I'm going crazy; want to come along? Archives | Page 2 of 5

previous ten entries | 1 2 3 4 5 | next ten entries

Saturday, September 10, 2005

misadventures with the nikon

Today was a gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous day. Bright blue sky, puffy white clouds, temperatures in the 70's, the whole thing. T was home and I was out for a walk when I decided to sit down in front of the courthouse, set up my camera on its mini tripod, and take the time-lapse cloud-motion video I've wanted to take (with the courthouse in the foreground) since I got my camera. So I went to the library, conveniently located right across the street from my planned subject, and I got a few books. (Since apparently September is Kidlit Month for me, I got two E.L. Konigsburgs that I'd never heard of, along with The Secret Life Of Bees, which I keep thinking I should probably read, but never actually do.) I set things up and had a pleasant two hours of quiet solitude, during which someone played the bagpipes across the square at the funeral parlor for a funeral, which made me cry a little, because my ordinary day was someone else's really sad day, which is, of course, always the case anytime anyone has an ordinary day. Anyway. At the end of the two hours, I stopped the movie, took a few more pictures, and looked at the results before packing up to walk home.

Which was when I realized I hadn't locked the auto-exposure to match the first frame, so the whole Quicktime movie had this really annoying flashing sort of strobe effect as the exposure changed due to the (frequent) movement of clouds between myself and the sun. Nice.

Then just as I got home and thought about sitting down to watch the strobe-ish video clip, I realized that I'd taken it in a vertical orientation, which made for the best composition, except that it also made for a sideways orientation when viewed on the screen, since as far as I know you can't rotate video files with any of the software I have (read: anything free). The funny thing about this is that I had just read a discussion about this very mistake on a photography-related e-list, and thought, whew, I'd better watch out because that sounds very much like something I'd do. Apparently I was right.

THEN, sometime between my camera and the memory card reader, the video file and half of the photos I'd taken on my walk were rendered unreadable while they were still on the memory card. FANtastic.

Ah well. At least I got to sit in the shade for two hours and read, before I came back to a house where everyone has been a bit on edge all evening, mostly because nobody got enough sleep last night, what with girls giggling till just before eleven, and me reading until two, and the boys coming home from the observatory at three, and LT and his friend and C and her friends all getting up at eight to play. Oh, yes, I am so ready to collapse in a sea of oblivion and rejoice that this day is at least finally over.

Friday, July 29, 2005

blecch

I have been getting comments-spam. (also trackback spam, which is why I turned trackbacks off a while ago, not that anyone likely noticed). No thank you I am NOT interested in... any of that stuff. How. Annoying. But hey, at least somebody's writing something in here.

Also, it is way hot, still. I can now say officially that I hate July. And it's not looking good for August either.

We had a swimming party today (one of LT's friends had a birthday) at our public pool, and ten minutes after we all got in, they had to clear the pool for 36 hours because of a Bodily Emission in the Pool. Yeah, no problem, I will LEAP out of the water; you don't have to ask me twice.

And also, why did Wal-Mart have to add glittery little things to the neckline of their tank tops? I was enjoying being able to buy myself a really useful piece of clothing for $4.50 every time I went shopping, but the jewels-on-the-neck thing takes a tank top from "yeah, I'm casual, that's the point, duh" to "see how fancy I can be for only $4.50? What do you mean, tacky, these are jewels!" So I had to stop at only four different colors, instead of having one in every color except lime green by the end of the summer. Life is full of little disappointments like that, isn't it.

Otherwise, everything's great. Kids are healthy, I'm healthy, T is healthy, everyone's getting along, except for the tendency the kids have nowadays to try to boss each other around all day long, just to see if they can in fact make me certifiably crazy before my thirty-first birthday. Really I am quite cheerful and happy. A little insane, but happy.

P.S. I just finished reading one of my favorite book series -- the Into the Wilderness series by Sara Donati, which in my opinion puts the Outlander series (which I also like) to shame, although a lot of people compare the two. This means that in about a week and a half I read approximately 2500 pages of epic historical family-drama romantic fiction with complicated plots and excellent characterization and wow. Anyway. Now I need something kind of light and maybe quirky before I dive into Middlemarch, and I was thinking I'd read The Blue Castle, but I realized I'm wanting something I've never read before. I tried The Eyre Affair, but five pages into it I decided that it was going in the yard sale pile, just not my type. Any recommendations? Please?

Sunday, July 17, 2005

I have a... what? oh yeah. A blog.

Really, I haven't forgotten this is here. I just haven't felt like writing. Even though I had a definitely blog-able (I refuse to coin the ugliest word in the world by leaving out the hyphen) day on Friday when I went to the San Joaquin Valley, a veritable comedy of errors involving, for example, an incident wherein about two dollars in change sprayed out of my wallet all over the checkout counter at Lowe's, and the whole trip turning out to be unnecessary, and a lot of similar things (but hey, at least it was only a hundred and four degrees out. It could have been worse). I also haven't updated the photo blog in like a week. So much for "pretty much every day". Well, that went out the window a long time ago, really.

The kids start swimming lessons tomorrow. This is probably the number four event of their year, right behind Christmas, their birthdays, and our annual summer Morro Bay trip. LT can swim quite well, when he has a snorkel and mask. Good luck to the swimming teacher who has to teach him not to sink without them, though. C thinks she's a sea lion, and gladly cannonballs and dives off the side into the pool, except that she can't actually swim successfully. Yet. I think she'll really take off during this session, and LT will too.

We have a tenant in our apartment. She's about 21 and looks like, I dunno, picture the most gorgeous classy vivacious charismatic blonde blue-eyed tan 21-year-old you can, with a great figure, who has no stretch marks and no facial blemishes, and that's what she looks like. Good thing I'm so secure in my own appearance that I never ever feel like a dowdy old fat person when I'm around her, right? Of course right.

And really, other than boring you to tears with more accounts of our horrific weather forecasts (woo hoo! down to 103 by next Sunday!), that's all I've got. See why I've not been around?

Sunday, June 26, 2005

sigh

T is still gone. He'll probably come home tomorrow night at his regular time. We hope. He was supposed to have a four-day weekend (well, Thursday he had to go to the lab, so he took it off, but whatever) and ended up getting called on Friday evening to go in early Saturday. So the last any of us saw him was Friday night, because no, I did NOT manage to stay up till 3:30 and make him pancakes. I've done it before in situations like this but I just couldn't this time; I was nodding off sitting up, and finally headed to bed around 12:30 or 1:00 in a sleepy haze of guilt.

I have a papercut (from a paper plate. What kind of person gets papercuts from a paper plate? Oh yeah, me. Nevermind) right in that web of skin between my finger and thumb on my left hand. A papercut has always been right up there with a hangnail as favorites for sarcastic excuses for getting out of work, as if they're these negligible little nothings. Well, I did do some work today, but I am here to tell you that papercuts and hangnails hurt. They really do. Whine.

Also, VBS starts tomorrow (that's Vacation Bible School, which lasts a week and takes all morning, for those of you who are either child-free or not from the Evangelical Christian planet). I did not sign up to help this year, but odds are I'll be helping anyway, since I have nothing else to do during the four-hour duration of the event. I'm certainly not driving home (15 miles) and back (15 miles again) when I don't have to and gas is still at European-style prices. The night before something like this I always dread it, and try to figure out ways to wiggle out of it, but the fact is that the kids are really looking forward to it. Well, C is. I think LT could probably do without VBS just fine and never miss it, but C is a little social animal who loves her fun and games. And once I'm actually there I'm always glad we went.

However. I have been a good girl this weekend and actually stuck to my diet, overall. I hate that word -- it's right up there with "blog" -- but it sounds even lamer to say something else, like "healthy eating plan" or what have you. So diet it is. For those of you who joined us late, I lost 30 pounds in the fall/winter of 2003/2004. Which is great, except that I wanted to lose 45 pounds, but I just sort of stopped at 30, way back over a year ago, last spring, and in the last few months I've actually gained five pounds back, and that is just purely unacceptable. So this past weekend has been that really fun time at the beginning of a new way of eating when you're basically starving all the time, especially in the afternoons and evenings, when I feel like I could eat a Mack truck if someone would deep-fry it and serve it with ranch sauce for dipping. If I hang in there for a week it'll get better, I know this, but augh. Oh, wait, that was a happy thing. Yay.

And I've been catching up on laundry. And the house is clean. I figure the least I can do for a man who leaves the house at 4:00 to go work two or three nineteen-hour days to feed our family when he thought he'd be at home relaxing (well, working. On projects. But... whatever. It's relaxing to HIM) is to have the house comfortable for him when he walks in. Now watch, tomorrow it'll get totally destroyed just in time for him to come in the door.

And I watched "The Phantom of the Opera" again tonight. My new favorite part this time was the Don Juan scene where the Phantom has just offed the male lead guy and taken his place on the stage and he's singing and Christine and Raoul and Madame Giry and Mssrs. Firmin and André have all just figured that out and the tension is just palpable and augh must NOT put it in again must NOT must go to BED.

Tuesday, June 14, 2005

oh, quit bothering me with your 'title' nonsense already

Yesterday I was in serious need of a comfort-food kind of dinner, so I made the following:
****
Ingredients:
1 c milk
3/4 c Italian-seasoned bread crumbs
4 large mushrooms
1/3 of a large yellow onion
1 large clove garlic
1 carrot, shredded or grated
1 t salt
1/2 t pepper
sprinkling of parsley
2 beaten eggs
2 lb lean ground beef
1 package brown gravy mix
2 T sherry

Soak crumbs in milk. Finely mince garlic, onion, and mushroom (I use my Pampered Chef chopper, which has seen better days, but still works fine), and sauté together until soft in a little bit of butter or oil. Add to milk and crumbs, along with carrot, salt, pepper, and eggs. Mix together, then add meat and knead with hands until well-mixed (Eew! gross! but if you try to use a spoon you'll be there all day). Shape into loaves or put into pans and bake at 350 degrees until an internal temperature of 160° is reached -- about an hour and a quarter. Slice and serve with gravy, which you mix according to package directions, except replace 2T of the water with the sherry.
****

Now, most people would call that meatloaf. However, I call it large rectangular meatballs which I happen to serve sliced with gravy. That way my husband will eat it. I also made twice-baked potatoes, which are SO YUMMY (halve baked potatoes and scoop out most of their innards; mix said innards with sour cream, butter, crumbled cooked bacon, and garlic and onion cooked WITH the bacon; replace in potato shells and top with grated cheese; bake till hot). I warned T when he called from work that I was making two of his least favorite foods for supper, but it ended up that he took seconds of everything. I think the earth's axis tilted a little bit; did you feel it?

Then, as much as I wanted to stay home and power through an entire half-gallon of Dulce de Leche ice cream, I couldn't. I had a meeting of the board of directors for our community chorus. (someday it might look kind of good on a resumé or whatever, that I am on the board of directors for something. Which is funny, since the reason I got the job was that I was one of only six people to show up at a planning meeting once, a few years ago. Everyone who went to that meeting is on the board of directors. That'll teach me to show up for stuff...). Usually these meetings are really, really boring, in that usual sort of Robert's-Rules-accompanied "I wonder if anyone would notice if I pulled Persuasion out of my purse and started reading it under the table" kind of head-exploding, frustrating way. And there was a good deal of that sort of thing -- why does it take us an hour to verbally go over a budget that we all have PRINTED OUT IN FRONT OF OUR FACES, for example. But last night things got enlivened by a lovely little shouting match between the chairman and the scholarship committee person, and since none of the rest of us had anything more than the vaguest idea of what they were talking about, we basically had to just sit there open-mouthed while the WWF Senior Tour had its first major smackdown right in the chairman's living room. And it wasn't pretty.

Funny how I wasn't feeling depressed anymore when I got home, though. I wonder what that says about me. (probably it helps a whole lot that the kids cleaned the kitchen while I was gone, but still.) Today I have a raging headache, but I seem to have shoved really hard against the sides of my chute, if I'm not climbing back up yet, at least I don't think I'm going down either. God works in strange ways sometimes.

Monday, June 13, 2005

you live, you learn

(third post today)

You know how you're supposed to stab potatoes with a fork so they don't blow up while they bake? I have become increasingly lazy about that over the years and haven't poked one in ages. Never did I have a potato explode or even, you know, act like it wanted to explode.

Until just now. Potato innards all over the inside of a 375° oven is not a pretty sight. Or smell. Just so you know.

Tuesday, March 29, 2005

frazzly

Today we (the kids and I) had to go to the valley to go shopping. On the drive home, LT (who's far less anxious than he used to be, but who still always worries if one of his parents seems unhappy or sick) asked me if I'd had an OK day, because I seemed a little frazzly. He was certainly right. Here's why.

First, picture a Chatty Cathy-type doll. Very cute, about 45 inches tall, goldeny kind of hair and eyes, freckles. Are you picturing?

OK, now her "chatty" switch is stuck ON, got it?

And she is being SO contrary and confrontational, and she never stops asking for things she wants or arguing when you tell her no until you either punish her or blow your top a bit and yell at her, and even when she's not doing this she is JUST. CONSTANTLY. TALKING.

Now picture spending hours teaching this doll school, or riding with her in the car, or taking her through a series of stores, or cooking her dinner, or reading her a bedtime story, or all of the above, and you have my day.

The worst part is that, in the midst of my frustration, there's a lot of guilt. First, there's guilt that I could ever be annoyed with someone whom I love so wholeheartedly. And then I feel guilty that I don't pay better attention to her -- you know how you swore you would never EVER tune out ANYTHING your kids said, you would hang on every word, until they learned to talk fluently, that is? yeah -- until the annoyance threshold is breached and then I act irritated with her. It's not that we have no pleasant interactions. It's not that I don't completely and totally adore her, because I do. It's just that instead of stopping her demands/arguments right away and being consistent, I start tuning her out and wait until I am seriously irritated before I deal with the situation. It's something I need to work on, and it's a recipe for disaster on a day like today. Or at least, it's a recipe for being "frazzly".

In other news, I am finally working on a transcription job I've been waiting on for two weeks. The guy who hired me for it first gave me the audio files in the wrong format, and then couldn't find the CF card with the correct files, and then got the flu, so it's taken this long to actually have files I can work with. I started transcribing tonight and I'm taking a break right now so that I don't get a life-threatening case of carpal tunnel syndrome. (you are forbidden to notice that I am, um, typing right now. I've BEEN taking a break, I really have.) It's amazing to watch how the Lord provides; last week we got smacked with $320 in extra bills out of a blue sky, and some odds and ends of broken stuff needed fixing, and we had no idea how we'd pay for any of it. Then a guy bought a car part from T -- T had not advertised it for sale, it was just sitting in his garage unwanted -- and then I did a résumé for a guy (who was in my first-grade class) and he paid double my usual rate, and now this job finally came through, and we're going to have enough and to spare. God is truly "able to do exceeding abundantly beyond all we ask or think." yay. :)

Thursday, March 24, 2005

grr.

Real life (in the form of unexpected bills and a very messy house and two stir-crazy kids stuck inside because of the weather) is interfering with my blogging AND with my photography right now. I'll be back around soon, I promise. Assuming I don't go completely batty insane.

Monday, March 07, 2005

Well, it could be worse...

So far today I have:

• Been awakened at 7:50 by the sun hitting the wall in my white bedroom. (I love this, it's the best way in the world to wake up)
• Been summoned to LT's room at 7:51 because he had a bloody nose. (again.)
• CLEANED MY ROOM. Big letters because it was a BIG job. With the kids sitting on my bed much of the time, doing schoolwork and/or reading. (and yes, I made a movie)
• Read Matthew 20-22 (including the parable of the vineyard workers, which, if I had to choose ONE, would be the parable which finds the most daily application in my life. What's yours?) while eating peanut butter toast and drinking a glass of milk for breakfast.
• Taken my asterisk-asterisk-asterisk iron pill. And hence, burped several different flavors of rust.
• Listened to LT sob for the past half hour because -- CRUEL mom/teacher that I am -- I told him that I love his story (about, um, a deer that got sick when it ate a mole, hey, he's an eight-year-old boy, what do you expect?), but he needs to rewrite it neatly.

As you can see, the tenor of my day has gone sloooowly downhill. Here's hoping this trend reverses before I reach the run-for-the-hills-waving-my-arms-wildly stage...

Tuesday, January 25, 2005

weird day

Yesterday was... a really, really weird day. I don't know where my regular self took off to, but I hope she's back today.

It started off with the unpleasant experience of simply walking out into a very cluttered, messy living room. This was partly because of my "it's clean enough, I'm going to be lazy this weekend" mentality (which always backfires), and partly because the kids had again got stuff out and not put it away, and partly because T's model things were still out, and partly because he had brought in his two telescopes and all their accoutrements and left them in the living room and dining area after a Saturday-night astronomy session. Anyway. The clutter was everywhere; I could not look in any direction (except from my bed) without seeing heaps of STUFF. So I set to work with the kids cleaning it up, but they were not cooperative and I don't know why but my mood just went south. And continued to do so until I found myself completely out of control, sitting in front of a Cary Grant movie methodically eating my way through three-quarters of a big bag of barbecue chips, not even tasting them. And then trying to throw them up.

It pains me even to type that, and it's embarrassing. That is so not like me. When I told T about it I kept saying, over and over, that I wasn't planning to make a habit of it, I just wanted to undo that stupid thing I'd done just this one time. It felt like if I'd been fifteen years younger I could have been the main character in an ABC After School Special. The kids and I went for a walk because I thought it might clear my mind, but still, I spent the rest of the day alternately cleaning, staring into space, and crying quietly (and telling the kids when they asked that Mommy just felt sad and she didn't know why. LT: "Sometimes I feel like that. You just have to think about other things.") I cooked dinner and walked to chorus rehearsal, and things started looking up at that point. When I came home, I found that T and the kids had not only installed my closet shelves and brought over my lingerie chest from the guest apartment, but they'd also hauled the model stuff next door and put away the telescopes. And the kids had washed the dishes. So I was able to put away a lot of things (thanks to the shelves and the dresser) and I'll do more of that today. So far this morning I feel normal and fine. Please God let it stay that way.

P.S. The cats are fast friends now. We've started letting them spend a little bit of time outside now, but they will always be trapped in the house from dusk until I get up in the morning -- other animals have been disappearing in our neighborhood at night as well.

I'm going crazy; want to come along? Archives | Page 2 of 5

previous ten entries | 1 2 3 4 5 | next ten entries