SAHMayhem

I had big plans for today -- I really did. Today is -- was -- my last day with alllll my boys to myself before school starts. The babysitter comes tomorrow so I can pretend to be all business-y and important, and then the day after that we're heading back to the beach for a few days (with Tracey and Charlie! THERE WILL BE VELVEETA DIP AND LUGGAGE CART MAYHEM.). 

And then Noah's school starts like, five minutes after we get back. And then Ezra -- EZRA! BABY ZAH! -- starts school a few days later. Today was it. (Until the first random holiday or teacher in-service day that I will not be aware of, and will be all, SHIT NOW WHAT when I realize we're the only idiots out at the bus stop.) I was going to swallow my fear at being anywhere out in public with all three boys and MAKE SOME GODDAMN MEMORIES IF IT KILLED US ALL.

"Who wants to go to the pool?" I asked them, over breakfast, and then waited for my barrage of joyful, grateful, life-choices-affirming squeals. 

"Not me!" said Noah.

"No pool!" said Ezra.

"Okay, how about the...splash park?" I offered, even while I trembled in fear at the prospect of chasing them around a giant glorified water fountain all day with a baby strapped to my chest.

"No thanks," said Noah, as if I'd just offered him a complimentary toenail clipping.

"Uh-uh," said Ezra, with a similar level of enthusiasm. 

"Well, we could go to the mall? A playground? Go out for pizza? Ikea?" I was getting desperate. 

The boys had completely tuned me out by this point and were playing lightsaber battle with their cereal spoons. Finally, Ezra had an idea.

"I want to play in the BASEMENT!" he said, and Noah promptly agreed that this was a kickass, bitching idea, and off they went to basement playroom, a place I usually must beg and beg for them to pleeeeeease go amuse themselves for five measly minutes on any other day of the week.

(Ike's contribution to the proceedings: "Blarrrfffggh.") 

So. We haven't really done much today. Made some messes, ate some macaroni and cheese, sorted ourselves into Gryffindor...

Crossed the streams by flashing Star Trek hand signals while wearing Star Wars onesies...

Put our Paws Up...

Finally put on pants in an attempt to convince Mommy that we weren't at all tired...

Snuck out of our room while Mommy was showering to give a roll of toilet paper a bath in the sink...

Thus clogging the drain with disintegrated paper mush and overflowing the sink and flooding the floor...

Oops.

In the end, I think everybody* had fun after all. Other than the toilet paper.** 

*Noah is Not Pictured because he opted to remain sans pants most of the day.

**Perhaps we are dealing with a serial killer?

Anytime Now, Fetus

Seriously, baby. THERE IS NOTHING MORE I CAN DO FOR YOU.

There's a freaking custom-made butterfly mobile here, for crying out loud.

And wall decals. That I will apply more of, so help me God, out of sheer boredom. Your call.

And if you think perfectly-color-and-damask-pattern-coordinated hoot owl toys just HAPPEN, well, they don't. This is nesting OCD driven to the breaking point, baby. 

That's you, through the ages. We're very excited at the prospect of adding some less-blobby-looking portraits to the gallery.

I have every kind of cloth diaper and cloth diaper accessory imaginable. 

And about four dozen swaddling blankets for you to poop on and/or reject outright.

Slings? Wraps? Pouches? Mei teis? Ergo and Ergo accessories? YOU KNOW IT, HIPPIE.

*BITES KNUCKLES*

So you can see, Fetus I Have Nicknamed IKEA, Even Though The Only Things In Your Room That Came From IKEA Are Some Storage Baskets, Hangers And One Throw Pillow, we are ready for you. We have everything your little body could possibly need, and I am literally itching with anticipation at the thought of getting my hands on your little body already to dress and diaper and swaddle and rock and wait a second what's that over in the corner...

*HEAD EXPLODES*

(PS. Everything pictured/linked here was bought and paid for by me and my own self, save for three super-cute diapers from reader Leanne who made and sent them as a gift. Everything else is either stuff I personally use, love, highly recommend and/or recently purchased in a fit of I AM COPING WITH MY GRIEF THROUGH THE POWER OF CUSTOM ORDERS ON ETSY.) 

36 Weeks & The Return of the Hysterical Nesting Syndrome Thing

I spent most of the weekend alternately convinced that 1) I was going into labor, or 2) never going to go into labor until I FINISHED ORGANIZING ALL THE CLOSETS EVER.

Saturday night:

Very Serious-Looking Self-Portrait With Toilet Paper & Assorted Hand Soaps (And A Very Bad Angle Of My Kickass Mother's Day Gift, Dammit). Taken at some point during three hours' worth of contractions, at times coming as little as three minutes apart. 

I figured the best way to put a stop to that nonsense was to pack my hospital bag, but then decided to take a quick bath first -- just in case, so I could shave some essential areas -- and BAM. The contractions stopped as soon as I got in the tub, which...was good! I'm still a week away from full term! I have to wash the car seat cover, and that one baby blanket I ordered hasn't shipped yet, also CLOSETS, and...and...

Fine. I was kind of bummed. 

Luckily, Noah was on hand to amuse me with his best Hipster Michael Cera impression.

Sunday Morning:

Very Serious Portait Of A Very Serious Breakfast In Bed. Perfect eggs Benedict with shaved pork loin and homemade Hollandaise sauce. Coffee and additional bacon arrived later, but by that point the rest of the plate was no longer as pretty because I'd practically eaten straight through the tray in a frantic rush.

Because I thought I was in labor. Again. This time, I was sure my water was leaking. It was not. 

I will...spare you any more details, now. 

Instead! 
 

Closet!

(Don't judge all the shoes! In particular those green gardening clogs that I wear FOR GARDENING OUT IN THE GARDEN I SWEAR TO GOD DON'T MAKE ME STAB YOU IN THE EYE WITH A STILETTO OF WHICH I ALSO OWN ENTIRELY TOO MANY.)

Baby closet! Freshly stocked with a brand-new summer-baby wardrobe, which he'll maybe wear about half of because I am generally too lazy to attempt anything more complicated and snap-centric than a diaper. But still! The clothes are there! They EXIST! They have been washed and organized meticulously by size and style and maybe even color scheme a little bit!  

I am ready to have a baby. This baby. Because seriously: I have nothing else to do with my time now except sit around and imagine that I am in fake labor all the time or maybe relabel those bins of hand-me-downs with a more pleasingly color-coordinated tape. 

*stares at blue tape*

*twitches eyelid*

I...need to go. Now. Something...important...just happened. 

Welcome to the Nursery

No, not THAT one. That one's still an unspeakable pile of horror and disorganization and missing crib screws. I meant this one:

Goddamn hippies.

When we first moved from the city to the 'burbs we were pretty much incapable of keeping anything green alive (except for one hand-me-down decade-old jade plant), and in fact saw the tiny yard we have here as a plus: LESS FOLIAGE TO MURDER. 

We moved in. The jade plant promptly caught some disease and died. But we bought some herbs and stuck 'em in a planter out back. And then a tomato plant. Then peppers and zucchini and cauliflower and strawberries and onions and kale and butternut squash and beets and parsnips and leeks and homemade baby food and now it's a big production involving self-watering containers and concrete wire supports and composting and newspaper seedling pots and big ugly greenhouse light in our kitchen and I'm pouting because I don't have a deep enough pot to grow sweet potatoes in.

YET, anyway. 

We have no immediate plans to move, though every time a single-family house goes up for sale in our neighborhood Jason and I play a game of imaginary landscaping and discuss just how big of a garden we could have, and what the light and soil situation is probably like, and oooh, look at that porch! We could enclose that and have a greenhouse! We could do containers AND a real-live soil-patch grown-up garden! Maybe I would keep some chickens! PLUS, THINK OF ALL THE SWEET POTATOES. 

The mortgage calculations always kill the daydreaming. It's okay though. I still think last year's garden was pretty good for a couple of formerly death-thumbed city noobs...

...especially since it all started out small enough to fit on our kitchen counters.

P.S. If you're curious and also a dirty hippie lamesauce, I wrote a little about container gardening and composting over at AlphaMom, along with recommended books and such that helped us get started and not kill the majority of everything we planted.

P.P.S. And while I'm self-pimping and all, here's a Top Chef recap. It's about food! Super relevant to everything I've been saying today, shut up.

Dog, Thwarted

In which Ceiba is introduced to the new laminate floors in the basement...

MY GOD WOMAN.

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE.

WHAAAAAT HAVE YOU DONNNNNNE.

MY VERY BEST FAVORITE CARPETED PEE SPOT! IT WAS RIGHT HERE!

I WILL SEEK OUT RESPONSIBLE PARTY. THEN DESTROY.

AHA! PREPARE TO BE SNIFFED AT FORCEFULLY.

HMM. OKAY. HI. IS MAYBE NOT SUCH A BAD SORT AFTER ALL.

WILL JUST GO UPSTAIRS TO POUT.

WAIT A SECOND. WAT'S THIS?

***

So that's been happening. Randy came and ripped up the hideously befouled carpet and put down laminate and my dog is all THERE IS NO TRACTION OR ABSORBENCY PANIC PANIC BZZZZZTTT OVERLOAD.

Oh, and everybody please say hi to Randy, as he is a long-time blog reader, at least he was before I was all, "Thanks for reading! Now please come fix everything at my house that is broken. Which is a lot of things. Also, BEWARE OF ALL THE PILES."  Then I wandered around in my pajamas and a ponytail all the time, just to completely shatter the illusion that bloggers are cool, together people who are at all worthy of respect or admiration. But then I bought his silence with a couple Chipotle burritos. I think.

The other day I told Noah that no, he couldn't have a snack because it was too close to dinner. He got...fairly angry with me over this, and announced his intention to go ask RANDY for a snack, which he prefaced by pleading with him to please rescue me from Mommy. Who is mean. You need to defeat her! 

I thought this was actually pretty cute until I realized he was requesting my vanquishment from the dude holding the circular saw. 

***

HEH. MISSED A SPOT, BITCH. 

Things That Go Bunk In The Night

IS SUBJECT CHANGING TIME NOW OKAY.

Yeeeeesh, what a downer week. Let's talk about...bunk beds!

Or, as Noah calls them, bump beds!

Or or, as Ezra calls them, boo beds! 

(I think he's actually trying to say "big boy bed," since he also refers to underwear as "boo pants.")

So. To recap: I started toying with the idea of moving the boys into a single room last summer, since they seemed to dislike being herding off into separate rooms at bedtime. I even asked you guys about it! And then proceeded to do nothing at all about it whatsoever. Yeah. That's so Raven Amalah.

Of course, just a month later the room-sharing idea was catapulted into Necessity when I got myself all good and knocked up. Ezra had to get out of the crib, and into Noah's room. (The "nursery" room is a postage stamp. If I'm changing Ezra's diaper and Ceiba walks in, it immediately feels all cramped.)

After looking around at all your creative bed-and-bunk suggestions and options, we eventually decided to just go with the traditional bunk-bed route, despite the fact that they fill me with no small amount of terror.

(And also: JEALOUSY. I wanted bunk beds as a kid SO BAD, you guys. Bunks or a giant four-poster princess-pink canopy bed. My mom was like, yeah no, here's a hand-me-down twin frame. I'll let you pick out your own comforter from TJMaxx. Take it or sleep on the floor.)

We "decided" on bunk beds because, well, Noah saw bunk beds at the store and wanted them. Wanted them BAD, SO BAD, as bad as I ever wanted them, maybe even more so, once he learned that after the bunk beds are at your house, you're allowed to take the "no climbing" sign off the ladder. 

Young mind = BLOWN.

Of course, we happened to be at Pottery Barn Kids at the time, where a nice set of bunk beds cost a nice amount of money, too much money for someone like me who still has nothing but eight-year-old IKEA furniture in her bedroom, combined with a couple stacks of giant plastic storage bins full of off-season clothes that I just push up against the walls and pretend that nobody will notice. Right? You never would have spotted them unless I said something just now. I mean, there's only like seven of them, whatever.

So we kicked off a very long search for inexpensive bunk beds. I voted for IKEA, but I guess some latent primal hunting instincts kicked on inside Jason's brain and he became fixated on trying to find something "nicer" on Craigslist. He would find the elusive solid-wood bunks from a reputable furniture manufacturer! He would track down the perfect set-up and finish! He would outwit that $1,600 retail price! RAWR. GRARR. AND ETC.

So that's how, after about three months of getting beaten to every single available set of second-hand bunk beds in the DC Metro area, we finally brought home some Pottery Barn twin-over-full bunk beds for a mere $200. 

(The only downside was that the previous owner's dog chewed on the bottom rung of the ladder "a little.")

(This is "a little" in Craiglistese, by the way.)

But! Who cares! Not Noah or Ezra, THAT'S for damn sure. 

I guess, taking the travel interruption last week into account, the boys have spent about five full nights with the new arrangement, and it's been stupidly easy. We moved Ezra from crib to bed justlikethat, band-aid style, like "this is your new bed, get in it," and he's been napping and sleeping there ever since. Last night was the first time he needed to be nudged away from the bookshelf and back into bed more than once or twice, while Noah simply scampers up the ladder and is immediately DEAD TO THE WORLD until morning. They don't seem to wake each other up at all, and our nightly battles with Noah over leaving the light on are all but non-existent, now that he has company. 

They've also been -- and this is where I know I sound like I'm totally making shit up -- playing together SO MUCH BETTER over the past few days. Not just playing around each other, but with each other. Noah's treating Ezra more like a playmate than like a nearby lump of play-dough who occasionally bugs him and messes his train tracks up. They're becoming friends. Something that I figured (or at least hoped) would happen eventually, but it really does seem like the roomie nighttime togetherness gave it a really nice little boost. 

There are a couple pain-in-the-ass things, of course -- after putting sheets on the top bunk I vowed to NEVER EVER DO THAT AGAIN, OUTSOURCE, OUTSOURCE, RAISES FOR THE BABYSITTER AND CLEANING LADY, and it's a little more complicated now to send Noah to his room for I Know You Won't Nap But Oh My God Go Lie Down Or Something You're Killing Me Here Quiet Time when Ezra actually IS napping. And sometimes I miss having Ezra CONTAINED for a little bit in the morning, since he now can come barreling down the hall and start yelling at my sleeping eyelids as soon as Noah is up and opens the door for him. 

And no, no one has fallen out of bed yet. Or horseplayed the other right off the top bunk. YET. I KNOW. I KNOW. JUST HOLD THAT SHIT OFF UNTIL JUNE, WHEN I CAN DRINK AGAIN. 

But so far, the pros outweigh the cons and it's all getting two thumbs up, fine holiday fun.

(I wish I had some better pictures to show you but the lighting in that room seems to be permaset on crappy. Also, our camera has started taking pictures like it's 90 years old in camera years. Which I suppose it kind of is.)

And yes. I totally splurged on the Star Wars bedding. Well, just the quilts and shams, anyway. The sheets and blankets are Plain Shit From Target. And the quilts were on sale! Still cost more than the damn bunk beds themselves, I think, but we can't ALL be mighty Craigslist bargain hunters, Jason. Some of us are still just hysterical nesting pregnant women who are stuck using the same beat-up crib and the same boring unisex crib bedding in the nursery for the THIRD TIME NOW and I'm NOT COMPLAINING ABOUT THAT but if you don't shut up and let me buy Millennium Falcon quilts and R2D2 pillowcases RIGHT NOW I will probably cry. And THEN I will start acting irrational about stuff, 'kay?

Life With Boys

1. While I cannot sufficiently EXPLAIN what is going on here, I am also not in the least bit surprised.

I mean, that's a toilet paper roll holder. What did you expect? Toilet paper? Bitch, please. 

2. Despite a rumored, God-given ability to AIM, I do not personally believe it. 

(photo of general toilet vicinity not included for the sake of human dignity and/or lunchtime, but SERIOUSLY YOU GUYS, it's not like they're expected to pee into a narrow little test tube here. IT'S A BIG OVALISH ROUND THING THAT I JUST CLEANED YESTERDAY GAAAAH.)

3. Some days, you are just going to feel like you are up to your eyeballs in boy bits. Some of these days may overlap with Laundry Day.

I'm sorry, but if you actually see an excavator on the first try, instead of, I DON'T KNOW, a pair of giant dangling yellow testicles, you are a better person than I am. 

Or maybe you have daughters. 

This Post is the Blogging Equivalent to a Set of Shiny Keys

My dad started chemotherapy today, the first of THREE all-day, 8-hour, super-intensive sessions he'll have THIS WEEK. Then he gets a couple weeks to kick back and relax before the next round. Maybe play some football, drink a few beers, go see a death metal concert or something. 

In other words: DEFLECT! IGNORE! LET'S TALK ABOUT ANYTHING ELSE IN THE WORLD. 

Ahem. Continuing on with some random things that are slightly more amusing:

1) Toddlers with the ability to accessorize.

2) Jason stopped at the grocery store yesterday and purchased the special nut-free store-bought birthday-snack cookies. We only needed one bag for Noah's classmates but he bought three. 

3) Magnum!

4) So far, I've flushed four (4) stinkbugs down the toilet today. I know that wouldn't usually be a check in the "YAY!" column for me, but I guess it speaks volumes for just how wildly I'm grasping for purpose these days.

5) In other insect-related, the-wine-glass-half-full news, I'm actually pretty jazzed that the baby no longer looks like this:

 

Yeah, YOU try telling people at the playground that it's a "mosquito bite on his eyebrow" and see if any of them believe YOU, either. 

6) In two days, I'm going to be in possession of a five-year-old child.

7) And that five-year-old child will be in the obnoxious possession of a Leapster 2, aka One Of Those Things I Used To Sniff Dismissively At Because That Is Just A Handheld Video Game & Preschoolers Should Not Own Handheld Video Games, "Electronic Educational Learning System," My Ass.

8) Now I Am All, "Here, Have A Handheld Video Game, Whatever, I'm Tired." 

9) Don't tell him though. IT'S A SURPRISE.

10) Dammit.

11) I didn't have a full 10 things, as usual.

12) But I hate ending lists at four or nine.

13) Or fourteen.

14) DAMMIT!

A Day Without Internet

It turns out, if I deliberately decide to stay off the Internet* for an entire day, that I am downright PRODUCTIVE. Possibly even bordering on COMPETENT. 

The first order of business yesterday was a playdate, and don't you love that while I would never betray the sacred trust of What Happens on a Playdate, Stays on a Playdate and actually TELL you about the playdate, I still feel compelled to tell you that yes, I totally fucking had a playdate, motherfuckers. I have friends and am in demand for social gatherings with other human beings. WHAT UP. PLAYDATE.

(She's probably reading this, by the way, so I will thank all of y'all to make me sound awesome in the comment section and not say anything about that time at the place with the thing. You know what I'm talking about.)

So anyway, I decided to clean the house before the playdate. (Playdate! Playdaaaate!) And I realize this is completely 1) lame, and probably 2) cheating, because there's usually some unspoken arrangement between women that we're only supposed to express shame over the messy state of our homes and one-up each other regarding our failures. 

HOSTESS: I am sorry the house is such a mess! 

GUEST: Oh no, this is lovely! You should see MY house! It's a disaster!

HOSTESS: Oh, but you should see the upstairs! It's a total pigsty up there.

GUEST: Oh, mine too! I've roped it off with police tape!

HOSTESS: I LOST A CAT IN MY CLOSET SIX MONTHS AGO.

GUEST: I HAVE AN ACTIVELY LEAKING NUCLEAR REACTOR IN MY BASEMENT.

And etcetera.

SO ANYWAY. My cleaning of the house mostly involved frantic dishwasher loading and sweeping up a thick carpet of catnip off the kitchen floor, because Max had somehow gotten the bag out of a cabinet during the night and ripped it open. I found him sprawled out and covered in the stuff that morning, high as a freaking kite. Even after I cleaned it all up, he kept returning to the scene to sniff the floorboards and chew on a nearby throw rug. 

Oh! And then I cleared off the dining room table, even going so far as to set a lovely silver centerpiece bowl out, only to realize the bowl looked kind of dumb empty. So I thought: Fruit! I shall fill it with fruit. But the only fruit we had was one overly browned banana and some pathetically shriveled-looking limes. 

I put the bowl away. I think this might be the first time in the history of the world that I successfully backed down from a Bad Idea, instead of like: I KNOW LET'S TRY SOME SCENTED CANDLES! OR TRAIL MIX! SCENTED CANDLES AND TRAIL MIX! IT'S POTPOURRI!

After the playdate, I was feeling so successfully housewife-y that I went on a cooking and baking rampage, the unplanned-for kind, where you're missing a good 25% of ingredients from every recipe but decide to improvise anyway, resulting in 1) several questionably edible results that you will decide to maybe freeze for the babysitter to microwave later, thus making it officially someone else's problem, and 2) a completely re-trashed kitchen because you've used every goddamn bowl you own and decided to do several recipes that contained eggs AND oatmeal, which is a combination you can use to repave your driveway in a pinch, I think. 

(I didn't really have a point to today's entry. By the way. In case you were waiting for one. Sometimes I stumble into a point, like, AHA! I CAN RE-TYPE A SENTENCE AT THE END THAT'S KIND OF LIKE ONE FROM THE BEGINNING AND IT'S LIKE, OOOOOH CIRCULAR DOUBLE MEANING! SO INTENSE.)

In summary: The house was clean but now it isn't again, my freezer is full of homemade stuffed shells and lentil veggie burgers for my children to reject, I dragged them both to the store so I could buy some coconut to make cookies and also bought a bottle of wine. Never made the cookies. No idea how that happened. Catnip fumes, probably. Ordered Indian food because it turned out I really wasn't in the mood for any of the healthy crap I'd made. 

Basically, MOST ACCOMPLISHMENT-FILLED DAY EVER! Going to go lie down now and get all caught up on mah gossip stories. Here is my dog and some toddler feet. 

 

*As opposed to being forcibly (FORCiBLY!) kept off the Internet by Pepco or other technology failures, because then I usually spend 99% of my time checking to see if the Internet is back? Is back now? Internet? I can haz? 

53 Hours

We went to the mall on Sunday, mostly because it was officially Too Damn Hot For Life outside and had run out of other indoor time-killing options. Life lesson time, boys: If you get bored, just go somewhere and buy shit you don't need for awhile.

Anyway. The lights flickered once. Twice. We decided to leave, let the power go out and lead to mass looting at Build-a-Bear. We noticed it was raining really hard through the skylights, but by the time we got outside the sun was shining again.  

The only evidence that a tornado had touched down nearby was...well, there were a lot of leaves all over the ground.

Oh. And shit like this:

 

That brownish...thing? That's the underside of a really big tree that just up and fell over. It peeled off a nice layer of the earth's crust and mantle on its way down, and yes I said MANTLE because BOO-YAH GEOLOGY 101. Preparing me for moments like this and not much else.  

(My drive-by cell-phone photography skillz: YOU LOVE THEM.)

Not surprisingly, we lost power as a result of the storm. As did over 300,000 other homes in our area, which I swear is like, an actual high-density area where actual real people live and work and DVR their favorite TV shows and poop using fancy modern indoor plumbing, as opposed to McHillbillyville, USA or something. I get the sense that Pepco power lines are held together by little more than popsicle sticks and electrical tape and chewed-up gum from all the third-party contractors they hire EVERY TIME we get one of these huge county-wide outages, and each repair leaves everything a bit more rickety and outage-prone than it was in the first place. 

Last time it took 84 hours for our power to be restored. This time we only lost power for about 53 hours. Fifty-three! That's nothing! And the temperatures during the day were only about 90, 91 degrees tops. I don't even see the point in blogging about any of it. What do you take me for, some kind of whiny brat urbanite with no coping skills, or something? 

(DON'T ANSWER THAT.)

Unlike the winter outage, this one at least wasn't...scary, like we all going to contract pneumonia and then get into a terrible car accident when we try to drive to the hospital for medicine for our pneumonia because our fingers fell off from frostbite already scary. This outage was mostly boring and sweaty.

Noah: Mommy, can I watch a show?

Amy: No, sweetie, there's no power, remember?

Noah: Okay. I will watch a DVD instead.

Amy: Um, can't do that either, bud. 

Noah: Okay. How about...the Star Wars game?

Amy: New rule of thumb, Noah. If something 1) lights up, 2) has buttons, or 3) is at all possibly remotely fun, it requires power, and you can't do it right now. 

Noah: Okay. Can I play with your phone?

(And yet, just a few hours later, after the boys were in bed and Jason and I prepared to watch a DVD on his charged-at-work laptop, I totally went I KNOW! We can still catch the Mad Men premiere! You just have to rent it on iTunes or something! Why don't you do that? What? Oh. Right. Never mind. Yeah, we can just watch Idiocracy again, I guess.)

I kept trying to get work done at the coffeeshops and such, but so did everyone else from the 300,000+ powerless households. On Monday I drove to Jodi's house to bask in her recently-restored electricity, only to have it go out again after an hour and a half ("HAAAAA SO LONG SUCKER," I cackled as I left, gaining strength for future evil superdeeds from her misfortune). 

On Tuesday I brought a big-ass wall outlet splitter with me and very politely asked a woman hogging an entire precious outlet with both her laptop and cell phone if she minded if we expanded the outlet's use for everybody, and...actually, it turned out she DID mind, a little bit, as she testily informed me that Panera had "a lot of other outlets" so she "didn't see the point" in using the splitter. When I mentioned that the plugs were actually all full and a bit more in demand than usual because of the power outages, she was like, "power outawhah?" but finally unplugged her shit for 10 measly seconds, then purposely replugged everything in so her chargers covered up more than one plug, just so no one else could use them. I did not like that lady, very much, and thought to myself that she deserved to get blogged about. So. There. 

(Our power came back on last night, but I brought the splitter again today because there are still thousands of people still waiting for theirs. I was heralded as the Smartest, Nicest Person Ever. Which is MORE LIKE IT, INGRATES.)

Anyway. What the outage lacked in DRAMAZZZ, though, it certainly made up in DOLLAH BILLZ, because this is the current state of our once-packed freezer:

 

Okay, for dinner tonight, your menu choices are grated cheddar cheese, some fancy farmers' market flour that you have to keep in the freezer for some reason, a plastic ice pack and those weird flaxseed/spelt waffles that nobody likes.