Not much to report today. Cordy and I have been home all day, nothing interesting has happened. OK, she did put a dish towel on her head and looked like a little Russian yenta, but the camera is recharging, so I missed it.

In other news, if you haven’t done this yet, get over to BlogMad and sign up. It’s only a matter of days until they go live. If you like BlogExplosion, then you’ll want to sign up for BlogMad too! Hell, even if you don’t like BlogExplosion, sign up anyway.

(Yeah, I’m a whore for more traffic. Lemming, lemming, lemming.)

I write about Cordy most of the time here. Well, now you all get to find out a little more about me! Aren’t you so lucky!

Four Jobs I’ve Had:

1. Retail clerk for a Champion-Hanes outlet store, where the work uniform was sweat pants and t-shirts or sweatshirts (that they paid for). Yeah, at 16, it was a pretty awesome job.
2. Retail clerk for a Motherhood Maternity outlet store. OK, so the only jobs in my small town were 10 minutes outside of town at the giant outlet mall. I worked there long before I even thought of wanting children of my own. And thanks to some of the women who walked in there, I was totally sure I was not ready for kids yet.
3. Daycare worker for an expensive daycare. Me, one other teacher, and 16 two-and-a-half year-olds, all in various stages of potty-training. Can you understand why I only did this job for 5 months?
4. Performer for the Ohio Renaissance Festival. I did this one on the weekends for 10 years. I was one of the women wearing the 30 pound velvet Elizabethan court costumes, complete with historically accurate corset. Loves: everyone wanted my picture (I was an Elizabethan rock-star, baby!), met my husband there. Hates: Wearing those outfits on a 90 degree day royally sucked, trying to use a port-a-potty in a hoop-skirt and corset was impossible. Want a good diet? Wear a corset – with nowhere to expand, your stomach can’t hold much food.

Four Movies I Can Watch Over and Over (in no particular order):

1. Moulin Rouge
2. The Princess Bride
3. Pirates of the Caribbean
4. Pride & Prejudice (the Colin Firth, 6-hour BBC version)

It’s very tough to pick just four movies. There are several more I could watch over and over as well.

Four Places I Have Lived:

1. Washington Court House, OH – my hometown. No movie theater, a K-Mart, several fast food joints, and that was about it. Is it any wonder there were so many teen pregnancies? There was nothing to do but have sex!
2. Oxford, OH, while going to school at Miami University. Great little college town. It’s a shame it’s so damn hard to get there.
3. Richmond College dorms, right down the street from Kensington Palace in London, England.
4. Columbus, OH

Four TV Shows I Love:

1. “Bones“
2. “House“
3. “Ghost Hunters“
4. “Supernanny” (my guilty pleasure)

Four Places I’ve Vacationed:

1. Walt Disney World
2. St. Petersburg, FL
3. Inverness, Scotland
4. New York, NY

Four of My Favorite Dishes:

1. Cajun shrimp pasta
2. Chicken tikka masala
3. Szechuan shrimp & vegetables
4. Bison burger, medium rare

Four Sites I Visit Daily:

1. Blogging Baby
2. e-Bay (it’s an addictive habit, I tell ya)
3. Columbus State Community College Website
4. Yahoo News

Four Places I Would Rather Be Right Now:

1. Home in bed asleep with no one else there
2. With my daughter and husband
3. Someplace warm and sunny
4. On a trip to the British Isles

Four People I’m Tagging:

Since most of the Internet World has already done this, I’m not posting a list. If you read this and haven’t done it yet, then consider yourself tagged.

It was a valiant fight for both sides, but the end has come. The germs have won the battle. I am sick.

The battle began last week when I started to feel a little sniffly. I took some (great stuff, folks) and it appeared to be the cavalry I needed to push back the germs. However, I got careless over the weekend, and didn’t keep taking the Emer’gen-C. The germs brought in reinforcements, with germ tanks and germ stealth bombers. Yesterday all was lost, and I succumbed to a horrible cold. The white flag is flying over my sinuses.

I should really count myself lucky. This year is nothing like Plague Fest, Winter 2005. This is my first cold since July, and other than one small stomach bug, my first illness of any kind since July.

Last year at this time, everyone in the house was sick. That’s the beauty of daycare – Cordy was 3 months old and started daycare at the beginning of January 2005. Exactly 10 days later, a perfect incubation period, all three of us came down with nasty, mucus-pumping colds. Just as we recovered from the colds, we were hit with a stomach flu. A week after that, more colds for everyone! Get the point? OK, I’ll stop listing each illness, although they are all detailed in her baby book.

Cordy served well as a plague-bearer, bringing home the virus of the week from the daycare to us. She learned sharing at such a young age, as she shared her illnesses with Aaron and I. To make a long story short slightly less long, there was a cold or stomach ick or ear infection affecting at least one of us from January to July 2005. You might think I’m exaggerating here, but alas, I’m not. It was one neverending sickness.

While I will give credit to the daycare for their efforts to keep everything sanitized, I will say that it is nearly impossible to keep a daycare germ-free. We took Cordy out of daycare in August, when my part-time work schedule stabilized. Since then, all three of us have been healthier.

However, it’s been so long since I had a cold, that I forgot how miserable it is. I feel ever so terribly not well.

Grocery shopping on a weekend is never a wise venture. But food was needed, and so off I went to pick up our necessities this afternoon. It’s been raining all day, and I wanted to get groceries before it changed into snow, when Ohio drivers lose all ability to control their cars,

I had no idea what I was getting myself into. First, the parking lot was packed. There were people waiting to take handicapped spaces. I should have turned back at this point, but for once a spot opened up for me very close to the entrance, so not wanting to turn down a parking gift from the gods, I took it.

Inside, it was chaos. Check-out lines stretching back into the aisles, aisles packed with people, screaming children, yelling adults. All of the carts available were soaking wet. I cut my list down to just the necessities, and tried to navigate upstream as best I could.

Once in the checkout line, I mentioned to the cashier, “Wow, this place is crazy today!”

“Well, yeah. Everyone is trying to get food for their parties.”

“Parties? I didn’t realize this was a big party weekend.”

“Uh, yeah. It’s Superbowl weekend. They’re getting food for Superbowl parties.”

“Ooooohhhhh.”

I may be the only idiot in the United States who didn’t realize it was Superbowl weekend. I felt like the biggest loser nerd walking out of the grocery. I wondered if there was a big neon sign over my head proclaiming “Geek! Likes science and literature, not sports!”

See, I guess I’m not your normal red-blooded American. I don’t care about football. I really don’t care about the Superbowl, either. Sure, if it’s on and nothing else is on, I’ll watch the commercials, but that’s about it.

It didn’t occur to me that people throw huge Superbowl parties. Most Americans go to big Superbowl and college bowl bashes, bet on the games and discuss the reputations of each team and its players.

Aaron and I, on the other hand, throw Oscar and Tony parties where we all bet on who will win each category and critique the fashion disasters on the red carpet.

Sometimes I feel like I belong somewhere else other than Midwestern America. I just don’t know where.