the round of life Archives | Page 18 of 29

previous ten entries | 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 | next ten entries

Monday, September 13, 2004

it's my own stupid fault.

I am almost never bored, but I am bored right now. This is because I don't feel like I should allow myself to do what I want to do (read Mansfield Park) until I've done what I ought to do (wash dishes and do data entry), and yet I really, really do not want to do the things I ought to do, so I sit here fiddling on the computer and essentially doing nothing. It's as if it doesn't count as wasting time unless I'm enjoying it.


I had an emotional rollercoaster of a day. It's all too complicated and boring to go into in any detail, so I'll summarize it as: I panicked when I thought we might have to move out of this house soon and I realized how un-ready we are financially to do that and how few options were available to us and how much I love this house, even though I hate it. Then I found out, fortunately, that we shouldn't plan on having to move after all, basically because our landlord is either very lazy, very kind, or clinically insane. I'm going with a combination of lazy and kind, because I like the guy. But there has to be an element of insanity as well, I guess, because if you could get a 2000% return on a 30-year-old emotion-free investment with minimal hassle to yourself, wouldn't you? But he won't bother. Thank God for that. I did, however, find out the REAL reason that renting sucks. It's not that you're throwing money away. That's minor compared to the fact that you're at the mercy of a property owner's whims and could be made to move out at any time whether you want to or not. Criminy, it's like I just figured out that I'm living in feudal England, or 19th-century Ireland, or something. [insert "Far and Away" theme music here.]. And what was most upsetting about today was really fully realizing how stupid the mistakes were that T and I made early in our marriage. We built up a ton of consumer debt, and that took so long to pay off (although we finally did pay it off) that by the time we reached the point where we could afford to buy, the market had gone nuts and we couldn't afford it anymore. Five years ago our landlord offered to sell us this house for a hundred thousand dollars (he bought it in the seventies for $14,000, yes, that's 14 with three zeroes). We couldn't do it then because we were still working our butts off to pay off our earlier fiscal frivolity (and, honestly, still being a bit frivolous at the same time). And now there is no way we could afford to buy this house or any other house in California, both because we are determined that I will not work outside the home, and because the California real estate market has taken a few too many hits from the ol' crack pipe. And it's all our own stupid fault for being in debt and not being able to buy when the market was still sane. Damn. Young people take note: Do not heed the siren song of instant gratification from the credit-card goddesses. Unless you happen to be the type of person who likes having lots of things to regret later. In which case go right ahead.



Wow. Didn't I say I wasn't going to go into all that?


All the other sources of stress are still hanging around also*. Which sucks. But they're buried enough that I manage not to think about them until I wake up at three o'clock in the morning and can't get back to sleep.

The good news, though, is that my life is just so unsinkably cheerful that I still feel happy, in the balance of things. Either I have a deep source of joy that goes beyond circumstances, or I'm happily deluded. I'm going with option A.

Sunday, September 12, 2004

happy in spite of ourselves

Just had one of those agonizing (for everyone) bedtime struggles to get saline spray in LT's nose (which, by the way, is the doctor's suggestion for the nosebleeds. If they don't stop with twice-daily saline and petroleum jelly, she'll refer him to an ENT to have his nose cauterized). I so remember being a little kid and having things like that be such an enormous THING to be afraid of. Although generally where medicine was concerned, I was more in the "this is an adventure!" school, like C is now. Come to think of it I'm that way about a lot of things that are actually negative experiences, like roller coasters, power outages, big storms, fires, required overnight absences for T, illness on my part (not anyone else's, though), etc. I'm always glad when things get back to normal, but there's a very small part of me that regrets the loss of the "differentness" of whatever was going on. I guess I just like things to be un-ordinary. I rearrange furniture for fun too.


My hair smells so nice right now. I have mentioned before that I buy a different scent of shampoo and conditioner every time I need to replenish our supply. So C and I are now using coconut-scented stuff. Yay Suave for all the smelly goodness that is its selection of shampoos. Coconut is on my list of things that smell way, way better than they taste (along with brewing coffee and fresh-turned dirt. Not that I've tasted dirt. Not on purpose, anyway). Coconut shampoo and coconut suntan lotion: bliss. Fresh coconut: eh. Sweetened coconut or coconut flavored anything: puke.


I hate being broke. We have so many big-ticket items on our needs/serious wants list right now. I have had the same eyeglass prescription for going on six years now, and it's considerably less effective than it once was. T also needs new glasses. We have three dressers in our house (T and I share a six-drawer low chest) and not one of them is big enough to hold all our clothes, and not one has all its drawers functioning either. Our refrigerator has been acting very suspiciously lately; it is supposed to be frost-free but it's, um, NOT, and it is constantly running, and stuff like ice cream and popsicles kept in the freezer are not as solid as they are supposed to be. These things are an underlying source of stress for T and myself but we have no way (short of going into [more than our very small current amount of] debt which we keep swearing we will NOT do) of remedying this situation. I'm not asking for contributions. Just venting. As awful as it is to say it, if T got assigned to a big fire, the two weeks' overtime generated would take care of everything nicely. It would, however, also involve two weeks of us missing him madly, and him missing us madly while also working fourteen insanely busy 16-hour days in a row. So it's not a great solution. Which is just as well, since we can't exactly bring it about on our own.


Other underlying sources of stress:

• the stupid mistake on the part of the people who issue vouchers for reduced rates for cat spay/neutering, which is keeping us from being able to put our cats outside, and also causing them to continue to be in constant heat and pee everywhere in our house.
  
• heat. heat heat heat.
  
• wondering why exactly we're so broke right now. We shouldn't be. We feel like we've been staying pretty close to our budget. So now we have that feeling of self-loathing that comes when we blow it, along with the feeling of indignation because we don't feel like we blew it, but apparently we did.
  
• the local real estate market which went berserk just before we reached our THIS IS THE MOMENT WE'VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR moment when we were actually going to start looking for a house. And which makes us worry that our landlord, who lives in the Bay Area, will catch on to the housing boom and stop nosing around the idea of selling this house like he has for the past five years and actually put it on the market, forcing us to move into a place that would either have way less space or cost a lot more, and which also would not be the place where we brought our babies home from the hospital and spent the first ten years of our married life together and a whole lot of other silly sentimental stuff like that. And which makes us worry that we'll either have to move out of state or rent for the rest of our lives.
  
• heat again. It needs mentioning twice. It's September now. Can we get a little reprieve please? I'm not asking for rain or anything, I'm certainly not going to presume that far before, say, the end of October, but something less than ninety-nine degrees would be, well, nice. That's all I'm saying.
  
• School.
  
• The messy house.
  
• This panicky middle-of-the-night worry I get -- previously titled Nameless Dread except nowadays it takes the form of either very detailed fear of a terrorist attack, or fear that I am an awful parent and my children are going to grow up with all kinds of issues because of the kind of parent I am, and that maybe they should already be in therapy to kind of head things off.
  
• LT's and T's health problems, for lack of a better term. (LT: nosebleeds and tics, and some pretty severe social anxiety, which [anxiety] is a serious underlying factor in the abovementioned panicky midnight worrying. T: that weird sugar thing.)
  
• My dad's health.
  
• My grandmother's health.
  
• Worry about my dear dear friend and her hurricane-wrecked house, and Ivan the Terrible possibly bearing down on them as we speak.
  
• The fact that I can't seem to have a normal woman-to-woman friendship to save my life, and what's wrong with me that makes it where the only people who both live near me and are close friends with me are related to me by blood or marriage?
  
• Did I mention the heat?
  

Oddly enough, in spite of all this underlying stress, we are generally quite happy and life goes on normally, except when T talks himself and me into making him a dessert that turns him into a grumpy bear until he can pass out. Praise God for that normalcy anyway.

Saturday, September 11, 2004

I am so dirty.

(this is my 300th entry! Happy entry-versary to me!)


I am so dirty. I am just filthy. (not like THAT, in case anyone has a dirty mind.) I am so dirty that if LT were not also filthy right now, he would be jealous. We have been working hard since early this morning, loading scrap metal (carburetors, pipe, two partial vehicles, a truck frame, and everything imaginary in between) into trucks and into trailers and then using our extensive knowledge of graduate-level physics (ha!) along with a Hi-Lift Jack and more muscles than I knew I had and a round water tank, to get the stuff off the trailers and out of the trucks. I am so sore, and quite sunburned, and did I mention I'm dirty? I am. Very. And now I'm going to take a long lukewarm shower and feel all helpful and powerful and hard-working and stuff, and then I'm going to barbecue.


updated to add: I am now all spiffy and clean. However, as if hauling around rusty metal (which would have been collectible if it hadn't been sitting around gathering rust since World War II), and then spending a considerable amount of time in a wrecking yard that makes your local Pick-A-Part look like a Lexus showroom, would not have sufficed: my neck? is really and truly, um, red.

Thursday, September 09, 2004

stress and nosebleeds

I have a very good reason for not having updated since Monday night. That reason is that I have been wanting to plant plastique explosives in my head, just to relieve the stress, but I couldn't figure out how to stick it in through my ears.


I homeschool my two kids (that would be the "hsing" part of "hsing-mom", just in case you ever wondered if maybe I was just a very poor speller. Which I'm not). One of the joys of this educational and parenting choice is that I can start the school year when I want to. For us, this is the Tuesday after Labor Day, because by golly that's when school should start. This whole beginning-of-August thing is for the birds. ANyway. That means that this last Tuesday was our first day of school. Tuesday arrived after a really busy wacky extremely-extended weekend involving company, a Wednesday-morning wedding, my first attempt at garment alterations, a trip to Yosemite, a county fair, a destruction derby which was an exercise in anger management, an afternoon sitting in a booth reading for four hours (yay!), a family dinner and walk, and the formation of a pile of dirty laundry which rivaled Mt. Fuji in scope (and smelled much worse.). I had not quite succeeded in gluing my head back on straight after this mostly-pleasant whirlwind of activity when all of a sudden WHAM the Tuesday after Labor Day was staring me in the face. And my two students Did Not Want to start school. School lasted till after four o'clock on Tuesday, and nearly as long on Wednesday, and I was really glad about the way I've always run off at the mouth about how I'll never put my kids in public school, because otherwise I'd pretty much have been wanting to throw my principles out the window and go enroll them as soon as the office opened Thursday morning. However. Wednesday night everyone else went to a potluck while I stayed home to try to regain my sanity. I knew I'd left it around here somewhere. I found it at the bottom of a basket of clean laundry during the scene in "Pride and Prejudice" where Mr. Darcy has just come upon Elizabeth by surprise at Pemberley and he's all flummoxed and asks twice about her family because he's so unlike his usual smooth, under-control self, because he adores her so madly. (that is my kind of man. Those who know my husband casually would never guess how completely he can become undone. But oh boy do I know it.)


So I felt better this morning. And school went much more pleasantly today -- less pulling teeth and more aha! moments. It IS fun to see my little mini-me plowing through Bob books in a way that bodes well for HER future literariness -- I absolutely cannot wait for her to have a crush on a character in a book. yay. My first book-character crush was Justin in Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh, followed closely by Stan in Fifteen. Who was yours? :-) And LT had rounding in math today, instead of place value, which was where much of the teeth-pulling and hair-tearing had happened for the first two days. And I just felt much more sane and it's alarming how much this household responds to my moods. When Mommy ain't sane, ain't NOBODY sane. Or something.


I can't believe I just typed the word "ain't", even in a quote-adaptation kind of way. Twice. My fingers are itching to go delete it.


Tonight LT got another nosebleed. He gets them A LOT. We had a doctor's appointment set for him for last week, because in the last month the nosebleeds have really picked up in intensity until they're pretty much a daily or twice-daily experience. But then two days before the appointment, I set up the humidifier in LT's room, and for those two days he had zero nosebleeds... so I thought I'd solved the problem. However, pretty much the very moment after I cancelled the appointment, his nose started plotting Act II, and he's had them again every day or twice a day since Thursday. (which didn't add to the Weekend-O-Sanity, might I add). Tonight he had one that lasted an hour, and they NEVER last that long, they always go away after five minutes, except for the few that continue till ten minutes, which cause a little licking flame of fear to start up somewhere in my lower intestines and work its way upward until the bleeding (which, at least, is never substantial in quantity) stops. Tonight I was successfully putting on the the patented Casual Mom (Let's Not Scare The Poor Kid) act, while inside I was starting to do some serious freaking out. So we will again try to brave the doctor's office tomorrow, just to get things checked out. I'm sure these aren't a symptom of something really serious, because he has, well, no other symptoms of anything serious, but they are an enormous hassle and they're scary (although Anxiety Boy is remarkably cool when they're going on -- he's just gotten so used to them) and they can't be good for him so we're going to see what can maybe be done to stop them. So any prayers and good thoughts you'd want to send our way would be much appreciated. Especially since we don't actually have an appointment, and we get to drive to the valley in the hundred-degree heat and hope we get seen, which is not ordinarily something I ever try to do.


I so totally meant to be in bed half an hour ago. ack.

--------

Monday, September 06, 2004

just a few pictures from an evening walk

We went to my parents' tonight for dinner and went on the usual post-dessert walk. I love evening light for taking pictures.

"If we were as tall as our shadows
How tall our shadows would be"
--"Emily", Emily Climbs
L.M. Montgomery





The kids had traced my shadow on the ground, and then my nephews had drawn my face and hair. Watch out that you don't turn to stone.






Soldiers on the march -- the biggest boy has his air rifle just in case any persnickety varmints present themselves for destruction; the littler ones have sticks to draw "traps" in the road for Grandpa.

--------

Friday, September 03, 2004

the fair

Before I get started on the stuff about the Fair, I wanted to show a picture of THE DRESS. The person wearing it really does have a face -- a quite pretty face, with a little 50's flip, and a cute glittery veil* -- but since I don't have her permission yet I'm not showing it to you all. Anyway. Did I mention, THE DRESS IS DONE?


*in my head this description is in the voice of the Knights who say Ni, describing the shrubbery :)

Without further ado:

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


Now. It is odd about the fair. I remember being a little kid and the whole year revolved around two events: Christmas and the Fair. Back then it was all about the rides. My brother and I would go through forty tickets each a night on the Scrambler and the Hammer and the Holy Grail of rides, the zipper [heavenly chord]. We looked forward to the fair so much that we had a huge post-holiday syndrome afterward, thinking how long it would be till the next one. We spent every possible minute there. We couldn't understand my parents who actually for some reason wanted to leave before closing time, and we would whine and argue about it all the way home in the car.


Now, I am that parent. Except the kids don't whine, largely because it's never occurred to them that we could stay much past dark. It's so noisy, and so crowded, and there's so much foul language (I swear I heard a group of way-pre-teen boys -- probably between eight and ten -- spouting off the F word like they were aspiring gangsta rappers), and between the country music blaring out of the beer garden, and the metal blaring out of the teen rides, you can't hear yourself think, and drunk people collide with you, you could feed a small African nation for a week for the cost of dinner for a family of four, and I could go on. However, there are some high points to make it worth it for a few hours, and here they are:





This one really doesn't have anything to do with the fair. She's just so darn cute.

Just for a total change of pace, LT was shouting cowboyish things like "Yee-haw" and "Giddap!" while C was pulling the whole I'm-scared-Mommy-don't-take-your-hands-off-me routine.

However, the real thing (if you can call sitting on a bored pony who's harnessed to a metal thingamajig and riding around in a plodding circle "the real thing") didn't phase her a bit...

More yee-haws and giddaps, but quietly...

LT won Best of Show for Lego creations in his age group with this oliphaunt. He made it completely from scratch out of his own head -- well, his, Tolkein's, and Peter Jackson's. Needless to say we're totally proud of him and he's very pleased.

Here's a better picture. Check out the little eyes, and the guys riding it. :)

The petting zoo sheep knew exactly what was in the little plastic cup LT was carrying around and by golly he wanted his share of it.

I was heaving a sigh of relief at his bravery here. He had a great time and totally forgot to be nervous. We won't talk about the Super Slide, though. :-|

The big event for tomorrow is the destruction derby. I'm taking LT and one of his friends. I get almost as excited about the fair as I used to be as a child, when I remember that hallelujah, it marks the end of destruction derby season, and I get my husband back on evenings and weekends again. :) This year hasn't been so bad; he takes LT with him which is fun for both of them, and their work went relatively smoothly. Except that he ended up working on other people's derby cars for them, almost more than he did on his own team's. This is perhaps the only sport where competitors have been known to help each other to win. Even tonight he is off at someone else's house doing last-minute fixing on a car that he'll hope to have just beaten at this time tomorrow. What a guy. :)

--------

Tuesday, August 31, 2004

officially my ramblingest entry ever. or at least in the last few days. yes, I just made up the word "ramblingest" all by myself.

It is too darn hot. Omigosh. And what really bites is that the weather service keeps teasing us, saying that in two or three days we'll have a couple days of coolness. Except the expected relief stays two or three days away. It will be Christmas, I think, and it'll be a hundred degrees on my front porch, and the NWS will say that it should only be ninety-four in three days. (What the heck kind of state IS this where we're all grateful and hopeful about NINETY-FOUR DEGREES, by the way?)


Our county fair is this weekend. (that'll help all you stalkers who haven't quite got it yet.) I entered some sewn things and a crocheted doily. The kids entered some pictures, and LT also entered some very spectacular Lego creations. Plus there will be all the rides (LT, with his gargantuanism genes, is too big for kiddie rides and too scared for big-person rides, poor boy) and the food oh heavens the fry bread! the Chinese food! the miniscule $4 cups of soda with no lids or straws! (must remember to carry in bottles of water this year).


In the comments for my last entry, mom-on-roof said something that kind of scared me. New colors? Do I have... new colors? Does this diary look the same to you? If not, please tell me. I would hate it if mom-on-roof was being sarcastic about the fact that every computer but mine has suddenly started rendering this page in violent yellow, chartreuse, and puce*. Speaking of which. Years ago when we were engaged, T had a really badass computer -- a 386 with TWO MEG OF RAM, wow, TWO WHOLE MEGABYTES -- and it had a monochrome monitor, which yes, actually was manufactured on purpose. That still happened in the late 80's and early 90's. I know it's hard for most of you to believe but it is true. Anyway. He had this monochrome monitor, and he made a really nice soothing attractive monochrome color scheme for Windows 3.1 in it. When we got married and I moved in (in that order. People still did THAT in the early 90's too. I swear it's true), we combined computer systems to make, oh wow, a really REALLY badass 486 with FOUR MEG of RAM and my color monitor (cue heavenly Monty Python chords here). We used his hard drive and so when we started up the newly refurbished machine for the first time, up popped the most wretched color combination that you could ever possibly imagine. Even the clothes I wore in elementary school couldn't top the heinousness of that color scheme. It hurt our eyes. But we saved it, so that we could laugh at it.


*WHAT IS PUCE? When Sully looks at the paper in Monsters Inc. and says, "Oh, that's puce," why didn't they show us what color it was? Because some of us still don't know and we feel really stupid about that.


Update: I just googled it (Dear Google, I swear, I actually do sometimes sit around and ponder how I ever satisfied my raging curiosity on so many of life's little questions before you were invented. Love, your adoring fan. XXXOOO) and apparently puce is a kind of lavender sort of grayish color. No wonder the name is so alarmingly similar to "puke." Which word I accidentally used the other day in front of my kids, and now it is their very very favorite. Oh well, it could be worse.

--------

Monday, August 30, 2004

two things

THE DRESS is done. No offense at ALL to the person for whom I made it, but I am inclined to want to give it a vile nickname like Kristin does for the things she sews. It is made out of the most difficult fabric I've ever worked with in my life. Suicidal fabric, that's what it was. All manipulative, sitting there in the machine writing a suicide note about how I didn't take good enough care of it so it just can't go on. But now it's done, and it came out OK, and I am so ready to make something out of flannel. Flannel is the nice grandmother of fabrics: "Whatever you say is fine with me, dearie." But yay. It's done: dress, crinoline, ruffle, little bolero jacket... even a little purse. yay.


* * * * * * * * *

WHY CATS ARE GOOD TO HAVE AROUND


1. If you have too many dishes they'll gladly break some for you. It's no problem for them at all; one leap onto the counter, an easy grab at a mixing bowl holding a large stack of cereal bowls, and it's all taken care of.

2. If you have too much money, you can always spend it on cat litter, cat food, a schmanzy litter pan with a sifter, long-term feeders, new dishes, etc.

3.If you don't have enough laundry to do, they'll gladly pee in every. single. basket. of clean laundry you ever turn your back on, plus your kids' tub of dress-up clothes, so that you can rewash everything twice or three times (heaven forbid you should just fold it and put it away as soon as it's dry. Where's the fun in that?)

4. If you haven't explained sex to your five-year-old yet, they'll give you a great reason to do so. Actually, my kids still think that the reason the cats can't go outside is because they'll meet men cats, get married, and have babies (they probably even picture them wearing wedding dresses. Or considering Mommy's recent sewing project, silver lamé). And the reason they go around scraping their tummies on the ground with their butts up in the air for a few days twice a month is because they want to get married. Cripes, we have got to get those beasts spayed, before we catch them going through Bride's magazine.

5. Who wants a clean bathroom? Just put the litter pan and the food and water dishes in there and voilà! You'll never have to deal with that irritating no-litter-on-the-bathroom-floor feeling again.



I hate when my husband is right about stuff.

--------

Thursday, August 26, 2004

how NOT to type

I am attempting to re-teach myself to type. I did take a typing class for about a week in high school. However, since I'd already taught myself to type by that time, I quickly reached the point where the very sound of the teacher's monotone droning on ("A!" [Class hits the A key on every. single. typewriter: CL-CL-CLACK.] "S!" [CL-CLACK.] "D!" [CLACK.] "F!" [CL-CLACK.]) was enough to make me want to poke someone's eyes out. Even my own. So I'd sit there ignoring the teacher, typing letters to my friends on the scratch paper. It's hard to keep from getting caught when you're writing notes this way, and teachers have this weird thing about students, you know, paying attention in class instead of typing friendly correspondence. Go figure. I quickly realized that if I continued in that class, I'd end up either killing someone or spending the rest of my natural life in detention (or both). So I dropped it and took home economics instead. So to this day, I always level when I measure, but I type in a very unhealthy manner. Fast, yes. But my form lacks. It lacks... a lot. I only ever use my left pinky for Shift. I stretch my fingers all around the wrong way, mostly on my left hand. I knew this but didn't care until I started this ongoing data entry project, involving lots of tabbing and even more shifting, really repetitively. When the pain from the pinky and ring fingers on my left hand reached that elbow, I thought, hey, it's never too late to retrain oneself and undo habits that have been set in concrete by, oh, say, fifteen years of rigorous exercise, right? Hence this entry is being typed Correctly. Oops. I just used the wrong pinky for Shift again. It is making me crazy and I'm beginning to place bets against myself regarding how long it will be before I give up and lapse back into the old incorrect-but-thought-free Rachel's Patented Carpal Tunnel Syndrome Guaranteed Typing System. I'm thinking... about five more words. Yep.

--------

Monday, August 23, 2004

more snippets

1. Tonight while I was washing dishes, I put my hair in a bun and stabbed a pencil through it, because I couldn't find one of my five bazillion scrunchies. I haven't done this since high school. It made me feel all young. There was a guy who used to sit behind me in chemistry class who would steal the pencil from my hair. ah, memories.
   
   
2. We went to my dad's tonight for his birthday party. The highlight of the visit for the kids was The Walk. Why do people say there's nothing to do in the country? In one short excursion my kids walked barefoot on an unpaved road(carefully circumnavigating the cow pies), had their shadows traced on the road with sticks, and drew "traps" in the dust with their sticks to catch their grandpa, who had to break out of said traps by drawing lines across them with his stick. Fun stuff, I tell ya.
   
   
3. In keeping with the rural theme, here are some of the items (probably about half the content) from last week's sheriff's report in our local paper.
   • A call reporting a truck full of chickens with smoking brakes was received from the highway in [outlying area].
   • A call reporting cows mooing strangely and sounding worried was received from [development].
   • A call from Elizabeth Lane in [outlying area] reported a dangerous coyote growling under a trailer.
   • A mountain lion and two cubs were spotted at the water's edge at Lake M______.
   • A call reporting loud music was received from Ramsden Road.
   • A barking dog complaint was received from the 5100 block of Hillside Drive.
   • A report of trespassing by two kids swimming in a horse trough was received from Old Highway and Yaqui Gulch.
   • A call reporting a rattlesnake in a dog house was received from the 4000 block of Old Highway.
   • A request for an ambulance to respond to a scorpion bite was received from the 5200 block of Davis Road.
   • A call describing a "lab wreaking havoc" was received from Granite Springs Road. (at first I thought this was referring to a meth lab, which are a common hazard in these here parts, but just now I realized it's referring to a dog. I think.)
   • A report of unfed goats was received from the 5200 block of Colorado Road. (note: all the references to "blocks" are a joke. Because... there ARE no blocks.)
   • A call reporting a rattlesnake in a living room was received from the 5100 block of Lakeview Road.
   • A call reporting a loose bull was received from the 5000 block of Silva Road.
   And people say nothing ever happens here. Sheesh.
   
   
4. I was getting into bed a half hour or so ago and something cut my foot. I reached down expecting to find a pencil, and instead found a long, sharp bamboo shish ke bob skewer. T had been using it to repair a camera. (SHUT UP.) He muttered an unintelligible apology in his sleep when I explained why I shrieked. Is he trying to kill me, do you think? Is there something I should know here?

And that's enough randomness from me for tonight. I'm going to go brave the bed again. Maybe with the lights on, though.

--------

the round of life Archives | Page 18 of 29

previous ten entries | 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 | next ten entries