cranky pixels

I’m not one to follow celebrity gossip* but this was so silly it caught my eye:

Backstage at the Teen Choice Awards, host Jessica Simpson, 26, asked presenter Britney Spears if she could kiss her pregnant belly. “Hell no!” responded Spears, 24. Says a witness, “Jessica was really insulted, but Britney refused to let her do it.”
-Us Weekly Blog

I’m sorry – is kissing pregnant women’s bellies something we have to deal with now? As though strangers wanting to touch you and asking intrusive questions about your reproductive bits isn’t weird enough? Then again, Britney did tongue-kiss Madonna, so maybe this is just how they communicate in Hollywood. With kissing. And tongues.

I need to go rinse my brain out now.

*Oh wait, that’s not true at all.

technorati tags:britney spears, jessica simpson, pregnant, hollywood, weird

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Either the morning staff at Safeway are obscenely helpful or I looked particularly lost today. Everyone I passed asked me if I needed help. Conversely I am at my least sociable before I have had my coffee, and I wanted nothing – nothing! – more than to gather my purchases and go home so that I could caffeinate.

The butcher was stocking the shelves in the lunchmeat section, where I had for some reason decided to go. I don’t typically eat luchmeat, you see, because I am a delicate flower and lunchmeat is full of additives. (Yet I will eat Hostess cupcakes. I am a multi-faceted girl.) But I had a craving for a ham and cheese omelet, and where there is lunchmeat, there is ham.

Also, there was butcher. I tried to  avoid making eye contact, but he made a point of talking to me.

“We’ve got some really great sales over here,” he said, gesturing to the Butcher’s Block stuff.

“Um,” I said.

“This is really good lunchmeat,” he told me.

I floundered. “Are there nitrates in the ham?”

“I don’t think so. Here, check for yourself.” He handed me the package.

A quick scan revealed that there are indeed nitrates, but I was now holding the ham and desperate to extricate myself. “I’m sure it will be fine. Lovely. Thank you for your help!” I tossed the ham into my basket and fled.

Now I have a package of Butcher’s Block ham that, the more I think about it, the less I am inclined to consume. There is gristle! And fat! And nitrates! I might put some in an omelet, but I make no promises. Good thing Not So likes ham!

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A note to parents with teething babies: do not give your child your cell phone to chew on “just for a second” while you finish typing a blog entry. I know, he wants the phone, and it’s a flip phone so it’s not like he can hurt anything, right?

Oh, how wrong you are. And in a related note, baby drool? Highly corrosive. So even after you (hypothetically, of course) disassemble and leave your phone to dry overnight, it will still exhibit entertaining behaviors such as powering down when you try to charge it. If you had given it to your baby. Which of course you would not.

I should have a new phone in a few days. Until then, I hear smoke signals are a good means of communication.

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Thingamababy made me cry this morning talking about an organization I’d never heard of but now support wholeheartedly: Bikers Against Child Abuse. No matter how big or imposing a child’s abuser might be, an entire gang of bikers outside the door? Gonna go a long way to making the kid feel protected.

Of course, that also requires other adults in the child’s life who are willing to step up and take measures to remove said child from the abusive situation. But that’s another rant, for another day.

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We put our mattress on the floor last night. There’s nothing wrong with the bed frame; we just finally stopped fighting the fact that we cosleep. In some ways it’s a relief: we’re attachment parenting! But in other ways it’s almost depressing: we’re attachment parenting. We have actually disassembled our bed to accomodate our child. ::insert crunchy-granola child-rearing anecdote of your choice::

The hope is that this will make it easier to transition Happy Fun Baby to his own sleeping area. We sleep on a relatively small bed. It’s full-sized, which Not So always insisted on. “We don’t need anything bigger! We like each other!” He doesn’t say this anymore, of course. I kindly refrain from reminding him that the small bed was his choice more than twice a month, even though there is an I-told-you-so factor I could cash in on. I am nothing if not magnanimous.

Having the mattress on the floor has already had benefits. I no longer worry about the baby falling out of bed, which significantly reduces my nighttime anxiety. Not So and I can actually cuddle, which is just so nice I can’t even describe it (because we do like each other, no matter what size bed we have). And in the morning I can let the baby crawl around while I get a wee bit of extra sleep. All these things are of the good.

On the other hand, my parents coslept with a mattress on the floor when I was a baby (although I think that was more pragmatic than dogmatic, since we were poor, and bedframes – not to mention cribs – were expensive). I don’t intend to do everything differently from my parents. For example, they ate food. I also eat food. But it does make me think twice.

It’s depressing to have a mattress on the floor, but I have my fingers crossed that this will make our sleep situation into something reasonable. I mean, there’s cranky, and then there’s cranky. Lack of sleep doesn’t do well with me.

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Baby is crying. I “wasted” his naptime doing dishes and scrubbing the stove (which still isn’t completely clean, but it’s better), so now I’m trying to make lunch while he wails. Also, my shoulder hurts. Does anyone have any clever home remedies for a pulled muscle/pinched nerve? Yes, heat, I know, but I’m out of heat packs and it huuuuuuurts.

In other news, we’re meeting with an agent today to get business insurance. I’ve never done anything remotely like this before. I feel so grown-up. The whole “starting a business” thing is kind of foreign to me…I’ve always been a fly-by-the-seat-of-her-pants kind of girl, and all of this official stuff is somewhat daunting. I am using a lot of modifiers. Does that mean I’m nervous?

We got the design site up, finally, so at least people have a place to see our portfolio while we’re getting the main couldbe studios site up and running. And there’s a desk in the office. Yay!

In other, other news, my grilled cheese is burning. So much for that grown-up thing, huh?

technorati tags:couldbe studios

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Today I am endlessly amused by Better Together’s politically incorrect alphabet cards. What’s not to love about these? Seriously. There is nothing about them that I don’t love.

Thanks to Daddy Types for the link.

technorati tags:better together, politically incorrect, alphabet

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