Now What Did I Do With That Image?

Last night I posted here about the alarming state of my house, which was all the more alarming because my mother was on her way to Chez Bird for a visit.

As I noted, I didn't actually post pictures of my own home -- wisely, I thought, since the pictures I had found on Google all seemed to have come from other people's blogs, which taught me that the "personal" photos you post on your own little corner of the blogiverse don't stay personal for very long. But the pictures I found were both highly evocative of my own house and very entertaining.

So imagine my surprise when I visited myself today only to see that the kitchen picture I'd found had disappeared and been replaced by that annoying little blue-and-white question mark.

Last night when I signed off, that photo was there. Today, it is gone. Except for the fact that it was a really FABULOUS messy kitchen picture, that's all I and my limited computer skills can tell you.

I tried to get it back, but when I tried to repost the image, it seems to have vanished. All that's left is the little thumbnail on the Google Image search results page.

So if you want to see just how bad my kitchen was (and unfortunately still is -- my mother loves me for qualities other than my housekeeping), you will just have to do a Google Image search of "messy kitchen." My personal favorite was the very first one, but I promise that many of them will be worth your while. Do it before the post-dinner cleanup, and you will probably even decide to save the dishes for another day.

Believe me -- you will not be alone.

Maybe I Should Not Post More Often

Life in disarray,
Blog abandoned for nine days.
Subscriptions? Up one.

Betsy Bird's Top Ten List of Home Improvement Principles YOU Should Know

Oh faithful readers ... how I have betrayed you! It's been seven days since my last post. It's not that I haven't been thinking of you, or itching to post. It's that between a four-day visit from my parents and an overnight trip out of town and three different kid performances to attend and a job and the small matter of a major construction project going on in my backyard, I haven't had time to look for my laptop, much less use it. Please don't feel bad. My laundry has been equally neglected.

But I'm back, and ready to aim for a post-per-day in May. Toward that end, tonight I offer some home improvement advice.

A bit of background is in order. It's a long and tragic story, with many chapters and subplots and a red herring or two. But here is a synopsis.

Long ago and far away, a builder constructed a house on the last undeveloped lot on a Southern suburban street. Neighborhood children had been happily playing on that lot for years because it was so much fun to roll down the ravine at the back of it toward the creek.

The builder sold the house to a family.

Ten years ago, that family sold the house to us. As soon as we left the closing, the family began to laugh.

Cut to five years ago. We began to notice the back corner of our kitchen was sloping.

We ignored it. By a couple of years later, we couldn't anymore. Things around our house -- or shall I say, under our house --were going downhill. Literally.

One pie-in-the-sky architect, five different contractors, one greedy underhanded overpaid engineer, an ocean full of gravel and cement, and a couple of years later, our house is stabilized. Now that that's done, we're finally replacing our deck and screen porch, so that we can look out upon the ravine into which we have poured money equal to the cost of a complete college education for one of our children.

I've learned many things on this journey. (Ever notice how everything today is a journey? American Idol, Top Chef, Project Runway, Dancing With the Stars, running for president -- apparently we've all been traveling and we didn't even know it.) Tonight I'd like to share some of them with you.

Betsy Bird's Top Ten Things Every Home Improver Should Know

10) All home improvement projects involve the modification or removal of a previous home improvement project that didn't improve anything. This is particularly true if the previous home improvement project was undertaken by the husband of the woman living in said home. Tip: Should your spouse announce plans to replace your gutters himself, immediately seek a restraining order.

9) Home improvement is actually a euphemism. The real name of what you are doing is Making One Decision After Another. I can make pie crust, curtains, and spreadsheets, but I have a lot more trouble with decisions. If you do not like to make decisions, you should learn to love the house you already have.

8) Here's a handy formula for determining the cost of the additional furniture you'll need for your improved space. For each additional 10 square foot of living space, count on spending more than you can possibly afford for the whole room.

7) Human life expectancy may increase with each passing decade, but today's appliances live on borrowed time. The dishwasher you buy to replace your 20-year-old one will develop a terminal illness before it reaches kindergarten age.

6) HGTV is not reality television. It is a fictional dramatic series written and acted by the same people who brought you imaginary friends.

5) Porta-potties can blow over in heavy winds.

4) When it comes to electric sockets, three things matter: location, location, location.

3) You know that pest control guy you've been paying to come to your house each month and spray for termites? That's all he's been doing -- spraying. You mean you wanted him to actually prevent termites? Geez ... you should have said so. That costs extra.

2) Laura Ingalls Wilder lived in a little house on the prairie. Surely we can all live in houses without granite countertops.

And my Number One suggestion about improving your home ...

Don't.

Brother, Can You Spare a Toyota?

Betsy Bird is unavailable for posting tonight and asked that I send her regrets.

She has spent the entire day trying to buy two cars and is too tired to do anything on the computer other than continue to search in vain for two safe and reliable vehicles available immediately at fire-sale prices.

Yes, two cars does sound like a lot. But less than 48 hours after the rear-ending of her son's decrepit van, which was only worth a couple of thousand at best, her husband's car expired of natural causes. The nerve! It was only 22 years old and had a mere 165,000 miles, which obviously means it was a wimpy, lily-livered thing.

Betsy will be back tomorrow, when (we should all hope) she is in a better frame of mind.

Yours sincerely,
Betsy's Keyboard

My Son, My Hero

This is not the post I was going to write.

As I mentioned in last night's post, my kids were rear-ended Saturday night by an elderly woman while Bob and I were at a Diana Krall concert. There was another car involved, but that was a whole 'nother story, which I wanted to save for tonight.

That story was about A Grownup Behaving Badly.

That bad behavior enraged me, and I was eager to vent.

But that story also involved A Grownup Behaving Kindly and Nobly. And the two grownups happen to be married.

Since the tale involved Billy, I let him read it before I posted it.

Billy told me it was my blog and I could write what I wanted. But he asked me how I would feel if I had been the Grownup Behaving Kindly/Nobly and I someday found out that the mother of the kid in the wreck had trashed the Grownup Behaving Badly on the Internet.

The answer is that I'd feel as hurt and angry as the Grownup Behaving Badly had made me feel. I'd feel like my kindness had been overlooked by someone eager to get revenge against someone I couldn't control.

I've known for several years now that Billy is sometimes more mature than I am. (Now that's a humbling experience.) He may still giggle about stuff like Hooters, but when it comes to treating people with respect, he can teach me a thing or two. Or two hundred.

So the post I was going to write has now been vaporized into the blogiverse. Trust me when I say that it was witty.

And that my son is the person I hope I'll be when I grow up.

My Blog Ate My Homework

I come to you this evening an extremely unhappy camper.

And the night had begun so auspiciously.

The kids were out, you see, and there was leftover pizza, and Bob and I had settled in for a night in front of the TV to finish the DVD of the first season of Friday Night Lights. A perfect, labor-free evening. All I had to do was finish a little post during the commercials.

And I did it. It was reasonably good. I copied and pasted it into Blogger.

Except the thing I pasted wasn't my post.

It was a very interesting thread about "match" schools that I'd copied last night from College Confidential -- I mean, very interesting if you're the mother of a high school junior. If you're anyone else, not so much.

I looked in my Blogger drafts. I looked in my Word directory. I pasted and repasted. Lots of College Confidential. None of my post about Ben explaining the finer points of students' constitutional rights to me while eating Fun Dip, which meant his teeth and face were bright blue. (Maybe you had to have been there. Which of course you never will be.)

Now it's nearly 9, and we're in the final episode of Friday Night Lights. They're driving to the state football championship game, and Coach Taylor's wife is about to tell him she's pregnant, and he's about to tell the boosters he's leaving Dillon for TMU. I really just don't have the stuff to write an entirely new post from scratch tonight.

So tune in tomorrow. If I'm lucky, sometime tonight I'll wake up and my post will be lying next to me in bed.

Or maybe it will just show up on College Confidential.

Number 19 on My List

Two days shy of my one-month blogging birthday, I’m beginning to realize that it’s awfully hard to find time to blog about being the mother of two teenage children if one is in fact the mother of two teenage children. Certain responsibilities and activities seem to push and shove their way to the top of my to-do list, leaving poor unassuming little “post blog entry” lying there neglected like a tiny box of shriveled raisins left in a plastic pumpkin once full of Halloween candy.

So I’m not making excuses. Actually, I am making excuses, but they’re good ones. In the last 72 hours, I have:

1) Attempted to bake a savarin with Ben for his French class.

2) Re-attempted to bake a savarin with Ben for his French class, after the “dough” for the first one remained liquid despite the addition of copious amounts of unauthorized flour.

3) Eaten part of a savarin that stuck to the non-stick pan.

4) Phoned 28 junior high school students, each of whom forgot to remember to sign up to rehearse for the upcoming talent show I am co-chairing over the next three weeks, and politely asked them when they’d like to practice.

5) Traveled to Wal-Mart (please God, forgive me, but I really needed to save 30 minutes by going there, even if my shopping trip tacitly supported the exploitation of some poor Chinese girl) to buy the makings for a William the Conqueror costume Ben must have for school in two weeks (you’re right -- that is before the talent show is over). Yes, he will be graded on the quality of both his design and execution. No, he does not know how to sew.

6) Responded to phone calls and e-mails from some of the 28 talent contestants who realized they couldn’t possibly rehearse when they said they could rehearse because they had a conflict they had failed to write down in their student planners.

7) Found the perfect college for Billy.

8) Looked at Billy’s calendar and discovered that he has committed to so many activities over the next few months that the only time he could possibly fly to perfect college for a visit this spring is March 10.

9) Perused school calendar and determined Billy has mid-term March 10.

10) Received e-mail requesting that “we” sell $400 worth of ads to help pay for musical in which Ben and Billy will appear next month.

11) Assigned the sale of part of these ads to Bob.

12) Attempted to complete 30-hour work assignment in order to pay for college, perfect or imperfect, for Billy.

13) Learned how to put a link within my blog to someone else’s blog (see “Only the Lonely Notebook”).

14) In preparation for cleaning woman's visit, put away papers, boxes, bags, books, coats, and crap lying on top of our dirt, as well as clean clothes that had been sitting in laundry basket since cleaning woman's last visit two weeks ago.

15) Sat down to write blog entry approximately 90 seconds before power went out.

16) Sat in dark and cussed.

17) Upon return of electricity, switched to battery-operated laptop. Signed on to blog.

18) Put down computer to run upstairs and rebalance banging washing machine.

So here I am, ready to get down to work. The washer has finished its load; the house is clean and quiet; the distractions are all gone.

There’s just one problem.

I’m so tired I can no longer type.

Only the Lonely Notebook

It is difficult to imagine a person who is less adept at both technological matters and self-promotion than your Betsy. In a slam to feminists everywhere, I scream for my menfolk the minute I encounter a frozen computer screen or an unruly mouse. Given its reliance on computing thingies, blogging comes only slightly more naturally to me than does tap dancing. Nor am I much for begging people to read me. Yet I realize that if I remain my only reader for much longer, my time would be better spent telling my stories to myself while I fold laundry. Therefore, with this post I am stepping out of my comfort zone by participating in Works for Me Wednesday, a weekly tipfest involving both technology and Emptying Our Nest promotion sponsored by the kind hostess of Rocks in My Dryer.

Comical as it may seem, I occasionally have a stroke of organizational genius, and one of them is this: The Notebook. Every few months I grab several cheap-cheap-cheap full-size spiral notebooks at the grocery. That's where everything, and I mean everything, goes. Need some Comet and a couple of shallots? I write them on the running grocery list. Need to remember the confirmation number for our rental car
reservation? I jot it down in the same notebook. Want to drive myself insane with a list of everything I need to do for the next six months? I put it in the notebook.

The key to this is to USE ONLY ONE NOTEBOOK AT A TIME. This is based on the amazing organizational principle that it is easier to keep up with one of something than several of something. (You have perhaps noticed this when you take children to the mall.) When you fill one notebook up, start another, but keep the old one and put dates on the front of it. That way, next year when you need to remember the name of the gutter-cleaner-outer you heard about last week, and all you can remember is that you heard it around the same time you gave the cast party, and you know that was in February, you'll have a general idea where to look. If you are tidy, perhaps you could put the notebook in a special Home for Notebooks. That, however, is not the Bird way. Mine stay in the Notebook Pile, which is right next to the Newspaper Articles to be Clipped Pile on top of the desk in the kitchen. All I know is It Works for Me.