As a potential substitute teacher I had to attend an orientation meeting.  There were probably 100 people there.  Many people who apparently do NOT have mirrors, friends, or common sense.

Yes, I am talking to you woman in plaid corduroy pants.  What were you thinking?  And pairing them with crocs?   No honey…just…NO. 

Elderly woman who looks pretty damn good for pushing 60?  Yes M’am, you.  If you’re gonna pack your ass in those pants like a teenager, you have to lose the panty lines.  And by the way?  Those underwear were waaaaay too small for you. 

Guy with the Tom Selleck (but nothing else) mustache?  I didn’t know they still sold Drakkar Noir, do you buy it by the 55 gallon drum?

Woman from India?  We respect your culture, and your outfit is pretty cool, but all that jingly stuff was pretty distracting considering that you could not sit still.  I had a craving for ice cream for hours.

Guy in sweatsuit?  Your wife does not love you if she let you leave the house that way.

Chunky woman in too small running shorts and thong?  TMI, really.  And btw, yes, the presenter was mocking you for munching your way through the meeting.

Man who kept raising your hand to ask questions?  Shut up already.   Was that pocket protector vintage? 

Society is falling to hell one bad fashion statement at a time.  What happened to the good old days when underwear were private, clothing actually fit, and plastic shoes were only worn by dolls?   I need to carry a gavel and knock sense into people… 

As far as finding myself, my ever expanding ass is right here on the couch where it has been for years, as evidenced by the permanent butt print in the cushion.  Lest you think this implies laziness, please be aware that I administer 2 companies from this spot.  Yes, we have a home office, but my self-proclaimed life guru is up there.  We tried sharing the space once.  He likes to talk to clients, and I like to listen to Metallica. 

I’m having a harder time with “what do I want to do with my life.”  Ok, a harder time not hitting him with a baseball bat (and for that I’d probably DO life).  I’m deeply sorry if running companies, raising children, and keeping a home is not enough of a life.  I went back to school.  He kept getting me pregnant.  I’m not stupid enough to tempt fate and go back a 3rd time.  Besides, it would be to finish a business management degree.  Counselor:  Why did you drop out?  Me: to raise my children and manage my husband’s companies.  Counselor:  You manage 2 companies?  Me:  Yep, but I’m sure that I could do a much better job if only I take the rest of those classes.  Especially the gym class….     Maybe I need to find out what I’m truly good at doing.   And for that, one just needs to turn to the internet and search for a career aptitude test…

The first question on the first quiz made my eyes roll.  Are you more likely to: 1) think before you act or 2) act before you think?  Wow.  Um.  If you even got to 2) you are already a 1).  They should have put those in a different order.  I can’t even go on with their a quiz.  But, I will read question 2.  Do you like to explain things with:  1) metaphors and analogies or 2) detailed descriptions?  Ummm, 3) scathing sarcasm.  NEXT QUIZ! 

After I bit of searching, I see that most quizzes want me to pick between things I’d rather do.  None of them involve cupcakes.   Here are some jobs they thought I’d be good at.

Clergy.  Really?  Seriously?  Sister Mary Margarita at your service.  
Criminal Justice.  My first thought was prison guard.  My second thought was lunch supervisor.  My third thought was that I am never getting into Princeton, so why am I here?

To get a bigger picture, I  participated in a random sampling of tests .   What did I learn?   That my aura color is red, most people who write Facebook quizzes are illiterate, and that my (admittedly internet generated) IQ suggests that I’m much too bright to waste my time on this crap.  Excuse me, I’m going to go and bake some cupcakes now.

Tired of being seen fondling the packages for women twice my age (ok, exacly my age, shutup), I turned to the internet.  Cyber-skincare, where you can share your deepest desires (oh, baby,  fill my…wrinkles) and get exactly what you want (Firm!  Smooth,! Even-toned!).   But it isn’t cheap.   The first house of beauty said they’d pimp my face for just over $78, and the second was gonna do me for $62.    They’d even come to my home, so no one would know.

The question is…do I believe that they can give me a happy ending?    Can they do what all the other contenders  in my bathroom failed to achieve? 

Hi, my name is darksnark, and I’m a productaholic.

Of course he wanted to go with me to the store.  He’s no dummy.  He knew that he was just sick enough to add a few extras to the grocery cart.   So we ambled through the store, him talking, me doing a grand imiitation of listening, and the cart filling up with all sorts of stuff. 

Then we went to go get his drops.  There was a line, so I did what any other kid would do, I slipped off my shoes and got on the Dr. Scholl’s arch support machine.  Why  not?  My darling son (and you can check his listing on ebay) was watching with interest.  The machine says “Do you weigh less than 160 lbs?”  Of course I said yes.  DS (there is a buy now link – I’ll pay postage) said “I thought you weighed about 170.”  (If he doesn’t go on ebay?  I’m listing him on half.com.)  I turned around and looked at him – mostly because I didn’t want to look at whoever might be around us.  “Oh really?” I said.  This, apparently, was when the male protective instinct came into play.  His face drained of all color, except those blazing red eyes.  “I don’t know what grown ups are supposed to weigh.   I just meant that you don’t look too skinny.”  Lucky for him it was our turn…

Hands:  This one is easy.  Our house needs updating, and I plan to put all those hours spent in front of HGTV to good use.  My oldest son needs a teen-age appropriate bedroom, and my husband says he is bored with our bedroom.  This looks to be the year of the make over…

Head:  They say that one way to get smarter is to learn something new.  Our boys got Rock Band for Christmas, and my husband goes down in the basement with them and they all rock out.  I’m an awesome audience member…  I think I’ll start with the drums and work my way up to guitar.  And tell myself that I’m more Susan Dey than Shirley Jones…

Heart:  I love my friends!  I email them all the time!  This year I will endeavor to SEE them, and not just at school and church functions.  It’s time to start throwing parties again.  We’ll just fiddle while Rome burns…

Health:  My goal is to eat more.  No, I am not some annoyingly skinny person.  I’m an annoying chubby person who has a terrible habit of skipping meals.   Which is why I find myself standing in the pantry at 3:00 eating chips and being pissy…

Apparently this is also the year of sentences that end in ellipses…

Kevin and I have already made the Almond Joy Macaroons.  He has made a dough for an as of yet untested cookie recipe, and set it outside to rest.  We turn off the oven and take a break.  After a while we grab the dough and try to shape the cookies.  It does not want to cooperate.  Tempers flare.  The dough gets a bit of water, and we decide to sandwich the colors and make pinwheels.  It still does not cooperate.  Things get ugly, and the dough becomes a marbled log with green sprinkles on the outside.  It goes back outside to firm so we can cut it.  I set the oven to preheat, cut the dough into logs, and sit on the couch for just a moment waiting for the oven to heat.  I fall asleep.  The oven never beeped to say it was preheated.  It has died in my sleep.

The first thing I do is look for the manual.  It is totally no help.  Not only does it cover a range of model numbers (and mine is nowhere to be found), the only suggestion it has for a dead oven is “plug it in”  thank you so much.  Next I google the problem, and it’s probably the heating element.  I do not have the emotional strength to disassemble my oven.  Oh, and by the way?  It’s after 5:00.  The parts stores are closed for the holiday. 

Frantic phone call to husband.  He is at an electronics giant, what do I want for Christmas?  A stove!  I want a stove that works!  He says there is one there on sale (knowing full well that I never pay full price for anything) , but he does not like it, but he will pick me up to see if I like it.  I do not like it.  We drive, in the above mentioned crappy weather, to a warehouse store, where the guy does his best to give us a great deal.  Unfortunately, I do not like those stoves, either.  I had it in my head that a good stove costs about $400 (yeah, it’s been that long).  They have something hideous for just over $200, and other models for over $2,000.  For $2,000 it had better come with its own food and someone to cook it.  The sales guy has me pick my top 3, and they range in price from $647 (the one I could tolerate)  to $825 (the one I like best but think should cost about $650).  Um..wow.  So, I take a deep breath and tell my poor, beleaguered spouse that I don’t feel that I have seen all there is to see.  He stifles a groan.  So, we drive, now, in mall traffic, and he suggests that I jump out of the car and pop into a department store to see if they have anything I like.  They do!  But it’s $719 (discontinued, floor model), and did not have the split oven rack or the cast iron grates.  There are still the home improvement stores.  I get in the car and Russ gives me the look that says “I am REALLY indulging you here.”  The drive should take 10 minutes, but it takes 30.   We get there I drag him to the back, and we are out of there in 15 minutes with a stove I like (split oven rack?  awesome, but not worth $225 (oh and I found it today online for $40!)) for less than $620. 

Finally home, we wrestle the giant box up the few steps from the garage to the house, and free it from the shackles of its packaging.  I’m hoping that it is plug and play.  Russ goes to make the swap, and, of course the coupling is not the same as our old stove.  I immediately start to think how I can make chinese takeout look like a festive Christmas dinner.  Russ mumbles something and heads to the basement, but I don’t pay attention as I’m looking around the kitchen that has trays of uncooked cookies, 2 ovens, and…and…   And Russ comes back with a coupling, some tape that he swears is important, and less than 5 minutes later I’m cooking with gas.

I’m thinking Santa just shot one over the bow…

Crown Roast of Pork with Stuffing (assuming I can find a competent butcher).

Mashed Potatoes and Gravy (because Brian would be horrified if I didn’t).

Cranberry Sauce (just because it’s pretty).

Green Bean and Artichokes (so good, yet so easy).

Corn (because it’s yellow).

Cauliflower (because it’s white).

Still not sure what’s for dessert.  Maybe pies, maybe a yule log.  I’ll think about it on Monday…

But no.  I couldn’t just wrap.  I had to decorate.  Some of these gifts are so pretty that I will have to look away when they are opened.   It all started when I wrapped a gift for my  great-niece in a cute little reindeer box from Hallmark.    And then the next gift just looked so plain.  And you can guess where it went from there.   15 presents in 4 hours.  This includes re-spooling all the tangled ribbon.   And making a CD for a relative and adding family pictures to the song art so that when I printed a jewel case insert it would have a nice cover.

If you were to make a snowman of me?  The head would be at the bottom…

There was a picture, and these rules:

1. Find the 4th folder on your computer.
2. Find the 4th picture in the folder.
3. Publish that picture with an explanation of what’s going on.
4. Tag 4 people to do the meme

I kept having to do iterations of the 4th folder because there’s so much crap on the computer, but here is the 4th picture:

Happy Birthday Carla!

You might say to yourself, WTF?  Well, it’s just further documentation of my insanity.  I decided to follow the advice of Mizfit and add chia to my diet.  It was so frickin’ nasty.  I even blogged about it over on the blog where I try to keep up a perky professional patter (it’s not working so well).

ANYHOW, I had this big bag of chia seeds, and nothing to do with them.  So I shaped them into the above photo and sent it off to her.  And then felt completely justified about having used those damn seeds for good and swept them into the trash.

I stuck my head into my husband’s office to ask him if he was ready for his meeting, and if he knew what he was wearing.  After 15 years together, he properly interpreted that as “I’m not going to like what you pick out to wear, so let’s hash this out right now so I can make sure whatever you need is cleaned and ironed because NO WAY am I going to run a round like a chicken 15 minutes before you have to go.”  So, we worked out what he was going to wear, and, being the kind and loving wife I am, I decided to iron his clothes while he finished his presentation.

I thought I was in trouble when I was ironing the no-iron pants, but justified it as freshening (kinda like how a flat-iron smooths down the hair cuticle?)  I knew I was in trouble when I started getting pissed that the sleeve crease was not aligning perfectly with the stripe on the shirt.  It was all out crazy time when I unlaced the shoes I had just shined because they were not laced so that the lace on top was pointing to the other shoe.   Full disclosure?  I put mink oil on those laces so they looked like waxed shoe laces, which I hate because they are too skinny and never stay tied.

This post must, unfortunately, end, ungracefully, right here.  Because that cat knocked my to-do pile on the floor.  And I saw the boys’ school pictures.  And remembered that the other day when I was dusting Russ’ office (Because no way in hell am I able to sit still while we work–meetings make me hyperventilate.) that his pictures of the kids are very outdated.   So I took up some pictures.  And I noticed that the glass on the artwork that we had recently hung on his wall had something on it, so I had to clean it.  And you can’t just clean one picture.  And then you can’t clean glass and not do the window, or the clock, or the computer screen…  And then it occurred to me that the artwork had moved from the dining room, and we are hosting Thanksgiving, and something has to go in its place.  So I had to measure the pictures, which meant finding the measuring tape, which ultimately ended up in our oldest son’s room (NOT ASKING), so I measured the pictures and wrote those measurements on a card which I stashed in my purse.  And then I came back to finish, but saw the pictures again.  And then figured that since I had the pictures out I would replace the 8 x 10 photos in the living room.  But those frames were full.  So I had to take out all the other pictures.  And look at them.  And admire my beautiful children.  And I decided to put the old pictures in an album (but am really thinking about a big wall collage), but of course the only one that would hold them already had pictures in it.  So I had to move those somewhere else.  And now I’m done.

(help me)