Recently in Life in the Kingdom Category

Every year, it's the same thing. I leave for BlogHer short on sleep and behind on everything. Then I get even shorter on sleep while at the conference, collapse when I get home, get more behind on everything, and find that I now need a vacation to recover from my vacation.

This year, I made a concerted effort to avoid that phenomenon.

By flying to Portland before BlogHer for a vacation, getting back 10 days before I left for New York City, and covering another colleague's full time job (while doing my own full time job) for four days in between the two trips.

AREN'T I CLEVER?

I think it still would have been okay if Boy Detective hadn't gotten sick on Monday. I really WAS working hard to set some reasonable goals. I did some smart things, like packing everything I could several days ahead of time. (If you can guess how many miniature tubes of toothpaste I discovered in our bathroom drawers and cabinets while rummaging around for duplicates to pack, I will send you a prize. I am convinced C-Man goes to the dentist extra times simply to bring home the swag bags.) (And no, the prize is not a box full of miniature tubes of toothpaste.) (Maybe.)

Monday I was supposed to go clothes shopping for a few key items. Instead I stayed home that afternoon to monitor the feverish kid and make the judgment call on whether to head to the pediatrician, while frantically trying to catch up on my work that had slipped while I was doing someone else's work.

Tuesday we did go to the doctor's office. (It turns out my kid had a virus that was giving him a fever. WHO KNEW? It's like the time I was diagnosed with vertigo because I was really dizzy.) Then I still couldn't find the bottom of my work inbox no matter how hard I tried, and I was using some of tomorrow's hours that night to finish today's work, and I was striking items from my "can get done before trip" list and staying up later than I wanted to working instead of going to the gym.

By Wednesday morning, though, I was still feeling like I could handle it. I would go to the gym, go home and work - which would surely result in being caught up since I had caught up the night before. Then I would head out a couple of hours before I had to pick him up so I could run my last minute errands.

At 3:15 p.m. I wasn't remotely done with work. So I was going to be working that night. But dammit, I was going to go shopping.

At 3:20 p.m. I was stressed out and realizing that this was WEDNESDAY which meant my mother in law had to leave early and I somehow had to fetch C-Man from work and get back in time for her to leave without picking him up so early that his boss would notice.

At 3:25 p.m. I was sitting in the car, now really stressed out, doing my pre-driving routine. Shut car door, seat belt, press button for garage door, check hair in vanity mirror, insert key, start car, start iPod, oops I forgtot to press button for garage door so let's do that now, turn on air conditioning.

(If you are my husband, you already see where this is going. He knows the end of every movie within five minutes of it beginning. It's so annoying.)

Between "press button for garage door" and the step that comes after turn on air conditioning, a certain amount of time normally elapses.

Now even if you are not my husband, you see it coming, don't you?

Normally, there is not a step called "oops I forgot to press button for garage door so let's do that now."

That changes how much time elapses between when the garage door starts opening and the steps that come after "turn on air conditioning," which are "shift car into reverse" and "back out of garage."

OH YES I DID!

Backed my own damn car right into my garage door while it was only halfway open.

Nothing says "let's leave for this event that requires lots of energy in a relaxed, well-rested state" like calling your husband to ask what the f*&k you should do about the fact that the lower panel of the garage door is bent and ripped out of the track, and the only car you own IS STUCK INSIDE.

And then I stayed up working until 12:30 that night, slept for two and a half hours, and got up so I could take a cab to the airport for my 6am flight.

The end.

Oh, hang on, answers to questions you may have:

1. Yes, I did end up getting some shirts, and they're lovely, and some of them are even not black. I spent $50 for 5 shirts at Buffalo Exchange and I think that's a pretty good deal.

2. The garage door was actually reparable and cost only $209, which sucks but is not as bad as the escalating estimate in my brain as I waited for the repair guy to show up. ($500! $1200! $2000!)

3. No, C-Man did not get angry with me. I'm a hot redheaded chick who spends his money on comic books and makes him go see Predators. If he has to spend $200 on garage doors occasionally because I can't be bothered to look in a rear view mirror, his life is still pretty f*&king awesome.

Me: I do not ever want to drink that much at one time again. I also feel guilty that I wasted good dessert by taking two bites and realizing that I really, really didn't need to eat any more of it because I really didn't want to get sick.

BFF: The dessert didn't go to waste! I ate it for you!

Please stop making me log in every time I want to use one of your services. Don't you know my password is so secure that I can only type it correctly one time out of three?

Just trying to get some work done,
The Princess

Ingredients:

• leaves from 1 cabbage delivered a week and a half ago by your beloved local food grocery delivery service
• 3 red potatoes from same service
• 4 or 5 reddish onion-y looking things you can't really identify, from same service, but from the delivery two weeks before the one where you got the cabbage and potatoes
• grated cheddar cheese
• goat's milk, since that's the only kind of dairy milk you have in the house and something tells you not to substitute soy or rice milk for this one
• maybe some other stuff, because your significant is cooking and who knows what the heck is going to end up in there

Directions:

• Ignore cabbage for 1 week.
• Insist that people other than yourself make some effort to use up the cabbage, peas, and basil that have shown up in the beloved local food grocery delivery boxes in the last two shipments.
• Admit that the pickling cucumbers are probably a little farfetched for your household to use up and mentally cross them off the list.
• Explain that making a batch of eggrolls large enough to use up an entire head of cabbage is even more farfetched.
• Reject multiple internet-generated "suggestions" from your significant other of recipes that would use up cabbage.
• Admit that a recipe calling for both cabbage and potatoes might be useful in using up both cabbage and potatoes.
• Cross "breakfast tacos with potatoes" off the meal planning list.
• Read the recipe in question.
• Watch your significant other google "runner beans."
• Explain that the higher the number of different ingredients contained in a dish, the less likely you are to eat it.
• Express appreciation when is agreed that runner beans be excluded.
• Days later, when your significant other has a day off work for the holiday and you do not (or rather, you can have a day off whenever you want it, but you don't get paid), and your significant other asks what he or she should do with his or her afternoon, suggest making the cabbage and potatoes dish.
• Say "bye!" to your significant other as she or he heads out to the grocery store for ingredients to make a pina colada.
• Answer phone call from significant other, who is at Half Price Books, asking whether he or she should purchase a used copy of Dark Reign, the Wolverine: Origins book that comes between the Original Sin crossover and Romulus, both of which you have read.
• Knowing full well that you're going to read the entire Wolverine:Origins series anyway, even though it's nowhere near as good as the first book of the Wolverine: Weapon X series that you just read last week (and OMG it ROCKED), agree that Dark Reign should be purchased.
• Make mental note to add Dark Reign into the Marvel continuity non-X-Men tab of your worksheet under the theory that it follows from that New Avengers book where Wolverine is all "that's my kid who just joined the Dark Avengers and I would like to have a word with him."
• Ignore blender noise upon significant other's return with pina colada ingredients.
• When significant other yells "Do you want any of this concoction?", say no.
• Be proven completely right several minutes later when significant other says "That was disgusting."
• Overhear significant other saying to herself or himself "Now to find that recipe again..."
• Check Firefox bookmarks for any evidence that significant other bookmarked the recipe for the cabbage and potatoes thing.
• Find nothing.
• Go back to reading blog posts about how bad The Last Airbender movie is.
• When asked to proffer an opinion on whether cabbage leaves are sufficiently cooked, guess that perhaps they do need to retain some structural integrity but then again what do you know?
• Agree that perhaps that looks like a LOT of milk.
• Ignore multiple comments by significant other about the likelihood of the dish being edible.
• Go upstairs to give two year old a bath.
• Ask significant other to bring your phone upstairs when your grandmother calls.
• Advise your grandmother on the proper placement of safety pins for basting a quilt.
• When oven timer goes off, leave significant other to supervise bath and remove cabbage and potatoes thing from oven.
• Shout up the stairs "Did you already take a spoonful out of it, or did it spontaneously develop a sinkhole?"
• Go back upstairs to dry off two year old.
• Agree with two year old that the blue big boy underwear is a fine choice.
• Assure two year old that even though he has not eaten in five hours, he does not have to eat dinner if he does not want to, but he does have to come downstairs so Mommy and Daddy can eat their dinner.
• Spoon some of the cabbage and potatoes thing onto two plates.
• Try it.
• Give up.
• Eat cereal for dinner.

I'm pretty sure everyone has a superhero power. Everyone has one thing they do better than just about anyone, something they do so well that onlookers are positively amazed. Mine is loading the dishwasher.

Seriously, my mother in law loads the dishwasher and then she asks me to come in and finish it up, and I rearrange to include 3 more plates, 2 cups, and a mixing bowl. I pay attention to where the water comes from and I don't crowd. I have low tolerance for breakable things touching each other due to the risk of chipping. I don't like to hear rattling while the machine is running, so I space well. And yet I can get more dishes in the dishwasher than anyone I know.

I haven't figured out how to make any money or save any lives with my power, but it is mine and I cherish it.

What's yours?

So we're eating dinner, which is a big salad that C-Man made.

I look down and say "You didn't peel the carrots, did you?"

C-Man says "No. I take it I should have?"

I say "Yes." And I almost say "I don't usually like to see roots growing out of my food"...

...but then, luckily, I remember what a carrot actually is and just keep eating.

C-Man, standing in front of the open fridge:

"So what kind of nachos are we having for dinner tonight?"

I like it here, y'all.

Yesterday was C-Man's birthday, so his mother made him a carrot cake. And lasagna and a green salad and fruit salad and garlic bread, because food is love. (Or because she thinks 12 people live in our house? I can never tell.)

I am not eating any of the carrot cake.

I have finally decided, after years of confusion and good faith effort, that I do not like carrot cake enough to waste time or calories on it. "It's there" is not a sufficiently good reason to eat something, particularly not something that's supposed to be a treat. What, pray tell, is the point of eating cake if I'm going to spend the whole time I'm eating cake thinking "I really should like this more than I do, everyone else likes this, but I kind of wish I were drinking a glass of water instead."

So, I will not be eating any carrot cake.

I make no promises about the leftover icing in the fridge, though, particularly since we have graham crackers in the pantry.

At the intersection where you were on your way home from the gym but forgot you were supposed to go by the library so you pull up into first place in the turn lane just as the light turns red and then you realize you need to go straight so you kind of turn and roll your car forward until it's halfway into the lane you really want to be in since there's no one there except it means you roll forward a bit over the stop line...

...and a COP pulls up behind you in the turn lane where the back half of your car is?

THAT intersection. The lights are reaaaaalllly long there.

Dear other drivers in Austin, Texas,

There are probably a fair number of things you do as a matter of habit while driving. It's automatic by now. You don't even have to think about it. Checking your rear view mirror on a regular basis, turning on headlights when you go somewhere late at night, changing lanes smoothly.

These things are not automatic for me. These things take a lot of thought and planning. I have only been driving on a regular basis for about two years. Consider me the equivalent of your average 18 year old behind the wheel, except without the feeling of invulnerability.

All of this is to let you know the following:

I understand that The Wave is a culturally necessary component of any driving transaction between two vehicles that involves the driver of one vehicle doing a favor for another vehicle, and by doing a favor I mean doing the polite thing that everyone knows they should do when faced with a similar situation and if they did, we would all be happier.

I understand that as Texans, we take social behaviors such as The Wave very seriously, and I am committed to doing my part to uphold our shared values of neighborliness (as long as I don't have to talk to my actual neighbors), good manners, and other values we have here that I actually agree with, since there are a few which obviously are kind of a mess and give our state a bad reputation.

And yet, despite my very clear understanding of what is at stake each time I am in a vehicular transaction that requires me to offer The Wave in thanks for another driver's display of proper neighborly behavior, I feel we may at times all be better served by having me concentrate on operating the motor vehicle. It may be little, but if I smash it into someone else's car, things could end badly.

I hope you understand.

Best wishes,
The Princess