Gabrielle What's Her Name

I know Gabrielle's real name, but on the advice of legal counsel I'll go ahead and leave out her last name on this post.

I don't know Gabrielle personally, but I sure feel like I do.  Gabrielle used to own the house I currently live in.

Seven years ago, the Hubs and I bought this house when it was a foreclosure.  This was before the big foreclosure boom that's been going on for years now and it was sort of rare to find a foreclosure in those days.

When we bought the house I didn't know anyone who lived in a foreclosure and I felt a little bad capitalizing on someone else's downturn.

I felt like maybe the house was "sad."  (No, actually I was worried the house might be possessed a la Amityville Horror.)  I had nightmares for the first couple of weeks we lived here.  Most of the time I had nightmares about Gabrielle and her family.

The Things MY Kids Think We Do While They're at School

My kids have been in school for a little over two weeks.  They love school.  They can't wait to see their friends, they thrive when they have a routine and they adore their teachers.  I love that they love school, because it makes my job so much easier that I don't have to fight them out the door every morning and they're happy when they get home every afternoon.

HOWEVER, my kids are certain - absolutely certain - that as much as they loooove school, they are missing some good stuff at home.  They are positive that the Hubs and I are having a ton of fun without them.

Here is what they think we're doing all day while they're at school:

The D-Bags Lunching at Taco Bell

I was out running errands with my mom and she told me she needed some lunch. She asked if we could stop at Taco Bell and get something to eat. We stopped at a restaurant with a wonky layout. See if you can follow along: so, you have the main floor where you order your food and there is lots of seating there and then there's this elevated part that holds 15 or so people and they overlook the lower dining area. My mom and I sat in the lower dining area right next to the elevated part where people could look down on us, over the edge.

We're sitting there eating, minding our own business when suddenly a wadded up straw wrapper goes flying onto my mom's food.

"What the hell?" I exclaimed.

With Neighbors Like This, Who Needs Enemies

I was scrolling through my Facebook feed this weekend and I saw a very upsetting status update from my friend Molly at A Day in Mollywood.

Molly came home last week to find this note on her door:

Source: Instagram

It says:

YOUR HOUSE IS THE FIRST HOUSE THAT EVERYONE SEES WHEN THEY ENTER THE NEIGHBORHOOD, COULD YOU PLEASE SHOW A LITTLE PRIDE OF OWNERSHIP AND TAKE BETTER CARE OF YOUR YARD! THANKS. [Smiley face]

First of all, I have no idea what Molly's lawn looks like, but in my lifetime of having neighbors, I have listened to enough of them bitch about lawns, to guess that Molly's grass is probably a bit shaggy with a few weeds and/or dandelions sticking up in the bushes. I guarantee you that's as "bad" as her lawn is.

I am positive that her lawn is NOT three feet high with a broken dishwasher thrown in there.

I can only imagine how much time this person had on his or her hands to sit down and craft this fine note. Maybe enough time to knock on Molly's door and say something like, "Hi. How are you? I know you've got three little kids and you and your husband have busy jobs, but I noticed that your yard needed some attention. I'm not doing anything right now and I was wondering if I could help you out? Where do you keep your mower?"

A Love Story About a Dude and His McChicken

Source: McDonalds

OK, so I couldn't sleep last night. That happens sometimes. I wake up because I have a bunch of ideas I want to write down, so I get up and I work for a few hours. However, this time I got up and my brain just wouldn't SHUT UP. Only it wasn't a good thing. It wasn't a ton of ideas that will soon be huge bestsellers and then turned into blockbuster films. NOOOOO. It was the worries. You name it, I was worried about it. I covered everything from "What is this lump? Is that cancer? Am I going to be dead by Christmas?" to Syria to Trump to my inability to leave sugar alone to "Did Adolpha get all her reading done last night? And why hasn't Gomer said more than two words to us in the last two days?" to my husband to the electric bill to being irritated that there's a damn moth flying around my office and I can't catch it. Then I worried that I wasn't getting any work done and when would I get my work done and that sent me into a shame spiral and that made me want to eat handfuls of sugar and just go back to bed. But now it's 6 am and this is the time when normal people wake up, so I'm fucked essentially.

PHEW. Did you get all of that??

The Place That Waxed My Eyebrows Today

Today I had some time on my hands and some seriously bushy eyebrows (as I was kindly reminded the other night).  Instead of going to my usual waxing joint, I decided I'd go to someplace a little closer.  I was running errands and I saw a sign for waxing.  I figured I would pop in there instead of driving across town to my usual place.

The sign said walk-ins welcome and I was hoping I could just run in quickly, get the brows ripped, trimmed and tweezed into shape and be on my merry way.

I walked in and I was greeted by what I can only assume was the owner.  "Hello.  How can I help you?"

"Hello," I replied.  "I'd like to get my eyebrows waxed please."  The man looked me up and down thoroughly.  He took in my caterpillar-like eyebrows and nodded in agreement.

PIWTPITT's Top 10 Reasons People are Compelled to Read Top 10 Lists

I read a lot of websites and I'm very competitive.  I want to know what everyone is reading if they're not reading me.  I started looking at what these bloggers were writing that was bringing in so much traffic. Was it their witty prose?  Was it their heart-warming stories of motherhood?  Was it their parenting insights?  Nope.  Not even close.  It's lists.     

The Top 10 _____, Best 8_______, Got to Have 6______, Most Amazing 29______.  These lists are out there on every site.  I know I have lists too, but my lists are not in slideshow format, thus driving up pageviews with each click.  Sneaky, right?  All these websites that are driven by the almighty pageview have started turning every fucking thing they can into a slideshow list.  I get my ass handed to me daily, because I refuse to bow to the pressure to make a 1,000 picture slideshow of the 1,000 Best Indoor Mall Playgrounds in North America.