Do you remember your dreams? I have always been a dream-rememberer (contrast with John, who has never remembered a single dream in the ten years I’ve known him), but since getting pregnant, the dreams have been OUT OF CONTROL. You know how they say women get bigger boobs, nice shiny hair, and stronger nails when they get pregnant?  Yeah, my boobs are still tiny, my hair is falling out, and my nails are peeling, but the wacky dreams- THAT symptom I have in spades.

During the first trimester, I woke up every single night from a nightmare.  They were not the same nightmares over and over again, either- each night was a new parade of horribles playing out in the cinema of my subconscious.  That was fun.

I’m still having fairly frequent nightmares, but my brain is starting to mix it up a little.  Last night I woke up at 4am to pee (fairly standard these days).  I went back to sleep and for the remaining two hours until I woke up, I had one long, continuous, and narratively coherent dream.  It was a love story about a star crossed couple that started in the late 30s, and it was a doozy.  It had interesting details, and excellent costumes, and interesting locales, and there was a Separation By Tragic Consequences and a Reunification In The Golden Years- seriously, this was like a sixty-year story that my dream-mind invented and played out like a flickering black and white movie.  It was WAY BETTER than any story I have ever managed to write in my feeble attempts at short fiction.  I woke up feeling actually sad that it was over.

Of course, when I tried to jot down notes of the key plot points this morning (to write it down, of course, so that I might finally win my National Book Award) it all started to crumble away and I can’t piece it back together.  I guess that’s another symptom I have:  pregnancy brain.

So!  I am about ready to hurl our new AT&T home gateway internet self install kit OFF A CLIFF.  THREE WEEKS, people.  THREE WEEKS that we have been without internet at home because the “simple AT&T self-install kit” has proved to be incompatible with the “one hundred and three year old house with old wiring,” and the AT&T guys apparently make you go through seventeen excruciating hour-long phone calls with them before they dispatch a tech guy to come out to your actual house to actually help you, good GRIEF.

But!  I now have little tiny pockets of internet connectivity, at least, so I figured now would be an appropriate time for some quick bullet-style updates.

• I have a new coworker, and we share an office.  She is lovely.  She also has pretty serious carpal tunnel/nerve damage issues which necessitate the use of voice recognition software, because she can’t type without pain.  Her voice recognition software is called “Dragon,” and whenever she needs to use the program, she has to don her little headset and say into the microphone “Dragon, can you hear me?”  Which, of course, makes me think of “Papa can you hear me?”  And now I’ve had a Yentl earworm for a month.  Spectacular.
• Our new house has a dust problem.  As in: I feel like we dust, sweep, and mop every day, and the place is still rife with drywall dust from some recent work we did.  Any advice on how to rid ourselves of this scourge?  I’m slowly going insane.
• My pants and I are in a fight.  Specifically, I keep saying “fit!” and they keep saying “not so much!” and I keep saying “please?” and they keep laughing and replying “nice try, lady.  Have you considered something in a stretchy fabric?”
• I mean, it’s almost like there’s a seventeen-week old baby growing in there or something.
• Oh wait.  There is.

(Please don’t throw things, I wanted to tell you sooner.  See “AT&T, murder of,” above.)

I’ve just said goodbye to my inlaws after a five-day visit, and suffice it to say I am ready for another weekend to recover from my weekend.  We had a lovely time, actually, filled absolutely to the brim with activities and family togetherness.  But I know I can’t be the only one out there who is never fully relaxed when there are houseguests of the inlaw variety staying in my bedroom while I sleep on the futon in the guest room.  (Please tell me I’m not the only one.)

I love having people in for the weekend, and I love weekends that are full to bursting with fun and activities, but they sure have a way of throwing the following week off-kilter.  Right now the only food in the house is leftover potato salad and some pickles, I’m down to one pair of clean underpants, and I accomplished exactly zero on a work project I’d hoped to address at least a tiny bit over the weekend.  Oh well.  Such is life.

The highlight of the weekend, comedy-wise, came during a rousing family game of Apples to Apples.  For those not familiar with the game, the basic idea is that one person reads a green adjective card that says something like “happy” or “outrageous” or “timeless” and the rest of the players choose a red noun card from their hand that they feel best aligns with that adjective (like for “timeless,” some submissions included “Romeo and Juliet,” “Niagara Falls,” and “Frank Sinatra.”)

We were playing last night with my mother and father-in-law and my sister-in-law and her partner.  My father-in-law, a rather buttoned up ex cop, draws “playful” as his adjective.  The rest of us look to our hands, select the cards we feel best align with “playful,” and turn them in.  One by one he reads out the submissions, and it’s immediately clear that none of us had anything good for “playful,” and we’ve all decided to just use this round to dump cards.    “The Godfather!” “New York!” “Rust!” (That was mine.  I mean, who hasn’t had some good times with rust, am I right?)

Then he gets to the last card.  He pauses, as the word kind of catches in this throat:   “Whips!”

Sister-in-law, her partner, John and I all totally lose it. Mother-in-law turns bright red, says “no!  oh dear!”  which only makes us laugh harder. And my father-in-law, bless him, considers each card carefully, thinks for a minute, and finally says “you know, I think the most playful thing in this group would have to be the whips!”

And that’s how my sister-in-law’s partner got her first green card of the evening.  Welcome to the family, kid.

John recently got a pair of chukka boots that he can wear in the winter that go with both work and school outfits- apparently wearing his shiny dress shoes to class made him feel a little silly.  John was not familiar with the term “chukka”, so when he was describing to me what he wanted and I said “oh, like chukkas?” he said “what? What are Chumbawumbas?”

And now he calls them his Chumbawumba boots, and I have that absolutely insanely annoying “Tubthumping” song in my head on a weekly basis.  Thanks, John!

As much as I regret the fact that I have had a mid-90s one-hit wonder earworm for the past three weeks, I actually love these little mishearings that become a part of a family’s personal vernacular.   My sister in particular is famous for these.  When she was little, whenever she wanted to go sledding, she would demand that my mom get out her “snowsnoot,” a word my family uses instead of “snow suit” to this day.  She’s also the queen of the Malapropism- we still tease her about time when, as a preteen whining about some grave injustice that had been done to her, she said “I hate this family! I always get the short end of the shaft!”

There are others: we all call my grandmother “Gummy” because my oldest cousin couldn’t say “grammy” correctly, and when we’re feeling something is particularly unfair, we’ll say that it “bites the baboon” (my sister’s childhood mishearing of “bites the big one.”)

Any good ones in your family?

* From the classic Friends scene:

Last week as I was driving to dinner at a friend’s house, the “add fuel” light came on.  I knew, I absolutely KNEW, that I had enough gas left to make it there and wait to fill up on the way home.  And I was running late.  And there was a 7-week-old baby at that house, and that 7-week-old baby butt was not going to pat itself, you know what I’m saying?  And yet: I almost pulled in to every gas station I passed on the way to their house.

Why?

Because when I was 16 I ran out of gas. Once.  Four blocks from my house.  And my parents, who had to drive FOUR WHOLE BLOCKS to bring me a gas can so I could rescue my 1991 Ford Explorer from the middle of Elm Street, have never let me live it down.  I still hear “remember that time you ran out of gas and stranded the car on Elm Street?  Man what a bonehead move hahahahahahaha!” at least twice a year.  FOURTEEN YEARS LATER.

And because I once ran out of gas that one time, I still freak out every time the add fuel light comes on in my car, convinced that I must stop immediately to avoid further cementing my reputation as “the girl who runs out of gas.”

Isn’t it funny, the things that you do that become a part of your family’s history of you?  The things you can never live down?  I swear, I am usually a highly competent person, but a majority of my family’s favorite stories about me involve some catastrophic screwup.

Like the time I backed out of the garage while the garage door was still closed.  That was a good one.  Or the time a friend and I were too lazy to make cookie dough so we bought one of those Pilsbury ready-to-bake giant cookie  things, except I forgot to take off the cellophane before popping it in the oven so our big cookie came out with a shiny plastic outer layer that said “RemoveThisFirstRemoveThisFirstRemoveThisFirst.”

That friend still signs her Christmas cards to me “RemoveThisFirst.”

Please tell me it’s not just me, that all families torture each other in this way.  They do, right?  Or am I the only one whose parents still gleefully remind her of that time when she was 14 and spilled an entire bottle of forest green nail polish on the white carpet?

I am convinced that every family has its own particular set of strange traditions, inevitable crises, and other oddities that surface at Thanksgiving.  They’re the best part of the holiday, aren’t they? Here, a selected list of ours:

• Every year, my mother makes a wild rice dish.  Every year she forgets to add raisins.  Every year she forgets to set it out on the buffet with the other sides.  Every year, she laments that no one ate it.  EVERY. SINGLE. YEAR.  If I didn’t know better, I’d swear it was a comedy bit.  “I forgot to put out the rice!” “No shit, that has never happened before!”
• I add salt to the potatoes in secret.  I actually post John as a lookout at the kitchen door and do it as fast as possible so no one will see me do it.  Because if they saw me, they would not eat the potatoes.  Except you know how mashed potatoes taste without salt?  LIKE PASTE.
• Forty-seven half-filled water glasses all over the house, with at least three people an hour asking “is this one mine?”
• Three kinds of cranberry sauce for a family of five.
• Similarly, three kinds of potatoes.
• Also, three kinds of stuffing.
• No, I’m not exaggerating.  We are picky.
• The once-a-year, only-at-Thanksgiving, musical version of grace before the meal.  Sung off key.  At different tempos.  By two people who know the words, one who kind of does, and two who just blatantly make it up.
• Dream Whip.  I know.  God, I know.  If I could change that one, I would.
• And finally, my personal favorite because it is SO RIDICULOUS and yet SO US, we have got to be the only family on earth who every year has to make a trip to the grocery store on Thanksgiving day to buy emergency lunch provisions including, I SWEAR TO GOD, sliced turkey for sandwiches.  Because, you know, we’re not going to have any of that lying around the house in a few hours or anything.

So yeah, mine was great.  How was yours?

The internet tells me that traditional gifts for this occasion are fruit and flowers.  So John, this is for you:

Kumquats. Kind of an inside joke.

Happy fourth anniversary, my little kumquat.  Even though we see each other for about 30 minutes a day these days (if we’re lucky), I still enjoy those 30 minutes more than any other part of my day.  I love you.

k

John’s birthday was this weekend, and when he woke up on the actual day, he looked at me kind of mournfully and said “I’m in my late mid-twenties now! I’m so old!”

And then I kneed him in the nuts.

Sometimes it is not awesome to be married to someone three years younger than you, is all I’m saying.

Anyway, I had planned to take us out to a nice dinner in the city for a nice birthday dinner on Saturday night, but our college football team threw a wrench in that by playing an evening game that was actually being broadcast in our market (very rare) that John really wanted to watch.  And while I would have probably skipped the game and gone to the delicious fancy restaurant it was, technically, John’s birthday, so I acquiesced.

So instead of dinner out we got fancy takeout sushi from one of our favorite places.  I was a little bummed about this originally, but may I say, after Saturday I highly recommend fancy takeout for special occasions.  We get takeout pretty rarely, and when we do it’s usually from cheap thai places or pizza delivery.  Takeout fancy sushi is an entirely different animal.  It feels so decadent, sitting in your pjs, drinking your own favorite wine that you bought at retail (not restaurant) prices, watching your college team get beat in an absolute heartbreaker.  No waitress to interrupt your conversation, or make you feel guilty that the two of you put away five huge rolls in 10 minutes flat.  Heaven.

And it turned out to be a very good thing that we did not go out, because if we’d been out, I never would have seen the commercial for what has to be the greatest product ever created:  The Chia Obama.

Oh yes.

Christmas presents anyone?

Seriously, family members: do not be at all surprised if, under the tree on Christmas morning, you find a strange ceramic pot in the shape of our president’s head that promises to grow your very own green ‘fro.