everyday mess

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Friday Randomosity: I Hate Mud and Phone Calls Edition

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!”)
The resemblance is uncanny.
  • (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.
Yes, that is a sliver of my actual forehead. Titillating.
  • 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.
These are two separate icicles from two separate sides of my home. Which is apparently ready to defend me from enemies.
  • 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. 
Actual text between me and my husband. He is very accommodating.
  • 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 think they LOOK beautiful, but apparently they are “too DRY, Mommy.”

  • 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?
The reality is SO MUCH WORSE than it appears here.
  • 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. 

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Santa’s Little Helper: Crafting a Craft Room Part 1

I hope you had a wonderful, delicious Thanksgiving and celebrated exactly the way you wanted to!

If you are looking for a little post-prandial distraction, might I ask you to join me in contemplating the execution of a Home Project, with potentially satisfying results? You don’t have to spend a dollar or move a single piece of furniture, you can simply sit back, sip your beverage of choice, pass judgment on my plans and life choices, and perhaps offer advice! Win win!

Carla has been asking, for months, for a “rilly big box full of all craft stuf.” That is a direct quote from her letter to Santa.

Carla is a crafter extraordinaire. She makes anything and everything, from miniature furniture to fishing rods and fish to tiny clay animals to elaborate seascape scenes to clothing for her stuffed animals and more. We have a lot of crafting supplies in our home already, and very little space to store it all, and my little craft enthusiast is constantly coming up with new ideas.

My husband and I decided that we wanted to help Santa fulfill Carla’s wish… but we needed a bigger plan than just a “rilly big box full of craft stuf.” The big box is part 2. Part 1 is carving out a crafting space.

Right now, crafting takes place on the kitchen table:

This is how my kitchen table looks at least 75% of the time. Craft mat, glue gun, craft detritus.

Or on the dining room floor:

This is what Carla hears when I ask her to “put her crafts away.” Deep sigh.

Short of moving to a home with a dedicated crafting room, we have to make do with what we have. And what we currently have makes me twitchy and claustrophobic.

We do have a decent-size basement, and my husband and I discussed repurposing the space for crafting.

Right now, the basement has several purposes. The left third is for exercise and gaming and TV watching; we have a treadmill, a recumbent bike, a couch, and a TV over there. It’s pretty full.

The right two thirds has a dual toys/music function. As in, it holds a huge amount of Carla’s toys (Barbies galore, dinosaurs, building sets) but it is also where we keep the electric piano and my husband’s electric drum kit.

(Our dream house needs to have a dedicated music room, too, apparently.)

I hope you are enjoying our walls. The color scheme… grows on you.

My idea was to move/break down the piano and drum kit, since they are so rarely used. My husband agreed to moving the piano, but he wants to keep the drum kit. (Sigh. The drum kit takes up so much more room than the piano. But we take what we can get.)

And then we use the space freed up to create a crafting space for Carla.

The dinosaur is envisioning a crafting table right here where the piano is. Perhaps we will find a new home for the dehumidifier.

While we already have the Expedit (which holds games and some puzzles and all the Make Your Own [XYZ]! kits that Carla has yet to put together, along with many that she HAS put together but have enough ingredients for more rounds) (I am going to go through and RUTHLESSLY TOSS some of the latter and RUTHLESSLY DONATE some of the former), a four-cube organizer that holds our DVDs and my husband’s video game collection, and a six-cube organizer for Carla’s LEGOs, we need dedicated craft storage and we need some sort of table.

We bought this with the sole intention of using it to relocate all the LEGO that have taken over my living room. Currently, the LEGO collection is still upstairs, strewn all over my hearth. In the meantime, the Barbies are making good use of the space.

Santa, in addition to the “rilly big box full of craft stuf” has assured us he will bring additional storage. I think he is planning on another six-cube shelf organizer and fabric bins.

Santa will not be bringing a table, although that’s a critical element of this plan. My husband and I have been on the hunt, but it’s difficult to find anything that doesn’t cost one million dollars. We decided we can wait to figure out the table solution until after Christmas. But that doesn’t mean I am not already thinking about a table.

When Carla crafts on the kitchen table, she takes up approximately half of the space.

Don’t get me wrong – given time, her crafting essentials eventually migrate to all four corners of the table and spill over the edges onto the floor, but she seems to be able to make do with just half. That’s 32” by 42”, so it would be IDEAL to find a table that is three feet by four feet. A table that folds, so we can slide it up against the wall. A table that has a smooth, untextured top for drawing. A table that is NOT one million dollars. (I would love love LOVE to spend less than $50, but that seems like a pipe dream. Maybe I should be aiming for under $100.)

Because I am a genius, I suggested that maybe all we needed was a giant board! Then we could help Carla move the not-yet-installed shelf and the current LEGO storage shelf into the middle of the basement, and put the board across the tops of both shelving units, and VOILA! instant table!

My husband doesn’t think that we will be able to find a board of the right size, and, even if we did, he is picturing something rough with jagged edges. So I need to think on/research this idea a bit more. I still think it is a genius solution, although that’s dependent on boards a) coming in the right size and b) also not costing one million dollars.

Because crafting is so important to Carla, and because it causes SUCH chaos in my home, I am pretty motivated to find a solution.

To help keep everything organized, we will also get a desktop carousel.

And I can think of dozens of uses for this craft keeper, which has 16 little plastic containers for pom-poms, stickers, glue sticks, beads, etc. etc. etc., so I think we’ll get one of these, too.  

Plus, it’s so rainbow-y!

The only other thing I can think of to complete this craft space is perhaps some sort of plastic carpet mat. You know, to protect the carpet from all sort of crafting debris.

I’m sure there are other things we will find we need, once this craft space is realized. But for now I am focused on the minimum needed to make it functional, and also on keeping it under one million dollars.

P.S. My plans include getting rid of Carla’s dress-up closet, which is the purple structure that lives to the left of the Expedit. I can’t remember the last time she played dress up. (“Halloween” she told me when I asked her. And before that? “Last Halloween.” This proves my point.) She laments the loss of the mirror, but it’s a pretty crummy mirror and we can easily get a mirror and affix it to her bedroom door.

I really wish we could get rid of the drum kit.

I also think it’s time to get rid of the Giant Bear. I impulse-bought this bear at Costco many years ago, and it achieved the surprise and delight I’d imagined when I spotted it. But now it mainly lives on one of the couches in the basement, rendering the couch unusable by humans. Or it endures various forms of torture inflicted by Carla. It has sagged a bit in its old age, as though the stuffing has been crushed or redistributed, so it is now much less fluffy than it was when we first brought it home. I think it’s time to say goodbye.

He is putting on a good front, but he is clearly SO miserable. This is not the life he wanted for himself.

If you were designing a crafting space, given what you now know about our available resources, is there anything I’ve missed or overlooked?