JUST #$@@!! WRITE SOMETHING!!

Pam and I went to The Works for lunch today. This was the sign outside.

We were cowards.

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Okay, so I've got this lingering tubercular cough (a guy in one of my graduate seminars called me Violetta or Camille interchangeably for one whole semester). I can't really use my CPAP when I'm coughing. My husband took off for San Francisco for March Break. And it's fucking cold.

So much for the suckage. Here is the good stuff:

I watched the hilariously inappropriate and inappropriately hilarious movie The World's End with the kids. Once Angus knew it had people from Shaun of the Dead in it there was no other movie happening that night. It was awesome. Please don't tell Children's Protective Services.

We went tubing to the same place we went last year. It was a little warmer than last time so the tubing conditions weren't as perfect, but we still had a blast. I love how our giant boys turn totally goofy on the hill. I loved less when I heard my friend's son coming up the hill saying "let's get Mom and Allison, they'll make us go faster!". Humph. It was so warm before lunch that we were all stripped down to t-shirts and tank tops, desperately looking for a good place to wire our tags to because wearing jackets was unbearable. As we were going in for lunch, Eve said "I don't care, I'm taking everything off when we come back out", and Collette and I did a hilarious "naked tubing? Awesome! Maybe leave on your hat, it'll make it easier for us to find you. And socks? The snow will be cold on your feet" routine that Eve didn't think was fun at all - she said she hated us and stomped away. These are the moments that warm a mother's heart. Our friend Dave is also an awesome tubing companion - he's tall and big, and he pushes really well and then jumps in his tube or just jumps on top of everyone else, and it all generally ends in snowy ridiculous carnage. 

We went to see Spamalot at Centrepointe Theatre. It was snowing all day, and in the afternoon my father called to demonstrate his love and concern by saying "It's absolutely stupid driving anywhere in this weather". So if you talk to my parents, we didn't actually see Spamalot at Centrepointe theatre, because we wanted to be smart and stay safe, even though it's only about a fifteen minute drive and it was really just blowing snow, the roads weren't all that bad at all. At least that's what I heard.

We went to the dentist. It was uneventful, except when I opened my wallet to pay I had no credit card or debit card because I had stuck them, along with my driver's license, in Eve's jacket pocket for tubing. You know, so I wouldn't lose them. Except now I didn't know where they were. The receptionist was really nice, she said just to call from home once I found my credit card. We went out to the van and they were lying on the console above the radio. Then I went grocery shopping and totally forgot to call, and come to think of it, I'll be back in a minute.

Eve went skiing with friends on Friday. Angus and I hibernated - he seemed to really need a break this week, so I didn't bother trying to excavate him out of the basement too much when we were home. 

I'm not sure what happened on the week-end. Matt got home and then it was all a blur. I slept and read a lot and continued to not-blog.

Okay. Now that we've established that I can still type, I will try to come back tomorrow and talk about some issues and be coherent and analytical and shit. 

So, it's Friday

This week has kind of sucked.

No, really.

I'd like to pretend that I'm more, I don't know, noble or sensitive or exquisitely attuned to the suffering of the world than I actually am, and claim that I've been struggling this week solely because of horrific things that have happened to other people, but that would be a lie, and I've sworn to myself that I will never lie to you unless you ask me how much I weigh or whether I still watch Grey's Anatomy. I think it's just my old stupid seasonal transition difficulties. I didn't have a very busy week, so I thought I should either tackle a satisfying project or two that I had been putting off or engage in some hardcore goofing-off - watching movies all day, or reading a whole book while the kids were at school, or something.

Instead every day was just a total non-starter. I couldn't settle to anything - I didn't even manage to wallow slothfully with anything you'd call success. I walked on the treadmill every day, but other than that I just kind of wandered around not being able to figure out what to do. I went to the mall to get Eve some new pajamas after realizing that her pajama situation was similar to the underwear situation described in this post - actually I didn't even realize it until my husband pointed out in a rather pained fashion that her pajama pants ranged from too tight to be remotely comfortable to falling apart. I bought Angus some jeans at Old Navy because he's too unsophisticated to like the insanely cool jeans I bought him at the Guess outlet at the Train Yards ("the legs go out too much at the bottom!" "They look cool like that!" "No they don't!") but the ones I bought him were "too skinny" - my son is the freaking Goldilocks of pants. I have to return them and attempt to obtain a pair that are Just Right, and hope he doesn't get eaten by three bears.

I didn't really feel like cooking. I didn't really feel like reading. I fell asleep early enough but waking up was miserable - Matt was in Sweden, but usually the first few days are great in the morning and it's only the end of the week where I feel dragged out. I was trying to read this, but I couldn't even get through a paragraph without feeling dense and dopey, so I stuck with a sort of lacklustre mystery novel, but mostly I watched Buffy on the ipad every night and then just read a few pages before falling asleep, which is really intensely catastrophically not like me.

Then Pam and I went on a road trip yesterday to the UPS Store in Ogdensburg New York. We checked our passports multiple times to make sure the pictures and expirations dates hadn't magically changed to pictures of wanted criminals and dates far in the past. Crossing the border was the usual - even when they're nice they're not nice, you know? We had a fabulous lunch at a restaurant called The Dirty Gringo, because I had found good reviews online, not because it looked nice, because it didn't, when you pull up it looks like a little shack where you'd worry about the bacteria count and the likelihood of getting in a fight with a biker. But the staff is charming and the food is amazing, especially the spicy black bean cakes. Then we came back over the border, which is usually better because, you know, Canadians, but it wasn't - the guy looking at my receipts was convinced I was trying to pull something. It didn't help that the packages were mostly Lands End kids' bathing suits but there were two items for me from Fresh Produce - his eyebrows shot right up, and then I couldn't stop thinking about my sister imitating some guy on tv saying "we should be worrying about weapons and instead we're just asking people if they've got any fruits" and then I had to bite my lip to not burst out laughing, which I was pretty sure would get me and Pam tied to chairs in a locked room somewhere, and then I started thinking about how I could spin this into a really good blog post or possibly a Penthouse Forum story, and then he sort of threw up his hands, gathered up all my invoices and threw them at me, like "I know you're engaged in spurious behaviour but I don't feel like breaking out my handcuffs right now, so go away".

Then Matt came home today and the kids came home from school and we spent a couple hours in the family room trying a pencil experiment that Eve had heard about and arguing about what constitutes an irregular verb in English and trying to get Angus to show us his muscles and then Matt started trying to play Eve's piece on the piano and she started hurling invective at him, and for a moment I felt like we were one of those charmingly madcap sit-com families. And then Matt went out to a baseball coaching clinic and Eve and I were trying to decide what else we could give her best friend for her birthday party tomorrow - we have a cool Minecraft shirt from Redbubble, but they gave Eve a ton of moustache stuff for her birthday so I wanted to add something, but she's not at all like Eve, so books or music stuff or art stuff were out, and finally Eve reminded me of what her friend loves most of all, so I've spent the last few hours making fancy bacon.

And I feel better.