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Tuesday, March 01, 2005

The kind of morning moms dream of

Well, some kind of moms, anyway.

The community chorus* had a rehearsal with the high school choruses this morning, since we are performing with them for a couple of songs at their concert this Thursday. I took the kids with me (obviously), and sat them in a couple of auditorium chairs with their schoolwork while I stood with a bunch of girls who were BABIES when I was their age and practiced singing. And here's the good part: those two angels (they're angels this morning, anyway ;) sat there quietly for the entire hour and did their work without giving me even a single smidge of regret for having had to bring them.

I'm writing this down so that the next time I feel like I am useless as a parent and my kids will have me in the asylum within fifteen minutes, I can read it, and hope. ;-)

*I don't get out much. The community chorus and church and Awana and Bible study, that's pretty much it. The chorus is the only one of those things that I do on my own, without the rest of the family, so it is pretty much the extent of my adult social exposure. So you'll probably hear about it a lot. Maybe I should put a picture of it in the sidebar.

By the way, I've been doing my reading every day. (pats self on back). I am using a modified version of a through-the-Bible-in-a-year plan that divides the days up into The Law, History, Prophecy, etc. Instead of going from one section to the other on successive days, though, I'm reading a book from one section, and then going on to a book from another, so as to have more context. It will still work out to take a year. That's if I don't slack. Which I may well do.

I'm also planning to put up a post about chapter summaries soon, probably when I actually start working on mine for the next study.

Monday, February 28, 2005

Breaking out of a rut

Lately I have been in a serious cooking rut. I began to dread the inevitable "What's for dinner?" when T would call me from work. The family would gather around me like baby birds with their mouths wide open, and I would throw in some hot dogs or a take-and-bake pizza or the occasional batch of spaghetti and run screaming from the room. I WAS TIRED OF IT, the neediness and yet the pickiness.

But when it comes right down to it, it's not really pickiness. Someone in our household (and I'm not naming names but I may happen to be married to him) just has really weirdo tastes in food. Here is a short sampling of the list of foods he doesn't like me to cook (note: if you happen to have ever cooked any of these things for my husband, don't feel bad. He doesn't HATE them. He just prefers when he's home and has some control, not to have to eat them.):

• Roast beef, and any of its trimmings (including really awesome potatoes roasted along with the meat. Right there, that shows you that something is wrong with him)
  
• Chicken pot pies, even yummy homemade ones
  
• Meatloaf, even really GOOD meatloaf, not the bricks of hamburger and oatmeal with ketchup slathered on top that defined meatloaf in the house where he grew up
  
• Baked potatoes
  
• Scalloped potatoes
  
• Any kind of potatoes except for a) mashed or b)Lipton onion roasted
  
• Soup, except clam chowder, which, hello, costs as much to make as a dinner out, so why cook?
  
• Stew
  

So I figured that I would stop teasing him and haranguing him about all his weird issues about food (we've been married eleven years and for nearly all that time I've worked very hard to try to convince him that just because his mother didn't know how to cook something doesn't mean that it isn't a worthwhile dish), and I had him make a list of foods he does like. Said list follows.

• Pancakes.
• Spaghetti.
• Pancakes.
• French toast which he can't eat because it has eggs in a recognizable eggy format, which for some reason cause his hiatal hernia to flare up to "hospitalization" levels
• Lipton Onion Roasted Potatoes
• Tacos
• Pancakes.
• Biscuits and gravy
• Chicken Marsala with Italian red sauce
• and let's not forget pancakes.

(if I could make a little cartoon drawing of myself with smoke above my head, I would put it here.)

So last night I pulled out this box of recipe cards that T bought before we got together. It was one of those things where they send you a sample set and explain that for X number of dollars a month you keep getting more and more cards until you have *fanfare* THE ULTIMATE RECIPE COLLECTION. He thought, hey, women like men who cook, and since he was in the market for a wife, he signed up and paid the X dollars for a couple of years until he figured out that he would be receiving recipes until he died, and that he had never used a single one of these (rather expensive) cards, at which time he canceled. A few years later I inherited this collection when I married him (and all he had in the refrigerator was a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter, and a jar of jam. He did have some really cool T-Fal pans, though). I never used them much -- I had first my trusty Betty Crocker cookbook and then the Internet to tell me how to make pancakes, spaghetti, chicken marsala, and French toast. ANYWAY. Last night I pulled out these cards and sat on the couch while he sat next to me, fiddling on the computer, and we played flash cards. Anything I thought he MIGHT not dislike, I would hold it up and he would say "OK" or "No way". When we were done I had a stack of about sixty recipes to try. Not bad, and it's way better than giving up and making spaghetti. Again.

Tonight I made "Southwestern Chicken Wraps" which were actually really good. Or maybe I was just really hungry, I dunno.

our weekend in pictures

Well, it's 3 a.m. and I'm at the computer. I have a good reason to (still) be up -- honest I do! T was called into work at 11 p.m. because, it turns out, a power outage caused some problems with radio transmission thingamabobs, and since he works in telecommunications, radio transmission thingamabobs are his job. (You can see by my extensive use of technical terminology that his knowledge has rubbed off on me a really whole lot, can't you.) He just called and said he's heading home, so he should be here within an hour or so. I just hope he doesn't have to turn around and go back in at 6AM like usual.

We had a really nice weekend up until about four hours ago. ;-) Yesterday we went with my parents to pick oranges at their neighbor's house. She is an elderly woman whose ranch, including the orange orchard, has been in her family for a hundred years (literally, this year). She can't pick the oranges herself anymore, so it's become tradition for our extended family (and a few others we drag along each year) to go do it for her when the oranges are ripe. Here are a few of the last pictures I'll be taking with my dinosaur of a digital camera before my wonderful anniversary present arrives this week:

This picture shows not only a very good reason why I need a new digital camera, but also the view from the top of the orange tree I was picking. It's harder to stand fifteen feet up a ladder and take a picture than you might think. :)

The person who finds the smallest orange each year "wins". We're not sure exactly what the person wins -- bragging rights? The first turn in the lunch buffet? (mmm, fried chicken this year. It's a good deal for all concerned -- the neighbor gets her orange crop in and we all a lot of exercise, enough oranges to last us quite a while, and five extra pounds apiece thanks to the fantastic lunch she cooks up for us.)

Cows in the road. How often do you encounter that on the way to work?

Back at my parents' ranch, we spent some time splitting wood, because we were nearly to the point of burning our furniture at home. Here are LT and C helping my dad drive the tractor into the shed to get the splitter.

We recently made a very important discovery at my parents'. Namely that straw on a steep slope is just as good as snow for tobogganing. Visits to Grandpa's will never be the same again.

C tied her shoes by herself for the first time after dinner on Saturday. That screeching sound you heard at about 6:00 Pacific time was my daughter running around to everyone in the house (and that was a lot of people) shrieking about her accomplishment.

Sunday, February 20, 2005

back in the saddle again

I did not fall off the face of the earth this weekend. It's just that T thought that he could use MY computer (the nerve!) to play Civilization III, also known as Computer Game Crack as far as T is concerned. So my computer time has been seriously diminished, with the result that my house is a relatively clean, I'm pretty much caught up on laundry, and I've read about three hundred pages of Les Misérables since Friday. I've also almost forgotten how to type. Again I say, the nerve of him. On my computer!
**********
Last night we (well, mostly I, as T was ensnared in the aforementioned web of addiction) watched Lost in Translation. I liked it pretty well, with the exception of a few scenes which I'm sure the director thought were essential but I did not. T hated it. Probably this has something to do with the fact that he only heard it, and it's really a very visually-told story.
**********
Today was my nephew's 6th birthday party. We gave him a dinosaur marionette and a bicycle license plate with his name on it, and I ate more cake and ice cream than I ought to have. Highlight of the afternoon: My two 77-year-old grandmothers (the whiny one and the spunky, feisty one, for those of you keeping track) explaining the concept of some asinine reality TV show to the rest of us ("no, it's not swapping wives like SEX swapping wives..."). Or wait, maybe that was the low point. Also, I actually took some pictures with my brother's (cue Monty Python heavenly chord) NIKON D70. That camera is so far out of my league. I am the total ugly nerd girl freshman who trips over her shoelaces, and it is the supernice intelligent artistic athletic senior guy with the muscles and the great clothes and the perfect hair. Who has to shave. I have such a crush on it. I think I'll go write its initials on my bookcovers.

Thursday, February 17, 2005

new contacts. And that's just the beginning of this long ol' rambly snippety entry

I am wearing contact lenses for the first time today. It is a little freaky, but not as freaky as many people think it would be. The main thing is that the darn things don't work as well as my new glasses do. Things look just a leeeetle bit blurry. So it's just as well that I hadn't planned to spend $240 four times a year to wear contacts full-time, eh? But they'll be good enough to wear for, say, chorus concerts or fancy dates, which are pretty much the only times I ever dress up.

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

Also, tonight we framed a Jack Vettriano print we've had rolled up in our closet for SIX YEARS. Because we are all efficient like that. Actually it's because we finally figured a little while ago that it probably didn't make much sense to spend $200 for custom framing for a print that cost $35 in 1999 dollars. It's called "The Singing Butler" and it is the only piece of art with which we have ever both fallen in love at first sight.



It now hangs above our FANTASTIC NEW COUCH. Because finally we have a couch worthy of having something hung over it.

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

Last night I was telling LT about a restaurant that used to be in town called The Sugar Pine. It was just a little diner but I loved it and still miss it often. I told LT that for $6.31 including tax but not tip you could get a big basket of just-right crispy fries and two enormous chocolate milkshakes, served in a glass with the rest of the shake making frost on the outside of the metal canister in which it had been mixed, the best milkshakes ever made. LT protested that they couldn't be better than my milkshakes, and I told him that indeed they are way better than any milkshake I could ever make, and he said, in a very serious voice, AND I QUOTE, "Well, then they would have to be made by Jesus."

THAT'S MY BOY. Who got a chocolate milkshake when we got home.

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

Also, one fun thing about five-year-olds -- or mine anyway -- is that they really believe it when you tell them that the white screen when there's no slide in the projector is a picture of a polar bear standing by an igloo in the snow. And they assure you that they can see it, see, there's the head.

Monday, February 14, 2005

YAY. yay yay yay.

DO YOU SEE THE HAPPINESS?





Do you notice the ABSENCE of the atrocious monstrosity of a couch?





Yeah baby, no more ugly 1970's throwback quilted ugly big-print brown-and-whatever UGLY couch.*



It's really serendipitous, the way this all happened. We were looking at thrift stores in the Valley on Saturday for a slide projector for T**, and we stopped at this one store and a guy met us at the door and said, sorry, they were closing, and while T asked if they had any slide projectors (they didn't), I saw this very nice*** couch and a matching loveseat behind the guy, and we asked how much they were, but we didn't get to see the fronts of them, only the backs. The store was closed yesterday, but I set things up so that I could go down this morning and check them out, see if they were in good enough shape and make sure they didn't smell like cigarette smoke (smokers, you fully have the right to do whatever you want with your lungs and your stuff, don't get me wrong, but dang, your furniture stinks), and if they were, I'd buy them (because we can take the money out of our summer vacation budget), and I had my dad on call to come down and haul them home for me. Dads of the world, listen, if you want to save yourself a lot of trouble, and you have a daughter, just buy her her own easy-and-cheap-to-operate pickup truck when she leaves home. Seriously. You will thank yourself later. Anyway. I digress. To finish the story without dragging it out any further, they looked gently used but worth the money and a FAR sight better than what we had in our living room at the time, so I called Dad, took the kids to the park and the little dollar zoo while we waited for him, took him and Mom out to lunch before we headed home, and by 3:30 I had happiness in my living room.



On Friday night at my dad's we're not going to set the other couch on fire because that is just not environmentally sound. And I would, um, never EVER do anything that's not environmentally sound. Right? And there probably won't be any pictures of me not doing that afterward, in this journal. So don't expect anything like that.



Speaking of serendipitous. The discount I got for having my dad pick up the couch (it's senior discount day at the thrift store) was exactly (within pennies) what it cost to take him and Mom and the kids and me to lunch. How cool is that?

*and no more serviceable-but-not-exactly-great Nagahyde loveseat either. That thing was COMFORTABLE though. Like a cushioned box. Great for curling up in to read. Except for that squeaky, sweat-sticky Nagahyde thing. Anyway. It's gone, but we're not going to burn it (of COURSE); we'll just take it to the SPCA for their ongoing rummage sale/thrift store thing. It's in good enough shape that someone might want it.

**We didn't find a projector to buy but we borrowed one and looking at T's astronomical photos, taken on slide film, projected on a screen in the dark? Totally awesome.

***did I ever mention how much I wanted a blue-checked couch and loveseat? Or that the few times I've seriously considered making a slipcover for the one we had [read: tons of work and a good outlay of money as well] I would gravitate toward a fabric that was almost exactly like the one you see in the pictures above this text? HAVE YOU SEEN THE BACKGROUND ON THIS PAGE? Just, yay.

Sunday, January 30, 2005

sunday afternoon and the living is easy

This sinus infection is still hanging on, although it's better than it was. Now I only feel like my head is going to explode if I sniffle, or if I bend over to pick up something off the floor. Just enough to make life interesting, right?

Henry the cat (who, you may remember, was coughing) is still coughing. He has a vet appointment on Tuesday, which was the soonest they could get him in. I am worried enough about him to have been excited enough to run outside and tell T about half an hour ago when I saw him drinking water from his dish. He behaves nearly normally during the day -- still a champion purrer, even. But at night the poor boy coughs and/or sneezes in the most miserable-sounding way. It reminds me of when the kids would get croup, and you'd wait for night with a mixture of dread, hope, and curiosity -- will it start getting better tonight? I even have the humidifier running for him. :)

When we got home from church today T made me lie down on the couch and take a rest. I started out reading Anne of Green Gables (which I have pretty much memorized, but I can't just start with Anne of Avonlea because that would be Reading Out Of Order), got as far as Anne crying herself to sleep in the east gable on her first night at Green Gables, and laid the book down "to close my eyes for a few minutes". I woke up THREE HOURS LATER. I actually got to take a nap on a Sunday afternoon. I will have to mark it on the calendar.

This is a nice week coming up. T only works three days, since I have a doctor's appointment AND we both have optometrist appointments tomorrow, and then Friday is his usual Friday off. So we have two three-day weekends in a row, PLUS he has Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of the next week off because we're taking our little overnight to Morro Bay so I can see the 6.7-foot high tide and the I-can't-remember-the-number-but-it's-really-low minus tide because I am a total geek and a half. Also because we need to eat the best fish and chips in the world. So T has a three-day week, then a two-day week, then a four-day week (regular Friday off) and then another four-day week (President's Day) and then ANOTHER four-day week (regular Friday off). Maybe after that he can break a bone to get some real time off. (Um, that's a joke. But seriously, we had such a blast when his ankle was broken two winters ago and he was home for 2 1/2 months solid. Yeah, he was in pain, and yeah, I had to wait on him hand and foot, but the whole family got to be together for such a nice long time. And compared to being at work with his word-I-don't-use-unless-I'm-really-super-angry of a boss, that sort of "vacation" looks really pleasant right now.)

And before I lapse into a hyphen-and-parentheses-induced coma (ack! there I go again! and here, too! oh dear), I will go update my 1001 Days journal and then fold some laundry, because Mommy Guilt won't let me just spend an ENTIRE day in idleness. Not today, anyway. :)

Thursday, January 27, 2005

feeling snippety

I feel snippety. All these little journal-thoughts keep skittering through my head, but nothing long enough for a whole entry. So, here; I'll nail a few of them down long enough to type them, as I do other stuff online:

Today's Lessons had not one but TWO concepts I wanted to steal today. One was blogging every hour all day long about what had gone on in the previous hour (which is much, MUCH more interesting in that particular author's house with her five children than it would be in mine) -- and one, which I may actually go ahead and steal since she OFFERED it like that, is "Before and After Thursdays" -- where I would take a picture of a room in my house before cleaning it, then clean it, then take a picture after, and blog about the whole thing. Oh good Lord that could get a little embarrassing though. Maybe nevermind on that one.

You know what motherhood smells like? It smells like VapoRub. We were not a Vick's family when I was growing up -- I did not even know that there was anything you could do about a stuffy nose besides drink hot tea and wait, until I was a nanny and was introduced to the wonderful world of Dimetapp Elixir -- but when I married T, I found that any time he was stuffy he'd use VapoRub. I still don't like to use it myself, but it works wonders for the kids so anytime we all start getting sick, I smell like it, from spreading it on their sweet little narrow chests. Sometimes as I'm applying it I think about the change that ten more short years will make to those knobby little kid chests, and I just want to grab my kids and take them someplace where they will stay young until I'm tired of it and can let them proceed with growing up.

Henry (the cat, remember?) is sleeping on the chair near me. He wakes up and sneezes periodically, and it startles me. I am such a worrywart about pets (kids' illnesses, I am familiar with; animals are a whole different world) that I have to work hard to stem the fear that he's going to get sick and die. Because he sneezes.

I was tucking LT into bed tonight and I put an extra blanket on him; it was the Toy Story one he got for I think his second birthday. One side features Buzz and the other Woody. When I put it on him I remembered that I used to ask him, as I made his bed each day, whether he wanted Buzz or Woody showing. He would almost always say Buzz, but occasionally would relent and choose Woody because he knew that Woody was my favorite. I reminded him about it, and we laughed. I had completely forgotten about that little ritual until tonight. It makes me wonder how many other things I've forgotten. While I was clearing out our dresser so that I could move it to paint our room (I AM DONE PAINTING), I came across a little note from myself to T from the first year of our marriage and it contained an inside joke of which I have absolutely no recollection. There was a time when I thought that could never happen. That's thirty for you, I guess. :)

Since the other snippets have skittered away, apparently never to return, I present:
11:05 PM At Rachel's House

A Photo Essay

Henry, asleep on C's coat. (now he is coughing a little bit too. Must not panic.)

Mary, in her favorite sleeping position (although she does often get more contorted than this).

DO YOU SEE THE EMPTINESS? I walk into this room and the shock is, well, shocking. It's unrecognizable. Laundry has been my let's-return-to-sanity-now-shall-we occupation this week. I am not sure HOW sane it is to obsess about getting to the bottoms of every single one of our hampers, to the tune of about 20 (small, because our new-to-us washer and dryer were apparently made for single people, or something) loads of laundry washed, dried, folded, and put away, over the course of three days, but oh well. At least I made it all the way through "Pride and Prejudice" while I did the folding.

Me. Man, I look tired. And also, more like my dad every time I see myself. Dad, in turn, looks remarkably like a Caucasian version of Bill Cosby (which is not, you understand, a bad thing for HIM, being male, but oh goody, just think what's in store for me in about 20 more years).

In between loads of laundry this afternoon, since P&P had long since been finished, and, well, because I am the kind of person who likes this sort of thing, I rearranged my living room. The atrocious couch used to be on the left, and the computer and ugly loveseat on the right, with the computer nearer the camera. I also switched positions of the stereo cabinet and TV. The reason for this (other than just my love of change) was so that I could wire the computer sound through the stereo. Which I did ALL BY MYSELF, and I also fixed it so that the DVD player's sound can go through the TV or the stereo or both, instead of just the stereo as was previously the case. This is all thanks to Dawn and her Go Girl Power inspiration, dating from early in our diaryland acquaintance when we were both so new at it that we were using the stock templates. Or I may have been in the fuzzy duckling stage by then; I don't remember.

Notice the little container of VapoRub sitting on top of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. Now please avert your eyes from the rest of the clutter, especially the one basket of laundry which I swear I am folding as soon as I post this, I SWEAR, and also my shoe, which is sticking out from the edge of the coffee table, even though I am always scolding the kids for leaving their shoes in the living room. Because I am the world's best mom, that's why.

Wednesday, January 26, 2005

as normal as I ever am

So I'm doing a lot better than I was on Monday. Basically, except for a lingering tendency to get all choked up over songs that would ordinarily have no effect on me (I can see "With or Without You" -- but "Fields of Gold"?!), I am normal and fine. Well, as normal and fine as I ever am.

What I am as well, however, is again extremely pissed off at T's boss. So much that it's not satisfying to look at other job listings, like I usually do to let off steam when T's job satisfaction levels hit a low point thanks to that loser, because I would want to actually send in his resumé, which would possibly involve being willing to move out of California, which is one of those things that's great in theory but scary as hell when you actually look at it, up close, personal, and seriously. Not because I wouldn't be unbelievably glad to get out of the politics and price-craziness of the left coast, but because:

• I love everything physical about California. I need relative proximity to mountains and ocean simultaneously. And frankly that's kind of hard to come by in places that aren't expensive and therefore populated by a lot of, well, people whose voting decisions make me want to scream out loud.


• Also, my parents, T's parents, my brother and SIL and nephews, T's friends (my local "friends", except for the aforementioned SIL and parents, could pretty much take me or leave me; we're not all that close) -- all are here within half an hour's drive. And that's a lot to throw away -- especially since my dad's health is poor, and that makes it even more important to us to be near him. It would seem scungy (funny, I have never tried to spell that particular junior-high word before) to move out of state just for our own selfish reasons and leave all that behind.

All this to say, this is why I'm not having a usajobs.gov/realtor.com spree right now. As much as I would probably enjoy it.

---

Darnit, T keeps altering my Yahoo Launch settings so that they play No Doubt ALL THE TIME*. They are definitely a two-or-three-star group for me, not a four-star one. GET YOUR OWN LAUNCH. Now I'm going to have "Underneath it All" in my head for DAYS. I do not appreciate this.

*He is also prone to giving anything by Pink Floyd a "Never Play Again" rating. Stinker.

---

I was carrying C to bed a few minutes ago (she is ill with a nasty sinusy thing so we are home from Bible study), because she had fallen asleep in her chair, and we had the following conversation:

She [mumbling, eyes still closed]: "Mommy, where are you taking me?"
I: "To bed, dearest."
She: "But I'm not tired."
I: "No, you're just asleep."
She: "I'm not asleep. I'm just resting."

She was fully unconscious again three (3) seconds after I put her down in her bed.

---

edited to add:

HE GAVE SHANIA TWAIN FOUR STARS. I cannot believe he would do that to me. What's next, Faith "you pretend you listen to me because you like my music but that's not really your reason, now is it, big guy" Hill?? gag.

Saturday, January 22, 2005

drama queen, awana games, leftovers, and absolutely no title creativity

C's latest Drama Queen moment, on learning that she must take a bath even though she has a cut on her hand: "I wish my whole life was just a dream!" (emphasis in original).

The big event for today was Awana Games. This is an activity where Awana kids (Awana, for those of you joining us late, is a Bible club for kids, wherein they get together and memorize Bible verses and listen to stories and play these club-specific sort of outdoor games involving bean bags and bowling pins and a few other oddments) from various churches get together and play all their games against each other. There's also, for the middle/older-elementary kids, of which LT is one, a "quizzing" segment where the kids sit there looking all serious and use little paddles with letters to answer multiple-choice questions, and then there's a free-response round where they buzz in like on "Jeopardy!". Last year, LT was a total basket case for this entire day (and he wasn't even doing the quizzing); it was not terribly long after his Tourette's had first manifested itself, and he was in a particularly anxious, crowd-phobic period, and the gym full of stomping, yelling people and all the strangeness and the fact that his awful, bad mother had left him with his aunt and a group of near-strangers because she had to run to the bathroom when we first arrived sent him into a ticcing, melting-down tailspin. He came out of it a bit when T told him a joke about Luke Skywalker wetting himself when he had to fight Darth Vader, and by the end of the event he was doing relatively OK, although he swore he never wanted to do anything in a high-school gym again. That was last year, though; this year he had a fine time, and didn't even really tic more than normal, which is a good sign for his stress level. And he even placed second with his team in both quizzing and games. Meanwhile C spent the day distracting her cousins, who are in Sparkies (that's the Awana division for K-2) with her, and then asking EVERY THIRTY FREAKING SECONDS if LT was almost done, once her part was over. While I ate half a bag of pretzels (I accidentally bought unsalted ones so nobody else wanted them) and wished I'd brought the seat cushion I made in Girl Scouts in the fourth grade. I'd forgotten how hard seats are in school gyms.

Do you know what I did today? I finally threw out the Christmas leftovers. Not that we'd been EATING them since about New Year's Eve. I just hadn't gotten around to cleaning out the fridge yet. Now you will never ever come over to my house. Sorry.

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