The goddess of inebriated crafting

Bow down to me, for I am the goddess of inebriated crafting.  Sure, I guess you have to have a pretty deep pantheon to have a goddess devoted to this.  But indeed, if I may pray to the parking gods (multiple gods devoted solely to finding me a parking space), is it so unlikely that there might be a goddess to call on when you find yourself inspired (by soul or by necessity) to create things when you (accidentally or on purpose) find yourself a little too deep into the box wine?  I say nay.  I say there is such a goddess, and she is me.  Um, I, she is I.  I can also be a goddess of dumb grammar that sounds wrong but is actually right.  I think there are a lot of us.  We’re kind of like harpies, only with red pens where our claws should be.

But I digress.

Back to inebriated crafting.  My creation myth involves Burning Man and a tiger print faux fur slipcover for a friend’s bicycle seat.  It involves sewing and altering clothing for friends during the heat of the day on the playa.  It involves a hat that incorporates a disco ball.  The disco ball turns using a small battery-operated mechanism and three battery-operated LEDs shine up on the spinning ball to create a disco effect.  On a hat.  The goddess of inebriated crafting was clearly born at Burning Man. 

Yesterday, I was called upon to modify a cummerbund.  My kiddos’ preschool Ballet/Tap class photo shoot is today.  I will once again be putting makeup on my child, and this year I will also be slicking back my son’s dreamy Beatles-esque mop of hair with gel à la Blaine on Glee.  Maybe I should draw on some sideburns, like I did when he dressed as tiny Elvis for Halloween when he was a year old.  Because what’s cuter than sideburns on a child?  They are dancing a tap routine to music from Happy Feet, and are dressing in tuxedo-inspired costumes to simulate tuxedoed penguins.  My son has an actual tuxedo.  With tails.  Kill me, he is so cute.  But the tux came with a classic black tie and cummerbund.  The teacher ordered a red one to swap in so he would match the girls better, whose costumes are tuxedo-inspired with red accents and adorable jaunty miniature top hats.  It’s like the teeny tiny prom, only he has nine dates instead of one.

Aaaanyway, wow, I’m so not the goddess of inebriated concise writing, am I?  That will have to be someone else.  Sorry.

As I was saying, anyway, the new red bow tie and cummerbund arrived one day before the photo shoot.  And they fit me.  I’m all for body love, but y’all have seen me.  You’ve seen, like, almost all of me.  A cummerbund for my four-year-old, skinny string bean son should not fit around my waist.  But it did.  It was not only too long, but also too wide.  It could cover his whole torso like a misguided satin tube top.  I could see the teacher panicking as she tried to fold it into something that could work, you know, with duct tape and safety pins, and maybe some WD-40 and a bamboo skewer. 

I stepped in.  “I can fix it.”  Palpable relief.  “Really,” she asked.  “Yes.  I can sew.  I can fix it.”  “You shouldn’t have told me that.  We’re going to call you all the time.”  It’s OK, Miss Dana.  I adore you and the way you teach my kids.  I adore the fact that you teach them the correct names for dance terms and expect perfection while also making sure they enjoy every moment of class.  You are a paragon of dance teachers.  You can ask me for anything you want.

Love fest.

Except I had a glass of wine with dinner.  And it was so good that I had a second.  And then after dinner, you know… whatever, shut up, don’t judge me.  But then I remembered I had to modify a cummerbund.  Oops.

So here is the status update I should have written instead of writing this blog entry:  I successfully modified a 5-pleat adult-sized cummerbund into a 3-pleat child-sized cummerbund in 10 minutes.  Perfectly.  Drunk.

Wow, that’s a tweet.  That’s less than 140 characters.  Why did I think this was a blog entry?  In my head, I heard the phrase “goddess of inebriated crafting,” and pretty much the rest is history.  So yeah, I had one day to do this.  I accidentally got tipsy.  And I seriously rocked this cummerbund alteration.  The end.

So bow down.  Leave high temperature glue sticks and spare Singer bobbins on my altar.  Adorn yourselves in hot pink faux fur, beaded fringe, and jewelry made of pipe cleaners and cowrie shells on November 21^st, my birthday.  And if you ever need a dance costume on short notice and accidentally get drunk, you know who to call.

How the mighty…

I was never popular or cool or a hipster. I was neither a queen bee nor a wanna-be. I was kind of bee-irrelevant. But looking back on my teens and twenties, I was cool enough that my young self would be completely horrified by some of the things that now completely f-ing make my day. I’m not talking about my kid telling me he loves me in pidgin sign language (point to self, make heart with fingers, point to mommy). Even my edgy(ish) twenty-something self would understand how that would cause my middle-aged heart to melt into a sopping puddle of goo. I’m talking about the truly pathetic things that make me happy. Like these:

My minivan. The doors open and close by magic. I can fold down the seats in the back and have enough space for furniture, boxes upon boxes of yard sale crap, or a week’s worth of groceries. It can fit 4 car seats plus 4 adults. It smells vaguely of sour milk and the carpet is coated in mystery crumbs. Bonus: if we are ever trapped in a blizzard, we could assemble an entire carton of slightly dessicated but probably still edible McDonald’s French fries from beneath the seats. I am so in love with my minivan that when I told my sister that minivans are sexy, I was not even being facetious.

Brown rice sushi from the grocery store. Gone are the days of west coast sushi snobbery. To get west coast quality sushi here costs more than I am willing to spend. But my grocery store has brown rice sushi. Brown rice unagi roll. With toasted sesame seeds and “eel sauce.” Bliss.

Speaking of the grocery store, grocery shopping alone. Grocery shopping alone while Daddy watches the kids feels like a trip to a favorite bistro for brunch followed by a calming walk on the beach. I get to choose the perfect apples rather than just throwing the closest ones into my kids’ miniature shopping carts and then watching the carts overturn, bruising all of the apples anyway. I get to peruse meats on sale to stock up the sad empty freezer. I get to sample the pumpernickel bread with fancy imported Irish butter. I often get mildly flirted with by at least one random stranger (or the dude behind the deli counter) when shopping alone, which is a little disturbing given my shopping cart full of multiple gallons of milk, Cheerios, and miniature frozen pancakes. But hey, I’ll take it. P.S. The rumor that we are soon getting a Wegmans in Columbia has me in a gourmet grocery tizzy. It would be tragic how happy this makes me if it weren’t just so exciting.

A new dishwasher. Our dishwasher has been on the fritz for more than a year. It was disgusting. We switched to detergent with bleach in it because there was some sort of mold problem developing in there. Dishes were coming out dirtier than when they went in. You would think I would consider hand-washing instead, but I have OCD an aversion to having dirty dishes in the sink. They have to go straight from table to dishwasher. Finally, this past weekend, we took advantage of the Memorial Day sales to replace that piece of crap (a piece of crap that is only 6-7 years old, by the way. It was new when we moved in. Had 2-star ratings on the Sears website for all of the same reasons I have always hated it.) We now have a brand new 5-star-rated dishwasher. It’s stainless on the inside. Why this brings me so much happiness, I have no idea, but looking at that shiny silver non-moldy interior brings joy to my heart. Also, it doesn’t have hard water stains down the front of it, and it WILL NOT get any, because now we have a water conditioning system for our well water. Best of all, it is nearly silent when running, so it will not force me to turn up the TV while watching The Bachelorette.

“Indigo” by Clarks. Clarks’ cuter, trendier line of shoes. They are not as comfortable as Clarks proper, but they are more comfortable than the non-Clarks version of the same shoe. In my 20’s, I didn’t even know what Clarks shoes were. I would not have been caught dead in any “comfort” line of shoes. Now I am pretty much just waiting for Dansko sandals to get a titsch cuter, and am considering the sparkly sequined version of the FitFlop. (If you go to Zappos or wherever and look up Indigo shoes, no, I have absolutely never spent that for them. Clarks outlet... clearance section. That’s how I roll.)

Box wine. Gentle readers, I truly never thought I would see the day. I was never a hipster, or cool, or whatever. But I WAS a wine snob. I am still kind of a wine snob. I have the palette potential of a sommelier. I sniff and swirl and suck air and pretty much do every pretentious thing that one can do with a glass of wine. (Although when servers give me the cork, I am always a bit at a loss. What am I supposed to do with that? I don’t give a rat’s patootie about the cork. I sniff it and nod so they will stop looking at me and just pour some wine into my glass already, but the cork tells me nothing. If I’m wrong about this, please, someone tell me what I am supposed to be doing with that thing.) Aaaaaaanyway, all that is to say that I love wine. But finances being what they are, we have sunk to the lowest of the low... box wine. It’s shameful. But it’s $18 for 4 bottles, less when it’s on sale (10% off every Tuesday at King’s Contrivance Liquor and Smoke Shop). And it is totally drinkable. Especially the Bota Malbec and the Big House “Naked” (i.e. un-oaked) Chardonnay. It’s probably just a matter of time until I am drinking Franzia White Zin with ice cubes in it ($12 for 5L, compared to the $18 for 3L I am spending on my snooty elitist box wine.)

Last, but certainly not least, my cordless stick vacuum. Light, maneuverable, with floor and carpet settings. Cordless stick vac, you complete me.

The ugly truth

I am as addicted to facebook as the next person. Um, by that I mean, I am way more addicted than most of the next people. So imagine my dismay at finding out that there is a phenomenon called “facebook depression." Bummer. One of the possible explanations for facebook depression comes out of the Psychology department at Stanford, my old stompin’ grounds. [Where by stompin’, I mean free-food-scroungin’. No one can sniff out free food like a PhD student.] So anyway, the possible explanation is that people tend to underestimate the negative emotions of their peers. We look at happy smiling people on facebook and think that their lives are so much better than ours. We look, for example, at our friend who got pink stripes in her hair, and maybe we think, “Wow, that’s so cool.” But I can tell you that I had to take 8 photos of that new pink hair to get one in which I didn’t feel like I looked fat, and I have been wondering ever since whether I am too old to have pink hair, even though I really do love it.

But I digress. [Which would have been a pretty good blog name, come to think of it, despite its lack of “ding dong.”]

So, in the spirit of showing you the ugly non-photoshopped truth, I have a confession. We have been living above our means. I know we can’t be the only ones, but it feels like a horrible secret. There is something about debt that fills me with shame. It began when I stopped working to stay home with the kids. At first we thought it was temporary, a function of diapers and emergency twin infant survival tactics, like too much takeout. We thought it was the car payments on the minivan we bought because two rear-facing car seats didn’t fit in the back of my little Sentra. But no, it’s pretty much just that we spend more than we make.

The fundamental problem, I think, is that both my husband and I ask ourselves, “Is [this thing we want] worth [this amount of money]?” when we need to be asking, “Do we have [this amount of money]?” and if the answer is no, then we need to either not have that thing/service/convenience, no matter how awesome it is, or find the money elsewhere and give something else up. When we had two incomes and no kids, we pretty much never had to learn that skill. You would think I would have figured it out, living on less than $15,000/year in the San Francisco Bay Area as a grad student. But there is something about the grad student lifestyle that is a surreal joke. We would literally wander the campus looking for leftover food after symposiums so we didn’t have to feed ourselves dinner. Those kinds of strategies don’t really translate to living in the suburbs with a family. If someone had told me back then what we would be making, and then told me I would be struggling to live within those means, I would have laughed.

We are very lucky. We are comfortable. We get to own a home and send our kids to preschool and save for retirement. I get to stay home and be a daily presence, for good or ill, in the lives of my two beautiful children. We have enough, and more than enough. We have more than most people. I know how lucky we are. And yet, we have a secret shameful red number—our debt—a number that is going in the wrong direction.

So it’s time for an overhaul. My once-a-month house cleaning service is the first thing to get the axe. The grocery bills suggest that it’s time for more spaghetti, less steak. Maybe heirloom tomatoes and Honeycrisp apples are not in the budget (even though they are TOTALLY worth the ludicrous amounts we spend on them). HBO and Showtime, I have loved you, but buh-bye. I already don’t really shop. I think the last time I was in a mall was Christmas shopping. But the kids probably don’t need any more toys off of ebay.

Here are the things we’re going to try to keep. Exercise classes for me. Zumba, dancing, whatever. Non-workout mommy is a depressed and unhealthy mommy. The classes stay. Dance and gymnastics classes for kiddos. Non-negotiable. I’ll give up my cleaning ladies. I would even give up the next thing on this list if I had to. And that would be… Wine. We’ve narrowed as far as we can. We’re working the system and getting pretty good wine under $8 or 9/bottle. We split a bottle most nights, a glass each with dinner and a glass each after. Doesn’t sound so crazy until you do the math. That’s $250+/month on booze before we even have a single friend over, before we include the occasional Saturday afternoon beer or Friday night glass of Scotch by the fire. So yeah, we need to think deep thoughts about the booze budget, but we’re not cutting wine completely unless we have to. The other big question mark is my hair. I can cut the uber-pricey hair appointments back to three times a year. I can live with roots. I no longer have the shorter style that needed more maintenance. But I have learned that when it comes to highlights and haircuts, you get what you pay for. I can go less frequently, but I don’t feel ready to give up my hair appointments altogether and revert to (grayer every day) hippie locks.

So it’s time for me and the hubs to sit down and figure out how much we need to cut to get back on track and pay down the shameful little problem that has gradually accumulated. I hope I get to keep my wine. I’m surely gonna need it. ‘Cause the roof is leaking again, and one roof repair seems to equal about a year of HBO and Showtime.

P.S. Despite my having a Master's in Statistics, we will probably continue to buy lottery tickets.

Bath time happy hour and ego shred

Bath time is ME time. Hot, hot water in my deep Jacuzzi tub, a glass of wine, and my kindle loaded with the brain candy I love so much. Now the obvious observation is that caring for two energetic preschoolers is not really compatible with happy hour bath time. Sadly, that’s true. So I usually take my baths at night, when the wine is slightly more socially acceptable anyway. But lately, I have been working out in the evening, so if the man and I want to get in some high quality American Idol time together before he falls asleep, bath time gets cut short.

Yesterday afternoon, while I was doing the backbreaking job of lifting and stacking huge 18”+ diameter logs from a downed tree, I knew I was earning some serious bath time. So when my back twinged one time too many and I called it a day, sore and sweaty, I stripped down (yes, I went inside first), and headed to my happy place. Oh yeah. Hot, hot water. Kindle. Sinking in like a lobster to be boiled… Aaaand my daughter comes wandering in, asking in her sweetest little angel voice if she can come in the bath with me. She likes the hot water as much as I do, but of course she can’t have it as hot as I like it, so I run some cooler water. Sigh. She starts splashing, so I put away my kindle. Sigh. She is completely adorable though. Practicing going underwater and holding her breath. Pretending to be a mermaid. It’s a different kind of wonderful.

Until she gets a load of my va-jay and informs me that it is yucky because it has hair on it. Uncool, kid. Uncool.