

I feel like I could put on my dancing shoes and go dancing. It’s not even unthinkable – there’s a party I’m missing tonight. But it is unthinkable because I am in the suburbs, I am old, it is 9:30 and up until late this afternoon when the tide shifted, I really thought I was lost in a little row boat out in The Perfect Storm and no one would ever find me to tow me back in. So, you know, none of my dancing shirts is polished.

Motherhood has made me more dramatic. And cliched. And uncaring about my overdramatism and clichedness!

In a lot of ways I am more laid back. And in a lot of ways I am just as laid back as I always was. But there has always been a maximum load that my brain can take and stay chill about. When the maximum load is reached, I cannot be diverted or distracted or jollied. I remember that maximum load being larger, say, 42 lbs in my pre-motherhood life. It seems to have shrunk.

On Monday Trombone and I went to visit a pediatrician because Dr. Awesome, who, as of yesterday, has retired, referred us. Trombone has a giant head. 19.5 inches around! I was not terribly worried about his as I know another fabulous little boy with a big head, as well as his big-headed parents and I know that head size is inherited and I know that I have a giant head (the pediatrician measured my head and confirmed this [ 22.5 inches!] and I did not google “big headed baby” because I am no idiot. Trombone seemed a little off and a little warm to me when we went to the doctor but not until we came home did I take his temperature. He had a high fever. I medicated and the fever came down. The next day, the snot came.

The day after that, Saint Aardvark and I woke up with sore throats.

The day after that, it was like someone put a hose in our house and hooked up the other end to a snot hydrant and then spun that bad boy allaway to ELEVEN. Snot Force Eleven.

Then I got my period.

Then Trombone started feeling less flu-y and more teeth-y. The symptoms are quite similar. Both involve large amounts of snot; the unwillingness to let me remove the snot from his face, a lot of whingeing and very little daytime sleep.

On Friday I drove him to my parents’ place and came back home, alone, to eat frozen mac & cheese that I couldn’t taste while watching recorded episodes of 7th Heaven, Gilmore Girls and a bunch of shows on The Food Network. I know! It was all so terrible and annoying but I couldn’t stop. I was weak and I couldn’t breathe and at least I was sitting still.

This afternoon to get him to nap (SLEEP TRAIN 2007 [daytime edition has been derailed) we went for a long walk in the sunshine and I got a cafe mocha at the coffee shop at the Most Depressing Mall in the Universe and Saint Aardvark blew his nose a lot. On returning home, Trombone had slept an hour and felt fantastic, I had had more coffee, which was exactly what I needed and suddenly, the unpinpointable moment had passed and all was right with the world.

So many times this week I thought of writing an entry to this blog to release a little tension. But it was so angry in my head; so petulant and petty. I kept waiting for it to pass so I could write about it with perspective. Days went by and it didn’t pass. I began to wonder if it would ever pass. Would I ever get the perspective? Was THIS my perspective?

It wasn’t.

Hello! I feel better!

(ducking and waiting for lightning bolt)

PS: The other night when I spiked a fever of my own, this picture nearly sent me round the bend into SellMyCDsI’mGoneForever Land. How did I not know there was a Daily Puppy site until now? HOW?

Posted in more about me!, trombone | 8 Comments

I Must Relay

Posted on 4/24/2007 by cheesefairy

Too tired so say much but this.

– the cover of the Vancouver Province today read:

YES! Now Bring on the Ducks!

It’s only by chance that I know they are talking about hockey. I like to imagine what an alien would think of that newspaper cover. Nevertheless, it is very much my kind of exclamatory statement.

– I am quite pleased that the candidate with the non-annoying voice (Stephani) won The Apprentice: Annoying Voices Edition.

– we got a new camera on the weekend and it does tricks. It also takes less than 4 minutes between pressing the button and taking the picture (shutter lag, Saint Aardvark informs me, is the term for this) so we will take fewer shots of the back of Trombone’s head. YES! Bring on the ducks! (see? fitting isn’t it?)

tiling is fun!

Posted in ducks, television, trombone | 6 Comments

You Goes for a Walk, You Takes your Chances

Posted on 4/19/2007 by cheesefairy

Dear Vancouver Sun Newspaper,

I keep a short list in my head of images I don’t want to see on the cover of a newspaper. This short list includes:

– a photo of a man pointing a gun at me. I don’t care if he is dead. I don’t care if he’s a devil, a hero, if it’s a toy gun or for a good cause. I don’t want to glance at a newspaper box and be looking down the barrel of a handgun, shotgun or semi-automatic rifle.

See? Told you it’s a short list.

The Province newspaper, usually the more idiot-cousin of you two, has outclassed you today with its cover, featuring a photograph of the family of one of the shooting victims.

You suck, you suck, you suck.
Love,
Cheesefairy

A few blocks further down I was struck by the likeness of a hedge to Barbapapa. I used Trombone as a cover so I wouldn’t get arrested for hedgespionage.

barbabushes.jpg

arlo2.jpg

Posted in idiots, media, outside, trombone | 11 Comments

Better Living Through Chemistry

Posted on 4/19/2007 by cheesefairy

One good way to eat fewer sweets is to only eat half a cookie at a time.

Oho, you say, easy for you to say but me, when I get a cookie, I have to eat the whole thing!

Oho nothing, I reply. You have to eat the whole thing when you eat half a GOOD cookie. When you are eating the top half of a cookie whose bottom half is burned to a crisp and stuck to a cookie sheet (A NON STICK COOKIE SHEET) I predict you will find it quite simple to only eat half a cookie.

Possibly even a quarter of a cookie.

Monday afternoon I set out a cup of butter to soften while I made supper. After we ate and were certain that no more fierce bellowing from upstairs would require our attention I set about making chocolate chip cookies. I use a modified “Chipits” package recipe. Here, I know it from memory:

1 cup butter
1.5 cups brown sugar
2 eggs
vanilla splash
tsp soda
tsp salt
2 cups flour
lots of chocolate chips
maybe some oatmeal if I feel like it
bake at 375 for 10 minutes.

OK? See how I did that? I just rattled it off while picking my nose and thinking about John Stuart Mill. I know the damn recipe.

So why, after several minutes (I set a timer) in the oven on Monday night did I smell, instead of sweet, chocolately goodness, the smell of burning charcoalness?

“Why do I smell something burning?” I asked SA, pausing the previous night’s episode of The Apprentice: Holy Crap These People Are Irritating: Los Angeles to run into the kitchen.

SA leapt to his feet and immediately began fanning the smoke alarm in our living room because if you so much as mention how candles are pretty around this thing it goes off with a vengeance. I opened the back door and placed a tray of smouldering cookies on the grill of our barbeque.

Then I swore a lot.

After reviewing the recipe carefully (did I put in twice as much butter? not enough chocolate? too high heat? had an hour passed, not 10 minutes?) I decided to blame the No-Stick Cookie Sheets Of Satan we have had forever or at least a couple of years, even though I use those same sheets every time I make cookies the exact same way. (No, I didn’t grease the sheet. No, I never grease the sheet.)

I mean, look at this cookie:

burned cookie

The next day I went to Safeway for more butter and headed to the baking isle for non-non-stick cookware. The only non-non-stick stuff they had was made of tinfoil but on closer examination of the cookie sheets, I had to buy them. (Plus it was only $2.77 for two sheets.) It’s a cookie sheet with the cookie spots marked out for you.

“Hey, where do I stick the cookie dough?”
“Up your butt?”
“No, that can’t be right. On the ceiling?”
“I don’t think so. Oh hey, the cookie sheet is trying to tell us something!”

thanks for the help!

No longer would I toss cookie dough, willy nilly, at a cookie sheet. Now that I had the Perfect Placement cookie sheet, I would have a guide to dough tossing. Nice! After all, I screwed up chocolate chip cookies just the night before. Apparently I need all the help I can get.

That night I got busy doing something else, so no cookies got made.

Yesterday morning, Trombone and I ended up at Superstore where I found two fabulous things. Fabulous thing the first:
rainbow twizzlers!

Pride Twizzlers!

Fabulous thing the second: an uncoated cookie sheet of the fancy pants variety that has two layers of sheet with air in the middle for even cooking and blah dee blah whatever I bought it. I bought it, OK? I bought the $15 cookie sheet. Because I collect points with my Superstore brand credit card so the cookie sheet was actually free. So were the Twizzlers. Moving on.

Trombone napped just long enough yesterday afternoon that I could make a second batch of cookies, using both new cookie sheets. Is anyone surprised that the ones on the cheap sheet turned out better? Come on: Perfect Placement!

oh so perfect

The ones on the fancy pants sheet would have turned out better had I heeded the instruction on the pan to cook at the greater end of the suggested cooking length. With the No-Stick Cookie Sheets of Satan, we had adopted the habit of under-cooking our cookies so that the bottoms would be done perfectly while the tops were still a little mushy so the cookies would be soft and chewy rather than hard and crumbly. Because the fancy pants pan accounts for cooking discrepancies between the top and the bottom (using the middle layer of air as insulation) it’s actually smarter than you. Than me. Than I. The pan is smarter than I. So one pan of cookies was a little raw. But I would rather eat raw than burned cookies. Wouldn’t you?

raw but delicious

The rainbow Twizzlers taste horrible but I’m thinking maybe I should make rainbox Twizzler cookies next?

In related “Strange Products You Can Buy” news, I purchased a tube of “Warming anti-blackhead cream cleanser” made by Biore, the people who make those awesome bandaids for your nose that pull out all your pore gunk. The instructions on the tube (alas, no placement guidelines) say “…wet face…squeeze product into palm of hand, massage cleanser over entire face…rinse.” I don’t know what I was expecting (it was on sale and I am a capital-S Sucker for beauty products on sale) but Stephen Joseph Harper if it doesn’t warm up when you put it on your wet face. It is so freaky. My face was wet and then it was warm and wet. And gritty.

That shit ain’t right.

The End.

Posted in food | 8 Comments

I am Saving You The Trouble

Posted on 4/17/2007 by cheesefairy

Don’t read any sleep books for advice about your kid. Don’t read the Internet. All you do is this.

1. Make plans to meet someone outside your home. Say, for coffee.
2. Put baby down approximately 2 hours before you have to meet the person outside your home, thusly allowing for the longest possible nap the baby has ever had, plus 15 minutes to get to your destination.
3. Baby will sleep so long you have to wake baby up in order to get to your destination. If you are lucky, baby will not mind being woken if you give it a cookie.

Bonus: You will walk so fast (pushing stroller, uphill both ways etc.) to not be late to your coffee date that you will feel very virtuous.

Done! Send me cheques!

Oh. Might not work for nighttime.

SLEEP TEACH 2007! is going well. Very well. It’s working. That’s all I can say until Trombone is 18 and I no longer have any investment in his sleep habits. I gently direct you away from this topic to the following paragraph.

Hey, look over here! Did you know there is a television show on at 3 pm called NWA? I stared at these two whitey white anchor-types for a few minutes, “NWA” floating on the lower right side of the screen, waiting for the punchline. The punchline? A talk show called North West Afternoon. Aha.

So I had the first 10 minutes of Oprah on this afternoon and Trombone sauntered (read: staggered whilst gripping the edge of the windowseat) over to stare at the TV. He smiled at Oprah and then he moved closer to the TV, which is at his head level, roughly, and he put out his hand and touched the screen, making his little “heh” noises of pleasure.

She really is queen of the universe, isn’t she.

Posted in television, trombone | 1 Comment