After a ridiculously mild December and January, February has hit us full force. We have a bunch of snow, and more coming. Unlike some people, we have not decreed that everything close down for days on end, which I’m more than a little bit bitter about. I would like some snow days, too, please.

Since that seems unlikely, we’ve been holing up as best we can. This evening I finally admitted that despite the difficulty in getting cars in or out of the driveway, we weren’t about to shovel, and I paid some guys from Craigslist to come clear it off. I expect that this investment will last until about three p.m. tomorrow, by which point there will be another foot of snow. Still, we’ll call that a win, as it means that as of right now, the car is in the garage and the driveway is navigable again.

It was actually almost nice to go out this morning, actually–the everything was iced over, including the trees, and it was pretty gorgeous. It almost made up for having to leave the house.

For those of you who are lucky enough to not have to leave the house, can I suggest making some cookies? Maura and I made these last weekend, and they were delicious.

Cream together butter, sugar, and salt. Beat in the eggs and vanilla extract. Add the flour, cocoa powder, and baking soda a little at a time, beating well after each addition. Stir in the chocolate chips. Drop by rounded spoonfuls onto greased (or parchment lined) cookie sheets. Bake in a preheated 375F oven for between eight and twelve minutes, depending on how well-done you like your cookies and how effective your oven is. (If you are me, you will bake each tray of cookies for nearly 25 minutes–my oven, obviously, is not very effective at all.)

Consume with milk.

Even more amazingly, this was all finished by about four thirty on Sunday afternoon. (I didn’t do anything Saturday except shop for ingredients, so it was all done in just a few hours.)

Maura’s been sick all weekend, and Nick and I weren’t really feeling up to a big supper, so I thought that I’d make some pretzels–we could have pretzels, cheese, mustard, and beer and call it a night.

So I’m standing at the mixer, mixing up pretzel dough, when all of a sudden, the cabinet that holds my dishware came off of the wall. It happened in slow-motion, like something out of a movie–I turned around when I heard the dishes starting to shift, and the cabinet was leaning from the wall at a forty-five degree angle. Before I could move, the doors sprung open and a waterfall of dishes poured out, bouncing off the countertop and onto the floor where they crashed and shattered.

It went on forever. Thirty seconds later, I was standing in the kitchen, surrounded by glass and exploded soda. My Pfaltzgraff (in the sadly discontinued Mountain Shadow), my nice stemless wine glasses, the mugs, the drinking glasses, the random bits of pretty dishware that I’d picked up at garage sales–all of it was shattered. We salvaged two bowls, one drinking glass, two mugs, and a few plates that won’t last long (they’re quite chipped) but will do until we’ve figured out where the rest of the dishware is.

Lucky for us, nobody got hurt. Nick and Maura were snuggling on the sofa, and I was on the other side of the kitchen. I ended up with a big scratch across my belly from struggling with a shredding bag of broken dishes, and Nick and I both ended up with little bits of glass in our hands, but it could’ve been so much worse. The kitchen is pretty small, and the cabinet that fell is right next to the fridge and the sink–anyone doing dishes would have gotten sliced up pretty badly, I think.

Thankfully we have other dishes–when Nick and I got together, he had a set of dishes and I had two, plus some random stuff that wasn’t part of a set. Then Nick’s grandmother died, and we inherited her dishes, as well. I’m pretty sure that Gram’s are in the garage, and all I’ll have to do is bring in the box, wash them off, and figure out somewhere to store them.

Has anyone else ever had this happen, where a cabinet (apparently properly installed–screwed into the wall at three points with ~3″ long screws) has just come undone? Do you think that I should be worried about this happening to my other cabinets? Is this one of those things that only happens to me?

It’s–it’s my feet. Okay? I said it. It’s my feet.

My feet are fucking disgusting. I swear less on the internet than I do in real life, so let me say that again, just for emphasis: my feet are fucking disgusting.

It’s not like they’re unclean or fungal or anything, but they’re dry.

Dry like sandpaper dry. Dry like I could probably use them to depill my sweaters, only I think that they would actually shred the sweaters, and also I don’t know where any of my sweaters are because I was rearranging our clothes and I put all the winter clothes in somewhere sensible and out of the way, only now it’s autumn and I’m not sure where sensible and out of the way is, and this paragraph has gone horribly off track.

My feet. Guys. My feet. They’re so dry that should I decide to pick up woodworking again, I’m pretty sure that I will not need to buy rasps, because I can use my feet instead. I don’t know what to do!

I’m not really good at caring a whole lot about my body or whatever. I dislike personal maintenance of any sort–I have a buzz cut, I don’t shave for reasons both ideological and laziness related, and I wash my face every night in the shower, by which I mean there’s water running across it, so I figure that it’s pretty clean. I grudgingly get my brows threaded every once in a while, but it always pisses me off to have to do it. So when I say that I don’t know what to do with this foot thing, I mean I really don’t even know where to start.

I have a PedEgg, and it’s amazing, but it takes me about 45 minutes to get both feet to a point where they feel like the feet of a normal person, and the effect lasts for about three days. Within a week, it’s back to square one. Plus, frankly, 45 minutes is a long time to be scrubbing awkwardly at one’s feet–that time could definitely be put to better use.

Lotion helps, but only for an hour or two. Also, I have this texture issue, and I can’t really touch my feet. I realize that it’s a stupid hangup, but whatever. Some people are afraid of needles, I can’t touch my feet without feeling like throwing up. Other people’s feet are fine, but my own? Ick.

Surely there’s something that I can do, right? I can’t apply lotion hourly, but neither can I go on with my feet like this.

Magic pills? Snake oil with a placebo effect? Reassurance that I am not the only person around with hideous, rough feet? Help me, internet, you’re my only hope*!

*Strictly speaking, this is probably not true, but whatever. I will keep you guys posted on important issues such as OMG A YELLOW LEAF and somewhat antiquated methods of food preservation, you will tell me things about how not to have disgusting feet.

It’s Sunday night–have pictures of cats! I’m told that the internet loves cats. This works out well, since obviously I love cats, too. I was just telling Nick that it’s fortunate he’s a cat person, since I don’t think that I could’ve married a dog person. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t dislike dogs, it’s just that I don’t understand how you could look at a cat and dog, side by side, and not conclude that the cat is the superior animal.

(The cats are Lola and Molly, respectively.)

Sleepy Louise kitty. I have to admit that I’m sympathetic to Louise’s very, very lazy approach to life. I feel like this week has gone on forever, and I’m hoping that on Saturday we’re able to just hole up and not do things. I suspect, of course, that this will not be quite how it actually plays out, but I can continue to hope.

I have a huge backlog of things to post about, and haven’t had the time to sit down and string two words together. A not-insubstantial portion of spare time this week has been dedicated to sleeping–I seem to have caught some sort of bug, and have been hard-pressed to do much more than sleep. I was hoping to make some more jam this weekend, but I might have to put it off until next weekend, instead.

The garden is about to turn a corner again, I think. After the early bounty of green beans, peas, chard, and tomatoes, we’ve had several weeks with very little to harvest save for yellow teardrop tomatoes. We’ve got several almost-ripe tomatoes, though, and it looks like the rest of them are on their way, as well. I can’t wait–I’ve not eaten nearly enough tomatoes this summer, and I intend to remedy that as soon as possible.

I’ll leave you with a picture of a kitten sleeping in a bowl. Maura loves to play with my mixing bowls, and Charlie, for some reason, loves to sleep in them.

And now I’m off to bed.

I’ve been so busy writing posts lately that I failed to post. Great job, self. That’s actually true, though–it’s not that I’ve got nothing to say, but rather that I’m in the middle of writing a bunch of ridiculously lengthy and involved posts about things like universal health care (for it), book piracy (for it, conditionally), and Disney movies (against it).

Tonight, though, something magical happened and, obviously, the thing to do is tell the internet.

Tonight, Maura went to bed without fussing. Or whining. Or calling me seventy-eight times to fix her blankets, find her a book, charge her (kinetic-energy-powered) flashlight, get her some more water, turn the lights on so she could go to the bathroom, or adjust the openness of her window.

You might think that this is because I’m a fantastic parent, or because she’s the sort of child who likes going to bed, or because I drugged her with Benadryl before putting her down, but you’d be wrong on all counts. No, my friends. Tonight, I said that she could have fifty cents if she didn’t fuss at bedtime.

And it worked.

We’ve been meaning to give her an allowance for a while now, but weren’t sure exactly how to handle it. This is perfect–she’s ridiculously money-oriented, and I’m more than happy to pay $2.50 a week for the privilege of being able to put her in bed, sit down, and then not get up for an hour. I can’t believe that I didn’t figure this out months ago. Now that we’ve done it, it seems so obvious, but I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that I could’ve saved myself many hours of lost sleep if I’d just wised up a bit earlier.

In other Maura-related news, she’s lost one of her bottom teeth. The photo above was supposed to be of her smiling so that I could send the picture to my mother, but Maura wanted to lounge against the tree and occasionally lunge at me, baring her teeth. Eventually she stayed still long enough for me to snap her missing teeth, top and bottom gaps lining up perfectly.

My baby’s all grown up.

Awww.

This is not a journey that I undertake lightly. I hate malls. I hate how they smell, and I hate how they’re full of people, I hate how the lights are ugly and too bright, and the salesclerks are either invisible or breathing down your neck, and I’m pretty sure that the air is actually thinner inside a mall because I always leave feeling lightheaded and dizzy and vaguely ill, and…yeah. I hate malls.

So when I say that I went to the mall, understand that what I am saying is that I went to the mall despite all of this, because I was convinced for the seven-minute drive there that it was somehow going to be a good thing.

Okay, in truth, I went because of two things. One is that something needed to be done about my eyebrows. I have a buzz cut, and every few months it occurs to me that the amount of eyebrow I have does not match the amount of hair I have, and then I go and give the nice woman at the mall $10 plus a $2 tip to thread them. It’s a $3 tip if she doesn’t get lotion in my eye.

The other reason that I went to the mall is because I’ve once again hit a point where I realize that all of my clothing is unattractive and inadequate, and that despite the fact that I’m a reasonably mature person who has a six-year-old child and a career and a husband and a house and garden that I haven’t killed, I look like a surly seventeen year old. Everyone I know–literally everyone I know–dresses better than I do.

This is partly because I do not care. I don’t like clothing that clings to me, I don’t like things that touch me too much, I don’t like things that are girly… There is a long, long list of things that I do not like in clothing.

The other reason that I dress like I do was driven home in my attempts at shopping. I am, let’s face it, kinda fat. I’m one of the in-betweenies: too fat to comfortably shop in the regular sections of a clothing store, too thin to really fit anything in the plus-size section. Add to that the fact that I’m apple shaped and have small boobs, and you’ve got limited clothing choices. My general objectives are inexpensive and comfortable, which usually ends up being men’s jeans and a tee-shirt. (Not one of those horrid girly-cut things, either, but a bog-standard rectangle-shaped tee-shirt.)

So my options today were this: continue to look like a teenager, or suck it up and go into JCPenny, where there was a big sale, and see what I could find. Somewhat reluctantly, I went for option number two.

Women’s clothing was right next to the door. I grabbed three pairs of jeans (fourteen, sixteen, eighteen) and two shirts (XL, XXL) and hit the dressing room. All the jeans fit, but…weirdly. Eighteens were huge in the legs and gappy at the back, fourteens fit my legs great but squeezed my stomach, and the crotch on the sixteens was much baggier than what I needed. The shirts also did not work–the XL fit, objectively, but was too tight for my comfort, and the XXL was cut in such a way that either a breast or a shoulder was exposed. Pass.

I texted my boss and offered Starbucks in exchange for letting me take a long lunch and make it up later. Deal struck.

The plus-sizes were in a section next to the regular sizes, so I headed over there. It’s like passing into a different world, a world that primarily caters to grandmothers who live in Miami and would like to wear brightly colored animal prints and large, floating muumuu-inspired tops. Apparently, the hot trend for fat girls this season is bright colors, lots of filmy fabric, and tight satin singlets worn under caftans.

News flash: the last thing that I want on my body is something that’s going to billow.

I grabbed several pairs of jeans, a few pairs of capris (I hate capris, but they’re so damn ubiquitous that I’ve given up), and two sizes of every shirt that I didn’t hate. The dressing-room police were off duty, so I was able to take everything in with me at once, which made it a bit easier.

After a dozen pairs of pants, I had two that fit. The shirts were harder, as I’m small-breasted, and the assumption seems to be that if you’re fat, obviously you will have enormous breasts. Out of the nine or ten styles of shirts (styles–I had two sizes for many of them) that I took in with me, one of them ended up fitting. The others either left my tits hanging out, fell off of my shoulders, cut across my nipples in a painful way, or involved a fitted singlet that was attached to a bunch of shapeless, filmy fabric.

Ninety minutes in the store, and I walked out with two pairs of pants and a shirt for a mere $50. Everything that I purchased was on sale, all of them more than half off–buying at regular prices, it would’ve been over $40 just for the jeans.

I made what was a pretty major effort, and I ended up with two pairs of pants and a shirt. It’s depressing, but I’m not sure what else to do–I’m unwilling to join the caftan club, unable to spend a ton of money on clothes, and ultimately unimpressed with my options.

So I shopped. Because I hate stores, I ended up shopping online, and eventually I found a vacuum that looked adequate and was available for local pickup from Best Buy. I love in-store pickup. You pay online, and then you just show up, they present you with whatever you’re buying, and you can walk out. You don’t have fight your way past the shoppers who just want to browse, slowly, in the middle of the aisle. You don’t have to try to compare things while you’re in the store, surrounded by loud, bright, and smell. All the bonuses of shopping online, none of the annoying waiting for things to be shipped. I wish that everywhere had in-store pickup. (Target, I’m looking at you.)

My new vacuum looks like this:

Anyhow, apparently I’ve turned into the sort of person who finds vacuums really, really exciting, because not only did I phone several friends and Twitter about my awesome new vacuum, I’m now blogging about it.

Seriously, though, this vacuum is amazing. It’s a Eureka Pet Lover Upright Bagless Vacuum in “mystic purple”, and it’s fantastic. I think that the carpet downstairs is cleaner than it’s been since we moved in. Two weeks, seven cats, and this picked up everything. It’s pretty small–when I brought it home, Nick thought that I’d lost my mind, buying a tiny baby vacuum–but it’s impressively powerful.

For all the reviews that comment that it has a small canister, I found it to be perfectly adequate. Two weeks of cat hair is a lot of cat hair, and I vacuumed the whole downstairs, but even so, I think that we could have easily done the upstairs as well, and then quite probably the downstairs again, too. You’re supposed to empty the canister every time you use the vacuum anyhow, so I don’t see that it’s likely to become problematic for us.

After the exciting vacuuming (did I mention that I finally got all of the spilled coffee grounds off of the kitchen floor? All of them! Even the ones that were basically inside the heating vent!) our friend Emily called to finalize our plans for tomorrow. The plans include her, plus a couple who lives nearby and went to school with Nick and Emily, but who I’ve never met. I ended up on the phone with the wife-half of the couple–who, again, I’ve never met–to figure out what she could and couldn’t eat, and ended up telling her all about my new vacuum. That’s right. “Hello, person I’ve never met, what shall we do for supper tomorrow? Also, I bought a vacuum!”

Hey, internet. I bought a vacuum.

So far, the plant mortality rate around here is zero, which is pretty damn impressive. Our yard is also covered with the flowers you see in the picture above. I think that they’re forget-me-nots, though I’d always thought that forget-me-nots were blue. There are definitely blue flowers here, but some of them are purple, and others are pink. They’re very attractive, whatever they are.

Unfortunately, it seems like the garden’s about the only thing going right this week. First my wrist started to have carpal-tunnel-esque issues. Annoying–especially since it’s somewhat more difficult to knit with a wrist brace on than it is without one–but not too bad. Last night I learned a very important lesson about making chicken wings at home (lesson: don’t do it) and managed to destroy supper and fill the entire house with smoke in the process. Then today, we found out that there’s a leak in the water service line, the pipe that connects the water main to our house.

Guess whose side of the pipe the leak is on? Yeah, ours. So after about two dozen phone calls to various insurance agents (who, predictably, told us that while any damage we sustain from the leak is covered, the pipes themselves are not) and plumbers (most of whom do deal with cover service line breaks) and referrals from referrals, we found someone who’s willing to do it next week, explained everything that they’d do, including telling us how they’d take down our fence, and is reasonably priced.

Sort of. Reasonably in the sense that I was afraid that this was going to cost $2500 or so, and it’s “only” going to cost $1250. I still about threw up when he said that. I realize how much work is involved (digging up the yard, removing the fence, drilling through the foundation of our hundred+ year old house…) and it’s a completely fair price, but it still stings.

He can fix it Wednesday, and in the meantime, our very, very nice neighbors have agreed to let us run a hose from their house to ours, so we can still do things like flush the toilet and shower. The water, we’ve found is sort of disgusting to drink even after it’s been filtered, so I think that I’ll be buying a flat of bottled water tomorrow. I never buy it–I feel bad about the environmental cost of all those plastic bottles, plus resent paying more for what’s probably just purified tap water anyhow–but I think that this one time, it’s probably worth it.

On the upside, the maybe forget-me-nots are in another part of the yard, so they’ll not be disturbed. All of the plants that I’ve started this year are in the backyard, so they’re safe, too. And the attractive green succulent that’s growing around the base of our giant tree is safe.

Next week’ll be better.