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Thursday, January 29, 2004
book insanity
You know that Hayley Mills movie, "Summer Magic"? Well, maybe you don't, but anyway, we like Hayley Mills and we like this movie and T had the opportunity to get a free copy from someone whose kids all moved out of the house so she was giving away their movies, so he took it, and MY kids just watched it and oh my goodness I'm so glad it's over because the sound on it was all skewed as if our VCR had had a few drinks too many. It almost made me seasick to listen to it.
I am on a book-waiting-list purge. Ever find yourself with a bookmark in like six or eight books, unable to finish any of them? I finally sat down and made a list of all the books I had bookmarks in, the day before yesterday:
- Jane Eyre
- Anne of Green Gables
- Mexifornia: A State of Becoming
- Dawn on a Distant Shore
- Les Miserables
- A Joyful Noise
- Fifteen
This resolution lasted about thirty hours.
I started out well -- I finished Fifteen really quickly (I love, love, LOVE this book; I had the biggest crush on Stan Crandall when I was an early teenager), then had the delicious experience of finishing Jane Eyre (although every time I read that I feel a stronger inclination to shove St. John Rivers over a cliff -- he is the type of Christian who helps to make some non-Christians despise Christians) at 1:00 in the morning after that sigh-worthy reunion with Mr. Rochester; I read the last five or six chapters of Dawn on a Distant Shore this morning and got well into Mexifornia. Then the library called. My hold was there. It's a Marian Keyes book. Marian Keyes!! Am I expected to plow through nonfiction -- not to mention reading a 1200-page epic translated from the French -- before cracking that 350-page all-nighter-of-delight? I've had it "on hold" since March, and finally it is in my possession and I'm supposed to wait because of a rule I made myself? I'm only human, after all, and I don't know if I can stand it. --------
Friday Five
I haven't done a Friday Five in a while...
You have just won one million dollars:
1. Whom do you call first?
My husband at work, I imagine.
2. What is the first thing you buy for yourself?
Acreage and a house.
3. What is the first thing you buy for someone else?
Probably something for my parents, not sure what.
4. Do you give any away? If yes, to whom?
I think, aside from the chunk that Uncle Sam would of course take off the top, I would end up giving a lot of it away -- to Christian ministries, homeless missions, our library...
5. Do you invest any? If so, how?
I am clueless about this. We'd probably buy some stock, or maybe put it somewhere really safe for retirement or to help the kids with college.
I've been having a weird kind of week. T has been sick. LT is displaying some tics that make me think he probably has Tourette's (this week he changed from blinking to yawning). I've been feeling like time has just been whizzing by so fast that I can't even see what's going on in the blur around me. It's almost February, for crying out loud! How did that happen?
School has been going well; we have a classroom now that's separate from the main house and that makes it MUCH nicer as far as keeping everything neat and making the kids enthusiastic about school. Not to mention that I found a bunch of stuff I'd forgotten I had while we were moving, which gave me a bunch of new ideas which are working out nicely. yay. And while I'm updating about standard diary stuff I'll mention that I'm at my lowest weight since I got married -- 165 -- and yes, it HAS taken me long enough to get here! yikes. I'm back on track and now my hope/plan is to be at my goal of 150 (size 10) by April 1st. Wish me luck.
I've been keeping a real diary, and as a result this one has suffered. I really was getting tired of trying to draw the line between exhibitionism and a creative outlet anyway. What's the point? So when I feel like it, I write, and when I don't, I don't, which explains the fact that there have been, what, five entries in January? (yawn). I knew it would happen; it just took longer than I thought.
Wednesday, January 28, 2004
a million fortune cookies
from diarist.net:What thought or sentiment would you like to put in 1,000,000 fortune cookies?
How about:
USE YOUR TURN SIGNAL
YOU MORON
Or
FOR CRYING OUT LOUD, PUNK
PULL UP YOUR PANTS
Or
TO YOU, IT'S ANGST
TO EVERYONE ELSE, IT'S JUST WHINING
SHUT UP ALREADY
I feel not terribly creative tonight; feel free to add your own ideas in the comments section... --------
Monday, January 19, 2004
paintball and procrastination
My New Experience For The Month was playing paintball on Saturday. I've only been watching/hearing about/spending money on my husband's paintball habit (well, it's money HE earns; I don't complain) since 1994; totally reasonable that it would be ten years before I joined him, right? It was... interesting. (which means, I sucked, but perhaps not as badly as I thought I would). As I kept repeating in the days leading up to Saturday (starting about Tuesday when T simply announced that It Was Time and that I would be trying paintball that weekend, no excuses), I do not sneak well. I am, well, like a galumphing ox or something -- I'm bulky enough that I can just dominate anything in my path (except for the corner posts on beds; they always win in their frequent confrontations with my thighs), so sneaking has never been an issue. The result of this lack of skill was that in the first FOUR of the six games played on Saturday, I did not fire a single shot before I got hit and went out of the game. Pathetic, no? By the fourth game I was sneaking a bit better, and even making and executing some bare-bones strategic plans (about as skilled as those I make and execute while playing chess, which is to say, a maximum of two turns ahead, and not very subtle), but stupid things kept getting me out before I shot at anyone. Even in the last two games, I never did take anyone out or capture the flag or otherwise cover myself in glory, but I did have a decent time. The area where we played is basically a hanging valley on the side of a steep hill, and I did enough hill-walking to make my legs very, very angry with me the next day. I admitted to T that I was glad he'd convinced (coerced!) me to do it, which of course meant that today he had to go buy me a paintball gun. Hmm. At least it's a used one.
And today, aside from a shopping trip to the valley, I filed papers. I hate filing, I really really do. This is how badly I hate it: Anytime I encounter a piece of paper which should be filed away (credit card or bank statements, phone bills, doctor bills, insurance paperwork, stuff like that) I toss it into a drawer in our filing cabinet. When the heap of paper is so enormous that the drawer can't shut properly, I file the papers neatly and in order in their proper folders in the other drawers of the cabinet. As I work down through the stack, it's like an archaeological dig: I'll encounter stuff from this month, then last month, and so on, until at the bottom I finally find out how long it's been since my last filing-drudgery day (in this case, it was apparently sometime in October 2002). And always as I'm going to all this work, I wonder, what are the possibilities that I will EVER need, oh, say, more than 2% of this paperwork? But you know if I threw any of it out, I'd find out very quickly just exactly how necessary it was to keep it all, in some very unpleasant way.
And now there's school stuff added into the mix. I use the same tried-and-true system with completed schoolwork as I do with other filing: pile it in a heap. A big, big heap, full of paragraphs written with many backward letters on newsprint paper with absurdly wide lines, and rough drafts of the Star Wars Episode VII script, and pages of addition facts and subtraction facts and multiplication facts, and preschool papers where the groups with more are circled and the groups with less are crossed out, and artwork of varying degrees of skill but universally unparallelled adorableness, and all manner of other early elementary educational stuff. I have the best intentions of filing this away consecutively by student, subject, and date, but the best I usually end up with is four folders for each school year: [LT] Art, [LT] Academic, [C] Art, and [C] Academic. And generally, there is, again, one big filing day per semester or so. blecch. Procrastination, thy name is Rachel.
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Thursday, January 15, 2004
I AM WOMAN HEAR ME ROAR part 2
First it was the icicle lights. And now, today, I have CONQUERED THE TOILET-PAPER HOLDER. Using a Yankee screwdriver and my own wits, I, and I alone, performed this very Tim-Allen-grunt-grunt installation. We've just started renting the apartment and garage that go with our house, in addition to the house itself, so as to have a guest room, school room (separate from LT's room, poor boy has had just a little alcove for a bedroom for months), shop, additional storage space, etc. And the previous tenants, in addition to taking the refrigerator which is supposed to go with the apartment, also apparently took the toilet-paper dispenser. Well, thanks to my extreme buffness, that is no longer a problem. Oo-rah. Improvise, adapt, overcome.
(of course, we won't mention the fact that I bought a shower curtain and neglected to buy shower curtain rings to go with it. ahem)
So far, that apartment is paying for itself, even if in no other way, by causing LT to adore school. The simple act of walking fifteen feet and up a set of stairs has revitalized his interest in the three Rs in an amazing manner. Of course the novelty will wear off fairly soon, but hey, I'll take what enthusiasm I can while I can take it.
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Monday, January 12, 2004
note to self
Note to self:
You know, just because your four-year-old daughter takes ballet lessons and you're all enthusiastic about that, don't assume that it's acceptable to be standing in a semi-public place (like, say, the sink-and-towels segment of a ladies' room while waiting for said daughter to finish in the stall) and suddenly start practicing one of said daughter's ballet "moves." To you, it's a four-count battement frappé, with the arms in second position. To a casual observer, it's extremely bizarre. You know, like that kid (who was, except for the Y chromosome, unnervingly like the juvenile version of you, poor haircut, overdone facial expressions, pop-cultural cluelessness, and all) in About A Boy, with his accidental singing, which, hello, you ALSO do from time to time. For crying out loud, BE AWARE OF WHAT YOU'RE DOING. Thanks.
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what good little munchkins
I am so so proud of my little munchkins. After a day which was, to say the least, NOT the best day of parenting and homeschooling I've ever experienced -- let's just say I had visions of my head exploding all over the living room from the stress, and they weren't pretty -- I had to take them with me to my chorus rehearsal this evening, and they behaved flawlessly. I choose to believe that this is because they love me and know how proper children behave and want to please me and grow up into gentle and competent individuals, and not because they were threatened with the removal of literally all of their very favorite privileges for two weeks if we had to leave the rehearsal because of their behavior. (yeah, it was that kind of day, and what, me delusional?). They were oohed and aahed over; they were aren't-they-cute, look-how-they've-grown-ed-over; they played quietly when appropriate and charmed the room by dancing and singing on the stage during the break. AND they even walked all the way home without complaint. They sure know how to make me feel guilty for having fantasized earlier about sending them to my parents' until they turned eighteen. Not that I would actually have done that to my parents. ;-)
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Friday, January 09, 2004
if I were...
This is a survey I found in someone's diary. I found it hard to keep from answering with what I like instead of what I would be, but I tried. :)
If I were a month I would be: October
If I were a day of the week I would be: Sunday
If I were a time of day I would be: sunset
If I were a planet I would be: Jupiter
If I were a sea animal I would be: a gull
If I were a direction I would be: West
If I were a piece of furniture I would be: A clunky and homely but comfortable couch
If I were a sin I would be: Sloth
If I were a historical figure I would be: An eighteenth-century midwife
If I were a liquid I would be: Diet cherry Coke :-Ž (or milk)
If I were a stone, I would be: Slate
If I were a tree, I would be: A ponderosa pine
If I were a bird, I would be: A duck (bien sūr!)
If I were a flower/plant, I would be: A daisy
If I were a kind of weather, I would be: pouring down rain, thunder optional
If I were a musical instrument, I would be: A piano
If I were an animal, I would be: A horse
If I were a color, I would be: brown
If I were an emotion, I would be: cheerfulness
If I were a vegetable, I would be: Yellow squash
If I were a sound, I would be: rain on a tin roof
If I were an element, I would be: Carbon
If I were a car, I would be: a Volvo
If I were a song, I would be: a flute concerto by CPE Bach
If I were a movie, I would be directed by: Meyers and Shyer (do they direct, or just produce?)
If I were a book, I would be written by: Jan Karon
If I were a food, I would be: Meatloaf
If I were a place, I would be: home
If I were a material, I would be: Calico
If I were a taste, I would be: Buttery and sweet
I was a scent, I would be: fruity and floral
If I were a word, I would be: "Happy"
If I were a body part I would be:
arms
If I were a facial expression I would be: a smile
If I were a subject in school I would be: English Literature
If I were a comic book character I would be: Dennis the Menace's mom -- only not so slender
If I were a shape I would be: a sphere
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Wednesday, January 07, 2004
a headache
I have, as previously mentioned, a some-say goofy aversion to taking analgesics for headaches. Well, perhaps aversion is too strong a word -- more like a shrugging don't-see-why-I-really-should attitude. Anyway. Today I have a headache which started last night as a little tickle behind my left eyebrow as I was finishing reading Possession (when I have the mental energy I will review that), then progressed to an outright pain behind my left eyebrow, the kind of pain that always makes me wonder in the back of my mind if it's some kind of aneurysm, but I think it's really related to my sinuses. Anyway. Today the headache is a bona-fide full-out headache, and I've exhausted my options. I've drunk plenty of water, eaten a good meal, practiced relaxation, taken a shower, and massaged my scalp. That works. The only problem is, when I stop massaging, the pain comes back. So either I need to sit and massage my head till my arms cease functioning (at which point the headache will come back anyway, and it is difficult to get anything done this way), or else I suppose it's time to actually take some Advil, in spite of the problem of wanting to know when whatever is causing the headache goes away. Barring, of course, the possibility of hiring or coercing someone to follow me around all day rubbing my head while I fold laundry, clean the house, cook supper, etc. Now that has appeal -- although it's wildly impractical, I suppose.
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Sunday, January 04, 2004
the Christmas stuff HAS to come down tonight
Tonight has to be the night. This is the longest we've ever left the Christmas tree up. And it's not sentimentality that has it still up, it's just pure laziness. Well, on my part. T always claims that he wants me to do it while he's gone because it's "too sad" for him, but I always suspect that he's slyly trying to get out of helping undecorate. Well, it's January 4th, Christmas has been over for almost two weeks; sadness shouldn't be a problem anymore, sweetie. So tonight's the night. While we're at it I'll clean the living room very thoroughly and see if I can find our DVD remote control. I never realized how much I depend on it till we were watching "We Were Soldiers" last night and I wanted SO BADLY to turn on the subtitles during the whispering parts, and I couldn't (I fully need Miracle Ear. I swear. I used to insist, in the manner of crotchety old men, that it wasn't my hearing, that people just mumbled, but I have finally realized that it's me. If there's any background noise people have to enunciate carefully or I have to ask them to repeat. Yeah, I'm only 29, why do you ask?).
I think, like mom-on-roof, I should take a picture of what's under my couch, to make all of you laugh, before I clean it out. But wait, no, I don't think I could stand that kind of humiliation. And I need to clean out under the cushions as well. Children + couch + lazy mom = really horrifying stuff under the couch cushions. (HOW long has it been since we had Froot Loops in the house??)
I am going to helpfully get out the boxes for the decorations while T is still gone getting dinner. Aren't I a good wife? :-D
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Saturday, January 03, 2004
quiet blah kind of day
We finally had weather dry enough for me to try out the inline skates which I bought the day after Christmas. T was working outdoors and said (with his voice dripping amusement) that he felt like he should be videotaping my efforts. I said something to the effect of, "only if you have a death wish." I did manage to get the hang of it, with only one fall (in which the elbow pads paid for themselves by sparing me an ER visit for a cracked humerus, I think). Seems like it could be a decent way to get in better shape if I don't kill myself at it.
I had a sort of unsatisfying day overall. I wanted to GO, wanted to go to the book store and then drive across the valley to the coast, and really enjoy the beautiful clear weather, but T wanted to spend most of the day at home. To me, nice weather after a long wet spell means recreation and going somewhere (since I have, of course, just been spending the entire spell of wet weather indoors by the fire). To him, nice weather means that he finally has time to work on his automotive projects. Bummer.
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Friday, January 02, 2004
Is it worth putting on outdoor clothes?
We got a new keyboard from ebay today. It turned out that the guy had sent us a European keyboard by mistake -- which was interesting, but not very practical. And herein lies the all-time speed record in our household for destruction by a child: by the time I went to put the old keyboard back on the computer, C (that's C, I was getting tired of saying C, so just know from now on that C=C) had used her kid scissors to not only bend every pin in the old keyboard's connector, but also to break off the little doohickey in the middle of it that tells you which way to plug it into the port. Asked why, she said that she "wanted to make the sticks along the sides, not be on the sides anymore." Well, it worked. So for the time being I'm using an old keyboard, a good comfortable ergonomic one which had, at least when used with our old system, the unfortunate habit of simply ceasing to communicate with the computer at intervals, generally in the middle of a really sensitive or fun instant-messaging conversation.
I'm trying to decide if I want to travel alone to the Valley tonight, to browse and relax in Barnes and Noble, and make use of my gift cards, as well as doing some necessary shopping (like, for instance, for a new keyboard, since the whole "shift produces capital letters" concept seems to have just begun eluding this one completely; have to use caps lock). Part of me wants solitude and quiet and BOOKS (OK, it's just the b and the n that shift won't work with, that is truly bizarre), and part of me wants to sit at home with my agreeable family and my heating pad and A.S. Byatt's Possession instead of driving through the dark and the rain for 50 minutes each way. Not to mention that I'd have to change out of my pajamas to go to the bookstore. hmm. decisions, decisions.
the question mark doesn't work either. This settles it. best buy, here I come...
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Thursday, January 01, 2004
I DO NOT MAKE RESOLUTIONS
This was one of those days when inanimate objects conspired against me. As soon as I leave a room they all huddle and whisper about what they're going to do next. Everything from my daughter's candy jar to the carburetor on my husband's truck, not to mention the BLENDER, I think blenders are the leaders of the universal inanimate objects' plot to take over the cosmos conspiracy -- they've all snickered and suppressed giggles till their little inanimate faces turned puce, watching me deal with their freak-outs in rapid succession today. I NEED A PADDED CELL. thank you.
Other than that, well, one can't really think in terms of "other than that", can one, when one's entire existence has been consumed with this huge comedy of errors, but really, in spite of that, I am surviving and actually not, well, angry, or cranky, or even afflicted with that awful ears-about-to-whistle-like-twin-teakettle-spouts stressed-out kind of feeling. Perhaps someone slipped some Prozac into my diet Coke. Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that I have had more sex in the past thirty days than in any other thirty days in my life to date, except possibly during the first month of my marriage, which really shouldn't count because for crying out loud, we had NO idea what we were doing, so those three times a day were all just practice runs. Anyway. I even did not have PMS this month AT ALL. ONCE, for one teeny MINUTE. I have a theory that all the oxytocin from all the, well, you know, that that all coursed through my system enough to put me on kind of a natural high. Or at least a natural tranquilizer/analgesic kind of thing. So, if I were going to make New Year's resolutions, which I'm not, I always resist the urge to do that just like I resisted that whole NaNoWriMo peer pressure thing -- IF I were going to make New Year's resolutions, I would resolve to keep this up. I think it has also definitely had a positive effect on T -- what else explains the fact that he disassembled and reassembled a carburetor in the pouring-down rain, in the dark, and even had one of those frightening things happen where the gas that's in the carburetor exploded while he was leaning over it, and it seared off part of his beard -- that even happened, and not once did he snap at me or somehow manage to imply that this whole thing had to be my fault just as certainly as if I had been the person on the assembly line making the fuel filter which had disintegrated and caused his truck to, well, to make us stand in the pouring-down rain in the dark while he disassembled the carburetor. And, as any mechanic's wife knows, part of the job description under "mechanic's wife" (this is for the wife of a professional or a recreational mechanic, mind you) reads: "will serve as the repository for release of any and all stress inflicted on mechanic by failure of vehicles to function as required." It's in there, just look. So, if I managed to waive that by encouraging us to exercise our marital privilege a bit more frequently than is perhaps normal, hey, this is a definite plus.
Or it could be that my husband is just the kind of man who keeps getting better and better with age (in TEMPERAMENT, I mean, get your mind out of the gutter...), and by the time he's 50 he'll be so perfect in every way that supermodels will hire hit men to take me out so that they can have a crack at him. It could be that.
Ooh, the rain started again. I was afraid it had gone away. Still hoping for snow, but I'm not counting on it.
My mom and I were looking at some of her old diaries today and it got me thinking about diaries. Not like diaryland diaries, but REAL diaries. It's a shame, there's such a paradox about them: Nobody reads them, so you can totally let yourself go in one and write whatever you want. But nobody reads them, so the motivation to write in one with any regularity is virtually nil. I think everyone knows that an online diary/journal/weblog is not really a real diary. A very few people actually do use them as such, and their journals are generally either so blushingly personal or so mind-numbingly dull that I can't stand it. No, for most people, this medium is a method of noting, in a public way, things we think are interesting or funny or clever or irritating or worth discussing, but definitely in a PUBLIC way. There are a lot of areas that I don't even touch on in here, and this would be the case even if nobody I knew read these entries at all; some things I just like to keep to myself. I might like to keep a record of them, but I don't have the discipline to sit and write about them every day. I think the reason that this diary has lasted so much longer than I predicted that it would in my first entry is that, at that time, I had envisioned using it as a real diary, but I quickly learned that I was not going to do that. A real diary takes more discipline, and more of a far-seeing attitude -- you're not writing this stuff down to vent, necessarily; you're not writing it to make anyone laugh or update anyone on what's going on; you're writing it so that years later you can have a record of your thoughts, your feelings, and the mundane events in your day-to-day life that you'd completely forget otherwise, but which might be worth remembering. But I, for one, simply lack the tenacity and the foresight and the discipline to keep a real diary, even though in ten years I may wish I had.
I almost, ALMOST gave in. I DO NOT MAKE RESOLUTIONS. But I do have a blank book sitting around here somewhere, and January 1st does seem like as good a day as any to start using it...
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