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Monday, December 27, 2004

In which Rachel is not Martha

Before I go one step (er, keystroke?) further, I must pause to clear up a gross misconception. Here is an example, from Dawn:

Happy Happy and a Merry Merry to you, Miss Rach! Beautiful job on the clothes and the kids too! You're giving me extreeeeme Martha envy, though.

ackity ack ack. You know that little plaque you can get from catalogs that says "Martha Stewart Doesn't Live Here"? That belongs on the wall of my living room. I sew like some people watch TV, because it soothes and relaxes me; I sew because it's a quiet way to spend some time alone doing something I enjoy; I sew because my kids need clothes and it's cheaper to sew them than it is to buy them already made; I sew because I don't like modern fashions for kids and like to be able to get them more traditional-looking things without spending three arms and two legs. Note the absence of "I sew because I am the Queen of Domesticity" on that list, because I SO am not.

Here is a list of things that do not relax or soothe me, and which I do not enjoy, and hence which only get done in this house in a tardy, haphazard manner until there's a reason to do them any other way:

• Dishes. I do them, but generally there's at least a small stack of them on the counter.
  
• Floors.
  
• Laundry. I am perenially behind and it's a really great day when nobody has to come to me and ask where s/he could find clean underwear, other than Wal-mart.
  
• Tidying up. See picture below for example, and note that while my kitchen/dining area is in such a state of disarray, where am I? I am at the computer. Typing a diaryland entry.
  

I doubt Martha's house ever looked like this, even after dinner for 19, including eight kids:

Those are TOY guns on the chair. Mostly not from Christmas; the kids (including the 35-year-old one) have quite a collection.

So. I hope that clears things up for everyone.

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

If I were the person solely responsible for defining what is traditional in my extended family, I would decree that from now on, we would be celebrating Christmas on two separate days: One day for the big dinner with grandparents and cousins and friends, and with the presents to and from those people being exchanged, and another day (Christmas itself) would be reserved just for the small family celebration. It made this weekend SO much nicer, that things ended up that way. It was my favorite Christmas yet, even though it was one of our more broke ones.

Also? it is raining. So my life is totally complete. I think I'll read Jane Eyre this week.

Saturday, December 25, 2004

the best-laid plans

You know how sometimes you say, "This is so not my day..."? Well, it would seem logically to indicate that there must be such a thing as a day that is one's day, or it wouldn't be worth noting when it wasn't, right? Well, finally it came. Today was my day. It really was. And how fitting that this should happen on my birthday, no?

It started off with presents this morning. Just as we were about to start opening things, my mom called to tell us that she and my dad couldn't be here for Christmas dinner because she had some sort of stomach bug. (As an aside, I am offering up a huge apostrophic apology to my mom, for the fact that My Day hinged on her feeling so miserable. I'm sorry, Mom. But if you HAD to feel miserable, at least some good came of it, right?). So we decided to put off Christmas dinner until tomorrow, to give Mom a chance to feel better, which only involved calling two households, and everyone seemed agreeable to it. So I proceeded to have, for the first time, a birthday that actually felt like a birthday. I have never had the day of my birthday itself be a day when there was the luxury of just doing what I wanted, just because the nature of the day involves a big family dinner and a lot of preparation and stuff. With that gone from the day, we just hung around home doing what we (I) wanted to do. We played a game; we watched a few movies; we went for a walk. It was perfect; if I could have been given a day to spend in any way I chose, it's what I would have chosen. And we still have the fun of the family-and-friends gathering tomorrow afternoon. I'm just (again) sorry that it was my mom's misery that brought it all about. I DO REALLY LOVE MY MOM. I promise.

It's just as well that we didn't try to cook that turkey today anyway, since it is too big for the roaster oven, and I would have been unable to buy a roasting bag without traveling 45 miles to the city, so we'd have had to just make do with the ham by itself, and then the side dishes. (yes, as a matter of fact, a 25-lb turkey and a 13-lb ham for 13 people does make for an enormous quantity of leftovers; why do you ask? There were going to be 19 people, not 21 as we were just confused about the in-laws coming, but our friends' family of 6 is ill.) Tomorrow I'll get a roasting bag on the way to church, and the turkey will be done to a turn by 3:00. YUM.

And here's a C-ism for today, before I sign off with pictures.

We got C a video for Christmas. It had one of those flyers in the packaging, advertising other movies you can buy from the distributor or studio or whatever. C was looking at the flyer, reading the names of the movies, and she laughed out loud and said, "This one's called 'Tomb Sewer'!" We went, whaaat? until T figured out, just before she brought me the flyer to show me, that she meant "Tom Sawyer".

C's hand is really stronger than you might think, when she is using it to cover your mouth to keep you from laughing out loud at her cute little 5-year-old reading mistakes. I just thought I should warn you. Not that I would know from experience or anything...

C with her new dress held up over her nightgown

actually wearing the dress. Whenever I see this dress, until I die, I will be nearly overcome with the desire to speak with a French accent, because I sewed it while listening to A Tale of Two Cities on CD.

LT in his bathrobe. (My back is cramping up just looking at these pictures.) I had some of the space-themed flannel left over from the pajamas I made him last spring, so I used it as accent material on the robe.

anyone says "merry birthday" and they get smacked. In a loving, friendly way, of course.

When I was a little girl, if I was awake at midnight Christmas Eve (and most of the time I was, because, hello, CHRISTMAS EVE), I would watch the clock until it said 12:15 and then hum "Happy Birthday" to myself, because at that time I was precisely another year older. So, as of the time of my sitting down at the computer to write this entry before going to bed (wrapping presents = work. Nobody tell the kids though), I am exactly thirty years old. Funny. I don't feel any older. ;-)

(which was also exactly the same feeling I had on every birthday for my entire childhood. Ten should feel different from nine. What a rip-off.)

So we're all ready for the kids to tumble out of bed at some awful hour in the morning. Up until now on Christmas morning we have always had to drag LT out of his bed at 7:00, still sleeping, and deposit him on the couch to start waking up so that we could open presents. He is not a morning person, let's just say that. Once he's awake he's quite personable, but the transition from sleeping to waking sometimes requires some pretty extreme measures, even on Christmas. This year might be different. We shall see.

By the way, I finished all my last-minute projects on time. LT's robe (and a new Christmas stocking too -- he says he's too old for the one I made him for his second Christmas, with construction equipment on it, so now he has a camouflage one like Daddy's, *snif*) and C's dress/pinafore are wrapped neatly under the tree. Well, the stocking's not wrapped... you know what I mean. The dress only narrowly escaped being wrapped up with the buttons on the pinafore sewn on inside-out. Because I am Suzy Domestic, that's why. I'll try to get good pictures tomorrow, so that when I wonder when I'm fifty why my shoulders are permanently hunched over, I will be able to look at the photos and remember: oh yeah. It dates back to that Christmas when I spent the three days beforehand hunched over my sewing machine like a crone.

Merry Christmas everyone. And I mean that, I hope you are having a day filled with family and joy and memories, and with a very real sense of the reason for this whole celebration (go read Valerie for more eloquence than I feel capable of at this precise sleepy moment on that topic). Thank you all for making me feel like writing in this thing is worthwhile. It's been a lot of fun, and I am so glad that I'm doing it, but if I knew nobody was reading it, I'd have given up long ago. So if you get bored and leave, just don't tell me, and I'll sit here talking to the empty room like I've been known to do in real life from time to time, only this time I'll never know any different. So that's cool.

Thursday, December 16, 2004

just odds and ends

We have installed a pet door for our cats. One cat has adjusted to it fine, although she didn't like it for the first couple of days. The other cat still protests by standing outside it (it's one of the type that goes into a sliding glass door, and is itself made of glass), meowing plaintively at us for several minutes before she finally gives in and paws at the pet door until she gets it to open toward her enough to stick her head in and wriggle through. She has a decided look of contempt for us in her eyes these days. How dare we subject her to such an indignity any time she wants in or out, she says as she turns her back on us and washes her face meticulously as soon as she's finally inside.

C is watching Ben Hur. She has loved this movie since she was probably three, especially the chariot race. I guess it's just the horses, I don't know. She is not your typical child in many ways, I don't suppose.

Also in the "not your typical child" category -- my son earnestly wants to crochet a blanket for his cousin who's due to arrive next June. His efforts are adorable. And again I'm lost between the desire to encourage him to be creative by leaving him somewhat alone with it, and my desire to help him make something that will be of higher quality by correcting him more often than would be ideal. I'm leaning toward the granola-mom unschooling "leave him be" side for the time being.

Today I had another of those episodes that some people call panic attacks, but I don't because I do not have any sense of panic when I'm having one, and that's a pretty central symptom. My heart pounds and races, I get weak and sweaty and trembly and my throat constricts and my extremities tingle. It is Not Fun. And so far I've never had one when there was an adult around to help me. Fortunately LT is a great hulking eight-year-old who is actually big enough to be helpful in supporting me when I walk, and whose natural tendency when either of his parents is having a problem is to FIX IT FIX IT ANYTHING TO FIX IT. His anxiety has ebbed to the point where I don't mentally call him Anxiety Boy anymore. He's still not terribly comfortable in new situations, but he's much improved overall as far as that goes.

AND speaking of panic, I have to go clothes shopping tomorrow -- for myself. This is trying enough in the best of circumstances (oh, wow, I am so turning into my mother). To make things worse, right now I have two rather prominent "spots" (I love the British way of saying this; so much more dignified than "zits" or "pimples"), and I feel fat, and ick. But I need a new white blouse, or sweater, or whatever I find that is please God not TOO unflattering -- I do not like myself in white -- for chorus concerts, one of which I have on Saturday. My preferred concert blouse got washed in the wrong load, because I am the new Martha Stewart, and it is definitely more gray than white now. And my backup shirts (three Land's End white button-downs which my mom got as uniform shirts in 1989, and which I got from her before I finished high school) are, well, fifteen years old and getting rather threadbare. They also have some of the kinds of stains that never show up in my house, but mutate into glaring atrocities under the lights of whatever my destination may be. So I have to shop. I always feel like such a dowd in clothing stores -- with everything except me all clean and new and perfect-looking. ah well. By this time tomorrow it will all be over, right? :)

Saturday, December 11, 2004

such sticks in the mud as we are

I grew up in a household where we didn't have a lot of money and generally our houses were small, but gas was relatively cheap, and so one of our favorite ways to enjoy ourselves was to just go rambling in the car. We were a spontaneous bunch and we'd take off on a weekend trip to the Bay Area to visit my mom's sister's family with very little more than a phone call to say we were on the way. So I have this gene, strengthened by my upbringing, which makes me want to be spontaneous. Often.

However, T is different. His nature and nurture push him in the other direction. His father is the type where if you show up for dinner fifteen minutes before the appointed time, you're told to go away and come back. (no, I am not kidding.) "Spontaneous" when he was growing up meant "Great news! Dad's off work today, so you boys are going to clean this garage, because Dad's around to smack you if you don't!" (again... no, not a joke.) So. He is a big planner, and sudden changes in plans stress him out A LOT, even if the change is for the better. This means that in the past ten years my spontaneity has been squelched to the point where we have gone beyond not-spontaneous and into the realm where even fun things we've had planned for months don't happen.

OK, now I'm being unfair. We're not so bad as that, and a lot of our fun plans do come to pass. But the thing is, there's this really really high tide this weekend, see? It's a proxigean spring tide (there's your vocabulary word of the day), where the earth is close to the sun and it's a new moon and so the high tide gets really high and the low tide gets really low. This happens every few years or so, for a couple of months in a row. And ever since the summer I've wanted to drive to Morro Bay for the proxigean tide and see the ocean come clear up across the beach to the dunes. Sounds silly but I'm silly in general so that's OK, right? But now the weekend has actually arrived, and T has a really unpleasant cold so he's exhausted, and we just bought this 1969 Dart and he wants to stay home and play with it, and plus we spent seven hours in the car(s) yesterday as well as seven hours in the car the previous Friday, and blah blah blah no Morro Bay trip blah.

Grr.

I could go by myself, but honestly, I would be so lonely for ten hours in the car and all night in a hotel room (but oh! the reading! it almost sways me...) that even the tide thingie wouldn't make it worthwhile, I don't think. Oh well, there's another identical tide next month. So what if it's a Monday, and the chances of T being allowed to take a day or two off work to go over there with me are laughable, and the weather's good this weekend but who knows what it will be in 29 days, and so on and so forth. I can still pin my hopes to that. And I can also (this is the really fun part) milk my disappointment for all its worth, and imply to T that because we're not spending money on my long-planned Morro Bay trip, I have the right to buy more Christmas lights and put them up, and the right to renew my gold Diaryland membership, and to go out to dinner instead of cooking, and to also hold this over his head and use it as a bargaining chip for months to come. Oh, it takes practice to be the kind of wife I am, and after ten years, I'm beginning to really get good at it.

Monday, December 06, 2004

busy days

Yesterday we drove to the Bay Area (twitch. twitch) to look at a car
we've been thinking about buying. We didn't end up getting it (although we're still thinking about it) but we had a nice long drive and a mostly-pleasant day. Except for the wretched 580/680 interchange which is everything that people who hate freeway interchanges hate about freeway interchanges. Ack. And for some strange reason, even though I always plan to have T* drive in places like that, I end up being the one with my white knuckles clamped to the wheel trying to look in four or five directions at once, so as to be able to merge without becoming part of a horrific mangled freeway accident. Because that would make the traffic even worse, with all the rubber-necking.

Then today we cut wood (and I did not skip out this time!) before
having T's birthday dinner at my parents' house. He wanted spaghetti, which is, hallelujah, something I'm good at making and I can do it reliably and it doesn't take a gazillion pots and pans or have to be kept warm in the oven while I cook it in batches or ANYTHING. Good old spaghetti. But T always gets (meaning I always make) German chocolate cake for his birthday. Eew. The cake part is bland and the frosting has (puke) coconut. Ah well, it's only once a year, and it makes the chances of my blowing my diet on leftovers virtually nonexistent. Which will not be the case after my birthday (which is in three weeks), because I am all about either a) a Costco cake, which is the be-all and end-all of cakes, or, if we can't spring for that, b) chocolate cake from a mix with chocolate frosting from a can. What other kind of cake does there really need to be, after all? And Dulce de Leche (Spanish
for "Let's Make Rachel Fat") ice cream. mmm.

I can tell that I've been reading the Little House books too much when I really start obsessing about food. Next time you read those, pay attention to how few pages can go by without a description of some kind of hearty Early American meal. Even during The Long Winter there's all that talk about grinding wheat to make nutty-tasting whole-wheat bread. And when they're not on the verge of starvation it's even worse. The roast geese! The fried chicken! The venison! Oh good Lord, the blackbird pie!! I think I maybe gained five pounds this past week just reading about it all.

Sunday, November 28, 2004

tomorrow is another day

Well, I am going to be all plain-vanilla for a while; my supergold membership is about to lapse if it hasn't already. No pictures, no comments. :( The notes function is still available, though. Not going to spend money on that right now.


Our Thanksgiving Day was... ehhh. Not horrible, just not what we'd have wanted if we could have chosen. Basically, being the only two conservatives in a room full of ex-hippies and current socialists when the war news is on does not make for a very comfortable holiday atmosphere. Energizing, yes. Comfortable, no. So we weren't exactly sad when it was time to leave. At least I did get to go to sleep at the nearly-obscenely-early hour of eight-fifty-five. In the evening. It felt so good I almost cried.


I've been away from the computer a lot over the past week. This is partly because I've been doing other things, and partly because T has become a total computer HOG. It's all about the project cars. A while ago I had the idea to look for a project car which could be gradually and cheaply fixed up, to serve as a replacement for our current car when it eventually reaches the "would cost more to repair it than it is worth" stage. Which could be tomorrow, or five years from now, who knows. Anyway. T thought this was a fantastic idea -- and I think he even found it a little sexy that I would come up with it; you know how some guys are about cars -- and lately he's started actually looking around on ebay and other sources for cars. To the point where if I did not have other things to do, I'd wish I'd never thought up the darn scheme.

"Other things" include: Finishing THREE BOOKS in the past week. (yay!) In addition to the Marian Keyes, I finished Watership Down -- a beautiful book, Read This Now, This Means You -- and Little HOuse on the Prairie, which we'd started as a family months ago and never finished. I am feeling like going through those again. It doesn't help that we have the first season of the TV show on DVD, borrowed from the library. Oh, and I also read most of A Christmas Carol before I misplaced my copy (in the car, maybe?). Oh how I love that book.

Also, I went shopping Friday morning, and got fabric for a dress for C. I was in the city at 6 am, and it was truly eerie to see the streets as full of traffic as they are at rush hour. I spent an hour and a half in line at the fabric store, first waiting for my fabric to be cut, and then waiting to pay for it. I braved Wal-Mart, as well, and was in and out in fifteen minutes (all I needed was cat food, aquarium filter cartridges, and a printer cartridge), and then I endured Sears which was probably the worst experience of all of them. Ugh. When I came home from that we raked all our leaves and got them moved to the backyard where they'll serve the dual purpose of keeping grass from growing in our garden area, and turning into nice rich mulch by spring. SO nice to listen to the rain on Friday night and know that we would not have to deal with wet soggy leaves this year, like we have had to every single other year we've lived here. And it felt so good to accomplish something that the next afternoon, we rearranged furniture in the living room, and then worked on organization projects (T: garage. I: schoolroom) until bedtime. Wow. Aren't we busy little bees.

Notice I didn't mention catching up on the laundry or having a sparkly clean kitchen. That would be because I didn't, and don't. Ugh again. There's always tomorrow, right...

Thursday, November 18, 2004

ooh goody a list, and my slackerness

Things I should buy in bulk and store in 55-gallon drums around the house, so as to avoid near-constant searching for one item or another:

• Hairbrushes
  
• Hair elastics
  
• Hair claw clips
  
• cordless phones
  
• remote controls
  
• when C was a baby, pacifiers would have been on this list
  
• sponges
  
• garlic presses
  
• salt shakers (full)
  
• sharp pencils
  
• working pens
  
• those butane hand-held bbq lighter thingies

And I know I'm forgetting some things.

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

We had a wild night last night. Well, wild for us; not very wild for most people my age, I don't think. Because I am Miss Muffet. I'd planned for a week to cook a turkey for our usual Wednesday-night dinner with my parents before Bible study. I decided, not at the last minute but near it, that I would also invite our neighbor family up to join us and help us eat it. There are two parents and four kids in that family; the kids are all good friends with my kids, and I would say we're probably friends with the parents by now, and not just acquaintances. Anyway. So that meant we had six kids at a kids' table and six adults at the adult table, and I couldn't find the dang salt, and I overcooked the brown-and-serve rolls. At least the house was pretty clean when we started. It was fun, but unlike Thanksgiving last year, things did NOT get done early; we ran about half an hour late, and I ended up staying home from Bible study with the kids to do the cleanup. (oops). But our friends stayed too, so we had a nice chat, above the noise the kids were making with swordfights and Battleship games and My Little Pony (Gag) videos and what not.

Then my pinky-swear best friend called from Florida, and we talked until eleven. It was one of those times when I genuinely had no idea how late it was when I got off the phone. THEN I put the kids to bed and read a new Marian Keyes book until about 1 a.m., and THEN I went on the computer and spent some time looking at old emails from the early days of the pinky-swear best friendship. Can I just say right now that I totally despise my twenty-two-year-old self? Ouch. And I won't say how late I was up doing that, or how long I read the Marian Keyes book afterward, but I will say that this morning when the phone rang at 8:15 I was not terribly chipper when I answered. I am such a slacker.

Monday, November 15, 2004

late night ramble ack

I am a failure at some things. This cannot be denied. I could not write a novel in a month. I frankly don't think I have it in me to write a novel given an infinite amount of time, because every time I open the file to add anything to the story, I'd naturally re-read what I'd written so far, and then I'd end up spending the time I had intended to spend writing new stuff in attempting to undo the suckiness of what had already been written. I think this would be a neverending cycle. Plus it's not that important and the stories were both kind of pedantic and I don't feel any kind of real urge to ever write a book ever. And that's fine.

I also was a failure at analytic geometry, during the second half of my junior year in high school. I'm actually sad about this. Not because I particularly enjoyed that class or because I think it would have been useful in my daily life (but hey, you never know when you'll have to draw a perfect freaking rose curve which I could never do never ever ever no matter how hard I tried my rose curves always looked like something a four-year-old colored with a fat crayon), but because, man, I got an F on my report card. Only bona fide slackers do that, right? That was the class where my cruddy study skills caught up with me and I could no longer sail through with Bs and As (and the occasional C) on the strength of my test scores, while virtually ignoring homework and any real studying. Whoops.

Also, I don't know if I will ever succeed at learning to knit. And I'm not good at social stuff.

But. BUT.

I can figure out how to make pinch-pleat drapes, all by myself, and construct a set that looks like it was bought at the store, without any instructions at all! See? See?


Now is not the time to tell me that even your GRANDMOTHER has finally figured out that pinch-pleats were oh-so-over fifteen years ago. I don't like valances and T doesn't like tab-tops and some ladies from chorus were coming over for a sectional rehearsal so I needed something on that sliding-glass door besides the who-knows-how-old tattered, old, dirty, ugly, beige pinch-pleat drapes that were there when we moved in eight years ago. And the hardware was all in place, and white muslin was 99c a yard on sale.

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

in other news.

Isn't it funny how a family can go for a long time without any medical problems to speak of, and then all of a sudden, WHAM, they start coming in one after the other? We had C's whole super-head-congestion-ear-infection-temporary-loss-of-hearing thing going on for a few weeks. Then yesterday T complained of a burning feeling on the back of his leg, and when I checked it for him I found a tick chowing down on the blood vessels behind his knee (thanks to the Internet, by the way, I now finally know the best way to remove a tick. It really works. Too gross to go into here, though). Since we live in Lyme Disease Central, now we have that to worry about. Also this weekend, a little bump on the inside of my elbow, which I'd been kind of keeping an eye on in a general way because I thought maybe it was a wart or something, suddenly got way, way bigger than it had been. It's not tender, isn't a boil or a pimple or any of those pleasant things. And oddly enough, if you look up "wart change size" in Google, a little man in a white coat leaps out of your computer and says "GET YOURSELF TO THE DOCTOR PRONTO!!!". Well, not quite. But close. So I'm going to get that looked at tomorrow. It's probably nothing at all but I'd rather KNOW that it was nothing at all, than wonder, the way things have been going.

Also. Can I just say something? NOVEMBER IS HALFWAY OVER AUUUGGGGHHHH!

Saturday, November 13, 2004

you may not know it, but you're glad this is short

I just typed a long post updating about a few things, but seeing as how it's after midnight and I'm tired, it was, well, really stupid. So here's the abbreviated version:

C's hearing: pretty much back to normal. Thank you all for your well-wishes and prayers for her.

NaNoWriMo: not happening. Basically because I suck at writing books, is why.

Stupid Things I Did Today: I finally made new curtains to replace the ones the cats destroyed, back when they were kittens. The new curtains look only marginally better than if I'd thumb-tacked white bedsheets over the windows. But they have to stay up until we can manage something better.

Off to bed to seek some much-needed oblivion. (In all honesty, today really has not been bad. I am just tired, and the sucky waste-of-time-and-effort sewing project gave me a crick in my back that makes me grumpy).

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