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Tuesday, September 13, 2005

things I worry about late at night

• LT's bedtime anxiety has returned. Three nights in a row he's been unable to get to sleep till really late because he's worried.
• T is either sick or depressed or both, except that I think maybe he believes that Real Men Don't Get Depressed. Actually, that's doing him a disservice; he'd be willing to admit depression if he honestly thought that was what was wrong. I just don't know if he's willing to honestly think that's what's wrong. ;)
• Money. Even when I think there's nothing to worry about, I can always fall back on good old Money. Especially when our gasoline budget has completely swallowed up our grocery budget, and if it weren't for Barbie the tenant next door, whose rent is supposed to be paying sundry credit card bills, we'd be, I dunno, eating grass until gas prices go back down. If they ever do.
• LT has a new Tourette-ish tic after having been pretty much tic-free for months.
• C has started to do this weird snorting thing which she says she "feels like she has to do". I resolutely refuse to think about the fact that this is similar to how LT's Tourette-ish symptoms started, tra la la.
• My mother-in-law
• New Orleans and the rest of the gulf coast
• All the usual stuff like terrorism, North Korea, my dad's health, my own sanity, whether my kids will turn out normally or whether I will damage them in some irremediable way, all the stupid things I've done or said and whether the witnesses to said stupid things think of them every time they see me.... you know. Normal everyday Nameless Dread sort of stuff.

I guess that's all. I guess that's probably enough, too. The thing is, I am generally not a worrier. Generally I'm way too spiritual for that. (HA HA HA THAT WAS A JOKE. Did you laugh? Hee hee. I did. Almost.) No, seriously, generally I just try to look on the positive side and all that happy sort of thing, and truly I do trust in God to handle my issues, most of the time. But sometimes when things start to happen, especially Thing One on that list up there, for some reason my usual sunny outlook starts to get submerged, and worries ensue.

I suppose, if I'm to maintain my Miss Annoying Optimist title, I should make a list of things that don't worry me, while I'm at it.

• Both kids are doing really well in school stuff, and it's a blast teaching them.
  
• Our household is full of love.
  
• Our house is intact and my husband has a good job. We have all our faculties and are reasonably healthy. (sometimes you have to go back to the very basics, no?)
  
• The Nikon still works just fine.
  
• I just spent an hour reading funny stories and poems with my son, who has decided to lay off the Hardy Boys and get back into the Ramona books, just because he missed Ramona and Henry and Beezus, and they're so funny.
  
• I have a daughter who writes letters for fun. ("Dear Ant [sic] Lamar and Kaitlyn, Thank you for the clothes. I love you. The clothes are all very nice. How are you? How is your day today? Love, C")
  
• After twelve years I can still be taken by surprise when I realize anew how much it is possible to love my husband.
  
• God is faithful, even when I'm an anxious, cranky, crazy wreck.
  

something to make me feel better

I am having a thoroughly cruddy sort of few days, here. Over the weekend the house was a disaster and I had kind of an amateur nervous breakdown about how I suck at what I do and everyone who knows me and is related to me wishes they didn't and weren't and all kinds of fun stuff like that. (Melodrama: It's not just for junior high anymore). Yesterday the kids and I worked hard on the house and made some serious improvements. Today we were going to continue, and are, sort of, except that I feel really ill, so our efforts at Operation Regain Mommy's Sanity are haphazard at best. And there was an emergency with the town water so we've no water to our house at all, which we found out when LT went to flush the potty, and no, he hadn't just done an innocuous little-boy pee. (fortunately we are survivalist freakos who have water stored in our basement, so that, at least, is taken care of, even if it did involve a tiny bit of a hassle).

ANYWAY. All this is to say, if you're ever having this kind of day/weekend/life, it's easy-peasy to get cheered up, all at once, with almost no effort at all. You just have a friend like Valerie who falls in love in a really romantic way and then goes and gets married in a beautiful dress on a lovely Australian spring day and then posts pictures of it in her journal. Thank you so much, Val, for brightening my day. God knew how much I personally needed you to marry that handsome young man and post pictures of the event. ;-)

Wednesday, September 07, 2005

party at Rachel's house

Be prepared for some accounts of serious debauchery; I'm throwing a party.

hee hee.

Seriously, it's going to be a slumber party for three or four very young girls, this weekend. The boys will be gone (at Lick Observatory, or, as C calls it, "Look Observatory", which really makes very good sense), so we can do all the girly stuff we want. This means the evening will include a VHS video of the Royal Ballet performing stories from Beatrix Potter, and maybe the video of Anne of Green Gables, and probably some fingernail painting and maybe even face painting and I don't know what all else. We'll have brownies and ice cream and popcorn, and if C had her way we'd have cookies and our weight in candy as well. We'll probably dance around the living room a little. It's going to be wild, you don't want to miss it. We might even stay up till, I dunno, eleven.

Friday, August 26, 2005

Thunderstorm

We had a HUGE thunderstorm last night. It was really spectacular. It started probably around 2:15 a.m.; LT woke up scared of the thunder and came into our bed where he promptly fell asleep with his hands over his ears. He's been tolerating storms better than he used to but this was some LOUD thunder; I can hardly blame him. I went out on the couch (scary that my baby boy, that little boy who used to cuddle next to me like a comma and nurse, is now so big that there's no room for both his parents and himself in our double bed!) and was actually kept awake by the lightning and thunder. It rained, the power went out, it was all very exciting. C slept through it all until about 7 this morning, when it was either still going or had started up again. By this time T was up getting ready for work so I was back in the bed; it ended up being me and both little ones in there.

--------

Thursday, August 11, 2005

cardboard sign says "yard sale"

We spent the afternoon preparing for tomorrow, when I hope that many obliging people will come to my house and pay staggeringly small amounts of money to haul away things I no longer have space to store. Oh please. Today was such a better day than yesterday, which ended up being one of the few days when I really really WANT a break from my kids. Or, in this case, my kid, but I won't tell you which five-year-old I'm talking about. I had an "I am the worst mother ever" headache (that is to say, a headache brought on by high levels of stress compounded by an excess of yelling), and it took "Ocean's 11" on the DVD player, some sugar-free ice cream, and a drawn-out relaxing discussion in the dark with my husband to make it go away. Then this morning I had him bring C in for a snuggle before he left for work, and by the time we got up I felt much better in every way.

And then of course today was full of that feeling of satisfaction you get when you finish a task. Drat it, why can't I get that same feeling without all the work? How manifestly unfair.

I'll leave you with a short list of seminars which my child or children are fully qualified to teach:

• Bathtime as Recreation
  
• How To Get Completely Sidetracked Without Even Trying
  
• Mud: Its Manufacture and Use
  
• Heart-Melting 101
  
• The Healing Magic of Malapropisms (with labs: Backward Letters and Cute Misspellings)
  
• Construction Workshop: Tall Piles of Stuff You Don't Want To Put Away
  
• Nutrition 17A: How to Convince Grandpa that Pop-Tarts and Sugared Cereal are Good for You
  

Hurry and book now; the conference season is just around the corner.

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

I really am more cheerful than this entry would imply

Things I don't want to do today, but must:

• Catch up with laundry, again, before it gets to be too daunting a job
  
• Clean the kitchen. Ugh. One corner of one of our (admittedly generous, for the size of our kitchen) counters is completely taken over by T's clutter. Some of it is stuff that he sets down there and abandons. Most of it is stuff that he sets down somewhere else in the house, but I later corral in "his spot" so that he'll deal with it. Every few months, either I empty the corner into a box and put it in his garage, or he spends an evening going through the pile and putting everything away. Then, for a few days, it's actually worthwhile to clean the kitchen, because I can get it really clean. (Don't think I'm being critical of T here. He's way neater than I am by nature. And yes I've heard of Flylady, BTDT, the thing is that Flylady doesn't account for a beloved spouse whose things are not yours to throw away or mess with too much).
  
• Avoid eating everything in the house. (Yes, Rachel's on 1300 calories a day again. Rachel had a very unhappy scale moment when she got home from Morro Bay* and is determined to regain control. sigh.)
  

*Morro Bay was a wee bit of a disappointment this year. It was nice to see the family (which, let's face it, happens every week at home anyway), and to have T off work, and to have no projects or chores beckoning to us. And the food was, of course, really really good. But the sun never came out, and yet I managed to get one of the worst sunburns of my notably sunburn-ridden career. The campground was really noisy at night, and we were only there for three days/two nights. Worth going, but we're definitely hoping for better weather and stuff next time.

Things that have annoyed me so far this week:

• "Finding Nemo". The kids checked this out of the library and I was reminded yet again why we don't own it. Enough with the "kids know everything, so parents, shut up and quit trying to protect them" nonsense. Sheesh. Yeah, my five-year-old has madd decision-making skillz, doesn't yours?
  
• "Tom and Jerry: The Movie". Ditto with the checked out of the library thing. THEY TALK. Ugh.
  
• The way the National Weather Service keeps teasing us with slightly cooler temperatures, far away in the weekly forecast (ooh! next Tuesday the high temp in the local range is only supposed to be 99!) but then, as the days get closer, the numbers go up. It will be a hundred and five on Christmas, I am convinced of this.
  
• Working hard to help C clean her room so her friends could come over, while C kept getting sidetracked and playing/staring into space (definitely her mother's child, that one), only to have the room destroyed completely within five minutes of the friends' arrival
  
• I had several other things on this list when it was merely floating around in my head, but God has mercifully allowed me to forget them. Thank you.
  

Fortunately, life is still more than good. I've been carving out lots of time for reading (see above re: laundry). Our chapter summaries are done for tonight -- we did them yesterday like good boys and girls. My parents are coming over for supper before Bible study (see above re: cleaning the kitchen). I've been going for nice evening walks, and if I bribe C with a trip to the elementary-school playground, she'll come with me. Things are peachy-keen marriage-wise, like they almost always are, and we haven't had any disasters worse than a pile of books falling off LT's bed and landing on my foot (which is the sort of thing that I think only happens to me). So I can't complain, except sometimes I do anyway because I'm a dork.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'd better get out of my jammies and wring something productive out of myself.

Sunday, July 24, 2005

um...

...I got nothing.

Well, almost nothing. And it's BEEN nothing for a long time, which is why the calendar up there on the right has so few days in bold this month. Except now that I have the domain and all that (stupid stupid), this "got nothing" is costing me money. Dang. No way am I going back to blogger, though, just no way.

Today we again flea-fogged or bombed or whatever you want to call it our house. I am hoping that the reasons we failed to get the results we wanted (i.e. being able to sit still in our house without having leaping, biting insects take up residence on our shins) were that a) we failed to use enough fog for the space we have and b) we used a cheap brand and c) we let the cats back in afterward with no flea protection except flea collars. Oh please please let those be the reasons because dangit it's such a huge pain to try to get rid of these awful freakish little beasties. I saw one (1) flea on myself this afternoon, post-fogging, and I am going to assume (tra la la) that that was a flea that was on me before which means that it did not survive the Raid onslaught and that we will not be dealing with the same stupid frustrating problem in three days (tra la la).

Also, our car has no air conditioning, thanks to a really well-timed refrigerant leak. This is manifestly unfair and unkind and just mean of God, I think, since it is the hottest July I ever remember living through, and I have now lived through 31 California Julys. Or I will have lived through 31 of them, assuming I don't die of the heat in the next seven days, that is.

Also, swimming lessons are going (oh, you knew I was going to do it, didn't you) swimmingly. Both kids are enjoying them and learning lots and I'm actually taking pictures while I wait for their lessons to finish each day, which are pretty much the only pictures I've been taking at all lately, not sure why.

And I have a really awesome film camera (people moving up to digital are remarkably willing to part with nice photographic equipment), an N50 which is an SLR which means you can use all these schmancy lenses that you can change out, and all that, and I have this really awesome 70-300mm lens with a macro setting and I've been having so much fun with it, but it's a FILM CAMERA. Which means I have to, you know, get PRINTS of everything before I can even see how any of the pictures came out. How totally backward. What's really awesome, though, is that in a few years when we get me a D70 (digital SLR), the auxiliary lenses and things will work with it.

And thatisall. I told you. Almost nothing.

ETA:
P.S. I typed the above entry, posted it, shut down the computer, and went to get a drink of water before heading to bed and found that someone had put away the milk in the cupboard where the glasses go. I know that sounds like a Rachel-ish thing to do, but I swear it wasn't me. Fortunately, it was still cold.

P.P.S. Speaking of Rachel-ish things to do, I've been mulling about how many little intricacies are contained in our DNA. C not only looks a great deal like I did as a child (less now than she did, say, two years ago, though), she also has the following identical idiosyncrasies/character traits:

• She riffles the pages of the book while she reads it. (sub-item: she always, always wants to be reading. Reading is the default activity).
  
• She narrates her life, what her dolls are doing, what she's thinking -- aloud, as if she were reading a book, complete with fake British accent.
  
• She stubs her toes and smacks her head on things and falls down multiple times a day.
  
• She looks like she's drowning when she swims.
  
• She always wants to be kissing and hugging and "I love you"ing. Over and over and over and over and over.
  
• She has elaborate methods for randomly picking a book to read.
  
• She gets dirty as soon as she steps outside.
  
• She cries if you look at her sternly.
  

See what I mean? Nobody had to teach her to do these things. She isn't copying me -- especially since some of this is stuff I haven't done since well before she was born. It's fascinating, really.

Wednesday, July 13, 2005

these days (updated with today's EVEN MORE APPALLING forecast)

First, a little visual:

Was it not a month ago that "63 to 73" was the (granted, quite unseasonable) range for HIGH temperatures? WHO ON EARTH SAID THIS COULD HAPPEN? I wanna know.

Oh yeah. God. Sorry, God. But WHAT THE HECK IS UP WITH THIS??

Here's a concrete example of the way this heat affects me: Today I took the kids to a friend's place to swim in their swimming hole (we's country kids. we ain't got no swimmin' pools), and I forgot my camera. I haven't gone out without that camera more than five times since I got it. I take the camera to the grocery store (I lock it in the trunk while I shop, but you never know, I might see something vaguely photographable on the quarter-mile trip there or back). But I forgot to take it today, and not only were the kids eminently photogenic today, but there was a waterfall. And you know (oh, man, I'm sorry for how WELL you know) how I am about waterfall pictures.

And also, I just wanted to tell you that between my two kids and myself, we managed to eat an entire blackberry pie today, except for one piece which I'm sure will be gone by the time we go to bed tonight. Maybe that whole idyllic family-picking-blackberries-Mom-baking-with-them thing wasn't such a good idea.

Poor pie. Your days were numbered. Little did you know HOW numbered.

(I did make a really good sugar-free, whole-grain blackberry cobbler as well. The kids and T ate that one last night.)

Yesterday evening we saw a really cool thing. [Cue Wild Kingdom theme music]. We were out for our berry-picking walk and as we were going across the creek near the abandoned beaver dam, we saw two new beavers swimming around scoping out the place. So hopefully I'll be able to actually get some pictures of them before they re-abandon the place. The ones I tried last night could just as well have been pictures of Bigfoot, thanks to the dim light and my lack of a tripod. This evening (as soon as it cools down to, oh, say, NINETY FIVE DEGREES outside) I'll try again, and be better prepared.

Meanwhile I think I'll just go climb into the freezer for a while.

Tuesday, July 05, 2005

Can we do that again tomorrow?

Well. I didn't break any of my resolutions. Although I should perhaps have resolved not to absentmindedly back up and run into people, because, um, yeah. As I told Kristen, I'm going to have to have "Oh, I am so sorry!" carved on my headstone when I die. Sigh.

(I will note for the record that in a moment of uncharacteristic capable-ness, I managed to not keep talking loudly into a sudden silence, when the carousel music stopped and Kristen and I were having an animated discussion about, I dunno, preterism and Hank Hanegraaff and the book of Revelation, or something. I see your skeptical look, but it's true, I swear it is.)

And also, I had just the most fantastic, wonderful time. It was too short, was all. But there was not the slightest bit of awkwardness, and there were no moments of sitting uncomfortably trying to reach for a topic to discuss to fill a silence. We had a really, really great time. At least I did; I think Kristen did too.

Here are a couple of pictures (there are more from the day in the photo blog):

Kristen, modeling the headwear which everyone who's anyone will be sporting very, very soon. (Actually, it's C's "Lydia Bennet bonnet" -- her second one, as the first went over a waterfall on our trip to Hetch Hetchy).



The requisite holding-the-camera-at-arms'-length close-up



At the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park. (it was very, very windy. Kristen's hair behaved beautifully but mine was being bratty.)

Golden Gate Park, by the way, would almost (ALMOST) make it worth the hassle of living in San Francisco. (but not worth the expense; there is nothing but NOTHING that could make it worth the expense, short of the death of a very wealthy distant relative with a generous will, or something of the sort). C wants to move there for the sake of the carousel alone. I've told her they'd frown on letting her have a ranch in downtown SF, and it's given her pause, but I can see the gears of her mind working to figure out a loophole.

P.S. I still hate hate hate driving on bridges.

Sunday, June 26, 2005

sigh

T is still gone. He'll probably come home tomorrow night at his regular time. We hope. He was supposed to have a four-day weekend (well, Thursday he had to go to the lab, so he took it off, but whatever) and ended up getting called on Friday evening to go in early Saturday. So the last any of us saw him was Friday night, because no, I did NOT manage to stay up till 3:30 and make him pancakes. I've done it before in situations like this but I just couldn't this time; I was nodding off sitting up, and finally headed to bed around 12:30 or 1:00 in a sleepy haze of guilt.

I have a papercut (from a paper plate. What kind of person gets papercuts from a paper plate? Oh yeah, me. Nevermind) right in that web of skin between my finger and thumb on my left hand. A papercut has always been right up there with a hangnail as favorites for sarcastic excuses for getting out of work, as if they're these negligible little nothings. Well, I did do some work today, but I am here to tell you that papercuts and hangnails hurt. They really do. Whine.

Also, VBS starts tomorrow (that's Vacation Bible School, which lasts a week and takes all morning, for those of you who are either child-free or not from the Evangelical Christian planet). I did not sign up to help this year, but odds are I'll be helping anyway, since I have nothing else to do during the four-hour duration of the event. I'm certainly not driving home (15 miles) and back (15 miles again) when I don't have to and gas is still at European-style prices. The night before something like this I always dread it, and try to figure out ways to wiggle out of it, but the fact is that the kids are really looking forward to it. Well, C is. I think LT could probably do without VBS just fine and never miss it, but C is a little social animal who loves her fun and games. And once I'm actually there I'm always glad we went.

However. I have been a good girl this weekend and actually stuck to my diet, overall. I hate that word -- it's right up there with "blog" -- but it sounds even lamer to say something else, like "healthy eating plan" or what have you. So diet it is. For those of you who joined us late, I lost 30 pounds in the fall/winter of 2003/2004. Which is great, except that I wanted to lose 45 pounds, but I just sort of stopped at 30, way back over a year ago, last spring, and in the last few months I've actually gained five pounds back, and that is just purely unacceptable. So this past weekend has been that really fun time at the beginning of a new way of eating when you're basically starving all the time, especially in the afternoons and evenings, when I feel like I could eat a Mack truck if someone would deep-fry it and serve it with ranch sauce for dipping. If I hang in there for a week it'll get better, I know this, but augh. Oh, wait, that was a happy thing. Yay.

And I've been catching up on laundry. And the house is clean. I figure the least I can do for a man who leaves the house at 4:00 to go work two or three nineteen-hour days to feed our family when he thought he'd be at home relaxing (well, working. On projects. But... whatever. It's relaxing to HIM) is to have the house comfortable for him when he walks in. Now watch, tomorrow it'll get totally destroyed just in time for him to come in the door.

And I watched "The Phantom of the Opera" again tonight. My new favorite part this time was the Don Juan scene where the Phantom has just offed the male lead guy and taken his place on the stage and he's singing and Christine and Raoul and Madame Giry and Mssrs. Firmin and André have all just figured that out and the tension is just palpable and augh must NOT put it in again must NOT must go to BED.

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