This post is sexy if you think ants are sexy

Thanks for your support of The Loosh and our family, posse.  It sure was a rough week, but we're moving past "the incident" nicely.

The other night Lucien fell asleep on our bed on a pile of newspaper.  When we moved him to his own bed, we saw he had newspaper ads printed all over the side of his face, so we did what any proper parent would do -- we pointed and laughed until he woke up and looked at us with wide, confused eyes.

So yep, it's safe to say the kid gloves are off again, and it's back to business and mockery of the children as usual.  But again, thank you for supporting us when we felt fragile.  We're lucky to have you all.

In much-needed fantastic news, the tacos are back!!!  The taco truck has moved into a corner store in the neighborhood.  It's now serving its delicious tacos across a real counter inside a real store so can never drive away again.  We celebrated by having Seattle Family over and eating hundreds of tacos.  Seattle Family also brought a birthday cake for me because I successfully grew a year older last week.

Alex took me to Restaurant Zoe for my birthday.  We ate seared foie gras.  I'm not sure how the French would feel about that.  The other part of my present was two tickets to Cats.  Cats was the first Broadway musical I saw as a kid, and kicked off my obsessive Broadway musical phase, which was nonstop fun for my whole family. 

I thanked Alex, agreed it would be nice to see Cats again after all these years.  But then Alex told me the second ticket wasn't for him, it was for Lucien.  The warm fuzzy feeling evaporated.  I said, "Wait....you want me to take Lucien to Cats and what's more, you consider it a present?  Are you insane, man?"

The show is in a couple weeks; I will spend the time between now and then begging Alex to go see Cats with me.

I also had a celebratory birthday night out with some of the neighborhood ladies.  We decided to start a book club.  We're not going to read any books, just go out to restaurants and drink wine.  Getting older isn't bad when you make grand plans like ours.

In not-so-great news, our Tiny Cottage is overrun with ants.  I returned from the grocery store one day to find a long line of ants winding across the dining room floor.  I armed myself with a spray bottle and a roll of paper towels and conducted an ant massacre of epic proportions.  I'm now worried their tiny ant ghosts are going to band together and seek revenge from the other side.  Whenever I hear a strange creak in the house, I yell, "Ant ghosts!" and crash through the screen door in my hurry to get the hell outta here.

The ants keep coming, I am powerless to stop them.  They appear to be pointing and laughing at my strategically-placed ant traps.  The only way I can keep them at bay is to regularly spray their entry point, which is directly under my writing desk, with a toxic spray cleaner.  It's possible I'm fuming myself to a dangerous degree, because as I write this, the chocolate Easter bunnies in the kids' baskets are talking to me.  (I should warn you all is not well in chocolate Easter bunny land -- they're planning something sinister according to the smiley one in the yellow bowtie known as "Mr. Pickles.")

We had a good Easter.  I had to return to the grocery store several times because the Cadbury Creme Eggs I bought for the kids' Easter baskets kept disappearing into my mouth.  I'd go back to the store, buy a few more, accidentally eat them again, go back to the store.  It was a vicious cycle, and now all my teeth are falling out.

The neighborhood Easter egg hunt was held in the backyard of The Goddamn House, which is kind of pathetic when you think about it.  We figured it was the best place to have it, on account of it being the biggest yard on the block.  It's also easy to hide eggs there -- it's so overgrown you just toss the eggs a couple inches in front of you and -- voila! -- hidden!

 the kids listening to Al's egg hunt instructions

Supermodel Neighbor uses the covered back porch of The Goddamn House as his carpentry workshop.  This offered more fantastic hiding opportunities -- our silly dumb kids didn't even consider looking in the jaws of the table saw.  It will probably surprise whoever owns the house someday to find our overlooked eggs hidden in piles of sawdust on the back porch.  They will know something happened back there.

We had Easter dinner with a handful of fellow neighbors who, like us, don't have family nearby.  With family far away, friends are family, maybe even slightly better because you get to choose them and don't have to buy them presents at Christmas. (Hugs, family!)

I was responsible for cooking half the Easter meal and it was not a disaster.  That's about as good as it gets when MJ's in charge of food.  I don't know if it's my midwestern upbringing or what, but I was shocked no one had heard of serving cherry sauce with the ham.  What the heck is the point of eating ham if it doesn't have cherries on top of it?  I just don't get people sometimes.

What was that noise?  Ant ghosts!
*runs*
MJ