I’ve been spending a great deal of time reading and reviewing other people’s blogs, a labor of love and, sometimes, money. I know you think what I’m about to say next: since I’ve been wrapped up in other people’s blog projects, that’s why I’ve been neglecting my own. Not true. I regularly neglect free fringes. It’s never been on a consistent blogging schedule unless you count the few months lovelinks—now yeah write—took it over like an invasion of pod people. I visit free fringes when I’m surrounded by people and their projects, yet feeling isolated. So I come here for a cup of hot coffee and maybe a few illegal pharmaceuticals. Note to potential employers: I’ve never taken illegal drugs, ever.

Funny side note about that:

Years ago, I ran a survey on my blog asking my readers to pick out the one statement out of four that was untrue. The statements were something like:

1. Beyonce once complimented my singing (I cannot sing)
2. I’ve never tried illegal drugs
3. I’ve had a warrant out for my arrest
4. I throw a Super Bowl party every year for hundreds of people

I’ll be damned, nearly every person chose the never done illegal drugs as the untrue statement. Everything was true except for number four. My feelings were kinda hurt until people explained it’s not that they assumed every black person was a raging crack addict, but that they’d never really met anyone who’d never tried anything at all. Fair enough, people, fair enough.

Q is on his way in for a long weekend, and our house is presently auditioning for an episode of Hoarders: Buried Alive. I’m stressed about it, he’s pretending not to be stressed about it. Instead of furiously cleaning, I’m blogging and eating Great Value wavy cut potato chips in bed next to the baby who’s playing Lego Batman. I may or may not be drinking pink lemonade-infused vodka from a red Solo cup. Holy shit, that’s tasty.

I’ve been feeling kinda outside-looking-inny lately, but what else is new? The baby thinks I’m the greatest thing since Cheetos for dinner, my husband loves me, the older ones lurk quietly in their rooms hoping no one asks them to clean anything. It is, for all practical and emotional purposes, a good life I have over here. No matter that my next-door neighbor told me the other day she thought I’d been out of town for weeks because my car hadn’t moved. Yeah, there are days I do not, cannot, leave the house. Our pantry is stocked for Armageddon. If bagged cold cereal is ever called upon during the apocalypse, we’re all set. Still, there is a nagging feeling I should get out more and walk around. Look around. Be around.

Which kinda reminds me: when Q gets here, I hope he can help me find the DVR remote. It’s gotta be around here somewhere.

Did Q even read the post I wrote a few weeks ago crying over my POS laptop? I think he may have missed that one, but he most definitely got to see the laptop first-hand over New Year’s weekend. Food stains, loose keys, missing keys, no memory, all bootleg crazy. It looked so bad, I think Q threw up on it and neither one of us noticed.

So I’m now typing this post on a wonderfully gently used Dell that we got in someone else’s divorce. The keyboard is backlit! I can type by dim lamplight with no problem. When I tap the keys, letters appear on the screen. There are no crumbs on the motherboard. It has not never been touched by anyone under 30 years old. I am giddy with glee.

In a week that Jordan experienced a bullying incident so serious her antagonist was sent to the district’s alternative school, Jordan also got her first boyfriend. Puppy love completely overrode the bullying, and I’ve heard 100 more stories about her new man than I ever did about the knucklehead (different boy) who’d apparently been spending the school year mercilessly teasing my daughter. Puppy love also encouraged her to quit the bowling team so they could spend more time on their texting machines, and they’ve made plans for Jordan’s first formal event and very first date with a boy in February. She’s a nervous, crying, emotional wreck.

I told him all about my stroke, and he doesn’t even care, Mommy. He says it’s okay because he has Alzheimer’s.

Sigh. Or something that starts with an A, I guess. Take your pick. He’s a nice kid. It doesn’t really matter what he has that she managed to process as dementia. They are kind of adorable together.

In other news, neither Jon Alex nor Ehren found themselves dropped off at a firestation this week under the Safe House ordinance, so that’s progress.

Not really. I just hate having to come up with 30 titles for 30 posts.

Q is here! Our family had a hot breakfast for the first time in forever and, since it’s been five years since he started making hot breakfast for us, 10-year-old Jon Alex is finally old enough to do the breakfast dishes. He’s also old enough to complain about it like we shackled him to his sister, planked him face down in the hold of a slave ship, then threw him overboard when he contracted dysentery, but he finally finished washing and drying them all.

No Q trip is complete without Mr Gatti’s pizza and entertainment center and Bedrock Comics. Mommy won 1600 tickets in a lucky spin on Wheel of Fortune, so so much for our trip to Vegas—our luck has been spent in a penny arcade. At the comics store, Jon Alex picked up another Scott Pilgrim installation, Jordan got two graphic novels including an Archie reboot, and Ehren scored two choking hazards named Spider-Man and the Green Goblin, pictured below.

The rest of the weekend will be football, football, some damn Pawn Stars marathon Q is watching, putting Q on the road for his drive home, then more football. I’ve got some THINGS I HAVE TO DO next week, so I’m praying to the anxiety gods that I can handle it all without too much self-doubt and destruction. Before you know it, it’ll be Friday again, and I can once again coast into the weekend.

It’s 60 degrees in my normally 74-degree house. I’m getting under the covers.

Four more days in comments…

Oh, wait! I forgot! I did take exactly one photo:

It’s my sister’s red velvet cheesecake, this evil baked good that deceived people into thinking they were eating a slice of cake when, as you can see, they were actually eating three. At one time.

I snapped the photo with my phone to send Q as an SMS and his reply was something like:

If you don’t bring me a slice home for my visit this weekend, I will cut you.

I have a hard relationship with leftovers: I do not like them. Especially after I’ve been eating all day then staring down a sinkful of dirty dishes. But: I love my mother’s cornbread turkey dressing and managed to leave without any. I woke up this morning without cornbread dressing for breakfast the day after Thanksgiving for the first time in 40 years.

Eh, I made myself feel better with a Whopper with cheese. I’ll suffer the nauseous consequences later, but it was yum.

Clicking round and round on Twitter, I followed a retweet to a post at Princess Nebraska. I hate that I’m pasting such a large swath of her post, but I can’t get you to get me without reading in complete context what she wrote:

A few months ago I was talking to my psychiatrist about my new anti depressant, and how well it was working, because I think it’s actually working quite well.  I have moments of genuine joy.  I feel happy many times a day.  I yell less.  Some things still make me anxious, but only ahead of time, not for hours afterwards, not to the detriment of my whole life.  I’m having fun, over here. I really really am.

But it is not PERFECT.  I am not a whole new person. I am not floating on air and walking on sunshine.  I still frustrated and I still yell and I still feel overwhelmed a thousand times a day. I still get raging PMS.  I am not calm and level and self centered, I am far from perfect.

And as I was telling all this to my doctor, she leaned over and she said “This may be as good as it gets.  You have a really stressful job.”

And damn it, if that isn’t true as all get out.  I have a REALLY STRESSFUL JOB.

For sure, I am doing the hardest job I have ever done.  Taking care of these two children is a really really hard job, and if anyone else I knew was doing a job THIS HARD, I would expect them to be stressed.  I would expect them to be tired. I would expect them to be anxious. I would expect that it would affect their life in a big big way.  I don’t know why I am so hard on my self when these very same things happen to me.

I read this. That this may be as good as it gets, and I get that now. And I haven’t felt this much relief in a long time. I keep expecting to get better even though I’m already better. I’m better than I was before and there is nothing that says I’ll ever feel better, do better, be better than I am now. This is probably it in all my anxiety, nervousness, scattered perfectionism, laziness, bewilderment at human nature, all of it, this is it. And I accept that now.

Two more Internet-related tasks to go, then I gotta take the baby outside like I promised him. Even though he’s been outside with Jordan for an hour. Does he not understand “Mommy’s watching Michael Jackson’s This Is It”?

Day 25 of blogging in comments, y’all…

I don’t even think I’m taking my big camera this year to my mom’s. It needs cleaning and repair and a little extra loving. So I’m sending it home with Q this weekend. You didn’t know we also share custody of our most expensive doo dad, did you?

Do people still say doo dad? I just said it, so I guess “people” do. Say doo dad, that is. Doo dad. Is that how it’s spelled? I’m not Googling the spelling because doo dad is probably today’s code word for gay porn. Not that there’s anything wrong with doo dad or anything, if that’s what you’re into.

I am absolutely starving. Dinner isn’t until 3:30, and I’m not heading to my mom’s until two-ish. I could scramble a few eggs and make toast, but then there would be dishes to wash, and I’m not into that right now. This calls for a cup of coffee in a disposable coffee cup made with my single serving coffee filter. Nothing to wash, appetite suppressed, laziness appeased.

Jordan is out for her 700th morning walk, and the boys are at my dad’s for waffles, sausage, Uno and dominoes. Ehren plays the hell out of cards games and dominoes, and he’s probably on his eighth waffle.

It’s an hour until football, and I need to figure out something to do with my hair. It’s all over my head these days and not in a good way. So: TV on, hair moisturizers and tamers on, coffee on. I’ve got a few more units of time before leaving my ’70s tract-housing suburban sanctuary. Happy American Thanksgiving. I’ll be back tomorrow with a few pics and some pie.

Or thinking he’s in the den watching TV when things get too quiet.

I’m thinking of this vacation away from him as a four-day weekend. I’m just sitting around doing much of nothing, not getting my hair pulled. The sensor on our DirecTV receiver had stopped picking up a signal from the remote, so we got a brand new fancy box from an 8 a.m. Sunday technician’s visit. I’m now setting up all of Ehren’s shows to record since we lost the hard drive in the malfunctioning box. There are some movies we may never get the chance to re-record, but c’est la vie. La Vie.

Get it? I said to say la vie, and you said la vie. Hilarious.

I signed up for Mug Swap 2011 and got my secret Santa blog in email last night. I started to leave a comment on my recipient’s blog until I remembered it’s a secret. So I’ll just go make him or her a mug on Zazzle and mail it while keeping my big mouth shut.

The Texans game starts in about an hour, so I gotta go meditate in a Zen circle for their anticipated win.

Your son’s scrambled eggs and toast for breakfast in comments…

I could actually go for a nice burger, but I’ve tremendously outspent my budget this week.

I don’t deserve a $10 burger. It’s easy to talk myself out of it since the burger place I’ve been meaning to try is all the way in midtown Houston, and I just drove through Midtown’s cousin downtown Houston on the way back from meeting Q to drop off the baby. I’m not willing to make a return trip through Houston for a $10 burger. That’s probably more accurate.

The owner of Hubcap Grill, the midtown burger place, is on Twitter. I follow him and a few other local food people. Until a few months ago, I don’t think he understood how Twitter worked when he thought he was having private conversations with his foodie friends. Ranting about customers, complaining about customers. Since I follow some of the same people, I was part of those conversations whether he knew I even existed or not.

So I tweeted one of Hubcab’s friends, a local food critic, something like: Hey, is the food at Hubcap Grill worth putting up with the owner’s attitude?

The critic answered: if you love good burgers, I wouldn’t let his crankiness stop you from trying them. It’s good stuff.

Miraculously, coincidentally, the grill owner’s customer complaints to the critic stopped. Now he tweets his menu specials, when there might be a bit of a wait, when he’s out of veggie burgers. Perhaps he’s learned the art of the private, direct message. He’s certainly learned what not to say in a public timeline.

Next time Q is in town for more than a baby exchange, we’ll take the kids to Hubcap. I’ve been wanting to try Gigi’s Asian Bistro as well, but one Midtown adventure with the family sounds like enough for one weekend.

Meanwhile, I think there is a loaf of white bread in the pantry with my name on it. Oooooh, and some Ramen. I’m all set.

Dreams of good food in comments…