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Friday, May 27, 2005

not QUITE an exercise in futility

Tonight I didn't feel like just sitting around; I wanted to do something productive. (whoops, sorry, should have warned you so that you'd be sure to be sitting down before you read that. Are you OK?) So I cleaned out the car.

I have noticed, in my walks around town, that most people's cars have... what's it called, that place under all the JUNK... um, floors. That's it. You can look in their car windows and see floor mats, and seats, not just in a couple spots where the stuff's shoved out of the way, but all the way around. I'd comfort myself with the knowledge that these people must not have kids, but I happen to know that's not always the case. (still clinging to hope that maybe the cars were NEW...). Ours used to be much, much better than it has become lately; I think it's largely that the kids are old enough to take stuff INTO the car, but they aren't old enough to take it OUT yet.

That and I'm a total and complete slob, that's also part of it. Maybe.

Anyway. I started thinking I really REALLY needed to clean out the car yesterday, when I tried to find my little bottle of glasses-cleaning solution on the way to Awana, and I couldn't. Before I was sure that it was lost, though, I'd gathered up a full grocery bag of garbage just from around my feet in the passenger side and what I could reach of the back floorboard. (not GROSS garbage, just papers and receipts and junk mail and plastic grocery bags and that sort of non-maggoty, non-food-item, non-stinky stuff. But still.) Today we went to the valley to watch Star Wars and eat at Applebee's and spend our retirement (well, not really, but it felt like it) at Wal-Mart, and when we got home, I was going to sit on the porch swing and read and listen to the snick-snick-snick of the sprinkler on the newly-mown front lawn, but I just couldn't, knowing that That Mess was out there, WAITING. So what started out as emptying out the junk, putting away the non-junk, and washing the inside of the windows (the rear window still bore the ghostly remains of a fog-written "BUSH 2004", done by my politically astute son last fall, and of course I only noticed it when I was actually driving the car down the road and hence could not exactly just reach back and clean it off) turned into a full-out wash job. Which was really pretty stupid. Because guess where we're driving tomorrow. If you guessed "down miles of dry dusty dirt road to your parents'", you are right! Bingo! You win the prize! Oh well; at least the inside will be clean.

P.S. re: Star Wars: I really enjoyed the movie, better than Episodes I and II, and also better than the earliest three episodes, at least in that it has no Mark Hamill, who, I'm sorry, belongs in a ballet class somewhere, not in an adventure movie. And the way Luke changed from a whiny teenager to a condescending know-it-all in the space of a mere three movies did not impress me. Anyway. Episode III was very nicely done, and emotionally stirring, and all that. But you know what had me in choky tears and cold chills simultaneously? Was the preview for "The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe" that came before it. MY GOSH I CAN NOT WAIT.

Friday, May 13, 2005

confession is good for the soul

Confession the First:
I can't believe how much of my emotional energy is wrapped up right now in what happens with Amos and Edda in "9 Chickweed Lane". I mean, it's not like I go around obsessing about them all day. But I DO get really excited when 9:30 PDT hits and I can go read the next day's installment. And no, in case you wondered, I totally am not a nerd.

Confession the Second:
This one is all Kristen's fault. She told me about Statcounter and I signed up and now I have one more thing to make me need to stop every time I walk past the computer: I can check and see who's been coming to my site from where, and what weird google searches ("Rachel High Heels Discipline": you do not want to know) people have used to find me, and ack. Blog crack, is what that is.

Confession the Third:
I have not finished one single book this month. SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH ME, CALL THE DOCTOR. (actually, it's that I've been crocheting, and I am not deft enough to read and crochet simultaneously like some people are. I can barely manage to watch a movie -- and boy have I been on an Austen/romantic comedy spree -- and crochet at the same time.) And I haven't found any really appealing books on CD at the library lately. Sometimes if I am still awake when I fall into bed, I pull out Mansfield Park and plow through a chapter or two. But that's it.

Confession the Fourth:
I took the Meyers-Briggs personality profile the other day, and the results showed my percentage leaning for each factor, and I came out almost exactly in the middle on every letter. I cannot even remember what I ended up with, it was that ambiguous. Does this mean that I have no personality? I am inclined to think so.

Wednesday, April 13, 2005

the best-laid plans...

Well, here's a list of things I meant to do before I went into the hospital:

1. Get fully caught up on laundry.
   
2. Make the house spotless.
   
3. Find a picture of the kids together to take with me. (one of the few evils of digital photos is that they're seriously less portable, unless you print them, which we can't since our printer hates us.)
   
4. Make a new journal template.

5. Write at least one journal post that wasn't full of whining, so that newcomers to my blog wouldn't run screaming the other way at the first sentence written by a person who gives Cousin Gladys in The Blue Castle a run for her money in the whining department. (Read This Now. This Means You.)
   
6. Go to the library and get some light-but-not-hilarious (because I know from experience that laughing after abdominal surgery is a huge no-no) books to take with me in addition to the stack I've already got going.
   
7. Wash my bathrobe. (this takes a load almost by itself. It's huge and blue and terrycloth.)
   

Now ask me how many of these things I got done. Go ahead, ask.

Maybe the BIG FAT ZERO you just heard has to do with the fact that I spent Monday in Yosemite, Tuesday in the valley doing pre-op stuff, and today working my hiney off (ha! I wish) helping to fell about 20 trees, and pulling brush, and stacking logs. T's dad (the realtor) had a client who wanted some property brushed and cleared a bit before he would agree to buy it, so T's dad hired us to do it. Today was the only day that my dad, T, and I could all work on it. LT and C helped also. I AM SO SORE OH MY GOSH SO SORE AND I CAN'T TAKE ADVIL. At least I'll have morphine tomorrow. That should knock out some muscle soreness pretty effectively, wouldn't you think?

Anyway. Ahem. This was supposed to be a NON-whiny post, wasn't it. Whoops.

Friday, March 04, 2005

I am SO grown-up

First, I have to get this out of the way. Yesterday we got up at the crack of dawn, which of course I photographed:

(OK, so that's sunrise, not dawn, quibble quibble. I'd also already been up for about an hour when I took that picture. Artistic license, OK? Oh, and you can click to see that bigger, in a new window)


We drove to first one city and then to another, to visit doctors. Here is what I learned (ooh, a list!):

• I have a flow murmur and a classic case of supraventricular tachycardia (neither of those things is actually that scary, but they sure sound like it).
  
• I will probably be having a hysterectomy sometime this spring.

• I should always turn off my cell phone at the GYN office, because otherwise I may end up talking to my dad whilst being examined, and folks, that just feels all wrong.
  
• T and I still have the happy ability to make a day of boring, necessary stuff into a date, just because we love each other and enjoy each other so much. (kids were with my parents).
  

Anyway, enough about that, on to the real news.

First, in case you are new to my journal(s), I must re-confess that I was a thirty-year-old woman who had never owned a pair of high-heeled shoes. This has to do with having reached my adult height (which is taller than average) in junior high, and all this deep-seated insecurity about being taller than everyone else. And also laziness, also known as "never getting around to it".

Yesterday, however, I figured, what the heck, and we bought me these:

T wants me to make sure you know that he picked them out. I said I wanted high heels, he did the rest. Aren't they darling? DO YOU SEE THE POLKA DOTS?

Then last night I wore them to a community chorus concert. My first time in high heels, how sweet. Now I need a frilly organza dress and a cute little ponytail.

(Seriously, though? HOW DO YOU WALK? I mean, is it really all about these little bitty short steps -- well, they're little bitty short to ME, anyway -- or is there some trick to moving quickly and gracefully at the same time which I just don't know about? And also, very freaky when you take off your shoes and feel like your heels are downhill from your toes.)

Monday, February 28, 2005

Stupid Thing Number Five Gazillion

I don't make nearly as many stupid mistakes as I used to. Really I don't. But tonight I did a doozy.

I was at community chorus rehearsal and the director was going over some instructions for an upcoming concert. I was sitting next to a homeschooling friend of mine, and we were already clear on the instructions he was giving, so we were being Underachieving Troublemakers, and chatting (as were three-quarters of the rest of the group). I mentioned that I was tired because T had had to go in to work so late last night and I'd stayed awake till he got home.

(At this point I have to interrupt myself and explain something. T's dad has exactly the same name as T. T's dad lives in our town and for the past year or so has been a real estate agent. EVERY SINGLE DAY someone will come up to T at work, and frequently to me as I go about my business around town, and make some comment about how T must be really busy with a full-time job PLUS a real estate business. This is small-town life for you. Anyway, we are really tired of explaining this situation. Back to the story.)

So my friend said, "Well, T is a realtor, right? What's he have to do in the middle of the night?"

I rolled my eyes, kind of snorted, and said, "That's my FATHER-IN-LAW, my FATHER-IN-LAW," in this semi-mock-annoyed tone of voice.

Right as the rest of the choir fell utterly silent and everyone including the director was staring directly at me, being the really bad (and loud, now that the room was silent) underachiever who was talking to her neighbor instead of paying attention to the teacher. It was really embarrassing. They probably think I run with scissors and waste paste, too.

Thursday, January 20, 2005

I can't possibly come up with a title for this one

note to self: when using Mozilla Firefox DO NOT ATTEMPT TO USE THE GOOGLE SEARCH WINDOW THINGIE WHEN TYPING A DIARYLAND ENTRY. Because the entry disappears. And the really bad thing is, that's the third time I've done this today. You'd think I'd have learned by now. I hate having to try to re-create what I'd already had typed out. Good thing I've had some diet Coke -- we were out of my crack substitute earlier today, which was part of why I was so crabby, I think -- or I would not have handled that as well as I did.

The new cat's name is (drumroll please) Henry. It was the first name we could all agree on; LT came up with it. And he already seems Henryish. And we don't know any Henrys, which is good, and nobody would agree to Fitzwilliam, Wentworth, or Rochester, which were my three suggestions. Frankly he doesn't LOOK like a nineteenth-century romantic hero -- but a girl has to try. Hmm, maybe I should have tried Frederick.

And now I am going to go to bed in my (never again to be painted by me) bedroom, in my own bed. It was a little weird, sleeping in C's bed and having T come lie down with me in the mornings, because hello, I slept on that bed from the age of 12 until I got married, and it was just a little... squeeby. I love our room right now, hospital-colored ceiling and all, because all it has in it is the bed and a small dresser on its beautiful hardwood floor. I wish it could be that minimalist all the time. Just being surrounded by clutter, before I even get out of bed in the morning, shoves my stress level up a few notches.

I plan to spend a lot of time this weekend reading and crocheting. The dratted bedroom is done, the house is "clean enough" -- I'm going to spend my time at home this weekend (which won't be as much as I like) folding laundry to the accompaniment of Austen adaptations, plowing into my new stack of library books (Ann Patchett, Maeve Binchy, Elizabeth Berg, and one I'd never heard of but it sounded interesting), and seeing how much of that blanket I can get done. ahhh. :) Of course I shouldn't plan for this, because as soon as I do that means it can't come to pass. Hmm. Maybe I'll figure on spending the weekend cleaning instead. ;-)

Saturday, January 15, 2005

******* painting

As I mentioned in the 1001 Days journal, I'm painting our bedroom. I've removed "this weekend" from that phrase because I see no way short of a miracle which includes a team of professional painters that I'll be done by Monday night. This is partly because we ended up zipping down to the valley this morning and didn't get back till 2:30, and partly because, dang, painting takes a whole lot of time. Or rather, preparing to paint does. I HATE PAINTING. I always forget how much I hate it in between episodes of it. T has suggested that I give myself a week and he'll plan on helping me put the trim back up on Friday. Which means a week of me sleeping in C's bed and T sleeping on the couch. That sounds sad. Except it means BLANKETS ALL TO MYSELF FOR SIX NIGHTS YAY.


Sorry, T. I really do love sleeping with you. I do. Really. I'm only tempted to do the 50's-TV-couple-twin-beds thing every ONCE in a while.

In other news: I am wearing a pedometer. I think it grossly overcounts. I am convinced that this is because I am wearing it at the front of my waist, like it says to do, and, well, that's a jiggly area. Which hopefully just wearing the pedometer will fix, right, I mean, that's a fitness regimen, isn't it?

I have noticed a decrease in the frequency -- the event density if you will -- of my Really Stupid Things. For a while I easily tallied up one or two a day. Now (and I don't think this is just because I'm not paying attention), I seem to be slowing down. Maybe it was turning 30. Today, however, I have made up for lost time. Moving furniture will do that. And was it the huge cumbersome mattress and box spring that gave me trouble? Nooo. The chest dresser? No, it was our little metal bedframe. Four measly lengths of angle iron bolted together in a rectangle, with legs and wheels attached, that C could probably have taken care of with very little trouble. Well, maybe not C, who is affectionately known between T and myself (never in her hearing) as "The World's Cutest Disaster". But LT, for sure. Anyway. It confounded me for several minutes and resulted in my incurring two minor-but-painful injuries. Because I am all cool that way.

Tuesday, October 19, 2004

thank you kitty. also plumbing. and other stuff.

Our bigger, more aggressive cat has strong hunting instincts. However, due to the dearth of mice at her location, she's turned to June bugs. And I hate Junebugs. So I will leave you to imagine my reaction when she hops up on our bed and offers me an enormous, twitching, oozing, spiky-legged, furry-antennaed specimen, like a gift.

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

Also, our plumbing (actually the town sewer system) is freaking out again. It happens when we get a lot of rain. Last spring we called a plumber, and he and the public utilities people passed the buck back and forth like it was some kind of new rainy-day elementary-school game. So today, when the washer drained onto the utility-room floor instead of into the sewer system like it's supposed to, I took matters into my own hands, and went out and checked the sewage access myself, while it was (here's a brainwave for the public utilities people) actually still raining. And lo and behold the pipe was full to the brim of rainwater, along with a lot of other nasty stuff. THEN I called them, told them it was definitively their problem, and supposedly they're going come out as soon as possible. I've no idea what they're going to be able to do about the situation, though. The water and sewer systems in this town were outdated in the forties when this development was built.

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

Dawn got me thinking yesterday about things I've lost. I started to make a mental list and I know I'm forgetting a lot of things, or blocking them out, more likely. But here are a few memorable ones.

• My high-school class ring. Last time I absolutely knew I had it was when I got engaged (October of 1993). The first time I missed it and absolutely couldn't find it was when I got back from my honeymoon (March of 1994). So there are six months during which, at some point, it vanished into thin air. For years after the wedding I would remember yet another place where I thought maybe I remembered setting it aside to keep it safe; I would check that spot next time I was at my parents', and I would be wrong. Finally I gave up. Old habits die hard, though; the other day I found myself wondering if Mom and Dad had ever had the traps out of their drains since then. Nevermind that the house was new when we moved in, and the drain covers have all been intact the entire time; the brain of a chronic thing-loser doesn't care about things like that.
  
• A ring my mom gave me in high school. This one makes me just sick. The ring wasn't worth much monetarily, but my mom bought it for me when she was on a work-related trip, and brought it home and gave it to me during one of the rare periods of my adolescence when we were just not getting along at all. I was so touched by the gesture, and then I lost the ring not two weeks later at a beach by the river, when I went there with "friends" late at night (that whole night was a total disaster). The next day I went back and looked for it for hours, but it was gone.
  
• A Zip-loc bag of crochet squares. This is the biggie. This is the item that we are still kind of actively looking for, because it just HAS to be somewhere, a gallon ziploc bag full to bursting with six months' worth of work doesn't just disappear. Except apparently it does.

Like I said, I know there are more things for this list. Someday when I die I will march straight up to God and ask Him where the vast repository is for all this kind of stuff that people lose and never find again. Because surely at least He must know.

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

Yesterday I was looking over my shoulder to back up while I was driving, and my neck totally spazzed. The pain got worse for an hour or so until I just couldn't move my head at all. So I spent the day lying around on a heating pad, reading. You may or may not recall that Sunday afternoon was spent the same way, minus the heating pad. Interestingly enough, one day of lying around leisurely plowing through a library book feels pleasantly decadent. Two days feels like I'm a lazy bum who needs to get off her couch and get something done, for crying out loud. Who knew my laziness tolerance would be quite so low? I've always craved a week where I could just do whatever I wanted, that being mostly sitting around and reading. And yet I get the opportunity and I can't even last two days without getting fidgety. Another of life's little dreams destroyed. **sigh**

Tuesday, October 12, 2004

various weird things

T and I were in Wal-Mart today with the kids and I was picking up some dry-erase markers for school. I was insisting on the $8 8-pack even though it cost more per marker than the dual-ended 8-pack -- 16 colors -- for $5. I mumbled reasons like "the brand is better on the more expensive ones" and "with that double-ended thing I KNOW you get less ink" and "where would I put the lid for the color I was using with that set? There's no room for it!" Finally T wrestled it out of me (well, not literally; we were in a public place and all, but you know what I mean): the real reason was that the cheaper ones were low-odor and OK so sue me, I like dry-erase smell, it's half the reason I use markers instead of chalk, what's wrong with that, huh? huh?

T didn't buy it until I came up with a comparison involving a 440 engine that sounded like a 225 6-cylinder.

Speaking of T, as soon as we got home from the city this evening, he got a call that whisked him off to work for who knows how long. Not only is there a series of new fires in Yosemite, and not only is there a new arsonist setting the fires, but also, apparently, there is some even freakier stuff going on that I am not going to be sure I have the liberty to post about on the Internet until I see it in the news first. Suffice to say that it all makes me (selfishly) very glad that T is just a radio guy.

Our TV is hooked up to the antenna right now, because of the presidential debates; we'll unplug it again after the election. Tonight I turned it on to see if there was anything on the news about the aforementioned freaky stuff, and "Jeopardy!" was on. This is the first time I've seen the infamous Ken Jennings. He doesn't do anything for me now -- after all, I'm a happily married woman -- but if I'd seen him do his thing when I was seventeen or so, he would have been serious crush material. And now you know exactly how weird I really am. In case the dry-erase odor thing hadn't already clued you in.

Tuesday, July 27, 2004

more snippets

just a bunch of little things, no one thing warranting its own entry...

snippet 1:
I remembered the second stupid thing from my camping trip. It involved a pan of spaghetti sauce, and one metal handle that wasn't hot, and one handle that was, and a really freakishly enormous blister on the pad of my thumb, and a relatively phenomenal amount of pain. I say "relatively" because I've had worse (um, c-sections), but for the amount of tissue involved, a burn packs quite a punch.

snippet 2:
We walked outside our house on Saturday morning to find a dead cat in our yard. It wasn't one of ours; it was one of the feral toms who wander around our neighborhood waiting for us to let our sweet young thangs outside (not gonna happen until they're spayed; a surprising amount of time and effort goes into making sure the cats don't escape the house). Anyway. So we had a dead cat to deal with; T used the shovel to take it into the bushes in the field near our house. And gee, I'm glad he did that, because we're supposed to learn something new every day, and now I know the direction of the prevailing wind (what little wind there is) around our house in the summer. The weather report helps with this:

GAG

Nothing like a little whiff of something dead coming in through the evaporative cooler to make your day special.

snippet 3:
I gained three pounds on vacation. Which is less than it feels like I've gained. Amazing how there's no good thing about how weight feels. You don't want to feel heavier than you are, but you don't want to be heavier than you feel either.

snippet 4:
My reading life has been a study in contrasts lately. Just before we left for vacation I read my advance readers' copy of Fire Along The Sky -- if you like historical fiction, romance, New York State, the early nineteenth century, Native American cultures, or just a ripping good story, you should pre-order this book TODAY, by the way. Then on vacation I read Northanger Abbey (Jane Austen*) and The Glass Lake (Maeve Binchy). THEN in the last week at home I've been reading the first Stephanie Plum mystery, The Fellowship of the Ring, and Ring of Bright Water, which is, so far, essentially an anthem to the natural scenery of the Western Scottish Highlands, although supposedly soon it will involve otter antics (unless the movie was an even worse adaptation than usual). Nobody can say I'm in a rut, anyway.

snippet 5:
All my nice ephemeral revolutionary thoughts about somehow finding a way for me to go back to college now instead of in eight or so years, as has been my plan since before my marriage, are becoming slightly less ephemeral. Suffice to say that T's boss is making me think that any life where T can be far from him would be way better than the alternative. He makes me say words that would never ordinarily come out of my mouth. I'm serious, he just MAKES me say them. Fortunately not to his face, but then I try to spend as little time around him as possible. See, there, I just had to stop one of those nasty words from spilling right out of my fingers onto the keyboard and into this journal. I am not sure yet what, if anything, will come of the revolutionary ideas. Realistically, since I've sworn a solemn vow that neither of my children will ever be enrolled in a public school and I intend to stand by that (not that T would let me change my mind on it even if, for some reason that would have to include either alien abduction or a frontal lobotomy or both, I should want to do so), there are a lot of obstacles to overcome if anything's going to change. But obstacles have been overcome before, so we'll see what happens.

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