Diary of a MILF in Progress

Thirty-six

It is a square triangular number, and the only triangular number whose square root is also a triangular number.  It is also the number of degrees in the tips of all five angles of a perfect star.

It is the atomic  number of kypton.

36 UK gallons make up a standard barrell of beer.

Some theorize that Jesus died in the year 36 A.D.

Marc Antony and Cleopatra welcomed a son in 36 B.C.

The 1936 Olympics were held in Berlin.  It was the first time Afghanistan, Bermuda, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Liechtenstein and Peru participated, and Germany led the medal count with 89.

Citizen Kane is expected to fall into the public domain in 2036.

Thirty-six years ago today, my mother spent twenty-seven hours in labor.  I've been apologizing about it for decades.

Inappropiate thoughts from my trip

The honor bar at the resort included an "intimacy kit."  My last trip had one, as well, but this one included a sticker that outlined the contents (I've been speculating about that for months.)  The charge for the kit is $8; the contents include 2 condoms, 2 personal cleansing wipes and a packet of lubricating jelly.  At $4 per condom, the sex better be good enough that no lubricating jelly is needed, if you ask me.

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The best way to get over any curiosity about whether an "entertainment for women" magazine is really worth the $5.99 newsstand price is to purchase it at a remote airport when you know there is no chance of seeing anyone you know.  I don't give a damn if the dude at the newsstand thinks I'm a perv, since I never plan to fly through that airport again.

BTW, totally not worth the money.  I was better off waiting until I got to a larger airport and getting something from the "erotica" section of the bookstore.  The pictures were good to look at, but there was not nearly enough in the way of columns or fiction, and the magazine was way too skimpy to justify the cost.

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The fact that I even considered taking up a meeting attendee on his offer to go out to In and Out Burger after our bistro dinner (since "bistro" usually means "not enough food to fill your hollow tooth") is probably an indication that the remark in my review about appropriate interaction was right on.

I've got nothing...

I was all ready to write some tongue-in-cheek bitchfest about my meeting this weekend- the travel hassles and the meeting itself and the frustration of being in a beautiful resort location with no chance to enjoy either the resort or the spa...

Then I read Danny's post about how death shouldn't belong to children.  And I felt like I should be so damned happy to come home to the Daughter and Elder Son trying to beat each other up, happy to have the Younger Son refusing to eat dinner (insisting instead that I should stop cooking said dinner and just open up some yogurt, already!), just happy that I've dodged the "dying young" conversation thus far.

It sucks when a child dies.  And there's nothing eloquent or humorous or deep that I can come up with in light of that.

Girl crush, confirmed

Nigella Lawson is my foodie girlfriend.  I've always kind of liked her- she seems very easygoing, and funny, and she cooks the way I do (sort of dumping things in that don't need to be carefully measured, nibbling on the food as she prepares and cooks it).  But a recent viewing put my affection for her over the top.

I caught an episode of her new show and it was all about chocolate (that's one point in her favor).  And during one scene, she walked into her ginormous pantry and indicated her chocolate stash, admitting that, if given the chance, she would designate about 95% of it for the "chocolate section" (that's another point.)  She made a recipe for hot cocoa (yum), instructing the viewer to use full fat milk ("And if you don't use full fat, well, I don't even want to know"), really good pieces of chocolate bar (preferably dark chocolate), and a few splashes of rum (that's a lot of points.) 

"I think I must have been a sailor in a prior life," she said, "because I just love rum."

Rum and chocolate.  This woman has totally won my heart.

Is there life out there, so much she hasn't done

Listening to country music while I was already hormonal was the first mistake.  I'm kind of a sap anyway, and when you add the moodiness that the extra rush of estrogen brings on, it's a bad scene.

She married when she was twenty/she thought she was ready, now she's not so sure
She thought she'd done some living/now she's just wondering what she's living for
Now she's feeling like there's something more
Like so many girls of my age, I always dreamed of finishing school and getting married and raising my children while following some fulfilling career.  Except the school-girl dreams don't factor in how to handle the nights and weekends when he is working and you are at home with the kids.  And going out for happy hour is a production because you can't get a babysitter on the spur of the moment.  I've never been single in the workplace- I was engaged before I started working.

She's always lived for tomorrow, she's never learned how to live for today
She's dying to try something foolish, to do something crazy, to just get away
Something for herself for a change...
There's a place in the sun where she's never been
where life is fair and time is a friend...
When The Daughter was a baby, The Husband was playing softball twice a week during the summer, and bowling one night a week during the fall and spring, and had music rehearsal on at least one other night all year round.  Sometimes there were baseball games, and music performances.   My outings were few and far between, and hard to schedule based on all the committments he had already made all the time, especially once we had another baby.  And no matter how many times he told me that he was happy to take care of the kids for me to go out with work friends, or my sister, or whatever, there never seemed to be a time that had been left open for me to do so.  Until I was suddenly staring at being over 30 and already being defined as someone's wife and someone's mother and someone's secretary, and nothing else.

Would she do it the same as she did back then?
She looks out her window and wonders again
Is there life out there, so much she hasn't done
Is there life beyond her family and her home
She's done what she should, should she do what she dares?
She doesn't want to leave, she's just wondering if there's life out there

Fifty

This is post number 50.  When I began this blog last year, I didn't know how long it was going to last.  It was a way for me to work through a side of my personality that I don't talk about on my "mommy blog" and to have an outlet for some of the things that I can't even really talk about with my sister (who is a regular reader of that other blog) or a few of my co-workers (ditto).  And I never bothered to do that "x number of things about me" post, because I figured that no one was reading this anyway.

Then I saw my stats, and realized that I do have a few regular readers, and I started to leave comments under this pseudonym, or link in places with an audience whose eyes would glaze over if I was talking about the parenting and social issues I talk about elsewhere.

So...here are my fifty things.  Most people do 100, but I'm an underacheiver.

1. I was born August 29, 1971, which makes me a Virgo born in the Year of the Pig.
2. I was supposed to be born early in the month of August, so I should have been a Leo.
3. There is a fair amount of conflict between my control-freak Virgo nature and my drama queen Leo tendencies.
4. I have an older sister and a younger brother.  I was close to neither while growing up.
5. My sister, with whom I fought constantly during childhood, is now one of my best friends.  If my brother lived closer, I'd probably be really tight with him now, too.
6. I spent four and a half years of college with basically the same goals and without changing my major.  The only reason I took an extra semester to fulfull my requirments was because I spent part of the time as a double major (Education and Psychology) before deciding which one to stick with.
7. I stuck with the education degree, since it would provide a job at graduation instead of impending grad school.
8. I am not using my degree in any way whatsoever.
9. For much of my childhood, I was ballet and jazz dancer.
10. I stopped dancing at the same time that puberty hit in full force. 
11. I've been unconsciously comparing my current self to that skinny, dancer self I was since I was 14.
12. I love food too much to have ever been anorexic.
13. Instead, I spent a lot of years throwing up
14. I still have absolutely no concept of what size I am.  I look at myself in the mirror and honestly believe that I am significantly larger than what my measurments say I am.
15. I don't know how to fix that, but I want to
16. I am a huge flirt, and have always been surrounded by guys, but couldn't get a date until I was 17
17. A friend at work jokes about how much of a drunken slut I am
18. The sum of the number of times I've gotten sick from drinking and the number of men I have slept with can be counted on one hand
19. My husband is the only guy I dated who didn't cheat on me
20. I've been married for one-third of my life
21. I have three children.  Two were planned.
22. Sometimes it's hard to reconcile the despair I felt with the last positive pregnancy test with the emotions my youngest brings out in me now
23. Sometimes it's not hard at all
24. I laugh a lot
25. I cry a lot, too
26. I wish I did more of the first and less of the second, but that's not so much working out for me
27. Dark chocolate, really rich coffee, red wine and a good massage are all decent ways to try to bribe me
28. I got my screen name from the main character in the short-lived ABC show Sports Night
29. That Dana Whitaker is neurotic, and "one of the guys" and tends to come across in social situations much more confidently than she really feels
30. It wasn't hard to find a parallel
31. I'm crazy good at remembering song lyrics and TV/movie quotes
32. I'm allergic to shellfish
33. I used to be able to eat shellfish, until a crab feast made it really hard to breathe
34. I don't know if I'm really allergic to all shellfish or just crustaceans.
35. I don't care to eat clams or mollusks or oysters again to test the theory
36. Over my lifetime, I've been taken to the ER six times
37. Two of them involved ambulances, two involved injuries outside of normal doctors' hours and two involved caregivers who were freaked out by me passing out when I puke
38. I pass out a lot.  I have low blood sugar and a low normal blood pressure.  As a result, whenever I get sick, my body doesn't so much like to function properly
39. I think an average of one ER visit every six years is too much
40. My only hospital stays other than ER visits were my tonsillectomy and the birth of my children
41. My many scars include: two c-section scars, three incisions for mole biopsies in the early 90's, six mole biopsies from early this year, a gash from when I learned to use a penknife, and a u-shaped slice from a bagel accident on the morning of my daughter's First Holy Communion
42. The day I sliced my thumb instead of the bagel, I proceeded to wrap my hand up and continue with our plans for the day- we went to church, I came back to the house to set up for the party and grabbed a bite to eat before leaving for the hospital.  Had my sister not seen me trying to slip out unnoticed, I would have driven myself to the ER so I didn't spoil anyone's day by taking them away from the festivities.
43. My emotional scars outnumber my physical ones by a large margin
44. I worked as a sound and lighting technician in college.   
45. I do a damned good job of hanging a lighting truss and wiring a small sound system, even if it does sometime screw up my manicure
46. My iPod consists of a very eclectic mix of indie pop, classic rock, jazz, country, show tunes, new age, classical, blues, some Amy Grant and a few random songs that the IT guys left on my iTunes when they were testing out the installation
47. When I want to be left alone in airports, I listen to my iPod and focus on my knitting
48. When someone tries to talk to me while I a listening to my iPod and knitting, I feel it should be legal for me to stab them with my needles or strangle them with the cord to my earbuds
49. I'm very good at procrastinating
50. I haven't decided whether its good or bad to be considered less intelligent than I really am at work. It's insulting, but less is asked of me by the folks who think I'm dumb because I'm "just a secretary"

A day of ups and downs

Yesterday, while I was fighting with the shredder (we're moving to the new buiding soon, and I am purging much of the extraneous paper from my cubicle, most of which contains semi-confidential information), Natalie said, not in a lascivious way, but a possibly complimentary way anyway,
"You look like you're hot."

Then she kind of rolled her eyes and said, "I don't mean 'hot' like Hot, but 'hot' like..." and then seemed like she was frustrated with herself.  "So, are you saying I look good, or that I look as though I'm about to break a sweat?" I laughed.  Being that is was already 85 degrees at 10:00 a.m., but also that I was wearing a camisole with no bra and a sheer blouse, it could go either way, you know?

She laughed, too, saying, "Like at hottie.  That's the hot I meant  to say."

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I had my annual review yesterday afternoon.  My boss actually emailed it to me prior to our meeting, and we had discussed the bulk of it, so all that was left was to see the actual wording of the comments, the numerical rating, and confirmation of the exact amount of my raise and bonus.

The rating was what I expected, I supposed, and the raise is decent.  The comments, however, are seeming more and more condescending as I think about more.  One in particular is sticking in my craw.  The one about "interacting appropriately...given [my] support function."  So, I guess I should be fading into the background and not making eye contact with upper management or other high level attendees during meals and social functions involved with my meetings.

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Work is wicked busy lately.  It's almost time for school to start (for everyone except me, now that the Younger Son is beginning preschool, the Elder Son is in first grade, the Daughter is in fourth, and the Husband has added a first period upperclassmen course to his schedule), so life at home isn't exactly leisurly.  I've gained and lost the same three pounds since May.  I quit smoking after my last lapse and don't want to fall off the wagon again.  Booze and comfort eating will only sabotage my diet.  I think my only stress relief is going to have to be getting laid.  If the Husband doesn't get his act together and treat me a bit nicer in the next month, Casey and I are going to have to pick up where we left off last year once we get to the Fall Conference.

Life's a beach

I was at the beach last week, which is part of the reason for the dirth of posts.  We go each year, packing the kids into the car for a 3 hour road trip to spend a whirlwind seven days staying in the same building with my parents and sister.  The upside is hour extra adults to watch and entertain the kids.  The downside is having my husband and my mother in the same building for seven straight days, as they both have certain personality traits that they criticize in each other, yet refuse to recongnize in themselves.  But, no blood was shed, no screaming matches ensued, all was sunny (pardon the pun.)

One peculiar conversation happened, though, which was not specificially related to being at the beach- it could have been anywhere.  Both The Husband and my sister and BIL had taken bike rides on day, and by coincidence took the exact same route up the main road to the state line and back.  That night at dinner my sister commented on a new "adult boutique" that  had opened up in one of the strip malls a bit north of our apartment, with a storefront clearly visible from the road.  She was surprised, as BIL and The Husband turned out to be, about the placement of the store.  How lovely that, as you take the little ones to the miniature golf course a quarter mile down the road, you can also check out the newest lingerie offerings.

Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with adult stores (as evidenced later in my post), but I cringed at the idea that this one was so prominent in nature.  I mean, they didn't pull any punches with the signage; no euphemistic 'adult toys' or 'magazines and books' with the implied modifier left out.  Nope, the scantily clad manniquins were in front of a mylar backdrop for maximum attention, each "S" "E" and "X" on the window was big and bold for all to see.  That's a bit of an awkward set-up when you have a budding reader like my six-year old son.

So, we joked a bit at the dinner table about how shocked we were that the storefront was so prominent, and made a mental note to drive to the minigolf later in the week to minimize the chance of the kids getting too much of an eyeful.  Truth be told, The Daughter would probably have been traumatized (she has a conniption fit when her four-year old brother leaves the bathroom without his towel after the bath- "OMG, he's nekkid!  That's so gross!"), and The Elder Son would have just tried to expand his vocabulary ("Mommy, what's 'feetish' mean?"  "No, sweetie, it's a short 'e' sound, not a long 'e'.")

That night, after the kids were asleep and The Husband and I had used the uncomfortable bed for its  non-sleep purpose, I awkwardly revisted the subject.  How surprising it is that the display window is facing the street that way, and how the locals are probably up at arms about the blatant signage.  And I segued into the more subtle names that could have been given to a store of that nature ("Forbidden Fruit" being the one near my office).  And I told him that, a few months ago when I was out of town to take a professional certification exam, I stopped into one of those stores.  And what I had purchased.  Now, a small toy is already handy in the bedside drawer at home for use with him, but I do take a lot of business trips these days, and a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do, right?

"Why are you telling me this now?" he asked.

"Well, there hasn't been a convenient time to drop this into conversation!  I just didn't want you to stumble across it in my closet [translation: in its box in the shopping bag in my tote bag in the back corner of my closet] and wonder what I was hiding."

"Well, I assume you'll show it to me eventually," he said.  "Just please tell me you paid cash for it."