Just rolling this post out with a non sequitur.

Christmas is nearly here and as a result all of my holiday spirit evaporates by the time my car hits the open road, because Christmas seems to drive my fellow man to forget everything he or she ever learned about driving. I am trying to let it go because it’s Christmas and we’re all equally in a hurry to get to the Target before Twilight  and Hello Kitty Island Adventure are sold out, but it’s difficult. My road rage sustains me. It is my outlet for all other raging. You know what happens when people drive well? I learn all the lyrics to Kreayshawn’s “Gucci Gucci”. Don’t contribute to my husband’s scorn, continue to drive like idiots. It’s for the best.

I got the swag and it’s pumpin’ out my ovaries

(in free verse)

I would rather do cartwheels

handsprings

triple toe loops and

quadruple axels

down a stretch of old asphalt

in the Arizona desert

in a bikini with

no sunscreen on this amazing

blindingly white

sun-resistant

Irish-Scottish-German-Cherokee-Sioux-Iroquois

already sunburned skin

in the scorching heat of

Mid-July

with no source of water nearby

with crowds of people watching

as the asphalt gives way to sharp gravel

and I end my

ill-advised gymnastic extravaganza

with a triple backflip-somersault-twist

and land in the splits

than clean one more thing in this house today.

Embarrassing.

I have no defense here. I am not timely. I haven’t prioritized sharing my offline presence with my online presence. If we’re being honest – and I try to be because frankly a good portion of my life contains events that couldn’t be made up even if I wanted them to be – I internalize a lot of my crap because I like to sit on it and hug it tight and love it forever before I break up with it and post it on the internet. Thus, last post, 2009. 

In a lot of ways I feel like my relationship with online blogging is unhealthy. I mean, if you were dating a person who kept promising they’d be better and then constantly did not, and in fact, did worse, I suspect you’d be out the door. Then they’d beg you to take them back and you’d give them another chance and they just do it again and again. 

So, I’m sorry, Internet. I won’t tell you I’ll do better. I can only tell you that I’ll try. 

Meanwhile, I really, really need to bitch about traffic. I am a restive person. I rarely get upset. I like to save my negative energy for anxiety and rage-fueled rants on the world wide webs. But for the LOVE of GOD I cannot COPE with people who INTERRUPT THE FLOW OF MERGE TRAFFIC. Can I talk to you about this, persons reading this who have clearly hit the bottom of the internet? Because the way I understand it – maybe I’m wrong, but I doubt it - when two lanes merge into one and it is not an on/off ramp, it goes one car, next car, one car, next car, right? A simple 1-1-1-1 pattern? Yet there are assholes in the world who seem to think they have accomplished some event in their life that gives them the privelege of DOING IT WRONG. Are you that person, the one that sees a lane closed sign and drives all the way to the very last possible cone before turning your blinker on, passing any number of available merge spots in your pursuit to get to the top of the list, like you’re some kind of cheetah in pursuit of dinner? Except there’s no actual dinner here to pursue and instead you’ve just pissed off 8 other drivers because you pulled a dick move. Don’t be that person. Be a friend. Take an open spot. 

Don’t be the person who tries to squeeze in to a spot where a vehicle has already let another car in front of them, either. That guy has done his part. It is your job as the merger to remember the pattern, one car, next car. If you speed up to get in front of that guy, you’re being a dick. Don’t be a dick. Brake and try the car behind him. If that car won’t let you in, that car is being a dick. 

What I’m saying here is, respect the flow of traffic. It is designed to get you there as quickly and safely as possible. And who knows, you may do it to me and it may be my moment to snap and then I will follow you home and send you a really sternly-worded letter about personal responsibility, and you do not want that.

Four months later – hello! In my absence I have cooked many things and also had a baby. Amazing, is it not? And since Greyson dumped a glass of iced tea in my laptop while I was feeding said baby, I also have a new laptop. Parenthood, it is a challenging and unexpectedly expensive thing.

I am having the most ridiculous formatting issues with my posts, so expect a new look sometime in the near future. Perhaps a look that will not force me to edit and re-edit and re-edit trying to find the magic spacing combination to keep my divs from floating all over the place. Argh.

There is an unholy and desperately sad kind of amusement in preparing for a steak a poivre dinner while simultaneously making lemon-blackberry tarts (to be posted soon!) and having to run back to the computer to be reminded of how to bake a potato.

Pregnancy, thy name is brain-dead.

[14:54] <@Ali> no, there’s a stone you bake bread in your oven on
[14:54] <@Ali> wow
[14:55] <@Ali> let me try that again
[14:55] <@Ali> there’s a stone upon which you bake bread in your oven
[14:56] <@Cal>  Ali: Stupid prepositions! Complicating up where words go in!
[14:56] <+Sindri> A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
[14:58]  <@yellowgoat> Preposition placement is something I never much cared for.
[14:59] <@Ali> As long as it’s not superfluous, it doesn’t matter overly much to me where people put their prepositions at.

Greyson was being friendly with an older woman passing by us as I was putting the groceries in the car at Target. She was being friendly back and when Grey pointed at her bags, she told him it was cereal. I smiled at her and she went on to say, “That’s one good thing about not having a man around, you can eat cereal for dinner if you want.”

I think she might be on to something there.

This would all be so much easier if I could just post to here and Facebook at the same time! Meanwhile, I hope this weekend to have updated with all of the posts I’ve meant to make and just haven’t.

So, let me do a little introduction here and then we’ll get to the rest of it.

So, my name is Alicia and this is my kingdom. I’ve owned this domain now for…a long time. A decade, give or take a few service interruptions. It has been through many redesigns and served many purposes, but I always come back to writing about my life somehow.

As it says in my “About” page, I live in Utah with my husband, Warren, our son, Greyson, and our completely neurotic golden retriever, Faye. I am originally from southern Indiana, and I moved here in 2002 to live with Warren after an internet friendship to courtship thing. It works for us. Our son was born in September 2006 and a few months shy of his first birthday was diagnosed with developmental delay. If you want to get really technical, it’s officially undiagnosed cerebral palsy, but we opted not to saddle him with that label unless it proves necessary to get him any treatment he may need. Anyway, as a result of cerebral palsy he receives therapy twice monthly to try to strengthen his speech and gross motor abilities. Utah has a great system in place through the school district and he has made incredible progress through it. He’s a healthy, happy and active toddler now and I am constantly amazed at the way he works.

Warren and I made everything official with a wedding ceremony in June of 2008, an intimate affair with our close friends and families. A couple of months later, we decided to try for a brother or sister for Grey, since his motor skills are at a point where he can handle me having divided attention. Considering I’m now 23 weeks pregnant, you could say we met with success, and Grey will have a little brother sometime in May.

The birth of my son and his subsequent problems made going back to work next to impossible, and we are lucky enough to be in a position where I am able to stay at home with him and provide the daily physical therapy he needs. Unfortunately for all of us, being a housewife is not something I seem to have any natural aptitude for whatsoever and I have been a cranky mess ever since. Every now and then I’ll slip into a groove with the cooking and the cleaning and the laundry and the blessed never-ending tedium of every day being so similar to the last and think, you know, this gig isn’t so bad. And then I wake up from that dream and it’s back to being bad at time management, dinner being way too late, Grey not getting a bath, and no one having clean pajamas.

Something happened, though, with this new pregnancy. I suddenly want to cook and bake, ALL THE TIME. It’s a compulsion, I absolutely need to do it, and I’m not just talking about nuking a hot dog and throwing fries in the oven. I pour over cookbooks and food blogs, collecting recipes for my Bi-Monthly Grocery List of Doom, I’ve stopped buying bread and started making my own, and possibly the strangest thing, I opted to buy a KitchenAid mixer for Christmas instead of photography equipment (the only –and most expensive- hobby that has never waned as so many frequently do). Would you like to see it? Here it is:

Man, I love that thing. Without it, it’s possible I never would have made a loaf of bread. Kneading is intimidating. Actually, a lot of things I cook and bake now I would not have tried had it not been for my KitchenAid – not that I used it to make short ribs or Carbonnade a la Flamande, but I guess my success with that first loaf of bread gave me a confidence in the kitchen that I did not previously have. See, internet, I am a timid creature at heart, and new things are very intimidating. New things make me not want to try them because I am genetically programmed towards failure, and that is not a pleasant thing to be reminded of. For instance, you’ll note that I’ve talked about enjoying baking now, but as a result laundry and cleaning have definitely fallen to the wayside. I even fail at hausfrauery.

So, long story short, this blog belongs to a woman who has a newfound love of her kitchen (oh man, the chauvinist jokes that could be inserted here….) and will contain posts about food, posts about life in general and other tales of housewifely woes. It will be a pleasure to share my misadventures with you.