Wait....You Mean I'm not as Important As I Thought?

My day has been.....well, weird.

My great aunt passed away on Tuesday night and I have been getting ready to make the 2 1/2 hour drive with the kids tomorrow for her funeral.  Although I am saddened by her passing, she was nearly 85 years old, she had lived a long and wonderful life, and in her own words, she'd "been ready to go for a long time."  I have been a little stressed about the funeral as it will be a first for my 2 youngest, and there will be awkward questions and most likely inappropriate ones.  I'm hoping that they use their inside voices. 

Hmmmm....according to your label, you contain "Miscellaneous Crap."
 

Having just moved and still battling the cardboard box takeover, I am busy trying to locate things that we will need for the funeral like the oldest boy's dress shoes.  I KNOW he has some, because I bought them for graduation this past Spring, but we just cannot locate them.  We also cannot find any of his jackets, but luckily he hasn't needed them yet.  I am hoping that the shoes are at one of the 3 houses that we were floating in between before we found ours, and NOT with the jackets.  There is also a box somewhere with the girls tights in it....  

Okay.  It's lost then.

In addition to the obvious clothing issues for a woman who wears nothing but T-shirts and yoga pants and her 4 kids who mostly exist in jeans, there was the notifying of the school of the upcoming absences and getting the car ready for the 5 hour round trip drive which included getting the oil changed as well as saying prayers of longevity over the brakes and tires that need to be replaced, (but there just isn't time).  So even if that was all I had to deal with over the past couple of days, it would have been enough. 


But it wasn't.

This morning, I had a meeting at the school about the decorations for the 5th and 6th grade social next month.  Through a strange twist, I am on the decorations committee, the food committee, the set-up committee, and I am down to be a chaperon and event photographer.  Well, the demons of tardiness were upon me this morning from the moment my feet hit the floor.  Kids didn't want to get up, they couldn't find their shoes, the hairbrush is missing, this one left his lunchbox at school (again), and it was all I could do to get them out the door in time to meet the bus.  Then I made coffee, spilled some sugar on the floor, cleaned it up and looked up and it was nearly 7:45.  Crap.  So I rush upstairs to get the youngest up because he is supposed to be at school at 8:30 and my meeting is at 9:00.  I get his clothes laid out for him, thrust an Eggo into his hand and tell him to get dressed and eat while I make myself presentable.  Anytime that I have to wear clothes with actual buttons and zippers, it takes me longer than my usual 7 minutes to get ready because it most likely means that there is makeup involved.  By the time I got everything done to make myself look like an adult, it was 8:30, and we were late.  After a brief argument about putting on the seat belt all by himself, we were on our way.  After dropping him off at preschool, I was all set to make the meeting just in time when a tractor pulled out in front of me.  (Yes, an actual tractor).  I made it to the school 10 minutes late.  I went to the meeting and while we were discussing decorating ideas, my phone was blowing up with email notifications.  One of the ladies asked me if I needed to check it because she thought it might be work related. (I neglected to tell her that I do not work outside the home because she seemed like the type who was a little "judgey" of someone who is "just a stay-at-home-mom").  I had no idea what was going on, but since there was a family funeral tomorrow, I thought it might have been condolences or something.

I was wrong.

Understatement of the year....

After the meeting, I pulled out my phone to find over 250 emails.  I was floored.  I opened the email app and almost immediately saw that they were 99% new comments on my blog and I got super excited thinking that one of my posts had gone viral.  I started speculating about which one it could be while I began opening the messages.  My excitement quickly turned to bitter disappointment.  They were all, every last one of them, SPAM.  Some payday loan company had commented on every.  Single.  Post that I have ever done.  Well, crap.  When I got home, I pulled out the laptop to begin the deletion process both in my email and on my blog, and I discovered a couple of legitimate emails mixed in with the blog notifications.  There were the usual requests for reviews or to plug someone else's blog on mine or on my Facebook page, but I also had an email from one of the fabulous bloggers that I had met in Chicago last January at the Kenmore Blogger's Summit.  I thought "Yay!  I love this lady!  Maybe she has some new blogging opportunity that she want to tell me about!"  Well, I was half right.  She was asking me if I was going to the Kenmore thing next month. 

I got very excited.  I began weeding through those spam emails faster and faster looking for my invite.  Soon though, it became apparent that there was no invite for me.  I checked my junk mail and went back through the trash folder just to make sure, but nope.  I had not been invited.  So with a pang of jealousy, I emailed my friend and let her know that apparently I wasn't coming this time.  To her credit, she seemed as bummed as I was and told me that I should email them and see if there had been a mistake.  That seemed a little needy (although I wished that all of the returning bloggers had sent an email and said "Hey, what about superrpsychomom?" since that is my Twitter handle).  I felt like I was in middle school all over again where every minor snub makes you feel as if the whole school has somehow blacklisted you and you'll never be invited to anything ever again.

(sniff, sniff)

 

I AM sending an email off to the organizers to let them know that if any of their first round picks are unavailable that I would LOVE to come, but I am not expecting much.  I tried to be very nonchalant about the whole thing:

 "Hey, I heard from one of my bloggidty buddies that you're doing another Summit.  That's cool.  Well, hey, if you have any trouble rounding up enough participants, I guess I could come again.  I had a pretty good time last January and all.  Just let me know if you need me." 

That's the gist of what I sent, but in my head I was actually more like this:

I think I probably looked a lot like this too....

I think that I may not have been exactly what they thought I was when they invited me last year....

I'm pathetic, I know.

So there you have it -- two major blows to my ego in one day.  First I thought that I had finally won the internet, and then I thought that I was going to get another fabulous blogging experience via Kenmore only to be let down.  I guess I am not quite as important as I thought and I may forever be the runner up on the internet.  Oh well, on to other, more pressing issues...like where in the heck are that boy's shoes??!

Yes.  Yes it does.