Bullets Thursday

• There's a stretch of sidewalk on the street where my church is that has always struck me as an accident waiting to happen. It's one of the few places in town that can be described as a hill. In places the cement has heaved, so the surface isn't as smooth as it should be. In the summer when the leaves are out, the streetlights don't really do much of anything. In the winter, when it's already dark, the crazy sidewalk develops patches of black ice. Downward slope + crazy sidewalk + darkness + ice = guess who wiped out tonight on her way to choir?

• And it was a full-on wipe-out, too. I was glad I was wearing a down jacket and thick mittens, because the padding helped protect the upper half of my body. But I hit the sidewalk pretty hard with my left knee (take that, stupid sidewalk!) and ripped my jeans.

• And I have a feeling I'm going to be very sore tomorrow.

• I don't know whether you've noticed, but I'm doing Blog365 again.


• I'm picking up the slack from Badger, who did it in 2009.

• Badger is number five in the Babble mommyblogger write-ins.

• I nominated her, and she's gone from number 365 to number 5. This may be the single most impressive thing I've done in the five years I've been blogging.

• If you think I'm exaggerating, come back tomorrow, when I'll probably be reduced to posting pictures of the owie on my left knee.

12 Days of Blogmas: Day 11--the join-a-new-gym edition

OK, will somebody please take me aside and tell me (in a low, concerned voice) that I'm not funny? Or that they've tried, but they can't leave comments at Mamarazzi? Because I post twice a week there, and apparently I'm posting to an echoing vastness of limitless space. And in space, no one can hear you comment.

Seriously, it would really be a kindness to let me know how much I suck before I spend another five years polluting the internet with my so-called "humor."

Right! So, on to the contest! Sharpen your wits--the same ones you'll be using to inform me that a job as a gag writer for Stephen Colbert is not in the offing--and figure out which popular Christmas song is illustrated by the following pictures. First one to figure out the song wins a Mamarazzi t-shirt. You know, that web site I write for that's NOT FUNNY.

Ready?

Mental masturbation, or, what I learned from doing Blog365

First of all, I'm amazed I did it. OK, sure--to make sure I adhered to the letter of the law, I farted around with my date and time settings. And daily readers might have been a little confused at times, because sometimes I was blogging someplace other than here (like here or here or here or even here.) But I did it.

As far as I'm concerned, this is even more amazing than losing 30 pounds and keeping it off. Which (in case you haven't been keeping score) I haven't managed to do yet. And partly I blame blogging, because sitting on your rear end in front of your laptop is not conducive to weight loss. Even if you are exercising your fingers.

Well. Now that I've landed heavily (pun intended) on this side of the Blog365 experience, now that I could buy and wear a t-shirt saying

I bored the Internet for a year
and all I got was this lousy t-shirt

my primary response is: why? What good did it do?

Let's explore this question, shall we? Here are some not-very-frequently asked questions about Blog365--which I made up--and my answers--which I also made up.

1. Did Blog365 improve your writing? Maybe. It certainly made it go faster. Let's face it; do anything at all every day for a year--even masturbate--and you'll be able to do it faster.

2. But what about quality? Quality is an issue, even with masturbation. Say you masturbate and have a sort of half-hearted, not-particularly-intense orgasm. What do you do, complain that you don't love yourself anymore? Break up with yourself? No, you roll over and go to sleep. (That is, if you're female. I don't know what guys do. And I don't want to know, OK? This is a family blog.) Well, let's face it: quality is even more important when another person is involved, say, for example, with blogging, where you really do kind of hope a reader or two will materialize.

3. How much faster did your writing get? Much. And with not even that much of a diminution of quality. Like what I've typed so far? Took 94 seconds. Truth. But again--speed isn't the whole picture. I'll use my masturbation analogy again, because it's occurred to me that what this blog has needed all along is more talk about masturbation. So anyway, how impressive is the ability to have an orgasm after only 20 seconds of stimulation? It's efficient; it would make a good party trick, but in the larger scheme of things, aren't we really looking for something more intense? I believe that we are.

4. Would you say then that the internet meme is the Hitachi Magic Wand of blogging? I would indeed. Memes get the job done, but they're not especially memorable.

5. What advice would you give to other people about to embark upon Blog365? Keep all of your drafts; break down long posts into shorter posts; write reviews; write reactions to other blog posts; make fun of the government, religion, or your family. And when inspiration fails, fire up the Hitachi.

12 Days of Blogmas, Day 7

It's snowing and I have to head out to Blockbuster's to get lots of DVDs so the Buxoms can ring in the New Year with our traditional New Year's Eve celebration: spaghetti carbonara washed down with lots of champagne, followed by a DVD-fest.

And so, without further ado, here is your seventh chance to win a $15 Starbucks or iTunes gift card by correctly identifying the first line of the Christmas carol illustrated below with Google Images.

Ready? Get to it.







And Happy New Year, internet.

The 12 Days of Blogmas Contest, Day 3

We've just arrived at a hotel in Syracuse, New York, after 12 hours of driving, but for me to whip out the laptop and get ready to compose today's Google Images First Line of a Christmas Carol Win an iTunes or Starbucks Gift card blog post took less time than it took to type that.

So without further ado

1. look at the following images
2. figure out which carol's first line they illustrate
3. leave a comment in the box

and if you're the first one to get it right, you win a prize.

And this time I picked something a little more obscure. Because I'm a Christmas carol hard-ass.

The 12 Days of Blogmas, The Contest: Day 2

I'm celebrating the 12 days of Blogmas this year with twelve days of Google images. Every day I'm going to illustrate the first line of one of my favorite carols.

And it's a contest! Every day I'll award a $15 iTunes or Starbucks gift card to the first person who correctly identifies the carol.

And why? Because I'm an attention whore. And I love Christmas carols. And I take part in Blog365, so I blog every day. Whether I have anything to say or not. That's why.

So here we go. The second carol of the 12 Days of Christmas. First one to leave a comment identifying the carol wins. Ready?

My Christmas present to myself is--you'll never guess--that's right! A meme!

I was tagged. By Jasmine. And this time, it was on Facebook. Since I don't know how many of you hang out with me on FaceBook, I thought I'd publish it over here, too.

And I don't care if I'm infringing my own copyright or whatever. It's Christmas eve, and there is only so far I'm willing to go with this whole Blog365 thing.

The Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 17 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 17 random people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

1. Believe it or not, the fact that I'm doing this meme on Christmas eve means almost nothing.


2. In case you think I'm a big loser for doing this, my husband just asked me "is it all right if I go watch my Fellowship of the Ring for a while?" And I said sure.


3. I'm secretly relieved I got so few Christmas cards this year.


4. I've always been kind of a perfectionist about Christmas.


5. Guess who gave up perfectionism for an early New Year's resolution?


6. Except I don't really do New Year's resolutions.


7. I lost a ton of weight in 2003-04, gained some back, lost more in 2007, gained some back, and am now a blimp.


8. Maybe I should have New Year's resolutions.


9. Seriously, when I type I can feel my arm fat move.


10. blackbird called me up yesterday, and I was really touched.


11. Instead of sending Christmas cards I would love to just call up my internet friends whom I heart so much. Because I go back with some of you people longer than I do with some of my flesh friends.


12. Because with some of you it has been 12 years. Can you believe it?


13. I can't wait to open the package that has my iPhone in it. I hate cell phones and I hate digital cameras, but you know how you feel when you switch from driving stick to driving automatic transmission and your hand flops around uselessly with no gears to shift? That's how it feels to have been without a cell phone for over a month.


14. I can't decide whether being more relaxed about Christmas is a symptom of something deeper. Like succumbing to utter slothfulness.


15. Like the window boxes in front of the house. There are two. They're nine feet long. One is cleared of dead plant material and decorated with icicle lights. The other is positively hair with dead plants, and when I checked, last year's strand of lights was broken, so it has no lights. Well, I finally got around to buying a second string of icicle lights. Will I get it together and get them onto the window box? Maybe. By the 27th. In the meantime, I have named the window boxes Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.


16. Also, I was going to bake three kinds of cookies today, and I only baked one. But maybe that's a good thing. See number 7.


17. My favorite things about Christmas are the music and the decorations, anyway.

Does this cupcake make me look fat?

Well, my friends, tough titties if it does, because it's a blog award, and I'm all about the ego strokes.

This award is from tutugirl, who has excellent taste in blogs, and I'm not just saying that because she picked me. Listen up, oh ye of little faith; she also picked the Hotfessional, so there. Also a couple of gals I've never heard of before and now need to check out.

And let me tell you, not only am I thrilled to win this award on its own merits, I'm also thrilled because it gives me something to blog about.

I don't know whether you've noticed, but blogging has slacked off around here. It's not that I'm not blogging regularly, because I am. I take that whole Blog365 thing very seriously. (Too seriously.)

But there has been a certain ... meme-ness seeping in. A tendency to indulge in the facile or the quick-and-dirty. A certain reluctance to engage--to talk about what I'm actually doing.

The cry goes up: This is Poppy's blog. Where's her slice of life?

It's up there, disguised as a cupcake.

Which pretty much sums it up for me at the moment.

First of all, if I were to really let it rip, the slice-of-life stuff I'd write is so brutal and ugly that it's unthinkable. I mean, my readers would quit on me in total disgust if I told them this stuff. And it's not that I think Sarah Palin represents the nadir of modern political so-called "thinking," because I said something along those lines yesterday, and it worked out fine.

No, the indigestible truth is this: my mother wrote me a very unpleasant letter about two weeks ago. And it really pissed me off. Big time. And now, every time I think about blogging about something going on in my life, all I want to do is post about what an asshole my mother is.

The thing is, she's really old. I should show some respect. And anyway, she won't be around forever, so I should just suck it up. And anyway, a mommyblogger knocking her own mother? This just seems wrong. We get to BE lovably imperfect mothers, but do we get to HAVE them? I don't know. I don't notice a lot of women knocking their mothers on their blogs. Kids, yes. Husbands, hell to the yeah. Mothers? No.

So there's that.

Now my other real-life stuff just reveals that I'm a brat who is spoiled rotten.

I mean, you aren't about to weep vats of tears over the fact that my cleaning ladies move my stuff when they dust and don't put things back when they're done, and I have to go around and rearrange my mantelpiece and my perfume bottles and other little knick-knacks. And it drives me crazy.

See, that's petty, right? And I'm spoiled. Somehow I don't think that would generate 137 supportive comments and ((((hugs)))). You know?

So, these days either I feel like a turdball for simmering away, full of repressed "OH YEAH, WELL FUCK YOU" type feelings that I refuse to actually express about my mother, or I feel like Marie Antoinette sitting around blogging while someone else deals with my wretched refuse yearning to be put out in the trash can.

I'm telling you, sometimes you just can't win at this blogging gig.

Except for today, because I just did! I won a prize.

Thanks, tutugirl!

Running errands at 8:30 p.m.

I don't know about the rest of you, but when I'm so busy during the day that I find myself buying bread and milk at 8:45 p.m., I begin to develop an attitude.

Not that buying groceries at 8:45 is unpleasant. The store was almost empty, and there were no children around, which meant that it was a lot quieter and more orderly, and I didn't need to be paranoid that while wielding my heavily-laden grocery cart around the store, I was going to smack into a shorty with the equivalent of a food-filled SUV.

And of course, if you have an actual job, instead of being 98 percent housewife and 2 percent free-lance writer (more on that later) it's to be expected that you shop during off hours.

But I AM a housewife, and I'm SUPPOSED to be at the grocery store during the peak post-breakfast, pre-morning nap time slot. Either that or the pre-picking-the-kids-up mid-afternoon scrimmage.

And so I feel a sense of personal failure.

Now, why was I grocery shopping so late? Good question. It's because I had back-to-back volunteer meetings and was out of the house from 9:30 until around 4:00 p.m. And one of the meetings required that I show up showered, made up, and wearing halfway decent clothes. And you know what a challenge that is to a woman who lives in flipflops. So when I got home, it was to be greeted by unmade beds and copious evidence strewn all over the kitchen that someone (me) had been packing lunches.

Now, I signed up for Blog365 on January 4, 2008, which means that I blog every day. So where was yesterday's entry, hmmmm? Well, before I left at 9:30 (wearing a lovely ensemble and makeup) I had written this. Which is my insights on one particular fashion fad for Fall, 2008.

If you haven't already checked it out, please do! And I'll be your BFF if you leave a comment. Because the BlogHer powers believe in the power of community, so the more back-and-forth they see, the happier they'll be. I think. And I feel the same way, actually. So leave a comment--if not there, then here.

Or call me up and yell at me--whatever. I'm not particular.

And for tomorrow, I'll probably post all the knowledge I've gleaned from spending what feels like decades of my life attending board meetings.

Live blogging Steamboat Bill, Jr.

Yeah, I realize it's not exactly liveblogging the season finale of Lost or So You Think You Can Dance. And frankly, if I weren't doing Blog365, I wouldn't bother.

I mean, how interesting are my attempts to steal ideas for what to plant in my front window boxes? Not very. But I'm trying to enjoy my summer, that season that is rumored to be showing up any day now. What about all white flowers, like the containers outside the library?

Wouldn't that give my windowboxes a certain Sissinghurst vibe?


Because my house totally qualifies as a Stately Home. No, really, it does. Ask anyone.

Meanwhile, it's chilly enough in my not-so-stately home that it seemed like a good idea to put on a sweatshirt, and now I'm wrapped up in a microfleece blanket in front of the television.

Buster Keaton is adorable. And my blanket is cozy. And I'm falling alseep. Tune in tomorrow when I decide whether I'm liveblogging or sleepblogging.

Cell phone Saturday

A new feature, in which I fill you in on my day via cell phone pictures.

Today we went to the neighborhood deli for lunch. My daughter is modeling the French braid the babysitter made in her hair last night.

Why is it that everything French is fancier? French toast is fancier than regular toast, French kisses are fancier than peck-on-the-cheek American kisses, and French fries are ... well, OK. Maybe not French fries.

Then we ordered our food. We were thisclose to getting my daughter to order real food, but then she saw the kids' part of the menu and wanted chicken fingers with American deep fat fried potatoes. At least she got milk. Chocolate milk.

Meanwhile, busy with my cell phone camera, I decided to immortalize what happens when you shut the garage door on your finger. Not the metal motorized one that the car uses; the regular one with a handle that humans open. And close. On their fingers.

Luckily, while they're wearing thick cashmere-lined gloves.

But this is what happened anyway.

Just so you know, Lamaze breathing comes in amazingly handy long after you'd think you'd need to remember it.

Another tidbit for you: I'm buying stock in companies that make deep, dark nail polish. This is one of the rare moments in the last month where I haven't been wearing any.

Moving right along.

When you're feeling sorry for yourself for having a boo-boo, there's only one thing that really satisfies.

Chicken soup.

Chicken soup with the world's biggest matzo ball.

You probably can't tell, but that thing is about the size of my fist. It was wonderful.

Back outside, there were many St. Patrick's Day idiots in evidence. Mostly male. I'd say four males in idiotic-looking green attire for every female.

Confession time: sometimes St. Patrick's Day leave me feeling a little left out. In fact, St. Patrick's Day leaves me feeling like a repressed minority. Frankly, I think the Anglo-not-Irish deserve a voice. What about t-shirts that say "You needn't kiss me; I'm not actually Irish." No?

Actually, I sort of like St. Patrick's Day. But the biggest celebrations seem to be in areas where it's really too damned cold to enjoy a parade. The people wearing the stupid green regalia? Looked pretty miserable.

Maybe that explains all the drinking.

And finally, one of my favorite views. The John Hancock Tower seen from the alley between two apartment buildings.

I took this coming back from one of the many little convenience stores that you find in apartment building basements. This one actually sells things like dried yeast in packets.

Good thing, or we wouldn't be able to make pizza dough for our weekly pizza night. Tonight's pizza featured eggplant, mushrooms, and shallots.

After dinner we watched Cat Ballou, and I watched my son laugh and laugh. It felt good to introduce him to Lee Marvin.

I think The Dirty Dozen should be next.

In case I don't get around to blogging today

my Friday Mamarazzi post is up.

I'm not posting today

Stupid wireless modem.