“By the way…”

“By the way…”

That phrase always struck terror into my poor mother’s heart. I’ve finally figured out why.

When I was in elementary and middle school, I regularly sauntered into the living room—usually late on a Sunday afternoon—and announced “By the way, I need three dozen cupcakes for Mrs. Halliday’s class tomorrow!” or “By the way, I need 27 color copies of this photo for my science project!” or “By the way, I volunteered you to chaperone the museum field trip on Tuesday!”

My mother groaned. She rolled her eyes. She occasionally snapped at me… not often, to her credit… but she always came through. Sometimes, she was up baking long after I had gone to sleep. And in the way mothers do, she used to tell me that one day it would all come back around and bite me in the butt (though I believe she stated it somewhat more delicately). I generally just laughed and rolled my eyes right back at her.

Many years later… oh dear… let’s just round it to 30 years later… this past Friday afternoon, my 11-year-old daughter pulled the great-grandmother of all “by the way” stunts on me. She needed to make a model of a Mesopotamian house for her history class. Out of clay. By Monday.

No, she didn’t have any clay—all the classroom clay was used up, and the structure she had been working on during class time hadn’t worked out. No, she wasn’t 100% sure what a Mesopotamian house looked like. Google Images was, for once, letting her down. Her teacher had said “Just make sure it has four walls and a flat roof and looks like it’s made out of mud brick!” She did have a large piece of white posterboard. Great. I tried not to think about the fact that I have at least 120 essays to grade. I tried not to burst into tears. She hates it when I do that… and I invariably do, at some point near the end of every term.

Plan A: we try to do things the “right” way.
One trip to Michaels for a box of Mexican “air drying” terracotta clay and a bag of pungent green moss.

We roll out the clay.

We drape it around the box we are using as a framework (the box the clay came in! How intelligent of us!) and smooth it over.

She scores lines in it so that it looks somewhat brick-like.

We reinforce the clay around the windows and the doors.

All is right with the world. Until… and I know all you ceramics experts are already snickering… until it dries over Saturday night and the damn clay shrinks and the entire thing falls apart into little brick-shaped slabs of clay by Sunday morning.

Plan B: Necessity is the mother of invention. Desperation is the mother of creativity.
And I’m the mother of Olivia, so I have to think up a solution, and fast.

We sit at the kitchen table, despondent, crumbling the small clay slabs apart with our fingernails. I hear the rising tide of panic in her voice… “But it’s due tomorrow! We have to make it work! Do something!”

And I look at the panettone and cookies at the other end of the cluttered kitchen table, and I remember that it’s nearly Christmas, and suddenly I experience my very own small Christmas miracle (and no, you don’t have to remind me that I’m an agnostic!). I know EXACTLY what we need to do.

And that is why, first thing this morning, my daughter went off to school with what is probably the world’s first Mesopotamian gingerbread hut. With lots of cocoa powder mixed into the royal icing to make it muddy enough. And with no candy, just moss and twigs (how restrained of us! Although we did eat the candy…). And if her history teacher doesn’t like it, I’ll gladly take the fall on my daughter’s behalf. At least his classroom will smell good, by the way.

My new celebrity crush...

...is... like... so totally Keith Olbermann. :-P

Sorry. I'm gushing like "A" (name withheld to protect the guilty) from my 9:30 English 101 class when she goes off on one of her tangents. (Don't worry, "A"--you're still one of my favorites!)

But seriously. With all this election madness, I've been watching a lot of "punditry," and Olbermann is my new smart-guy hero. Intelligent, funny, kinda cute for an old-ish guy (hey! Only seven years older than me!)

Anyway, David Duchovny can move over now. (He's kind of grossing me out lately anyway!)

And don't worry, Steve. You are still The One. Besides, if you are determined to lust after Krista Allen and Brooke Burke, in spite of my forceful attempts to convince you otherwise, you can allow me this moment of starry-eyed frivolity... right?

Miracles. Do. Happen.

My mother came to visit.

She...

She... I can barely get the words out.

She told me that my house was actually in much better shape than usual!

(And then she "tidied around" my laundry room. Which was fine with me, actually.)

Now remember, "in much better shape than usual" can be translated to mean something along the lines of "not quite the fire trap it was LAST time I was here"--even so, I'm pretty pleased with myself.

I'm still drowning in piles of paper, junk mail, assorted clothes that don't fit me... but for one brief moment there, I felt like much LESS of a slob than usual!

Now (and in a complete non sequitur), I just have to find a way to confiscate or "lose" the Screaming Rubber Chicken that--in a fit of madness--I bought for my daughter.

It all started here...

Sigh.

Sooo... all that stuff I was going to do for myself, back in the spring... the exercise, the manicures, the losing weight, all that good stuff...

I didn't.

Well, I did go to farmer's markets. I ate lots of fresh berries (generally for breakfast, with cottage cheese). And I did buy flowers a couple of times! That was nice. But the house is messier than ever, and Really Important Things are starting to get lost. If the Large Hadron Collider DID create a micro black hole, I think it's somewhere in here, either in my living room or my daughter's bedroom! My last checkbook is apparently in an alternate universe by now... and her cell phone is somewhere in there too! Sigh.

Soooo... I'm rather bummed. :-( It has been a tough summer. Life has been challenging on just about every level imaginable, I'm physically and emotionally exhausted, my editing work is piling up, and the real work hasn't even begun--I'm teaching two more classes beginning on Monday, on top of the one I've already started!

I don't need a fairy godmother. I need a fairy housekeeper!

But instead of lamenting summer, I think I need to throw myself wholeheartedly into fall. I need to roast chickens, bake cookies, and maybe even finish knitting that afghan I've had on the needles since 1993 or so! Oh, and did I mention I need to drink more--and better quality--red wine? Well, that may not be a NEED, but I may still have to make it a priority.

I really do need a plan to make my life run more smoothly, though. Working three jobs (two teaching, one editing) isn't conducive to having a house that is even remotely clean, or dishes that are even remotely done! (That reminds me, if anyone has figured out a way to get makeup out of a white hoodie... makeup that even bleach hasn't lifted so far... please let me know?) I think back sometimes these days to FlyLady's command that the last thing to do every night is "shine your kitchen sink," and I think DOUBLEYOU, TEE, EFF... I can't even SEE my kitchen sink under all the dirty dishes!!! FlyLady is either super-human or really needs to get a life.

Lately, I've seen lots of buzz on the Internet to the effect that clutter can indicate a "hoarding disorder" (my mother emails me the links to such enlightening news, heaven knows why!) but PLEASE--I need therapy for enough OTHER things, I don't want it for my messy house!

Any suggestions? Are there any small but miraculous changes I can make that I haven't yet figured out, that will make my house more Martha-Stewart-ish and help to keep my blood pressure down?

I'm not sure WHY I started writing this post. I think maybe I just needed to vent. So this isn't going to be one of those posts with a nicely-turned conclusion, an epiphany in which I turn my life around and end up in a minimalist house with no magazines on the coffee table. It's just going to be a vent. OK? Thanks for listening (if anyone's still out there....)!

So sweet...

Sometimes, especially when the TV and Internet seem to be filled with bad news and disaster, it's nice to be reminded of all the sweetness and beauty and talent that fills the world... so please, spend a few minutes with Amy, Brad, and their amazing friends. (this is a HQ video, so may load slowly--it's definitely worth it to pause and wait!) (And thanks to my husband Steve for making the captions and uploading the HQ video for Amy! :-) )

This is my peaceful place...

I think that everyone needs a place that they can conjure up in their mind's eye when things get rough. This is mine. It's the terrace of my friend Luca's family villa in Campania, Italy. That's the Amalfi Coast on the horizon....

Two minutes after I snapped that photo, I was sitting in the chair to the left, nursing a fresh cup of coffee, getting cookie crumbs on my PJs, listening to a dog barking in the distance, and watching tiny lizards run back and forth along the handrail.

This is where I go when I can't sleep. It's where I go when I'm sad. And it's now in my "goals journal" as where I want to go again "in real life" as soon as I can afford to. And this is why I'm writing it down now--to write it into reality, to keep myself honest, and to make it happen!

This is my incentive to pay off the installments I owe the IRS, to keep the credit card debts down, to live within my means... so that maybe a year from now, I can set the Moka pot on the stove, breathe deeply as the fresh coffee bubbles up, and throw open the inner and outer doors that lead to the terrace, finally finding my way back to this, my spiritual home.

Clearing out the cobwebs...

Today, I plan to move my office from the laundry room (outside in a chilly shed) into the third bedroom, the one recently vacated by my stepson. I'm scared. Moving the computer is no problem--it's awkward to carry but easy to hook up again--it's the piles of paper that I am finding so daunting.

Fact is, I'm a slob. My mother still despairs of me, and wonders "what did I do wrong?" My daughter, to my dismay, is turning out the same way. I'm clean, but untidy, and now that I have no excuse to avoid the piles of paper any more, I'm getting into a bit of a panic. I know there are pieces of mail in there that I should have dealt with, student essays that I should have returned sooner after the end of term, candy wrappers and chip crumbs that have attracted the ants (a constant irritant in our house since spring arrived... I think they are living in the ceiling!), and so on.

How do I become tidier, less of a hoarder? I've seen the Oprah shows on hoarding, the "Clean Sweep" shows, the "How Clean is Your House" ladies, and so on. I've tried FlyLady (lasted for about a week before I got so irritated with the constant emails that I couldn't handle it any more...), I've tried little plastic file boxes, I've tried... lots of things. But nothing lasts long. My office and bedroom are still the biggest disaster areas on the planet. My kitchen is clean but cluttered, my living room looks like a bookstore exploded, and I am just feeling crushed by my clutter.

I want one of those houses that feels like a haven to come home to. I don't get a lot of help around here, so pretty much anything I decide to do, I'll have to handle on my own. So how do I make it happen? I don't know... I've lived my life this way. Can I learn new habits now?