I can’t think of a better time for See’s Candies to do their flat-rate-or-free shipping deal than right before next week’s election. It’s not quiiiiiite what I’d call “flat-rate” since it does in fact vary—but it’s $6.95 for orders $30 and under, $5 for orders between $30 and $65, and free over $65. It used to be you could pick your exact delivery date, but now you can pick a range—and when I placed my order this morning, the earliest range is November 8th-11th. Wouldn’t it be PERFECT for it to arrive ON Election Day??? But arriving for the aftermath is good, too.

We have had our credit card number stolen AGAIN. I get so frustrated with this. This time we found out because packages addressed to someone else started arriving to our house, four packages so far. At first we thought it was just a shipping error, but then Paul remembered that some places will only ship to the address connected to the credit card, so we checked and sure enough: $600 to a MILITARY TACTICAL SUPPLIES site. OH GOOD. Then Paul was like, “But how did he think he could GET these packages?”—and then we both remembered the car that’s been parked across the street from our house several days this week, in a place there is never a car parked, so that we’d both noticed and commented on it. So thaaaaaaat’s great. I have a feeling we will be dealing with this mess for awhile. Today I keep hoping to see that car out there again; we’re both kicking ourselves for not jotting down the plate number. And now we’re waiting 5 days for the new cards to arrive. I hope they will actually arrive in more like 2 days; usually it’s more like 2 days. I hate that this has happened often enough for there to be a usually.

I am ALMOST DONE filling out the FAFSA (college financial aid form). There was a big pause in there because the FAFSA asked for our checking/savings account balances, but I knew we had an orthodontist evaluation and a window-replacement appointment in the near future, so I didn’t want to put in the numbers for financial aid and THEN take out thousands. But now I am back on track. I just have to wait for Rob to get home so we can sign it and submit it.

I took the two littler boys trick-or-treating last night (older three kids were either at home or with friends) and really enjoyed it. I used to haaaaaate it: I felt so sure we were going to lose a little kid in the dark, and I was nervous about traffic, and I was trying to keep everyone from stepping in dog poop, and I was frazzled from having to get everyone fed and into a costume before 6:00, and the whole thing was an ordeal. But now everyone can for the most part get into their own costumes, and everyone can walk independently with just a periodic reminder to “Are you kidding me?? Get out of the ROAD,” and everyone remembers to say thank you, and I’ve found that sturdy little apple/cranberry juice bottles (like these or these) make PERFECT pocket flasks, so I would now say it isn’t even slightly an ordeal and I find it fairly fun.

Furthermore, I’m sure I’ve written about this before, but I get so sentimental and weepy at the whole Halloween THING. Look at all the expense and trouble people in a community go to, just to make a fun event for other people’s little children. And many of them are so FRIENDLY and CHEERY about it: “Oh, look at you! What a great costume! Here, you can take THREE things! Happy Halloween! Have fun, be safe!” *SOB* There were tears leaking out of my eyes pretty much the whole time, so good thing it was dark.

Today was not a great day, parenting-wise. I did the “I REALLY don’t want to take you to something you want to go to, so I will take you to it, but I will be so grumpy and sullen and martyrish about it, and so unable to break out of that mood even as I OBSERVE the mood and know I MUST break out of it, that I threaten to suck the joy out of everything; and also I will say regrettable things indicating my lack of enthusiasm, as if you couldn’t already FULLY COMPREHEND my lack of enthusiasm from THE LOOMING DARK CLOUD OF MY WHOLE BEING.” Then I did the “Pointing out that I TOLD YOU it would not be fun, but you WOULD NOT BELIEVE ME, and now I have set it up so that it is IMPOSSIBLE FOR YOU TO ADMIT IT, and in this way I CONTINUE TO SUCK OUT ANY POTENTIAL HAPPINESS, now or in the future when you might want to do something else you think might be fun.”

It wasn’t good. Why did I even BECOME a parent? What a terrible idea. My poor children. Etc.

Oh! Do you need an infusion of “humankind is generally-speaking okay after all,” as I do after repeatedly accidentally looking at comments on political posts, and also after repeatedly accidentally deliberately looking at the Facebook profiles of family members I’ve had to hide for their nauseating-to-me political views? I suggest a trip to a museum. Paul and I went to an art museum today, and I kept getting teary-eyed at all the WORK and EFFORT it takes for some people to make art, and for other people to carefully preserve and protect and display it, and to create special exhibitions around a theme, and to take time to choose what to write on the little plaques, and to CARE that people come visit. There were items from, like, 1263. That’s a YEAR: 1263 doesn’t even LOOK LIKE a year, but it WAS. And those items were in a museum because not just one somebody but a whole LINE of somebodies care so much about keeping it. People spend THEIR WHOLE LIVES preserving ART for people to see long after they themselves have died. Something is beautiful and/or meaningful and/or important and so they carefully protect it and…*SOB* PEOPLE CAN BE SO LOVELY

I ordered Elizabeth some new shirts from The Children’s Place, and also bought her some at Target. Here is a picture of one of the shirts she outgrew in TCP large (green, top), one of her new TCP extra-large shirts (pale blue, middle), and one of her Cat & Jack (Target) shirts in extra-large (white with pattern, bottom):

I can see how a parent might go either way, feelings-wise. If the child in question was jussssst out of the TCP L, or had gotten wider without getting much taller, the jump to Cat & Jack XL might give a parent the feeling that there was NO SIZE THAT FIT. But in Elizabeth’s case, where she suddenly grew a whole bunch taller and not much wider, the new TCP XL shirts already look short and boxy and as if she’s about to outgrow them: they’re only an inch longer than the old size. The Cat & Jack XL shirts are perfect for what I’m looking for: they have room to grow, so I don’t feel like I already have to start shopping for the next size up, but they don’t look enormous on her.

Speaking of Elizabeth, she would like to be Holtzmann for Halloween, and that is a request I’d like to honor because Holtzmann is awesome.

(image from third-bit.com)

But I am very, very, very low-end of the spectrum as to what I want to spend on a Halloween costume. I looked up “homemade Holtzmann costume” and found instructions that included purchasing a $40 jumpsuit and $15 goggles to be worn one single time, and I am not on board with that plan.

Our tentative plan right now is to go with this inspiration from Paul Feig, producer of Ghostbusters: “You imagine her room is just this enormous pile of clothes she’s found in dumpsters and Goodwill and bought at garage sales.” We’ll color a pair of cheap safety goggles yellow, figure out how to do crazy hair, and layer on the rest of her look from assorted household clothing and disabled electrical tools. We’ll do Holtzmann’s everyday look, rather than her professional ghost-hunting uniform.

My main earlobe piercings got a little irritated, so this morning I dipped the earring studs in antibiotic ointment before putting them into my ears. This is a tip my Aunt Barb mentioned to me when I was a pre-teen. My mom didn’t have pierced ears, and so neither of us knew this idea. (I have heard about NOT doing it for cartilage piercings, in case you are suddenly feeling anxious.)

I was thinking about all the other beauty/care tips that get handed down and around. My mom’s friend Carol is the one who mentioned you have to use some sort of shaving cream or lotion or soap when you shave your legs with a disposable razor: my mom used my dad’s electric razor, so I’d thought disposable razors worked on the same “dry legs, no added substances” principle and gave myself a nasty razor burn.

Carol is also the one who told me you could water down an overly-intense lipstick by putting on lip balm/gloss first, then dabbing on the lipstick lightly, then rubbing your lips together to mix.

My friend Melanie’s mom is the one who taught us to wash our faces: first, run the washcloth under hot water and hold it against your face for a little while to open the pores; then put soap on the washcloth and wash and rinse your face; then, run the washcloth under cold water and hold it against your face for a little while to close the pores. I don’t even do it this way, yet I think of it as The Way To Wash Your Face.

My brother’s friend Robin had a much older sister who taught us to put a little bit of conditioner in our hair after towel-drying it but before blow-drying it. This was in the era of perming, blow-drying, and using a curling iron, so we were all looking for ways to turn straw back into hair.

I wish I could remember and thank whoever was so persuasive about face lotion that I started using it every day from age 12 onward. It might have been one of the teen magazines I read, or maybe Cosmo. Well worth the price of the subscription, if so. I bought Oil of Olay with my $1.25/hour babysitting money.

Amy, a girl in my youth group who was 16 when I was 12, is the one who mentioned that sometimes you need to shave armpits in more than one direction. She’s also the one who taught me how to feather my hair. And to match all my eye make-up to my eye-color, which I no longer do, but it was fun at the time.

My grandmother demonstrated how to spray perfume on a wrist, then touch the wrists together lightly, then touch the wrists lightly to the sides of the neck.

My mom taught me how to put wet hair into a towel turban. I think often of something I saw a long time ago (surely one of you will know what this was) where Elaine from Seinfeld tosses a pile of towels to a line of towel-clad women (could one of the women have been Elliot from Scrubs? but if so, WHY?), and we look away, and there’s a fwip-fwip-fwip sound, and when we look back all of them have towel-turbaned heads, and Elaine says “I love how we all know how to do that.” What IS this from? It’s in my memory like it’s a commercial.

I’m trying to remember other tips and who told them to me. In the meantime, who taught what to you?

I keep trying to get people with tattoos to tell me how much it hurt and what the pain was like, I think because I am worried I would get started on a tattoo and then not be able to finish. But pain is too hard to describe, and anyway it varies so much based on where and who. Three things that have set my mind at ease recently:

1. LOTS of people get tattoos. And though I am sure it has happened, I have not yet heard someone say that they got one and will never get another because of the pain; and I have not yet heard someone say they have only a partial tattoo because the pain was too intense to complete it. …Though saying this one out loud is certainly a mistake. How at this point can anyone who HAS heard such a story keep themselves from telling it to me now, for SCIENCE? But in this case I would like to knit a little non-scientific comfort blanket to hold, so shhhhhhhh. Tell me later, AFTER I write a post about what it was like to get a tattoo. I will try to remember to specifically invite such stories at that time. For now, I am leaning on the huge number of people who go back again and again for MORE tattoos. (Go ahead and tell THOSE stories now, if you like.)

2. I can get a VERY VERY SMALL tattoo to start. I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me before. But if I wanted to I could get like ONE FRECKLE tattooed on my shoulder, just to see. I don’t think I’ll go THAT small, but I could do a teensy little flower or something. I don’t have to impress the tattoo artist with my originality, I can just pick something out of a book.

3. The cartilage piercing. I don’t want to seem to be comparing several seconds of sharp pain to the long-haul burn of tattoo pain, but that experience built a little structure in my brain, where “scared of pain” got paired up with “pleased and strutting after doing it anyway.”

I was thinking it would be fun and motivating if all of us who had been putting off tattoos could all plan to go on the same day, but the logistics of that are not workable. Plus, there’s a Right Mood, I think. Like, some days I just THINK of doing some task and my stomach lurches teeteringly into my poor throat, and other days I’m like, “Sure, let’s do it!” I feel fidgety even trying to say “Let’s aim for October!” The big hurdle for me right now isn’t even the pain, it’s the fear of going somewhere new and doing something new. That is going to take a very particular kind of mood.