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• It’s my Friday today because I’ve decided to take tomorrow off to deal with last-minute party preparations.  I’d far rather do it the day before than run around on the day of the party exhausting myself before it even begins.  It takes no small amount of energy to sing heavy metal, you know!
• My sister-in-law and her 15-month-old son are staying with us through next Tuesday or so.  Our house?  If there’s such a thing as "the opposite of childproofed," it would fit that definition.  I’ve rubber-banded all of the cupboard door handles together and moved fragile things off of low shelves, but there’s not much more I can do to stop He Who Must Touch Everything.
• One funny toddler story so far:  he is obsessed with my kid-hating cat.  She reacts in the usual way when he tries to touch her:  hissing, smacking him with her paw, nipping lightly.  He doesn’t care.  The cat is so used to terrorizing small children that the lack of reaction actually seems to be mellowing her out a bit.
• Today we were supposed to have our photos taken at work.  There would be a serious photo for press releases and a "fun photo" to hang on the wall in the office.  I have absolutely no idea what kind of prop I would want to bring for the "fun photo," so I was relieved to get a one-week reprieve.  At least it’ll give me time to get a haircut and heal the spot of poison ivy on my neck, if nothing else.
• Speaking of the poison ivy:  still itching.
• Well, off to shower and get to work.  Today I’m planning on cleaning off my exceedingly messy desk so that when we finally move to the new office (which I expect will be in the next couple of weeks), I’ll be ready to go.

Sometimes people want to know why my husband and I have our annual parties and invite everyone we know.  I think it’s because my parents used to do the same thing when I was growing up. 

Depending on budget and other circumstances, sometimes my folks’ parties were fairly elaborate.  My sister and I will never forget the party where my mother ordered an entire roast suckling pig.  It was DISgusting!  I remember that it had olives in its horrid eye sockets and an apple in its mouth.  We had leftover pork in the freezer for a year, but neither one of us would knowingly eat it.  I presume my mom hid some of it in various dishes and eventually threw the rest away.

My mother worked in advertising and my father worked in law enforcement.  When you put his friends and co-workers together with her friends, clients and co-workers, it wasn’t exactly a seamless blend.  I distinctly remember one party where a couple of advertising and/or media people busily uprooted wild hemp from the woods next to our barn and stashed it in their car while the cops pretended not to notice.

Eventually they divided their groups and had separate, smaller parties.  Fortunately, my husband and I have relatively compatible friends, so I doubt we’d ever need to split them up.  If any group objects to any other group, they’re all polite enough to play it off.

Of course, the "everyone we know" list ebbs and flows over time.  Of the approximately 200 people we’ve invited this year via Evite, more than 100 haven’t RSVPed.  Some of the e-mail addresses are probably outdated, but that doesn’t excuse the people revealed by Evite to have looked at their invitations but not responded.  Common courtesy, folks!  That’s why there’s a "Maybe" option – if you can’t commit, you can at least sit on the "Maybe" fence.  Or just say "No."  That’s better than no answer at all.  </obsessed hostess rant>

So anyway, there’s a precedent for this annual madness and it IS a lot of fun.  Plus, it gets me to clean up my house and grounds, so that’s a nice bonus.  Which reminds me, I need to go put a bandana on my head, change into the t-shirt I use for painting and dyeing my hair, and apply Kilz to the bathroom ceiling.  ‘Bye for now!

After all my yard work on Saturday, I woke up with some bug bites on Sunday.  I had one on my forearm, a couple on my back and one on my neck.  I noticed them, scratched a few times and ignored them for most of the day.

They got progressively itchier and I finally looked closely enough at my arm to see that I didn’t have a bug bite – it was poison ivy.  I knew exactly where it came from, too.  On Saturday I had cut down some poison ivy with the loppers, then left it in a pile with other vegetation to be bagged up on Sunday.  By the time Sunday rolled around, I’d pretty much forgotten about it and thus did not hesitate to scoop up the leaves and branches with my hands.  I had gloves on but my arms were bare.

By midday Monday it was quite obvious that I really only had one mosquito bite…and three rapidly-spreading patches of poison ivy.  I’m covered with flaky smears of Caladryl Clear and trying desperately not to scratch. 

My biggest worry is that the poison ivy will spread to my face between now and my party on Saturday.  As it is I may have to wear a scarf to cover the hickey-like blotch of poison ivy on my neck.

Remind me again what’s so great about the Great Outdoors?

Obviously I was way too optimistic last week when I foretold a return to my usual blogging schedule.  That’s what a 50-hour work week will do to you:  get you all geared up into work mode and then take away all your extra time.

This week promises to be just as hectic, but mainly on the home front.  We spent the weekend laboring mightily to get our house into shape for company.  It’s coming along, but I’ll still need to spend every evening at it until our party this Saturday.

Some weekend highlights:

• I pulled the 30-year-old carpeting off our basement stairs.  It was beyond icky and even though I had a bandanna tied over my face, I’ve had allergy symptoms ever since.  Let me tell you, it’s not easy yanking out nailed-down carpet from hardwood steps (and a claw hammer doesn’t help as much as you’d think).
• My husband disconnected the spaghetti of cords connecting our home entertainment components, cleaned each cable and reorganized them tidily.  I cleaned the floor, baseboards and blinds that had been inaccessible since the last cleaning (don’t ask how long ago that was).
• I scrubbed my bathroom ceiling in preparation for painting it tonight.  I also cleaned the linoleum floor with a soft-bristled scrub brush and a dish sponge. 

That’s not even half of it, especially when you take into account the outdoor work I did and all the errands I had to run.  Oh, and I also managed to write the lyrics to another song and present it at a lengthy band practice yesterday.

It’s really quite satisfying to go to bed head-to-toe exhausted and sleep hard into the next morning.  Getting up isn’t quite so easy, but sore muscles can be stretched.  Now I just hope the weather stays nice one more week.

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And speaking of labor…

Congratulations to Cagey on the birth of her son yesterday!

Man, this has been a busy week!  It’s not getting any better now, but I’m up early enough this morning that I figured I could check in.

I can tell I’m suffering from Blog Madness because just as I was waking up, I had a brief dream fragment that my last post had 66 comments that had to be comment spam.  I was very indignant and determined to log in and delete them all.

The next few weeks are going to be a blur of activity:

• I still need to take care of my pre-party to-do list.
• The list has to be re-prioritized because my sister-in-law is coming to visit with her one-year-old starting sometime next week.
• My company has six strict project deadlines between Friday and Monday, so there’s a strong chance I’ll be putting in some time at the office this weekend.
• My co-workers and I will be moving to a new office in the next few weeks (and taking on new projects even sooner).
• I need to write the lyrics to a minimum of two of my band’s original songs or face their wrath.
• I must write several articles for my community service organization’s newsletter and e-mail them to the editor by the end of the week.

There’s probably more, but continuing the list is sapping my will to live.  Actually, that’s an exaggeration; so far I’m holding up rather well.  Yesterday evening after I led my service club’s board meeting because the president was sick, I went to dinner with friends and got a chance to wind down a bit.  In retrospect, I think three glasses of red wine before dinner was not a particularly good idea, but I woke up with my shoulders relaxed for the first time in two weeks, so it still paid off.

That’s enough rambling from me.  This post signals my return to my usual Monday-Friday posting schedule.  See you tomorrow!

You may have noticed I didn’t post yesterday.  I’m so swamped with work right now that I know there’s no way I’ll have a chance to write anything even remotely thoughtful in the next couple of days, so I’m going to take an official blogging break until Thursday morning.

This all started the last time I had my hair cut.  Once upon a time I used to get my hair colored at the salon, but there’s no way I can afford that now, so I do it myself at home. 

My husband goes to the same hair stylist, and after my last haircut, she told him that she thought I should go for a lighter brown color with highlights, instead of the reddish color to which my current shade tends to fade.

Well, obviously I’m not going to try to highlight my own hair, but I figured it sounded like advice worth taking into consideration.  The next time I bought hair color, I chose a shade lighter than usual that was supposed to be "light golden brown."  I figured that "golden" should outweigh the whole "reddish" thing.  Boy, was I wrong.

My hair turned out light auburn – redder on the crown of my head than on the long part of my hair.  It was not at all what I had in mind, but I lived with it for a couple of weeks out of a combination of laziness and a reluctance to overprocess my already frizz-prone hair.

Earlier this week, overcaffeinated at about 9:00 p.m. after a visit to a coffeehouse to see a friend and his wife do a reading from a screenplay they’d written, I decided to run by the drugstore on my way home and choose a new color.  I also needed to choose a different brand because my usual kind wasn’t covering any gray, which meant my most recent color was exacerbated by a "strawberry roan" effect.

I picked a brown shade that looked like the color I’d had before I started foolishly switching around.  What did I end up with?  Dark auburn with almost a purplish cast – still redder on top than on the sides, but at least covering the gray.  Now, I’m no stranger to hair colors not found in nature.  In the early ’90s I went for a color called "burgundy" for a while, so I can live with weird colors when I choose to…if I do it on purpose.  The good news is that this color is quite shiny, so at least the frizz factor has been nicely minimized.

I’m certainly not planning on coloring my hair again until the roots grow out a bit.  I think it’s been put through quite enough already.  I’ll just have to own the dramatic color as though I’d meant to have my hair that way.  That is, if anyone even notices.

As usual, I’m pressed for time today, but here are a couple of things that may entertain you:

• By now everyone has probably seen this reedited trailer for "The Shining," but since it’s the most amusing thing I’ve seen all week, I figured I’d post it anyway.
• The 100Bloggers project is back in another incarnation here.  I’ve done one post so far.  I had to make a faux Average Jane blog on Blogger to be able to participate, but I don’t really mind since it’ll allow me to comment on some Blogger blogs I read that are closed to non-Blogger comments.

More tomorrow…have a lovely day!