new morning habits

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This is my dog, Junior:

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Don’t let that sweet innocent face and exposed belly fool you. This dog is a MONSTER.

Since I’ve started trying to get into this “do yoga in the mornings” habit, Junior has developed an accompanying new habit.  It’s actually a series of habits strung together into one ridiculous performance of dog fuckery the likes of which I feel few people could truly appreciate without video documentation, but I’m going to do my best to describe it to you.

Stage One (which honestly is the same basic Stage One that we had on non-yoga mornings):

Junior starts whining at about 6am.  Husband and I take turns alternately pulling blankets / pillow over our head for ten minutes at a time while the other one pets Junior and tries to soothe him back into another half hour of dozing.  It never works.

Sometimes there’s also a Stage One, Part B where-in I try to sing the song of Junior’s people back to him in an attempt to offend him so deeply that he fucks off and lets us sleep a while longer.  Again, never works.  It does have the residual bonus of being a minor husband trolling maneuver, though.  I mean, he’s never SAID he doesn’t like it…but I can infer.

Stage Two:

Resigned to my fate of eternal sleep deprivation, I claw my way out of the tangle of sheets and feel around the bedside for my glasses like a developmentally challenged raccoon feeling for a dropped morsel of food.  Once glasses have been located and placed on my face, I pick up my phone and stumble from the bedroom to the bathroom.  I can usually get about five minutes of peace at this point before the whining starts up again, assuming I’ve had the presence of mind to actually shut the bathroom door.  If I haven’t, then there’s immediate whining and, far more disconcertingly, disappointed staring.  We’re still talking about the dog at this point, by the way.  Husband knows better than to follow me into the can first thing in the morning…or ever, really.

Stage Three:

After the whining has once again reached Emergency Alert System proportions, I abandon the bathroom and stomp downstairs.  It should be noted that Junior isn’t actually whining this way because of any deep and desperate need to go outside, by the way – he’s literally just being an attention-whoring tit.  Also, this may be your first sign that my choosing not to procreate was probably the right decision.  Anyway – Stage Three culminates in me rolling out the yoga mat on the living room floor and firing up my favorite yoga video on the laptop.

Stage Four, AKA: The Pre-Trolling Warm-Up:

The pre-trolling warm-up begins with me laying down on the yoga mat to begin the practice.  While I’m on the floor trying to like, harness my chi or find my center or whatever, Junior is busy looking out the living room windows, scanning for neighbors, neighbor cats, chipmunks, birds, swirling leaves…really anything that moves in any way.  Once he inevitably spots a target, he unleashes a tirade of the shrillest yaps imaginable.  To his credit, the yaps are usually interspersed with some pretty amazing tiny-angry-Wookie noises which I do find amusing, but generally this stage ends with me picking up the nearest dog toy and chucking it at him to try and shut him up.  There are usually grumbles coming from the husband upstairs at this point as well.

Stage Five, AKA: Full On Trolling, AKA: Shit Gets Real:

Shortly after I run out of dog toy bark deterrents to chuck at Junior, Stage Five goes into full swing.  Because, you see, my dog does nothing by half measures.  Just barking and whining while I’m trying to better myself via the ancient art of yoga is simply not enough for him.  He will at this point bound off to another part of the living room where he stockpiles all of the stinky dirty socks that my husband peels off and gives to him at the end of every work day (hey, at least it’s not underpants?), and gleefully return with one of said stinky socks in his mouth.

Now, to be fair to Junior, we DO treat socks as dog toys in this house and always have, so he comes by the sock-fetching naturally enough and I have no problem with that.  However, when he takes the sock by one end, carefully orients the other end of the sock right next to my head and then proceeds to shake the ever-loving shit out of it in a manner such that it rapidly and repeatedly fwaps me DIRECTLY IN THE FACE…I tend to take that personally.

After the sock-face-fwapping, we proceed quickly to Stage Five, Part B, which is where Junior moves from above my head to somewhere near my hip and actually launches his entire 12 pound self directly into my solar plexus, quickly and effectively undoing any deep oxygenation, chi harnessing and/or muscle relaxation I have thus far accomplished.

Conveniently, this is just about when the yoga video wants me to stand up and start doing more painful movey-aroundy stuff anyway, and it’s also pretty much when my husband has finally started to wonder what the hell is going on down in the living room. He comes downstairs at this point, leashes Junior up and takes him out while I finish my yoga routine in relative peace.

"Namaste? That roughly translates to 'abuse mom with sock', right? I mean, my accent may be a little off, but I'm pretty sure that's what it means."

“Namaste? That roughly translates to ‘abuse mom with sock’, right? I mean, my accent may be a little off, but I’m pretty sure that’s what it means.”

laundro-bed

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I hate putting away laundry.

Picking up dirty laundry?  Don’t mind!

Schlepping the laundry down to the washer, switching it over to the dryer, and schlepping it back upstairs?  Don’t mind!

Putting the laundry away once it’s clean?

OMGWTFBBQ CANNOT HANDLE.

So, it all ends up in the spare room on the guest bed, aka: The Laundro-Bed:

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That bed full of laundry really ties the room together…

Sometimes I get as far as separating out my clothes and my husband’s clothes into their own piles, but that’s really about as far as I ever get in terms of taking care of any of it unless there’s the imminent threat of company coming over.  Which, let’s be honest, I’m basically a fucking hermit so those occasions are blessedly few and far between.

By sharing my laundro-bed with you, I’m attempting to take a little of the sting of shame out of it for myself and for anyone else reading this that may have a similar situation.  If putting away laundry is your jam then by all means you have my admiration, I wish you a lifetime of happy laundry-taking-care-of, and perhaps we could work out some sort of arrangement where I make you gelato and you take care of my laundry (seriously, call me)!  But, if you’re someone who has a hard time getting it done for whatever reason and you maybe mentally beat yourself up over it, I’d like to offer you a little cuddle and a reminder that not putting away the laundry is not the end of the world.  It’s not even like, the pebble that gets kicked off the side of a cliff that causes the avalanche that maybe buries some hikers.  That’s kind of dark, but you get my point, I think.  You are more than your un-done household chores.  You’re a valuable and loved person even if your guest bed is full of laundry and your t-shirts are a little bit wrinkled.

pterodactyl troll attack

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Our xBox (which is what we use to watch Netflix, among other things) has a Kinect…unit? Camera? Thing.  One of the functions the Kinect thing can do is operate the xBox via voice command.  If you say, “xBox!”, a little menu of things it can do for you (none of which involve putting away the laundry or emptying the dishwasher, much to my disappointment, but I digress), will pop up on the screen.  You can tell it to play the next episode of the show you’re watching, exit to the main menu, shut the console off, etc.

Ever since we got the xBox and Kinect thing a few years ago, my husband has been kind of fixated on the voice command feature.  He has a British accent and the xBox doesn’t always seem to pick up / understand what he’s saying…so I think part of the fixation is that he maybe wants to prove to the xBox that he is, in fact, in charge.

Now, I’m an asshole.  I like to fuck with my husband by trying to talk over him while he’s talking to the xBox because he gets all exasperated when the xBox doesn’t recognize him or doesn’t do what he tells it to do.  Consequently, any exchange he has with the xBox while I’m around usually goes like this:

Husband: “xBox!”

(xBox chimes and pops up the menu)

Husband: “Mai…”

Me, cutting him off: “xBox, nooo!”

Husband: “Main Men…”

Me: “No, xBox, noooo! Cancel, cancel!”

Like I said, I’m an asshole.  He knew this when I married him.

Anyway – so this morning, we were sitting around watching The League on Netflix before Husband had to go to work.  The last episode ended and true to form, Husband piped up with his “commanding” voice:

“xBox!”

The xBox chimed and popped up the menu. The game was afoot.

Husband: “Exit Netflix!”

Me: “Nyerrrrrrhe!”

The xBox went to the main menu.  I was going to have to try harder.

Husband: “xBox!”

Me: “WAAAHHHGGG!”

The xBox popped up its menu like an obedient little robot.

Husband: “Main Menu!”

Me, talking over him loudly: “Raaaah! No, xBox, noooo!”

The xBox didn’t respond.

Husband, louder: “MAIN MENU!”

The xBox popped to the main menu with a happy little chime.  At this point, I knew I was going to have to bust out the really big guns if I was going to win this game. I took a stealthy deep breath, readying my diaphragm. I used to be a singer – if there’s one thing I can do, it’s project my voice.

When my husband opened his mouth to give the xBox the “Settings” command, I unleashed what was later described by him as a reasonable facsimile of a pterodactyl cry.  Husband screwed his face up in the most precious display of bemusement I’ve ever seen on another human being and I just completely LOST it.  I went into one of the longest bouts of no-breath silent-wheeze laughter I’ve ever experienced.  I finally managed to claw my way out of it long enough to gasp for air only to get sucked in again just as hard because the whole time, I could hear Husband in the background STILL trying to talk to the fucking xBox!  The xBox must have picked up my wheezing gasping laughter, (possibly it’s programmed to pick up signs of bodily distress?), because it just sat there with the menu up, still waiting to be told what to do next even though Husband was booming “SETTINGS!” at it in what I can only imagine is his best impression of a British headmaster.  This, of course, made the entire thing all the more funny to me and I remained incapacitated, wracked with sobs of laughter, for a good five solid minutes after Husband had finally got the xBox to shut itself off and had stomped upstairs.

Moral of the story:  Even when pterodactyl doesn’t win, it always wins.

BA-KAAAAAAAAAHW!

chair pose can suck a d

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I signed up to do a 30 day yoga challenge with some knitting friends of mine. It’s pretty simple – you have to do at least 10 minutes of yoga a day for 30 days. It took me a couple days to find a video that worked for me, but I found one and I’ve been doing it the last couple mornings. It’s fine, except that the last pose in the routine is chair pose.

If you’re not familiar with chair pose, basically the best way to describe it is the 7th level of hell. You stand with your feet close together and stick your ass back like you’re sitting in a chair. A chair that’s NOT there. Everything in your body wants to just…sit down…but there’s nothing to sit on, so you sit-hover and grit your teeth and try to remember to breathe and hope your quads don’t explode in giant swaths of fiery doom before it’s time to stand back up.

This morning, as I was sit-hovering in chair pose, cursing the name of the instructor in the video and basically the entire country of India as well, trying to focus on my breath…suddenly, all I could think was, “chair pose can SUCK A DIIIIIIIIIIIICK!”  At first I laughed, but it wouldn’t go away so I embraced it and started chanting it in my head like a mantra. It actually ended up really helping.

I wonder if I could make Angry Yoga a thing…

that new blog smell

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It smells like freshly laundered towels, with just a hint of mild panic…

This is my new blog. I’m super good at starting things, but I’m pretty bad at continuing things, and I’m even worse at finishing them. That’s probably where this is headed, so don’t say I didn’t warn you.

My old blog, One Girl Cooks, was kind of starting to feel like a prison. I had originally set it up as a place to publish pictures of food that I had cooked, and maybe share recipes.

Except, I’m total shit at writing recipes. Seriously. I cook by feel and by smell and by sight for the most part. Plus, I seldom ever manage to actually read through an entire recipe if I’m using one (which often backfires, believe me), so I’m not sure what made me think I’d be able to harness the ADHD long enough to be able to write useful recipes.

That left me with trying to be a blog full of food porn, and that’s all well and good…but I’m not a professional photographer. I can only take as good a picture as my cell phone lets me, which granted, is better nowadays than the digital camera I had when I started out – but still. I don’t want to learn about special lighting to make my food look better. I don’t want to figure out how to style and stage plates. I also have no fucking patience whatsoever for doing all those step-by-step, “this is how I chop the cucumber – just like everyone else does, but with better lighting and a fancier knife” pictures that so many successful food blogs seem to have.

So, since I couldn’t write recipes and I didn’t want to become a part-time food photographer / stylist just so I could blog, I figured I should probably give up the ghost in terms of being a food blogger.

Which is not to say that I’m not going to post about food here. I love to cook, I love to bake, I love to share yummy things. But I’m also going to write about other stuff too. I felt like, abruptly switching to blogging about life and mental health and dirty jokes and my dog and knitting on One Girl Cooks after so many years of just writing about food would be weird, so here we are.