Stupid Bachelorette show

So, I have watched reality TV from the very beginning. Think what you will, but I find people fascinating. Why they want to be on TV in the first place when they know people like me are judging them is beyond me. Is the longing for fame that great? And fame, fine, but what reality TV show contestant has become anything more than a joke afterward? If you want fame, do something tremendous for mankind. Cure cancer or something.

So, I was sitting here tonight, watching The Bachelorette. I know the show is a sham. People don't find love on this show. One marriage out of 25 proposals does not a successful love story make. But, I watch because, like I said, people fascinate me. And the people who come on this show are train wrecks and are highly entertaining to see in action.

But tonight, I was annoyed. I don't know if it's just because Ali is the worst actress ever or they have tried too hard this season to create drama that it's beyond tedious. I'm uninterested in any of the guys, I yell at the TV so much that my cat is now afraid of me, and I am pissedoff that these fools get to travel around the world and stay in fancy hotels just because they're on this stupid show.

Oh. Well, maybe that's why they chose to be on this show. Fine whatever.

Here are my observations from tonight.

• Number of times the word "amazing" was used: 126 162

• Why do they pretend these "events" are spontaneous? I assume the cameras are with these guys a lot, but do the guys really have to feign surprise that something big is happening? Dude, 6 cameramen are there to capture all your responses at once. Let's not treat the viewers like they're idiots.

• What is with the focus on "being here for the right reasons?" What are the right reasons? Love? Ha!

• Why don't some of these guys realize how much Ali is not into them? Ty? Craig R? I'm looking in your direction. Craig, if she didn't kiss you, she's just not that into you. She has kissed everyone. Everyone else. If she's looking away each and every time you look at her, she doesn't want you to kiss her. Have a little self-respect and dial it down a notch. I get that you think you're the perfect guy for her and all, and you just might be, but get a clue. If she's not taking her clothes off for you like she is with the others, you don't stand a chance.

• Dude, Frank is going to lose his sheet. He just said that he only wants to propose once, only wants to get married once. Then... why go on an effin' show like this?! The track record for happily ever after on this show isn't so great. Also? You can't freak out every time she's with another guy. It's the nature of the show. You knew that going in. Get a grip.

But, even though I'm annoyed, the scenes from the next couple episodes look pretty interesting (I'm sure, in the end, they won't be). I think they did that on purpose because the last couple episodes have been so insipid, I have wanted to stab myself in the eye with a fork. At least twice.

But, I'll watch. Fine, you ABC bastards. You win.

Love thy neighbor

So, I have not had good luck with neighbors. Well, I shouldn't say that. Growing up, I had pretty good neighbors. Or at least there were kids my own age that I could play with. Although, they weren't good neighbors in that they broke into our house, stole money and ran up our phone bill while we were in California for a month. Yeeaaahh. Bad luck. In college, though, some of my best friends were first my neighbors. And, when my roommates and I rented an apartment, our upstairs and downstairs neighbors were pretty great.

So, let me rephrase. In my adult life, I haven't had luck with neighbors. My first apartment out of college was this awesome 3-story, brick-faced walk-up in a suburb of Cleveland where most young single adults lived. My sister lived within walking distance, we were close to mass transit for work and also in close proximity to the local bars. Good place. Great memories.

But neighbors? Yeah, they sucked. The woman I shared a floor with was so unfriendly. I didn't get it, either, because we both frequented the same bar down the street. Think she ever offered me a ride? No. Hmmph.

Anyway, after my husband and I married, we bought a house in the same city I had been living. My sister had also gotten married and lived, again, fairly close to us. (BTW, my sister? Always had good luck with neighbors. First house? A man who cut her grass. Second house? A nice couple who liked porch parties.) In our new house, our neighbors consisted of a couple to the left of us, who:

• cleaned out their garage (finally), and scared all the mice who had taken up permanent residence
• hung their party plates in their garage with pride
• had a dog who barked nonstop

And to the right of us, a very nice couple with two teen-aged children. He was a postman and she ran a day-care out of their house. I'm not sure what they thought of us, though. The day we moved in, my sister went over to ask for a bottle opener. Her response?

"We don't drink."

Oh. Oh. Well, she was going to love us.

When we bought our current house, I thought we'd have better luck. My brother? Has great neighbors. On one side anyway. And we all live in the same development, so I figured... WRONG.

We live in a cul-de-sac, you'd think we'd all be close. But, our immediate neighbors keep to themselves, save for a wave now and then. The people 3 doors down are great. They tell us stories about how great the cul-de-sac used to be, how they used to have parties in the circle and all that. So... we're about 12 years too late. And there are no kids around us that are our kids' ages. Sigh.

But that all changed recently. We met the neighbors behind us. And they are awesome. They meet all our requirements. They:

a) say hello
b) have younger kids
c) enjoy drinking (at 10am on a weekday now that he's on summer break)

The kids were introduced and, as time has gone by, play together every day. I love it. Their 4-year-old is, well... something else. She stands at the end of her backyard, waiting for us to come outside. When she sees the boys outside playing, she runs over and walks right into my house to ask for a snack. She's awesome.  Sometimes, at night, I can picture her face pressed up against our darkened windows, looking for us. But, that can't be real... right? Right??

Yesterday was no exception. It was my family's annual golf outing. Of course, my husband plays. And my dad, brothers and sister-in-law. (Guess who's the baby-sitter?)

So, I had 4 kids to care for, a mother to check on (she had eye surgery last week) and 3 neighbor kids, who came over to play. I admit I get just as excited to see them as my 5-year-old does. We've been waiting 3 years for neighborhood kids to play with.

There were 7 kids at my house. Their dad is really good about coming over to play with the kids, so I'm never overwhelmed. My girlfriend also came over yesterday to help me out, which was great. I can handle a million kids over the age of 2, but my niece, who's 11-months-old, is a handful. At one point, I was making sandwiches for 3 kids, feeding the baby, putting drops in my mom's eye and fixing her lunch. I find, though, that I work better in high pressure situations, so it was fine. Chaotic, but fine.

However, when we got to the party after the golf, I allowed myself a little too much wine. I figured I had a busy day while they were all off having fun, so I deserved it. That was a mistake. This morning, I wasn't feeling so great.

I wonder if I can hit up the neighbors for some Advil?

For sale: Cat

7-year-old calico in desperate need of a home. Calicos are, by nature, a birth defect, but don't let that sway you. Just because she hisses at everyone (except the 2 that feed her), bites the 2 that feed her (lovingly, of course), continuously misses the litter box, and coughs up hairballs on new carpeting, she really is a devil sweet cat.

When the children go to bed, she comes out of hiding to sleep around your neck like an expensive (and warm) fur stoll.  Not sure if this is meant to suffocate her victim or not, but, if it is, she's not very good at it, so not to worry.

Additionally, she likes to talk. She meows to tell you her food dish is empty. She meows to tell you her litter box needs cleaning. She meows to tell you there's another cat outside. She meows in her sleep (which sounds like barking and makes the children laugh). She meows to tell you it's 6:30 am. And if the meow doesn't wake you up, a friendly nip to your ear sure will.

In cases such as this, she's really telling you she likes to fly. When she bites you out of a sound sleep, she's telling you she wants to be thrown like a football towards the bathroom. When she jumps onto the counter, she's telling you she wants to be tossed into the family room. She almost always lands on her feet.

If interested, please comment below. I can duct tape her to a milk crate and ship her off today.

Opa!

So, this weekend is the Greek Heritage Festival at my church. I look forward to this festival every year. And, by the time it's over, I tell myself, if I never have another gryo, domade(h) or loukoumade(h) the rest of the year, I'll be okay. But then there's another festival the next month at the church across town and I overdose again on loukoumades. They're fried dough in honey, can you blame me?

I've been attending these festivals my entire life. When we were young, we would spend all day and night there. They had arcade games available for kids to play, so during the year (well, not with the sole purpose of the festival), I would hoard keep quarters in a bag to take with me to the festival.

Looking back, I have no idea where my parents were. Or why they weren't more concerned about where we were (which, I might add, I continue to point out to my mother when she yells at us for not watching our children every second. She denies everything.). I don't think we even gathered together for meals. We just knew to be at the car when it was over and that was good enough for everyone.

As I got older, when arcade games weren't much of a draw for me, I found other things of interest. At the flea market, where one person's trash is another's treasure, I found some darling summer plates one year. Or the jewelry counter, where my BFF and I would buy at least one new ring a year. (Interestingly enough, people would mistake my BFF for the Greek [she's Italian] and me for the non-Greek. And I've been attending this church my entire life. How do they not know me?! We've joked about this in my family for years. Everyone knows my 3 siblings, my cousins, my dog [if we ever had one], but no one remembers me. Yeah. Hilarious.)

And now that I'm, you know, old and responsible, I am asked to (read: guilted into) work the festival. I prefer to work the drive-thru. It reminds me of my days working as a gyro flipper. Plus, I work hard... and no one has to see me. Perfect. (This may be the reason no one at church knows who I am, but that's neither here nor there.)

But the dancing was, and still is, the main attraction for me. When I was 15 or so, my cousin's cousin taught me all the Greek dances she knew. She was a great teacher, too. She broke down each dance into sections and I had no trouble learning the steps as we danced around the pool table in our basement. I try each year to teach my brother the hardest dance, but I just can't do it as well as she did. I guess "Do what I do" isn't much help. Or maybe he's not as good a student as I was, yo. Yeah, that's it. Every year, my BFF would refuse to learn the steps, but insisted on dancing with me anyway. She's a good sport.

So, the festival is upon us. I will spend the next 3 days eating, drinking and, overall, being merry. And on Sunday, I will throw the last loukoumade in the garbage and say, "Never again."

Until next month.

Feeding old people is easy

About 3 weeks ago, my father-in-law called. This was the gist of the conversation:

"Hey, it's Dad. Aunt Daphne [his sister] will be in town blahblahblah. You'll have us over for dinner. Great. See ya."

I adore my FIL, so I was okay with him offering up our house for dinner. Truthfully, I enjoy having people over. And my FIL said he'd buy the food, so, really, it was going to be easy-peasy. And I didn't give it another thought.

Until this past Saturday.

Holy sheet, people are coming to our house?! Our house is not ready for company!

We've been in this house just over 3 years now. We did a lot of work on the house in the beginning. Our house was a pastel, um, pit paradise (?) when we first moved in. Every room was either pink or peach. They had carpeting in the BATHROOM. Blech. Who thinks that's sanitary?

First thing we did? Ripped up that teal-colored carpeting in our bedroom and master bath. Put in nice, normal, clean (or at least able to be cleaned easily) tile in the bathroom and a nice neutral (read: not teal) carpet in our bedroom. And, 2 years ago, we redid the basement. We've painted other rooms, including our 2-story pink foyer and peach upstairs hallway and installed new carpeting up the stairs and in our family room this past winter. So, things have been getting done. Slowly.

The problem is that, most days, I have no motivation to decorate my house. Drives my mother crazy. Most of my motivation comes from new people visiting our home. I mean, they can't possibly see our pink hallway. What will they think of us? So, the aunt and uncle visit gave me some motivation.

My mother? Ecstatic. We went shopping as soon as I mentioned decorating. It was almost as if she'd been waiting for this phone call for months. She (and about 15 decorating magazines) picked me up and off we went.

The room that gives me the most trouble is our living room. For one, we don't need one. We didn't have one in our old house, I don't need one now. But, we have this room and, currently, that room is used for... crap. It houses the extra chairs from our dining room table and our buffet. For months, we had a broken TV sitting on the floor in that room. And it's the first room people see when they walk in. I can't stand it. So, my mother and I set out to fix that, among other little things. (I ended up buying nothing and stealing borrowing things my mother isn't currently using in her home. Woohoo!)

I was feeling particularly gung ho this home improvement cycle. I was, with paint and paint brush in hand, ready to cover up scuff marks on all the walls in our family room. I wanted to paint the shelving in our downstairs bathroom. I wanted to remove the stupid extra mattresses just lying on the floor in our guest bedroom (sorry, Tim and Erin, Vidas and Tracie - the kids no longer have a bed to sleep on. I'll buy an air mattress for your next visit). I wanted to pull up carpeting and lay hardwood floors in the dining room.

Eh, 2 out of 3 3 out of 4 ain't bad.

Problem with painting the family room is what I thought was the paint for the family room was actually paint from the foyer (it said foyer on it, but I thought the foyer and family room were the same color). But then I remembered I made the foyer a shade lighter than the family room (why, I have no idea, but whatever). Or, rather, I remembered that after I painted the scuff marks. Our family room looked like a crack house painter lived here. So, my awesome husband set off for Home Depot early this morning, came home with the correct paint and I painted over the mess I made yesterday. With that done, and the stolen borrowed articles from my mother strategically placed throughout the house, we were ready for company.

So, my FIL showed up with his sister and brother-in-law. I thought we hadn't see them since our wedding, but they reminded us they were here 3 years ago, right after we moved in. Oh. They had already been here? So, why the hello was I working so hard when they had already seen our house? Damn.

Well, I suppose motivation is motivation. Strike while the iron's hot and all that. And the house does look better. So, I guess there's that.

And dinner? Consisted of this:

• 5:00: they arrived (and dropped the news they'd already been here)
• 6:15: dinner (excellent steak, potatoes, corn on the cob, salad)
• 7:45: out the door (is it an old age thing? they mentioned not being able to see past a certain time of day. if this were my family, we'd have been opening a 5th bottle of wine with no intention of leaving before 10:00)
• 8:15: dishes washed (nice thing about the grill - not a lot of dishes. this included my crystal wine glasses [which they used, so i guess they're not that old])
• 8:45: procrastinators (those would be my children. 2-year-old: "Hold on a second. Not ready yet.") in bed
• 8:50: The Bachelorette (yay! bad tv! and able to fast forward through ALL commercials!)

By the way, The Bachelorette? When Kasey sang? Had to be the funniest, the most cover-my-face-I'm-so-embarrassed-for-him thing I'd ever seen on this show. I rewound it so I could enjoy it one more time. The second time he sang? I got pissed. Dude, stop singing. And why does he keep saying "protect and guard her heart?" Is he the heart police?

Idiot.

Also? I hate The Weatherman. Oh wait, the "amber alert" comment was kinda funny.

And... did Ali just say, "Supposebly?"

The show is awesomely terrible. How many guys can they get on one show to play the guitar? This show was better when it was called Star Search. I love Chris Harrison, but he's no Ed McMahon.

And now I can go to bed, knowing The Weatherman is gone, all my dishes are cleaned and put away, and my house is a little better decorated today than it was yesterday.

Or at least the wall color matches.

Old people can come to my house for dinner any time they want.

No-No-Notorious!

So, last night, my husband and I watched the much overlooked and underhyped movie, Notorious. It's the story of the rise (and fall) of Christopher Wallace, aka Biggie Smalls, aka The Notorious B.I.G., aka the guy who became famous just for rapping to other people's already made up songs.

I'm not saying I don't like his music. Much of my college career was spent dancing and singing along to him and 2Pac, LL Cool J and Ice Cube, and many others. Can you just picture 4-5 white girls rollin' in a 1989 Mercury Topaz, rapping with the best of them? To this day, I can't help myself. When a song comes on, I have to sing. Just ask my co-worker. He was highly amused to watch a 30-something-year-old (sidenote: I bet if I watched thirtysomething nowadays, it would make sense) mother rapping in her minivan.

My roommate in college was as big a fan of hip hop and R&B as I was. We used to joke she was from the ghetto (P-Ville, holla!), whenever she'd get her ghetto fabulous self in a tizzy. Not to mention she had no money and used to live on a small barrel of pickles she'd get from her dad when she went home to visit. We went dancing every Thursday, Friday and Saturday in our tank tops, baggie jeans and kicks. It was a good great time.

So, anyway, here I was with my husband, watching this movie, and, of course, singing along. I felt like I was in my 20s again. Too bad my girls weren't here to sing along with me. I learned a lot about Biggie, too. That he had an affair with Lil' Kim? That he only knew his wife a week before they got married? This was all interesting stuff.

Or not. Really, I just wanted the music.

And then, I had a dream last night that I was part of the East Coast-West Coast feud. Although, I can't remember which side I was on. And honestly, thinking about it, I still can't decide. 2Pac had the better lyrics, but I danced more to Biggie.

Oh, if only they would've listened to Rodney King and just gotten along. That would've made for one great album.

Birthday Week... um, the rest of the week

So, the rest of Birthday Week can be summed up like this:

Purple glitter toes. Alcohol. Happy hour. Alcohol. Cookouts. Alcohol. Pool. No alcohol. Birthday cake.

Day 3 included getting a pedicure with a good friend. I love pretty much anything that involves pampering. Massages? Awesome. Facials? It's like two services in one, which is awesome x2.

Pedicures, in particular, are great because you get to sit in these massage chairs with an alcoholic beverage in one hand, magazine in the other, while soaking your feet in a whirlpool bath. I hate feet (except my own and my children's), so I don't know how those women work on other people's day in and day out, but whatever. The girl who did my friend's pedicure had these great purple toes. I'm usually a hot pink kind of girl in the summer, but I really liked her color. So, here I am with purple glitter toes.

Additionally, Day 3 reminded me I'm getting older (since, obviously, the birthday itself wasn't). I received a text from our babysitter that my 5-year-old lost his first tooth. WTF? Isn't he still getting his baby teeth? How is he old enough to lose them? I knew he had a loose tooth, but I thought it'd stay in there until he was at least 7.

What?  That's not how it works?  Oh.

A few weeks ago, my mother had brought over a tooth fairy pillow for us to use for the tooth. As soon as I saw it, I remembered putting my own teeth in there. And, um, it still had a tooth in the pocket, which was kind of gross. My mother took the tooth home with her, which is even grosser. What was she going to do with it? (I can just picture my mother furiously grasping at anything to keep us young - a strand of hair, a baby tooth... and, what? Putting it all in a scrapbook? Seriously, what was she going to do with this tooth?)

Anyway, that night, we put the tooth in the pocket of the pillow and, lucky for me... I must interrupt here -- for those who still believe in the Tooth Fairy, because he's real - he really is, but... please skip this paragraph. Thanks. -- lucky for me he didn't want to put the pillow under his pillow. I was concerned about how I was going to get at the tooth without waking him. Instead, he put the pillow on his dresser, which was so much easier for me (er, for the Tooth Fairy) to access. And what did he get for the tooth? FIVE dollars!

In my defense, a friend told me that the first tooth is special, so pay a premium for it, but have the rest at a normal price (I think I got a quarter for each of my teeth). But, then I had another friend tell me the first tooth will set the precedent and the child will expect the same for all his (24) teeth. Of course, I was told that AFTER I had already given the $5... rats. And my son told me his friend was given a wallet for his teeth. I kind of doubt that happened, but he's been asking for a wallet ever since. Maybe for tooth #24... to hold his 5x23... $115(!).

The rest of the week/end was filled with alcohol and happy hours and cookouts and time at the pool. My 2-year-old, who wouldn't go near the water last year, is now afraid of nothing. He jumped in, whether someone was there to catch him or not. He swallowed half the pool's chlorine (which is most likely what made him throw up later - it was either that or the fact he shoved an entire peanut butter and jelly sandwich into his mouth at once and then freaked because he couldn't swallow, or, uh, breathe. Um, hello?).

And birthday cake. Not sure this is known about me, but I love dessert. I'd give you my kidney for a good piece of cake. Well, it'd have to be a pretty damn good piece of cake. And we'd have to be a match and all...

Anyway, birthday week is done and over. And now I'm back to cleaning bathrooms. Good times, good times.