Sarah's A Single Parent, #1: Fit Bit fights, a new gym, "ARE YOU SERIOUS" and family shame averted. ( Hubby makes the blog.)

Good evening all!

So Hubby is being a mountain man for two weeks, visiting his sister in Colorado.  (No, robbers, I'm not alone. My surly adult son, my four attack cats, and my new set of CUTCO knives are with me.)  I'm telling people I'm a single parent, although my children are 21 and 18, and the 18 year old, who is moving out this next weekend  (I'd get misty eyed, but at this point, so much of her stuff is piled all over the house I just want it OUT!)  So it's not like I'm wrangling toddlers and getting kids to school. My kids don't even get up before...two PM.

Anyway, Hubby bid farewell on Sunday...and it's Wednesday.  And things have been...well, you know how my life is normally?  Yeah, now picture it without the adult supervision Hubby brings to the table.

Like that.

Let's start with the Fit Bit.  Two weeks ago I got Hubby and myself Fit Bit Charges for his birthday.  Couples fitness, competition, married shaming, all that fun stuff.  What I found out is that I don't obsess about Hubby and his fitness. I obsess about the Fit Bit on my wrist and why it hates me.

oh no, Sarah, you say, the Fit Bit doesn't hate you. It accurately measures your steps, your calories burned, and your sleep time. And if you input the food you eat, it'll tell you when you've eaten too much.

Yeah, that last part?  I'm not doing that.

I count my steps. In my head. I do. I can tell how many steps it is from my house to several points in my neighborhood.  Fit Bit doesn't count all my steps.  I was at the mall today...Fit Bit didn't count 189 of my steps. I know this because I was counting my steps...out loud. Yep, I'm the crazy fluffy lady at the mall counting out loud. So I didn't feel bad drumming on my steering wheel all the way home (321 steps added) from the mall because, all's fair in Fit Bit steps war, right?

I'll delve more into my Fit Bit battles, I promise, it's going to be epic.

Okay, then yesterday I decided to finally cancel my kids' membership at the 24 hr gym I've been paying $45 bucks a month for them to ignore.  Instead, I got all four of us a membership at a 24 hour gym I can pay $60 bucks a month for all of us to ignore!  (Well, it's 24 hours for the kids, `16 hours for us. The 24 hour membership costs more and frankly, I doubt I'm going to hit the gym past 10 PM ever in my life.  Or before 6 AM. I'm just not that girl.)

So I went in for the great signing up of the membership.  If you recall the battle I did when I joined

Gold's, I wound up making that sales guy cry and get transferred to another store.  It's a story I shared with Pie, the guy who signed me up and thinks he's going to make me thin.

Why do I call him Pie?  Because we had to sign a lot of pages.  When you join a gym for four people, you get to sign the membership agreement four times. And then Pie had to sing four times. Only he was signing his initials and he was signing upside down. So his initials are T.T.  He drew two lines and a single horizontal line.  Pie.  (So when you're at Xperience Fitness in Waukesha...and you see Timothy, call him Pie.  He'll know.)

Look for that to be fun. They are going to have a pool in their new facility. How can this possibly end?  Not BADLY NO!

Then, once again, it's that time of month, the time of month when women my age wonder why on God's Green Earth we need punctuation lessons.  I mean, it's not like we need to know how to writ anything anymore.  We're pretty much done writing.  Reading, not so much, but writing yes.  (Okay, if you think about it, you'll get what I'm saying.  If you don't, well, I can't help you, just keep reading.)  Anyway, so I'm at the big box store in the middle of the day in the middle of the week, and I'm just going to say it, ALL MEN OF WORKING AGE SHOULD BE AT WORK.  So tell me why, why, WHY was there a man in the punctuation protection aisle, blocking most of both sides of the aisle?  I'll tell you why...he was snap chatting someone, sending them pictures of different brands of punctuation protection.  (I noted he wasn't near anything that ALWAYS leaks.  I mean, that's half the aisle on one side. They don't have to restock...because you know, it ALWAYS fails.  Anyway, since he was blocking all of the products I needed to reach, I had to wait for him to leave the aisle, (WITHOUT PICKLING ANYTHING UP...apparently the person he was send pictures to wasn't liking anything he was sending.)  ARE YOU SERIOUS RIGHT NOW? Middle of the day, middle of the week and this guy in a dress shirt and dress pants and a tie is sending pictures of punctuation protection and BLOCKING ME?  There were roughly 19 people in the whole store.  And he was blocking me in this one aisle.  Really?

But I did manage to save the family from major neighborhood shame.  It's been a dry summer, the grass really hasn't grown that much. Those who mow grass haven't been busy. Until last week.  Yeah, it rained. It rained plenty. And it's going to rain this week. And guess what?  Hubby is gone for two weeks.  Everyone else moved on Sunday, because that's what they do. Everyone except our one neighbor and he's the guy we all say, "whoa, we better mow, that guy just mowed."

Well he mowed yesterday. Which made us the shaggy grass of the neighborhood.  I offered money to Skippy who was too busy working and moving his friends into an apartment.  So I offered money to Peaches who is busy doing whatever it is 18 year old girls do when they're getting ready to move and they only come home to push things into the living room and watch Netflix.  And bake cookies.  I like the cookie.

so I couldn't wait any longer.  I got the mower out of the garage. This isn't going to be hard, I thought. I mean, I'm watching the boom boom redneck truck guy across the street mow...he's just walking. He's strolling like he's got a noisy baby in a stroller. I can do that.

I know you're supposed to pull a cord.  But the only cord I saw was attached to the arm handle and too short to yank and start anything. So I texted hubby.

here's how that went:

Me: How do you turn on the mower?

him:  Just leave it.

Me:  No. Grass is longer than anyone's in the neighborhood. I need to mow.

Him: Call Heidi and ask if her son needs a few bucks. He goes to school in Waukesha. 

 (Heidi is a friend of ours, but I haven't seen her in a very long time and it would be weird for me to randomly call her and ask if her kid who I really haven't seen in a long time would come and mow my grass when I have two perfectly healthy kids who can't make time to do it.)

Me:  I won't be able to tell him how to turn on the mower.  What's the big secret?  I'm not going to steal your job.  I want to cut the d*** grass!

Him:  No secret.  Squeeze the safety bar on the handlebar.  Pull cord.

Okay, so at this point I'm sort of like Laura Dern in the first Jurrasic Park movie, the part where she's looking at the sick dinosaur and muttering to herself and then she reaches into the big pile of poop.  Yeah, that was me trying to figure out what part of the handlebar the safety bar was.  

But I figured it out and I was on my way.

Ya know, I realize I'm out of shape, but I'm watching boom boom truck guy across the street and he's not heaving and shoving like he's dragging a row boat full of supplies across Antarctica.  (It's been hot lately so I've been watching "Shackleton" on DVD.  Very fun.  Very chilly. Man those guys lived through some cold stuff!)  Anyway, he's just strolling along.  La la la.  

Meanwhile I'm like GRUNT, push, drag shove, GRUNT.  I did a few patches and then had to pause for a lady who was my level of fluffiness to walk by. She looked at me with pity because even though both of us were sweating and both of us were working way too hard for our body types, she had a shot at surviving her exercise.

I sent a text to Hubby.

Me:  I'm mowing.  I may just do the front yard.  Leave the back yard. This is hard!

Him:  Great way to get in steps!!!

Then, two solid minutes later, and this is why he's in the blog, he sends me this text:

Push the bar between your thumbs down. Self propelled.

WHAT?  He was keeping that tiny smidge of info to himself until what, I died on the front lawn?  Hey, guess what, self propelled is awesome!  It's rather like being a kite or something. It goes, you go flying behind it. Like being dragged by a horse.   

But mowing with self propulsion is better than now and I managed to finish the front yard. However, pushing and holding things with my thumbs is not something I'm able to do for long stretches, so the front yard is done, the back yard is not. Doesn't matter. The back yard neighbors sort of don't like us anyway.

There you go.  He's been gone less than 4 days.  And this is what's happening around here.

This week I'm renting a 10 foot UHaul truck and driving it down the road so girl child can move.  I've never driven anything bigger than a mini van before.

We are all going to die.