His ears must have been burning

My hubby must have known I was bad mouthing him this morning because he called me within minutes of my bitching to a friend/co-worker and now I am feeling shameful.

Back story is that my MIL called me the other night to invite me to go to Hermann, MO's Stone Hill Winery with her, FIL and another couple on August 9th. When we were in Chicago, we were talking about how much fun we had the last, and only, time we'd been there, back in the Spring of 1992 (not married quite a year to her son). So the opportunity came up and she instantly thought to invite me. Well the problem, if you want to call it that, was that hubby works Saturdays and I needed to figure out child care for our girl. I knew this but when I told hubs about the invite, he snarkily says to me, "You know I work on Saturdays so who are YOU going to get to watch the kid?" I, of course, told him to not worry about it because I'd figure out something. I always do. 'Cause you know that is MY job. I figured I ask my parents. It would be sucky for the girl because it would mean I'd have to get her up at the ass crack of dawn to take over their house but if that's what I had to do, so be it. I was planning on asking my mom today or tomorrow about it.

The reason I'm feeling shameful - he called me to tell me that he put in for a vacation day so I could go! He said it was time for him and the girl to have a daddy/girl day together. I hadn't asked him to take a vacation day because he usually gives me grief when I ask him to change his schedule for me. I know I gripe about him a lot and sometimes it seems like all I have to say about him is negative, but it's little things like this that reminds me why I'm still married to him after 17 years. I really am lucky. Of course, in his usual pervy fashion, tells me that I can pay him back by letting him bring another woman to our bed so she can be the menage to our trois. The ass! LOL!

Daddy & his girl

So What Have You Read

Please forgive me for stealing this from a favorite blogger of mine. The Big Read (a program of the National Endowment for the Arts) guesses that the average adult has only read six of the top 100 books on this list. I really do love to read and I thought found it interesting just how many I've read and/or started/in progress. The majority of the classics I've read, I owe to my 11th and 12th grade English Literature class teacher, Mrs. Rita Weiss.


1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read. (I'm including any books I've started but haven't finished.)
3) Reprint this list in your blog so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)"

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma- Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility- Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (en francais)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (en francais)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I need to take up a hobby

For all the internal bitching I do about needing some alone time with the hub, I'm missing my girl terribly. I need a hobby. One that I can stick to. There is just 2 more days and she'll be home. The child free week has NOT been sex filled. In fact, Mother Nature showed up on July 4th. Since she left town, we've hooked up twice. Oh well, at least we got to do it in our bed without the fear of getting caught. Yes, even though our girl is 11 and knows that mommies and daddies have sex, she does her darnedest to keep her parents from enjoying each other.

Also, this week has just been absolutely awful on my sinuses. I've had a nagging sinus headache every.flippin.single.day. I'm so sick of it! I can't take the OTC sinus medications because of my high blood pressure. As one of my doctors said, I have to just deal with it. All I can say is that thank the good Lord above that I've been pretty immune to colds for the last 7 years or so because that Coricidin HBP stuff they have out there on the market doesn't do shit! I tried it once for what I thought was a cold, turned out to be allergies, and it did nothing for me.

Oh well, life will turned back to normal come Saturday afternoon. When I start complaining about my drama queen again, remind me of this post, will ya?

Child-free Week

This Saturday G leaves for 7 nights, 8 days with the ILs for their annual Lake of the Ozarks trip. Woo hoo! This is the longest time she will be away from us since she was 2 1/2 when we went to Puerta Vallerta.

You know what this means don't you? D and I will actually get to enjoy our "alone" time in our bed instead of the living room floor. And there is potential to make it last longer than 10-15 minutes because we aren't having to worry about her walking in on us. We also will get to catch up on watching all the inappropriate movies that she can't watch AND go to a couple of restaurants that she doesn't like because she is such a picky eater.

She told me last night she was getting nervous about being gone for so long away from us. That trip we went on when she was 2 1/2? Well, let's just say we had some abandonment issues with her that took us almost a year to figure out why she wouldn't stay overnight with grandparents or her Aunt Di Di anymore. That lasted until she was around 5 and then we had a relapse again at age 9. She went on an overnight school field trip without me and she got freaked out. She still won't go spend overnight at friend's houses and only has stayed overnight at ILs house twice since that time. Well, I assured her she was going to be fine because she was going with grandma and grandpa, who would spoil her and she was going to get to swim everyday, etc. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that she doesn't get too homesick. I don't think she will but my girl has a tendency to over think things before they happen and worry about potential bad things and then she gets a pleasant surprise when it didn't turn out as bad as she thought. Up until it happens, she drives me bat shit crazy about it!

So the husband and I get to relive the days of what it was like before we had a kid. While I'm looking forward to the break, I know that I'll miss my smart-mouth, drama queen, baby girl.

Finally, Chicago trip details, and one other thing

 

Chicago. What can I say other than we had a blast! The above picture is one of G on the Architectural River Cruise. You can see all the other pictures here. I took loads of pictures of the displays inside the Field Museum and Shedd Aquarium as well as buildings we saw on the cruise. Two and half days is definitely not enough time to see and experience all that is Chicago!

Our flight took off at 11:55 a.m. You'll see in the first picture of my photos that G wasn't looking very happy about flying. By the time we got up in the air, she was all smiles and admitted that old mom was right, flying isn't so bad. :-)We took the orange line elevated train through the city. It was amazing to see just how close some of the trains come to the buildings! From there, we hopped on the red line subway train to the Grand Ave. stop. Our hotel was one block to the left and 2 blocks down the street on Ontario, right off Michigan Ave. As per usual when I plan a trip, even to St. Louis, there is always a glitch. I had a typo when I googled the directions to the place we needed to pick up the GoChicago discount cards. I put in South when it should have been North. It took us in opposite direction all the way at the other end of Michigan Ave. Where we needed to go was only within 3 blocks walking distance from our hotel. It was nice that none of us got stressed and whigged out over it as would have been the case if D was with us. By the time we got the discount cards, it was 5ish and we were all starving balls. We ended up at a Thai restaurant, called Dao, for dinner. They had reasonably priced and good food. We all liked it except for G. Pad Thai is nothing like Lo Mein. We ended up stopping at a Starbucks right across the street from our hotel for a coffee and I bought G a turtle brownie. It was still pretty early in the evening so I suggested going to see a movie at the Loew's theater. We saw Kung Fu Panda. Yawn! I was really disappointed in it. Jack Black is a favorite of mine and I thought it'd would be funnier. I ended up taking a cat nap during it. So did my mom but that's nothing new because if she sits still for more than 10 minutes, she falls asleep.

The next day we got up and went to breakfast at Viand which was in the Marriott across the street from our hotel. Very good food but very expensive. Then we headed out to catch the 146 bus to the Museum Campus. Like the day before, we messed up when we hopped on the 146 bus and took a very scenic drive down Lake Shore Drive. I finally asked the bus driver if we were on the right bus to which he said no. We got on the wrong 146 bus. So we waited about 15 minutes for the right one and wouldn't you know it, our stop was at the very end of the route. I won't bore you with the details but we were able to go to all the places I had planned - Field Museum, Shedd Aquarium, and the Architectural River Cruise. We ended up taking a river taxi from below the Shedd to the Navy Pier so we got to ride on Lake Michigan (Shoreline cruise without the narration). The Architectural Cruise took right an hour so we were done by 5 p.m. We walked a couple blocks to catch a bus back to our hotel. Realistically we could have just walked from Navy Pier back but my poor mother doesn't move quite as fast as she once did (arthritis in her hips). We cleaned up and walked back over to the Loew's movie theater and went to dinner at Heaven on Seven. Very yummy! Kids' menu was on $5.95. My mom and MIL were tired so after we dropped them off at the hotel, G and I set out to walk down Michigan Ave. in search of a Walgreen's to pick up cheap souvenirs for us.

Wednesday we got up and walked a couple blocks to the Corner Bakery and Cafe for breakfast. We walked over to the Eddie Bauer and did a little shopping. I got me a couple pair of nice slacks originally $49 a pair for $15 a pair. Rock on! I usually can never find bargains for my size so I super pumped about it. Because we couldn't find anything in G's size that I wanted to pay for, we dropped my mom off at the hotel and my MIL, me, and G, headed back down Michigan Ave. to the Macy's. We immediately saw the Lush shop and stopped there. G was able to get her another Happy Pill and grandma paid half for some shower jelly. By the time we got back we had to head back to hotel to pick up my mom and the luggage and go to the airport. We all pitched in and took a taxi. We just couldn't fathom doing the EL route all over again.

I will definitely go back to Chicago. I grew up in the 'burbs/country and thought I would never say this but if I was young, single, childless, I could definitely see myself living there. No way in hell I'd have a car - public transportation all the way for me. Anyway, I am hoping that I can work it out to make Chicago an annual mother/daughter trip. I had that much fun.

Lastly, this past Sunday, June 22nd, D and I celebrated our 17th year of marriage. I complain about him a lot but like Dana at mamalogues.com said better than I ever could, "I believe in two things: that there is that one person out there for everyone, your soulmate; also that one person who is the only person that can put up with you for all your life."