Nee: Entertaining and Informing Since 2004

I have a bunch of photos I wanted to put up, so consider this post educational.



This scary item is Mortadella sausage for children. See how the package looks all cute and slightly appetizing, while the reality makes you glad it is going to be smothered in ketchup and covered with bread? Hannah specifically asked for this lunch meat.



To the uninitiated, this may just look like a bucket of water. But for your information, it is the amount of water that comes out of 1 week's worth of whites and underwear in our condensation dryer.



(Sorry for the blur.) This is the one and only bud to form this year on the xmas cactus I bought last winter. I had been watching it diligently for about a week, giving the plant plenty of water and verbal encouragement, but one morning I found the bud lying in the pot. I don't know if it dropped or if a cat had anything to do with its untimely removal, but I was slightly heartbroken. The other xmas cactus has bloomed regularly ever since I got it (hell, it has flowers and buds on it right now), but I had high hopes for new hot-pink flowers.



Halloween, Part 1. Hannah was in charge of drawing on the jack-o-lantern's face. We are not going to carve it until closer to the 31st, because I hate having a pumpkin deflate before the big day. Doesn't this guy look dapper? I think he just needs a beret and a cigarette in one of those long holders.



Halloween, Part 2. The other side of the pumpkin is a bit abraded, probably from lying on the ground, so Hannah couldn't make face 2 opposite face 1. This is a girl face (note the long hair), but to me, it still looks like a clown.

Ding Dong, The Paper's Dead

So I turned in my paper yesterday. It's basically garbage, but at least it is gone. I got off the bus to go to my department 25 minutes after the last page came off the printer, and things I meant to put in the paper started popping in my head. Also, a better conclusion. Also, a better section on paranoia. At this point, I will take a C and a note to never enter his classroom again. That is how sick of it I am.

On the plus side, I found this lovely line in Underworld that just really clicked in my brain:

...and he bucketed up to the bar car, filled with people who more or less resembled Charlie, give or take a few years and a few gray hairs and the details of their evilest dreams.

Even after reading it several times, it gives me a shiver.

My daughter has a mouth on her that would please my mother to no end (her and that "mother's curse" and all). I rubbed Hannah's cheek, and she claimed I scratched her with my "old lady skin". It's not that bad, yet! So now I feel no compunctions against bringing up her flabby armpits and stinky feet. Take that, young one!

You asked for it!

I hadn’t realized how much like a transsexual I was starting to look until I tried to take a hair photo this morning. Yikes! The photo below is the best out of about 5 or 6 attempts, sadly enough.



And I had been thinking about posting a grey update anyway, so here is the new photo, taken in natural light in the sunroom:



And here is a photo from almost exactly a year ago:



I knew the shorter hair would show up the grey, but it still makes me a little sad to see how *mature* I look. *sigh*

15 minutes

That's how long I have until John and Hannah get home and want some dinner! So I must blog fast-ly and furious-ly (but not like that crappy Vin Diesel movie *shudder*).

I am still writing on my paper. I know. Don't say it. I am plugging along with an outline and everything. I have a sneaking suspicion the whole thing might be garbage, but it's too late now!

Hannah and I want to make a gingerbread house, Halloween style, but one of the main ingredients is only available at the whole foods store. Despite that setback, we forged on with making Halloween cookies!



Hannah was actually only home for mixing the dough and cutting out one batch of pumpkins, but I put her to work frosting the un-candied cookies the next day:



She's got to earn that allowance somehow! (Wow--how exclamation-mark heavy can this post get?)

I have been very dissatisfied with my hair lately. It is tiresome always picking up one-and-a-half foot long hairs that I've shed, so in the grand tradition of my grandmother, I picked up a pair of scissors this morning and gave my hair a good whack. Goodbye, hair! It turned out pretty good for being self cut; even John was impressed. Now if I can just keep it out of my eyes...

Navel: It's What's for Gazing

I realized last night as I couldn't sleep that my recent "Shame" posts are what is known as the opposite of helpful. All this online self-flagellation is not actually helping me to write; it's just providing a distraction that I had mentally labeled as acceptable.

John needed to work on the computer this morning, which sent me to the table with paper and pencil, and I actually got a lot done. Today I feel like I'm in a better place mentally for working, so that's what I am aiming for: steady progress. Slow and steady wins the race, right?

The Shame Game--Tuesday, Part 3

(What a waste of a 400th post, eh?)

I make a little headway on my paper, then I flounder a bit. And I hate the whole thing.

I would rather be watching movies with Hannah (and I did stop to watch part of a Jimmy Neutron movie--the shame!), but instead I flail about on my paper, then take a break to help Hannah with her tooth-removal efforts, or get a snack, or more coffee, or go to the bathroom.

John is working like a fiend upstairs, and I...mmm...not so much. Rats.

The Shame Game--Tuesday, Part 2

It's 2:30. I have almost 4 pages of paper, plus bibliography, plus a couple more pages of hand-written graphs that won't be included with the paper, so why the hell did I do them after all?

John is diligently plugging away on his reading.

Since I last checked in, I have fed Hannah lunch, ate an apple and some peanut butter, taken a shower, made more coffee, washed a load of towels (in the dryer), and checked out Hannah's Polly Pocket plane that she made herself. And written a bit on my paper, but probably not enough to finish the goddamned thing today.

Feeling frustrated and ready to give up. Why did I think a paper about a book *827* pages long was a good idea?!

The Shame Game, Tuesday--Part 1

So here we are again. It is 11:30, and I am just getting started. I slept in, despite John's attempts to boot me out of bed starting at 9. I got Hannah up, started reading my email, cooked breakfast, finished reading email, and now I am going to work on my paper.

It has been raining for 2 days, and Hannah has a mild cold, and John is leaving for a conference on Thursday, so he has a bunch of reading and preparing to do for his presentation at said conference. I put Hannah on the couch and turned on the tv. We usually try to limit her tv intake, but today I will just add that to the shame list.

Shame Me Once...

John and Hannah got home, so we fixed a quick salad dinner, and now I'm back to looking at what I was doing when they got here.

I'm at the bottom of page 3, plus some notes on page 4. I had already abandoned the computer for my notebook and novel before the monkeys got home, and I think that's what I'll continue to work on this evening, but no all-nighter. That is never helpful.

I will check in tomorrow morning when I get rolling.

Self-Shaming Update

I had to take a quick break to empty the dryer (but not fold the clothes!), so here is the update:

I have another 3 paragraphs or so. In one hour. But considering that the novel I am writing about is 827 pages long, and even with a whole pad of post-its marking pages in the novel itself and about 15 pages of notes, it can sometimes be difficult to find what I am looking for. But the ideas are there. An outline would be nice, but I don't know if I am that far.

Onward and upward!

Oh! The Shame!

My paper is still not done. I wrote my professor over the weekend and told him I would turn it in today, but it is 4:30, and I barely have 2 pages. Tomorrow is a national holiday, so the department won't be open, but that is a lame excuse for putting off finishing the damn thing.

John has been really supportive and tries to give me positive reinforcement, but it is obviously not working. He and Hannah went into town to run some errands and see a movie (and give me uninterrupted time to work), but I am such a jerk, I am not getting much done.

So! I am going to have to take up the slack and shame myself into working. Here, for all the internet to read and tsk tsk at me. Feel free to tsk tsk in the comments, or just aloud when you read this. I will report back regularly today as I work.

Excuses, excuses

1. Check out Hannah's new video.

2. No new blog-love for a few days until I finish my literature paper. Being the smug smart-ass that I am, I started too late, and now am both super-late and stuck.

3. Hannah has no school on Monday or Tuesday (Reunification Day), so maybe there will be hijinks to report on.

Out of the Mouth of my Babe

"I think I got rid of the toe fairy. First she was in my toe, then I accidentally shook her out in my shoe, then she climbed up in my sock, but there was sweat in there and not-so-good-smelliness, and she cracked." (accompanied by a finger across the throat)

"The toe fairy has 50 daughters"--she had one a year starting at age 50, according to Hannah, so more toe fairies might move in later.

In Germany.1 (a series)

In Germany, there is no grape jelly, or corn tortillas, or pecans.

We can buy plum jelly, flour torts, and walnuts, which are all fine in their own right, but it’s just not the same.

Also, no Kraft Mac n Cheese.

Cookie Crisp—yes.

Rotel—no.

Peanut butter—yes.

Molasses—no.

As you can guess, we have a much healthier diet than when we lived in Texas, mostly due to the lack of Tex-Mex ingredients.

Of course, German cuisine is not renowned for its low-fat-ness (cf. 800-ish varieties of sausage, about 20 varieties of fried pork, i.e. Schnitzel, and countless brands of beer), but we don’t actually cook German at home much, so it balances out.

This is not a cry for people to mail us American food—far from it. That shit is heavy (i.e., expensive to mail), and we can always put our most brazen face forward and ask our neighbors who work on the Am. military base to pick us up a few things at the commissary. We just don’t, so that is our own problem.

No, this is just a small whine about the junky junk-food that we love and miss and will whole-heartedly embrace when we are back in the States.

Another tacky Nee quote

"If we're made in God's image, he could really use an Epilady."

Moody Mom

I had forgotten that Depressive Irritable Nee tends to accompany Super-Manic Nee. They’re kind of like conjoined twins. My mood was not helped today by losing a piece of paper from our bank that I kind of needed. I was able to order a new one, but I didn’t until I had torn apart the study looking for it. That and a sense of not-accomplishing-anything-useful today and some serious absent-mindedness have put me in a foul mood. Fortunately, I can remedy it somewhat by cranking Smashing Pumpkins in the kitchen while I cook dinner and drink mint tea. Droning, loud, noisy music makes me happy.

I am in such a bad mood that I am throwing away my lists, because they just make it worse. Usually they help me get a grip, but I just might lose it if I have to look at another one.

While I was cutting Hannah’s hair, she was already formulating plans for using it. First she tried to talk her dad into using a chainsaw to cut some small pieces off the walking stick he is carving.



Once she realized that wasn’t going to happen, she took matters into her own hands. She found some cardboard—crap! I meant to take that to the recycling center today—to fashion a handle out of, a chunk of her own (pre-cut) hair, some tape, and presto! She has a paintbrush. Here is the first artwork it has produced.

Titleless

One big, blinking clue that something has gone south re: my IUD (the kind plus hormones) is the return of Super-Manic Nee (TM). To wit, once I was able to sit still today, I could not shut up. When there’s been no one to talk to, I’ve written blog posts and revised on a story. And even worked on my paper, which I’ve otherwise been aggressively avoiding.

Hannah has been watching too much Ren and Stimpy lately. She was talking about the episode where Ren loses all his teeth and the Tooth Beaver comes and gnaws on his nerve endings. She somehow used this as the basis for assuming the existence of the Toe Fairy, who causes toe pain. What happens is that if I clip Hannah’s toenails too short, the toe fairy can climb in there “easierlier” and eat the stuff from under your toenail. I am much too dumb to make this stuff up myself, you know.

Ironically, Hannah lost a tooth just a couple of days after this statement. She asked me straight out for her buck, because she knows “all about the tooth fairy.” And she vows that Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are next. So I handed her a buck in change, and she handed me her tooth. But when I reached out to drop the tooth in the trash, she swapped it back. She didn’t like the idea of her *medical waste* going in the garbage. So she’s saving it for John’s dad. bwa ha ha ha! (1)

(1) John’s dad is an unreformed pack rat and sentimentalist. In a box he gave us from his garage, I found John’s *umbilical cord* and his brother’s *baby teeth*. I don’t think I will ever forgive John’s dad for that, but it makes me indescribably happy to think that Hannah will be returning the favor for me.

Like any conscientious student, Hannah has broken in her new notebooks by defacing the illustrations in them. In the people-drawings, this entails the adding of antennae, glasses, and beards—pretty straightforward stuff. (2) But she had to get a bit more creative when it came to the handout with the alpacas on it. Her solution was take a cute little alpaca about like this:




and draw a few curlicues around its face, then add a shiny necklace, a cursive version of this:



The result was pimptastic! (But difficult to photograph, hence the approximation.)

(2) She just showed me an “embellishment” that was the special eye-gear and breathing apparatus for an alien, and then proceeded to tell me the alien’s life story. I told her to just get on with her math homework.

The Many Faces of Hannah

Hannah's first day of school was today, and boy, did her classmates get a surprise! See if you can spot the difference:



And the before photo:

How do I love thee, Consumerism?

Hannah’s head is full of the glamours of shopping these days. Which is funny, because when I take her shopping—for instance, for school clothes—she acts like I have devised a new method of torture involving a bank card and a department store.

I blame her infatuation on the Barbie web site. Most of the games and video clips revolve around malls and shopping. *gag* I try to point out the vapidity of the whole set-up, but she won’t hear a word against her beloved Barbie overlord web site.

But she also has a friend whose family is in a much higher income-tax bracket than us, and who have a correspondingly more friendly attitude to consumerism. I myself am not completely opposed to buying things, but

1. we live in a smallish apartment that would fill up quickly,
and 2. I firmly believe in living within your means.

Besides, past evidence has shown that Hannah loves and plays with new toys for about 2 days before they are relegated to the toy heap under her play-bed. So it seems silly to keep adding to the heap, especially since I’m the only one who ever tackles the heap to prevent it from taking over her whole room.

That being said, I like to see the kinds of things that are available to buy, or that other people have bought. For instance, I saw a woman wearing sandals with a spring where the heel would normally be. *A spring.* Considering the oddly stiff way she was walking, I don’t think the spring was really adding to the comfort-level and wearability of the sandals.

I’m sure that old-school Adidas wouldn’t have those issues, but the pair I saw in Kermit-green with Mr. The Frog himself on them might drive the wearer mad or temporarily blind. When looking for the above link, I discovered that they also sell a Miss Piggy version. I like my Muppets, the seven dwarves know, but that is just going too far.

The one item I coveted desperately, but that disappeared from the window display by the following week, was a set of yard-gnome candles. One was pink and the other apple-green. They were full-sized, so about 10 inches tall. If anyone spots a yard-gnome cookie jar, let me know, because that would satisfy two of my shopping cravings in one go.

Addendum to "Our Girl"

I knew there was at least one other thing I wanted to add to my last post, but I was starting to get a little frayed around the edges and didn't manage to think of it that night. In the meanwhile, I found some notes I had jotted down, and it has all come back to me.

When we were at Legoland, there was a room with tables covered in Legos for their visitors' building pleasure. John started building a car. *ho hum* I started building a house. *thunk* (the sound a someone falling unconscious from dullness) Hannah built a phone booth. With 2 phones, so it was more like a call center.

Also at Legoland, Hannah attracted the stares of the people we were walking behind when she described how she wanted to live in a mansion when she grows up. A mansion set in the middle of a shopping center just for her. *Where did I go wrong as a mother?* Her idea of a good job that would fund all of this was President of the United States. I had to disabuse her of that notion quickly. President pays ok, but not mansion-buying ok.

Hannah and her friend, the cooking duo, found the recipe for "spice soup" they had previously concocted and decided to have another go at it. Except this time they thought it would make a good base for bread. Not wanting to let them loose with flour in my kitchen, I agreed to come help them make pancakes instead. They turned out a little crepe-y, but still surprisingly tasty, considering their origins. They were like a savory version of pancakes, or like seasoned naan bread (Indian). Hannah even ate the leftovers for a couple of breakfasts, which she is otherwise morally opposed to. Now I just have to figure out a way to get her excited about cooking what *we* want to eat, and I can resign from my post as chief cook.