Me and the Wii

So, shortly before Mr. Ex moved out he decided that we needed a Wii. Oh, he had support over here – Allie couldn’t have been more excited. Then, of course, we also needed a flatscreen TV to go with it, but that’s another story.

So Allie and I had been on a quest to fnd a Wii Fit. Harder than it sounds, but we ultimately got one. I finally used it yesterday (well, it takes me a while…)

I love it. No kidding. This may actually be the fitness plan I’ve been looking for.

Why I like the Wii better than working out at a health club:

1. I don’t have to look for a parking space. Did you ever notice people circling at the health club looking for the closest parking space? Does that strike you as illogical?

2. I don’t have to wonder about the cleanliness of the changing area. Frankly I know exactly how dirty it is.

3. It’s private. The dogs look at me like I’m a little crazy, but that’s not a new thing.

4. It’s cheaper (duh – you knew I’d get to that one, right?)

5. I don’t look like an idiot in front of strangers. I prefer to look like an idiot in the privacy of my own home.

6. It’s basically a video game, and I’m totally a sucker for a good video game. If they could only get the trainer to look like Super Mario I’d be really happy.

8. It appeals to my competitive nature. Seriously. I did that stupid slalom ski about 10 times trying to beat my score.

9. It has some humor to it, although I was not terribly amused when my little Wii Mii got fat after Wii Fit calculated my BMI. I did love the sweat pouring off the Mii in the tightrope walk, though.

10. Most trainers creep me out, but the animated Mii trainer was pretty inocuous. Although I would happier if he looked like Bob from Biggest Loser, and they totally have to figure out how to make his mouth move.

More to come – I have to go do the step thing with a bunch of little Miis now.

A lot of frogs

So – I’m on Match.com and I get another email. Jewish. A teacher. One suburb over from mine. A little younger than I, but not too much.

I email him back… I choose one or two things in his profile about which to comment. Not too much, not too little. I’m playing it cool.

He replies.

“What makes you feel sexy?” He writes.

Seriously? On the second email? Before he even buys me dinner?

What happened to what’s your favorite restaurant? Tell me about your kids. Or where would you like to travel?

“What makes you feel sexy?”

Well, it definitely isn’t getting questions like that from a man I haven’t even met (who, by the way, according to his profile, lives with a roommate. What are you? 19?).

Yep – ya gotta kiss a lot of frogs…

I’ve discovered the key to doing home repairs

I’ve been a crafter my whole life. I love to buy new craft toys, play at Michael’s, Hobby Lobby or Joann Fabric… The Internet changed my crafting life by exposing me to new ways of seeing and doing things.

This is it – the key to doing home repair. I just have to look at it the same way I look at crafting. Here’s what I found:

1. doing home repairs give me an excuse to buy new tools and play with new materials.

2. If you think of Home Depot as just another craft store, it’s way less threatening. It even has a cutting station, just like Joann.

3. Google anything, anything at all – you’ll find somebody on the Internet showing you how to do it.

4. Crafters have that “it’s more fun to do it myself” mentality. Just like home handypeople!

5. Doing my own home repairs takes advantage of my artistic ability, too. My heart just sang when I read that good grouting is more about artisitic ability than home repair skill. YES!

See ya later – I’m off to Home Depot (again!).

I feel like Bob Vila!

Image via Wikipedia

One of my spring break tasks was to deal with the moldy grout in the shower. Yuck.

I tried Oxy Clean. It got the tiles cleaner-than-clean, but didn’t tackle the grout at all. Boo.

So back to Home Depot I went and I purchased a Clorox Bleach Pen. I also purchased some stuff that I need to create the mosaic I want to make for the table I plan to paint for the living room (this becomes important later).

So, last evening around 8:00 pm I started to bleach the grout (what? you don’t do that at 8:00 pm? Well, there was nothing good on TV). It worked great.

It also ran down the wall – of course – and attacked the nasty caulk around the tiles that butt up against the tub.

Hm. Attack is a good word.

It came off, as did the tiles. Whoops.

I called Mr. Ex to find out what to do, and emailed his BlackBerry. No answer. I go look at the tiles again. Yup; still coming off. Six of those little suckers.

So – I decide that I need to deal with this myself. I Google “replacing bathroom caulk” or something like that, and within 30 minutes I’m an expert at what I need to do. I removed the loose tiles (not hard – the bleach had pretty much done that for me) and took them to the newly-cleaned out laundry toom to soak them in mineral spirits to remove the old cement, grout and caulk. I scraped off the old stuff from the tiles on the wall (not having a screwdriver I used a wooden paint stirrer from Home Depot – it worked) and cleaned and dried the area. The soaking tiles were clean and the remaining cement scraped off easily.

Now – I needed ceramic tile cement. Luckily, earlier that day I had already gone to Home Depot to get some for my mosaic project. How good was that? I also needed something to spread the cement on the tile. Did you ever notice that there are special tools and gadgets for everything in home repair? Well, I went through my craft supplies in the laundry room (again, newly cleaned, so it was easy) and found the tools that I had used when I was in my paste paper phase. Well, they’re just perfect for cementing tiles! Whoohoo.

So, back to the bathroom and the tiles. I put some music on, and did me some cementing. No big deal.

Crept back in an hour later – tiles still up.

Wow. I rock. The biggest problem is the the six tiles are waaaaaaay cleaner than the others, and when I’m done grouting and caulking that’ll be cleaner too. Oh well – this project will wait until this summer when Allie’s in Israel and I’m alone in the house. That way a few days or so with no upstairs bath won’t be a disaster.

So today it’ll be back to Home Depot for grout and caulk. I’m so cool.

Fastest rejection eva?

Cover via Amazon

So, I took the big steps and actually paid money to join JDate and Match.com. That’s what Diana Kirschner says to do in Love in 90 Days. Last week I get a Match email from a Jewish man in my city who’s a few years older than I. Wow. Not 25. Not in another city or country. Jewish. It even says in his profile that he’s interested in women who aren’t exactly, ahem, svelte.

We agree to meet for coffee this morning at 11:00am. I alert the troops (seriously). I email his cellphone number to my kids in case they never hear from me again. I warn my girlfriends not to show up at that Starbucks (then I seriously rethink whether meeting at the Starbucks next to “my” Jewel is really a good idea. I mean, it’s not like there isn’t a Starbucks on every other street corner – do I need to pick the one in my neighborhood?).

I get an email from him at 8:00 this morning to call him at 10:30 because he may be running late from the dentist.

Okay. Good dental hygiene is important.

I get up, I shower. I put on way more makeup than is normal for a Saturday. I get dressed – perfectly dressed for a Saturday coffee; not too dressy, not my usual Saturday schmatte-wear for hanging out at home (in case you don’t know what that is, schmatte-wear is, well, crap clothes that can get dirty or whatever).

I call at 10:40 (don’t want to look anxious) from my cell (so he can’t do reverse lookup and find my home and murder me in my sleep), and get his voice mail. I leave a message.

It’s 12:17 now. No call back. What on earth is that dentist doing? I’m having visions of the dentist scene in Little Shop of Horrors (the original – with a super-young Jack Nicholson).

I think I’ve been rejected before I even begin.

Sigh.

Now what? I’m all dressed up. I think I’ll take my kids to lunch.

Sigh. I hope he had to have a root canal.

Oh well – at least it’s good blogging.

Random questions while perusing online dating sites…

1. Why are so many lawyers divorced?

2. How come so many men in their 50′s and 60′s think they’ll attract women in their 30′s?

3. Why do people put up awful photos?

4. Are people really so technically illiterate that they don’t realize they’re posting the same photo four times? Do they not look at their completed profile?

5. Why do men think I care what their favorite color is? “Oh no – he’s into blue. No way… Next” Really?

6. Don’t all browsers have spell check these days? How come intelligent (I guess) men with advanced degrees don’t know to put a space after a period or comma and to capitalize sentences? Or has MS Word ruined the whole manual capitalization thing? Conversely, why do people capitalize random words within sentences?

7. Why do so many men in Israel look at my profile? Why has a 25-year old man winked at me twice?

8. Do men in their 50′s and 60′s really think it’s okay to use “2″ for the words to and too or “gr8″ for great? Seriously? Especially on Match.com, where you have tons of characters. Honestly, it’s an online dating site, not Twitter.

9. Isn’t there anything we can do about bad mustaches?

10. Have you ever REALLY seen someone stop and smell the roses? Wouldn’t you think, “gee, that guy is weird…,” rather than “wow – I’d like to date him!”?

The buddha’s back…

A little story… please indulge me.

In 1963 my mother, my brother and I went to San Francisco to visit family. My brother was an infant. We did all the touristy things, including Chinatown, where my mother bought a rubber squeaky buddha (how politically incorrect). We had that little guy for years.

When my brother and I traveled, my mother would send the buddha with us as a good luck talisman.

When I had children my mother handed the buddha down to me. The buddha became our family talisman and traveled with our children.

One year – shudder – buddha didn’t come home from camp. My youngest had left him there. We even went to the camp in Wisconsin to see if we could track him down. Nope. He was gone forever. That was something like ten years or so ago. Sigh. We. Were. Very. Sad.

Ever since then I’ve looked for squeaky buddha. Whenever we’ve been in a Chinatown I’ve gone into every souvenir shop I saw, asking if they carried rubber squeaky buddhas. They generally looked at me like I was a crazy person and shook their heads. I’ve seen brass buddhas, wooden buddhas, plastic buddhas… but no squeaky rubber ones.

Enter eBay.

I set up a search for rubber squeaky buddha. I wait.

One day, I got an eBay alert. Heart pounding, I click on the link.

It’s him. I can’t believe it. The one and same. Turns out that Little Ho Ho (seriously – that’s his name) was designed by Rose O’Neill, who brought the world Kewpie dolls. Great – this little buddha that my mother probably paid $1.99 for in 1963 (if that) is a collectible piece of Americana.

I watch… the auction was up in 5 days… I watch. On the day the auction closed, I log in. The girls and I agree that we’ll pay no more than $60.00 (gack).

We lost the bid – he sold for over $70.00. I just couldn’t do it.

Wait! My story has a happy ending. This last Sunday another Little Ho Ho became ours. Again we waited for the auction to count down… last 14 seconds… we posted a bid and waited… watched it count down. We won the little guy. Won – ha! Won it for $36.00.

Whatever. He’s ours.

Life is good.

“but he’s not Jewish…”

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The first time around – y’know, when Gerald Ford was in office… It was really important to me to find a Jewish partner. I knew that I wanted to have a Jewish home, and raise Jewish children. Been there, done that.

So now that I’m out there looking for someone else, how important is that?

I already have the Jewish kids, of course. And I’m not looking to make any more; that’s for sure. Obviously, having a partner who’s the same faith as I wasn’t any guarantee for the “happily ever after” marriage. And it’s not even like I practice Judaism that regularly. Besides going every Sunday to teach religious school, and working in a day school, I rarely go to synagogue. Cultural Judaism is really important to me – I know that I need to know that my partner knows what I mean when I say, for instance, ‘gefilte fish.’

“I bought gefilte fish the other day,”

“Really? I didn’t know you had a tank.”

nope; that won’t do

Let’s say, though, that Mr. Potential Partner is savvy enough to know about Judaism but isn’t. Let’s say that he’s that elusive “spiritual, but not religious” guy. Is that enough?

Does he have to be Jewish? And, if so, what kind of “Jewish?” Go to synagogue every week Jewish? Nope – that would seriously cut into my Friday night at the movies habit. Raised by a Jewish mother but can’t stand Jews Jewish? Raised in a Jewish home but couldn’t recite a prayer to save his life Jewish? Uber-Jewish? No – I’m certainly not “Jewish enough” for that.

Okay – here’s the next issue: does he have to be Jewish to date? When I was younger and had gotten serious about dating-in-order-to-find-a-mate I only dated Jewish. That made sense; you generally do not marry someone whom you didn’t date (at least not in my world). But now – am I dating to find a mate? Or to have someone to do things with, explore who I am now, etc? So does he have to be Jewish?