Keeping It Real (or, Stripping and The Sky Is Falling)

You know how there are people that are just a wee bit too perfect?  The glossy people?

There are blogs like that too, right?  The perfect people with the perfect blogs... they always serve healthy meals with home-made bread and salad they grew themselves, their kids are prodigies in academics, music, and sport, their marriages are always delightful, they're mothers-of-many and still slim and youthful looking, the photos on the blog are always professional quality, and - yes - they could write about dirt and make it interesting.  And they never write about anything that went wrong, until it's all good again and they've wrenched a lesson from it they want to share with you.

*sigh*

But other bloggers, while they have a lot going for them, manage not to be so stinkin' perfect. Their kids are average - and they admit it. Or, their husband sometimes irritates them and they own up to it (without running him down). They forgot to defrost the meat, so their three boys got macaroni and cheese and hot-dog-octopi (otherwise known at this house as American Sushi) for dinner. Or, you know... they have hedge-hog hair.

I like those people.  They're my kind of people.


So, in the interest of keeping it real... this is what's been happening around our house lately.

*  After my revelation from the boys' shower, I went to clean ours.  Because, there's a problem.  I can't see.  I wear contacts, which is great, but I usually shower first, and then put in my 'eyes'.  Which means that the shower can get kind of... um...  funky... before I notice it.  So I cleaned the sides and sliding doors, then squirted cleaner on the floor and left it to ferment soak.  Came back that evening and it was practically sparkling.  I was all excited to think I'd found a miracle product that did all the work for me!  Turns out Kerry scrubbed it.  I should be really thankful he went to the unprecedented effort, but I'm still thinking, Dang!  I thought I'd found IT!

*  Meanwhile, the boys are busying themselves eking all the fun out of summer they possibly can, which involves reading a lot of Calvin and Hobbes and Bloom County, staging wars in Dino-opolis, and bickering about who held the rabbit the longest.

*  We had "Astronomy Night" last night, and spent about two hours last night up on Grampa and Gramma's deck watching the crescent moon sink down behind the islands in a so-beautiful-it-looks-fake red sky, looking at planets through the telescope, laughing at Uncle Dave for naming a new 3-star Y-shaped constellation The Flux Capacitor, and counting satellites and shooting stars.  And bats.  Lots and lots of bats.  (And - yes - I know they're not really shooting stars.  They're meteors.  The Perseids, to be precise, but shooting stars sounds better.  You know, like the sky is falling.)

*  But we couldn't stay too late (oops, we did) because Grampa invited the boys on a hike today - to complete the hike they attempted a couple weeks ago.  Which left me with an unexpected kid-free day... or most of a day.  Though there were plenty of things I probably should could have done, I thought it would be a great idea to tackle an item that's had permanent status on my Mother Load for about seven years.  (I wasn't kidding about the geologic ages!)

*  I bit off way more than I could chew (at least, today) on this project.  Let's just say it involves an antique dresser, several layers of Very Ugly Paint, and chemicals.  Lots of chemicals.

And what I have to show for all that is
 - four drawers that are mostly stripped of paint, but not sanded.
 - two ancient sanders, neither of which appear to work properly.
 - an only partially stripped dresser.
 - a temporary inability to smell much of anything.
 - and an aching back.


So there you have it.


Elbert Hubbard wrote, Complete success alienates a man from his fellows, but suffering makes kinsmen of us all.

Your kinsman,

Julie