Tomorrow!

Styro's coming to see me tomorrow. I could only be more beside myself with excitement if my friend Styro were coming to... WAIT!

Since most of our ten-day schedule consists of binge drinking, the majority of my preparations have revolved around making sure my toilets are clean and huggable. Although I did also print her a perky little business card that reads "Hi, my name is Styro! I live at [address]! If you call [number] someone will come and get me shortly. I apologize if I've been a drunken inconvenience or if I've sullied your coat." Yeah. And I had the card laminated because it's entirely possible she'll have to refer to it on more than one lost occasion. It's wash-n-wear. I'm just that good a hostess.

In light of the fact that Styro is going to need some consistent place to lay her head down after all the poison, it became increasingly necessary to complete the "the office to no, like an ACTUAL OFFICE" room transition. Not because I'm ashamed to have a bunch of random six-year-old crap lying around, not because I'm embarrassed that there's an entire room at the back of the house we'd rather deny than clean out, but because I'm sincerely concerned that my friend might very well suffocate in there. Even standing up. And don't quote me, but I'm almost positive we don't have "Friend to Obscene Yarn Blanket Suffocation" coverage on our homeowners'. I'll ask Randy but I'm pretty sure.

OFFICIAL "TOTN,LAAO" SCHEMATIC:

STEP 1: Go to IKEA.

STEP 2: Remind Randy, the king of going IN the OUT door, that there's a whole showroom upstairs, you don't have to select what you want from the fucking identical brown box warehouse.

STEP 3: Find a reasonably-sized desk.

STEP 4: Find a reasonably-sized bookcase.

STEP 5: Tear up aisle and bin number of reasonably-sized bookcase when you happen upon The Bookcase Of Your Dreams. Celebrate when you learn that there's one in stock, that the Library of Congress didn't take them all.

STEP 6: Purchase all of the above; get boxes inside house.

STEP 7: In a clandestine move to thwart his insurance carrier, Randy has surprise rotator cuff surgery. Again. While theatrically flipping the end-of-the-year bird to Blue Cross / Blue Shield (with a humbly reconstituted right arm, thank you) he succeeds in simultaneously flipping it to me, the girl with a newly blanketless (read: harmless) room full of brown IKEA boxes, and apparently no helpers.

I guess the Library of Congress must maybe hire a guy or something, because assembling this bookshelf was a goddamned algebraic equation. I don't know that for a fact because I failed algebra twice, but since algebra's the one with all the angles and the shelves and the books and shit I took a pitiful conjecturer's stab. Anyway. I got it all together. And though Randy fundamentally knows that putting me in charge of assembling a room full of IKEA furniture is tantamount to asking me to teach my parents how to configure a wireless network, I reckon the Vicodan must have eased his structural mind. And also eased his sense of allowable style, since I seem to have buzzed in this shelf under his aesthetic decorum radar.

Oh yes. It's a Day of the Dead shelf. Dia de los Muertos, as I understand it. A whole shelf. That's a devil chicken artfully -- and evilly-- suspended by a picture hook. And some bobble-headed skeleton sunbathers consolidated with some pale bony ballet dancers. Think it's tasteless? Well, go sit in the family room then, dick. See what kind of relief that brings****.

Given that this gigantorm shelf was designed to carry the weight of many, many historical American documents, however, and given that I have the rudimentary building skills of a Yoplait yogurt cup, Randy understandably had a couple of structural integrity questions.

"So you screwed the bracket on?"

"Well yeah. Do you see a bracket leftover anywhere?" [ Scan room for anything immediately unrecognizable, i.e.; apparently a "bracket"]

"And you secured the bracket into...."

"The... bookshelf."

"Right. But you secured it to..."

"The... bookshelf."

"Right. But the other end. You screwed that into...."

"The chair? Or no, the desk!"

"The wall."

"Well obviously the wall, doy."

No. Not the wall. How? How would I... nevermind. You don't have degrees in algebra.

So really my only point here was to give Styro a heads up; you're gonna want to move that cot I set up for you in the office up against the far wall. Or into the hallway. And possibly out into the yard, I don't know. Maybe when you get here you can do the algebraic algorithm and figure it out for sure. My parents can help; they're currently working with a wireless network made up of thirteen large paperclips, an infrared mouse and a tangerine. So they've got time.

**** P.S. A shot of a shelf in the family room. Hey, and FYI? Some kind of bitey spider is breeding in the couch, I don't know. Just don't lie down. And if you accidentally lie down, don't for the love of God fall asleep.

Dinner was wafflasagna.

My laptop's broken. It can't seem to make it over the "Windows loading" screen hump. Holding the power button down and shutting it off mid-whir and then restarting it thirty-eight times didn't work, so my expertise is officially tapped. I'll make due with the desktop, I guess, but it sure is a shitload heavier on my legs.

It's been a fairly productive holiday. This morning I was relaxing at the breakfast table enjoying a cup of tea, waiting for Randy to finish whipping up Belgian waffles for seven people, when I announced to the room at large that I'd decided to spend the afternoon making Christmas cookies. The kids looked excited for about a tenth of a second before their eyes went slack with skepticism. They clearly doubted that I would follow through. Just because I didn't string up the Christmas lights this year. Or hang up the wreath. Or get a Christmas tree. Or buy anyone a present.

Or, as it turns out, bake any cookies.

No one bought my Leftover Frosted Christmas Waffles as valid holiday baked goods. Everybody's a cynic.

I did go hiking with my dad at South Mountain, though. We made plans to head out about seven so I rolled up around noon thirty. I've been a little lax this (seventeen) month(s) about exercise (most recently evidenced this afternoon by the number of "Wish You Were Here" postcards my ass received from the couch) and my dad has justifiably been distracted from his workout regimen lately, so at least we were on the same fitness page. Page one. Or maybe the title page.

We had just started out and I, bleakly encouraged by the fact that my legs didn't fall off when they realized there was no pantry up ahead, began boldly making future hiking plans.

"There's a beautiful trail over in the Superstitions," I said. (I sort of said. I gasped.) "But it's like ten miles long. So before we try that we really need to make sure we..."

"Pack extra chocolate," my dad finished.

"Exactly," I said. (I wheezed. I choked.)

After that I just answered "Yeah" to everything he said because it was the only word I could squeeze out my nose. It was too hard to talk with my mouth stuffed with trail-waffles.

Phhhhfffft.

If you inexplicably find yourself awake with your boyfriend's kids at midnight, don't be a hero, just take their word for it: you cannot eat six Saltines in under a minute.

P.S. Your bedtime is 10:30 for a reason, Pastemouth.

Hey, the floors are clean! It must be Easter!

What's better than clean bedsheets? Around here I like to wash our sheets regularly, on a solid schedule. That way we have something to look forward to.

And that way we also know when it's Christmas.

I opened the advent calendar today and a tiny chocolate box of detergent fell out.

Gettin' close!

I Forgot About Conner.

Yesterday I finally used a gift certificate for a mani/pedi I'd been sitting on-- I've been stockpiling cuticle for about seven months and I figured it'd be an easy way to lose a quarter-pound before the holiday push. So I'm sitting there in the chair, apologizing about the hangnail situation and lamenting Christmas preparation when the manicurist looked me dead in the eye and asked, "Do you have kids?"

And without so much as a rogue blink I answered, "Yes."

"Oh, well, you have to pull out all the Christmas stops, then."

This was strange for two reasons:

1) I do not, in point of fact, have any children.

2) I do, in other point of other fact, have the maternal instinct of a twenty-two year old frat boy. Seriously. A friend told me she was pregnant last week and my gut impulse was to put an arm around her shoulders and ask if she needed a ride home from the clinic. And it's not that I don't like children, it's just that my uterus is a barren minefield full of quicksand and lice. That's all.

And yet I spent the subsequent few minutes sputtering painfully about my two kids, Matthew and Annie. Interesting to note that I used the names of Sean and Julia McNamara's kids on Nip/Tuck, and while I'm not exactly sure how that sordid detail breaks down, for the sake of argument let's go ahead and assume the absolute worst.

In the car on the way home I started thinking about how I'd answered the kid question in the affirmative almost without thinking, and I wondered whether my unconscious was trying to tell me that I wanted to have children of my own after all. Maybe my uterus was sweeping the broken glass shards under the mat; maybe my eggs were no longer gagged and duct taped in the ovary trunk but were hanging out in the tubes again.

When I got home I forced Randy through my suspicions. I mean, could it be that I really wanted a baby and just didn't know it?

"Naaaah, Sweetie," he admonished, trying to scarf down the last of the Crunch n' Munch before I could figure out the box was almost empty. "You're just a sociopathic liar."

I slapped myself in the forehead. "That makes so much sense!" I said. "For starters, it completely explains why I spoke with a French accent the whole time."

"And why you're wearing a S.W.A.T. Team uniform," he added stickily.

Get back in that trunk, you eggs.