Go ahead, click it, it is a sneak preview commercial.

Adorable, right? I love Amy Sedaris, I love Mean Joe Greene (even though he spent his entire career with the Steelers) and I love Downy Unstopables.

I don’t know if I have mentioned this in the past, but one time I saw Mean Joe Greene at the airport. True story. I wasn’t 100% sure it was him until just now when I saw him with this beard. It was totally him!

Seriously, the Downy Unstopables are cool. You put these little beads right into your washing machine and they seriously make things smell significantly better.

I’m not just saying that either. Remember I have a bed wetter.

You can shake up your boring laundry routine, Here, let Amy Sedaris show you how they work.

I want to be her when I grow up.

But here is the really important part. If your team has already been eliminated (like my beloved Buccaneers were sometime long before they lot their 10th consecutive game – yes I am bitter) it doesn’t mean that you can’t still win. On Sunday, every time a touchdown is scored  all you have to do is tweet “#touchdowny” to @downy and you could win prizes. You can win samples or Unstopable fan packages. I don’t really know what fan packages are, but in my mind they are awesome.

Since you will be watching the Super Bowl on Sunday anyway – you will be watching the Super Bowl right? There is something wrong with people who choose not to watch the Super Bowl. – make sure you are tuned in on time because the commercial will air live between 5:30 and 6:00.

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Don’t miss Downy shaking up Super Bowl Sunday by recapturing the magic of the past and freshening up one of the game’s most memorable commercials.

This is a sponsored post.  Downy product and additional incentives were provided to me.  All opinions are my own. Downy didn’t even know about the airport thing.

Me: A miner?

Him: Yes. A miner.

Me: You want to dig mines or you want to actually mine coal?

Him: I want to be a miner. I read about it in “Boys Life”.

My Internal Monologue: “Boys Life” his encouraging scouts to become miners when they grow up? The economy isn’t that bad.

His Dad: You mean you want to explore caves? That isn’t really mining, that is spelunking.

Him: I want to be a miner. I want to carry around a pickaxe and collect gems.

Don’t we all?

Now that I work for Disney I can probably use this graphic without getting sued or SOPAd, right? RIGHT?

* * *

I got to thinking about how if his job was carrying around a pickaxe and collecting gems his life would be a lot like Gem Hunter.

Which of course made me think of Die Antwoord’s “Enter the Ninja” which actually contains the lyric “My life is like a video game.”

It was true (if by my notary you mean my friend who I just found out was a notary, but he lives really close to me and he will be back in three days) it just sounds really uppity.

So I am thinking, well at least I won’t say anything that sounds weirder than that for a while.

But no.

Because when a restaurant I have been trying to get into for – well, forever – called me and said they had a cancellation tomorrow night at 9:30 I said “My babysitters are in Burma.”

My babysitters are in Burma.

Oh, I said it.

It sounds like a lie for so many reasons. One, who goes to Burma? Two, who has more than one babysitter in Burma at one time? Three, can’t you get another babysitter?

Well, yeah, but not one that wants to hang out my house until one o’clock in the morning. I have training babysitters for when the grandparents go out of town but they are really young and I feel like a jerk staying out too late.

I can’t wait to hear what I say next. I wonder if my accountant is out of town?

* * *

That title sounds filthy! Who lets me choose my own headlines?

I’m not pregnant. I am not adopting. I’m not even getting a puppy, but I am nesting.

I started thinking about my recent actions. I’m clearing room on my calendar. I am doing home renovations. I am purging my belongings. I am making room for something.

I just don’t know quite what that something is yet.

Let me clarify, when I say purging my belongings, I really mean giving away things that don’t fit and things I don’t use. I still have a huge amount of crap in my house. I will never be a minimalist when it comes to things.

It just seems like lately everything I do is in preparation for something. I don’t know what, but I know that I will be ready.

photo

I just listened to “Fire” by The Front two and 3/4 times in a row.

I like the song, but not, you know, compulsively.

I do fell sort of lucky. I have an album called “Short Music for Short People” and all of the songs are about 30 seconds long. Can you imagine being in a bathing situation where you were stuck listening to a 30 second song like twelve times in a row? I guess that is the sort of situation where you just go ahead and track water all over your bathroom to keep from snapping.

I am still convinced that the first half of the book was an exercise to see how many authors names he could fit into one story.

2) We are re-watching the entire series “The West Wing” in order. This is probably the third or fourth time we have done this and I’m not sick of it yet. I think Aaron Sorkin is a genius. If it weren’t for Mandy the pilot would be perfect.

3) My kids auditioned and got into a children’s choir. I am very proud of them and I was very excited until I realized that getting them to and from rehearsal on the same night as my rehearsals is going to be a logistical nightmare. I think I need one more car and probably a sister wife to make this work.

4) I went to a business lunch the other day and Savatage came up in casual conversation.

5) We are renovating our kitchen. It really needs it. Right now we have the original countertops that were put in the house when it was built in 1964. I remember my grandmother had these same counters back when I was a kid. I didn’t like them then either.

It turns out that there are about one bazillion options for cabinets, countertops and floors. One bazillion of each, so three bazillion total. How does a person pick just one style of cabinet? I am a decisive person and this is blowing my mind. I wanted red but my architect gave me a really unpleasant look when I said red so we picked black. Black is too dark due to our large number of upper cabinets. So I tried looking on Pinterest, which I don’t get AT ALL.

Now I’m thinking grey, but I also really love eggplant.

Not the vegetable. Eggplant is gross as a food. I love the color. But is it too much? I DON’T KNOW. This is why I am not in interior design. This is also why I married someone with good taste. He will pick something attractive. I will choose a nice wine to pair with dinner.

The deal is that I have the child read me a few pages and then I ask him or her about what he or she has just read. In this case a little boy was reading to me about what ants eat. The book said that they eat worms or aphids or leftover people food or sometimes they even eat other ants.

I asked the kid “What do you think about that?”

He looked surprised. “They eat other ants?”

I said “What do you think would happen if you went back into class and just took a big bite out of your friend’s arm?”

He laughed a litte bit and then he got serious. “I bet you would get your name written on the board like a million times.”

Indeed.

I actually have a valid reason for asking. Without forcing my readers to take a survey (yet) I am trying to figure out why my audience here is almost half menfolk.

Maybe it is because this is the first time in six and half years I have used the word menfolk.

I have other theories, I am just trying to flesh them out. After harassing a handful of my fantasy football friends, my college friends, the ladies at dinner, my husband and a few neighbors I remembered that my blog would be the perfect place to ask this question.

Why do you think men read my blog?  Do I think like a guy? Do I think like a Dad?

I don’t want to sway you by telling you what everyone else has said, but so far my favorite answer was from my friend Croutonboy. He said “Well, are you thinking about boobs right now?  I’m thinking about boobs.  If you’re thinking about boobs you might think like a guy.”

Of course, now we are ALL thinking about boobs.

I guess I should have told you that story before I asked the questions. Let’s refocus. Do you think that I think like a guy? And why?

Thanks.

Do not let this alarm you. I just need to get reorganized after the holidays. December wrecks me every year. It is a new year and I’ve got things to say.

Here are some of the things I have been thinking about.

1) Last year was my “Year of Jubilee“. I am thinking this year will be my year of “Getting My House in Order” both literally and figuratively.

I am literally tearing up my house. Well, I am not doing it, I am guessing some sort of skilled construction crew will be doing the actual work, but we are redoing our kitchen, all three bathrooms and really, rearranging our entire floor plan. It is exciting and terrifying.

Figuratively, I need to clean up my internet mess. I’ve got this amazing sports site with phenomenal writers that I tend to forget about twice a year. I need to get it back up and running. I need to make Sarah and the Goon Squad a priority again and I need to keep branching out and creating fresh new content. I need to find where I left all of my funny.

2) I read somewhere that Taylor Kitsch was considered for the role of Edward in “Twilight”. I actually think Pattinson did a great job as Edward (just taking into consideration the first movie, nothing was good about “New Moon” or  ”Eclipse” and I haven’t seen “Breaking Dawn” yet) but what I was thinking was that if they had cast Kitsch as Jacob it would have changed the entire dynamic.

No offense to Taylor Lautner, but if this guy was Jacob I don’t see how there could even BE a Team Edward.

I have no idea what it going on in this picture but now I kind of want to see "The Covenant".

Right?

(I’ve been watching a lot of live streaming “Friday Night Lights”. A lot.)

3) I turned 39 last month.

Most of my friends are already 40. I spent the last 10 years watching them spend their entire 39th year preparing to turn 40. It seems like such a weird thing to do, but I’ve found myself falling into that trap – I want to lose 20 pounds before I turn 40, I want to go somewhere for my 40th birthday, I should have a party for my 40th, etc. It is almost an entire year away,  yet I am almost obsessing about it. I am going to try really hard not to do this, but I make no promises.

4) I found a partially written life list in an old computer bag. My best guess is that it is between a year and a half to two years old. It had 35 items on it. Since I wrote it I have completed six of the things already. I took my kids to Disney World, I watched the movie “Amelie”, I went to the Messiah sing along at the Kennedy Center, I had dinner at “The Inn  at Little Washington”, I went to a Virginia winery and I have had one of my essays published in a book – two, actually.

I realize that most of these aren’t huge things –  anybody with Netflix and a DVD player can watch “Amelie”, but I had to orchestrate and entire weekend out of town and spend a good deal of money to eat at The Inn at Little Washington (totally worth it). I also realize that #11 –  Hold my grandchild – might take a while before it becomes a possibility. My kids are both seven and I sincerely they wait at LEAST 15 years before they even consider procreating.

I also realize that I got to sing on stage at The Kennedy Center which has been a dream of mine ever since moving to the Washington D.C. area, but I was too chicken shit to even write it down on a piece of paper.

If I can do six (or seven) things on my half-written life list in two years, what would happen if I wrote a real list? What if I wrote down 100 things and actually set out to do them?

I have been known to make fun of the life list. I have also been known to cross things off my life list that I really wanted to do because someone more famous had it on her life list and it didn’t seem cool when she did it. But maybe there is some magic to these lists. I guess it could also be the concreteness of writing something down and cross it off of a list. Looking at what is still on here it would take very little effort for me to take my kids to a live symphony or grow tomatillos or read “War and Peace”. Maybe sometimes we just need to be reminded of what we actually want to do.

Writing my life list will be part of my year of “Getting My House in Order”.

And look at that, I just wrote four posts.

1) Do you celebrate Christmas?

1b) If not, what do you celebrate at this time of year?

2) Do you put an angel or a star on top of your tree?

3) In your eggnog: whiskey or rum?

4) What is your favorite Christmas carol?

5) What is your least favorite Christmas carol?

Bonus Answer: “Do They Know It’s Christmas” is my favorite Holiday song (see above) but if you want to see my ten favorites, I wrote this last year.

Happy Holidays.