"How pregnant did you get that girl's mouth last night?"

I lifted 4 tons of pellets this weekend. I am not even joking, 8,000 pounds passed through my hands. I am extremely proud of this. Muscles are being flexed as I write. I'm all capable and contributory and shit.

Let's start at the beginning. We were invited to a birthday party for my MiL's best friend's grandkid on Saturday in a city maybe three hours away. I'd planned on attending until I realized that was my once yearly go to the bar day so I asked if I could bail and just G and Granny go. Granny was all for it, and said she wanted to spend 2 nights as well, get some extra time in with them. I freaked out because I have identity issues, aka what the shit do I do with myself without my kid around, plus my car is all broken so if I wanted to have an adventure I'd have to drive the gas guzzling Yukon all by myself. Let's kill the earth and my pocket book in fell swoop with one seat being used in a nine seater shall we? (I need to learn to ride a motorcycle, way cheaper on gas.) But I knew G would have a WONDERFUL time so I acquiesced.

They left Friday at nap time and I got all sad in the pants and unmotivated for awhile. I finally got my shit together and took the The Beast into town to do the shopping I needed to do, but didn't really happen because they were out of everything and I wanted to punch the stores in the throat. Luckily they did have Magic Mike so the day was saved. Oh and I met my husband, his dad, aunt and uncle in town for dinner, that was nice too. ;) J has been working his ass off and generally falling asleep before G, so our movie time hasn't been happening. But not having Princess Procrastination's bedtime routine and the fact that he was switching to swing the next day we actually got to watch TWO movies together. It was a very nice start to the weekend.

The next morning I slept in. It was glorious. I am pretty spoiled with what time I get up in the morning, but seeing as my entire adult working life my day started at 10 am the miserably earliest, usually more like 11 am, it is still really hard for me to get the eff up in the morning. Up at 9:30 was wonderful. J said to get ready and we'll go out to breakfast before disappearing outside to do whatever he does out there, so I showered and did the minimal allowed for public; hair in a bun and mascara. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was without G. You get so single minded and intertwined you wonder if conversations can be had that do not include or revolve around her, but we didn't have any troubles with that. After breakfast we went to the store to spend a boatload of money on pellets to keep our houses warm for the winter. 2 of the compound houses have pellet stoves. I very much prefer them to the wood stove counterpart based on lack of bug and dirt mess alone. It also takes extremely less effort for J, as wood stoves require trees to be cut down and split. Very time consuming. On our way back J was concerned about how much time he had; he needed to drop off the ton in the truck in our garage and go back to the store for the next load on his way to work. I asked how much a bag weighs and he said 40 pounds. G is probably a little over 30 and I still haul her ass around all the time, so I said I was sure I could help some at least. We get home and I get up there and start handing bags to my husband, which he stacked in gloriously tetris like columns. (I might love him for his stacking abilities. If I could take pictures and post them I would, we were meant for each other.) He came home with the next load that night, which we unloaded the next morning, and he went and got 2 more loads over the weekend. I helped with them all. 4 tons of pellets to keep our houses warm. I'm may not dig in the dirt and bugs for our food but I can do manual labor with these guns. :)

After the first load J went to work, and I cleaned up the house, vacuumed the stairs, switched G's summer clothes to winter, and made pizzas for our get together that evening. At 5 I went to my BiL's house while everyone did Halloween make up and pre-partied. I didn't do that because I was going to dance, I didn't care about costumes. We left at 8 and I had a FANTASTIC time. It really reminded me how much I miss dancing. I even entertained starting a career in stripping before I remembered the lap dance requirement. As unlikely as it is I might be brave enough to take off my clothes in front of strangers, me gyrating on them naked is an impossibility. Nuh uh no way, back to the drawing board. However, drunkenly dancing to fast music in the dark surrounded by people and flashing lights brought me indescribable joy, and I wish I could go every weekend. I just did shots of vodka and continuously drank water the whole night, so the next day I was tired and sore but not nearly as hungover as I expected. J came and got the lot of us after he got off work, around 12:30, which was perfect because I am not a last call kind of girl anymore. I just can't stay at the bar that late. We got home and hung out at BiL's for a bit then brought our guests home and crashed.

I slept in again, *LOVE* got up and showered, unloaded pellets, sent J off to work and made dairy free cream puffs for my BiL's birthday. My baby came home and we had everyone over for dinner, as per usual. Then the 2 of us had a quiet evening of recovery from our separately spent busy weekends, together. It was just what I needed. I started this week feeling refreshed and ready. Except my ankle still hurts like a motherfucker. No clue what I did to it, and I thought I was making the smart choice dancing in Vans, I guess not.

I have a few pretend friends on the East Coast that I'm sending light and love to. I hope you guys are doing as well as can be expected.

*Title is from Magic Mike, a movie I very much liked until they decided to give it a moral at which time I started channeling Tom Hanks from A League of Their Own; There's no crying! There's no CRYING in the stripper movie!! Jeez. Remove the clothing from your zero percent body fat having self in time to the music and stop your whining.