REGISTER TO VOTE, THEN VOTE!

For those of you, like me, who want to be politically responsible but are not up to door to door canvasing or demonstrating in the streets, read the comments for the prior post and all of the great suggestions on how to get involved in the political process. The most obvious one for me is to use this blog to remind you to VOTE, which means register NOW if you are not registered.

This is the last day of summer holidays and Wednesday school starts for the younger kids. Saturday was gorgeous and I spent it doing small errands, puttering around the house, and taking up a new hobby, which I need like a hole in the head, but more about that later. My family was here for dinner Friday night, and since I wasn't up to the traditional Labor Day cook out, we ordered Chinese.

Yesterday, my husband and kids dragged me to IKEA and we battled crowds of people as confused as we were, trying to find a loft bed for the Little One. Didn't buy a damn thing and came away with a big headache. Yes, the prices are unbelievably cheap but there's no one to ask questions of, and a huge line to get on to order anything, and I hated all the beds they had anyway. I ended up getting into one of those snits with my husband when I found out that he hadn't measured her room, and we began talking loudly at each other in overly civilized fashion, to wit:

ME: This loft is awfully high - how high are our ceilings?
DH: High? As high as regular ceilings.
ME: How high are "regular" ceilings?.
DH: About as high as this - (gesturing to painted phony ceiling in IKEA showroom)
ME: Darling, that may be the strangest observation you've ever made. How do you know that?
KID: Mom, look I can reach the top of the bed with my arms, so it can't be that high
ME: I think you logic may be a little askew, dear. I don't think you'll be able to sit up in the bed it's so high.
KID: I don't care!
DH: It'll be fine - they wouldn't build this fake ceiling unless it was a standard ceiling height.
ME: I think you are both laboring under misconceptions, as good intentioned as you may be. The appropriate thing is to measure, so let's do that and come back.
DH: No way!
KID: Mom, puleeze!
ME: Let's do this right ( now voice disintegrates into hissing).
DH: You always make a production out of everything
KID: We can return it!

Exit, three disgruntled people, none talking to the other, weave their way through a bazillion people wandering around with order forms in their hands. The Princess takes up the rear, shaking her head and talking into her cell phone. Somehow we all reconverge at the snack stand and eat giant cinnamon buns that produce sugar rushes and pleasantries all around. We promise the Little One we will continue to look elsewhere for the loft bed.

We walk a hundred miles to our car, go up and down fifty ramps trying to find out way out, battle the traffic on the LIE, and just as we are crossing the bridge and I think I'm home free, The Princess pipes up in her sweet, clear voice:

"Don't forget you're taking me grocery shopping"

NONONONONO!

ME: Why don't you take the debit card, dear.

Princess: MOM, I need you to show me what to buy.

Damn.

Husband and Little One take off for another furniture store and Princess and I push the cart up and down the aisles as we examine how to pick out onion (no soft spots), order roast beef (only a 1/4 because it tastes funky in two days), and buy pasta (get the generic brand on sale 5 packages for 2.00 even tho I won't buy it because it tastes gummy but I have a job and she doesn't not that I tell her all this). After I drag her past the toiletries aisle where she is fixated on what hair gel to buy and we still have all of dairy and paper goods to discuss, it goes more quickly. We don't even approach meat, because basically she/we can't afford to buy any, and we are done.

We all gone home exhausted, unload the groceries, make promises of future bed shopping expeditions, appease the Little One with a cousin sleepover, help The Princes pack up to leave, and settle into the living room. I then get on the phone with my sister, annoying the DH who is trying to watch yet another ball game and he strongly suggests that I go to Borders with my sister to have some fun, i.e., shut up and leave. We fly there, never being ones to allow a chance to escape kids and husbands grow moss under our feet, and sit at Borders and knit. Yes, knit. I am now knitting. Who knew? I order a pumpkin spice coffee and a piece of cheesecake, whereupon I realize that the last thing I had to eat was a cinnamon bun, thereby bringing my total carb intake for the day to something like a hundred thousand. Gross.

Speaking of eating, it's been very cool this weekend, which always turns a middle aged woman's thoughts to food (what doesn't?) It's time to whip out the fall meals, like beef stew, apple pie, mashed potatoes, and the other high caloric intake that we justify because the temperature is below seventy degrees. Not a good time for the oven to go out, which it did about three weeks ago. It's taken the husband and I three weeks to remember to look for a phone number for a repair person, and I suspect it will take another three weeks to remember to call and set up a date.

Or as my husband says, why not just buy a new oven, and as I say, well, then, why not just guy the whole kitchen, which it desperately needs. (We are those kind of people, beware). The kitchen has ugly laminate cabinets, plastic countertops, a crazy sink stuck in a corner, unpainted walls, and ugly faux brick linoleum. The cabinet doors regularly fall off the hinges, so Ive taken to not putting them back up and telling guests we are renovating. We had the walls primed four years ago when we moved in and then didn't do another thing to it since it's too pitiful a room to put any effort into cosmetic changes.

However, after viewing our bank account and the drain of tuition for the next four years, we've decided we can't stand it anymore but can't do anything drastic. IKEA has interesting "faux wood" cabinets that look like the wood-painted, rustic cabinets I dream of. But they are plastic. Hard to tell if they'll hold up. And speaking of holding up, who is going to hold up the cabinets in our DIY adventure? Not I! Not the husband with the fused lumbar spine and two cervical discs disintegrating as I type. So we are back to square one.

What was that? Oh, right, call the repairman to fix the ugly stove and buy some paint on sale at the Depot and make some stupid curtains to bring a little cheer and something else to look at besides the ugly brick red floor.

That's my whine for today. And now I really HAVE to work on my submission for the next issue of the magazine. Haven't done it, due in nine days, haven't a clue what I'm going to write/draw/ etc. Hey, maybe I'll go to the Depot after all with the husband, then check out the loft beds with the Little One at another store, then brown the sausages and pork I bought to make tomato gravy, and finish the scarf I'm knitting.....