I give up!

Last night I went to bed to the sound of Phoebe retching up grass onto the floor and this morning I woke up to Bailey's late night accident in the kitchen.  That was it.  The last straw.  I'm done with trying to keep this house straight.

You know the way Dexter covers an entire room with and all of its contents with clear plastic before he slices someone up to bits?  Well I'm gonna Dexter-ize my house.  I have decided to cover the interior of my home in plastic so that I can clean it up so well not even the police would be able to determine what I do in here.  I'm not doing this so I can cut people up in my spare time, but instead so I can keep my house clean.  It would catch all of the animal hair, animal accidents, and animal stomach contents.  All I would have to do to clean would be to hose it down!  If it got really bad, I could tear it down and start fresh!

Granted, the furniture would be very uncomfortable on hot days but otherwise I see no flaws in this plan.

I used to be a domestic goddess

I love to cook.  I collect all kinds of cookbooks and enjoy reading them as if they are novels.  I also used to cook all the time and for the most part, everything turned out quite yummy.  I felt such a sense of accomplishment when people would ask me for my recipes.

Then something extraordinary happened...I completely forgot how to cook.  I can't fix a thing.  Any time I want to boil an egg I have to look it up.  I started a small grease fire while burning up some bacon the other day.  I attempted a grilled cheese sandwich and turned it into a blackened grilled cheese (three ingredients:  cheese, bread, and butter and I still managed it render it inedible!).  I was having a guy friend over and decided to make baked spaghetti.  My spaghetti was so hard I thought we would have to make emergency trips to the dentist.  Tonight I was making brownies to give to a friend who recently lost her mother.  I was supposed to make a full meal but I have lost all confidence and figured I could handle adding some water to a mix in order to create some brownies.  I mixed everything together, put the dish in the oven and waited the required 45 minutes.  I even remembered to do the clean toothpick test to make sure they were done.  I let them cool, frosted them, and then decided to try one before giving them away.  Goo.  I managed to make brownie goo.  The edges are done.  But how would it look to give someone just brownie edges?  Hi, here are your brownies I slaved over but you only get the outside of them because I don't care enough to give you all of the brownies.   

It's a wonder I don't starve to death (quick...hide the McDonald's bag!).  I'm glad nobody depends on me for nourishment...Bailey and Phoebe's food comes premade in bags and cans.  That is pretty difficult to screw up.  I might have to reduce myself to eating cereal for the rest of my life (although I'm sure if there is a way to screw up Rice Chex and milk, I'll figure it out!).

A yard sale kind of day

About a month ago I drove past a trailer park that was having a yard sale.  After I laughed uproariously at the thought of people selling stuff that they had probably bought at a yard sale (yes, this is one of the many reasons I am probably going to hell...oh well) I decided that I needed to have a yard sale.  If people were willing to by trailer park crap, I was sure they would be willing to buy my crap!

I talked my mom into hosting the yard sale.  We discuss having a yard sale at least once a year and this is the first time in a decade that we actually pulled it all together.  At our last yard sale one of my best friends brought all of her used underwear to sell.  I was shocked...I would never buy a stranger's used underwear...I mean you can buy it pretty cheap (and most importantly - unworn!) at WalMart already.  This wasn't fancy stuff, it was plain white cotton undies.  Guess what people swarmed all over?  That's right, her underwear.  She sold every last pair immediately.  I still don't have the gumption to sell my worn out panties.

On the actual yard sale day yesterday, people started stopping by 40 minutes before the actual start time (which is normal...which is why we set up 45 minutes early).  Yard salers are an entirely different breed of person.  They all knew each other, if something was more than a $1 they didn't want it, and many were looking for hidden treasures they could sell for a fortune on eBay.  Unfortunately for them we aren't stupid and sold that stuff ourselves on eBay long ago.  They rifled through our junk, fondled everything, and bought very little.  The stuff that I thought would sell didn't and the essentially garbage that I put out did sell (Used Christmas cards?  One lady bought them ALL...but expensive handbags that I was selling for $3?  Now at Goodwill).

The negotiators always make me laugh.  A woman looked at mom's Pottery Barn rugs.  There were three rugs and mom had priced them at $5 each.  This woman made an offer we couldn't refuse, "I only want two rugs, will you take $10 for them?"  Um, yes. 

We promised that we would take nothing back home so we piled everything into cars to haul to Goodwill.  As we were getting ready to leave a tremendous tractor trailer slowly inched its way down mom's neighborhood street.   People were coming out to see why this truck was crawling down the street (not much happens in mom's neighborhood...).  They were selling furniture off the back of the truck.  They gave us some made up spiel about why they had all of this high end furniture that they were selling off the back of the truck.  Being a sucker for any type of shopping I climbed aboard to check out their wares (after I made the man reassure me that he wasn't going to trap me in there and sell me into slavery or something like that).  I am now the proud owner of a settee that I bought from clean cut gypsies out of the back of a truck.  I guess my next purchase will be a designer watch that I buy out of some guy's trench coat.

Those yard sale dollars I earned lasted all of 10 minutes. 

Oh, and the new settee is completely unusable because Phoebe immediately claimed it as her own.

Junk

I seem to be on just about every mailing list out there.  My mailbox is filled with useless information on a daily basis.  I get magazines, catalogs, credit card offers, books the size of novels full of numbers I don't understand (from my 401b provider), and letters from Publishers Clearing House telling me that I "could be a winner" if I subscribe to more magazines.  I also get fliers from the guy who did my mortgage loan (I haven't been here that long...so no, I am not selling yet), every new Chinese restaurant within a 10 mile radius, and advertisements offering me more student loans (as if I needed to owe more).  I decided to teach all these mailbox cloggers a lesson by not accepting their mail.  I decided to follow Nancy Reagan's advice to just say NO.  I rifle through it and take what I need, putting the rest back in the box.  Take that you junk mailing tree killers!

Fast forward to the end of the week.  My mailbox is overflowing, my mailman has probably crammed in some hate mail (but I wouldn't know it), and I can't mail anything until I empty the box.

Junk mail:  1                  Kristin: 0

Typical.

New extreme sport

I haven't written in a while because all I do anymore is go to work, go to the gym, and sleep.  I can't write about my job, I like being employed.  Although I have plenty of posts in my head about the gym, I am sure most of you are tired of those by now.  And I'm not going to write about sleep (or lack thereof...that would just be boring).  If I think of something that I think might be remotely entertaining, I save it for my new column. I used to write as a form of procrastination while I was working on another degree, but I don't have homework to put off since the degree is finished.  So those are my excuses for avoiding my blog.  I'm sorry.

Now, onto a new post about nothing.

There seems to be a new extreme sport that has come about in the Star City of the South.  The rules appear to be very easy to follow....

1.  Make sure you are either wearing all black (or at least dark colors, navy and gray work well too, just no white or yellow or anything).  If you are wearing a hoodie, make sure the hood is over your head.

2.  Go to a neighborhood after dark that doesn't have streetlights.  If it has narrow streets with lots of curves and hills, you get bonus points.

3.  Start walking.  It's even better if you can do this with friends so that you can all spread out across the street.  And whatever you do, don't carry a flashlight or walk on the correct side of the street so that you can see traffic.  That takes the fun out of the game.

4.  Try not to get hit by a car.

Although the point of this new game may be to get smooshed by a driver with poor night vision (me).  That way you can sue for millions provided you survive the encounter with the hood of my Honda.  Not that you would get any millions from me.  You would be lucky to get a couple hundred.  But the evil part of me (and that is a very large part) hopes you do get creamed.  The world needs fewer idiots. 

Auto-dial

When I go to bed at night, I plug in my phone and set it on "calls only" so that I don't hear all of its beeps, bloops, and blips.  I also do not lock the keyboard because I know that if I do receive a call that wakes me, my sleep fogged mind can barely figure out how to answer much less be able to unlock it before answering.  I learned the hard way to lock the keyboard after my handbag called my sister's boyfriend one too many times....

Early this morning my phone rang and once I processed what the sound was, I panicked.  I immediately wondered who had died.  Did it cross my mind that it could have been a wrong number?  Nope...I jumped directly to death.  Must be the pessimist in me.  I root around for my phone but can't find it.  As the anxiety increases with each chime, I finally find it under Bailey (don't ask me how it got there).  I see it is my aunt in North Carolina and I assume that my entire family here had died and that was why she was calling me and not my mom.  Unfortunately in all of this I miss the call and have to call her back.

"Hello?"
"What did you need?  Why did you call me?" I urgently ask.
"What?  I called you because you called me a half hour ago."
"No I didn't, I was sound asleep.  And I specifically asked the doctor NOT to give me Ambien to keep this from happening...."
"Yes, you did call and when I answered I just heard muffled sounds."
"Wait a minute" and I look down at Bailey....

Luckily my aunt is an early riser and has a good sense of humor.