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Rob and I suck at home décor.  Like, really.  We’ve lived in our house for a year now – almost to the day, actually – and only two rooms have anything hanging on the walls.  And one of those rooms is in the basement, where the décor consists of an “Evil Dead” movie poster and a “Moulin Rouge” movie poster.

Part of the reason for the bare walls is that we decided we wanted to decorate this house deliberately.  We wanted to banish the movie posters of our college days to the basement, and put carefully chosen, grown-up décor in the rest of the house.

But, as I mentioned, we suck that that sort of thing.

We recently made a long list of goals for our home, ranging from expensive projects like redoing all the flooring to little things like finding a nice painting for the wall in the family room.  One item on that list seemed pretty simple: We wanted a clock to hang above the fireplace.

You’d think we’d just, you know, go out and buy a damn clock.

But it has taken months of deliberation to choose the right clock – one that’s nice, but not too nice.  One that appeals to our tastes, looks kind of pretty, but isn’t so ornate that it calls attention to all the dog hair on our shabby couch.  All that deliberation was kind of ridiculous when you consider that we weren’t scouring antique shops or perusing the catalogs of high-end furniture stores.  We were shopping at Target and Wal-Mart, because although we want something pretty, we also need something made of cheap plastic because all our money goes into paying for diapers and other kiddie supplies.

This morning I suggested we go to Bed Bath & Beyond and check out their clocks, mostly because I had a gift card for $25.  Kaylee dragged Rob to the candle aisle to sniff a bunch of flowery votives while Robbie and I went to look at clocks.  And Internet, there it was.  Finally, I found a clock that spoke to me.  I talked Kaylee into letting me borrow Rob for a moment to look at the clock, and luckily it spoke to him, too.

Do you want to see a picture?  Here you go!

There are two things wrong with this picture.  I’ll tell you what they are in a minute.

So, we put the new clock in the trunk of our car and spent the rest of the day feeling like we were finally making progress on our house.  Finally, we had something to hang on the family room wall.  Finally, we had a grown-up looking piece of décor that had nothing to do with “The Goonies” or “Final Fantasy.”

After the kids went to bed tonight, I decided to do a little straightening up, followed by hanging our lovely new clock on the wall.

Now, I’ve mentioned before that I’m not really allowed to do home improvement projects because I always fuck them up.  But this?  I mean, the nail was already in the wall.  We hung a wreath over the fireplace last Christmas, so I didn’t even have to get out the hammer.

All I had to do was hang the clock on a nail.

And so I did.  I took our new find out of its box, stood on my tiptoes and hung the clock on the nail.  Then I took a step back to admire it, and was in the middle of contemplating how we should rearrange the things on the mantel to accentuate the clock … when it fell off the nail, crashing to the floor and shattering its glass face into a thousand glittering pieces.

Did you figure out what’s wrong with that photo yet?  You’re right!  1. The clock is not hanging on the wall.  2.  There is no glass covering the face.

About a decade ago (my god, I’m old), I worked the customer service desk at Office Depot.  Ours was a pretty customer-centric store, and we always did what we could to keep customers happy.  Only when it was absolutely clear that someone was stealing from us would we refuse a return.  One time, my manager even approved a return on a several-hundred-dollar camera that a guy brought back after his dog had chewed it up.

I could hope that Bed Bath & Beyond is staffed with as forgiving a staff as we were back then.  That “but it was an accident” would be a good enough reason for them to give me a new clock.  But I have a feeling they wouldn’t be all that sympathetic to someone who isn’t smart enough to hang a clock on a nail.

I think the message here is clear.  When Rob and I try to be grown-ups, bad things happen.

Maybe we should just accept our fate and buy a “Ghostbusters” clock.

It would be a tremendous understatement to say we’ve been busy lately.  Here’s a short list of things that have happened in the past week.

• I gave up my car for an indefinite period of time so it can be repaired.
• We drove to Texas (in my mother-in-law’s car).
• We ate a lot, played a lot, and nobody went to bed before 10 p.m., which wouldn’t be remarkable if one of us wasn’t a 7-month-old baby.
• We took Kaylee to see a traveling Nickelodeon show starring Dora, The Backyardigans, Wonder Pets and some cartoon girl whose name I can never remember.  Kaylee was absolutely mesmerized and spent the rest of the day pretending she was Dora The Explorer.
• We got back yesterday evening.  I started a new job today, waking up at the crack of dawn so I could get to a rental car agency before work since my car is still in the shop.
• Kaylee started preschool today.  She’ll be going two days a week, and she is ecstatic.
• Robbie learned to be a little speed-demon crawler in our hotel room in Dallas.  He can no longer be contained.

The point here is that I’m sleepy, hence the lack of real updates lately.  One of these days, when I get my bearings again, I’ll try to say something more interesting.

• Robbie has learned to make fart noises by blowing on my arm.  For some reason, people were steering very clear of me at Half Price Books today.
• The tap water in Texas comes in two temperatures: pretty warm and very hot.
• It is actual, physical torture for me to be across the street from Six Flags Over Texas and not be able to go ride a roller coaster.
• Kaylee has declared that she is Dora The Explorer, as long as she’s wearing her new Dora T-shirt. If Robbie grabs a fistful of her shirt and tries to eat it, she’s not Dora anymore. That is why it’s ok for her to scream her head off any time he gets within a few inches of her.
• A lightbulb has come on, and Robbie totally gets this crawling thing now.  Before he’d managed to cover a little distance a couple times, but now he can go.  He’s already destroyed the hotel’s comment card and found wires to chew on.  He reminds me of my old rabbit, who we rarely let out of its cage because it was always chewing up papers, biting through lamp cords and pooping on the couch.  Robbie better watch himself.

I apologize for all the quiet around these here parts, because I know you are all waiting with bated breath to hear more tales from my household.  I know it keeps you up at night, wondering what color vomit Robbie sent flying last night, and what unintentionally amusing thing Kaylee said this morning.

It’s just … well, I’m kind of spent.  There was so much build-up to that surgery, and we’re working on a minor home improvement project that cuts right into blog-writing time, and there’s the car stuff and the money stuff and the stress stuff and all the other STUFF, and even with all that happening I just can’t think of much to say.

All this blabbering basically boils down to a two-word update: I’m tired.

Since I can’t entertain you, here’s a video that might do the job for me.  (You’ve probably already seen this, but again, I’m too tired to find anything fresh.  But still, if you grew up in the same era as me, you’ll enjoy it.)

My birthday is three weeks away, so Rob and I went to Jake Jabs’ lair – despite our past difficulties with his superhuman powers, he does have good prices – last night to look for a chair to put in my office.

I’d picked one out a few weeks ago, but it’s apparently no longer available, so I had to take a few test-sits to choose a new one.  I found one that seemed just about perfect for kicking back with a book – or a Kindle, because we are gadget fiends – and relax for a while.

So we loaded it up in our SUV, which was exciting to me because we were finally using the car for something our old sedan couldn’t accomplish, thus justifying the expense.  Obviously.  We needed to spend $20,000 in order to move this $130 chair.  Duh.

Rob carried it up to my office and plopped it in its corner, and we set up a new lamp next to it to create a happy little reading nook.  And then I tried it out … and suddenly felt like a giant.

Do you see what’s wrong with this photo?  Because we didn’t realize until last night that this chair is supposed to have legs.  Because chairs?  They don’t normally sit flat on the floor like that.

But, um, where were the legs?

This chair was wrapped in some netting stuff and plastic wrap, so there was no box to dig through to find the requisite parts.  It took a bit of head scratching and searching before we finally noticed the secret zippered compartment on the underside of the chair.

Rob reached his arm elbow deep and fished around, pulling out a drawstring bag of chair legs hidden in the recesses of the chair.  But there was so much more space in there, Jake could have easily hidden a lot more.

“What else am I going to find in here?” Rob wondered as he fished around. “Doubloons?  A map to One-Eyed Willie’s treasure?”

Alas, there was only the bag of chair legs.  But why do I suddenly have the feeling that I’ll open that compartment 20 years from now and discover one of Kaylee’s stuffed animals and a half-eaten bag of moldy Cheetos?

I’m well aware that I babbled for a week about getting to go out of town, and then once we got back there were four weeks of dead silence regarding how that vacation went.  The vacation was fantastic, but I haven’t talked about it because it’s tied inextricably to the few days that followed it, which we’ll call Heather’s Existential Crisis of 2010.  We still won’t be talking about HEC2010 just yet (if ever), but I will go ahead and tell you about the awesomeness of visiting The Stanley Hotel on the same weekend as the Ghost Hunters.

We dropped the kids off with Rob’s mom on Friday afternoon, and as we drove away we reminisced about the days when we’d feel guilty and worried every time we left Kaylee with someone else.  Robbie has never had the benefit of being cried over that way, because we’ve long since learned to rejoice in the act of leaving our kids with other people.  What if he gets an owie?  What if he wants his Mommy?  What if he gets really sad? Eh, he’ll live.  As long as we get both kids back with all their limbs, we’ll be happy.  With this attitude, we’re either building an independent son or a sociopath.  Time will tell!

On the way to Estes Park, we stopped at a P.F. Changs in Denver because we haven’t been to one in a long time.  (I know it’s evil and/or unclassy to enjoy chain restaurants, but shut up, I like P.F. Changs.)  For once we got to enjoy a meal without a baby sitting on my lap and trying to grab my fork, and without a toddler deciding that restaurants are the perfect place to get exercise by doing laps around the table.  We didn’t have to worry about the insanely cacophonous dining room waking up our precious snowflake, and I didn’t have to feel embarrassed about the spit-up on my shirt.  (Although, now that I think of it, I probably did have spit-up on my shirt, as I doubt I changed clothes after dropping the kids off.)  After dinner, we drove through some sort of crazy hurricane and arrived at the Stanley Hotel around 11 o’clock.  The front desk clerk — who had quite possibly the coolest name ever, which won’t be shared just because I don’t like to identify people without their permission — gave us a weird look for arriving very late and soaking wet, but was otherwise pretty nice.

We didn’t know when we scheduled this trip that Jason and Grant of TAPS were holding a seminar at the Stanley for a few days, starting on the day we were leaving.  I found out sort of randomly a few weeks prior, when a cashier at Wal-Mart commented on the TAPS t-shirt I was wearing and went all fanboi on all things ghost-related.  (How sad is it that I kind of reveled in making a random twenty-something jealous of me by telling him there was a small percentage of a chance that I’d get to meet the Ghost Hunters?)  (We did not meet the Ghost Hunters.)  The upshot of all this was that there were a number of seminar-goers who arrived early, and the hotel was packed with people who were searching for ghosts.

On Saturday we wandered the town a little bit before returning to the hotel for a ghost tour in the afternoon, where we learned that one of the men who was an integral part of early Estes and the Stanley, English Earl Lord Dunraven, was kind of a douchebag.  His ghost is also a douchebag, and likes to harass women in room 401.  (But we ate at a small, local Italian restaurant named after him, and his pasta is delicious.)  We also learned that the Stanley has one channel on its TVs that is devoted exclusively to showing “The Shining” over and over, Stephen King stayed in room 217 and wrote “The Shining” within one week of his visit, the resident psychic likes to leave animal crackers out for the child ghosts, and when a bride decides she wants to walk the lobby right before her wedding, all ghost tour groups are expected to clear the fuck out.

Inspired by our ghost tour and full of alcohol and douchebag-inspired pasta, Rob and I decided to do a little ghost hunting in the halls on Friday evening.  We took amazing pictures such as these:

It's a vortex! Or just a staircase.

The kid ghosts didn't seem to care about the animal crackers lining the arms of this couch.

This is the room Stephen King stayed in when he was inspired to write "The Shining." Maybe if I stood here long enough, some of his success would rub off on me.

Ack! Ghostly construction!

A message from beyond, or an asshole with a sharpie? YOU DECIDE.

… that didn’t show anything creepy at all.  But we had fun anyway, because the whole place was crawling with people who were in search of the dead.  Some people were doing it just for the hell of it, while others were taking it very, very seriously.  Once in a while, someone would ask if you’d caught anything good, and overall it was just a feeling of giddy excitement that we were walking around a notoriously haunted hotel and just willing something scary/cool to happen.

We spent some time on Saturday and Sunday wandering downtown, and we broke from our normal laziness and decided that we would not eat anywhere but local restaurants.  I ate a buffalo burger for the first time — it’s about time, really, since I live in Colorado and buffalo burgers are available in the town where I live, but whatever — we tried the douchebag’s restaurant, and we ate at a pizza place with the best hot wings in the history of the world.  (I am now in the middle of plotting a move to Estes Park, just so I can reside in the same zip code as those hot wings.)

The weather was sort of dreary, the clouds were so low that we couldn’t see the mountains surrounding us, and the river was damn near spilling over its banks, but it. was. awesome.  I loved every moment of that trip, and I’m so glad we got to get away from real life for a couple of days.

Here, have some more photos:

We watched this horrible movie one and a half times. I kind of want to beat the wife to death myself.

This river wanted to eat us. I could tell.

The Stanley is lovely from the back.

But prettier from the front.

Goodbye, Stanley.  We will definitely be back.

So, remember a few weeks ago when Robbie had a stomach bug and kept puking on me?  And I went to Awesome Doctor and she made us all feel better?

Well, I just got a letter in the mail saying they haven’t paid that claim because they believe it may qualify as a pre-existing condition.

What. The. Fuck.

Some days I truly hate being an adult.

UPDATE: The person I spoke to on the phone agrees that the letter they sent doesn’t make any damn sense, so they’re reprocessing the claim.  We’ll see what happens in about a week or so.

The scene: Kaylee is whining because she desperately wants animal crackers for lunch.  I’ve told her she can have animal crackers as long as she eats them with her lunch rather than as her lunch.  She launches a last-ditch effort.

KAYLEE: I’m siiiiiiick.

ME: You’re not sick.

KAYLEE: I am too!

ME: You know what helps when you’re sick?  A nap.

KAYLEE: I think animal crackers will help me feel better.

Hey Internet, want to know something ridiculous?  I’ve never put on eyeliner, and I only have a vague understanding of eyeshadow.

Yes, I am a grown-ass 31-year-old woman.

Makeup is not something I’ve ever bothered to learn how to apply, and up until recently that didn’t really bother me. I’d sometimes make an effort when headed to a big event like, oh say, my wedding, but on those occasions I’ve always felt like an imposter and/or a scary clown.  I always imagine that all the other women around me are analyzing my makeup job and picking it apart, and rather than spending every day feeling out-of-place, I’ve chosen to stick with chapstick.

But ever since Robbie was born, I’ve feel like I look exhausted all the time.  (Probably because I’m exhausted all the time.)

I’m telling you this so you’ll understand why I let a Mary Kay saleswoman into my home two weeks ago.

I met her in the grocery store by the penny-a-ride pony that beckons Kaylee every time we enter King Soopers.  If I neglect to bring a penny with me, there is hell to pay.  I learned that lesson quickly.

So I was standing at the pony waiting for it to stop, when a woman brought her son over for a turn on the ride.  We ended up talking about how that horse was sometimes the bane of our existences, and after a couple of minutes she said, “I don’t normally do this, but I just feel like I should,” and she whipped out a Mary Kay business card.

Now, in the past I probably wouldn’t have given her my number.  But as I mentioned, the complete lack of a decent night’s sleep for the past four months has made me vulnerable.  I figured this was my chance to finally have a chance to sit down with an actual girl and have her show me how I could look like an actual girl, too.

So she came over two weeks ago – Kaylee is still annoyed with me for ignoring her for an hour while I put on makeup – and she was actually pretty cool.  She was not wearing bright blue eyeshadow and she did not have a beehive hairdo, and she helped fulfill my daily desire to bitch about my children.  I ended up buying some stuff from her and I gave her names and numbers of a few friends.  (Sorry, y’all!  I’m totally bribeable!)

And then she bribed me some more.  She asked if she could come by in a couple more weeks to give me a presentation on becoming a Mary Kay salesperson.  I agreed, because she said she’d give me a free “Satin Hands” gift bag.  (My hands are so dry they’re almost always cracking open.  Eww, right?  You totally wanted to know that about me.)

But I just knew I’d be telling her no at the end of the day.  Because me?  Selling Mary Kay?  Yeah, right.

But damn it.  Her sales pitch was really intriguing.  Damn.  It.

I’ve been talking to Rob about getting a part-time job at a bookstore or something, because I feel like I’ve been dialing up the crazy a bit in the past couple of months.  I lovelovelove my kids, but I think I need my life to revolve around them a little bit less.

And I think the most compelling bits of information I came away with were these:

1.  The hourly rate for selling this stuff is WAY better than the hourly rate for working retail.  And how badly do I want to go back to making $8 an hour?

2.  They don’t want their salespeople to be pushy.

3.  Her shy salespeople actually outsell her outgoing ones.

4.  She’d rather work with someone who knows nothing about cosmetics than someone who thinks they know everything.

Also?  The initial investment is $100.  I let Rob blow more than that on video games every month.

So here I am, sitting in the café at the gym, alternating between staring at a Barnes & Noble application and perusing the Mary Kay web site.

Stand behind a cash register and ring people up for books or coffee?  Or sit with women in their kitchens and talk about their days, and make them feel better about themselves?

I’m still chewing on this, but I have one final argument for doing it: If nothing else, becoming a Mary Kay salesperson could be excellent blog fodder.

And wouldn’t you all want to read about my spectacular failure?  Wouldn’t you?

UPDATE: All right, I’m either a coward or really smart, because I don’t think I’m going to do this after all.  I just found this site and it scared me off.  I *do* like the woman who came to my house, but I can totally see her pushing me to buy a bunch of inventory that will never sell.  This has the potential to turn into a big hairy mess, and I’m not really up for that.

I’ve seen roughly a gabillion (that’s a real number, right?) movies in which a character, through the magic of a fairy godmother or a bit of ancient magic or whatever, gets to relive the glory days of high school.  Often, that character was the shit in high school and regards that period as the best time in his/her life.

Something got me thinking about this the other day, contemplating whether I would ever want to go back if I suddenly happened upon a bit of elfin magic that would make it possible to revisit those days.

My answer?  Fuck. No.

It would take an exorbitant amount of cash, or possibly this stove from Best Buy (TWO OVENS!), to get me to return to the shyest, most awkward time in my life.  I was pimply.  I was nerdy.  I was pretty sure no one liked me.

But Heather! you protest. Imagine going back with the knowledge you’ve gained in the intervening years!

Yeah, no.  Still not doing it.

Look, I did have some good times in high school.  I had some good friends who I still keep in touch with, some fun activities, and some laughs.   But when I think back on those days, the things I really remember are the crippling insecurities and the desperate longing to just be accepted that come with being a teenager.  I remember getting made fun of for sweating in gym class.  I remember getting laughed at for the way I did my hair.  I remember being approached by an oh-so-popular, oh-so-cute boy in the days before prom my junior year, being asked if I was going to prom, my heart skipping a beat, thinking maybe-just-maybe he was going to ask me to be his date, and then having him ask if he could have my free ticket I’d earned with my perfect attendance record since I wouldn’t be using it.  I remember my senior prom sucking ass, and spending the after party with my head in my hands, trying not to cry.

I left high school with a better understanding of who my real friends were, and I left with a sense of overwhelming joy that I was finally moving on.  And then in college I started to figure out who I was, and I started to shed some of that insecurity.  (Not that it’ll ever go away entirely, I think, because what if the other moms in the playgroup don’t like meeeee?)

So when I think about high school, it’s not with a longing to return.  It’s with worry for how I’m going to handle it when I’m experiencing it vicariously through my kids.  How will I help them understand that high school is just a blip on the timeline?  That all the heartaches and frustrations and drama will pass? That if they can just ignore the sadness of being dissed by the popular girl, and focus instead on the goofing off with their sports teammates, watching reruns of “Mr. Belvedere”(or whatever timely equivalent they will have) with their friends, staying up late gossiping on the phone with their best friend, or talking until 3 a.m. with their crush – if they can just enjoy the good times and say “fuck it” to the rest, then those teen years don’t have to be so difficult.

I read news stories about teenagers who let the absolute suck of high school get to them and take a tragic way out, and I just wish they’d been able to stick it out until adulthood.  I wish they could have seen that all that teen bullshit becomes so insignificant in hindsight, and those movies that portray high school as the glory days and the pinnacle of life?  Those movies are just kind of sad, because there’s so much more that comes later.

That’s what I think, anyway.  What about you?  If a genie showed up and gave you the chance to go back to high school, would you do it?