Remind me to learn how to make cheese

I just ate an entirely unreasonably sized portion of spaghetti and meat sauce with cheese on top. It is justified, I reckon,  because Marlo is now in constant motion (physics!) and still dependent on me for 90% of her calories. I can't keep my pants up anymore.

All false humility aside,  my binge reminded me of a few points I want to make on that whole vegan thing I brought up the other day. Number one: I have nothing against veganism. Something against some vegans, yes, the condescending PETA-joiner kind, but that's beside the point. I think if you want to subsist on plants and plants alone, good for you. I couldn't do it. Nor do I want to.

I could probably be a vegetarian. I think that if I were forced with the choice to either go veg or raise and, um, harvest? my own meat, I would be unable to do it. I'm creeped out by eating plants I grow myself. (Fun fact: I'm kind of scared of plants. They creep me out that they are alive and breathing and whatever but completely silent. The way that they will move toward you and those vines that will grab you if you're not careful - yikes! But anyway.) Yes, I'm kind of sicked out by eating my own plants, so you can imagine how I would feel about eating livestock. That I actually saw, you know, alive.

But eggs, cheese? Not a problem for me. In fact I could never give up cheese, it is far to dear to me. So if everything goes to shit and we have to start raising all our own food, you can bet on me to be your friendly neighborhood cheese maker. I will probably barter you some for a steak, you heartless murderer.

Number two point: I get that the Veganist lady was trying to ease that family into it, what with the seven hundred dollars worth of fake meat. But I still think that is stupid. It is not going to solve any of our increasingly urgent problems to get America to "ease into" a diet that would be good for the planet via a diet based mainly on soybeans and corn. Oh wait. Ha ha. Based directly on soybeans and corn. I mean, I guess it cuts out the middle man of the cow, but we'll still die a slow painful death as the synthetic fertilizers deplete all the oxygen in our water systems and Earth turns in to Mars.

Have a nice day!

It's like a shower before your shift is against company policy

Remember how I was saying I was having a RAM shortage that was making computing difficult? Yeah, well, turns out it wasn't memory that was my problem. My problem was a sad old dying hard drive - but a hard drive that had the decency to crap out with three weeks left on my warranty! So that's the good news.

The bad news is that I spent three hours of my life that I will never get back in the Apple store on Saturday, working with a so-called "genius" to eke out whatever files I could from the old drive. Long story short: he did everything wrong, Time Machine is a piece of crap, and I figured out how to do it myself. Instead of standing in the middle of a store packed with people getting some free iPad time on a rainy afternoon, I could have done it all from the comfort of my own kitchen table, perhaps even in jammies. Minus the increasingly frazzled husband trying to navigate the chaos with the stroller.

Marlo of course thought the Apple store was fascinating - what with all the video monitors and unwashed geeks. She only started to fuss and cry well after I had already started to do so myself.

Oh, and by the way Motorola. Nobody wants your fake iPad. Thanks, bye.

Suddenly, an intense craving for cheeseburgers

Funny that a theme in my little blogiverse this week seems to be the insufferability of preachy lifestyle people, because I just saw a particularly insufferable lady on Oprah. And it wasn't even Oprah! The preachy lady, aka The Veganist, cannot tell an animal his right to a dignified life is less important than her appetite.

Of course, the underlying message in this statement I have just paraphrased for you is that you are an asshole because you think your love of bacon is more important than Miss Piggy's right to frolic.

It was fun to see Michael Pollan sit next to this lady and try not to roll his eyes. I mean, seriously.  I struggle with the ethics of consuming meat and other animal products. We buy everything all organic and free-range and whatnot - although I have not yet bought one of those ridiculous $20 heritage chickens. The Veganist's argument is that not all Americans can afford to buy food responsibly like I can - so therefore they should go vegan.

Cut to the Veganist loading a Harpo staffer's Whole Foods cart full of probably $700 worth of Tofurkey products. Shouldn't someone who calls herself the Veganist have a better plan than highly processed meat substitutes? Is it really better for the environment to produce and consume fake meat? Is it really more cost effective? Am I just being insufferably obtuse and defensive of my elitist meat eating lifestyle?

Someday, I will be that crazy person

Sooo. The weekend with my mother in law. It was fabuu. Luckily she left yesterday, thus avoiding a weather-induced extension of her visit. I was able to spend extra time futzing around the internet and indulge in 30 minute showers, so all in all it was a good five days. We have two weeks to recover and then it's my parents' turn to test the bonds of our marriage.

In the mean time. Tomorrow is Marlo's first Kindermusik class, which is really more for me than her. I mean, if she learns sign language that's great and all, but mostly I like paying for an activity for which I have to get dressed and actually leave the house. Plus I'm hoping that she will pass on her sign language knowledge to her future sibling(s). Maybe I will have a miracle baby that will communicate by sign language at like five weeks old and then, THEN who will scoff at baby sign language class?

I'll tell you who. The old me. I used to be very anti-baby sign language. I thought everyone who did it was a moron or an idiot, probably both. Mostly because I knew a pair of idiot parents who thought every time their stupid kid pointed at something it was "her sign" for whatever that object was. If you see me start acting like that, please punch me in the face.

Warning: Boring blog post ahead

It was Marlo's two-thirds birthday yesterday. Hard to believe she is already eight months old. She has celebrated this milestone by sleeping all night -12 hours- in her crib for the past two nights. Here's to hoping this is a long-term trend.

We have definitely entered a third phase of baby around here. Phase One was the newborn phase, where she pooped every ten seconds and slept whenever she wasn't eating. Phase Two was when she needed stuff like the swing and the bouncy seat. Lots of gear in Phase Two.

Phase Three is more like having a little kid, but I assume better because she can't get far on her own and can't talk back yet. Most all of the gear is put away. She only has a high chair  and an Emergency Johnny Jump Up for when I need a shower and she is not sleeping. She sleeps in her crib, she eats three meals a day, and she is even starting to take two solid naps instead of the on-again-off-again catnap crap.

Did I mention the gear is put away? You guys, for the first time in almost a year there is no baby stuff in my bedroom. This is mindblowing for me. No bassinet, no swing, no pack-n-play. All gone. If somebody told me (probably did) before Marlo was born that I shouldn't worry, it would only be eight months and the crap would be gone and she'd be sleeping in her crib, I would have said (probably did say) "what do you mean only eight months? Eight months is forever!" But it's not. It seems like it went by in a flash.

Something I want to enter on the record is this: I'm happy. Not that I was UNhappy before, but I would rate my job satisfaction higher in Phase Three than the other phases. Yes, the days can be a slog; yes, I often wake up thinking here we go again. But I'm happy. I think it's because there is structure to the days now. It's not all haywire anymore. I get up, I feed her breakfast, I watch her play, I put her down for a nap. I know I have these steps to go through. The day is parsed into manageable increments. Maybe this sounds horrifyingly dull to you, but it works for me. Structure is my friend.

I will try not to be so boring next time. I should warn you (make excuses) that my computer is in desperate need of more RAM which makes blogging quite a task AND my mother-in-law is here, so you may not see much of me over the next week or so. But it doesn't mean I love you any less.

I think I'd rather have an Uncle Paul

I bet it would be pretty cool to find out that Oprah was your sister for the first five minutes. Then I bet she would just be insufferable. But I don't have to tell you that.  I love that her favorite part about finding out she has a sister is that her sister didn't sell her out. It's all about Oprah, after all.

I bet you don't really even get any benefits. I bet all that being Oprah's long-lost sister gets you is a bunch of phone calls to talk about Oprah. Or Deepak Chopra lectures. Except maybe you get a check-up with Doctor Oz or something, that might be worth it. But I bet Oprah's all Warren Buffet (ha, I almost said Jimmy) with her money. I bet there are no free rides in Oprah town. I bet those poor kids that were all excited five minutes ago about "Auntie Oprah" are getting bupkis.

Way back in 2010 when Oprah and Sir Paul McCartney were both getting Kennedy Center Honors, the husband and I sat around musing on how they could combine forces to become King and Queen of Earth. Imagine the money in that marriage! I wonder if they would be benevolent leaders, or if Oprah's wrath would come out. If I were her, I would want to yell "off with his head!" at least once.

I would have written a snappy conclusion, but the baby's screaming

I've got a rock in my craw. Or whatever the appropriate colloquialism is for "I'm feeling pretty frustrated."

This whole BPA thing. I'm having trouble deciding where the line is between "sensible concern" and "paranoid hyper-paranoia." Like, okay, I get it. BPA leaches out of plastic and into food, and that's probably bad for us. So we all threw out our $24.99 BPA-laden water bottles and got new, shiny $24.99 BPA-free bottles. Hooray! Problem solved, right? No. Because we are not supposed to eat things out of cans, because cans (turns out) are lined with plastic that leaches BPA into the food. Oh. Right.

Okay, so up until the time I get really good at canning without growing botulism spores and spend all of August putting up all of the tomato product we could possibly go through in the year, what am I supposed to do? Not use canned tomato product? That eliminates about 75% of the meals that I regularly prepare for my family. And what about beans? Am I really supposed to go all 19th century and have a bean pot a-boilin' on the stove at all times? Or wait, isn't it Mondays that are for sheets and bean cooking? I can't remember. All I know is I'm trying to break my habit of rinsing the bean can out over the beans in the colander, a process I have recently dubbed "getting all the BPA goodness."

It's just frustrating. It's like it wasn't bad enough when Martha Stewart was telling you you weren't doing it pretty enough, now it's like you're not doing it not killing your family enough. Here I am, buying somewhere around 85% organic, unprocessed foods, making nearly everything that we eat, yet I'm still doing it wrong. I call shenanigans.