Okay, so this article called, "Five Things People Without Kids Should Never Say To People With Kids" popped up in my feed five times this morning. FIVE TIMES. Different people, none of them connected (and also no one who actually reads this blog, but never mind that).

I would just like to call b.s.

I get that having a kid is really, really hard. I get it. But there's a reward there that those of us without kids will never get. Never. No sticky baby kisses or tiny toes or graduations or weddings or any of that stuff. Maybe there are people out there who talk smack about moms, but I'm certainly not one of them. So stop complaining about how much harder your life is than mine, and how we childless people always give you crap. I would never say what you're doing is easy; I know it's rough, and I would never compare my struggles to yours. But I do have them, they're mine, and to me, they're difficult.

I give you major credit for raising teeny people; in fact, I think parents are pretty amazing beings, and I don't know how you do it. That just isn't my path. But don't assume that my childlessness is my way of silently judging you. I don't feel like any of us has a right to belittle another person's problems. 

I don't judge you on Mother's Day, when I have to leave the house in order to take my Mom someplace special to celebrate how awesome she is, and I have to hear either, "Hey there, Mom! Happy Mother's Day!" or,"How come you don't have kids?" a billion times. Seriously.

I don't judge you when strangers feel like they can comment on my lack of babies, or even people who know me say things like, "Oh, she doesn't like kids." (Total and complete lie, btw. I absolutely do. My reasons are way more complex and entirely none of anyone's business.)

I don't even judge you when it's Christmas and I get to see all of your beautiful pictures of kids happily opening fun presents from Santa and I know I'll never get to do that. It's not easy, guys. Sometimes the cute that pops up on my Facebook page is almost unbearable.

Yet, I never, not even once, made an attempt to compare my difficulties to yours.

I will gladly listen to you tell me how hard it is. I will gladly sympathize with your lack of sleep and total failure to make it through a movie without having to leave because someone peed his pants or started screaming because something random was scary. That sucks. And I get that it's hard.

But don't put down my life because of it.

Life is a terribly complicated thing. Nothing is simple, nothing is straightforward, and NOTHING is fair. We make the best choices we can, and move on from there. And I applaud you for choosing to share your life with those miniature insane people. They will grow up, it will get better, and you will sleep again. I will never put down your choice, and I will never compare my struggles to yours.

Try to think of that next time you feel offended by my lack of offspring, and for me daring to say that I ever have difficulties. Your life is yours, mine is mine, they're all tricky, and we should all support each other. Period.

So this is my last week of teaching for a bit, since I'm taking a couple of weeks off while the house is all torn up. All day yesterday, I kept getting the question, "How are you going to cook?" 

Well, if our dinner yesterday was any indicator, we're going to put half a dozen eggs in the egg cooker, start it, have it overflow all over the makeshift counter, then run out of water too soon to fully cook the eggs, and then have a runny batch of eggs which we will then try to microwave, but will not cook any further without turning into a wet bunch of eggy goo, which will then get thrown away, and we will eat cheese sandwiches.

So that, my friends, is how we're going to cook.

I believe we will also have us some pb&j, yogurt, and string cheese. Might throw some lunchmeat and/or some microwave popcorn in there, too. Just to spice it up.

Thank goodness we don't have children, because the whining would just kick this project into a very, very bad place. A place involving McDonald's at every meal and gaining fifty pounds over the next three weeks.

But that is not the case. Yet.

Three weeks from tomorrow, we'll be done. 

No more eggs, though. 

Sigh.

Well, we're up in this business for real, now. We took down the wall.

Granted, it was a little tiny wall, just one dividing the kitchen from the laundry area, but seeing as how we've never done that before, it was a little exciting. See, here's what it looked like before...

Old cupboards painted brown, and about four feet of counter space altogether. Which is just not enough for canning. Or so I keep telling myself. We took the washer and dryer out about a month and a half ago and put them in the garage, which, I must say, is working really well. Keeps that lint out of my house, yo.

Anyway, here's where we're at now. 

So much bigger. I mean, it's really only four feet, but holy cow. The ceiling seems higher and it's a lot brighter, too. Also, since we moved the doorway to the left down by about three feet(these pictures don't really show it), we'll have room for a pantry. A real, live pantry.

I'm pretty excited. Or, I will be, once this mess is over.

It will end, someday. It will. Four more weeks. Or, really, three. Then we just wait a week for appliances because when you live in the boonies, you have to get things delivered when the people feel like delivering them. Poops.

At any rate, I still have a sink, so I can wash my hands. And that's what matters.

P.S. Knocking down a wall is fun, but it really makes your arms hurt. Like, a lot. Invest in some ibuprofen if you're going to do that.

So I keep writing posts and then clicking "publish," and then my machine freezes and eats them. This is my third this week. I think it really emphasizes the mindset in my house right now. My brain is frozen and all I want to do is eat.....except that part is pretty normal for me.

At any rate, I'm so done with this remodel. He's done. We're done. But we still have a month to go.

This is a big old project. I have no baseboards and all my food is moved out to my garage in preparation for the big kitchen tear down this weekend. We knew it was going to be a pain in the butt.

And it is. It really is.

There's a lot that I just can't do. I'm not qualified to do plumbing or electrical stuff, and I'm useless at heavy work. I'm really good at organizing and painting, but all the organizing is going to come later, and there's only so much painting to do. That means my husband is stuck with the rest, and, boy, is he tired.

We are, like, three months in. We started all these shenanigans three months ago. Whoa.

One more week of teaching for me, and then I'm off for two weeks while the house is full of guys working and hammers banging and floors getting ripped out, etc. I will be spending a lot of time in my little office in the back, I'm guessing. So much noise. I hate it.

Also, I hate that I can't help more so my husband isn't quite so exhausted. That feels pretty lame.

I also also hate that I've blogged about this three times and the machine has done away with my posts. Where did they go?

Oh, well. 

At least there's coffee. Not having that would put this into national disaster territory; believe me, you wouldn't like me when I'm decaffeinated. I shall have an extra cup this morning and keep my fingers crossed that we'll make it through. We will. I swear.

Unless we run out of coffee. I should probably get more today, just in case.

I do like pie. I do.

It should be its own food group, as you can have all kinds with all kinds of ingredients, but it's usually not super healthy, and involves copious amounts of butter, which is delicious. 

So, yeah, usually pie is a good thing.

However, there is a pie I do not like. It's the pie chart on myfitnesspal. Guys. That thing is brutal.

I spend nineteen hundred hours a day trying to get the pie pieces the right size, and no matter what I do, I can't get the green pie piece to be huge. 

Stupid green pie piece.

I can get the blue one to stay around 1/3, I can get the red one to be there, too, but never at the same time. One of them always encroaches upon the green piece. 

Well, unless I eat nothing but lowfat cottage cheese and Greek yogurt. At this point, those two things are coming out my ears. I keep searching for a beer that is low carb and high protein, but so far that's not working out. Also, as much as I enjoy cheese, that tends to push the fat pie piece into the protein pie piece.

Jerks.

Cookies don't fit into the pie chart at all, either. Why? Why are you ruining my life, pie chart?

I think I need to switch that pie out for a different pie. Maybe a pot pie or even a quiche. Or one of those apple pies from McDonald's that burns the crap out of my tongue every time, even though I try to wait as long as is humanly possible. Those pies are so much more delightful and will make my life so much better.

Maybe that's what I'll do.

Except I know I won't.

Stupid pie chart.

Some political wisdom for your day, here, since the elections are cluttering up my life and I feel like you guys all need my particular brand of guidance. Ready?

Vote.

That's it. I don't care which person gets your vote. I know for sure my favorite candidate won't win, and the others are all pretty awful this time around. But, seriously, we survived some pretty horrible people in the White House, so I think we could recover from anything (well, anything but Trump...he can't run his own hair and he wants to run a country? Come on...).

I did a report on LBJ in elementary school, and I dug up a fact that he peed on people. Like, more than once. He was a big old douchebag. Yet, we survived.

Taft may or may not have gotten stuck in a bathtub. How embarrassing was that?

And the whole Monica Lewinsky debacle made me cringe, even though I was a little young to understand the true grossness of the stained dress.

So, at any rate, I think we'll be okay. As I've said a billion times, the local elections have WAY more bearing on our day to day lives, yet almost no one bothers to show up for them. The President is kind of a showpiece for the country (so, Trump...just, no), but your County Councilors and Mayors and all that really have more to do with local and state taxes, spending, schools, etc. So maybe actually learn about them and then go vote.

Also, stop threatening to unfriend people who disagree with you. It's childish. Do it, or don't. There are a million different ways to get things done, and most people are just trying to get people who lean more to their way of thinking. It's okay. If they're hateful or bigoted or racist or something, you should probably not be friends with them anyway. So why make a big stinky deal out of it?

Calm down. Have a coffee or take a nap or get a snack in there. We're all going to survive, no matter who gets voted in. 

Well, unless it's Trump. He is epically horrible. 

I've been having really weird dreams lately, but the last couple of nights, they've gotten more annoying, because they're waking me up before my alarm goes off.

What's up with that, brain? Knock it off.

Night before last, I was having my recurring "grinding all my teeth out" dream, which is pretty common for me, except that all of a sudden, there was a loud explosion in my head, so I woke up, because I thought something had busted in through the windows or something.

Turns out, I had clenched my teeth so hard, I shattered a temporary crown. Good thing I work in a dental office, and I already had an appointment to get my permanent one put on. Scary, though. Those things are loud.

And then, this morning, around 5:00ish, when I had planned to try an extra half hour of sleep because yesterday was just really tiring, I start dreaming about seagulls. Not the nice, peaceful, beachy kind, the "we will fly in your face and attack you" kind. They were getting louder and louder and I couldn't fight them off. 

Then I opened my eyes and realized that the noise was not, in fact, seagulls. It was boogers in my nose making a whistly sound that actually did sound pretty bird-like.

Nice, no? I was basically being chased by my deviated septum.

I really need to stop all this dreaming, though. It's exhausting.