Well, it only took me seven days to utterly lose my shit. I silently cried for about an hour today while simultaneously working, because of course. I feel a little bad that I freaked out the nephews, but damnit I’m human.

If you’re wondering, it seems as though I lost my shit over paprika. We’re out of it, and Cade thinks it’s a necessity we must immediately run to Target to get. He’s not doing well with quarantine and wants to go out at any opportunity. In fact, when he calls in to see if he has to go in for random drug testing (as mandated by the court) he’s bummed when they tell him not to report today.

So when he was bugging me about getting out of the house and getting paprika so he could make deviled eggs, I lost it. I cried for an hour and then explained to him how even though he doesn’t care if he gets the virus, I care if he does, and I especially care if I get it.

I told him and made sure Maxwell, who is flippant about the virus and still going to hang out with friends at their houses, was listening that if I get it it’s going to be a huge, big deal. That if I don’t work, I don’t get paid. I don’t have the luxury of sick time nor do I think I’ll qualify for unemployment. I tried to express that it’s in all of our best interests that I stay healthy. And if I get sick, it’ll probably be because they exposed me.

I suspect they think I’m being irrational and controlling, but fuck man, I don’t know how to get through to them that they should stay home and away from people.

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editor’s note: In an earlier draft I spelled intentions wrong roughly 50% of the time in this post including in the title & the image. So I guess what I’m saying is that I’m using the term “editor” very loosely. Also that I’m kind of a dummy.

Sometime in March my nephew Nolan, 13, was over for dinner. When he spied a pile of black and grey granny-square strips he asked if I was ever going to finish his Christmas present.

“I’ll have it done by Easter,” I said. Because I like to believe I work better under a deadline and really the “Christmas” deadline was a stupid pipe dream as was the “by your birthday” (which is January 14th). Un my defense I do make all the gifts for my niblings and so.

Easter came and went with almost no mention of the blanket, until Jaycie via Skype from the UofO started talking about some blanket she made, which involved the tying together of two pieces of microfleece. And not to demean her efforts or anything, but the stupid blanket I am making for Nolan involves like 445 individual granny square, each of which takes nine minutes to make, and then they have to be joined and then the strips of joined grannies have to be joined again and it’s a never-ending ellBlanket^TM. I hope he likes it or at least uses it as a sort of shroud for me when I finish it and then promptly die.

This post isn’t even about HellBlanket^TM. This is a post about how all my best intentions seems to dissipate into the wind and I don’t know if this is because I am inherently lazy or inherently flaky or if it’s some other as-yet-unnamed character flaw.

What I am saying here is that Nolan’s HellBlanket^TM still isn’t done, though it’s really, truly almost done and will be complete by the next Bob’s Burgers Night^*.

What I’m really saying is that the blanket is just a symbol of all my good intentions that go right into the crapper about 12 minutes after I intend them. Like my intention to blog more regularly every month or not to eat so many chicken nuggets or to finally, finally, finally get serious about writing the bowling alley short story collection. I have these intentions every month and I do really well for about a day. Then, the next thing I know, it’s the 29th and I’m waking up from a nugget coma smeared with honey mustard, haven’t blogged in like two weeks, and yet somehow managed to re-watch the entirety of Scrubs, even the super shitty Med School season.

What is wrong with me?

What do I have to do keep starting each paragraph with the word what?

What I intend to do with this blog post is list my best intentions for the month. I saw this concept on Shutterbean, only she does this weekly because she is not a garbage human. I’m going to try it monthly to see if I can ungarbage myself.

So here are my intentions for May:

• Finish the HellBlanket^TM (this one is a little cheatery because I really only need to finish the edging but I’m the type of woman who makes ToDo lists and always includes one thing I’ve already done just so I can start out on a positive note)
• Write four non-book review blog posts & two book reviews
• Hand in the MN Artists’ Initiative Grant by May 18th (it’s due May 19th)
• Query four more agents
• Submit ROCK & ROLL LOUDMOUTH to Milkweed during their open reading submissions

There. That’s a good start right? I can do those things this month. At least I think I can. Goal setting has never been a strength of mine, which is why whenever I accomplish anything it surprises the fuck out of me.

Here’s to good intentions

*The Tibbles & I have instituted bi-weekly Bob’s Burger nights where we cook something from The Bob’s Burgers Burger Book: Real Recipes for Joke Burgers. So far we’ve done “Bet it All on Black Garlic” and “Baby, You Can Chive my Car” . And let me tell you it takes some kind of deep love to allow teenage boys to deep fry pickles in your house, and not just pickles but anything because deep frying is stinky and dirty and my house has just stopped smelling like a fast food joint even though we made the pickles on Saturday.

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Without fail, it seems, the batteries in the various smoke alarms at Supergenius HQ decide to die at the most in convenient time. Today it was 5:25 a.m. which would suck most any day of the week, but sucked a little harder this morning considering how much tequila I had the night before.

I’m still a little amazed that I managed to find the 9-volt battery and get it installed without too much swearing or annoyance. In fact, I was so chill about the whole thing that I promptly collapsed back into bed for another three hours. Go me!

Of course that’s only because it was one of the smoke alarms upstairs and not the shitty, crappy smoke alarm in the kitchen that requires me to stand on a chair to change the battery, which requires at least two panic attacks and a lot of needless fear-of-standing-on-chairs anxiety. I hate that fucking smoke alarm.

Upon my second awakening I decided that I wasn’t going to mess around with any hangover bullshit, and promptly pulled on some pants and went in search of a Sausage Egg McMuffin. It was delicious and chased away any hangovers with designs on ruining my day.

Kind of.

I spent the morning eating my McMuffin, drinking my Mocha-Chocalatta-Ya-Ya, and writing a book review. Then I decided to spend a little time editing other book reviews for the much-neglected MN Reads. Also, I listened to that Jason Isbell record for what appears to be the 180th time this month. I am nothing if not obsessive. It has also come to my attention that I need to listening to something new — got any ideas?

This took us up to about 10:30 or 11 a.m. I’m not entirely sure. What I am sure of is that I curled up on the long brown couch with the rest of Saga Vol. 2 and Queens of Noise: The Real Story of the Runaways. While I managed to finish Saga, bringing my grand total of books finished this weekend to four, I only got about five pages into ‘Queens’ before I fell into a deep, deep, disturbing slumber.

Yeah, I had the accidental two-hour nap and it kind of sucked butt. First, I didn’t want to take a two-hour nap, I wanted to take a 20-minute refresher nap. Second, I had plans to finish reading the liner notes section of The Beast before the special Aunt’s Day Edition of Family Dinner. Also, lunch.

And what made the accidental nap extra sucky is that it was plagued with anxiety dreams about having to go back and re-do high school and me trying to figure out away of getting out it. Plus while I was sleeping part of my brain was all “GET UP! GET UP! GET UP!” and the other part of my brain was in cahoots with my body and was all “it’s so snuggly under this soft blanket lets sleep a little while longer.”

So I awoke for the third time today a little disoriented and grouchy and unwilling to do anything productive. That’s when I sat on the couch eating a Pop Tart and watching this week’s Project Runway. Eventually I made i through a few more pages of The Beast read-through Part II before I wanted to kill myself with my own pen.

Then, off to Sister #2’s for Family Dinner where we ate Davanni’s pizza in my honor. I love pizza but I rarely get it because I am cheap and it’s not often the I want to make that kind of 3-day pizza commitment. By the way, the pizza was delicious.

Jaycie & Max gave me the awesome Dundie award and the coffee mug for Aunt’s Day. The Tibbles forgot it was Aunt’s Day. I will exact my revenge on them sometime this week. Most of the dinner was spent as an extended rant session for Sister #3 who has had to live with the “vacationing” Sister #4 for the past ten days with four more days to go. And by “vacationing” I mean Sister #4 has taken up residence on her couch and only occasionally budges from that spot. We all had much sympathy for her, since we’ve all had to house Sister #4 for spell that long exceeded her welcome (something she fails to understand and takes entirely too personally, when really I wouldn’t even want His Royal Hottiness Prince Harry of the Ginger Goodness to stay at my house for more than three days).

And now I am here. Typing. Like I always do.

The “It’s (Insert Day of Week) and I’m Boring” is a series that Christa and I do to pay homage to the beauty of old-school blogging. (I totally copied this nice explanation from Christa).

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Though sometimes we make our own pizzas:

And then we do crafts:

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