Ah, the memories. And the column!

When I was a kid, my brothers and sisters called me “Bess The Mess, The Big Fat Pest.” My mom, when she yelled at me, called me “Old Lady Number 38.” (Something about a train that ran past my Grandma Bessie’s house when SHE was a kid and they called it that and somehow it has been handed down as some sort of insane version of being called by your full name. Or something.)

But chewing out a bunch of kids has its own rhythm and cadence, which translates easily into other arenas, as demonstrated in this month’s Mom, Interrupted.

I swear, I thought this would be comedy gold.

When I started the No Sugar Initiative, I was certain that it would be comedy fodder for the next month.

I envisioned sugar withdrawal. I envisioned night sweats. I envisioned a methadone program.

I most emphatically did not envision this: “eh.”

One of the reasons I embarked on the NSI is that I desperately needed something to control, as my eating was anything BUT controlled. So I eliminated, not all carbs, but at least all obvious forms of sugar.

I’m not limiting anything else. I’m not worried about points. I’m just not eating sugar.

So far, this has been a non-event. A kid made cake the other night, and I did have to curb the habitual “Cake? There’s cake? Give me half!” response. When I looked in the fridge I saw a slim fast and thought, “Oh, I could have that!” and then thought, “Eh, not so much.”

I did get a little irked when the vending machine at work quit stocking pistachios. But I coped with the peanuts. Until they quit stocking *them.*

Ok, there was, indeed, a bit of a hostage crisis when all that was left was trail mix with m&ms mixed in.

But all in all, not so bad. While the point of the whole process wasn’t weight loss so much as self-control, I will weigh myself at the one-week mark and let you know what I did.

That pesky little bugger sure causes a lot of trouble.

Who knew how much havoc 12 atoms of carbon, 22 of hydrogen, and 11 of oxygen could wreak?

We’re almost two days into the No Sugar Inititiative and I’d say it’s been a piece of cake, except I’m not allowed to have that.

I don’t feel incredibly different. I haven’t had to resist anything, though I have looked at certain foods in the pantry and thought, “HEY! I could have that!” only to remember the NSI and look away.

I’m sure there’s still time for a trainwreck, though. Stay tuned for a post some midnight hour, promising to sell my soul for a Ho-Ho.

Huh. I guess sex addicts go through the same thing.

A spoonful of you-know-what helps the medicine go down…

It all started with this month’s Mom, Interrupted.

I really do love my m&ms. But over time, I have become increasingly aware that, every time I eat them, even a sensible amount (and no, by ’sensible’ I do not mean ‘one pound bag’) I find myself feeling…not right.

And so I decided that, in honor of this month’s column, I will make a public attempt to not eat any sugar for an entire month. That’s October 5, 2008, at 12:42 p.m.

Not that I’m counting or anything.

But I’ll pop back by to let you know how it’s going.

The One Where The Entire World Has Gone Off Its Nut.

Please tell me that Timothy Noah is reaching here. Please tell me that it’s some sort of parody. Satire. Three Stooges.

Anything but what it looks like, which is that he really means that if you say someone is ’skinny’ you’re using a code word for ‘of color.’

Because if ’skinny’ = ‘African-American,’ does that mean ‘fat’ is a code word for ‘Caucasian’?

I sure hope Timothy Noah didn’t mean *that,* because if he did I’m gonna haul my fat white rear end down to Slate and complain.

I am officially moved.

They moved me! Mom, Interrupted is now featured on the first Wednesday of every month, and so for your reading pleasure, here it is.

Am I the only one…

who watches this commercial and keeps hoping that the young woman will slam past that obnoxious twerp and whack him over the head with a hot iron?

I mean, I understand that it’s important to have good credit. I know how hard it would be to marry someone and discover after the fact that they have crappy credit. But to treat your beloved’s credit score like it’s a dealbreaker certainly implies that your decision-making regarding matrimony is maybe a touch too banker and not enough lover.

If it’s really the person whom you cannot live without, can’t you work to repair his or her credit prior to the wedding?

Cue the iron.

 

©     E.S. Evans 2008

Now I get it: I’m living in a Twilight Zone episode.

One thing that’s really fun about having kids is watching them experience things for the first time that are old hat to you. Disneyland. “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.” Snow.  That kind of thing.

My thirteen year old son discovered Twilight Zone reruns in July, 2007, when some cable channel ran a marathon over Independence Day weekend. He was enchanted, and it was fun to watch him mesmerized by the story lines and astounded by the conclusions, most of which are so old hat and cliched to us decrepit oldsters that we use Zone synopses to describe situations: “You know what I mean! It’s like Burgess Meredith with his glasses broken!”

We’re still wading through the recordings of the July, 2008 marathon and last night watched a classic: Little Girl Lost. The boys were entranced! Where is the girl? What if the dog gets lost, too? Can I make my own voice come out of the TV set?

I was entranced, too, only now I was looking at this through different eyes…If I went upstairs and couldn’t find a kid, I would assume that he or she was stuck under a carton of engineered hardwood flooring. Who do you call, by the way, when you can HEAR your child but not see her? The police? The fire department comes to mind, but they’d probably rip down all the drywall. I can see calling a trusted neighbor, but would it occur to me to call a physicist?

I would hope that my child, if he rolled under his bed and into the Twilight Zone, would think of something creative to say or do, as opposed to the piteous bleating that Bettina Miller cranked out. I do know that if we sent Elmer The Basset Hound in after her he would NOT retrieve the girl but would instead wreak such havoc that the denizens of The Fourth Dimension would probably declare war on us and hilarity would ensue.

And what does finding another dimension in the second bedroom do to your property values? Is this a detriment or an advantage? “Who cares if the house only has one bathroom? It has an extra dimension!” Who needs a swingset when there’s a cool place where everyone is upside down just on the other side of your wall?

A sticky situation, certainly.

My mom read the column published Friday in the Ahwatukee Foothills News and promptly emailed me to say, “So I take it that the floor is done.”

 

Well, no.

 

It would be reaching to say I have any skill in laying hardwood floor at all. It took me several days to lay five rows of wood, and most of my sessions ended with me standing in the garage scraping glue off various tools while I cried, muttering, “I suck” over and over and making sure the dog hadn’t been cemented to the floor.

 

To be fair, this was more than I signed up for. I originally wanted Pergo or some similar photographed laminate product. You install it over an underlayment, no glue.

 

But my husband checked with a neighbor who is a professional contractor, and he recommended engineered hardwood to improve the added value to our house. (Though I have to admit, resale value is the last thing I care about now; mostly I just want to flee, screaming, into the night and pretend I’ve never even SEEN this house.)

 

OK, engineered hardwood it is. Found a smoking deal. But the salespeople and anyone else I talked to said, “Glue.” Better for noise, not so good for application.

 

The problem is this: this is way beyond my skill level. I should not do this. We should do something else, like set fire to the second floor and do that ‘flee, screaming’ thing. But I had already pulled up all the carpeting in the one bedroom and thrown it away by the time we figured this out. And there is no way I can afford to pay someone to do it.

 

Ooops.

 

But my husband came to my rescue when he found out that I was standing in the garage crying and muttering. He is much more experienced at construction than I. While I initially mocked his “Anal Retentive Carpenter” routine (similar to this “Anal Retentive Chef” routine that the late Phil Hartman popularized) it turned out that scraping up all your glue as you worked really speeds things up.

So now I’m relegated to apprentice. I pick out lengths of wood for the next run. I hand the cute carpenter his gear. I mop up glue. I cut wood. (Brave man, my husband, to teach me how to use a table saw. In the last piece I cut, I almost set fire to it with the saw.)

And we’re making progress. Where it took me several days to lay two rows of wood, he is banging one out every ten minutes. We might have the room done in a couple of days. And then only two more bedrooms, a loft, and the stairs to go.

Oh, man. Better keep me away from the table saw for a while.

I haven’t been interrupted in a while.

Or rather, I’ve been interrupted too many times, hence the absence. Without further ado, this month’s Mom, Interrupted, as seen in the Ahwatukee Foothills News.