Nothing makes me want to boogie more than bagpipe music from the Songs of Britain and Ireland show on WCPN 90.3.
Friday, August 31, 2007
Guys and Toddlers
The official lyrics from Guys and Dolls (featuring Adelaide and the Hot Box dancers):
I love you a bushel and a peck
A bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck
Hug around the neck and a barrel and a heap
Barrel and a heap and I'm talking in my sleep about you
About you?
About you
My heart is leaping, I'm having trouble sleeping
Cause I love you a bushel and a peck
You bet your pretty neck I do
Doodle-oodle-oodle, doodle-oodle-oodle, a-doodle-oodle-oodle-oo.
I love you a bushel and a peck
A bushel and a peck and it beats me all to heck
Beats me all to heck how I'll ever tend the farm
Ever tend the farm when I wanna keep my arms about you
About you?
About you
The cows and chickens are going to the dickens
Cause I love you a bushel and a peck
You bet your pretty neck I do
Doodle-oodle-oodle, doodle-oodle-oodle, a-doodle-oodle-oodle-oo.
A picture is worth ...
Three pee accidents, one poop accident, but she stayed clean and dry from about 10:30 until 7pm, including her nap, which is like a major miracle. And, oh yeah, she pooped on the potty and got her toenails painted as a reward. Next up: fingernails.
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Progress, of a sort
Wednesday: three pee accidents (all near mealtime or when she was very tired), two poop accidents (both at the time she normally goes, but she refused to go to the potty until it was too late)
Thursday: one pee accident (at lunchtime ... maybe tomorrow we'll just eat on the potty!), one poop accident (at the time she normally goes, and she told me she wanted a diaper and I wouldn't give her one, and right after she pooped she ran over to the potty, so I think we may be getting somewhere)
Approximate number of times I have said, "Remember what Elmo says in the game - you need to listen to your body, and when your body feels like you have to go to the bathroom, you should stop what you're doing and go to the bathroom. Do you feel like you have to pee or poop?" 140,592. On Thursday. I'm thinking of recording myself on a digital memo player so I just have to hit a button to say it again. And again. And again.
Progression of bribes:
Sitting on the potty: a checkmark on her hand
Peeing on the potty: two M&Ms, which she usually forgets anyway
Staying dry all morning or afternoon: temporary tattoo
Pooping on potty: temporary tattoo AND I promised to paint her toenails hot pink, which apparently is the Holy Grail of toddler rewards, at least as far as she's concerned.
Thursday: one pee accident (at lunchtime ... maybe tomorrow we'll just eat on the potty!), one poop accident (at the time she normally goes, and she told me she wanted a diaper and I wouldn't give her one, and right after she pooped she ran over to the potty, so I think we may be getting somewhere)
Approximate number of times I have said, "Remember what Elmo says in the game - you need to listen to your body, and when your body feels like you have to go to the bathroom, you should stop what you're doing and go to the bathroom. Do you feel like you have to pee or poop?" 140,592. On Thursday. I'm thinking of recording myself on a digital memo player so I just have to hit a button to say it again. And again. And again.
Progression of bribes:
Sitting on the potty: a checkmark on her hand
Peeing on the potty: two M&Ms, which she usually forgets anyway
Staying dry all morning or afternoon: temporary tattoo
Pooping on potty: temporary tattoo AND I promised to paint her toenails hot pink, which apparently is the Holy Grail of toddler rewards, at least as far as she's concerned.
What I've been doing while watching television
Zombie Bunnies!Pattern now available on my other blog.
And coming soon ... a free pattern to make the Basket o' Entrails to go with the bunnies!
And coming soon ... a free pattern to make the Basket o' Entrails to go with the bunnies!
Best $20 I ever spent
It just goes to show that if you covet a playhouse your neighbor has stuffed in a pile behind his back shed, you should offer to take it off his hands if he ever decides to get rid of it. These things cost $150 used on Craig's List (and even then, they're missing parts), and all I have to do is hose this one down and find a level place to set it up so I can make sure the walls actually connect so it doesn't crush Rapunzel here under 200 pounds of blow-molded plastic.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Thank you for the dress, Grandma
Gotta love it when you totally deconstruct a dress to make a pattern from it, combine that with sale fabric from JoAnn's, and end up with a new dress for like $6. The only thing better: convincing my mother to do it for me. So how are you coming on the denim version, Mom?This marks the first time I've been able to actually pose the kid, as in, "put your hand on the slide. No, the other one. Okay, get your other finger out of your nose. That one, too. Stop lifting up your skirt. Look, can you just put that hand on your tummy? Your tummy. No, dude, your tummy - right here." If only I could have gotten "stop pooching out your stomach" to penetrate the layers of her brain, we'd be golden.
And I believe this shot was the smile I got for, "Say, 'vomitus maximus!'"
I find it mind-boggling ...
... that a two-year-old can concentrate so hard on the act of, say, running down the driveway, that the first sign they receive that they need to poop occurs when a tennis-ball-sized chunk of it falls out the back of their shorts onto the driveway. A little self-awareness goes a long way, is all I'm saying.
Also, note to self: When potty training, avoid locations with fountains. We're two for two on leaving puddles behind at the Chinese restaurant lobby and next to the koi pond at PetSmart.
Also, note to self: When potty training, avoid locations with fountains. We're two for two on leaving puddles behind at the Chinese restaurant lobby and next to the koi pond at PetSmart.
Monday, August 27, 2007
Pseudo-title
I've learned a lot from the neighbor who lives across our back fence. I've learned that the raccoon we've seen once or twice in our yard lives in the fruit tree in his yard, and the skunk we smell occasionally used to live under our shed, but the previous owners filled it in so the skunk moved two yards down under a much larger, less gravel-filled shed. And the woodchuck that's been leaving bitemarks on the mushrooms in our yard lives under our next-door neighbors' deck.
This last bit of information I confirmed independently when I saw the little bugger twice in the past week. Both times it was in the neighbors' yard, and both times it ended up making a break for the deck when it heard something threatening (like a 2-year-old with a golf club headed in its general direction).
Woodchucks moving at top speed aren't something I get to see up close too frequently - usually they're just standing by the side of the highway as I whizz by at high speeds. But watching this one up close ... okay, from 30 yards away ... has given me the insight that woodchucks must be distantly related to flying squirrels. They have so much flabby skin between their forelegs and hindlegs that they don't run, scamper, or scurry - they flollop. It's a speedy flollop, but a flollop nonetheless.
When I mentioned this to one of the contractors who was checking out my kitchen, he wasn't familiar with the word, and I realized that this was yet another pseudo-word in my vocabulary. In this case, it's a Douglas Adams creation, from Life, the Universe and Everything*:
It was a large mattress, and probably one of quite high quality. Very few things actually get manufactured these days, because in an infinitely large Universe such as, for instance, the one in which we live, most things one could possibly imagine and a lot of things one would rather not, grow somewhere.... [Mattresses] are large, friendly, pocket-sprung creatures that live quite private lives in the marshes of Sqornshellous Zeta. Many of them get caught, slaughtered, dried out, shipped out and slept on. None of them seems to mind this and all of them are called Zem. ... The mattress flolloped around. This is a thing that only live mattresses in swamps are able to do, which is why the word is not in common usage. It flolloped in a sympathetic sort of way, moving a fair-sized body of water as it did so.
Another Adams-ism that I use with alarming frequency is "dongle." As in, "That outlet has to have an $8 child-proof cover instead of the little olastic plug, because the stupid DustBuster power cord has a dongle on the end of it."
Some words that I use all the time I actually didn't know were made-up, at least until I married Jason and found out that "kaslonchwise" isn't a generally accepted term meaning "out of alignment," as in, 'Crap, I the cabinet door is hanging kaslonchwise again.'
Some of the uncommon words in my vocabulary come from friends ("schlick - to use a flexible device such as a spatula or finger to get every last bit of ice cream or other food out of a container," as in, "Can I schlick the pudding spoon?") and family ("spinkle," which is what my cousin did as a 3-year-old when trying to apply colored sugar to cookies ... 'spinkle, spinkle, spinkle!').
A few have found their way into common slang, such as (follow links at your own risk - Urban Dictionary is not exactly a clean site, but at least there's no porn) 'ginormous,' 'skeezy,' 'gigundous,' and 'bajillion.' Other definitions that I'll let you look up for yourself: flump, squidgy, futz, wifty, thingus, kludge, and a really bad definition of "skeezix" that I may hold against my mother forever.
And, of course, I know a few pseudo-words that I refuse to use on general principles. Such as "hork," a friend's term for gulping down large quantities of food in a short time. Sorry, Wendlings, the proper term is "snarf," and the folks at Urban Dictionary back me up, at least if you count the number of definitions that match mine for each word. And there are only a handful of people in the world who understand that "rax" is an extremely uncommon word for "what you feel like doing after eating at a Rax restaurant."
I still have a few words that are my own, including such wonders as "murph" - what you say when you are frustrated/pissed/tired/grumpy and can't explain why, usually growled while collapsing on soft furniture with alcohol and/or chocolate in hand, as in "She didn't take a nap today. Murph." Oh, and "betweeners" are the sheets of tissue paper that come stacked between business cards ... you look really dorky if you don't remove the betweeners before you hand out cards. Ootzle means "squish" or "squeeze," as in "I think there's enough room for you to ootzle behind me." And "kaslonchwise," which I inherited from my parents but use frequently enough to claim as my own.
And in case you're wondering, I didn't come up with all of these off the top of my head. I'm just dorky enough that I started collecting the pseudo-words a few years ago, an they're on an index card on my bulletin board. Yep, I'm just that dorky.
*I had to flip through 350 pages of The More Than Complete Hitchhiker's Guide to find the citation. I have a lot of time on my hands, apparently, and nothing better to do than find citations for words that don't exist to post on a blog that a handful of people read. Procrastination is sooooo much fun!
This last bit of information I confirmed independently when I saw the little bugger twice in the past week. Both times it was in the neighbors' yard, and both times it ended up making a break for the deck when it heard something threatening (like a 2-year-old with a golf club headed in its general direction).
Woodchucks moving at top speed aren't something I get to see up close too frequently - usually they're just standing by the side of the highway as I whizz by at high speeds. But watching this one up close ... okay, from 30 yards away ... has given me the insight that woodchucks must be distantly related to flying squirrels. They have so much flabby skin between their forelegs and hindlegs that they don't run, scamper, or scurry - they flollop. It's a speedy flollop, but a flollop nonetheless.
When I mentioned this to one of the contractors who was checking out my kitchen, he wasn't familiar with the word, and I realized that this was yet another pseudo-word in my vocabulary. In this case, it's a Douglas Adams creation, from Life, the Universe and Everything*:
It was a large mattress, and probably one of quite high quality. Very few things actually get manufactured these days, because in an infinitely large Universe such as, for instance, the one in which we live, most things one could possibly imagine and a lot of things one would rather not, grow somewhere.... [Mattresses] are large, friendly, pocket-sprung creatures that live quite private lives in the marshes of Sqornshellous Zeta. Many of them get caught, slaughtered, dried out, shipped out and slept on. None of them seems to mind this and all of them are called Zem. ... The mattress flolloped around. This is a thing that only live mattresses in swamps are able to do, which is why the word is not in common usage. It flolloped in a sympathetic sort of way, moving a fair-sized body of water as it did so.
Another Adams-ism that I use with alarming frequency is "dongle." As in, "That outlet has to have an $8 child-proof cover instead of the little olastic plug, because the stupid DustBuster power cord has a dongle on the end of it."
Some words that I use all the time I actually didn't know were made-up, at least until I married Jason and found out that "kaslonchwise" isn't a generally accepted term meaning "out of alignment," as in, 'Crap, I the cabinet door is hanging kaslonchwise again.'
Some of the uncommon words in my vocabulary come from friends ("schlick - to use a flexible device such as a spatula or finger to get every last bit of ice cream or other food out of a container," as in, "Can I schlick the pudding spoon?") and family ("spinkle," which is what my cousin did as a 3-year-old when trying to apply colored sugar to cookies ... 'spinkle, spinkle, spinkle!').
A few have found their way into common slang, such as (follow links at your own risk - Urban Dictionary is not exactly a clean site, but at least there's no porn) 'ginormous,' 'skeezy,' 'gigundous,' and 'bajillion.' Other definitions that I'll let you look up for yourself: flump, squidgy, futz, wifty, thingus, kludge, and a really bad definition of "skeezix" that I may hold against my mother forever.
And, of course, I know a few pseudo-words that I refuse to use on general principles. Such as "hork," a friend's term for gulping down large quantities of food in a short time. Sorry, Wendlings, the proper term is "snarf," and the folks at Urban Dictionary back me up, at least if you count the number of definitions that match mine for each word. And there are only a handful of people in the world who understand that "rax" is an extremely uncommon word for "what you feel like doing after eating at a Rax restaurant."
I still have a few words that are my own, including such wonders as "murph" - what you say when you are frustrated/pissed/tired/grumpy and can't explain why, usually growled while collapsing on soft furniture with alcohol and/or chocolate in hand, as in "She didn't take a nap today. Murph." Oh, and "betweeners" are the sheets of tissue paper that come stacked between business cards ... you look really dorky if you don't remove the betweeners before you hand out cards. Ootzle means "squish" or "squeeze," as in "I think there's enough room for you to ootzle behind me." And "kaslonchwise," which I inherited from my parents but use frequently enough to claim as my own.
And in case you're wondering, I didn't come up with all of these off the top of my head. I'm just dorky enough that I started collecting the pseudo-words a few years ago, an they're on an index card on my bulletin board. Yep, I'm just that dorky.
*I had to flip through 350 pages of The More Than Complete Hitchhiker's Guide to find the citation. I have a lot of time on my hands, apparently, and nothing better to do than find citations for words that don't exist to post on a blog that a handful of people read. Procrastination is sooooo much fun!
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Pardon the interruption
Mommmmmmmmyyyyyyyyy! Moooooooooommmyyyyyy! Aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh!
Liza poop! Liza poooooooooooop!
Liza pooooooooop on leeeeeeeeggggggggg! Aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh!
That's okaaaaaaaayyy! Everybody has acci- acca- ackadents!!!!
Liza pooooooop! That's okaaaaay! Aaaaaaaaahhhh!
Diaper off, pajama pants off, kneeling on the bench in front of her vanity, she had, indeed, pooped on her leg. And the bench. And the floor. At 9:45pm. Sigh.
Liza poop! Liza poooooooooooop!
Liza pooooooooop on leeeeeeeeggggggggg! Aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh!
That's okaaaaaaaayyy! Everybody has acci- acca- ackadents!!!!
Liza pooooooop! That's okaaaaay! Aaaaaaaaahhhh!
Diaper off, pajama pants off, kneeling on the bench in front of her vanity, she had, indeed, pooped on her leg. And the bench. And the floor. At 9:45pm. Sigh.
Kitchen design, v. 2.0
After our discussion with Mary from Design Tech, here's our current favorite design. Lacks any seating in the kitchen, but it's wide open, and not only can I fit my fancy pantry AND a pot-and-pan drawer AND a built-in trashcan, I can keep my dishes and Tupperware in nifty drawers in the "base cooking center" right next to my dishwasher. Oh, how I want the base cooking center. And the pantry. And a trashcan I won't trip over four times a day.In other news, I finished the curtains to cover up the storage cubbies above the closets in our bedroom, and I got all the hardware on the closet doors. Here's the before and after:
I'm especially proud of the little decorations on each of the closet doors. When we pulled off the dummy doorknobs the previous owners had installed, it turned out to be practically impossible to patch the holes invisibly. Since I wanted to install smaller knobs to match the hardware on the drawers, I had to come up with some way to cover up the holes. Solution: a couple of those carved wooden decorations they sell at Home Depot, a can of leftover hammertone spraypaint Jason snatched from work, and a couple of really long screws to attach the knobs through 2 1/2" of door and decoration. Voila! They sort of look like they belong!
Next up: finishing the Cabinet of Mature Content. Again. Can anyone say, "forget the veneer, I'm sanding the filler smooth and painting that sucker"? I know I can.Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Oh dear, my eBay listings are never this good
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=130144061675&fromMakeTrack=true&ssPageName=VIP:Watchlink:middle:us
Maybe I need to start doing something like this with my lots of baby clothes. Heck, if she can get $150 for a pack of Pokemon cards, I ought to be pulling in four figures for Hanna Andersson outfits, right?
Maybe I need to start doing something like this with my lots of baby clothes. Heck, if she can get $150 for a pack of Pokemon cards, I ought to be pulling in four figures for Hanna Andersson outfits, right?
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
My Dad at the cottage in Cape May - then and now
When I was in college (top)Last September (bottom)
Look for more scintillating action shots of my father reading after our Cape May vacation this September!
I swear, he's as regular as Leap Year
He's threatening to grow a beard again, folks. I had him for a while - people who work in jobs that require respirators (even occasionally) aren't allowed to grow any sort of facial hair because it interferes with the seal. But now that he's a manager in the paint brush and roller cover (and ridiculously expensive but really nice dropcloth) division, he doesn't have to wear a respirator. Ever.
Crud.
So before things get out of hand, I'd just like to remind the world why my husband, Jason T. Woods, should not grow a beard.
That is, he's got weird bald spots, and he never trims it so he ends up looking like Marty Stouffer, that guy who used to host Wild America (sorry, it was the best photo I could find on short notice). Plus it gives me rugburn when he kisses me.
Corollary: My husband should also not wear acid-washed jeans shorts, or fall asleep when his girlfriend (now wife) has a camera handy, even if it's 1996 and you've only been dating for like two months and you're working in a potato shed 14 hours a day over the summer to pay for college.
Just remember, dear - if you stop shaving, so do I. And while I'll admit my razor hasn't seen as much action as you'd like this summer, trust me - my legs and armpits can get a whole lot worse, and I could use the extra insulation this winter. You have been warned.
Crud.
So before things get out of hand, I'd just like to remind the world why my husband, Jason T. Woods, should not grow a beard.
That is, he's got weird bald spots, and he never trims it so he ends up looking like Marty Stouffer, that guy who used to host Wild America (sorry, it was the best photo I could find on short notice). Plus it gives me rugburn when he kisses me.Corollary: My husband should also not wear acid-washed jeans shorts, or fall asleep when his girlfriend (now wife) has a camera handy, even if it's 1996 and you've only been dating for like two months and you're working in a potato shed 14 hours a day over the summer to pay for college.
Just remember, dear - if you stop shaving, so do I. And while I'll admit my razor hasn't seen as much action as you'd like this summer, trust me - my legs and armpits can get a whole lot worse, and I could use the extra insulation this winter. You have been warned.
Monday, August 20, 2007
Best design so far
Here's the best I've come up with on my own - the space near the right bottom between the "base filler pullout" and "vanity base drawers" is a door, not that you can tell because I didn't erase the wall that's currently there. Notice that the work triangle is actually out of the way of the traffic flow? And the oven door doesn't open into the doorway? And the dishwasher doesn't block the drawers? The only thing I'm bummed about in this design is that there's noplace to put a set of drawers to hold pots ... but I think that lazy Susan in the corner would eat up most of my pots and pans with nary a complaint.
Btw, the scale is 1 square = 6", since my engineer father would kill me if I posted a drawing without a proper scale mentioned.
I started calling contractors and kitchen design centers today to make appointments for estimates, so it will be interesting to see if they come up with anything better. At least this has room for two barstools under the counter, and I put the drawers there so that Liza could keep some Play-Doh and crayons there to use when she gets underfoot. I was just excited to realize that I could get base cabinets in something more shallow than 24" if I used bathroom vanity cabinets, which means I can actually have a door that's wide enough to walk through without turning sideways. Hooray!
Why bother having a yard sale?
I've got 359.24 reasons for you right here, baby. And a whole garage full of parking and space to work on the chainsaw cabinet - oh, boy.Funky fungus among us
Couldn't get the shot of the gills in before the camera died, so you'll just have to imagine the bright yellow spongy tiny honeycomb-looking underside of these suckers.
Yes, I am exactly this lame
Because I try not to break my promises ...
And here's a bonus photo of the only kitchen I've ever had with less counterspace than my current one:
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