How to tick me off

Walk onto my freshly washed hard wood floors with your shoes still on and then somehow miss the toilet when you pee.

Not sooooo fast!

I feel it.

It is coming.

The weather is changing.

I LOVE summer…the warm air…the hot sun…the laziness of it all.

I really don’t want to see it go.

Wondering

If a cat barfs in your shoe…is it time to buy new?

Tisk-tisk

I received the following message from the library yesterday:

*** FIRST NOTICE ***

Autobiography of a face / 04 AUG 2005

I am just giddy with naughtiness!

Choices

I signed-up to have my name placed in a lottery in the hopes of running the TC 10 mile run. And, I got in.

A year ago, my best friend and I were going to run this same race together. I was just coming off my third pregnancy and thought it would be a good way to get back into shape. She just wanted to do it. So, how fun to do it together.

However, a month or so later, my friend decided not to run the race. Instead, she chose to take up mountain biking and train for a vigorous forty mile bike race. That choice, along with a string of many others after it, altered our lives forever.

As I train for this race, I wonder…if she ran that race with me, instead of biking, would things be different? Would we still be friends? Would she still be married? Would everything that happened over the past year and a half happen anyway, just on a different timeline with different catalysts?

It is amazing the choices we make, the situations we put ourselves in, the things we say without even really thinking about them.

I wonder…knowing what she knows now, would she choose differently next time?

While we’re down there

I have an underwear crisis so to speak. What is that you ask? Well you see, my underwear is in such a state of disrepair that when one said person, like myself perhaps, is getting dressed in the ladies locker room at the gym, I would rather crumple my undies up into a little ball and throw them away then don them.

I tried to buy some last week. Once we were in the store, three kids in tow, two melt downs and several trips to the potty later, I just left…empty handed.

I even tried buying some the week before. I went to the store, they weren’t on sale (oh how my cheapness really fucks things up sometimes) and so I thought I would be back in the store next week (which I was) and that it would be no problem. Wrong.

About two weeks prior to all these unsuccessful trips to the store, I realized how bad they actually were. And now, a month later, they are almost not worth wearing.

So today, when the sitter comes, off I will go to buy new undies. What will I buy you ask? Or maybe not…but I will tell you anyway because it is where I am in my underwear lifecycle. I am at the Jockey, white, bikini stage.

Since putting some thought into this, I realized my life can be broken down by what underwear I have worn.

Here is the timeline:

Little kid: Hanes girl’s underwear, cotton, pink or blue flowers

High School: Jockey, white (maybe stripes sometimes), g-string bikini

College: Hung onto the Jockeys for workouts, then slipped into Victoria Secrete satin or silk bikini (always with flowers or prints) but they never really fit right. Wait, there was also a small segment of my college years where I wore no underwear at all and NO that is not the time in my life when I met Erik.

Early 20’s: Calvin Klein thong, black or white, cotton

Late 20’s: OnGossamer thong (the most expensive/smallest piece of fabric I have ever purchased in my life) any color will due, you can hardly see it anyway

Early 30’s to present day: I still have a few remnants of thongs laying around, which I love to wear depending on the outfit and ONLY if I don’t have hemorrhoids (oh, there is nothing worse than hemorrhoids and thongs!) and on a day-to-day basis I have almost come full circle back to my good old high school days with white Jockeys.

Maybe I’ll even branch out and get poke-a-dots this time.

The highs and lows

As I am talking with my friend Jen out on the deck, KP on my hip, hose in the other hand watering the plants, I look down, and to my surprise… I see pubic hairs sticking out of the top of my pants.

OH MY GOD! What gives with this? Is my pubic hair not coiffed enough and crawling up too high? Are my pants too low? Is it me? Is it today’s fashion styles? Am I wearing clothing meant for people with small patches?

These are difficult questions on many levels and only bring up even more questions. Was it the weight of the child that caused this predicament? Or, do I flash pubs all the time and not even know it? Are my friends not really my friends at all because they won’t tell me?

Would you tell your friend?

Thinking…

Even though I haven’t washed the kitchen floors in a couple of months, does that mean I need to wash all those kitchen utensils KP keeps taking out of all the drawers on a multi-daily basis?

Please tell me now, because I’m most defiantly not.

My special place

We have a chair in our living room that I always thought would be mine. You know that special place that I would make my own. Well, in the last two years that we have owned this chair I haven’t really sat in it…until last night.

Last night, I opened up my book, cozied in and started to read. And today, I couldn’t get that feeling of wanting to just sit in that chair and read my book out of my mind.

So finally, here I am. Kids in bed, rain falling, glass of wine. I must say goodbye because my chair is waiting for me to put my feet up, turn the light on and read.

Ciao

It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it…even in an email

I was so excited looking through all the cool t-shirts at www.threadless.com, trying to figure out which one to buy for me and which one to buy for Adam. I think I wasted a good half a day meandering through pages of t-shirts.

Once I finally came to a decision and ordered them, I couldn’t wait to put it on. The shirts were delivered in a timely fashion and then immediately washed and worn. Do you typically wash something before you wear it? I do.

But, once I put mine on I noticed it was pulling to one side. Like the neck line was being stretched way out to the left and then the flying elephant on the front of the shirt would pull across my body. I thought maybe it was my lopsided breasts, but that didn’t make sense since it was pulling on the side where my “little one” lives. Now, it is annoying and actually uncomfortable to wear because I am constantly pulling the shirt over to the right when I wear it. T-shirts should not be this labor intensive.

So, because I really liked the shirt, I decided to email them at threadless to see if they could help me out. My email is as follows:

Dear Threadless,
I recently ordered a woman’s, medium, Southbound Pachyderm T and it is lopsided. I have only washed it once and it is constantly pulling to the left. I love the shirt but have to tell you it doesn’t look so great pulling across my torso. I see that you are now sold out of them and wondering what I should do. Thoughts?
Thanks, Mary

Here is there response:

Well, I wish you wouldn’t have washed it because now I can’t accept it back. Our policy is 30 days, no wash – even if it was defective. There’s really no more I can do at this point. The return must be in original condition. I’m sorry.

Maybe I am being too sensitive, or maybe I am reading it all wrong, but it seems to me that they are not really sorry. And I really don’t like the tone they used. It makes me not want to purchase t-shirts from them anymore, even if they are cool. It makes me want to tell you not to purchase t-shirts from them, even if they are really cool. I wonder if they would change their tone a little bit if they knew that 10 people have just been told on the internet that they have poor customer service and that those 10 people might tell 10 more people and that those 10 might tell 10 more.

Really, I’m not trying to get away with anything. But to sell me a defective t-shirt and then be snot about it, shame on you