Stupid Things Rachel Does Archives | Page 4 of 5
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Tuesday, July 20, 2004
back from vacation
We just got back from our ten-day camping vacation at the beach. I know you are all (all, what, two of you who read this?) eagerly awaiting the details of all the stupid things I must have done in ten whole days. Well, I am not one to disappoint. I did two monumentally stupid things, and such is my Internet addiction that I was fully aware as I was doing said stupid things that they were going in my journal for you all to snort at. Unfortunately I forgot the second thing, I really did. But the first one makes up for it. Picture a BMX-style bicycle course, dirt made into bumps for riding over. Are you picturing? Now, picture me, freshly arrived in town with my family, stopping at the bicycle park before heading to the campground because we were too early for our site to be ready. Picture us parking in the dirt lot which is pretty much an extension of the bike area. (and now you totally just guessed what happened, didn't you). Picture the family deciding to ride their bikes straight to the park, while I drove the car. I don't think I even have to finish. I will just say, when you high-center a big old 1991 Buick Park Avenue on a packed dirt bump, so that you have to be pushed off backward, it makes a very interesting scraping noise. And lots and lots of laughter from onlookers (who, fortunately for me, were all related to me by blood or marriage). And lots of jokes at the driver's expense for the NEXT TEN DAYS.
I also did a lot of minor stupid things, like constantly (constantly!) hitting my head on the two lanterns in camp which were suspended in the air so that their bottoms were precisely five feet and eight inches off the ground, and don't tell me nobody did that on purpose, just for my five-foot-nine self, either. I also scrupulously used sunscreen every time we got out of bed for the first five days of our vacation, which was not the stupid thing; the stupid thing was behaving as if sunburn were a virus to which we had all become immune, and forgoing sunscreen for a few days, and getting myself burned just as badly as if I'd never used it in the first place. Fun.
While we're on the subject of camping, I'll explain something. What we do, according to my
husband, is not actually camping. We "camp" at a level campground with fence partitions, clean bathrooms, hot showers, and a little store. This campground is between Highway 1 and the ocean, well within easy reach of such things as pizzerias and fish and chip shops and grocery stores and libraries. We even (ssshhh) sleep on an inflatable air mattress in our tent. I have, seriously, slept in EconoLodges that were less accommodating. No, if you're going to call it camping, it has to involve backpacks and extremely light sleeping bags, and tiny little one-person tents (or no tents at all), and water purification tablets and dehydrated food and, if possible, at least a few injuries requiring trailside first aid, bonus points for use of parachute cord in binding open wounds shut. You must hike to a place inaccessible by cars or even trail motorcycles, and brave bears and snakes and poison oak and emerge from the woods after a few days, filthy and triumphant, grunting like Marines in boot camp. This is camping. I never, ever, ever do this. Ever. I like my hot shower and at least a water spigot at my campsite with potable water. This is why for the first few years of our marriage, T and I did not camp together. He would do his manly hiking-in routine with his buddies once a year, and I would stay home and try not to think about rattlesnakes and mountain lions. Finally we reached a compromise. He'll camp my way; he just prefers to think of it as staying in a very inexpensive motel.
We had a great time, but it was so good to get home. We missed our cats (who didn't demolish the house as badly as we feared while we were gone); the kids missed their toys; I missed having my own toilet within fifteen feet of my bed. I never realize how many times I get up in the night for the bathroom until I spend a few days having to put on sandals and walk twenty yards through the cold foggy night to get to one.
I could keep going, but instead I'll just post a few billion pictures for the benefit of those few souls still in the Dial-Up Dark Ages.
the kids and their daddy in the ocean
C, just too cool for her training wheels, which she shed before the end of our trip (so did both of her cousins)
LT, also looking very cool
The infamous bicycle bumps. This isn't the one I drove onto.
We went to a GREAT rummage sale and got a ton of things (because it was just so easy to pack ten days' worth of our lives on the way there; we wanted a little more excitement. Or not). One thing we got was a shoebox full of Playmobil and Lego stuff for a dollar. C made this diorama of Ma, Pa, and Carrie in their covered wagon. And if you don't know who Ma, Pa, and Carrie are, I feel very sorry for you.
We hiked up this smallish hill where we got a great view of the surrounding area. This is Morro Rock with the power plant (which we actually like, it says vacation to us as loud as the rock does) with a fog coming in from the ocean. Worth the hike. My SIL and I decided that the top of the mountain, with its not-quite-accidental-looking dirt, rocks, and shrubs, looked like a set from a TV show; we kept expecting Hoss and Little Joe to show up and fight some bad guys or something.
Me in the Bonanza set.
Minas Tirith made of sand
I usually would take a book and sit at the laundromat while I waited for my laundry to finish. C was copying me, and then her cousin came along and they were looking at the book (another rummage sale find) together. Too too cute.
Saturday, July 03, 2004
Rachel's Lessons for Life
1. If you are working on an important document? Like, say, someone's resumé, for your work on which they are paying you a hundred dollars? And you have just made the most brilliant section EVER and everyone is high-fiving everyone else about how totally employable this person sounds because of you? You should definitely save the document. In fact you should have saved it several times already. And in the event that you attempt to close a window, even if you don't THINK it's the window with the magical $100 document in it, and it asks you to save? You should really triple-check before you click no.
1a. Rewriting is a bitch and it never comes out quite the same as it did the first time.
2. "Take and bake" pizzas should come on sturdier cardboard. That way they are less likely to wind up (uncooked, but not for long) all over the bottom of a 450-degree oven.
Funnily enough, I was having a fantastic day for quite a while today. Now I could cheerily boil myself in oil (and I don't think my son had heard me say that particular word before. But he has now. Because I am The Mother of the Year.)
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Sunday, June 27, 2004
phone therapy
I think I need to go to a Phone Therapy Center. There must be such a place, right? Where they use, I dunno, shock therapy, to make spazzes like me more effective telephone communicators? Maybe after a course at the State Facility for Telephone Losers, I would be more confident about phone use, and wouldn't dread it so. Because right now, frankly, most of the time, my feeling is, why would God have invented the Internet, if he had wanted us to talk on the phone and make utter fools of ourselves? After a six-week commitment, though, that could all be changed.
Scene: Rachel is pretending to talk on a toy phone. Wires trail from electrodes attached to Rachel's shaved skull (hey, I've always wanted to shave off this unhealthy mess and start fresh. Another plus).
Rachel: says "like", as in, "So I was like" [ZOT!!] [begins to tell story she's told to this person twice already] [ZOT!!]
exceeds limit of 15 words per second[ZOT!!]
babbles. [ZOT!!] says, "so, ANYWAY" [ZOT!!] starts a friendly conversation with a person conducting a survey [ZOT!!]
At night they would play subliminal messages over the speakers in my cell in a soft, soothing monotone: "Nobody wants to hear your talk to your child for forty-five seconds in the middle of a conversation. You always spit out your gum before you answer the phone. Your voice does not sound nearly as nasal to others as it does inside your head. Other people know how to finish their own sentences...."
Do you think they'd have basket weaving? I've always wanted to learn basket weaving.
Saturday, June 05, 2004
mid-day ramble
I am less enamored with my inline skates than I was this morning. Let's just say that while I know and am grateful that falling full length on my side, somehow managing to avoid landing on any part of my body wearing protective padding while hitting every OTHER part, and impacting the ground in a most spectacularly forceful way -- I am envisioning it in a Bill Nye video, repeated several times backed by frenetic music and then played in slow-mo -- anyway, as I was saying, I realize that this is much easier on my 29-year-old body than it would be in, say, forty years. As in, I'm still alive. But dang. It is also a LOT less fun than it was when I was ten, you know? OUCH.
With that out of the way, I'll move on. We had our first swim of the year today, in the neighbor kids' pool. I love that feeling of coming home from swimming and changing out of my suit, and my skin is still all cool, so the warm air in the room feels a little bit pleasant, and I almost want to put on something long-sleeved just because I could wear it for five minutes without passing out from the heat. Have I mentioned I really don't like summer? The only things I like about it are the ones that temporarily put summer ickiness on hold -- like swimming, or being at the beach where the temperature is ALWAYS in the sixties or seventies. For the rest -- blah. Except for clothesline-dried sheets. Those are bliss and summer's the only time I can have them. Still and all I'd trade if I could.
I'm going to have a sappy moment right now. You can leave if you want to. Today my daughter began to read for the first time. As if that weren't emotional enough for me as it is. But then right after she did that, her brother was watching a home video, and there was my one-year-old daughter, saying her first word (which was "hat"). Sniff.
*C is an unschooler's dream. For all you mainstream people who don't know what unschooling is ;-), it's basically extreme homeschooling, where not only does the child not go to school, but the family doesn't even "do school" at home. They just kind of absorb knowledge as they go and study what they're interested in. Now, we don't do this. I don't quite have the guts for it and I'm always a little afraid that my kids would grow up with gaps in their knowledge -- like say the times tables, because who ever wants to learn those? -- although I am closer to it than I ever thought I would be. For example, instead of starting Sit Down School with C at 3, like I did with her brother, I have never done any of that with her at all, and she's been able to just play and color and do little workbook pages she liked or whatever while her brother does school. And yet she is reading at exactly the same age he did.
Monday, May 10, 2004
this is why I should never volunteer for anything
I just made a flyer for our community chorus's concert coming up next week. (you all are invited. It will be awesome, of course. Plus then you get to smell my very favorite smell: high-school auditorium. YUM. Wish I could bottle it and wear it.*) ANyway. I am, let's just say, less than great at making flyers and stuff like that, which is exactly why I'm the PR person for the chorus, right? Or maybe it's because I showed up at the committee-forming meeting last summer, and EVERYONE who showed up got a job, and it was that or secretary and I genuinely, utterly SUCK at taking minutes. SUCK. So. I am the PR person, and as such my job was to make this flyer to stick in windows around town to beg people to come pay $4 for a rather amateur concert. And this was the hardest job I have done in ages. Potty-train? easy. Teach multiplication tables? A total cinch. Put together my awesome and wonderful porch swing? really a lot of fun. But it took me a mouth-breathing two hours to finally produce a flyer that didn't make me want to throw myself off a cliff so as to never have to see anyone in the chorus again. And even as it is I may have to wear a disguise next time I see them all.
First the flyer was just this plain vanilla boring THING, so I was furiously searching the Internet for clip art that a) was free b) did not depict cartoonishly-stupid people singing with their uvulas showing and c) had something faintly to do with music (this is harder than you may think). I got the brilliant idea to use a staff of musical notes at the top and the bottom, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it, because of this: I discovered just tonight that I have a major pet peeve, and that is staffs of music used for decoration that are absolute rubbish and aren't real music. I always knew that I liked to take my Peanuts comic books and play the music above Schroeder's head on the piano (it was Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor once, which is, I have to say, the only piece of music ever composed for the organ that I actually like), but I never realized the depth of my obsession with this until I couldn't bring myself to use the usual mumbo-jumbo meaningless tripe for a stinking BORDER, which nine-tenths of the people who view it will simply absorb as background without fully seeing it. All was happy, however, when I found an online source for sheet music and was able to use a staff from an actual song which we are actually singing. And now I can go to bed, musical integrity intact, although I'm not going to be applying for a job as a graphic designer anytime soon.
*you know how everyone always says this about fragrances they like? I was in a perfume outlet store in Florida and saw that someone has actually TRIED. They had a little display of bottles of perfume scented like dirt, grass, rain, and an assortment of even more bizarre things which I can't remember offhand. I thought, huh, what a neat idea, and sprayed one, and you know what? The whole idea of wearing the scent of grass is really scary when it comes right down to it. That stuff STANK.
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Sunday, March 28, 2004
just exactly how freakish AM I?
note to self: Either make somewhat-strenuous hill hikes part of a daily/weekly regimen, or don't do them at all. You know you always end up moaning in pain if you do, say, one every five years.
However, I think the views were worth the aches and pains:
(These are thumbnails; you can click on them to view the full-sized pictures. ha. Remember when 340x256 was a full-sized picture?
Also, yes, this is near where I live; my parents' house is in one of the pictures. Lucky me. And no, none of it's for sale.)
Also, while I have your attention (oh shut up, I hear you laughing, no, wait, that's snoring...), I have a question. Just exactly how freakish am I? I mean, here's something that happened to me about fifteen minutes ago: I was scooping ice cream (Dulce de Leche, which is Spanish for "my current diet-disaster obsession"). Somehow a good-sized scoop of ice cream managed to roll off the scooper and in my attempt to catch it, since I was holding the ice cream carton in one hand and the scoop in the other and hence was rendered as manually dexterous as, oh, a cow, I ended up trying to capture it in the crook of my elbows, but I failed. Can you get a mental image of this? This kind of thing (thankfully not this precise situation) happens to me with some regularity. Now, back to my question. Am I the only one? Was I brought to earth from some distant Planet Freakishness and switched, in the dark of night, for the perfectly normal and graceful baby my parents should have had? Am I some kind of changeling from the clumsiness fairy? Or is this the kind of thing that some other people (I can't hope that everyone does this) do also, and just nobody talks about? Or maybe I shouldn't ask this question. Nevermind, don't answer.
Thursday, March 18, 2004
um, ouch
Here's one for the Stupid Things I Did Today column. (ever since I made that comment in the entry last week about how I think I do something stupid every day, I've been kinda keeping track, and it is so completely depressingly true. Usually multiple stupid things each day, albeit small ones.) I was bending over to put groceries away in the fridge and when I stood up I smacked my head extremely, very, really, extra hard against the freezer door handle. I cried, I literally did, and I cannot remember the last time I cried in pain. I don't think I even cried when I was having my third c-section and the anesthesia wore off before they finished stapling me, and the afterpains, and the shameless begging for morphine, and augh. Anyway. Back to the present, I was standing there snuffling and holding my head and kind of rocking back and forth and trying not to cry in front of the kids, and WHACK, I rocked "forth" right into the open front door, end-on, which not only hurt the top of my head and made my neck feel oddly compacted, but it also, well, was really stupid. Meanwhile my daughter was beside herself trying to figure out how to make me feel better because MOMMY IS CRYING RED ALERT RED ALERT -- offering me cookies, candy, flowers ("Let me go into the backyard real quick [holding up one finger] and see if there are any flowers that blossomed and I'll get you some. OK?"). And I now have a really big bump on the back of my head, like I used to get all the time... when I was ELEVEN. And the pain has still not gone away.
While I'm adding things to lists, here's one to add to my Things I Once Swore I Would Never Do But Now Do With Unabashed Enthusiasm (right under "have an online diary"). I am wearing capri pants. When they came back in, first I went, "eew." Then I thought, "OK, they're all right on thin women but they're certainly not for me. They've been slowly growing on me, and then I got a few pairs from a church friend who's losing weight and shrunk out of her 12's (I'll be there someday! I swear! Just let me finish eating this peanut-butter-and-fudge cookie first!), and I've been wearing them, and, well, really liking them. (and hey, I only have to shave below the knee; that's pretty cool, no?) I even wear them with a button-down blouse tied in a knot at my waist. Next thing you know I'll be wearing Birkenstocks and watching cable TV. No I won't.
Friday, March 12, 2004
FREAKING
I did a really stupid thing today.
You know, I think I could say that most days.
But anyway. Today I was running late for the kids' Awana meeting, and I realized that I did not have enough gas to get us there and back, so I swung into the gas station as I was leaving town. We belong to this "fueling network" kind of thing where you have to be a member to use their stations and generally the prices are pretty good if you can find a station in your area -- plus it's a charge account kind of thing where you pay once a month. It's an enterprise that's heavy on truckers and low on restrooms. ANYWAY. I kept swiping my card and the dang machine wouldn't read it, the stupid freaking machine kept saying it couldn't read my freaking card, what IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS HOLY is wrong with this FREAKING machine??!? It was like that. (might I point out the extreme appropriateness of this attitude as I was ferrying my jubilant offspring to a Bible-study club meeting, at which I am a leader?) I slammed back into the car, handed the FREAKING card to my son and asked him to put it back in my purse while I drove, and screeched back onto the road, hoping we had enough gas to make it to the next gas station five miles away. My son said, with typical 7-year-old helpfulness, "Are you sure this is the right card?" Snapped I in reply: "Of course it's the right -- oh."
The most embarrassing part was having to again encounter the anonymous stranger who was still filling his tank at the station and who had just had to witness my fuming and FREAKING at the card machine and whose presence at said FREAKING I had shrugged off because I'd probably never see him again. Whoops.
* * * * *
Today wasn't all bad, though. I am about five minutes from being finished with the jeans quilt I've been working on -- which is a little sad, actually, because now I won't get to work on it and listen to books on tape anymore. Maybe I'll have to -- gasp -- start another sewing project, or work on one of the way-too-many crochet projects I have underway. AND, yay, I once again have a digital camera, thanks to a man on eBay, who, bless his heart, happened to have one exactly like my dead one, except not dead, for only $20 plus shipping. So I will leave you with a picture, just because I can. :)
Friday, February 20, 2004
clever me
Here's something for my list of Things I Shouldn't Have To Learn From Experience This Many Times (and when you're me, that list is pretty long):
- If you insist on putting a wooden spoon down into the non-moving mass at the bottom of the blender "just to get it moving", you will be picking slivers of wood out of your smoothy until you finish it. Idiot.
Monday, January 12, 2004
note to self
Note to self:
You know, just because your four-year-old daughter takes ballet lessons and you're all enthusiastic about that, don't assume that it's acceptable to be standing in a semi-public place (like, say, the sink-and-towels segment of a ladies' room while waiting for said daughter to finish in the stall) and suddenly start practicing one of said daughter's ballet "moves." To you, it's a four-count battement frappé, with the arms in second position. To a casual observer, it's extremely bizarre. You know, like that kid (who was, except for the Y chromosome, unnervingly like the juvenile version of you, poor haircut, overdone facial expressions, pop-cultural cluelessness, and all) in About A Boy, with his accidental singing, which, hello, you ALSO do from time to time. For crying out loud, BE AWARE OF WHAT YOU'RE DOING. Thanks.
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