New Directions

this blog will have nothing to do with glee, but my unnecessary love for the show makes me giddy and light headed at my ability to use the team name as my title for a post. also, i sincerely hope that lea michele reads this because it 100% pertains to her.  kind of.

i've decided that this blog needs more direction than "write something funny". it's too vague and it often turns into me ranting and complaining about something not worth complaining about. my husband can tell you (behind my back) that i already whine far too much, so i think it's time to turn this ship around and be funny yet PRODUCTIVE!!!!

a dear friend of mine suggested that i pull a julie and julia this summer when i was missing my husband, living with my parents, and in a general funk. unfortunately, the funk strongly resembled the blob and i was rendered immobile, stuck to the ceiling in someone's office, hands unable to fit the pages of a cookbook between my sludge-filled fingers.

but now my son and i are back with my husband, my kitchen aid mixer is out on my counter, and we are slowly reuniting ourselves with our normal food staples.

now, to turn this around on me for a moment! i eat primarily vegetarian-- lacto ovo, which means i eat dairy products and eggs. i also occasionally eat fish and very rarely eat other kinds of meat. i am by no means an animal activist. i can't even think about what happens in processing plants long enough to become offended. i made the choice to eat less meat years ago because it was slightly more cost effective and significantly healthier. meat became a regular part of my diet again when i was pregnant because i had lost so much weight i simply began consuming everything i could stomach to try to gain weight.

we're back to a primarily vegetarian diet now, for ethical, health, and monetary reasons.

for monetary and health reasons, i also make a lot of things from scratch now. i want to use this blog to share recipes, trials, and errors with you. battleofthebulger will be a battle against bulge-- bulging tummies, bulging debts, and bulging.... lack of ethics? that doesn't really make sense, but you get the idea.

i have no credentials and no experience, and most of what i find is on the internet!! but i do have a lot of heart, a lot of humor, and a lot of time on my hands to cook. oh, and i have a bad-ass camera that i can take sweet pictures with, so that might be worth tuning in for!!!

i hope this shift isn't too boring for anyone. however, if it is... reconsider your friendship with me, because my life basically consists of 2 things: my boys and taking care of them. you're getting the method behind the latter, so technically, this blog will center around half of my life. if you find the blog boring, you'll totally hate me!! :)

love you guys

last night i had a dream that i took 8 pregnancy tests. they all came out positive and all had a number on them designating how much HCG was in my body. the first test said .7, the last 4.0. it appeared on the pee stick in cursive.

first of all, once i figure out what i ate before bed last night, it's getting tossed.

after that, me and my dream self are gonna have a little chat about her spending. the  chances of getting a false positive once are slim. but to get 2 in the same cycle? pretty much impossible. she could have easily stopped with two. does she realize who's paying for all those pee sticks!?!

it's not her, because every time she waits tables, she gets sat with 5 sets of 8 tops all at once and gets into the weeds so bad that nobody is tipping her. i know it for a fact. usually she just ends up breaking down in the dish pit. i have never seen her work a job successfully.

oh, and her medical bills are piling high from all of her teeth crumbling or falling out. i swear her molars grow back like hydras, 3 in the place of the last one. maybe that's how. maybe she's doing a circus act when i'm awake, pulling her own teeth out and letting people watch the newbs grow in. i bet she charges $5 a head.

i wouldn't pay to see that, but the people in my dreams are a bit off, so i wouldn't put it past them.

if you happen to see dream-leanne, can you please let her know that all this pregnancy test nonsense is out of control, and that she owes me rent?

Cat Lovers, Beware

by now you already know that i am brazenly offensive. but thanks to modern day labels, i can call it a disease. i have no idea WHAT disease it is, but i can definitely work my way into the description of at least one.

that one disease, however, is not hoarding.

i've been watching a hoarders marathon all day. up until this point i had only seen parts of a handful of these shows. today i have seen over a half a dozen.

there are obvious common themes. inabilities to cope, tragic beginnings to bad behaviors, denial, defeat.

and cats.

here's the thing: i hate cats and they hate me likewise. i firmly believe this is because they can sense my discomfort and they react. initially they made me ill at ease because i am mildly allergic. that uneasiness led to multiple bites which consequently led to hatred.

cats are demanding, solitary, condescending, and entirely delusional. what other 7-15 pound living thing do you know of that believes it is in control of 160 pound human beings? babies. but babies are cute, so they get a pass.

probably close to 75% of the hoarders have cats. hoarders tend to be demanding, solitary, and entirely delusional, so i think the relationship makes sense.

it's interesting to me how upset these people get when their cats are taken by animal control, or when the cat runs away once it finds an open door, or how sad people are that their cats started killing each other when there were simply too many in too cramped of an environment. a logical person would say "if you loved the cats so much, why wouldn't you clean up so you could keep your house/not have your animals taken away for neglect/not end up finding cats mummified into the floor boards/not be burying shoe boxes full of cat bones that were found on your kitchen counter?"

but, back to the delusional thing. i'm sure they don't even notice if the cats are there, until they are taken away.

but there's something even MORE interesting to me. the cats.

i understand that the hoarders themselves are mentally ill.

but the cats... LEAVE!!! it doesn't seem that difficult to me! the people whose house you're staying in wouldn't even notice if you were gone! seriously, just slip outside while they're busy catching falling items from the 8 foot tall stack of pitted olive jars. chances are they didn't adopt you from a shelter, they took you in when you kept showing up because they had an abundance of food to offer you (mostly olives) and they were lonelier than jabba the hut (seriously, do you really think he had friends at the end of the day? no way. he ate them all).

sooooo... if you are eating cat food that has insect eggs in it, being attacked by the persian cat army, sleeping in a rusted cage, and twisting your tiny kitty ankles with every step, hit the streets. you obviously already know how to scavenge.

and that leads me here: is it possible that cats have mental disorders as well? not cat in its right mind would willingly live in those situations.

and if cats CAN have mental disorders...

sweet mother of pearl, i'll take a dog please.

and a personal organizer. my piles of laundry are starting to upset me.

Double Standards, Something Like Ice Cream, and A Video

this is going to go in a few different directions before it comes to a glorious culmination of awesome.

there's a double standard in parenting. who's shocked? anyone? 

i'm sure the double standard you're thinking of is not the one i'm going to talk about, which leads me to this conclusion: parenting should never, ever work, yet somehow we keep managing to make it happen, and in some instances, make it work. 

tim gunn would be a great dad. "well daddy, i was thinking about making a model of planet earth out of lead, mercury, and asbestos as a commentary on our society's lack of vision and concern for future generations." "ok, i'm a little concerned that this is going to be tasteless. these materials, if not handled properly, could be a total disaster. your sketch is promising, and i love the color palette, but it's going to take a lot of precision. make it work." 

back to the double standard. dads are almost invariably the parental unit to introduce kids to soda, doritos, pixie sticks, and the host of other terrible foods and drinks that result in children who never sleep and mothers who turn gray by the age of 28. and when dads do these things, we giggle and roll our eyes and say things like "father-son/daughter bonding" or "aw, a dad's rite of passage" or "YOU'RE GOING TO BE THE ONE WHO STAYS UP WITH JACK WHEN HE'S BOUNCING OFF THE WALLS AT 2 AM!!!!!!!" 

but when you see a mom giving her child a sip of her diet pepsi, your jaw drops. "omg becky, did you see that? doesn't she know what's in sodas!? i bet her kid has no teeth from bottle rot and she probably does heroine in their living room. oh, and they're on welfare and she's pregnant right now. with twins from two different men. we'll see her on maury in a year."

next on the agenda!

i am white. my husband is white. i'm not talking ethnicity. i would say caucasian in that instance, to be PC. not the computer. i'm a mac. just wanted to clarify that.

when i say we are white i am almost exclusively talking about our dance moves. my husband will tell you that his wrestling background formed him into a smooth operator with excellent hip control, thus forming him into an exceptional dancer.

do not listen to him. he is a very good looking, delusional liar.

vanilla ice should be a hero for people like me. first of all, his stage name alone represents everything we stand for. it sort of sounds hard, but when you really look at it, it doesn't make any sense. vanilla ice. ok, white=vanilla. ice=cold. so he's a tall iced latte no whip? or is he gelato? 

for the record, i've never heard a news report stating that both the driver and passengers of a drive-by were sipping starbucks or enjoying a creamy baskin robbins creation while gunning down some bloods who were on the wrong side of town. 

he couldn't even come up with his own beat. and he found a legal way to get away with it. remember the interview? "well, ours is dumdumdumdadadumdum-dum-dumdumdumdadadumdum, theirs is dumdumdumdadadumdum-dumdumdumdadadumdum. it's the 'dum'".

you're right vanilly (that's his hood name), it is in the dum(b).

people like me act tough. we want the outside world to think we pose some kind of threat, that we could beat down anyone who messed with us. the truth of the matter is that we would probably just get a lawyer to bury you in paperwork.

i've only held a gun once, and i cried. however, i shot santa right between the eyes when i finally conjured up the courage to pull the trigger. i still have nightmares.

ready for the culmination?

here is my response to the daddy double standard, a result of my horrible whiteness, and why you should never be scared of me or anyone in my family.

tim gun would be so proud.