Hello, internet!

Yesterday was M's birthday and we had a fun little birthday party, just the three of us, last night. There were gifts and a hearty Pioneer Woman man-sandwich and a blueberry pie type of thing , from a recipe by a Swedish food blogger. I try to get dessert recipes from Swedish sources if I want M to enjoy them because he generally thinks that American desserts are cloyingly sweet. And, they are, actually. The blueberry thing turned out better than I was expecting from how it first looked when I put it in the oven, and he said it was even better cold this morning. I made him take the leftovers to work with him for his morning snack because otherwise, I'd have ended up eating a piece myself and they're 8 WW points+ per slice, which is kind of a lot for a snack, especially if you don't even really like blueberries that much. We had a nice time, I think. Or at least I did. I guess the birthday boy is the one whose opinion matters, truly, but I think he was satisfied.

As you may have guessed from above, Weight Watchers is still on, and I am down almost five pounds--just half a pound from last week but I'm not tremendously concerned about it yet. Stupid WW subtracted one of my daily points today, though, which is good and bad. Nice to see that I'm making progress but hey, I wanted that point! ;) I'm getting better about not throwing in extras when I cook--using less oil and butter and such, and using less cheese, etc. One thing that I really like about WW is that you get your daily points but also 49 extra weekly points, so you can have a real splurge every week. The first week, I went to my parents house and surprised my mom one morning. I knew that we were going to eat lunch somewhere, but she had just agreed to have Mexican with my aunt, so I went there instead of say, any other restaurant in town that would have been easier for me. So, I threw my weekly points at it, estimated how many was in it as best as I could, and didn't feel too guilty. Last week I used my weekly points on potato chips. Because, let's face it.... it's not exactly like someone will stay on an eating plan that doesn't allow for some wiggle room. Basically, it's not too horrible so far, which means a lot.

We had a little excitement around here on Sunday night. It was all excitement that we could do without, though. We had a perfectly ordinary day, unusual only in that we decided not to go to church. I even got to sleep in, and then we all had a nice, lazy day. Right after we sent Evie off to bed, though, it all went haywire in a very short period of time.

1. First, the storm started. The power flickered but only went off for a second--just enough for the computers to go off and for all the clocks to need reset. There was an inordinate amount of lightning with this storm and we have a lot of freaky trees and M was a bit worried about Evie's location in her room, in the bed by the window, so we decided to go get her and let her get out of bed for a few minutes. Girl thought it was her birthday and Christmas all at once. While she sat on the couch with M and talked her little head off, I decided to be proactive and fetch the flashlight and light the candles on our mantle, just to make sure we'd have a bit of orientation from the candles and light from the flashlight to easily round up the rest of our power outage supplies if necessary. This proved unnecessary, and the storm died down a bit and we sent E back to bed.


2. But see, as she was heading to bed, M picked up a toy from the ground by the couch and uncovered a piece of ART. My child, the one that I would never have imagined doing something like this? She wrote her name on the carpet. In marker. !! I mean, it's bad enough that she did it, and hid it for at least a day, but she was dopey enough to write her name?? She tried to pretend that she knew nothing about it but it's hard to make that one believable since you know. It definitely wasn't me and I would also feel confident in saying that my husband is, you know. Not the type to write on the carpet.. especially not in Evie's handwriting. Seriously, wtf?


3. Since there was still some lightning and since I was in the middle of a good book that I've been waiting on for a while, I continued to sit at my desk, reading. I kept seeing the candles flickering in the corner of my eye but I knew what that was so I didn't really look up at first, until.... OMG THE CANDLEHOLDER HAS LARGE FLAMES SHOOTING OUT OF IT.It's a set of three wooden candleholders that M made for me for Christmas one year. They're tall and square with varying heights and they all have a bottom about halfway up for a tea candle, and holes cut in the sides.. It's hard to explain but I don't seem to have any easily located photos. Anyway, fire. In a wooden item. Next to television and wall and mantle and in my HOUSE. But I saw it before it became a serious matter, and M was able to grab it and get it to the kitchen, where he sprayed water in it, which initially made matters much worse but then finally put out the fire without even catching the kitchen curtains on fire...which I so totally saw happening for a second.


4. We returned to our desks and tried to calm down. I decided I needed a comfort snack and went to pour myself some lemonade. (Minute Maid's Just15 lemonade is pretty good, by the way, and 0 points per serving.) I grabbed the unopened container and checked the cap (just in case, even though it was a sealed container) and shook it. The cap was on, alright, but there was a defect in the packaging near the top. Lemonade sprayed all over the counters, the cabinet, the floor and me. It was cold and sticky and wet and incredibly unpleasant. Cleanup taken care of, I returned to the computer room and informed M that I hoped household calamities come in threes because I had just had the third one. He reminded me that the storm itself was the first one, so we would be on our second set of three if that was the case.


5. There were no further incidents until bedtime. I was falling asleep at my desk, so I headed off to bed. As I was getting ready to crawl in, I kept thinking I saw something moving but couldn't find anything. Finally, i moved the pillow just to check, and a huge nasty spider went darting across the bed. It was one of the largest we've ever had in the house and it was FAST. I called for M, who is the resident spider killer. He failed on the first attempt and it ran behind the bed, so we had to move the bed out and go in search of power tools. He finally caught it in a dustbuster and took it off to the laundry room for purposes of murder. And, you can call me a wuss if you'd like, but there was no way I was sleeping on spidery sheets, so I went in search of the spare set of sheets. At least I was feeling relatively confident by then that nothing else would go wrong before bedtime. HA!


6. courtesy, please avert your eyes from this last item, because you do not want to read this. And that is when I was attacked by a suicidal moth. Twice. It was dive-bombing towards me. I don't think that I've ever seen a bug behave quite like that before. I fetched the bug killer back to the bedroom, who eventually managed to chase it into the closet (you know. With our clothes.) and as far as I know, there it still is, munching away at all our best stuff. We couldn't get it to come out, so we finally had to close the doors and hope for the best.

So there it was, our evening of WTF. There was nothing truly horrible or anything--well, the fire could have been, but thankfully it led to nothing more inconvenient than me needing to scrape wax off my sink the next day. But all of this happened out of the blue in a two hour time frame and it made us a little freaked out. ;)

Anyway, it's 1:30 so I'm thinking I should probably wrap this up and head to bed. We've been awful about going to bed lately. Umm.. did I mention our new mattress? And how the salesman was saying that we would actually require less sleep if we bought it because we'd get more quality sleep and wake up less, etc etc? And it was clearly a sales pitch, except it's kind of not. We've both been sleeping less since we got this bed, and waking up feeling better than we should. It's quite wonderful, actually.