u unner dare?

If you weren't there last night, you missed out. We ate a lot of noodles and bread and cheese and oil and Trader Joe's meatless balls and built a fort using a blanket and my kitchen table and we all hung out under there for a good while.

It's really hard to climb out of that kind of fort when you are a grown-up. I still haven't fully recovered.

I shoulda brought the camera in. Maybe next time, but I just don't think it will be the same.

housekeeping

Hello all!

Today is Lauren M's birthday, so be sure to gush all about it all day long! Nothing is as sacred as the day you were born, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Also, holy crap! Can you believe that the holidays are practically tomorrow? Dave and I were at Lowe's over the weekend and the Christmas trees were on display. Luckily I didn't see anything that I liked better than the one I bought at Target, and the one I wanted from Lowe's last year but they were out of wasn't there again this year. Maybe it was a fire hazard or something and the universe has once again saved me from going down in a firey inferno.

Anyway, the holidays are coming and I would like to do something fun with you guys. I'm closing WedSpag to the public on October 29th because my fat girls from the Pub will be in town and we are "habbing private pardy" that day.

On November 5th, please bring all your leftover Halloween candy and we can play trick-or-treats hide-and-seek with the kiddies. We will sit and they will scamper around looking for hidden treats. Like an Easter Egg Hunt but different. If the costumes are still intact, maybe we can let them dress up one last time. Thoughts?

For the week of November 26th I'm closing the doors on the outliers again, this time my friends I met on the internet are coming over and we are going to talk about how normal it is to feel so alone and scared when you are pregnant that you stalk people online and make them be your best friends.

We will resume some sort of normalcy on December 3rd, for a couple weeks at least. I'm assuming no one will be interested in coming over on Christmas Eve, but if you find yourself with nothing to do, I'm quite sure I will have a houseful of revelers. I usually do.

Oh! Angela accidentally won the honor of naming the official winter drink of WedSpag! Hot chocolate and peppermint schnapps. Delish. We will be serving ours beginning December 1st. If you are good, I'll make you REAL hot chocolate. You'll at least get brandnamed packets of the stuff if nothing else. Because I'm the boss, I'm naming hot cider and whiskey as the official drink of autumn. It's getting a little too brisk for our gin&lemonade with a cuke garnish.

Hope to see you at the table tonight. If not, let me know what kind of pasta you made at your house.

I eat WedSpag leftovers for breakfast on Friday morning. Don't judge. Cold spaghetti is amazing, and once we eat it for dinner on Wednesday and Jake gets it for lunch on Thursday and Friday, there is a perfect amount left for me to enjoy with my coffee on Friday at 8am.

But, ohgod the heartburn.

I can't quit coffee and I don't want to quit spaghetti.

Getting old is the pits.

My meager offering

serious problem

I need to find a good clothing store. Any suggestions? I'm having a hard time finding pants that fit. Poor me, right? Like I'm the only one with this problem.

Pants for girls tend to be cut for girls with relatively narrow hips and those weird thighs that stick out on the sides. I don't have those. You don't have those. Who has those? Oh, wait. Most of the girls at my office.

Whatever. What about MY needs? Where do you buy your pants?

I used to be able to go to the Gap or Old Navy, but now everything at ON has ultra low waistbands and I have an ultra high muffin top when I wear them. The Gap only caters to wide hour glass people or thin string bean people. I can't win for losing there.

I like (love) Lucky, but a girl can only have so many pairs of $125 pants until her electric bill stops getting paid. Any time I buy something from there I don't buy lunch for a month, and I like lunch too much to give it up. Express is too slutty. The Limited is too much for people in their 40's. I'm too old for H&M, and I can't stand to buy one more pair of chintzy cheap pants from Mandees, Fashion Bug, etc. because I end up with 3 pairs of $30 pants that fall apart or stretch sideways or something in a month's time and then I'm $90 in the hole where I should have just bought one pair of $90 pants that last for 3 years.

Oh, I'm not above wearing the same pair of pants every day for two weeks. Or more. My kid is constantly pissing himself so it's not like I'm not doing tons of laundry four times a week.

That's enough for now, I'll complain about shirts another time.

Lying to children

Working for the world's largest-museum complex makes for great people watching. At lunchtime, I often sit outside on a wrought iron bench in the Castle's perfectly manicured gardens, just watching hordes of tourists go by and making observations.

Today a man, woman and two children walked by holding hands. The little girl looked trustingly at the man--I'll call him her father, for the sake of argument--and asked, "When did they come up with the idea to make the Smithsonian." Without blinking an eye, her father responded, "1874."

Close, but no cigar. The correct answer is 1846.

Parent's lying to children is not uncommon around here. In fact, The Washington Post wrote an article, "Father Knows Best?", earlier this year about parent's making up information in response to their kids' questions about objects on display at the Air and Space Museum.

I wonder how many lies my own parents told me. I never believed in the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus, but that's probably because I'm Jewish. I do however recall being told things like, "Quit making that face or it will get stuck that way" and "don't swallow your gum or it will stick to your insides."

What lies do you remember being told? Do you lie to your kids? Do you plan to lie when the "where do babies come from" question pops up?

lemginumber

Ladies, WedSpag has an official spokesdrink.

Thanks to my and Samantha's love of gin (because we think it is 1923) and Amy Jo's suggestion that the incredible organic lemonade from Whole Foods (or the cheap crap from the Chinese store on my corner) tastes even more incredibler with gin, and Sara's urban garden that produces cucumbers we found it.

Now it needs a name.

What do you call a lemonade with a healthy dose of gin and a garnish of cuke? I'm sure that it already has a name. Something so delicious has to already been invented but we can call it what we want. Anyone feeling creative this morning?

Oh, and by the way, no. No it doesn't taste so good with spaghetti, but it sure does taste good before spaghetti. I'll never drink another gin and tonic as long as we both shall live.