with having a very stubborn toddler is that in order to beat you at your game of adult-in-control, he will often pull out all the stops, including, but not limited to, proving me entirely wrong when I cast aspersions on his character at the doctor’s office.

The Crabcake had to have a finger stick when we got to the office and I told the lab tech to be careful and to be prepared because the wrath she was going to endure for injuring my son so grievously would melt her eyebrows off of her face.

Instead, the boychild blinked at her suspiciously and didn’t flinch or become particularly bothered by the prick, whereas with his big sister, I am usually forced to undergo the fingerstick myself first (she prefers it if I do it myself, too, “like at home, mommy,” which references my stint with gestational diabetes while knocked up with McScreamy). Not a tear was uttered and not a whimper was made.

If you’ve been to any sort of odd or cutthroat graduate school or know someone who has, you may also know all about the Napoleon complexed short men who become asshole career fellas because, oh, who knows, it makes them taller in their brains. I think there are a lot of doctors and lawyers and business executives (now I’m humming the Weeds theme song) who are tiny little short men driven to greater heights any way they can reach them. Oh, I know an architect like this, too. Short, short man.

At just over two years, the Crabcake is about the same height his sister was: 34 inches. If you follow the “double the height at age two” standard, that means he will be 5′8″ as an adult. The Husband had a serious growth spurt in adolescence where he grew 12 or 13 inches that year (his legs hurt all the time, he remembers), so I hope the Crabman will eke out a few more inches somewhere, but if not, his already diabolical personality is shaping up well for graduate school.

Sadly, this puts a pretty big damper on what could be his true aspirations, judging by the things he likes to do best right now: construction site loiterer. He screams at me in the car to take him to see a bulldozer (in a French accent: bull-doh-HAIR!) or to see “men work in street” or “men build houses” and we drive by slowly with the windows rolled down while the boy screams to “RIIIIIIDE DAT TRACTOR, MOMMMAY!”

So, I guess he’s got a little bit of a screamy man complex about the loitering, too.

If you have a construction site loiterer (also on our screaming visit lists: fire station and anything at all involving garbage trucks and garbage men and tractors and cows), also known in common parlance as “typical toddler boy,” I am told, you will enjoy these videos as much as your child. Fred Levine is a freaking genius. I think George, the host of a few of the videos, is cute and that Rusty, who hosts the farm video, isn’t bad, either.

Is there such thing as a Construction Site Loiterer with a Napoleon complex? Where would such a man go to college, I wonder?

I made a CD for my sister last night. I called it “Chick music that will make you sing in the car like a doofus.”

Cyndi Lauper – I Drove All Night
Abba – Knowing Me, Knowing You
Bananarama – Cruel Summer
Pet Shop Boys – It’s a Sin
Indigo Girls – Least Complicated
Psychedelic Furs – Love My Way
Berlin – No More Words
Soft Cell – Tainted Love
Kenny Loggins – Playing with the Boys
Psychedelic Furs – Pretty in Pink
Dream Academy – Life in a Northern Town
Falco – Rock Me, Amadeus
Kate Bush – Running Up that Hill
America – Sister Golden Hair
Thompson Twins – If You Were Here
Abba – Fernando
Stacey Q – Two of Hearts
Yes – Love Will Find a Way
Rick Springfield – You Better Love Somebody

The original playlist was much longer, but everything wouldn’t fit on the CD. Rejected songs include The Why Store’s Lack of Water, which is one of my favorite songs in life; Kate Bush’s This Woman’s Work, because no crying songs on the CD; and JayZ’s 99 Problems, because I suspect I might be the only person I know who likes that song. Plus, it didn’t fit the time period of most of the songs I chose.

I’m taking the Crabcake to his 2 yr well check this afternoon, at which point I will learn exactly how short he is compared to the vitamin-enhanced, turbo-charged, superbabies everyone seems to have now and I will confess with deep shame that he has been on a self-imposed nearly protein-free diet for the past six months, up until two weeks ago, when he consented to eat a peanut butter sandwich (and has continued to enjoy one almost every day since, while we gaze at him in completely silent puzzled wonderment, lest we shift slightly and cause him to refuse to eat this one protein forevermore and dart off into the woods like the strange noneating deer).

The list of things the boy refuses to eat is as long as a regularly tall kid when typed in normal, 12 pt font. The list of decent things he will eat, however, includes applesauce, fourthed grapes (I am cautious and take the whole “halving grapes” thing even further) on occasion, supremed oranges (he’d eat three of those in a sitting, I think), and peeled apple slices. He will not touch chicken, beef, seafood or pork (except for bacon! he can always get his nitrate food groups down). He won’t eat cheese or eggs or pasta or any form of untoasted bread, which makes this new peanut butter sandwich thing confusing to me, but mine is not to reason why…

He will eat rice cakes (I buy the unsalted ones, which means they are probably negative in calories because crunching up those godawful bits of puffed rice cardboard has to take more physical effort than the 12 calories they seem to contain), pretzels and any number of foods so completely awful that I hesitate to list them (pop tarts–the non-iced ones, okay, OKAY?, cinnamon toast, chips, pretzels, pizza, french fries, any form of chocwhet that I will let him have and hold onto long enough to melt in his grubby fist before I become so grossed-out at the chocwhet sludge that I force the fist open and scrape out the sludge or just turn the dogs on him and let them clean him up*).

So, that’s my kid. At least he’s not in danger of getting scurvy.

Are you still reading? Do you need a CD of completely obnoxious music? First commenter gets one. If I am already mailing you a package and you know it and I think you might appreciate such a musical grouping, chances are you’re already getting one. Smooches.

* I don’t really do this because it’s extremely gross and it would make him hysterically angry (he got so angry at something at dinner last night that in the interim when he sucked in his breath before he let out the huge angry scream, his face turned deep, deep red–like this but more scarlet–and his lips actually turned purple and we thought the coming scream was going to blow out the window with a gale-force wind), but sometimes the dogs get to him before I can and they are large, hungry, sweet gorgeous girls and I try not to think about the things they have licked before they lick my kid.

I am already fine-ish, I think.

Tonight: church meeting that I chair once a month. Then quick drink followed by second drink in a go cup carried next door to the sole indie theater in town.

Saw Peter O’Toole’s Oscar-worthy performance in Venus and the movie was riveting. Much dissection before the movie and afterwards (at same next-door drinky place for a final drink) of the job situation, wherein it was decided that perhaps people at the job where I wanted to work so desperately need warm and fuzzy because that’s what people need sometimes and, says my friend’s husband, I am neither warm nor fuzzy–I take that as a grand compliment. I ain’t the dispenser of free hugs. I make up for it by being generous.

The nice girl who applied for the job called while I was out to commiserate about her incredibly strange rejection letter.

I love her and it’s not just the Maker’s Mark talking.

I shall call her tomorrow. I suspect the potential employers had no idea we’d compare notes to the letter. Daft fuckers.

Bitterness and bourbon warm the sheets nicely. Off to bed I go, with Martha Grimes’ Foul Matters to keep me warm.

I have been running home every day at lunch for the past two weeks waiting for a job letter and it finally came today, but not before a letter from the same place, about something else entirely came in yesterday’s mail, stopping my heart, just for fun.

The letter was strange enough for me to save it; I usually either burn or shred bad news. I want The Husband and my sister to read this one. At first I was insulted at the effusive flattery because it felt condescending by the second paragraph. I was also aggravated by the big grammatical error. Then I remembered that these people expect to be dealing with me for the next many years and that they probably felt like they had to at least give me the reach around while they told me to fuck off, so I guess that’s where the strange flattery comes in.

(Strange flattery = being told I am sort of too smartish or too something to fit just right and that I should try a more elevated level instead.)

I remain strangely unflattered, but I am, at least, not leaking tears in my [gray suffocating overlarge underpersonalized] office.

Places where I have leaked tears today:

*by the mailbox
*in the driveway (while on the phone)
*in the kitchen (still on the phone)
*in the back yard (while the dogs did their thing)
*sitting at the kitchen table
*prone, plank-backed on the bed, with shoes on, under the covers (while one dog snuggled next to me with her ass end on The Husband’s pillow)
*in the bathroom (while washing face and drying face on towel)
*on the way out of the bathroom and into the car (dried face on unfolded cloth diaper that = auto snot rag for the Crabcake)

Pause in tears here while I enjoy Berlin singing No More Words, which is a swell song for not leaking self-pitying tears while driving self to bank. Then, damn and blast, I forgot that I loaded another 50 or so songs onto my i-pod last night and got Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush singing Don’t Give Up, which is lovely and all, but COME. ON. I planned the rest of the day around no tears and avoiding bourbon at work, which seems like good manners and Kate Bush and ole Peter have to go and ruin it all?

So I took myself to my friend’s house, washed my face there and drove around for an hour while leaking and not leaking tears and ended up at Wendy’s, where I didn’t leak at all until I got up to the window (how anyone can cry while listening to the Foo Fighters sing Best of You is beyond me, but that is pretty much the extent of my current wallowing.*) and reached out to get my sweet tea. What a stupid place to cry.

The delicate part of my ego cannot call the woman I know who’s also up for the job. The nice part of my ego says if not me, then surely her because she really wanted it, too. The not-nice part of my ego says if not me, then no one and surely not her because not her over me. So, I have no idea who did get the job. Eventually, as always, the nosy part of me will win and I will call the nice woman to see what kind of letter she got and I will, if she got a rejection letter, make her read it to me so we can compare notes. If she got the job, I’ll send her a big bunch of flowers because I am nice that way.

Well, I’m not really nice that way, but I can fake it that way, anyway.

There’s a joke about the guy who was drowning and waiting for God to save him and all sorts of folks come to help him out (Coast Guard, rafts, helicopter) and the guy keeps saying, “No, no, I’ll wait for God to save me.” He finally drowns and when he gets to Heaven, he says, “Why didn’t you save me?” God says, “Who do you think sent all those folks to help you out?”

I feel like that guy–I expect there is a helicopter somewhere above me, and a raft somewhere beside me, but I’m just being too much of an asshole to look up or over right now, so I will be stuck right here instead.

I was going to stop here, but it sounds unnecessarily dark, so instead, I’ll say: I will be fine. Tomorrow.

*If you are southaaan, you will understand the word “wallowing” in its spoken form, which is “wallerin.’” Wallerin’ has two definitions in redneck: to become mired in self-pity; what a dog or other animal does in the dirt. Wallerin’ like a dirty pig. I guess I’m doing a combination of both types today, what with the Wendy’s lunch and all.

I just realized this very second that I have been writing this blog for four years today.

I have several thoughts on this, and they include: man, what a waste, sorta, except for the friends I’ve made and the interesting chronicle of bitching and what’s happened in my life; wow, have I said some silly things in the past four years; I am no closer to having enough dog food, cheese and other life staples in stock at any given time in my house (I used to keep track); monkeys are still frequently summarily executed in the Monkey Parliament (we just talked about that last night), where the criminal justice system makes Gitmo look like Disneyworld; and, most of all, boy do I have a lot of words to use up on any given day.

I have another child, eleven fish, many more crafty hobbies and interests, more white hair, a much flobbly-ier belly, about the same number of pairs of overpriced shoes (haven’t bought any lately), and still forget almost daily that I am the grownup with a mortgage and not the gangly dorkish girl I remember myself as.

Four years.

You would think that a man who swoons over the New Yorker every week (and who reads it from cover to cover, every single word) could understand the powerful good feelings I associate with packages that come in the mail, but when he jokes about my internet friends (”Who? Oh, you mean an internet friend.”), I’m not so sure.

Still.

Melissa will cringe at my photography skills from across the nation, but I take comfort in knowing that I live way too far away for her to actually come take her fantastic gift back because I can’t photograph it properly.

It’s big: about 2 1/2 feet by 18 inches. The rounded corners: oooh, aaah. The tiny quilted circles. The phrase stitched on there.

If I land the new job, I am going to hang it on the wall there. If I don’t, I think I will haul it here and hang it on my office wall and hope that instead of my office sucking the life out of the cloth art, the cloth art will breathe new air in here. It’s a toss-up whether or not fabric good will triumph over office evile, though. Hmmm. Perhaps I am having a a case of the Mondays.

Surely, though, this could win the office battle:

I love knowing that a wonderful crafty world exists so far beyond the confines of my daily existence and when a bit of it comes into my home from across the nation, I love it more. Lisa of Losabia sent me fabric ball and pear patterns along with this fella:

Now, in addition to three sketchbooks (they’re different sizes, y’all, and one is watercolor paper) and about two dozen other little crafty nibbles, I am hauling a ziploc bag that contains a bushel (or, to be exact, three) of future little peas, halfway sewn up and waiting for red felt mouths and embroidered black eyes.

Happy, happy mail. I need to send some out myself.

plus c’est la meme chose.

Did I spell it right? The more things change the more they stay the same?

I’m leaving in a while to head up I-65 to fetch McPantses from the elegant wilds of the Nashville suburb area. She’s had a fantastic week and been spoiled rotten, for which we are so grateful.

I’ve been informed, though, that despite wanting to leave right at breakfast tomorrow morning to come home (it’s a 5+ hr drive), that we should really do the brunch thing with them and that I cannot wear denim to the country club. Again you need to tell me that I can’t wear denim at The Last Plantation? Where is my terminal-ennui prescription medicine when I need it? Seriously. SERIOUSLY.

I reminded them that I don’t wear denim much anyway, but it’s right this second that I wish I still had the size negative 2 sluttastic Gasoline-brand mini I wore in high school, only in acid wash. I’d pack it just for grins.

Geeze Louise.

Alternate title: oh, good hell.

Hartselle, Alabama, parents have named a second child after the University of Alabama’s football team/program/coaches/nicknames/whatever.

It’s a good thing we don’t subscribe to the rule of naming kids after the things we adore most in life at our house because we’d have a pair named Letterpressed Chocolate Sauce and Cole Haan or Balvenie Macanudo Maduro New Yorker on the Back Porch on Friday nights and probably something equally awful comemmorating the football team like Rammer Jammer.