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All this freaking out about the pediatric Tylenol et al recall is making me roll my eyes. People need to calm the fuck down.

1. Working out. Not technically, anyway. I suppose painting my mom’s living room a grand total of four times counts as a workout, but I need to do more. I almost miss running. Since I am stuck here for the foreseeable future, I am looking into renting a bike and taking advantage of the hike/bike trail in town. In three weeks I might be allowed to run again as well.

2. Seeing people. I’ve been busy with the house projects I am forcing my mom to let me do, so by the time evening rolls around I am exhausted. Plus, most people have real jobs and can’t go out on Tuesday nights. This weekend will help, since I am getting out and about for a bit.

3. Eating right. The food here… whoa. Now, I could easily plan a menu and go to the store but the issue of storage is a tricky one. Mom’s fridge is a piece of shit on a good day, and it’s stuffed to capacity with God knows what. She refuses to clean it out because she is holding out for a new one but in the meantime, ew. I’m not the most conscientious housekeeper, but this is grossing me out and I might have to take it upon myself to make some room in there. Ewwww ew ew ew ew ew.

4. Eating right even when out. There are no diners here, which is sucky. I must be getting close to becoming a true Jersey Girl, because I really really miss my diner.

Oh. Hi.

Jillian, the dog, and I are camped out at my parents’ house. We’ve been here a week. On day 2, I didn’t think I was going to survive, what with the dog hair, the dust, the cigarette smoke, the dog hair, the dust, the musty basement, the dog hair, the cigarette smoke, and the near-complete lack of diners in Ohio. Oh, and the NOISE. The three dogs bark at each other constantly. My mom yells at the dogs. Jillian laughs like a maniac, which causes the dogs to bark more. Mom turns up the TV. The dogs bark. She yells. I die. I’m supposedly the deaf one, and I am the one telling people to turn shit down. It’s enough to kill a person. Day 2 was a rough day.

Yet here we are, on day 9 and it’s not getting any better but it’s not getting any worse. Over the past week, I have scrubbed the walls in the living room. Then I painted a coat of primer on said walls. And the ceiling. And then I painted a second coat of primer. Then I painted.

I’m quite tired.

There was a lot of furniture moving involved.

Anyway, we’re still here. For at least another week. There is NOTHING TO EAT HERE. Unless you like pizza, which I do… but there is only so much pizza a girl can eat and still fit into her jeans. The best doughnuts in the world are here, but again - only so many a girl can eat.

Sigh.

I suppose I could make some calls and go out but people work during the week and I can’t really leave Jillian with the parents all the time, since they are doing us a favor in the first place and the dog is still pretty high-needs and they’ve been taking her out at 6AM so I don’t have to. Plus, I’m a bit of a hermit (NEWS FLASH!!) so this sorta-downtime is actually quite good for my head. Sorta. In a way.

Did I mention there is nothing to eat here? It’s all chain restaurants and pizza and the one super-greasiest of the greasy spoons (the East Park Restaurant) or college bars or [even worse] TOWNIE bars. I would have to drive a rather sizeable distance to get decent food here. I’m a snob now.

Argh.

…for it is my birthday. Yes, that’s right. I’ve been kicking ass and not even bothering to take names (because: who cares? I kicked your ass already) for 35 years. Whoa. 35 years. Eeek.

I’ve never really had problems with ‘getting older’ or whatever it is that women freak out about on birthdays. I probably LOOK 35, but I don’t feel like I am. I sure as hell don’t act like it, and I often feel like I’m only posing as an adult. Sometimes I look around me and think “I own a house. And a kid. And a dog. And a car… I OWN these things. I am IN CHARGE of them. Shouldn’t somebody do something about this? It can’t be right!”

I see other women my age who just… seem so much older. Even women I know who are younger than me seem older. Maybe it’s because they seem to have their shit together, I don’t know. Maybe they’ve found what they’re looking for. Or maybe they figured out what they wanted to be when they grew up and they are that. I have yet to even IDENTIFY what I’m looking for, so I know I haven’t found it. I know I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, so I’m in no hurry to do that. This state of mind isn’t a bad thing, necessarily, but I find it curious that other people pay a lot more attention to ‘grown-up’ stuff than I do.

I mean, I just spent $500 on Phish tickets.

It’s a good thing, I think, this youthfulness (okay, let’s call it what it is: immaturity) of mine. I have never felt like I had to grow up and be an adult, whatever that means. And as Neil from The Young Ones says: “it’s never too late to have a happy childhood.” My childhood was as happy as anyone’s, I guess, and I don’t see why it has to end just because I’m in a new demographic.

OH GOD. I’m in a new demographic! I am no longer the 18-34 super-desirable marketing target! Does this mean the types of advertisements directed at my age group change?

35. Sounds weird. I remember when my mom turned 35. I have a sweater that I bought that year (1988). I STILL HAVE IT. And it’s been in style four times since then.

The upside to this “I don’t feel 35″ business is that I don’t think I look it, either. I probably do, but a fine layer of fat is keeping my skin smooth. HAHAHAHA!!! If I lose all this weight I will finally look my age! Yikes. Anyway. Even though I am a die-hard hair dye aficionado, my current hair color is my ACTUAL hair color (brown? Who knew?), and there are no grey ones in there. Nope. So that’s good. Ma started going grey pretty much the day I was born (sorry, mom). But not me! NOT YET. And… NOT ON MY HEAD. Oh, I do have some grey hair, but… they’re… elsewhere. I’ve had those for a few years so there’s been time to get used to seeing them (AND PULLING THEM OUT BECAUSE WHAT THE FUCK?).

Overall, I’m fine with my age. There’s nothing I can do about it if I’m not, so why waste time freaking out about it? I’m 35. Apparently, I’m a real live adult person, and people take me seriously sometimes. I have made a promise to myself that I’m not going to plan to do things, I’m going to ACTUALLY do things. When you’re 20 and say “I’m going to go skydiving,” people say “awww, isn’t that cute!” But when you’re 35 and say that, people go “Whoa, that’s ballsy! Don’t die!”

Big plans to not make plans, homies. It’s my birthday.

Sigh. Where to begin?

My 35th birthday is coming up. Freddie asked me what I wanted, since he suggested going to see Billy Elliot on Broadway and I shot that down. Not in a mean way, but I love that movie more than is reasonable and I feel like the Broadway show will ruin it for me. Plus, Elton John is involved, and… shut up, Elton John.

So… what do I want?

I have plenty of things. I am in desperate need of new clothes, BUT I refused to buy clothes for the size I am now so maybe when I lose 50 pounds I will be more interested, but the kinds of clothes that are produced for the size lady I am are hideously ugly and certainly don’t help with the body-image issues I already have. I will continue to wear ratty concert t-shirts and cargo shorts and Chuck Taylors until I get that part of me in shape. It’s a work in progress, and a slow one.

I have books. I have music. I have… things.

What I do not have is… mental health? I don’t know. This year has been really hard so far because I haven’t been feeling like I ever have time off. There is always something going on, even on the weekends. I need quite a bit of downtime to get my head in order and I haven’t had very much of that lately.

I get up around 6AM, when the dog starts chewing on her leg or whatever the hell she does that shakes the bed. She does that for about a half-hour, then the nosing and face-licking starts because she has to go out. It was slightly better when she slept in her crate because then I could ignore her for that extra 15 minutes, but now? Not so much. The upside is that she wakes Freddie up, too.

But *I* take her out. I don’t get 10 minutes to wake up and figure out what planet I’m on before I have to do stuff. I get out of bed, into clothes and am out the door within 5 minutes. It sucks, especially (or perhaps because) I am not a morning person.

Some of the more snarky of my acquaintances will take this opportunity to say “well, you’re not an afternoon or an evening person either” and I will take this opportunity to tell those people to just fuck right off. Whatever it is that you think of me, you’re probably wrong so fuck off. For sure. Like, totally. People seem to have these preconceived notions of who I am and what I will do, and then they have the nerve to act disappointed when I defy their expectations. I have come to realize lately that a lot of people whom I consider friends… aren’t. It will be a slow process to divest myself of them, but I think it has to be done because I am too old and have had quite enough.

Anyway, once the dog is taken care of, more often than not, I have to drive Freddie to the train station because he is a princess and is either running late (oh, to sleep in even for ten minutes!) or the weather isn’t perfect for walking a mile or… whatever the fuck. I don’t know. I do it and I don’t really complain to him about it, because (as he reminds me fairly often) it’s my job.

Ugh.

Yes, I chose this life. I love it. I do. I am insanely grateful that I don’t have to get up and go out to work because that is never a good thing for me. But I never, ever, EVER get a break. Ever. I never have downtime. Ever. Even at night, if Jillian or the dog have some kind of emergency and need tending, *I* do it. Motherhood/half-assed housewifery is truly a 24/7 sort of job. And, again, I wouldn’t trade it, but some time off would be nice.

I feel sort of broken. It’s like I carry not only my own emotional burden (and let me tell you, it’s a big one because I am… erm… yeah) but that of everyone else around me, too. People like to tell me their problems and I feel like I give good advice, but I haven’t figured out how to shake the feeling that I’m carrying all of this stuff. My own shit is quite enough, and oftentimes far too much.

SO, what I really really really would like to have is a week’s vacation, to just go somewhere else and be BY MYSELF. No husband, no kid, no dog, no JGz, no Facebook, no internet, nothing. Since that notion really crystallized just this morning, I’m not sure what that would look like, exactly, but that’s what I want. Even a long weekend somewhere else completely would be so amazing, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.

8AM and the concrete blocks arrived. Big truck! Lots o’ blocks. The builders got right to work (after graciously moving my baker’s rack from the porch to the front yard so the Freecycle lady could come get it). Building building building. The neighbors are starting to slow down when they drive by.

Eventually I will get around to posting pictures of this journey but today the camera is going with me to NYC to chase after Jamie Oliver.

No progress yesterday on the building, but things inside are moving right along. Essentially, we have to move everything out of the living room and kitchen and into the back of the house so when they take the roof off, all my stuff isn’t exposed to the elements.

I had to pack up my books and all my junk from my bookcases and now my house looks all naked, like we’re moving out. We even took down all the pictures and art on the walls, which are peppered with tiny nails. It looks very forlorn in here.

Today we are tackling the kitchen, which has storage issues, despite its size. My cabinets are… well let’s just say the kitchen is a piece of shit. It looks nice but was VERY cheaply done, and I hate every inch of it. I think the previous owners just went “ooh shiny!” and didn’t stop to think about how the cabinets would actually be used, so there are too many cupboards, not enough drawers, and although there are acres of counter space, little of it is actually in a useful place. Ugh.

ANYWAY, tomorrow the builders are putting in concrete blocks out in the foundation hole. I have no idea what happens after that.

The hole is still there. But now it’s partially filled with concrete! Freddie dropped the ball big-time by not getting pictures of the giant cement truck or the builder buried up to his knees in wet concrete. I’ll try to take some pictures later that give a sense of just how much destruction there is. And concrete! Yay!

The house renovation has begun. After nearly a year of discussion and meetings with the architect and standing out in the front yard looking at the house in a thinky way, we have started construction.

Like all good things, it started with a heavy dose of DEstruction, what with the dismantling of half the patio and a good chunk of the driveway. There was a backhoe involved. A hole was dug around the porch and along the perimeter of what will be the new entryway and stair hall. It looks way bigger as a big, muddy hole than it did on paper.

For all intents and purposes, we are stranded in the house. The builders made a little bridge that we can use when it’s time to take the dog out or when we feel like we have to go run errands, but it’s a pain in their ass for me to be running in and out all the time and it’s a pain in my ass because the dog is not a fan of going over the bridge and Jillian just wants to jump off of it and play in the mud.

Our backyard is wholly inaccessible, which sucks mighty donkey balls. I was hoping to use this 80-degree weekend to get a move on with the garden but I can’t even get NEAR the garden, much less trek back and forth from the truck to the backyard with a bunch of topsoil and sand (that I haven’t actually purchased yet, thank goodness). Perhaps I can still start the indoor seeds and maybe be a little late with the direct-sown plants. We’ll see. That involves planning and I don’t really like to do that with the garden.

With the indoor bit, I spent a good chunk of yesterday emptying my bookshelves in advance of moving them to the playroom. I have way too many books but I already got rid of a lot of them when we moved here, so what’s left is… what’s left. LOTS of books, and it made me wonder if I really need 4 different coffee-table books about U2 even though I don’t have a coffee table. The answer, of course, is yes.

I also realized that I have a lot of cookbooks and food magazines.

The kitchen is also in need of some packing up. We’re losing two walls in there, which means the baker’s rack and my desk are going away. I have no idea what’s going to happen to the things that live on these two surfaces. Despite the relative enormity of my kitchen, the storage in that room is TERRIBLE. The pantry cupboard is too deep, the TWO drawers are way too shallow, and the cabinets are… in need of reorganization. I have to find a place to stash my KitchenAid, my food processor, my steamer, napkins/placemats, extra dish towels, and the fruit rack. Where am I going to hang my bunches of bananas now? We’re throwing around the idea of installing a kitchen island, but as expected, Freddie and I are butting heads on that. He wants to have the guys build something permanent-ish and I want something that is going to cost me as close to nothing as possible so that when I finally get fed up and demolish the kitchen in a couple of years, I can build something better.

Speaking of the kitchen, remember how, on the night before I was too cook a 22-lb turkey my oven conked out? Well, that’s fixed and I’m thrilled. The day before yesterday, I loaded up the dishwasher, started it up, and went to see what Jillian was up to. Not three minutes later, I went back into the kitchen to see smoke pouring out of the top of the dishwasher. I said to myself: “Self! Smoke coming out of the dishwasher is generally not a good thing. Maybe something plastic fell down onto the heating coil, not unlike my Mets water bottle [RIP].” So I opened up the door and FLAMES shot out of the top of it.

“Well, that’s interesting,” I thought. You’d think that the water part of the dishwashing equation would cancel out fire, but you would be WRONG.

The appliance repair guy came out this morning to have a look at it and was all “yep. You’ve had a fire.” Erm, no shit, homey. Apparently parts need to be ordered and that will get us into next week before it’s fixed.

Everything in the kitchen has shit the bed at least once (the fridge twice and the oven three times). The microwave is the only appliance in there that hasn’t tried to commit suicide yet, but I’m expecting it to leave me a note and jump off the wall any day now.

Even though I have the best of intentions when it comes to writing here, my reality just isn’t reflecting it. It’s not that I’m rushed off my feet - in fact, quite the reverse - it’s that… I don’t know. I feel hobbled, somehow.

Anyway, Zeus willing, the house renovation starts tomorrow. The guys are coming to do something painful to my driveway, and something something foundations blah. I have a feeling this renovation process is going to be VERY irritating in the worst way. My whole life is an exercise in Trying To Avoid Irritation, Even Though It Follows Me Everywhere, and a project of this magnitude… well, let’s just say that if *I* were in charge, it would probably go a lot smoother.

In other news, I don’t think this half-marathon is going to happen. I have developed shin splints, which might be a result of new shoes (which are the same as my old shoes, just the updated model) and/or an increase in mileage. After the tailspin that was February, getting back on track has been difficult, to say the least. While I think the body could slog through 13.1 miles, I’m not so sure the mind can do it. I’m too distracted.

I hate it when my life gets in the way of my life.