Inadequate Materials

I've been spending WAY too much time online lately. I had to finally intervene on my own behalf this week. The addiction had reached ridiculous proportions and was affecting my family life. While I can't truthfully claim it's just one website, I think it's fair to say that the bulk of the blame goes to Facebook . Is anyone else having this problem? I get on for the sole purpose of writing a few emails and generally interacting with friends I otherwise wouldn't be in contact with, and suddenly I find myself looking at people's "Which Days Of Our Lives Character Are You?" quiz results. Before I know it, we've missed our all-important mid-morning snack, I have 3 days' worth of laundry piled up, and I have nothing to show for all that lost time. Facebook has been a great thing for me in terms of reconnecting with people I'm thrilled to be in contact with again. But then there are the friends who just seemed to add me to collect another friend...

There are some really handy things floating around out there in cyberspace, and one that's great for the blogger who likes to just sit down and start writing about any old thing is the writing prompt. I personally like the One-Minute Writer and, occasionally, a new one I've found called Plinky . Plinky is hit-or-miss for me, possibly because it's actually intended for the youngsters. For example, today's prompt is asking me what I'll do when the zombies come (THE ZOMBIES ARE COMING?!! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES PEOPLE!!!). But a few days back, Plinky had a great prompt that got my brain working. It asked me to list 5 things I want to do before I die. When I say my brain got working, I don't mean that a bunch of ideas started chattering away in my head. I mean that after several minutes of hard thinking, literally nothing came to me. And frankly, that was a little bit scary. I am 35 years old. I figure my life is roughly half over. While it's good that I'm sat...

I've made a new discovery! Okay, the Captain made it for me, but it's cool just the same. For a while now, I've been telling him that no one is actually reading this stuff, aside from my small-but-faithful band of followers (does anyone else HATE that term? When I use it, I feel like the kooky leader of one of those "religions" where you have to cut ties with your loved ones and hand over all your banking information). And I don't mean that in a complainy way. It's just been my argument when he's raised an eyebrow at me for publicly describing all those terribly shocking items about him (What?! He's messy?! We argue sometimes?! Crazy!!). So, to prove me wrong, he set me up with something called a stat counter . And, oh my, is it ever awesome!! For those who don't know about this (and, let's be honest, I'm probably the last to know), my stat counter keeps track of how many hits my blog gets in a day, and it shows me a map of where in the...

Alright, well not exactly, but I can see part of my driveway! That's got to count for something, right?! In honour of every living thing out here coming back from the dead (eventually), I've decided it's time for a couple of new purses! As you may or may not know, I do not need even ONE more purse. Actually, I need to get rid of a few (dozen). But you may also know that I love to recycle old stuff, and these two projects have actually not cost me a darned thing and have provided me with a bit of fun in the process. So, I consider that to be the actual reward here. Having two new purses is just a happy by-product. Really... These projects began with a couple of pairs of pants that, for one reason or another, were no longer wearable. The jeans were destroyed enough that they couldn't be donated, so my options were to recycle or trash. Now, I know the youngsters on the interweb like to take the tops of their old jeans and make themselves a bag with pockets and such. But at...

I always look forward to St. Patrick's Day, even though there's no evidence anywhere that I have any Irish in me whatsoever. Why? One word: FOOD! Every year, I make a batch of Irish soda bread, some cabbage and potatoes, and my favourite thing ever, the Steak and Guinness Pie! Of course, I also have a drink (or three), and I usually make the kids some sort of greenish milkshake-type concoction as well. The music I could live without, but who can pass up an excuse to pinch everyone who forgot to wear green? Of course, if you REALLY like doing that, don't move onto an army base. It's kind of counterproductive. But today, my favourite colour is actually not green, it's blue. And that's because blue is the colour I chose for my bathroom walls! Yes! After years of white (because we rented), followed by a couple of years of brown (because that seemed like a safe choice), I've finally taken the leap into colour! And I love it! I didn't do it by halves either...

For those who aren't sure (and let's be honest, sometimes I'm not even sure), the Captain has been home for a couple of weeks on leave. Next week he goes back to working his normal 9-to-5 (ish) day until the crazy exercises start in April. While he's been home, he's been enjoying walking up our rather long driveway in the afternoons to meet Firstborn when he gets home on the schoolbus. I enjoy it too, because it's darned cold out there. Yesterday, he was getting ready for the driveway trek when the phone rang. It was the school resource teacher. At first, I thought Firstborn had done something uncharacteristically naughty, like throwing snowballs perhaps, on the playground. But it turned out his uncharacteristic naughtiness had surfaced in a slightly more sophisticated manner. Firstborn had concocted himself a cunning plan. While all the other kindergarteners were lining up to either get on the bus or meet their parents at the door, Firstborn slipped into the w...

A few months back, in some magazine somewhere, I read an article about the French president and his hot wife, Carla . The point of this article, as I remember it, was to try to figure out the wife. At one point, the writer suggested that we all knew her "type" and then went on to elaborate that she was the kind of woman whose friends were mostly male. This clearly wasn't meant to indicate anything good. It kind of got my back up, because before I met the Captain and started riding around in his car with him, arguing about what to listen to on the radio, I spent most of my free time riding around in a car (arguing about what to listen to on the radio) with three good friends. And those three friends were all male. In fact, most of my friends back then were male. And I'd say that now, though I really only ever get together on my own with other women, and I value those women immensely, a good chunk of my "friends" are still guys. One such buddy is celebrating...

Well, I haven't taken any hostages yet. Actually, things have been running pretty smoothly, but you know how these things are. You can't really relax in your own home when you constantly have people working there. And when you haven't had a shower since Friday. Hopefully tonight... The place is a mess, but the bath is halfway installed, and we have a new layer of floor. I took a break for some retail therapy yesterday and bought myself 4 new sweaters. That really helped. Oh, and Janine's very lovely plug has doubled my loyal readership. I'm practically famous! So, all-in-all, things could be worse. I still wouldn't mind a bath though...

Well, it's that time of year again. Time to catch up on my correspondence! Dear renovation-related headache, mold/dust cough, and raging case of B.O., Please go away soon. I'm not sure what I was thinking... Sincerely, A Crazy Woman ********* Dear Mel Gibson, Remember back when you were a cute guy we all wanted to see make another Lethal Weapon sequel? What on earth possessed you to start opening your mouth in public? And behaving like a drunken frat-boy? If this doesn't stop, you're going to go the way of Tom Cruise . Way to blow it, Riggs. Yours Truly, Someone who isn't sure if anyone in Hollywood is lustworthy anymore ********** Dear local small-town newspaper columnist, Okay, I admit I'm still a little mad about your lack of support for teachers , so you may want to take this one with a grain of salt. That said, are you aware that the words "who" and "that" are not interchangeable? Also, when you ask your readers a question (even when it...

Before we bought the house that love built , I figured I'd be a great handywoman. I watched Trading Spaces religiously, enjoyed This Old House and even followed the Captain around Rona on weekends. Flooring, paint, decorative moldings! It all looked so easy, and so do-able. Then one day, on a whim, I ripped down the living room walls. It was a bit of a disaster. The kitchen was, at this point, already demolished and half-put-back-together. The Captain was, as usual, away. The guy we hired to do the kitchen job was in and out on his off-hours working to get things back together. The whole nightmare pushed me to the edge of reason. Eventually, everything got returned to (relative) normal, but only after I had spent three months with no kitchen to work in, and no living room to relax in after the kids were in bed, and had caught stomach flu three times, probably from having to do the dishes in the bathtub. It's incredible what a bit of chaos at home will do to a person. If you...

I've heard it said that by the age of five, we have each created in our own mind a picture of what marriage and our perfect partner should look like, based entirely on what we've seen at home. I think this is probably true. It would certainly explain how I found myself married to a cranky, anti-social man who'd like nothing more than to sit in front of the TV with a beer in his hand all weekend long, but rarely does. When my parents were married, on this date in 1973, I think life must've looked a lot different than it does now. I can actually picture it in that brown-and-orange hue that seems to turn up on every drugstore-printed family photo from that era. The bell-bottoms. The Brady-Bunch style butterfly collars. The POLYESTER!! True, people back then had a penchant for fabrics that will never biodegrade. And they wore them in patterns that are best forgotten, though they have a habit of turning up frequently in my worst nightmares. But that's not really what I...