Let’s hear it for all the slobmobiles! After reading all your comments over the weekend, I no longer feel ashamed that I could probably feed, clothe, wallpaper and infect a small country with all the crap on the floor of my car. Not to mention entertain its people for at least a month by playing the game WAS THIS ONCE ALIVE AND HOW DID IT DIE? Keeps them occupied while they recover from bubonic plague from having come into contact with any one of several foreign substances decorating the interior of my Honda.

And for all you stinkers who have clean cars … live dangerously! Splash a little kool aid and vomit in your car every once in awhile – it keeps you humble.

As of 9:00 pm eastern time yesterday, there were 191 entries to the Designs by Jessie Giveaway. I asked random.org to choose one random number between 1 and 191, inclusive, and this is what it spat at me:

..

and the corresponding comments were:

and

Congratulations Julie and Heather! Contact me at admin@thecreativejunkie.com within forty-eight hours to claim your prizes! But only after you clean your cars. Geesh.

Thanks to all of you who participated in this giveaway and I’d also like to give a big shout out to Jessie of Designs by Jessie for offering up two shopping sprees! Remember … she’s got a coupon for my readers: enter CREATIVEJUNKIE4 at checkout to get $4 off your first order, good through the end of November!

Now, for all of us losers .. how about another episode of female porn?

*swoon*

*fanning myself*

I’ve always hated our stair runner and when I say hate, I mean abhor, loathe and despise with the heat of a thousand suns. But I couldn’t get Nate to do anything about it because of the other 865 things on his list that he secretly refers to as PROOF THAT I MARRIED AN ANAL RETENTIVE OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE FREAK OF NATURE. Therefore, I’ve had to stare at that monstrosity covering our stairs for six long icky years.

Until yesterday, when I dropped a subtle hint like You know what just occurred to me? We’ve never had sex on hardwood stairs. A shame, don’t you think? and Nate yanked that runner up in two minutes flat.

Honestly, I’m embarrassed to admit I never thought of it sooner.

Do me favor … remind me never to bump uglies on any wall-to-wall built-ins anywhere, OK?  I’ve been wanting those in my living room forever.

.

.

Numero Uno:  There’s still time to get in on the Designs by Jessie Shopping Spree Giveaway! There will be TWO WINNERS which means I get double the opportunity to beg the winner to buy me something. Awesome! Ends at 9:00 p.m. eastern time tonight! Enter HERE.

Numero Dos:  I’m not Spanish. I just like to count like I am. Oh, and my toes hurt. All diez of them. Thought you should know.

Numero Tres:  There isn’t actually a numero tres … I just think things look better grouped in threes.

I’ll leave you with the post I wrote last year around this time, when Helena, my youngest, was just entering third grade. An entire year has passed since then. She’s now nine, in fourth grade, several inches taller with hair several inches shorter. Her room, on the other hand, has not changed a bit. Not even uno iota.

Happy Sunday, everyone!

.

************************************************

If it walks like Helena and talks like Helena, I still want a DNA test

.

Last week we went to Helena’s third grade Open House, not to be confused with curriculum night which was last month.

Curriculum night is when we meet the teacher for the first time and find out what’s she’s going to teach and how she plans to teach it. On that night, the teacher is usually eager and excited and full of promise and anticipation for the coming year.

Open House is when we get to see the curriculum in practice and find out what the children have learned so far. We also get to see if the teacher is still upright and verbal and then we determine whether she now meets the state’s threshold for being legally insane and if she doesn’t, we clap and give her a standing ovation.

Then we participate in fun classroom exercises, like figuring out how much hair remains on the left quadrant of her scalp if her entire head started with a total of 1,546,893 strands and she yanked an average of 689 hairs out for every hour spent on multiplication facts thus far. Bonus points for estimating how long before all the hair turns white. Or taking the number of hours spent on currency and making change, multiplying by five and dividing by two to find out how many years she’s aged in one month, thereby calculating her adjusted life expectancy or anticipated year of mental breakdown – I’m still not sure of this one and Nate wouldn’t let me cheat of his sheet.

My personal favorite on Open House night is learning the teacher’s new language which I think is called HELP ME and consists of shaky hand movements and incoherent gibberish and is best described as a fusion of sign language and garbled pig Latin.

I hope there’s a special place in Heaven reserved for elementary school teachers, a place where everyone will understand everything they say the first time they say it and where they will never again have to deal with lice checks, never again be asked for a potty pass and never again yank a dangling tooth out of the mouth of a child who does not share their bloodline.

So far, Nate and I are very impressed with Helena’s teacher, Mrs. H. She’s a tiny thing and although she looks like she’s twenty, she’s been teaching for almost twice as long as her students have been alive, a fact that inspires awe from her students (Oh my gosh, Mom! She’s old! Do you think she’s as old as you?) and envy and waves of bitter disillusionment from those moms who have recently come to the conclusion that they will never look that good for their age, no matter what they have lifted, enhanced, tucked, paralyzed, suctioned out or surgically removed.

(sniff, sniff)

I need a moment.

.

.

.

Thank you.

Mrs. H is passionate about her profession and her students and she’s a Buffalo Bills fan so really, she could be teaching Helena voodoo for all Nate cares, provided she’s not sticking needles into Trent Edwards’ passing arm.

I get the feeling Mrs. H genuinely likes all eight year olds, regardless of whether they swim in her gene pool, despite the fact that she is under no legal obligation to do so. Then again, eight year olds are so much easier to like when they’re not throwing hissy fits or screaming DON’T LOOK AT ME EVER AGAIN to their siblings or channeling Hansel and Gretel all over the house or hollering YOU ARE THE BIGGEST MEANIE EVER while stomping up the stairs, aren’t they?

Helena came home from school one day waving this note that she found on her desk. I had to hunt around the floor a minute to find my jaw. After I shoved it back onto my face, I stared at her in shock. Then I gave her a squeeze, told her I was proud of her and quickly plucked a strand of her hair to send to the local FBI office for DNA analysis.

This is Helena’s desk. When Helena showed it to us, I silently reamed myself out for not having super glued my jaw to my face because it fell off again and rolled underneath her desk. As I was on my hands and knees searching for it, I was half inclined to just stay under there because every instinct screamed at me that the sky was falling.

Because this desk was neat as a pin. Book were stacked up neatly, facing the same direction, the folders were neatly stacked opposite them and in between were her eraser and ChapSticks, all facing due south. There were no dirty tissues, no smelly clothes bunched up in the corners, no discarded candy wrappers, no crumbs, no underwear strewn about, nothing spilled, nothing, nothing, nothing except neatness. For crying out loud, even her pencils were lined up in the same direction.

I was able to inconspicuously swab her desk for DNA before Nate hissed at me to stop acting like a deranged lunatic.

I think he needs to get acquainted with Helena’s room. Maybe then he’ll understand why I’ve got a little crazy going on, when her desk is so meticulously neat yet her room can only be entered when wearing a fully body hazmat suit after a tetanus booster.

Mrs. H is all about consequences and I like the visual she uses. There’s no question that if the kids misbehave, they’ll know exactly how much less time they’ll have to scream and jump around and work up a sweat.

You know, I think this tool would work perfectly for all kinds of situations. Like when I’ve spent a couple of hours making a special dinner and Nate calls me five minutes before he’s due home to tell me that he’s going to be late and not to worry because he had a big, late lunch at Dinosaur Barbecue so he’s not hungry anyway.

There’s no question that Nate would know exactly how much less time he will have to scream and jump around and work up a sweat later that night.

I also like the way she uses clothespins as a form of discipline. All the kids start with three clothespins under their names and can I just tell you, the sigh of relief from the parents holding their collective breath before discovering how many clothespins remained under their child’s name? Deafening.

Three clothespins means three chances. Each time a clothespin is taken away, there are consequences:

Like the clock, I think this chart is very versatile. For instance, I’m going to make my own consequences chart for laundry. I’ll have to post it on the front of the refrigerator because if I posted it in the laundry room, no one would ever know it existed.

We have a laundry room? Since when? No way! Where?

It will specifically deal with those occasions when I find myself trying to wash 245 cubic feet of laundry before noon, which might be possible if it weren’t for the sheer amount of time I spend smacking my head against the floor screaming I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE, not to mention the ensuing migraine, which happens each and every time I unwad a dirty pair of underwear found incubating in the pant legs of jeans.

My take on this idea

Mrs. H emphasizes reading and descriptive writing and Helena wasted no time in packing up her clothes and Littlest Pet Shops and Bear and jumped on the synonym bandwagon with gusto and we now refer to her as our youngest daughter, Roget’s Thesaurus. I’m constantly chasing her all around the house, yelling OPEN YOUR BRAIN, I NEED ANOTHER WORD FOR BRAIN ANEURYSM when I’m writing this blog.

I’ll catch her telling her friend that she had a delicious, smooth, sticky peanut concoction spread uniformly on a circular piece of crispy baked dough and washed it down with a clear, luminous liquid with a lovely fruity bouquet and it was all just thoroughly delicious. And I’ll stare blankly at the 3/4 left over peanut butter bagel and crumpled up juice box in her lunch box, right before plucking another hair out of her head.

Or I’ll yell CLEAN UP THIS BATHROOM THIS INSTANT and she hollers back MOM! I INTENSELY DISLIKE IT WHEN YOU VOCIFERATE SO VEHEMENTLY and I shout back WHAT DOES THAT MEAN? STOP USING BIG WORDS.

Pluck.

Pretty soon, people are going to be asking me who the cute little bald girl is and why is she living in our house?

Posted outside Helena’s classroom on Open House were monster stories written by the kids. Helena’s monster was named Dave which made me a little nervous that the story was about Zoe’s father but then we saw her drawing accompanying the story and it did not resemble Dave at all because we think it had hair.

Helena is totally loving third grade and I’m totally loving the fact that she’s loving third grade and doing so well and I’m seriously considering giving Mrs. H a kidney if she ever needs it.

And after I write this, I’m going to drop to my knees and thank God that my little snuggle bunny, whom I’ve always known to be smart as a whip, is so neat and tidy and well behaved and courteous and well-mannered outside of our home.

And then I’m calling the FBI for status on her DNA results.

.

.

Guess who forged her mother’s name on the paperwork and then ran away at seventeen to join the Navy? And got herself a degree in main propulsion engineering? And worked on some of the largest deep water oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico?

And perhaps most ballsy of all … hired a housekeeper for over a year and never told her husband?

Me!

Just kidding.

As if.

I only forged my mother’s name once, while in high school, to get out of gym class so that I could go four wheeling with an asshat whose muscles were three times bigger than his brain. My gym teacher caught me and then my mother psychologically banished me to Siberia and to this day, my frontal lobe suffers frostbite the instant I enter a school gymnasium.

I never had the chutzpah or genetic disposition to do anything cool like join the Navy. I was a self-absorbed, uncoordinated, seventeen year old rebelling the only way I knew how … in a miniskirt and four inch black patent leather heels. So even if I had tried it, I’d have probably gotten as far as the driveway before breaking both my ankles, resulting in an emergency trip to the ER where I would have met Dr. Hottie with whom I’d become totally infatuated and over whom I’d cry buckets after being discharged. From the hospital. Not the Navy since I never made it to the Navy in the first place because of my lousy DNA.

Did I mention that my entire body swam in stupid at seventeen?

To answer my own questions above … I’m talking about Jessie of Designs by Jessie. You can find her ad over there —–> in my sidebar. She’s the one offering $4 off your first order and she’s just extended the offer through the end of November! Enter CREATIVEJUNKIE4 at checkout!

I have an anal-retentive, penmanship bond with Jessie. Her children drive her nuts because they write their letters from bottom to top. My youngest drives me insane because she starts her letters out fat and then they gradually succumb to anorexia by the time she gets to the right margin.

Jessie takes the plain and ordinary and transforms it into something pretty damn good looking. I’m about to jump into a FedX box and ship myself off to her, out of sheer desperation.

.

.

This is one of her pretty camera strap slip covers. The front and the back. Don’t you love how they coordinate?

I wish my front and back were so coordinated. What the hell, Mom and Dad? Were you blind when you made me? Drunk? What?

These patterns make me feel refreshed, like someone splashed ice cold water on my face while I was in the throes of a hot flash. You know? Hot flash? When the sun decides to cop a squat in your bra for ten years?

.

Jessie’s camera strap slip covers slide right over your existing camera strap, that plain, black torture device the manufacturers include with their cameras. What they lack in imagination, they more than make up for in functional hideousness. We’ve all seen the straps, right? Those thick, mini-seatbelt looking things that hold your camera and hang from your neck and cut into your skin and give you a rash and make you scream OH MY GOD, I SHOT TWO HUMANS THROUGH MY PRIVATES, HAVEN’T I DONE ENOUGH ALREADY? SOMEONE ELSE HOLD THE DAMN CAMERA after three hours at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

My PSA for today: Don’t shriek in aquariums. It scares the fish.

Think of the manufacturer’s camera strap as an ugly ass couch with scuzzy dog hair all over it, ripped and torn, held together with duct tape and dried up mustard. Who wants to sit on that when you have a party?

But everyone will fall all over themselves to get near it if you cover it with something pretty!

Not that I’m advocating treating your camera strap like a couch. You don’t want your guests fighting over who can sit on your camera strap first, especially if it’s around your neck. That could be awkward, especially if you’re lying there dead from asphyxiation, leaving your guests to wander about aimlessly, asking out loud “Who wants to play Scattergories?”

.

They’re lined with fleece interfacing for durability and comfort. Oh, and guess what? They’re washable too. So if your neck oozes ring around the collar, or your daughter eats Cheetos and grabs your camera so she can play Ansel Adams, no problem!

Have I mentioned that I’m a sucker for polka dots? If Nate had just worn polka dots on our first date, he wouldn’t have even had to buy me dinner. Just dessert.

.

Looky, looky! Jessie can make a little pocket for your lens cap! So now, you won’t lose your lens cap when you set it down on a guard rail in order to take a shot from atop the 120 meter ski jump in Lake Placid, only to miss the shot entirely by having a myocardial infarction because your husband likes to stand at the edge of tall buildings and pretend to jump off them due to some latent Superman tendencies. It’s not until four hours later, back at the hotel, when you realize your lens cap is still perched 120 meters up in the sky and Clark Kent refuses to go back and fetch it, even though you offered him a quickie with your 17th personality, Lois Lane.

Hypothetically speaking, of course.

.

If you love the feel of softness around your neck, you can even ask Jessie to attach some plush, furry minky to one side of your strap. Personally? If I had my druthers, I’d wear nothing but minky all day every day. Unfortunately, I have kids and they absconded with my druthers a long time ago, probably burying them in the back yard somewhere, right next to my social life.

.

This is one of Jessie’s Perfect Pockets. It’s made to carry your cellphone, small camera, iPhone, iTouch, iPod and quite possibly your toddler, if she’s small boned and squishy. She can even customize it to carry your crackberry at no extra charge!

The Perfect Pocket, not your toddler. I assume you’ve taken care of all those customizations yourself.

.

.I don’t know about you, but I throw my phone into my purse where it cavorts with all sorts of sharp things like pens and keys and my favorite four pronged fork that I lost last year and recently found hiding on the floor of my car’s back seat, underneath a fossilized Christmas ham. My poor cellphone screen winds up being used as an etch-a-sketch with half its keypad stuck down by chewed-up spearmint gum and then when I try to dial my mother in North Carolina, I wind up yelling CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW? HOW ABOUT NOW? to some poor, socially challenged, agoraphobic shmuck in Idaho who just trampled over his thirty cats to answer the phone.

I could avoid that entire scenario if I had a Perfect Pocket.

.

I’m not sure what I’d do with all the free time I’d have from not scrounging around the bowels of my purse for my phone. Knit a sweater, maybe? Learn a language?

Conquer a small country? Is Liechtenstein still available?

Is Liechtenstein a country? Or a small musical instrument?

I’ll take How The Hell Did I Graduate College Suma Cum Laude for $800, Alex.

.

Hey, how many of you work at a place where you are required to wear a lanyard with a security tag around your neck?

I do!

OK. Fine. I work from home. Happy now?

But security tags make me feel important so, every once in awhile, I create one in Photoshop, print it out, laminate it, throw it around my neck, run around the house in my jammies and pretend like I actually matter. Sometimes I’ll even pretend to be really important and duct tape my cellphone to my ear just like a bluetooth and then buzz my imaginary secretary and request a lunch reservation at Le Cirque with Anderson Cooper. Around noonish.

But if I had to wear one in public? Like, officially, with actual real live people?

I’d make sure it was pretty.

Or rather, Jessie would.

.

Like these. Why the hell not? Is there a law that says lanyards have to be dull and boring, devoid of any and all personality whatsoever? I mean, what are they, Wolf Blitzer?

Sorry, Wolf. You just make it too easy. By the way, tell Anderson not to be late for lunch. I hate waiting.

.

Up for grabs:

.

Two (count ‘em, TWO ) $25 shopping sprees at Designs by Jessie!

Not just one.

Two!

That means two winners, for the mathematically challenged. Not that there’s really any math involved because I’m not a sadist, no matter what they say.

Think holiday shopping!

49 days until Christmas. Thought I’d throw that out there!

Alright, so I’m a teensy bit of a sadist. Sue me.

.

The devil’s in the details, right?

• To enter, leave a comment in this post and tell me what I’d find if I jumped into your car this instant and looked at the floor. I’ll go first … my car? I shudder to think. Get your shots updated. And bring a shovel. Maybe we’ll discover Jimmy Hoffa!
• Anyone 18 or older can enter. You young’uns – do you even know who Jimmy Hoffa is?
• Shopping sprees expire one month from winner notification.
• Winners must confirm notification within 48 hours or I’ll have to choose a substitute and then my blog schedule will be totally messed up and I’ll be cranky.
• No entries after 9:00 pm eastern time on Sunday, November 8, because that’s when I will be famished and dragging myself up to the trough for a snack. Stay back. DO NOT FEED THE ANIMAL. Unless you have a donut.
• I will use Random.org to choose the winners. Oh, it’s no problem! No problem at all! You are so welcome!
• One entry per person. Entering more than once drives me batty. And believe me, I don’t need to be driven batty. I can walk there quite easily on my own.
• My blog theme Thesis is still messing with my comment numbers. It numbers all the way to up comment #300 and then starts back at #1 again. It’s infuriating but I’m aware of it so go ahead and post your comment and don’t worry if there are duplicate comment numbers! I’ve got a handle on it!
  
• I’ll announce the winners on Monday!

.

That’s it!

Good luck!

.

.