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.... Read more →

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. Read more →

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... Read more →

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 Read more →

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... Read more →

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... Read more →

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... Read more →

(*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... Read more →

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.... Read more →

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... Read more →