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Thursday, September 30, 2004

five years ago

just rambling around going on and on about widely varied topics

LT had his first nosebleed in three weeks tonight. Just when we were thinking that his nose had healed fully and nosebleeds would be a thing of the past, wham. It wasn't a terribly bad one but it didn't stop as soon as I'd have liked. sigh. Just something else to add to Nameless Dread.

If Nameless Dread didn't have such a catchy title already I'd call it, I dunno, Trying to Be God or Not Trusting God Enough. Because that's what it is. I know that and yet it doesn't keep it from happening sometimes. There's a whole list of things that can trigger it or pass through my mind while it's going on. LT's Tourette's. T's lack of energy (which is getting worse and doesn't seem to need sugar as a trigger anymore, although sugar definitely doesn't help). T's boss. T's job. The real estate market. North Korea. LT's nosebleeds. Money. The everlasting worry about whether I'm doing the right things with my kids. Terrorism. And it goes on. And sometimes there's no trigger and nothing specific in my head, I just get this feeling of foreboding and worry in the pit of my stomach that won't go away. I know I should just give this over to God and trust Him. I'm trying. I keep giving it to Him and then taking it all right back. sigh.

I just tonight started working on the nightgown we're going to give C for her birthday. I'll work on it some more tomorrow night, and then Friday morning T will be off; I'll get him to keep the kids occupied while I finish it. I so totally should have started this days ago. It's my own fault -- I actually completely forgot about it last night and Monday night. whoops.

I am not sure there were enough adverbs in those last two sentences. Maybe I should add a few "very"s and a "surely" or two.

Tomorrow -- well, technically speaking, today -- my little girl will be five. A whole hand. I've said this before in here, I think, but I never realized before I had kids how big a deal a birthday is for the person's mother. I always thought of my birthdays as just my own thing -- as much as a birthday can be one's own thing when it is on Christmas -- and never thought about what was going through Mom's head. Now I know. Five years ago right now I was extremely uncomfortable, just finally going to bed after getting the house all clean so that I could go down to the hospital in the morning and not come home to an absolute pigsty. In fact, here: the last picture of me pregnant, not counting the wretched ones with me in a hospital gown. Five years and half an hour ago. (note the wrist brace. In addition to a separating pelvis, I had carpal tunnel syndrome in a very bad way at the end of that pregnancy. Ouch.)

Tuesday, September 28, 2004

it's all about money today

With overtime money looming on the horizon, we're finally able to take care of some things that have been sitting in that "someday when we are not so financially strapped that we scrounge in the couch cushions to go buy milk" category. Such things include:

Paying library fines. We like to check out a lot of stuff at the library. When each person in your family has about fifteen things checked out, and you miss the due date for all sixty (SIXTY!) things by one day, that makes for some rather substantial fines, considering that they range from 25c to 50c per item. (yes, I know there is a cents sign that I can make with alt-codes. I'm just too lazy. It's a diary, fercryinoutloud. If you want to see perfect usage, pay me and I'll help you with your resumé). So now I have that pristine pure feeling that comes with owing the library nothing. I can look the librarian in the eye when I check things out now.

Buying collars for the cats. This is well-timed since yesterday was the first day they were allowed outside post-spaying. They love being outdoors. They have been giving us accusing looks for two days because we've kept this no-ceilinged, dirt-floored nirvana from them for so long. Sorry, girls, it was for the best. Anyway. It was kind of a shock to whip out the checkbook and write a check for ten bucks for two cat collars -- but hey, at least they're the special snag-safe ones where they'll come off or break rather than strangling the poor little beasts if they get caught on a branch or what have you. That's the kind of thing you look at and say, "dang, too bad I didn't think of that first."

Um, groceries. yay!

We are going out to dinner! Even bigger yay. Sorry, but it has been too long since I even got to go to Burger King, let alone sit down in a clean, pretty restaurant and tell a nice person what I want and have it brought to me. Especially since, oh, what I want is so delightfully GOOD. mmm. zucchini sticks, here I come.

it's all about money today

With overtime money looming on the horizon, we're finally able to take care of some things that have been sitting in that "someday when we are not so financially strapped that we scrounge in the couch cushions to go buy milk" category. Such things include:

Paying library fines. We like to check out a lot of stuff at the library. When each person in your family has about fifteen things checked out, and you miss the due date for all sixty (SIXTY!) things by one day, that makes for some rather substantial fines, considering that they range from 25c to 50c per item. (yes, I know there is a cents sign that I can make with alt-codes. I'm just too lazy. It's a diary, fercryinoutloud. If you want to see perfect usage, pay me and I'll help you with your resumé). So now I have that pristine pure feeling that comes with owing the library nothing. I can look the librarian in the eye when I check things out now.

Buying collars for the cats. This is well-timed since yesterday was the first day they were allowed outside post-spaying. They love being outdoors. They have been giving us accusing looks for two days because we've kept this no-ceilinged, dirt-floored nirvana from them for so long. Sorry, girls, it was for the best. Anyway. It was kind of a shock to whip out the checkbook and write a check for ten bucks for two cat collars -- but hey, at least they're the special snag-safe ones where they'll come off or break rather than strangling the poor little beasts if they get caught on a branch or what have you. That's the kind of thing you look at and say, "dang, too bad I didn't think of that first."

Um, groceries. yay!

We are going out to dinner! Even bigger yay. Sorry, but it has been too long since I even got to go to Burger King, let alone sit down in a clean, pretty restaurant and tell a nice person what I want and have it brought to me. Especially since, oh, what I want is so delightfully GOOD. mmm. zucchini sticks, here I come.
-------

shopping

I went shopping today. This was supposed to be a solo trip, but the person who was supposed to watch the kids while I went is a couple hundred miles away earning really nice amounts of overtime right now. However, I couldn't put off the trip, because I needed to get supplies for C's birthday present in time to actually, you know, make the present, which is going to be a nice frilly comfy flannel nightgown, white and pink with little tulips, yay. Anyway. This made it a bit harder to maintain the surprise, but I think she still doesn't know exactly what I'm going to make for her. It also meant that while I was waiting in the obscenely long cutting line at the fabric store (twice, thanks to my airheadedness, especially annoying since the second time turned out to have been unnecessary), and then in the also-obscenely-long line to check out at the fabric store, and then in the line at Costco (I don't even have to describe that one, since anyone who's ever been to Costco knows about the lines, and anyone who hasn't just wouldn't understand; it would be like trying to describe the fourth level of Hell, or something)... anyway, T's absence meant that while I was waiting in all these lines, I had children with me who were at first cooperative, and then a little overwound, and then whiny and droopy, and then more whiny and more droopy. So by the end of the day I was not only footsore and frustrated, but also almost ready to do that running-for-the-hills-waving-my-arms-like-a-madwoman routine. Almost. Then we came home and spent five hours cleaning the kids' bedrooms, moving in their new dressers, sorting through their heaped-up clothes, putting clothes away, putting clothes in bags to give away, putting clothes in the rag box, etc. I am so, so, so ready for bed.

Except I just remembered that my bed has two very big clothes boxes on it. oh dear. This may well be the final straw for the overburdened camel representing my sanity in this metaphor. I think maybe someone had better call the men in white coats, ha ha, hee hee, ho ho, ha ha, hee hee.

Friday, September 24, 2004

a nice day :)

To file under Things To Make Me Happy About Being A Mom*:


Last night the kids really "surprised" me. T was home getting ready to head out for the fire he's working on (which is in the Los Padres National Forest, between Highway 1 and Highway 101 about halfway from Monterey to, oh, say, Santa Barbara, by the way. He's in King City. Steinbeck fans** will know where that is), and I ran to the store to get him the latest issue of Sky and Telescope to take with him. C was feeling much better at this point -- Tylenol is like a miracle cure for her. So I asked the kids to please unload the dishwasher while I was gone, as much as they could. When I got back I had to walk through the kitchen but I was told that under no circumstances was I to look toward the dishwasher, because they were working on a surprise. So I pretended not to see them scrubbing off the dishes with a brush and loading them into the dishwasher, and sat down in the living room to read. At one point LT came in and told me that he didn't know where to put a certain dish in the dishwasher. This was followed by a loudly whispered argument in the kitchen, and then the declaration: "I needed to know because we are cleaning off the counter, Mom!" And they did do that, too. They really did quite a good job.

And today has gone pretty well. C continues to feel pretty well. The kids were cooperative. With C being sick and T being gone, we took the day off from sit-down school, but the kids ended up having a great time doing learning games on the computer. I don't have the guts to be an unschooler, but I can certainly see where they're coming from.



On the money front, things are looking up a bit. Today we answered a classified ad offering two free dressers to a person who'd come pick them up. So now, instead of needing to buy four dressers, we only need to buy two, and those can wait a bit; it was the kids' dressers that were in the worst shape. Our A/C ended up being fine in the car (did I mention it was broken?). T kept trying to add Freon to it, and it wouldn't take any, and we thought that was a problem with the intake. Then he rigged it so it would come on whenever the car was on, and it was cold, so we concluded that since it obviously had plenty of Freon, it must be an electrical problem. But then he had to disconnect the battery to sort of shut down and restart the car's computer, for something totally unrelated, and when he reconnected it, the A/C worked fine. Also, I fixed our fridge again, so we don't need a new one of those. Basically, we had a list of things we needed money for pretty badly, with the total running up about $2500, and God has whittled that down to about $700 -- eye appointments and glasses for T and myself, and two dressers. Which is almost definitely within reach of the overtime T will make from this little one-weekend fire. yay God!

Thursday, September 23, 2004

Mom's version of a wild weekend

T just got called out on a fire*. Ten minutes later C, who'd been feeling suspiciously warm all afternoon, threw up. What a weekend I'm going to have. :-D

Monday, September 20, 2004

before and after

I think for the rest of my life, my memories will be divided into two stacks: Before the Retreat and After the Retreat. I am not going into a whole lot of detail -- some of the transformation is still so close and overwhelming that it's difficult to elucidate anyway, and somehow just feels private at this point. Suffice to say that I had my focus in the wrong place, I'd been struggling with a lot of little doubts that are gone now, and I am going to stop nailing my sins and my problems to the cross and then taking them back over and over. A few of you will probably find me really boring from here on out. And honestly, I'm a little bit sorry about that, but I'm no longer going to let my desire to have people like me keep me from being the person I am, or from becoming the person God wants me to be. I've realized that while most of this diary is harmless, most of it also isn't actually God-honoring, and some of it, I'm sure, grieves God. In summary: The Jesus freak is back. I've missed her a whole lot, more than I knew. And it's worth it to keep her, even if it means that some people like me less, or that I spend less of my energy on things I have become accustomed to enjoying, but that pull me in the wrong direction spiritually.


OK, let's see, who's left? hi. and hi. :)


In other news

• our cats are at the vet, FINALLY, getting spayed. And that's a hallelujah of a different sort. They were each sick over the weekend; at least, first one and then the other spent a couple of days being really lethargic and not eating, drinking, or peeing normally. We'll be leaving to pick them up in about half an hour.
  
• LT just took a really painful fall off his bike. No broken anything (thank you God), but we had to break out the Big Band Aids [read that with dismay and awe in your voice, like a five-year-old, for the full effect] for his elbow, which lost a couple layers of skin. He's watching "The Return of the Jedi" and secretly loving all the attention.
  
• I'm halfway through Persuasion and I have to keep reminding myself to wait to watch the movie until I'm completely finished. Don't ask why I'm so rigid about this, because I don't know. Persuasion is the last book in my First Annual Jane Austen Re-Read, and I'm at a bit of a loss for what to start next. I've been kind of hankering after Watership Down. We'll see.

• C's birthday just crept up and smacked me over the head. It's a week and a half away and once again I haven't worked out any party details yet. T and I will talk about it tonight and I'll call/email the invitations tomorrow.
  
• The weather finally cooled down. It is a positively GORGEOUS day -- blue skies, puffy clouds, cloud shadows, low 70's. It even sprinkled a little last night, and there were some really impressive dark clouds. I wish it was like this all year.
• We had our first really GOOD school day today. No scolding, no meltdowns, no struggles. I was beginning to think that those kind of school days were a thing of the past. Can we say "relieved"?
  

soli deo gloria

I just got back from a Christian ladies' retreat at this place. Wow. I am still trying to get my brain and spirit around all the stuff I encountered there. I prayerfully believe that my life is going to be very different from now on. I had an amazing time, even though I enjoyed it in a completely different way from how I thought I might, when I thought I might enjoy it at all, which I didn't think I really would.


Signing off for the immediate future and I don't know exactly when I'll be back.

Wednesday, September 15, 2004

in memory of Sammy

I was actually about to sit down at the computer this morning to do another Sheriff's Report entry (snake in a church this time, just for variety) when I got a sobering phone call from our church's prayer chain. A little boy, seven years old, who's been in my kids' Sunday school classes and Awana group for years, had been in a carpool on the way to school when there was an accident and he was injured. Then a few hours later the call came in that he had died. I just can't get his parents out of my mind. All through the day, all the ordinary stuff like dealing with the onset of my period, and wondering if our cat is sick (I'm thinking yes), and struggling with a pot of beans that just won't cook right (I have the worst luck with beans. Give me a complicated recipe involving wine and mushrooms and reducing and I do fine. But pinto beans confound me every time) and doing laundry and all that, all these things were just put on over the top of an underlying vicarious agony. As I was kissing my kids after they got into their jammies tonight, I thought of that couple's empty arms tonight (the boy was their only child) and just cried. People will surround them and do everything they can for them and love them, but it just has the feeling of trying to thaw a glacier with candles, or something. So inadequate. And our pain at not being able to do anything is just so inconsequential compared to theirs. It doesn't make me mad at God. It doesn't even really make me question what He's doing; I've been there and questioned that and moved on. But it just makes things seem bleak. Life, this life that gives us the opportunity to absorb beauty and feel passion and love people, can also be just so stark and horrible. And yet I am the lucky one this time around -- I'm touched relatively lightly by this boy's death. It hurts me indirectly; I am pained by other people's pain. I can go on with my day and do all the things that need doing. There are worlds of difference between being an onlooker to grief -- painful as that is -- and grieving oneself. Again I'm struck with the different feel this day will have for them, forever. The surreality of watching everyone else go on as normal -- people saying oh God I am so sorry and anything we can do just ask and then going home to their normal lives that haven't been turned upside down, just shaken a little -- and especially the people who don't even know, who are walking down the street when they're driving home from the hospital, who are not going away from their child's deathbed and probably never will and will not ever know that there was anything out of the ordinary about this day at all. And I think how often, how almost every minute of my life, I'm in that category for so many people. Tragedy happens every second, just not to us. While I'm watching P&P and folding laundry, some woman's getting a phone call that makes her scream and rock and sob and changes her life forever. For the sake of our sanity we can't bear to think about that for long; we just have to walk down the street, and fold our laundry, and wait to deal with the pain when it's our turn.


I didn't mean to go into all that. I just started typing and it all came out. I think it was good for me, so I'll leave it. Sorry for the downer this time ... come back another time for more of the usual sunny self-deprecating humor. I'm sure my life will be completely normal in very short order. For what that's worth.

Monday, September 13, 2004

it's my own stupid fault.

I am almost never bored, but I am bored right now. This is because I don't feel like I should allow myself to do what I want to do (read Mansfield Park) until I've done what I ought to do (wash dishes and do data entry), and yet I really, really do not want to do the things I ought to do, so I sit here fiddling on the computer and essentially doing nothing. It's as if it doesn't count as wasting time unless I'm enjoying it.


I had an emotional rollercoaster of a day. It's all too complicated and boring to go into in any detail, so I'll summarize it as: I panicked when I thought we might have to move out of this house soon and I realized how un-ready we are financially to do that and how few options were available to us and how much I love this house, even though I hate it. Then I found out, fortunately, that we shouldn't plan on having to move after all, basically because our landlord is either very lazy, very kind, or clinically insane. I'm going with a combination of lazy and kind, because I like the guy. But there has to be an element of insanity as well, I guess, because if you could get a 2000% return on a 30-year-old emotion-free investment with minimal hassle to yourself, wouldn't you? But he won't bother. Thank God for that. I did, however, find out the REAL reason that renting sucks. It's not that you're throwing money away. That's minor compared to the fact that you're at the mercy of a property owner's whims and could be made to move out at any time whether you want to or not. Criminy, it's like I just figured out that I'm living in feudal England, or 19th-century Ireland, or something. [insert "Far and Away" theme music here.]. And what was most upsetting about today was really fully realizing how stupid the mistakes were that T and I made early in our marriage. We built up a ton of consumer debt, and that took so long to pay off (although we finally did pay it off) that by the time we reached the point where we could afford to buy, the market had gone nuts and we couldn't afford it anymore. Five years ago our landlord offered to sell us this house for a hundred thousand dollars (he bought it in the seventies for $14,000, yes, that's 14 with three zeroes). We couldn't do it then because we were still working our butts off to pay off our earlier fiscal frivolity (and, honestly, still being a bit frivolous at the same time). And now there is no way we could afford to buy this house or any other house in California, both because we are determined that I will not work outside the home, and because the California real estate market has taken a few too many hits from the ol' crack pipe. And it's all our own stupid fault for being in debt and not being able to buy when the market was still sane. Damn. Young people take note: Do not heed the siren song of instant gratification from the credit-card goddesses. Unless you happen to be the type of person who likes having lots of things to regret later. In which case go right ahead.



Wow. Didn't I say I wasn't going to go into all that?


All the other sources of stress are still hanging around also*. Which sucks. But they're buried enough that I manage not to think about them until I wake up at three o'clock in the morning and can't get back to sleep.

The good news, though, is that my life is just so unsinkably cheerful that I still feel happy, in the balance of things. Either I have a deep source of joy that goes beyond circumstances, or I'm happily deluded. I'm going with option A.

Sunday, September 12, 2004

happy in spite of ourselves

Just had one of those agonizing (for everyone) bedtime struggles to get saline spray in LT's nose (which, by the way, is the doctor's suggestion for the nosebleeds. If they don't stop with twice-daily saline and petroleum jelly, she'll refer him to an ENT to have his nose cauterized). I so remember being a little kid and having things like that be such an enormous THING to be afraid of. Although generally where medicine was concerned, I was more in the "this is an adventure!" school, like C is now. Come to think of it I'm that way about a lot of things that are actually negative experiences, like roller coasters, power outages, big storms, fires, required overnight absences for T, illness on my part (not anyone else's, though), etc. I'm always glad when things get back to normal, but there's a very small part of me that regrets the loss of the "differentness" of whatever was going on. I guess I just like things to be un-ordinary. I rearrange furniture for fun too.


My hair smells so nice right now. I have mentioned before that I buy a different scent of shampoo and conditioner every time I need to replenish our supply. So C and I are now using coconut-scented stuff. Yay Suave for all the smelly goodness that is its selection of shampoos. Coconut is on my list of things that smell way, way better than they taste (along with brewing coffee and fresh-turned dirt. Not that I've tasted dirt. Not on purpose, anyway). Coconut shampoo and coconut suntan lotion: bliss. Fresh coconut: eh. Sweetened coconut or coconut flavored anything: puke.


I hate being broke. We have so many big-ticket items on our needs/serious wants list right now. I have had the same eyeglass prescription for going on six years now, and it's considerably less effective than it once was. T also needs new glasses. We have three dressers in our house (T and I share a six-drawer low chest) and not one of them is big enough to hold all our clothes, and not one has all its drawers functioning either. Our refrigerator has been acting very suspiciously lately; it is supposed to be frost-free but it's, um, NOT, and it is constantly running, and stuff like ice cream and popsicles kept in the freezer are not as solid as they are supposed to be. These things are an underlying source of stress for T and myself but we have no way (short of going into [more than our very small current amount of] debt which we keep swearing we will NOT do) of remedying this situation. I'm not asking for contributions. Just venting. As awful as it is to say it, if T got assigned to a big fire, the two weeks' overtime generated would take care of everything nicely. It would, however, also involve two weeks of us missing him madly, and him missing us madly while also working fourteen insanely busy 16-hour days in a row. So it's not a great solution. Which is just as well, since we can't exactly bring it about on our own.


Other underlying sources of stress:

• the stupid mistake on the part of the people who issue vouchers for reduced rates for cat spay/neutering, which is keeping us from being able to put our cats outside, and also causing them to continue to be in constant heat and pee everywhere in our house.
  
• heat. heat heat heat.
  
• wondering why exactly we're so broke right now. We shouldn't be. We feel like we've been staying pretty close to our budget. So now we have that feeling of self-loathing that comes when we blow it, along with the feeling of indignation because we don't feel like we blew it, but apparently we did.
  
• the local real estate market which went berserk just before we reached our THIS IS THE MOMENT WE'VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR moment when we were actually going to start looking for a house. And which makes us worry that our landlord, who lives in the Bay Area, will catch on to the housing boom and stop nosing around the idea of selling this house like he has for the past five years and actually put it on the market, forcing us to move into a place that would either have way less space or cost a lot more, and which also would not be the place where we brought our babies home from the hospital and spent the first ten years of our married life together and a whole lot of other silly sentimental stuff like that. And which makes us worry that we'll either have to move out of state or rent for the rest of our lives.
  
• heat again. It needs mentioning twice. It's September now. Can we get a little reprieve please? I'm not asking for rain or anything, I'm certainly not going to presume that far before, say, the end of October, but something less than ninety-nine degrees would be, well, nice. That's all I'm saying.
  
• School.
  
• The messy house.
  
• This panicky middle-of-the-night worry I get -- previously titled Nameless Dread except nowadays it takes the form of either very detailed fear of a terrorist attack, or fear that I am an awful parent and my children are going to grow up with all kinds of issues because of the kind of parent I am, and that maybe they should already be in therapy to kind of head things off.
  
• LT's and T's health problems, for lack of a better term. (LT: nosebleeds and tics, and some pretty severe social anxiety, which [anxiety] is a serious underlying factor in the abovementioned panicky midnight worrying. T: that weird sugar thing.)
  
• My dad's health.
  
• My grandmother's health.
  
• Worry about my dear dear friend and her hurricane-wrecked house, and Ivan the Terrible possibly bearing down on them as we speak.
  
• The fact that I can't seem to have a normal woman-to-woman friendship to save my life, and what's wrong with me that makes it where the only people who both live near me and are close friends with me are related to me by blood or marriage?
  
• Did I mention the heat?
  

Oddly enough, in spite of all this underlying stress, we are generally quite happy and life goes on normally, except when T talks himself and me into making him a dessert that turns him into a grumpy bear until he can pass out. Praise God for that normalcy anyway.

Saturday, September 11, 2004

I am so dirty.

(this is my 300th entry! Happy entry-versary to me!)


I am so dirty. I am just filthy. (not like THAT, in case anyone has a dirty mind.) I am so dirty that if LT were not also filthy right now, he would be jealous. We have been working hard since early this morning, loading scrap metal (carburetors, pipe, two partial vehicles, a truck frame, and everything imaginary in between) into trucks and into trailers and then using our extensive knowledge of graduate-level physics (ha!) along with a Hi-Lift Jack and more muscles than I knew I had and a round water tank, to get the stuff off the trailers and out of the trucks. I am so sore, and quite sunburned, and did I mention I'm dirty? I am. Very. And now I'm going to take a long lukewarm shower and feel all helpful and powerful and hard-working and stuff, and then I'm going to barbecue.


updated to add: I am now all spiffy and clean. However, as if hauling around rusty metal (which would have been collectible if it hadn't been sitting around gathering rust since World War II), and then spending a considerable amount of time in a wrecking yard that makes your local Pick-A-Part look like a Lexus showroom, would not have sufficed: my neck? is really and truly, um, red.

Thursday, September 09, 2004

stress and nosebleeds

I have a very good reason for not having updated since Monday night. That reason is that I have been wanting to plant plastique explosives in my head, just to relieve the stress, but I couldn't figure out how to stick it in through my ears.


I homeschool my two kids (that would be the "hsing" part of "hsing-mom", just in case you ever wondered if maybe I was just a very poor speller. Which I'm not). One of the joys of this educational and parenting choice is that I can start the school year when I want to. For us, this is the Tuesday after Labor Day, because by golly that's when school should start. This whole beginning-of-August thing is for the birds. ANyway. That means that this last Tuesday was our first day of school. Tuesday arrived after a really busy wacky extremely-extended weekend involving company, a Wednesday-morning wedding, my first attempt at garment alterations, a trip to Yosemite, a county fair, a destruction derby which was an exercise in anger management, an afternoon sitting in a booth reading for four hours (yay!), a family dinner and walk, and the formation of a pile of dirty laundry which rivaled Mt. Fuji in scope (and smelled much worse.). I had not quite succeeded in gluing my head back on straight after this mostly-pleasant whirlwind of activity when all of a sudden WHAM the Tuesday after Labor Day was staring me in the face. And my two students Did Not Want to start school. School lasted till after four o'clock on Tuesday, and nearly as long on Wednesday, and I was really glad about the way I've always run off at the mouth about how I'll never put my kids in public school, because otherwise I'd pretty much have been wanting to throw my principles out the window and go enroll them as soon as the office opened Thursday morning. However. Wednesday night everyone else went to a potluck while I stayed home to try to regain my sanity. I knew I'd left it around here somewhere. I found it at the bottom of a basket of clean laundry during the scene in "Pride and Prejudice" where Mr. Darcy has just come upon Elizabeth by surprise at Pemberley and he's all flummoxed and asks twice about her family because he's so unlike his usual smooth, under-control self, because he adores her so madly. (that is my kind of man. Those who know my husband casually would never guess how completely he can become undone. But oh boy do I know it.)


So I felt better this morning. And school went much more pleasantly today -- less pulling teeth and more aha! moments. It IS fun to see my little mini-me plowing through Bob books in a way that bodes well for HER future literariness -- I absolutely cannot wait for her to have a crush on a character in a book. yay. My first book-character crush was Justin in Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh, followed closely by Stan in Fifteen. Who was yours? :-) And LT had rounding in math today, instead of place value, which was where much of the teeth-pulling and hair-tearing had happened for the first two days. And I just felt much more sane and it's alarming how much this household responds to my moods. When Mommy ain't sane, ain't NOBODY sane. Or something.


I can't believe I just typed the word "ain't", even in a quote-adaptation kind of way. Twice. My fingers are itching to go delete it.


Tonight LT got another nosebleed. He gets them A LOT. We had a doctor's appointment set for him for last week, because in the last month the nosebleeds have really picked up in intensity until they're pretty much a daily or twice-daily experience. But then two days before the appointment, I set up the humidifier in LT's room, and for those two days he had zero nosebleeds... so I thought I'd solved the problem. However, pretty much the very moment after I cancelled the appointment, his nose started plotting Act II, and he's had them again every day or twice a day since Thursday. (which didn't add to the Weekend-O-Sanity, might I add). Tonight he had one that lasted an hour, and they NEVER last that long, they always go away after five minutes, except for the few that continue till ten minutes, which cause a little licking flame of fear to start up somewhere in my lower intestines and work its way upward until the bleeding (which, at least, is never substantial in quantity) stops. Tonight I was successfully putting on the the patented Casual Mom (Let's Not Scare The Poor Kid) act, while inside I was starting to do some serious freaking out. So we will again try to brave the doctor's office tomorrow, just to get things checked out. I'm sure these aren't a symptom of something really serious, because he has, well, no other symptoms of anything serious, but they are an enormous hassle and they're scary (although Anxiety Boy is remarkably cool when they're going on -- he's just gotten so used to them) and they can't be good for him so we're going to see what can maybe be done to stop them. So any prayers and good thoughts you'd want to send our way would be much appreciated. Especially since we don't actually have an appointment, and we get to drive to the valley in the hundred-degree heat and hope we get seen, which is not ordinarily something I ever try to do.


I so totally meant to be in bed half an hour ago. ack.

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Monday, September 06, 2004

just a few pictures from an evening walk

We went to my parents' tonight for dinner and went on the usual post-dessert walk. I love evening light for taking pictures.

"If we were as tall as our shadows
How tall our shadows would be"
--"Emily", Emily Climbs
L.M. Montgomery





The kids had traced my shadow on the ground, and then my nephews had drawn my face and hair. Watch out that you don't turn to stone.






Soldiers on the march -- the biggest boy has his air rifle just in case any persnickety varmints present themselves for destruction; the littler ones have sticks to draw "traps" in the road for Grandpa.

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Friday, September 03, 2004

the fair

Before I get started on the stuff about the Fair, I wanted to show a picture of THE DRESS. The person wearing it really does have a face -- a quite pretty face, with a little 50's flip, and a cute glittery veil* -- but since I don't have her permission yet I'm not showing it to you all. Anyway. Did I mention, THE DRESS IS DONE?


*in my head this description is in the voice of the Knights who say Ni, describing the shrubbery :)

Without further ado:

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Now. It is odd about the fair. I remember being a little kid and the whole year revolved around two events: Christmas and the Fair. Back then it was all about the rides. My brother and I would go through forty tickets each a night on the Scrambler and the Hammer and the Holy Grail of rides, the zipper [heavenly chord]. We looked forward to the fair so much that we had a huge post-holiday syndrome afterward, thinking how long it would be till the next one. We spent every possible minute there. We couldn't understand my parents who actually for some reason wanted to leave before closing time, and we would whine and argue about it all the way home in the car.


Now, I am that parent. Except the kids don't whine, largely because it's never occurred to them that we could stay much past dark. It's so noisy, and so crowded, and there's so much foul language (I swear I heard a group of way-pre-teen boys -- probably between eight and ten -- spouting off the F word like they were aspiring gangsta rappers), and between the country music blaring out of the beer garden, and the metal blaring out of the teen rides, you can't hear yourself think, and drunk people collide with you, you could feed a small African nation for a week for the cost of dinner for a family of four, and I could go on. However, there are some high points to make it worth it for a few hours, and here they are:





This one really doesn't have anything to do with the fair. She's just so darn cute.

Just for a total change of pace, LT was shouting cowboyish things like "Yee-haw" and "Giddap!" while C was pulling the whole I'm-scared-Mommy-don't-take-your-hands-off-me routine.

However, the real thing (if you can call sitting on a bored pony who's harnessed to a metal thingamajig and riding around in a plodding circle "the real thing") didn't phase her a bit...

More yee-haws and giddaps, but quietly...

LT won Best of Show for Lego creations in his age group with this oliphaunt. He made it completely from scratch out of his own head -- well, his, Tolkein's, and Peter Jackson's. Needless to say we're totally proud of him and he's very pleased.

Here's a better picture. Check out the little eyes, and the guys riding it. :)

The petting zoo sheep knew exactly what was in the little plastic cup LT was carrying around and by golly he wanted his share of it.

I was heaving a sigh of relief at his bravery here. He had a great time and totally forgot to be nervous. We won't talk about the Super Slide, though. :-|

The big event for tomorrow is the destruction derby. I'm taking LT and one of his friends. I get almost as excited about the fair as I used to be as a child, when I remember that hallelujah, it marks the end of destruction derby season, and I get my husband back on evenings and weekends again. :) This year hasn't been so bad; he takes LT with him which is fun for both of them, and their work went relatively smoothly. Except that he ended up working on other people's derby cars for them, almost more than he did on his own team's. This is perhaps the only sport where competitors have been known to help each other to win. Even tonight he is off at someone else's house doing last-minute fixing on a car that he'll hope to have just beaten at this time tomorrow. What a guy. :)

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