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Wednesday, October 15, 2003
the diary curse is coming upon me
Note: It is happening. It just took longer than I predicted it would in my first entry. I have gone from multiple entries a day, through one entry a day, and now I've begun skipping. I do hope that I'm still writing in this thing a month from now.
It's not so much that my life has been boring, either, it's just that I haven't felt much like writing about it. Our trip to the zoo on Monday was nice. We also did a bit of shopping (you can't possibly take a trip to the city without buying at least a few things that are unavailable up the hill). T went to Harbor Freight, which, for the uninitiated, is a kind of Oriental Trading Company of hardware stores. Everything's cheap, in more ways than one, but if you're looking for certain things (like tools for a kit that will be in the car for emergencies) it's a decent place to go. It's also a man magnet. C and I were the only females within two blocks of that store, I think. And, like paintball stores, auto body websites, and telescope accessories catalogs, it's the kind of place where I should just automatically double his pre-shopping spending estimate. I did have plenty of time to sit in the car and finally read the instruction manual for our new car stereo, though. (hey, it DOES have a clock!)
Here's a bit of advice: If you're trying to cut back the amount of time you spend at the computer, do NOT get a CD burner and a cd player for your car during the same week. Let's just say it's counterproductive. But now I have all kinds of cool stuff to listen to in the car.
I am trying to figure out what book I want to buy next week (oh, what a happy kind of decision to have to make! And I'm going to eat at Olive Garden too, all by myself!). I'm going to be spending two hours next Friday afternoon donating platelets, and I'll want a paperback book (I just see that being so much easier to handle with a needle in each arm), one I haven't read before that will really draw me in. I have a $18 book to return at Borders, and a $25 gift certificate for Barnes and NOble, and they're right across the street from each other in Fresno (whose bright idea WAS that?), so I should be able to get pretty much anything I want. I'm thinking I might get Jane Austen's juvenalia, if it's available in the store, but then I'm also thinking I might want something a little lighter and more modern since I'll want to be totally absorbed in it. If anyone has any recommendations, leave a comment. :) Thanks.
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Thursday, October 09, 2003
upgrading, or an exercise in frustration
The lack-of-sleep haze from Tuesday night has finally worn off, after a good eight hours last night. I'm still working on getting used to the new computer, though (hmm, sounds like a good excuse to sit around at the computer half the day....). We were the last people on the planet to upgrade to Windows 95, just before Windows 98 came out. Then we got Windows 98 late too, and now we have WIndows XP which, if the pattern holds true, will become seriously outdated within the next seven days, all because we've finally upgraded to it. Regardless, it is extremely nice to be able to start up my computer without a series of error messages about bad sectors, and to be able to run it for more than two hours without The Blue Screen Of Death, or without the keyboard stubbornly deciding to stop communicating with whatever it's supposed to communicate with -- generally in the middle of a really good scintillating IM conversation. It's worth the hassle of having to make this program fit my kinks -- for example, this font has got to go. Ick. Just as soon as I'm done with this entry.
In order to facilitate moving our documents, music, etc., from our old system to the new one, we bought a cheapo $100 external CD-RW drive when we bought the new computer. It was the process of getting this to actually function that took probably half the night on Tuesday. I swear the directions for this machine were stolen from engrish.com. Not only did they make no sense, but they also told almost nothing about how to actually use the thing. It was as if someone had made up a set of generic poorly-translated directions that would work for a new blow dryer, a compact imported car, a power drill, or a gas barbecue -- take your pick -- and then mistakenly put them in the package for this CD burner. Surely there are enough native-English-speaking people in China and other foreign countries who could be hired by manufacturers to make sure that packaging and instructions are both comprehensible and useful for English speakers? Or perhaps not.
Once I finally made that work, mostly by divine intervention I think, everything went pretty smoothly, and before I knew it, I was looking at that bizarrely-plastic-silver-boombox-looking Windows XP layout, having officially joined the rest of humanity in its susceptibility to modern viruses (our operating system was so old that your average pimply virus-writing hack was born after it was. Well, not quite, but close). I still would love to figure out how to make Outlook Express figure out how to import my old emails. I had backed them up ages ago, when we got a second 3.2G hard drive (ha! remember when that was a HUGE hard drive? I do) because our main 3.2G hard drive was too full. Now I have them on a CD, and I can't make Outlook Express see them. I am an obsessive-compulsive email-saver; it's extremely unsettling (and has been since I backed them up) to have no access to the history of my life for the last seven years. And I also REALLY miss my ergonomic keyboard, although it had its problems so I don't want to hook it up to this machine. I have a new one coming from eBay. I don't even have a wrist rest, and I can feel the CTS coming on as I type this.
Anyway. In other news of the day...
Those of you coming to this diary for the first time from a weight loss ring might be surprised to find no reference to my weight at all. Well, here. In the last two weeks I have lost one pound -- and I lost that two weeks ago, and it's periodically been lost and found since then. I started out at 194 pounds (which isn't as fat as it sounds, since I'm just a shade under 5'9" and very dense), and right now I'm sitting at 174. I'm on my way to 150 pounds, and now that my husband is home from the fire he was working on for a week and a half, and the kids and I aren't driving all over the countryside and eating half our meals in restaurants, as well as having junk-food parties, to distract ourselves from missing him, I'm back on track.
Also, homeschooling is going well. LT and I are studying Arthurian legends, and he is writing a puppet-show script of Star Wars Episode 7, since George Lucas isn't going to make it. So far the plot is a dread secret, but he has allowed it to leak out that Luke has 20 Death Stars and that he (Luke, not my 7-yo son) has made 100 double-ended light sabers. I'll keep you posted so that you can line up 200 people deep and camp on our street when the premiere (where lemonade and brownies will be available for sale, I am to understand) happens. ;-)
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Wednesday, October 08, 2003
The Day After
I have a whole bunch of funny stuff to talk about today. Just a ton. (setting up a new computer system will do that for you). Unfortunately, the problem is, all the funny things happened between 11 pm and 5 am, and then I only got to sleep for about 3 1/2 hours, so while the material is there, there's just no way I can do it justice in my semi-groggy state. Maybe later.
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Tuesday, October 07, 2003
a little birdie, just had to share
There is a bird (I don't know what kind, I'm not very good at that) just singing its little birdie heart out outside my house. Full-volume, very insistent warbling, for about the last four minutes -- just amazing. I feel like I should go outside and give the little guy some applause, or something, so he'll know his work is appreciated and doesn't stop. Barring that, however, since it would probably be counterproductive, I just hope he gets the attention of the prettiest girl bird ever hatched as his reward. :)
Another random item of note (2:12 p.m.): When you have an antiquated Pleistocene-era PC like mine, and you are listening to your bootleg downloaded copy of Barenaked Ladies' "Another Postcard" (I don't feel guilty because I'm buying the album as soon as it comes out ;-) and doing something else on said elderly machine which requires much RAM (like, say, selecting and deleting large quantities of emails), the stutter effect produced in the music creates an additional level of humor in this already-zany song. You should try it.
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Friday, October 03, 2003
book sale
ooh, joy, joy, the "members only" opening night of our library's semi-annual book sale was tonight. I only realized the book sale was going on when I read a post on one of my many email lists, wherein someone was offering a possible explanation for the quietness of the list -- "is everyone off at library book sales?" At first I thought, what an absolutely idiotic thing to say, does she think everyone's library has book sales the same weekend? And then I thought, Oh my goodness, my library's book sale IS this weekend!! So I turned around and asked the kids if they wanted to go to the library sale and buy books. C was enthusiastic; LT was not. Now here's the awful kind of mother I am: I said, "But you know, they might have some Star Wars books... it'd be a shame to miss it if they had Star Wars books..." and before the words have even finished leaving my mouth I'm mentally kicking myself -- what kind of mother ARE you??? First of all, you're the mom, he's the son, you say we're going to revel in cheap books and by golly, he just has to go! And secondly, exactly what are you going to do when you get there and there are no Star Wars books? You manipulative, lying excuse for a mother! So went my mental self-flagellations. I needn't have worried on one count, though, because we'd barely arrived at the children's section before LT found not one but two Star Wars books -- a storybook of Return of the Jedi, with photos from the movie, and a comic-novel version of Episode IV, most commonly just called "Star Wars", but actually, if we're going to go with the naming conventions used in the other movies, it would be called "A New Hope". Egads, let's not go with that, shall we?
Anyway, I spent $17 on books, and they're 50c apiece. This time I got stuff for the kids or for school, almost exclusively; I only got two books entirely for myself and they're children's books also. I found an almost-complete set of the Narnia books from the 80's (missing The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, which, before someone determined to re-order the series, was #1). This edition is especially significant to me because it's the same as the set my brother and I had when we were little. I think I may even have our old copy of LWW sitting around somewhere. If not, I can find it on eBay. And I got a Trixie Belden book (#5, The Mystery Off Glen Road). It is my goal to re-accumulate all of the first 20 of this series. I had them when I was younger, and somehow they got lost or disposed of. I got a few horse-y books for C (I am a sucker where those are concerned. I figure she'll read them eventually...), and the rest of the books were just odds and ends that I thought we should have, either for reading aloud or for school or for both.
Enough about the book sale. We had a really nice evening after that. We came home and I barbecued chicken burgers and hot dogs for supper; I sat outside and read a library book (The Time Traveler's Wife -- maybe I was just predisposed to enjoy whatever I read tonight, but so far I am really intrigued by this book) while the kids played happily. It was a really happy scene, without a doubt the best part of the day. Earlier we went to the valley with the neighbor ladies; it wasn't nearly as bad as I'd worked myself up to think it would be, but still, it was not an insupportable amount of fun either. I got the very bright idea to walk along the bike/walking path in smallish-shopping-city from the park to Toys R Us, so we could look at stuff and the kids could work on their Christmas lists while we waited for the ladies to be done with what they were doing and ready to go home. It proved to be too much of a walk for C, and she had a spectacular meltdown on the way back to our car. I never expected to be one of those mothers pulling a sobbing child along by the hand on the sidewalk. Next time you see one of those mothers, please have some mercy in your thoughts of her, on my account. It was far less fun for me than it looked. The rest of the trip was nice enough, though.
I am kind of bummed because I lost my really nice Mary Cassatt stamps. I have got into the habit of requesting something other than the ordinary standard stamps given out by default, when I buy stamps. A couple of months ago I requested Audrey Hepburn stamps; this last time I just asked for "something different", and the postal person handed me these really wonderful stamps with Mary Cassatt's artwork on them. I don't collect the stamps, I actually use them; it just feels all interesting and different to use a stamp that's something besides the traditional flag or whatever. I'd used about half the stamps on that sheet when I lost the sheet. I am far more upset about this than I should be. For one thing, I can just get more. It wasn't a limited edition thing or anything. But that's not what bothers me. I am just idiotic about stamps. One time the kids got hold of a partial sheet and stuck two or three them on their clothes like stickers, not knowing they were actually for mailing things. I went borderline ballistic, as if the stamps were worth, say $34 apiece instead of $.34 apiece. I know for a fact that I have spent more than $.34 per sticker for a sheet of stickers for them to play with, on more than one occasion. Don't ask me why the stamp thing bothers me so much, but it does. There are many strange things about myself which I will never understand.
random thought: I love how on amazon.co.uk it says that the item is "usually dispatched in 2-3 days" instead of "shipped".
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Wednesday, October 01, 2003
irritations and joys
In the "life's little irritations" category for today:
- Paying $43 for checks. Really, it's disgusting that it can cost that much for four boxes of freaking checks. You'd think they were printed on Van Gogh canvases or something. And I am a total sucker for every one of their shifty-eyed merchandising schemes also -- first I fall for the really cheap initial offering, and then I stay with that company rather than go for another cheap initial offering because it is SO much easier, since they have all my information already. And when I get all the way through checkout and on the last page they reveal that their handling cost is $9.00, I balk at first but then cave because I've come so far. And I spend 45 minutes dallying and trying to decide whether to go with the old comfortable patriotic-themed checks or to branch out into something new. sigh.
- Going to my favorite restaurant, with my parents and my two children, and waiting an hour and a half for our food. We were the first people in the restaurant when they opened for dinner, and yet half a dozen tables had paid and left by the time we finally got our food. We were so full from appetizers that I asked the waitress to go ahead and package our food to go, since an hour and a half is about the outside limit of a 4-year-old's (*sob*, that's the first time I've had to type that, no more 3-year-old) good-restaurant-behavior anyway.
- Being so totally uncomfortable from eating appetizers, salad, and soup that I could hardly sit down. Stepping on the scale and seeing that I had apparently gained seven pounds since getting up this morning. What the heck is up with that, I know I didn't eat that much. It makes me think I can't believe anything that scale says. And trust is a very important element in the relationship between a woman and her bathroom scale. I feel so - so betrayed.
To balance that, here are some parts of today that made life bliss.
- Singing "Happy Birthday" about a dozen times.
- Realizing that this girl's whole life for the past four days has basically been one long birthday celebration, and that it's not over yet.
- Speaking on the phone three times to my absent-but-adored husband, instead of the usual one stolen-time-at-11-pm fire overtime phone call.
- Feeling that teenagerish heart-leaping feeling when I hear the voice of the man I've been married to for almost ten years (can you tell I'm trying to make the best of a bad situation here?)
- Contemplating all day, and especially around 9:00 at night, what I was doing four years ago at that moment. My daughter's surgical birth was not a happy incident at its face value, but it was a momentous day even if it wasn't a lot of fun. And I never realized until my children began having birthdays, how much a birthday means to the person's mother. Now I always give my mom a special hug on my birthday as well.
- That startling moment of satisfaction when I step onto the porch or into the living room and see how clean it is (see, raving optimist that I am, I can even find something to be glad about in my FIL's panic-inducing visit)
- C's horse obsession. It is such fun watching my little mini-me enjoy the same things I did at her age.
And now it's time for me to carry my sleeping 4-year-old to her bed, and go read a chapter of The Silver Chair to LT (and my dad via audiocassette) before collapsing in sleep. :)
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Monday, September 29, 2003
born in the 70's diaryring, shopping spree
Today a lot of really funny stuff happened, but I don't know if I have the energy to type it all up. Lemme see, just a sec.
Hmm, not yet. So I think I'll just tell you about the ring I just created. It's for anyone born in the 1970's. I personally was born in 1974, and there's no ring for that; I thought about trying to join the 1975 ring (because, you see, I am a ringaholic, and periodically I go on ring-joining binges, as you can see from this page), since I was born at the veeeeery end of 1974, and most of the people in my grade in school etc. were born in 1975. But let's face it, I didn't like most of the people in my grade anyway ;-), and I don't want to be the lone 1974-born imposter on the 1975 ring. Still, I didn't want to experience the mega-rejection that would come from starting a born-in-1974 ring and having not one single person join it (insecurity is my middle name. Well, not really. But still, you get the idea); I figured I'd have more of a chance of getting that validated feeling brought on by having someone actually notice that I exist at diaryland if I left it open to everyone born in the 70's, since there isn't one of those rings either. So. Anyone reading this who was born between 1970 and 1980 (I am not one of those purists who think that a decade or a century can only begin with a number ending in 1, but I'll make a concession to them by including 1980 ;-), go to this page and join up. Um, please?
Today I went to our local True Value (that's a hardware store for those who don't know) to get a $10 package of 5 cardboard under-bed storage cartons, for C's too-big clothes. Mysteriously, the check I wrote was for WAY more than that, even accounting for tax, which is a usurious 8.75%. Perhaps -- and this is just surmise, mind you -- perhaps that had something to do with the 3 32-gallon trash cans, the laundry hamper, the can crusher, and the trash bag liners I put in my trunk. I dunno, the whole thing is kind of a blur, in a shopping-maniacal-haze kind of way. I remember leaving the house thinking, "I REALLY need to get some of those underbed cartons for those clothes I have sitting in my living room waiting for me to sort them." Then I remember being in the store... there's a hazy vision of... what... oh yes, I remember thinking, hmm, that hamper from the bathroom has been broken ever since T sat on it a few months ago; they have hampers; I should replace it... then... my anal-retentive father-in-law is coming by tomorrow to bring C a birthday present; I really don't want him to see LT's recycling area looking like such a mess, I should price garbage cans. Right around then it all gets very fuzzy until I get home and unload all this stuff and get this bizarre-but-familiar feeling -- a mix of "goody goody new stuff for organizing" and "oh dear, how am I going to tell T?" Can I get an amen here, ladies?
My kids are watching one of their old Blue's Clue's videos. I will never look at these videos the same again; I keep picturing Steve's webpage with its cute little mouseover faces. Sooner or later I will break down and buy his album just for novelty's sake. One of my online friends observed the likelihood that the vast majority of his fans will be the parents of Blue's Clue's fans, who discover his music through some incredulous friend telling them, "You will not BELIEVE this!" Kind of like me. :)
I caught the cleaning bug pretty hard today, as you can tell by my hardware store experience (I swear that place is as bad as Wal-Mart). As I mentioned, my FIL is coming over tomorrow, and he is not one of those people who doesn't care if your house is a mess when he comes by. Which is why he schedules his visits like dental appointments, only far, far less frequently. I suppose if he's going to be all anal about what the house looks like, it is good of him to give us advance notice. Anyway, the house is clean and lemony-smelling, but there's still a pile of laundry for me to go through so off I go. :)
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Saturday, September 27, 2003
fun afternoon
This will just be a quick, not-very-witty entry because in a few minutes I'm getting off the computer. The kids and I are going to have a stay-up-late-and-play-boardgames kind of night. Watch out, "Leave it to Beaver"; here comes something wholesomer. ;-)
We just had such a great afternoon. We went to Fresno with the goal of buying a family zoo membership, which is something I've been wanting to do for a while. We got there at two, and when we went to buy our membership we were told that all zoo members had free passes to Storyland AND all the rides at "Playland" today. Only problem was, the rides shut down at 4 along with the zoo (which I had expected to be open till 6), and Storyland was only open till 5:30. So we had a limited amount of time to do everything. We decided to skip the zoo for today, since we'll be able to do that for free for a year (criminy, I hope it's not for the rest of this year; gotta log onto their website and check that out...), and just enjoy the other two places. We had an absolute blast, it was the best day in a long time. I just wish T could have been there, and I wish I'd brought my camera. Next time. There were so many places in Storyland that I remembered from my own childhood -- I hadn't been in there since I was about seven. And the kids enjoyed themselves there immensely. (LT: "I sure liked Storyland better than I thought I would. I thought it would just be a bunch of boring people reading stories."). Their favorite thing in there was King Arthur's castle, which of course was renamed by them as Cair Paravel, and they took turns sitting on the throne pretending to be King Peter and Queen Lucy.
I keep forgetting to post about something I find hugely amusing. You know (well, if you're not the parent of someone who is or recently was a preschooler, you might not know) that guy Steve from Blue's Clue's? Well, I know this sounds like one of those urban legend things (why are they called that, I wonder, when they spread equally well in rural areas? anyone?), but it is really and truly true that he is now a singer/songwriter and has released an album. The music is pretty decent -- let's just say that if a really famous alternative musician came out with songs like his you might go, huh? but if your next-door neighbor's teenaged son's garage band could play this well, you might actually set up a lawn chair and listen. You can look at his website and listen to some of his music at www.steveswebpage.com. Drat, I wish I'd been the one to come up with that mouseover-face thing first, it's really kind of cool. Anyway, there's my goofy link for today. :)
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Friday, September 26, 2003
don't want to fall behind
I am not feeling terribly articulate today, so don't expect much in the way of sparkly wit, but there's a lot going on so I felt the need to update now before I reach the dreaded death-to-journal point. You know, when you skip updating, and it seems like it'd be just too much effort to catch up right then, and the backlog builds up and builds up until updating is pointless. You know what I'm talking about, right? Anyway.
T got called out to a fire last night. No, he's not a firefighter; he's a telecommunications technician, so he gets "borrowed" from his usual job by the Forest Service or whoever is responsible for fighting the wildfire at hand, to go to their command center and set up communications. He fixes radios, sets up repeaters, that sort of thing. More than you needed to know, I know, but I have to stem the tide of reverence that always rushes toward me as soon as I mention him getting called out on a fire. ;-) He'll be gone for a minimum of a few days, and a maximum of two weeks, probably somewhere in between. The overtime from the 16-hour days will be nice to have but we really miss him.
Also, C's birthday party was to be tomorrow but we've put it off, not only because of her daddy's absence but also because she has been fighting a cold and it's not going away. I don't want to be The Bad Guy, sending her into a crowd, full of germs, infecting all her friends and cousins with my sinus whatever.
LT worked this afternoon on the piñata for the party. It's to be a barn. The party will have a horse theme but the kids (and I) objected to the idea of beating up a horse with a stick, so we had to figure out something else that could be made out of cardboard or papîer-maché that fit with a horse theme. He is outside painting it now; I'll see if I can make Snappy behave long enough to get a picture of it when he's done.
I was a baaad girl last night. Instead of getting a good healthy night's sleep, I stayed up chatting with a friend from eleven to three. I think I needed the chat more than the sleep, however, even though I'm a big on the foggy side today. And my hands are actually tired from their extensive workout; it's physically uncomfortable to type. Oh well, one benefit of my sanity lapse is that I'm sure I burned at least 300 calories laughing. ;-)
There's no Friday Five today! WELL! :) While I'm thinking about that sort of thing, though, I wanted to note that I'm working on a project which I hope will end up being a year of diary prompts. So if you have any ideas, email them to me, and I'll put them in, with credit (and links if applicable) to all who participated. Thanks. :)
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Saturday, September 20, 2003
all by my little lonesome self
Well, the boys are off on their San Diego adventure, and we girls had our nice dinner out as planned. It was nice; C was far more ladylike than you might expect a girl of almost-4 to be; the food was good; several people stopped by our table to tell C how lovely she looked in her pretty dress. And she did look very pretty. We had gone out shopping (already beginning with the mother-daughter shopping trips! ;-) earlier today, and I bought her some white dress shoes since she had none to fit her. Then we came home and relaxed for a while before going to the video store and then to our dinner. After we got home we got into our jammies and popped popcorn (I am amazed at how much she ate!) and watched a cute video of a ballet production of several of Beatrix Potter's stories. We purposefully got a video that we knew her brother would not like, and sure enough, when they called from their motel room (they are staying at the same one where T and I spent the last two nights of our honeymoon trip), and he asked what video he heard playing in the background, he was just plain disgusted. He's not much on ballet or Beatrix Potter. Anyway, C crashed on the couch just as the video was getting over, and I'm sitting here starting to feel lonely.
I am vacillating between wanting to stay up late and watch the DVD I rented for myself, and wanting to go fall unconscious on my bed, hogging the whole thing which is my sole comfort in having to have it all to myself. Darnit, it's a $2.50 DVD (Two Weeks Notice) and I know if I put it off till tomorrow night (the store's closed Sundays so no videos are due that day) it won't get watched. Really I don't have to go to early service at church tomorrow, although C loves her Sunday School class so she should get to go. I, on the other hand, do not love any of the adult Sunday School classes that are available, so I tend to feel at loose ends during the first service if I don't have nursery duty or whatever. But most likely, we'll go, which means I should be up at 7:30 so as to be ready to leave the house at 8:30. Which means starting a movie at 10:30 would be lunacy. Look at me talking myself into wasting that $2.50! Bad me! (maybe, just maybe, T will want to watch it with me tomorrow evening... right... when he has to get up at 5 the next morning and he'll have been driving all afternoon...). sigh.
YAWN. I am definitely leaning toward the unconsciousness-on-the-bed option. I am rapidly losing the ability to put a sentence together, even mentally, let alone in type. This is a boring enough post (please, if this is the first one of mine you've ever read, realize I'm not really this dull... pretty close, but not quite this dull...) without having it lapse into gibberish, which is about to start happening.
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