The three p's

Today was a memorable day. The kids reached several different milestones and I officially started hankering for a new baby. The Boy finally pooped and peed in the potty (like the alliteration?!), fully and completely on his own initiative. I have actual pictures of the event and aftermath but I won’t post them because I don’t want to give him any excuse to climb a bell tower with a shotgun as a teenager. And the Girl said Papà (daddy), in fact it is my most fervent belief that she didn’t just make the random sound pa - pà, she actually meant the Husband. Clever girl! They’re  getting so big. And this segues, for me, directly into the completely irrational desire for another baby. Am I a complete moron? I would have to say no, but then why do I insist on thinking like one. The Girl, amazingly slept through the night for 2 nights in a row, though the Boy woke up twice a night (but who said life was perfect?)  and the Girl and I are at the tapering off of the nursing relationship, so my addled brain starts sending images to my heart of cute, tiny newborns, hence the hankering.

I’m having a serious talk with both heart and head to explain to them the ridiculousness of having three kids in less than four years and that if they want we can revisit the option in a few years, but right now the factory is shut for remodeling. I hope they don’t unionize and start harassing and haranguing me.

Living with Leukemia. The other side of the story – part 1 The Girl

As I mentioned in the first posts on this blog, my Husband was diagnosed with Acute Leukemia at the end of last year. On December 24^th 2009 to be precise. That date will be forever imprinted on my mind like a hot brand on a calf’s hide. You may very well object that I am not, in fact, living with leukemia, as I am not, in truth, the one who has it. And you would certainly have a point. The truth, however, is that while my Husband is the one actually sick the rest of us are living with his illness too and though I cannot speak for someone who has this disease I can certainly speak for someone who is experiencing it second hand every day.

When I think back to the time right after the diagnosis it feels almost dreamlike. All my memories are in a sort of haze, and this saddens me to no end, not because I want to remember those first crappy months with HD clarity, but because it all coincided with The Girl’s birth. I can picture every nuance of The Boy’s first milestones, the first time he latched on, the first smile, the first laugh, the first time he held my finger in his tiny fist. Whereas The Girl was only exactly one month old the day her daddy was admitted to the hospital, so for the life of me I can’t remember her first Christmas, her first New Year, her first smile…. I have the pictures, sure, but no memories. And that is so sad. Of course, her father doesn’t have any of these memories either, because he wasn’t there, he was stuck in a hospital room with no visitors (just one a day, usually me), but I was there, I was, and yet I may as well have not been there. It makes me so sad not to remember, it makes me feel so guilty. Although, what I write is not completely true, I don’t remember events, I can’t remember how she looked or what she did, but I do remember feelings.

I remember the feeling of loss every time I had to leave her at home to go visit her dad in the hospital. I so wanted to see him, but I so needed to be with her, so every time I left the house it was a tiny scar on my heart. I remember the wonderful feeling of peace every time I came home to feed her. This is why I kept breastfeeding her, though everyone told me I was crazy, that I was dealing with too much stuff and should save my energy. By nursing her I had to come home from the hospital, I had to hold her and pay attention to her, and love her, all things that would have been too easy to ignore in the general chaos of those first few weeks. She kept me grounded, she kept me sane. I remember the feeling of going to sleep with her in my bed (yes, she slept in my bed, with me, I know it was completely irresponsible of me, but I was alone in my big bed and she was alone in her tiny crib next to me and I needed her there with me) snuggled together, her tiny baby head just a few inches from my nose so I could smell her all night long.

So many people said to me variations of the following: “oh, you poor dear, and with a newborn to tend to, it would have been so much better if you had found out earlier” and my thought, as well as my husband’s was the timing, though terrible, was also perfect. He watched her being born, he got to hold her and love her for a month, and I had my anchor. So tiny, such a blessing.

Recipes

You may be wondering why on earth I posted a recipe on this blog. (I sure as hell would be…) The truth is that I’m planning a spin-off of Moomser, ie. Moomser Food (soon to be followed by Moomser baby, because I’m an egomaniac like that), but since I’m about as technologically-minded as my leather couch I have to wait for my DH to find the time and energy to set me up. So I will, occasionally, when the fancy hits, be posting recipes on here, which I will promptly move to their new location at an indeterminate time in an uncertain future.

Pasta alla Checca

The Husband always knows when I decide that summer is just around the corner because for starters I start painting my toes and wearing sandals, but mainly because we start eating Pasta alla Checca at least three times a week. It is literally my favorite pasta in the world, it’s easy to make, it’s fast, and if the ingredients are good quality then the dish is to die for. There are many variants of this pasta, all of which are good, I’m going to share my favorite, and then you can take it from there and create your perfect version of Pasta alla Checca, because it’s one of those summer comfort foods that has to fit like your favorite pair of Manolo’s, the ones that you can walk for miles in they’re so comfortable, and yet you still look amazing.

What you need:

Well, pasta of course. I’m partial to De Cecco, which is a high quality Italian brand that you can find pretty easily in most big cities worldwide, but your favorite brand will work perfectly too! You need “short” pasta for this dish, so no spaghetti or other long pastas. I like to use fusilli (corkscrew shaped pasta), but my Mom prefers farfalle (bow shaped pasta), if you experiment a little you’ll find the perfect pasta shape for you, the one that absorbs the right amount of sauce, and that allows you to spear all the main ingredients so you can make the “perfect mouthful”.

Tomatoes, which is why I only make it in the summer, with those lovely straight from the plant tomatoes in my vegetable garden.

Fresh Mozzarella, ideally buffalo mozzarella, but regular mozzarella is fine too as long as it’s fresh. I realize this is trickier for people outside of Italy cause it’s hard to find and expensive when you do, but it really, really needs to be fresh. So do NOT, under any circumstances, substitute with other types of mozzarella (mozzarella cheese sticks are totally NOT ok) I really can’t stress this enough. If you can’t find fresh mozzarella you’re going to have to go without cheese in the dish (it’s still very, very good) and if you really can’t give up the cheese entirely then substitute with something completely different, like Feta cheese. (If my Mom actually read my blog she would have keeled over from a heart attack after that suggestion.)

Basil, just a few fresh leaves, if you can, it makes the dish positively heavenly.

Salt and oil.

And then you have a whole slew of options, just a few would be:  anchovy paste, oregano, parmesan cheese and garlic.

This is what you do:

1.       Put a large pan full of water to boil with about a tablespoon of salt every 1.5 to 2 litres – or if you’re like me and don’t feel like actually measuring anything dump in a handful of salt and then taste the water, if you can taste the salt, but it doesn’t feel like you got a mouthful of water from the Dead Sea then you’re good to go, otherwise keep adding salt (little by little!).

2.       Cut up the tomatoes – you want them to be just a little smaller than the pasta so that when you put them in your mouth there’s a balance between pasta and tomato where neither overwhelms the other. And put them directly in your serving dish. Oh, and the ratio of tomato (piece) to pasta is 1 – 1,5. So you want there to be more pasta than tomato in the finished product, but not a lot more.

3.       Dress the tomatoes with some salt and oil and I like to put in a slightly squished whole, clean clove of garlic, I like the aroma but it can’t be overwhelming. My Mom on the other hand, hates garlic in her Checca but she adds about a spoonful of anchovy paste to the tomatoes, oil and salt. Try them both or mix ‘em up and let me know what you prefer!

4.       At this point your water should be boiling and you should have the amount of salt sorted out so dump in the pasta. (Dieticians say 80grams/person is the correct amount of pasta as a main course, if you’re American this’ll look like maybe an appetizer, so I suggest you go with at least 100gr per person, or more realistically 120gr – it’s worth it. But don’t get too greedy and go over 150gr/person, or, you know, you won’t have room for  dessert!)

5.       While your pasta cooks (and, for the love of all that is holy, check the cooking time on the package you’ve GOT TO drain it al dente.) cut up the mozzarella (same rule as per the tomatoes), and coarsely chop some basil leaves (or leave them whole, whatever).

6.       Hold the mozzarella, don’t mix it with the tomatoes yet! But do go ahead and put the basil leaves with the tomatoes (if you don’t have fresh basil, use dried oregano, not dried or frozen basil!)

7.       Drain the pasta – all together now – AL DENTE and dump it over the tomatoes and mix.

this photo adds absolutely nothing to the description, but I thought the steam effect on the camera was kinda cool

8.       NOW put in the mozzarella and mix some more. Why? Because if you put the mozzarella and cover it with boiling hot pasta your mozzarella will get stringy or hardened whereas if you wait just one beat it’ll get warm from the hot pasta but it’ll stay intact in all its chewy goodness.

9.       Fish out the clove of garlic lest your husband accidently bite into it and then goes on to complain about it for three hours.

Voilà, Pasta alla Checca

10.   Sometimes I like it with parmesan cheese on top, sometimes I just want to taste tomatoes, mozzarella and basil. Whatever works for you!

Donate blood, now!

On Friday I went to the hospital “Centro Trasfusionale” I don’t know the exact translation but it’s similar to a blood bank. It’s where you go to donate blood, but also to become a bone marrow donor. I realized this week that I’m turning 35  in a few days and I had read that the Italian bone marrow registry only accepted new donors that had signed up by the age of 35, so in typical procrastinator fashion having left it all to the last minute, I rushed down to the hospital hoping that I could get all the tests done in time.

Luckily, they had recently pushed the cut-off age for new donors to 40, so I had plenty of time. They did the preliminary tests for the blood donation (I figured I’d kill two birds with one stone) and the interview to become a BM donor. I was asked no fewer than 6 times if I had taken any drugs in the past year, but only once if I had engage in high risk sexual behavior. I thought that was a little weird, seeing as it’s infinitely more likely that one would get a horrible transmissible disease from the latter than the former, but whatever, they know what they’re doing so… unless, of course, and this occurs to me only now, I look like a total druggie, hmmm, must think about this more…

Well, the day was fruitful since I managed to do the preliminary tests for bone marrow donation and if nothing funny turns up in my blood work I’ll be officially in the Italian Bone Marrow Donor Registry. The only glitch in the morning was that I was not allowed to donate blood because apparently you have to wait at least a year after giving birth (I thought it was only 6 months) and you can’t be breastfeeding. So I’ll go back in December, which isn’t all bad as the need for blood increases during the holidays.

The reasons for this decision are, I’m assuming, obvious. The Husband received a BM transplant that saved his life so I think I should give something back. Also, going through this experience with The Husband made me realize that there is a very real and concrete need for blood, plasma and platelets. In the time that he was in the hospital he must have received close to a hundred transfusions. In April, he got either blood or platelets or both every single day. Every day. This thought makes my skin crawl. This is why donating blood is important, because without all those blood donors out there The Husband would likely have died. Without that 23 year old German kid who donated his bone marrow, my Husband would have died. I hope this thought makes it a little more real for you and maybe someone will decide to become a blood donor. You can donate just once a year, it’s not a huge commitment, pick a date that’s significant for you and every year go give blood on that day. It’s not just people with leukemia who need daily blood transfusions, there are hundreds if not thousands of illnesses that require transfusions at some point, not to mention people who undergo surgery, people who have accidents, the amount of blood the average ER goes through in a day is mind boggling. So pick a date, right now, and go donate some blood!

And for those of you who already are blood donors, consider becoming a bone marrow donor. I know it’s not an easy decision to make. It’s not an easy procedure, though depending on where you live, there are generally two options as to how to do it. I’m not going to get into it, because frankly I’m not a doctor so I don’t want to give misleading or inaccurate information. But seriously, it’s not hard, it’s not that time consuming, it’s really not that much of a hassle and it really does save lives. Believe me, I know.

Plus, most of us would do it for someone we know, right? Literally, hundreds of our friends and colleagues and family members offered to get tested for The Husband, but the truth is, it doesn’t work that way. The chances of any one of us actually knowing someone who is compatible enough for a BM transfusion are ridiculously low. That’s why they only test brothers and sisters. Not parents, not cousins, not aunts and uncles and other family members, they ONLY test direct, full siblings (not half brothers and sisters) because statistically they’re the best chance of compatibility (funnily enough – though we really didn’t think it was funny at the time – The Husband’s brother and sister are not very compatible with him, though they are extremely compatible with each other, oh, the irony). Apart from direct siblings it’s more time and cost efficient to go look in the Bone Marrow Donor Registries of each country.

So think about it, there’s probably someone, somewhere who could use your BM, you could save someone’s life. And that someone will probably have parents, and brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles and cousins, and maybe kids and a wife who would be eternally grateful to you.

Ok, I’ve said my piece.

Magic Mushrooms

The other day I was talking to someone very near and dear to me about recreational drug use in our youth and I realized I actually missed out on a lot of interesting experiences mainly cause I was scared of my parents finding out, please take a moment to note that I have lived on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean from my parents since I was 19 years old. They only things they could ever possibly know about my life were things that I would tell them myself. But the human psyche is a very strange thing indeed and led me to feel guilty for weeks and weeks every time I talked to my Mom after a weekend in Amsterdam that I hadn’t told her about. So I was telling this person about my weekend in Amsterdam when I was 20, which incidentally is the most rebellious I have ever been, ever, since I rarely drink and may have gotten drunk maybe twice in my whole entire life, and the most drugs I’ve ever done is marijuana occasionally when I could find it or hash which is more common here in Italy, I’ve never once tried cocaine though I lived in the cocaine capital of southern Europe for 10 years (Milan) cause I’m completely freaked out at the idea of snorting something up my nose, this is how badass I am. Anyway so this person chimes in with a story about “magic mushrooms” and how the effects are really interesting. The idea was that they don’t actually make you see stuff that isn’t there, like they show in the movies, but you see the stuff around you at an almost molecular level, “take this tablecloth” he said (we were having dinner) “if you were high on peyote right now, you’d be staring at the weave of the tablecloth and these lines made by the weave would probably be moving” waving of the fingers in his hand to illustrate the point “and you’d be staring at the weave of the table cloth and thinking, duuuuuude, this is so cool, look at the little lines moving up and down.” In fact, he told me, once he sat in his parents’ bathroom for three hours straight staring at the flowered wallpaper. Now, at this point in my life I really don’t have time to sit and stare at the coolness of my kitchen cabinets for three hours, but it’s one of those things that I wish I had done in my early twenties when I could have justified it with the simple stupidity of a twenty year old. Now I’m going to have to wait till I’m in my fifties so I can blame it on a mid life crisis. Although, I’m pretty much already seeing things, so if I just keep not sleeping for another few months I’m sure you’ll find me frozen in rapt attention staring in wonderment at the dust mites in my living room.

Sleep baby, sleep

The Girl turned 10 months yesterday and this is what I realized: I haven’t had a full night’s sleep (and by that I mean that I haven’t slept for at least 7 hours straight) since December 2007. That’s almost three years, and you may well be wondering why. The fact of the matter is that I stopped sleeping in December of 2007 cause I was in my third trimester and had to get up and pee every thirty minutes (though why I didn’t think of just sleeping in diapers is completely beyond me), in February 2008 The Boy was born. The Boy enjoyed two night feedings (at midnight and 5am) until he was almost a year old (do I look like I’m joking??) and then he moved on to just one night feeding at 5am, until he was 19months old. At this point The Boy started sleeping from 8pm to 8am with no interruptions. Heaven? Of course, for The Husband… I had already started waking every thirty minutes to pee at night cause I was pregnant and in the third trimester once again. In retrospect, the whole getting pregnant when The Boy turned one, was obviously a decision made by two people who’s judgment was severely impaired due to lack of sleep.

 Having come to this realization has helped me come to terms with several things, for example: I can’t get anything done, I do all the immediate, urgent, needs to get done right this minute or not at all stuff, but walk around the house and you’ll see piles and piles of black holes as The Husband calls them. Black holes are piles of all the crap you need to get done, but don’t, like filing the bills away, there’s a pile of bills on my desk starting from November 2009, that’s almost a year’s worth of paper I need to file, or in my closet I have a pile of shirts and pants missing buttons that I need to sew on, I think that black hole started in the mid nineties, or in the kitchen, a black hole of coupons, yoga class flyers, recipes and just random crap that needs to be dealt with, but I can’t get anything done. The reason for this, I believe, is that my brain is using 90% of its capacity with actions like stay alert, breathe in and then out, where’s The Girl? Keep her out of harm’s way, deal with The Boy’s tantrum, feed them, clothe them, love them and then also breathe in, out, in... The remaining 10% is desperately trying to keep me from lying down on any horizontal surface that I may run into at any given time. Or that’s what it probably used to do, now I’m at the point where I couldn’t even sleep if I wanted to. We had three marvelously blissful days in which both kids slept soundly and quietly all night long, I kept waking up to make sure they were still there and hadn’t been kidnapped in the night. So the situation now is, The Boy occasionally talks or walks in his sleep, and will sometimes wake up and call for us in the middle of the night, but this only happens about once a week, so it’s totally manageable. The girl wakes up once or twice at random times during the night and wants to nurse. At this point I am soooo tempted to just let her cry it out and see if we can’t break this habit seeing as if she behaves like her brother I’ll still be feeding her at night a year from now and that thought makes me want to catapult myself into the void. On the other had I know that if I do let her cry it out there’s two very real possibilities I’m going to have to deal with: 1) that her brother wakes up from all the screaming and starts screaming himself and then no one will get to sleep and 2) that I start suffering from guilt induced insomnia for leaving her to cry on her own all night and I’ll never sleep again. Any suggestions??

Somebody give me some trash tv

We just finished watching the Coen brothers’ latest masterpiece, A Serious Man.

And when I say we I actually mean me since my darling husband decided to go to bed halfway through the movie, that’s how positively riveting it was. Now, I’ll admit that I’m a total redneck when it comes to movies. I liked ‘Independence Day’, I think Steve Martin and Adam Sandler are hilarious, my all time favorite movie is ‘The Day After Tomorrow’. I love all those movies that Italians disparagingly call “Americanate” – typically American movies – the ones with lots of action where something generally blows up, where the good guy is really good and the bad guy is actually the guy that you don’t really notice till  half way through the movie, the one where the hero invariably gives up smoking because he realizes how bad it is for him, possibly with an American flag waving in the wind towards the end. So, basically, I ain’t no film critic.

So when The Husband comes home with a movie directed by Clint Eastwood, zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz, snort, oh excuse me, but I fell asleep just thinking about it (and bless his heart CE is a giant in American filmography, he’s a great actor, but Lord Almighty, can you say boooooorrrrrrrrriiiiiinnnnnnggggg director), and this pearl from the Coen brothers, my only thought was, why, oh why, didn’t I just go to blockbuster myself??!!

His only answer to the look of despair in my eyes was “the critics say it’s fantastic”, oh, right, sorry, cause that’s always a guarantee. So, he gets up and goes to bed, and I doggedly watch on, hoping against hope that it’s going to get better, isn’t it, the critics are good, it’s GOT to get better, right?

It didn’t.

Hot Dawg

Despite the flimsiness of the title, I actually am posting on hot dogs. Hot dogs are a greatly underappreciated food. Generally, if I’m going to eat some sort of cooked meat in a bun I tend to go for a hamburger, pretty predictable. Last Saturday, as I opened the fridge, I was feeling a tad whimsical, so I went for the hot dogs. Fanfuckingtastic. That’s all I’m going to say.

First real post

This is my first real Moomser post. All the previous posts come from our private family blog, so if they sound a little weird, that's why. I copied them here cause I wanted to put in a little background. And also the idea of the first lonely posts kind of intimidated me, so I gave myself a little comfort cushion of older words and thoughts that help define me so I wouldn't feel so lonely out here on my own. I'll be posting pictures soon, to liven up the page. So welcome to whomever is interested in my marginally neurotic ramblings, I hope to at least mildly entertain you!

On a wholly unrelated note, I just started watching season 4 of Hell's Kitchen, and I have to say, I honestly didn't think that professional chefs needed to say 'fuck' quite as many times as Gordon Ramsey does. Just saying.

Date Night

Just a quick word to heartily suggest you watch a movie called Date Night (Notte folle a Manhattan) with Tina Fey and Steve Carrell. Too Funny! But, watch it in English cause, apart from the fact that comedy is generally funnier in the original language, whoever dubbed Tina Fey in Italian sounds like a man trying to talk like a woman. It’s very disturbing.

Rebirth and renewal

The past ten days have been dedicated to The Girl’s baptism. Not kidding. It was like organizing a wedding, and the aftermath was like recuperating from the apocalypse, albeit a fun and relaxed one. We are just now barely crawling out of the coma-like state we’ve been in since Saturday, today I am once again finally able to string together complete sentences, which miraculously relate to each other and make a semblance of sense. I’m also doing the rounds of all the suppliers and paying for services rendered. Oy.

Anyway, Saturday was a superbly fantastic day (I’m into hyperboles today). We were surrounded by a crowd of wonderful friends and family, which honestly we did not expect. That’s weird, you may say, how could you not expect it, considering everyone was invited (in writing no less...), but honestly we thought that most people would be busy (last weekend before school started), or not in the mood for a baptism (it’s not like we were inviting people to a wet t-shirt contest), or with sick or otherwise engaged children. Instead the turnout was fantastic! We were missing very few people (and yes, we missed you!). Also, the weather was unbelievable, really, the perfect late summer / early autumn day, sunny, blue cloudless skies, warm and crisp (as opposed to hot and humid, or wet and cold, all viable options this time of year). So basically we totally lucked out!

The Husband was in great health and spirits, thankfully, since I suspect a good number of people came to see him (that’s ok, The Girl doesn’t mind, she knows she was still the cutest one there, anyway!). The past few weeks his general tone has greatly improved he seems to be almost back to normal, for which we are all grateful.

So on this auspicious day our baby girl made her entrance into the catholic church… I’ve always had mixed feelings about this, my parents made the conscious choice not to baptize us, though both of them grew up catholic. My brother decided as an adult to take the sacraments and is, in fact, The Boy’s godfather (or I should actually say “Godfather”, in a Sicilian-American accent). But I’ve never felt the need to become a part of organized religion. I’m not going to start a long discussion on a blog, because I don’t want to raise anyone’s hackles and I don’t want to get into a long, drawn out and completely useless debate. I do, however, want to emphasize the fact that, though I may feel ambiguous towards the church, and I don’t feel the need to become a part of it myself, I am happy that we baptized The Girl, and I feel a huge responsibility to teach her a healthy respect for religion, and for her church as well as for others and to help her nurture her spiritual self in the best way possible for her.

This last little paragraph may sound a little strange to our Italian readers, because here (fortunately or unfortunately, who can say?) religion generally equates Catholic church, so there is a certain sense of inevitability to religious experience that tends to take choice out of the equation as well as the idea of spiritual growth.

Anywho,  moving right along, the day was doubly special for us, as a family, because The Husband and I renewed our marriage vows. Huh? What? Why? The thing is that about a month or two ago I accidently lost my wedding band. Or better, we know exactly where it is but to get it we would have to literally take apart our house and incur expenses in the tens of thousands of euros so it’s as good as lost in the real sense of the word. Basically, I was playing with it and the ring slipped off my finger, and fell to the ground (and as I write this I hear my mother’s voice about a hundred and fifty thousand times: “stop playing with your rings, that’s how you lose them!” and me, eye roll, “mom quit nagging, I’m not going to lose them” – so basically she jinxed it). Now, I heard it fall, and thought, I’ll get it in just a minute (I was holding The Girl and she was playing with something) and then poof, it disappeared. We looked for it for days, gone. And then we figured it fell in the cavity wall of the house where all the plumbing, electric tubes and the such run. Ha, we went looking there too, amidst a slew of insects I’m not even going to describe except to say that if any of those spiders decided to come out and cavort in the light of day I may just have a simultaneous heart attack, stroke, hissy fit and die.

So for all intents and purposes my wedding band was gone. Thus we decided to have another one made using The Husband’s band, melting it, adding some gold and in this manner getting two new bands that both had some of one original band in them (sounds complicated, but it made us feel better, thanks Bears for the idea). So long story short, Father F (priest who married us, and friend) was coming to baptize The Girl so we figured we would ask him to bless the new bands and that would be that. Enter Mother. My Mom is a very superstitious lady. And when I say very superstitious I mean that if she has to get from point A to point B and between points A and B there is a staircase or ladder under which she must go to reach her destination, she will either not go to point B at all or take even the most ridiculously long and circuitous route she needs to take to avoid the staircase or ladder. I’m not kidding. If my Mother asks you to pass the salt, you better damn well put the salt shaker down near her cause you will be holding the salt up in the air till kingdom come before she takes it out of your hand. I could compile a dictionary of superstitions with all of the things she’s taught me. All this to say that my Mom announced that we absolutely could not simply bless the rings we had to renew our vows for it to count, otherwise the bands would be “bad luck” (insert eerie music). Of course The Husband’s mom jumped on the bandwagon and wanted us to do it in front of all the conveniently assembled guests in church. Ha, ha, ha.

Anyway. The Husband and I renewed our vows in private, we’ve been married seven years, and this being a notoriously ominous year for marriage, we’re turning a new leaf and starting afresh. Hopefully the next seven will be happy, healthy and filled with love.

I-pad, oh i-pad, wherefore art thou i-pad

So I finally, finally got sucked into the whole apple world. True, I had dipped my toes in with the i-phone, but honestly, I never took it seriously, plus I have always been conscious of its main flaw: it sucks as a phone. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an amazing toy, I love the apps, I love that I can watch my tv shows on it, I literally play around with it all day, but it has crappy reception and just try dialing a number while driving without taking your eyes off the road. And then I bought the i-pad. I love the i-pad. The i-pad rocks.

The i-pad’s only flaw? It’s a money sucking machine. It somehow ensnares you, bewitches you, convinces you that you can’t live without that app, and gosh let me buy some e-books, and it’s got so much memory let me download that new tv show and oooooh I can’t get parenting magazine in Italy, I’ll just subscribe to the digital version… and on and on and on… and all of a sudden you’re looking at your bank statement and going woah, where’d those 400bucks go??

I’m just hoping it’s the initial excitement or The Husband is going to have to take my credit cards away again….

So to steal my brother’s words on an fb update:

Mr. Jobs you do your voodoo on me soooo good Mr. Jobs.. Can't get enough of da iPad Mr. Jobs.. Congratulations Mr. Jobs.. You yuppify me