Posts from — September 2010

Yesterday I cashed in on a gift certificate my parents gave me for my birthday and went to get a massage and pedicure at a local salon. Just FYI, if you are ever in the market for a gift for me, massages and/or (best bet = and) pedicures are surefire winners. In fact, there should be some sort of “Massage of the Month” club so that people can purchase membership as gifts for a friend/daughter/sister/mother/girl-they’ve-never-met-in-real-life-but-read-her-website. Is there such a thing? Surely there is. I can imagine that if I received such a gift, I might have a hard time not just saving up all the months until the year was almost over and then scheduling a twelve-hour massage marathon. Whoa. Seriously though, I’m pretty sure heaven is probably just rows and rows of heated tables with a hole for your face, and miles and miles of masseurs ready to knead your muscles into mush. Of course, I guess you won’t be holding any tension in your body in the heavenly afterlife. Or even have a body. So maybe I’m off on that.

Anyway, where was I? Oh, right – I arrived at my appointment on time, and by “on time” I mean “in time to hear my masseuse get reamed by the owner for some such thing that I very much tried to pretend like I couldn’t hear.” It was awkward. I was in the same hallway as they were, and they were talking loudly, and I was trying to look very interested in the blank wall in front of me (thank you acting classes!) until finally one of them noticed I was there and went from “I DON’T THINK YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT I’M TELLING Y- Oh, hello Mrs. Ellis, come on back with me and we’ll get you all set up for your relaxation session!” Ok, great! I’m feeling loosened up already!

Let’s get real though – someone was about to drape me in warm cloths and rub my 30lb.-toddler-holding muscles with scented lotion while generic Eastern-sounding music played softly in my dimly-lit room. I was not feeling picky about the preambular ambiance.

The massage therapist had a heavy foreign accent – something Eastern-European that I couldn’t place. She asked, “Vat jew vant from dis myahsage? You he-yav probellum air-deas?” I told her yes – my problem area was my body. Just massage that.  She laughed and said, “Ho-keh. Vee jus do EVERYTING den. Heh heh.” The whole time I kept thinking – I do not think this woman showers.

It’s not that she smelled bad, she just smelled…unshowered. Which is not necessarily the kind of olfactory sensation you want to encounter during a massage, I gotta say. It kind of consumed my thoughts the whole time I was face down in the padded hole.  I could see her toes, and I thought, “What does she smell like? I mean, B.O., sure, but come on, Rachel, let’s test out that ol’ schnozz! Now think: where have we encountered that particular aroma before? The kitchen? Yes, yes, I think you’re on to something! Food! She smells like food! But the question is, what food?” This seriously went on for the entire thirty minutes. If it had been an hour-long massage, I would have figured it out, no problem, but the time ran out, and so the mystery remained unsolved.

I left the spa area all greased up like a pig at the county fair and slipped into my pedicure lounge chair for some more kneading, this time mechanical. As I sat with my feet in the frothy warm bubbles and read all about the life and times of TomKat in a back issue of Allure, I forgot about the mystery of the malodorious massage just long enough for it to marinate in the thalamus juices at the way back of my brain and then slowly bubble to the top to the section that was processing the fact that Suri Cruise wears outfits that cost more than my monthly insurance bill. It popped up suddenly there, clear as day, like a sign in the middle of Times Square on a Friday evening, and I had to physically restrain myself from yelling it out to the nail technician who was ever so diligently applying the second coat of Sweet Kiss to my left pinky toe. Instead, I gave myself a mental high five and imagined myself leaping to my feet and shouting it out like the winning answer at the end of a Trivial Pursuit tournament of champions.

MEATBALLS!

I left the salon a few minutes later, feeling significantly more refreshed than I had when I arrived.

I am hard, hard at work on something that I hope to tell you about later on this week, and as a result haven’t been able to fufill my Internet Putzing Around quota of late.  In addition, I have been waxing heavy on the single-parenting, dealing with a broken washing machine, upsetting a yellow jacket nest in the wall of our back porch and watching open-mouthed from the safety of the front porch as the power lines in front of our house caught on fire. (Which was unrelated to the yellow jacket incident.)(I think.)(Unless….IT WASN’T. OMG.) So, you know, I’ve been busy.

But! I miss this place. I have several posts backlogged in my brain right now, and I know from past experience that if I don’t get them tapped out soon, they will most certainly go the way of Algebra II and pretty much every fact of the Revolutionary War except for who fought in it. (Which was us – or PRE-us, I guess – and….some other people who were not us.)(I’m KIDDING. I totally know it was the French.)(Kidding again! Mrs. Smith! I’m kidding! You guys, don’t tell Mrs. Smith.) Which is to say: I will completely and totally forget every single detail of them.

I didn’t want to be absent from here so much again this week, though, so I thought I would share a couple of things I’ve had bookmarked on my computer for a long time, for various reasons. I figure if I don’t have time to putz around, you can do it for me. Thanks for helping out, you guys.

First up: Pomplamoose. They can do no wrong in my book. I love everything they’ve ever done. Please allow this to set a warm, mellow vibe for you as we begin our Internet Putzaround:

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Second: I am constantly looking for wall art (seriously – do you have some laying around that you don’t need? Because we have a lot of sad, empty wall space, and I will take it off your hands. I will even give you a solid, resounding high five in return.) and recently found this website called Poster Cabaret. And once we have more than $17.33 in our bank account, I will allow myself to click on that link again.

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Third: The summer we got our wife. One of my favorite pieces from one of my new favorite websites, Adequate Parenting.

“I could be a vigilante butch housewife.  In my mind, I grow to the size of Godzilla, shooting flesh-piercing streams of water from my eyes.”

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Fourth: A while back when I asked what sort of things you all find funny (Which you can still answer! This blog is the extra-fancy kind that that can accommodate retroactive commenting!) my brother sent me about 11 hours of YouTube clips of different comedians that he enjoys. He is serious about his humor, you guys. My number one favorite was Demetri Martin. Something about his particular humor is just right up my alley. Also someone once told me Noah favors him, so maybe I’m biased a little.

Fifth: Speaking of my brother, he introduced my sister and me to Sporcle. And now we need a 12-step recovery program to break our addiction to it.  Some of our favorites:

Famous Faces Drawn Badly

90s TV Sitcoms by Theme Song Now this is a story all about how my life got flip turned upside down…

80s Music Without Lyrics Don’t stop believin’, you guys.

Five Songs in Five Seconds

Literally there are about 20 more I could link to here. But you’ll just have to peruse them yourself and find your favorites..

Sorry for screwing with your productivity on a Monday, everybody. Tell your bosses/children/significant others/pets/personal hygiene habits that I’m sorry. (But really, I’m not.)

Original WSS post with explanation here.

WSS collection (or most of it – still catching up on Flickr) here.

I had a whole other post for today, but as I was writing it I started putzing around on the blog tidying up a bit and ran across this old video in the process and now I am totally verklempt to the max.

Oh my goodness, you guys. Sometimes it just knocks the breath right out of me when I think about how much I love these two kids.

I’m just now coming up for air after a few days of intense resume/cover letter/writing sample/shamalamadingdong revamping, which takes an extraordinarily long time, but mostly because you have to stop at regular intervals and make a whole bunch of phone calls to people so that they’ll remind you that you are not, in fact, a worthless, two-bit human being whose only chance at a job is working as the sales receipt highlighter at the exit doors of the Wal-Mart.  Also, they can remind you not to do that thing where you use big long run-on sentences while you’re writing.

I’m ramping up my job search, meaning that I am going to try to apply to more than just one job a week, and the timing of this ramping up is awesome, because I’m also now home with Rosie four out of the five days of the week. (That was sarcasm. Maybe I should write my sarcastic sentences in red, so that’s clear from now on? Except then I might have to put a disclaimer on the header of this site: WARNING – HEAVY SARCASM. MAY CAUSE EYE DAMAGE.) L and I took a hard look at our budget last week and realized that even sending Rosie to a babysitter just three mornings a week was out of our price range (truthfully, sending her to a babysitter one morning of the week is also out of our price range, but she needs the interaction with other kids, and I need to keep myself from going completely loco in the cabeza.)  It’s like a bad case of the Catch-22s around here. I need to be child-free for a few mornings a week to look for a job so we can make more money, but we don’t make enough money to pay for me to be child-free for a few mornings a week to look for a job so we can make more money..etc. etc., nausea, heartburn, indigestion, upset stomach, head explosion.

Right at this very moment I feel optimistic though, and that is entirely due to the fact that I just submitted an application about two hours ago for a job I could really get excited about having, so I’m still in the hopeful stage of the unemployment emotional rollercoaster.  The world is my oyster! Possibilities abound! Tally ho and Geronimo and other exclamatory wordage!  Yes, I think I’ll coast on this feeling until at least dinner time.