Wow did this post get away from me!  I started drawing about one thing and then totally went off on a stupid tangent.  You know when you’re writing a letter and after a while your handwriting gets really bad?

These Drawings.  Bad.

I started saying something about our upstairs neighbor.  Girlfriend doesn’t even have the door shut behind her and her laundry is STARTED.  Every day after work its a bee-line to the patio where her machines are.  

Her noises are :

Slam!

Clop Clop Clop (OR Stomp..)

Zzzzhweeeeek (sliding glass door opening)

Slam (closing the washer lid)

whirwhirwhirwhir.  Its like, what do you do to your clothes at work and how do you get them off that fast??

We’ve moved a lot so we’ve had a TON of neighbors.  There was Dog Lady, in Chicago, who liked to slip things under the door. Or just wait for me to come out…..

She was reeeeaaaalllll nice…..

And then we shared a duplex with a witch.  She was a nice witch about my age.  She and her buddies would have a little Circle of Earth Love (or whatever) in the field across the street and then they’d congregate on the lawn drinking wine and listening to Enya.

We’d come home and there would be like 20 o them out there, and I’d be all..

And when we lived on the farm there was a very tall, very large guy who lived next door.  His absolute very favorite thing to do was to water his porch.

Yes. The cement.

And he’d do it in the shortest shorts he could find.  And the entire time he was out there, he was screaming at his dog in an English accent.  Our Saturdays were basically this:

But my favorites were Aubergine and Francis.  Aubergine owned the horse farm on the beach in South Africa and we rented the tiny flat in the paddock from her. Francis was her daughter.

(Fricky the parrot was ALWAYS present)

They were quite the duo.  Always fighting.  Always home.  They both loved The Dark Knight. Francis would corner him and ask him bizarre questions.

Aubergine (who resembled Denathor on Lord of the Rings, look him up on Google Images….) liked to skinny dip in the salt water pool in front of their house.

To say they were eccentric would be a vast, grave, ridiculously inadequate understatement.  They kept horses for other people and enjoyed letting them graze inside their fenced yard. They would leave the french doors open so the horses could come in and eat the apples off the diningroom table.

I say its all fun and games until somebody takes a car-sized dump on the floor.

Of course, knowing Aubergine, she would have  let the dogs clean it up.

So one day The Dark Knight and I were outside chilling when Francis comes running out of the main house screaming.

She did a lot of screaming so we didn’t alert the press.  Bur we did follow her to the front of the house and saw this:

One of the horses was in the swimming pool, upside down, and Aubergine (and her enormous dress) was trying to hold his head up.  What the…?

So of course The Dark Knight jumped in.

Turns out the horse had fallen in (even thought there was a net over the pool. Idiots all around) and he was completely tangled in the net.  The Dark Knight got him mostly untangled and sent a still-screaming-Francis into the house for scissors.  She came back out with a giant butcher knife and passed it off. To me.

So I stood there like an idiot with a huge knife.

The horse eventually (and quite suddenly) lunged out of the water and came up the steps.  But his back hoof was still caught on the net and the net was attached to the pool.

He was totally about to freak, so I pulled swift ninja move.

…and  sliced through the net.  The horse went flying one way and the net snapped back into the pool,  trapping a still-screaming-Aubergine.

…aaaaaannnd thats where I realized I had gotten a little side-tracked here…..

Sorry.  Come back again for more coherent thoughts….

Update-I”m submitting this post for a great weekly writing “contest” at YeahWrite.com

You should go check them out. Lots of great writers.  Vote for some!

Want to know why?????

Well, this past week, as you know, was really …….actually, let me back up a little.

2008.  I was doing alright in 2008.  I’d worked hard for many years, but then we moved from Chicago to Africa. And I “fell” pregnant.  We had no money but I didn’t have to work and we lived by the beach (so who cares if you have money when you have that kind of fabulousness??).

I spent everyday outside with the dogs. I stuffed my face with strawberries from the farm.  Heaven!

Things were going pretty good for me until about September. Not only did I turn 34, but this happened….

And then I had Siegfried in December. And since then, life has basically gone like this:

Which brings us to today.  My mother-in-law, Honey, offered to take BOTH BOYS.

I was all….

Where do you even START when you have that kind of time?  Now, I’m not one to use my time wisely, so here’s what I did…

And most importantly……

*bad night photo

Hi Mama.

Since I can’t seem to make it into Walgreens to get you a nice generic card, I thought I’d make you a little blog post (to hang on the fridge).

Everyone, let me tell you about my mother…..

She’s not one of those, “I say it like it is!” kind of women.  Our family was playing Chinese Checkers one night and she was losing. Big time.  She looked at the board and frowned and said, “I hate Chinese Checkers.”

All the oxygen left the room as we gasped at the violence of her statement.  Its the single harshest thing I’ve ever heard her say.  She raised 47 million kids without raising her voice.  That, my friends, is a triumph.

She is from Berkeley.  She is tan and fit and beautiful. And she is really, really, really really tall. (I inherited my sasquatchdom from her).

I’ll always remember her with her long brown hair.

Total babe!

Once when I was little, I stepped off a tree in the backyard and hung my neck on the fence.

Luckily I got stuck between the massive wooden spikes (as opposed to ON one of them) and I was able to free myself.  But I was totally freaked out and I ran around the back yard screaming deliriously and unreasonably.

After several failed attempts to stop me with soothing words, my mom decided it would be best to take me down with a firm tackle.

I drew myself all little and cute right there but I was probably like 10.

My mom was pregnant when we got out first microwave.  She would stick something in it, hit start and then run for the door to hide from the….waves?  micro….waves?

Now she has a mane of silver hair and all her kids are grown and she drives a school bus (because apparently she has no fear in her middle-age) and anytime she runs over anything she buries it….

Tell me she isn’t totally awesome!  I dare you!

I love you, Mama!  Happy Mother’s Day!

Siegfried has QUITE the gag-reflex.  That boy can do some serious kacking.

The other day The Dark Knight was pretending the barf up one of Siegfried’s bouncy balls.  The 3-year-old thought it was hi-larious.

(PS- if any of you are wondering why my husband’s head is a dry-erase board, look here)

….until it wasn’t…..

Poor little unsuspecting boy.  The Dark Knight got to clean up that pile.  And I was all, He gets that from YOU, you know!

I fell in love with The Dark Knight because his gag-reflex just melted my heart.  When we met, he was in college (I had already done my 52 days and was SO over it….).

One day he was hanging out in a food court/cafeteria inside one of the major university buildings.  He and a couple of friends were eating pizza and talking “band-nerd”.

…when The Dark Knight busted out a wicked humor-ism….

(I WISH I could remember what it was!)

….and suddenly Willard started thinking it was totally hi-larious…..

…and then he REALLY started going to town…..

…and then suddenly he was all….

The Dark Knight said it was like 10 liters of big-red came out of his face over and over and over again.

His friend Skylar thought it was a riot and continued chowing on the pizza  but The Dark Knight was not entertained.

He made a run for it.

….dry-heaving the ENTIRE way.

He burst through the cafeteria doors and into the hallway, and proceeded to double over and dry-heave his little smarty-pants heart out.

And he is a VIOLENT heaver. Its loud.

And he busts blood vessels.  He makes the nasty noises.  Like the burp plus the blehhhhh!!!!

And this went on and on and on and on.  He just couldn’t shake the vision.

Unfortunately he was standing in the center of the commons and people were changing classes.  And there were dorms above. Frat dorms.  

Of course, he is officially The Dark Knight PhD now, so he would never do something that uncouth these days.

(Unless he’s changing a dirty diaper. shhh!)

So, I was eating some M&M’s….

…when finally I took a freaking breath and noticed something attached to one of my treasure -spheres.

I looked closely.  I smelt it.  I held it close to my face.

*Note, I do not have man hands. I don't know what happened here....also, I'm too lazy to take out the "This" duplicate.

I eventually realized what it was. It was a Nerd. 

A NERD ON MY M&M.

I experienced a vast range of emotions.

Vague Fear.

A strong sense of having been wronged.

Disgust over the fact that the Willy Wonka company has absolutely nothing to do with the Mars company.  

They probably don’t even have the same UPS guy!

In my mind, this was way worse than the time The Dark Knight was drinking a frappachino…..

….and a peanut came up through the straw.

Now THAT was funny.

Anyway, before the nerd incident all I was going to say was I miss y’all on the weekend!!

Y’all miss me too, don’t you!