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Tuesday, December 16, 2003

hypochondriac, airline tickets, and a runaway freight train

C has a cough. This doesn't bother her a bit; I think she actually enjoys it. She is always kind of hoping she's just a little bit sick -- not sick enough to be really miserable, but enough to get some attention. To illustrate my point: she just coughed, and then said to her brother, "I sure have some big coughs, don't I? Poor me!" Those words exactly! I worry about her future; she has potential pill-fiending tendencies (oh, Mommy, please can I have some red medicine? I think I might have a sniffly nose...)


I have just done a very exciting thing. Last night, for the first time in my life, I actually purchased airline tickets. Yes, I, who have never been in an airplane, never been further east than Kansas, never seen the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico, am GOING TO FLORIDA IN AN AIRPLANE in about a month and a half, along with T and both kids, to visit my best friend. She and I met in a Christian chat room at WBS Chat. Does anyone else remember WBS chat? Chat-room chatting is kind of an Internet-newbie staple, and it's the kind of thing we all look back at with embarrassment (I stayed up until the wee hours of the morning doing what?), but by the grace of God, in January 1997, I "met" a kindred spirit there, in among all the sig lines and little icon pictures and server-push text scrolling up and up and up. Yay for WBS. ;-). And I finally get to go see her, after mentally planning this trip scores of times (she's been here once, in the spring of 1999).


Can everyone please join with me in a minor panic? Christmas is a week and two days away! It's not that I don't love Christmas, because I do, and it's not that I'm not ready for it, because I am (well, pretty much. THe house needs a little tidying before we can achieve the Norman Rockwell Christmas-morning scene), it's just that it came running up so fast! What happened to November and December? For that matter, what happened to 2003? It makes reasonable sense that the years keep seeming faster and faster -- after all, when I was ten, the time between Christmases was one-tenth of my life; at 30 it's only one-thirtieth of my life -- but still, if it keeps up like this, by the time I'm fifty I'll go to sleep on Christmas night and wake up on the next Christmas morning, another year older. This is insane, and more than a little frightening. There's got to be a happy medium between that desolate childhood December 26th feeling of looking across the unending desert of the year to come at the tiny little Christmas oasis that is so depressingly far away on the other side, and this runaway freight train where the years fly by so fast we can hardly see them. Maybe I passed that happy medium when I was 19.3 years old, or something. sigh.

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Saturday, December 13, 2003

the Nutcracker ballet

Things I will be sure to remember after tonight:

No matter how glad you are to fit into a dress you haven't been able to wear for years, you really should try sitting down in it before you wear it to an event where you will be sitting down. That way you can find out ahead of time if it magically transforms your midsection into a fairly decent imitation of the Michelin Man anytime you relax in a sitting position, and plan around that.

Floor-length crepe skirt + calf-length wool coat + tights = more static cling than you've ever seen outside a Bounce dryer sheet commercial. Just FYI.

Wearing heels when one hasn't worn heels in a really long time should be approached gradually, like working out. Overdoing it the first night out is not a wise idea. Attention to this would also eliminate the possibility of discovering as you're getting dressed that the only pair of navy-blue shoes you possess are a half-size too small.

In spite of these few minor lessons, and the fact that I found a restaurant NEVER to eat at again as long as I live (I have never seen jambalaya look quite like that. eew), C and I had an absolutely smashing time tonight. I won't go into a ton of details and bore you all, but we looked pretty, we were treated like ladies everywhere we went, C behaved perfectly, the ballet was superb, the music was amazing, and I even managed not to feel like a dolt once (thanks to the fact that once I discovered the static-cling thing, I just didn't take my coat off when I was walking around). Not ONCE the whole evening, not even when I was parking or driving around in a semi-unfamiliar area or anything. THAT is a huge accomplishment for me.

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Friday, December 12, 2003

it's tomorrow!

No way should I be up this late. This is really dumb of me. But since I'm here, I have to tell you the wonderful, wonderful news:


Diet Cherry Coke has come to our town.

Yes, I know it sounds too good to be true. But it is true, it really is! I have one of those new funky-looking fridge packs in my refrigerator to prove it. My dad (I have the best dad in the world. I really do, and not just because he has been such an ally in the quest for diet Cherry Coke) brought me some today; I was just going about my housewife-ish business, making my Christmas card list and getting lunch for the kids or whatever, and the doorbell rang and there he was like Santa Claus in overalls, with a brown paper bag from our own little small-town wannabe supermarket, containing a 12-pack of nirvana just for me. yay! My only fear is that now that they've teased me in this manner, the northern CA bottler will stop making it for some reason, and I'll be left with a serious addiction, instead of a simple craving, and I'll have real withdrawals. But I'll stop borrowing trouble and just go load up on it while I can. Carpe Diem! (Carpe... colum? carpe colum non calorum cum cherrium? You can tell that the full extent of the Latin with which I am familiar came from Dead Poets' Society, phrases in books, and high-school chorus, can't you?)


Anyway. I just had to share the joy.

Speaking of joy, today (since it IS today; it's 1 AM almost) is Nutcracker Day, which means, in my daughter's way of reckoning time, it's actually Tomorrow. Whenever a day arrives for which she's been waiting eagerly (like, for instance, Thursday which is Awana day, or a Saturday on which DACY THE MAGNIFICENT is going to be home all day), she sprints out of bed, clobbers me awake, and says, "Mommy, I just remembered! Today is tomorrow!!" It's very Little Elizabeth in Anne of Windy Poplars, really, don't you think?

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Wednesday, December 10, 2003

We're in the money

We got something in the mail today from "Check Processing Center" -- a generic-looking envelope; I was almost sure it was going to be yet another junk-mail-disguised-as-something-important-in-a-spammish-attempt-to-make-you-open-it-instead-of-throwing-it-out-on-the-way-out-of-the-post-office scam (dang, I know I do a lot of those hyphenated adjective phrases, but that has GOT to be a record, even for me. Thought about switching to quotes halfway through but I'd have had to go back and change all the hyphens to spaces and I didn't have the energy. Yet I had the energy for a six-line parenthetical statement. Never said I was logical. Well, yes, actually, I have said that, come to think of it. Shut up, Rachel.). Yet it (what? oh yes, the envelope. I was talking about mail) turned out to actually contain a real honest-to-goodness check. Yessir, we are in the money; all our worries are over; we have been a member of the winning party in a class-action lawsuit against a credit-card company, to the tune of... drumroll please...

seventy-four cents.

Why even BOTHER? Why? Seventy-four CENTS? Sheesh, just the absurdity of cashing or depositing a check like that will probably prevent me from doing so. Can you picture it at the credit union? Maybe I'll add a penny so I can get it in quarters and let the kids put them in a candy machine.


no, I won't, I think I'll just be one of the thousands of people who screw up the lawyers' accounting by tossing it in the woodstove.

Also, in other news, did you hear about the global warming on Mars? Next thing you know they'll be finding SUVs and industrial complexes there, since those, like, cause global warming, right? Oh, wait, Mars is just having a cyclic climate change. Earth stopped having those at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. I forgot. Otherwise a whole lot of environmentalists could be out of a job.

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Tuesday, December 09, 2003

raking

I have come to the conclusion that deciduous trees are the direct invention of the Devil. I realize this afresh every autumn, and it's largely the fault of this enormous tree in our front yard. I don't know what kind of tree it is; it's built kind of like a cottonwood except (praise the Lord for small mercies) it doesn't shed cottony wisps all over everything. It does, however, try to fill the San Joaquin Valley with leaves. It makes a valiant effort. Usually I rake the leaves into a pile or two on the grass, with the intention of eventually getting them into bags and taken who knows where, the dump, whatever. Then, because I like putting leaves in bags about as much as I like putting away laundry, they sit around in piles till it's rained a few times and they're sodden and weigh about a pound apiece and of course by that time it's a lost cause and they just sit there in their piles and rot, and ruin that part of the lawn for the next eight months or so. This year, however, we had A Plan. We want to rototill our backyard in the early spring and plant grass seed there, in hopes of transforming the mown field weeds into an actual, you know, lawn. Then the kids can play back there instead of the front yard, and the front of the house will cease to be so cluttered up with their toys that it looks like we were holding a yard sale and had to run away from an oncoming tornado just in time to spare our lives. However, our soil is classic red clay. You could practically sculpt with this stuff. Water pools on it, runs off it, and makes it into slippery red staining mud that hardens into something so hard that only weeds can tolerate it, and those only barely, as soon as it's dry. We called our local ag advisor to ask how to remedy this, and his reply was "six inches of organic matter". Well, thanks to our tree(s -- there're three ornamental plum trees out front that contribute their fair share to the Lawn-Killing Leaf Piles each year), we had a plenitude of organic waste on hand, and it was just a matter of moving it to the backyard. That sounds so simple. ha. At least I got a workout today and yesterday. I hope I never hold another rake as long as I live.

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Sunday, December 07, 2003

uuuuuurrrrrgggggghhhhhh

T's birthday party was this afternoon. The crowning glory of the birthday present stack (even more brilliant than the atomic-synchonized solar-powered watch I got him) is the Lego-wannabe M1 tank. It has about five zillion pieces. OK, so it's more like 850, close enough. Almost as soon as the last guest was off the porch they began sorting (don't worry, Debi; we weren't glad to see you go, I promise). T predicts that he and LT will have it built by 9:00 p.m. You may note from the time of this entry that that is just over two and a half hours away. I am dubious. My tummy didn't appreciate getting a chunk of pecan pie (leave it to T to request pecan pie and cheesecake for his birthday dessert instead of cake) after nearly a week of strict dieting, so I am going to to bed. My prediction, however, is that there will still be sorted Lego-wannabe-pieces, along with a half-constructed tank, on my dining room table in the morning. We shall see; perhaps I'll end up eating my words. As long as I don't have to eat anything SWEET with them (oh, my stomach is lurching just thinking of the pecan pie, urrgh) I don't care.

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stress. sigh.

It is really, really raining outside. This is nice. I am all conflicted about whether I should go to bed (which would be the sane thing to do, considering the time and the fact that the alarm goes off to bring in a busy, busy day at 7:00), or stay up and read by the fire, enjoying the quiet and the sound of the rain. Such hard decisions.


I've been quiet the last few days; things have been kind of stressful, and very busy. What with Christmas, Thanksgiving, and three people's birthdays, we are having gatherings of the same 12-15 people FIVE TIMES in these four weeks, three of them at my house. Someday we'll have to break down and combine celebrations but I have always resisted that. We like each one to be fully separate. But this is getting ridiculous. At any rate, I'll be glad when things are more normal, and I hate that my favorite time of year is becoming such a dreaded source of stress. We've got to figure out how to change that.

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Friday, December 05, 2003

mostly about yesterday

ooh, rain that's supposed to last all weekend started last night. It Is Time. My annual reading of Jane Eyre can commence. Although maybe the Christmas tree is too cheerful to allow the proper atmosphere? Should I hold out for a foggy week in January?


In other news, I totally, fully suck. I completely blew off my discussion chapters for one of my reading Yahoogroups this week. I've been getting later and later with them and this week I fully FORGOT about them until someone posted the next section. This is like high school all over again, and that feeling of shame as I walked into class after class without homework. I just never got around to doing a lot of it. Someone please just beat me with sticks. I'd feel so much better afterward.


Other than that today is a pretty good day, so far. I am feeling much better than I was yesterday. Although the meltdown LT just had does not bode well for the rest of the day. Oh please, please just let me hold it together better today...


I'm all motivated again to watch what I eat. I was really well-behaved diet-wise yesterday; it was a huge struggle because I never really have got back on the well-behaved bandwagon after getting waylaid back in, oh, October I think. I haven't gained but I've only lost about three pounds in all that time. So yesterday I decided that it was The Day, I was going to just DO it, and I had growly cranky hunger to deal with all day in addition to a really ridiculous case of PMS, and a cluttery house. Is it any wonder my mood was so awful? I ask you.


Plus, on a serious note, yesterday morning when I woke up I had just been having a dream about my middle daughter, who died when she was two months old. The date that would have been her sixth birthday is approaching and I always dream about her around her birthday (as well as a lot of other times, but the birthday is a without-fail kind of thing). In all the dreams, she is still a baby; in this one, she was in a crib in our living room, except when I picked her up it turned out that the baby I'd been caring for all these years was my (living) daughter's doll. So I looked in the other crib in my living room, and it was full of dolls; my best friend was there (a definite dream-thing -- she lives in Florida; I only WISH she could just drop by like she did in this dream) and she kept giving me dolls saying, "Is she this one?" and I was panicking because she was lost, until the crib was empty and the realization hit me that she had been dead for almost six years and then the phone rang and I woke up. Crying. This did not help to set a positive tone for the rest of the day.


Wow, that turned serious, didn't it. I don't usually talk about my dreams -- in fact few things are more mind-numbingly boring to me than hearing someone detail every moment of a dream, so don't worry that this will become a daily occurrence -- but that one was key to how I felt yesterday, in combination with all the other factors. I also never know how much to talk about my daughter. I know a lady whose husband died five years before I met her. When we first met, the first thing she said to me was something to the effect of how hard it was dealing with life without her husband, giving the impression that he had just died, and I had a hard time maintaining a straight face when I found out that he'd been gone for so long. While I know that if MY husband died I would still be missing him unbearably after five years, bringing it up like that takes on a certain level of ridiculousness -- like someone you'd read about in an L.M. Montgomery book or something -- and I resolved at that moment that I would not be the person who brought up my daughter as a sympathy ploy to everyone I met. And yet her memory is very dear to us, and we still miss her, and I don't want the world to think that I have forgotten her, either. It's a hard line to draw; please forgive me if I've crossed it today. :)

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Wednesday, December 03, 2003

the smell of beans, and other stuff

My house smells of beans. blecch. As is usual on Wednesday nights, my parents came over for dinner (the Bible study we all go to is on Wednesdays, and Mom and Dad live half an hour out of town, so Mom would have to zip home, scarf some dinner, and then zip back into town with Dad; instead, they just stay in town and eat with us instead. Nothing fancy, as you will see from what I'm about to relate). Dad's favorite meal on Earth is -- get this, this is about as Okie as you can get, when this is your Last Meal fantasy -- pinto beans, cornbread, and fried potatoes. Conveniently, this meal is also extremely cheap to prepare, which means that we ate it A LOT when I was growing up since we frequently had very little money. Partly due to this fact, and partly due to the fact that pinto beans taste, pardon me, like farts, I would be content the entire rest of my life without ever eating it again. I don't hate it (anymore), I just never, ever want to eat it. However, I had this big meaty ham bone from the Thanksgiving ham, which I altruistically set aside for a Wednesday night pot of beans, knowing that Dad would love it. Except I almost never cook pinto beans. I don't mind black beans or red beans so I make chili or soup with those a lot, which left me with the false idea that I knew how to cook beans. Beans are beans. Or... not. After a proper soaking and three hours of cooking, these pinto beans could still have been rinsed off and used in a marbles game, I am not kidding. Pinto beans are from the devil. So anyway, I ended up leaving them cooking and we had take-n-bake pizza for supper instead. Which means that not only does my house reek of beans (funny, can't even smell the pizza at ALL), but we now have an entire huge POT of beans -- nasty puky PINTO beans -- just for the four of us. As of this moment I predict that at least half of that pot will be going in the compost bin. Which is a shame because that ham would have made a fantastic split pea soup and now it is doomed to be wasted. Unless I package it up and send it home with Dad....

I have had a creeping headache all day. At times it's almost gone, and I think, YES, victory is mine, but then it starts coming back in like the tide or something, and before I know it I'm mindlessly clutching the sides of my head, which I'm sure is a really flattering pose, but I lapse into it without thinking when the headache starts coming back. Yeah, I'm that cool. And do I take anything for my headache? Nooo. Because, you see, I want to know when it goes away on its own. T and I have actual arguments about this. He says it's ridiculous of me not to take something to make the pain go away. I say, DON'T call me ridiculous, you know I HATE being called ridiculous, and let me deal with this my own way please, and he says not if you're going to complain about it I'm not, OK, look, just TAKE something, and I say he's a closet drug addict who hasn't learned to allow himself to feel the pain without running for a chemical solution (got this line of thought from Rachel's Holiday by Marian Keyes, which is a really funny-but-interesting book, and which is also pretty much the sum total of my post-elementary education about addiction of any type), and the discussion generally degenerates from there into a "You can't just let other people live their lives without interfering"/"You are goofy and impractical and ridiculous/"DON'T call me RIDICULOUS" kind of thing. Not that this has happened today, which is good, because today was a good husband/wife affection kind of day and I didn't want to ruin that with one of our petty and stupid arguments. (We take the cake for petty and stupid arguments. We once had a harrowing, frustrating, voice-raising, laughable-to-those-around-us argument about whether every object with mass has its own inherent gravity. I won, by the way, that time, although I lost the one about how the space shuttle maneuvers in a vacuum. These arguments are much more easily solved -- but perhaps less interesting -- since the advent of the Internet).


I could almost set my watch by my babbling. I always start getting like this right after eleven. This is not a good time to start an IM chat because I will stay up until two laughing myself sick about things that will not sound at all funny the next day. Bedtime for me tonight, before I make a fool of myself any further.

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Monday, December 01, 2003

happy list

Today is hard to describe without a list. Sorry, ANOTHER one, yes. Today I...

• ...found my way onto the DSL superhighway, OH yeah. :)
  
• ...folded a lot of laundry and actually didn't mind it (but don't ask me if I've put it away)
  
• ...had a good chat with a good friend
  
• ...drove in the rain, listening to Christmas music
  
• ...drove up the hill to my house and saw my own Christmas lights at night for the first time (including my "I Can Conquer The World" icicle lights)
  
• ...watched "When Harry Met Sally"; laughed at the funny parts, longed for those CLOTHES, contemplated female friendship
  
• ...got a whole lot of childish hugs and kisses (and more than a few marital ones too, of course)
  
• ...watched my little ballerina daughter and her new best friend whisper secrets, kiss cheeks, and walk with arms entwined
  
• ...bought two tickets to the Nutcracker, for the aforementioned ballerina daughter and myself
  
• ...turned the calendar to December, which, if I had to choose a favorite month, would be it.
  
• ...measured my waist (for a new skirt) for the first time since the summer, and found that I've lost five inches from it in that period of time. (high fives all around)
  

In other words, I am indeed blissfully content (joyful sigh).

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the round of life Archives | Page 23 of 29

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