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Tuesday, May 31, 2005

May reads

Mansfield Park.

That's it, that's the only book I've read in its entirety during the month of May. I don't know WHEN the last time was that I only read one book in a month; it's almost embarrassing. We bookish nerdy types have our image to maintain, after all.

Excuses:

• I've been crocheting lots. I made a baby blanket for my sister-in-law (well, for her baby, who's due to arrive any day now) as well as a baby's sweater set which I hope to sell but will probably end up giving away, and I've begun another sweater set too (this has to do with the promise I made myself that I would clean out my craft box this year. The yarn with which I am making these sweater sets? was bought to make something for C. When she was in utero. I have a bad, bad habit of not finishing projects, and I'm trying to reform. We'll see how long it lasts; I have about eight other projects lined up when this one's done.
  
• Thanks to the crocheting, I've been watching movies. And not JUST P&P on endless loop, although Austen has certainly been a mainstay in my DVD experience. I've also watched "Les Miserables" with Liam Neeson (worth watching) and a handful of other more forgettable rented films.
  
• School. School is going really well. Who knows why that should interfere more this month than any other, but still. (I have come up with a slightly more time-consuming, but much better method by which the kids do their chapter summaries... but all told I don't think that makes much of an additional cut into my reading time.)
  
• Um. I am halfway through Emma and also My Sister's Keeper which I just picked up at the library today?
  
• I've been reading out loud to the family (Swiss Family Robinson) and hearing the kids read out loud to me (Ramona and her Father, Max's Chocolate Chicken, and Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, which C recently bought for herself even though I have a copy, a wise move since my copy is a tattered one I got in the third or fourth grade and I'd rather not have her completely destroy it).
  
• Probably The Nikon is a lot to blame. It's hard to read and take pictures at the same time. Although I feel like I've kind of lost it with the photography thing. All of a sudden all the pictures I take look really boring.
  
• I've been outdoors lots.
  

That's all I can come up with -- a pretty poor covering for my shame, when all's said and done. Maybe I should just give it up and admit that I'm not the nerd you thought I was.

About Mansfield Park -- what a book. I don't think it's anybody's favorite Austen book, simply because Fanny is not as likeable a heroine as Elizabeth or Anne (my personal favorite) or even Emma; she's not strong-willed in a spunky way; she doesn't stand up for herself; she doesn't win her man by making him crazy about her against his will, but rather by default when the woman he really is crazy about turns out to be a soulless heathen. I'm not as bothered by some aspects of the book as most other people are -- I can get past the extremely dated narrative objection to (shock and horror) PLAYACTING because I can see it as a representation of moral collapse and indecency, which I do have a problem with myself. I like that the lack of moral underpinnings in Henry and Mary Crawford (I just now realized that our two cats are named after an Austenian brother and sister) is a major stumbling block in their relations with upstanding people, and I like the disapproval subtly heaped on Sir Thomas because he neglected the moral training of his children, and I like the fact that a married woman who ran away with another man felt the consequences for the rest of her life. In short, I'm enough of a fuddy-duddy that a lot of the story resonates with me in a way that it fails to do with most modern readers. ;)

Sunday, May 29, 2005

ouch

I would like to point out that this sticker/seed looks pretty ordinary and small:

UNTIL IT IS STUCK BETWEEN YOUR CHILD'S EYELID AND EYEBALL.

(he's fine, but I apologized to him all evening for the way I had to wrestle him to the ground and have his dad hold his panic-waving arms while his grandpa held his panic-thrashing head and I got the thing out)

Friday, May 27, 2005

not QUITE an exercise in futility

Tonight I didn't feel like just sitting around; I wanted to do something productive. (whoops, sorry, should have warned you so that you'd be sure to be sitting down before you read that. Are you OK?) So I cleaned out the car.

I have noticed, in my walks around town, that most people's cars have... what's it called, that place under all the JUNK... um, floors. That's it. You can look in their car windows and see floor mats, and seats, not just in a couple spots where the stuff's shoved out of the way, but all the way around. I'd comfort myself with the knowledge that these people must not have kids, but I happen to know that's not always the case. (still clinging to hope that maybe the cars were NEW...). Ours used to be much, much better than it has become lately; I think it's largely that the kids are old enough to take stuff INTO the car, but they aren't old enough to take it OUT yet.

That and I'm a total and complete slob, that's also part of it. Maybe.

Anyway. I started thinking I really REALLY needed to clean out the car yesterday, when I tried to find my little bottle of glasses-cleaning solution on the way to Awana, and I couldn't. Before I was sure that it was lost, though, I'd gathered up a full grocery bag of garbage just from around my feet in the passenger side and what I could reach of the back floorboard. (not GROSS garbage, just papers and receipts and junk mail and plastic grocery bags and that sort of non-maggoty, non-food-item, non-stinky stuff. But still.) Today we went to the valley to watch Star Wars and eat at Applebee's and spend our retirement (well, not really, but it felt like it) at Wal-Mart, and when we got home, I was going to sit on the porch swing and read and listen to the snick-snick-snick of the sprinkler on the newly-mown front lawn, but I just couldn't, knowing that That Mess was out there, WAITING. So what started out as emptying out the junk, putting away the non-junk, and washing the inside of the windows (the rear window still bore the ghostly remains of a fog-written "BUSH 2004", done by my politically astute son last fall, and of course I only noticed it when I was actually driving the car down the road and hence could not exactly just reach back and clean it off) turned into a full-out wash job. Which was really pretty stupid. Because guess where we're driving tomorrow. If you guessed "down miles of dry dusty dirt road to your parents'", you are right! Bingo! You win the prize! Oh well; at least the inside will be clean.

P.S. re: Star Wars: I really enjoyed the movie, better than Episodes I and II, and also better than the earliest three episodes, at least in that it has no Mark Hamill, who, I'm sorry, belongs in a ballet class somewhere, not in an adventure movie. And the way Luke changed from a whiny teenager to a condescending know-it-all in the space of a mere three movies did not impress me. Anyway. Episode III was very nicely done, and emotionally stirring, and all that. But you know what had me in choky tears and cold chills simultaneously? Was the preview for "The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe" that came before it. MY GOSH I CAN NOT WAIT.

Thursday, May 26, 2005

our excitement for the day

Did you know that a riding lawn mower can throw a rock really, really hard, at an upward angle, for quite a distance? And that it can aim it right between the wide boards that make up the railing on a back deck? And that when a 7' by 4' panel of a sliding glass door shatters, it makes thousands and thousands of very sharp and tiny squares of glass, which take quite a lot of effort and time to clean up?

We do, now.

Tuesday, May 24, 2005

things about today

• T was off work yesterday because his back was (is) out. This means that I keep forgetting that it's Tuesday -- which is not only the day I pay bills, but also, in this particular instance, my mother's birthday; good thing that I remembered long enough to at least have C call her at work.
• I really feel like going for a walk, except
• it is so hot out that the cooler is barely keeping up at 9:00 in the morning. Way to go with the abrupt change of seasons, there, God. I'm sure you have a fantastic reason for it. We'll adjust. Thanks.
• My feet still hurt from wearing high heels (yes, the cute black-and-white ones) at a chorus concert last night. This is the closest I ever get to feeling the effects of hard partying in the morning. Whew, yeah, that was a wild one.
• C, who says she is "Anakin's little sister", is taking apart the works from her light-up-vibrating-head-song-playing duck. Or actually, it's my duck. She has itty bitty screws all over the couch and she is really intent on fixing the head-vibration function. I'm kind of hoping she messes the whole thing up, since I got tired of the "squeeze here for a computer-chip rendering of a familiar song" stuffed-animal gimmick about three seconds after it was invented. Chances are, however, that she'll actually fix it. Drat.
• We are thinking about renting out the apartment we use for school and guests (but not the garage underneath it). Eek! This is because we are also thinking about buying this house, and that would enable us to do it. Double Eek! No, wait, triple Eek!
• I am a bad, bad girl, because I'm on the computer without having done my Bible reading first. Someone smack me.
• OK, while you're at it, smack me for all the other days I've done that too. Which is, these days, pretty much every day. Sigh.
• I am shuddering in disgust already at the google hits I'm going to get from having "smack me" and "high-heeled" in the same paragraph. GO AWAY SCARY GOOGLERS. NOTHING TO SEE HERE.

Sunday, May 22, 2005

trying on a new reaction

[I started writing this on Friday afternoon and am just now finishing and posting it]

This is a pretty standard parenting day. That is to say, lots of joy, dotted with frustration. We're cleaning. You might ask, "when are you NOT cleaning, Rachel?" To which I would answer, "only when I stop to be lazy and let things pile up so as to make it take much longer the next time, which is pretty much the majority of the time." You might ask, "Why don't you try Flylady, Rachel?" To which I would answer, "I did. She never would come clean my house, no matter how much I crossed my fingers and wished." seriously, I do have a system. It works way better than Flylady's, for me -- Flylady doesn't have homeschooled kids, apparently -- when I use it, which is never. Because, well, lazy. That's what it is, I'm lazy. And if I ever close this everlasting parenthetical statement and move on, you'll find that I'm sorta working on that.)

AN-Y-WAY. We're cleaning, as I said. I set the kids working on their rooms -- if you ever want a room made messy absolutely as quickly as it is possible to be done, like say, you're making a movie and you want a scene where a hurricane has destroyed a residence, hire my daughter. But don't tell her I said that. Meanwhile I was working in the kitchen. Sort of. If "working in the kitchen" constitutes "cleaning a little, then walking by the computer to check my bloglines thing WHICH DOES NOT WORK". The kids started to snipe at each other. C hit LT (he never hits. Whereas she thinks hitting is 'the i ching...the answer to every question.'). C started to sob about the huge job of cleaning her room. LT worked well for a while, then did likewise. I was quickly approaching the point where I would begin fantasizing about a) banging my head against hard surfaces b) running for the hills or c) living alone far far away. Warning signs of my nearness to that state included daydreaming about The Parallel Rachel while I washed dishes, and thinking minor swear words.

Then I had a little breakthrough. I thought -- what if, instead of getting mad, or yelling... what if I channeled that reaction into something positive? I could take my frustrations out on my countertops and piles of clutter. Instead of fantasizing about my quiet, clean, sparse apartment with the grand piano in an upscale old neighborhood in a highly-cultured city where I "worked" as conductor or second-chair flute (even in my fantasies, I don't reach as high as principal. It just is that little bit too unrealistic) in a symphony and weighed something obscenely and fashionably small and never EVER bought bargain clothes -- um, yeah, anyway, instead of fantasizing about all that, I would do my best to incorporate the good parts of that fantasy -- namely, the quiet, the cleanliness, and the lack of clutter -- into my Real Life. I would -- here's the biggie -- get those fantasies behind me, so to speak, by pulling a Marilla.

(if you know why I would call it pulling a Marilla, note it in my comments and if you are right I will seriously get your address and send you a present.)

I also thought I'd try, when the minor swear words began to come out in my mutterings without my really even asking them to -- hang uninvited guests anyway -- I thought that I would think about something, I dunno, holy. What Would The Proverbs 31 Woman Do? That sort of thing. That didn't work quite so well, because -- here's my dirty little secret, lean in close, it's juicy -- I don't ever plan to be like the Proverbs 31 woman. She buys real estate. She has servant girls. PUH-LEEZE. That is so not my sphere, and I just cannot identify. So does that get me out of the whole "her hands are busy" kind of thing? [hopeful grin.] See, my hands -- my hands are busy! They're busy... typing. dang. oh well.

Oh, man, where was I. Oh yes, I was going to try to think about something holy instead of thinking bad words, while I turned my house into a crystal-clean palace, that's right. And it worked! it really did. By the time T got home, I was in such a state of normalcy that I did not pass him as he was on his way in, blow him a kiss, and jump in the car with my camera and tripod to go try a little -- like four hours' worth of -- Nikon therapy, as I had originally planned. No, instead I showed him around so he'd make sure to praise me for all the work I'd done, and I begged and cajoled until he got us takeout for dinner. And then I put him in charge of the kids while I went to bed early with Mansfield Park. And he was so gracious and patient. Have I not TOLD you that he is the most wonderful man in the world? I knew I had.

worship and songs, and a little survey

Jane wrote an entry today about some of her thoughts on worship, which is interesting, because I've been pondering the same subject for much of the day. Specifically I was thinking about worship songs. It seems like such a no-win subject for a congregation; you'll always have somebody who thinks there're too many praise choruses, and some who think there are too many fuddy-duddy hymns; some who think the tempo is too fast and some who think it's too slow. And then there's me: from one week to another, my opinion on the above is prone to change, but one thing I always manage to get hung up on is lyrics. I can't get into a worshipful mindset if I don't agree completely with the lyrics of the song. I don't complain to The Powers That Be at the chapel I attend; I just either don't sing, or I change the lyrics as I go, or I, like today, get so caught up in musing about the correctness of a lyric ("are we worshiping God's majesty, as in, that attribute of God, or are we worshiping His Majesty like he's a king?" Either one, I don't particularly like) that I completely miss the point and end up with pretty much no worship experience at all, as far as the singing goes.

How does all this work for you? I mean, do you prefer hymns or praises or a mix? energetic or contemplative? How much of your "worship experience" depends on the songs being a good fit for you, theologically or otherwise?

Friday, May 20, 2005

"Friday Feast"

This is from Friday's Feast" via Kristen.

Appetizer
Approximately how many hours per day do you spend watching television?
None, unless it happens to be a week when we happen to visit, say, my in-laws' house, where the TV is generally always on. I do watch somewhere between two and ten hours of videos or DVDs a week, though, almost all from our home collection or from the library, usually while I'm doing something else, like crocheting. And most of that is the kids watching something and me just happening to be there.

Soup
Which colors decorate your kitchen?
Cobalt blue and white. If you can call it "decorate".

Salad
Name 2 brand names you buy on a regular basis, and what do you like about them?
Um. Diet Coke, because, well, it is perfection in a carbonated beverage (NO ASPARTAME RANTS, PLEASE, I've heard it all before, thanks). And also... man, I am not much of a brand-names person -- Grape Nuts cereal, because the generic version is awful.

Main Course
What is your biggest fear?
I don't even like to think about it long enough to type it, but I imagine every mother (or anyone who knows any mothers) knows what it is.

Dessert
If you could wake up tomorrow and find yourself in another location, where would you want to be?
Hmm. Morro Bay? I'm assuming I could take my family with me and come back when I wanted to?

Bonus Birthday Question
What's your favorite flavor of birthday cake?
I like Costco's chocolate cake with their chocolate mousse filling and chocolate whipped icing. Thank you so much, that nice healthy stew I just ate for lunch seems a lot less appealing now.

Thursday, May 19, 2005

another interesting experience

(you'll want to have read the previous entry before reading this one or it won't make any sense. Also, some of you might be really turned off by this. Sorry, please do come back anyway.)

Last night after I typed that entry I was lying on the couch, and LT (in the recliner) and I were trying to go to sleep. I was praying for my boy, asking God to help him relax and get some rest and trust in Him, and I was praying for myself, that I wouldn't let this make me anxious. I also prayed that God would help me to understand what was going on, if He could even let me feel whatever it was that LT had been feeling, so I could at least know what he was talking about for sure.

About a minute after I whispered Amen, cold chills just started coursing over my body. At first I was like, what on earth--?, and then I remembered that of course, I was getting what I had asked for, I was being let know what it was that my son was feeling and trying to describe to me. This morning when I asked him, he confirmed that the "shivery" feeling was indeed the same feeling he gets when someone rubs a jacket with their fingernails, or when he's kind of grossed out, or at the end of going pee (I would roll my eyes and say "boys" here, but it was C who came up with the last two examples). I told him that God had shown me that that was what he was feeling, and that was how I knew.

So. We don't know why it happened, or if we can expect it to happen every night, but we at least have both had confirmation that even if we don't know, God does. That sort of thing has happened in our family a handful of times -- a very visible, immediate, direct answer to prayer -- and it always leaves me with a tangible sense of the presence of God, in a very awestruck "the creator of the universe is HERE IN THIS ROOM WITH ME" kind of heebie-jeebie sort of way (speaking of cold chills). It's good to be reminded sometimes.

the best-laid plans, part, what, five bazillion?

This is what I get for planning (and announcing my plans) to be in bed before eleven:

1. T needing me to alter a picture of a vehicle he'd found online, so that he could print it out and use it as a template for designs for the paintball tank he's been wanting to make for years
2. My decision, while I was up and at the computer anyway, to check on some journals for a few minutes.
3. You don't need to know the third thing, but it takes more than a few minutes.
4. then, juuust as I was drifting off to sleep at midnight, along comes LT, saying that he feels "funny" and "shivery" and that he thinks he needs to go outside for fresh air.
5. a cuddle with my boy in the porch swing in the moonlight, both of us tucked into one of T's flannel jackets
6. several attempts at going to sleep, only to have LT start feeling "shivery" again just as he's about to drift off
7. mounting anxiety about this whole "shivery" thing, covered by a thick veneer of nonchalance, because dang, the boy's anxious enough without Mom spazzing out
8. a journal entry and a photo posted at 2 a.m., with my nine-year-old reading his Hardy Boys book in the recliner, in the hopes that he'll get so tired he'll just fall asleep without trying

I really am unsure about what's going on with him. He has what we think is Tourette's Syndrome, coupled with more-than-normal anxiety at times, so we've seen a lot of stuff and learned to take new developments pretty much in stride, after an initial period of freaking out as quietly as possible adjusting. Part of me says this is just related to having had some sugar or some caffeine, or maybe it's just that tight-chested feeling everyone gets sometimes. Another part of me wonders how strangely the staff would look at me if we took a little drive over to the emergency room (that part is easily shut up with a reminder of the uselessness of the below-mediocre hospital in our town). And there's the whole rest of me in between, swinging from "maybe we'll go to the pediatrician tomorrow" to "let's look things up on the internet all night and see if we can scare the daylights out of ourselves" (sometimes my inner voice speaks to itself in the plural. So sue me).

In a way, this is nice. I don't get much alone time with either of the kids, so I take it when I can get it and am glad about that aspect of such situations, anyway. In another way, I'm scared senseless. Motherhood is just full of this kind of confusion; it's one of those things nobody ever tells you about when they warn you about never sleeping again and having no time to yourself for years.

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

alive!

Yesterday morning we had a really interesting experience. It actually started on Sunday night, when I realized that I hadn't seen our cat Mary all day, and neither (I found when I woke him up to ask him) had T. I went out in the dark in the rain and looked for her, as well as checking all her usual indoor haunts, and didn't find her. In the morning, T looked around as well, with the same results. I remembered that late on Saturday night, Mary had been acting a little strangely, and I concluded that she must have been ill, and that she had gone off somewhere to die. I broke the news gently to the kids mid-morning on Monday, which of course was not a lot of fun for anyone, and started cleaning the house, partly because it just needed it, and partly so that if she had not done the "going off" part of "gone off to die", we wouldn't be finding her mortal remains by smell in a few days. The kids were cleaning their rooms and I was working in the living room when C came dashing out shrieking with joy that she had seen Mary under her bed, and her eyes were open. For some reason I was still convinced that Mary was dead (after all, she hadn't responded when we'd called her; we hadn't even heard her collar bell jingle) and told C that she probably was, eyes open and all, so that C wouldn't have her hopes up.

But of course when we went and peered under C's bed, we saw that Mary wasn't dead. She was a little sick, we think, and she'd huddled under that bed for who knows how long, but after another day of lying around the house not eating or drinking or playing, she woke up today so much improved that I cancelled her appointment at the vet, and she is pretty much as chipper as ever tonight. I just walked past her, lying on the end of C's bed, and I got thinking about the resurrection. I thought of the way C jumped up and down after we'd pulled the living breathing Mary out from under her bed: "I'm the hero of finding Mary!!" I remember how we all felt kind of slap-happy for half an hour or so afterward, and how relieved T was when I called him to tell him the news, and how surreal the whole thing seemed later. Mary is "just a cat", but yet, the account of the Resurrection in Scripture is similar: doleful, sad, let-down followers of Jesus, still loving him, hearts broken, a bit scattered, trying to move on. Then comes the news: He is risen, just as he said! How fantastic, what a surprise, He's not dead after all! What a pivotal moment, from grief to joy with head-spinning rapidity.

I am guilty, as are most Christians at one time or another, of going through my daily existence knowing full well that Jesus was dead and that he rose again -- completely aware of how boggling and joyful a truth that is and how it has changed my life and my eternal destiny -- and not being excited about it in the slightest. It's distant from me, it's old news, it doesn't have a lot to do with all the stuff I have to do day in and day out. I need to remember that excitement, to catch fire with it like I have done a few times in my spiritual life, but not nearly often (or steadily) enough. The Lord is risen! And because he rose again, I too can walk in newness of life. I'm asking God to help me to LIVE like that's as amazing and exciting as it really truly is.

Monday, May 16, 2005

what a weekend

I'm taking a break from giving the house a badly-needed very thorough cleaning to post a few notes about what my weekend was like. Because, you know, I really NEED a break, since I've been working without stopping for, what, ten minutes now. THE HARDSHIP. (really it's because words are rattling around in my brain and they won't shut up until I type them out.)

Friday: Was T's Friday off. Um, I think we spent the day at home hanging out as a family. How sad is it that I can't remember three days ago? Oh yes, in the afternoon C and I went for a walk while the boys practiced target shooting (oh goody! pacifist comments again!) in the backyard with their air rifles (read: pellet guns). Then we went to the video store, where we rented "The Phantom of the Opera", which T and I watched after the kids were in bed. I am SO MAD that I didn't go see that at the theater; I LOVED it. I was afraid to watch it in the theater because everyone said I wouldn't like it if I liked the stage musical. That just meant that the "everyone" in that sentence was taking hallucinogenic drugs, or something, because I repeat, I LOVED it. Perhaps this makes me the cinematic equivalent of a fourteen-year-old, but I don't care. (T loved it too. We watched the musical on the first New Year's Eve we were married, in San Francisco; this was one of the HUGE highlights of our pre-kids life together, for both of us.)

Saturday: T had decided that Saturday would be kind of a Mother's Day: Take Two kind of thing, since Mother's Day ended up being a quiet day at home with a (sick?) child. So we went to the zoo. We went to Storyland (basically a huge, shady playground/garden, with equipment, buildings, etc., based on kids' stories, very nice). We went to Denny's. We went to Barnes and Noble, where I spent my gift card on Middlemarch, a CD of Bach's flute sonatas, a collection of Jane Austen's unfinished works, and The Wind in the Willows.

Nothing terribly notable on Sunday: Sunday school, nap, baby shower, quick trip to my parents' so that T could get a tractor part for his cousin and the kids could go swimming in the creek. I have pictures of this but I'm too lazy to post them now.

And now today. I'm listening to Dvorak's "Symphony from the New World" at a pretty high volume level, which brings back high school years in a big way, and trying to undo the disaster that is my living room and kitchen. The kids are supposed to be cleaning their rooms. I hear playing, but I'm pretending I don't.

Speaking of people who are supposed to be cleaning but aren't. Ahem.

Friday, May 13, 2005

confession is good for the soul

Confession the First:
I can't believe how much of my emotional energy is wrapped up right now in what happens with Amos and Edda in "9 Chickweed Lane". I mean, it's not like I go around obsessing about them all day. But I DO get really excited when 9:30 PDT hits and I can go read the next day's installment. And no, in case you wondered, I totally am not a nerd.

Confession the Second:
This one is all Kristen's fault. She told me about Statcounter and I signed up and now I have one more thing to make me need to stop every time I walk past the computer: I can check and see who's been coming to my site from where, and what weird google searches ("Rachel High Heels Discipline": you do not want to know) people have used to find me, and ack. Blog crack, is what that is.

Confession the Third:
I have not finished one single book this month. SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH ME, CALL THE DOCTOR. (actually, it's that I've been crocheting, and I am not deft enough to read and crochet simultaneously like some people are. I can barely manage to watch a movie -- and boy have I been on an Austen/romantic comedy spree -- and crochet at the same time.) And I haven't found any really appealing books on CD at the library lately. Sometimes if I am still awake when I fall into bed, I pull out Mansfield Park and plow through a chapter or two. But that's it.

Confession the Fourth:
I took the Meyers-Briggs personality profile the other day, and the results showed my percentage leaning for each factor, and I came out almost exactly in the middle on every letter. I cannot even remember what I ended up with, it was that ambiguous. Does this mean that I have no personality? I am inclined to think so.

Thursday, May 12, 2005

if I could be...

Kristen "tagged" me with this a while ago, and I'm just now getting around to doing it.

How to play: I have to pick 5 occupations out of the list below and post my answers. Then I tag 3 other people to post their answers on their blog. If I tag you, and you don't want to be a part of this, then that is okay. Just let me know and I'll tag someone else.

The Questions: If I could be a scientist...If I could be a farmer...If I could be a musician...If I could be a doctor...If I could be a painter...If I could be a gardener...If I could be a missionary...If I could be a chef...If I could be an architect...If I could be a linguist...If I could be a psychologist...If I could be a librarian...If I could be an athlete...If I could be a lawyer...If I could be an inn-keeper...If I could be a professor...If I could be a writer...If I could be a llama-rider...If I could be a bonnie pirate...If I could be an astronaut...If I could be a world famous blogger...If I could be a justice on any one court in the world...If I could be married to any current famous political figure...

Well, I was going to get all smart-alecky and say that this being twenty-first century America, I could be any of these things if I really, really wanted to be, but my priorities are such that I am... um, not. However, I won't be a smart-alec, I'll just do the meme the way it was meant to be done. :) (except that I'll skip the "tagging" part, and just let people copy it if they want to.)

If I could be a scientist: I would work for the Institute for Creation Research, and I would make a HUGE effort to let the world know exactly how bad a fit Darwinian evolution is with the fossil record.

If I could be a farmer: I wouldn't. No way would I want my livelihood and that of my family to depend so completely on the weather and other unpredictable natural events. Which shows that I need to trust God more, I guess, or else that I read the Little House series too many times as a little girl.

If I could be a librarian: I think I might someday. I would be friendly to everyone, especially the kids, have sugarless suckers behind my desk, recommend really good books to everyone, and smell the books when nobody was looking.

If I could be a gardener: Nobody would want me to. I kill plants just by looking at them.

If I could be a musician: I would have studied the piano really thoroughly and not taken a twelve-year-and-counting hiatus from it after finishing high school. I would perhaps conduct a medium-major orchestra, or else play the flute for one. Whichever it was I would never tire of the way the air vibrates when the cello plays, and the feeling it makes in my chest like being in love. I would live in a house with hardwood floors and slanting sunlight, tastefully decorated, with a whole room dedicated to music which would contain a gleaming Steinway grand piano. I would have a complete personality transplant so that I could be surrounded by lots and lots of interesting friends and be at ease with them, and we would get together on weekends and make music together. And I would be really lonely and wish I had the friendly, crazy, happy life I have now, with my family around me in my lived-in little house.

Tuesday, May 10, 2005

where I'm from

(edited about a gajillion times since I first posted it)

I shamelessly ripped off this idea from The Happy Husband, which I thought I had found through Amy's blog but now that I look I see that I must have been wrong, as she has no link to it. (ed: yes she does, Rachel, you idiot.) Anyone who can tell me how I did come across The Happy Husband, please do so, thanks (from a person whose brain decided to go on permanent vacation as a 30th-birthday present). Anyway. Without further ado:

I am from
playing outside and dusty summers
riding horses and bicycles and in the backs of pickup trucks
I am from sunburns and peeling cheeks
from car-hood sleds on pine needles
from tarweed and peach brush and dirty faces

I am from sawdust and pine tar and pulling brush and bonfires
from swimming and fishing in creeks
from reading on rocks
and sleeping outdoors

I am from unruly hair and hand-me-downs
rats-nests and more interesting things to do than think about how I look
from schoolyard torture and you're so ugly
from "i'll be your friend when nobody else is around to see"
I am from daily sobbing heartbreak

I am from anne of green gables and trixie belden and the hardy boys
and marguerite henry and laura ingalls wilder and black beauty and the black stallion
from cynthia voigt and beverly cleary and judy blume
and jane austen and jane eyre and john steinbeck and charles dickens
from horse books and books about growing up and books about gymnasts or ballerinas
and a thousand others
I am from long summer days spent in the library sucking on butterscotch disks
reading through one shelf at a time

I am from spelling bees, from math competitions
from trophies and family pride
from small-town people who never forget (and unfortunately neither do their kids)
I am from no traffic lights and no movie house and no wal-mart
from golden grass and green oaks as far as you can see
from stickers in my socks and freckles on my shoulders

I am from rattly old cars
from all-day trips with the windows down
from "mistress shady" and "who stole the cookie" and "twenty questions"
I am from signal peak and morro bay and monterey and bagby grade and coulterville
and everywhere else within $20 worth of gas
I am from getting lost on purpose
from "i spy" and "ninety-nine bottles of coke" and "i met a fair maiden out walking one day" and "my grandfather's clock"

I am from parents who hug
from stories read out loud, from hard-working people
I am from a brother who teases and cousins who play pranks
I am from family secrets and little dramas and tension
and from reconciliation
I am from so much love

I am from junior high dances
from "hair band" ballads and very bad dancing and searing crushes
from giggling friends and bubble skirts
high tops and big shirts and rolled-cuff cutoffs

I am from underachieving
from "performs below potential" and "disorganized" and 99th-percentile SATs
from driving to the river and swimming in the moonlight
from midnight walks and deep conversations about love and eternity
and whether you think he really likes me

I am from surrender
from flaming enthusiasm for Jesus and singing hymns and praise
I am from deep abiding joy

I am from the world's happiest marriages
(that's two generations' worth)
I am from our own private language
from a thousand loving nicknames and as much affection as I can handle
(and that's a lot)
from Candy Land and Homer Price and Goodnight Moon
I am from sticky kisses and dandelion bouquets

Monday, May 09, 2005

mother's day etc.

Well, I'm going to join the ranks of Christian women bloggers who are explaining why they're not blogging as often anymore. My reasons aren't as cool as theirs -- especially Molly; I mean, who can top having a baby as a reason to stay away from the computer? But I do have a little list of reasons. I have a crochet project I'm working on really hard; I am trying to get through Mansfield Park; we're getting to the end of the school year and I'm getting that "you slacker, your children are going to hate you when they're adults because you basically took off the entire months of March and April from any kind of regular sit-down school every year and that meant that they reached the age of 18 barely able to multiply single-digit numbers and now they live in the ghetto and scrounge in trash cans for a living THANKS A WHOLE LOT MOM" kind of panic. I KNOW it's not true, I mean, heck, if I stopped right now they could probably get jobs with, I dunno, the postal service or something. And most importantly, they're growing and blossoming and reading and writing (sometimes even legibly, but don't count on it) and being creative and they're very bright and everything. It's just this kind of opposite-of-spring-fever thing I get every year, don't mind me.

Also, it has been raining again, so I haven't been taking a whole lot of pictures to post, or going for walks. And the biggest reason is that I have a tendency to spend way too much time sitting here in front of this machine, and I need to work on curtailing that to a conscionable level. Don't expect me to disappear (especially because my resolve on this sort of thing is notoriously weak), but don't expect a post every day either, I guess. Which, hey, who's been expecting that lately anyway.

quick Mother's Day summation: I spent the day at home, except for a brief excursion to the library's used book sale, because LT woke up in the wee small hours on Sunday, throwing up. It ended up being a one-off, but we couldn't know that in time to go to church or the family gathering afterward. Plus I was up at 3 a.m., washing sheets and blankets and cuddling my nine-year-old (!!), and that is not conducive to getting up bright and early. It ended up being a pretty nice day, all things considered. We didn't play a family board game like I wanted to (the boys' round of the Star Wars trading card game thing or whatever it's called took longer than they thought it would), but I didn't have to wash dishes or cook, and I DID have ice cream and cookies. Definitely a day for the positive column. :)

Saturday, May 07, 2005

ssshhh...

...be very quiet.

Right now there are people in my kitchen washing my dishes. And I am not sick or otherwise incapacitated.

yippee!

Also, the kids simply could not wait until tomorrow to give me the following (ooh! a list!):

• a new iced tea jug, because mine cracked
  
• two new pie/pizza spatulas, because both of mine were broken (not by me) in the space of about a week, a month or two ago
  
• chip clips with magnets, so they can always be stuck to the side of the fridge, because when I want a chip clip I can never find one, even though I am falling over them when I don't want them
  
  (do they know me or what?)
  
  
• two bookmarks, because I collect bookmarks
  AND
  
• A $25 gift certificate to Barnes and Noble.
  

Apparently this list represents a large percentage of their recycling haul from earlier this week. I am absolutely convinced that I have the world's most amazing children. And of course I'm not biased at all.

Happy Mothers' Day to all my friends who are moms... and to those who aren't yet too. (((hugs)))

Thursday, May 05, 2005

this ought to say "Hallmark" on the back

Last night at Bible study, one of the women approached me and said that as a gift for me after The Event I Swore I Would Not Mention Again, she was going to come over and clean my house for me (she cleans houses for a living). What I wanted to say was "oh, like h*** am I ever going to let a casual friend anywhere NEAR the dirty parts of my house." However, when someone offers you a gift, you're supposed to smile politely and say 'thank you', and then only write the above sentence in your online journal (I think that's what Emily Post says about it), so that's what I did. Am doing. She's coming over at 2:30 today. And my mom is coming over from 1:00 to 2:00 to help me clean in advance of the arrival of the cleaning lady. Now there's one particular cliché I never thought I'd be living out.

Seriously, there are some household things I'm not supposed to be doing yet -- floors, and scrubbing the bathtub -- which really do need to be done pretty badly. But there is a megaton of STUFF that needs to get put away first, and that's what Mom's going to help me with. What a mom. She gives birth to me, lavishes me with love and affection and creative ideas for fun for my entire childhood, puts up with my regrettable attitude during my teenaged years, offers herself on the altar of free babysitting as soon as I provide her with a grandchild, and then, to top it off, comes over on her lunch break to help me clean my house even though I'm thirty years old and really, if I haven't got the discipline to clean my own house, that ought to be my own problem. Wow. This is the stuff of shiny embossed pastel fancy-script $4.50 Mother's Day cards if ever I saw it.

Now you'll have to excuse me; I'd love to write a nice thoughtful post about the parallels between "cleaning for the cleaning lady" and our Christian walk, but I'd better get to work; my mom will be here in three hours and this place is A MESS.

Tuesday, May 03, 2005

"How do you keep falling in love?"

KiwiRia posted the following in her journal:

How do you keep falling in love?

Due to recent problems in our marriage, my husband and I have decided that we really need to work on spending more time together - not just "we're-living-together" time - but proper quality time, just like we did when we were dating.

However, we seem to have gotten stuck in a rut, so I need ideas!
Ideas of (inexpensive) things to do on date-nights.
Ideas of how to fall in love with my DH all over again.
Ideas of how I can make my DH fall in love with me all over again.

We love each other dearly, but in the stress of everyday life, the magic tends to slip away.
What do you do to rekindle the romance in your relationship?

Oh dear, she had to go and ask for my advice (not specifically my advice, but yeah, so what?), didn't she. I am such a sucker for giving advice. I wrote such a long reply that I decided to go ahead and post it here and link to it, rather than taking over her comments area with my long-windedness. My reply follows.

-----------

Wow, there's a lot of good advice so far! What a good use of the blogosphere, no?

As for me, eleven years of marriage have helped me to discover the following:

1. If the computer is YOUR addiction, so to speak, just shut the darn thing off. If it's HIS, he won't like you doing that, so you have to lure him away from it. I suggest the aforementioned sexy outfit. This is where you're lucky not to have kids yet, because those of us blessed with little ones can't just do this kind of thing as soon as DH walks in the door, we have to wait till the kiddos are in bed or send them to Grandma's ahead of time. Although we can, um, kind of HINT, in a subtle way, to, um, keep things at the forefront of our minds while we wait. (Ditto with the TV or whatever else might take you away from each other.)

2. All the time, whatever you're doing, don't get so engrossed in it that you don't touch/talk to/smile at each other. Just being in the same room together can be really chummy if you're still aware of each other, and really desolate-feeling if you're not. When we watch a movie, we cuddle with each other on the couch instead of sitting in separate chairs. When he walks past me, he pauses to kiss me; when I walk past him sitting at the computer I stroke the top of his head. I look up from my crocheting and wait till he looks up from his studying, and I catch his eye and smile. That kind of thing.

3. In our specific marriage, I have found that when we start getting snippy or "bored" with each other, a lot of the time we'll look at our lives and see that we just don't have much time together. We make a conscious effort to fix that, to spend hours in each other's company even if it's just doing ordinary household things or our own projects, and things get better. This is the opposite of what most modern relationship advice will tell you -- that these things are a sign of needing some time apart. That never, ever, ever works for us.

4. All the other suggestions about romantic dinners at home, etc. are great. You and your DH both love theater; maybe a night on the other side of the curtain would be a good date? When T and I are broke (which is often), even just a standing date every two weeks to put the kids to bed on time and put in one of the movies we already own, and lie on the couch together to watch it -- and then, well, YOU know -- is perfect. It gives us something to look forward to, and just having an appointment for something pleasant with each other reminds us of how fond we are of each other.

5. In the long term, see if you have time in your schedules to take on an activity together. Do you still do the theater thing? If not, could you do it again in some form? Something where you not only have a standing "date" to spend time together, but also have something to reminisce and think and plan about in common, can be a really good thing.

6. Remember to be playful. Remember to be engrossed in each other. This gets HARD to do sometimes, when you reach the stage where your relationship is easily taken for granted. The focus needn't be on that flirty-butterflies-in-the-stomach feeling -- that pretty much belongs to the beginning of a relationship. The problems start when a couple equates that feeling with "love", and thinks that because that feeling is gone, the relationship is somehow flat and the love is gone. It's not. It's just not a new relationship anymore, and that's a good thing, because new relationships might make you dizzy and crazy and blissful, but they are never as rich as long ones. I think of the things that enrich my marriage and make me feel passionate about my husband, and often it's the little things, like riding in the car listening to the radio and getting fired up about the same things politically or theologically, or in making each other laugh, REALLY laugh, belly laugh, or in the way he makes up songs for me or crosses the room just to kiss me. (Funny: T and I fell in love while carrying on a series of political and religious debates with each other and so now, even though we agree on most issues, one way we really connect with each other is by having a really verbal, passionate discussion about current events or theology. nerds? nah.)

7. Being on track spiritually always, always helps us. If we get to where we're not spending time in the Word (apart OR together) and in prayer, it really starts to show in our attitudes, which affects our relationship. The times our marriage has been at its very best have been the times when we've been in the habit of purposefully setting aside time for devotions together. Sadly, this is not nearly as large a percentage of our marriage as it should be....

I don't mean to sound like I think I know it all. Obviously I don't know it all, or anywhere near that. But I do have a really happy marriage, and these are just some things that that marriage has taught me.

Monday, May 02, 2005

out of practice II

Well, here's how you get me to shut up, I guess. Just get me my own domain and I completely run out of things to say for days on end.

Real life started again today. No sitting in the recliner crocheting for hours. No waking up in the morning and stretching lazily and going back to sleep with my leg stretched over T's. No, T went back to work, and the kids and I had a regular day filled with school and errands and housework and all that. I even cooked dinner, which I hadn't done since April 12th, which has to be some kind of record, right? Laundry, messes, getting the soap out of C's eyes in the bath, getting down the breakfast cereal, shopping for things we're out of -- all these things are once more my responsibility. I wouldn't mind, in fact it would be nice to be getting back into our routine, if it weren't for the fact that we had become accustomed to the luxury of having T home all the time and now he's not, and we just plain MISSED him today. It was almost as bad as the day he had to go back to work after two and a half months off for a broken ankle in the winter of 2002/2003. I'm inclined to make a joke about that being pitiful, but I really don't think it's pitiful, if I didn't like having him around I wouldn't have married him, right?

Also, I have to seriously start watching what I eat again. I gained FIVE POUNDS in the past three weeks, not only because I was sitting around not getting much exercise, but also because I ate like a trencherman the whole time. I think I felt like I had to make up for the three days of either liquid diet or no food at all. And people kept bringing us these fantastic meals, and the meals were so HEARTY and the quantities were so large, and T wanted to make me happy so he would bring me heaping bowls of ice cream with brownies, and anytime I was hungry I would just snack. So if you ever should NEED to gain five pounds in three weeks, (I will try hard not to hate your skinny self and) there's the method right there for you.

Good things about today:

• School. The kids were cooperative and we all really enjoyed ourselves. LT gets to basically skip the chapters in his math book that deal with the multiplication tables, since he learned those last year, so now he's doing geometry and measurement, which C is learning along with him as well as doing two-digit addition. They both have books they're really into right now -- LT is tearing it up in his Hardy Boys series (well, tearing it up for a nine-year-old, at least), and C has one of those old-fashioned school reading textbooks, maybe from the 40's, which she borrowed from my parents yesterday, and she's halfway through it. Every time I hear her read out loud she surprises me with how FAST she's getting better and better at it.
  
• The library. I hadn't been there in weeks. I didn't find any books I wanted (when I'm reading Austen, nothing else has any appeal) but I found a few movies. And it was good to just BE there.
  
• LT discussing Austen adaptations with the librarian.
  
• The rebate from the purchase of The Nikon finally arrived, just in time to pay (pause to push down the wave of white-hot self-loathing trying to overtake me) the fine from my traffic ticket.
  
• I went back to the community chorus and I really enjoyed myself.

Oh, man, I am just SO un-funny tonight. You know the scene in The Phantom Tollbooth when Milo winds up in the Doldrums? And the doldrums kind of slink around and talk slower and slower until Milo is lulled into a state of exhausted apathy? I am that tired.