The video blog that features extreme close-ups of Slinky the corn snake

This one was fun to make! In the future though, I will do the blogs before I have wine, so I don't end up calling the snake a "rodent."

Flowers for Algernon in Reverse

Once I discovered that the cause of my increasing idiocy was physiological, it was a snap to fix.

Why didn't anyone tell me this EIGHT YEARS AGO before I spent the better part of a decade bumping into the walls in a fog?

This is the story of my before and after with anemia.

Shaken Video

I've posted my first video blog!

It's here.

Pushing my buttons

I keep thinking of something Glennon said last night about mothering.

She said it much more eloquently than I can paraphrase, but basically that she doesn't believe that women should stop their entire lives when their children are born in order to be a servant to that child for the rest of her life... her point was, "Where does it stop?" ... or who gets to work toward something even greater? She wouldn't want her daughters to stop their entire lives in order to raise their children.

I hadn't heard it said quite this way before, and I'm surprised that it rang true to me.

OK, I don't agree 100%, because I can't imagine that my life has just stopped since I decided to stay home with our girls. It certainly felt that way at first, but the more I wrote about things and then got paid to write about things and then took over the Girl Scout troop then started singing my heart out with the Berkeley Broadway Singers, the more I felt that I was using a crucial part of my brain.

In the meantime, I don't feel like a servant to my kids since I'm home with them all the time... or do I? And what is the alternative? Having a full-time live-in nanny? I worked so hard to get these kids into my life, I am afraid that if I had the option of handing them over to the care of a full-time helper, I would do that all the time.

What I think is this: my girls' childhood will ultimately be fleeting, so I am choosing to stare at them for the maximum number of hours before they escape from me. But Glennon's comments freed me from feeling like I had to judge working moms harshly.

You know why I did that? I was afraid they knew something I didn't, that they were having some kind of life I was missing out on. For example, working moms get to go onto elevators, possibly with pantyhose on, and push the elevator buttons themselves. What is that even like?

Because I felt insecure that I had made a silly choice on some level by giving up my PR career whole hog, I felt like I had to figure out a way to not like women who got to continue their careers. I had to figure out some way to take a righteous position on this issue.

And you know what, people? That is exhausting, living up on some ridiculous pedestal. It's also no way to live. When Glennon said that, about women not somehow being obligated to sacrifice their lives to the servitude of their children, it snipped a big cord between me and my desire to be righteous about what mothers should do.

Because ultimately, I don't have any idea what the hell I'm doing. I mean really, do you?

Brush with Momastery

There was one thing better than anything else about coming to Glennon Melton's book reading in Marin County tonight.

There were many good things. First, hearing her read the story of her girls' Target meltdown and the kind police officer who frightened them into silence was priceless!

Hearing others ask questions that were on my mind was also good. (How are the kids handling the separation? What's next for Momastery? Is it OK to have our own lives separate from being parents?) (The answers to all of those questions was basically "yes.")

Oh, and meeting Glennon that was good too. We got to take this photo and I told her about Gigi "feeling too much" just like Glennon does. She told me that her daughter Tish is wired the same way, and recommended "The Highly Sensitive Child."

Yes, YES and I also made Laura be my friend. Laura and her wife Jaime were featured in a series of amazing videos about gay families. Theirs is here. So when I saw her, I totally recognized her and thought she was my friend, and made her talk with me AND then she introduced me to Jaime and I saw their tired yet spectacular son, Simon and was immediately hypnotized by his eyes.

It should be mentioned that Laura made a spectacular suggestion that we should have Momastery Cruises. 303 meets Momastery? She's a genius.

But the BEST PART of coming to the signing was meeting six new friends who had also been pulled away from their families on a Friday night and driven rather long distances to wait in line with fellow Monkees for more than two hours. Oh my God they were awesome, and two of them were also named Laura, including this awesome Laura. Then there is Sue, whose firefighting husband has been sidelined by cancer, so we were all secretly praying the whole time she was talking about him.

I mean REALLY, it's too much. In a great way. Goodnight new Momastery friends!

My goal is to die last

I was thinking about death today, not because Stella insists on talking about it, but because of Cher.

There was some general accidental hilarity this week when Margaret Thatcher died (may she rest in peace), but the hashtag "#nowthatcherisdead" cause people to start memorializing Cher. And I though, what fun to know now how people will talk about you when you die!

Then I had a fantasy about my own death: I will consider myself a failure if, when I die, hundreds of people come and keen and cry and have a slideshow about me.

My goal is to die last, after everyone else is dead, and have the lamest, least attended funeral possible.

See, I want to live so long that no one is left to be sad about my death. I will attend everyone else's funerals and give really awesome eulogies when asked (hey, if you have a eulogizing talent, it's OK to flaunt it), and then I will just keep living and living.

My children and grandchildren will eventually tire of me, living their interesting neo-22nd century lifestyles, and I will continue to send them fat checks for their birthdays, or tickets for cruises in honor of The 303, and I will toddle on through my golden years, right into my platinum years, and I will die with no friends or people of my generation left to mourn me.

That just seems like the very definition of success: to spend my life lifting up those close to me, and only when I run out of people to lift will I shuffle off this mortal coil.

The great surprise

Chebbles' best friend Z. moved away from us in August 2011, and she has pined for him ever since. He now lives across the country, rendering playdates almost impossible.

UNTIL TODAY. Z.'s mom and I made a plan to surprise Chebbles by her best friend's reappearance. He is visiting for five days! The first two videos below are Chebbles ruminating the day before. The third video is of Z. while Chebbles was at an Easter Egg hunt, and the final video is the reveal.




VIDEO ONE:

What would you do if you saw your friend?

VIDEO TWO:
What would be the best present you could get?

VIDEO THREE:
Z right before.

VIDEO FOUR:
Chebbles opens the box.

BONUS VIDEO:
Z's father was spotted by Chebbles surreptitiously picking up a carseat the day before.

How to adopt the right cat

As I was digging contemplatively in the litter box today (it is my Zen sand garden) I thought about a friend of mine who lost her fantastic tabby, Dragon, last week.

Dragon possessed all of the eye-rolling, the handsomeness and strength of character that make a tabby special. I was forever threatening to steal him, and regret we did not have him cloned.

Now, for the first time in 16 years (Dragon had a strict policy which prohibited additional cat acquisition), my friend is looking for a cat.

This is my advice:

* Do not let the children choose. My dad tried this once. He brought two kids to the pound and let each of them choose one kitten. They chose drastically mismatched personalities, and Jane and Lana had to live staring at each other in a tiny apartment for more than a decade. One child chose the crankiest, scratchiest cat based on how cute she was, and the other child chose a cat that was staring blankly into the corner of the cage. These personalities never changed.

* Avoid adopting a tiny kitten. Every cat is cute and sweet when it's eight weeks old. If you can find a cat that's at least five months old, you'll have a much better idea of its final appearance and personality. This is how we found Rehnquest (above). I had wanted a teeny furball but when we met him and experienced his relaxed and hilarious personality, I knew he was the cat for us.

* Adopt from an Adoption Van... that is the place that places like ARF put only the mellowest, sweetest, most adoptable pets. Especially if you hate going into the pound, go to the mobile adoption VAN. That's where they keep the real winners.

* Don't get attached to a cat on Petfinder. When we adopted Prince and Otto, I just liked the idea of identical twin cats, and I got caught up in their sob stories -- they wanted to stay together and they had been returned to the rescue group. So I committed to adopting them sight unseen. As it turns out, they don't really like kids. And Otto completely has it in for Hub-D. I adore them, but we did a much better job adopting our two newer cats.

* Don't worry about their behavior when you first bring them home. Diamond (whom we adopted at nine months) was a real pill for the first eight weeks when she arrived at our house. She was mean to all the other cats, she shed all over everything, and meowed every time someone picked her up. She basically had a (micro?) chip on her shoulder, having been returned to the pound at least once. But I had looked at a lot of cats before selecting her, and I knew, based on her close relationship with the animal handler at the pound that she was capable of being a terrific cat -- and once she settled into our new home, she quickly became the Queen of the Roost. She is a brilliant addition to our family. I'm so glad we didn't return her. She also completely stopped shedding.

* If a cat -- especially a kitten -- looks even remotely sick, do not adopt them. The rescue groups will say nice things like, "She's just getting over a cold," but both of the times I adopted a cat who was "just getting over a cold" they never did. Prince still has the same exact respiratory problem (coughing and wheezing) he had the day I adopted him. And our dear cat Megathumos died when he was three years old, he wasn't well for a day of his life, despite the extreme lengths we went to heal him (taking two buses across town to $200 acupuncture/Chinese herb sessions, for example). The litmus test is: if they give you some medicine -- even if it's just eyedrops -- when you adopt the cat, do not adopt the cat.


Follow these tips and YOU TOO can be the crazy cat lady on the hill like me! With only the very best felines filling up your kitty litter...