My inspiration (source: Restoration Hardware)

I swear I decided to do this almost on a whim. I mean, I ran it by Rob, but just barely. In fact, he kind of imploded about it last night when he came home, but fortunately for our marriage, it looks like its going to turn out OK.

Of course, this essentially necessitates painting the walls. Probably like the picture, though I’ve picked out a bit more of a greenish shade. And, while I’ve had a can of white semi-gloss open, I’ve been touching up the trim around the house. Because, I mean, why not.

Oh yeah, and this nightstand, too.

And then tomorrow, my neighbor and I are going to the mothership Home Depot to pick out some flower bulbs and shrubs to plant in the front yard. I got a quote from a landscaper, but of course we know that we can do it better ourselves, and for free. (She works from home, too.)

I definitely do not have time for this.

I definitely missed my calling as a manual laborer.

Even Molly thinks I’m nuts.

The funny part is that, bruised though my ego may be, I still truly and honestly like my writing better than that on the blog written by the woman in charge of the department (cancerbitch (dot) blogspot (dot) com — I won’t link directly; I may be disrespectful but I’m not rude). Reading her blog, and thinking mine is better, is what gave me the confidence to apply in the first place.

I realize that, in saying this, I’ve essentially ruined any chance whatsoever of being accepted to her program in the future. Not that I’d apply again. It’s not that I’m too proud; I just much prefer to relish the idea of someday being wildly successful on my own and having the opportunity to shove it back in their faces. You know, when they ask me to become an adjunct professor and I tell them exactly where and how they can get off.

Remember the movie The Mighty Ducks? My brother watched it over and over and over again as a child (as well as the Beethoven movies, and Home Alone, and home movies of himself waterskiing), so that I know the entire scripts of these classics by heart. Something about this one line in The Mighty Ducks stuck with me and has since informed my reactions whenever I find myself in a compromising situation. In his first (albeit failed and morally questionable) attempt at coaching his team, Emilio Estevez teaches the kids to:

“Take the fall! Act hurt! GET INDIGNANT!”

In another day or so, I’ll have done just that. And I’ll have a plan.

Northwestern can keep their crummy degrees, and I’ll keep my twenty grand a year (which, incidentally, is the brightest side of this all, as far as Rob is concerned; hello, down payment!). The college path has never worked out quite right for me, and I’m finished trying to play their game. I’ll go my own way. I never want to, but I always have to. I don’t know why I thought this time should be any different.

Happily, I had a lot to keep me busy over the weekend. Rob came home from work on Friday night with flowers, and before the sun went down — I repeat: before the sun went down — and took me to Hopleaf for enough porters and stouts and pommes frites with garlic aioli to make me seriously sick to my stomach.

I spent the rest of the weekend helping Jen set up her kindergarten classroom.

What can I say? I enjoy a theme, and we all know how I feel about manual labor. I may have missed my calling as a kindergarten classroom decorator, if there ever could be such a job. (I’m not foolish enough to think that I might be a good kindergarten teacher; just the thought of the five-year olds coming in and touching my beautiful handiwork with their grubby grubby paws is enough to send me into a tailspin.)

And tomorrow is another day.

The holidays have come and gone, leaving behind an exponentially growing heap of work on my desk, a good eight extra pounds on my ass, and a million little pine needles all over the floor, all of which, for the life of me, I can’t seem to manage to vacuum up.

Let’s recap quickly, shall we?

Our annual Christmas party returned this year with a bang (and, of course, a John Bang!), after a yearlong hiatus while we were in Nashville. (Did I seriously live in Nashville? I can hardly remember.) It just didn’t feel like the holidays last year without inviting all eight million of our nearest and dearest to come over and trash our house. The good news is, I only got a picture of the “before.” I wish my house looked like this all the time:

Note the overwhelming presence of bacon-wrapped items:

Actually, apart from waking up to an arctic breeze flowing through my living room through an open window (!!!!), the collateral damage this year was far less extensive than what I remember from the past, though perhaps I had too many glasses of champagne to notice. A special shout-out to the girliest girls I know, Elizabeth and Abbie, who took over the kitchen and, I suspect, refilled my glass when I wasn’t looking. Let it flow, girls, just let it flow.

Christmas Eve and Day proved mild and, dare I say, almost a little boring? Nary a tear was shed (and I kept myself together pretty good, too) in our Honda CR-V as Rob and I raced back and forth between family parties, counting the minutes to ensure we were spending precisely the same amount of time with each family. We used to feel a crushing sense of guilt that we were Ruining Everyone’s Christmas and Beloved Family Traditions for our parents and siblings, but this year, either they stopped caring, or we did. It was awesome.

This is not to say that the holidays didn’t bring about the requisite drama. Christmas Eve (and Day) found me in the midst of eight dog fights, at least 25 Jews eating ham, a five-hour drive from Chicago to Highland Park, one ball-in-a-cup smackdown, two Mexican “hired help”-ers admiring my wedding album, one Korean Jazzercise instructor telling me how I look much less fat now than I do in my wedding album, and a partridge in a pear tree.

Mmmmm …. ham.

Mexico’s favorite game for over 100 years!

¡Qué gorda la novia! 

Molly, before going postal, holiday-style, on Autumn (my next dog will be a golden retriever):

and, of course, the grand finale:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Of course, no celebration of The Birth of Our Savior Jesus Christ would be complete without a group of Jews singing church hymns in four-part harmony around the hearth. Can you spot the Holocaust survivor? (Hint: She’s 95 and has the best seat in the house.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Yes, my head nearly exploded the first time I experienced this bizarre ritual, too.

But such commitment to wholesomeness, so fervent as to transcend social and religious norms, certainly could not limit itself to just one holiday. And so, for those of you who still don’t believe that Rob’s family has a Thanksgiving talent show and a sing-a-long, including such beloved hippie family classics as “Feelin’ Groovy,” “This Land Is Your Land” and “You’ve Got A Friend,” I give you my new family, holding hands and singing “Kumbaya”:

(Just kidding, sort of. This is a little song by my friend Dan Fogelberg, about love, family, growing up, and the poignancy of life.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Let’s see, where was I?

The new year sort of flew under the radar. I resolved to blog closer to daily than to monthly, and I promptly failed. My friends Liz and Joel have vowed to keep me on my toes, though — Joel because he misguidedly thinks I am hilarious, and Liz because she was getting really damn sick of looking at that ultrasound at the top of my blog for so long, for crying out loud, there are babies everywhere! – so you can all thank them for this gratuitously long entry.

Perhaps if I start blogging more often, Rob will start keeping his own new year’s resolutions. Sadly, I have yet to experience more than even the slightest hint that Rob might be giving me a back rub, in spite of his resolution to do so, and despite the fact that he knows full well what’s in it for him. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. If you know what I mean.

Though I have to hand it to my husband: he is coming home from work at a reasonable hour.  I suspect, however, that this has more than a little something to do with his brand new speakers. He loosens his tie, pours himself some bourbon, and settles in on the couch, flipping through the unending library of music on TiVo Rhapsody and listening to some tunes, man, all the while tuning out the rest of the world (including, say, his wife, or a dog whimpering by the door to be let out).

Speaking of Molly, she is about two incidents away from going to the glue factory. Apart from developing an overly dominant state of being (that’s Dog Whisperer-speak for getting into some nasty dog fights), she remains a mischevious holy terror around the house.

Because she can no longer have her head in the garbage for what amounts to a good four hours of the day (Abbie had the brilliant idea of turning the garbage can around), Molly has now redoubled her effort to retrieve food from the counter. The other day, while I was attempting to make corn chowder, I left on the counter a mixing bowl with two cups of whole milk (for which I had made a special trip to the store, and that I had just measured out and poured the rest down the drain) while I ran in the office to look at the recipe on the (laptop) computer (that I very well could have brought into the kitchen, but that would have made too much sense).

CRASH! SPLASH! Wait … splash?!?

I came running into the kitchen to find milk EVERYWHERE.

Note the tail in the background. Not pictured: the milk dripping from the tops of the cabinets and — I kid you not — the ceiling.

And, of course, that was the end of the corn chowder. It was the end of a really bad day, and I’m not gonna lie: I cried. I cried over spilled milk.

It has been snowing a lot, which has meant that I’ve been outside shoveling. We live in a condo building, and of course we are paying someone to do this kind of thing for us — not that he has done it in, oh, about four of the five years I’ve lived here, not that I’m counting, but the condo president refuses to fire him, and he happens to be the same neighbor that tried to punch me, so I’m not going anywhere near this one. (Wait, have I not told you that story yet?)

Anyway, I do a lot of shoveling. We all know my affinity for mindless household tasks and manual labor, such as painting the mantel or installing light fixtures, so I can’t exactly play the martyr.

Molly adores the snow and is thrilled when I ask her if she wants to “go shovel.” She treats a snowy day like a crime scene investigation, shoving her nose, then her snout, then her face and entire head into the snow banks, sniffing relentlessly to verify the identity of the culprit that has covered her entire world in this cold white stuff. Once she uncovers a piece of evidence — be it a stick, a piece of cloth, or a McDonald’s cheeseburger wrapper — she flings it up in the air and bounds over and through the snow, prancing around with trash hanging out of her mouth like she won a prize.

It’s good entertainment.

Here she is, enjoying a frigid afternoon and beautiful “wintry mix”:

Because she’s a cute dog, my neighbors assume (and insist) that she should be wearing a sweater, or at least some doggie boots. But I swear, Molly could live out in that snow and never get cold. When it’s time to go in, she puts on her best pathetic face and pleads for five more minutes.

Some days, I have half a mind to just leave her out there.

Have I suitably made up for having missed an entire month? I hope so. Even I’m getting sick of me by now.