Well, not so very bespoke, but I do think the suit I’m wearing today had to be hemmed, which is moderately tailored for me, right, right?, even if it’s not quite Oswald Boateng (talk about bespoke, baby)… I don’t think Mr. Boateng has his line of maternity suiting out just yet.

My ego is in high cotton this a.m. because I am wearing a regular button-down shirt (blue, herringbone, size 6) and a gawgeous black suit with a flippy skirt (and by flippy, I do not mean the Paris Hilton-like tiny-pleated concoction that hangs about an adolescent ass, but instead, a nice skirt with a tulip-shaped bottom) and a fitted jacket from Harold’s (or Harold Powell’s, to you Okies) in a size 8.

And the skirt fit with no pantyhose.

Add to this pleasant get-up a pair of kitten-heeled slingbacks, black, with white overstitching and the pearls I got for my 16th birthday (because that’s what girls get when they turn 16, right, right?) and you have one well-heeled gal who’s proud that her bozooooms and her belly still fit into regular clothes.

We won’t mention the fact that a mere hour into my workday I had to unzip the skirt an inch. We also won’t dwell on the fact that the shirt’s untucked over my burgeoning belly. I’m just excited that I get another wearing out of a decent suit. We won’t mention the size 6 Harold’s suit whose skirt I couldn’t pull up a year ago, let alone now, and the sheath dress and matching jacket that I begrudgingly handed over to my sis for the next year or so when she visited two weeks ago.

Harold’s? What’s Harold’s? It’s a small chain store based out of Norman, Oklahoma, and it sells a lot of cute, but not-my-style, housewifey stuff (read: like Talbots, but moderately sassier) and a decent selection of snappy businessy stuff (read: like Ann Taylor, but cooler) and it has the best sales ever. For example, the suit I’m wearing today came to me via the megasale rack and was less than $150 for both pieces.

Every summer, Harold’s has a big ole sale in the Civic Center (or whatever the big empty place is that you can rent out) in Norman and my sister and I always wanted to venture across the nation for a shopping extravaganza, but we grew out of the idea after college and grad school and haven’t talked about it in a long while.

You wanted to know what I was wearing, didn’t you?

In the “what we’re wearing” department, I’m proud to report that McPantses dressed herself from top to toe this morning. I only had to adjust a sock–not because it bothers her, but because it bothers me–whose heel ended up on top of her foot rather than on the bottom. She even brushed her hair with minimal help. I fastened the barette, though. She has a tendency to plonk them down on the top center of her head and the result is strange.

Happy, happy day.

That’s according to McPantses, anyway, who informed me yesterday morning that the Old Goat is going to die today and go to Heaven to live with God.

I called my mother to give her the heads-up, in case she wanted to do any planning.

In the rare event that McP is on the money with this one, I’m going to ask her what gender the parasite child I’m gestating shall be. I’ll trust her.

In other news, I’m pleased to report that I have reached apple pie nirvana, finally, after approximately 17 years of attempts to recreate a slice of apple pie that I had in junior high at my best friend at the time’s house. Her mother made a perfect apple pie: the filling was dark caramel-y, and not too jelly-like (I have a deep loathing for jelly and jello because of the texture, but for some reason, I like homemade strawberry preserves on biscuits.).

Yesterday afternoon, I made the basic crust recipe from Mark Bitman’s cookbook*, and did my own apple concoction.

I peeled and cored six green apples (much to the dogs’ delight) even tho most apple pie experts say to use red. I’ve always used green apples. I squeezed a lemon over them and ground up the lemon guts in the disposal because I love grinding lemons and limes into oblivion–it scents the kitchen nicely. I put a good sprinkling of cinnamon and a bit of white sugar and nutmeg over the apples. I added a TON of dark brown sugar and a capful of good vanilla (use a Martha voice there) as the homemade vanilla, while darkening up nicely, won’t be ready until December or January. I added about a tablespoon of bourbon, too, and stirred the whole mess. I covered the bowl and left apples-and-co in the fridge to macerate (I love that word) and made a double crust recipe and tossed it into a ziploc and let it rest in the freezer for an hour.

I did roll the crust too thin on the bottom and the filling oozed through, but the pie, after 10 min at 400 and another 50 – 60 at 350, was perfection.

Sadly, the filling was pure liquid, but I know that I can correct that next time with a bit o’cornstarch–I’ll have to work the ratio so I use enough cornstarch to thicken, but not so much that I turn the filling to the dreaded jelly. I’m also going to do a triple recipe for the crust and divide that in two (because three sticks of butter makes it all better, yes?) so that the crusts will be thicker.

I love cooking things that will make my inlaws plotz.

*Mark Bitman’s How to Cook Everything is the best cookbook anyone can own, unless that someone is a sous chef somewhere. I give it as a wedding or shower present all the time and while I might own 50 – 100 cookbooks (enough to fill an entire bookcase, anyway), this one is my tried-and-true favorite. I’ve never had trouble with a recipe from him and there’s a recipe for every. single. thing. you could ever want to eat in there. My cookbook collection is pretty varied, so I might step out for the night with a Jr. League cookbook from somewhere neat (I collect Jr. League cookbooks–check out the Houston, TX, one–it’s the best, and it and many other Jr. League cookbooks can often be found at Steinmart, of all places, for cheapo.) or with Barbara Kafka, but I still always return to my first true love, Mr. Bitman.

Yes, it’s 3:52 in the a.m. I got up at 3:22. If McPantses’ cry of “Again, Mommy!”* at 3:15 didn’t wake me up fully, the Husband’s magic ventriloquist big-man ricochet snore that sounded like it came from the living room had my hair standing on end, so here I sit, slugging grape koolaid (klassy, no?) to settle the roiling stomach while the hungry hippo dogs pace the kitchen floor hoping for an early breakfast.

And that’s about all I have for you, so I’ll see you tomorrow.

I can’t decide if I should try the living room couch or go back to bed, where I can stare, wide-eyed, at the ceiling for a couple of hours before giving up altogether, which will be exhausting.

*McPantses’ stuffed lion hit the floor earlier this evening and it woke her up (she sleeps with an arm slung around it, even tho’ it’s almost as big as she is) and I had to go fetch it for her. I sent the lovely Husband at 3:whatever in an effort to stay asleep, but alas, here I am anyway.

1. that I felt somewhat redeemed when the Husband said to me, after church on Sunday, “you know, when you turned to me in Sunday school and said you had to throw up, your face turned green?”

2. that I feel a sly burning sense of revenge when a jackass driver who speeds around me gets caught at the same red light I do?

3. that despite the fact that she would do anything in the world to help me out, my mother drives me stark raving batty at times? Not today. Just at times.

4. that I watched a Colin Firth movie called What a Girl Wants in teary-eyed utter fascination? Can I blame that on the whoremoans?

5. that I am tempted to snag this fountain pen just because I kinda want it, but don’t really need it at all and would likely not use it all that much?

6. that I am weirdly delighted that McPantses’ school has gotten a faboo ballet class for less than any of her other outside classes that come into the school and that I can’t wait to see what she learns?

7. that I am still debating how to use my yummy amazon gift certificate?

8. that my brand-new, hardback copy of The Westing Game arrived at the sole indie bookstore in my town and I am hoping to have the chance to read the whole thing tonight?

9. that I might take my above-mentioned annoying-but-kind mother to the LYS to pick out what color of baby alpaca she wants me to use for a scarf? If I don’t let her pick, chances are good that she will hate what I pick.

10. that my child’s sole favorite person in the world outside the Husband and me (and possibly including the Husband and me) is my sister’s husband? Seriously. She likes him best.

11. that we now refer to McPantses as “The Prosecutor” (for her stunning and annoying ability to build questions upon linked questions to elicit countless amounts of information out of people) and that we think to ourselves, when she goes to bed at night, “The prosecution rests?”

12. that I have the following menu planned for myself this fine evening: steamed broccoli with a bit of lemon and a bit of butter; steamed squash-n-onion (kosher salt, cracked pepper, bit o’butter) and wilted spinach (tiny bit o’olive oil, or EVOHHHH OHHHHH, as Rachel Ray would gratingly put it; garlic; squirt of lemon)? I believe the veggies are calling out to me from my fridge. The Husband is working late-ish and McPantses is at my mother’s house entertaining my grandmother.

13. that my grandmother, who was once my favorite relative in life (hmmmm, the brother-in-law has far to fall), now annoys me because she’s waiting to die? She keeps asking me when the baby is coming and I keep telling her that it’s not until March and she says that she might die before then and can’t I have it sooner? I finally told her, after she asked me that last week, that if I have it any sooner the baby might die and I wasn’t going for that.

14. (I remembered another one) that I finally got shafted buying something on ebay and I am now at a complete loss as to what to do? I’m giving her another two weeks and then I’ll really work on solving the problem. It’ll have been 2 months by then and good googly moogly, all I am waiting on is a damned pair of khaki pregnant pants. It’s not the $32 that matters so much. It’s the principal of it all. The crapmo seller is quite the pistol, too, and leaves horrid feedback for people who leave bad feedback for her and it looks like I’m not the only person to have a problem with her. Wugherty.

And on that bright and cheerful note, eat your veggies! Your mother would want you to do this, right after you finish your thank-yous.

Books I might want: the family style cookbook by the soothing-voiced Ina Garten. Love her. Love the show. Love the recipes and would really like to be a houseguest for a weekend or forever, whichever works for her.

Did you know that Nick Bantock expanded the Griffin and Sabine trilogy and there’s a whole new trilogy now? I need these books.

Did you know that Bantock is partnered with Barbara Hodgson and that their company is called Byzantium Books and that I had a bit of lovely correspondence with both of them while in grad school? I was toying with the idea of running away and moving to Vancouver or B.C. or wherever it is they live and begging and pleading for a job doing anything, anything at all.

Their books fascinate me. I think their collective work with Karen Elizabeth Gordon is a delightful book and I love to scrabble through the pages every once in a while.

My favorite of all of their books, though, is this one. The style is inspirational for any journal-keeper who does more than just write in a journal and I’m a girl who loves a glue stick and glassine envelopes and scissors and lists and pens and on and on and on and on.

So, I’m tempted to snag a Barbara Hodgson book or two that I don’t already have. Pure selfishness, of course. I am sharing my Bantock pop-up books of Kubla Kahn and Jabberwocky with McPantses and she loves them and listens in quiet awe as I recite the familiar poetry. I started reading poetry to her when she was a wee babe because it entertained me and because it passed the time and because it was a good excuse to read poetry allowed (for a reason, you see–the baby needed to hear it) and not feel like a complete dork about it.

Needless to say, I’m still shopping at amazon. The gift card has the potential to amuse me for days on end and I feel like a cat who just got a new ball of tin foil thrown in a big, empty cardboard box full of possibilities.

Random bits:

1. Peanut butter sandwich doesn’t taste foul coming back up. It tastes the same, which is comforting.

2. I would like to never, ever see liquid dog poops all over my kitchen and guest bedroom carpet ever again. Ever. Thank you. Hey, Husband: the vet bill was $180. I guessed $200 and was pleasantly surprised to be off. The woman paying before me’s bill was $960-something. They’re letting her pay in installments, and it’s nice to know they offer that plan, but they make you write out post-dated checks for all of it. I said to the woman, “You probably don’t want to know that they have no obligation to hold your check, despite the post-dating,” because I’m a buttinsky that way and the lady at the desk said they do it anyway, to be nice. Please let me never have a vet bill so large that I need to write many post-dated checks. Please.

3. When we got to school this morning, a girl in McPantses’ class was on the floor throwing a mighty tantrum, the likes of which McP hasn’t ever seen (come to think of it, I haven’t seen anything like that except on tv) and it freaked McP right the heck out. Her eyes got all round and she looked at me and big tears threatened to spill over and she wrapped her arms around my neck and said, “I don’t want you to go, mommy.” So, I picked her up and gave her a smooch and headed away from the tantrum and towards the teacher and passed her off to the teacher, who gave her a smooch, too, and headed towards the window so they could wave at me as I got in the car. Goodness gracious.

4. I am working on a small set of invitations for a sybermom and they’re just about ready to drop in the mail and I’ll be crapdamned if I didn’t just notice a punctuation error, which means that I have to take them apart and re-do the invite part at lunch and re-cut and re-attach and this is what happens to me when I get cocky and don’t ask the Husband to proofread. Dammit.

5. My friends learned this week, after testing, that they are expecting a healthy baby girl. I couldn’t be happier for them.

6. Last Friday night, I did nothing. I planted my happy ass on the couch and slept the entire time the Husband and McP were at the baseball game. It was blissful.

Have a swell weekend. My sis and her husband are coming to stay on Saturday so she can go to her class reunion (which means that I have exactly 26 hours to de-stink the liquid dog poop guest bedroom, but the carpet has been Resolved and covered in baking soda and plain cat litter for 2 days, and I’ll vacuum tonight. Cross your fingers and say it with me, as we drive the demon-stink away: THE POWER OF CHRIST COMPELS YOU!). I am so anxious to see the new Exorcist. The Husband hasn’t seen the first one. How can a man have seen the money shot in Basic Instinct one zillion and one times (I’ve never seen that or the movie in its entirety, for that matter) and have never once seen The Exorcist?

Sooooo, if a kind soul sent you a nice amazon gift card, and you were of a sort who spends bookstore gift cards on nice, crafty books that you wouldn’t normally buy, what book or books would you get, if you were me?

I’m eyeing this one, but I can’t find anything about it anywhere, so I’m not so sure…

Or would you forego a foofy book or two altogether and snag the Calphalon grill pan you’ve been eyeing?

I need suggestions.

I’m having such a marvelous time poking selfishly about amazon. Usually I’m looking for things for McPantses or the latest Wilco book or CD for the Husband. That’s not to say that I don’t make many, many selfish purchases at amazon, because I do.

But this time it’s different.

So, what would you buy?

I wanted to be Harriet the Spy, and not the Harriet the Spy of the recent movie (why, why, why do they take characters who are known by their wonderful illustrations and make them into different people altogether for movies? Why? I looked like a skinnier Harriet as a child and not like the movie star kid who plays Harriet in the completely different movie), but a 1970s Harriet, the way it was meant to be. I have no use for movies that turn beloved novels into modern bastardizations of what they should be. The reason Fitzhugh and the two kiddie/young adult authors I’ll mention in a minute were, and remain, so wildly popular with kids (of all ages, ahem) is because of the way they write for kids. They treat kids like smart small people, not like little bumbling idiots who must be led merrily along the garden path. Not every non-adult lacks an attention span. I’m the dorkahantas who got through most of Agatha Christie (loved Poirot and hated Miss Marple) in elementary school because the books were in my parents’ bookcases and because no one monitored what I read.

I always thought my parents were wildly liberal about child-rearing because they let me read whatever I wanted to read in elementary school, but it turns out that my mother didn’t intend for me to read Stephen King or that creeeeeeepy book about the freaky twin gynecologists (Jeremy Irons starred in the Cronenburg film) and that she just didn’t pay good enough attention to what I grabbed from the bookcases.

I wanted to hide out in the Met, like the kids in E.L. Konisburg’s book. I wanted to live in Sunset Towers like Turtle Wexler in Ellen Raskin’s book and I loved everything each of these authors wrote (with the exception of Fitzhugh’s Sport, which, as a sybermom friend put so aptly, lacked Fitzhugh’s typical magic.

I’ve had a marvelous time the past few weeks snagging books off of ebay. I’ve gotten many 1970s Trixie Belden hardcovers and snagged a full set of the Meg books today (there are only 6).

I cannot tell you why, but I remember vehemently disliking the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. All I can figure out is that I was so enamored of the television show that the books paled in comparison.

I tell myself that the books for which I have such an intense longing (really, I do, and it’s a little frightful in a nerds-are-us way) are for my daughter and that she will love them when she’s a little older, if only because her mother and her grandmother did, but I don’t know how true that is. First, the books are pretty much for me and second, McPantses may very well hate them.

Wonder what age is appropriate to start reading chapter mysteries before bedtime? I might wait a year or two…

Whatever will I do?

My grandmother is here and she and my mother are fetching McPantses from school after her nap and taking her for an adventure on the town this afternoon. Then, the Husband is taking McP to a baseball game tonight and he’s picking her up from my parents’ house, so I’m all alone until 8 or 9 tonight.

I headed to the art store at lunch and got a small stack of primed boards (if that’s what you call them–they’re canvas-covered, but they’re flat) and a couple of new brushes, and I’m going to try to paint something cute for McP’s room.

I have a new movie from Netflix and a dishwasher full of clean dishes to occupy me, too, so I hope I won’t waste a moment of free time, but the truth of the matter is that I will probably just sleep on the couch while Miss Libby rests her ginormous head on me and smiles.

After perusing this lovely sewn stationery website, I am desperate for a serger so that I can test sewing paper to silk myself. I already have vats of fabric I could use, including a fair amount of organza and silk shantung, so I’d only need to lay out dough for the serger and not the fabric… Makes good, sound financial sense, right? No? I could probably wait a while.

I’ve also got a hankering for wide-format, borderless printer and a laminator big enough to shoot an 11 x 17 sheet through so that I can make little kid placemats at home. I talked to the Husband about this a couple of times (which means that I chirped happily about costly things I absolutely must have at some point to grow my business while his eyes glazed over and he started thinking about something else entirely) and we agreed (I think) that I would save up for this $600-ish in equipment over a period of time. I might have agreed in the flow of conversation and he might have agreed thinking, hmmm, she’s looking at me expectantly, so now’s the time to nod if I want her to stop talking and take a breath.

Your guess is as good as mine.

The canvas board whatevers were $1.20 each and I bought 8. I spent less today at the art store than I have on any given visit over the past year. This is a good thing and the Husband will agree (if he’s listening, which he is likely not).

Oooh, the crazy neighbors moved yesterday instead of today. They left a medium-sized pile of trash at the curb (I do not like curb trash and always get the Husband to haul our trash far, far away). The trash pile was pretty small, given their penchant for stuff and the circumstances, so I’m not complaining about it. Much. When I stopped by at lunch to check the mail and eat a sandwich, I noticed that a curb vulture had already picked through it and snagged some sort of white wire shelving thing. I guess it’s the curb goodies cycle of life, carrying on by itself.

Have a swell night. I’m going to make a sincere effort to enjoy every second.

Edited to add: Rest in Peace, Julia Child. You were a shining example of what it means to be a lady, in the best possible way, and you lived an amazing and full life. Your cooking, your deportment and your very personality added a bit of class to this country and we sure need it. You were the living definition of grace and you will be missed.