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Thursday, November 16, 2006

Things I have not been doing

• Blogging. As is obvious.

• NaNoWriMo. I hadn't planned on doing this, but in case you all thought I'd vanished (if you noticed I'd vanished) because I was busy writing The Great American Novella, nope.

• Taking pictures. Except for the ones I took at a wedding on Saturday, as a favor to a friend, confirming in my mind that I do not want to pursue a career in wedding photography. MY GOSH THE PRESSURE! The terrible lighting and stark white walls that you can't do anything about! The dilemma: Do I bob around the building getting good shots and annoying the living daylights out of all the guests, or do I try to be unobtrusive and get a lot of great shots of the bride's and groom's backs?! The barely-eighteen-year-old bride and her bevy of high-school friends who give endless toasts consisting of long strings of inside jokes while everyone else looks first baffled and then bored!

  I don't know what's up with the lack of plain old recreational photography. Maybe I can blame it on the fact that the sun goes down at 4:20 (thank you hill to the west), leaving me no time to go for a nice walk and take pictures unless I want to forcibly drag along my kids. Or on the fact that even if I do drag them along on a walk, I have taken pictures of EV ER Y THING within walking distance over the course of the last eighteen months. Or on the fact that my beloved and beautiful Dart will not have its brakes repaired until tomorrow, and I've been too skeered to go for long drives with the skeery non-power-assist brakes it has had for the past few weeks. High gas prices! El Niño! I don't know. I'm kind of getting the itch again anyway. I'm thinking Yosemite on Saturday. We'll see if I can get pulled over again; that was fabulous.

• Communicating with anyone not residing in my home. I don't call. I don't IM. I feel like a heel because there are people I love very much who never hear from me because I am so lazy and, I dunno, kind of... blah. Which probably also explains the rest of this list.

• Folding laundry. But then that's no surprise.

• Knitting. I keep meaning to. But then I don't.

However, all is not lost. Some things I have been doing:

• Reading. I all of a sudden got a hankering for Pat of Silver Bush and Mistress Pat a couple of weeks ago, so I read them. And I have a stack of library books, thanks to this site and this one too.

• Working on my husband's car webpage, whose link I won't share for Creepy Internet Stalker reasons. As soon as Google starts picking it up (who knows when that will be), if you know my husband's super-secret first name and, say, the kind of car he's restoring, you might be able to find it. If you cared. Not that you care.

• Stumbling. If you don't know what I'm talking about, get Firefox and then go here. Proceed at your own risk; do not blame me if you never work again.
  

And that's just about it. I had hoped to reach a total of thirteen, and this could be a weak attempt at a Thursday Thirteen, but I guess I'm just not cool enough for that.

Thursday, November 02, 2006

things that make you say grr duh

Let's say you're walking along somewhere in a small town and you see a cell phone lying somewhere, all lonely and abandoned. And let's say it's on and the battery is charged and everything. Do you:

a) leave it there and keep walking, assuming someone will come back for it?

b) pick it up, find an address book entry marked, say, HOME, hit SEND, and say to the person who answers, "Hey, I think I found your cell phone."?

or

c) pick it up, take it with you, and use it freely until the owner realizes it's really and truly lost and notices that she has a whole lot of recent calls and text messages and who knows what all on her online statement that she didn't make, and she calls customer service to have it suspended?

I'm a letter B person myself. I'm nosy. Maybe you're more of a letter A person. But whoever the jerk was who found MY cell phone obviously went for letter C. With gusto.

Oh, well, good thing I was way overdue for my new-every-two free phone anyway. Except that now I have to start all over buying accessories and spare batteries and all that fun stuff. yay.

This also means that if I had your phone number(s) (Susan and Jenn, I am totally talking to you. Kristen, I think I still have an email with yours somewhere), I probably don't now, and you should email me with it(them). I don't even have my brother-in-law's phone number, or T's best friend's. I hope he wrote that one down somewhere, otherwise we'll just have to wait for him to call us because the guy doesn't even have e-mail and I became super lazy about writing important stuff down if I have an electronic device in which to save it instead (Please Lord don't let Microsoft Money crash and burn anytime soon).

******************updated to add***********************

I so totally hesitated to write this update, but in the spirit of full bloggerish disclosure and honesty among friends I feel that I must.

Guess what I found under the armrest in my car when we went to go to Awana tonight? (note: I had driven the car twice already today for short distances. I am SO SO OBSERVANT.)

Um, yeah.

What remains a mystery is the fact that when I logged into my account this morning online to check and see if anyone had been using my phone in the last couple of days, when I'd not seen or used it, the website said that someone had. There were more minutes than there had been, and it said that the last call made had been this morning at 8:30, when I hadn't had my hands on my phone since Monday afternoon. In fact I can be relatively certain that my phone battery was dead at 8:30 this morning, because the battery lasts a max of like a day and a half on standby. After I called and suspended the use of the phone, the minutes rolled back and the last-call date and time did too; I assumed this was the little telecom gnomes wiping my account clean of all those nasty evil stolen minutes.

You can hum the Twilight Zone theme now if you want. Or else the Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum one. You choose.

At least the replacement phone didn't cost me anything. I guess now I have a spare, at any rate, and woo hoo, am I glad I didn't already dump all those chargers and accessories and stuff. Can you imagine if I'd had insurance on the silly thing and filed a claim? I'm SO GLAD I didn't pay the extra $6 a month for insurance, or else I would be in the seventh level of hellish embarrassment right now. Instead of only the third.

Friday, October 27, 2006

what I did today

before (blurry. I am so awesome at self-portraits. way to move out of the focus area, Rachel.)

and

after. (yay for the single little strand of hair going across my forehead. It was windy.)

Note: Whenever possible, get your hair cut by someone whose first language is not English. Yes, there's a bit of difficulty explaining exactly what you want, but my goodness does it cut down on the uncomfortable need for small talk. My stylist today (I say that as if it has been less than eight years since a stylist touched my hair) was Natalya from Uzbekistan, and aside from telling me helpfully that "wite-amins" would help my poor thin hair to thicken up a bit, she was really nice about the not-talking. (Seriously, she was very nice, and conversed quite well -- far, far, FAR better than I would if I moved to Uzbekistan to start cutting hair, that's for absolutely sure.)

Also, I bought jeans. It was actually a little bit of an anticlimax, because I was all prepared to Lose the Mom Jeans and Go Below the Waist and all that, and it turned out that at least two of the pairs of jeans I already wear qualify as below-the-waist and therefore probably aren't Mom Jeans at all. So I'm not as unhip as I thought I was. Except I couldn't bring myself to buy stretch denim jeans because, let's face it, one awesome thing about denim is that it's kind of corsety, and it sort of shapes you, even without being super tight. It's magic. Not so much with the stretch denim; I haven't seen my thighs look that fat, like, ever. Also, there seemed to be very few options in the gap between Mom Jeans and jeans with 70's-designer-style decorations on the back pockets. I just am not ready to go there yet. However, I did buy a pair of boot-cut below-the-waist jeans, and one pair of straight-leg below-the-waist ones. Kristin, you should be proud of me.

AND I found a nice soft red boucle sweater that I really like. I'm going to hate pulling it out of the washer, with that shuddery wet-acrylic feeling, but I like it.

Also, speaking of boucle, I bought a big skein of boucle yarn. This stuff is from the devil, as it turns out. Not only is it almost impossible to work with (I think there's a stitch... there [tentative poke]. repeat), but also, I could not find the pulling end no matter how hard I tried, so I had to take the paper off and unwind the yarn from the outside, and the skein has... it has grown. It is fully round and every time I look at it it's bigger. I'm afraid to go to sleep tonight because I think I might come out front and find it absorbing stuff, Blob-style, filling my living room. It's pretty colors, though.

And I bought a knitting book that I'm going to take back because it turns out to not be very helpful. I would scan a sample so that you could see the unhelpfulness of it, but that would bend the book up and I so want that $11.95 back. I could buy yarn with that money.

AND I went to Panda Express. Mmm, yum. I wish I could go back right now. Take that, haters of the bliss that is fast Chinese-esque food combined with a buffet.

And I went to Costco but forgot to buy cat food even though it was on my list and we were already totally out and had been feeding the cats leftovers from our fridge since this morning, so when I got home I went next door and asked our tenants if we could borrow a cup of cat food. Because I am all together and with-it like that. Further evidence of my extreme tiredness near the end of my shopping trip: I was on the phone with T as I was driving home and he swears that I said I felt "much more safer" driving my parents' van while my beautiful Dart is awaiting a rebuilt brake cylinder booster (read: while my beautiful Dart doesn't want to stop once it's moving unless you ask it really forcefully and well in advance). I deny this. How could I not? But he insists.

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

things that are happening around here

Thing One:

My seven-year-old daughter has a temporary tattoo:

I think it's kind of cute and glittery and girly and pretty (although I just noticed that the fairy's posture looks just the slightest bit suggestive in a Bare Naked Ladies anime-babes-that-make-me-think-the-wrong-thing kind of way), and since my problem with the idea of a tattoo is the permanence of it, I thought it was fine when C wanted to spend her two quarters on a fairy tattoo from the machine at the grocery store. Heck, I think I might spend two quarters on a fairy tattoo from the machine at the grocery store next time I'm there. After all, it's not like she'll have some bleached-out green version of it on her wrinkled 80-year-old neck. Her dad, however, was not so comfortable with the idea, and he kind of failed to see the cute girly glitteriness and went straight to "that'll come off in her bath, right?"

********************************
Thing Two:

I KNITTED.

A WHOLE DISHCLOTH. Do you SEE the knitty goodness?

I have always been under the impression that I could not knit. This dates back to a dreadful experience in Girl Scouts, when we were all supposed to make little knitted bells as ornaments for the library Christmas tree, and I just couldn't do it. The two memories I took away from the attempt are:

• the shameful feeling of coming to the leader for, like, the eighth time, and having her rip my bell apart AGAIN and tell me to start over because I was doing it wrong, and

• the realization that the world didn't fall in if I failed to complete an assignment. As my high-school grades will attest, this was a Very Bad Lesson to have learnt at such an impressionable age.
  

So you can see why I was scarred.

Anyway. I learned to crochet instead, and periodically I would try knitting and fail again and put away my one lone set of needles until the next time. This time it worked, thanks in part to Kat's cheerleading and advice, and also thanks to about.com's knitting area, which is totally awesome. I made a dishcloth because I could learn as I went without having to care if the result was ugly because who cares what a dishcloth looks like?

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

Thing three:

I have a little bit of money, and aside from the two pairs I bought at Goodwill a month or so ago, pretty much all my jeans are getting ratty. So I need to replace them. I MIGHT happen to buy jeans that are not Mom Jeans, but LET IT BE KNOWN BY THESE PRESENTS that it is not because I feel like I have to. It is certainly not because of any dictates by the fashion police or clothing manufacturers who think it's really important that everyone throw out all their clothes every few years so that a) they can look ridiculous to their kids fifteen years later and b) the aforementioned clothing manufacturers can make more money. If I buy jeans that are mid-rise, it will be because, well, I need jeans, and they are available, comfortable, appropriate, and nice-looking on me, and that is all. I would like to remind the fashion-conscious youth of America that they are not the first generation to think that their mom's clothes were dorky and that obviously THEIR clothes are the only ones worth wearing. Nor will they be the last. I can't WAIT till there's a whole generation of 40-year-old women clinging to mid-rise jeans while their young daughters mock them in Internet videos.

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

rather interesting and totally awesome

(separately)

Here's the 'rather interesting':

(oops, the Ctrl-C didn't take. I just pasted an entire chapter of Villette here. Trying again.)

HowManyOfMe.com

There are: 12 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

There we go, that's better. Thanks Kat, who is as always ever so helpful in pointing out interesting Internet things to me. (warning: Turn OFF your speakers for this one. There's a really annoying sound-embedded ad.)

And for the totally awesome, everyone-must-see-this part of today's post:

(Turn your speakers back on.)

Go watch this now. This means you. Especially if you are a girl or a woman or ever looked at a girl or a woman or at a magazine ad or a movie star or any print or video media portrayal of female beauty. Please?

Sunday, October 15, 2006

many random things

I have a spot on the side of my nose that I can see in my peripheral vision, which drives me batty. I have said it before, but I find it patently unfair of God to decree that I should have spots and wrinkles at the same time. Further, I far prefer the nice British-ish term "spot" to "zit". "Zit" sounds like the name of a dog in a 1950's sci-fi book, and yet paradoxically it always brings to mind a skinny fifteen-year-old with buck teeth, a prominent Adam's apple, and a loud way of guffawing at un-funny things.

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

I have recently discovered that the style of jeans I wear are called "Mom jeans" by the youth of America. In spite of a) my persistent belief that the waist of pants should sit at the waist of the woman, and that any other place looks kind of ridiculous, and b) my insistence that, not being in high school, I don't have to care what other people think of my clothes as long as they are clean and in good repair, this disturbs me a bit. Are "mom jeans" the embarrassment equivalent of the candy-apple-red, white-polka-dotted sheeny rayon pantsuit with the frilly cravat that my mother used to wear, until Jenn mercifully (but totally accidentally) put it out of its misery by dropping it into a serendipitously-placed pan of used motor oil in the laundry/utility shed when she lived with us during high school? If so, perhaps I should maybe go try on something that's mid-rise and straight-legged. Because that would be actually pretty bad.

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

While we're discussing my lack of hipness, perhaps I should share that as I'm typing this, I'm listening to a Yanni song. Whoops, it just went to Loreena McKennitt. I don't think that brought me much higher on the hipness scale, but what do I know, in a world where jeans that show all your belly fat are preferable to ones that don't.

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

I have stopped updating the librivox chapters in the blog. Not that anybody noticed. They're always available at the "my librivox recordings" link over on the right, if anyone's interested. I'm well over halfway done with both solo projects now and am planning to do Anne of Green Gables next.

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

Oops, now it's Enya. This is far from the only kind of music I have on my computer. It's just what I felt like listening to while doing a negative-scanning job.

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

This feels like the kind of note I would write when I was thirteen (on peach-colored binder paper, with big circles for dots on the i's), wherein I would announce at intervals what song was playing on the radio and how I felt about it. And yet... my friends still liked me. Crazy.

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

OK, I have a bit of a literary question for all you brilliant English major types out there. Why, in "The Highwayman" (Loreena McKennitt's musical version of which I may or may not be listening to right now, at quite a loud volume for 11 PM), do the soldiers tie the musket to Bess, other than as a necessary plot device? How would that further serve their purpose than to simply gag and bind her? I do not understand. Not that I don't totally love that poem, in the same way that I love the impassioned music of the Romantic era. I'm just... wondering. Randomly.

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

let's play a little game

When I was in second and third grades, I had a teacher who liked to use Fortunately-Unfortunately Story-Building as a class exercise. So, in honor of Miss M (who is still teaching and now lives right down the street from me; otherwise I might use her whole name), here is

My Weekend: Fortunately and Unfortunately

Fortunately, I went to the retreat with my beloved mother and sister-in-law and had a fabulous time and God spoke to me about several Important Things. We went for hikes and it was beautiful and I took some nice, happy pictures.

Unfortunately, I felt rather manipulated by the music much of the time. Maybe it was just me.

Fortunately, there was one song we sang that is now my favorite even though it made me cry every time we sang it:

Blessed Be Your Name
by Matt Redman
- - -
Blessed Be Your Name
In the land that is plentiful
Where Your streams of abundance flow
Blessed be Your name

Blessed Be Your name
When I'm found in the desert place
Though I walk through the wilderness
Blessed Be Your name

Every blessing You pour out
I'll turn back to praise
When the darkness closes in, Lord
Still I will say

Blessed be the name of the Lord
Blessed be Your name
Blessed be the name of the Lord
Blessed be Your glorious name

Blessed be Your name
When the sun's shining down on me
When the world's 'all as it should be'
Blessed be Your name

Blessed be Your name
On the road marked with suffering
Though there's pain in the offering
Blessed be Your name

Every blessing You pour out
I'll turn back to praise
When the darkness closes in, Lord
Still I will say

Blessed be the name of the Lord
Blessed be Your name
Blessed be the name of the Lord
Blessed be Your glorious name

Blessed be the name of the Lord
Blessed be Your name
Blessed be the name of the Lord
Blessed be Your glorious name

You give and take away
You give and take away
My heart will choose to say
Lord, blessed be Your name

I have a rather -- is it stoic? -- interpretation of that passage of Job (referenced in that last bridge/verse in the song), a passage which many people find perplexing or hard. Not me. To me it means, dude, everything beyond our bare-bones basic existence -- the nakedness with which we came from our mother's wombs -- is an extra -- a bonus -- and if God chooses to give us stuff, awesome. Praise Him. If He gives us some stuff and then he takes it away, well, it was all a bonus anyway, so: awesome. Praise Him. I don't spend a lot of time wrangling with questions like "Why does God let this stuff happen to me?" when I'm in pain. I figure, hey, God let life happen to me, and we live in a fallen world so bad stuff will happen during that life, and I am small and God is big and if the Why matters, then I'll find it out later, and if it doesn't matter, then I won't. Kind of boring, I know. But I love that song, because the idea of praising God through good and bad is a really important, difficult, beautiful idea, and also because it's quite catchy.

Whoo. I digress. I totally strayed from the formula there. Back to it.

Unfortunately... um, can't think of another Unfortunately that fits here. Mom, Debi, and I had two roommates who snored so loudly that we made a trip away from the retreat into town on the second day to buy earplugs? (I don't say that to be mean. Everybody snores sometimes. These people, bless their hearts, just did it very energetically. Whatever your hand finds to do, etc.)

Fortunately, there were the much-anticipated Six Meals No Planning No Cooking No Cleaning.

Unfortunately, I came home just in time to endure two days (and counting) of the worst bout of (I think) food poisoning I've ever had (based on incubation periods and the non-illness of the other people who were there with me, though, I think it was from the salad bar at the Hometown Buffet at which we ate on Thursday, and not the retreat. Or else it's a virus.).

Fortunately, this meant that even though I overate wildly during the 48 hours of the retreat, I now weigh four pounds less than I did on the morning I left. How sick is our skinny-obsessed culture that this makes me want to get food poisoning once a week for the rest of my life? (do not tell me about how all I lost is water weight. I don't want to think about that. Rather, I am happy thinking about the simple fact that The Scale Went Down.)

Unfortunately (sort of), the combination of Very Unhappy Innards and the Very Important Things about which God spoke to me at the retreat has kept me away from the computer almost the entire time I've been home. I am dreadfully behind on my blog-reading.

Fortunately, LT just finished teaching C her math lesson and made me a bed on the couch where I am supposed to lie down and read. Because I feel sick. They are so nice to me.

Sunday, September 03, 2006

a really, really weird entry. sersly.

So, what do you want first? The county-fair rundown or the grisly details of yet another splinter removal (C's, of course)?

The splinter? OK. Gotcha. I'll throw in a side of Mother Of The Year Award goodness for you too.

This actually started on Friday, which was, ohmygosh, one of those days where, when you're living it, you're all, 'no way is all this nonsense actually happening to me. right? this is some kind of joke?', what with the truck breaking down a few times and the hundred zillion degree heat and all. While we were in the middle of this (during the second attempt to revive the truck, which had conked out this time with its nose fully out all the way across the road my in-laws live on, which was the SECOND-worst place it died that day), C fell down, cried a little, and told me she felt like she had 'something in her leg' which had a bit of a scratch along it. I said it was probably just swollen a little because she had hurt it, and went back to looking sympathetic and praying that T would get the truck started soon, before a) we all died of heat prostration and b) someone came along and T-boned our truck which would totally have helped our day be way more exciting than it already had been. And this was BEFORE the truck died at the gas station, taking up an entire row of pumps because of the trailer behind it. Did I mention that we don't have tow insurance on the truck? We don't. So. Anyway. C fell down. Fast-forward to today, when I noticed that she was still feeling the pain of that scrape a bit more than I thought she should, and really sat down and looked at her leg, and saw that the area around the bottom of the scratch was swollen and tight and red and hot. And it looked vaguely like there was some pus under the edge of the scratch. And I pulled off a scab and some pus came out. Of my daughter's leg. This is not supposed to happen, because this isn't the eighteenth century and I am not (praise be to God) some time-traveling doctor woman who's performing surgery in the wilderness. So I called T in (T's hand-eye coordination is way better than mine) and amid many tears and a little screaming and much hydrogen peroxide, we performed a minor surgery in our bathroom and pulled a 3/4" sliver of wood out from under my child's skin. There was... more pus. A lot more.

Excuse me, I just had to go give her another guilt-hug. I've been doing this all afternoon. I hope she doesn't know why.

So now she's OK, and we've cleaned the site and put on ointment and drawn dotted lines around the red area so we can monitor it to make sure it gets smaller instead of larger. Because, you know, I am such a good parent.

OK, no more pus in this entry, I promise.

County fair, let's see. We went on Friday night, after all the truck troubles, and had a good time. They had bumper cars this year, which -- oh my gosh we are SUCH party animals -- we had been hoping and wishing they would, and then when the kids and I went to the fairgrounds to buy ride tickets last week and saw the truck with the bumper car ride actually being pulled onto the grounds to get set up, it was, I am not joking, the highlight of the day. Or maybe even the week. We went out again later to make sure that they hadn't changed their minds just because they knew we wanted this so badly. While we were there, we had to drive kind of close to a trailer and we heard this kind of clattery sound like we'd knocked over a garbage bag, and I half-jokingly-half-freaking-out said, as we were driving the two miles home, that I hoped it hadn't been a PERSON we'd hit, you know, like some passed out carny or something, and it wasn't. No, it was a really large black cargo net kind of thing. This we knew because when we got home and I went to open the trunk, I tripped over it, because it was still attached to our car. We felt like felons, tossing it in the trunk, driving back out to the fairgrounds, tossing it out where we'd accidentally picked it up, and then driving away all calmly, not knowing whether to giggle like maniacs or not. (honestly, I kept thinking about Jennifer and myself and how if this had happened when we were in high school we'd still be talking about it like every time we talked to each other. And snorting with laughter.)

Anyway. Fair. Rides were fun. Pictures I entered did OK but not fantastic. Same with kids' entries. Spent too much on food. Parade was hot and rather boring but a nice fireman gave C a stuffed unicorn. The end.

pictures:

Cautious LT LOVES the Tilt-A-Whirl.


bumper-car madness


more bumper-car madness


the forestry guys had a little-kid obstacle course contest thing set up where they'd put on fireman clothes and run around looking all cute and doing funny things. C had a great time.


(teach YOU to stand there taking pictures of me.)

Monday, August 28, 2006

101 things update

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

Warning: Dude, this is LONG.

For my spirit:

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

For my body:

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


For my mind:

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


For my family (and friends):

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




For others:



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


For myself:


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




For fun:



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



For my home:


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


Crafty things:

(darn, there goes the "For" theme)


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



Together with DH:


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

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

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

yesterday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And THEN... well, here:

Open Letter

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

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

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

So there was that.

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

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

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

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

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

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