Repeat after me in  outrageous French accent:  Ice Crrrreammmm, she eez zee enemeeeeeeee
Ice cream is the enemy because it pretends to be my friend.  My two evil cravings tend to be fast food (with its salty french fry goodness) and  ice cream.  The thing about the fast food is its easier to resist because I know how crappy and greasy and gross it makes me feel afterwards.  I know it’s bad, and it doesn’t pretend otherwise.  But ice cream doesn’t make me feel bad.  Even if I gorge on it.  It makes me sleepy and happy.  It talks me into gaining 15 lbs in one sitting.  Well, not one sitting, but you know what I mean.
After I had Neve I managed to lose all the weight plus extra (I know, right????) and I felt pretty great.  Then I went back to work. And what a job experience that was.  I temped for the most evil woman in the world.  The kind that tells you to put all other projects aside and work on this one very important thing, and then when you complete it and hand it to her she not only yells at you for putting all of your efforts into something so unimportant, she also wants to know who the hell told you to do it in the first place.  And you can’t tell her that it was her, because then she accuses you of lying.  The kind that everyone else knows about and random people in the cafeteria express their sympathy for you.  My co-worker and I would hide out in her office and cry together.  I cried all the way home every night.  And then the siren song of ice cream began to call.  It soothed me with its creamy goodness and told me everything would be ok.  It would fix all of my problems.  It lulled me into a not quite peaceful state where I was not able to get any sleep but I could certainly stay up late eating pint after pint of The Full Vermonty and One Sweet Whirled.  I began stopping to get some every night.  Before I knew it my pants weren’t quite going on as easily.  My fat roll was becoming more prominent and then I developed (gasp!) a muffin top.  The horror!
But you see now I know better.  I have learned from my ill-fated love affair with Ben and Jerry.  SO that craving I am having for Cookie Dough?  I am going to drown it with water.
Ok, maybe I’ll have just one bite……….

I will have you all know, I do not have dust bunnies in my home.
Now now, don’t hate me.  I just happen to have a superior cleaning
method which allows for the lack of these small bundles of dust and fur.
I must give credit for this situation where it is due:  the 3 pets which constantly
shed, and the 3 children who make it impossible for me to do any
cleaning so that what should be a dust bunny in fact becomes a herd of large
dust buffaloes.
I know – you’re so jealous.
(Tip: You are almost guaranteed to have only dust bunnies if you lack pets
or if you vacuum or sweep regularly).

Martha Stewart, eat your heart out.

Now that I am thoroughly freaked out by Neve’s brown recluse incident, it seems fitting that I should be bombarded with more spider fun.

Incident 1:
There I was, in my bathroom, brushing my teeth, innocently preparing for bed. There was Sushi, hangin’ out in the sink, getting in my way. And there, as I leaned close to the wall and looked in the mirror to check my flossing, was a big ol’ spider. Right on the wall, not far from my head.
Sidebar: If you don’t already know, I am terrified of vermin of the 8 legged variety. We’re talking full-on phobia here. I can’t even get close enough to kill them. If I am home alone, I try to get one of the animals to dispatch said creature. Failing that, it takes a whole lot of working myself up to
squash it, accompanied by some major adrenaline, goosebumps, and cold sweat. And screaming. I must look like some tribal warrior heading to an inevitable death, shouting a war chant. And then I have trouble
disposing of the carcass. Dead or alive, it doesn’t matter. They still suck.
Anyway, back to the story. I see this spider hanging out on my bathroom wall and after I jump back and cry out, I do what comes naturally in those situations: I grab the cat out of the sink and hold her out toward the wall, hoping she’ll spot it. She does. I set her down on the tub and jump back away. She looks
at the spider, looks at me, yawns, and nonchalantly exits the room. Crap!!!!
Now I am frantically looking around for something I can smash it with. I don’t want to call Paul upstairs now because it’s on the move and I don’t want it to get away before he is able to come to the rescue. There’s an empty perfume box…..it’s the only thing close at hand that will do the trick. So with a loud scream and an even louder smack, Mr. Spider met his doom. Even better, he stuck to the perfume box so I didn’t have to worry about wiping him up with a tissue.

Incident 2:
I was feeling a little edgy after the aforementioned spider smackdown. I threw away the box (holding it out at arm’s length all the while……I wonder if I can burn the box and spider in a fire….). I rinsed my mouth (still had toothpaste in there) and was going for the towel when I spotted yet another big ugly on the wall opposite the one where ugly 1 had met his doom moments ago. Okaaaayyyyy……well my nerves are still shot from the first guy, and since this one was staying put, I yelled for Paul, who made his way upstairs and smooshed it
rather handily, thank you very much. But I wasn’t happy. Two spiders in my bathroom (which is in my bedroom to make matters worse) at the same time. Not cool. Not cool at all. And Paul thinks burning dead spiders is a waste. I really need to break out the vacuum. Get under all the beds and behind all the furniture. Satisfy myself that there are none others lurking in the dark recesses of my home. Sent a chill up my spine just thinking about it. Maybe I’d go down to the kitchen and get a drink.

Incident 3:
On the ceiling. In the kitchen. Mere moments after Incident 2, which was itself mere moments after Incident 1.
WTF??!!!!!
Another job for Paul. Even when I am home alone I don’t attempt a kill while they are above me. They could fall on me, and no amount of anti-crazy meds could bring me back from that. (ok, I exaggerate…..but trust me when they’ve dropped on me in the past it’s not been pretty.)
3 spiders. In one night. Practically at the same time. In my home, my sanctuary. They must totally be out to get me.

Incident 4:
After a fitful night of sleep (spider dreams anyone???) I groggily make my way to the coffee maker and then over to the couch. It’s almost bus stop time, and it’s still somewhat dark out. I don’t have any lights on downstairs but you can see pretty well with the sun starting to come up. So it’s no problem for me to see the spider making his way quickly and creepily past my feet next to the couch and toward the fireplace. Paul’s not home, and even if he were, this guy is too fast. Thankfully I have my hard soled slippers on. I jump on him. It doesn’t kill him. Again, and he’s slowing down. Third time is the charm. Trouble is, I now have spider guts on my slippers and I no longer wish to be associated with them. I fact, I need the fireplace to be working so I can burn them. No, not burn. Incinerate. Damn spiders. Instead I take the dog outside and scrape my slippers hard on the concrete sidewalk outside.
I can burn that later.

Other “not quite incidents, but bad nonetheless”:
In the morning there are hundreds upon hundreds of “sheet webs” all over my lawn. Actually, they are there all the time, but it’s the morning dew that makes them visible. These are created by funnel spiders who trap bugs from the lawn to eat. They are not huge, but neither are they small. I prefer to pretend that I don’t know they are there. In the morning with all the dew, I cannot do that. They are
also all over the gravel driveway. I take perverse pleasure in running over them with my car. Hmmm…..can’t burn that later…….but I can take it through a high powered car wash.There is a giant spider carcass in my garage right now. Paul killed him the other night when coming home from doing van work. I swear, this
thing is big…even dead and all curled up…..still big. I get goosebumps just thinking about it. ANd I certainly can’t walk near it, all squished on the garage floor. If I spent any measurable time in the garage……I’d have to burn the floor.
The girls spotted a big fast spider in the sunroom last night. Paul killed him. I do not like all of these spider sightings all of a sudden.
Now I am jumping at every little dust bunny, every little bit of cat fur.
And what’s worse, I know there are some giants out there. I’ve seen them in the past. They haunt my nightmares. Three, in particular stand out, and I wish I had pictures of them for proof.
The first one was the worst. We had lived in Virginia maybe 5 or 6 months. It was a humid night and we were coming home from the laundry mat.
At the time we lived in an apartment in a house surrounded by huge trees. We didn’t get a lot of light in because of them, and there were a lot of bugs. Perfect for spiders. But up until that night I hadn’t seen anything worse than what I’d seen growing up in NY or NJ. BUt that night……….it was dark, and there was a light on outside the front door. And above the front door……the horror. I swear on all that is holy, I seriously thought someone’s pet tarantula had escaped. I have seen wolf spiders, I have seen dock spiders…..I have Never seen anything like that guy. I swear he was the size of my hand. And he was hanging out right above the doorway. I froze about 20 feet away. There was no way in hell I
was walking through that doorway. Paul had to (bravely) run in and come back out with a propane torch. He had himself a nice spider bbq before I
I could go in the house. Paul thinks live spiders are perfectly fine to burn.
The second one, we named. And we named him for the noise he made when he “jumped” off of our back porch into the leaf pile. “Thud”. He was almost as big
as the first guy, but not as quite. I didn’t go out onto our back porch for weeks after that.
The third one, I can still hardly believe I saw. Thankfully my mother did, too, so I have a witness. I had pulled up to her house in late September to drop something off and by her front door was what I thought, a fake spider. And I said to myself, “It’s kind of early for her to be putting out her Halloween stuff”.
But I did think I’d give her props for finding such a life – like fake widow spider. I mean, obviously it was fake. It was brown, shaped like a widow spider, and
had a giant fat body and long, long legs. I mean a spider that looks like that with a diameter of like 3 or 4 inches just can’t be real. Holy Crap he was real.
He even scared my mother….the master gardener who is totally used to co-existing with giant garden spiders. As I recall, she dispatched him with one of those electrified rackets that are generally used for flies and mosquitoes. And we both learned that there exists a spider called a “brown widow”. Great.
Anyway, that’s enough spider talk for me for today. I am sure I will have more in the future. I hate spiders, I see them way too often, and I like to whine about it.

So I was watching Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends on Cartoon Network, and they created an imaginary race called  “Space Nut Boogies”.  If I ever form a band, I am so naming it that.

Tomorrow:  Sunday, OCTOBER 7, 2007
Predicted high: 93 degrees
It’s too F-ing hot!!!!!!!!!!

Yes, shit happens.  It just seems to happen to me a whole lot more than I’d like to think is my fair share.  Why do I think that?  Here is a small sampling of reasons:

Last week I had a migraine.  A really wretched, no amount of pain killers were working kind of migraine.  I managed to get the baby to sleep despite the urge to vomit/bash my head in with a hammer and was trying to sleep off said migraine when I was woken by Paul at about 2 am.  It seems Neve had gotten up at some point and was playing with the dog leash.  When Paul came in from working for the night he found Neve asleep in our bed, finger stuck firmly in the leash clasp, leash firmly attached to our bed frame. He tried getting her finger slippery.  Her finger swelled.  We tried ice.  She screamed.  Out came the dremmel tool.  SHe screamed more.  Took about 2 hours of screaming and me holding her down to get the damn thing off of her.  And my migraine?  I still had it in the morning.  Later that day a had most of an iced venti coffee land in my lap due to a faulty top on the cup.

Neve got bit on the face by a brown recluse spider.  Aren’t they supposed to be really rare and rarely seen around here?

Last weekend the dog flipped out over something (I can’t remember what) and bumped hard into the middle drawer in the coffee table.  I happened to have my bare foot resting onthat very drawer.  It shut on my toe.  A few days later, that toe nail fell off.  Ouch.

Some jerk backed into my car in the grocery store parking lot this summer and did major damage.  He took off.  When we took the plate number to the police, we discovered the plates had been stolen:  their rightful owner had been in jail at the time of the incident.  Chances of finding the actual perpetrator:  next to zero.

I told Emily and Neve they could paint some pictures last night as long as they were careful not to make a mess.  The result?  Paint dripped all down the stairs, all in the hallway on my white carpeting, ALL over the bathroom (even the shower curtain!) and all over Neve.

We had to cut a big hole in our wall upstairs 2 weeks ago because of a nasty rotten smell we traced to the wall in that area.  What did we find?  3 dead mice.

Both Emily AND Neve got pneumonia at the same time one year, despite the fact that doctors told us that was next to impossible.  Pneumonia is not contagious, but the nasty bug that caused both of my girls to develop pneumonia sure was.  Emily was in the hospital for almost 3 weeks and had to have 2 tubes surgically implanted into her chest to drain out the fluid.

I got pregnant even though we were using protection.  (ok, so that has turned out to be a good thing and Oona is a total delight, but still.  At the time I was pretty miffed).

Emily once set my car on fire while I was driving down route 53 in Fluvanna.  (she shorted a wire in the reading light behind her)

Speaking of fire, the bus I was driving went up in flames at midnight one night on Beta Bridge in Cville.  I got all the passengers off ok and fortunately diesel isn’t as combustible as gasoline.  Turns out the repair shop put in the wrong fuel filter earlier that day and it was just waiting for me to get behind the wheel before it became a problem.

I got chicken pox twice – and the second time I was an adult.  It sucked.

I got 4 flat tires in the first year I owned my current car.

My entire day was wasted on Tuesday because the very common antibiotic our doctor prescribed for Neve was not in stock at any of the pharmacies in Cville.  (fortunately they had it at the lake).

I met my old boss for lunch in June and the waiter dropped a huge glass full of frozen mango smoothie on my head.  The next day I met another friend at a different restaurant and we waited for our food for an hour – the waitress apologized and admitted she had completely forgotten we were there.

There’s an overload of poop at my house on any given day (I’ve blogged about this already)

Embarq cannot get our phone service correct.  For no good reason we never know if we’ll be able to dial a long distance number, and despite months of trying to get it fixed, we also cannot receive calls from certain people.  Anytime we call,  no one at Embarq can figure out if there’s a problem or why.  And don’t you know it’s always when I really need to call Paul that suddenly our long distance doesn’t work.  Murphys’s Law really is Law, not probability.

I had several large nasty patches of poison ivy on me this summer, even though I hardly set foot outside and didn’t go near the woods.

And as if to drive home the point, as I write this, the dog is laying under my feet passing some raunchy horrendous gas and I think I may need to vomit.

The good thing about having family that owned a restaurant in Buffalo for 20 years is that i know how to make authentic buffalo wings whenever I want them.
The bad thing is I know how to make authentic buffalo wings whenever I want them.
Bluuuuuurgh.

So I decided to actually listen to my body today and take it easy.  And you know what?  For the first day in several weeks I did not experience debilitating pain.  Unfortunately it also means that no laundry or housewoek got done and I had to rely on Emily for a lot of things.  But I also got quite a lot of knitting progress made.  The girls have been bugging me for ages to knit them some “rainbow socks”, and they picked out colorful sock yarn for the project, and today I got halfway through with a Neve sock.And it’s nice to have a day where I am not boning up on my labor breathing.  I made the mistake of preparing lasagne for dinner last night – god forbid I spend 40 minutes on my feet!  I was in agony for like 2 hours after that.  Not cool.  That’s when I decided I’d better try to be more lazy.  I’ve been on my feet very little today (mostly to let the dog out) and it’s worked.

The moral of the story is that I just might get a lot of knitting projects done by the time this baby comes.  And that’s a good thing, because I have sooooo many Works in Progress on the needles that it’s ridiculous.

On a random note, I am totally addicted to Deadliest Catch on Discovery.  I would’ve watched it all day yesterday if the girls had let me.

I don’t know if it’s the hormones hitting me particularly hard, or if it’s just my usual semi annual bout, but I am feeling massively homesick lately.  It’s kind of hard being an artist that is mostly inspired by the terrain of the northest while I am living in the south.  Mostly it’s the eastern part of upstate NY, which is where I grew up.  We moved a lot when I was a kid so it’s really the whole region rather than a particular town.  I spent a lot of time in Kingston, and though I would never want to live there again, I definitely have the urge to go for a visit and see how things have changed.I guess it’s funny what sticks in your mind as you get older.  Now that it’s summer I am nostalgic for the many summer days I spent at my aunt Phyllis’ house in Tappan with my cousins, playing out all day in her yard with our Barbies.  And then there are days when what I’d really like is to go hang out at the picnic grounds overlooking Lake George in Lake George Village.  I liked watching the steamboats coming and going from the dock, and there’s nothing like a big bowl of freshly made ice cream at Wagar’s on the strip to wind down the day.

I really am a New England girl at heart – I like foggy overcast days and the smell of salty sea air.  Paul’s convinced I was a New England fisherman in a past life.  Maybe I am just weird.

Paul and I are headed to Martha’s Vineyard in July – I am hoping it will really feed my soul being up there for a few days and hold me over for another few months.  I’ll take plenty of pictures and spend time when I get home turning those into paintings.  That should help anyway.