a new highlight...

19 december 2009. our trip to idyllwild, just 90 minutes from home, along empty snowlined roads, listening to beautiful nat king cole christmas songs all the way (and a little lady gaga for the boys:) our adorable knotty pine treetop cottage with the softest beds ever, a stack of classic dvds, a much-cooler-than-ours waffle iron and a wonderful wraparound deck with festive red painted furniture and visiting birds and squirrels. we took the boys out to lunch at a 'fancy restaurant' and they spent the afternoon sledding until they were too tired to take another step :) at night we watched the wizard of oz in pyjamas in front of a crackling fire, and made elaborate 7 layer brownie sundaes with tillamook chocolate icecream (yum)

however after all this wonder.... after spending a good hour outside attempting to take pictures that do the stunningly gorgeous starry sky justice... after another day of breakfast with the most amazing view ever, taking sweet pictures of gorgeous bundled up boys, woodland walks, and the quietest, laziest, most perfect afternoon ever... i did find myself agreeing with Dorothy: that there's just no place like home... and no matter how lovely the vacation and how sweet and cozy the little home is you are borrowing... real home is just so much more comfortable, cozy and convenient than anywhere else

in short i miss:

• my garage. parking inside it, rain or shine, kicking off my shoes and carrying my stuff 5 steps to my desk... i have no idea why something so simple makes me feel so hugely blessed


• our big wide king sized bed. however comfy the bed is here (it's the heavenly bed) ours is softer and more luxurious and lower with cooler sheets and a heavier cozier comforter. and wider, i sleep much more like a starfish than a hermit crab


• annnd... there's a big tv at home... and a dvd player... and a dvr filled with dozens of episodes of shows about heinous crimes and annoying housewives :)


• i miss my desktop... i can't photoshop on a laptop and i can't even blog on an iphone...


• walmart - not having walmart nearby is like not having a safety net and i miss it so


• $5 awesome pizza... i bet tonight's is at least $20 and not a quarter as yummy....


• did i mention the big tv..... small tvs are bad for the eyes :)

it's a good thing to miss home, right...?

it's not officially over....

but i have liked 2009 a whoooole lot (so far... it can still get effed up). it's unusual, because i don't like odd years as a general rule of thumb. you see, odd numbers/years are male, which in my mixed-up catholic school head equals not quite as nice and safe and happy, with nice rounded edges and pretty pastel colors, as even numbers/years)

anyhow my highlights of the odd, but in a good way, year:

• 20 january 2009. i watched. i cried. i watched again and cried again and watched again and kept it on my dvr, all 5 hours of it, for a very very very long time :)
• 17 march 2009. we went to watch Obama land in his fancy naval helicopter thing at long beach airport and he waved to us (forget the thousand other people behind us, he was waving to US!) and he got onto air force one at took off, waving all the time through the window :)
• 3 april 2009. our wedding anniversary. it was 11pm (and the sky was so beautifully clear and studded with millions of bright teeny stars stretching all the way from America to England :) and we were driving along the coast from new york to cape cod, taking our boys to visit a little slice of heaven. they were fast asleep in the back of our fancy seeing-the-usa-in-our-chevrolet impala rental car and we stopped to get hot mcdonalds apple pies to celebrate our anniversary, and we listened to 'stardust' by nat king cole. ahhhhhhh.... paradise found:)
• 9 april 2009. we took our boys to tour the white house, where they were given pictures of Obama's above mentioned helicopter and air force one, presidential candies, allowed to sit on the fancy silk furniture, skip along the long hallways, press their noses against the perfectly pristine windows and admire the JFK painting up close in person. soooooo much fun (but no cameras allowed - dang)
• 15 may 2009. Grandma came to visit from England!! we rented a beach house and spent many hours playing games together, watching dolphins swim by and collecting perfect white seashells on the perfectly empty beach.
• 1 june 2009. you know when you meet someone for the first time and you find you have so much in common and you just want to talk to them for hours and see them again the next day and the day after and you want to share everything with them? well, that's Steph and she is a really good sharer-back :)
• 7 august 2009. how i love Sam and his sweet, summer, tanned-little-face/huge-blue-eyes birthday. we spent the day swimming underneath the awesome waterfall at the Mirage (with Steph's underwater camera:) and had all-you-can-eat cotton candy for lunch and it was all so perfectly sweet and perfect, just like the boy himself :)
• 15 september 2009. we met Mrs Kay, Danny's preschool teacher, who we love dearly. all her classroom toys are from the 70s and 80s and she plays the super cute JFK school exercise tape before class starts... she is so authentically american and wholesome and REAL :) she has been running the preschool the exact same way for 23 years. so she's really organized and calm, and is the most kind, positive, loving teacher to my precious little Dannyboy, who has learned sooo much in just 3 months with her. and she doesn't mind that a stray cat lives under the school, she is just that cool kind of person :)

there are many more dates to add... but it's late... and my shoulders ache... and i want to go to bed remembering these days while they are fresh in my mind again :)

random again

i am still slightly perturbed that i have yet to make a portugese water dog at build-a-bear :( i have a name picked out and everything :(

ps it's Bo :)

Aaron dropped 2 humungous chalk boards on his foot today and almost chopped his toes off - and we are going to the snow in the morning, i hope he can still drive :0 he is hobbling around and his toes look like blood filled water balloons, which i just know he will ask me to lance at some point and i just can't do it :| i can't do medical stuff..... even though i can perform pretty decent lipo or ear pin-back in photoshop ;)

i forgot to take my iphone to bed with me last night and spent a sleepless night turning over the following lame questions in my head, with no way to find out the answers:

• how far is it from escondido to encinitas? i always thought they were the same place until i noticed when writing christmas cards that they are spelled vastly different :|
• and where IS silverlake?
• and holmby hills for that matter?
  
• and what made REM appear on my statcounter yesterday...?
• and i wonder if there might be a totally cool little twin peaks diner in Idyllwild that sells darned fine coffee, and hot too....?
• or at the very least a nearby Trader Joe's in case i decide to pretend to cook dinner?
  

sigh, i missed my iphone last night - the night was too long without it :|

ok, i just watched the real housewives of OC (not 'the OC') while eating dinner. it's official, i despise that horrible super-judgmental hyper-religious new couple (i know - duh...) not only are they really phoney and lame but the man wears his baseball hat back to front, and they were all judgmental of Gretchen's chicken cutlet breast pad thingies. seriously, piss off you guys! take a hike!! and i bet that man drinks fancy coffee too, he seems tooootally the type :| and is it just me or does Slade look cute with grey hair? uhuh.... i thought so too!

alrighty, we are going to the mountains, back soon xo

randomy things

last night Danny slept in the dog bed :(

this is because the dog was sprawled across our bed leaving no room for little boys looking for somewhere warm and safe to snuggle in the middle of the night :(

bad doggy! i woke up furious with the dog in question and yelled "blackjack romeo rice!!" which is my catch-all name for all black dogs ;| he did NOT move a muscle, not even an eyeball or an ear twitch :|

i was forced to take Danny to preschool to distribute cards even though he had a horrible cough, which i swore he didn't have yesterday T... anyway the 'special helper' at preschool was 20 minutes late. it's her job to be there at 9am to play with the kids and assist Mrs Kay.... she arrived with her fricking bluetooth in her ear (you CANNOT use your cellphone when you are on special helper doody) and then took off immediately to run an emergency errand (probably to get coffee... she is that type) if i was Mrs Kay i would soooo have kicked her sorry ass and banned her child and all siblings from preschool for life. but Mrs Kay is far too nice and just wrung her hands and looked uncomfortable. urghhh! Mrs Kay needs to learn how to open a can of whoop-ass!

there is a house by preschool with a life size cow on the roof :| i have no idea why - the cow is holding two huge inflatable balls attached to it's back. i need to ask my iphone if it knows what that's all about...

also there is a cat that lives under the preschool. he is a stray and according to Mrs Kay people have tried to give him a home but he always finds his way back. anyway a nice lady stops by daily to feed him. i have been secretly plotting to leave a little gift "from the cat" for her to find when she goes to check on him :) but i don't want the woman to think i am a crazy stalker and to be too scared to keep going... is it crazy and stalkerish to leave a gift "from the cat"...? sigh, i think i think too much

our fed-ex man is very odd. he always leaves a note saying he came to the door but he missed us (even though i was standing behind the door watching for him...) so he hid a parcel but then leaves the note with the location right on the door....? i don't get that...? mr ups just leaves stuff where we can find it because we track (or should i say i) track my parcels compulsively and as soon as they say 'out for delivery' i check the doorbell is working 300 times an hour waiting for him to show up :)

i am soooooo completely beaten up and tired tonight. i must take extra multivitamins in the morning to boost my energy - i wonder if taking two one-a-day vitamins gives you double the energy? i have postponed building-a-bobama dog with Danny for 2 nights straight now :( and i have so many cuts on my hands that putting hand sanitizer on is pure agony. sigh... off to bed for a little more 'dead like me' with an aleve chaser i think :)

i'm just not that into it

not that i doubted it for a second :|

first i suck at boring housewife stuff like rolling out cookie dough to 1/8 of an inch thick. it seems so completely trivial to be worried that all the cookies will be of equal thickness, when people are living in their cars and don't even have a kitchen to bake in. sigh... so as a result the cookies all baked unequally and some are burned and crispy and some are as thick as biscuits :| but on the plus side, we get to eat all the ugly reject cookies :)

second i absolutely lost my mind today assembling 10 boxes of cookies, brownies and bon-bons for teachers. it sounds easy and almost like it might be 'great fun', right? well it's not easy at all - and it's definitely no fun whatsoever ... never again will i attempt to be the kind of mom who does stuff like this (and then claims it was 'great fun') :|

next - i let my 5 year old listen to Lady Gaga this morning...... i don't know why on earth i did that, knowing how eidetic that 5 year old's memory is. he immediately sang the line about the disco stick (which in his defense is really catchy and plays constantly in my head: alongside 'annie are you ok? say, annie are you ok? are you ok, annie?), wondered if he could have a disco stick for christmas, if you can shoot people with a disco stick, and umm, momma, what IS a disco stick anyway??? back to the dreadful played-to-death christmas playlist, i guess :|

now i am patiently waiting for the children to run along to bed so i can watch the next season of 'dead like me'... which i am pretty sure would give them nightmares if i attempted to watch it between the hours of 6am to 8pm. our dvd player has finally recovered after being dropped in water last week. and it didn't seem wise, given the terrifying sizzling smoke smell coming from it, to tempt fate by watching a show about untimely deaths on it. but now the smell is gone (i think - sniff sniff sniff... nope nothing!) and we are back in business!!! off to bed xo

a scary home movie with fed-ex truck sound effects (it's the week before christmas around here)

yawn

i have sooooo much to do today and so little energy to do it with. it's all pointless housewife stuff like make a scarf for the teacher, buy american express giftcards for the teacher, make cookies for the teacher but still it's the kind of stuff Martha would have on HER daily planner if she had young unestranged children and wasn't already scheduled today for:

1) NBC today show appearance*
2) yoga
3) chandelier dusting
oh and it's Jane Heller's birthday, whoever the hell she is.
*subject to change

ps... do you really think Martha dusts her own chandeliers...? after being on the today show...? i think she more likely had a remote control cattle prod thingie that she alerts her staff with, to do such menial tasks... surely?

one thing i do love about Martha - she doesn't go to church on sundays and that makes her ridiculously cool and honest in my book. and i checked saturdays in case she gets it out of the way but no. she just doesn't go!

oh well back to the buckets of cookie dough, sprinkles, scarf fabric, etc. back later xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxxxoxoxox

drinkin'
diet coke for a change. i should make it my facebook update 'finally sitting down with that glass of diet coke' ;)

hopin'
the disneyland build-a-bear has a Bobama puppy i can make tomorrow :) Danny wants to make a woolly mammoth and i want to make a fluffy black puppy with oversized white paws

update... they DO have one - three cheers!!

listenin' to
lovegame by the most awe-some lady gaga (even though the 'i wanna to take a ride on your disco stick' line makes me giddy - she is just plain sassy and fun and i like her a whooole lot :)

lovin' that
it's 3:33 minutes long. i keep a list in my head (i should make a playlist, huh :) of songs that last 3:33 minutes long - there are many for some reason

hatin' on
some random woman at preschool, who bugs me for absolutely no good reason, other than she's just hopelessly generic, and far too dull to even make eye contact with. she has a 50d and uses the built-in flash for heaven's sake (so i guess technically i do have a good reason:)

wonderin'
which mommy at preschool is 'the one that looks like a zebra'... i have figured out which mommy is like a tiger but the zebra is a real head scratcher :|

also wonderin'
how on earth there are NO TICKETS left for 'walking with dinosaurs' on 4 september 2010 when the tickets cost $93 each! that does not compute :| not that i can book to go to something that i would have to take my dinosaur obsessed KINDERGARDENER to - nope, that doesn't compute at all :|

also also wonderin'
how anyone can listen to pandora.... you can only skip 6 songs per hour - i skip 6 songs per minute, i have music listening ADD and can't possibly play a song to the end no matter how awesome it is :| and just because i love REM doesn't mean i like coldplay.... or live versions... or weezer???! awww i can't fast forward anymore, back to tune wiki. sweet little iphone, don't ever die on me!!

gratitude overflowing for....

• my arms. i watched 'born without arms' today and was ashamed of my constant whining and aleve popping over my missing thumbtop (which is still bleeding as i accidentally stuck a bandaid on the skin flap today and then tore it off without realizing... yes ouchhhhheeee) anyway, having no arms would truly suck.... one woman had to pay for her coffee with her foot, keep the receipt in her shoe and then carry her coffee with her chin. if i did that the lid would pop off and scold me and ruin my outfit and i would cry and go back to bed and never get up again. having to keep the receipt in my shoe ALONE would make me crazy.... i hate having even a grain of sand in my shoe and i am sure her feet are way more sensitive than mine :|
• bedroom dvr and the slew of compulsive shows such as the above-mentioned, waiting to be watched in bed
• my iphone. we're attached at the hip. i even have to wear pockets now to accommodate my bpf :)
• air and simple gifts and Obama's first year in office... and the collective sigh of relief from all over the world (excluding the square states but it's their turn to grind their teeth at night :)
• fresh milk chocolate sent all the way from England xoxo
• MJ's music. when my kids hear him, it's like someone pours energy into them and they come to life :)
• dark velvet starry skies and foggy overcast mornings
• jo malone nutmeg and ginger and dkny cashmere mist
  
• every last christmas thing being done so we can spend this entire weekend together in the perfect red-decked cottage, just us and no-one else around
• good good good good friends
• the song 'river' on my ipod by like 10 different artists :)
  
• a mailbox full of hand written christmas cards
  

it's impossible...

to find a tv you can hang on the bedroom wall above the linen chest that measures 32 inches, no more no less, that has an invisible dvd player in it's side, that will arrive this week for under $350, tax and shipping included. am i asking for the moon and stars??! apparently :| we'll just keep hitting the one we have i guess :|

i made lofthouse cookies on friday and i love them. i was in albertsons about to purchase a box of stale lofthouse cookies with ugly generic sprinkles for $3.79 when i thought i would ask my iphone if it had a recipe and sure enough, up popped all the ingredients :| so i dashed home and made them. and i love them! sure i love all the cookies i make but these are magical undersweet rolled flat pillows of fluffy biscuit with supersweet frosting to make them taste american and processed and super yummy. i'm making them again today :)

off to put a dozen more bandaids over my missing thumbtop.... it's pretty gross and scary for small children to see :| and Danny need to get out of pjs because he is begging to run to harbor freight tools for a bullhorn :) oh yes, it's going to be a wonderful day around here!

strep throat tests, chicken noodle soup and the smell of the costco tire center

... what are things that make me heave?

also: that new orange county housewife. oh gawd i don't just not like her, she is the wikipedia entry for everything that's grotesque about south county. i of course don't know her name but she is the one who dotes on her disgusting goatee chauvanistic pig of a husband who doesn't say please and thank you, and she comes from the midwest (i know...) and is just nauseating and all religious but in that processed, faux american way. and ps her kids aren't cute either :) yes i know, i'm going to hell - so i might as well enjoy the ride:)

i like gretchen, in fact i love her the most and am sooo on team rossi NOT barney :) and i like slade too, no wonder tamra is jealous :) i feel hopelessly sorry for haggard old lynne with that obnoxious snot of a daughter. hmm, is there anyone else worth noting? Vicki? nope :)

i can't decide if we need this bike thing for Danny. of course, i think we NEEEEED it but do we have room for it with 10 other trikes, scooters, cars, bikes...? probably not - but i still think we need it :)

i am running slightly behind my Martha Stewart guidelines for having a successful holiday season but i may wrap gifts tonight!! i even have a cool paper cutter and fancy SILVER bracelet that dispenses sticky tape (thanks to the wonderful dollar tree!!) on second thoughts... i just remembered that i sliced the top of my thumb off last night (it's STILL bleeding....), so maybe it's smart to stay away from sharp things for another day or so...

back tomorrow with news on whether it has stopped raining yet here :| it has been soooooo shockingly cold i have taken the desperate measure of buying furry snowboots (i used to mock people who wore them... till it reached 38 bonechilling degrees here, and i joined the ugg boot brigade. but i wear them 80% covered by jeans and apologize to anyone who has to look at them, but they are kind of necessary right now. it's like the north pole here :)