Hellooooo before and after!
The hall bathroom - a small space with lots of opportunities for easy fixes - was another of the first projects I tackled when we moved into our new place, just because I already knew what to do (and also knew that it would be low-cost, high-impact).
Moving day!
We're moved in!!! Mostly. Our kitchen is still a construction zone, the toilets and showers are giving me sass, and I've been wandering around at 3am every night hanging things, so I am a puffy exhausted mess - but all of the bedrooms are more or less set up, we have a usable dining room, I know what day the trash gets picked up, et cetera. And the Wifi is functioning (!), hence my ability to write this post.
(BY THE WAY. 99% of the reason I've been able to do all of this while also being a working mother and maintaining a marginal degree of mental stability is Duckbill. It's a personal assistant service. Go get your free month with code RAMSHACKLE and thank me later.)
I've been writing about emotional labor for years. When I was married, the load that I carried in my mind each and every minute of each and every day was legitimately intolerable - but guess what? Being a single mom is...well, it's not worse, exactly, because there's one fewer person whose needs I have to keep track of, but it's also not better. I still have to maintain a constant and ongoing list in my head consisting of approximately ten thousand tasks per child (and a few for me). And the pets. And the house. And the self-care (hahahahaha).
And! Did I mention I'm moving? I'm moving! (Yes, again, and we'll discuss; I'm going to be putting up before and afters that I think will be super fun.)
You know what moving is?
My dreams veer between acute realism and apocalyptic wastelands - an obvious, albeit depressing, metaphor for my perspective on life. Some nights, I dream that I'm in my own bedroom, eyes open in the dark, everything around me just as it should be...and then I glance upwards, and see a spider drifting down from the ceiling, legs extended towards my face.
Other nights, I'm walking down an office hallway when the building begins to crack, glass shattering in my face. I scurry down the side of a building to shelter beneath a support beam while the rest of the building comes down around me. Later, I find myself charged with shepherding a group of mystery children through the ruins of New York City.
Our OG baby has a sibling!
Pick up a copy of The Big Journal For Pregnant People here, or wherever books are sold. Happiest Mother's Day to all the moms and moms-to-be out there!
Look at baby me modeling!
For many years, I made a living, in part, by writing about products and integrating them into this website. These were literally called "integration posts," and they were what gave me the leeway to do the writing I loved, both here and elsewhere. But they weren't exactly a hardship - I always really enjoyed the challenge of being presented with a new product or brand, seeing how it worked in my life, and then creating a story around it.
It was also, honestly, just super fun to get to try out new stuff all the time, from makeup to washing machines to married-people dating services. Which is all to say that, of the bazillions of things that I've written about over the years, there are a few that may have started out as brand partnerships, but then quickly evolved from a novelty to a must-have - products that I ended up loving and religiously keeping stocked in my house, long after my formal relationships with the brands ended.
I have a lot of conflicting feelings about my condo. On the plus side, I bought it! All by myself! The building it's in burned to the ground during the Woolsey Fire, so it's brand-new construction - which means everything works (!). Having lived in extremely ramshackle (hee) housing over the years - from our adorable-but-not-super-functional Hudson Valley house to a trailer with multi-million dollar views but no especially reliable electrical or plumbing - this is quite exciting. Sometimes I just open the closet where the water heater is kept, think back to the spricket-infested basement hellscape where the water tank lived in Tarrytown, and marvel at its shiny newness.
Our very first house. I LOVED it, sprickets and all.
Hi! Welcome to Ramshackle Glam. From 2009-2020, I wrote daily blog posts right here about everything from divorce to anxiety to soup. In the past couple of years I've switched my focus to books, screenwriting and my marketing business, so I'm not writing here as much anymore, but ohhh my goodness are the archives ever extensive.
If you’re new to this site, you might have gotten here by way of a Google search for makeup tips for asymmetrical eyes, or because you’re nervous about having a baby (or a second baby) and how it’ll change your life, or because you read the saga of my hacking, or maybe because you’ve stumbled across my (many) musings on single motherhood. All of these ways of arriving here are completely legit, because those are all things that I write about.
Teachers: They’re basically superheroes. They’re educators, sure—but they’re also counselors, custodians, referees, detectives, party planners, epidemiologists, and traffic controllers (among the many, many other jobs that they don’t get paid for, but should).
Now available for preorder: The next book in the Big Activity Book series, The Big Activity Book for Teacher People. This one was inspired by the many, many, many hilarious tales my teacher friends have told me - and by the fact that teachers are wonderful, and they deserve presents.
Activities include:
• a word scramble of useless stuff you have to teach anyway
• draw the administrator in their natural habitat
• color in the break room of horrors
• things you do not want to receive from a parent, like, ever
zzzzzzzzzz
OK, so nothing was wrong with the second bathroom in our new place - not technically, at least. Our condo is a new build - the original structure burned to the ground in the Woolsey fire a couple of years back - so everything was in great shape, but it just felt like...a hotel. You know, what with the large flat mirror, the nickel-plated lights, the white walls. It was one big "meh."
You know what I enjoy, though? A blank slate. Give me a boring room, and I am a child on Christmas morning.
