Cranky Mommy

For those of you that live in Baltimore and are interested, my friend Joe and I will have artwork at at Common Ground Cafe in Hampden for the month of February. And they make a great latte, too.

Common Ground is located at:

819 West 36th Street
Baltimore, MD 21211
(410) 235- 5533

Hours: 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., 7 days a week

I did a really dorky thing. Wanna hear about it? Sure, you do.
I installed the Smart Bookmarks Bar for Firefox which makes your bookmarks bar look like this:

Just favicons and no words, unless you mouse over the bookmarks.
and then I installed Favicon Picker 2 so I could assign icons for the stuff on my toolbar that doesn’t already have an icon. I even made some 32 x 32 icons with photoshop.
Yes I know, I am a total geek… not necessarily because I did it, but because of the love of the way my bookmarks bar looks.
I am ready for my Star Wars Fan Club Membership now.

This Friday is our annual preschool parent-teacher conference. I’m not expecting to hear much that I don’t already know. I talk to his teachers all the time and I pretty much have the picture on his behavior and development — he is developing fine and is well behaved at school.
Never mind what my son is like at home (he has settled down a lot at home too), he is pretty angelic at school. And compared to most of the boys in his class who are, by comparison, absolutely running around CRAZY, he must seem like the easiest kid. The class is chocked full of boys - 12 total, and when I drop my son off in the morning sometimes, I think I made a wrong turn and ended up at the zoo. Sometimes I feel bad for the teachers, they are stuck there with that pack of wild animals to settle down and try to organize them into civilized activities. They really need whips and chairs.
That’s not to say these boys are bad kids (really what 4-year-olds are bad? They’re FOUR!) The all seem okay, although some of them are a bit rough and immature. It’s amazing what a year can do… perhaps some of these boys will settle down. I hope, for their parents sake and for the sake of their parents furniture and personal possessions.
I’m happy to say though, that my son has gravitated towards one of the nicer, mellower boys in school. They play well together and both love trucks. It’s nice to see your kid making a good choice early on, choosing a nice friend. At least he seems nice, for now. And the mom does too.
Of course, I have to put an asterisk next to that, since I don’t know her that well, but I will find out at a playdate we will have this week. My requirements for the moms really aren’t too great.
1) Put up with me
2)Return phone calls or emails within 3 days
3)If you are a major Christian or belong to an evangelical faith, don’t God-talk and proselytize excessively
4) If you kid tries to wail on my kid, take some kind of action and don’t just sit there, do something.
Not too much to ask, right?
Of course I always hope for something a little more with the moms… something in common. Reading material, music, art, writing, hobbies, activities. But at this age, I’ll compromise for a nice kid who plays well with mine.
Oh yeah, and having good snacks in the house — that is a major plus.

Among the discipline techniques I’ve been employing lately at our household, I’ve found a new favorite.
Counting.
Fear the AWFUL TERROR of hearing Mom say THREE very scary numbers!!!
Actually, I rarely get past One. Sometimes I don’t even have to to actually count, I just threaten to count.
I don’t want to have to count now, T, don’t make me COUNT!
I don’t know what kids are so afraid of with the counting thing, but I suppose he imagines something really awful is on the other side of hearing three. I haven’t gotten to Three in months. Usually my biggest tactic is just saying, ONE. It’s amazing how ONE makes him start moving.
I don’t know how long this will last, but I love how it works and I’m reveling in it — while it does.

T.S. Eliot wrote “April is The Cruelest Month…”, but for me it was always January.
January seemed to be my least favorite, bringing about a minor case of the blues. Greyness and cold was not my thing when I lived in Southern California, and so can imagine how much I don’t cherish the winter greyness of Baltimore winters.
I don’t think I’m alone in this. In fact, my husband just told that a psychologist concluded that yesterday, January 22, was the most depressing day of the year.
To quote the article:

His equation takes into account six factors: bad weather, unpaid Christmas bills, post-Christmas fatigue, failed New Years resolutions, low motivation levels and the feeling of a need to take action. Taken together, they calculate to equal “Blue Monday.”

But for some reason, this January hasn’t been that miserable. In fact, my mood Monday wasn’t bad at all. While my son was in school, and I worked on art for several hours straight which never happens. I could chock it up to a few good things happening (excited about art show, cheaper health insurance that will save us thousands a year). Or, it could be that January wasn’t all that cold - I’ve only worn my gloves twice this winter so far.
Or maybe it was the rippling after-effects of Global Orgasm Day held last month, December 22nd? You never know! Ha.
So how was your Blue Monday?

I’m currently preoccupied with getting my life art together for a show with a friend next month (more on that in the future).
It’s been so long since I have shown my work, I have forgotten how much work can go into it. Of course I am trying to do it inexpensively, which is irritating; it’s expensive to frame art even on the cheap. I can just hope that whatever I sell covers the framing, at least.
The Good News: I won’t have to do split the gross sales with a gallery, which can take up 50%. The Bad news: I am showing in a cafe (ah, the humility!) but then again, they don’t take any of the profit.
Meanwhile I am so sick of looking at my art, I am so ready to get rid of it. I guess that is a good thing, since sometimes one can get too attached to what one makes, and then it piles up in the studio er, uh, basement.
Needless to say I have been distracted from my weblog, not that I had much to say right now anyhow (I keep thinking I am going to quit this weblog and I never do). It hasn’t been a very eventful month.
However, if you are interested (and have some bucks to spend on art, ha ha!), and want to see some of my art (some of which is available, some of which is sold), just Register if you haven’t done so already, and then click on My Art under “Categories” on the Sidebar.

When I first met my husband, I had no idea he was into football in any way, shape or form. It was the mid 1990s, and Baltimore didn’t have an NFL football team at the time. He was uninterested in watching college games or the Redskins games, so I was clueless. And, I thought he was an old punk rocker; and what could be more un-punk rock, than football?
Well as it turns out, I was very wrong. Old punk rockers, to my dismay, can be into football. Once the Baltimore Ravens became our team, my husband became an avid fan. You’d never know by outward appearances (he would never wear a logo tee even though he was given one), but for approximately 3 hours a week during football season, he is glued to the edge of the bed, glossy eyed, staring at the game.
And, all week, all day long I get to hear more than I ever wanted to know about Steve McNair or Ray Lewis or Kyle Boller or Johnathan Ogden. I get the rundown on the injuries list, I get the local news on the state of the team repeated to me. No matter how hard I try I just can’t get into it.
I’ve never been much into any sport, anyhow. I went to a few high school games when I was 15 or 16 but, it was more to hang out at night with my friends, than watch the game. And, I’ve never been particularly athletic. But mostly - I just find it incredibly boring. I don’t get the point of it. Of course, to each their own, and my husband isn’t into Scrabble like I am. So I suppose I could bore him to death reciting lists of two letter words to him or discussing strategies for using up all my letters, right?
I do feel a little outnumbered here. My son has been a bit brainwashed by the whole Ravens thing because of dad. He was all suited up in purple Ravens sweatsuit bought by his half-brother, ready to watch the game with his dad. Which was okay with me, I got a little time to read a book. And dad had a 4-year-old jumping on his back and tackling him for three hours.
I hate to piss off any Ravens fans, but as much as part of me would have liked our team to win the game tonight (for the sake of the city and my husband), deep down I was mostly kinda happy that the Ravens lost the playoffs to the Colts tonight. I thought to myself, ah, a break, until next year (hubby isn’t into the Baltimore Orioles, and they kinda suck anyhow).
But then my husband said to me after the Ravens lost, Okay, well now I have to figure out what team I’m going to root for. So to my dismay, the Ravens being out of the playoffs is not the end of the football season for the Cranky Mommy household.
Damn.

Today was my big do-my-civic-duty-or-else day — I went to jury duty for the first time.
I had been really dreading it all week; mostly because a long trial would require me to put my son in daycare. I kept wondering why I was never called before I had my son. Does the court have something against twenty-somethings? There were not many of them there. Probably not, I figure that a lot of twenty-somethings are college students who are not registered to vote in Maryland, and therefore never end up being called for duty. Either that or they know something I don’t know. I will say that today was one of the few times wish I was still breastfeeding… to get out of jury duty!
Anyhow, I packed up my lunch, 592 pages of nice boring non-fiction that I keep checking out from the library and never finishing, and wished for the best. I caught a ride with my friend who works downtown, to arrive at 8:10 — 25 minutes after I’d woken up (I didn’t look pretty but hey, this wasn’t a beauty contest). And then I sat, and sat, and sat at the courthouse… with 900 or so other miserable-looking people who all look like they didn’t want to be there, either.
I didn’t get sent to a courtroom until 11:45 — so in the meantime I learned about the 54-year-old lady next to me’s fibroid problem, and how her son was shot and killed at age 24 by a 15-year-old who robbed him. And I learned about the woman next to her’s diabetes problem and her fibroids, and the fact that she is a Godmother to a child who is one of ten children. The mother is 31. And we all talked about birth control. See, I will talk to anybody about anything!
I watched parts of a bad movie about a spelling bee. I also learned, from my nice boring nonfiction book, all about the collapse of the earliest settlement of Nordic Greenland and why it failed (And did you know the original Nordic settlers of Greenland didn’t eat any fish? But I won’t bore you with that… you will have to buy the book and bore yourself).
Anyhow…. what was I saying…
So, I got to sit around and look at glorious, but decaying, 100 year-old architecture, and hundreds of grumpy people eating snack food out of vending machines, occasionally laughing at the bad movie. And I had a number, instead of a name, for the day: 36. Just like guys in jail (or one of the characters on Get Smart. Agent 36 sounds much better than Juror 36). I could have ended up on the big local scandal case, a Baltimore city cop accused of rape, but they were understanding of the childcare difficulty. Same with the assault case I didn’t get on.
I received $15 bucks for my day’s labor of mostly sitting, intersperced by standing in line, for 8 hours. Not much, but it covered the terrible $4 soup I got at local cafe and the $3.50 day-pass bus fare to get home (boy the fares have gone up since I stopped riding!).
And, I actually set some kind of personal record for hours spent away from my son. Amazing (and kind of bizarre) to think that I have never been away from him for 8 hours before.
Net profit -$7.50. Not having to go back again tomorrow, or for at least another year — priceless.

After reading way too many a blog over the last several years, I have come to this conclusion… there are 2 kinds of people out there:

1)Married people who take too many pictures of their kids.
2)Single people who take too many pictures of their cats.

(I’m sure there’s a few other types out there, but I’m generalizing for the sake of arguement).
As many gripes as I have with category 1, category 2 peeves me much, much more. In fact, I know quite a few single people who are way, way way into their cats, in the way that people who don’t have kids can, because they have the time and energy to lavish on their furry friends, instead of kids.
As much as I love them, some of my single friends are just mere inches away from being one of those crazy cat ladies we have all heard about. These are the types of people who, when you tell them that your kid did something unsual, they will say my cat does that too!
And they have way too many photos of their cats. For as much as newborns all look alike, CATS ALL LOOK EVEN MORE ALIKE. Okay, there are more than subtle differences but a cat is a cat — same cat brains, different fur colors. Big deal.
Of course all the cat lovers are shaking their fingers at me. But truly, most pictures of cats on your blogs are the most boring things I have ever seen. That is, unless they are hanging off a ceiling lamp or something.
Really, I don’t have anything against cats. I like cats, other than the fact that they make me sneeze (other than my friend Joe’s cat, who is absolutely insane and needs kitty cat antipsychotics. But other than that cat, really I have nothing against them).
So single (or married) people out there, if you simply must take multiple photos of your cat, and must post it to your blog, make it interesting — stick them on funny furniture. hang them from precarious places. Dress them in strange outfits. Teach them a cool trick. (Actually, this video of talking cats isn’t bad). Anything but another boring cat photo.
Or — I’ll start posting pictures of newborns, in revenge.

(postnote 1/9: the above link was incorrect, i fixed it… if you want to see talking cats)

Every woman has her weakness, I suppose. Some women turn to drugs. Some women turn to sex. Those who know me well, know that my weakness is deeper and more complex than that. And it comes in a can (no, I’m not talking about the nitrous oxide in the can, you sicko).

This is what my husband calls Kira Crack.
I know it’s not the real thing, but I love it! And, its only 15 calories for two tablespoons! But then again, who measures? Sometimes I feel dignified and use a spoon… more often I feel down and dirty and just spray the thing in my mouth.
The fact is, I’ve had a lifelong “problem” with whipped cream — I can even remember once in jr. high throwing up in the girl’s bathroom, after I’d had the brilliant idea that whipped cream was good on simply anything, including breakfast cereal. Very bad idea.
So, I’ve kept a commitment to keep the evil stuff out of my house — except — for around the holidays. What else goes well on pie? (there’s ice cream, but never mind that).
I made several pies, all were well enjoyed by friends and family. The pie is nearly gone, and guess what is still in my refrigerator? And guess who is sitting here typing right now with a stomach ache? Yup, you guessed it.
Anyhow if anyone wants to come over and relieve me of my impulse control problem and take this can of whipped cream, just feel free to stop by. I don’t have the heart to throw it in the trash, yet.