Radio Silence

Well…this is fun.

My brief hiatus from this blog was in part due to my staycation (which had its ups and downs, as I’ll get in to momentarily), and in part due to some incompetent ass-clown driver who managed to fall asleep at the wheel and plow through the telephone pole in front of my house before flying gracefully through the air and landing delicately on my front fence late Friday night.

HE walked away with a few scratches.

WE were left without cable or interwebz for going on 6 days straight (I’m at Starbucks right now. Hell must be freezing over, although this Chi Latte is delicious).

And it’s probably just the hormones talking, but part of me wants to hunt this guy down and go kung-fu on his ass until he’s appropriately injured to validate 6 days (and counting) of no TV and having to work from internet cafes. It amazes me that someone can manage to completely mangle your front yard and disrupt your life and ability to work for days on end without any consequences whatsoever. Where’s the apologetic card? Where are the flowers? Where is the delicious muffin basket that in all rights should have been left on my doorstep by the perpetrator of these heinous crimes?

Chivalry is dead.

And so is this guy, if I ever manage to find out where he lives and put down the ice cream long enough to hunt him down.

(BTW, if anybody wants a Nissan X-terra roof rack…it’s still on my front lawn. First come, first serve, and PS, I hate you, local volunteer fire department, for being so lazy that you couldn’t manage to toss the roof rack into the tow truck before you left to go celebrate your heroic efforts at the closest Denny’s)

And while we’re talking about people I hate (isn't this fun, guys?), I also hate Verizon, for cancelling our repair ticket after NOT solving the problem (or even showing up) yesterday, causing me to have to call them at 8:00 pm last night and say mean, nasty, reprehensible things to poor Travis, tech manager at the call center, who I guarantee is reconsidering his life choices right about now.

They say they’ll be out today to work on the problem.

I’m not holding my breath this time

(I am, however, holding a baseball bat. They’ve been warned.)

My staycation was fun. Not plunging through rapids while taking pictures of bald eagles fun (yeah, I’m still bitter about the hubs white water rafting the Grand Canyon). But fun in a hey, wow, I just learned how to knit kind of way. It rained a lot, which is weird for August in NJ and put a damper on a lot of planned activities. I also had an allergic reaction to god knows what and ended up in the emergency room last Tuesday night swelling, bright red, covered in hives, and completely high off of a whopper dose of anti-histamines and steroids. But despite those setbacks, I got a lot of quality time in with my sister, hosted a fabulous vegetarian girls’ dinner party, and spent a wonderful afternoon at the Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton NJ and if you haven’t been there yet, I HIGHLY recommend it. Even if you don’t like sculpture. Hell, I certainly don’t have a particular interest in some dude’s abstract interpretation of the downfalls of society. But the grounds are immaculately landscaped in a way where irresistible pathways and doorways in hedgerows simply beg you to investigate. It’s a lot like Alice in Wonderland.

Plus, they serve booze in the café.

SCORE.

But all things must come to an end.

The staycation is over. Brian is home, which makes me exceedingly happy, because now there’s someone to clean the litter box and heft me off the couch when I get stuck. I’m back to work (as much as Starbucks WiFi will allow), and we’re counting down the weekends until the little meatloaves could arrive with a mixture of fear, anticipation, excitement, and a little regret that we didn’t manage to climb Mt. Everest before procreating.

Or…at least that’s how I’m feeling. But that may or may not be due to the fact that I’m currently reading Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer. (I tend to get like that when it comes to mountain climbing. You should have seen me when I was watching that Everest: Beyond The Limits series on the Discovery channel…I was literally trying to rappel off of my basement steps after watching the first episode. It wasn’t pretty).

I’m 28 weeks along, which means I have a maximum of 12 weeks to go until life ends as I know it. And although it’s not as romantic or exciting as scaling the highest peak in the world, something tells me it’ll take the same amount of effort and will-power to survive. So in a way, I’m about to tackle my own Everest. I feel like I’m hanging out at base camp (literally, because I haven’t had a full breath since March), looking up at the summit, and thinking to myself, what the HELL did I just get myself in to?!? But there’s no Shirpas to help me. Just my husband, who isn’t on my payroll and therefore can’t be ordered to carry me when I get tired.

So there’s your metaphor for the day:

Raising twins is sure to be like climbing Everest, but with more poop and vomit.

But unlike Everest, once you start, you don’t have the option to stop. You just have to keep going and going until you succumb to exhaustion and beg for God to put you out of your misery.

This parenting thing is going to be awesome.