Book Giveaway Winner!

Congrats, Ms Constantine! You won the signed copy of “It Sucked and Then I Cried”! I’ll be emailing you in just a minute so that I can get it sent to you.

Make sure you all check out her Etsy store that has ADORABLE necklaces, earrings and rings. I’m thinking about getting a piece of her jewelry for the next giveaway. Or possibly a gift certificate for her store and the winner can pick what they want? We’ll see!

PUPPY UPDATES TOMORROW!

Giveaway: It Sucked and then I Cried

I discovered dooce.com and Heather Armstrong the day she posted the photo of Leta’s birth. That one small post captured me and I spent the next several days between work and home life reading the blog from the very beginning. I loved every single post. I’d never thought going forward from there that her writing would effect me as much as it did.

When she started suffering from depression, and OPENLY wrote about it, I would read the posts and say WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN MY HEAD!? The words she spoke, the symptoms she had, the feelings that she was expressing, they were all things I had felt, suffered, hid and ran from for much longer than I can remember. There have been times that I’ve started to feel that way again, and I go back and read those posts and they somehow remind me of how far I’ve come since then, and that there is always light on the other side of that dark, deep tunnel of despair.

I know that I’m not the only person she’s touched with her writing so when I went to her reading and signing for It Sucked and Then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a Much Needed Margarita I immediately thought of getting a second copy to give away here. I know that quite a few of my readers have had similar experiences with the disease and if reading her thoughts has helped any of you as much as it’s helped me, I think you will appreciate this book.

The book itself is basically passages pulled straight from her blog, although some of them seem to have been expounded on a bit. Now I have a convenient, hard back covered way to read through these passages while sitting on the toilet trying to get five minutes of peace from the ALWAYS TALKING NEVER STOPPING ten year old.

AND! YOU CAN TOO!

I’m giving away a signed copy to one of you. All you have to do is comment here and say hi, tell me about your experience with depression, just say I WANT THE BOOK, or take a few minutes to tell me how awesome I am. I don’t really care what the comment says, you just have to get one in to enter and use a VALID EMAIL ADDRESS so I have a way to contact you. You have till next Wednesday, April 8th at midnight to enter. I will write down the name of all the commenters (one entry per person), put them into a hat and pull one out. Seems more fun than those silly randomizer things. I’ll made a video of it or something too just to make it MORE EXCITING! I’ll post the winner Thursday or Friday so make sure to check back then.

Also, if you’d like to tell others about the contest, feel free just don’t be spammy about it. Your blog readers and twitter followers will appreciate it.

So go forth! Comment! Enter! Discuss! AWAY!

In which I use bullets to distract you from the fact that I haven’t posted in a month.

People Updates:

• I have a very small hairline fracture on my ankle. That in itself isn’t painful. The severe sprain has me still limping around in a brace over a week later. I wish there was some awesome story or explanation how I was doing something REALLY COOL and REALLY FUN and REALLY NEAT but there isn’t. I fell getting out of the truck. In front of people. Who just watched me fall, severely sprain my ankle, and fracture it a little, and then they all turned around and walked away. THE END!
• Cassidy is totally turning into a TWEEN. There are a lot of things I looked forward to when I became a mom… first steps, first words, first day of school, it was going to be all fun and smiles and swings and cartwheels. Then she turned 10 and was all HA HA JOKES ON YOU, SUCKER! There’s too much to post about this under the scope of a single bullet. THE END!
• KC the cat and Hans are complete and total lazy asses. Hans spent ALL DAY SATURDAY on our bed asleep. KC hasn’t moved off the same couch cushion in two days. THE END!
• Ben is the most patient, understanding, ball of fantastic ever to grace the face of our fine planet. And also, falling asleep next to his warm body is the highlight of my day. THE END!

House Updates:

• We ordered blinds from Home Depot. Yes, I own Home Depot a letter of apology. Six blinds to go on the upper windows all over the top of the living room. We also paid for installation because ladders, heavy awkward wooden blinds, and blond don’t mix. I’m really excited for them to get here and be installed. They will help a lot with the sunlight that you can’t escape in the afternoons and also keep the heat out some in the summer.
• We also have a quote from a landscaper to come in and fix some sprinklers and clean out the pond, install a new pump and get it all up and running again.
• We’ve been slowly cleaning out the yards. Trimming bushes, mowing lawns, cutting down trees, this list is really endless so I’ll just stop there. It’s looking good and will only be getting better as the weekends pass!

Misc Updates:

• I forgot to mention the severe hives attack I had for about two weeks. It sucked. I went an ENTIRE WEEK with ZERO wheat, the hives went away, I laid in the bed in a fetal position and cried. I’ve very slowly started introducing some back into my diet, but not much. MUCH less than I was eating before. Being allergic to wheat is about a fun as having your teeth knocked out one at a time. With a jackhammer.
• I have become slightly obsessed with YouTube. Specifically, makeup guru videos. I have a few favorites and I have a blog post half written to point you to some of the best ones. Also, I finally broke my six month No Makeup Buying Binge and got a few things. I also have a blog post partly written about that because I’ve found some AMAZING stuff for AMAZING deals and I want to share.
• If I were a teenage girl, I’d totally have a poster of Adam Lambert on my wall. Best Idol by far this season. He makes it seem as if singing is just… effortless. TEAM ADAM!
• If you haven’t yet, check out Castle. Nathan Fillion is so awesome. I’ve had a nerd crush on him since I fell in love with Serenity and Firefly and he’s every bit as awesome in Castle.
• Heather Armstrong is going to be in Mountain View tomorrow and I’ve been trying to fit her book signing into my schedule but it’s so late and 40 miles from home where I’ll be then. It’s only 12 miles from work but I’d have to find something to do for five hours before the signing. DILEMMA!
• I need to charge the DSLR batteries. For serious.
• THE END!

That’s what she said.

Last last night, possibly very early this morning as we were getting into bed:

Me: If you get up before 9:00AM I am going to kill you.
Ben: That wasn’t nice.
Me: …

4:43AM this morning:

Me: SHIT! Honey, it’s 4:43!
Ben: It’s SATURDAY!
Me: Oh.
Ben: So should I kill you now?
Me: Shut up.

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.

I was originally going to write something eloquent, like what John Armstrong wrote, about this awesome day. Something graceful, full of meaning, faith and excitement for what the immediate and long term future has in store for us. Something that shows how awesome I think it was to have been able to cast a vote that lead to this historic event.

Then I decided on a whim to check my flickr stats for the first time in quite some time and I saw that the following image’s stats have shot up 300% in the last two days. And it dawned on me that WHO AM I KIDDING!? I’m neither graceful nor eloquent. So I leave you with the same sentiment and image from when I cast that first primary vote back in February of 2008:

*Title Quote: John F. Kennedy

Welcome, gentle Sir Knight, to the Castle Anthrax!

We had a big family gathering yesterday because my cousin Sarah is carrying a big plump BlueBerry in her belly which will miraculously manifest into a perfect baby boy as it is birthed into the world in about two months.

My family will look for any reason to throw a party and because we are so spread out all over California, it’s hard for me to get to attend a lot of them but every time I do I am reminded just how completely awesome they all are.

I’m writing today because on a few occasions, various family members mentioned the blog to me because my dad had talked to them about it. When this happens, when somebody from my real life tells me that they are going to be checking out my blog, I always have this double edge reaction.

Reaction 1: Awesome! It’s a great way to keep up with what’s been goin’ on in my life and stuff.
Reaction 2: Shit. Maybe I should start to rethink my habit of using the word ‘fuck’ as a verb, noun, adjective. adverb and Proper Name in pretty much EVERY SINGLE POST I WRITE.

Maybe.

Maybe not.

So I figured the best way to welcome any new readers who happen to share the same blood as me to the site is to finally write that post I promised about the newest edition to our family: the boob mug.

The boob mug was given to Ben by a good friend who picked it up for him on a holiday cruise trip to Mexico. I immediately fell in love with it and don’t know how we managed to live such a happy life for so long without such awesomeness being present within our blessed home. I’ve been racking my brain to come up with a decent but not completely skankerific 365 shot using it as a prop. So, if you have ideas, please let me know.

The best part of owning the boob mug so far was the following exchange I had with Cassidy when I decided it would be better to tell her about it than have her open the cupboard some random day and be accosted by the drinkable nipple jumping out at her:

Me: So, have you seen the boob mug yet?
Cassidy: The what?
Me: The boob mug. It’s a mug that looks like a boob. It’s in the mug cupboard.
Cassidy: Oh, it’s a boob?! I saw it this morning and thought it was a REINDEER.
Me: A WHAT?!
Cassidy: A reindeer!
Me: Bwahahaahahaahahaahahahahah.
Cassidy: What?!
Me: That’s just hillarious.
Cassidy: Well, a boob mug in lame.
Me: NO IT IS NOT AND YOU WILL NOT SPEAK OF IT THAT WAY!
Cassidy: Whatever.

Welcome, family! This is what I write about! If you manage to make it past this post, I’ll assume that means you think I’m as awesome as I think you are.