As you can tell by how I referred to distance in terms of time, I’m not originally from here. I’m a California transplant, one of the most-loathed imports in this area for reasons inscrutable to me. I’ve lived here for twelve years, so I’m hardly fresh off the airplane anymore so I doubt anyone can tell I’m not a WA original.

Anyway, one of the things I’ve learned since moving here is that Washington is a state of extremes. If you have six inches of snow in a few hours one winter, you’ll probably get bupkes in terms of snow the next year. If you have one summer that’s blistering hot, with endless days sans rain or clouds, the next summer will probably be cloudy, humid, and blah.

Last year’s winter was mild, with hardly any snow worth mentioning, which means, of course, that this year was the SNOWPACALYPSE.

Snow in Washington is treacherous, which means that when it starts sticking to the roads you should probably hunker down and leave your car (or SUV) in the garage unless you absolutely have to leave.

Why? Because of HILLS! We have hills! Everywhere! Huge hills! Icy hills! Bobsled-run grade hills!

And ice! And other bad drivers (hi, fellow Californians!), and did I mention the hills that people slide off of?

It’s a mess.

Add to that a power outage thanks to snow-laden, frozen tree branches crashing down on power lines and you have a huge mess. A power outage is challenging enough as it is, but when it’s twenty-something degrees outside it can get downright perilous.

The one nice thing about the snow though? Refrigeration! Did you know that if you take all the food out of your fridge and bury it in the snow, it won’t go bad? The more you know.

Still, chilled food aside, the low outside temperatures can be a big problem. When our house’s temperature dropped down to 61 degrees after eight hours without power, Wes and I packed up Aidan and braved the mile-long drive to Wes’s parents’ house. They have two gas fireplaces that keep their place nice and toasty.

Plus, they have people to talk to there. After eight hours without power, Wes and I were starting to run out of stuff to talk about. And did you know that you can’t shoot zombies on your Wii without power? LAME!

Snow and utility woes be darned, we survived last week. Not only did we survive, we had a lot of fun. We played catch with Aidan in the snow, we played our guitar and clarinet for Aidan, and Wes gave our son his first snow driving lesson.

The biggest takeaway I got from that lesson? Don’t drive in the snow. It’s dangerous, and cars in the snow = death traps. I’m from California, you won’t convince me otherwise. I’d feel much more comfortable taking a dog sledding team to the grocery store.

I doubt the dogs would enjoy schlepping me and my groceries around, though. Too bad! I shall pay them with sirloin and all will yet be well!

Can you tell I haven’t left the house much lately?

Not that I’m talking about any toddler in particular. Ahem. AIDAN.

Seriously though, I always feel such joie de vivre when I’m fully recovered from a bout with illness of any kind. While watching my bathrooms grow grubbier day by day as I lay on my sickbed (i.e. the couch) I wished for energy. I wished for health. I wished for Netflix to just skip to the next episode of Thomas the Train already instead of making me get off the effing couch every half hour.

Yes, I let the TV entertain my child when I’m incapable of breathing through my nose. Judge me silently if you must.

Now, though? In the cold light of a winter’s day to which I awoke without a horrible hacking cough and sore throat that made me feel like I swallowed a wire grill brush?

I AM SUPERWOMAN.

Thanks to my newfound amazing health and also the second trimester (my favorite of the trimesters, indisputably the very best one) there is nothing I can’t do. Clean bathrooms, windows, hardwood floors, counters, and clothes? Check. Vacuum all the carpets I have access to? Check. Polish the tables, thus freeing them from the scurf of the thrillion and a half meals we served and ate on them over the holidays? CHECK.

I may already be missing some crucial pieces to my son’s Christmas toys, but gosh dang it I am back! I am alive! I can now set to work removing the imprint of my sad, sorry self from the cushions of my couch!

That is, until Aidan inevitably picks up yet another illness from the Sunday school nursery (or, as I’ve begun to call it in my bitter little head, The Pandemic Breeding Ground). I love the ability to sit through church knowing Aidan is playing with trains and loving his life, but I really wish he didn’t come home with his very own edition of the Pestilence Plague every week.

Oh, well. It’s building a good immune system for my boy, yes? I am capable of looking at the bright side of this situation, because I can breathe through my nose.

If blogging has taught me anything, it’s the value of an embarrassing story. It takes a special kind of courage to tell a story about yourself that’s so humiliating it sets an entire table to laughing, and it’s this same courage that enables bloggers to write posts and share pictures that aren’t flattering so much as they’re freaking hilarious.

And you know what? It’s totally worth it. I’d much rather make people laugh than pretend I’ve never fallen down a flight of stairs or danced drunk in an effort to convince someone I was totally fit to go clubbing (hint: I so wasn’t). Lucky for us, almost everyone at the table shared that mentality.

And even if I celebrated the Jewish New Year by making a fool of myself, at least we all rang in the new year with laughter. And some frigging amazing food. And transliterated Hebrew blessings I can never pronounce properly.

In the meantime, I’m back at the gym three times a week (I’d go more but I now have to share early morning gym custody with my husband), my brother and his wife are moving up here in a couple weeks, I have a thrillion social commitments, and a toddler who occasionally enjoys my company.

That said, because I am horrible at managing my time and setting realistic goals, posting might be a tad light while I revise like a crazy person. And then again when NaNoWriMo starts in November.

If we’re lucky, things will settle down soon and I’ll be back to regular posting. If we’re really lucky, I’ll finish revising Enemy Accountant and agents will go crazy for it and want to sell it to all sorts of giant publishers. If we’re really, really lucky, I’ll finish revising Enemy Accountant and actually have a chance to sleep in a few times before NaNoWriMo starts and I’m sucked into an ambitious creative undertow of my own creation.

Because then they’ll be set in stone done. As in finished. As in, I can’t muck around with them any more. Paul Valery once said, “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” The same can be said of novels!

I think I’ll well and truly be done with revisions after this round, though. Honestly, it’s not like I have a problem or something. I can stop revising whenever I want to….

Just let me fix one more comma splice! Just one more! Don’t cut me off, man, these revisions are all I have left!

This is where it would be helpful to have a grave-faced man spring from the pantry to slap me across the face and tell me, “Get yourself together, woman!”

In other news, now that Aidan is almost 18 months old there’s been an uptick in interest in the contents of my womb. Or, rather, the prospect of womb contents. Womb is a weird word.

This could be because I’m not shy about saying that Wes and I will start trying for Future Baby starting next month (egads!). Or it could be because 18 months is one of those milestones where your baby isn’t really a baby any more so why not make another one?

Either way, five people have asked me about Future Baby’s timeline in the last week. Even I have to admit, I’m getting excited too. My brain knows how all-consuming and exhausting babies are, but my hormones have hijacked the joint so I guess I’ll come back to my senses in about a year and a half. I look forward to seeing you then.

Not even the grave-faced face slapper can help me now.

Between now and when a tiny fetus takes over my whole world, I plan to a) go on vacation, b) release a fun short story I just wrote, c) attend a writer’s conference, and d) write my third novel during the month of September.

September should be a fun month. I’m doing my own little NaNoWriMo during September because I have no guarantees I won’t be in mt first trimester come November and there’s no way I’m doing NaNoWriMo during my first trimester.

I guess what I’m saying is that I hope to have a brand new manuscript and a brand new fetus by the end of the year. Plus a printed version of my book. Not for the fetus though. For me. And maybe for you too if I can just bring myself to approve the fracking proof already!

Grave-faced face slapper? Do your worst.

I’ll start from the beginning.

Over the weekend, we had the pleasure of spending quality time with a lot of awesome people. We had some friends over for dinner on Saturday, and my friend brought some truly excellent cheesecake brownies she made from scratch. They were delicious, and I had two small brownies which I immediately felt guilty for eating.

Then came Sunday, which was the Super Bowl. Traditionally one of my favorite over-eating holidays, I really tried hard to watch what I was eating. I had a salad for lunch (even though there was also spaghetti and meatballs) and a small plate of nachos for dinner. And, because there was homemade fudge sauce (oh my gosh Y.U.M.) I had a small bowl of low fat vanilla ice cream with fudge sauce for dessert.

Even as careful as I tried to be, however, I still went over my calorie goals on both days. According to my calorie counting app, I should strive for 2,000 calories a day if I want to lose weight.

Here comes the beginning of the crisis. Ever since my phone recommended 2,000 calories a day, I’ve been striving to keep my calories under 1,800 per day. If 2,000 calories a day means I’ll lose weight, 1,800 will be even better, right?

That right there is a slippery slope.

On Monday, in an effort to atone for my weekend excesses, I ate 1,163 calories. Yes, that’s right. 1,163. As in half of what I should have been eating.

I felt like crap. I was sluggish, had little energy, and felt weak. It was a miserable feeling.

The next day, I told Wes that I thought I might have the makings of a problem. The ambitious side of me is always going to want to push it. If 10 push-ups is great, 20 is even better! If 1,800 calories a day means weight loss, 1,600 would mean it even more!

I told him this is not a healthy way to live, and that if at the end of the day I tell him I’ve eaten less than 1,800 calories he needs to tell me to go grab some cheese sticks from the freezer to make up for it.

He promised me he would, and then told me he’d do me one better and yell at me to go eat a sandwich (which is what I always yell at the TV when an actress looks particularly skeletal).

I’ve always thought my ambition was an ally, like my own personal pet dragon that incinerates my problems when I let it out. I never thought it would turn on me like that. Well, this just goes to show you that you should never turn your back on a dragon. Or neglect your sandwiches.

What did you think of my disappearing act there?  One minute it’s all complaining about the gym, the next it’s Bermuda Triangled blog all up in here.  If your imagination were allowed to run rampant, you could almost imagine a treadmill swallowed me whole or something!

Alas, no freak gym equipment accidents here.  Just moving.  Hauling up stakes and plopping them down elsewhere.  Back-breaking, exhausting, disorienting moving.

It was a big move, too.  We moved all of four miles away.  I’m pretty sure the weather is different on this side of the same city, and for sure the people are friendlier!

We got the keys to the new place on Saturday.  It’s a fantastic place, by the way.  Roughly twice the size of our old house, with an actual master bathroom (our old house had no master suite, just a slightly larger room than the other, by which I mean it was just barely big enough to put a king size bed in so long as you didn’t mind not being able to walk around).

Our new bathroom is almost comically large, though.  The bathroom in this place is almost the size of our former bedroom.  If we ever needed extra income, we could rent out the bathroom to a family of three.

Anyway, tangents aside all our stuff is over here.  We were originally intending to move this coming Saturday, but I kind of got started packing and couldn’t stop, so we moved on Tuesday instead.

And now you know why I haven’t blogged in a week.  I haven’t even typed much in a week.  Heck, I barely remember where the keys are!  Nah, that’s an exaggeration but only barely.  I turned on my computer and glanced at MSN and I was instantly overwhelmed by how much information there was.  I simply could not believe there was so much stuff going on out in the world that did not involve boxes!

In other words, please forgive the absence and also this resumptive, rambling post.  I’ll get better at this coherency thing.  I reckon I’ll get better at it right about the time my back forgives me for rearranging the living room furniture by myself because I was too impatient to wait for Wes to come home and help me.

We sat down, I handed Aidan a paper napkin to destroy, and we commenced sharing tortilla chips and tales of the day.  About five minutes into our relaxing, quiet dinner, we heard a gaggle of what sounded like teenage girls descend on the maître d’.  A minute later, they were seated in the booth right next to us.

At first, they were just loud.  They harassed the waiter with intentionally poorly spoken Spanish (I refuse to believe anyone could butcher a language that badly except on purpose) and spoke loudly and with great affinity for profanity.  Had Aidan been at a speaking age, I would have asked them to watch their language.

Then, they started throwing ice cubes into the aisle of the restaurant, cackling like hyenas all the while.  They continued to harangue the waiter and busboy, and the waiter adopted a look of exasperated resignation while dealing with them.

Wes and I tried conversing while we tucked into our food, but the uproar coming from the booth next to us was such that it rendered our conversation useless.  Especially when they started wrestling or something and crashing into the back of the booth hard enough to move it.  Wes, whose back was against the back of the booth in question, was not amused.

Still they got louder.  They were drunk on their own 8th grade fabulousness, and convinced that the world was likewise intoxicated by what I’m sure they thought was their hilarious behavior.  Finally, disgusted, Wes and I paid for our food and got up to leave.  As we were leaving, they got louder still.

My patience for things like this is not great.  I was raised with a strict expectation of civilized behavior in public, and watching these girls ruin both my meal and the meals of those around me vexed me past the point of quiescence.

As they shouted at each other and then dissolved into obnoxious laughter, I said, firmly, “Seriously you guys: SHUT UP.”

Wes, knowing my temper, scuttled out the door with Aidan.  I walked over to their table, where I saw four 8th grade girls wearing embarrassed looks (I know they were in 8th grade because I heard them discussing it).  I followed up by saying, “Honestly?  I’ve seen 5 year olds who were better behaved in restaurants than you are.”  Then I left.

There was so much more I wanted to say.  I wanted to tell them that wearing shorts that are so short that your butt cheeks hang out the bottom is really just an invitation for skeevy middle-aged men to stare at your jail-bait-backside.  I wanted to tell them that fake-baking yourself orange doesn’t make you look thin, it makes you look blind.  I wanted to tell them that their behavior was immature, and likely the reason they were all still single.

But I didn’t.  I left.

Wes contends that what I said was a very mom thing to say, like telling them I was so disappointed in them.  I don’t know if it was a mom thing to do, I’m fairly certain I would have said that pre-baby.  But still, something had to be said.  Or did it?  Would you have made the same call?

As our new routine emerged, I eased into my new life.  It looked nothing like my pre-baby life, but it was no less fulfilling for being different.  Every day helps me feel a little more like I’ve got a handle on my new life as a mother, and I can’t even tell you how good that feels.  Aidan and I have a lot of fun together, and even though I’m not perfect I know my little guy is healthy, happy, and learning.  Good enough, in my opinion.

What I haven’t gotten a handle on yet is being a wife too.  Before Aidan was born, I feel like I was a pretty good wife.  Wes and I devoted a lot of time to each other and to our marriage.  It’s very easy to give a ton of attention to your spouse when there’s no adorable little baby to steal the show.

It’s been almost six weeks since Aidan joined our world, and Wes and I still have yet to go on a date.  We are terrific parents to our baby, and we help one another as much as possible, but we’ve definitely gotten out of practice paying attention to one another.  So, we’re going on a date!  A real date, with just the two of us, where we make eye contact and get to eat at the same time without one of us holding the baby.

According to Wes, we’re going to go on a quest for the best burger in Seattle.  Sounds like fun, no?  Is it weird, then, that I feel anxious?  I’ll be expected to converse with my husband, and I have nothing to talk about except Aidan.  I am the most boring person on the planet, how am I possibly going to make sparkling conversation with my husband?

Maybe the first post-baby date is supposed to be a little rough?  Maybe everyone gets out of practice being spouses when they’re getting used to being new parents?  I don’t know.  What I do know is I could use some good conversation topics for my first post-baby date with my husband.  Any of you have any good topics of conversation?  Any cool tidbits you’ve learned?  Random facts?  Gossip or news items?  Help!

Besides, it’s not as though my blog is drowning in new content this week (I wonder if slacker bloggers are on anyone’s pet peeves list…)

Ok!  So, my pet peeves…

People who misuse words that sound similar but really aren’t. For example, someone who uses eminent when they meant imminent.  Affect vs. effect, illicit vs. elicit, insure vs. ensure, you get the idea.  This bothers me most in writing.  When spoken, sometimes I can give someone the benefit of the doubt owing to speech patterns and the general unwieldiness of the human tongue, but in writing?  There’s no excuse.

Bad table manners. I don’t want to see you chewing away with your mouth open, hear you slurp your soup out of your spoon, or watch as your napkin sits unused by the side of your plate while food speckles the corners of your mouth and the top of your lap.  Sure, not everyone knows how to drink wine properly, and very few people know how to eat an artichoke at a fancy restaurant, but criminy.  How difficult is it to not behave at a restaurant like you’re eating a Hungryman dinner in your underwear while watching reality TV?

People who choose squiggly fonts in bright colors for their work emails. Unless you are the director of admissions for clown college, this kind of thing is not cute.  Or endearing.  It’s unprofessional, and it makes me want to delete your email without even reading it.  How am I supposed to take a requisition request seriously when it looks like a kindergartner scribed it with a crayon?

Calorie counts at restaurants. Actually, let’s just include most instances of the government trying to “help” me.  I don’t want your help.  I don’t need to know that my scone has 700 calories, I don’t want to pay higher taxes so you can “help” me get health insurance I’m able to procure on my own thanks so much.  If you want to help me, leave me alone.  I’m a big girl, I can decide whether my hips are capable of adding a scone here and there, and I can get health insurance on my own.  Seriously government, do us all a favor: Stop “helping” the economy with stimulus packages and just leave us alone.  Your spending is helping all right.  Helping us all into an early grave.

Weed smokers at concerts. You’re standing there at a concert, super excited and waiting for the band to start playing, when the smell hits your nose: Weed.  Foul, stinky, weed.  Thanks to some jack-hole who can’t enjoy live music without being high as a kite, you’re forced (literally, you can’t escape thanks to the press of bodies all around you) to partake in an illegal substance against your will.  I don’t think weed is evil.  I don’t think it’ll ruin your whole life.  What I do think is that it’s inconsiderate to remove my ability to choose what goes into my body.

People who leave public bathrooms in complete disarray. I was at Babies R Us this weekend and the bathroom was so unspeakably foul I was actually angry that I had to use it so often.  How is it ok to leave toilet paper all over the floor, or bodily fluids dripping off the toilet?  Where is the decency, man?

That’s all I can come up with for now.  How about you?  Any pet peeves you want to get off your chest?