Don't get around much any more.

Things have been awfully quiet around here lately, and you might be wondering why. Well:

1. I no longer have any household help. Now that I don't have them anymore, I think it's OK to admit that I used to have a weekly cleaning lady and a part-time babysitter who had (because my children are now in school all day) morphed into more of a housekeeper, thus allowing me ample time to bum around on the internet work on my dissertation. Well, I'm not going to finish the dissertation, so it seemed an excessive amount of enabling help. So now it's just me doing the dirty work around here, and it kind of keeps me busy.

2. I'm not doing much other than housework, at least, since I had seven drinks the Friday before last and woke up with the mother of all hangovers. There was nothing to help but a bottle of Grape-Flavored Liquid Children's Tylenol and a big bottle of that low-dosage Enteric Aspirin your doctor wants you to take so you won't die of a heart attack. (Which is so dumb, I can't believe it. OK, I was an English major and science is not my strong point, but I wasn't going to die of a heart attack; I was going to die because my brain was going to implode and fall into my abdomen, and then I was going to vomit it back up--that's how it was going to happen.) Well, eventually the enteric aspirin kicked in (even the low-dosage stuff is effective if you take enough of it) and I survived. But I spent some time repenting and self-flagellating and whining about my hangover and what-not.

3. I'm expecting a visit from my mother, so everything she could possibly criticize me about has to be done. Yesterday. Which means I'm so stressed that I can't type straight. But one lucky thing is that I

4. discovered the cure for lack-of-cleaning-lady-itis. It's called "child labor." With "child labor," you pay your child (or children, if you're lucky) anything between a quarter to $3.00 to do the dirty jobs you don't want to have to do. A quarter gets the recycling bin pulled to the curb; $3.00 polishes a mountain of silver.

5. I have other blogs to keep up with, people!

6. I need to come up with something to write about for Mamarazzi. Yes, yet another blog. My day is Friday and I'm combing the gossip sites, and nothing is happening. Somebody throw me a bone, please!

7. I still have to go pick up the kids at school and oversee the homework and cook dinner and buy groceries and wash dishes and basically do all the stuff I was doing before I invented "child labor."

8. I just took the kids to the library for books they needed. I got five books for myself. That means I need to read--read like the wind!

'k bye!