And I Get Extra Points for Knowing the Anarchy Symbol

Question: What do you do when your eight-year-old daughter desperately needs you to write COOL, RAD, WICKED, and HOT in red paint on her black pants for Carnaval?

And you've just thrown out the half-empty pot of red paint and packed all the brushes? Because, hey, when's the last time somebody used those? And we're moving.

And you don't have red nail polish, because you're not that kind of girl? (No lipstick either.)

Answer: You use red hair dye. You know, the little squishy tubes for Halloween pizzazz. (Because that's in the hall, and you haven't packed the hall yet. Procrastination has its benefits.)

Only, even after it dries, it rubs off onto your fingers. (Where, paradoxically enough, it steadfastly remains, despite lots of water and soap and scrubbing. We should have gone straight for her legs.)

So you grab the hairspray (which you DO have, because you had that $%!@# fancy wedding back in September, and which is NOT packed, because your ten-year-old son wants to tease his hair into a furball for his Carnaval costume). A nice thick layer of that stuff, and Punkerbaby Eight's good to go. 

Go ahead, say it: Kisa, baby, you so creative. You so smart. You so resourceful.

Dead Rooster is a Dead Man

...because he just made me go join Twitter. Made me. 

I have been valiantly resisting the Twitter temptation. Not lickin' the icing on that cake. Not dippin' my toes into that pool. No, sirree. I have enough to distract me.

But he made it sound so inviting. So interesting. So yummy. 

Who knew he was a dealer?

So watcha back, Roosterboy. I might just snarf up so much Twitter you wish you'd never mentioned it. Tweet tweet tweet tweet......

Discontinuity

Packing boxes. A photo of my eldest daughter. On the back, "2004." 

How would her life have been different if she'd known then she had only three more years to live? Known that, at thirteen, three-quarters of her life was behind her?

What a gaping chasm between 2004 and 2009. Continuity smashed. Four innocent numbers scrawled on the back of a photograph. Not so long ago, and yet infinitely remote. It was a different universe then.

Streaming Eggos of Consciousness

So I was over at Jenny's blog and she said something about Eggos. (Which are prefab round freezer waffles, for my European readers.) 

So I thought about making a Lego sculpture of an Eggo. You know, because "Leggo my Eggo!" (Which was the catchy jingle for Eggo commercials back when I was a kid, for my European readers. Children and grownups alike would tug-of-war over who got to eat the last Eggo.)

Which, I'm thinking, is a really good jingle. Some advertising guy did great work there. I hope he got rewarded for his brilliance. Because a lot of jingles are crap, but this one's good.

Except, I suddenly realize, any mother of two with Eggos in the house could have coined it without wiggling a single brain cell. You can't even say she coined it, really. Just witnessed it. And some advertising jerk got paid for it!

Unless the advertising jerk was a mother of two. Or a father of two who handled the breakfasts back in the 70s. Which totally makes him awesome. So he can have his accolades back. Great jingle, man.

Bright Dorona Painty Whalen Slugs

We're finished painting. (I'll let you guess how much paint fumage we inhaled getting there; the post title should give you some idea.) Well, finished except for the dabs of white we need to strategically place to cover overenthusiastic roller swipes in apple green, brilliant teal, and firepower orange.

The real painters are finished, too. And for the entire living room and kitchen including ceiling, they took about a tenth of the time it took us to do less square footage. Their stuff looks better, too. That's why they're painting professionals, and we're painting slugs. Painting earthworms. Better than painting ameobae, but hardly at the top of the food chain.

But none of that matters, because we get to live in the house.

In other, utterly unrelated news that is not in fact news, but more a What I Was Thinking On The Drive Home morsel, because I know you've been wondering what I think about during our now-weekly trek across the vast, monotonous sea of carsitting miles oh, wait, we're in Europe kilometers between our old house and our new house: 

<gasps for air> 

Katharine Whalen would have been a good second choice for Gare du Nord 's song "Marvin and Miles." But Dorona Alberti definitely sings its socks off. Turns out Dorona's the daughter of the woman who owns the bed and breakfast in Maastricht that The Hubster and I slept in on our mad, mad weekend away a few months ago.

I first heard Katharine sing on the Squirrel Nut Zippers album The Inevitable. The second track, "Danny Diamond," came on, and I was mesmerized. I thought, "This is the best female voice since Billie Holiday." Opened the CD case, and there was Katharine. I know Katharine. We hung out with the same folks when we were in our late teens in Chapel Hill. Went to the same parties. Did the same drugs. Well, I did some drugs. Don't know about Katharine.

Let Katharine drop your jaw singing the first 30 seconds of Danny Diamond (sorry, folks, I couldn't find a video) (click on the "Play Song" link under the album image)

The Neverending Day

Which is not as magical as The Neverending Story. No, it's pretty much filled with drool and poop and whining, and it begins at the decidedly unmagical hour of 5 AM. It's not even 11:30 yet, and already it's neverending. Neverending at less than halfway! This is going to be the most neverenderingest day I've ever had.

And of course, it's the day The Hubster is off gallivanting around Germany, visiting some silly old client and probably having catered lunch.

Speedybuns Zero loves me, which I know because he wants me to be with him every single second. If I stop translating long enough to collapse near him on the sofa, he beams at me and speeds back and forth, showing off his new one-hand technique and occasionally going for the no-hand-three-step. It's the beaming at me that has kept us both alive this neverending morning. 

My head will be in my spaghetti at dinnertime. I just hope the elder children will be gentle when they drag me to the sofa. And wipe off my face before it stains the leather.

Being Wrong About This Would Be Vastly Preferable

When Hot Pink Jellybean got brain cancer, I read everything I could find on the Web about glioblastoma multiforme (GBM). Research data. Complicated technical papers. Personal stories. And I drew a mind-numbingly obvious conclusion: this illness is the kiss of death. Pretty much nobody survives it, even those whose surgery removes all visible traces of tumor. Hot Pink Jellybean couldn't even have surgery to remove hers. She was almost certainly going to die.

Though median survival with treatment is fourteen months, there are people who've survived GBM for a few years. People who got well enough, for long enough, that they looked toward the future, had more babies. People whose scans were clean for six months, a year, two years. But every time, the cancer came back. And when it did, treatment failed spectacularly. Decline was swift, and relentless.

Amid the many stories of death, I found one hopeful work-in-progress on the Web. She's now three years out since her GBM diagnosis, two years without tumor progression. I've been rooting for her since I first found her blog in late 2006, a year after she heard the news (and days after we'd gotten Hot Pink Jellybean's). I still check in from time to time to see how she's faring (skimming over the right-wing religious prose). Today I found this, dated January 13:

Today's MRI showed a couple of areas that warrant further review. It could be nothing, or it could be slight growth.

This is how it starts, the final decline. I've seen it all over the Web. I would love to be wrong--and maybe I will be--but I can't help being realistic. She now has a snowball's chance in hell of surviving GBM.

(The photo: Hot Pink Jellybean, halfway through radiation and chemotherapy, and Divagirl Six.)

Not Dead! Just Busy Packin' & Paintin'

...and translating, of course. Speedybuns Zero is home this week, back at the g-parents' next week while his father is off gallivanting around some silly trade show in Barcelona. Leaving me to finish packing everything we own in our last week before the move. Because, yeah, we're still behind on that.

Speaking of Speedybuns Zero, he's started walking. At ten and a half months, that makes him our fastest baby yet. Hot Pink Jellybean walked at ten and a half months, too, but she came two weeks late, so Speedybuns Zero is technically six weeks ahead of her.

In our three-day weekend, we got the mud room brightly yellowed and the white walls and ceilings in the kids' rooms painted. The newly sanded and varnished living room floor looks great. We left two builder guys (technical term) busily dividing the attic into two rooms; they finish today. Yesterday, a wall guy (yo, I'm full of technical terms) redid two living room walls that had nasty cracky gashy places. 

Friday we head back; Saturday we paint the kids' colored walls (apple green for Divagirl Eight; teal blue for Deep Thoughts Ten; happy orange for Speedybuns Zero; these colors coordinate with the wall stickers the kids are getting, and oh yes, you'll be seeing photos when we're all done). Far too early Sunday morning, painters will come paint the living room and kitchen walls. The Hubster jets off to Barcelona early Sunday afternoon, and the older kids and I will be chauffeured home by The World's Best Grandfather.

(That's the view out Divagirl Eight's window. Hardly blurry at all for an iPhone photo, no? From the bottom of the photo, that's our street; some grass; a bike path; playground areas; a decorative span of water; the houses on the other side.)

I Wish I Had Weird Al for a Brother

Because he's an absolutely brilliantly talented parodyv...what's the male version of vixen? Vax? Yes, a brilliantly talented parodyVAX. (Yep, I mean it that way. Geek background bleeding through.)

And then when he married Venetian Princess, I'd get to go to the wedding, and she'd be my new sister, and I would be totally forever supplied with brilliant parodies. Especially of family holidays.

Anyhooooo... Here's the latest Weird Al concotion I've imbibed. And this. Thanks to Karen for the tip.

A Few Mental Tidbits for Your Wednesday Morning Coffee Break

According to Jennifer 8. Lee, Chinese food is the Linux of American cuisine.

I'd never seen her in action, so I had no idea that Martha Stewart actually fabulously, enormously complicates what used to be fun activities. I thought she just, you know, baked a mean cookie and had a way with fabrics.

If you don't already know the brilliantly talented parodyvixen Venetian Princess, give her a whirl. (And yes, I freely admit I may be the last person on Al Gore's Superhighway to discover her.)

Thanks to The Hubster and Deborah for letting me in on the first two tidbits.

Dang, This House Looks Reeeeeeeeally Small Now Blues

The Hubster and I closed on our new house yesterday. Yep, pretty darn over-the-moon gleeful. It's an hour and a half away from our current house, so we spent a few hours floating around, turning faucets on and off, admiring views out windows, and basically grinning like idiots. Then we headed back .... home. Is it still home?

Divagirl Eight and Deep Thoughts Ten got to scope out their new school and new classes yesterday, which was a godsend. They're both feeling like this move may no longer be a descent into the underworld. The Hubster and I were quite impressed with the school, too, which is very good, since we love the kids' current school nearly as much as I love chocolate.

Speedybuns Zero is hanging out with his grandparents the rest of the week, so I can catch up on translation work and pack a zillion boxes for the move. (Yeah....we're kinda behind on that.) The Hubster hopes to dig out from under his inbox. A floor guy (technical term) is, at this very moment, sanding and revarnishing the living room floor. 

Friday evening we head back ... home. A weekend painting and installing no-babies-gonna-die-here-from-electrocution-or-cleaning-fluids-or-stair-tumbling stuff. A weekend grinning like idiots. And then we're only two weeks away from grinning twenty-four seven.