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Saturday, April 29, 2006

boring rambly sorts of things

So today the sun came out with a vengeance. I drove to the valley for groceries (for the next two weeks of carefully-laid-out meals) and I have an official Driving Sunburn.

Also, I remembered today that our car doesn't have A/C. (It should be fixed relatively soon. Please God please.)

Speaking of please God please, I lost something small tonight, and wouldn't it be nice if He would help me find it when He thinks it's appropriate and I've learned my little slacker lesson and all? It's not that big a deal (I keep telling myself). It's just the bracket that attaches my external flash to a tripod. I've no idea where it is. I thought it was sitting merrily in my camera bag waiting for me to read the remote flash section of the manual so that I could use it, and when I had done so, it was nowhere to be found even though I took the camera bag completely apart three times. (you all know the sign of insanity indicated here so I won't bother typing it.) The frustrating thing isn't that it's lost, per se. I can replace it, and it's not very expensive (although, see above re: two weeks of groceries, and even "not very expensive" doesn't mean "yippee, let's go buy it"). It's just that I discovered the loss at the precise moment when I was all set up to use it. Also, that losing things makes me crazy, and it makes me disgusted with myself, and blah.

However.

Getting new tires on our car and getting them balanced seems to have removed the perplexing vibration that's been driving us nuts for the past few months. (Too bad we didn't try that before T spent a hundred dollars and a lot of hours replacing the front axles because he and most other people thought that was the problem. But still. It's fixed, and we needed new tires really badly anyway.)

And everyone in my house is healthy.

And... I have two Nikons. What kind of world do we live in where I get to have two Nikons?

And I've flossed every night for like two weeks running now. Yes, this is a record. I hate flossing but when you're 31 sometimes you have to do stuff you hate just because it's The Grown-Up Thing To Do.

And I have absolutely nothing scheduled to do tomorrow. I have a Free Day. That is if I can get over the guilt of not being caught up on laundry. I have this wild hankering to ride the bus into Yosemite and take pictures but that costs money (less money, however, than it would cost to drive, with gas at $3.30 a gallon here) and see above re: two weeks of groceries and tires and see the last post re: money in savings. Which we are Not Going To Touch. Especially for frivolous Free Day trips.

And I was going to stay up and watch the rest of the segments of the LBY session that I still haven't finished for this week (SO SO BAD I AM SO BAD) but my DSL is only working in patches and I am going to take that as a sign from God that I need to go lie down and read Northanger Abbey until I can't keep my eyes open anymore. Sometimes signs from God are super-convenient that way. Ahem. Right? Cough.

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

turning over some new leaves, and other stuff

things we have done in the last two weeks to make our lives more organized:

1) all our bills are actually really truly completely totally 100% paid off for the first time in our marriage. This is a new development. AND, because this was T's "extra check" -- he gets two a year since we base our bill-paying schedule on two paydays per month and he gets 26 paydays per year and you should have SEEN me trying to prove to him that this really happened when we were first married; I looked like Ross Perot with the charts -- we actually have money in savings. For the first time in our marriage. And we have cancelled every form of credit we had, and please don't write and tell us how we need a credit card for our credit rating because honestly we are never going to buy a house in this state and if we ever go to move elsewhere, well, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. It's much worse for our credit rating and our life in general to have credit at our disposal. In times of weakness we tend to cave and do atrocious things with it.

So. No debt, and money in savings. Honestly, I don't feel like myself.

*****edited to add********
I should note that we have had retirement savings building up for years. At least we've been doing THAT right. This savings account is a contingency fund for things that pop up like car tires, hospitalizations, etc.

2) I made a meal calendar. I've continually sworn that I needed to do this. It's just four weeks of meals, and we'll repeat them. This way I'll know what groceries I need ahead of time and I won't need to wander the aisles of the local store every afternoon trying to figure out what I should make for dinner that night. (Yes, I really have been in the habit of doing that.)

What do you mean, it doesn't take normal people thirteen years of adulthood to figure this stuff out? Since when have I ever been normal? These are big steps for me. Next thing you know I'll have my house decluttered and it will stay clean for more than five minutes at a time. Or -- here's a concept -- I'll file papers as they come in, rather than stuffing them in a drawer until they won't fit anymore.

Don't hold your breath on those, by the way.

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Um, other stuff. C has been sick for the past 24 hours. I have been feeling not-so-stellar, myself. We both slept for about an hour and a half this afternoon while LT played Civilization III and Falling Sand.

I am again behind on the LBY study. I'm also behind on laundry. No big news there.

We had a fantastic time at LT's birthday party on Saturday. Nineteen rocket launches, the aforementioned bb-gun shooting, and about six hours of running around outdoors playing boy games (including C, the one girl) made for some very exhausted but happy kids (and parents) by the end of the day. I made a cake shaped like a castle, and T and LT decorated it with Lego people and marshmallows, and we are STILL trying to finish off the leftovers, my gosh I'm so tired of chocolate cake.

I am SO READY for the eighty-degree days we're supposed to have this weekend. We keep having these dreary, gray, drizzly days, at a time of year when we've ordinarily had our winter clothes put away for weeks.

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And there you have your post, Debi, is that better? At least it wasn't a meme. :) (that'll be tomorrow.)

Saturday, March 25, 2006

happy days are here again

T and I had a big, heated, personal argument tonight. Just wanted to make sure I presented a balanced and fair portrait of our lives. It's not all new lenses and ... let me think, something I've done for him... uh, not all new lenses and -- biscuits and gravy. I make him a lot of biscuits and gravy. Anyway. It's not all new lenses and biscuits and gravy; we fight. Then we make up. And oooh, is the making-up part nice, once it's past that bumpy and uncomfortable "I'm not sure I'm ready to make up; I think I want to burn with anger against you for just a little while longer first" stage. I hate fighting so much. Man, am I glad that's over.

I'm also glad (segue! no asterisks! go me!) that the audio quality on these recordings I'm transcribing is good. That makes such a difference in my mood. Give me an ongoing job where I have to repeatedly and continuously attempt to discern what two people are saying in an interview that appears to have been held either at a college basketball game or inside a jet engine, and I get terribly cranky. Whereas nice clear audio that enables me to rattle along at 65% without missing a word even when both people talk faster than I do (and anyone who has ever heard me talk can attest that this means very fast), and I go around smiling and humming and tipping flowers up to look at them and all those other stereotypical happy-woman sorts of things.

As if that wasn't enough to make my mood all that it should be, we had "quizzing" for Awana tonight. This is a sort of Jeopardy sort of thing where the kids from Awana clubs all around our area get together and answer questions about all the Bible verses and things they've been learning all year. It has served as an excellent gauge of LT's mental/emotional stability for the three years we've done it. The first year, his tics had really just begun to manifest themselves and he became a veritable ticcing machine during the competition. It was so, so painful to watch that poor anxious boy deal with a situation that was totally new to him, and a room full of strangers, and being up in front of people for maybe the fourth or fifth time in his life when he was also having to deal with these impulses that would take over his body any time he got nervous, which, of course, went beyond 'quite frequently' and well into the realm of 'constantly'. That was, I am not exaggerating, one of the top ten worst days of my parenting career. Last year was better but still a stressful situation for all of us. This year was fabulous. He sat up there, calm and completely in control of himself, seeming quite self-assured, laughing composedly with the crowd when he accidentally tossed an answer card across the room, answering questions. It took a great deal of self-restraint to keep myself from dashing up on the stage and kissing him repeatedly just for the simple joy of it. Several separate times. AND he went to sleep without a single problem tonight, praise God.

So. Life is good right now in our household. It's a busy weekend for all of us; I have two separate jobs going, and T is taking LT to again help his friend prepare for his move. So with that (notice the time and see above re: argument and transcribing), I'm going to go snuggle up to my nicely-made-up-with husband and sleep as long as C will let me in the morning. I wonder if I could nicely bribe God to keep her happily in bed until at least 8:30.

Monday, March 20, 2006

It's Monday

Kat does this thing on Mondays where she lists a few positive things in her life. I figure, hey, if any day needs something like this, it's Monday, right?

Actually, things have been pretty good for me for a while. I'm a happy lady. And why shouldn't I be?

Just a few things that have made me happy lately (ooh! a list!):

• I have an array of machines that do much of my work for me. I am especially grateful for the dishwasher. That swish-swash-swish can still fill my heart with joy even after five years of hearing it.
  
• Speaking of heartwarming, yesterday was our twelfth wedding anniversary. Since we've been celebrating pretty much full-bore for the past month and a half or so, it was OK that we spent yesterday afternoon apart -- T helped a friend who is moving to another state in a mere two weeks or so (note: he, like T, collects cars and their paraphernalia. It has been snowing every weekend since the middle of February, which has put a cold, wet, white damper on any outdoor interstate-moving-related work. Read: still much to do.), and I cleaned our bedroom which was only a slightly less desperate task. We did go out to dinner, all four of us, even though we had multiple child-minding offers. It is our family's birthday, after all. Then we came home and watched The Cat From Outer Space, had brownies and ice cream, and crashed into bed. We are so happening.
  
• We are all in excellent health (and we're very good walkers, too. I wonder how many posts of mine do not have a Jane Austen reference in them somewhere?).
  
• I finally defrosted and cleaned out our refrigerator. And I mean really cleaned it out, not just emptied the unidentifiable moldy messes out of the Rubbermaid containers that have been shoved to the back of the shelves for who knows how long. It now smells pleasantly clean and is actually white on the inside. Who knew? Such a good feeling; it gives me a little jolt of satisfaction every time I open it (easily pleased? why do you ask?). Also, I'd forgotten what the house sounded like without the fridge running.
  
• I am married to the best person on the planet, and I'm exponentially more in love with him than I was when we got married and thought we loved each other as much as was humanly possible.
  
• School has been going well, and my kids love me in spite of my multiple mothering flaws (will they ever have clean socks in their drawers on a regular basis? do they even know what that's like?)
  
• The photographer's block is gone. woo hoo! Probably because in spite of our freakish weather for the past month, wildflowers are bursting out all over. Run for your lives!
  

See? So what if the house gets messy again as soon as I clean it? So what if dpchallenge still hates my photos? So what if our tenant is moving away in July and we're kind of wondering where our grocery money will come from if we don't get someone else in there right away? All the important stuff is covered, right?

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

growing up and other exciting things

C lost her first tooth yesterday. In a kind of reverse of the usual first child/second child dichotomy, while I don't remember LT's first tooth, I have very distinct memories of the morning we found C's. Incidentally, this is probably mostly because that was also the first morning we had our video camera. That first tooth, which made nursing an occasionally extremely painful event (C had this way, you see, of involuntarily clenching her gums together when she fell asleep...) came out yesterday, after a couple of weeks of increasing wiggliness. I'll spare you the gory details; consider yourself lucky that C isn't writing this, because she certainly wouldn't, and they really are remarkably gory. Needless to say, she's quite excited. If you don't like the sight of a newly-bare section of juvenile gum, for heaven's sake stay clear away from C for a while.

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Meanwhile I have another new Internet addiction. I can't even count how many this makes. I don't know exactly how to describe Librarything in a way that will adequately convey the feeling of joy and even glee that it gives me, so here are the bare facts: You create an online record of the books you own, and you can compare them with others' libraries, and give them little descriptive tags, and all kinds of fun things. Here is my profile, complete with goofy-looking photo. I'm not done entering my books yet; I still have two shelves of the schoolroom shelves to go, and that's if I completely ignore all the picture books (two shelves) and curriculum-oriented schoolbooks (about three shelves' worth). And that's not even bringing up the four wall-to-wall shelves in our bedroom full of T's religion section. Maybe someday, or more specifically, some night -- since I was up till nearly 1:00 doing my bedroom shelves last night. It all seems almost pointless when I tell about it, and I don't think T will ever understand the pleasure of it, but oh goodness is it fun.

Sunday, March 12, 2006

snippets yet again

I've not done anything funny or stupid, and I've no Great Spiritual Wisdom to hand down or Pensive Mothering Thoughts to relate. So, as usual, no posts. Finally, though, I think I've enough little snippets of stuff to sit down and write.

1) I've not felt inspired to take photographs AT ALL the last couple of weeks. Which is strange, especially in light of the fact that:

2) We've just had our third snowstorm in about three weeks. I don't remember this ever happening before in the thirty-one years I have lived in this area. Some years we'll get three snowstorms in a winter -- I think in 1998/1999 we had six -- but this close together, it's been interesting. Especially since in the few days in between the temperatures will frequently get up into the sixties and seventies. (and yet, I've not taken more than five or eight pictures of the snow. It'll pass. In fact I'm thinking about going for a drive and doing some shooting later this afternoon. If I have the energy.)

3) T's been off work all week. He sprained his back a week ago today and just in the last couple of days, after three chiropractor visits and a lot of lying flat on his back on a heating pad with his legs elevated on our daughter's blue daisy-printed beanbag chair, has he been able to be up and around doing stuff.

4) Then yesterday we took him to the ER because out of the blue he had one of his incidents of severe, mind-numbing pain brought about by what is essentially a muscle cramp, in one of the muscles that makes his esophagus do what esophagi do best. He hasn't had one in years, because in the past they've always been triggered by certain foods, and he's avoided those very carefully for a long time. So yesterday at the hospital, after they hooked him up to an EKG because anytime anyone presents with any kind of pain in the chest they have to treat it like a heart condition (thank you, malpractice lawyers), they gave him an opiate for the pain. This caused him to (in his words) go from intense pain to outer space in about thirty seconds. He stayed in outer space for several hours, until he returned to earth with a nauseated jolt. So that all made for an interesting afternoon.

Other than that (unless you wanted to hear about the trials and tribulations of having a cat who has decided that your closet floor is a MUCH better litterbox than her litterbox is, and, uh, you don't), there's nothing to report. I'm fine, the kids are fine. School is fine. The house is cluttered and messy and I'm behind on laundry. There's a Star Wars Trading Card Game set up on my coffee table that's been there since Friday morning sometime. Or maybe it was Thursday night. Just, you know, the usual.

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

how I've been spending my time

T's still gone. I always hesitate to just announce in this journal how long he'll be gone when they whisk him away to save the world keep firefighters' radios functioning in a land far, far away; it's the stalkers, you know. Because, as I have mentioned before, I am totally stalker material.

Anyway. He's not home (yet), and as usual when he's gone, our routine has completely fallen one hundred percent to pieces. Not like our routine was ever going to make any Navy captains sit up and take notice, but ehh. I'm surprised we even sleep when he's gone. We've been having a great time, though, overall. The kids have been getting along really well, and I don't think I have yelled a single time since last Thursday and that is really amazing and good, and the weather has been unbeLIEVable. I mean, as in, wearing tank tops and capris and sandals and going for picnics at the park kind of weather. We've been taking full advantage of this; so far the tally is two picnics, one afternoon at Grandpa's, three evening walks, and three hundred photographs taken (many, many of these have been of flowers. Even I am starting to get tired of flower pictures, and it's only February. The neighbor ladies' tulips haven't even come out yet.).

We find that we get a little stir-crazy in the evenings. Or let me rephrase that. Two of us -- the two who may happen to have two X chromosomes, just maybe -- get stir-crazy. The other of us -- the one who may or may not be nine years old -- never gets anything like stir-crazy and would just as soon stay home and set up Playmobile battles on his bedroom floor. However, he's been outvoted a few times this past week. Tonight we went to the valley and bought a few groceries, and I discovered that a decision not to celebrate Valentine's day may be all well and good but it still won't get you a table at a restaurant on the evening of February 14th. We thought initially of Applebees, because with kids that's a really cheap decent place to go, but there was a line out the door, so we went to Panda Express because who'd do fast food Chinese for Valentine's Day? Apparently only about, oh, everyone. We ended up at Carl's Jr., where a large percentage of the clientele seemed to be celebrating a new holiday called Go To A Fast-Food Establishment, Talk Really Loudly, and Use Plenty of Obscene Language Day. I gave out so many level, cool, angry stares that I ran out of them and had to resort to just plain glaring.

Also, while T's been gone, for some reason I've started watching movies. I'm not ordinarily much of a movie person; the majority of my movie time coincides quite purposefully with my laundry-folding time, and hence consists of movies with which I am familiar enough that they won't distract me from actually, you know, folding laundry **cough Jane Austen adaptations cough**. But on Saturday the kids and I went to the video store and rented a stack of movies. We went with the intention of getting movies for them, but thanks to the library and our lack of interest in just about anything put in theaters and aimed at kids these days, we couldn't find much of anything for them that we hadn't seen a dozen times, and we wound up getting just a couple for them and a few for me. So far we've all watched Shrek 2 (C is obsessed with the cat and tells us repeatedly how cute it is when he takes off his hat and makes his eyes all big; fortunately she didn't pick up on the less, er, couth aspects of his characterization) and The Incredibles, which I think I might have liked if I'd cared about comic books in the slightest. But I don't, so I didn't. And by myself I've watched Finding Neverland (WATCH THIS NOW THIS MEANS YOU), Shall We Dance (the recent one with Richard Gere) and 13 Going on 30. I wouldn't bother listing the titles here except that I wanted to humiliate myself by saying that at some point during each of these three movies, I cried. Actual tears going down my face cried. Because I am all cool that way.

Speaking of cool, I'm going to go curl up with a cat, my husband's pre-worn work turtleneck, and a James Herriot book. I am one happening chick, no?

Monday, February 06, 2006

things that are not working out for me right now

• My diet. I ate not one but two large chocolate milkshakes yesterday. Hey, I was sick, it was sick-person food. Right? I felt like a ton of bricks when I went to bed, I'll just say that.

• The darn woodstove. Free heat my eye. For that to mean anything I have to be able to actually light a fire. I think the wood must be wet. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Meanwhile it's quite chilly in here. Of course it might help if I changed out of the capri pants and tank top I wore to sleep in last night.

• DPChallenge. Remember, the photography contest site with which I was so infatuated for a few months. I can't please those people a-tall now. Every photo I enter scores well below average. I refuse to believe that my photography is that bad; I'm just going to assume that it's just not the dpchallenge style. Presto! Self-respect is rescued. ;) It does kind of suck the fun out of taking pictures if I'm doing it for a bunch of people who are going to hate them, so I think I may give up that site for a while and just take pictures for myself, and maybe the photo blog, where at least if people don't like it they keep their mouths shut about it and don't give me a 3 on a scale from 1 to 10 just to make sure I know how lame I am.

• Blogging. Everything I would write about, I've already covered in extensive (or perhaps I should say excessive) detail -- housework or the lack of it, the kids and how they are or are not getting along, our Bible reading and whether we do or do not (usually the latter) do it every day, etc. I don't think I want to close this down -- where else would I post my books each month? -- but I think I'm just going to have to come to accept that anything over one or two posts a week is going to be the exception.
  

The good news is, though, that everything else is going just fine right now. Rather boring, but just fine. :)

Friday, January 20, 2006

what the doctor ordered

You know what I'd forgotten about myself? That for all my gregarious blabbermouth tendencies, I'm actually an introvert, if you define an introvert as someone who finds refreshment in solitude -- and solitude has been in short supply lately around here, since staying up late can't count because of all the darned guilt.

Today, though, I drove to Yosemite, thanks to dpchallenge.com (I am totally dpchallenge's slave). I went by myself, because Jenn couldn't come up after all, and T had the day off and never sets foot in Yosemite unless he has to (and he frequently does have to, since he, er, works there), and why torture the kids with one of Mom's photography trips if it's not absolutely necessary, right? And it was perfect. The park's quiet this time of year, and largely empty, and there was snow, and solitude, and silence, and I didn't have to worry about pestering any companions with my frequent shutter-junkie fixes. I took about two hundred and twenty pictures (lots of bracketing; I think I kept about forty of them, maybe fifty). I hiked about two and a half miles; I stopped to take pictures whenever I wanted to, and I took as long as I wanted to before moving on. I set up my tripod and I tried different lenses and I bracketed and I stood and just stared, and thought, and smiled. And I listened to The Four Seasons, and "Winter" was just starting as I crossed the Pohono Bridge coming into a frosty, snowy valley, and I got an Anne-Shirley-ish 'queer ache' and I almost cried.

I feel so much better. Now if only those elves would show up and do all that laundry for me....

Tuesday, January 03, 2006

Dismantled, by the numbers

• Height of our Christmas tree, in feet: 4 1/2
• Number of strings of lights on said tree: 5 (not short ones, either)
• Number of branches disconnected from the base by our cat who discovered the joy of climbing up the fake trunk: I neglected to count; I'd guess 8 (so roughly 1/3)
• Ornament casualties (not counting those that were broken before it was time to start taking it apart): 5
• Knowing that your husband is snickering with glee over having got out of taking the dratted Christmas tree apart for yet another year: priceless.

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