Old

I had a good birthday yesterday. I got some lovely flowers from the kids (aka my husband), a Pottery Barn gift card, quite a few very touching cards, some cold hard cash, and a phone call from a dear friend.
I have mixed feelings about this whole aging thing. It's a surreal experience for me. I don't know if I'm ready to accept it yet.
Accept it or not, age happens. It beats the alternative!

Taco Town

I know this is over a year old but I saw it again the other night on a SNL repeat (gotta have my Dane Cook).

AND IT GETS EVEN AWESOMER!!!!!!!!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEF-3PiQdq0

I Feel The Earth Shift

I haven't posted lately about how stressed out and depressed I've been. I really wanted this to be the "new blog" where I did not whine. But this is not a whine post. This is a "things are looking up" post. My husband finally took pity on me and agreed to make some changes to help alleviate some of my daily stress. All it took was him getting up a little earlier and taking on a little more in the mornings. For the first time in two months I made it to work on time. Despite the train blocking traffic, despite the ice I had to scrape off of every window of my car, despite myself...I made it on time. I did not cry in the car all the way to work out of frustration. I have a flicker of hope that maybe things can turn around and be better.
It's 9:30am and I have not yelled at anyone today, cried, gotten mad, or stressed out. I think I'm dreaming. If so, don't wake me up.

Don't Tell Me We're Not Related

I love this story about the chimp and her new baby. You can't look at that picture of her holding and nursing her newborn and not humanize them. I had to say a big misty-eyed "Awwwww" when I saw the pics (but I am quite hormonal due to just having weaned my own infant in the past week).
Warning: if you or your partner have had a vasectomy you may want to take a sedative before reading the story on CNN about how this little baby came to be.

Me and my Buster Browns

I don't have a real shoe fetish per se. I mean, it's not a "fetish". It's more of a...well...a deep emotional attachment and a romantic/nostalgic ache over certain kinds of shoes.
There, I've said it. It started in toddlerhood. I had a pair of shoes almost exactly like these

Well, except they weren't *$(@)% $75 friggin' bucks. I am pretty sure they were purchased at my favorite childhood store: Buster Brown Shoes. [que violins]

The play area, the aged store owners and workers who had been fitting children's growing feet for 30 years, and who can forget the golden goose egg toy (plastic one...it was the '70s not the '50s people) you got after purchasing a pair of shoes.

I love shoes and you would never know it by the way I wear them. I wear one or two pairs all winter and a different one or two pairs all summer. It's not quantity, it's quality. It's really a metaphor for my personal life when you think about it. I have a small group of friends with which I develop deep and long lasting friendships which span decades. I am a woman who commits to my shoes and my friends. So when I say I like you, I mean I really like you. Now and thirty years from now.

When I found out that this shoe company (Aster) with the outrageously overpriced children's shoes were now making this style in women's sizes I felt this tug on my heart that I cannot put into words. I honestly don't care if they look like little girl shoes. I so totally want them to the point that I can't stand it. I found a site that has them for ~$55. That's still a lot on my shoe budget but if you consider how often and how long I'd wear them and the fact that I rarely, rarely find shoes I like enough to actually buy and commit to longterm...it starts to seem totally practical.
Ahem.

Here are the styles of shoes that I feel emotional about (in order of my deepest love coming first):

t-strap mary janes
sophisticated mary janes
t-strap sandals (can't find any I like right now)
saddle oxford/oxford shoes
tap shoes(adult)

I don't know, maybe when it comes to footwear I'm just stuck in childhood and afraid to grow up. Is there something wrong with me? But honestly, when today's women's footwear looks a whole lot more like an object of torture than something you could chase down a cab in then who is the one with something wrong?

7 Years

My first born turned 7 on Saturday.
Yes, seven short years ago I was thrown into a whirlwind of motherhood where I would remain a dumbfounded and terrified bundle of nerves for nearly 3 years.
We celebrated all weekend because the party place was all booked up for her actual birthday so we extended the fun to Sunday and she had a total blast. I am totally exhausted. I was up until midnight for the past three nights baking and decorating a cake, making what seemed like a gazillion goody bags, wrapping gifts, and answering the RSVP phone calls.
In addition to my exhaustion, the muscles in every part of my body are sore and achy. Apparently, when they say that the inflatable bouncy play equipment is strong enough for adults they did not mean you could play as hard as all the first graders and not suffer the next day. Ouch. It was fun, though. Now I want a trampoline.

Operation Trans Fat Removal

So in my attempt to get started with my New Year's diet resolution, I watched a show on Discovery Health called "You: On a Diet". The two doctors featured in the show have written a book of the same title. The approach is a focus on waist size (studies have shown that fat stores around our waists are more important indicators of good health/bad health than numbers on the scale) and eliminating unhealthy trans-fats and processed foods from the diet. I like being able to focus on something other than the scale for once! The healthy waist size for men is 35" and for women it's 32". Umm.....
So I better get to work. LOL. I started in my pantry. Folks, I was in for a shock. I started label reading and for the first time I was not paying attention to only the calories or fat per serving. I was reading the entire ingredients lists and looking for trans fats (partially hydrogenated anything) and over processed grains, unnatural sugars...you get the point. If I were really following the advice from the show/book I would have had to throw away about 1/3 of my pantry contents. Ok, maybe not that much. But there were things in there that I *thought* were at least semi-healthy like my beloved pumpkin bread mix. Pumpkin is very good for you. If I were to make pumpkin bread entirely from scratch and used unbleached flour and lowered the sugar a bit it would actually be pretty healthy stuff. But the mix I usually buy...OMG!!! I had no idea the bad stuff that's in it. Trans fat and corn syrup city. Sigh....
I guess it's a good wake up call. I wish I were a pear shape sometimes and could store fat in other parts but I am all waist and belly. Even at a supposed healthy weight if I go buy charts or BMI my waist size is just large. It takes a lot of exercise, weight training, and calorie deficit to get my waist to shrink.
Here I go....

A New Beginning

It's a new year.
And a new blog site.
As I posted in my "other" blog, I think the nature of my posting lately is more suited to something like blogger. I don't post often enough, or interestingly enough to keep up a paid site of my own. This little blog here will be my space on the web for networking with other frazzled academic moms.