It was like a clown teapot.

I thought I would make some nice tea this afternoon. Then I noticed my teapot was making a funny noise.

Items removed from teapot:

Toy airplane propeller
Wine bottle cork
Yogurt covered raisins (7)
Hairclip
Pretzel rods (3)
Unidentified chewed up plastic thing
Crushed Oreo (approx. 2 tablespoons)

I'm not sure if my son has been putting one thing in the teapot every day for two weeks, or if he decided to cram this variety of gross things in there one magical afternoon.

Can you imagine the other magpie-like collections that are at this very moment waiting to be discovered? Tweezers and a button in the camera case! Eight pens, a washcloth, and a pickle in my shoe! The possibilities are endless.

Instead of tea, I had juice.

Parenting. Maybe I should take some sort of class.

Me: Hey Nort, what's in your mouth?

Nort: Just a battery.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Team Jacob

Yeah, I read Twilight. And New Moon. And Eclipse.

I read the first one because my sister recommended it, the second because some girls from my new neighborhood invited me to see the movie, and the third because the second one ends on kind of a cliffhanger.

I'm done now though. This isn't necessarily a bad review, because the books are certainly entertaining. But this series is messing with my emotions. There is so much teenage angst that it is making my stomach hurt. Two people so in love they can't function without the other. The searing pain of unrequited love. Choosing between two men who love you equally but offer very different futures. ENOUGH.

If I want to read more emotional disaster bullshit like this I'll dig out my diary from high school.

All the Pretty Horses

I almost gave up on this book. It's a little heavy handed with the dramatic descriptive phrasing, which always drives me crazy (hello, White Oleander).

But I'm glad I hung in there, because I ended up loving the story.

Two friends leave their home in Texas on horseback, and ride to Mexico in search of a new life. Along the way they meet some folks and have some adventures.

I was very moved by the spare writing style. There is not a lot of dialogue, and much is put into describing the landscape. Textures and sounds. The mood of the book is hard to describe, but I'll say it is kind of like an ache. There clearly won't be an ending with white doves and balloons, and I kept waiting for someone to die. It's the kind of book where you just know someone is going to die. Despite my somber description, there is something of a happy ending, and I felt it suited the story and characters well.

The book reads very masculine to me. Living off the land, using your wits to survive, working and sweating in the sun... it struck me as being the kind of thing a man would wish for. Especially a man who currently wears a suit to work and spends 50 hours a week in an office toiling under a florescent light. This book is the opposite of that.

At its heart, this is an adventure book. Love, friendship, adventure. And horses. Thumbs up.

Books. I'm going to read some.

Sooo, I used to be quite the reading fanatic. In grade school I spent approximately 70% of my time reading books under my desk and not paying attention. The other 30% I spent daydreaming and not paying attention. This is probably why today I am terrible at Trivial Pursuit.


I've fallen off the book bandwagon pretty hard lately because I'm busy. HOWEVER, I have a whole shelf of books that survived the move (as in, I didn't give them away) just waiting to be read. I have decided to force myself to at least start all of them. If they are still boring by page 50 I'm not slogging through the whole thing.



In the past I have tried to alternate between brainy books and fun books. I suffer through some long, dusty literary masterpiece (The Sound and The Fury: I thought I would go mad trying to make sense of that book. Suck it, Faulkner.) and then reward myself with a book intended for pre-teens (The Westing Game: Best Book Ever).


I'm starting with National Book Award winner All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy. We'll see. I hope it is about actual horses, because I don't do so well in cases where, say, the horse is a metaphor for something else. I'm thinking, that was a book about nice horses! Meanwhile, the NYTimes book review is all, "the horse figure acts as a stand in for her absent father and indicates that the central character has broken free from her oppressive childhood..."






Keep an eye out for my book review. Probably it will be like, "Whee! Horses!" But I might throw some big words in there just to impress everyone.

Picture dump

Sometimes I draw a picture and then get bored with the subject before I get around to writing about it. Here are those lost souls with crappy truncated explanations. Hey, not every post is going to be gold people.

We were at the playground, and Nort spied some other kid eating eating a lollipop. Of course, he asked me if he could have one, and when I said I didn't have any he threw a fit. So the original lollipop eater came up to us and said, "I have another one, he can have it if he wants." Which is incredibly generous coming from a child. I would think that the instincts of a 7 year old would scream "Keep all the lollipops for yourself!!!" Anyway, he dug a crinkly old sucker out of his sandy pocket and gave it to my son. And I let him eat it, because I am a top notch parent.This is the complete tool at Lowes who tried to sell us a washing machine and dryer. I came in armed with lots of washer/dryer research, and this guy actually announced, "Oh, you can't believe anything you read in Consumer Reports." Then practically said that I was an idiot for believing the non-bias research in Consumer Reports over the information provided by him- a 50 year old fat guy working at Lowes.

I recently developed a caffeine addiction by accident. This is what I look like when I didn't get caffeine. I feel like a dolt, but I didn't realize that iced tea had caffeine in it, and I was drinking like 700 bottles a day. Then I was awake until midnight and couldn't figure out why. It takes me a good long while to connect the dots sometimes. The happy ending is that after a weekend with a miserable headache, I don't drink caffeine any more.

I miss it.

Library, let's go under the bleachers together.

I love the library. I always have. My best friend and I used to spend forever playing on the elevator in our local library. By "forever", I mean as long as we could before the librarian yelled at us for pushing all the buttons and keeping the door open on the second floor. When I move to a new city I run out like a nerd and get a new library card right away. I love how the air smells like newsprint, that people speak in a whisper, and the dewey decimal system. If my library was a person, I would make out with it.

However, lately I am not feeling the love back.

Last week husband, son and I went on vacation. I had a fantastic time, but only managed to hold out a few days before running off to rendezvous with the local library. Like every affair, this one ended badly: I contracted a disease from the library. For real. The guy before me in the computer line had a cold, sneezed on the keyboard, and I caught it. I got sick on my vacation because I couldn't resist the lure of the library.

Also, the library in the neighboring town thinks it is too good for me. I went there this afternoon and brought my book up to the counter...

Octogenarian Librarian: This book is new.

Hanna: I know, I can't wait to read it!

Repetitive Librarian: But, it's new.

Hanna's Head: You just said that. I thought you had to get some sort of advanced degree to become a librarian.

Hanna's Mouth: Right. Yes. New.

Crazy Talk Librarian: You can't check it out.

Hanna: Oh, it's just for reading in the library?

Elitist Librarian: Only people who live in this town can read that book.

What does she think I'm going to do with the book? Burn it for heat? Color on all the pages? Has my town, a mere three miles away, been deemed so unsavory that the residents no longer have access to the Joint Free Public Library? Did I miss some sort of forced illiteracy vote? Is the plan that their town with fancy mansions and rolling green hills hoards all the knowledge while my town slides into anarchy?

Nobody tells me what I can't read, so I just shoved the book under my shirt when she turned around.

Just kidding. But I do think the library should send me some flowers to make up for its recent bad attitude.

Who needs four limbs anyway?

The previous owners of our house had a terrible aversion to yardwork. Possibly stemming from some traumatic lawn mowing accident, but more likely because they had a general distaste for anything that might make this house look like somewhere anyone would want to live. Our yard is teeming with poison ivy, and there are massive piles of branches and sticks everywhere. Like, so big that I think there are probably monsters living in them and I expect to see a pair of glowing eyes peering out at me as I walk by.

As a surprise, my husband rented a wood chipper. By surprise, I mean he told me about it like this:

Mike: Hey guess what? I rented a wood chipper and it will be here in an hour.

Hanna: ???

It arrived, my son thought it was awesome, and my husband chipped a lot of wood and probably damaged his hearing, because that thing is crazy loud. It is also crazy dangerous. People die in chipper accidents every year. I tried to find out exactly how many, but ten seconds of lazily searching the internet didn't reap any results, so let's just wildly guess around five.

Apparently, if a log gets stuck, some people try and kick it free, like a ninja. A ninja who is also a moron. Because what follows is the log becomes unstuck, and zips right into the chipper, dragging your ninja foot along with it. And two seconds later you are dead and unceremoniously sprayed all over your own yard. This, I did learn via the glorious internet, is called "morselization." Which: gross.

The washing machine repair man is upstairs right this minute.

Just in time too, as yesterday I had to wear mens socks and my bathing suit cover-up as a shirt.

First, he arrived early (yay!) then parked his car by my mailbox and sat in it smoking a cigarette and talking on the phone for twenty minutes (boo). Second, he asked if this was "Mike's house" (if he later asks if it is "Hanna's washing machine" I am going to kill him). Third, here is a little dialogue we had that does not fill me with confidence:

Hanna: Thank you so much for coming out; I sure hope you can fix the washer!

Washing Machine Man: I wish so too!

Um.

Is that his general first step when fixing things? Making a wish? Shit, if I knew that was all there was to fixing washing machines, I would have wished mine was fixed last week instead of sweating over the manual trying to figure out what "nD" stands for and following all the unhelpful steps suggested by the Samsung company.

I am now going to walk around Mike's house pointing at various appliances and making wishes. Freezer, I WISH YOU HAD ICE CREAM IN YOU! I'll let you know about my results.

I am not "expressing myself"

Our brand new washing machine, which I was already not on good terms with, broke last week. Low blow, washing machine, low blow. Now I hate it something decent, but I don't know how to retaliate. Give it the cold shoulder? Pee in its cornflakes? I'll just write nasty things about it on the internet and call it even.

The deal is: we call the manufacturer, they call some local repair company, and this local joint sends someone out to fix our hateful washer whenever they feel like it. Which may or may not be some time in the next two weeks. I don't have enough clothes to last me until then! I'm already wearing things from my drawer of clothes that do not really fit me or look nice. Today it was an american gothic style blouse (yeah, a blouse) and jeans that look amazing when I put them on and ten seconds later are baggy in the ass and knees. My last pair of normal socks are on my feet right now. In two weeks I'll be deep into the bag of completely out of style and weird clothes I meant to donate to the salvation army in 1998.

So, who wants to hang out in two weeks? I'll be wearing this cat sweater and green hot pants. Let's go somewhere public.

I am full of good ideas. This is perhaps not one of them though.

My mother is getting married this weekend. A lovely Sunday morning brunch wedding. Most of the female guests, I imagine, are going to be wearing floaty dresses in a summery pastel palate. I am going to be wearing a skanky black cocktail dress that makes me look like possibly I am the paid escort of one of the other guests.

I hardly ever wear makeup, but whenever I get a big zit I feel compelled to wear an enormous amount of eyeliner; like, amounts comparable to Alice Cooper. My hope is that people will be so distracted by my insane raccoon eyes that they won't notice my skin issues.

I am putting this same delusional concept into play for the wedding. A few days ago my son leapt onto our bed while I was sleeping, bounced across the mattress, and dove into my prone face in an enthusiastic and painful attempt to give me a hug at 5:45 a.m. I got a big hug, a toddler yelling, "Hello mommy! WAKE UP!" in my ear, and a fat lip.

So my thinking is that if I dress like a hooker on my mother's wedding day, everyone will be staring at my inappropriate clothes, and nobody will notice my swollen, purple face. Good plan, yes/yes? Just please don't let me get a zit too, because lord knows what kind of next-level distraction tactics I will have to employ in that case.

Turns out, it wasn't allergies

(this is pretty much a cut and paste from an e-mail, but I thought others might be interested...)

So, score one in the DOG column in the eternal debate: should I have a kid or get a dog? I think it is unlikely that a dog would secretly shove a peanut up his own nose in MAY necessitating multiple doctor visits in JULY to find out what the hell is going on. Yes, Nort has had a peanut living in his nose for over a month.

A PEANUT in his NOSE for a MONTH.

What kind of parent am I??? The ear nose throat doctor was super nice (and very cute in that older doctor way) but he had a rack full of what appeared to be his collection of shiny, pointy, medieval torture devices. Turns out it was his array of things-stuck-in-your-nose removal tools. I recommend you never put anything up your nose for fun, because getting it out later (say, a month later) is pretty traumatizing. Did you ever see Total Recall? Pretty much like that. Like a disgusting magic trick, he crammed an Edward Scissorhands like contraption up my son's nose and, with a flourish, came out with a peanut. He said he had already taken a googly eye out of some kid's ear earlier in the day.


Also, he gave me the peanut back! What on earth am I supposed to do with it??? Save it until he is a teenager and show it to girls he wants to date? My sister said I should bronze it and wear it around like a Tiffany bean.

Go play outside, son

One of the major reasons we decided to buy a house was because we wanted to give our son some room to run. We were living in a townhouse and the only patch of grass was about as big as a car, and the neighbor's dog always crapped in it. They only picked it up if we all happened to be outside while the dog was actually going. Otherwise, they would dash back in their house and hide, perhaps hoping that the dog poop fairy would come and clean it up for them. Eventually my husband started picking it up and re-homing it on their porch. Another neighbor bought a box of coctail umbrellas and festively placed one in each lawn crap.

Of all the homes we looked at, this one has the most land. Awesome, you say. Not so, I correct you.

The entire septic system had to be replaced. It was SUPPOSED to be done before we moved in. Naturally, they started right AFTER we moved in, around Christmas. Nothing says "welcome to your new home" more than the melodious sounds of a backhoe grinding up your front yard every day for weeks. I wanted to jump out of a window. In another lucky break for people who hate us, the ground froze, so they had to halt production until APRIL. Leaving us with a front yard that is the exact opposite of the grassy playland we had envisioned for our son:

Also, it reeks of sewer gas.

What, you are wondering about the back yard? That is where they dumped the dirt from the front yard. Great for little children. Mud as far as the eye can see, and hundreds of jagged rocks just holding their breath and waiting for a tender child to trip and land on them:

I still let him play back there.

What's happening, hot stuff?

Make a comment! For real, I don't care what it is, you can tell me about the weather in your town today, or how your paperboy always throws your New York Times into a puddle. I changed the comments filter so anyone can post, you don't need an account. At least, I think I did this. I am like an octogenarian when it comes to computer savvy.

What's up, one eye?

What's that you say? This is the laziest picture I have ever posted here? The perspective is horribly off, the doorknob is on the wrong side, the colors are lame, and the grass looks like a fungus? I respond: suck it, blog critics!

It's hard to give a good description of a house, because most houses are basically the same. There is a roof, door, some windows, and maybe a plant or two by the stoop. There are castles and shacks, but most of us in the suburbs live in some variation of the colonial theme.

HOWEVER, there is one house in this neighborhood that stands out. I hope it goes up for sale just so I can be creepy and poke through the mls pictures of the inside. The realtor would definitely have to use a flash, owing to the particular defining feature of this house: It has ONE window. For real! ONLY ONE. And this is not some huge, modern wall of glass window either, it is about the size of a porthole. Imagine how freaky that looks. Where on other houses are more windows, there is just plain old wall. It makes me feel like this house was in a horrible accident and all its windows were sewn up. It's like a cyclops. (Okay, there is one on the side also, so that makes two total. But one window per side? According to my research, which involves staring at people's homes as I drive down the street, that is grossly below average.)

Go ahead and count how many windows are in your house. If you don't have time to count, just estimate. What? It's more than one? You win!

I have been working up some theories about the occupants. They could be:

1. Running a meth lab.

2. Vampires.

That's pretty much all I've got so far.

Neighbor meeting fail

This weekend was so nice. Husband fired up the grill while son and I took a walk. We were playing near the sewer drain (not the most stellar parenting, but Nort likes to throw little rocks in it) when I see a man power walking up the street. A neighbor! An opportunity to make another connection in this community! He was wearing a University of Connecticut shirt (tucked into very high waisted blue sweatpants, so maybe this failure isn't so devastating).

I smiled and said, "Hi! Big win you guys had last night!" I am referring to the NCAA tournament. For those of you who don't know anything about college basketball, it is the tournament to determine the national championship- 64 teams enter, one team leaves. (I mean, they win. The other 63 teams just lose, they aren't killed or anything.)

Unfortunately, I mixed up UConn and UNC. UNC did have a big win, and UConn had a horrible, embarrassing, season-ending loss to Michigan State. Just the kind of thing you want to bring up in order to endear yourself to a strange UConn fan.

It is the equivalent of saying to someone, "Congratulations on your big promotion!" And they respond, "I just got fired you idiot."

He didn't call me an idiot, but he didn't hang around getting to know me either.

King of the douchebags

The man we bought this house from is a pretty big jerk. He threatened to pull out of the deal every two minutes and threatened to sue us every once and a while just to keep things spicy.

Now I find out that in addition to being an annoying jerk, he looks like a jackass. I know this because he plays an obscure sport for rich people (he is, I further learned, a club "pro" at this retarded sport) and he was recently featured in the magazine published by the national association of (let's pretend it's croquet, so I can just type that instead of being vague) croquet players. This magazine is addressed to "or current resident" so we keep getting it.

And there he is, grinning out at me from the pages of this glossy magazine like an arrogant wiener. He seems like the kind of guy who brings up his croquet prowess within the first three minutes of meeting people in order to impress them. Then he would challenge you to a friendly game, using the full croquet set he just happens to have in his car trunk, and nail your ass to the floor. I also think he's the kind of guy who would use pickup lines like, "if I wrote the alphabet, I would put U and I together." wink, wink.

In an effort to be fair, I will say that he does not actually have snaggle teeth, even though my nearly spot-on illustration above might lead you to believe otherwise. However, he does have those creepy ears.

Oh hi, my blog looks like crap

I was TRYING to give this wasteland a spring-y makeover, but instead I made it look like birthday party barf. I cannot give the matter further attention currently, as I see my son opening and closing, opening and closing, opening and closing our DVD player. (He is also announcing "OPEN!" and "CLOSED!" as he does it). Just know I don't think this is a finished product that looks awesome or anything.

The people that you meet, when you're walking down the street

My "neighborhood" is pretty much one road with like 45 houses on it. Even though we are without a doubt the youngest people on this street, I still want to meet everyone and be good neighbors. It's lonely when you move. I don't care, I'll hang out with 50 year olds and play Bunco or whatever it is that they do.

Unfortunately, it's winter and freezing cold and hard to meet people. Here is how we are doing so far:

• Neighbors to the right- came over to introduce themselves and brought brownies. Yay! This made me very happy, except they rang the bell about one minute before my son's bedtime. He kept yelling, "Brownie! Eat it!" and dashing about underfoot. They let on that the people who lived here before were rather snobby. I let on that they were repulsive housekeepers. I haven't seen them since, but I keep hoping to run into the wife again while getting the mail. Sometimes I hear the dad yelling at the two sons. He has powerful lungs.
  


• Neighbors across the street- I haven't met them, but my husband met the across the street husband while doing yard work. They had a nice conversation, and then my husband insulted him by saying, "so, how about that huge cell tower in your backyard?". We have not seen them since either.
  


• People down the road- while getting my new library card, the librarian mentioned that she lived on the same street and asked, "Did you buy the old Sullivan place?" with a tone like, "Did you buy the old Bates motel?". When I said, "Yes!", as in "Yes, and aren't I so nice and cheery and exactly the kind of person you would like to live down the street from?!" She replied, "Don't bother planting any flowers, the deer will eat them."

So, as you can see, we are fitting in just great here.

Weird blog behavior

My mouse poop entry showed up in a very odd place, below the post I wrote weeks ago. It's two down, if you like reading about that sort of thing. And I'm having trouble coming up with a reason why you wouldn't. Everyone loves rodents!

It really happens, watch out ladies.

For real. I didn't see it coming, but I am turning into my mother.

The other day I left the house in the freakiest assortment of ugly clothes you can possibly imagine. I was going out in PUBLIC to MEET someone and I just grabbed whatever outerwear happened to already be sitting around in my car and put it on. My hair was crazy, I had a giant zit, and I guess I thought "well I can hardly look any more horrible, so what will this giant puffy purple down jacket that makes me look like a man hurt?" Then, because it is winter, my ears got cold and I had to wear a hat made for my SON. It is a knit hat shaped like a pumpkin and I willingly put it on my head and wore it around for a good hour. I should note that this pumpkin hat also has a stem, leaf, and curly tendril sticking out the top. AND I WORE IT IN PUBLIC like some kind of mental patient.

My sister advised me, "You should always dress as if you are going to run into your husband's ex-girlfriend." If I had run into anyone who used to know me when I was cute and put together I probably would have pretended to be someone else. Someone such as my sister, cause we look a lot alike and who cares if people think she goes out on the town dressed like the michelin man in a child's hat?

Lucky for you, there are no photographs of this horrible ensemble. So I drew a picture to illustrate. The girl with no nose or eyebrows actually looks way nicer than I actually did.

I can't find the cord that connects my camera to my computer, so I think I may be drawing my blog pictures for a while. Try not to be impressed by the quality of this rendering. I am currently working on a picture of a drawer full of mouse poop to go along with my next post.

The people who lived here before were GROSS.

That title is not witty, but it is a FACT. We have spent weeks and weeks and weeks cleaning and everytime I get down on my hands and knees to scrub something I hate them more. I'm going to be brief because every time I think about these horrible people my blood pressure goes up.

And it's not like I'm some kind of fanatic for cleanliness either. I have very very very low standards. If there were a continuum of cleanliness I would probably fall somewhere below slovenly bachelor and above drunken fraternity brother. I don't pee on the floor, but I don't pick my socks up either.

This is foul, but it will give you an idea of how nasty these folks were: when we moved in, every drawer in the kitchen was filled with mouse poop. For real. And not like one brown spot where you're like, is that a mouse poop or a crumb of burnt toast? Piles and piles of crap. And some of it was all squashed up, like the mice kept walking around in their own feces for a while.

I hated the last owners so much right then I think I had a little stroke.

Lest anyone who comes over for dinner now feel compelled to bring their own silverwear, don't worry, I cleaned every inch and crevice of those drawers like my life depended on it. I employed a sanitizing steamer, cleaning solution that will burn the hair off your head, and steel wool. I scrubbed so hard that I stripped the finish off.

I hate them.

It's harder than I thought to draw a good picture of a drawer full of mouse crap, but I gave it my best shot.

Lord, I hate those people.