Remember two weeks ago, when my dear friend Summer left two bags of puffy Cheetos (and possibly a midsized bottle of Absolut that might have been drunk) on my porch? She’s at it again. Today she showed up with Christmas gifts: two Vosges Mo’s Bacon Bars (that would be a high-end chocolate bar filled with bacon) and a ham.

Oh, not just any ham. It’s not in a can. Or deviled. Or deli sliced. This bad-ass meat chunk is a leg, bone included. It’s from Wenneman Meat Market.

You know it’s good ham when it comes from a place that uses “You can’t beat our meat” as  their catch line. When I opened it and Clara Jane, beside herself with glee shrieked, “Oh! I wanna have that for dinner tonight!”, I almost threw it in the oven right then and there. It’s so big that dinner would have had to happen at 3 A.M., but still. I can eat ham at 3 A.M.

Geez. Give Summer a styrofoam cooler full of sausage for her birthday once and the pork just keeps coming.

(Really, I’m thrilled. This will most likely be my favorite gift this year because let me tell you, I really like ham. A lot. I also love that Summer doesn’t hesitate to leave Cheetos on my porch and give me a giant smoked pig leg for Christmas. That’s a person who truly gets what makes me tick.)

Now that I’ve got you all hungry, I’m going to bring on the guilt.

If you’ve been reading for any length of time, you know I’m a sucker for hunger relief organizations. While I will help my friends raise funds for their pet causes, when I’m deciding where to help, I always go for the hunger organizations. For one thing, if people aren’t getting their most basic human need met, well, something’s seriously fucked up. There’s absolutely, positively no reason why anyone should go hungry. Ever. Also, having gone through culinary school, run my own tiny catering company, taught people to cook, and written about food for a good chunk of the past decade, I feel obligated to help people get fed. Not just the ones who can afford catered events or wine-soaked classes on how to throw cocktail parties, either.

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Wow. Time flies when chaos reigns.Last Friday, I drove Clara Jane halfway across rural Missouri to pass her over to my parents. Considering the number of McCain-Palin signs hung from giant farm implements, I’m a little surprised and perhaps disappointed that no one shot out my tires because of my “Read my lipstick – I’m voting Democrat!” bumper sticker.

Saturday, Brian and I had an appointment that involved the taking of Myers-Briggs personality tests. Big shocker, I’m an ENFP. The official definition of this personality type: Strangers are going to talk to me, and I’m so open I might as well strut around nude. Brian’s the exact opposite, an ISTJ, which means he won’t go to the restroom unless it’s on his schedule. Our insurance paid for us to find out the glaringly obvious.

Saturday night, our friends Julie and Jeff also ditched their kids and came over for an orgy of hot wings, cheese lasagna, The Office, and Rock Band. Once again, I proved my metal chops by repeatedly singing like an angry man. Jeff played faux cowbell on “Don’t Fear the Reaper” in a manner that I’m pretty sure led to the unending headache I had all day Sunday.

The best part, they gave me the most awesome early birthday gift. Awesome to the point of nearly making me cry.

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I’m not doing two dot-posts in a row, although this is going to be a dot-post without the dots. It’s been a disjointed kind of weekend.

Curse you, May 10th. So many things are happening in St. Louis that weekend, and I keep saying no because we’ll be going to my hometown for Mother’s Day. But now there’s an offer I can’t refuse on behalf of my daughter. Dan Zanes, who she loves like I love Wilco, will finally be coming to St. Louis. Today, I figure out a way to take her to see him while spending the weekend in my hometown. Got a cloner I can borrow? No longer an issue, as both shows are already sold out, goddammit. I should check these things before I go on crazy wild goose chases to make plans.

Speaking of Clara Jane, why won’t she sleep later than 7 AM? This is getting quite old. This weekend has, blessedly, been somewhat more peaceful than the rest of the week has been. We were at the bookstore on Friday, and she was acting like one of the apocalypse horsemen. While I issued orders through gritted teeth, one of the sweet storytime ladies patted me on the shoulder and said, “You are so patient with her.” I said, “Thank you, but I don’t feel very patient right now.” I guess the fact that my behavior appears patient is more important than the fact that I can feel my brain melting from the white heat of the impatience that dwells within me. Perhaps I’m doing something right.

Then again, I’ve felt like hell all weekend. I think I have repressed impatience poisoning.

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If you’ve been reading for any length of time, you know certain things about me. You know I love Wilco, beer, dip, and knitting. You know that I have a big mouth. And you know that I love my friends and I love a good cause, and I’ll do nutty things to support both.

Kristina has been one of my bestest friends for a long time. The girl has been swamped of late. She’s in grad school, earning her masters in library and information science. She also works for the Humane Society of Greater Akron, and has adopted a big goober dog named Cosmo and a lovely retired greyhound named Gracie. She’s also got a super-close extended family and a sweet fiance named Drew. She’s a busy, busy one, this girl. She did take a break last fall to go see Wilco with me. Remember this?

Anyway, point is, I love Kristina a lot, and I’m so proud of her for all the stuff she’s done over the past few years. And I’m really excited about the next thing she’s doing. As busy as she is, she and Drew are walking in Bark in the Park to raise money for the horribly overcrowded, outdated shelter where she works, which doesn’t turn animals away.

Of course, I want to help, and if you were around for the Boob-Ha-Ha last summer, you know I like to find creative ways to help. Here’s what I’m gonna do: in honor of my peanut butter-thieving hound, Chloe, I’m going to be selling homemade peanut butter bone doggie treats. They’re $8 for a dozen, and every single penny of that will go to Bark in the Park. Eight dollars provides one day of food and shelter for a homeless animal.

If you’re a feline person, $8 will get you a pair of hand-knit catnip toys.

If you want to help the Humane Society of Greater Akron, provide your pup with some yummy, healthy treats, and force me to slave over a hot oven, drop me an email at poppymom@gmail.com before May 10th. I’ll tell you were to send payment and put Clara Jane to work start shuffling around my kitchen.

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I’m wishing I hadn’t used my dots yesterday because today lended itself to a dots post. Also, I got my days confused and thought today was the day I was supposed to blog about a favorite charity for Holidailies. I had my post all planned and, because I’m rather lax in looking at things like calendars and clocks, I missed it. Oh well. I guess there’s nothing stopping me from writing about it today, instead of making a mind-numbing list regarding my Roomba once again locking itself in the bathroom, the nice mom I met at storytime, how I got the shaft on two days of pre-sales for the Wilco show in Nashville, and how I have decided I adore the song “30 Days”
in every single one of its incarnations and would like to listen to it at least once a day for, well, 30 days in a row. I heard the Elizabeth McQueen rendition on a particularly fabulous edition of KDHX’s “Fishin’ with Dynamite” today.

Right, the time of year to be charitable. I’m on it. A day late, but on it.

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What a great, fun weekend I’ve had. And oh, how I needed it.

I started Saturday by sweating Stag Beer from the night before while doing away with the pink hair. That’s right – it’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month and I’m no longer a pinkhead. Erin The Miracle Worker at Bouffant Daddy once again worked her color magic and did the coolest thing to my head:

Dark chestnut brown with candy-apple red highlights. I love it more than any hair I’ve ever had.

The pink was fun, and I’m glad I did it even though I’m not really a “pink” girl. I even learned some stuff. For example, little kids love pink hair more than anything in the world. Do you know how many times in the past six weeks I’ve walked past kids in public and heard, “Mom! That girl has pink hair!” behind my back? About 340 times. I almost always would turn around and say, “Yep, that’s right!” The attention was a lot of fun and made me realize that I do, indeed, like it. It reinforced that sticking out in a crowd is only a bad thing if you perceive it to be. And I don’t. Plus, it gave me a chance to brag on The Cuz and her crazy breast cancer hiking.

I find it amusing that the only people who expressed outright dislike of my pink hair were my parents and grandmother.

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• I’m majorly peeved right now. Nothing big, just irritation that comes with taking over an hour to wrangle an exhausted child into sleep, followed by the irritation that comes when one wants some mindless entertainment after a full day of wrangling said exhausted child, only to find that both the satellite TV and internet service are sketchy at best right now. O, the woe of living in the modern age.
• To those who wanted foundation garment information after viewing that photo of my boobs yesterday: First of all, thank you. The nearly 3fucking5-year-old boobs that spent five months attached to a breast milk pump thank you. Second, go to a lingerie store – not Victoria’s Secret or JC Penny – and get a professional fitting! Honestly, it’s not as humiliating as you might think. In fact, the gals at Ann’s Bra Shop (at least, the ones in Chesterfield, MO and O’Fallon, IL) are quite discrete and very respectful. I’ve never had an occasion where I haven’t gotten measured and fitted and been out the door in more than 30 minutes. It’s so worth it. I hear Nordstroms does a great job, too. Anyway,  the particular bra I was wearing yesterday (same make and model I wear all the time because goddamn, they’re good!) was made by Goddess. They are, by far, the best bras I’ve ever owned, and they didn’t cost a fortune. I think they were around $25; it’s been a few months since I bought them so I can’t remember for sure. Just like I can’t remember which model it is. I think it’s the Sheer Delights version. I also adore their sports bras. Well worth the $40. They don’t give you monotubeboob, but the girls ain’t going anywhere in them.
• As wonderful as my foundation garments are, please keep in mind that, in the photo, I’m leaning back (but not laying down), I’m on a downward slope, and there had to be some sort of physics going on regarding the force of gravity pushing up on my boobs while I was coming down the slide. I’m not a scientist, so I don’t know. Read the rest of this entry

You know you wanna know what it is.

I tend to avoid political topics when I blog. Not because I lack an interest or passion for the stuff discussed in civics classes. It’s because I spend so much of my time glued to reading news sources and wallowing the state of the world around in my head that I’d rather use my blog for personal means instead of political.

But we all know that the personal is political, so sometimes there’s overlap.

Four years ago today, I was trying to get pregnant. Actively trying to get pregnant. Afterwards, while scrounging the kitchen for dinner, I turned on the TV just in time to see the beginning of the president’s address, informing us of the “shock and awe” campaign.

Shocked? Yes. Awed? Not even a little. Shocked and disgusted, chagrined, saddened, embarrassed, and terrified’s more like it.

I remember one thought so clearly from that night. I remember sitting on the couch, half-listening to the address and thinking, “What the hell are we thinking, trying to bring a child into this world right now?”

Obviously, those thoughts only momentarily deterred our efforts. Clara Jane was conceived two months later. I also don’t talk about religion/spirituality on my blog for the same reasons I avoid political discussions, but I will say this. At Clara Jane’s Methodist daycare, there’s a framed print near the nursery that reads, “Babies are God’s sign that the world will continue.”

I was born in October, 1972, in the midst of the Vietnam War and the beginning of Watergate. Things were bad. And yet, here I am, along with a lot of other people who grew up, too little to understand Vietnam and Nixon, but marked by it. I firmly believe that I picked up enough of what was going on when I was a child for it to form me into the raging anti-war liberal I’ve always been.

Who knows? Maybe it’ll be kids like Clara Jane, born into this current mess, who will have the motivation to fix things. It’s not fair to burden the next generation, but maybe they’ll have the tools and experiences to figure it out.

Why the political rambling? My old pal Kara posted this weekend about the One Million Blogs for Peace initiative. If you look to the right you’ll see that I’ve signed up. If you have a blog and think that all combat troops should be brought home immediately, please sign up and spread the word.
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In less than a week The Cuz will be walking 60 miles in three days for the Susan G. Komen Foundation. And for six months, I have knit nothing but boobies to help her raise money for her walk. There have been pink boobies, green tweedy boobies, rosy pink and green boobies, and flaming sunset-orange boobies. Well, I also knit a baby sweater and hat, but boobies are involved there, you know.

And thanks to lovely readers of this blog like Jodi, Suzy, Roni, Debbie, and all the generous bidders who drove up the price, we’ve raised $235, which is awesome! But, Wendy (The Cuz) is still $215 shy of her $3000 fundraising goal. Let’s help push her over the top, shall we?

This is it: the fifth and final auction for a boobie scarf, knit by me with a pattern by Jillian Moreno. Now that I’m finally done with these damn scarves, maybe I can finally knit something from her not-quite-so-new book, Big Girl Knits, which has been collecting dust on my desk while I knit boobs until my fingers bled.

Here’s how it works: The auction starts immediately (Sunday, August 13th at 11:00 PM Central Daylight Time). Since this is the last auction, I’m going to run it a little longer. You have until Tuesday, August 15 at 12 noon Central Standard Time to place your bids. Bidding will start at $30. To place your bid, just post your amount in the comments. Bidding wars are highly encouraged.

The winner of the auction will donate the winning bid amount through Wendy’s 3-Day donation page. Totally safe and secure – neither of us will see your payment info. Once you’ve donated, I’ll send the scarf to you at my expense. 100% of your purchase goes to the Komen foundation.

Now, the details of this, the final scarf: It’s 44″ long and 4″ wide, knit from Elsebeth Lavold Chunky AL yarn in “Midnight Sky”. The yarn’s 50% alpaca and 50% Peruvian wool. This is some soft, soft yarn. In fact, so soft that I had a hard time keeping it from sliding off my needles, making this, without question, the most annoying boobie scarf of all.

Unfortunately, because of the super-dark shade of blue, this is a particularly difficult scarf to capture in photos. Trust me, it looks just like the previous boobie scarves, only blue. Really dark blue. You can see all of the scarves right here.

Boobies love to shuffle two days late. Alas, no “My Humps”. Or “Milkshake”.
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