No, Bloglines didn't mess up; this really is an update. Imagine that.

So here I am, sitting in my little haiku of silence and relative calm after

• A whirlwind trip to Nashville for BlissDom09
• Returning home to have my not-so-blissful domestic responsibilities handed off to me relay race-style as my husband raced out the door for a business trip
• (leaving behind a vast mountain of laundry)
• Nursing my daughter through a cold and fever
  
• Realizing that American Airlines is not going to call me and tell me they found my iPod. Those fuckers.
  

With all that on my plate, my first order of business was to sit on my fat ass in front of my laptop madly Twittering with everyone I met in Nashville. While I ate Little Debbie Nutty Bars.

People, it's a question of having priorities. OK?

So I'm going to do a Blissdom recap. I really am! But, since it's been several days, and everyone has beaten me to it already, I'm going to do a recap with a twist. I'm going to tell you Everything You Need to Know to Go to a Blogging Conference.

So stay tuned.

Leftovers

I've been so busy tweaking my Facebook profile tonight that I have nothing left for you guys. Go over and check it out, if you want.

You can even add me as a friend, if you think I need to find more ways to waste time and neglect this blog.

I mean, does it get any more fascinating than my score on The Dirty Dozen quiz? Or the fact that I can correctly identify 19 out of 20 famous actresses? I thought not.

(But-and I don't mean to cavil--but a note to the Famous Movie Actress quiz writer: if those actresses were really all that famous, I'd get 20 out of 20. Please don't go padding your numbers with nonenities like Jennifer Jones or whoever she was. OK?)

The Wednesday Weigh In that wasn't

You can imagine how enthusiastic I felt about heading to my Weight Watchers meeting this morning.

I just knew the meeting would be packed with all the people whose New Year Resolution was to lose weight. I knew the news from the scales was going to be bad, bad, bad. How could it not be bad when I spent the last month sitting on my ass, drinking champagne, eating chocolate, and watching House, M.D., where, for some reason, no one ever seemed to be dying of obesity-related illnesses like diabetes or hardening of the arteries or stuckinthebathtub-itis.

My weight gain? Hugh Laurie's fault. Damn him and his stubble-faced wonderfulness!

And then, at 8:00 or so this morning, when it came time to pack my daughter's backpack for school, I found a bunch of homework sheets that she had not done. So there I was, still in my pajamas, trying to get some of her homework finished and properly slotted away into the binder ... grumpy past all my abilities to describe, yet trying to sound cheerful and loving and not like the kind of mother who stomps all over her daughter's self-esteem, minces it, dips it in flour, deep fat fries it, and EATS IT.

So I sent her off to school, not in tears or anything like that. Yay. But at that point, I really didn't want to go to my meeting.

Mind you, I do want to get to the gym. I do want to re-lose the weight I just finished losing, for God's sake. I do want to be back on track. Why, on Sunday, I had sushi for lunch. On Tuesday, I had a grilled shrimp salad. Yesterday I spent 90 minutes on my new treadmill watching Bringing up Baby.

But baby steps for now.

So I'm wearing one of those god-awful Juicy Couture knock-off velour track suits. I'm going to make the beds, clean up the kitchen, and pack the van with a nice selection of rummage. If I have time, I'll get on the treadmill. (Maybe watch House, M.D.) And I will not drink champagne while I'm on it.

Tomorrow I will weigh myself on my friendly (i.e., lying sack of shit) bathroom scale. And I will post the number.

Honestly, what I do for my darling Hugh you people.

This is going around the internet. So I regifted it.

Christmas Carols for the Psychologically Challenged

1) Schizophrenia - "Do You Hear What I Hear?"

2) Amnesia - "I Don't Know if I'll be Home for Christmas"

3) Narcisscism - "Hark the Herald Angels Sing About Me"

4) Mania - "Deck the Halls and Walls and House and Lawn and Streets and Stores and Office and Town and Cars and Buses and Trucks and Trees and Fire Hydrants and ..."

5) Multiple Personality Disorder -"We Three Queens Disoriented Are"

6) Paranoia - "Santa Claus is Coming to Get Me"

7) Borderline Personality Disorder - "Thoughts of Roasting on an Open Fire"

8) Full Personality Disorder - "You'd Better Watch Out, I'm Gonna Cry, and I'm Gonna Pout, Maybe I'll Tell You Why"

9) Obsessive Compsulsive Disorder - "Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells"

10) Agoraphobia - "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day but Wouldn't Leave My House."

11) Senile Dementia - "Walking in a Winter Wonderland Miles From My House Wearing Only a Robe and Slippers"

12) Oppositional Defiant Disorder -"I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus So I Burned Down the House"

13) Social Anxiety Disorder - "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas While I Sit Here and Hyperventilate"

14) Attention Deficit Disorder - "We Wish You ... Hey Look!! It's Snowing!!!"

This is how lame I am.

You're all decorating your houses, planning parties, wrapping gifts.

Me?

I just discovered a Halloween picture. So voila:



Luigi (from Luigi's Haunted Mansion video game) and Devil Girl.

Look for Christmas pictures in time for Easter.

Things to do when you can't seem to get off your lazy fat ass

Start by not waking up until 11:00. And then let it go downhill from there.

1. When you're a lame-o, the laptop always beckons. With a cup of tea at your side, and still wearing a pair of cornea-searing hot pink Lilly Pulitzer pajamas, get straight to work.

2. Check Bloglines for updated blogs. Head over to Badger's. Read and enjoy.

3. Methodically go through Badger's links. Add everything promising to your Bloglines feeds.

4. Worry that so many people are dealing with cancer.

5. Upload pictures from camera to laptop and from laptop to Flickr.

6. Answer telephone. Find out sister wants to bring the kids to the beach.

7. Go to beach.

8. On the way to the beach, try to decide whether you're more of a lame-o for giving up a thriving career as a pajamas blogger, for spending so much time on the computer, or for doing what your big sister wants you to do.

An email from Nora Ephron

Internet, I've got nothing for you today. Why? Because I spent most of the weekend cleaning out my study, that's why.

My study, which was a vast dumping ground for all of the paper a girl tends to accumulate when she's chairing not one, but two fundraisers, is almost kind of clean. The budgets, solicitation letters, mission statements, agendas, menus, invitations, proofs, reports, and general bullshit had been stacked up in piles all over the place. But now it's down to a dull roar in there. You can actually see the rug. And even my desktop! And I found a lot of bills I should have paid, and (in a fiscal attempt at equal time for opposing parties) a lot of checks I should have deposited.

But that's it. Apart from some of my usual maunderings at Mamarazzi, and surprisingly enough, at my shopping blog, I haven't had much to tell you.

So I will let Nora Ephron do the talking, in an op-ed column from the New York Times.

And don't give me any of the usual shit where you object to me squandering someone else's intellectual property. I know all about intellectual property. Intellectual property has been paying the mortgage for years. And if I take the car in for its 30,000 mile check up and find out that I need to spend $900 on repairs, I just whip out my Bank of Intellectual Property card and pay for it. So shut up. In my opinion, Nora Ephron (who??) and that useless birdcage liner The New York Times should be both pleased and proud that I'm violating their copyrights.

* * * * *

Op-Ed Contributor

The Six Stages of E-Mail

• By NORA EPHRON

Published: July 1, 2007

Stage One: Infatuation

I just got e-mail! I can’t believe it! It’s so great! Here’s my handle. Write me! Who said letter writing was dead? Were they ever wrong! I’m writing letters like crazy for the first time in years. I come home and ignore all my loved ones and go straight to the computer to make contact with total strangers. And how great is AOL? It’s so easy. It’s so friendly. It’s a community. Wheeeee! I’ve got mail!

Stage Two: Clarification

O.K., I’m starting to understand — e-mail isn’t letter-writing at all, it’s something else entirely. It was just invented, it was just born and overnight it turns out to have a form and a set of rules and a language all its own. Not since the printing press. Not since television. It’s revolutionary. It’s life-altering. It’s shorthand. Cut to the chase. Get to the point.

And it saves so much time. It takes five seconds to accomplish in an e-mail message something that takes five minutes on the telephone. The phone requires you to converse, to say things like hello and goodbye, to pretend to some semblance of interest in the person on the other end of the line. Worst of all, the phone occasionally forces you to make actual plans with the people you talk to — to suggest lunch or dinner — even if you have no desire whatsoever to see them. No danger of that with e-mail.

E-mail is a whole new way of being friends with people: intimate but not, chatty but not, communicative but not; in short, friends but not. What a breakthrough. How did we ever live without it? I have more to say on this subject, but I have to answer an Instant Message from someone I almost know.

Stage Three: Confusion

I have done nothing to deserve any of this:

Viagra!!!!! Best Web source for Vioxx. Spend a week in Cancún. Have a rich beautiful lawn. Astrid would like to be added as one of your friends. XXXXXXXVideos. Add three inches to the length of your penis. The Democratic National Committee needs you. Virus Alert. FW: This will make you laugh. FW: This is funny. FW: This is hilarious. FW: Grapes and raisins toxic for dogs. FW: Gabriel García Márquez’s Final Farewell. FW: Kurt Vonnegut’s Commencement Address. FW: The Neiman Marcus Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe. AOL Member: We value your opinion. A message from Hillary Clinton. Find low mortgage payments, Nora. Nora, it’s your time to shine. Need to fight off bills, Nora? Yvette would like to be added as one of your friends. You have failed to establish a full connection to AOL.

Stage Four: Disenchantment

Help! I’m drowning. I have 112 unanswered e-mail messages. I’m a writer — imagine how many unanswered messages I would have if I had a real job. Imagine how much writing I could do if I didn’t have to answer all this e-mail. My eyes are dim. I have a mild case of carpal tunnel syndrome. I have a galloping case of attention deficit disorder because every time I start to write something, the e-mail icon starts bobbing up and down and I’m compelled to check whether anything good or interesting has arrived. It hasn’t. Still, it might, any second now. And yes it’s true — I can do in a few seconds with e-mail what would take much longer on the phone, but most of my messages are from people who don’t have my phone number and would never call me in the first place. In the brief time it took me to write this paragraph, three more messages arrived. Now I have 115 unanswered messages. Strike that: 116.

Stage Five: Accommodation

Yes. No. No :). No :(. Can’t. No way. Maybe. Doubtful. Sorry. So Sorry. Thanks. No thanks. Not my thing. You must be kidding. Out of town. O.O.T. Try me in a month. Try me in the fall. Try me in a year. NoraE@aol.com can now be reached at NoraE81082@gmail.com.

Stage Six: Death

Call me.

Nora Ephron, the author, most recently, of “I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman,” is a contributing columnist for The Times.

* * * * *

Are you still there? Because I'm back. OK, so this is what is making me feel incredibly witty, in that smug, post-modern way: in order to blog this, I emailed this article to myself.

Welcome to my mid-life crisis.

I just received a letter from a grammar school classmate. He said that members of our class were interested in having some kind of reunion. Now mind you, I think that's a swell idea. I'm a fairly outgoing person, and by nature, I'm a joiner, so what the hell, right?

And then I started Googling my old classmates. And discovered that I am the only housewife in the bunch.

OK, I realize that old skool housewives are something of an endangered species, right up there with the manatees I so much resemble. But this is demoralizing. There doesn't seem to be a gentleman's C, slackerish, vice-president-in-his-father's-company person in the whole goddamned class. Except me.

I'm trying to be OK with this. I'm really working at it. I mean, sure they all have millions of degrees and publications and awards, but I can and do take a bit of pride in my accomplishments, modest though they are.

But I foresee another reunion where I go around telling everyone I'm a trophy wife.

The Strife is O'er, Part I

The first of my two fundraisers is over, over, over, and I am glad, glad, glad. I had a nice crowd of people eating, drinking, and making merry to celebrate the opening of an exhibit at the Chicago Cultural Center. The food was delish, the drinks plenteous, I met the Mayor's wife, and was petted and praised by all. Yay, me.

And now, I get to do what I want to do. Which is sit around in my pajamas and play Snood Solitaire on my laptop. When I'm not blabbing on the phone with RW of Chasing Vincenzo, who, believe it or not, is even funnier in real life than he is on his blog.

The cleaners will be here soon, so I'll help them out a bit by doing my bulldozer bit, wherein I put away my crap and put everyone else's in big grocery sacks and then carry them down to what a realtor would call our "rec room," (otherwise known as "that tomb of gloom down in the basement that, many owners ago, was enlivened with a green linoleum floor and knotty pine paneling.") So that takes care of my workout, because that will be a few bags and a few trips up and down the stairs.

So really, life couldn't be better, except for the Liprosy.

Maybe you haven't heard of that.

"Liprosy" is what you get when you let your lipstick wear off and then spend five hours in the sun at an amusement park surrounded by sixth grade boys and roller coasters. Because without lipstick on, you get a sunburn on your lips. I know! How weird is that? And then you have two days to wonder whether you've become allergic to your usual lip balm, and why isn't it working, and why are your lips two different colors, and what's with all the peeling?

So anyway, I'm all better now, but yesterday I'm afraid I looked ... a little unsavory.

So the moral of the story is: wear lipstick. Even if you're a guy.