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Wednesday, April 14, 2010

ouch.

Oh, it's been a long time since I used this category. Now I'm all nostalgic.

So, how many of you have seen the rear end of a car outside of a car? Show of hands? How many of you have seen one with the leaf springs attached? Well, you all don't live the same kind of life of privilege that I do, apparently.

See, there's this automotive rear end out next to my clothesline. (He swears it isn't there permanently.) And my son (who's six feet tall and 160 pounds now) and I were at the clothesline, and somehow we ended up trying to see if we could balance each other, fulcrum-problem style (because math is everywhere, even in really stupid ideas like this one), on one of the leaf springs (I am totally going to have to go take a picture of this thing as soon as I can move my limbs again), and somehow I wound up flying through the air, catapult-in-Monty-Python-and-the-Holy-Grail fashion. For about two seconds, it was totally awesome. Then my chest came down on the ground a split second before my hips did, and it wasn't so much fun anymore, except it was still funny so I was still laughing. I even got up and finished with the laundry before I came inside to die. But one crazy thing about getting older is the way pain shows up after an incident. The way I remember it, when you're ten and you fall down, you cry and then the pain is kind of a declining gradient after that. The worst moment is the moment of impact. When you're thirtyohmygoshfive years old, not so much:

T + 0=oooh, that's gonna hurt.
T + 10 seconds: ohmygosh my SPINE is it still ATTACHED? Can I stand UP?
T + 30 seconds: OK, I can move if I'm careful.
T + 5 minutes: WTH? My shoulder? I didn't hit my shoulder!
T + 1 day: I am gonna die and really it can't be soon enough.

So. Ice when an injury is fresh, right? Finally, an excuse to sit down and knit for a while.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Sometimes I am really, really lame.

This morning I was merrily folding laundry in my room -- OK, I can't stretch it that far. I was... ungrudgingly? moderately happily? smugly?... folding laundry in my room, when C came in and informed me that she had found a plastic-wrapped tray of Italian sausage in the fruit bowl. On the counter. Where it had been since Tuesday night. Apparently the bagger had bagged the sausage with my apples (HUGE pet peeve, by the way: please, baggers, please keep the possibly e-coli-laden raw meat away from the fruit which will be eaten uncooked and, knowing my daughter, possibly unwashed), and then I, in a moment of supremely wasteful stupidity, had just plopped the whole grocery bag of apples into the fruit bowl on the counter because I'm all classy like that. (To be fair to myself, I had also thought that T would be taking them to work and it would have been easier for him to just grab the bag.) And then I had completely forgotten that I'd bought Italian sausage, until, well, this morning. So now I am cooking up one and one third pounds of what would have been really good topping for our next Friday pizza in a solid chunk which I'll put out in our woods for the stray cats and the foxes, who will eat it up in no time, and I'm feeling really stupid and wasteful and lame.

Too bad I can't muster that much guilt when I blow three dollars on junk food or at, say, Starbucks. (Can you spend only three dollars at Starbucks?)

Friday, February 22, 2008

Rachel + company dinner = at least one humorous disaster

We had company at our new house. Real company -- in other words, not somebody related by blood or marriage, and not somebody who's here to check an appliance or install a threshold. In fact, we had LOTS of real company: Our entire Bible study group converged on our humble home on Wednesday for a potluck.

If you're wondering why I am still sitting here and sanely typing, so am I.

Really, everything went pretty smoothly. I worked steadily all day, cooking and polishing, and the day was almost disaster-free, which, considering who I am and what my life is usually like, was really a positive change. OK, OK, so I'll tell you about the "almost" since I know you are just dying to hear. Our washer drains into a deep sink, which is not a system I love, mainly because it seems so unhygienic, but also because I am always afraid that something will fall into the sink and cover the drain and then the washer will fill the sink and drain onto the floor and ack I'm so paranoid, right? Except that finally, after forty days and probably fifty loads of laundry in this house, while I was scurrying around all efficiently preparing my modest little rectangle of a house to contain seventeen people, some of whom actually, you know, decorate for seasons, the dreaded event happened. Just for your information, if you have a similar system in your house, there are a few things that should probably not be hanging out on the floor directly under the edge of the sink that might possibly fail to properly dispose of a substantial quantity of warm greywater. On that list of inadvisable objects, somewhere between "family heirloom quilt" (which fortunately in this case I do not own) and "expensive electronics equipment" (ditto), would be "cat litter tray". So my utility-room floor wasn't just covered in unsanitary laundry water, it was covered in warm cat-litter soup, brewed in a hearty unsanitary-laundry-water broth.

Before you decide that you will never, ever come to my house no matter how hard I beg, I must point out that I had JUST COMPLETELY CHANGED the cat litter, so it was not as nasty as you might have just pictured. It was just more expensive.

Everything else was fine. The house was clean well before everyone arrived; Scout was quietly crated because she is scared to death of people and who knows how traumatized she would have been if she'd been out among all those strangers; there was enough food; the roast didn't burn; and though things were cramped for space, there were enough chairs and tables to go around (thanks to helpful family members). So. Aside from that one mishap, I can't complain. Which means, of course, that I have to milk that one mishap for all it's worth.

Thursday, November 15, 2007

tying up a few loose ends

loose end the first:
The texbook was in the classroom. The instructor didn't bat an eyelash or even smirk (that I could see, anyway) when I asked about it. As Mr./Ms. Anonymous Commenter noted a couple of days ago, surely the guy knows me by now.

loose end the second:
Claire's ear is healing up. I am not at all certain that the thing was a keloid, simply because it has shrunk so much and keloids are supposed to be more or less permanent. I think it is/was a boil. But what do I know? Anyway, it's responding favorably to antibiotics and very careful earring hygiene, so I'm not worried.

loose end the third:
In case anyone's wondering, we're still buying The House. We just get to pay penalties for the extension of the escrow. The selling agency has courteously agreed to pay the penalties for which it is at fault (failure to get all the necessary signatures as fast as they should have); we pay the rest. Only buying a house (or, I suppose, having unimaginable-to-me wealth, or maybe serious remodeling, or having a dreadful disease... oh, shut up, Rachel) can put you in a mindset where you find out that you are going to have to pay $600-ish extra for something, and you just shrug and move on. So. Sometime between Thanksgiving and the end of the month, we should close, and then we start making repairs and doing a little bit of remodeling, and then we hope to move in before Christmas. It all feels very unreal to me at present, frankly. Watch this space for a possibly-asterisk-laden freakout once the layer of surreality wears off.

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

anytime the floor wants to open and swallow me up, that'd be fine

Let's say, just hypothetically, that there was a person who lost her wallet and had to embarrass herself by scurrying around like a forgetful mouse in a nursery tale trying to find it. Then let's say that this purely hypothetical person, barely a month later, lost, say, a rather expensive textbook. Possibly in the same classroom where she thought she had lost the wallet. With the same instructor. Who may or may not have also observed this same hypothetical silly person through four years of high school, back in the dark ages of lost antiquity, as she left a trail of her belongings around campus nearly every day and had to scurry around similarly to reclaim them. Should this hypothetical person:

a) Work up the courage to shamefacedly ask the instructor if she left her book in his class?

or

b) Go through the last five weeks of class including the final with no book and see if anyone notices?

Wednesday, November 07, 2007

whiny rant, nipped in the bud

little reminders that this earth is not my home:

1. Almost two weeks ago now, we were piling into my parents' van for a trip to town. C was wearing a long, straight denim skirt, and I was demonstrating for her how a lady gets into a van when she's wearing such a thing, and because I am so awesome, mid-demonstration, my head impacted the top of the van's door frame so solidly that I both felt and heard three or four vertebrae popping, reminiscent of the way a bendy straw does if you stretch it out and then compact it again. Um, ouch. The situation is not improving, and now (as soon as the chiropractor's office is closed; my neck even knows that he takes the whole day off on Wednesday) I get these lovely shooting pains down into my shoulders. If I end up in a wheelchair at the age of 34, know all men by these presents that it was my own stupid fault.

2. I am going grocery/sundries shopping on Friday. Printer ink is on my list; we need it very badly. Obviously, this is why tonight I got an email from FIL/agent with a whole bunch of papers that I need to print, sign, and return to him tomorrow (when, by the way, I do not ordinarily go into town). I hope a signed document is valid if it has that faint-dark-faint-dark ripple thing going on. You know, I am beginning to wish we had just moved into another stupid rental in the first freaking place. Actually, I lied; I am not beginning to think that; I'm just finally allowing the thought to fully form in my consciousness instead of stuffing it mercilessly back where it came from every time it started to edge forward, as had been the rule previously.
   

OK, I can hear you saying it: Shut up, Rachel, you ungrateful brat! Sheesh.

You know what? You're right. I am going to stop now because Whining Is Not Nice. Instead, here's an assortment of things that made me smile today:

From my screensaver:

LT, age just past two, with his trademark grin. I never saw such a grinny child as he was then. I miss that carefree grin of his. In fact, I'd better move on before Annie Dillard has to come knock me around some more.

OK. This too:

C, age not quite two, obviously plotting mischief

Today's "Brevity" comic panel. I have no idea why (and frankly, I'm afraid to dig too deeply into my psyche to figure it out, for fear of what I'd find) but this made me guffaw out loud this morning. Repeatedly.

Lastly: Chocolate-chip cookies; I made them last night. I have been making this recipe (not my own; it's from Pillsbury) since the first Christmas I was married and I see no reason to experiment with other methods since these are the BEST CHOCOLATE-CHIP COOKIES EVER.

Soft and Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies

1 1/4 c. sugar
1 1/4 c. packed brown sugar
1 1/2 c. butter or margarine, softened
2 t. vanilla
3 eggs
4 1/4 c. flour
2 t. baking soda
1/2 t. salt
2 11-oz. packages chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 375ºF.
In a large bowl with an electric mixer, beat the sugars and the butter until
they're light and creamy. (This takes a longish time; don't rush this step.) Add the vanilla and the eggs, and beat well. Combine the dry ingredients in a large bowl. Then add the dry ingredients about a cup at a time to the sugar/butter/eggs concoction, mixing well. Add the chocolate chips, and stir them in with a spoon. When the chips are as evenly distributed as possible, drop dough in rounded teaspoons onto cookie sheets. Bake at 375º for 9 ½ minutes or until they're done to your liking.

The problem is that this recipe makes between four and six dozen cookies, depending on how generous you are with the heaping teaspoons thing. If your cookie capacity is anything like mine, this fact is a disaster in the making. Don't blame me if you can't fit in your jeans tomorrow.

Thursday, October 11, 2007

If My Head Were Not Bolted On, and other totally true clichés

This has been an amazing week for me. I had noticed maybe a few months ago how I seemed to be getting myself together a bit, and I wasn't kicking things or falling down or losing things nearly as much, and I kind of patted myself on the back a little and said, Rachel, you must be growing up. Good for you!

Now I am thinking this was a bit premature.

Last week on Tuesday I got my hair cut. I went to the ATM right outside the hair salon to get cash to pay the lady, because I am all organized like that, and I left my ATM card in the ATM, which I didn't realize until Thursday afternoon when I wanted to use it again. That was really no fun at all; we're still waiting for the replacement debit card to come in the mail and I am debit-cardless, and that is harder than you think when you've become accustomed to this cashless very swipy kind of society in which we now live. However, I blamed it on the fact that it's one of those archaic ATMs from the dark ages that holds on to your card until you're done with your transaction, and I'm used to the zippy ones where you put it away before you even enter your PIN, so my rhythm was all off and of COURSE I was going to leave it there. I bet it's all a big scam.

Then THIS Tuesday, I went to the post office right before they closed, and then right after they closed, I wanted to unlock my car. Except I couldn't, because my keys? Had been left in the post office. I begged a man who was loading a truck with mail out back to go inside and get the post office employee who was still lurking inside to bring me my keys, which he did, amid a hail of jokes about my hair color not being blonde. This was all very embarrassing and also not fun, but I blamed that on the fact that it was Tuesday and Tuesdays are apparently just not a good day for me.

Which means that I didn't have a valid excuse on Wednesday when I not only left my keys dangling from my ignition while I was in my music class at the high school (hi honey! I, um, hadn't told anyone that one yet! ha ha! Rachel so funny!), but I also managed to lose my wallet sometime between the moment when I was putting my change in it as I walked out of the grocery store before driving to class, and the moment when I wanted to add my Barnes and Noble membership to my Barnes and Noble online account at around midnight and I discovered that my wallet was not in my bag. And there's nobody to blame that on but myself, since it wasn't Tuesday.

I have looked all over. I have dismantled my bedroom and put it back together; I went to town (scanning the road and ditches for all sixteen miles of the route in both directions in case I had set it down on my car and driven off) and asked at the high school and even the store, where I knew I hadn't left it, if it had been found. I called the sheriff's department in case anyone had found it along the road and brought it there. I called the night janitor at his house (small town, everyone knows who the night janitor at the high school is) and asked if he had found it. I have begun the wrenching process of cancelling cards and all that fun stuff, which can't be good right now what with the whole "lenders scrutinizing our credit record with magnifying glass" home-buying thing going on. I have done this knowing the likelihood that as soon as I have called the last company and dealt with the last hassle involved in this hassle-laden situation, my wallet will jump out of wherever it is hiding and cackle gleefully at me.

This, honestly, is the kind of situation where I kind of wish I could boss God around (OK, if I could, then it wouldn't do any good because he wouldn't be God, but let's not stray into deep philosophical discussions right now). I know that He knows where my wallet is, right? His eye is on the sparrow, and my wallet is considerably larger than a sparrow and also more important, except maybe to the sparrow's babies. So wherever my wallet is, whether it's sitting beside the road, or in some unscrupulous person's hands, or kicking back at the bar with everyone's lost socks talking about the good old days -- God knows. Wouldn't it be nice if I could just make Him TELL me? I have asked nicely, but He apparently has a really good and important reason to withhold that information from me at this time.

Maybe it's so that I can reconsider my chosen career path. I wish I was joking, but I'm not. I mean, it's one thing when I lose my own belongings; would you want a nurse who, for all her gentle, skillful attention, instantly lost everything she set down? Who left behind her a trail of Room 103B's bedpan and Room 106D's medication and Room 115A's pitcher of water? Or, worse yet, who mixed them up? I'm thinking maybe I'll change my major to English. A scatterbrained librarian is a lark, and a ditzy, talkative English teacher may be the joke of the sophomore class, but at least she's not going to kill anybody.

I think I'd at least better stick to the general ed breadth requirements at this point, pending further smacks about the head from God. Right? sigh.

********** update! deet! deet! deetdeetdeetdeet! update! **********

We found it. It was on the highway. Apparently I left it on the rear fender when I got in the car after class. We actually saw it on our trip by in the morning but failed to recognize it, which I'm sure is some kind of object lesson for how sometimes God puts the answer to our problems SQUARE IN THE MIDDLE OF OUR FACES and we still miss them. Because we did. By the time we found it in the afternoon, it was shredded to pieces and the contents had been spread over about a quarter-mile debris field, but we found a surprisingly large majority of them. So I can undo the "temporary closure" of our credit card account, and I don't have to memorize a new library card number for each of us. I think my driver's license is even still usable. Some of the other cards were so badly damaged that they will have to be replaced, but that is no big deal. I still feel like a complete and utter fool, but then, what's new about that?

P.S. T says he won't let me be anything but a nurse and that's that. He points out that nurses have systems and checklists and do lots of practicing in school before they practice on poor unsuspecting patients, which seriously reduces the stupid-mistake frequency, and he says if anyone was ever meant to be a nurse, it's me. So blame him if I empty 103B's bedpan into your IV someday.

Friday, May 18, 2007

at this rate, this thing costs me about $4 a post.

I've had a lot of things going on; I just haven't felt like writing. And I'm so tired that I just used a comma splice in that sentence and had to go back and fix it. (Apparently in my own personal grammar-nazi code of ethics, a comma splice is a cardinal sin, but starting a sentence with "and" is just fine, and the use of parentheses is completely unrestricted. Hey, it's my grammar-nazi code and I can be completely inconsistent if I want to.)

So, without further ado, a brief sampling of the Things Going On mentioned above:

We took LT to the orthopedist today for that thing about his legs that I think I mentioned before. It turns out that his left lower leg is about one centimeter shorter than his right; I knew there was a difference but I didn't think it was that much. As long as the difference doesn't increase too much, all the doctor prescribed was a lift in his left shoe and a follow-up every year. If, in the course of the massive puberty growth spurts that are to come, he should wind up with, say, a difference of an inch or more, they'll operate on him. But that's not likely.

I left my wallet at the grocery store today. Believe it or not, that doesn't happen often. I think the only time in adulthood that I've left my purse or wallet anywhere (that I haven't blocked from my memory, anyway) was the time about seven years ago when I left my purse in a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Hollister, about two and a half hours away, so that we had to drive all the way back there in the pouring rain the next day. One cross-state drive with the family is a lark. Two in 24 hours, not so much. At least today it was more like two and a half minutes away.

I'll bet you think you know why I'm up so late, but you're wrong*. I haven't Librivoxed in a month, because of this stupid nasty cold and cough thing that has been plaguing me. It will be aaaaaaalmost gone, and then just as I'm looking forward to a nice late-night recording session, wham start the sniffling and coughing again. (At least it's not as bad as poor T, who is now getting over walking pneumonia and hasn't gone to work since Tuesday. He gets all the fun stuff, I swear. It's much more interesting to tell people you have walking pneumonia or bronchitis or a broken ankle or back surgery [him] than viral pinkeye or an ear infection [me.])

*actually, it's a transcribing job this time.

Oh! oh! and I've learned to knit cables! All my life I've thought they were this super-mysterious complicated thing, when actually they're not. At all. You should try some. They make you feel really smart.

Um, let's see. College. Last week I went down to the valley by myself and had my head examined took an hour and a half's worth of assessments in English and math. I had so much fun that if I could do the same thing every week for credit, I would. (I took the SAT an extra time too. I told everyone it was because I wanted to see if I could get a better score, but really it was because I had $30 to spare and I wanted to spend a Saturday in word-comparison and algebra heaven. There. I said it.) Today I went down and talked to one of the counselors for the nursing department about the results and Where To Go From Here. I did well enough on the tests that I can be pretty confident about challenging the reading corequisite for the English class I'll be taking (and really need. If the assessments had included anything about how to write a proper research paper, they'd have sent me packing to the seventh grade). So next semester I'll be taking music appreciation and (most likely) English. I'm so tempted to take some lovely (absolutely research-paper-free) algebra and trigonometry classes, with their lovely methodical equations that feel like listening to Scarlatti piano sonatas, but those will have to wait until I'm able to spend more time (and money) driving back and forth to the valley in the evenings. I'm taking my history final on Tuesday, and we have three more weeks of Awana and three more weeks of Bible study and then begins THE SUMMER O' BLISS, with nary an evening commitment (for me -- the Ts have Boy Scouts) until classes start up in mid-August.

Also re: college and then I will SHUT UP ALREADY RACHEL: I should have done the dratted orientation, instead of waiving it because I'm not actually taking classes on the campus down there. Maybe then I would have known a) where to find an ATM, b) where to make copies, and c) how to print the cover letter for the prerequisite-challenge application I typed up in the computer lab today, without looking like an absolute dolt asking random people for help. Debi: Do the orientation if you can swing it. I'll watch the boys. Or maybe we'll foist all our children on our unsuspecting husbands while we do the orientation together. Par-tay!

Thursday, November 02, 2006

things that make you say grr duh

Let's say you're walking along somewhere in a small town and you see a cell phone lying somewhere, all lonely and abandoned. And let's say it's on and the battery is charged and everything. Do you:

a) leave it there and keep walking, assuming someone will come back for it?

b) pick it up, find an address book entry marked, say, HOME, hit SEND, and say to the person who answers, "Hey, I think I found your cell phone."?

or

c) pick it up, take it with you, and use it freely until the owner realizes it's really and truly lost and notices that she has a whole lot of recent calls and text messages and who knows what all on her online statement that she didn't make, and she calls customer service to have it suspended?

I'm a letter B person myself. I'm nosy. Maybe you're more of a letter A person. But whoever the jerk was who found MY cell phone obviously went for letter C. With gusto.

Oh, well, good thing I was way overdue for my new-every-two free phone anyway. Except that now I have to start all over buying accessories and spare batteries and all that fun stuff. yay.

This also means that if I had your phone number(s) (Susan and Jenn, I am totally talking to you. Kristen, I think I still have an email with yours somewhere), I probably don't now, and you should email me with it(them). I don't even have my brother-in-law's phone number, or T's best friend's. I hope he wrote that one down somewhere, otherwise we'll just have to wait for him to call us because the guy doesn't even have e-mail and I became super lazy about writing important stuff down if I have an electronic device in which to save it instead (Please Lord don't let Microsoft Money crash and burn anytime soon).

******************updated to add***********************

I so totally hesitated to write this update, but in the spirit of full bloggerish disclosure and honesty among friends I feel that I must.

Guess what I found under the armrest in my car when we went to go to Awana tonight? (note: I had driven the car twice already today for short distances. I am SO SO OBSERVANT.)

Um, yeah.

What remains a mystery is the fact that when I logged into my account this morning online to check and see if anyone had been using my phone in the last couple of days, when I'd not seen or used it, the website said that someone had. There were more minutes than there had been, and it said that the last call made had been this morning at 8:30, when I hadn't had my hands on my phone since Monday afternoon. In fact I can be relatively certain that my phone battery was dead at 8:30 this morning, because the battery lasts a max of like a day and a half on standby. After I called and suspended the use of the phone, the minutes rolled back and the last-call date and time did too; I assumed this was the little telecom gnomes wiping my account clean of all those nasty evil stolen minutes.

You can hum the Twilight Zone theme now if you want. Or else the Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum one. You choose.

At least the replacement phone didn't cost me anything. I guess now I have a spare, at any rate, and woo hoo, am I glad I didn't already dump all those chargers and accessories and stuff. Can you imagine if I'd had insurance on the silly thing and filed a claim? I'm SO GLAD I didn't pay the extra $6 a month for insurance, or else I would be in the seventh level of hellish embarrassment right now. Instead of only the third.

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.

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