Cure JM -- Vote TODAY

Today is the last day to help earn $250,000 for the Cure JM fund from the Pepsi Refresh Everything campaign.

Vote here -- it's quick, easy, and will likely be the best thing you do all day.

You can also:

(1) Send a text vote: Text 100850 to PEPSI (73774) (standard text messaging rate apply)
(2) Use the Facebook app: http://bit.ly/CureJMonFB

To learn more about this disease and one family's personal account, visit Kevin.

Tell him I say hi.

Yet Another Reason to Rethink Franzen vs Picoult

You want some real chick lit, the kind with bull's balls, the kind of stuff that women/mom's write when no one is looking, then you should read our book.

This is cut and pasted from an email I sent CarolynOnline tonight answering hers that asked, "What are you doing?":

"Deadline for feature pushed twelve hours UP. Awesome? No. It.is.not.

Babysat some kids today -- nanny trouble for the mom. Five kids, all good, but all day.

Too hot to weed. Weeds taking over. Cringe when I walk outside.

PTO prez meeting lasted 2 hours when it could have taken 15 minutes.

Lonely for adult conversation much?

Can not seem to keep house organized, clean, with food in it.

Have not showered. Will not tell you how long.

More driving to soccer -- too far, too late in the day. Uncool to bring roadies.

Screaming match with GFYO. Banned him from everything.

Keep thinking all will be OK when school starts.

Know this is a fool's business -- to think such things: school, ok, etc.

PS: Might make this a blog post. Fucking verbatim."

Ch-ch-changes

Something strange is afoot in the House of Picket.

Rory has asked me twice (in as many days) for a hairbrush. She has been turning down the corners of a clothes catalog. She tried on a dress while on vacation and today spent a solid 8 hours with a best (girl) friend without 1) breaking a bone, or 2) requiring sutures.

I am not sure if it's the three days of rain and maybe some weird disease from all the mold that surely is growing in the petri dish of my basement, but I think the tomboy is getting more girly less tomboyish.

I got an inkling last March that things might change. One of her friends started making plans for their co-Halloween costume (it's never too early to prep for the quest for candy): he'd be the monkey and she'd be the banana. This seemed perfectly apropos until I noticed that he blushed when he talked to her, and that she kinda did when I asked her about it. Suddenly, the whole monkey/banana thing took on a life (in my head) of its own, but I get it. When I was in third grade, an anonymous suitor left cash in my desk for two months. CASH! It was usually ones but once, I found a crumpled twenty in there and the teacher stood in front of the classroom and demanded that the giver confess. He did -- but more than 10 years later at a bar during Thanksgiving break.

The thing is, as much as I knew someday someone might be um, well leaving cash for her sounds completely wrong but you know what I mean, I still feel a little sad about it. Granted I wish she wouldn't scar up her knees (as much as mine) or take as many risks (as I did, when I was her age), but I am completely down with the messy, tom-boy look (still). Granted, a child (or grownup) who leaves the house appearing less like she just rolled out of bed is a potentially good thing, but still. Still. Sigh.

I never anticipated milestones like these.

I Don't Even Know What to Call It, This Fat

Please tell me that I did not invent this unwelcome middle-aged new-to-me phenom. Please tell me that I alone have not discovered this new…

fat...this...

backassfat.

Tell me that it is known the world 'round. Tell me that in Japan "backassfat" translates as Sweet Dumpling Descended Like Bird On Buttocks, or that in Germany, they call it the Fraulein Strudel Doodle. Maybe it's poetic and cute in other countries and just.another.thing that happens to women.

I already know about our hijanes, our muffineffintops, but now? Now, I have to contend with this... this? Tell me that I alone have not invented backassfat (or maybe I should call it lowerbackfatmeetsassfat).

Don't I have enough to worry about already? Now I have to name my own fat?

I wonder sometimes if I didn't make this horrible thing happen to me. After so many years of standing both hands on hips, all mean and bossy, maybe I literally forced all the chub down into these weird lumps above my ass. Maybe I forced all the chub into lumps on either sides of my once sexy (?), baby-making (!) hips because I am a total bitch who put her hands like that. Who stood (stands?) like a broad, like that.

Maybe that's the reason.

I was on an Island last week in a I can barely type this bathing suit, yelling at ten children to surf safer, to get away from the.omigodthe.fire, and to "stop eating all the chips!"

Want to know where my two hands were? They were firmly on my hips, which is, after all, the universal sign of "I mean business" and perhaps the real reason for the backassfat.

Who knows? This might work for me. Maybe I'll just keep pushing the fat all the fucking way down until I have giant, Guinness-record-worthy gargantuan toes.

A girl can dream...

The "Where's My Friggin Calgon" Rant

We were gone, what -- a week? We're home for a few days and then outta here again.

I still have no idea when or how we're getting us and our car on a ferry with a waiting list longer than Chelsea's wedding. Or what we're eating once we get there...besides the 6 gargantuan bags of chips and the case of assorted cookies I bought at BJs today. I'm still not quite sure where the dog is gonna live while we're gone and I'm not sure what time The Kid is flying home tonight from Budapest. Or is it Frankfurt?

I don't know which of the clothes, still half hanging out of the Short Drunk People's little duffle bags, are clean or dirty. I don't know if it's a horrible thing just to jam them all back in and call us packed. I don't know why I bothered vacuuming, as we appear to be in the 36th hour of the great playdoh cake making competition. I don't know why I made dinner tonight because everyone seems more interested in eating playdoh cakes.

I do know that the GFYO is slowly driving me insane. I do know that if I didn't hold him back by the ankle, he would move in with the neighbor's, uninvited or not. I do know that Bridget has inherited my excellent singing voice, which is even better when she's got her headphones on and we get to enjoy every tenth word of some heinous Katy Perry song. I do know that I do not like sleeping (?) with three sleep-talking kids and a dog in my bed.

Because of this, I have decided that I am firing the housekeeper, the laundress, the chef, the personal assistant, the dog trainer, the travel agent, and while I'm at it, will temporarily re-assign the position of Mommy. Don't bother sending your resume: it will just get lost in the pile of mail I haven't gone through.

TAKE ME AWAY!

Requisite Yet Confessional, Thinky (!) After-Blogher Post

I need to confess something.

I wrote a very long and over-thinky (which is, by the by, bad and should not be confused with thinky, which is good) "goodbye to all this Picket stuff" post about 10 days ago. I meant every word, every labored, blubbery, i'm-outta-here, over-thinky word, but instead of just blurting it out, I did something shockingly unusual: I decided to sit on it for a while. This normally would not be a polite or well-intentioned thing for me to do, what with the crushing that could ensue, but in this case, waiting, sitting, even crushing, was one of my better ideas. And god knows, I have many, many good fucking ideas.

Anyhoo, that post is somewhere tucked away on this machine where I figure it will linger and lollygag and get lonely for me to come find it. Maybe someday I will. Maybe someday when I'm looking for something completely different it will pop up to say hello -- oh helllooooo, where have you been? And maybe I will hang out with it for a while and we'll play scrabble or boggle or charades or something. Who knows? For now, it stays hidden away and waiting.

See, I'm home from Blogher where Carolyn and I did our usual soul-searching and deeply intellectual conversation-making and about which she has written here. (You should go read it, even though she stole all the best stories and funny lines from me -- ALL.OF.THEM -- just like she stole all the drink tickets. But I digress.)

The thing is I'm glad I waited before hanging the foreclosure sign on the House of Picket, because it turns out even though the dog peed all over the carpet and the screen door rolls on its track like a square-shaped ball up a hill, it's comfy here. And you can't beat the location: it's a very, very short walk from the porch to some other houses (yo! updated blogroll and I command you to go there) with all kinds of good stuff going down by all kinds of amazing funny real tipsy truth-telling and dare I say, inspirational people.

Carolyn whispered to me on Saturday night, about one of the many we met and adored, "I wished she lived in our town." I love Carolyn but she is so bad with geography (me up here, she way down there) and yet so frickin' right (again). Doesn't matter where you live -- New England, Atlanta, Virginia, California, Maryland, Connecticut, Ohio, Canada, middle of nowhere, city, farm -- where you at? -- because here, here, it is OUR town, granted one big weird town with an inordinate amount of good looking, brilliant loudmouths, but ours nonetheless.

So, lock your garage doors, because I'm sneaking in for your beer and the boxes of bulk mac and cheese I know you store there. Someone's gotta feed these kids.