Larry and me. I think he should add this pic to the Stage Right Show montage.

Right now I’m at Troopathon. Sitting next to Larry O’Connor, my favorite late night talk radio host. He’s my favorite because he keeps having me back on his show, and he thinks I’m cute. Let’s face it; a little flattery goes a long way.

By the way, have I told you guys how awesome I think you are? I know you’re smart (you’re reading this!), and I’m just going to assume you’re all gorgeous.

S.E. Cupp is sitting in front of me, doing her thing being brilliant and beautiful, raising money for our troops.

In his typical ADD fashion, Andrew Breitbart keeps popping in and out. He’s kinda awesome. Gave a great speech at RightOnline last week that included one of my favorite lines ever in a speech, “Film the bitch!” Just watch it.

By the way, Andrew just rolled back in. Yup, rolled. On rollerblades. Love it.

All around me are stacks and stacks of boxes – care packages for the troops. Read about what we’re doing here. Donate to support the troops here.

I’m an obsessive water drinker. With wine and salt being my two favorite food groups, it’s sort of a necessity. At home, I’m rarely more than 10 feet from my plastic, insulated Starbucks cup filled with ice water. When I’m out and about, I still want access to water because I hate being thirsty and not knowing where to find a drink. It makes me panic. Which makes me thirstier. And panickier. It’s a vicious cycle, is what it is.

To ward off panic attacks, I can almost always be found in possession of a water bottle. I know I should be all eco-friendly and stuff and get one of those aluminum ones, but I like plastic water bottles. The same way I prefer to drink my sodas out of aluminum cans, I like my water out of plastic. I know, I have issues. Moving on.

Here’s what I do. Every time I find myself out in public in a dehydration-induced state of panic, I buy the cheapest plastic bottle of water I can find (ok, sometimes I buy the square Fiji ones because they’re cool. I’m not perfect. If I were perfect, I wouldn’t have forgotten a bottle from home.). I down the entire thing, then find the nearest drinking fountain and refill it.

Today I went to the Del Mar Fair with my mom and the Things, and I carried around the same plastic water bottle I bought in the San Diego airport last Thursday. I had planned to buy a bottle once I got past security, because you know 28-year-old blonde chicks are constantly trying to blow airplanes up with water bottles. So I wasn’t allowed to bring water in, but I didn’t have a sealable vessel at home, so I just bought the $4 bottle of water in the gift shop. And yeah, I needed it, since we’d had friends over until 2am the night before and much wine had been consumed.

That water bottle traveled everywhere with me in Minneapolis. It was sort of like my sidekick, always there in my purple laptop bag that I should really replace one of these days in an effort to be all professional and stuff. I stayed (mostly) hydrated the entire trip.

There was a moment at the airport headed back, when I forgot to drink the last 2 tablespoons of water before heading through security. Of course I got pulled aside and frisked, and they had to hand search all of my carry-on stuff and run it through the xray machine 27 times. Gah! And then they said they were going to confiscate my water. And I almost cried, right there in the middle of airport security.

“Well, you can go out, drink it, and go through security again,” offered the agent.

“I can’t! *sniff sniff snort* I don’t have time!” I’m really eloquent when I need to be.

“It’s just water … you can buy another bottle inside,” the agent consoled.

“But … but … but … it’s FOUR DOLLARS!” Ok, I may or may not have actually shed a tear. It was hard getting through that airport!

Thankfully, the kind and lovely TSA agent decided that since it was the liquid and not the bottle itself that was the problem, she dumped the teeny bit of water in the trash and handed me my water bottle back. God bless common sense.

Long live my cheap, crappy, economically efficient water bottle!

Empty wine glasses. Furbaby. Coke Zero. Pile of crap. #GlamLife

I’m eating scrambled eggs with pepper jack cheese while I wait for my last load of laundry to dry before I pack.

The sitter is coming in one hour.

I really hope she doesn’t expect the house to be totally clean.

We had friends over last night night until 2am instead of picking up.

Well, I picked up the main living area, since we had people coming over. Now the only messy thing about it is the dirty scrambled egg pan in the sink. Ok, and the dishes we generated last night entertaining. Oh, and the trash is full. And there are empty wine glasses on the counter. Ack! Crumpled napkins! And the pile of stuff that came in with my kids last night when Gramma and Papa dropped them off. Ok, it’s actually a mess in here.

I texted the sitter last night to keep in mind that I work from home, have a three-year-old with me 99% of the time, and don’t have a maid. She said she’d bring her white glove.

I laughed.

These scrambled eggs are soooo good. Have I ever told you how much I love pepper jack cheese? I’m rethinking polygamy, because I totally want pepper jack for a sister wife.

Plus Leif is deathly allergic to dairy, so I wouldn’t have to deal with the whole sharing a man thing.

But if I did have to share a husband, I’d consider sharing with pepper jack. That’s how much I love it.

I freaking love mornings when I get up before everyone else. It’s so … what’s the word? Oh yeah, peaceful.

I might get up an hour before everyone else on a regular basis.

Except.

I like sleep better.

Happy Thursday! I’ll see y’all in Minneapolis!

I’m full of suck the past week or two in keeping my eight readers over here updated on what I’ve posted elsewhere. So instead of linking each post directly, I’ll give you a summary here.

I wrote about the high gas prices and what kinds of things we’ve had to sacrifice to balance our budgets. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just steal from our kids, like the U.S. government does?

Ben Shapiro has a scandalous new book out detailing what we conservatives have known all along: Hollywood is unfailing, unapologetically liberal. Ben donned his Harvard baseball cap for his interviews with Hollywood power players, and assuming he was one of them, they let loose with the truth of how much they hate conservatism.

In my most controversial piece recently, I dared to ask the question of whether or not breastfeeding should be a right or a privilege in a private establishment open to the public. Because  of this, I either don’t have children or I hate them. Also, what’s wrong with me not wanting to see someone’s breast hanging out of her shirt while her toddler dines away while she walks down the aisle at Target? Breastfeeding is beautiful! Yeah, well so is sex between a husband and wife, but no one needs to see that either. By the way, this is my most commented-on article ever, with close to 600 replies. Go me.

Because I’m obviously a racist (insert eyeroll here), I wrote about President Obama and his diet. Frankly, I don’t care that the man eats crap and smokes like a chimney. But I can’t take his wife seriously when she espouses the importance of healthy eating. If it’s so gosh darn important, why can’t she get her husband to eat better?

And in shocking yet hopefully optimistic news, I wrote about RNC Chairman Reince Priebus reaching out to bloggers to help restore trust and credibility with the Republican Party.

Phew! Happy reading.

I don’t get some people. Take progressives, for example. Their very moniker indicates their penchant for progress. Yet for some reason, they seem bound and determined for us to make our way back to the days when we lived in mud huts and life expectancy was 37, but gosh darn it, smog levels were nonexistent.

One of the latest developments in the fight to save the planet has been to ban phosphates in dishwashing detergents. Because phosphates make algae grow in rivers and lakes, and that could, like, totally starve the fishies of oxygen.

Side note: Aren’t these the same people that supposedly believe in evolution? Why don’t the fish evolve to need less oxygen? Food for thought…

I’ve been going crazy for the better part of year now, wondering why the heck my dishwasher stopped working. Leif has taken the thing apart and cleaned it. We’ve fiddled with this and that. The dishes were still dirty. If we didn’t wash the dishes before they went into the machine, they came out with the food gunk still stuck on them. Even if we prewashed everything, there was this white filmy stuff coating everything. The dishwasher couldn’t even get rid of lip marks on glasses.

It’s enough to make a busy work-at-home-mom that hates doing dishes lose her mind.

It turns out my broken dishwasher isn’t broken at all. My Cascade is — the phosphates are missing. Phosphates used to be the part of the detergent that cut through grease and other food particles, and left nothing but sparkly clean behind. Thank goodness for Google, without which I might have never discovered the cause of filmy, groddy plight.

Luckily, people (especially moms, in my ever-so-humble opinion!) are smarter than the government. Thanks to the Internet, I figured out that I could add phosphates back into my detergent and enjoy shiny clean dishes again (no elbow grease required!), and thanks to a friend, I found out that I could buy phosphates at my local Home Depot. A teaspoon added to each cycle should do the trick.

So now I sit, in eager anticipation, listening to the dishwasher run and imagining all sorts of little phosphorus scrubby guys running around in there making everything all clean and sparkly.

I’ll let you know how it goes…

Update

Dishes are clean and sparkly. No hand washing required. Mega win!

Congrats to Gracie!

gracie says:

LOVE all of Chipotle…sometimes as a bowl, and sometimes in a burrito…depends how i feel. their rice is the BEST! haven’t been able to reproduce that one yet…have a great day

I have given up drinking for lent this year. Not being Catholic, I’m not obliged to participate in the annual act of sacrifice between Ash Wednesday and Easter, but I’ve decided to join in for the second time in my life. The first was when I was a vegetarian teenager and I went vegan for lent. Easter Sunday saw me in the kitchen at the break of dawn noshing on a grilled cheese and a giant chocolate Easter bunny.

Recently, both money and my waistband have been tighter than I’d like, so I decided to use lent as an excuse to break my daily wine habit. A glass here and there every evening adds up on the budget and the scale more than you’d think.

It is now six days since I’ve consumed alcohol. I survived my first weekend. I survived having wine-drinking company over on Friday (I’m pretty sure they think I’m pregnant and using lent as an excuse). I have now officially survived my first Monday.

If it weren’t for this sheer determination to never fail at anything that I know I can accomplish with a little bit of will power, I’d be three sheets to the wind right now.

But I can guarantee you that nothing will taste sweeter than the mimosas I plan to drink on Easter morning.

And hopefully my pants will fit a little bit better too.

Look at me taking notes on appropriations from Chief Deputy Whip Peter Roskam. This IL (Republican!) Representative sits on the House Ways and Means Committee (those tax-writing people) and is vice-chair of AmericaSpeakingOut.com. Congressman Roskam was very gracious in inviting us MomThink.org bloggers into his office and answering our questions about the national deficit and debt.

I tried to look smart by writing down stuff he said so that I could share it with you.

Too bad I left my notepad* at the hotel this morning. D’oh!

Taking Notes in Congressman Roskam's Office

Photo by Ms. Blissdom herself Allison Worthington

*Update: My uber fabulous fellow blogger and roommate Molly Teichman picked up my notebook and is sending it to me. She’s my hero today.

Congrats to mwarner95!

“I love anything Starbucks, but my favorite drink is Venti Bold Coffee in the mornings and in the afternoons I love me some lattes, but it has to be the Venti Cinnamon Dolce Latte!
Happy Birthday to the best patriot I have come to know! You’re an awesome friend!”

Remember that hullabaloo surrounding Juan Williams when he was fired from NPR for saying he got nervous when flying with Islamic-looking males? His exact quote to Fox News’ Bill O’Reily was:

“I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

NPR’s Big Boss Lady Vivian Schiller defended the decision to terminate Mr. Williams’s employment with that organization because according to her, “he had several times in the past violated our news code of ethics with things that he had said on other people’s air.”

Well then cool people like S.E. Cupp and Sarah Palin started asking why such an obviously left-wing outfit should receive federal funding (our tax dollars at work!) and calling for NPR to be defunded.

Vivian Schiller called the claim that NPR depends on public funding ‘laughable.’ It’s the parent company (the Corporation for Public Broadcasting) that receives the public funding, while NPR is funded (in part) by station fees. And where do the stations get their funding? From the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Laughable indeed.

Besides, if NPR really didn’t needs public funding, as Ms. Schiller claims, why are they so insistent that the supposed non-existent funding not be cut?

In November, the House GOP moved to defund NPR. It was defeated, and supporters of the bill were mocked as petty and juvenile. NPR released a statement saying:

“In an increasingly fractious media environment, public radio’s value in fostering an informed society has never been more critical. Our growing audience shows that we are meeting that need. It is imperative for federal funding to continue to ensure that this essential tool of democracy remains available to all Americans and thrives well into the future.”

Basically, NPR is claiming to be an unbiased, reliable source of information for all Americans.

On a completely unrelated note, I saw a lot of people mentioning WikiLeaks on Twitter this morning, in relation to Amazon. I wondered to myself: what does WikiLeaks have to do with Amazon? And I skipped on over to Google to figure it out. Here’s what NPR had to say about the situation:

The WikiLeaks website has left its U.S. Web host, Amazon.com, and moved back to a Swedish provider.

Amazon.com would not comment on its relationship with WikiLeaks or whether it forced the site to leave. Messages seeking comment from WikiLeaks were not returned.

Here’s what actually happened, according to oh, um, actual facts: Amazon cut ties with WikiLeaks and slimey Julian Assange after the website leaked over a quarter of a million classified state documents, causing a global scandal, embarrassment for many world leaders, and potential danger for countless innocents around the world.

Amazon told Congressman Joe Leiberman (chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee) about the decision to break with WikiLeaks.

“This morning Amazon informed my staff that it has ceased to host the WikiLeaks website,” Liberman said in a public statement. ”The company’s decision to cut off WikiLeaks now is the right decision and should set the standard for other companies WikiLeaks is using to distribute its illegally seized material.”

Even WikiLeaks itself whined about being ousted on Twitter.

Amazon absolutely made a good decision in booting the wretched WikiLeaks from its servers. Bravo, Amazon!

Shame on NPR for not even trying to get its facts straight. Unbiased my left foot. Bottom line: If NPR is going to promote left-wing propaganda, they can do it on their own dime.