hi again

I'm posting! Two days in a row! Because I am nothing if not inconsistent in the attention to which I pay this blog!

So Cal and I made the cookies, and I'm not going to tell you that they all turned out great, because while 23 of them turned out in decent enough shape to send to school, 15 of them (the ones on the pan closest to the bottom rack of the oven) turned out like this:





OK looking on one side, horror charred cinder on the other. Just like the Phantom of the Opera.

They still tasted OK though, so while I sent the 23 aesthetic ones to school in a box (luckily there are 22 kids in Cal's class), I couldn't quite bring myself to throw out the burned-on-the-bottom ones, because hey, don't waste food. So overall, carbonization aside, I would classify the cookie-making as a marginal success of family activity cum math lesson. If I have a pan with three rows of five how many cookies do I have and how many more do I need to make to make sure everyone in your class gets one cookie, etcetera. Not that I have to trick Cal into learning math (he actually has a wonkish devotion to all things mathematical and clamors for us to get him math workbooks, which I find alternately weird and satisfying) but it's always nice to have real life applicability.

Oh, one more thing from inside Target. Who else thinks that Blue Bell needs to update the packaging on their individually-wrapped ice cream products line?





The second one in particular is horrifying. Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? She ate too many ice cream sandwiches, that's what. And now LOOK AT HER.

And now, for no other reason than because she looks cute, a picture of Cooper.




Periodically I am obligated to show some sort of photographic evidence to my mother in law that we are not KILLING THE DOG as she so heartily insists. Look, it's not that we don't care about the dog, it's just when you have two kids, the dog is not your third kid, the dog is a dog. I know several people who have dogs-as-children who are about to have human children soon, and I keep trying to warn them that look, I know you love your dog, but be prepared, Rover/Spot/Cujo is in for a major downgrade in status. On one hand, it's kind of pathetic for the dog. But on the other hand, I don't give my children squeaky tennis balls to chew. So there you go.

ok, ok

I haven't updated for a while, to the point that I was starting to get performance anxiety about my next post, like after two weeks off, whatever I put up there better be good. (You can see, of course, the ultra high standards to which I have held my blog in these past few months--that is to say, I try to mostly capitalize where needed and I do not use Microsoft Paint to draw pictures of penises onto people's faces.) But then I remembered that the best way to break out of that no-writing funk was just to throw a bunch of writing up there and just apologize in advance. So!

Really I just need something to do because the chatter on the internet (in the form of the SDN forums--I find it a little embarrassing calling attention to the fact they are globally known as the Student Doctor Network as I know that a good many people who check by on the forums are actually finished with the "student" phase of their lives; I in particular only check in with it to assess when I should be freaking out about a thing and how much I should be freaking) is that the results of the Anesthesia Oral Boards are to be posted today and I need something else to do instead of ritualistically checking my e-mail every five or ten minutes. So this is good, because I am writing this blog entry on my new iPad (about which more later--I got a bluetooth keyboard to pair with it so I can actually type more than 20 words per minute) and since the iPad famously cannot multitask, I can't exit out the check my e-mail without closing this window. This is known as forced distraction.

So, the iPad! It was a present. From me. To myself. We got the next installment of my book advance recently, and though I kept telling Joe that I wasn't going to use it to get anything for myself, I would just put it in the bank and save it for bills or childcare or to send Mack to Space College (for, as you know, that is what all kids will attend in The Future--no, not Starfleet Academy, that's fictional, I'm talking about a university on the moon), I found after looking deep within my soul that actually, I really, really did want an iPad. And also, Joe just started his attending job at [Big Academic Hospital] in town, which means that we are actually a two income family now with a little more to save, so what the hell am I, Hamlet? I got the fucking iPad. And it is awesome.

The best, best thing that I love about the iPad is the fact that I can download Kindle books onto it, and I can already tell that this is going to change my freaking life. Back when the iPad was just a glimmer in Steve Job's eye, I was seriously considering getting a Kindle, though I ultimately didn't because I was trying to save my pennies. But the iPad is like a bright, color Kindle on which you can surf the internet, listen to podcasts, and play Plants vs. Zombies. If you got a boner just now, I'm pretty sure that you would like the iPad. And now I'm going to stop because who isn't already sick of hearing about this thing?


* * *


So I went to Target the other day to get some cookie mix, because Cal's class is having a "summer birthday party" celebration for all the kids who, by disadvantage of conception, celebrate their birthdays during summer vacation. Cal's birthday is July 22nd, so I'm going to send him in with some cookies for the party, because I want to pretend like I'm a real mom or something. I know that making cookies from a dry mix is not very impressive, but we're going to put M&Ms in them so who's going to tell me that's not totally fucking creative? YOU?

Anyway, so I was walking to the checkout line when I heard some lady talking what sounded very much like Cantonese, except the words didn't make any sense. For those of you who don't speak Cantonese, the sound of the language is very characteristic because it has a lot of tones and a lot of wide, flat vowel-type sounds (there was actually a great "Radiolab" episode about such so-called "tone-languages,"--but I digress), and I was looking around for the other Chinese lady when I realized that the sounds were actually being emitted by the lady at cash register, who was, in fact, a youngish African-American lady. She very pleasantly then turned to me and waved me over. "I can take you at this register." So I pushed my cart into her line and paid for my cookie mix.

"I'm sorry," she said, "I didn't see you." I told her that was OK, thinking she was still talking about ringing up my items. But then she went on. "My friend over there," she gestured to the other cashier one line over, a younger guy, "always says that I look Chinese, because my eyes are slanty." She used her fingers to push up the corners of her eyes, to illustrate what exactly she meant. "So he always calls me Chinese. So we just joke around and I pretend to talk Chinese to him." She smiled at me. "So that's what that was. I didn't see you." She handed me my bag of cookie mix. "I just didn't want you to think I was disrespecting you or anything."

She seemed so nice and so utterly without guile that I just smiled at her and told her that her Chinese language impression was actually pretty good.


* * *


I'm going to go check my email again.

Edited to add: I passed! U-S-A! U-S-A!