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Sunday, May 28, 2006

stuff

Here, I'll write ANOTHER POST FOR SPAMMERS TO COMMENT ON. Jerks. It's extremely annoying to have to spend so much of my precious online time (with T home right now I have to share the computer with another adult as well as the usual two kids) blasting comment spam to Mars. Or I wish I could. I ban the IPs, anyway. Three hundred sixty banned IPs and counting. And I've started closing comments on the most popular targets -- I wish MT had a function where the comments would automatically close on any post over a certain age. I say again: Jerks.

I know I have been MIA here. Things have been a wee bit crazy. T had a consultation on Friday at which it was determined that he has to stay off work for another four weeks. On the way home from said consultation I was going to go the long way around Fresno's freeway system and stop off in downtown to take a picture of something city-ish for my 28in28 project, but as I was getting on the freeway our car started acting funny. Namely, it started, um, dying. It would just die, la di da, as I was going 70 miles an hour surrounded by other cars also going 70 miles per hour. This was so much fun. Y'all should try it the next time you want your blood pressure to go through the roof. Fortunately it would restart fine and I could steer and all, but I couldn't take my foot off the gas or let the RPM drop below 1200ish or it would die again. It was like Speed (which I've actually never seen) without the high budget. Or, thankfully, the bomb. The car has done this before, but it did it here in town where you can't go 70 miles an hour if you try and there are only about fifteen other cars on the road with you at any given time. And if you have to walk, you're less than a mile from home in a totally safe environment, not scores of miles away in downtown Fresno. With dark coming on. T says it is the camshaft position sensor and once he's better we'll mortgage one of the kids (or maybe me) so that we can afford to fix it. Or maybe we'll just shove the car off a cliff and see if we can collect the insurance. KIDDING. GEICO, I am TOTALLY kidding about that. If our car goes off a cliff with nobody in it in the near future it will TOTALLY be an accident and IN NO WAY will it be attempted insurance fraud. Totally.

We made it home. The car only died about eleventy gajillion times on the way. Or maybe twenty. When we stopped to eat fast food about thirty miles from home, T, who is supposed to be all super-careful with his back, hung over the hood of the car and rigged up a wire to do what my foot had been doing with the keeping-the-RPM-up thing. (I'm really good at shifting to Neutral to go down hills now).

And the funny thing is, yesterday and today his back has felt way better. Not all better. He still can't tie his own shoes, take off his own socks, or pick up anything. But he can get up from the couch without assistance and walk to the bathroom without a walker, and he's only taking two V!cod!n (take THAT, spammers) a day instead of maybe six. This is progress. So maybe he should go hang over the hood of a car again. (actually, he did for a little while, today, to adjust the valves on our Dart, and he's paying for it a bit now. Silly man. I'm not his mommy, he has to make his own decisions.)

After he worked on the car and we ate supper, we had a sanding party. I'm proud to say that this was my idea. I'm also proud to say that I can, with a random orbital rotary sander thingamabob, take all the layers of old paint and primer off an essential piece of a 1970 Dodge Charger. And my son sanded a whole fender thing, and I did not kiss him even though he looked so adorable in his hearing protection and horn-rimmed eye protection that it was very difficult not to. And my daughter sanded a good-sized patch of a door, and we successfully made T sit down and rest his back. Most of the time. And I earned enough brownie points to be good for AT LEAST six or eight Jane Austen movie marathons and maybe a few evening walks downtown (once he's able, of course). And it was actually fun. Go girl power.

********************************

This morning T got it into his head that he wanted to watch our wedding video. I've no idea why. We hadn't watched it in literally years -- C had never seen it -- and it was, ugh. quite uncomfortable for me. Here's a list of things I would do differently if I were doing my wedding today:

• Just say no to the linebacker shoulders on the dress.
  
• Definitely just say no to the bizarre frill of tulle at the back of the veil that made me look like I was wearing an Elizabethan ruff in the wrong place.
  
• I would never have dyed my hair black. Which I did like THREE MONTHS before the wedding and which I COULD NOT undo with any amount of light-colored dye.
  
• I would not fidget. My gosh did I fidget.
  
• No singing. I don't care who tells us you have to have a couple of songs to make the ceremony last longer for the people who travel five hours for a wedding. NO SINGING. Have fun at the reception, people.
  
• Speaking of which, something I have regretted since like six hours after we did it: no opening presents during the reception. I don't care if we wanted the checks that we knew would be interspersed among the really nice kitcheny stuff (most of which I still use) to spend on our honeymoon. TACK-Y.
  
• I'd have had my dress whateveritistheycallit-ed so that the train would have been like a normal skirt during the reception and I wouldn't have had to hold it over my arm the whole time.
  
• Puffier petticoat please Rachel.
  
• And a smaller guest list. I felt guilty and wanted to apologize to all those people for making them feel obligated to come watch this whole thing. Sorry guests. You must remember, when a 19-year-old gets married it's essentially her chance to have her Very Own Prom and she goes a little haywire with the traditional boring stuff.
  
• I would not have opened my eyes during the closing prayer to peek around at the audience and at T. I still pray with my eyes open but I have always maintained that it is a habit I got into when the children were smaller and I couldn't take my eyes off them that long. Now I know that I have videographic evidence that I was wrong about that.
  
• I would not have held my hand over my very nervous butterfly-laden tummy during the little speech, one of the songs, and the beginning of our vows.
  
• I would not have whispered back and forth with T during the ceremony as if we were teenaged girls at a lecture on, I dunno, astrophysics or something.
  
• One bridesmaid, not three. In a dress she'd have worn again. I'd like to issue a public apology to my bridesmaids Tammie, Sarah, and Rhonda, for the atrocious burgundy dresses. At least you didn't have to pay for them.
  

I am required to note at this juncture that my husband disagrees with this list, thinks my whole "wedding clothing ensemble" (his words) was "lovely and fine" (ditto), and sees no problem with our wedding the way it was. That's because he is a man.

The thing I would do the same:

• Marry that wonderful handsome BABY-FACED OH MY GOSH HE WAS SO YOUNG hottie of a man. Who is way way sexier now than he was then, and that's saying a lot. Yay T.

**********************

Also, in case you missed it at her own blog, KRISTEN IS PREGNANT. WOO HOO! yay. I heart Kristen, a lot, a lot a lot, and just, yay.

Comments

Posted by: Valerie at May 29, 2006 05:58 AM

Posted by: mary at May 29, 2006 08:22 AM

Posted by: Kristen at May 29, 2006 12:41 PM

Posted by: jenn at May 29, 2006 04:36 PM

Posted by: Maria at May 29, 2006 11:01 PM

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