Tj from Zazzafooky is my guest poster for today. Hope you enjoy her funny post! I’m moving moving moving!

Sucking It Up

Today I’m recalling a story from way back when the kid was still just a wee-newborn. It was cold season and she got one. I was sent home from the hospital with a little baby care kit which included one of those rubber nose suckers. You know the ones, that look like mini turkey basters? Anyway, she was screaming bloody murder and the nose sucker wasn’t working for shit. My poor little baby was miserable and there was nothing I could do.

I finally decided a nice soothing bath was in order and maybe some of the steam generated would clear up her nose. I got in the bath with her and I’m doing my best to calm her down and make her more comfortable but nothing is working. I tried the nose sucker again but to no avail. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. Her discomfort was killing me. I pulled her to me, placed my mouth over her nose and with the force and enthusiasm it takes to get that last little bit of milkshake through the straw I sucked all the boogars right of her nose. Not realizing my genius plan would actually work I failed to prepare and found myself holding on to a mouthful of baby boogars. I had to jump from the tub to the sink to spit. GAK! It worked though. The screaming and crying stopped and she fell fast asleep.

The memory flooded back because it’s cold season again. I look at her now and wonder if would do the same thing all over again. She’s bigger now which means bigger boogars. GROSS.

I told the kid the story about a year ago and every now and then she tells people “my mommy is so gross, she sucked boogars out of my nose, ewwwwwww.” Thanks a lot kid, you little ingrate!

I’m sitting squished in between a stack of very large and precariously piled boxes. Not everything is packed, but enough is boxed up that I feel good about how tomorrow will go. In that department anyway. I have one friend coming to help me unpack, but only two guys coming to help haul our junk to the new house. That stresses me out a bit. The trouble is that Chris works swing shift and so we have to move during the day and not a whole lot of people are around at ten am. So they say. According to How Things Are Run a third of this base should be on swings, so there should be an entire third of the base available to help out, but not many people are stepping up. My only real concern is trying to get the piano onto the truck. In my opinion that is a four or five man job, not a three men and wussy me job. So this could be interesting.

I have a few more boxes I need to fill before tomorrow but I can’t convince both kids to sleep at the same time and the house in such disarray there really isn’t any safe place to set Maggie down. I have feeling it will have to wait until bedtime, which, since Jonas just opted to take his siesta at four in stead of one, will probably be pretty late. I think I’m going to let him have another ten minutes then wake him up.

Man, I’m bored! I hate being stuck in between times. I just want to get going and move things now. We are so anxious to get moved in that we are already watering the very dry, neglected lawn. My car is packed full of kitchen stuff just waiting for me to wake up and take the kids to my friend’s house so I can haul all of the stuff inside where I have another friend waiting to unpack it into my new cupboards. Thank heaven for friends or I’d seriously get nothing done.

Well, I need to get on the phone and see if I can scrounge up another herculean specimen of piano moving strength to help out. So that’s that. You’ll have a guest poster tomorrow

Today I ate chicken feet.

Ok, I ate a bite and decided that it was just too gross to continue even though my crazy sister in-law was snarfing them like they were oreos. They taste, well, just like chicken. The trouble with these feet are that they are, well, feet. Feet are quite tendony and have bones running through them and so while the taste won’t make you gag, the texture will. I think it is best described as smooshy yet crunchy, which I realize is a contradiction in terms, but maybe that’s why it’s so hard to handle. (Jellyfish are actually similar in texture only more smooshy less crunchy.) Texture really freaks me out. I won’t cook anything but chicken breasts, and even then I have to cut every trace of fat off of them because gristle and tendon gross me out to no end. The mere thought of eating anyting like that is enough to make my stomach heave. But sometimes you do things you wouldn’t normally do for the bragging rights. I can now say, “I ate chicken feet.”

So how did I come to be eating feet on such a mild Sunday morning? Well, my other sister in-law got married yesterday morning, and now that all the wedding hoopla is behind us we still had a horde of people visiting at my in-law’s house so my brother in-law’s father, who is Chinese and a very sweet guy, decided to treat us all to a dim sum brunch. In San Jose. So we drove forty-five minutes to eat chicken feet.

We had custards, sea bass and sharkfin, crab and shrimp thingies wrapped in noodles and it was all very good. The one thing I didn’t try were the baby octopuses, so I can’t tell you how they were, but they were on the table, and I saw them, and cringed, but hey, I had just eaten a chicken foot. My adventure quota was filled for the day.

I am blogging from my in-law’s house today. What was originally an overnight trip has turned into a three night extended stay, and I am grateful to be out of my house which looks like a bomb went off what with all of the packing and moving and piles for the thrift store and such flung about. Tomorrow I have to go home and face reality and finish packing so I can move on Tuesday. Remember how I said we were moving on Thursday? I changed my mind. Why do tomorrow what you can do today? I hate living in limbo so I upped the move date so we could get things done before I went insane in the mess.

So here I am. Chicken feet traveling through my digestive system.

Holy cow people. I am so out of it. Just in case you guys are thinking that everything is all roses here at Lou’s place, I am here to inform you that while I am tickled to death to be moving into this new place, several other things have been going on that I haven’t had the energy to blog about yet. Now that I am sitting down typing I am noticing that my right contact is a bit blurry, so it is really weird to look at the screen and try to read what I am writng.

To begin with, my friend gave Maggie the Cold From Hell and Maggie shared it with me. So I had about four days of sleep deprivation while Maggie went through the worst of it, and then about five more sleepless nights while I’ve been dealing with it. I wasn’t aware that much snot could come out of one little baby. When I was young and ignorant I swore up and down that no child of mine would run around with bogies smeared across her face and green goobs everywhere. However, I would have to glue a tissue to my hand to even have a prayer of keeping her snot free so for now, I just watch her crawling around the floor looking very much like Charlie Chaplain with a little green mustache perched above her upper lip. Very cute, very demure. It’s really fun when I do work up the energy to go wipe her schnoz. Apparently she is quite attached to her boogers, because she screams bloody murder and turns a simple nose wipe into a three minute event that usually ends with the bogies smeared across her cheeks and into her hair and big fat tears rolling down her cheeks, which we all know only serve to produce more snot and lands me right back where I started.

My favorite part of this whole cold thing has got to be the weird side effect that I have dubbed “boogerboob”. Since Maggie is still nursing, and can’t breathe through her nose while she eats she basically blows her nose into my chest while she nurses. Boogers and Nosh anyone?

I really thought I wasn’t going to get the full effect of this cold. I had about four days of pre-cold where my throat was itchy and my glands were swollen and I had a horrible headache, but I thought I would be just fine even though my entire body was screaming to be put to bed and let alone. I thought this until late Saturday night when I was up preparing to speak in church the next morning and I started to feel even worse. I was so nervous about being late to church (because, you know, it looks really pathetic when the speaker is late) that I woke up every half an hour to check the clock and by five a.m. my throat had gone from itchy to I Want To Die Every Time I Swallow. I got up and took some Tylenol, which was painful. While finding the Tylenol I found some leftover Percocet and very seriously thought about taking some of that, because really truly, I was in pain, and not only does Percocet kill pain, but it makes me very, very happy. I’d be a lot less nervous with a Percocet in me. The reasonable person inside told me that it would not be wise to be high while speaking in church, even if I would be happy and pain free, I would probably be a little too relaxed, and people, there is a reason we have the Super-Ego and Ego to keep the Id in check. I need mine functioning in public or I can guarantee I would land myself in trouble. This is also one of the reasons I don’t drink. I don’t even want to think about me drunk. Truly yikes.

So why, if this is the case, has the good little Mormon girl been in the liquor store not once, but three times this week? Why because liquor stores have the best boxes for moving! They are free and small enough to carry while still being sturdy enough to shove lots of junk into without bursting open. So they advertise Jack Daniels and Triple Distilled Gin (what in the heck does triple distilled mean?). So what if my future neighbors see me hauling this stuff inside and think, “Whoaaaa, our new neighbor must be a total lush!” They’s good boxes. *hic*

So here I am, packing up my liquor boxes, wetting my pants every time I blow my red, miserable nose, and coughing up a lung. All this joy and almost the entire house is ready to be moved. We upped the moving day to Tuesday, so now all we have to do is find a few able bodied young men and somebody with a truck Oh, and get through my sister in-law’s wedding which is this weekend, and which will probably kill me with all of the extra relatives and events and the fact that I’m not likely to get any sleep for yet another three days, because people, I have to do the flowers which will add to the already guaranteed allergy attack I have every time I visit my in-laws. Ha ha ha ha ha they’re coming to take me away!

We just found out that the housing office has a house for us! It is a one level house, not too much bigger than the one we have now, but with some distinctly wonderful features that our current little townhouse lacks.

First and foremost, it has a huge, beautiful backyard. Right now the backyard has no gardening going on, so it will be fun to start with a clean slate in that department. It does have one tree, and the minute Chris and I saw it we said in unison, “Look at that climbing tree!” Because, truly, it is the most beautiful climbing tree I have ever seen and it is in MY future backyard. Bliss, I tell you, bliss.

Secondly, there is a large one car garage. Currently I park in a lot and walk about ten yards to my front door, which isn’t a big deal unless I have a trunk full of groceries and two sleeping children in the car. You see, while the workout isn’t so bad, it is technically illegal for me to leave one of the children unsupervised while I walk that distance to my front door to drop one of them off. And while you think that no one would ever get busted for that, I had a friend who did get busted for that and in very similar circumstances, and it wasn’t funny at all. So now I am paranoid, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to ruin one of their naps (and the rest of my day) by waking Jonas up and making him walk with me. I’ve been doing this thing where I walk Maggie to the front walk casting furtive glances behind me, and leave her there in her carseat and then go back for Jonas because this way, neither of them is out of my line of sight, so at least I’d have that going for me if an MP decided to be a jerk and bust me for it. Now, with a garage, I could let them sleep in there until they woke up if I felt so inclined, and no one would ever know.

Another favorite feature of mine is the laundry room. Right now we have a laundry hall and it is so narrow it took some serious contorting to remove a load of clothes from the dryer when I was pregnant. It is always a mess because we have attempted to store all of the cleaning supplies and computer supplies in the tiny cupboards above the washer dryer and this stuff doesn’t actually fit in those cupboards. The new laundry room is and actual room that is attached to the garage and it has a nook with many, many shelves that will fit the computer and hold all of the computer stuff and more (our computer is currently located in our dining room and Maggie is loving yanking on the cords and trying to chew on live wires). It also has a lovely counter with several large cupboards above and below it and the space for a small table or shelf or something. This area is going to be my scrap space! I am SO TOTALLY STOKED about this! My scrap stuff is currently in a weird closet under the stairs and every time I have to venture into that tiny little mess to retrieve something I feel very much like Harry Potter locked in his Cupboard Under The Stairs. Then I have to take my junk out of there and take over the kitchen table, which means that no one gets to eat while I am in a creative mood. This new house will be the end of all that. I have a feeling that the laundry will be my favorite room!

The bedrooms are comparable, so there is no real loss or gain there. We have several wonderful closets throughout the house for storage, and the kitchen is a larger and more open, friendly space than the hall style kitchen I have right now. And most of the new house has carpet instead of the disgusting linoleum that we have in our entire house currently. Although carpet can be a pain to keep clean with two little kids, I am happy that Maggie will have something softer than linoleum over concrete to fall on as she learns to walk. Since we won’t need the rug we keep in the living room we will move it to the dining room to be destroyed as our children drop their spaghetti dinners on it.

So I am pretty excited, if you couldn’t tell. Today I am off to find boxes so I can start packing. The one downer to all of this is that we have to move ourselves. The great thing is that we have a lot of friends who will help us and this gives me opportunity to do some serious de-junking. (Which is good because if we want to do anything special for Christmas we will need some money from a rummage sale!) We move September first! I am feeling very blessed.

I am feeling particularly moody this evening and since I have no plans I thought it would be the perfect evening to plant myself on the couch and watch Sense & Sensibility. It’s one of my favorite movies, very well acted and beautifully done, and when I am in moods like this I really enjoy being able to escape into Jane Austen’s world for a few hours. I also enjoy triumphing with Elinor and muttering curses at Marianne because she so does not deserve Col. Brandon, who I am actually in love with, and plan to marry. So there.

Anyway. I was going to watch my movie, but I couldn’t find the case, which is weird because we only keep DVDs in two places: in my closet or on the entertainment center. It took me ten minutes to find it stashed between The Secret Garden and To Kill A Mockingbird on my bookshelf of favorites. No matter, I thought. I found it and now I can watch. I turned on all of the electronic stuff, explained to Maggie that we were going to watch a chick flik together, squatted down, opened the case and found no disc inside it.

I have looked everywhere I can think of. I’ve opened half of the cases in my closet and it’s not in any of them. I have spent over an HOUR searching for my movie and I still don’t get to watch it. Instead, I am listing to Maggie growl at me and Jonas whine because I refused to let him nap past four o’clock. It’s just not right.

I am sure this is Chris’ doing. He has a bad habit of not putting DVDs away in their cases and then defending himself by accusing me of doing the same thing, which I do not, thank you very much. And I know he hates this movie. I called him at work and he has no idea where it is. So here I sit listening to the neighbor’s TV blasting through our tissue paper walls instead of listening to my own.

It’s been an uneventful day. I spent the morning cleaning out the kitchen pantry. It turns out that we’ve been moving the same collection of canned goods around for the past three or four moves. They never get eaten, just dutifully shelved when we move in, and then forgotten. I have decided that this will not happen with this upcoming move. No spoiled food is welcome in our new house. The pantry actually looks really sparse now since I threw out the eleven boxes of cereal with half a bowl’s worth crumbling to dust inside (I kid you not).

I found a can of Cream of Mushroom soup that I know is older than Jonas and I am pretty sure has actually been moving around with us for the past four years. I finally threw away stuff that went bad in 2002 and realized that the food basket Chris’ squadron gave us for Christmas last year had fake potatoes (eeech), stuffing and yams that went bad prior to last Christmas. I suppose this means it is a good thing I forgot about them in my postpartum haze and never cooked them. We could have died of food poisoning and it would have been the military’s fault.

I’m going to go see if my movie is in the other half of the collection in my closet. If not, I really don’t know what to do with myself tonight.

1: Over heard at my house lately:

“It’s not fair that you get to go give blood and I have to watch the children.”
“You would rather give blood than watch the kids?”
“Yes. I am saying I would rather open a vein than watch these snarling beasts.”

“I know you’re hormonally challenged right now.”

“I look fat.”
“It’s ok. I love you anyway.”

2: Chris passed his huge air force test after weeks of study and neurotic behavior. This means he doesn’t get kicked out of the air force. I’ve never seen him walk around wringing his hands and nervously pick up every item in the house then put it back down again as he paced aimlessly. He was completely wigging out. I wasn’t nearly as worried because I was sure he’d pass it. When the call came that he had passed he ran into the kitchen, picked me up, jumped up and down for a minute then declared, “Let’s go have sex!” Which I would have were the children in bed, and had he not just given me shaken baby syndrome with all the jumping.

3: I resigned my position on the scrapbook design team I was on. I wasn’t enjoying it. I was only doing it for egotistical reasons. I liked to be able to say, “I”m on a Design Team.” Now there is nothing special about me. I’m just boring old mediocre Lou.

4: Boring Old Mediocre Lou is a little depressed. The past week has been ok- but I feel so down. It’s why I haven’t blogged much. When I’m down I don’t have much to say. If it weren’t for the questions needing to be answered there would have been nothing. The good news is, we are only in the blue phase and haven’t hit the mean reds yet. The bad news is, if I don’t pull myself out of this, they just might get here.

5: The ants have taken over the house. I’ve had the pest guy here and I’ve tried every old wives tale that’s been suggested in addition to chemicals and bug traps. No dice. I would prefer to have my home built on an cemetery than on an anthill. The ghosts would be easier to remove. On the upside,

6: Our request for a house with a backyard was approved. (Whoopee!) Now we are just waiting for the housing office to do their job and assign us one. The ants can have the house because I’m moving!

7: I promise that while I am moving (we don’t have dates yet, but I can bet I’ll be without internet for a week at least what with the cruddy local service) I will find some guest posters to keep you guys occupied. If this down streak keeps up I may have to have the guest posting start now. Ho hum.