girlfiend

I haven’t done one of these in a few years.

1. What did you do in 2009 that you’d never done before?

I unintentionally got pregnant

2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

I’m not a resolution maker and I don’t know that I’ll start now, but there are ideas I’m tossing around.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

My friend Ellen, Doodlebug, my sister-in-law

4. Did anyone close to you die?

I think 2009 was funeral free for us, but my internet friend lost her mother.

5. What countries did you visit?

Ha. We made it as far as New Hampshire.

6. What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?

More patience with my (asshole) 3 (soon to be 4) year old.

7. What dates from 2009 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

I blocked out the exact date, but in early September I walked my kids over to the Rite Aid, perused the selection for the cheapest 2 pack, brought home and took the positive pregnancy test

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

I’m not sure. I completed a sewing class and a pair of pajamas for F. I started and completed several complicated sewing projects. I read more books than I’ve read the previous 3 or 4 years. I actually completed the  number of gym visits I needed to get my reimbursement from insurance for the first time since F was born.  I got very good at couponing and managing our food budget. I’m managing my own time better, which I should give myself credit for.

9. What was your biggest failure?

I wish I’d been a better mother at times. I’m not proud of the way I react to F sometimes. I know it’s just a stage, and underneath he’s still the sweetest kid, but my god, I want to fucking kill him sometimes.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

Nothing major, but my asthma was pretty bad the past few months. The last lung function test I took put me at 60% capacity.  I had a freak intestinal infection over the summer that landed me in the ER, the antibiotic combination made me puke for months, then ooops! I found out maybe some of that puking was related to my surprise pregnancy.

11. What was the best thing you bought?

I love the desk I bought at a flea market. Also, our giant, gas guzzling 8 seater car is pretty sweet too. And the oven that doesn’t lock by itself is a winner. And the toilet that doesn’t run for hours is lovely. I’m also pretty fond of the new roof that doesn’t leak. There was a very cute shirt from the Gap too.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?

My husband is fantastic.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?

Mine. The Fiendling’s. Mine in reaction to the Fiendling. Family members I am not allowed to write about.

14. Where did most of your money go?

Bills. Lots and lots of bills. Financially, 2009 was a rough year until we got our tax return and it wasn’t any more.

15. What did you get really excited about?

My kids have finally started playing together. It is a beautiful thing when it doesn’t result in screaming within the first 5 minutes.

16. What song will always remind you of 2009?

Loving You as sung by John Stamos’s brother on South Park.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:

– happier or sadder? Happier, sadder, somewhere in between. Happier now than I was earlier in the year.
– thinner or fatter? More pregnant.
– richer or poorer? Richer. Last year this was a very tough time for us.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?

I wish I’d spent more time with my friends.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?

I wish I’d spent less time feeling irritated and/or angry

20. How did you spend Christmas?

We spent Christmas Eve at home, a tradition I hope to keep. My parents came over Christmas morning to watch the kids open presents then we went to my sister-in-law’s for dinner.

21. Did you fall in love in 2009?
Not really.

22. What was your favorite TV program?

Everything I watch is on Netflix or Hulu. I loved Friday Night Lights, Battlestar Galactica, Mad Men and LOST.

23. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?

No, but I’ve unfortunately been unable to let go of some grudges.

24. What was the best book you read?

I LOVED A Homemade Life by Molly Wizenberg,  and really liked The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer, and Olive Kitteredge by Elizabeth Strout.

I5. What was your greatest musical discovery?

I’m too old to discover anything. I’m stuck in a musical rut.

26. What did you want and get?

An ice cream maker, a big cast  iron pan, better rolling pin, sewing lessons, and I can now bake a successful loaf of bread just about every time.

27. What did you want and not get?

A live in nanny.

28. What was your favorite film of this year?

We watch a lot of TV and not too many movies. I liked Julie and Julia (hated the book about the blog, liked Julia Child’s book) which I just watched the other night when B was out. Food, Inc. made me feel pretty smug about our eating habits.

29. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

B threw me a belated 30th birthday party the night before I turned 31.

30. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

I wish I’d had it in me to write more.

31. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2009?

I rediscovered the Gap this summer, since I finally felt thin enough to shop somewhere other than Old Navy, but now I’m pregnant again. I’m just wearing the same damn maternity clothes and sneakers I’ve been wearing since I got pregnant in 2005.  And the giant wool sweaters I’ve had since college. Can’t forget those.

32. What kept you sane?

My husband, my (internet, mostly)friends, my asthma inhalers.

33. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

Tim Riggins from Friday Night Lights.

34. What political issue stirred you the most?

Issues? My friend from the playground summed it up pretty nicely here.  Add pregnancy to the mix and I’m utterly useless in adult conversation

35. Who did you miss?

My friends. I went for months without seeing friends who live a few blocks away.

36. Who was the best new person you met?

I don’t know if I’ve met anyone new this year aside from reading a few new blogs.

37. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2009.

Life lessons? Ummm.  If you’re learning to bake bread  start with white bread. Don’t forget to put the presser foot down on the sewing machine.

38. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.

Drawing a blank.  The only lyric that comes to mind is, “My mommy doesn’t lick me. Even when I’m sticky.”

The baby’s evaluation went well, I guess, and he’s due to receive services.  We live in a nice (white!) part of the city so his case manager informed us that he should be assigned a speech therapist pretty quickly. In some parts of the city it takes weeks or months to find the appropriate (willing) therapist.

The Fiendling is still sleeping in my bed. It’s been weeks, and most nights he doesn’t even bother falling asleep in his own bed. As soon as we leave his room he walks down the stairs, announces he’s getting in our bed, tucks himself in and goes to sleep. If we move him back upstairs he comes back down. I’ve been sleeping okay with him in bed so it’s not too bothersome. I just wonder how long it will last.

We go through an insane amount of eggs. If I’m doing a lot of baking we can easily go through a carton of 18 in a week. Eggs used to languish in my refrigerator for months, so this is taking some getting used to.  Our every other week egg share is not enough.

I’m trying to sell our Joovy Caboose stroller on craigslist. I hate it. I seriously hate it. I’m sure that it’s a great stroller for some people, but we are outdoorsy people who walk all over the place and the Joovy is best for people who mostly walk in malls, museums and parking lots. It sucks for bumby sidewalks, gravel paths, and grass. Anyway, the stroller was barely used since I hated it and is in fantastic shape. I priced it at $90, which is less than what some people have listed and more than others. I’m in no hurry to get rid of it and I know it will sell eventually for either the price I’ve listed or $10 less. But, the emails, my god, the emails. No, I will not sell you the stroller for $40. No, I don’t need to go to a website to learn how to earn money so I don’t have to sell my stuff. No, you can’t “take it off my hands” for $70.  I looked at a Maclaren double that was listed for $120. It’s on the high end of the spectrum, but Maclarens are great, lightweight strollers. Turns out the woman was trying to sell a 10 year old stroller for $120. Seriously? The model isn’t even manufactured any more. I’m more than willing to pay a decent price for a used stroller in good shape, but this stroller was a decade old. Good luck with that.

In addition to stroller shopping we’re car shopping. Turns out our 1995 Corolla was far superior to the 2007 Corolla we bought to replace it. I’m sorry to say I just don’t love this car. I loved my 1986 Corolla more than this one. I hate car shopping, but we have to do it now while we can still get a good price for it.

Boyfiend’s birthday was last week. I ended up baking a sourdough chocolate cake with fudge icing, but initially I wanted to make a red velvet cake. The idea using all of that food coloring bothered me so I found a recipe that uses beets instead. To test it out F and I made mini cupcakes. They were so good that the boys devoured them long before we even got to the part where we made the frosting ( I still hadn’t decided between a cooked frosting or a cream cheese frosting.) I give the beet cupcakes two enthusiastic thumbs up even though the reddish, purplish batter turned brown when it was baked.

My aunt gave me a stovetop cappuccino maker a while back.  The first time I used it the coffee overflowed and put out the burner. It was messy and irritating so I put it away and forgot about it. Yesterday I pulled it out and gave it another go. The first attempt was slightly disastrous- slightly because I caught the overflow before the mess was made. But I tried again and made a perfectly acceptable cappuccino. This morning it was a mess and I ended up drinking coffee flavored hot milk. I can’t decide if the pot is defective or if I am.

I’ve been knitting a lot. I’ve made a bunch of cute little baby skull hats and I’m making a cute striped pinwheel sweater right now. I should post pictures some time.

I’m taking a sewing class too. We haven’t actually started sewing yet since our last class was canceled because the instructor was sick, but I have high hopes that I may actually conquer the sewing machine.

So what’s up with you?

A few days ago I went to log in to my breastfeeding website and found I was locked out. I feared that I had been fired for not posting for months. I tried to log in to the food site and found I was locked out of that one too. My name had been removed from all of the posts and I was no longer listed as the author. I did a quick google search and found nothing, but a search on Twitter came up with a tweet about 451press going under. A day later there was more information. Some people had even received official emails about the network closing. I had not. So it’s a good news/bad news kind of thing. I’m out $50 a month, but at least I wasn’t fired.

My plan, once I’m able to force myself through this dry spell, is to put the assorted breastfeeding and cooking posts back here where they used to be. There’s someone who gets to this site using my meatloaf recipe as a bookmark, and I still get several hits a week for Lidia’s Eggplant and Country Bread Lasagna. Great recipe. Cook it when it’s not so hot using all of your fresh garden tomatoes for the marinara. I also have a giveaway for an alcohol test strip kit for breastmilk.

I don’t what I’m going to do about the small income. It wasn’t much, but it did fund all of the outrageously expensive phthalate, paraben, sodium lauryl/laureth sulfate, PABA, formaldehyde, Polyethylene glycol, Octyl methoxycinnamate, and oxybenzone (among others) free soaps and sunscreens for the children. I’d add ads here, but I don’t think I’d make any money.

In other news I still can’t drink. Well, to be fair, I haven’t tried to drink since last Thursday when four sips of wine made me violently ill and I think I may wait a few more days to try again. I am bitter and I fear people are starting to think I am pregnant. I am not pregnant.

I like this one, but I need to replace the header which means I need to install my outdated copy of photoshop on one of the computers. and then I need to learn how to use it.

unless someone wants to make me a header. anyone?

I updated wordpress last week and now all of the themes I attempted to install in the past actually work. I think I’ll try this one for a bit. If you’re reading the feed click over and let me know if you hate it.

Lora at Jakezilla has bestowed upon me The Proximity Award for blogs which: “…invest and believe in Proximity; Nearness in space, time and relationships. These blogs are exceedingly charming. These kind bloggers aim to find and to be friends. Our hope is that when the ribbons of these prizes are cut, even more friendships are propagated. Please give more attention to these writers! Deliver this award to 8 bloggers, who must then chose 8 more and include this text into the body of their award.”

This was awarded to me well over a month ago. I am, as usual, a little late on the follow through. But since I appreciate the award I’m going to pass this award on to some other bloggers.

1. Kim at The Yummy Mummy Cooks Gourmet- The stories about her girls are hilarious. All of the tampon and maxi pad art make me even more grateful to have boys. But her recipes are where it’s at. I want to cook like her when I grow up, and my children like it. Kim is going through a rough time right now, but her writing hasn’t suffered.

2. Gina, The Feminist Breeder- I got to “know” Gina through posting on my not-nearly-as-batshit-crazy-as-the-last-one baby board. On the board she had very strong opinions (that I mostly agreed with! remember this picture?) and never failed to offend someone (who inevitably deserved to be offended) with her opinions. Her blog is smart, funny, and opinionated.

3. Stefani at Blue Yonder has a beautiful blog. She’s a mom to three boys and her creativity is endless. Her writing is inspirational, and if bored, jaded me refers to someone as an inspiration you know it must be good. She almost makes me want to homeschool.

Speaking of inspirational, I’ve inexplicably started reading and enjoying a few Christian bloggers. Ordinarily I wouldn’t admit to this, but it seems to fit into the theme of the award. I mean seriously, me? Jaded, Jewish, trucker-mouth me reading Christians? It makes me wonder what the hell is going on with me, but instead of reading to mock I’m reading because I’m interested.

4. Crystal at Money Saving Mom has, as the blog name suggests, saved me a ton of money. The weekly coupon match-ups have helped cut my grocery bill in half. Thanks to her daily links to giveaways I get a ton of free stuff in the mail, from granola bars to reusable bags. (Her other blog, Biblical Womanhood, is the one I’m always surprised to enjoy.)

5. Sara at Walk Slowly, Live Wildly is the other Christian blogger I really enjoy reading. Her blogging has been sporadic, lately, but when she writes it’s worth reading. I’m most impressed by how she’s able to live such a green existence, how she’s able to so effectively minimize the impact her family makes on the earth. (Thanks, E for turning me on to the blog.)

Getting away from the religion, here are a few more. My children are losing patience with me so these will be brief.

6. caro at new pants is a good writer. I like her blog.

7. Punky Mama lives in my neighborhood. I see her and her two boys at the playground.

8. Mrs. T at Chuchería reminds me of why I both miss and don’t miss teaching.

So there you have it. Check out these blogs if you’re not reading them already, and thanks Lora for the award.

It’s that time of year again. Leave a comment and let me know what you’re reading.

At some point someone hacked my blog. Nothing showed up on the blog itself so aside from some things that had been broken and I couldn’t figure out how to fix I had no idea. But some nice guy emailed me to tell me that he found my blog searching for webmaster tools and the source code showed a ton of invisible spam links. I attempted to upgrade my version of wordpress myself and failed miserably so I recruited Mix who patiently worked through it all with me. Friday night, Mix, Boyfiend and I spent the evening searching for cars and upgrading wordpress. We’re party animals.

We found and deleted the invisible links, upgraded to WP 2.whatever it is these days and all was well. Until yesterday when I checked my stats and saw I had something like a kajillion page views from people searching for ring tones. I followed the referrer pages to the various Google searches. Each search landed me on the front page of the blog- no mention of N@kia, Ericcs@n, or T-M@bile to be found. Viewing the source code also showed nothing. I went back to the Google searches and viewed the cached pages. Somehow, whoever hacked my blog was able to actually replace it with something else entirely.

Freaky shit. Anyway, it seems to be fixed now. The cache is still screwy, but I can’t find anything in the site itself. I feel sorry for the people who have come here searching for Christian ring tones. They are definitely in the wrong place.

Last night I was checking my various blog stats and my page views here were way higher than usual. This is not an especially popular blog. I can’t speak for the number of people who read the RSS feeds, but I generally have between 30 and 50 visitors a day and a slightly higher number of page views. On the weekends the numbers tend to drop. The same is true for the other updated blogs I write, though the numbers are definitely lower. My most popular blog of the others is the breastfeeding blog and I only tend to average 15 visits a day during the week and maybe 5 or 6 during the weekend.

But back to this blog. Yesterday I had an average number of unique visits but the page views were nuts. 36 visitors and more than 300 page views. I checked out the details and saw that someone local who got here from my never updated 50 Books blog and read at least three years worth of posts in order. And they were still reading! As I refreshed the page I could see what time period they were up to. It was fascinating. I was intrigued and horrified. They’d been reading for an hour and a half when I first started obsessing and kept going for another hour.

I know it’s not unusual to read through someone’s archives. I’ve found bloggers I liked and started back at the beginning to catch up. And I’ve noticed people reading through all my archives in the past.  But most of those people lived in other places. It’s weird when that person lives in the same city. I hope that if it’s someone I know they leave a comment or send an email to say hi.

Because I saw it over at Fraulein’s place I’m going to completely ignore the fact that I’ve been neglecting this blog in favor of posting recipes and stuff about boobs and banned books at my numerous other blogs and beg you to come out from behind your feed readers and say hello in the comments.

Or something. You don’t have to say hi. You can tell me about your boobs. Or a recipe. Or a good book you’ve read. Or you could just tell me to shut up about comments and tell you a funny story about my mother. Anyway, comment away. My self-esteem depends on it.