Best inventions of all time

The car. The camera. The Internet. Pasteurization.

And Mucinex. Right now my personal savior.

Magnusism #4

Me: "Magnus! Do not lie on the baby!"
Magnus: "But Mommy, I am massaging him!"

I need to win the lottery NOW

I do. You know why? I need to adopt all the beaten and starving animals whose pictures keep getting posted on Facebook, along with appeals for someone, anyone, to take them in. I want to buy a massive farm property and hire five of the nicest, most compassionate animal experts on the planet who will nurse each and every helpless, starving creature I hand them back to life. I want to write a big-ass check to the ASPCA, even if it just pays for their commercials, so these poor dogs, kittens, chickens, gerbils, pot-bellied pigs, bats, whatever, get the hell out of their present situation and into a new and loving home with rolling hills and a view.

I think I may take a FB hiatus. As Black Dynamite said in the film Black Dynamite, "I can't look at this no more!"

It's official

So we have been living in Camarillo (the sticks) for seven months. I promised when we moved to withhold all judgements, misgivings, stereotyping and general snarkiness and try to see the city objectively. Give it a fair shake. Make peace with the chain restaurants and enjoy life with a minivan and shit.

I pretty much loathed the city the first week but I didn't tell anyone. Didn't want to violate my pledge and all. I was at my local Von's hunting for Katsu, a delish Japanese barbecue sauce, and the employee who was helping me scout the various Asian sauce bottles looked at me like I had second, protruding head. "I don't believe we carry that," he said. And then felt the need to add, "We don't have a lot of Koreans living here."

I chalked the incident up to sheer comedy and kept going. I started frequenting parks with the kiddies and striking up conversations with the other moms. They were stay-at-home, like me, but they really loved TV competition shows like The Voice and another show that Simon Cowell was on. I didn't watch those so I had nothing to contribute. Pretty quickly we started limiting our park excursions in favor of the library.

I hated, after a month, that there were so few trees in our neighborhood. If you live in Thousand Oaks or Newbury Park, you are dwarfed by beautiful trees of various colors. We have a pretty nice backyard, and I contemplated digging some of the bushes and trees up and relocating them to the sidewalk.

Then election season arrived and the rednecks came out swinging. Even our neighbors, who I suspected were conspiracy theorists or survivalists, but nice people to talk to, put up the nastiest anti-
Obama signs you have ever seen. (They also had stickers on their trucks that said NOTW, which I
think stands for Not of This World. Space aliens? Marines? What?)

I let six months go by without complaining to the mister, who was facing a demanding job as
president of his company, which is why we moved here in the first place.  He would come home looking almost beat up so I felt bad complaining about the lack of trees, culture and Asian sauces tormenting me.

But now it has been more than six months. I have found silver linings when I can and appreciated things that I could not do in Los Angeles, like pull off the road and buy fruit straight from a farm. I found a friend across the street who comes over on Fridays and we drink super-cheap red wine from
Target, because we are both non-working and have to make do on one income now. These are the bright points that fill the days and make my brain do that happy little ho-hum dance.

Because, faithful readers, I don't like living here, I will never get used to living here, and if Magnus gets accepted to the super-duper magnet school that is nestled among farm properties in nearby Santa Rosa, a very, very good, school, we will be stuck living here even longer. I shit you not when I say
that spooks the ever loving hell out of me. This town is too divided among the elite, who have mansions in the hills, and the workers who toil and pick their food. There is a middle class but there is something very hollow about it, like they are watching a tennis match between the richies and the workers, volleying back and forth. 

But I gave it six months, I did. I told the mister last night I hated living here, I missed LA way more than I anticipated, and what the hell, how will I adjust?

He just patted my hand, in that soothing style of his, and said it will be okay. You know why?
Because we have each other.

Damn him straight to heck.

A bitchy moment

I am days away from my monthly bill, so please forgive this super-catty observation/gripe.

Why does Jessica Simpson get media coverage? She has as much charm and grace as a water buffalo. She dresses like she just won the lottery and her first stop was Chicos (after hitting up In n Out.) She can barely string a sentence together and she is only slightly more attractive than Chris Farley.

Someone tell me why, why?

I lied.

Kind of.

Remember that post that said I had nothing meaningful to say about the school shooting in Connecticut? Okay. I have one more thing to say, thanks to the NRA's recent press "conference" on what can be done to combat gun violence. (In case you missed it, the organization said we should have armed guards at schools).

I think the NRA missed an opportunity. Clearly there are many places where people can take a weapon and fire it at someone who is already shooting. These include:

Movie theaters
Parks
Indoor play facilities
Swap meets
Grocery stores
Farmers markets
Target
Dry cleaners
Chuck E Cheese
Arcades
Churches, temples and other houses of worship
Theme parks
Post offices
Restaurants, including chain and ethnic establishments
Bars
Home improvement chains
Hair salons
Spas and massage parlors
Acupuncture and wellness clinics
Pet stores
DMV
Libraries
Baskin Robbins

We can't leave these places off to fend for themselves.

I am definitely leaving a bunch of organizations off the list - Facebook me if you can think of more.

Life with the babies

I should have started this documentation a long time ago, but these days I suck at creativity and planning.

Observation #1: one male baby discovering his penis: humorous. Two male babies discovering their penises (in synch): disturbing.