« September 2003 | Main | November 2003 »

Friday, October 31, 2003

happy day :)

Today has been happy. Here's why. :)

• Yummy homemade meatloaf for lunch. (I didn't say that today had been a good day for my diet. Which I really need to work on, I have basically just gone back to eating the way I used to eat, over the course of the last few days. Anyone notice the irony that this started happening the very day after I was going on and on in my diary about how easy it was to eat less?)
  
• Pleasant and productive shopping trip -- we needed a few wintery clothes and today was a perfect day to go to the valley and buy them.
  
• Rain!
  
• That splendid post-rain smell.
  
• Rain!
  
• A nice snapping fire in the woodstove
  
• T called and said that it's also raining where he is, which will help hugely with the effort to get the fire out and GET HIM HOME. hurrah!
  
• Rain!
  
• My plans for the rest of the evening: Put LT to bed (C fell asleep on the way home in the car), shut down the computer, put on some nice relaxing music, and snuggle on the couch near the fire with a blanket and a good book. I forgot to buy Pickwick Papers today, but I have plenty of wonderful rainy-day books on my shelf. I'm not going to start Jane Eyre because the weather is supposed to clear up tomorrow, and then I'll be left reading it on crisp sunny days, and a reading of Jane Eyre needs gray, wet days throughout to be fully satisfactory. Maybe David Copperfield.
  
• Did I mention rain?
  

--------

Thursday, October 30, 2003

fall, yay!

Today it is as if someone flipped a switch and all of a sudden fall is here. Two days ago it was 85 degrees. Tonight it's under 40 and it won't get above 55 tomorrow. Leaves are starting to turn and fall, the light has that golden slanty autumnal look to it, and C and I were wearing matching red sweaters today. Red sweaters and autumn days just belong together. Overall, I would be loving this to bits, and I am enjoying it, but without having had any rain it's not safe to build a fire in the woodstove -- and the woodstove is the only way to heat this house. So we made brownies tonight, to warm the house up a bit, and we're going to all pile into my bed tonight and put a bunch of extra blankets on it to keep us warm. Tomorrow there's a good chance of rain, so we'll probably be able to have a nice toasty fire tomorrow evening, and I'll send the kids to bed early and sit up for a long time reading a scrumptious Victorian novel. (I'm thinking I'll get Pickwick Papers tomorrow -- I've never read that one yet).



I have two very happy children. We ordered VHS copies of the Star Wars trilogy (IV, V, VI) and they arrived in today's mail. The kids couldn't even get out of the post office before they were literally giggling with glee. And gee, guess what's on right now. Bet you can't. ;-)

--------

Wednesday, October 29, 2003

weird phone problems, and sneezes

I got more done today than I have in quite a while, for the simple reason that our phone lines got all messed up and I couldn't connect to the Internet till 3 p.m. *ahem*. We have two phone lines, one for the Internet, and for some reason during the night some wiring got messed up in one of the jacks in the house, so that whenever you pick up a phone (or open the modem connection), both lines would be picked up at once. Suffice to say, this made calling people a bizarre experience, and it heartily confused the poor modem. Very weird. And of course we don't pay for inside-the-house line insurance; T is a telecommunications technician so he can handle that kind of thing just fine. Except that right now T is 300 miles away. So I had them disconnect our extra line for the time being, and we're back in the dark ages, not able to stay connected too long lest someone try to call. Sheesh, and I don't even have Callwave anymore. We'll probably sign up for LTL when T gets back -- I'd do it now, since we've been meaning to anyway, except I don't touch things Inside The Box of our computer -- that's solely his domain, so he'll have to be the one to install the card thingamabob (you can see how technically inclined I am, just based on that one word, can't you).

On a totally unrelated note, does anyone know why some people have to yell in order to sneeze? Has there been any research done on this? There are so many different kinds of sneezes, really. Now me, I sneeze like a normal human being. ;-) But then there are my husband and my son (who just blasted my eardrums, which was what brought about this train of thought, in case you were wondering), who sneeze like they're trying to scare away an intruder or possibly a wild animal, or at least make me startled enough to wet myself. ("YAH-CHOOO!!" doesn't even begin to cover it). And then -- well, there was this girl in high school, God love her, but she sneezed these tiny little a-heem sneezes, without even seeming to expel any air, and it seems like that just wouldn't have done her any good at all. But who am I to say.

--------

bummer, I thought I'd like this...

I have been reading Home to Harmony by Phillip Gulley, which was another of the holds the library had waiting for me last night. Amazon.com recommended him to me because I like Jan Karon. At first I was really enjoying this book, but by the time I was a few chapters in I was tired of it. This is mainly due to the Full-House-Cheesiness of his writing style. Remember on the TV show "Full House" (which I actually, truth be told, enjoyed, for the most part), once you'd watched a few of the shows, you could always predict the exact moment that the sappy music would start, near the end of each episode? ("Aw, Steph...") It's like that. The last two paragraphs of every chapter are dedicated to the overly-obvious inculcation of a predictable and sappy moral. You get the idea that the author thinks he's being subtle about it -- but he's, um, not. It's distracting, and makes me inclined to make fun of the book rather than just enjoy it.

--------

Tuesday, October 28, 2003

wonderful wonderful (stinky) book

I am 26 pages into What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox-Hunting to Whist -- the Facts of Daily Life in 19th-Century England, and I have already added it to my Christmas list. I am in love. This is the book I have always dreamed of having. Where has it been all my life? (or at least, where has it been since I discovered 19th-century literature in high school?). It has ALL KINLT of information on all sorts of topics I've wondered about for years. Like, for example, all those shillings and pence and pounds and stuff, and the locations of the counties (finally I know where Derbyshire is). All this is information that can be had online as well, I'm sure. In fact, not being one to sit around and wonder, I have looked up some of it and found it. But to have all this kind of thing bound between covers in one place is just delicious. Even if it does smell like stale cigarette smoke.


Another benefit (?) is that the author keeps quoting little bits of Victorian books, some of which I have read, and some of which I haven't, and the effect this has on me is to make me want to go pull these books off the shelf and READ, NOW. I sense that I will be up quite late tonight.

--------

stinky book

Don't you hate when you get a book from the library and it has that smoker's-house smell? Ick. The kids and I went out walking tonight and remembered while we were out that the library was still open, so we went and got a few books (do I even have to tell you that LT got one book about Legos and one about Star Wars?), and I collected some (oh joy) holds I had waiting for me. It's the copy of What Jane Austen Ate And Charles Dickens Knew, which looks to be exactly the book I was hoping it would be, that stinks. It makes me want to put it outside for the night to air out.

--------

Monday, October 27, 2003

"anxiety" attack

The kids and I got a major case of the stir-crazies today and took off for the Valley. We had a good time -- went to Toys R Us (soon we will have collected every small Star Wars Lego kit that exists, and Toys R Us will cease to have a golden Grail shining above it in the eyes of my Lego-and-Star-Wars-obsessed son), Wal-Mart... you know, general stuff taken for granted by people who live in or near towns with a population greater than 2000. We also went to the park. The smallish city where we shop is not the brightest jewel in California's crown, that's for certain, but it has some very nice features. One is the trees -- someone had the very bright idea to plant LOTS of trees in the residential areas, years ago, and along many streets there are now these huge old trees that meet above the road. Lovely. Another good thing about it is its parks. There are a zillion, it seems like, and they have this walking/bicycle trail that loops around one end of the city. Very nice for letting the kids burn off some energy. Anyway. While we were at the park, I had just given the kids their five-minute warning when I had an enormous "anxiety attack". I put it in quotes because every time I describe these to people, they say, Oh, yes, that's an anxiety attack, except they never ever happen when I'm anxious. Daughter's not where I thought she was and I can't find her anywhere around our house and I'm running around outside calling her name trying not to panic? No anxiety attack. Son pulls a spring scale down on top of his head and splits his scalp, causing blood to run freely down his head, face, neck, and shoulders as if he were in a horror movie? Nope, doesn't happen then either. These only happen when I'm reclining on the couch, or sitting on a park bench watching my children play happily -- although I did have one once while washing the car. Hmm, perhaps that's more stress-inducing than it would seem. ;-). Anyway. I had a lot of mild ones during pregnancy, but the last one I had before today was a doozy -- that was the one when I was washing the car -- I got so weak I could hardly move, had to have LT call my mother to come help me, my heart raced at 150bpm for about twenty minutes, that sort of thing. It was really scary. This one wasn't quite that bad, which is a good thing since there was nobody who knew me personally within 45 miles and my only recourse would have been a very expensive (stupid freaking insurance!) trip to the hospital if it hadn't gone away.

---

Added later:


OK, I just found this at webmd:

Symptoms of a panic attack, which often last about 10 minutes, include:

• Difficulty breathing
• Pounding heart or chest pain
• Intense feeling of terror
• Sensation of choking or smothering
• Dizziness or feeling faint
• Trembling or shaking
• Sweating
• Nausea or stomachache
• Tingling or numbness in the fingers and toes
• Chills or hot flashes
• A fear that you are losing control or are about to die.
  

The physical symptoms -- shortness of breath, pounding heart, dizziness, faintness, trembling, sweating, nausea, chills, hot flashes -- those are right on. But there's never been any kind of "sensation of terror" or "fear that I am losing control or am about to die." Whatever.

---

Anyway, I don't know exactly where I was going with that. That was the only bad thing that happened on the whole trip though -- it was one of those golden days when both children were better-behaved than they sometimes are when we're going from store to store, and we had a lot of fun without spending too much money, and I ate too much but got enough exercise to at least partly make up for it. I did make the mistake a week or so ago of making a CD with kids' songs on it, and I am already wholeheartedly tired of all the songs on it. The two hours in the car with it today didn't help. Which is kind of a shame, because I do enjoy those songs ordinarily. Maybe that CD will get "lost" for a while.

--------

Sunday, October 26, 2003

nothing is as gray as it was yesterday

This is so bizarre. LT and I have been giving ourselves severe cases of joystick-related carpal tunnel syndrome, attempting to master this Star Wars Starfighter game I bought at Wal-Mart on Friday. (note: he is already better at it than I am, even though I have played it for more total time. This means I am a grownup now, for real, right?). Anyway. The idea of this game is that you drive through these scenes and shoot at things and try not to get killed. The first mission is a training mission, and all of you video gamer types are going to laugh yourselves silly when I tell you that it is REALLY HARD on the easy level and I'm really proud of myself for making it through about four of maybe six stages in forty minutes when you're supposed to complete the whole mission in four minutes. This mission involves flying this little yellow starfighter thingie (like Anakin uses to destroy the control ship in Episode 1, my resident Star Wars aficiando is telling me) through this ravine and shooting these mines and stuff. It makes me seasick when I first start playing it. But the weirdest part is (remember up there I said this was bizarre) is that after I've been playing it, it makes me seasick to stop. Like getting sea legs. This screen is only just now starting to slow down on its pitching and yawing, and I have the strange sensation that really I'm looking at this upside down somehow, even though plainly I am not.


Remember when River Raid -- for the Atari 800, not the 2600 or whatever that one was with the huge cartridges -- had really cool graphics? And Miner 2049er, how I loved that game. (now the screen seems sideways. I have to stop myself from tilting my head to make it straight). And Zaxxon. These really hokey 2-d graphics that we thought were just Top Of The Line. We who had 800's looked down on those of our friends and cousins who had the bulkier cartridges and the funkier graphics. And now those are antique video games. You can download them with ROMs (which basically make your PC run like an Atari, or something) for your PC (not that I would break the law like that) and the whole darn thing -- ROMs, a zillion games, whatever else you need -- takes up like 60K on your hard drive. That's how fancy and top-of-the-line they are. Not that I would know this personally, of course. I wonder how long it will be before we will be laughing because we thought this two-week-old 2.7GHz-512M-RAM-120G-hard-drive machine was pretty snazzy. Probably not very long at all.


Today has been a better day than yesterday. I still have a lot on my mind but it doesn't weigh me down as much as it did. We came home from church and just kind of relaxed, although I did some housework first, to alleviate guilt. Except now, you can't tell I did any at all. Children see a blank space of hardwood floor and think, FANTASTIC! More space to play Legos/put together a huge floor puzzle/play with my dollies/get out my dollhouse! And lazy indulgent single-Mom-for-the-week that I am, I do not keep on them about having Only One Thing Out At A Time, so as a reward I get to put it all away after they go to bed. But oh well, it's a cheerful happy mess and it's not as hard to put away as it looks. See how much more myself I am feeling? already finding the happy side of a mess in my living room. By tomorrow I'll be waxing rhapsodic about how my little baby girl has grown into this 4-year-old with a horsie dress and a sweater and Mary Janes and a single ponytail in the back, carrying her little Bible out to the car for church. Or hey, maybe I'll do that now. What the heck.

--------

Saturday, October 25, 2003

maybe tomorrow will be better

Sad day today. Jared, one of the JMML kids whose stories I've been following, died this morning. JMML is Juvenile Monomyelocytic Leukemia and it is a hell of a disease, with a very low survival rate even with treatment. sigh.


On the home front it's been a lazy, quiet, mildly depressed kind of day. We did go to the SPCA's rummage sale, where I bought even more books. I thought about driving over to the coast to go to a Diana Gabaldon book signing, but sanity set in and I realized how foolish that would be, considering the following:

• I am not going to buy the book she's promoting on her current tour (Lord John and the Private Matter). I was talking about that a couple of weeks ago. And I already got my Outlander series -- the only other books I have of hers -- signed. I did think briefly about doing some Christmas shopping and getting signed copies for someone, but I couldn't think offhand of anyone who would want them.
  
• The coast is a little over three hours away.
  
• The book signing/talk starts at 7:30. Do the math.
  
• I would be bringing both kids -- and if DG is still opening her book talks with the same joke about socks as birth control, I wouldn't want them there even if they would sit still the whole time.
  
• The last time I went to a Diana Gabaldon book signing, our car died partway there and we had to buy a new (used) one to finish our trip. I'm not superstitious ordinarily, but with my husband 300 miles away, I didn't want to press my luck.
  

Overall, it just didn't look like a good idea, even though thinking about it as a possibility brought about one of the few moments of actual enthusiasm and excitement in my day.


I just sat here for like three minutes trying to think of something that would make me feel cheerful or excited. Nope, nothing. I must be really tired. And now T just called, and said that it looks likely that on Tuesday, instead of coming home, if the fire he's on is under control, they'll just roll him over to another fire. I think I'll go to bed and cry. sigh.

--------

Friday, October 24, 2003

giving platelets... or not

Well, what a waste of an afternoon. For the most part. I zipped into Barnes and Noble on the way to the blood bank, and bought four nice matching Austen books (thereby finishing my collection of her novels in nice matching paperbacks), as well as a Maeve Binchy, and, on impulse, Lois Lowry's Gathering Blue, so that I would have a couple of options to get me through the two hours sitting still with needles in my arms. I negotiated the dreadful Fresno freeway traffic (uurrrggghg), got to the blood center, did my little "have you had sex with any prostitutes in the last two years" survey (I wonder, does anyone ever answer yes on that question? probably), got my finger poked... and got sent away because my iron is too low. Damn. I had forgotten about that -- not that they told me it would be checked -- they just said no alcohol, no caffeine, no this, no that, when I made the appointment on the phone. But I do have low iron. I'm not sure if it's because of my horrific periods or not. Anyway, I was so depressed for a few minutes -- I felt like I let Conor and Jared and Kayli down (all kids with this rare and vicious form of leukemia -- I'm friends with Conor's mom and it's through her that I learned about the importance of giving blood products, and found out about the other kids). I felt like I let the blood bank down, and I felt absurd for having stressed so much about getting there on time, pawned my kids off on my parents, etc., all so that I could go do this, and then I couldn't. I got over that -- after all, I tried, and after I work on getting my iron to normal levels I can try again. But I do feel kind of silly having scheduled this whole trip down there around that and then having the main event fall through.


I did get a lot of cool books though. So all was not lost.


I also went to Borders after the blood bank, returned a book T had given me (bless his heart, I love Jane Austen, and he got me a Jane Austen biography, but not one I'm interested in), and got three books: one with Jane Austen's and Charlotte Brontë's juvenalia, one with four of Shakespeare's comedies, and My Antonia. I did a little bit of necessary shopping (and got some surprises for the kids; they were gratifyingly pleased about that when I went to pick them up) and went to the Olive Garden, where I was treated rudely and the food was not as good as usual and I just generally wished I hadn't gone there. So. On the plus side, snazzy new books. On the minus side... almost everything else. sigh.


Good news though -- T just called and it looks like he'll probably be home by Tuesday. yippee!

--------

two old poems and some miscellaneous stuff

Well, T just called and said that he's been called out on another fire, and he'll be home to kiss us goodbye and grab his stuff any time. So we're in the midst of scurrying around getting his stuff ready to go, and writing him love notes, and drawing him pictures. I have a few minutes to spare while his clothes are in the dryer so here I am, trying not to think about how much I'm going to miss him.

I was going through the papers he keeps with him when he's away (sentimental stuff) and came across these two poems I'd written. They're the only two poems I've ever written that I still like. The first is about falling in love with my best friend; I wrote it just over ten years ago.

All these years
peeking around corners
waiting impatiently for him to appear
THE MAN OF MY DREAMS
He would have all the right pieces
yes, his puzzle would be well-put-together
He would be all I could ever want from a person.
A best friend, a partner in my walk, a fabulous person
all wrapped up in a body for which I'd have died
I waited
and watched
applicants came and were discarded
nobody seemed to fit and I would have lost hope

had I not turned

and seen you.
God pointed you out
(how could it have ever been any other?)
You'd been there all along, our love patiently waiting
to be found
(like misplaced glasses sitting on my face)
No earthly discovery ever pleased me more
than when I found us
sitting right beside me all the while.

--September 10, 1993

OK, so I was 18. "Would have lost hope?" But still, I like it. And I always had wanted to marry young. :)

The other is one that I wrote one night a couple of years ago, having just picked up my then-five-year-old sleeping son to put him to bed.

You used to live under my skin.
My every breath and motion rocked you.
My muscles wrapped around you in a protective embrace.
Your movements kept me company.
Your presence answered my prayers and filled my dreams.
You gave my body a reason for being.

Then you were a noisy bundle of Boy
hungry for my breasts, needful of my attentions.
I doted on you
(along with the rest of Western civilization).
I fed you, held you, stroked your head, changed your pants,
dressed you in fuzzy yellow sleepers.
You gazed at me like I was the only person you ever needed to see in the world.
I have never felt so important in my life.

I turned my head, and then looked back at you
and found in place of that bundle
this tall
capable
headstrong
loving
beautiful
intelligent
PERSON.
Who told you your legs could get that long?
When did you get permission to be four feet tall
and learn to read
and make up stories out of your own head
and have a best friend?
It is almost impossible to see that needy, helpless baby
in this joyful, wonderful boy before me.

That is, until I creep in when you are sleeping
and fold you into my lap with your head under my chin.
You almost wake up, but then
your breathing is even and your lashes are on your cheeks.
(who says you can have lashes like that?)
I rock you gently back and forth
and cuddle your head.
You are busy dreaming about dinosaurs or animal crackers
or motorcycles or big trucks or helicopters
or jigsaw puzzles.
You don't even know your Mommy is wetting your stubbly hair with her tears.
I have found my baby boy again.
You won't remember this moment in the morning
but I shall never forget it as long as I live.

August 3, 2001

That one, I still really do like, and it means more as time goes on. (for example, now I can't even put him on my lap and tuck his head under my chin; he's too big.

Today is the day I am going down to give platelets. I put off leaving until T could come home, so that we could kiss and hug him before his departure for what could be a two-week absence. I think I'll still have time to go by the bookstore on my way to the blood center, but I'll be putting off all the other shopping and dining until after I'm done there. I have printed out a long list of book ideas for myself -- some of them culled from the book list from ivillage, and some from Amazon's recommendations. I have discovered the joy of tinkering with my Amazon recommendations -- I spent an unmentionable amount of time doing that over a couple of days and now they actually recommend things I would be interested in, for the most part. It is almost creepy how they remember what I've bought in years past better than I do -- and heaven forbid you buy one Star Wars book from them; I had absolutely NO idea there were so many Star Wars books in existence. I think I'll have to make LT his own wish list for them; I had to delete them all from mine because my wish list was 80% Star Wars stuff. yikes.

--------

Thursday, October 23, 2003

99 questions answered -- I am such a sucker for surveys. This one is less inane than usual.

WHEW. I borrowed these 99 questions from Emily. I've been working on them a handful at a time over the past week or so.

1. What is your name?
well, I'm known as hsing-mom at Diaryland. I've probably let my name slip in here a few times...

2. Where and when were you born?
December 25th, 1974, in the same small California town where I live now

3. Who are/were your parents?
They are the people who married each other, conceived me, gave birth to me (well, one of them did), and raised me. :) They're still married (32 years and counting).

4. Do you have any siblings?
I have a brother, 2 1/2 years older than me.

5. Where do you live now, and with whom? Describe the place and the person/people.
I live in a medium-to-small rented house with my husband, our 7-year-old son, and our 4-year-old daughter.

6. What is your occupation?
I'm a homemaker and a homeschooling mom.

7. Write a full physical description of yourself. Include height, weight, race, hair and eye color, style of dress, and any tattoos, scars, or distinguishing marks.
What, am I a wanted suspect or something? :) I'm 5'8 1/2" tall, 174 lb (and going down), brown hair, brown eyes, caucasian, casual dresser, no tattoos, small scar on my forehead from when I slammed my bicycle into a pole when I was maybe 5.

8. To which social class do you belong?
I would say lower middle.

9. Do you have any allergies, diseases, or other physical weaknesses?
(I like the way this is phrased, hee hee). No, I am invincible non-allergic mega-ox-woman. Very low maintenance. I actually envied my higher-maintenance friends in high school but now I've realized how superior I am ;-).

10. Are you right- or left-handed?
Right-handed.

11. What does your voice sound like?
Low-pitched, a little nasal.

12. What words and/or phrases do you use very frequently?
Like. I say "like" way too much. Also "freaking", which I said in front of my dad the other day without realizing it, and he looked at me like I'd said the Real Bad Word. Whoops.

13. What do you have in your pockets?
Nothing.

14. Do you have any quirks, strange mannerisms, or annoying habits?
I talk too much. I push my glasses up against my shoulder when my hands are full.

Growing Up 15. How would you describe your childhood in general?
Happy at home, unhappy at school.

16. What is your earliest memory?
I think it's from the national bicentennial but I'm not sure that's when it was.

17. How much schooling have you had?
High school graduate, some not-for-credit night classes.

18. Did you enjoy school?
Some aspects of it, very much. Others, not at all.

19. What was your favorite subject in school?
It varied year by year. I always liked music. I also liked drama, physics, chemistry, algebra, geometry, English, and French.

20. While growing up, did you have any role models?
My parents.

21. While growing up, how did you get along with the other members of your family?
Really well.

22. As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
A teacher. A mom.

23. As a child, what were your favorite activities?
Reading, imaginative play, playing with my brother, riding my horse.

24. As a child, what kinds of personality traits did you display?
I was pretty annoying, I think. I didn't think before I spoke, and didn't have a clue how to fit in with other people. And quirky is not OK when you're in elementary school -- at least, it's not OK with the other kids.

25. As a child, were you popular?
Not at all.

26. When and with whom was your first kiss?
Aside from some stupid experimentation stuff with my friends' brothers and stuff, my first real "love" kiss was in ninth grade.

27. Are you a virgin? If not, when and with whom did you lose your virginity?
I've been married 9 1/2 years, so virginity is pretty much out. I lost my virginity at the end of ninth grade, unfortunately, with my first serious boyfriend.

Past Influences

28. What do you consider the three most important events of your life so far?
My marriage (although really, the wedding was just the beginning of that, and it is ongoing), the births of my children, and becoming a Christian.

29. Who has had the most influence on you?
hmm. My parents, my husband, Jesus -- lots of people have influenced me whether I knew it or not. Even the kids who were mean to me in school influenced me.

30. What do you consider your greatest achievement?
My children -- that so far, they are loving, generous, friendly, capable young people.

31. What is your greatest regret?
If it had been possible, I wish that I had known how to rise above the criticism of my peers when I was younger. But that's not really a regret, because I don't think anyone in that situation at that age can do that. I do wish I'd not had sex until I was married. It just made for uncomfortable embarrassment later on -- after all, I see my high school boyfriends and their families around town, and that's always between us -- that history of intimacy thrown away. I don't understand how people can have such a casual view of sex, I really don't.

32. What is the most evil thing you have ever done?
I haven't done a lot of evil things. When I was in high school there was a girl who was lower on the social scale than I was and I was kind of mean to her. OK, there's another one for my greatest regret as well.

33. Do you have a criminal record of any kind?
No.

34. When was the time you were the most frightened?
When my middle daughter was born.

35. What is the most embarrassing thing ever to happen to you?
I have answered this question in every single survey in this diary, it seems like. I don't know, it varies by what I think of as cringe-worthy, and it depends on whether the intention is to hear about an embarrassing gaffe I've made, or a moment when I was embarrassed by other people's unkindness. There are plenty of both, let's just say that.

36. If you could change one thing from your past, what would it be, and why?
See above under greatest regrets.

37. What is your best memory?
Oh, there are so many. My wedding, my wedding night. The births of my children, to a degree, although there was a lot of unhappy and scary stuff involved with those also. And I have a million happy memories of my life with my husband and children. As far as one thing that stands out, I'll pick one from before my marriage. It made me feel really special when I was about to turn 18, and my parents bought me this gorgeous red velvet dress I'd been eyeing for a while, and then my dad took us and my best friend out to a very fancy dinner at the Ahwahnee Hotel for my 18th birthday.

38. What is your worst memory?
There are also a lot of those, many of them from elementary school. Most of them are too painful to bring up right now. From adulthood, the loss of my middle daughter was very hard. The surgical births of my daughters (babies 2 and 3) were really scary -- one because she had serious life-threatening problems which we'd had no clue about until she came out of me, and the other because she exhibited some of the same symptoms as her sister, even though she had been checked for the same problems and found to be fine. Those were definitely the two worst days/nights of my life so far.

Beliefs And Opinions

39. Are you basically optimistic or pessimistic?
Optimistic.

40. What is your greatest fear?
That something awful will happen to my children or husband.

41. What is your greatest comfort?
My belief in eternity. Being surrounded by my loved ones.

42. What are your religious views?
I am a born-again Christian -- I believe the Bible in its entirety.

43. What are your political views?
I'm morally and fiscally conservative. In the US this means that I'm opposed to spending a lot of money on social programs; I'm aware that the money people earn is their own and hence a tax cut is not "a break", it's just realizing that people should get to keep more of their own money; I'm opposed to abortion because it is the cruel and barbaric taking of an innocent human life; overall, I think people should be more responsible for the consequences of their actions than they usually are, and that people should be responsible for themselves in general whenever possible. If it weren't for abortion and drug legalization (which is a pretty minor factor for me, but still there), I would probably be a libertarian. When I first registered to vote, I registered as an "American Independent" -- also called the Taxpayers' Party if I remember correctly -- because the Republican party was too centrist for me. Now I'm a Republican, because the party moved back to the right a bit in the mid-90's.

44. What are your views on sex?
Sex is treated far too casually in our society. We've bought into this whole humans-are-just-animals thing a bit too far, and now we're telling our kids that they don't need to try to resist their hormonal urges because they can't anyway. This carries over into adulthood also, obviously, to the point where you're a weirdo if you don't have sex by the third date. And I think this is all very destructive to our culture, to our lives in general. Sex is the coupling of two people. Popular thinking reduces it to a simple connection of body parts, and it feels good, so why not do it? But really, intercourse puts two people together in a very serious and inextricable way. It causes a lot of emotional (and physical, but I'm not even going INTO that) difficulties when the relationship ends and it's time to move on -- all that shared intimacy becomes something to be sorry and embarrassed about. It's a lot of baggage. People who say sex shouldn't be reserved for marriage because that would somehow be boring or repressive don't know what they're missing. Married sex -- when you know this is the partner for the rest of your life, you have years and years to learn to do things exactly the way your spouse likes them done and vice versa, you can truly and really let yourself go with this person because you know there will not come a time when you're going to wish you could forget all these intimate moments... it's phenomenal.

45. Would you be able to kill?
If someone was threatening the safety and well-being of my children, my husband, my parents, myself -- you damn bet I would be able to.

46. In your opinion, what is the most evil thing any human being could do?
So much evil has been done -- my inclination is to say something about abortion or mothers drowning their children or terrorism or the Holocaust, but unfortunately, humanity is certainly capable of evil beyond even those horrific situations.

47. Do you believe in the existence of soul mates and/or true love?
I don't necessarily believe that there is One Person out there, and if you're in the wrong place or whatever you'll miss that one person and never be happy. But of course I believe in true love. And when you love someone enough, and spend time with him/her, that person becomes your soul mate, so to speak -- you become part of each other in a very real way. I think of it like two trees planted very close together -- the roots become so intertwined that to pull one out, you'd have to pull them both.

48. What do you believe makes a successful life?
Figuring out what your priorities are and living according to them. Surrounding yourself with people you love, and people you need, and people who need you. Being able to get by in a life that is enjoyable for you, without giving up on important things. Obviously it's something that's different for everyone, in my book.

49. How honest are you about your thoughts and feelings (i.e. do you hide your true self from others, and in what way)?
I am really outspoken about my thoughts and feelings, except with people in that middle ground between super close and not close at all. Like, say, my in-laws, who don't know me well enough that I feel like I can be totally open, but some kind of relationship has to be maintained with them. With just casual acquaintances, I really don't give a hoot what they think and I'll just let fly.

50. Do you have any biases or prejudices?
Everyone does. A bias is simply a predetermined set of beliefs or preferences. Anyone who says he's unbiased is either kidding himself, or he's a jellyfish who changes his mind every time a new opinion is presented. As far as prejudices -- that's a little different, or at least the word has different connotations -- this implies that you have judged a person or a set of people (or whatever) before becoming familiar with him/them/it. I think we all probably have some of those too, but I'm not aware of mine.

51. Is there anything you absolutely refuse to do under any circumstances?
Put an apostrophe in the wrong place. ;-)

52. Who or what, if anything, would you die for (or otherwise go to extremes for)?
My children. My husband. My parents. My brother and his family. I don't know about anything else -- my inclination is to say that there are more, but I wouldn't know until realistically put in the situation.

Relationships With Others

53. In general, how do you treat others (politely, rudely, by keeping them at a distance, etc.)?
Politely. Overwhelmingly.

54. Who is the most important person in your life, and why?
The most important physical earthbound person to me is my husband, followed VERY closely by my children. For obvious reasons.

55. Who is the person you respect the most, and why?
Oh my. That's a big question. I respect a lot of people for a lot of different reasons. (why is there always an emphasis on "most", I wonder?). I have a lot of respect for my grandmother for raising seven children on a shoestring and not losing her sense of humor. For my dad, for facing enormous physical pain every single day and maintaining a cheerful, positive, God-honoring outlook on his life. For my husband, for having the courage to leave behind a lifetime of very destructive beliefs and friends, to start fresh at 18 years of age and again at 23, and for maintaining the right course, and for being so different with his children than his father was with him. For my mother, for basically reinventing herself physically and emotionally through great strength of will, and for being the exactly the perfect kind of mother for me -- really, my parents were, by and large, the parents all my friends wished they had -- and they are the role models for my husband and myself as we bring up our own children.

56. Who are your friends?
I have a lot of friends, and yet I have almost no friends (the joy of the Internet, eh?). I am part of a very close circle of online friends in a mom's group; I have a lot of friendly internet acquaintances picked up in various ways; my best girlfriend is a woman who lives in Florida whom I've met one time but known inside and out for going on seven years. I have one friend who was my best friend in high school; we didn't contact each other for ten years but this past year we've reconnected and are quite good friends again -- but again, I haven't met her since we were teenagers. I do have some quite close friends who live near me, but there aren't many, and we never seem to get together and do "girlfriend" stuff. My very best friend is my husband -- and he was that before we "got together".

57. Do you have a spouse or significant other?
If you've been reading just about any of my answers you'll have gathered that the answer to this is yes. :)

58. Have you ever been in love?
Ah, yes. :)

59. What do you look for in a potential lover?
That wedding ring I put on his finger... ;). I'll change this into "What is about your spouse that drew/draws you to him," and I'll say: He and I agree on most things but disagree on others -- just enough for a healthy debate now and then ;-). Our priorities and values are the same. We enjoy each other's company; there's a megaton of that elusive "chemistry" everyone talks about between us, and there always has been. He respects me and I respect him; he doesn't talk down to me; he is my intellectual equal. He is a wonderful communicator, a good listener, my best friend. We complement each other in every way.

60. How close are you to your family?
Very close. We see each other multiple times every week and speak on the phone almost every day.

61. Have you started your own family?
Yes, I have two living children and a daughter in heaven.

62. Who would you turn to if you were in desperate need of help?
My husband. My parents. My brother. Beyond that, it depends on the kind of help.

63. Do you trust anyone to protect you?
Yes, I trust my husband and God. :) (and myself!)

64. If you died or went missing, who would miss you?
Lots of people, to varying degrees.

65. Who is the person you despise the most, and why?
Oh my. Most of the people I despise are public figures. Probably the MOST -- Hillary Clinton, sorry to the myriads of her fans. She is so intent on riding her husband's coattails to political success, while managing to push from behind at the same time. And of course I disagree with her on every possible issue there is, I think. Think of an issue, find her position on it, and chances are great that mine is the direct opposite. So she's handy that way, I guess. ;-þ

66. Do you tend to argue with people, or avoid conflict?
I touched on this a bit above in the answer about honesty about my thoughts and feelings. It depends on how close I am to the person. Super close or total strangers, I'll debate or argue (nicely and reasonably). It's the middle ground where I keep my mouth shut a lot because I don't want to offend.

67. Do you tend to take on leadership roles in social situations?
Um, not really. Well, sometimes -- like online, in certain groups. But as a rule, no. Only when I am fed up with nobody else doing it -- like, say, putting together a field trip for a homeschool group.

68. Do you like interacting with large groups of people? Why or why not?
Not in general. Only if I'm feeling more confident than usual. Which is not often.

69. Do you care what others think of you?
I care what people close to me think, very much. And I care enough about the opinions of total strangers not to go to the post office in sweats -- but not a whole lot more than that.

Likes And Dislikes

70. What are your favorite hobbies and pastimes?
Reading, spending time with my family, cooking (but not cleaning up), crocheting, Internet stuff.

71. What is your most treasured possession?
I don't know. Probably something sentimental. My grandfather's 1919 edition of the Oxford Book of English Verse maybe.

72. What is your favorite color?
It varies. It's usually a variation of blue -- cobalt, navy, dark dark teal.

73. What are your favorite foods?
A really good steak. Olive Garden's chicken scampi. Cadbury Roast Almond bars.

74. What, if anything, do you like to read?
I have discussed this a lot in various formats -- my first real literary love as an adult is the classical literature like Austen, Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, etc. My VERY first literary love was good kid-lit like Beverly Cleary, Laura Ingalls Wilder, L.M. Montgomery -- and I still definitely enjoy these authors even now. And I also like good modern literature -- Elizabeth Berg, Maeve Binchy, Sara Donati, Diana Gabaldon. But heck, I'll read the back of the shampoo bottle, if I'm stuck sitting still with nothing else to read.

75. What is your idea of good entertainment (consider music, movies, art, etc.)?
I like listening to good music (from just about any era). I like good movies -- not too many "arty" or obscure ones, I have painfully plebeian cinematic tastes, I'm afraid. I enjoy old movie musicals, old movies in general, romantic comedies, adaptations of classic novels, non-gory thrillers, and some deep important movies as well.

76. Do you smoke, drink, or use drugs? If so, why? Do you want to quit?
No, no, no, n/a, and n/a. :)

77. How do you spend a typical Saturday night?
At home with my family.

78. What makes you laugh?
My children, my husband, sundry (and a lot of other diaryland diaries), movies, books. I'm easy to amuse.

79. What, if anything, shocks or offends you?
Well, there's shock and offense, and then there's shock and offense. In a way, a lot of things shock and offend me, because they are not the way I think they should be (like, say, people applauding a graphic video presentation of a partial-birth abortion). But in another way, I'm not shocked by that, because it's what I expect in a world that's as hell-bound as this one is. Sad to say.

80. What would you do if you had insomnia and had to find something to do to amuse yourself?
Fire up this machine and stare at the happy blue glow. Probably discover a bunch of diaries I'd never read before. ;-)

81. How do you deal with stress?
Not well. I don't have a lot of it, so I don't have a lot of practice. I yell. And I know I shouldn't yell, and I always resolve I won't, but I do. And I get twitchy and very easily irritated.

82. Are you spontaneous, or do you always need to have a plan?
I like having plans, but I like spontaneity also.

83. What are your pet peeves?
Oh, there's a long list. Grammatical/word usage stuff (like skim/scan, misplaced apostrophes, overuse of exclamation points, public mis-spellings [I don't mind in chats, but please, if you're going to publish an ad or name a restaurant, for crying out loud, run it through a human spelling checker first...]) always comes to mind when I'm asked this question. Also common thoughtlessnesses like not using turn signals.

Self Images Etc.

84. Describe the routine of a normal day for you.
I get up in the morning around 8:00, supervise/fix breakfast for my children, and start school. School takes anywhere from one to two hours. I check my email and browse around online, do some housework, play with the kids, run errands. Make lunch. Make dinner. Clean up after dinner, get the kids ready for bed, and put them to bed. Then T and I have some time alone, and then I'm back on the computer until I feel like going to bed, generally around midnight. There are tons of variations, but this is the basic bare-bones weekday.

85. What is your greatest strength as a person?
I am very, very loving and dedicated to the people who are important to me. I am generous with my time and affection.

86. What is your greatest weakness?
A lack of discipline.

87. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
I would be more disciplined. :)

88. Are you generally introverted or extroverted?
Extroverted.

89. Are you generally organized or messy?
Messy. But I would dearly LOVE to be organized. I'm just too lazy to pull myself together for more than a week or two at a time.

90. Name three things you consider yourself to be very good at, and three things you consider yourself to be very bad at.
I am very good at: mothering, reading, and spelling. I am very bad at: washing dishes, working on cars, and writing.

91. Do you like yourself?
Yes, most of the time I do. And it hasn't always been this way, so I'm aware what a blessing that is.

93. What goal do you most want to accomplish in your lifetime?
I want to see my children grow into loving, capable, generous adults, with a solid faith.

94. Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
The homeschooling mother of a 12-year-old and a nine-year-old, with a mortgage and some night classes under my belt.

95. If you could choose, how would you want to die?
The same way everyone says -- painlessly, as an old woman, with my family around me.

96. If you knew you were going to die in 24 hours, name three things you would do in the time you had left.
I would write a long letter to each of my children about my love and my hopes for them. I would do the same for my husband. I would call or email many, many people to tell them how appreciated they are.

97. What is the one thing for which you would most like to be remembered after your death?
For being a loving person, faithful to God.

98. What three words best describe your personality?
Insecure, optimistic, joyful.

99. What three words would others probably use to describe you?
That depends on how well they know me.
Family/very close friends: Happy, loving, talkative.
Acquaintances and strangers: Weird, talkative, and ... cheerful?

--------

funny

So far my day has been quite amusing. I read in a weblog that Howard Dean has an A rating from the NRA, and I went to verify that and I found this page (Howard Dean on Gun Control). [side note: this is not actually pertinent to this story, but I was a little blown away that on this issue he actually seems more of a libertarian than a Democrat.] Then I was clicking around -- they have a very useful section of links where you can find either that candidate's views on other issues, or other candidates' views on that issue -- and through a series of links I wound up clicking on a link to "Hillary Clinton on Morals and Values." The result? 404 -- "Not Found." I'm sorry. Perhaps I'm easily amused today. But that just seemed so totally fitting.


And while I'm being easily amused, check out this guy's ebay listing. It's a riot.

--------

Wednesday, October 22, 2003

Why couldn't I have just stayed in bed this morning...?

Today has been an odd mix of good and bad stuff. It reminds me of those stories we used to do in elementary school, where we had to alternate "Fortunately" and "Unfortunately." Here's today in second-grade-ese:

FORTUNATELY, I did not have to drag LT out of bed at an un-Godly hour like I usually do, much to the consternation of T, who thinks we should all be in our places with bright shiny faces at the crack of dawn. However, T isn't the one who's home having to stir that heavily-sleeping enormous boy out of his comfortable bed. And there are plenty of advantages to homeschooling, one of which being that we can start whenever we want to each day.

UNFORTUNATELY, LT dragged me out of bed at 7:30 instead. [grr]

FORTUNATELY, we had plenty of cereal and milk for breakfast, thanks to T's trip to the grocery store last night.

UNFORTUNATELY, both children managed to spill their cereal all over the table within about 30 seconds of each other.

OK, I can't think of a "fortunately" for that one.



School went well, and the kids and I had some good quality time outside. There is one section of our yard which will not grow grass no matter how hard we try to grow it there. I think this is a combination of too much shade, too many tree roots, too clay-ish soil, too much slope, and too lazy lawn-care. Anyway, that area always ends up being The Digging Zone for the kids. This year LT has made an intricate series of canals and islands (since I told him he could not "play river", wherein he digs rivers and islands). At least this year he is more persnickety about mud on his person -- he is his father's child through and through and is becoming more so every day in this regard -- so he prefers the neater method of filling a 2L bottle with water and dumping it down the canals, to last year's mud-hole method wherein he would just turn on the hose and put it at the uphill end of the river. So I sat outside and read a book while he and his willing slave (I mean assistant, I mean sister) dug happily and interrupted me periodically with "look at this!" -- at which I would look, pretend to notice the difference, and go back to my book. Then I had to stop procrastinating and actually (sigh) clean the kitchen. My roll of kitchen trash bags has mysteriously disappeared, so LT "loaned" (little egghead) me one of his trash bags (which I bought for him to make his recycling area neater and easier to deal with... but who's counting...). T called in the middle of me taking out the trash, which is, suffice to say, not the best time to try to have a loving conversation with me. It was such a tense conversation that he called back half an hour later -- he said he was just checking to see if I felt better, but I think he did it to make sure that I was OK and hadn't gone completely psycho and started killing the neighbors or anything newsworthy like that.


Once the kitchen was clean, things were going along pretty well until I had to stop procrastinating again -- I hate that -- this time at the last possible moment when I could start making dinner rolls for our potluck tonight if I wanted to have them done on time. All was going swimmingly until I looked down at the recipe and remembered that I didn't have any eggs. When I made cookies last week I used our last egg and had to send one of the kids down to borrow two from the neighbor ladies, and I didn't want to do that again. And there's no way I could make it to the store and back in time to make the darn rolls. And the restaurant (my very favorite restaurant in the world, have I mentioned that place before? ;) which I was going to call to order a dozen of their scrumpdiddlyumptious rolls to go, since my procrastination had landed me in such hot water, turns out to be closed on Wednesdays. sigh. I guess I'll make garlic bread. But first I have to wait for some actual wearable-outside-the-house clothes to finish in the dryer.



Too bad I couldn't just stay in bed this morning. I need to schedule an illness or something. [g]

--------

Unconscious Mutterings

Yet another Friday-Five-ish prop for when I don't have the energy for a real entry:


Unconscious Mutterings

1. Country:: USA
   
2. G:: spot. (Sorry, you'd almost think I was male, wouldn't you.)
   
3. Offer:: refusal (that's more typically feminine of me, isn't it.)
   
4. Connection:: link
   
5. Quest:: game
   
6. Lighthouse:: stormy
   
7. Sycamore:: spiky
   
8. Inhumane:: cruelty
   
9. Sneer:: sarcasm
   
10. Weapon:: useless (where did THAT come from?)
    

--------

Tuesday, October 21, 2003

Yet another frequently-inane survey apparently written by a young person trying to appear wacky and witty

I borrowed these 100 questions from Peyton's Place.

1. Are you an innie or an outie?
I'm going to assume this refers to belly buttons -- isn't just about everyone an innie?

2. Have you ever worn bell-bottoms?
Actually, yes, many of the clothes I wore in elementary school were hand-me-downs and many of the pants were bell-bottoms. (this was the early-mid 80's so they weren't THAT old). This did not help with my popularity problems. I had one pair in particular that was utterly putrid -- orchid-colored. It would probably be fashionable again now. gag.

3. Have you ever written a song?
I don't think so. I did a lot of pretentious self-important stuff as a teenager, because I thought I was just the best and brightest and the first person to ever feel the way I did or think of the things I thought of (which, I came to find out later, is a really common affliction of teenagerhood, witness the many teenage diaries at diaryland for confirmation of this), and I know I wrote a lot of really. Cheezy. Poetry. So I may have written a song too, but I doubt it.

4. Can you make change for a dollar right now?
If I'm allowed to borrow from my son's money jar. He always has more money than I do.

5. Have you ever been in the opposite sex's public toilet?
I used to work for several different restaurants, and part of my job was cleaning bathrooms. So yes.

6. Have you ever smelled your own feet?
Um, who hasn't?

7. Do you like catsup on or beside your fries?
I dip in catsup. But if there's vinegar available I sprinkle that on top, with lots of salt. Yummers. Especially good with fish and chips but even just plain fries will do.

8. Can you touch your tongue to your nose?
No.

9. Have you ever been a boy/girl scout?
I was in Brownies and Juniors. Then my dad and brother were heavily involved in boy scouts so I was always hanging around that as well.

10. Have you ever broken a mirror?
Many, many times.

11. Have you ever put your tongue on a frozen pole?
No.

12. What is your biggest pet peeve?
Oh, wow, there are so many. Drawing one of the many at random, I would have to say... when people say "scan" and really mean "skim" (as in, "I just scanned it quickly, I didn't really read it carefully."). yarrrg.

13. Do you slurp your drink after it's gone?
No, that really gets on my nerves. Eating shouldn't make noise.

14. Have you ever blown bubbles in your milk?
When I was little.

15. Would you rather eat a Big Mac or a Whopper?
Whopper, whopper, whopper. McDonalds is like the British version of American food -- so bland.

16. Have you ever gone skinny-dipping?
Yes, in a scenic river by moonlight the summer when I was 17, with my best friend. It was fun. One of those things I would NEVER do again, but I'm glad I have the memory.

17. When you are at the grocery store, do you ask for paper or plastic?
Paper. We have a woodstove and the paper bags are great for putting your burnable garbage in and then just throwing in the stove.

18. True or False: You would rather eat steak than pizza.
Definitely, definitely true. No contest at all.

19. Did you have a baby blanket?
No.

20. Have you ever tried to cut your own hair?
I actually did, just before starting high school. It came out not well but not TOO badly. I don't know why I did it, though. And I always cut my own bangs.

21. Have you ever sleepwalked?
Once.

22. Have you ever had a birthday party at McDonalds?
No, barf.

23. Can you flip your eye-lids up?
I don't try.

24. Are you double jointed?
No.

25. If you could be any age, what age would you be?
I like the age I am, and I like the stage I'm at in my life.

26. Have you ever gotten gum stuck in your hair?
When I was little I did.

27. Have you ever thrown-up after a roller coaster ride?
No.

28. What is your dream car?
Either a Dodge Durango or a convertible Chrysler Sebring. Probably I would like to own the Durango, but rent the Sebring once, or lease it for a little while. Convertibles are a pain to own, from what I understand.

29. What is your favorite cartoon of all time?
I am not much into cartoons. Do VeggieTales count?

30. Would you go swimming in shallow waters where, one year earlier, a shark had attacked a child?
Generally sharks don't attack in shallow water, do they?

32. Have you ever eaten a dog biscuit?
I tasted dog food once when I was little, but no, I have never actually eaten a dog biscuit.

33. If you were in a car sinking in a lake, what would you do first?
Unbuckle the children, get the door open, and get them out.

34. Have you ever ridden in an ambulance?
No.

35. Can you pick something up with your toes?
Pencils and stuff, yes, can't everyone?

36. How many remote controls do you have in your house?
4. TV (which should also work the VCR and DVD player but it doesn't), VCR (which also works the TV but not the DVD player), camcorder, and DVD player.

37. Have you ever fallen asleep in school?
Not that I remember.

38. How many times have you flown in an airplane in the last year?
None. I have never been in an airplane.

39. How many foreign countries have you visited?
None. I almost went to Mexico once, on my honeymoon, but there was rioting in Tijuana that day so we stayed in San Diego and didn't go there.

40. If you were out of shape, would you compete in a triathlon if you were somehow guaranteed to win a big, gaudy medal?
Um, no.

41. Would you rather be rich and unhappy, or poor and happy?
I have been poor and happy pretty much all my life, to one degree or another, relatively speaking. (I mean, compared to a family in Africa, we're rolling in money. But compared to the national average, we've never been very well off). I would definitely choose that route over rich and unhappy.

42. If you fell into quicksand, would you try to swim or try to float?
I would probably try to tread water. Quicksand is where a spring is coming up under a sandpit, and the sand floats on top of the water. Interesting, huh.

44. Do you ask for directions when you are lost?
Yes. If I can buy a map, I do that first. Otherwise I just ask.

45. Have you ever had a Mexican jumping bean?
No, but there is a larvae that lives in our local oak trees that is similar.

46. Are you more like Cinderella or Alice in Wonderland?
Um, neither. I do not live a life of drudgery, but I love books without pictures.

47. Would you rather have an ant farm with no ants or a box of crayons with broken points?
Ant farm with no ants.

48. Do you prefer light or dark bread?
Medium. I don't like the REALLY dark stuff, like Russian rye, but I don't like plain white bread either. Although a good French bread is nice.

49. Do you prefer scrambled or fried eggs?
Depends on my mood. Probably scrambled most of the time.

50. Have you ever been in a car that ran out of gas?
Yes, a couple of times.

51. Do you talk in your sleep?
Yes.

52. Would you rather shovel snow or mow the lawn?
Mow the lawn, hands down.

53. Would you rather be bitten by a poisonous snake or constricted by a python?
Neither! But I suppose the bite would be easier to treat.

54. Have you ever played in the rain?
Frequently. I love playing in the rain.

55. Which do you think is more dangerous: an angry bear or a hungry white shark?
Angry bear. I'm generally not in the vicinity of a hungry white shark, but bears are a fact of life where I live (although generally they only attack garbage cans and dog food). (what is up with this survey? Was the person who wrote it obsessed with death?)

56. Would you climb a very high tree to save a kitten?
No, they'll come down on their own. Although if the tree was easy to climb, yes, I would, because I enjoy climbing trees.

57. Can you tell the difference between a crocodile and an alligator?
I think so.

58. Do you drink pepsi or coke?
Diet Coke.

59. What�s your favorite number?
I don't have one.

60. If you were a car, would you be an SUV or a sports car?
I would be an SUV. And not a new shiny one either -- I'd be like a 1975 Travelall or something -- clunky and ugly, but utilitarian and good to have around.

61. Have you ever accidentally taken something from a hotel?
I don't think so.

62. Would you blow your nose at the dinner table?
No.

63. Have you ever slipped in the bathtub?
Yes.

64. Do you use regular or deodorant soap?
I change every time. Right now we have Ivory. Before that we had Coast (the eye opener!)

65. Have you ever locked yourself out of the house?
Yes, a couple of times.

66. Would you rather make your living as a singing cowboy or as one of the Simpsons voices?
Singing cowboy.

67. If you could invite any movie star to your home for dinner, who would it be?
Ewan McGregor. He could sing for me, and he could play light sabers with my husband and son.

68. Have you ever gotten a truck driver to honk his horn?
Oh yes, we used to do this all the time. Trains too.

69. Which would you rather live with: a huge nose or crossed eyes?
Probably the nose.

70. Would you hang out with someone your best friend didn't like?
This is so high school. Yes.

71. Would you hang out with someone your best friend liked, but you didn't like?
I doubt it.

72. Have you ever returned a gift?
Yes.

73. Would you give someone else a gift that had been given to you?
Um, I did this once.

74. If you could attend an Olympic Event, what would it be?
Ice dancing.

75. How many pairs of shoes do you own?
maybe... 7?

76. If your grandmother gave you a gift that you already have, would you tell her?
No. In fact this already happens, squared. Both of my grandmothers get me a subscription to Reader's Digest every year. I called the company about this, and they said that what will happen is that every year, I'll get a two year subscription added to what I already have coming to me. I figure, eventually, they will die, and I will have years and years of Reader's Digest subscriptions to remember them by.

77. Do you sing in the car?
Yes.

78. Would you rather jump into a dumpster or into a vat of honey?
Ugh, neither. The dumpster, probably, though, because I could wash it off easier, and chances are I'd land on TOP of stuff and not IN it.

79. What is your favorite breed of dog?
This is a tough question. I like border collies a lot. But they are impractical where I live because of stickers -- short hair makes more sense.

80. Would you donate money to feed starving animals in the winter?
You mean wild animals? Um, no. Animals would all have died off thousands of years ago if God had not given them their own mechanisms for surviving winters. Although I'm not opposed to feeding birds and stuff, don't get me wrong.

81. If you were a bicycle, would you be a stingray or a mountain bike?
I don't know what a stingray is.

82. What is your least favorite fruit?
Raisins.

83. What kind of fruit have you never had?
I live in California; I think I have probably had most kinds at one time or another.

84. If you won a $5,000 shopping spree to any store, which store would you pick?
Barnes and Noble. Woo hoo!

85. What brand sports apparel do you wear the most?
Um, I don't wear sports apparel.

86. Are/were you a good student?
I was smart but I lacked study skills. So no.

87. Among your friends, who could you arm wrestle and beat?
Most of them. I'm a pretty bulky, muscular, ox-like, low-maintenance person, and most of them were skinnier and smaller than me, even some of the boys.

88. If you had to choose, what branch of the military would you be in?
The Marines, and I'd be in the band. (I thought about doing this).

89. Would you ever parachute out of a plane?
Only if necessary, never for fun.

90. What do you think is your best feature?
My eyebrows.

91. If you were to win a Grammy, what kind of music would it be for?
It would be a special award for saving the world from undue pain by never singing alone in a public place, I'm sure. Although I do decently in a choir.

92. What is your favorite season?
Early spring -- say, like February, when narcissus are coming up and the grass is green but it's still chilly. But I like crisp autumn days and foggy days and snowy winter days and pouring rainy days as well. Basically anytime that's not summer.

93. How many members do you have in your immediate family?
4 living.

94. Which of the five senses is most important to you?
I hate this question. I can never just choose one. As far as what would require the most difficult adjustment if I had to learn to live without it, probably sight. But never to hear Vivaldi again... ack.

95. Would you be a more successful painter or singer?
Singer, marginally, but I wouldn't ever actually be a success at either. Unless I could get away with painting houses, at which I'm no better or worse than the average person.

97. How many years will/did you end up going to college?
Zero. None. Zilch. I imagine I'll spend years at it when I do it though, going just at night for a long time before the kids cease to need me during the days at which time I hope to go full-time.

98. Have you ever had surgery?
Three c-sections and a tonsillectomy (not in that order).

99. Would you rather be a professional figure skater or professional football player?
Figure skater. But considering that I have a hard time walking across my living room without breaking my toes (literally), it's never gonna happen.

100. What do you like to collect?
Turtles (not live ones), bookmarks, and books.

--------

fell off the diet wagon

Over the course of the last few weeks I totally fell off the diet wagon. Or, should I say, I jumped off with both feet. It is a full-out miracle that I didn't gain back everything I've lost to date. As it is, I did gain back two pounds (or else I can be like Cathy and assume that those two pounds were just water ;-). Nothing to do with the fact that I inhaled chocolate chip cookies as if they were calorie-free -- nothing to do with eating at restaurants two days in a row (Chinese for lunch on Sunday and then [insert heavenly choir clouds-opening chords here] The Red Fox last night for dinner. That one was T's idea, and bless him, it was fantastic. I love that place, it's my favorite restaurant, and everyone should eat there. But I had been so good all day until then...), nothing to do with the fact that the most brisk walking I've done since the end of September was about a block and a half total on Friday when I parked my car in the center of a triangle whose points were the post office, the grocery store, and our credit union. I did get a lot of exercise on Saturday, helping to paint my parents' house, but then I ate enough of my dad's barbecue to compensate fully for that. So I am still hanging around juuuuust under 174, a net loss of juuuuust over 20 lb. And of course I resolve to Change That.


Another thing about today that really bites is that for some reason my ISP's Internet connection works just great, but their website and email is down. waah! Not only am I having email withdrawal, but I can envision the piles and piles of mail backing up at the server, because I get a LOT of mail, and I know I should just set it downloading and then go, say, on an expedition to Mt. Everest, while I wait for it to download, when it finally functions again.


My 4-year-old daughter is singing "Happy Birthday" (to whom I do not know) in Ewok-ese. "Yub yub yub yub yub yub!" and so on. She is also playing tic-tac-toe with her Ewok Pez dispenser as an opponent. I just thought I would share a little bit of normal with you all. :)


We have been having a great time in school. We learned as much as we wanted to about Arthurian legends, and then LT wanted to move on to studying maps. So this week he's learning basics -- he already knows map directions and how to interpret most things on maps; he's learning where the continents and oceans are now. Then next week we'll start going continent-by-continent, studying countries on each one. I'm really looking forward to it, and so is he -- especially to the part when we find recipes from the various countries we study and make them. I am wondering what people eat in Africa, though. I suppose I'll find out. ;-).

--------

Friday, October 17, 2003

alone for the afternoon

My parents took my children with them to the city and T won't be home till 3:00. So I have two and a half hours to spend totally alone and what am I doing? Sitting here writing a diaryland entry. How totally pathetic.


OK, well, I am playing Alanis Morissette, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Barenaked Ladies, Meredith Brooks, Evanescence, and the Proclaimers at non-kid-friendly volume levels. Good thing the neighbors are all either a) deaf, b) away at work, or c) members of an aging-baby-boomer garage band which generally tunes up at midnight and gets really blasting by 1 AM, so I don't have the slightest inclination to accommodate them with my stereo volume. In fact I've often been inclined to pipe some really, ah, stereotypical Wagnerian opera at extremely high volume directly into their living room at 5:30 in the morning while my poor bleary-eyed husband's getting ready for work. But I digress.


I just don't have a lot of activities I enjoy that are substantially more pleasant without children in the vicinity. I don't smoke, don't drink, don't swear, don't even have a secret stash of Godiva chocolates (which actually, I don't like) hidden somewhere. Here's a list of possibilities that generally run through my head when my two munchkins are going to be gone:

• Sex. T isn't home yet so that's out.
  
• Blasting loud music. Check.
  
• Going to the grocery store. Well, it's not that I enjoy this, but it is a necessary activity which is simpler to do solo. And I did that already today.
  
• Going for a brisk walk. Did that.
  
• Going to a fancy restaurant. Doing that next week.
  
• Watching a nice romantic comedy without having to use my psychic Mom powers to mute or skip to the next scene at just the right moment. Hmm, has possibilities... but can't do that while "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" is playing....
  

It used to be that reading was at the top of that list. But now that the kids are older, if I'm going to neglect my housework to read, I can do it almost just as well while they're happily occupied playing with Legos or running around the yard as I can while they're gone or asleep. So when they're gone, I'm kind of at a loss -- what to do to maximize this time on my own? I guess I can just bask in my uninterruptedness... for the first twenty minutes until I really start missing them, and start having to remind myself every two minutes that I'm supposed to be enjoying this break....


I know that many of you are agreeing with my first paragraph right now: I'm totally pathetic. Which is as it may be, but I guess I kinda like it that way. I'm just gonna go lip-synch to "Bring Me To Life" while I fold some laundry and give up on being wild and reckless for today. ;-)

--------

Thursday, October 16, 2003

deliver me from temptation (and Grandma)

I did a bad thing. A very bad thing. While T was gone a couple of weeks ago, I bought chocolate chips, in case the kids and I, in a frenzy of loneliness, felt compelled to drown our sorrows in a batch of homemade goodness. Well, we didn't ever reach that point, so the chocolate chips were still hanging around in the cabinet looking all forlorn and depressed and feeling pretty useless. So yesterday I put them out of their misery. Now, I have to say, there are only a few things I do very, very well, but baking chocolate chip cookies is definitely one of them. So now I have a substantial quantity of chocolatey, chewy, soft, moist goodness sitting on my kitchen counter in a bakery bag whispering, "eat me! come on, just one! it's only 130 calories per cookie! [yes, I do calculate the number of calories in the things I bake; do you have a problem with this?] one more won't hurt you! you can always go for a brisk walk later...." Fortunately my dad was over yesterday and he helped eat a few of them; T took some to work today to share with his boss, also. But still, there are a good three dozen cookies sitting in there beckoning to me. I ate a few yesterday and this morning I caved and had two cookies and a glass of milk for breakfast (with the Special K box looking reproachfully at me the whole time). I am thinking I'll have to take some of them to the neighbors, to lessen the temptation.


I have started a new 9-week challenge for the weight-loss Yahoogroup I'm a part of. My personal goal is to lose a pound a week for the next nine weeks; I didn't want to set myself up for failure by trying for more. This was a great time to have made those cookies, huh. (and don't suggest freezing them; have you ever eaten chocolate chip cookies straight from the freezer? yum!). The weather is supposed to be perfect for walking for the next week. Of course, this doesn't mean I'll actually walk; it just means I'll think I should lose weight just because the weather is so great for walking.


Great, and I just remembered we're eating dinner at my paternal grandmother's house tonight. This means a stringy bland pot roast, boiled potatoes, and vegetables boiled to the point of total limpness and swimming in enough margarine to lubricate a ship's engine. And we won't even go into the whining, or the insistence that SHE will wash the dishes and I am to SIT DOWN, no I may NOT help, followed by her complaints to her county-hired house help and anyone else who will listen tomorrow that "those selfish kids came over for dinner and [insert one: "barely touched the dinner I worked so hard on" or "ate me out of house and home"], and then Rachel wouldn't even help with the dishes afterward, just sat with her kids and watched TV." (item: I hate watching TV). She has been nagging/whining at and about T for weeks, wanting him to come fix some stuff on the RV she never uses, and this was the first time he had available to go over and do it. Great. I had totally forgotten about that until just now. I wonder if I could come down with some debilitating flu in the next eight hours that would get me out of it....

--------

Wednesday, October 15, 2003

the diary curse is coming upon me

Note: It is happening. It just took longer than I predicted it would in my first entry. I have gone from multiple entries a day, through one entry a day, and now I've begun skipping. I do hope that I'm still writing in this thing a month from now.

It's not so much that my life has been boring, either, it's just that I haven't felt much like writing about it. Our trip to the zoo on Monday was nice. We also did a bit of shopping (you can't possibly take a trip to the city without buying at least a few things that are unavailable up the hill). T went to Harbor Freight, which, for the uninitiated, is a kind of Oriental Trading Company of hardware stores. Everything's cheap, in more ways than one, but if you're looking for certain things (like tools for a kit that will be in the car for emergencies) it's a decent place to go. It's also a man magnet. C and I were the only females within two blocks of that store, I think. And, like paintball stores, auto body websites, and telescope accessories catalogs, it's the kind of place where I should just automatically double his pre-shopping spending estimate. I did have plenty of time to sit in the car and finally read the instruction manual for our new car stereo, though. (hey, it DOES have a clock!)

Here's a bit of advice: If you're trying to cut back the amount of time you spend at the computer, do NOT get a CD burner and a cd player for your car during the same week. Let's just say it's counterproductive. But now I have all kinds of cool stuff to listen to in the car.

I am trying to figure out what book I want to buy next week (oh, what a happy kind of decision to have to make! And I'm going to eat at Olive Garden too, all by myself!). I'm going to be spending two hours next Friday afternoon donating platelets, and I'll want a paperback book (I just see that being so much easier to handle with a needle in each arm), one I haven't read before that will really draw me in. I have a $18 book to return at Borders, and a $25 gift certificate for Barnes and NOble, and they're right across the street from each other in Fresno (whose bright idea WAS that?), so I should be able to get pretty much anything I want. I'm thinking I might get Jane Austen's juvenalia, if it's available in the store, but then I'm also thinking I might want something a little lighter and more modern since I'll want to be totally absorbed in it. If anyone has any recommendations, leave a comment. :) Thanks.

--------

Monday, October 13, 2003

two book reviews

I finished two books this weekend. (I am just on a roll lately!)


First was an Elizabeth Berg book (Open House), which actually helped to put me in an extraordinarily emotional mood when I finished it at 1:30 Sunday morning, as anyone who was unfortunate enough to happen upon that diary entry before it was deleted will know. Elizabeth Berg is very good at making mundane or sad or horrific situations into stories so wonderfully-told that on every page it seems like there's at least one line or paragraph that resonates so strongly with me that I have to re-read it several times to fully savor the rightness of it. Superficially, Open House about a woman heading toward middle age, dealing with a divorce and the increasing independence of her eleven-year-old son. But oh, there is so much more. If you're female, and you've ever loved anyone to the point of tears in your life before, you should read it. Especially if you're a mother. Be prepared to catch your breath, and cry, and laugh, and to shamelessly dog-ear pages that you want to go back to and re-read later.


Also, yesterday I read a book from start to finish. I don't know exactly how that happened. I had church in the morning and I had company over in the afternoon. And I wasn't rude to them -- really! My sister-in-law and I sat outside and watched the kids play and read for a while, and then after everyone went home and we got the kids in bed, T installed a game on our computer and spent a few hours playing that while I sat on the couch and read. I kept thinking I had to put the book down and go to bed, but I didn't, until I finished it. This book was called Same as it Never Was and it's the first novel by C Scovell LaZebnik. Obviously I liked it pretty well, considering the rapidity with which I consumed it. ;-). It's a pretty light read, but not too fluffy, about a cynical college student who becomes the guardian of her four-year-old half-sister when her father dies. It was a pleasure to see Olivia change from a college girl who'd built very high walls around herself to keep people out, into a young woman who cared about her sister, cared about decency, and cared about herself. The characters (except perhaps for the girl's father and stepmother, but they're only in the story for one or two "scenes" so their cardboard-cutoutness is excusable) are really well-written, and the relationships between them seem very realistic. I liked the book better and better as I went along.


In other news, today is a holiday for my husband and hence our school, and we're going to surprise the kids with a trip to the zoo. I'm looking forward to seeing their faces when we get there. ;-). I suppose I shouldn't go in a nightgown and my old threadbare gray leggings, though...

--------

Friday, October 10, 2003

gripe moan complain

Initially, on looking back at today, my inclination would be to say that it stank. But it didn't really, I suppose. I mean, there were a few negative episodes that stand out -- like my husband realizing at 9:30 (note: both grocery stores in our town close at 8:00) that he needed something sweet for his men's breakfast meeting tomorrow at 7:30 (note: both grocery stores in our town open at 8:00). So I have cinnamon yeast rolls in the oven. I had just finished baking and decorating (rather poorly) C's birthday cake. Poor T had been putting the new car stereo in our car (the old one died a spectacular death not long ago and took my 78th Fraser Highlanders bagpipe music cassette with it, may it rest in peace), which started out as a simple job but ended up taking about six hours and much, much frustration. Little things kept going wrong, like the infernal aluminum strip that is supposed to hold the stuff that's stored in our refrigerator door actually in the door, except that for months it has been popping out at inopportune times and spilling the contents of the door all over the floor. Tonight it seemed to calculate the absolute worst possible moment for that to happen, and let fly. Repeatedly.

And I finally gave up trying to like Lord John and the Private Matter -- it's not just that it's too sordid for my taste (although it is); it just kept refusing to pull me into the story. It was an effort to read every page of it that I actually did read (about half the book). I'm disappointed, because I really do like Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series. I think, though, that she took it a little too seriously when her fans told her to make her books as long as she wanted -- they'd read them. The most recent one in the series is just a little too sprawling and long, and this John Grey novel (which, of course, her fans are going crazy over because it's Something She Wrote) should have stayed a short story. And then I still wouldn't have wanted to read it, I don't think.


I promise I'll be done with the irritations soon, but I have to share one more, for which I'm sure I'll get some nasty notes. But I have got to vent somewhere, so I guess you can just fire at will if you so desire. But here it is. There are SO MANY PEOPLE who take their pets too seriously. I know that a pet can be a friend and companion, and in some cases these people don't have kids and I can kind of see how they get as attached as they do. But here's an example of what is, in my opinion, Going Too Far. A woman on one of my email lists had to put her cat down a while ago. Then recently she got a card in the mail from the same vet's office where she'd had her put down, reminding her to bring in the cat for a checkup (or probably, in the irritating cutesy manner of most of the veterinarians' reminder postcards I've seen, reminding the pet to come in for a checkup, but I digress). Her sane and normal reaction? She shredded the card and sobbed uncontrollably for an hour -- she could not even pull herself together enough to explain the situation to her husband, who, being of course unable to read the shredded postcard, had no idea what was causing this reaction and thought something unbelievably horrible must have happened. OK, now, look, I can understand being upset about that incident, but that was just too darn much. Come on. When my daughter died -- when the person who'd lived inside me for nine months, whose name we had so carefully selected, whose life was the subject of so many daydreams, when that wonderful little person was dead, and the hospital called about three weeks later to confirm an appointment, I told the nice person on the phone what had happened and she apologized a million times, and I sighed and grieved a little extra, and that was that. And I don't think I'm some kind of cold callous person who doesn't care. Who knows.


OK, go ahead and click the link on the left and send me a nasty note. I can take it.


OK, I'm done griping. Today was not all bad. The weather was perfect, absolutely perfect (as perfect, that is, as weather can be when there is no precipitation). It was a great day for being outside, and we took advantage of that. The kids played in the yard, and I folded and sorted laundry and then read for a while. And the bird across the street has been joined by a dozen families of birds, and they all sing so beautifully that I'd sit outside just to listen to it even if I had no other reason for being there. They've taken up residence in the yew tree just across the street from our house. They make a very nice counterpoint to the stellar jays, who sound more interesting than beautiful most of the time.


Mmm, sweet rolls are done and they smell fabulous.


Speaking of such things, another happy thing about today is that I am down another two pounds. This is a banner day, because not only am I halfway to my goal weight (22 down, 22 to go), but I also weigh what I weighed when I got pregnant for the first time. Except for a very brief time after the birth of my son when I dipped down into the 160's, this is the least I have weighed in over eight years. [doing a little happy dance].



Since I decided to give up on Lord John this afternoon, I started an Elizabeth Berg I haven't read yet. I love the way she describes the way I feel, or the way I would feel if put in her characters' situations, only so much more attractively than I could ever put it. And her characters seem as real as people whom you know better than you know yourself. I have to struggle to make myself go slowly with her books and savor them. The one I'm reading now is Open House. I actually started reading it while I was walking home from the library -- I felt like my ten-year-old self, walking along with my nose buried in a book, looking up periodically to make sure I wasn't about to run into anything in an embarrassing or painful way. I probably looked like a total nerd, but it's a wonderful free feeling to be an adult and not care about that. ahhh. :)

--------

Thursday, October 09, 2003

upgrading, or an exercise in frustration

The lack-of-sleep haze from Tuesday night has finally worn off, after a good eight hours last night. I'm still working on getting used to the new computer, though (hmm, sounds like a good excuse to sit around at the computer half the day....). We were the last people on the planet to upgrade to Windows 95, just before Windows 98 came out. Then we got Windows 98 late too, and now we have WIndows XP which, if the pattern holds true, will become seriously outdated within the next seven days, all because we've finally upgraded to it. Regardless, it is extremely nice to be able to start up my computer without a series of error messages about bad sectors, and to be able to run it for more than two hours without The Blue Screen Of Death, or without the keyboard stubbornly deciding to stop communicating with whatever it's supposed to communicate with -- generally in the middle of a really good scintillating IM conversation. It's worth the hassle of having to make this program fit my kinks -- for example, this font has got to go. Ick. Just as soon as I'm done with this entry.


In order to facilitate moving our documents, music, etc., from our old system to the new one, we bought a cheapo $100 external CD-RW drive when we bought the new computer. It was the process of getting this to actually function that took probably half the night on Tuesday. I swear the directions for this machine were stolen from engrish.com. Not only did they make no sense, but they also told almost nothing about how to actually use the thing. It was as if someone had made up a set of generic poorly-translated directions that would work for a new blow dryer, a compact imported car, a power drill, or a gas barbecue -- take your pick -- and then mistakenly put them in the package for this CD burner. Surely there are enough native-English-speaking people in China and other foreign countries who could be hired by manufacturers to make sure that packaging and instructions are both comprehensible and useful for English speakers? Or perhaps not.


Once I finally made that work, mostly by divine intervention I think, everything went pretty smoothly, and before I knew it, I was looking at that bizarrely-plastic-silver-boombox-looking Windows XP layout, having officially joined the rest of humanity in its susceptibility to modern viruses (our operating system was so old that your average pimply virus-writing hack was born after it was. Well, not quite, but close). I still would love to figure out how to make Outlook Express figure out how to import my old emails. I had backed them up ages ago, when we got a second 3.2G hard drive (ha! remember when that was a HUGE hard drive? I do) because our main 3.2G hard drive was too full. Now I have them on a CD, and I can't make Outlook Express see them. I am an obsessive-compulsive email-saver; it's extremely unsettling (and has been since I backed them up) to have no access to the history of my life for the last seven years. And I also REALLY miss my ergonomic keyboard, although it had its problems so I don't want to hook it up to this machine. I have a new one coming from eBay. I don't even have a wrist rest, and I can feel the CTS coming on as I type this.


Anyway. In other news of the day...


Those of you coming to this diary for the first time from a weight loss ring might be surprised to find no reference to my weight at all. Well, here. In the last two weeks I have lost one pound -- and I lost that two weeks ago, and it's periodically been lost and found since then. I started out at 194 pounds (which isn't as fat as it sounds, since I'm just a shade under 5'9" and very dense), and right now I'm sitting at 174. I'm on my way to 150 pounds, and now that my husband is home from the fire he was working on for a week and a half, and the kids and I aren't driving all over the countryside and eating half our meals in restaurants, as well as having junk-food parties, to distract ourselves from missing him, I'm back on track.


Also, homeschooling is going well. LT and I are studying Arthurian legends, and he is writing a puppet-show script of Star Wars Episode 7, since George Lucas isn't going to make it. So far the plot is a dread secret, but he has allowed it to leak out that Luke has 20 Death Stars and that he (Luke, not my 7-yo son) has made 100 double-ended light sabers. I'll keep you posted so that you can line up 200 people deep and camp on our street when the premiere (where lemonade and brownies will be available for sale, I am to understand) happens. ;-)

--------

Wednesday, October 08, 2003

The Day After

I have a whole bunch of funny stuff to talk about today. Just a ton. (setting up a new computer system will do that for you). Unfortunately, the problem is, all the funny things happened between 11 pm and 5 am, and then I only got to sleep for about 3 1/2 hours, so while the material is there, there's just no way I can do it justice in my semi-groggy state. Maybe later.

--------

Tuesday, October 07, 2003

a little birdie, just had to share

There is a bird (I don't know what kind, I'm not very good at that) just singing its little birdie heart out outside my house. Full-volume, very insistent warbling, for about the last four minutes -- just amazing. I feel like I should go outside and give the little guy some applause, or something, so he'll know his work is appreciated and doesn't stop. Barring that, however, since it would probably be counterproductive, I just hope he gets the attention of the prettiest girl bird ever hatched as his reward. :)






Another random item of note (2:12 p.m.): When you have an antiquated Pleistocene-era PC like mine, and you are listening to your bootleg downloaded copy of Barenaked Ladies' "Another Postcard" (I don't feel guilty because I'm buying the album as soon as it comes out ;-) and doing something else on said elderly machine which requires much RAM (like, say, selecting and deleting large quantities of emails), the stutter effect produced in the music creates an additional level of humor in this already-zany song. You should try it.

--------

Sunday, October 05, 2003

mostly a book review: The Time Traveler's Wife

I finished The Time Traveler's Wife last night (see Friday's entry). I really enjoyed it. The first third or so was a huge mental puzzle about time travel -- and of course I was reading as fast as I could trying to figure everything out, thinking, "I hope this book is still this good once the gimmick is explained." And it was, it really was. There was a lot to it besides just the time travel -- a good love story, well-written characters, and excellent dialogue. So often dialogue in books really bothers me, because nobody really talks the way the characters do -- and I don't mean in an antiquated kind of way either -- it's kind of hard to explain, sometimes it just feels fake. This is why I don't write; I have some fun ideas for stories but I know I would suck at making the dialogue sound natural. Anyway. There were a couple of things about the book that made me wish this first-time novelist had had a better editor (and the library copy I had was an advance reader's copy, so who knows, maybe these things were addressed before the actual book came out). Two things that come to mind: Overall the prose is modern but eloquent and almost lyrical, but during the sex scenes the words used for body parts are straight out of a high-school boy's locker room. Not that I wanted to read about "quivering shafts" or any other harlequin-ish stuff -- but it just didn't sound right. Again, another reason I'm not a writer. ;-). And there were a few episodes in the book that were jarring because they seemed utterly gratuitous -- had nothing really to do with the story, just tossed in to allow the author to broadcast her opinion about something. The two young "punks" at the party come to mind. Overall, though, this is an excellent book, especially for a first novel, and you should go out and check it out right now and read it. Go on, what are you still sitting here for?!? ;-)


In other news, today is the day that T is finally going to come home from the fire he's been working on. We have missed him a great deal, and we are really looking forward to his arrival. (how's that for an understatement). The kids even cleaned, voluntarily, to make the house nice for Daddy! My seven-year-old son emptied the dishwasher of his own accord and without prompting, can you believe that? Having kids is paying off! ;-) (would insert a whole row of winks here if it would help you to understand that really, even if I never had to lift a finger to do a chore again for the rest of my life, that would be only a drop in the lake of the wonderfulness of being the mother of my children. But I'll spare you the row of winks, and just tell you.).


Other than that, there's nothing new. Seriously. Nothing even remotely funny has happened to me in the last 36 hours, just general happy sorts of things which bore diary readers to tears, so I'll keep them to myself. :)


random thought: After three days of the kids watching Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron once a day, I am ready to throttle Bryan Adams until his face turns purple...

--------

Friday, October 03, 2003

book sale

ooh, joy, joy, the "members only" opening night of our library's semi-annual book sale was tonight. I only realized the book sale was going on when I read a post on one of my many email lists, wherein someone was offering a possible explanation for the quietness of the list -- "is everyone off at library book sales?" At first I thought, what an absolutely idiotic thing to say, does she think everyone's library has book sales the same weekend? And then I thought, Oh my goodness, my library's book sale IS this weekend!! So I turned around and asked the kids if they wanted to go to the library sale and buy books. C was enthusiastic; LT was not. Now here's the awful kind of mother I am: I said, "But you know, they might have some Star Wars books... it'd be a shame to miss it if they had Star Wars books..." and before the words have even finished leaving my mouth I'm mentally kicking myself -- what kind of mother ARE you??? First of all, you're the mom, he's the son, you say we're going to revel in cheap books and by golly, he just has to go! And secondly, exactly what are you going to do when you get there and there are no Star Wars books? You manipulative, lying excuse for a mother! So went my mental self-flagellations. I needn't have worried on one count, though, because we'd barely arrived at the children's section before LT found not one but two Star Wars books -- a storybook of Return of the Jedi, with photos from the movie, and a comic-novel version of Episode IV, most commonly just called "Star Wars", but actually, if we're going to go with the naming conventions used in the other movies, it would be called "A New Hope". Egads, let's not go with that, shall we?


Anyway, I spent $17 on books, and they're 50c apiece. This time I got stuff for the kids or for school, almost exclusively; I only got two books entirely for myself and they're children's books also. I found an almost-complete set of the Narnia books from the 80's (missing The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, which, before someone determined to re-order the series, was #1). This edition is especially significant to me because it's the same as the set my brother and I had when we were little. I think I may even have our old copy of LWW sitting around somewhere. If not, I can find it on eBay. And I got a Trixie Belden book (#5, The Mystery Off Glen Road). It is my goal to re-accumulate all of the first 20 of this series. I had them when I was younger, and somehow they got lost or disposed of. I got a few horse-y books for C (I am a sucker where those are concerned. I figure she'll read them eventually...), and the rest of the books were just odds and ends that I thought we should have, either for reading aloud or for school or for both.


Enough about the book sale. We had a really nice evening after that. We came home and I barbecued chicken burgers and hot dogs for supper; I sat outside and read a library book (The Time Traveler's Wife -- maybe I was just predisposed to enjoy whatever I read tonight, but so far I am really intrigued by this book) while the kids played happily. It was a really happy scene, without a doubt the best part of the day. Earlier we went to the valley with the neighbor ladies; it wasn't nearly as bad as I'd worked myself up to think it would be, but still, it was not an insupportable amount of fun either. I got the very bright idea to walk along the bike/walking path in smallish-shopping-city from the park to Toys R Us, so we could look at stuff and the kids could work on their Christmas lists while we waited for the ladies to be done with what they were doing and ready to go home. It proved to be too much of a walk for C, and she had a spectacular meltdown on the way back to our car. I never expected to be one of those mothers pulling a sobbing child along by the hand on the sidewalk. Next time you see one of those mothers, please have some mercy in your thoughts of her, on my account. It was far less fun for me than it looked. The rest of the trip was nice enough, though.


I am kind of bummed because I lost my really nice Mary Cassatt stamps. I have got into the habit of requesting something other than the ordinary standard stamps given out by default, when I buy stamps. A couple of months ago I requested Audrey Hepburn stamps; this last time I just asked for "something different", and the postal person handed me these really wonderful stamps with Mary Cassatt's artwork on them. I don't collect the stamps, I actually use them; it just feels all interesting and different to use a stamp that's something besides the traditional flag or whatever. I'd used about half the stamps on that sheet when I lost the sheet. I am far more upset about this than I should be. For one thing, I can just get more. It wasn't a limited edition thing or anything. But that's not what bothers me. I am just idiotic about stamps. One time the kids got hold of a partial sheet and stuck two or three them on their clothes like stickers, not knowing they were actually for mailing things. I went borderline ballistic, as if the stamps were worth, say $34 apiece instead of $.34 apiece. I know for a fact that I have spent more than $.34 per sticker for a sheet of stickers for them to play with, on more than one occasion. Don't ask me why the stamp thing bothers me so much, but it does. There are many strange things about myself which I will never understand.


random thought: I love how on amazon.co.uk it says that the item is "usually dispatched in 2-3 days" instead of "shipped".

--------

Thursday, October 02, 2003

the grouchies, and a funny

I feel kind of grumbly and grouchy today. I don't know exactly why. I think it has something to do with the fact that I got myself roped into taking the neighbor ladies to the valley tomorrow and I feel all guilty and mean and uncharitable because I'm unhappy about that. I have to figure out the logistics of dropping them off at a very crowded funeral and picking them up again, without a cell phone so they could call me to tell me when they're done. And they can't shuffle more than twenty yards at the most so I can't just park and go get them, I have to actually drive right up to the church and park close. sigh. But that's not a full explanation for my case of the grouchies. I seem to have started a minor furor over at someone else's diary's notes section, completely inadvertently, and that doesn't help.


I did get to go see T today. He had to drive down to his regular workplace to get some tools/parts/whatever, and so we drove up to meet him for lunch. That was nice. The kids and I played pool in the little diner where we ate and walked along the river. That was nice too. That certainly shouldn't have made me grouchy. Who knows what goes on in my mind.


LT and I had a good laugh last night, although he didn't know exactly why; he was just laughing because I was laughing. I was reading The Silver Chair onto a tape for my dad, and we got to the part where Jill, Eustace, and Puddleglum are trying to figure out how to get out of the giants' castle at Harfang so that they could get under the ruined city, as Aslan had told them to do. Jill's job was to act like a silly little girl and try to get information out of the giants while they were off their guard. The line goes:

"She made love to everyone--the grooms, the porters, the housemaids, the ladies-in-waiting, and the elderly giant lords whose hunting days were past. She submitted to being kissed and pawed about by any number of giantesses..."

OK, now, look. I know fully that "made love" didn't mean then what it means now. And generally I have the furthest thing from a dirty mind that's humanly possible in the year 2003. But I was so tired last night, and when I'm tired I am very prone to this slap-happy kind of attitude, in which, in turn, I am very prone to getting fits of the giggles for no reason at all whatsoever. It took about five tries to get through the first sentence of that quote. I'd burst out laughing, then stop and rewind the tape to find my place again and start over, and LT would crack up laughing at the sound of my laughter on fast rewind, so we'd have to listen to that a few times in both directions. Then I finally got a good "take" of that one and came to the bit about being pawed by giantesses and I had to start the whole thing over. I couldn't help it. And I felt so guilty for finding it funny... but I just couldn't stop. I felt like I was back in junior high. (now there's something to have nightmares about).

--------

Wednesday, October 01, 2003

irritations and joys

In the "life's little irritations" category for today:

• Paying $43 for checks. Really, it's disgusting that it can cost that much for four boxes of freaking checks. You'd think they were printed on Van Gogh canvases or something. And I am a total sucker for every one of their shifty-eyed merchandising schemes also -- first I fall for the really cheap initial offering, and then I stay with that company rather than go for another cheap initial offering because it is SO much easier, since they have all my information already. And when I get all the way through checkout and on the last page they reveal that their handling cost is $9.00, I balk at first but then cave because I've come so far. And I spend 45 minutes dallying and trying to decide whether to go with the old comfortable patriotic-themed checks or to branch out into something new. sigh.
  
• Going to my favorite restaurant, with my parents and my two children, and waiting an hour and a half for our food. We were the first people in the restaurant when they opened for dinner, and yet half a dozen tables had paid and left by the time we finally got our food. We were so full from appetizers that I asked the waitress to go ahead and package our food to go, since an hour and a half is about the outside limit of a 4-year-old's (*sob*, that's the first time I've had to type that, no more 3-year-old) good-restaurant-behavior anyway.
  
• Being so totally uncomfortable from eating appetizers, salad, and soup that I could hardly sit down. Stepping on the scale and seeing that I had apparently gained seven pounds since getting up this morning. What the heck is up with that, I know I didn't eat that much. It makes me think I can't believe anything that scale says. And trust is a very important element in the relationship between a woman and her bathroom scale. I feel so - so betrayed.
  

To balance that, here are some parts of today that made life bliss.

• Singing "Happy Birthday" about a dozen times.
  
• Realizing that this girl's whole life for the past four days has basically been one long birthday celebration, and that it's not over yet.
  
• Speaking on the phone three times to my absent-but-adored husband, instead of the usual one stolen-time-at-11-pm fire overtime phone call.
  
• Feeling that teenagerish heart-leaping feeling when I hear the voice of the man I've been married to for almost ten years (can you tell I'm trying to make the best of a bad situation here?)
  
• Contemplating all day, and especially around 9:00 at night, what I was doing four years ago at that moment. My daughter's surgical birth was not a happy incident at its face value, but it was a momentous day even if it wasn't a lot of fun. And I never realized until my children began having birthdays, how much a birthday means to the person's mother. Now I always give my mom a special hug on my birthday as well.
  
• That startling moment of satisfaction when I step onto the porch or into the living room and see how clean it is (see, raving optimist that I am, I can even find something to be glad about in my FIL's panic-inducing visit)
  
• C's horse obsession. It is such fun watching my little mini-me enjoy the same things I did at her age.
  

And now it's time for me to carry my sleeping 4-year-old to her bed, and go read a chapter of The Silver Chair to LT (and my dad via audiocassette) before collapsing in sleep. :)

--------