Insomnimusing: Allons-y!

Flashback Friday brings Pictures of You by The Cure, as performed live at Wembley Stadium in 1991

I hate the current commercial campaign for Glade air freshening products. Every time I watch, I cringe. This woman lies to her friends and family to make herself seem more wealthy, important, sophisticated, cultured, whatever. But she's a pretentious phony liar. She's sitting in her bathtub - but claims she's at the spa. She invites her pals over for yoga and claims the scent in the air is some exotic aromatherapy. She dumps a box of hard gingerbread cookies onto a plate and tries to pass off some canned fragrance as real cooking. I see that all the friends think this stuff smells great. And clearly the lying society wannabe thinks the stuff smells good. But what kind of ad campaign has the person using your products ashamed to admit she's using your products? And who are these friends who just laugh it off every time this woman lies to their faces? Is the humiliation funny enough that they don't mind she's a complete fake?

The girls are out of school today - the first day of Thanksgiving break. My mother was unavailable so I had to work from home today, rather than go into the office as I usually do on Wednesdays. It was all working out fairly well, at first. I got up and made my coffee. Munch popped her head into the room a few minutes later, but I told her she didn't have school so she could go on back to bed. Which she did, for a few minutes. Gin was still sleeping, so Munch went downstairs and made herself a bowl of cereal then entertained herself quietly for a while. When Gin got up later, she went downstairs and got a bowl of cereal, then headed back up to her room to read a book. So the house was quiet. Gin was reading. Munch was eating, again. Mom was getting to work undisturbed - while also running downstairs periodically to work on the brine for tomorrow's turkey. Then what did I do? I took the quiet and decided to spoil it. I suggested to Gin that she might want to get one of her chore...

It's almost universal that the giving of flowers is one of the most romantic gestures a partner can make. The most romantic gesture of all is putting real thought into those flowers - not just the aesthetic arrangement, but the secret messages those flowers convey.  Back in the 1800s, men and women used flowers to send  secret messages to each other. Since the propriety of the day would not allow lovers to express their feelings verbally, the Victorians developed an intricate language of feelings and emotions using flowers.  If you want to say - Use these flowers I am thinking about you - Asters I love your innocence - Baby's Breath I'll be faithful to you - Bird of Paradise (given to a man from a woman) I send you luck - Bells of Ireland I long for you - pink Camellia You're adorable - white Camellia I'll never forget you - pink Carnation My heart aches for you - red Carnation Wish I could be with you - striped Carnation I'm disappointed - yellow Carnation I se...

Here's another of my '80s favorites for Flashback Friday: The Promise by When in Rome.

I don't know if it's a blessing or a curse. Everyone in the house now has officially been sick. (That's the curse.) But no two were sick at the same time. (That might be a blessing.) Last Friday night, Gin came into my room and said she had a stomachache. Not two minutes later, I hear retching sounds coming from the bathroom. I called Book's dad and told him I would not be picking Book up for our usual Saturday visit because Gin was sick. It was a good thing I did, too. Gin spent half the night hanging over a bucket in her bed, and even though she didn't feel sick Saturday, whenever she tried to eat anything, it came right back up. By afternoon, she was actually getting angry about it. By Sunday morning, she was perfectly fine again. Sunday night, you guessed it, Munch said, "I have a stomachache." Replay Gin's scenario, except Munch got a day off school for it. A few days passed, and we thought it was over, then Pooh got it too. His lasted a day lo...

With more than 375 million copies of his books sold and 11 thrillers reaching # 1 on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list, Dean Koontz is known for his middle-of-the-night-sneak-up-behind-you literary surprises. But what you didn’t know is that he is quite the comedian! Koontz is currently promoting his new book Your Heart Belongs To Me in a special video blog at Barnes & Noble.com. Readers and fans have posted questions online, and Koontz is answering more than a dozen of them in a series of videos that began this week. Koontz says, “The questions are lively and direct, and my answers are mostly true, though occasionally evasive and deceptive.” A new video will be posted every weekday through November 26th, the day after Your Heart Belongs to Me is released. The videos can be seen here , and in the Fiction Book Club .

A sixteen-year-old girl has just become the first female in professional Japanese baseball's all-male league. You go girl!

I've been waxing nostalgic lately, so I've decided to institute a new feature I'm calling Flashback Friday. I'm a child of the '80s, so I'll be offering each Friday a song, video, news item or some other '80s memory. This week, it's one of the best songs ever - Peter Gabriel's Solsbury Hill

Gin was sick all weekend, and it hit Munch last night too. So Gin went off to school today feeling better, but Munch spent the day in bed. It did mean that I didn't have to go into the office. A sick kid means work at home for me, while for anyone else it would actually be a day off. But at least I got to stay home. And I did not volunteer to trade it for tomorrow in the office, so I'll be home then too. No footie on tomorrow though, I see. Great. I'm depressed, and I don't even have anything to look forward to. There's good proof to my theory: hope is the quickest road to disappointment. I dared hope that I'd have a footie match to cheer me up tomorrow, and I don't even have that. Yes, I am depressed today. I'm 36, twice-divorced with four kids in a crappy job that keeps getting crappier. I'm alone, but even if I had someone I could really love who really loved me back, how awful would it be of me to inflict me and my life on that person? It seems l...

I haven't taken the time to outline this post, so it will probably start to wander all over the place. Consider yourself warned. But here's my rant on California's Prop 8 and the two other gay marriage bans that were enacted by the voters on Tuesday. Let's go over the standard arguments against gay marriage, and I'll address them one by one. (Thanks to the jackasses at nogaymarriage.com for making this easier.) Maybe it'll help keep this a little more organized, but I still don't promise not to stray a bit. * God says it's bad, according to the Book, anyway. We have no business legalizing behavior prohibited by God. Alright, I'm going to get the God argument out of the way right now. We're not talking about church doctrine, we're talking about law - as in man's law. The church doesn't apply on a legal issue. Each church has the right to decide whether or not they will bless the union of a same-sex couple or a heterosexual couple, but ...

Munch had her second swim lesson this evening. She came home from school and immediately asked if she could change into her swimsuit. I told her that she could, but it was probably a mistake, because then she started asking every 20 minutes if it was time to go yet. Two hours later, yes, Munch, it's time to go. "Okay! I'll be waiting in the car!" She's so excited. After swim lesson - and picking up our Thursday night pizza - I had to race to get the girls back home to drop them off so I could go to a parent/teacher conference for Munch at school. They schedule these things for 10-minute sessions. I was there for 40 minutes. Surprise, surprise - Munch is flighty, disorganized and unfocused. I know this. Every parent/teacher conference I've had has been the same. In fact, I've already gotten at least five phone calls from her teacher about her work habits this year alone. Funny thing is, we just got her report card, and it was four A's and a B, plus thr...

I think it's safe to say that we're all hoping somehow, some way, this economic nightmare we're facing is going to turn around soon. Remember the "It's morning in America" message that Ronald Reagan offered when we were seeing double-digit inflation, double-digit interest rates and double-digit unemployment numbers of the late 1970s? I was only 8 years old when Reagan took office, but I remember the factories closing down in my town, and my mother being forced to take a job as a dishwasher in a restaurant just to keep me fed and a roof over my head. Things slowly began to turn around. New businesses came into town, and my hometown - which was fast becoming a ghost town - recovered and even grew. Those businesses are now laying off workers, cutting back shifts, and we're all back to tightening our belts after the salad days. Every expense is getting to be too much, so we're all getting a lot more creative in how we save money. Some of them are complicat...

May I pause to take a breath, please? Today, I finally could, and it was wonderful. Just to stop and breathe. Lately, I've been so busy, waking up every morning with a long list of things that must be done and not enough time to do them. The last two were the worst, I won't get into Monday, but the insomnia set back in Monday night. I watched the hours tick away all night, until finally at 4 a.m. I gave up on the attempt and just took a shower. Afterward, I spread a towel over my pillow and managed to squeeze in about an hour and a half of sleep. I had to wake up early Tuesday morning so I could get the papers' homepage news up before I had to run to a meeting at the girls' school. After that I had to drive in to the store (it's in another town - we only have a little tiny market here). I came back home to find that Pooh had just arrived home from work, so we went over to the church hall to vote - it was his first time. :) He's a bit of a political junkie too. F...

My friend L at work had a party yesterday for her husband's 40th birthday, and she invited me and the kids to join in the festivities. I took along Gin, Munch and Book, hoping that Book would be able to manage with the crowd. It was my first party since all those graduation parties back in May and June. Those weren't a lot of fun for me, since they came immediately following my break-up and I was kind of a mess. (Ok, if anyone remembers back that far, clearly, I was a lot more than "kind of" a mess.....) First thing when we arrived at L's, Book decided to take a seat in the kiddie pool sitting on the front porch for the apple bobbing. "It looked like a chair," he told me, so we did the best we could drying the back of his jeans with a hair dryer. Once all the kids arrived, they started into the apple bobbing in the kiddie pool. I had to laugh at Munch as she critically assessed the pool and stated, "There needs to be more water." It didn't ...

My top droppers for October: Politi-Gal Communique by Ivanhoe WindMill on the hill Hong Kong, iPod and Joomla New Dilemma Thanks for reading!