Regular People Party

Monday was weird because Z volunteered to marshal* for the big fiesta parade on Saturday. This means he got invited to a big fancy party and I had to go and pretend to be a regular person. This is difficult for me, it takes a lot of effort to talk to regular people about regular things and not offend anyone or make them think I belong in jail. I have compiled the following list of topics I need to avoid when talking to regular people:

1. Dead baby jokes.
2. Number of pets I have or what I feed them.
3. Things I do on vacation.
4. Deep personal desires to commit crimes.
5. Stupid baby-naming conventions.
6. Pitbulls.
7. Operant conditioning.
8. My dog.
9. My wedding.
10. My grandmother.
11. Live babies.
12. Bizarre health problems.
13. Television.
14. Baby strollers.
15. ADD.
16. Weird stuff I read in the news recently.
17. Anything I learned on the Awful Forums.
18. Details about hair dye.
19. My ever-increasing dependency on my phone.
20. My musical preferences.
21. Any casual references to Hitler.
22. Zombies.
23. My internet friends.
24. Rube Goldberg.

Before meeting Z at the party, I had to shower and get dressed. This would have taken a lot less time if I had remembered to put the shower back together. Our showerhead has become a ridiculously complicated beast with a water filter and also a dog-washing attachment in between the wall and the part where the water is supposed to come out. I say 'supposed to' because I couldn't actually get it to stop leaking everywhere. After applying an untold amount of plumbers putty, I gave up and just bathed with water spraying all over the bathroom.

Then I had to find something to wear. Sometime in the last two years I accidentally got rid of all my nice clothes. We were really short on closet space so I decided to get rid of the stuff I hardly ever wear. Apparently I don't dress up very often, because I pretty much eliminated anything that wasn't a tshirt or a lacy tanktop.

I can't actually remember how I originally planned on ending this blog, so here's a picture of a brontosaurus.

*Spelling tip: marshal has one L, the name Marshall has two. These two things are not the same.

Cosmic metabolic karma

I used to be one of those people that could eat anything and never gain a pound.

It pissed people off.

Then one day I developed appendicitis.

After they removed all my abdominal organs and then put them back again, things never quite worked right. I have something called gastroparesis, which basically means my digestive system no longer gives a fuck. It digests what it wants, when it wants. I now have the metabolism of a python.

I found this out about a month after I got out of the hospital. I was having really horrendous reflux, so I went to a specialist for an endoscopy, which involved shoving a camera down my throat while I was not properly sedated.

I had a bezoar, which in nonmedical terms is a magical stone found in the third stomach of a Syrian goat.

Instead I'm not supposed to eat fresh fruit or vegetables. Also, I drink soda sometimes to make up the calories I miss from not eating. It's the stupidest doctor-approved diet ever, and makes me look like I have the pallet of a 6 year old when I'm trying to look like a responsible adult.

Group Home

The house next door is a group home for severely mentally disabled teenagers.

They basically scream and make random incoherent noises all day.

I don't really mind this. Whenever I'm in our yard yelling weird stuff, I can pretend all the other neighbors assume it's one of the group home kids. They're not really that coherent, but I can hope.

TDI fanboy.

My husband drives a Volkswagen Golf TDI. The D stands for diesel. Probably.

He's pretty passionate about it. He gets all excited when he sees another TDI.

Yet for some reason nobody else seems to get it.

BFF.

My best friend is basically a slug.

Who lives in my house.

Actually, she's probably more like a sloth.

The only that wakes her up is a deadline.

Or a D&D game.

But we seem to be sharing a brain, so it all works out.

I have yet to meet anyone that has a friendship quite like ours.

Baby.

My older sister has wanted a baby of her own since, well, I was born. She was 16 months old at the time. I don’t like babies.

Then she got pregnant. I made an exception.

I started imagining all the fun I would have being a part of my little niece’s or nephew’s life, watching the baby hit milestones and speculating on what kind of genius it would grow up to be.

And then the baby was born.

My mother was the happiest grandma ever.

They called it a “high needs” baby. This is a secret code for “screams all the time, but it’s not colicky, it’s just pissed”.

This was complicated by the fact that I worked at the same small private school as my mother. Sis also worked there pre-baby. Thus I was routinely asked about the baby within close proximity to my mother.

When she got pregnant, I had my sister sign me up for a weekly email newletter from Babycenter.com, with pregnancy progress information. This ensured that I always had something to talk about with her, even if it was only “had an Braxton-Hicks contractions lately?”. The newsletter turned into a baby-development newsletter, with brain-development games to play, and potential problems and upcoming milestones. The baby kept missing major ones, like clapping and pointing, and waving, and babbling, and imitating other people. I saw her at least once a week, and she was screaming 90% of the time.

She’s a year old now, and she doesn’t scream all the time anymore. I don’t work at the school anymore, and Sis and her husband and the kid moved in with my parents, combining forces to form the This Baby is Perfectly Normal team. The baby doesn’t walk or talk yet.

I was hoping for a gifted, highly-interactive kid to play with. This baby continues to develop at any-slower-and-she’d-actually-be-retarded pace. It doesn’t help that my friend’s baby that is exactly a week younger is doing this right now:

I'm still waiting for my sister's kid to turn into an interactive person that I can do things with. It's been a long wait.

I made my tablet work!

Turns out I had to download the drivers and now it totally works. Except the screen on this computer is really wide and all the menus I want are off the edge of the tablet.

So I drew a picture like the first one, but with the tablet. It turns out I'm not so good at drawing with the tablet either. Then I drew a background with some trees and some grass. Then I decided the trees should be on fire.

I found my tablet but I can't get it to work yet.

I want to blog and draw pictures and explain things, but I finally found my tablet and now I can't get it to work. I try drawing pictures with my trackball, but they come out like this:

I'm 87% certain I can draw better with the tablet if I can get it to work.