Little Weiners

With the advent of Grandmom and Grandpop watching Julia, they’ve been offering her more foods than she normally gets offered. That is good that her food horizon is expanding. I’m trying to repress my disdain that they’ve given her a Happy Meal and an Auntie Anne’s pretzel though. I didn’t want Julia to know about fast food for many more years. Oh well.

One thing they have offered her that she really likes is Vienna sausages. I have never had the things, but if you take them on looks and smell alone, they are very nasty. Worse than spam. To me they look like little penises floating in goo. The way Julia holds them and gnaws on them makes me feel bad for the little penis sausages. I picked up two more cans of penis sausages this morning. Hey, at 130 calories for 3 penises + 12 grams of fat + 5 grams of protein, I’m going to put up with the smell.

Mother-in-law is obsessed with Tupperware and Ziploc bags. Seriously, this woman should own stock in both. If 4 slices of cucumber are remaining, into a Ziploc bag they go! I myself would just eat the 4 slices of cucumber. Our refrigerator is full of Ziploc bags with small pieces of food and suspicious looking Tupperware. Let’s say you heat up some vegetables in a Pyrex bowl and don’t eat them all. I myself (yes, I’m lazy) would put saran wrap over the Pyrex bowl and put it into the fridge. Mother-in-law’s method is to take the leftovers out of the Pyrex bowl and put them into Tuppeware. Okay, that’s fine. I get it. But the part I really don’t get is the way MIL downsizes the Tupperware as you start to eat the leftovers. For some reason, the Tupperware must exactly fit the food in it. So if you start out with a 4-cup piece of Tupperware and then scoop out some leftovers onto a plate, she will repackage the leftovers in a 2-cup piece of Tupperware. Her method uses a Pyrex bowl, two pieces of Tupperware, 2 lids. My method uses a Pyrex bowl.

I do not know how we generate so much trash when the in-laws are staying with us. 4 bags of trash in a week. With us and Julia, we only generate 1.5 bags, and that includes her diapers. So father-in-law says in his know-it-all voice, “You need a bigger trash can.” The same voice that also says Julia’s tired and not hungry when she’s screaming. No, we don’t need a bigger trash can. You two generate gobs and gobs of trash in some weird, mysterious way. Well, actually it’s not that weird and mysterious because the secret to why we had to run the dishwasher daily during the past week is becoming abundantly clear.

I do like post-it notes. My life is choreographed by post-it notes, or little scraps of paper that I use as post-it notes. After almost a decade of marriage, S has a deep understanding of my love of detailing important things on tiny scraps of paper. That’s why he shows me teeny tiny scraps of paper and asks, “Is it safe to throw this away?” He has learned that if he throws away a tiny scrap of paper with the slightest memo from me to me, he may be thrown out of the house.

Wait, then I sound horribly unstable. I don’t think I’m quite THAT unstable, but let’s just say if I have my grocery list on the back of an envelope that a bill came in & it gets thrown away, I might just come close to a few tears. Okay, maybe I’m slightly unstable when it comes to small pieces of random paper with important things on them.

Since my MIL is staying with us, I’ve seemed to lost track of several random pieces of paper with important stuff on them. I know I had last seen a little piece of paper with important jottings on it a few days ago. It was on the passenger seat right before MIL got into the car. Now it’s not there. I spent 10 minutes going through that car, and I can’t find it. Ugh, I guess I can’t fault her for picking up what seemed to be a random piece of paper and throwing it away. But it’s something her son has learned to NEVER do with pieces of paper in my car, next to my bed, in the kitchen, or in the bathroom.

Memo to self: Should use my phone for lists now.

Memo to Mazda: Why must you have a half-inch gap between the seats and center console? That is a huge space for little pieces of paper (that aren’t the ones I need) to fall into, yet it is an incredibly tiny space to get into. Could you do us all favor and just close that space up? I really don’t want to fetch anything from there anymore. Thank you.

MIL is great. The woman can get more done around the house in a day than I can get done in a week. She definitely has her skills. I am a perpetual bed – unmaker. I have never mastered the skill of making the bed. Maybe I would if I actually cared. But I don’t care. It seems like a stupid exercise because you’re just going to mess it up in a few hours. MIL is obsessed with bedmaking. I suppose most people are except for me. Anyway, I don’t make the bed. And MIL has been making it for us. Gosh darn it, I don’t need anyone to make my bed for me. I’m not an invalid. I hate that she makes our bed so much that I’ve now taken to making the bed just so that she doesn’t. It’s passive aggressive bedmaking at its best. I can’t wait til I can go back to not making the bed.

Is this ever going to be fashionable? Sweaty feet. I have been bestowed with sweaty feet. It’s not like curly or straight hair, when either will be en vogue at least some of the time. Sweaty feet will never be en vogue. They say the average person sweats a pint from their feet each day. I take comfort in this because then I think I’m ‘average’ or ‘slightly higher than average.’ No one else I know confesses to having this problem. Most of the time socks curb the sweat. But in the summer when it’s 90 degrees and you want to show off your cute toes, that leaves sandals as the footwear of choice. Sweaty feet + sandals is a recipe for disaster. Oh, to have dry feet. Julia has sweaty feet too. Why couldn’t she have gotten her dad’s un-sweaty feet? It seems like she inherited every inferior feature possible, so add sweaty feet to the list. When you get a pedicure, it’s even worse. Mango lotion + sweaty feet + sandals = falling out of your sandals and a mango-y, sweaty mess. At least my toes look okay.

O, criminy, am I the only one with a Facebook “friend” who I don’t want? My passive aggressive strategy was to not allow her to see my status updates and then block her status updates. Great strategy, right? Not really, but it works so I don’t see her and she can’t see me. It’s only one person. She seeks me out on every darn social networking site. I don’t really understand why since she won’t say a word to me if we see each other in person. But, anyway, her husband “friend’ed” me today. So now I have to either make it so that she can see my stuff, or I have to make it so that he can’t. Because sooner or later she would figure out that he has different access than she does.

Yet another reason to sell everything and move to a cabin in the woods and change my name to Frickinnuts.