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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.
