Because this blog is more important than any of my other jobs for no other reason than I can say what I want, when I want, with any language I want, (Hola! Coma Esta! No... not that kind of language, sillies) I'm going to get back to posting 3 times/week. Yeah for you!

Sadly for me, I feel a bit these days like the crack head Halloween decor that a neighbor kid across the street thought would be cute for the kids. Um, at six feet, with bloodied arms and a skull smaller than OJ's nuts when his last verdict was read, Franken-What-Da-Hell went head first into the trash can.

I hope this Monday finds all of you heads up, ready for Halloween, with full plans to eat healthy but who most likely will end up like me with a cauldron tummy of Twix, Snickers and Sprees followed by a Yuban chaser.

What are ya'll doing for Halloween? And what are you all being, other than your fabulous selves? Hey, it's not about what you want to be, but WHO you want to be in life, right? (Except for Halloween. And then only fun costumes cut the mustard. Who needs the Nobel Prize? I want to see a couple going as Sarah Palin and the bloody moose. Take it! I'm so not in the mood to hot glue gun antlers to Rex's computer brain.)

When you spend more time in the car than at home...

When your nap is cut short by a phone call from Stink's school about a class that he wasn't signed up for, but then he really was signed up for, but then he didn't really like so much and spent his time at the homework club "where it was quiet"...

When you've broken your pledge to not be on the computer while the kids are home, and they're still up, and you have dishes to wash and bills to pay...

When you think your RSS feeder is now working, but you still don't know the difference between the one you have, FeedBurner, Google Reader and the reason Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld made so much money on those dumb computer commercials but you acknowledge that at least Bill Gates knows his way around a feed reader...

When your life has become such that rather than drink a beer with your husband your kids saddle up to him at the end of the day watching Modern Marvels, The History of Brewing, while you compute in geek heaven next door...

It's time to put the kids to bed and crack open a cold one.

And now, yes, I'm going to age myself, but sing along with me, friends, hopefully from the comfort of your happy RSS feed:

For All You Do, This Buds For You.

PS: Stella is back with life advice. Also, want to win a $15.00 gift card? Name Karin's blog.

Happy Yom Kippur to members of the tribe out there. I hope your day was spent in peaceful prayer and your night spent stuffing your face with delicious food.

With Rex out of town, the kids and I spent the day at a friend's house that I've known since summer of second grade. (We made aprons together. Predictably, I haven't used one since.) 

She has three kids, and it's always like stepping back in time at her place. There's the garden, the compost pile, the little Halloween decorations.

She has a black cauldron near the door. Each day her kids put their excited little hands into it. Sometimes they pull out treats like tiny pencils or candy corn. Other times she puts in jello for the "eewy gross" factor. I think I've convinced her to put worms in there tomorrow.

Sadly, when I put my hand in there, neither Eric Bana's phone number nor a hundred dollar gas card fell into my palm. There's always tomorrow.
My kids managed to score a cool pencil and a Halloween coloring book. Those brats get everything.

Tonight we had a "break fast" dinner at my next door neighbor's home from childhood. I've known her since I was six. Now, close to forty, I still call her family members by their formal names: Aunt L, Uncle N and Grandma. My kids ate their brisket, held hands through a traditional Hebrew prayer, didn't bounce the brussel sprouts off the china (didn't eat them either), and managed to not push over the twelve foot high green glass artwork in their dining room. I was proud.

What I'm not proud of was an email I received from Stink's sweet kindergarten teacher today asking if he was sick since he was missing from school. Huh? Turns out today was NOT a holiday from school. I have got to get my act together. I was doing so well up until now. (bam bam bam... head hitting desk. ow... moving on..)

I have also got to figure out how to work everyone's Google readers so that the right website is reflected. MN was kind enough to shoot me an email with advice, so be patient. Or at least relieved. You have a few days of respite before I start infiltrating your boxes with spam of the Zoloft kind.

Until Monday, Happy New Year, Happy Economy (God willing) and a lovely weekend off to you!

PS: Stella will be posting again soon. Stay tuned.

* Photo of a shofar - a horn that is blown at the end of High Holiday services. I was thinking of calling the title of this post "A real blow job" but that seems a bit sacrilegious. I also figure I'd look a bit more classy if I put that in small print.

My mom's birthday was September 29. In the Land of Good Intentions section of my pee brain, I drove over in a clean car, wielding presents of frankincense and mir (wait, that's a different story... sorry).

In addition to my lovely fantasy of gifts and cleanliness, I offered her a fish plate from Jerry's Famous Deli (her favorite), followed by a black and white cookie, topped off with a steaming cup of Yuban with non-fat milk. In the Frenzied Land of Two Kids-I'm Working-I'm a Crappy Daughter reality I live in, I just phoned her.

While in some ways I feel guilty that I wasn't there on the actual day, overall I don't feel too bad. My mom is not passive aggressive. If she wanted me to throw a fiesta with Trapper John MD look-a-like strippers and Doritos, she'd have said so. Instead, good ole Grandma Nancy told me to come on a day that we could really be in the moment and enjoy it.

And so yesterday, after dropping Stink at school, Pip and I picked up my mom and went out for an Italian lunch at Maggianos. (I love that place. For a chain restaurant, it's such a cozy, warm atmosphere. Frank Sinatra would have been so happy there, booking his next Vegas gig and cheating on his wife. Ah, those were the days.) 

Despite being some what relaxed, I can't say I was 100% in the present. I was thinking about work and politics and am I really making a difference on the planet or should I go away from the internet world and live my own little quiet life?

But the flipside for an artist like myself is that if I never wrote my brain would spin more dramatically than it already does. What's the balance? I mean, are we living our lives so much in cyberspace that we forget to be good neighbors, friends and family members? And yet, to ignore the big bad internet dinosaur would be a shame. After all, there's power in monsters - we simply have to learn to tame the beast. Translation: Set boundaries.

I asked my mom, now 78, how she felt about technology. She had the wisdom to say that in her day people were seperated by the cities they lived and were isolated. God forbid you got pregnant at 16 or didn't have the same thoughts as everyone else in your town - you were considered totally wacky. And then we all got more advanced and started to connect through the computer and could find others who felt and lived like we did - even, God forbid, made mistakes! But now, we're back to being isolated in our tiny little bubbles once again. She hopes that people will swing back to the middle again.

It's amazing how forgetting your mother's present, but listening to her talk about living in the present, can turn out to be the best gift there is.


 

Let's hope my second attempt at launching this new website gives me an expression happier than Pip's self-portrait.

Want to comment just to see if everything works and make me your best internet bloggy friend? Click on the green comment section above.

Don't be shy with criticism. Like the economic state of our country, I can use all the help you can give. And I promise, in the future, my press releases will be a hell of a lot funnier, not to mention positive.

For now, I'll leave you with the conversation I just overheard. My kids are in the kitchen, sitting on the counter. eating meatballs and probably sucking in bacteria even though, "We washed our hands! We swear!"

Pip: (singing)  "Head, shoudlers knees and toes, knees and toes... Head--"

Stink: "Pipsqueak, I want to tell you--"

Pipsqueak: "Stop it, Stink! (mad about the interruption)  You're erupting me!"

Stink: But I wanted to say I love you.

Pipsqueak: Oh. That's okay then.