Styro's coming to see me tomorrow. I could only be more beside myself with excitement if my friend Styro were coming to... WAIT!

Since most of our ten-day schedule consists of binge drinking, the majority of my preparations have revolved around making sure my toilets are clean and huggable. Although I did also print her a perky little business card that reads "Hi, my name is Styro! I live at [address]! If you call [number] someone will come and get me shortly. I apologize if I've been a drunken inconvenience or if I've sullied your coat." Yeah. And I had the card laminated because it's entirely possible she'll have to refer to it on more than one lost occasion. It's wash-n-wear. I'm just that good a hostess.

In light of the fact that Styro is going to need some consistent place to lay her head down after all the poison, it became increasingly necessary to complete the "the office to no, like an ACTUAL OFFICE" room transition. Not because I'm ashamed to have a bunch of random six-year-old crap lying around, not because I'm embarrassed that there's an entire room at the back of the house we'd rather deny than clean out, but because I'm sincerely concerned that my friend might very well suffocate in there. Even standing up. And don't quote me, but I'm almost positive we don't have "Friend to Obscene Yarn Blanket Suffocation" coverage on our homeowners'. I'll ask Randy but I'm pretty sure.

OFFICIAL "TOTN,LAAO" SCHEMATIC:

STEP 1: Go to IKEA.

STEP 2: Remind Randy, the king of going IN the OUT door, that there's a whole showroom upstairs, you don't have to select what you want from the fucking identical brown box warehouse.

STEP 3: Find a reasonably-sized desk.

STEP 4: Find a reasonably-sized bookcase.

STEP 5: Tear up aisle and bin number of reasonably-sized bookcase when you happen upon The Bookcase Of Your Dreams. Celebrate when you learn that there's one in stock, that the Library of Congress didn't take them all.

STEP 6: Purchase all of the above; get boxes inside house.

STEP 7: In a clandestine move to thwart his insurance carrier, Randy has surprise rotator cuff surgery. Again. While theatrically flipping the end-of-the-year bird to Blue Cross / Blue Shield (with a humbly reconstituted right arm, thank you) he succeeds in simultaneously flipping it to me, the girl with a newly blanketless (read: harmless) room full of brown IKEA boxes, and apparently no helpers.

I guess the Library of Congress must maybe hire a guy or something, because assembling this bookshelf was a goddamned algebraic equation. I don't know that for a fact because I failed algebra twice, but since algebra's the one with all the angles and the shelves and the books and shit I took a pitiful conjecturer's stab. Anyway. I got it all together. And though Randy fundamentally knows that putting me in charge of assembling a room full of IKEA furniture is tantamount to asking me to teach my parents how to configure a wireless network, I reckon the Vicodan must have eased his structural mind. And also eased his sense of allowable style, since I seem to have buzzed in this shelf under his aesthetic decorum radar.

Oh yes. It's a Day of the Dead shelf. Dia de los Muertos, as I understand it. A whole shelf. That's a devil chicken artfully -- and evilly-- suspended by a picture hook. And some bobble-headed skeleton sunbathers consolidated with some pale bony ballet dancers. Think it's tasteless? Well, go sit in the family room then, dick. See what kind of relief that brings****.

Given that this gigantorm shelf was designed to carry the weight of many, many historical American documents, however, and given that I have the rudimentary building skills of a Yoplait yogurt cup, Randy understandably had a couple of structural integrity questions.

"So you screwed the bracket on?"

"Well yeah. Do you see a bracket leftover anywhere?" [ Scan room for anything immediately unrecognizable, i.e.; apparently a "bracket"]

"And you secured the bracket into...."

"The... bookshelf."

"Right. But you secured it to..."

"The... bookshelf."

"Right. But the other end. You screwed that into...."

"The chair? Or no, the desk!"

"The wall."

"Well obviously the wall, doy."

No. Not the wall. How? How would I... nevermind. You don't have degrees in algebra.

So really my only point here was to give Styro a heads up; you're gonna want to move that cot I set up for you in the office up against the far wall. Or into the hallway. And possibly out into the yard, I don't know. Maybe when you get here you can do the algebraic algorithm and figure it out for sure. My parents can help; they're currently working with a wireless network made up of thirteen large paperclips, an infrared mouse and a tangerine. So they've got time.

**** P.S. A shot of a shelf in the family room. Hey, and FYI? Some kind of bitey spider is breeding in the couch, I don't know. Just don't lie down. And if you accidentally lie down, don't for the love of God fall asleep. 
¶ posted by Erin on Wednesday, December 27, 2006

  Dinner was wafflasagna.

My laptop's broken. It can't seem to make it over the "Windows loading" screen hump. Holding the power button down and shutting it off mid-whir and then restarting it thirty-eight times didn't work, so my expertise is officially tapped. I'll make due with the desktop, I guess, but it sure is a shitload heavier on my legs.

It's been a fairly productive holiday. This morning I was relaxing at the breakfast table enjoying a cup of tea, waiting for Randy to finish whipping up Belgian waffles for seven people, when I announced to the room at large that I'd decided to spend the afternoon making Christmas cookies. The kids looked excited for about a tenth of a second before their eyes went slack with skepticism. They clearly doubted that I would follow through. Just because I didn't string up the Christmas lights this year. Or hang up the wreath. Or get a Christmas tree. Or buy anyone a present.

Or, as it turns out, bake any cookies.

No one bought my Leftover Frosted Christmas Waffles as valid holiday baked goods. Everybody's a cynic.

I did go hiking with my dad at South Mountain, though. We made plans to head out about seven so I rolled up around noon thirty. I've been a little lax this (seventeen) month(s) about exercise (most recently evidenced this afternoon by the number of "Wish You Were Here" postcards my ass received from the couch) and my dad has justifiably been distracted from his workout regimen lately, so at least we were on the same fitness page. Page one. Or maybe the title page.

We had just started out and I, bleakly encouraged by the fact that my legs didn't fall off when they realized there was no pantry up ahead, began boldly making future hiking plans.

"There's a beautiful trail over in the Superstitions," I said. (I sort of said. I gasped.) "But it's like ten miles long. So before we try that we really need to make sure we..."

"Pack extra chocolate," my dad finished.

"Exactly," I said. (I wheezed. I choked.)

After that I just answered "Yeah" to everything he said because it was the only word I could squeeze out my nose. It was too hard to talk with my mouth stuffed with trail-waffles. 
¶ posted by Erin on Monday, December 25, 2006

 

If you inexplicably find yourself awake with your boyfriend's kids at midnight, don't be a hero, just take their word for it: you cannot eat six Saltines in under a minute.

P.S. Your bedtime is 10:30 for a reason, Pastemouth. 
¶ posted by Erin on Thursday, December 21, 2006

  Hey, the floors are clean! It must be Easter!

What's better than clean bedsheets? Around here I like to wash our sheets regularly, on a solid schedule. That way we have something to look forward to.

And that way we also know when it's Christmas.

I opened the advent calendar today and a tiny chocolate box of detergent fell out.

Gettin' close! 
¶ posted by Erin on Tuesday, December 19, 2006

  I Forgot About Conner.

Yesterday I finally used a gift certificate for a mani/pedi I'd been sitting on-- I've been stockpiling cuticle for about seven months and I figured it'd be an easy way to lose a quarter-pound before the holiday push. So I'm sitting there in the chair, apologizing about the hangnail situation and lamenting Christmas preparation when the manicurist looked me dead in the eye and asked, "Do you have kids?"

And without so much as a rogue blink I answered, "Yes."

"Oh, well, you have to pull out all the Christmas stops, then."

This was strange for two reasons:

1) I do not, in point of fact, have any children.

2) I do, in other point of other fact, have the maternal instinct of a twenty-two year old frat boy. Seriously. A friend told me she was pregnant last week and my gut impulse was to put an arm around her shoulders and ask if she needed a ride home from the clinic. And it's not that I don't like children, it's just that my uterus is a barren minefield full of quicksand and lice. That's all.

And yet I spent the subsequent few minutes sputtering painfully about my two kids, Matthew and Annie. Interesting to note that I used the names of Sean and Julia McNamara's kids on Nip/Tuck, and while I'm not exactly sure how that sordid detail breaks down, for the sake of argument let's go ahead and assume the absolute worst.

In the car on the way home I started thinking about how I'd answered the kid question in the affirmative almost without thinking, and I wondered whether my unconscious was trying to tell me that I wanted to have children of my own after all. Maybe my uterus was sweeping the broken glass shards under the mat; maybe my eggs were no longer gagged and duct taped in the ovary trunk but were hanging out in the tubes again.

When I got home I forced Randy through my suspicions. I mean, could it be that I really wanted a baby and just didn't know it?

"Naaaah, Sweetie," he admonished, trying to scarf down the last of the Crunch n' Munch before I could figure out the box was almost empty. "You're just a sociopathic liar."

I slapped myself in the forehead. "That makes so much sense!" I said. "For starters, it completely explains why I spoke with a French accent the whole time."

"And why you're wearing a S.W.A.T. Team uniform," he added stickily.

Get back in that trunk, you eggs. 
¶ posted by Erin on Sunday, December 17, 2006

  Rita wishes she didn't need hands to hog the palm and play solitaire all day.

My parents run a business together out of their house, and in my dad's multi-week absence my mom has been at home doing the work of three people. (They have an assistant, Rita, but she doesn't appear to be much help. She takes long lunches, she's late almost every day, and she's completely round.)

Late last week I called and asked Mom if she wanted to have dinner and she said no, thanks, that she was getting ready to crawl into bed. I thought that a little odd at the time since it was roughly three in the afternoon, but hey, I practically have a top sheet growing out of my abdomen-- I'm in no position to play Bed Police.

Skip ahead to this week and my poor mom has one of those flus that make people who come into contact with her want to slather themselves in betadine and hang out at Walgreens for a few hours. She was supposed to fly out to meet my dad today but there was absolutely no way that was going to happen. Not only because she's too sick to stand up, but also because the fluid in her face and head FAR exceeds legal carry-on limits. So I went over to my parents' house last night to Fed Ex my dad's dark suit to him and to make sure my mom ate something that stayed eaten. I stood at the foot of her bed and listed everything in the kitchen that I thought boasted the most internal gravity.

"Could you please..." she whispered. "Could you please go get me a steak panini from Einstein's?"

"Mom," I said, hating to be the bearer, "I'm sorry, but Einstein's is only open until like ten in the morning." Watch, now my sick mom hates my guts.

She rolled over weakly under the comforter and groaned something about my guts.

So I made her some soup I found in the cabinet. Alphabet soup, store brand from a can, so baseless and anemic that the all the limp pasta words in it were misspelled. It made me sad watching her eat it. I wished I had a lamp to rub for a panini.

"Do you need anything else?" I asked. "Do you want me to shut the house down for you?"

And the second the words were out of my mouth, "shut the house down", I wanted to slap myself in the face. My mom nodded emphatically over a spoonful of alfibit. "Oh, would you?" Shit.

Before adopting her current occupation my mother was the director of several art galleries in downtown Scottsdale. She's also been a licensed and successful interior designer for close to thirty years. Why is this important? The woman is a lighting ninja. Every room in their house holds roughly four thousand separate lights-- every picture, every shelf, every eave, every counter, end table, kitchen table, kitchen counter, bathroom counter, armoire, fucking bookshelf, fucking sconce-- is lit by its very own subtle and aesthetic light source. My parents would go out of town when I was younger but the fear of blowing it with the lighting and giving myself away upon their return-- combined with the fact that I had no friends-- kept me from throwing any wild parties in their absence. Shut the house down, indeed. As I crept around the house, squeezing between the wall and the couch to get to four different tiny switches, studying the shelves in the office trying to determine how the fuck to turn that off, I realized that growing up this chore was the reason we all raced to bed at six: the last one awake had to SHUT THE DAMN HOUSE DOWN.

But of course I took care of it. Who else was going to do it? Rita? Please. All bitch does is roll.

It took me about twenty-five minutes. Randy and I just light matches around our house for light so I'm a little out of practice.

This morning I brought Mom chicken soup that I had made from scratch last night after I got home, complete with homemade egg noodles (1,398 matches, thanks). I warmed it up and then propped her against the headboard so she could eat.

"If you're good and eat all your soup," I said, "tomorrow maybe we can talk about that panini."

I'm bribing my own mother with a five-dollar bagel store panini.

She looked up at me then all bleary sick-eyed and wobbly, hopeful, taking an extra big spoonful, and my heart just broke for her. I was this close to throwing the soup down the drain and running down the street to Panini Town when I suddenly realized that all of the lights in the house-- the lights that I had systematically turned off the night before like shutting down the Louvre-- had all been turned back on.

"Did you..." and I gestured around the room, "did you turn all this shit on again?"

She ate soup.

"I had to help you stand up a minute ago, but you seriously got out of bed this morning and limped around and re-illuminated the entire house? I mean, I left you a box of matches, Mom."

She put the soup down wetly and scooched under the covers. "It wasn't that hard," she sighed.

No, of course it wasn't. So I washed her soup cup and tucked her in for the day, secure in the knowledge that as soon as I left my mom would be up and out of bed, planting tulips and waxing the car and busting out the panini maker.

I'm not sure what Rita spent the day doing. I can only imagine it was something spherical. 
¶ posted by Erin on Thursday, December 14, 2006

  I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you.

My sweet, sweet grandfather passed away this morning. My dad has been with him for several weeks, taking care of his mother and doing everything in his power to infuse the last few days of his father's life with the love and respect and devotion that he so richly gave all of us.

"How many times can you say 'I love you'?" my dad asked me over the phone one day last week. "A million times," he answered himself. "A million million times. And each time you mean it more."

Oh, the men in my family. They don't skimp on what's important. 
¶ posted by Erin on Monday, December 11, 2006

  Stupid healthy gums.

We have a Christmas party to attend tonight, and since it's too late for me to exhibit any realistic symptoms of tuberculosis (unless you're lucky enough to have gums that bleed a lot fake TB takes some planning) it looks like I've got a decision to make: picking from past party behaviors, should I a) start a deceptively serious fight with someone's husband over whether or not we've met and thus whether or not he has, in fact, forgotten my name, b) get drunk and become convinced that frenziedly jumping up and down barefoot in between actual dance steps makes me appear nimble and fantastic, c) wear something so breathtakingly inappropriate that I'm forced to spend the night hiding inside a borrowed coat and lying to people about a party I'll be attending later, a charity whore gala fundraiser, where it will be required to look as though a distracted four-year-old in sequined gloves is in charge of covering my breasts, or d) just cry a lot.

What about mono? I bet I could fake mono like a champ.

 
¶ posted by Erin on Friday, December 08, 2006

 

I volunteered to hand embroider a handkerchief as a prize for a random winner of NaBloPoMo, and Dimitra is the lucky pick. She seems like a very nice, polite, and civilized sort of person, the sort of person who probably should have won something more practical than a monogrammed handkerchief with sequin sushi rolls on it (she decided on a sushi theme after learning that her options were a) aliens, b) naked chicks with or without panthers, or c) skeletons). I added a koi fish for class. I hope she likes it.

Hey, does anyone know how to back up a blogspot blog? My "Links" and "About" pages have been inaccessible and showing error messages for weeks, and Blogger Support hasn't responded to any of my eleven emails (seriously, eleven) except to send me a completely worthless auto-response link to the Blogger Help page. Oh, and then a customer satisfaction survey. That I tried to take, actually, if only to answer every question with a passive-aggressive zero, but ha ha! The page wouldn't load. I'm concerned that this part of the blog, the main part, might at some point become inaccessible as well and I'd hate to lose almost four years of... well, of crap.  
¶ posted by Erin on Wednesday, December 06, 2006

  Always Late With The Gift, But I Make It Up By Eating Part of It.

Confidential to Melati:

Front porch. Check it.

Late-ass birthday present, plus some pretty great wine and glass Christmas ornaments designed to shatter upon contact with sound.

I ate the cheese.

I owe you some cheese.

Maybe for Christmas.

In March. 
¶ posted by Erin on Tuesday, December 05, 2006

 

My dad's been out of town for a week and my mother--powerless against fifty-plus years of "Thanksgiving + One Day = Christmas" tradition-- called me yesterday morning to ask if I would come over and get the ornaments out of the attic for her.

"I've got the tree up and the lights on it," she said, "I just need the ornaments."

"Sure," I said. "I was going to spend the day fashioning holly wreaths by hand and stringing lights on the house and making four-story gingerbread condos, but I guess I can get ornaments out of your attic first."

"Are you even out of bed yet?"

"Maybe."

My parents' attic is far more treacherous than I remembered from... all those times I never went up there. It's dark and crowded and you can't walk on the floor, you have to stay on the wooden rafters. My mom kept shouting this up to me from her hand-wringing perch beneath the attic hole, as if I hadn't taken this dire instruction to heart. As if I was interested in collapsing through the drywall and landing on a car. As if I'd forgotten that time my brother tried to get into the house from the garage and fell through the kitchen ceiling. (I really should have just unlocked the door for that kid, hindsight.)

Once I had a stable toe-hold on a rafter and I'd been passed a flashlight I realized that the attic wasn't crowded at all-- the attic was a barren tomb. What was crowded was the three peripheral feet around the attic opening. Apparently our family is lazy, not stuff rich. Pile close and abandon. If I hadn't been so concerned about my vanishing legacy of attic stuffs I would have been proud.

Oooh. Hold the phone.

"Hey, Mom?"

"Yeah?"

"There're like four boxes up here marked 'Prussian China'."

"What?"

I got a better foothold, took the flashlight out of my mouth. "'Prussian China'," I yelled. "With a 'P'."

"Oh yeah," she hollered back. "My mother inherited all of that from her mom. When I die, remember that's up there. It's valuable."

"Mom," I said, "don't talk like that."

"I'm just saying..."

"Seriously, Mom. It's morbid and silly and I can't even think that way."

"I know," and she laughed, "I'm sorry."

I bent double, adjusted my no-fall stance, put the flashlight under my arm and started unpeeling tape with my mouth.

"Right, so can I just have this shit now?"

No. No, I can't. But I can have a thirty-seven pound ripped Hefty bag stuffed with Christmas lights! Awesome! I'll just hold onto it until Christmas rolls around in three months and I'll be ahead of the pack. 
¶ posted by Erin on Sunday, December 03, 2006