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Monday, February 28, 2005

Stupid Thing Number Five Gazillion

I don't make nearly as many stupid mistakes as I used to. Really I don't. But tonight I did a doozy.

I was at community chorus rehearsal and the director was going over some instructions for an upcoming concert. I was sitting next to a homeschooling friend of mine, and we were already clear on the instructions he was giving, so we were being Underachieving Troublemakers, and chatting (as were three-quarters of the rest of the group). I mentioned that I was tired because T had had to go in to work so late last night and I'd stayed awake till he got home.

(At this point I have to interrupt myself and explain something. T's dad has exactly the same name as T. T's dad lives in our town and for the past year or so has been a real estate agent. EVERY SINGLE DAY someone will come up to T at work, and frequently to me as I go about my business around town, and make some comment about how T must be really busy with a full-time job PLUS a real estate business. This is small-town life for you. Anyway, we are really tired of explaining this situation. Back to the story.)

So my friend said, "Well, T is a realtor, right? What's he have to do in the middle of the night?"

I rolled my eyes, kind of snorted, and said, "That's my FATHER-IN-LAW, my FATHER-IN-LAW," in this semi-mock-annoyed tone of voice.

Right as the rest of the choir fell utterly silent and everyone including the director was staring directly at me, being the really bad (and loud, now that the room was silent) underachiever who was talking to her neighbor instead of paying attention to the teacher. It was really embarrassing. They probably think I run with scissors and waste paste, too.

Breaking out of a rut

Lately I have been in a serious cooking rut. I began to dread the inevitable "What's for dinner?" when T would call me from work. The family would gather around me like baby birds with their mouths wide open, and I would throw in some hot dogs or a take-and-bake pizza or the occasional batch of spaghetti and run screaming from the room. I WAS TIRED OF IT, the neediness and yet the pickiness.

But when it comes right down to it, it's not really pickiness. Someone in our household (and I'm not naming names but I may happen to be married to him) just has really weirdo tastes in food. Here is a short sampling of the list of foods he doesn't like me to cook (note: if you happen to have ever cooked any of these things for my husband, don't feel bad. He doesn't HATE them. He just prefers when he's home and has some control, not to have to eat them.):

• Roast beef, and any of its trimmings (including really awesome potatoes roasted along with the meat. Right there, that shows you that something is wrong with him)
  
• Chicken pot pies, even yummy homemade ones
  
• Meatloaf, even really GOOD meatloaf, not the bricks of hamburger and oatmeal with ketchup slathered on top that defined meatloaf in the house where he grew up
  
• Baked potatoes
  
• Scalloped potatoes
  
• Any kind of potatoes except for a) mashed or b)Lipton onion roasted
  
• Soup, except clam chowder, which, hello, costs as much to make as a dinner out, so why cook?
  
• Stew
  

So I figured that I would stop teasing him and haranguing him about all his weird issues about food (we've been married eleven years and for nearly all that time I've worked very hard to try to convince him that just because his mother didn't know how to cook something doesn't mean that it isn't a worthwhile dish), and I had him make a list of foods he does like. Said list follows.

• Pancakes.
• Spaghetti.
• Pancakes.
• French toast which he can't eat because it has eggs in a recognizable eggy format, which for some reason cause his hiatal hernia to flare up to "hospitalization" levels
• Lipton Onion Roasted Potatoes
• Tacos
• Pancakes.
• Biscuits and gravy
• Chicken Marsala with Italian red sauce
• and let's not forget pancakes.

(if I could make a little cartoon drawing of myself with smoke above my head, I would put it here.)

So last night I pulled out this box of recipe cards that T bought before we got together. It was one of those things where they send you a sample set and explain that for X number of dollars a month you keep getting more and more cards until you have *fanfare* THE ULTIMATE RECIPE COLLECTION. He thought, hey, women like men who cook, and since he was in the market for a wife, he signed up and paid the X dollars for a couple of years until he figured out that he would be receiving recipes until he died, and that he had never used a single one of these (rather expensive) cards, at which time he canceled. A few years later I inherited this collection when I married him (and all he had in the refrigerator was a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter, and a jar of jam. He did have some really cool T-Fal pans, though). I never used them much -- I had first my trusty Betty Crocker cookbook and then the Internet to tell me how to make pancakes, spaghetti, chicken marsala, and French toast. ANYWAY. Last night I pulled out these cards and sat on the couch while he sat next to me, fiddling on the computer, and we played flash cards. Anything I thought he MIGHT not dislike, I would hold it up and he would say "OK" or "No way". When we were done I had a stack of about sixty recipes to try. Not bad, and it's way better than giving up and making spaghetti. Again.

Tonight I made "Southwestern Chicken Wraps" which were actually really good. Or maybe I was just really hungry, I dunno.

Books read in February

They didn't all get reviewed this month, but at least I'm keeping my resolution and writing them all down...

1. 2/3: finished Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (read aloud) -- Robert C. O'Brien -- 4.5 -- 233 pages
   • I first encountered this book in the third grade, after I had already become rather obsessed with reading the books on which movies were based to find all the things I missed in the movie. The mid-80's cartoon made from this story is a pale, overdrawn shadow of the original, which is understated, humorous, serious, fascinating, and altogether wonderful. Every time I read it (and that's a lot of times), I fall into the world of the mice and rats and live in it until I am done. The pages of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH contain adventure, pathos, energy, and completely knowable characters -- including a certain VERY crush-worthy rat. The "moral lessons are couched in this very real fantasy story without even a breath of overbearing preachiness or condescension. This is truly a book for adults and children to cherish.
   
   
2. 2/5: finished Anne of Green Gables -- L.M. Montgomery -- 5 -- 301 pages
   
   
   
3. 2/6: Go Ahead, Secret Seven -- Enid Blyton -- 4.5 -- (book on tape)
   
   
   
   


4. 2/8: What To Keep -- Rachel Cline -- 3 -- 304 pages
   • I'm the first person to admit that I read a lot of "chick books", in among the other genres I enjoy. And this seemed like standard chick-book fare -- divorce, hints at borderline sexual abuse, a problematic relationship between a girl/woman and her mother, the death of a substitute mother, the adoption of her teenaged son -- with a few twists, but it was told in such a cumbersome way that at times I had a hard time getting through it. The prose simply didn't flow well for me. However, for what it is, it was worth reading once, and I did enjoy some aspects of it.
   
   
5. 2/11: Life of Pi -- Yann Martel -- 4.5 -- 319 pages
   • This novel has earned so much international attention that it seems like anything I could say about it would be laughably miniature in scope. I will say that the final section of the story transformed it, for me, from an enjoyable, quirky, sometimes very violent adventure story, into an absolute masterpiece of a novel, one that leaves the reader thinking, chewing the plot, savoring the taste, studying all the levels and parallels and saying, "but what..." and "oh, of course." I finished reading this before falling asleep, and every time I woke in the night my mind was filled with thoughts of Pi. If that's not the mark of a good book, I don't know what is. (Philosophically speaking, this is definitely a book to be read with discernment, and it has some very disturbing (gory) moments. For thinking adults, though, even with that caveat, I still see it as a really worthwhile read.)
   
   
6. 2/13: Firefly Summer -- Maeve Binchy -- 5 -- 601 pages
   • I think every time I read a Maeve Binchy book I have a new favorite. Well, not quite. But this definitely ranks high on my list of favorites of her books. The cast of characters is miles long and by the fourth chapter you feel like you've known them all your life; the story is just complicated enough and with enough twists to keep it interesting without feeling too contrived. The driving strength in most of Binchy's books is, for me, the dialogue. Nobody writes it like she does, so naturally and with just enough of an Irish sound to it to make it seem quirky to my American ears, without being overdone. The interactions between her characters, and her characters themselves, are so real that the strange circumstances in which they will always find themselves as long as she is writing about them seem as familiar to me as my own life does.
   
   
7. Fahrenheit 451 -- Ray Bradbury -- 4.5
   • I think of this book as the third in a trilogy of mid-20th-century futuristic morality tales. Whereas 1984 was a study of totalitarian government, and Brave New World was a warning about taking science and technology too far, Fahrenheit 451 delves more into the social dangers Bradbury saw as he looked into a future dominated by television and political correctness, where reading became less and less popular until finally nobody cared when the government banned it. This is a stirring book, one that will make you think. Of course Bradbury didn't get everything right in his horrifying vision of the not-too-distant future. But that doesn't make it any less chilling.

That list goes up through about the fifteenth. Then I started Les Misérables. Hey, I'm halfway through...
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our weekend in pictures

Well, it's 3 a.m. and I'm at the computer. I have a good reason to (still) be up -- honest I do! T was called into work at 11 p.m. because, it turns out, a power outage caused some problems with radio transmission thingamabobs, and since he works in telecommunications, radio transmission thingamabobs are his job. (You can see by my extensive use of technical terminology that his knowledge has rubbed off on me a really whole lot, can't you.) He just called and said he's heading home, so he should be here within an hour or so. I just hope he doesn't have to turn around and go back in at 6AM like usual.

We had a really nice weekend up until about four hours ago. ;-) Yesterday we went with my parents to pick oranges at their neighbor's house. She is an elderly woman whose ranch, including the orange orchard, has been in her family for a hundred years (literally, this year). She can't pick the oranges herself anymore, so it's become tradition for our extended family (and a few others we drag along each year) to go do it for her when the oranges are ripe. Here are a few of the last pictures I'll be taking with my dinosaur of a digital camera before my wonderful anniversary present arrives this week:

This picture shows not only a very good reason why I need a new digital camera, but also the view from the top of the orange tree I was picking. It's harder to stand fifteen feet up a ladder and take a picture than you might think. :)

The person who finds the smallest orange each year "wins". We're not sure exactly what the person wins -- bragging rights? The first turn in the lunch buffet? (mmm, fried chicken this year. It's a good deal for all concerned -- the neighbor gets her orange crop in and we all a lot of exercise, enough oranges to last us quite a while, and five extra pounds apiece thanks to the fantastic lunch she cooks up for us.)

Cows in the road. How often do you encounter that on the way to work?

Back at my parents' ranch, we spent some time splitting wood, because we were nearly to the point of burning our furniture at home. Here are LT and C helping my dad drive the tractor into the shed to get the splitter.

We recently made a very important discovery at my parents'. Namely that straw on a steep slope is just as good as snow for tobogganing. Visits to Grandpa's will never be the same again.

C tied her shoes by herself for the first time after dinner on Saturday. That screeching sound you heard at about 6:00 Pacific time was my daughter running around to everyone in the house (and that was a lot of people) shrieking about her accomplishment.

Friday, February 25, 2005

Resolution

I did this before, when my children were much smaller, and while I stuck to it my spiritual life was the better for it. So I'm going to resolve again that each day, I will not do any fiction reading OR turn on the computer until I have read my daily three chapters of the Bible, as well as reading through the chapter I'll be summarizing at Bible study the following Wednesday. (ask me sometime about chapter summaries and how fantastic that method of study is.)

This means that if you see a post from me, or a comment, or if you otherwise discern I'm online, you can feel free to hold me accountable by starting a discussion with me about my Bible reading for that morning (if anyone wants to check up on me via instant messaging I'll gladly email you my Yahoo ID). ;-)
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Questions from Kristen

1) What book (in the last year) has most impacted your relationship with God (excluding the Bible)?

Well. Most of the actual book-reading I do is novels, some of which affect me positively spiritually (like Jane Eyre, or the Mitford books, and I'm reading Les Misérables right now, for example), some of which are neutral (Austen and many others) and some of which I frankly maybe shouldn't be exposing myself to. Every bit of garbage I put in my head stays there, whether I'm "reading with discernment" or not. Something to think about. ANYWAY. As far as what I've read that's most affected my relationship with God, well, Kristen, your journal would be high on the list. ;-)

2) If you could choose a country to live in other than your current home country, which would it be, and why?

That would be really hard. America has its faults but I do love it, and frankly I can't think of another first-world nation whose policies and lifestyle aren't even further from my ideal than the U.S. is, with the possible exception of Israel, and that's no place to move right now, when you have kids. Maybe in Africa or South America, as a missionary?

3) If you were sent to the Isle of Patmos for the rest of your life and could only bring ONE BOOK of the Bible, which would it be? Why?

This is the question I've been thinking about the most since I first read these questions, and I'd have to answer Psalms. For one thing, it's the longest, and I like variety. ;-) For another, there's a little bit of everything in Psalms -- lots of comfort, plenty of conviction, BIG views of God, personal views of God, prophecies about Jesus, it's all there. So if I could only have ONE, that would probably be it.

4) What was your favorite movie, book, or character as a child?

In early childhood, I liked Laura Ingalls Wilder, the Narnia books, and a whole lot of assorted kids' books like Mr. Popper's Penguins, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, The Phantom Tollbooth, and Blue Willow (note: with the possible exception of The Phantom Tollbooth, I am still enormously fond of all of these books today). Later I discovered Anne (of Green Gables, of course), and as a teenager I added Dickens to my list of favorites, on the strength of David Copperfield and Great Expectations. And let's not forget the obligatory worldy-teenager fit of literary angst which included a profound admiration of John Steinbeck and the socialism he stood for. Ouch.

That's what you get for asking me to pick a favorite. :)

5) What's your very 'favoritest' thing to eat?

Oh, no! You did it again! :)

Probably the food that I MOST love to have in my mouth, no matter what my mood is and dietary considerations aside, is REALLY GOOD cookies-and-cream ice cream over a warm walnut brownie with hot fudge and whipped cream on top.

Thanks for the questions (and everything else as well), Kristen! :)
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Why another online journal?

The Lord has been working in me lately. A lot.

I can't really say "it all started with...", because, well, it all started before the foundation of time, when you really get down to it, and God has been working through events my entire life to bring me into first any relationship at all with him, and then to bring me closer and mold me into the woman He wants me to be. I am, like every follower of Jesus (and every other person, really) a work in progress. However. The most recent chain of events which have brought me to this point where I can feel myself being drawn nearer to Him started with, of all things, a really offensive cartoon about homeschooling, and my response to it. Some of the people who commented on my response left links to their journals, and those journals had links to OTHER journals, and just... wow. These are women who are not afraid to put it all out there for Jesus, and who defend the gospel eloquently and with humor, and who also are likeable people in their own right. I think I developed about four friend-crushes in the space of two hours.

Now, I've been a Christian for twelve years this month. I went through the standard phase at the beginning of my Christian walk when I was really passionate and really in love with Jesus and really vocal about it and also really clueless about how to be anything but very heavy-handed with the gospel. I was everything that annoys non-Christians about Christians, really, with very sharp edges and very little understanding of other positions. Fast-forward ten or eleven years and basically I had the opposite set of problems. I had allowed myself to be immersed in the world so much and for so long, and I was out of the Word, and basically my Christian walk was a façade of church and Bible-study attendance and teaching my children about Jesus, over a morass of uncertainty and apathy. I wasn't witnessing, not just because of the standard fear of rejection but because I had honestly fallen into a trap of not really believing that it was important. I was essentially giving lip-service to being a Christian. Well, not exactly, because my life (from a distance, at least, if you didn't look too closely at how I spent my time and what I read and what I watched and the words that would slip out of my mouth) was also "on the straight and narrow". I was never unfaithful to my husband even in thought; I never stopped going to church or doing my weekly Bible study. But I was at first appalled, and then later I shrugged, at how infrequently I opened the Bible when it didn't directly involve one of those two events. I had no private devotions or prayer time. My online journal was full of posts that bordered on disrespect for God and certainly didn't give any solid impression of myself as a woman who was devoted to Him -- because I wasn't.

You know, in reading over that, it sounds a lot harsher than it was. There was nothing harsh about it. It was all very soggy really. Squishy. Undefined. My whole spiritual life was like wet newspaper.

Then last fall I was "roped into" going to a ladies' retreat. My mom paid for me to go; I assumed she was going as well, and then found out that indeed I was going to go off on my own with some near-strangers from our church to spend three days with a lot of TOTAL strangers, worshiping Jesus and learning about him. Now remember, I had my façade in place, although I think those closest to me knew something of the wet-newspaper-consistency mess that was underneath it, so this wasn't something along the lines of Let's Send Rachel Off To Get Right With God. I think my mom saw it as a way for me to get closer to God, because as I said I think she figured that I was not at the top of my game spiritually speaking, but I don't think she knew how riddled with doubt I was, or how very squishy my Christian walk had become. She just figured that if I were there alone (and if you know me at all you know that I do not mix well. I don't mind being ALONE alone, in fact I like it from time to time, what mother doesn't? but one of the worst places for me to be, comfort-wise, is in a large group of people where I am not friends with anybody, but everyone else there is friends with someone else. THAT is the worst possible kind of alone there is, to someone who had the experiences in elementary school and junior high that I did) it would throw me into God's arms pretty hard.

And it did. When I first got there I was nearly despondent; it was exactly as I had pictured it would be. Three hundred well-kept, stylishly-dressed, put-together women, calling out HELLO!! and It's so great to SEE you!! to each other, and then (homely, unattractive, awkward -- these words come FLOODING to mind when I am in this kind of situation) me, wandering around alone, making occasional snippets of meaningless conversation with the handful of women with whom I was acquainted, when I happened to encounter a chattering group of them. My paper journal from those first few hours is filled with words like "exile" and "reject". Then we went to the first evening's worship/teaching session -- and God reached down his arms and hugged me to him in a way that still brings tears to my eyes when I think of it. The rest of the weekend was amazing. I was no less alone physically -- I didn't miraculously turn around and make a dozen new best pinky-swear friends with whom I meet regularly for tea, or anything like that. But I spent the next forty hours or so in a kind of communion with God that I hadn't experienced in years. I couldn't go twenty minutes without crying. God revealed Himself to me in ways that brought me back trembling to worship at His feet and thank Him for my salvation and His love for me. I spent my alone time reading the Bible (and Persuasion too, OK, I was nearing the end of my annual Jane Austen re-read, but a LOT of the time it was the Bible), and praying. I won't lie to you and say that I never felt lonely again that weekend. I did. But God used that loneliness in a mighty way.

The problem was that the retreat ended. I couldn't spend the rest of my life in that painful kind of situation that sent me running to God until I was so happily out of breath -- nor would I want to. But coming back home took a bit of the glory out of the experience. I was back to the same life, the same situations, and it became easier and easier as the days went by to slough off the defined edges I'd regained at the retreat, and slide back toward sogginess. The doubts didn't return, I'll say that much, but over the course of months from then till now, I found it easier and easier to slip into old habits rather than stand out for Jesus. I'll be honest and say that much of it is simple fear -- that people won't like me, mostly. I want my online friends (some of whom are people I have known at one point or another in real life, while others aren't) to think I'm funny and clever, not to see me as one of those boring judgmental "born-agains". If I'd been confronted by it, I wouldn't have put it in those words exactly; I'd have sugar-coated it with things like "not wanting to alienate people with whom I might be able to share the gospel" -- until the last couple of days, reading these other journals by these Christian women, when I have been having a different sort of spiritual renewal -- one where I honestly assess my situation and find it lacking indeed. No fireworks, just a flashlight that shines into the corners and shows up all my spiderwebs.

So, in answer to the question that is the title of this post, this journal is going to be a chronicle of my movement back toward a walk that is truly "in newness of life". By the grace of God, I know I can do it. "Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come." (2 Corinthians 5:17)

way to blow it, wal-mart.com

Well, I guess that whole we-don't-buy-anniversary-presents thing is out the window. Last year I got the cell phone, which was a total surprise and hence I, in keeping with the previous nine years of tradition, did not get anything for T, and felt like a total heel. Not a sexy stiletto heel either, more like a worn-out Converse gym sneaker heel. But then I just found out that this year I am getting A NEW DIGITAL CAMERA, WOO HOO!! It's not a D70 like my brother's; I didn't want one of those -- a little too much camera for me to handle, frankly, and I am just not cool enough. No, the one I've been drooling over in a "someday" kind of way is the Coolpix 5400. AND ONE IS ON ITS WAY TO ME even as we speak, because I have the best husband IN THE WORLD.

Who will be getting a motorized focuser and a new tripod from Orion, by the way. Because at least this year I wasn't caught totally flat-footed by the fact that I was actually receiving a gift, thanks to the fact that the wal-mart.com person couldn't figure out that if it was gift-wrapped with a gift tag saying, "Happy Anniversary Honey," it probably wasn't the best idea to discuss the order with the customer's WIFE. Thank you, clueless wal-mart.com person.

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

schooling-related rant

This cartoon has been making the rounds of homeschooling e-lists around the nation for a week or so. (go ahead, click the link, I'll wait.) I've copied my post to one of these e-lists here.

Among the many aspects of this attitude that bother me (and there ARE many; I could easily spend a lot of time ranting about, say, whether the quantity of abuse stopped because it's detected at school comes anywhere NEAR the quantity of abuse that actually occurs at school), this one stands out:

Free public schooling used to mean that children could get educated whether their parents were wealthy enough to pay for it or not, hence poor children were not bound to grow up to be poor adults. This was a good thing.

Then it became mandatory, so that we would be "assured" an educated populace (or at least a constantly-replenished workforce). Meh.

With the advent of the two-income-household-based economy, school quickly became free babysitting as well.

Then somewhere along the line school was transformed from a free required education to free required education PLUS a free source of social development. Meh again. (It was quickly discovered that nobody could POSSIBLY reach adulthood and thrive without this source of social development. Who knows how culture even existed before school became mandatory in the 1900's.)

Then along came social education -- also known as The Three R's Plus Everything Else Under The Sun Including AIDS, Safety, Sex Education, Etc. Because of course parents can't be relied upon to teach their kids about these things.

And now the latest "official" purpose for school, according to mainstream thought: Allowing the state to keep an eye on everyone's children. It's not just about educating them (if you can still call it that), babysitting them, teaching them how to wear condoms, and letting their peer group be their main influence anymore. It's now the latest (free and already in place) extension of Big Brother's periscope.

WHAT IS NEXT??

I'm off to be a counter-cultural rebel and teach my own children. See you later.

Sunday, February 20, 2005

back in the saddle again

I did not fall off the face of the earth this weekend. It's just that T thought that he could use MY computer (the nerve!) to play Civilization III, also known as Computer Game Crack as far as T is concerned. So my computer time has been seriously diminished, with the result that my house is a relatively clean, I'm pretty much caught up on laundry, and I've read about three hundred pages of Les Misérables since Friday. I've also almost forgotten how to type. Again I say, the nerve of him. On my computer!
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Last night we (well, mostly I, as T was ensnared in the aforementioned web of addiction) watched Lost in Translation. I liked it pretty well, with the exception of a few scenes which I'm sure the director thought were essential but I did not. T hated it. Probably this has something to do with the fact that he only heard it, and it's really a very visually-told story.
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Today was my nephew's 6th birthday party. We gave him a dinosaur marionette and a bicycle license plate with his name on it, and I ate more cake and ice cream than I ought to have. Highlight of the afternoon: My two 77-year-old grandmothers (the whiny one and the spunky, feisty one, for those of you keeping track) explaining the concept of some asinine reality TV show to the rest of us ("no, it's not swapping wives like SEX swapping wives..."). Or wait, maybe that was the low point. Also, I actually took some pictures with my brother's (cue Monty Python heavenly chord) NIKON D70. That camera is so far out of my league. I am the total ugly nerd girl freshman who trips over her shoelaces, and it is the supernice intelligent artistic athletic senior guy with the muscles and the great clothes and the perfect hair. Who has to shave. I have such a crush on it. I think I'll go write its initials on my bookcovers.

natalie things

I wasn't going to write about this but the words keep running around in my head and maybe they'll stop if I type them out.

There are a lot of things associated with Natalie's brief life which are a source of guilt for me. First there's the gut-deep automatic maternal guilt that whispers that somehow it must be because of me that she was born with problems in the first place. Then there are the more realistic things, like: I should have been more assertive with the medical staff. I should have held her more often. And probably number one on the list, as far as the "we just should have known better" factor, is that we should have taken more pictures of her. We only have a small handful of them, and none (ZERO) from when she was at home, all from the hospital. Once at the hospital we took T's camera in and took nearly an entire roll of pictures of her on what was, in retrospect, probably the best day of her life health-wise. She was not attached to any machines, she had no tubes, she was wearing a cute little ducky sleeper and she drank from a bottle and nursed. We took an entire roll of film. Except when we went to unload the camera we realized there was no film in it. Did we run to the gift shop in the hospital and buy film and take more pictures? No. We still kick ourselves over that. Anyway.

At the time (late 1997/early 1998) we didn't have a video camera, but my brother did. He took some video of Natalie on the day she was born, and then we borrowed his camera and took some video of her in the NICU a few days later, and then he set up the camera to take video of her funeral. We never saw any of that footage, I think initially because it was too raw, and then later because it was all buried in my brother's sizable collection of camcorder cassettes and we never got around to getting it from him. But lately he's been working on a project where he's putting all his home video on DVD, and today when we were at his house he showed us the digitized video of Natalie -- all 15 or so minutes of it. T and I sat at the computer and watched it together. We were handling it OK until it got to the part where I sat by her NICU bed and did what I'd dreamed of doing with my daughter since the age of thirteen or so -- read to her from Anne of Green Gables -- at which point I know I started to cry and I think T did too.

Tears and all, though, it was a wonderful experience. T says that for him it is like, in a way, we got to visit with her. For me, well... hindsight being 20/20 is not always a good thing for our psyches, I know that. From my position in the present time it's easy to look back at all the things I did wrong. I'm so thankful that today I had the opportunity to manage to get past the feelings of guilt and watch the 23-year-old me do what I really did do, whether I remember it most of the time or not -- love her the best I possibly could, and do the best for her that I knew to do at the time.

Thursday, February 17, 2005

new contacts. And that's just the beginning of this long ol' rambly snippety entry

I am wearing contact lenses for the first time today. It is a little freaky, but not as freaky as many people think it would be. The main thing is that the darn things don't work as well as my new glasses do. Things look just a leeeetle bit blurry. So it's just as well that I hadn't planned to spend $240 four times a year to wear contacts full-time, eh? But they'll be good enough to wear for, say, chorus concerts or fancy dates, which are pretty much the only times I ever dress up.

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Also, tonight we framed a Jack Vettriano print we've had rolled up in our closet for SIX YEARS. Because we are all efficient like that. Actually it's because we finally figured a little while ago that it probably didn't make much sense to spend $200 for custom framing for a print that cost $35 in 1999 dollars. It's called "The Singing Butler" and it is the only piece of art with which we have ever both fallen in love at first sight.



It now hangs above our FANTASTIC NEW COUCH. Because finally we have a couch worthy of having something hung over it.

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Last night I was telling LT about a restaurant that used to be in town called The Sugar Pine. It was just a little diner but I loved it and still miss it often. I told LT that for $6.31 including tax but not tip you could get a big basket of just-right crispy fries and two enormous chocolate milkshakes, served in a glass with the rest of the shake making frost on the outside of the metal canister in which it had been mixed, the best milkshakes ever made. LT protested that they couldn't be better than my milkshakes, and I told him that indeed they are way better than any milkshake I could ever make, and he said, in a very serious voice, AND I QUOTE, "Well, then they would have to be made by Jesus."

THAT'S MY BOY. Who got a chocolate milkshake when we got home.

******************

Also, one fun thing about five-year-olds -- or mine anyway -- is that they really believe it when you tell them that the white screen when there's no slide in the projector is a picture of a polar bear standing by an igloo in the snow. And they assure you that they can see it, see, there's the head.

Monday, February 14, 2005

YAY. yay yay yay.

DO YOU SEE THE HAPPINESS?





Do you notice the ABSENCE of the atrocious monstrosity of a couch?





Yeah baby, no more ugly 1970's throwback quilted ugly big-print brown-and-whatever UGLY couch.*



It's really serendipitous, the way this all happened. We were looking at thrift stores in the Valley on Saturday for a slide projector for T**, and we stopped at this one store and a guy met us at the door and said, sorry, they were closing, and while T asked if they had any slide projectors (they didn't), I saw this very nice*** couch and a matching loveseat behind the guy, and we asked how much they were, but we didn't get to see the fronts of them, only the backs. The store was closed yesterday, but I set things up so that I could go down this morning and check them out, see if they were in good enough shape and make sure they didn't smell like cigarette smoke (smokers, you fully have the right to do whatever you want with your lungs and your stuff, don't get me wrong, but dang, your furniture stinks), and if they were, I'd buy them (because we can take the money out of our summer vacation budget), and I had my dad on call to come down and haul them home for me. Dads of the world, listen, if you want to save yourself a lot of trouble, and you have a daughter, just buy her her own easy-and-cheap-to-operate pickup truck when she leaves home. Seriously. You will thank yourself later. Anyway. I digress. To finish the story without dragging it out any further, they looked gently used but worth the money and a FAR sight better than what we had in our living room at the time, so I called Dad, took the kids to the park and the little dollar zoo while we waited for him, took him and Mom out to lunch before we headed home, and by 3:30 I had happiness in my living room.



On Friday night at my dad's we're not going to set the other couch on fire because that is just not environmentally sound. And I would, um, never EVER do anything that's not environmentally sound. Right? And there probably won't be any pictures of me not doing that afterward, in this journal. So don't expect anything like that.



Speaking of serendipitous. The discount I got for having my dad pick up the couch (it's senior discount day at the thrift store) was exactly (within pennies) what it cost to take him and Mom and the kids and me to lunch. How cool is that?

*and no more serviceable-but-not-exactly-great Nagahyde loveseat either. That thing was COMFORTABLE though. Like a cushioned box. Great for curling up in to read. Except for that squeaky, sweat-sticky Nagahyde thing. Anyway. It's gone, but we're not going to burn it (of COURSE); we'll just take it to the SPCA for their ongoing rummage sale/thrift store thing. It's in good enough shape that someone might want it.

**We didn't find a projector to buy but we borrowed one and looking at T's astronomical photos, taken on slide film, projected on a screen in the dark? Totally awesome.

***did I ever mention how much I wanted a blue-checked couch and loveseat? Or that the few times I've seriously considered making a slipcover for the one we had [read: tons of work and a good outlay of money as well] I would gravitate toward a fabric that was almost exactly like the one you see in the pictures above this text? HAVE YOU SEEN THE BACKGROUND ON THIS PAGE? Just, yay.

Sunday, February 13, 2005

the un-valentine's day

This is a mystifying time of year for me. Everyone and her sister is all het up about What The Man Will Get Me For Valentine's Day And It Had Better Be Good. T and I have never done much for V-day (tomorrow will be our twelfth one as a couple) -- maybe twice flowers, maybe once a dinner out. And I don't care. Maybe it's because our anniversary is only a month away. Maybe it's because I'm the kind of person who LIKES getting an iron and an ironing board for Christmas from my husband and the kids (true story, that's what I asked for this year). Maybe it's because we were both the kids in our classes who only got Valentines in our boxes at school because everyone in class had to make them for everyone else. Maybe it's because, clichéd as it sounds, it's completely true that an average day in our marriage is happier than Valentine's Day is for most of the couples who celebrate it. For whatever reason, we have always just seen Valentine's Day as one of those holidays promoted by card-and-gift manufacturers for their own purposes, and we've pretty much ignored it. So don't watch this space for any romantic oohs and aahs tomorrow.

Thursday, February 10, 2005

I AM SOREYE

This morning we had a minor computer disaster. I was elbow-deep in the fishtank, which needed a really thorough cleaning, when a nervous LT came and told me that he'd done something to the computer. We have a screen saver which shows a slideshow of pictures to the accompaniment of a playlist of sound files, and he knew that "F-something" would make it advance through the pictures, and there was one he really wanted to see. So he pushed all the function buttons from F1 to F12, without having hit F-Lock first. So basically, he told the computer: Help, Undo, Redo, New, Open, Close, Reply, Forward, Send, Spell, Save, and Print, and somewhere along the line the whole system froze up so badly that I had to shut the thing off without shutting down for only the second time since we got this computer a year and a half ago. And then when it restarted the email didn't work. He was distraught and apologized repeatedly, profusely, and with tears, which of course made me feel protective of him, rather than angry -- mustn't let him catch on to how that works. And his sister (who was somehow complicit in the whole thing but I didn't quite catch how) wrote me the following letter of apology:

that's a picture of herself crying. and give her a break on the spelling; she's 5.

Wednesday, February 09, 2005

recap of our "mini-break"

We just got back from two nights and three partial-or-full days in paradise (also known as Morro Bay, California, for the uninitiated). Everything was fantastic. At least four or five times in the three days of our trip, T and I looked at each other and gushed, "I am just so glad we are here!" Exclamation point inclusive; we really were gushing. The kids didn't fight. T and I didn't fight. The weather was perfect. T injured his back and was in a little pain from that from time to time but even that didn't dampen our spirits for long; we were having the best mini-break (one of my favorite Britishisms and I have shamelessly stolen it even though I've never been anywhere near England) in the history of the world.

And then we came home.

That's the thing about fabulous vacations; they tend to end. And as soon as you get up on the first morning back home, and the kids are sniping at each other and the parents are doing their fair share of the same thing, and the inevitable heap of laundry threatens to smother you, and the search for socks in the unmated socks bin seems as head-explodingly frustrating as it ever is, there's this tendency to think, "if only we were still on our fantastic vacation, how wonderful everything would be." Conveniently forgetting, of course, that in order to stay longer you'd have had to pack more which is an added stress, or else do laundry which is distinctly un-vacationish. And eventually we'd run out of money and have to come home or take up a life of vagrancy -- which for a family with kids is rather irresponsible.

A year ago this week we were coming home from Florida, experiencing the same set of post-vacation symptoms: wallowing in happy memories, wistfully wishing we hadn't had to come home, being thrown face-first back into a life where clocks matter and so do messes, and three times a day there are all these overgrown baby birds with their beaks open clamoring for me to FEED THEM (and clean up after them too, while I'm at it). And with all that I'm still very, very glad we went. I'm even glad we're home; I just don't know it yet.

And now a few (ha ha!) pictures:

One of the long-standing Morro Bay vacation traditions, since we first took the kids there four years ago, has been the bicycle park.





Which means that the "sale pending" on that sign is bad news. :(





It is when it is windy that we most realize how badly he needs a haircut. All he needs in this picture is a time machine and some eye makeup and he'd be a headline tour.





The shell crop was pretty measly this year, except for the sand dollars (and of course the ever-present butterfly clams, the kind whose shells crack if you touch them). Here are two of the smaller ones in T's palm. And LT's shadow.





I think Morro Rock is much more photographable than its Yosemite equivalent, Half Dome. (better watch out that I don't get struck by Park Service lightning for that one).





C, champion of the climbing wall.





LT at the top of the spiral slide





C bought herself a unicorn at Albertson's (Albertsons' toy aisle being yet ANOTHER MB tradition. Not to mention that it was in that Albertson's that I first saw -- cue heavenly chord -- DIET CHERRY COKE. And my life changed forever). She named it Bright Bright White and didn't put it down for at least, oh, ten hours.





This time instead of camping, since we were only staying two nights and we weren't sure of the weather, we stayed at Motel 6, whose signature utilitarian-but-bright decorating style is seen here, as the kids play Uno in their jammies.





One defining physical feature of Morro Bay is the sandspit that encloses the estuary. Last summer T, my dad, and my brother boated out to it. On this trip he took us to see it -- by a land route, however. Here are the kids looking for shells on the seaward side of the "spit". Which I hate to call it, because I am a dork, and I wish it had a different name.





At the "fish park" (as it is called because one of the kids named it that, after the large fish-shaped ladder thing which features in its play structure, and as anyone knows who has kids, you eventually end up adopting untold numbers of their sayings as your own without even realizing it), there is a really bizarre swinging/spinning sort of thing. It looks so simple and yet the physics of it defy anyone to make it go without much, much effort. Usually the grown-ups end up hogging it until one of the men gets it whirling around, usually standing on it rather than sitting. Here is LT taking the easy way out, being spun/swung by someone else.





the Rock again, this time with a flock of birds taking their baths in its reflection





This was actually the sunset on the first night. We watched it through the windows of the restaurant where we ate the best restaurant clam chowder I have had in years. We'd have said that about the fish and chips, too, if we didn't know of the glory that is Giovanni's Fish Company, just up the street, where we had lunch the next day. OH LORD I NEED TO GO BACK. NOW. *sob*





We decided to take the ultimate scenic route home -- that being Highway 1. Anyone who lives in a place without Highway 1 near it simply doesn't know what s/he is missing. Anyway. This is NOT one of the famous views of that often-photographed area -- it's part of a colony of elephant seals who winter just off the highway, just north of Cambria. Very bizarre to look at, yet interesting. And smelly.





There have been many pictures taken of this bridge, almost all of them better than this one. But the thing about scenery like this is that even an utter amateur like myself has a hard time messing it up. Wow. (I made T stop nearly every time there was a pullout so that I could take pictures. I won't inflict them all on you, however).

Thursday, February 03, 2005

"Mean Girls" and a meme

We just finished watching "Mean Girls". I've wanted to watch this for a long time. The reason I have given whenever I mentioned that in the past has been that I wanted to see how it treated homeschooling (which is, by the way, really pretty badly, but who's shocked about that? not me), but I will just come clean and admit it, right now, right here:

I wanted to watch it because it looked like a funny movie.

And it was. Even though the previews told us loud and clear, before we even got to the menu (yes we watch previews on purpose. I LIKE previews. I must not be the only one. Right?) that we were about fourteen and nineteen respective years outside the target demographic for the film, we laughed. A lot. I've heard this movie called the Heathers for this generation, and I can see where that comes from. (Query: I wonder if the fashions and attitudes in "Heathers" are as unfathomable to a modern 16-year-old WHO OH GOOD LORD WAS, WHAT, A NEWBORN WEARING BOOTIES AND A LITTLE PINK-FABRIC-COVERED ELASTIC BAND AROUND HER HEAD WITH A BOW ON IT WHEN HEATHERS WAS MADE as the fashions in "Mean Girls" were to me. I mean, come on. There are about five million more flattering styles for girls' jeans than low-rise boot-cuts. But I guess "flattering" isn't necessarily what we're aiming for nowadays.)

Also, the whole bit about friend C rejoicing a little when friend A gets mad at friend B because that means that friend C can get closer to friend A -- eerily, creepily familiar. And I couldn't figure out why until I remembered the dynamics of this one trio of girls, of which I was one, where there was a friend A, and then friend B and C (I and another girl) were constantly jockeying for the position Right Next to friend A. Sometimes not very nicely.

Thank you, God, that I will never ever have to go to junior high or high school again. Oh, God, thank you.



And then I stole this from KiwiRia:


List five fictional people -- from television, movies, books, whatever -- that you had a crush on as a child (or early teens). Then post this on your [journal] so other people can know what a dork you've always been.


1. The most memorable was Justin from Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. Just finished rereading this book and I can still see why. ;-)
2. Stan Crandall from Fifteen by Beverly Cleary. The button-down shirts! The politeness! The dip in his hair!
3. Like KiwiRia, I must confess to having had a thing -- just a LITTLE thing -- for Uncle Jesse from Full House.
4. Jim Craig in "The Man From Snowy River".
5. Frank Hardy in the Hardy Boys series.

a teeny bit of boring medical stuff, and then a music survey-thingie

Only one quick note in this entry about the whole boring medical thing, and then on to other (boring, but hey, what can I do?) things. I realized today that there is one thing I like about the anemia. I had thought that I had no symptoms at all, except for the low numbers in my blood, but then I remembered: I used to have this really ruddy complexion most of the time. I totally hated it. I remember on my honeymoon I got one of those department store makeovers (which was really crappy, by the way; I'm a brown-warm type, not a coral-warm type), and there was a $25 purchase requirement for it to be free. I spent the whole $25 on a big bottle of this green lotion foundation which was intended to tone down the red in my skin. Now I am more pale, with a few freckles -- no noticeable ruddiness. I am glad about this. If it's because I'm anemic, and if my face starts getting red again as soon as my iron comes back up, I am going to be really ticked off.


OK, that's all. See, that wasn't SO bad.

I made a really, really good salad for dinner last night. Romaine lettuce, yellow bell peppers, tomatoes, red onions, Italian dressing. MMM. I was happy all morning because I knew I was having that salad for lunch. Which reminded me of a time in high school, when I had actually taken the time to make myself a nice salad to eat at lunchtime, and I had a little Tupperware container of dressing nestled down in the bowl with the lettuce and stuff, and I went through the whole morning in pleasant anticipation of that salad. Then I went to get it out of my locker at lunch and it was GONE. Everything else was there -- books, flute, jacket, nothing was disturbed except MY WONDERFUL SALAD which had simply disappeared. I had a picture of Dwight Yoakum in my locker, and from then on I joked that he had eaten my salad. I would write "KEEP YOUR FILTHY HANLT OFF MY SALAD, DWIGHT" or something similar on my lunch bags. That salad today just made me think of that.



Hey, I never said I was sane.

Here is a music survey. You're supposed to wait until someone else with a journal passes it to you, but since I am a social leper even in the world of online journaling, nobody's going to do that, so I'll just do it all on my own. (Oh dear lord I'm turning into my whiny grandmother. Somebody shoot me now. Please.)



1. What are the total amount of music files on your computer?
hold on, lemme check. Apparently 325, including some incomplete ones. And maybe a few duplicates.



2. The last CD you bought was?
Chanticleer, "Sing We Christmas". Chanticleer gives me that Anne-of-Green-Gables-ish "funny ache", along with the book Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, Jane Austen (especially the letter-writing scene in Persuasion), dark starry nights, the first sight of the ocean as we drive toward it, both kids hugging me hard at once, a hard snowfall when everyone I love is home safe... shoot, I'll have to do a whole list sometime of things that give me the "funny ache", I guess. But Chanticleer will definitely be on it.



3. What is the song you last listened to before this message?
Well, "The Courier" from the "Last of the Mohicans" soundtrack was on in the car. But C is watching an episode of "Little House on the Prairie" and I was just hearing the theme music from that. I don't think that can count, though.



4. Write down five songs you often listen to, or that mean a lot to you.
oh sheesh. Um. I listen to so many songs, so much of the time, that I can't just do that. I'll try the "mean a lot to me" angle and see what happens.

• Listening to late 80's/early 90's music reminds me of junior high and high school, which is a time from which most of my happy memories of friends and things come, as far as school goes anyway. Tops in this category might be "Stand" by REM. I'd been stood up by the boy I liked most at a dance, and I cried like a whiny baby until the DJ played that song, at which time I pulled myself together and started dancing, and managed to make something fun out of the rest of the evening.
  
  
  
• There's a song by the Mavericks called "Oh What A Thrill". If T and I had a song, this would probably be it.
  
  
• Unless it were Loreena McKennitt's rendition of Alfred Noyes' "The Highwayman."
  
  
• Christmas music, GOOD Christmas music (like Chanticleer, yum) is some of the happiest music I know. I love Christmastime, especially with kids.
  
  
• Our whole family enjoys Vivaldi and Mozart and Bach and basically everyone who composed just about anything until about, oh, 1905 or so (no Debussy, thank you, but we also like Gershwin a lot). When we listen to classical music (in the loose definition of the term, with a lowercase C, not necessarily the Classical era, just classical music) in the car, the kids either pretend to play instruments, or we take turns telling each other what story the music is telling. I enjoy this immensely now, and I think when I'm an old lady and my children are grandparents, I will still cherish the memories of it.
  

I know I promised only that one mention of boring medical stuff but I typed that yesterday. Today I had an echocardiogram. Basically this is all the mess of a sonogram with none of the fun of seeing a little baby wiggling around in his or her little secret place, with the addition of a good dose of embarrassment about bare breasts. Yuck, in other words.

Tuesday, February 01, 2005

boring medical stuff. Especially boring to those of the male persuasion (you've been warned)

Yesterday and this morning I have spent more time in a medical or semi-medical setting than I have since I had my babies. First I went to the clinic for a pre-referral appointment with my "primary care provider" (except that the doctor/PA turnover at that clinic is so high, and I so rarely go to the doctor, that I don't think I've ever seen the same person twice there) regarding the tachycardia episodes I have. They did that really fun thing, which I'd actually never had done before, where you lie still with stickies all over you and a machine analyzes your heart function in various places in your body. Then they took blood ("they" being a perky blonde phlebotomist who seemed about eleven years old -- you know you're getting older when medical personnel and teachers start to seem too young). THEN we went to the valley so that T and I could get our eyes checked, both of us being phenomenally overdue for that. My eyeglass prescription dates from the time when I had only one child, for example. Anyway. My eyes have gotten worse, and T's (stinker) have actually gotten better. I was going to get contacts but because of the severity of my astigmatism I'd have to sell one of the kids to do that, and it's just not going to happen. But T's contacts are CHEAP. CHEAPER THAN GLASSES. And yet he only wants them for playing paintball. [blows raspberry in T's general direction]. And then this morning the kids and I took Henry to the vet. Poor Henry got two shots and two different kinds of medicine (not all relating to his upper respiratory infection; some of it's standard stuff that the SPCA didn't do before we got him) and will have to have MORE medicine at home. Poor Rachel's checkbook got quite a dent in it when she paid the bill.

Today I discussed the results of yesterday's bloodwork with the physician's assistant (PA) (not, thankfully, the perky phlebotomist). Turns out I am severely anemic. This is not startling news, I've always been pretty anemic, but it's even worse than it was and I've been ordered to take THREE STINKING IRON PILLS A DAY to try to bring my numbers up. This means I also have to take a stool softener because I am all cool that way. Meanwhile I have an appointment for an echocardiogram on Thursday, and ANOTHER appointment, this one with the good ol' GYN, in early March, to try to address the actual probable cause of the anemia, that being my overachieving-yet-useless uterus. The PA did say that anemia can trigger tachycardia, so that stacks up one more reason for a hysterectomy -- which I tend to be flippant about, especially for three or four days every three and a half weeks or so, but which really kind of freaks me out when I think hard about it. Not that I would be getting a radical hysterectomy and going through menopause at 30 and all that fun stuff -- but still. As much as my uterus pisses me off sometimes, I'm really kind of sentimentally attached to it. But all the various hormonal methods have been tried, and they really do not agree with my system (not only do I gain unpleasant amounts of weight while using them, but they frequently have the direct opposite of the regulating-and-lessening effect they're supposed to have).

The funniest thing about all this is that I don't feel "anemic". I feel normal. Who knows, maybe if I'm ever not anemic (which I've been, at least in a borderline way, since at least the time of my first pregnancy when I was 20), I'll suddenly turn into some kind of energetic house-cleaning superwoman. And I'll have the kind of house where people can just drop by and it's clean and fresh-smelling and airy and uncluttered.

Ha ha. Fat chance.