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Monday, August 28, 2006

101 things update

Five hundred and ninety-five days ago, when I was still using Diaryland and when my husband was doing a very dangerous job and risking getting himself killed because his boss said to and I needed to distract myself, I came up with this list of 101 things to do in 1001 days. It has been well over a year since I've even looked at it, but Kiwiria posted about her list today and that got me thinking about mine. It's not a project that I'm really into at this point, but I thought it would be interesting to go through and see how many things I'd done and how many I'd completely dropped the ball on. Yes, I know I just ended a sentence with a preposition. So shoot me.

Warning: Dude, this is LONG.

For my spirit:

1. Read through the Bible.
2. Attend a Christian ladies' retreat. -- and will again in less than a month. Six meals, no cooking! woo hoo!
3. Read the Bible every day. -- have completely fallen off the wagon on this. This will change. Now. Today.
4. Have private devotions every day. ditto as above

For my body:

5. Achieve and maintain a weight between 140 and 150. -- Ack! All the guilt right at first! Honestly, though, I am working on this again and have been since last Thursday, because see, I had a teeny weeny little heart thing on Wednesday. It wasn't even a full-blown attack but it was the second almost-attack in three days after a series of weeks of noticing more thuddy extra heartbeats. Up until recently I'd been fine since the hysterectomy magically corrected my iron levels. I think the increase in VERY SLIGHT problems is because I'm eating very stupidly and gaining weight. So I made a deal with T: I don't have to go back to the brusque, unkind doctor who wants to put me on medicine with side effects I don't like if I a) lose weight and get in better shape and b) don't have any attacks between now and Thanksgiving. So. I think 150-160 is a better idea, though, for my frame, height, and mentality. A perpetually hungry Mommy is a grumpy Mommy.
6. Spend half an hour at least five times a week in some kind of exercise. -- does typing count? Or reading for Librivox? Seriously, since T's back problems I haven't even been able to go for many walks, and with his later workdays it's still difficult. Will start taking kids on walks in mornings.
7. Eat enough fiber. -- am doing, I think.
8. Eat enough fresh vegetables. -- yes! thanks to Costco's cheap ready-to-eat broccoli and spring mix.
9. Drink half a gallon of water every day. -- not unless I can count diet Coke. I really should get on this, though.
10. See a doctor about the tachycardia thing.
11. See my GYN about my weird periods.
12. Make junk food an occasional treat instead of a regular dietary occurrence. -- I had done this for a long time. I'm still not as bad as I used to be (a candy bar a day doesn't keep anything away but wolf whistles).


For my mind:

13. Begin taking academic college classes. -- I am so frustrated that I cannot mark this off. However, since I can't do this yet -- NEXT SEMESTER I SWEAR. Or maybe I'm pushing this too hard and it's Just Not What God Has For Me Right Now.
14. Read chronologically through the works of Dickens. -- you know, I am not so crazy about this one anymore. Who cares if I do that. Maybe next year.
15. Practice the piano at least four days a week. -- HA HA! oh, hee hee.
16. Practice the flute at least four days a week. -- ditto.
17. Read one book every two weeks which I'd never read before.
18. Empty my never-been-read shelf. -- and again
19. Read through this list of books. -- I remember that list although I'm not looking at it right now and I know that I did read a lot of them. Some of them I lost interest in. Some of them I may go ahead and get.
20. Beat my husband at chess. -- Nope.


For my family (and friends):

21. Teach my children to read music and to play the piano. -- I backed off on this because they weren't interested.
22. Learn to use the chainsaw so it's not all up to T and my dad every time we cut wood. -- Decided against this one because I like to have all my limbs.
23. Stop yelling. Ever.* -- This one goes up and down.
24. Establish a cupboard of rain toys while my kids are small enough to enjoy it. -- Not a bad idea. I don't have an empty cupboard, though.
25. On days divisible by 3, don't watch videos; instead, do things from our copy of 501 TV-Free Activities for Kids.* -- Did I write that? How hokey. Not that eliminating excess video watching is a bad idea, don't get me wrong. We don't watch a lot these days as it is -- both kids are crazy about reading and spend a lot of time doing that. So if I die never having stopped yelling, I will at least have not bungled THAT up, eh?
26. Visit T's mother and half-siblings in Washington. -- This is one of those things that we keep saying "maybe next fall. Maybe next spring." It's mostly the expense and partly the time involved that keeps us from doing it. SOMEday.
27. Read a biography onto tapes for my dad. -- I don't remember if I'd done Mover of Men and Mountains for him before I made this list or not. At any rate, I've done one for him, and a couple of other fiction books.
28. Read a series of books onto tapes for my dad. -- No new series since I did Narnia for him years ago. (and I've moved up to CDs now, by the way.)
29. Read out loud to the kids most nights.* -- when they're not reading to themselves.
30. Send at least an e-card, preferably a paper card, to the people whose birthdays are in our family calendar. -- I usually hit most of these.
31. Establish a cozy reading corner in the school room. -- This is now a non-issue since we no longer have a school room.




For others:



32. Get my iron levels up so that I can again give blood. -- did it, and will give platelets next time I'm going to Fresno.
    
33. Give platelets. -- see above
    
34. Register as a bone-marrow donor.
    
35. Write regular letters, with the kids, to our three sponsored Compassion children. -- actually, we just started doing this this year. It's been nice.
    


For myself:


36. Own a dress in which I look stunning, and wear it. -- This is dependent on the weight-loss bit.
    
37. Get a haircut that flatters me. -- not yet, but I'm gearing up my nerve.
    
38. Get contact lenses. -- tried them. They didn't work right. I give up.
    
39. Give myself a makeover day.
    
40. Watch a movie in the theater by myself.
    




For fun:



41. Have a bonfire, complete with hot dogs and marshmallows.
    
42. Take a trip where at least half the time I am looking at scenery I have never seen before.
    
43. Travel to a foreign country. -- Ha ha. Hee hee hee.
    
44. Get a bigger Christmas tree. -- when we gave up the school room we lost living room space so this idea got shelved.
    
45. Have another family (aside from extended family) over for a meal every two months. -- gave up on this. I am too antisocial. And too embarrassed about my house.
    
46. See the Nutcracker in San Francisco. -- I still want to do this. I don't think it's a trip we'll be able to afford this winter, but maybe next year.
    
47. Buy a good digital camera and learn to take good pictures with it. -- I think they're good anyway. :)
    
48. Transfer the last two years' camcorder cassettes of family movies to VHS. Watch them while we're doing it. -- Did this one!
    
49. Look at the lights of our town from the mountain that overlooks it.
    
50. Climb the "mountain" near my parents' with T and the kids. -- It'll be a while before T is up to a project of this nature. I did climb it with my mom and LT but I think that was before I made this list.
    
51. See my friend Susan and her family in person. -- I wish. :(
    
52. Stomp in rain puddles with the kids. Don't just let them do it.
    
53. Get a tan on my legs. (one year out of my life won't kill me.)
    
54. Take the same trip we did on our honeymoon, except stay to the coast rather than driving through LA on I-5. -- We've done bits and pieces of this but not the whole thing and certainly not all in one trip.
    
55. Do an overnight hike/campout. -- ah, no. Maybe when C is a wee bit older and past the my FEET hurt. When will we be DONE? stage.
    
56. Visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium. -- Twice in the past six months.
    
57. Renew our zoo membership. -- And let it expire again.
    
58. Go to Storyland -- with T this time, who's never been there. -- Did this one this year.
    
59. Take the kids on BART (LT's wanted to do this for years). -- Well, T took LT yesterday, to go to the Oakland Colosseum for some Raiders Day thing that T's dad had given them tickets for.
    
60. Find a hedge maze and go through it. -- It was rather cheezy but it WAS a hedge maze (at the Dennis the Menace park in Monterey
    
61. Have a spring picnic in Yosemite Valley. -- The kids and I have done this several times now.
    
62. Do family portraits ourselves, outdoors in a place that we love. -- never all of us at once. Yet.
    
63. Go camping in a place we've never been. -- we are sticks in the mud. I am finding this out.
    



For my home:


64. Rid my house of things we don't use and figure out storage for the things we keep. -- This is done. The problem is that we use a dismaying number of things.
    
65. Frame the prints we've had sitting around rolled up for six years. -- kind of gave up on this one. However, I've framed a few of my pictures and put them up.
    
66. Get some kind of enclosed storage (even if it means enclosing the built-in shelves they're already on) for our videos and DVDs.
    
67. Decorate the walls in this house, or in whatever house in which we're living. -- Still this house, and still quite bleak overall
    
68. Get decent living-room furniture.
    
69. Burn the atrocious couch to cinders, and dance ceremoniously around the ashes.
    
70. Get decent dining-room furniture. -- Our chairs are in SUCH bad condition. They're soft upholstered things on wheels and the upholstery is in shreds, literally. It's so trashy. Chairs cost too dang much.
    
71. Make shelves in our bedroom, to hold books. -- Did that one a year or so ago.
    
72. Replace our low dresser with two upright ones.
    
73. Make a door for the cupboard over the fridge.
    
74. Paint our bedroom.
    
75. Perform my chore list every day. -- HA HA.
    
76. Establish a chore chart for my children and use it. -- We did this last spring and we'll start it up again when school starts next week.
    
77. Raise vegetables in the summer. -- Next summer, I swear.
    
78. Fix up our backyard so that it's a pleasant area for playing, relaxing, or entertaining. -- HA HA. Hee hee hee. It has a really... um, creative... kids' fort in it, made by kids...
    
79. Grow my own cooking herbs. -- am doing this. I've been using them, too. Yum.
    
80. Build the kids' play fort. -- They built their own.
    
81. Renovate LT's room.
    
82. Realize that the landlord is never going to finish painting our house, and get him to let us do it ourselves.
    


Crafty things:

(darn, there goes the "For" theme)


83. Transform my box of unused yarn into completed crochet projects. -- I got a really good start on this but I haven't been crocheting much lately.
    
84. Crochet a doily every month. -- or not.
    
85. Make a lace tablecloth. -- This is still something I'd like to do, but it's definitely not high on my priority list. The first time someone spilled Diet Coke on it I'd probably need to be institutionalized. Maybe for a wedding present for C, or something. :)
    
86. Make a tablecloth for family gatherings where each person signs his/her name on the cloth at the end of the meal, and I embroider the signatures for each gathering in a given color. -- I still think this is a good idea, and every time a gathering goes by and I haven't done it I wish I had. I'm hosting Christmas this year... maybe I'll make one then.
    
87. Have a booth at the Christmas craft fair in our town. -- Not something that's high on my priority list at this point.
    
88. Make the sandbag gun rests T has been wanting me to make for months. -- Did those over a year ago, when I still had my sewing room.
    
89. Make a double-bed-sized double Irish chain quilt out of my scrap fabric (yes, I have enough to do this). -- I cut out the pieces and there they all sit in Ziploc bags.
    
90. Make pajamas for the kids every fall. -- So far, so good.
    
91. Make T, LT, my nephews, and my dad matching Western shirts for the fair. -- methinks this is too big a project to undertake with no sewing room, and also with a son who does not care about dressing like Grandpa anymore. :(
    
92. Make C and myself matching Christmas dresses.-- Not yet. Not this year, either.
    
93. Make matching springtime dresses for my best friend's three daughters. -- I still really want to do this. Her girls are growing so fast! Perhaps next spring.
    
94. Finish the 1 Corinthians 13 cross-stitch I started, um, six years ago. -- Nope.
    



Together with DH:


95. Make our wills.-- nope.
    
96. Restore our biweekly home date nights.
    
97. Declutter the outside of our house. -- We made such vast improvements in this arena that I'm going to go ahead and cross it off even though there are still a VERY few things that need to be done.
    
98. Establish a savings account to cover medical copayments. -- We did. It's empty right now, though.
    
99. Establish a savings account for normal use.
    
100. Plan menus and shop from those, rather than running to the store at 2 every afternoon to figure out what to make for dinner. -- This is one of my minor household triumphs. Things go SO much more smoothly on a daily basis because of this.
     

So if I've counted right, I'm now down to about sixty things, give or take, to do in 406 days. If I cared.

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

yesterday

Yesterday was, as C announced at the end of it, QUITE a day of "adventures". We went to Yosemite, just because we could (we haven't been able to since April, what with the landslide and all). We took T a nice lunch and then proceeded to the valley to take pictures and generally torture LT who swears he hates going to Yosemite and yet oddly enough has a great time while he's there. Especially yesterday, since, let's face it, yesterday was not just an ordinary day.

First thing I did was get pulled over. By a park ranger. For, uh, going the wrong way on a one-way road (hey, at least it was exciting this time. No measly speeding ticket for me). In my defense, the last time I was up there they'd converted that one-way road to a two-way because of road construction elsewhere. Still. Ahem. Big signs saying WRONG WAY DO NOT ENTER are generally there for a reason. I did not get ticketed but I did get a lot of ribbing from T (including a voice mail message with references to 'trying to raise the bail' and my 'one phone call'. Hardy har har) who of course knew about it as soon as the ranger ran my plates because it came over the Park radio system, and if they hadn't heard it on the radio he'd have known when the guys in Dispatch instant-messaged him about it.

Things were uneventful until we had parked in the day-use parking and ridden the shuttle bus to the Mirror Lake trailhead. We were hiking merrily along the trail, and I'm afraid I was not looking very carefully ahead of me when LT gave a little shriek when he saw this guy in our path:

(not the best photo. By the time I felt safe taking my eyes off him and got my lens changed he was pretty far away).

Just a bit of country-girl trivia: That is the first rattlesnake I've been near to in person, other than at the zoo, that survived the encounter. I may not be able to jump a car battery without reading the instructions over three or four times first by by golly I'm pretty good at dispatching venomous snakes. In a national park, however, that is Just Not Done. It was an interesting feeling to just let it slither away.

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

Another snake we saw just tooling around in the water as we crossed Mirror Lake (except it's more like Mirror Stream at this time of year) at the dam:

(poor photograph because it's not so easy to focus when you're straddling a running stream on two boulders and your subject keeps moving)

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

THEN we were quick-stepping back to the bus stop in order to be able to pick up T on time, and the trees parted to show us this:

Aah, summertime. Freedom and long evenings and of course forest fires. See the faint white line going down the rocks on the right-hand side of the picture? That is the August remnant of Yosemite Falls. It boggles my mind that people will scrimp and save and plan to come across the country or around the world toYosemite... in August. Or September. Dude, people, COME IN APRIL.

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

And THEN... well, here:

Open Letter

To the man who shoved in front of me in line in order to take the last possible available place on the shuttle bus, avoiding eye contact and dragging along your twentyish son by the backpack strap over his fair and somewhat gallant insistences that we should be allowed to go first:

The fact that the next bus came in two minutes and was nearly empty, allowing us to sit and relax in comfort with our personal space intact, in no way exonerates you for your boorish behavior, since you couldn't have known. Jerk.

Cordially,
The harried-looking woman with the two dehydrated kids

So there was that.

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

Then, thanks to the fire, T couldn't come home with us anyway, and narrowly escaped having to stay completely overnight thanks to his boss and his boss's hero complex.

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

THEN I stayed up until 2 AM reading the new Marian Keyes book. Not that that's so much of an adventure, since I've been staying up till that hour doing Librivox stuff these days anyway. It's the only time the house is guaranteed to be quiet for any extended period of time.

Today's rather ordinary, so far. But I'm going out on the back porch to clean up eight months' or so worth of mess back there, so stay tuned.

Monday, August 14, 2006

stuff

As kind of a last-hurrah kind of thing before T goes back to work tomorrow (or actually, as I look at my computer clock, that would be... today. In about five hours, as a matter of fact), we drove to Monterey yesterday for a car show and a visit to the aquarium and also a reminder of why we don't live in the city. Various things we encountered included (ooh, a list!):

• The kind of traffic where you can't move even when your light turns green because the cars are backed up from the next traffic light.
• A parking garage. I hate parking garages, and I didn't know it until yesterday. I don't know why but I couldn't help thinking of all the weight above me and how terrible it would be if an earthquake happened. I've no idea why this doesn't bother me in, say, a really tall building (not that I've been in many of these, although T's orthopedic surgeon is on -- gasp -- THE THIRD FLOOR of a three-story building), when it made my palms sweat in an above-ground parking garage. Maybe it's the low ceilings, or the dim maze-ish kind of creepiness, or maybe it's just that I'm a nut. I don't know.
• So darn many people at the aquarium that we vowed never to go on a summer weekend again. At least we could go in through the members' entrance and didn't have to wait in the line that snaked way up the block and then around and around in one of those maze-things they have at Disneyland for everything from the Haunted Mansion to the pretzel carts. If there ARE pretzel carts in Disneyland... I haven't been there since 1993, back when it only cost $40 for an adult to get in. My beloved jellyfish room was a mob scene, and I got so annoyed at all the people taking flash pictures because how can you sit and be soothed by floating jellyfish when you're blinded every two seconds by another point-and-shoot taking a picture of flash reflected off glass?
• A Denny's where I finally learned why Jennifer hates Denny's. I hereby apologize for ever doubting you, Jenn.
• The tail end of a wine celebration fiesta thing, which meant that as we were walking toward the Custom House to see the organ grinder, there were scores of people walking away from it wearing little lanyards attached to wine glasses, the vast majority of whom were rather humorously impaired. Not so much that they staggered -- it was a wine festival, after all, and not a frat party -- but just enough that they thought they were fine when really they weren't. I hope none of them were going to drive. One woman, who I'm sure thought she was being really quiet and subtle, said in a voice that carried across the courtyard to her companion as she passed me: "Look how burned she ish. Look at that. I don't burn like that, I just tan and tan. She'sh sho red." Which I was, and I'm not offended; I'm grateful, in fact, that she gave me something to laugh at since this was not long before I would have to brave the parking garage again and I needed something to lighten my mood.

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

T is doing way, way better. Not sure if he's better than he was before the surgery yet -- I tend to think so; he's been much more active in the past four or five days than he had been for quite some time. Thank you all for your thoughts and prayers. I'm sincerely hoping that this surgery fixes things, not only for the sake of his comfort which goes without saying, but because if it doesn't it will mean a lot of very big lifestyle changes for us, starting with the loss of his job and some serious financial struggling, and probably ending with me being a nurse in four years instead of ten or twelve and him being the one to homeschool our kids. And while I love rearranging furniture and daydream about moving out of state, Real Change on that kind of scale kind of scares the bejeebers out of me. So. While you're praying... :)

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

I've been planning for school, which we will start after Labor Day. I actually found myself in the position of having to buy two math textbooks this year from eBay. This means that thus far, including some glue and pencils at Wal-Mart's back-to-school sale and a cursive workbook bought at the school supply store, we will have spent almost five eighths of a percent of the average California per-child taxpayer cost of a public-school education.

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

Lastly (for tonight; I'm starting to nod off), the Librivox obsession continues. Just tonight I started recording my first solo project, Silas Marner. I also volunteered to do Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, which I've actually never read but have always wanted to. Also I'm recording some of the Federalist Papers, which is I think my favorite project so far because it makes me feel all smart to say the words "requisite" and "effectual" and "enumerate". Also, any time I'm in the car alone, I'm listening to A Little Princess, which was recorded for Librivox by a woman who should record audiobooks for a living, she's so awesome at it. Thank you again to my enabler of a brother for telling me about that site. I certainly didn't have enough stuff to do before, right? Yeah.

Saturday, July 29, 2006

duty update. Also, Jenn is thirty.

I know I should update this even though I am feeling really dry, and not in a good way, when it comes to writing. So here's a just-the-facts-ma'am post to keep the empty page away.

We're back from a few days' vacation in Morro Bay, where T rested his back a lot and we all had a pretty good time, and where it was 70 balmy degrees when it was a hundred and six at home, and where THE NIKON took its nine-thousandth picture. Did I mention that THE NIKON took its first picture on I think January 8th? Nine thousand pictures in approximately two hundred days, that's very nearly two rolls of film a day -- about $7 worth of developing in the old-fashioned film economy. Which means that THE NIKON paid for itself somewhere around the middle of June, give or take. If you add that to the over eight thousand that I took with The Nikon, that makes a total of over 17,000 pictures since last March. If I were to estimate the average shutter speed of those pictures at, ack, 1/60th of a second? that would translate to about four minutes and forty seconds of sensor exposure in both cameras, not counting cleaning times for THE NIKON. If I think of it in terms of Sanity Units Per Second, that is an EXTREMELY good deal. Not so good if I think of it in terms of dollars per second, however, so I won't. Better to think of it in dollars per sanity unit.

Um, what else. T is having his back operated on on Monday. I can't believe I forgot to tell you all that. He's having the less-invasive kind of surgery where they go in laparoscopically and remove the portion of his disc that bulged out into his spinal column. This means that his recovery time, instead of being measured in months (and quite a lot of them) as it would have been for the fusion we were originally talking about, will be measured in weeks, and not so terribly many of those. And the fusion is still an option if it's needed.

I hear you yawning. You could at least try to cover it. This is my husband's spine we're talking about here. Scintillating stuff.

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

In other news, Jenn turned thirty this week. I was going to do this maudlin did-we-ever-think-we'd-make-it-this-far post with pictures, kind of a Beaches montage trailer without the dying or the Bette Midler song (unless I could find a really cheezy MIDI file of it for effect) but I was away from my home PC when her numbers rolled over and it didn't seem as good to do it after the fact. But here, I can still put up a few pictures:

I'm 17 here, just starting my senior year, and Jenn at 16 was a year behind me.
I: Do you see my chin that digs a hole to China? Also, for some inexplicable reason, I am wearing teal eyeshadow.
Jenn: Dude, WHY are we looking at the sun? Whose idea was this? (uh, that'd be miss Chin-to-China there.)

Similar ages, I think this was about two months before the previous shot. We'd been hiking. I THOUGHT I WAS FAT. Just had to get that out of the way. [kicks 17-yo self].

Fun times.

It was the early 90's; it was so cool to act like hippies. Plus it really annoyed my brother and T who were also on this trip and at that stage of our lives we dearly loved to annoy my brother and T.

I: I am turning 18 tomorrow and I have a new and very squiggly perm and I want to show it off. Thank you for taking my picture.
Jenn: I am holding... a balloon? (probably my idea again).

I wasn't going to post this one (because I am NOT doing what it looks like I am doing, and because it's a bad scan of a blurry picture) but it was the only one I had on my computer of the two of us from junior high, which was when we met. Here I was around 14, maybe 13, and Jenn would have been 12. We used so much hairspray on our hair on a daily basis at this point in time that my dad still calls us "The Crispy Twins" eighteen years later.

And now both of those girls are on the plus-side of thirty, which at the time was a hazy number far away beyond anything we could really picture, I think. And if you can believe it I don't have a single picture of us together past the summer of 1993. MUST REMEDY THIS SOON JENN. Happy belated birthday, friend. I love you bunches.

Monday, July 17, 2006

things that have made me smile lately

You've got to ac-cen-tu-ate the positive, right? So here I go.

1. Librivox.org. Because I really need another obsession. Especially a computer-related book obsession. This is an awesome site, it really is -- audio recordings of public-domain books, read by volunteers, available completely free. What's more fun than listening to them (for me anyway, since I dislike being read to unless I'm doing something that makes reading impossible -- such as driving -- and I don't have an iPod, although I'm beginning to really want one) is reading them. So far I've contributed a chapter to Vanity Fair and two (of five I volunteered for) to Anne of the Island. I'm contemplating doing Silas Marner as a solo project, since I've been wanting to record it for my dad anyway. Bonus: Because I needed to get a new microphone and download some editing software to do the Librivox thing, I can now do my dad's books on tape on CD instead, and, you know, actually edit the files to take out mistakes. Yay!

2. Mary, one of my oldest online friends and a frequent commenter here, had her baby this weekend. GO MARY. You're awesome.

3. More butterfly pictures. Stay tuned to (or stay away from) the photo blog this week.

4. Summer reading. LT has discovered Roald Dahl and would rather read than sleep or eat. C has bookmarks in like five different books. Not that she gets that from ME or anything. Ahem.

5. Um. I typed "summer" up there and my mind went blank. Our forecast for this week has highs of 105 degrees and a 20 percent chance of thunderstorms. At the same time. For several days running. Oops, sorry, positives. These are supposed to be positives. Um, we don't have to build fires to stay warm?

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

I'm a bad bad blogger.

I go through these meme-induced sprees of daily blogging that last for half a week or so and then I get the writing blahs and don't post anything (about... watching grass grow? the nail-bitingly tense games of Clue my family has taken to playing at night? North Korea? the letters my daughter writes to herself? do you see the problem here?) until the empty screen shows up and people start sending me emails about it. (it's a test, see, to see if you all notice I'm here or not. It's good to know who my real friends are.)

(um, kidding.)

But I'm not a bad daughter. Instead of blogging yesterday, I was out at my dad's house, helping him. Which is a switch, because historically the help has moved overwhelmingly in the other direction in that relationship; that's just the kind of guy my dad is. But even Superdad can't take the broken pump out of his well and put a new one in by himself. So at 7:45 in the morning I found myself at his house, where I took part of the roof off the wellhouse. Yes, I. Took the roof off. Me. Well, at least I took off about three sheets of corrugated tin. Ahem. Then he, I, and my 78-year-old grandmother -- the spunky one, not the whiny one nor the dead one, bien sûr -- hauled a 75-lb pump attached to 120 feet of PVC pipe (which was of course full of water) out the well hand-over-hand. In case you haven't gathered, this is very hard work. Then after a drive to town where my dad spent an absolutely ginormous amount of money to buy a new pump and new PVC pipe and new wiring and rope and all kinds of clever technical stuff, we went back to his house where he, my brother, and I (Grandma having gone into town to have lunch with her girlfriends and organize a church directory photography session) did the even harder job of putting it all down the well, one 20-foot section of PVC at a time, through the hole I had so skillfully made in the roof. And then we took it all out and did it again, because we'd forgotten something at the bottom. Amazingly, the only injury I incurred during this entire process was a small rope burn on my thumb; I almost knocked myself off the ladder with the help of a wobbly section of pipe helicoptering around my head, but I stayed upright; in fact I managed to avoid major catastrophe completely. I had never sweated so much in my adult life, however, so as soon as the men were hunched over the technical stuff where there was no room for me to hunch even if I could have helped (wiring is not my bag, it's one of those things I'm scared to mess with), after I put the roof back together, I took my kids and my nephews down to the creek and we all jumped in. Granted, from a hygiene perspective, the sweat was probably preferable to the sandy, mossy, fishy creek water that had been running through cow pastures for about fifteen miles, but who cares. Plus there's that whole "floating on my back staring up at the sunlit alder leaves against the sky" thing, too. Very relaxing, just what my poor offended muscles needed.

Another thing I've been doing instead of blogging is trying to figure out what pictures I'm going to enter in the fair. I think I have it pretty well narrowed down so I'm not going to do that thing like I did last year when I ask everyone to go over to my photo blog and make suggestions. However, I am sick to death of all my flower pictures and I think I'll skip that category unless there's one that particularly stands out for other people. Not that I'm asking for input or validation, or fishing for compliments, or anything. I'm just saying.

We were really late signing the kids up for the summer reading program this year (and I never did get around to joining the one that Kat told me about); we only did it yesterday. They've had their noses glued in books since before we got home from the library. It's hard to tear them away long enough to do just about anything. You know how I hate that. Ahem. LT is reading Tuck Everlasting, which I think he's about to finish, and C is alternating between American Girl books and the Boxcar Children series, with some Saddle Club thrown in for good measure. I have got to gently nudge her away from boilerplate ghostwritten series books or else the next thing I know she'll be reading the Sweet Valley Twins and I may have to go throw myself off a bridge. I think I'll put her on a diet of Beverly Cleary and Mrs. Frisby and Narnia, and see if it'll pull her out before it's too late.

Thursday, July 06, 2006

dilly dallying

I'm supposed to be typing. Well, I am typing, but I'm supposed to be typing something very specific, namely a transcription of an audio file that is queued up and waiting for me to stop putting it off and do my work already. It's funny, because yesterday when I was muttering and slamming things around and frustrated about the whole tenant/back surgery/work/money/everything thing, I was thinking what a great time it would be to have a transcription job come in. Then about five minutes after I had that thought I checked my email and there was a message from the guy who hires me to do this stuff. It's a small job but every little bit helps make me more sane. So yay.

The only problem is, I didn't buy any Jolly Ranchers today (after our last frightening non-tenant experience, we're being VERY careful not to spend any money until it is actually in our hot little hands. This even extends to Jolly Ranchers, since if I stop off at the store to just buy a $1.70 bag of candy, our bank account will inevitably be at least $20 lighter after I've checked out. Hey, admitting I have a problem is the first step toward healing, right?). I think this is why I can't get motivated properly. I have a few left over from my last job, but they've been around a while and humidity and Jolly Ranchers don't play well together. So I'm a little afraid to look at them.

Also, in the 'ha ha very funny God' department, we have had six serious calls about our apartment today, and I had to tell every one of them that it was already taken but thank you very much. That God, he sure has a sense of humor.

Also, I used the weedeater today. IT WAS FUN, and I did a good job. And what a feeling of empowerment! Any time I saw a thicket of tall weeds today (and living where I do, this is not at all an uncommon experience), I would think, I could weedeat that. Before, weedeating was a mystery, an enigma, a task best left to my betters. Now I have conquered. Next up: the chainsaw. (or... maybe not. Some things a clumsy girl just shouldn't try. But then again, it's not like T's going to be using one anytime soon.)

Wednesday, July 05, 2006

OK, I am done whining now.

And not just because someone came and agreed to rent the apartment just now, either. Although that certainly helps. Thank you, God; I'll bet you're having a good laugh at me this evening. That's OK. It's good to know I'm good for something.

Off to finish cleaning my room and then play another good rousing match of CLUE! with the kids. Or else maybe before it gets dark I'll use the weedeater, which I've never done before. If I can remember all the steps Dad showed me to make the thing work. Me using a machine I've never touched before in my life: don't you wish you were here with a video camera? And maybe a tourniquet?

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

where's Johnny Olson when you need him?

Do you know what we got today? We got (drumroll) a NEEWW CAR!

(really I always thought the showcase with the vacation looked like more fun.)

Well, OK, it's a 34-year-old car. But -- get this -- it was owned by a little old lady who owned it from the day she bought it new in 1972 until today when she sold it to us. And I don't know if she only drove it to church on Sunday or what, but DANG did she take good care of it. This car is WAY better inside, out, and mechanically than our 1991 Buick was when it was a third the age of this classic machine. So, we're happy. Because now the aforementioned 1991 Buick can go rot in Pick And Pull (which is all it's good for now thanks to the fact that its cash value is far, far less than what it would cost to make it, you know, go down the road when you push the gas pedal -- I know, that's a lot to ask) while I drive something that goes where I need it to go. And if it should stop going where I need it to go, my husband can actually fix it**, because it isn't run by a Hal-ish computer that tells you an assortment of lies about what's wrong with its insides. Here is a picture of our new car, with C as an added bonus (really, we were heading out for a walk and I realized that there was an actual object on the premises that THE NIKON had not met yet, so I took a couple of shots before we left the driveway, to get them properly acquainted).

**I told T when we were first married and he was replacing the engine in a vehicle that it had always seemed to me that it couldn't be so simple really as hooking up the engine to make a car start working -- that even though I KNEW this wasn't true, I couldn't help thinking there almost had to be some kind of white magic hoodoo thing going on that mechanics just didn't tell us about. I felt like I was crazy telling him this until he told me he'd felt the same way for years. The moral of the story is, don't be afraid to tell people your crazy secrets. If they don't haul you away in a straitjacket*** to a nice quiet place where you can weave baskets and watch daytime TV, they might just surprise you by admitting that they're crazy too.

***You know one of my favorite Britishisms? "Strait-waistcoat". AWESOME. Thank you, Mother England.

Also today we found out that T is most likely going to have surgery on his back, being as how that's the only way he'll ever be able to live a normal life and do his job and work on his projects and stuff. (it's a good thing they can't give him a Spine of Steel that would allow him to lift transmissions with no negative repercussions, because if they could he would totally want it but you KNOW the insurance wouldn't cover that). They could continue to do 'pain management', but his discs would never just magically de-herniate themselves, and he'd still have to be so super careful to never lift anything or do anything fun, and he'd always be at serious risk for giving himself another spell of miserable couch-bound agony. So we don't know yet when the surgery will be (please oh please after our weekend in Morro Bay near the end of July) but we're pretty sure that unless God intervenes, it'll happen, and he'll be that much closer (he already has screws in his ankle courtesy of a pickup tackle football game on Thanksgiving 2002, when he broke the little poky-out bone on the inside of his ankle clean off. Yeah, ouch) to being the Bionic Man. Or else maybe the Tin Woodman.

And with that I think I'm completely out of parentheses, so I'll have to close.

Monday, May 22, 2006

a week in my life

T is still couch-bound. Poor guy has never had it this bad with his back, and that's saying a lot. We've all been sleeping in the living room: T because the couch is much better on his back than our bed since it keeps him from flopping around and changing positions in his sleep, I in case he needs help getting up during the night (he has a walker now, borrowed from a friend, so it's actually just the getting-back-down that he needs my help with now), and the kids because if Mom and Dad get to have a slumber party in the front room then by golly they get to too.

Yesterday I woke up at 9, looked at the clock, and thought, ooh, I am totally getting on the ball with those pain-management people (he was referred to pain management on Friday, and the insurance-referrals person at the local medical clinic messed around all day and missed faxing out his information, just in time for a weekend of lying on the couch taking Vicodin and having sciatica spasms), and I called the office in Fresno and left a polite and concise and clear message on their answering machine, and when I hung up T asked me why I'd done that. When it was Sunday. Which I had totally forgotten, I thought it was Monday and continued to have to remind myself that it wasn't, all day long. My internal clock gets totally out of whack without the rhythm of work days to keep it straight.

Honestly we love having him home. He and LT spent an evening making some really awesome Lego creations; now they have a car-model project going. And so far we've played three different games of Trivial Pursuit (Star Wars, Book Lovers', and regular Genus IV), caught up on reading, and watched a handful of movies we'd never seen. We keep saying we should do this more often, only without the excruciating pain part.

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