Because that’s not awkward
Last weekend we had one of my very good friends bachelorette parties. We relived our youth by getting a limo and dancing until the wee hours of the morning. We broke it down dawg.
To really get the true bachelorette experience, I hit up Spencer gift shop before the party. For those of you that aren’t local, this store carries novelty & gag items galore. It also features some extremely edgy and might I add kinky items for those that are a little more risque. I hadn’t been in the store in a couple years but from my past experiences I knew they carried edible outerwear and I thought that it would be a great gift for the party.
While I was perusing the shelves I saw a whole bunch of bachelorette party items; bride to be sashes, penis straws, shot glasses. I found a whole section of bondage items which was a new experience since most were marked beginner. What’s advanced Lady? I was unable to find the edible section however. I wandered the store for a good 20 minutes and came to the conclusion that there was only one thing to do; Listen Lady, I was going to have to buck up and ask the 16 year old working the counter about edible underwear.
It was not one of my finer moments in life, but she was all “Oh Yea…we have that in the birthday section”. Birthday Section?????? She took me right over to the secluded corner in the store where the edible section was. Whether or not she believed my story about the candy necklace titty tassels I was purchasing being for a friend is her perogative I suppose.
SAUCY!
This summer I didn’t plant a garden. There were a couple reasons for my lack of ambition this year. One…we got a late start in the spring as we had a massive monsoon season. Two…we got bogged down putting together the WOODEN JIHADIST WEASEL! That, coupled with some other personal family crises in the early spring kept us pretty much out of the running for planting any type of veggies.
Luckily, my 82 year old grandma decided its still in her best interest to plant a gigantic garden each summer while crawling around on her very arthritic knees weeding the whole thing. I profited a whole bucket full of tomato’s out of her garden and decided to make sauce to get us through the winter.
I’ve canned sauce pretty much my whole life. When I lived at my parents house, they’d pick one weekend in the summer and designate it as sauce weekend. They’d force my brother and I to help wash, chop, strain, and mix the sauce ALL DAY LONG. We’d end up making usually between 80-100 jars of sauce for the whole year. For those of you that are unaware….that’s a lot of fucking tomatoes.
For whatever reason, when I got married I decided to take up this tradition myself. Because clearly hating it for all those years when I was younger was not enough torture, I now had to lay it on my own children as well. As soon as Cardin is old enough to wield a knife she is in on the production.
Here is a little picture by picture sequence to guide you through the action:
STEP 1: first you have to chop all the tomatoes. Taking care to remove the stems and any rotten sections; which becomes a royal pain in the ass.
STEP 2: next you have to puree the chopped tomato’s in your blender. CAUTION: do not remove your hand from the top, it is likely that tomato gunk will splatter the ceiling causing many an obsenity.
STEP 3: once the tomato’s are a nice smooth puree, pour the mixture into a bowl, straining through a fine metal strainer to catch all the guts and skin.
STEP 4: stir until your arm wants to fall off so only the puree goes into the pot. At this point you should feel free to pull out your wine and go heavy hitters with it. You’re going to have to do this stirring shit a lot more. THIS IS THE MOST NECESSARY STEP. If you are going to leave out any step make sure it is not this one.
STEP 5: once you are done to just the guts in the strainer, scoop them out and put them aside. Feel free to make art.
STEP 6: repeat steps 1-5 (mostly #4 though) over and over until you have strained all the tomato’s and your arm feels as though its made of ceramic.
STEP 7: throw a whole bunch of seasoning into the pot. We don’t measure anything, we just dump. The more the merrier. Boil this shit for 3-4 hours.
STEP 8: while it is hot, transfer this to canning jars. CAUTION LADY: hot. can burn. Put a canning top on super tight. Turn the jar over, I’m told this helps to seal the jar. I’m not really sure if it’s true but it’s what my mom always did, and her mom, and her mom….so I suppose some Italian lady knew what they were doing.
STEP 9: voila. You have just made Italian sauce via Listen Lady
WWF Style
Cardin has more toys than we know what to do with and I’m pretty sure they have started to procreate on their own now. I heard squeaking from the toy box the other day. I was growing tired of stepping on small plastic animals, Lego pieces, and the occasional fish cracker so I deemed Monday night “playroom creation night at the Mayer’s”.
You see Internet, our basement is partially finished and Brett’s man cave has been relegated to one corner of the basement now. The basement was finished when we bought the house, and in all honesty, it was one of the biggest selling points as we saw major potential in a future playroom. Up until this point, the basement potential has yet to be realized as Cardin has really been to little to be left unattended. Well….without a visit from child protective services I suppose. However, in recent weeks I’ve been letting her off the leash more and more and luckily, she comes back each time we call her.
We moved 99% of the living room toys down to the basement Monday night and gated it off so Cardin can’t wander around and play with ninja’s litter or go touch the furnace. She loves the open area and runs around the support beam. When pole dancing starts we may have a new issue on hand. It’s nice that she can have a whole room to destroy and I can have a living room to entertain people that doesn’t appear as if toys r us just vomited all over the floor.
In an effort to organize the basement, I was sitting on the floor combining bins of lego toys and I managed to dig out an old whiteboard eraser that went to Cardin’s easel; we had been in search of said eraser for month, figuring it had been consumed by the all encompassing mass of toys. I handed it to Cardin and she happily danced away with it. Unbeknownst to me, Cardin came running at me, full force, like an army brigade charging the gates of the next castle it was about to take down, and smacked me upside the head with the eraser. Leaving me in a cloud of dry erase dust, I was so shocked with the flutter of activity that I didn’t know how to respond and I sat there, a bewildered look on my face, unable to form words or reprimand.
Meanwhile, Brett had watched the whole battle scene play out and his only response was one of stifled laughter. He managed to sputter out, “Cardin, please don’t bash mommy in the head with erasers” only to crumble into another fit of laughter again. Thanks hon, for all that supportive parenting.
Listen Lady, at some point in the parenting regime I figured we’d have to tell our kids not to bite or throw balls inside the house; I did not bank on having to tell them that it is inappropriate to play WWF with erasers.
More Crack than a Plumber
Remember that whole “bad shit happens in threes”? I think we’re finally out of our rut Internet. Listen Lady, you recall Fridgemageddon and then we Dropped it Like its Hot. Well about 3 days after we replaced the hot water heater we came home to find a pool of water on the kitchen floor in front of the dishwasher. A quick search inside and it appeared that the dishwasher blew a gasket.
Let me tell you, after the redoing the bathroom window, the front landscape, fixing the fridge, and replacing the hot water tank, this lady was also blowing a gasket as we were WAY over our summer budget spending. There was no way I was calling a repair man for this job, we were fixing this dishwasher come hell or high water; I would show my own plumbers crack if needed.
Brett found a youtube video of how to replace the gasket and we made some calls to local repair shops in search of parts. Of course nobody had the gasket we needed in stock so we would need to order it. In speaking with the nice appliance people, they also informed me that more often than not the baffles need to be replaced as well. BAFFLED YET???? These pieces go on the side of the door and direct the water flow back into the dishwasher. PEACHY. How about I just use some caulk, would that work? No?
So I went onto the local big box store and ordered the appliance parts we needed. Except I had a momentary lapse in dumbness and I ordered two left handed baffles, because it seemed through the description and picture that they were interchangeable on either side of the dishwasher. I paid 6 bucks in shipping and we waited a week for all these lovely parts to arrive happily at our door.
Fast forward to last week a when the parts finally arrived. Brett tires to put the baffles in and finds that they are, in fact, not interchangeable. AWESOME. Not only did I get to pay for shipping once, I got to pay for shipping TWICE. Oh yes sir, and then I got to pay to ship the extra baffle back. I was overflowing with joy and happiness at my own stupidity at this point and banking on another week of hand washing dishes. Which was extra special since I felt like June Cleaver except I was also required to work 50 hours at my normal job.
Luckily the right handed baffle arrived much quicker than anticipated and Brett was able to get the dishwasher fixed and in working order this weekend. Cardin helped him the whole time. We are now able to run a load of dishes without the resulting swimming pool on our kitchen floor.
Perhaps the Karma gods felt that we were coming up to our 5 year anniversary in the house and they needed to shit on us all at once. In response Karma gods, I deem us fulfilled for a year of all appliance and house repair. Nothing else is allowed to crap out or die. I want to go on vacation and eat mickey bars. Capiche?
The cave of wonders
Positives of working from home:
-really short commute
-its not necessary that I brush my teeth
-bras are completely optional
Negatives of working from home:
-Pinocchio playing incessantly in the background will drive anyone mad after 5 days.
-the house looks like a bomb exploded by about 10 am
-I hear “MOMMY, MOMMY, MOMMY, MOMMY. Come play wif me” 200 times a day
Cardin’s attention span isn’t exactly long so for her to entertain herself for an entire 8 or 9 hours while I work is quite the task. She’ll go through spans where she plays alone for awhile and then she’ll go through spans where she hovers over me like a moth to a flame. Listen lady, its not exactly easy to work with a wiggly 2 year old sitting on your lap, trying to touch every button on your laptop. The other day she managed to delete all the contents of my inbox. 
In order to entertain her, I built her a cave out of couch cushions. Trust me, it was no Taj Mahal and I’m positive the Egyptians did a better job with those pyramid things, but she was stoked beyond words that this little cave was all hers. Simple things in life, right?
I dubbed it the cave of wonder because she actually fell asleep for me in there, which is unheard of. Normally when she is home with me she is like a pinball machine, bouncing from one end of the room to the other; refusing sleep as though she were on speed.
Thank you oh magical cave of wonder, I had silence for a good 2 hours.
