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Wednesday, March 31, 2004
long rambles about many assorted unrelated topics
My research has proved successfully that clumsy people are normal, and people who never make stupid physical errors are a bizarre anomaly who should be psychologically examined. Or at least, that's how I am choosing to interpret the results of my in-depth unbiased survey conducted earlier this week. Thank you to all who participated and hence made me feel more at home in this huge cold cruel world full of things for me to stub my toe against or hit my head on. Clumsy people unite! Perhaps we should make tomorrow National Stand Up Into A Cupboard Door Day to celebrate.
Oh wait, I forgot, tomorrow already has a holiday. Ahem. Nevermind.
Which reminds me that tomorrow is also the 30th birthday of the second serious boyfriend I ever had. Even when we were dating I found it appropriate that his birthday was on April Fools' Day. Ahem again.
I have always wished I was better at April Fools kind of things. Beyond calling my parents the first year I was married and telling them I was pregnant, which was pretty obviously a sham (and not only because I'd only been sexually active for twelve days at the time and twelve days is Too Soon To Know) I've never done much for it. I know people who hatch elaborate plans and pull them off successfully on large groups of their friends and I'm always a little bit envious. I lack the devious creativity to come up with things like that. Now my husband -- he is ALL THE TIME doing that sort of thing, but never on April Fools' Day, I think because he thinks of that as a silly excuse for a holiday. You know how there are people who are into things like school spirit and small holidays, and people who aren't? He's one of the aren'ts. But he'd be very good at it.
On a completely, totally unrelated note, I saw a whole flowerbed full of tulips exactly like the one on this page while I was on a walk today. It gave me a diaryland-addict kind of glowing feeling of rightness, and I narrowly escaped exclaiming aloud about it, which would have been stupid since I'd then have had to explain to my parents (who were walking with me at the time) what an online diary is, and why they can't read mine but the entire remainder of Western civilization is allowed to (although there are certainly other people who I hope never stumble across it, that's for sure).
Yet another completely, totally unrelated note (OK, if you must know, it came to mind because I was trying desperately to figure out if that last parenthetical statement should use who or whom. I think who is correct but I wouldn't stake anything on it): I was reading an article about that "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves" book yesterday and I have found a kindred spirit in its author. I have got to feel fond affection for anyone who is as angry as I am when Hollywood misplaces or leaves out an apostrophe. I'll bet we could have a nice bitter vindictive ramble together about the way the English language is being dismantled and destroyed. She probably cringes whenever she sees "Honey, I Shrunk The Kids" at the video store, just like me. We should get together for coffee. I hope I could keep her from finding out about my parentheses addiction, though.
Sunday, March 28, 2004
just exactly how freakish AM I?
note to self: Either make somewhat-strenuous hill hikes part of a daily/weekly regimen, or don't do them at all. You know you always end up moaning in pain if you do, say, one every five years.
However, I think the views were worth the aches and pains:
(These are thumbnails; you can click on them to view the full-sized pictures. ha. Remember when 340x256 was a full-sized picture?
Also, yes, this is near where I live; my parents' house is in one of the pictures. Lucky me. And no, none of it's for sale.)
Also, while I have your attention (oh shut up, I hear you laughing, no, wait, that's snoring...), I have a question. Just exactly how freakish am I? I mean, here's something that happened to me about fifteen minutes ago: I was scooping ice cream (Dulce de Leche, which is Spanish for "my current diet-disaster obsession"). Somehow a good-sized scoop of ice cream managed to roll off the scooper and in my attempt to catch it, since I was holding the ice cream carton in one hand and the scoop in the other and hence was rendered as manually dexterous as, oh, a cow, I ended up trying to capture it in the crook of my elbows, but I failed. Can you get a mental image of this? This kind of thing (thankfully not this precise situation) happens to me with some regularity. Now, back to my question. Am I the only one? Was I brought to earth from some distant Planet Freakishness and switched, in the dark of night, for the perfectly normal and graceful baby my parents should have had? Am I some kind of changeling from the clumsiness fairy? Or is this the kind of thing that some other people (I can't hope that everyone does this) do also, and just nobody talks about? Or maybe I shouldn't ask this question. Nevermind, don't answer.
Friday, March 26, 2004
places I've called home
Because I lack the creativity, wit, cleverness, and motivation to do a real post, and have suffered from this lack for quite some time, here is my response to today's spark from diarist.net, just so I don't forget how Diaryland works.
What are the different places you've called home? Be it specific buildings and rooms, or cities and towns. Which was your favorite, and why? Did they each signify a beginning, an ending, or growing? Would you, or could you, ever go back?
1. The first place I remember living was "the yellow house." We moved in when I was three and moved out before I started kindergarten. This was probably actually the sixth or seventh house we lived in but I don't remember any of the previous ones. It seemed like a normal house to me at the time, but in retrospect I think it was quite small and old; you might even call it ramshackle. It had a big porch (at least it seemed big then), and a front yard with an old pump in it (I cranked the handle once and a bee came out and stung me). I learned right and left in the yard of that house and for years -- until I was at least ten, I'd guess -- anytime I needed to remember which was which I'd have to mentally put myself back in the garden, facing the bean-plant teepee, and remember that left was toward the house and right was toward town. I remember at least one Christmas here, when my dad built my brother and me a house out of our new Lincoln Logs -- and I got a doll crib, and my brother and I also got a typewriter. Almost as soon as we moved out of this house, the owner painted it dark gray, almost black. It looked like a haunted house for years until it was painted white with green trim (and black undertones). It was demolished five years ago or so, which was sad.
2. We moved from "the yellow house" to "the Plant", so called because we occupied the apartment above the garage at the sand and gravel plant where my father worked. We lived there till I was ten. Again, this apartment was really small, I guess (the property was sold a few years back and the ad mentioned a "possible upstairs apartment?"). And I suppose to most people it was a strange place to live -- but we loved it. We played in the rock and sand piles, and floated our decrepit old boat on the pond, where we also raised ducks. We started out with a few of our own and our flock grew effortlessly, because people would drop off ducks in the night once they knew this was a decent place to leave those ducklings which had been so cute at Easter but which had quickly become annoying. This was the best place in the world to ride a bike.
3. The summer before fifth grade we moved in with my maternal grandparents. I was excited about the move, and enjoyed living there for a while, but then two things happened: 1) I became painfully conscious of what other people thought, and realized that to an objective observer, the house was old, and... a little strange. (Pink, with a mint-green tin roof, for starters, and my bedroom had once been a breezeway and then been enclosed; much bare concrete was involved, and the chimney from the fireplace stuck out into my room) and 2) I became a teenager and had daily conflicts with my grandmother, increasing in intensity until I was fifteen and we moved out. Looking back, this was a wonderful place to live. Acres and acres of nothing around you but grass and cows -- which of course was another problem when I was a teenager and wanted to go go go and see people. But my brother and I had a wonderful time there, riding our horses from breakfast to supper in the summertime. This is the ranch where I would love to live again someday.
4. Next we lived in "the blue house" -- a new mobile home on my paternal grandparents' property. This was also a fun place to live -- I spent three years there and this was where most of my teenaged shenanigans with friends took place. It was the first place where I had a bedroom I could really personalize, so I had the stereotypical teenaged girl's wall covered with scraps of everything that had sentimental value to me -- dried roses, greeting cards, photographs, pictures, posters, banana stickers, and a strip of adding-machine tape going around the ceiling with socialist, falsely-deep quotes written on it in black Magic Marker. ("Man was the pariah dog, the moral leper...the muddier of crystal waters, the despoiler of forests, the murderer of the innocent" was one of my favorites at the time). I loved that room.
5. When that grandmother died and her will was a mess and her property got sold we moved back out to my other grandmother's ranch, except in our own house this time. I loved living there this time -- I was eighteen and appreciated everything (including my grandmother) much more. I only lived there a year before I got married and moved in with my husband into...
6. ... his little apartment over a garage in town -- the first time I had ever lived "in town" -- although the yellow house was pretty close. This place was a great little love nest and of course I have hundreds of happy memories centering around it -- the little bitty alcove of a room which we used for our books until we made it over into a tiny nursery -- the garage where where our cats had kittens and where we set up our computer, so that our mouse hands reached absolute zero when we played a game late on winter nights -- the little kitchen with its obligatory landlord-furnished glass-topped octagonal dinette table -- the nifty and ingenious built-in cupboards in the hall between the living room and the bathroom, which were practically responsible for the place being habitable at all. We lived there together for over two years, until our son was six weeks old.
7. Then we moved into the house we're in now, which is the "main house" about fifteen feet from the garage/apartment in #6. Anyone who saw it before we lived here would hardly recognize it on the inside -- when we moved in, it had new linoleum in the kitchen, but the bathroom was really bizarre, and the flooring throughout the house was in very sad shape. Not to mention the irregularly-shaped patch of orange, yellow, and brown shag carpet in the living room, which harmonized in a very 60's way with the dark knotty pine walls and wall sconces (these last two items are unchanged). Then it went through a wall-to-wall-carpet stage (meanwhile the bathroom got remodeled), until two years ago when the landlord (bless him!) paid to have the hardwood floors in the whole house refinished. yay, I am still besotted with them even today. :) We never thought we'd live here this long, and this was the year we'd planned to buy a house outside of town, but our housing market has gone completely insane so we decided to stay here where the rent's really reasonable and wait a while to see if the real estate bubble bursts, before we lock ourselves into a mortgage. In keeping with that decision, when the most recent tenants moved out of our little love nest next door, we started renting it also, so as to have a garage and a LOT more space. Now our son has a bedroom instead of an alcove in our school room, and we have space for guests and an amazingly cool, large, storage-bliss schoolroom. Aren't we lucky little homeschoolers. ;-) Meanwhile over the course of the almost eight years we've lived in this house, it's become "home" in a big, big way. All of our family's memories of home involve this little piece of property. Secretly I wouldn't mind buying it, but T's car hobby does not lend itself to permanent residence in town, so we have to at least hold out the possibility of buying a place with space around it.
And there you have it, whew! Maybe now that my fingers remember how to type I'll manage to post a "real" entry this weekend. ;-).
Sunday, March 21, 2004
camping questions and observations
I just finished a very nice weekend. T totally surprised me with A CELL PHONE for an anniversary present ("Welcome to the nineties!" was the greeting I got from my best friend when I told her) And yes, I'm so cool and thoughtful that I didn't get him anything; we've never done anniversary presents before, however, to be fair. We went on a little date on Saturday, and then the whole family camped overnight with my parents at a lake near here and had a good time. And since I am an official Diaryland Addict, you know I've been thinking all weekend about a few questions and observations to put in this entry:
- I spent most of today hanging around in the semi-shade outdoors, wearing shorts, not wearing sunscreen. As a result I am really pink around the neck and face but my legs are still fish-belly white. WHY IS THIS?? It is patently unfair.
- Good way to get lots of exercise: Have the worst 24 hours of your period whilst camping three or four hundred yards from the nearest bathroom. Walking back and forth every hour is great for your legs. Also a good way to practice women's safety tactics, since it involves walking said hundreds of yards at least a few times in the wee hours of the morning, when almost everyone around you is asleep but those few who aren't are certain to be highly intoxicated.
- I don't think there's a spot on my daughter that was both clean and un-scraped by the time we left. (note: she had a shower last night before going to sleep in the tent; I had to tell you that lest you think I let her -- eew -- go to bed filthy). Even though she fell asleep in the car on the way home, we simply had to wake her up for a bath before we could put her in her bed tonight, poor girl. She is a dirt and injury magnet (yes, we're talking about this little girl; it's like she has a split personality; her "Pig-Pen From 'Peanuts' With A Side of Accident-Proneness" self alternates with her "Fairy Princess of the World" self in a shocking manner). At least she didn't get sunburned.
- There ought to be a law whereby fish have to bite on a boy's first fishing expedition. But there isn't. :(
- Inline skates work a certain set of muscles, very very well. Overall, what with the period and the skating, my poor lower body is feeling so abused that I couldn't even read the title of Mom-on-Roof's entry from Friday (it involves magic fingers and hot lotions) without having a momentary massage fantasy which almost took my breath away. I think I'll have to get as close as I can with a heating pad and a few Advil.
Friday, March 19, 2004
the wedding was only the beginning
The wedding day was only the beginning, it really was. On that day we were transformed from two people who loved each other into one entity made up of two individuals -- we were Us, the two of us, for the rest of our lives. We looked at each other and thought we knew each other, thought we loved each other so much there couldn't possibly be love greater than what we felt. And we were so wrong.
What we have today is better, stronger, more passionate, more loving, more compassionate, more friendly, and happier in every way. Added to the basic giddy adoration we had for each other in the beginning, we now have a history of hundreds of shared joys and sorrows which have knit us closer together and given us a greater understanding of each other.
And of course we have three beautiful people in our lives -- two in person and one in memory -- given to us by God, who have made our lives (and other people's lives too) so much brighter. We are so blessed that I can't even get my mind around the size of it.
The past ten years have been an amazing gift. Here's to as many more as God will give us...
ten years later
March 19, 2004:
I felt like Miss Havisham, somehow, putting that on. I've been wanting to try it just to see if I could, and today seemed like a good day for it. Here, however, is proof that I am NOT yet at my lowest married weight -- the dress wouldn't quiiiiite button all the way up the back. (and bridesmaids, wherever you all may be: I am truly sorry about the buttons. Please accept my sincere, groveling apologies. Holy COW what was I thinking, to put you through that.) Since this is a special occasion and all, and I don't want to ruin my mood, I'm going to assume, just for today, that the reason it won't close is that my breasts are more robust than they were when I was 19, and leave it at that.
And while we're on the subject of "what was I thinking" I'll just say that apparently no, I did not think my football-player shoulders were QUITE wide enough, hence the enormity of the sleeves. ahem. --------
Thursday, March 18, 2004
um, ouch
Here's one for the Stupid Things I Did Today column. (ever since I made that comment in the entry last week about how I think I do something stupid every day, I've been kinda keeping track, and it is so completely depressingly true. Usually multiple stupid things each day, albeit small ones.) I was bending over to put groceries away in the fridge and when I stood up I smacked my head extremely, very, really, extra hard against the freezer door handle. I cried, I literally did, and I cannot remember the last time I cried in pain. I don't think I even cried when I was having my third c-section and the anesthesia wore off before they finished stapling me, and the afterpains, and the shameless begging for morphine, and augh. Anyway. Back to the present, I was standing there snuffling and holding my head and kind of rocking back and forth and trying not to cry in front of the kids, and WHACK, I rocked "forth" right into the open front door, end-on, which not only hurt the top of my head and made my neck feel oddly compacted, but it also, well, was really stupid. Meanwhile my daughter was beside herself trying to figure out how to make me feel better because MOMMY IS CRYING RED ALERT RED ALERT -- offering me cookies, candy, flowers ("Let me go into the backyard real quick [holding up one finger] and see if there are any flowers that blossomed and I'll get you some. OK?"). And I now have a really big bump on the back of my head, like I used to get all the time... when I was ELEVEN. And the pain has still not gone away.
While I'm adding things to lists, here's one to add to my Things I Once Swore I Would Never Do But Now Do With Unabashed Enthusiasm (right under "have an online diary"). I am wearing capri pants. When they came back in, first I went, "eew." Then I thought, "OK, they're all right on thin women but they're certainly not for me. They've been slowly growing on me, and then I got a few pairs from a church friend who's losing weight and shrunk out of her 12's (I'll be there someday! I swear! Just let me finish eating this peanut-butter-and-fudge cookie first!), and I've been wearing them, and, well, really liking them. (and hey, I only have to shave below the knee; that's pretty cool, no?) I even wear them with a button-down blouse tied in a knot at my waist. Next thing you know I'll be wearing Birkenstocks and watching cable TV. No I won't.
Sunday, March 14, 2004
this will help you get your zzz's
I had just popped open a diet Coke in anticipation of sitting and reading for an hour but I CAN'T FIND MY BOOK. (The Two Towers, and I'm liking it OK). And now since I have this nice beverage o' bliss to keep me company, I can't just go to bed, now can I, so here I am typing an entry. I remember in junior high, notes written when bored were always the most boring ones. So, if you are prone to insomnia, perhaps you should save this entry to read in the middle of the night -- and in any case, make sure not to operate any heavy machinery after reading. OK?
I've been spending a lot of time away from the computer being, well, productive. In fact, this weekend overall has been a good one with lots of things getting accomplished that have been a long time coming. Ooh, a LIST!
- On Friday I finished a sewing project for the first time since last May: a denim blanket intended for picnics.
- Time spent collecting old jeans and letting them lie around in an old military laundry bag, figuring that "someday" I would make a quilt out of them: Ten years.
- Total days elapsed from starting cutting to finishing the project: about 15
- Total hours involved: Maybe 35? 40?
- Other miscellaneous costs: much frustration with my sewing machine, until we reached a truce and worked things out between us; one cassette in a 25-cassette book on tape owned by my local library, "eaten" by my extremely inexpensive generic cassette player (Light a Penny Candle by Maeve Binchy, and I was so engrossed in it that I had to check out the book at the same time as I confessed the depravity and misadventures of my cassette player to the librarian who's known me since I was a baby, and stay up till all hours reading instead of sewing to find out what happened), replacement $8.
- Saturday T put the engine in his truck. This is a big, big deal. I won't go into the mechanic-y greasy details, nor will I tell you how long the truck's been sitting in our driveway waiting for said engine (partly because I can't remember, it seems like it's always been there), but trust me, a big big deal. Yay hubby. :)
- Also Saturday I started a new sewing project (I am liking this books on tape thing, and sewing is a good excuse), this one being a dress for my daughter. I have had this very very expensive fabric stored for eight years -- since I bought more than I needed to for a maternity dress -- and have planned since then that I would eventually make a dress for my daughter (mind you, this was before I HAD a daughter) from it. I bought the pattern for the dress last spring. So after eight years of waiting and two and a half days (about eight or ten hours) of work, here it is:
- On Friday, LT had the shining moment of his life to date (or close enough anyway) when he took his savings to Target and bought THE LEGO AT-AT. He'd been coveting one for a year or so, and saving his recycling money for months. And now through the miracle of modern technology (including my new-to-me, functional digital camera! woo hoo!), you, yes, YOU, diaryland reader, can be witness to the creation of a Star Wars legend. (can you tell it's late?)
Early in the project, Friday night...
Daddy of course had to get in on this (talk about bonding! ;-)
After just a few hours' sleep, I don't think I have to tell you about the first thing he looked at when he got out of bed on Saturday...
The finished product, Saturday morning.
It was a little smaller than I expected for $100 -choke- but the owner is extremely well-pleased.
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Friday, March 12, 2004
FREAKING
I did a really stupid thing today.
You know, I think I could say that most days.
But anyway. Today I was running late for the kids' Awana meeting, and I realized that I did not have enough gas to get us there and back, so I swung into the gas station as I was leaving town. We belong to this "fueling network" kind of thing where you have to be a member to use their stations and generally the prices are pretty good if you can find a station in your area -- plus it's a charge account kind of thing where you pay once a month. It's an enterprise that's heavy on truckers and low on restrooms. ANYWAY. I kept swiping my card and the dang machine wouldn't read it, the stupid freaking machine kept saying it couldn't read my freaking card, what IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS HOLY is wrong with this FREAKING machine??!? It was like that. (might I point out the extreme appropriateness of this attitude as I was ferrying my jubilant offspring to a Bible-study club meeting, at which I am a leader?) I slammed back into the car, handed the FREAKING card to my son and asked him to put it back in my purse while I drove, and screeched back onto the road, hoping we had enough gas to make it to the next gas station five miles away. My son said, with typical 7-year-old helpfulness, "Are you sure this is the right card?" Snapped I in reply: "Of course it's the right -- oh."
The most embarrassing part was having to again encounter the anonymous stranger who was still filling his tank at the station and who had just had to witness my fuming and FREAKING at the card machine and whose presence at said FREAKING I had shrugged off because I'd probably never see him again. Whoops.
* * * * *
Today wasn't all bad, though. I am about five minutes from being finished with the jeans quilt I've been working on -- which is a little sad, actually, because now I won't get to work on it and listen to books on tape anymore. Maybe I'll have to -- gasp -- start another sewing project, or work on one of the way-too-many crochet projects I have underway. AND, yay, I once again have a digital camera, thanks to a man on eBay, who, bless his heart, happened to have one exactly like my dead one, except not dead, for only $20 plus shipping. So I will leave you with a picture, just because I can. :)
Monday, March 08, 2004
spring, and kid questions
This is the day which comes at some point during the late winter every year.
Humans: Um, it's barely March. And last week it was really cold. What's up with the eighty degrees? I'm sweating here! I'm getting in slap-fights over the shady parking spaces at Costco! This isn't supposed to be happening. I don't even have my shorts out yet.Foolish people of North America (that is to say, "me"), DO NOT BE TAKEN IN by the capricious weather. KEEP YOUR SWEATERS WITHIN EASY REACH. In the middle of April you'll wish you had, as your frozen purple knees knock together in your cute little khaki skort. I mean it.
Weather: What are you talking about? It's SUPPOSED to be eighty degrees now. It's the normal state of things from here till November.
Humans: Um, no. Last week I KNOW it was under sixty degrees. I was wearing a sweater.
Weather: Um, YES. But I'm telling you, it's spring now. I'm the one who'd know, right? S-P-R-I-N-G. Eighty degrees. Like that. Every year.
Humans: No. Wait, really?
Weather: [emphatically] Yes.
Humans: Oh. OK. Yeah, I guess you must be right. Eighty degrees, hmm. I guess I'll take my kids' shorts out of storage and put my sweaters away now.
Weather: [snickering, sotto voce] Sucker.
My children and I walked two miles today -- a mile outbound to the park, then an hour playing at the park, and a mile walking back. The first mile is basically all downhill, which means of course that the second is all uphill, with the worst and steepest stretch being the last hundred yards before reaching our house. You can imagine the mood my four-year-old was in by the time we reached the top. Oh yeah. Now add more whining. Mm-hmm. Add in two or three more dramatic declarations of "I give up!" followed by a pathetic collapse into the grass by the side of the road, and I think you pretty much have it. Surprisingly enough, this is her favorite part of the day in retrospect, as is evidenced by her answers to the ten kid questions for this week (the website where I originally found this concept seems to have stopped putting up sets of questions, so I made up my own this week. Her answers follow "C"; her 7-year-old brother's follow "LT"):
1. What does the president do?
C: He talks.
LT: He rules the country.
2. What does it mean to vote?
C: Go to the fairgrounds when it's not fair time.
LT: Well, give our things to the president and then the government will get them and see what we vote for.
3. What is the best thing that ever happened to you?
C: A walk.
LT: Launching rockets and playing with Legos.
4. What happens at a circus?
C: Animals walk and people ride them.
LT: Somebody goes and goes on a wire and goes across.
5. How does a person train an animal?
C: By using it nicely.
LT: People do it like Grandma and Grandpa trained Droopy.
6. How old should a person be when he or she gets married?
C: Ninety ninety ninety. [but is Mommy that old?]. No. [So I shouldn't be married?] Yes, you should. (Nobody ever said a 4-year-old had to be logical, I guess).
LT: Nine thousand years old. I'm kidding. About twenty.
7. What would be the most fun job ever?
C: Spending the night at [her two nearby cousins'] house.
LT: Launching rockets and learning science and being an Awana leader.
8. What part of Mommy's job do you think she likes best?
C: Sewing together the quilt.
LT: Watching our stories and things.
9. What part of Daddy's job do you think he likes best?
C: Doing rockets. (Those are a family hobby, not his job).
LT: Coming home.
10. What is your favorite part of the day? Why?
C: Launching rockets and going for walks.
LT: Going for a walk.
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Friday, March 05, 2004
the next project on every programmer's to-do list
Since there's no polite way to tell friends, "Please don't send me any email forwards that are stupid. I don't mind the rest of them, but the stupid ones make me want to throw darts at you," someone ought to design an email filter that would weed out anything (ANYTHING!) that has an animated gif of a squirrel tapping its foot and playing the harmonica, to the tune of an embedded MIDI file written in 1994 on someone's XT. I don't know why this hasn't already been developed.
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Wednesday, March 03, 2004
random thoughts, ebay addiction, weight loss
A few thoughts that have rattled around in my head over the last few days:
- Do the makers of those flashy, jiggly ads designed to look like Windows error messages (comics.com usually has at least one going) honestly think we're going to fall for their scheme? I have more faith in my fellow man than to believe that ANYONE would be clueless enough to go around clicking on those, especially more than once. All they do is give me a headache.
- If you happen to watch the original 70's version of "The Love Bug", and you are for one second fooled by the scrub-brush laden location (with a very cheezy cardboard mock-up of the corner of the Ahwahnee Hotel in one scene; this is boggling, since anyone who knows what that hotel looks like would presumably also know what its setting looks like) which was used to stand in as "Yosemite Valley", you need to take a four-day weekend and take a vacation to Yosemite RIGHT NOW, that is an order.
- This is a genuine question. What's up with everyone disguising the names of places and businesses in their diaries/journals/weblogs? (KM@rt, TuIsa, etc) Is this to avoid having search engines find those terms? Why? I'm not being facetious here; I'm genuinely curious.
My seven-year-old son has discovered eBay. It must be a genetic thing, since his father is clinically addicted to that site and can sit there for hours looking at Dodge Charger stuff, most of which he will never buy, "just to see what they're going for." However, it's not MoPar parts that draw my son; it's Legos. And Star Wars stuff. And generally anything else he thinks up that would be fun. ("Hey, Mommy, let's see if doubleyou doubleyou doubleyou dot ebay dot com has any light sabers.") And women are supposed to be the ones who love to shop! T was setting up a computer for a friend of his; when he was testing it in our garage, our son saw it and asked if THAT computer has an eBay in it.
This is the first time since mid-January that our seven-day forecast doesn't have rain in it. We celebrated yesterday by going for not one but TWO walks around town. Today the kids will ride bikes and I will break out my inline skates. Stay tuned for reports of tomorrow's celebration; I'm sure it will be equally riveting. ;-) Seriously, though, we've enjoyed the rain, but we're really glad to be able to see the sun for a few days. I don't know how larger families do it -- it's hard enough cooping up just my two kids inside all day.
I sang in a chorus concert on Saturday. This was the first one I've done since last spring, so it was also the first one I've done since losing weight. It certainly was nice not having that extra thirty pounds pressing down on my feet for an hour and a half. It didn't help with singing "Stomp Your Foot" (WHY did Aaron Copland write that song? And WHY do chorus directors insist on including it in programs season after season? aargh!!), but a girl can't have everything. I still have fifteen pounds to go (and may decide to lose more once I get there -- I'm not sure fifteen pounds will be enough to solve some of my more problematic problem areas) but it is a nice feeling of accomplishment to be where I am. When I was weighing our luggage for our trip to Florida, I stood on the scale with a huge duffel bag packed full of my kids' clothes, and the number on the scale was the same as it was last summer, only that had been without the duffel bag. It was a mental image that will stay before my eyes every time I feel like slacking on my diet, that's for sure. Ack. --------
