Gets to be 4 o’clock, I’m more than happy to let the kids watch PBS Kids. Am I a failure? Shouldn’t we be at the park, or library or something? We do plenty of that — orthodontist appointments, playing at the park, then walking home when it’s nearly dinnertime, running by the library or the store. Some days I just am toast and so are they.

I don’t know what the line-up is now for afternoon PBS kids’ programming, they changed the sked. It used to be something like “Arthur,” “Maya and Miguel,” “Cyberchase” and… something. “Ruff Ruffman”? They are ga-ga mad for Ruff Ruffman. I kind of like him, too. His corny jokes and all. Now it gets to be 6 o’clock, PBS Kids is over and still, no word from my kids. Being a neglectful mother, I’m thinking, good, more time for me to get dinner ready, or have another glass of wine. (Sad, really, me giving up booze re: heart issues. I like a glass of wine.)

A couple of weeks ago I popped into the office. They were in front of the TV, absorbed, and wouldn’t tell me what they were watching.

“Just sit down,” Wacky Boy says.

“What’s the show?” I ask.

“It’s the one show,” Wacky Girl says, eyes glued to the set. “With the two guys. You know.” (Irritated.)

Me: “No, I don’t know.”

“Shhh!” (both kids, in unison.)

You know which show it was? Are you guessing?

That’s right. It’s This Old House. (Which I thought was canceled, but in the 1907-2007 time warp that is My Old House, it’s still on.)

“Oh, this is the good part,” Wacky Boy murmurs. They’re demolishing a kitchen. He’s right, it is the good part. I am a sucker for a good demo, just ask my husband. (Who hissed at me at one point, “No. More. Demo’ing while I’m at work. Got it?”)

My husband walked in at this point.

“What are you guys watching?”

“Just sit down, Dad,” Wacky Boy says.

“Is it…” he starts.

Wacky Boy, gesturing madly, “No talking.”

This afternoon they were both watching PBS Kids again; Wacky Boy was home sick with a cold, which didn’t deter him much from being a maniac. The rest does him good — it means he’s not using the couches as trampolines.

“Good,” his sister tells him. “It’s Monday.”

“‘This Old House,'” he says. “Ready?”

Ready? We’ll be doing some modest landscaping in the front, more radical in the back, patio, two retaining walls, so this family can really enjoy their home, now let’s take a look at this bush out front. No, let’s not. It’s a beautiful bush — lush and green.

“They’re going to chop it down!” I say, horrified. (But not, because, you know. I’ve watched the show before. And I’ve been talking with realtors for the last week. We are now in negotiations because they want to sell our house for $12 and I think it’s worth more. I think it’s worth $15, minimum. “The market is so smooshy right now! You’ll be lucky to get $12 for it.” Argh.)

You think it looks healthy, from the outside, this bush, but the inside, look. (Obviously, it is healthy, it’s huge and verdant.) (They rip the bush apart.) All. Dead. Wood. (I think if you click on that link above you will see the bush in question.) It blocks the house! You can’t see anything out front but the bush! It must go.

“It’s not dead, it’s frickin’ healthy,” I say. “What do they know?”

Wacky Boy, satisfied, “Yep. They’re taking it down.”

Honestly, people who don’t know gardening have no busy selling houses or doing big exterior remodeling jobs. I spit on them.

We started packing up our house and paring down after Hurricane Katrina. Because you just never know when a hurricane is going to tear through, even in placid Portland, Ore.

Naw, it was because my girlfriend R, an old friend of my sister’s and mine, lost her house in New Orleans and almost everything in it. She, her husband and her kids were okay, and sometimes, that’s enough. But they lost all their stuff, see? No stuff! So I packed up roughly half of my house and sent it to them. I had too much stuff, anyway.

R’s sister, C, wrote Diary from Louisiana entries about their experiences for my blog, so their friends would have a place to find them and know what was going on in their world. You’ll find the posts here, here, here, here, here, here, here and also here.

Me at the post office, mailing another three boxes: “You got a rate for ‘We’re in Deep Shit, Louisiana, please help’?”
Post office guy: “Nope. I wish we did.”
Me: “Gimme book rate.”

I mailed them towels, dishes, toys, toothpaste, toiletries, videos, books, sheets. Basically anything that would fit into a box, didn’t weigh too much, and that I could tape shut and not have the box break open. My sister and our friends mailed them some stuff, too, and some people kicked in a little money.

That is what you call “love in a box,” my friend.

They shared it all out, then they sent us a King Cake for Mardi Gras, and a thank you note. A thank you note! This undid me. I love Southern girls. They are thoughtful, even in the time of a crisis. I have not heard from them in awhile and I miss them. They are nice girls, you’d like them.

So what I’m saying is, how can I have so much junk to pack? We are anti-junk here. We’re not compulsive shoppers, we share the love, we don’t have any excessive habits. I am a little intimidated by how much we have to pack — dishes, towels, plastic dohickeys, toys, clothes, books…

Hockey God, on packing: “I’m not opposed to throwing it all in boxes and just taking it to the new place. I’ve done it before.”

That was just what I needed to hear. So if I’m not blogging much? It’s cuz I’m packing.

Do you want to talk about ugly dropped ceilings? Soffits? My overgrown garden and yard? How to fix up a house and sell it? How to make an offer on a new house, way across town, even when you haven’t sold the old house yet? Oh, let’s talk about that here and now. (For the rest, head over to my new post on Grasshopper, “Where You See Corn, Your Realtor Will See Weeds.”)

We put a contingent offer on a house today. A big house, a fancy house that is way across town where I have never lived before. It has woods and greenspaces nearby, and is 10 minutes from my husband’s work.

Ten minutes. It takes him an hour and a half sometimes to get home now. (Usually it’s a mere 45 minutes.) (I count the minutes.) (The kids count the minutes, and fall apart.) (Usually because I’m attempting to make dinner and be a good little homemaker, to make his commute worth his while.) (I should make him martinis, don’t you agree?)

Ten minutes away? We could have nooners.

That is, f we weren’t too busy unpacking all 847 boxes of our junk.

We could have a nooner right now (it’s 2:10 p.m., but whatever) if we weren’t shell-shocked by the four-page list our realtor laid on us of everything we need to do. It includes, but is certainly not limited to:

* Ripping out the carpet in our room, Wacky Boy’s room, the stairs and the hallway.
* Cleaning. “Sparkly clean! Really, really sparkly clean!” (Will ponder this.)
* Clean up garden, tear down cornstalks, prune, weed, edge.
* Put up “light, airy” curtains and valances.
* Relocate the neighbor and her appliances which she is fond of leaving in her driveway.
* Relocate the cats because They Stink.
* “Sparkly clean!” This means you, windows.
* Re-do grout on sinks and shower.
* Buy a new doormat.
* Buy a new door.
* Install the new door. (Hockey God hates hanging doors. Hockey God just checked with the neighbor, who is a whiz at installing doors. Neighbor will install door.)

Gotta motor, more later…

Love,

Miss Sparkly Clean

* Planet Nomad is BACK and enjoying her new house.

* We’re next.

* I am getting excited about moving, but not so excited about weeding the yard and cleaning.

* When people say, “You need to put a little elbow grease into it,” do you think, “Perdon?” I do.

* I mean, “elbow grease”? What the heck?

* I’m taking the kids to my mom’s for the day, they are ecstatic. So is she. Move across town means longer drive to Grandma’s. My mom lives 20 minutes away right now, we’re pretty spoiled. She and my sister came over for dinner last night — we had Thai take-out so we could keep packing and working on projects. It will be a big change living across town from them — we’ve always lived nearby each other, with a few short exceptions here and there. My sister, “We’ll drive over, don’t worry.” (Yeah, cuz I’ll be holding her niece and nephew hostage, heh heh.)

* Webkins is fun for hours and hours and hours if you are a 5 or 8 year old.

1. I can’t bear being seen naked. I’m not exactly a tiny woman. When Sophia Loren is naked, this is a lot of nakedness.

2. I still like me, inside and out. Not in a vain way— I just feel good in my skin.

3. It is very important for an actor or actress to look around at everything and everyone and never forget about real life.

4. I’ve never tried to block out the memories of the past, even though some are painful. I don’t understand people who hide from their past. Everything you live through helps to make you the person you are now.

5. I am against all war.

6. When I was a child, fear was common to my life— fear of having nothing to eat, fear of the other children taunting me at school because I was illegitimate, and particularly fear of the big bombers appearing overhead and dropping their lethal bursts from the sky.

7. To prepare for the part I opened the sluices of my memory, letting the bombing raids, the nights in the tunnel, the killings, the rapes and starvation and inhumanity wash back over me. I particularly concentrated on my mother as I remembered her during the war, her fears, connivances and sacrifices, and especially the way she fiercely protected us against the scourges of the war. (On her role in “Two Women”)

8. I was blessed with a sense of my own destiny. I have never sold myself short. I have never judged myself by other people’s standards. I have always expected a great deal of myself, and if I fail, I fail myself.

9. You have to be born a sex symbol. You don’t become one. If you’re born with it, you’ll have it even when you’re 100 years old.

10. For me, it is good to be vulnerable. It makes me nice… weak sometimes, but in a good way, not a tragic way.

11. Everything you see I owe to spaghetti.

12. Beauty is how you feel inside, and it reflects in your eyes. It is not something physical.

13. After all these years, I am still involved in the process of self-discovery. It’s better to explore life and make mistakes than to play it safe. Mistakes are part of the dues one pays for a full life.

(and two bonus quotes:)

* If you haven’t cried, your eyes can’t be beautiful.

* When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child.

(Do you love the Thursday Thirteen? I do.)

Honest to pete, I need to stop reading Hockey God’s blog. You know Hockey God, aka Steve? My husband? Yeah, everyone is weighing in on his blog re: should the Wacky Family move or not?

You don’t see them over here packing. You don’t see them kicking pitbulls for me.

My response?

Dear NoPo Parent,

First of all, re: “But we can’t get going when the going gets tough.”

Yes, we can. See ya. And see this.

You’re not married to me (and for that, you should thank God, because really? I’m a handful) but Hockey God is married to me, and this conversation should we stay/or should we go now? has come up about 50 times since we got together 10 years ago. This is nothing new for us, talking about leaving.

Which you don’t know because you and I are not married, see? So you don’t get to weigh in here.

Portland-metro area is and has always been fifth choice for me, or sixth, after San Diego (family, great weather, Mexico close by); Lisbon, Portugal (where my husband and I fell in love); Oh, Canada (on the prairie, or East coast, hockey); Iowa (family, Amish country, boating on the lake); and Manhattan (always, always my first choice, but not my husband’s).

Has a pitbull tried to eat you lately? I’ve had it with that shit. At what point did I say, “I’m done”? Last Thursday, when a pitbull tried to nibble on me. Try saying something to me like, “Sheesh, sorry — that must have been a drag” or “I’m glad you’re OK,” or something, would you? instead of rambling about restaurants and “wrestling with questions” and yadda-yadda-blip.

I love my neighbor (not the Nekkid One, although I do love her, or the Nasty One, who I do not love at all, but another one who lives nearby). But when she showed up on my front porch last year, with a pitbull attached to her leg, I wasn’t that fucking pleased. So when I say, I love most of my neighbors and will miss them… Yes, I will. But I won’t miss the other shit. I won’t miss calling my sister and saying, “Library/community center/neighborhood is in lockdown, I can’t stop by.” My sister lives nearby and there have been numerous times we haven’t been able to navigate the twenty-odd blocks between us because the police? They’re either over in her neighborhood or they’re here in mine. And usually someone has ended up dead, or close to dead.

We are divided and at each other’s throats here, and that is the last thing I wanted. I thought we were past all that. See: Chavez Blvd. We are so not past that.

This is my life. This is my reality, not yours. Mine.

I didn’t care for it much, the evening we couldn’t come home because of the sharpshooters on the corners. I don’t like the SWAT teams circling. I don’t like the way the kids get scared when the cops are searching house-to-house. I don’t like when a Hispanic family’s house gets raided and then INS or the FBI is all, oh, sorry! Wrong family!

I don’t like how I’ve taken to yelling, “Move, bitch!” at male drivers. I don’t like that a homeless man was shot to death right down the street. (Edited to say: And worse, that no one seemed to care.)

I don’t like my nearby neighborhood schools being in fucking lock-down every time there is an “incident.” I don’t like it that Jefferson High School is in perpetual lockdown, just because PPS said so.

I don’t like that the Nekkid Neighbor asked us to walk to the library and later, I was glad that we didn’t go because a man was shot to death on the corner. Five minutes before my neighbor walked by.

I was glad she had called me, because all I could think was, maybe that was her five minutes that made the difference. What if she and her baby had been right there, right then? What if my babies and I had been with them? Would the outcome have changed? Would it have been more than one person dead? How can I know?

She was so shook up, all she could say was, “I saw his feet.” They were sticking out from under the police blanket.

My kids are going to be at home and in public schools here for about ten more minutes and then they’ll be off to college. So please you will not try to run our show. Go get your own blog and go off on there, would you? You have plenty to blog about, it sounds like.

And last of all, I don’t like the nickname “NoPo,” cuz the word po’ is colloquial for “poor.” Were you aware of that? NoPo to me has always sounded like, “No mo’ po’ people around here, boss, just us chickens.” It’s not North Portland that I’m leaving, or Northeast, where I’ve lived my entire life.

It’s NoPo.

I do read other people’s blogs occasionally. When I’m not freaking out because we’re selling the house and moving. Now. Not next spring, not next year, not when the kids are in middle school — now. While it’s freshly painted and the fall colors in the yard are spectacular and before we change our minds again.

Now.

Ready, steady, go.

Here are a handful of blogs I’ve been visiting lately, or for awhile:

Breed ’em and Weep (Don’t I know it, sister.)

Busy Mom Reviews (I love her regular blog, too, but I like seeing what’s new with products, books and movies)

Frederick Foodie (I love foodtalk.)

J’s Thoughts and Musings (Kitten pictures! And because she seems like the kind of girl I’d like to invite over for coffee. If we didn’t live across the country from each other.)

Mimi Smartypants (because she is)

The Pioneer Woman Cooks! (Girl likes to cook!)

Rose DesRochers — World Outside My Window (I like Rose. And I knew nothing about Hello Kitty vibrators before I met her)

Vixen’s Den (Because she helps everyone through the rough spots. And posts great pix.)

Go say hi!

Because when you’re planning a move to the suburbs, don’t you just think, “trifle” and “rosettes”?

Lemon/Blueberry Trifle

1 frozen prepared pound cake (16 ounces)
2 lemons
1 1/2 cups milk
1 container (8 ounces) sour cream
1 container (8 ounces) whipped topping
2 packages (3.4 ounces each) lemon instant pudding and pie filling
1 pint blueberries
1 square (1 ounce) white chocolate for baking.

1) Cut pound cake into 1 inch cubes; place in a large bowl. Zest one lemon; set aside. Juice same lemon. Sprinkle lemon juice over pound cake cubes; toss gently.

2) Combine milk, sour cream, half of the whipped topping and reserved lemon zest; whisk until smooth. Add pudding mix/whisk until mixture begins to thicken.

3) Set aside 10 blueberries for garnish. To assemble trifle, place 1/3 of cake cubes in bottom of trifle bowl. Top with 1/3 pudding mix, 1/4 grated white chocolate over blueberries. Top with 1/2 of the pudding mixture, spreading evenly. Repeat layers two more times. Reserve remaining chocolate for garnish.

4) If you have an Easy Accent Decorator; fill with the remaining whipped topping. Pipe 10 rosettes around edge of serving bowl. Slice remaining lemon into five, 1/4 inch slices. Cut each slice in half and place between rosettes. Place one reserved blueberry on each rosette. Grate remaining white chocolate in center. Refrigerate at least 30 minutes before serving.

**Note, If you don’t have the tools mentioned, smooth out the top layer of Cool Whip. Place the lemon slices in intervals as mentioned above and put a blueberry in between the lemon slices. Then put the grated white chocolate in the center.

We’re making an offer on a house in the suburbs. What do you think of that, world wide web? It’s Agrestic. No gates, but lots of little boxes, on the hillside, little boxes, made of ticky-tacky… (more…)

Reviewed today:

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