Yesterday, after Hayley got home from school and George was home from work, I had to head out to the drugstore. Of course, as soon as I announce I’m going to the store, I get hit with a virtual cacophony of requests. I walked there, wandered through various aisles, picking up what I was there for, and headed for the cash with my purchases as well as things that George and the girls wanted.

When I spread out my things on the counter at the cash register, I looked down and started to giggle. Giggles soon gave way to full-out laughing. The cashier looked at me curiously, clearly wanting to ask what was so funny. I pointed out why I was laughing and she started snickering too. It was funny because even though not everything was for me, I was still a walking stereotype at first glance.

Because there I stood at the cash, a woman with a bag of salty chips, three chocolate bars, a big bag of Skittles candy… and a pack of pads. Talk about your basic PMS survival kit, right? All I needed was a bottle of Midol (and yesterday I probably could have used it) and the stereotype would have been complete.

To be fair to myself, two of the chocolate bars were for the girls, and the Skittles were for George. As for the chips, I don’t need to wait for a specific time in my cycle to eat something salty. But still, it was a good laugh.

It’s almost embarrassing how much I am loving Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I mean, I loved the movies (at least the first two), so I guess it’s not much of a surprise, but I am enjoying it in a way that I haven’t enjoyed a new series in a long time. And since it just started, there should be at least a handful of episodes to keep me going when all my other shows flip back to re-run mode because of the strike.

Please tell me I’m not the only one watching!

I remember when I was a young girl in high school I hated so many things about myself. I hated my thick glasses that made me look like I was wearing Coke bottles on my face. I hated my hair because, although hairdressers loved its thickness, for me it just made it hard to do anything nice with it because at that age I possessed an ineptitude with anything that could be called styling; as a result, I had bushy hair. I didn’t hate my entire body but I wondered why I couldn’t have a little more cleavage, dammit. I was self-conscious about my teeth because my incisors were more prominent than the rest of them (actually, I’m still self-conscious about that).

In other words, I was a fairly typical teenage girl. Just about the only problem I didn’t have was an eating disorder because I was always thin. But I had all those other things, plus a horrible sense of fashion, an uncertainty about makeup (though that never stopped me from wearing it, which was probably unfortunate, what with all that blue eyeshadow and metallic pink lipstick that was “in” back then), and a burning need – like so many girls that age – to fit in, to cave to peer pressure, to follow all the trends so I could be as “cool” as everyone else.

I know this is one of the things lying ahead of me as the mother of two girls, having two beautiful girls who should have all the self-confidence in the world and who may not, no matter how much we both try to instill it in them. Look at the world around young girls – they see women on TV and in movies who are the size of a toothpick and they talk to magazines about what diet they follow or how many hours they work with a personal trainer. People call Jennifer Love Hewitt, a girl with a very normal and nice body (and awesome rack) fat after seeing her in an unflattering pose in a bikini when she was in a private moment – fat. FAT. If people think she’s fat just because she isn’t a stick figure with a bobble head, what do you suppose young girls think? Every few years, an article is released mentioning that eating disorders are hitting girls younger and younger. It’s disgusting.

And THEN I read this article called Why 10 is too young for your first Brazilian where it mentions that Nair released a special line of hair removal products which is ranged at girls age 10 to 15. Why? Why are girls as young as ten being encouraged to use a chemical to melt the hair off their legs and bikini lines? But that’s not the worst part.

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I don’t know where my blog interest went. Well, actually I sort of know. Whenever I have free time lately, which is usually in the evening after the kids go to bed, I find myself practically living on Flickr, looking at photos taken by people I admire. I find that I have a lot of people that I’ve added to my contacts listing that I don’t even know, just because I love the pictures they take. I poke around and I get inspired, and if they have exif data, sometimes I’ll click through to find out what settings they used. Lately it seems that all I can think about when I don’t have to be thinking about problogging and kids and what to make for supper is photography. I suddenly remembered last night that my father was really into photography for awhile and I guess maybe it’s a genetic bug because I’ve gone from being happy with just snapshots to wanting to do so much more.

Anyway, between my Flickr/photo obsession and two straight months of self-imposed blogging, I just lost it somewhere. I’m still not sure what I want to do. Part of me wants to make some changes to what currently exists here, and part of me wants to back it up, take it down, and start from scratch. New year, new page? Same domain, but just wipe out all these entries and begin again.

In the meantime, I wasn’t sure I was feeling the other design so I went and poked around, lamenting the fact that 95% of the WordPress templates all look more or less the same, another 4% look original because they’re custom designs, and only 1% of the free themes look somewhat unique. Luckily, after some cursing and despair, I found this one and I think I like it. If you’re reading on a Feed Reader, kindly click through and let me know if it looks okay for you.

Right, enough of my own blog, off to take care of the other ones. Let’s see what I end up doing with this space.

I have totally lost my blogging mojo.