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Saturday, December 11, 2010

Snapshot of a marriage

This has been T's forty-first-birthday party day. I got him an olive-drab field jacket and some subdued flag and Appleseed patches to put on it. (Hey, it's more romantic than lots of the other things on his list -- like, say, the gas cap for his Charger -- although only marginally less expensive.) It's been a crazy-hectic but fun day.

Now we're both sitting on the couch, and I'm attempting to compose an abbreviated modern retelling of "The Gift of the Magi" (don't ask). T is providing valuable editorial advice. ("No, it's much better if he sold his collection of game cartridges and she bought him a vintage Atari system from eBay than it would be for her to buy the games and him to sell the system. Obviously!")

This one made me laugh very, very much:

T: He could sell his project-car Camaro to buy her one of those plastic hair clips at Wal-Mart. She sells her hair to buy him a shift knob for the Camaro.

Maybe you have to be a Dodge guy, or married to one, to get that. And if any Chevy guys read this -- don't shoot the messenger. Right?

(T says, "Hey, Chevy guys, don't get mad. It was a *really* nice two-tone hair clip.")

THE HIJINKS. Don't you wish this was your marriage?

Monday, September 28, 2009

The Day In Tweets: in which I am humbled.

OK, I'm going to try the daily posting of tweets thing. Without further ado*:

• A&P work done. I read half a chapter without taking notes. Feels a little scary, like I should be in hiding from the Studying Secret Police. about 7 hours ago from web

I got a 9/10 on the quiz. I cannot allow this to lull me into a false sense of security about the exam I will be taking this week, though, and I am studying like a maniac. Except when I'm , um, blogging. Or tweeting. Or reading other people's blogs or tweets, or playing Lexulous, or hanging out at Facebook, or eating leftover birthday cake, or idly fantasizing about diving into a giant pool filled with cold tingly diet Coke.

• I have to take a quiz by 4:00 on the entire skeleton. In a week's worth of studying, have now learned... the skull. I am dead meat. about 10 hours ago from web

This was poor planning on my part. In fairness, the skull and the stuff that came before it (bone cells, bone anatomy, bone repair, etc.) made up about half the chapter BUT STILL. Side note: I LOVE this class so, so much. It's right up there with linguistic nerdiness on my list of Favorite Kinds of Stuff to Learn (what, you don't keep track of this too?), but I'm very glad that I don't study in public because it'd look a little odd for me to be sitting, say, on a commuter train, instead of on my couch, feeling my zygomatic arches or pronating and supinating my hand or contemplatively wiggling the condyloid joints in my metacarpals. And you know I would do it.

• I am publicly confessing that I was wrong about what monkey bars are called & my husband was right. (Good thing he can't see this at work.) about 13 hours ago from web

I wasn't very vehement about it, but in my mind "monkey bars" was a generic term for any kind of jungle-gym bars setup (at my elementary school we used to have a set that was vaguely rocket-shaped), and the bars that C likes to do, the ones that are like a ladder lying horizontally and you go hand-over-hand across them, I've always called "horizontal bars." T maintained that horizontal bars were for gymnasts and that C likes monkey bars. He was right and I was wrong and just look at me posting this where he can see it now! Aren't I a good wife?

*I occasionally contemplate closing this blog and moving to blogger where I will have a free blog titled "Further Ado" or maybe "With Further Ado", because really, I am ALL ABOUT further ado. And now the word "ado" looks like a non-word that I've just made up. My work here is done.

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Fourteen years ago today, it rained.*

Ordinarily I wouldn't remember random facts about the weather on a day a decade and a half ago, but when a day is a fulcrum point between the life before it and the life after it, random things tend to stick in your head.

Yes, it is once again our wedding anniversary, or as we like to think of it, our family's birthday. We're really cram-packed-busy right now, but we'll find some time soon to have a little birthday party, maybe involving the zoo and dinner at the Olive Garden. Or maybe just homemade buffalo chicken strips and a few episodes of the Twilight Zone. In other words, we are happening, people.

*The sun came out just as we were heading from the church down to the reception hall. Also, the sunset was gorgeous.

Friday, September 28, 2007

conversation with T

Tonight on the way home. T is driving; I am mostly-jokingly chiding him for driving too fast:

I: You're being kind of careless with my car. I usually shift down to first and go really slowly when I get to the dirt road. You're rattling my car to bits and raising way too much dust. No wonder your car is always so dirty, if you drive like this.

He: Well, when I'm driving my car onto the dirt road I'm headed to where you are. So you can understand why I would drive fast.

I: Now how can I scold you, when you say something like that?

He:You can't. But you can blog about it.

I: I'll do that.

Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Or maybe THIS is why people get married.

YES.
4gb iPod Nano: Best belated-thanks-to-eBay-dolt birthday present ever.

Serious advantages (ooh, goody! a list!):

• holds way way way more Librivox audiobooks than my car's 12-CD changer.
• oh, yeah, it holds all that music on there too.
• I hear stuff in music that I never noticed before, even with the blow-your-ears-off stereo we had in the Buick. Half the time it kind of freaks me out -- like, where is that COWBELL coming from? Who is banging on a COWBELL? until I remember that I have earphones in my ears and that is in fact Ringo himself on the cowbell. Oh yeah.
• Applying the above characteristic to Rachmaninov and Mozart (the only ones I've tried so far) = unbelievably awesomely oh my gosh wow. You can hear them turning the pages of their sheet music. You can hear them breathing. André Previn and the London Symphony Orchestra are in my head, y'all.
• I know you all know this because I am the last person in the western world to get an iPod. I was the last one to see Titanic and also the last one to get DSL or a cell phone. And my cell phone still doesn't have a camera in it, which is actually quite an accomplishment. I am so far from an early adopter they had to create a new category for me.
• It forced me to finally organize all those mp3s I had sitting around in folders duplicating each other and hiding totally inaccurate metadata.
• Remember the first time you listened to "Bohemian Rhapsody" with stereo headphones and you entered a whole new world? This is like that all over again only more awesome, except now I am 32 instead of 10 so my awe is perhaps less excusable.

All is not perfect, however.

• The aforementioned 12-disc changer is feeling a little inferior and left-out. Or it will be as soon as I get a car kit.
• There is enormous embarrassment potential here, folks. I mean, I am, er, extremely musically expressive, shall we say, and my car dancing is the source of much mirth for others, in my car or out of it. Add 'singing along to music only you can hear' to the mix and I may have to buy a hermitage or something.

Saturday, December 23, 2006

THIS is why people get married

My bedtimes have been really awful lately. Last night I was up until 4:30, and it wasn't the first or the second time in the past three weeks that I'd done that. This Christmastime has wrecked my sleep patterns FOR EVER, I am sure (witness: it is 12:50 A.M. and not only am I not tired, I simply can't imagine going to bed right now unless it was to read -- oh bliss -- for a couple of hours). So this morning T let me sleep until 10:30ish, at which time he woke me with breakfast in bed -- eggs and toast and bacon all done perfectly -- on my very own breakfast-in-bed tray. Then at 2:30 he whisked the kids and me off to the city for dinner at the Olive Garden (mmm, Kristen and Jenn, the OLIVE GARDEN. It's even better than Panda Express!) and a walk down Christmas Tree Lane, complete with all the grumble-free photo-taking stops I wanted. We even stopped off at the biggest brightest most beautiful Joann Fabric and Crafts store ever. I didn't buy anything -- we actually stopped there because it was on the way out of town and we needed to make sure we didn't wind up in the middle of nowhere on the way home in the middle of the night in the forty-degree fog with someone who had to pee RIGHT NOW, C, I am looking at you -- but Debi and I will have to make a pilgrimage there soon, I am thinking. Just as soon as our checkbook recovers from Christmas. So maybe sometime in 2009.

Anyway, it was all just a pleasant, sweet day. T has declared that it was Day One in the Four Days of Ducky (you have to have been there on that nickname), culminating with Monday, which is my 32nd birthday, but which is also the day on which twelve or eighteen people will descend upon my cave of a house, which is currently in oh my gosh such a messy state, to eat a meal which I will have prepared for them. I can only fondly hope that the Four Days will include some serious help getting ready.

Monday, July 31, 2006

surgery's done

...and T is feeling way better at this point than I thought he might. I hope it's not all because of the Per-co-cet they gave him.

Also, if you live in Central California and you ever need surgery, go to the Fresno Surgical Hospital (Bullard and Fresno Sts). That place is AWESOME. Best medical personnel I have ever dealt with in my life, from the front desk on back. I swear to you that I have had worse days shopping for groceries than my husband had today, having surgery. So, wow. Thank you all for your prayers; I'm sure they helped.

Friday, October 21, 2005

oh, how I love that man

Here's a partial list of items I encountered (most of which I already knew about, of course, but you didn't) while I was tidying my husband's shelves in our bedroom today:

• A spotting scope and part of a periscope from a Sherman tank
  
• Two headlamps (one LED, one incandescent)
  
• More pairs of binoculars than any one person could probably use in a lifetime
  
• A two-inch stack (more or less) of astronomy-related catalogs, and a five-inch stack of Charger-renovation-related catalogs
  
• Several different editions of the Bible, and The Believer's Bible Commentary
  
• A printout from the Internet titled "WHAT TO DO IF A NUCLEAR DISASTER IS IMMINENT"
  
• A loaded camera bag the approximate size and weight of a Peterbilt truck
  
• A picture, made for him by our son, of a jungle scene, with a crayoned backdrop on which cute, jubilant jungle animal stickers cavort toward each other, titled "The War of the Jungle"
  
• A love letter from me, circa 1993
  

What's not to love? A veritable Renaissance man, no?

P.S. I have been hoarse for a couple of days. Tonight I reached the point where I have essentially completely lost my voice (actually, I can speak, but it hurts like fire). You have to understand, this is the approximate equivalent of a dam built across the top of Yosemite Falls in April. It feels so, so good to sit here and type, fast, communicating essentially without a barrier. I've been writing notes to my family. It feels like passing notes in class in junior high, only more frantic, and without the visceral thrill of disobedience.

Tuesday, October 18, 2005

just so you know I'm not perfect

...cause I know you all thought I was, right? tee hee.

Tonight T and I had a little argument. Not even an argument, really; just an incidence of Rachel Not Getting Her Way. The short version: I had (and have) a quite miserable headache, and wanted takeout for supper. T (who had a friend coming over, immediately after his own arrival home from work, to do some really manly stuff to a car they're going to sell) pointed out that I had just told him earlier today that money was tight, and that no, paying less to our credit card really shouldn't be an option, now should it, so I was going to have to go ahead and cook supper.

You should have seen how spiritually I handled this disappointment. I set an example for every Christian wife in Western civilization with my humble, submissive, Godly attitude. Here's how I did it.

I pouted.

Oh MAN did I pout. You were expecting me to say that I stood there virtuously cooking supper with a shining, sweet attitude about me, whilst mentally reciting a litany of reasons I love my husband, interspersed with really helpful Bible passages like Titus 2:3-5, weren't you? But I didn't. Nooo. I slammed doors, I clattered pans, I muttered under my breath like a surly fifteen-year-old, I manufactured a tight little I'm so ticked off at you, and you had better watch it, buddy smile for my husband every time I happened to see him. I did this for the first five minutes because it seemed good and righteous and necessary. For about the next half hour I kept it up because I felt very strongly that backing down would have been the sissy thing to do. Right at the end of this half-hour, dinner was ready, which fact I sent the kids out to announce to their father, just so he wouldn't think I'd relented and gone all warm-fuzzy-submissive-Christian-wife on him.

In other words, I was a total, total brat. I really was.

I'm better now. The dishes are done (well, the dishwasher's doing them; hallelujah for minor miracles), I've a diet cherry Coke on hand, and I carefully calculated that I could eat a peanut-butter Twix bar (bought after a quick post-dinner trip to the library to pick up a hold, with a dollar I'd found on the sidewalk, of all things -- I mean, God must have WANTED me to have a peanut-butter Twix bar, don't you think? to throw the dollar at me that way?) without losing all my "nothing tastes as good as thin feels" weight-loss momentum. And chocolate, especially chocolate combined with peanut butter and crispiness, always helps, doesn't it? Now I just have to (gulp) go outside and say something sweet to T so that he knows I'm better, and I can sit down with my book and my Coke and pretend I was never upset at all. Because I'm such a good wife that way.

Friday, June 24, 2005

T's Top Ten

T has to leave for work at 3:30 in the morning, and will probably be gone all weekend. I'm going to see if I can stay up long enough to make him sugar-free pancakes for breakfast, and I've been wanting to do this kind of tribute post for quite a while, so, well, here it is.

Note: This list represents only a few high points, as I look at life with a man who is full of kind, wacky, clever, intelligent, generous ways, every day of his life. This doesn't even begin to display the magnitude of the joy I have, that he is in my life, that I didn't have to "settle" for a man to whom I wasn't terribly important, but was given one who takes my sometimes-overboard affection and returns it to me many-fold. I don't want to imply that these are more important than any of the thousands of everyday happinesses we have together and as a family. Also, um, the list had to be family-friendly, so, um, yeah. There's none of THAT in here; don't worry.

Without further ado, and in no particular order:

• My surgery and recovery. For three weeks he basically waited on me hand and foot. He brought me my meals on a tray. He helped me get up from my chair. He did the laundry and corralled the kids to get the kitchen cleaned each night -- all this with the most generous, loving attitude I could ever have imagined. There was not one false note, one frustrated sigh, one teeny hint that I should just get better already so he could have his life back.
• "Babe". When we'd been married about three years, Yosemite Valley flooded and T had to live in the Park so that he could get to work. He'd be up there for six days and then come home for one day. It was the first time we'd been really separated in our marriage, and it was a difficult time. However, one day T called me and told me about this movie they'd shown on the bus they rode in, down from their housing in Wawona to the valley floor, called "Babe". He told me I HAD to watch it, it had the cutest little pig in the WORLD in it, and I did, and he was right, and I just loved that this same man who could rebuild a transmission and exegete Phillippians and plan military strategy, that man whom people think of as so serious... fell in love with a talking pig with a good heart, and wasn't ashamed to admit it.
• The Nikon. Um, what more can I say on that one. He's always been great at gift-giving, even when we're broke and that means we're giving each other backrub coupons for Christmas, but he totally outdid himself with The Nikon.
• When we found out I was pregnant for the first time and he was so happy that he cried.
• "Ducky!" When we were engaged, we were out for a walk, and he looked at me and just said, "DUCK-y!" in, well, in this cute little cartoon voice he does. He avers that he has no idea why he said it (I think it was because of the annoying little flip in the back of my then-short hair, which looked like a duck's tail, but he says it wasn't that). And Ducky -- along with a parade of other duck-related nicknames -- has been what he's called me ever since. Now my nine-year-old son calls me "Quacky". I guess that's OK. ;)
• Snapple. When we were dating, I discovered peach Snapple and couldn't get enough of it. In 1993 in our small town, Snapple could be hard to come by, so he bought out our local grocery's entire stock of Peach Snapple (about a dozen bottles) and set them aside to give to me one at a time. I'd come out of the restaurant where I worked and there would be a Snapple in a bowl of ice on the seat of my car. Now I drink the diet version, and not as often, but the taste still takes me right back to that summer and fall.
• Florida. I have a very, very dear NOW PREGNANT WOO HOO SUSAN friend who lives in Florida. I'd wanted to visit her for YEARS, and in February 2004 T decided that to heck with it, we'd just make it happen, no more putting it off. So we went, and had a fantastic, amazing, wonderful time, and T was the first person to start planning our next trip.
• Phantom of the Opera. In the fall of 1994, our first year of marriage, he worked some overtime and used the money to buy tickets to the San Francisco production of Phantom of the Opera. We went on New Years' Eve. It was definitely a gift for me -- he went expecting to watch me have a good time and not much else. Which totally explains why he cried at the end and couldn't stop talking about the show for days, right?
• His broken ankle. He was off work for two and a half months, and we all enjoyed it so much, funny as it sounds to say it. We look back on that time with immense fondness. The stereotype about men is that they whine and act like babies when they're sick or injured, and the stereotype about wives is that we can't wait for our husbands to get out from underfoot so we can have our routine in place. We shatter both of these, I'm happy to say.
• The book signing. In the fall of 2001 An author I liked was going to a town about four hours away to give a talk and sign books. T took me to meet her, on a trip which involved our car's final death throes and the purchase of a used car. We were later getting to the city than we thought we'd be but no way would he give up and go home. He had bought me four of this woman's books for Christmas (which, you'll note, since it was fall, had not arrived yet); he smuggled them along in the car in the hope that he could somehow manage to get them signed without my seeing him do it. I ended up in the end of the signing line, which was moving slowly, and he was trying to amuse the kids and keep them in order, so I gave up on getting my book (the one I'd bought for myself that day) signed, and suggested we go. So T took me to ANOTHER event the next spring where the author would be, and we got all five of the books signed. Books which T wouldn't read if he was alone with them in a doctor's office with a three-hour wait. THAT is how much he loves me.

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