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Tuesday, June 21, 2005
things I think
You know what is a total scam? Is laundry detergent scoops. Laundry detergent scoops are the Make Thousands A Month Stuffing Envelopes At Home of the housework world. The manufacturer sells you a box of powdered detergent, proclaiming that said box of detergent will wash, say, 80 loads of your husband's socks and your son's muddy jeans. But then they include -- here's the devious thing -- a scoop which holds THREE LOADS' WORTH of detergent. Now, they are up-front about this; they put little lines on the side of the scoop showing how little you actually need to use, but come on, they know that with a scoop that big you're going to get in a hurry and just scoop up whatever and end up buying more product after only, say, twenty-eight loads of wash.
Where is the outrage? I ask you.
(my personal solution is to replace the clear green tool of deception with a 1/3-cup measure. I'LL SHOW THEM.)
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Also, I need a haircut, like really badly. I can't do anything dramatic because I'm too wimpy, but it's going be going from waist-length (the few stray hairs that actually live long enough to make it that far) to above the bra strap, SOON, or I'm going to end up going completely off the deep end and getting it cut up to my jaw or something. And I'd really regret that. Especially when the divorce papers were served.
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And further, I think the people who are crying because cutting PBS will mean the end of quality children's programming until the end of time need to watch Nickelodeon a little bit, and also check out, say, THE SESAME STREET STORE in their local mall. I think Big Bird and the gang could probably make it on their own without the subsidy, don't you?
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Also, because we are moving our schoolroom stuff back into the main house since what has formerly been known as our schoolroom will (I hope) soon be rented out to some fortunate individual, I get all the fun of moving, without, well, the fun of moving. In other words, I hauled boxes and books for about three and a half hours today, and I'm not done yet, and then I get to scour and scrub and all that fun stuff. Anyone want a nice small apartment in a good location, all utilities included? :-D
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I'm about to reveal a dirty secret. Ready?
Our house has fleas.
NOT the apartment! Oh dear me no, the apartment's clean as a whistle. Er, at least as far as INSIDIOUS DEMONIC LITTLE BEASTS are concerned. That's because the fleabags cats don't go in there. So if you were gonna come rent that apartment you just come on ahead, it's all fine and dandy, yessir.
So far we've tried flea collars for the cats and fogging (which is a HUGE pain in the derriere, oh my GOSH, the covering of food preparation items! the shutting off of aquariums and pilot lights and refrigerators! and on top of that, it completely and totally failed to have any effect whatsoever) for the house. Now we're planning on doing the drops-behind-the-shoulder-blades thing, since everyone says that is just the be-all and end-all of flea prevention. Because sitting down at the computer and having to pinch three fleas to death within about ten minutes is really lame.
Monday, June 13, 2005
slipping
Today I can feel myself slipping down. It has been a long time since I've felt like this, and I don't like it. Every time it goes away, I think, whew, glad that's done, won't have to deal with that again.
Oops.
Am I sensing the delicate shifting of chemical balances in my brain? Is it the devil, pulling on me and cackling merrily? Am I not spiritual enough? Not active enough? Just weak? Maybe I'm overwhelmed by the sheer work involved in pulling a household back into normalcy after a weekend of being gone almost all the time, or maybe... I don't know. All I do know is that I feel like I'm sliding down a seamless, slippery chute into a fog of gray waiting for me at the bottom. I'm trying for handholds -- get something done, that sometimes works. If you don't like your surroundings, change them. Clean up the mess and then the vicious circle will break and you'll feel normal. Go out and see something different.
Or, sit.
I sometimes think the fatigue and exhaustion associated with depression is actually related to the way that, when you're depressed, nothing at all sounds appealing. You can't even daydream and take yourself away from where you are, because all the usual daydream fodder -- I am sitting by a snapping fire. It is autumn and the rain is coming down in sheets outside the plate-glass window of the library in my beautiful new home. The whole family is with me, and quiet, with a general feeling of well-being and love in the room. I have a thick book which I've never read before, and a cup of rich hot chocolate, and a throw blanket on my lap -- feels just as empty as the thought of washing the sinkful of dishes, or getting the kids ready for running errands, or staring into space. I think it's not so much that lying in bed sounds so much more worthwhile than anything else -- it's just that when we humans get this way we tend to want to maintain the default position. So I lie around staring at the wall, thinking of nothing. Or I sit in this chair, staring at the screen, likewise thinking of nothing. (well, NOW I'm thinking, I'm thinking about typing a post. Ha ha. Depressed person's idea of a joke. To quote C: "You're supposed to laugh. Like [hysterically] 'HEE HEE HAW HAW HAW!!'" And then she sits and waits for me to indeed laugh like HEE HEE HAW HAW HAW.) Actually, since, as I mentioned, I'm still only slipping down into the fog, and haven't landed in it (yet?), I got really clever a little bit ago. If nothing was going to have any appeal, from lying in bed to discovering a never-before-known Jane Austen book to taking a beach vacation, well, I might as well do things that were ordinarily unappealing, since it wouldn't matter what I was doing. That lasted through the sinkful of dirty dishes anyway. (I think my family is doing a study. It's physics. They're wondering how many bowls and cups can be piled on top of each other -- some partly filled with their beslimed contents, some just encrusted with them -- and still stay upright in the sink. I was gone all day Saturday and then we were all gone most of the day yesterday. The dishwasher's been sitting there empty, waiting to be filled, and yet the sink was piled high with the aforementioned physics experiment. Wanna come over? It's so much fun here.)
Anyway. I think I'm going to go try to dig in my nails, or build a ladder, or, I dunno, at least accomplish a few things that really need to be done.
Saturday, June 04, 2005
a date
Tonight T whisked us all off on a date.
Yes, the whole family, it wasn't THAT kind of date, it was just a nice surprise evening. He'd known that I wanted to go take sunset pictures at a lake where we camp sometimes, and see the dam with the water as high as it has been (I AM SO GEEKILY EASY TO AMUSE. So sue me). So he loaded us all into the car, took us out for fast food, and then started driving. We had so much fun. In case I've never told you, I have the best husband in the world. Just so you know.
There are sunset pictures in the photo blog, but here are a couple of family ones.
LT and C. LT is carrying my tripod. That's not a purse. :)
The family. Except me. (In case you're wondering, T is smiling. Really. And he wonders why people sometimes find him intimidating.)
Friday, June 03, 2005
busy days
I put 200 miles on our car yesterday, which I don't mind doing if I'm going, you know, on a trip or something, but when it happens in the course of running errands, UGH. A hundred and fifty of the miles were from a trip to the valley to buy a part for our washing machine; thirty to take the cat to the vet and back (not to mention that I also paid $64 for an exam and some antibiotics for poor Mary who had an abscess of some sort on her jaw); thirty to go to a planning meeting for next year's Awana club at the chapel. At this point I feel like I never want to drive again, and that's without even thinking about how much I spent on gas yesterday. (you people who don't live in California and complain about your gas prices, I don't wanna hear it, or wait, I do, because maybe for a while I can pretend to be you so that I can find $2.00 a gallon really outrageous instead of unimaginably cheap. Remember when gas topped $1.50 and everyone shrieked in agony? sigh. the good old days.). I was going to go to Yosemite today to take pictures but I couldn't bring myself to do it. Maybe on Monday. So I spent today getting the kids to clean their rooms, working on school stuff, walking to the creek (with one of the neighbor kids) to hunt for tadpoles for the neighbor kids' pond, and DOING LAUNDRY WOO HOO. (yes, I cheer, even though I hate laundry. Because even more than I hate laundry, I hate having to pay to do laundry, like I did on Monday when our washing machine was broken so I had to drop another $20 at the laundromat to do six loads). I've been busy enough for the past two days to make me want a nap really, really badly right now.
By the way, I finished My Sister's Keeper at 3 AM on Wednesday, and then I read the new Elizabeth Berg (A Year of Pleasures) on Wednesday as well. (Which means that quite by accident I read two books in 24 hours about death -- one about dying, and one about grieving, which means that sort of thing has been on my mind a lot since then.) And now I'm almost done with Emma. Overcompensating? me?
Friday, May 27, 2005
not QUITE an exercise in futility
Tonight I didn't feel like just sitting around; I wanted to do something productive. (whoops, sorry, should have warned you so that you'd be sure to be sitting down before you read that. Are you OK?) So I cleaned out the car.
I have noticed, in my walks around town, that most people's cars have... what's it called, that place under all the JUNK... um, floors. That's it. You can look in their car windows and see floor mats, and seats, not just in a couple spots where the stuff's shoved out of the way, but all the way around. I'd comfort myself with the knowledge that these people must not have kids, but I happen to know that's not always the case. (still clinging to hope that maybe the cars were NEW...). Ours used to be much, much better than it has become lately; I think it's largely that the kids are old enough to take stuff INTO the car, but they aren't old enough to take it OUT yet.
That and I'm a total and complete slob, that's also part of it. Maybe.
Anyway. I started thinking I really REALLY needed to clean out the car yesterday, when I tried to find my little bottle of glasses-cleaning solution on the way to Awana, and I couldn't. Before I was sure that it was lost, though, I'd gathered up a full grocery bag of garbage just from around my feet in the passenger side and what I could reach of the back floorboard. (not GROSS garbage, just papers and receipts and junk mail and plastic grocery bags and that sort of non-maggoty, non-food-item, non-stinky stuff. But still.) Today we went to the valley to watch Star Wars and eat at Applebee's and spend our retirement (well, not really, but it felt like it) at Wal-Mart, and when we got home, I was going to sit on the porch swing and read and listen to the snick-snick-snick of the sprinkler on the newly-mown front lawn, but I just couldn't, knowing that That Mess was out there, WAITING. So what started out as emptying out the junk, putting away the non-junk, and washing the inside of the windows (the rear window still bore the ghostly remains of a fog-written "BUSH 2004", done by my politically astute son last fall, and of course I only noticed it when I was actually driving the car down the road and hence could not exactly just reach back and clean it off) turned into a full-out wash job. Which was really pretty stupid. Because guess where we're driving tomorrow. If you guessed "down miles of dry dusty dirt road to your parents'", you are right! Bingo! You win the prize! Oh well; at least the inside will be clean.
P.S. re: Star Wars: I really enjoyed the movie, better than Episodes I and II, and also better than the earliest three episodes, at least in that it has no Mark Hamill, who, I'm sorry, belongs in a ballet class somewhere, not in an adventure movie. And the way Luke changed from a whiny teenager to a condescending know-it-all in the space of a mere three movies did not impress me. Anyway. Episode III was very nicely done, and emotionally stirring, and all that. But you know what had me in choky tears and cold chills simultaneously? Was the preview for "The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe" that came before it. MY GOSH I CAN NOT WAIT.
Thursday, May 26, 2005
our excitement for the day
Did you know that a riding lawn mower can throw a rock really, really hard, at an upward angle, for quite a distance? And that it can aim it right between the wide boards that make up the railing on a back deck? And that when a 7' by 4' panel of a sliding glass door shatters, it makes thousands and thousands of very sharp and tiny squares of glass, which take quite a lot of effort and time to clean up?
We do, now.
Tuesday, May 24, 2005
things about today
- T was off work yesterday because his back was (is) out. This means that I keep forgetting that it's Tuesday -- which is not only the day I pay bills, but also, in this particular instance, my mother's birthday; good thing that I remembered long enough to at least have C call her at work.
- I really feel like going for a walk, except
- it is so hot out that the cooler is barely keeping up at 9:00 in the morning. Way to go with the abrupt change of seasons, there, God. I'm sure you have a fantastic reason for it. We'll adjust. Thanks.
- My feet still hurt from wearing high heels (yes, the cute black-and-white ones) at a chorus concert last night. This is the closest I ever get to feeling the effects of hard partying in the morning. Whew, yeah, that was a wild one.
- C, who says she is "Anakin's little sister", is taking apart the works from her light-up-vibrating-head-song-playing duck. Or actually, it's my duck. She has itty bitty screws all over the couch and she is really intent on fixing the head-vibration function. I'm kind of hoping she messes the whole thing up, since I got tired of the "squeeze here for a computer-chip rendering of a familiar song" stuffed-animal gimmick about three seconds after it was invented. Chances are, however, that she'll actually fix it. Drat.
- We are thinking about renting out the apartment we use for school and guests (but not the garage underneath it). Eek! This is because we are also thinking about buying this house, and that would enable us to do it. Double Eek! No, wait, triple Eek!
- I am a bad, bad girl, because I'm on the computer without having done my Bible reading first. Someone smack me.
- OK, while you're at it, smack me for all the other days I've done that too. Which is, these days, pretty much every day. Sigh.
- I am shuddering in disgust already at the google hits I'm going to get from having "smack me" and "high-heeled" in the same paragraph. GO AWAY SCARY GOOGLERS. NOTHING TO SEE HERE.
Sunday, May 22, 2005
trying on a new reaction
[I started writing this on Friday afternoon and am just now finishing and posting it]
This is a pretty standard parenting day. That is to say, lots of joy, dotted with frustration. We're cleaning. You might ask, "when are you NOT cleaning, Rachel?" To which I would answer, "only when I stop to be lazy and let things pile up so as to make it take much longer the next time, which is pretty much the majority of the time." You might ask, "Why don't you try Flylady, Rachel?" To which I would answer, "I did. She never would come clean my house, no matter how much I crossed my fingers and wished." seriously, I do have a system. It works way better than Flylady's, for me -- Flylady doesn't have homeschooled kids, apparently -- when I use it, which is never. Because, well, lazy. That's what it is, I'm lazy. And if I ever close this everlasting parenthetical statement and move on, you'll find that I'm sorta working on that.)
AN-Y-WAY. We're cleaning, as I said. I set the kids working on their rooms -- if you ever want a room made messy absolutely as quickly as it is possible to be done, like say, you're making a movie and you want a scene where a hurricane has destroyed a residence, hire my daughter. But don't tell her I said that. Meanwhile I was working in the kitchen. Sort of. If "working in the kitchen" constitutes "cleaning a little, then walking by the computer to check my bloglines thing WHICH DOES NOT WORK". The kids started to snipe at each other. C hit LT (he never hits. Whereas she thinks hitting is 'the i ching...the answer to every question.'). C started to sob about the huge job of cleaning her room. LT worked well for a while, then did likewise. I was quickly approaching the point where I would begin fantasizing about a) banging my head against hard surfaces b) running for the hills or c) living alone far far away. Warning signs of my nearness to that state included daydreaming about The Parallel Rachel while I washed dishes, and thinking minor swear words.
Then I had a little breakthrough. I thought -- what if, instead of getting mad, or yelling... what if I channeled that reaction into something positive? I could take my frustrations out on my countertops and piles of clutter. Instead of fantasizing about my quiet, clean, sparse apartment with the grand piano in an upscale old neighborhood in a highly-cultured city where I "worked" as conductor or second-chair flute (even in my fantasies, I don't reach as high as principal. It just is that little bit too unrealistic) in a symphony and weighed something obscenely and fashionably small and never EVER bought bargain clothes -- um, yeah, anyway, instead of fantasizing about all that, I would do my best to incorporate the good parts of that fantasy -- namely, the quiet, the cleanliness, and the lack of clutter -- into my Real Life. I would -- here's the biggie -- get those fantasies behind me, so to speak, by pulling a Marilla.
(if you know why I would call it pulling a Marilla, note it in my comments and if you are right I will seriously get your address and send you a present.)
I also thought I'd try, when the minor swear words began to come out in my mutterings without my really even asking them to -- hang uninvited guests anyway -- I thought that I would think about something, I dunno, holy. What Would The Proverbs 31 Woman Do? That sort of thing. That didn't work quite so well, because -- here's my dirty little secret, lean in close, it's juicy -- I don't ever plan to be like the Proverbs 31 woman. She buys real estate. She has servant girls. PUH-LEEZE. That is so not my sphere, and I just cannot identify. So does that get me out of the whole "her hands are busy" kind of thing? [hopeful grin.] See, my hands -- my hands are busy! They're busy... typing. dang. oh well.
Oh, man, where was I. Oh yes, I was going to try to think about something holy instead of thinking bad words, while I turned my house into a crystal-clean palace, that's right. And it worked! it really did. By the time T got home, I was in such a state of normalcy that I did not pass him as he was on his way in, blow him a kiss, and jump in the car with my camera and tripod to go try a little -- like four hours' worth of -- Nikon therapy, as I had originally planned. No, instead I showed him around so he'd make sure to praise me for all the work I'd done, and I begged and cajoled until he got us takeout for dinner. And then I put him in charge of the kids while I went to bed early with Mansfield Park. And he was so gracious and patient. Have I not TOLD you that he is the most wonderful man in the world? I knew I had.
Thursday, May 19, 2005
the best-laid plans, part, what, five bazillion?
This is what I get for planning (and announcing my plans) to be in bed before eleven:
- T needing me to alter a picture of a vehicle he'd found online, so that he could print it out and use it as a template for designs for the paintball tank he's been wanting to make for years
- My decision, while I was up and at the computer anyway, to check on some journals for a few minutes.
- You don't need to know the third thing, but it takes more than a few minutes.
- then, juuust as I was drifting off to sleep at midnight, along comes LT, saying that he feels "funny" and "shivery" and that he thinks he needs to go outside for fresh air.
- a cuddle with my boy in the porch swing in the moonlight, both of us tucked into one of T's flannel jackets
- several attempts at going to sleep, only to have LT start feeling "shivery" again just as he's about to drift off
- mounting anxiety about this whole "shivery" thing, covered by a thick veneer of nonchalance, because dang, the boy's anxious enough without Mom spazzing out
- a journal entry and a photo posted at 2 a.m., with my nine-year-old reading his Hardy Boys book in the recliner, in the hopes that he'll get so tired he'll just fall asleep without trying
I really am unsure about what's going on with him. He has what we think is Tourette's Syndrome, coupled with more-than-normal anxiety at times, so we've seen a lot of stuff and learned to take new developments pretty much in stride, after an initial period of freaking out as quietly as possible adjusting. Part of me says this is just related to having had some sugar or some caffeine, or maybe it's just that tight-chested feeling everyone gets sometimes. Another part of me wonders how strangely the staff would look at me if we took a little drive over to the emergency room (that part is easily shut up with a reminder of the uselessness of the below-mediocre hospital in our town). And there's the whole rest of me in between, swinging from "maybe we'll go to the pediatrician tomorrow" to "let's look things up on the internet all night and see if we can scare the daylights out of ourselves" (sometimes my inner voice speaks to itself in the plural. So sue me).
In a way, this is nice. I don't get much alone time with either of the kids, so I take it when I can get it and am glad about that aspect of such situations, anyway. In another way, I'm scared senseless. Motherhood is just full of this kind of confusion; it's one of those things nobody ever tells you about when they warn you about never sleeping again and having no time to yourself for years.
Monday, May 16, 2005
what a weekend
I'm taking a break from giving the house a badly-needed very thorough cleaning to post a few notes about what my weekend was like. Because, you know, I really NEED a break, since I've been working without stopping for, what, ten minutes now. THE HARDSHIP. (really it's because words are rattling around in my brain and they won't shut up until I type them out.)
Friday: Was T's Friday off. Um, I think we spent the day at home hanging out as a family. How sad is it that I can't remember three days ago? Oh yes, in the afternoon C and I went for a walk while the boys practiced target shooting (oh goody! pacifist comments again!) in the backyard with their air rifles (read: pellet guns). Then we went to the video store, where we rented "The Phantom of the Opera", which T and I watched after the kids were in bed. I am SO MAD that I didn't go see that at the theater; I LOVED it. I was afraid to watch it in the theater because everyone said I wouldn't like it if I liked the stage musical. That just meant that the "everyone" in that sentence was taking hallucinogenic drugs, or something, because I repeat, I LOVED it. Perhaps this makes me the cinematic equivalent of a fourteen-year-old, but I don't care. (T loved it too. We watched the musical on the first New Year's Eve we were married, in San Francisco; this was one of the HUGE highlights of our pre-kids life together, for both of us.)
Saturday: T had decided that Saturday would be kind of a Mother's Day: Take Two kind of thing, since Mother's Day ended up being a quiet day at home with a (sick?) child. So we went to the zoo. We went to Storyland (basically a huge, shady playground/garden, with equipment, buildings, etc., based on kids' stories, very nice). We went to Denny's. We went to Barnes and Noble, where I spent my gift card on Middlemarch, a CD of Bach's flute sonatas, a collection of Jane Austen's unfinished works, and The Wind in the Willows.
Nothing terribly notable on Sunday: Sunday school, nap, baby shower, quick trip to my parents' so that T could get a tractor part for his cousin and the kids could go swimming in the creek. I have pictures of this but I'm too lazy to post them now.
And now today. I'm listening to Dvorak's "Symphony from the New World" at a pretty high volume level, which brings back high school years in a big way, and trying to undo the disaster that is my living room and kitchen. The kids are supposed to be cleaning their rooms. I hear playing, but I'm pretending I don't.
Speaking of people who are supposed to be cleaning but aren't. Ahem.
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