Blogging From the Trenches

I’m writing this from the bench in a BounceU. It’s one of those places where you can take your kids and they have like 25 different inflatable jumpy castle type things. I’m hiding out from the cleaning people who are currently at our house. My white suburban middle class guilt leaves me horrified that I’ve hired an Hispanic couple to clean my bathrooms and do my floors; so once every two weeks I flee the scene just so I don’t follow them around apologizing for the dirt I’m paying them to clean up and centuries of oppression by my people.  Yes, I sprayed Febreze throughout the house right before I left so it would smell less like used cat litter, I confess.

I will not, however, be posting this from the bench at BounceU because the sadist who owns the place does not offer wifi to parents. What kind of monster creates a place you can take your kids and let them run wild for 2 hours at $8.95/kid but does not equip it with the internet so parents can enjoy themselves equally? A sick bastard who was probably tortured by his own parents and is now taking his pain out on the parents of the East Valley, that’s who.

Anyway. There’s the matter of the Holiday Card Typo Contest to address. Clearly not everyone who reads this site got a Christmas card. Let’s face it, not even everyone I’m related to got a Christmas card (one lady in the neighborhood I’ve been mailing to for 4 years did get one, however, and called me to tell me she thought it was ‘in poor taste’ because it took her 10 minutes to figure out it was a mailer from a real estate agent and not one of her friends. I had to resist the urge to explain to her that means it was a successful real estate agent mailer).

Honestly, this year I had lofty goals of staying organized and updating my database every time anyone I knew moved (or hey, at least with the new address of people who I helped BUY a new house), but that all totally swirled down the drain about June when I started to be really depressed about how dead the real estate market was. Then, the day I actually mailed out the cards it was all I could do to print the labels directly from what was in Outlook at that moment to get them out at all. I have a stack of 50 or so cards and a list of people who I need to email and get their new addresses (or even just copy it off the card they sent me), but it’s been staring at me for the last two weeks in an excessively accusatory manner, so I hid it under a Christmas dish towel last night so I could get some peace. They’re probably not going out any time soon. Or any time ever.

The point is; here is what the card looked like for those of you who didn’t get yours (also feel free to insert a holiday hug from me, if you’re into that sort of thing, and as long as I can do it ‘virtually’ and I don’t really have to hug you. It’s not you, it’s me. I’m not a hugger):

The Newlins think you’re hilarious. Jonas especially finds your wit efflorescent.  Bennett thinks you’re amusing without being obnoxious.  Gray says you make him giggle. Elizabeth just laughed so hard her eyes couldn’t bear to stay open. Jason detects an off-color note to your humor and is pleased.

The Newlins hope your holiday season is as charming and amusing as you are.

So, yes. As many of you pointed out (Amanda Cowan being the first!) the word I was going for in the first line was: effervescent, which means sparkling, bubbly or lively, not so much with the efflorescent, which means (among other things) foaming and like a skin rash.

Ed Najim put it the best in his comment: We don’t wish to think that Jonas thinks our humor is flowery or like crystalline deposits on a rock, but he is the trouble maker. We’d prefer to think of ourselves as effervescent, even though we don’t release gas bubbles too often.

Amanda and Ed will each get a $10 iTunes gift card (thanks to Tyler for teaching me that with Apple it’s always lowercase ‘i’ followed by an uppercase letter). At some point. When my husband comes back into town and I stop breaking down in the middle of grocery stores weeping and clawing at strangers begging them to come home with me and do the dishes or take out the trash or even just keep an eye on Jonas so I can pee with the door closed for once.