A Pondsi scheme for the masses

I have OK skin. My skin was never notably fabulous but it's fairly typical, especially from a distance. Up close is a different story. It's bumpy and blotchy and dry and porous, enough so that over the years I have spent a goodly amount of time and money on scrubs, cleansers, creams, masks, facials and medication, from organic to toxic and everything in between.

In the end I found that birth control pills were the only thing that really cleared up my skin. And I have been on them for a hundred years. But then it was time to get pregnant and be pregnant so my skin got a little out of hand and I was back to three step cleanses and spot treatments and 2% of this gel and 5% of that gel. This has gone on for so long that I now have pimples AND wrinkles. Sometimes one inside the other.  It just seems that I should have one or the other but not both. I mean come on GOD. There is a season - turn turn turn!

And then two weeks ago I had a dream about my Papa Benny who's been dead nearly 25 years. And in the dream he said one word. Pond's. Pond's? I woke up remembering that my mom once told me that he'd always said there was no point in buying all of the other cleanser garbage because it was all made of the same stuff as Pond's cold cream and Pond's was cheaper. It is unclear why he had an opinion about this since he was a gangster. Although my grandmother was a showgirl so maybe he knew this from her. Anyway, the next day, during a fact finding mission, I discovered that Pond's is pretty much the cheapest thing you can buy at the drugstore. And there are like seven ingredients, none of which are parabens.

So I bought it and do you know what? It's like a little jar of magic. It turns out my skin and the rest of me is seriously dehydrated which I know because at my last ultrasound I drank 20 ounces of water and even that was not enough to fill my bladder and thus tilt my uterus for better viewing. The water got absorbed everywhere else before it could reach my bladder because I am a walking Sahara Desert. Here I had been scrubbing the crap out of my skin all of these years making it dryer and more irritated when all I needed to do was drink some water and slather on some Pond's. The zits are actually softening up and filling in the wrinkles! It's like my own brand of Botox! And people have commented! Though they naturally assume it's the pregnancy glow. But they are wrong! It's the Pond's! So god bless Unilever and Papa Benny. I can now declare puberty over and hang tight for peri-menopause.

Coincidentally Rookie Moms are also talking about lotions and potions, but for the very pre-pubescent. Just wait kids. You're in for a treat in another few years...

Starting in the middle

You know how the hardest part of any project is starting? Of course. We all know this. I sometimes have trouble with the finishing too. And the parts in the middle when I want to quit. Or leave the country. Or eat a pita with Nutella. When we decided a few months ago that we were not going to move because we just can't afford anything else in this area, we said, OK let's manage the space we do have a little better. Starting with the garage room which doubles as my office and studio space. So my husband went online and quickly bought a kit to build a Murphy bed and has spent the last few weekends building it while I have been losing my mind trying to occupy our kids so he has time to build. Last weekend he finished the thing in record time and started talking about installing it and I'm like, wait, what about ripping out this hideous carpet and painting the walls?  This was not part of his plan. This was part of my plan. So he said, OK, we can start doing that next week. And something in me snapped. I needed to start painting a wall at that moment. So I took my son to buy some paint and we came home to paint the whole damn room test the color. We didn't move any of the furniture (except the futon) or tape anything or put plastic down. We just started. Painting.

Now, know that this is totally not my style. I plan everything. I am careful. I don't jump in usually. But I had to do it. And as we are painting and having a jolly time my husband is slowly coming unglued. And he's put together with epoxy so this is unusual. About an hour later I get a lecture about how this isn't how he does projects. Nothing about the room is ready. True. But I am ready. He understood the urgency and took the kids to the pool and I agreed to take everything out of the room while he was gone. That night we painted. And the next day I bought the wood for the floor, we ripped out the carpet and in one weekend the room was done. Almost done. Putting in shelves and installing Murphy next week.

Sometimes you just have to start. And who better to know this but my husband who, for months, has wanted to start a compost. We inherited the outside bin but not everything was aligned to get started. We needed some chicken wire to deter rats. We needed to mow the lawn to use the grass to get started which meant we also needed our lawn mower back from friends who had borrowed it. We needed a compost can for our kitchen. But none of this stopped him from starting to collect rotting fruits and vegetables in a salad spinner on our counter. For about a week. Eventually all of the pieces were in place but had he not started saving scraps and stinking up the kitchen, we might not have been so quick to figure out the rest.  I made this analogy for him and he rolled his eyes. But I have a new floor so I let it slide.

REMINDER: Still time to enter the cute little gift cards giveaway. Go here. Happy weekend!

The Mensch with the wrench

I have to hand it to my handy husband. He's like Macguyver. There's no problem that duct tape, a switch and some wires won't fix. I mentioned the problem we had with our analog television - that we couldn't watch DVDs anymore because the converter was set to the video channel. The cable was only reading info from the converter box and not from the DVD player. Or something like that. I don't claim to understand any of this. Anyway, on Friday night when I told him I'd had enough and I was buying a new television he said he thought he knew a way to fix it. Of course he does.

This seems an appropriate time to mention the car that we had ten years ago when we lived in Israel. My husband was a student at the university where I worked and we were the only ones of our friends who had a car. It had been his mom's - a fiat something or other that we lovingly called Fifi. But my husband had treated it like a jeep going off-roading and what have you in the desert. The poor car was a wreck. But that didn't stop us from hauling up to six people around town in that thing. At one point it needed a new transmission which would have cost more than the car was worth so my husband put it in himself which took four months (did I mention he's a mechanical engineer and not a mechanic?). I walked to work. I think it was summer. 100 degrees by 9am. Good times.

Anyway, once the transmission was fixed the thing ran great. But then the car itself started falling a part. First the handle snapped off the inside of the driver's side. So I had to roll down the window to open the car door. No problem. Then the passenger side ceased to close altogether so we had to tie it shut with a string. No problem. Then the ignition stopped working one day. I put my key in there and the thing wouldn't turn. I was late for work so I just left it and walked to my office hoping someone would steal the damn thing. No such luck.

Two days later my husband had performed an ignition-ectomy. Removed the whole thing. In it's place were two wires. That's when I learned to hot-wire the car. No problem. Except for the slight spark I would sometimes get when the two wires connected. Eventually, when the wires started to fray and I started to worry I might electrocute myself and my passenger, my husband found a better solution. He added a switch which meant we could turn the car on or off with the push of a button. With this thing in place we were limitless. We could continue schlepping our friends around. Hell, we could rob banks with a fast getaway. And so it went for another year until we ended up selling that car for $50 before we left Israel to go traveling.

But back to the television. He popped over to his office on Saturday and came home with a switch and some wires and before long we had ourselves another homemade contraption allowing us to hot-wire the television. Switch it one way and it was a TV, the other way it was a DVD player. Genius. Unfortunately we're still stuck with the same channels, but the legend of Fifi lives on in our TV. I just hope I don't electrocute myself trying to watch the Korean home shopping network.