mrtl

I'm a Whore for the Backyardigans

Mister mrtl may be happy to hear that Tom is no longer my #1 MySpace friend. I'm a little stunned over it myself, but when I received the email today from the North Charleston Coliseum, which is hosting the Backyardigans Live tour next month, saying that I could win FOUR FREE TICKETS for making them one of my top three friends, I knew what I had to do.

Tom is now #2. Mister mrtl is #3.

So what if I already have tickets to take Bug next month? The more the merrier, for sure!

Tom, don't worry, hoss. If I don't win, I'm fixin' to put you right back in your spot. (Note the local linguistics I've picked up. I heard "I'm fixin'" today at an appointment and adopted it right away. I'm fixin' to use it all the time.)

Playing with Pasta

Go forth and have fun.

Fourth of July Pie

The other morning I had a fabulous green smoothie and exhausted myself by lunchtime. When I mentioned during lunch that I may just wait to make pie until the next day, Bug almost had a conniption. How can we have Fourth of July Pie on another day? It's our FOURTH OF JULY PIE. The child, she guilted me into making it.

So I made it, and it was a lovely site to behold (for those who are interested, the recipe is at www.marthastewart.com - Mile High Apple Pie - just bake the apples with lemon juice for 30 minutes at 300°; thanks to Martha reader for that tip).

I love this pie, but it is soooo time-consuming to make. Being exhausted, it was a lot to accomplish when all I really wanted to do during naptime was nap myself.

But guess what! After all the trouble I went through, after all the bragging from Bug about how delicious our pie was going to be (she helped roll the dough and cut out the lovely shapes adorning it), she. didn't. want. any. After receiving her still-warm pie with side of vanilla bean ice cream (she never mixes), she focused on the ice cream and wouldn't touch the pie. When mister mrtl told her later that when he was a kid and asked for something, he'd be sitting at the table all night till he ate it, I wished for a moment that I was that kind of parent. I'd be sure to be talking big about how I worked and slaved over a hot oven to make that pie. It's a good thing Jem inhaled hers and put a dent in Bug's as well. It made it worthwhile to see her enjoy it so much.

A side note to all of you who haven't had kids yet or with babies: Relish that pie for breakfast. Once the kids reach a certain age, you just can't do that anymore. :(

Sweaty and Friendless

I was so spent yesterday that I didn't realize what I had posted as my new subtitle till mister mrtl, sitting next to me on the couch with his laptop, leaned into me and said with a come-hither look, "Hey, 'Hot and Lonely'!"

Did I really write that? Yes. It's hot here, and I don't have any friends yet. Yes, mister mrtl is a friend, but that's not what I meant. And I didn't mean it sexually...

... Or did I? Seems I did broach the subject of cock rings the other day...

For Susie

The lovely Susie Fairchild and I had a chance for a quick cup of coffee one morning while I was staying with my parents, during which Susie and LG gifted the bugs with some goody bags from a recent festivity.

The girls loved the contents, and promptly donned the colorful bandanas as capes and set forth in the yard as superheroes. Note that Bug also has the Wonder Women-esque armband.

Yeah, no faces. See their own blogs for those. :)

Enemasity

I have this imaginary friend with whom I IM on a fairly regular basis. Apparently I tend to initiate these sessions, as tonight she felt compelled to ask if I had any questions for her tonight when I hadn't IM'd her.

Each discussion we have is hysterically tangential, very rarely heading back to the primary topic of conversation, if there even was one. While I'd love to meet this imaginary friend, I have a feeling it would be a huge embarrassment, what with the cosmo's shooting out of my nose and the pained stomach from laughing. She's a barrel of hoots, she is.

She asks me to update my blog because she's bored. Since I'm having trouble coming up with something halfway entertaining, I'll instead go with a list of things I've learned about her, most in tonight's conversation.

• She vacuums her kids.
• She's never been to a passion party (my advice: go! she thinks because it'd be good fodder for blackmail, but it's more about the free cock ring)
• She's very much like mister mrtl in that people often can't interpret if she's serious or joking. It's all in the delivery.
• Her teenager uses her computer sometimes, so that first IM must be tentative.
• Negative people make her want to cut herself.
• Her old neighbor gave her kids enemas just to "clean them out."
• She didn't know what a cock ring was.

The End.

Oh, yeah. Sorry, I titled this inappropriately. I was initially going to focus on the enema discussion we had, wherein she mistook my talk of colon cleansing as a desire to do an enema. You know, whenever I hear the word "enema," I am reminded of Pearls Before Swine. I love that comic.

Eaten Alive

Alternate Title: The Unhappy Hostess

The day we closed on the new house the rugs got torn out, and over the following days new carpet was installed. The new carpet was infested with fleas, fleas that like me more than anyone else in the house. I walk into the family room in the morning and they're all, "WOOOO! Breakfast!" Even when I don't have fleas on me, I feel imaginary ones; it's a near-constant state of paranoia.

But wait, there's more! One day mister mrtl had me remove the hugest beetle I've seen on this side of the Pacific. I scoured What's That Bug? and found a picture that resembles it. For the squeamish, I'll link to the picture rather than posting it here. You know in Japan people keep these monsters as pets? I'm pretty sure my brother had one.

I called an exterminator promptly when we realized our plight. They told me they wouldn't make an appointment until I had vacuumed. This was on the morning of Day 2 of 3 for the movers, and we'd yet to see our vacuum cleaner emerge from the packing paper. It wasn't until Day 3 that we got it. Of course, after rushing to get the rugs cleaned up, the exterminator couldn't even come out for almost a week, today actually. I'm waiting for them now.

Bug was a little concerned about her friends during the bombing. She thought they'd be harmed. I think I'll move them to the van to give her peace of mind. I'm just glad she didn't make a connection about us calling her Bug and wanting to get rid of bugs.