The space between my bed and the bedside table is 7 1/2 inches wide.
In that space, I have a magazine rack.
The magazine rack is 5 inches wide.
Over time, after the magazine rack was full, I started piling books and magazines on top of it.
And on the sides.
This has been going on for awhile now.
After I put a Kleenex box on top of the pile the other day, the pile was as tall as the bed.
There are also a few books on the floor.
And under the bedside table.
And of course, on top of the bedside table.

Two nights ago I decided this was ridiculous, even though technically it wasn’t 100% slobby since most of it was off the floor. But then I started pulling books and magazines off the pile, and then when it became clear that it was comical I started counting.

Any guesses?

There were 42 magazines and catalogs. FORTY-TWO! They ranged in size from hefty Real Simples to thinnish Entertainment Weeklys. As if that wasn’t bad enough, there were also 16 books. I didn’t even include the six baby books that were in that mess too.

I can’t decide if I should be impressed with my piling abilities or ashamed of myself for not cleaning it out sooner.

I can contain my American Idol comments no longer!

I only have a few. This won’t take long.

1. The Tiny Vomiting Mulleteer did really well last night. Nothing is more endearing that hearing a small, frightened boy admit that he barfs before his performances.
2. Todrick Hall ruined “What’s Love Got to Do With It” by not understanding what the song was about. He sang it as a standard slow jam, when it is supposed to be a rumination of why you can be attracted to someone and not actually have feelings for them. (Which, ok, may be the point of most slow jams.) He just seemed to be singing some words without understanding what they meant.
3. While I thought Lee DeWyze (Dwyze? Duh, wise?) was better, I think the only reason the judges told him he was awesome was that he was the last one on last night and they got to go home.
4. I fear for Andrew Garcia.

See, that wasn’t so bad.

So yesterday I went to login and found not the lovable masthead that has been in place since 2005, but a plain black background with some annoying red words. Those words said something like “Ha ha! You’ve been running a ridiculously old-ass version of Wordpress and we have found the cracks and hacked your site! We find your stories too hilarious too endure and must shut you down.” So anyway, my tech consult, gclark, said he couldn’t fix it, and then I whined to Total Choice Hosting, who said “oh yeah btw your version of WordPress is really old and perhaps you should rebuild your whole site from scratch” and then I just ignored the whole thing and so today I sent out an email to a few people alerting them to this OBVIOUSLY SEVERE CRISIS and I set up a temporary site because god knows I can’t go a few days without reporting something terribly important like a vanity tag that says WAR1812 and then I emailed Total Choice Hosting again and asked if they knew someone who could fix this for me, and after all of that gnashing and emailing, this nice man named Dick wrote me back and said OH HEY EVERYTHING IS FIXED.

So this post is moot. But still: WAR1812!

1. A baby successfully napping in a hotel room after a long battle.
2. Discovering one of your stepsiblings’ daughters has quit community college to “hang chickens” at a poultry plant.
3. That’s hang as in kill.
4. Chicken killer!
5. Did I mention we’re in a tiny, albeit charming, hotel room in New Orleans? Tiny and charming are awesome if you are travelling without a grumpy child in need of a nap, but sucky if there’s no closet/alcove to stash the pack and play.
6. I’m actually not complaining, as I am laying in bed drinking a Coke and eating a cherry
danish at the moment.

“…about a year later, Mike Todd took off in a private plan in a rainstorm, and the following morning Elizabeth [Taylor] was a widow. Well, naturally, my father flew to Elizabeth’s side, gradually making his way to her front. He first dried her eyes with his handkerchief, then he consoled her with flowers, and he ultimately consoled her with his penis. Now this made marriage to my mother awkward, so he was gone within the week.”

–Carrie Fisher, Wishful Drinking

This is my second favorite part. My favorite part is the photo family tree.

I was just trying to think of what Mary Jo Buttafuoco’s autobiography was called, and said this to my coworker (who did not know about Amy Fisher/Joey Buttafuoco/Mary Jo Buttafuoco):

It’s something like, Yo, My Head Is Too Big for a Bullet. Or Hey, You Shot Me In the Head But It Bounced Off, So I’m Ok. Or maybe Little Bullet, Big Head. Something like that.

Then I checked, and the actual title is: Getting It Through My Thick Skull.

So it turns out that I’m kind of a crap knitter. I figured I would be, as I have very poor hand-eye coordination. (I am horrible at all video games, although I am not total crap at pinball. Because what’s sweeping the nation, much like baby fish mouth? PINBALL IN 2010.) I have been plugging along on a crusty scarf that is only getting crustier as I manhandle it, and it brings me no joy: only reminders of how crusty it is. I could blame Vanna White and her shitty, splayed yarn for my troubles, but I know that Vanna and her 2/$3 special are only partly to blame. That being said, I did make some lovely felt flowers today during Spike’s nap. So see, I still have the crafting flu — I just need to find something that doesn’t make me feel like I did growing up when I could not make it past the cherry level in Ms. Pac Man. (In related news, I used to get whipped by a friend’s brother at Super Mario Brothers in high school. He had Down Syndrome.)

I started reading The Foreskin’s Lament by Shalom Auslander, and it turns out I don’t enjoy books like that. I felt like I signed up for “wacky wacky Orthodox insanity” and instead just got the Jewish version of Running with Scissors. Which I did not read. On purpose. However, since I got halfway through Foreskin’s Lament, I am counting that as a completely read book and adding it to my list. Next up: I plan to halfway read The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family by Mary S. Lovell before giving up and just looking at the photos and then putting it back on the shelf.

Anyway.

Here are some tags:
IFLUBIYU
SMRIE (I’ve decided that this person embraces the Cole Porter within her, and that her name is Marie. You know, ’swonderful, ’smarvelous, ’sMarie.)

If my glasses were submitted to a forensics lab, this is what the results would look like:

Glasses owner:
Uses lots of hairspray and is therefore most likely from Texas. Both lenses are coated.
Recently made lemon glaze, probably for Dorie Greenspan’s lemon poppy seed muffins. Glob found on left lens.
Recently wrestled on the floor with her toddler son, resulting in carpet fibers caught in the left hinge. The toddler was probably slap-happy due to refusing second nap.
Does not clean lenses regularly.

Tag:
SWTNESS

Song inspired by seeing this tag:
SWTNESS
SWTNESS
I WS NLY JKG WN I SD ID LK 2 SMSH EVRY 2TH N YR HD

I made this for dinner and these for dessert yesterday. Both are awesome, although the cookies were definitely easier. That lasagna almost did me in, especially because I was trying to get it on the table in time for babydinner. While I might not make this exact sauce again (seriously, that’s a lot of steps), I will definitely do the part about ricotta + parmesan + egg in the food processor again instead of just glopping hunks of ricotta in my future lasagnas.

Yup, that’s all I got.

Edited to add:
A note about the cookies: as much as I follow recipes, there is always a part of me that thinks I know better, and so when I read “space two inches apart” I thought “nah, I can cram in a few more,” and thus ended up with a cookie sheet filled with one giant interconnected cookie. This is fine, except when I cut them up I apparently made them into squares, and then when a friend came over she thought I had made a bunch of hash browns. Mmm, a tasty dessert treat: the hash brown.

A note about the lasagna: I ate some for lunch today and it was ten times better than it was last night. Which means I will suffer through all the various steps again one day.

Edited again to add:
These additions did not particularly help this post.

Sign I may watch too much television: it only took me 3 or 4 minutes to figure out that the reason the girl getting a makeover on How Do I Look? looked familiar was that she was on an episode of True Life (the one where the girls want to get breast reductions).

Speaking of How Do I Look?, there is also an episode where one of the friends of the makeoveree was a cheerleader at my high school.

It turns out that if you liked Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time-Traveler’s Wife, you will not necessarily like Her Fearful Symmetry. I didn’t like the title, first off: it’s awkward and hard to say. Every time I said it, I added a question mark at the end to imply that I didn’t understand it either. I’m reading Her Fearful Symmetry? I also hated the spindly font on the cover.

Edited to add: ohhhh, it’s a reference to Blake’s “The Tyger.” Whatevs.

There are ghosts in it, but Niffenegger handles the ghosty elements pretty rationally: they do NOT SEND EMAIL or throw buckets of water on people or try to make out with their nephews with one rotting eyeball hanging out of their skulls like in some books.

However, if you like rationally ghosty books involving characters you don’t really like because there’s nothing to like about them, go read this book!

In related reading news, have you read Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard? Holy balls, these poems are fantastic.

In closing, here are two vanity tags I saw recently that totally fail:
PEECE
MYBABBE

I’m watching an episode of Neat (another in a series of shows where people throw away their stuff and get organized; in other words, heaven on tv) where a lady just got bullied into throwing away her portion of a towel that she and her friends acquired at a Duran Duran concert and which holds the sweat of Simon LeBon. Hello. I am all for throwing out, but there is room in any house for a two inch square of sweaty Duran Duran towel.

I watch these shows because I enjoy watching people be forced to get rid of their ugly, broken items, NOT PRECIOUS ARTIFACTS. I may not be able to watch this show anymore.

Three Names I Came Across Recently in Looking at Land Patent Records from the 1860s, Or, Alternately, the Name of the Villains in My New Western:

Hermogene LeBlanc
Magness Teague
Roling Suggs

Monday afternoon, Spike and I were in the yard playing. He’s got a car and a lawn mower he likes to play with outside and we were busy going up and down the driveway nine million times with them. Spike is an even-tempered fellow most of the time, but the one thing that inspires his wrath is having to come inside from playing. If we go out in the stroller, there is no spitting or rage or the tearing of hair when we return, but dragging him inside when he is busy mowing the yard is ugly. Ugly.

So I was getting tired of being made to push a tiny lawn mower around the perimeter of my house, and thought, hey, if we go for a walk now, maybe he won’t scream when we have to go in. And so I said let’s go for a walk in the stroller! and Spike said no and I said oh come on it’ll be fun! and he said no and finally I just caught him and started jamming him into the stroller. It was an ugly battle; there was writhing and kicking and I might’ve had my knee on his chest holding him down as I attempted to buckle him in.

And that is when I saw it: dog shit, all over my pants, Spike’s pants, and the bottom of the stroller. And oh, the shit on his shoe. It was no mere “aw man, I stepped in dog poop”; it was more “look how I magically managed to have an entire turd dangling off my shoe.” I had some antibacterial wipes in the stroller and knocked the big chunks off, and then, friends, Spike and I went for a leisurely walk through beautiful historic Belhaven, accompanied by the dog shit on our pants and a song in our hearts.