Small pleasures: it's red, y'all!

So here I am coming out of blogging seclusion, and it's to share the fabulosity of this awesome red stapler. Because so often it's these small little pleasures that make my day better. 

And yes. I've seen Office Space. I still love my red stapler. 

Glamour hair: rockin' the red!

Look at the sunny girl's fabulous new red hair!  Don't you love it?!

Small pleasures: Look what I found!

Oh my gosh! I found these shoes in the clearance rack at DSW! People, I literally skipped to the cash register. It's true.

So let's see . . . how many identical pairs of these rockin' red loafers have I now purchased? One pair for Coleen. One pair for Carolyn. And one two three pairs for me.

They don't call me frugal for nothing!

A bummer -- but not a tragedy

So just look at this sad little fender bender! The girl in charge was just a wee bit traumatized when she was rear-ended on her way to school, but frankly, I was relieved when I saw how little damage was done to her fun little get-around-town car.

I did have the classic racing-heart moment when my phone rang at 7:15 that morning -- exactly eighteen minutes after the girl in charge and the sunny girl left on a drizzly Thursday morning on their way to school. The voice on the other end of the line was a slightly breathless sunny girl, who said, "Hello -- Mama? OK, we'll all fine, no one's hurt, but . . . " You can figure out the rest of that conversation! It turns out that after picking up a carpool pal, the three girls were stopped in traffic when they were hit from behind by a distracted commuter who didn't even see the traffic stopped in front of her.

The sunny girl said, "she wants to talk to you," and handed the phone to the girl in charge, my calm, cool, collected girl, who promptly burst into tears. When I got to them ( about thirteen seconds before the pal's mom showed up and approximately seven minutes ahead of the husband, who courteously paused to put on pants before he flung himself into a car), I was just glad that everyone seemed to be OK, and our car had managed to escape major damage.

But . . .

The little red car is almost ten years old, so it didn't take much to total it. The insurance company was d-o-n-e, done with us, thrilled to write us a check that so completely did not cover the cost of buying a reliable-if-used kid car. And I tell you what: if it hadn't been so sad, I would have laughed my ass off at the husband, who kept saying after we got off the phone with the insurance company, "This can't be right . . . . This morning we had a car . . . "

So the quest began for a new get-around-town car, and we turn out to be total creatures of habit.

Not only did we replace the fun little red car with an almost identical fun little red car. . . .

. . . but the girl in charge raced to place her Golden Snitch back on the antenna -- right where it belongs.

Here's a November prayer of gratitude -- that my girls and their friend are healthy and safe, and all we lost was a car.

And then I saw (red).

So remember way back when -- when I was so overjoyed to have found these fabulous red shoes? I loved these pretty, pretty loafers, people! I wore them all the time. Also -- when I bought some for myself, I also bought some for Coleen, and I bought some for my sister. I'm generous like that.

tangent: true fact -- my sister bought herself -- and me -- a fantastic bright red raincoat, at the same time that I bought myself -- and her -- these stunning red loafers. We traveled together soon after, when we visited our family in Texas and Oklahoma -- dressed identically in red raincoats and red loafers. We were like weird adult Doublemint twins. Or Rockettes without talent.

Well, here's how pathetically in love with these shoes I was when I discovered them: I bought -- for myself -- two pairs of the rockin' red flats. My theory was that I would eventually wear them out (scuff them up too badly, run the heels down, wear a hole in them somehow), so I would keep a pair stashed away so that I would never be without them.

Sad, ain't it?

So here we are, two years later, and it turns out I was right; I did wear out the delicious red shoes. At some point, some beverage was spilled on them; I have a vague memory of cooking oil splashing and staining them. But the true point of no return was that a hole developed in the lining of the shoes, so I got a blister every time I wore them. You are noticing, I'm sure, that I said "every time." So you are correct if you assume that I wore those bitches many times knowing that a blister would be my reward. I'm ridiculous like that.

But finally I decided it was time to set the rockin' red loafers aside, and replace them with the identical rockin' red loafers I had stashed away for just such a day as this. I wore the new shoes to work one day last month, and then came home and took them off. I left them by our front door, which turns out to have been a big mistake.

This is what happens when delicious red leather shoes are left where the hellhounds can get them.

People, I got to wear them once. Once.

So the good news is that I know what I'm serving as a main course for Thanksgiving dinner: forget the turkey. We're having roast beast.

" In keeping with tradition, the bride wore scarlet . . . "

So the husband and I attended the most lovely wedding earlier this month. A former colleague who worked with my husband invited us to participate in her wonderful day, which involved not one but two wedding rituals -- one Christian and one Sikh.

Now I must admit at the outset that we both were . . . I think nonplussed is the word . . . to learn that the Eastern ritual would require that we enter the room without our shoes, cover our hair and (can you hear the creak of knees and hips?) sit on the floor for the two-hour ceremony.

It was easy enough for me to find a lovely scarf to complement my western dress, and Coleen was confident that as long as I had a fresh pedicure the no-shoes situation could hold no fear. But the husband was . . . I'm going to say hesitant. Yes, hesitant, and -- because he rarely wears headgear other than a ball cap on a Boy Scout camping trip -- concerned that he would offend either our hosts or his own sense of dignity. (Men . . . .) He ended up wearing a patriotic red-white-and-blue bandanna that, while perfectly appropriate, also gave his charcoal grey suit a dashing biker dude air. He wouldn't let me take a picture.

And I'm telling you people, the lovely if virginal white wedding dress that we Westerners are accustomed to pales in all ways to the opulently beautiful traditional wedding garb of an Indian woman.

This is to say nothing of the fact that in the Indian and Sikh tradition, the groom dresses like an exotic Eastern prince. I will never swoon over a man in a tuxedo in the same way again.

Now don't get me wrong -- the Christian ceremony that followed was lovely. The lakeside setting and the adoring gaze of the groom were enough to make any grandmother a little teary-eyed. You do see that he shaved in between the two ceremonies, right? For me this just proved what I have always suspected: beards really are that itchy, and he really must love her a lot.

As the bride appeared with her father for this second ceremony, I was vividly reminded that this woman is really such a gorgeous blending of two worlds -- all rolled up in one brilliant and sophisticated package: a savvy computer engineer who also founded an e-zine for young and modern Indian-American women, who want to embrace every aspect of both their cultures. No wonder her dad looks so proud.

Under construction!

So you may remember a while back I got a fabulous new red washing machine. I love that washer, people -- which shows either that anything red really does rock my world, or that I need to get out more.

Well, the down side to getting the fabulous red washer is that I immediately began to covet the fabuous red dryer to go with it -- and to yearn for a laundry room that could live up to the fabulosity of the red glamour machines.

Well, dig this: my Contractor has been working her tail off the past two weeks, to give me the laundry room of my dreams!

My lovely red washer currently resides in my dining room, along with a whole lot of tools and construction schmutz, but when she's done -- have mercy!

First she tore out all of the ugly cabinet frames and wire shelving and battered baseboards and tacky linoleum. I felt better immediately!

And my Contractor loves "demo" -- she says it feels great to rip stuff off of walls and cut through nails with a Saws-All.

Then she patched and sanded and smoothed and prepped the walls; my Contractor is thorough, y'all!

Meanwhile I got a couple of paint samples and slapped them on a wall. That's the only painting I'm allowed to do; my Contractor has very strong feelings about proper painting technique -- and I don't have it. She told me, "just plop the samples up on the wall, because I'm going to put primer over them anyway -- you can't hurt anything." And then she promptly "fixed" the place where I had painted over some spackle.

After using her mad painting skillz to transform my boring white walls into pure gold, my Contractor hung a new door to the carport. Think about that, y'all. Her husband was her minion for the day (though I would have offered up the tall boy), because door-hanging is a four-hands operation. How swell is this new door?! And how cool is my Contractor?!

The next task was to tile the floor, which involves a whole lot of tools I don't know the name of, and some sweaty math moments, trying to make sure that the tiles in inches + grout/caulk = the square root of baseboards(x/threshold). Luckily in a former life my Contractor was an engineer.

When the floor was done, we took a break to play a game of checkers.

And my Contractor took a solemn vow never to work with black grout again unless a manicure is written into the contract.

Today, after she finishes hanging the moulding around the door, she will move the washer and (old, ugly) dryer back so my family can get a little laundry done without spending $40.00 at a time at the Spin Cycle laudrymat or hijacking the fabulous neighbor's machines. Then, while she hangs bright new cabinets, a nice man from the gas company will come and set us up to get a new dryer. Fabulous!

And my Contractor is doing all this while leading three Girl Scout troops, wrangling the copy machines at the elementary school for her daughter's fifth grade teacher, swirling her urchins to hockey practice and art lessons and orchestra rehearsal, walking dogs, making dinner, wrestling her house into submission -- and writing a novel. I shit you not.