Or not. I should just shut up. It’s not that I’ve noticed any weird goings on at their house since they moved in. They look nice enough, and I’ve been meaning to go over with a pan of brownies. But it’s too cold to walk across the street. And I don’t bake brownies. Or pretty much anything.
Still, I’ve been thinking I should be neighborly. I thought the opportunity might present itself sometime when they were getting into their car at the same time I was getting into mine, or something. I could yell “hey there!”
I did it. I made it a teensy fraction of the way through January before breaking one of my resolutions.
This one had to do with reading stupid stuff on the internet, so I was doomed anyway.
This particular absurd artifact was a list of What Women Shouldn’t Wear After 30. Just the title took me from zero to full-on righteous indignation in seconds – which I suppose is how internet tripe should be approached for maximum gratification. I tried to find the article again just now, so we could all mock the author together, but there’s a ridiculous amount of advice on what women should or shouldn’t do after age 30, which got my blood boiling all over again.
If I ever completely lose my mind, it will be ten minutes before dinner.
My losing my mind is not what this blog was going to be about. It was going to be about my daydream of being on reality television.
My favorite reality show was Frontier House on PBS. Its producers plopped modern families in the Montana outback to live as pioneers. The winner was supposed to be the family that not only survived a summer, but also had adequately prepared for winter by the end of the series.
I think they all failed, not just the family from California with the mom who bawled at the outset when she couldn’t bring her make up kit.
Not enough room in the wagon for mama’s face, apparently.
I will rejoice in the fact that the gym is crowded this time of year, and not use my elbows to clear a path to class. I will be happy everyone has resolved to get/stay in shape and support that commitment. Even if it only lasts until February. Even if they door ding my car in the parking lot.
I will not fall for click bait. If I have to click more than once to read the whole story, or see a picture, or discover what the child star looks like now, I’m closing the window. Basta baby. I have more productive things to do with my time.
Assorted adhesive mustaches, for the girl who has everything.
I received a shiny gadget for Christmas. Well, not so much shiny as nondescript and black and made to be worn on my wrist like a bracelet. It was moderately spendy, so when Mike and I agreed to get them for each other, we decided they would be our only gifts.
Oh, I should say “among our only gifts,” because there was also a tin of assorted adhesive mustaches in my stocking.
So, here we were with these new tracker gadgets – which were bound to have been popular for every uptight, OCD fitness fanatic you know (as well as for a couple of posers like us). They came with a little card, listing a website on which is presumably all the instructions for calibrating our new toys.
If you happen to work for a company that makes gadgets for a particularly uptight, OCD population, and all the functionality of your gadget depends upon your website, you really should (a) make sure your website can support a fairly significant uptick of traffic on Christmas morning, and that (b) the default error reading doesn’t say something about “planned maintenance,” when I’m pretty sure the website’s crashing wasn’t in the plan.
I’m pretty sure this company was actually just experiencing a North Korea kind of morning.
I was driving my mom downtown the other day. She needs a chauffeur since her fall at Thanksgiving necessitated the donning of a huge neck brace that makes her move like a robot.
She was trapped with me in the car, so of course I introduced a topic I knew would get her goat start an interesting conversation.
“I showed Colin what someone had written in a Christmas card the other day and he couldn’t read it,” I said.
“What?” She tried to turn her whole upper body to face me. I don’t think it’s necessary to maintain polite eye contact with a driver, but I appreciated the effort.
I love Runner’s World, the magazine, probably more than any of the other of the publications we collect like hoarders around here. It’s got great recipes, fun gear reviews and good features.
They usually also have tips and programs with reasonable goals for lazy ordinary people like me. Titles like Train for your first marathon in ten minutes a day tend to attract such people with both feet planted firmly in the short-term commitment universe as myself.
And that esteemed publication is not paying me for this, by the way, although I’m all kinds of amenable to that.
This month I had to check out an article on the habits of highly motivated runners. Not to see what kinds of changes to make to my own routine, mind you, but to pat myself on the back for having mastered many of these without even trying.
I was kind of flabbergasted to find I do not, in fact, possess all of these habits right off the bat. But it’s not my fault.
I’m a summer person. I love sundresses, dinners on a patio, pedicures, and outdoor concerts. Once I got over the fact that I sweat profusely, summer and I realized we had kind of a thing going on. The season’s passing always makes me feel a little morose.
Ski season is only thing that makes it okay that it’s no longer summer.
When we were first married, Mike and I had about enough scratch to make renting a video a special occasion. I’d never been on downhill skis. Mike had grown up on the sport. We somehow found an inexpensive pair of skis, boots and poles at a garage sale for me, and Mike set out to teach me how to ski….
….which pretty much means he led me to the most harrowing run on the mountain and pointed downhill, then bit his tongue while I yelled at him, then cried, then took my skis off and walked to the lodge.
“Katie’s out there,” I overheard someone tell Lee.
He stood like a bouncer at the end of the line where the trays were handed through the window. He nodded dispassionately as people picked up their dinners, one by one. Sometimes he recognized someone who’d been in line before.
“No seconds,” Lee told them. This was only the first shift. There had to be enough for everyone.
Katie had been escorted out the week before. Unruly behavior is what we overheard. She was back again, had been spotted in the parking lot, stomping and rubbing her hands together in the cold, waiting for the doors to open.
Poor Mike came in last night in a huff from fighting his annual battle with our Christmas lights.
What we now call the Markley Holiday Lights Smack Down usually happens something like this:
Step 1: Everybody else in the neighborhood puts up their lights.
Some of our neighbors trace the eaves of their homes with perfectly straight lines. They artfully drape various and sundry trees and shrubs with tasteful strands of LEDs. Others barf up a maelstrom of seizure-inducing twinkle-rama the likes of which would make the Griswold’s cringe. We have all types.
Step 2: We all (except Mike) ohh and ahh about everybody else’s Christmas lights.
Step 3: Mike declares we’re not having Christmas lights this year.
The new neighbors may be swingers.
“Katie’s out there,” I overheard someone tell Lee.
