Would You Like to Hear All About My Dog's Bladder Functions?

Well gosh darn goodness, Internet, I've been so consumed with real estate and cat pee smells and posting a hundred times a day at Mamapop that I COMPLETELY neglected to tell you what's going on with my dog's urinary tract.

I am sorry for this oversight. I know how you care. Deeply, is how you care.

On Saturday afternoon we had our windows washed, which was 1) completely thrilling, 2) an example of the violent turn towards boring my life has taken, just like the time I countered Jason's offer of pointlessly fancy shoes for Christmas with a request for a Dyson vacuum instead, and 3) an example of how my many years of Spanish language instruction failed me, as the team of window-washers only spoke Spanish and you'd THINK six or so levels of Spanish in high school and college would have left me able to converse with them just slightly instead of pointing a lot while sitting there, eating a burrito, unable to remember the fucking word for "windows" (VENTANAS! God, what is wrong with me?).

And this is why I let Noah watch Dora the Explorer AND Go Diego Go. I'm only thinking of his future.

ANYWAY. The presence of the window washers upset Ceiba greatly (Ceiba: (ears back, full body mohawk in effect) BARK BARK BARK YAP YAP YAP) (Window Guy: hurón estúpido), and Noah really REALLY wanted to upend some water buckets, so I took both of them outside for a walk. Where Noah proceeded to shove acorns, mulch and pebbles into his mouth (whatever, it's great to see him eat something other than hummus and carpet lint), and Ceiba proceeded to pee and pee and pee and squat and squat and squat.

<-- This is how she squats, by the way. Balanced on her front legs with her back legs sticking straight out, which never fails to crack people up, which is great, since she's already an embarassingly-teeny freak-of-nature goofy-looking ratdog, so thanks for being even MORE WEIRD, Ceibs.

Anyway, after squat number eight or nine I finally started thinking that hey! I know that feeling. I know that feeling very well.

(WHY DOES MY DOG ONLY GET SICK ON THE WEEKENDS? WHY CAN SHE NOT CONFINE HER ILLNESSES AND INJURIES TO NORMAL BUSINESS HOURS?)

Blah. So off to the 24-hour emergency vet place, where I learned that 1) Animal Planet still shows back-to-back-to-back episodes of The Crocodile Hunter, oh my GOD, 2) urine cultures for dogs do not involve peeing in a cup, although if they'd just been patient I'm sure I could have made that work, since it's not like I'm above totally embarassing myself in front of people in regards to Ceiba's evacuation habits, 3) the visit cost THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY THREE DOLLARS, and 4) we accidentally let our pet insurance lapse sometime earlier this year, FUCK ME.

I don't think I will be getting that Dyson after all. I will, however, be sticking festive bows on Ceiba's butt at every occasion. Merry Christmas!

We got the results of the World's Most Expensive Urine Culture back this morning, and it actually showed no evidence of an infection. Which means the constant squatting and fever could be a stone. I don't know. I think she seems better on the antibiotics, so I am hoping we just caught a UTI super early?  Or maybe she's just perfecting her balance beam routine for the Olympic qualifiers?

On the plus side, her urine sample revealed no evidence of doping.

Signs & Wonders

And on the first day of the first open house, God said, "Let there be ugly."

And it was so.

Our open house was extremely well-attended by lots of people who absolutely loved our condo despite having absolutely no intention of actually buying our condo. Plus one lady who complained about a "cat odor."

CAT ODOR? OH MY GOD. I know I joked about living in filth before, but...I meant I never dusted my baseboards, not rancid cat urine.

I can't even tell you how paranoid I am about it now, walking around and sniffing everything because I don't smell a cat odor, but you know those crazy old ladies who end up with 176 cats never smell anything either, and then the neighbors go on the news and say things like, "Well, she seemed normal enough, except HOO BOY, you could knock trees over with that stench that strong."

In summary: Yes. I've officially lost it. This is what real estate does to you, or maybe it's just the prolonged exposure to lemon-scented Pledge.

But look at those adorable gleaming-white baseboards! Awww, I love them.

Preserving the Evidence

A CHORUS OF LIKE, AT LEAST THREE OR FOUR PEOPLE, MAN: Um, where the hell are all the baby pictures?

Bah. Okay.

Issue #1: My Flickr photos (and yours, probably) are now being republished at Bitacle. I cannot express how much this bugs me. (Read this and this if you don't know what I'm talking about; if I try to explain it in my own words I'd have to include so much profanity that I'd get kicked off the Internet.) While Bitacle is being a little less douchey than they were a few weeks ago, when they had ads and no attributing links and claimed their own license on the mountains of scraped content, I still hate Bitacle and always will. And I believe tthey will most certainly regroup and find another way to make money off our splogged photos and writing.

I hate that Flickr does not give me the option of turning off the RSS feed for my photostream, and I really hate that I didn't read Flickr's Terms of Service closely enough to realize that they are totally okay with what Bitacle is doing.

So I'm not sure I'm going to use Flickr anymore. I know full and total control over content published on the Internet will probably always be a pipe dream, but I also don't think it was COMPLETELY naive of me to assume that photos uploaded to Flickr would...stay on Flickr, for the most part, or that the precautions I took to protect them (the "all rights reserved" copyright notice? the no-downloading/no-blogging option?) meant I had some kind of recourse if they cropped up elsewhere.

(What was that I said about not wanting to write about it in my own words? Didn't I say something like that, several hundred words ago?)

Issue #2: Obviously, I do exert far more control over my RSS feed here (TRUNCATED, YE BASTARDS), so what's my damage? I guess the fact that Noah has recently become so much harder to photograph. For one thing, he never stops moving. I have a zillion pictures of the back of his head.

Even worse, he's hyper-aware of the camera now and glares at it. One minute he'll make these absolutely amazing faces where he scrunches his nose and smiles and chatters and I swear, you could go cave-diving in those dimples, and I think: that right there, that's him. And I grab the camera and point and click, and boom. I get this:

I'm thinking of offering his services to Brangelina.

So lately I've just stopped diving for the camera as often as I used to. My already limited skills as a photographer are no match for toddlerhood.

Which makes photos like this one so much more precious to me:

We had professional photos taken shortly before Noah's birthday. I included a few of them in Noah's birthday video, and then meant to post the full collection that next week, but of course: molars, illness, woe, general malaise and my typical stupidness.

Kaileen first emailed me a few months ago with a proposition I could not turn down: a free in-home photo session and at-cost prints in exchange for a mention here. I usually ignore any freebies-for-editorial offers I get (CONTENT IS NOT FOR SALE. SIDEBAR IS. I LIVE ON MONEY, NOT FABRIC SOFTENER SAMPLES) (Mmmm, just SMELL that selective integrity), but this was obviously a little different. Kaileen is another mom (her son is just a couple months younger than Noah), who recently left the corporate world to pursue her photography business. She's stressed, she's nervous, she is insanely fucking talented.

Of course, I didn't really know that at the time, but figured that the photos would probably speak for themselves without a whole lot of input from me.

But oh my God, people, these photos. They take my breath away every time I look at them. They made family members cry.

They captured something so fleeting and precious that I almost can't stand it. They captured Noah's last moments of honest-to-goodness babyhood.

He's already changed so much, in just a few weeks. His cheeks aren't as round. His arms are lean. His legs are strong and un-rollified.  Everything about him screams toddler, little kid, big kid.

God. Maybe I need to go grab the camera after all.

Bye Bye Baby from amalah on Vimeo.
Music: Still Fighting It by Ben Folds.

(Apologies for another overly-indulgent video montage thing, but TypePad is having some serious thumbnail resizing issues today, plus what, you think I'd miss a chance to be overly mournful and dramatic about MY PRESHUS BAYBEEEEE? Hell no.)

(Also, for real. If ANY MD-DC-VA readers are thinking about having maternity/baby/family portraits done, I cannot recommend Kaileen enough. I mean, look at who's modeling for her website. Would that face steer you wrong?)

Blastoff

Hours Our Condo Has Officially Been On the Market: 5

Minutes of Notice Given Before Very First Showing: 27

Number of Showers Taken Before That Moment: 0

Number of Beds Made Before That Moment: 0

Number of Toys Strewn Across Spacious, Light-Filled Living Room: 4,278

Number of Naptimes Officially Fucked With: 1

Confessions of a Gymboreeaholic

This week's Insurmountable Odds Standing Between Amy & Gymboree:

1) No car. Still. We've had zero time to take it in for repairs, so just to let the poor useless thing know we haven't abandoned it entirely, I like to go outside and kick it occasionally.

2) No stroller. In Jason's car, despite the three separate reminders this morning to put it in my car, plus the way I chanted "stroller stroller stroller" as he walked out the door. He rolled his eyes and got all kinds of testy with me, because OKAY. GOD. And then he walked outside and was promptly distracted by "some kind of crazy pothole-filling machine" and forgot to move the stroller.

3) No house key. Realtor has it. Jason forgot to get a copy made; I forgot to steal his off his keychain.

4) No morning nap. Self-explanatory, although I do wish I was technically proficient enough to upload an MP3 of Noah's EEEEEEEEEEEEEYYYYYEEEHHHHHHEEEEAAAAHHH shriek-fest, just to really give you the full multimedia experience of this one.

So obviously, I called Gymboree and scheduled a makeup class, because really. I can take a hint. Right?

Ha! No, I totally did not do that. I called Jason instead, and tearfully told him that I just HAD to get out of the house today, I just HAD to. So he came home at lunchtime and drove us to Gymboree.

Yes, I am nuts.

To be fair, somebody needed to be home this afternoon to meet the realtor and sign some other thing in the endless stream of things that need signed (we're officially on the market TOMORROW. somebody come buy our place. bring money.), so Jason got to work from home all afternoon, which is fun and I think makes up for the fact that I never really told him I can schedule makeup classes anytime I need to.

Here's the really scary thing: I kind of love Gymboree. It's...actually pretty fun, which I guess proves I've gone as low on the mommyscale as one can sink. The nanny-to-mother ratio has balanced out over the last few weeks and I've met some really cool women. Almost all of us work part-time-ish at home, and we all kind of eye each other with the same hungry, will-you-be-my-friend-wanna-go-to-Starbucks-circle-yes-or-no kind of look. I love being around all the other babies and I love the way everybody treats every kid like their own: we praise and cheer and cuddle and kiss boo-boos indiscriminately.

There's one little girl who has been kind of lagging developmentally (she wouldn't crawl or walk). Today she WALKED into class, and we all burst into applause while her nanny teared up in relief. I love looking around the room at all the women -- mothers and nannies alike -- who all seem to be finding such joy in raising these hilarious little people, even while we roll our eyes at singing the same stupid songs AGAIN, God.

But I love that Max and Hannah and Anya give me hugs every week. I love watching Mia come out of her reserved little shell a little more every week. And I love -- LOVE -- watching Noah shriek with delight over each new activity and watching him master a new skill with every class. I love it so much that after our class I take him out for lunch and then return an hour later for the "open gym" playtime so I can watch him crawl through tunnels and up ramps to his heart's delight.

There. Whew. That felt good to confess. It's not cool to like stupid parenting shit like Gymboree, I know. It's probably a sign that I need to Get Out More and Find An Identity Outside Of The C-H-I-L-D before my brain turns into mushy stay-at-home-mom mush, but there it is.

Gymbo the Clown can still bite my ass though.

Project Sweet-Ass Revealed!

So what do you when you're feeling burned out and hostile and generally fed up with the whole blogging scene?

What do you do when you're tired and stretched thin and falling behind your deadlines and suffering from writer's block?

What do you do when you're getting ready to move and you're stressed out and all you really want to do is curl up in bed and eat cheese crackers and never look at the Internet again?

You start another damn website, is what you do.

Duh.

Introducing Mamapop.com, where I get to geek out and talk about television. And the Internet. And celebrities. And Kevin Federline. I enjoy watching that man get the shit kicked out of him, and now I have the perfect forum for sharing my enjoyment with the world. Amen.

This is actually Tracey's babybrainchild, but she was nice enough to trust me with the password to the Admin page so I can play too. It's all extremely beta right now, since we don't have our real design done or anything, and I think the page crashed earlier today under the MASSIVE WEIGHT of both Tracey and I looking at it AT THE SAME TIME. Plus I secretly think that Wordpress kind of hates me because I keep messing things up.

Anyway! Check it out, if you be so inclined, and rest assured that my language over there is absolutely fucking filthy.

PS. HAAA. I just realized Tracey named her unveiling post the exact same thing. One day into it and we're already redundant. Awesome!

A House This Clean Is Not A Home

Hey, remember when I first said we were moving? That was...a very long time ago, when I first said that.

In my delusional little heart, I thought we'd have moved by now. I thought we'd be out in the suburbs, trying to figure out if any of the neighbors were the poison-Halloween-candy types and doing suburban shit like...I don't know, apple-picking or whatever the hell.

Our condo goes on the market this weekend. THIS WEEKEND.

Who moved my cheese crap?

And it's being offered at a price that hurts my heart a little bit. Although I imagine it will hurt our next-door neighbor's heart even more, as she paid OVER a hundred grand more on a near-identical unit just last summer. But she never holds the downstairs door open for anyone and always gives me these looks like I am some kind of serial killer so you know what? Screw her. And I'm guessing our old neighbors who got that insane price last summer are probably seeing the same decline on their million-dollar home in the suburbs.

"Oh heavens! Our house is only worth $900,000! We are RUINED!"

Screw them too!

(I am way C-R-A-N-K-Y today. I also had a touch of the S-T-O-M-A-C-H F-L-U or something this weekend and spent much time in the bathroom puking up microscopic crumbs of toast. And then I re-caulked the bathtub while I was in there.)

(NOT. PREGNANT.)

Oh, and I locked myself out of the building this morning, while the baby was napping INSIDE OF THE BUILDING. Biiiiig shout-out of thanks for my other neighbor who closed the downstairs door after I'd propped it open while I ran some trash out to the curb, and then refused to acknowledge my persistent buzzing on the intercom 15 seconds later, like I CAN SEE YOU, RIGHT THERE THROUGH YOUR WINDOW, COME ON MAAAAN, I ONCE RESCUED YOUR CAT WHEN YOUR CLEANING LADY LET HIM ESCAPE.

Who moved my laundry piles?

God, I'm tired. (And also NOT. PREGNANT.)

A FEW THINGS I DID NOT KNOW:

1) I am apparently responsible for washing my own windows. And apparently "rain" does not count as a washing.

2) My oven is self-cleaning! Which means it cleans it own self! Which means I could have been living with a clean oven for the past five years without any effort at all!*

3)  The ugly, moldy and beat-up floor in front of my washer and dryer could have been remedied at any time with three pieces of vinyl flooring and a pair of scissors. Total cost: $2.94.

Look at my floor! My fascinating floor! Are you not fascinated? Be fascinated!

4) Paper towel holders and toasters are perhaps the most offensive items to prospective homebuyers and must be hidden away, you sick toast-eating bastard. You probably just wipe the crumbs up with a damp, non-antibacterial paper towel, too. GOD.

No paper towels or toasters here. Just gleaming white appliances and a single well-placed tomato, which is red like a heart, for the kitchen is the heart of the home, so think of the tomato like a literal beating bloody heart sitting out on your countertop. Yum!

5) The minute you box something up and stash it in a rented storage unit, you will need that exact something.

Real Estate Rule #423: Replace actual useful things on shelves with completely useless things, particularly of the wicker-basket-type variety.

5) The tax records for our unit have the square footage all wrong. I would personally like to invite the District of Columbia Office of Tax & Revenue over for a measuring party, because it's bullshit. BYOMT.**

*This is not to say I ever put any effort into cleaning my oven.
**Bring Your Own Measuring Tape, for I think mine is in the rented storage unit.

Amy's handbags would like to say how happy they are to be all lined up and bagged properly instead of lying in their customary heap.

Our realtor told us to give our storage area the "Crate & Barrel Treatment." I am guessing that has something to do with wicker baskets?

CLUTTER! CLUUUUUUTTER!

So everything is freshly painted and scrubbed and we are all pretty much afraid to move or cook or breathe on anything. Extra hangers have been removed from the closets. I ironed the shower curtain this morning. Yes, prospective homebuyers beware: I will not be held responsible for what the bathroom looks like when you hang your own wrinkly-ass shower curtain up.

I'm going back to bed now. Wake me up when we're under contract.

This place will probably not sell, and that face right there? Knows it.

It's Snot You, It's Me

(*rimshot!*)

Soon after I posted The Entry That Proves Amy Could Probably Discover The Fountain Of Youth And Still Find Something To Complain About, Like Maybe The Fountain Is A Tad Over-Chlorinated For Her Tastes, I got an email from the always-eloquent Blue Poppy:

Listen kid, you are ill.  Your baby (okay, he's a toddler, but I'm not ready for him to grow up so fast so baby it is) has been SICK SICK SICK and all of that is deeply wearying.

Deeply wearying.

It can cause a loss of morale and energy.  It can cause you to think everything in your life is fucked up.  But it is not.  You are simply sick.  Your baby is sick.  You are tired and spent and need a good long week at Canyon Ranch.

And behold. She was right. I'd underestimated the Impact of the Sick. (What Is With The Random Capitalization Today? Perhaps My Possessed Pinkie Finger Is Having An Affair With The Shift Key? Oh My God, Intrigue!) I'd forgotten just how deeply wearying it is when the primary focus of your day is wiping snot off a cranky, protesting toddler and then, when you finally have a few minutes to write about your day, all you can type is: SNOT SNOT SNOT SNOT ALL SNOT AND NO WINE MAKES AMY A DULL SNOT.

It is, indeed, deeply wearying and deserving of its own paragraph for emphasis.

But the good news is that we are no longer sick. Noah's molars haven't cut through yet -- but at least the swelling has gone down and the black and blue gums are now a nice shade of purple. I like purple. The maintenance and upkeep of his bodily fluids require a more reasonable level of effort, PLUS I've discovered that he really, really likes hummus and he now perpetually smells like garlic. I also like garlic.

Of course, today is...Wednesday. Which means...oh, God. And I still haven't gotten my damn car fixed which means... Although I did sort of make a friend who offered to give me a ride but she's not returning my phone calls, probably because she found out that I lied when I said I was a freelance writer because please, I write about snot on teh Internet, la dee fricking daaaaa, or maybe she doesn't like babies who smell like garlic and oh, God, I have to take the fucking bus to Gymboree again blah blah snake eating own tail vicious circle blah blah SNOT.

Wait. Here. You don't even have to imagine kicking me in the head. I've got it covered:

You are welcome.

Weekend Report: I Almost Electrocuted Myself

Dear Everybody: If you ever decide to replace one of those little wall light socket things, please pay a visit to your friendly household fuse box and cut the power to the socket in question, preferably BEFORE going after the old one with cordless drills and screwdrivers.

Dear Amy's Hair: Lie down! Down!

Dear Amy's Weekend: You are ON NOTICE

JASON: Do you think we should keep this folding table?

AMY: We own a folding table?

JASON: Apparently so, yeah.

AMY: Huh.

JASON'S MOM: Did you say something about a folding table?

JASON'S DAD: No.

AMY: Stick it out on the curb. We don't need it.

JASON: Are you sure? I mean, we MIGHT NEED IT.

JASON'S MOM: That's a nice folding table.

JASON'S DAD: No.

JASON: I think we should keep it.

AMY: Name one instance when we would need a folding table.

JASON'S MOM: I could use that for a buffet table!

JASON'S DAD: No.

JASON: We...we might need a buffet table! You know, for parties.

AMY: We don't throw parties.

JASON: But we MIGHT throw a party when we have a bigger house.

JASON'S MOM: I throw parties!

JASON'S DAD: No.

AMY: We know like, five people. We will make due without a folding table.

JASON: But...maybe...the...basement? Like...um...

AMY: Put the folding table on the curb. We don't need a folding table.

JASON: *clutches folding table frantically*

JASON'S MOM: *eyes folding table frantically*

JASON'S DAD: No.

AMY: *grabs folding table, marches it out to curb, where it vanishes 15 minutes later and I swear to God, if I find out Jason somehow snuck it into the car bound for the rented storage unit I will bludgeon him to death with one of the four sets of skis he also refused to give away*

OTHER THINGS JASON GAVE ME A HARD TIME ABOUT WHEN I DUMPED THEM ON THE CURB FOR PEOPLE TO TAKE:

1) Broken baby gate
2) Stepstool, used by me to reach top kitchen cabinets, that he used to trip over all the time and complain about why I had to keep that damn stepstool out all the time Jesus Christ
3) Some random IKEA shelf insert belonging to an IKEA bookshelf we no longer own because I made him throw it out last year to make room for the crib
4) A poster that got rained on when we moved last time
5) Four pieces of tile from first kitchen floor we had installed but was installed wrong and had to be re-done, which was okay because we changed our minds about the tile color anyway and yet we still kept this stack of extra tiles on the dining room floor for over a year Jesus Christ

THINGS I GAVE JASON A HARD TIME ABOUT WHEN HE SUGGESTED WE THROW THEM AWAY:

1) Seven Blue's Clues plates, four Blue's Clues napkins and one deflated Blue Clue's mylar balloon from Noah's first birthday party
2) Every item of clothing that Noah has ever worn
3) My collection of fancy shopping bags
4) My collection of gift boxes and tissue paper because I sometimes ask for boxes even when buying stuff for myself because you can never have too many gift boxes. Seriously! 37 gift boxes is not too many!
5) The broken TiVo because nooooooo we can repair him! We must repair him! Don't you realize what the Wednesday night line-up looks like these days?

OTHER FAMOUS LAST WORDS:

"We don't need to hire a painter. I will paint our kitchen myself. In 30 minutes. Watch me. Right now. Well, right after I patch the walls. And then sand the plaster down. Okay, and I guess I better tape around the cabinets. Oh wait, do we have primer? Okay, now I'm ready. I will paint. Just watch me."

"Now where the fuck is my stepstool?"

Alternate Reality Blogging

Oh my God. I can't even look at y'all directly. I'm so embarrassed. Let me stare at my shoes instead. Ah. Pretty shoes.

Don't you know I have issues with taking compliments? Now I feel compelled to like, insult myself a lot. Or scan my junior high yearbook photos. Or maybe just go ahead punch myself in the eye. Anything to balance out the niceness, that I swear (POSSESSED PINKY-FINGER SWEAR!) I wasn't fishing for, nor did I ever expect in such massive quantities.

Anyway. Yesterday was one of those things I just needed to write down and throw out there, and I started to feel better almost as soon as I hit "publish." (I actually, in all seriousness, went back to delete it about 10 minutes later, but then the nice comments were already pouring in, and WHO AM I TO DENY THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE?) (PARTICULARLY WHEN THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE = SAYING NICE THINGS ABOUT ME.)

(I am once again friends with parentheses and caps lock, in case you were wondering.)

What amused me mostly, however, was just how many of you said something along the lines of "you could write about [something dumb and boring] and I'd still read it."

O RLY?

Well, in the interest of science, I say: WE'LL JUST SEE ABOUT THAT. HA!

Here are the topics suggested by various good-looking commenters in that very fashion, accompanied by my blatant abuse of your loyal reading eyeballs:

MY KITCHEN SPONGE

A REPORT BY AMY BETH CORBETT, AGE NINE

My kitchen sponge is blue. We use it to clean many things like pots and things. It is full of holes like an English Muffin.

One time I used the kitchen sponge when it was my turn to clean the bathroom and then put it back in the kitchen and my mom got mad and yelled at me when she found out later that I'd used it on the toilet.

Real sponges come from the ocean. My kitchen sponge came from the Acme.

WATCHING PAINT DRY

We never repainted our kitchen after we remodeled it last summer. Our real estate agent has suggested that maybe we better get on that. I would very much like for someone else to get on that and am in fact fully planning to hire a professional to paint it, despite the fact that our kitchen is the size of a postage stamp and the walls will probably require like, seven strokes of a paintbrush.

(Heh. Strokes.)

WATCHING GRASS GROW

I would write about this topic now, but I think I'm going to save it for after we buy a house and the full reality of yardwork hits me like a ton of lawnmowers.

POOP, DROOL, SCREAMING, PUKE, & GYMBOREE

New tagline, anyone?

"I Had a Bowl of Captain Crunch for Breakfast"

I do not like Captain Crunch. Mostly because of the word "crunchberries," which come on. Doesn't it totally make you think of like, dried crusty boogers?

No? Well, I bet it will now. MWA HA HA.

MY BIG TOE

Okay, let's be honest here. Does anyone else have hair on their big toe? And does anyone else maybe occasionally shave that hair off?

Y's BOOBS

Yvonne's rack is magnificent, and she's got more cleavage than you can shake a beeflog at.

TAKING A LEAK

Um, ew? `

Although...wait. I already DID talk about taking a leak, albeit an implied leak, in that entry about Ceiba falling in the toilet. (TWICE.) See? This blog hit rock bottom AGES ago.

DRYER LINT

Have you ever wondered if you're a crazy religious nutjob or a crazy liberal doomed to forever burn in hell?

Wonder no more, for I have devised a simple personality test to tell you for sure!

Face of Satan? Or Missing Link?

*also, for everybody wondering where the hell poor old MaxCat is, the above picture should put your minds at ease that he is alive and well and as sheddy as ever.

MARSHMALLOW FLUFF & PINWHEELS

Okay, so I wasn't sure if Ivie chose these two things randomly, or if they went together in some way, on purpose, so I Googled them. And indeed, there a couple recipes for marshmallow fluff pinwheels.  Mostly involving JELL-O brand gelatin.

I am not going to comment on the JELL-O and marshmallow fluff pinwheels, as I learned my lesson ages ago about poking fun at cherished family recipes involving JELL-O. (And that lesson is: Dave Barry will link to you and five million bazillion people will come to your site on the exact same day you decide to write about a thrush infection in your boobs.)

However, I also found something called "Candle Salad," which involves: a plate of lettuce, one pineapple ring, one upright banana stuck in said pineapple ring, all topped off with a cherry and marshmallow fluff for that special, ultra-appetizing "melted wax" look.

I TOTALLY smell a photo essay, don't you?