Tell It To COACHIE

I posted every day!

1. Turn your volume all the way up

2. Press play

3. Enjoy!

Remember all that whining I did about the computer desk that never came? Well here’s what happened:

The HP put the chipped and scratched desk together and except for a missing finish piece, it looked okay. We had initially planned to put it in the toyroom, so we figured, what the heck - it was free, it will be sitting in the corner, and most importantly, it’s here. The HP cut a piece of wood to the size of the missing piece, then wrapped it in black electrical tape and slammed it into place. To the unknowing eye, it was a perfect fit. (Of course since it was in the toyroom the kiddies eventually discovered it and pried it off, so now the desk looks pretty ugly and the replacement piece has been stuck up into the closet for its own protection.)

When the second black desk finally arrived, I was beaten. I told the HP to just put it together and I would use it, even though it was not the stylish showpiece I was hoping for. All told, we spent about $160 on the two desks, rather than the $500 - $600 I was planning, and the one in the kitchen has grown on me. I was planning to get a desk that was a little more dainty, but I’m not sure I would have liked the way it fit into the space (get a load of me - too much HGTV, perhaps? - plus the bigger desk camouflages more of the crappy paint job).

I’d take a picture of it with my newly resurrected camera, but I don’t feel like straightening it up, so click here and check out the picture on Overstock. Many of the customer comments describe the problems we had - the screwed up shipping, the damaged parts - but only a few describe the worst part of the desk: the keyboard tray is only 23 inches from the floor. The seat of the chair that I am sitting on right now is more than 19 inches from the floor. That is not a lot of clearance for the average American and definitely not enough for the above average American. We didn’t attach the keyboard tray to the kitchen desk, so maybe no one else did either. It has not caused any elbow pain so far, so for now we will stick with it.

And now in honor of the penultimate post of NaBloPoMo and of the fact that I finally got the You Tube plugin to work and because it runs through my head every time I hear the desk’s model name (Broadway Black Computer Desk) which reminds me of the kiddies as teeny tiny babies because this is the song I used to sing to them, click here (if Hugh Jackman gets too annoying - and how could he not, slide the red dot to about 2:00 minutes):

I suppose if I had actually hit that deer that darted out in front of my car on the way home from guitar lessons, and then it had jumped up and run off, this would also be the title I would use, but that’s a story for another day.

When our digital camera broke, I stuck it in the cabinet with the china and placemats, figuring it would be handy to pull out and hand to Marty when our new, better camera came home. The kiddies have been playing with it for a few days now, or perhaps casting magic spells over it, because tonight when I went to check on the process of pajama-donning, Aislinn was holding the camera and laughing. She said,”Look how silly we look, Mommy!”

The camera had sprung to life. Here’s what she was looking at:

Yep, that’s kindergarten graduation, May, 2005. Another event of that spring was Aislinn’s 6th birthday pool/slip ‘n’ slide party.

Yep, that’s a pretty good picture of Marty’s super long double-jointed baby fingers and Lauren’s much-hated curly hair (when I showed her the picture, she got just as angry as she used to be every morning for years when she woke up and found that her hair was still curly). It also held what may be the only image of one of my other cupcake triumphs:

As you can see, the picture quality is not great. I don’t think we can avoid getting a new camera, and I don’t think we should. If for no other reason than this could be like when that guy woke up out of a long-term coma and could talk to his family, and then slipped back into the coma a few days later. With our luck, the camera coma would begin on Christmas morning.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this little trip down memory lane. But I’m begging you, whatever you do, please don’t mention the curly hair picture to Lauren.

Edited to add: Our camera hasn’t been broken for three years. I guess I stuck the old memory stick in when I was trying to bring it back to life. Apparently what I should have been doing is turning it on and off repeatedly and dropping it on the floor.

Today as I performed one of my least favorite yuletide chores - crawling under the tree to water it, I got sap all over my hands. By the time I walked from the living room to the kitchen, my black t-shirt had gotten stuck to the sap, leaving me with a sticky, linty line on my wrist. Before I grabbed the soap, I took a long sniff of that piney sap smell, then washed my hands (which are now freezing - I wish I had some of those fingerless gloves so I could blog the following story in proper Dickenisan fashion) and retired to the sofa for a few minutes of The Biggest Loser (ironic isn’t it). A few minutes later I went to push my hair out of my face, and I could smell the sap again. I pushed my sleeve back and sure enough, I had new sticky, linty black line on my wrist because soap doesn’t remove tree sap. Probably only gasoline or turpentine remove tree sap, and I don’t keep those under the sink due to the HPs tendency to huff (I’m kidding!).

The annoying sap (not me, the stuff on my wrist) got me thinking about all of the little inconveniences that come with holiday decorating, and then suddenly I was reminded of how horribly abused I was as a young girl when it came time to decorate the house for Christmas.

I know some people get all confessional on their blogs. I try not too, but sometimes the stories must come out. This may be hard for you to hear, but for probably 8 to 10 years of my childhood, my parents forced me to hang crocheted snowflakes in the high window next to the fireplace of my childhood home. Granted, the snowflakes were pretty and the finished display was always a high point of artistic style and proportion, but oh the pain and heartache it took to get the snow hung and the cold stares I received when I asked to be relieved of this horrible duty.

In theory, I would climb up on the step stool, push some plastic thumbtacks into the backside of the window frame*, and then hang the snowflakes on the thumbtacks and climb back down to admire my work. Unfortunately, in reality: the step stool- WOBBLY; the window - OVER MY HEAD; the thumbtacks - DULL and UNCOOPERATIVE; the window frame - UNFINISHED, IMPENETRABLE, and POSSIBLY MADE OF STEEL; and the snowflakes - TANGLED.

Every year I’d scour the family corkboards for nine plastic thumbtacks, although I always needed twelve or thirteen, because when I reached up above my head to jam them into the Lignum Vitae that composed the top of the window, a few always bent at the point.** This meant that not only would the tack become worthless, but my fingers would slip and smack into the very hard unfinished top of the window frame.

When I finally got the tacks in place, I would reach into the shirt box of snowflakes that I had balanced on top of the bookshelves. I usually started with the biggest fanciest one, because it always hung near the middle. Inevitably, many of the other snowflakes would be tangled up with it, and I would stand and wobble on the stool as I tried to untangle them, until finally I climbed down and sat on the couch to work out the knots.

Apparently, all the untangling caused the threads that held the snowflakes to snap and break, so I’d have to go hunt down more thread. Of course when I tied the new thread on, all the snowflakes would hang at the wrong length, so I’d have to shorten them and retie them (always attempted on the step stool then finished on the couch). Finally, with scraped knuckles and a sweaty neck, I’d climb down from the step stool, admire the snowflakes, curse them, and head off to find the bactine.

My parents always gave me high praise on my mixed media rendition of falling snow, but they also got more and more annoyed every year when I tried to snake out of doing it. I suppose I could have asked for a ladder or new push pins, but I guess sometimes, at Christmas time, you just cling to tradition no matter how much it hurts.

* I don’t know how to explain the window in less than 100 words, but the actual window glass was about four inches behind the framed hole in the wall, so I had to reach up above my head (did I mention it was above my head?) and stick the pins into the backside of the inner frame. Here, in honor of the waning days of NaBloPoMo, I have made you a crappy diagram. Enjoy.

** I suppose now, at my advanced age, I can understand why my parents didn’t want the thumbtacks left in the window all year, but back then, I just chalked it up to the random cruelty and inscrutability of the world. Actually, back then I probably just said “This sucks.”

Today I spent a delightful day trying to put the inside of the house back together. The dazzling Christmas display out front is not exactly matched by the Christmas chaos inside, and the Christmas chaos inside is intertwined with the leftover Thanksgiving chaos, a week’s worth of laundry, and the assorted rabble of having 6 to 8 people partying it up nonstop for 8 days.

After getting the kitchen straightened and the laundry started, I picked up Marty from his preschool, where I discovered that the bottom half of his sleeves were wet. I asked him what had happened, and he told me that he’d been playing at the water table. Why didn’t he roll up his sleeves? He did but they fell back down.

After we’d been home a while, Marty asked if he could have a dry shirt. Although I am the meanest mom on the street, I would never consciously force my child to hang out in a wet shirt, particularly on a disgusting, cold November day in Missouri. However, as I reached into the dryer tonight and pulled out Marty’s Phillies shirt, it occurred to me that maybe I would do it subconsciously.

The Phillies shirt was his third shirt of the day. When I went to track down the kiddies at dinnertime, for some reason the girls were dressing Marty in Aislinn’s black velvet pants and Lauren’s pink cardigan sweater. Marty’s contribution to the ensemble was his Phillies shirt which he used to replace the perfectly good and dry shirt he’d worn since after school.

Marty ditched the girl clothes and came out for dinner, then went for his bath. In my haste to keep the bathroom floor clear of clothes and to get all of the laundry done in one day, I didn’t realize that I scooped up Marty’s Phillies shirt, the one he had worn for about 35 minutes, the perfectly clean and rewearable one, and put it into the wash.

I spent an hour tonight straightening up the living room - moving nine pairs of shoes to their designated baskets, hanging up 11 fleeces and raincoats and other jackets, sorting through the school papers and mail and books and catalogs, and picking up every imaginable sort of trash, some from under the couch which has been in its current spot for less than 48 hours.

People always say, “Oh, you must feel like Sisyphus.” It’s a favorite expression people toss at mothers of small children. But according to Camus, that is wrong. I remember reading The Myth of Sisyphus very, very well, because I didn’t understand the end of it (right here, I kid you not, the computer just froze, twice, and I thought the post was lost - which just further negates the Sisyphus thing).  According to Camus,  “one must imagine Sisyphus happy” as “The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.”

Could I make some soup in that crock?