Category: Home Life

Fiendish Friday: And I thought dogs were color blind

~ tahenryauthoress ~ 3 Comments

I have a super cute mutt. He’s a momma’s boy but likes the hubs pretty well. He gives a little daddy’s home woof when my husband arrives home each night.

Today the hubs came home in a new car. Different make, model, and color than the one he left in. The dog went mad. Totally ballistic with his who are you and wtf do you think you are doing at my house bark as the hubs pulled into the garage. Kept right on at it until the hubs walked into the house too.

Huh. And I thought dogs were color blind….who knew they could differentiate make, model, and color. LOL

Fiendish Friday: Murphy’s Law Got Me Again

~ tahenryauthoress ~ 2 Comments

Let me set the scene for you. Tuesday morning. I think I know where my day is going. Up on time, coffee while puttering around handling stuff at the house.

An hour of yoga, hot, sweaty yoga.

Get the kiddo up, start on home school with him (yes, we home school in the summer too). Before I know it, it’s 940A. I need to leave the house in 20 to 30 minutes at the absolute maximum if I am going to make our first stop on time. Crud home school time warp strikes again.

I still need to get all the things we need for the day together, multiple stops worth. Pack healthy lunches and snacks. Get the kiddo through getting dressed and brushing teeth. And Shower.

No time for all of that. Hrm, decisions. Mental check list. Dropping kiddo off to the climbing gym. No one there is going to notice if I’m in work out clothes and a little smelly. Go to Starbucks to write. I’ll sit outside, that will be fine. Meet friends at Adventure Park, the park where kids get to build things out of wood, in 85 degree weather and lots of dirt. Huh. Shower can wait til after that little adventure. Perfect. I just get everything else done, with a few seconds for extra deodorant.

Meanwhile unbeknownst to me, the office manager at the non profit where we rent space for the coop school, has discovered he forgot to communicate our 2PM appt with his boss. He calls the coop pres and asks her to come in at 2P. She calls me, stressed because its 1230 and this feels like something is wrong. Right? Who calls you to drop everything and come in unless there is a problem?

I am 45 minutes without traffic from my home. The coop is 30 minutes without traffic from my home. If I yank my kiddo out of class right now, I can get home and pull on clean clothes but I won’t be showering. AGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Murphy, you suck!

Fiendish Friday: TV

~ tahenryauthoress ~ 2 Comments

What the bleep is wrong with TV these days? Seriously. I just watched all the new seasons that hit netflix in July. For all the shows I really like. And they all feel like they’ve jumped the shark. All of them.

Gone are semi realistic and bad ass fight scenes. Instead with a woosh and swoosh they pull it off and the Queen of England is pinning medals on them.

Actors are leaving shows because they make 10% less than another actor. Guess what, you aren’t the main star, you do less than half the air time but still get 90% of the money? But that isn’t enough for you? Well whaaaa

Gone is the psychological basis. The efforts made to demonstrate how one actually profiles. Instead we get episode after episode of how smart the big bad is and how dumb they are all acting now. I hope Scratch wins. You idiots deserve it. The only one using any logical thinking is the character who left at the end of last season and guest starred for two minutes.

I couldn’t even watch all of last season on some of my shows. They just went sideways immediately.

And then my beloved NCIS…really McGee? Finding out you’re gonna be a dad made you grow a pair so you’ll stay behind and die. Super. And what is with Senior guest starring?No Tony, no Senior. End of story.

Do audiences not want real story lines anymore? Do they not care about character development or substantial plot? I read an article this morning about how audiences just want pretty effects. And I’m afraid. What does this mean for books? For me as an author? Perhaps I was just born too late to be an author.

 

Fiendish Friday: Civilization vs the Primitive Brain

~ tahenryauthoress ~ 6 Comments

I am a civilized human. I am. I take my coffee with cream. I cook my meat and eat my fish raw. I bathe several times a week. I apply my war paint strategically for attractiveness, not to instill fear in my enemies.  I sew my fur coverings into shapes, rather than fasten them with a bone. I am civilized.

I love my husband for all the civilized reasons. He is funny and he laughs at my jokes which might actually be more important than him being funny. He is kind and so brilliant he makes me look dumb despite my above average IQ. He’s supportive of my crazy desire to be an author. He takes excellent financial care of the family. He treats me like a true partner. We agree on almost all the big picture items, so much so that when we disagree it’s a shock to the system.

But at the end of the day, what I find incredibly sexy at my core, is his ability to rip a 20 foot tall tree out of the ground with his bare hands and a minimum of effort. sigh. Primitive brain talking loud and clear.

You know damn well he would have brought home the woolly mammoth, every time.

Thanks for 12 fabulous years of marriage my darling!

Fiendish Friday: Out of the Mouths of Babes

~ tahenryauthoress ~ 4 Comments

One of my oldest friend was here to visit with her fam. She has two older children, tweenagers, but they’re super good with my kiddo. He adores them as well.

So one of the things said friend needed to do while here was drive 5 hours one way to visit her dad. I agreed to take her, mainly because her dad lives past Portland and I was hoping for some time for fun. A little Kyra’s, a little Powell’s. Yummy dinner.

Anyway, said friend told me her kids were currently listening to the Twilight series on Audible. So in an effort to prepare my kiddo for the trip, I started explaining that the tweenagers are listening to this book about vampires but they are nice vampires that live with humans.

“That’s just wrong Mom. You can’t change the nature of vampires. It just isn’t right.”

Fiendish Friday: Commercials

~ tahenryauthoress ~ 5 Comments

Last week the kiddo was sick. That translated into lots of hours on the couch watching HGTV. What can I say, we both like renovation shows. Anyway, I saw the new HUM commercials like 400 times each. There are two of them. And they both drove me mad.

Commercial A) Family returns from vacation, close up on Dad looking forlornly for car in airport parking. Mom pulls out cell phone and uses GPS on HUM to find car.  “Follow me boys.” And they all traipse after her like little sheep.

That was cute, the first time.

Commercial B) Check engine light comes on in the car. Family, mom driving, pulls over. Dad gets out to look under the hood. Mom rolls her eyes and calls HUM. They tell her it’s the oxygen censor and that she can drive on home, then get it checked out. Mom tells Dad who says, I need my tools. Cue two girls in the back seat rolling eyes at Dad too.

This one rubbed me wrong from the get go. Sure it looks like a cute little commercial about how clueless men are. In fact, both play on that fact. Men are clueless. Women are the smart savvy ones who know to install technology so they can have more super powers. Yay women!

But let’s look a little deeper. We have slid into a culture where men occupy two roles.

A) demonic oppressors of women and minorities everywhere

B) clueless bumbling idiots

Neither are a true, complete picture. Both are damaging to the functionality of society as a whole and healthy organism. In both, the children are being taught not to respect their father. Mom lumps Dad in with the kids in the first one. Mom rolls her eyes at Dad in the second careful to make eye contact with the children in the back seat first. She’s saying in effect, “Your father is less than and I want you to know I think that. It’s ok for you to think that too.”

I am sure I would have missed most of this, if I hadn’t seen the commercials 400 times each in 4 days. But I did see them. And it gave me the opportunity to really look at the way in which men are being portrayed. The way women are treating them. They way women are teaching their children to treat their fathers, with contempt.

I love my hubs and my kiddo way too much to stand idly by while a society is built that demonizes them for their penises. Neither chose it. They were born that way. It has zero impact on whether they are good people. It is a physical feature. And it’s not ok to judge anyone by their physical features in my world. Popular idea or not, everyone deserves to be seen for their whole selves, even men.

 

 

 

 

Fiendish Friday: Constraints

~ tahenryauthoress ~ 2 Comments

I think of you often. Yes, you, all of you. I’ll be reading a book or driving about and something will cross my mind and I think I should totally post about that, readers would find it funny.

But then the constraining naysayer kicks in. Maybe you shouldn’t tell them that. What if someone reads that posts and misconstrues it? Gulp. What if that friend who never reads your blog picks today to read it? Gulp. What if that funny little post unleashes a shit storm? Gulp.

That’s me swallowing all the things I decide not to say. I do it in real life too. Say only that which is kind and helpful. Swallow down that which is cranky, snippy, or dismissive, that which might hurt.

But sometimes I have the mad urge to just say all the things I never say.

“hey mother fucker don’t flip me off in front of my kid because you decided to break the law and I almost hit you.”

“Don’t you have anything more important to do than spend all day bitching about politics on Facebook. Go out and and make actual change in the world.”

“I don’t care what you think about how we are running the coop; you would never take any real responsibility while you were here, caused nothing but issues with vendors, and then you left to put your daughter in private school. Don’t call and explain how much we are ruining everything.”

Actually I see a trend here. The one I really want to shout, every time I turn around,

TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOURSELF

Next week a feel good rant, I promise. Or at least one that will make you laugh.

 

Fiendish Friday: Keep your hands to my back

~ tahenryauthoress ~ Leave a comment

One of the things I started doing for myself when I began teaching at the coop this past year was to get a massage, every three weeks, if I can get it on the books. It’s ridiculously indulgent. But we all need something ridiculously indulgent in our lives. Better this than a pan full of brownies.

I don’t like change. When I find a provider I like, I go with them every time. I will rearrange my schedule to make any openings they have in their schedule rather than take what easily works for me. I’m loyal like that.

So I started with one I really liked. She was awesome. But after a few months it got really hard to book with her. She was popular and her availability and mine just didn’t gel. So I switched and the new one was even better.  Yay! I was happy. Life was massage good. Then she moved to Texas. Texas. Seriously. The same month my hair dresser moved to Texas. WTF? (I am not moving to Texas) Before she left she gave me a couple of names. I checked on them. One has availability that will almost never work for me. The other was male.

So I went back to the first therapist I liked. She has now canceled the morning of the appt three times in a row. I guess I know why her schedule is so open these days.

So I am about to do the unthinkable, see a male therapist. gulp.

 

Fiendish Friday: Fitted Sheets

~ tahenryauthoress ~ 11 Comments

I keep seeing all these videos for “the easiest way to fold fitted sheets.” Um, ok. Except the videos are like 5 or 6 minutes long. Seriously? 5 or 6 minutes to fold one sheet? I did actually watch one. It was kind of funny, but after a typical day in my house(4 hours home school, 5 errands, 3 hours in traffic, most of it with the kiddo, make dinner, write a blog, consider working on my own novel, exhaustedly fall into bed with a book for review), five minutes to fold one sheet is crazy.

So to save you all some trauma and time, here is my method for folding a fitted sheet.

Grab a corner, check for the pillow case that will be hiding inside.

Repeat will the other three corners.

You should now have four corners in one hand.

Use your other hand to grab all the rest of the hanging material, fold it towards the hand with the corners, place on a shelf.

Bam, 16 seconds. Beat my record, I dare you.

PS. Points will be deducted if you miss one of the pillowcases in the corners.

Fiendish Friday: Again

~ tahenryauthoress ~ 2 Comments

I went into the bastion of hell again yesterday…Home Depot. I know, I know. Why do I do it? I suppose it comes down to this; I needed potting soil for succulents, more succulents, additional plants, paint samples, door stops, blinds, and Vormax replacement fluid for my self cleaning toilet (which is the bomb, BTW).

Where do you go for a list like that? Don’t say Amazon, you can’t buy plants on Amazon. LOL

So it’s Home Depot or Lowe’s. And do you know why I pick HD? Two reasons.

A) They have awesome classes free to the public. You or your kid, they have several types, get to go in and have someone teach you how to do something construction related.  The best part…they’ll answer your dumbass questions, even the ones that are only tangentially related.

B) The Olympic Athlete program. That is just bad ass. It opens the world of competitive athletics to those who aren’t rich.

So I go to HD, even though, it sucks. LOL.

I started with the toilet cleaner, the hubs SAID it was right in the same aisle as the toilets. Nope. I found an employee. Nope. They don’t carry it, even though they carry the toilets. This set of sentences makes it sound all quick and easy but really it took 23 minutes.

I move onto to paint samples. This actually goes just fine. LOL.

The blinds. They have what I want but only in custom made and for 225 a piece. Not on your life.

Plants. I have to say they had a fun selection. And everything is super well labeled, so if you’re a plant idiot like me, you can actually figure out what to buy. But of course they have the water hoses all over the plant area so you couldn’t actually roll your cart around and what I wanted was at the farthest point from where I could park my cart. Grrr. Lots of back and forth with wet muddy plants.

Which brings me to door stops. I finally find them in the plumbing section. ROFL. I like exactly 2 styles. One is completely sold out. The other has 4 left. sigh. I buy them, thus ensuring I will now have to go to another bastion of hell to find the rest….