I didn't want to just post a downer so I thought I'd share pictures of the kids from this weekend, when they returned from a spring picnic at the park and were hot, sweaty and, in oona's case, had just eaten a bunch of cheetos. Ahh, nothing like face paint when it's close to 90 degrees out. But my friend, Kathleen, painted all the children there and she did an amazing job. Toby took them to the spring park party and then I stopped over to take Oona to a birthday party down the street, where they had a pirate themed moon walk and sprinkler and Oona stripped to her undies once her dress got wet from running in the sprinkler but then she got all crabby because the kids in the moowalk kept saying 'I can see your underwear.' No big surprise being they're 3 and 4 and that's all that Oona was wearing, but she was having none of the logic behind it. So she sat in the moonwalk along the side with her arms crossed fuming until a sweet girl tried to cheer her up. So I leave you with the two faces of kitty cat Oona, sweet as can be and giving Jack Nicholson in The Shining a run for his money with the deranged glower.

One of my favorite parts of spring is the riotous colors of acid green baby leaves on trees with the stormy skies, it's like a color phantasmagoria. This top picture needs to be photoshopped to truly represent (by altering how odd) what it was like outside, the sky darker and more grey with the leaves bright chartreuse. The weather wasn't working with me though, pre-thunderstorm wind made the leaves blow willy-nilly making it hard to capture what I saw. I'm pretty sure when Eliot said that April was the cruelest month that he was talking to the manic depressive community. It's like nature physically expressing the mixed state of turmoil inside the bipolar mind, so charged and unsettled. I'm not bipolar but I'm pretty sure my Dad is. He never got help for his condition and could frequently be a turn on a dime person with the moods, and the outright lies, I guess delusions. Sometimes the anger and mania occur at the same time, so uncontrolled, which is very scary to witness when you're young and there's no acknowledgement that the behavior isn't normal. No wonder I have issues.

Anybody else find the news very end of days lately? The unemployment all over the world, the insanity in the middle east with suicide bombers and so much violence everywhere it seems. Traumatic brain injuries are up in children in Southwestern PA, experts think it's due to the economy and stressed parents taking out their stress on their children which makes me so sad. I switched to CNN whilst (I'm such an anglophile) on the elliptical yesterday and saw all the concern about swine flu and a possible global pandemic. The website doesn't show it but CNN has already come up with a swine flu graphic (comprised of sliced together pictures of a pig next to a medical symbol) that is quite humorous. There'd be more than a little irony, what with our country's conspicuous consumption on so many levels, if swine flu is the next pandemic. Oink! I would hate to die from swine flu, it's seems horribly vain but I'd hate to die from anything embarrassing and this is completely insipid on my part but doesn't it sound worse to say death from swine flu as opposed to avian flu. Not that I have anything against pigs, they're supposed to be really smart animals and I love crispy bacon. My God I think the citristrip fumes I inhaled for five hours, even though I was outside, while stripping a buffet (will post when it's done, I got it for $29.99 solid wood with lovely legs) has affected my intelligence. Good night and good oink.

Can I just complain about still needing to wear my winter coat. Granted I'm the type of person who's almost always cold but still... I can't wait for this weekend when it's supposed to be in the 80s. How I long for my skin to be warmed by the sun.

I am having to rethink my nursing school plans since Duquesne offers very little in the way of scholarship money for second degree students and I can't take out ungodly amounts of aid that I'll have to pay back on a nursing salary, it just doesn't seem wise when there are hospital nursing programs that will pay your tuition. Soo I'm scrambling to apply to two hospital schools at the last minute with all the chaos that entails; getting transcripts mailed (including my high school one, even though I graduated 22 years ago!), groveling for references, taking pre-admission tests, getting flooded with 'will I get in?' anxiety once again. Aghhh, and then I've got to find some sort of nurse's aide job for extra money (all of $9 an hour) when I used to make $40 an hour freelancing. Thank God I live in America's most livable city, where my mortgage is CHEAP and I could actually get by on $9 an hour. Seriously, if I was facing all this in New York or Boston I would have had my breakdown by now. The picture has nothing to do with the post, it's just Oona's demonstration of 'tiny clap'.

what was i thinking

I was very busy this Easter weekend. I spent friday evening and all day saturday, like until 8:30 at night, much to the annoyance of my neighbors, gutting our downstairs bathroom. This all started innocently enough back in the fall when the drywall ceiling was falling due to previous water damage. I couldn't stand to look at it and tore the dry wall down one inspired (or insane) afternoon to find that the previous water damage had removed a good portion of the ceiling's plaster as well as damaging the lathe underneath the tub. Soooo I put up plastic bags with duct tape and a staple gun and figured I'd tackle the project later (these first 3 pictures document my fall venture).




Well, March rolls around and I had two contractors come in order to get estimates on various repairs around the house. Both said the plaster and lathe would need to be torn down so that the joists could be examined to make sure they were alright. Visions of the tub landing on my head while on the toilet floated through my head. So Toby picked up the kids on Good Friday and I figured that gave me two whole days to tackle the project. The remnants of the ceiling came down easily enough BUT then I noticed termite damage on one wall, which I tore down, first dry wall then the plaster and finally the lathe. Long story short all four walls had termite damage (the drywall and window moldings/baseboards and one section of lathe). Fortunately all the studs miraculously escaped termite damage. So now I have a dumpster's worth of plaster and lathe in our garage, which I hauled out of the bathroom by filling kitter litter bins full of plaster and lathe and then dumping the bin into Owen & Oona's wagon in the narrow alley between our house and the neighbors and then I'd wheel it to the garage. I didn't want to track this through the house due to the mess factor.





I still have some black soot coming out through two heating registers that access the vent that I removed plaster and wire mesh off of (I thought taking down plaster and lathe was hard, that wire mesh was near impossible). There's a blocked off doorway to the kitchen that makes me think part of this room was originally a pantry. I still have to gut the narrow hallway between this former bathroom and the basement. I'm thinking of opening the whole thing up and redoing the pantry, which would then lead to me needing to gut and renovate the kitchen, which I would love to do but for the lack of funds.




This last picture is my battered arms, fortunately I got a tetanus booster when I saw a doctor last month because I scraped alongside a lot of rusty metal and I had a very large protruding nail gouge me in the ass when I came off the ladder to quickly. Can I tell you, I never knew that my hands, specifically my palms, could ache so much. And I went through two respirator filters making sure I didn't inhale the lead dust and 100 plus years of crap behind those plaster walls. I still felt goofy at the end of it but I think that's just because I exhausted myself. So God knows when I'll get around to completing this project. Does anyone know if it's really difficult to hang drywall?

spring has sprung

I hope that everyone enjoyed their easter/passover/spring break. The kids enjoyed Easter, although Owen did pout and whine a little bit today when he asked if we could get the card game Uno and I didn't drop everything and run to a store to purchase it. My kids are spoiled, like why they should be expecting presents for Easter is beyond me, they think it's like a second Christmas. Any religion attached to the holiday has been lost with the consumerism, entirely my fault. I try to explain the religious reasons for the holidays but I don't think I do the best job. I tend to over explain and neglect to tone it down for the kids but then I've heard about some churches doing the passion with the easter bunny to get the point across for children which just seems wrong on so many levels.

Anyhoo, the kids had a good time and I was rewarded with belgian chocolate by a friend of Toby's who's visiting. I got two milk chocolate bars and two dark chocolate bars and as of 6:30 tonight they are gone. My God, my way of coping with stress is to dichotomize myself when it comes to eating, meaning I either eat very little extremely healthy stuff or batten down the hatches I'm like somone with prader willi syndrome. I don't mean to make fun of that syndrome it's just once I start eating it's like I can't stop. Having had an eating disorder before I know stress makes me revert to disordered eating habits. I just can't gain any more weight because I'm serious when I say that none of my new clothes (that I got for a song at the Gap) will fit the stressed binging (but not purging) me.

Like this last photo? I know you've heard about the ghost of Christmas past but probably not the ghost of Easter present? That's Oona who prefers to have her shirt of most of the time, when she's topless with her black leggings she's like a toddler Iggy Pop. She is the sybarite of the family, only the best for her. She loves pleasing her senses, all the time, with abandon. The girl is pure Id. I'm sort of in awe of her powers, believe the girl has power. All the boys in her pre-k talk about Oona and she's one of the younger kids and usually bosses them around - could she have a future as a dominatrix? I'm just amazed at her confidence. She's a very loving girl, Owen was sick last night from eating too much candy and she was like a tyke sized Florence Nightingale, but she won't sacrifice her needs for another's. Owen's more like me. I told a friend he's the daughter I always wanted, which sounds horrible, but whenever I thought of having a child I'd imagine a nice little girl who read a lot and was a people pleaser and that's my Owen. The poor kid is also burdened with an overwhelming superego. At least now I have a partner in whining, my Owen.

Deadly ambush in Stanton Heights claims the lives of 3 city police officers

What happened here in Pittsburgh on Saturday was dumbfounding to me. Stanton Heights is right next to Morningside, the neighborhood I live in. I drive past the street where these 3 police officers were killed every day on my way to pick up Oona from pre-k. I heard some ding dong at the care center where my Grandma lives say 'well you know that's inner city Pittsburgh for you.' but that statement is ridiculous! Stanton Heights has nice homes with well maintained lawns. Many police officers and firemen live in that neighborhood and Morningside. I had no idea what happened until I got to the gym and saw it on the news, although I was wondering why there were so many helicopters hovering on the hill up the street from me when I was getting into my car. Then I was listening to the news at the gym and one thing that pissed me off was an interview with the killer's best friend. The guy starts talking about how, like myself, my friend was against the zionist movement blah blah blah and I'm thinking, why aren't they cutting the camera from this guy? Maybe this is a huge generalization but whenever I hear 'against zionist movement' I tend to think white supremist and there's no need to televise this guy preaching his racist agenda when three men lost their lives.

This will seem like a stretch but I think about the girl who went postal on me in the car accident and this shooting and every day I see people who are so angry and it really saddens me. This is a very stressful, scary time for our country but all the anger, it winds up being misplaced and then people lash out at strangers. Before my car accident a woman, I use the term euphemisitically, shouted at me 'you fucking bitch' because I had the right of way and went straight thru an intersection while she needed to turn left. But it wasn't like I raced through when the light was yellow, that would be bitchy. The light was still green, she had to wait two seconds for me to pass and then she was able to turn. Meanwhile she has a three year old in the front seat, without a seat belt, let alone a car seat, and the child is standing on the seat looking out the back window. People get in cars and forget their manners. With my car accident my Mom thought I should have yelled right back at the lady but I'm like 'What would that solve? I'd just wind up feeling worse because I was as petty as she was.' and she's like 'you're right.' It's not worth it. My God, and on Marty Griffin (talk radio that me and every Pittsburgh senior citizen listen to) he was interviewing a gun shop owner who said since Obama took office it's been crazy the sales he's had, that people are stockpiling weapons and ammunition because they're scared about the administration clamping down on gun laws. What the fuck?! This paranoia, it's gonna be the downfall of us. I'm agnostic but even I know that it's best to love thy neighbor. Follow the golden rule, treat people the way you want to be treated. I'm incredibly shy but it's amazing what a difference it makes when you're kind, make small talk and smile.

house without kutner is not a home

Last night I shuffled the kids off to bed before 8 so I could sit down and watch House, which is one of my favorite tv shows. I love House and especially like his relationship with Wilson. I don't really care for the new residents working with House aside from Kutner, whom I loved, and I thought Kal Penn portrayed him perfectly. When they killed him off with a suicide last night I was ready to protest such a seemingly half-assed out of nowhere plot twist. How could they get rid of Kutner, he was a lovable goofball but usually the resident most likely to solve the case and his character was the ethical one. BUT after listening to NPR this afternoon I learned that he had to leave the show because of his new appointment as arts liaison for the White House. He's smart, creative and politically active. How adorable is he? And he looks so friendly with his sweet little smile. If I was 10 to 15 years younger I'd be swooning, as it is the Mom in me wants to pinch his cheeks and give him a hug for a job well done.

Among the things that baffle me as a mom. Why children protest so much about naps, if only someone would insist that I take a nap every day. Also why they refuse to go the bathroom, my son's nickname should be the camel for how long he'll hold off before going the bathroom. My kids are also incredibly picky with food at mealtimes but I only have myself to blame for that, I'm not a good example for three well balanced meals. In fact Owen used to tease me about my soda addiction, almost as if I was an boozehound, he'd tell his teachers how I was addicted to Coke, fortunately I got no call from a social worker about this. But this is one of the more baffling thing to me. How children will position themselves while doing things. Tell me how in the world balancing your body on a couch and table like this while watching tv can be comfortable? There's just no way.

Owen told me something priceless at bathtime tonight. I was patting him dry and poked his tummy, he's got abs that Toby & I both envy for how lean and strong he is, when he lifted his arm up and told me to feel his muscle. I touched his slender bicep, wrapping my hands around it until thumb and index finger touch. He said 'I'm getting really strong because I've been exercising. In girltown today (he went over to his friend's house and her room, which she shares with her sister, is called girltown, which is priceless in itself) I picked up a five pound weight' he says incredulous. 'With one hand! And raised it over my head!' I whistled amazed at this tale 'Wow, you're quite strong Owen.' 'Yeah, imagine if I found a ten pound wieght.' Imagine.