Monthly Archives: October 2009

“I have no life. I play with Lego all day!”

8 Replies

Let me start this post by saying that we are a Lego family.  With 3 boys in the household – my 2 sons and my one husband, our floor used to be covered with Lego pieces when they were little (the kids, not the husband).  Later, a home-made Lego table was the mainstay in the living room, also covered with Lego pieces, and at one time, Lego train tracks, until the kids decided to use the train and tracks as launching pad for Lego people…

We love Legos.   We are not embarrassed to admit that we still play with Legos ourselves.  We don’t make fun of people who love Legos, or trains for that matter.  Yada yada yada.  You get the drift.

Then I saw this today on Amazon.com (or as one of my good friends calls them, The Evil Empire…)

LEGO Town Plan

I was utterly disturbed.

Is this a joke?  Is it Photoshopped?  Is it me?  Doesn’t that seem like a parallel to “Could you come and help me look for my puppy?”

I showed it to my 11 year-old, and the first thing he said was, “Wow.  I have no life.  I play with Lego all day!”

Then he went back to his Mindstorms.   (Yeah. I love me some good irony too…)

Has the marketing department at Lego lost their marbles?  Or, in this case, their blocks?

Much to my embarrassment and relief, google is once again my friend, and I found the truth behind the

The Special 50th Anniversary Edition Lego!

My bad…  The guy?  He is the owner of the Lego company Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen (yeah, no kidding. Try and say that name 3 times…) aka Lego founder’s grandson who appeared as a kid on the original Town Plan box and now returns on this 50th anniversary special edition!

Somehow I suspect that he does indeed “have no life” because he’s too busy running a global company and thinking up ways to reinvent Lego year after year, and that he does “play with Lego all day”.

The rest of us are just jealous.

To redeem myself from the over-rampant cynicism, I shall seek solace in this oldie but goodie:

Those who do the laundry should have immunity. Just sayin…

10 Replies

So the other day husband left one of his baseball caps on the floor of the laundry room, looking quite dirty.  As in, it’s no longer beige but brown-ish all over.

So what does it mean when someone just leaves clothing on the floor of the laundry room?  I’d say it means they are asking you nicely to wash it for them.  Wouldn’t you agree?

Since I am a very nice person, so I did.

Turns out this hat is husband’s favorite.  Don’t ask me why.  This was the first time I heard it too.  A cap from a baseball team we don’t really know about.  A cap husband had purchased for our oldest at a company outing and later inherited because our oldest was too cool to wear it.

CIMG2707

It’s a mystery to me, really.  Sort of like the mystery of how a child selects his/her lovey.  (THAT. Is yet another topic we should all blog about.  Raise your hand if you have experienced the agony of a lost lovey.  Or worst, the death of a beloved lovey…)

It also turned out that the back closure of the hat had split in half and husband had glued it together with super glue.  (Have to say I am impressed by that feat and his dedication!)  So the hat came out of the wash, well, broken again.

“You broke my hat!  That’s my favorite hat!”

In order to keep peace in the household, I offered to glue it together.

“Well, you’d better do a good job: don’t get glue all over it.”

Have to say, he knows me only too well.  I can’t work with any type of glue:  I once glued my fingers shut with super glue.  I offered to use the glue gun.

“You are KIDDING, right?”

Well, I guess I’m now even if I wasn’t…

As I sat there trying to hold the pieces together as my fingers were being glued shut, again.  I thought,

Shouldn’t there be immunity for people who do the laundry in the household?  Next time, I’m going to have him sign a release form…

FINE.  I’ll fix your hat for you.

i'll fix your damn hat!

There. You. Go.

Got Summer? Or, On the Agonizing Ritual of Closet Reorg

1 Reply

Apparently not this year.

Despite its severe winters and famous 3-foot snow, Chicago has always delivered hot and humid summers.  These two things are not mutually exclusive, I am sure, according to a meteorologist, but in my mind I always wonder, while either dying from motion sickness from all the shivering or from dehydration when my body turns into a water tank with holes, “Why out of all the cities did we choose this place?! WHY?!”

This year, we had a very cool summer.  How cool?

I went through the whole year without seasonalizing my closet…  I have basically been living on the clothes I hauled into my closet last fall.  And it is LIBERATING!

You know the twice-a-year ritual:

You say goodbye to your sweaters and place your summer clothes on the hangers.  Later you stash away your shorts and tank tops and bring out your t-necks and wool pants.  The fat clothes, much to your dismay, are still applicable.  You may or may not decide to look through the clothes you put away for when you lose weight.  Probably better if you don’t.  Since if you do, you will realize, by the looks and the styles, that they have been there for A VERY LONG TIME…

Although I love the changing seasons in the Midwest: the 2 weeks of spring, the 5 weeks of fall, I always dread the implications: Summarizing/winterizing the closets.  More so because as soon as I am done reorganizing the closets, the temperature will drop/increase to be “unseasonably” WTF.

Every. Single. Time.  Murphy’s Law.

I especially dread the re-organizing  of my children’s closets: They are not like us.  We get to wear the same clothes every year, or pretty much the same “fat” clothes in my case.  They grow.  Like weed.  And they grow out of their clothes before they have the chance to wear them twice.  Here is when I envy people with only one child.

Outgrew the clothes already?  Pack them up!  Haul them away!

When you have multiple children, now is the time to go through every single piece of clothing and agonize: Will No. 2 be able to wear this one from No. 1 two years from now?  Will he have grown big enough in time to wear this sweater?  Why can’t they grow in sync, as in, No. 2 will conveniently be able to wear No. 1’s hand-me-downs a few years later?  Why do they have to grow OUT OF SEASONs?  i.e. yeah, No. 2 can now wear No.1’s old clothes, but ooops, these are the sweaters, and we are now in July!

You also need to separate them by sizes, by seasons, by the types of clothing: pants, shirts, shorts, t-shirts, sweaters, jackets, gloves, hats, snow boots, Halloween costumes.

I regret for not having planned the births of my children with precision whenever I am sitting on the floor, surrounded by piles of clothes, assaulting my anal-itis.

Don’t even get me started on the stress I go through, when in the middle of the summer, I receive the Overstock catalogue from Lands’ End: “50% off on Winter Jackets and Snow Boots!” How am I supposed to know how big/tall these kids are going to be 6 months from now? But I’d better get the winter equipments while they are on massive discounts so we won’t be caught with nothing when winter comes suddenly.  Which happens in Chicago, it feels, every year. And why do I have to worry about winter when I am sweating like a pig? Curses, Lands’ End!

So, yes, this year I have been living in jeans and long-sleeved shirts when it is cool, and jeans and t-shirts when it is warm.  I haven’t touched any skirts or shorts.  I didn’t even pack my capris when we went to the beach for the summer.  I lived in my swimming suit that week.

I did make the attempt to summarize my closet this August when I decided that oh, yes, the temperature is going to stay summer-y finally…

closet

The pile has been on the floor since…

This weekend I’m just going to box the summer clothes up again and hang up the sweaters, again.

And you know what?  Maybe we will see Summer, again…

You can’t fight Murphy’s Law…

p.s. Here is if you need an explanation on WHY cool summers do not mean Global Warming is not happening to respond to snide comments from the deniers…

“Wisconsin Tourism Federation changes name to avoid acronym” ’nuff said…

5 Replies

“The folks at the Wisconsin Tourism Federation, a 30-year-old tourism lobbying coalition based in Sun Prairie, couldn’t possibly have predicted how the Internet would change the lingo.

While its abbreviation, WTF, was fairly innocuous a few decades ago, it means something entirely different these days…”

News article here.

Apparently the alarm was first sounded by a blogger.  So don’t ever say we bloggers do not make a difference!

WTF

What do you think?  The new logo does not seem to have the same PUNCHY ring to it, eh? They should have changed it to Federation of Tourism in Wisconsin.

FTW!  Baby!