One of the advantages of being an old fart

is that stuff you find completely old-hat, cliché, goes-without-saying actually needs to be articulated once in a while.



Which explains why my latest BlogHer Beauty Hacks post is about new-fangled products like lipstick, powder, and cold cream.

I've failed the internet

Today's my day to post on Mamarazzi, and I didn't have the heart to say anything mean about Michael Jackson.

But I took the opportunity to take a swipe at Perez Hilton, because what's a Mamarazzi entry without some snark? And he's a first-class creep who deserves it.

Call me petty, but I'm enjoying the twitter #unfollowPerez backlash.

Martha Stewart 1, Fred Sanford 0

Don't you love a false sense of accomplishment?

Yesterday I was on the phone with Susie Sunshine for just under three hours. Yes, THREE HOURS.

After a morning like that, you'd think I'd feel like a total sloth, but you'd be wrong. Because last month I scheduled a rummage pick-up, and the truck came by today.

They came to take away the Sheraton-style love seat that has been cluttering up my living room since the new sofa arrived from Ballard Designs. But while they were there, I got them to take the old L. L. Bean futon and frame and the Ikea kiddy table off the front porch.

I guess I haven't mentioned that last Wednesday, I found a white wicker table and chairs at a local antique shop, shut my eyes, and handed over my credit card. They're cute, they fit the space perfectly, and what could be better than another place to sit and eat? Now, no matter what the weather, we have a full range of choices of places to sit and feed our faces.

They were delivered on Saturday. They look awesome! And made for a half-way attractive porch. I say half-way because my old furniture was pushed down to the opposite end of the porch waiting to be junked. It was like I had a split personality, half Martha Stewart, half Fred Sanford.

But now the truck has gone away with my junk on board, leaving me with an almost clutter-free porch. All I have left is a few packages to mail, conveniently located out of the range of this picture:



And just think--I totally get my money's worth of any bouquet I put on the new table, because I can see it from the living room, too. What a deal! (I jest. I cannot tell a lie. I grew the roses myself. And cut them with my little hatchet.)






I have a feeling that the decorating books probably wouldn't approve of the Big Boy bank, Disneyworld snow globes, bowl of shells, and broken timer. Well, maybe the Domino book will be OK with it, but let's hope the Schumacher book doesn't notice my inner Fred manifesting itself.

Morgan Freeman gives me the creeps, and other stories

• It continues to rain in an Old Testament fashion. Speaking of that, have you ever noticed that the ceiling of a Gothic church looks like the hull of a frigate? I noticed this again last Sunday. A few more days of rain, and I'm heading to church, where I'll barricade myself and wait for a tidal wave to flip the church over, a la The Poseidon Adventure.

(In this remake, the Shelley Winters part will be played by Poppy Buxom.)


Then I'll sail that mother to Boston in time for the Tall Ships parade. You read it here first.

In the meantime, river, stay away from my new deck cushions.

• Speaking of new deck cushions, I've become obsessed with interior decoration. Obsessed. I think it's because I've finally finished my yard, and there's not a whole lot I can do with my children during summer vacation. Right now they're both lying around being fallow. Which means it's time to think about ... drumroll ... window treatments! Because not even Scarlet's best frenemy Melanie would consent to wear a dress made out of this fabric:


Yes, my living room walls are pink.

• I claim to be obsessed with interior decorating. But who knows whether I'm telling the truth? You will if you're coming to BlogHer. Because if you're reading this, and you're going to BlogHer 2009, you might be interested in coming to my cocktail party on Saturday, July 25.

Now, I don't want to start any Mommyblogging wars, but this party is not corporate sponsored, it's Poppy Buxom sponsored. It also takes place not in a hotel ballroom, but at my apartment, which is conveniently located four blocks from the Sheraton. And I don't let just anyone put out cigarettes on my floor, so I'm not inviting everyone. Just everyone who ever left a comment or went to BlissDom09 or reads Mamarazzi or is a fellow BlogHer Beauty Hacker or follows me on Twitter. I'll be sending out e-vites, so if you're interested, leave me a comment or shoot me an email.

Party! Yay!

• And speaking of Mamarazzi, which I kind of was up there, if you haven't heard about Morgan Freeman and his step-granddaughter, waste no time and check out my latest Mamarazzi entry. In a word: ew.

The truth revealed. Also, my va-jay-jay.

Hey everybody! My vagina is the internet!

But before I get into that, let me deal with the two truths and a lie situation.

1. I'm a published author--not a blog. A book.
True. An essay of mine, written when I was still a card-carrying intellectual, appeared in a collection of scholarly essays edited by a couple friends of mine. Which came out in book form about 10 years ago. Duke University Press. Yes, you'd never guess. And yes, I have killed quite a few brain cells since then.

2. One time when I was partying with some friends at a record company, Keith Richards came in and offered me some coke, but I told him no thanks, I had some of my own.
False. Doing lines of cocaine with Keith Richards is a lie, insofar as it didn't actually happen to me. It happened to my oldest friend when she was at college in California. I went to college in Massachusetts, where you hardly ever meet rock stars. (If you went to college in California, please don't comment that you hung out with rock stars all the time. I already have all the degrees any housewife needs, and anyway, it would look weird if I started applying to college at this point. Although I probably would breeze through the essay part, what with almost five years of blogging under my belt.)

3. I didn't learn how to drive a car until I was 35 years old. True. Where I grew up there was a lot of good public transportation. And boyfriends with cars. So I didn't feel the need to learn to drive until I moved to Chicago and lived in the doughnut hole of Hyde Park, which, yes, is an oasis of integration and intellectuals and also where Barack Obama used to live, but is also surrounded on three sides by extremely non-gentrified housing and one side by Lake Michigan. There is public transportation, but it involves first heading into the Loop and transferring to the bus or train that will take you elsewhere in the city. It takes forever. So I learned to drive.

And now, about my va-jay-jay: I went to the lady doctor today for the annual weight, blood pressure, feel-the-boobs, get-up-in-the-stirrups swabfest, and when I left, I was handed a card with the url to a website and the instructions for how to log on and get the results of my pap smear.

This is probably news to absolutely no one out there. You've probably been checking out your cervix on the internet for ages. But it was news to me. Which just shows you how long it's been since I was up in the stirrups, whoops.

But now? My vagina is on the internet.

I feel just like Paris Hilton.

Two truths and a lie

1. I'm a published author--not a blog. A book.

2. One time when I was partying with some friends at a record company, Keith Richards came in and offered me some coke, but I told him no thanks, I had some of my own.

3. I didn't learn how to drive a car until I was 35 years old.

The Tale of the Mad Hatter, or how to lose weight.

OMG! You guys! I shopped my ass off yesterday. Literally.

I have a Mad Hatters luncheon to attend today. (I know! My life is so wacky!) I went out to buy either 1) a hat or 2) an outfit that would work with the two lovely hats I already own. One is light brown straw trimmed with navy grosgrain, and I bought it about 10 years ago to wear with a navy blue wrap dress. The other hat is a dream of beauty; it's pink straw trimmed with pink flowers and I bought it to wear with a cute pink suit.

Then I gained a shitload of weight, and the navy dress and pink suit are both way too tight.

So it was either buy something that goes with navy or pink OR buy a black hat to go with the mostly black clothes I'm wearing these days. (Because I'm in deep mourning for my lost figure.)

I headed to Nordstrom because from the looks of their website, they'd have something appropriate. But most of their hats sent off a utilitarian vibe. They were clearly designed primarily to keep either sun or rain off their wearer.

But there was one broad brimmed black number that I thought would be OK. But I didn't love it, so I thought I'd check to see if I could find a cute flippy skirt to go with a pink jacket I have, and then I could stun the world with the sight of me in the gorgeous pink hat I already own.

On the way to the escalator I spotted these shoes



And thought, like Arnold, "I'll be back."


Well, it turns out that cute flippy skirts were not to be had. There were acres of jeans and Bohemian tops, but if you wanted to wear something other than pants, you had a choice of bathing suit cover-ups or cocktail dresses. There was nothing in between.

But while looking for a dress or skirt to wear to lunch, I found a black evening gown that looked like it would work, and was really surprisingly not-that-expensive ($138) and looked great on me, so I snagged it. And I felt lucky to find it, because I really didn't like much of what they had, except for some St. John knits stuff. And that stuff is cruelly expensive.

Then I went down and tried on the shoes, and they were amazingly comfortable, so I got them. So I went back and bought their no-so-bad black hat

So picture me carrying one of those long dress bags, a bag with the new shoes, and believe it or not, one of those huge round hat boxes--the kind of hat box you only see in the movies. When I spotted this bag:



Reader, I bought it.

And now, my friends, you see why I married Mr. Buxom in his third year of law school. So I could shamelessly mooch off his big lawyer bucks.

And I know it's not very mommyblogger of me to prance around throwing fistfuls of money in the air. It's not even very Poppy Buxom of me. Hell, my moribund shopping blog is about saving money, not splurging.

But I'll tell you something. Those rich thin celebrities who are always having their pictures taken at Barney's? (Katie Holmes, I'm talking to you.) That's how they stay thin.

And I'll tell you how I know. I'm back on the South Beach Diet. It's been about 10 days. You probably know the drill. Lots of protein and veggies and not much else. Well, yesterday morning I didn't think I could face another egg, so I breakfasted on a handful of raw almonds. And then at 2:00 I went shopping. And I was not hungry at all. And the rush of shopping endorphins kept me full until dinner.

And this morning I weighed myself, and I've lost five pounds since last Monday.

Maybe I need to go hang out in the St. John section at Nordstrom. I could call it a spa day.

Hey internet! Is this short enough for you?

The New York Times just ran an article on how people are abandoning their blogs in droves, partly because no one is reading them.

And then there's Nancy Sun, who started blogging in 1999. In 2001 she won a SXSW award for best on-line journal. She stopped blogging in 2004 (the year I started) because she'd become too well-known. Like stalker-y well-known.

Now she's starting up again, but with a difference. Sun's earlier blog posts were "long and artful" but, in her new blog, she keeps things much shorter.

"The Internet is different now,” she said over a cup of tea in Midtown. “I was too Web 1.0. You want to be anonymous, you want to write, like, long entries, and no one wants to read that stuff.”

So that's my problem! I'm too anonymous! Too long-winded! Too Web 1.0!

But I'm also too damned old to change my ways.

Sun started blogging when she was 16, won her SXSW award when she was 18, and stopped blogging right about when she attained her legal majority. At the age of 26, she's starting a new blog and changing her style. Bully for her.

I don't want to disappoint you guys, but I have no plans to change the way I write. You'll just have to put your granny pants on and deal with it.

Those pictures I promised

So the big day was here at last. Eighth Grade graduation! Or is it America's Top Debutante? You be the judge:



No, they're not 27 year old supermodels; it just seems that way.

It was quite a ceremony. The procession was complicated. They marched in in pairs: a boy and a girl, and were organized by height, with the shortest ones coming in first. There were more boys than girls in the class, though, so the last five boys had to march in and out together. They seemed a bit uncomfortable.



Then kids gave speeches, and grown-ups gave speeches. Diplomas were distributed. They read the names of the kids and what grade they started the school. The vast majority of them started school together in Junior Kindergarten, so they'd been in school together for 10 years. They had them all stand up as their names were read.



Then there was a part where they read the names of the kids whose parents, aunts, uncles, or grandparents had gone to the school, and there was more standing up.

I hope I'm not being too long-winded in describing this very long ceremony. Because one of the speakers (in an attempt to seem polite, I won't name names--suffice it to say that he's an Episcopal minister, but not mine) was incredibly long-winded. My daughter was rolling her eyes, my friend's daughter closed her eyes and pretended to snore, and I kept muttering things like "pompous old windbag," "self-important old blow-hard," and other, less-tactful criticisms.

After the ceremony was over, there was a reception in the gym, which gave everybody a chance to show off their outfits.





And then the fun began. The convertible parade. I'm not even a car nut and I was goggling unashamedly.



Those little girls made sure I knew that the girl whose father owned the Rolls-Royce convertible? Was their best friend. I'm happy for them, having the opportunity to befriend fame like that. But I liked the other cars just as much.





Just so you know, you're nobody around here if you don't come up with a totally clever sign for the kids to see as they're driven by. This sign showed the boy in question when he was in kindergarten in what looked like a cage with two of his friends.



Then the parade finally started. Tsk, tsk, tsk, all these Bentleys and GTOs and Corvettes, and my son was riding in a Chrysler.



Oh well. It was red, and that's what really matters.



Some of the kids threw candy out of the convertibles as they drove by, so when the parade was over, the kids ran out and picked it up.



Then some people had graduation parties, but the graduates had a dinner dance of their own to attend. And what's the point of a graduation party when the guest of honor is elsewhere? How's someone going to take him aside and tell him about plastics?

So we went out for dinner with friends. And had a rollicking time. Even so, when Young Master Buxom came home, his parents were already in bed.

He out-rollicked us. And not, I'm afraid, for the last time.

A word is worth one-thousandth of a picture

As Badger tends to say, oh dudes. DUDES.

Remember how just yesterday I was bragging about how I don't complain all that much? That sound you hear is me eating crow, nom nom nom.

And now, please give me a chance to complain about my day.

First of all, my husband left this morning for D.C., so he's out of town. Again. This is bad enough--I mean, I've reached the point where I forget his name--but it also means he'll miss our son's eighth grade graduation.

On the face of it, it doesn't seem like all that big of a deal, right? I mean, it's eighth grade. He's not getting a terminal degree. In fact, he's not even getting a diploma.

But the thing is, this town takes its graduations seriously. The kids have been rehearsing all week. I have no idea what they'll be doing ... I'm imagining a big production number like the Oscars that time Rob Lowe sang with Snow White.

They have to wear special outfits. The girls wear white dresses; the boys wear white pants (not jeans or painters pants or cargos--but chinos are OK) a navy blazer, a blue oxford cloth shirt, and the special class tie, which this year is green and navy stripes.

After the graduation ceremony is over, they head to the blacktop behind the school for the graduation parade, in which the kids ride around town in the back of a convertible.

To ensure an adequate supply of convertibles, an email is sent out asking everyone to inform the graduation committee the make and model of their convertibles. (Oh gee, we don't have a convertible. No wonder no one likes us!) People who already own convertibles (BMWs, classic Mustangs) have been known to rent Bentleys for the occasion.

The families with graduates have decked their houses with huge commercially-produced signs congratulating their kids. If you don't live on the parade route, you ask to use someone else's house for the parade. One of my fellow Girl Scout leaders is going to have her beautiful house and yard defaced with the signs I spent all day Monday ordering over the internet. Yes, she is actually allowing those tacky Buxoms onto her property, where they will yell their heads off and lower her property values.

That, people, is friendship for you.

After the parade, there's a dinner dance. For the kids. No grown-ups, unless they're chaperones.

So the past week and a half have been spent acquiring the clothes and the signs and the clamps and bungee cords to hang the signs with. And then hanging signs.

But on top of that, I've been busy in my own right. Because believe it or not, life trundles along even if your child is about to graduate from eighth grade. I had a couple of performances--one yesterday, one this evening. Then there's been the driving the child back and forth to various parties, because my son's social life is as over the top as you'd think, considering that people around here are willing to rent Bentley convertibles when they have a perfectly good Jaguar at home in the garage. (And no, I'm not kidding.)

Then today we drug home my son's new cello, which I'm going to call a graduation present because it cost either the price of a used convertible or a day's rental of a new Bentley, I'm not sure which.

In short, it's been crazy around here lately.

And that, internet friends, is why you're getting the thousand words today. Pictures tomorrow.

Hey geniuses! Invent these! (Please?)

Hey, I'm not one of those mommybloggers who can't seem to stop whining about teensy-tiny imaginary problems. I'm not all "Wanh-wanh, I have a hangnail!"

Or "Shit! Taking care of babies is really hard! And kind of boring! Nobody ever told me that! It's not fair!"

Not me, I suck it up.

So I'm not complaining--exactly--when I mention that for some reason, I dreamed up some nifty inventions today--inventions that will take the world by storm. Or would, if I actually had the engineering skills to actually make them.

Seriously, they're that good. And so, for the better good, I'll act like a newspaper and give my ideas away for free on the internet.

(That way I can go around telling people I'm as intelligent as The New York Times.)

OK, here goes:

1. Individual clear Astrodome-style roofs for yards. This would be perfect for keeping any and all precipitation off my yard when I want to be outside. Just think--no more spoiled Memorial Day cookouts!

Oh, and hey, while you're at it, the same thing except bigger for country clubs, historic houses, and mansions. Wouldn't it be nice to know that you can celebrate your wedding or your kid's graduation without worrying about rain? Of course it would. See? Genius.

2. A muffler for my blow-dryer. Rock concerts and earbuds are getting a bad rap. They aren't what's destroying my hearing: the 20 pound screaming behemoth that dries my hair is the culprit. Come on, if we can muffle a car, we can shush a Conair.

3. Some robot arms to help with blow-drying would be nice, too. Am I right?

4. OK, I saved the best for last. Honestly, I'll give up inventions 1-3 for this one: a mute button for my kids.

This is what I do while I listen to the repairmen installing a heater in my refrigerator

And yes, I said heater. Now, I know that doesn't make a lot of sense; refrigerators are for keeping things cold. But our refrigerator is making ice where it doesn't belong--like under the vegetable drawers. And the ice is blocking the drainage doohickey. And then the water puddles over and starts to spill onto the floor. And the rotting wooden floor is what precipitated 2007's kitchen re-do, and we don't want to endanger that, because we don't want to go through any unnecessary house renovations, do we?

So while those guys are banging around in my kitchen, I'm going to show you some garden porn. Mind you, there's not much to see around here yet; I've put in a bunch of new perennials, but right now the yard is at the awkward age. The bulbs are pretty much over, as are the lilacs, but the peonies and roses aren't blooming yet.

The window boxes out front, right after I filled them:



Shot from the porch windows, this is an impressive amount of plant material, right? But this is what you see from the street:



Guys? Grow, please. You're reminding me of my children's heads when they were one year old.

The side yard with new astilbe and hydrangeas, yay! But almost nothing in bloom,



except the bleeding hearts,



which proclaim my political beliefs to all and sundry.

One of the new trees--a pink dogwood:



Which IMO, isn't doing a good enough job of screening the view of my neighbors' trash cans.

We have about five of these Miss Kim dwarf lilacs:



Which are OK, but don't smell as amazing as regular lilacs. However, they're blooming right now, which means Miss Kim is Miss Right Now. And there's something to be said for that.

Finally, the hot mess on the far side of the honey locust tree is the largest perennial bed. Lots of stuff was already there: forsythia, peonies, daffodils, iris, ajuga, and I've added shrub roses, a climbing rose, some mock oranges, dwarf lilacs, and a crabapple tree--none of which can you see because I was walking around trying to get a sense of The Grand Sweep of Things with my crappy iPhone camera. And trying not to get rained on.



This cool, damp, rainy weather is good for reducing transplant shock, so I'm sure the new plants are happy, but frankly, I could use some vitamin D.

So can summer actually start? Or I'm going to have to ask the refrigerator guys to install a heater in my YARD.