« May 2005 | Main | July 2005 »

Thursday, June 30, 2005

June reads

(bold indicates a first-time read)

1. My Sister's Keeper -- Jodi Picoult -- 3
   • This was hyped pretty heavily, and I found that it just didn't quite meet up to my expectations. The moral issues raised are definitely the best aspect of this story, and why it's had such success as a book club selection, but I found the writing style to be amateurish at times, and I definitely felt ripped off by the ending.
2. The Year of Pleasures -- Elizabeth Berg -- 4
   • Elizabeth Berg has done it again, with this book whose characters are knowable and whose issues resonate even for those who've never dealt with them in reality.
3. Emma -- Jane Austen -- 5
   • Emma, Emma, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways. (Until you get over yourself, that is.) And the great thing is, the story's written so brilliantly that even while you're wishing you could wring the title character's neck, you're having the time of your life reading about her.
4. Eats, Shoots, and Leaves -- Lynne Truss -- 5
   • I LOVE THIS BOOK. But of course you all knew I would.
5. The Jane Austen Book Club -- Karen Joy Fowler -- 1.5
   • Blah. Don't bother. Austen fans won't find as much meat as they'd hope to, and people who haven't read or don't like Austen will be bored to tears. The plot's mighty thin, and the book discussions around which it revolves seem really... pale and bland to me.
6. The Buccaneers -- Edith Wharton -- 3
   • A friend lent this to me, and I liked it more than I thought I would. It was a biting, vicious depiction of the "marriage market" of (late-, in this instance) 19th-century England and America, and it's an excellent look at the collision of those two cultures during that time period. I could have done without the adultery, though.
7. Persuasion -- Jane Austen -- 5
   • My favorite, favorite Austen. It's more of a pure romance than her other books. The social satire is still there, in spades, but it takes a backseat to the glowing romance. And SUCH glowing romance it is, too.
8. The Art of Mending -- Elizabeth Berg -- 4
   • Elizabeth Berg is one of my favorite modern authors, but this isn't my favorite of her books. It was very good, but not up to the standard of the rest of hers, I thought. It seemed a little less tightly woven. Still very poetic and with a good number of "I've always felt that way but never thought to put it like that" zinger moments, but... I dunno. It was a little bit flat for me. (You'll note that even with all this I gave it a 4. She's good, even when she's not at her best.)

Tuesday, June 28, 2005

such a Rachel-ish thing to do

This is so embarrassing that I almost couldn't blog about it.

Almost.

Anyone who's read this journal for oh, say, three nanoseconds knows that I am, well, not exactly graceful. And that's putting it really nicely. I usually manage to keep my klutzishness to a livable level, with only occasional embarrassing moments, which I hope I manage to have in separate locations most of the time, so that it's not always the same people seeing me make hideous writhe-worthy mistakes.

Which means that I think maybe I should never go back to our grocery store again. Can I move to a different town? Because tonight I dashed out to the store to buy a Cadbury Roast Almond bar and a bag of Jolly Ranchers (yes, as a matter of fact, I DO have a transcribing job I'm starting tonight), and some coffee and apples and a magazine for T. On my way out of the store, after I swiped the wrong side of my ATM card through the machine which was embarrassing enough in its own small way (I think a three-year-old knows which way to orient an ATM card in the swiping thingamabob), I was carrying my bag of groceries in one hand and sort of leading the cart out of the store with the other (because I'm not the high-maintenance sort of person who leaves the cart there at the checkstand for the prepubescent bagger to have to push outside), when the cart banged into the sliding door of the store and knocked it off its track. Not only the door that slides, but the stationary door behind it. And of course these aren't your simple little roller doors like you have in your shower or closet. These are heavy-duty whack-proof-except-when-Rachel's-around pieces of equipment. And I managed to, um, well.

That's right, people, I BROKE THE STORE.

(The one door went back on its track-thingie really easily; I pushed it back on right away. And the manager, a stock boy, and a customer with a screwdriver worked together to fix the other one, while I stood there with my very best "please don't sue me" look on my face. So it's not like, you know, I'm going to have to pay to replace it or whatever. But augh, I will have to shop there again someday, because while I actually like the owners better at the only other store in town, it can not be relied upon to have any given perishable item on any given day, and it never has fresh broccoli. I will never EVER live this down.)

Sunday, June 26, 2005

sigh

T is still gone. He'll probably come home tomorrow night at his regular time. We hope. He was supposed to have a four-day weekend (well, Thursday he had to go to the lab, so he took it off, but whatever) and ended up getting called on Friday evening to go in early Saturday. So the last any of us saw him was Friday night, because no, I did NOT manage to stay up till 3:30 and make him pancakes. I've done it before in situations like this but I just couldn't this time; I was nodding off sitting up, and finally headed to bed around 12:30 or 1:00 in a sleepy haze of guilt.

I have a papercut (from a paper plate. What kind of person gets papercuts from a paper plate? Oh yeah, me. Nevermind) right in that web of skin between my finger and thumb on my left hand. A papercut has always been right up there with a hangnail as favorites for sarcastic excuses for getting out of work, as if they're these negligible little nothings. Well, I did do some work today, but I am here to tell you that papercuts and hangnails hurt. They really do. Whine.

Also, VBS starts tomorrow (that's Vacation Bible School, which lasts a week and takes all morning, for those of you who are either child-free or not from the Evangelical Christian planet). I did not sign up to help this year, but odds are I'll be helping anyway, since I have nothing else to do during the four-hour duration of the event. I'm certainly not driving home (15 miles) and back (15 miles again) when I don't have to and gas is still at European-style prices. The night before something like this I always dread it, and try to figure out ways to wiggle out of it, but the fact is that the kids are really looking forward to it. Well, C is. I think LT could probably do without VBS just fine and never miss it, but C is a little social animal who loves her fun and games. And once I'm actually there I'm always glad we went.

However. I have been a good girl this weekend and actually stuck to my diet, overall. I hate that word -- it's right up there with "blog" -- but it sounds even lamer to say something else, like "healthy eating plan" or what have you. So diet it is. For those of you who joined us late, I lost 30 pounds in the fall/winter of 2003/2004. Which is great, except that I wanted to lose 45 pounds, but I just sort of stopped at 30, way back over a year ago, last spring, and in the last few months I've actually gained five pounds back, and that is just purely unacceptable. So this past weekend has been that really fun time at the beginning of a new way of eating when you're basically starving all the time, especially in the afternoons and evenings, when I feel like I could eat a Mack truck if someone would deep-fry it and serve it with ranch sauce for dipping. If I hang in there for a week it'll get better, I know this, but augh. Oh, wait, that was a happy thing. Yay.

And I've been catching up on laundry. And the house is clean. I figure the least I can do for a man who leaves the house at 4:00 to go work two or three nineteen-hour days to feed our family when he thought he'd be at home relaxing (well, working. On projects. But... whatever. It's relaxing to HIM) is to have the house comfortable for him when he walks in. Now watch, tomorrow it'll get totally destroyed just in time for him to come in the door.

And I watched "The Phantom of the Opera" again tonight. My new favorite part this time was the Don Juan scene where the Phantom has just offed the male lead guy and taken his place on the stage and he's singing and Christine and Raoul and Madame Giry and Mssrs. Firmin and André have all just figured that out and the tension is just palpable and augh must NOT put it in again must NOT must go to BED.

Friday, June 24, 2005

T's Top Ten

T has to leave for work at 3:30 in the morning, and will probably be gone all weekend. I'm going to see if I can stay up long enough to make him sugar-free pancakes for breakfast, and I've been wanting to do this kind of tribute post for quite a while, so, well, here it is.

Note: This list represents only a few high points, as I look at life with a man who is full of kind, wacky, clever, intelligent, generous ways, every day of his life. This doesn't even begin to display the magnitude of the joy I have, that he is in my life, that I didn't have to "settle" for a man to whom I wasn't terribly important, but was given one who takes my sometimes-overboard affection and returns it to me many-fold. I don't want to imply that these are more important than any of the thousands of everyday happinesses we have together and as a family. Also, um, the list had to be family-friendly, so, um, yeah. There's none of THAT in here; don't worry.

Without further ado, and in no particular order:

• My surgery and recovery. For three weeks he basically waited on me hand and foot. He brought me my meals on a tray. He helped me get up from my chair. He did the laundry and corralled the kids to get the kitchen cleaned each night -- all this with the most generous, loving attitude I could ever have imagined. There was not one false note, one frustrated sigh, one teeny hint that I should just get better already so he could have his life back.
• "Babe". When we'd been married about three years, Yosemite Valley flooded and T had to live in the Park so that he could get to work. He'd be up there for six days and then come home for one day. It was the first time we'd been really separated in our marriage, and it was a difficult time. However, one day T called me and told me about this movie they'd shown on the bus they rode in, down from their housing in Wawona to the valley floor, called "Babe". He told me I HAD to watch it, it had the cutest little pig in the WORLD in it, and I did, and he was right, and I just loved that this same man who could rebuild a transmission and exegete Phillippians and plan military strategy, that man whom people think of as so serious... fell in love with a talking pig with a good heart, and wasn't ashamed to admit it.
• The Nikon. Um, what more can I say on that one. He's always been great at gift-giving, even when we're broke and that means we're giving each other backrub coupons for Christmas, but he totally outdid himself with The Nikon.
• When we found out I was pregnant for the first time and he was so happy that he cried.
• "Ducky!" When we were engaged, we were out for a walk, and he looked at me and just said, "DUCK-y!" in, well, in this cute little cartoon voice he does. He avers that he has no idea why he said it (I think it was because of the annoying little flip in the back of my then-short hair, which looked like a duck's tail, but he says it wasn't that). And Ducky -- along with a parade of other duck-related nicknames -- has been what he's called me ever since. Now my nine-year-old son calls me "Quacky". I guess that's OK. ;)
• Snapple. When we were dating, I discovered peach Snapple and couldn't get enough of it. In 1993 in our small town, Snapple could be hard to come by, so he bought out our local grocery's entire stock of Peach Snapple (about a dozen bottles) and set them aside to give to me one at a time. I'd come out of the restaurant where I worked and there would be a Snapple in a bowl of ice on the seat of my car. Now I drink the diet version, and not as often, but the taste still takes me right back to that summer and fall.
• Florida. I have a very, very dear NOW PREGNANT WOO HOO SUSAN friend who lives in Florida. I'd wanted to visit her for YEARS, and in February 2004 T decided that to heck with it, we'd just make it happen, no more putting it off. So we went, and had a fantastic, amazing, wonderful time, and T was the first person to start planning our next trip.
• Phantom of the Opera. In the fall of 1994, our first year of marriage, he worked some overtime and used the money to buy tickets to the San Francisco production of Phantom of the Opera. We went on New Years' Eve. It was definitely a gift for me -- he went expecting to watch me have a good time and not much else. Which totally explains why he cried at the end and couldn't stop talking about the show for days, right?
• His broken ankle. He was off work for two and a half months, and we all enjoyed it so much, funny as it sounds to say it. We look back on that time with immense fondness. The stereotype about men is that they whine and act like babies when they're sick or injured, and the stereotype about wives is that we can't wait for our husbands to get out from underfoot so we can have our routine in place. We shatter both of these, I'm happy to say.
• The book signing. In the fall of 2001 An author I liked was going to a town about four hours away to give a talk and sign books. T took me to meet her, on a trip which involved our car's final death throes and the purchase of a used car. We were later getting to the city than we thought we'd be but no way would he give up and go home. He had bought me four of this woman's books for Christmas (which, you'll note, since it was fall, had not arrived yet); he smuggled them along in the car in the hope that he could somehow manage to get them signed without my seeing him do it. I ended up in the end of the signing line, which was moving slowly, and he was trying to amuse the kids and keep them in order, so I gave up on getting my book (the one I'd bought for myself that day) signed, and suggested we go. So T took me to ANOTHER event the next spring where the author would be, and we got all five of the books signed. Books which T wouldn't read if he was alone with them in a doctor's office with a three-hour wait. THAT is how much he loves me.

so what you're saying is...

I saw this placard in the window at the lab* yesterday:

It's amazing that at no point during the production of that logo did anyone realize/point out/care that what they are actually saying is: YOU MAY NOT CREATE A ZONE WHERE HATE AND VIOLENCE ARE FORBIDDEN. sigh.

This reminds me of the sign that stood in front of our local high school for maybe six years (including at least one year when I attended, maybe two). I dearly wish I'd taken a photograph of it. It proclaimed the school to be a SUBSTANCE-FREE ZONE in very large, commanding, black type (above a series of circle-and-slash images of a cigarette, a martini glass, and a marijuana leaf). Telling, I thought.

*where my husband (the one who crashes when he eats half a piece of cake) had to do a three-hour glucose screen, involving basically consuming a cup of syrup, for those who don't know. It was a good thing the lab had an examining table where he could sleep.

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

C's book

Yesterday C wrote a tie-in book for Star Wars Episode 3. Here it is. I think she has a future in this, no? Warning: It gives away the end.

Front Cover

"STAR WARSE EPASOTD THREE RAVANG [revenge] OF THE SITH
"BY [C] AGE 5"




"ANAKIN SKYWAKER HAS MARED [married] PADMAY OMADOLA AND SHE GAVE BERTH TO TWINS NAMD LUKE AND LAYA AND ANAKIN SKYWAKER HAS TERND INTO DARTH VADER"




"AND DARTH VADER BECAM VAREE BAD
"AND PADMAY DID [died]"




"AND DARTH VADER LIVID [lived]"

Tuesday, June 21, 2005

things I think

You know what is a total scam? Is laundry detergent scoops. Laundry detergent scoops are the Make Thousands A Month Stuffing Envelopes At Home of the housework world. The manufacturer sells you a box of powdered detergent, proclaiming that said box of detergent will wash, say, 80 loads of your husband's socks and your son's muddy jeans. But then they include -- here's the devious thing -- a scoop which holds THREE LOADS' WORTH of detergent. Now, they are up-front about this; they put little lines on the side of the scoop showing how little you actually need to use, but come on, they know that with a scoop that big you're going to get in a hurry and just scoop up whatever and end up buying more product after only, say, twenty-eight loads of wash.

Where is the outrage? I ask you.

(my personal solution is to replace the clear green tool of deception with a 1/3-cup measure. I'LL SHOW THEM.)

**********

Also, I need a haircut, like really badly. I can't do anything dramatic because I'm too wimpy, but it's going be going from waist-length (the few stray hairs that actually live long enough to make it that far) to above the bra strap, SOON, or I'm going to end up going completely off the deep end and getting it cut up to my jaw or something. And I'd really regret that. Especially when the divorce papers were served.

***********

And further, I think the people who are crying because cutting PBS will mean the end of quality children's programming until the end of time need to watch Nickelodeon a little bit, and also check out, say, THE SESAME STREET STORE in their local mall. I think Big Bird and the gang could probably make it on their own without the subsidy, don't you?

***********

Also, because we are moving our schoolroom stuff back into the main house since what has formerly been known as our schoolroom will (I hope) soon be rented out to some fortunate individual, I get all the fun of moving, without, well, the fun of moving. In other words, I hauled boxes and books for about three and a half hours today, and I'm not done yet, and then I get to scour and scrub and all that fun stuff. Anyone want a nice small apartment in a good location, all utilities included? :-D

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

I'm about to reveal a dirty secret. Ready?

Our house has fleas.

NOT the apartment! Oh dear me no, the apartment's clean as a whistle. Er, at least as far as INSIDIOUS DEMONIC LITTLE BEASTS are concerned. That's because the fleabags cats don't go in there. So if you were gonna come rent that apartment you just come on ahead, it's all fine and dandy, yessir.

So far we've tried flea collars for the cats and fogging (which is a HUGE pain in the derriere, oh my GOSH, the covering of food preparation items! the shutting off of aquariums and pilot lights and refrigerators! and on top of that, it completely and totally failed to have any effect whatsoever) for the house. Now we're planning on doing the drops-behind-the-shoulder-blades thing, since everyone says that is just the be-all and end-all of flea prevention. Because sitting down at the computer and having to pinch three fleas to death within about ten minutes is really lame.

Saturday, June 18, 2005

favorite things

C likes to come with my on my evening exercise/photography walks. T and LT do not -- T used to enjoy walking but doesn't anymore, and LT has always been able to find something better to do than to walk without a destination in mind. So frequently this is some good "alone time" with my daughter, time when I can hold her hand and we can converse and it can really smack me over the head how much she's growing up, time when I can get to know her even better, as an individual with her own thoughts and ideas, and not just as my daughter, time when there's no competition for each other's attention. (note: I sometimes have this kind of time with LT also, generally after everyone else is in bed, as both he and I tend more toward night-owlism than the other two people in our family.)

Anyway. Last night as we were walking we started a conversation about our favorite sounds, and our favorite smells, taking turns. Here are some of the things we came up with
(sounds)

• I like the sound of a shovel going into soft dirt.
  
• C likes the sound of a bird singing.
  
• I like the sound of a car driving by on a wet road.
  
• C likes the sound of windshield wipers on a really rainy window.
  
• I like the sound of a quiet room where people are reading.
  
• C likes the sound of horses' feet running.
  
• I like the sound of paper or silk rustling.
  
• C likes the sound of feet crunching in gravel.
  
• I like the sound of a dog's tags jingling when it runs.
  
• C likes the smell of the back of my neck when it's clean (borrowed from Stuart Little. Yeesh, I hope she's never smelled it when it's not clean...).
  
• I like the smell of gasoline. (C: "me too. And I like the smell of diesel too." I: "me too.")
  
• C likes the smell of roses.
  
• I like the smell of fresh laundry as I'm hanging it on the clothesline.
  
• C likes the smell of horses.
  
• I like the smell of cooking coming out from other people's houses.
  
• C likes the smell of water.
  
• I like the smell of the sun on a field of dry grass.
  
• C likes the smell of her Dragon Fruit shampoo-mixed-with-conditioner.
  
• I like the smell of tarweed and peach brush, but only because it reminds me of when I was growing up.
  
• C likes the smell of the air at Grandma and Grandpa's.
  
• I like the smell when rain just starts to fall on the very hot, dry ground.
  
• C likes the smell of lawns with sprinklers on them.
  

And so on. We kept going back and forth for probably twenty minutes; I can't even remember half of what we said, but it was a really pleasant conversation.

So what do YOU like?

Thursday, June 16, 2005

bliss

We got back at 2:00 from a really long hard walk in town, and the kids settled down in the living room with books (yay for the summer reading program, one of my all-time favorite summer memories, and something that I was excited about sharing with my kids before I even HAD kids). Except for the sound my typing is making right now, we've heard nothing but turning pages for the past half-hour.

I totally love my life today. Just had to share, especially after the slipping earlier in the week. :)

Wednesday, June 15, 2005

Jonathan

LOOK AT THAT FACE.

(in case you just landed in my journal from the far side of the galaxy, he's not mine; he's my nephew, and he's three days old in this picture.)

ack

Here's a recipe for a minor parenting freak-out:

• a Bible open to Revelation 17
  
• two children who don't know about the mechanics of sex
  
• one mother who would like to keep it that way
  

Of course the first question to come up was, "Mommy, what's a pros-ti-tute?"* I think God gave me special grace, because not only did I not stammer and freak out, I actually managed to give what I thought, considering the circumstances, was a pretty coherent, decent answer. In case you should ever find yourself in the same predicament ;), here's what I said:

There are some things that God says we must ONLY DO with our spouse -- that's a husband or wife. (C: "Like taking showers together?" I: "Yes. That's one thing."). These are very special and private things, and only for married people. But a prostitute is someone who, instead of doing those things with her husband, goes out and does them with other people, if they'll pay her.

This is why, in LT's chapter summary, he notes that "there is a woman who is a simbal for a city and she sells things she is not sopposed to sell." (spelling original, obviously).

*Funnily enough, I asked my mom this question once also, when I was ten or eleven. Except I asked it aloud from my seat in the crowded waiting room of the dental office where she works. (I was reading a joke book, and it had a cartoon depicting a little old lady chasing a minister out of a church, smacking him with her purse, and the wayside pulpit said "ARE WE ALL PROSTITUTES?". The joke book belonged to the other dentist in the practice. It was never there again after that incident. I was bummed.)

And now I'm going to (again) sit back and wait for the really freakish Google hits to pour in. GO AWAY SCARY GOOGLER, NOTHING TO SEE HERE.

Tuesday, June 14, 2005

oh, quit bothering me with your 'title' nonsense already

Yesterday I was in serious need of a comfort-food kind of dinner, so I made the following:
****
Ingredients:
1 c milk
3/4 c Italian-seasoned bread crumbs
4 large mushrooms
1/3 of a large yellow onion
1 large clove garlic
1 carrot, shredded or grated
1 t salt
1/2 t pepper
sprinkling of parsley
2 beaten eggs
2 lb lean ground beef
1 package brown gravy mix
2 T sherry

Soak crumbs in milk. Finely mince garlic, onion, and mushroom (I use my Pampered Chef chopper, which has seen better days, but still works fine), and sauté together until soft in a little bit of butter or oil. Add to milk and crumbs, along with carrot, salt, pepper, and eggs. Mix together, then add meat and knead with hands until well-mixed (Eew! gross! but if you try to use a spoon you'll be there all day). Shape into loaves or put into pans and bake at 350 degrees until an internal temperature of 160° is reached -- about an hour and a quarter. Slice and serve with gravy, which you mix according to package directions, except replace 2T of the water with the sherry.
****

Now, most people would call that meatloaf. However, I call it large rectangular meatballs which I happen to serve sliced with gravy. That way my husband will eat it. I also made twice-baked potatoes, which are SO YUMMY (halve baked potatoes and scoop out most of their innards; mix said innards with sour cream, butter, crumbled cooked bacon, and garlic and onion cooked WITH the bacon; replace in potato shells and top with grated cheese; bake till hot). I warned T when he called from work that I was making two of his least favorite foods for supper, but it ended up that he took seconds of everything. I think the earth's axis tilted a little bit; did you feel it?

Then, as much as I wanted to stay home and power through an entire half-gallon of Dulce de Leche ice cream, I couldn't. I had a meeting of the board of directors for our community chorus. (someday it might look kind of good on a resumé or whatever, that I am on the board of directors for something. Which is funny, since the reason I got the job was that I was one of only six people to show up at a planning meeting once, a few years ago. Everyone who went to that meeting is on the board of directors. That'll teach me to show up for stuff...). Usually these meetings are really, really boring, in that usual sort of Robert's-Rules-accompanied "I wonder if anyone would notice if I pulled Persuasion out of my purse and started reading it under the table" kind of head-exploding, frustrating way. And there was a good deal of that sort of thing -- why does it take us an hour to verbally go over a budget that we all have PRINTED OUT IN FRONT OF OUR FACES, for example. But last night things got enlivened by a lovely little shouting match between the chairman and the scholarship committee person, and since none of the rest of us had anything more than the vaguest idea of what they were talking about, we basically had to just sit there open-mouthed while the WWF Senior Tour had its first major smackdown right in the chairman's living room. And it wasn't pretty.

Funny how I wasn't feeling depressed anymore when I got home, though. I wonder what that says about me. (probably it helps a whole lot that the kids cleaned the kitchen while I was gone, but still.) Today I have a raging headache, but I seem to have shoved really hard against the sides of my chute, if I'm not climbing back up yet, at least I don't think I'm going down either. God works in strange ways sometimes.

Monday, June 13, 2005

you live, you learn

(third post today)

You know how you're supposed to stab potatoes with a fork so they don't blow up while they bake? I have become increasingly lazy about that over the years and haven't poked one in ages. Never did I have a potato explode or even, you know, act like it wanted to explode.

Until just now. Potato innards all over the inside of a 375° oven is not a pretty sight. Or smell. Just so you know.

slipping

Today I can feel myself slipping down. It has been a long time since I've felt like this, and I don't like it. Every time it goes away, I think, whew, glad that's done, won't have to deal with that again.

Oops.

Am I sensing the delicate shifting of chemical balances in my brain? Is it the devil, pulling on me and cackling merrily? Am I not spiritual enough? Not active enough? Just weak? Maybe I'm overwhelmed by the sheer work involved in pulling a household back into normalcy after a weekend of being gone almost all the time, or maybe... I don't know. All I do know is that I feel like I'm sliding down a seamless, slippery chute into a fog of gray waiting for me at the bottom. I'm trying for handholds -- get something done, that sometimes works. If you don't like your surroundings, change them. Clean up the mess and then the vicious circle will break and you'll feel normal. Go out and see something different.

Or, sit.

I sometimes think the fatigue and exhaustion associated with depression is actually related to the way that, when you're depressed, nothing at all sounds appealing. You can't even daydream and take yourself away from where you are, because all the usual daydream fodder -- I am sitting by a snapping fire. It is autumn and the rain is coming down in sheets outside the plate-glass window of the library in my beautiful new home. The whole family is with me, and quiet, with a general feeling of well-being and love in the room. I have a thick book which I've never read before, and a cup of rich hot chocolate, and a throw blanket on my lap -- feels just as empty as the thought of washing the sinkful of dishes, or getting the kids ready for running errands, or staring into space. I think it's not so much that lying in bed sounds so much more worthwhile than anything else -- it's just that when we humans get this way we tend to want to maintain the default position. So I lie around staring at the wall, thinking of nothing. Or I sit in this chair, staring at the screen, likewise thinking of nothing. (well, NOW I'm thinking, I'm thinking about typing a post. Ha ha. Depressed person's idea of a joke. To quote C: "You're supposed to laugh. Like [hysterically] 'HEE HEE HAW HAW HAW!!'" And then she sits and waits for me to indeed laugh like HEE HEE HAW HAW HAW.) Actually, since, as I mentioned, I'm still only slipping down into the fog, and haven't landed in it (yet?), I got really clever a little bit ago. If nothing was going to have any appeal, from lying in bed to discovering a never-before-known Jane Austen book to taking a beach vacation, well, I might as well do things that were ordinarily unappealing, since it wouldn't matter what I was doing. That lasted through the sinkful of dirty dishes anyway. (I think my family is doing a study. It's physics. They're wondering how many bowls and cups can be piled on top of each other -- some partly filled with their beslimed contents, some just encrusted with them -- and still stay upright in the sink. I was gone all day Saturday and then we were all gone most of the day yesterday. The dishwasher's been sitting there empty, waiting to be filled, and yet the sink was piled high with the aforementioned physics experiment. Wanna come over? It's so much fun here.)

Anyway. I think I'm going to go try to dig in my nails, or build a ladder, or, I dunno, at least accomplish a few things that really need to be done.

this woman's work

After a much longer labor than it took for either of his brothers to arrive, my sister-in-law ushered her newest blessing into the world yesterday morning. Here he is being examined and admired by his brothers and cousins.

I was thinking yesterday about all that we go through for our children. We as mothers carry them around inside our bodies; we care for ourselves so as to care for them; we go through enormously painful processes to bring them outside into the world; we feed them; we nurture them. We give up huge, huge chunks of our time and our freedom to them. They become a part of who we are. Now, this is not an unpleasant sacrifice, for me, anyway; I have always relished my role as a mother. But what I was thinking about yesterday was the way our children have no clue AT ALL how much our lives are altered by them, how much work and pain we put ourselves through for their sake. Maybe as they gain maturity they'll understand that better. Maybe it won't be until they have children of their own, and do it all themselves (or watch their wives do it). Then they'll be able to empathize a bit.

Certainly, it wasn't happening yet yesterday, when I suggested that the kids and I hang around at the park rather than waiting in the car while T ran some car-project-related errands, and C said that she'd much rather I ran the errands while T took them to the park. Not much maternal appreciation there, no sirree.

Thursday, June 09, 2005

deliberateness (or whatever)

Amy posted yesterday about deliberateness (is that a word? If not, it's my invention, not Amy's) in our decisions, which touched off a train of thought for me, about which I'll post here, rather than using her comments section for it.

When T and I married, and actually largely before we even married, we made several conscious decisions about the way our new family (that's us plus whatever children God blessed us with) would be. A few of the boundaries we set early on were:

• We would homeschool our children if God made it at all possible.
• I would not have an outside-the-house job that required us to put our children in day care. (we were not sure if we would be able to manage without my income long-term, so we decided that if I HAD to work, we would put our children in a private Christian school. Praise God that he has enabled us to go with Plan A. ;)
• Divorce was never going to be an option on the table. We could disagree, we could fight, but it was never our marriage on the line.
• We would not belittle each other in any way -- not in anger, not to make a joke, not to show affection.
• We would not engage in "coarse jesting", with each other or with our children. (in other words: no potty humor).
• We wouldn't teach our children to believe in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy, or any of the other imaginary beings whose existence they would later discover to be a sham, because we didn't want them to end up lumping our faith in God in with all those other invisible, imaginary people Mom and Dad had told them about.

Now, every family has a set of values, whether they mean to or not. Ours may mark us out as "weird" to other people, and frequently do, and we've had to deal with several different instances of confrontation about one or more of the above items (and there are others as well). But every family either consciously or otherwise lands in a pattern -- a set of priorities. Some people decisively set out to reach a certain financial goal -- to own a home, to be independent, to be able to clothe their children in brand names (this, by the way, was one of my hard and fast goals before I was a Christian and before homeschooling became mainstream. If my children were going to go to school then they were going to have to have whatever was trendy, from their shoes on up, because I figured that was their best shot at avoiding the kind of school experience I had). Some families just kind of fall into a lifestyle that suits them, without ever really thinking about it or setting hard and fast boundaries -- "beyond this point we will not go." I think, honestly, that this is the average American family -- shaped by TV, trends, peers, youth culture. We tend to stand out in rather a startling way from this average family. No, I haven't seen the commercial for X or the episode of that show where Y does blah blah. No, I can't just go get a job so that we can buy a house, because we believe firmly that my place is here with my kids, even if that means we rent for the rest of our natural lives. No, my kids don't climb on a yellow bus and wave goodbye and leave me with six hours of structurable alone time every day. My kids talk differently from their peers, and they dress differently (as do their parents), and they don't notice or care that they're different. This "differentness" was not the goal of the priorities we set, at least not in most ways, but it is definitely a byproduct of it.

Occasionally we'll come to a crisis (financial or otherwise) regarding some of those priorities; we (I) may tear our (my) hair out looking for a way to slip by and somehow manage to uphold what we know is right while simultaneously denying it, but in the end it's of course impossible. And each of those times I do remember why we decided to do things the way we do. In fact I think God lets me have those moments of trying to wiggle under the fences we set up so early on, just so that I can remind myself why we built them in the first place. A few weeks ago I was pressing my husband hard; I wanted to take a night job so that we could afford to buy a house. He said no, and reminded me that really we don't want to be a family where one person's always coming in as the other goes out; we know that's not what we want to be locked into. But we prayed, and then gee, one day out of the blue (who'd a thunk it!) we both at once came up with the idea of sub-leasing the apartment over our garage, which our landlord had told us in the past we can do, until we reach a defined point in one year where our financial status will be better for some very boring reasons. At first the landlord backpedaled when we brought it up; we got off the phone and prayed, and he called the next day to tell us he'd reverted to his original position. So we'll proceed prayerfully and see what happens; our hope is that this will enable us to pay off the little bit of debt we have and build up some savings before we make the decision to plunge ourselves into a California-sized mortgage (the very thought of which gives me a freaked-out tingly kind of feeling. Remember when a quarter of a million dollars seemed like just a huge amount of money? It's apparently chump change in the California real estate market. Ouch.)

All this is just one example, chosen to show why I believe God will bless us if we deliberately choose to honor Him and His plan in our priorities, and come to Him with the difficulties caused by that choice rather than deciding not to honor him after all. It's a hard lesson sometimes, but I think if He hits me over the head with it often enough I'll eventually get it.

Monday, June 06, 2005

my day in pictures (sort of)

First, we got up at 5:00 and drove T to work. Then we continued on to...

Hetch Hetchy, which is about an hour and a quarter from Yosemite Valley, the way I drive, anyway. On the way there, we stopped at the bridge that goes over Cascade Creek (Falls), and C's beloved "Lydia Bennet bonnet" was blown off her head and down into this:

By the way, I liked the trip to Hetch Hetchy; it's a beautiful and interesting place. My parents swear I've been there before, but I have no memory of it. The way my memory's been lately, that's not surprising.

After we hung around for a while, the kids...

...sketched their impressions and wrote in their journals while I read Emma (I HEART HOMESCHOOLING) and took a few more pictures. Then we headed to...

Yosemite Valley, where we took more pictures, did a little more sketching, and rode shuttle buses which were so packed through traffic so intense that it took us a cumulative two and a quarter hours to make the usually-one-hour shuttle bus circuit, during which we were able to sit down for three minutes, not counting waiting at stops. But hey, I got a picture of Lower Yosemite Fall, and even some pictures of dogwood blossoms (missed almost all of those), so it was, um, worth it. Right?

Then I came home and figured out finances. I didn't take a picture of that. It's not pretty. Sigh.

In that mood, shopping for a few supplies for supper was not a pleasant activity, especially since the "music" playing in the store was (please forgive me for sticking this song in your head on endless loop, but hey, if I can't share my misery with my beloved bloggity friends, with whom can I share it?) that horrific "song" that goes: That's the way (uh huh uh huh) I LIKE it. It "goes" that way quite repetitively, in case you hadn't noticed. By the time it ended my loathing for it was white hot and very heavy.

So I got the mail, and T had a Mopar Collector's Guide, and the woman on the front just annoyed the heck out of me. So I fixed her good:

Oh, and there was also this that I had to administer, when I came home:

("I will not bite my brother" and "I am not my sister's boss.")

I am SO READY for a bubble bath.

Sunday, June 05, 2005

I'm still alive

Ever have one of those days where every single thing you do seems to go wrong, but not in a big life-altering way, just a little driving-you-absolutely-out-of-your-skull-insane kind of way?

If you haven't, don't tell me, OK?

Yesterday I burned myself twice (splattering grease from frying bacon beside my eye, AND scalding coffee all down the front of me because I was drinking from a thermos wrong, shut up, ANYONE could drink from a thermos wrong), spilled things a huge number of times, tripped a lot, and generally acted like a person in a cartoon while people politely pretended not to notice (at least I didn't burn the london broil. Yes, I used the barbecue. Maybe I had a death wish, I dunno.). I considered staying in bed this morning but figured that if I did, before long the whole thing would somehow manage to collapse and then we'd have to buy a new bed on top of everything else.

So far, today, I haven't endangered myself too much. I did catch my toe on the edge of the sidewalk while I was out walking and let out a loud yelp while I narrowly avoided landing on my face, but fortunately nobody was around. I think. At least I didn't hear anyone laughing.

Saturday, June 04, 2005

a date

Tonight T whisked us all off on a date.

Yes, the whole family, it wasn't THAT kind of date, it was just a nice surprise evening. He'd known that I wanted to go take sunset pictures at a lake where we camp sometimes, and see the dam with the water as high as it has been (I AM SO GEEKILY EASY TO AMUSE. So sue me). So he loaded us all into the car, took us out for fast food, and then started driving. We had so much fun. In case I've never told you, I have the best husband in the world. Just so you know.

There are sunset pictures in the photo blog, but here are a couple of family ones.

LT and C. LT is carrying my tripod. That's not a purse. :)

The family. Except me. (In case you're wondering, T is smiling. Really. And he wonders why people sometimes find him intimidating.)

Friday, June 03, 2005

busy days

I put 200 miles on our car yesterday, which I don't mind doing if I'm going, you know, on a trip or something, but when it happens in the course of running errands, UGH. A hundred and fifty of the miles were from a trip to the valley to buy a part for our washing machine; thirty to take the cat to the vet and back (not to mention that I also paid $64 for an exam and some antibiotics for poor Mary who had an abscess of some sort on her jaw); thirty to go to a planning meeting for next year's Awana club at the chapel. At this point I feel like I never want to drive again, and that's without even thinking about how much I spent on gas yesterday. (you people who don't live in California and complain about your gas prices, I don't wanna hear it, or wait, I do, because maybe for a while I can pretend to be you so that I can find $2.00 a gallon really outrageous instead of unimaginably cheap. Remember when gas topped $1.50 and everyone shrieked in agony? sigh. the good old days.). I was going to go to Yosemite today to take pictures but I couldn't bring myself to do it. Maybe on Monday. So I spent today getting the kids to clean their rooms, working on school stuff, walking to the creek (with one of the neighbor kids) to hunt for tadpoles for the neighbor kids' pond, and DOING LAUNDRY WOO HOO. (yes, I cheer, even though I hate laundry. Because even more than I hate laundry, I hate having to pay to do laundry, like I did on Monday when our washing machine was broken so I had to drop another $20 at the laundromat to do six loads). I've been busy enough for the past two days to make me want a nap really, really badly right now.

By the way, I finished My Sister's Keeper at 3 AM on Wednesday, and then I read the new Elizabeth Berg (A Year of Pleasures) on Wednesday as well. (Which means that quite by accident I read two books in 24 hours about death -- one about dying, and one about grieving, which means that sort of thing has been on my mind a lot since then.) And now I'm almost done with Emma. Overcompensating? me?