the round of life Archives | Page 22 of 28

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

Tuesday, December 09, 2003

raking

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

--------

Sunday, December 07, 2003

uuuuuurrrrrgggggghhhhhh

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

--------

stress. sigh.

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


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

--------

Friday, December 05, 2003

mostly about yesterday

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


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


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


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


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


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

--------

Wednesday, December 03, 2003

the smell of beans, and other stuff

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

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


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

--------

Monday, December 01, 2003

happy list

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

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

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

--------

DSL ROCKS

Oh. My. GAWRRSHH. I feel like I just emerged from the Stone Age into downtown Los Angeles, or something. LTL, where have you been all my life? My test page was Getty Images, which was a useful but painfully slow page with 56K access (which, back in the dark ages when we first connected to the Internet with a 33.6 modem, was lightning-fast). I used to do a search and then go make a cup of tea or something while the results loaded. Now I barely had time to inhale. I will have a fond feeling for that phone-check guy who was just here for the rest of my life. What a nice man, opening up this whole world of non-waiting.


ooh, I'm gonna go try downloading something. Just for fun.

* * * * * * * * *

update: It is downloading an 11.5M file in 3 minutes. Download speed 80 KB/sec. I am just totally speechless. Think of the MUSIC I could download! (that is, if I weren't an ethical-type person who is way too afraid of getting in trouble to download any... more... music). But... more CHRISTMAS music! it's almost tempting. But not quite.

--------

Sunday, November 30, 2003

last dial-up entry, I hope

I just wanted to note that this is probably my last dial-up DIaryland entry, unless something goes wrong tomorrow or I can't figure out how to configure our new computer to use LTL, or something. LTL Man is coming tomorrow to work his magic. I am trying not to get my hopes up TOO much -- reasoning with myself that maybe it's NOT our modem that's making things slow, maybe some sites just ARE slow, stuff like that -- but really I'm pretty jazzed. Stay tuned tomorrow for some gushing gladness about finally having caught up with the rest of Western civilization...


We got more Christmas lights put up this evening. It's very pretty from the road. Then we came in the house and I had this laundry kind of spree where I actually felt like doing laundry so I folded all I had clean and washed some more and folded that and then I cleaned my room and T got into the spirit of things and cleaned off our dresser and WOW, it looks like we actually live in this house, as opposed to that refugee-piling-stuff-everywhere look. ("The fleeing-my-homeland motif", as Robin Williams says in "Mrs. Doubtfire"). Still have more laundry to fold but I think I'm going to take a shower (so as to be all nice and clean getting into our clean sheets) and get to bed. ahh, horizontal and soft sounds SO nice right now.

--------

Saturday, November 29, 2003

the season can start now!

Our Christmas tree is up! hurrah! just had to share. :) I've been listening to Christmas carols, sitting by the crackling fire drinking cocoa -- bliss. I love this time of year (as if you couldn't tell, right?).


also, just so you all know, this is approximately my fourth update in two days. Sorry for spewing out so many so quickly; it just kind of happened that way. There are links below in case you haven't been checking your Diaryland buddy list every four hours today. yeah, like anyone besides me does that...

--------

Friday, November 28, 2003

the day after -- especially for Valerie

Breakfast is in the microwave as I type this. Mmm. Can you guess? No? Well, I'll tell you then.


(wait a minute, it beeped, gotta go turn it; the turntable part of our wedding-present microwave died about six years ago)


OK. Here we go.

• small portion turkey
  
• small portion mashed potatoes, dotted with real butter
  
• medium portion stuffing (I am a sucker for stuffing)
  
• all of the above items with yummy rich turkey gravy
  
• corn casserole
  
• small portion ham
  
• (not in the microwave; waiting patiently to be added cold to the plate) corn salad; this is my brother's specialty recipe, nicked from the railroad museum where he used to work
  

Of course, we had more last night -- we had green bean casserole, caesar salad, cranberries, rolls, I cannot even remember it all. At least I virtuously decided to save the one piece of remaining pecan pie for a snack later. We also still have cherry pie and pumpkin pie, but those are the kids' favorites. In fact LT is having cherry pie with vanilla ice cream for breakfast.



The above paragraphs were entered expressly for the viewing pleasure of Valerie, my new Australian friend who bemoans the fact that she must wait till Christmas for a feast like this. Hope you enjoyed it. ;-)


Now I must eat my Thanksgiving Part II breakfast, and get on to work with this resumé that has to be finished by this evening. ack.

--------

the round of life Archives | Page 22 of 28

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