(May contain) Blatant and Unjustified Whining and Self-Pity

So yeah, it's really fun, being alone with the kids for seven days and nights and then having my husband come home, dump all his laundry on me and leave his crap all over the house I've been trying not to let be destroyed all week. Then we go over to my Mom's house for dinner and he gets fussed over for how tired he must be and tells whimsical, charming stories about being in Hong Kong while I was alone with the kids for a week (except he leaves that part out).
Also, he got home right after (I'm talking minutes) the school Halloween dance, meaning I had to herd the kids through an appalling mass of heaving bodies, deafening Black-Eyed Peas songs, lame D.J. patter and miniature Spider-Men (Mans?) and Hannah Montanas trying to take me out at the knees every other minute for two and a half hours all by myself. Actually, I suspect he landed at four o'clock and hung out at the airport for five hours drinking coffee and reading the magazines in the Elite Lounge just so he wouldn't have to come to the dance.

photo credit
creative commons license

Additionally, (okay, this one I kind of asked for) it turns out that caving in and allowing one kid to sleep in my bed and the other on a mattress on the floor feels really sweet and companionable at night when we're all reading and telling jokes and falling asleep, and then starts to go horribly wrong at two or three in the morning, and turns downright ugly by five.
Furthermore, it's rained A LOT the past few weeks. In the fall. And I love the fall. When it's dry. It rained coldly and unsympathetically on us while we were trying to hustle our witchy and zombie-ey and spider-y butts from the car to the f&*^ing school Halloween dance. While my husband was (allegedly) flying back from China.
As well, I've been entirely uninspired blog-wise, which means I haven't even been able to console myself that at least I have a creative outlet with which to transform my whiny wallowing into witty, hysterically funny wallowing which would give someone else a laugh or at least a pleasurable pang of schadenfreude. Or I could review one or two of the dozens of really great books I've read while not blogging, or going to the gym, or parenting my children.
And I think I've run out of of synonyms for and. I guess for Halloween I should go as a great yawning void of narcissistic bitchery. Do you think I can find anything like that at Value Village?

Slightly late list of 23 random things for which I am thankful

1) that we decided not to try to cook a turkey
2) my kids wrestling, trying to pull off each others' pants, and browbeating each other in Scottish and German accents, which they may or may not know are Scottish and German accents
3) my husband bringing me chicken soup and ginger ale on Monday while I was reading in my bedroom and feeling guilty for being sick and housebound most of Thanksgiving week-end.
4) Fred Vargas
5) my Wednesday walk with Pam
6) blue flowers
7) Angus playing the Ode to Joy on the piano (one hand at a time) while Eve dances
8) running water and indoor plumbing
9) chicken korma 9b) that everybody in my family will eat chicken korma. Seriously -- I can make chicken korma and rice and peas and every single person will eat it. No leftover noodles or cut-up raw vegetables or cheese or hard-boiled eggs required. One dinner. One!
10) sparkly footprints leading from the kitchen table across the floor, up the stairs and into Eve's room
11) Little, Big, by John Crowley
12) My mother, who channels her hypermania into baking cookies and taking care of my kids rather than focusing on what a non-hyper-manic disappointment I must be
13) My father, who is always available for a school pick-up or bringing his ladder to the grade one entrance to mount a daring Webkin rescue. He also rocks the word 'horseshit' like no one else.
14) That I told my kids about all the studies saying that families should eat dinner together in order for kids to be more successful in life, and now whenever we can't eat together they threaten to go out and knock over a convenience store
15) Green tea and ginger ale but not -- please God, worst idea ever -- together.
16) Eve's tummy

photo credit
creative commons license

17) Angus's crazy-ass cowlick
18) seeing the most amazing rainbow of my entire life on the way to piano lessons with the kids
19) lying in bed with my friend Zarah, drunk on wine after her friends cooked us the most amazing dinner, watching Glee
20) Phineas and Ferb
21) my new bamboo sheets that I had to go buy after lying in Zarah's bed watching Glee (seriously people -- it's like the bed is hugging you)
22) my relatively high standard of living and personal freedom (yeah, it's a sop, I just didn't want them all to be totally frivolous, damn the internal self-critical voices, damn them!)
23) Ativan

Happy post-Thanksgiving (Canadian).

Sometimes I put dishes in the dishwasher too!

My husband is a good guy. The complaints I have (because I am a person filled with bitterness and bile and people, it has to go somewhere) are by and large fairly trivial (which is not to say I can't work up a good vituperative rant on any one of them at any given moment). I don't know whether he's done any random coveting of our neighbours' wives (hey, hasn't everyone?), but he's good on the basics, and the big things.
But sometimes? I just don't get him. He overthinks things, he overcomplicates things, and it's like he thinks it will cause him physical pain to just agree with me about something. A few months ago one of the shelves in the kitchen started giving way and he had to reinforce the supporting posts. Whatever -- crappy mass builder stuff. A couple of weeks ago one of the drawers in Angus's dresser came off the rails and wouldn't go back on. The dresser belonged to Matt's younger brother, making it roughly thirty years old -- not terribly surprising that it's falling apart. But my husband looks at it differently. He looked at the shelves and said "well, you have a lot of stuff in there". Yeah -- plates, cups, the odd bowl. It's a shelf. In the kitchen. He looked at the drawer and said "wow, you've got a lot of t-shirts packed in there". Yeah, and boys' t-shirts are made really heavy these days....?
So basically he's accusing me of wrecking the house. By treating furniture (wait for it) as furniture.
Sweet, loyal, dependable, great father, funny, considerate, dynamite in the sack. But about some things he really has his head stuck up his butt.