Lord of the Jeeps, My Weekly Cleaning Schedule, and Time-Machine Advice I Would Love to Give Myself

Holden has a documentary on the history of the Jeep. It's called "Jeep: The Unstoppable Soldier," but he mysteriously refers to it as "Lord of the Jeeps." The movie is quite boring, consisting mostly of interviews with nerdy historians and raw footage of WWII, but Holden sure loves it. He loves it so much, in fact, that he now insists that he will be a soldier when he turns 16--why 16? I have no idea. This whole soldier fascination may have also come from the fact that once while we were listening to an NPR program about how nobody talks about the psychology of killing in the armed forces, I turned to Holden and said "I hope you never become a soldier" with the kind of tearful pleading in my voice that only a mother can conjur. That pretty much sealed the whole soldier deal. It's not that I don't APPRECIATE soldiers, because I DO. Very much. I just don't want Holden to be one. P.S. Who here LOVED "Hip Hop Week" on Fresh Air last week? I sure did. That Ice-T! I have always had a little thing for him, what with "Cop Killer" and all. He's totally brilliant, and even knows what PSYOPS means.

On an unrelated note, I started my cleaning schedule this week (pause for audience laughter...pause...pause...pause). So my plan was to "deep clean" twice a week and do a "fifteen minute pickup ala 'Fly Lady'" the other days. Today was a "deep clean" day. I got as far as floors and a little dusting and called it the end of the weekly cleaning schedule as I know it. I was really only doing it to assuage the guilt I felt for buying the greatest maternity outfit on earth at Ross yesterday. And it really is great. It will be the only outfit I wear for the next 8 weeks, seriously. It comes as close to Gwyneth Paltrow maternity chic as is humanly possible for a hoss such as myself. So, I gave myself a few vacuum-stripes and now I am clean...

In a delicious twist of irony, Mike has become a TRUE follower of "Survivor." He has to watch the reruns every day. Now he can't say a word to me about my devotion to The Apprentice, or my soon-to-be-euphoria over the new Martha Stewart show. Ha, Ha! He even has to watch the comments from each person who gets voted off the island. "Don't change it yet!" he yells, clawing at the remote.

And finally, I have been thinking a lot about what I would like to tell my 16-year-old self if I had a time machine and could travel back to 1995. Well, there are a lot of things. But I think the most important thing I would tell myself is this:
Stop wasting your time in Botany Club and start getting into Scanning Electron Microscopes...mm...flaven.


More later.