There's something I wanted to say...

M wants to move out of her dad’s house and move in with us primarily. (Right now both M and A go back and forth for a week at a time.) I’m trying to handle this in the best possible way because A doesn’t want to change her situation right now. I don’t want to cause undue stress or pain for anyone involved.

M has spoken with her dad and he has told her no. I called my divorce lawyer to try to get a sense of what we can expect if this ends up in court, but she hasn’t returned my call yet. I got an email saying she’d call me last Tuesday, then she didn’t. I wanted to talk with her before I spoke with M’s dad, but it’s not a necessity, so I’m going to call him tomorrow and urge him to reconsider, and let him know that we support her in this. Then I’m planning to give him a week to think about it before I mention court and lawyers.

I have had an anxiety disorder my whole life, and for the past few years it has largely been under control thanks to medication. But for the past few weeks, since M made her decision to talk with her dad (after talking with me about it for about 2 years), I’ve been a mess of anxiety. I’ve had nightmares, insomnia, upset stomach, inability to focus, chest pain, you name it. I’ve increased my medication dosage a little to deal with it, but I’m still in a bad way.

I just want to do the best I can for my daughters to help them be happy and safe, and it frustrates me terribly that I’m virtually incapacitated with anxiety. I don’t know why I’m so afraid. Even the worst case scenario isn’t going to change my life or the kids’ lives for the worst, beyond some hard feelings from their dad. I just need to figure out how to get past the anxiety, and how to hide it, and to do what needs to be done.

I got behind on 43T when we went Disney World in early February. I didn’t come back for awhile, and when I did, I was mega-behind in cheers. Since then I’ve been trying to catch up, going back weeks and weeks and diligently cheering people who had cheered me. And today I finally caught up! And had some cheers leftover to bestow at will!

Nobody outside of 43T would ever understand how happy this makes me.

Cosmopolitans
are not girly drinks, Patrick!
They are womanly.

and I’m enjoying it. Like his other books, it’s groundbreaking and makes you think about things differently.

But I’m finding it depressing. He convincingly argues that it takes about 10,000 hours to get good at anything. It doesn’t bother me that I haven’t yet spend 10,000 hours practicing anything. What bothers me is that there’s no one thing I want to spend that much time on. Five or six things, sure. One thing, no.

Doomed to mediocrity.

I saw several of these in an office while I was at the JCC, and they kind of turned me on. Is that wrong?

“it’s both inaccurate AND offensive!”

What are the chances that the “Jewish Skillet” is kosher?

1. Often, instead of “no,” she says “nobo.”

2. Last week she saw a church steeple and said, “Look, Mommy! It’s the Tower of Terror [a ride at Disney World].”

3. A couple of days ago she sneaked off to the basement, took off her socks, and played with her socks in the dogs’ water bowl. When Patrick brought her back upstairs (inexplicably without taking the sopping wet socks from her), she was slapping the wet socks wildly at anyone and anything she could hit.

4. She named her nap buddy, a kitty, “Anya” all by herself.

5. She never eats any cake at birthday parties. If there’s fruit served with the cake, she eats the fruit. If not, she cries and begs for fruit until she gets some. In spite of this, she has already requested a chocolate cake with pink icing for her birthday.

6. She recognizes CVS drugstore as “the place we get ice cream.”

7. She calls sunscreen “sunscream,” the piano the “pinano” and says “ayuminute” instead of “ayudame” (“help” in Spanish).

8. She adores lima beans, broccoli, asparagus, and tomatoes. Really, she’ll eat just about anything.

9. Today she put an entire roll of toilet paper into the toilet. And as I’m writing this, she just said, “Write some bad stuff about me. I pooped in my pull-up.”

10. When she hears the “All Things Considered” music on National Public Radio, she says, “It’s Russia!” I have no idea why.

I wrote to our village about recycling:

Dear [redacted],

As we all become more conscious of the importance of green living and preserving our environment, we’ve appreciated the Village’s environmentally friendly activities, such as medicine collection, computer and electronics recycling collection, and the annual weed-out. In addition, we believe it would be a good time to review and improve [our village]’s recycling program.

Our family tries to recycle everything we can. We find, however, that the current recycling program in the Village is inadequate. The once-per-month pick-up schedule leaves us with piles of recyclable refuse every month, in spite of the fact that we purchased a trash compactor to assist with the problem. The Village also fails to accept a number of items commonly recycled in other municipalities, such as container board and plastic items labeled 3 through 7. In contrast, Shorewood provides bi-weekly recycling pick-up and recycling of those types of items. It seems to us that weekly pick-up and expanded acceptance of materials would be appropriate.

We’d like to ask the Department of Public Works and the Village Board to consider improving our village recycling program to better meet these needs. Could you please forward copies of this letter to the Village Board? We’d be happy to discuss the matter further with you at your convenience.

Sincerely yours,

[emelle and nightnimbus]

to someone who should never have children, who tries to get pregnant, and then does? I mean, after congratulations?

Maybe just congratulations?

I sent to merchants who refused to honor my ‘no catalog’ request from catalogchoice.com. (It’s signed by P and me, so that’s why it’s written in the Royal We.)

We are members of Catalog Choice, the purpose of which is to opt out of receiving catalogs in the mail, thereby conserving our planet’s natural resources. Although we both are avid online shoppers, we are also avid environmentalists, and prefer not to receive catalogs in the mail.

According to the records on www.catalogchoice.com, your company refused to honor our request, submitted through Catalog Choice, that you no longer send us your catalog. We are disappointed to see that you have taken this position, and we urge you to instead join the merchants at https://www.catalogchoice.org/pages/merchants who have committed to honoring requests like ours.

As we said, we are frequent online shoppers and we are supporting the merchants at https://www.catalogchoice.org/pages/merchants by purchasing their products. As long as you continue to refuse our Catalog Choice request, however, we will no longer purchase any products from you.