Halloweaned

So this week has been a little exhausting. In most respects Olivia is not mine. She does not look like me, talk like me or share any of my interests. In fact, at the ripe age of four she already takes any opportunity possible to spite or spurn me. Think I'm kidding? Just ask her father whom she looks and talks like and if he said that his new favorite activity was eating garbage off the street she would say, "Yum Daddy! Discarded ATM receipts are my favorite!"

So it is a little shocking that Olivia loves Halloween every bit as much as I do. Until I began to suspect that she is trying to love it so much as to make me hate it. One craft is not enough, it must be ten crafts, one special Halloween meal is not enough, there must be two, there is one corner in the house that remains undecorated! Every single one of her friends needs a personalized Halloween treat bag! At first, I tackled it with gusto, just excited to be enjoying something together instead of fantasizing about fifteen minutes and a roll of duct tape. However, as I finish the ugliest pink cape known to man and the "eyeball" meatballs tonight I am breathing a little sigh of relief that tomorrow it will all be over.

Because next is Thanksgiving and I already can't stand that damn holiday.

Party Like It's 1996

Love parties? Love elections? Then this is the link for you with lots of great ideas of how to spend election night. The thought of making electoral map cookies makes me very sad that I will be watching election results with my cranky Republican parents who have already forbidden any whooping, gloating, happy dances and high fives.

We might have to watch the results in a bar. After all, the car picks us up at 5 AM, why not stay up all night? It's Vegas, in my opinion, you should arrive there hung over and not having slept for days.

Wrong side

I missed my workout due to an early-waking kid, who then refused to get her hair cut at her appointment today only to get home, look at my recipe for dinner and realize that for some unknown reason I only purchased two out of the ten ingredients and had to improvise the rest. I then spent the next thirty minutes telling my grandfather that my aunt's breast cancer is going to be fine, Fine, FINE! I spent the evening just staring at the on-line photo of our hotel room in Vegas and chanting eight days, eight days. . .

A Little Off

So you know your parenting might be a little askew when the following scenario happens:

You are taking your four year-old to see one of her favorite movies that happens to be in limited theatrical release. You get to the theatre and your heart sinks thinking, oh no, all these kids are here to see our movie and we are not going to be able to get tickets. After all, the theatre is mobbed. You get in line looking at all the little girls waiting for tickets and think, wow, cool, I am glad this movie is getting so much attention; then you hear the person in front of you order her tickets. . .

What? High School Musical? WTF? Is that what all these people are here to see? I didn't even know it was out? Huh. You walk up to your theatre and see along line. Crap. Oh wait, it is the overflow line from High School Musical. You walk into the theatre to see-one other family. Parents with their 7 year-old daughter. That's when you realize. . .

You are the only asshole in the world taking your four year-old to see Nightmare Before Christmas in 3D.

It was totally awesome though.

Obama-rama

We have been trying desperately to get a nice family portrait in front of our Obama yard sign but Chad has been working late so it hasn't worked out quite yet. We did, however, go as a family to vote yesterday. Wisconsin is a state where you can vote early and Chad and I always do because it frees us up to volunteer on election day. This was the first election that we have lived in the Madison city limits though and voting early is a wholly different experience.

First of all, it took forty-five minutes. In a politically active city whose preferred candidate is encouraging voters to hit the polls early even at eleven in the morning the polls are packed. Second, we were the only ones in line with a small child which means that we were the only in line having fun. I Spy, my father owns a zoo, and various other guessing is about all you have to entertain a four year-old in line, that was we needed because everyone in line totally got into it. It was one of those times that rejoice in humanity because Olivia waiting in line for forty-five minutes for something that did not involve candy or stickers at the end could have been disastrous. There is just something about kid that exclaims, "B is for Barak Obama!" that can bring people together.

So vote early everyone, free up the polls on election day!

Fall fantasy

There are certain things that I can't get enough of, peas in Spring, strawberries in Summer and apples in Fall. We only have a few more weeks of Farmer's Market left where you can stand as it's apples as far as the eye can see. I have about four more days to get everything in order before the holidays start for us. Halloween is my favorite holiday, and therefore, a week long affair that includes making special treat for the neighborhood kids. This year it is all about apples, apple chips, carmel apples, and apple-pear sauce. Look for lots of posts of our goings-on next week.

After that it is only two weeks until our big Thanksgiving. Somewhere in there i am going to Vegas for four days where i am going to do nothing but sit in a tub and watch tv. I am serious there is a tv in front of the tub, it's like they made a room just for me. Now if that tv showed nothing but Law and Order and Keith Olberman you'd never see me again. I am sure room service would bring some apple butter.

Mindful

I know that it is ridiculous that I am still doing California posts weeks after we are back but i finally today felt like we had finally started to catch up from being gone. It is fabulous here with great Midwest colors and perfect weather, so i am finding it hard to come inside and do anything except make great food. I actually baked a cake today which is something I never do.

Anyway, one of the few things I really wanted to do while we were in San Francisco was to visit City Lights Bookstore. I know it is a total tourist trap now, however i could not resist the siren song of my Converse high-top wearing teenage years. It should not come a surprise to any of my readers that I I had a torrid love-affair with the Beat poets my senior year of high school after I was kicked out of my AP English class for telling my teacher that i found Beowulf "redundant. " To be fair, the poor woman didn't have much choice since had just I turned in the 7th Level Of Hell-The Board Game for Dante. Even though that game was fucking brilliant thanks to my incredibly talented illustrator/partner. C'est la vie, I convinced one of the young, idealistic special ed teachers to take me on for "independent study" and found Lawrence Ferlinghetti. I finished up the year by staging a sit in to protest the letting go of that special ed teacher, but that is another story for another day. Long story short humiliation and exile from AP English, totally worth it.

City Lights was a little more tame than I expected, but I picked up some European novels that I could never find in a store here and brought home the gorgeously reissued A Coney Island of The Mind, complete with a CD of the poet reading his works. I read some poems to Olivia in the bathtub tonight. Where she was trapped and had no choice but to listen. I'm hoping that it prevent her staging her own coup d'etat to get something for scintillating than Beowulf later.

Eating Crow

So I have to eat a little crow after our trip to California. I have railed and railed against Chad's iPhone but I am here to tell you that without that iPhone I would have died. Died because apparently I can no longer go for eight days without checking my e-mail, seeing a weather forecast, or hearing what all the bloggers think about the Vice-Presidential debate. I don't know how and when this happened to me but it did and it is a sad state of affairs.

Beach Bums

And this completes the photo portions of our trip with Chad and Olivia at the beach. Look at that hubby, GQ is calling. Here we had some close encounters with sea lions and, look, more fog! What about this weather is so great?

Imagine Me And You

Olivia has added a new child to her harem of imaginary siblings, Morgan. They were two peas in a pod, but a little too much alike if you know what i mean. I feared that if I turned my back on them too long they would produce some type of mid-control device that would force us all to be their loyal subjects who would do nothing but feed them cookies all day long and look the other way when they decided it would be a good time to try and use the chandelier for the acrobatic purposes it was so obviously intended.

And We're Back

I can't say that I left my heart in San Francisco, I was pretty glad to get home after an action-packed trip. However, going through the pictures we always wish we had just one more day to see just one more thing. This was the first trip that I saw this famous landmark and laughed at the fact that the only ones who were not nervous to take a walk on this behemoth were me and the kid. Never have I been anywhere that you snap a picture and what was in front of you has completely disappeared by the time you look up. I actually debated setting up a slideshow with my continuous shutter shots of the fog moving in, but laziness won out.