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Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Before/After: The Video Shelves Etc.

******UPDATED****** (see below)

(Don't miss a post with actual content, from yesterday).

Here's another embarrassing photo. We have these really handy built-in shelves in our living room -- one of the first things I liked about this house when I saw it. They are CLUTTER MAGNETS. As you will see.

The picture's tilted because I was too dang lazy to get out the real tripod, and I just set the camera on something. So sue me. :)

Think we have enough videos? I dunno.

Note the row of handheld radios in front of the DVDs. I don't think we have enough of those either. Hey, if we ever needed to equip an entire paramilitary squad, or if our entire extended family, adult cousins and all, were headed to Disneyland, we'd be set. I am not at all sure what the final resting place of those is going to be. Where do you KEEP things like that?

Also note on top of the stereo cabinet, the stack of pictures which I took down from the piano yesterday, and on the desk, you might be able to see the little glass bowl of nails to hang them up. And there's folded, clean laundry on the coffee table in the foreground, of course. AT LEAST IT'S FOLDED. Likewise, the sheets, blanket, and pillow on the end of the couch are at least folded and not still laid out on the couch, where I slept last night (no, we didn't have a fight. Occasionally LT will sleep with Daddy and they'll have deep talks and stuff.)

Back in a while...

******UPDATE******

It doesn't look a whole lot better to me. Still busy. But not sad and naked like the piano, anyway. (although I just looked and realized that now that I'm used to it, the piano doesn't look like it minds being naked.)

This job also included a lot of work tidying up the hallway shelves (which hold a very small portion of our Christian books); the bottom two were full of basically clutter and junk, and with that cleared away there was room for our Christian videos in there. (We have a really great collection of CRI's creation documentaries.)

I was going to reward myself with piano time when I was done with that job, but I just looked at the clock and it's time to start supper. Such is life. :)

Tuesday, September 27, 2005

1 Corinthians 13

My dear friend Jenn has been on a bit of a journey. We don't know where it'll end yet, but I'm certainly glad to watch her progress. :) As part of that, today, she studied 1 Corinthians 13. Since I suggested that particular chapter, I figured it would be a good idea for me to look at the same passage today. Even though I'm supposed to be doing my Exodus chapter 1 summary. :) (I'll do that this evening with T.)

First I'd like to look at the first three verses:

1 If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have {the gift of} prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 And if I give all my possessions to feed {the poor,} and if I deliver my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing.

What is God saying here? He's taken love, and he's put it up against some pretty seriously important concepts, and actions, and decisions. And love trumps them all. Education, spiritual gifts, intelligence, wisdom, faith, generosity, self-sacrifice -- all these are meaningless to God without love as their basis. And not just any love, either.

Now when this passage says 'love', it's not love like we might think of today (to make things even more confusing, the King James version uses the word 'charity' in this passage). You might know, or you might not, that the Greek language didn't (and probably still doesn't) lump a bunch of different ideas under one word, like we do with the word 'love'. They used the word phileo to denote brotherly love -- the love that we have for our friends and family. Chummy, happy, long-lasting, you-are-important-to-me-and-I-have-fun-with-you love. Eros meant passionate sexual love. Storge is the kind of love you have for a child -- it's frequently translated "natural affection". And then there was agape, which is the word used here. Agape is selfless love -- the kind of love God has for us; the kind He wants us to have for one another. It's love that puts the needs of the other person first. And we're about to get a great description of how that all works, in the next few verses.

4 Love is patient, love is kind, {and} is not jealous; love does not brag {and} is not arrogant, 5 does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong {suffered,} 6 does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; 7 bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 8 Love never fails; but if {there are gifts of} prophecy, they will be done away; if {there are} tongues, they will cease; if {there is} knowledge, it will be done away.

Wow. What a tall order. Whenever I want to pat myself on the back for being such a loving person (and I am, really, a very loving person) I should come read this passage instead. All these things that love is -- real love, agape love -- does my love look like this?

Patient. People aren't going to be everything we want them to be all the time. To me, patience goes beyond the idea of waiting for everyone to be ready to leave on Sunday mornings without starting to shout and tear my hair; it means letting God work on the people I love at His own pace, and theirs, and not expecting people to be more than they are, or to move through life at my pace.

Kind. Am I kind in word and deed? Am I generous? Am I thoughtful? Not always. Ouch.

Not jealous. Does this mean that if I love someone, I should be able to be happy for their good circumstances without bemoaning my own situation? I should be willing to share their time and affection? I have always had a bit of a problem with this. Not just with what we would call love relationships, but with my friendships. As a teen I wanted to be THE best friend. I ached with jealousy when a friend of mine did things with someone else, loved someone else. And let's not even get into boyfriends, shall we?

Doesn't brag. I was about to type that I don't quite "get" this idea, but I just realized that perhaps God's telling us that when we love people, we won't boast of our accomplishments, possessions, happiness, etc., in a way that would cause jealousy or envy. Interesting inverse of the concept before it, really.

Isn't arrogant. Going through life and relationships with a high idea of our own worth compared to those around us certainly isn't loving. Or agape-ing, to be more precise.

Does not act unbecomingly I wonder what God meant by "unbecoming". It's a word whose meaning seems to change culturally. Maybe it means I shouldn't embarrass the people I love. Sorry, guys.

Does not seek its own. Meaning it isn't selfish. This, for me, is the crux of this whole passage. A love that is selfless -- that seeks to put self on a lower level of priority than others -- will naturally be all of these other things, if you think about it.

Is not provoked. I have a hard time with this one. I get "provoked" easily. It burns off quickly (that's the next phrase, hee hee), but it happens.

Does not take into account a wrong suffered. I love this phrase. Love does not take into account a wrong suffered -- love doesn't hold grudges. LET THINGS GO. Forgive and move on. It's a hard lesson at times, but it's key.

Does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices in the truth. Another interesting concept to relate to the idea of love. Naturally we shouldn't rejoice at unrighteousness, right? We shouldn't get happy about sin, that's pretty easy. But to say that love doesn't get happy about sin -- are we not to get happy about others' sin? Does this mean simply that when we love, we aren't glad when bad things happen to people? We don't get a kick out of people we love getting away with doing wrong? I am confused. Input please. :)

Bears, believes, hopes, and endures all things. Also key. Real love doesn't die easily, through trials, over long periods of time, past obstacles, through dry spells -- our love for each other and for God can't die out just because things get tough, or we feel distant.

And in keeping with that:

Love is eternal. There are other very important things in our lives, but when they're all gone, love will still be there. Love for and from God; love for and from each other.

9 For we know in part, and we prophesy in part; 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away. 11 When I was a child, I used to speak as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things. 12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I shall know fully just as I also have been fully known.

We're not done yet. We don't know everything yet. We're not perfect yet; we're not complete. Nothing around us is perfect or complete, nothing we do is. Not until we are with Jesus in heaven will we know true completeness and perfection, although our goal as Christians is to continually move toward that goal. (What this has to do with the rest of the passage about love is a little bewildering to me. Paul's writing style can do that to me sometimes. :)

(edit: In thinking about this, if you put it next to verse 8, which is really, I suppose, where it belongs, you can see that the contrast is between these things that will pass away and love, which won't. We know a little, but "when the perfect comes" [there are about as many ideas about what "the perfect" is in this phrase as there are Bible commentaries -- the gist seems to indicate "at the end of things, when we get to heaven" to me], these things we know now will be revealed in the full light of God's truth, and since love is the only thing in that long list that won't pass away, maybe -- love provides a lot of that light? I still dunno. Just wanted to add this. T, HELP ME. :)

13 But now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Back to the beginning here (reminds me of teaching my kids to write paragraphs with a topic sentence and a closing one) to sum up: There are important things in life, no doubt, but love is the most important.

Love for what? Love for whom? For each other? For our husbands and friends? Beyond a doubt. But it's my opinion, taking the rest of Scripture into account, that our love for God -- agape at its best -- trounces even these.

Before/After: The Piano

******UPDATED****** (see below)

WHAT an exercise in humiliation this is.

The speaker at the retreat had slides she would show -- before and after pictures from her organization jobs. Most of them I would look at and go, hey, that's not SO bad. One, I remember thinking, FINALLY, someone who's worse than me. The speaker said that she'd asked the woman how she could live with her counter so covered with things, and the woman had replied, "I just stopped seeing it after a while."

That is so totally me. Because if you'd asked for a list of cluttered areas in my house, the piano (which is, hello, basically the first thing you see when you walk in my house -- the shame!) would not have been on it. And yet LOOK AT IT.

ack. The big dry-erase calendar is for school, as is the little whiteboard next to that (LT was teacher for a day last week; he rewrote our schedule for us, including the visible "Jernles"). THere are a lot of pictures, and the orange thing holds paints for T's model-building, which he hasn't done in months. And then there's the usual archaeological dig as well.

Watch for the "After" photo this afternoon.

******UPDATE******

OK, here it is:

I'm not actually done with this job. I still need to put away the pictures I took off the top. I originally planned to put them up on the wall around the desk, but most of them are in frames that aren't made to hang on the wall.

Now let's see if I ever play, now that I can find the instrument. The thing is, unfortunately, that it's really not a great piano. Pianos, unlike other furniture, do not age well, even the best ones, and this one was inexpensive when it was made over eighty years ago. I've a huge sentimental attachment to it, but it's dreadfully out of tune, would fall out of tune almost immediately after being retuned if we ever got around to spending the money on that, and the keys themselves have begun to come apart. So it's kind of a catch-22; I am not terribly encouraged to play it because it's in poor shape, but I never play, so why would we ever buy a new one (or spend just about the same amount of money to get new works put into this one, which is what I'd probably actually do. see above re: sentimental attachment). So it just sits there, holding clutter.

My next big decluttering job will probably be the video/DVD shelves. There's another area that I just stop seeing after a while.

Monday, September 26, 2005

Before/After: The Desk

***UPDATED*** (see below)

I can't believe I'm about to show you what I'm about to show you.

I've decided that it will be fun (ha ha!! yeah, in the way that going to the gynecologist when you have a yeast infection is fun) and probably productive to document my organization attempts (see previous post) with Before and After pictures. And if I post the Before pictures here, not only will I utterly humiliate myself, but I will be FORCED to complete the task so that I can post an After picture, and those of you who don't swear off friendship with me forever after seeing the "Before" can see that I can improve things if I really really try. And maybe I can see that too.

Anyway. Without further ado, here is our computer desk. I would love to say that it's not usually this bad -- but it usually is, because even when I clean it, it's this way again within a couple of days. HABITS MUST CHANGE, no?

Witness the multiple water bottles. The CDs. The 3 1/2" floppy disks which have NEVER EVER been in our two-year-old computer. The archaeological-dig-style layers of STUFF. And if you ever talk to me again, I'll know that you must really love me.

OK. I'll edit this post with the After picture in an hour or two. Assuming I survive.

*******UPDATE*******

OK, so it was more like three and a half hours (!!!). But that time included actually going through a lot of old floppy disks and CDs, deciding what to toss and tossing it, rather than putting them aside to examine later (and when would 'later' be exactly?).

Without further ado, here is THE DESK.

Ha ha! hee hee. That was a joke. Ooh, I think I may have just given T a heart attack. Don't worry, sweetie; I didn't have a credit-card fest at Staples and the local home decorator's office. (stop drooling, Rachel.) No, here's the real picture of our actual particle-board desk with our actual ugly knotty pine walls and the whole shebang.

You can actually, you know, SEE it. (that's a picture of C, age about 15 months and covered in spaghetti, on the screensaver. And you can see the front edge of our totally destroyed rolling chair. Those are on our "someday it'd be nice to finally replace those" list.) Nice if it could stay this way.

Next up (probably tomorrow; it's time to go cook supper): The Junk Drawer. (cue scary music).

the retreat

I'm glad I went, and not just because of the six delicious meals I didn't have to cook. Not even just because of the chocolate fountain:

That's melted dark chocolate (nothing can be perfect in this world, right?), and we had everything from Nutter Butters and Rice Krispie Treats to strawberries and cherries to dip in it. I won't show you pictures of the cheesecake table, or the dark chocolate cake with frosting apparently made of chocolate chips, or the fruit and cheese, because then you'd just be jealous.

No, I'm glad I went because I really did learn a lot, or at least I was in an environment where I could come up with a lot of great ideas on my own (since many of the things suggested by the professional organizer who was the speaker wouldn't quite mesh with our household -- although some will), about organization and how I could make my house more appealing. I do think that the mounting sense of discomfort -- you could even say total insanity -- about the state of my house has been God's way of working me up to a point where I was really open for ideas for this sort of thing. Also, the worship was beautiful, even though it did involve a bit too much of the "let's repeat this one line of this song until we're all mildly hypnotized" sort of thing (as Hank Hanegraaf might say, in his pompous and annoying "I've said this phrase so many times that it's totally meaningless to me and totally unintelligible to you" tone, maybe they were trying to put us in analteredstateofconsciousness).

That said, it wasn't like last year. There was no life-changing spiritual renewal going on. There was only the vaguest mention of anything that might lead people who didn't know Jesus to trust him and love him. The best memories I've taken away from this weekend, honestly, are:

• walking around the beautiful grounds and surrounding area with my SIL, taking pictures and talk-talk-talking.
  
• Making a new friend out of a recent acquaintance. I think. Time will tell.
  
• Coming home and hearing shrieks of joy at my appearance -- which is something that T gets every day, but only happens to me twice or three times a year.
  
• The idea that I can actually maybe make my house the way I want it to be.
  
• The worship singing. It really was nice.
  

And good thing for all those memories, because I came home and was instantly overwhelmed by the actual scope of the job of organizing this place. One job at a time, I know, but at that rate it'll take me till T retires to get all the jobs done. And of course they won't stay done, if past experience means anything. Still, I'm going to try. Hmm, I wonder how much that professional organizer would charge...

Saturday, September 24, 2005

live from a retreat near you (or not so near)

So far at this retreat I have:

• become better acquainted with the Proverbs 31 Woman than I ever wanted to be. I don't hate her quite so much as I used to.
  
• remembered too late that if I turned off my cell phone in an area with no signal, the clock would not work when I turned it back on, and hence neither would the alarm clock. This meant I had to use my own internal alarm to get up at 6 this morning, which further meant that I had dreams all night about oversleeping.
  
• learned to hate the keyboard at this kiosk.
  
• Seen a large room full of grown women get WAY too excited about file folders.
  
• Thought up a whole bunch of ideas for organizing my home, some of which I might actually, you know, TRY. Anything to increase the Mommy Sanity Index.
  
• Witnessed the apparent death of my 512MB CF card. (WAAH!)
  

And with that I'm just about out of time.

Friday, September 23, 2005

because I'm myself...

I'm all packed and ready to go, with a duffel bag by the door with a sleeping bag and pillow on top just like a junior high kid heading off to Methodist church camp; I've tidied the house, and even done a little reorganizing, so that it's not TOO much to expect it to be reasonably tidy in two days when I get back. I am leaving in an hour and a half, after the Jane-Austen-film-adaptation-assisted laundry-folding spree on which I'm about to embark. And five minutes ago I got a strong, distinct, solid, acid-reflux-inducing conviction that I've forgotten something essential -- either something I'm supposed to do here at home before I go, or something I'm supposed to pack. Tonight at approximately 11:15 I will remember it, whatever it is. I hope it's not something that results in some sort of disaster on the level of, say, a conflagration that consumes our home.

Thursday, September 22, 2005

Rita Mita bo Bita, Fee Fi fo Fita

Texas and Louisiana, you are on my mind a lot today. I'll have to bring my credit card to the retreat so that I can check the news periodically on their little Internet kiosk. (that's my EXCUSE for using the internet kiosk anyway. But seriously, I would hate to have to wait till Sunday evening to find out how things are down there.)

Also, finally a hurricane season that gets to R, and they don't use Rachel like I've always kind of hoped they would. *miffed* How else am I ever going to have any notoriety, stick-in-the-mud that I am?

Here's hoping that Rita yawns and decides Texas is boring and she'd rather just turn into an annoying little misty drizzle so that she can at least tick off all the news people who thought they were about to make their careers in this one story.

I'm feeling better (again). We took a mental health day in school today -- which means the kids practiced their Awana verses and then watched the complete Schoolhouse Rock DVD. No printing practice, even! Remember walking into history class and seeing the lights off and the TV on its stand in front of the room? I just have to recreate that feeling for them occasionally. You know, so they don't feel deprived on account of not getting a public-school education. :)

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

why I'm not around

I don't feel exactly bad. Life's OK. I just don't feel particularly frothy, witty, theological (or any kind of logical), or funny, and generally I have to at least think I'm one of the above if I'm going to post here regularly. Instead, I feel blah. I'm in the kind of mood I look at myself and see a person who is am a bad wife, a really bad housekeeper (lost not only the water bill earlier this month but also the DMV registration bill for one of our cars; also, the laundry pile is beginning to grow and the floors are screaming WASH ME PLEASE and I'm ignoring them, because in order to appease them I'd have to also dig through all the ... STUFF ... sitting on them, and before I can do that I have to organize so that I have room to put things away, and before THAT -- you see how it goes), spiritually blah, ten pounds heavier than I was six months ago, and generally a flop as a person in general. I'm hopeful that the Christian ladies' retreat I'm heading for this weekend will help with at least some of the above. I think I need a little kick in the pants from God. Plus, there will be six meals for which I do not have to shop, plan, cook, or clean up. Man, I feel better already.

and boy do I need it

I'm going to a Christian ladies' retreat this weekend. The timing is perfect -- not because (as is so commonly discussed among women, and which actually sort of torques me off) I need a weekend break from my family. Although the idea of six meals for which I do not have to shop, plan, cook, or clean up has a certain appeal. No, it's because I've been feeling spiritually flat as a pancake lately. Not dead, not empty -- just kind of la di da bored. I'm hoping that one way or another, a weekend of study, praise, and worship will give me a bit of a jolt.

And here's another thing I need. It's actually a favor from all of you. What makes you weird? Is there anything you do or used to do as a kid that was... a little different? Bonus points if a) you thought everyone did what you did but boy were you wrong or b) you had tics or oddities as a child and outgrew them. This weird mom of some non-average kids needs a bit of help remembering that normal is just a wash setting on her dishwasher. It would help my sanity. :)

I'll start. Many of you know (because I think I've talked about it here before, but maybe not) that I see words in my head when I hear speech. (Hi, I'm Rachel, and I see words in my head). It's like -- a transcript, if you will, or subtitles, of everything I hear, and it's always happening. Sometimes it flashes up all at once; usually it comes up one word at a time; occasionally (especially when I'm talking) one letter at a time, like typing. There are... fonts involved. And occasionally colors. I have a theory: I am a visual learner, this I know, which is why I'm a good speller. I think that this seeing-words thing (which I can not remember ever NOT doing) is my brain's way of making me remember what I hear. If I don't visualize the words (as in, if I'm sidetracked or very busy), I don't remember what was said, and then I get things like my husband saying, "I TOLD you I was going to work on his car this weekend," and I have to kind of just fake it and go, "oh yeah. Of course you told me; silly me, I forgot." I was all of about twenty-eight years old when I found out that I was the only person I know of (besides Anne Shirley) who does this. I thought everyone did, until one memorable morning when I mentioned it to T in a matter-of-fact sort of way and he started slowly...backing...away from me.

Also, for years, I couldn't sleep if anything was touching my face. Hair -- sheet -- hand -- nothing. It gave me a sort of cold-chills feeling that wasn't exactly cold chills. I did eventually get over that, but until I was married I thought nobody could sleep with something touching his/her face. And I can't stand the feeling of taking an acrylic sweater (or egads, an afghan -- I beg the kids to do the afghans) out of the washing machine, or of erasing a chalkboard. This last is a new one. I do it, but I get chills up and down my spine every time.

So. If you haven't fled yet (and I didn't even mention what I see in my brain when nobody's talking!*)... add your contributions in the comments. Please? It always helps me feel better to know I'm not the only one; doesn't that work for you too?

(*It's random words. Serendipity. Oglethorpe. ending. heavily. multitudinous. I stopped typing/actively thinking, and those were the words that came to mind just then.)

Biblical fellowship

At the outset, I want to ask that if you know me in real life, and you know the congregation(s) of which I'm speaking... please keep this post to yourself. Thank you.

We've left churches in the past. I left the Methodist church, where I grew up, at the age of eighteen when I accepted Christ and knew that the place I'd been going most Sundays since birth was not going to feed a healthy personal relationship with Him. My husband and I left a group we loved when we were told by the leadership there that we had to, because we wouldn't cease fellowship with a brother who had angered said leadership. We left a home fellowship when it whittled down gradually to only two families; we left a small Baptist congregation because the pastor and his wife (dear brethren and friends of ours to this day) started saying things like "Well, we know what the Bible teaches, but..."

We've been in our current congregation for six years. That's the longest we've been anywhere, except for my many years as a socially awkward little Methodist. We have put up with minor differences in those six years, knowing that since local congregations are made up of human beings who are sinful, there will never be a perfect one no matter how hard we look. We've stayed at times simply because we are relatively certain that our chosen congregation is as close to perfectly Biblical as we'll be able to get in our local area, where selection is rather limited. We already drive fifteen miles (out of town, where we live) to meet with these people whom we love, where our kids have friends and so do we. So even thinking about thinking about leaving is terrifying in a way, and thoroughly disheartening in, well, in every way. But how many instances do we need of leadership putting aside the Bible to follow the dictates of some other book or idea -- even when a good portion of the men in leadership disagree with the action -- before we decide that we have found yet another place where we can't in good conscience sit under this kind of leadership?

Ack. I guess I'm just thinking out loud here.

Sunday, September 18, 2005

the sad and the funny all tangled up together

Tonight while I was on my way across our neighbor's field in order to get to a good spot to try and get a few decent moonrise pictures (and also to get enough stinky stickers on my person and clothing to start a tarweed colony on Mars), I nearly stumbled over what was left of the body of our cat Henry. I barely looked at him long enough to register that indeed it was what was left of Henry, and walked on, but I called T to let him know not to bring the kids over to hang out with me, like we'd thought he might, because we didn't want them to see. We decided that after he came out and moved the body off the path, he should go ahead and tell the kids, though, so they (like we) could stop wondering and finally know what had happened to our little buddy.

C's response was utterly typical of her: fifteen minutes of loud sobbing followed by several hours of intermittent sniffling. LT's was more stoic. He wondered if we should have a funeral -- "and what do people do at funerals, anyway? Is there cake and ice cream?"

Friday, September 16, 2005

oh dear

Here is a short list of websites aimed at children where I (an adult in full possession of my faculties, last time I checked) can waste an inordinate amount of time without even trying*:

• Cyberchase (from PBS) rhythm patterns: JINGLY JANGLY CRACK is what this is. Not that I would know, never having tried crack, but with this -- game? not only do I find myself spending "just a few more minutes" trying to perfect an interesting rhythm -- I go around humming said rhythms all day long. Just what I need, something more to make people think I'm crazy.
  
• elouai Game Makers. Like paper dolls (and dollhouses), without the cleanup, or the little tabs that never stayed where they were supposed to.
  
• Crazy Libs. I've talked about these on here often. (Rinkworks also provides, for your amusement, Book-A-Minute, Movie-A-Minute, Computer Stupidities, and The Dialectizer, which enables you to translate text into jive, cockney, Swedish Chef, Redneck, and an assortment of other well-known dialects of English. Also it enables you to spew beverages onto your monitor, if you're nerdy like me. These sites, however, aren't necessarily aimed at kids, and hence they do not get their own list tags.)
  
• USA Geography Web Games, which I originally bookmarked for school use, but guess who spent days mousing and arrowing until she could get above 90% on level 9 (Cartographer), which -- you might think you know US geography, and you probably do, but if you need a little dose in humility, see how many tries it takes you before you can resize and rotate each state before putting it in its proper spot on a map WITH NO BORDER OUTLINES.
  

*The author of this website will not be held responsible for dusty houses, unfinished laundry, full inboxes, or actual job loss incurred as a result of time spent on the featured websites. Reader is responsible for formulating his/her own excuses for said lapses of responsibility.

Thursday, September 15, 2005

moving on

Things are looking up. T seems back to normal (I think he really was just sick), LT was asleep at eleven last night (although he was awakened by a bloody nose this morning), we're being proactively very careful about using gas to help with the money problem, and mostly I just wanted to bump that gripe-fest of a post away from the top slot on my blog.

When I come up with some actual content to replace it, I'll let you know.

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

things I worry about late at night

• LT's bedtime anxiety has returned. Three nights in a row he's been unable to get to sleep till really late because he's worried.
• T is either sick or depressed or both, except that I think maybe he believes that Real Men Don't Get Depressed. Actually, that's doing him a disservice; he'd be willing to admit depression if he honestly thought that was what was wrong. I just don't know if he's willing to honestly think that's what's wrong. ;)
• Money. Even when I think there's nothing to worry about, I can always fall back on good old Money. Especially when our gasoline budget has completely swallowed up our grocery budget, and if it weren't for Barbie the tenant next door, whose rent is supposed to be paying sundry credit card bills, we'd be, I dunno, eating grass until gas prices go back down. If they ever do.
• LT has a new Tourette-ish tic after having been pretty much tic-free for months.
• C has started to do this weird snorting thing which she says she "feels like she has to do". I resolutely refuse to think about the fact that this is similar to how LT's Tourette-ish symptoms started, tra la la.
• My mother-in-law
• New Orleans and the rest of the gulf coast
• All the usual stuff like terrorism, North Korea, my dad's health, my own sanity, whether my kids will turn out normally or whether I will damage them in some irremediable way, all the stupid things I've done or said and whether the witnesses to said stupid things think of them every time they see me.... you know. Normal everyday Nameless Dread sort of stuff.

I guess that's all. I guess that's probably enough, too. The thing is, I am generally not a worrier. Generally I'm way too spiritual for that. (HA HA HA THAT WAS A JOKE. Did you laugh? Hee hee. I did. Almost.) No, seriously, generally I just try to look on the positive side and all that happy sort of thing, and truly I do trust in God to handle my issues, most of the time. But sometimes when things start to happen, especially Thing One on that list up there, for some reason my usual sunny outlook starts to get submerged, and worries ensue.

I suppose, if I'm to maintain my Miss Annoying Optimist title, I should make a list of things that don't worry me, while I'm at it.

• Both kids are doing really well in school stuff, and it's a blast teaching them.
  
• Our household is full of love.
  
• Our house is intact and my husband has a good job. We have all our faculties and are reasonably healthy. (sometimes you have to go back to the very basics, no?)
  
• The Nikon still works just fine.
  
• I just spent an hour reading funny stories and poems with my son, who has decided to lay off the Hardy Boys and get back into the Ramona books, just because he missed Ramona and Henry and Beezus, and they're so funny.
  
• I have a daughter who writes letters for fun. ("Dear Ant [sic] Lamar and Kaitlyn, Thank you for the clothes. I love you. The clothes are all very nice. How are you? How is your day today? Love, C")
  
• After twelve years I can still be taken by surprise when I realize anew how much it is possible to love my husband.
  
• God is faithful, even when I'm an anxious, cranky, crazy wreck.
  

something to make me feel better

I am having a thoroughly cruddy sort of few days, here. Over the weekend the house was a disaster and I had kind of an amateur nervous breakdown about how I suck at what I do and everyone who knows me and is related to me wishes they didn't and weren't and all kinds of fun stuff like that. (Melodrama: It's not just for junior high anymore). Yesterday the kids and I worked hard on the house and made some serious improvements. Today we were going to continue, and are, sort of, except that I feel really ill, so our efforts at Operation Regain Mommy's Sanity are haphazard at best. And there was an emergency with the town water so we've no water to our house at all, which we found out when LT went to flush the potty, and no, he hadn't just done an innocuous little-boy pee. (fortunately we are survivalist freakos who have water stored in our basement, so that, at least, is taken care of, even if it did involve a tiny bit of a hassle).

ANYWAY. All this is to say, if you're ever having this kind of day/weekend/life, it's easy-peasy to get cheered up, all at once, with almost no effort at all. You just have a friend like Valerie who falls in love in a really romantic way and then goes and gets married in a beautiful dress on a lovely Australian spring day and then posts pictures of it in her journal. Thank you so much, Val, for brightening my day. God knew how much I personally needed you to marry that handsome young man and post pictures of the event. ;-)

Saturday, September 10, 2005

misadventures with the nikon

Today was a gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous day. Bright blue sky, puffy white clouds, temperatures in the 70's, the whole thing. T was home and I was out for a walk when I decided to sit down in front of the courthouse, set up my camera on its mini tripod, and take the time-lapse cloud-motion video I've wanted to take (with the courthouse in the foreground) since I got my camera. So I went to the library, conveniently located right across the street from my planned subject, and I got a few books. (Since apparently September is Kidlit Month for me, I got two E.L. Konigsburgs that I'd never heard of, along with The Secret Life Of Bees, which I keep thinking I should probably read, but never actually do.) I set things up and had a pleasant two hours of quiet solitude, during which someone played the bagpipes across the square at the funeral parlor for a funeral, which made me cry a little, because my ordinary day was someone else's really sad day, which is, of course, always the case anytime anyone has an ordinary day. Anyway. At the end of the two hours, I stopped the movie, took a few more pictures, and looked at the results before packing up to walk home.

Which was when I realized I hadn't locked the auto-exposure to match the first frame, so the whole Quicktime movie had this really annoying flashing sort of strobe effect as the exposure changed due to the (frequent) movement of clouds between myself and the sun. Nice.

Then just as I got home and thought about sitting down to watch the strobe-ish video clip, I realized that I'd taken it in a vertical orientation, which made for the best composition, except that it also made for a sideways orientation when viewed on the screen, since as far as I know you can't rotate video files with any of the software I have (read: anything free). The funny thing about this is that I had just read a discussion about this very mistake on a photography-related e-list, and thought, whew, I'd better watch out because that sounds very much like something I'd do. Apparently I was right.

THEN, sometime between my camera and the memory card reader, the video file and half of the photos I'd taken on my walk were rendered unreadable while they were still on the memory card. FANtastic.

Ah well. At least I got to sit in the shade for two hours and read, before I came back to a house where everyone has been a bit on edge all evening, mostly because nobody got enough sleep last night, what with girls giggling till just before eleven, and me reading until two, and the boys coming home from the observatory at three, and LT and his friend and C and her friends all getting up at eight to play. Oh, yes, I am so ready to collapse in a sea of oblivion and rejoice that this day is at least finally over.

Wednesday, September 07, 2005

party at Rachel's house

Be prepared for some accounts of serious debauchery; I'm throwing a party.

hee hee.

Seriously, it's going to be a slumber party for three or four very young girls, this weekend. The boys will be gone (at Lick Observatory, or, as C calls it, "Look Observatory", which really makes very good sense), so we can do all the girly stuff we want. This means the evening will include a VHS video of the Royal Ballet performing stories from Beatrix Potter, and maybe the video of Anne of Green Gables, and probably some fingernail painting and maybe even face painting and I don't know what all else. We'll have brownies and ice cream and popcorn, and if C had her way we'd have cookies and our weight in candy as well. We'll probably dance around the living room a little. It's going to be wild, you don't want to miss it. We might even stay up till, I dunno, eleven.

Friday, September 02, 2005

county fair

I'm too exhausted to stay up long enough to write a genuine entry about the fair (it's kind of a sad part of growing up, that the fair loses its magic and becomes more about sore feet and expense than anything else) but I just wanted to mention a few highlights:

I went on a crazy ride. Twice. It felt like being fifteen felt, without the angst or the crush on the geeky-but-nice fourteen-year-old boy.

C had an awesome time, LT not so much, because he's too big for the kiddy rides but he's way too, er, cautious (as is his daddy) for the bigger rides, and when you're a kid, rides are The Thing That Matters about the fair, right?

I posted my photography entry results in the photo blog. The crocheted items I entered placed as follows: sweater set that wasn't striped got best of show -- my first best of show EVER in anything, in twenty-five years of entering our county fair; sweater set that was striped took second in that category, and the daisy afghan scored a first. I'm pleased. I'm also done bragging now. Shut up Rachel.

If my head were not bolted on

JUST TODAY (and it is only 10:22 AM as I type this), so far, I have lost:

1) My library card. (eventually found in the change compartment of my purse.)

2) The cordless phone, about four times.

3) My purse, three times. And the thing is... I haven't moved it. I just keep forgetting where it is.

4) Our water bill. NO CLUE where it is. Important documents should always be printed on fluorescent-colored paper, don't you think? Man, that would make my life so much easier.

5) My gas card (not that I could afford to use it). Called to request a new one. It was cracked anyway; that's my excuse.

6) a new little vat of Carmex, purchased yesterday.

Also in the last couple of weeks I've lost one of my two mini-tripods (the one I liked better), a tube of Chapstick (see above re: "Carmex, purchased yesterday"), and innumerable hair elastics.

It's a good thing T's here to keep an eye on the kids; otherwise I'd probably lose them too (actually I DID think that LT was outside working on his fort for half an hour when really he was sitting silently on the couch behind me, reading The Hardy Boys). I am hoping that somewhere buried in all this clutter I'll actually find my mind, which I've evidently lost as well, but I'm not counting on it.

Thursday, September 01, 2005

Looting question

I've been thinking a lot about something. Remember after the terrorist attacks almost four years ago, how everyone was talking about how New York came together and there was no looting even though there could have been? What do you think is the difference between that incident and the situation in New Orleans with all the looters in the wake of the hurricane? I've a few ideas I'll throw out but they're not even to the point of theories, really, just ideas.

Maybe it's because of the socioeconomic differences? Maybe it's because when the terrorist attacks happened, we had been attacked by an enemy, which drew us together, whereas Katrina doesn't qualify as an enemy in the same way? Maybe the looting was happening in New York but not being reported by the media?

Any thoughts?