Katrina was a good exercise in mandatory purging. We lost about one/third of our stuff, and I was glad to get rid of some of that crap! Paperwork from the 90s, Christmas ornaments that were in the family but I didn't really LOVE, furniture that needed to be replaced, a certain portion of our things I felt great about losing....
Another portion I felt stupid about losing, the American Girl dolls and all their outfits and paraphernalia; they were so expensive that instead of giving them away, I was selfishly into that "save them for the grandchildren" mentality, so now no one has them. Also, right before we evacuated I made a big to-do about Portia's big suitcase...she had been home from camp for over a month and it was still lying around, I insisted she move it back to the storage room...she still laments the loss of that turquoise valise that went for a swim with everything else...
Then there was stuff that I occasionally miss, especially the yearbooks, which I would refer to now and again and a few products that they really DON'T make the way they used to...
Finally there is the stuff that was painful to lose, like the entire, recently renovated apartment and the tenant, the washer/dryer, the carpet, the pool table...
The sad or possibly happy thing is that even though we completely gutted the storage room in 2005 resulting in NOTHING in it, 4 years later, the room has filled up again! New crap, new years of paperwork, John's entire office when he moved home, lamps that don't work too well but MAYBE someone will use them one day...
So I would say that I am inconsistent on the hoarding issue. I do have a drawer that is sort of scary to open, where I keep keys and Scotch tape and postage stamps and envelopes and thousands of various sundry items. I can find anything I am looking for in seconds...why does tape go with keys? My mother had a similar drawer, and in my mind, these items belong together...I suppose I am propagating another generation of weird-items-thrown-together. When I really stop to look at it, some of the items make NO sense, like old cellphones are in that drawer...when there are old veggies in the fridge, even when there is 99% chance that no one will ever eat them I can look at them and say "Hmmm, not quite rotten enough yet" and close the drawer. The food will eventually go BAD and then I throw it out. If ONLY the cell phones would just go BAD!
It was a crazy week, first it was the midnight showing of Inglourious Basterds followed by Cafe du Monde resulting in a sea of teenagers coming in at 4AM...then the going-away night, which also involved lots of loud teens, ( 1AM reenactment: "DUUUUUUDDDE!!!!" ) Do you now feel like you were here?? Then, Saturday at Tulane moving Zeke in to his dorm room and on to Atlanta in our Beverly Hillbillies car, with mops and hangers sticking out the windows to move Madison in to her on-campus apartment on Sunday...now I'm home and it's like someone died. It's so quiet! Good time to look at an old yearbook...doh!!
Patty
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
One Man's Garbage... (Ruby)
It seems like there are suddenly a lot more shows on T.V. about Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and I have a vested interest in this topic because of my little guy, Ollie, whose OCD behaviors got severe around the age of eight…as well as my own tendencies, not nearly as severe, throughout my life. The show “Obsessed” which was on for a few consecutive weeks became a favorite in our household and last week the season concluded with a story about a very likeable man who is a “Hoarder”, an OCD derivative that causes a person to live among the chaotic ruins of, essentially, all their own garbage; they continuously acquire “stuff” but are psychologically unable to get rid of a thing. (Ollie is not a Hoarder by definition...yet...although I imagine his OCD could go in several directions...we'll see) They develop a comfort level within the horrific messes they call home and see their lives as predictable and safe, in the same way that any of us would appreciate our own lifestyles as predictable and safe. The big difference is that they live with the nagging threat that they could lose everything from their homes to their children and relationships with all family and friends because of the deteriorating and insanitary living conditions…which probably perpetuates the problem, making them hold on to all their stuff even more. Although they all probably comprehend how destructive it is to the framework of their lives, it appears to take some super-vigilant intervention to get them to finally part with their “special” possessions and then “stay clean”, literally. And the likelihood of returning to their previous behaviors is all too common. Last night a new series called “Hoarders” premiered and this will, as the name implies, specifically feature people who hang on to and hoard, for dear life, all their stuff – from rotten food, to broken toys and dirty laundry – all scattered and piled to obscure every inch of the floor. 
Throughout my life I’ve observed houses and yards that must certainly be occupied by hoarders…I remember going with friends in college to get a sneak peek through the bushes of one such back yard that was wooly with shrubs and trees, where millions and millions of trinkets hung from the branches, were hidden in the brush or piled precariously high on top of older piles of garbage; my friends and I were fascinated by the place. I recall always prefacing for anyone about to see it for the first time, “You will not believe it…you’ll DEFINITELY think it was worth the trip”. It was like peering into a crazy cave, a secret world that no one was supposed to see or know about, a show.
I remember hearing that a friend of mine had a mother who was a Hoarder; every hallway and room of their house was completely lined from floor to ceiling with cardboard boxes, with only narrow ”tunnels” between all the cardboard to move around in. My friends squeezed through the halls, single file, and were horrified to think of our friend having to call that his home.
On the other hand, as Scot and I watched this perfectly nice couple, last night, struggling to get rid of their junk and beginning the clean up phase – fully assisted by a team of cleaners – I did think a few times about my own basement, shown here with lime green hampers and baskets of CLEAN, not dirty laundry - one for each child, one for each parent, one for towels, one for sheets and blankets, one for boy socks, one for boy boxers, etc...never put away but picked through as we need stuff because there is simply too much of it to get on top of; mine is an organized mess, certainly not an example of hoarding but clearly a project for optimizing and parting with tons of the items at the bottom of all the piles, to make it easier to find things, easier to visually comprehend, easier for me to emotionally stomach.
I thought of attics or garages I’ve had in the past, closets, certain drawers, the tops of certain counters throughout the house. I believe we all hoard to a degree but we set limits; I can scrounge around through my “pencil drawer” and toss random things into it as I race through my day, a lone thumbtack, a rubberband, a lozenge, someone’s library card, a couple pennies. I tell myself it’s O.K. I don’t even think about it. But if you were to ask me to go through that drawer and make sense of it, I’d put it off for as long as possible. It’s hard to be discriminating about what’s really important to hold onto. So much stuff is flying at us all the time; junk mail that we fear could be important mail, important info and dates from our children’s schools, the millions of THINGS that could be useful at another time, all screaming at us “KEEP ME!”
Because I do NOT have a serious hoarding condition, only your average-human kind of "keeping stuff I don't need", I am thankfully able to numb myself to the significance of my stuff - from time to time - and simply toss, toss, toss! Moving is the perfect excuse for this type of cleansing because most of us really want to know what we’re putting the effort into, what are the items that really get to stay in the “keep” pile. I knew I had really dulled my neurotic senses to a workable point when we moved to our current home because I had all five kids at that time, but none of them were babies anymore…which meant that I had to go through their baby stuff. That’s when I was finally able to get rid of their little belly-button stubs that I had saved from their infancies. And not that a baby’s belly button takes up a lot of room, but I was able to get rid of them mentally, which is the exercise that has to happen…for anyone...OCD, or not.
Scrapbooking is a form of hoarding, by the way, but it’s a controlled and elegant version of the same human sentiments. And it’s designed, laid out, displayed like a perfect advertisement for the moments of your life, versus strewn on the ground to be stepped on. I could totally see someone becoming obsessive-compulsive about their scrap-booking though, like freaking out if they had not been careful to hold onto every precious moment. My belly-buttons would have been perfect in a scrap-book but I never took the time to put one together. Instead I have bins, Rubbermaid bins, some labeled, some not, tons of them, with my important stuff that passed the test and was granted entrance to “the next house”…
I guess the curious thing for me is where the possibly fine line is when “collecting” or “keeping” in a healthy, sentimental way crosses into “hoarding” and the scary feeling of literally having your soul “emptied out” when you’re challenged to get rid of your garbage for the sake of saving your home or your life.
Blue had a Pork Chop for a while in the back seat of his car, an old slice of Pizza, a million empty cigarette packs, a broken umbrella, a stray shoe. Scot keeps broken phones, broken VCR’s, mostly appliances, but out of sight…in the garage. I keep things that bring a tear to my eye like notes from Santa to the kids, but also WAY too many clothes, lipsticks, things I know will never be used. Toyen “collects” bottles and cans, some of which are beautiful, limited edition pieces of art…while she’ll also allow an empty humdrum pepsi can - which somehow feels like pure garbage to me - to be part of her display; many of these bottles are crammed in between other significant things in her large bookshelf and look less like an artisitc collection than something more quirky. And if she catches me even glancing at the overcrowded and chaotic "display", she glares hard at me with a face that says “Don’t go NEAR them!”. Clearly these are significant in her life.
“I’ll keep it for my grandchildren!” is another classic reason to hold onto every little thing…but for me, I have so much crap to wade through in my own life as a Mom that I’d have to threaten my mother if she started sending us stuff from my past; she’s shared a few things, some books, an item here or there…but honest-to-God, would my kids really cherish all my old things?? How exciting is my erector set from the ‘60’s to a child who really wants an I-Phone??
Anyway, just curious...what have you held onto? Are you able to simply TOSS or are you a sentimental KEEPER? A scrap-booker? A hoarder? (I am guessing not…) All I know is that after watching these Hoarder shows I am feeling a little uneasy about my basement, in particular, my laundry room and I am determined to have it morph into something very different by sometime in September, that’s my goal.
But for now, I’m feeling somehow balanced between my pristine living room (who is LIVING in it?) and the chaos of the basement, as I imagine the average person is.
Ruby
Throughout my life I’ve observed houses and yards that must certainly be occupied by hoarders…I remember going with friends in college to get a sneak peek through the bushes of one such back yard that was wooly with shrubs and trees, where millions and millions of trinkets hung from the branches, were hidden in the brush or piled precariously high on top of older piles of garbage; my friends and I were fascinated by the place. I recall always prefacing for anyone about to see it for the first time, “You will not believe it…you’ll DEFINITELY think it was worth the trip”. It was like peering into a crazy cave, a secret world that no one was supposed to see or know about, a show. I remember hearing that a friend of mine had a mother who was a Hoarder; every hallway and room of their house was completely lined from floor to ceiling with cardboard boxes, with only narrow ”tunnels” between all the cardboard to move around in. My friends squeezed through the halls, single file, and were horrified to think of our friend having to call that his home.
On the other hand, as Scot and I watched this perfectly nice couple, last night, struggling to get rid of their junk and beginning the clean up phase – fully assisted by a team of cleaners – I did think a few times about my own basement, shown here with lime green hampers and baskets of CLEAN, not dirty laundry - one for each child, one for each parent, one for towels, one for sheets and blankets, one for boy socks, one for boy boxers, etc...never put away but picked through as we need stuff because there is simply too much of it to get on top of; mine is an organized mess, certainly not an example of hoarding but clearly a project for optimizing and parting with tons of the items at the bottom of all the piles, to make it easier to find things, easier to visually comprehend, easier for me to emotionally stomach.
I thought of attics or garages I’ve had in the past, closets, certain drawers, the tops of certain counters throughout the house. I believe we all hoard to a degree but we set limits; I can scrounge around through my “pencil drawer” and toss random things into it as I race through my day, a lone thumbtack, a rubberband, a lozenge, someone’s library card, a couple pennies. I tell myself it’s O.K. I don’t even think about it. But if you were to ask me to go through that drawer and make sense of it, I’d put it off for as long as possible. It’s hard to be discriminating about what’s really important to hold onto. So much stuff is flying at us all the time; junk mail that we fear could be important mail, important info and dates from our children’s schools, the millions of THINGS that could be useful at another time, all screaming at us “KEEP ME!”Because I do NOT have a serious hoarding condition, only your average-human kind of "keeping stuff I don't need", I am thankfully able to numb myself to the significance of my stuff - from time to time - and simply toss, toss, toss! Moving is the perfect excuse for this type of cleansing because most of us really want to know what we’re putting the effort into, what are the items that really get to stay in the “keep” pile. I knew I had really dulled my neurotic senses to a workable point when we moved to our current home because I had all five kids at that time, but none of them were babies anymore…which meant that I had to go through their baby stuff. That’s when I was finally able to get rid of their little belly-button stubs that I had saved from their infancies. And not that a baby’s belly button takes up a lot of room, but I was able to get rid of them mentally, which is the exercise that has to happen…for anyone...OCD, or not.
Scrapbooking is a form of hoarding, by the way, but it’s a controlled and elegant version of the same human sentiments. And it’s designed, laid out, displayed like a perfect advertisement for the moments of your life, versus strewn on the ground to be stepped on. I could totally see someone becoming obsessive-compulsive about their scrap-booking though, like freaking out if they had not been careful to hold onto every precious moment. My belly-buttons would have been perfect in a scrap-book but I never took the time to put one together. Instead I have bins, Rubbermaid bins, some labeled, some not, tons of them, with my important stuff that passed the test and was granted entrance to “the next house”…I guess the curious thing for me is where the possibly fine line is when “collecting” or “keeping” in a healthy, sentimental way crosses into “hoarding” and the scary feeling of literally having your soul “emptied out” when you’re challenged to get rid of your garbage for the sake of saving your home or your life.
Blue had a Pork Chop for a while in the back seat of his car, an old slice of Pizza, a million empty cigarette packs, a broken umbrella, a stray shoe. Scot keeps broken phones, broken VCR’s, mostly appliances, but out of sight…in the garage. I keep things that bring a tear to my eye like notes from Santa to the kids, but also WAY too many clothes, lipsticks, things I know will never be used. Toyen “collects” bottles and cans, some of which are beautiful, limited edition pieces of art…while she’ll also allow an empty humdrum pepsi can - which somehow feels like pure garbage to me - to be part of her display; many of these bottles are crammed in between other significant things in her large bookshelf and look less like an artisitc collection than something more quirky. And if she catches me even glancing at the overcrowded and chaotic "display", she glares hard at me with a face that says “Don’t go NEAR them!”. Clearly these are significant in her life.
“I’ll keep it for my grandchildren!” is another classic reason to hold onto every little thing…but for me, I have so much crap to wade through in my own life as a Mom that I’d have to threaten my mother if she started sending us stuff from my past; she’s shared a few things, some books, an item here or there…but honest-to-God, would my kids really cherish all my old things?? How exciting is my erector set from the ‘60’s to a child who really wants an I-Phone??
Anyway, just curious...what have you held onto? Are you able to simply TOSS or are you a sentimental KEEPER? A scrap-booker? A hoarder? (I am guessing not…) All I know is that after watching these Hoarder shows I am feeling a little uneasy about my basement, in particular, my laundry room and I am determined to have it morph into something very different by sometime in September, that’s my goal.
But for now, I’m feeling somehow balanced between my pristine living room (who is LIVING in it?) and the chaos of the basement, as I imagine the average person is.Ruby
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Seeing Red (Patty)
I have definitely been experiencing the hemorrhaging, and a little more time between occurrences….This was my most recent secret drama (Party of One? Oh, right over here for your monthly unpredictable event that no one will ever hear about…)
When we were in Europe, I was getting smug, like “Oh yeah! Old age ROCKS! It is so cool NOT to get your period while on vacation. Ha, HA! But then (cue the Jaws soundtrack…) the night before we left, I was walking around Vienna, and I got some “pre” signs that it was on it’s way. You know how you are about to have a picnic and you see ominous clouds and a flash of lightning in the distance but still you hope and sort of believe it’s not going to rain?
My most-excellent plan was to ignore it in the hopes that it would go away. The following morning was one of those crazy travel days, where our wake-up call was at 430AM for a 630 flight. I packed a good amount of supplies in my carry-on, and semi-ignored that situation. We took a short flight to Amsterdam, and right when we were landing, the dam broke and The Event was underway. But we had to go through customs, and we made our connecting flight by the skin of our teeth, in fact if it hadn’t left a few minutes late, we would have missed that 10 and a half hour flight to Houston….I was in a movie coma, and about 2 hours into the flight, right after Last Chance Harvey but before Ratatouille, all my supplies were gone, no match for the torrent that is my “peri” stage. Even the flight attendant commented “Wow! You have so much energy!” Which is airlinespeak for “Wow! You like to be in my way in the aisles a lot!” In the end, after using maybe 10,000 Continental paper towels, and several more movies, the plane, (thank you, Jesus!) was landing in Houston…I run/waddle to the gift shop, where they have everything a person could want, Slim Jims, eyeglass repair packets, ashtrays, Texas-shaped potato-chip bowls, leaf-rubbing kits for kids, 72 varieties of gum, condoms…but they DON’T stock feminine hygiene supplies…what the F?!!?!? This emotional rollercoaster is all under the veil of secrecy, somewhere in there I had completely changed outfits, but for whatever reason, husbands are wired not to notice that sort of thing and it’s probably all for the best, they don’t want to end up with TMI, something I have just provided you with I’m afraid…
My hand hurts today, I went to a pool party last night that was “Tankini Mandatory” and I volunteered to bring my awesome juicer and 100 limes for skini Martinis, but after lugging this cumbersome appliance to the party, I realized that I’d left a piece of the juicer (and apparently a piece of my brain) on the counter at home, and it was too far to go back and get it…the host had a manual, pitiful excuse-for-a-juicer, and I felt obligated to juice a gazillion limes…
And completely unrelated, but always fun are Summer Events in New Orleans…Last weekend was White Linen night, all the art galleries are open and the streets are pedestrian-only... maybe 25,000 attend this event and everyone wears white, it’s a great people watching event, you see lots of women in interesting hats, drinking wine, it’s quite lovely… like Mardi Gras without the drunks…
They follow that the next weekend with a lower-brow event called Dirty Linen night, which takes place in the French Quarter and is kicked-off by the Red Dress Race. It’s not cheap, I think it’s 50 bucks to participate in this running/drinking event, but that didn’t stop over 6,000 people from signing up, thus all day yesterday, from the coffee shops to bookstores, wherever you went you saw men and women in lovely red dresses…gotta do something to beat the heat!!
Patty
When we were in Europe, I was getting smug, like “Oh yeah! Old age ROCKS! It is so cool NOT to get your period while on vacation. Ha, HA! But then (cue the Jaws soundtrack…) the night before we left, I was walking around Vienna, and I got some “pre” signs that it was on it’s way. You know how you are about to have a picnic and you see ominous clouds and a flash of lightning in the distance but still you hope and sort of believe it’s not going to rain?
My most-excellent plan was to ignore it in the hopes that it would go away. The following morning was one of those crazy travel days, where our wake-up call was at 430AM for a 630 flight. I packed a good amount of supplies in my carry-on, and semi-ignored that situation. We took a short flight to Amsterdam, and right when we were landing, the dam broke and The Event was underway. But we had to go through customs, and we made our connecting flight by the skin of our teeth, in fact if it hadn’t left a few minutes late, we would have missed that 10 and a half hour flight to Houston….I was in a movie coma, and about 2 hours into the flight, right after Last Chance Harvey but before Ratatouille, all my supplies were gone, no match for the torrent that is my “peri” stage. Even the flight attendant commented “Wow! You have so much energy!” Which is airlinespeak for “Wow! You like to be in my way in the aisles a lot!” In the end, after using maybe 10,000 Continental paper towels, and several more movies, the plane, (thank you, Jesus!) was landing in Houston…I run/waddle to the gift shop, where they have everything a person could want, Slim Jims, eyeglass repair packets, ashtrays, Texas-shaped potato-chip bowls, leaf-rubbing kits for kids, 72 varieties of gum, condoms…but they DON’T stock feminine hygiene supplies…what the F?!!?!? This emotional rollercoaster is all under the veil of secrecy, somewhere in there I had completely changed outfits, but for whatever reason, husbands are wired not to notice that sort of thing and it’s probably all for the best, they don’t want to end up with TMI, something I have just provided you with I’m afraid…
My hand hurts today, I went to a pool party last night that was “Tankini Mandatory” and I volunteered to bring my awesome juicer and 100 limes for skini Martinis, but after lugging this cumbersome appliance to the party, I realized that I’d left a piece of the juicer (and apparently a piece of my brain) on the counter at home, and it was too far to go back and get it…the host had a manual, pitiful excuse-for-a-juicer, and I felt obligated to juice a gazillion limes…
And completely unrelated, but always fun are Summer Events in New Orleans…Last weekend was White Linen night, all the art galleries are open and the streets are pedestrian-only... maybe 25,000 attend this event and everyone wears white, it’s a great people watching event, you see lots of women in interesting hats, drinking wine, it’s quite lovely… like Mardi Gras without the drunks…
They follow that the next weekend with a lower-brow event called Dirty Linen night, which takes place in the French Quarter and is kicked-off by the Red Dress Race. It’s not cheap, I think it’s 50 bucks to participate in this running/drinking event, but that didn’t stop over 6,000 people from signing up, thus all day yesterday, from the coffee shops to bookstores, wherever you went you saw men and women in lovely red dresses…gotta do something to beat the heat!!
Patty
Saturday, August 8, 2009
We could have had CAKE! (Ruby)
Let’s get the Menopause thing straight…and if I already explained this to you, my apologies up front. It will occur on ONE DAY and you will not know that it is THE DAY at the time…which kind of takes all the event-planning and party-potential right out of it. Menopause is technically the one day that is one year from your last MENSES (a word I love to say in my old puckered Spinster face and voice; from Latin, plural of mensis ‘month’). Anyway, our Moms don’t tell us this because they are clueless and Doctors refuse to tell you this unless pressed, because they enjoy secrets, so I am committed to sharing what I do know – in humane terms - about this bizarre and often troublesome female passage. I kept saying to my doctor “I have been non-stop hemorrhaging to death for two years….is this menopause”?...and she would say, with a wink and a knowing but private-not-sharing-shit look “oh no…..PERI…menopause…”. So the mystery for me was the whole Peri thing, which seems to be more symptomatic than Menopause itself…you could stop bleeding altogether, or sporadically, or hemorrhage-style bleeding off and on or continuously like I did, which leaves you light-headed and distracted at work. Not to mention a million other little annoyances like hot-flashes, night-sweats, libido issues, etc…a different bundle of pleasantries for different women. My confusion was always when does it BECOME “menopause”, certifiably?? When can we drop the stupid PERI prefix? When I finally had stopped bleeding to death and I had essentially been dry docked for about one and a half years, my doctor decided I was grown up enough to hear that menopause had occurred on that magical date one year after the bleeding officially stopped. “Now you are POST-Menopausal and have been for about a half year”, she explained. My office buddy said, when I told him this, “Aw, shit…you mean we missed it? We could have had cake!”…which is why I said before that you really cannot celebrate menopause itself…only peri-hemorrhaging or Post Menopause,…which I am now thinking could go on for ever. I am in the throws of such insane hot-flashes that my back is almost always sticky, if not drenched, and at any given moment I can turn beet red and have a body temperature of 200 degrees Farenheit. Luckily since I wear my hair short and spiky-ish, hair sweat can double as styling product...a huge savings for me. Hot flashes seem dangerous though, like it’s all a mistake…as in how can our bodies endure that much heat? I think of a car that overheats and has the good fortune to be treated to care and repair when this happens while women just have to keep huffing and puffing along with steam coming out of their nostrils like furious dragons, pretending to be fine, fanning with feminine dignity at our faces with our hands or shopping lists, a shoe, whatever we can find. I have been known to run to the freezer and cram my face between the frozen spinach packages. None of it seems fair, but…whatever. My mother insists that she never actually went through menopause; I keep telling her “uh, Mom….we all actually HAVE to go through it….it’s that no-more-eggies thing…I think you were just thinking about other things at the time and maybe didn’t notice…”. And for her, that’s fine...because she’ll be 100 years old and still be adorable and stronger than I am now, flirting with her plumber, doing the girly thing…she lucked out by having no raging flashes or soaked sheets or anger management issues as a 50-ish woman. Which gets me finally to you…don’t worry about any of this…it’ll happen. I think it’s kind of cute that you have not done it yet…but are you not Peri at all?? Like no changes in your MENSES (ha!), whatsoever? Not so much as a temper tantrum? Good for you, girl!
Please do me this favor, then, so that you can be the ONE person I know who gets to have a Menopause party: carefully document the EXACT last day of every period you get from now on, since one of them is bound to be your last…then start counting…get the dang thing on your calendar and when you are about a month or two away from the one year lapse from that truly LAST one, I will work on cute, girly invitations and we’ll do it up…can’t you see it…party favors in shades of red…lot’s of red balloons, Pomegranate-Vodka-Punch (duh), red velvet cake, red jellybeans (eggs, get it?), etc…the theme has endless possibilities in my mind. 
In fact I am thinking there is some career potential in this for us…we could become the Global-Menopause-Party-Planners (GMPP, Inc.), shedding light and good will upon something that can otherwise be a pinnacle of female doldrums.
Start Counting!!!! And I'll be looking for a fun red hat to wear!
Ruby
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Semper Fi (Patty)
That is hilarious. They could use you in the Air Force, they'd have to issue Combat Heels, of course. I'm pretty sure that a pair of those clunky boots weigh more than you do. And you'd have to do some kind of batik on the uniform...aren't you afraid to fly?
And yes, I knew that Target's in-house brand is Archer, we still don't carry it...
One last thing on the yogurt topic, I would stay away from Soy-licious, it's heavy on the Soy and light on the -licious...
We are winding down on summer. On our job scene, Madison started her summer jobs this weekend even though she is leaving for college on the 18th. She is semi-babysitting these 2 girls, ages 14 and 16, while their parents are out of town. In a million years, I would not leave kids that age alone for 10 days, but they seem to be really good kids who enjoy each other's company, and once a day, Madison takes them somewhere. The first day they wanted to go to Glow-in-the-dark Putt-Putt, which I think of as more of an outing for 9 year-olds, but whatever. Yesterday she took them for Mexican food. She gets $50 a day for this grueling schedule. They seem happy for her to arrive and happy for her to leave. In my warped mind, they are doing nasty deeds at night, but in reality, they are probably baking cookies...she also got a job with Sony Records for the school year. Madison loves music, attends all kinds of Indie concerts and festivals, but the job that was available was in the COUNTRY division...hmmmm....still it's a foot-in-the-door, and it's $150 a week, a lot of the job is on Facebook and going to concerts. With her spending habits, she was in dire need of a weekly cash infusion. Thus, we were running around while she was interviewing, buying Billboard, memorizing the top 20 country artists and their hits, asking Portia, our resident country expert thanks to our extended evacuation in Texas, her favorite songs and lyrics, i.e. "I'm so much cooler on line"...she even gets business cards, so this will be fun.
This might be more information than you want, but um, am I ever going to hit menopause? It's getting a little embarrassing, someone forgot to give the memo to my body that the time has come and gone, I'm really sick of producing estrogen, just me and all the 19 year olds...
All the high schools start one week from today. Portia will be a Junior. It is the New Orleans mentality that expects disaster, maybe the Swine Flu, possibly a huge tropical storm, always anticipating lenghty disruption of school...let's get a few weeks in while we can! So that's about it for Summer '09, it's a wrap!
Patty
And yes, I knew that Target's in-house brand is Archer, we still don't carry it...
One last thing on the yogurt topic, I would stay away from Soy-licious, it's heavy on the Soy and light on the -licious...
We are winding down on summer. On our job scene, Madison started her summer jobs this weekend even though she is leaving for college on the 18th. She is semi-babysitting these 2 girls, ages 14 and 16, while their parents are out of town. In a million years, I would not leave kids that age alone for 10 days, but they seem to be really good kids who enjoy each other's company, and once a day, Madison takes them somewhere. The first day they wanted to go to Glow-in-the-dark Putt-Putt, which I think of as more of an outing for 9 year-olds, but whatever. Yesterday she took them for Mexican food. She gets $50 a day for this grueling schedule. They seem happy for her to arrive and happy for her to leave. In my warped mind, they are doing nasty deeds at night, but in reality, they are probably baking cookies...she also got a job with Sony Records for the school year. Madison loves music, attends all kinds of Indie concerts and festivals, but the job that was available was in the COUNTRY division...hmmmm....still it's a foot-in-the-door, and it's $150 a week, a lot of the job is on Facebook and going to concerts. With her spending habits, she was in dire need of a weekly cash infusion. Thus, we were running around while she was interviewing, buying Billboard, memorizing the top 20 country artists and their hits, asking Portia, our resident country expert thanks to our extended evacuation in Texas, her favorite songs and lyrics, i.e. "I'm so much cooler on line"...she even gets business cards, so this will be fun.
This might be more information than you want, but um, am I ever going to hit menopause? It's getting a little embarrassing, someone forgot to give the memo to my body that the time has come and gone, I'm really sick of producing estrogen, just me and all the 19 year olds...
All the high schools start one week from today. Portia will be a Junior. It is the New Orleans mentality that expects disaster, maybe the Swine Flu, possibly a huge tropical storm, always anticipating lenghty disruption of school...let's get a few weeks in while we can! So that's about it for Summer '09, it's a wrap!
Patty
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