Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Pay Attention to ME!

I've never been the most extroverted person. I don't stop and talk to random people on the street. I don't like pesky sales people. I regularly avoid the greeters at church (Not that they're not great people or they're not doing a great service for the church. I just don't want to talk to them).

Ever since I've had a baby, though, I've been forced get comfortable with these sorts of interactions. Given the fact that my child is the cutest ever (just my opinion), people regularly stop and talk to her, or me. This happens so often that one day at the zoo, so many people were looking at her in the stroller that my mom thought something was wrong with her. I told her it's pretty normal.

I didn't realize the effect this was having on me until one day when I had the chance to go to Aldi by myself. Grocery shopping without baby is pretty exciting--I'm extremely efficient, not having to constantly try to keep the baby quiet or stop her from pulling tampons out of my purse.

So there I was at Aldi, enjoying my time alone, and I had this strange feeling. Something just wasn't right. I wasn't as happy as I thought I should be during my solo shopping trip. Then it hit me: No one is paying attention to me! I'm walking around, trying to make eye contact and smiling at people, but they're not even looking at me. It's like I'm invisible.I guess I'm just a big nobody without my child!

This revelation left me a little disgusted with myself--I'm dependent on the attention my child gets! I'm such a loser. I never imagined that I'd be looking for regular interaction with strangers. I used to be so confident and happy to keep to myself. Now I'm just plain needy. I guess it's true that having a baby will change you in many ways. But I'm still going to avoid the greeters at church.

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Lyrics By YouTube

So I decided it was time to introduce Eliza to the wonderful world of Annie, and, being too lazy to actually put the movie in, I just looked up some of the songs on YouTube.

While we were enjoying them, I started poking around and discovered a way to make the video infinitely more entertaining. It's called "Interactive Transcript" and you should check for it any time you ever watch a YouTube video. Unfortunately, it's not available on many of them. Here's a sampling of it's goodness (click on the picture to make it bigger):


Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Superfly!

Remember how I said we were infested by flies? And remember how I thought they were disabled? Well, it seems I grossly underestimated them.

It all started when my lovely Aunt Nancy bought me an over-sized fly swatter. She'd read my blog post and my pathetic cry for help regarding our lack of fly swatter. She came through with the most gigantic fly swatter I've ever seen. It's like 3 feet long. And it's pretty awesome.

So today, I was lounging on the couch and low and behold, a fly landed on my foot. Luckily, my new three foot long fly swatter was right next to me. So I grabbed it and whacked the fly, and I didn't even have to move. On account of the three foot long fly swatter. I whacked the fly once and he bounced off my foot and onto the couch. But he was still moving. So I whacked him again. Still moving. Whack! Whack! How many whacks was it going to take? He may have been slipping through the giant holes in the giant fly swatter.

Finally, he seemed to be dead. So I took a picture of him with the gigantic fly swatter.



I decided to leave him there on the floor so that Scott could see it when he got home. A few hours later, I happened to walk by and notice that the fly was now standing up right and had moved a few inches. He wasn't dead!! He was just sitting there, moving his legs slightly, probably slowly dying in agony.

Another few hours later, I came by and he'd managed to move himself off of the fly swatter and onto the floor next to it where he lay on his back, finally accepting his defeat.


So it turns out these flies I believed to be disabled were actually super flies. In all honesty, Scott told me this after his run in with them the other night, but I didn't believe him. They fly so stinkin' slow! There's still one flying around out there, but he's wisely laying low. Perhaps he's witnessed the horror of the past few days. And no doubt he's spotted the giant fly swatter, a literally massive deterrent for any pests who dare to show their faces.

I took a picture of the giant fly swatter with my foot so you could see how huge it is.


Friday, June 15, 2012

Lord of the Flies

We have an infestation. A fly infestation. Somehow (when I say "somehow," I mean, "because I left the door open all day and there are holes in our screen"), a bunch of flies got into our house yesterday. I noticed them around lunch time, just sitting on our screen door. I didn't do anything about it. I figured I'd wait and see how it all played out.

Later on I shut the door and they were inside. Flying around. I thought they were flying rather slowly. I think they may have a disease or are disabled. Scott thought they were normal. We'll disagree about this till the day we die.

Anyway, Scott and I have very different approaches to how we deal with bugs in our house. If the bug is harmless and uncreepy, I'm fairly passive. If they're not bothering me too much, I figure we can all live in harmony. If they're creepy, then I run away and have Scott take care of it.

Scott, on the other hand, makes it his life's work to kill every single bug he sees--harmless or not. I think it's really just a game to him. When I was a kid, we had a Super Nintendo. The only game my mother would buy me was this Mario Paint game that wasn't even actually a game, just a bunch of "activities" of an artistic nature. It came with this mouse and the closest thing it had to a game was this fly swatter exercise to help you get used to the mouse. I imagine that this is what it's like for Scott killing flies. Ironically, we do not own a fly swatter.

Back to my story. Scott came home and we went about our business, ate dinner, watched LOST obsessively on Netflix. All the while, Scott was planning his attack.

Finally, while I was putting the baby down for bed, he had his chance. Free reign over the house. Total destruction for the flies. After a few minutes of rocking the baby, I hear a whack. Then another one. Soon they become more frequent and more intense. I knew what was going on out there. Those poor flies. They'd been living in our house in peace all day, assuming they were in the clear. After all, if they were going to be killed, it would have happened right away.

When I came out of the baby's room, Scott presented me with his killings. 8 dead flies. It was like when your cat is all proud to bring you a dead mouse. I congratulated him and he told me there were still a couple more, but this was the best he could do with the piece of junk mail he was using to kill them.

We went to bed in peace, knowing we wouldn't be attacked by a band of disabled flies. But now what's Scott going to do with his free time? I may just have to leave the door open again today.