Breaking The Dress Code

October 2006

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I wonder if I've ever mentioned

DSC_0787What an outstanding husband the Dr. is.
Oh sure I yell at him all the time about all manner of things
but really when it comes right down to it - he's quite nearly perfect.

Case and Point:

1. He does about 90% of the grocery shopping.
2. He does all his own laundry.
3. He does all the dishes, as long as I cook.
4. If I don't want to cook, he'll usually do that too.
5. He's better at playing with the girls than I am
6. He never asks how much anything I buy costs
7. He never suffered any insecurity all the years I made all the money or more money than he did.
8. He never mentions that he now makes almost twice what I do
9. He will actually genuinely root for my Auburn Tigers as long as they are not playing his Florida Gators
10. He puts up with me.

I say all this because I will need to remind myself of this list continually over the next two weeks while we paint and redecorate Pud's room while trying to get ready for her birthday party with 25 kids and in-laws galore.

Manifest This!

I'm going to be 40, not someday anymore but on a very certain day. My next birthday. Next February to be more specific. And since Oprah has now made 50 the new 40, who really cares about the real 40 anymore. My recently turned 40 friends have all welcomed it the same gusto they turned 21 - and with more booze since they can now afford it.

But I feel the need to do a little something different. I am going to write and publish a manifesto. What am I, Who am I, What do I believe? I don't know so much... These are all questions I hope to answer in the next several months.

Clearly Mr. Peters is the mack-daddy of manifesto writing and he is clearly an inspiration to me. I've crushed on him since I wrote my first Excellence paper back in the 80s. He's been a unknowing career counselor to me on my very wacky and strange journey from finance to service to IT to marketing. So now I'm going to take a tip from him on the personal side and put it all on paper for the world to see.  If I can come up with something that is 1/10 as intense and as filled with truth I will consider myself successful.

I will write my manifesto - and I will actually show it to people. Something a bit geeky unexpected but what the hell. The Dr. will find it truly embarrassing, he prefers I keep my geeky and unexpected tendencies behind closed doors or better yet, only on the Internet and not in his actual reality - but he will survive. It will be my birthday present to myself.

Do you have a manifesto? Can I see?

Blogging Along

I've really been thinking a lot about what I want to post about now that I've decided to start up again. We went through so much change last year, so many good and wonderful things happened but somehow only the negative stuff made it into the blog - so much so that I felt it became a bit toxic and I had to walk away. The shower has always been my thinking spot and in last night's shower I think I hit on the reason why the blog got so ick.

We moved last year into the most wonderful neighborhood you can possibly imagine. I mean, it's the one that they make real estate commercials about. It's not my ideal house, I've always dreamed of the classic colonial but when we found this one there was so much else that was right - that I quietly but willingly kissed my dreams of brick and columns and banistered staircases goodbye. I felt a vibe from this house from the beginning despite the fact that our realtor was sure I'd hate it. And there was a lot to hate - the whole dame interior was PINK. This blog is the exact shade of pink that my entire house was. But I got a vibe. This house knew me, and I knew it. I got a vibe.

What we didn't know is that we were getting the perfect street as well. And so many new and wonderful friends. And roots. We'd moved so many times that we'd stopped thinking about roots. We'd lived in this same town for 3 years now and maybe we knew 5 more people than when we first got her. We didn't bother putting down roots because we expected to move again. But we stayed in town and started putting down roots.

And what I realize now that it's gentle work creating roots. You do it with great care. And on some level I think I was afraid to blog about the connections and friendships I was making. They were new and fragile and beautiful and they had to be protected. It was such new territory for me making real, actual people you see everyday type friends. I didn't want to mess it up. I was being protective of them. They are not computer geeks, they do not blog, the have not presented themselves to the internet for inspection.

The ladies are also stay at home moms. And that scared me. My experiences with stay at home moms hadn't been that positive in the past. In general they didn't seem to want to let the working mom's be a part of their club. So I was a little shy on that front as well but really wanting everything to work out. Blogging about it didn't seem like the best way to bridge the gap.

Then there was the fact that I was learning be the mother of more than one child and learning how to manage and juggle and make sure that both children felt their mother was meeting their needs. Blogging about P but not S, or S but not P, made me feel guilty. What if they wasn't something I wanted to say about both of them on any given day?

So with all this goodness and fun happening all around only the bad stuff was making it into the blog. I was ranting, and venting, and pissing, and moaning. And I hated it.

Now that I feel like I've got a handle on what went wrong I think I can steer myself towards things that 1) excite me enough to write about 2) still fit in the comfort zone of what I feel I can write about. I've ordered this book to help me with ideas as well. And I feel like I'm on track, I have a plan, I'm moving forward....

So, do you want to know what I had for lunch today?

The Return of McSteamy

Words cannot begin to express how happy I was to see McSteamy, even I had to wait for ABC to post the episode Friday night to do it! My stinking Comcast DVR cut off the last few seconds of the show and all I saw was steam... and some dude. I was flipping out! Who was in that bathroom?!? Thank God Grey Matter was able to clear it up pretty quickly. But nothing beats actually seeing the scene play out... and seeing the look on Derek's face. If your DVR cut it off, go watch the end on ABC! Quickly!

I love Merideth's decision to not decide! That just means more McDreamy and more McVet for me! Yeah!!!

The Izzie thing is a little hard to swallow even with "willing suspension of disbelief" - I mean you just don't get to stay in a residency program after you kill a patient sort of on purpose like that no matter what.

I loved Alex in the bar scene - I feel like the old Alex is back.

I have to say after reading through this week's comments Grey Matter I'm so surprised at who many people are just now coming around to loving Callie as much as I do. First of all she's a tough chick Ortho - which well, just ROCKS! But to me she' always represented that 95% of the population who aren't in the cool, popular kids club. She's the girl on the outside that face it, most of us were (are). She looking in and wanting to be a part, wanting to be liked, and not sure how to make them see that she's cool too if they'd only give her a chance. Callie is the most real character, she's what they try to make George into but somehow just fall a little short by making him more wimpy than insecure. I love Callie, I have a mad girl crush on Callie.

Seriously!

Feeling Voxy

I got an invite to try out Vox and while I don't see the immediate advantage of using it as a blog tool over something like Typepad I do dig it as a place to rest my videos.

I've uploaded a little of Stink taking some steps and helping the Dr. do dishes. http://meliss.vox.com/

Fits and Starts

Okay so the universe met my new resolution to revive the blog with a I'll-show-you-who's-boss slapdown in the form of a scary and unexpected health issue.

Seems the Fifths Disease that Stinkerbell so lovely brought home three-weeks ago is a little more hard to handle when the adults of the house get it. The Dr. had it first and he seemed to come through relatively unscathed and only a little bit more grumpy.

I thought I was going to avoid it but it took the form of a chest cold and an inflamed liver. Yes, an inflamed liver. I'm not going to use the hepati.. word the white coats keep using because in the world of the Internet it might bring all kinds of misdirected traffic but you know what I'm talking about.

Evidently you can get a form of that without a stylish A B or C to accessorize it. It's just plain jane and resolves on it's own. But in the meantime the white coats like to prod you a lot and drain you alot just to see what's what with the enzymes.

According to today's results I'm down to only about 320% above normal down from 500% above normal so I guess I'm on the mend.

By the way normal = cocktails so if this sucker doesn't resolve itself by the Auburn/Florida game - I just may have to EBay a new liver!

Stinkerbell

DSC_0766

The first thing to catch up I think would be the fact that we no longer refer to SugarPop as SugarPop. My girl's real names are awesome if I do say so myself but they are very similar in rhythm and cadence and I have a hard time yelling the correct one at them. So to have like sounding nicknames on top of that just didn't work out.

So SugarPop became Stinkerbell (or StinkerPuss if I want to make Puddin' all crazy). If you'll remember Puddin loves Peter Pan like most girls love Cinderella. So she started calling her blond-haired blue-eyed mischievous little sister Tinkerbell and I quickly altered it to fit the little culprit better.

As you can see she wears it well

Back Again For Another Try

Well I am back again. I disabled this blog for a while because I sort of felt like I didn't know what I wanted to say anymore. As with most experiments it started out as one thing but grew into a different thing and I didn't really like where it was going. I hoped by shutting it down I'd find a new direction to go.

But a few days ago I stumbled along a forgotten link, quite by accident - it was in my "one day I should take the time to read these blogs" folder and an inadvertant mouse click introduced me to Miss Zoot. The right place and the right time... and she reminded me of all the reasons that I wanted to blog in the first place. She clearly was having the fun that I had long ago hoped to find and made me think that it was still out there just waiting for another try.

So I re-visited my own blog and found that if I just scrubbed 2006 I didn't hate me quite so much so that's what I did. I ditched all my snarky posts from this year and we're open for business again. The truth is it's been a really good year and I'll write a couple of posts that catch up anyone who still happens to wander by.. bless you for keeping the faith.

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