Meal planning, grocery store reports, and randomosity. Seems like that’s all I can dredge up for a blog post these days. Thank you for reading anyway.
(Perhaps you could use one of your over-long randomosity bullets as its own blog post! you might suggest. Ah. If only my brain were capable of processing posts in manageable bite sizes instead of epic book-length tomes.)
- I finally got my hair cut and colored this week. My original appointment was a month ago. But the day before I was scheduled to see her, my hair stylist canceled because she had Covid. And then the day before I was rescheduled to see her, I thought I had Covid. My hair was very, very grey and now it is very, very brown and I am deeply grateful to my hair stylist. This time, she also dyed my eyebrows. You will have to trust me when I say that I currently look exactly like Uncle Leo. (The dye has temporarily adhered to the skin beneath my brows, and my hair stylist promises it will wash out in a day or so. Until then, I say, “Hello!”)
- Speaking of vanity, I have totally forgotten to report back on my waterproof mascara experimentation. Perhaps you did not know or care about said experimentation, but I am reporting back nonetheless. Julie recommended that I try L’Oreal Voluminous Million Lashes, so I marched right out to Target to buy some. This was back in Julyish. Target did not have any of that particular mascara, but I was determined to try something new, so I got the closest thing available on the shelves: L’Oreal Paris Voluminous Superstar Waterproof Mascara.
- (This is not a new bullet, but WordPress disagrees.) Aside from the absolutely ridiculous name, I love it. It has the base primer, which makes my lashes super long. And then it has the top layer. And it’s waterproof so it never runs or smudges. It is a little difficult to remove, but it stays on so well I don’t mind. Since we are all wearing masks for the next FOREVER, it is my new best friend. I wore it skiing the other day, when it was snowing so heavily that my family and I were human moguls by the time we reached the top of the chair lift. And I made the mistake of putting my goggles on top of my helmet, where they immediately became crusted with snow and ice, which rendered them completely unusable, so I had to spend the rest of the day with snow flying directly into my face. My mascara did not budge.
- Who was it that recommended I watch Sex Education? My husband and I just finished Season 2 and I love it. The first season was good. I wasn’t crazy about the premise: Otis, son of beautiful sex therapist Gillian Anderson, starts offering a sex advice clinic of his own at school, with the help of prickly bad girl Maeve. For the entirety of Season 1, I had to suspend a LOT of disbelief, and plus the advice that Otis charged for seemed really basic – like no one could simply google their issues and get the exact same solution? But the characters were interesting, and I became Very Invested in a couple of the side stories, so we went straight into Season 2. And it was GREAT. The cast of characters are so fun and interesting. Everyone is complex and has their own inner struggles. I love how diverse the cast is (although there could be a little more size diversity), and I love how plainly and non-judgmentally a wide variety of sexual preferences are portrayed, and I love the friendship between Otis and his best friend Eric, and I love Gillian Anderson even though her character can be kind of irritating. Anyway: it is a really different, interesting show and I am hoping my husband will be up for jumping right into Season 3. (This may sound like “no, duh” advice, but if you aren’t interested in seeing/hearing about pretty graphic sex acts, I would skip this show.)
- Has it been cold in your neck of the woods? It’s been cold here, but nowhere near as cold as it COULD be. I grew up in the land of Minus Sixty Degrees, so I am pretty blasé about our current in-the-teens temps. We do have some pretty serious icicle action going on though. These guys are all come at me bro and I want to say, Whoa, whoa, whoa. Chill out, my dude. No need to get so defensive.
- Where I was originally going with the previous bullet was that my office is quite frigid lately. I used to have a space heater, one that’s so old I can’t remember when or how or why I acquired it. It died last year. Is it still sitting forlornly in the corner of my office, mourning its inability to fulfill its life purpose? Yes. Despite my sympathy for the defunct space heater, I decided to buy a new space heater and I found this little guy. So far, I really like it. I park it in the middleish of my office and direct it toward my desk, and it definitely makes the space warmer. I think it would be perfect for a cubicle or a small office. It has a little handle, and it is very sensitive to being bumped, and I really like it. It’s little, too – about the height of a hard-bound book, and a very cute little fella. Because as we all know, cuteness is a key factor in which space heater to buy.
- Not that I’ve been in my office a whole lot this week. Even though I am supposed to be doing revisions, I have instead been traipsing all over hither and thither for all sorts of stupid appointments. Annual gyn appointment. Annual mammogram. Routine physical to establish with a new PCP. Hair appointment. Financial advisor appointment. PTA meeting about something I volunteered for. And then I just had to make a bunch of phone calls (UGH) to set up more appointments. Eye appointments for me and Carla. Dental appointment. Car maintenance appointment. Ugh ugh ugh. I hate being on the phone and I feel like my schedule is BOOKED for the rest of the year.
- May I complain a moment about the central scheduling system my healthcare provider has? I spent a very long time on the phone with a scheduler, trying to set up eye appointments for myself and Carla. And while I am grateful that I could call one number and get appointments for us both, with different doctors, I am… a little concerned. I explained my time/date parameters, and she found a time and a date. So I plugged them into my calendar on my phone. And then she said, “Okay, I have you scheduled on DATE at TIME.” But… that was not the date she and I had agreed on! So I asked her to double check it, and she confirmed the original date and time, in a tone of voice that indicated I should have been paying closer attention. And then when I scheduled Carla’s appointment, she said, “Oh, I have an appointment on the same day as your appointment – DATE.” But the date she said was not the date we’d agreed on, so I had to ask her to double check it again. Also for Carla, I picked a specific location near our house, and a specific time of day (after school, because the doctor will need to dilate her eyes). The scheduler set it all up, and then said, “Oh, I scheduled it for DIFFERENT LOCATION. Is that okay?” I said no, could we please find a date at the nearby office. And she said sure, and then offered several early morning times… when we had just discussed that the appointment needed to be in the afternoon. FINALLY we got it scheduled, and then she told me the date and time, and they were different from what I had just plugged into my calendar! It was a very confusing call, and I really, really hope that Carla and I are scheduled correctly.
- In my never-ending quest to find ways to use the bananas that eventually soften into mush before anyone (ahem, CARLA) eats them, I attempted a new recipe. It was a MAGICAL recipe, let me tell you. Elisabeth posted it on her blog, and it sounded ideal for my particular child: it contains oats (which she will eat RAW by the bowl), bananas, and chocolate chips. It also used dates, which I had on hand from the sticky toffee pudding we never ate. No liquid though, which I felt was surely a mistake. But no! As soon as I turned on the blender, the banana liquified and the ingredients morphed into a beautiful, uniform batter. I was generous with the chocolate chips. The cupcakes were so easy and seemed so wholesome. And none of my family members liked them. HUGE WEARY SIGH. [CLARIFICATION: They are not dry. They are perfect. If they didn’t have a banana flavor, which I cannot stand, I would have eaten them myself.]
- I need some advice about my “mud room,” even though I am pretty sure that my situation is un-fixable. As I have complained about at great length in the past, my “mud room” is a teeny tiny square of space between my garage and kitchen, with a shoe closet on one side. We come in through the garage, remove our shoes, toss them in the general direction of the shoe closet, and then enter the kitchen. It’s not great normally, but currently, with the deep snow we find ourselves in, it’s reached a fever pitch of untenability. Our feet are wet and muddy, so the floor gets wet and muddy. And there’s no easy way to remove one’s shoes and then step into the kitchen, so mud and dirt inevitably get tracked into the kitchen and then all around the house. I am zooping things constantly. I am spraying and wiping the floor constantly. And then, multiple times a day, the floor is a filthy mess again. Plus, the shoe closet is FULL. There is NO ROOM for all the snow boots that have assembled. The other closet, where I store the snow boots in dry weather, is too far away for us to reasonably store the boots in between wearings. And because some people like to wear normal shoes when it’s not actively snowing, I can’t simply stow the regular footwear in the other closet. I guess I could move SOME of the shoes, so that we could put our boots INSIDE the closet, instead of outside. But that still doesn’t resolve the Mud and Dirt issue. I would love to get a boot tray… but the “mud room” is so small that a boot tray would make it impossible to open the door. I don’t think a boot tray would fit inside the shoe closet, either. It’s tiny, plus we already have a shoe shelf in there, taking up most of the real estate. You will have to believe me that there is no In the Garage Solution, either; our garage is tiny, and there is barely enough room to squeeze past our cars to get inside. We cannot remove our shoes outside before we come in. So. Is there some obvious solution I am overlooking? Or is this just a Grit Your Teeth and Keep Zooping situation?
- This may be really silly question, but if you track your reading, and you also have children, do you track the books you read with/to your children? I track the books I read on Goodreads, and I never used to count the books I read to Carla. (Mostly because my husband is the primary bedtime reader in our household – his accents are MUCH higher quality.) But I have making an effort to read to her more often outside of bedtime, and we just finished Frindle and I tracked it. I mean, I read the entire thing. Out loud. So I want credit. Credit that matters literally only to me.
- By the way, have you read Frindle yet? It was seriously such a good book. It’s about a boy named Nick and his teacher Mrs. Granger. As part of an effort to distract Mrs. Granger from teaching/assigning homework, Nick decides to make up his own word for a pen (frindle), and then launches a campaign to make frindle the real word for an ink-filled writing implement. It was a fun book about how words come to be, and how students can make a difference, and how important good teachers are. My voice was wobbling all over the place as I read the last two chapters. It was really such a lovely, fun, moving book. Carla liked it too, but being a child and not a parent/former child, she didn’t fully understand the beauty of the Nick/Mrs. Granger relationship.
That seems as good a note to end on as any. I need to go gear myself up to make yet another phone call and schedule yet another appointment. And then I have two meetings today. Blech.
Oh no! I thought those muffins were magical and now I realize they are not. Maybe I should make a batch and mail them to you? It is a bit ridiculous how often I make this recipe (for context I ate FOUR of these muffins yesterday). Sigh. Sorry, Suzanne. I would make suggestions of what I do…but maybe I just have a penchant for enjoying dry muffins (though my family always loves them because they’re so moist). Maybe we’re texture-blind? Or maybe bananas purchased in Canada are more moist (and I do add a bit of oil and if I use dates, I soak them in water water first to soften up). Okay, now I am offering suggestions because I’m so passionate about this recipe…
YES I track the books I read with the kids. Any YA chapter book (like Harry Potter, Roald Dahl), I add to my own reading list. For picture books (which we still read with wild abandon), I post anything that we decide deserves 4 or 5 stars to a “kids-lit” shelf. I don’t give it a “read” date, so it doesn’t go toward my yearly stats, but I LOVE having this information on hand. It’s a huge part of my reading life right now, so if I’m going to monitor everything else to do with reading, it just feels…odd, to leave it out. BUT, I think most mother’s/parents DON’T do this. Like I don’t know a single other friend of mine that does this. Maybe I’m just weird. Or neurotic. Likely both…
Elisabeth! The muffins were lovely — it is simply A Fact that my child is impossible to feed!
And I like your book tracking idea. It makes me nostalgic for the days of mostly picture books — it would be nice to go back and see what we were reading regularly.
Would you take the door off the closet? It’s not very pretty, but maybe just for the winter, it would give you enough space to maneuver a boot tray in there against the wall. And a rug/mat will help with the snow and mud.
Alas, I think even without the closet door, there isn’t enough space to fit a boot tray. Maybe a very thin rug?
Those were my thoughts exactly. I would use a dark-ish rug to HIDE the mud even if you can’t eliminate it entirely, and maybe consider a small shoe rack or boot tray outside the mud “room”, on the left side of the first photo, closer to us.
I adore you.
I think of Uncle Leo every single time I darken my eyebrows, which is every morning, because it is a great source of angst for me that my eyebrows are going grey and patchy when I used to have Brooke Shields-type eyebrows. (another Seinfeld quote: who cares about eyebrows?) (I do). It is a great tragedy that everything is going grey on my body except the hair on my upper lip, which is having a Second Youth. What is that about.
That appointment. I had second-hand stress. It reminds me of when I used to try to make ortho appointments for the boys. “Do you have anything at the end of the day?” I’d say, and they would say “How’s 1:15?” What, no.
I am here for your mascara recommendations, but how do you remove it? I like the idea of waterproof mascara but I always have so much trouble removing it. What do you use? I must know.
My mudroom is just a tiny, tiny area and my sons have size 11 and 12 feet, and it’s a disaster.
It’s not cold here at all! Very mild, which, you know how that goes. It’s coming for us.
I use an abominable disposable face wipe or a washcloth and Clearasil to remove the mascara. It does take some scrubbing, sadly.
And I have had that EXACT experience with schedulers. “First thing in the morning” does not mean 10:00, especially when I am well aware you open at 7:00. (And if I have given you a time criteria, rather than a date one, and the only appointment slot that fits that time criteria is four months from now, just TELL me that. Maybe I will take it! It’s better than repeatedly saying, “No, that won’t work. Is there anything earlier?”)
Ooh – please don’t put up with having to scrub around your eye area🥺 – you simply need the right kind of eye makeup remover! Generally, although not always, an oil-based one is likely to be what you want. I use the Nivea one that separates into two layers that you have to shake before use and it works and is cheap👏!
You definitely need a couple of washable mats/rugs by your back door (they’re usually thin and so shouldn’t impede your doors) at right angles to each other to make a T-shape. Could you live with siting a slim boot tray against the wall that is opposite the single black boot next to the sideboard (?)? Whilst not perfectly ideal, it would only need to be there for part of the year (and you’d feel relieved when it went away for the Spring!🤷🏻♀️).
Ooooh thanks for the recommendation — I will look up the Nivea makeup remover. (I have super sensitive skin, so finding products that don’t irritate it is… difficult.)
We have no mud room and everything is just piled by the front door. During the rainy/snowy season here I put a carpet runner down so there is room to walk in and step away from the door to remove wet shoes/boots.
Yes, maybe I can find a very thin rug!
Oh man, the worst part of working in an office in prepandemic times was that it was always so cold. Now that we’re at home we’re in control of the temperature. I can have a big ol’ warm blanket at my desk out of range of the camera and still be “professional”, and my husband gets to blast his space heater in his attic office.
We don’t have a mudroom, so our front hall is a mess of boots and coats this time of year. There’s no solution apart from waiting until the kids grow up and leave home, so I’m good with it.
I never tracked what books I read to / with my children, but I wish I had, especially so that I could remember all of them when making recommendations to my friends with younger children. Also, I have the same mud room situation, just without the closet. We use a large metal tray, which is usually semi-adequate but is really failing to keep up with the winter boots, so is more of an overflow mess. I will say, though, the oversized, flat industrial rug/mat we have in there does a lot to keep it the mess in the mud room vs in the kitchen.
I totally tracked read-alouds, including all the poetry books we used to read at bedtime (starting in 2016, when North was 10), so my GR year-end totals used to be a lot higher than they are now. The cover of Frindle looks quite familiar. I don’t think I read it aloud to anyone, but one of the kids must have read it.
To clarify, what started in 2016 was me joining GR, not the poetry reading.
Your mudroom woes remind me of the issue we had in our last house. There was no mudroom, though. If you came into the house from the garage, which we did about 90% off the time, you entered the tile kitchen. It was always a mess during the winter months, which is basically 6-7 months of the year in Minnesota, or that’s what it feels like! We used a thin rug at the door to help but it wasn’t optimal… Now we have a small mudroom so this is an issue I forget that we had but don’t have anymore!
For the most part, I have not tracked what I read to my kids, but Elisabeth commented on my post about children’s books and told me about her kid lit shelf on goodreads. So I have started to track picture books we love there so I know what to request when the 1yo is older. I have read one chapter book to the 4yo – Mr. Poppers Penguins (which by the way, has the strangest ending!! Dad is going to go to the arctic with the penguins – see ya later family!) and I think I actually counted this toward my reading for the year since it was a chapter book. But I probably shouldn’t do that going forward as it could really skew things when our son is more interested in chapter books (that’s the only one I’ve managed to get him interested in… I’m probably being too aggressive on pushing chapter books but I’m so excited for him to read some of my faves!).
The venn diagram of my and my husband’s interests is so so thin so we will have to give Sex Education a try when we finish the creepy show we are watching now – Archive 81.
1) My husband really liked Sex Education, but I struggle with cringe humor, so I only watched a couple of episodes before I noped right out of there. I can not watch movies like Napoleon Dynamite, either.
2) We have a glorious mud room (this is a total brag and I’m sorry to be that person) and we have a boot tray, but the boot tray is not large enough to accommodate our shoes and boots, so there’s random footwear everywhere. We also troop (troupe? I’m not looking it up) in salt, sand, ice, birdseed, and whatever else, so I’m constantly sweeping and cleaning up small areas. So even if your mudroom was larger, I fear you’d just have a larger space to clean, although the clutter would probably be better.
My partial solution is that we use the dog’s towels on the floor for people to take off shoes and sometimes the shoes/boots actually stay on the towel for extended periods of time if the boot tray is full. I’d say the dog’s booties rarely make it to the boot tray and dry off mostly on towels. I do not care if these towels get gross because they are used mostly for cleaning the dog. We have a rug in the mudroom, but I actually don’t like the rug to get dirty, so I sometimes actually roll the rug up during the winter. If I had something like a rag rug, I wouldn’t care so much because I could just toss it in the washer (I used to have two rag rugs in the mudroom, but the dog cannot resist chewing them, so we no longer have them). So, rag rug (I got mine for $10 at Fleet Farm) or towel. Lots of words to say nothing.
It is really NO WONDER we hate phone calls. The only REAL mystery is why OTHER PEOPLE don’t hate them.
YES. And I did make a difficult phone call, and it was MORE difficult than anticipated and required a callback, and THAT was difficult, and now I am waiting on another callback.
I have a few places in our home that are SO cold. The girls’ bedroom. Downright frigid. I have called an insulation place to see what they recommend, but that little guy is cute and I wonder if he might give some relief.
I have a rug inside our mudroom and another as you turn the corner into the kitchen. There is plenty of room for the tots I sit for to keep their boots and for their mothers to stand when they pick up /drop off. I would try a small thin rug, just like the other recommendations.
I recently tried to set up an ortho appointment. I wanted both kids on the same day. The person scheduling me suggested that I speak to someone about why they needed to be seen when they needed to be seen. What? I don’t care what they are having done, I just want them to line them up on the same day. It was a very confusing conversation. I could tell she was knew because I’ve been bringing kids there for over 10 years. So, I was patient but it was mind blowing.
I just cleaned off the bookshelf in the girls’ room and I was like REMEMBER WHEN I READ THIS TO YOU? Yes, that was a long overdue clean up. The books were for little kids. 🙂
Your space heater looks like it has a smiling face. I love that.
I ate a lot of bananas this week. I feel like that muffin recipe is just another vehicle for me to get bananas in my system.
Frindle sounds like a lovely book. I might even read it as an adult.
My heater is very friendly and charming. And YES, Frindle is definitely a good read even as an adult.
I love posts of randomosity! And that little heater is so cute! Also, I hate phone calls and scheduling too. Why do they make it so hard?
Your office and mine are very similar, the doors, the floor, the walls. I also have a small little heater that is my BFF this time of year.
I dislike making phone calls let alone ones to schedule doctor appointments. I actually played phone tag for 40 days at one point, just trying to schedule a basic procedure. I understand that there’s a pandemic going on, but the doc practice only had one person who did scheduling. Maddening.
I don’t know what I’d do about your mudroom. Our laundry room is also our mudroom which means there’s not much space for shoes + stuff. Looking forward to seeing what you come up with.
I HATE making phone calls so very much! So I have sympathy for you. And am also clapping that you got it done.
Your “mud room” looks like mine – except you have a closet. Ours is just a short hall that leads to the kitchen, with a pantry and the door leading upstairs. Do you have any space at all between the cars and the door? We do, and I added a bench and a rug. Have I been able to convince my husband to remove his shoes there? No. He prefers to clomp around the house in his shoes knowing that it makes me absolutely insane.
If you have no space in the garage, perhaps you could add low shelves to the bottom of the closet to place the shoes on?
I hate waterproof mascara for the exact reason of having to scrub it off. But, maybe Pond’s cold cream (or any other cold cream) might help. My two current favorite (non-waterproof; but they come in waterproof formulas) are Maybelline Sky High Lash something or other (excellent for lengthening) and L’Oreal Voluminous (excellent for thickening).
We currently have TWO space heaters. Our bedroom is consistently at least 10-15 degrees colder in the winter than any other room in the house – so that one will run in the evening before my husband comes to bed. The other one is in the main living area usually pointed at my feet since, according to my husband (who is NOT a doctor), I have “poor circulation” which, according to him, explains why my toes are always cold (rather than admit he keeps this house colder than it needs to be).
I would also suggest removing the closet door to give more space. Maybe then put a boot tray inside the bottom of the closet. We have this typeof rug that does a pretty good job of absorbing wetness/ mud. https://www.crateandbarrel.com/thirsty-leaves-blue-doormat/f86481
We also have Flor carpet tiles throughout the house and they wear very well. Maybe cover the entire area with these? If you remove the closet door you can probably put another shoe bench across from the door on the wall or a boot tray there or maybe a tray under a shelf!
Well, that mascara must be pretty good if you made it through a day of skiing sans goggles without a smudge. I am impressed. I might have to try find this on my next Target trip. (Also, I want to go skiing.)
Those muffins look delicious and I actually like mine on the drier side – maybe I should try this recipe. LOL
I just want all doctors to move toward an online scheduling process. It’s so much easier when I can decide which day/time I want to come in, rather than wrestling with an appointment booker. I never get the time I want because I’m too afraid of being a pain, and it gives me such anxiety. That whole situation with booking yours and Carla’s appointments sounds like a nightmare!
I’m adding Sex Education to my to-be-watched list and that mascara to my to-be-bought list. I’m always on the lookout for a great drugstore mascara.
I am catching up after being gone for two weeks due to funerals and work trips and man.
I am sure I was not the only/first to recommend Sex Education, but I am so glad you liked it! Yes, there are definitely some things that require Suspension of Disbelief but I love the characters and the sex and Otherness positive outlook.
I have been using Glossier’s Cleanser Concentrate at the end of the day and I attempt that I like it enough to actually wash my face most nights which is a big deal for me. (Too tired to go to bed when it requires one last tidy of the kitchen, letting the dog out, brushing the dog’s teeth, washing hands, flossing, brushing my teeth, washing face, etc. Too much.) I don’t have waterproof mascara though, so I am not sure how well it would do with that.
For the mud room, I’d take the doors down and hang a curtain across the opening of the closet and then toss a boot tray to the right of the photo, where Carla’s snow boots are. Add a Waterhog mat (not cheap, but worth every penny. We have two – one at front and back doors and they have done super well with the mud the dog tracks in and wet shoes from us) at the door from the garage.
I’d also consider putting in a shelf or two for shoes in the closet that takes up more of the space than the shoe rack appears to. I’ve also found that alternating shoes so that the left shoe is toe-out and the right shoe is heel-out helps shoes take up a LOT less space, but it does require that ALL members of the household pay attention. I might even consider putting in a shelf or two at the bottom of the closet on the side where the door is, so that the shelf runs from front to back rather than side to side, and then you can use that for out of season storage and put the rack in front of it.