I’ve looked high and low for the perfect bedroom lamp, and the answer to my quest arrived today in the Touch of Class catalog. (Why am I on this mailing list? Why?)

Victorian Lady Table Lamp

How is it that someone actually decided to manufacture and market this . . . this . . . thing? Is there really enough of a demand out there for creepy doll lamps to justify it?

Seriously . . . some people just need to be saved from their own bad taste.

Did anyone catch the end of Dr. Phil today? It was a show where people were asking Dr. Phil about their parenting dilemmas, and this one woman was all like, “My two year old is this BRILLIANT child who can count in English and Spanish, and knows all of the states, and was drawing trapezoids when he was nine months old, and we’re just not sure how to handle how exceptional he is.”
Oh, puh-lease. Just because your kid is able to rattle off the alphabet, doesn’t mean he’s any smarter than my kid who is, right this very moment . . . er . . . talking into the television remote control like it’s a telephone.
But hey, that just shows he has a creative spirit! And he isn’t afraid to express himself in nontraditional ways! And who needs to draw a trapezoid anyway?

Beep . . . beep . . . beep . . . beep . . .
That’s the sound of the smoke detector — which I can’t reach, even when standing on my tippy-toes at the top of the step ladder — in Sam’s room letting me know that the battery needs changing.
It. Is driving. Me. Insane.
Beep . . . beep . . . beep . . .

I just spent an hour at the local Verizon store, trying to purchase a new charger for my cell phone. There were eighteen employees milling around the store, but apparently only one had received the advanced training on how to fetch a charger out of the back room, so they made Sam and I wait.
Sam does not like waiting in line. And he especially doesn’t like waiting in line in the Verizon store, a feeling he communicated to me by turning bright red, clenching his face like a fist and screeching loudly while we waited for the one competent salesperson to help us.
Which I actually sort of understood. If it had been socially acceptable, I would have screamed too.
I rarely use my cell phone. My charger died weeks ago, and I’ve only just now gotten around to buying a replacement. Before that, my phone spent about a month sitting at the bottom of Sam’s toy box. But there’s something about being in the Verizon store that makes me want a new cell phone. And not just any cell phone, but one of the cool ass ones that takes pictures and can be programmed to play a Depeche Mode song when it rings.
It’s sort of how I feel when I walk into the Best Buy, and immediately start coveting a flat screened television set that I can hang on my wall like a painting. And all of a sudden, I’m all like, Sure it’s thousands of dollars, but just think of how freaking cool it would look in my living room. I’ve even gone so far as to try to figure out a way to write one of those suckers off as a business expense — I mean, hell, I write contemporary fiction, so shouldn’t vegging out in front of the television count as research?

So we have new neighbors moving in across the street. Want to know how I met them?
By chasing Lexi through their pristine, beautiful new house.
Lex managed to sneak out while I was otherwise engaged keeping Sam from dashing out the back gate . . . and she promptly ran across the street and through the open front door of our neighbors’ new house.
I ran after her, wearing a black t-shirt, no bra, gray sweat shorts and pink Dr. Scholls.
But here’s the thing about greyhounds . . . they’re really freaking fast. Too fast to catch them when you’re pursuing on foot, especially while wearing pink sandals.
Luckily, our new neighbors were exceptionally gracious about the canine interruption. Either that, or they genuinely thought that the braless woman sprinting through their house was actually insane, and were afraid of provoking me.
Either way, I probably owe them a bottle of wine.

Yup, I’m going to blog about salad dressing.

Why?

Because this Galeos Cafe Miso Original is the best damn salad dressing I have ever had in my life. So good, that we order a dozen bottles at a time, since they don’t carry it at the local grocery store. So good, that we go through two bottles a week. So good that I practically — ok, actually — lick my salad plate so that I won’t waste a single drop.

Yum.

Just had to share. Not literally share, since this stuff is like liquid 22 calories per tablespoon gold, but more in the public service announcement sense.

Tonight’s episode of Lost is a repeat.
Gah.

So I’ve been bitching for weeks about how vile Rob and Ambuh have ruined the latest season of The Amazing Race.
This chick agrees with me, but she thinks that the damage goes beyond this one season:
We know we’re being manipulated. We can’t help but let it happen. The action makes us too giddy, even if later on, once we really think about what Rob and Amber did this week and last, and previously to that — oh, and remember that they already have a million dollars in the bank — it simply makes us seethe.
Who knows, maybe some good can come from witnessing their true colors. The more wretchedness they display, the less inclined we may be to witness their Burnett-produced televised hitching. Keep in mind, fame and fortune doesn’t guarantee they’ll win. But the damage is done, and a respectable show has been irreparably tainted.

Don’t try this at home.

I think I’m probably the only person in modern history who didn’t get stoned while visiting Amsterdam. I was in college at the time, and stayed remarkably sober throughout my trip to the substance abuse capital of the world.